RTHK: UK PM hopeful Truss gains further heavyweight backing Former Conservative health minister Sajid Javid announced on Wednesday his support for Liz Truss as the UK's next Conservative prime minister, adding to the roster of senior Tories backing her leadership bid. Javid resigned as Health Secretary in Boris Johnson's government in early July at the same time as Truss's rival, Rishi Sunak, quit as Chancellor of the Exchequer, leading to a wave of resignations. Javid said in an article published in The Times on Wednesday evening that the new prime minister would need to swiftly reunite the party and show "we are rising to the challenges of our times". "After careful consideration it is clear to me that Liz Truss is best placed to pass these tests," he wrote. He said that Truss had "sharp focus and willingness to challenge the status quo". Challenging Sunak's approach to the economy, he said that "the circumstances we are now in require a new approach" and "not cutting taxes carries an even greater risk". Truss is backed by the bookmakers to win and has secured heavyweight endorsement from Tories including some, who like Javid, earlier threw their hats into the race. Her backers include international trade minister Penny Mordaunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis and Tory centrist Tom Tugendhat. The result of the election, to decide who will replace Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is due on September 5. (AFP) This story has been published on: 2022-08-03. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Nearly 60 Vietnam flights affected by Chinese military exercises near Taiwan Nearly 60 flights operated by Vietnam's airlines have been affected by China's military drills near Taiwan. Six marked areas denote places where China's military actions are planned. Photo from Xinhua News Agency The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) has asked Vietnamese airlines to adjust their flight routes on August 4-5 to avoid six 'danger zones' near the island of Taiwan Chinese military exercises are planned. A source has told Dantri/Dtinews that the direction has affected the operation of at least 59 flights including 36 by Vietnam Airlines, 22 by Vietjet 22, and one by Bamboo Airways. Speaking at a Wednesday meeting, CAAV's director Dinh Viet Thang said that they had received a notice from the Chinese authorities with recommendations to avoid flying near the six marked areas around the island from 11 am August 4 to 5. "We have alerted Vietnamese airlines of the notice, adding that airlines can still operate normally and decide on their own whether to postpone or cancel flights if any," Thang said. "The adjustments would likely result in longer flight routes, costing more fuel." Routes like charter flights from Vietnam to the US (regular routes operated by Vietnam Airlines), Vietnam-Taiwan, Vietnam-Japan, and Vietnam-South Korea could be affected by Chinese military actions. Earlier on Tuesday, the Chinese official news agency Xinhua reported that the Eastern Theatre Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army would launch a series of joint military operations around Taiwan starting on Tuesday night, soon after US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived on the island for a controversial visit that has drawn a rebuke from China. "For safety reasons, the entering of vessels and aircraft into the sea and air space is prohibited," Xinhua said. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 A Butte man who attacked a Town Pump employee and left him floored and covered in blood urged a judge on Wednesday to spare him from prison, saying it was full of violence and hostility. But the judge sentenced Robert Matthew Berkopec to 10 years in the Montana State Prison anyway and said it was his own violence that put him there. It is an anger-management issue that clearly is a danger to society, said District Judge Robert Whelan. Prosecutors had talked to the Town Pump victim and were previously prepared to recommend a lighter sentence. But while that plea deal and sentencing hearing were pending, Berkopec was arrested in June for physically assaulting a woman. He pleaded guilty to felony partner-family member assault in that case earlier Wednesday afternoon, his fourth conviction on that charge. Whelan gave him a five-year commitment to the Department of Corrections for that but it will run concurrent to the prison sentence. Prosecutor Ann Shea said Berkopec deserved prison time this time. We believe the defendant, given his criminal history, has a propensity toward violence, she said. People get injured. He creates victims. According to prosecutors, a clerk at the Town Pump at 531 S. Montana St. had apparently upset a woman customer on Aug. 15, 2020 by saying she had a new coffee cup so she could not get it for a refill price. The woman paid for the coffee but yelled at him and a short time later, Berkopec ran toward the clerk saying he made his girlfriend cry. Before the clerk could respond, Berkopec rushed him and slammed him into the manager office door. Berkopec struck him several times in the face and head with his fists before taking off, according to charging documents. A business manager was inside an office in the store at the time. When she came out, she saw the clerk laying on the ground covered in blood and unknown male was running out of the business, charging documents state. He was treated for his injuries. Police tracked down Berkopec and he admitting hitting the clerk. Berkopec stated he knew he was wrong but said that his girlfriend had come out of the store crying and his maternal instincts got the best of him, prosecutors said. Prosecutors initially charged Berkopec with aggravated burglary, which carries a 40-year maximum prison sentence, but in a plea deal reduced it to criminal endangerment with a 10-year maximum. Prosecutors were going to recommend that Berkopec be sentenced to 10 years in custody of the Montana Department of Corrections, with five of those years suspended. Such DOC commitments often result in offenders being sent to corrections treatment programs instead of prison. Prosecutors changed their recommendation after they charged Berkopec for assaulting a woman during a domestic dispute on June 5, which he admitted and pleaded guilty to on Wednesday. His public defender, Walter Hennessey, argued Wednesday for a DOC commitment instead of prison, saying it offered a better chance for rehabilitation. Berkopec asked for that too. I need help with my anger, he said, adding that he had a 4-year-old son who needed a dad. After calling it a senseless crime and tragic waste of a mothers life, a judge sentenced a man to 75 years in the Montana State Prison on Thursday for fatally stabbing his girlfriend in a house on Grand Avenue in June 2021. Prosecutors had recommended the sentence for 47-year-old Ronald Walter Roberts, saying the homicide of 38-year-old Carmen Edwards was just plain evil, and District Judge Kurt Krueger agreed to that during a 10-minute hearing. Police say when they got to the house that day, Roberts had blood all over his face and arms, said he was the devil and told officers to shoot him. Roberts defense attorney, Sherry Petrovich-Staedler, told Krueger on Thursday that her client was OK with 75 years in prison because he didnt want to hurt anyone else. She said he was using drugs heavily and suffering auditory hallucinations at the time of the stabbing. He had a long history of mental health disorders and substance abuse, Petrovich-Staedler said, and prior to the stabbing, Edwards and family members tried to get him help at St. James Healthcare. Staff there couldnt distinguish between the drug use and mental health issues so they released him, she said. She cited police reports and said he was speaking nonsense when arrested. "He thought the only way to get the devil out of him was to for him and his partner to drink each other's blood," Petrovich-Staedler said. He asked that he be put away for a lengthy amount of time, she said as Roberts, shackled and dressed in orange jail garb, stood next to her without displaying emotion. Prosecutor Ann Shea said Roberts admitted he was high on meth when he killed Edwards and her death left a young son without a mother. She said a 70-year sentence for deliberate homicide and a five-year enhancement for using a weapon during the crime were justified. We have to protect society, Shea said. There was no excuse for this. It was just plain evil. There is no other way for the state to actually describe this. Roberts has been jailed since the stabbing in the 1800 block of Grand Avenue on June 12, 2021. Police say he and Edwards had come to Butte from Salida, Colorado, about two weeks prior and that Edwards was stabbed repeatedly with a knife. Officers say he admitted to the stabbing but police and prosecutors have not said why he did it or what led to the crime. But Roberts father called police at noon that day saying his son had just killed his girlfriend and he wanted the police. He also said they were in the yard of the residence. Police found nobody in the yard and nobody inside responded initially when an officer yelled. They heard someone upstairs, however, and when walking up the stairs a male began yelling, Im the devil, you have to kill me, according to charging documents. Roberts had blood all over his face and arms but no apparent wounds, and after running past officers toward an alley, they caught and detained him. Police then found Edwards lying on her back with no clothing and blood all over her face, neck and head areas. The blood around her head appeared to be coagulating and there appeared to be wounds on her neck, prosecutors say. Roberts mother arrived at the residence and told police she had picked up her son and Edwards in Bozeman and brought them to Butte. But she said she had no other information on Edwards. On Thursday, Krueger said the case was just tragic. Its tragic from the standpoint that Mr. Roberts, throughout life youve had a substance-abuse problem. A severe substance-abuse problem, Krueger told him. Youve had opportunities to treat your substance abuse problem and you failed to do so. You also failed to adequately address your mental health issues and you had many opportunities to do so and you continued to heighten your mental health issues with your substance abuse, he said. This is just a senseless crime and a tragic waste of a mothers life. KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Powerful explosions rattled the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv on Thursday and a city close to the country's biggest nuclear power plant sustained a barrage of shelling, part of a series of new Russian attacks in several regions, Ukrainian officials said. Ukrainian authorities said shelling of a town in the eastern Donetsk region, where fighting has been focused in recent weeks, left at least eight people dead. And the mayor of the separatist-held city of Donetsk said six were killed in shelling there. Ukraine's presidential office said in its daily update that nine Ukrainian regions came under fire over the previous 24 hours. Two districts of Mykolaiv, which has been targeted frequently in recent weeks, were shelled early Thursday morning. Russian forces reportedly fired 60 rockets at Nikopol, in the central Dnipropetrovsk region. Some 50 residential buildings were damaged in the city of 107,000 and some projectiles hit power lines, leaving city residents without electricity, according to Ukrainian authorities. Nikopol is located across the Dnieper river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which was taken over by Russian troops early in the war. Experts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War believe that Russia is shelling the area intentionally, putting Ukraine in a difficult position." Either Ukraine returns fire, risking international condemnation and a nuclear incident (which Ukrainian forces are unlikely to do), or Ukrainian forces allow Russian forces to continue firing on Ukrainian positions from an effective safe zone, the Institutes latest report said. The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency earlier this week voiced alarm over the situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Thursday that the Russian military had struck two Ukrainian munitions depots near the village of Novoivanivka in the Zaporizhzhia region and a fuel depot near the Zaporizhzhia railway station. In northern Ukraine, the country's second-largest city, Kharkiv, was being shelled from Russia, the presidential office said. Several industrial facilities were hit in the city, which has been a frequent target. In the nearby city of Chuhuiv, a rocket hit a five-story residential building. Fighting continued in the fiercely contested Donetsk region, with Ukrainian authorities saying a school was destroyed in the village of Ocheretyne. The region is struggling without gas supplies and, in part, without power and water supplies; its residents are being evacuated. In the town of Toretsk, artillery shells hit a bus stop, a church and apartment buildings, killing at least eight people and wounding four, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said. In the city of Donetsk, Russian-backed separatist authorities blamed Ukrainian forces for shelling the central part of the city Thursday. The area hit was near a theater where a farewell ceremony for a prominent separatist officer killed a few days ago was being held. Donetsk Mayor Alexei Kulemzin said six people were killed and seven more wounded. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied Ukrainian involvement. He alleged, without offering evidence, that Russian or separatist forces were responsible for the shelling. Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of firing on territories under their own control. Russian forces have already seized the Luhansk region that neighbors Donetsk. Its Ukrainian governor, Serhiy Haidai, said on social media that local residents are being mobilized to fight against Kyiv's forces and that even indispensable mine workers are being taken. Ukrainian authorities reported another abduction of a mayor who reportedly refused to collaborate with the Russians in the southern Kherson region, which is also almost entirely occupied. The reported kidnapping of Serhiy Lyakhno, the mayor of the village of Hornostaivka, comes as Russia amasses more troops in the area in anticipation of a counteroffensive by Kyiv and ahead of a planned referendum on the region becoming part of Russia. ___ MUSCATINE The Muscatine County Democratic party announced Wednesday that former Mayor Diana Broderson will be the partys nominee to face Republican Danny Chick for the Muscatine County Board of Supervisors Dist. 1 seat. According to a news released from the party, Broderson was nominated during a virtual reconvening of delegates on Aug. 2. The general election coincides with the Gubernatorial election on Tuesday, Nov. 8. I was encouraged by a lot of different people, she said. I just got out of that business, but I guess Im walking right back in. In the Nov. 2, 2021, election, Broderson was defeated by current Mayor Brad Bark, 1,834 to 1,236. Before that, Broderson served six years as mayor, or three terms. She also retired in February from the Muscatine Community YMCA after 25 years. She has served on many boards and commissions. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in philosophy, has done post-graduate work and holds many certificates in human resource management, mental health, fiscal management and budgeting, among other things. Broderson's first term as mayor was fraught with controversy, as the Muscatine City Council voted her out of office in May 2017, claiming she willfully violated city code. A month after the removal vote, a district court judge reinstated Broderson, and later a judge ruled the council's removal was a violation of the mayor's right to due process. During the following election, Broderson was reelected mayor in November 2017. She remains one of several former City Council members being sued by former city administrator Gregg Mandsager. During the COVID-19 health crisis, Broderson lead the charge in Muscatine to keep people safe and informed. She turned to social media to do regular updates many times daily on the latest information being released by the Muscatine County Public Health as well as national health care professionals. She did many news releases to make sure information was being distributed. I really, really like working for the people, she said. That is what I like to do just be that public servant really appeals to me. I feel like because of the background I have had working with working families and being one myself, as well as being born and raised here all my life I really think I can add value to the current board. They are a great group, and I feel I would just add value to them by bringing in a fresh perspective from the experience I have. She said she had worked with most of the board members and had a good working relationship with them. In the coming campaign, she hopes to get out and meet more people in the community. She commented knowing the community has always been important to her and working with the people. She said she wanted to do what she had always done and be there for the community. Diana Brodersons experience as mayor of Muscatine will be an enormous benefit to the residents of our county, Kelcey Brackett, chair of the party, said. Diana will be able to hit the ground running, using her previous experience and extensive knowledge to provide the best representation possible from Day One. We could not be more pleased to have her represent us on the ticket and stand soundly behind her qualifications and credentials as we look to November. The Dist. 1 seat is currently held by Supervisor Santos Saucedo, who lost the primary election to Chick. MUSCATINE Last Sunday, July 31, members of 10 different LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) councils from across Iowa gathered at Augustana College, taking the time to hand out scholarships in the hopes of helping build the futures of Latin American students. This was an opportunity to come together and celebrate the work that these students have been doing towards their education, LULAC Council 371 President Nick Salazar said. At this years LULAC Scholarship Banquet, 67 different students were awarded over $55,000 in scholarships. Of these students, five were selected by LULAC of Muscatine, receiving a total of $5,000 divided amongst the five. Additionally, the funds raised for each Muscatine scholarship are matched by the LULAC National Scholarship Fund. The five students that received scholarships were Fernando Carillo, Paola Castillo Santiago, Leticia Ibarra, Jennifer Solis and Naylea Verdeniz. Carillo recently graduated from Muscatine High School and is planning to attend University of Northern Iowa while the other four recipients are all students of Muscatine Community College (MCC) and are currently part of its on-campus LULAC student group. Jesse Garcia, Student Advisor for MCCs LULAC members, shared that these same four students assisted in one of this years earliest fundraisers, that being a community bingo night. A big focus of the MCC LULAC Council is to get these students to be more engaged, not just on campus but in the community, so that was an opportunity for them to do so, Garcia said. Obviously its nice to see it come back and see them benefit from those funds as the students that helped put the fundraiser on. We do hold joint fundraisers with the MCC LULAC Council to help raise funds, not just for themselves but also for the next group of students that will be arriving the following year, Salazar added. According to Salazar, this was the third year that LULAC Muscatine has ran its scholarship program. Although the program took some time off during the pandemic, it has still seen significant growth since first starting in 2018, with each year seeing a doubling of the amount being fundraised for the scholarships. What were seeing is that there is a need to raise funds for the students, and theres also been an increase in community engagement to make that happen, Salazar said. We really hope to keep this momentum going for the future. When it came to the importance of the program, Salazar explained that he saw it as a way to not only provide aid to students who may not otherwise have the means to afford going to college, allowing them to continue their education pursuits by removing those financial barriers, but he also saw it as a way to motivate other students to strive for higher education. When theyre in middle school and they see that theres a program that has folks out in the community working towards it, it will inspire them and empower them to continue to plan their higher education path, he continued. The fundraising (for the scholarships) also gives the community an opportunity to come together and engage with and make a direct impact in the lives of students. Garcia shared that felt similarly, adding that he was glad that the scholarship recipients can focus on being engaged in both their studies and on campus now that they dont have to worry as much about financial strains. From our point of view, its nice that we can provide them that peace of mind, so that they can focus on the things we consider to be the most important, Garcia said. Were hoping to be able to do the same going forward for future students, and members of the community should know that if they ever do see one of our events going on, participating in it does affect a local student in a big way. Every dollar we raise has a profound impact on the lives of others. Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday. Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and multiple sharp force injuries, while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Their 6-year-old daughter, Lula Schmidt, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation, officials said. All three family members deaths have been ruled homicides. The Schmidts 9-year-old son, who was with his family on the camping trip, survived the attack without physical injuries, but investigators have not said whether he was in the tent when the attack happened. The department confirmed Thursday that the killer was Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Nebraska, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the family was attacked early on the morning of July 22 in their tent at the Maquoketa Caves State Park campground. Sherwin was at the park camping with his parents at the time of the attack, according to police and Sherwin's mother. Investigators said all evidence collected substantiates that Sherwin acted alone, but police have not revealed a motive for the killings. Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Department of Public Safetys division of criminal investigation, said Thursday that investigators have indications as to what the motive was, but don't plan to release that information. Police who swarmed the park about 180 miles (290 kilometers) east of Des Moines in the wake of the shooting found Sherwins body outside the campground but within a wooded area of the park. A memorial to celebrate the lives of the Schmidts was held Tuesday in their hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, drawing about 200 people. Associated Press reporter Michael Tarm in Chicago contributed to this report. Nigerias broadcasting regulator has fined DStv and several other broadcasters for airing a BBC documentary about the ultra-violent bandit groups operating in the countrys northwestern parts. In a statement on Wednesday, the countrys National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) announced a 5 million naira (R201,135) sanction on DStv, TSTV, and Startimes for broadcasting the Bandit Warlords of Zamfara during an episode of the BBC Africa Eye programme. The NBC has alleged that the 50-minute piece glorified the activities of bandits and undermined Nigerias national security. The regulator also fined Trust TV for broadcasting a documentary titled Nigerias Banditry The Inside Story. The NBC said the airing of the documentaries contravened Nigerias Broadcasting Code, which states the following: No broadcast shall encourage or incite to crime, lead to public disorder or hate, be repugnant to public feelings or contain offensive reference to any person or organisation, alive or dead or generally be disrespectful to human dignity. The broadcaster shall not transmit a programme that incites or is likely to incite violence among the populace, causing mass panic, political and social upheaval, security breach and general social disorder. The broadcaster shall ensure that law enforcement is upheld at all times in a manner depicting that law and order are socially superior to, or more desirable than crime or anarchy. The regulator said although it appreciated the need for educating, informing, and enlightening the public on issues bordering on developments and happenings within and outside the country, it advised broadcasters to be circumspect and deliberate in the choice and carriage of contents deleterious to Nigerias national security. The documentary was also published on YouTube on 25 July 2022 and had been viewed almost 1.2 million times at the time of publication. It is narrated by a law student raised in the impacted area who has first-hand experience of the violence perpetrated by the gangs and vigilante groups formed in response to their activities. The documentary includes interviews with the victims of the violence and the leaders of the bandits. It includes disturbing footage of the bodies of the gangs victims, including young children. The ensuing nightmare has killed thousands, closed hundreds of schools, and is spreading into neighbouring states. Massacres and mass abductions are frequent, he explains. A report from Nigerian news publication The Nation Online on the latest development states that the fine was because of the governments disdain for negative press and sharp revelations. This is particularly true of the governments reactions to international media coverage, such as the CNN story on the Lekki gate shootings during the #ENDSARS protest, and negative international indices, such as those published annually by the Corruption Perception Index and the Fragile States Index. The banning and unbanning of Twitter for spreading fake news is yet another example, the reporter added. MyBroadband asked DStv parent company MultiChoice for comment on the development but did not immediately receive feedback to our queries. This is not the first time MultiChoice has faced legal trouble in the country. In 2021, a Nigerian tribunal ordered the company to pay 50% of a disputed 1.8 trillion naira (R72.5 billion) tax bill after the countrys revenue services instructed banks to freeze the accounts of MultiChoice Africa and its Nigerian subsidiary. The Federal Inland Revenue Service (Firs) alleged that MultiChoice had breached agreements and denied access to its records for auditing. MultiChoice and Firs later reached an agreement by which it would permit the auditing of its accounts to determine its tax liability. In 2018, the Federal High Court in Abuja ordered that DStv freeze its package prices as part of an investigation into consumer complaints about its arbitrary price hikes. MTN customers in the Free State and Western Cape have complained that they cannot use mobile data services on the operators network. A surge in reports on Thursday morning was recorded on MTNs Downdetector page from around 06:00 AM, with the main issue being flagged as Mobile Internet. Several customers from Cape Town and Bloemfontein reported they could not use mobile data. One subscriber in Kenwyn in Cape Town said the issue started around midnight. Several customers were complaining about the same problems on Twitter. Your Internet is not working in Stellenbosch, cannot connect to WhatsApp to log a fault. Cannot buy mobile data using the banking app, no Internet, one user posted. The graph below shows the increase in reports about issues on MTNs network in South Africa on Thursday morning. Interestingly, Downdetector also showed Capitec bank experiencing issues around the same time. MyBroadband tested logging into Capitecs app from Gauteng. It failed on an MTN connection but worked when connected to other networks. This suggests MTNs network problems may affect customers elsewhere in the country when trying to access specific services. MyBroadband contacted the operator for feedback on the outage, and it said the issues would be resolved within the next 30 minutes. MTN can confirm that we experienced some downtime in the Western Cape and Free State due to urgently planned repair work, said MTN corporate affairs executive Jacqui OSullivan. Teams are busy with the rollback on work done, and we anticipate that all impacted areas will be back online within the next 30 minutes [10:40]. MTN apologised to affected customers. The work was urgently required to ensure we can maintain the high quality performance that our customers receive on our network. An MTN spokesperson had previously told Fin24 on Thursday morning its network would be fully operational by 09:20. The husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor driving under the influence charges in connection with a May car crash in Northern California's wine country. Paul Pelosi did not appear in person Wednesday at Napa County Superior Court. His attorney entered not guilty pleas on his behalf. The charges are driving under the influence of alcohol causing injury and driving with a .08% blood alcohol level or higher, causing injury. California Highway Patrol officers responding to the crash said Pelosi was unsteady on his feet and his speech was slurred. Nancy Pelosi is traveling in Asia this week. The local historical newspapers of yesteryear were filled with announcements and articles about the marriages of both local and visiting couples. Some of these accounts also provided insights into the cultural traditions of various ethnic communities within Napa County including the local Chinese community. The first story is about the January 4, 1869 wedding of Sing Ling and Ah Gow and how cultural differences resulted in an awkward yet humorous event. According to the Jan. 9, 1869 Napa County Reporter, this ceremony was the first Chinese marriage service for Napa County Judge Crouch, who was somewhat naive about the differences between the cultures. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help. Subscribe today! Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register. Following the exchange of vows, Crouch informed the happy groom that to constitute a genuine, high-toned, moral marriage he (Ah Gow, not the judge) must kiss his new made spouse," the article reported. Desiring a legal and binding marriage, Gow attempted to kiss Ling. The article continued, the coy bride was not willin, and here ensued a scene that was interestingly ludicrous. She, conscious that all eyes were upon her, sought to evade the proffered salute...Gow pursued her eagerly, bent upon performing the concluding rite of the ceremony which was to make her his forever. He was unsuccessful until our kind-hearted County Clerk, realizing the situation, caught and held the damsel, fast, while Sheriff Walker seized the groom... The article also said the clerk, sheriff and judge positioned the couple face-to-face and in close proximity to guarantee the kiss was an accomplished fact. The 1869 article added, Everything having thus terminated, the couple departed, duly married in point of fact and point of law. In the Dec. 19, 1890 Napa Register ran a reprint of a St. Helena Reflector article. However, this particular wedding differed from the others as it was a traditional Chinese arranged marriage and ceremony. According the article, the wedding took place in Rutherford. And, the entire Napa County Chinese community was filled with excited anticipation as they all rushed about to fulfill their obligations in preparation for the big event. Some of that excitement was due in part to the social status of the bridal party. The brides father is the boss of the China house in Oakville. The article continued, he escorted his daughter from her home in Oakville to her future home in Rutherford. The conveyance used was a closed carriage brought from Napa for the especial purpose. The bride sat alone in the hack completely covered by a costly garment of red silk. Just after 7 p.m. the bridal party drew close to Rutherford. At that point, the San Francisco Chinese band was given the signal to begin playing traditional Chinese wedding tunes. The cavalcade halted... and the hack was immediately surrounded by an immense crowd of friends of the bride." Then two Chinese men appeared with peculiar instruments in their hands and chased one another around the hack pell-mell through the crowd three times... It continued, ...then the groom appeared dressed in all the customary fantastic colors of the Celestial costume, struck the hack with his forehead, turned to the west and made three elaborate bows, nearly to the ground with his arms spread out, gave a grunt and dashed back to the house. At that point the bride exited the carriage as best she could, blindfolded as she was, being assisted by two Chinese ladies who led her through the throng and into her cottage..." The Dec. 19, 1890 article continued with the final details. Then the fire-crackers were touched off, the band commenced another tune...For a few moments the noise was deafening, but finally the fire-crackers expended their force, the musicians stopped and the ceremony was over. For now, the fates of these couples are unknown. However, and hopefully, their lives were happy and prosperous. Riverside County has announced its Board of Supervisors will name former Napa County Executive Officer Minh Tran as county counsel on Aug. 30, raising questions of why Napa County agreed to give him severance pay. In a late Tuesday press release, Riverside County said Tran will be appointed county counsel when its Board of Supervisors next meets on Aug. 30. He will make a base salary of $285,000, compared to his base salary of $ 311,000 as Napa County CEO. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help. Subscribe today! Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register. Minh is an exceptional leader with discerning judgement and a strong acumen, Riverside County Board of Supervisors Chairperson Jeff Hewitt said. I look forward to working with Minh to continue finding innovative solutions for Riverside County residents. Tran is also quoted in the press release. I am honored to serve in this new capacity with the County of Riverside, Tran said. Returning to Riverside County is exciting, both professionally and personally, and I look forward to joining a team dedicated to driving the county forward. Tran could not be reached Wednesday to say whether he will still accept the Napa County severance pay, given he is taking another job. The Napa County Board of Supervisors on July 28 voted unanimously in closed session to release Tran from his CEO job with severance pay. Tran's employment contract calls for 18 months of severance pay, which comes to $467,000. County Board of Supervisors Chairperson Ryan Gregory said on July 28 that Tran was released because Tran was looking for another job and Napa County needs a CEO laser-focused on Napa County. It was known at that point that Riverside County had offered Tran its county counsel job. Trans Napa County contract said he is entitled to severance pay if he is released without cause and is willing and able to keep serving as CEO. That raises the question of why Napa County would provide severance pay if Tran intended to leave for the Riverside County job. My answer to that is he did not disclose his intent to take that position, Gregory said on Wednesday. In fact, he said the opposite, which was he preferred to stay. We were interested in a transition immediately and he left us no choice. Supervisor Alfredo Pedroza on Wednesday also addressed the severance pay issue. Our attorney and his attorney are talking," Pedroza said. "Minh is on administrative leave. The most important part here is about moving forward together as a county. Riverside County initially was going to appoint Tran as county counsel on July 26. The item appeared briefly July 21 on that countys online Board of Supervisors agenda, only to be pulled by July 22. That triggered the Napa County Board of Supervisors closed sessions that culminated in Tran's release. Tran previously worked in Riverside County. He was senior deputy county counsel there for 10 years before coming to Napa County in 2009, where he served as assistant county counsel and county counsel. He served as CEO from 2017 until last week. Tran last year filed a claim against Napa County. The Napa County Board of Supervisors discussed the claim on the day it released Tran under the closed session heading of significant exposure to litigation. To receive severance pay, Tran under his contract must release Napa County, its Board of Supervisors and its employees from all claims he may have against them. County officials said Tran as of Wednesday morning had not signed the release. The claim was related to a 2021 incident when Supervisor Belia Ramos received a COVID-19 shot before eligible. She said it was an end-of-the-day shot that otherwise would have been tossed. On March 4, 2021, the Board of Supervisors voted to do a third-party investigation that focused on the controversial incident. Ramos later said Tran should have presented an in-house report that found she had apparently been "in the right place at the right time" to receive an end-of-the-day shot. Tran said that in-house report had been done quickly and new information had arisen. Ramos reported Tran to the State Bar of California, which has never announced any disciplinary action taken against Tran. In his Oct. 19, 2021 claim, obtained by the Napa Valley Register, Tran said Ramos showed a pattern of retaliatory actions resulting in a hostile work environment and damage to his reputation. He offered to settle for $1, though the claim doesnt say what actions he expected the Board of Supervisors to take in return. The Board of Supervisors never took any action announced publicly regarding the matter. The Napa Valley Register on Wednesday asked Ramos for comments. "Given the nature of Mr. Trans departure from the County of Napa, I am not able to comment on specific details about severance and claims at this time," Ramos said. "Having been hired at an executive level by another governmental agency demonstrates that Mr. Trans reputation and career were not damaged at all." She added she looks forward to working with a new CEO to further the countys values. Napa County last week named Assistant CEO Rebecca Craig as interim CEO. Gregory said the Board of Supervisors will discuss next Tuesday how to approach filling the CEOs position on a permanent basis. One consideration is whether to wait until January to choose a new CEO, when two new supervisors will be on the Board. Supervisors Diane Dillon and Brad Wagenknecht didnt run for reelection. Gregory said the Board of Supervisors might want to get the ball rolling now, since recruitment can take four to six months. Counties are struggling to fill leadership roles. The preference is to find someone with California county government experience, since California government is unique, he said. Tran led Napa County during a period when it responded to five wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. After the July 28 closed session, Gregory read a statement when announcing the Board of Supervisors vote to release Tran. He said this was a no-cause separation." This action should not be construed to impugn or reflect negatively on any aspect of Mr. Trans past work performance, Gregory said. Updated at 4:31 p.m. Wednesday Napa County public health authorities have reported finding bacteria that cause Legionnaires disease on the property of a Napa city hotel, one day after the announcement of a local death from the disease. Preliminary testing of human-made water sources detected high levels of the Legionella bacterium in a sample taken from a cooling tower at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Napa Valley at 1075 California Blvd., the county announced in a news release Wednesday afternoon. However, none of the 12 people in Napa County to have fallen ill from the disease since July one of whom has died are known to have stayed at or visited the hotel, according to the statement. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help. Subscribe today! Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register. The cooling tower has since been taken offline, which mitigates any ongoing risk to public health, county officials said. The county added it is continuing its investigation into any other potential sources of unsafe levels of the bacteria. Our joint investigation team continues to work with Embassy Suites staff to remediate the source of exposure, Dr. Karen Relucio, Napa Countys public health officer, said in the statement. Finding Legionella in one water sample is an important piece of the puzzle, but we must continue to investigate other cooling towers and water sources in the outbreak area, as it is common to find more than one source. Becky Craig, Napa Countys interim executive officer, announced a news conference on the discovery and the Legionnaires outbreak for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. Updates from the conference were not available before the Napa Valley Register went to press. County looks into Legionnaires' disease cases in Napa and Calistoga Health officials in Napa County nine confirmed cases of Legionnaires' disease in Napa and Calistoga, county officials announced Friday. Tuesday evening, Napa County said the outbreak of Legionnaires disease it had first announced Friday has caused one death and several hospitalizations. The ailment has sickened 12 people overall since July 11. One or two cases in Napa County per year are typical, although the risk to residents and visitors remains low despite the recent outbreak, county officials said last week. Legionella, the bacterium that causes the disease, grows in warm water. Most cases can be traced to contamination of artificial water systems such as cooling towers for air conditioning in buildings or decorative fountains. Napa County Public Health is working closely with a joint investigation team from the California Department of Public Health, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Napa County Environmental Health Branch of the Planning Building and Environmental Department, the county said. Authorities are sampling water for Legionella and recommending remediation strategies where appropriate to prevent further transmission. The reported fatality was the first one identified in the county "for several years," the county said. "We are deeply saddened by the death of this individual," Relucio said Tuesday. "Our thoughts and condolences go out to the family. We share concern for all impacted by this outbreak." Symptoms of Legionnaires' disease include fever, chills, muscle aches and cough. It is not transmitted person-to-person, only from breathing in water vapor containing the bacteria. There is no danger from most home air conditioning units, which do not use water vapor for cooling. People at a higher risk for serious illness include those over 50, cigarette smokers, and people with chronic lung disease or compromised immune systems. Legionnaires' disease is treatable with antibiotics. While Legionnaires cases are rare, the Napa outbreak is a reminder that the bacteria causing the disease are common in nature and can be found in man-made water systems, Relucio said in the countys announcement Wednesday. "This means its very important for owners and managers of water systems that can create aerosols to take steps to prevent Legionella from growing and spreading in water systems, she said. Strategies to prevent the growth of Legionella bacteria in the home include flushing faucets and shower heads that have not been recently used, as well as cleaning, disinfecting and maintain all devices that use water, such as humidifiers, respiratory therapy devices, shower head and faucet aerators, water heaters, and hot tubs. With reports from Register reporter Howard Yune and Bay City News Service. Updated at 4 p.m. Thursday Napa County public health authorities are investigating the largest local outbreak of Legionnaires disease in several years with one resident dead, others hospitalized, and disease-causing bacteria found in a hotels cooling tower. One local resident has died after contracting the waterborne microbe, and another 11 have fallen ill since July 11, the county announced late Tuesday. Wednesday evening, Napa Countys Health & Human Services agency confirmed the Legionella bacterium that causes the disease was detected in preliminary samples taken from a rooftop cooling tower at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Napa Valley, at 1075 California Blvd. in the city of Napa. None of the people sickened in the latest outbreak, which began July 11, are known to have visited or stayed at the Embassy Suites. All of the patients have been local residents, with most living in Napa near the hotel but at least one in Calistoga, county Public Health Director Dr. Karen Relucio said. (The Calistoga resident has a history of visiting Napa, she added.) Legionella bacteria, which are waterborne, can spread in aerosols for up to a mile from a contaminated water source, according to Relucio. Interim County Public Information Officer Leah Doyle-Stevens said Thursday that's why the county believes the cooling tower could have been the source of infection, given that those most of those infected live near the hotel. But, she added, the county is continuing to investigate nearby cooling towers, spas and other areas that may be serving as sources of infection. Three of the people sickened in the Napa County outbreak are currently hospitalized, one is on a ventilator, and eight have recovered, Relucio told reporters outside the county health department offices. The patients range in age from 58 to 80 with an average age of 69, and most are men, according to Relucio. Many also had existing health conditions such as lung disease, kidney problems or diabetes, which she said is consistent with patients older than 50 and with weakened immune systems being most vulnerable to contracting Legionnaires disease. These were not healthy people with no underlying conditions, she said. The cooling tower has since been taken offline, which mitigates any ongoing risk to public health, she said, adding that Napa County continues to look into any other artificial water fixtures such as decorative fountains or cooling towers for commercial air conditioning systems that may harbor unsafe levels of the bacteria. Finding Legionella in one water sample is an important piece of the puzzle, but we must continue to investigate other cooling towers and water sources in the outbreak area, as it is common to find more than one source, Relucio said Wednesday. County officials are discussing a targeted outreach to residents of the neighborhood near the Embassy Suites hotel, which is near Highway 29s interchange with First Street, according to Patty Martinez, a Napa County health education specialist. An Embassy Suites spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that the hotel is working closely with health officials on their investigation, and "continues to make every effort to ensure all practices and standards are in line with strict safety and security regulations." Once the hotel became aware of the preliminary findings of Legionella in the cooling tower, the spokesperson said, "we immediately contacted our consultant and water treatment provider to ensure we were following the guidance set forth by the health department and began remediation." Health officials in Napa County first confirmed nine probable Legionnaires' cases on July 29. One or two cases in Napa County per year are typical, although the risk to residents and visitors remains low despite the recent outbreak, county officials said last week. The fatality was the first to be recorded from Legionnaires disease in Napa County since at least before Relucios appointment as public health officer in 2015. Legionella, the bacterium that causes the disease, grows in warm water. While the microbe naturally occurs in lakes and streams, it can become a health threat when it contaminates artificial water systems such as cooling towers for air conditioning in buildings or decorative fountains. Incubation of Legionella bacteria can take from two to 14 days, according to Relucio. Outbreaks are commonly associated with buildings or structures that have complex water systems, like hotels and resorts, long-term care facilities, hospitals, and cruise ships," according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most likely sources of infection include water used for showering, hot tubs, decorative fountains, and cooling towers." Napa County Public Health is working closely with a joint investigation team from the California Department of Public Health, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Napa County Environmental Health Branch of the Planning Building and Environmental Department, the county said. Authorities are sampling water for Legionella and recommending remediation strategies where appropriate to prevent further transmission. Symptoms of Legionnaires' disease include fever, chills, nausea, vomiting muscle aches and cough. It is not transmitted person-to-person, only from breathing in water vapor containing the bacteria. There is no danger from most home air conditioning units, which do not use water vapor for cooling. People at a higher risk for serious illness include those over 50, cigarette smokers, and people with chronic lung disease or compromised immune systems. Legionnaires' disease is treatable with antibiotics. Relucio advised people with possible symptoms and health risk factors to avoid being outside for long periods, and to seek medical attention. While Legionnaires cases are rare, the Napa outbreak is a reminder that the bacteria causing the disease are common in nature and can be found in man-made water systems, Relucio said earlier Wednesday. "This means its very important for owners and managers of water systems that can create aerosols to take steps to prevent Legionella from growing and spreading in water systems, she said. Strategies to prevent the growth of Legionella bacteria in the home include flushing faucets and shower heads that have not been recently used, as well as cleaning, disinfecting and maintain all devices that use water, such as humidifiers, respiratory therapy devices, shower head and faucet aerators, water heaters, and hot tubs. We understand that this information is concerning, and were working really hard to get the answers that we need to ensure community safety, Relucio said of Napa Countys response to the outbreak. The disease is named after the first reported outbreak, which occurred in 1976 at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia and resulted in about 180 illnesses and 29 deaths. Some 10,000 cases were reported in 2018, but the CDC says the actual number is probably 1.8 to 2.7 times higher because the disease is underdiagnosed. With reports from The Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle. Register reporter Edward Booth contributed to this report. Editor's note: This is the third part of a series by Napa Valley architect Chris D. Craiker. Wines in America have a complex history. The Vikings visited North America and called it Vinland because of the profusion of grape vines, none of which made good wine. The earliest traceable winemaking is to the 1562 French Huguenots settling near Jacksonville, Florida. Using wild Muscadine grapes, still used in Florida wine. Growing the familiar European Vitis vinifera grapes started in 1619 but the crop failed after native pests and plant disease decimated the crop. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help. Subscribe today! Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register. Interestingly, in the 1650s Spanish missionaries planted mission vineyards, native to Baja California, as they conquered California and New Mexico. Wine then was supposed to be for sacrificial rites but really for the monks' benefit. The first vines of Vitis vinifera origin were planted in 1629 near San Antonio, New Mexico, and is considered Americas earliest wine industry. It wasnt until 1683 that William Penn planted a vineyard of French grapes in Pennsylvania and the first commercial winery in the U.S. was in 1787 by Pierre LaGoues. Most of the East Coast still uses the French-American highbred grapes. The first secular California vineyard was established in Los Angeles by a French immigrant, Jean-Louis Vignes who imported vines from France. By 1851 he had 40,000 vines under cultivation and was producing 1,000 U.S. barrels of wine per year. In Northern California, with its excellent climate for growing grapes, General Mariano Vallejo, the former Sonoma Presidio commander, became the first large-scale winegrower in the valley. In 1857, Agoston Haraszthy bought 520 acres (2.1 km2) near Vallejo's vineyards. In contrast to Vallejo and most others, Haraszthy dry planted his vines on hill slopes without irrigation. Dry farming has become a common practice for up to 10% of Northern California vineyards, to many, creating a superior wine. After the Gold Rush, hordes of immigrants from around the world entered California, bringing with them new grapes and unique architecture styles. In 1854, John Patchett planted the first commercial vineyard in Napa Valley and in 1858 established the first winery. In 1861 Charles Krug, a Prussian farmworker for Haraszthy and Patchett, founded a St. Helena winery to mentor the industry to this day. Karl Wente, Charles Wetmore, Jacob Berringer and Robert Mondavi, all of whom became important vintners, worked there. Interestingly, Napa likes to pontificate about the 1976 Judgement in Paris, but at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, Napa Valley wines won 20 of the 34 medals or awards, including four gold medals. Napa wines showed their superiority then, only to be followed by 40 years of natural and political disasters. The outbreak of phylloxera destroyed most Vitis vinifera vines, severe frosts, droughts, the Great Depression and the San Francisco Earthquake where an estimated 30,000,000 U.S. gallons of wine were destroyed. The biggest political disaster was the 1920 to 1933 national Prohibition that limited winemaking and purchase toguess who? The missions and monasteries. This crippled the wine industry for 50 years. Of the 2,500 pre-Prohibition wineries in America, barely 100 survived. In 1966 Robert Mondavi and his sons created Robert Mondavi Winery, which upset the wine industry forever. Not only striving to create better wines, Mondavi built the first major new winery since Prohibition. Up until then, winery architecture was industrial and functional. To design his vision, Mondavi hired Cliff May, a renowned California architect, famous for designing ranch homes. The style was loosely called Mission Style or Modernistic Adobe with the massive Spanish-inspired arch and Italian-inspired campanile that crossed cultural lines to provide a beacon to curious wine enthusiasts. It wasnt monastic or chateau-ish. The unusual architecture was a brilliant combination of Californias history and desire to showcase better wines. In 1976 the famous Judgement of Paris not only celebrated Napa wines but put the entire industry in high gear to not only create better wines but also build bigger shrines to show them off. So I ask, as the winery buildings get bigger, grander and more opulent, are their wines equally magnificent? Thats for another discussion. Next, we will look at what makes good winery architecture. According to information published by Tactical Report on August 4, 2022, the Egyptian government is reportedly in talks with the Spanish company Navantia to acquire amphibious assault ships and patrol boats. Follow Navy Recognition on Google News at this link Egyptian Mistral-class amphibious assault ship ENS Anwar el Sadat (Picture source: Airbase) The Egyptian Navy already has two Mistral-class amphibious assault ships, the Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Anwar El Sadat, that respond to the needs of numerous navies thanks to their versatility. It allows a wide spectrum of civil and military missions. With a length of 199 meters and a speed exceeding 18 knots, the Mistral-class LHD vessel is characterized by its high capacity for the transportation of troops, equipment, heavy helicopters, and landing craft, which the LHD is capable of projecting around the world. It is equipped with an electric propulsion system that uses pods. It also has an onboard hospital and can carry out large-scale humanitarian missions. Its highly capable communication system makes it the ideal command vessel within a naval force. The 2,650-square-metre (28,500 sq ft) vehicle hangar can carry a 40-strong Leclerc tank battalion, or a 13-strong Leclerc tank company, and 46 other vehicles. The 900 m2 (9,700 sq ft) hospital provides 20 rooms and 69 hospitalisation beds, of which 7 are fit for intensive care. The two surgery blocks come complete with a radiology room providing digital radiography and ultrasonography, and that can be fitted with a mobile CT scanner. 50 medicalized beds are kept in reserve and can be installed in a helicopter hangar to extend the capacity of the hospital in case of emergency. The Mistral class are armed with two Simbad missile systems, two 20 mm modele F2 gun, two 30 mm Breda-Mauser, two 7.62 mm M134 miniguns and four 12.7 mm M2HB Browning machine guns. Thames Water bans customers from using hoses for irrigation Search operations at Surmalu shopping center ceased until morning Most polluted cities revealed Investor pessimism in Germany has worsened even more in August Electricity prices in Europe continue to rise steadily NATO to increase its peacekeeping forces in Kosovo in case of escalation of tensions with Serbia OPEC Secretary General: Organization is not involved in gas and oil prices rise Estonia to ban Russian citizens who received visa in third EU country from entering Estonia Goldman Sachs: Europe's chances of recession are now twice as high as US NEWS.am BREAKING on Yerevan market blast: 16 people killed, 1 person still missing French FM expresses solidarity with Armenia over Surmalu tragedy Philippines ready to support US in case of war with China Mayor of Venice looking for two 'pushy idiots' who raced Grand Canal Mishustin and Pashinyan discuss cooperation in trade and economic sphere Norway will provide military aid to Ukraine Garo Paylan appeals to Ankara Prosecutor's Office Mourning liturgy for victims of explosion and fire at Surmalu will be held in Armenia Iran to develop cooperation with Pakistan UN Secretary General arrives in Lviv Explosions and fires in at least 17 locations in southern Thailand Lithuanian FM calls for cancellation of tourist Schengen visas for Russians Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan sign agreement on international transit corridor Management of Surmalu shopping center expresses condolences in connection with explosion Wildberries denies information about leakage of customer data 1 injured in explosion has been discharged, and four citizens are currently undergoing treatment Armenia Investigative Committee asks to hand over unused fireworks obtained from Surmalu market to police Iranian Foreign Ministry aims to expand regional transit routes Dollar falls, euro rises in Armenia Eurozone GDP is up in second quarter Charles Michel expresses his condolences in connection with Surmalu explosion Israeli President welcomes Turkey's decision to restore diplomatic relations Turkey decides to restore diplomatic relations with Israel Five injured in explosion are being treated at medical centers NYT: Western countries want to give Russian diamonds bloody status Karabakh teen drowns in reservoir (PHOTOS) More than 50 people questioned in Yerevan shopping market explosion criminal case President: Armenia underscores development of mutually beneficial cooperation with Indonesia Azerbaijan ombudsperson is interested in convicted Armenian captives Kazakhstan President sends condolence message to Armenia PM Armenia has new consul general in Russias Rostov-on-Don No bombs found at Gyumri international airport, railway station 3 men who strangled Yerevan woman, 47, to death are arrested People continue bringing flowers, toys nearby tragic Yerevan explosion site Book of condolences opened at all Armenia diplomatic missions abroad Bomb threat made at Gyumri international airport, railway station Russian embassy upset by reports about Russia organizations participation in Yerevan market tragedy Armenia ex-deputy PM Avinyan visits Yerevan market blast site Yerevan market explosion: We have one missing person, Armenia official says Armenia Prosecutor Generals Office: No one is charged in Yerevan market blast case World oil prices going up Day of mourning declared in Armenia, Artsakh today and tomorrow Kazakhstan embassy offers condolences over Yerevan market explosion People laying flowers nearby Yerevan market blast site Newspaper: One person is charged in Yerevan market explosion case Newspaper: Armenia ruling party plans to make state institutions employees become party members Yerevan explosion: 2 people still being searched for Yerevan market explosion: 2 people still considered missing as of midnight (PHOTOS) Turkey launches airstrike on Aleppo countryside, 3 Syria soldiers dead Is Western unity over Ukraine about to crack? Which countries could survive nuclear war? Surmalu re-inspection scheduled for November In Lebanon, man who held hostages in bank released without charges TerraPower of Bill Gates raises $750 million for projects in nuclear energy and medicine China's 'Galaxy Fold clone' sold out in five minutes and became a bestseller Germany plans to postpone closure of its last three nuclear power plants Expert estimates environmental consequences of Yerevan explosion and gives advices Switzerland signs agreement with Uzbekistan to return $131 million seized from Gulnara Karimova Artsakh also declares mourning Norway can no longer supply Germany with more gas UN Secretary General to meet with Presidents of Ukraine and Turkey in Lviv Ministry of Emergency Situations: There were about 4 tons of flammable substances in Surmalu Russian Security Council says Kyiv threatens global nuclear security Content of toxic substances in air after explosion in Yerevan has increased sharply Scholz says Sweden and Finland's NATO accession process goes according to plan Macron and Zelenskiy discuss situation over Zaporozhye nuclear power plant Expert: Biden is not preparing Americans for what is to come Armenian Prosecutor General's Office: Representatives of management and employees of Surmalu will be interrogated Mourning declared in Armenia Latvia will not extend residence permits previously issued to Russian citizens NEWS.am BREAKING on Yerevan market explosion: 16 people killed First Lady of US contracts COVID-19 Aghvan Hovsepyan undergoes surgery Investigative Committee: More than 20 people questioned in case of Surmalu explosion in Yerevan Head of Armenian HM visits victims of explosion on territory of Surmalu in Yerevan Deputy PM of Singapore: US and China may slide into conflict Director of Surmalu shopping center is in heavy psychological state and does not comment Identity of another victim of Surmalu shopping center in Yerevan established Two Armenian startups advance to EWC Global Finals (PHOTOS) Patriarch Kirill expresses condolences in connection with Surmalu shopping mall explosion Russia announces supply of second S-400 regiment to Turkey Dollar, euro lose value in Armenia Republican Party of Armenia calls for naming leader of united opposition Yerevan market explosion death toll is 16 as of 3:30pm, Armenia emergency ministry says Putin calls Pelosi's trip to Taiwan gamble Russia embassy: Russian citizen considered missing in Yerevan market blast is alive and well Gazprom: European gas price will exceed $4,000 per thousand cubic meters in winter Yerevan subway operations resume Yerevan market explosion: 6 people still considered missing Former head of NSC: Bomb alerts have never been so systematic and periodic before Armenia truckers temporarily block Goris-Sisian motorway The arrival of Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in Taipei is not a reason for aggressive activity in the Taiwan Strait, said Josep Borrell, head of European diplomacy. In his opinion, such a visit is a routine moment for Western officials. "There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally. We encourage all parties to remain calm, exercise restraint, act with transparency," he tweeted. For the first time, an EU representative reacted to Pelosi's controversial visit to Taiwan almost a day after her departure from Taipei. The trip of the American speaker caused an extremely negative reaction from Beijing, which considers the island to be part of its territory and opposed the arrival of the chairman of the lower house of Congress. In response to Pelosi's arrival, China has already launched large-scale military exercises around Taiwan. Te United States, like the European Union, officially adheres to the One China policy, that is, it recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate leadership of China, which also applies to Taiwan. Political and public figure Avetik Chalabyan accused Prime Minister Pashinyan of the crime of consistently disbanding the defense of Armenia and depriving Armenian citizens of protection. He was detained for another 3 months. On August 3, during preliminary hearings that lasted until late evening, the General Jurisdiction Court of Yerevan, presided over by Mnatsakan Martirosyan, made a decision to arrest Avetik Chalabyan for another 3 months. The restraining order against Avetik Chalabyan, a member of the "Unification" movement, public-politician, was applied right in the courtroom. Let's remind that Avetik Chalabyan was detained on May 14 in a fabricated criminal case with the absence of a criminal motive, then he was released on July 27 as a result of the expiration of the detention period set by the court. "This decision is unprecedented in the legal practice of Armenia, perhaps it is a rare case when a person is detained in the conditions of a complete lack of grounds and a gross violation of the requirements of the law. This absurd action shows how much the current regime is afraid of its principled opponents, and what flagrant illegalities it is willing to commit in order to extend its own power. However, no illegality will distract us from our goal of building a free and powerful country and just society for all of us. Our struggle continues and will only gain new momentum until then I thank our many honorable brothers and sisters who were by our side these days, and with their presence and principled stance, gave us strength and determination to continue our struggle" Avetik Chalabyan made the last statement on the official page before the arrest. During the trial, the public prosecutor requested that bail be applied to Chalabyan as a preventive measure, which, according to him, was fully capable of ensuring Chalabyan's proper behavior and that there was no need for detention in this case, and Chalabyan's defense attorneys first proposed not to apply any preventive measures at all, because that there are no criminal procedural grounds for its application, and in any case, in the case of applying for a restraining order, they suggested to consider the possibility of joint application of several restraining measures, such as bail and guarantee, according to the Armenian Criminal Procedure Code. More than a dozen respected figures presented letters of recommendation for Chalabyan, including former Deputy Prime Minister Vache Gabrielyan, former Minister of Finance Vardan Aramyan, founder of "Hay Aspet" School Karin Tonoyan, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of "Ayb" Educational Foundation Aram Pakhchanyan, "Ayb" Educational Foundation Director Sona Koshetsyan, Director of "Arar" Foundation Armen Khachikyan, Director of "Return to Armenia" Foundation Vardan Marashlyan, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Professor Gurgen Melikyan, Former Minister of Justice Gevorg Danielyan, Head of YSU Civil Procedure Chair Vahe Hovhannisyan and others who were present at the court session. Chalabyan's defenders generally petitioned to dismiss the case, based on the fact that the material that is the basis of the case was published on a platform classified as fake media, which is related to Nikol Pashinyan's deputy chief of staff, Taron Chakhoyan. The said judgment is made on the basis of an investigative article on a publicly verified platform. "The pre-investigation body showed criminal inaction and did not take any significant action to find that recording, even sent a summons to the website directly, the website director did not appear for questioning, and the pre-investigation body closed the proceedings. It's interesting, if you're sending a subpoena, you assume that information is important, right? If that information is important, why aren't you taking steps to get that information? I will say this for a very simple reason. The honorable public prosecutor stated that this case has no political context because it would become clear where you made that fabrication, it would become clear for what purpose. Let me say more, it would have gone until it reached the client, and we know where the client is. The client is sitting in the prime minister's chair and he is creating fabrications against his political opponents through various such websites under his control," Avetik Chalabyan said in court, who recorded a deterioration in his health after being in prison for two and a half months, received a diagnosis of hypertension of the 3rd degree and was assigned to outpatient treatment under the supervision of a cardiologist. "I am not afraid of arrest. I wonder about something else. Why are you detaining me for another 3 months? Give me a life sentence, put lead in my mouth so I die. You will report to your senior that, your task is done," Avetik Chalabyan said in his speech, then added, "You place yourself above the law, but the law does not allow it. Sooner or later the law will be restored in this country, my fight is also for the law to be restored in this country, so that these arrests take place according to the law, according to the letter and spirit of the law. You remember, the law will be restored, and from today wait for that day. The law will come after you." Armenia has called for clarification of Russian peacekeepers mandate in Karabakh, said Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday. He recalled that as a result of the fighting, 19 servicemen of the Karabakh Defense Army were injured, two died. I ask you to honor the memory of the fallen soldiers with a minute of silence. We wish the wounded soldiers a speedy recovery. "A number of events taking place these days, and those that have happened before, reveal issues of a systemic nature. I have repeatedly said that the presence and activity of the Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno-Karabakh is a key factor in ensuring the security of the Karabakh Armenians, and we highly appreciate the efforts of Russia to ensure stability and peace in our region. "But a number of events that have taken place in Nagorno-Karabakh since November 2020, including the events of recent days, have raised questions from the Armenian public about the content and nature of the peacekeeping operation in Nagorno-Karabakh. "On December 11, 2020, the capture by Azerbaijan of the villages of Khtsaberd and Khin Tager, the capture of Armenian servicemen in the presence and with the connivance of Russian peacekeepers, the capture of the village of Parukh in Nagorno-Karabakh on March 24, 2022 and again in the presence of Russian peacekeepers, constant and increasing ceasefire violations along the line of contact , cases of physical and psychological terror against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh in the presence of peacekeepers - all this is simply unacceptable. "In this context, there is an urgent need to clarify the details of the peacekeeping operation in Nagorno-Karabakh. This was necessary from the very beginning, along with the deployment of peacekeeping forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, it should be recognized that Azerbaijan directly interfered with this process by refusing to sign a mandate for the activities of peacekeeping forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia, however, did this back in November 2020, and we expect that the mandate, signed in a bilateral format, will work in full. "There are a number of institutional issues related to this topic. In particular, the third paragraph of the November 9, 2020 statement clearly states that there is a line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh along which Russian peacekeeping forces are stationed. "And it is this territory that is called the zone of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. Therefore, we expect that any attempt to cross the line of contact will be stopped by the Russian peacekeeping forces, and the Azerbaijani units that find themselves inside will be withdrawn to their original positions. "Returning to the topic of the mandate of the Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, I must repeat: in our opinion, the signatures of Armenia and Russia are sufficient for the full implementation of this mandate. Well, if not, then steps should be taken to establish this mandate at the international level or give the peacekeepers a broader international mandate. "I do not want to reveal a large number of working details now, however, these issues have been bothering us since November 2020. We have made efforts to achieve concrete solutions, and now these efforts should be doubled and tripled," the PM said. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro demanded the return of a Boeing 747-300M transport aircraft detained in Argentina, RIA Novosti reports. The US Department of Justice asked the Argentine authorities to arrest a Boeing 747-300M transport aircraft, which, according to them, was transferred by an Iranian airline to Venezuelan counterparts in violation of US export control regulations. According to the case file, the plane, which belonged to the Iranian Mahan Air, came under the control of the Venezuelan Emtrasur, which, in turn, allowed "the re-export of the aircraft between Caracas, Venezuela, Tehran, Iran, and Moscow, Russia, without the permission of the US government." As the Venezuelan leader noted, the aircraft detained in Argentina played a fundamental role in the humanitarian life of Venezuela. It transported medicines from China, Russia and India, as well as humanitarian aid to the countries of the Caribbean and Africa. A cargo plane belonging to the Venezuelan company Emtrasur arrived in Argentina from Mexico on June 6. There were 19 people on board - Venezuelans and Iranians. On June 8, he took off from Ezeiza airport in the direction of Uruguay, but returned because that country did not approve the landing. Upon returning, the ship with the crew was arrested. The Argentine authorities, in addition to the vessel, detained the crew of the aircraft, including five Iranians. The commander of the crew has been identified as a former officer of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary structure that is included in the United States on terrorist lists, the US Department of Justice said. Mahan Air and Venezuelan Conviasa, which controls Emtrasur, are under US sanctions. The Danish shipping company Maersk, which specializes in shipping, has warned the world about the possibility of a new logistics crisis, CNBC reported. According to Maersk, this year will see a slowdown in global demand for container transportation, especially fraught against the backdrop of increased warehouse occupancy, which is observed now. The complication in the industry comes against the background of other problems, including overloaded supply chains and a decline in confidence from customers and consumers. According to Maersk forecasts, the demand for sea containers in 2022 will fluctuate in the range from minus one to plus one percent. In the second quarter, Maersk's freight volume was down 7.4 percent year-over-year. This is partly due to the company's withdrawal from the Russian market after the start of a special operation in Ukraine. Azerbaijan uses the issue of the new route of the Lachin corridor as a pretext, allegedly it has completed the construction of a new route of the Lachin corridor, therefore, a number of sections of the existing corridor should be transferred under its control, Armenain Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said during a government meeting on Thursday. "Such statements by Azerbaijan are also a violation of the tripartite statement of November 9, 2020, and heres why: Paragraph 6 of the said statement says: By agreement of the Parties, a plan for the construction of a new traffic route along the Lachin corridor will be determined in the next three years, providing a connection between the Nagorny Karabakh and Armenia, with the subsequent redeployment of the Russian peacekeeping contingent to guard this route. Azerbaijan guarantees the safety of movement of citizens, vehicles and goods along the Lachin corridor in both directions," he said. "At the moment, there is not a single plan approved in a trilateral format by Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and we have proposed several times, and now we are proposing to do this, that is, to approve the plan in a trilateral format. "Please note that the statement is not just about the construction of a new road, but about a plan for the construction and redeployment of peacekeeping troops, which is a very complex and tripartite process. "At the moment, we have not agreed to any plan, because we have not even been offered a draft of such a plan. "Although I must highlight that Armenia has begun the reconstruction of the Kornidzor-tech M 12 highway, which should be connected to the new route of the Lachin corridor, but I repeat, the tripartite statement is not only about the construction of a new road. Within the framework of the plan, a number of important issues should be clarified, including the issues of providing Nagorno-Karabakh with electricity, gas, and security issues, Pashinyan said. He stated that Azerbaijan is speculating, saying that Armenia is trying to avoid discussing these issues. "This is an absurd statement in the conditions when I publicly announced the above program on June 27 this year during my press conference. Moreover, Azerbaijan went to aggravate the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh in those days when the construction of the M 12 Kornidzor-Teg road itself began. Under these conditions, Azerbaijan's desire for escalation pursues one goal - the elimination of the mechanisms established by the statement of November 9, 2020. Azerbaijan, which considers the statement of November 9 its victory, today sets one task - to cancel this statement and avoid ascertaining the realities fixed by this statement. "Today, Azerbaijan is trumpeting a lot about the fact that Armenia has assumed obligations according to the statement of November 9. Yes, we took on obligations and fulfilled everything, Azerbaijan must fulfill its three obligations: recognize the existence of the unit of Nagorno-Karabakh, ascertained by the signature of the President of Azerbaijan respect the existence of the line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh respect the existence of the Lachin corridor, the most important institution linking Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. Azerbaijan is obliged to fulfill these three obligations, if not, then we must include in our agenda the launch of international mechanisms aimed at respecting the obligations assumed by our own signature," Pashinyan said. Although there are currently no active military operations on the line of contact, the situation, according to the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities, remains extremely tense, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at a government meeting today. "We have to work on easing these tensions. I would like to emphasize that on all points of the November 9, 2020 agreements, Armenia is pursuing a policy of convincing negotiations for the benefit of establishing and strengthening peace and stability in the region," he said. Pashinyan noted that Azerbaijan claims that Armenia is committed to ensuring connectivity between the western region of Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan. "Yes, during this time we are ready to provide this connection even today. It is Azerbaijan that does not use the opportunities provided by us. Even today we say that in the order established by the legislation of RA, in the order, let's cross the border of Armenia and go to Azerbaijan. We also have a customs service point and a border service point from last year, and we told Azerbaijan that at any time these points can cross and establish communication with Nakhchivan. As for the newly built roads, the trilateral statement clearly states that this should happen by agreement of the parties, we say that we consider the route of these roads as the second issue, the first one is fixing and performing legal procedures. I officially state that today Azerbaijan can cross the Armenian border at several points and go to Nakhichevan. If interpreted literally, it says that we must provide a link between the western regions of Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan. The westernmost region of Azerbaijan is the Kazakh region, we are ready, let them come, cross over, go to Nakhchivan. We guarantee security in the order established by the Armenian legislation. We can provide it in the Vardenis section, the Sisian section, the Yeraskh section, the Goris section. In this period Azerbaijan did not even try to use it," said Nikol Pashinyan. He also appealed to the heads of the CGD and the NSC, instructing them to ensure communication between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan. "Mr. Abazyan and Mr. Badasyan, once again I instruct you to ensure such an opportunity with the announcement of November 9." China may reconsider its attitude towards dialogue with the G7 countries if they do not reconsider their erroneous position on the situation around Taiwan, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a briefing on Thursday, RIA Novosti reported. If the G7 countries do not change their erroneous position on the Taiwan issue, then we will have to reconsider the meaning of dialogue with them, the diplomat said. Hua Chunying said she understands the general concern about the impact of the situation around Taiwan on China's cooperation with the G7 countries. There are so many problems in the world, including the coronavirus pandemic, the Ukrainian crisis, as well as economic, energy, food problems and a number of acute regional issues. All of them demand better cooperation between the G7 and China, but if they (the G7 countries) do not respect Beijing's core interests in matters related to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity at all, and neglect China's core interests, then such an erroneous attitude cannot but affect on their cooperation with China in relevant important areas or on their relationship with each other, said Hua Chunying. In Georgia, more than 13,000 people signed a petition addressed to the Georgian government and parliament demanding the introduction of a visa regime for citizens of Russia and Belarus. The document was published on the website Manifest.ge. The petition proposes to the country's leadership to introduce a visa regime for citizens of these countries in order to limit their stay in Georgia to three months. In this case, the citizens of Russia and Belarus will not be able to stay in Georgia for more than three months, which means that the purpose of their visit will be tourism and travel, and not business activities, the statement says. Earlier, the opposition parliamentary party also demanded the introduction of a visa regime for citizens of Russia and Belarus. The United States opposes any unilateral effort to change the status quo in Taiwan, especially by force, and its policy on Taiwan has not changed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a meeting with Southeast Asian counterparts, Reuters reported. "The United States and other countries believed escalation serves no one, Blinken said, "and could have unintended consequences that serve no one's interests, including ASEAN members, and including China." On Thursday, China launched several missiles while conducting the largest military drills around Taiwan in history, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that China has made every diplomatic effort to avert the crisis, but will not allow its core interests to be violated. Blinken is in Cambodia for a meeting of more than 27 countries on security issues, which is expected to discuss the food crisis, stability in the Taiwan Strait and the crisis in Myanmar. Azerbaijan aims to capture the most important heights in the territory of Artsakh in order to easily occupy Artsakh in 2025 when a large-scale war begins, Nairi Hokhikyan an expert on regional issues, told journalists today. According to him, even if the land connection between the Republic of Armenia and Artsakh was changed by the road being built now from Kornidzor to Berdadzor, Mets Shen and Hin Shen villages, the situation would be the same as it is now. "Since August 1 Azerbaijan has been trying to carry out local attacks in several ways and these local attacks are carried out in long-range battles, using mainly mortars. Intelligence shows that Azerbaijan's forward troops are now armed with light weapons. This shows that Azerbaijan has no tendency and possibility for a large-scale war," Hokhikyan said. Hokhikyan said that in recent months, a study of Azerbaijan's heavy military equipment has come to the conclusion that Azerbaijan has not yet been able to restore the lost military equipment. He noted that Azerbaijan had lost more than 75 percent of its heavy military equipment during the 2020 war. According to Nairi Khokhikyan, on the eve of the meeting between the presidents of Russia and Turkey, Azerbaijan is using the language of blackmail with Turkey's consent. "Azerbaijan's main goal is the heights on the territory of Artsakh. These days, Azerbaijan seeks to take some important heights. One of them is the Nareshtar hill. Nareshtar is in the west-central part of Artsakh. These same days, Azerbaijanis have tried to seize the Khaterk hill. And yesterday they tried to seize the hill near Yeghtsahogh, which Azerbaijanis call Saribaba. This hill is of great importance, if Azerbaijan seizes this hill, the whole part of the Shusha region will be under their control," he said. On Monday, starting from 09:00 a.m. in some sectors of the northern and north-western boundary zone of Artsakh Republic the Azerbaijani units made an attempt to cross the line of contact and they were stopped by the Defence Forces. As a result of these provocations from the Armenian side one serviceman of the Armed Forces Albert Bakhshiyan was wounded. The provocations of the Azerbaijani side in Artsakh continued yesterday from 09:00. The Azerbaijani armed forces roughly violated the ceasefire, opened fire at Armed Forces positions and the permanent location of a military unit, using in addition to small arms of various caliber, mortars, grenade launchers and assault rifles. As a result Gurgen Gabrielian and Artur Khachatryan were killed. Another 19 servicemen were wounded. Measures are being taken to stabilize the situation with the command of Russian servicemen who are on a Russian peacekeeping mission in the Republic of Artsakh. The Defense Army reported today that the operational and tactical situation on the line of contact on the night of August 3 to 4 and as of 09:00 a.m. was relatively stable. Nikol Pashinyan said at a government meeting today, referring to the situation in Artsakh, that Armenia is ready to provide communications between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan. "Yes, during this period we are ready to provide this connection even today. It is Azerbaijan that does not use the opportunities provided by us. Even today we are saying that in the order stipulated by the RA legislation, in order, let's cross the Armenian border and go to Azerbaijan," Pashinyan said. Pashinyan also noted that Azerbaijan uses the issue of the new Lachin corridor route, regarding which there is no trilateral plan at the moment. "At the moment there is no plan approved by Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the trilateral format, and we have suggested several times and now suggest doing it, that is to approve the plan in the trilateral format," Pashinyan said. Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said five ballistic missiles fired by China landed in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) as part of a Chinese military exercise. The exercise, the largest in Chinese history in the Taiwan Strait, began as planned at noon and included live firing in waters north, south and east of Taiwan, Reuters reported. "We have protested strongly through diplomatic channels," Kishi said. The zone extends 200 nautical miles from the outer limits of Japan's territorial waters, and North Korean missiles have hit another part of Japan's EEZ in the past. The exercise comes two days after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, and just hours after China said a planned meeting between its foreign ministers and Japan's foreign minister was canceled because of the G7 statement on Taiwan. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. One of the main problems of Azerbaijan is the demilitarization of Artsakh. It is not only about the withdrawal of servicemen from Artsakh with the Armenian account, but also about the disarmament of paramilitary structures of Artsakh as a whole. MP from the "I have honor" faction of the National Assembly Tigran Abrahamyan told NEWS.am. "Secondly, we are speaking about the corridor connecting Armenia with Artsakh, because it is already clear now that Azerbaijan is not simply changing the route, but actually turning the corridor into a road, which will result in a fairly large security vulnerability for those who travel along this road. The other issue concerns the surrender of the villages of Berdzor, Sus and Aghavno. This is very important for Azerbaijan, and at this stage they are trying to ensure a military-political victory for Aliyev. And fourthly, the basis for increasing the pressure on the territory of Armenia in the direction of providing the so-called "Zangezur corridor," which promises to create a tense situation again," he said. He noted with regret that after 2018 and the 44-day war in 2020, Azerbaijan, with Turkey's active support, acts quite prudently and step by step restricts Armenia's ability to show any flexibility. Regarding Nikol Pashinyan's statement that at the moment Azerbaijan can go to Nakhchivan through the territory of the Republic of Armenia in accordance with the procedure established by the RA legislation, Tigran Abrahamyan said. "Obviously, after overcoming the current processes, the next main target will be the so-called Zangezur corridor." In this case, the Armenian government is trying to present a situation that goes in terms of regional unblocking, which implies opening all kinds of communications. The Armenian Prime Minister's hints referred to the possibility of using this road, not the provision of a corridor. Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu calls to stop issuing Schengen visas to Russian citizens. According to Bloomberg, he proposes including this measure in the next package of EU sanctions against Russia. "We have to raise the cost of Russian aggression through additional sanctions, weapons and by increasingly isolating Russia," Reinsalu said. Individual EU member states, including the Baltic states and the Czech Republic, have imposed visa restrictions on Russian citizens in addition to halting direct flights from Russia. But the EU-wide visa ban has yet to gain consensus in the 27-member bloc. Reinsalu said he is seeking support among other countries ahead of the new package, which will be drafted later this month. "Its going to be a very difficult winter, he said. Russia will certainly try to take advantage of the situation to break Western unity." Reinsalu, who said Russia seeks to "destroy Ukrainian statehood," made it clear he wants to go further, expressing support for a Latvian policy requiring Russian citizens entering the country to sign a document "condemning the invasion." Several Artsakh soldiers who received minor injuries have already been discharged from the hospital after sustaining injuries as a result of the Azerbaijani aggression, Artsakh Minister of Health Mikayel Hayriyan told Armenian News - NEWS.am. One of the soldiers, who is in an extremely serious condition has a little positive dynamic, he added. The number of soldiers injured as a result of the Azerbaijani provocation is 19. Four of them are in a serious condition, one is in an extremely critical condition, the condition of the other servicemen is assessed as medium and light. Starting from 09:00 on August 1, in a number of parts of the northern and northwestern border zone of the Artsakh Republic, the Azerbaijani units resorted to provocation, making attempts to cross the contact line, which were stopped by the forces of the Defense Forces. As a result of these provocations, the Armenian side had two victims. Today, as of 19:00, the operational-tactical situation along the contact line was relatively stable. Azerbaijan has resumed attacks on Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani attack came less than a month after Secretary of State Antony Blinken lifted restrictions under Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Blinken did it in the background of the July 4th holiday to avoid attention, Michael Rubin wrote in his article on the 1945 portal. Blinken's move may be diplomatically convenient, but it violates the intentions of Congress: Section 907 allows for exceptions only if Azerbaijan refrains from resolving conflicts militarily, which Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev scoffs at. While Aliyev has a free hand, and it would be unfair to blame Blinken for his decision to attack the Armenians, Blinken must also acknowledge that Aliyev is responding to every concession offered with more violence. Blinken may not pull the trigger, but his policy was tantamount to putting a loaded gun in front of a repeat offender. The dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia may seem complex and irrelevant to broader US security interests. Neither is correct. President Joe Biden took office promising to return to diplomacy and recognize the Armenian Genocide. While Biden made good on his promise, Blinken tarnished it with his Article 907 waivers despite Aliyev's continued instigation. The latter concluded that he would not suffer any consequences for his actions. On the air of Azerbaijani television, he insulted the American co-chairman of the Minsk Group, Andrew Schofer. Blinken's subsequent silence was deafening. Obviously, Aliyev interpreted Blinken's actions as a green light for aggression. The diversion to Ukraine and Taiwan convinced Aliyev that he could resume the offensive. The decision ends a long history of violence against Armenians that appears to have been motivated more by racist and religious hatred than by simple frustration with a diplomatic dispute. After all, there is no other explanation for Azerbaijan's destruction of the Julfie cemetery, which is a cultural crime on par with the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Although the Armenians are guilty of neglecting some cities, such as Aghdam, abandoned by the Azerbaijanis during the First Karabakh War, this is nothing compared to the destruction of Julfa, or the removal of Armenian inscriptions from centuries-old churches in order to propagate the fiction that the Armenians are alien to the area. . This is akin to efforts to de-Judaize Jerusalem. Blinken reveals himself to be the most naive secretary since Frank Kellogg. Perhaps it's time to change tactics. Artsakh, like Taiwan, has a unique centuries-old history. Today, the people of Artsakh are wondering why the United States supports Taiwan but ignores Nagorno-Karabakh. At a minimum, the time has come to cancel the exemption from Article 907 for Azerbaijan. Congress may revise its interpretation of Section 907 to apply to Turkey due to Ankara's support for Azerbaijan's military aggression. The US has postponed a planned test launch of a Minuteman III ICBM to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing amid China's show of force near Taiwan. This is reported by the Wall Street Journal, citing US officials. According to the source, the US Air Force planned to conduct a test launch this week from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. US officials did not specify how long the delay would last, but one of them noted that it could last 10 days, the Journal reported. In April, the US military canceled tests of the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. This delay was intended to reduce nuclear tensions with Russia during the war in Ukraine. The nuclear-capable Minuteman III is a key part of the US military's strategic arsenal. The missile has a range of more than 9,660 km and can move at a speed of approximately 24,000 km/h. A group of protesters broke into the Azerbaijani embassy in London, the British newspaper Metro reported. Social media footage shows men waving flags from the balcony of the embassy in Kensington. Slogans in Arabic are painted on the wall, and the protesters tore down the Azerbaijani flag. It is not clear how the protest ended, but it appears to have been led by a group called the Union of Mahdi Servants. It is a London-based Shia Muslim organization that claims on its website that it wants to establish civilizational dominance. Its leader, Yasser al-Habib, is a controversial cleric whose film The Heavenly Lady was pulled from British cinemas earlier this year after protests by some Sunni Muslims offended by his interpretation of Islamic history. Members of the group refer to the Azerbaijani government's persecution of some Shiite Muslims in the country. The group said in a statement that its leader had instructed it to "take urgent action" against Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry issued an urgent statement condemning the seizure of the diplomatic mission. The seizure of the embassy and the threat looming over Azerbaijani diplomats are a gross violation of the Vienna Convention, the statement said. Theprotesters were detained by the police, the embassy employees were not injured. Between the pro-government Azerbaijani portal haqqin.az, citing diplomatic sources, reports that the group carried out the action under the influence of the special services of one of the Shiite states. A record number of undergraduate students delved into intense research this summer across Emory, examining everything from the questionable history of a U.S. physician who helped create modern medical ethics to clarifying Aristotles definitions of justice and their implications today. More than 120 Emory undergraduates, plus another two dozen from nearby partner institutions, conducted research and built their professional networks with world-renowned researchers and peers from all disciplines through the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. Based in Emory College, the 10-week program, held in-person for the first time since 2019, typically draws about 95 student researchers. In addition to conducting independent research with faculty mentors, students live on campus and take weekly professional development workshops. Many go on to publish their research and expand it into larger projects such as honors theses. I am thrilled with all of the opportunities Ive had from this research, because I am getting to see bioethics in action, says Lucy Amirani, a rising junior and double major in biology and philosophy, politics and law, who spent the summer digging into digital and in-person archives for information about Dr. Andrew C. Ivy. Ivys testimony played a critical role in the prosecution of Nazi doctors for their lethal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners which in turn influenced the creation of the strict medical ethics rules known as the Nuremberg Code despite his own dubious research on American prisoners. Amiranis faculty mentor, Emory School of Medicine professor Jonathan K. Crane, is working with her to create a narrative of Ivys work. Crane will use the narrative in an updated university-wide bioethics course next spring, with Amirani serving as his teaching assistant. Lucy has been an extraordinary research assistant to organize what we collected and fill in gaps we identified, says Crane, who is also the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought at the Emory Center for Ethics. She has been invaluable as a researcher and as a creative partner. Ownership of discovery SURE is an outgrowth of an Emory initiative started more than 30 years ago to allow students to conduct full-time research in the natural sciences. By including research in the social sciences and humanities, the program has helped imbue students with the ability to craft an argument, solve problems and think critically all hallmarks of Emorys liberal arts excellence, says Cora MacBeth, an associate dean in the Colleges Office for Undergraduate Education. SURE is an opportunity to take ownership of the discovery process and hone these fundamental skills they will take with them as directly translatable skills in any career, MacBeth says. We know that undergraduate research really empowers students. With a major in anthropology and human biology and minor in global development, rising senior Tommy Davis was looking for research in the global health sphere. Having volunteered with the health nonprofit Global Brigades in Panama, he also knew he wanted to focus on developing nations. Davis found it as part of a larger study examining nonpublication of abstracts, led by Chris Rees, an emergency department physician at Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta and pediatric research scientist with the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) network. Davis project was to see whether abstracts, or summaries of ongoing or completed research, reporting on work in low- and middle-income countries end up in peer-reviewed publications. He found that roughly half of the abstracts were not published, meaning countries with the most need are left without the official findings to help them secure aid, information or plans for help. Rees says he plans to examine those findings for further study, to see what sets apart the work that did get published. For Davis, the research confirmed his plans to pursue a dual masters degree in public health and physician assistant studies for eventual international work. With all of this work not being shared in publications, it means at the end of the day there are a lot of people not getting the care they need, says Davis, who launched an online campaign to raise funds for the World Food Program after reading more about the lack of health programs for the famine in Somalia. This is the kind of research that can create that awareness. Stand out research Research can also continue conversations started thousands of years ago. At least, thats what Bethany Williams learned from her analysis of Aristotles concept of justice and hopes that others do, too. Williams, a rising senior with a double major in political science and psychology, first identified each individual form of justice Aristotle presents and showed how they connect to one another. Then, she focused on modern problems that raise issues of corrective, distributive and reciprocal justice. Distributive justice, for instance, is awarded based on merit. But conflicts rage without agreement on what merit is, like whether being human is enough to warrant health care. I came into college wanting to work into politics but realized what really interests me is helping people secure justice, says Williams, who is now planning to become a social worker. My project is all about making an ancient concept more accessible because the questions are still relevant. The work is a continuation of Williams directed study with Judd Owen, an associate professor of political science who is working on a book linking Aristotles ethics and politics to his natural sciences. A political theorist by training, with a background in Aristotles politics and ethics, Owen was initially reluctant to have his first SURE undergraduate researcher tackle the philosophers more complicated writings. Now he says Williams was his first SURE researcher, but will not be his last. Her project stands out as a kind of research you dont often see but I wish we would, Owen says. Bethany has created a visual breakdown of these types of justice and where the problem areas are, which means anyone can review and discuss it. Junior and Stamps Scholar Lindsey Faucher is majoring in international studies and psychology at the University of Miami. She spent two months of her summer in Lisbon, Portugal, as a part of Absolute Internship, where she could choose from 11 different site locations. Faucher opted to teach English to young students at Associacao Infante de Sagres, a private school offering education to children from ages 3 to 10, including those with special educational needs. Faucher just returned from Portugal and shared her thoughts about her experience in the southern European country. How did you learn about this opportunity? I researched online about various internship abroad programs and Absolute Internship stood out to me because of the wide range of professional industries that I could select from for my internship. Where did you live? I lived with other interns at a student residence, located about 15 minutes from the center of Lisbon. Conveniently, my internship was a five-minute walk from the student residence. Did you learn the language? It was not a requirement to know Portuguese, since my role was focused on communicating to the children in English. However, since I enjoy learning languages and had the desire to fully embrace Portuguese culture, I decided to do independent language lessons, where I practiced for about 30 minutes daily. My comprehension of the language improved significantly as a result of constantly being surrounded by it. I would often do a language exchange with the children, where I taught them a word in English, and they would teach me the equivalent in Portuguese. By the end of the program, I was able to navigate my way through everyday situations like ordering food and communicating with a taxi driver in Portuguese. What attracted you to this internship? The mission of the school where I worked is to provide a complete and inclusive education to all children, including those with special educational needs. This aligns closely with my interests. Because this past year, I've had the opportunity to work on research focused on early social and cognitive development. Therefore, I've was able to use that previous experience in more of an applied sense, while also learning about the cultural differences that exist in Portugal. What were you doing there? My daily responsibilities consisted of developing activities and lessons for the English class, assisting with activities in the special needs classroom, and working to facilitate the summer beach program. This was a program where roughly 300 students were brought to a beach in the Lisbon area after the school year ended. And my role was to ensure a safe environment for the children and to communicate with them in English. Did you have any experience in these areas? Prior to working this summer, I did child psychology research in the University of Miami's Social Cognition Lab, where I worked with associate professor Elizabeth Simpson on projects related to early social attention, oxytocin in relation to emotional reactions, and autism. How did your education, so far, help you with this experience? I've been able to apply information taught in my psychology classes to real-world situations and problem solving. For example, in my Child and Adolescent Development course, I learned that around the ages of 3 to 4 years old, children are developing the skills to share with their peers. Being aware of the social behaviors that children demonstrate greatly benefitted me in Portugal, as I was able to have more patience and understanding with my students. And it also allowed me to encourage more positive interactions between them. After graduation, I hope to teach English abroad a second time before applying for graduate school. In the future, I hope to pursue research that will somehow meld my interests of psychology and global cultures. What were some of your favorite experiences while you were abroad? My favorite experience in Portugal was the celebration of Festas dos Santos Populares (or Holiday of the Popular Saints). For the entire month of June, the streets are beautifully decorated with streamers, and grills on every corner serve the Portuguese specialtysardines. The excitement surrounding this holiday was unlike anything that I have ever experienced, and it was remarkable to be able to fully immerse in Portuguese culture for eight weeks. Four US cops charged over Breonna Taylor death Four US cops charged over Breonna Taylor death The US Justice Department charged four police officers on Thursday over the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed in a botched 2020 raid on her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the officers face federal charges of civil rights offences, unlawful conspiracy, making false statements unconstitutional use of force and obstruction. "We allege that these offences resulted in Miss Taylor's death," Garland said. "Breonna Taylor should be alive today". The deaths of Taylor and George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, became the focus of a wave of mass protests in the United States and beyond against racial injustice and police brutality. The 26-year-old Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were sleeping in her apartment around midnight on March 13, 2020 when they heard a noise at the door. Walker, believing it was a break-in, fired his gun, wounding one police officer. Police, who had obtained a controversial no-knock warrant to make a drug arrest, fired more than 30 shots back, mortally wounding Taylor. Garland said three of the Louisville police officers Joshua Jaynes, 45, Kyle Meany, 35, and Kelly Goodlett were involved in the falsification of a search warrant in a drug trafficking case against Taylor's ex-boyfriend. They are accused of violating Taylor's rights by seeking a warrant to search her home when they knew they lacked probable cause. "We allege that the defendants knew that the affidavit in support of that warrant contained false and misleading information and that it omitted material information," Garland said. He added that the officers also allegedly "took steps to cover up their unlawful conduct after Miss Taylor was killed". The fourth police officer, Brett Hankison, was charged with using excessive force by opening fire wildly during the raid which left Taylor dead. Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney who represented Taylor's family, welcomed the charges filed against the officers. "Today was a huge step toward justice," Crump said in a statement. He said he hopes it "sends a message to all other involved officers that it is time to stop covering up and time to accept responsibility for their roles in causing the death of an innocent, beautiful young Black woman". (AFP) Delhi businessman Karan Kumar Aggarwal was on Wednesday arrested by officials of CGST, Delhi West, for fraudulently availing ITC of around Rs 8 crore. An official said that on the basis of an alert, an investigation against Niyati Steels was undertaken by the CGST's Delhi West Commissionerate. The official said Aggarwal, in his voluntary statements, has admitted that he looks after all day-to-day transactions and operations of the said firm, which availed ITC of Rs 7.7 crore from non-existent entities. Through further inquiry and the use of analytical tools, it was found that six more firms were linked with Aggarwal. These firms on the strength of goods-less invoices worth Rs 292 crore, have collectively availed ineligible/inadmissible Input Tax Credit (ITC) of more than Rs 52 crore from non-existent entities. Agarwal has admitted in his voluntary statement that he has used his Aadhar for authentication in all these six firms and has issued goods-less invoices without receiving any goods in some of these firms and he is also involved in sale of goods-less invoices for commission of 3 to 4 per cent of the taxable value of the invoices. In view of his own admission of his involvement in availment of ineligible/ inadmissible ITC and substantiated by data analytics, Agarwal was arrested for offences under section 132 of the CGST Act, 2017 read with section 69 of the Act. He was later sent to 14 days judicial custody by a magistrate's court. --IANS atk/vd ( 258 Words) 2022-08-03-22:44:03 (IANS) Ahmedabad (Gujarat) [India], August 4 (ANI/NewsVoir): The Board of Directors of MAS Financial Services Limited (MAS Financial) (BSE: 540749, NSE: MASFIN), specialized in MSME financing, announced today the unaudited financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. The consistent financial performance during all the past turbulent period is the testimony of the strong fundamentals of the company; which is being followed over two decades. We witnessed a healthy growth in business activities across the segment which we serve during the quarter. The same was reflected in disbursement which stood at ` 2153.73 Crore during the quarter ended 30th June 2022 as compared to ` 1041.37 Crore during the corresponding period. Disbursement during March 22 quarter was ` 1962.33 Crore. Performance Highlights MAS Financial Services Limited reports Assets under Management (AUM) of ` 6683.92 Crore and profit after tax of ` 46.52 Crore for the quarter ended 30th June 2022 from ` 5161.63 Crore and ` 36.83 Crore respectively for the quarter ended 30th June 2021. The AUM as on 31st March 2022 was ` 6246.80 Crore. - A Growth of 29.49 per cent in AUM and 26.33 per cent in PAT over the corresponding period of the previous year. - The Capital Adequacy Ratio (including Tier II capital) as of June 30, 2022, stood at 25.28 per cent. The Tier-I capital stood at 22.49 per cent. - The NPA and Stage 3 classification criteria followed by the Company was in compliance with RBI circular RBI/2021-22/125 DOR/STR/REC.68/21.04.048/2021-22 dated November 12, 2021. - The portfolio quality remained stable and strong despite of the prolonged ongoing crisis followed by the unprecedented pandemic situation at 2.27 per cent gross stage 3 assets and 1.63 per cent net stage 3 assets of AUM as compared to 2.28 per cent gross stage 3 assets and 1.70 per cent net stage 3 assets of AUM as on March 31, 2022. - The company continues to carry buffer provision (COVID provision) of ` 33.95 Crore as on June 30, 2022, which is 0.62 per cent of the total on book assets. *Represents underlying assets in each of the category. As on June 30, 2022 45.32 per cent of the total underlying assets is through various NBFCs. *June-22 AUM includes ` 59.34 Crore of personal loans. Note on MAS Rural Housing and Mortgage Finance Limited (Subsidiary) The Board of Directors of MAS Rural Housing and Mortgage Finance Limited in their meeting held today took on record the unaudited Financial Results of the company for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. Performance Highlights MAS Rural Housing and Mortgage Finance Limited reports Assets under Management (AUM) of ` 343.21 Crore and profit after tax of ` 1.07 Crore for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, from ` 294.70 Crore and ` 0.82 Crore respectively for the quarter ended June 30, 2021. - A growth of 16.46 per cent in AUM and 29.86 per cent in PAT over the corresponding period of the previous year. - Capital Adequacy Ratio (including Tier II capital) as of 30th June 2022 stood at 46.43%. The Tier-I capital stood at 33.43 per cent. - The NPA and Stage 3 classification criteria followed by the Company was in compliance with RBI circular RBI/2021-22/125 DOR/STR/REC.68/21.04.048/2021-22 dated November 12, 2021. - The portfolio quality remained stable and strong despite of the prolonged ongoing crisis followed by the unprecedented pandemic situation at 0.54 per cent gross stage 3 assets and 0.38% net stage 3 assets of AUM as compared to 0.53 per cent gross stage 3 assets and 0.38 per cent net stage 3 assets of AUM as on March 31, 2022. - The company continues to carry buffer provision (COVID provision) of ` 3.00 Crore as on 30th June 2022 which is 1.06 per cent of the total on book assets. Commenting on the performance, Kamlesh Gandhi - Founder, Chairman and Managing Director, MAS Financial said, We have over two and half decade demonstrated that "Consistently and steadily is the fastest way to reach where you want to." As shared earlier we have the strong conviction that the company has excellent enablers to grow at a consistent CAGR of 20-25 per cent, the same was very aptly demonstrated in the working of this quarter and are confident for the same going forward. In consonance with our mission and vision to constantly endeavor to create value for stakeholders on a very large scale through efficient last mile delivery of credit, the main focus of the company continues to remain on maintaining strong capital base, adequate liquidity and quality of assets. Team MAS remains committed to its mission of excellence through endeavours. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) Jaipur (Rajasthan) [India], August (ANI/NewsVoir): The 4th edition of India's largest education brainstorming event, the ScooNews Global Educators Fest (SGEF) will be held on the 4th, 5th and 6th of August, 2022 at Jaipur Marriott Hotel in Pink City. It will bring together over 500 educators to discuss the way towards establishing India as the next global education powerhouse. The theme for this year's fest is 'Transforming School Curriculum: Empowering Learning for Life'. SGEF will run alongside the first event of TOD-FOD-JOD, a unique 'tinkering fest' for early childhood educators. Over 100 speakers will shed light on multi-disciplinary concepts of early childhood education and brainstorm on educational theories that can be applied to the classrooms and centres. During the sessions, educators will reconstruct and repurpose important early childhood theories, practices, and ideas to make them more relevant and applicable in post-pandemic classrooms. Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar of Udaipur Royalty is the patron of this year's edition. He said, "I am pleased to be part of the Global Educators Fest 2022. I robustly believe in passion for the development of education in the country. I also admire the hard work, uncountable hours, and innovation being put to work by the Educationalists to scale learning expertise amongst students of the 21st century India." Dr Swati Popat Vats, President, Early Childhood Association said, "We fully recognize the pivotal role played by our educators, especially in early childhood, and are honoured and excited to present them with this special Tod-Fod-Jod conference where experts will conduct activity-based sessions to teach academic concepts using engaging methodologies like story-telling, play, art, and outdoor activities. It will always be our endeavor to empower our educators knowing that they shape our collective future." Ravi Santlani, CEO, ScooNews said, "Global Educators Fest 2022 is a Celebration of Education, now in its fourth year, it has become a most attended, most recognized, and most awaited global event of and for educators. Our focus is to celebrate the good work and ideas with the education fraternity and provide a fertile ground for ideation and discussion. I am honoured and thankful to our advisory board, participants, and patrons for making #SGEF2022 India's Largest Education Brainstorm." The SGEF will see top educators speaking on how to move towards a sustainable education system that prioritizes creativity over conformity. Over 100 educators from across the world will speak on key issues concerning Education in the new world, with power packed panels spread over 2 days. The attending educators will also benefit from the experiences of Dr Abdulla Rasheed Ahmed, the Minister of State for Education, Republic of Maldives. The fest will provide an excellent platform for individuals and organizations contributing to the cause of education, schools as well as start-ups to debate on innovation with industry leaders on Industry-Academia partnerships, showcase their products among peers and network with like-minded people. ScooNews will also be recognizing individuals and organizations excelling at Innovation in the field of Education by assisting the industry with trend-setting solutions and best practice sharing. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir) Adani Enterprises Ltd (AEL), the business incubation arm of the Adani Group, on Thursday, said it has signed an MoU with Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), the premier public-funded agency overseeing Israel's innovation policy, for cooperation in technological innovation. This cooperation will deepen the existing partnerships that Adani has already established over the past six years in Israel. The MoU will lead to the creation of a cutting-edge innovation platform that will allow Adani businesses to access tech solutions provided by Israeli start-ups whereby selected innovation projects will be supported by the partnership. The collaboration will span climate change, cyber, AI, IoT, 5G, agriculture, all of which are core businesses for Adani. "The Haifa Port acquisition demonstrates the Adani Group's commitment to Israel. The partnership with the Israel Innovation Authority is yet another large step in deepening our relations within Israel and provides us a platform to access the hundreds of cutting-edge technologies that Israel continues to produce," Karan Adani, CEO and Whole-time Director, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd, said in a statement. "What we offer in return is the broadest sandbox of multiple B2B and B2C industries from Adani to multiple tech companies in Israel. It is a classic supply-demand match between two nations that have always shared very strong bonds. The Adani-IIA collaboration will also help to open various channels for the latest technologies from Israel to enter India and accelerate the digitization of several other organisations," Adani added. Reacting to the deal, Dror Bin, CEO, Israel Innovation Authority, said, "The Israel Innovation Authority is pleased to partner with the Adani Group in cementing Adani's and India's strategic collaboration with Israel, following the group's historic acquisition of Haifa Port last month." "The Adani Group, one of India's largest conglomerates, is a partner of choice for any Israeli startup looking to tap into the world's fastest-growing economy - India. With this MoU, the Israel Innovation Authority will provide Israeli companies a unique opportunity to co-develop, pilot and scale-up innovative technologies in collaboration with Adani's diverse businesses in the fields of renewable energy, AI, logistics and more," Dror Bin was quoted in the statement. "As we celebrate this year the 30thanniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between India and Israel, we are proud to further expand our collaboration with India in the field of innovation, and together with the Adani Group, lead the sustainable and digital transformation that will create ripple effects worldwide," he added. Adani Group's broader strategy is to digitally integrate its current and future businesses by linking its data centres through a network of submarine and terrestrial cables, industrial level 5G connectivity, building the largest industrial operations cloud in the world, developing the super app to offer a suite of services across its consumer base of 400 million, and establishing a world-class AI centre of excellence. This tie-up between Adani Enterprises and IIA is expected to further each other's capabilities, technology leadership, resources and worldwide presence, Adani Group said in a statement. Under the provisions of Israeli industrial laws and policies that encourage research, development and technological innovation, the Adani Group will screen and select Israeli start-ups and other innovation companies developing new and exciting solutions in the tech space. Approved projects will then be assisted by the Adani Group and supported by the Israel Innovation Authority. (ANI) New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI/SRV): After running many successful marketing campaigns for Indian clients, Online Apes Media, a digital marketing agency from Noida is now ready to level up the marketing game for overseas clients as well. The Delhi-based digital marketing agency, which encompasses a robust presence within India has currently with success entered the overseas market. Located less than 10 miles from the Capital of India, Delhi, Online Apes Media pays homage to the pursuit and commitment of deep and interactive marketing solutions. Online Apes Media is a full-scale digital marketing agency that bridges the gap between technology and creativity by creating captivating brand stories and exceptional digital experiences for end-users. For overseas clients, Online Apes Media is doing customer-centric marketing approaches, for example, personalized messages, personalized products, user-generated content, and more to ensure the consumer is getting exactly what they are looking for. Shashank told us that the customer-centric approach needs to go beyond just the marketing and that is what we are doing at Online Apes Media. As per Shashank Trivedi, founder of Online Apes Media, this agency is a group of passionate young individuals who understand the world of web and mobile technology as their home. Shashank told us that "we have already started working for many US and UK based clients and looking forward to getting some more business from the same. Currently, we are working with an application-based model, where we promote only applications outside India. Our personal focus this year is to actually pay attention to our weaknesses as marketers. We are not going to see our strengths for a minute and we will really meditate on what we should do that we were not doing as marketers. This approach may be unique in this era when everyone has their own LinkedIn brand, but if we can foster a sort of self-awareness of our personal brands, I think there will be a breakthrough hit on a small digital platform for our overseas clients." Online Apes Media is an agency inclined to execute strategic marketing strategies to help our clients build a meaningful online community around their brand as well as achieve a high ROI through our marketing solutions combined with creative Design and Development across Social Media platforms, ensuring a high impact online presence from day one. Shashank Trivedi is the CEO and Founder of Online Apes Media and consults many brands on their marketing strategies. This story is provided by SRV. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/SRV) Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], August 4 (ANI/PNN): Excellence is the mirror of success. This excellence is the result of determination and persistence in continuing efforts. Global Institute of Business Studies (GIBS), Bangalore, is recognized for its excellence in the field of management education. Resounding on its tradition of excellence, GIBS has added two new feathers to its hat. In the Times of India (TOI) 2022 Survey, GIBS has been ranked as the 5th Best Emerging Business School in India and the 9th Best Business School for BBA Placement. The goal of this research was to compile a list of top business schools that provide full-time management courses. The research consisted of three key modules: desk research, a factual survey, and a perceptual rating survey. Following data collection, a rigorous analysis was performed to score and rank the various B schools that participated in the study. In the current year, the ranking method incorporated a comprehensive research module that included both factual and perceptual data/information. While the factual is done to capture a real depiction of what exists, the perceptual is done to understand how different stakeholders view different B-schools. As a result, these two methodological modules contributed to a more rigorous ranking procedure. Global Institute of Business Studies (GIBS) is one such B-school that perfectly epitomizes what it means to be a business school. Among the expanding number of management schools, there are a few non-IIM B-schools that have truly transformed students via creative training and great teaching approaches, allowing them to achieve new heights of success at national and international levels. GIBS has always believed that the primary goal of the institute should be to develop its trainees into future business leaders by exposing them to the real business world. To do this, GIBS created a number of exclusive programmes. GIBS's innovative teaching approach has gained great praise. Innovative programmes such as Finishing School and IRE Labs have been created. GIBS Finishing School is a separate segment for PGDM students that assist with starting, placement, and internship opportunities. In contrast, the Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship (IRE) lab is a comprehensive action-learning school. IRE fosters and prepares PGDM students in innovation, research, and entrepreneurship through events, workshops, expert sessions, and other ways. GIBS is also a popular choice among BBA students. Its BBA programme is accredited by Bangalore University. It is a well-known and highly regarded business curriculum. Regular seminars and corporate workshops are held at GIBS as part of the BBA training programme, where subject matter experts from industry and academia share their knowledge and experience with students. Through activity-based learning, counselling, certificate programmes, and placement training, students are also supported in becoming industry-ready. GIBS curriculums are designed to provide students with real-world business experience, with practical training accounting for 70 per cent of teaching and theoretical accounting for 30 per cent. The initiatives have prioritized industrial visits. Furthermore, credit-based industrial projects have been developed as a curriculum component. Through constant innovation, GIBS aims to produce global professionals capable of excelling in an ever-changing business world. The growing rankings and newer achievements are proof of this. GIBS Management has reiterated its commitment to carry on its tradition of excellence. It is to be expected that with the presence of top B-schools like GIBS, the level of management and business education in India will rise further in upcoming times. This story is provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PNN) New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI/PNN): A book with a mystic twist is in the news. A debut novel has been launched with a whirlwind of adventure, mystery, and unexplored journey, and it's none other than author Viral Roger's 'The Quests of William Wood'. This mystifying masterpiece has come into the limelight and amazed all gaze. Fictions that play with creativity and imagination have brought yet another delight to readers. Full of surprising elements, the edition is already making buzz among readers. Already in vogue @ StoryMirror platform, the awe-inspiring adventure is catching the gaze of all booklovers. A magical dose is added by the debutant book writer in her remarkable fictional work. She has introduced the eponymous hero William Wood well in the edition. It's intriguing how he has embarked upon quite a bewitching journey that brought him suspense, awe, and staggering facts in his way. At first, the boy goes to his aunt's to stay there after he witnesses his mother's death. Unusual things occur during his quest and he lands in the small village of Glennins. Here, the young boy perceives weird happenstances during nighttime. Wood unravels so many hidden truths along his path. He befriends Leon and Ivy in the village but there's a queer lurking of evil. The book takes the reader into that very magical experience conveying the story picturesquely. This mysterious elixir is well exhibited by the author. Viral Roger has created various stories for her son out of her imagination. That explains her finesse on carving this wonderful fiction. Her flair and creativity have given birth to such an astounding tale. Her storytelling skill is well demonstrated throughout the book. The balance of storytelling and plot construction is well synchronized in her debut narrative. In 'The Quests of William Wood', the plot not only centers around the protagonist but also highlights other important characters and scenarios in a precise manner. The author has magnificently constructed such a spellbinding concoction of mystery and fantasy. The plot thickens when Wood meets with an evil and bewitching wizard who happens to know his total history. The eponymous hero is shocked to witness such confidential information from the sorcerer's declaration. He gets tangled into such a stupefying predicament in this beguiling realm and doesn't know the way out. The flabbergasting plot and mesmerizing theme of 'The Quests of William Wood' have been winning hearts since its release. Fiction lovers, kids, and grown-ups who are fond of sorcery, thriller, suspense, and adventure will surely find this book a delightful read. The nail-biting anticipation to reach the story's climax is amazing as the plot build-up before that is well manifested by Viral Roger's genius in penmanship. Her work is truly applaudable and worthy of praise. Viral Roger has made her mark in the array of established litterateurs in her first chance by presenting such a remarkable piece of work to the perusers. This story is provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PNN) Rajasthan is set for a big leap towards a new era of industrialisation with proposals of over Rs 10 trillion lined up ahead of Invest Rajasthan 2022 summit to be held October 7-8, 2022, as per an official statement released on Thursday. The proposals have arrived across sectors due to the advantages of land, resources, infrastructure and state government policies. Rajasthan now aims to turn the proposals in reality, to uphold its mega investment summit motto of Committed and Delivered, the statement said. Rajasthan Minister of Industries Shakuntala Rawat said Invest Rajasthan 2022 summit is likely to host around 3,000 delegates from various industries and sectors. According to the minister, there will be deliberations on varied sectors during conclaves and sessions on startups, agri and agri processing, future-ready sectors, tourism and MSME. "The summit will commemorate the fructification of investment proposals received in Rajasthan," she said. Ahead of the summit, investment proposals from Reliance, Renew Power Solar Module Manufacturing, Renew Power Green Hydrogen, Lenskart Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Okaya EV Pvt Ltd., Saint Gobain Glass India Pvt. Ltd., Adani Group, Asahi Glass., RSWM Limited, Sudiva Spinners, Borosil Limited, Wipro Hydrolics Pvt. Ltd. E-Pack Durable Pvt. Ltd., Anand Shree Trust., Sahasra Semiconductor Pvt Ltd have been provided clearances. Along with several multinational and Indian investors, the summit has also attracted proposals from local entrepreneurs, assuring the development of a conducive ecosystem for industries in the state, the statement said. In the run-up to the Invest Rajasthan summit, various roadshows and investor connect programmes have been held across India and abroad. Recently, Start-up Conclave was organised where 4,192 memorandums of understanding and letters of intent were received. The MoUs signed are majorly in mines and minerals, agri and agro-processing, tourism, textile, engineering, chemicals and petrochemicals, health and medical, logistics, energy and handicraft. The release said out of the 4192 MoUs/LoIs, already 39 per cent have been implemented or in the advance stage of setting up ventures in the state. The aim of the state government is to have most of the MoUs/LoIs on ground before the Summit, the statement said. Veenu Gupta, Additional Chief Secretary, Government of Rajasthan said, "The Summit will see breakaway sessions on topics addressing new age agendas pertaining to tourism, renewable energy, MSMEs, agri, start-ups. For the MoUs and LoIs signed, the government is putting in a lot of effort to provide clearances and permissions so that these can be started timely." The huge interest of investors reflects the confidence in vision of Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot for industrial development of the state, the statement said. The investors are being attracted to the advantages of human capital, rapid infrastructure development, excellent market access, India's largest industrial land bank and attractive investment incentives, it added. The statement said the state government has established exemplary facilities such as One Stop Shop to facilitate the time-bound setting up of investments. A bouquet of policies, including the Rajasthan Industrial Development Policy (2019); Rajasthan Solar Energy Policy (2019); Wind and Hybrid Energy Policy (2019); Rajasthan Agro-processing, Agro Business and Agri Export Promotion Policy (2019), Rajasthan Tourism Policy (2020) while Rajasthan Investment Promotion Scheme (RIPS-2019) is helping investors to establish new ventures in Rajasthan. (ANI) New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI/India PR Distribution): Bangalore-based start-up, VOIZ - a marketplace for gig work professionals has raised seed funding of Rs 15 crores ($ 2 million) led by Omidyar Network India with participation from other investors. The company will use the funds to scale up its technology, onboard more talent on the platform, and expand their market presence. Founded by Rajesh Bernard, VineetPatil, and Sandeep Nyamati, VOIZ connects businesses with independent grey-collared professionals for work fulfilment of online jobs like customer service, tele-calling, sales, data entry, recruitment, virtual assistance, tech support, and online reputation management. By making it easier for companies to hire gig workers in more traditional roles, VOIZ is reimagining the entire lifecycle of entry-level jobs. Launched in July 2021, VOIZ has onboarded 100+ clients including some of the well-known unicorns in e-commerce, edtech, food tech, fintech, and logistics tech industries and has more than 1 lakh+ independent professionals signed up for gig work. In a report published by NITI Aayog in June 2022, there were 68 lakh gig workers in India in 2020 which is expected to grow to 2.35 crore workers by 2030. A significant segment of this workforce is expected to be in the remote workspace for simple transactional work and VOIZ with its unique offerings in the grey-collar workforce market is poised to take advantage of this explosive growth. "There are very few platforms out there building for the future of work. Our vision is to disrupt the grey collar gig workforce economy and create employment for over 3 million independent professionals in the next 5 yrs. We are excited to partner with Omidyar Network India in our next phase of growth. VOIZ believes that the future of work for the grey collared gig workforce space is digital, remote, powered by gig, enabled by gamification that can have a huge social impact in employing mobility challenged workforce across the world" said Rajesh Bernard, Co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer at VOIZ. "Our supply pool, which is mostly made up of 30+ female, secondary incomes, gives us a big first advantage in delivering quality and quantity. The next thing is how templatized the jobs are to be able to scale significantly, and we are working on it relentlessly as we speak. The tech in this space will mature over the next 3-5 years and we seem to be in the right place at the right time to make a disruption. With ONI coming in, the next 12 months are going to be exciting" said VineetPatil, Co-founder, and Chief Business Officer at VOIZ. "We are excited to back Rajesh and the team at VOIZ in their mission to generate livelihoods for thousands of gig workers from the 'Next Half Billion' segment. It is bringing into the workforce women who prefer to work from home on flexible projects and equipping them with the right tools and training. We have been impressed by the depth of offering and the range of clients being served on the platform. We are happy to support them on their goal to become the #1 destination for gig workers in India" said BadriPillapakkam, Partner at Omidyar Network India. VOIZ is a 'future of work' platform operating in the grey collared segment of the gig work landscape. VOIZ enables work completion of simple online jobs on its platform VOIZ (voizworks.com) via gig work professionals. VOIZ operates in eight specific business processes: tele-calling, customer service, sales, recruitment, data entry, technical support, executive assistance and online reputation Omidyar Network India invests in bold entrepreneurs who help create a meaningful life for every Indian, especially the hundreds of millions of Indians in low-income and lower-middle-income populations, ranging from the poorest among us to the existing middle class. To drive empowerment and social impact at scale, we work with entrepreneurs in the private, non-profit and public sectors, who are tackling India's hardest and most chronic problems. We make equity investments in early-stage enterprises and provide grants to non-profits in the areas of Digital Society, Education, Emerging Tech, Financial Inclusion, Cities & Innovation and Property Inclusivity. Omidyar Network India is part of the Omidyar Group, a diverse collection of companies, organizations and initiatives, supported by philanthropists Pam and Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. This story is provided by India PR Distribution. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/India PR Distribution) Imagine Jason Momoa being your flight attendant. We're sure he wouldn't just be serving snacks and water, but also his good looks! This is exactly what happened when he decided to take the food cart for a spin on a flight to Hawaii. Jason surprised the passengers aboard a flight to Hawaii on Tuesday as he pushed the snacks cart, handing out water bottles. The video has now gone viral on social media and people are appreciating the actor for being so humble. According to a report by the New York Post, Jason served water bottles of his own 'Manalunu' brand that promises to be a sustainable company. As per the report of the New York Post, Jason even gifted every passenger 10,000 Hawaiian Airlines miles. Check out the video: https://www.instagram.com/p/CgyWiWhFj42/ On the work front, Jason will next be seen sharing screen space with Amber Heard in 'Aquaman 2'. The sequel will also star original cast members - Nicole Kidman, Temuera Morrison, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Patrick Wilson, and Dolph Lundgren. New stars to join the cast of the forthcoming action flick include Indya Moore and Jani Zhao. The film is slated to release in March next year. Speaking about Jason, he hails from Hawaii. He is currently dating Mexican actor Eiza Gonzalez. After 'Aquaman 2', he will play be seen playing the villain in 'Fast X' - the tenth instalment in the Fast and the Furious franchise. (ANI) Charles Polevich, a man who killed rapper Nicki Minaj's father Robert Maraj in a hit-and-run incident that took place in 2021 has been sentenced to one year in jail. According to People magazine, on Wednesday, Charles Polevich was sentenced Wednesday following the death of Charles Maraj whom he hit with his Volvo on Long Island in February 2021. A spokesperson for the Nassau County Courthouse confirmed that Polevich must also pay a $5,000 fine and will have his driver's license suspended. "This is just a tragic situation and a situation which if, I think by all accounts, if [he] had stayed at the scene of this accident, this would've been a civil matter, not a criminal matter at all." "I don't think he was responsible for the accident, but he was certainly responsible for the conduct after leaving the scene of the accident. And it's my belief and strong opinion that he suffered from a medical issue, I think a heart issue, that resulted in his leaving the scene of the accident and not being able to recall his conduct or whereabouts thereafter," his attorney Marc Gann told People. In an interview, Nicki Minaj shared that his father's death was "the most devastating loss" of her life. She wrote on her website in May 2021, "Tho I can't really bring myself to discuss the passing of my father as yet; I can say it has been the most devastating loss of my life." "I find myself wanting to call him all the time. More so now that he's gone. Life is funny that way." Maraj died in the hospital one day after the incident, during which Polevich struck him with his 1992 Volvo station wagon as he walked in Mineola, New York. Police later said that Polevich was "absolutely aware of what happened" in the accident, but fled the scene anyway, as per People. Shortly after the incident, " Nassau County Detective Lt. Stephen Fitzpatrick at a press conference said, "He got out of the car, looked at the deceased, got into his car and made the conscious decision to leave instead of dialling 911 and calling an ambulance for the man. He went home and secreted his vehicle." Polevich pleaded guilty in May to two felony charges, including leaving the scene of a fatal crash and tampering with physical evidence. He admitted that upon returning home, he hid his Volvo under a tarp. Polevich, who lives in Guam but has a house in Mineola, was eventually tracked down by police who used video footage from neighbouring cameras to identify his "distinctive" vehicle. In May, acting State Supreme Court Justice Howard Sturim told Polevich that he would sentence him to "no more than a year in jail," despite the fact that prosecutors had recommended between one and three years, and he was facing up to 11. The decision of Sturim's upset Maraj's wife and Nicki's mother Carol, who reportedly said she was "not happy with" just one year in jail. In an interview Carol stated that "I was angry, very, very angry." "I started to shake because it brought back all the memories of that night when I was sitting in the hospital." Carol filed a $150 million lawsuit against Polevich in March 2021, with her lawyer Ben Crump saying at the time that Polevich was "not only irresponsible and negligent, but more concerned about running away and hiding than seeking help, " as per People. Marc Gann said in May that he believed his client may have suffered a "medical emergency" immediately after the crash, and said he had insurance and a good driving record. "Mr. Polevich's life story is one of helping others which makes this case so out of character." There are no allegations of substance use or abuse as causative of his conduct and it is our belief that a medical heart issue contributed to Mr. Polevich's conduct. Mr. Polevich could not be more sorry for the loss of Mr. Maraj." (ANI) Tamil Nadu Health Minister Ma Subramanian on Wednesday confirmed the arrest of three persons in connection with illegally harvesting (ova) eggs from a minor girl in Erode, Tamil Nadu. The accused have been detained under the National Security Act. The TN Health PRO has confirmed the news. In June, the Tamil Nadu government received a complaint that a minor girl from Erode was forced to donate her ovum eggs to hospitals for commercial reasons. The state officials appointed an enquiry committee and formed a team headed by the Joint Director of Medical and Rural Health Services (ACTs) to look into the matter. The team submitted a report in July after visiting the hospitals, speaking to the doctors, the girl, her mother, his partner and the "agent". The team found that the 16-year-old was taken to the hospitals by her parents and brokers - who are now in jail - and have forced her to donate eggs month after month. Following the team's report, Tamil Nadu Health Minister ordered the closure of three branches of Sudha Hospital, Ram Prasad hospital and Vijay hospital in Tamil Nadu and even the Scan centres attached to these facilities were closed and hospitals empanelled under the Tamil Nadu State Health insurance schemes were removed from the list. Tamil Nadu Medical and rural health services joint directors were asked to file cases against these hospitals for violations under Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act and Clinical Establishment Act. (ANI) The Ramsar recognition tally of wetlands in the state of Tamil Nadu reached 10 after six more wetlands were added, informed the officials on Wednesday. Confirming the news, Chief Minister MK Stalin congratulated the state's forest department on the achievement. "Extremely happy that 6 more wetlands in TN (Koonthankulam Bird Sanctuary, Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, Vembannur Wetland Complex, Vellode Bird Sanctuary, Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary & Udhayamarthandapuram Bird Sanctuary) have got the Ramsar site recognition today," tweeted the chief minister. He further added,"This takes the Ramsar recognition tally of Tamil Nadu to 10. This International recognition is a matter of great pride and goes hand in hand with Tamil Nadu Wetland Mission. I congratulate TN Forest Department on this sterling achievement". As per the official website of Ramsar, the Convention on Wetlands is an intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. The Convention was adopted in the Iranian city of Ramsar in 1971 and came into force in 1975. India is also one of the signatories of the convention. Since the beginning, almost 90 per cent of UN member states, from all the world's geographic regions, have acceded to become "Contracting Parties". (ANI) The two accused have been identified as Abdul Arbaz and Maulavi Mushfique Ahmed. Both of them were associates of arrested accused persons Irfan Shaikh, Shoaib Khan, Mudassir Ahmed, Aatif Rashid, Yusuf Khan, Abdul Toufiq and Shahrukh Pathan and wanted accused, Shamim Ahmed and Firoj Ahmed. In total, nine accused have been held so far in connection with the case. Kolhe (54) was murdered on June 21 after he wrote a post on Facebook in support of suspended BJP spoesperson Nupur Sharma. The NIA mentioned in its FIR that a group of people had hatched a conspiracy to send a message to the people supporting Sharma. "They conspired to strike terror among a section of people in India to promote enmity on grounds of religion. Kolhe's murder was carried out as part of the conspiracy to 'terrorise a section of the society'," the NIA said. The counter-terror agency also said that the accused in this case might be having international links. The NIA had earlier conducted searches at 13 locations in Maharashtra, which led to the recovery of incriminating documents, digital devices, pamphlets with hate messages and knives. The Kolhe murder case was initially registered at the City Kotwali police station on June 22. However, the probe was taken over by the NIA on July 2. --IANS atk/sks/arm ( 257 Words) 2022-08-03-22:34:04 (IANS) According to police, all three victims were standing at the side of the Jaipur Natun Ali road when the car hit them and knocked them down. "Nirmal Das, 35, died on the spot while Vikram Mahali, 42, and Lakhi Patar, 26, were rushed to the Assam Medical College and Hospital, where they succumbed to their injuries," police said quoting the eyewitness. The agitated people detained the driver of the vehicle and thrashed him before handing him over to police. "The driver was drunk and he was driving recklessly and could not control his vehicle, leading to the dashing of the three labourers heavily," a police official said. --IANS sc/vd ( 144 Words) 2022-08-03-22:48:01 (IANS) Congress MLA Kuldeep Bishnoi on Wednesday resigned from the Haryana Assembly, and as per sources, he is all set to join the BJP on Thursday. Bishnoi thus became another high-profile Congress leader to drift towards the saffron camp after Jyotiraditya Scindia and Jitin Prasada. Once considered close to the Gandhis, Bishnoi was reportedly upset after Udai Bhan, a close aide of former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, was made the Haryana Congress President. Bishnoi, who had earlier floated his own party before merging it with the Congress, said, "The party has drifted from the ideology of Indira Gandhi." His main rivalry in the state was with Hooda, who was appointed as the Chief Minister in 2004 ignoring the claims of Bhajan Lal, Bishnoi's father. Earlier in May this year, Kapil Sibal had exited the Congress to become an independent Rajya Sabha MP with the support of the Samajwadi Party. Sibal, however, did not join the BJP nor has he criticised the Congress ever since he left. Former Union Law Minister Ashwani Kumar too had left the party after reportedly being upset with the Congress leadership. "I was feeling uncomfortable, helpless and ignored for the last many months and I understood that now I am not needed in the party. Therefore, I distanced myself. I was not able to do whatever I wanted to do by staying inside the party," he had said. Kumar had also predicted loss for the Congress in Punjab ahead of the Assembly elections held earlier this year. Prior to Sibal, former Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar had jumped ship from the Congress to the BJP. After joining the BJP, Jakhar had said that it was not easy to break 50 years of relationship with the Congress. "From 1972 to 2022, my three generations considered Congress as their family. But an attempt was made to suppress my voice in the Congress. I was given a notice for speaking in the interest of Punjab and the country," he had said Former Union minister R.P.N. Singh, and Patidar leader Hardik Patel, the ex-working president of Gujarat Congress, too had left the party in the recent past. --IANS miz/arm ( 375 Words) 2022-08-03-23:00:03 (IANS) "During the searches, cash amounting to Rs 17 lakh, electronic devices including 10 mobile phones, pen drives, hard discs, besides several incriminating documents and a locker key have been recovered," said a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) official. Trinamool Congress leader Anubrata Mondal is also facing prosecution in the matter. In September 2020, the CBI lodged an FIR against Mohd Enamul Haque, the kingpin of the racket, BSF Commandant Satish Kumar and others regarding smuggling of cattle through the Indo-Bangladesh Border. Haque was arrested by the CBI in November 2020, for allegedly bribing BSF officials to keep his illegal, cross-border cattle smuggling business running. The CBI had learnt in its investigation that Haque had allegedly been running a hawala racket of Rs 1,000 crore. He was paying fat bribes to BSF officials. Trinamool leader Vinay Mishra and his brother Vikas Mishra were also allegedly involved in the matter. In March 2021, the Enforcement Directorate had arrested Vikas Mishra and attached the property of Vinay Mishra, for allegedlyreceiving money from Haque through Hawala channels. --IANS atk/vd ( 224 Words) 2022-08-03-23:24:04 (IANS) Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Wednesday expressed his condolences over the death of three people in a road accident at Bahuara Chowk in Vaishali's Patepur. Taking to Twitter, Kumar said, "Three people died in a road accident caused by an uncontrolled truck at Bahuara Chowk in Vaishali's Patepur. May God give strength to the bereaved families." Taking note of the situation, the state chief announced an ex-gratia of Rs 4 lakh to each of the deceased's family members. "An ex-gratia grant of Rs.4 lakh each will be given to the next of kin of the deceased. Wishing the injured a speedy recovery," Kumar added. Earlier on July 21, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar expressed condolences over the death of five people due to lightning and announced an ex-gratia of Rs 4 lakh to each of the deceased' family members. He also appealed to people to take full vigil in bad weather and follow the suggestions issued by the Disaster Management Department to prevent thunderstorms. Taking to Twitter, the Chief Minister said, "The death of 5 people is sad due to lightning in 5 districts of the state. An ex-gratia grant of Rs 4 lakh each will be given immediately to the dependents of the deceased. Be careful in bad weather. Follow the suggestions issued by the Disaster Management Department to prevent thunderstorms. Stay at home in bad weather, and stay safe." According to the press release from Chief Minister's Office (CMO), one death was reported in Siwan, 1 in Samastipur, 1 in Gaya, 1 in Khagaria and 1 in Saran due to thunderstorms. Meanwhile, India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Sunday said isolated heavy rainfall was very likely over Odisha, Bihar and Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim on July 20 and 21. "Isolated heavy rainfall very likely over Odisha, Bihar and Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim on 20th and 21st; Jharkhand on 23rd July 2022. Isolated very heavy rainfall also likely over Sub-Himalayan West Bengal & Sikkim on 20th and over Odisha during 22nd-24th July 2022," IMD tweeted. (ANI) The 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign under the aegis of Azadi ka Amrit Mohatsav is a big hit in Jammu and Kashmir with a large number of people joining the celebrations to mark the 75 years of India's Independence. The common citizens, politicians and soldiers are jointly campaigning to show patriotism toward the country. In Kupwara, the councillor of Ward 4 Lateef Ahmad hoisted the National Flag at his residence to mark the celebrations. People in the Kashmir Valley are willingly and enthusiastically hoisting flags at their buildings - be it homes, hotels or restaurants. The Tricolour is also flying high in many public places like Lal Chowk in Srinagar and Kokila Chowk in Kishtwar. In Pulwama, the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign has gained momentum as students, besides taking active part in essay, painting and singing competitions, are also participating in Tiranga rallies in all educational institutions in the district. Under the Har Ghar Tiranga Abhiyan, people of Anantnag district have also started hoisting tricolor on rooftops of their houses. "The locals are very happy and are in a positive mood for this campaign", said a local resident. The Border Security Force, Central Reserve Police Force and the Army also joined the campaign by hoisting the National flag at their posts and office buildings. In a tweet, BSF Kashmir said, "Participation of @BSF_Kashmir in #HarGharTiranga campaign with the celebration of the 75th year of independence for a commitment to nation-building". 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is a campaign under the aegis of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to encourage people to bring the Tiranga home and to hoist it to mark the 75th year of India's independence. Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav is an initiative of the Government of India to celebrate and commemorate 75 years of independence and the glorious history of its people, culture and achievements. PM Modi on Sunday called upon all citizens to turn the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign into a mass movement by hoisting or displaying the national flag at their homes and using the 'Tiranga' as a display picture on their social media accounts between August 2 and August 15 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of India's Independence." "Under the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, from the 13th to the 15th of August, a special movement - 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is being organized. Let us further this movement by hoisting the National Flag at our homes," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday while addressing the monthly radio programme 'Mann Ki Baat'. (ANI) Bharatiya Janata Party MP Manoj Tiwari issued an apology after Delhi Traffic Police issued a challan to him for not wearing a helmet during the Centre's 'Har Ghar Tiranga' bike rally in Delhi's Red Fort area. Delhi Traffic police also issued a separate challan against the vehicle owner. The challan amount to Rs 20,000. The owner of the vehicle has been prosecuted for a PUC certificate, police said. Tiwari took to Twitter to apologise and added that he will pay the fine. "Very Sorry for not wearing helmet today. I will pay the challan @dtptraffic.. clear number plate of vehicle is shown in this photo and location was Red Fort. aap sb se nivedn hai ki binaa helmett two wheeler nhii claayeN #DriveSafe family and friends need you," he tweeted. https://twitter.com/ManojTiwariMP/status/1554747041061818368?s=20&t=XK33uqyJdrRx7DOhbhh_hA The central government and the BJP are celebrating 75 years of Independence with the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign. Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu along with Union ministers Pralhad Joshi and Piyush Goyal flagged off a Tiranga Bike Rally for MPs from Red Fort on Wednesday. PM Modi on Sunday called upon all citizens to turn the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign into a mass movement by hoisting or displaying the national flag at their homes and using the 'Tiranga' as a display picture on their social media accounts between August 2 and August 15 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of India's Independence. "Under the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, from the 13th to the 15th of August, a special movement - 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is being organized. Let us further this movement by hoisting the National Flag at our homes," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday while addressing the monthly radio programme 'Mann Ki Baat'. 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is a campaign under the aegis of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to encourage people to bring the Tiranga home and to hoist it to mark the 75th year of India's independence. Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav is an initiative of the Government of India to celebrate and commemorate 75 years of independence and the glorious history of its people, culture and achievements. (ANI) The issue led to heated allegations between members of both treasury and opposition soon after floor leader of Congress in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge accused the Central government of misusing Central agencies. "Autonomous bodies ka misuse ho raha hai (there is misuse of autonomous bodies)...," Kharge pointed out the issue a few minutes after the Rajya Sabha assembled for the day. The senior Congress leader was referring to the deployment of Delhi Police personnel outside the residence of Congress interim chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday, ED's action of partially sealing the office of Young Indian Limited office located in the National Herald building. Members from treasury benches jointly opposed Kharge by standing near their seats. Meanwhile, Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu adjourned the House till 12 noon. Police forces were deployed outside the Congress headquarters and the residences of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi after the Enforcement Directorate partially sealed the Young Indian Limited office. The Congress then slammed blocking of roads to party headquarters, alleging that this has become a norm rather than an exception. The Delhi Police had said it stepped up security near the party's headquarters in the national capital to prevent any untoward incidents. (ANI) The Supreme Court on Thursday adjourned hearing on the plea of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren and state government against the Jharkhand High Court order which had accepted maintainability of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in connection with shell companies allegedly related to Soren and his associates. A bench headed by Justice UU Lalit adjourned the matter for August 12. The Jharkhand Government and chief minister Hemant Soren has moved the apex court against an order of the high court which had accepted maintainability of PIL in connection with shell companies allegedly related to Hemant Soren and his associates. The Jharkhand government has filed a Special Leave Petition (SLP) in the apex court challenging the Jharkhand High Court's order. On June 3, Jharkhand High Court held two PILs against Soren and rejected the arguments made by senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Mukul Rohatgi (questioning the maintainability of the two PILs filed against CM and his associates) in its 79-page judgement. Rejecting the objections point-by-point, the High Court had said that because some of the requirements as per rule 4, 4-B and 5 of the Jharkhand High Court (Public Interest Litigation) Rules, 2010 have not been followed and the instant writ petitions cannot be held to be not maintainable. "This Court, after considering the aforesaid aspect of the matter and taking into consideration the fact that the issue which is the subject matter of writ petition since it involves the issue of siphoning off huge public money, having the public interest at large, therefore, this Court deems it fit and proper not to throw the writ petition on that ground," stated the Jharkhand's HC order copy. In its conclusion, the Division Bench of Chief Justice Dr Ravi Ranjan and Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad said "This Court, after having answered the issue, as framed by this Court, and on the basis of discussions made hereinabove, is summing up its view and is of the considered opinion that the writ petitions cannot be thrown away on the ground of maintainability." The Jharkhand High Court had been hearing various petitions pertaining to shell companies, the mining lease of Chief Minister Soren and the MGNREGA scam. (ANI) Madhya Pradesh Economic offences wing (EOW) conducted raids at the residence of a senior clerk of the Medical Education Department in Bhopal on Wednesday and seized a large amount of cash, gold and property-related documents, officials said. According to EOW, they were constantly receiving complaints about the disproportionate assets of Hero Keswani, a senior clerk posted in the Medical Education Department in Satpura Bhawan. The EOW verified Keswani's alleged links with corruption and following that the EOW sleuths raided his house situated on the Mini Market Road in the Bairagarh area of Bhopal. "Hero Keswani, currently drawing a salary of around Rs 50,000 per month, has several properties exceeding his income. We got information about it and raided his house," said Superintendent of Police (EOW) Rajesh Mishra. About a dozen officers of EOW raided Hero Keswani's residence yesterday. As soon as Keswani came to know that EOW has reached his residence for the raid, his health deteriorated. He was rushed to Hamidia Hospital. Sources said, his blood pressure shot up during the searches. His condition is said to be stable now. According to the information, property-related papers, around Rs 80 lakhs of cash, gold and silver were recovered from his house during the raid. The EOW said that the clerk had started his job at a salary of about Rs 4,000 a month and was currently drawing around Rs 50,000 per month. Amounts running into lakhs of rupees were found deposited in the bank accounts of Keswani's close family members. He had purchased most of the properties in the name of his wife, a homemaker, who had no source of income, informed the agency. The EOW said that Keswani is close to the secretary of Jeev Sewa Sansthan, a charitable trust, who is under the scanner of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for allegedly selling lands received as donations for the construction of an educational institute to builders. This is believed to be a major scam since this is an old trust and some members had been involved in procuring lands in the guise of social activities. (ANI) Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Thursday explained the reason behind withdrawing the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, asserting that the aim is to bring new compressive legislation at par with technology landscape which is changing rapidly. He further said that the Joint Committee of Parliament recommended 81 amendments in a Bill that was of 99 sections which practically, suggested for overhauling the Bill. The government on Wednesday withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 and has decided to come up with new legislation in view of a large number of amendments suggested by the Joint Committee of Parliament towards a comprehensive legal framework on the digital ecosystem. Speaking to ANI, the Union Minister said, the Joint Parliamentary Committee recommended major changes in the Bill, which was like rewriting the entire Bill. "The Joint Parliamentary Committee did very extensive work. They consulted a very large number of stakeholders. After it, the Joint Committee of Parliament gave a very comprehensive report which recommended 81 amendments in a Bill that was of 99 sections, it was practically rewriting the entire bill. Apart from the amendments, they were some 12 major suggestions were there from the committee," said Vaishnaw. He said that it was important to withdraw the old Bill to come up with a contemporary and modern legal framework to tackle the challenges of coping with the rapidly changing technology. "To make sure that we do a compressive Bill it was important to do withdraw the old Bill and very soon we will be coming out with a new Bill. With the whole digital economy that we have and the way the technology landscape is changing rapidly, we need a very contemporary and modern legal framework. Today telecom is the primary method by which data is consumed," he said. The Union Minister said that the government is working on it and Personal Data Protection Bill will be a part of that. So, there is an overhaul of the legal framework. "Our focus on making social media accountable has given good results. There is a good response to any law enforcement agency request which comes. No question of coming under any pressure, it is a very conscious decision (of withdrawal) and a well-thought-out process," added Vaishnaw. Ashwini Vaishnaw moved the motion for withdrawal of the Bill in Lok Sabha. "The Data Protection Bill 2021 as reported by the Joint Committee may be withdrawn," he said. The House adopted the motion. The Government had July 31, 2017, constituted a "committee of Experts on Data Protection" chaired by Justice BN Srikrishna to examine the issues relating to data protection. The committee examined the issues on data protection and submitted its report on July 27, 2018. The 2019 Bill sought to bring a strong and robust data protection framework for India and to set up an Authority for protecting personal data and empowering the citizens' with rights relating to their personal data ensuring their fundamental right to "privacy and protection of personal data". The bill was sent to a Joint Committee of Parliament which gave its report on December 16, 2021. (ANI) Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Thursday urged parents in the state to keep a watch over subjects their children are being taught in the madrasas. "We have already abolished 800 government madrasas in Assam. But there are many Qawmi Madrasas in the state. The citizens, parents should keep a watch on these madrasas that what type of subjects are taught here," the CM said addressing a press conference. The CM's remarks came after the Morigaon district administration demolished the Jamiul Huda Madrasa in Moirabari area in Assam. The Jamiul Huda Madrasa was run by an active member of Bangladesh-based terror outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), Mustafa alias Mufti Mustafa, who was a resident of Saharia Gaon in Morigaon and an important financial conduit of the ABT. Earlier, the Morigaon district police had arrested Mustafa for having links with ABT and Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent (AQIS). The state CM had said that the Madrasa was demolished under Disaster Management Act and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and added that its students were admitted to different schools. "In Morigaon today, Jamiul Huda Madrasa was demolished under Disaster Management Act and UAPA Act. 43 students were studying in this madrasa, who are now admitted to different schools," he said while further mentioning that Mustafa had obtained a doctorate in Islamic Law from Madhya Pradesh's Bhopal in 2017. This came after 11 persons were detained in a major crackdown in Assam on July 28 for their alleged links with the global terror outfits including AQIS and ABT. Earlier on Friday (July 29), the police found eight people including Mustafa, who had links with ABT and AQIS, and produced them before the Barpeta Court, which sent them to the nine-days police custody. "The eight arrested persons having links with AQIS/ABT were produced before the Chief Judicial Magistrate court in Barpeta, Assam today. The court has sent them to 9-day Police custody," said Amitava Sinha, Superintendent of Police, Barpeta. The ABT is linked to Al Qaeda in Indian Sub-continent (AQIS). According to police, the activities of the Mustafa's madrasa were being funded through the proceeds of unlawful activities, hence the Jamiul Huda Madrasa was sealed by the police. Besides Mustafa, the police had also arrested Afsaruddin Bhuyan (39) from Morigaon, Goalpara's Abbas Ali (22) who used to provide logistics and shelter to one of the absconding members namely Mehbubur Rehman. Mehbubur Rehman alias Mehbub is also a member of Ansarullah Bangla Team. He was wanted in the Jogighopa PS case. He was arrested by the Bongaigaon police team on July 26."We got information about a man named Mustafa who runs a madrasa in Moriabari associated with anti-national activities. He's linked with financing of the Ansarullah Bangla Team related to Al-Qaeda in the sub-continent. Case registered under various sections of UAPA," said Aparna N, SP, Morigaon. The other people arrested are Jubair Khan (25), Rafiqul Islam (27), Dewan Hamidul Islam (20), Moinul Haque (42), Kajibur Hussain (37), Muzibaur Rahman (50), Shahanur Aslam and Sahjahan Ali (34). "It's an outcome of a long surveillance operation of Assam police and central agencies," the Special DGP GP Singh said on July 28. (ANI) An aircraft of Go First returned to Ahmedabad after it suffered a bird strike within a few minutes of take-off on Thursday afternoon. The directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has ordered an inquiry into the incident. A senior DGCA official confirmed that Go First flight G8911 which was operating on Thursday from Ahmedabad to Chandigarh was diverted to Ahmedabad after a bird-hit incident. On June 20, a Delhi-bound aircraft of the SpiceJet airlines carrying 185 passengers caught fire soon after taking off from the Patna airport and made an emergency landing minutes later due to a bird hit. On the same day, another Delhi-bound IndiGo flight from Guwahati returned to Guwahati airport due to a suspected bird hit after the takeoff. Earlier last month, the windshield of a Go First flight between Delhi and Guwahati cracked mid-air due to bad weather on Wednesday, a Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) official said. The aircraft was diverted to Jaipur and landed safely. DGCA had said that such incidents take place on a daily basis, but these occurrences hardly have any safety implications. "On average, about 30 incidents do take place, including go-around, missed approaches, diversion, medical emergencies, weather, technical and bird hits," the top DGCA official told ANI. "Most of them have no safety implications. On the contrary, they are a sine qua non of a robust safety management system," he added. A Delhi-bound GoAir aircraft was rejected take-off from Leh due to a dog on the runway. In similar incidents, another two Go First flights were diverted due to engine snags. The DGCA said that the matter is being investigated. While the GoAir A320 aircraft VT-WGA flight from Mumbai to Leh was diverted to Delhi due to Engine No.2 EIU (Engine Interface Unit) fault, Go Air A320 aircraft VT-WJG flight G8-6202, from Srinagar to Delhi was diverted to Srinagar due to Engine no. 2 EGT over limit. Meanwhile, after frequent engineering-related glitches were reported in several airlines, the DGCA conducted several spot checks and advised that all aircraft at base and transit stations shall be released by certifying staff holding a licence with appropriate authorization by their organization, said officials. (ANI) September 8 becomes annual day for hounouring Vietnamese language September 8 will become an annual day for honouring the Vietnamese language under a decision signed by Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh on the approval of a project to honour it among the Vietnamese community abroad in the 2023-2030 period. The project aims to enhance the communitys awareness of the Vietnamese languages beauty and value, while honouring individuals and organisations that make positive contributions to maintaining and expanding the coverage of the language among the community, keeping it as a language for communicating among the Vietnamese families abroad, and spreading it to foreigners. It is expected to motivate the efficiency and quality of Vietnamese teaching and learning among the community, while encouraging the host administrations to bring Vietnamese into educational facilities in Vietnamese-inhabited areas. Through the project, the Vietnamese studies and research are hoped to be strengthened, contributing to making the language an official alongside others in areas with favourable conditions. At the opening of a Vietnamese class at High School 251, named after President Ho Chi Minh in Kiev, Ukraine (Photo: VNA) The project will be implemented in parallel with the cultural diplomacy strategy until 2030 that was approved by the Prime Minister on November 30, 2021. Activities to celebrate the day for honouring the Vietnamese language will be held throughout the year and integrated into festivals and special occasions of the country. They include an annual meeting to mark the day, an annual contest to explore the language and the presentation of the Vietnamese language ambassador abroad title, and an art performance in Vietnam or abroad to honour the Vietnamese language. Individuals, organisations, families and associations with positive contributions to maintaining and spreading the language among Vietnamese community abroad will also be honoured. At the same time, an online portal for Vietnamese language training for overseas Vietnamese will be launched under the management of the Vietnam National University-Hanoi./ Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) arrested one Parvez Zubair in a terror funding case on Thursday in Mumbai. The arrest was made under the provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. A court has sent Zubair to ATS custody till August 10. Zubair has been accused of being in touch with Anees Ibrahim, the younger brother of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim and of conducting terror funding activities for Dawood Ibrahim. As per the ATS, Zubair used to work for Dawood Ibrahim under different aliases and had been absconding for a long time. His arrest was made on the basis of specific information received by the Central investigation agency. An ATS official said that Zubair has visited Dubai 54 times between 2014-2022. ATS has registered a case against Zubair under Sections 17 and 18 of UAPA. Zubair's lawyer said in court that Zubair had received a message on a chat application with someone a year ago and the ATS was making a case against his client on that basis even though his client had not responded to the chat. A case was registered against Zubair in the year 1993 at Dharavi police station under section 323 of IPC. ATS said it is investigating a terror funding case. Earlier in June this year, 2022, Yusuf had been arrested from Kashmir for terror-funding Lashkar-e-Toiba. The accused had transferred money to Junaid Mohammad following which he had been produced before a Pune court. The Maharashtra anti-terror body had arrested Junaid Mohammad for working for Lashkar-e-Toiba and recruiting people. He used to recruit youths from different states after radicalising them. Meanwhile, in June this year the Maharashtra ATS said it had arrested a suspect identified as Yusf from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) for his alleged involvement in funding and recruitment for the terror outfit LeT. The arrested accused Yusuf was also presented in a court in Pune. Yusuf allegedly transferred funds to one accused Junaid Mohammad who was arrested on May 24 this year from the Khamgaon Taluka in Jammu and Kashmir's Buldhana district. The ATS on June 2 had arrested another wanted suspect in the same case, Aftab Hussain Shah, 28, a carpenter from J&K's Kishtwar. Shah is accused of being the link between Junaid Mohammed and a LeT operative based in a foreign country. Further, on June 10 this year, the ATS took custody of Inamul Haque from Saharanpur. He is allegedly a partner of Junaid Mohammad who was arrested by ATS from Pune. (ANI) Senior Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge is being questioned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case linked to the National Herald, said Congress MP Jairam Ramesh on Thursday. Jairam Ramesh said that Mallikarjun Kharge is being interrogated for the past four and a half hours. "Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, has been undergoing interrogation by the ED for the last four and a half hours. His ordeal is continuing." Earlier in the day, Kharge informed the Rajya Sabha that the Enforcement Directorate had issued summons against him amid ongoing proceedings of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, accusing the Central government of attempting to intimidate the Congress party. The ED has asked Kharge to appear before it in a money laundering case linked to the National Herald. Interim party chief Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have already been questioned in the case over alleged evasion of tax. Kharge stated while speaking during the Question Hour session of the Rajya Sabha. "I received ED summon, they called me at 12.30 pm. I want to abide by law, but is it right for them to summon when Parliament is in session? Is it right for Police to gherao residences of Sonia Gandhi & Rahul Gandhi? They are doing it purposely to afraid us (Congress). We won't be scared, we'll fight," Kharge said. Responding to Kharge's complaint, the Leader of the House in Rajya Sabha Piyush Goyal said the Centre has nothing to do with it. "The government does not interfere in the work of the law enforcement authorities. Perhaps during their tenure, when their government was there, they might be interfering," Goyal said The union minister said that said law enforcement agencies were doing their job and acting against those who have done anything wrong. ED on Wednesday partially sealed the offices of Young India Limited -- the firm that owns Associated Journals, which runs the outlet -- at Herald House in Delhi. Mallikarjun Kharge is the authorised representative for the company, and the sealing had to be done as he wasn't there. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) in April this year examined senior Congress leader Kharge here in connection with its money laundering probe into the National Herald case and recorded his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). (ANI) Surender Singh lost his life in an unfortunate incident while trying to stop illegal mining activities in Nuh district. He was posted as DSP Tauru, said a press release. While condoling the family members, ADGP Jadhav said that Singh would be long remembered for his exemplary courage and professional commitment to the Police Department. He also assured the grieved family members that Haryana Police would provide all possible assistance to the family as per the welfare schemes of the Department. The financial assistance is given to the dependents under an agreement of accidental death insurance cover where the salary account is maintained with the HDFC Bank. Among others present on this occasion included Superintendent of Police Kurukshetra Surender Bhoria, AIG/Welfare Rajiv Deswal, DSP Nuh Anirudh Chauhan, State Head HDFC Ritesh Jindal, Nodal Officer HDFC Vipin Gupta and family members of late Surender Singh. (ANI) The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi has tested 12 samples of suspected Monkeypox cases so far, said an official on Thursday. The Virology Lab, AIIMS, Delhi is one of the 15 labs in the country that has been authorised by the Department of Health Research-Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Speaking to ANI, Dr Lalit Dar, Professor, Department of Microbiology, AIIMS said, "At the Virology Laboratory Department of Microbiology, we have received 12 samples from different states. We have also received samples from Delhi." AIIMS, Delhi received samples from Delhi, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana so far. Pertinent to mention, two samples of Delhi tested positive for Monkeypox and both the patients are admitted at LNJP hospital. "Out of these 12 samples, who have tested positive and they are both from Delhi," Dr Dar said. He said some of the samples tested positive for chicken pox. Notably, the patients who tested positive for Monkeypox in the AIIMS lab do not have any recent travel history abroad. On the capacity of conducting tests, Dr Lalit said, "Right now we are getting a couple of samples on daily basis, which is not a large number. During COVID, the government augmented the RTPCR testing capacity. For Monkeypox, RTPCR is done. We have the capacity of conducting 400 samples a day depending on requirement and number of patients." He further said, "So, far there is really more than enough capacity in the country to do the testing. 15 labs are already authorised by the Department of Health Research, ICMR for testing across the country." The laboratory staff in AIIMS, Delhi has received training from ICMR-NIV Pune for conducting real-time RTPCR, biosafety measures, storage and transportation of samples, Dr Lalit said. The results of testing for Monkeypox come in 24 hours. "We are giving the report within 24 hours. We usually try to give it on the same day. Even if a sample arrives late in the evening, we still give the report within 24 hours," He said. India has so far reported nine Monkeypox cases, of which five are from Kerala with a history of international travel and four from Delhi with no recent travel history. A 31-year-old woman tested positive for Monkeypox in the national capital on Wednesday, taking India's tally to nine. This is the first case of the disease among women in India. Earlier on Tuesday, another 35-year-old Nigerian man living in Delhi, with no recent travel history, tested positive for monkeypox. Both patients are admitted to Lok Nayak Jaiprakash hospital which comes under the government of Delhi. In the wake of an increase in the number of Monkeypox cases in the country, isolation rooms have been made operational for the treatment of such infections in three central government hospitals, according to sources. "The isolation rooms for the treatment of Monkeypox patients are operational in three major central government hospitals i.e Safdarjang hospital, RML hospital and Lady Hardinge hospital," official sources told ANI. The Delhi Government issued the official statement on Tuesday on the preparation of isolation rooms in government and private hospitals. The 20 isolation rooms at the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital, while 10 isolation rooms have been set up in Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital (GTB) hospital and 10 at Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital. Notably, the Delhi government has also directed private hospitals to create isolation rooms for patients with Monkeypox cases. These three hospitals are Kailash Deepak hospital, East Delhi; MD City Hospital, North Delhi and Batra Hospital and Research Centre, Tughlakabad in South Delhi.On Monday, the Joint Secretary in the Union Health Ministry wrote to Dr Hussain Abdul Rahman, Executive Director and IHR focal point in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), requesting him to intensify screening to ensure that persons exhibiting symptoms suggestive of Monkeypox disease are not allowed to board flights to India to minimize the risk of disease transmission. In the wake of the rising cases of Monkeypox in the country, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Tuesday assured citizens not to panic and said that an awareness campaign is being run in collaboration with the state governments to prevent the spread of the infection. (ANI) Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) in association with the Flag Foundation of India (FFI) on Thursday installed a 72-feet-high national flag at ITBP Academy near Nag Mandir in Mussoorie. The national flag has been dedicated to the martyrs of the freedom struggle by ITBP and FFI and also for spreading awareness of the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign. The central government is celebrating 75 years of Independence with the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign. Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu along with Union ministers Pralhad Joshi and Piyush Goyal flagged off a Tiranga Bike Rally for MPs from Red Fort on Wednesday. Earlier on Wednesday, the Ministry of Culture released a 'Har Ghar Tiranga' anthem featuring famous celebrities including Amitabh Bachchan, Kapil Dev, Virat Kohli, Anupam Kher and Asha Bhonsle. The video showcases the spirit, strength and diversity of India from sports, missile launches, army, to the mesmerising beauty of the country. Legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan lent his voice and Anushka Sharma, her husband Virat Kohli, south star Prabhas were also spotted in the video. Prabhas is the only male actor from south India who has been featured in this anthem video. At the end of the video, PM Modi graced it with his charismatic personality. 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is a campaign under the aegis of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to encourage people to bring the Tiranga home and to hoist it to mark the 75th year of India's independence. PM Modi on Sunday called upon all citizens to turn the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign into a mass movement by hoisting or displaying the national flag at their homes and using the 'tiranga' as a display picture on their social media accounts between August 2 and August 15 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of India's Independence. "Under the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, from the 13th to the 15th of August, a special movement - 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is being organized. Let us further this movement by hoisting the National Flag at our homes," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday while addressing the monthly radio programme 'Mann Ki Baat'. 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is a campaign under the aegis of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to encourage people to bring the Tiranga home and to hoist it to mark the 75th year of India's independence. Addressing the 91st edition of the monthly radio programme, Mann Ki Baat, Prime Minister Modi stated that India is set to witness a glorious and historic moment as it completes 75 years of Independence. "My dear countrymen, today we started our discussion on 75 years of Independence, with a visit across the country. The next time we meet, the journey of our next 25 years would have already begun. We all have to join for our beloved tricolour to be hoisted at our homes and those of our loved ones. Do share with me how you celebrated Independence Day, if you did anything special, this time. Next time, we will talk again about the different colours of our Amrit Parv. Till then, I take leave of you. Thank you very much," said PM Modi. Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav is an initiative of the Government of India to celebrate and commemorate 75 years of independence and the glorious history of its people, culture and achievements. This Mahotsav is dedicated to the people of India who have not only been instrumental in bringing India thus far in its evolutionary journey but also hold within them the power and potential to enable Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of activating India 2.0, fuelled by the spirit of Aatmanirbhar Bharat. The official journey of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav commenced on March 12, 2021, which started a 75-week countdown to our 75th anniversary of independence and will end post a year on August 15, 2023. (ANI) There has been a huge demand for the national flag which has created a shortage in supply in Kerala after the government of India called on citizens and institutions to hoist the national flag on Independence Day. Sulaiman Sayd, the owner of Thiruvananthapuram's oldest flag shop said that they have placed the orders one month in advance, but the government appealed to all houses and institutions to hoist the flag. Due to this, the stock is coming from other states, but there is a shortage. He said, "Now there are bulk orders but we are unable to deliver them. Even though we tried to source it locally, then too, there is a shortage." Meanwhile, the union government has changed the country's flag code to allow the tricolour to fly both in the daytime and at night now. Polyester flags can also be produced by machines. Another PRS Kodikkada shop owner, Shanalkala told that there is a shortage and there are bulk orders also. They have their own printing units and eight women are stitching flags in their own houses. "Now the government has given the permission to make it in polyester cloth. There is a shortage of cloth coming from outside, so we are taking the cloth from Kerala and doing it on polyester cloth now. As we have our own system, we are able to deliver all bulk orders," he added. He also said that the number of orders is increasing. There are orders for 5,000 to 10,000 flags and the Residents' associations are also giving bulk orders. Another shopkeeper said, "We're getting demand for supply of national flag from many apartment complexes. Due to high demand, we're only making flags right now. I've been operating this shop for many years, but this year the demand for Tricolour is very high." Whereas in Karnataka a shopkeeper in Bengaluru said that there is a rise in demand for the Tricolour in view of the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign announced by PM Modi. "Demand for the national flag is such that we have to manufacture it in cloth varieties other than Khadi, cotton & silk to make it affordable for all. We are happy to support customers and wish that this campaign gains greater momentum in coming years," he added. Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday said that the "Har Ghar Tiranga" programme is a message to the world that every citizen of India is united to take forward India's journey of development, prosperity, security and culture. PM Modi on Sunday called upon all citizens to turn the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign into a mass movement by hoisting or displaying the national flag at their homes and using the 'Tiranga' as a display picture on their social media accounts between August 2 and August 15 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of India's Independence. "Under the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, from the 13th to the 15th of August, a special movement - 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is being organized. Let us further this movement by hoisting the National Flag at our homes," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday while addressing the monthly radio programme 'Mann Ki Baat'. 'Har Ghar Tiranga' is a campaign under the aegis of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to encourage people to bring the Tiranga home and to hoist it to mark the 75th year of India's independence. Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav is an initiative of the Government of India to celebrate and commemorate 75 years of independence and the glorious history of India's people, culture and achievements. (ANI) Hours after joining Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Kuldeep Bishnoi on Thursday suggested Congress to change its strategy if the party wants to defeat BJP. He further said that he will quit politics if former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda wins the Adampur assembly constituency seat of Hisar district in the upcoming bypolls. Haryana Assembly secretariat informed the Election Commission (EC) that the Adampur assembly constituency has fallen vacant in the wake of Congress MLA Kuldeep Bishnoi's resignation from this assembly seat. The move will set into motion the exercise to hold a bypoll. Speaking to ANI, the BJP leader said, "I would like to suggest to them (Congress party) that the Congress of Indira ji and Rajiv ji, their ideology is something from which the party has completely gone astray. If they have to face BJP once again, they will have to revive that ideology. I was in Congress for a long time, so I was trying to give Rahul Gandhi a chance, but still when the Congress party itself is in self-destruction mode, then what can anyone do? I had said in the media that if Rahul Gandhi satisfies me. Only then, I will vote for Ajay Maken, otherwise, I will vote for BJP." Bishnoi further advised Congress not to send their workers to protest as they are beaten up on the streets for protesting against the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and asserted that Gandhis should face the investigation in the National Herald case. Bishnoi said that he decided to join BJP after consulting his voters and told them that Prime Minister Narendra Modi thinks in the interest of the country and should give his support to strengthen them further. "I wanted to join BJP for a long time now still I wanted to give them one more chance as I had been a Congressman for a long time. But what can one do if Congress is in a self-destruction mode," he added. When asked whether he left Congress because of Bhupinder Hooda, to which he said, "I have not left Congress because of Bhupinder Hooda, but I have joined BJP after being impressed by Narendra Modi ji's vision and his policy." Challenging Hooda to win the Adampur bypolls, Bishnoi said that if his son loses the election then he will retire from politics. "Hooda had challenged me that if am not afraid then I should resign, see I have shown him by completing the challenge. Hooda always says in the last 10 years he has done work for the development of Haryana. Now, I challenge him that if he wins the Adampur bypolls against my son, I will quit the politics and if he loses, he must leave the pind of Haryana," said Bishnoi. Responding to Congress MP Rahul Gandhi's remark that he is "not scared" of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's suppressive government, Bishnoi said that the national agency is doing its job and as a responsible citizen Rahul Gandhi should cooperate with the probe agency and should not bring the workers on the streets for being thrashed by the police. "I do not think that the national agencies that are there work under someone's authority. If those people say that we are clean, then there is no need to panic. What is the need to force workers to protest on the streets when you know the police will thrash them? Answer what ED and income tax is asking and if you are right then you will come out clean," he said. On claims that Bishnoi has joined BJP under pressure from ED and other investigation agencies, he said, "There was no ED raid on me, only income tax search was done at my house and if I had to join BJP, I would have joined three years ago. If I have to join BJP under investigation agencies pressure then I would have done it in 2019, not after three years when my cases are almost over." Bishnoi said he will strengthen the Bharatiya Janata Party in Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab. "As far as joining BJP is concerned, I have the advantage that I will be able to strengthen the party further by conveying the policies of Narendra Modi ji to my workers and leaders. The difference will be seen in the whole of Rajasthan and Haryana in the coming time. I joined the party without any conditions and it was necessary so that I and my colleagues work for the people. I have no other condition other than strengthening the Bharatiya Janata Party," he said. Expelled Congress MLA Kuldeep Bishnoi resigned as the legislator from the Adampur Constituency in Haryana on Wednesday and joined BJP today. Bishnoi who cross-voted in the Rajya Sabha polls in Haryana was expelled from all party positions including his status as a special invitee to the Congress Working Committee (CWC). (ANI) Punjab and Haryana High Court on Thursday issued directions to the Punjab Government to file a report on the occurrence of large potholes after illegal mining in the international border area. According to Arun Gosai, the counsel of the Centre, while hearing the matters of illegal mining in Punjab, the High Court raised security concerns of the country regarding the large ditches in the border area. Gosai said, the Punjab government recorded the reply and said that all the rules regarding mining are being followed by the Punjab government. The Centre's counsel categorically said there was no mention in the Punjab government's reply to 'stop mining'. The High Court then expressed dissatisfaction with the reply and directed the Punjab government to file a detailed report over the matter. Earlier, Haryana Police conducted raids against illegal mining in 24 villages and impounded as many as 236 vehicles without documents. The development came days after Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Surendra Singh Bishnoi was mowed down by a truck while investigating illegal mining in Nuh on July 19. According to the police, the search operation was conducted under Operation Clean, in which around 1,500 police personnel were deployed. "We conducted the search operation with the help of technical and human intelligence and after acting upon the specific input, we launched a campaign against illegal mining, wherein we conducted raids against criminals in 24 villages and found 236 vehicles without documents which have been impounded under the Motor Vehicles Act. We also seized 60 other vehicles and they were seized by the Mining department for allegedly being involved in illegal mining," said SP Singla, Nuh. The SP said they have also filed three cases in the matter and have seized 27 'stolen vehicles' under section 102 of the CrPC (Power of police officer to seize certain property), which will be investigated later in a separate case. The main accused, identified as Shabir alias Mittar hailing from Tauru, Haryana was arrested on Wednesday in the Nuh DSP killing. He was arrested after an encounter with Haryana Police in connection with the case.The accused was arrested from the hills of Ganghora, the hill station area of Bharatpur (Rajasthan) where he was hiding after killing the DSP.(ANI) A plea has been filed in the Supreme Court challenging the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security's decision to allow Sikh passengers to carry kirpan on domestic flights operating from Domestic Terminals. The petition was filed by Hindu Sena, through advocate Ankur Yadav, which sought to issue direction to restrain any article in the airport on the basis of religion that may pose a potential threat to the flight. The petition filed by Hindu Sena is likely to be heard on Friday by a bench of Justices Abdul Nazeer and JK Maheshwari. The petitioner Hindu Sena has challenged the Aviation Security order dated March 4, 2022, and corrigendum dated March 12, 2022, issued by the respondent Bureau of Civil Aviation Security alleging that whereby the Respondent created a loophole in the safety and security of the Airport and the aircraft and also safety and security of the passengers thereby violating the Fundamental Right to Life and Personal liberty of the public at large guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India. In March, Aviation security regulator BCAS has earlier allowed Sikh aviation sector employees to carry kirpan on a person within the airport premises. On March 4 2020, BCAS allowed Sikh passengers to carry Kirpan with the exception that this shall be for Sikh passengers only and, no stakeholder or its employee at the airport (including Sikh) and working in any terminal, domestic or international, shall be allowed to carry Kirpan on the person. But on March 12 BCAS removed the exception and allowed its Sikh employee to carry Kirpan. "Kirpan may be carried only by a Sikh passenger, on his person, provided the length of its blade does not exceed 15.24 cms (6 inches), and the total length of a Kirpan does not exceed 22.86 cms (9 inches). It is allowed while travelling by air on Indian aircrafts within India (domestic routes of fully domestic flights operating from Domestic Terminals only," Avsec order copy read. This exception shall be for Sikh passengers only as stated above. And, no stakeholder or its employee at the airport (including Sikh) and working in any terminal, domestic or international, shall be allowed to carry Kirpan on the person. The petitioner claimed that said order was issued in a discriminatory manner and the respondents acted like anti-secular and allowed members of the Sikh community to carry 'kirpan' at their person not only at the airports but also in the flight cabin on domestic flights. The petitioner sought the issuance of appropriate direction to the respondents to rectify the anomaly in the said order of the respondents. The petitioner Hindu Sena, who claimed to be a Registered Non-Profit Organization working towards Sanathan Dharma Profession, Upliftment of Hindu Community, Cow Protection and building of Dharmarashtra, raised the question of whether freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion as guaranteed by Article 25 of the Constitution of India is absolute without limitation to public order and safety to the co-passengers in a flight? The petitioner also raised the issue that whether the respondent Bureau of Civil Aviation Security is empowered under the provisions of sub-section 1A of section 5A of the Aircraft Act 1934 (XXII of 1934), read with rule 3(b) of Aircraft (Security) Rules, 2011 to allow a person of a specific religion to carry 'kripan' (curved sharp knife) on his person in the flight cabin? "Whether allowing a person of a specific religion to carry an object at his person which may be used as a weapon in the flight cabin among the co-passengers who are not allowed to carry any object in flight which may be used as a weapon in the flight amounts to discrimination on the basis of religion, accordingly, is violative of Article 21 of the Constitution of India? " the petitioner questioned and it also asked Whether allowing 'kripan' in flight is violative of Article 14 and 15 of the Constitution of India? "The freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion has to be in consonance of Article 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India along with other Articles in PART III and where the said freedom exceeds the limitation, it is curtailed by restrictions provided under Article 25 itself," the petition said. Hence the petitioner urged the top court to issue direction to declare the Aviation Security order dated 04.03.2022 and corrigendum dated 12.03.2022 as invalid being in sheer contradiction to the interest of the security of India and the security of civil aviation operations; The petition also urged the court to issue directions to the respondents to not allow any article in the airport and in flight on the basis of religion that may pose a potential threat in the flight. (ANI) The Indian Navy on Thursday said five woman officers of INAS 314 based at Naval Air Enclave, Porbandar, created history by completing the first all-woman independent maritime reconnaissance and surveillance mission in the North Arabian Sea onboard a Dornier 228 aircraft. The mission was conducted on Wednesday and the aircraft was captained by the Mission Commander, Lt Cdr Aanchal Sharma, who had pilots, Lt Shivangi and Lt Apurva Gite, and Tactical and Sensor Officers, Lt Pooja Panda and SLt Pooja Shekhawat in her team. INAS 314 is a frontline Naval Air Squadron based at Porbandar, Gujarat and operates the state-of-the-art Dornier 228 maritime reconnaissance aircraft, the Navy said. The women officers received months of ground training and comprehensive mission briefings in the run-up to this historical sortie. According to Indian Navy, its impressive and pioneering women empowerment initiatives include the induction of women pilots, selection of women Air Operations Officers into the helicopter stream and conducting an all-woman sailing circumnavigation expedition across the globe in 2018. The Navy said the first-of-its-kind military flying mission was, however, unique and is expected to pave the way for women officers in the aviation cadre to assume greater responsibility and aspire for more challenging roles. It perhaps marks a unique achievement for the Armed Forces that a crew of only women officers undertook an independent operational mission in a multi-crew maritime surveillance aircraft. "Many congratulations to these officers for successfully doing so and inspiring millions of women all across India and the world to break free from all shackles and achieve their dreams. It was indeed a mission that showcased 'Nari Shakti' in its real spirit," said Indian Navy. (ANI) All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) will support Opposition vice presidential candidate Margaret Alva in the upcoming Vice Presidential elections, said party MP Imtiaz Jaleel on Thursday. The announcement came soon after Opposition leaders' meeting at Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Sharad Pawar's residence. Margaret Alva was also present at the meeting. "We discussed Margaret Alva's name and decided that the whole AIMIM party will support her, help her and stand with her. She is a woman and hails from a minority background. The country would be happy to see her, we wish her success," said AIMIM MP Imtiaz Jaleel. Earlier today, Alva appealed to all MPs to vote without fear or political pressure for the candidate they believe is best suited for this critical office. In a video appeal, she claimed she is the best candidate as she has the experience and will work impartially from the chair, besides committing herself to forge consensus on issues of national importance. "I appeal to each member of Parliament to vote for me in the election on August 6 without any fear. For, truly there is nothing to fear but fear itself. With your support, if elected Vice President, I commit myself to forge consensus on issues of national importance and to work with you - respected members to restore the glory of Parliament," she said. On Wednesday, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) declared its support for the opposition's vice presidential candidate Margaret Alva. The vice-presidential poll is slated to be held on August 6 as the tenure of incumbent M. Venkaiah Naidu comes to an end on August 10. Alva filed her nomination for the Vice Presidential election on July 19. Opposition parties on July 17 decided to field the former Rajasthan Governor as their joint candidate for the vice presidential election. The decision to field Alva was taken at a meeting of opposition leaders of 17 parties at the residence of NCP supremo Sharad Pawar. On the other hand, the ruling NDA has fielded West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar as its joint candidate for the post of Vice President. Dhankar, who is a lawyer by profession, entered politics in 1989. He became the governor of West Bengal in July 2019 and has made headlines since then over his tumultuous relations with the Mamata Banerjee government. He tendered his resignation as the Governor of West Bengal, following the nomination for the vice president post. The vice president of India, which is the second-highest constitutional post in the country, is elected through an electoral college consisting of members of the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha. Meanwhile, Trinamool Congress said that the party will abstain from voting in the upcoming Vice Presidential poll. In 2017, the NDA had nominated Venkaiah Naidu as its candidate for the vice-presidential election and he went on to become India's 15th vice president. (ANI) Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams chairman YV Subba Reddy on Thursday urged the devotees participating in Srivari Salakatla (annual) Brahmotsavams, a mega religious event, to follow COVID protocols. Reddy further said that the event will be conducted in a grand manner this year from September 27 to October 5. Addressing media persons after detailed discussions with TTD, district and police officials on the arrangements of ensuing Srivari annual Brahmotsavams at Annamaiah Bhavan in Tirumala, he said that CM YS Jaganmohan Reddy will present on the first day of annual fete on September 27. "Prominent vahana sevas during the Brahmotsavams are - Garuda Vahana Seva on October 1, Swarna Ratham on October 2, Rathotsavam on October 4, Chakra Snanam on October 5," he said. "On the first day due to the Dwajarohanam event, the Pedda Sesha vahana will commence at 9 pm but on all other days vahana sevas are scheduled between 8 am and 10 am in the mornings and 7 pm to 9 pm in the evenings," Reddy informed. He further said that elaborate arrangements are being made for the Garuda Seva as it fell on the second Saturday of Peratasi month, which is very special for the devotees from Tamil Nadu. "Since the annual fete is set to take place after two years due to the COVID pandemic, a heavy pilgrim rush is being anticipated. So it was directed to hold a series of meetings exclusively with a special focus on accommodation, annaprasadam, traffic management and parking," he said. He said that an adequate number of APSRTC buses are deployed for devotees and particularly on Garuda Seva day more buses will be operated. "As this year nearly 4-5 lakhs pilgrims are being expected for Garuda Seva, 20,000 vehicles are also anticipated. But once the holding capacity of vehicles in Tirumala is completed, separate parking facilities will be arranged in Tirupati and devotees will be transported to Tirumala through RTC buses," he said. Reddy said that German sheds will also be erected at some vital places with temporary washroom facilities to meet the requirements of the pilgrims. "As a safety measure on Garuda Seva day and next day, the 2-wheelers movement on the Ghat roads will be stalled from 11 pm of September 30 till 12 noon of October 2," he said. (ANI) The Supreme Court has set aside a Himachal Pradesh High Court judgment, noting that it was "utterly incomprehensible." A bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Sudhanshu Dhulia said: "The judgment of the high court is utterly incomprehensible. The reasons on the basis of which the High Court has proceeded to allow the petitions and set aside the reassessment cannot be discerned from the judgments." The top court order, passed on August 1, came on an appeal by Himachal Pradesh government challenging the Himachal Pradesh High Court judgment, which allowed the writ petitions instituted by the respondent under Article 226 of the Constitution. The top court, in its order, said: "A Division Bench of the High Court of Himachal Pradesh has by its judgments dated 27 November 2020 allowed the writ petitions instituted by the respondents under Article 226 of the Constitution. The respondents sought to challenge the validity of orders of reassessment passed by the appellant. The High Court by its impugned judgments has set aside the reassessment." It noted that notice was issued by the top court on January 12, April 18, and April 29 in the special leave petitions. "The appeals are accordingly allowed. The impugned judgments of the High Court are set aside," said the bench, directing the high court to hear the matter afresh. The matter was Himachal Pradesh and another vs Himachal Aluminium Conductors. --IANS ss/vd ( 244 Words) 2022-08-04-19:18:03 (IANS) Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday expressed his condolences over the loss of 6 lives due to thunderstorms that struck three districts in the state. Taking note of the situation, the state chief also announced an ex-gratia of Rs 4 lakh each to the dependents of the deceased. "The death of 6 people is sad due to thunderstorm in 3 districts of the state. An ex-gratia grant of Rs 4 lakh each will be given immediately to the dependents of the deceased," Tweeted CM Kumar. He further advised the masses to be careful and stay at home during the bad weather. "Be careful in bad weather. Follow the suggestions issued by the Disaster Management Department to prevent thunderstorms. Stay at home in bad weather, stay safe," he added. Earlier, Kumar also expressed his grief over the death of three people in a road accident at Bahuara Chowk in Vaishali's Patepur. Taking to Twitter, Kumar said, "Three people died in a road accident caused by an uncontrolled truck at Bahuara Chowk in Vaishali's Patepur. May God give strength to the bereaved families." Taking note of the situation, the state chief announced an ex-gratia of Rs 4 lakh to each of the deceased's family members. "An ex-gratia grant of Rs.4 lakh each will be given to the next of kin of the deceased. Wishing the injured a speedy recovery," Kumar added. Earlier on July 21, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar expressed condolences over the death of five people due to lightning and announced an ex-gratia of Rs 4 lakh to each of the deceased' family members. He also appealed to people to take full vigil in bad weather and follow the suggestions issued by the Disaster Management Department to prevent thunderstorms. Taking to Twitter, the Chief Minister said, "The death of 5 people is sad due to lightning in 5 districts of the state. An ex-gratia grant of Rs 4 lakh each will be given immediately to the dependents of the deceased. Be careful in bad weather. Follow the suggestions issued by the Disaster Management Department to prevent thunderstorms. Stay at home in bad weather, and stay safe." According to the press release from Chief Minister's Office (CMO), one death was reported in Siwan, 1 in Samastipur, 1 in Gaya, 1 in Khagaria and 1 in Saran due to thunderstorms. Meanwhile, India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Sunday said isolated heavy rainfall was very likely over Odisha, Bihar and Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim on July 20 and 21. "Isolated heavy rainfall very likely over Odisha, Bihar and Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim on 20th and 21st; Jharkhand on 23rd July 2022. Isolated very heavy rainfall also likely over Sub-Himalayan West Bengal & Sikkim on 20th and over Odisha during 22nd-24th July 2022," IMD tweeted. (ANI) Dr Jayanthi was recently awarded the Gold Medal at the recently held 21st convocation ceremony of NBE in Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Dr Jayanthi, a mother of two children, joined the DNB program at Dr Agarwal's Eye Hospital in 2017 and graduated in 2020. Diplomate of National Board (DNB) is a postgraduate programme awarded to specialist medical practitioners in India after completion of a three-year residency. DNB courses are run by the National Board of Examinations (NBE), New Delhi, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. (ANI) According to sources, during the meeting, Yediyurappa told the Home Minister that the new-found unity in Karnataka Congress unit could prove costly for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming assembly elections. Yediyurappa also stressed on the "support" extended by the people toward the celebration of Opposition leader Siddaramaiah's 75th birthday held on August 3 in Davanagere, stating "the message of unity given out by the Congress" should be an alarm bell to the ruling BJP. He also underlined the "solidarity shown by former Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Karnataka Congress president D.K. Shivakumar before the 4-5 lakh people that gathered for the birthday bash, which was well received by the people", sources said. According to sources, Yediyurappa told Shah "if counter-strategy is not formulated and put forth before the people, it could be an uphill task for the BJP to attain power in Karnataka". He also suggested the leaders take up state-wide tours and organise functions ahead of the elections. Sources said that Amit Shah gave a patient hearing to Yediyurappa. --IANS mka/pgh ( 205 Words) 2022-08-04-19:30:03 (IANS) Both the Houses of Parliament on Thursday witnessed protests by opposition members against the alleged misuse of investigating agencies by the government against political opponents. Opposition members led by the Congress in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha protested against the Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids and summons against Opposition leaders. The Lok Sabha proceedings were first adjourned until 2 p.m. and then adjourned for the day after opposition members continued loud sloganeering over the misuse of the ED against political rivals. Congress members tried to raise the issue of the alleged misuse of the ED but Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu said that he will listen to them after papers are laid on the table. After the papers were laid, Naidu said he has received five notices under Rule 267 but none has been admitted and he was not admitting them as the issues can be raised in any other form. The Rajya Sabha first adjourned till 12 noon as the opposition benches protested against the misuse of the ED. As the chairman gave permission, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said that the investigating agencies were being misused against the opposition parties to suppress them. Members from the treasury benches opposed Kharge's remark and heated exchanges took place between the two sides. As the disruption continued, the Chairman adjourned the Rajya Sabha till 12 noon. When the House resumed proceedings at 12 noon, Question Hour was held amid loud sloganeering and disruption from the Opposition, who were demanding a response from the Prime Minister. Kharge said that while the House was in session he had received a summons from the ED to appear before the agency at 12.30 pm. "I respect the law and will appear before the law enforcement agency," Kharge said. Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha Piyush Goyal said that the law enforcing agencies were doing their work and the present government is not interfering in their functioning. After Question Hour amid sloganeering, the Rajya Sabha was adjourned till 2 p.m. for the lunch break. Post lunch, the Rajya Sabha passed the 'Family Courts (Amendment) Bill, 2022' by a voice vote amid continuous sloganeering by the opposition members. As soon as the bill was passed, Rajya Sabha deputy chairman Harivansh adjourned the House for the day. --IANS ssb/bg ( 406 Words) 2022-08-04-20:18:02 (IANS) Kharge, being the principal official of YI, was assisting the ED officials when he was quizzed. He was quizzed over a few documents of YI. On Thursday a team of ED officials reached the YI office for the search operation. They also opened the office of YI which had been sealed. The ED had earlier accused Mallikarjuna Kharge and Pawan Bansal of not cooperating despite sending two emails to them. On Wednesday, the ED officials had sealed the YI office saying nobody was assisting them and they were forced to do so. On Thursday Kharge reached the YI office and assisted the ED officials in the search operation. During the search proceedings Kharge was quizzed regarding a few documents. The search operation was still going on at the time of filing this report. --IANS atk/bg ( 184 Words) 2022-08-04-20:32:02 (IANS) The Goa government has decided to take up the issue of 'e-Visa' to the UK with the Central government to help the tourism industry of the state. Goa tourism Minister Rohan Khaunte on Thursday said that providing e-Visa is also important for the state to get the same flow of people, which the government is looking forward. He was speaking during a meeting of the World Travel and Tourism Council-India, here. "Chief Minister Pramod Sawant in his forthcoming meeting with Home Minister (Amit Shah) will sort out the issue of e-Visa as far as the UK is concerned. We will try our level best. e-Visa which is important for you, same is for the government, as the same flow of people we are looking forward," Khaunte said. Rohan Khaunte had earlier said that the coastal state's tourism is predominantly dependent on the UK and Russia, and some parts of Europe. "Government is taking all steps to get a good footfall with good spending," he had said. In 2019, about 71,27,000 were domestic tourists who arrived in Goa, while 9,31,000 were foreign tourists. But this number dropped in 2020 and 2021 as Covid pandemic had struck the coastal state. Congress MLA Aleixo Sequeira, in recently concluded assembly session, had demanded that the central government should make the UK eligible for e-visa and also bring fees of visa on par to other countries. Travel and Tourism Association of Goa (TTAG), in June, had urged Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to convince the central government to include UK, Canada, Kyrgyzstan and other nations for issuance of e-visas. TTAG had stated that Goa's tourism sector has suffered due to withdrawal of e-visa for travellers from the UK, Canada, Kyrgyzstan and other countries. According to TTAG, mostly senior citizens from the UK visit Goa and hence they find it difficult to apply for a regular paper visa at the Indian embassy, which involves additional cost of travelling and other expenses. --IANS sanjay/pgh ( 341 Words) 2022-08-04-22:04:01 (IANS) US President Joe Biden expressed grief over the death of Indiana Republican representative Jackie Walorski along with two members of her staff in a car accident on Wednesday (local time) in Indiana. Walorski, who was 58, represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional District and had previously served as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives. She began serving in Congress in 2013. The announcement of Walorski's death was made by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. "Dean Swihart, Jackie's husband, was just informed by Elkhart County Sheriff's office that Jackie was killed in a car accident this afternoon. She has returned home to be with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Please keep her family in your thoughts and prayers. We will have no further comment at this time," read a message from the congresswoman's office that McCarthy tweeted. Following the news, there was an outpouring of grief and remembrances from lawmakers and aides who paid tribute to the lives and careers of the congresswoman and the two staffers. "Jill and I are shocked and saddened by the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana along with two members of her staff in a car accident today in Indiana," a White House Statement read. Born in her beloved South Bend as the daughter of a meat-cutter and firefighter, she spent a lifetime serving the community that she grew up in - as a journalist, a nonprofit director, a state legislator, and eventually as a Member of Congress for the past nine and half years. "We may have represented different parties and disagreed on many issues, but she was respected by members of both parties for her work on the House Ways and Means Committee on which she served," it added. "She also served as co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, and my team and I appreciated her partnership as we plan for a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health this fall that will be marked by her deep care for the needs of rural America." Biden expressed his deepest condolences to her husband, Dean, to the families of her staff members, Zachery Potts and Emma Thomson, who lost their lives in public service, and to the people of Indiana's Second District who lost a representative who was one of their own. (ANI) Sri Lankan Supreme Court on Wednesday extended the travel ban imposed on country's former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and Basil Rajapaksa until August 11. The Sri Lankan Supreme Court had earlier issued an interim order that prevented former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and former Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa from leaving the country without the court's permission until July 28. Meanwhile, three suspects were arrested on Tuesday by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Sri Lanka for allegedly setting ablaze President Ranil Wickremesinghe's private residence in Colombo on July 9, according to local media reports. According to the police, as reported by the Daily Mirror, two of the three suspects were aged 18 and 22 and belonged to Madapatha and Colombo respectively. They were detained yesterday in the Piliyandala and Narahenpita areas. The details of the third suspect were not immediately available. Four suspects were previously detained by the police in connection with the incident, and the Colombo Fort Magistrate's Court remanded them until August 10, reported the Daily Mirror.A group of protesters on July 9 had entered the private residence of Wickremesinghe and set it on fire, hours after he offered to resign as prime minister, to make way for an all-party government amid unprecedented protests in the country for the resignation of the government led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.The protestors entered 73-year-old Wickremesinghe's house on 5th Lane in Colombo and set the place on fire following a tense situation that erupted between the protestors and security forces on the ground. (ANI) Wickremesinghe on Wednesday thanked India which he said under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has provided the crisis-hit island nation "a breath of life" in tough times.President Wickremesinghe made the remarks while presenting the government's policy statement during the third session of Parliament during which he invited political parties to form an all-party government. "I wish to specially mention the assistance provided by India, our closest neighbour, in our efforts of economic revitalisation. The Government of India under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given us a breath of life. On behalf of my people and that of my own, I convey the gratitude to Prime Minister Modi, the government and the people of India," said Wickremesinghe in his address.The Sri Lankan Parliament met for the first session under President Wickremesinghe after he was sworn in on July 21. Wickremesinghe in his address reiterated the formation of an all-party government to help the country tide over its economic crisis.He said that Parliament must be united and not divided to address the current crisis and added that some political parties have already expressed interest to join the all-party, according to Colombo Gazette, which published Wirckremsinghe's full speech."An All-Party Government is not a government that acts on the sole opinion of one party. It is a government that comprises the views of all parties within a common policy framework, and implemented after decisions are made.I wish to reiterate to this House, the importance of an All-Party Government in order to resolve this crisis and establish stability in an expeditious manner," the Sri Lankan President said.He said that they are preparing a National Economic Policy for the next 25 years, which "lays the foundation for a social market economic system, securing development for the poor and underprivileged groups and encouraging small and medium entrepreneurs." Since the beginning of 2022, Sri Lanka has experienced an escalating economic crisis and the government has defaulted on its foreign loans. The United Nations warned that 5.7 million people "require immediate humanitarian assistance."With many Sri Lankans experiencing extreme shortages of essentials including food and fuel, peaceful protests began in March. The protests led then-Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa to resign on May 9, and his brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to flee the country on July 13 and resign the following day.Wickremasinghe became acting president, and parliament elected him as the new president on July 20 with the support of the Rajapaksas' political party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna.Meanwhile, India under its 'Neighbourhood First' policy, has always come forward to help the debt-ridden island country. Recently, India has extended 8 Lines of Credit (LOCs) to Sri Lanka amounting to USD 1,850.64 million in the past 10 years."Government of India has extended 8 Lines of Credit (LOCs) to Sri Lanka amounting to USD 1,850.64 million in sectors including railways, infrastructure, defence, renewable energy, petroleum and fertilizers in the past 10 years," External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said in a written reply to question put by DMK Lok Sabha MP S Ramalingam."In January 2022, India extended a USD 400 million currency swap to Sri Lanka under the SAARC Framework and deferred successive Asian Clearing Union (A.C.U.) settlements till July 6, 2022. A Line of Credit of US$ 500 million was extended to Sri Lanka for importing fuel from India," the minister added.More than 25 tons of drugs and medical supplies which were donated by the government and people of India during the last two months are valued at close to SLR 370 million. This is in addition to the economic assistance of around USD 3.5 billion and supply of other humanitarian supplies such as rice, milk powder, and kerosene.These humanitarian supplies are in continuation of the government of India's ongoing support to the people of Sri Lanka in multiple forms such as financial assistance, forex support, material supply, and many more. These efforts prove that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Neighborhood First' policy which places people-to-people engagement is still active.India is becoming a stronger and more mutually beneficial partner to Sri Lanka. Apart from assistance during the pandemic and fertilizer chaos, India is also donating basic products to the island nation. (ANI) Vietnamese carriers have been asked to avoid flying in areas near Taiwan for a few days as China conducts military exercises amid tension with the US over White House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Dinh Viet Thang, head of the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam, as quoted by local media, said that they received an official notice from Chinese authorities asking airlines operating in Asia to avoid flying near the island of Taiwan from 11 am Thursday until Friday. Accordingly, CAAV has informed Vietnamese airlines to adjust their flight routes. "Airlines can still operate flights to Taiwan normally and can decide on their own to postpone or cancel flights if necessary," Thang said, Vn Express reported. Pelosi's visit, which is also the highest level of US visits in more than two decades, left China heavily infuriated and the communist nation warned the US that it will "pay the price" Pelosi's trip has heightened US-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her high-level position as leader of the House of Representatives. She is the first speaker of the house to come to Taiwan in 25 years since Newt Gingrich in 1997. The Chinese military had announced holding live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait after Pelosi's visit which is mainly seen to build security and economic momentum for the Indo-Pacific and is also seen as a move by the US to build pressure on China over its claim on Taiwan, responding to which the Pentagon also sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying yesterday said that the kind of democracy referred to by Pelosi is "like nothing but a robe with lice crawling all over it which may look opulent from a distance, but could not stand close scrutiny." "We see the empty pledge and so-called strength of this type of democracy from what the US military has done in Iraq and Syria and from its retreat from Kabul," she said further. China sent 27 aircraft to Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ), the island's Defence Ministry said on Wednesday hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Taipei. China which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments, announced multiple military exercises around the island, issued a series of harsh statements and even summoned the US ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, to protest against Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.Moreover, China has decided to avoid meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Cambodia. China's customs department announced a suspension of imports of citrus fruits, chilled white striped hairtail and frozen horse mackerel from Taiwan, while its commerce ministry banned the export of natural sand to Taiwan. Meanwhile in Washington, US national security spokesperson John Kirby said there was "no reason for this visit to become a spurring event for a crisis or conflict"."China appears to be positioning itself to potentially take further steps in the coming days and perhaps over longer time horizons," Kirby told reporters Tuesday. He had warned provocations could include firing missiles in the Taiwan Strait or around Taiwan and large-scale breaches of Taiwan's air defence identification zone by warplanes. He said that China might also make public assertions similar to those it made recently to the effect that the Taiwan Strait is not an international waterway. (ANI) The US drone that killed Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahri on July 31 in Afghanistan's capital city Kabul was possibly launched from an airbase in Kyrgyzstan, according to reports. Pakistani publication Dawn reported that the attack was launched from Ganci Airbase, a US transit facility at Manas in northern Kyrgyzstan. Ganci is a former American military base in Kyrgyzstan, near the Bishkek international airport, according to the US Department of Defence as cited by Dawn. It was operated by the US Air Force, which handed it over to the Kyrgyz military in June 2014. However, the US administration did not comment on over the exact location of where the drone take-off from and what route it used. "Zawahiri was killed in an over-the-horizon operation in downtown Kabul, where he was residing as a guest of the Taliban. The house was struck by two Hellfires missiles in a precision, counterterrorism operation at 6:18am Kabul time on Sunday," the Department of Defence said in a statement. The US said that the Haqqani network terror outfit was aware of the al-Qaeda chief's presence in Kabul. Moreover, the US State Department has issued a worldwide alert after the death of Zawahiri. Zawahiri was one of the world's most wanted terrorists and a mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He was killed in a drone strike carried out by the US in the Afghan capital Kabul on Saturday. An Egyptian surgeon, Zawahiri was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11 and he also acted as Osama Bin Laden's personal physician. The strike was conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was carried out by an Air Force drone.An official claimed that Zawahiri was the only person killed in the strike and that none of his family members were injured. Meanwhile, the Taliban confirmed the killing of Zawahiri and condemned the drone strike carried out by the United States in Kabul over the weekend. In a statement, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that a strike took place on a residence in the capital and called it a violation of "international principles," responding to which the US secretary of state Antony Blinken said that the Taliban had grossly violated the Doha Agreement by hosting and sheltering the Al-Qaeda chief. The US and the Taliban signed a peace agreement in February 2020 under then US President Donald Trump. The deal called for withdrawal of US troops from Afghan soil and that the Taliban would abate violence and guarantee that its soil will not be a safe haven for terrorists. Zawahiri's targeted killing comes a year after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban's takeover of the country. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) added a "deceased" caption under the profile image of Zawahiri on its website. (ANI) China on Wednesday commenced military drills around Taiwan's main island, according to Chinese state media, hours after US House Speaker departed from Taipei following a visit that has rankled Beijing. Live-fire drills began in six identified zones around the island at noon local time, Al Jazeera reported citing China state media. According to Xinhua News Agency, the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Wednesday organized joint combat training exercises in the northern, southwestern and southeastern waters and airspace off Taiwan Island. Under the Eastern Theater Command, the exercises involved troops from the Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, Strategic Support Force and Logistic Support Force. "The exercises focused on key training sessions including joint blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control operation, and the joint combat capabilities of the troops got tested in the military operations," Xinhua added. Responding to a question about the PLA's decision to kick off the drills two days after Pelosi's arrival, a military expert said that the arrangement shows the army's rational and responsible attitude as it leaves time for domestic and foreign civilian ships and airlines to evacuate their ships and adjust their flights, Global Times reported. Zhang Junshe, a senior research fellow at the Naval Research Academy of the People's Liberation Army, said that the drills include long-range live-fire shooting and conventional missile test launches. As per the international conventions, areas of military drills have to be disclosed three days in advance and 24 hours in advance under an emergency situation. " That is mainly to leave enough time for domestic and foreign ships to evacuate as well as for related civilian airlines to adjust their routes to avoid the areas. The move is intended to avoid hurting ordinary people during the drills, showing the rational and responsible attitude of the PLA," Zhang said as quoted by Global Times. Taiwan's defence ministry said that an unidentified aircraft flew above the Kinmen Islands, Taiwanese territory off China's southeastern coast, on Wednesday night and it had fired flares in response. Major General Chang Zone-sung of the military's Kinmen Defense Command said that the Chinese drones came in a pair and flew into the Kinmen area twice on Wednesday night, at about 9 pm (6:30 pm IST) and 10 pm (7:30 pm IST), Al Jazeera reported citing Reuters News Agency. "We immediately fired flares to issue warnings and to drive them away. After that, they turned around. They came into our restricted area and that's why we dispersed them," he said. The Group of Seven developed nations has expressed concern at China's response to Pelosi's visit, calling for calm and saying the moves by the People's Republic of China (PRC) risked unnecessary escalation. Pelosi's visit, which is also the highest level of US visits in more than two decades, left China heavily infuriated and the communist nation warned the US that it will "pay the price" Pelosi's trip has heightened US-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her high-level position as leader of the House of Representatives. She is the first speaker of the house to come to Taiwan in 25 years since Newt Gingrich in 1997. The Chinese military had announced holding live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait after Pelosi's visit which is mainly seen to build security and economic momentum for the Indo-Pacific and is also seen as a move by the US to build pressure on China over its claim on Taiwan, responding to which the Pentagon also sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Earlier, China sent 27 aircraft to Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ), the island's Defence Ministry said on Wednesday hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Taipei. China which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments, announced multiple military exercises around the island, issued a series of harsh statements and even summoned the US ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, to protest against Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Moreover, China has decided to avoid meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Cambodia. (ANI) External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Cambodia ahead of the ASEAN ministerial meeting on Thursday. "Always good to meet. There's a lot we need to talk about and it is actually been a very busy year, we had a very good Quad and since then I think a number of developments all over the world...," Jaishnakar told Blinken in Phnom Penh. Jaishankar had arrived in Cambodia on Wednesday to attend the ASEAN ministerial meeting. The US Secretary of State said that the meeting is an opportunity for both the leaders to compare notes on mutual interest areas including a free and open Indo-Pacific as well as the Sri Lankan crisis. "Taking part in the ASEAN meetings is the opportunity for us to get together and compare notes with our closest partners, starting with my longtime friend, Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar," Blinken said "This is an opportunity for us to compare notes as we head into these very important ASEAN meetings. We're both strong proponents of ASEAN centrality. We have a shared vision together for a free and open Indo-Pacific that we work on in so many different ways every single day," US Secretary of State said. Blinken also noted several challenges in Sri Lanka and Burma that concerns both India and the US. "We have some immediate challenges that we're both concerned with including the situation in Sri Lanka, Burma and a number of other hotspots. So I very much look forward to once again being able to go through a number of these issues with my friend, and then we'll both head over to the meetings," Blinken said. On Wednesday, Jaishankar visited the 12th century Ta Prohm Temple in Siem Reap of Cambodia. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. (ANI) The Southeast Asian Foreign Ministers expressed concern over Taiwan as China began the massive military drills around Taiwan and warned that the situation could spark "open conflicts" and "unpredictable consequences" among major powers. China has started its large-scale military drills around self-ruled Taiwan, hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi departed from Taipei which infuriated Beijing. "ASEAN is concerned with the international and regional volatility, especially in the recent development in the area adjacent to the ASEAN region which could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers," as per the statement released by ASEAN. ASEAN countries called for maximum restraint, refraining from provocative action and asked to uphold the principles that were enshrined in the United Nations Charter and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). "We reiterate ASEAN Member States' support for their respective One-China Policy," the statement reads. According to the statement, the entire world needs the wisdom and responsibility of all the leaders to uphold multilateralism and partnership, cooperation, peaceful coexistence and healthy competition for the shared goals of peace, stability, security and inclusive and sustainable development. "We should ACT TOGETHER and ASEAN stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilizing ASEAN-led mechanisms to deescalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region," the statement added. Meanwhile, the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army on Thursday conducted military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills around Taiwan island. Pelosi's visit, which is also the highest level of US visits in more than two decades, left China heavily infuriated and the communist nation warned the US that it will "pay the price" Pelosi's trip has heightened US-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her high-level position as leader of the House of Representatives. She is the first speaker of the house to come to Taiwan in 25 years since Newt Gingrich in 1997. The Chinese military had announced holding live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait after Pelosi's visit which is mainly seen to build security and economic momentum for the Indo-Pacific and is also seen as a move by the US to build pressure on China over its claim on Taiwan, responding to which the Pentagon also sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Earlier, China sent 27 aircraft to Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ), the island's Defence Ministry said on Wednesday hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Taipei. China which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments, announced multiple military exercises around the island, issued a series of harsh statements and even summoned the US ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, to protest against Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Moreover, China has decided to avoid meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Cambodia. (ANI) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who met External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in Cambodia ahead of the ASEAN ministerial meeting on Thursday, said that New Delhi is among Washington's "closest partners". Both Blinken and Jaishankar are in Cambodia to attend the ASEAN ministerial meeting. In a statement issued by the Department of State, Blinken said that it is an opportunity for both the leaders to compare notes over various mutual interest areas including free and open Indo-Pacific and Sri Lanka crisis. "Taking part in the ASEAN meetings is the opportunity for us to get together and compare notes with our closest partners, starting with my longtime friend, Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar," Blinken said in the statement. "This is an opportunity for us to compare notes as we head into these very important ASEAN meetings. We're both strong proponents of ASEAN centrality. We have a shared vision together for a free and open Indo-Pacific that we work on in so many different ways every single day," the US Secretary of State said further. He also noted several challenges in Sri Lanka and Burma. "We have some immediate challenges that we're both concerned with including the situation in Sri Lanka, Burma and a number of other hotspots. So I very much look forward to once again being able to go through a number of these issues with my friend, and then we'll both head over to the meetings," he said in the statement. Meanwhile, Jaishankar told Blinken: "Always good to meet. There's a lot we need to talk about and it is actually been a very busy year, we had a very good Quad and since then I think a number of developments all over the world..." The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. (ANI) Thailand Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, according to the statement released by Thailand's Foreign Affairs Ministry. According to the statement, Thailand's PM sent a letter to PM Modi and extended his best wishes to him, the government and the people of India. "The cultural and historical ties between our peoples span millennia and provide a strong foundation for our diplomatic relations, as highlighted by the commemorative activities organised in both Thailand and India throughout this year I am pleased that our friendship and cooperation have grown from strength to strength in all areas, especially through the times of hardship from the COVID-19 epidemic," the statement reads. Prayut reaffirmed their government's determination to continue working closely with the Indian government to further forge cooperation bilaterally as well as in ASEAN and other multilateral frameworks for the mutual benefit of our peoples. He also wishes for good health, prosperity and happiness for the Indian people A day earlier, the Thai Embassy in New Delhi organised an event highlighting the warm relationship between India and Thailand with avenues for greater cooperation in several fields on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the countries. According to the Ministry of External Affairs on Tuesday, Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs, Rajkumar Ranjan Singh on Monday attended the reception dinner hosted by the Embassy on the theme of "75th Anniversary: Celebrating Indo-Thai Friendship." "A short film commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the bilateral relations and a promotion film on "Amazing New Chapter: Responsible Tourism in Thailand" was released during the event, which was followed by cultural performances by Thai troupes and remarks by the Deputy Governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, Thanet Petchsuwan and the Ambassador of Kingdom of Thailand to India Pattarat Hongtong," the MEA statement read. It further stated that the event concluded successfully, highlighting the warm relationship between India and Thailand with avenues for greater cooperation in various fields. (ANI) Paris [France], August 4 (ANI/Sputnik): The Investigation Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal on Thursday approved the US request to withdraw Russian citizen Alexander Vinnik's extradition request, a Sputnik correspondent reported. "In connection with the US request to withdraw their extradition request, the court has ruled to approve this request and to release you," the presiding judge told Vinnik. Vinnik's lawyer Frederic Belot told Sputnik that the Russian citizen was immediately detained again after the court's ruling, this time on Greece's request. "A court in Paris today released Vinnik as part of an extradition case to the United States. Alexander Vinnik was released as part of this case. However, there is another matter - about his extradition to Greece. As part of the request of the Greek authorities and agreements between France and Greece, Vinnik will be detained again," the lawyer said, adding that Vinnik will be extradited to Greece possibly on Thursday. Belot did not rule out Vinnik's extradition to the United States from Greece. Vinnik was detained in Greece in 2017 at the request of the US, which accused him of laundering $4 billion worth of funds through a cryptocurrency trading platform. In the US, Vinnik faces 55 years in prison. France also filed charges against Vinnik. On January 23, 2020, Vinnik was extradited to France, where he was sentenced to five years in prison and a 100,000 euro ($119,433) fine in December that year. Vinnik has denied committing any criminal or administrative offenses. (ANI/Sputnik) New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta met her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit and said that de-escalation is needed in the Taiwan Strait, as China started its military drills in the region. According to the statement released by the New Zealand government, "the Minister restated Aotearoa New Zealand's interest in peace and stability in the region, including across the Taiwan Strait, and emphasised the importance of de-escalation, diplomacy and dialogue. This meeting came after Beijing commenced its military drills around Taiwan's main island, in retaliation for United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting the democratically led island nation. Mahuta, who is in Cambodia to participate ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting, expressed concerns regarding the human rights situation in Xinjiang and the erosion of rights and freedoms in Hong Kong. "Minister Mahuta acknowledged the importance of Aotearoa New Zealand and China's relationship - this year marking 50 years of diplomatic relations - and our significant economic, people-to-people, and cultural connections. Both sides highlighted the areas where China and New Zealand cooperate, including trade, agriculture, climate change and the environment. Both sides underbred the importance of organising high-level visits when COVID conditions allowed," the statement reads. Mahuta also pointed to the need to look beyond the "firsts" to a mature relationship that respects New Zealand's independent foreign policy. In relation to the Pacific, the minister emphasised the importance of the Pacific Islands Forum, and Pacific-led responses to Pacific priorities, including in the field of security. She also stressed the importance of all ASEAN partners, making the utmost efforts to help return Myanmar to the path of peace and democracy. Mahuta expressed concern at the record number of ballistic missile tests conducted by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea this year in violation of UN Security Council resolutions; as well as over developments in the South China Sea. "The Minister urged China to be clear, in line with its commitment to the UN Charter, that it does not support Russia's unlawful aggression against Ukraine, and encouraged China to use its access and influence with Russia to promote a return to diplomacy," the statement reads. New Zealand minister also accepted Wang Yi's invitation to visit China when conditions are met. (ANI) Union Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs V Muraleedharan on Thursday said that there has not been any progress between India and Pakistan since 2019 regarding the resumption of trade. In August 2019, relations between India and Pakistan worsened when Pakistan decided to downgrade diplomatic ties with India, recall its high commissioner from New Delhi, expel the Indian envoy to Islamabad and suspend bilateral trade. On being asked whether there has been any progress concerning the resumption of trade ties with Pakistan since 2019, the minister in his written response to Rajya Sabha in his written response in Rajya Sabha said: "In August 2019, Pakistan announced the suspension of bilateral trade with India. Pakistan partially relaxed its ban on trade with India in September 2019 by permitting trade in certain pharmaceutical products. There has not been any progress regarding resumption of trade with Pakistan since then." In June, Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari emphasized the country's interest in trade and engagement with India saying that Pakistan was isolated on the world stage due to past policies. India revoked Article 370 to withdraw the special status to Jammu and Kashmir and bifurcated the state into two Union Territories - Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh. Meanwhile, in another response in the Rajya Sabha, the minister said around 546 Indians or believed to be Indian fishermen are in Pakistan custody. "As per available information, 546 Indian or believed to be Indian fishermen under Pakistan custody are from the state of Gujarat. It has been reported that Indian fishermen along with their boats are apprehended by Pakistani authorities for allegedly fishing in Pakistani waters and charged under the Fisheries Act of Pakistan." "Government attaches the highest priority to the welfare, safety and security of Indian fishermen. As soon as cases of apprehension of Indian fishermen and their fishing boats by Pakistan are reported, immediate steps are taken by the Indian Mission in Islamabad towards seeking consular access from the Pakistan Government. All possible assistance, including legal assistance, is extended to the fishermen for their early release and repatriation, along with the release of their boats. Meanwhile, the Rajya Sabha was adjourned till 12 noon amid uproar on misuse of Central investigation agencies with both opposition and treasury benches raising allegations against each other over the issue. (ANI) Numerous villagers from five villages badly affected by wastewater reservoir at Gorano in Pakistan held a protest on the arrival of Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah on Wednesday. The protests were held in Mithi region in opposition of toxic wastewater release from the reservoir which is located in the Gorano area of Tharparkar district in Pakistan and how it has affected the lives of locals. "The Sindh government has failed to meet its promises made to local people. Our homes and grazing lands for animals have vanished and we have become homeless due to the dumping of highly-toxic water from the reservoir," said advocate Leelaram Meghwar and other protestors, Dawn reported. The toxic water had wreaked havoc on the ecology and environment in the area, the advocate said, adding that it did not fall within the limits of Thar coalfields. Over 500 families were paid annual compensation of Rs 100,000 each for a few years although the chief minister had promised release of compensation funds every year against huge losses suffered by villagers. The villagers complained that more and more water was being released in the Gorano wastewater reservoir, increasing environmental issues for the residents of the region, their livestock and wildlife species, according to Dawn. Notably, the enraged protestors also stopped the power company's vehicles before the arrival of the chief minister to showcase their plight and also threatened to widen the scope of their protest if their demands were not met. According to the recently released United Nations (UN) 'Global Land Outlook' report, Pakistan is part of the 23 countries in the world that are suffering from a "severe and prolonged drought." The situation is drought-like in several parts of Sindh and desert areas of South Punjab, including Cholistan, Thal etc. Not only this worsening water crisis in Balochistan and Sindh is leading to the unavailability of water for human consumption and agricultural purposes but it is also causing health issues. Moreover, non-availability of potable water has also become a matter of grave concern for Sindh as the number of patients, including children, are being brought to hospitals in Karachi and other parts of Sindh due to acute gastroenteritis, continues to rise due to the government's failure to provide safe sanitation. (ANI) Over 200 media outlets have ceased operations in Afghanistan and 7,000 media workers have lost their jobs since the Taliban seized power in August last year while the country's economy continues to shrink. Expressing concerns over the deteriorating situation of Afghan media, the Afghanistan Federation of Journalists and Media noted that they had made suggestions to the international community and the Islamic Emirate about the protection of media workers, but the problem has not been solved till date, Tolo News reported. According to officials of media in Takhar province, nine out of the region's 13 media outlets have closed as a result of economic challenges. "In the last year, out of 544 media outlets, 218 of them were closed, and out of 1200 media workers, 7000 of them lost their jobs," said Hujatullah Mujaddidi, the Head of the Free Association of Afghan Journalists said. Moreover, several officials from the media said that they are unable to pay their employees' salaries due to the poor economy. "Takhar's local media is facing economic challenges, it has lost its staff and its activities stopped," said Abdul Sami Khawari, stated the director of a media outlet in Takhar. "We had seven employees here, due to economic challenges we have laid them off," said another media outlet owner, Sadrudin Qunarai to Tolo News. The Afghan media community continues to face overwhelming challenges under the brutal regime of the Taliban. Numerous organizations were forced to shut down due to economic collapse, threats and draconian reporting restrictions since the Islamist outfit came to power. Thousands of journalists and media professionals, especially women, have lost their jobs. "Most of the journalists who have lost their jobs cannot provide food for their families," said Parween Iqbally, a journalist. According to the Afghanistan Federation of Journalists and Media, more than 2,800 women were employed in the Afghan media before the Islamic Emirate came to power, but more than 2,100 of them have lost their jobs as a result of several factors in the last year. In a recent survey conducted by IFJ-affiliate Afghanistan National Journalists Union (ANJU) across 33 provinces, shows 318 media have closed since 15 August 2021. The crisis has hit newspapers the hardest with just 20 out of 114 continuing to publish. 51 TV stations, 132 radio stations and 49 online media have ceased operations according to the report compiled for the IFJ. 72 per cent of those who have lost their jobs are women, IFJ said in a release. As per the report, released by United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), human rights violations affected 173 journalists and media workers, 163 of which were attributed to the de facto authorities. Among these were 122 instances of arbitrary arrest and detention, 58 instances were of ill-treatment, 33 instances of threats and intimidation and 12 instances of incommunicado detention. Six journalists were also killed during the period (five by self-identified ISIS Khorasan, one by unknown perpetrators). According to some media-supporting organizations, over 70 per cent of media outlets halted their operations since the Taliban came to power. (ANI) Taiwan on Thursday strongly condemned China's "North Korea" style missile firing into waters near the self-governed island as it asked Beijing to exercise self-restraint amid rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait. "On August 4, China launched multiple ballistic missiles into waters to the northeast and southwest of Taiwan, threatening Taiwan's national security, escalating regional tensions, and affecting regular international traffic and trade," the Taiwan foreign ministry said in a statement. "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of the Republic of China (Taiwan) strongly condemns the Chinese government for following the example of North Korea in willfully test-firing missiles into waters near other countries, and demands that China exercise self-restraint," it added. The Taiwan Defence Ministry today confirmed that China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has launched multiple Dongfeng (DF) ballistic missiles at the island's Northeast and Southwest waters. This comes as China commenced military drills around Taiwan's main island, a day after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi departed from Taipei following a visit that has rankled Beijing. Live-fire drills began in at least six identified zones around the island, that regard its own and threaten to take over. The Chinese PLA organized joint combat training exercises near Taiwan waters and airspace, Xinhua news agency reported. The Taiwan government has urged the international community to condemn China's military coercion toward Taiwan. "The ministry also calls on countries around the globe to continue to speak up in support of democratic Taiwan in order to jointly safeguard the values of freedom and democracy, to maintain the rules-based international order, and to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific," the Taiwan foreign ministry said. "ROC Armed Forces are operating as usual and monitor our surroundings in response to irrational activities from PRC, aiming for changing the status quo & destabilizing the region's security. We seek no escalation, but we don't stand down when it comes to our security and sovereignty," the ministry said. Pelosi's high-stakes visit marks the first visit by a US House Speaker in 25 years since Newt Gingrich came to Taiwan in April 1997. It was also Pelosi's first trip to Taiwan in 22 years. After Pelosi left Taipei, China sent 27 aircraft into Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ). Pelosi on Wednesday said the Congressional delegation's visit should be seen as a strong statement that America stands with Taiwan. ANI) Amid the uncertainty surrounding the future of Indian students who returned from war-ravaged Ukraine, the Centre has said that the ground situation in that country does not permit the return of Indian students. The government issued these remarks in Rajya Sabha in response to questions pertaining to students who were studying in Ukraine prior to the Russia-Ukraine war. "The government has been in touch with the educational authorities in Ukraine regarding the continuation of studies by Indian students who returned from Ukraine. Currently, the ground situation in that country does not permit the return of Indian students. The Ukrainian side has reiterated its willingness to allow Indian students to continue their courses online," Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs Meenakashi Lekhi informed Rajya Sabha in a written response. The Union Minister said National Medical Commission (NMC) has devised a scheme to help Indian medical students who did not undergo physical clinical training due to the extraordinary situation. She also informed that students who returned from Ukraine will be permitted to appear in the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE). "Upon qualifying the FMGE, such students will be required to undergo Compulsory Rotating Medical Internship (CRMI) for a period of two years in order to be eligible for registration in India," the minister added. The MoS also said that issues relating to the education of Indian medical students from overseas are being dealt with as per regulations of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the National Medical Commission. India has brought back 22,500 Indian citizens and 147 foreign nationals belonging to 18 countries from Ukraine since February 2022 in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war. A number of medical students evacuated from war-torn Ukraine have been seeking admission to Indian medical universities in order to secure their future. They have urged the government that the students be accommodated as a one-time measure to prevent an academic year's loss. (ANI) Referring to the current economic crisis in the country, former Pakistan Prime Minister and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan on Wednesday said that the present coalition government should focus on bringing stability back to the country instead of thinking about the appointment of a new Army Chief. Speaking to the media, Imran asked if the country could be held back for the appointment of the new army chief, sugesting that the focus should be on bringing stability back to Pakistan instead of thinking what will happen in November, the Dawn reported. Imran said that while the army played an important part in the country's national security, economic stability was equally important. "We have to choose,.. do we want stability or a new army chief?" he said in response to a question. "Right now, the more important issue than the army chief's appointment is stability and only one thing can bring that -- elections," Imran said, highlighting that the aim should be to prevent Pakistan from falling into a place where "things go out of hand". Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, who was given an extension by the previous PTI government in 2019, will leave his position on November 29 when his second three-year tenure comes to an end, the Dawn reported. The next army chief's appointment is at times mentioned as one of the major subplots in the ongoing political crisis engulfing the country. Imran highlighted that the markets were tumbling, industries were closing down and the economy was in a freefall. "Now is the time to decide. But this fear in Zardari and Shehbaz of losing the elections is sabotaging the entire country," the PTI chairman said. Imran pointed out the economic crisis in the country and said that "free and transparent" elections were the only way out of the crises that have grappled the country right now. He highlighted that rupee was falling and the markets were suffering because they had "lost confidence" in the government. "Imagine that a country's army chief has to call America and request them for funds." Imran said that he was even ready to talk to the government if they "dissolve the assemblies today and announce the new date for elections", the Dawn reported. He said that it, however, didn't seem like the coalition government wanted to opt for that because he claimed they were "afraid of losing". "They are not thinking about the country, they just want to save their loot [...] this is their issue, not Pakistan," he said. "They have money abroad, they don't care if the rupee falls. This will just increase their wealth." Bajwa has been serving as Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Army since November 2016. Amid the worsening crisis due to shrinking foreign reserves, General Bajwa recently approached the US for help in securing an early disbursement of funds from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to prevent the south Asian country from a looming economic disaster. As per the reports, Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif persuaded Bajwa to talk to US Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and use his influence for the early disbursement of USD 1.2 billion in IMF funds. Bajwa's phone call to US authorities kicked up a storm and shows that Pakistan's economy is in tatters. It also goes to show that the situation has deteriorated to such an extent that even the country's army chief feels compelled to reach out to the people who matter to avert the danger of a default-like situation, reported Business Recorder. Meanwhile, the country's political elite are spewing venom at each other; muddying the waters even more while its economy is collapsing and there is a desperate need to save Pakistan from default or else it will go Sri Lanka's way. Even a number of very friendly, and usually very reliable countries have now disassociated from any further lending to Pakistan with the resumption of the EFF (Extended Fund Facility). (ANI) The Taliban on Thursday said that they had no information about slain Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri's arrival and stay in Kabul. On August 1, the US announced the killing of the Al-Qaeda chief in a safe house in the heart of the country's capital. Though the Islamic outfit confirmed the US drone strike in Kabul but denied the presence of the Al-Qaeda chief. The Taliban said that they have instructed their investigative and intelligence agencies to probe into the various aspects of the incident. "...an air strike was carried out on a residential house in Kabul city, two days later, US President Joe Biden claimed that US troops had targeted Al-Qaeda leader Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri in this attack, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has no information about Ayman al-Zawahiri's arrival and stay in Kabul," the statement said. "The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) has instructed the investigative and intelligence agencies to conduct a comprehensive and serious investigation into the various aspects of the incident," it added. The Taliban also warned the US not to repeat the incident which the group termed a violation of international principles. Earlier this week, the Biden administration said that by hosting the leader of Al-Qaeda in Kabul, the Taliban violated the Doha Agreement and repeated assurances that they would not allow Afghan territory to be used by terrorists to threaten the security of other countries. "They also betrayed the Afghan people and their own stated desire for recognition from and normalization with the international community," US State Department said in a statement. On July 31, the United States conducted a precision counterterrorism strike in Afghanistan that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy and successor as leader of al-Qa'ida. Al- Zawahiri was one of the masterminds of the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, and had continued to urge his followers to attack the United States. Following al-Zawahiri's death, supporters of al- Qa'ida, or its affiliated terrorist organizations, may seek to attack U.S. facilities, personnel, or citizens. After the killing of Zawahri, the US warned Americans overseas to be on high alert. "As terrorist attacks often occur without warning, U.S. citizens are strongly encouraged to maintain a high level of vigilance and practice good situational awareness when traveling abroad," State Department said in a alert. It added that there is a "higher potential for anti-American violence after death, and that current information suggests terrorist groups are plotting attacks against US interests in multiple regions across the globe." (ANI) India and Mauritius have agreed to include the provisions related to Automatic Trigger Safeguard Mechanism in their trade pact Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement (CECPA), the Ministry of Commerce and Industry said on Thursday. The agreement was decided during the 1st session of India-Mauritius High-Powered Joint Trade Committee on August 1-3, in New Delhi. The High-Powered Joint Trade Committee had been constituted as per the mandate of the India-Mauritius Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement (CECPA), to review the general functioning and implementation of the trade pact. The CECPA entered into force on 1st April, 2021 and it is the first trade Agreement signed by India with a country in Africa. "Both sides agreed to the inclusion of the General Economic Cooperation (GEC) Chapter and Automatic Trigger Safeguard Mechanism (ATSM) in CECPA," the official statement said. The GEC chapter will enable enhancement of export competitiveness and enlarging the existing scope for collaboration, inter-alia, in the fields of Investments, Financial Services, Textile, Small and Medium Enterprises, Handicrafts, Gems and Jewellery, Information and Communication Technology, Film Production, Space Technology, Blue Economy, Port Infrastructure, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals and Bio-technology, Competition Policy, Renewable Energy etc. During the meeting, both sides agreed to enhance bilateral collaboration to further increase bilateral trade and realize the true potential of the bilateral relationship especially under the CECPA. India and Mauritius held extensive interactions in the Services sector with regard to establishing equivalence in certification, skills and licensing requirements of various professional bodies and exploring collaboration/ cooperation arrangement between Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and its counterpart in Mauritius on developing skill-sets. Mauritian side, while conveying the shortage of professionals in Mauritius in various sectors such as ICT, Financial Services, Film production, Engineering, Health, Tourism/Hospitality and Ocean Economy etc., welcomed movement of high skilled professionals from India to Mauritius. Besides, both sides expressed willingness to enter into a Customs Mutual Administrative Assistance Agreement (CMMA) and agreed to initiate discussions on the Agreement soon. Affirming mutual keenness in diversifying and expanding trade basket, the two sides discussed additional market access issues and agreed to discuss bilateral recognition arrangements of equivalence on SPS and TBT measures. Both sides also agreed to identify bilateral focal points to further strengthen bilateral institutional cooperation. The bilateral merchandise trade between India and Mauritius rose to USD 786.72 million in 2021-22 from USD 690.02 million in 2019-20. The meeting was co-chaired by Srikar K Reddy, Joint Secretary, Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry of India, Government of India, and Narainduth Boodhoo, Director of Trade Policy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and International Trade, Government of Mauritius. Senior officials from both countries also took part in the meeting. Both sides agreed to hold the next session of India- Mauritius High Powered JTC meeting in 2023. (ANI) The 17th Everything About Water Expo 2022 was inaugurated today by Ambassador of Israel in India Naor Gilon in the national capital to strengthen the cooperation between Israel and India in the water sector and the longstanding ties between the two nations. Israel is the country partner in the event, which is taking place at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi from August 4-6. Speaking on the occasion, Ambassador Gilon said, "We are happy to bring 4 Israeli water experts as speakers in this Water Expo. They took part in a conference, where they shared their experience and technical know-how about advanced technologies and Israel-India partnership in the field of water. The visit of these water experts to India, to take part in this Water Expo, has further deepened the ongoing water partnership between our two countries." An international conference on innovative and sustainable water and environmental technologies has been launched at the Water Expo in which four high-level water experts from Israel participated. The experts shared their knowledge and expertise in a session about India-Israel water partnership and the session was chaired by the Director General of National Mission for Clean Ganga, G. Asok Kumar. The four Israeli water experts who marked their presence during the event were CEO of Meniv Rishon Ltd, Israel, Sally Levy, Senior Deputy Legal Adviser of the Governmental Authority For Water And Sewage (IWA) of Israel, Tahel Brandes, Professor Hadas Mamane, Head, Environmental Engineering Program and The Water-Energy (WE) Lab, School Of Mechanical Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Israel and Dr Lior Asaf, Water Attache, Embassy Of Israel, New Delhi. Notably, the conference also witnessed participation of Indian officials working in the water sector. Another highlight of the event was the inauguration of an Israeli pavilion, which showcased cutting-edge water technologies of 8 leading Israeli water companies. The Israeli water companies introduced solutions related to water distribution and management, filtration, leak detection, wastewater treatment, desalination and water security. Moreover, the importance of the water partnership between Israel and India can be understood from the fact that both countries signed two major water agreements to increase cooperation in water conservation and state water utility reform during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel in 2017. India is the only country wherein Israel has the position of Water Attache to help share Israeli best practices and technologies for advancements in India's water management sector. (ANI) Ahead of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan's public protest against the Chief Election Commissioner of Pakistan, PTI lawmakers on Thursday afternoon assembled outside the electoral watchdog's office in Islamabad and registered their protest. The protesters included PTI leaders Faisal Javed Khan, Fawad Chaudhry, Pervez Khattak, Asad Umar, Azam Swati, Shibli Faraz, and Kanwal Shauzab among others, reported Dawn. While marching towards the ECP office, the demonstrators were also carrying placards which read "Biased chief election commissioner unacceptable" and "ECP abettors of PML-N, PPP" as they demanded Chief Election Commissioner Sikandar Sultan Raja's resignation. The submission of memorandum against Raja and his role as the CEC came right after the ECP's August 2 verdict in PTI's prohibited funding case. Blaming the CEC for being biased, the lawmakers stated "From the investigation to its verdict, the case is surrounded by severe doubts," the memorandum stated, adding that Imran Khan had also, on multiple occasions, expressed his reservations with the ECP and the CEC, reported Dawn. It also alleged that the verdict of the poll body was influenced by the CEC's meeting with the coalition parties last week. The PTI, which has demanded Raja's resignation, is scheduled to stage a protest outside the electoral watchdog's office today (August 4) and it has been called in anticipation of the prohibited funding verdict. The government, however, has declared it won't allow protesters to enter the Red Zone. Ahead of the protest, PTI chief Imran Khan said, " "Today, I am calling all our people to come out in [a] peaceful public protest against the CEC and ECP in F-9 park at 6pm. I will be addressing the gathering between 7-7:30pm." However, Islamabad authorities denied the PTI's request to stage a protest against the ECP at the nearby Nadra Chowk and suggested F-9 park and H-9 ground as alternate venues. According to Dawn, Section 144 had been imposed on all kinds of public gatherings in the federal capital including in and around Red Zone on July 23. In a statement, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah claimed yesterday that the government had received information that the PTI was planning to create an "anarchic situation" outside the ECP, warning of stern action in case of any violence or attempt to cross the "red line". The show cause notice issued by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on prohibited funding to PTI is likely to put Imran Khan's leadership in danger as the funds received by the PTI Chief from foreign countries including the US, UAE, Australia and UK could lead to several numbers of cases against the party. The move by ECP came right after it was revealed that the money received from the foreign countries was used by Khan to fund PTI and he made false declarations in 2018 before the elections. The ECP in its decision issued a show-cause notice to the PTI, as to why the prohibited funds may not be confiscated as confiscation of the prohibited funds is the domain of the ECP. The foreign funding case is pending since November 14, 2014, and it was filed by PTI founding member Akbar S Babar who had alleged that there are some financial irregularities in the PTI's funding from Pakistan and abroad. (ANI) Japanese government on Thursday condemned the firing of five ballistic missiles by the Chinese military in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and characterised this action as an "extremely coercive" move. China is conducting live-fire drills in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. The missiles that China launched today fell in an area located southwest of Hateruma Island in the southern prefecture of Okinawa. Japan's Kyodo News reported that Tokyo has asked Beijing to immediately stop the military drills. "This is a grave issue that concerns our country's national security and the safety of the people," said Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi. The Fumio Kishida government also lodged a diplomatic protest with the Chinese government. The Japanese publication has said the government slammed Chinese drills near Senkaku Islands, saying that the area overlaps with the EEZ. Taiwan has strongly condemned China's "North Korea" style missile firing into waters near the self-governed island as it asked Beijing to exercise self-restraint. "On August 4, China launched multiple ballistic missiles into waters to the northeast and southwest of Taiwan, threatening Taiwan's national security, escalating regional tensions, and affecting regular international traffic and trade," the Taiwan foreign ministry said in a statement. "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of the Republic of China (Taiwan) strongly condemns the Chinese government for following the example of North Korea in willfully test-firing missiles into waters near other countries, and demands that China exercise self-restraint," it added. Live-fire drills began in at least six identified zones around the island, that regard its own and threaten to take over. The Chinese PLA organized joint combat training exercises near Taiwan waters and airspace, Xinhua news agency reported. The Taiwan government has urged the international community to condemn China's military coercion toward Taiwan. "The ministry also calls on countries around the globe to continue to speak up in support of democratic Taiwan in order to jointly safeguard the values of freedom and democracy, to maintain the rules-based international order, and to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific," it said. Pelosi's high-stakes visit marks the first visit by a US House Speaker in 25 years since Newt Gingrich came to Taiwan in April 1997. It was also Pelosi's first trip to Taiwan in 22 years. After Pelosi left Taipei, China sent 27 aircraft into Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ). Pelosi on Wednesday said the Congressional delegation's visit should be seen as a strong statement that America stands with Taiwan. (ANI) Former Pakistan Prime Minister and Pakistan-Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan on Wednesday said that the relations between Pakistan and China could be seriously damaged if Pakistan provided air space to the United States to conduct an air strike in Afghanistan, which killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri. "I was not aware if Pakistan had provided its "airspace" to the US, but if they have, this could seriously damage our relations with China," Khan said, adding that the country has suffered grave consequences in past for "minuscule benefits". "Whether you like the Taliban or not, you need to accept that they are not against Pakistan, unlike the Ghani government, and this is why we should not do anything that affects these relations," the Dawn quoted Khan as saying. PTI chief further said that if Pakistan gives space and America conducts a drone attack in Afghanistan, it will affect the tribal areas. "Do we want to become a part of someone else's war amid these crises? Have we not learned and will we become a part of someone else's conflict again?" Imran asked. Khan reiterated that the country is in crisis and the main focus should be bringing stability to the country. He suggested that the only way out of the crisis is fresh elections. "Free and transparent elections are the only way out of the crisis that has grappled the country right now," Khan said. He highlighted that rupee was falling and the markets were suffering because they had "lost confidence" in the government. "Imagine that a country's army chief has to call America and request them for funds." He further said that it, however, didn't seem like the coalition government wanted to opt for that because he claimed they were "afraid of losing". "They are not thinking about the country, they just want to save their loot [...] this is their issue, not Pakistan," he said. "They have money abroad, they don't care if the rupee falls. This will just increase their wealth." Notably, Al Qeaeda chief Ayman al Zawahiri was killed on August 1 in a drone strike carried out by the US on a residential house in the Sherpoor area of Kabul city. An Egyptian surgeon, Zawahiri was one of the most wanted terrorist and was deeply involved in the planning of September 11, 2001 attacks. He also acted as Osama Bin Laden's personal physician. The strike was conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was carried out by an Air Force drone. After the drone strike conducted in the Kabul "green zone" of Sherpoor, Kabul and Washington have accused each other of violating the Doha agreement. Second Deputy Prime Minister of Taliban, Abdul Salam Hanafi slammed the US for the drone strike and said that US drone attack in Kabul violated both national sovereignty and the Doha Agreement and that Afghan territory will not be used against any country. In a statement, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that a strike took place on a residence in the capital and called it a violation of "international principles," responding to which the US secretary of state Antony Blinken said that the Taliban had grossly violated the Doha Agreement by hosting and sheltering the Al-Qaeda chief. One of the terms of the Doha Agreement was to not provide sanctuary to terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The US and the Taliban signed a peace agreement in February 2020 under then US President Donald Trump. The deal called for withdrawal of US troops from Afghan soil and that the Taliban would abate violence and guarantee that its soil will not be a safe haven for terrorists. Analysts said that the US drone attack in the centre of Kabul may harm relations between the international community and Afghanistan. Zawahiri's targeted killing comes a year after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban's takeover of the country. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) added a "deceased" caption under the profile image of Zawahiri on its website. (ANI) "Chief of the Army Staff, General Manoj Pande had a video telephonic interaction with General Park, Jeong Hwan, Chief of Staff, the Republic of Korea Army and discussed steps to enhance bilateral defence ties between the two Nations," Indian Army tweeted. This phone call comes amid heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait after the brief trip of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei. India and the Republic of Korea, as Special Strategic Partners, continued to have high-level engagements last year, according to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) annual report. Former South Korea Defence Minister Suh Wook visited India in March 2021. During this visit, India-Korea Friendship Park in Delhi was inaugurated. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations in December 1973, relations between India and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea have been cordial. India has been consistently supportive of efforts to bring about peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and diplomacy. (ANI) Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) protesters gathered at Islamabad's F-9 park on Thursday to protest against the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sikandar Sultan Raja on the call of party chief Imran Khan. Decked in red and green scarves and bands, the crowd raised slogans against the poll body demanding the resignation of all its officials, the Dawn reported. Earlier, in the day, the PTI lawmakers assembled outside the electoral watchdog's office in Islamabad and registered their protest. The protesters included PTI leaders Faisal Javed Khan, Fawad Chaudhry, Pervez Khattak, Asad Umar, Azam Swati, Shibli Faraz, and Kanwal Shauzab among others, reported Dawn. The submission of a memorandum against Raja and his role as the CEC came right after the ECP's August 2 verdict in PTI's prohibited funding case. In the August 2 judgment, it had declared PTI to be a "foreign-funded party". Imran and his party members had rejected the decision, calling it "illegal and unconstitutional". Blaming the CEC for being biased, the lawmakers stated "From the investigation to its verdict, the case is surrounded by severe doubts," the memorandum stated, adding that Imran Khan had also, on multiple occasions, expressed his reservations with the ECP and the CEC. It also alleged that the verdict of the poll body was influenced by the CEC's meeting with the coalition parties last week. Ahead of the protest, PTI chief Imran Khan said, " "Today, I am calling all our people to come out in [a] peaceful public protest against the CEC and ECP in F-9 park at 6 pm. I will be addressing the gathering between 7-7:30 pm." However, Islamabad authorities denied the PTI's request to stage a protest against the ECP at the nearby Nadra Chowk and suggested F-9 park and H-9 ground as alternate venues. According to Dawn, Section 144 had been imposed on all kinds of public gatherings in the federal capital including in and around Red Zone on July 23. In a statement, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah claimed yesterday that the government had received information that the PTI was planning to create an "anarchic situation" outside the ECP, warning of stern action in case of any violence or attempt to cross the "red line". The show cause notice issued by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on prohibited funding to PTI is likely to put Imran Khan's leadership in danger as the funds received by the PTI chief from foreign countries including the US, UAE, Australia and UK could lead to several numbers of cases against the party. The move by ECP came right after it was revealed that the money received from the foreign countries was used by Khan to fund PTI and he made false declarations in 2018 before the elections. The ECP in its decision issued a show-cause notice to the PTI, as to why the prohibited funds may not be confiscated as confiscation of the prohibited funds is the domain of the ECP. The foreign funding case is pending since November 14, 2014, and it was filed by PTI founding member Akbar S Babar who had alleged that there are some financial irregularities in the PTI's funding from Pakistan and abroad. (ANI) In China's occupied Tibet, human rights situation of women has worsened over time as they comprise a sizeable number among the political prisoners who are arrested for various crimes which include participation in a demonstration against the Communist ideology of Xi Jinping. In early July this year 'Tibet-Watch', a Dharamshala-based human rights group, reported the case of a Tibetan woman Norzin Wangmo, in her thirties, who was being pushed from one hospital to another in the Xining city of China's Qinghai province. Belonging to the Chigril township of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai, she was accused of sharing information with exiled Tibetans about a Tibetan nomad named Tenzin Sherab who had committed self-immolation in 2013 and was given a sentence of three years for this act of 'treason'. She was found to be in a grave state due to severe injuries caused by the Chinese Public Security Bureau (PSB) during her arrest since 2020, TibetPress reported. According to details received by Tibet-Watch, Wangmo was released by Chinese jail authorities in May this year much before the expiry of her sentence because her health and her condition was too bad to recover from medical treatment. Moreover, in another news report Tibet.net, an exile Tibetan media group reported news of arrest of two Tibetan sisters named Youdon and Zumkar from Tsarang village of Amdo County in the Qinghai province. The two sisters were reportedly tortured and detained after celebrating the Dalai Lama's birthday on July 6. In China it is a common practice to torture prisoners, especially the ones who are found guilty of political crimes, and release them before they die inside the prison. In China's occupied Tibet, women form a sizeable number among the political prisoners who are arrested for political crimes which include participation in a demonstration against the Chinese rule or possessing a photo of the Dalai Lama or even showcasing reluctance towards the Chinese communist authorities who come to take away Tibetan children for admission in residential schools, according to TibetPress. Notably, such special schools are established across Tibet for the purpose of 'de-Tibetanizing' their minds and brainwashing them with communist ideology under the new policy of President Xi Jinping which aims at producing a new generation of 'patriotic' Tibetans. Earlier in April, six UN human rights experts in Geneva had issued a joint statement urging China to account for the arrest, detention and disappearance of three Tibetans who included a woman teacher Rinchen Kyi. She was arrested in August 2021 on charge of 'inciting separatism' after she held a hunger strike to protest against the forced closure of the Sengdruk Taktse Middle School, a privately managed Tibetan cultural setup, in Darlag County of Golog Prefecture, Qinghai Province, where she taught. Moreover, the Chinese authorities in Tibet are using tactics to turn Tibetans against each other by creating fear and distrust among families, friends and neighbours. According to TibetPress, some experts hailing from Italy, Taiwan and India also expressed deep concerns over the politicization of the institution of marriage by Chinese authorities in Tibet who were sponsoring marriages between male Han settlers and local Tibetan woman and termed such Chinese practices in Tibet as 'cultural genocide'. The Tibetan women have been subjected to the same type of suppression and discrimination at the hands of the Chinese as their basic rights have been violated. While such atrocities against Tibetan women by Chinese authorities speak volumes about the inhuman treatment of Tibetan women by the Chinese rulers of today's Tibet, the women of Tibet too have proven their guts and determination to fight back against this tyranny and are playing their role with courage both at the family front as well as in the national struggle. (ANI) The US Department of Justice, which has taken up the findings of the January 6 (2021) panel on Capitol Hill insurrection, has sued former President Donald Trump's legal counsel Peter Navarro over using personal email for presidential records. The lawsuit claimed that Navarro used a personal email account to conduct business that involved presidential records and, as such, he should hand over those emails as they are the rightful property of the National Archives. "Mr. Navarro is wrongfully retaining Presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration," the lawsuit stated, adding, "Mr. Navarro's wrongful retention of Presidential records violates District of Columbia law, federal common law, and the Presidential Records Act." Navarro's attorneys, John Irving and John Rowley, however, denied withholding documents from the government. "As detailed in our recent letter to the Archives, Mr. Navarro instructed his lawyers to preserve all such records, and he expects the government to follow standard processes in good faith to allow him to produce records. Instead, the government chose to file its lawsuit today," they said in a statement sent to Politico. The lawsuit, filed in the federal court in Washington, is the latest in a slew of public battles between the former Trump adviser and US government, said the Washington Examiner in a report. In June, Navarro was arrested and charged with contempt of Congress after refusing to provide documents or appear to testify in front of the Jan 6 committee. A judge set a trial date for November 17 after he pleaded not guilty to the charges. --IANS arm/ ( 287 Words) 2022-08-04-22:28:03 (IANS) Two teenage girls were rushed to a hospital Thursday after someone shot them. One of the teens is in critical condition. Two bullet holes show part of the aftermath of the late morning shooting in Homewood. One of bullet holes was on a power pole, and the other went into a window of a nearby home. A woman tells me she heard 4-6 gunshots & came outside & two teenage girls were lying in the middle of Stranahan. One of the girls said they were shot in their backs. So far we have found 2 bullet holes @WPXI pic.twitter.com/A5WrVJbA3F Gabriella DeLuca (@GabriellaDeLuca) August 4, 2022 A woman who was working as a caretaker at the home told Channel 11 it was terrifying. I heard four to six gunshots while sitting in the living room. For my safety, me and my client, I had to pull her into the kitchen. Shes hard of hearing and she heard the gunshot. It was loud, the woman said. She then saw the two teenage girls who were shot. Police say both victims are 18 years old. I looked out the living room and saw one body on the ground. The other victim was standing up, she said. According to investigators, someone shot the two girls in the back, and it was after some sort of confrontation. Thursday, a spokesperson from Mayor Gaineys office addressed the violence in Pittsburgh, specifically in Homewood. Press secretary Maria Montano said they had implemented a rapid response learning session in Homewood by working with community groups to examine social conditions that lead to violence. I know some of you are looking for immediate results from this effort, but as the mayor likes to say, there are no microwave meals when it comes to long-lasting change and peace in our city, Montano said. Montano said they have made progress in Homewood when it comes to violence, and have had only five shootings there since April, with the exception of the two teens shot on Thursday. Story continues Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW TRENDING NOW: Emergency crews respond to fatal motorcycle crash in Pleasant Hills Pittsburgh Police searching for missing 13-year-old girl Man charged after allegedly leaving young child alone in car in Ross Township VIDEO: Bus Rapid Transit project connecting Downtown, Oakland will cost more than initially thought DOWNLOAD the Channel 11 News app for breaking news alerts The man wanted by the FBI for firing multiple rounds at an agent two weeks ago in Columbus is now in custody. Joshuia Johnathon Luke Brown, 24, turned himself in to the FBI in Columbus at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, the FBI told the Ledger-Enquirer in an email Thursday. He reportedly felt pressure from the multi-day manhunt, the FBI Atlanta public affairs office said in the email. Agents say there is no indication he ever left Columbus between the incident date and Wednesday. The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia issued a warrant for Browns arrest on charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and impeding a federal official. Following that issuance, the FBI announced last week a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Brown. No reward was given because he turned himself in, FBI public affairs specialist Tony Thomas told the Ledger-Enquirer. The agency has released no further details on the case. Aug. 4The first step for New Brunswick on its path to redemption for 2021's lopsided AAABA Tournament title game loss was to dominate pool play. Consider that box checked off after the Matrix completed a clean sweep of Pool B with a 11-2 victory over Maryland State Crabfest at Roxbury Park on Wednesday afternoon. A day after a seven-run inning propelled the New Jersey squad to a comeback win over Brooklyn-2, a seven-run eighth inning broke open a tight 4-2 game. While there is still plenty of work to do as New Brunswick enters the quarterfinal round, it would be tough to not be optimistic about its prospects of being the last team standing. "I just hope we keep it going," New Brunswick manager Glenn Fredricks said. "Whoever they tell us we have to play tomorrow, I hope we continue to play good baseball. At the end of nine innings, we'll see where we're at." New Orleans' loss to Philadelphia on Wednesday secured the Boosters the No. 2 seed out of Pool A, meaning the Boosters and the Matrix will match up in the round of eight at 10 a.m. Thursday at Sargent's Stadium at the Point. New Brunswick was battered 17-6 by New Orleans in the championship game in 2021, but Fredricks and his team believe they have a chance to flip the script on Thursday. "We have the right mix of new guys with the right vets from last year," Fredericks said. "They know what it takes to get that far. It seems like we've been out here for a month. We've been out here for three days. We're only halfway there. "These guys have to understand that, and I think the older guys will be able to let the younger guys know that this is a focus-type thing." Rocko Bzezniak blasted a two-run homer, cracked an RBI single and scored twice for New Brunswick. Gianni Marano had two hits, including a solo home run in the third, and scored three runs. "When this lineup hits top to bottom, we're very difficult to beat," Fredricks said. Story continues While the offense has had notable success, New Brunswick's pitching staff is also pulling its weight, giving up just 11 runs thus far and only two combined on Monday and Wednesday. Tyler Tilton threw five scoreless innings to pick up the win. He allowed only three hits, walked two and struck out three. "I think our starting pitching has been magnificent for the first three games," Fredricks said. "When you get great pitchers going deep into the games in this tournament especially it gives your bullpen a chance to rest up." John Higgins allowed two runs, one earned, in four innings and struck out five in relief of Tilton. Maryland State starter Raphel Roman suffered the loss after surrendering four runs on five hits with four strikeouts compared to five walks. Brandon Cook reached base safely three times and scored a run for Crabfest. Ryan Torres doubled, and Danneuris Infante walked and scored a run. Despite coming up winless in pool play, Maryland State manager Mike Higginbotham is appreciative of the experience Johnstown provides. "They got great experience, playing against good teams, seeing good pitching," Higginbotham said about the positives his team can take away from this week. "They got to better themselves, so they can get to where they want to go. "They did a good job. Great experience. "AAABA did a great job putting this on." Maryland State had an opportunity to tie or even take the lead in the top half of the eighth. Crabfest had runners on the corners with one out when disaster struck. Higgins' quick step off the mound set off a chain reaction that eventually led to both runners being tagged out, killing what could have been a game-changing rally. The Matrix racked up four hits and sent 12 batters to the plate in the bottom half to slam the door shut. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote a letter to the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) this week urging officials to stop confiscating the turbans of Sikh asylum-seekers. We write to inform you of ongoing, serious religious-freedom violations in the Yuma Border Patrol Sector, where your agents are confiscating turbans from Sikh individuals during asylum processing, the ACLU wrote to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus on Monday, in a letter obtained by Arizona Luminaria and The Intercept. In the last two months alone, our organizational partners in Arizona have documented nearly 50 cases of asylees arriving from Yuma who reported that their religious headwear had been taken by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and never returned or replaced, it added. The officials said they wanted a meeting with Magnus to hear how he would handle the issue and pressed Yuma Border Patrol agents to stop confiscating turbans. These practices blatantly violate federal law. They are also inconsistent with CBPs own national standards and contrary to the agencys non-discrimination policy, which states that CBP employees must treat all individuals with dignity and respect, and respect individual rights such as freedom of religion, the ACLU officials wrote. Magnus said in a statement that there would be an investigation into the matter. We take allegations of this nature very seriously, the commissioner said in a statement. This issue was raised in June and steps were immediately taken to address the situation. Our expectation is that CBP employees treat all migrants we encounter with respect. An internal investigation has been opened to address this matter. The ACLU noted in its letter that it was not the first time it had raised concerns over Sikhs turbans being taken away, saying it had raised a similar issue in March 2019 to the CBP and others. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. The military has charged Tech. Sgt. David Wayne Dezwaan, Jr., an Air Force explosive ordnance disposal technician, in connection with Aprils insider attack on U.S. troops in Syria. Dezwaan, an active duty member of the 775th Civil Engineer Squadron at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, most recently served as his squadrons noncommissioned officer in charge of EOD equipment, the Air Force said Thursday. He is accused of several violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including: dereliction of duty; destroying military property; reckless endangerment; unauthorized access of a government computer; obtaining classified information; and aggravated assault. American airman arrested in connection with April attack on US base CNN previously reported a perpetrator set up military-grade explosives more powerful than a hand grenade near ammunition storage and showers at Green Village, a small American outpost in northern Syria. Blasts injured four service members, who were treated for traumatic brain injuries and returned to work later in April. About 900 U.S. personnel remain in Syria to advise and assist the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting government troops in the countrys civil war. The Air Force did not answer how long Dezwaan was deployed to Syria at the time of the attack. He was arrested in the U.S. on June 16 and placed in pretrial confinement. A Hill spokesperson declined to say where the suspect is being held. Dezwaan is scheduled to appear at an Article 32 hearing at Hill on Aug. 23, where a military judge will decide whether evidence is sufficient to move on to a court-martial. The proceeding is the military justice systems equivalent of a preliminary hearing ahead of trial in civilian court. US service member is possible suspect in Syria base blast Dezwaan enlisted in the Air Force in October 2007, two years after graduating from high school in western Michigan, according to a 2010 article in the Holland Sentinel. While stationed at Kadena Air Base, Japan, in 2010, Dezwaan received the Air Force Combat Action Medal in recognition of his deployment with the Marine Corps to Afghanistans Helmand province the previous year. Story continues He told the Holland Sentinel he received the medal for a mission in which he helped clear a route between Forward Operating Bases Delaram and Golestan in southern Afghanistan. Twelve hours into the route clearance, we came to what is called Buji Bast Pass. This is the entrance into the Black Pass, Dezwaan said in the question-and-answer article. The area is known for frequent and deadly insurgent activity. US military changes explanation of attack on base in Syria But the route between the two mountains is the only way to get between the two bases, so sweepers walked ahead of the convoy with metal detectors to find any IEDs. Halfway through Buji Bast Pass, my vehicle was struck by an IED blast which detonated right under the front right tire. The 40-pound blast completely immobilized the vehicle, Dezwaan said. A 2010 Air Force press release said he wasnt sure what had happened, but the explosion caused Dezwaan to hit his head. We experienced only minor injuries, ranging from some bruising to a cut and busted-open lip, he told the Holland Sentinel. The convoy waited for a recovery team to arrive about 24 hours later. After an hour, though, the troops came under indirect mortar fire and gunshots from the mountains above them. Attack in east Syria injures 2 US-led coalition members We returned fire, making the terrorists withdraw, Dezwaan said. When our recovery assets came, the supporting EOD teams vehicle was struck by an IED, also 40 pounds of bulk homemade explosives, approximately 75 meters away from the site of our disabled vehicle. That vehicle was immobilized as well. They linked up with our convoy to continue the mission as we waited for more recovery assets, he added. Dezwaan received several other military medals, including the Joint Service Achievement Medal for outstanding achievement or meritorious service, according to the Air Force, plus seven other achievement and commendation medals from the Army, Navy and Air Force. Its unclear if the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Armys Criminal Investigation Division are looking into any other suspects. Airmen who have charges preferred against them are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty, Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said Thursday. A jury ruled Friday that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should pay $45.2 millionto the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting after spending years spreading lies that the shooting didnt happen. Jurors deliberated for less than a day before coming to its first decision Thursday that Jones must pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages. On Friday, jurors again deliberated for less than a day when deciding further punitive damages against Jones of more than $40 million. Along with the judgments, Jones will have to pay an additional $1.5 million in sanctions, Houston attorney Mark Bankston told HuffPost. Jurors in the Austin, Texas, courtroom were tasked with finding an appropriate amount that Jones and Infowars must pay to a pair of Sandy Hook parents, whose 6-year-old boy, Jesse, died in the 2012 Connecticut shooting that left 20 kids and six adults dead. For years, Jones and his outlet have claimed the shooting was fake, leading to harassment of the families from listeners of his show. Jones lost the case along with several others before it could even go to trial after a judge ruled default judgment against him for not turning over court-ordered documents related to the case last year. During his closing argument Friday, attorney Wes Ball thanked jurors for their previous ruling of $4.1 million against Jones but said it wouldnt be enough to adequately punish him. You must make a statement, loud and clear, that the gold rush of misinformation and fear must end, and it must end today, Ball said before the jurys final verdict. Fridays final verdict could potentially be capped by a Texas law that says punitive damages cant be more than twice the compensatory damages ($4.1 million) plus an additional $750,000 per plaintiff. Attorney Bankston told HuffPost his team will litigate that if necessary. Jones two-week trial has helped peel back the curtain on Infowars ethically bankrupt operation and offered a greater glimpse into the profits Jones and his web outlet have reaped while spreading lies about the shooting. On Wednesday, Jones was confronted on the stand with earnings that the Infowars store which sells non-FDA-approved supplements along with survival gear has made over the years. Story continues On one particularly profitable day, for instance, the store made $800,000. Jones did not dispute the number but complained that lawyers for the plaintiffs were cherry-picking his most lucrative days. HuffPost first reported earlier this year that Jones store sold $165 million in products from 2015 to 2018. Jones was also recently given $8 million in an anonymous Bitcoin donation. When asked about the donation, Jones told HuffPost outside of court last week that he had already spent it. For years, Alex Jones and his conspiracy outlet Infowars amplified the horrendous lie that 20 kids and six adults weren't killed in the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, shooting. (Photo: Illustration: HuffPost/ Photo: Reuters) For years, Alex Jones and his conspiracy outlet Infowars amplified the horrendous lie that 20 kids and six adults weren't killed in the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, shooting. (Photo: Illustration: HuffPost/ Photo: Reuters) Testimony from Jones on Wednesday concluded with a dramatic moment when Jones was confronted with his own text messages, taken from his phone, which had been accidentally handed over to the plaintiffs lawyers by his own defense team. Did you know 12 days ago your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone, with every text message youve sent for the past two years? Attorney Mark Bankston asked Jones on the stand. And when informed did not take any steps to identify those texts as privileged? Jones did not know, and was confronted with a 2020 text that mentioned Sandy Hook. Thats a problem because Jones previously testified under oath that hed handed over all communications mentioning Sandy Hook to the court. You know what perjury is, right? Bankston asked Jones. The trial saw other dramatic moments including a deposition from a former Infowars employee who said he begged staff to stop spreading lies about Sandy Hook, only to be laughed at. And Infowars sidekick Owen Shroyer admitted on the stand that he did nothing to fact-check the accuracy of a bogus story claiming Heslin did not hold his dead child. I could have done a better job, Shroyer said on the stand last week. You could have done A job, attorney Kyle Farrar shot back. You could have done something. On Tuesday, parents Heslin and Lewis finally got to hold Jones feet to the fire when they testified about the harm he has caused. Lewis spoke directly to Jones while on the stand, telling him several times to pay attention as she spoke about her son and the damage Jones has caused. I wanted to tell you to your face, because I wanted you to know I am a mother first and foremost, and I know youre a father, Lewis said to Jones. My son existed, and youre still on your show today trying to say Im fine, Im an actress, Im deep state. Stop. Lewis also spoke about the last day she had with her son. Jesse was being dropped off at school, and had written I love you in the frost that had accumulated on the car. Lewis gave him a big hug, and Jesse went to class. Lewis now runs a nonprofit, the Choose Love Movement, which teaches social and emotional learning skills to kids in school. In separate testimony, parent Heslin dismissed Jones late supposed apologies. Alex Jones apologies are worthless, Heslin testified Tuesday. At this stage, any apology would not be sincere, its gone too late. I dont even know if Alex is capable of a sincere apology. While Heslin was on the stand, Jones was miles away from the courthouse airing an Infowars segment. As Heslin testified, Jones spoke on his program and called the father of Jesse slow and on the spectrum. This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. Related... American Airlines cancels 1,175 more flights for July and August. Getty Images American Airlines says it is slashing thousands of flights in September and October. The cuts equate to thousands of flights, many of which are out of Philadelphia International Airport. American told Insider that the changes are "proactive steps to add resiliency into our schedule." American Airlines is reducing its fall flying in an effort to minimize flight disruptions after a summer of travel chaos. On Thursday, Dallas-Fort Worth-based American said it is slashing thousands of flights in September and October, calling the reductions "proactive steps to add resiliency into our schedule" in an email to Insider. The company explained that the adjustments were made in cities with multiple frequencies "with the goal of moving customers to different flights." The worst hit airport will be Philadelphia International Airport, which is one of American's largest hubs. American explained that its original schedule was based on its 2019 flying schedule but "not the current demand environment." Specifically, the airline reduced its flight schedule in Philadelphia by 8.4% in September and 5.3% in October, American confirmed to Insider. The carrier will still fly 213 and 224 average daily departures each month, respectively, which is consistent with the 241 average daily departures from Philadelphia in July, and 228 average daily departures in August. "The schedule changes made by American across its hub network, including PHL, are indicative of the current travel atmosphere for all airlines and the need to balance passenger demand with capacity and staffing," Kate Sullivan, the airport's deputy director of strategic partnerships, told the Business Journal. Despite the cuts, the carrier told Insider it will still offer an average of 5,400 daily departures across the nation, which is the largest network of any US carrier. The move comes as the summer travel season causes mass flight disruptions, which have been exacerbated by the pilot shortage, bad weather, post-pandemic demand, and staffing issues. Story continues Since May 1, American has canceled or delayed 81,525 flights, according to Flight Aware data. Moreover, the carrier recently grounded 100 regional jets because it does not have enough pilots to fly them and nixed several regional routes, like Philadelphia to Ithaca, New York, and Chicago to Toledo, Ohio. "We're sizing the airline for the resources we've available and the operating conditions we face, and we'll make other changes as needed," American CEO Robert Isom said in the company's recent earnings call. American told Insider that it is working to move customers with existing reservations to alternate flights but will offer a refund "under our standard schedule change policy" if the new travel options are not doable. The news comes just a day after the US Department of Transportation proposed a new rule that would require airlines to compensate passengers for delays of three or more hours for domestic flights or six or more hours for international flights. The carrier is not the only airline to reduce its flying this year. United cut 12% of its flights at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey to improve on-time performance. Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines said it slashed about 100 daily flights in July and August to prevent flight disruptions. Read the original article on Business Insider Handcuffs Illustrated | Gettyimages Britney Griner's imprisonment in Russia may emphasis on may soon come to an end. American officials have reportedly proposed a prisoner swap with Russia: The U.S. would give up convicted arms Viktor Bout in exchange for Griner and Paul Whelan, a former marine. News of the proposed exchange has been met with some anger in the U.S, Maya Yang reports for The Guardian. Bout "has a notorious international reputation," but even if he didn't, some observers wonder if giving him up "might encourage further hostage-taking" by America's foreign rivals. It's also true, though, that the U.S. and Russia have a long Cold War history of trading prisoners perhaps most notably after American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union: After nearly two years' imprisonment, Powers was sent back to the U.S. in 1962 in exchange for Russian spy Colonel Rudolph Abel. Despite that history of swaps, Yang writes, "none have quite involved the notoriety of a figure like Bout." Hostage situations and prisoner swaps can be routine, as far as foreign policy goes but they can also burst into scandal or dramatic clashes between America and other countries. Here are three times when U.S. presidents were tested: The Barbary Coast The Marines' Hymn opens with the following lyrics: "From the halls of Montezuma/to the coast of Tripoli/we fight our country's battles/in the air, on land, and sea." The "Tripoli" in that lyric refers to what might be regarded as America's original hostage crisis when President Thomas Jefferson faced down the dreaded Barbary pirates. "For almost 300 years, leaders of the North African Barbary States hired ship captains to capture foreign ships in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean," the State Department says in its official history. After winning independence, the United State initially followed European countries' practice of paying "tribute" to the pirates to keep their ships free from interference. Jefferson changed course, sending the U.S. Navy to protect American shipping. In 1803, though, the U.S.S. Philadelphia ran aground near Tripoli and its crew was taken hostage. Story continues American troops recaptured the Philadelphia and set it ablaze. Recovering the hostages was another matter. A force of Marines marched 500 miles across the desert to Derna, where "the motley force charged the city and captured it making the first time the Stars and Stripes were raised in the conquest of a foreign land," Peter Suciu writes for The National Interest. That still wasn't quite enough: The U.S. government eventually paid $60,000 for the prisoners. "Jefferson declared 'victory,' but it wasn't to last," Suciu writes. The Second Barbary War a decade later finally put an end to the practice of collecting tributes. The Iran Hostage Crisis If you're of a certain age, you can probably still remember CBS anchor Walter Cronkite counting every single weeknight how long American hostages had been held in Iran: There are still many Americans who believe that the Iran Hostage Crisis ended Jimmy Carter's presidency. Shortly after the Islamic revolution, Iranian students in November 1979 stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 53 Americans hostage a situation that persisted for 444 days, the bulk of them during the presidential election year of 1980. Carter's approval ratings "doubled in the first month of the crisis," Mark Bowden later wrote in The Atlantic. "But in the following months, restraint had begun to smell like weakness and indecision. An April 1980 attempt to rescue the hostages by force ended when a U.S. helicopter crashed into a jet plane, killing eight servicemen. Carter lost the election to Ronald Reagan, and spent his final days in office negotiating for the hostages' release. "Carter's standing never recovered" from the extended crisis, Anne Gearan wrote last year in The Washington Post, "and when the captives were released hours after Reagan's inaugural address, it seemed a final insult to the departing president." The Iran-Contra scandal Reagan didn't really have an easier time with Iran, though. Throughout the early 1980s, Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon routinely captured American hostages seven in all were in captivity by 1985. At the same time, Iran was locked in a brutal war with its neighbor, Iraq. And that's where things got complicated. In 1985, "Iran made a secret request to buy weapons from the United States," PBS' American Experience says in its overview of the crisis. That was a tall order, given both an arms embargo against Iran and lingering American anger over the Carter-era hostage crisis. But U.S. officials saw an opportunity to bring home the hostages. Reagan "convinced himself that he was not negotiating with terrorists." More than 1,500 missiles were shipped to Iran and proceeds from the sale were illegally funneled to the Contras, a militant group battling the Marxist government in Nicaragua. Eventually, the hostages came home When the sale became public, however, a Watergate-level scandal blew up. "Reagan eventually went on television to tell the American people that it was not an arms-for-hostages deal," Bryan Craig writes for the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. It wasn't believable, or true. Reagan avoided prosecution after a 1990 deposition in which he claimed more than 80 times not to remember details of the operation. (He was later diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.) Nearly a dozen other administration officials were convicted, however. Reagan got off better than Carter: He left office with a 63 percent approval rating. You may also like Monica Lewinsky has a suggestion for another song lyric Beyonce should change Airbnb apologizes for '1830s slave cabin' listing Everything you need to know about Tuesday's primary results Argentina's new economic "super minister" pledged on Wednesday to respect the crisis-wracked country's commitment with the IMF to reduce its public deficit to 2.5 percent this year. As part of Argentina's long-running negotiations with the International Monetary Fund to restructure a $44 billion debt, authorities had agreed to progressively reduce the public deficit from three percent in 2021 to 0.9 percent by 2024. "We will meet the goal of the 2.5 percent primary fiscal deficit. We will make the necessary corrections to comply with our word," said Sergio Massa, in an announcement of his first measures as the new "super minister" in charge of the economy, development and agriculture ministries, as well as relations with international organizations. Argentina has suffered years of economic crisis, with some 37 percent of its population now living in poverty. Inflation for the first half of this year alone topped 36 percent, and is predicted to reach 80 percent by the year's end. Speaking at a press conference after being officially presented by President Alberto Fernandez in his new job, Massa described inflation as the "biggest poverty factory" in the country. "Inflation is one of the main issues to fight. The last month and the one just started will be the most difficult in terms of inflation and from there we will begin a downward curve," said Massa, 50, a lawyer by trade who on Tuesday resigned as president of the lower house of congress to take up his new post. "We are beginning a new stage of government that I am convinced we will come through successfully," said Fernandez at Massa's swearing in ceremony. One of Massa's toughest challenges will be to increase Argentina's available international reserves, which analysts say are at critical levels. A problem he won't be able to solve, though, is the ongoing power struggle inside the ruling Frente de Todos political coalition between Fernandez and Vice President Cristina Kirchner, herself a former president. nn/mr/bc/des The Daily Beast Tennessee Department of CorrectionA woman who shared a kiss with a prisoner during a visitation in Tennessee has been charged with murder after the inmate died shortly after their exchange.Rachel Dollard was taken into custody over the weekend by special agents from the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) and the Dickson County Sheriffs Department, the TDOC confirmed in a statement on Tuesday. She is accused of smuggling drugs into the Turney Center Industrial Complex.Dollard is facing ch Aug. 3MITCHELL Two Arizona residents who were using an RV as an "elaborate drug use facility" in the presence of their child while parked at a campground near Mitchell were sentenced Tuesday to prison. Jamie Bosone, 37, and Daniel Smythe, 38, both of Mesa, Arizona, were each sentenced to serve roughly three-and-a-half years in prison a significant reduction from the decade each faced before suspensions and credits. During Tuesday's sentencing hearing, Judge Chris Giles characterized Bosone and Smythe's drug operation as "one of the more complex and organized drug use situations" he's seen. "The best way to describe this is that it's a highly unusual situation. How you acquired these drugs was elaborate," Giles said during Smythe's sentencing. "All this was in an environment where you had your young son and elderly mother inside." Bosone and Smythe were apprehended by police in April, after someone called police to report they had locked a "frail" woman out of an RV at Betts Campground on a cold, windy day. Upon arrival, police were able to locate multiple varying forms of fentanyl on Smythe's person, and acquired a search warrant for the RV. Inside, investigators found and seized eight grams of fentanyl, under two ounces of marijuana, a digital scale as well as "several pieces" of marijuana and other narcotic paraphernalia. Authorities later determined Bosone and Smythe were on a cross-country RV trip with their 4-year-old child and Bosone's mother. According to Davison County State's Attorney Jim Miskimins, Bosone and Smythe were purchasing opioids, oxycodone and fentanyl online and also mailing drugs through an elaborate process. Miskimins provided more details of the conditions the child and Bosone's elderly mother were living in while in the RV. He said the two would "crush pills" and other drugs in front of the child and Bosone's mother. Story continues "There was constant grinding of pills. The child was exposed to those dangerous items, not to mention fentanyl being in the trailer," Miskimins said, adding allegations he learned via letters that the couple used the child as "a pawn" in their drug operation. As part of a plea agreement to reduce the original roughly 60-year sentence the pair faced, prosecutors offered to dismiss multiple charges including elder abuse, child abuse and other felony offenses in exchange for a guilty plea. Both Bosone and Smythe pleaded guilty to possession of fentanyl and keeping a place for use or sale of a controlled substance in May. During Bosone's sentencing, Giles said her "lack of compassion and concern for her own mother" is one element of the case that bothered him the most. "There is a lack of remorse," Giles told Bosone, who did not speak during her hearing. Smythe, however, took the opportunity to acknowledge to Giles that he and Bosone were "acting recklessly." "I want to thank law enforcement and the court for interviewing and avoiding a catastrophe," Smythe said, without emotion. Miskimins argued the couple "throwing an elderly woman" out of the RV was a clear demonstration of an act of violence for the court to consider imposing the maximum 10-year prison sentence for both Smythe and Bosone. In prior court appearances, the couple had asked Giles for a lighter sentence for either of them so one could appear before the Department of Social Services to obtain custody of their child, who has since been placed into the state's foster care system. Miskimins vehemently opposed their requests, citing the nature of the crimes. Bosone will serve her sentence at the South Dakota Women's Prison in Pierre, while Smythe will serve his at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls. Gov. Ron DeSantis order to remove Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren sent shockwaves through Florida on Thursday and raised several questions from readers. Can DeSantis oust a democratically elected official? Who else can be removed by DeSantis, and for what reasons? And whats next for Warren? Answers to these questions and more are below. Whom can DeSantis remove from office? Under Article IV of the Florida Constitution, DeSantis can suspend by executive order any state officers who are not subject to impeachment, as well as any county officers. That includes state attorneys, who are elected but not impeachable. Impeachable positions in Floridas state government include the governor, lieutenant governor, Cabinet members, state Supreme Court justices, courts of appeal judges, circuit court judges and county court judges. DeSantis can also remove elected municipal officers, or local officials, such as mayors, after theyve been charged with a crime. Who else has been removed by DeSantis? Other elected officials DeSantis has ousted during his tenure include a Broward County sheriff, the Palm Beach supervisor of elections and the superintendent of Okaloosa County schools. He also removed Port Richey Mayor Dale Glen Massad in 2019 after he was charged with a crime. What reasons can DeSantis use to remove a democratically elected official? Under state law, DeSantis can suspend state officers for malfeasance (acting illegally), misfeasance (carrying out official duties in a way that is careless and causes harm), and neglect of duty (failing to carry out official responsibilities). Other actions that can warrant removal include drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties or committing a felony. DeSantis executive order deems Warrens decision to sign letters stating he would use his offices discretion to not prosecute certain offenses as neglect of duty. The offenses Warren said he wouldnt prosecute include Floridas ban on abortions after 15 weeks, as well as any future legislation to ban gender-affirming care for minors. (Florida has no such law in effect yet.) DeSantis order said those letters amounted to a blanket refusal to enforce, or a functional veto, of the law, which amounts to neglect of Warrens responsibilities. Story continues The order also said Warrens ignorance of official duties amounts to incompetence. What is prosecutorial discretion and is it protected by law? One of the chief responsibilities of state attorneys like Warren is to decide which cases to prosecute using the states limited resources and which charges to file in a given case. The Florida Supreme Court ruled in a 2017 case that prosecutorial discretion does not allow state attorneys to make blanket statements that they will not prosecute certain types of crimes, and must make decisions on a case-by-case basis. DeSantis executive order claims Warrens statements about not prosecuting abortion providers or doctors providing gender-affirming care qualify as a blanket refusal to uphold the states laws. Whats next? Can Warren fight his removal? Once the governor suspends a state official, if that person contests it, the task falls to the Florida Senate to decide whether to reinstate them or remove them from office. Both Warren and DeSantis will be able to present evidence, call witnesses and give testimony to make their case. Senate rules state the Senate must send out a notice of an initial hearing within 90 days of the suspension and make a final decision by the end of the next legislative session. Floridas next legislative session is scheduled to start in March and end in May. However, if Warren challenges his suspension in court, it could push that Senate timeline back. An artists conception of a near Earth asteroid (Getty Images/iStockphoto) An asteroid has swooped past Earth just days after it was first spotted. The object, known as 2022 OE2, never posed any danger to Earth. It remained at a safe distance of 3.2 million miles away, more than 10 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The rock is up to 380 meters wide, scientists said, and made its closest approach to Earth at 12.23am eastern time on Thursday morning. It is one of around 15,000 Apollo-class asteroids. That means they are in orbit around the Sun in such a way that they cross over with our own orbit. The object was only found on 26 July, less than two weeks before it made its closest path with Earth. While Nasa aims to spot and categorise all of what it calls near-Earth objects or NEOs, the vast expanse of space and the relatively small size of such asteroids can often make it difficult. Today, Nasa tracks thousands of such NEOs. But many remain unknown: the space agency says that less than half of the 25,00 near-Earth objects that are 140 meters or larger have yet been found. Nasa says that it is not aware of any asteroid that is due to make a dangerous collision with Earth in the next 100 years. The most hazardous object that it tracks is the asteroid Bennu famous for being landed on by Nasas Osiris-Rex mission, which will bring back pieces of asteroid next year and there is still only a 1-in-1,800 chance that it will hit Earth before 2290. Experts are nonetheless concerned that humanity could be taken by surprise by a potentially hazardous asteroid, and Nasa and other space agencies have launched planetary protection programmes in an attempt to limit those risks. They have included major space missions to test any possible response. At the end of September, for instance, Nasas Dart mission will crash into an asteroid in a test that will be used to understand whether it might be possible to move the path of any hazardous object so that it would avoid our planet. On Saturday, August 6th, The Avenues Mall is hosting a back to school event from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. on a first-come, first-served basis to the first 100 students. Not only will students receive a brand-new, free backpack, theyll be invited to artistically customize it by working with a designer on site. In addition to the backpack give-away, the Avenues Mall is working in tandem with the Salvation Army to collect school supplies and used denim to distribute to community children in need. Major Keath Biggers, Area Commander of the Salvation Army of Northeast Florida, says that he welcomes the effort to help families in need. Biggers expressed his appreciation for The Avenues Mall in stepping up to work with families struggling to make ends meet. With the economy and the cost of food, the cost of fuel, etc, families are going to be really struggling to provide school supplies and clothing for their children, he said. We are so grateful for the partnership of the Avenues Mall as we are so grateful to all of people who support us. " Major Biggers underscored the importance of getting school supplies school to children in need to ensure that every child not only excelled, but succeeded. Again were excited to distribute to those in need through our Tower Center of Hope Social Services Program, he continued. An Apple Tree will be standing at the food court with details of what children need the most. The Apple Tree will remain standing until August 10. The Avenues Mall: 10300 Southside Blvd, Jacksonville, FL 32256 SheKnows It goes without saying that its every parents goal to make sure their children will, when the time comes, be able to handle life without them and, in families with multiple siblings, it often comes with the hope that they also care for one another (along with any other responsibilities they have). But, as [] Four people were shot in Baltimore in three separate shootings that took place within 1 1/2 hours Wednesday night, Baltimore Police said. Homicide detectives are investigating the shooting of a 34-year-old man whose condition is unknown. Southwest District officers arrived at the 3300 block of North Hilton Street in Forest Park in West Baltimore at about 8:20 p.m. and found the victim unresponsive. An officer and medics attempted lifesaving measures before taking the man to a hospital. Anyone with information about this shooting can call detectives at 410-396-2100 or call Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7LOCKUP. At about 9:45 p.m., Western District police responded to report of a shooting at 9:43 p.m. in the 200 block of North Fremont Avenue in Poppleton in Central Southwest. Officers found a male teenager with gunshot wounds in his right leg. The teenager was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Southwest District officers were called to the 2900 block of Belmont Avenue in Northwest Community Action in West Baltimore for a shooting, also around 9:45 p.m., Although there were no victims at the scene, police said two injured men walked into a hospital seeking treatment. Police said a 25-year-old was in serious condition and a 35-year-old was shot in the leg and ankle, sustaining injuries that are not life-threatening. Southwest District detectives can be reached at 410-396-2488 or anyone with information about this shooting can call Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7LOCKUP. Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah pictured on the film's set in January The directors of Batgirl have said they are upset their film was axed months before its planned release, by Warner Bros Discovery. "We are saddened and shocked by the news. We still can't believe it," directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah wrote on Instagram. They said it had been a dream to work with stars including Michael Keaton. Both had been in Morocco for El Arbi's wedding, which had been attended by Will Smith as guest of honour. https://www.instagram.com/p/CguBRK4ImE1/?hl=en The film, which featured Keaton as Batman, was also due to star Leslie Grace as Batgirl, Brendan Fraser as villain Firefly and JK Simmons as Commissioner James Gordon. "As directors, it is critical that our work be shown to audiences, and while the film was far from finished, we wish that fans all over the world would have had the opportunity to see and embrace the final film themselves," Fallah and El Arbi said in their statement. "Our amazing cast and crew did a tremendous job and worked so hard to bring Batgirl to life. We are forever grateful to have been part of that team," they added. "In any case, as huge fans of Batman since we were little kids, it was a privilege and an honour to have been part of the DCEU [DC Extended Universe], even if it was for a brief moment. Batgirl for life." In The Heights star Grace tweeted that she was "proud of the love, hard work and intention all of our incredible cast and tireless crew put into this film over seven months", adding she felt "blessed to have worked among absolute greats and forged relationships for a lifetime in the process". She thanked fans for believing in her to become "my own damn hero!". The movie, shot entirely in Glasgow and reportedly budgeted at more than $70m (58m), was due to be shown in cinemas and on the streaming service HBO Max later this year. https://www.instagram.com/p/CgzisvCMwmk/?hl=en Story continues The film had completed its principal photography and much of its post-production work and was in test screenings - Variety reported that news of its demise "sent immediate shockwaves through Hollywood". The New York Post reported that the decision had followed a poor reaction to test screenings, but Variety suggested that the cost of putting the film into cinemas and marketing it may have contributed to the decision. As the film was unfinished, Warner Media would have had to spend more money completing, releasing and advertising it. Halting the process now means it can cut its existing losses without creating more. According to US trade publications, the company may also be able to recoup some of the money it had already spent by using what's called a tax write-down, which would save money by reducing the company's tax liability as a result of not releasing the film and recording it as a straight loss. "When Warner Bros files its taxes this year, the company will combine the income from its profitable movies with its losses to determine its taxable income. The loss from Batgirl would lower that taxable income significantly," David Blum, deputy chair of the tax practice group at law firm Akerman LLP, explained to Fortune. The film's cancellation follows a merger between Warner Bros and Discovery last May. Warner Bros had also confirmed that Scoob! Holiday Haunt would be scrapped. A spokesperson for the firm told the BBC: "The decision to not release Batgirl reflects our leadership's strategic shift as it relates to the DC universe and HBO Max. "Leslie Grace is an incredibly talented actor and this decision is not a reflection of her performance. "We are incredibly grateful to the filmmakers of Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt and their respective casts, and we hope to collaborate with everyone again in the near future." On Tuesday, Batgirl filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah were in Morocco, where they had recently celebrated El Arbis wedding at a bash attended by guests such as their Bad Boys for Life star Will Smith. In the afterglow of the happy occasion, they received the stunning news that their upcoming DC film Batgirl would be shelved, despite it being deep into postproduction ahead of a planned HBO Max bow. The filmmakers are said to have been given a heads-up shortly before articles circulated online. We are saddened and shocked by the news, the filmmakers wrote in a statement Wednesday. As directors, it is critical that our work be shown to audiences, and while the film was far from finished, we wish that fans all over the world would have the opportunity to see and embrace the final film themselves. Maybe one day they will inshaAllah. More from The Hollywood Reporter Batgirl was a casualty of new corporate strategy from Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who opted to shelve the project in order to take a tax write-down on the $90 million film, multiple sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. The film had been greenlit for around $80 million under former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, who also teed up multiple DC projects for HBO Max that would be budgeted more modestly than a theatrical DC offering. Its budget jumped to $90 million due to COVID-19 protocols. Just a few months ago, Batgirl was seen as one of the more intriguing of the upcoming DC films. It hailed from the duo known as Adil & Bilall, who became hot commodities with Bad Boys for Life (2020) and continued to build excitement with well-received episodes of Disney+s Ms. Marvel, released this summer. Even Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige expressed interest in learning spoilers from the film. Batgirl was also seen as a win for representation, with Leslie Grace being the first Latina to front a DC Extended Universe film, transgender actress Ivory Aquino playing a supporting role and Adil & Bilall bringing their unique background as Muslim, Belgian Moroccan filmmakers. Plus, Michael Keaton was back as Batman. Story continues For a time, according to multiple sources, Warners considered pumping more money into Batgirl to beef it up into a 2023 theatrical release. Another source downplays the notion that a theatrical upgrade was seriously in contention, as from the script stage it was conceived as a streaming play. Either way, when a very early version of the film test screened, with temp VFX and score, it landed a score in the low 60s and is believed to have only tested once. Film producers and executives have long noted that test screenings are best used to determine whether audiences are engaged or disengaged during certain parts of the film, not as a final judgment call on a movie. For example, horror films that end up doing well have been known to test in the 60s. Batgirls test score, which was for a directors cut, is comparable to scores for the first It (2017), which wound up grossing $700.3 million globally, as well as an early score for the upcoming Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Both of those films tested in the 60s. Batgirl felt more modest than, say, The Batman which had a production budget nearly $100 million more than Batgirls with Glasgow, Scotland, filling in for Gotham City. Warners leadership under Zaslav feared it would not deliver the spectacle DC audiences are accustomed to. Still, its smaller feel was baked into its DNA, as Batgirl was supposed to be the first in a number of smaller DC films. That strategy has been reversed. In May, Zaslav killed a DC Wonder Twins movie for HBO Max that was in preproduction, just weeks after Riverdales KJ Apa and 1883s Isabel May had been cast in the lead roles. At a certain point, a source notes, it doesnt make financial sense to spend $80 million or $90 million on a streaming movie, as it wont necessarily attract more subscribers than, say, a $40 million movie. (In an earnings disclosure in April, HBO and its HBO Max streaming service counted 76.8 million combined global subscribers.) Going forward, a streaming film will be made for a more modest number, and if its for theatrical, it better feel theatrical, notes a knowledgeable source. The death of Batgirl also hints at a diminished role for Keaton going forward. The actors Dark Knight, who hadnt been seen since 1992s Batman Returns, was being positioned as akin to Samuel L. Jacksons Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe an elder statesman who could pop up in multiple films and offer guidance. In Batgirl, he is said to have been at the center of a splashy action sequence. He is also a key part of The Flash, the upcoming movie starring embattled actor Ezra Miller that is due out in June 2023. According to multiple sources, Keaton also filmed a scene for the upcoming Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom that test audiences found confusing, as it was unclear what Keatons Batman was doing in this universe. Lost Kingdom previously was supposed to open before The Flash, which will explain Keatons return. But last week, Aquaman star Jason Momoa revealed that Ben Affleck was filming a scene as Bruce Wayne, suggesting Keaton had been replaced with Afflecks version of the character. The Batgirl news comes ahead of Warner Bros. Discoverys earnings call Thursday, with rumors swirling that Warners is considering moving the release dates for two of its upcoming films Shazam! Fury of the Gods (currently slated for Dec. 21) and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (currently set for March 17, 2023). On Wednesday, the studio revealed an October 2024 date for the Joker sequel, Joker: Folie a Deux. While Batgirl was supposed to be a win for representation, the studio has another groundbreaking superhero project in the can. Just months after Grace was cast as Batgirl, Cobra Kai star Xolo Mariduena joined the DC universe as Blue Beetle the fourth Latino actor cast in a DC movie that year (Colombian American actress Sasha Calle had been cast as Supergirl in The Flash, and West Side Story star Rachel Zegler previously joined Shazam! Fury of the Gods). Blue Beetle was originally developed for HBO Max before being upgraded to a theatrical release in December. As soon as Batgirl was shelved, a number of tweets circulated asking the studio to save Blue Beetle. Among those who liked those tweets? Angel Manuel Soto, the films director, underscoring the uncertainty Warners talent faces at this time. As for Adil & Bilall, the duo say they are grateful for their time in the DC universe, praising their cast, especially the great Leslie Grace, who portrayed Batgirl with so much passion, dedication and humanity. Added the directors: It was a huge privilege and an honor to have been part of the DCEU, even if it was for a brief moment. Batgirl For Life. Kim Masters, Rebecca Sun and Borys Kit contributed to this story. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Click here to read the full article. OLHA HLUSHCHENKO THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2022, 07:12 The General Staff of the Ukrainian Army reports that the combat readiness of the Armed Forces of Belarus is being checked. Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces as of 06.00 on 4 August Details: On the Volyn and Polissia fronts, units of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus are carrying out the task of strengthening protection of the section of the Belarusian-Ukrainian border in the Brest and Gomel oblasts. A combat readiness check was held in units of the special operations forces of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus. On the Sivershchyna front, Russian forces shelled the districts of Medvedivka in Chernihiv Oblast and Krasnopillia and Myropillia in Sumy Oblast using tubed artillery. On the Kharkiv front, the Russian army fired from tanks, tubed and rocket artillery in the areas of the settlements of Kharkiv, Lebiazhe, Borshchova, Dementiivka, Korobochkyne, Velyki Prokhody, Ruski Tyshky, Staryi Saltiv, Prudianka, Pytomnyk and Tsupivka. Russian soldiers made an attempted offensive on the Bairak Husarivka axis, and the hostilities are ongoing. On the Sloviansk front, shelling was recorded near Bohorodychne, Dibrivne, Mazanivka, Karnaukhivka, Chepil and Husarivka. The occupiers tried to advance on the Dovhenke Bohorodychne axis. They were repulsed and withdrew. On the Kramatorsk front, Russian soldiers carried out firing operations near Siversk, Mykolaivka, Starodubivka, Spirne, Kryva Luka, Verkhnokamianske, Hryhorivka, Serebrianka, Raihorodka and Kalenyky. They also conducted an airstrike near Spirne, and conducted an offensive battle on the Yaremivka Dolyna axis with no success, so they withdrew. On the Bakhmut front, the Russian occupying forces used tubed and rocket artillery in the areas of the settlements of Yakovlivka, Travneve, Kodema, Pokrovske, Rozdolivka, Kurdiumivka, Zaitseve, Bakhmut and Soledar. They conducted airstrikes near Yakovlivka, Soledar and Kodema. Story continues The occupiers tried to improve their tactical position on the Striapivka Soledar, Dolomitne Travneve, Vidrodzhennia Vershyna, Pokrovske Bakhmut, Vasylivka Yakovlivka, and Semyhiria Vershyna axes. The invaders had no success on all the indicated fronts and retreated. Russian soldiers conduct offensive operations on the Novoluhanske Kodema axis, and hostilities continue. On the Avdiivka front, the Russian occupiers shelled the areas of Pisky, Prechystivka, Shevchenko, Volodymyrivka, Nevelske, Netailove and Krasnohorivka. They led assault operations in the areas of Lozove Pisky and Vesele Pisky, but were unsuccessful and withdrew. On the Novopavlivka and Zaporizhzhia fronts, shelling from artillery and tanks was recorded near Zaliznychne, Varvarivka, Marinka, Huliaipole, Novosilky, Huliaipilske and Temyrivka. The Russian soldiers launched an airstrike near Novopillia. Fighting continues on the Oleksandrivka-Marinka axis. On the Pivdennyi Buh front, Russian forces fired using tanks, tubed and rocket artillery in Mykolaiv, Prybuzke and another 25 settlements. The Russian soldiers continue conducting aerial reconnaissance using UAVs. Two sea-based cruise missile carriers are on standby to use high-precision weapons in the waters of the Black and Azov Seas. "The Russian occupiers suffer losses, are demoralised and look for any opportunity to sustain light wounds. In order to get back to the territory of the Russian Federation, they are resorting to self-mutilation and various simulations of poor health," the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine noted. Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda! Southeast Asia presents a ripe opportunity for the United States and western allies to diversify their supply chain away from China, making it the next major economic battleground between the rival nations. "China is a geographical fact in the region - it's an economic fact," Ashok Mirpuri, Ambassador of Singapore to the U.S., said during Julys Aspen Security Forum. "It's been there for generations: It's risen, it's come down, it's risen again, but the region has had to learn to live with China." "The United States has been in many ways a stabilizing force in the region, and we don't see the United States as an outsider," he continued. "We see them as a resident power in the region as well. So the both of them, dealing with a region of Southeast Asia [with] 600 million people, is really where the competition is taking place day by day, week by week, month by month." Secretary of State Antony Blinken began his visit Tuesday when he met with leaders in Cambodia, which currently serves as the head of the 10-country trading block known as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN has found itself in the spotlight not just due to its proximity to China, but also for the promising business opportunities present in the region. Blinken is also due to attend a Ministerial meeting with ASEAN foreign ministers, Wednesday. REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: CHINA, PELOSI AND THE IDES OF AUGUST Mirpuri highlighted Southeast Asias role at the "heart of this competitive dynamic between China and the United States," which has turned the region into a budding economic battleground between the two world powers. China's "Zero-COVID" policy caused global disruption to the supply chain, and the threat of an invasion of Taiwan has caused many trading partners to consider back-up options. Ford opened a factory in Cambodia in April after investing $21 million to build facilities in the Pursat Province, which Minister Delegate to the Prime Minister Keo Rattanak said was part of trying to attract new business and partners to the region. Apple, meanwhile, opened a new iPad factory in Vietnam in 2021 a process started in 2019 as part of avoiding U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, the New York Times reported. Story continues Kao Kim Hourn, minister delegate attached to the Prime Minister of Cambodia, told Fox News Digital that ASEAN allows its members to operate as "one big market" to benefit from each countrys competitive advantages. "I think it depends on international companies that are investing in those countries and where they want to invest," Kao said, using the example of a Japanese company that he said had remained hesitant of opening a factory in Cambodia but has now commenced building several factories in the country. PELOSI SHOULD HAVE VISITED TAIWAN YEARS AGO: FOREIGN POLICY EXPERT "Of course, all of us welcome investment, welcome the relocation of factories and companies in production in Southeast Asia," he said. "This is good for us. It's good for the region." ASEAN members have tried to pull both the U.S. and China into a more "cooperative and coordinated" relationship in the region to help maximize investment and growth. Mirpuri pointed to other "great powers" in the region, such as India and Japan, who could help ASEAN members as he expressed concern over the "uncertainty" in the U.S.-China relationship. "We have the trading relationships with both the U.S. and China, [and] we have security relationships around the region, so were sort of operating in that space," he said. ASEAN has kept an eye on the impacts from the Ukraine-Russia war: The war has exacerbated inflation issues, as well as threatened food security. FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: COMPANIES ARE MAKING CHINA CONTINGENCY PLANS However, that has also presented some trade opportunities for the region, Kao explained. He said that ASEAN countries have produced millions of tons of rice 6 million from Cambodia alone that has helped the members maintain a stronger level of food security while also exporting it to other countries. Maritime states in the group, such as Singapore and the Philippines, have struggled a little more for the fact that they need to import staple crops, but Kao insists that the alliance will be able to "sort it out." Kevin Maher, a senior advisor at NMV Consulting and the former Japan office director at the State Department, told Fox News Digital that the proximity to China makes Southeast Asia "vulnerable" to Chinese claims and advances through its Belt and Road Initiative. Maher argued that if the U.S. can step up investment in the region, those countries no longer need to take Chinese loans to help build infrastructure, in turn cutting off some of Chinas influence in the region while diversifying the U.S. supply chain in a double blow to Beijings economic ambitions. "The future is going to be this continued struggle to, not just on the military side, but on the infrastructure investment side, official development assistance and economically, to try to balance these very robust efforts by the Chinese to come in and dominate a lot of the Southeast Asian countries," Maher said. Brittney Griner EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Brittney Griner has been sentenced to almost a decade in Russian prison after being convicted of drug smuggling with criminal intent. A Russian judge on Thursday handed down the sentence for the WNBA star, who has been in custody for over five months after being arrested with cannabis vape cartridges in her luggage. During her trial, Griner's legal team said she did not intentionally smuggle drugs into the country. "I had no intention on breaking any Russian law," she said. "I was in a rush packing and the cartridges accidentally ended up in my bags." Her attorneys also showed evidence she was prescribed medical cannabis due to chronic pain. Griner's conviction was expected, as she had already pleaded guilty. Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence her to nine-and-a-half years in prison. The United States, which has classified Griner as wrongfully detained, is attempting to negotiate a prisoner swap with Russia. According to CNN, the Biden administration has proposed swapping convicted Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout with both Griner and Paul Whelan, another American being held in Russia. The Russian government has reportedly requested that Vadim Krasikov, a convicted murderer, be added to the swap. President Biden on Friday called Griner's sentence "unacceptable" and "one more reminder of what the world already knew: Russia is wrongfully detaining Brittney." He also called on Russia to "release her immediately" and vowed to "continue to work tirelessly" to bring her home. You may also like Monica Lewinsky has a suggestion for another song lyric Beyonce should change Airbnb apologizes for '1830s slave cabin' listing Everything you need to know about Tuesday's primary results Brittney Griner stands in the defendant's cage during her Russian trial. Evgenia Novozhenina/Pool/Reuters Prison guards and inmates told Brittney Griner "everything will be OK!" before her sentencing. Griner's lawyer said the Russians were "won over" by the American WNBA superstar. Griner was sentenced to nine years in Russian prison after hashish oil was found in her bags at a Moscow airport. Prison guards and fellow Russian inmates offered Brittney Griner support and encouragement ahead of her final Russian court appearance, her lawyer said. As the American WNBA superstar walked, handcuffed, to her sentencing hearing on Thursday, those closest to her at the facility where she's been detained reassured her: "Everything will be OK!" Griner's attorney in Russia, Alexander Boykov, told the court that the WNBA star had "won over" a number of guards and inmates in the Russian prison where she is being held, Jezebel's Emily Liebert reported. Griner is escorted to a court appearance. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko The two-time Olympic gold medalist was ultimately sentenced on Thursday to nine years in Russian prison after being found guilty of large-scale transportation of drugs with criminal intent. She has been held in custody near Moscow since her February arrest, when officials at a Moscow airport found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charges early on in her trial which began four months after she was arrested with hopes that the move would help reduce her sentence. Instead, Griner received a sentence that was just six months less than prosecutor's requested and one year below the maximum sentence for her charge. President Joe Biden announced in May that the US government was classifying Griner as "wrongfully detained" and later declared a national emergency to help free wrongful detainees. Just last week, the Biden administration announced that it had offered to swap a convicted Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, in exchange for the early release of both Griner and Paul Whelan a former US Marine also detained in Russia. American detainee Paul Whelan holds a sign ahead of a hearing in Moscow. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov But some sources suggested that the eight-time WNBA All-Star would need to be sentenced before a swap could come to fruition. Story continues Russia has yet to formally respond to the administration's offer, but suggested that they would be interested in the swap if the US helps to free an additional convict a Russian national who was tried, sentenced, and imprisoned for murder in Germany. John Kirby, the Biden administration's National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, slammed Russia's counter as "a bad faith attempt to avoid a very serious offer and proposal that the United States has put forward." Griner. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, Pool Moscow officials fired back that "loudspeaker diplomacy" wouldn't succeed in bringing the detained Americans home, signaling that the US and Russia were still quite far from agreeing to a deal. Still, there has been mounting public pressure on the Biden administration to get her home, and the prospect of Griner heading to a penal colony only increases the urgency of the situation. Biden, for his part, called on Russia to release Griner immediately after she was sentenced. Read the original article on Insider DELPHI, Ind. A traffic stop in northwest Carroll County early Tuesday removed half-a-pound of meth from the local illegal drug market, according to Carroll County Sheriff's Office. A deputy stopped a car in the area of U.S. 421 near Carroll County Road 600 North. The car's license plate did not match the vehicle police stopped. A police dog called to the scene indicated there might be drugs inside the car. Deputies searched the car and found the meth, which has a street value of roughly $20,000. They also found marijuana. Deputies arrested the driver, Zachary Pancake, 32, of rural Delphi, and the passenger, Amanda Miller, 41, of rural Monticello in Carroll County. Deputies booked Pancake into the Carroll County Jail on suspicion of possession of methamphetamine and suspicion of possession of marijuana. He posted bond Tuesday afternoon and was released from jail, according to the sheriff's office. Miller remained incarcerated at the jail in lieu of $75,000 cash bond. She's being held on suspicion of dealing methamphetamine, possession of meth amphetamine, possession of a syringe, and possession of paraphernalia, according to the sheriff's office. Reach Ron Wilkins at rwilkins@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @RonWilkins2. This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Carroll County deputies arrest 2; confiscate 1/2 pound of meth Watch: Jennifer Coolidge slept with 200 men after American Pie Jennifer Coolidge, 60, has made headlines after revealing she's had around 200 sexual encounters following her infamous role in American Pie over two decades ago. Coolidge played Jeanine, the mother of Stifler (Seann William Scott) who has a fling with one of her sons classmates. Throughout the film, Coolidges character is depicted as attractive and desired by Stiflers high school friends and she said the role in the 1999 film lead to her courting a lot of sexual attention. "I got a lot of play at being a MILF [Mother I'd Like to F**K] and I got a lot of sexual action from American Pie," she told Variety. "There were so many benefits to doing that movie. I mean, there would be like 200 people that I would never have slept with." Read more: Why we should celebrate Jada Pinkett-Smith and Gwyneth Paltrow getting real about their sex lives Jennifer Coolidge has opened up about the number of people she slept with since 'American Pie', pictured in November 2021. (Getty Images) Coolidge isn't the only star to get candid about the number of people they have had sex with, in fact even though many remain tight-lipped about their love lives, others have also put a figure on their sexual encounters over the years. Back in 2019, Mariah Carey revealed that while she has had some high profile relationships, she has never really played the field. "I haven't had that many, but there has been a variety pack," Carey told Cosmopolitan. "I've only been with five people in my life, so I'm kind of a prude, honestly, compared to most others in the field." Rock Star, Mick Jagger's magic number is, allegedly, much higher than Careys. According to author Christopher Anderson, who wrote the 2012 biography Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger, the 79-year-old musician has potentially slept with thousands of women. "By one estimate, Mick Jagger has slept with 4000 women over the course of his life," Anderson told Extra while promoting the book. "In retrospect, I think that may be kind of a low figure," he added. Read more: How an orgasm affects your body and mind for the following 60 minutes Story continues Mariah Carey has previously opened up about her magic number, pictured in January 2020. (Getty Images) Actor Charlie Sheen could potentially give Jagger a run for his money in the bedroom encounter stakes. The Two And A Half Men star once claimed to be so good in bed that the ladies would call him "The Machine", so it's little wonder that the 56-year-old has admitted to losing count of his sexual tally. "If you want me to take a wild guess, I'll say 5000," he told Maxim. Russell Brand also estimates his magic number runs into the thousands. The comedian may now be happily married to Laura Gallacher, with the couple sharing two daughters, but in his bachelor heyday he once claimed that the number of women he has bedded was "up there" at the 1000 mark, as reported by the Mirror. "I was having sex with different women three, four, five times a day. In Ireland, nine in one evening," the star said on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson in 2010. Amy Schumer previously revealed her magic number was 28, pictured in December 2021. (Getty Images) Someone with a slightly more modest magic number is Amy Schumer. In her 2016 memoir The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, the comedian and actor Amy Schumer discussed the number of sexual partners she'd had at the time. "To date, I've slept with 28 people. I can't remember all of their names, but I remember the nicknames I gave them (Third Ball, Pit Bull Guy, JKJKJKJK)," she wrote. Read more: Great sex is less important than a clean bathroom, new research finds How do celebrity sexual partner counts compare to those not in the public eye? While there is a pretty big range between the number of sexual encounters some celebrities have shared, it seems the average person is seeing considerably less action. According to a survey by Superdrug, of 2,000 people in the US and Europe, people from the UK average have seven sexual partners across their lifetime, which is considerably more than their European and US counterparts. Italians averaged only 5.4 sexual partners, which was similar to those from Belgium, while 6.2 was the average number of partners for people from Germany. Further research, carried out by men's mental health platform, Manual, found that British men have sex with 9.8 partners on average, across their lifetime. This put them in 16th place for the number of sexual partners in the study of 35 countries. Top of the list was Turkey, with 14.5, followed by Australia with 13.3. Read more: Midlife women are happiest with their sex lives, study finds How do celebrity magic number stack up with the general population? (Getty Images) When it comes to being honest about the number of people they've slept with the majority of both genders, 67.4% of women and 58.6% of men, admitted to always being truthful. There are the odd few who like to bend the truth, however, with 5.8% of women and 10.1% of men confessing to both increasing and decreasing the number, presumably depending on the situation. While it may be interesting to discover other people's magic number, it is important to understand that everyone's circumstances are different and people shouldn't feel pressure to compare themselves to others in the sexual partner stakes. While people in some countries prove to have more sexual partners than others, it is important not to compare yourself to these figures," explains Dr Earim Chaudry, medical director of Manual Safe, consensual sex should always also be practised, and the number of sexual partners does not correlate with a person's level of satisfaction with their sex life. Aug. 3The Huntsville-Walker County Chamber of Commerce will be hosting its Small Business Breakfast to encourage local business leaders and professionals to engage with community leaders. The breakfast will be Thursday, Aug. 11 at Farmhouse Cafe and will be catered by Frank's Taco Station. Initial costs should be expected for attendees, including a $10 charge for chamber members and a $15 for potential members. Doors will open at 7:30 a.m. with a program shortly following at 8 a.m. This Small Business Breakfast is primarily to build business relationships in a casual informative setting. Attendees are welcome to share their own infomercial and bring informative flyers and literature for visiting members. Donor prizes can be brought and will be announced from a microphone during the breakfast. Huntsville-Walker County Chamber of Commerce CEO and President, Ray Hernandez said, "We're honored to host them on a monthly basis. It's a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, business owners and other leaders within the community. As we all know people like to do business with individuals they know, like and trust and this event provides that opportunity to build relationships." Residents in South Charleston in West Virginia were under an order to shelter in place for around 35 minutes on Thursday morning. The shelter guidance was first issued at around 6.25am after officials announced that a minor chemical incident had occurred at the Clearon plant in the area, with a slight haze and the smell of chlorine being detected in the area, according to West Virginia Metro News. More follows... The Rocket Force under the Eastern Theatre Command of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts conventional missile tests into the waters off the eastern coast of Taiwan, from an undisclosed location in this handout released on August 4, 2022. Eastern Theatre Command/Handout via REUTERS China's staging provocative military drills near Taiwan in response to Pelosi's visit. Experts say the drills are not just about signaling but serve as a rehearsal for seizing the island. One expert told Insider Beijing is signaling "how willing China is to use military force over Taiwan." In the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial trip to Taiwan, the Chinese military is staging massive, provocative live-fire exercises in close proximity to the island which has included launching missiles into nearby waters. Experts on the region say that the joint air and sea exercises not only signal China's anger over Pelosi's visit, but also serve as a kind of practice for what would be needed to take Taiwan by force. China regards Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, as a breakaway part of its own territory. The Chinese government has said it wants to achieve the "reunification" of China and Taiwan peacefully, but it has not excluded the possibility of achieving this goal through military force. The drills being held by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) are intended to serve multiple purposes, including to "rehearse for a blockade or other major military operations against Taiwan (including preventing third countries from intervening)," Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Insider. The exercises are also meant to "punish Taiwan and undermine Taiwan's morale and support for President Tsai" while signaling to Washington, Taipei, and the international community "how willing China is to use military force over Taiwan," Lin added, going on to say that Beijing also hopes to discourage other countries from supporting Taiwan or sending government officials to visit in the future. The immediate purposes of the drills are to present "a show of force to respond to Pelosi's visit" and "to exhibit [China's] displeasure" and "presumably to deter the US or other countries from undertaking visits like this in the future," Lyle Morris, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation who focuses on China's foreign policy and military, told Insider. Story continues But another purpose of the drills is to show the Chinese military's "readiness to respond to Taiwan provocations" that China regards as breaking from the status quo, which "naturally support PLA capabilities to blockade or invade Taiwan in the future," added Morris, who also served as the Country Director for China in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2019 to 2021. Oriana Skylar Mastro, an expert on the Chinese military and fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, told The New York Times the Chinese drills are "not just about the messaging." "Under the guise of signaling, they're trying to basically test their ability to conduct complex maneuvers that are necessary for an amphibious assault on Taiwan," Mastro said. An article published on the Chinese Ministry of Defense website said the exercises "focus on key training sessions including joint blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, airspace control operation, and the joint combat capabilities of the troops got tested in the military operations," and the nationalist and often provocative Chinese state-affiliated media outlet Global Times also characterized the drills as "rehearsals for the PLA to reunify the island by force." Meanwhile, Taiwanese officials described the exercises, which have encircled the island, as "tantamount to an air and sea blockade." On Thursday, as China carried out its drills, at least 11 Chinese ballistic missiles were fired into waters around Taiwan, Taiwan's Defense Ministry confirmed. Several missiles reportedly flew over the island itself, and the Japanese government said five missiles landed in water close to Taiwan that are part of its Exclusive Economic Zone. "This is a grave issue that concerns our country's national security and the safety of the people," Japan's Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said, according to Kyodo News. In the midst of the live-fire military drills, which are poised to continue until Sunday, Chinese warplanes also repeatedly crossed the median line that divides the Taiwan Strait. The situation has the region on edge and is raising some concerns that a broader crisis with global implications could be on the horizon particularly given the Taiwan Strait is a major trade route. "China is upping the ante by what it is doing militarily vs Taiwan. My sense is the leadership is responding to nationalist sentiment as much as anything else. The danger is that [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] will feel the need to continue escalating, turning a manufactured crisis into a real one," Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet on Thursday. Along these lines, some China watchers and others in the US foreign policy community have questioned the wisdom of Pelosi visiting Taiwan. Prior to her arrival, China warned that the visit could provoke a military response. Beijing said it would regard the visit of such a high-ranking US lawmaker as undermining the US government's longstanding policy of not supporting Taiwan's independence. But Pelosi said that traveling to Taiwan served as important symbol of America's commitment to democracy, particularly at a time when China is increasingly aggressive in the region. Bonnie Glaser, a leading China expert and director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Insider last week that US policy toward Taiwan needs "to be more clear and more consistent." "The US says it doesn't support Taiwan independence. We have to be clear about what that means we will not do," she said, noting though that more of the blame for current tensions can be attributed to Beijing. The White House insists that there's been no change to US policy, as it decries China over the military drills. National security advisor Jake Sullivan told NPR on Wednesday that "we believe that what China is doing here is not responsible. We believe that it is escalating tensions unnecessarily. And this is particularly so because what the speaker did in visiting Taiwan is not unprecedented, it is not threatening to China, it is not out of the historical norm." Read the original article on Business Insider Hainan chicken rice, center, and other dishes at Pearl River Deli. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) When chomping into the Macau pork-chop bun at Pearl River Deli, the first sensation that rolls over your taste buds is obvious: meat. Breaded, fried, appealingly nubbly meat. It takes about eight seconds before more intricate flavors start to sing out in harmony. Tomato-onion relish, simmered to jam with garlic and capers, introduces sour, sweetness and tang. You might first notice the sugar sprinkled atop the bolo bao also known as a pineapple bun for its turmeric-yellow color and patterned crown, not for any presence of fruit as a texture that grazes the roof of your mouth. It blends in among the other tastes and lingers without overwhelming. To boost the savory kick, umami-blasting Maggi seasoning laces the mayo thats spread over the pork in a thin slick. The chop is bone-in; the long end, full of crisp-chewy edges, juts out of the bao, resembling a fish tail. If youre sharing the dish, you may wind up in a sort of wishbone situation. One of you will be luckier. Red lanterns, left, hang from the front entryway at Pearl River Deli; right, a marinated cucumber side dish. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Maybe each diner should order their own. The pork bao is among the most perfectly engineered sandwich-type constructs in Los Angeles and, at one of the citys most creatively vital and mercurial restaurants, is among a handful of menu mainstays. No single label neatly defines Pearl River Deli, but chef and owner Johnny Lee devised it foremost as a personal expression of Cantonese cooking. Its the cuisine of his childhood. His parents moved the family from Taishan, Guangdong, to Los Angeles when Lee was 1. He grew up visiting Chinatown on weekly grocery-shopping jaunts. Two decades later, in January 2020, he took an opportunity to try out a pop-up in Far East Plaza in a storefront vacated by Eddie Huangs Baohaus. As he settled in, Lee watched the lines for Howlin Rays hot chicken sandwiches trail down the plaza corridors for two months. Then the world went quiet. Pearl River Deli hunkered down in the tiny space, serving takeout for nearly the first two years of the pandemic. At the end of 2021, Lee announced he would move the restaurant down the street a few blocks to the 1930s-era building long occupied by New Dragon Seafood Restaurant and more recently by Vivian Kus wonderful, short-lived Taiwanese breakfast pop-up Today Starts Here. Story continues Various books about food and cooking sit on top of a shelf at Pearl River Deli. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Patrons dine at Pearl River Deli. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) PRD 2.0, as Lee sometimes calls it, reopened in its spare larger space at the end of March. He and his crew have eased in slowly. Concise menus appear weekly on Instagram. Lee once wrote there, Were gonna continue the ethos of whats driven us since the beginning: We cook whatever we want and feel like. Short-run specials disappear fast, sometimes maddeningly so. But, to paraphrase words that came to mind when I saw an original "Star Wars" poster among the framed images that fill the restaurants back wall, this Death Star is now fully operational. The kitchen has landed on a flow that accommodates a sustainable mix of ambition, experimentation and consistency. The front entryway of Pearl River Deli's new location. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Before Pearl River Deli, Lee made his name as a chef with the Hainan chicken rice he mastered while running Side Chick in the Santa Anita mall. He poaches the bird slowly until the flesh turns buttery and the skin retains a bit of snap while almost melting into the meat. The way he glosses rice with chicken fat leaves it light, never greasy. The flavors of the sauces on the side, even the acid-bright hot sauce, register gently. Its a calming collage that steadies your mood. Lee also clearly no longer wants the labors of the dish to rule his culinary life. He honors his customers demands for it but continually switches up its availability; currently Hainan chicken rice runs as a weekend special, and I have a feeling that will remain its slot for a while. You can depend on the constant presence of char siu the pork belly fat deeply rendered, the arching crown of each slice reddened and caramelized from a glaze heady with five-spice. A plate comes with either rice (ideal for soaking up the meats juices) or egg noodles (pleasing in their tangled, textural contrast). The silky shrimp scramble sometimes made with crab, or served in a shallow pool of crab gravy is a shape-shifter that lately has settled into the form of a beautifully pale omelet. Its rich and arguably best enjoyed as a shared addition with other dishes on the table. The char siu plate with noodles. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) The bao for the Macau pork-chop bun is cracklier and more structurally sound thanks to pastry chef Laura Hoang; she has provided desserts for many businesses across L.A. but took on the role of chef de cuisine when Pearl River Deli moved. Rice flour gives the bao dough its appealing tautness, and Hoang uses the master recipe for an ever-changing rotation of sweet and savory inspirations: cream-filled strawberry shortcakes built from the bolo bao, buns filled with char siu or overlaid with hot dogs and (particularly outstanding) a trio of corn, cheese and chili oil. Hoangs edgy whimsy matches Lees restless imagination. Their paired creativity carries a thunder-and-lightning potency. Pearl River Deli owner and chef Johnny Lee, left, and chef de cuisine Laura Hoang. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) You study the menu at the counter where you order; Lee, Hoang and other staffers bring the food out as its ready. What else is there to eat? Simple steamed bok choy dressed in oyster sauce, wok-smoky chowfun tossed with mushrooms or pork and who knows! Fried lemon chicken? Its billed as a weekend special and sells out in a night. Lee is an ace with clay pot tofu casseroles and sausage-flecked rice dishes, but they consume lots of time and stovetop space, so they come and go. I seem to always miss Hoangs seasonal shaved ice concoctions, but I have caught her sublime, airy-dense cheesecake finished with mango slices macerated in passion fruit-makrut lime shrub. I hope you do too. When I occasionally long for a more locked-in experience at Pearl River Deli, I remind myself to step back and consider the context in which it exists. The steamed bok choy side dish, left, and a collage decorating a back wall at Pearl River Deli. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Chinatown technically the New Chinatown community, since Old Chinatown was razed in the 1930s on the land where Union Station stands has become a center of gentrification battles in Los Angeles. High-rise condo buildings and expensive restaurants appear in a neighborhood where the median income hovers around $22,000 a year. Lifelong residents are being displaced; the grocery stores where Lee and his family came to shop no longer exist. As generational tastes shift, Cantonese cuisine also continues to vanish in Los Angeles. Grand banquet houses in the San Gabriel Valley draw fewer crowds for celebrations; Needle, a Cantonese-inspired restaurant that opened shortly before the pandemic, closed in Silver Lake last week. In Lees cooking, you can taste the cuisines history and a real-time evolution guided by his hands and mind. And he doesnt want to be tethered: Sometimes dishes from Vietnamese, Thai and Hawaiian traditions or other regions of China appear in his repertoire. Most of the time theyre delicious, but Lee is an exacting self-editor: Ive noticed dishes that fall flat disappear quickly. The world seems to be in accelerated flux. If Lees goal is to make food animated by curiosity and an overt pursuit of excellence, why shouldnt his menu change at a heart-racing pace? The strawberry shortcake bolo, made with Sunrise Organic Farm strawberries. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Chord Energy Corporation (CHRD) came out with quarterly earnings of $7.30 per share, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $7.81 per share. This compares to earnings of $2.76 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of -6.53%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $7.13 per share when it actually produced earnings of $8.32, delivering a surprise of 16.69%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates two times. Chord Energy Corporation , which belongs to the Zacks Oil and Gas - Exploration and Production - United States industry, posted revenues of $789.38 million for the quarter ended June 2022, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 91.83%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $393.06 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates four times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Chord Energy Corporation shares have added about 1.1% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's decline of -14.2%. What's Next for Chord Energy Corporation? While Chord Energy Corporation has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Story continues Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Chord Energy Corporation: favorable. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to outperform the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $8.45 on $908 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $34.50 on $2.84 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year. Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Oil and Gas - Exploration and Production - United States is currently in the top 22% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. Another stock from the same industry, Denbury (DEN), has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2022. The results are expected to be released on August 4. This independent oil and gas company is expected to post quarterly earnings of $1.72 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +182%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 7.2% lower over the last 30 days to the current level. Denbury's revenues are expected to be $403.22 million, up 33.8% from the year-ago quarter. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Chord Energy Corporation (CHRD) : Free Stock Analysis Report Denbury Inc. (DEN) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research A man watches an Orange County Sheriff's Department cruiser patrol the Santa Ana River bed. (Al Schaben / Los Angeles Times) In an effort to address a burgeoning unhoused population and increasing fire risk, the Riverside City Council has approved a ban on camping or sleeping in areas where undeveloped vegetation runs up against homes, including the Santa Ana River bottom. The ordinance makes it illegal to "sit, lie, sleep, or store, use, maintain, or place any bulky item or personal property" in the so-called wildland-urban interface. Before the 6-1 vote Tuesday night, city officials cited an anticamping ordinance passed last year by the Los Angeles City Council designating certain areas off-limits to encampments; the law has drawn criticism from activists who say it criminalizes homelessness. Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes was the lone no vote, citing concerns that there will not be enough shelter for everyone living in the river bottom. Exacerbated by extreme drought, probable "human-caused" fires have ignited in the river bottom over the years, prompting officials to propose the anticamping ordinance. In the last five years, the Riverside Fire Department has responded to 163 calls for vegetation fires in the Santa Ana River bottom, 66% of which were caused by humans, according to a city report. Riverside has struggled with homelessness for years, allotting $33.5 million of its city budget in 2021-22 to create affordable housing and address the crisis. In June, the City Council approved a five-year plan to reduce homelessness that includes assembling a "Wildlands Public Safety Engagement Team" comprising the Riverside Police Department, outreach workers from City Net and code enforcement officers to try to engage with people living in the Santa Ana River bottom. Once shelter and housing are made available, the team will conduct anticamping enforcement and camp clean-up. Officials said they will abide by a federal court ruling that forbids cities from enforcing prohibitive camping ordinances when alternative housing isn't available. The county this year has identified 3,316 homeless people, 59.71% of whom don't have shelter. As more people have resided in the Santa Ana River bottom and remote canyon areas, fire risk has increased. Story continues During Tuesday's meeting, officials also highlighted the Riverside County Partnership for the Homeless Outreach Mediation and Education program, an alternative criminal sentencing program for those who are experiencing homelessness or are on the verge of homelessness. In order to qualify for the program, which promotes a treatment-based approach to sentencing, rather than incarceration or fines, the person must be charged with a nonviolent misdemeanor and be evaluated by the court, attorneys and Riverside University Health System-Behavioral Health. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer in front of LAPD headquarters in August 2021. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer is proposing a new law to strengthen reproductive rights and to position the city as a haven for those seeking abortion services. Feuer said the draft legislation would prohibit any pregnancy center from misrepresenting the services it performs. The proposed law would also provide women and others legal recourse if they are misled. "When it comes to reproductive choice, time matters," Feuer said at a news conference Thursday. "When it comes to reproductive choices, truth matters." States around the country are restricting or prohibiting abortion access, making California and Los Angeles County a critical destination for some in the post-Roe vs. Wade era, Feuer said. According to a June UCLA study, up to 16,000 more people are expected to travel to California each year for abortion care, with more than half likely to end up in Los Angeles County. To aid those seeking help, the draft legislation would ban clinics from making false advertising statements or misleading potential clients about the services they provide. While it applies to any business offering pregnancy-related care, the proposed law is largely aimed at providers known as crisis pregnancy centers, which are often religiously affiliated and opposed to abortion. These crisis centers are commonly near or otherwise resemble reproductive health clinics and often deceive people by falsely advertising full reproductive care, including abortion. Many centers are typically staffed by untrained or unlicensed volunteers and employees, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate information that limits people from making grounded and timely choices about their reproductive care. Those who seek care at crisis pregnancy centers are often in distress, and they tend to be disproportionately young, poorly educated or poor, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights. "After the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, I am even more concerned that these centers will feed on the vulnerability of these patients and that women will be told that abortion care isnt an option, forced to give birth to a child that they cannot afford to care for," said Nury Martinez, Los Angeles City Council president, who in 2016 introduced a motion calling attention to the issue with crisis centers. Story continues There are an estimated five crisis pregnancy centers in Los Angeles, Feuer said. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked enforcement of a 2015 California law, known as the Reproductive Fact Act, that required faith-based crisis pregnancy centers to notify patients that the state offers subsidized medical care, including abortions. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. A fourth-generation dairy farmer fears that possible climate initiatives could threaten independent farmers and their ability to provide for the U.S. food supply. Several nations have imposed regulations on the agriculture industry, such as limits on nitrogen emissions, which have sparked backlash from farmers in those countries. The Biden administration, too, has indicated that it aims to push changes on the industry to tackle climate change. "Americans are feeding into this lie that climate change is because of agriculture and climate change is not going to get better until farmers and ranchers do better," Stephanie Nash, a fourth-generation dairy farmer, told Fox News. In 2020 the EPA estimated that at 11% of the U.S.'s total greenhouse gas emissions came from the agriculture sector, compared to 27% from transportation, 25% from energy, and 24% from industry. CLIMATE CHANGE IS HERE AND CONGRESS MUST ACT NOW TO CREATE A CLEANER, HEALTHIER WORLD President Biden, in his first congressional address, floated paying farmers to grow cover crops, which are planted to cover the soil rather than for harvesting, to reduce carbon dioxide and improve soil health. It also encouraged the Department of Agriculture to use farm aid funding to incentivize carbon emission reduction on farms. Most recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released a new ESG proposal in March which would require companies to report the environmental impact of its practices. If enacted, American farmers and ranchers would be left vulnerable as major food-production corporations could look toward buying small farms or importing animal products to preserve their ESG rating. Nash fears the effort to implement green policies across the globe will continue to kill off an already struggling farming industry that's faced with skyrocketing costs for labor, fuel, seed and fertilizer. She said institutions like the World Economic Forum are "scaring us" with its prediction that by 2050 the global population will demand 70% more food than is consumed today and advocates for an overhaul of food production to meet that supply. Story continues WORKING AMERICANS 'ARE GOING TO PAY THE PRICE' FOR BIDEN'S CLIMATE CHANGE AGENDA: THE BIG SUNDAY SHOW "Well, if you continue to kill off our food supply and our American farmers, yeah, we're not going to have enough food," she said. The Inflation Reduction Act introduced last week would spend $369 billion on various climate change initiatives. The bill claims it would reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40% by 2030, primarily through investing in renewable energy production and practices. FOOD BANKS IN AMERICA EXPERIENCE SURGING DEMAND: 'NO SIGN OF IT SLOWING DOWN ANY TIME SOON' The Dutch government announced its plan to reduce nitrogen emissions by 50% in June, causing a major backlash among the nation's farmers. To meet its goal, the plan requires a 30% reduction in the number of Dutch livestock, whose manure produces nitrogen oxide, forcing many farms out of business. Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign to protest climate initiatives (Photo by VINCENT JANNINK/ANP/AFP via Getty Images) VINCENT JANNINK/ANP/AFP via Getty Images Similarly, the Canadian government proposed a 30% cut to nitrogen emissions from fertilizer by 2030 as part of a plan to get to net zero in the next three decades, sparking backlash from farmers. And New Zealand proposed a plan to tax farmers for the emissions from their livestocks farts and burps. Nash, who said her family moved their century-old dairy farm from California to Tennessee in 2015 due to the Golden States restrictive agriculture policies limiting water usage, fears the U.S. will follow suit in implementing restrictive policies on livestock farmers already struggling to stay afloat amid increasing production costs and existing regulatory restrictions. FARMERS, CONSUMERS SCRAMBLE AS FOOD PRICES EXPECTED TO SURGE HIGHER She said the push by corporations and wealthy individuals like Bill Gates to shift away from animal products toward plant-based food is rooted in misinformation and ulterior motives. "They can say it's for the future, and they want to feed Americans, but honestly, they're putting chemically grown food into our bodies," she said. Imitation meats like Beyond Meat contain synthetic preservatives and Red #3 food dye which was banned by the FDA for use in cosmetics in 1990, according to the Center for Consumer Freedom. Looking ahead, Nash said to look out for the 2025 Farm Bill, legislation passed roughly once every five years, which she fears will be used to give the EPA more access to and control over independent farmers. "There's not a backbone in Washington, D.C. and there's not enough family farmers and ranchers in office to protect us around the United States," she said. Aug. 4What started as a simple event to welcome in the new school year has grown into a greater demonstration of community collaboration for a good cause. Coastal Community Health Services will host Friday a free End-of-Summer Extravaganza intended to bring the community together ahead of the upcoming academic year, which begins Aug. 9. The event, planned for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Mary Ross Waterfront Park in Brunswick, is supported by more than 50 local partners that will offer back-to-school supplies as well as public health information and resources. Along with games and entertainment, the event will include a field sobriety test simulation and free distribution of Narcan, a nasal spray that can save someone during an emergency overdose situation. "We want all the children to be aware of what the possibilities are out there because fentanyl and heroine are having such a major impact on our youth these days a well as our adults," said Honey Sparre, equity liaison at Coastal Community Health and an event organizer. There will also be speakers, entertainers and a live DJ at the event. Students can get free haircuts, backpacks, school supplies, books and more. Door prizes will also be given out to the parents and other adults. "They can come and not only get resources for their children but for themselves while having good, safe, fun time," Sparre said. Safe Harbor Children's Center will sponsor the Kona Ice Truck and a gaming truck. Obstacle courses will be set up alongside interactive activities at almost every sponsored station. Face-painting will be offered as well. New Glory Church will grill out. "I think the community's just ready to come together as a whole," Sparre said. "... Our community is great at rallying together when asked, and that's what they're doing." Twins Bernardo and Arthur Lima, 3, born conjoined at the head, can now look at each other face-to-face in time for their 4th birthday. A medical team from Brazil and London worked together to separate the boys, who shared vital veins in their brains, during a series of surgeries, involving almost 100 medical professionals and 33 total hours in the operating room, according to a statement from the nonprofit Gemini Untwined. We are delighted the surgery went so well, Dr. Gabriel Mufarrej, head of pediatric surgery at Instituto Estadual do Cerebro Paulo Niemeyer in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, told the BBC. Since the parents of the boys came from their home in the Roraima region to Rio to seek our help two-and-a-half years ago, they have become part of our family here. Image: Surgeons successfully separated 4-year-old conjoined twins Arthur and Bernardo Lima in Rio de Janiero. (NBC News) In 2018, Adriely and Antonio Lima, who live in rural Brazil, welcomed twins, Arthur and Bernardo. The boys were born connected at the skull and sharing part of their brain, whats known as craniopagus twins. For much of their lives, they lived at the Instituto Estadual do Cerebro Paulo Niemeyer hospital, receiving care from doctors and nurses who one day hoped to separate them, according to Gemini Untwined. Their team in Brazil had reached out to experts around the world for help and many refused saying it was too difficult, Gemini Untwined said in a statement. Dr. Noor ul Owase Jeelani founded the nonprofit to train surgeons around the world how to separate craniopagus twins. He worked with the Brazilian team for months to train them and used a virtual reality room to operate in tandem, according to the BBC. In some ways these operations are considered the hardest of our time, Jeelani told the BBC. To do it in virtual reality was just really man-on-Mars stuff. Image: Twins Arthur and Bernardo Lima sleep next to each other after a successful separation surgery in Rio de Janiero. (NBC News) Craniopagus twins are extremely rare occurring in one out of every 2.5 million live births and most twins dont survive past their second birthday without being separated. When Arthur and Bernardo were finally separated at nearly 4-years-old, they became the oldest twins to undergo such a surgery, according to Gemini Untwined. As a parent myself, it is always such a special privilege to be able to improve the outcome for these children and their families, Jeelani said in a statement from Gemini Untwined. Not only have we provided a new future for the boys and their family, we have equipped the local team with the capabilities and confidence to undertake such complex work successfully. Thanks to the training, the Instituto Estadual do Cerebro Paulo Niemeyer will become a partner with the UK-based organization and be able to provide these surgeries to other conjoined twins in South America. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY., apologized to President Joe Biden for saying she would not support a 2024 presidential run and tried to reword her statement during an interview Thursday. After a reporter popped the question of if Biden should seek re-election during a Tuesday debate against primary opponent Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-NY, Maloney said, "I don't believe he's running for re-election." The media quickly added Maloney to the growing list of Democrats who aren't endorsing the president. Maloney joined CNN Thursday to apologize to Biden for not supporting his potential run. "Mr. President, I apologize," she said. "I want you to run. I happen to think you won't be running, but if you run, when you run, I will be there 100%." The reporter then asked Maloney to explain why she thought he wasn't going to run. "That was just my own personal belief but I will support him if he runs, and it's totally his decision We are all entitled to our own information." TWO NEW YORK REPS JOIN GROWING LIST OF DEMOCRATS WHO REFUSE TO COMMIT TO SUPPORTING BIDEN IN 2024 Maloney then went on to praise Biden and how he's handled the presidency so far, touting the recent introduction of the "exciting" Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. In recent weeks, following Biden's approval rating plummeting to a record low of 31%, Democrats have been dodging the question of if they would endorse the president in a 2024 run. LIST OF DEMOCRATS OPPOSED TO BIDEN RUNNING FOR RE-ELECTION GROW WITH ADDITION OF VULNERABLE CONGRESSWOMAN Nadler, who is running against Maloney in New York's newly redrawn 12th Congressional District, was also asked if Biden should see re-election during the debate. "Too early to say. Doesn't serve the purpose of the Democratic Party to deal with that until after the midterms," Nadler said. Other Democrats have either avoided committing to support Biden or outright said he should not run again for president. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn, told an interviewer that instead of Biden seeking re-election, "The country would be well-served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats who step up." Story continues Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., agreed with Phillips that the country needs "a new generation of leadership" up and down the ballot. Phillips and Craig are both up for re-election this fall. Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., said during a town hall, "Im not going to opine on who should be president." Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio., told Fox News' Sandra Smith: "Im working on my own election and thats all Im focused on right now." Rep. Alexandria Ocastio-Cortez, D-NY., told CNN ealier this summer: "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it Should he run again, I think it's we'll take a look at it." Maloney was the only representative to attempt to retract an apparently anti-Biden 2024 statement. Biden, who would be 81 at the next presidential election, has not officially announced a reelection bid, though the White House has stated that he plans to run. Shame on you, Democrats. Thats the big takeaway from Tuesdays West Michigan primary upset that saw a MAGA, election-conspiracist candidate prevail over freshman incumbent Republican Rep. Peter Meijer. The states 3rd Congressional District was watched nationally because of the Trump dynamics at play. Meijer is one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump last year after the Jan. 6 riot. The vote made him a pariah to the Trump faithful. Oddly, it also made Meijer a target of Democrats, who dumped nearly half a million dollars on a TV ad that boosted Meijers opponent John Gibbs by showcasing his far-right Trump credentials. The amount the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent on this ad is more than Gibbs raised during his entire campaign. Where's the patriotism? Democrats run ad to boost Trump candidate in congressional race A dangerous bet by Democrats Democrats made the dangerous bet that helping get the MAGA candidate elected would clear the path for flipping the seat come November. Attorney Hillary Scholten, the Democrat whom Meijer defeated by 6 points in 2020, is again making a run for the seat. Rep. Peter Meijer, R-Mich. Oakland University political science professor David Dulio told me Monday that if Meijer had won the primary, he likely would have prevailed in November. A Gibbs win, meanwhile, is an all but certain Democratic victory in a district that now leans more left after recent redistricting. Democrats' fingerprints on election In a piece for Common Sense, Meijer put it this way: If successful, Republican voters will be blamed if any of these (Trump-endorsed) candidates are ultimately elected, but there is no doubt Democrats fingerprints will be on the weapon. We should never forget it. Primaries: Election conspiracies and Donald Trump's long trail of broken brains Democrats' risky gamble doesnt support their purported defense of democracy, which theyve broadcast loudly during weeks of televised congressional hearings investigating Trumps involvement in what went down Jan. 6, 2021. Story continues Democratic leaders probably hope that everyone will forget their meddling in the race, and you can bet theyll use Republicans choice of Gibbs as rationale for painting the whole party as tinfoil-hat wearing extremists. The cost of impeachment vote So far, Meijer is one of two Republicans who voted to impeach Trump to suffer a primary loss. Two others from Washington state survived their primaries Tuesday. Four of the 10 arent seeking reelection at all. The most prominent of the 10 Republicans is Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who is up next in her Aug. 16 primary. Its not looking good for her, especially given her very public role as vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee. Cheney has already faced punishment from the party, losing her leadership role in the House after her impeachment vote and continued criticism of Trump. Trump has had mixed results as GOP kingmaker, but the message Tuesday seems to be that candidates who cross him risk a backlash at the ballot box. Let's stop rehashing 2020 USA TODAY columnist Ingrid Jacques I would love to see the party move past Trump and rehashing the 2020 election. And I know most moderate Republicans and mainstream conservatives feel the same. Primaries typically play to the party faithful, however, and Democrats are doing everything they can to help the most extreme GOP candidates whom they think they can defeat more easily in November, when a broader base of voters heads to the polls. Its despicable, and as Meijer said, dont forget it. More from Ingrid Jacques: Michigan primary tests Trumps role as Republicans' anointer-in-chief Medical students shunned a doctor because of her abortion views. Is this what America has become? New Biden Title IX rules would use civil rights office to strip civil rights from students Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Democrats help Trump-backed extremist win in Michigan primary election IRYNA BALACHUK, OLEKSANDR SHUMILIN THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2022, 20:41 Iryna Vereshchuk, Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine responsible for evacuation, has criticised the Amnesty International report which claims that it has not come across any instances of the Ukrainian Armed Forces calling for the evacuation of civilians or helping to organise evacuation from buildings at the epicentre of hostilities. Source: Vereshchuk in an interview for Ukrainska Pravda Quote from Vereshchuk: "The process of evacuation is extremely complicated. Unfortunately, there is no-one we can appeal to when Russia ruthlessly violates peoples rights, when it violates the Geneva Conventions and every other convention. All those [human rights] organisations are powerless and inadequate, they can do nothing about it. The same human rights organisation that has authored this report knows full well what the [Russian] occupiers are doing on the temporarily occupied territories [of Ukraine], but it doesnt want to talk about it because doing so would reveal the lack of mechanisms at their disposal to hold the terrorist state accountable." Details: Vereshchuk noted that the Ukrainian forces regularly appeal with requests to "urgently evacuate civilians" and do everything they can to help with evacuations on the ground. Quote from Vereshchuk: "But the enemy is wickedly using our civilians as a human shield, they are equipping their strong points and firing positions in our hospitals, schools, and private houses. They are deliberately corralling our women and children into buildings that they then use to fire from on our positions." Earlier: On 4 August, Amnesty International released a report which states that Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harms way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, as they repelled the Russian invasion. Meanwhile, Amnesty International fails to even mention anywhere on its website let alone denounce the recent killing of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka. The Office of the Ukrainian President has said that it is only the Russian army that puts the lives of Ukrainians in harms way and has added that the claims made by Amnesty International directly participate in Russias campaign to discredit Ukraine. Dmytro Kuleba, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, has said that he was outraged by the claims made by Amnesty International and that he considers them wrongful. Amnesty International has also stated that it was "not aware that the Ukrainian military who located themselves in civilian structures in residential areas asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians". Journalists fight on their own frontline. Become our patron, support our work! Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) rejected growing concerns over monkeypox during a press conference Wednesday, arguing that the media and politicians were unnecessarily stoking fear about the illness. I am so sick of politicians, and we saw this with COVID, trying to sow fear into the population, the Republican governor said. We had people calling, mothers worried about whether their kids could catch it at schools. We are not doing fear, he added. And we are not going to go out and try to rile people up and try to act like people cant live their lives as theyve been normally doing because of something. DeSantis, who has been a vocal critic of the Biden administrations response to COVID-19, also slammed states imposing emergency measures in regard to monkeypox. You see some of these states declaring states of emergency. Theyre going to abuse those emergency powers to restrict your freedom. I guarantee you thats what will happen, DeSantis said. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) declared a disaster in her state last weekend over the outbreak. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, both Democrats, also declared states of emergency over the virus on Monday. Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running against DeSantis in the Florida gubernatorial race, criticized the governors comments on Twitter. While Governor DeSantis dismisses Monkeypox, at-risk Floridians still need better information, better testing, and access to vaccines for prevention, Crist wrote. The governors comments come as Florida has recorded 525 monkeypox cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are 6,617 confirmed cases throughout the U.S. as of Wednesday. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. MIAMI Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended the top county prosecutor from Tampa on Thursday after the Democrat publicly said he wouldnt enforce a new state abortion restriction or a potential law banning surgeries for transgender children. Flanked by state and area law enforcement officials who are fellow Republicans, DeSantis said at his news conference that Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren was neglecting his official duties and was essentially usurping the veto power of a governor by signaling his refusal to prosecute those who break laws with which he disagrees. When you flagrantly violate your oath of office, when you make yourself above the law, you have violated your duty, DeSantis said. You have neglected your duty, and you are displaying a lack of competence to be able to perform those duties. Warren, who became a face of progressive criminal justice reform after he first won office in 2016 and had considered running for Florida attorney general in 2022, accused DeSantis of political posturing, suggesting the governor was motivated by his re-election campaign and his potential 2024 White House bid. Todays political stunt is an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition, Warren said in a written statement, accusing DeSantis of overriding the will of the voters who elected him prosecutor. The people have the right to elect their own leadersnot have them dictated by an aspiring presidential candidate who has shown time and again he feels accountable to no one. A Warren adviser who was not authorized to publicly speak on his behalf said Warren was blindsided by the DeSantis announcement and by the area law enforcement officials who bashed him as soft on crime while standing next to the governor at the news conference in Tampa. Warren was removed from his office by deputies, according to the adviser and another knowledgeable source who described him as angry and loud. Story continues Warrens team says he justifies resisting Floridas new abortion law DeSantis signed because it violates the law: a state constitutional privacy provision that the state Supreme Court previously ruled protected abortion rights. The new law is being challenged in court. The high-profile political dynamics were telegraphed a day earlier by DeSantis press secretary, Christina Pushaw, who hyped the coming announcement on social media. The governor's office also issued a statement to conservative media calling Warren a Soros-backed prosecutor, a reference to progressive financier George Soros, whom Warren in 2020 acknowledged may have helped his first successful election campaign four years before. Warren was elected with more than 53% of the vote, or 370,000 ballots, in 2020 in Hillsborough County. A Democratic stronghold, Hillsborough has a Republican sheriff, Chad Chronister, who joined other colleagues in trashing Warren at the DeSantis news conference. The suspension is another continuation of DeSantis muscular exercise of power, which Democrats and other critics routinely describe as dictatorial. More popular among Florida Republicans than former President Donald Trump, DeSantis has met little resistance from the GOP-led Legislature, although his office has a relatively poor court record defending laws he signed. Floridas Constitution gives a governor the right to suspend state officials for reasons of misfeasance, malfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony. DeSantis order, however, did not cite specific instances where Warren refused to do his job. Instead, DeSantis order said, Warrens blanket refusal to enforce Floridas new abortion restrictions or prospective restrictions concerning issues related to surgeries or restroom use for transgender people ran afoul of the state constitution. Under state law, the Florida Senate can decide whether to remove Warren from office for the remainder of his term. The chamber is controlled by the same Republicans who passed the abortion law that Warren said he opposes. DeSantis cited two letters signed by Warren along with other prosecutors from across the country: A June 24, 2022, joint statement supporting abortion rights and a June 2021 letter condemning efforts in a number of states to restrict access to gender-affirming health care for transgender people. Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court undoing federal protections for abortion rights, DeSantis signed the new legislation limiting abortions in Florida to 15 weeks, regardless of whether the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. The law is being challenged in court. DeSantis administration is in the process of using executive action to ban transition-related therapies for minors and Medicaid recipients. State lawmakers are expected to take the issue up during the next legislative session this spring. Another state attorney from Florida, Orlando-area prosecutor Monique H. Worrell, joined Warren in signing the letter supporting access to gender-affirming care, but she didnt sign the joint statement concerning abortion. A DeSantis spokesperson said Worrell is not being suspended for now because the proposed restrictions on surgeries for transgender children are not yet a matter of state law that she would be flouting. Shortly after taking office in 2019, DeSantis issued his first suspension by temporarily removing Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel from office over his offices handling of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland that left 17 dead and 17 wounded. Israel was subsequently removed from office by the Florida Senate. DeSantis' predecessor as governor, current Sen. Rick Scott, had refused to suspend Israel. Scott also had a different reaction to managing a different prosecutor from the Orlando area, Aramis Ayala, when she refused to prosecute death penalty cases, including one against an accused cop-killer: Scott just assigned those cases to other prosecutors instead of suspending her. Ayala is now running for attorney general. DeSantis faces re-election this year. Polls show hes leading his top prospective Democratic challengers, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Rep. Charlie Crist, who face each other in a primary on Aug. 23. Both Crist and Fried have made abortion rights a top issue in the primary and issued statements indicating that Warrens fate is now a campaign issue as well. Hes doing this because he wants to be dictator, not a governor of Florida. Thats not how this works, though. This will backfire, Fried said in a statement, which referenced Tuesdays vote in Kansas to protect abortion rights. We just saw it in Kansas. Florida is a pro-choice, pro-democracy state. If this stands, the people of Florida will put an end to it in November. CORRECTION (Aug. 4, 2022, 2:32 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the states abortion law. It was prior to the Supreme Courts decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, not after. The Dodgers will honor broadcasting legend Vin Scully with a commemorative jersey patch beginning Wednesday when they play the Giants in San Francisco. The black patch features a microphone with the word "Vin" above it. Scully, who was the voice of the Dodgers for 67 seasons, died Tuesday at age 94. Dodgers players, coaches and managers who have been honored with commemorative patches include Jim Gilliam (1978), Tim Crews (1993), Don Drysdale (1993), Roy Campanella (1993), Pee Wee Reese (1999), Duke Snider (2011), Don Newcombe (2019), Tom Lasorda (2021) and Don Sutton (2021). The Dodgers plan to honor Scully with a tribute Friday before their game against the San Diego Padres at Dodger Stadium. Funeral services are pending. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. The Justice Department is suing Peter Navarro for emails from his time as former President Trumps trade adviser, alleging that he used at least one nonadministration email account while working in the White House and was wrongfully retaining communications. While serving in the White House, Mr. Navarro used at least one non-official email account an account hosted by the non-official service ProtonMail to send and receive messages constituting Presidential records, according to court documents filed on Wednesday. Mr. Navarro did not copy each email or message constituting Presidential records that was sent or received on his non-official account or accounts to his official government email account, the court documents added. The Justice Department said in the filing that nonofficial electronic accounts used to carry out official duties are considered presidential records and therefore must be forwarded to official accounts within 20 days of sending them. The National Archives and Records Administration is also supposed to receive those communications before the president leaves office. The court filing alleges that Navarro did not respond to the archivist about those communications that had not been improperly handled. It further alleged that Navarro refused to return any Presidential records that he retained absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents after lawyers at the Department of Justice reached out to him about the matter. Mr. Navarro is wrongfully retaining Presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration, the filing claimed. Attorneys for Navarro refuted the Justice Departments claims in a statement to The Hill, saying their client did ask for his communications to be preserved. Mr. Navarro has never refused to provide records to the government. As detailed in our recent letter to the Archives, Mr. Navarro instructed his lawyers to preserve all such records, and he expects the government to follow standard processes in good faith to allow him to produce records. Instead, the government chose to file its lawsuit today, Navarros attorneys John Irving and John Rowley said. The development comes two months after Navarro was indicted by a grand jury for refusing to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. The Sanford Police Department is seeking the public's help in locating Jill Sidebotham, 28, of Springvale, Maine, and her daughter, Lydia. Both have not been seen by family members in more than a month. SANFORD, Maine This week makes a solid month since police and family members have had any indication of the whereabouts of a Sanford mother, her ex-boyfriend, and their 2-year-old daughter. Jill Sidebotham, 28, and her daughter, Lydia, were last seen June 27, when Sidebotham told her mother she and Lydia were going camping with her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Hansen, in Franklin County. Sidebotham told her mother she would return to Sanford by Thursday, June 30, at the latest, but that never happened. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has joined local and state authorities in the effort to locate the missing family, according to Sanford police Lt. Matthew Gagne. Authorities have issued alerts throughout New England and New York, Gagne added. Previous story: Police, family seek help to find missing Maine mom and daughter Jill Sidebotham, Nicholas Hansen, and their daughter, Lydia, are seen here at Walmart in Mexico, Maine, on Saturday, July 2, 2022. The Sanford Police Department has released this image to public as investigators continue their search for them. "This is still an active investigation, Gagne said. Until the three of them are located, well continue to search. Recently, the Sanford Police Department released video surveillance images of the last known whereabouts of Sidebotham, Hansen, and their daughter at a Walmart in Mexico, Maine, on July 2. Another image released by the police shows the three were indeed at a campground the Coos Canyon Campground in Byron on June 29. On Wednesday, Sidebothams father, Ron, said her disappearance is out of character. Its just not in her heart to do this, he said. There are so many factors that shy away from her doing this voluntarily. The Sanford Police Department has released this image that confirms that Lydia Sidebotham, Nicholas Hansen, and their daughter, Lydia, were at the Coos Canyon Campground in Byron, Maine, on June 29, 2022. Chief among them, according to Sidebotham: Jill has a 10-year-old son in Sanford. She loves her son, Sidebotham said. She adores him. Sidebotham said his 10-year-old grandson, who has a different father than Lydia, gets along very well with his sister. He embraces the older brother role, Sidebotham said. Sidebotham said his daughter appeared to be the one paying for merchandise at the checkout counter in the Walmart image. He said he noticed that a jar of money that she had kept at home here in Sanford is gone. There was about $200 in the jar, Sidebotham estimated. Story continues Ron Sidebotham, seen here at his home on Allen Street in Springvale, Maine, on Aug. 3, 2022, says he and his wife are grateful to those who have joined the search for his missing daughter, Jill Sidebotham. Jill Sidebotham, her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Hansen, and their daughter, Lydia, have been missing for a month, Sidebotham said he and his wife, Cottie, had seen no indication from their daughter the camping trip was planned. The Sanford Police Department has teamed up with the Maine Warden Service to use fixed-wing aircraft to provide aerial views of the towns of Rangely and Mexico, the two communities where the missing young family was last seen. Gagne said authorities continue to receive tips about the case, though fewer than when their search began weeks ago. Police are asking members of the public to keep an eye out for a silver 2005 Volkswagen Jetta, the last known vehicle that Sidebotham, Lydia and Hansen were known to be using. The vehicles Maine registration plate is 1563VJ. Anyone who sees either the three of them or their vehicle is urged to contact their local law enforcement agency, Gagne said. Sidebotham said he knows the Sanford Police Department is doing everything they can to find his daughter and granddaughter. The Sanford Police Department has released this image of Nicholas Hansen and his daughter, Lydia, at the Coos Canyon Campground in Byron, Maine, on June 29, 2022. Police and family members have been trying to locate Hansen, Lydia, and her mother, Jill Sidebotham, of Sanford, for more than a month now. Its a needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing at this point, he said. The search has attracted national media attention, with outlets from New England Cable News to People magazine reporting. Sidebotham said he and his wife want everyone who is helping in the search distributing flyers, posting on social media to know how much they appreciate their efforts. He said he hopes such efforts to locate his daughter continue. Dont give up on her, he said. Dont give up on us. And dont give up on that baby that goes without saying. This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Maine mom and 2-year-old still missing after a month Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls (right) answers a question during his news conference inside Yuma City Council Chambers about the current humanitarian crisis in the border region, on March 28, 2019, in Yuma. In the city of Yumas mayoral election, preliminary results show incumbent Douglas Nicholls is in the lead with 59% of the vote compared to his opponent Karen Watts with 38% of the vote, as of Wednesday morning. This number reflects results as of 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. A total of 9,407 ballots were cast with 4,700 ballots remaining to be counted. Nicholls has been vocal about migrants moving across the border into Yuma. In December 2021 he proclaimed a local emergency in Yuma and called the influx of migrants entering the city a humanitarian and border crisis in a press release. Yuma is a popular crossing for migrants coming into the U.S. from Mexico. The Biden Administration authorized last week, the completion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall there, where gaps in the wall make it a well-known area to cross. In a written statement to The Republic, the Nicholls campaign reflected on the preliminary win. It is good to have an affirmation from the voters of the previous 9 years of work as Mayor and to receive their confidence for 4 more years, the mayors campaign said in an emailed statement. For Nicholls, the largest issues facing the Yuma community are the future of water along the Colorado River, border security and immigration, and the direction of the economy. Water crisis: Modify Glen Canyon Dam soon or risk losing the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon His opponent Watts, who is a nurse practitioner, has been on the city council since 2018 and was deputy mayor in 2020. In other interviews Watts said she wanted to work on housing and climate change issues. In an interview April 10 with KYMA, Watts said her priority would be public safety and conserving water. Her team did not respond to a request for comment from The Republic. According to a city of Yuma press release, the city anticipates the final tally will be released on or by Wednesday, Aug. 10, following the 5-day verification period that ends Aug. 9. Results will become official once canvassed by the Yuma City Council at their Aug. 17 meeting. Story continues Coverage of southern Arizona on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is funded by the nonprofit Report for America in association with The Republic. Reach the reporter at sarah.lapidus@gannett.com. Subscribe to azcentral.com today. What are you waiting for? This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Douglas Nicholls leads over Karen Watts in Yuma mayor's race Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect number of precincts affected by ballot shortages. It's impossible to know how many people were prevented from voting in Pinal County's primary after polling stations ran out of ballots and at least one failed to open for hours. In the midst of calls to nullify the results from one candidate and angry questions from others, county officials on Wednesday conceded they botched the primary election again. Officials promised to immediately restructure the county's Elections Department to ensure the same mistakes are not repeated when early ballots for November's election go out in about three weeks. And on Thursday officials terminated Elections Director David Frisk after just three months on the job to restore public confidence. "This county made a mistake," County Attorney Kent Volkmer said at a news conference in Florence. "Every county official is embarrassed about what happened." Election coverage: Live updates across Arizona | Arizona election results Pinal became the poster child for election day problems in Arizona, as only a smattering of problems were reported throughout the state, including a ballot shortage at one precinct in Pima County and ink-smeared ballots in Maricopa County. Volkmer said up to 750 people were affected by delays in Pinal County, but he could not estimate how many left polling places without casting votes. About 25% of the county's 95 precincts reported running out of ballots or running low and needing help. The shortages come soon after an error last month that caused Pinal County to send out nearly 63,000 erroneous ballots to voters, leaving officials scrambling to come up with a legal solution before the primary. They settled on a plan that allowed affected voters to augment their original ballots with supplemental ones that they could cast in person or by mail. The erroneous ballots only affected municipal races. Story continues More:County-issued pens smeared some ballots, but details won't be known for awhile Issues could impact municipal races With only a handful of ballots separating some municipal elections in the county, officials couldn't promise the outcomes weren't affected by the ballot shortages. Officials blamed the shortfall on human error. "Quite frankly we underestimated ... We didn't order enough ballots," Volkmer said. "There were more people that showed up than we thought were going to show up," A contributing factor was an unanticipated number of independent voters who came to polling stations in person Tuesday and requested a Republican ballot, Volkmer said. Another was a 10% population increase in the county since the last election. Volkmer said the county's response also was hindered by an inability to quickly print new ballots. He said the county had to rely on two old printers that only were capable of printing one new ballot every three minutes. Frisk, who started working for the county in March and was officially appointed to the job in May, did not attend the news conference. County officials announced Thursday he was terminated. Frisk could not be reached for comment Thursday. He will be replaced by Pinal County Recorder Virginia Ross. "Recorder Virginia Ross has resigned from her elected office and has been appointed elections director effective immediately," the county said in a statement. Pinal County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeffrey McClure said election experts are being sought to review election procedures and operations. "We are looking at restructuring the way we do our Elections Department," he said, adding he did not believe the errors were intentional. "I have not seen any evidence of a nefarious act. I have seen mistakes made on a grand scale." Election guide: 2022 primaries Election results |Congressional races | State races |Mayor, city council races|How to vote Candidates, voters outraged Voters and candidates who attended the news conference at Pinal County Superior Court in Florence demanded accountability. "It's unacceptable what went on," said Bryan Soller, a candidate for City Council in Apache Junction and a lieutenant in the Mesa Police Department. Holly Klingensmith, a poll observer at the Moose Lodge in Apache Junction, left the courthouse shaking her head and whispering, "Lies, lies, lies." She said poll workers at the lodge got to a point where they only had 25 ballots left, and when extras were delivered, they received only 50 more. She said she anticipated shortages and asked: "Why couldn't they?" State Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction, who lost a race for reelection, said she wanted to ensure ballots were handled properly by the county and urged transparency. On Twitter, however, Townsend called for a do-over of the county election. Pinal Co update: Apparently voters were turned away as early as 1 PM and ballots didnt get brought until later in the evening so the afternoon voters have been disenfranchised. I am calling on the @PinalCounty supervisors to nullify the election and repeat it. 1/2 Senator Kelly Townsend (@AZKellyT) August 3, 2022 "Apparently voters were turned away as early as 1 PM and ballots didnt get brought until later in the evening so the afternoon voters have been disenfranchised," she said in a post. "I am calling on the @PinalCounty supervisors to nullify the election and repeat it." Townsend said she was prepared to file an injunction to prevent certification if the supervisors didn't act. "I am doing this not for my race, but the municipal & local races that were flawed beyond repair," she said in another post. Volkmer said county supervisors cannot nullify an election without court intervention. Even if they could, he said the county doesn't certify municipal elections; only cities do. Some voters told to come back later Anyone who was in line by 7 p.m. at a polling station had the chance to vote, Volkmer said. But he acknowledged some voters were turned away and asked to come back due to ballot shortages. He didn't know if any of them did. A voting rights group on Tuesday called Pinal County's refusal to keep polls open longer to offset the shutdown undemocratic and filed an emergency action in Pinal County Superior Court. The Arizona Democracy Resource Center focused on the Hidden Valley precinct, saying the polling station opened four hours late, according to the complaint. "Voters seeking to cast their ballots before their work days, before assuming their childcare obligations, and before meeting the other demands that ordinary people encounter, were denied their right to vote," the organization said in a statement. Smeared ink, pilfered pens, ballot shortage: Scattered issues dot election day The court rejected the argument and ruled the county did not have to keep the poll open later. Four fewer hours of voting at a Pinal County precinct is not merely an inconvenience, but an infringement of our most basic tenet of democracy," M. Teresa Mabry, the organization's co-executive director, said in a statement. "Hidden Valley precincts delayed opening was only one of many issues that took place in Pinal County." Officials said county staff worked through the night to count ballots, and by 1:30 p.m. Wednesday about 8,000 were outstanding. Volkmer assured the public that the county would be ready for November. How will the county win back the public's trust? "Watch us," he said. "Judge us on our actions, not by what I say here." Ballot woes for Pima and Maricopa Pima County was not immune to the ballot shortages that plagued Pinal, although on a much smaller scale. County Communications Director Mark Evans said one voting center ran out of ballot paper, causing several people to have to wait for about an hour to vote. He blamed the situation on a worldwide paper shortage and said elections officials underestimated the number of ballots needed at some polling stations. He said the county had a low turnout, with about 30,000 voting on Tuesday, an average of 232 voters for each of the 129 voting centers. Some voters were delayed because of missing envelopes for provisional ballots. Evans said there were plenty of provisional ballots on hand, but elections officials forgot to deliver envelopes for them. By 8:30 a.m., he said, the envelopes were delivered. Evans described the delays as road bumps. But a controversy emerged when a poll worker told a voter that Matt Salmon had dropped out of the governor's race even though Salmon's name was still on the ballot. I just witnessed electioneering while I voted. It happened to me! @pimaarizona Pima County Elections Department told workers you can tell people Matt Salmon has withdrawn when you hand people their ballot. This is being done to hurt @KariLake. Where else is this happening? pic.twitter.com/OqdUWFQdaP Garret Lewis (@GarretLewis) August 2, 2022 The conversation was reported by conservative radio host Garret Lewis of KNST in Tucson, who described what happened on Twitter and called it "electioneering." Poll workers are prohibited from discussing candidates with voters. Lewis said on Twitter that poll workers were deliberately attempting to steer votes away from Kari Lake. "That was the only thing that attracted a lot of attention here," Evans said. Meanwhile, Maricopa County officials faced questions about government-issued pens smearing ballots with ink. Officials conceded Wednesday that smears occurred in limited instances but could not provide details about how many times or where. The Arizona Republic on Tuesday first reported problems with the pens at polling stations. Officials said no ballots were lost and no one was prevented from voting. Multiple poll workers, including a polling station judge and an inspector, reported the smeared ink on ballots. They said they had to run some ballots multiple times to get the tabulation machines to process them. The reports came hours after the Maricopa County Attorney's Office hit a Republican candidate with an order to cease-and-desist telling social media followers to replace the county's pens with their own. Gail Golec, who lost her bid for a seat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Tuesday, told followers that ink from the county pens could not be trusted. Her post was followed by reports of pen thefts at two polling stations. Golec made no apologies for the post, saying she was trying to protect elections from fraud. Robert Anglen is an investigative reporter for The Republic. Reach him at robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8694. Follow him on Twitter @robertanglen. Reach breaking news reporter Sam Burdette at sburdette@gannett.com or on Twitter @SuperSafetySam. Reach Maricopa County reporter Sasha Hupka at sasha.hupka@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter @SashaHupka. Help us fight for you and support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Problems plague Pinal County primary; hundreds likely kept from voting TOKYO Uniqlos sister brand is branching out from Asia and entering the U.S. market, with a pop-up store planned for this fall. GU, the lower-priced, trend-driven brand owned by parent company Fast Retailing, has chosen New Yorks SoHo as the site of its first retail presence in the West. We want to accelerate the globalization of GU, Osamu Yunoki, GUs chief executive officer, said in an exclusive interview with WWD. Until now, we have had strength in Asia and we were thinking of expanding from there step by step, but in order to become truly global, we realized it would be faster to open a store at the fashion center of the world in New Yorks SoHo, and to use what we learn from that to continue our expansion. More from WWD While the exact date of the pop-ups opening is yet to be announced, Yunoki said it will be open for about a year, until summer of 2023. The store will encompass 2,900 square feet of sales floor and will stock a selection of the brands clothing and accessories for both men and women. The executive said the product offering will change as the brand tests out what types of styles are most popular among western customers. The decision to open a pop-up rather than a permanent retail presence in New York was made in order to make this kind of trialing of product selection easier, as well as for efficiencys sake. Permanent brick-and-mortar stores take more time to launch due to contract negotiations and other administrative hurdles, Yunoki said. As for what types of products customers can expect to find at the SoHo pop-up, Yunoki said it will be a mix of things that are considered typical of GU by its customers in Asia: well-made, trendy pieces that can easily be added to any shoppers existing wardrobe. However, he said certain pieces that are considered too Japanese will likely be swapped out for other, more universally appealing styles. Story continues We want to convey [to Western customers] the unique characteristics of GU. These include beautiful design, high quality and affordable pricing. We are constantly pursuing the perfect balance of these three things, Yunoki said. And then we will also select products that we think will enable a wide variety of people to have fun with fashion. Sizing at the pop-up will be the same as it is in Japan, but the brand will work to communicate this to customers in order to avoid confusion. Sizes will range from XS to XL, and the selection will include many genderless and ageless styles, Yunoki said. We want to hear any opinions that our U.S. customers have, and use this to improve GU overall. Thats what were thinking of most with this pop-up, Yunoki said. Pronounced as the letters g and u, the GU brand was launched in 2006 and counts around 450 stores, most of which are located in Japan. The brand also has retail locations in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The opening of the SoHo pop-up marks the brands first foray outside of Asia and signals further international expansion. The brand name is inspired by the Japanese word jiyu, which means freedom. While Yunoki plans to continue GUs global expansion in other cities across the U.S. and eventually in Southeast Asia and Europe as well with the end goal of having stores in all the same markets as Uniqlo he said the brand has no concrete plans for additional store openings. For now, we want to concentrate on SoHo, he said. Natural gas prices have soared in Europe to record highs. NurPhoto/Getty Images Fears are growing that Russia will choke off the supply off natural gas to Europe completely. Analysts have said such a move would push an already fragile economy into a major recession. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are predicting a recession even if supplies continue. Fears are growing that Vladimir Putin's Russia could completely stop the flow of natural gas to Europe, a move analysts say would push the continent into an economic crisis. Russia last week cut the supply of natural gas a crucial fossil fuel to Germany and Western Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to just 20% of its previous capacity, pushing prices to record highs. Moscow has blamed the cuts on sanctions, which it says are stopping the arrival of a key piece of equipment for the pipeline. But politicians in Europe have said the supply cuts are a politically motivated effort to punish Western governments for sanctioning Moscow over its war in Ukraine. They have repeatedly warned that Russia could even cut off flows entirely, and analysts are now beginning to take them seriously. In research notes and reports over the last week, economists and strategists have said a complete stop to natural gas supplies to Europe would batter the already fragile eurozone economy. "A complete gas supply stop remains a live possibility, especially during the winter months," said Goldman Sachs economists, led by Sven Jari Stehn. "We estimate that such a stop would push the euro area into a sharp recession." Stehn and colleagues said the eurozone is set to fall into a recession in the second half of the year even if flows through Nord Stream 1 pick back up to 40% of capacity. JPMorgan also said this week that it now expects the eurozone economy to fall into a recession by the end of the year, basing its forecast on a situation in which natural gas supply from Russia stands at around 40%. "Inflation pressures have not abated and new shocks have emerged," JPMorgan economist Greg Fuzesi in a note to clients last week. "The outlook for gas supply to the region has become highly uncertain, US recession fears have increased, and, more recently, Italian political uncertainty has been brought again to the fore." Story continues Economists have said the reduction in natural gas supplies means European consumers and companies will have to cut the amount of energy they use, so that storage facilities can be filled ahead of the winter months. The European Union agreed last week to try to cut its gas consumption by 15% between August and March. Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at consultancy Capital Economics, said the planned cuts come with big economic risks. "If this translates into mandatory gas rationing which looks plausible at least for Germany it could force factories in the metals and chemical sectors to put staff on short-time working scheme and reduce their output," he said. Germany is likely to bear the brunt of the looming crisis, analysts have said. Before the war it got 55% of its natural gas from Russia, and it is an industrial powerhouse that is heavily reliant on the fossil fuel. Commerzbank, Germany's biggest lender, warned Wednesday that a total halt to supplies would plunge Germany into a 2009-style recession in which the economy would shrink 2.7% this year and 1.1% in 2023. Karolina Siemieniuk, analyst at Rystad Energy, said: "A serious gas shortage in one of the biggest European economies could cause a major economic crisis in the country and negative impacts on other EU member states. " Goldman Sachs said last month that the energy crisis in Europe could weigh on US growth by knocking trans-Atlantic trade. Read the original article on Business Insider STORY: Villagers came to the help of firefighters to confine the spread of numerous blazes in the area. Some carried hoses and removed beehives as flames neared their fields and houses. Like other European nations, Albania experienced a scorching heatwave in recent weeks. With human-caused climate change triggering droughts, the number of extreme wildfires was expected to increase 30% within the next 28 years, according to a February 2022 U.N. report. Jacksonville police cordon off the end of Doris Lane on May 9, 2019, as they investigate the death of 44-year-old Velvet Floyd Burns. A 40-year-old man avoided a possible death penalty after he pleaded guilty in the 2019 stabbing death of Velvet Love Burns in her Jacksonville home in a sordid plot involving her husband. But as Stephen Shelton Hand begins his life sentence, husband Jerry Allen Burns has yet to go to trial on his charges of murder and conspiracy, while his mistress awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and conspiracy just months after the stabbing. Third suspect arrested: Accused hitman in Jacksonville murder-for-hire Hand pleaded guilty on Tuesday to the murder charge, while other counts of burglary and conspiracy to commit murder were dropped, court records show. Burns, 53, has another pretrial hearing set for Aug. 13, with no trial date set, according to court files. Amanda Lee Love, 34, pleaded guilty on July 16, 2019, but her sentencing has been postponed multiple times in the past three years, the latest date also Aug. 13. No reason has been given as to why Love and Hands' cases have remained on hold for so many years. But part of Hands' plea deal is that he would be willing to testify in those co-defendants' cases, the State Attorney's Office said. Murder for hire in 2019 The May 9, 2019, homicide was staged to look like a burglary, the Sheriff's Office previously said. The husband told officers he had left home about 3:30 a.m. for a job in Tallahassee, then a family friend found his wifes body that afternoon. But the investigation revealed he was having an affair with Love. Jacksonville Beach ex-wife of slain Bridegan speaks out: 'I want people to know where I am coming from' Jacksonville forensic artist: His crime scenes in miniature give juries 'a sense and feel for what happened' Burns is accused of conspiring with Love to kill his 44-year-old wife, offering $5,000 for her to drive other suspects to the scene on the dead-end road off Commonwealth Avenue, promising an additional sum after the murder was done. The amount would be contributed from the victims life insurance policy, the Sheriff's Office said. Story continues Love, left, and Burns In announcing Hand's arrest, the Sheriff's Office said he was seen stabbing the victim and destroying evidence. Forensic evidence found at the scene also placed Hand there. The Sheriff's Office said he and the victim did not know each other. But Love and Hand have three children together, according to a 2018 injunction for protection she filed against him. Hand was already in jail after an unrelated May 29, 2019, arrest when he was officially charged with the murder. dscanlan@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4549 This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Stephen Hand pleads guilty in Velvet Burns murder plot in Jacksonville ORLANDO, Fla. Out-of-state real estate investors and homebuyers would pay a special tax under a state senators plan designed to tackle sky-high rents pricing tenants out of Orange County. Sen. Randolph Bracy, who is running for U.S. Congress, unveiled a proposal Tuesday he intends to submit at the next Orange County Commission meeting on Aug. 9. I would like to institute special taxes on these companies and individuals in order to discourage their buying, selling and renting of properties, Bracy said. I believe we should be keeping it in the community, and lets keep it affordable. Bracys plan also calls for approving more high-density apartment buildings, converting vacant commercial properties into housing and providing grants and tax breaks to developers of affordable housing. The tax would be levied at closing on out-of-state investors and individual buyers who dont own property in Florida, Bracy said. The tax amount hasnt been determined, he said, but revenue could be used to build more affordable housing and offer assistance to renters. Orlandos rental prices have exploded, forcing tenants to move out of the city to find less expensive housing. The average asking rent in Orlando is $1,819, more than $150 above where it was in January, according to CoStar Group, which tracks rental rates. Real estate investors have been snatching up more properties as housing demand has soared, buying nearly half of the properties sold last year in the predominantly Black ZIP code of 32805, according to an Orlando Sentinel investigation. Bracy said out-of-state investors are worsening the regions affordable housing crisis. I have had people that have said theyre moving out of Orlando ... because they cant afford to live, Bracy said. We have out-of-town companies buying the properties and raising (rent) to where its unaffordable. I think we have to look into that. David Howard, executive director of the National Rental Home Council, said discouraging out-of-state investors will result in less rental housing. Story continues The county should instead be focused on policies and incentives designed to increase the supply of all types of housing, owner-occupied and rental, said Howard, whose group represents rental homeowners large and small. Taxing out-of-state investors and buyers differently than in-state ones could spark litigation citing the equal protection and commerce clauses of the U.S. Constitution, said Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University. Jarvis said he thinks Bracys special tax likely would pass legal muster, but it could backfire politically by causing real estate agents and companies to lose business to other counties in Florida that dont have such a tax, he said. As a lawyer Id say, Go forth and proper, Jarvis said. As a PR guy, I would say, Are you insane? State Sen. Linda Stewart, D-Orlando, and a representative from U.S. Rep. Darren Sotos office joined Bracy at an event unveiling the plan. Bracy said he met with landlords, tenants and developers while crafting it. Another proposal championed by Orange County Commissioner Emily Bonilla would create a one-year cap on rent increases for many properties. A draft proposal calls for a 5% cap or limiting rent increases to the consumer price index, whichever is higher. The consumer price index rose about 9% in the 12 months ending June 30. Bonilla said she doesnt think Bracys proposal will interfere with her effort, which applies to rental properties with four or more units. The County Commission is set to consider Bonillas proposal on Aug. 9, which opponents say could draw legal challenges, too. Commissioners recently approved a separate measure requiring landlords to give 60-day written notice before imposing a rent increase of more than 5%. Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday vacated a lower court's decision to block the Biden administration's pause on new oil and gas leasing on federal land and waters - a key piece of the president's climate change strategy - and sent the case back to that court for further proceedings. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the Louisiana district court decision to block the Interior Department's leasing pause after Louisiana and a dozen states sued the administration established arguing that they would suffer injury from the policy. The court said the district court's order and accompanying memorandum "lack specificity" and said its injunction focused on an Interior Department action which was not yet finalized. Gal Gadot and her family headed out on a European adventure, and there was no shortage of picturesque landscape to capture in photos for future memories. The actress did just that, taking to Instagram to share her vacation snaps in a slideshow gallery upon her return. "Obrigada Portugal! You were good to us," she captioned the post. Gadot, 37, and husband Jaron Varsano, 45, share three daughterstwo of which can be seen in one of the photos donning fun, printed bucket hats while taking in the sights. The former Miss Israel included a roundup of moments in the social media post, from her and Varsano sharing a tropical pineapple drink and toasting beers, to her smiling widely while enjoying tourist locations. There was no shortage of endless natural green landscape showcased in the shots. Water activities seemed to also have been a draw, with the Fast Five actress snapping a photo of sailboats in the distance. View the original article to see embedded media. Gadot is currently filming upcoming Netflix spy-thriller Heart of Stone. In other projects, she's gearing up to play the Evil Queen Grimhilde in a new live-action Snow White film set for 2023; it is in pre-production due to COVID-19 delays. Additionally, the Israeli actress will star as the titular queen of Egypt in Cleopatra and is set to reprise her role of Diana Prince in the announced Wonder Woman 3. Last year, Gadot starred in Red Notice alongside Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. The film became one of the streaming service's most watched original movies ever with 364 million hours viewed in its first 28 days of release. More Pop Culture: When you think of The Cosby Show, one of its promising actors who comes to mind is Geoffrey Owens. Playing the character of Elvin Tibideaux marked his television debut. The actor made recurring appearances from season two up until its end in season eight in 1992. The Brooklyn natives path into acting started when he became involved in theater while attending the High School of Performing Arts. Following his gig on The Cosby Show, Owens went on to feature in numerous films and shows such as Law & Order, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Blue Bloods. But within his successful career, what was once an opportunity of a lifetime became a turn in his journey. Once the Bill Cosby scandal hit the media, TV Land was one of the multiple networks to pull reruns of The Cosby Show from its schedule. The dent in the actors income from the loss of TV royalties pushed him to find a consistent job at the time, so he decided to work at Trader Joes. While working in his new position at the grocery store, someone took a photo of him and it went viral. Yes, it impacted me financially, he told PEOPLE in regards to the show being pulled in 2018. At the time that the show was pulled, that did make a difference in our income. That was one of the elements that led to my getting to a place where I said to myself, I have to do something, and I was thinking, What can I do? and the answer ended up being Trader Joes which is actually a wonderful situation for me in many ways. Despite the job shaming and feeling humiliated, Owens didnt let that deter him from his longtime passion. Im going to keep pursuing it. Im going to persevere, he told the outlet. And even if that means, that eventually when all this hoopla dies down, I might need to take another job outside of the business. Im still willing to do that. And persevered he did. Following the viral photo, Tyler Perry offered Owens a role on OWNs The Haves and the Have Nots for respect for his hustle and being a true artist, US Weekly reported. Additionally, 50 Cent showed support for Owens via Instagram, according to Complex. Yeah The underdog back on Top @iamgeoffreyowens, he wrote. Owens went on to appear on STARZs Power and Power Book II: Ghost. Story continues His dedication to his craft garnered Geoffrey Owens an estimated net worth of $400,000, per Celebrity Net Worth. Through all of the support that poured in, the best of all came from his son Jordyn. As previously reported by Shadow and Act, now, the 23-year-old is following in his fathers footsteps. Here is how his only child is chasing his dreams, too. Jordyn Owens Jordyn Owens is 23-years-old and has explored various talents such as modeling, and painting, to now, acting. He is a cast member on Netflixs Uncoupled, alongside TV vets like Neil Patrick Harris, Tisha Campbell, and Marcia Gay Harden. Vietnam's Covid-19 tally surpasses 11 million The Vietnamese Ministry of Health on Thursday reported an additional 2,012 Covid-19 infections, raising the country's total tally to over 11 million. Illustrative photo According to the ministry's report, the number of Covid-19 patients in Vietnam has increased to 11,189,968. On August 4, an additional 7,712 more patients recovered from the disease, raising the number of recoveries in the country to over 9.94 million. On Thursday evening, no deaths from Covid-19 were recorded. The country's total fatalities stood at 43,094, accounting for 0.4 per cent of total infections. By August 4, the country had injected more than 247 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines. Vietnam is targeting the completion of Covid-19 inoculation for children aged between 5 - 11 in August, as well as the administration of the third shot for those aged 12 - 17, as well as the third and fourth doses to people aged 18 and above as soon as possible. (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc's credit card business is being investigated by a top U.S. consumer watchdog, the bank disclosed in a regulatory filing on Thursday. The investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) includes scrutiny of the bank's credit card account management practices, refunds and billing error resolution, according to the filing. Goldman said it was cooperating with the CFPB. Under its chief executive officer, David Solomon, the bank has been looking to expand its consumer business as it seeks to diversify its revenue streams beyond trading and investment banking. The bank has a credit card partnership with Apple Inc, following the launch of a card with the iPhone maker in 2019. It also offers a co-branded credit card with General Motors Co. The Wall Street giant also said it had reduced its credit exposure to Russia by over 13% in the second quarter. Citigroup Inc, on the other hand, saw its Russia exposure climb by $500 million as the rouble firmed. (Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva) A diver being towed by a boat conducts a survey of the Great Barrier Reef Coral has recovered from storms and bleaching events to record levels across much of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a survey has found. The reef's northern and central parts have the highest amount of coral cover since monitoring began 36 years ago. But coral cover in the southern part of the reef has decreased. The new coral is particularly vulnerable - meaning the progress could be quickly undone by climate change and other threats, officials say. Each year the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims) surveys the reef's health, using aerial surveys and divers slowly towed by boat. After the fourth mass bleaching in six years was confirmed in March, Aims had grave concerns ahead of this year's study. "In our 36 years of monitoring the condition of the Great Barrier Reef we have not seen bleaching events so close together," said chief executive Paul Hardisty. Bleaching occurs when corals stressed by warm water temperatures expel the algae living within them that gives them colour and life. Only two mass bleaching events had ever been recorded before 2016. This year's bleaching event was the first to occur during a La Nina, a weather phenomenon which typically brings cooler water temperatures. Map of Great Barrier Reef These latest results demonstrate the reef can recover if conditions allow, Dr Hardisty says, but "acute and severe disturbances" are becoming more frequent and longer. The reef has also been damaged by coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish and tropical cyclones which generate damaging waves. Much of the new coral growth - a species called Acropora - is especially exposed to the reef's threats, said Dr Mike Emslie from Aims. "This means that... future disturbance can reverse the observed recovery in a short amount of time," he said. The crown-of-thorns starfish is largely responsible for the decrease in coral recorded on the southern reef The Great Barrier Reef has been World Heritage-listed for 40 years due to its "enormous scientific and intrinsic importance" as one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. Story continues The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which manages the reef, says the outlook for the icon is "very poor" due to climate change. Unesco, the UN's scientific and cultural body, says not enough is being done to protect the reef. You may also be interested in: The Daily Beast Courtesy of Marvel StudiosThink back to the worst, most haphazardly-made, monetary glue trap you saw that also cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Chances are, youre landing on something in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The latest Thor entry was middling; Ms. Marvel squandered a promisingly progressive tale; Eternals was a visually bland superhero link-up; and Black Widow was a confoundingly boring letdown that arrived long after its star hero was already dead.The MCU has garnered Hong Kongs Jumbo Floating Restaurant, which closed its doors in 2020 but made headlines when it began to sink earlier this year, is now allegedly trapped upside down on a reef. A Hainan Maritime Safety Administration duty officer said on Wednesday that the iconic boat was still near the Paracel Islands, also known as the Xisha Islands in China. We are still looking into the incident. The vessel capsized and keeled over, and was trapped on a reef off Sansha [in Hainan]. As far as I know, this is the latest situation, he reported. We cannot say for sure how much longer the investigation will take. It is being conducted in accordance with the relevant laws. The Jumbo Floating Restaurant first capsized in June due to rough seas while en route to Cambodia after closing its doors in 2020. More from NextShark: Community Raises Over $90,000 to Help Gilroy Donut House Family Amid Pandemic The vessels owner, Aberdeen Restaurant Enterprises, shared that the COVID-19 pandemic had devastated tourism in the area, leading to an accumulated loss of $12.75 million which forced the restaurants doors to close. The duty officer also noted, Presently there is no threat to the safety of navigation in the area, while declining to discuss the state of the Jumbo. After opening in 1976, the restaurant had become an iconic landmark in the area, attracting tourists to its doors for nearly 45 years while offering banquet-style fine Cantonese cuisine. More from NextShark: Boxer Amir Khan says he and his friend were removed from flight for being 'two Asian boys' It is unclear whether authorities plan on recovering the vessel. Featured Image via South China Morning Post More from NextShark: Filipino film icon Gloria Sevilla, 'Queen of Visayan Movies,' dies at 90 Enjoy this content? Read more from NextShark! Indian medical student refused to flee war-torn Ukraine without her Siberian husky puppy The Telegraph Until lately, there was a tendency to roll our eyes about Marlon Brando rejecting his best actor Oscar for The Godfather in 1973. Couldnt he just play ball, show up and say something nice, like anyone else? What was he trying to prove, sending in the Apache actress Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the award for him, as a protest against the brutal treatment of Native Americans in Hollywoods output? The Los Angeles Police Department has shifted about 200 officers to Hollywood as crime in the city continues to surge. "I'm here as a resident, a concerned resident," Cathy Hood said during a Wednesday anti-crime news conference, according to KABC. "I don't feel 100% safe." Residents like Hood have forced LAPD to act, and the department's Deputy Chief Blake Chow boasted that the famed area would be receiving a large boost in police presence. "That's really basically about 200 more officers out on the street here on Hollywood Boulevard," Chow said. "They're going to be on foot, they're going to be in patrol cars, they're going to be on horseback, they're going to be on bikes." LA CITY COUNCIL GREENLIGHTS BAN ON HOMELESS ENCAMPMENTS 500 FEET FROM SCHOOLS, DAYCARE CENTERS Hikers pass by the Hollywood sign in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson - RC149CE960F0 The event was organized by Los Angeles City Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell, who warned potential criminals that a perception that the city's local prosecutors aren't going after them was false. "If you come here to commit crime, you will be arrested, you will be prosecuted, you will be jailed or imprisoned," O'Farrell said. "There is no permissiveness in Hollywood. We're not going to permit or tolerate that." But shortly before the event, an armed robbery about a mile away turned into a shooting, with a man being shot in the chest after a robber demanded he hand over his wallet and phone. Police say the man was transferred to the hospital in critical condition, while the shooter remains at large. Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Reuters/Mario Anzuoni The shooting just a short distance away from the anti-crime event was representative of the problem Los Angeles residents have been facing, with homicides recorded in the city on pace to be the highest in over a decade. "181 murder victims. We're on pace for a 15-year-high," Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz with the Los Angeles Police Protective League told KABC. "This is very, very scary for our city and it's scary for the residents that we are supposed to protect." Revenge porn king Hunter Moore has claimed he withdrew from the Netflix documentary about him, titled The Most Hated Man on the Internet, because he wasnt allowed to tell his side of the story. The documentary chronicles Moores downfall after he founded a website called IsAnyoneUp.com in 2010. While Moore has claimed that revenge porn had never been the original purpose of the website, Is Anyone Up? became a forum for users to share explicit images of people they knew, before linking the photos to their public social media profiles. Moore allegedly refused to remove pictures from the website at the behest of the victims, many of whom said the files had been stolen through hacks or shared by malicious ex-partners. While the Netflix documentary was originally supposed to include interviews with Moore, it ended up focusing on Charlotte Laws, who led the fight against Moore. Posting on Twitter about his withdrawal from the series, Moore wrote: A lot of you has been asking why didnt I tell my side of the story on Netflix documentary, well at first we all had agreed about the terms and all but at the end they wouldnt let me tell my side of the story, basically I had to say what they wanted me to say, so I back off [sic]. He added in the comments: There is always two side of the stories, 60 per cent of that Netflix documentary was BS, they never want you to tell or hear the truth. Instead of new interviews with Moore, the show does include several clips of past interviews he has given, and videos he published online. Director Rob Miller said Moore is fairly represented in the footage shown throughout the series. Revenge porn king and convicted felon Hunter Moore (Netflix) Producer Vikki Miller said, via Metro: When Hunter pulled out, I was initially disappointed but then I completely changed my mind and am so glad we ended up telling it through Charlotte Laws narrative. Shes an extraordinary character and fought extremely hard for justice to be done. Through Hunters regular media appearances at the time we know what Hunters thoughts were and we included them. What was new, and what we did, was to flip the narrative to tell it from the other side, to include the voices that havent yet been heard the victims and theyre led by Charlotte. The Most Hated Man on the Internet is out now on Netflix. Iain Lee has called out Rebekah Vardy after she denied bullying him on Im a Celebrity. The DJ previously hit out at the wife of footballer Jamie Vardy for making him f***ing miserable and isolated when they appeared on the ITV series together in 2017. Last month, Lee said that he had been asked to pariticpate in an interview to discuss Vardy being so brave for promoting mental health. He declined the request, calling her a bully, a liar and a manipulator. I dont know if you saw any of Im a Celebrity when I was in there. She was part of a team that targeted me and made much of my time in there miserable, he wrote on Twitter in response. He went on to claim: She encouraged people not to talk to me and left me isolated (apart from two camp mates who were not taken in by her). When she came out of the camp she told lies about me. She bullied my sister who was staying in Australia and told her, In my world, men dont cry. In a new interview with The Sun, Vardy denied bullying Lee on the series, calling the claims false. She added: Edited TV looks a certain way. I dont have anything bad to say about him. Lee hit out at these comments, writing on Twitter: They can only edit what you do and say. You dont get to say if I was bullied. You made my time in the jungle miserable. Dont start using me as part of your rehabilitation. Iain Lee hit out at Rebekah Vardy on Twitter (Twitter) Lees post was referring to Vardys High Court case loss after she brought a libel case against her former friend Coleen Rooney who accused Vardy of selling information from her Instagram account to The Sun . The judge found that the allegation was substantially true. Vardy first denied bullying Lee on Im a Celebrity when she left the series, stating on catch-up show Coming Out: You know what, I was the one that was being the most supportive of him. A bully? Ive never been a bully in my whole entire life. TEHRAN, Iran (AP) Mourners poured out onto the streets of Tehran on Thursday to pay their respects to several Iranian officers killed in Syria, a testament to the human cost of Irans involvement in the civil war and a public display of nationalist fervor as nuclear talks resume in Vienna. The remains of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard members were recently recovered in Khan Tuman, a village 9 miles (about 15 kilometers) south of Aleppo, Syrias largest city that was for years the wars most important front line. The Guard identified the five deceased fighters, providing few details about their deaths with the exception of Gen. Abdollah Eskandari a decorated commander who became known as the headless general after his capture and beheading by Syrian rebels in May 2014. Their bodies were repatriated after a lengthy process of recovery and DNA analysis. Iran has increasingly admitted casualties since it intervened to rescue Syrian President Bashar Assad's government, a ground presence that coincided with Russias air campaign and helped Assad recover control over most of the country. Although Iran has only acknowledged its forces as having an advisory role, dozens of Iranian soldiers have been killed fighting the Islamic State group and other extremists in Syria. Funeral marches snaked through cities across the country this week, beginning Monday in the northeastern city of Mashhad before moving south, returning each officer's body to his birthplace for burial. The thousands that gathered in Tehrans streets on Thursday evening waved red flags to mark Ashoura, a commemoration of the 7th century death of Prophet Muhammads grandson Hussein, a revered figure in Shiite Islam. Chants of Death to America and Death to Israel rang out from the crowds. In a speech, Guard commander Gen. Hossein Salami hailed the return of the fighters remains and the survival of Assads government. We wanted the (Assads) system to remain but the U.S., Europe and the Arab world did not want it. Now see who remains in the country, Salami declared. Story continues Meanwhile, Iran's Intelligence Ministry said authorities arrested 10 suspects with links to the Islamic State group who had planned attacks at various locations across Iran during Ashoura rallies planned next week. Two agents were wounded in shootouts with suspected militants in the country's south and west, the ministry added. Irans Shiites revere the dead, especially their martyrs killed in battle, so the funerals for the Guard officers present a way to gauge public opinion and rally support for the theocracy at a time of political and economic crisis. Talks to revive Irans tattered 2015 nuclear deal with world powers resumed Thursday in Vienna after a monthslong deadlock, apparently a last-ditch effort to save the diplomatic process from collapse. Prospects for a breakthrough have darkened as Iran rapidly advances its nuclear work under diminishing international oversight and political opposition to the deal rises in Washington. Meanwhile, Irans economy is staggering under heavy sanctions four years after former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the landmark accord, which granted Tehran sanctions relief in exchange for strict curbs on its atomic program. As inflation surges to new heights and desperation grows over deteriorating living conditions, Iranian hard-liners have sought to reinforce the national ideology. Earlier this spring, authorities organized performances for a new pop song called Hello Commander! and school children across the country saluted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. Samuel Corum/Getty (2) Ivanka Trump (left), Donald Trump Jr. Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have been questioned under oath by lawyers at the New York State attorney general's office, according to a report by CNN. The outlet reports that both Ivanka and Don Jr. two of former President Donald Trump's adult children sat for depositions in recent days as part of the ongoing probe into the Trump Organization's finances. According to CNN, Ivanka's testimony was taken Wednesday, while Don Jr.'s was taken on July 28. RELATED: Donald Trump, Ivanka and Don Jr. to Be Questioned Under Oath in N.Y. About Family's Business Practices The Trumps had fought earlier attempts to get them to testify in the case, previously asking a judge to quash what they called an "unprecedented and unconstitutional" bid for their testimony after being subpoenaed in December. After the court directed Donald, Donald Jr. and Ivanka to appear for testimony back in February, the three appealed that decision. The court then reaffirmed that they must sit for testimony and were scheduled to appear for testimony in July. The testimony was postponed, however, following the unexpected death of their mother, Ivana. The testimony comes as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James' civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization misstated the value of its assets on annual financial statements, tax submissions and other documents in order to secure loans and insurance coverage and obtain other economic and tax benefits. James' office has said it has evidence of "fraudulent or misleading asset valuations" used by the Trumps to secure loans, insurance coverage and tax deductions. "Each of the individuals was directly involved in one or more transactions under review," the attorney general's office said. RELATED: New York Attorney General Claims She Has Evidence of Fraud by Trump, Don Jr. and Ivanka The Trumps have argued that James' investigation is politically motivated, which James, a Democrat, has repeatedly denied. Story continues President Trump's middle son, Eric Trump, who serves as an executive vice president at Trump Organization, was subpoenaed earlier on and testified in 2020. According to reports, however, both he and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg asserted their Fifth Amendment right when questioned. Trump himself is expected to testify as part of the probe later this month, according to CNN. The family is currently facing both a civil and a criminal investigation into the accuracy of Trump Organization financial statements. The criminal investigation has slowed after senior prosecutors resigned when a district attorney reportedly expressed doubts about the case, the New York Times reports. Still, the case remains ongoing. LOS ANGELES (AP) For a comedy, Jo Koy's new movie Easter Sunday had a lot of waterworks. The film was no ordinary job for the comedian and the rest of the cast. The magnitude of being on a mostly Filipino set led to happy cry-fests, Koy said. Emotions really hit when co-star Tia Carrere pointed out this was her first time playing a Filipino character in her 40-year career. To be able to be right there in a scene with five other Filipino actors and just doing a scene about a family... She never saw that before, Koy, 51, told The Associated Press. We all just kind of like teared up and just celebrated together because its like OK, this is going to be one of many moments up here. Koy, who is half Filipino and half white, is making his feature film debut in a movie largely inspired by the material from his Netflix stand-up specials. DreamWorks/Universal is touting Easter Sunday," which opens in theaters Friday, as the first big studio movie with an all-Filipino ensemble. Koy plays Joe Valencia, a comic and aspiring actor who goes home to the San Francisco Bay Area for the titular holiday. He attempts to bond with his teenage son while dealing with well-meaning but overbearing relatives. The production comes at a time when Filipino American food, history and advocacy are increasingly emerging into the zeitgeist. Finally our stories, our faces are front and center on the big screen," said Carrere, 55, and known for movies like Wayne's World, True Lies and Lilo & Stitch. I have to pinch myself that I'm still here, still in the business and invited to the party. Jimmy O. Yang ("Crazy Rich Asians," Love Hard"), who has a cameo in Easter Sunday, also served as a producer. That meant watching many, many audition tapes of actors of Filipino or Asian descent. Yang was blown away by the talent. It made casting 10 roles that much tougher. He thinks Hollywood claims that capable Asian actors are hard to find are just lazy excuses. Story continues As an actor, I'm like all of these guys are so good. How did I ever get a job?" Yang said. Some of them I wanted to call them and be like Hey, man! Please keep going OK? We just couldnt hire you for this job but please keep going.'" Easter Sunday," directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, is set in the heavily Filipino suburb of Daly City where screenwriter Ken Cheng immigrated to as a kid. He envisioned a mix of Ice Cubes Friday and the holiday flick Its a Wonderful Life. A producer, too, Cheng wrote it in 2020 during lockdown. He then turned to Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Partners is co-producing. Within a few hours the legendary director read it and gave his approval, according to Cheng. From that day to the first day we started shooting was something like five and a half months. And thats like insanely fast," Cheng said. A lot of that is how enthusiastic everyone was about building a movie around Jo. Hollywood is populated with notable half-Filipino actors like Vanessa Hudgens and Darren Criss. But Koy is the one leaning into his heritage in his work. For example, he wanted a scene in Easter Sunday showing the family packing customary balikbayan boxes. Filipinos, usually first-generation immigrants, typically send boxes with American goods to relatives in the Philippines. Mailing balikbayan boxes is practically its own industry. Theres this responsibility that they put on their shoulders when they make it to this country, Koy said. "I see that with a lot of Filipino families and I wanted to show the world thats how important this is to us." Today, Filipinos make up over 4 million of the country's 23 million-plus Asian population, according to the U.S. Census. Only Chinese and Indians number more. Filipino culture and history have been gaining more mainstream visibility in recent years mostly because of decades-long activism by Filipinos. This year, a 30-foot (9-meter) tall gateway arch was unveiled in Los Angeles Historic Filipinotown and a street in New York Citys Queens was co-named Little Manila Avenue. A newly built Bay Area park was named for striking Filipino American farmworkers. For years, Filipino food has been hailed off and on as the next culinary trend. It seems to be having a moment again in the fine dining world. Chicago's Kasama became the only Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant in the country. Easter Sunday is coming during this really amazing moment in Asian American history and Filipino American history, where political, social, and economic capital has all come together, said Eric Pido, an Asian American Studies professor at San Francisco State University with a background in Filipina/o American Studies. He predicts younger generations will raise Filipinos' profiles in the next few years. I think Filipino Americans are no longer shying away from sort of taking a representational role in American politics, which will bring up all sorts of interesting things about Filipino American culture that lots of folks just dont think about, Pido said. Last month, Koy and Cheng attended a screening of Easter Sunday in Daly City. Among the people there was the director of Pixar's Turning Red, Domee Shi. Turning Red, about a Chinese-Canadian teenage girl and her family, was a hit after its March release on Disney+. But a white film reviewer called the animated feature exhausting and only relatable for Shi's Chinese family and friends. The review was later pulled over accusations of racism. The idea that stories that focus on Asian ethnicities and cultures are too specific to be appealing is just outdated, Koy said. The relationship between a mother and son is the same no matter what ethnicity, Koy said. I hate ignorant people that don't move forward... Theres a lot of people that live in this country that need to be heard and its time to hear it. ___ Terry Tang is a member of The Associated Press Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP The Kansas Supreme Court disbarred a Johnson County attorney last month after he pleaded guilty to putting a camera in an office bathroom to secretly film women, court records show. Troy Renkemeyer, who owned the Renkemeyer Law Firm in Overland Park, was disbarred and lost his ability to practice law in Kansas on July 6, Supreme Court records show. Renkemeyer had surrendered his law license on June 14. Renkemeyer can still practice law and is in good standing in Missouri, according to the Missouri Bar Associations official directory of lawyers. In September 2020, Renkemeyer was charged with breach of privacy by picture or video and pleaded guilty in Johnson County District Court. A woman told police she noticed a block-shaped item on a table in the restroom on Sept. 28, 2020. She didnt think much of it at first, but saw a camera the next day attached to the table that pointed directly at the toilet, according to the affidavit. The woman bought an SD card reader from Target to watch the recording. It showed videos of her and other women using the bathroom as well as footage of Renkemeyer setting up the camera, according to court records. None of the women consented to being filmed, according to the affidavit. He was arrested and released from the Johnson County jail on a $2,500 bond. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 20. Renkemeyers lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday. The Kansas Supreme Court previously suspended Renkemeyers law license in October 2015 after fraud allegations arose after the 2007 sale of his trucking company, Monarch. Renkemeyer and a co-owner were alleged to have improperly diverted invoice payments after the sale, and a district court jury later awarded nearly $650,000 in damages. His law license was reciprocally suspended in 2016 in Missouri. Renkemeyers license was reinstated in January 2017 in Kansas. Joy Behar is opening up about a health scare she says she experienced 43 years ago thats still fueling her passion for reproductive rights. On Wednesdays episode of The View, Behar and co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Sunny Hostin discussed the Supreme Courts June ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the federal right to an abortion. This week, advocates for abortion rights were handed a surprise victory when voters in Kansas, a Republican stronghold, overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have stripped abortion protections from their state constitution. During the conversation, Behar told her co-hosts that she almost died from an ectopic pregnancy in 1979, about nine years after shed given birth to a daughter, Eve. They rushed me to the hospital, Behar said. The doctor, the next day, said We almost lost you. Because I was in the situation where I could go to Beth Israel Hospital, and they took care of it there. Watch a clip from Wednesdays episode of The View below. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus, often in a fallopian tube. The embryo cant survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening internal bleeding if left untreated. Behar on Wednesday clarified to guest co-host Hasselback that she did not have an abortion or a miscarriage. There is nowhere to go from that, she said. You cant give birth from your fallopian tube. And the fetus will not grow. It just grows, but not to full term. Behar joins a growing list of celebrities, including The Hills star Lauren Conrad and Grammy-winning musician Amanda Shires, who have shared their experiences with ectopic pregnancies in connection with the Supreme Courts June ruling. Elsewhere in the chat, Behar addressed lawmakers who oppose abortion rights, like Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee in Georgias Senate race. Story continues What are these people thinking about, when they talk about the health of the mother? she said. People like that cannot be in positions of power. This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. Related... The lawyers in the Brian Flores case made an aggressive attempt to secure discovery on the question of whether the case should be sent to arbitration. The attempt was aggressive, but not successful. Judge Valerie Caproni has denied the motion to compel discovery on the arbitration question. She calls it an impermissible fishing expedition, and she explains that Flores, Steve Wilks, and Ray Horton dont need discovery in order to argue that the proposed arbitrator is so biased against them that the motion to compel arbitration should not be granted. We are confident that we will defeat the efforts of the NFL to move this matter into a private and confidential arbitration behind closed doors, attorneys Douglas H. Wigdor and John Elefterakis said in a statement. It is obvious that the NFL is trying to hide behind the arbitration process and avoid public scrutiny of the racial discrimination and retaliation claims we have brought. If they are confident in their defenses, they should let the process play out in court so the general public can see. The case should play out in public, before a truly neutral third party. The Commissioner, who is hired, paid, and retained (or not) by the leagues owners can never be truly impartial in a case involving his employers. That said, theres one specific line in Judge Capronis order that points to a potential finding that arbitration must proceed, with an attack coming on it after the fact. The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) already contemplates a route through which parties can seek judicial protection against arbitrator bias; courts can overturn arbitration decisions where there was evident partiality or corruption in the arbitrators, Judge Caproni writes. Flores and his co-plaintiffs are essentially arguing that the bias is so clear and inherent that any ruling will be partial and corrupt. Theyll have to make that argument without access to more information about, for example, Goodells full compensation or his history or arbitration rulings involving the NFL and its teams. Ultimately, they may have to go through the arbitration and argue later that the ruling shows evident partiality and corruption. The response to the motion is due to be filed by August 19. The reply from the NFL and the teams that have been sued is due August 26. Judge denies effort in Brian Flores case to conduct discovery on arbitration issue originally appeared on Pro Football Talk The Daily Beast via GoFundMeIn the wake of the Highland Park Fourth of July parade mass shooting, the story of 8-year-old Cooper Roberts survival was embraced by many following updates on the boys recovery.And more than a month after the massacre, Roberts is long out of intensive carebut his family says he is now in constant pain and hopeless, sad, and angry at the realization he is paralyzed.In a sobering and gut-wrenching statement released Tuesday, the Roberts family said they want people to see the u Kandi Burruss and her foundation, Kandi C.A.R.E.S., donated back-to-school supplies to 500 children in Atlanta, Georgia. Families in need in the Atlanta area received the supplies over the weekend. In collaboration with Goodr, Garner Trial Attorneys, Nouveaux and Kandi Care held the giveaway at the Jefferson Park Recreation Center in East Point. Jasmine Crowe, Goodr CEO, said in a statement that single-parent families are vulnerable in their communities, and Goodr was honored to work with Burruss and her foundation. Single-parent families are a uniquely vulnerable part of our communities, Crowe stated. Even two-income households are struggling to provide anything above basic necessities right now so events like this are essential. Goodr is honored to partner with Kandi Cares again on such a vital initiative. Kandis Back To School School Supply Giveaway was a SUCCESS today Kandi ALWAYS gives back to her community in East Point, where she was raised Kandis giving spirit WILL NOT be spoiled by a rotten peach #RHOA #KandiCares pic.twitter.com/ob6GDI8JoC TeamKandiAlways (@teamkandialways) July 30, 2022 Burruss also released a statement stating that the organizations are delighted to spread positivity in a world filled with so much negativity. She also said the initiative would provide single-parent homes with all necessities. With so much negativity in the world and the cost of living continuing to rise, we are delighted to spread some positivity and help the families within our community that desperately need it, Burruss said. This initiative will provide single-parent homes with the necessities for all of their back-to-school needs. Story continues With so much negativity in the world and the cost of living continuing to rise, we are delighted to spread some positivity and help the families within our community that desperately need it, said Kandi Burruss. https://t.co/DQJ3zWNSVw CBS46 (@cbs46) July 31, 2022 In an Instagram post, Burruss shared photos and videos of the event, thanking her collaborators for a successful event. Today was an awesome day! We did our @kandicares back to school give away & gave away book bags, filled with school supplies & snacks for over 500 children, Burruss wrote. Thank you @cityofeastpoint @goodrco @nouveaubaratl @gta_law & all of our volunteers for partnering with us for this giveback! Love yall! Over the weekend, several other giveaways were held across metro Atlanta in addition to Burruss back-to-school event. EXCLUSIVE: Karoline Leavitt, the 24-year-old former spokeswoman for House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and a former assistant press secretary for President Trump, said the American dream is "completely out of reach" for her generation of voters due to Democrats' policies. Leavitt, who was born and raised in Atkinson, N.H. and is running for Congress in her home state, told Fox News young Americans "best be voting for conservatives" come November. Leavitt, who has been endorsed by Stefanik, R-N.Y., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said she returned to the Granite State last year from Washington, D.C., to "step into the arena and fight." In an interview with Fox News this week, Leavitt said the issues most important to New Hampshire voters are "the economy, record inflation and skyrocketing gas prices." KAROLINE LEAVITT, FORMER TRUMP, STEFANIK SPOKESWOMAN, RUNNING FOR CONGRESS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE "We are a cold weather state here in New Hampshire, and were headed for a very dark and scary winter, where people are literally going to have to choose between eating and heating, and so those are the main concerns of constituents here," Leavitt said. "We are the live free or die state. We believe in less government and more freedom. So, my goal, as the next congresswoman from New Hampshire, is to get the federal government out of our economy." The U.S. economy shrank in the spring for the second consecutive quarter, meeting the criterion for a recession as record-high inflation and higher interest rates forced consumers and businesses to pull back on spending. The Biden administration, though, says the U.S. "is not in a recession," despite a recent GDP report, saying it is "no surprise that the economy is slowing down" amid inflation. TED CRUZ TAKES SIDES IN GOP PRIMARY IN KEY CONGRESSIONAL BATTLEGROUND DISTRICT "Young people, arguably more than any population in America right now, are feeling the effects of this administration with skyrocketing rents in cities across this country, with the inflation that's making life incredibly unaffordable for us, with the gas prices," Leavitt told Fox News. Story continues Leavitt added that the "American dream is completely out of reach for my generation of voters." "It's my hope to allow them to understand and to break through the propaganda they're hearing on social media, in the mainstream media, on their college campuses and get them to understand, you know, our state of the country is because of Democrat policies," Leavitt said. Leavitt has also been endorsed by Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA, a national student movement dedicated to identifying, organizing and empowering young people to promote the principles of free markets and limited government. Leavitt told Fox News she doesnt "blame Generation Z and millennial voters for believing in socialism." "It's in every institution in our country," she said. 23-YEAR-OLD KAROLINE LEAVITT LAUNCHING BID FOR CONGRESS, 'STANDING UP TO FIGHT' FOR HER GENERATION "If we want to break through that monolithic group think and reach out to these voters, it is going to take young candidates in Congress, people like myself, to do that," Leavitt said. Leavitt said she has traveled to nearly every college campus in New Hampshire to reach out to voters between ages 18 and 30. But Leavitt isnt the youngest candidate in the race to take on Democrat Rep. Chris Pappas in November. Tim Baxter, a first-term member of the New Hampshire House, said he is one week younger than Leavitt and also will turn 25 before the GOP primary Sept. 13. "I don't believe in identity politics. I think you're never too young or too old to make a difference," Baxter told Fox News, adding he thinks voters "should vote for whoever they think is the best candidate." Baxter told Fox News he is the "only proven conservative fighter in the race." Pappas won re-election in 2020 by five points in whats long been a top congressional battleground district. Republican Matt Mowers, who won the GOP congressional nomination two years ago, is running again for the seat. Mowers, who is 32, is also a veteran of the Trump administration, having served as a senior advisor and former diplomat at the State Department, as well as chief of staff for Dr. Deborah Birx. Mowers was also a longtime political aide to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and a former New Hampshire GOP executive director. Mowers has the endorsement of three top officials in the Trump administration former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former acting director of National Intelligence Rick Grenell. Hes also backed by the top two Republicans in the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise. "Its time for a new generation of conservative leaders, which is why I am running for Congress," Mowers said. "We need fresh blood in Washington who wont back down from a fight." But the other candidates in the race, like Gail Huff Brown, told Fox News "Granite Staters deserve a voice in Congress with the life experience to get things done." Huff Brown is a former longtime television reporter and wife of former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown who later served as ambassador to New Zealand during the Trump administration. "As a mother, a new grandmother, a military spouse and a journalist, I understand that the issues we face every day require more than talking points to solve," she said. "Under Joe Biden, we have runaway inflation, sky-high fuel prices and are now in a recession. Fixing this requires more than the performative rhetoric we see from my opponents." Huff Brown, 60, added: "Experience matters." And 61-year-old Russell Prescott, a former longtime New Hampshire state senator vying for the GOP nomination, agreed. "What adds to the ability to be effective in Washington, D.C., is to have experience," Prescott said, highlighting his nearly four decades of business experience and his time in state government and on the campaign trail. "The experience is very broad and very deep, and it assists me on how to answer questions, how to build consensus, how to pass legislation one step at a time that lasts and take the problems head-on, on my first day on the job in Washington D.C.," he said. Leavitt also said her experience working alongside former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany during the Trump administration has prepared her for adversity in Washington. "We went to battle against the fake news every single day that were attacking our president and attacking all of the people in this state and in this country who believed in him," Leavitt said. Leavitt told Fox News her campaign has raised more than $1.4 million. The first GOP primary debate is set for Thursday. The New Hampshire GOP primary is Sept. 13. If elected, Leavitt would be the youngest congresswoman in U.S. history. By Hyonhee Shin SEOUL (Reuters) -U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her South Korean counterpart vowed on Thursday to support deterrence against North Korea and achieve its denuclearisation. "Both sides expressed concerns about the dire situation of North Korea's growing threat," Pelosi and South Korea's National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo said in a joint statement after meeting in Seoul. "We agreed to support the efforts of the two governments to achieve practical denuclearisation and peace through international cooperation and diplomatic dialogue, based on the strong and extended deterrence against the North." Pelosi also said at a news conference that she and Kim discussed ways to boost cooperation on regional security and economic and climate issues. Pelosi arrived in South Korea late on Wednesday following a brief stop in self-ruled Taiwan to the fury of China. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol did not meet Pelosi due to his scheduled vacation this week, but held a 40-minute phone call with her where he promised close cooperation with the U.S. Congress, Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo said. The presidential office in a separate press release said Yoon, during the phone call, expressed his hopes to meet Pelosi when he visits the United States. South Korean media speculated that Yoon could be shunning meeting Pelosi in person to avoid antagonising China, after her visit to Taiwan outraged Beijing, which claims the self-governed island as its own. Choi Young-bum, senior presidential secretary for public relations, told reporters that "every decision was made in consideration of our national interest", and that there will be no change in prioritising the South Korea-U.S. alliance. Late Thursday night, Pelosi arrived in Japan, which earlier in the day said five Chinese ballistic missiles landed within its exclusive economic zone, part of military exercises launched by Beijing in response to her Taiwan visit. Pelosi is scheduled to hold a breakfast meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Friday. (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Additional reporting by Joori Roh and Soo-hyang Choi in Seoul, Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Raju Gopalakrishnan) Lady Gaga has officially confirmed her casting in the Joker sequel, Joker: Folie a Deux. Rumours began to circulate in June that Gaga would be cast in the movie, which is said to be a musical, alongside Joaquin Phoenix. The title is a French term pertaining to a mental health disorder that affects two or more people. Gaga confirmed her casting on Twitter on Thursday (4 August), posting a clip of her and Phoenixs silhouettes dancing against a red backdrop. The Louis Armstrong song Cheek to Cheek also plays in the video. It is thought that she will be playing a version of Harley Quinn, opposite Phoenixs reprisal of his Joker role. Fans are very happy with the news. I absolutely did not expect that Gaga herself would confirm this Im crying my year was made, posted one person. I am genuinely looking forward to this, and I am not afraid to admit it. Some may even call me #brave, wrote another. I CANT BELIEVE THIS IS REAL, said a third, while a fourth added: This is going to be such an interesting role for Gaga to play, shes LITERALLY serving versatility in her movie roles as well, Im sure shes going to deliver. Joker: Folie a Deux 10.04.24 pic.twitter.com/obp7T9lBFL Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) August 4, 2022 Many people commented on how bizarre the interviews promoting the film are likely to be, given that Phoenix and Gaga both have reputations for going to extreme lengths to get into character. This press tour is going to be absolutely unhinged the method acting quotes we are about to be blessed with we are not worthy, posted one person. 2019sJoker was nominated for 11 Oscars, with Hildur Gunadottir winning for Original Music Score and Joaquin Phoenix winning Best Actor. Joker: Folie a Deux will be released in cinemas on 4 October 2024. Fox News Twenty-four hours after polls closed in the GOP primary for Arizona governor, the race is too close to call, yet Fox News host Laura Ingraham and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich complained Wednesday that the lack of an outcome is crazy, obscene, a disgrace, and profoundly wrong. Kari Lake, former President Donald Trumps pick for the seat who alleged voter fraud about a week before election day, has a slight lead over Karrin Taylor Robson, former Vice President Mike Pences choice, with about 82 percent of votes counted. During her 10 p.m. broadcast, Ingraham said that a new batch of votes in Maricopa County had been reported, with Robson now leading there by less than 1 percentage point. The county says that it can release updated numbers tomorrow around 10 p.m. Thats great for us because our show starts at 10 p.m. Eastern, the Fox host said. But Newt, I talked about this with [Sean] Hannity. This is obscene that in the greatest country in the world, we cant count our votes on Election Day and report on election night. What the heck is going on and why is this still not fixed? Gingrich claimed the situation was crazy, suggesting that if the winner of the French presidential election (in which only in-person paper ballots were allowed) could be determined the night of the election, then Arizonas results should be known promptly also. (That result, though, was a comfortable 17 percentage-point margin of victory for incumbent Emmanuel Macron.) Theres something profoundly wrong with the way that we approach all of this, and I think it will be interesting tomorrow to watch because there are other counties that Lake was carrying by a pretty good margin and I dont think they are finishing reporting either, Gingrich said. So who knows what the final number is going to be sometime tomorrow. And you are right: It is crazy that they cant just get this done. Notable races in Arizona that have been called include that of Rusty Bowers, the Republican House Speaker who testified before the Jan. 6 committee of Trumps efforts to get him to overturn the 2020 election and was promptly censured by the state GOP. Bowers lost to a Trump-backed opponent. Story continues Also on the losing end was Ron Watkins, the alleged founder of the QAnon conspiracy theory, who couldnt manage to get more than 4 percent of the vote in the states 2nd Congressional District. Winning his primary race for secretary of state, and therefore one step closer to overseeing the elections process, was Trump-endorsed Mark Finchem, who has supported the former presidents lies about the 2020 election. After Arizonans cast their ballots in November 2020, it was the Fox News Decision Desk which first called the state for Biden on election night a move that didnt sit well with many Fox figures and, of course, Trump. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now. Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now. A new lawsuit alleges that an online programming boot camp charges students hefty fees and makes big promises, but does not provide what students paid for. More than a dozen plaintiffs from all across the country filed the lawsuit against a company called Clever Programmer. In eye-catching and entertaining videos on YouTube and ads on social media, Clever Programmer claims its coding training programs can lead to six-figure jobs with top companies like Apple, Google and Netflix. But the lawsuit alleges that is not happening. Instead, students end up with large debts and lack the expected job skills or opportunities. Georgia attorney Cyclone Covey represents the plaintiffs. To imply that you can learn this stuff in half a year and go out and make that kind of money is frankly false, and the problem is if you arent in the programming space, you dont know any better you think this is true, Covey told Channel 2 Consumer Investigative reporter Justin Gray. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] The sales pitch convinced Adrienne Harris to sign up. Shes a medical coder looking to switch careers. I cant even explain how hyped we were at the beginning. We were so excited, Harris said. But Harris said she did not get was she was promised. You said you were going to teach us, and we have class, and no ones here, or we have class, and the guy doesnt know what to teach us, Harris said. What Harris did get is more than $20,000 in new debt. The lawsuit alleges that Clever Programmer would pressure students into taking out big loans ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 to pay for the online classes. TRENDING STORIES: They have a very high-pressure sales pitch, Covey said. The lawsuit demands that the plaintiffs be paid back their money. Story continues Harris says she still is committed to starting a new career but cant help but be discouraged by what happened. In addition to feeling defeated or discouraged, we were feeling really, really stupid. Its like, how did I let myself into this? How did I get caught up in this? Harris said. Channel 2 reached out to the attorney for Clever Programmer for comment, who says the lawsuit is so new, he has not even seen it yet. [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter] IN OTHER NEWS: Story at a glance The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) on Thursday filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a 2021 Tennessee law that prohibits transgender students from using school restrooms or locker rooms that match their gender identity. A similar complaint was filed by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the educational arm of the HRC, last year. That lawsuit was dropped in February after the plaintiffs and their families decided to move out of Tennessee. Thursdays complaint was filed on behalf of D.H., a transgender 8-year-old girl entering the third grade in Williamson County, Tenn. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), one of the nations largest LGBTQ+ rights groups, is suing the Tennessee Department of Education and its commissioner over the enforcement of a state law barring transgender students from using school facilities like restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. The lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court alleges that the law, signed by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) last May, singles out transgender students for disfavored treatment and violates rights guaranteed to them under the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs. The U.S. Department of Education last year said the policy protects students from discrimination based on their gender identity. The law, officially titled the Tennessee Accommodations for All Children Act, requires state public schools to provide reasonable accommodation for students who will not or cannot use a gender-specific facility. Under the measure, a reasonable accommodation does not include access to a restroom or changing room that is designated for use by members of the opposite sex while persons of the opposite sex are present or could be present. In this case, sex is defined as a students sex assigned at birth, which the law argues is immutable. America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news. The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the educational arm of the HRC, filed a similar lawsuit against the Tennessee law last year, but that case was dismissed in February after both plaintiffs and their families decided to move to another state. Story continues Thursdays complaint was filed jointly with the law firm Linklaters on behalf of a transgender 8-year-old girl entering the third grade in Williamson County, Tenn. Jason Golden, the director of Williamson County Schools, and the Williamson County Board of Education are also named as defendants in the complaint. According to the lawsuit, the girl, identified pseudonymously as D.H. to protect her identity, had previously been permitted to use the girls restroom at school for in-person events while engaging in distance learning in 2021. Once D.H. returned to the classroom earlier this year, she was barred under the Accommodations for All Children Act from using facilities aligning with her gender identity and made to use a single-occupancy restroom which reportedly has on more than one occasion been covered in human waste. These restroom accommodations provided to D.H. by the elementary school are not accommodations at all, the complaint states. They reinforce the differential treatment and trauma associated with living under the [Accommodations for All Children Act], violating D.H.s constitutional and statutory rights. In a statement on Thursday, HRC Litigation Director Cynthia Cheng-Wun Weaver called state lawmakers that backed the law power hungry and accused them of supporting the legislation to ignite their base. It is unfortunate that Tennessee lawmakers are using their authority to attack some of our nations most vulnerable our children, she said. D.H.s mother, identified in the suit as A.H., said she felt ashamed to live in an area so hostile to transgender young people. Years ago, I chose to move to Tennessee because it was known as the volunteer state, whose citizens cared for their neighbors without hesitation not a state that legalizes discrimination against helpless children, she said Thursday. Now, I am embarrassed to say that I live in a state that refuses to see anything beyond my childs gender. By filing this lawsuit, I am showing my volunteer spirit because Im fighting to not only affirm my childs existence, but also the thousands of transgender and nonbinary children who live in Tennessee. Neither the Tennessee Department of Education nor Williamson County Schools immediately responded to Changing Americas request for comment. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Laodicea's arrest went public on July 30 According to the ministry, the corresponding decision was made despite firm evidence being provided about the origin of the stolen cargo. Read also: Russias boasts of record harvests are based on stolen Ukrainian grain, says Ukrainian official Ukraine expressed its "disappointment" with Beirut's decision, and warns of possible consequences, the ministry said. The ministry said Kyiv has always made every effort to ensure the food security of Lebanon, continuing the export of agricultural products even after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Read also: CNN publishes satellite images of Russian ships loading stolen Ukrainian grain This decision actually encourages Russia to continue thefts in the temporarily occupied south part of Ukraine with a sense of impunity, a foreign ministry statement reads. Read also: Russia delivered 100,000 tons of stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria In addition, this decision basically undermines Lebanons food security and hurts the relationship with Ukraine as a reliable business partner. We call on the Lebanese side to reverse the decision to release from custody the Laodicea ship and take measures to prevent further attempts to use Lebanon for deals regarding stolen Ukrainian grain. Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine Aug. 4LIMA Lima officials are joining forces with other groups hoping to answer an age-old question about local gun violence: What can we do? Lima Mayor Sharetta Smith addressed local gun violence Wednesday morning at her weekly press conference, announcing steps to curtail the violence and community meetings to discuss the issue. Lima Fire Department Chief Andy Heffner presented another opportunity to aid in this effort. The Lima Fire Department plans to complete spot checks at local bars. Their goal is to prevent violence from happening at bars. One way to contribute to the effort is to ensure bars are not overcrowded. "We are going to go to the bars, get measurements and verify their occupancy requirements are correct, then we can move forward," Heffner said. "We should begin sometime in September. It will be three bars at random. It could be as simple as going to three bars at random and saying everything looks great." The Lima Fire Department plans to continue to partner with the Lima Police Department in an effort to keep the city safe. Smith said she met with a 10-year-old gun-violence survivor who was injured in cross-fire just last week. "I learned that the events that transpired a week ago yesterday on Spring and Cole Street marked the second time in one week that this same 10-year-old had been caught in the cross-fire of gun violence," Smith said. "I also learned this brave little girl actually laid in the car over her brothers to keep them from being injured. No child should have to make this decision." Smith thanked the local police departments and encouraged members of the community to participate in ending gun violence in the City. "Overall the Lima Police Department, the Allen County Sheriff's Office and other law enforcement partners have done a good job at keeping our community safe, where crime has seen a double-digit decrease for over a decade," Smith said. "However, community safety is all our responsibility. These senseless acts of violence currently happening in our city are not random acts. We need everyone who sees what is happening to speak out. Ending this violence starts with us." City officials will also play host to four safety conversations at the Cambridge Center, 418 N. Central Ave., Lima. At 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 9, Smith will speak with people who lost family members and friends to gun violence. At 7:15 p.m., she'll speak with childcare providers. The following week, Smith will speak with healthcare professionals starting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 16. At 7:15 p.m., she'll meet with neighborhood groups and business owners. BAMAKO, Mali (AP) In Bamako's popular Darsalam neighborhood, a young gendarme stands by a newly barricaded street, his hand on the trigger of a rifle pointed slightly to the ground. The armed policeman is a sign of how Mali's bustling capital of more than 2.5 million people on the banks of the Niger River is on heightened alert as jihadi attacks have moved perilously close to the city. At least 15 extremist attacks hit Mali in June and July, the most daring when jihadi fighters attacked Kati, the country's largest military base, just 15 kilometers (9 miles) outside the capital. The growing insecurity in Mali, a sprawling country of 20 million people, has increased instability in West Africa's volatile Sahel region. Mali has had two coups since 2020 in which the military has vowed to do more to stop the jihadi violence. In recent months the junta's leader, Col. Assimi Goita, who had himself appointed transitional president, has ordered French troops and a European Union force to leave the country. The junta has also restricted the operations of a U.N. peacekeeping force. Instead, Mali's military is working with the Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group. The Malian government officially denies the presence of the Russian mercenaries, although several European diplomats have cited evidence that Wagner is in Mali. The withdrawal of the French forces has certainly left a vacuum, especially at the intelligence level, and this puts Bamako and other areas of the country in a more vulnerable position against jihadist groups, and through previous experience, preventing infiltration and attacks is very difficult," said Rida Lyammouri, senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South. "If these groups can infiltrate and attack Malis most protected base at Kati, then they can do the same against strategic locations in Bamako, warned Lyamouri. The pace of the jihadi attacks has increased and in June a leader of the al-Qaida-linked group JNIM issued a threat that the capital would soon be directly attacked. Story continues The United States is moving all nonessential staff out of Bamako and like many other Western countries has advised travelers to avoid visiting Mali. Mali's military has tightened security in the capital and has closed major roads to counter this terrorist threat in both Kati and Bamako. Some roads leading to the military camp or to the residence of the transitional president are also cut off, Col. Souleymane Dembele, spokesman for the Malian army, told The Associated Press. Every day we arrest terrorists in Bamako or nearby. Although the ramped-up security is to protect citizens, some of the measures have been detrimental to ordinary residents. Assa Diakite looked with dismay at her ruined corn field near the military camp at Bamako's airport, in a video posted on social media. Her entire crop had been cut down by the army as a security measure, she said. I've been farming here for 25 years and there has been no problem until now, she said. The soldiers who cut down my crop say the corn plants blocked visibility around their camp and allowed jihadi rebels to hide in the fields to attack them. That was not my wish. I am a widow, and it is thanks to these crops that I feed myself and my family. I ask transitional President Assimi Goita for help. A few days later, goodhearted citizens contributed money to help Diakite and other farmers whose fields had been cut down. But even those acts of generosity may come under attack by jihadi rebels, who warn that cooperation with the military could lead to attacks by them. A recent jihadi audio message circulated over WhatsApp has created panic. The jihadi message was directed to the people of Kati who after the July attack on the army barracks had vowed they would search all their houses to root out extremist rebels. When you see a kamikaze car (suicide bomb vehicle) coming from far away, taking care to avoid bars, concert venues, soccer stadiums, markets to target only a military camp, you should understand that (the military) is our target," said the message. But if you show us that you and the army are the same thing, then why do we bother targeting only the military camp? it warned ominously. This message is to tell people to be careful. ... If you push us to the extreme thats how we can react, said Baba Alfa Umar, an independent geopolitical researcher who follows the situation in the Sahel. Amid the military movements, the junta has taken steps to address Mali's political situation and prepare the way for new elections, which it says will be in February 2024. Last week, Mali's transitional government appointed a team to draft a new constitution within two months. A key point will be if Mali continues to be a secular state. In 2012 extremist rebels linked to al-Qaida started their attacks saying they were fighting for Mali to be governed by Muslim Shariah law. The question of secularism and the place of religion in the Malian constitution," is the crucial question to be decided in drafting the new document," said Gilles Yabi, director of the West African Citizen think tank, Wati. The main question that interests Western partners and necessarily other Malians is the place of religion in politics. Should there be a separation between the religious sphere and the political sphere?" said Yabi. He said while the majority of people in Mali are Muslim, "there are Malian civil society actors that will also push for the Republic of Mali to remain secular. The man accused of killing three people and injuring six others in a stabbing spree at a kindergarten in Jiangxi province, China, has been arrested. Liu Xiaohui, 48, allegedly stormed the private Childrens Home kindergarten in Anfu county with a knife on Wednesday morning and was arrested in a neighboring county 12 hours later. Liu was previously captured on surveillance video calmly walking away from the scene after the attack. He went into hiding in a mountainous area, where he was captured at 10:50 p.m. local time, according to the Anfu county police. Police have not revealed the identities and ages of the victims. However, at least one victim was a child, reported the state-run Global Times. More from NextShark: Chinese woman who suffered child loss, divorce and paralysis finds love with her best friends son Schools in Jiangxi province were urged to strengthen campus safety following the attack. Those with insufficient security measures will reportedly be closed for the summer term. All schools in all regions need to work with public security (and) other departments to immediately and comprehensively carry out a major investigation and rectification of potential safety issues on campuses, including kindergartens, Education Ministry officials said. While China prohibits private gun ownership, most mass attacks in the country are carried out with homemade explosives, gasoline bombs or knives. More from NextShark: Video: Woman in China forcibly administered COVID test while being pinned down There has been a string of mass knife attacks in the country recently. Four people were injured in a knife attack in a Shanghai hospital last month, and two children were killed in another knife attack at a kindergarten in southern China in April last year. Featured Image via New York Post More from NextShark: Shenzhou-13 crew member becomes first female Chinese astronaut to complete spacewalk Enjoy this content? Read more from NextShark! SF tourist shows how she tracked down stolen luggage in viral TikToks One of two suspects in a shooting that killed a 32-year-old in a Kansas City hotel parking lot last month was charged Monday. Chance K. Bandy, who turned 21 on Wednesday, was arrested earlier this week after walking into Kansas City police headquarters to clear his name, according to documents filed in Clay County Circuit Court. Instead, prosecutors charged Bandy with one count of first-degree murder and another count of armed criminal action. Authorities allege Bandy, of Kansas City, is one of two men who killed Angel Rivera-Rodriguez on July 14. The fatal shooting took place outside the Best Western hotel at 2633 N.E. 43rd Street in the Northland. According to court records, Kansas City police were called to the hotel around 2:10 a.m. in response to a reported shooting. Inside the parking lot they found Rivera-Rodriguez, who had been shot, on his back in the parking lot. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Witnesses interviewed by police included a woman, identified in court papers as his girlfriend, who was with Rivera-Rodriguez at the hotel, staying in one of the rooms on the second floor. She told investigators Rivera-Rodriguez had been shot after two men, including one she knew, came to hang out with them early that morning. The witness told police Rivera-Rodriguez had been abusive to her and was a drug dealer who carried large amounts of cash. Bandy and another man came to the hotel wearing face masks, she said, and at some point there was an argument between the pair and Rivera-Rodriguez, during which Rivera-Rodriguez went downstairs to his car. From there, she described seeing a man she knew as Chance fire a gunshot at Rivera-Rodriguez from the second-story balcony as another man ran downstairs and shot him twice more, according to court papers. Based on information provided by the witness, police showed her a photograph lineup that included Bandy. She identified him as one of the shooters, court papers allege. Forensic reports determined Rivera-Rodriguez died of a bullet that struck the back of his neck. Court documents said the trajectory of the bullet showed it coming from above and from behind him. Story continues Evidence recorded at the crime scene included one shell casing from a 9mm firearm found on the upper balcony just above Rivera-Rodriguezs vehicle. Two more shell casings of a different caliber were found by his body. Detectives also noted that a handgun was found on the side of Interstate 35 on the morning of the shooting by Claycomo police. It was a .45 caliber like two shell casings found at the scene, court papers say, which was sent to the Kansas City Crime Lab to be analyzed. Surveillance cameras recorded some of the events as they unfolded. In a video reviewed by detectives, two men identified by authorities as the suspects were seen walking in the area around the time Rivera-Rodriguez was observed going to his car. The video also showed Rivera-Rodriguez collapsing at one point as he appeared to be walking away from the hotel, a detective wrote in court papers. During his police interview on Monday, Bandy allegedly admitted to being present when the shooting occurred but denied having a gun with him. Bandy described arguing with Rivera-Rodriguez, alleging the gunshot victim had assaulted his friend at the hotel. He also said he saw Rivera-Rodriguez holding a firearm before the other man Bandy was with shot him, according to court papers. After the shooting, Bandy said the pair grabbed Rivera-Rodriguezs gun and fled the area, tossing the firearm out of a moving car on the side of the highway. Detectives reported that no firearm was found on or near Rivera-Rodriguez at the shooting scene. Police did report finding a purse containing around $10,000 cash. A warrant was issued for Bandys arrest on Monday following his interview with police. As of Wednesday, he was being held on a $1 million bond in the Clay County jail. An attorney for Bandy was not listed in court records. GREENBELT, Md. (AP) A West Virginia man was sentenced Thursday to three years in federal prison after he sent emails threatening Dr. Anthony Fauci and another federal health official for talking about the coronavirus and efforts to prevent its spread. Using an anonymous email account based in Switzerland, Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr. threatened to kill Fauci or members of his family, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release. One of his messages said they would be dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire." Another email said Fauci would be hunted, captured, tortured and killed, according to court records. Fauci is President Joe Bidens chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Fauci has been a vocal supporter of vaccines and other preventive measures against COVID-19. He said he expects to retire at the end of Biden's current term. Another target was Dr. Francis Collins, who was director of NIH at the time of Connally's threats. Collins and his family were threatened with physical assault and death if Collins continued to speak about the need for mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, the Justice Department said. Connally also admitted to sending emails threatening Dr. Rachel Levine, Pennsylvania's then-Secretary of Health, the Justice Department said. An unidentified public health official in Massachusetts and a religious leader in New Jersey were also threatened. Everyone has the right to disagree, but you do not have the right to threaten a federal officials life, Erek L. Barron, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, said in a statement. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis sentenced Connally to 37 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. Connally most recently lived in Snowshoe, West Virginia. He was arrested last summer, and pleaded guilty in May to making threats against a federal official. Something about Sunny Aggregator felt off-kilter to the cryptocurrency user known as Saint Eclectic. Sunny was the newest decentralized finance (DeFi) app to hit Solana during that blockchains scorching bull run last summer, when its native token jumped fivefold. Sunny was barely two weeks old by early September, but billions of dollars in crypto were flooding this yield farm. Still, Saint and others had questions: Who was behind Sunny? Why was its developer, one Surya Khosla, pseudonymous? Was its codebase audited? Would users cash be safe? There was no indication of who Surya was, Saint recalled recently, so many users didnt feel comfortable putting their crypto in. Their suspicions proved prescient. CoinDesk has learned who Surya was: Ian Macalinao, the chief architect of Saber, a stablecoin exchange built on top of Solana. In turn, he built Sunny Aggregator on top of Saber. And thats just the top of the pile. Coding as 11 purportedly independent developers, Ian, a 20-something computer wiz from Texas, created a vast web of interlocking DeFi protocols that projected billions of dollars of double-counted value onto the Saber ecosystem. That temporarily inflated the total value locked (TVL) on Solana, as the network was racing toward its zenith last November. The DeFi faithful regard TVL as a barometer for on-chain activity. I devised a scheme to maximize Solanas TVL: I would build protocols that stack on top of each other, such that a dollar could be counted several times, Ian wrote in a never-published blog post reviewed by CoinDesk. The blog post was prepared on March 26, three days after Cashio, one of Ians secretly built protocols, lost $52 million in a hack. People close to the matter confirmed the drafts authenticity. Peak value Ians ploy worked for a while. By his count, Saber and Sunny comprised $7.5 billion of Solanas $10.5 billion TVL at their peak. (Billions of those dollars were double-counted between his two protocols.) Story continues I believe it contributed to the dramatic rise of SOL, Ian wrote of a time when Solanas native currency traded at $188. Solana networks TVL continued to swell even after the Saber ecosystem began losing steam in mid-September 2021, topping at $15 billion around Nov. 9, according to data provider DeFiLlama, while Sabers TVL had by then dropped 64%. Ian wrote he disdained this vanity metric; nonetheless, it bothered me that Ethereum TVL was so much higher than Solanas, because in his view, DeFi projects on Ethereum the largest blockchain for DeFi are stacked to double-count deposits. I wanted to create a system very similar to this, he wrote. One problem: If the same team built each protocol, TVL would be more silly as a metric. Thus I created more anonymous profiles, he wrote. Ian wore 11 masks. In public, Ian and his brother Dylan called their anonymous personas friends, or friends of friends. Their Ship Capital coder club was laying the blueprints for my ideal DeFi ecosystem, Ian wrote in the unpublished blog. Saber and its so-called liquidity provider (LP) tokens anchored everything. If an ecosystem is all built by a few people, it does not look as authentic, Ian wrote in his blog post. I wanted to make it look like a lot of people were building on our protocol, rather than ship 20+ disjoint[ed] programs as one person. The Macalinaos wanted other crypto protocols to become so dependent on Saber that its failure would lead to the entire system going down, as Dylan phrased it on Oct. 1, 2021. Btw this is the 200 IQ [Saber Labs] strategy, but few understand The Macalinao brothers offered no comment by press time. A Sybil attack There are valid reasons to seek shelter in pseudonyms. Ians weaponized anons, however, mounted something akin to a Sybil attack abusing crypto users trust. (A Sybil attack is when a computer in a network uses bogus identities to gain disproportionate influence over the whole.) Read more: Why CoinDesk Respects Pseudonymity: A Stand Against Doxxing I am revealing this because it is inevitable that I will be found out, Ian wrote in his never-published blog. Instead, the Macalinaos in May published Saber Public Goods to propagate the Saber teams prolific code across Solana. Eight of Ians 11 secret projects appear there. Their disclosure is mum on the anons and their master. Sunny and Cashio, whose tokens imploded, dont show up, either. My army of anons Surya Khosla was Ians moniker when building Sunny Aggregator. Surya popped onto Twitter in August 2021. Saint Eclectic, the Sunny skeptic, hesitated to deposit his LP tokens in the work of this mysterious character, an anon with an artificial intelligence-generated face. One factor swung in Suryas favor: The Ian puppet claimed to know brother Dylan pretty well in real life. On Sept. 9 of last year, Dylan Macalinao tweeted he felt comfortable putting his own crypto into Sunny Aggregator. We audited their code, Dylan, who is in his early 20s, said. Dylan lent Surya the credibility he needed to win over skeptics like Saint. The problem was, the lead developer, Surya Khosla, didnt exist. Dylans brother Ian built Sunny Aggregator. Ian had made Surya up. It was Ians first dalliance with assumed identities for Saber and far from his last. Ian wrote in March 2022 that he had created 11 anonymous founders that are actually me. Ship Capital had many friends": 0xGhostchain, who created Cashio; Goki Rajesh, builder of multi-signature wallet Goki; Larry Jarry from mining rewards aggregator Quarry; Swaglioni, the grandmaster of governance platform TribecaDAO; and of course Surya Khosla from Sunny Aggregator, Sabers yield farm. These DeFi Lego bricks were the jewels of the Saber ecosystem. Lesser-known protocols Crate (run by kiwipepper), aSOL (0xAurelion), Arrow (oliver_code) Traction.Market (0xIsaacNewton), Sencha (jjmatcha) and Venko App (ayyakovenko), rounded out the crown, according to Ians blog. He admitted to creating the lot. Pump it Ian, Dylan and the puppet anons promoted Ship Capitals work incessantly on social media. They shilled their counterparts launches and integrations, praised their brethren's thinkfluencer tweets, credited each other for inspiring them to build on Solana. They even circulated Ians self-referential memes. Sometimes they waxed philosophical. When on Dec. 29 prolific Solana developer Armani Ferrante (a real person) tweeted, If you're not making mistakes you're too slow, five Ian stooges responded in four minutes: One of Ian Macalinao's experiments quotes its master on Twitter. As @simplyianm likes to say it's an experiment! declared @_kiwipepper herself one of them. Others danced around the truth. Team size =! Success, Ian tweeted on Dec. 7, 2021. I would pay @larrinator01 and @0xGoki 10x market rate in a heartbeat. Not that they need my money (Ians Goki and Larry personas cheered). Ians anons were cheeky when outsiders challenged their legitimacy. Im no puppet, Surya Khosla asserted on Nov. 25. In early January he joked of doxxing myself to another developer as a reward for building atop Sunny; Ians creation even tweeted a photo that purported to show himself visiting the Macalinao brothers in Los Angeles. It's impossible to know whether Ian puppeteered his anons Twitters after springing them from his workbench. But two people who have worked with Ship Capital recalled the inexplicable behavior of its crew. One personas Telegram account would come online after another logged off. Regardless, Ian admits in the unpublished draft to pulling their strings where it mattered most: the codebases. If you are a developer, it is very easy to find out which open source protocols were written by me: there is always a flake.nix file that only I use. CoinDesk verified that many of the projects described in Ians blog contained the flake.nix file. #CashioRulesEverythingAroundMe To understand how the army of anons pumped double-counted value into Saber, 0xGhostchains Cashio project offers a compelling view. Unveiled last November near the crypto market peak, Cashios CASH was billed as a decentralized stablecoin whose dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies were backed by liquidity provider tokens. (LP tokens are a type of crypto asset that holders stake to earn extra yield. DeFi protocols issue them to users whose loaned tokens keep trades moving smoothly.) Cashio accepted only LP tokens from Saber as collateral. That wasnt overly strange last November, when Saber, an automated market maker with over $1 billion in TVL, was a major DeFi trading venue for stablecoin pairs on Solana. (Sabers current TVL is $90.6 million.) Cashio relied on Saber ecosystem projects created by Ians anons to generate yield. It first packaged Saber LP tokens into tokenized baskets using Crate, which Ian built under the pseudonym kiwipepper. It sent those crates through a yield redirection platform called Arrow Ian built this as oliver_code. Finally, Cashio said it earned yield by staking these deposit derivatives in Suryas Sunny Aggregator as well as Quarry, which Ian built as Larry Jarry. Profits flowed to Cashios treasury, managed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Confused? Cashios customers were. CoinDesk asked two high-profile users of Cashio to explain the apps convoluted process; neither could. The apps about page didnt help much, either. Chart a deleted user made in Cashio's Discord server on Feb. 19 What users cared about was this: Cashios DeFi machine accepted their Saber LP tokens and spat out CASH tokens. It was a lucrative trade. CASH holders could deposit their LP-backed stablecoins into Sunny liquidity pools and earn returns of 10%-30%. Had they deposited Saber LP tokens into Sunny instead of Cashio, they would get just 5%-10%, one trader said. It didnt matter that the same crypto asset was behind both. Such is the logic of DeFi money Legos. Ramming deposits from Saber-to-Cashio-to-Crate-to-Arrow-to-Sunny-or-Quarry had even bigger implications for Saber. According to Ian, it turned $1 of apparent TVL into $6. Many DeFi projects measure their worth by touting total user deposits: TVL. TVL can only count if protocols are built separately, Ian wrote, explaining why his anons protocols appeared to be separately built. According to TVL tracker DeFiLlama, Sabers deposits peaked at $4.15 billion on Sept. 11 2021; its flagship SBR token had topped out at 90 cents days earlier. Sunny Aggregators TVL also peaked on Sept. 11, at $3.4 billion. Its SUNNY token had flirted with an all-time-high of 18 cents one day before. Both tokens have plummeted 99%, according to data provider CoinGecko. Sabers and Sunnys TVL hardly fared better as they have both dropped by over 96%. Fallen angels Cashios March 23 implosion from a $52 million hack was a broadside against Ship Capital. Ian said in the unpublished blog that he pushed very hard for people to stake more into Cashio, because he wrote its code. He apologized for their catastrophic losses in a protocol that he created using a pseudonym and endorsed under his true identity. In the unpublished post, Ian begged the hacker a self-styled Robin Hood-type who railed against American and European fat cats to consider returning the funds. The hacker later did return $14 million of the $39 million that hack victims requested. Ian wrote that if the hacker didnt pay users back in full, I will do what I can to repay affected personal users in my personal Saber and Sunny tokens. This wont cover the full amount, but its all I have to offer. He never made good on that unpublished pledge. A barrier for criticism Pseudonymity is widespread in crypto, and not in itself evidence of wrongdoing. Thirteen years after bitcoins debut, the true identity of its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains unknown. Yet even after a recent brutal sell-off, the bellwether cryptocurrency boasts a $442 billion market capitalization. Ian, however, wanted a barrier for criticism, according to the unpublished post: I only want to focus on building and creating value in my perception of what I believe is the best way of doing things. I do not want to deal with excessive criticism before my ideas are fully brought to market, and being anonymous is an easy way to distance myself (and the protocols I work on) from this. Ians arrival in Solanaland in October 2020, according to Discord server logs, was hardly the self-proclaimed shipooors first code rodeo. His GitHub commit history stretches back over a decade, with the first public crypto contribution, on an EOS project, in late 2017. In early January 2021, Ian discussed the tokenomics of what he considered (rightly, it turned out) as a doomed-to-depeg stablecoin in the Discord for Basis.Cash. There, he became obsessed with building decentralized money. Somewhere along the way, he tried and failed to build a multiprotocol DeFi ecosystem that ended in criticism and ridicule, Ians post said. Moving to Solana was a way for me to reset that. Read more: USTs Do Kwon Was Behind Earlier Failed Stablecoin, Ex-Terra Colleagues Say Public statements Who were these anonymous builders flocking to Saber? Ian grappled with the question at last years Solana conference in Lisbon, Portugal, during a panel called From Zero to $2 Billion: How Saber Became the Biggest DeFi App on Solana. We brought in some friends to basically build on top of Saber and just grow out the ecosystem, Ian told Chris McCann of Race Capital, Sabers biggest venture capital (VC) backer. One friends project was Sunny; Crate, the tokenized basket-making protocol from Ians alias kiwipepper, was another. But that person also has, like a lot of friends that they know, Ian told the audience. One of those friends-of-friends built Cashio, a stablecoin project backed by Saber LP tokens that fed liquidity into Sunny Aggregator, he claimed. We could promote [CASH] to get more liquidity into Saber, he said on stage. In a brief interview with CoinDesk Thursday, McCann said he was unaware of Ians intimate connection to Cashio. Hes always mentioned that there is somebody else that created it, but I do not know who the somebody else is nor have I met them. Ians unpublished blog reveals Cashios true origin. Coding as 0xGhostchain, Ian rushed to complete an exemplar of Saber LP-backed stablecoins in time for Breakpoint, the Solana ecosystems biggest-ever gathering of fellow developers. Ian wanted others to copy Cashio, he wrote. Each protocol that parroted its dependence on Saber LP tokens would become a liquidity spigot gushing yet more TVL into the $1.7 billion mothership. This is part of why the code was insecure, it was rushed for this deadline, he wrote on March 26, after a hacker had spoofed Cashios unaudited smart contracts with fake collateral, draining it of $52 million. Cashios Discord community where passionate users roam likely believed the CASH code was safe. After all, Ian told them on Nov. 23: I personally audited it. He pitched a similar yarn to crypto Twitter on March 23, the day of the exploit: I did not audit Cashio as closely as I should have. Both statements contradict what Ian wrote in his unpublished letter: I didnt get anyone else to look at the code, including an auditor. I should not have done this. A reply to a tweet by Ian Macalinao... ...that he later deleted Moving on It was always the goal to eventually have real people building projects, Ian wrote in the unpublished blog. On July 23, the brothers started wooing external developers to Saber with a DAO accelerator program. Its application form asks: How will your protocol deeply integrate with the Saber Protocol thereby increasing Saber's volume/TVL/capital efficiency? That effort comes as the brothers cast off from Solana for Aptos, an up-and-coming blockchain porting Saber with them. Many Solana developers are in tow, a venture capital source said. The Macalinaos are betting on it: they helm a VC thats anchored in Aptos, three sources said. Their VC is called Protagonist. Its old name was Ship Capital. Read more: Solanas Macalinao Brothers Double Down on Crypto Venture Fund Seven Saber ecosystem users told CoinDesk they felt abandoned by the Macalinao brothers. Some lost money in CASH tokens (the erstwhile stablecoin went to zero). Others say their crypto is stuck in derivative tokens issued by Sunny. One pseudonymous user, Brad_Garlic_Bread, said he lost around $300,000 across Sunny and Saber there's a lot of people worse off than me. Read more: Curve Wars Heat Up: Emergency DAO Invoked After Clear Governance Attack The community assumes Ian is running the show but no one knows for sure, Brad_Garlic_Bread said. Hes still trying to get Ians attention. On July 16, Brad asked if Ian can pretend to be Surya for like a day to help Sunny Aggregator's investors recover locked tokens. Ian was answering questions in the Saber Discord; he skipped Brads. Other SUNNY token-holders asked Ian for clues about the yield aggregators future. Saber is moving to Aptos will Sunny do the same? They asked what became of Sunnys lead developer. The main sunny dev got burned out after losing most of their savings from the Cashio hack, Ian said on July 16. He said he would encourage this disenchanted dev to rebuild Sunny in Move, a coding language Ian says is safer than Solanas Rust for building multi-million-dollar protocols. One week later, Ian said the Sunny dev felt rejuvenated after giving Move a go. Feels like early Solana all over again. The issues facing the MBTA keep rolling in, as an MBTA bus caught fire, Thursday afternoon. Two workers were taken to the hospital as a result. The incident took place in Jamaica Plain, shortly after 3 p.m. according to T officials. I said oh my goodness that bus is on fire, said Darragh Murphy who witnessed the bus burning as she drove past the Forest Hills T station. Murphy could barely believe what she was seeing. Out of the corner of my eye, on the left side, I thought I saw some flames, she said. Murphy stopped to take a picture. Bus on fire on Washington Street just outside Forest Hills. Kudos to the driver for safely driving their ON FIRE bus into the @MBTA yard. Also kudos to @BostonFire for arriving in less than a minute and putting out the fire. #bospoli Please stay safe out there today. pic.twitter.com/VZyBpYDUdh Darragh Murphy (@DarraghCMurphy) August 4, 2022 An out of service bus had just returned to the MBTA Arborway bus yard when flames were observed in the vehicles rear compartment, according to the MBTA. The MBTA says that T personnel attempted to extinguish the flames, but were unsuccessful. The Boston Fire Department was called in to put out the flames. The Fire Department - God love them, God bless them, they were there within a minute, said Murphy. And while this may be an isolated incident, this fire comes a day after the MBTA announced a 30-day shutdown of the Orange Line to make urgent repairs. Joao Santos is a regular Orange Line commuter. Its very troublesome to hear this, he said. After seeing this bus in flames Santos says hell avoid buses even if they are from a private charter, which will be the case for busses replacing the Orange Line trains during the shut down, and take the commuter rail, saying right now, he has few options. Story continues The question is - is there an alternative and there is not and thats a problem we have right now, said Santos. The bus fire sent two MBTA workers to the hospital to be evaluated for possible smoke inhalation. As of Thursday night, one of the workers has been released, the other is currently still at a local hospital being treated, according to the MBTA. The cause of the fire remains under investigation at this time. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW MINNEAPOLIS (AP) Whit Merrifield said Thursday he is vaccinated for COVID-19 and will be cleared to play for Toronto when the Blue Jays return to Canada. Merrifield was acquired in a trade with Kansas City on Tuesday for two minor leaguers. The two-time All-Star was in the starting lineup in center field for his first game with his new team Thursday night at Minnesota. Ill be in Toronto when the team gets to Toronto," Merrifield said, avoiding saying when he received the vaccine. Merrifield was among 10 players on the Royals who were unvaccinated last month, preventing them from making their trip to Toronto. When asked about his decision, Merrifield drew the ire of Kansas City fans by saying: Something happens and I happen to get on a team that has a chance to go play in Canada in the postseason, maybe that changes. It was something that I probably could have handled a little better," Merrifield said Thursday of his comments in July. "But whats happened, happened. Im excited to be a Blue Jay. Excited to get to Toronto and play in the Rogers Centre as my home. Toronto leads the AL wild-card standings as it tries to make the postseason for the second time in three years. The next home game for the Blue Jays is Aug. 12 against Cleveland. Toronto manager John Schneider said Merrifield will play almost every day in a variety of positions, most likely second base and center. Its a luxury to have, to have that kind of guy where you can literally put anywhere and feel comfortable about it," Schneider said. "The days that hes not starting, hes probably going to play. I think with having a bench like this now, it allows us to be a little bit more aggressive in some certain spots that we havent been earlier in the year. An asset to have, for sure. ___ More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard will discuss lithium collaboration with Bolivian authorities in his visit to the South American country scheduled for Friday, according to a statement published on Wednesday by the ministry. "As you know, Bolivia has one of the largest reserves in the world, and it is a dialogue that matters to us and interests us", Ebrard said in a message to the media. (Reporting by Valentine Hilaire) Makarenko family From left: Inna, Oleh, and Yevhen Makarenko The mother of a family accused of beating a gay man so badly that he was blinded now says her she never even met the victim. Inna and Yevhen Makarenko and their sons Oleh and Pavel are charged with attempted murder, battery, and kidnapping in the attack, which police say occurred August 6, 2021, at the victims home in Pompano Beach, Fla. The first three were arrested by Broward County authorities in March and charged in April, and Pavel Makarenko was arrested later in New York. Charges against another son, Vladyslav Makarenko, were dropped because evidence showed he was not in Pompano Beach when the assault took place. The charges carry hate-crime enhancements. Police and prosecutors say the motivation was that the victim, a 31-year-old man whose name is being kept confidential, had been dating Oleh Makarenko, and that the family did not approve of the relationship. The victim suffered broken bones and other injuries in addition to losing his eyesight. Inna Makarenko, the mother, recently told Florida TV station WPLG that she has never met the man she is accused of assaulting. I cant understand why he lied, she said in an interview that aired this week, marking the first time she has spoken publicly about the matter. I never could understand how people could lie so easily. She also said she and her family are the only victims in the case and that they have nothing against gay people. We love everyone; we are Christian, she said. Vladyslav Makarenko has denied the familys involvement as well and denied knowing the victim. Just because someone who youve never even met said something about you, they are going to arrest you tomorrow and put you in jail for like, months, he told Miamis CBS affiliate last month. Not only you but all of your family. How would you feel? Follow More Advocate News on Pride Today Below A J-11 air fighter takes off from a PLA military airport in a training session in east China's Zhejiang province in late August 2021. Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images Chinese warplanes crossed the median line dividing the Taiwan Strait for the second day in a row on Thursday. China also began military drills around Taiwan and launched ballistic missiles into waters near the island. The moves come on the heels of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial visit to the self-ruled island. Nearly two dozen Chinese warplanes crossed the median line dividing the Taiwan Strait on Thursday as China began four days of military drills involving live fire around the island. Twenty-two Chinese military aircraft eight Shenyang J-11 fighter jets, 12 Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets and two Shenyang J-16 fighter jets entered Taiwan's air defense identification zone and then crossed the median line, according to Taiwan's defense ministry. Ministry of National Defense, R.O.C. (@MoNDefense) August 4, 2022 Though China routinely sends military aircraft, from fighters to bombers, into Taiwan's ADIZ, military flights across the median line are less common occurrences. Taiwan's defense ministry said it scrambled aircraft in response. It also issued radio warnings and had its air defense systems monitoring the Chinese activity. This week, more than 70 Chinese aircraft have flown sorties in and around the Taiwan Strait, and many have crossed the contentious dividing line. The latest moves come as Beijing conducts military drills around the self-governing island in response to a visit from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, high-level engagement that has frustrated Chinese leadership. On Thursday, China's military launched multiple ballistic missiles into waters near Taiwan, something they have not done since the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996. The missiles were identified by Taiwan's defense ministry as "DF ballistic missiles," which could be any of a number of different weapons in the Dongfeng missile series. Story continues Reports indicated China's People's Liberation Army Rocket Force fired 11 missiles into waters northeast and southwest of the island of Taiwan. The ongoing Chinese drills are being conducted in the air and at sea in six areas surrounding Taiwan, and the exercises are expected to continue until Aug. 7. The announcement that China would be conducting these drills came after Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taipei on Tuesday. Prior to Pelosi's visit, China, which has long claimed Taiwan as an inseparable part of its territory, issued numerous warnings about a possible military response. Read the original article on Business Insider German Chancellor Olaf Scholz viewed the repaired Siemens Energy turbine for Nord Stream 1 on Wednesday and said it's "ready for action at any time." Andreas Rentz/Getty Images The Nord Stream 1 pipeline sends gas from Russia to Germany. Gazprom said it's "impossible" to get a turbine for the pipeline back from repairs due to sanctions. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said "there is nothing preventing it from being transported to Russia." The Nord Stream 1 pipeline is missing a key turbine that's keeping natural-gas flows from Russia to Europe slow, and Russia and Germany are caught in a blame game over the delay. Gazprom has cut natural-gas flows via the Nord Stream 1 to Germany twice in the past two months. In June, Gazprom cut flows to about 40% of the pipeline's capacity, citing a turbine's hold-up in Canada as a result of war-related sanctions. In July, Gazprom again cut natural-gas flow to Germany, this time to just 20% of capacity, citing a second turbine that needed maintenance. On July 10, Canada said it would waive sanctions and return the first repaired turbine to Russia to ensure continued gas flows in Europe. But, on July 13, Gazprom said it didn't have the required paperwork to get the equipment out of Canada. The first turbine, manufactured by Siemens Energy, is now in Germany awaiting transportation to Russia. German Chancellor Olaf viewed the equipment in Germany on Wednesday and said it was "ready for action at any time," Bloomberg reported. "There is nothing preventing it from being transported to Russia," Scholz added. Christian Bruch, the head of Siemens Energy, said Wednesday the company is discussing the issue with Gazprom and is keen to return the turbine, The New York Times reported. But Russian state-energy giant Gazprom said Wednesday on Twitter that it's "impossible" to get the turbine back "due to the discrepancy between the current situation and the existing contractual obligations on the part of Siemens." Also on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the turbine's return to Russia is contingent upon documentation proving it isn't subject to sanctions, Reuters reported. Story continues Europe depends on Russia for 40% of its natural-gas needs, such as cooking in homes and firing up power stations. It's fretting over a winter energy crisis because Russia has been slowing natural-gas flows to countries in the region as some buyers refused to pay in rubles, and on the back of the turbine drama. German industry leaders have warned of severe economic hardship should Russian gas be cut completely. To save energy, Europe's largest economy has already started turning off some heating and lights in summer. Read the original article on Business Insider Just moments after the Senate finalized a military toxic exposure bill that could benefit millions of veterans, activist John Feal issued a warning to the crowd of advocates celebrating outside the Capitol about the moment they had been lobbying for and dreaming about for years: The hard part hasnt begun. Feal who spent years as one of the lead advocates to award federal benefits to Sept. 11 victims, first responders and their families said work to make sure those payouts and resources are properly funded and administered continues to this day. He cautioned that even well-written bills dont always mean an easy transition to getting people the help they need. Getting a bill passed is easy, you just have to beat up the Senate and the House, Feal said. These people behind me, they have to take that and make sure Congress and the VA now do the right thing. Millions of vets suffering from burn pit, toxic injuries set for more benefits after Congress passes PACT Act The Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act better known as the PACT Act is set to be signed into law by President Joe Biden on Aug. 8. When that happens, it will mark a key moment in the 13-year-old fight to expand benefits for burn pit victims sickened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the decades-old quest to fully compensate Vietnam veterans for their exposure to chemical defoliants. But, advocates say it wont be the end of their work on the issue. The next step is delivering the benefits to veterans and their families, estimated to cost around $300 billion over the next 10 years. White House and Veterans Affairs officials promise they have been preparing for that task for months. Veterans who were exposed to toxic fumes while fighting for our country are American heroes, and they deserve world-class care and benefits for their selfless service, VA Secretary Denis McDonough said in a statement minutes after Feals speech. Once the president signs this bill into law, we at VA will implement it quickly and effectively, delivering the care these veterans need and the benefits they deserve. Story continues When will benefits arrive Separate from the congressional work, VA last year began revamping how it approaches illnesses believed linked to burn pit smoke in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. In the past, the department stuck to strict scientific evidence before granting presumptive status for illnesses believed linked to military service. Now, the department uses a wider set of metrics to evaluate the claims, which has led to adding 12 respiratory illnesses and cancers to the list of conditions presumed caused by burn pits (a designation that greatly speeds up the process of veterans receiving disability payouts). Once the PACT Act is signed into law, those new processes will be codified, a move that veterans advocates say will be key in coming years to preventing long waits for department recognition of military injuries. Other parts of the sweeping toxic exposure legislation will also go into effect immediately. Veterans currently get five years of medical coverage through VA after leaving the service, but will see that expanded to 10 years under the new law. Here are the veterans who will benefit from Congress sweeping toxic exposure bill All veterans who left the ranks in summer 2017 or later will have their eligibility automatically extended. Veterans who left between summer 2014 and summer 2017 will be able to apply for additional years of health care coverage, ending at 10 years after the date they separated. The benefits for individual illnesses will take longer to process. The law calls for VA to add 23 new conditions to the list of burn pit presumptive illnesses including asthma, chronic bronchitis and brain cancer but those will be phased in over the next three years. For Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, presumptive status for monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) goes into effect immediately. But new benefits for Vietnam veterans suffering from high-blood pressure (a group estimated to be around 500,000 individuals) arent set to go into effect until late 2026. There are provisions in the bill to speed up benefits for individuals with deteriorating health conditions, or age 80 and older. However, as the bill is written, some veterans expecting to benefit from the PACT Act wont see any checks in the mail for another four years. Changing the timeline White House officials said they are hoping to speed that up. The law does provide discretion to the VA secretary to move more quickly than some of the dates, so were going to be working collaboratively to see how much we can get done as quickly as possible so that veterans can get the services they need, said Terri Tanielian, special assistant to the president for Veterans Affairs. The department is focused on making sure that they can hire the staff that they need, that they have the resources in the right places. Were mindful of needing to make sure that the workforce and the infrastructure is ready. Lawmakers included funding in the measure for the new hires, aware that sending millions of new benefits claims to VA in coming years has the potential to overwhelm their current systems. Burn pits benefits bill concerns arent new, hinge on budget moves Biden called on Congress to pass comprehensive burn pit legislation in his State of the Union speech last spring. Tanielian said now that it has been done, the administration is focused on making sure it meets its responsibilities to implement the measure. This is a major victory for veterans, their families and survivors and those that have cared for them over the years, she said. Were looking forward to the President signing it and then being able to implement it effectively so that we can deliver the health care benefits that we know veterans have earned and that they deserve. Veterans advocates said theyll be lobbying for quicker responses, too. The provisions regarding deteriorating health conditions are written broadly, and some veterans groups said they see opportunities to force VA to respond immediately to certain claims even if the law seems to give them more time. But much of that will depend on VAs ability to hire new staff to process claims and respond to veterans questions. The department has hired several hundred claims processors in recent months to deal with the glut of overdue disability claims (cases pending for more than four months). The figure was as high as 264,000 last fall, but now sits at about 165,000, roughly half what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. What are military burn pits? And why are veterans worried about them? Apply now The Department of Defense has estimated nearly 3.5 million troops from recent wars may have suffered enough exposure to the smoke to cause health problems. Only a small portion of that group has signed up for VAs official burn pit registry, designed to help track health issues in that population. In his statement on the PACT Act passage, McDonough encouraged eligible veterans to apply for benefits as soon as possible, rather than waiting on the legislations official start date. Depending on the case, veterans may eventually be eligible for retroactive pay if they file earlier. Veterans can visit the departments online page regarding PACT information or call 1-800-MyVA411 (800-698-2411). The PACT Act is perhaps the largest health care and benefit expansion in VA history, the VAs benefits site states. If youre a veteran or survivor, you can file claims now to apply for PACT Act-related benefits. In his statement, McDonough said that department officials will be communicating with you every step of the way to make sure that you and your loved ones get the benefits youve earned. As Feal delivered his speech to the celebrating advocates, Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jon Tester, D-Mont., received a text from McDonough offering his congratulations on the legislative victory and promising that we will execute this. Tester said hell hold the secretary to that promise. Well be watching, he said. I know theyre committed, and I know the president said were going to get this done. But weve got to watch them to make sure. Thanks to popular Reddit forum WallStreetBets, Hong Kong financial tech company AMTD Digital is now worth even more than giants like Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Costco, with a current market value of $310 billion. AMTD Digital, which trades under the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ticker HKD, has gone from being virtually unknown to becoming the new meme stock one that gains popularity via social media. It has been dubbed the new GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC), which were the crazes of 2021s online traders. The Hong Kong newcomers shares soared a staggering 21,000 percent since it went public in the U.S. last month. More from NextShark: Brooklyn couple receives Marriott Hotel invoice with typewritten anti-Asian slur At the time of its debut to American investors on July 15, stocks were valued at $7.80 each, giving the small company a market share value of $1.4 billion. This made AMTD Digital the first Hong Kong company to be worth at least $1 billion on the NYSE, which is an impressive feat on its own, but nothing compared to what soon followed. By July 29, the stock surged to $400, and on Tuesday, American depositary receipts (ADRs) closed at $1,679 each, giving it a total market value of $310 billion. More from NextShark: Fast fashion retailer H&M accused of plagiarizing work of queer Asian American knitwear designer AMTD released a statement of gratitude while also acknowledging its unusual meteoric rise in the past weeks. Thank you note to investors and our response to our ADS price performance, wrote the company on Tuesday in the subject line of its release. To our knowledge, there are no material circumstances, events nor other matters relating to our Companys business and operating activities since the IPO date. More from NextShark: New Japanese writing cafe pressures customers to keep writing, won't allow them to leave unfinished According to the company description, AMTD Digital describes itself as one of the most comprehensive digital solutions platforms in Asia, serving as a one-stop platform for businesses in regards to digital financial services. Story continues The company, a financial services startup, is an arm of AMTD Idea Group, an investment bank based in Hong Kong. The larger company, founded in 2019, is listed in both New York and Singapore and provides fintech services throughout Asia, including virtual bank Airstar. More from NextShark: Review of Turning Red that criticized the movie's characters as unrelatable prompts backlash, apologies Featured Image via ABC News 26 state attorneys generals, including Oklahoma attorney general John OConnor, have filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration. The lawsuit is directed at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who released new guidance aimed at protecting LGBTQI+ students who receive federal nutritional assistance at school earlier this year. The amended ruling expands Title IX protection and states that any public or non-profit private schools who receive nutritional funds from the USDAs Food and Nutrition Service must investigate any allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. If these allegations are not investigated, federal funding to the school could be put in jeopardy. The Biden Administration wants to force every State to adopt its radical agenda, and to punish those financially who do not comply, said Attorney General OConnor. The guidance threatens to take away those childrens meals unless the local schools adopt a pro-transgender agenda. This is just another example of Biden bullying Americans by attacking our children. The lawsuit claims that the ruling was issued without providing each state an opportunity to share input, as required by the Administrative Procedures Act. The plaintiffs also claim that the ruling imposes new and unlawful regulatory measures on state agencies and operators who receive federal funding from the USDA. The following states have joined in the lawsuit: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia. Joining Attorney General OConnor in the lawsuit are the attorneys general of the following States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia. To read the complaint, click Russia's war against Ukraine illustrates the danger of excess attachment to abstract political goals, no matter how desirable we may consider them. My first lesson about this danger came as an undergraduate at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Political science professor Theodore Shay claimed that Republicans could only win in liberal Portland if they could shut down all telephones there on election day. Responsible Republicans would vote anyway, he assumed, but many Democrats would only turn out if someone phoned to remind them. Paul F. deLespinasse The Republican Party was different back then, and I had inherited enthusiastic support for it from my parents. I figured out an easy way to shut down Portland telephones for the day. (More recent telephone technology would probably prevent my scheme from working now, but I won't disclose details in case it might still work.) My enthusiasm evaporated, though, when I thought about the other things shutting down the telephone system would cause. Houses would burn down because no one could phone the fire department. People with medical emergencies would die because no one could call an ambulance. It would have been irresponsible to carry out my scheme. The damage it would do to real people was obvious. It might have been nice for Republicans to win in Portland, but this rather abstract political goal was not worth killing people and destroying valuable property. Sixty years later, this lesson has interesting implications for Vladimir Putin and his vicious war against Ukraine. I don't think Putin is correct in believing that what is now Ukraine ideally should be part of Russia rather than an independent country. But for purposes of the present discussion, we can assume that he is correct in this belief. Paul deLespinasse during his professor days. Clearly, everything else being equal, larger political systems are better than smaller ones. The largest possible system, a world government, could maximize freedom to travel without contending with tons of national red tape (passports, visas, currency exchanges, etc.). Story continues A universal government would also maximize opportunities for mutually profitable trade, without arbitrary barriers like quotas and tariffs. And of course many fundamental problems like pandemics and the global environment could be tackled most effectively by a universal regime. The misery afflicting post-Brexit England, now withdrawn from the European Union, illustrates the economic value of living in bigger political systems. The theoretical benefits of a larger political system and Putin's historical arguments about why Ukrainians and Russians should be united are nice, abstract political generalizations, similar to my former belief that Portland, Oregon, would be better off governed by Republicans. A Republican victory in Portland was not worth burning down houses and killing people. Are Putin's abstract theoretical or historical advantages worth the thousands of lives, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians and Russian soldiers, currently being slaughtered? Are these theoretical benefits worth the hundreds of billions of property damage caused by the Russian missiles striking Ukrainian cities? Are they worth the starvation that threatens developing countries because Ukrainian wheat exports were cut off? Millions of people would be living normal lives if Vladimir Putin had been concerned about the damage that would be caused by his "special military operation." Perhaps separate countries for Ukrainians and Russians would not be ideal, but they were not dog meat either, and were obviously good enough. Larger political systems are only ideal everything else being equal, and here that is obviously not the case. One of the most important concepts in serious political analysis is side effects, and it is irresponsible to take major actions without considering them. As I see it, Putin has been behaving very irresponsibly. A source of dubious reliability recently reported that Putin had urgently summoned doctors due to "severe nausea." True or not, severe nausea is exactly what he would be suffering if he gave appropriate weight to the misery his war is causing both Ukrainians and Russians. Paul F. deLespinasse is professor emeritus of political science and computer science at Adrian College. He can be reached at pdeles@proaxis.com. This article originally appeared on The Sault News: Paul deLespinasse: Putin prioritizes abstract political goals over human consequences President Biden testing positive for COVID-19 again days after completing a course of Paxlovid has raised the question of whether the length of the antiviral treatment should be reconsidered. Just days after he completed a five-day round of Pfizers COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Bidens physician Kevin OConnor said in a letter on Saturday that the president had tested positive once again. As of Wednesday, Biden is still testing positive for COVID-19. This phenomenon has come to be known as Paxlovid rebound, when a person tests positive for coronavirus again even after initially testing negative following a round of treatment with the antiviral. A recent preprint study found that Paxlovid rebound occurred among 3.5 percent and 5.4 percent of coronavirus infections at the 7-day and the 30-day mark after treatment respectively. Bidens chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci also experienced Paxlovid rebound after contracting the virus and started a second round of treatment. Some experts have called for studies into extending Paxlovid treatments to be prioritized, as early research has suggested that Paxlovid rebound could occur due to insufficient exposure to the drug. Researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine said last month that the drug may not be reaching enough infected cells in the allotted time. Paxlovid, under an emergency use authorization issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is administered in two doses taken daily over the course of five days. Physicians are not permitted to prescribe longer rounds of treatment and clinical data on courses lasting more than five days has yet to be completed. Earlier this year, Fauci said the National Institutes of Health was in talks with Pfizer about studies looking into longer courses of Paxlovid, though any updates on these possible trials have not been disclosed. Story continues Im actually still flabbergasted that we have not set up a clinical trial to figure this out. Its an easy thing to do, Robert M. Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Hill. Wouldnt cost that much to be able to accumulate enough patients in a week or two and follow them for a few weeks so we could have an answer, Wachter said, adding that the data needed to potentially extend the length of a round of Paxlovid could have been collected already if trials had been started just a few months ago. According to Wachter, there arent any similar antiviral analogies to compare Paxlovid to. Viral rebound isnt usually tested for and other antiviral treatments arent administered in the same manner. Eric Toner, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, noted that viral rebound has rarely been studied as much as it is now in the context of COVID. However, Toner said instances of viruses or bacterial infections still lingering after treatment do occur. Instances of viral rebound of coronavirus are also not unique to Paxlovid. Cases of rebound with molnupiravir, the COVID-19 antiviral created by Merck and Ridgeback, have been observed as well. People who experience cases of antiviral rebound are still at risk of transmitting COVID-19 to other people. Michael Charness, a researcher from the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boston, recently told CNN that he and his colleagues had observed at least two instances of people infecting others after their symptoms reoccurred. Both cases involved people who tested positive again after taking Paxlovid. People tend to have much milder symptoms that resolve fairly easily on their own after testing positive again, Toner said. For this reason, he said a second round of treatment, even in cases of Paxlovid rebound, is probably unneeded. OConnor, Bidens physician, has provided regular updates on the presidents health, but has not disclosed whether he has started a second course of Paxlovid like Fauci did. While the need for and feasibility of longer Paxlovid rounds remains uncertain, the U.S. may find itself relying on antivirals more going forward as new variants of COVID-19, more infectious and better at evading immune protection, continue to crop up. If we do see more variants and theyre more evasive and we have more people with infections who are at risk of a serious outcome, then antivirals will become increasingly important, Wachter said, though he added, As far as we know, none of that is really true. He noted that even with subvariants like BA.5 spreading and causing more infections, the current vaccines are still offering strong protection against severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Researchers have previously said that it would be difficult, but not impossible, for COVID-19 to become resistant to Paxlovid treatment, as the drug targets a part of the virus that does not change easily. When reached for comment, a Pfizer spokesperson pointed to a health advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released earlier this year that stated a brief return of COVID-19 symptoms following the completion of Paxlovid treatment may be part of the natural history of SARS-CoV-2. While further evaluation is needed, we have not seen any viral resistance emerge to date in patients treated with PAXLOVID, and we continue to monitor data from our ongoing clinical studies and post-authorization safety surveillance, said the spokesperson. We remain very confident in PAXLOVIDs clinical effectiveness at preventing severe outcomes from COVID-19 in patients at increased risk. The spokesperson for Pfizer did not comment on the possibility of longer Paxlovid courses. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to visit an inter-Korean border area that is jointly controlled by American-led U.N. Command and North Korea later on Thursday, Associated Press reported, citing a South Korean official. If that visit occurs, Pelosi would be the highest-level American to go to the Joint Security Area since then-President Donald Trump went there in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the report added. Earlier in the day, Pelosi will meet South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of Parliament for talks on regional security, economic cooperation and climate issues, AP said. (Reporting by Juby Babu in Bengaluru; Editing by Jacqueline Wong) In light of revelations that senior Defense Department officials phones were scrubbed of communications in the final days of the Trump administration, the Pentagons No. 2 official is reminding everyone that the contents of their government phones are to be preserved. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks sent the memo out to senior leaders Wednesday, according to a Thursday release from DoD. This memorandum further directs that, effective immediately, all mobile device service providers in DoD will capture and save the data resident on DoD-provisioned mobile devices when devices are turned-in by users, Hicks wrote. Officials whose text messages and other data were deleted include former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel, CNN first reported. All three were major players in the militarys response to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The revelation about the wiped phones came Wednesday, after watchdog group American Oversight filed a lawsuit in response to a denied Freedom of Information Act request seeking Jan. 6 phone records of top federal government officials. This is why the National Guard didnt respond to the attack on the Capitol The disappearance of this critical information could jeopardize efforts to learn the full truth about Jan. 6, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in a statement calling for an investigation. I dont know whether the failure to preserve these critical government texts is the result of bad faith, stunning incompetence, or outdated records management policies, but we must get to the bottom of it. A court filing from the federal government asserted that government phones are routinely scrubbed in the course of jobs turning over. DoD and Army conveyed to Plaintiff that when an employee separates from DoD or Army he or she turns in the government-issued phone, and the phone is wiped, the filing reads. For those custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched, although it is possible that particular text messages could have been saved into other records systems such as email. In addition to reminding DoD personnel to preserve their communications, Hicks called on the departments chief information officer and general counsel to report back in 30 days with an assessment of existing DoD policy on communications, as well as recommendations for improvement. Steve Ubl, who leads the nations top industry group for drugmakers, is offering a final salvo to Congress as Democratic lawmakers inch closer to passing their sweeping reconciliation package that includes drug pricing measures and threatening swift retaliation if they dont listen, he told POLITICO. Ubls group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, and its 31 board members sent a letter to every member of Congress on Thursday afternoon, urging them to vote against the package. PhRMA, not accustomed to losing legislative fights, has waged a multimillion-dollar advocacy campaign against the drug pricing measures, and is crafting contingency plans if they fail. In addition to hinting at running campaign ads against Democrats in tough races this fall, the industry is assessing its legal options and pondering future regulatory or legislative fixes. Regardless of the outcome in the coming weeks, this fight isn't over, Ubl said in an interview. Few associations have all the tools of modern political advocacy at their disposal in the way that PhRMA does. Thursdays letter largely reiterates arguments the industry has made throughout the process, with the executives from companies including Pfizer and Merck saying that passing the legislation would lead to fewer treatments and cures particularly for tough illnesses like cancer and Alzheimers disease that can be difficult and costly to develop. Ubl said that one of PhRMAs member companies has 15 drugs in the pipeline that would be nixed if the bill becomes law. This is a very consequential vote. Those members who vote for this bill will not get a free pass. We'll do whatever we can to hold them accountable, he said. Its unclear when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will bring the $740 billion reconciliation package to the floor, and senators anticipate having to stay over the weekend as they move to work out any kinks and pass it as quickly as possible. Story continues The stakes are high for the drug industry: allowing Medicare to negotiate the cost of high-price drugs is expected to save the federal government more than $100 billion. The move would put the U.S. system on a course toward broad government control, setting the stage for our country to fall behind, reads the letter sent to Congress on Thursday. PhRMA has spent millions of dollars lobbying on Democrats drug pricing reform measures over the past two years, and millions more on TV and digital advertisements trying to sway public opinion. In the first six months of 2022, the groups overall lobbying operation spent more than $14.4 million, according to disclosure filings. Ubl declined to talk more about what kinds of legal arguments would be on the table for fear that tipping our hand would foreclose future options or what changes could come from future regulations or legislation. From my experience, when a bill like this is pursued on a hyperpartisan basis, with slim margins and deficiencies in due process, it rarely sticks, he said, pointing to all the changes that have been made to the Affordable Care Act since its passage. I would expect there'll be opportunities to further mitigate the harms of this legislation going forward. UPDATE Aug. 9, 4:10 p.m.: Police said she has been found safe. Pittsburgh police are searching for a missing 13-year-old girl. According to a release, Ashlynn Southerland is 51 and weighs 115 pounds. She has black hair and blue eyes, and has a scar under her right eye. She was last seen by her family on July 30. Her last known potential location was a movie theater in Bridgeville on Tuesday. Police said Ashlynn is known to spend time in Brookline, Beechview and Dormont. She could possibly be in Mt. Lebanon. According to police, her phone is turned off. She could be in the company of adult males. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call police at (412)323-7141 or (412)323-7800. This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW TRENDING NOW: Harrison city community rallies around 6-year-old boy after accident leads to amputation of his feet Report: Equifax issued wrong credit scores for millions looking for home, auto loans Beaver County woman charged after allegedly chasing, rear-ending victim VIDEO: Dr. Oz visits McCandless for National Night Out event DOWNLOAD the Channel 11 News app for breaking news alerts Planned Parenthood of Michigan wants the state's highest court to step in and reverse a ruling issued earlier this week by a lower court, which briefly allowed prosecutors to charge providers under a state law that criminalizes most abortions. This is separate from a temporary restraining order issued by an Oakland County judge this week, which continues to prevent prosecutors from charging people using the law that bans all abortions except those performed to save the life of the pregnant person. Vickie Edwards, 68, of Detroit, raises her fist and chants as abortion rights protesters march through downtown Detroit following a rally at the Theodore Levin Federal Court building in Detroit to protest against the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Edwards said, "I had to be here, I remember fighting for this in the 1970s." But both were prompted by the same Michigan Court of Appeals ruling on Monday, which caused confusion and fear among proponents of legal access to abortion. The request to the Michigan Supreme Court is the latest in a flurry of legal filings as supporters and opponents of abortion rights continue to battle over the controversial procedure following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and nullify its holding that there is a national constitutional right to abortion. It's only the latest effort to push the state Supreme Court for an answer to a question that has driven substantial debate since Roe's reversal: Does the Michigan Constitution guarantee the right to an abortion? More: Michigan judge extends order preventing criminal charges under abortion ban More: Where Michigan stands after a tumultuous day for abortion rights "First and foremost, abortion is still safe, legal, and available in Michigan," said Paula Thornton Greear, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, in a statement issued Thursday. "This action is needed to further protect essential abortion care after a Monday decision by the Michigan Court of Appeals caused chaos and confusion for patients and providers in the state." Planned Parenthood filed three requests: it wants the Michigan Supreme Court to accept its application to appeal the Court of Appeals order, to immediately consider its requests that the court temporarily bar the lower court's order from taking effect and to ultimately grant that request, known as a stay. Story continues The Court of Appeals dismissed a case Monday brought by prosecutors from Kent and Jackson counties, where the conservative officials tried to overturn a ruling from a separate court that sought to prevent every local prosecutor from bringing criminal charges under the state's 1931 abortion law. But in dismissing that request, the court also found that the lower court's ruling didn't actually apply to any local prosecutors, deemed a victory for opponents of abortion rights. Planned Parenthood noted a separate court order that largely prevents the Court of Appeals decision from taking effect in the 13 counties with an abortion clinic. But it argued there is still confusion and fear for residents in the rest of Michigan's counties, asking the Michigan Supreme Court to reverse the Court of Appeals decision. "The Court of Appeals erroneous order will cause grave, widespread, and irreparable material injustice each day it remains uncorrected," part of the Planned Parenthood filings state. "The uncertainty the Court of Appeals decision has created makes it impossible for Planned Parenthood and other providers throughout Michigan to provide abortion without the risk of criminal investigation and possibly even prosecution. ... In light of the Court of Appealss decision, many physicians may stop providing abortions altogether." More: 7 prosecutors to appeals court: Your abortion ruling means nothing to us More: Michigan Court of Appeals just dropped abortion ruling that could have huge impact The emergency request is a bit irregular: Planned Parenthood isn't actually formally involved in the lawsuit brought by local prosecutors that prompted the Court of Appeals decision. Planned Parenthood acknowledges this, saying if the high court denies the request to appeal it wants the justices to also interpret the filing as a request to intervene in the Court of Appeals case. That's one of several reasons why the Michigan Supreme Court shouldn't take it up, said David Kallman, a conservative attorney representing the Kent and Jackson county prosecutors. "The parties with the right to appeal would be the prosecutors," Kallman said, noting his clients are pleased with the Court of Appeals decision. "But I think all bets are off when it comes to this issue." Kallman was still smarting a bit after he and his clients lost a ruling Wednesday in a separate, abortion-related lawsuit. Earlier this year, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer sued prosecutors in every Michigan county with an abortion clinic. After the Court of Appeals issued its ruling on Monday, Whitmer and her team asked the judge overseeing her abortion lawsuit to temporarily ban all of the prosecutors she sued from charging anyone under the abortion law. Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Jacob Cunningham agreed, issuing a temporary restraining order late Monday. On Wednesday, he extended that order through Aug. 17, despite Kallman arguing the measure violated the rights of his clients. More: Dixon, Whitmer working out of different playbooks as gubernatorial race gets underway More: Michigan abortion rights activists: We're putting issue on November ballot The legal fights from Planned Parenthood and Whitmer are technically separate, but both, ultimately, want the Michigan Supreme Court to rule the 1931 abortion ban is unconstitutional and that the state Constitution guarantees the right to an abortion. Whitmer's team filed a document late Wednesday with the state Supreme Court, in support of Planned Parenthood's request for the justices to intervene and overrule the Court of Appeal's decision. "(The temporary restraining order) only governs the defendants in that case thirteen prosecutors whose counties have standalone facilities that offer abortion care," Whitmer's team wrote. "Not only does the threat of criminal prosecution hover over abortion care in the rest of Michigans 83 counties, the threats of prosecution from several of those covered counties have also caused massive confusion among healthcare professionals about whether caring for their patients could mean felony charges." Whitmer also filed a separate request with the Michigan Supreme Court related to her own lawsuit, again asking it to immediately take up her case. While she has repeatedly asked the state's high court to take action on her case, and the justices have asked her team several clarifying questions, the Michigan Supreme Court has yet to formally announce whether it will hear her case. Voters may make a decision this fall that lasts longer than any court ruling. An initiative to change the state Constitution so that it expressly protects abortion received a record amount of support. The state is reviewing the hundreds of thousands of signatures submitted with the initiative, and is set to determine by the end of August whether the question will appear on the ballot for the general election. Contact Dave Boucher: dboucher@freepress.com or 313-938-4591. Follow him on Twitter @Dave_Boucher1. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Planned Parenthood asks Michigan Supreme Court to nix abortion ruling Erin Smith fought for months for death benefits after her husband, a D.C. Metropolitan police officer, died of suicide nine days after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. In an interview with CBS News, she said she was initially skeptical that legislation would pass, having fought for over a year to have his suicide designated as a line-of-duty death in the District of Columbia. "I tried to keep my hopes within the right space, if you will. And once it got approved last night, I was just overly thrilled," she said. "Obviously, this is going to help a lot of people. It's not just me, but others who have gone through this, as well." After the bill passed on Monday, Erin Smith was "thrilled" that these officers and their families "will get the recognition that they're due from the federal government." Legislation qualifying families of public safety officers who die by suicide to seek death benefits cleared the Senate on Monday, part of a larger effort to recognize the emotional impacts of traumatic events on first responders nationwide. The measure was passed in by unanimous consent. Erin Smith's husband, Jeffrey Smith, was a 12-year veteran of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. He was the target of several attacks on Jan. 6, after responding to the mob of rioters who breached the Capitol. "He left with that one personality and came home with a different one," Smith said. "He just didn't want to do or be around anyone. Kept to himself and was struggling to really just, you know, understand what happened that day, his injuries, and ultimately we know the end." Like many parts of the country, Washington, D.C., where Jeff Smith served, did not consider suicide a line-of-duty death, which left Erin Smith without health insurance and income following her husband's death. In March, the District of Columbia recognized that the injury her husband sustained on Jan. 6, 2021, while performing his duties was the "sole and direct cause" of his death. Story continues Jeff Smith was one of four law enforcement officers who responded to the Jan. 6 attack to have died by suicide within seven months of the insurrection. More than 140 officers with the Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department were injured in the Capitol riot, according to the U.S. Capitol Police Labor Committee. The bill was introduced by Reps. David Trone, Democrat of Maryland, and Guy Reschenthaler, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Sens. Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois,and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. The legislation expands the Public Safety Officers' Benefits Program to provide coverage for officers who die by suicide or become permanently disabled because of traumatic service-related experiences. Presently, the program only covers physical injuries, but the new legislation would permit public safety officers to seek disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder tied to severe trauma. Families of law enforcement and first responders who die by suicide are now entitled to seek death benefits now that suicide is recognized as a line-of-duty death. For Erin Smith, this recognition brings a sense of "peace." "The firefighters, EMS, police, anyone considered a first responder will, their families will, benefit from this as long as they meet one of the three criteria," she explained. Erin Smith is now petitioning to have her husband's name added to the National Law Enforcement Memorial in Washington, D.C., and to see that he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, next to U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of natural causes a day after defending the Capitol. Sicknick was laid to rest in February 2021. The House passed the bill in May with overwhelming bipartisan support, with just 17 Republican lawmakers voting against it. The legislation now heads to President Biden's desk for his signature. If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or suicidal crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). For more information about mental health care resources and support, The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) HelpLine can be reached Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.6 p.m. ET, at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or email info@nami.org. Weekly jobless claims rise and mortgage rates drop as economic recovery remains in flux "My Voice" program trying to help kids speak through technology Federal charges for 4 Louisville officers in connection to the death of Breonna Taylor President Joe Biden speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 9, 2022. Drew Angerer/Getty Images President Joe Biden called on Russia to immediately release WNBA star Brittney Griner from prison. Griner was sentenced to nine years in prison Thursday after she was found guilty on drug charges. Biden has proposed a prisoner swap to free Griner early, but Russia has yet to officially respond. President Joe Biden called on Russia to "release her immediately" after Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison. "Today, American citizen Brittney Griner received a prison sentence that is one more reminder of what the world already knew: Russia is wrongfully detaining Brittney," Biden said in a statement shared Thursday, moments after a Russian judge handed down her sentence. "It's unacceptable, and I call on Russia to release her immediately so she can be with her wife, loved ones, friends, and teammates," he continued. The WNBA superstar and two-time Olympic gold medalist was found guilty of drug-smuggling charges after customs agents at a Moscow airport found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage back in February. She has been detained ever since. Brittney Griner stands in a Russian jail cell. Evgenia Novozhenina/Pool/Reuters Earlier Thursday, prosecutors recommended a nine-and-a-half-year sentence for Griner, who faced up to 10 years in prison. Griner had pleaded guilty to the charges against her early on in the trial which began four months after her initial arrest and her legal team appealed for leniency throughout the July proceedings. Legal expert Aron Solomon, who acts as the Head of Strategy for Esquire Digital, told Insider that Biden's near-instant statement was unsurprising, as "he knew this [verdict] was coming." "If we look at the totality of this case so far as a chess match, it was a move cause by the other player's move," Solomon said of Biden's words. "It doesn't do anything in itself, but not calling for Griner's immediate release would have again left the administration open to a valid argument that they aren't moving quickly enough." Griner speaks with her attorneys from a holding cell in a Russian courtroom. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina/Pool Last week, news broke that the Biden Administration offered to swap convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout in exchange for the early release of both Griner and Paul Whelan, another American detainee in Russia. Story continues Biden alluded to such a deal in his statement Thursday. "My administration will continue to work tirelessly and pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittney and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible," he said. American detainee Paul Whelan holds a sign ahead of a hearing in Moscow. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov Russia has yet to officially respond to the White House's proposal but has suggested that they are interested in the swap if the US helps to free an additional convict a Russian national who was tried, sentenced, and imprisoned for murder in Germany. John Kirby, the Biden administration's National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, slammed Russia's counter as "a bad faith attempt to avoid a very serious offer and proposal that the United States has put forward." Griner leaves the courtroom in Russia after speaking during closing arguments of her drug-smuggling trial. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Moscow officials fired back that "loudspeaker diplomacy" wouldn't succeed in bringing the detained Americans home, signaling that the US and Russia were still quite far from agreeing to a deal. But with mounting pressure on the administration to bring the eight-time WNBA All-Star home, the White House and US State Department will almost certainly face increasing urgency to act as Griner potentially heads to a penal colony. Read the original article on Insider courtesy @CheerPowerX/Facebook A Texas man who recently contracted monkeypox, now commonly being called MPV, received a lot of mixed attention after sharing images of the progression of the infection, which has manifested itself in part on his face. By sharing his MPV experience in public, the gay Houstonian says he hopes to raise awareness about its prevalence while also removing the stigma and bringing attention to its isolation. Following the 4th of July holiday, Wesley Wallace traveled to Austin for Hippie Hollow Otter Fest, a weekend event attended by queer men on Lake Travis, to have a leisurely time on the water. Its a lake, boat, shoreline kind of thing, says the 42-year-old tech professional. When he returned from the weekend of drinking, socializing, and soaking up some rays, he noticed some irritation on his face, which he attributed to shaving and wearing sunscreen while baking in the sun. When another blister-like dot appeared on his chin on Tuesday, he assumed it was a pimple, but he could not pop it. After the sores started to grow the next day, he thought, Monkeypox, monkeypox. Then, when he woke up Friday, he knew something was wrong because his body aches and swollen lymph nodes made him feel unwell. And so I thought, God, I already know, he says, I know what this is. Wallace says he was aware that Quest Diagnostics had just come online to test for MPV, so he called his doctor and asked for a test. Ultimately, his doctor did not require a test result to recognize that he had MPV. Unlike many who have contracted MPV, he does not believe it was acquired through sex. I have a promiscuous nature, and I have casual sex, he says, but the particular weekend that I would have gotten it, I was not being that wild. According to him, on the 4th of July weekend, he had taken his shirt off in crowded gay bars, where countless sweaty people rubbed up against him. He says he believes he caught MPV by kissing someone. I probably made out with several people at the bar, he says, and a lot of hugging went on. Story continues As TPOXX wasnt available to him then, Wallaces doctor prescribed Vicodin and gabapentin, an anticonvulsant nerve pain medication. On June 30, another man, Kyle Planck began to feel ill after attending Pride festivities in New York City. The 26-year-old says hes been concerned about MPV for longer than the average person and tried to get vaccinated early on but couldnt. Planck says he intially thought he had contracted COVID when the infection began. For several days he experienced body aches and fatigue. But that [coronavirus] test kept coming back negative, he says. Then it happened he discovered bumps on his arms, hands, and elsewhere. In his genital area, the most painful lesions, he says, kept him up at night, unable to get comfortable because of their excruciating pain. Other lesions mostly became irritable when touched, he says. Other MPV patients we spoke with also reported that the lesions in the area they believe they touched another person's infection were constantly painful, while the bumps that appeared elsewhere on their bodies were less painful. Planck is a Ph.D. student studying infectious diseases, so due to his expertise in the medical community and his ability to advocate for himself, he received TPOXX the day after his July 5 visit to an academic medical center in New York. Because that medication has been thoroughly tested and is so heavily regulated, he believes the government should make it available and allow people to enroll in clinical trials. Moreover, although he's fully recovered, he says it's untenable that two hours of paperwork are required to get the antiviral even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lowered the requirements. Despite understanding the nuance of the governments response, he says much of what's happened in the U.S. in relation to the MPV outbreak could have been avoided in May had the government acquired vaccines when the outbreak spread in Europe. Waiting and seeing does not take into account how infectious diseases work, and very differently from COVID, we had the tools. We have a vaccine thats 85 percent effective and an antiviral that has been shown to be safe in humans and efficacious in animal models of orthopox virus infections, Planck says. Aside from its physical effects, MPV also takes an emotional toll on people, both Planck and Wallace say. There are people I know who have turned their backs on me, and Ive gotten messages of hate and vitriol, trying to shame me and stigmatize me, Wallace says. But thats not going to work. Wallace says through tears that it has been hard to live with the equivalent of a societal scarlet letter on his face. But he says he draws strength from knowing that his story will help other people in the LGBTQ+ community (who have been the most vulnerable to the virus so far). So what I knew to do was to help others, he says. So, after speaking with some friends, he says he decided to come forward and share his experience to take the shame out of MPV. This is me; I got a virus, he says. Thats it. Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization warned that men who have sex with men should reduce the number of sexual partners they have. The WHOs advice goes beyond what has been suggested by the CDC, which has only recommended individuals avoid skin contact with someone who may have MPV. Follow More Advocate News on Pride Today Below Ousted former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced on Twitter that he will not be running for reelection this year. Boudin, who was previously recalled from office in June, said he is not running for office in November 2022, choosing instead to put his family first after more than three years of nearly non-stop campaigning. My son is on the verge of taking his first step and speaking his first word, Boudin wrote in a 14-tweet thread on Thursday morning. My wifes research on Multiple Sclerosis at UCSF deserves the same support she has offered my work. My elderly father just came home from prison after more than 40 years. My father faces the myriad challenges those returning from incarceration encounter: housing, healthcare, employment, and more, he added. My mother died in May and I have not had time to clean out her apartment or plan her memorial or even mourn her death. More from NextShark: 35-mile 'Run for Chinatown' organized to honor Christina Lees life, raise awareness of anti-Asian crimes My father faces the myriad challenges those returning from incarceration encounter: housing, healthcare, employment, and more. My mother died in May and I have not had time to clean out her apartment or plan her memorial or even mourn her death. Chesa Boudin (@chesaboudin) August 4, 2022 More from NextShark: Woman called 'scum of society' for trying to enter tourist site in China while wearing a kimono Since taking office in January 2020, Boudin called for robust social programs, eliminated cash bail, increased accountability for police and promised efforts to reduce the number of people sent to prison. While felony charges fell by about 30 percent, he has been criticized for San Franciscos increasing crime rates due to his purportedly lax policies. His former employee Brooke Jenkins had also faulted Boudin and has since replaced him as the citys district attorney. Story continues Due to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans became a leading force for his recall, with many citing his ineffective efforts to reform the justice system. More from NextShark: House Speaker Pelosis visit to Taiwan lasted less than day but will have long-term impact On his Twitter thread, Boudin listed his accomplishments throughout his tenure, including an expansion of victims services, a worker protection unit, a litigation against manufacturers of ghost guns and the historic strides in police accountability. Although he has not mentioned if or when he will be running again, the former lawyer is able to run for district attorney in the next regular election in November 2023. I know this news will come as a disappointment to many who are dedicated to reform, Boudin concluded his Twitter thread. I assure you I remain deeply committed to justice and to the people of San Francisco. More from NextShark: Woman Kicked in the Face By Teens at Bus Stop in Minnesota I know this news will come as a disappointment to many who are dedicated to reform. I assure you I remain deeply committed to justice and to the people of San Francisco. Chesa Boudin (@chesaboudin) August 4, 2022 Featured Image via KTVU FOX 2 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has refused to declare an emergency over rising cases of monkeypox in the state and claimed that the media and politicians were unnecessarily stoking fear about the illness. The Republican governor was asked about the rising cases in his state during a news conference he called in Brevard County on Wednesday to announce an opioid treatment initiative. In response, he said Florida would not adopt a policy of fear. I am so sick of politicians, and we saw this with Covid, trying to sow fear into the population, Mr DeSantis said. We had people calling, mothers worried about whether their kids could catch it at schools. We are not doing fear, he added. And we are not going to go out and try to rile people up and try to act like people cant live their lives as theyve been normally doing because of something. Mr DeSantis, who has been a vocal critic of the Biden administrations response to Covid-19, also slammed blue states that have declared emergency over rising cases of monkeypox and said they restricted peoples freedom. You see some of these states declaring states of emergency. Theyre going to abuse those emergency powers to restrict your freedom. I guarantee you thats what will happen, Mr DeSantis said. Any of these politicians you see out there trying to scare you about this do not listen to their nonsense, he said. Representative Charlie Crist, who is challenging the Republican in the Florida gubernatorial race, slammed the governors comments on Twitter. While Governor DeSantis dismisses monkeypox, at-risk Floridians still need better information, better testing, and access to vaccines for prevention, Mr Crist wrote. While Governor DeSantis dismisses Monkeypox, at-risk Floridians still need better information, better testing, and access to vaccines for prevention. Get it done! Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) August 3, 2022 Florida has reported more than 500 cases of monkeypox, more than double from last week. There are concerns that as schools open, the cases could soar further. The US has reported more than 6,300 confirmed cases of monkeypox so far, while overall infections across the world have now surpassed 25,300. WASHINGTON U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson is expressing reservations over backing a bill that would codify same-sex marriage legislation he for weeks signaled he would not oppose. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Oshkosh Republican indicated he now has concerns over religious protections issues and would like to see changes to the bill's text. I said at the time I had no reason to oppose it, Johnson said Wednesday. I think there are a lot of people with reasons and very legitimate issues in terms of religious freedom. I think that needs to be considered and addressed. Johnsons position on the topic has been called into question since the Wisconsin senator said in July he wouldn't oppose the Respect for Marriage Act if it comes up for a vote in the Senate. He said at the time he saw the legislation as unnecessary but added: I see no reason to oppose it." This week, however, Johnson told Axios, I've never said I would support it. I said I didn't see a reason to oppose it. Subscribe to our On Wisconsin Politics newsletter for the week's political news explained. Sen. Tammy Baldwins office told the Journal Sentinel that the Wisconsin Democrat is working with Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins to get GOP support for the bill by adding language that provides more clarity about what the legislation does not do. It will not take away any religious liberty or conscience protections, Baldwins office said, referencing protections that could apply to situations where someone refuses to do something based on their beliefs. Religious freedoms are protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Johnson suggested there are multiple people in the Senate Republican Conference with similar concerns and would not say whether he would support the bill should language be added to the bill explicitly stating it would not take away religious liberties. "Well see what they come up with and well see if they can provide adequate protection," he said. Story continues Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, also raised concerns about the bill and religious liberties, according to Axios. Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher previously said he was worried language in the bill would force the government to recognize polygamous relationships. Johnson's refusal to say whether he supports the bill has raised questions from both supporters and opponents of the Respect for Marriage Act. After Johnson initially signaled his support for the House-passed bill, Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, urged members of the conservative group to contact the senators office. I'm pleased that we don't have a definite yes from the senator, Appling told the Journal Sentinel Wednesday. "I do think that it's always good for elected officials to hear from their constituents, and I know that Senator Johnson did hear from a significant number of people in Wisconsin. Appling added: We're cautiously optimistic that if this bill hits the Senate floor that Senator Johnson will do the right thing and not support this redefinition of marriage. U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, one of nine openly gay members of the House and an outspoken supporter of the legislation, said he believes Johnson is making up excuses not to support the bill. "If Ron Johnson doesn't support current marriage law he can make up any excuse he wants to vote against it, despite its popularity among Wisconsinites and all Americans," Pocan said. Should changes be made to the bill, it would likely need to return to the House for another vote. As it stands now, the Senate is not expected to take up the legislation until after the August recess. Bill Glauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report. Contact Lawrence Andrea at landrea@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter @lawrencegandrea. Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal. DOWNLOAD THE APP: Get the latest news, sports and more This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Ron Johnson expresses concerns over same-sex marriage bill The occupiers are demoralized and want to escape from Ukraine Read also: 41,500 Russian troops killed in Ukraine, reports General Staff In order to return to Russia, the invading soldiers mutilate themselves and also pretend to be in poor health. Meanwhile, fighting continues across Ukraine, the General Staff said. Invading Russian forces attempted to go on the offensive in Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts, but were repulsed by Ukrainian troops. Read also: Russians lost almost $1 billion dollars worth of equipment during occupation of Snake Island Forbes Ukraine Russian troops in the city of Kherson are reported to be seizing rubber boats from local businesses after Ukraine struck the three bridges in the oblast that cross the Dnipro River. Read also: Time for the Russian Army to take stock And after 161 days of full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military has still failed to gain air superiority Ukrainian fighter aircraft continue to patrol the airspace of Ukraine, and strike aircraft successfully provide fire support to units in several operational areas, the General Staff said. Help NV continue reporting on the Russian invasion Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine UKRAINSKA PRAVDA THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2022, 14:32 During the night of Wednesday 3 August, the Russians launched a P-800 Oniks cruise missile on Odesa Oblast. The missile failed to reach the ground and exploded in mid-air. Source: Operational Command Pivden (South) on Facebook Quote: "Last night the occupiers launched a P-800 Oniks anti-ship missile on the Odesa region from the Crimean front. The missile exploded in the air as it was approaching the ground." Details: It is also reported that 11 vessels of the Russian ship-boat fleet in the Black Sea are continuing to manoeuvre out of missile range along the Crimean coast in the direction of Novorossiysk. In addition, 2 launch vehicles carrying 16 Kalibr cruise missiles on board and 3 large landing ships are being kept on stand-by. Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda! IRYNA BALACHUK THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2022, 07:52 On the night of 3 August, the Russian occupiers shelled the Dnipropetrovsk region again, injuring one woman; 60 Grad MLRS were fired on the city of Nikopol, with dozens of houses damaged. Source: Valentin Reznichenko, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Military Administration, on Telegram Quote from Reznichenko: "A tense night of air-raid sirens and shelling. Two districts of the oblast - Nikopol and Kryvyi Rih - came under enemy attack. Russian troops shelled Nikopol twice. 60 rockets from Grad MLRS hit residential areas. Preliminary reports indicate that there were no casualties." Details: In Nikopol, one house was destroyed, almost 50 were damaged, and about 30 outbuildings were also affected. Fires broke out in two private yards - the fires were extinguished by rescue workers. Buildings and equipment of three local enterprises were damaged by shelling, as well as more than 100 solar panels. The occupiers knocked out two power lines in Nikopol, leaving more than 3,000 Nikopol residents without electricity. Emergency teams of electricians are working on the scene. In the Kryvyi Rih district, the Russian forces fired on the Karpivka and Shyroke hromadas [Amalgamated Territorial Communities] using Uragan MLRS. Housing was destroyed in Shyroke, and a 44-year-old woman was injured. Reznichenko reported that she has been given help and is being treated at home. Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda! Mark Bankston, a lawyer for Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, asks Alex Jones questions about his text messages in court in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday. Briana Sanchez/Austin American-Statesman via AP, Pool Alex Jones' cellphone leak includes "intimate messages" with Roger Stone, a lawyer said. The House committee investigating the Capitol riot wants the phone's contents, the attorney added. The contents of Jones' phone were inadvertently sent to an attorney for Sandy Hook parents. Alex Jones' cellphone leak includes "intimate messages" with the former Trump political advisor Roger Stone, according to a lawyer for Sandy Hook parents. The House committee investigating the Capitol riot wants the details, the attorney said Thursday. The contents of the far-right conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder's phone were inadvertently sent to Mark Bankston, a lawyer representing the Sandy Hook parents who have sued Jones for defamation over his false "hoax" claims about the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre. "Things like Mr. Jones and his intimate messages to Roger Stone are not confidential. They are not trade secrets, none of them," Bankston told a Texas judge after Jones' defense lawyer called for a mistrial in Jones' defamation-damages trial. Jones' lawyer F. Andino Reynal filed for an emergency motion to protect the contents of Jones' phone that wound up in Bankston's possession. Bankston disclosed during Thursday's hearing that the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection asked him to turn over the contents of Jones' phone. "I am under request from various federal agencies and law enforcement to provide that phone. Absent a ruling from you saying, 'You cannot do that Mr. Bankston,' I intend to do so," Bankston told Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble. The judge said the House committee could subpoena the contents of Jones' phone. "They know about them. They know they exist. They know you have them. I think they're going there either way," said Gamble, who denied Reynal's motion for a mistrial as she said she wouldn't seal the entire phone. Reynal said during the court hearing: "These allegations about law-enforcement interest is absolutely calculated to create more press around this issue." Story continues The defense attorney added: "This should have never gotten this far." He added that he told Bankston in an email last month, "Please disregard," after the contents of Jones' phone were mistakenly sent to Bankston. In a dramatic courtroom moment on Wednesday, Bankston said Jones' attorneys "messed up" and sent him a copy of Jones' entire phone contents going back two years. "Your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message you sent for the past two years," Bankston told Jones as Jones was on the witness stand. "That is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn't have text messages about Sandy Hook." Jones is in court after he was found liable by default for defaming Sandy Hook parents by falsely claiming the 2012 elementary-school massacre was a "giant hoax." A jury in the civil case is now deliberating how much Jones must pay in compensatory damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Lewis a 6-year-old among the 26 killed in the mass shooting. The parents are seeking $150 million in compensatory damages from Jones. The trial is the first of three in which juries will determine how much Jones must pay in damages to Sandy Hook families. Read the original article on Business Insider Now that the hit FX show Reservation Dogs has returned for Season 2, Canadian actor Sarah Podemski, who plays Bears mom Rita on the show, stresses that the success of the first season has allowed the series to push the boundaries, including intensifying the comedy that is rarely seen by Indigenous actors on TV. We've definitely turned up the volume on everything, so the comedy, the insanity, the playfulness, there's a deeper dive into all the characters, which is just so exciting, Podemski told Yahoo Canada. Season 2 for Rita, it's really great because we get to see Rita coming into her own as a woman, aside from being there as mother We just get to spend a bit more time with her and we still see her and Bears dynamic, but I think she gets to kind of discover herself again, outside of being a mother. Coming off an incredibly well-received first season, Podemski identifies that the support for Season 1 has given the cast and crew more confidence working on this second season. We never know, when we come into a project, how it's going to be received, so it's such a treat when not only we have a great audience, but then there's also been recognition from the industry, Podemski said. I think there was a bit more of a, I'd say a confidence on set for Season 2, while we were working. It was just knowing that we had that support and that we could push the boundaries a little further, and knowing that our audience was totally going to go on this journey with us. SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 06: (L-R) Devery Jacobs, Paulina Alexis, DPharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Taika Waititi, Zahn McClarnon, and Sarah Podemski, winners of the Best New Scripted Series Award for 'Reservation Dogs,' pose during the IMDb Portrait Studio at the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards on March 06, 2022 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Irvin Rivera/Contour by Getty Images for IMDb) One aspect of the show that Podemski highlights is the comedy, which she identified as something that isnt usually shown by Indigenous actors on screen. We really haven't been able to be funny as Native actors, so it's just so wonderful because humour in our community is so, so important, Podemski said. It's a way to deal with grief, it's a way to deal with trauma and I think a lot of the narratives we've seen about our community have been very much trauma-based and to be able to play into the comedy, and see really how funny our writers are and how funny our directors are, how funny our talent is, it's just such an exciting thing to explore. Story continues Sarah Podemski (Jaclyn Vogl) 'We've just only scratched the surface of being able to be trusted with our own content' While Reservation Dogs has been celebrated for the breadth of Indigenous talent in front of and behind the scenes, Sarah Podemski stresses that this is just the beginning of actually supporting projects that not only tell stories about Indigenous communities, but are told by the people in the communities as well. I feel like we've just only scratched the surface of being able to be trusted with our own content, Podemski said. Weve got a lot of good work ahead of us and we have a lot of great people that are championing us outside of the community, but there's a ways to go. The great thing about Reservation Dogs is that kind of proved, on a very high level, that people wanted to see our stories told by us. We've been making content for years and we've always known that we had the talent to make great content, but people either weren't watching it or networks, or people, weren't trusting that we were capable of working on a high level, using our lived experience. So I think Reservation Dogs has been really great in terms of opening that door for a lot of writers, a lot of directors and a lot of actors being visible for the first time. Podemski added that its not just about opening the door for Indigenous people in the film and TV industry, but its about sustaining that momentum, continuing to support projects from Indigenous creators and actors. We still have a ways to go but I feel really confident that it's sustainable, Podemski said. I feel like there's always kind of been a moment where we're like, oh Natives are hot or this is going to be the renaissance of Indigenous film and television,...every few years we'll have something like that, but it doesn't stick. I actually feel like this time, we now have such successful shows and we've proven ourselves, and our actors have proven ourselves, and our writers have proven themselves, and directors and showrunners, that I think it's actually sustainable this time, to continue this really great work with Indigenous people at the heads of production. Sarah Podemski (Jaclyn Vogl) 'I didn't have the tools to advocate for myself' Sarah Podemski started in the film and television industry as a kid, alongside her sisters Jennifer and Tamara, but now, shes enjoying being able to watch her younger Reservation Dogs co-stars, the next generation, rise to fame. It's really amazing, they're all so talented and it's just so crazy how they've just blown up since Season 1, so it's been really interesting because I get to kind of be on the sidelines watching it, Podemski said. It's been really interesting to just see them skyrocket in Hollywood, they haven't changed, they're still super humble, and they're really awesome, they're all so talented and they bring something so unique to each of their characters. It's funny, because I feel like when I was coming up in this industry, I started as a kid like almost 30 years ago, and I've always been the youngest for a really long time, and so it's kind of nice to to be playing the mother and be seeing this incredible new generation of performers that are kind of carrying the torch. Now, as Podemski navigates her future roles, she has identified that feeling confident about the creative team behind the project is a big priority for her. Having been in this industry for as long as I have, my main focus now is the team, who's the creative team? Because I find that even if the content is really great, if you get stuck with a team that isn't on the same side and all into working in the same way, it can be a really challenging experience, Podemski said. I've been in those really uncomfortable situations where there is no one to advocate for me and I didn't have the tools to advocate for myself. We don't need to just look out for ourselves, we need to look out for the other marginalized people that we're working with, and the younger people, and the women, and the women of colour, and we need to all be very aware that this isn't over It's scary to tell the truth and it's really scary to speak up when you're afraid you're going to lose your job. It's something that I'm learning I have to do, and I'll be better for it because I'll prevent working in a toxic environment. Following the announcement of a permanent closure in late 2021, any thought of GameWorks Seattle reopening was not in the cards. First opening in Seattle in 1997, GameWorks was not just a regular arcade. Originally conceived as an entertainment hub by Sega, Universal Studios and DreamWorks, it was designed for fun, excitement, competition and bringing people together, as Steven Spielberg of DreamWorks said. GameWorks eventually would open at least 30 locations around the country, and at least 6 international locations. But over the years, citing financial difficulties, locations closed or were acquired by other arcades, such as Dave & Busters or Jillians. The Seattle location hung on through, but then COVID-19 came along. GameWorks said the 20 months during the pandemic turned their business upside down and the slow economic recovery left them no choice but to close. On Dec. 24, 2021, GameWorks announced they were closing their doors forever. But then an ownership group bought it, with the original arcade games intact and few new machines out on the floor. Darren Des Roches, managing partner of the new GameWorks, provided KIRO 7 a tour before Thursdays grand opening. When asked why now and why this location, Des Roches said there was lots of nostalgia behind this location, after all, it was the first one and it opened 25-years ago. There are a few changes to this new GameWorks, mostly aesthetic. The e-sports lounge has been moved above the side bar, and the pinball machines moved just below. Des Roches says he wants GameWorks to be a place for the community to be connected again, especially after being separated for so long during the pandemic. New games include a couple arcade-versions of the popular VR game Beat Saber, Mario Kart and even Kung Fu Panda. There are carnival-style games for kids to gather tickets and trade-in for prizes, like a stuffed Homer Simpson head. Des Roches says the kitchen will be open for customers, with food soon. New hiring is moving along, and adjusted hours reflect staffing concerns. Story continues As of now, the plan is to be open five days a week, from noon to 8 or 9, probably longer on the weekends. The gameworks.com website is currently getting revamped, and most of the information on there is in the process of being updated. Its about releasing that inner kid inside of you, Des Roches said. Its all about having fun. A former Sedgwick County Jail inmate will receive a $190,000 settlement from the county after he was shoved against a wall and struck in the head by a detention deputy while the inmate was handcuffed, according to officials and court records. The County Commission approved the settlement on Wednesday after a January 2020 incident in a holding cell at the courthouse involving 41-year-old Chantry Moon, who was an inmate at the jail, and then-detention Deputy Matthew Stineman. We commend Sedgwick County for the decision to agree to settle Mr. Moons claims of serious injury after he asserted he was unjustifiably attacked by a deputy while under restraint, Moons attorney, Todd Johnson, said in an email. Stineman was hired in February 2007 and remains employed as a deputy. He is currently assigned to administrative duties in the records department of the Sheriffs Office pending the outcome of a criminal case, spokesperson Lt. Benjamin Blick said. Stineman has been charged with misdemeanor mistreatment of a confined person in Sedgwick County District Court, court records show. Court records dont indicate Stinemans next hearing. His attorney did not immediately respond to a call from The Eagle. The incident happened on Jan. 30, 2020. Sheriff Easter said during a 2020 news conference that Moon was in a holding cell at the courthouse awaiting a hearing that day. Moon began rubbing his handcuffs against the wall. Court records said Moon was asked to stop by a deputy and he replied, What? Stineman then had the deputy open the door and went into the cell and aggressively rushed toward Moon, punched him in the chest, slammed him against the wall and struck Moon in the head as he held him against the wall, according to a complaint filed in district court. Still pinned against the wall, Stineman told Moon you understand that now dont you (expletive), the complaint said. Two deputies witnessed the incident. One of the deputies reported Stineman to a jail supervisor, court records show. Stineman was charged in February 2020 with mistreatment of a confined person. Boston Police are turning to the public for help after a 13-year-old girl from Roxbury went missing nearly a week ago. Nah-Tayleigh Brown was reported missing from her home on Saturday, July 30, and was last seen around 6 p.m. Friday, July 29, police said. Brown was seen wearing a black shirt and pants with rainbow Crocs. According to officers, they spoke with Brown on the phone on Saturday but she refused to come home or give her location. Police said she known to frequent the Mattapan area. Anyone with information about where she was asked to call 911 or 617-343-4275. This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW Aug. 4A plan to reimburse counties for lost revenue if the equipment and inventory and vehicle property taxes are eliminated has been completed. Sen Chandler Swope, R-6th District, who has pushed for those taxes to end, said the move will not only bring more businesses into the state it will also save residents money in the vehicle tax and actually reimburse them for the tax they paid this year. "As soon as the bill passes, we can write people checks to cover the money they spent on the vehicle taxes this year," he said, putting money into residents' pockets and helping the local economy in the process. The move will also make the state more attractive for businesses. "I know personally of at least 12 companies that did not locate in Mercer County because of the equipment and inventory tax," he said. "It is a real jobs killer." Not only will the plan reimburse counties for the revenue they would lose from the taxes, each county would receive at least $1 million above that to help offset the money counties spend on the "jail bill" to house prisoners in state correctional facilities. Swope said the entire cost for those reimbursements would be $558 million a year, with an extra $140 million this year to cover the costs of paying residents back the money they spent on the vehicle tax. Going forward, when this plan would kick in on July 1, 2023, the vehicle tax revenue now going to counties is included in the $558 million. All of this is dependent on whether voters approve Amendment No. 2 this fall, the Property Tax Modernization Amendment, which would basically give legislators the authority to change or eliminate the property taxes. Mercer County Assessor Lyle Cottle said it is a "solid" plan, and he agrees it will help bring in businesses as well as help residents. In fact, the personal vehicle tax in the county is substantial. Cottle said the average annual bill for vehicle owners in the county is around $600. Story continues "That would save residents money," he said, which would help the local economy. Cottle's main concern, shared by assessors and county commissioners around the state, has been whether the state will continue the reimbursements from now on, not just for a few years. That is crucial because counties depend on revenue from the taxes to help fund schools and county services, with Mercer County receiving more than $8 million a year (not including another $3 million from other sources). According to the Senate plan, Mercer County will be reimbursed that $8 million plus another $1.4 million, which is about what the jail bill is, for a total of $9.7 million. McDowell County would receive $5.3 million a year, $1 million above the highest average (equipment and inventory and vehicle) tax collection totals during the last five years. Monroe County would receive almost $2.5 million, also $1 million more. Mercer County would get the extra $1.4 million because its jail bill is higher than in McDowell or Monroe. Swope said the state can afford to do this because of the growth during the past six years which was made possible by former Senate President Bill Cole's emphasis on making the state more business friendly. "He ran a very effective pro-business agenda," Swope said, which helped pave the way for things to come. When Swope was elected in 2016, the state's budget was $4 billion, and cuts had to be made each year, and that was also the same year Gov. Jim Justice was elected and he ran on a pro-business platform. Growth has been steady since then, Swope said, with the state budget raised to $4.5 billion after the first three years. The budget was then frozen, he said, to allow the state to regain a revenue surplus, which gradually grew and hit a record $1.3 billion during the last fiscal year, which ended on June 30, and about the same surplus is projected for the current fiscal year. Swope said of that $1.3 billion, $600 million was in actual revenue growth, the state's GDP (Gross Domestic Product), with the rest in federal money and revenue from the coal and gas severance taxes (about $400 million). Any federal money or the volatile coal and gas severance tax cannot be used to plan for ongoing spending, he said, but the $600 million can. "We are confident the state will continue to see at least that much surplus in the GDP each year," Swope said, adding that projections can only be used for five years simply because of statistical reliability. In responding to Cottle's concern about long-term reimbursements, Swope said part of the plan is that the governor will build that money into the state's base budget every year so it will be there. The proposed bill, if Amendment 2 passes, would " provide and codify replacement revenue for each county" and "create a special revenue account that would contain an annual appropriation for replacement revenue." However, he said he and other Senate leaders, like Senate Finance Chair Eric Tarr, are confident the state will continue to grow in the foreseeable future. That $600 million a year will more than cover the $558 million, with a $40 million cushion. Swope said the $140 million to repay residents their vehicle tax for this year can come from other surplus money available now, but that is just a one-time expense and will do what Justice wanted to do with his 10 percent personal income tax cut put money into people's pockets straightaway, whenever the bill would pass. Justice has opposed the Senate plan, saying Monday it is too risky and referring to it as a $700 million plan. But Swope explained he was including that initial one-time $140 million vehicle tax reimbursement to residents. With those taxes gone, counties will be likely to see growth, Swope said, and the plan also paves the way for the Governor's personal income tax reduction plan, which Swope also supports as a long-term goal. "If the sales tax revenue grows by more then 5 percent, we will take half of that extra amount (above 5 percent) to use as an income tax replacement fund," he said. Justice's plan would cut the personal income tax by 10 percent this year, costing the state $254 million. With the Senate plan, money would be set aside to make up that money with an ongoing fund based on growth and then phase in the cuts when the money is there to do it. The eventual goal, he said, is to completely eliminate the personal income tax. Swope, a retired construction company owner, praised Tarr and the Legislature's leadership, saying he is just a "soldier" doing whatever he can do to help. "We have a leadership team who are compassionate," he said, because they want to do what is best for the state and do all they can to help residents. Swope said they also want to make West Virginia "a desired destination everybody wants to come to." Contact Charles Boothe at cboothe@bdtonline.com Contact Charles Boothe at cboothe@bdtonline.com The Daily Beast Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/GettyConcerns are swirling within the Kremlin and splashing onto the screens of Russias tightly controlled state media. Moscows grueling invasion of Ukraine and Washingtons potential designation of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism are at the top of the listbut the upcoming U.S. elections are likewise causing some heart palpitations.Having recovered from their initial shock over the FBIs search of Donald Trumps Florida estate, Russian Joaquim Martins, a professor at the University of Michigan and expert in aircraft design, told Insider that the broken plastic barrier didn't pose any safety threat. Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock A viral TikTok showed what appeared to be a shattered window on a Southwest flight. The broken piece was actually the plastic barrier, which an airplane expert said is "non-structural." The passenger said she was given a $300 flight voucher from the airline. A passenger on board a Southwest flight posted a TikTok that quickly went viral of what appeared to be a shattered window, but she later explained it was only the plastic layer that broke. The passenger was headed from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas when she said she rested her arm on the window next to her seat, instantly breaking the plastic layer. "As soon as my elbow applied any type of slight pressure, as soon as that happened, the whole window just broke, shattered, the whole thing," she said in a TikTok explaining the situation. Later in the video, she said a flight attendant checked with the pilot and assured her there were no issues with cabin pressure and they were safe to complete their flight to Las Vegas. Southwest didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. Joaquim Martins, a professor at the University of Michigan and expert in aircraft design, told Insider that while he hasn't seen a plastic barrier break on a plane before, it didn't pose any safety threat. Martins said the plastic part of the window is not impacted by cabin pressure. Instead, the outside glass window absorbs all the force. Non-structural items breaking on planes is "perfectly normal" Martins said, and the virality of the video probably came from the shock of what appeared to be a broken window. Martins clarified that had it been the actual glass panel, "stuff would be getting sucked out, and she would have had to put on an oxygen mask." In 2018, a Southwest passenger was killed after she was partially sucked out of a window that broke after the plane's left engine exploded in midair. In the TikTok explaining the incident, the passenger said Southwest grounded the plane for repairs Martin said that's standard practice when anything breaks on the plane. Story continues "There are several items that are perfectly safe to fly with, but they need to be fixed before flying," Martin said. The passenger said she received a $300 flight voucher from Southwest following the incident. Read the original article on Insider Aug. 4Pointy pencils, unblemished notebooks and pristine glue sticks were piled high inside bright yellow bins in the church gym. Outside, a school bus backed up to the gym's doors. "This is the last bus, whoop, whoop!" a volunteer called. On Wednesday, volunteers picked up donated school supplies across Frederick County, loaded them onto Frederick County Public Schools buses and dropped them off at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at 199 North Place in Frederick, where they were sorted. "No student in our system should be without the school supplies they need," said Ken Oldham, president and CEO of the United Way of Frederick County. The United Way of Frederick County's Stuff the Bus drive, in partnership with FCPS, aims to support students in ALICE households. ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, and refers to households that have working members but are unable to afford basic necessities. Between July 5 and Wednesday, nearly 60 local businesses and nonprofits across the county collected school supplies in yellow bins. People were also invited to make financial contributions to the United Way to buy supplies. While the tally of donations was not known Wednesday, Oldham said the stockpile looked "pretty good." The United Way also received more than $13,000 in direct contributions, he said. About 125 volunteers helped pick up and sort supplies, according to Erin Lawson, manager of resource development for the United Way. Last year, Stuff the Bus netted 300 yellow collection bins, plus 35 pallets of school supplies from Walmart, allowing the United Way to serve about 7,000 students, according to Veronica Henry, manager of community impact and grants. Donations will be distributed Aug. 5 to 9. Wednesday afternoon, 9-year-old Malaki Dorsey hefted a box almost as big as him in the church gym. "I just decided to help because some people don't have stuff for school," he said. Story continues He was among 13 children and four mentors from the nonprofit I Believe in Me, which focuses on youth development and empowerment. Mentor Kelly Moran beamed as she watched I Believe in Me youths rush to help unload boxes. "They love this," she said. I Believe in Me teaches its youths to give back through its summer program, according to Moran. They also can benefit from the supplies collected. "They know what it's like to maybe not be able to buy school supplies," Moran said. She said volunteering for Stuff the Bus makes the children feel like part of the community, and shows they are not alone. I Believe in Me parent volunteer Kay Brooks sorted composition notebooks. "This will definitely help," she said. "It's not cheap." Sisters Olivia, 10, and Jessica, 9, rode the school bus with their mother, Lindsey Bernier, to pick up four bins of school supplies from the Seton Center in Emmitsburg on Wednesday morning. The girls said they have volunteered for Stuff the Bus since they were about 5 years old. "I'd like for other people to have the same chance as us," to have school supplies, Jessica said. At the gym later that afternoon, Olivia and Jessica sorted pencils into packs of 10. They said it was a fun day. The Rev. Barbara Kershner Daniel said she pictures a child or family behind every box of crayons. For a dozen years, she organized the city of Frederick distribution through the Religious Coalition for Emergency Human Needs. The Rotary Club of Carroll Creek now fills that role. "We're really about making sure kids get a great start to the school year," said Rotary volunteer Amy Benton, who chairs Backpacks for Bright Futures for the club. Benton said Rotary members will help Frederick students pick out supplies next week. The club raised about $22,000 for school supplies, she said. Gazing across the stacks of school supplies, Kershner Daniel said the donations looked to be around 2019 levels before Stuff the Bus was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. "People are very generous in the community," Kershner Daniel said. "It's a huge need." Follow Mary Grace Keller on Twitter: @MaryGraceKeller By Yimou Lee and Sarah Wu TAIPEI (Reuters) -China deployed scores of planes and fired live missiles near Taiwan on Thursday in its biggest drills in the Taiwan Strait, a day after U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a solidarity trip to the self-ruled island. China's military confirmed multiple firings of conventional missiles in waters off Taiwan as part of planned exercises in six zones set to run until noon on Sunday. It activated more than 100 planes, including fighter jets and bombers, and over 10 warships, state broadcaster CCTV said. Taiwan's defence ministry said it scrambled jets to warn away 22 Chinese fighter aircraft that crossed the Taiwan Strait median line into its air defence zone, and said troops fired flares late on Thursday to drive away four drones that flew above the area of its Kinmen islands, off the southeastern coast of China. It said missiles fired by China flew high into the atmosphere and constituted no threat to it, responding to public concern about whether they passed over the main island of Taiwan. Japan protested that five missiles appeared to land in its economic zone. "The U.S.-Taiwan collusion and provocation will only push Taiwan towards the abyss of disaster, bringing catastrophe to Taiwan compatriots," said a Chinese defence ministry spokesperson. Responding to the Chinese drills, President Tsai Ing-wen said Taiwan would not provoke conflicts but would firmly defend its sovereignty and national security. "Taiwan will never be knocked down by challenges," Tsai said in a recorded video message to the people of Taiwan. "We are calm and not impetuous, we are rational and not provocative, but we will also be firm and not shirk." The White House condemned China's move as "irresponsible" and said it expected Beijing would continue to react in the coming days. "Beijing's provocative actions are significant escalation and its long standing attempt to change the status quo," U.S. national security spokesperson John Kirby told a briefing. Story continues To avoid escalating tensions further, the United States has postponed a long-planned test of an Air Force Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, Kirby said. HACKER ATTACKS Taiwan said 11 Chinese Dongfeng ballistic missiles had been fired in nearby waters - the first time since 1996. Taiwan officials said the drills violated United Nations rules, invaded its space and threatened free air and sea navigation. It has been self-ruled since 1949, when Mao Zedong's communists took power in Beijing after defeating Chiang Kai-sheks Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists in a civil war, prompting the KMT-led government to retreat to the island. The military activity followed Pelosi's unannounced visit of support to Taiwan in defiance of warnings from China. Before the drills officially began, Chinese navy ships and military aircraft briefly crossed the Taiwan Strait median line several times on Thursday, a Taiwanese source briefed on the matter told Reuters. By midday, warships from both sides remained in close proximity as Taiwan also scrambled jets and deployed missile systems to track Chinese aircraft crossing the line. "They flew in and then flew out, again and again. They continue to harass us," the Taiwanese source said. China, which has long said it reserves the right to take Taiwan by force, says its differences with the island are an internal affair. In Taiwan, life was largely normal despite worries that Beijing could fire a missile over the main island as North Korea did over Japan's northern island of Hokkaido in 2017. "When China says it wants to annex Taiwan by force, they have actually said that for quite a while," said Chen Ming-cheng, a 38-year-old realtor. "From my personal understanding, they are trying to deflect public anger, the anger of their own people, and turn it onto Taiwan." Taiwan said websites of its defence ministry, foreign ministry and the presidential office were attacked by hackers and warned of coming "psychological warfare". 'COMRADE PELOSI' Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Pelosi's visit to Taiwan a "manic, irresponsible and highly irrational" act, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Wang, speaking at a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Cambodia, said China had tried to avert crisis by diplomatic means but would never let its core interests be hurt. Unusually, the drills in six areas around Taiwan were announced with a locator map circulated by China's official Xinhua news agency - a factor that for some analysts illustrated playing to both domestic and foreign audiences. In Beijing, security near the U.S. Embassy was unusually tight though there were no signs of significant protests. "I think this (Pelosi's visit) is a good thing," said a man surnamed Zhao in Beijing. "It gives us an opportunity to surround Taiwan, then to use this opportunity to take Taiwan by force. I think we should thank Comrade Pelosi." Pelosi, the highest-level U.S. visitor to Taiwan in 25 years, praised its democracy and pledged American solidarity during her brief stopover. Chinese anger could not stop world leaders from travelling there, she said. "Our delegation came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear that we will not abandon Taiwan," Pelosi told Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, whom Beijing suspects of pushing for formal independence - a red line for China. China summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing in protest and halted several agricultural imports from Taiwan. The United States and the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven nations warned China against using Pelosi's visit as a pretext for military action against Taiwan. The United States has no official diplomatic relations with Taiwan but is bound by U.S. law to provide it with the means to defend itself. Taiwan rejects China's sovereignty claims, saying only the islanders themselves can decide their future. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres is following the developments closely and with concern, a U.N. spokesperson said. (Reporting by Yimou Lee and Sarah Wu; Additional reporting by Tony Munroe, Ryan Woo and Martin Quin Pollard in Beijing and Fabian Hamacher in Taipei; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, William Maclean and Deepa Babington; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore, Angus MacSwan, Janet Lawrence and Daniel Wallis) TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's defence ministry said on Thursday the Chinese military launched a total of 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles into waters near Taiwan's northern, southern and eastern coasts in several volleys. Earlier in the day, Chinese military launched missiles from near Taiwan's Matsu islands. (Reporting by Yimou Lee; Writing by Meg Shen; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel) China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi at an Asean meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia China's foreign minister has called US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan "manic, irresponsible and irrational". At a meeting of Southeast Asian countries, Wang Yi defended China's military drills in the seas around Taiwan, held in response to the visit. Ms Pelosi made a brief but controversial stop on the island on Wednesday, during a tour of the region. China reacted by launching its biggest ever military exercises in the region. Ms Pelosi is the most senior US politician to visit the island in 25 years. Her decision to stop at the island has enraged Beijing, which considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province of China. The US does not officially recognise Taiwan, but it does maintain a strong relationship with the island, which includes selling weapons for Taiwan to defend itself. Speaking during a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, Mr Wang said his country had done all it could to avoid a crisis but that it could "not allow its core interests to be hurt". His comments came after Southeast Asian foreign ministers had earlier warned that growing tensions over Taiwan could spark open conflict in the region. A statement from the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) called for maximum restraint and urged against any provocative action. It said that recent developments could lead to "miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers". Mr Wang said Taiwan would "eventually return to the embrace of the motherland". The Chinese government has threatened to eventually seize the island by force if other attempts at unification are unsuccessful. Russia - which maintains good relations with Beijing - said China had the "sovereign right" to hold the drills. "The tension in the region and around Taiwan was provoked...by the visit of Nancy Pelosi," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. Story continues China and Taiwan: The basics Why do China and Taiwan have poor relations? China sees the self-ruled island as a part of its territory and insists it should be unified with the mainland, by force if necessary How is Taiwan governed? The island has its own constitution, democratically elected leaders, and about 300,000 active troops in its armed forces Who recognises Taiwan? Only a few countries recognise Taiwan. Most recognise the Chinese government in Beijing instead. The US has no official ties with Taiwan but does have a law which requires it to provide the island with the means to defend itself Following her visit to Taiwan, Ms Pelosi has been to South Korea and has now landed in Japan as part of an official four-country tour which also includes Singapore and Malaysia. In Seoul she met National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo. Concerns over North Korea's nuclear and missile threats were discussed. However, she did not meet in person South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was said to be on holiday - although still in Seoul - during Ms Pelosi's visit. Instead they spoke only by phone, a move which has been criticised by some opposition politicians and interpreted by analysts as an attempt not to antagonise China. Ms Pelosi was expected to visit the heavily fortified border with North Korea - known as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) - according to reports. Taron Egerton knows about fame especially after the attention he received for his award-winning work as Elton John in 2019s Rocketman. But Egerton never felt as popular as he did on July 23 when Britney Spears posted videos on her Instagram of them together in London. I felt very, very, very famous for a second, Egerton tells me on this weeks Just for Variety podcast, crediting her passionate fans for all the love and attention. More from Variety I love Britney, he says. The Instagram video which Spears captioned, Coolest guy ever!!! Such a freaking fan! was taken at a mutual friends dinner party. She was very, very, very lovely, the actor reports, explaining hes been a fan of the pop star since her early days. I was exactly the right age to have been swept up in all that mania, he says, adding, Shes a force. I spoke with Egerton on Zoom from Greece, where he was vacationing with his family. He didnt mind taking a break from holiday to promote his latest project, Apple TV+s Black Bird. Inspired by true events, the series stars Egerton as Jimmy Keene, a drug dealer who is sent to prison for 10 years. However, prosecutors offer to commute his sentence if he is willing to be transferred to a maximum-security lockup to get a serial killer (Paul Walter Hauser) to reveal the location of the bodies of women he allegedly killed. The eight-episode series the finale of which streams on Aug. 5 opens with depictions of Jimmys Mafia-esque life full of women, sex, drugs and debauchery. Ray Liotta, in one of his last roles before he died in May, plays Egertons father. Story continues I mention to Egerton that I grew up in Howard Beach, the same Queens neighborhood that was home to the late Mafia boss John Gotti. I, like a lot of young men, fell in love with those kind of stories, these usually Italian American stories that kind of glamorize a life of crime, Egerton says. Doing the show and obviously Rays involvement it did feel a bit like living something of a fantasy. That fantasy included getting in great shape before stripping down for a sex scene that highlights his naked derriere. I did a lot of training, Egerton explains. I mean, Jimmy is in good shape as a man in his fifties, but as a man in his early thirties, he was in phenomenal shape. Egerton gushes over working with Hauser, whose creepy child-like voice on the show is what nightmares are made of. We had a great time working together, Egerton says. I feel we have this great kind of odd-couple fucking weird chemistry. It has moments of fun and lightness, but obviously all in the context of kind of the darkest things imaginable. Perhaps something lighter a reboot of The Odd Couple could be in the duos future? Id like to go to work with him where we dont feel like we need a shower after every scene, Egerton says. Egerton made headlines in April when he dropped out of a West End production of Cock co-starring Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton). Though he politely declines to discuss the details, he previously revealed that a close family member was battling cancer. I think its really important that I get back on the horse again sooner rather than later, Egerton says of returning to the stage. His dream project is Sweeney Todd. At the moment Im too young and not gruff enough, but I probably could do it at 40, the 32-year-old actor explains, adding, No ones going to buy me as Sweeney just yet. I need to have accrued enough years to be that jaded and embittered. Hell likely be singing again in Sing 3. Although Universal Pictures hasnt officially announced a third installment in Illuminations animated musical franchise, Egerton believes it will happen. It would be fun to have Elton in it, he says. Im sure hed love to do it. You can listen to the full interview with Egerton above. You can also find Just for Variety wherever you download your favorite podcasts. Best of Variety Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Associated Press Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and backers of universal school vouchers took a victory lap Tuesday over legislation the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted in June giving the state the nation's most expansive voucher system, and he also used the time to attack backers of public schools who are trying to block the measure at the ballot. Ducey touted the signature bill he signed in July that gives all Arizona parents the ability to take state money that would go to their local public school and instead use it for private school tuition or other education costs. The governor had a ceremonial signing at a central Phoenix Christian school that already gets large benefits from the state's tax credit donation programs and existing school voucher program. TOKYO (Reuters) - At least three people were missing and thousands in northern Japan were ordered to evacuate on Thursday after torrential rains pounded the area, flooding roads and causing rivers to burst their banks in some regions. More than 500 mm (19 inches) of rain had fallen in one part of Niigata prefecture in the 24 hours to 1:00 p.m. (0400 GMT), NHK public television said, prompting authorities to issue the highest possible level of disaster warnings in some areas. Bridges were cut and roads were flooded, television footage showed. Service along one portion of a Shinkansen superfast train line was suspended. Roughly 500,000 people were ordered to evacuate in Niigata, Ishikawa and Yamagata prefectures, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said, but there were no immediate reports of fatalities. Though the affected areas are largely rural, they are also home to a number of factories. Major chipmaker Renesas Electronics Corp temporarily suspended operations at its factory in Yamagata, northern Japan, after local authorities issued a warning over heavy rains on Wednesday evening but said operations were mostly back to normal. Technoflex Corporation said it was suspending production at a factory in Murakami due to a power outage and flooding until the situation stabilised. (Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Lincoln Feast.) Tim Westwood is facing an investigation by the Metropolitan police over the accusations of sexual offences against him dating back 40 years. The news comes after a joint investigation by the BBC and The Guardian revealed seven women had accused Westwood of predatory and unwanted sexual behaviour and touching. The Mets specialist crime unit is looking into four reports of historical offences allegedly committed in London, from 1982, 1985, 2010 and 2016, a spokesperson told The Guardian. A statement from Scotland Yard on Thursday (4 August), which did not name Westwood, said: Detectives from the Mets Central Specialist Crime continue to investigate four reports relating to allegations of non-recent sexual offences allegedly committed by a man. The offences are alleged to have occurred in London in 1982, 1985, 2010 and 2016. There have been no arrests, inquiries continue. Westwood has denied any wrongdoing and said the allegations were fabricated, false, and without foundation. In a career that has spanned 40 years, there have never been any complaints made against him officially or unofficially. Tim Westwood strongly rejects all allegations of wrongdoing, a statement issued in April on behalf of the presenter said. Tim Westwood (Getty Images) BBC director-general Tim Davie called the claims made against Westwood appalling and initially said hed seen no evidence of complaints before later backtracking. The BBC later confirmed that it had received six complaints about the DJ. It was reported this week that the media company has appointed an independent barrister to lead a broader review into Westwoods conduct after an earlier review revealed that the BBC should have further explored issues that were being raised about the radio host. Westwood worked on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 1Xtra for nearly 20 years from 1994, when he joined to host the first national rap show in the UK. In 2013, he left the BBC to work at Capital Xtra where he presents a show on Saturday nights. If you have been raped or sexually assaulted, you can contact your nearest Rape Crisis organisation for specialist, independent and confidential support. For more information, visit their website here. Day and night, Komlatse Koto watches over the forest near his village in southern Togo, hoping to prevent the diminishing patch of woodland from being turned bit by bit into a treeless clearing. For years, inhabitants of Ando-Kpomey village, around 65 kilometres (40 miles) north of Togo's capital Lome, have anarchically cut down trees for firewood and charcoal. Koto and his fellow watchdogs are doing all they can to end the destruction, warning villagers that by harming the environment they also harm their own livelihoods. "The development committee keeps a close watch," said Koto, who for two years has guarded the forest surrounding his village of around 500 people. Each year, the small West African nation suffers more than 3,500 hectares (9,600 acres) of forest degradation, representing more than five million destroyed trees, the environment ministry says. That very high rate has accelerated in recent years, mostly because firewood is the main energy source for cooking in 90 percent of households. Gas is beyond their reach while other forms of energy are not widespread. Access to cooking gas for many Togolese has worsened since the Russian offensive in Ukraine, which made fuel and gas prices soar. "The situation is very critical. Inside the country, there is practically no forest left," said Sebastien Balouki, director of the NGO Reboisons Vite le Togo (RVT) dedicated to reforestation. "Everything has been destroyed for firewood and charcoal making. We must act quickly." A forest code approved in 2008 provides for prison sentences ranging from one month to two years and fines of 20,000 to 1 million CFA francs (approximately $31 to $1,560) for offences committed. But in Togo, where 60 percent of the rural population live in the greatest poverty, it is difficult to enforce such a law. "The penalties vary according to the extent of the destruction. But the text suffers in its application," said a Togolese environment ministry official, who requested anonymity. Story continues Togo is not alone on the continent. Nearly one billion Africans do not have access to a clean source of energy for cooking, according to a report by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation published in 2022. According to the same report, air pollution from wood smoke was also responsible for the premature death of half a million Africans each year. - One billion plants - Togo's government is making efforts. A reforestation operation started on June 1, with the goal of planting least 23 million seedlings by the end of 2022. "The government has finally heard our cries, by decreeing a reforestation campaign," said RVT's Balouki. The longer-term objective is to reach one billion plants by 2030. NGOs and associations, state services and several large companies are mobilising for reforestation operations on open spaces in Lome and other areas in the country. "Our ambition is to achieve 25 percent forest cover," according to the minister of environment and forest resources, Katari Foli-Bazi. "We have all the assets to succeed in this project, and our first strategy is mobilisation," he said. To motivate the population, the government has rewarded in recent weeks the three best re-foresters from all regions of the country. But reforestation is not enough without slowing deforestation, which is difficult when reliance on wood is so great. - Improved stoves - As part of those efforts, authorities have embarked on a campaign to promote improved stoves -- locally-made cookers that are very economical in charcoal consumption. The cookers are made using recycled galvanised sheet metal and ceramics. The government has distributed 1,500 in seven villages including Ando-Kpomey. The goal is to reach 10 more villages by 2025 and 500 by 2050. These stoves, produced locally and whose prices vary between 5,000 and 25,000 CFA francs, seem to have won over the villages where they are used. "Today it is impossible to prohibit the use of charcoal in households: rather, an alternative is needed to reduce the impact of deforestation through the ecological management of the use of charcoal and firewood," Balouki said. "And experience has shown that improved stoves can significantly reduce pressure on trees." In Ando-Kpomey, energy-intensive cookers have already been abandoned, and their remains tossed out of homes are still visible here and there. Rebecca Agbogla now prepares meals on her improved stove placed on the ground in front of her hut. Even more than an ecological alternative, for Agbogla, it is above all a source of savings. "I use twice, even three times less charcoal in one week than our terracotta cooker," she said. ek/cma/pma/imm/ri The death of U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski in a car crash yesterday leaves a vacant seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and leaves voters in the 2nd Congressional District, which includes South Bend and Elkhart, without representation in the U.S. House. Indiana law and the U.S. Constitution dictates what should happen in this case: a special election must be called by the state's governor to fill the vacancy. The Governor's Office told IndyStar in an email that the process has not yet started, so no date has been set for the special election. The seat in the heavily Republican district also is up for election Nov. 8. More on U.S. Rep. Walorski's death: Indiana, national leaders react to U.S. Rep. Walorski's death Replacing a politician of Walorski's stature and experience, especially this close to the November Midterm election, will be very difficult for the Republican Party, said Michael Wolf, the chair of the Purdue University Fort Wayne political science department. "These are probably people who have worked together who would like to run for the seat. This makes it very confusing for up-and-coming and established party figures. Who do you choose? Somebody to be a placeholder or an established figure who would have name recognition? Or is it going to a be a young, up-and-coming figure in the party...?" Indiana Republican Party spokesperson Luke Thomas told IndyStar in an email, "At this time, the Indiana Republican Party is mourning the loss of friends and colleagues; our sole focus is on those lost and their families. "Over the course of the coming days, we will work with the Governor's Office and the Indiana Election Division to confirm the proper steps moving forward and will provide an update at a later date." Given the upcoming November midterm election, with early voting beginning as soon as October, it is possible that the governor will decide to have the special election at the same time as the midterm. Story continues "That means as a voter, you would vote twice for a member of the House of Representatives," Andy Downs told IndyStar. He is the former director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Purdue University Fort Wayne and a foremost expert on Indiana politics. Both he and Wolf predict that the special election will be held at the same time as the November midterm. "More than likely, when you figure out all steps to figuring out a special election, it would be held on the same day (as the November election)," Downs said. "No. 1, the programming of machines so they can be used (comes into play). Second, the timing of when ballots are available comes into play. And a bunch of logistical issues come into play that just make it far easier for both elections to be held the same day." Honoring Jackie Walorski:Indiana and U.S. Capitol flags to be lowered at half-staff for Rep. Jackie Walorski This is what happened in 2010, when voters in Indiana's 3rd Congressional District, which includes Fort Wayne, were left without a representative when Rep. Mark Souder resigned after admitting to an affair with a female staffer. Then-Gov. Mitch Daniels called for a special election to be held the same time as the November midterm election, Wolf said, citing the infrastructure and cost of holding an election, as well as ensuring the attentiveness of voters. If this were to happen, there would be two questions on the ballot for the 2nd Congressional District: who should fill the unexpired term, and who should serve the district for the next term, Downs said. It would be overwhelmingly likely that the same candidate would win both elections, in that case, Downs said, because voters would vote the same way on the same ballot. But in the unlikely event two different candidates win the special election and the midterm election, the winner of the special election would serve until the end of Rep. Walorski's unexpired term, which would be Jan 3, 2023, and the winner of the midterm election would serve from the start of the next term, also Jan 3, 2023. Wolf said the Democrat nominee for the special election is likely to be Paul Steury, who is the nominee for the November midterm election. Contact IndyStar reporter Ko Lyn Cheang at kcheang@indystar.com or 317-903-7071. Follow her on Twitter: @kolyn_cheang. This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana Jackie Walorski: How will vacant Congress seat be filled? Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty Pay Dirt is a weekly foray into the pigpen of political funding. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Thursday. When tech billionaire Peter Thiel pours his money into candidates, he isnt just donating; hes buying into a new strategy to reshape the way campaigns are runa strategy that legal experts say is subverting traditional campaign laws. Despite the way Thiels donations are often framed in headlines, he doesnt give the bulk of his money to individual candidates. Thats largely because he cant. Federal law caps individual campaign contributions at a comparatively low amount$5,800 for a full election cycle. Instead, the bulk of Thiels cash is going to outside groups called super PACs, which unlike campaigns can accept unlimited amounts of money, both from individuals and corporations. California Venture Capitalist Blake Masters Wins AZ GOP Senate Primary But the super PACs Thiel bankrolls arent just any super PACs. They each focus on one candidate, and one candidate only. In Ohio, Thiel has J.D. Vance, and in Arizona, he has Blake Masters. The singular focus is part of a trend in Republican politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, while there are currently about 100 fewer single-candidate super PACs than in the 2018 midterms, theyve already raised and spent more than $30 million above the 2018 totalswith the home stretch still months away. The GOP dominates this landscape. In 2018, one in three single-candidate super PACs (or SCSPs) were liberal. This year, the proportion is half that, according to CRP data. The GOP groups have also outspent their Democratic counterparts $144.1 million to $10.6 million. (Democrats tend to launch more pop-up PACs in the weeks just before an election.) Watchdogs say these groups create unique concerns about corruption and fairness in elections. And in Thiels case, its part of a broader attempt to influence the shape of the political playing field itself. Story continues As the head of the pro-Vance super PAC, Luke Thompson, recently put it, its a means of taking on myself, as a super PAC, some of the roles traditionally played by campaigns. Want a closer look inside the pockets of the governments most powerful players? Subscribe to the Pay Dirt newsletter here for exclusive reporting every Thursday. Down with the sickness That is a new and disturbing development, said Adav Noti, vice president and legal director of the Campaign Legal Center. Super PACs are premised on the idea that they operate completely independently from any candidate, Noti explained, referring to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that gave rise to super PACs a decade ago. However, over time, were seeing fewer and fewer separations. And when you have a super PAC thats essentially functioning as the day-to-day operations of the campaign, that is obviously corruptive, he said. Peter Thiel Invests Big in Firms His Favorite Candidates Love to Hate Notis group, CLC, recently filed a legal complaint against Thiels pro-Vance super PAC, Protect Ohio Values, and the Vance campaign. It accuses the groups of using a secret website to unlawfully coordinate political strategy. Thompson, the head of Protect Ohio Values, recently offered a candid assessment of that allegation. Citing concerns of some aspects of campaign finance law, Thompson said in an interview that he had been putting a lot of information up on a blog and hoping that the campaign would see it. In doing so, he said, the super PAC was taking on some of the roles traditionally played by campaigns. He also thanked Vance personally. Credit also to J.D. for being willing to trust me on it, Thompson said, adding that this was a professional trust that I really appreciate. Aaron Scherb of government watchdog Common Cause observed that sometimes people say the quiet part out loud. Super PACs are often seen as proxies for campaigns, but they cant work with the campaign, Scherb said. Its illegal, Noti said. Either the FEC or the Department of Justice should put an end to this entire game and shut down super PACs operating as a campaign apparatus. Theres no conceivable understanding under which a super PAC is allowed to do this. Blake Masters Views on Gay Marriage May Surprise His Political Master Peter Thiel Thompson would appear to differ. The current system, with its limits on direct campaign donations, he said in the interview, rewards the fabulously wealthy and encourages deceit. The limits give an unfair edge to independently wealthy candidates, he said, who can self-fund their campaigns while upstarts and outsiders might struggle to cobble together a budget. But while that explanation could theoretically carry water, its not whats happening on the ground. Vance and Masters are both wealthy investors with deep connections to the corporate and financial world. And five of the seven highest-grossing SCSPs are supporting candidates of meansMasters, Vance, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), former GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate and hedge fund guru Dave McCormick, and McCormicks conqueror, Dr. Mehmet Oz. Theres definitely disproportionate involvement of single-candidate super PACs this cycle, Scherb observed. These groups tend to have a small number of donors, and they often silence and drown out the voices of small donors and everyday voters. Take the case of Masters, Thiels longtime friend and protege. Almost all of his financial depth lies in the Thiel-backed Saving Arizona super PAC. That group has just 52 individual donors, and Thiel dominates, accounting for $15 million of the groups $16.2 million in receipts. J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel Accused of Secret Website Shenanigans The bulk of the other contributors come from executives in the tech and financial world, most of them bearing some connection to the crypto community. Exactly four of the 52 hail from Arizona. The pro-Vance groups numbers have a similar distribution. From an anti-corruption perspective, its more about how many people are bankrolling a super PAC, Noti said. If you have one funder whos underwriting the activity, then any candidate supported by that super PAC is going to be indebted to that funder. (GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein single-handedly funded a super PAC backing Eric Greitens, the disgraced Missouri governor who lost his primary this Tuesday.) Scherb agreed. Often these donors want something in return, he said. What a Thiel wants Thiel has said he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible. His super PAC strong-arming certainly aligns with an autocratic view of campaign finance. His two main betsMasters and Vancehave been criticized for flirting with autocracy. And they cite the influence of new right intellectual Curtis Yarvin, who advocates for a monarchical takeover in the United States. Neither candidate has a diverse fundraising base, and both have struggled to raise money. Vances campaign committee was broke at the end of June, and Masters has loaned himself about $200,000 more than he received from Arizona donors, who in turn have given him $14.6 million less than his friend and business partner, Thiel. Theres definitely more danger of a quid pro quo with these groups, Scherb said. At the very least it creates the perception of corruption, which in many ways can be just as damaging. This is all terrible, Noti said. The fact that small numbers of rich people are dominating major campaigns for Congress is a big flashing red alarm for our elections. It has a lot of complicated causes, but in the end we have to fix this. We have to find a way to enforce the rules that prevent any one person or corporation from just dominating an entire campaign. Subscribe to the Pay Dirt newsletter here to follow the movement of the dirty dollars influencing our public policy. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now. Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now. When it comes to race, Tyler Perry says hes putting off giving his 7-year-old son Aman the talk. Speaking to AARP in a recent profile, the filmmaker and creator of the tough-as-nails character Madea gave a rare glance into his life with his son Aman, who he shares with model Gelila Bekele. In his interview, Perry explained his efforts to protect his son from the realities of being Black in the world. In particular, the actor opened up about his reasons for putting off the talk, or the conversation Black parents give their children when it comes to the realities and dangers of their race. I havent had the conversation with Aman because hes only 7, and I want to hold out as long as I can, Perry shared. I dont want to tell him that there are people who will judge him because of the color of his skin, because right now hes in a school with every race, and all these kids are in their purest form. When he describes his friends, he never defines them by race. So, the moment he loses that innocence is going to be a very, very sad day for me. The filmmaker added that he knows the conversation is imminent. I know its coming, though, because hes already asking some really tough questions, he explained. What I want him to be, more than anything, is somebody who sees injustice, speaks out against it, and effects change. Another notable aspect of Perrys approach to parenting highlighted in the interview was his strife to maintain his sons privacy. My sons not famous, he remarked about his desire to keep his private life private. I want him to have as normal a life as he can. I want him to know what its like to have his own name and his own life and not have the pressure of trying to live up to whatever or whoever your father was. ZURICH (Reuters) - The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog appealed for access to a Ukrainian nuclear power plant now controlled by Russian forces to determine whether it was a source of danger.Contact with the Europe's largest nuclear plant, which is at Zaporizhzhia and is being operated by Ukrainian technicians, was "fragile" and communications did not function every day, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Rafael Grossi told Swiss paper Tages-Anzeiger. "We can't afford faulty communication with the plant in areas relevant to safety. We know of allegations that live ammunition is stored in the plant, that there are attacks on the power plant," he said in interview published in German. "Frankly, if I don't have access, I can't determine that. There are contradictions between the accounts of the Russian and Ukrainian sides. I receive information, I also mention it in my situation reports, but I have no way of determining whether it corresponds to the facts." A Russian-installed official in Ukraine said on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces had repeatedly used Western arms to attack the plant, which has two of six reactors operating and has been the subject of repeated warnings from Ukraine, the West and Russia. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday called Russia's actions around the plant "the height of irresponsibility", accusing Moscow of using it as a "nuclear shield" in attacks on Ukrainian forces. Reuters was unable to verify battlefield accounts from either side of the war. Grossi said the UN discussions with parties to the conflict covered a proposed accord on security zones around nuclear plants but he saw no willingness to strike a deal at this stage. Access to the plant was difficult and overland travel through occupied territory would require special security arrangements, he said. Talks with the Ukrainian government on arranging a visit were under way. The agency has at times reported losing connection with surveillance systems that keep track of nuclear material at the power plant. (Reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Bradley Perrett) By Lucy Craymer WELLINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman met with leaders in Samoa and Tonga on Friday, discussing climate change, ocean security and opportunities to work together as Washington seeks to re-engage with the region amid concerns about growing Chinese influence. The senior U.S. diplomat's visit is part of a multi-leg trip to Pacific nations. Sherman was in the region to listen and learn, she told a news conference, and her meeting with Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata'afa had been productive. "Our two countries share a commitment to important democratic values, including respect for human rights, a commitment to protecting freedom of expression, and freedom of religion or belief and a strong belief in the importance of a free and open press," said Sherman. "I look forward to our continued friendship." Several U.S. senior diplomats have visited the South Pacific this year as geostrategic competition in the region grows. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Samoa and Tonga in May, followed by Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong in early June. Sherman confirmed Pacific leaders had been invited to visit President Joe Biden at the White House in September, although a date has not been confirmed. Mata'afa expressed appreciation for the U.S. shift in its stance on climate change and its involvement in ocean governance. She said Samoa was excited to explore opportunities to work with the United States. In Tonga, Sherman met with Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Siaosi Sovaleni, as well as Tonga's King Tupou VI, marking 50 years of bilateral relations and to discuss establishing a U.S. embassy. They discussed expanding cooperation in public health, combating climate change and regional security issues, the U.S. state department said. Sherman's Pacific tour is scheduled to include World War Two commemorations in the Solomon Islands and visits to both Australia and New Zealand. (Reporting by Lucy Craymer and Kirsty Needham; Editing by Sam Holmes) The Daily Beast NewsmaxNewsmax host Eric Bolling pounced on Laura Ingrahams apparent skepticism of former President Donald Trumps potential run for office, using the opportunity to knock his former Fox News colleague and the network itself.Regarding another Trump presidential campaign, Ingraham said on a podcast Monday that well see whether thats what the country wants.The country, I think, is so exhausted, theyre exhausted by the battle, the constant battle, that they may believe that, well, maybe its Ukraine's Armed Forces liberated the villages of Mazanivka and Dmytrivka in Donetsk Oblast The village of Mazanivka is 140 kilometers from Donetsk, while Dmytrivka is 61 kilometers away. Gromov also said that the Ukrainian military had managed to improve its tactical position and switched to defending in depth in the areas of the settlements of Mazanivka, Brashkov, Sulugunivka and Dmytrivka. Read also: Donetsk terrorist Korsa, who 'enjoyed killing Ukrainians,' eliminated in Donbas Defending in depth is a military tactic in which the defender cedes territory through pulling back from one defensive line to another, sapping the momentum of the attacker while inflicting losses on the enemy. Two settlements were liberated Mazanivka and Dmytrivka, Gromov said. At the same time, the Armed Forces of Ukraine withdrew from two positions near Donetsk and Bakhmut, he said. Read also: Russia ramps up pressure along Luhansk-Donetsk boundary According to Gromov, the enemy managed to push out the Ukrainian troops using artillery and conducting an offensive in the area of the Dolomitne and Vuhlehirska thermal power plants on the Kodema section of the front. The Armed Forces of Ukraine were forced to leave Semihirya and switch to defensive actions on the eastern outskirts of Kodema, he said. Read also: Mandatory evacuation begins in Donetsk Oblast, first train of evacuees arrives in Kropyvnytskyi Vereshchuk In addition, on July 30, as a result of the enemys active use of air force, artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and offensive assault operations on the Spartak-Avdiyivka section of the front, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were forced to leave the Butivka mine and switch to defense actions south of the city of Avdiyivka in Donetsk Oblast. Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine UKRAINSKA PRAVDA THURSDAY, 4 AUGUST 2022, 12:53 Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, has said that the international organisation wants to launch a mission to establish the circumstances of the killing of Ukrainian PoWs in occupied Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast. Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Details: According to Guterres, both Ukrainian and Russian officials appealed to the UN to conduct an investigation. Currently, the terms of reference for the mission are being prepared, which will be agreed upon by both parties. Background: On the morning of 29 July, Russian-aligned propaganda media reported the shelling of a prison camp in Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast, where Ukrainian prisoners are being held. Russia has claimed that at least 53 prisoners were killed. The Ukrainian Directorate of Intelligence believes that the killing of Ukrainian prisoners in Olenivka, Donetsk Oblast, was organised by the Wagner Group [a Russian private military company - ed.] on the personal instructions of Yevgeny Prigozhin, without coordination with the leadership of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Ministry of Defence, the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ombudsman of Ukraine demand that the UN and the ICRC, which acted as guarantors of the lives and health of Ukrainian soldiers, send their representatives to the prison camp. Dmytro Lubinets, the ombudsman of Ukraine, asked the ICRC to organise his visit to the prison camp destroyed by the Russians in occupied Olenivka to inspect the bodies of dead Ukrainian prisoners and communicate with the wounded. The Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation announced that it had invited UN and ICRC experts to the prison camp at the place of death of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka. The families of Ukrainian soldiers are dissatisfied with the activities of international organisations, as they have not received any information about their relatives who have been held as prisoners for several months. Journalists fight on their own frontline. Become our patron, support our work! UNITED NATIONS (AP) The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations headed to Africa on Wednesday, saying she was going to focus on how the United States can help Uganda, Ghana and Cape Verde deal with the food crisis that has hit the continent particularly hard not to compete with China and Russia. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the long-planned trip is not part of global competition with either of Americas rivals, but it is part of a series of high-level U.S. engagements that aim to affirm and strengthen our partnerships and relationships with African leaders and peoples. Her trip from Aug. 4-7 will be followed immediately by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkens visits to South Africa, Congo and Rwanda from Aug. 7-11. It also comes on the heels of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs visit last week to Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Republic of Congo where he accused the U.S. and European countries of driving up food prices. Chinas Foreign Minister Wang Yi began 2022 with a four-day visit to Eritrea, Kenya and the Comoros, keeping a 32-year tradition that the countrys top diplomat make his first trip of the year to Africa. Were not catching up. They are catching up, Thomas-Greenfield said. We have been engaging with this continent for decades, and even my own career is very much evidence of that. Thomas-Greenfield first went to Africa as a student in the 1970s, and in her career as a U.S. diplomat she rose to be assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2013 to 2017. She said high energy prices, climate change, COVID-19 and increasing conflict have pushed millions of Africans to the brink, and that Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 has added to the crisis, especially since some countries in Africa once got up to 75% of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. The U.S. ambassador said the three countries she is visiting Uganda first followed by Ghana and Cape Verde all face serious food security situations because of the significant rise in the cost of food and energy. But she said Ghana has been a leader in dealing with it and she will be visiting a market, meeting farmers and going to a grain factory in the country to see how we can help them improve on their production. Story continues In an interview and at a news conference ahead of her three-nation visit, Thomas-Greenfield said her trip happens to come on the heels of Lavrovs visit. Refusing to call Russias invasion of Ukraine a war, Lavrov said: The situation in Ukraine did additionally negatively affect food markets, but not due to the Russian special operation, rather due to the absolutely inadequate reaction of the West, which announced sanctions. Thomas-Greenfield countered: Russia is there to defend what they know they have to defend that they took actions that are hurting Africans, and theyre trying to somehow defend their actions and blame somebody else for the impact that their actions are having on the African continent. They can try to do that. But my question to them is, how are you helping Africans to address the food insecurity issue, not whom youre blaming for the food insecurity issues, she said. Were there to help Africans address those issues. Russia can deal with its own problems. As for China, while its trade with Africa last year was dramatically higher than U.S. trade, Thomas-Greenfield said if you look at our figures, and how far back our engagement has been with the Africans, then we really are far above those numbers. As you look at what Chinas doing in Africa, you need to look at the debt trap that African countries, many of them, have faced because of those relationships with China, she said. China has become one of the biggest lenders to developing countries through its Belt and Road initiative to expand trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Wang, Chinas foreign minister, insisted during his visit to Kenya in January that there is no debt trap. The so-called `debt trap in Africa is not a fact, but a malicious hype-up, he said. It is an 'utterance trap created by those external forces that do not want to see Africa accelerate development. If there is any `trap in Africa, it is the `poverty trap. Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. is not telling African countries they cant engage with China. What we are engaged in is vision for economic development that promotes democracy and that promotes respect for human rights and transparency and strengthening the capacity for Africans to create jobs for their own citizens, she said. We respect the ability of countries to decide for themselves whether they want to partner with China or not. A 95% reduction in the nicotine content of cigars and cigarettes would make these tobacco products largely nonaddictive. Robert Recker/The Image Bank via Getty Images The cigarette is the only legal consumer product that when used as intended causes the premature death of half of long-term users. To address this long-standing health threat, in late June 2022, the Biden-Harris administration announced a plan to move forward with a new standard for cigarettes and other combusted tobacco products that would make them minimally or nonaddictive. A similar nicotine-reduction strategy has also recently been announced by the government of New Zealand and was described as the key component of the countrys new smoke-free plan. The Biden-Harris proposal was predated by an earlier plan in 2017 during Trumps presidency to reduce the permissible nicotine content in cigarettes. Mitch Zeller, the director of the Food and Drug Administrations Center for Tobacco Products from 2013 to April 2022, stated in 2019 that this one rule could have the greatest impact on public health in the history of public health. So what does the proposal mean in practice? When implemented likely not for at least another three years it would mean that all cigarettes and cigars sold in the United States will have to contain approximately 95% less nicotine than they currently do. As nicotine is the addictive substance in tobacco, this would mean that these tobacco products would become pretty much nonaddictive. No more young people would become addicted to cigarettes and current smokers would find it much easier to quit. As a professor of public health sciences who has been doing research on smoking cessation for over 30 years, I am impressed by any intervention that increases the quit rate among smokers with no plans to quit. In one of our recent randomized clinical trials of very low-nicotine cigarettes, my research team at Penn State, along with colleagues at Harvard, found that those assigned to use them were more than four times as likely to quit smoking as those who smoked normal nicotine cigarettes. Research suggests that the full public health benefits of a successfully implemented reduced nicotine standard for cigarettes could be enormous. Story continues A 2018 FDA study projected that by the year 2060, a reduced nicotine standard for cigarettes could reduce the smoking rate dramatically from around 13% now to below 2%, preventing 16 million people from becoming regular smokers and preventing more than 2.8 million tobacco-caused deaths. Not just a light or low-tar cigarette The proposed standard would not simply result in something akin to a light cigarette. Light cigarettes, which have been marketed for decades, contain about the same amount of nicotine as regular cigarettes about 10 to 15 milligrams per cigarette. To comply with the new standard, a cigarette will likely be required to contain less than 0.5 milligrams of nicotine. So-called light or low-tar cigarettes have tiny holes in the filter that allow air flow into the filter to dilute the smoke. When smoked by a machine, light cigarettes deliver lower levels of tar and nicotine per puff. However, when held by a human, the holes are often blocked by the fingers, and smokers can easily puff a bit harder to inhale the same amount of nicotine and tar. Some skeptics of the proposed nicotine reductions have raised the concern that smokers might just smoke reduced-nicotine-content cigarettes more intensely, as they do with light cigarettes. However, dozens of research studies have shown that with very low-nicotine-content cigarettes, smokers do not increase their smoke intake. Instead, over a short period of time, smokers learn that the very low-nicotine cigarette is not very satisfying, and they gradually reduce their smoking. In randomized trials, those using very low-nicotine-content cigarettes are also more likely to quit. A role for e-cigarettes When nicotine reduction in cigarettes was initially proposed under the Trump administration, Zeller and former FDA director Scott Gottlieb recognized that one of the main challenges to the success of this plan was the possibility that the regulation might give rise to an illicit market for high-nicotine cigarettes. Zeller and Gottlieb understood that one critical way to keep that from happening is to allow nonsmoked nicotine products like electronic cigarettes to remain on the market. E-cigarettes deliver a satisfying amount of nicotine for smokers while exposing the user to significantly lower amounts of toxic substances than regular cigarettes. As a result, e-cigarettes are likely to be significantly less harmful. New research by our team, along with colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University, recently found that when smokers with no plans to quit use electronic cigarettes with cigarettelike nicotine delivery, a greater proportion completely quit smoking than those using zero-nicotine e-cigarettes or no e-cigarette. The controversy over e-cigarettes The potential for e-cigarettes to help replace smoking explains why it came as a surprise to many when two days after the Biden-Harris announcement in June to drastically reduce the permissible nicotine content in cigarettes the FDA then announced that it was effectively banning all sales of Juul, the enormously popular e-cigarette that has been the biggest selling e-cigarette brand over the past five years. When Juul appealed the decision, the FDA suspended the denial order until an additional review is completed, which is expected to take months. And Juul is not the only e-cigarette to be threatened with a ban. Of the millions of e-cigarette applications submitted to the FDA by the deadline in September 2020, more than 99% have been denied. The reason the FDAs e-cigarette ban is so puzzling and counterintuitive in the context of the FDAs nicotine-reduction efforts in cigarettes is that the availability of e-cigarettes is critical to the feasibility of that plan. Many researchers, including me, believe that having a variety of legal, regulated high-nicotine e-cigarettes on the market is a critical element in reducing consumer demand for illegal high-nicotine smoked products. Health authorities in other parts of the world, including the United Kingdom and New Zealand, have recognized the important role that e-cigarettes can play in reducing cigarette smoking. New Zealands nicotine-reduction plan explicitly includes providing access to alternative nicotine products like e-cigarettes. Research shows that e-cigarettes are much less harmful than cigarettes, and they are proved to help smokers transition from highly toxic cigarettes. It is therefore highly likely to be appropriate for the protection of public health to keep a variety of e-cigarette brands on the market until after the nicotine reduction plan for cigarettes has been successfully implemented. As we pass World Lung Cancer Day, quietly as usual, I believe we now have a plan that could do more than anything else to reduce the number of deaths each year from that horrible disease. It is a plan that has been proposed by Republican and Democratic administrations alike and is supported by the best available science. In my view, implementation of a reduced-nicotine standard for combustible tobacco represents the possibility of finally bringing an end to cigarette addiction within our lifetimes. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Jonathan Foulds, Penn State. Read more: Jonathan Foulds receives research funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and has previously done consulting for pharmaceutical companies that manufacture smoking cessation medicines. Three days after the Uvalde superintendent placed the principal of Robb Elementary School on paid administrative leave, Mandy Gutierrez is back in her leadership position, according to her lawyer. The reinstatement came one day after Gutierrez rebuffed findings in a Texas House committees investigative report about security at her school. According to a letter from Superintendent Hal Harrell that Gutierrezs attorney released July 28, she resumed her duties as principal after her submission of additional information to the investigative committee. Gutierrez was placed on leave July 25, more than two months after a shooting at Robb left 19 students and two teachers dead. It was the worst school shooting in Texas history. Sign up here for The 74s daily newsletter. Donate here to support The 74's independent journalism. The letter to Gutierrez from Harrell suggested that her leave was related to the House committees investigation. Thank you for responding to our request for information by submitting your response to the House Investigative Report. As a result of our review, you will be allowed to return to work, Harrell wrote. In a statement responding to the reinstatement, Ricardo Cedillo, Gutierrezs lawyer, said, she has been fully reinstated to her position, where she will continue to discharge her duties and continue to serve all the families of the [Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District]. The House committees report pointed to several systemic failures in law enforcements response to the shooting. The committee also alleged that issues at Robb Elementary, including a culture of complacency with security measures, allowed the shooter to enter the school unobstructed. In Gutierrezs letter to the House committee, she rejected assertions that she created an environment of complacency regarding school safety. She said that by not announcing a lockdown alert over the intercom system she had followed her training, and that the door through which the shooter is believed to have entered the classroom had a functioning lock, two areas of investigation by the House committee. Story continues Harrell did not respond to a request for comment. Anne Marie Espinoza, a spokesperson for the district, said the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District follows a practice of not addressing personnel matters. Uriel J. Garcia contributed to this story. This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org. Aug. 3A recent Christian mission trip to Guadalajara, Honduras, by a Jacksonville church group brought about repairs to a Baptist church in that city and addressed what the group saw as spiritual needs of residents there. The mission team members, most of whom represent West Point Baptist Church in Jacksonville, hope to return to Honduras in spring next year and then, if they can raise the money to do so, send another team next summer that includes young people. Eleven people were on the team that returned recently; Leatherwood Baptist Church and Bynum Baptist Church were also represented in the group. "These trips are transformational," said the Rev. Ronny Moore, pastor of West Point, a church that was completely rebuilt in 2020 after the 2018 tornado that hit Jacksonville destroyed the church building. "We fly for thousands of miles to help others and advance the gospel," Moore said, "and we are the ones who have more of a change." Another member of the team who traveled to Honduras was Summer Quinn, 37, of Pleasant Valley, accompanied by her husband, Jeremy. "While there, we went out into the community in Guadalajara and shared the message of Jesus," she said. That message was delivered by teaching a vacation Bible school, praying with people who were sick, going door-to-door and conducting worship services through translators. Members also delivered baskets of food to those in need and assisted the Cross Point Ministries, a group that presents families with filters that clean the water. Another member of the church, Alison Moore, 34, of Wellborn community, had been to Nicaragua in 2017 and said their group had carried out similar activities in that country. Both Quinn and Alison Moore said that as much as anything, they enjoyed the worship services that took place each evening with those they felt connected to by the shared love for God. "During the services, we often had no idea what they were saying or singing, but we could feel the presence of the Lord," said Moore. "We, as visitors, would give our testimonies, three of us my husband Chance, a team member named Rick Nabors and I sang in English while the Hondurans sang in Spanish. Neither set of Christians had any idea what the other was saying or singing, but we feel the presence of the Lord. They have so much love for God, and we all know that He is the same God who is everywhere." Story continues Moore and Quinn said they hope to return with the next team. "It means we get to be a part of something so powerful," Quinn said. "You see God at work in so many ways. There were people dropping to their knees and praising God. I could feel God's presence in all we were doing." Moore said the emotions she felt awakened something in her. The people there are happy, and she wondered if someone told American Christians that they must worship with no glass on the windows or doors on a building, no air conditioner and no lights, would they? "Even to tell Christians here that they would sit in the plastic chairs they use there," she said, "how many would show up for worship? The Hondurans show up, though, and stay at services all day long." Anyone interested in contributing to the mission effort may visitwww.wpbcjville.com to contribute, or they may call the church building and leave a message 256-435-6835. Taiwan's return to motherland a historical inevitability: Chinese FM Xinhua) 08:16, August 04, 2022 PHNOM PENH, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Wednesday made clear here China's solemn position on Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region. Wang, who is attending meetings on East Asia cooperation and on a visit to Cambodia, told reporters that Pelosi's tour is a complete farce. Wang said the U.S. side, under the guise of so-called "democracy," is doing the heinous deeds of violating China's sovereignty. Such "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces represented by Tsai Ing-wen, riding the U.S. coattails, have betrayed the righteousness of the great national cause, said Wang. These perverse practices will not change the international consensus that there is only one China, nor will they change the historical trend that Taiwan will return to the motherland, Wang said. Those who play with fire will not end up well, and those who violate China's sovereignty will certainly be penalized, he added. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) (Reuters) - President Joe Biden will remain in isolation until he tests negative for COVID-19, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday. She also said it would be up to Biden's physician, Kevin O'Connor, to decide whether two negative tests were needed to end his isolation. Biden tested positive again for COVID-19 on Thursday but he was feeling "very well," O'Connor said in a memo released earlier by the White House. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Daniel Wallis) Brittney Griner has been "wrongfully" detained in Russia, the White House has said. The American basketball player was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony after being found guilty of drug possession and smuggling with criminal intent by a Russian court on Thursday, 4 August. Ms Griner was also fined a million rubles (around $16,300). "Russia is wrongfully detaining Brittney. She never should have had to endure a trial in the first place," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. Sign up for our newsletters. Photo credit: MARIA ALEJANDRA CARDONA - Getty Images Kylie Jenner has responded to criticism over a recent Instagram post in which she posed for pictures in a lab for brand Kylie Cosmetics. The 24-year-old shared a selection of snaps from a lab in Milan on Wednesday, adding the caption, "in the lab creating new magic for you guys better than ever. @kyliecosmetics." Pictures show Kylie wearing a white lab coat, alongside videos offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how products are made. Following the post, Kylie faced backlash from followers, with some honing in on the fact that she didn't appear to be wearing usual lab gear such as a hair net or gloves. Cosmetics developer and makeup artist Kevin James Bennett also took to Instagram to publicly criticise Kylie in a lengthy post, calling out manufacturers for allowing the pictures to take place "without following proper sanitation protocols." Now, Kylie has responded to the criticism via comment on Kevin's post. She wrote: "Kevin - this picture is not taken in a manufacturing facility. I would never bypass sanitary protocols and neither would any other celeb or beauty brand owner. Thats completely unacceptable I agree. This is a small personal space creating my own fun samples and taking pictures for content nowhere near the mass manufacturing. No one is putting customers at risk! Shame on you Kevin for spreading false information!!!!" Prior to Kylie's response, fans had criticised the 24-year-old for apparently not wearing protective gear in pictures. Commenting on her post, one fan wrote, "[Aren't you] supposed to wear gloves, mask and the hair net thingy???" Meanwhile, another added, "No gloves though ." A third wrote, "Where is your protecting cap?" with a fourth chiming in, "No gloves or a hair net in a lab??? Or even a mask???" At the time, sources told Page Six that the cosmetics founder wasn't actually on the production floor while pictures and videos were being taken. Insiders shared that Kylie was in an accessible lab area where she could review colours and ideas, with Kylie confirming the same via her comment. Story continues We have reached out to Kylie's reps for comment. You Might Also Like FIRST ON FOX: Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes paid nearly $600,000 in taxpayer dollars for his state police detail over two years while cozying up to the defund the police movement. Barnes is the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate to take on incumbent Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican who is running for his third term. Fox News Digital has learned Barnes total bill for his police detail between January 7, 2019 and November 6, 2021, was $587,281 in pure taxpayer funds. The $587,281 went to paying for 8,868 regular hours of police protection, 4,900 hours of overtime protection, and 203 hours of holiday protection, records requests show. WISCONSIN DEMOCRAT LT. GOV. MANDELA BARNES SAYS FOUNDING OF AMERICA AWFUL Sen. Ron Johnson will face Barnes in the midterm elections this fall. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Barnes, who is running for Senate in the Cheese State, dwarfed his Republican predecessors spending with his two-year, half a million-dollar bill. As the Democrat Senate candidate spent the taxpayer money on his own police protection, Barnes was also cozying up to the defund the police movement. Barnes has made statements online with a soft tone on the defund the police movement, and his campaign has received funding from five groups that advocate for defunding cops. "Defunding the police only dreams of being as radical as a Donald Trump pardon," Barnes tweeted in July 2020. The lieutenant governor also spoke at a major meeting for the Center for Popular Democracy a far-left group that supports defunding the police and claims Israel targets Palestinians with "violent attacks." "Defund police. Defund police states," the group tweeted in May of last year. "Defund militarized occupation. Defund state-sanctioned violence." "In Palestine and everywhere. #FreePalestine," the Center for Popular Democracy continued. Additionally, Barnes praised "Squad" member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., as "brilliant." Omar actively called for and supported the gutting of Minneapolis police department. Minneapolis is now amidst a violent crime wave with little police presence. The Wisconsin lieutenant governor is a noted progressive, aligning himself with "Squad" members like Omar and progressive ideas like abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, Barnes has stated in the press that he does not support the defund the police movement, despite his close ties. A construction worker has spent 50 years on the job and is still going strong. Clyde Smith Jr. says hell never forget the first time he saw it. Atlanta Fulton County Stadium. The old stadium where Hank Aaron hit the home runs at, Smith said. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] At that moment, his lifes work was settled. A then 19-year-old Clyde took classes at what was then called Atlanta Area Technical School. He became an engineering technician. Over the next half-century, he was involved in the construction of every major sports arena in the city. Turner Field. The Georgia Dome. Mercedes-Benz Stadium. You name it. Channel 2s Berndt Petersen spoke with Smith and those around him, trying this milestone into perspective Longtime friend Sheila Bryant says our heroes may have played in those places, but Clyde is the hero who had a hand in building them. All of them. They say I want to be like Mike. Michael Jordan. Well, Mike is good. But Clyde is better, Bryant said. TRENDING STORIES: Sheila has known Clyde for 46 years. She says Clyde should be considered a role model for younger Black men and teenagers. He helped build the foundation where Mike came to perform. Many venues where those Mikes go forth and do their thing. It started with Clyde Smith, Bryant said. Smiths latest project is at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Hell be inspecting another foundation. He has worked at the same place for 50 years. Of course, there were different owners over that time, from Law Engineering in 1972 to Wood today, but its the same place. He has advice on how you do that. Treat people the way you want to be treated. Respect people on a project or a job. Respect yourself. And if you have respect for yourself and love for others, I think with the grace of God, everything falls into place, Smith said. Story continues Smith is about to turn 70 and has no plans to retire. [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter] IN OTHER NEWS: After shooting a McDonalds team member over cold fries, a 20-year-old man and his girlfriend are in custody. According to the NY Post, Michael Morgan was taken into custody shortly after the shooting on Monday night and charged with attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon. Camellia Dunlap, 18, was also charged with two counts of criminal possession of a weapon. The 23-year-old unnamed McDonalds worker was shot during the altercation with the alleged Morgans mother, Lisa Fulmore. Fulmore was FaceTiming her son during the argument, resulting in Morgan coming to the restaurant and confronting the employee. The mom complained that her fries were cold, the police source said. The mom was on FaceTime with her son, and he heard the dispute between her and the clerk. The son and the clerk got into a dispute inside, and it went outside. Morgan allegedly pulled out a gun and shot the worker. Police said the victim was taken to Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center. According to authorities, the McDonalds employee who was shot in the neck is currently being kept alive by a machine. A Brooklyn judge ordered his alleged attacker jailed without bail on Thursday, the NY Post reports. Your Honor, the people anticipate a homicide charge on this case given the victim is currently on life support. The victim has been transported to Brookdale Hospital and has been brain-dead, Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Luis Paternina told Judge Inga ONeale during Morgans arraignment on attempted murder charges. The family now has to make the difficult decision [to take him off life support]. Mom of man in custody for McDonalds fries shooting details what led to incident, reveals sons chilling words https://t.co/Xuqjgvg2BU pic.twitter.com/8KcjQ2B9aB New York Post (@nypost) August 2, 2022 On Monday Fulmore told The Post that she spoke to her son and when she asked him about the incident, he said he did what he had to do. Story continues My son is just saying that he gotta do what he gotta do, Fulmore said. and the [victim] came after him, and whatever happened, happened. Fulmore, 40, said the incident happened after she ordered McDonalds through her mobile app and went to the Bedford-Stuyvesant restaurant to pick up her food, which included fries. The fries were cold, Fulmore said. I asked the girl to change the french fries because the fries were cold. She went to the French fry machine for maybe 10 seconds and brought back fries, so I thought they was new fries, so I had left. So I taste the fries, and after I got to the third one, it was a cold fry still. So I went back to take the food back. Fulmore said she then approached the same female team member and asked her why she would give her the same fries as before. She alleges the team member and others started to laugh about the situation. I was like, Whats funny? I paid for food, and I should get what I asked for. They laughed at me, Fulmore said. One of them was like, All of this over fries? So now Im arguing with them back and forth. The mother of three then recalls when she had her encounter with the team member, who was later shot. The boy where they cook the food at was like, You got all this food in your teeth,' Fulmore recalled. So I said, You wanna take it out? Youre saying I got all this food in my teeth; you wanna take it out?' View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Neighborhood Talk (@theneighborhoodtalk) Fulmore explains that the argument continued until she got on the phone with Morgan, explaining what was happening before he told his mother he was on his way. He was like, Im coming in. So he came in. He heard them saying stuff to me, so he was like, You all gotta back off my mother,' Fulmore said. My son said, Come outside to the boy in the back. At that point, Fulmore said she told her son to leave because she didnt want him to get into trouble. So Im thinking my son was gone, she said. Im thinking it was over because my son left the store. Fulmore alleges that 15 minutes later, the team member asked her, Where your son at? She told him her son had left. She told the publication that he went out looking for her son and eventually heard a gunshot outside the restaurant. She saw the young man on the ground and her son running away from the scene. She said she called 911 and waited at the scene. According to law enforcement sources, there is no indication the victim was carrying a weapon when he was shot. Morgan has been previously arrested several times, including for grand larceny in 2019 and assault and theft of service in 2018. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday that Russia accumulating reserve troops in the south of Ukraine shows that Moscow is not interested in negotiating. Zelensky said in an address to his people that Russia is activating emissaries to suggest that Moscow wants to hold negotiations on the conflict but that they should not be believed. He said Russia has begun to realize the inevitability of being recognized as a terrorist state and added that the country is number one among terrorists. Zelensky called for the United Nations to label Russia a terrorist state and expel it from the organization after a Russian bomb hit a shopping mall in late June. Members of Congress have urged the Biden administration to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, which is defined as a country that has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism. Zelensky said Russia is trying to brand the Azov Regiment, a unit in Ukraines National Guard, as terrorists, which he called absurd. He noted in his address that Switzerland, which historically has pursued policies of neutrality in international conflicts, joined the most recent sanctions package that the European Union placed on Russia, which he said he is grateful for. When such a country does not remain neutral in the protection of values and human morality, it is a very important signal for the whole world, he said. Zelensky said he spoke with students from more than 20 Australian universities, as well as Australian media and politicians, to urge the country to help Ukraine in fighting Russian disinformation about the war and spread the truth of Russian terror. He said the Ukrainian point of view needs to be heard in parts of the world still hearing Russian propaganda like the Pacific, South and East Asia, the Arab world, Africa and Latin America. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Tokyo has lodged a protest with Beijing, after multiple Chinese ballistic missiles landed within Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone, amid large-scale military drills. It's believed to be the first time that projectiles fired by China have fallen inside of the Japanese EEZ. Japanese Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo said, "China appears to have launched nine ballistic missiles. Five of them are believed to have landed in Japan's exclusive economic zone. We strongly condemn the act, as it is a serious issue concerning Japan's security and the safety of Japanese people." Kishi told reporters that China launched the ballistic missiles Thursday afternoon, Japan time. There were no immediate reports of any damage caused by the event. Kishi also said that Japan's defense ministry and the Self-Defense Forces are still working to gather information and monitor the situation. The launches appear to be part of large-scale military exercises being held in the skies and waters surrounding Taiwan. Photo: The Canadian Press Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., flanked by Paivi Nevala, minister counselor of the Finnish Embassy, left, and Karin Olofsdotter, Sweden's ambassador to the U.S., welcomes diplomats from Sweden and Finland just before the Senate vote to ratify NATO membership for the two nations in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) U.S. Senators delivered near-unanimous bipartisan approval to NATO membership for Finland and Sweden Wednesday, calling expansion of the Western defensive bloc a slam-dunk for U.S. national security and a day of reckoning for Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine. Wednesdays 95-1 vote for the candidacy of two Western European nations that, until Russias war against Ukraine, had long avoided military alliances took a crucial step toward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its 73-year-old pact of mutual defense among the United States and democratic allies in Europe. President Joe Biden, who has been the principal player rallying global economic and material support for Ukraine, has sought quick entry for the two previously non-militarily aligned northern European nations. Approval from all member nations currently, 30 is required. The candidacies of the two prosperous Northern European nations have won ratification from more than half of the NATO member nations in the roughly three months since the two applied. Its a purposely rapid pace meant to send a message to Russia over its six-month-old war against Ukraines West-looking government. It sends a warning shot to tyrants around the world who believe free democracies are just up for grabs, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in the Senate debate ahead of the vote. Russias unprovoked invasion has changed the way we think about world security, she added. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who visited Kyiv earlier this year, urged unanimous approval. Speaking to the Senate, McConnell cited Finlands and Swedens well-funded, modernizing militaries and their experience working with U.S. forces and weapons systems, calling it a slam-dunk for national security of the United States. Their accession will make NATO stronger and America more secure. If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote no, I wish them good luck, McConnell said. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who often aligns his positions with those of the most ardent supporters of former President Donald Trump, has been one of the few to speak in opposition. Hawley took the Senate floor to call European security alliances a distraction from what he called the United States chief rival China, not Russia. We can do more in Europe ... devote more resources, more firepower ... or do what we need to do to deter Asia and China. We cannot do both, Hawley said, calling his a classic nationalist approach to foreign policy. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, like Hawley a potential 2024 presidential contender, rebutted his points without naming his potential Republican rival. That included arguing against Hawleys contention a bigger NATO would mean more obligations for the U.S. military, the worlds largest. Cotton was one of many citing the two nations military strengths including Finlands experience securing its hundreds of miles of border with Russia and its well-trained ground forces, and Swedens well-equipped navy and air force. Theyre two of the strongest members of the alliance the minute they join, Cotton said. U.S. State and Defense officials consider the two countries net security providers, strengthening NATOs defense posture in the Baltics in particular. Finland is expected to exceed NATOs 2% GDP defense spending target in 2022, and Sweden has committed to meet the 2% goal. Thats in contrast to many of NATOs newcomers formerly from the orbit of the Soviet Union, many with smaller militaries and economies. North Macedonia, NATOs most recent newcomer nation, brought an active military of just 8,000 personnel when it joined in 2020. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he and McConnell had committed to the countrys leaders that the Senate would approve the ratification resolution as fast as we could to bolster the alliance in light of recent Russian aggression. Sweden and Finland applied in May, setting aside their longstanding stance of military nonalignment. It was a major shift of security arrangements for the two countries after neighboring Russia launched its war on Ukraine in late February. Biden encouraged their joining and welcomed the two countries government heads to the White House in May, standing side by side with them in a signal of U.S. backing. The U.S. and its European allies have rallied with newfound partnership in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putins aggression, strengthening the NATO alliance first formed after World War II. Enlarging NATO is exactly the opposite of what Putin envisioned when he ordered his tanks to invade Ukraine, Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday, adding that the West could not allow Russia to launch invasions of countries. Biden sent the protocols to the Senate for review in July, launching a notably speedy process in the typically divided and slower-moving chamber. Each member government in NATO must give its approval for any new member to join. The process ran into unexpected trouble when Turkey raised concerns over adding Sweden and Finland, accusing the two of being soft on banned Turkish Kurdish exile groups. Turkeys objections still threaten the two countries membership. Pottawattamie County was recognized by the National Association of County and City Health Officials with a bronze Innovative Practice award for its COVID-19 vaccination program. The award is presented to local health departments that demonstrated effective community partnerships and collaboration, adaptability, resilience and innovation. Working alongside and serving our community at the mass vaccine clinics was an amazing experience, Public Health Administrator Maria Sieck said in the press release. We built relationships with the individuals that make up our community and came together as a team. Once the COVID vaccines were available, the Pottawattamie County Public Health Department, led by its Public Health Leadership Team, organized a number of free mass-vaccination clinics throughout the county. The clinics ran from December 2020 to May 2021, and saw more than 55,000 doses distributed to about 30,000 area residents, according to An Expression of Community, an after-action report that summarized the countys efforts. The involvement of county residents proved essential in ensuring the clinics were staffed and supported by local volunteer, nonprofit and business communities, as well as elected officials and employees from other county departments. As a board, were always considering the safety of county residents, and COVID-19 really highlighted this, Supervisor Scott Belt said. The mass vaccine clinics became a community event where the community organizations and businesses all contributed to ensure it was a positive experience available to all residents. Pottawattamie County Public Health is one of 10 local health departments from around the country to receive the bronze award at NACCHOs annual meeting, held in Atlanta, Georgia last month. The organization also presented 10 silver and four gold awards. Local health departments have demonstrated remarkable innovation and resilience to better the health of their communities during the pandemic and the 2022 Innovative Practice Awards highlight the very best practices, NACCHO CEO Lori Tremmel Freeman said in the press release. Winners excelled at various disciplines including promoting health equity, contact tracing, mobile testing, contactless medication delivery and many more. NACCHO is very proud to join them in honoring the outstanding work done by local health departments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Winning projects were determined through a competitive, peer-reviewed process and will be added to NACCHOs Innovative Practice searchable online database. There, other local health departments can review these best practices and adopt them for use in their local community. The NACCHO award is the second national recognition Pottawattamie County has received for its COVID-19 vaccination plan. In May, An Expression of Community received an Achievement Award from the National Association of Counties, which are given out to honor innovative, effective county government programs that strengthen services for residents. NACCHO represents the nations nearly 3,000 local governmental health departments. These city, county, metropolitan, district and tribal departments work every day to protect and promote health and well-being for all people in their communities. For more information about NACCHO, visit www.naccho.org. A new agreement between University of Northern Iowa and Iowas community colleges will make it easier and more affordable for community college graduates to earn bachelors degrees. Starting this fall, Iowans with an associate degree from any Iowa community college will be able to earn a UNI online degree without having to leave their hometown, according to a press release from UNI. The UNI@IACC initiative offers a pathway for Iowans who hold an associates degree from any Iowa community college to pursue a bachelors degree in several high-demand areas: managing business and organizations, management: business administration, criminal justice, elementary education, human services, technology management, and the Bachelor of Liberal Studies. To put a bachelors degree within reach, UNI is also launching the Future Ready Scholarship Program to eligible participants in a UNI@IACC program. The Future Ready Scholarship comes with two years of eligibility and covers the difference between UNI and community college tuition. Information about the program and how to apply can be found at iacc.uni.edu. I applaud UNIs forward thinking to create greater opportunities and expand access to higher education, said Gov. Kim Reynolds. This innovative program provides students with the convenience of attaining a four-year degree without having to relocate to UNI. Through partnerships with community colleges across Iowa, UNI@IACC meets students right where they are in their rural communities, removing barriers that may have prevented them from pursuing higher education. UNI@IACC brings the personalized touch that defines a UNI education to adult learners throughout our state, said UNI President Mark Nook. One of UNIs greatest strengths is our ability to identify and remove barriers to access and success that many learners face. UNI@IACC represents a major leap forward to assure access for more Iowans through this dynamic and innovative program that leads to in-demand careers in their hometowns. Many thanks go to Governor Reynolds and her staff for their support of this important project that will improve the lives of Iowans across the state. We are truly educating Iowans for Iowa. The UNI@IACC initiative, which expands the UNI@DMACC (Des Moines Area Community College) partnership that began in 2020, has received the support of Gov. Reynolds, who authorized $4.166 million in American Rescue Plan funding to support the initiative. In addition to Future Ready Scholarships and enhanced pathways to access UNIs high-demand academic programs, the UNI@IACC initiative will provide on-site student support personnel to prepare learners for academic and career success through advising and career navigation programs, resources and services. To begin, on-site student support specialists will be located at DMACC and Western Iowa Technical Community College in Sioux City beginning in the fall. In the spring, student support specialists will be placed at Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs and Indian Hills Community College in Ottumwa. Iowa Western President Dan Kinney and the presidents of the other community colleges included in the new partnership expressed strong support for the initiative and the opportunities it will create for students. The partnership between the University of Northern Iowa and Iowa Western will provide affordable opportunities for students of all ages to pursue a quality four-year degree, Kinney said. We are excited to welcome UNI to our campus as we partner to open the door for additional educational options for degree seeking students. Its important for the Regent schools to reach out across the state to Iowans who are place-bound but who want to pursue their bachelors degree, said DMACC President Rob Denson. UNI@DMACC is exactly what our students need to achieve their higher education goals. Its also a collaboration that benefits both of our institutions. Both Western Iowa Tech President Terry Murrell and Indian Hills President Matt Thompson echoed those sentiments. Western Iowa Tech Community College is very pleased to partner with University of Northern Iowa on this initiative, Murrell said. We are excited the Universitys educational services are expanding to become even more accessible to students in Siouxland. This partnership aligns with our mission to change students lives by providing a clear pathway to success, Thompson said. Having the ability to complete a four-year degree without having to leave southern Iowa will be life-changing for current and future students of Indian Hills and the University of Northern Iowa. We are excited to partner with the University of Northern Iowa on the UNI@IHCC program. We believe the opportunity provides students and families in our region access to a quality, affordable four-year public education from the Indian Hills campus. As work begins to set these partnerships in motion for the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters, UNIs Interim Dean of the Graduate College Gabriela Olivares, who will also lead the implementation of UNI@IACC, spoke about the significant impact this initiative will make in the lives of students living in regions where an affordable, quality four-year degree is difficult to access. These partnerships value access and remove educational barriers that students have experienced in the past, she said. We are thrilled to expand our partnership with Iowa community colleges, to strengthen UNIs online presence across the state and to provide a quality education to our students. It will be a game-changer for these students and will prepare them for a lifetime of success. For more information about the UNI@IACC partnership, program offerings and application instructions, visit https://iacc.uni.edu. We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not willing to attend the Francophonie summit slated for November in Tunisia and has been lobbying for the event to be postponed citing lack of democracy in the North African country. Canadian media, La Press, revealed that Trudeau has been campaigning for weeks now to have the Nov. 19-20 conference rescheduled. The Canadian media also indicated that he had already spoken to French President Emmanuel Macron for the need to postpone the gathering in view of the ongoing political situation in Tunisia. The two leaders, the media added, addressed the issue privately during the G7 summit in Germany last June. Macron is expected to visit Canada early next month and both leaders are likely to touch on the fate of the Francophonie conference. Tunisia has since July 25, 2021 slid into an unprecedented political crisis after incumbent President Kais Saied seized all major powers and dissolved the Parliament. The move was condemned by most political parties and civil society groups. Foreign partners including the U.S and Canada criticized Saieds action. The Summit was scheduled to take place in November last year but the organization postponed it to November this year due to external pressures. Former Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki also lobbied for the postponement. President Saied ramped up his grip on power last month following a referendum that adopted his proposed new Constitution rejected by majority of Tunisians as the turnout was put 30 per cent. The Libya Presidential Council (PC) decided Wednesday to dissolve 15 military operation rooms that were established years ago, Al Wasat news outlet reports citing a military source. The decision comes on the heel of a Monday meeting between the PC, the Supreme Commander of the Army and the Military Prosecutor, Major General Massoud Arhouma, in the presence of Government of National Unity Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General Muhammad Al-Haddad. The meeting reportedly discussed problems facing a number of military units and departments. The PC issued a statement saying that the meeting discussed a number of obstacles and organizational procedures facing all military departments and units and ways to solve them, so that they can perform their roles in accordance with the laws and regulations in force. Libya currently has no official central army. The PC, headquartered in capital Tripoli, commands a patchwork army made of militias. Property valuations sometimes trigger questions and concerns for area residents when they find assessment of their property has risen. State statute dictates specifically how valuations are determined, County Assessor Julie Stenger said. Monday, Stengers office presented its three-year property assessment plan to the Lincoln County commissioners. In that report, her office revealed a 4% increase for the south side of North Platte and a 7% increase for the north side. Stenger said any misunderstandings people have about the process can usually be resolved by communicating with her and her staff. The Nebraska Department of Revenue keeps a sales file for every county in the state. Sales are documented by the Register of Deeds and copies sent to the assessors office and then to the state. Each year the data is used to generate reports, Stenger said. For residential, we use two years of sales to calculate our values, for ag and commercial we use three years of sales because there generally are not as many sales. Valuations had to be certified by March 1, 2022. Data show the current assessed value and the state has the sale price and calculates the ratio of value to sale price. By state statute, commercial and residential has to be 92% to 100% of what sales show, Stenger said. Ag has to be 69% to 75% of what sales show. The Department of Revenue and the Tax Equalization Review Commission looks at these factors to determine if a county is in compliance. Right now, on residential, Lincoln County is at 94%, Stenger said. We are in compliance because we fall between that 92% and 100%. She said there were 1,248 residential sales that occurred within the two-year period from Oct. 1, 2019, through Sept. 30, 2021, that are used to determine the percentage used to calculate compliance. If the county is not in compliance, TERC will make an adjustment, but Stenger said they generally do it county-wide rather than adjusting individual villages or areas. That means, she said, if Lincoln County doesnt meet the criteria, then everyones valuations are raised. Stenger said it is better for her office to make the necessary changes so they only affect the village or area that is not in compliance. If residential is low, TERC raises valuations by 7% for everyone in the county, Stenger said. But if we do it by these groupings, such as lake properties, the city of North Platte, it breaks it down (more specifically). As an example, Stenger said if a village is low at 82%, her office can go in and fix that for that specific village without raising the valuations in the other groupings within the county. Thats why its best for us to do it because we can look at the more specific areas and make the adjustments, Stenger said. We had to do that this year for our residential for the city of North Platte. The data showed we were way too low. North Platte is split between south and north with the dividing line at the railroad tracks. The sales (over the two year period) showed that our north side needed an increase of 7% on both land and improvements and the south side needed to increase by 4%, Stenger said. Our lakes were also low this year, which includes Jeffrey Lake (near) Brady and Lake Maloney. Those also got a 4% increase. Additionally, state statute requires the county to physically inspect all properties every six years. That cycle comes up in 2023. We will be physically out looking at the north side of North Platte and Lake Maloney, Stenger said. We will be out taking photos. She said the assessors office vehicles have a logo on them so they are easily identified. We dont go inside any yards or gates or anything, Stenger said. If we have information that there was a permit to build a new garage or a new deck or new addition to a house, we will get out and measure. Stenger said sometimes a change on the property is seen during inspections that isnt on the card, so the inspectors will take a closer look in those cases. We always knock on the door and if they are not home, we leave a hang tag with a phone number for questions about the inspection and letting the homeowners know we were there, Stenger said. In 2024, the county will inspect the south side of North Platte. For property owners whose valuation went up despite no improvements, Stenger said it can be tricky. We get that, Stenger said. Youd think it would depreciate, but statutes are written based on the market and the market is really, really strong right now. Across the state, houses are being sold, what Stenger said, is far above assessed value, which drives up valuations. We are going on our second year of high values, Stenger said. When that happens, you may have to go in and rebuild all your depreciation tables. You have to have that house valued with what is its market value. Replacement costs factor heavily into those values and throughout the pandemic, they have risen because of the supply issues. We follow state statute here and I think thats really hard for the taxpayer to understand sometimes, Stenger said. They come in thinking were raising their value because the county wants to buy a new road grader or maintainer or something. She said valuations have nothing to do with the countys budgeting process, but are driven solely by the law. We try to encourage people to understand that just because your valuation goes up doesnt mean your taxes go up, Stenger said. The county is pretty frugal. If you look over the years when we have had some pretty significant increases in valuation, the countys levy will drop. It is important to note, Stenger said, that the county commissioners set the tax request, not the county assessor. Charity Farley, lead appraiser, said it is important for people who have questions to come in and talk to someone in the assessors office. I would say that most people who come in and have questions, generally they have a better understanding of it afterwards, Farley said. They may not like it, but at least they understand it and we encourage people to come in and ask those questions. Wed rather the public be informed. Tax statements for 2022 will be mailed out in December and those values are unchangeable for the 2022 tax year. March 19, 2023, that is when we will certify our new 2023 values, Stenger said. We send out a postcard on May 31 notifying property owners there has been a change on their valuation. The postcard indicates they have from June 1 to June 30 to file a protest form for the 2023 valuation with the County Clerks office. Thats the only time they can protest, Stenger said. Protests are then scheduled in front of the Lincoln County Board of Equalization. Following the hearing, the board makes a decision to accept or deny the protest. The property owner has 30 days to appeal the decision to TERC if they are not satisfied with the Board of Equalization ruling on the protest. We encourage people to come in at any time if they have questions or if somethings not quite right, Stenger said. The Assessors Office is inside the Lincoln County Courthouse, 301 N. Jeffers St. To contact the office by phone, call 308-534-4350. The City of Auburn could soon see more public art adorning the walls of local buildings. The Auburn City Council has decided to move forward with updating its policy on permitting murals within the city after hearing recommendations from Scott Cummings, executive director of development services, on Tuesday. The decision comes after months of research on the part of the Auburn City Council. In January, a mural on the side of Bedzzz Express on Opelika Road welcoming travelers to Auburn caught the attention of the city. Austin Bond, the Bedzzz Express franchise owner was told his mural violated city ordinance. At some point, the city asked Bond to cover up the mural while it began studying options for changing the law. It was a request that proved unpopular with many in the public. A petition put up at Change.org called Keep the Bedzzz Express Auburn Mural has accrued 549 signatures. We still get people coming in daily now asking us when they can take a picture with it, Bedzzz Express Regional Manager Chris Ceman told Opelika-Auburn News on Wednesday. Weve had about 100% of people say keep the mural and about zero say anything negative about it at all. Councilwoman Beth Witten and councilman Bob Parsons were both tasked with heading up a study group on murals. They, along with Cummings, consulted multiple other Alabama municipalities, OA Tourism, and local museums as they came to a decision on how to best move forward. Our zoning ordinance, as it is, has murals defined as a sign, Cummings said. So, one of the key first things we would have to do to legalize murals in Auburn would be to strike that definition as a sign and then to create a definition in the zoning ordinance. Cummings proposed that murals be defined as a graphic or work of art that is painted or drawn on an exterior wall and is a representation of a creative idea that is expressed in form and manner as primarily provide aesthetic enjoyment for the viewer rather than convey a commercial message. According to Cummings, so long as the mural doesnt convey a commercial message, it would not be considered a sign. Additionally, murals could not be considered nuisances to the public, or be vulgar. Cummings also recommended changing the definition of a commercial sign. That definition would be simplified to a commercial sign being a sign with any commercial message. Cummings recommendations will now move on to the city planning commission. If it accepts the recommendations, the new ordinance will come back before the city council as soon as October. If the proposed definition changes are accepted, murals would become permitted within the city. When asked about the proposed change, Cemon said, You dont really anticipate anything like this when you do anything. We just run a mattress company. We didnt really have any of the other stuff in mind. Opelika Fire Chief Shane Boyd said that when he arrived on the scene of the downtown fire on July 21, his first thoughts were to save as many downtown structures as possible. After rescue, our next most important thing is exposure, Boyd said. A fire downtown, thats as bad as it gets. Boyd and his department, along with the Auburn Fire Department, Lee County Emergency Management Agency, Opelika Police Department and Opelika Public Works, were honored for their response to the early morning fire at Maffia's Italian Restaurant. Boyd said there are always buildings that firemen drive by and hope that they never catch on fire. Downtown Opelika is that spot for us, he said. The buildings in downtown Opelika are over 100 years old and were built with hard pine and heavy timber. After battling the fire for several hours, Boyd said, they used a tractor provided by Mike Hilyer director of Public Works, to clear out the space. The entire process from responding to the call to hauling away the debris took about 12 hours. Boyd said the reason he decided to clean up the area the way they did and as quickly as they did is because of how hot the fire was and how long it was burning. Heres the dilemma: when youre spraying a fire to put it out, you have to get to the base of the fire, he said. Well, this thing had two roofs and they both collapsed inside, so the seed of the fire was down deep in the rubble in between two over-120-year-old walls. Boyd said the building was exposed to 800-to-1,000 degree heat for more than five hours and had about 900,000 gallons of water sprayed on top of it. Without the help from Auburns Fire Department, Boyd doesnt think they would have had enough water. No matter what, Boyd said the Maffias building was going to be a total loss, so his next decision was to either bring in heavy equipment to pull out the debris and prevent more buildings from burning or to put his firefighters in the middle of it. After evaluating the risks, including the instability of the walls on each side and the likelihood of a collapse, Boyd said he didnt want to put his firefighters in that situation. Boyd said his natural assumption is that the fire started in the kitchen area of the restaurant because the temperatures increased in that area, but theres no way to confirm it. He said a call from a citizen who had noticed smoke was the key to responding quickly to the fire. Because they called as soon as they did and because of the proximity to downtown, I think our guys were on the scene in a minute and 40 seconds, which makes all the difference in the world, Boyd said. Photo: Photo Mike Howell. Vancouver-Granville Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed says he received a serious threat in July from a man who ended up being apprehended by police under the Mental Health Act. Vancouver-Granville Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed says he received a serious threat from a man in July that caused him to involve the Vancouver Police Department, RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency in an investigation. Noormohamed took to Twitter July 8 to reveal some of the details of the threat but shared more last week in an interview with Vancouver Is Awesome, including the fact that no charges were laid against the person in question. The first-term MP said the threat came July 7 via email and included a video. When you are a Muslim, or a certain group, or minority, there are lots of messages like this [that] we get pretty regularly, he said. But this one, as I said in the tweet, was specificit was very different because it actually contained a desire to do harm. Noormohamed said the person lives close to his constituency office and was known to police. He declined to discuss the contents of the video. Const. Tania Visintin, a Vancouver police media relations officer, said Wednesday (Aug. 3) via email that officers apprehended the man under the Mental Health Act and transported him to hospital for assessment. Why Canada Border Services Agency was involved is not clear. The agency has yet to respond to Vancouver Is Awesomes request for more information about the case and whether it involved someone illegally in the country. 'Part of the life of being elected' As a politician of colour, who is also Muslim, Noormohamed said it is not uncommon to receive angry emails daily in which an author uses a racial slur. His colleague, Vancouver-South Liberal MP Harjit Sajjan, has also been a target of such racism, he said. The idea that when we can normalize racism, or normalize this type of behavior in a way that says we are going to just go at people because they are different is something that is now, unfortunately, part of the life of being elected, he said, noting female colleagues have also had inappropriate comments directed at them. There's a heightened sense of concern about the tone and nature of the communication that we now receive from folks. Noormohamed serves on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security a group that recently targeted the rise of ideologically motivated extremism in Canada. In a report released in June, the standing committee traced the rise of a diffused Canadian far-right movement, one that allows adherents to cherry pick what they hate, including Muslims, immigrants and women. Jessica Davis of Insight Threat Intelligence told the committee that laws are not applied evenly across the ideological spectrum, leading to a certain sense of impunity. A 2021 Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) report found the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled an increase in extreme anti-authority and anti-government rhetoric often rooted in the weaponization of conspiracy theories. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh targeted In May, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh faced protesters shouting expletives at him and calling him a traitor. Singh has said the experience in Peterborough, Ont., was one of the worst incidents of aggressive behaviour he's experienced in his political career. Last month, an increase in threats against federal parliamentarians prompted the Parliamentary Protective Service which safeguards security on Parliament Hill to hand out personal panic buttons or mobile duress alarms. MPs can carry them around to immediately alert the Parliamentary Protective Service or local police for a rapid response. The device can be used across Canada, including in MPs' home constituencies, according to a June presentation made by Sergeant-at-Arms Patrick McDonnell to Liberal MPs. Mendicino subject of death threats In an interview with the Canadian Press, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino revealed he has been the subject of death threats on social media in recent weeks after presenting a bill curbing gun ownership. Mendicino said he, police and the Parliamentary Protective Service are reassessing the security of MPs after a series of threats and intimidating incidents. Alex Cohen, Mendicino's director of communications, said in an email there has been an alarming rise in hateful rhetoric in recent years, which has resulted in an unacceptable level of threats and intimidation against elected officials. "It affects people across the political spectrum it is not a partisan issue," Cohen said. "Furthermore, this heinous rhetoric and behaviour has particularly targeted women, LGBTQ individuals, and Indigenous peoples. Minister Mendicino joins a chorus of voices from across the country in strongly condemning it, and taking action. This includes increased security for Parliamentarians, including mobile duress alarms provided by the House of Commons." Most notably, Cohen continued, the ministers mandate letter includes specific instructions to work with the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities to bolster the security of ministers and Parliamentarians. "This work is well underway, in collaborating with the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Commons, colleagues from other parties and law enforcement from across the country," Cohen said. Women politicians targeted In July 2020, Vancouver city councillors Melissa De Genova and Sarah Kirby-Yung announced at a council meeting that they had been harassed via emails, social media and phone calls. Both are married to police officers and the topic at the time was police street checks. These have included calls for me to commit suicide and threats of violence to me and my family, De Genova wrote in an email to Glacier Media at the time. l am targeted because of my husbands employment as a police officer. I suspect the ways I have been targeted are because I am a woman. The level of hate against women politicians is documented in a report released in April 2019 by the House of Commons standing committee on the status of women. The reports title is "Elect her: A roadmap for improving representation of women in Canadian politics." The report noted that gender-based violence or harassment against female elected officials can take many forms including sexist comments or insults, sexual harassment, sexual assault and death threats. A survey referenced in the report revealed that more than 80 per cent of respondents indicated having experienced some form of psychological violence during their parliamentary terms, and 20 per cent reported being victims of physical violence. Hate-motivated crimes up 27 per cent Statistics Canada released new data Tuesday that showed the number of police-reported hate-motivated crimes in Canada increased by 27 per cent, up from 2,646 incidents in 2020 to 3,360 in 2021. This follows a 36 per cent increase in 2020. In total, the number of police-reported hate crimes rose 72 per cent from 2019 to 2021. Higher numbers of hate-motivated crimes targeting religion [+67%; 884 incidents], sexual orientation [+64%; 423 incidents] and race or ethnicity [+6%; 1,723 incidents] accounted for the majority of the increase, the Statistics Canada report said. All provinces and territories reported increases in the number of hate crimes in 2021, except for Yukon, where it remained the same. Anti-Asian hate crimes In Vancouver, it has been well-reported that reported hate crimes against Asians increased substantially since the pandemic was declared in March 2020, with police reporting a 717 per cent increase between 2019 and 2020. At the same time, police have been clear they dont believe all victims are reporting the incidents, as was confirmed by Fred Kwok, chairperson of the Chinese Cultural Centre and president of the Chinese Benevolent Association. Kwok suggested at Vancouver Police Board-sponsored forum in May 2021 that reported hate crimes over the past year only accounted for one-third of all cases, saying I know many friends of mine who never reported the incidents. A survey conducted in April and May of 2021 by the BC Centre for Disease Control found 20 per cent of South Asian respondents reported experiencing racism during the pandemic, with 43 per cent experiencing discrimination in the workplace. Pandemic's negative effect on racialized groups The Statistics Canada report confirmed the pandemics negative effect on racialized groups, noting they were more than twice as likely to report having experienced discrimination since the beginning of the pandemic, compared with the rest of the population. Jewish people in Vancouver have been the primary targets of racists for years, with the citys Jewish community centre forced to beef up security, add panic buttons and install blast film on its windows. Vancouver police have conducted active shooter training at the centre. 'Ideologically motivated violent extremism' Noormohamed wouldnt discuss whether the recent incident targeting him translated to increased security measures for him, his staff and family. Obviously, you have to be careful and be vigilant, and particularly when you have family, he said. These things are top of mind, and so you take the steps to make sure everyone is safe. In his series of tweets last month, he wrote: This is another reminder that we cannot ignore the very real threat of ideologically motivated violent extremism and of the harmful rhetoric of the far right. Islamophobia and hatred in all its forms exist in Canada and we need to work together to protect one another and make our communities a safer place to live for all. with files from Stefan Labbe and Canadian Press Decrease Font Size Font Size Increase Font Size Article body Auburn Universitys College of Agriculture will host a national event sharing the cattle industrys best techniques for proper cattle handling. The National Cattlemens Beef Association (NCBA) Stockmanship & Stewardship educational experience will be held Aug. 12-13 at the Auburn University Equestrian Center at 1235 Wire Road, Auburn. Organized by the Department of Animal Sciences at Auburn, Stockmanship & Stewardship will feature low-stress cattle handling demonstrations, Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) educational sessions, facility design sessions and industry updates available nowhere else. In todays world, no matter the beef production system you are involved with, stockmanship and stewardship are more important than ever, said Curt Pate, Stockmanship & Stewardship clinician and cattle handling expert. This quality program combines age-old skills with modern practices to improve your bottom line and quality of life. The two-day event will kick off Friday afternoon, Aug. 12, with the farm production tours at Collins Farm and RL&M Cattle Company in Cusseta, Alabama, which will highlight value added programs, selection methods, local processing facilities, product marketing tools for both the seedstock breeder and commercial cattlemen. A welcome reception will follow at Lazenby Farms in Auburn featuring dinner, silent auction and keynote address by Nic Cornelison of Lake Majestik Farms in Flat Rock, Alabama. The Cornelison family has strong roots in the southeastern United States and are premiere Brangus breeders. Saturday will feature classroom sessions including both live cattle demonstrations and on the rail in the Lambert-Powell Meats Lab with hands-on opportunities for attendees. Educational topics include niche beef production, tools for improved sustainability, forage management, animal health, risk management within cow calf operations, advocacy and reproductive management. A unique program designed for teen junior cattlemen members will also be offered, and all attendees can become BQA certified. The Stockmanship & Stewardship website has more information, complete agenda, fees and registration details. Full registration includes all events and meals. Student pricing and one-day registration options are available. Cattle producers attending Stockmanship & Stewardship are eligible for reimbursement through the Rancher Resilience Grant. To apply for a grant to cover registration costs and two nights' hotel, visit the NCBA website. gorgeous talented and amazing. hope its a large/recurring role and not a one-off. Reply Thread Link Honestly ... give ha a romance with short king Alden Ehrenreich's character! Reply Thread Link Not a Shea Coulee fan I take it :( Reply Parent Thread Link I am! Shea has chemistry with everybody and if we are gonna see a lot of AE, at least have someone engaging opposite him. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I LOVE IT Reply Thread Link I am HERE for this. Reply Thread Link the male white nerds are quaking rn Reply Thread Link TRULY ICONIC Reply Thread Link I hope she's in drag tho Reply Thread Link Some fans are speculating she might be playing the drag superhero, Shade, who was partially modeled after Shea herself. I would LIVE. Reply Parent Thread Link THAT'S THE TEA!!! I LIVE FOR THAT! Reply Parent Thread Link Wait WHO is this??? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I am SUS-ing at this theory.... I was assuming they would go full out with Mutants in Phase 6. Though it would be amazing if this is some trickling in effect they're doing with Mutant popping out on the side after Ms. Marvel and Namor. Reply Parent Thread Link Gonna leave Kang in the dust like Tina did Ike Reply Thread Link Idt its a secret lol oop shea tweeted and deleted images of the drag queen character partially inspired by her Reply Thread Link Omg I'm hyped for this, Shea is everything!! Reply Thread Link This is fucking cool. Get it, Shea! Reply Thread Link Good for her! (Jaida still should've gotten that spot) Reply Thread Link Shea Coulee is everythinggggg! I dont care for Marvel but will watch whatever shes in. So freaking happy for her! Reply Thread Link SHEA!!!! I'm an MCU hater but I can't believe I'm saying this but I might just have to watch this for her Reply Thread Link I can hear this beautiful GIF! Reply Parent Thread Link Apparently Natalie Portman filmed a bunch of scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio as Juliet in Romeo + Juliet, but they watched the footage and she looked way too young next to him so they replaced her with Claire Danes. I find this hilarious/sad considering his dating patterns now (ETA I dont consider this an awful casting story, just maybe a lesser-known one) Edited at 2022-08-04 02:49 am (UTC) Reply Thread Link I didn't know that, and I'm pleasantly surprised they even cared. Reply Parent Thread Link Apparently she was only like 13/14 when she was cast and Leo was like19/20? So the fact that they even let Natalie screen test or whatever with him is like yikes, but Im glad they came to their senses Reply Parent Thread Link That's kinda hilarious xonsiderin the rumor that George Lucas wanted Leo to play Anakin in AotC. Reply Parent Thread Link omg... i would have preferred her tbh Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I dont think Natalie filmed any scenes but I believe she was cast before Leo. Baz was especially keen to work with her because she was 13 at the time (the same age Juliet is supposed to be in the original play). Once Leo was on board it just became obvious how inappropriate they would look together on screen and how Natalie really looked like a child compared to the rest of the cast. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link A few other actresses were auditioned for that role. I can't remember the rest rn but I know Reese Witherspoon tried for it....I could not imagine that. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Baz Luhrman said it looked like Leo was molesting her. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I love Claire Danes in that role but I'm still sad we never got a DiCaprio/Portman team up. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Claire is so dead eyed and bland other than the soundtrack to that movie is so cringey to me. Idgaf if its unpopular opinion. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link "Casting director Patrick Rush told the Welcome to the OC, Bitches! podcast, "This is painful. At the time Chris Pines skin was really, really bad, and that broke my heart because I was a kid with acne. I remember thinking he was so good." I've heard of this one before but how awful to be told this!! Reply Thread Link How awful to be told this...and then have the casting director go on and repeat it to a bunch of strangers on the internet. Reply Parent Thread Link I was watching Young Royals recently, and was just thinking how you knew this was not an American show (beyond the language, obviously) by the fact that the teens don't have perfect skin, hair, and everything. As a grown ass lady, I appreciate that kind of realism because I am always a bit distressed by how media, especially the rise of social media, seems to flood younger folks with unrealistic body image, all day every day. It's not to say the 80s and 90s were paradise, but it felt like those images were not as constant as they are now. Reply Parent Thread Link I did not know Lisa Edelstein almost starred in Sex and the City! She would have been great. One of my all-time favorite non-casting stories is Ryan Gosling independently deciding to gain a bunch of weight for The Lovely Bones and then getting the axe. Reply Thread Link I always remember he said he drank melted Haagen Dazs to gain the weight lol Reply Parent Thread Link what the fuck? just eat the fucking ice cream, ryan Reply Parent Thread Link Jessica chastain said she drank melted vegan ice cream to gain weight for the help lol Reply Parent Thread Link Alden Ehreinreich seems shorter than 59. Reply Thread Link I think some people rejected him as Han because he has short energy in addition to actually being short. Reply Parent Thread Link penn seems taller than 5'9 which surprises me. though i have to admit alden just looks short in a way penn doesn't if that makes sense Reply Parent Thread Link lol first thing I ever saw him in was Stoker and Mia Wasikowska is like 5'3 so I was like 'okay not tiny'. The other young actor in that - Lucas Till - is 5'10 so I guess I gaged he wasn't too small. Reply Parent Thread Link Im willing to bet Alden is shorter than 59 but rounded up his height. I think so many actors lie about their height and add a few inches. Whereas Penn seems like an actual 59. Reply Parent Thread Link Donald Glover is 5'9 too and in pictures they seem to be about the same size. especially next to PWB lol Reply Parent Thread Link yeah, 5'9" in hollywood means 5'7" (and 5'7" means 5'5" lol) Reply Parent Thread Link Penn could pass as taller maybe cause hes so lean Or just the lack of short man complex Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah, but I'm willing to bet the real issue was his face. I could see him playing Chuck, who's supposed to be blatantly creepy, but definitely not Dan. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Actors lie about height constantly. Hes not 59 while I think Badgely is a true 59. Reply Parent Thread Link Regarding height in male actors, I remember James McAvoy mentioning that he's lost roles because he wasn't tall enough in some cases. He's 5ft7in/170CM Reply Thread Link My Short Scot. Reply Parent Thread Link Which is crazy bc he gives off a sexy, fuckable energy a lot of tall actors lack. Reply Parent Thread Link He absolutely has that man who can fuck swagger. It's incredible. I never would've guessed he was so short. Reply Parent Thread Link Hold me close now, tiny drinker. Reply Parent Thread Link I wonder if the Daniel Kaluuya one was that show with Michael Socha and Michaela Coel? If so, he had the last laugh. I like Michael Socha but Daniel is definitely a much bigger name now than he is. Reply Thread Link Michael was better suited. Daniel did his time on never get a second season on brit tv unless it's boring bland. Reply Parent Thread Link I liked Michael a lot in that show (and especially Michaela - god, shes good). Im still mad it got cancelled on a cliffhanger. Reply Parent Thread Link Samantha Morton was originally gonna play the female AI in Spike Jonze's HER and I think she had developed/workshopped that character with Spike but they had to go with a bigger name I think was the implication and so Scarlett Jonahsson was cast. Salma Hayek was supposed to be the original lead for GRAVITY but the studio did not think a mexican in space was realistic. Cauron fought as long as he could for Salma to be the lead until he couldn't. Which is why Sandra Bullock later got the role. Reply Thread Link I don't think they ever gave a reason for the Morton-recast beyond "not what the character needed," but the inference I remember people taking from that news when it came out is that Johanssen has kind of a sexier, more gravelly voice which was presumably a shortcut to making a romance between a body-less AI and her owner far more plausible. Morton's voice is generally more gentle and sweet. Edited at 2022-08-04 03:08 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link I haven't seen that movie since it came out but I don't really remember Scarlett as sexy voice or like that special either. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link did they film with samantha morton? i feel like she was replaced far along enough that there's probably a samantha morton cut Reply Parent Thread Expand Link wasn't angelina jolie originally cast for gravity? and it was someone else besides clooney in the male role but i'm forgetting who. sandra bullock must've been like their 5th choice or some shit damn Reply Parent Thread Expand Link and i got too excited talking about her that i didn't read the holy shit second part. salma would have been great! Reply Parent Thread Link Re Samantha - I think thats why she has a producer credit in the film, it was so last minute Also I just watched Gravity for the first time a couple of days ago and actually I thought Sandra was really well cast (I dont normally like her in stuff) Edited at 2022-08-04 03:34 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link I think Alden Ehreinreich reads as especially tiny because of how big his head is. It's the proportions. I definitely would have guessed Penn was taller. (I say this with no ill will, I like him.) Conflicting feelings on the Alicia Silverstone being too pretty for My So-Called Life. I kind of see it, but I also kind of think her and Claire are about equally pretty, but it's a different kind of pretty. I think it's a shitty and incomplete reason for what was a good choice. Reply Thread Link i'm screaming at the head comment. i feel like he looks v different in candids vs. being styled/on camera camera. Penn to me always reads as being tall-ish, but I think that's just his vibe. Reply Parent Thread Link I think Claire Danes was the right amount of naive and clueless (excuse the pun lol) but also introspective and thoughtful. I think Alicia wouldve made it too naive, and someone like Natalie Portman or Reese wouldve made it too smart like they saw through high school. I think Claire in the 1990s is similar to Lily James. But then again I can only see Alicia as Clueless so if she didnt do that then maybe yes. Reply Parent Thread Link omg the head thing is soo true Reply Parent Thread Link I think Alicia Silverstone is pretty in a more conventional way, especially in the early/mid 90s, which makes it easy to picture her in a popular/cheerleader role at that age. Claire Danes is pretty in a different way, but that's what made it more believable that she was best friends with someone like Sharon but didn't stand out enough to make the sophomore list, even after she dyed her hair bright red. I think their demeanor also played a role. Even when she was very young, Alicia Silverstone carried herself with an outward confidence, which wasn't right for Angela's character. Claire Danes has had roles where she was confident but Angela was a lot less sure of herself and she portrayed that well with her body language. Reply Parent Thread Link I never thought Alicia was pretty lol I remember watching Clueless and thinking it made no sense Dionne wasn't the lead bc she was gorgeous and Cher was just blonde with straight hair. Reply Parent Thread Link lol back then, that's all you needed to be. blonde, thin and rich. Reply Parent Thread Link I think Claire Danes is the kind of pretty that wouldn't be necessarily recognised as a teenager, unlike Alicia, which is more appropriate for the story. It would have been hard to watch Alicia in the role, and not have her be more popular and adored. Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah I can see what they were saying with My So-Called Life, Claire Danes could more realistically play a teenager who wasnt that confident about her appearance and saw herself as ugly, even while audiences could recognise that she was still obviously attractive and just couldnt see it yet. She didnt have the kind of flashy good looks that get you attention in high school, whereas Alicia Silverstone did have that typical California blonde, high school cheerleader kind of look that makes it harder to buy her as an outcast Reply Parent Thread Link omg in what world is 5"9 short! Reply Thread Link It's average for men in the U.S. but definitely short in a lot of northern European countries. It's also not a super-unusual height for male actors, but casting directors can tend to be very height-conscious when the leading lady is tall. Reply Parent Thread Link that makes sense i spose my bf and i are both 5'5 lmao so like... true short kings Reply Parent Thread Link For me 5'9" is definitely on the shorter side for a guy because I am 5'7" and considered around average height for a woman in the Netherlands lol we are very tall tho. However my friends from other countries along this side of Europe would agree. Reply Parent Thread Link Blake is also way taller than the average American woman Reply Parent Thread Expand Link it's not even the shortest guy in the cast, i think ed westwick was(is?) like 5'6" or 5'7". curious as to who else might have been rejected for being short Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Casting is just very messed up and weird in general, especially on those types of shows because its so dependent on looks. Jessica who played Vanessa on Gossip Girl mentioned she almost didnt get cast because her headshot was her hair long and straight and they said she looked too brunette and similar to Leighton (??) and then she submitted a headshot with her natural hair curly and got the job because of her ~ethnic vibes~ Reply Parent Thread Expand Link It depends on the family, I'm 5'8 & the short one of the family. My mom is 5' 11", my dad is 6' 2", my sister is 5' 10". My dad's brother is taller than him & both his sons are also taller than my dad, his eldest son is the tallest. Well have to wait and see about the 5 kids (my one cousin has 3 kids, my sister & other cousin both have 1) when they grow up I guess. Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah its all bullshit honestly and these assholes are just immature bullies with high school mentality in stagnation who legit cannot even tell anything different and are so out of touch with reality. Theyre the same hiring people who doesnt even believe your mixed heritage nor language proficiency or if youre talented enough to make it somewhere but they dont want that bc it is seen as a threat or a risk over whatever people clutches pearls nowadays. They see nothing but themselves in their fishbowl world. Its legit literally batshit insane lol. Reply Thread Link 7. Mark Webber and Jake Johnson seems more like a lateral move to me. I wouldn't call Jake more handsome or even handsome. He's fine. Reply Thread Link Lol thank you, I thought I was taking crazy pills with that one Reply Parent Thread Link IA but I think Jake definitely has a sexy image due to his New Girl role which i dont really get but different strokes Reply Parent Thread Link I'm going to go with different strokes. I liked him on New Girl but sexy never entered my mind. He was also the least sexy main on Stumptown. Reply Parent Thread Link Sometimes he looked attractive on that show and sometimes he looked like a bruised mole rat, it blew my mind. He had his moments though.. and his personality made him cute, when he was being likable. Reply Parent Thread Link I think Jake has a bit more oompf behind him. I'll always picture Mark as his character from Scott Pilgrim. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Yea they both seem pretty on par in terms of blandness Reply Parent Thread Link Penn Badgley was in the final for Jesse on Breaking Bad but ultimately lost out to Aaron Paul. Reply Thread Link Lol absolutely do NOT see Penn in that role. Aaron was soo good Reply Parent Thread Link I actually can see Penn in that role. Itd be very different but I think it could work Now what Id pay to see is Aaron Paul as Dan Humphrey lmao Reply Parent Thread Link penn is too conventionally handsome to have been believable as jesse (no disrespect to aaron paul lmao) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I feel like Penn would have loved his career so much more on the Breaking Bad track than on the Gossip Girl track hahah Reply Parent Thread Link Also I will forever lol at Paul Bettany turning down the main role on The Kings Speech to do that fucking The Tourist movie with Angelina and Depp lmao Reply Thread Link or him dropping out of the Masters of Sex pilot (allegedly) for wanting a bigger name instead of Lizzy Caplan to co-star Reply Parent Thread Link what an asshole wtf Reply Parent Thread Link he was worried she could out-act him lbr Reply Parent Thread Link i always though colin was weird casing because he didn't look like george at all, while paul definitely has a passing resemblance Reply Parent Thread Expand Link LBR, Bettany was just thinking of all the drugs he could do with Depp. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm glad he did, Colin Firth has much more vulnerability as an actor. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm still confused by the Mark Webber one. Are we really saying Jake Johnson is objectively more handsome...? Reply Thread Link In person he might be, and when casting it's probably difficult to divorce opinion of someone's appearance completely from your in-person experience versus how that person appears in a screen test/audition. Edited at 2022-08-04 03:37 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link idk who Mark Webber is so I goggled him and he's fine but just kinda blah? I feel like Jake probably has more charisma. Reply Parent Thread Link I think that Jake Johnson has something more charismatic about him tbh, even if objectively hes not the most handsome guy in the world, he had a lot more viewers swooning over his character vs the rest of the male cast during New Girl. I kind of see him as similar to Joshua Jackson who also isnt the greatest looking guy in the world when youre looking at pictures, hes just kind of fine/ordinary-looking, but he has a very charming screen presence about him on camera that audiences really respond too Reply Parent Thread Link OPECs most prolific oil producer and exporter, Saudi Arabia, has raised the official selling price of its crude oil to new highs for September loadings. Saudi Arabia raised the price of all of its crude grades to its prized market, Asia, for September. Saudi Arabia raised the September price of Arab Light to the Far East by $0.50 per barrel to $9.80 over the Oman/Dubai benchmark. OPECs largest producer, Saudi Arabia, typically adjusts the selling price of its crude oil a day after the monthly OPEC+ meeting. On Wednesday, the group met to discuss September production plans, ultimately deciding to raise the September quota by 100,000 bpd26,000 bpd of which was allocated to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia also raised the price of crude oil heading to the United States, North West Europe, and the Mediterranean. Other OPEC producers often reset their prices too, following Saudis pricing action. It is also largely seen as a bellwether for how Saudi Arabia views future oil demand. The pricing adjustment paints a more complete picture of the direction the market could be headed. Yesterday, OPEC raised its production quota, indicating that there was an increased need for production beyond its August target (which was already 648,000 bpd over Julysa move that typically signals that the group sees a greater call on OPEC oil. But today, Saudi Arabia is sending a message to the market that is a bit different; it wants to cool the demand for its exports by hiking prices. This is typically a signal to the market that the Kingdom sees no need for additional production. Saudi Arabia did make a few downward adjustments with its Extra Light grades to North West Europe and the Mediterranean. By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The last two energy crises that threatened hundreds of energy companies with bankruptcy have rewritten the O&G M&A playbook. Previously, oil and gas companies made numerous aggressive tactical or cyclical acquisitions in the wake of a price crash after many distressed assets became available on the cheap. However, the 2020 oil price crash that sent oil prices into negative territory has seen energy companies adopt a more restrained, strategic, and environment-focused approach to cutting M&A deals. Its therefore hardly surprising that Big Oil executives have become increasingly hesitant to pull the trigger after the last M&A wave turned into a disaster for acquiring companies. According to data released by energy analytics firm Enverus, U.S. oil and gas dealmaking contracted 65% Y/Y to $12 billion last quarter, a far cry from $34.8 billion in last years corresponding period, as high commodity price volatility left buyers and sellers clashing over asset values. "The spike in commodity prices that followed Russias invasion of Ukraine temporarily stalled M&A as buyers and sellers disagreed on the value of assets," said Andrew Dittmar, a director at Enverus Intelligence Research. U.S. benchmark crude oil futures prices briefly spiked to more than $130 a barrel in early March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, but prices have since cooled thanks to recession worries, a fresh wave of Covid-19 as well as demand destruction concerns. Last quarter's high oil and gas prices triggered a rebound in M&A activity, especially from private equity firms. Enervous has reported that deals by private equity firms saw a significant uptick in the first quarter as they bought assets that oil companies deemed as non-core to their development plans. These assets tended to lay outside oil-prolific areas like the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico. Related: Saudi Arabia And The UAE Wont Be Tapping Emergency Oil Capacity Private equity still has dry powder for deals. They are using this to target assets being tagged as non-core by public companies. Once you step out of the core of the Permian Basin and a few other key areas, competition for deals drops, and these positions are often available at buyer-friendly price points. That said, private equity is still a net seller in the space and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future given the number of investments outstanding and how long that capital has been deployed, Dittmar has remarked. Further, there are growing concerns that high oil prices might have caused significant demand destruction, which could hamper an oil price recovery. On Wednesday, we saw crude oil futures give up their modest gains and dip lower after data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) revealed unexpected increases in U.S. crude and gasoline inventories. On Thursday, WTI September crude oil fell to $88 per barrel while October Brent crude fell to $94 per barrel. U.S. crude inventories jumped by 4.5M barrels to 426.6M barrels, with crude oil stored at the Cushing, Oklahoma, hub increasing by 926K barrels from the previous week to 24.5M barrels, while gasoline stockpiles added 163K barrels to 225.3M barrels. The four-week average of U.S. gasoline consumption is now more than 1M bbl/day below pre-COVID seasonal levels, despite pump prices having fallen for 50 straight days. Theres another reason though why Big Oil has gone cold on M&A. M&A Disaster Cowen analysts have pointed out how the last M&A wave turned into a disaster for the acquiring companies. In 2020, Shell Plc (NYSE: SHEL) cut its dividend by a hefty 66%. That marked the first time the company cut the dividend since WWII, a testament of just how severe the oil massacre was, which is what Shell blamed in its press release. However, another culprit was blamed for the dramatic cut: the companys 2016 acquisition of BG Group, which set it back a whopping $60B. Occidental Petroleums (NYSE: OXY) $55B leveraged purchase of Anadarko quickly became the poster-child of oil and gas mergers gone bad. The deal quickly turned into a nightmare, leaving the company in deep distress over its mountain of debt and water cooler wisecracks of how it could itself get acquired at a fraction of what it paid for Anadarko. Cowen also pointed at BP Plc.s (NYSE:BP) high debt, though it might have less to do with its 2018 merger with BHP Billiton for $10.5B and more to do with its Deepwater Horizon oil spill which has cost it a staggering $65B in clean-up costs and legal fees over the years. BPs debt-to-equity ratio of 0.96 is more than double the oil and gas sectors average of 0.44, and the highest among the oil supermajors. Luckily, the situation has improved dramatically since the 2020 oil price crash, with the vast majority of shale companies now printing millions in profits and free cash flow even at current oil prices. We, therefore, could see more M&A activity down the line. By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Kuwaits crude oil production has shrunk to around 2.7 million bpd, little in the way of significant new investment has been made into its oil sector in years, and the entire government including its oil minister - resigned in April. However, a new prime minister has just been appointed - retired general Sheikh Ahmad Nawaf al-Sabah. Will he be the one who engineers the long-envisioned two million barrels per day extra of crude oil production for Kuwait and the supply-crimped world? Just four years ago, the then-chief executive officer of the Kuwait Petroleum Corp (KPC), Nizar al-Adsani, announced that he expected the state-run oil firm to spend around US$500 billion in the run-up to 2040 with the intention of boosting the Emirates crude oil production capacity to 4.75 million barrels per day (bpd) by that year, up from the then-3.15 million bpd output Kuwait was producing. That figure of just under five million barrels per day of crude oil was more than either Iran or Iraq was producing at that point (4.4 million bpd, and 3.8 million bpd, respectively) and would have made Kuwait the second biggest oil producer in OPEC, after neighboring Saudi Arabia. In order to re-energize Kuwaits efforts in this regard, then, the new prime ministers immediate task will be to form a new government and he can begin this process by providing the names of potential candidates to Kuwaits Emir, Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, to issue a decree appointing them. This said, the 85-year-old emir, who succeeded to the throne in September 2020 following the death of his 91-year-old half-brother, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, has been able to do little to assuage the perennially fractious National Assemblys opposition to spending money if it involves anything approximating to the country taking on more debt. It is the Kuwaiti National Assembly that must authorize any and all increases in pre-agreed government borrowing - including any international bond offerings and any reforms that these necessitate must also then be passed through the legislature. This impasse has negatively impacted the ability as well of Kuwaits US$580 billion sovereign wealth fund the Kuwait Investment Authority to make effective decisions to direct investment at boosting the output from the countrys oil sector. As a result of this previous lack of any meaningful funding strategy, ratings agency Standard & Poors (S&P) cut Kuwaits key foreign currency credit rating by one notch (to A+ from AA-) in July last year and, even less propitiously, kept its outlook on the country negative. Recent estimates from S&P Global Commodity Insights suggest that Kuwait has less than 40,000 bpd of crude oil output upside remaining, and the state is quickly running out of output capacity. Superficially, the fact that Kuwaits fiscal breakeven Brent oil price for 2022 was projected at the beginning of the year to fall to US$64.50 per barrel (pb) from US$69.30 pb in 2021 and US$68.10 pb in 2020, according to IMF figures and has been nearer to US$53 pb for some months now, according to FRED data would have been cause for optimism for the Emirates ability to turn around its recent financial troubles. Indeed, a reiteration last year of a US$6.1 billion investment plan by the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) seems to have been produced in part on the back of this apparently positive future fiscal breakeven projection, given that crude oil still accounts for around 90 percent of the Emirates exports and government revenue. Specifically, the KOC said that it planned to drill 700 wells per year over the investment period, an increase of approximately 300 wells, having also completed to date around 93 percent of the construction of the heavy oil plant project in the broadly promising South Ratqa field. The KOC then announced that it had awarded around KWD350 million (US$1.16 billion) in contracts to a range of international companies for the supply of 31 oil rigs. The largest of these (10 rigs) went to China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), with the remainder going to a mix of seven foreign firms from Oman, the UK, and Egypt, plus domestic Kuwaiti companies. South Ratqa was the initial focus of these plans, with the aim of securing production of at least 60,000 bpd of heavy oil from the field in Stage 1, and that was achieved. Much of the new crude oil output was recovered on the proviso that it went for processing at the new Al-Zour refinery in order that it could contribute to the production of low-sulfur environmental fuel and supply it to power plants in Kuwait, as well as be available for export. This production and future production that was to come from the intended US$6.1 billion investment program was to have augmented the heavy oil production currently being produced from the Umm Niqa field. This has been in production since 2016 and back when the reiteration of the investment plan was made, was producing around 15,000 barrels of heavy oil per day, meaning that it and the new output from South Ratqa were together producing around 75,000 bpd. This aligned with a similar statement last year from the KOC that it was looking to move forward as well with the parallel development of three new fields in the western region of Kuwait, namely Umm Rass, Karaa Al Marw, and Kabd. Specifically in this context, the KOC had obtained approval to float a tender to build and operate two new Jurassic production units, which would enable Kuwait to reach a free gas production capacity of 850 million cubic feet per day, and the production of approximately 250,000 bpd of light crude. Related: The Race To Produce A Commercially Viable Electric Supercar Despite these plans, though, the willingness of the National Assembly to allow not just for budget programs to go through but also to approve the corollary necessary economic reforms has remained exceptionally limited. This intransigence was hardened with the release of figures last year showing that Kuwaits budget deficit increased by 175 percent in 2020-21 to KWD10.8 billion the highest deficit in its budgetary history, according to then-Finance Minister, Khalifa Hamada. While revenues dropped (by 38.9 percent), expenditure increased (by 0.7 percent), and salaries and subsidies still accounted for 73 percent of all spending. In response, the Governor of Kuwaits Central Bank, Mohammad al-Hashel, highlighted that there is an urgent need for economic reforms, and all parties, especially the executive and legislative authority, must work to address all imbalances. The Central Bank itself had already used many of the economic stimulus tools available to it at that point, including the reduction of a key discount rate twice to a historic low, relaxing banks liquidity requirement, bolstering banks lending capacity by enhancing maximum credit limits and reducing risk weights, but to little avail. Added to the dilemma facing the new prime minister is the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Partitioned Neutral Zone (PNZ), which leaves Kuwait directly subject to the whims of neighboring Saudi Arabia. Currently, the PNZ is functioning largely as it should, but this is not to say that the Saudis will not close it down again without warning and for purely vindictive reasons, as they have done in the past. Before production resumed in 2020, the PNZ had been locked down for around five years, after the Saudis closed the joint operations for the official reason that the site was not compliant with new environmental air emission standards issued by Saudi Arabias Presidency of Meteorology and Environment Authority. According to this agency, a gas leak had sprung in one of its 15 platforms (in addition to producing around 280,000-300,000 bpd of crude just before its closure the site also produced around 125 million standard cubic feet per day of associated gases). The real reason, according to various oil and gas industry sources across the Middle East spoken to by OilPrice.com, was that Saudi Arabia wanted to firmly show its neighbor who was in charge. This came after Kuwait had been increasing its competition with Saudi Arabia in the key Asian export markets to the degree that it was selling oil to buyers in Asia at the widest discount to the comparable Saudi grade for 10 years. Additionally, Kuwait had been increasing the difficulty for Saudi Arabian Chevron (SAC) in obtaining work permits to operate in the Zone, jeopardizing SACs ability to move ahead with its full-field steam injection project in Wafra that was intended to boost the output of heavy oil thereby more than 80,000 bpd. By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: More recently, it seems that the UK is increasingly hesitant about joining the oil insurance ban despite its significant market share in the industry. The EU has already added exemptions to its sanctions to reduce disruptions to essential goods, while the U.S. is now pushing an oil price cap instead of an embargo. While the EU remains determined to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, a shortage of energy and food is forcing the group to ease sanctions. If you ask a random EU official if the bloc should continue trying to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, you will invariably get a positive answer. The sanction potential is reaching its end, but this is no reason for the EU to relieve the pressure, that official will say, as many have in conversations with the media. And yet, the EU has quietly begun to unwind its sanctions against Moscow. The UK's Express called it caving in to Putin. Bloomberg dubbed it "corrections to previous sanctions." Whatever it is called, it comes down to the same thing: the EU is loosening the noose. And it's not just the EU, either. For starters, the European Union decided to add exemptions to Russian sanctions, which would allow countries from outside the bloc to deal with sanctioned Russian entities, including banks and state companies such as Rosneft. Per the Bloomberg report, these exemptions are for entities "deemed essential to shipments of food, agricultural goods and oil to third countries outside the EU". The EU appears to be putting a lot of effort into convincing whoever is listening that their sanctions against Russia have absolutely nothing to do with either food or energy supply disruptions or, at the very least, they did not aim for them to happen. It said it directly in a news release by the Council of Europe that announced the latest round of sanctions that targeted Russia's gold. "More broadly, the EU is committed to avoiding all measures which might lead to food insecurity around the globe. None of the measures adopted today or earlier in view of Russia's actions destabilising the situation in Ukraine target in any way the trade in agricultural and food products, including wheat and fertilisers, between third countries and Russia," the news release stated. What all this effectively amounts to is an admission that sanctions against Russia are not working too well in their intended way and are instead hurting or threatening to hurt third parties not involved in the Ukraine conflict. There's more, too. While the EU tweaks its sanctions to allow the trade of more Russian oil in order to avoid another spike in oil prices, the UK is hesitant to join the block in its oil insurance ban on Russian vessels. The UK's participation in the insurance squeeze is essential because of the market share British-based insurers hold in shipping insurance and yet they are stalling. A recent Financial Times report on the topic suggests this might have something to do with the UK's big geopolitical brother and its concern about oil prices. The U.S., unlike the EU and its embargo, has opted for an alternative way of trying to reduce Russia's oil income: price caps. The UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, France, and Italy have agreed to pursue this cap. Judging by the latest news from the G7 camp, however, the cap is not moving ahead as planned. A lot of people - analysts, shipping industry insiders, and the head of Russia's central bank, among others - said that a price cap on Russian crude would not work. It appears that G7 has not heard them. Per a Reuters report from earlier this week, the G7 is looking into "a comprehensive prohibition of all services that enable transportation of Russian seaborne crude oil and petroleum products globally, unless the oil is purchased at or below a price to be agreed in consultation with international partners." Talk, however, is cheap, while action is not. Yet talking is important when the world is watching you, so the G7 planners also said that "In considering this and other options, we will also consider mitigation mechanisms alongside our restrictive measures to ensure the most vulnerable and impacted countries maintain access to energy markets including from Russia." Related: How Russian Oil Is Making Its Way From Europe To Asia In other words, just like the EU, the G7 would be wary of causing unintended damage to countries not involved in the Ukraine mess by making sure Russian oil reaches them freely. And then, refined products made from Russian oil will head back to the EU. India buys Russian oil, runs it through its refineries, and sells 'Indian refined products' where? To the EU. Ditto for other cargos. Ditto for Saudi Arabia. Those vessels' bills of lading won't mention Russia as they arrive at their EU destination. "In short, the EU is quietly facilitating the bypass of its own proclaimed 'crushing' sanctions regime," according to Alastair Crooke, director of Lebanon-based nonprofit Conflicts Forum, as quoted by the Express. It must have dawned on EU, UK, and U.S. policymakers that sanctioning Russia would not be as easy as sanctioning a smaller oil exporter, especially if this oil exporter also exports a lot of other vital stuff, such as food and fertilizers. The U.S. even issued a fact sheet to clarify that its sanctions do not target Russian fertilizer exports, or, indeed, agricultural product exports. And this while Amos Hochstein said that "Their economy has nothing else. They produce weapons and they produce and they drill for oil and gas." It appears that 'their economy" has at the very least a lot of fertilizers and agricultural produce that serves to feed people outside Russia as well, and that's without mentioning the metals, too. As for the oil, it seems pretty critical as well: nothing short of critical would force the EU, the UK, and the U.S. to loosen the sanction noose. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Photo: The Canadian Press FILE - In this photo released by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Enrique Mora, a leading European Union diplomat, left, shakes hands with Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani in Tehran, Iran, March 27, 2022. Iran and the European Union said Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022, that they would send representatives to Vienna amid what appears to be a last-ditch effort at reviving talks over Tehran's tattered 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Mora who chairs the talks, wrote on Twitter that the negotiations would focus on the most recent draft on restoring the agreement, while Tehran said it was dispatching Kani to the Austrian capital. (Iranian Foreign Ministry via AP, File) Iran, the United States and the European Union said Wednesday they would send representatives to Vienna amid what appears to be a last-ditch effort at reviving talks over Tehran's tattered 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. It wasn't immediately clear if other parties to the landmark accord would attend the surprise summit, nor if there had been any progress after a monthslong stalemate and recent fruitless round of indirect talks between Iran and the U.S. in Doha. The European Union official who chairs the talks, Enrique Mora, said the negotiations would focus on the most recent draft to restore the agreement, while Tehran said it was dispatching nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani to the Austrian capital. U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley wrote on Twitter that he was preparing to travel to Vienna for talks. He cautioned that American expectations are in check" ahead of the negotiations. The United States welcomes EU efforts and is prepared for a good faith attempt to reach a deal. It will shortly be clear if Iran is prepared for the same," Malley added. Russias chief representative at the talks, Mikhail Ulyanov, also wrote on Twitter that negotiators from Russia, a key signatory of the nuclear deal, stand ready for constructive talks in order to finalize the agreement. The prospects for the deal's restoration have darkened in the past few months with major sticking points remaining, including Tehran's demand that Washington provide guarantees that it wont again quit the pact and that it lift terrorism sanctions on Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. The abruptly called meeting in Vienna comes after EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has repeatedly pushed to break the deadlock and salvage the deal in past weeks. He recently wrote in The Financial Times that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted. Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, which lifted most international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for tight restrictions on Irans nuclear program. Since then, Iran has massively expanded its nuclear work and now has enough highly enriched uranium to fuel one nuclear weapon, according to nonproliferation experts. However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, likely a monthslong project. Iran insists its program is for peaceful purposes, though U.N. experts and Western intelligence agencies say Iran had an organized military nuclear program through 2003. The secretary-general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, lashed out at the oil and gas industry, accusing it of "grotesque greed" and calling for additional taxes on their profits. Guterres noted that for the first quarter alone, the combined profits of the world's largest oil and gas companies were 'close to $100 billion" and urged all governments to tax these profits. "It is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities, at a massive cost to the climate," Guterres told media, as quoted by Reuters. "I urge all governments to tax these excessive profits, and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times," he also said, adding "And I urge people everywhere to send a clear message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers: that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home." The UN's top official is a vocal critic of the oil and gas industry. Earlier this year, he said investing in new oil and gas production was "delusional," and it would only have negative consequences. "New funding for fossil fuel exploration and production infrastructure is delusional. It will only further feed the scourge of war, pollution and climate catastrophe," Guterres said in June. He has also spoken against coal investment, calling it "stupid" and saying that dependence on fossil fuels was madness. "Had we invested massively in renewable energy in the past, we should not be so dramatically at the mercy of the instability of fossil fuel markets now," he said in June. Big Oil majors all reported massive profits both for the first and second quarters of the year, thanks to higher oil prices. This is not the first time prices have been this high, but it may be the first time majors are being this careful with new spending, which is ironic given Guterres' remark about delusional oil and gas investments. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: BOSTON (AP) A former parishioner at a Massachusetts church has filed a lawsuit alleging he was sexually abused as a child more than 30 years ago by a Roman Catholic priest who is now an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Detroit. The plaintiff, identified in court documents as John Doe No. 12, was a 12-year-old parishioner at Saint Mary of the Sacred Heart Parish in Lynn in 1989 and 1990 when he was sexually assaulted about 25 times by Paul Fitzpatrick Russell, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in Boston. The Archdiocese of Detroit in a statement said Russell denied the allegations. Abp. Russell is shocked and saddened by the claims that have been made," the statement said. He states that the allegations are totally without merit and that his conscience is perfectly clear. Russell has been placed on limited ministerial duty, and Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron has pledged complete cooperation. The suit also names as defendants the Archbishop of Boston and Russell's supervisor at Saint Mary of the Sacred Heart. Given it is a pending legal matter we will withhold comment at this time," a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston said in an email. The suit seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages. Russell, who was ordained in 1987, went on to become priest-secretary for the late Boston Cardinal Bernard Law, joined the Vaticans diplomatic service where he served as the churchs top ambassador to Turkey, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, and was named auxiliary bishop in Detroit in May. The plaintiff met Russell when he volunteered at the parish food bank, according to the lawsuit. Russell invited the boy back to the parish rectory where he began to groom him" before sexually assaulting him, the suit said. The man turned to alcohol and drugs as a coping mechanism, considered suicide, sought mental health treatment, and still experiences flashbacks as well as feelings of guilt and shame, according to court documents. He did not understand he had been harmed by the conduct of the defendants" until 2021. He wishes to remain anonymous because he thinks making his name public will cause him to be stigmatized, affect his personal relationships, and further harm him emotionally, according to court documents. The plaintiff, now in his mid-40s and living outside of Massachusetts, was inspired to come forward by others who have reported allegations of abuse that occurred decades ago, said his attorney, Carmen Durso. The age at which people have been coming forward has been getting lower, and mostly it's because they have heard about other people coming forward, and that has given them the courage to talk about this," he said. Its not so overwhelmingly shameful as it was before. Durso said to his knowledge Russell has never before faced abuse allegations. According to the lawsuit, church officials in Boston have for decades hidden sexual abuse by priests, conspired to keep the information from becoming public, and protected suspected priests from criminal prosecution. Boston became the center of the Catholic clergy abuse scandal that spread worldwide when The Boston Globe published a series of Pultizer Prize-winning stories that showed priests suspected of abuse had been transferred from parish to parish without alerting parishioners. The stories were the basis for the 2015 movie Spotlight, which won a Best Picture Academy Award. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a church accountability and victim support group, called on the church to release its records on Russell. Given Bishop Russells high position in the Catholic church ... we believe true transparency and accountability will only come when the files on the clergyman held by the church are publicly disclosed, the group said in a statement. MADISON, Wis. (AP) The Republican candidate for Wisconsin governor endorsed by Donald Trump would not commit Monday to supporting Trump should he run for president again in 2024, but also didn't rule out trying to decertify his 2020 loss in the battleground state. Trump-backed candidate Tim Michels, at a town hall event a week before the Aug. 9 primary, also said he did not think Trump did anything wrong on Jan. 6, 2021. Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who is endorsed by former Vice President Mike Pence, said she would support whoever wins the Republican primary for president in 2024. A third candidate who has made decertification the keystone of his candidacy, state Rep. Tim Ramthun, also did not commit to endorsing Trump in 2024 should he run for president. The winner of next week's primary will advance to face Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in November. Whoever wins will be governor during the 2024 presidential race and in position to sign, or veto, election law changes passed by Wisconsin's conservative-controlled Legislature. Trump has hung heavy over the Republican primary race for governor. He endorsed Michels, who co-owns an energy and infrastructure construction company, passing over Kleefisch who served eight years as lieutenant governor under Scott Walker. She scored an endorsement from Pence last week. Trump has scheduled a rally in a conservative Milwaukee suburb on Friday night. Michels said he won Trump's endorsement because he is a businessman and political outsider. But he refused to say he would support Trump in 2024. 2024? Im focused on this election right now," Michels said. "I have made no commitment to any candidates in 2024. What I am focused on is beating Tony Evers. Kleefisch said, I will support the Republican nominee and it looks like we have an assortment to choose from. Ramthun, who polls show is far behind Michels and Kleefisch, said 2024 was going to be a whole new game and he will support whoever wins the primary. Ramthun has pushed for decertification of the 2020 election, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden in Wisconsin by nearly 21,000 votes. The outcome has withstood two partial recounts, multiple lawsuits, a nonpartisan audit and a review by a conservative law firm. A review by a former conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justice also did not turn up evidence to overturn Biden's win. Michels did not rule out signing a bill to decertify Trump's loss, even though legal experts, including conservative attorneys, have said it is unconstitutional and impossible to do. Michels said if elected governor he would look at all the evidence of what happened in the 2020 election and everything will be on the table." Kleefisch, in her strongest comments to date on the issue, ruled out decertification. It's not constitutionally possible, she said. There is no path to decertifying an election that has already happened. All three of the candidates said they would accept the results of next week's primary election. As for the Jan. 6 insurrection, Michels and Kleefisch blamed those who stormed the Capitol but not Trump for what happened after his Stop the Steal rally. Donald Trump, he had a rally," Michels said. I haven't see any evidence that Donald Trump said Go to the Capitol now and storm it.' I dont think he would have done it. ... I don't think he did anything wrong. Kleefisch said, Ultimately those people who stormed the Capitol are responsible for what they did." More than 840 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot. Over 340 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors. More than 220 have been sentenced, with nearly half of them receiving terms of imprisonment. Approximately 150 others have trial dates stretching into 2023. A special U.S. House committee continues to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump's role in it. The town hall, hosted by WISN-TV in Milwaukee, was the last scheduled joint appearance by the Republican candidates before the election. Omaha police said a man has been arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder a month after a woman was found dead in northwest Omaha. Lorenzo M. Washington, 31, who is homeless, was arrested in connection with the death of 58-year-old Rita Hash, the Omaha Police Department said in a statement. He was also arrested on suspicion of first-degree sexual assault of Hash. Hash was found dead in her apartment near Maple Street and Maplewood Boulevard on July 3, police said. Detectives had noted possible suspicious circumstances surrounding her death. WASHINGTON (AP) Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski was killed Wednesday in a car crash in her northern Indiana district along with two members of her congressional staff and another person, police said. The crash happened about 12:30 p.m. when an SUV Walorski was riding in crossed the centerline on a state highway and collided head-on with a car, the Elkhart County Sheriffs Office said. Three people in the SUV, including Walorski, 58, were killed, as was a woman driving the other car, authorities said. The sheriff's department initially reported that the car crossed the centerline, but a news release Thursday corrected that to say it was the SUV. Walorski, who served on the House Ways and Means Committee, was first elected to represent Indianas 2nd Congressional District in 2012. She previously served six years in the state's Legislature. She has returned home to be with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Please keep her family in your thoughts and prayers, Walorskis chief of staff Tim Cummings said in a statement. Walorski and her husband, Dean Swihart, were previously Christian missionaries in Romania, where they established a foundation that provided food and medical supplies to impoverished children. She worked as a television news reporter in South Bend before turning to politics. Also killed in the crash were Zachery Potts, 27, of Mishawaka, Indiana; Emma Thomson, 28, of Washington, D.C.; and Edith Schmucker, 56, of Nappanee, Indiana, according to the sheriff's office. Cummings confirmed that Potts and Thomson were members of Walorskis congressional staff. Thomson was Walorskis communications director, while Potts was her district director and the Republican chairman for northern Indianas St. Joseph County. Schmucker was driving the other car, according to the sheriff's office. The crash, which occurred in a rural area near the town of Wakarusa, is still under investigation. Walorski was seeking reelection this year to a sixth term in the solidly Republican district. She was active on agriculture and food policy in Congress, often working across the aisle on those issues. A co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, she introduced legislation with Democrats to bring back a Nixon-era White House event on food insecurity. President Joe Biden pointed to that work in a statement crediting Walorski for years of public service. We may have represented different parties and disagreed on many issues, but she was respected by members of both parties for her work, Biden said. My team and I appreciated her partnership as we plan for a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health this fall that will be marked by her deep care for the needs of rural America. Indiana Republican U.S. Sen. Todd Young said he was devastated by Walorskis death. Jackie loved Hoosiers and devoted her life to fighting for them, Young said in a statement. Ill never forget her spirit, her positive attitude, and most importantly her friendship. All of Indiana mourns her passing, along with the tragic deaths of her staff Emma Thomson and Zach Potts. Walorski was a reliable Republican vote in Congress, including against accepting the Arizona and Pennsylvania electoral votes for Biden following the Capitol insurrection. As a member of the Indiana House, Walorski pushed anti-abortion legislation opposed gambling expansion proposals. She became a favorite of the conservative tea party movement. Walorski lost a close 2010 congressional race to Democrat Joe Donnelly before narrowly winning the seat in 2012 as Donnelly made a successful run for the Senate. She had easily won her reelection campaigns since then. House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Walorski a no-nonsense, straight shooter." Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Walorski lived a life of service. She passionately brought the voices of her north Indiana constituents to the Congress, and she was admired by colleagues on both sides of the aisle for her personal kindness, Pelosi said in a statement. Pelosi ordered the flags at the U.S. Capitol to be flown at half-staff in Walorskis honor. The White House said its flags would be lowered Wednesday and Thursday, and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb issued a similar flag directive for the state. At every level of public service Jackie was known to be a positive force of nature, a patriot, and a relentless policymaker with an unwavering loyalty to her constituents," Holcomb, a Republican, said. Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire said she and Walorski bonded as newly elected members of Congress in late 2012 over their husbands shared love of jazz music and became friends. I was proud to work with her on a variety of critical issues, including legislation to address the addiction crisis, end sexual violence, and help military sexual assault survivors access the care they need, Kuster said. Davies reported from Indianapolis. Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed from Washington. This story was first published on August 3, 2022. It was updated on August 4, 2022, to correct details about the crash that killed Warlorski. The sheriffs department now says the the SUV that Walorski was riding in crossed the centerline of a highway and into oncoming traffic crashing into a car driven by Edith Schmucker, 56, of Nappanee, Indiana. The agency previously said it was Shcmuckers car that crossed the centerline. HINDMAN, Ky. (AP) For days, a search-and-rescue team led by Phillip Dix has combed debris-clogged creekbanks looking for survivors in flood-ravaged eastern Kentucky. His crew is used to the stifling heat and humidity but is laboring under the grind of 12-hour shifts spent pulling people from danger. The scope of the devastation and the conversations with people who lost everything keeps the rescuers going, said Dix, who leads the Memphis, Tennessee-based team. Its a job to us, but talking to the local people, that kind of brings it down to the human level, which our guys have to deal with, Dix said Wednesday. You cant just turn that switch off when youre talking to someone whos lost everything they had. Nearly a week since floodwaters consumed parts of Appalachia, rescue missions were winding down while supplies poured into what looms as a massive relief effort. Floodwaters wrecked homes and businesses, and some escaped the surging waters with only the clothes they wore. Initial expenditures from a relief fund opened by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear were being distributed to pay funeral expenses of flood victims. The statewide death toll is 37, Beshear said. Temperatures surged as people continued shoveling out from the wreckage. The rising heat and humidity meant heat index values were near 100 Wednesday, a steam bath that will continue through Thursday evening, the National Weather Service said. The guys are tired, Dix said from Knott County, where his crew resumed their mission on foot and boats. "So youve got to watch them, make sure theyre hydrated more than usual. That included tending to the dogs assisting the crews. The K-9s were being rotated to keep them from overheating, said Deborah Burnett, a K-9 coordinator. Were splashing some water on the dogs ... just to keep them nice and hydrated, she said. Dix's team rescued 16 people during a two-day stretch, he said. The rescued had no cell service, no electricity, no way out due to damaged roads and bridges and some were running short of food. The team reunited families, but also found two bodies. The area that we were in, the houses were just gone, Dix said. "These people that have lost everything theyve got, they still make it a point to thank us for being up here. Cooling centers were opened after forecasters warned of the risk of heat-related illnesses. In Breathitt County, plans were made to deliver supplies by foot in areas where roads were washed out, said county Judge-Executive Jeff Noble. It just devastates me to see what pain people are going through, he said. My staff and workers, theyve worked nonstop and theyre still working nonstop, and well continue to do that until every holler is open and every road is open. More than 1,300 people were rescued and crews were still trying to reach some people cut off by floods or mudslides. About 5,000 customers still lacked electricity in eastern Kentucky, the governor said. Emergency shelters and area state parks housed hundreds of residents who fled homes that were destroyed or badly damaged. Many more are staying with relatives and friends. More than 400 National Guardsmen have been deployed across the disaster area, delivering water and other relief. Beshear said water stations are set up every few miles along some roadways. Our goal is to provide so much water they (local officials) say stop sending us water, he said. Infrastructure also took a pounding from flooding. Water systems sustained heavy damage, and some roads and bridges were eaten away by floodwaters, the governor said. Its going to take significant time and significant dollars to restore what was destroyed, he said. Beshear said a special legislative session will likely be needed to devise a relief package for the flood-stricken region. The governor holds the power to reconvene lawmakers for a special session. The outpouring of support was evident across the area. Volunteers helped remove debris from homes, while others served up meals. Beshear said it's a time for people to lean on each other and urged them to seek help in dealing with the trauma. Remember, its OK not to be OK," the Democratic governor said. "I dont think our brains or hearts are designed to deal with trauma and loss at this level. Robyn Casey Caldwell joined the relief effort while coping with her own grief. The elementary school kindergarten aide has spent long days delivering water, medication, bedding, baby food and tools in flood-torn Knott County. Weighing heavily has been the loss of her cousin Jay Edward Bush, a 57-year-old Army veteran who died Wednesday, just hours before the flood came. The next day, his wifes home was washed away. She lost everything. I dont think there has been time to even think we just do what needs to be done, she said. But Im sure there have been many people that just find a quiet place and break down and cry. When I find time, I will surely cry. The governor said the magnitude of the losses takes your breath away. Many people are left with absolutely nothing, with every single possession wiped out, he said. Imagine scratching and clawing for 10, 15 years to be able to have something you call a home," the governor said. "But its not insured and its wiped out, as is every other thing that you own. Repairing these lives is going to be challenging, but were up for it, he added. President Joe Biden declared a federal disaster to direct relief money to counties flooded after 8 to 10 1/2 inches (20 to 27 centimeters) of rain fell in just 48 hours last week in the Appalachian mountain region. The flooding also hit areas just across the state line in Virginia and West Virginia. Schreiner reported from Frankfort, Kentucky. Associated Press Writers Rebecca Reynolds in Louisville, Kentucky, and Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed to this report. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Twitter denied in a court filing that it had deprived its would-be acquirer, billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, of necessary information or misrepresented details about its business. Musk originally made those charges to justify his attempt to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the social platform, which he later claimed was infested with much larger numbers of spam bots and fake accounts than Twitter had disclosed. That fate of that acquisition, which Musk agreed to without taking the time to examine the details of Twitters business, now rests with a Delaware court where Twitter sued to force Musk to complete the deal. The case is scheduled to go to trial on October 17. The courts decision could ultimately determine the future of a social platform used daily by 238 million people around the globe a small audience by the standards of Facebook and other major platforms, but one that include political leaders, major entertainers and experts on a variety of subjects. Until January 2021, it was also home to the then-U.S. president, Donald Trump. In an unexpected twist, Twitter was able to file its response to Musk before Musk's own counterclaims have surfaced in public. A judge ruled on Wednesday that Musk's counterclaim will be made public by Friday. Parts of Musks counterclaim, however, was included in Twitters response. These include accusing the company of fraud and delay tactics and only providing Musk sanitized, incomplete information in answer to his questions about spam accounts and other company metrics. While Twitter has claimed that Musk is inventing reasons to get out of buying the company, Musk's lawyers say that Twitter is the one holding back the deal by dragging its feet and providing insufficient data to the billionaire's requests. In a reply filed Thursday in Delaware Chancery Court, Twitter calls Musks reasoning a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive. The Counterclaims are a made-for-litigation tale that is contradicted by the evidence and common sense, Twitter's response says. Musk invents representations Twitter never made and then tries to wield, selectively, the extensive confidential data Twitter provided him to conjure a breach of those purported representations. At the same time, the response says, Musk also accused Twitter of breaching their agreement by stonewalling his information requests. Representatives for Musk did not immediately return a message for comment Thursday, although Musk briefly talked about Twitter at Tesla's annual shareholders meeting Thursday. He told an audience at Tesla's factory near Austin, Texas, that Twitter fit into the grand vision for his holding company. He said that since he uses Twitter a lot, with more than 100 million followers, he knows what to do with it. I do understand the product quite well," he said. "So I think I've got a good sense of where to point the engineering team at Twitter to make it radically better, he said. Attorneys for Musk had wanted to file a public version of their answer and counterclaims in Delaware court Wednesday. But Twitter attorneys complained that they needed more time to review and potentially redact Musks sealed filing, saying it refers extensively to internal Twitter information and data given to Musk. Musk, the worlds richest man, agreed in April to buy Twitter and take it private, offering $54.20 a share and vowing to loosen the companys policing of content and to root out fake accounts. Among other things, Musk said he would restore Trump who was banned from Twitter following the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol to the platform. But Musk said in July that he wanted to back out of the deal, prompting Twitter to file a lawsuit to hold him to the seller-friendly agreement. Musk says Twitter has failed to provide him enough information about the number of fake accounts on its service. Twitter argues that Musk, CEO of electric car maker and solar energy company Tesla Inc., is deliberately trying to tank the deal because market conditions have deteriorated and the acquisition no longer serves his interests. Either Musk or Twitter would be entitled to a $1 billion breakup fee if the other party is found responsible for the agreement failing. Twitter wants more, however, and is seeking a court order of specific performance directing Musk to follow through with the deal. Associated Press Writer Randall Chase contributed to this story from Dover, Delaware. Police suspect foul play in two overnight fires that killed four people in the small northeast Nebraska town of Laurel. Four people in two homes within three blocks of each other died in house fires in the early morning hours on Thursday. Col. John Bolduc, the superintendent of law enforcement and public safety for the Nebraska State Patrol, said during a Thursday afternoon press conference that accelerants may have been used in both fires. Investigators who examined the crime scenes later determined that gunfire is suspected to have played a part in the incidents at both homes, the patrol said in a Thursday night press release. Just after 3 a.m. Thursday, Cedar County 911 received a phone call reporting an explosion and fire at 209 Elm St. in Laurel. Inside, one person was found dead. While crews were on the scene of the first fire, another fire was reported three blocks away at 503 Elm St. Fire crews and law enforcement found three dead people in the home. Fire investigators think the fire at 503 Elm may have started around the same time as the explosion at 209 Elm around 3 a.m., the patrol said. Both residences were single-family homes. Police did not release the names, ages or causes of death for any of the victims. They also did not say whether any of the victims were related to one another. Autopsies have been ordered to determine if the victims were killed by the fire or beforehand. Firefighters worked diligently to put out the fire, but also to preserve evidence that may be located inside the home, Bolduc said. Our investigators are processing that second scene at this time. When asked if the community of Laurel was in danger, Cedar County Sheriff Larry Koranda urged the public to be diligent. Everybody knows everybody in this small community, Koranda said. I think people just need to be diligent. If you see something out of order, please call. No arrests have been made. Police said that whoever set the fires may have suffered burns. A silver sedan was seen leaving Laurel westbound on U.S. Highway 20 at some point after the second fire was set, according to the patrol. The driver may have picked up a passenger before leaving the city. He is being sought as a person of interest. Patrol officials asked residents who saw anything out of the ordinary between midnight and 4 a.m. Thursday to report it immediately. Officials also are looking for security camera footage in Laurel and surrounding areas and ask that members of the public come forward if they have video from early Thursday morning. Any information about the incident should be reported to the State Patrol at 402-479-4921. Photo: The Canadian Press Canada's international travel restrictions reduced the number of coronavirus cases entering the country during the first waves of the pandemic but did not prevent new outbreaks, according to a new study. The study, led by University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers, finds that COVID-19 cases declined by 10-fold four weeks after new restrictions prevented most foreign nationals from entering the country in March 2020. The researchers constructed a detailed timeline of how the virus was entering the country from January 2020 to March 2021 by using publicly available viral genome sequences. The data was used to identify the geographic origin of COVID-19 cases, enabling the identification of 2,263 instances where it was imported. The study, published today in eLife, is the first national-level genomic analysis of COVID-19 epidemiology in Canada. COVID-19 importations were accelerating in the lead up to March 2020, but experienced a sharp and drastic decline after travel restrictions were put in place, said Angela McLaughlin, a UBC Ph.D. candidate in bioinformatics and the studys lead author. The data shows that federal travel restrictions can be effective in reducing viral importations when implemented rapidly. But while the restrictions reduced the importation of the virus, they were not eliminated. Instead, they continued on "at a lower level through the spring and summer of 2020," notes the study. These new chains of transmission contributed to Canada's second wave and rebounded further in November. Additionally, eased entry requirements resulted in newly emergent variants of concern (VOCs) and interest (VOIs). Travel restrictions have a diminishing return if domestic transmission is high, if highly transmissible variants become widespread globally, or if there are many individuals exempt from travel restrictions and quarantine without access to rapid testing, said McLaughlin. The study notes that an estimated 30 unique genetic sublineages of the Alpha variant (B.1.1.7) were imported into Canada by February 2021. From there, these sublineages increasingly displaced the original COVID-19 strain by the second half of the second wave and into the third wave. The only way to fully curtail the importation of new cases would be to continue the travel restrictions. But continuing to impose the rules poses a significant economic burden, according to the researchers. The social and economic repercussions of travel restrictions must be weighed relative to the risk of unhampered viral importations, which have the potential to overburden the healthcare system, Mclaughlin explained. During Canada's first wave, the data suggests that 49 per cent of cases probably originated from the United States and were mostly introduced into Quebec and Ontario. In the second wave, the United States continued to be the "predominant source of viral entry, at 43 per cent, alongside a larger contribution from India, 16 per cent, and the [United Kingdom], at seven per cent." The study was led by researchers at UBC and the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE), alongside colleagues from Western University, the University of Arizona, and the Canadian COVID-19 Genomics Network (CanCOGeN). According to the researchers, the study provides key insight into the "effectiveness of public health interventions" that allow policymakers to respond to viral threats in the future. LINCOLN The speaker of the Nebraska Legislature is gauging his colleagues support for a special session to debate a 12-week abortion ban, according to an Omaha lawmaker. State Sen. Megan Hunt posted a Tweet Wednesday night saying that Speaker of the Legislature Mike Hilgers is calling all members and asking them to sign on to a letter supporting a special session to take up the proposal. Hilgers, of Lincoln, told The World-Herald on Thursday that he has contacted multiple lawmakers to discuss a special session, but would not confirm whether he is proposing a 12-week ban. I dont have additional comment until Ive finished those conversations and had the chance to comprehensively discuss with my colleagues, Hilgers said. Hilgers has not called all lawmakers. Omaha Sens. Machaela Cavanaugh and Justin Wayne said they hadnt received a call as of Thursday afternoon. Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Elkhorn said she hasnt received a call on this specific issue, but she talks to Hilgers multiple times a week, and they have discussed abortion restrictions and a special session. She said she may not receive a call at all, because she is confident Hilgers already knows her stance. He knows where Im at, Linehan said. Linehan said she is all in on a special session, provided officials are confident the proposed bill would pass. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June, Gov. Pete Ricketts said he would work with Hilgers to evaluate what policies could pass in the Legislature during a potential special session. The governor has avoided commenting on the topic since then, and a spokesperson for Ricketts did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. A 12-week ban wouldnt go as far as the bans that many Southern and Midwestern states passed after the Supreme Courts ruling. It would also be scaled back compared with a trigger bill that nearly passed in the Legislature earlier this year. The trigger bill would have banned all abortions in Nebraska in the event the Supreme Court overturned Roe. The bill would have made it a felony for anyone to provide any medication or undertake any procedure with the intent of ending the life of an unborn child, starting at fertilization, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The bill died when it failed to reach the 33 votes necessary to end a filibuster against it. Sen. Joni Albrecht of Thurston, who introduced the trigger legislation, said Wednesday that the bill is completely off the table. She said she is not writing the legislation that could be proposed in a special session, but predicted it would propose further abortion restrictions, rather than a complete ban, which she felt had a higher chance of passing. I cant say what the governor is going to settle on, Albrecht said Thursday. Linehan, who supported the trigger bill, said that while a 12-week ban would not eliminate all abortions, she would support any legislation that leads to fewer abortions in the state. Currently in Nebraska, abortions are legal up until 20 weeks after fertilization. A total of 2,360 abortions were reported in 2021, according to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. That marked a slight decrease from the 2,378 reported in 2020. According to the report, more than 85% of the abortions performed in 2021 occurred before an estimated 12 weeks of gestation. Hunt, who led the eight-hour filibuster against the trigger bill, said in a follow-up Tweet that she also opposed a 12-week ban. Politicians might think that a 12 week ban will make them look moderate, but they know what everybody else knows: Putting government between a doctor and a patient for no medically necessary reason is never moderate, Hunt said in the Tweet. LINCOLN Abortion-rights advocates in Nebraska said Kansas voters decision to uphold abortion protections sends a clear message of where the public stands on the issue, while abortion opponents cautioned against reading too much into the results and vowed to continue fighting for additional restrictions. On Tuesday, Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have added language to the states constitution stating that it does not grant a right to an abortion, thereby allowing state lawmakers to regulate abortion as they see fit. It was a major victory for abortion-rights advocates following weeks in which many states in the South and Midwest largely banned abortion following the U.S. Supreme Courts overturning of Roe v. Wade. State Sen. Adam Morfeld of Lincoln, a Democrat who has opposed abortion restrictions, said he wasnt surprised by the news, claiming that abortion rights have support from voters regardless of political affiliation. What did surprise him was the landslide result, in which votes against the proposal prevailed by roughly 20 percentage points, according to unofficial results. Scout Richters with ACLU of Nebraska said the outcome in Kansas resembles Nebraskans opinion on the issue. A recent ACLU poll found that 55% of Nebraskans were against an abortion ban. Morfeld said abortion rights have always had support across political lines, despite repeated claims from conservative lawmakers that Nebraska is a pro-life state. Anti-abortion advocates disagreed. Nate Grasz, policy director for the Nebraska Family Alliance, said the level of support largely depends on how the question is framed. He said the majority of voters dont support extreme options like late-term abortions. Currently in Nebraska, abortions are legal up until 20 weeks after fertilization. Sen. Joni Albrecht of Thurston said the Nebraska Legislatures count of lawmakers who support abortion restrictions is proof that a majority of voters are also against abortion access. She said she consistently hears affirmation of that from her constituents. In my arena, I hear it loud and clear, Albrecht said. Earlier this year, Nebraska lawmakers attempted to pass a trigger bill that would have banned abortion in the event Roe v. Wade was overturned. The bill failed to get the 33 votes necessary to end a filibuster against it. In the wake of the Supreme Courts abortion ruling in June, Gov. Pete Ricketts said he would work with Speaker of the Legislature Mike Hilgers to determine what policies could pass in the Legislature during a potential special session. Ricketts, who has voiced support for a ban on abortion, hasnt made any announcements regarding a special session and has refrained from commenting on the topic. Even if a special session isnt called, abortion restrictions will likely be proposed in the next regular session. Albrecht, who introduced the trigger bill, said that bill is completely off the table. She said she is not writing the legislation that could be proposed in a special session, but believes it will be a less extreme version of her previous bill one that proposes abortion restrictions, rather than a complete ban. Richters said the Kansas vote could be an indication that voters in largely conservative states are shifting their support to candidates and causes that support abortion rights. Tuesdays election was the first test of voters feelings about abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The high court ruling likely motivated many voters in Kansas to vote like their rights depend on it, Richters said. Now, more than ever, they really do, she said. Grasz said the Kansas vote reflects the magnitude of the fight for and against abortion rights, but he doesnt believe it is an indicator of whats to come in the November midterm elections. He said Tuesdays vote was mostly fueled by panic in the aftermath of Roe being overturned, and that abortion-rights groups funneled millions of dollars into spreading fear and false information. Sandy Danek, executive director of Nebraska Right to Life, said she believed rhetoric from abortion-rights groups confused the voters into thinking the initiative would have banned abortions and other health care procedures, rather than amend the states constitution. The need to amend the constitution stemmed from a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court decision that declared access to abortion as a fundamental right under the states Bill of Rights. Abortion opponents in Kansas wouldnt say what legislation theyd pursue if the amendment passed and bristled when opponents predicted it would lead to a ban. Danek said leading up to the midterms, anti-abortion groups must put more effort into educating voters about abortion-restricting policies and alternatives to abortion. She said the nearly 50 years since the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling created a culture that normalized abortion for many of todays voters, and supporters of abortion bans must work to change that culture. This report includes material from the Associated Press. A 53-year-old Lincoln man was sentenced Wednesday to over 20 years in federal prison after being found guilty of four counts of production of child pornography. Gregory Dightman, who worked as a photographer, will spend 20 years in prison to be followed by 10 years of supervised release, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for Nebraska. A woman went to Lincoln police in 2019 to report that a professional photographer named Dightman had taken inappropriate photographs of her daughter, including nude images. The Lincoln Police Department acquired a search warrant for Dightmans home and studio. Dightman agreed to talk to officers and admitted that he knew how old the girl was and that he had taken nude photographs of her. During an examination of Dightmans devices and interviews with other young women, it was determined that Dightman paid at least four girls ages 16 or 17 to pose for sexually explicit photos. Investigators found that about 590 photos were taken from 2009 until 2019. The case was investigated by the Lincoln Police Department and the FBI. This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide Justice Department initiative to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln wont require students, faculty and staff to test negative for the coronavirus before they return to campus for the 2022-23 school year. Nor will the states largest university campus require masking when the semester starts Aug. 22. UNL will largely continue the voluntary testing protocol that was in place at the end of last school year and through the sumaWednesday. Students, faculty and staff at UNL will continue to have access to free saliva-based PCR testing Sunday through Friday outside the Nebraska Union as well as the East Union. Individuals needing to test can walk up to one of the testing locations on either campus, show their NCard and submit a saliva sample. The results will be available a day later online at UNLs COVID-19 testing portal. Users will be required to sign up for two-factor authentication in order to use the portal. Or, members of the campus community can receive a push notification that their results are ready through the Nebraska app, which is currently used by most students. The change in testing protocol also means UNL will allow students to delete the Safer Community app from their phones. The app, which went into use in January 2021, was used to schedule COVID-19 tests and send results, and also had a feature allowing students to opt in to receive alerts if they were potentially exposed to someone who had recently tested positive. UNL discontinued using most of the features on the app last November. While UNL has not required students, faculty or staff to get vaccinated against COVID-19, the university is once again encouraging those who will be on campus to get a shot. Deb Fiddelke, UNLs chief communications officer, said the vaccine registry will continue to be available to individuals to submit details on the date and type of vaccine they received. In partnership with the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department, UNL will use the vaccine registry to determine potential exposure rates if a COVID-19 hot spot shows up on campus. But, nearly two and a half years after the pandemic forced campuses to close, Fiddelke noted UNL and other colleges and universities across the country have become more consistent in their plans for managing COVID-19. People have a good sense of what to do to keep themselves safe, she said. On its COVID-19 dashboard, UNL recorded 38 positive cases out of 314 tests for the week of July 30. The positivity rate is 12.1%, down from 17.4% a week earlier. BLOOMINGTON Downtown Bloomington is getting taken on a moonlight ride Saturday. Let me get to the point Tom Pettys terrific music legacy will be regenerated by a professional band that was born out of love for the legend himself: Southern Accents. Its time to turn his radio classics loud. The five-piece act plans to rock the joint up for the third Saturdays at the Square concert series, sponsored by Pantagraph Media and The Castle Theater. Jeremy Todd is scheduled to open. The Nashville-based band will be buzzing like Honey Bee and strumming sweet rhythms heard in American Girl. Epics like Runnin Down A Dream just might deliver crowds to something good waiting down the road. Their frontman, Ronnie Gregg, is channeling Pettys voice and looks, along with his eccentric vibes from the 1985 album that shares the bands namesake. Bringing the rest of the Heartbreakers sounds are Nick Swan on guitar and harmony vocals, bassist Paul Jones, Tony Mac on drums, and keyboardist Jeff Hollandsworth. Southern Accents takes on Pettys material with note-to-note precision for a bold and flawless impression. Their repertoire boasts at least three dozens of Pettys songs, both solo and with the Heartbreakers. Diehard Petty fans can let in those feelings of the summer creeping in, and maybe get in that Last Dance With Mary Jane. Even casual listeners could shed a tear for Tom. Petty may be gone, but the icon lives on. Come out Saturday night, and get grooving in his honor. BloNo beats invited Gregg to answer six questions about their thoughts on Pettys music and why the love to play it. Read his answers below: Tell me about the first time you listened to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The first time I heard Tom Petty was on MTV in the 1980s. The first song I heard was "Refugee," and I was instantly a fan. Have you seen Tom Petty live? What was that experience like for you? I've seen Tom Petty four times in concert and actually met him once in Nashville. I became an even bigger fan after seeing him live the first time in 1994. Whats your favorite song, and why? Whats your favorite deep cut? Hard to say a particular favorite song, because there are so many I love. However, Honeybee and Out In The Cold are two of my favorite deep cuts. How did you band form? Have you performed Tom Petty covers from the start? We formed the band in 2016 prior to Mr. Petty's death. We started the band out of our love of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers music. What songs get the most reaction out of the crowd? Any best openers or closers youd like to mention? Songs like Free Fallin' and Mary Jane's Last Dance always get people up singing and dancing. We usually close the show with Running Down a Dream, which is also very high energy. Have you played in Bloomington-Normal before, and what energy do you hope to see from the crowd next weekend? We have played The Castle Theatre a couple of times and we love Bloomington. We're looking forward to a Tom Petty-style party and we can't wait to see everyone. 100 years ago Aug. 4, 1922: The B.S. Green building at the corner of Monroe and East streets is to be the new home of the Bloomington Association of Commerce. This was announced by J.S. Hudson, secretary. All that remains is the signing of the contract by Mrs. B.S. Green, owner of the building. Her son, Ralph, left yesterday for New York to secure her signature on the document. 75 years ago Aug. 4, 1947: July, a month traditionally dangerous for polio, ended in McLean County without a single case reported, said Dr. John W. Turner, director of the county health department. He said it is not likely that the county will have a serious polio outbreak this year. Earlier, Dr. Turner said the latter part of July was a "crucial period" for polio. Last year, the county had 34 cases. 50 years ago Aug. 4, 1972: The Bloomington Board of Education and the Bloomington Education Association reached tentative agreement on a new two-year master contract for teachers. It contains essentially the same language as existed in the 1971-72 contract, but includes a clause to reopen for negotiation the salary and extra pay for extra duty schedules for the 1973-74 school year. 25 years ago Aug. 4, 1997: Six Illinois teenagers recently spent three weeks in Chile using the arts to express their Baha'i faith. Katie Smith of Bloomington joined Julie Clark of Decatur, Suzanne Mitchell of Batavia, Alexis Krapf of Manhattan, Husayn Allmart of Wheaton and Nate House of Payson on the trip June 13 to July 6. They presented a program that combined dancing, singing and prayer. BLOOMINGTON The McLean County Fair opened to waves of attendees Wednesday before a brief downpour of rain called for quick thinking and impromptu shelter. McLean County Emergency Management Agency Director Cathy Beck said that no injuries and "not as much damage" was reported as expected but there were plenty of tents lost due to the high winds. The National Weather Service in Lincoln has issued a severe thunderstorm watch for Wednesday evening and a flood watch until Thursday morning for much of Central Illinois. "A couple rounds of thunderstorms this afternoon through tonight will produce rainfall amounts of one to three inches on saturated soils," meteorologists reported. "A few locations that see repeated rounds of thunderstorms may see rainfall amounts of three to six inches." According to the weather service, excessive rain may result in the flooding of rivers, creeks, streams, and other low-lying and flood-prone locations. Counties included in the flood watch include Christian, DeWitt, Logan, Macon, McLean, Moultrie, Piatt and Shelby. Jeremiah Cox, a support staff member for the fair, said he was at the front entrance when the storm hit and saw multiple tents, trash cans and even a metal chain link fence get blown over as he and others hid inside the ticket booth. No one was hurt and we all just waited in this little area until the storm passed, Cox said. The last time it rained it wasnt this bad. Other workers could be seen picking up poles, rearranging tents and even pouring out residual water from rides like the bumper cars and Zero Gravity. Nathan Ramler, who was out at the fair with his son Josiah, said he was expecting the inclement weather but not quite that extreme. Deb Phares said she knew there would be a storm rolling through but did not notice anything until her son Owen was on the OMG 360 ride when the lighting started. I was really impressed, Phares said. They shut the rides down, got people off and most of us went into the building where McLean County Beef Producers were serving food and had lunch. Although they only attend one day each year, Phares said they would make the most of their day and go on as many rides before it rains again. "Fortunately it didnt rain very much here," said Carl Neubauer, secretary and treasurer at the McLean County Beef Producers. It cleared us off for 15 to 20 minutes. Hopefully we can have a nice evening. Fair organizers also announced that the Big Smokers Tractor Pull & Local Pickup Truck Pull-Offs has been canceled. Carnival rides and concessions are still open. Lee Enterprise reporters' Brendan Denison, Donnette Beckett, D. Jack Alkire and Olivia Jacobs contributed to this article. IF YOU GO What: McLean County Fair When: Wednesday, Aug. 3, through Sunday, Aug. 7 Where: 1106 Interstate Drive, Bloomington Gate admission: Wednesday-Saturday: Free for kids 5 and under, $5 for kids ages 6-12, $8 for ages 13 and up. On Sunday: Free for kids 5 and under, $2 for kids ages 6-12, $4 for ages 13 and up. Dollar discount for tickets purchased online. Parking is free. Grandstand lineup (tickets required): 7 p.m. Friday, Ya Bud Country Music Night with Craig Campbell and Jordan Davis; 7 p.m. Saturday, demolition derby. More info and tickets: www.mcleancountyfair.org or 309-663-6497 Democrats sometimes refer to Fox News and other conservative media with envy, presuming that the influence of right-leaning news outlets gives the GOP a large advantage in electoral politics. Even if Democrats have an easier time making their case in neutral media something both Republican voters and party actors strongly believe but for which proof is hard to find wouldnt it be nice to be able to reach supporters easily, with hardly any filter? Democrats should be careful what they wish for. For one, ceding a central role to party-aligned media puts the preferences of Fox News, talk-radio hosts and their corporate bosses above those of other party actors. Having such a powerful media megaphone in their corner also tends to make politicians and political parties lazy. Why sharpen ones arguments when they are going to be adopted with little scrutiny by content-hungry outlets? Two examples of that laziness, one small and one big, emerged last week. The small one was the decision by Republicans to ridicule Vice President Kamala Harris for introducing herself at a White House event by saying I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit and mentioning her preferred pronouns. It was ridicule that played well on right-wing media but probably didnt broaden the partys appeal, something the GOP needs to do if it wants to win back the White House in 2024. The larger moment was a decision by Senate Republicans to defeat what had been a bipartisan bill to help veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits while serving overseas. An earlier version of the bill passed the Senate earlier this year, but last week it failed to overcome a filibuster when 25 Republicans switched their votes. The reasons for the change had to do with overall budget policy. Or at least thats what Republicans say; there also is some suspicion that the switch was prompted by GOP anger toward Democrats over the surprise agreement between Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Joe Manchin on a big health care, climate and tax package. Whether or not their concerns were valid, Republicans have been taking almost all the blame from veterans groups and advocates, who say open-air trash incineration near military bases led to cancer and other health problems. Mainstream media is following the lead of those groups and dumping on Senate Republicans. This was entirely predictable. The unaligned media isnt actually neutral, but its biases arent based on partisanship; they are more often tied to norms that have been built up over the years. And one of those norms is that veterans are always good. So while many fights over spending are treated as disputes between two sides that are entitled to their positions, battles over legislation for veterans are generally covered as if there is an obvious good side and an obvious wrong one. And Republicans were putting themselves on the wrong side. There are other reflexive biases in media. Budget deficits are invariably seen as bad. Oddly enough, high voter turnout is always seen as a good thing, while laws to make it easier to vote are subject to both-sides treatment, even though there is a good case to be made that the opposite should be true. But its hard to think of a media norm much stronger than the one that holds that veterans are good. While its hard to prove any specific effects of this kind, the core problem likely is that Republicans are so used to just feeding their talking points to their willing partners in Republican-aligned media that their ability to make strong arguments to the rest of the media and to the rest of the electorate has atrophied. This has been true for quite some time, and it has only become worse. The failure to speak to a broader audience wont necessarily make the difference in elections, especially when Republicans dont have the White House or majorities in Congress, because elections are fought over big-picture issues such as the economy and war and peace. But it probably does have an impact at the margins, and when elections are close even small effects can change the results. It also makes governing and healthy representation harder. Democrats shouldnt envy that. A bench warrant has been issued by an Accra Circuit Court for the arrest of a senior officer of the State Insurance Corporation (SIC) who allegedly, willfully caused GH334,114 loss to the State. Hillary Kwasi Senanu, 47, who oversaw the Institutional Payment at SIC was absent when his accomplices-Martha Siaw,36, a nurse, Priscilla Telley Annang, 26, event planner and Clifford Emmanuel Kukubor, 44, GPHA staff- were arraigned on Monday, August 1, 2022. Senanu is also charged for allegedly conspiring with Martha to steal GH260,732.74 belonging to SIC Life Ghana Limited. In addition, Senanu is alleged to have falsified the accounts of Kukubor, Martha, Priscilla Annang, Priscilla Odofoley Nortey, Agnes Darbea Amakye, Angela Agyeiwaa Gyan, Lily Atswei Ablorh and David Mensah to steal GH98,313.96. Martha and Priscilla Telley Annang were both granted a GH30,000 bail with two sureties, each, who should be public servants, but Kukubor was remanded into prison custody. They will make their next appearance on August 15, 2022. Meanwhile, David Mensah, a trader, Agnes Amakye Darbea and Priscilla Odofoley Nartey, his accomplices, are on the run. Mensah contributed to the offence by dishonestly receiving GH62,201; Agnes, trader, received GH7,100 whilst Priscilla Odofoley Nartey stole GH40,610. Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Maxwell Oppong giving the facts, told the court presided over by Mr Emmanuel Essandoh that Jacob Aikins Tandoh, complainant, is the Head of Audit at SIC Life Company Limited in Accra whilst Senanu was the Senior Officer in charge of Institutional Payment and one of the premium Officers of SiC Life Company Limited. He said Siaw, Annang, Kukubor, Mensah, Darbea and Nartey were all clients of the company. In June 2021, the Head of Premium Department of the company detected some financial malpractices relating to some client's account and accordingly informed the complainant, ASP Oppong told the Court. He said a report was made to the Police for investigation and during investigation, it was detected that, Senanu had deliberately credited the premium account of his accomplices: Siaw, Annang, Kukubor, Mensah, Darbea, Nartey as well as two other clients who were witnesses in this case with premiums and repaid policy loans, to suggest that they were genuine but could not account for it. Prosecution said during interrogation, Annang admitted receiving GH10,040 in three installments and on each occasion, Senanu asked her to take GH1,000.00 and send the remaining amount to him via mobile money which she did, but those monies were not accounted for by Senanu and so applied to Siaw. In all, a total of GH260,732.74 was detected by the company to have been embezzled by Senanu in relation to the dealings by him (Senanu) and the rest of the accused persons, the Court heard. ASP Oppong said Siaw also made a refund of GH1,500.00 out of the amount she received from the company during investigation. He said further investigation revealed that the accused persons' malicious and fraudulent actions led to the State Insurance Corporation insuring a fundamental loss of GH332,114.00 by fraudulently allocating loans to the customers and benefiting from it. The prosecutor said after investigation, the accused persons were charged with the respective offences and put before the Court. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Photo: The Canadian Press Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday. Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and multiple sharp force injuries, while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Their 6-year-old daughter, Lula Schmidt, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation, officials said. All three family members deaths have been ruled homicides. The Schmidts' 9-year-old son, who was with his family on the camping trip, survived the attack without physical injuries, but investigators have not said whether he was in the tent when the attack happened. The department confirmed Thursday that the killer was Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Nebraska, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the family was attacked early on the morning of July 22 in their tent at the Maquoketa Caves State Park campground. Investigators said all evidence collected substantiates that Sherwin acted alone, but police have not indicated a motive in the killings. Police who swarmed the park about 180 miles east of Des Moines in the wake of the shooting found Sherwins body outside the campground but within a wooded area of the park. A Japanese national, Morikawa Hikawu has been arrested in Ghana upon a request by INTERPOL Tokyo, following the revocation of his passport in Japan. The Ghana Police Service in a press release said the suspect was put before a court and remanded into lawful custody awaiting his deportation from the country. "The INTERPOL Unit of the Ghana Police Service is working with the Ghana Immigration Service, INTERPOL Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Ghana for his removal," the Police release said. "We would like to assure the public that the Ghana Police Service will continue to use due process to deepen our regional and international law enforcement cooperation". Read the entire release below; PRESS RELEASE ARREST OF A JAPANESE NATIONAL IN GHANA UPON A REQUEST BY INTERPOL TOKYO 1. A Japanese national, Morikawa Hikawu was arrested in Ghana upon a request by INTERPOL Tokyo, following a revocation of his passport by Japan. 2. The suspect was put before court and was remanded into lawful custody awaiting his removal from the country. 3. The INTERPOL Unit of the Ghana Police Service is working with the Ghana Immigration Service, INTERPOL Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Ghana for his removal. 4. We would like to assure the public that the Ghana Police Service will continue to use due process to deepen our regional and international law enforcement cooperation. GRACE ANSAH-AKROFI CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT OF POLICE DIRECTOR, PUBLIC AFFAIRS Source: graphic.com.gh 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 Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Minister of Education, has charged the Governing Councils of Colleges of Education to produce innovative and critical thinking teachers to impart the right knowledge to students for national development. We need to train our teacher trainees to go beyond memorization of lesson notes and focus on being assertive in creating modules for the transformation of the country. We need to be asking them to create a city without pollution instead of asking them to define pollution and how to stop pollution, the Minister added. Dr Adutwum stated that teachers and students who were critical thinkers came to the realization of four Cs of education- collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication, making them competitive on the global market. The Minister said this in Accra at the inauguration of 10 Governing Councils of Colleges of Education and administered the oath of office and oath of secrecy to the members with the mandate to proffer strategic direction in managing the affairs of their respective institutions. He said the Colleges of Education played a critical role in the transformation of the countrys educational system and charged them to leave a legacy by transforming the trainees to be productive and meaningful to society. The Minister advised the Council members to focus on the mission and vision of the Colleges to improve quality teaching and learning and not only focus on administrative responsibilities like promotion and allowances of members. Dr Adutwum, also the Member of Parliament for Bosomtwe in the Ashanti Region, urged the leadership of the Colleges to avoid trivial issues like prescribing uniforms for the trainees but concentrate more importantly on improving learning outcomes in the institutions. When you want your students or trainees to be so compliant that you require them to wear uniforms, they will take the same into the classrooms and expect the pupils or the students to be compliant to the extent that the students cannot ask questions in class, he said. I have visited a number of schools and anytime I ask the students at the end of my interaction with them if they have a question for me, no hand goes up. What it tells me is that invariably we tame the students. We tell them we are the teachers, we are here to dispense knowledge to you, we give you the knowledge, keep it close in your head and on the day of the exams, give it back to us and you are the best student, he said. Dr Adutwum emphasized the need for the trainees to have a voice in the teaching and learning environment by meaningfully participating in the discourse of teaching activities and be empowered to ask questions without being intimidated. He said the country had built six state-of-the-art science laboratories in the country and was transforming other institutions into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) schools to produce students and graduates who would be fit for purpose. He said the first-ever National Standardised Test organised by the Ministry for Primary Four pupils revealed that the Ahafo, Bono East and Bono regions which were formerly together as the Brong Ahafo Region, emerged as a strong base for lower primary education. After the test in Mathematics and English Language, P4 pupils in the Ahafo Region posted the highest mean scores of 67 per cent in English and 58 per cent in Mathematics, while those in the Bono Region posted 65 per cent in English and 55 per cent in Mathematics, with those in the Bono East Region scoring 58 per cent in English and 50 per cent in Mathematics. The Volta Region posted the least mean scores of 34 per cent in English and 27 per cent in Mathematics. The Minister said the results of the test would enable the Ministry to design strategic interventions to address some of the pitfalls in the regions and districts that performed poorly. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Nigeria's broadcast regulator has fined Multichoice Nigeria Ltd, part of a South African pay-TV group, and others 5 million naira ($12,013.74) each for airing a BBC report that it said "glorified the activities of bandits and undermines national security." The National Broadcasting Commission said in a statement on Wednesday that the outlets had until Aug. 30 to pay. It also fined local channel Trust TV, part of the group that owns the prominent Daily Trust newspaper, for its own report on banditry. "The Commission wishes to seize this opportunity to advise broadcasters to be circumspect and deliberate in the choice and carriage of contents deleterious to Nigeria's national security," NBC said in a statement. The Daily Trust quoted its management as saying, "We wish to state unequivocally that as a television station, we believe we were acting in the public interest by shedding light on the thorny issue of banditry." The BBC did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Multichoice had no immediate comment. Armed criminals, known locally as bandits, have kidnapped thousands of Nigerians over the past two years. Free speech and democracy activists in Africa's most populous country have raised the alarm over what they say are erosions to freedom of expression in recent years, including last year's ban on social media platform Twitter. Nigeria has a presidential election in February in which deteriorating security nationwide could play a prominent role. Source: Reuters 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 General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church, Pastor Mensa Otabil has said the African continent would see a turnaround and become a destination for job seekers from America and Europe. Justifying his position on the shift in Africas fortunes, he said his positive outlook of the continent is not premised on physical entities but rather on a deep belief in Gods justness and fairness not to lift up one and neglect the other. Speaking in a message titled, We Will Get It Back, on the opening night of Greater Works Conference, Pastor Mensa Otabil re-affirmed his belief that Africa will become the most significant continent on the planet. Pastor Mensa Otabil encouraged the congregation not to limit God but rather be inspired by the example of the prophet Jeremiah as they seek to move the African continent from a state of hopelessness. He anchored his sermon on Jeremiah chapter 32 and recalled how God showed Jeremiah the most impossible situation ever, where an external and an internal enemy had taken over Israel. Pastor Mensa Otabil demonstrated how God restored the nation in the midst of captivity and impossibility. He likened the situation to some foreign powers who have impoverished Africa and taken her assets including locals who were taking advantage of a bad situation and making it worse. The theologian opined, Africa will get it back and it will be well with the continent, it will be well with our people! Pastor Otabil said up until now, he remains eternally convinced that the future of Africa is bright and the future of Ghana is great. He prayed for a resurgence in Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Ivory Coast, Sudan, South Sudan, Mali and all African countries. America has had its chance, Europe has had its chance, and Asia has had its chance. Its Africas chance too, he said. He was hopeful that the largest number of billionaires will soon come from Africa. He there urged worshipers to work harder and do bigger things because very soon, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Jack ma will read about you. Other speakers at this years Greater Works Conference are; Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, the founder and Senior Pastor of Kingsway International Christian Centre in the United Kingdom and Bishop Tudor Bismark, senior Pastor of Jabula New Life Covenant ChurchHarare, Zimbabwe. Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com/ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Burkina Faso's army said on Wednesday that it had accidentally killed civilians during a counter-terrorist operation in the country's southeast earlier this week, without saying how many. Residents of the area told Reuters that as many as 37 people were killed in the strike on Monday near the village of Pognoa, about 10 km (6 miles) from the border with Togo, where some fled afterwards. The West African country has been battling an insurgency by Islamist militant groups, some linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State, which control large swathes of territory and wage frequent attacks. "During operations which made it possible to neutralize several dozen terrorists, the strikes unfortunately caused collateral victims within the civilian population," the army said in a statement. It did not say how many civilians were killed. The victims were hit by projectiles in the zone between Kompienga and Pognoa, it said. One man from Pognoa said he had attended the burial of 37 people following the strike. A woman from the same town said about 30 people were killed, including women and children. Both sources requested anonymity out of fear of repercussions. Nine people with injuries were admitted to the regional hospital in Dapaong, Togo, after the incident, a medical source said. "According to the victims and those accompanying them, it was drone strikes. Some spoke of two strikes and others three," said the medical source, who also requested anonymity. Togo, which has been contending with the spillover of militancy from Burkina Faso, accidentally killed seven civilians in an air strike last month in the same border zone. Burkina Faso in June ordered civilians to evacuate two large areas in its northern and southeastern regions ahead of anticipated operations against Islamist militants. The strikes that hit civilians on Monday were near but outside one of those zones. Source: Reuters Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The National Peace Council (NPC) and the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) have urged political parties to use Alternative Disputes Resolution (ADR) in addressing intra and inter-party disputes. A statement issued by the NPC, copied to the Ghana News Agency, said the appeal was made by the two institutions at a three-day Multi-Stakeholder Consultation and Training on ADR for Political Parties in West Africa. It said the overarching objective of the programme was to enhance the capacity of election stakeholders, especially political parties, to develop sustainable dispute resolution structures to manage disputes and minimize election-related disputes and violence. It said it was also intended to create or expand existing infrastructure in target countries, including Ghana for effectively managing disputes surrounding elections and other democratic processes. Participants were drawn from Operations Managers Units of Political Parties, External Affairs Units of Political Parties, Offices of the General Secretaries of Political Parties, Electoral Commission, National Commission on Civic Education, GIZ and the European Union. Mr George Amoh, the Executive Secretary of the National Peace Council and Dr Chukwuemeka Eze, the Executive Director of WANEP, who facilitated sessions of the workshop, urged political parties to use Alternative Dispute Resolution or Appropriate Dispute Resolution Structures and measures to resolve the challenges they face regarding conflict within and outside their political parties. According to them, this was the only way to prevent the volatility and instability of the West African sub-region which was brought about by election-related issues, ethnicity, religious extremism and intolerance and an influx of small arms. Dr Serebour Quaicoo, the Director of Electoral Services at the Electoral Commission, who was participating backed this call, saying it would help the country in ensuring peaceful elections. Attending the workshop on behalf of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) were Mr Chris Arthur, Mr Kwasi Afriyie and Madam Sheila Offei. The National Democratic Congress (NDC) was represented by Mr Kakra Esamoah, Mr Abraham Amaliba and Mr Atukwei Quaye. The Convention People's Party (CPP) delegation included Nana Yaa Jantua, the General Secretary and Mr Moses Yirimambo, the National Organiser. The People's National Convention (PNC) was represented by Madam Janet Nabla, and Mr Muniru Mohammed. The Progressive People's Party (PPP) also had Mr Remy Paa Kow Edmundson, the General Secretary and Mr Faisal Abu Sadat, the Youth Organizer. Other participants included delegations and Directors from other organisations in Ghana and Africa such as NCCE, CHRAJ, EU, GIZ. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO) has detained a notorious leader of a fraudulent enterprise operating in Ghana and neighboring Nigeria who is also on the wanted list of Interpol for various organized crimes. On Thursday, July 21, 2022, Sunny Anwamini (Alias Sunny Enyindah Anwamini @ Apostle Sunny Chigeru), a Nigerian national, was arrested and charged with three counts of Uttering forged documents, defrauding by false pretences and money laundering. The accused, between January 2017 and May 2022, used forged documents including an Export Declaration Form from the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) to obtain various sums of money totaling Six Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars ($6,500,000) from one Mazen Farakh, the complainant, under the pretext of exporting teak wood from Ghana to him in Ukraine. The accused was arraigned before Her Ladyship Elfreda Dankyi at Criminal Court 2 of the High Court, Accra. After the accused persons plea was taken, EOCOs legal team prosecuting on behalf of the Republic, prayed the court to take into consideration the amount involved in the offence allegedly committed in granting bail. The Court in its ruling set the terms of bail at Twenty Million Ghana Cedis (GHc 20,000,000) with three (3) sureties, two (2) of whom must be justified. The accused is to surrender his passport and other travelling documents and to report twice a week to the EOCO headquarters. However, Sunny Awamini is yet to settle the bail conditions and has been detained. Background According to deep throat sources at EOCO, the suspect met Mazen Farakh in December 2018 during which the latter expressed interest in purchasing expensive wood (teak). Sam after receiving the sum of $6.5 million from the Ukrainian businessman sent photographs of fake pallets of teak stored in custom bonded warehouses and promised to get the goods delivered to Ukraine. Additionally Information Sunny Awamini alias Sam is apparently a wanted man by interpol and Nigeria security apparatus having been in the hunt for him for several years. EOCO after doing a diligent work sought collaboration from their Nigerian counterparts and were informed that Sam has been a wanted man and operates a criminal gang of fraudulent enterprise in Nigeria for a very long time. Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Minister of Energy, Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has fired salvoes at the Minority in Parliament about their claim of a possible $7 billion judgement debt against Ghana over an impasse between ENI/Vitol and Springfield Ghana. The Minority reportedly says a directive by former Minister of Energy, John Peter Amewu, instructing the two parties to execute a Unitisation and Unit Operating Agreement (UUOA) at the Sankofa and Afina fields has been challenged by ENI/Vitol stating that it's a premature decision and didn't meet industry standards. A legal tussle subsequently ensued, with ENI/Vitol eventually initiating action in the International Court of Arbitration for $7 billion against the Government of Ghana. A publication by the Insight newspaper stated that the Minority, in a statement signed by John Jinapor, Ranking Member on Mine's and Energy Committee of Parliament, said the impasse has led to an impending legal battle between the ENI/Vitol and the Government of Ghana. "We are also aware that ENI/Vitol has commenced legal action in the International Court of Arbitration seeking damages of about $7 billion against the Government of Ghana . . . Indeed, since assuming office in 2017, the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia-led Government has not successfully executed a single block agreement, neither has any new oil field been brought into production," the statement read. Speaking in a one-on-one interview on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" morning show, the Energy Minister gave full details of the impasse between ENI/Vitol and Springfield Ghana. Listen to him in the video below Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain NSW is in the middle of overhauling its approach to suspensions and expulsions. Under a proposed plan due to start in term 4, students can only be sent home a maximum of three times a year. This is designed to reduce the high number of sanctions against vulnerable children in public schools. But it has been met with opposition from teachers, who say it will increase safety risks when managing disruptive students. This comes amid a wider debate about how to approach student discipline, which continues to be one of the most difficult issues in Australian schools. The views about student behavior are diverse and often passionate, with some arguing students should be "punished." Unfortunately these views do not always reflect the research, which shows tough approaches make student disengagement worse. What is school exclusion? Suspensions and expulsions are traditionally used by schools to manage problematic student behavior. They are given to students who disrupt the "good order" of schools or threaten others' safety. Schools use suspensions to help change unproductive student behaviors or allow time for other strategies to be implemented to help avoid repeat situations. The length of school suspensions will be halved and students won't be sent home more than three times a year under a new behavior strategy in NSW public schools | @JordsBaker https://t.co/9KqQW1ZFqr The Sydney Morning Herald (@smh) February 18, 2022 Exclusions vary across Australia. They can either be for a short time, a long time, or they can even be permanent. State and territory legislation and departmental discipline policies provide guidance on how schools should prevent and respond to problematic student behaviors around Australia. Recent data from states indicates school exclusions are on the rise. For example, in Western Australia there was a new high of 18,068 suspensions in 2021, an increase of 13% from 2020. Five issues that need more attention We are researching how and why Australian schools use exclusionary practiceslike suspensionsto manage disorderly students. Policymakers and schools need to give more attention to the following issues when it comes to discipline and behavior. 1. Some groups of students are suspended more often Research over the past three decades has consistently shown suspensions and expulsions disproportionately target students from diverse or minority backgrounds. This is particularly the case for those with a disability or those from specific racial, ethnic and class backgrounds. For example, in NSW in 2021, while 3.3% of all students were suspended, 10% of Aboriginal students and 8.4% of all students with disability were suspended. This is not just the case in Australia, but also in the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. 2. We don't have the full picture Official statistics provided by education departments offer a publicly available account as to the number of students schools have suspended and expelled from schools. However, these figures do not always present an accurate picture. Students can be excluded from the classroom in other ways, that are not captured in official data. For example, schools might let students remain on the school grounds for partial or full days, but not let them join their peers for lessons. This allows schools to "maintain statistical respectability." 3. What else is going on in students' lives? Often discussions on how to manage students' behavior focus on responding to the individual's academic failure, behavior or disinterest in school. They don't look at the broader complexities of their lives. When looking at whether suspension or exclusion is an appropriate discipline technique, schools should consider the likely impact on a child's life chances, especially for marginalized children. Will a suspension put at risk the chances of the student completing school? Will the student be supervised while they are not allowed to attend school? Understanding how poverty and other forms of social inequality contribute to behavior in schools is important. There are many other ways to manage students' behavior that are more supportive and can lead to more positive outcomes for the school, students and families. For example, teaching students how to manage conflict or how to manage their anger. 4. Make students feel valued Research tells us students value schools which make trust, respect and care central to everything that happens there. If we are going to help students connect to schooling, we need to look at the deeper causes of student disengagement. This means understanding and attending to students who feel like they do not matter or do not fit in or feel like their interests are not recognized. This requires a commitment from schools to connect to student's lives and communities as the foundation for curriculum design and learning. Treating teachers like professionals and giving them the time and resources to plan engaging and differentiated lessons is critical. This also involves talking and listening to what young people have to say. 5. The broader political context Schools of course exist in a broader social and political climate. In Australia, the trend in education has been to prioritize individuals and individualism over the public good. At the broader level, this has seen an emphasis on standards, performance and national testing. At the micro level, this encourages schools to view problem student behaviors as the responsibility of individuals. So this means there is a focus on blaming "disruptive" students, "dud" teachers or "negligent" parents, rather than look at the influence of broader public policy settings. So, while the NSW government is making positive steps, there is still so much more to be done to improve our approach to student discipline. Explore further Schools unfairly targeting vulnerable children with exclusion policies This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The affected area of 15,000 square metres (161,500 square feet) includes a storage site for police ammunition. An "unprecedented" fire broke out Thursday around a German police munitions storage site in a popular forest in western Berlin, sending plumes of smoke into the skies and setting off a series of explosions. The fire began in the Grunewald forest in the early hours of the morning, with residents reporting a series of explosions. Firefighters were initially unable to tackle the blaze directly due to the danger of further blasts, with emergency services setting up a 1,000-metre (3,280-foot) safety zone around the site. Around 250 emergency personnel were deployed to the site. The fire had spread across 50 hectares by the evening, according to police, but the emergency services were hoping to bring it under control overnight. The most dangerous zones have been identified and firefighters have been cleared to proceed to within 500 metres of the blaze in some areas, they said. The army had earlier sent in a tank aimed at evacuating munitions at the affected storage site as well as remote-controlled de-mining robots, while drones circled the air to assess the emergency. Heatwave Water cannons were also deployed around the safety zone to prevent the fire from spreading. But authorities said no firefighting helicopters were available as they were already in use to tackle forest fires in eastern Germany. They also said the 1,000-metre safety zone applied to the air, so there was a limit to how useful it would be to drop water on the fire from above. Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey interrupted her holiday to visit the scene, calling the events "unprecedented in the post-war history of Berlin". Giffey advised Berliners to close their windows but said the danger was minimal as there were no residential buildings within a two-kilometre (1.2-mile) radius and so no need to issue evacuation orders. Road and rail traffic had been disrupted but was expected to return to normal in the course of the evening. The fire came as a heatwave swept across Germany, with temperatures hitting 39 degrees Celsius (102 Fahrenheit) on Thursday. Scientists say climate change is making heatwaves around the world more frequent and more intense, which increases the risk of fires. Germany has suffered a series of forest fires this summer, with Brandenburgthe state that surrounds Berlinamong the hardest hit areas, along with the mountainous parts of Saxony state. Unexploded bombs Police said they were investigating what set off the fire in Grunewald. The store holds munitions uncovered by police, but also unexploded World War II-era ordnance which is regularly dug up during construction works. German media questioned the wisdom of having a bomb disposal site located in a major city. "At least 25 tons of World War II ammunition and illegal fireworks were hoarded at the munitions site there, in the middle of the forest. How can this be?" Berlin newspaper BZ asked. Cyclist Hellmut Schmidt, 64, who commutes through the forest to work, told AFP that "when you see all these fires, of course you worry". "But I don't know where else you could have (a munitions site) in Berlin... If it was further from the city, then it would also be dangerous with the transport because something could explode," he said. Giffey said local authorities would "have to think about how to deal with this munitions site in the future and whether such a place is the right one in Berlin". The German capital is rarely hit by forest fires, even though its 29,000 hectares of forests make it one of the greenest cities in the world. Heavy thunderstorms are expected to sweep into the country from the west on Friday, the German weather service said. A cold front is predicted to bring temperatures down by more than 10C overnight in western Germany, falling to around 20-25C on Friday. Explore further Italy heatwave peaks with 16 cities on red alert as Tuscany burns 2022 AFP Photo: Glacier Media For nearly two years, Claudia Zamorano has been quietly working to help keep hospital patients safe in the face of COVID-19 through her work as a housekeeper at Royal Columbian Hospital. Now she faces the prospect of being deported from the country she has called home for more than four years. Zamorano and her family her mother-in-law Leticia Bazan Porto, her brother-in-law Isaias Liberato Bazan, her husband Andres Liberato Bazan and their nine-year-old daughter Evangeline are all facing deportation to Mexico while they await a decision on their ongoing application for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Sanctuary Health, a grassroots community group that advocates for migrant justice, held a rally at Sapperton Park Wednesday morning to draw attention to the familys plight. The family fled Mexico in 2017 under threat from organized crime. Theyre now living in New Westminster, where Evangeline is set to start Grade 4 in the fall but they may not be allowed to stay. Since the pandemic began, they havent qualified to stay in Canada despite some federal programs designed to regularize the immigration status of essential workers. Though Zamorano worked in COVID-19 wards that put her at direct risk from the virus, she didnt qualify for a federal program launched in December 2020 to regularize the status of refugee claimants who worked in health care. The two Bazan brothers, meanwhile, have been working in construction, and their employer, CWL Contracting, is supporting their application for permanent residence. They, too, missed out on a federal program designed to regularize the status of construction workers. Such a policy was introduced in July 2019 for out-of-status construction workers in the Greater Toronto Area, in recognition of the economic contributions of those workers, but theres nothing similar for B.C. refugee claimants. We can't afford as a society to exclude and deport families like these, said Omar Chu of Sanctuary Health. Were standing together because we won't let the government continually chew up and spit out members of our community by introducing piecemeal programs that exclude far more people than they support. Porto, meanwhile, has been serving the community through volunteer work at the South Granville Seniors Centre, Carnegie Community Centre, Mission Possible and Watari Counselling and Support Services where she has been a pillar of a food security program that helped provide meals and food hampers through the height of pandemic restrictions and beyond. Theyre a truly remarkable family that has given so much to the community, Chu said. The trauma, the anxiety and the fear that our immigration has created for this family is unacceptable. 'I like my job; I do it with joy,' says health-care worker The soft-spoken Zamorano is unassuming about her own contributions. I like my job; I do it with joy, she said. We are short of staff, so if I can help the patient and the nurse, then I will. Shes even been able to use her language skills to help nurses deal with Spanish-speaking patients. Despite her close contact with the virus throughout the pandemic, she was able to dodge COVID-19 until last week when, finally, she tested positive after working in a seniors ward with a COVID outbreak. Ive been doing my work carefully, cleaning up everything, she said, but added the workload is high for housekeepers tending to large numbers of rooms. One person, its just not enough. Zamorano has gone through her own personal struggles over the past few years, including miscarriage she attributes to the stress of the familys immigration situation. But her concern is focused largely on her daughter who was forced to attend a family meeting with immigration officials on July 8, where she was told her family would be deported. For nine years old, how can she understand? Zamorano said. She cannot sleep properly right now. Shes scared of officers. She cried and asked why we cannot be here if we are not bad people. CBSA has to change and protect the mental health of every children in the same situation. Hospital Employees' Union backs family The family has earned the support of the Hospital Employees Union, which is publicly urging Immigration Minister Sean Fraser to support the familys permanent residency application. It is clear that Claudia has an active role in ensuring safe direct patient care, and she never should have been excluded from the special measures that were introduced for refugee claimants working in health care, said HEU president Barb Nederpel, who spoke at the rally. She continues to this day to be a critical part of the health-care team, especially at a time when our hospitals and our health-care facilities are facing dire staffing shortages. And we need to retain every single one of our qualified and dedicated health-care workers that we can in order to prevent placing further burden on our already understaffed and overworked health-care sector. Sanctuary Health is also conducting a letter-writing campaign in support of the family, and more than 900 people have already signed letters of support. The organization is also fighting on behalf of another New Westminster couple, Adriana Rosales Contreras and Alberto Vargas Mendez, who are also fighting to stay in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Volcanic eruptions play an important role in cooling the planet. But scientists are concerned that climate change could make eruptions less effective at lowering global temperatures. Credit: J. Helgason, Shutterstock New analysis of ash clouds created from large volcanic eruptions shows the temporary cooling effects are changed as the environment becomes hotter. On 15 June 1991, the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines erupted with a cataclysmic explosion so violent that the volcano collapsed in on itself. Its gas and ash cloud reached about 40 km into the air, and in the weeks that followed, the cloud entered the stratosphere and spread around the globe. During the next year, the average global temperature dropped by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. A volcano is an opening in the Earth's crust that allows hot, molten rock to escape to the surface. It also allows gas and ash to escape from the high-temperature interior of the earth. Volcanic eruptions play an important role in cooling the planet. The sulfur gases from the volcanic plumes combine with other gases in the atmosphere, and these aerosols scatter solar radiation, reflecting it into space. But scientists are concerned that climate change could make eruptions less effective at reducing global temperatures. This feedback loop, in which climate change could hinder or amplify the ability of volcanic eruptions to combat rising temperatures, is currently not included in future climate scenarios. The VOLCPRO project set out to investigate two different types of eruptions to see if global heating would compromise their cooling effect. Thomas Aubry, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Marie Skodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) fellow on VOLCPRO, wondered whether an eruption like Mount Pinatubo would have had the same cooling effect were it to happen a hundred years later in a world where global temperature risethrough the effects of climate changecontinues unchecked. High intensity eruption The first type of eruption, similar to Mount Pinatubo, is known as a high-intensity eruption. This type emits plumes of ash and particles that reach 25 km or higher into the atmosphere, and contains billions of tons of sulfur gases. Relatively rare, an eruption of this powerful type arises every few decadesMount Pinatubo was one of the largest eruptions the world had seen in a century. The second type is smaller, but more frequent. "We were wondering how climate change will affect these two different types of eruptions, the small ones versus the big ones," said Aubry. The VOLCPRO team modeled historical eruptions showing their influence on climate, and then simulated what would happen if those same eruptions took place in the future, when the climate has changed and global temperatures are hotter. Their simulations relied on the U.K. Met Office's advanced climate model. "Inside that (U.K. Met Office) model, we added another model that can simulate the rise of a volcanic plume and how high this volcanic column can rise depending on, for example, the wind condition during eruption day, or the temperature in the atmosphere on the day, and so on," Aubry said. For the large eruptions, they found that the cooling would be amplified by global warming, "which is kind of good news," said Aubry. "More global warming, more volcanic cooling." In a warmer atmosphere, the plumes of high intensity eruptions will rise even higher, allowing the tiny volcanic particles to travel further. This haze of aerosols will cover a wider area, reflecting more solar radiation and amplifying these volcanoes' temporary cooling effect. The opposite was true of the smaller, more frequent volcanic eruptions. In those cases, the hotter temperatures thwarted the cooling effects from the eruptions. However, before they push to have their findings included in scientists' global climate change projections, Aubry wants to investigate other volcanoes and other models to reinforce their results. VOLCPRO focused on tropical volcanoes, as eruptions around the equator tend to affect climate globally because the volcanic particles spread to both hemispheres easily. By including volcanoes closer to the poles, the researchers will be able to determine how other eruptions respond to higher temperatures. They also want to include more climate models, not just the U.K.'s, to make sure that their findings are robust. Volcanic ash Meanwhile, Elena Maters, a former MSCA fellow now based at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, is working to figure out what happens to volcanic ash in the atmosphere and how it influences cloud formation and, ultimately, climate. Volcanic ash promotes ice formation in the atmosphere, which ultimately replaces water in clouds. Clouds are one of the biggest question marks in climate research, and the more we understand how they are formed and behave, the more precise our models. "The common assumption is that liquid water will turn to ice below zero (degrees)," Maters explained. That is not always the case and small droplets can remain as liquid down to around minus 35 degrees Celsius. But particles in the atmosphere create "catalytic surfaces that make it easier for water molecules to form an ice crystal." Mineral dust, from sand originating in desert regions around the world such as the Sahara and Gobi deserts, is the dominant source of solid particles in the atmosphere. However, there are many other sources, including volcanic ash. The INoVA project sought to determine the extent to which volcanic ash aids ice formation. "On a yearly average, there's about 10 times less volcanic ash (than mineral dust) in the atmosphere," Maters said. "But you can have big eruptions that can quickly, in a matter of hours to days, release huge amounts of particles, and this has been neglected in a lot of climate modeling and even in cases that look at the impacts of volcanoes." Ice formation As part of INoVA, Maters and colleagues investigated the efficacy of volcanic ash in promoting ice formation. They compared this to the ubiquitous mineral dust, testing to see which types were the most successful. Volcanic ash is mostly glass, with a sprinkling of minerals like feldspars and iron oxides. The composition of the ash depends on the make-up of the magma roiling underneath, and the speed at which it is explosively ejected from the volcano, among other things. Previous studies compared only a handful of ash types, said Maters, whose research focuses on volcanic ash reactivity and chemistry. "You can't measure two or three samples and then make a conclusion for all volcanic ash and volcanic eruptions worldwide. They vary hugely in the glass composition, the proportion of glass to minerals, the types of minerals, and so the experiments I did were trying to get to the bottom of the range of efficacy of volcanic ash from different types of eruptions," she said. Maters took nine ash samples with a range of compositions and used them to create nine synthetic samples through melting and rapid cooling. She compared these 18 samples to identify which properties make volcanic ash more active in creating ice. In another study with a group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Maters and colleagues analyzed another 15 volcanic samples to identify their ice-making properties. She suggested that the most ice-active component in volcanic ash is alkali feldspar, a mineral composed of aluminum, silicon and oxygen commonly found in the Earth's crust. "Now, having this understanding of which minerals in ash are good at nucleating (forming) ice," said Maters, "you might be able to predict when a volcano erupts whether that volcano, based on its magma composition, could produce ice-active ash." While her work was previously very laboratory-based, the COVID pandemic has forced her into modeling, she joked. She is now investigating the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull volcanic eruptions in Iceland to see how that introduced ice-forming particles into the atmosphere, and how those particles compared to the abundance of mineral dust. The study will examine how volcanic ash has a role in ice formation when we actually plug it into the atmosphere. It will compare it to other types of particle, such as mineral dust and asks the question, "Does it matter?" As better climate models are developed, "It's a proof of concept to demonstrate that explosive eruptions could be important to include," said Maters. Explore further Climate change will transform cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, study suggests Provided by Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine In Toronto, lockdown measures asked residents to remain at home. Credit: Shutterstock During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese cities have repeatedly imposed lockdowns following their central government's stubborn pursuit of Zero-COVID. But lockdowns weren't limited to authoritarian regimes such as China. Many democracies also imposed some form of lockdowns to curb the virus transmission. How effective were they? Was it worth it? And who was the most adversely affected? These are meaningful questions to reflect on, especially as drastic COVID-19 measures have been lifted as the severity of the virus's impact has waned. We've been studying the disparate responses to COVID-19 undertaken by three major cities: Johannesburg, Toronto and Chicago. We examined the nature and impact of public health measures on various populations in these cities. We found "lockdown" to be an imprecise description for the range of restrictions put in place. Lockdown meant different things in different places, but regardless of the context, they disproportionately afflicted those who are and the disadvantaged. Johannesburg: Traumatic impact South Africa's hard lockdown in 2020lasting from March 27 to April 30was modeled on Wuhan's. Strictly enforced by the announcement of a National State of Disaster, which gave government extraordinary powers, it banned all outdoor activities except for essential services. It was a blunt instrument applied uniformly across the country, although patterns of infection varied widely by region and locality. The lockdown had a devastating impact on the economy, people's livelihoods and food security. On May 1, 2020, South Africa introduced a five-level risk-adjusted strategy. The response remained national in scope, with the National Coronavirus Command Council issuing directives to the provincial governments, which manage health care, and local governments, which provide services in distressed communities. The lockdown may have delayed the first wave by a month or so, but its economic impact was more traumatic than the impact of the illness. This was especially so for those who did not have the option of home-based work. There was a difference between how the lockdown was experienced by, for example, households in informal settlements and middle-class households in the suburbs. Social disparity in South Africa, one of the world's most unequal societies, increased throughout the pandemic. There was a shadow pandemic of violence against women, with South African police reporting a 37 percent increase in gender-based crime. Children in poor communities lost more than a year of schooling, while those from affluent communities moved online. Toronto: Swift and decisive Toronto's early response to COVID-19 was swift and decisive, but not as restrictive as in Johannesburg. Subject mostly to provincial oversight in public health management, the city closed schools and restaurants, canceled professional sporting events and restricted most public life, leaving intact only emergency and essential services. Throughout subsequent waves of surges, Toronto oscillated between opening up and shutting down. This gave the city a reputation of imposing lockdowns that were longer and stricter than most. The lockdown had uneven impacts across Toronto. There were significant differences between rich and poor, office and essential workers, households saddled with caregiving responsibilities and those without. Community responses varied across the region as the impact of the pandemic intensified in health and economic terms. There was a visible class divide in Canada's urban communities. Racialized and lower-income people experienced the lockdown measures as an additional, often existential, burden, while residents in higher-income households experienced temporary inconvenience. Eventually, restrictive measures were enacted across all three levels of government. These restrictions contributed to the so-called "freedom convoy," which occupied parts of Ottawa in protest in 2022. Chicago: Softer measures Comparatively, Chicago had a soft lockdown. The city issued a stay-at-home order from March 20 to April 30, 2020, but exempted many essential activities, including exercising outdoors and shopping for groceries. It closed restaurants, offices and public schools, but many resource-rich private schools remained open and offered in-person instruction. The stay-at-home order had a devastating impact on the economy (especially the service sector) and on Black and Latino neighborhoods, where many residents who worked in essential services lived. For higher-income households, the stay-at-home order brought some inconvenience, but many also enjoyed the benefit of working from homea trend that continued even after the city lifted all restrictions in 2022. Weighing the pros and cons Our preliminary research suggests that the experience of COVID-19 should at least give authorities pause before introducing lockdowns as a blanket strategy. We accept that they were generally intended to "flatten the curve," providing time to prepare for the anticipated waves of infection. The COVID-19 lockdowns were understandable as a public health measure in a time of insecurity and ignorance of the emerging disease threat. But we now know that they most deeply affected the poor and other vulnerable groups, worsening social inequalities. They were often a blunt measures, relying on quickly dated information on virus transmission and implemented at geographic scales that didn't account for how the disease spread. The negative impacts of hard lockdowns may have exceeded their benefits. They intensified social conflict, eroded democratic practice and undermined trust in politics and governance at a time when they were most needed. Lockdowns should be a measure of last resort but, if they are unavoidable in future pandemics, governments must consider more targeted approaches, put in place a support system to cushion the impact on vulnerable citizens and keep democratic ground rules in place. Explore further China Covid outbreak grows with millions under lockdown This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. This self-portrait of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity combines dozens of exposures taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Feb. 3, 2013), plus three exposures taken during Sol 270 (May 10, 2013) to update the appearance of part of the ground beside the rover. Credit: NASA Revealing the potentially habitable climate of ancient Mars is a key part of NASA's mission to explore and understand the unknown, to inspire and benefit humanityand for 10 years, the Curiosity rover has been on the case at the Red Planet. To mark the occasion, here are five of the most significant discoveries that scientists have made using Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite. SAM is one of NASA's most powerful astrobiology instruments on Mars. Designed and built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, SAM searches for and measures organic molecules and light elements, which are important to life as we know it. To complete this task, SAM carries components that scientists use remotely to test Martian samples. 1. Detection of organic compounds on Mars Charles Malespin and Amy McAdam, SAM's principal and deputy principal investigators at Goddard, very much agree on SAM's most significant finding: SAM detected organic molecules in rock samples collected from Mars's Gale Crater. Organic molecules (those containing carbon) could be used as building blocks and "food" for life. Their presence on Mars suggests the planet once could have supported life, if it ever was present. While the isotopes in carbon dioxide and methane measured during some SAM sample analyses could be consistent with ancient biological activity producing the organics observed, importantly there are also non-life-based explanationsfor example, this isotopic signal could be a result of an interaction between ultraviolet light from the sun and carbon dioxide in Mars's atmosphere producing organics that fall to the surface, no life required. Overall, these results motivate ongoing and future studies with SAM and the entire Curiosity suite of instruments, as well as other planetary missions searching for evidence of habitable environments and life beyond Earth. 2. Methane variability Using SAM's Tunable Laser Spectrometer, developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, scientists have detected fluctuations in the abundance of methane in the near-surface atmosphere where Curiosity gathers samples. On Earth, most of the methane present in the atmosphere gets there thanks to processes from life and varies as a result of changes in biological processes, but we do not know whether this is the case on Mars. Curiosity isn't equipped to determine whether or not the methane it has detected originates from biological processes, but the host of Red Planet missions continue to piece together the tantalizing puzzle. 3. Rock formation and exposure age in Gale Crater Curiosity had only been on Mars for a bit more than a year when, thanks to SAM, scientists determined both the formation age and the exposure age of a rock on the surface of another planet for the first time. The rocks around the rim of Gale Crater were formed about 4 billion years ago, then transported as sediments to Yellowknife Bay. "Here they were buried and became sedimentary rocks," McAdam said. From there, weathering and erosion slowly broke down and exposed the rocks to surface radiation about 70 million years ago. Apart from providing insight into Mars's erosion rates, knowing how long a sample was exposed enables scientists to consider possible radiation-induced changes to organic compounds which could affect the ability to identify potential biosignatures. "The age dating experiment was not planned before launch," McAdam said. "But flexibility in the design and operation of SAM, and dedication of a team of scientists and engineers, enabled it to be successfully carried out." 4. Homing in on the history of water on Mars SAM has also shed light on Mars's wetter past and how the planet has dried out. Water is vitally important to life as we know it, and "multiple lines of evidence indicate that the rocks of Gale Crater record a rich history of water," Malespin said. Part of that evidence is the presence of jarosite, a ruddy-yellow mineral only formed in watery environments, McAdam said. An age-dating experiment with SAM and another Curiosity instrument (APXS) found jarosite hundreds of millions of years younger than expected. This finding suggests that even as much of the surface of Mars was becoming dry, some liquid water remained below the surface in the Gale Crater environment, extending the period of habitability for any Martian microbes that might have existed. In addition, analyses by SAM provided insight into the loss of Mars's atmosphere that led its long-term evolution from the early warm and wet state to the current cold and arid state. Water, H 2 O, contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The hydrogen can be swapped for a heavier form of itself, called deuterium. Through measuring the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in its samples, Curiosity uncovered evidence of a history of hydrogen escape and water loss on Mars. 5. Biologically useful nitrogen On Earth, nitrogen is an essential ingredient in the recipe for lifebut not just any nitrogen will do. For most biological processes to make use of it, the nitrogen atoms must first be "fixed": freed from their strong tendency to interact only with themselves. "Fixed nitrogen is required for the synthesis of DNA, RNA, and proteins," Malespin said. "These are the building blocks of life as we know it." SAM detected fixed nitrogen in the form of nitrate in rock samples it analyzed in 2015. The finding indicated that biologically and chemically usable nitrogen was present on Mars 3.5 billion years ago. "While this nitrate could have been produced early in Martian history by thermal shocks from meteor impacts," McAdam said, "it is possible that some could be forming in the Martian atmosphere today." No finding from SAM or Curiosity's other instruments can offer proof positive for past life on Mars, but importantly, these discoveries don't rule it out. Earlier this year, NASA extended Curiosity's mission at least into 2025, allowing the rover and its mobile SAM chemistry lab to stay focused on the tantalizing matter of Mars's habitability. Explore further Curiosity rover takes inventory of key life ingredient on Mars Credit: Shutterstock There's a long history and growing evidence base that the use of performance enhancing drugs such as anabolic-androgenic steroids to build muscle mass and strength is common in the armed forces, including in Australia. This isn't surprising considering the pressures soldiers face to complete missions successfully, achieve elite levels of fitness, and deal with the physical and mental stresses of their profession. The Australian Defense Force (ADF) is also constantly looking for ways to amplify the performance of soldiers, which includes the consideration of technologies both "in" (such as drugs) and "on" (for example exoskeletons) soldiers. In 2016, the Department of Defense also created the Human Performance Research Network, which is focused on enhancing the physical and cognitive performance of military personnel. At the same time, the ADF has adopted parts of the World Anti-Doping Codea code developed to govern drug use in sportto manage the governance of human enhancing drugs within the military. Under the code, using steroids isn't allowed. But considering the military is constantly looking for means to create "super soldiers," should we consider allowing the use of steroids and other enhancement drugs? The answer to this question isn't clear cut. But there's no reason to believe the use of enhancement drugs such as steroids by soldiers is, in and of itself, unethical. Are the ethics of using steroids on the battlefield the same as those in sport? In sport, critics of drug use are concerned with the integrity of the contest. Many consider a level playing field in sport to be an essential element of the fairness of a contest. But there's a fundamental difference of purpose between a drug policy designed to protect the integrity of sport and one to protect the integrity of armed forces. The thought that one side in a battle shouldn't employ technologies unavailable to their opponents is irrelevant to the conduct of war. Two things matter for the integrity of a military conflict, according to traditional "just war theory." Firstly, that the cause is just, or fair. Within just war theory, self-defense is generally regarded as one such just cause. And second, that the means employed to wage war discriminate between innocents and genuine combatants, and are proportionate. The use of performance enhancing drugs therefore does not, as such, affect whether a war is fair, at least according to the just war theory. Risks and benefits The use of steroids is a serious issue when considering the health of soldiers. There's evidence people who use steroids have a higher risk of various physical and psychological harms, including cardiovascular disease and steroid dependence. However, there are several issues with using such a simple dichotomy. First of all, life is generally full of risks, and simply avoiding them would mean we would live very sheltered and restricted lives. Second, it has been well-established that many people use illicit drugs (including steroids) for pleasurable and functional reasons without necessarily experiencing serious harms. For these people, the benefits of using illicit substances outweigh their potential harms. Researched published today debunks some of the stereotypes around steroid use. It's not only young men seeking to get "ripped" who use themand they don't necessarily lead to aggression. https://t.co/5sh6AFn40I The Conversation (@ConversationEDU) May 19, 2019 The benefits of steroids are obvious. Their use is associated with an increase in muscle strength and mass, reduced risk of injuries, and quicker recovery from injuries. The use of battlefield medicine and technological developments (such as armor) have long sought to protect the physical and mental health of soldiers. For example, the prescription drug Modafinil, a drug licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy, is approved for use by the Republic of Singapore Air Force, and has been tested for military application in both the U.S. and the U.K. Individuals who are sleep deprived have decreased psychological and physical capabilities. Soldiers often operate over long hours and are deprived of sleep. So using stimulants like Modafinil can support maintaining alertness, cognitive function, judgment, and situation awareness in sleep-deprived soldiers. In a similar manner, steroids could potentially prove useful in protecting the bodies of soldiers. Having said this, special consideration needs to be given to the link between steroid use and aggression. A study published in 2021 provides evidence of an increase, although small, in self-reported aggression in healthy males following steroid use. However, the relationship between aggression and steroid use is complex, and there are generally other mediating factors (such as other substance use and personality traits). Regardless, the fact that steroid use may increase aggression when split-second decisions are required on the battlefield can be morally significant given these are often matters of life and death. Consent and coercion On the one hand, steroid use is a matter of personal and individual choice. But on the other, there are tremendous social and cultural pressures to perform and succeed. Competitive environments particularly, such as the military, have the potential to become highly stressful. As such, soldiers might well feel coerced by their peers and their superiors to undertake bodily or performance enhancement. If steroids were to be allowed in the military, this would require informed consent. But considering these pressures, satisfying the requirements of voluntary and informed consent for the use of illicit enhancement drugs within the military might well be challenging. Such consent will often be undermined due to the pressures on soldiers to perform and succeed within the military. Not unethical, but studies needed There's no reason to believe the use of enhancement drugs such as steroids is, in and of itself, unethical. But there are concerns, such as the long-term health of soldiers, and any possible effects these drugs might have upon the behavior of soldiers when in combat situations and when they return to society. What's required are robust empirical studies to determine the extent of the dangers. Our list of such concerns isn't intended to be exhaustive, but rather represents a list of issues that need to be addressed when developing any regulatory frameworks for the use of enhancement drugs in a military context. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. By synthesizing a semiconducting material containing tin-based nanoparticles known as quantum dots, an international team of researchers including KAUST achieved impressive light-power conversion. Credit: KAUST/Heno Hwang Tiny crystals, known as quantum dots, have enabled an international team to achieve a quantum efficiency exceeding 100 percent in the photocurrent generated in a hybrid inorganic-organic semiconductor. Perovskites are exciting semiconductors for light-harvesting applications and have already shown some impressive performances in solar cells. But improvements in photo-conversion efficiency are necessary to take this technology to a broader market. Light comes in packets of energy known as photons. When a semiconductor absorbs a photon, the electromagnetic energy is transferred to a negatively charged electron and its positively charged counterpart, known as a hole. An electric field can sweep these particles in opposite directions, thereby allowing a current to flow. This is the basic operation of a solar cell. It might sound simple, but optimizing the quantum efficiency, or getting as many electron-hole pairs from the incoming photons as possible, has been a long-standing goal. One cause of inefficiency is that if the photon has more energy than is needed to create the electron-hole pair, the excess energy is usually lost as heat. But nanomaterials offer a solution. Small particles, such as nanocrystals or quantum dots, can convert high-energy photons into more than one electron-hole pair. Jun Yin and Omar Mohammed from KAUST worked with Yifan Chen and Mingjie Li from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and their colleagues to demonstrate this so-called multiple exciton generation (MEG) in nanocrystals of tin-lead halide perovskite. "We demonstrated a photocurrent quantum efficiency exceeding 100 percent by harnessing MEG in the perovskite nanocrystal devices," says Yin. In the past, MEG has been observed in perovskite nanocrystals with a large bandgap: that is, those semiconductors that can only absorb high-energy photons. Narrower-bandgap materials present a greater challenge because the excited electron-hole pairs relax, or cool, too fast for them to be extracted in a functioning solar cell device. "Efficient MEG in narrower-bandgap perovskite nanocrystals and verification of their inherent MEG in practical optical devices have not been reported," says Yin. Chen, Yin and the team synthesized a semiconducting material composed of tiny particles of formamidinium tinlead iodide perovskitemade using small amounts of tinembedded in tin-free FAPbI 3 . The team believe that the introduction of tin helps to slow the "cooling." "We will be able to further optimize the perovskite nanocrystal by altering its composition to obtain higher MEG performance and improved the light-power conversion," says Yin. The research was published in Nature Photonics. Explore further Helping semiconductors find a cooler way to relax More information: Yifan Chen et al, Multiple exciton generation in tinlead halide perovskite nanocrystals for photocurrent quantum efficiency enhancement, Nature Photonics (2022). Journal information: Nature Photonics Yifan Chen et al, Multiple exciton generation in tinlead halide perovskite nanocrystals for photocurrent quantum efficiency enhancement,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01006-x Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Think the intense heat baking the nation and much of the world this summer seems like an apocalyptic blockbuster? Just wait for the sequel. Already occurring more often, heat waves are forecast to increase in potency and duration because of climate change, say scientists, who fear the globe is ill-prepared to handle the punishing toll. "I can't imagine what these heat waves will be like in the future," University of Georgia meteorologist Marshall Shepherd told U.S. TODAY. Temperatures in the U.S. could rise 3-12 degrees by the end of the century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With every increase, scientists say extreme temperatures and heat waves will have a brutal impact on daily life, human health, the workforce and transportation. "We're absolutely not prepared. How could anyone prepare?" said Catherine McKenna, former minister of environment and climate change in Canada and chair of a new United Nations climate task force. "Our infrastructure is just not designed for extreme heat, and the temperatures are just going up." There is "literally no question" that heat waves are becoming more intense and more frequent in the U.S. and around the world because of climate change, Penn State University meteorologist Michael Mann said. "Sure, heat waves happen naturally," he said. "But we would not be seeing this record heat wave, or the unprecedented 'heat dome' last summer, if not for human-caused warming from fossil-fuel burning." How hot is it? On July 19, the temperature in London hit an all-time record high of 104.5 degrees, overheating rail lines and melting a runway at Luton Airport. More than 9,000 warm temperature records were broken around the world in July, nearly 6,000 of those in the U.S., according to the National Climate Data Center. Texas is responsible for hundreds of those. It was the hottest July on record in Houston, Dallas and Galveston. Abilene set a daily high record of 110 degrees for three days in a row in late July, just one degree short of its all-time record high. State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said it could wind up being the state's warmest summer on record. Given future climate warming projections, this summer is "likely to be one of the coolest summers of the rest of our lives," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said last week. Remember the Dust Bowl? It's hotter than that We have even surpassed the heat that helped create the historic Dust Bowl, said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The Dust Bowl occurred across the central and southern plains in the 1930s, a combination of extreme heat, droughts and farming practices that helped create massive dust storms. Meehl and colleagues compared heat records set then to records today. In any given decade, chances of a record high or record low should be equal, he said, but in the 1930s, the odds leaned heavily toward heat records, 1.7 to 1. That ratio remained highest throughout the 20th century, and many heat records set that decade have only recently been broken. But the odds of breaking warm temperature records started climbing in the 2000s, increasing every decade, Meehl said. Since 2020, the chances of breaking a warm temperature record versus a cool temperature record are 2.4 to 1. People will sometimes cite the 1930s to say there's no climate change, but the evidence shows it's even hotter now, he said. And even the Dust Bowl can be partly blamed on human influence. Thousands of acres grassland were plowed up for farmland, then the plants died during the drought, he said, allowing exposed drought-baked soil to rise into dust storms. How will heat waves increase? Every little bit of warming will increase the frequency and intensity of heat waves and heat extremes, and droughts also are expected to increase, said Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. The heat waves and droughts will amplify each other, Kirchmeier-Young said, growing stronger and increasing the risk of wildfires. Heat waves that used to happen every 10 years already happen three times more often, said Claudia Tebaldi, an earth scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. If the global average temperature rises to 2.7 degrees above pre-industrial temperaturesforecast to happen over the next 10-15 yearsthose heat waves could occur four times more often. More concerning: Increases in the most intense heat waves over that time period. She said heat waves that once occurred every 50 years are five times more frequent now and will become "almost nine times more frequent." How can the world prepare? Even though most heat-related deaths are preventable, too many people already suffer and die in the heat, said Kristie Ebi, professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment. "Urgent and immediate investments are needed." From 2008 to 2017 in the U.S., an average of 1,400-2,000 deaths each year in the U.S. were associated with extreme heat, a group of University of Pennsylvania physicians led by cardiologist Sameed Khatana concluded. Worldwide such deaths nearly doubled over the past 20 years among those over 65, according to the World Health Organization. Heat also exacerbates existing inequalities, putting society's most vulnerable at risk, including the elderly, children and those who work outside, McKenna said. Cities are even more prone to extreme heat because of the "urban heat island" effect, Mann said. "Yesterday in Philadelphia, the heat index might have been as high as 110 degrees F. That's downright dangerous. And unfortunately, cities are typically home to low-income communities and people who don't have access to the luxuries of air conditioning and other mitigating options." Being prepared for the future requires new building materials, more efficient cooling and lifesaving warning and response systems, Ebi said. Extreme heat is not only deadly but incredibly expensive, Raimondo said when announcing the administration's new website for extreme heat awareness, Heat.gov. Her agency estimates the nation loses an estimated $100 billion a year when outdoor workers can't do their jobs because it's too hot. Infrastructure is at risk The risks and potential consequences of extreme heat events in areas where they are rare have been "severely underestimated," UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said. Now climate change is "increasing the stakes." Extreme heat puts stress on aviation, bridges, railways, roads, schools and energy systems, said Kim Roddis, a professor in civil and environmental engineering at George Washington University. Steel, concrete and other solids expand in higher temperatures, causing roads to heave and buckle and rail lines to become misaligned. Trains must run at slower speeds to reduce the force to make it less likely for the tracks to buckle. Aging infrastructure compounds the problem, Roddis said. More than 90% of the nation's bridges and highways were built before the latest warming trend. At the same time, they're reaching the end of their design lifespans and little maintenance has been done, she said. "It's like watching people run the family car with no oil." Meanwhile, the question of just how much the Earth will warm remains unanswered, McKenna said. "That's literally determined by us. The world is committed to staying below 2 degrees (Celsius) and striving for 1.5, but we're not on track for that." At a climate conference in Berlin in July, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres challenged world leaders to "treat adaptation with the urgency it needs." "This has to be the decade of decisive climate action," he warned. "We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands." (c)2022 USA Today Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Credit: Dmitry Bogdanov, CC BY 3.0 One sweltering afternoon this spring, Stephen Kruse trekked along a dry creek bed with a backpack full of fossils. An amateur enthusiast, Kruse has been interested in dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures since he hunted for rocks with his brother as a kid. That afternoon, he was hiking by himself near the North Sulphur River, about 80 miles northeast of Dallas. It's an area he'd combed several times. He was getting tired. As the day got longer, Kruse searched for a way back to his white Chevy Suburban. He decided to look for a shortcut a quarter mile farther out. "Best decision I ever made," he said. Just 100 yards down the rocky stream bed, he saw it: a 5- to 6-inch black vertebra, a piece of a prehistoric creature's spine. Kruse followed the path upstream, searching for the rest of the creature. "When I turned this corner," Kruse recalled, "he was just sitting there, coming right out of the wall." Kruse had found fossilized bones belonging to a mosasaur, a 30-foot marine lizard that ruled the seas around 80 million years ago. Recently, paleontologists from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science dug the fossils out of the creek bed's soft, claylike rock. They excavated parts of the mosasaur's skull, lower jawbones and several vertebrae from its spine. This is important work for the scientists: Even though mosasaurs aren't around today, learning more about the past can give us a window into the present. Finding out what these creatures were eating and how they interacted with their environment can help paleontologists refine their picture of what life used to be like millions of years ago. "You get this nice history of why things are the way they are here, by building that history back to your time," said Dori Contreras, a curator of paleobotany at the Perot Museum. A fossil-rich river In the 1920s, farmers had a problem with the North Sulphur River. The river's bends and curves were causing farmlands to flood when it rained. So, the river was channelized, or straightened out, to help the water drain more quickly. Channelizing the North Sulphur River did more than drain the swamp. It affected how water eroded the edges of the river bank. To this day, rainwater quickly breaks down the soft rock, revealing pieces of the past. "It's perfect for fossil hunters, because when it rains, this thing will flood, rip all this stuff out," Kruse said. "And because it's cut at a grade, the very next day, the water's gone, and you can just come out here and hike." Kruse said he finds fossils often in the creeks near the river valley. Many have been from mosasaurs. That's not surprising to Ron Tykoski, the Perot Museum's director of paleontology and curator of vertebrate paleontology. He says 80 million years ago, pretty much all of central Texas was underwater. The shallow, warm seawater and abundance of food in the area created the perfect habitat for creatures like mosasaurs. Great white sharks of prehistoric times Tykoski said mosasaurs were like the great white sharks or killer whales of prehistoric times. As top marine predators, they ate turtles, sharks and even each other. "Imagine a 30-foot swimming pointy-nosed Komodo dragon with flippers and a forked tail," he said. The mosasaur fossils Kruse found were jutting out of the rocky creek bed. Once Kruse realized the bones could be more than a couple of vertebrae, he ran uphill and called Mike Polcyn, whom Kruse knew was a paleontologist and mosasaur expert at Southern Methodist University. Polcyn helped Kruse contact Tykoski at the Perot Museum. Tykoski and his team got permission from the Upper Trinity Regional Water District to retrieve the fossils. Tykoski checked out the area in June to get an idea of how many fossils were there and how easy they'd be to remove. He realized the soft rock would be fairly easy to peel away with picks and shovels, revealing the fossils beneath. Fossil extraction 101 The excavation began mid-July at a dry creek bed lined with claylike brown and gray rock. Each day, Tykoski, along with paleontologists from the Perot, arrived early to beat the heat. They were joined by a small entourage, including a photographer from the museum, a videographer and Kruse. Removing remnants of a 30-foot lizard from a creek bed is no easy task. To get the fossils out, Tykoski and his team had to dig into the rock using picks and shovels. They shot glue made of plastic and acetone into the bone cracks to keep the fossils from breaking apart. They also used finer tools like probes and paintbrushes to carefully pry out pieces of gray rock once they got closer to the exposed fossils. To distinguish rock from bone, Tykoski and his team tapped a rocky area lightly with a metal probe. If it was soft rock, it peeled away from the creek bed with a small amount of force, soundless. If it was bone, it made a sharp, metallic clink against the probe. Once the fossils were mostly exposed, the team dug down and under them, making something of a mushroom shape, said Mariah Slovacek, the Paleo Lab collections manager at the Perot who was onsite. When they had their mushroom, the team made casts called "field jackets" over the fossils to hold everything in place, similar to setting a broken arm or leg. Each field jacket was made of burlap dipped in plaster. Once the plaster hardened, the team could flip it over and carry the fossils in sections up the creek bed. The entire process took about six days. Tykoski said digs like this happen sporadically. Sometimes, he'll get a bunch of calls about fossils exposed after spring rains. Other times, he goes years without finding anything worth exploring. Contreras said she loved every part of the fieldwork. "It's like a puzzle: The whole time you're working, you never know where it's going to lead," she said. "And so, as you dig further back, you discover more, you find more." Rithvik Shroff, 17, is a high school summer intern who was invited to the dig. He said maintaining stamina and staying cool was difficult, but seeing the fossils come out of the ground made it worth it. "I mean, you see them in the museum, but then actually coming out here and seeing how they dig it up What it's like?" Shroff said. "It's really cool." The present, sitting on the past Tykoski and his team removed several mosasaur bones from the creek bed last week. But they're not done excavating this lizard. On their initial investigation, Tykoski and his team noticed more marine lizard bones protruding into the creek bed. But they couldn't get to them without trampling the jawbones they'd already found. Tykoski said the team plans to return in the fall with better equipment and a refreshed game plan to pull back the creek bed and reveal the rest of the mosasaur. Once they've got all the fossils, they can compare them to other mosasaur skeletons to see how the creatures evolved over time, or study this mosasaur's teeth to determine what it was eating amid a prehistoric landscape of creatures. This isn't the firstor secondmosasaur that Perot paleontologists have uncovered in the Dallas area. It's a prime example of the vivid remnants of our prehistoric pasts lying underneath us. "We have a wonderful, rich natural history story, right in the palm of our hands," Tykoski said. In the meantime, the fossils are at the Perot Museum's collection facility, snug in their field jackets. Tykoski said he won't be able to see them again until he and the team remove the remaining rock from the fossils and begin their study. "You get to peek at the Christmas presents," said Tykoski, "and then you have to put them away again." 2022 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Klein acknowledged that many users had not understood his joke. A red ball of spicy fire with luminous patches glowing menacingly against a black background. This, prominent French scientist Etienne Klein declared, was the latest astonishing picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun. Fellow Twitter users marveled at the details on the picture purportedly taken by the telescope, which has thrilled the world with images of distant galaxies going back to the birth of the universe. "This level of detail... A new world is revealed every day," he gushed. But in fact, as Klein later revealed, the picture was not of the intriguing star just over four light-years from the Sun but a far more modest slice of the lip-sizzling Spanish sausage chorizo. Photo de Proxima du Centaure, l'etoile la plus proche du Soleil, situee a 4,2 annee-lumiere de nous. Elle a ete prise par le JWST. Ce niveau de details Un nouveau monde se devoile jour apres jour. pic.twitter.com/88UBbHDQ7Z Etienne KLEIN (@EtienneKlein) July 31, 2022 "According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth," he said. Klein acknowledged that many users had not understood his joke which he said was simply aimed at encouraging us "to be wary of arguments from people in positions of authority as well as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images". However, at a time when battling fake news is of paramount importance for the scientific community, many Twitter users indicated they were unamused by Klein, director of research at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and a radio show producer. On Wednesday, he said sorry to those who were misled. "I come to present my apologies to those who may have been shocked by my prank, which had nothing original about it," he said, describing the post as a "scientist's joke". He was shortly back on surer ground posting on Twitter an image of the famous Cartwheel Galaxy taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This time, he assured users, the photo was real. Explore further Webb telescope captures colorful Cartwheel Galaxy 2022 AFP Schematic representation of two analytical frameworks for dissecting wheat yield. Credit: Nature Food (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-022-00512-z The disruptions in global trading markets resulting from the war in Ukraine, among other causes, have focused public attention on the issue of securing a sufficient supply of high-quality foods for the global population. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are searching for modern methods to boost global harvests and ensure global food security. Wheat plays a special role in these efforts. In terms of cultivated cropland, wheat is one of the most important grain varieties and plays a significant role as a basic food. It is grown in more than one hundred countries. However, the supply of wheat is inadequate, and many developing and emerging countries are highly dependent on imports. Senthold Asseng, Professor of Digital Agriculture at TUM, has been working with international research teams to study scenarios and models that could lead the way out of the wheat crisis. Wheat crisis threatens food security and global peace Fluctuations in prices on global markets and in harvests have a major impact on the nutrition situation for many people worldwide. These supply bottlenecks have negative effects on the quality of life of the population that can undermine social stability. "The current global wheat crisis shows how important wheat is for the world. In many countries food security is linked to national security, civil unrest, migration and even war," says Prof. Asseng, the director of the World Agricultural Systems CenterHans Eisenmann Forum for Agricultural Sciences at TUM in Weihenstephan. "Wheat yields are stagnating in many parts of the world. Especially with the rising global population, steady increases in yields will be needed over the coming decades to secure global food needs," warns Asseng. Finding and utilizing hidden breeding resources Prof. Asseng is working intensively on potential increases in wheat yields. As a scientist, his work is not limited to theoretical calculations and models. His research also engages directly with nature through field experiments, including work with regional wheat varieties. "We are approaching the biophysical limits of wheat yields. So we need to understand the functions of crops to boost yields further," says the scientist. He firmly believes that the genetic resources of wheat are considerable. In his experiments, he has identified the unused genetic resources in this cultivated plant with the potential to increase yields around the world. He speaks of a genetic yield gap of 51%. The goal is to mobilize this breeding gap. This can be done by targeted breeding that will utilize the yield potential of wheat and thus lead to richer harvests. Genetics are important, but only an interdisciplinary approach will achieve the goal Prof. Asseng is certain: "Genetics alone cannot solve the global nutrition problems. We can achieve this only with an interdisciplinary approach through the application of genetics combined with soil and climate science as well as research into cultivated plants." The use of advanced modern breeding instruments and the continual improvement of agricultural crop production through optimized plant and soil management will achieve the urgently needed increases in the global wheat harvest. This can then bring about an effective solution for an adequate worldwide supply of food in the future. More information: Nimai Senapati et al, Global wheat production could benefit from closing the genetic yield gap, Nature Food (2022). Nimai Senapati et al, Global wheat production could benefit from closing the genetic yield gap,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-022-00540-9 Matthew Paul Reynolds et al, A wiring diagram to integrate physiological traits of wheat yield potential, Nature Food (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-022-00512-z Journal information: Nature Food Provided by Technical University Munich Credit: CC0 Public Domain In 2014, an object crashed into the ocean just off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Data collected at the time indicated that the meteorite just might be an interstellar object, and if that's true, then it's only the third such object known (after 'Oumuamua and Borisov), and the first known to exist on Earth. Launching an undersea expedition to find it would be a long shot, but the scientific payoff could be enormous. Dubbed CNEOS 2014-01-08, the candidate interstellar object is believed to have measured about a half-meter wide, and its potentially interstellar origins were first recognized by then graduate student Amir Siraj and Harvard professor Avi Loeb. Using catalog data regarding the object's trajectory, Siraj and Loeb concluded that it might be from beyond our solar system due to its unusually high heliocentric velocityin other words, it was moving at speeds that suggest it may not be bound within the sun's gravity well. There's a catch, however. The data used to measure the object's impact with Earth came from a U.S. Department of Defense spy satellite, designed to monitor Earthly military activities. As such, the exact error values of the measurement are a carefully guarded secretthe U.S. military is wary of allowing the precise capabilities of their satellite to become public domain information. But without these details, much of the scientific community understandably remains unwilling to officially classify CNEOS 2014-01-08 as an interstellar object. Siraj and Loeb's paper therefore remains unpublished, having not yet passed peer review. Their claim, however, was bolstered in April 2022, when the U.S. Space Force's Space Operations Command's Chief Scientist, Joel Mozer, reviewed the classified data in question and "confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory." 6/ "I had the pleasure of signing a memo with @ussfspoc's Chief Scientist, Dr. Mozer, to confirm that a previously-detected interstellar object was indeed an interstellar object, a confirmation that assisted the broader astronomical community." pic.twitter.com/PGlIOnCSrW U.S. Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) April 7, 2022 While the official scientific classification of CNEOS 2014-01-08 seems doomed to remain in limbo for the time being, the statement by the U.S. Space Force was enough to convince Siraj and Loeb of its interstellar origin, and they have now moved on to proposing possible ways to find the object and study it up close. Much of the meteorite would have burned up during its descent into Earth's atmosphere, likely leaving only fragments behind, scattered across the ocean floor. However, not all hope is lost, as the tracking data from the satellite, combined with wind and ocean current data, can provide a reasonable search area of just 10km by 10km. More importantly, the fragments are expected to be magnetic, so a ship trawling with a large magnet could potentially scoop up the minuscule meteorite fragments from the ocean floor. Siraj and Loeb propose to do just that, and have teamed up with an ocean technology consulting company to make it happen. Credit: Universe Today In an interview with Universe Today last year, Loeb explained that such a search could offer us "the opportunity to actually put our hands on the relic and figure out whether it's natural, whether it's a rock, or whether, you know, a small fraction of those [interstellar objects] might be artificial." Loeb has been vocal in recent years about the potential for interstellar objects like CNEOS 2014-01-08, 'Oumuamua, and Borisov to be artificial objects created by extra-terrestrial intelligence. As head of the Galileo Project, the search for evidence of intelligent life in the Universe is one of his core research areas. But his more extravagant claims have invited criticism from some of his peers in the astronomical community. In the case of CNEOS 2014-01-08, however, Loeb isn't going so far as to suggest it's an alien artifact. "This result does not imply that the first interstellar meteor was artificially made by a technological civilization and not natural in origin," he and Siraj write in their most recent paper outlining the ocean expedition. But it's clear that Loeb thinks it wouldn't hurt to go find the object and take a look. Even if it is just a rockwhich is by far the most likely explanationit'll tell us a lot about the composition of rocky matter beyond our own solar system, and that itself would be a valuable bit of new data. Explore further Possible evidence of an extrasolar object striking the Earth in 2014 More information: Amir Siraj, Abraham Loeb, Tim Gallaudet, An Ocean Expedition by the Galileo Project to Retrieve Fragments of the First Large Interstellar Meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08. arXiv:2208.00092v1 [astro-ph.EP], Amir Siraj, Abraham Loeb, Tim Gallaudet, An Ocean Expedition by the Galileo Project to Retrieve Fragments of the First Large Interstellar Meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08. arXiv:2208.00092v1 [astro-ph.EP], arxiv.org/abs/2208.00092 Amir Siraj, Abraham Loeb, The 2019 Discovery of a Meteor of Interstellar Origin. arXiv:1904.07224v4 [astro-ph.EP], arxiv.org/abs/1904.07224 Photo: The Canadian Press Pipes at a natural gas plant near Fort St. John, B.C., on October 11, 2018. A coalition of environmental groups is calling on the federal government to reject any proposals to build export facilities for liquefied natural gas on Canada's East Coast.THE CANADIAN PRESS Jonathan Hayward A coalition of environmental groups is calling on Ottawa to reject any proposals to build export facilities for liquefied natural gas on Canada's East Coast, saying such projects will produce "climate-wrecking emissions." The coalition, which includes the Sierra Club Canada Foundation and Climate Action Network Canada, issued a statement Thursday that also takes aim at the financial risks associated with multibillion-dollar ventures that could take several years to come on stream. "On the world stage, Canadian politicians deliver passionate speeches about climate action, but their words will be revealed as empty promises if the federal government approves new fossil gas infrastructure on the East Coast," Kelsey Lane, climate policy co-ordinator for the Halifax-based Ecology Action Centre, said in the statement. On Wednesday, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly told a chamber of commerce audience in Montreal that Germany is looking to invest in LNG projects in Canada. Calgary-based Pieridae Energy has been promoting construction of a multibillion-dollar LNG export terminal in Goldboro, N.S., since 2011, but it put the project on hold last summer because of "cost pressures and time constraints" linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company, which could not be reached for comment, had planned to get natural gas from Western Canada via pipeline and then ship it by tanker to European customers. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, however, the demand for natural gas has grown amid concerns the Russians will cut off its supply to Europe, and Germany in particular. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is expected to visit Canada later this month, the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement in June. Published reports have suggested Scholz is keen to get more natural gas from Canada. Earlier this year, Pieridae CEO Alfred Sorensen issued a statement saying the invasion of Ukraine has prompted countries to look for secure supplies of natural gas. "Pieridaes proposed net-zero LNG export project off the East Coast continues to make sense, and conversations with a broad list of stakeholders are ongoing," he said on May 12. "Many want to see Canada offer leadership in a meaningful way to support a long-term solution by providing Canadian natural gas overseas in an environmentally and socially responsible manner." Gretchen Fitzgerald, national programs director for the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, said the federal government is using the war in Ukraine to "hoodwink" the public into believing that LNG projects are a necessary evil. "LNG export plants will blow our chances of meeting emissions targets," Fitzgerald said in a statement. "And all this for projects that have no hope of coming online faster than truly clean alternatives, such as wind, solar and energy efficiency." Meanwhile, dormant plans for other LNG terminals in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have also experienced renewed interest as of late. On June 29, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs said a liquefied natural gas facility in Saint John, N.B., could be modified to reverse its flow and help reduce Europe's reliance on fossil fuels from Russia. The plant currently imports liquefied natural gas from the United States, but it could be retrofitted to export gas in about three years, he said. Higgs said the owner of the Saint John plant, the Spanish firm Repsol, has already talked to the federal government about transforming the facility into an export terminal. But that would be a mistake, said Louise Comeau, director of climate change at the Conservation Council of New Brunswick. "Canada has promised to cap greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector," she said in the statement released Thursday. "Any new methane gas infrastructure must comply with the cap. We can't continue to let the fossil gas industry weaken climate policy in Canada." The coalition says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the world's leading scientific authority on the subject has stated that carbon emissions must start falling before 2025 if the planet is to avoid the worst-case scenario for climate change. Credit: NASA A study into the zinc isotope composition of meteorites by researchers from the University of St Andrews suggests that material from the outer solar system was an important source of volatile elements during the formation of the Earth. The question of the origin of the volatile elements present on Earth is fundamental to understanding the evolution of our planet. The study, carried out by researchers in the University's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, in collaboration with workers at the Institut de Physique du globe de Paris and Universite Clermont Auvergne shows, for the first time, that there is a difference between the zinc isotope composition of meteorites that formed in the inner solar system and those formed in the outer solar system. Dr. Paul Savage, senior lecturer at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, explains: "This is important because zinc is a moderately volatile elementand to date, the most volatile element in which such unique isotopic signatures have been detected in meteorites. If we compare these meteorite compositions to Earth's zinc isotope composition, we see that Earth plots between the two groups and therefore Earth's zinc inventory is a mixture of both inner and outer solar system material. This points to both reservoirs as important sources of Earth's volatile element inventory." The findings imply that the Earth must have accreted five to six percent of its global mass from material supposedly from the outer solar systemthe part of the solar system beyond the "snow line," where the giant planets are dominated by gases and volatiles. Dr. Savage said: "Meteorites, as well as being fascinating and beautiful extra-terrestrial objects, are important scientific samples because their chemistries reflect the earliest solids that formed in our solar system. We can use the compositions of meteorites to tell us about the processes and timescales of planet formation, as well as providing us insights into the types and sources of materials that accreted to form our own planet. "One particularly crucial question asks from where did Earth receive its volatile elements? These are the sorts of elements that are crucial to life: did Earth get all of its volatile elements from the outer solar system, where today the gas and ice giant planets orbit, or is the drier, hotter inner solar system still an important source?" The study shows that, even though only a small proportion of Earth's total mass can come from the outer solar system, this material needs to be volatile-enriched, delivering around a third of Earth's total zinc budget. Elements more volatile than zinc were likely even more enriched in this outer solar system material, and therefore this reservoir was an even more significant source for Earth's volatile element inventory. "Studies like ours add new insights into how and from where planets accrete the sorts of elements that are crucial to supporting lifebut more broadly, it gives us more clues as to how our early solar system behaved. We can apply these findings to understand how other planetary systems behave and if newly discovered exoplanets might have the sort of elements that can also support life." In future, this isotope system can be applied to other bodies in the solar system from which we have samples, such as the moon and Mars, to place further constraints on the transport and delivery of moderately volatile elements in the solar system. Furthermore, these isotope variations can be used to work out the sorts of stellar environments that generated these elements and injected them into the pre-solar nebula. Explore further Martian meteorite upsets planet formation theory More information: Paul S. Savage et al, Zinc isotope anomalies in primitive meteorites identify the outer solar system as an important source of Earth's volatile inventory, Icarus (2022). Journal information: Icarus Paul S. Savage et al, Zinc isotope anomalies in primitive meteorites identify the outer solar system as an important source of Earth's volatile inventory,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2022.115172 Credit: Petr Kratochvil/Public Domain San Diego leaders have declared a war on natural gas to dramatically shrink the city's carbon footprint and reach net-zero emission by 2035. The City Council voted unanimously this week to approve a dramatically overhauled climate action plan that calls for banning the fossil fuel in new construction while also electrifying nearly all existing buildings over the next 12 years. Dozens of cities across California have restricted installation of gas stoves and heaters in new construction, including Encinitas. However, retrofitting entire neighborhoods would be a massive undertaking for which there is little precedent. The new climate blueprint, authored by Mayor Todd Gloria and his team, calls for drafting a new building ordinance as early as next year. Details on electrifying existing homes, office towers and other structures have yet to be hammered out. "The window to reverse the dangerous trends of climate change is rapidly closing, and this moment demands aggressive action," said Gloria at Tuesday's public hearing. "Implementing this more ambitious plan won't be easy, but the financial cost and human consequences of inaction are almost unimaginable." Targeting local sources of natural gas represents a sharp departure from the previous iteration of the plan, which relied more heavily on state and federal programs to curb city emissions. In fact, phasing out natural gas from existing buildings, including all those owned by the city, represents nearly 40 percent of all greenhouse-gas reductions in the plan by 2035, according to city documents. Under the previous plan, drafted in 2015 by then-mayor Kevin Faulconer, strategies to green-up buildings represented less than 2 percent of total cuts. "There's one action within this that outweighs every other strategy, and that is the measure to phase out 90 percent of natural gas from existing buildings," Jordan More, fiscal and policy analyst at the city's Office of the Independent Budget Analyst, said at the public meeting. City leaders recognized the major lift ahead. Councilman Joe LaCava pledged to help shepherd the new goals, calling on city staff to draft a detailed implementation and funding plan in coming months. "We will meet our targets," he said ahead of Tuesday's vote. "I commit to working closely with the mayor's office on the timelines." Many environmental activists lauded the city for its bold vision, while others were more reserved. "The City Council is giving us hope that the city is serious now, but we have to wait to celebrate until we see real action," said Nicole Capretz, executive director of the San Diego-based Climate Action Campaign. The consequences of banning natural gas in new construction are expected to be "slight," eliminating about 65 out of 32,000 residential construction jobs in the region, according to an independent analysis conducted by the Building Electrification Institute. However, the broader vision of decarbonizing nearly all of the existing buildings in the city will have a "much more significant impact," according to the report. The city has about 6,200 jobs associated with the distribution of natural gas, including electricians, plumbers and engineers. While some workers will likely be able to secure employment elsewhere, about 1,900 specialized workers could find themselves in a tough spot. Still, retrofitting buildings with electric stoves and heat pumps would create "thousands" of new jobs, the report found. Ensuring a smooth transition will likely require years of planning that allows workers to gain skills in other sectors, such as water and sewer. "The city of San Diego climate action plan must include an action job plan, stronger worker protections and workforce standards to create good green energy jobs," said Cristina Marquez, an organizer with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 569. Many strategies to rein in climate pollution in the updated plan remained largely unchanged. Officials are still looking to ramp up investments in local solar and other renewable energy projects through the city's publicly run alternative to San Diego Gas & Electric, known as San Diego Community Power. The so-called community choice aggregation program launched last year and serves customers in San Diego, Chula Vista, La Mesa, Encinitas and Imperial Beach. The city is also doubling down on a plan to reduce driving. Its vision calls for boosting housing density and overhauling streets to encourage half of all commuters to walk, bike and ride public transit by 2035although the city has tweaked its targets a bit, aiming for less transit and bicycle use and more walking. However, getting people out of their cars has been a major challenge across sprawling Southern California. The recent failure of a proposed tax hike in San Diego County, spearheaded by labor and green groups to dramatically expand the region's rail system, represents a major setback for the city's efforts to limit tailpipe emissions. Explore further New York unveils plan to cut building CO2 emissions 2022 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. In Havelland, insect protection measures are being tested in a living laboratory, such as the cultivation of flowers in grassland. Credit: Philipp Scharschmidt / ZALF In the FInAL project, researchers from the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) are testing measures for insect protection. Since 2018, they have been investigating possibilities for the insect-friendly management of lowland fen soils in a specially established landscape laboratory in Havelland, Brandenburg. These soils can only be used to a limited extent for agriculture, but are very valuable due to their ecological significance, for example as carbon sinks. By directly comparing areas with and without measures, practical results are now available showing the successes and limitations of various insect protection measures. According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), biodiversity loss is a threat to billions of people. At the latest since the publication of the Krefeld Study in 2017, the decline in insects has also been a cause for concern in Germany. A research team is combining insect protection with the cultivation of renewable raw materials on test sites at the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Havelland. Coordinated by the Thunen Institute, insect-friendly agriculture has been tested in practice here since October 2018 as part of the research project FInALFacilitating Insects in Agricultural Landscapes in a landscape laboratory in lowland fen areas. The lowland fen areas were drained and intensively used for agriculture until 1992. Since then, they have been under protection. The researchers have investigated how these areas can now be managed in a way that is friendly to both insects and the environment, and at the same time economically viable. Results are now available showing that proper tillage is crucial for the occurrence of wildflowers and insects in grassland. Beetle banks also contribute to insect diversity in agricultural landscapes. The question of how insect protection measures are perceived by practitioners and the public also plays an important role. Insect-promoting measures tested Wildflowers in grassland are an important food source for insects. However, for wildflowers to establish successfully, the soil must first be tilled or mulched to loosen the turfthis is the result of the project's initial research findings. The research team was also able to demonstrate the effectiveness of beetle banks, i.e. retreats for insects at the edges of fields, in promoting ground beetles. Ground beetles are beneficial insects in agriculture because they feed on various pests, such as snail eggs. The researchers counted almost eight times more ground beetles on the area with beetle banks than on the reference area without measures. The effect on spiders and rove beetles, on the other hand, was small to non-existent. This is also an important finding for the research project and the selection of measures on other farms. "What is special about the project is the research approach, in which we involve many important relevant stakeholders in the research from the very beginning and test insect protection measures under practical conditions and in direct comparison with a reference area," says Prof. Frank Eulenstein, who is coordinating the project on the ZALF side. Economic solutions for insect protection The studies show that two factors must be met in order for measures to be successful: they must be economical and they must take local conditions into account. "There is no set of blanket measures for insect protection. This varies greatly from farm to farm and makes it difficult to implement measures on a broad scale. That's why we need these practical trials in as many different regions as possible," adds Eulenstein. The experimental plots on which the ZALF researchers conducted their trials are located in the Havellandische Luch, a lowland fen area in Brandenburg. Lowland fens are characterized by a high content of organic matter. If the land is drained for agriculture, as is the case here, large amounts of carbon dioxide are released, which contributes to climate change. However, there is a lack of water in the region for the rewetting of the areas in the Havellandisches Luch. In order to be able to use the land in an environmentally friendly and economical way, the grassland there is now used three times, a so-called cascade use: By sowing wildflowers, the food supply for insects is increased on the land. The biomass produced on the land can be used by the farms in biogas plants. The residues from the energy production, in turn, are suitable as peat substitutes. Since peat is to be largely replaced in commercial horticulture by 2030 and banned in recreational horticulture by 2026, peat substitutes are becoming increasingly important right now. Thus, an insect-friendly and economical management system was tested specifically for lowland fen soils. Other landscape laboratories in the project are located in Lower Saxony and Bavaria, where research has been conducted since 2020 on insect protection measures adapted to the respective context and local conditions. Cooperation with farmers, but also with local communities as well as soil and water associations, plays a major role in the development of measures. The researchers specifically investigated farmers' perceptions of the ecological importance of insects and their decline. The majority were receptive to insect protection measures if they were financially compensated for them. To ensure that insect protection measures are also supported by the wider public, the researchers provide information at meetings and through information boards in the fields. Explore further Insect diversity boosted by combination of crop diversity and semi-natural habitats Provided by Leibniz-Zentrum fur Agrarlandschaftsforschung Heliocidaris juvenile under microscope. The ability of urchin parents to pass on benefits to their offspring after exposure to heat waves is key to helping prepare and protect the next generation. Credit: Dr Maria Byrne Global ocean temperatures are increasing due to climate change, exposing ecosystems to extreme temperatures called marine heat waves (MHWs), which can increase the temperature of marine waters by 5 degrees Celsius higher than normal in summer. MHWs can last several months and cause devastating effects on marine organisms. Dr. Bayden D. Russell from The Swire Institute of Marine Science (SWIMS) and The School of Biological Sciences (SBS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), along with his research group, in collaboration with Dr. Maria Byrne, from the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, The University of Sydney (USyd), experimentally assessed whether adult sea urchins (Heliocidaris erythrogramma) that are exposed to marine heat waves could pass beneficial protective mechanisms onto their offspring, thus ensuring the survival of the next generation. The findings indicated that adult sea urchins could pass on this heat wave resistance to the next generation. However, the study also identified that these carryover effects may not remain effective throughout the development and growth of juvenile urchins. The findings have been published in Global Change Biology. Sea urchins are both economically and ecologically valuable. They maintain the structure and function of benthic marine ecosystems by eating algae that would otherwise take over these systems in the absence of urchins, making the ecosystem simpler and less biodiverse. This role is particularly important in ecosystems stressed by human activities like nutrient pollution or marine heat waves, which benefit fast-growing algae that replace critical habitats like coral reefs or larger seaweed forests (e.g., kelp forests). Therefore, the continued survival of sea urchins under global heating is key to the continued function of many marine ecosystems. This current research identified that the ability of urchins to survive extreme conditions through physiological adaptation, and pass on this resistance to the next generation fundamentally depends on their heat tolerance limits. When exposed to thermal stress, some urchin species have the ability to pass on protective mechanisms to their offspring as a means of defense should the offspring come up against the same type of stress as their parents. However, whether these "carryover effects" remain effective throughout the development and growth of juvenile urchins and therefore allow them to survive till adulthood, can vary widely. Importantly, the research identified that different life stages can have very different abilities to cope with thermal stress; so, the responses seen in offspring may be different to that observed in their parents. Heliocidaris population in Sydney, Australia. Sea urchins play a key role in maintaining the function of ecosystems, but the fate of future populations is under threat due to increases in the occurrence of marine heat waves. Credit: Dr Maria Byrne The research exposed adult sea urchins to different strengths of marine heat waves and then spawned the adults under these conditions. The offspring were then reared across a range of temperatures, and their development was tracked to assess for carryover effects from the parents to their offspring. Surprisingly, heat waveconditioned parents produced faster growing, larger and more heat tolerant offspring. If heat waves continued, however, there was high mortality in offspring. "If a MHW occurs at any time during the spawning period of the urchins, these carryover effects could lead to increased survival of the juveniles under what would normally be stressful temperatures. But, if the heat wave continues throughout the larval development, these short-term physiological responses may lead to higher mortality and ultimately reduce the survival of the next generation," said Dr. Jay Minuti, the lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at HKU SWIMS & SBS. Therefore, as these types of extreme events become more frequent and intense under climate change, the beneficial carryover effects of parental conditioning to MHWs will only protect the more sensitive juvenile stage and enhance survival if ocean conditions return promptly to normal temperatures. "These findings are key for our understanding of what some marine ecosystems might look like under climate change," said Dr. Bayden Russell. "Sea urchins play a key role in maintaining the function of ecosystems, so if the parents can help their offspring survive the extreme temperatures in marine heat waves, then this may help overall ecosystem function. Unfortunately, it is clear that the only way to stop heat waves from becoming worse is to reduce the effects of climate change by reducing carbon emissions. If we don't, then it is becoming clear that heat waves will devastate marine ecosystems which are important for human society." "The species of urchin that we used, Heliocidaris erythrogramma, is native to Australia and is ecologically important in near-shore areas," said Professor Maria Byrne at USyd, who uses Heliocidaris as a model species to investigate climate change impacts. "Its fast development is key to its success in nature, but also provides opportunities for trans-generational research to understand how marine species might adapt to climate change." With many species of Heliocidaris urchins being ecologically and economically important worldwide (including Hong Kong), this research provides a first key insight into how the next generation could be protected by their parents from the negative effects of extreme temperatures caused by climate change. Explore further Colonizing sea urchins in the Mediterranean can withstand hot, acidic seas More information: Jay J. Minuti et al, Livefastdieyoung: Carryover effects of heatwaveexposed adult urchins on the development of the next generation, Global Change Biology (2022). Journal information: Global Change Biology Jay J. Minuti et al, Livefastdieyoung: Carryover effects of heatwaveexposed adult urchins on the development of the next generation,(2022). DOI: 10.1111/gcb.16339 Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A charred chunk of space junk found jutting from a paddock by an Australian sheep farmer was part of one of Elon Musk's SpaceX missions, authorities confirmed Thursday. The ethereal-looking debris, believed to have plummeted to Earth on July 9, was found last week in Dalgetya remote area near Australia's Snowy Mountains, about five hours' drive southwest of Sydney. "It was kind of exciting and weird all in the same way," astrophysicist Brad Tucker, who visited the site after local farmers contacted him last month, told AFP. He said that finding the large chunk embedded in an empty field reminded him of something out of the sci-fi film "2001: A Space Odyssey". "It's astounding to see it." Australia's space agency confirmed the debris had come from one of Musk's missions in a statement and told locals to report any further finds to SpaceX. "The Agency has confirmed the debris is from a SpaceX mission and continues to engage with our counterparts in the US, as well as other parts of the Commonwealth and local authorities as appropriate," an Australian Space Agency spokesman said. Tucker said the piece was part of a trunk jettisoned by the earlier Crew-1 capsule when it re-entered Earth's atmosphere in 2021. He said the trunk had split up on re-entry, with reports of other space junk also found at nearby properties, making more discoveries linked to the SpaceX mission likely. Most space debris splashes down at sea but with the increase in space industries worldwide, the amount crashing to earth would likely increase, he added. "We do have to realise that there is a likely risk it may hit in a populated area once and what that means." Benjamin Reed, senior director of SpaceX's human spaceflight programme, told reporters during a news conference that the company was aware of the reports and "we actually have a team that's going there to check that out." He said SpaceX was in touch with authorities including the US State Department and the Australian Space Agency adding: "The important news is, of course, that there were no injuries, no damage." "This was all within the expected analysed space of what can happen," said Reed, though SpaceX will "always look for ways we can improve things." Crew-1 was the second crewed flight for the Crew Dragon spacecraft. It launched from Florida in November 2020 and splashed down off the Gulf of Mexico in May 2021. Dragon's trunk section connects the capsule with the Falcon 9 rocket on ascent. In orbit, half the trunk contains a solar array, while the other contains a radiator to release heat. Both of these are mounted to the exterior of the trunk, which the capsule jettisons shortly before atmospheric reentry. 2022 AFP The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) currently has nearly 150,000 entries on its Red List for threatened species, including some 41,000 species threatened with extinction. More than half of species whose endangered status cannot be assessed due to a lack of data are predicted to face the risk of extinction, according to a machine-learning analysis published Thursday. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) currently has nearly 150,000 entries on its Red List for threatened species, including some 41,000 species threatened with extinction. These include 41 percent of amphibians, 38 percent of sharks and rays, 33 percent of reef building corals, 27 percent of mammals and 13 percent of birds. But there are thousands of species that the IUCN has been unable to categorize as they are "data insufficient" and are not on the Red List even though they live in the same regions and face similar threats to those species that have so far been assessed. Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology used a machine learning technique to predict the likelihood of 7,699 data deficient species being at risk of extinction. They trained the algorithm on a list of more than 26,000 species that the IUCN has been able to categorize, incorporating data on the regions where species live and other factors known to influence biodiversity to determine whether it predicted their extinction risk status. "These could include climatic conditions, land use conditions or land use changes, pesticide use, threats from invasive species or really a range of different stressors," lead author Jan Borgelt, from the university's Industrial Ecology Program, told AFP. After comparing the algorithm's results with the IUCN's lists, the team then applied it to predict the data deficient species' extinction risk. Writing in the journal Communications Biology, they found that 4,336 speciesor 56 percent of those sampledwere likely threatened with extinction, including 85 percent of amphibians and 61 percent of mammals. This compares to the 28 percent of species assessed by the IUCN Red List. "We see that across most land areas and coastal areas around the world that the average extinction risk would be higher if we included data deficient species," said Borgelt. A global United Nations biodiversity assessment in 2019 warned that as many as a million species were threatened with extinction due to a number of factors including habitat loss, invasive species and climate change. Borgelt said the analysis revealed some hotspots for data-deficient species risk, including Madagascar and southern India. He said he hoped the study could help the IUCN develop its strategy for underreported species, adding that the team had reached out to the union. "With these predictions from machine learning we can get really sort of pre-assessments or we could use those as predictions to prioritize which species have to be looked at by the IUCN," he said. Head of the IUCN's Red List Craig Hilton-Taylor said the organization was continuously harnessing new technology with a view to reduce the number of data deficient species. "We also understand that a proportion of data deficient species are at risk of extinction, and include this in our calculations when we estimate the proportion of threatened species in a group," he told AFP. Explore further More reptile species may be at risk of extinction than previously thought More information: Jan Borgelt et al, More than half of data deficient species predicted to be threatened by extinction, Communications Biology (2022). Journal information: Communications Biology Jan Borgelt et al, More than half of data deficient species predicted to be threatened by extinction,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03638-9 2022 AFP Credit: Shutterstock Greyhounds in Australia will continue to be impregnated via a procedure that's illegal in other countries, after a provision to ban it was recently overturned in a New South Wales government bill. This procedure, known as "surgical artificial insemination," is unnecessary and unethical, as it is highly invasive and often painful for dogs. An estimated 80% of greyhound breeding in the state involves surgical artificial insemination. The practice is legal throughout Australia. The procedure is not only used in racing greyhounds, but also flat-faced breeds, such as the French bulldog. These dogs are physically challenged, with airway issues that place them at a higher risk for undergoing anesthesia. I am a veterinarian with over 30 years experience, with particular interest in welfare and ethics in animal ownership and veterinary practice. I believe this procedure is an animal welfare issue and must not continue, especially when safer alternatives are available. What is surgical artificial insemination? Surgical artificial insemination involves anesthetizing a female dog at the time of ovulation and incising her abdomen. The surgeon locates her uterus in order to inject semen, before returning the uterus to the abdomen. It is not to be confused with "artificial insemination," a safer procedure used around the world, including in humans. In most cases, it involves the relatively benign deposition of sperm into the uterus through the vagina and cervix (called "transcervical insemination"). The proposal to prohibit surgical artificial insemination was contained in an early draft of the Animal Welfare Bill 2022, after two rounds of public consultation. Steep opposition to the ban followed, such as from the NSW greyhound racing industry. The NSW government confirmed to The Conversation that after receiving further feedback, the provision will not be included in the final version of the Animal Welfare Bill. It pointed to a different law that already regulates artificial insemination of racing greyhounds. This requires that surgical artificial insemination can only be performed by a veterinarian using general anesthetic, with appropriate pain relief during and post-surgery. But this is only a minimal concession, given major procedures on animals are performed by veterinary surgeons as regulated by state veterinary boards. Many veterinary surgeons oppose it Surgical artificial insemination has been under scrutiny in Europe for over a decade. The ethical issues stem from the fact the dogs undergo a highly invasive surgery to ensure pregnancy, presenting an unacceptable level of risk for dogs. The greyhound racing industry in Australia uses surgical artificial insemination. Credit: Shutterstock A British paper from 2008 suggested using an ethical matrix to assess reproductive intervention in dogs. An ethical matrix is a tool that integrates values from those with different opinions in order to make a major decision. More recently, a European survey of 83 veterinary surgeons in 2022 found 80% working in assisted reproduction in dogs felt significant ethical conflict related to the practices some breeders requested. Over 62% stated that surgical insemination is not ethical. The United Kingdom banned the procedure in 2019, as have Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. There are additional risks from the surgery for greyhounds, in particular. Greyhounds are often at slightly more risk for general anesthetic than most other dog breeds, as the anesthetic effects last longer. They are also at a greater risk of blood clotting failure if there's a minor surgical bleed related to the procedure. This is due to a breed-related tendency to break down clots quickly in the body. A safer, effective alternative One reason surgical artificial insemination is so widely used is because it supposedly leads to multiple large litters. But there are alternative methods that are far safer for greyhounds and give good, if not better, results. In particular, many specialists in veterinary reproduction advocate for transcervical insemination as the most effective way of inseminating a greyhound. This method of insemination is widely used worldwide, and occurs via a vaginal and cervical catheter. It can be done in a matter of minutes with the dog fully conscious, avoiding the risks associated with general anesthesia and open abdominal surgery. A letter from veterinary reproductive specialists to the Australian Veterinary Journal last year argued that surgical artificial insemination should cease in Australia, with transcervical insemination used instead. As they write, it's important for veterinary surgeons to "protect the deservedly attained privilege to be the guardians of animal health and welfare." Numerous reports have shown transcervical insemination is as productive as surgical artificial insemination, especially when using frozen-thawed semen. In particular, a nine-year study from New Zealand on 1,146 dogs objectively concluded that there is "no difference in whelping rate" after either transcervical insemination or surgical artificial insemination. Another scientific paper from 2018 also confirmed that the risk to the dog is far lower. If surgical artificial insemination continues to be used despite the evidence, welfare and ethical viewpoints that render it redundant, Australia's standard of animal welfare will stay disastrously and embarrassingly low. Explore further Lion cub Simba born in Singapore via artificial insemination This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Diffusion with resetting is a quite common phenomenon, but only now have the universal conditions that must be met to achieve its steady states become known. Credit: Source: IFJ PAN The manner in which animals penetrate a neighborhood searching for food shows similarities to the movements of liquid particles in plant capillaries or gas molecules near an absorbing wall. These phenomenaand many others in naturecan be thought of as processes called anomalous diffusion with resetting. Recent research suggests that they have properties of a very universal nature. From its very beginnings, humanity has been learning about the world. Despite millennia of chaotic exploration and centuries of increasingly systematic research, colored by successive scientific revolutions, we are still not fully aware of the nuances of the general laws, even those describing phenomena that are widespread in nature. Indeed, we often fail to realize that there are regularities of a very universal nature in the course of seemingly different processes. In a recent paper published in Physical Review E, an international team of scientists with the participation of Dr. Katarzyna Gorska of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, described a feature of systems in which anomalous diffusion with resetting occurs. Diffusion is a common phenomenon. It is what we call the chaotic motion of specks of dust in the air or the propagation of molecules from one fluid to another, such as ink in water. The stochastic motion of a particle is the result of its constant collisions with many smaller objects in its environment, such as atoms or molecules. When the motions of the particles are completely random, we speak of Brownian motion or normal diffusion. If, however, the randomness of the motions is disturbed (for example, the particle moves every so often over a long distance without interference), we are dealing with anomalous diffusion. "Behind the menacing-sounding 'anomalous diffusion with resetting' are phenomena well known to all of us," says Dr. Gorska and gives an example: "When a hungry animal comes out of its hiding place for the first time and penetrates its surroundings, it moves around the environment quite randomly and is usually unsuccessful, so it returns to its hiding place. On the following day, it makes another attempt and acts in a similar way, only this time it already has the knowledge it gained from its previous attempt. So, on the one hand, we are dealing with diffusion, consisting of more or less random movements in the environment, and on the other hand, with resetting, i.e. with the protagonist returning to the starting point." Examples of anomalous diffusion processes with resetting include the motions of gas and liquid particles absorbed by the walls of a vessel or the wanderings of autonomous floor-cleaning robots, ending with their return to charging. Phenomena of this type are modeled using differential and integral equations, generally assuming that the reset process, i.e. the return of the tracked particle or device to its starting point, takes place instantaneously (and is therefore not described by any continuous function). Only that in the real world, the return always takes some time! The assumption is therefore unphysical, but nevertheless simplifies calculations considerably. We can find quite a good equivalent of anomalous diffusion with virtually instantaneous resetting in... military intelligence. A scout leaves base and heads towards a designated target. He moves fast through exposed terrain, but when he feels safer, he penetrates the terrain in his immediate vicinity and, although his movements are quite random, he moves in a fixed direction in a sufficiently long time interval. "Our reset mechanism is that each scout is eventually lost and the base immediately releases another. Importantly, the whole system has a certain memory, so the scout remembers all the steps taken so far," this is how Dr. Gorska explains the essence of the reset process used in the article. Theoretical models describing anomalous diffusion with resetting include one part responsible for simulating stochastic motions as the particle moves and another implementing the resetting protocol. This protocol describes the lifetime of the particle and how it returns to its starting point. The three-person team of researchers, which in addition to Dr. Gorska included Dr. R. K. Singh from Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Dr. Trifce Sandev from the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, analyzed the long-term effects of the subtle interplay between the fluctuations of the process responsible for particle movements and fluctuations of the reset mechanism. The researchers managed to observe an interesting relationship. It turns out that systems with anomalous diffusion with resetting can only reach a state of equilibrium when the fluctuations involved remain constant over a sufficiently long time interval. "The aforementioned condition can be fulfilled in two ways: either by reducing the stochastic motions of the particles, which, however, leads to an increase in the fluctuations of the reset protocol, or, conversely, by reducing the fluctuations of the reset protocol, which in turn increases the randomness of the particle motions. So we have here a subtle interplay between fluctuations in both processes," says Dr. Gorska. The statistical relationships presented in this publication can already be attempted to be used to optimize diffusion processes in industrial or biological applications and to improve search strategies, for example by domestic autonomous cleaning robots. In future models, the researchers, on the Polish side funded by the National Science Centre, intend to focus, among other things, on analyzing the influence of the return paths of diffusing particles, thus taking into account the physical nature of the resetting process. Explore further Throwing down the scientific gauntlet to assess methods for anomalous diffusion More information: R. K. Singh et al, General approach to stochastic resetting, Physical Review E (2022). Journal information: Physical Review E R. K. Singh et al, General approach to stochastic resetting,(2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.105.064133 Provided by The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences Ecuadoran scientist Javier Carvajal shows vials containing the resurrected strain of yeast from Latin America's oldest beer. Inside an old oak barrel, Ecuadoran bioengineer Javier Carvajal found the fungus of fortune: a 400-year-old yeast specimen that he has since managed to resurrect and use to reproduce what is believed to be Latin America's oldest beer. That single-cell microorganism, taken from just a splinter of wood, was the key to recovering the formula for an elixir first brewed in Quito in 1566 by friar Jodoco Ricke, a Franciscan of Flemish origin who historians believe introduced wheat and barley to what is now the Ecuadoran capital. "Not only have we recovered a biological treasure but also the 400-year-old work of silent domestication of a yeast that probably came from a chicha and that had been collected from the local environment," Carvajal told AFP. Chicha is a fermented corn drink brewed by the Indigenous people of the Americas before Spanish colonization. Carvajal, who already had experience recovering other yeasts, found out about the ancient Franciscan brewery in Quito while reading specialist beer magazines. It took him a year to do so, but he finally managed to find a barrel from the old brewery in 2008. It was stored in Quito's San Francisco Convent, an imposing three-hectare complex built between 1537 and 1680, which is now a museum. After extracting a splinter, Carvajal used a microscope to find a tiny yeast specimen, which after a long period of cultivation he was able to resurrect. In his laboratory at the Catholic University of Ecuador, Carvajal takes a small vial containing a variety of the Saccharomyces cerevisiaerescatada yeast. "It lives here in a little container. It's very humble, but it is the star" of the laboratory, said the 59-year-old. Filling the holes Carvajal, who comes from a brewing family, found an article in an industry magazine that vaguely described the formula for the Franciscans' 16th century drink. Little by little, he pieced together bits of information to revive the brew with cinnamon, fig, clove and sugarcane flavors. "There were a massive number of holes in the recipe and my job was to fill those holes," said Carvajal. "It is a work of beer archeology within the microbial archeology" he had to carry out to rescue the yeast, which generates the majority of the drink's flavor. After a decade of investigation and testing, Carvajal in 2018 began producing the beer at his homebut the pandemic frustrated his attempts to commercialize it. He still has not come up with a launch date for his product, nor a price. Carvajal compares his work, centuries after the Franciscans domesticated the yeast, to intensive care on a molecular scale. "It is as if they were dormant, like dried seeds but having deteriorated over the years. So you have to reconstruct them, fluidize them, hydrate them and see if their vital signs return." Historian Javier Gomezjurado, who wrote a book on Quito beverages, told AFP that the brewery in the San Francisco Convent was the first brewery in hispanic America. It began operations in 1566, but there were just eight friars in the convent at that time and production was minimal, said Gomezjurado. With the introduction of machinery into the brewing industry, ancient formulas began to disappear. The brewery closed in 1970. For Carvajal, resurrecting the yeast and the age-old methods used to make the ancient recipe was simply a labor of love for "the value of the intangible." Explore further The history of beer yeast 2022 AFP Bowie rebelrebel one of the species newly described by Peter Jager. Credit: Senckenberg/Jager Senckenberg arachnologist Dr. Peter Jager named a new genus from the wandering spider family in honor of the late pop musician David Bowieon the occasion of the music legend's 75th birthday. Within the genus Bowie gen. nov. originating in Asia, he described 54 new species of spiders and named them after Bowie's musical work. By naming the spiders after a celebrity, the spider researcher from Frankfurt wants to draw attention to the still largely unexplored diversity and the need for protection of the eight-legged creatures. The study is published today in the journal Zootaxa. The family of wandering spiders (Ctenidae) includes both smaller representatives with a body length of only two millimeters and comparatively large spiders with a length of up to five centimeters, all of which are primarily found in the tropics. Wandering spiders are nocturnal, live nomadically, and hunt freely without a web. The most prominent representative of this family is likely the "Brazilian wandering spider," which is one of the few spiders whose bite can also be life-threatening for humans. "When examining species from a predominantly Asian lineage in this family, I soon realized that they could not be assigned to any preexisting genus," explains arachnologist Peter Jager of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, and he continues, "I therefore dedicated this new genre to David Bowie and called it simply Bowie!" This is not the first time that Jager has given his eight-legged new discoveries a prominent name: Among others, he has already honored Greta Thunberg, Nina Hagen, Boyan Slat and Malala Yousafzai as namesakes. By naming the huntsman spider species Heteropoda davidbowie, the Frankfurt spider researcher in 2008 already proclaimed himself a fan of the British musician, who died in 2016. So why now dedicate an entire spider genus to David Bowie, as well? "On the occasion of Bowie's 75th birthday, I wanted to commemorate this incomparable artist who left us much too early, but what matters most to me here is the idea of conservation: We only protect what we knowand an attractive name is much more likely to be remembered," explains Jager. Bowie neukoeln, from Malaysia. Credit: Senckenberg/Jager With the newly described 54 species Bowie gen. nov. is the second-largest genus within the family of wandering spiders. Species are found from Nepal and southern India, through much of southern and southeastern Asia, to Papua New Guinea. An undescribed species is also known from northern Australia. Members of the new genus live in the leaf litter of forests, and most species have a small range, usually within a 100-kilometer radius. "Especially these endemic species that are restricted to a very specific area must be considered potentially endangeredeven small changes in their habitat can lead to extinction," adds Jager. The newly described species bear names such as Bowie ziggystardust, Bowie majortom, or Bowie heroes, in reference to the musician's hits or characters. In the northwestern part of the range, the older Bowie songs provided inspiration for the naming; in the central areas, names such as Bowie teenagewildlife or Bowie chinagirl can be found, while in the southeast in New Guinea, Bowie's latest oeuvre is commemorated with Bowie lazarus and Bowie blackstar. "We assume that there are still some undiscovered species in this genus. Those wholike Bowiewish to become immortalized and be mentioned along with 'his' spiders, can realize this by making a donation under the BIOPAT sponsorship program. The money raised by the program is used to research animal and plant species in their natural habitats in close cooperation with local scientists. In addition, we support local experts in their efforts to protect the endangered habitats of the species, thus preserving our planet's diversity," says Jager in conclusion. Explore further New spider species named after Greta More information: PETER JAGER, Bowie gen. nov., a diverse lineage of ground-dwelling spiders occurring from the Himalayas to Papua New Guinea and northern Australia (Araneae: Ctenidae: Cteninae), Zootaxa (2022). Journal information: Zootaxa PETER JAGER, Bowie gen. nov., a diverse lineage of ground-dwelling spiders occurring from the Himalayas to Papua New Guinea and northern Australia (Araneae: Ctenidae: Cteninae),(2022). DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5170.1.1 Two residents from Moreau were honored on Wednesday by Saratoga County Sheriff Michael Zurlo for their actions to help save a motorcyclist after a crash on Friday. Christopher and Jill Rafferty, of Moreau, were awarded the Saratoga County Sheriffs Offices Samaritan Award. According to a news release, both were passing by after the accident on Route 9 in Wilton and stopped to aid the male motorcycle driver with a severed leg. Christopher Rafferty applied a bandana to slow the bleeding and he and his wife remained on the scene until police and EMS arrived. Mr. and Mrs. Rafferty were cited for an act of humanity as a friend to a person in need during a time of accident wherein they provided understanding and confidence to that person, the news release stated. Their son, Evan accepted the award on his mothers behalf. Evan is a member of the sheriffs Explorer program. The selflessness and compassion shown toward a fellow human being on the part of the Raffertys was perhaps one of the most commendable acts Ive seen in my career, Zurlo said. Sgt. Ryan Mahan of the Sheriffs Office and Trooper Taylor Salaway of the New York State Police were awarded the Saratoga County Sheriffs Offices Life Saving Award. Mahan applied a tourniquet to the motorcyclists leg when he arrived on scene. He and Salaway together applied a second one after the first did not stop the bleeding. Both were hailed for performing an act in the line of duty which, through prompt or alert action resulted in saving a life. QUEENSBURY The Warren County Office of Emergency Services is offering free cases of bottled water at the county Municipal Center until 1 p.m. today to help residents beat the heat. The giveaway started at 9 a.m. and will last until 1 p.m., while supplies last. Emergency Services staff received three pallets of cases of 16-ounce bottles of water from New York state on Wednesday afternoon. The bottles have a use-by date at the end of August. Water will be available in front of the Warren County Municipal Center at 1340 Route 9, Queensbury. Officials ask that residents limit themselves to two cases per family. We thank our partners from New York state for providing this supply of bottled water to us to help keep our residents cool and hydrated on what is expected to be the hottest day of the year, said Craig Leggett, Chester supervisor and acting Warren County administrator, in a news release. No doubt by now youve heard of the spotted lanternfly? Well, its getting very close to a yard, farm, field or forest near you if you havent met up with it already. There are things you must know and hopefully do to impede its destructive ways. This strikingly colorful but highly invasive creature found its way to Eastern Pennsylvania in 2014. It appears that its putty colored egg masses hitched a ride on some paver stone building materials shipped from Korea. This kind of story goes all the way back to our nations founding, when non-native, invasive creatures and plants first arrived intentionally and unintentionally from all over the world. In the case of the spotted lanternfly, as with many insects, it has a preferred host plant; having co-evolved over millennia to provide habitat and sustenance to the bug. That host plant is the tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus Altissima). Tree-of-heaven was introduced into the Philadelphia area from Asia apparently in 1784, as an ornamental attraction. It has been planted and has spread exponentially all over the country. Now, the stars have aligned for the bug and host plant to be reunited. The spotted lanternfly, technically a leafhopper bug, has been hitching rides throughout much of Eastern Pennsylvania, Western New Jersey along the Delaware, and has now reached eastern New Jersey. The scheme of this bug is that it feeds by clustering on wounds, cracks and bark crevices and then sucks the sap from trees and other woody plants. Not satisfied to stay on tree-of-heaven, it goes after at least 70 other of your favorite trees, shrubs and vines. It usually does not kill the tree outright, hoping for job security forever. However, the trees and plants are usually weakened to the point where they are susceptible and destined to succumb to other invaders, blights and fungal rotting. Did I mention that the fruit, beer, wine and other industries vital to South Jersey are in the cross hairs of this pest? The vitality of most woody plants under your care is at risk. So, what to do? Please look up spotted lanternfly on the New Jersey Department of Agricultures website for very detailed information on what to look for. Know what this invasive species looks like in all its stages egg mass, nymph, and adult. Additionally, learn how to help extirpate this pest. Further, tree-of-heaven is everywhere and you may not even know that you have it or are seeing it somewhere else. It can be mistaken for native staghorn sumac and other beneficial trees and bushes. Consult the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station website for identification and information on what to do before cutting it down. Unfortunately, simply cutting it down will only stimulate the stump to push up new shoots. The Galloway Township Environmental Commission and the Southeast Chapter of the New Jersey Native Plant Society have produced a video that contains information on this and other local invasive plants. It is titled Twelve Tenacious Invasives and can be found if you search for it on YouTube. New Jersey coastal waters are changing. Tides are getting higher and nuisance flooding is becoming more frequent. Coastal flooding just doesnt affect barrier islands and coastal communities. It affects all tidal waterways, the rivers, streams and creeks that reach far inland. To have a better understanding of coastal storms and rising tides, and to show how ordinary citizens can contribute informative data on sea level rise, the Atlantic-Cape May Sustainable Jersey Hub recently invited Vanessa Tropiano from the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve and Atlantic City Press meteorologist Joe Martucci to discuss the science behind coastal flooding and how to use the MyCoast app. The MyCoast: New Jersey app is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the New Jersey Coastal Management Program, Department of Environmental Protection in partnership with the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve. This new app allows citizens to contribute photos and information during high tides and storm water flooding to help scientists and city planners make better decisions through the data collected. During the presentation, Tropiano, the coastal training program coordinator with the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve discussed the science behind coastal flooding and explained how the MyCoast app can be used as an effective tool to document the changes in coastal flooding. Additionally, Martucci discussed the Rutgers Report on Rising Seas and Coastal Storms in terms of its impacts on the Jersey Shore and explained the Community Rating System for flood insurance. To view this presentation, you can go to shorturl.at/gruDJ. Additionally, for more information about Sustainable Jersey, you can visit our local Atlantic-Cape May hub at atlanticcapemayregionalhub.wordpress.com. LINWOOD As long as there is no indoor smoking in casinos, and no casino worker is exposed to secondhand smoke, groups pushing to close the casino smoking loophole will help provide alternatives for smoking customers, representatives said Wednesday during a news conference. Held at the headquarters of the United Auto Workers at the Cornerstone Building on New Road, participants said they would support outdoor smoking areas, and perhaps outdoor gaming areas with smoking, as long as there is substantial ventilation and no workers have to interact with smokers. The solution is an outdoor smoking area, said Pete Naccarelli, co-leader of Casino Employees Against Smokings Effects and a casino dealer. Its not acceptable to me to blow smoke in my face. Indoors or outdoors, thats unhealthy. Two pieces of legislation (S264/A2151) would ban indoor smoking in casinos and simulcasting facilities, bringing the law into line with the law banning indoor smoking in all other public facilities. They are now co-sponsored by half of New Jerseys legislators, and the groups are asking lawmakers to move them quickly when the Legislature begins meeting again in September, Naccarelli said. When Maryland opened (casinos) from the beginning they were smoke free, said Chris Moyer with Americans for Nonsmokers Rights. Initially they had outdoor areas where people could smoke and gamble, but they have since become hardly distinguishable from indoor spaces. Political Briefs: Support grows for banning smoking in Atlantic City casinos TRENTON Half of state senators and 43 of 80 Assembly members have signed on to sponsor bil Casinos have built walls around them and roofs over them, and left only small window openings, Moyer said. The way the bill was written it allowed them to create outdoor areas that are not truly outdoors, Moyer said, making a mockery of the law. That would not be an acceptable situation here. Current law allows casinos to allow smoking in 25% of their gaming space, but the air is shared with non-smoking areas, said the American Heart Associations Corinne Orlando. Its been proposed to have indoor rooms, even if enclosed (for smokers only), Orlando said. Thats not something we think is a solution. The doors would open and close, and workers would have to work in rooms. Naccarelli said he cannot escape players secondhand smoke now, which is often blown into his face as he works. What about dealers who are pregnant, people who got over cancer, have lung issues or asthma? I dont have those problems yet, but I probably will from secondhand smoke, Naccarelli said. Majority of Legislature now sponsoring casino smoking ban bill TRENTON Half of state senators and 43 of 80 Assembly members have signed on to sponsor bil The Casino Association of New Jersey has strongly opposed the bills, saying banning smoking would harm the industry and cost jobs. A majority of South Jersey legislators, including the entire Atlantic City delegation, supports the bills. A new study released in June by Las Vegas-based C3 Gaming earlier this year found that banning smoking no longer results in a loss of customers for casinos. A Stockton University poll released in April found 62% of respondents support eliminating indoor smoking in casinos. Casinos were closed for three months in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and when they reopened in the summer of 2020, the state did not allow indoor smoking because the pandemic was in full swing. But more than a year ago, the state allowed indoor smoking to resume. Thats when our movement started, Naccarelli said. Robert Zlotnick of Pleasantvilles Atlantic Prevention Resources said it started with a group of 10 to 20 casino workers and has grown to more than 2,000 such workers. For the UAW, the biggest issue in health and safety is smoking on the casino floor, said the UAWs Patrick Ashton. The UAW represents dealers in several Atlantic City casinos. Casinos always mention its bad for business and jobs (to ban smoking), Ashton said. When internet gaming came in, they never said its going to affect business and jobs. There is such a shortage of workers, the idea that jobs will be lost is ridiculous, Ashton said. The labor shortage is severe, Ashton said. To say (eliminating smoking) will affect employment in casinos is factually not true. Casino executives are refusing to voluntarily end indoor smoking, Naccarelli said, in part because a lot of them are stuck in the past. They have been in the business 40 years. This isnt 1985 anymore, Naccarelli said. We are seeing reports now that casinos that have gone nonsmoking have done better, such as Philadelphia-area casinos. Allowing smoking can also enable problem gambling, Moyer said. One of the core tenants of responsible gaming is taking breaks, Moyer said. If you are not forced to step outside to smoke, you are not forced to take a break. So casinos are getting more money. The big question we should be asking is, Why is that OK? Casino players would swim through a moat of alligators to get back to that table, Naccarelli said. Theyre coming back. Its a ridiculous argument. GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP A church can lift up a local community. In Pomona, the community is lifting up a local church. The Pomona Union Protestant Church was moved from its longtime home at the corner of Genoa Avenue and the White Horse Pike on Thursday and brought to a new location in Smithville. A construction crew was at the property early Thursday morning and would take apart the church piece by piece and reconstruct it on its new foundation, which is adjacent to the Smithville Bakery. Steve Hauck, the owner of SJ Hauck Construction, led work on the move. He reflected on the churchs long history in the town and noted how important it would be to keep it intact for posterity. Anyone whos local knows of this church and it would be devastating to get torn down, Hauck said. So its phenomenal what were able to do, its phenomenal that Historic Smithville is taking it. Too often, were throwing these types of buildings away and thats going to have to stop, Hauck added. After preliminary work, the first major operation was to lift the roof with a crane that towered above the property. Some parts of the church, such as the steeple, needed to be cut and reattached later so it could fit down some of the townships narrow streets. Pat Scamoffa, the treasurer and a trustee for Pomona Union Protestant, came down from Somers Point to witness the move. She put together a book documenting the history of the church and the role it played in so many lives in the town. Scamoffa, 79, said she had gotten married at Pomona Union Protestant and her three children were baptized at the church. A lot of people that came would say I came here for Sunday school somebody else would come one week and say this is where I was baptized, this is where my mother was married, all those events, said Scamoffas sister Kathy Falciano who was also at the Genoa Avenue site. The Pomona Union congregation was established in 1890 as an interdenominational place of worship. Harold Booth, Scamoffas grandfather, owned much of the open land from Genoa to Mannheim Avenue and donated the lot where the church stood. His brother, Arthur Booth, led efforts to help build the church and gave the building its historic design that the community was eager to preserve. Charles Bushar, a possessor of the Historic Towne of Smithville company which will take Pomona Union in, said he was glad to be able to house the church. Theres a great deal of pride in the church and the members who have had it for many, many years, Bushar said. Mayor Anthony Coppola, who is also another owner of The Historic Towne of Smithville, said that the company had a plethora of experience transplanting buildings from other parts of South Jersey, having preserved buildings such as the Grist Mill. We think its a really cool piece of Galloway history, Coppola said of the church. Were honored to have it here. Real estate broker Drew Fishman helped organize the deal. He said there were first discussions about moving the church four years ago and that the parties involved began seriously dealing with the logistics of the transfer two years ago. Watching over the church as the construction crew prepared the transfer, Fishman said having the church nearby its original location by placing it in Smithville was an ideal option for its future. The land the church was on was sold to Nantucket at Galloway, which owns some of the surrounding land. Smithville was something (the church trustees) figured was a nice option, because they figured this way any of the family members would still be able to visit, Fishman said. And its being put in a prominent place, so it at least gives them a positive of what comes out of everything. David Booth, another of Harold Booths grandchildren, came over with his family from Egg Harbor Township to watch the transfer. He recalled how his fathers cousin used to teach Sunday school at Pomona Union Protestant and how his family had been involved as trustees and caretakers for the church. He said he was grateful the building would be preserved but did call the moment bittersweet. If my dad was here, hed have a tear in his eye, Booth said. Passersby on Genoa Avenue on Thursday were impressed by the operation. David Sykes, a Linwood resident who regularly drives down Genoa Avenue, stopped to talk with developers and church trustees to learn about the churchs history. Frank Mohr, who lived in Galloway, had himself converted an old church into a house, which he now rents. He said he was impressed how intact the church was since its construction in the early 20th century and wanted to come down to Genoa Avenue to watch the transfer. To let it go, you kind of lose where you came from and what people used to do back then, Mohr said. Scamoffa said that attendance had declined at the church in recent years and a longtime minister there had moved out of the area. There were only three services being held each year by 2019 and then the COVID-19 pandemic ended worship there entirely. As it had been a target of recent vandals, she wanted to find someplace where it could be kept safely preserved. Its hard to find a minister sometimes, Scamoffa said. Its hard to find a congregation also. Scamoffa said she had a longstanding business relationship with the owners of The Historic Towne of Smithville and was confident in their ability to take over her role as caretaker of the Galloway landmark. Speaking during Thursday afternoon after the caravan of church pieces had just set off for Smithville, she reflected on the day and the history of the church. Im going to feel relief that everything went safely, Scamoffa said. At peace. Meteorologist It's great to forecast for you in N.J., where I was born and raised. I earned my degree from Rutgers and have been at The Press since Fall 2017. I'm honored to be a 10 time N.J. Press Association award winner and a South Jersey "Top 40 Under 40". The hometown of jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke will celebrate the musician with some new acts this year, bringing traditional jazz and more to Davenport. The 51st-annual Bix Jazz Festival will jazz up the Quad-Cities Thursday through Saturday in the Rhythm City Casino Resort Event Center, 7077 Elmore Ave., Davenport. Tickets can be purchased at the entrance. "We just have amazing, fabulous, talented musicians," Bix Jazz Society President Verna Burrichter said. "I'm amazed." The Chicago Cellar Boys will kick off the celebrations 3 p.m. Thursday at the Putnam Museum and Science Center, 1717 W 12th St., Davenport. The festival will move to Rhythm City starting at 6 p.m., with the Bix Youth Jazz Band, T.J. Muller Trio and Jeff Barnhart. The Spicy Pickles will strike up the band 11:30 a.m. Friday, and performances by the New Orleans Night Owls, Dave Bennett Quartet, NOLA Jazz Band, Graystone Monarchs and more will last through 10:45 p.m. Music acts will start at 10 a.m. Saturday at Oakdale Cemetary, where Bix Beiderbecke was buried, 2501 Eastern Ave., Davenport, and move to Rhythm City from 11:30 a.m.-10:45 p.m. Created by the Bix Jazz Society to memorialize Davenport native Bix Beiderbecke and the music style he helped develop, Burrichter said its namesake is a major draw for performers. "The musicians tell us that they love our festival," Burrichter said. "They love to come and play it because it's about a person. It's all about Bix Beiderbecke and his career. He was talented and gifted and was really a contributor to the jazz society, and he passed away before he was 30. I can't believe how much of a mark he made as a musician. And what they say is this one they love because it's about him." The State Library of Iowa awarded the Scott Community College (SCC) Library a $5,000 grant Wednesday morning, which will be used to update technology and expand digital inclusion for students. "It was quite a wonderful opportunity for us," Debra Lowman, assistant dean of library and learning resources at Eastern Iowa Community College, said. "It's always great to have something that will help you serve students better." The State Library of Iowa received federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to use for community college libraries. We are excited to offer these ARPA grants to community college libraries and anticipate the positive outcomes that will result, especially because we believe the ones who will benefit most are our college students. State Librarian of Iowa Micheal Scott said in a news release. The grant funds must be used toward materials or technology to support digital inclusion efforts, enabling libraries to make information and educational material more accessible. According to Lowman, digital inclusion is a key component of the college's diversity, equity and inclusion strategic plan. "Sometimes students need a textbook in their hands, other times students prefer to read digitally. Or, maybe a student needs a text-to-speech accommodation or needs a searchable PDF. We try and offer their educational materials across a wide variety of formats," she said. "They took the ARPA funds and turned that into mini grants; they did a round for public libraries and ended with rounds for community colleges specifically, and they put up a list of eligible items. I looked how it paired with our strategic plan, and the State Library wanted their monies to support digital inclusion it aligned quite nicely and I was happy to apply for it." The SCC Library will use grant monies in several ways, one being the purchase of a digital key-coded lock box to place at each SCC campus (Belmont, West Davenport, the Blong Technology Center and the downtown urban campus) for hands-free drop off and distribution of materials. "We're hoping to improve access. We circulate not only books and typical library materials, we also circulate a lot of technology," Lowman said. "So, that's going to be a nice bridge for students who might not have the time or resources to get to our main Belmont campus for us to distribute materials or technology items they would need to complete their coursework." The money will also fund the purchases of portable laptop chargers for short-term check to use during class, multi-use eBooks to reduce student material costs and multi-use eBooks and audio formats to support the Great Scott Reads classroom sets. "We want to be able to leverage library materials in the classrooms to help reduce that student cost student textbooks and accessory materials can get quite pricey," Lowman said. "So we're going to turn some of that money toward classroom licensing. For example, if an English class is reading 'Parable of the Sower,' the library could go out and secure the rights for a multi-user at our cost, and therefore the students wouldn't have to buy the book for class." SCC will also use the grant to bolster access to eBooks focused on diversity, inclusion and mental health. The Institute of Museum and Library Services determined the rules and priorities surrounding how the ARPA funds could be used by library recipients and gave an an allotment to the State Library of Iowa. ARPA is a federal program that was approved by congress and signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021. Illinois has joined with three other states to build a 1,100-mile EV charging circuit along Lake Michigan, creating a scenic tourism route with enough juice to get electric vehicles from fish boils in Green Bay to cherry picking in Traverse City. The Lake Michigan EV Circuit Tour will incorporate existing charging infrastructure with strategically located new chargers at key coastal communities, lighthouses, state parks, breweries and other popular tourist attractions along the shoreline route. The build-out is expected to be completed over the next few years. Advertisement An electric vehicle charging stations at the Millennium Park parking garage in Chicago in 2019. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune) The agreement between Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan follows the tourism initiative announced last year by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to create the EV circuit around Lake Michigan. Dubbed an electric Route 66 by the participating states, the circuit takes in everything from the urban bustle of Chicago to the pastoral splendor of Mackinac Island, Michigan, where motorized vehicles are not allowed, and horsepower is still measured in actual horses. The Great Lakes are the crown jewel of the upper Midwest, and this initiative proudly blends our clean energy goals with the natural beauty that attracts countless visitors each year, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said in a news release Wednesday. Advertisement EV sales, which made up 2.6% of the U.S. auto market in 2021, are projected to nearly double this year to a 5% market share, according to car shopping website Edmunds. Demand has been boosted by spiking gas prices, but EV manufacturers such as Rivian, which builds electric trucks at its downstate Normal plant, are struggling with supply chain issues that have roiled global auto production. The revived climate bill proposed by Democrats in the Senate last week would extend the federal $7,500 tax credit for EV buyers, an added incentive which gets phased out after a manufacturer has sold 200,000 electric vehicles. The proposed bill also imposes a cap that would make any EVs priced over $80,000 ineligible for the tax credit, raising concerns at California-based Rivian, whose inaugural R1T pickup and R1S SUV may be too expensive to qualify under the new rules. While EV manufacturing is gearing up, consumer adoption has a long way to go to hit Pritzkers goal of 1 million EVs in the state by 2030. There are currently 46,645 electric vehicles registered in Illinois, or less than 1% of the states 10.3 million vehicles, according to Dave Druker, a spokesman for the Illinois secretary of states office. Building out a public charging infrastructure remains a priority for a broader EV rollout, and a concern for owners planning a trip to the North Woods or other remote destinations. [ Lake Michigan car ferries make for fun Midwest getaways, plus 16 things to do once you land ] There are 56,738 public charging stations in the U.S., including 1,484 in Illinois, according to the U.S. Department of Energys alternative fuels website. The network is far less developed for fast-charging stations, where drivers can fully charge their vehicles in 15 to 45 minutes, with 6,442 stations in the U.S. and 143 in Illinois. An April study by Chicago-based car shopping app CoPilot shows the four states that have banded together in the Lake Michigan EV Circuit Tour are behind the curve in both EV adoption and charging infrastructure. Indiana ranked No. 37, Wisconsin No. 36, Michigan No. 31 and Illinois No. 19 on the list, which was topped by California. rchannick@chicagotribune.com Iowas Republican nominee for attorney general Brenna Bird said, if elected, she would challenge the Biden administration on various executive and administrative rules around climate change and the environment that she sees as hurting farmers. Bird held a press conference Wednesday with Republican Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig criticizing both the Biden administration and Attorney General Tom Miller, a Democrat, for what they said was federal overreach on agriculture. Bird pointed to several administrative rules which she said shed challenge in court as Iowas attorney general, including plans to change the Waters of the U.S. rule, implementation of the Endangered Species Act, and Environmental Protection Agency rules regulating the use of herbicides. Those are unconstitutional overreaches that have to be stopped, and theyre stopped in court with a federal judge, and thats exactly what I aim to do as attorney general, she said. Naig said climate and environmental rules from the Biden administration have hampered farmers controls over their land and warned that more regulation would hurt farmers at a time when input prices are historically high. Weve seen that this administration has not been friendly to the ag sector and further efforts along this line could make things worse, he said. Waters of the U.S. is an administrative rule that defines which waterways can be regulated by the EPA under the Clean Water Act. During President Barack Obamas presidency, the rule was extended to small streams and wetlands, which affected what farmers could do near those waterways. The rule became a common rallying point for Republican politicians, and it was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in 2015. President Donald Trump in 2020 implemented a narrower reading of the rule. Under President Biden, the EPA is currently in the process of rewriting the rule. The EPA is also considering adding or changing rules around common herbicides and pesticides, which has been challenged by some farm groups and Republicans. In an interview, Miller said hes been focusing on agriculture issues for his whole career, and he said Bird was running a campaign focused on ideology and politics. "We think we have a strong and broad record on serving farmers," he said. "That's always been a huge concern and priority of mine." Miller pointed to a study he commissioned in February into the causes of high fertilizer prices to determine whether price gouging was occurring in the market. In 2021, he filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court over exemptions for some fuel refineries from blending renewable fuels into their gasoline and diesel, and he said he has led antitrust efforts against the meatpacking industry. I care deeply about farmers, Ive worked with them for 40 years and Im working very closely with them as we speak on the fertilizer industry, he said. Bird also took issue with the structure of Millers farm division, a division of the office dedicated to farm issues. The division does not have dedicated attorneys, which she said shows a lack of focus on the area. The current attorney general says he has a farm division, but there are no lawyers in it at all," she said. Miller said the structure of the farm division allows for streamlined handling of agriculture issues based on the issue. Lawyers assist with the division based on their expertise, such as consumer protection and environmental law. So we're able to access the right people and the right resources when we need them for farmers, he said. U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa's senior Republican, said he'd most likely support a measure that aims to ensure a peaceful transition of power from one president to the next after attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed rewrites of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, the vague wording of which allies of former President Trump based their arguments on in an attempt to reverse the results of the 2020 election. A U.S. Senate committee held hearings on the proposed bill on Wednesday, for which University of Iowa Law Professor Derek Muller provided testimony. The proposed rewrites would clarify that the vice president doesn't have discretion over the results, raises the objection threshold in Congress, and clarifies procedures. "Now, I have not read the bill, but I have read a lot about the bill and I think that I'm going to vote for it," Grassley told reporters on a press call Wednesday. "I believe that they made some good changes, particularly the one in both houses where you have to have 20% of the body raise an objection to receiving the (electoral) ballots from the states." Muller, the UI professor, told Congress in prepared remarks that the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 was a "good bill" with bipartisan support that is "sufficient to handle the pressing challenges in presidential elections, for this moment and for the future." "The risks of failing to enact the ECRA are, in my judgment, significant," he continued. "Some have attempted to exploit ambiguities in the ECA over the years, most significantly in the 2020 election. To leave those ambiguities in place ahead of the 2024 election is to invite serious mischief. No law can prevent all mischief. But the ECRA significantly strengthens several important areas of the ECA and offers greater confidence." Grassley said another reason to put him in the "yes" column is the bill clarifies that the vice president's role in certifying elections is very limited. "People thought, well, maybe the vice president has some discretion. He should not have had this discretion ever," Grassley said. "And this law will make it clear that he won't have that discretion." "So that's two out of maybe several reasons I might vote for it now," Grassley continued. "Just give me one opportunity here too if I vote no when this bill comes up, and that's when I read it. I may come to a different conclusion. But that's everything I know about it." In response to two shootings in Evanston and the mass killing in Highland Park, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss expressed his concerned that the community is becoming numb to the impact of gun violence in a recent newsletter. In the span of two weeks, Servando Hamros, 29, and a 13-year-old Evanston girl have been shot within city limits. Hamros was shot and killed while in Isabella Butler Park on the evening of July 14. The unnamed 13-year-old was shot in the neck during a backyard party on July 25 and was listed in critical condition. Khiyran Monroe, 20, was charged with first-degree murder in the July 14 shooting death of Hamros, who was with his 7-year-old daughter. Monroe was ordered held without bond. No arrests have been made in the July 25 shooting. In his newsletter, Biss reflected on the shooting in nearby Highland Park on July 4 that left seven dead and dozens wounded, saying how community members stopped what they were doing that day in shock and grief. We cannot let our nations gun violence epidemic leave us numb (and by the way, once we allow ourselves to head down that path, it wont be long before we also lose our capacity to be shocked by events like what happened in Highland Park on July 4), he said. When the two more recent tragedies took place, plenty of people felt that same way, and of course many in our community were directly affected and in terrible pain, said Biss. At the same time, I have the impression that for many others, these events were just a horrible piece of news to be consumed, saddened by, and then moved on from. When asked what has given him the indication that residents are becoming numb, Biss referenced the September 2012 shooting of Dajae Coleman, which spurred community action. The community rose up in one voice because it was so shocking and so horrifying, said Biss. I think people are just as sad. People know its just as wrong. But the reaction is different I think because of the repetition of these events. What I hope people wont do is react to the repetition by feeling like Hey, theres no point in standing up and coming together and trying to put a stop to it. Biss said he isnt suggesting that people dont care, but that due to the amount of gun violence experienced by Americans, that our capacity for shock and outrage has been lowered. Shock and outrage are necessary, said Biss, and the community needs to come together, take care of each other and demand reasonable gun laws that arent limited to assault rifles. Im asking you to stay engaged, stay outraged, and demand more. The current status quo only becomes inevitable if we decide it has to be, he said. ANKENY, Iowa Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday. Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and multiple sharp force injuries, while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Their 6-year-old daughter, Lula Schmidt, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation, officials said. All three family members deaths have been ruled homicides. The Schmidts' 9-year-old son, who was with his family on the camping trip, survived the attack without physical injuries, but investigators have not said whether he was in the tent when the attack happened. The department confirmed Thursday that the killer was Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Nebraska, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the family was attacked early on the morning of July 22 in their tent at the Maquoketa Caves State Park campground. Investigators said all evidence collected substantiates that Sherwin acted alone, but police have not indicated a motive in the killings. Police who swarmed the park about 180 miles east of Des Moines in the wake of the shooting found Sherwins body outside the campground but within a wooded area of the park. The Jackson County Sheriff's Office and Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation were called about 6:23 a.m. for a report of a shooting at the park campground, Mike Krapfl, a special agent in charge with DCI, said at a news conference held a few hours after the killings. When they arrived, law enforcement officials found three bodies (the members of the Schmidt family who were killed) at the campsite. As they investigated the killings, police learned Sherwin, who was also camping at the park, was not among the other campers and that he was armed, Krapfl said. Sherwin's body was found a few hours later. Krapfl said the campground was relatively full at the time of the attack and was at least partially evacuated in its wake. The park was closed until July 28. A message on the parks phone Thursday said the campground remained closed. Sherwin was camping with his parents and had his own tent, police said in the days after the shooting. The two families campsites were near each other. In a statement on social media, Cedar Falls Mayor Rob Green said he knew the Schmidts, who were neighbors, according to previous reporting. The Schmidts walked regularly in the Sartori Park neighborhood. He also said Sarah Schmidt was an employee of the Cedar Falls Public Library and he had recently worked with her while developing a presentation. A Gofundme was set up for Tyler and Sarah Schmidts 9-year-old son Arlo: https://www.gofundme.com/f/arlo-schmidt. As of Thursday, the account had reached $275,981. A Des Moines Register report stated that Sherwin lived in an apartment complex with his parents and La Vista law enforcement said he had no prior criminal history there. The Omaha World-Herald had an initial statement from Cecilia Sherwin, Anthony Sherwin's mother. She said she heard two gunshots that morning and heard shouting. A young boy ran up to the Sherwins campsite yelling for help and told her a man wearing black shot his family, Cecilia Sherwin said in that statement. Her son, however, was wearing green and no black clothing was found in the area. She also said her family was traveling legally with a firearm in a secure container. In another statement, this one to the AP, she said her son was kind, sensitive, an exceptional student and an aspiring businessman. She said in that statement the family was still trying to absorb the loss of its son, but we still find ourselves breaking down and care deeply for the little boy and the loss of his family. Associated Press, Des Moines Register, Omaha World-Herald contributed to this report. The start of school is just around the corner for most area schools signaling the eventual arrival of cooler weather, more indoor events and the inevitable spread of viruses ranging from the common cold to COVID-19. And while the heat of summer has been accompanied by the decrease and stabilization in COVID-19 cases across Rock Island and Scott counties, the number of people choosing to become fully vaccinated has shown steady growth. According to numbers provided by the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, since roughly the middle of April 4,447 people from across the Quad-Cities have been fully vaccinated. In Rock Island County the number of fully vaccinated rose from 82,453 on April 12 to 84,585 on Aug. 2. The latter number is 59.6% of the county's population of 141,879. The percent of the population of Scott County that has chosen full vaccination is even larger, rising to 62% from 104,969 on April 12 to 107,284 by Aug. 2. The county's population is 172,943. One of the forces driving the local vaccination numbers is the expansion of who is eligible to receive it. The CDC recommended COVID-19 vaccinations for children ages 6 months to 5 years old in the middle of June. While a Kaiser Family Foundation found 43% of parents of children under 5 in the U.S. said they had no intention of getting their children vaccinated against COVID-19, officials at the Rock Island Health Department are actively vaccinating children. " ... we are seeing between 25 to 30 kids in the 6 months to 4-year age group at our Wednesday clinics here," Rock Island Health Department Public Health Administrator Nita Ludwig said. "This age group is seen by appointment only since they tend to take a little extra time and attention." Brooke Barnes, deputy director of the Scott County Health Department, agreed. "As we have seen eligibility expand including 6 months and up age group we are seeing the number of vaccinated expand as well," Barnes said, "I think the responses toward vaccine for young children are what we expected. Some families were waiting a very long time for this opportunity and made sure to get their child vaccinated at the first possible chance. Other families chose to wait until the vaccine was available to have important conversations with their health care provider, and we are grateful that they are using their provider as a resource." As fall and winter approach, health departments across the country are looking for new ways to reach those who have chosen to not get vaccinated. At Tuesday's meeting of the Scott County Board of Supervisors, Barnes outlined how the Scott County Health Department plans to launch a six-month digital campaign to promote COVID-19 vaccines and booster shots. Barnes said the countys goal was to reach diverse audiences through cable, internet and some of the streaming services. "We are looking at populations that may have been more hesitant about the vaccinations and how we can partner with community leaders to reach out," Barnes explained later in the week. "Some minority folks may have some concerns concerns that are well-founded from a historical standpoint. So part of what we hope to do is build trust with various portions of our broader community." Barnes asked the Board of Supervisors to approve the $27,840 digital ad campaign, which is paid for by federal public health preparedness and response funds earmarked for vaccine equity. Previously, the county health department put up billboard advertisements encouraging passing motorists to get vaccinated. Vaccines for the Omicron BA.5 variant are expected this fall, according to the Associated Press. Pfizer and Moderna expect to have updated versions of their shots available as early as September. PORTLAND, Maine (AP) The Maine Department of Environmental Protections citizen board on Thursday rejected the latest effort to stop a $1 billion power line, and the next hurdle for the project lies with the state Supreme Court. The Board of Environmental Protection unanimously upheld the permit for the project, which would supply up to 1,200 megawatts of Canadian hydropower to the regional power grid. But the board did require some new stipulations such as conserving an additional 10,000 acres of land to offset the loss of wildlife habitat caused by construction in western Maine. Supporters say the project would address climate change by removing carbon from the environment in a region thats heavily dependent on natural gas for energy. Detractors said the environmental benefits are overblown, and that the project would destroy woodlands. The Natural Resources Council of Maine, a leading opponent of the project, expressed disappointment with the outcome. Pete Didisheim, the environmental group's interim CEO, said after the vote that he remains hopeful that the state Supreme Court will uphold a referendum in which Mainers voted to reject the project. The next important action will come from the law court, he said. We hope they will uphold the will of the Maine people to terminate this project. Developers said the project has cleared all regulatory hurdles and that they will review the new conditions imposed by the board. With the price of gas and oil spiking, the need for the clean energy corridor is even more evident today, the New England Clean Energy Connect said in a statement issued after the vote. Central Maine Powers parent company and Hydro Quebec teamed up on the New England Clean Energy Connect project, funded by ratepayers in Massachusetts. Most of the proposed 145-mile (233-kilometer) power transmission line would follow existing corridors, but a new 53-mile (85-kilometer) section was needed to reach the Canadian border. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection already granted a permit for the project in 2020, and much of the trees were cleared and poles were erected after other regulators signed off as well. But DEP Commissioner Melanie Loyzim put the project on hold after the referendum, and the citizen board was required to hear appeals of the original permit brought by opponents. Opponents have been seeking to kill the project either outright or through delays. Developers of the project contend theyll miss a contractual deadline with Massachusetts utilities if the delays continue late into the summer, resulting in costly penalties. The state Supreme Court, meanwhile, is expected to rule on two lawsuits in upcoming weeks. The court is considering the constitutionality of the referendum and the legality of a lease that allows a small portion of the power line to cross state land. DES MOINES Former Vice President Mike Pence is coming to the Iowa State Fair. Pence will make his fourth trip to Iowa since leaving office for a two-day swing Aug. 19-20, Politico reported recently, citing a Pence aide familiar with the planning. In addition to making a stop at the Iowa State Fair, Pence will attend fundraisers for U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, U.S. House candidate Zach Nunn and Bremer County Republicans; and a house party hosted by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, Politico reported. Pence is among many national Republicans who have made multiple trips to Iowa, which on the Republican side will remain the first state in the nation to cast its preference for president in 2024. National Democrats are re-evaluating their presidential nominating calendar, and Iowa Democrats may lose their No. 1 spot on that side. 1 MILLION CONTACTS: The Republican Party of Iowa reported its 1 millionth voter contact over the weekend. The voter contacts are part of the partys efforts to encourage Republican voters to cast ballots in this falls elections Elevate Rapid City, in partnership with Heartland Forward and Builders and Backers, released applications Monday for Black Hills residents to dare themselves to pursue their ideas. Black Hills area residents will be able to submit four-question applications to solve problems they see with creative solutions. Ten will be selected to have access to up to $5,000 to help turn their ideas into potential businesses or ventures. "We recognize the need to foster entrepreneurship and to give our startups every opportunity they can," said Mitch Nachtigall, innovation and entrepreneurship director at Elevate Rapid City. Nachtigall said James Atkin, head of public engagement communities for Builders and Backers, emailed him a few months ago proposing the partnership. The program is brought forward by Heartland Forward's Community Growth Program and Toolkit and Builders and Backer's Idea Accelerator program. No business plan or pitch deck is required for the idea. The 10-member cohort selected would be part of Heartland Forward's commitment to funding and supporting 1,000 builders across the heartland by 2023. Applications are due by Aug. 15. The residents with the most promising and innovative ideas will be selected to participate in a two-month long virtual program starting Sept. 22. "The issue we're trying to get at is there are millions of ideas out there, they exist in people's minds," Atkin said. "They happen on the way to the gym in the morning, they happen taking your kids to school, they happen when you're at the emergency room at three in the morning because your kid has a fever. People see problems that should be solved and they say, 'Why does this exist?'" Atkin said for 95% of people, that's where it stops. "I think that, at its key, is one of the big issues holding communities back, holding the country back when you think about the need to innovate, the need to create more jobs, the need to create the next industries of the 21st century," he said. Atkin said the goal is to get people who typically would not consider themselves as entrepreneurs to say, "Why don't I build that? Why don't I try that?" He said the program will help people delve into the problem at hand, solve it and surround them with people who can help them run experiments to test their idea. Atkin said sometimes ideas don't work out but people can now have confidence to know how to run experiments and move forward with a different idea. The program was first piloted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Oxford, Mississippi, in the summer of 2021. Since then, there have been around 150 participating builders across 11 cities. Atkin said the idea or solution does not have to be tech or industry specific. Nachtigall said during the program, Elevate Rapid City hopes to have watch parties for the cohort and build a community for the builders, although it is not required. He said for those who are not selected, Elevate Rapid City wants them to come back and apply for the next round, if Builders and Backers invites them back. Nachtigall said they're also using this to find out who is out there, who has an idea, and if they can help them move forward with an idea or business. Nachtigall said if people have startup ideas, they should email him and he can connect them with the appropriate resources. Nachtigall's email is mitch.nachtigall@elevaterapidcity.com. He also said those who submit ideas to the program will hear back from Elevate Rapid City either way and can expect to hear from him. Ideas also can be submitted to Elevate Rapid City's website. PLA Eastern Theater Command conducts joint exercises around Taiwan Island Xinhua) 08:20, August 04, 2022 NANJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Wednesday organized joint combat training exercises in the northern, southwestern and southeastern waters and airspace off the Taiwan Island. The exercises involved troops from the Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, Strategic Support Force and Logistic Support Force under the Eastern Theater Command. The exercises focused on key training sessions including joint blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control operation, and the joint combat capabilities of the troops got tested in the military operations. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) A rendering depicts the nine-story apartment tower in the Lincoln Park neighborhood Sterling Bay is set to begin. The structure would be Chicago's first mass timber tower. (Sterling Bay/Hartshorne Plunkard) Developer Sterling Bay is set to begin construction of Chicagos first mass timber building, a nine-story, apartment tower in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. If approved by City Council, the $50 million development may kick off widespread use of the modern technique, already popular in other cities, which boosters claim is more environmentally friendly than concrete or steel and provides residents with a warmer ambience. Company officials said they hope to break ground by early next year at 2100 N. Southport Ave., several blocks north of Sterling Bays planned $6 billion Lincoln Yards development, and within another 24 months debut up to 135 new rental units. Advertisement This is something Ive long aspired to do, Sterling Bay CEO Andy Gloor said. Hopefully, this project will lead to other mass timber buildings throughout Chicago. Chicago will have to play catch up with other cities. The Great Fire of 1871 left lingering worries over wood-based buildings, and a strict local code discouraged mass timber construction even as such structures began dotting the skylines of cities across Europe and North America, including Minneapolis, Atlanta and Milwaukee, where a developer just put the finishing touches on the worlds tallest building using mass timber, a 25-story, 284-foot apartment tower called Ascent. Advertisement Construction workers secure an engineered wood column onto the deck of the 12th floor of the Ascent apartment building on Aug. 2, 2021, in Milwaukee. Now completed, Ascent is a 25-story tower and the world's tallest hybrid timber building. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune) But an overhaul of Chicagos code began taking effect in 2020, bringing it more in line with international standards and raising hopes among advocates that local developers can finally start mass timber construction. That would mean another weapon in the fight against climate change, according to Megan Zack, director of sustainability at Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture, which designed Sterling Bays proposed mass timber apartments. Producing steel and concrete emits huge amounts of carbon dioxide, but timber-based frames remove carbon from the atmosphere, an important selling point for environmentally conscious residents and office users. Wood is also a much lighter material, so it reduces the amount of concrete we use for the foundation, Zack added. The technique is much different from using 2-by-4s to construct wood frames. Mass timber builders glue wood sections together, forming thick prefabricated beams, posts and panels, usually left exposed, giving interiors the look and feel of older, loft-style buildings, and complete with openings for plumbing, electrical and other building systems. And although some people may worry about the safety of wood-based skyscrapers, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, along with scientists from the U.S. Forest Service, conducted a series of fire tests in 2017, and found mass timber structures hold up as well or better than concrete or steel buildings even under extreme conditions. Researchers found mass timber surfaces would char, but the wood itself, and adhesives holding it all together, didnt burn, allowing buildings to maintain structural integrity. Other developers have also hatched plans for mass timber buildings in the Chicago area and will closely watch Sterling Bays progress as it works toward getting full city approval. Houston-based Hines, best known locally as the developer of trophy office towers such as the 835-foot Salesforce Tower, unveiled plans in 2017 for a six-story office development at 1017 W. Division St. on Chicagos Goose Island, and later a seven-story building at Oak Brook Commons, its $500 million redevelopment of the former McDonalds Plaza in Oak Brook. The company isnt ready to break ground on either, but last year did bring aboard a brokerage team from Stream Realty Partners to hunt for potential Goose Island tenants and has fielded inquiries from several corporations about its Oak Brook proposal, according to Brian Atkinson, Hines Chicago-based managing director. We are very actively searching for anchor tenants, Atkinson said. Advertisement The search accelerated after COVID-19 appeared, as more companies look for ways to entice workers back to the office, and now consider mass timber structures as a possible way to set themselves apart, providing spaces with all the amenities of new buildings, but with the added bonus of comfortable wood surfaces, added Atkinson. Ive been pleasantly surprised at the depth of interest weve had from very recognizable brands, including Fortune 500 companies, he said. Hines finished T3 Minneapolis, a 221,000-square foot, seven-story mass timber office building in that citys North Loop neighborhood in 2016, and Atlantas T3 West Midtown, another seven-story timber building, in 2019. Both were hits with big tech firms, with Facebook signing on as a major tenant in Atlanta, and Amazon establishing a hub at T3 Minneapolis, which Hines sold in 2018 to Chicago-based LaSalle Investment Management for $87 million. Hines also has more than a dozen other mass timber office developments either planned or under construction across North America, including two in Toronto and one in Vancouver, as well as seven others overseas. Next year at this time, well have another two or three completed, Atkinson said. T3, the first commercial property in the country to use an engineered wood material for its structure and interior, opened in 2016 in Minneapolis' North Loop. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Minneapolis Star Tribune) Sterling Bay hopes to have similar success with apartment dwellers. Ray Hartshorne, co-founder of Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture, said there is a big market for new wood-based residences, partly because rehabbers spent decades snapping up and renovating every old timber building they could find in River North, Fulton Market and other former industrial neighborhoods, drying up that source of units. And if renters still want the tall ceilings, big windows and exposed wood often provided by century-old timber structures, theyll need developments like Sterling Bays Southport project. In terms of size and amenities, you could call this a conventional apartment building, but the feel will be more loft-like, he said. Advertisement Residents of other cities are filling up mass timber buildings. Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture also designed the just completed INTRO Cleveland, a nine-story, 297-unit mass timber residential building in Clevelands Ohio Citys neighborhood, which is now 90% leased and 70% occupied, according to Paul Alessandro, an HPA partner. Timber buildings are most popular in areas committed to sustainable architecture, including West Coast cities and Scandinavia, he said, but recent initiatives such as Our Roots Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoots promise to plant 75,000 trees, shows the city also takes pride in its green reputation. And local developers could jump at the chance to create more sustainable buildings, if it remains cost effective. I do believe we are going to see more, and taller, timber buildings in Chicago, he said. Mass timber still costs slightly more than traditional materials, but the prefabricated components can be assembled faster, cutting construction times and overall costs, according to Alessandro. The key for Sterling Bay was getting the green light to build nine stories, he added. Initial guidelines for mass timber buildings in Chicago would have limited office buildings to six stories, and apartment buildings to five, neither more than 85 feet, too small to generate the returns needed by Sterling Bay to justify construction. But the developers team presented its proposal to the Chicago Department of Buildings Committee on Standards and Tests, which in early June approved the companys nine-story, 116-foot plan, Alessandro said. Advertisement A spokesperson for the Department of Buildings did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Sterling Bays project isnt a done deal. The developer still needs to secure a zoning change for the property and final approval from City Council before breaking ground. Neighborhood activists can also oppose apartment developments on this scale. But the company already has the approval of the local alderman. Chicagos rich history of architectural innovation is one of our citys most notable contributions to the global community, and its very exciting to know that this groundbreaking new mass-timber development will be constructed right here in Lincoln Park, 2nd Ward Ald. Brian Hopkins said in a statement. Gloor said the Southport building wont be the companys last use of mass timber. It has another residential building, and one office project, already in the planning stages, but wont disclose possible locations. Wed love to do more, he said. Hopefully, this is the first of many. brogal@chicagotribune.com Suits mingled with neon green Lloyd Construction vests Wednesday afternoon for a ribbon cutting at Heartland Heights Apartments an affordable housing complex in Rapid City's Elk Vale neighborhood. The project was created by a partnership between The Club for Boys and Lloyd Companies. Josh Yurek, vice president of government affairs and community outreach for Midwest Housing Equity Group, kicked off the event, calling it a celebration. Its the residents lives that are shaped by the work that we do, Yurek said. He noted challenging years, perseverance and the partners that got the development across the finish line, with a second complex currently in the works. Now like most everything, to get something like this done, it takes an entire team it takes a village and Heartland Heights is no different, Yurek said. Yurek introduced several speakers representing the village, including U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., and Club for Boys Executive Director Doug Hermann. I grew up a poor kid, Johnson said, and as a result, I've had a lot of interest in life over what factors give somebody the best chance of escaping poverty. The 41 units at Heartland Heights will have a ripple impact, Johnson said, throughout communities across the state. He spoke of hundreds of families that will come through and find a stable housing situation that otherwise would not have existed. Johnson highlighted Pat and Craig Lloyd, founders of Lloyd Companies, saying they have "put their capital at risk to try and give poor families an opportunity to build a real life." Hermann called the day an "exciting day" for the Club for Boys, an organization in operation since 1963. We think that this really provides the future of the Club, and how we can support our members and their families, he said. Hermann said the project was first discussed in March 2020 a month where the club had to close due to the pandemic. When Lloyd approached the Club for Boys about an affordable housing project, we did have to expand our brains a little bit, Hermann said, but they saw possibilities. One of the biggest disruptors of their members is housing, Hermann said, with about 10% of their boys being homeless and many in substandard housing. The club saw an opportunity to have more of a permanent impact on their members, he said. So this has come full circle for us, Hermann said. Other speakers Wednesday afternoon included Laura Jones with Elevate Rapid City, Luke Jessen with Lloyd Companies, John Wiechmann from Midwest Housing Equity Group and Lorraine Polak from the State Housing Finance Agency. This is going to change the lives of probably, over the next 15 years, several 100 families, Wiechmann said. Its going to allow them to get their feet up under them again, to stand up straight. Heartland Heights is possible through tax credits awarded by the South Dakota Housing Development Authority. You can't build these developments without the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program, Wiechmann said. We need more of these resources. It's the only way that we can address the needs that are out there. Wiechmann referenced legislation currently in both the House and the Senate, the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, that would provide more resources for this program legislation of which Johnson is a co-sponsor. The complex, located on Degeest Drive, offers 41 apartments ranging from one to three bedrooms. The project offers residents amenities such as washers and dryers and a security system. Household income limits are within 30-60% of the median income in Rapid City. "It's a head and heart business and it's the residents that matter," Yurek said, "It gives individuals the freedom and flexibility and security to have that safe, quality roof over their head." Heartland Heights II has already broken ground, with plans for completion in spring 2023. U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., answered questions from about 17 people in a room of almost 100 Wednesday afternoon at South Dakota Mines in Rapid City. Johnson hosted a town hall in the Classroom Building and fielded questions ranging from government's role in education and clean energy, to social security checks and unemployment. However, Johnson emphasized his thoughts on the need to be more concerned about China and his new bill that would blacklist the country from buying American farmland, and reducing government spending. "I understand this is a global economy and, in general, when international companies invest in America, it could be good for the American worker, it could be good for prosperity," Johnson said in his opening remarks. "If Toyota wants to build a car manufacturing facility in Tennessee, hire 1,000 workers at good wages, that enriches America. I feel pretty differently when it's the Chinese Communist Party seeking to gain more control over our food or health care supply chains." He said over the last decade, China has increased their foreign agricultural land holdings, and own 1,300 agricultural processing facilities in the United States and elsewhere. Johnson said people should also be concerned about China having much control over the food supply. He said that's why he is a leader on the bill, and a leader on another bill that would make it clear that if someone steals intellectual property, they can be taken to federal court. In response to a question on how China is able to purchase land, Johnson said it's not typically the government on the paperwork, it's a company. One man asked what Johnson's thoughts were on people still in prison for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Johnson said the federal system does not have bail and many of those arrested for the insurrection are able to be released pretrial on a personal recognizance bond. For those that judges don't feel can be released, they have to wait for their trial in jail. In response to a question on unemployment and workforce, Johnson said the unemployment rate is "a garbage statistic." "You only show up in the unemployment rate if you are receiving unemployment insurance, and that means every single week you've got to be out looking for a job and you have to take a job if it's offered," he said. "There are a lot of people who don't want to do that, they're not actively looking for work, and so they don't show up in the unemployment numbers, even if they're getting food stamps, SNAP, WIC, LIHEAP, HUD vouchers." Johnson said he's not denigrating the existence of the programs and does believe in having a safety net. He said instead of the unemployment rate, he looks at the workforce participation rate. He said the workforce participation rate for women has increased and decreased for men. Johnson said there is no problem with that, but it begs the question what are the men doing. He said for those who are watching television 14 hours a day, he's not angry at them but rather angry at his colleagues in the U.S. Congress that don't enforce work requirements. "We put back into place work requirements that say, and these were not onerous, this is not like you've got to work your fingers to the bone," Johnson said. "The work requirements used to be in place for food stamps, where if you're able-bodied, no dependents at home, you're in an area with normal unemployment, you have to work or be in a training program 20 hours a week." Johnson was also questioned on why he thought the contraception and marriage equality act of the House passed and why he would not vote yes. Johnson said there is a fair amount of fear-mongering around issues and that eight out of nine Supreme Court Justices have said they do not want to address this. "Contraception is not going away in this country," he said. "I don't know very many members of Congress in either chamber or either party that are interested in getting in the way of people and their decisions related to contraception." Johnson said he voted against the bill because there were concerns that the bill would create a new right to abortion pills. He said there was a separate bill that would have made clear that abortion pills were not covered, but it was not raised by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "I think the Speaker missed an opportunity to have an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote on that one," he said. He said it is similar to gay marriage it is not going anywhere, and the Supreme Court justices are not looking at a case that would change that. Although there were questions on South Dakota's government, laws and upcoming items on the ballot, like the Medicaid expansion in Constitutional Amendment D and Critical Race Theory, Johnson did not speak specifically on state business. He did say that he does not believe the federal government should have gotten involved in education and has consistently failed to make good on its promises. A 42-year-old motorcycle driver has charges pending against him following a Thursday morning crash on Interstate 90 in Rapid City. The South Dakota Highway Patrol said William Smith, of Ashland, Kentucky, may face charges after he ran his 2010 Yamaha motorcycle into a 2010 Chevy Silverado pickup truck. Smith and the pickup were heading west on I-90 around 8:18 a.m. when traffic was backed up due a Department of Transportation lane closure a half-mile ahead near mile marker 57 in Rapid City. Tony Mangan, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, said the pickup abruptly stopped for stopped traffic and the motorcycle ran into the back of the vehicle. Smith, who was wearing a helmet, faced serious non-life threatening injuries and was transported to a Rapid City hospital. The driver of the pickup, a 24-year-old male, did not sustain any injuries and was wearing a seat belt. He does not have charges pending. South Dakota Highway Patrol is investigating the crash. Rapid City Regional Airport announced Thursday the receipt of a $1 million federal grant to develop airline service to the San Francisco Bay area. The grant came from the U.S. Department of Transportation's Small Community Air Service Development Program. According to airport officials, the grant will provide a revenue guarantee for the West Coast route. The $1 million federal grant will be matched by approximately $557,920 in local funds and in-kind contributions. Rapid City Regional Airport Executive Director Patrick Dame said the grant partnership includes Visit Rapid City, the South Dakota Department of Tourism and the city of Rapid City. We are glad to see this vital funding go toward supporting travel throughout the Black Hills, while also promoting greater economic opportunities for the surrounding areas, Dame said. We continue to work diligently on our air service development to benefit both the business and tourism markets. This is the fourth SCASD grant that has been received by RAP to encourage and develop additional air service. The Small Community Air Service Development Program helps communities establish air services, restore lost service and provides support to establish new routes to improve connectivity and allow people in the community to fly more easily and affordably. Rapid City Regional Airport previously had a route to San Francisco International Airport through United Airlines. The route was discontinued by United after the 2020 summer travel season. San Francisco International Airport is a hub for United for many of the airline's trans-Pacific routes. South Dakota Secretary of Tourism Jim Hagan said the grant was great news for Rapid City, the Black Hills and the state. The Rapid City Regional Airport is the air service gateway to the beautiful Black Hills and our states premier tourism offerings," he said. "This grant will provide the opportunity for even more people from around the country and the globe to access world-class tourism attractions, businesses, and some of our nations most outstanding national and state parks. Rapid City Regional Airport is served by Allegiant, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. The airport provides nonstop flights from Rapid City to 11 destinations: Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Minneapolis, New York City/Newark and Salt Lake City. Some flights are only offered during the summer, connecting passengers to hundreds of cities worldwide. Both Native and non-Native middle school students in Rapid City Area Schools may have talking circles available to them in the upcoming school year. Annie Bachand and executive director Gene Tyon of Oaye Luta Okolakiciye (OLO) presented the proposal Tuesday night during the Board of Education's meeting. OLO is a Lakota-based nonprofit organization established in 2012 that promotes healing by providing continuum substance abuse prevention, intervention and recovery education, and reconnects "inherent cultural potential while instilling hope, promoting wellness and revitalizing cultural identity development in youth, adults, families and communities," according to the organization's website. The proposed talking circle would be conducted with OLO volunteers vetted through the RCAS Office of College and Career Readiness, if the Board of Education approves the partnership. The circles would occur during EI classes, or study hall, and would not disrupt instructional time. Angel Lee, Title VI Indian Education Manager with RCAS, said the idea was introduced to middle school principals who all were in favor of the proposed project and felt it would support the needs of Native students. "Our primary (goal) is providing cultural identity development for the healing of that unresolved trauma and grief that exists within people that we witness in the substance use and abuse and alcohol use in our relatives out in the community," Bachand said. She said this brings hope and an opportunity for healing and the restoration of the ability to be sustainable, contributing members of the community. Bachand said this is intended to assist the school system in the development of the programming. "We are here for our youth, we exist for our youth, for our future generations," she said. Bachand said they know there is an alarming 75% attrition rate among Native American high school students and a high rate of teen suicide. "We know that there is a need for preventative ways to these challenges in our community," she said. "We offer the school personnel support, not just in these talking circles that we're proposing, but to meet with and support as often as we can to be another additional partner in the school." She said the program would be for all students, not just Native American students. Bachand said the implementation of the talking circles with the RCAS is in alignment with the South Dakota state standards and in alignment with Health and Education and Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings. Those outcomes include identify, promote self image and self advocacy, strengthening cultural resilience, promote healing, strengthen family, community, school relationships, and promote Indigenous academic achievement. Bachand said they can incorporate tribal knowledge, language and approaches through dialogue, support and education with a holistic approach. She said if there is a conversation about a particular education challenge, the volunteers would sit down with principals and present feedback. She also said if someone mentioned self harm, that would be followed up with immediately. She said the volunteers are mandatory reporters. There will also be a certified staff member in the room during the talking circles. Board President Kate Thomas said the program sounded very promising. A memorandum of understanding will be presented at the Aug. 16 meeting to formalize the partnership, if the board chooses to do so. During the meeting the board approved increasing meal prices due to federal waivers related to COVID that allowed meals at no charge no longer being available. Students that do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals will be charged for meals during the 2022-2023 school year. According to the agenda, the district has seen an increase in food and supply costs between 8% and 63%. Breakfast meals will increase by $0.10 and lunch meals will increase by $0.20 at elementary, middle and high schools. Breakfast and lunch at each level will be $2.25 and $2.95 for elementary students, $2.30 and $3.30 for middle school students, and $2.35 and $3.40 for high school students. Interim Chief Executive Officer Nicole Swigart said she would have a more detailed report on staffing at the Aug. 16 meeting, but said Tuesday the district is still struggling. She said as of Friday there were 62.5 paraprofessional positions posted, 11 special education positions, seven high school, nine middle school, 17.5 elementary school and four counseling positions. She said the openings have principals and downtown leadership struggling to come up with ways to put teachers in front of students on day one. "Please trust that we are working very hard on that," Swigart said. SIOUX FALLS A South Dakota government ethics board on Wednesday pressed forward with its investigation of two complaints against Gov. Kristi Noem, resisting an effort from the Republican governor to see them dismissed and extending the time it has to examine the allegations. Noem is under scrutiny from the state's Government Accountability Board for allegations that she misused the powers of her office by interfering in her daughters application for a real estate appraiser license and flying on state-owned airplanes to political events. She has denied any wrongdoing. As attorney general, Jason Ravnsborg last year filed the complaints against Noem. Ravnsborg, a fellow Republican, was removed from office through impeachment in June for his conduct surrounding a car crash in which he killed a pedestrian. He has continued to bring the complaints as a private citizen. After meeting in a closed-door executive session for roughly one hour, the board's three retired judges who are evaluating the complaints voted unanimously to deny the governor's requests to dismiss the complaints. They then voted to give themselves a 60-day extension for further investigation" to evaluate the merits of the complaints. Ravnsborg said he was pleased the board had continued with its investigation, adding that the people of South Dakota deserve to know the truth of these two matters." Noem's office said it would be a violation of state law to comment on the board's actions, referring to a statute that holds the board's files are confidential unless the board decides to hold a contested case hearing. The governor's requests to the board, as well as the presence of an attorney for Noem for the first time, showed a willingness to take action to see the allegations dismissed. The board has broad powers, and if it decides the complaints have merit, could refer them for criminal investigation, subpoena evidence and witnesses, or eventually hold a contested case hearing. The Government Accountability Board has taken steps to insulate itself from conflicts of interest while it takes up an issue that involves the state's most powerful political figures. Noem's appointee to the board, former state Supreme Court Chief Justice David Gilbertson, recused himself from evaluating the complaints. The board's attorney, Katie Mallery, was recused from advising the board because she works in the attorney general's office. If the board decides laws may have been violated, state law calls for it to refer a criminal investigation to the Division of Criminal Investigation. That would put the investigation under the oversight of the interim attorney general, Mark Vargo, who was appointed by Noem after Ravnsborg was removed. The board could also choose to subpoena witnesses or hold a contested case hearing if it instead finds possible misconduct rather than criminality. Vargo said in a statement, Decisions regarding recusal, either of DCI or the office in general, will be made when the issue squarely presents itself, not in advance of a possible, hypothetical situation. It's not always the case that a prosecutor should recuse themselves from an investigation into someone who appointed them, said Kathleen Clark, a law professor who specializes in government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis. But, she said, the timing of Vargo's appointment while the board's investigation was already underway added an additional reason for recusal. It seems to me that failure to recuse would undermine the credibility of any decision in Noems favor, particularly because she appointed this attorney general after this investigation already started, Clark said. Noem has also forged a political partnership with the likely next attorney general, Republican Marty Jackley, with the pair exchanging endorsements earlier this year. Ravnsborg showed an increasing willingness to bring the complaints against Noem after they fell out over his fatal car crash and she pushed hard for his impeachment. Ravnsborg's first complaint came after The Associated Press reported that the governor took a hands-on role in a state agency soon after it had moved to deny her daughter, Kassidy Peters, an appraiser license in 2020. A Republican-controlled legislative committee concluded that Peters' application received special treatment, but did not say whether Noems actions were appropriate. The director of the Appraisal Certification Program, Sherry Bren, was pressured to retire soon after Peters received her license and eventually received a $200,000 settlement from the state to withdraw an age discrimination complaint. The former attorney generals other complaint was sparked after news website Raw Story found that Noem in 2019 used a state airplane to travel to events hosted by political organizations including the National Rifle Association and the Republican Jewish Coalition. South Dakota law bars state airplanes from being used for anything other than state business. Noem has said she was traveling to the events as an ambassador for the state. According to the RCPD, officers responded to the call at approximately 8 p.m. Tuesday in the 700 block of South Street. Police said they spoke to several witnesses and determined the shooting followed an altercation between a motorist and a motorcyclist. At one point during the incident, the motorcyclist began firing a handgun at the motor vehicle before fleeing the scene. MP Belousov put on wanted list after being sentenced to 10 years in jail MOSCOW, August 4 (RAPSI) State Duma lawmaker Vadim Belousov, sentenced to 10 years in prison for taking a bribe, has been put on the federal wanted list, the press service of the Moscow City Court informs RAPSI. The Moscow City Court ruled that the convicted lawmaker was put on the wanted list due to his failure to appear without good reason for the announcement of the sentence and the failure to establish his whereabouts. On Wednesday, the Moscow Tverskoy District Court sentenced Belousov to 10 years in a strict regime penal colony in a criminal case over taking a bribe in the amount of more than 3 billion rubles (about $50 million at the current exchange rate). The MP failed to appear for the announcement of the sentence. Belousovs lawyers cited busyness and previously scheduled working meetings, which allegedly prevented his presence in the courtroom. The judge clarified that if a probe by the Federal Penitentiary Service establishes no plausible excuse, the defendant is to be put on the wanted list. The court also imposed on Belousov a fine in the amount of 500 million rubles (about $8 million) and deprived him of a state award. The property of the deputy in an amount equal to the amount of the bribe was turned into state revenue, according to the ruling. A sentence was also announced in relation to the 80-year-old mother-in-law of the deputy, Margarita Butakova, the chief accountant of the First Khlebokombinat OJSC. The woman received a 5-year suspended sentence with a similar fine. According to investigators, from 2010 to 2014, Belousov and Butakova, being members of an organized criminal group, together with ex-Governor of the Chelyabinsk region Mikhail Yurevich and other persons, received a bribe from representatives of a road construction holding for providing general patronage to the activities of its enterprises. Overall, the members of the said organized criminal group received bribes totaling more than 3 billion rubles. The defendants were charged with taking a bribe on an especially large scale. Yurevich was put on international wanted list after he left his post in January 2014 and managed to flee justice. In the course of the preliminary investigation, at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office, the consent of the State Duma of the Russian Federation was obtained to deprive Vadim Belousov of parliamentary immunity and bring him to criminal responsibility. On a hot summer day outside Florence, MPG Ranch researcher Mike McTee quietly lied belly-down in the tall grass carefully sizing up a target in the scope of his .270 Winchester rifle. Moments later a shot rang out, breaking the silence of a Bitterroot Valley morning. Should we take a look? he asked as he brushed off the dust and walked toward a four-wheeler. His target set-up isnt typical of most gun ranges. He's not looking at what the bullet did to the target, as what the target did to the bullet. When a lead bullet crashes into an animal, it's traveling really fast, and that lead can splinter off. McTee said. "If any of that's left in the field, a scavenger is going to eat it. It's really bad for eagles, and an easy solution is just to shoot a copper bullet." A study conducted in the Bitterroot Valley by the Raptor View Research Institute in Missoula from 2011 to 2018 tested 91 golden eagles and found almost 95% had elevated lead levels in their blood. The study, Widespread Lead Exposure in Golden Eagles Captured in Montana, was published in The Journal of Wildlife Management in December of 2020 by Rob Domenech, Adam Shreading, Philip Ramsey and McTee. McTee has also written a book titled Wilted Wings that will be released in September. The MPG shooting practice demonstrates the problem. Across the coulee from McTee's position were three rain barrels set atop tables. Each barrel had six one-gallon jugs of water lined up inside. The goal is to shoot the water jugs with different types of bullets some lead and some copper and then compare what the different ammunition did. The water stops the bullets and the fragments from the bullets fall into the water in the rain barrel. McTee then uses a pressure washer to rinse the fragments out of the barrels into a coffee filter to count them. The test allows McTee to examine the bullet and see whether it did what its supposed to if it expands, stays intact, or falls apart and what kind of fragments are dispersed. What this test does is it'll show all the different fragments that come off a lead bullet," McTee said. "And the water is really a surrogate for animal tissue. If somebody shoots a deer with a lead bullet, those particles just spray inside. A hunter, if they get that animal, can field dress it, leave behind the guts and then take home the carcass. But in that gut pile, there can be those particles." A typical cup-and-core lead bullet leaves behind the most fragments according to McTee. Copper bullets tend to stay intact. Bullets that are bonded, hold together better, but even with a bonded lead bullet you're looking at about 5% to 25% weight loss, he said. "If you're shooting a cup-and-core you can lose half the bullet fragments." There have been multiple cases of eagle fatalities due to lead poisoning in the Bitterroot Valley over the past few years. Most recently, in January of 2022, a bald eagle named Darby died of lead poisoning despite the efforts of rehabilitators at Potomacs Wild Skies Raptor Center to save the bird. Lead poisoning symptoms in raptors include loss of balance or inability to stand, honking due to distressed breathing or open-mouth breathing, muscle weakness, dehydration, kidney and liver damage, starvation, seizures and death. Rehabbers will bring them in, and these eagles, which are these regal animals that can fall from the sky at 200 miles an hour after prey, they can't even lift their wings, McTee said. "They can't stand, they might shake, their vision can be impaired. Some die in that state and the rehabilitators try their best to chelate the lead out of their system, but lead causes permanent neurological damage. So even if a rehabilitator saves that eagle, you have to wonder about the eagles prospects in the wild. If we consider exposure in humans, we're not worried about people dying outright from lead exposure," he said. "Its the sub-lethal effects were freaked out about like reduced IQ and aggressive behavior, those types of things, especially with children. So when we're talking about eagles that have lead concentrations that are more than 10 times what would be elevated for a human, you have to wonder, what the consequences to that population are. They might only weigh 8 to 12 pounds, so if they swallow a big hunk of lead or something with these lead bullets, as they fragment into tiny pieces like dust, that lead can more easily assimilate into the blood, he said. While a number of sportsmen have made the switch to copper bullets over the years, lead bullets still dominate ammunition sales with the majority of shooters. Jon Wemple of Choice Ammunition in Victor said about 75% of his customers probably still shoot lead bullets. And while some may shoot copper for the conservation benefit, he thinks its mostly based on personal preference. It's probably of 75 to 25%, the majority still shoot lead bullets, Wemple said. Its not because of the residual effects of lead in the carcasses and things like that. I just think that the 25% of people that use the lead-free bullets just prefer that. While some shooters may prefer the heavier weight of lead versus copper for its ability to maintain stability at high speed over a far distance, some of the choice in ammunition is based on how different bullets perform when shot from different guns. A lead bullet, being heavier than copper, can pack more mass in a smaller-caliber rifle. So, for instance, a 6.5 PRC caliber will shoot a 156 grain lead-core bullet. The biggest copper bullet that can go in a 6.5 PRC is 130 grains. But as technology has advanced so has ballistics innovation. The lathe-turning process used by copper-bullet manufacturers has enabled them to become more precise than the force-mold process used in lead bullet manufacturing according to Wemple. Because of the formulas of the copper bullets, I think before, people really didn't think that they would have the same terminal effect as a lead-core bullet, Wemple said. "But you know, a bullet thats really popular now is called a Berger bullet. That bullets designed to enter the wound channel and fragment into 200 pieces, and it's a good hunting bullet and its very effective. But you shoot a (copper) Barnes bullet into an animal you're going to have 100% weight retention. You pull out that bullet out of that carcass, and it's going to be just as big as what it was when it entered the carcass." The bottom line is that theres no reason not to shoot copper bullets. For virtually everything you do, there's no downside. It's just as good of a performing bullet as far as killing while you're shooting, and just as accurate as what you're shooting with a lead bullet, Wemple added. That's just some people, you know, old dogs, new tricks, and so on. ABSAROKEE As veteran boaters have returned to explore the Stillwater River following historic June flooding, theyve been amazed at what they are finding. Ive never seen a river change like that, said Ron Lodders, a Billings kayaker who has been running the Stillwater for 40 years. Its just really dramatic. The high water relocated boulders, uprooted trees, scoured channels and filled in one famous wave caused by a rock ledge named Beartooth Drop, a rapid known for either toppling unwary or inexperienced boaters or pushing them into a midstream bridge abutment. Waves above the Beartooth Drop were estimated at 12-feet high, even after the river's water level receded, according to Marek Rosin, owner of Adventure Whitewater, located on the banks of the river just north of Absarokee. Its almost inconceivable how violent the flood was, Rosin said. Changes Its hard to imagine, looking at the cool green pools of the Stillwater River on the first day of August, that only seven weeks ago the stream was 20 times larger. At the peak of flooding, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the popular south-central Montana stream was running at 24,000 cubic feet per second. During the torrential event, river guide Grayson Lowe saw an entire staircase bobbing down the stream. A hot tub, bedroom furniture, a large propane tank and an entire deck are just some of the unusual items rafting guides, kayakers and floaters have spotted along the shores or stuffed into brush on the river as the water has receded. Everything is different, which is good and bad, Rosin said as he walked from his business to the river shore next door. There used to be a rock bigger than a Volkswagen right there, he said pointing to a large gravel bar. We dont know where it went. The gravel bar did not exist before the flood, leaving the business riverside launch rocked in. Weve seen, firsthand, Mother Natures power, he added. When Rosin and his crew went to evacuate gear at the height of flooding from the old barn they use for storage, rafts floated out the door. At his Red Lodge home, where Rock Creek inundated parts of the community, the sound of boulders and rocks being pushed downstream echoed for blocks, he said. It was the eeriest, most frightful sound, Rosin said. Eric Dye, a veteran guide at Absaroka Whitewater Adventures in Absarokee, compared the noise of tumbling Stillwater River rocks to a constant thunder. Business In addition to destroying roads, bridges and homes, the high water caused by rain on mountain snow has shortened the normally busy summer season for rafting guides on the Stillwater. News of the flooding and related road and trail closures in Yellowstone National Park, the Beartooth Highway (now repaired and reopened) and on trails in the Beartooth Ranger District may be keeping some tourists away, reducing business further. We were shut down for about two-and-a-half weeks due to high water after the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks closed the river to all recreation, Dye said. As soon as people heard the news about the flood, they went somewhere else. Its definitely been a slower year. Business at the two Stillwater River rafting companies is down about 60% from last year, which set records as COVID refugees sought outdoor experiences, and as airline and international travel was restricted. Flows The flood also carved the main channel of the Stillwater River deeper in many places, allowing boaters to run at flows lower than normal. With the river at about 1,000 cfs on Monday, the two outfitters were still guiding trips on the lower portion of the river onto its junction with the Yellowstone River, continuing downstream to the community of Columbus before taking out. In previous years, they would have to be off the river when it was around 1,200 to 1,400 cfs. Last year, that occurred by mid-July. Water is also being released from Mystic Dam on West Rosebud Creek, a lake that climbed 32 feet in three days during the peak of the flooding. That has helped keep the water cool and the flows a bit higher. Rosin said in the middle section of the river, from Cliff Swallow fishing access site down to Jeffreys Landing, the flooding cleared out a lot of the junk. The wave train above Beartooth Drop has become a favorite new play area for adventurous kayakers and rafters. From Whitebird (fishing access site) down past Mad Max, theres just a wave train everywhere, Lodders said with a wide grin. Even now with lower flows, for boaters who like to play, this is the place to come. Dye said when the river was running at 3,000 cfs the lower Stillwater was monstrous. Below Mad Max, a hole known as Nemesis trapped one cataraft for 28 minutes as the boat circulated around and around, the oarsman unable to row out of the swirling pool. A cataraft has two inflatable pontoons joined by a rowing frame. On the upper Stillwater, low bridges that made floating at flows above 5,200 cfs dangerous, were washed out in the flood. With the temperature climbing toward 100 degrees on Monday, Lodders and his wife, Carla, and their dog River were anxious to paddle the rivers refreshing water. Business is up at the rafting outfitters as the recent heat wave continues and people seek a fun way to cool off. Rosin, always the optimist, stressed the positive side of the changes. Its definitely a fun ride downstream, he said. Guide Roy Peck agreed. If youre not having fun, youre not doing it right. Workers at a Starbucks in West Rogers Park voted narrowly to unionize Wednesday, making their store the fifth unionized Starbucks in Chicago. Baristas at the Starbucks at 6075 N. Lincoln Ave. voted 4-3 to unionize with Starbucks Workers United, the Service Employees International Union affiliate representing Starbucks employees nationwide. Advertisement The main reasons are to get people the support they need while theyre working at Starbucks, said Sean Plotts, a shift supervisor at the store and a member of the workers organizing committee there. That could mean employees getting more hours, Plotts said, so baristas dont have to work a job-and-a-half or having more daytime coverage at the store so they can better handle the volume of customers. Advertisement Plotts, who has worked for Starbucks for more than five years, said he and some of his co-workers work more than one job to make ends meet. Plotts said he works 30 to 35 hours at Starbucks each week making about $23 an hour. He has a second job working irregular freelance hours in liquor inventory at a bar in the Loop. Plotts said he would like to work more hours at Starbucks if hours were made available to him. As of last week, baristas had unionized 200 Starbucks stores nationwide, according to the National Labor Relations Board. In total, employees at more than 300 stores in 36 states had filed for union elections with the NLRB. Of the approximately 250 elections that had been held, 40 were union losses. We will respect the NLRBs process and bargain in good faith with the stores that chose to be represented by Workers United. We hope the union does the same, a Starbucks spokesperson said in a statement. In a statement, Workers United International Vice President Kathy Hanshew called the Starbucks union win a huge step forward for their movement and for all workers in Chicago. Starbucks bosses are no match for this new generation of union activists, and no match for a united labor movement that is steadfast in its commitment to stand with them, Hanshew said. Starbucks worker Logan Higgins holds an agreement document, which workers for unionization wanted company executives to sign, outside a location in the 100 block of North Wabash Avenue on April 7, 2022, in Chicago. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune) In Chicago, workers at eight Starbucks have filed for union elections since January. Starbucks Workers United won its first elections here in May, when baristas at two Edgewater Starbucks voted overwhelmingly to unionize. In early June, the union eked out a victory in Hyde Park while narrowly losing two elections in the Loop and in Palmer Square. The following week, baristas at a Bucktown Starbucks voted nearly unanimously to unionize. Todays vote brings the unions Chicago record to five wins and two losses. Advertisement Starbucks has opposed the union push at its stores. Nationally, the Starbucks union has filed hundreds of charges with the NLRB alleging a range of unfair labor practices. As of last week, the NLRBs regional offices had issued 18 complaints against the company covering 80 unfair labor practice cases nationwide. In the Chicago area and in Peoria, workers have filed claims of unfair labor practices ranging from threats of retaliation against workers who support the union to promising benefits to an employee if they didnt support one, WTTW reported last month. Starbucks told WTTW it denies the claims. Workers at a unionized Starbucks in Edgewater went on strike a month ago, asking for Starbucks to remedy what they described as chronic understaffing at the store. A shift supervisor at the Edgewater cafe told the Tribune he suspected understaffing was the result of corporate retaliation for unionization; Starbucks denied the claim, calling it categorically false. Starbucks reported record revenue between April and June, posting $8.2 billion in revenue over the quarter. Police on Thursday said an arrest has been made in a fatal shooting in Richmond. Dylan Johnson, 22, of Richmond, was found with a gunshot wound and pronounced dead at the scene in the 4900 block of Chamberlayne Avenue on July 27. Police were dispatched there at about 5:55 p.m. Police in a statement said Anthony Dandridge Jr., 21, of Richmond, was arrested at the scene. Hes been charged with second-degree murder and use of a firearm in commission of a felony. Henrico County Public Schools new chief of staff is a former Virginia Department of Education official. Holly Coy will be officially appointed at the Henrico School Boards meeting next week. Coy served as assistant superintendent of policy, equity and communications at the VDOE from May 2020 to March of this year. Before that, she was the deputy secretary of education for Virginia from 2015-20 under former Govs. Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam. She replaces Beth Teigen, who worked in HCPS administration for six years, the last four of those as chief of staff. Teigen left her post in Henrico in July to take the role of superintendent of Powhatan County Public Schools. Teigen replaced Eric Jones, who retired from his superintendent post after nine years. He also came from Henrico schools, where he worked for more than a decade. As chief of staff, Teigen was one of HCPS most public-facing figures. At the time she left HCPS, Teigens salary was $188,470, according to salary records. In Powhatan, her salary is $173,810, and she will also receive $700 per month for a car allowance, according to her superintendent contract. Coy is the second former VDOE official to join HCPS since the new state administration took over in January. Coy left the VDOE in early March, less than two weeks after the departure of Ken Blackstone, who worked as the VDOEs executive director of communications for about a year. Blackstone joined HCPS in April as assistant director of communications. The superintendent of Hanover schools is apologizing about the district using a logo on T-shirts and other materials that resembles a swastika. The logo was used in a Hanover County Public Schools professional learning conference this week. One of our teachers designed the logo intending for it to represent four hands and arms grasping together a symbol of unity for our all-county professional learning conference. Nothing more, Superintendent Michael Gill wrote in a message to families and staff. While we are confident that the logo was created without any ill-intent, we understand that this has deeply upset members of our staff and community who see the logo as resembling a swastika. Gill said the administration has stopped distributing the T-shirts that include the logo and staff are working to remove the logo from all conference materials. We are deeply sorry for this mistake and for the emotions that the logo has evoked by its semblance to a swastika and, by extension, to the atrocities that were committed under its banner, Gill wrote. Unquestionably, we condemn anything associated with the Nazi regime in the strongest manner possible. Gill was not part of developing or reviewing the logo, according to district spokesperson Chris Whitley. Moving forward, the administration will reevaluate the process by which logos are reviewed, Whitley said. In a letter on Monday afternoon, the NAACP said that the incident is another example of the urgent need for required training and professional development in diversity, equity and inclusion for all HCPS employees, including the School Board and Board of Supervisors. We stand in solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters in calling out this insensitivity, said the letter signed by Hanover NAACP President Patricia Hunter-Jordan. We appreciate and respect Superintendent Gills apology. However, mere oversight by one individual cannot explain this pattern of a lack of diversity, and the refusal to make substantive changes that would result in the new direction for our schools Last week, the NAACP wrote a letter urging the Hanover Board of Supervisors to reconsider some School Board appointments and to require both boards to participate in diversity, equity and inclusion training. The Anti-Defamation Leagues regional office in Washington said in a statement to the Times-Dispatch on Wednesday that the ADL appreciates Gills swift response to the community and his acknowledgement of the impact the incident has on the Jewish community and other marginalized groups targeted by white supremacy and hate. We were deeply disturbed when we saw the image, and with antisemitic incidents continuing to reach historic highs across the country and the Commonwealth, it was upsetting for many of our community members to see this symbol which so closely resembles a swastika being used for a conference for educators, the Washington ADL statement said in part. According to an annual ADL audit, there were 46 antisemetic incidents reported in Virginia last year, a 6% decrease from the 49 incidents reported in 2020 and a 64% increase from the 28 incidents reported in 2019. Virginia was the state with the 15th-highest number of antisemitic incidents reported in the U.S. last year, according to the ADL. A conservancy group has purchased more than 42 acres of privately owned land at the falls of the Appomattox River, with plans to turn the historic site into a greenspace with trails and wildlife. The Capital Region Land Conservancy said it paid $2.4 million for the partially wooded land, which includes 16 islands and ruins of former mills, canals and dams in Chesterfield County, Colonial Heights and Petersburg. One mill dates to 1791, when Campbells Bridge was built to cross the Appomattox River and open development of the north side of the falls. Plans call for using the site to complete the 25-mile Appomattox River Trail. It also will intersect with the 42-mile Fall Line Trail from Petersburg to Ashland. The site will anchor the eastern end of the Appomattox River Park System, while Chesterfields 110-acre Radcliffe Conservation Area is on the western end, starting below Lake Chesdin Dam. Virginia State Universitys campus in Ettrick is to the east, and the VSU Randolph Farm is to the west. The land will be protected under conservation easements held by the Virginia Outdoors Foundation and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Eventually, ownership of the property located in Chesterfield will be transferred to Chesterfield Department of Parks & Recreation, while the land in Colonial Heights will be transferred to that locality, and the remaining property in Petersburg along the shoreline will be transferred to the Friends of the Lower Appomattox River. Chesterfield has had its eye on this property for a long time. The location along the Appomattox Rivers fall line at Ettrick makes it ideal, and this purchase accelerates goals for the park weve planned there, said Kevin Carroll, Chesterfields Matoaca District supervisor. This will greatly enhance public access to the river and provides a critical element for local and regional trail networks. It also preserves the natural beauty and historic significance of an area that serves as an important gateway to our community. The conservancy entered into a purchase agreement in 2021 with Josh and Ingrid Greenwood, the longtime stewards and property owners. Virginias U.S. senators have added their names to a federal bill to address hazing on college campuses following the death of a Virginia Commonwealth University student last year. The bill, the Report and Educate About Campus Hazing, or REACH, Act, would require similar provisions to a law Virginia legislators passed this year. The Virginia statute is nicknamed Adams Law for Adam Oakes, a 19-year-old freshman who died after a fraternity party in February 2021. Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., said too many families have lost loved ones because of hazing. Former Delta Chi brother pleads to alcohol offense in death of Adam Oakes Enayat Sheikhzad, 22, admitted Wednesday in Richmond Circuit Court to helping provide the alcohol that killed Oakes. Parents who send their kids off to college never imagine that their child may be injured, seriously impaired or killed by the actions of their friends or peers, the senators said in a statement. The REACH Act would require colleges to report hazing incidents as part of their annual crime report. It would establish a definition for hazing not all states have one and it would require colleges to establish an educational program about the dangers of hazing. Virginias law, which Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed, requires schools to report instances of hazing in a separate document each September. Colleges nationwide are already required to report the number of sexual assaults and other campus crimes each October as part of the Clery Act. Adams Law also requires student organizations in Virginia to undergo hazing prevention training. Virginia already has a definition for hazing to recklessly endanger the health or safety of a student or to inflict bodily injury in connection with the initiation to a student organization, regardless of whether the student participates voluntarily. Hazing is a Class 5 misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in jail. Oakes family urged the General Assembly to pass a bill upgrading the crime to a felony, but the bill failed to gain consensus. Since 2000, there have been more than 100 deaths associated with hazing, according to Hank Nuwer, a former University of Richmond professor who tracks hazing deaths across the country. The REACH Act got its first push from Julie and Gary Devercelly. Their son, Gary Devercelly Jr., died during a Phi Kappa Tau fraternity hazing ritual on "big-little night" in 2007. Federal lawmakers introduced bills in 2017 and 2019, but they failed to reach the House or Senate floors for voting. Eric and Linda Oakes, Adam Oakes parents, met with Warner and Kaine last week in hopes of gaining their support. Eric Oakes said Rep. Don McEachin, D-4th, and Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-10th, have indicated they will vote in favor, too. Adam's Law, requiring hazing prevention training in college, is signed into law Named for Adam Oakes, "Adam's Law" passed unanimously in the Senate and received 98 of 100 votes in the House. Right now, weve got a lot of momentum, Eric Oakes said. Id love to see all Virginia reps get behind this. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., reintroduced the Senate version of the bill last year, and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., has introduced similar legislation. We owe it to parents and students to pass this legislation to provide transparency and accountability around these incidents, as well as education on the dangers and life-long consequences of hazing, Warner and Kaine said. Bill Lohmann Follow Bill Lohmann 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 Thrilled might be an understatement to describe Dan T. Schmitts mood when he called from the side of the road in Massachusetts. He used words such as amazing and magical and said he kept getting stronger and stronger, which is noteworthy when youre 62 and nearing the end of a 4,800-mile cross-country bike ride about two weeks ahead of schedule. Something else buoyed his spirits: He surpassed his goal to raise $100,000 for Sportable, a Richmond nonprofit that provides sporting opportunities for athletes with physical disabilities and visual impairments. It feels so great to be riding in, knowing that weve accomplished that big goal for Sportable, he said. That just feels so incredible. As of Wednesday, the fundraising total for his ride had reached $116,000. (Hes well-familiar with the good work of Sportable as hes volunteered with the organization over the years, and his wife, Cindy, works for Sportable as development director.) Schmitt, who lives in Glen Allen and recently retired as president of HHHunt Corp., a real estate developer, left Anacortes, Wash., north of Seattle, on May 21, as noted in my original story. He pedaled into Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 26, completing the coast-to-coast portion of the trip, though he always planned to ride an additional 300 miles into Boston. We chatted by phone Monday morning, as he was closing in on Boston. That afternoon, he arrived at Seven Cycles, the company that manufactured his bike and is headquartered just outside Boston, where Schmitt was celebrated with champagne and ice cream. Sportable executive director Hunter Leemon, who has said Sportable is blown away by the generous support of our community who rallied together to help us reach an unbelievable fundraising goal, met Schmitt outside Boston and pedaled with him the final day. Schmitt had riding partners occasionally throughout the trip. His brother Paul pedaled with him through Montana, and other cyclists joined him at times, and he was befriended by countless others along the way. People rescued me all the time, he said. They invited me into their houses when it was pouring down rain. I sat around large dinner tables with total strangers and just had great conversations. [The trip] was super hard, difficult and challenging, and I ran into a lot of mechanical issues, some weather issues and navigational issues. But thats part of it: just kind of figuring out how to keep going, solve your problems and move forward. But the far bigger part of it was just meeting these people and just seeing the good in humanity. Later, he added, It has been quite a ride through America and literally through the heart of humanity. Very lucky to see how good they both are. Lohmann: Two Goochland sisters, two remarkable adventures Late the other afternoon, the phone buzzed. It was Maya Sweeney returning my call. She had j Schmitt noted that he believes he stopped at every lemonade stand in America that I passed and chatted with the kids who were operating them. No stop was more meaningful than the one on his ride between Bar Harbor and Boston, where he found two little girls, under the watchful eyes of their mother and grandfather, selling lemonade. Fifty cents a cup (+ free cookie, the sign read). I bought several cups of lemonade, and they asked if I was riding for a cause, and I told them about Sportable, he said. They reached into their shoebox and gave me all the cash, and said, You take this. Wed be honored to help you. I said, No, no, thats yours. They said, We insist. Take this and help people. Were inspired by what youre doing. Schmitt said his ride was filled with magic moments like that every single day. Every day, it was just great adventures and great people and great stories. WASHINGTON The Richmond-based United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, faced intense criticism Wednesday from U.S. senators and health experts who accused the nonprofit of failing in its duty to oversee the transplantation of kidneys, livers, lungs and other organs to dying patients across the country. One doctor recounted receiving a kidney whose package was smeared with tire marks. A White House report concluded UNOS IT infrastructure is old, slow and cumbersome. One senator said UNOS is failing to discipline the struggling organizations it manages. The shortcomings have led to patient deaths and increasing the cost for care, five lawmakers from both sides of the aisle said at a Senate Finance Committee hearing. Health experts questioned whether UNOS should be awarded the next contract for overseeing organ transplantation in the United States. The contract will be awarded this year or next year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has already made up her mind. You should lose this contract, Warren said. You should not be anywhere near organ transplants in this country. Patients and families deserve better than theyre getting right now from UNOS. Brian Shepard, CEO of UNOS, defended the functionality of the IT network, lamented the number of lost or unused organs and advocated for UNOS continuing in its role of leading organ transplantation. In 1984, Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act and sought a nonprofit to oversee transplantation throughout the country. UNOS won the first contract in 1986 and has won it every time since. UNOS, located on North Fourth Street in downtown, employs 450 people, according to its website. It oversees the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which includes 252 transplant centers, such as Virginia Commonwealth Universitys Hume-Lee Transplant Center, and 57 regional organ procurement organizations. But Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore, said it is struggling to do so. UNOS administers 115 transplants transplantations each day, but 17 people die each day waiting, Shepard said. Lisa Schaffner honored by UNOS The United Network for Organ Sharing has honored the late Lisa Schaffner by renaming the ann Last year, the White Houses United States Digital Services issued a report criticizing UNOS technological capabilities. Staffers must enter data by hand, leading to error. Instead of placing data in cloud computing, UNOS operates a data center on-premises, meaning it is responsible for all maintenance and upgrades. DonorNet, the software that links UNOS with hospitals and procurement organizations, is outdated and slow to function, said Diane Brockmeier, CEO of Mid-America Transplant, a Midwestern procurement organization. The report said UNOS deemed efforts to improve the systems too costly or difficult. Shepard disagreed with the findings of the U.S. Digital Services review. UNOS computer systems function 99.9% of the time and are highly reliable, he said. The network has gone down only once for more than an hour. He agreed data entry should be automated. One in four kidneys never makes it to the body of a dying patient, experts said Wednesday. Dr. Jayme Locke, the head of transplantation at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, said transportation problems are a reason why. In 2017, she received a kidney whose box was compressed and marked with tire marks. She salvaged the kidney and managed to transplant it. Earlier this year, she received four kidneys in one week, and all four were unusable. One was the result of a botched biopsy, one had an artery cut and two were blue, meaning they hadnt been flushed, a necessary step for transplantation. Locke discovered that if an organ arrives to the Atlanta airport after 10 p.m., it will sit in a cargo hold overnight. Kidneys are the most transplanted organ in the United States, according to UNOS. Kidney failure disproportionately affects Black populations, meaning kidney shortages disproportionately affect Black residents, Locke said. There are legitimate reasons why an organ cannot be transplanted, but Shepard said one in four is too many. Each one is a tragedy, he added. Most organs arent tracked during shipping. UNOS offers a tracking system, but some organ procurement organizations opted out in favor of less expensive, higher quality trackers. According to a Kaiser Health News investigation from 2020, UNOS is 15 times more likely to lose or damage an organ in transit than an airline is to damage luggage. In the past three decades, UNOS and its affiliates have received more than 1,000 complaints, 249 patients have developed diseases because they received infected organs and 70 of them died, Warren said. Thats a pretty terrible record, she added. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently determined that a third of organ procurement organizations are failing to meet its standards. Despite the complaints and failing statuses, UNOS rarely disciplines organ procurement organizations. Only once has UNOS referred a procurement organization for decertification, Wyden said. Shepard said UNOS job is to improve procurement organizations, not discipline them. That is the duty of CMS. He added that UNOS has developed a new metric to determine a hospitals acceptance rate of organs and the success of patients after transplant to determine which facilities are performing better than others. Breach exposed personal data of organ donors and recipients at VCU Health since 2006 Virginia Commonwealth University Health System has announced a data breach may have exposed the personal information of almost 4,500 organ donors and recipients since 2006. Wyden accused UNOS of operating a culture of secrecy. The U.S. Digital Services report stated that UNOS had threatened to walk away and continue operating without a federal contract if it were to lose its special status. Warren said UNOS has demanded tens of millions of dollars to sell its technology system back to the government if it were to lose its contract even though Wyden said UNOS receives most of its revenue through tax dollars. Shepard responded that UNOS wont do anything to harm its patients. It would never turn off the system and walk away. Shepard announced recently he plans to resign from UNOS. A spokesman said his resignation is unrelated to the accusations made against UNOS. Because UNOS faces no competition, it has failed to maintain necessary standards, Warren said. Senators and health experts questioned whether UNOS should be awarded the next contract and whether future contracts should be broken up so that different organizations perform different functions. The Patient Affairs Committee of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network wrote to the Senate Finance Committee that UNOS has proved itself incapable of functioning as the manager of the transplantation network. Shepard said UNOS is willing to work with Congress on legislation that would improve the organization. And he advocated for UNOS maintaining its administrative role. UNOS has a unique understanding of how organ transplantation works and a long record of promoting equitable transplantation, he said. Asked if he believed the Justice Department had called parents domestic terrorists, as he said in tweet on the day of the Mar-a-Lago search, Youngkin said: I think the DOJ was investigating parents ... and what we saw was accusations had been made and the whole circumstance was wrong." Environmental nonprofit group Appalachian Voices filed a lawsuit Thursday to obtain a reported document from the Virginia attorney generals office that would undercut Gov. Glenn Youngkins desire to pull Virginia out of a regional environmental cap and trade market. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative dubbed RGGI is a consortium of several states where energy producers trade emission reductions for credits, or they buy credits to emit carbon dioxide past a capped amount. Proceeds from participation in the initiative go toward various environmental and energy efficiency projects. The mystery of the secret Virginia air board document State officials are refusing to release a document that purportedly undercuts Gov. Glenn You Virginia joined RGGI in 2021 after the state legislature passed a law in 2020. The month after his November election, Youngkin said he wanted to pull Virginia from the initiative, terming it a tax on electricity ratepayers and a bad deal for them and for business. But for Virginia to pull out of RGGI, the move would have to come from the states General Assembly, which passed the law in the first place according to the purported opinion from the attorney generals office. During an April 20 meeting of the State Air Pollution Control Board, member Hope Cupit said she received an opinion from the attorney generals office back in March saying that [removing Virginia from RGGI] is not the responsibility of the board, that its the responsibility of the General Assembly. The lawsuit, filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court, seeks to obtain the document. The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the suit on behalf of Appalachian Voices. SELC is representing the organization and its policy director, Peter Anderson, who had been denied in a Freedom of Information Act request from the board and the attorney generals office. Because Cupit made public the existence of the document at a public meeting, senior SELC attorney Mark Sabath said that should not exempt it from FOIA. Sabath said that if theres not a valid exclusion, then you have to provide the public with the document. Pressed as to whether the attorney generals office provided Cupit with anything in writing, a special counsel in the office, Stephanie Hamlett, said there was a document. She said the attorney general declined to release it, and she cited a discretionary FOIA exemption for written advice of legal counsel, the Richmond Times-Dispatch previously reported. They could have said we dont have any documents responsive to your request. Thats not what they said, Sabath explained. They said, theres a record and were withholding it. In an email, Victoria LaCivita, a spokesperson in the attorney generals office, declined to comment as the litigation is pending. According to Sabath, the case has a hearing scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on Aug. 12 in Charlottesville. Youngkin backs off plan to use executive power to remove Virginia from RGGI Gov. Glenn Youngkin backed off his pledge to try to remove Virginia from the Regional Greenh Presumably the court will decide whether were entitled to the document or whether it was properly withheld, he said. More than three months after Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed emergency reforms of the Virginia Employment Commission into law, House Speaker Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, made appointments this week to a legislative commission that is supposed to lead oversight of the state agencys management of unemployment benefits. The Commission on Unemployment Compensation is tasked with a central role in overseeing the VEC under bipartisan legislation to carry out recommendations by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. JLARC issued a withering report last fall that strongly faulted the agencys response to a record deluge of unemployment claims during the COVID-19 pandemic. JLARC Director Hal Greer called the creation of a legislative oversight subcommittee a critical part of recommended changes at the VEC, which Youngkin had made a target for criticism of his Democratic predecessor, Gov. Ralph Northam, during Youngkins successful gubernatorial campaign last fall. Given the substantial number of improvements that VEC needs to make and the challenges and complexities associated with making them, it is important that there be ongoing legislative oversight in the near term to help ensure that the necessary changes are effectively implemented and Virginia has a well-functioning unemployment insurance program, Greer said Wednesday. But the legislative commission hasnt met to form a special oversight subcommittee or convene an expert advisory group both requirements of the reforms that the General Assembly approved this year. The VEC has hired an ombudsman, as required under the law, who will start work next week as chief customer advocate, according to Virginia Employment Commissioner Carrie Roth. The legislation took effect immediately under an emergency clause that Youngkin had requested and the General Assembly approved on April 27, the same day the governor signed the bill into law 14 weeks ago. The Youngkin administration said the emergency clause was necessary to allow the VEC to receive reports electronically from employers to speed review of employment claims. Under the law, the commission is required to meet at least quarterly, beginning on July 1. The governor is pleased with the progress made so far to reform the VEC and reduce claim backlogs, spokesperson Macaulay Porter said. Our team continues to work with the General Assembly on keeping them apprised of significant activity, in particular the waiver of overpayments provided in statute, and will work with the new subcommittee as well as move forward on this important transformation effort. The panel has been waiting for Gilbert, who is a key legislative ally of Youngkin, to make appointments to reflect the new Republican majority in the House of Delegates. Until there are appointments made from the House side, a meeting cant be called, said Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, chair of the Senate Rules Committee, which kept the three current representatives of the Democratic-controlled Senate. Gilbert made his appointments on Wednesday, replacing three members of the commission one Republican and two Democrats including a University of Virginia labor economist who is considered an authority on the unemployment system. Its frustrating; this is what people dont like about politics, said Del. Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville, a critic of the VEC during the previous Democratic administration who lost her seat on the commission. Neither party wants a watchdog in their own backyard. In addition to Hudson, Gilbert removed Del. Candi King, D-Prince William, and Del. Lee Ware, R-Powhatan, replacing them with Del. Rob Bloxom, R-Accomack; Del. Chris Runion, R-Rockingham; and Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, D-Alexandria. Gilberts office cited Bloxoms and Runions experience as the owners of small businesses. It gave no reason for replacing Hudson and King, nor did it comment on the delay in naming members. Gilbert kept Del. Lamont Bagby, D-Henrico, the panels current chair, and Del. Kathy Byron, R-Bedford, who was one of the sponsors of legislation that passed both chambers by unanimous votes. The decision to replace Hudson dismayed Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, the current vice chair of the commission and one of three Democratic senators on the panel. Thats too bad, Ebbin said Thursday. Shes the one with the most knowledge on this stuff. Bagby, who also is chair of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, faulted the Youngkin administration. Its evident that theyre not committed to executing their campaign promises, he said. The commission also had been slow to respond to the unemployment crisis during the Northam administration, meeting twice in the 15 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The VEC received more unemployment claims during that period than it had in the previous 10 years. The eight-member panel is charged under state code with monitoring the unemployment compensation program and its effectiveness and protecting the Virginia Unemployment Trust Fund, financed by employer payroll taxes to pay benefits. Hudson was blunt in an interview last summer about the lack of urgency in the response of the assembly and the Northam administration to the crisis. The commission could be doing a lot more, she said then. As an assistant professor of public policy, education and economics at UVA, Hudson said Thursday, This stuff is as close to my professional wheelhouse as it gets. Despite losing her seat on the commission, the two-term delegate promised to remain focused on the problems besetting the states unemployment compensation system. Im not going anywhere on this one, Hudson said. Happy Thursday, Chicago. Theres a lot of history in the food and arts news this week. First up, food critic Louisa Chu delves into the history behind the jibarito, a Chicago invention with shatteringly crisp plantains housing anything from octopus an increasingly popular dish around these parts to adobo-seasoned steak. And, she writes, one restaurant does it better than anyone else. Meanwhile, if youve ever taken a scenic walk through Graceland Cemetery, youve surely spied a famous name or two. Now, author and former cemetery tour guide Adam Selzer has a new book revealing hundreds of stories and more than a few secrets of the historical figures resting on the sprawling grounds. Theres a new concert venue in a historic salt shed sporting an iconic umbrella-touting girl; and a chat with a political consultant for some of Chicagos most historic politicians. And while it can be fascinating to take a look back, Im also excited for some events just ahead, from Windy City Smokeout this weekend to an art exhibit in Humboldt Park that will donate all proceeds toward helping a cherished Puerto Rican museum rebuild. See you next week. Ariel Cheung, food and travel editor Octopus jibarito at Jibaritos y Mas, 3400 W. Fullerton Ave., a family of Puerto Rican restaurants founded on a corner in Logan Square, July 26, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune) Jibaritos must be the most unpredictable of our iconic Chicago-style foods, writes Tribune critic Louisa Chu. The best of them feature garlic-smeared plantains that crackle and crunch with each bite, with the shattering texture of chicharron. And the best of the best can be found at Jibaritos y Mas, Chu says. Read her full review here. Advertisement The outdoor stage at The Salt Shed, a new performance space in Chicago on Aug. 2, 2022. The space is the former Morton Salt packaging and warehousing facility. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) There is nothing like the Salt Shed in Chicago. The former Morton Salt complex in West Town is being transformed into a performance venue and had its first outdoor concerts this week and theres plenty more to come. Advertisement Braised octopus at Alpana, 831 N. State St. in Chicago on May 6, 2022. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) Tribune food critic Nick Kindelsperger has been spotting the trendy cephalopod at a shocking number of new restaurants, from Alpana, Alla Vita and Nisos Mediterranean to Lyra, Peanut Park Trattoria and Rose Mary. What do chefs have to say about the increasingly ubiquitous dish? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Advertisement Brett Eldredge fans at the Windy City Smokeout barbecue, beer and country music festival outside the United Center in Chicago on July 8, 2021. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune) Its got barbecue from both Chicago and around the country. Its got A-list country stars, from Willie Nelson to Miranda Lambert. And its happening this weekend. Heres the full lineup and everything else you need to know about Windy City Smokeout 2022. Advertisement Lydia Gaston and Jo Koy star in "Easter Sunday." (Ed Araquel/Universal Pictures/AP) Since this summers latest big action film is kind of a drag, a smaller-scale comedy offering a fair number of laughs and sending the audience out with an intergenerational karaoke rendition of I Gotta Feeling hits the spot even with its misses, writes Tribune critic Michael Phillips. Read his review here. Advertisement A rendering shows the Goose Island lineup of 2022 Bourbon County beers. (Goose Island Beer Co.) Two months after a tepid consumer response to pricey NFT versions of Goose Islands renowned boozy beers aged in whiskey barrels, Chicagos oldest brewery has announced the good old-fashioned liquid versions of this years Bourbon County brews, which includes the return of two old favorites and beers meant to emulate Fig Newtons and biscotti. Tribune beer writer Josh Noel has an early look at the Black Friday release. Advertisement Visitors tour the De: Lata (What Gives Us Away) exhibit at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture in Chicago on July 28, 2022. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) In Puerto Rico, the Museo de Arte de Ponces building has provided an even greater lifeline for Puerto Ricans than the art within it. Over the years, it has served as a refuge in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, earthquakes and COVID-19. But it has suffered extensive damage from the series of natural disasters, and had to close indefinitely during the pandemic. Here in Chicagos Humboldt Park neighborhood, the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture is looking to send aid in the form of proceeds from its Nostalgia for My Island exhibit, which features never-before-seen-in-the-States artworks from the Museo de Arte. Advertisement David Axelrod at the University Club in Chicago in 2015. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune) In a small, thoughtful way, David Axelrods podcast, The Axe Files, which airs its 500th episode this month, has been building a sometimes nuanced, occasionally touching ongoing oral history of these political times, as viewed from both right and left. The Tribunes Chris Borrelli sits down with the longtime Chicago political consultant and former Tribune City Hall reporter to talk about Axelrods approach to interviews with the likes of Kellyanne Conway and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, working with former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, and his predictions on whats to come in the November election. Advertisement The memorial of Potter and Bertha Palmer at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago on April 30. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune) Graceland Cemetery is one of Chicagos great curiosities, a place that has become less cemetery and something more like an open-air history lesson. And there continue to be secrets to unfold, year after year. The latest revealing comes from author Adam Selzer and his latest book, Graceland Cemetery: Chicago Stories, Symbols, and Secrets. Read more about how the book came to be here. Advertisement Heather J. Beck, Jessica Brooke Seals, Lydia Burke of "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" at the Mercury Theater. (Brett Beiner Photography / HANDOUT) In 1994, the movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert walked so that one day, RuPauls Drag Race could sashay. But when it comes to the stage version of the movie, currently at the Mercury Theater in the Lakeview neighborhood, Tribune critic Chris Jones says theres one major problem: Theres just too much talent on stage for a canned background track. One of Gov. Glenn Youngkins appointees to Virginias Board of Historic Resources has resigned following her remarks about the Confederacy and slavery. Ann McLean, an art historian who has criticized the removal of Confederate statues, resigned Monday, according to Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter. McLean has opposed the renaming of buildings and removal of monuments related to the Confederacy and slavery telling The Virginia Star our heritage has come under a vicious attack. McLeans resignation followed a discussion about our Administrations goals and priorities and Dr. McLeans, Porter said in an email. The Governor had previously acknowledged that he did not agree with Ann McLeans statements and the Administration is focused on ensuring that our Commonwealths rich history and resources are preserved, the good and the bad, for future generations of Virginians and visitors, Porter said. WRIC-TV, Richmonds ABC affiliate, first reported that McLean was leaving the post. On July 12, the administration had announced McLeans appointment to the board, which oversees historic site designations. In a July 18 appearance on Richmonds Morning News with John Reid on WRVA, McLean said that many people want to just flatten the whole Civil War to slavery. Youngkin appointee Flores leaves LGBTQ board, moving to Florida for job Casey Flores, one of Gov. Glenn Youngkins appointees to the states LGBTQ Advisory Board, w A central tension between northern and southern states that led to the Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, was disagreement over states rights particularly whether states could permit individuals to own enslaved people. McLean likened President Abraham Lincolns efforts in the Civil War to Russia invading Ukraine. She added that slavery would have eventually ended had the Confederacy remained a country. Slavery would have been outlawed in the South within five or 10 years, but they wanted to do it on their own time, she said. Youngkin places Wheeler in charge of cutting regulations Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order Thursday tasking the official who was rejected In a Dec. 23, 2021, appearance on WRVA, she also defended the erection of Confederate monuments. This whole tragedy is that these statues were built to tell the true story of the American South to people 500 years from now after everything calmed down, McLean said. But we have forces right here 150 years later that want to destroy the evidence of that story. McLean, who could not be reached for comment, was previously the head of Hunter Classical Christian School which she founded and she holds a doctorate in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia. Frank Dukes, an architecture professor at UVA, said: If she had stayed on the historic resources board, then she would have been exposed to many different truths of history than she obviously has been exposed to before. Dukes is involved in Charlottesvilles efforts to reshape and contextualize its now-removed statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. McLeans statements in media outlets came amid several years of debates surrounding the removal of monuments and memorials that venerate slaveholders and key Confederate historical figures. Virginia and localities removed a number of Confederate statues in 2020, a year of reckoning about racial injustice sparked, in part, by the murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd by a police officer. Following a 2020 change in state law that gave localities authority to do so, a number of cities and counties throughout Virginia have removed their Confederate statues. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the removal of city-owned Confederate statues from Monument Avenue, after demonstrators already had taken down several statues. Last September, Virginia removed the state-owned statue of Lee on Monument Avenue after then-Gov. Ralph Northam prevailed in a court fight. Dukes said hes glad there has been more research and education over the years into more of the complexity of American history. We have to be able to approach that knowledge with an open mind and to be prepared, you know, to learn. Im still learning very much myself, Dukes said. My hope is that theyre going to get somebody whos willing to confront the authentic histories that are far more complex. Porter did not give further details on when Youngkin might appoint a new person to McLeans slot on the board. When 18-year-olds move out of foster care, Virginia will be stepping up with help finding housing through a General Assembly bill that Gov. Glenn Youngkin has signed into law. Teachers will get a tax break when they dig into their pockets to buy classroom supplies, too. Both were among initiatives the General Assembly approved during this years special session. The governor had a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Thursday to act on remaining bills and say yes, no, or I want changes. The governor also approved the School Construction Fund and Program proposed by state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, and Del. Israel OQuinn, R-Washington County, which will award grants to local school boards for building, renovating or adding to schools. The state budget approved during the special session sets aside $1.5 billion for school construction. The foster care bill, sponsored by Del. Anne Ferrell Tata, R-Virginia Beach, says local social services departments will provide housing support for youth when they age out of foster care at 18. That support is also to be provided to young people leaving Department of Juvenile Justice facilities as they participate in programs to become self-sufficient. That support would be available to those young people until they turn 21. The new effort is likely to cost about $630,000 a year, General Assembly fiscal analysts estimate. Almost all would come from the state. The state Department of Social Services expects about 200 youth a year would seek the support, or roughly half the number of young people who aged out of foster care in fiscal year 2021, the latest data available. Teachers would get income tax deductions of up to $500 in 2022, 2023 and 2024 for money they spent buying classroom supplies, books and equipment. Principals, counselors and staff who work with students with special needs can also get the credit, after Youngkin signed a bill sponsored by Del. Karen Greenhalgh, R-Virginia Beach. Although nobody can say how many educators would seek the credit, if all those eligible claimed the maximum, it would reduce tax collections by $3.5 million a year, according to the General Assemblys financial analysts. Bills sponsored by Del. John McGuire, R-Goochland, and state Sen. Bryce Reeves, R-Spotsylvania, write into law the income tax break for veterans retirement pay that the special session voted into the state budget. The relief, which is for veterans over 55, also covers other military benefits as well as benefits paid to surviving spouses. This is a chance to deliver for Virginias students, parents, our veterans and teachers, said Macaulay Porter, Youngkins press secretary. These special session bills reaffirm the governors commitment to deliver on the largest education budget in the history of Virginia including creative structures to support school construction and classroom materials, she said. RICHMOND The Virginia Department of Education is finalizing model policies to ensure parents are notified if their children are being taught sexually explicit instructional materials in the classroom. Wednesday marked the last day for Virginia residents to weigh in on the new policies that the department drafted. Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill in April sponsored by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico requiring the education department to develop and local school boards to adopt such policies. According to the VDOE policy, parents will be notified at least 30 days in advance if any instructional materials with sexually explicit content (as defined by the model policy) will be taught in their childs classroom. At that time, parents will be able to review the materials. On school websites, principals will maintain a current list of sexually explicit instructional materials by grade and subject. Local school boards have until January to adopt either VDOEs model policies concerning instructional materials with sexually explicit content, or more comprehensive policies. Youngkin, who has advocated for more parental involvement in the classroom, ran a campaign ad in October that criticized his opponent, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, for vetoing a similar bill when McAuliffe was governor. The so-called Beloved bill named after Nobel laureate Toni Morrisons book Beloved that McAuliffe vetoed would have required school districts to notify parents of assignments containing sexually explicit content. Dunnavant, who sponsored the bill in the most recent legislative session, was not immediately available for comment. Policies should be drafted which empower parents to exercise their right to decide whether the use of sexually explicit content in instructional materials is appropriate for their child, the model policy states. The online public comment period, which closes midnight Wednesday, garnered roughly 1,500 comments as of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. The online forum has a mix of comments in support of and against the model policies. One supportive commenter said the policies were a common-sense program, while another supporter wrote, these model policies are a wake-up call to school boards and teachers to attend to the voices of those who innately care most about the children: their parents. An opponent said, classrooms should be a place where students are free to ask questions, explore new ideas, and learn about diverse viewpoints. On Tuesday, the ACLU of Virginia submitted a comment to the town hall and sent a letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow in opposition to the proposed model policies. Educators and librarians cannot do their job if they are constantly being required to justify their curricula and instruction to parents who may hold diametrically opposing viewpoints, the letter states. Nor was the public education system put in place to present a homogenized viewpoint. The education of young Virginians will be disrupted by efforts to use classrooms to support a political agenda a space of control rather than a thriving ground for free speech and freedom of thought. The proposed model policies, according to the ACLU of Virginia, will force school divisions to adopt anti-free speech practices and deny students the opportunity to be inspired by stories of people from all walks of life. The ACLU of Virginia argues that the proposed model policies will lead to classroom censorship and will likely target curriculum by and/or that includes LGBTQ people and Black, Indigenous and other communities of color. The Pride Liberation Project, a student-led LGBTQ rights advocacy organization, published a letter with over 600 student signatures calling on the VDOE to explicitly state that instruction about LGBTQIA+ people is not inherently sexual. Failing to do so would have a chilling effect on our education, the letter states, adding that every student, including LGBTQIA+ students, deserves to be accurately represented in school curriculum. Erasing Queer people from our classes would lead to fictionalized and over-simplified instruction, given the immense contributions that LGBTQIA+ people have made to our state and county, the letter states. While Susan Muskett, president of Pro-Family Women, a pro-life organization based in Arlington, wrote positively of the model policies in the online town hall, she cited some concerns with the document. Muskett characterized the policies as a much-needed tilt toward restoring parental rights and welcomes all efforts toward making parental notification of sexually explicit material a more standardized and open procedure. The organization took pause with a sentence that says: when determining whether instructional materials contain sexually explicit content, teachers, principals, and division staff should consider student age and maturity, and whether a parent might reasonably consider the instructional content harmful to their child. Pro-Family Women wrote in the public comment section that including the sentence would undermine the law because it would allow school staff to make subjective assessments as to whether instructional material contains sexually explicit content impact[ing] whether or not students parents are given notice. Charles Pyle, a spokesperson for VDOE, said in an email Wednesday that the model policies became available at the beginning of July. After reviewing public comments, the department will communicate the final document to school divisions to inform the adoption of local policies by January 1, 2023, as required by the legislation, Pyle wrote. Youngkin signs bill requiring parental notification of sexually explicit content in schools Gov. Glenn Youngkins office announced Friday that the governor signed a bill to require the Department of Education to develop and local school boards to adopt policies for ensuring parental notification of sexually explicit instructional material. 23 Va. school districts have taken books off shelves in past two years The Times-Dispatch sent public records requests to each of the state's 132 public school systems seeking information on books that had been removed or placed under review in the last two school years. FLORENCE, S.C. The Greater Florence Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Hartsville Chamber of Commerce will play host host to the 2022 S.C. Chamber Grassroots Tour Luncheon Sept. 7 at the Darlington Raceway Media Center. Doors will open at 11:30 a.m. and the program will begin at noon. Bob Morgan, president and chief executive officer of the S.C. Chamber of Commerce, will lead the program discussion and legislative review. Each year, the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce partners with regional chambers of commerce throughout South Carolina to present the Chambers Alliance Grassroots Tour along with a legislative update or review. We are so fortunate to be able to gather together to celebrate the triumphs of our business community leaders and all that was accomplished after the treacherous past two years said Murphy Monk, president of the Hartsville Chamber. Coming together to hear from the S.C. Chambers CEO, Bob Morgan, and making sure Darlington and Florence counties can have their voices heard in the planning process of the next years legislative priorities is crucial. The interactive luncheon allows for the local business and industries to share thoughts and concerns on the issues they are faced with in todays business environment. The feedback received will help shape the state chambers 2022 Competitiveness Agenda and set the chambers priorities for the next legislative session in Columbia. This is a great opportunity for area business and industry leaders to share their thoughts on government and legislative issues, said Mike Miller, president of the Greater Florence Chamber. The S.C. Chamber can help local voices to be heard in Columbia. The Florence Chamber helps host and support this annual luncheon to help our members take advantage of the opportunity to contribute and share important business views. Seating for the Grassroots Luncheon is limited and will close out early. Those planning to attend should get their registration in quickly. There is no charge for registration. Register at https://www.flochamber.com/event/2022-grassroots-tour-luncheon/. If you have questions, contact the Florence Chamber at 843-665-0515 or the Hartsville Chamber at 843-332-6401. Map and directions to the Darlington Raceways infield Media Center are available when you register. "Juries, Democracy, and Petty Crime" | Main | Will SCOTUS ruling in Bruen function to "defund the police" in order to fund government gun-law lawyers? As noted in this post last month, Oklahoma has scheduled 25 executions over the next few years after the ending a moratorium on lethal injections. The first of these executions is scheduled for later this month. But, as this new local article reports, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted Wednesday to spare the life of the condemned scheduled to be execution on August 25. Here are the details: James Coddington addressed the board himself and expressed remorse for killing his friend, 73-year-old Albert Hale, at Hales Choctaw residence in 1997 after Hale refused to give Coddington money for drugs. The person that he welcomed into his home was not me, it was a shell of me. It was a drug addict that didnt deserve his friendship, said Coddington. Hales family spoke about their loss to the board. Son Mitch Hale said hes forgiven Coddington but the murder devastated the family. Not only did he brutally kill a kind, gentle, elderly man, he also killed our family. When he took my fathers life, he completely destroyed the gathering place and tradition of five generations, said Hale. Board member Edward Konieczny, appointed by Gov. Kevin Stitt in Jan., joined Richard Smothermon and Larry Morris in voting for clemency. Cathy Stocker and Scott Williams voted to deny clemency. Konieczny cited exceptional childhood abuse, as well as Coddingtons age of 24 years at the time of the murder as concerns. I certainly want to hear from my colleagues. Weve had a number of trainings and conversations around the maturation of a persons brain and also the impact of abusive environments. In this particular case, its not just somebody suggesting that. We have documentation of what could be considered extraordinary drug and alcohol and physical and emotional abuse. I would just appreciate hearing from some of my other colleagues, said Konieczny.... Smothermon, who has thus far voted to deny clemency to every death row inmate, said how people endure abuse in similar situations matters to him. Given that environment, what is the resulting actions of other people or children that were in that environment and how did they turn out?... Cathy Stocker, appointed by Stitt in Mar., said Coddingtons background was already considered in court and so she voted to deny clemency. Before voting no, Scott Williams acknowledged that Coddington, who earned his GED in prison in 2002, had changed for the better. Just from what weve seen, Id say theres definitely been some change there and hes had an exemplary record for a number of years. At the same time, that doesnt take away from all of the facts and everything we have to consider today, said Williams.... The boards clemency suggestion will go to Stitt to decide. Coddington is still scheduled for execution Aug. 25. Oklahoma board recommends clemency for first of many scheduled to be executed in coming months | Main | WNBA star Brittney Griner sentenced to 9 years(!) in prison by Russian judge for "drug smuggling" August 4, 2022 Will SCOTUS ruling in Bruen function to "defund the police" in order to fund government gun-law lawyers? The question in the title of this post was my reaction to a particular quote by a gun control advocate in this notable new AP article about all the litigation following the Supreme Court's big Second Amendment ruling in Bruen earlier this summer. The AP piece is headlined "After Supreme Court ruling, its open season on US gun laws," and here are excerpts (with the quote highlighted): The Supreme Court ruling expanding gun rights threatens to upend firearms restrictions across the country as activists wage court battles over everything from bans on AR-15-style guns to age limits..... The gun rights movement has been given a weapon of mass destruction, and it will annihilate approximately 75% of the gun laws eventually, said Evan Nappen, a New Jersey gun rights attorney. The court battles come as the Biden administration and police departments across the U.S. struggle to combat a surge in violent crime and mass shootings, including several high-profile killings carried out by suspects who purchased their guns legally. And given the sheer number of cases now working through the courts, a lot more time will be spent in courtrooms no matter who wins. We will see a lot of tax dollars and government resources that should be used to stop gun crime being used to defend gun laws that are lifesaving and wildly popular, said Jonathan Lowry, chief counsel and vice president at Brady, the gun control group.... In its New York ruling, the high courts conservative majority also changed a test lower courts had used for evaluating challenges to gun laws. Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the opinion authored by Justice Clarence Thomas said. Instead, they should only weigh whether the law is consistent with the Second Amendments text and historical understanding. Basically, the Supreme Court has given an invitation for the gun lobby to file lawsuits against virtually every gun law in America, Lowry said.... The ruling also has come up in challenges to restrictions on gun possession for 18- to 20-year-olds in Texas and Pennsylvania. And it has been cited in a case challenging a federal ban on gun possession for people convicted of nonviolent crimes punishable by more than a year behind bars, as well as a prohibition on concealed guns on the subway in Washington, D.C. In addition, a gun rights group is suing Colorado over the states 2013 ban on magazines that hold more than 15 rounds, saying the high court ruling reinforces the groups argument that it infringes on Second Amendment rights. And the ruling has public defenders in New York City asking judges to drop gun possession cases. Not all those lawsuits will necessarily be successful. The Texas attorney general, for example, argues the Supreme Court ruling doesnt affect the states age limit law, and more state and local governments can certainly defend their gun laws as being in line with U.S. history. Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, predicted that when the dust settles, only laws along the margins will eventually be struck down. Most judges are going to see these for what they are, which is overreaching and lacking in any merit, he said. Just as we saw after prior big Second Amendment rulings in Heller and McDonald, it seems most likely that most existing gun control laws will eventually be upheld by lower courts (even though I think the Bruen majority opinion ought to be read as a strong signal that many more broad gun laws ought to be deemed constitutionally suspect). But this AP article highlights the reality that Bruen is sure to lead to a whole lot more time and money being spent on a whole lot more court challenges to a whole lot more existing gun laws and regulations. I seriously doubt that the resources to be spent on all this Second Amendment litigation will come directly from the budgets for police, but I do think it sensible to expect that more time spent by government lawyers and others trying to defend the constitutionality of various laws likely means, as a practical matter, somewhat less time spent by by government lawyers and others vigorously enforcing these and other laws. (On a somewhat related front, Damon Root at Reason.com has this notable post fully titled "The New York Times Is Surprised To Find Public Defenders Championing the Second Amendment: Yet the civil rights movement has long had a gun rights component.") Prior recent related posts: August 4, 2022 at 10:41 AM | Permalink Comments Post a comment THURSDAY, Aug. 4, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- As the worst flu season in five years winds down in Australia, U.S. health officials are bracing for similar severity this coming fall. Why? The flu season in Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia can often predict the potential for a similar experience in Northern Hemisphere countries. "We watch all of the Southern Hemisphere countries very closely, hoping that we get some sort of insight, but it's not perfect by any means," Dr. Alicia Fry, chief of the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NBC News. Australia's flu season had a big impact on children. Children ages 5 to 9 had the highest flu rates, while those aged 4 and younger and teenagers were also hit hard. "There are a lot of young kids who have not had flu at all over the past couple of years," Dr. James Cutrell, an infectious disease expert at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told NBC News. "That's going to make them more susceptible to get it and then to spread it to other people." Not only were the young the most vulnerable, but also Australia's flu season kicked off early. "The earlier it starts, the worse it tends to be," Dr. Robert Citronberg, executive medical director of infectious disease and prevention for Advocate Aurora Health in Illinois, told NBC News. That's because an early season can also be one that continues for more months, having more time to infect people. Between 9 million and 41 million Americans get the flu each year, according to the CDC. As many as 52,000 people die. Though public health officials have warned since 2020 about the challenges of a bad flu season paired with the COVID-19 pandemic, that hasn't happened yet. Cutrell said it isn't time to panic, but "it is time for people to prepare." That includes flu shots, which in the United States will protect against four strains of flu, two each from influenza A and B. Immunity has waned these past two years with little flu circulating, NBC News reported. Those vaccines should arrive at U.S. pharmacies and doctors' offices soon. Fry said the CDC recommends getting the shots in September or October. Flu shots can reduce the risk of flu severity and death. "Flu is not completely preventable by the vaccine, but it's controllable," Citronberg said. "If we get a significantly fewer number of people getting vaccinated this year for flu, then it could really impact how many cases we have and the severity of those cases." Then, "we're going to have our hands full," Citronberg noted. Young children and pregnant women in their third trimesters should get their shots earliest. "It's a good idea to get the vaccine before they deliver so that the baby gets some of the antibodies that Mom develops and the baby's protected," Fry said. Babies can't get their own flu shots until they are 6 months old. COVID-19 booster shots will also be important because protection against one viral infection can help protect against the other, Citronberg said. "Once you have lung inflammation, you're more susceptible to other infections or pathogens," Citronberg explained. More information The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the flu. SOURCE: NBC News BISBEE, Ariz. (AP) MJ was a tiny, black-haired girl, just 5 years old, when her father admitted to his bishop that he was sexually abusing her. The father, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an admitted pornography addict, was in counseling with his bishop when he revealed the abuse. The bishop, who was also a family physician, followed church policy and called what church officials have dubbed the help line for guidance. But the call offered little help for MJ. Lawyers for the church, widely known as the Mormon church, who staff the help line around the clock told Bishop John Herrod not to call police or child welfare officials. Instead he kept the abuse secret. They said, You absolutely can do nothing, Herrod said in a recorded interview with law enforcement. Herrod continued to counsel MJs father, Paul Douglas Adams, for another year, and brought in Adams wife, Leizza Adams, in hopes she would do something to protect the children. She didnt. Herrod later told a second bishop, who also kept the matter secret after consulting with church officials who maintain that the bishops were excused from reporting the abuse to police under the states so-called clergy-penitent privilege. Adams continued raping MJ for as many as seven more years, into her adolescence, and also abused her infant sister, who was born during that time. He frequently recorded the abuse on video and posted the video on the internet. Adams was finally arrested by Homeland Security agents in 2017 with no help from the church, after law enforcement officials in New Zealand discovered one of the videos. He died by suicide in custody before he could stand trial. The Associated Press has obtained nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records from an unrelated child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon church in West Virginia. The documents offer the most detailed and comprehensive look yet at the so-called help line Herrod called. Families of survivors who filed the lawsuit said they show its part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harms way. The help line has been criticized by abuse victims and their attorneys for being inadequate to quickly stop abuse and protect victims. Yet the Utah-based faith has stuck by the system despite the criticism and increasing scrutiny from attorneys and prosecutors, including those in the Adams case. I just think that the Mormon church really sucks. Seriously sucks, said MJ, who is now 16, during an interview with the AP. They are just the worst type of people, from what Ive experienced and what other people have also experienced. MJ and her adoptive mother asked the AP to use only her initials in part because videos of her abuse posted by her father are still circulating on the internet. The AP does not publish the names of sexual abuse survivors without their consent. William Maledon, an Arizona attorney representing the bishops and the church in a lawsuit filed by three of the Adams six children, told the AP last month that the bishops were not required to report the abuse. These bishops did nothing wrong. They didnt violate the law, and therefore they cant be held liable, he said. Maledon referred to the suit as a money grab. In his AP interview, Maledon also insisted Herrod did not know that Adams was continuing to sexually assault his daughter after learning of the abuse in a single counseling session. But in the recorded interview with the agent obtained by the AP, Herrod said he asked Leizza Adams in multiple sessions if the abuse was ongoing and asked her, What are we going to do to stop it? At least for a period of time I assumed they had stopped things, but and then I never asked if they picked up again. THE PERFECT LIFESTYLE The Adams family lived on a lonely dirt road about 8 miles from the center of Bisbee, an old copper-mining town in southeastern Arizona known today for its antique shops and laid-back attitude. Far from prying eyes, the Adams home a three-bedroom, open concept affair surrounded by desert was often littered with piles of clothing and containers of lubricant Adams used to sexually abuse his children, according to legal documents reviewed by the AP. Pauls wife, Leizza, assumed most of the child-rearing responsibilities, including getting their six children off to school and chauffeuring them to church and religious instruction on Sundays. Paul, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol, spent much of his time online looking at porn, often with his children watching, or wandering the house naked or in nothing but his underwear. He had a short fuse and would frequently throw things, yell at his wife and beat his kids. He just had this explosive personality, said Shaunice Warr, a Border Patrol agent and a Mormon who worked with Paul and described herself as Leizzas best friend. He had a horrible temper. Paul was more relaxed while coaxing his older daughter to hold a smartphone camera and record him while he sexually abused her. He also seemed to revel in the abuse in online chat rooms, where he once bragged that he had the perfect lifestyle because he could have sex with his daughters whenever he pleased, while his wife knew and doesnt care. He would later tell investigators the abuse was a compulsion he couldnt stop. I got into something too deep that I just couldnt pull myself out of, he said. Im not trying to say the devil made me do it. The Adams family was deeply involved in the Mormon community, and on Sundays they attended services in Bisbee. So Adams turned to his church, and to Bishop Herrod, when he sought help and revealed his abuse of MJ. Herrod later told Homeland Security agent Robert Edwards he knew from the start that Leizza Adams was unlikely to stop her husband, after he called her into the counseling sessions. The bishop, who was also Leizzas personal physician, said she seemed pretty emotionally dead when her husband recounted his abuse of their daughter. The bishop also recognized the harm being done to MJ. I doubt (she) will ever do well, he said in his recorded interview with Homeland Security agents. Herrod also told Edwards that when he called the help line, church officials told him the states clergy-penitent privilege required him to keep Adamss abuse confidential. But the law required no such thing. Arizonas child sex abuse reporting law, and similar laws in more than 20 states that require clergy to report child sex abuse and neglect, says that clergy, physicians, nurses, or anyone caring for a child who reasonably believes a child has been abused or neglected has a legal obligation to report the information to police or the state Department of Child Safety. But it also says that clergy who receive information about child neglect or sexual abuse during spiritual confessions may withhold that information from authorities if the clergy determine it is reasonable and necessary under church doctrine. In 2012, when Herrod rotated out of his position as bishop of the Bisbee ward a Mormon jurisdiction similar to a Catholic parish he told incoming Bishop Robert Kim Mauzy about the abuse in the Adams household. Instead of rescuing MJ by reporting the abuse to authorities, Mauzy also kept the information within the church. In a separate recorded interview with federal agents obtained by the AP, Mauzy said church officials told him he should convene a confidential disciplinary hearing for Adams, after which Adams was ex-communicated in 2013. Mauzy and other church leaders still didnt report Adams to the police. Two years later, in 2015, Leizza Adams gave birth to a second daughter. It took her husband just six weeks to start sexually assaulting her, recording the abuse, and uploading the videos to the internet. The revelation that Mormon officials may have directed an effort to conceal years of abuse in the Adams household sparked a criminal investigation of the church by Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre, and the civil lawsuit by three of the Adams children. Whos really responsible for Herrod not disclosing? McIntyre asked in an AP interview. Is it Herrod, who says he followed the church lawyers instruction not to report the abuse to authorities? Or is it the people who gave him that advice? THE CALL COMES TO MY CELL PHONE When it comes to child sexual abuse, the Mormon church says the first responsibility of the church in abuse cases is to help those who have been abused and protect those who may be vulnerable to future abuse, according to its 2010 handbook for church leaders. The handbook also says, Abuse cannot be tolerated in any form. But church officials, from the bishops in the Bisbee ward to officials in Salt Lake City, tolerated abuse in the Adams family for years. They just let it keep happening, said MJ, in her AP interview. They just said, Hey, lets excommunicate her father. It didnt stop. Lets have them do therapy. It didnt stop. Hey, lets forgive and forget and all this will go away. It didnt go away. A similar dynamic played out in West Virginia, where church leaders were accused of covering up the crimes committed by a young abuser from a prominent Mormon family even after hed been convicted on child sex abuse charges in Utah. The abuser, Michael Jensen, today is serving a 35- to 75-year prison sentence for abusing two children in West Virginia. Their family, along with others, sued the church and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Child abuse festers and grows in secrecy, said Lynne Cadigan, a lawyer for the Adams children who filed suit. That is why the mandatory reporting came into effect. Its the most important thing in the world to immediately report to the police. The lawsuit filed by the three Adams children accuses The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and several members, including Bishops Herrod and Mauzy, of negligence and conspiring to cover up child sex abuse to avoid costly lawsuits and protect the reputation of the church, which relies on proselytizing and tithing to attract new members and raise money. In 2020, the church claimed approximately 16 million members worldwide, most of them living outside the United States. The failure to prevent or report abuse was part of the policy of the defendants, which was to block public disclosure to avoid scandals, to avoid the disclosure of their tolerance of child sexual molestation and assault, to preserve a false appearance of propriety, and to avoid investigation and action by public authority, including law enforcement, the suit alleges. Plaintiffs are informed and believe that such actions were motivated by a desire to protect the reputation of the defendants. Very few of the scores of lawsuits against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mention the help line, in part because details of its operations have been a closely guarded secret. The documents in the sealed court records show how it works. The help line is certainly there to help to help the church keep its secrets and to cover up abuse, said Craig Vernon, an Idaho attorney who has filed several sex abuse lawsuits against the church. Vernon, a former member, routinely demands that the church require bishops to report sex abuse to police or state authorities rather than the help line. The sealed records say calls to the help line are answered by social workers or professional counselors who determine whether the information they receive is serious enough to be referred to an attorney with Kirton McConkie, a Salt Lake City firm that represents the church. A document with the heading Protocol for abuse help line calls, which was among the sealed records obtained by the AP, laid out the questions social workers were to ask before determining whether the calls should be referred to the lawyers. Mormon officials in the West Virginia case said they did not recognize the Protocol and could not authenticate it. But a ranking church official in a separate sex abuse lawsuit in Oregon confirmed that those answering the help line used a written protocol to guide them. There would be a page containing various topics to discuss and handle, said Harold C. Brown, then director of the churchs Welfare Services Department. The Protocol instructs those staffing the help line to tell callers they are to use first names only. No identifying information should be given. Under the heading High Risk Cases, it also instructs staffers to ask a series of questions, including whether calls concerned possible abuse by a church leader, an employee, or abuse at a church-sponsored activity. The protocol advises those taking the calls to instruct a priesthood leader, which includes bishops and stake presidents, to encourage the perpetrator, the victim, or others who know of the abuse to report it. But it also says, in capital letters, that those taking the calls should never advise a priesthood leader to report abuse. Counsel of this nature should come only from legal counsel. That counsel comes from attorneys from Kirton McConkie, which represents the church. Joseph Osmond, one of the Kirton McConkie lawyers assigned to take help line calls, said in a sealed deposition that hes always ready to deal with sex abuse complaints. Wherever I am. The call comes to my cell phone, he said. He then acknowledged that he did not refer calls to a social worker and wouldnt know how to do so. Osmond declined to comment through church officials. Peter Schofield, a Kirton McConkie lawyer long associated with the help line, also declined to answer questions from the AP. Maledon, the attorney for the church in the Adams lawsuit, said church clergy or church attorneys have made hundreds of reports of child abuse to civil authorities in Arizona over an unspecified number of years. But he could not say how many calls to the help line were not referred to police or child welfare officials and could not provide a referral rate. Two church practices, identified in the sealed records, work together to ensure that the contents of all help lines calls remain confidential. First, all records of calls to the help line are routinely destroyed. Those notes are destroyed by the end of every day, said Roger Van Komen, the churchs director of Family Services, in an affidavit included in the sealed records. Second, church officials say that all calls referred to Kirton McConkie lawyers are covered by attorney-client privilege and remain out of the reach of prosecutors and victims attorneys. The church has always regarded those communications between its lawyers and local leaders as attorney-client privileged, said Paul Rytting, the director of Risk Management, in a sealed affidavit. AN OMINOUS TIME Mormon leaders established the help line in 1995 and it operated not within its Department of Family Services, but instead in its Office of Risk Management, whose role is to protect the church and members from injury and liability in an array of circumstances, including fires, explosions, hazardous chemical spills and severe weather. The department ultimately reports to the First Presidency, the three officials at the very top of the church hierarchy, according to records in the sealed documents. Risk management also tracks all sex abuse lawsuits against the church, according to a sealed affidavit by Dwayne Liddell, a past director of the department who helped establish the help line. He said members of the churchs First Presidency knew the details of the help line. I have been in those type of meetings where ... the training of ecclesiastical leaders (and) the establishment of a help line have been discussed, Liddell said. When asked who attended the meetings, he answered, Members of the First Presidency and the presiding bishopric, or the top leaders of the church. Before establishing the help line in 1995, the Mormon church simply instructed bishops to comply with local child sex abuse reporting laws. At the time, child sex abuse lawsuits were on the rise and juries were awarding victims millions of dollars. The Mormon church is largely self-insured, leaving it especially vulnerable to costly lawsuits. There is nothing inconsistent between identifying cases that may pose litigation risks to the church and complying with reporting obligations, church lawyers said in a sealed legal filing. But one affidavit in the sealed records which repeatedly says the church condemns child sexual abuse, also suggests the church is more concerned about the spiritual well-being of perpetrators than the physical and emotional well-being of young victims, who also may be members of the faith. Disciplinary proceedings are subject to the highest confidentiality possible, said Rytting. If members had any concerns that their disciplinary files could be read by a secular judge or attorneys or be presented to a jury as evidence in a public trial, their willingness to confess and repent and for their souls to be saved would be seriously compromised. A GLOBAL INVESTIGATION In 2016 police in New Zealand arrested a 47-year-old farm worker on child pornography charges and found a nine-minute video on his cell phone, downloaded from the internet, showing a man in his 30s raping a 10-year-old girl. A global search for the rapist and his victim was on. It started with Interpol and led to the U.S. State Department, where investigators using facial recognition technology matched the rapist with a passport card photo of a U.S. Border Patrol employee living in Bisbee, Arizona, according to a Homeland Security synopsis obtained by the AP. Agents rushed to the Naco, Arizona, Border Station and arrested Adams, then a lanky, bearded mission support specialist with the Border Patrol. After some coaxing, Adams admitted to raping MJ and to sexually assaulting her younger sister, and to posting video of the assaults on the internet. When agents raided his home, they seized phones and computers holding more than 4,000 photos and nearly 1,000 videos depicting child sex abuse, many featuring the Adams daughters. But the nine-minute video stood out. This video is one of the worst Ive ever seen, Homeland Security agent Edwards later testified, adding that haunting dialogue between Adams and his older daughter helped make the video stand out in my mind and continue to stand out in my mind. That video represented nine minutes and 14 seconds in seven years of continual and unnecessary trauma for MJ and a lifetime of abuse for her tiny sister while Bishops Herrod and Mauzy and church representatives in Salt Lake City stood by. After Paul Adams died by suicide, Leizza Adams pleaded no contest to child sex abuse charges and served two-and-a-half years in state prison. Three of the Adams children went to live with members of Leizzas extended family in California. The other three were taken in by local families. THE SURVIVORS MJs little sister was only 2 when she met her adoptive mother for the first time. The toddler wrapped her arms and legs around Miranda Whitworths head, buried her face in her neck, and refused to look up to say good-bye to members of Leizzas family. It was the craziest thing, said Whitworth who, with her husband, Matthew, welcomed the toddler into their family. It was like when you see a baby monkey or baby gorilla cling to their mother, and they just wont let go. Over the next few days and weeks, the Whitworths would see additional markers of the unfathomable abuse the toddler endured at the hands of her father much of it recorded on video. She would howl in terror when any man attempted to touch her, whether it was Matthew or the family physician. The nurse was fine but the minute the doctor walked in she climbed onto me and started screaming bloody murder, Miranda said. The 2-year-old was also terrified of the water, which made bathing an ear-splitting ordeal. She wouldnt tolerate anything wrapped around her wrists. And at church, she would run and hide behind Miranda whenever anyone greeted her by an old family nickname. When they took in the toddler, neither Miranda nor Matthew knew very much about what had happened to her. But while sitting in on Leizza Adamss sentencing hearing, they learned about the repeated rapes, the videos, and the fact that church bishops knew about the abuse of the older daughter and did nothing to stop it. The Whitworths were converts to the Mormon faith and, like many new followers of a religion, they were especially enthusiastic about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In particular, they appreciated the efforts Mormons make to help fellow church members in times of need through church organizations established to give special attention to women, teens and children. Its all about family, Miranda said. Thats one of the things we absolutely loved. But after learning about what Adams did to their new daughter, and the failure of the church to stop him, the scales fell from their eyes. We decided to remove our records from the church, said Matthew Whitworth. I personally couldnt continue to provide tithing money to a church that would allow young children to be abused and not do anything to prevent it. Unlike the Whitworths, Nancy Salminen has never been a member of the Mormon church. But as a special needs teacher and a rape victim herself, she has a special affinity for MJ and others like her. Over the last five years, she has opened her home to 17 girls and boys who needed a safe place to stay. Her house is a modest, ranch-style structure she bought out of foreclosure. Everythings a little broken here and thats perfect because so are we, she said. Salminen said she met MJ after receiving an urgent call on a Friday evening to rescue a 12-year-old from another family. She was pretty scared and pretty confused when I picked her up, Salminen recalled. She spent a lot of time in her closet in her room when we got home, but we got to know each other and got to like each other. Like the Whitworths, Salminen knew very little about what MJ had endured until Leizza Adamss sentencing hearing. What I heard made me want to throw up, she said. And the more I learned the more I wanted to help her fight this fight that she didnt even know about. Safely settled in Salminens household which today includes a foster girl Salminen also plans to adopt MJ has been transformed from a victim of unimaginable abuse to a bubbly 16-year-old who plays in the high school band and proudly dons a crisp, new uniform for her job at a fast-food restaurant. She had every excuse to fail and to just fold into herself and run away, Salminen said. But instead, she came back stronger than anyone Ive ever known. So strong that she appears eager to play an active role in the battle she and her two siblings are waging against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I just want them to do what theyre supposed to do and report to the police, MJ said. The adoptive parents of the third Adams child who has filed suit declined to speak to the AP about the case. Like MJ, Miranda and Matthew Whitworth said they joined the lawsuit against the church on behalf of their young daughter not in hopes of a payday, but to change church policy so that any instance of child sexual abuse is immediately reported to civil authorities. We just dont understand why theyre paying all these lawyers to fight this, Matthew Whitworth said. Just change the policy. THE PRIVILEGE That policy is the key to the churchs defense. In a recent filing asking a Superior Court judge to dismiss the case, Maledon and other lawyers for the church said the case hinges entirely on whether Arizonas child abuse reporting statute required two church bishops ... to report to authorities confidential confessions made to them by plaintiffs father. Whatever moral or public policy arguments one could make that the church should have told authorities that Paul Adams was raping his daughters are irrelevant, the lawyers argued. Arizonas reporting statute broadly exempts confidential communications with clergy, as determined by the clergyman himself, according to the church motion to dismiss the case. Reasonable people can debate whether this is the best public policy choice. But that is not an issue for a jury or this court. Bishop Herrod, in his recorded interview, said church officials told him he had to keep what Adams told him confidential or he could be sued if he went to authorities. But McIntyre, the Cochise County attorney, said thats false, noting the Arizona reporting law says that anyone reporting a belief that child sex abuse occurred is immune from any civil or criminal liability. Aside from the legal arguments over whether Bishops Herrod and Mauzy were excused from their reporting obligations under the clergy-penitent privilege, critics of the inaction by the two bishops and the broader church have raised ethical issues. Gerard Moretz, a seasoned child sex abuse investigator for the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriffs Department and an expert witness for the Adams children, is one of them. What aspect of your religious practice are you advancing if you dont report something like this? he asked. Associated Press editor Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this story. To contact the AP's investigations team, email investigative@ap.org. Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. August is National Water Quality month, and Partners of Scott County Watersheds will celebrate on Saturday by leading a group of volunteers in cleaning up the backwaters of the Mississippi River at the Princeton Wildlife Management Area, 26545 285th Ave., Princeton, Iowa. The one constant recently: The meals have to come together quickly. The longer days of spring are lovely, but the later-setting sun makes me lose track of time. Even if I had hoped to roast a whole chicken or bake a lasagna, I find myself glancing at the clock and gasping. I thought I still had plenty of time to cook! How did it get so late? Having lost the minutes intended for heating up the oven, I opt for recipes that come together in the time it takes to make rice or cook pasta, and feel like a whole meal alongside stir-fried vegetables or a simple salad. Speedy recipes dont come at the expense of taste. They may not develop the deep caramelization of slowly roasted anything, but quick-cooking on the stovetop or grill often delivers the kind of freshness we crave this time of year. Advertisement And, because these dishes are so fast, they leave plenty of time to enjoy the meal as the sun sets and to dream of even longer nights ahead. Mushroom Chicharron Tacos (LINDA XIAO/NYT) 1. Mushroom Chicharron Tacos Creator: Jocelyn Ramirez Advertisement This simple recipe calls for pan-searing meaty oyster mushrooms so they become as perfectly crispy and golden as chicharron. Paired with fresh pico de gallo, these mushrooms feel satisfying with their natural umami savoriness. This quick dish tastes like juicy carniceria tacos that balance the richness of fried meat with the acidic punch of salsa. Yield: 4 servings Total time: 30 minutes Ingredients: For the pico de gallo: 1 large beefsteak tomato, cored and cut into 1/4-inch dice 1 large ripe Hass avocado, pitted, peeled and cut into 1/4-inch dice 2 jalapenos, stemmed and finely chopped (seeded if desired) Advertisement cup cilantro leaves, finely chopped 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice (from 1 to 2 limes) Coarse kosher salt For the mushroom tacos: 18 ounces oyster mushrooms (from 2 to 3 medium clusters) cup neutral oil, such as canola Advertisement teaspoon ground cumin 1 teaspoons coarse kosher salt Black pepper 12 corn tortillas Preparation: 1. Make the pico de gallo: Combine the tomato, avocado, jalapenos, cilantro and lime juice in a bowl and season with salt. Gently fold together. Set aside to allow flavors to marry while the mushrooms cook. Advertisement 2. Make the tacos: Tear the oyster mushrooms into bite-size pieces, leaving some mushroom tops whole. To make sure the mushrooms become crisp, cook in two batches: Heat a large cast iron or other heavy skillet over medium-high and coat with half of the oil. Once the oil is hot, add half of the mushrooms in a single layer without crowding the skillet. Cook, stirring every few minutes, until deep golden brown and crisp, 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer to a plate, then repeat with the remaining oil and mushrooms. Return the first batch to the skillet, and add the cumin and salt, and season with pepper. Stir well, then remove from the heat. 3. While the mushrooms are cooking, warm the tortillas on a comal or heavy skillet over medium-high heat until soft and pliable. Wrap them in a dish towel to keep them warm until ready to serve. Divide the mushrooms and pico de gallo among the warm tortillas. Serve immediately. 2. Hara Masala Murgh (Green Masala Chicken) Creator: Zainab Shah As is the case with every South Asian dish, variations of hara masala murgh abound. In the south of India, fresh desiccated coconut is used in place of yogurt, which is a common ingredient in the northern parts of Pakistan and India. The stalwarts of the dish across regions are copious amounts of fresh cilantro and mint hence its name hara masala, which means green masala. In Lahore, it is commonly found on restaurant menus, and its peppery herbaceousness is a welcome reprieve from the tomato-onion gravies typical in Punjabi cooking. This version uses thinly sliced chicken breast. It also skips over the tedium of grinding almonds in favor of using almond butter. These two shortcuts mean a quicker cooking time and a creamy texture. Yield: 2 to 4 servings Advertisement Total time: 30 minutes Ingredients: 3 tablespoons ghee or neutral oil 1 large yellow onion, finely chopped 12 whole black peppercorns 1 teaspoon cumin seeds Advertisement 1 pound chicken breasts, thinly sliced (about 1/4-inch thick) 1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger or ginger paste 1 teaspoon freshly grated garlic or garlic paste teaspoon kashmiri red chile powder or other red chile powder 3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt 1 cups finely chopped cilantro leaves and tender stems Advertisement 1 cups finely chopped fresh mint leaves 4 Thai green chiles, chopped cup full-fat Greek yogurt or coconut milk 2 tablespoons almond butter or other nut butter, stirred to combine 2 to 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (from about 1/2 lemon) teaspoon garam masala (optional) Advertisement Directions: 1. Heat ghee or oil in a medium pot or wok for about 30 seconds over medium. Add the onion, peppercorns and cumin seeds. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion becomes translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the chicken, ginger and garlic, and cook on medium-high, stirring frequently until the chicken is no longer pink or fleshy and the onions have softened, about 7 to 10 minutes. 2. Lower the heat to medium and stir in the chile powder and salt. Continue cooking for about 30 seconds. Add 1 cup cilantro, 1 cup mint and the Thai green chiles, and stir until all the ingredients are incorporated. 3. Stir in the yogurt and almond butter. Turn off the heat and stir in the remaining cup cilantro and cup mint. Sprinkle with lemon juice and garam masala, if you like. Tomato and Shrimp Pasta. (LINDA XIAO/NYT) 3. Shrimp and Tomato Pasta Creator: Naz Deravian Frozen shrimp is a freezer staple that can be counted on to save dinner any night simply thaw to use them whenever needed. Here, shrimp and spaghetti are tossed with juicy cherry tomatoes, which are gently simmered until they burst and turn saucy. This dish is best with ripe, in-season cherry tomatoes, but the aromatic fennel seeds and garlic infused in the oil will coax maximum flavor out of less enthusiastic tomatoes while adding depth to the sauce. Advertisement Yield: 4 to 6 servings Total time: 40 minutes Ingredients: 8 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 pound peeled and deveined frozen shrimp (16/20-count), thawed and cut into thirds Kosher salt (Diamond Crystal) Advertisement 3 large garlic cloves, gently smashed with the flat side of a knife 1 teaspoon fennel seeds 1/4 teaspoon red-pepper flakes, or to taste 2 pounds cherry tomatoes, larger ones halved, small ones kept whole 1 pound spaghetti Handful of basil leaves, torn Advertisement Black pepper Preparation: 1. In a large skillet, heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium. Add the shrimp, season with 1 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until just cooked through, about 3 minutes. Transfer the shrimp to a dish and set aside. Discard any excess liquid in the pan. 2. Add the remaining 6 tablespoons oil and the garlic cloves to the same pan and cook over medium-low, turning the garlic a couple of times until light gold and fragrant, taking care not to burn them, about 4 minutes. Add the fennel seeds and red-pepper flakes, stir and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Increase the heat to medium and add the cherry tomatoes and 1 teaspoons salt. 3. Cook the tomatoes, stirring occasionally, until they release their juices and get saucy, 25 to 30 minutes. While the tomatoes cook, bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil for the pasta. Add the spaghetti and cook until al dente, about 10 minutes. 4. Transfer the shrimp with any juices to the tomatoes to reheat for a couple of minutes. Taste the sauce and adjust seasoning. Advertisement 5. Set the pasta pot next to the saucepan and use tongs to transfer the spaghetti to the tomatoes and shrimp. The starchy water clinging to the spaghetti will make for a tasty and silky sauce. (You can drain the spaghetti, if you prefer. If you do, reserve cup of the pasta water to add as needed for a silky sauce.) Remove the pan from the heat, add the basil and toss well. Season with black pepper to taste and serve. 4. Tofu and Bok Choy With Ginger-Tahini Sauce Creator: Kay Chun This simple dish showcases the uniquely silky texture of soft tofu. The tofu is steamed on top of a layer of bok choy, eliminating the need for a formal steamer and making this meal a cinch to prepare. (Napa or savoy cabbage leaves would also make a nice bed for the tofu.) Once steamed, the warm, mild tofu soaks in all of the bright flavors of a tangy and creamy tahini sauce thats spiked with aromatic ginger and fragrant herbs. For a heftier meal, either double the tofu or serve with a side of rice. Yield: 4 servings Total time: 20 minutes Ingredients: Advertisement 1 pound baby bok choy, quartered lengthwise through the core Kosher salt and black pepper 1 (14- to 16-ounce) package soft (not silken) tofu, drained and cut into 4 equal squares 6 tablespoons tahini cup low-sodium soy sauce 3 tablespoons distilled white vinegar Advertisement 1 teaspoon minced ginger teaspoon minced garlic cup chopped scallions (from about 1 scallion), plus more for garnish cup chopped cilantro, plus more for garnish Toasted white sesame seeds, for garnish Preparation: Advertisement 1. In a large skillet with a lid, arrange bok choy in an even layer to cover the bottom of the pan, and season with salt and pepper. Nestle the tofu pieces on top of or in between the bok choy, depending on the depth of your pan. Add 1/2 cup of water to the skillet and bring to a boil over high heat. Cover securely to prevent steam from escaping, reduce heat to medium and steam until bok choy is tender and tofu is warm throughout, about 10 minutes. 2. Meanwhile, in a small bowl combine tahini, soy sauce, vinegar, ginger, garlic, scallions, cilantro and 1 tablespoon of water. Whisk until well blended, and season with salt and pepper to taste. 3. Using a spatula or large slotted spoon, transfer bok choy and tofu to 4 serving plates. (Discard any remaining water in the skillet.) Spoon some of the sauce over the tofu and garnish with scallions, cilantro and sesame seeds. Serve warm. 5. Fish Skewers With Herbs and Lime Creator: Melissa Clark In this simple, speedy recipe, meaty cubes of fish are marinated with fish sauce and red-pepper flakes, then lined up on skewers and grilled until seared at their corners, but still juicy and tender inside. Topped with herbs and lime juice, its a minimalist take that lets the flavors of good, fresh fish shine through. If you have a fish basket and would rather line up the cubes inside that, go right ahead. Just watch it carefully and adjust the cooking time if needed. If youre looking to add a sauce, this is lovely served with some garlic-spiked yogurt on the side. Advertisement Yield: 4 servings Total time: 20 minutes, plus grill heating Ingredients: 2 garlic cloves, finely grated, pressed or minced 1 tablespoon fish sauce teaspoon red-pepper flakes Advertisement 3 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil 1 pound thick, dense fish steaks, such as tuna or swordfish, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces Lime wedges, for serving 2 scallions, white and green parts, trimmed and thinly sliced cup chopped dill, mint, parsley, cilantro or a combination Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. > Preparation: Advertisement 1. Heat the grill to high. In a mixing bowl, combine garlic, fish sauce and red-pepper flakes. Whisk in oil. Add fish cubes and gently toss to evenly coat. Let marinate while the grill heats up. 2. Thread marinated fish onto metal or pre-soaked bamboo skewers (see tip), pushing them up so they touch. This keeps them from overcooking. 3. When the grill is hot, lightly brush the grates with oil and add the skewers. Cook until slightly charred in places, about 2 to 4 minutes, rotating them carefully halfway through. 4. Transfer to a serving platter, and immediately squeeze 2 or 3 lime wedges on top of the fish while still hot. Garnish fish with scallions and herbs, and serve with more lime wedges on the side. TIP: Using traditional flat metal skewers is best, but not necessary. If using bamboo skewers, they must be soaked in water for at least 30 minutes before grilling to prevent flare-ups. Place bamboo skewers flat on a rimmed sheet pan and add enough water to cover. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. PONCA, Neb. An Allen, Nebraska, man has been arrested on allegations that he sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in his home and while riding a four-wheeler. The Dixon County Sheriff's Office arrested Bruce Malcom, 58, on Tuesday on charges of third-degree sexual assault of a child, contributing to the delinquency of a child and procuring alcohol to a minor. His bond was set at $60,000. According to an affidavit filed in Dixon County Court, Malcom touched the girl with a vibrator and his hands in his bedroom on July 24 after she had changed her shirt that had become wet and muddy from riding utility vehicles and all-terrain vehicles at a get-together. Malcom told her not to tell anyone about it and gave her $20. When they resumed riding, the girl told investigators, Malcom gave her water mixed with vodka, and she refused to keep drinking more after she realized the water contained alcohol. While riding the four-wheeler with Malcom later in the evening, the girl said he touched her inappropriately over her clothes during the whole ride. After the ride, the girl told her father what had happened, the affidavit said. Dixon County Sheriff Tom Decker said his department's investigation continues, and more charges are possible. A Bettendorf medical office and a doctor accused of submitting false Medicare claims have agreed to pay $1.66 million to resolve the allegations. Eastern Iowa Dermatology, PLC, and Dr. Manish Kumar allegedly submitted false claims for office visits and the removal of skin tags and lesions, according to a news release issued Thursday by the United States Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Iowa. Kumar and the dermatology office also agreed to an integrity agreement and to submit to monitoring by officials of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to the news release. The federal prosecutors and the Inspector Generals Office of the federal health and human services department cooperated to develop and accomplish the agreement, the release states. The release states that the resolved claims were allegations only and liability had not been determined as of Thursday. A copy of the settlement provided with the news release is available on the newspapers website. SIOUX CITY Jessica Goodman maintained her composure as she heard the judge announce that her fiancee's killer had been found guilty of first-degree murder. But her body couldn't control its involuntary reaction. "Once I heard it, my whole body got goosebumps," Goodman said Thursday, minutes after a jury found Dwight Evans guilty of first-degree murder and going armed with intent for the May 1, 2021, shooting death of Martez Harrison outside Uncle Dave's Bar in Sioux City. The five-man, seven-woman jury reached the verdict after more than four hours of deliberations that began late Wednesday afternoon and resumed Thursday morning. Goodman was on edge that whole time, she said, but remained confident jurors would find Evans guilty. "There was proof. There was video," she said. "I was there that night, and I witnessed it for myself." Evans, 18, faces life in prison for murder and five years for going armed with intent. Because Evans was 17 and a juvenile at the time of the shooting, Poulson must decide if and/or when he could be eligible for parole. Had Evans been an adult, he would automatically have been ineligible for parole. Senior Judge Jeffrey Poulson scheduled a hearing for Oct. 4 in Woodbury County District Court. Evans showed no visible reaction to the verdict and kept his eyes focused forward as he was led from the courtroom while his mother called out "I love you" to him. Public defender Michael Adams declined to comment after the verdict. During the first day of the four-day trial, Goodman testified she was a few feet away from Harrison while he was fighting with Lawrence Canady outside the bar at 1427 W. Third St. Canady was among four people apparently seeking revenge on Harrison, who they said had struck a friend's girlfriend days earlier. Surveillance video outside the bar showed Goodman pull up in her car to pick Harrison up at 1 a.m. After she got out, Canady punched her in the face, drawing Harrison outside, and the two began to fight. The fight spilled into the street, where Evans walked up and fired a shot into Harrison's left flank. Six seconds later he fired a second shot into Harrison's upper abdomen before fleeing the scene on foot. Harrison, 22, died a short time later at MercyOne Siouxland Medical Center. Canady was apprehended two blocks away minutes after the shooting. Evans was located about three hours later a mile away near Canady's house. The revolver was found nearby in an alley. Adams and his co-counsel, Jill Eimermann, never disputed that Evans pulled the trigger. They argued he was intoxicated at the time and was defending himself and others. Evans' mother testified that Canady brought Evans home hours before the shooting and her son was so "wasted" that he could not hold his head up or walk without help. He was sleeping when she left for work at about 9:30 p.m., but Canady and another friend came and took him out. Jurors were shown a video of Evans recorded on a convenience store security camera two hours before the shooting in which Evans appeared to be walking normally, though his mother testified his movements indicated he was intoxicated. Police officers who apprehended Evans testified said they saw no indications he was intoxicated. Adams had encouraged jurors to review and play close attention to the videos, especially one recorded in a police interrogation room more than four hours after the shooting in which officers twice entered and had a difficult time waking Evans, who then stumbled and swayed when they made him stand to have his picture taken. Evans was not looking to hurt anyone that night, Adams said in his closing argument, and watched the fight between Canady and Harrison unfold without getting involved until he felt threatened to act. "Dwight stood there because he was stoned out of his head. He wasn't looking for anyone. He might have been looking for a place to sit down and go to sleep," Adams said. Jurors, obviously, did not accept the intoxication defense, providing Goodman and her family with relief they've sought for more than a year. "We got justice, justice for Tezzo," she said, referring to Harrison by a nickname. Canady, 22, of Sioux City, was tried for first-degree murder and other charges, but a jury in December found him guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, plus willful injury causing bodily injury and serious assault. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Evans still faces a second trial for possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance and failure to affix a drug tax stamp, charges stemming from officers' discovery of marijuana and a scale during a search of his home after his arrest. Poulson previously ordered a separate trial on those charges. OMAHA A Macy, Nebraska, man who assaulted a police officer was sentenced Wednesday to 37 months in federal prison. Patrick Walker, 56, pleaded guilty in May in U.S. District Court in Omaha to assault on an officer causing bodily injury. A charge of assault causing serious bodily injury was dismissed. Walker will serve three years on supervised release after completing his prison sentence. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the officer responded to a call about a man inside a home on Oct. 30. After entering the residence and encountering Walker, the officer ordered him to leave. Walker tackled the officer and slammed his head to the floor, causing head trauma and a laceration. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Bringman was arrested on Sept. 29 while picking up a 5-pound package of meth that had been delivered by the USPS from a supplier. Authorities seized another 1.5 pounds of meth from her vehicle and more than $22,000 in cash. SIOUX CITY Whether Dwight Evans shot Martez Harrison is not the question jurors will decide during their deliberations. On more than one occasion during three days of witness testimony and evidence and again Wednesday during closing arguments, Evans' attorneys said he's the shooter. Their defense: he was intoxicated at the time he pulled the trigger of the revolver that fired the two shots that killed Harrison, and the shooting was justified because Evans thought he might be in danger as his friend Lawrence Canady fought with Harrison outside Uncle Dave's Bar in the early morning hours of May 1, 2021. Jurors received the case at 4:30 p.m. and spent 30 minutes deliberating before leaving for the night. They will return at 9 a.m. Thursday to resume their discussions. Throughout the trial, jurors saw video of Evans taken at different times that night and heard his mother describe him as so "wasted" when his friends brought him home hours before the shooting that he could not hold his head up or walk without assistance. Police officers who apprehended Evans three hours after the shooting said they saw no indications he was intoxicated, and he carried on a conversation with one of them in a police car after his arrest. "He clearly was able to talk to the officer. There are no signs of intoxication," First Assistant Woodbury County Attorney Mark Campbell said. Campbell told jurors the law says that even if a defendant is under the influence when committing a crime, he is responsible for his actions unless he's unable to form the specific intent to act. When he left his house with Canady that night, Campbell said, Evans had the intent to shoot and kill Harrison as revenge for Harrison hitting a friend's girlfriend previously. He brought along a loaded gun, and, during the fight outside the bar, security camera footage showed him approach the scuffle, aim the gun and fire shots into Harrison's left flank and upper abdomen. He fled immediately after the shooting. "The defendant had enough presence of mind to know he needed to get out of there," Campbell said. "He knew what he did was wrong." Other videos shown during the trial tell a different story, public defender Michael Adams said. He showed footage taken more than four hours after the shooting in a police interrogation room in which officers twice entered and had a difficult time waking Evans, who then stumbled and swayed when they made him stand to have his picture taken and his hands swabbed. Adams encouraged jurors to watch the videos again and review photos of Evans taken that night. "Decide for yourself if he looks intoxicated," Adams said. Surveillance footage of the fight and shooting had no audio, Adams said, so it's not known what kind of danger Evans perceived, what Harrison might have said when he stepped outside the bar to confront Canady, who had just punched Harrison's fiancee in the face. But during the fight, Evans can be seen standing to one side, watching rather than participating. "Dwight stood there because he was stoned out of his head. He wasn't looking for anyone. He might have been looking for a place to sit down and go to sleep," Adams said. Campbell said Evans was standing in the shadows waiting for Canady to draw Harrison out into the street so he could shoot him. If Evans felt he was in danger, leaving the scene before firing the gun was a more reasonable alternative. "The defendant in no way in this case was justified in what he did," Campbell said. Harrison, 22, died later at a Sioux City hospital. Evans, 18, of Sioux City, also is charged with going armed with intent. SIOUX CITY Hunt Elementary School staff are working quickly to prepare for the first day of school in their new building. The midtown neighborhood school, just north of 19th Street between Jackson and Nebraska streets, has been under construction for two years and will welcome its first students Aug. 23. The district took possession of the building June 1 and teachers were welcomed July 25. The summer has been spent putting the finishing touches throughout the building and receiving furniture deliveries while teachers take time to set up their new spaces. The L-shaped building will be about three times larger than the previous Hunt, which once stood near the construction site. The old school, built in 1906, was demolished in June 2019. Construction started September 2020. Hunt Elementary Principal Cami Barker said there are teachers who have been with Hunt for over 20 years, and it is exciting for them to be in a new building. Our students and families and staff deserve this, Barker said. Since Hunt was officially closed in 2019, the school's students attended classes in the former Crescent Park Elementary School at 114 W. 27th St. When entering the new school there are seven words chosen by the staff on what Hunt means to them. The words are: believe, explore, dream, create, dance, imagine and inspire. Continuing into the commons area, the large "Hunt" letters carved into the sandstone from the original school building have been incorporated into the wall. This has been done in multiple new school constructions in Sioux City to remember the original buildings and provides a nostalgia feel. Other terra cotta decorations that were part of the original school are framed and displayed throughout the building. A majority of the school is on one floor, but a lower level features additional classrooms. Because of the design of the building, each classroom boasts large windows. Because Hunt is named the A-plus for arts and music school, there is a performing arts stage in the gymnasium that also features terra cotta aspects that were part of the original Hunt building. Barker said it is one of her favorite parts of the school. Barker said the teachers incorporate the arts in lessons every day and the arts are utilized to teach the standards. The school theme was known before the design process, so specific rooms were designed to cater to it. The black box theater is a space for students to do performances, as well as a space for clubs such as dance, theater, piano and vocal. Another new feature of the building is a gallery room, where students will be able to showcase artwork and parents will get to view different projects. One of visitors' favorite parts in the new building is a large windowed stairwell that looks onto Jackson Street. There are three outdoor playgrounds, each geared to a specific grade level, the same as other recent elementary schools built in the district. As with other new schools, the new Hunt will have one main entrance, with a security system during school hours to keep pupils safe. Visitors will be directed solely to the principal's office area. Barker wants the school to be a safe space for students, both physically and emotionally. Tim Paul, the district's director of operations and maintenance said construction has gone smoothly, with only a few bumps due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the project started before the pandemic, many items were able to be ordered before there were shortages. The entire school is geothermal, a more efficient heating and cooling system. It is the only school in the district with a chilled beam system, to provide an even and moderate temperature throughout the building. Barker previously said it is amazing to see the building now, compared to when she saw the architect designs. She said more than 90 percent of the students walked to the original school. Originally there was only one bus that was intended for students living in shelters. The total cost of the project is estimated at $22 million. The project is being financed by the district's share of a 1-percent sales tax the state designates for new and expanded schools and other physical improvements. The school was named for Dr. Andrew Hunt, a physician and dentist who was also the first president of the Sioux City School Board, the previous school was easily the district's oldest. The oldest remaining school building in Sioux City is now Sunnyside Elementary, which dates to 1957. SIOUX CITY The Sioux City Council discussed fencing in the new Grandview Park water tank with either chain-link or wrought iron fencing, during a retreat meeting Wednesday at the Siouxland Expo Center. Sioux City Utilities Director Brad Puetz told the council the tank structure itself is nearly complete. "They painted, I believe, the second coat yesterday, or they're on the second coat. But, after the painting is done, they're done and gone," he said. "The waterlines are within feet of the tank ready to be connected and, after that, it's just a matter of a little bit of beautification and getting a retaining wall up and getting everything in place." Since the city's investment is roughly $7.5 million with the new tank alone, Puetz requested feedback on installing a fence. He said all of the city's other water assets are protected by fencing. Two previous tanks in the park were built in the 1890s. The south tank was taken out of commission in 1993, after bulges were discovered in the structure. Throughout the years, prominent artists, such as Paul Chelstad and Mark Kochen, have painted images onto the concrete walls. Music fans, who were inspired by the annual Saturday in the Park festival, which uses the park as its venue, also left anonymous art. "We've had discussions about painting on the tank, I'm perfectly fine with that. I think it should be controlled," Puetz said. "I think we should consider very strongly the possibility of putting a fence around that tank. It shouldn't affect any park activities." Mayor Bob Scott asked Puetz about going with chain-link fencing, rather than wrought iron, which is the type of fencing that surrounds the city's wastewater treatment plant. "It's not even attractive around your sewer plant, I'm sorry," Scott said. "You pay five times as much for wrought iron." Councilman Alex Watters said he expects that there will be some pushback from residents about the fencing. "A lot of the graffiti or murals that were on that previous tank were celebrated," he said. "There were people that were doing their senior pictures there." City Manager Bob Padmore stressed that city staff is OK with professional artists painting murals on the new tank. "What we're not OK with is people who then take it upon themselves, if they see a nice new painted water tower, to just start doing things on their own and declare it art," he said. The council also reviewed a draft of the city's 2022-2026 strategic plan and talked about drilling a new well. Finance Director Teresa Fitch gave councilmembers a status update on projects funded with American Rescue Plan Act dollars. The city has $40.6 million in ARPA funding to spend on water, sewer and broadband projects, as well as public health and negative economic impacts. The city has until Dec. 31, 2024 to allocate the funds and an additional two years to spend them. Currently, $1.8 million is slated to go toward infrastructure for an affordable housing development, but the city hasn't identified a site for the development. A site near West Middle School and a site in Woodbury Heights are being examined. "We want to create affordable housing, but affordable housing doesn't mean low income housing. It means starter homes for people that don't meet any guidelines for low income on a starter house," Padmore said. The city's initial plan was to allocate $5 million in ARPA funding to Outer Drive water pressure and storage. Fitch said the matter will be brought back to the council with a request to reduce the amount to $4 million, so $1 million can be moved to the well replacement program. Puetz said he thinks it will be "very difficult" to get the funding for the water pressure and storage project under contract before the ARPA deadline. UPDATED 8:22 A.M. FRIDAY LAUREL, Neb. The Nebraska State Patrol arrested a suspect in connection with four homicides in Laurel early early Friday. The Nebraska State Patrol is planning a 9:30 a.m. press conference today to release information about the arrest. LAUREL, Neb. A total of four people were found dead at two different crime scenes in Laurel, authorities said Thursday afternoon. Nebraska State Patrol Col. John Bolduc said, during a news conference, that foul play is suspected in the deaths. He described the investigation as being in "the very early stages" and said the victims' identities are not being released at this time. "We have two fires with deceased people three blocks apart. It would be a stretch to say that there's no connection," he said. "We hope to find those answers in the coming days." Just after 3 a.m., Cedar County dispatchers received a report of an explosion at a residence in the 200 block of Elm Street. Bolduc said firefighters found a deceased individual inside the home. As investigators from the Laurel Police Department, Cedar County Sheriff's Office and Nebraska State Patrol were at the scene, a second fire was reported in the 500 block of Elm Street. Bolduc said firefighters and officers found three individuals deceased inside of the second residence. "Fire crews have worked diligently to put out the fire, but also to preserve evidence that may be located inside the home," he said. Investigators believe accelerants may have been used in both fires, according to Bolduc. He said anyone who was inside of the homes at the time of the fires may have been burned. "It is possible that our suspect or suspects received burn injuries during these incidents," he said. Shortly after the second fire was reported, Bolduc said law enforcement received a tip that a silver sedan had been seen leaving Laurel. The vehicle was headed westbound on Highway 20. "It was reportedly driven by a Black male. The vehicle may have picked up a passenger before leaving town," Bolduc said. Cedar County Sheriff Larry Koranda said the community of about 1,000 people is a "tight-knit" one. He said everybody knows everybody in Laurel. "I just think that people need to be diligent. If they see something out of the ordinary, something they're not used to, please contact the State Patrol," he said. Racquel Holloway, who has lived in Laurel since 1998, told The Journal that she saw emergency lights a few blocks away from her home, but didn't give the sight a second thought, at first. Once she heard what had happened, her reaction changed. "Oh my gosh, I just walked to my car. And, if the suspect was anywhere around, I could've been..." she said, trailing off. Bolduc encouraged members of the public to contact the State Patrol at 402- 479-4921, if they have any information about the crimes. He said investigators, who are canvassing the entire community, are also seeking security camera footage that may be pertinent to the case. "Incidents like this can shake a community, but I want to emphasize that we have an outstanding public safety team on scene here and a number of our partners to keep the community safe," he said. Law enforcement officers set up a perimeter, which encompassed multiple blocks of residential area, near Laurel United Methodist Church. UTE, Iowa The Monona County Sheriff's Office has identified the pilot who died in an airplane crash Saturday near Ute. The pilot, 45-year-old Brady Neil Penner, of Weatherford, Oklahoma, succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead on the scene, according to a press release from the sheriff's office. Early information on the crash indicated that a sprayer airplane, piloted by Penner, struck electrical lines and crashed into the roadway near the intersection of 230th Street and Teak Avenue (County Road L37) south of Ute. The Monona County 911 center was alerted to the crash shortly after 1 p.m. Saturday. County Road L37 south of Ute was closed for a time during the weekend pending a county engineer's examination of any damage done to the roadway by the plane crash. The road was reopened Monday. It could be several months before a full report on the crash is released by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, which are investigating the crash, the Monona County Sheriff's Office said in its press release. A photo of Tyler and Sarah Schmidt sits on the podium during the Celebration of Life event for Tyler, Sarah, and Lula Schmidt held at Overman Park on Aug. 2 2022 in Cedar Falls, Iowa. (CHRIS ZOELLER, Courier Staff Photographer/AP) ANKENY, Iowa Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday. Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and multiple sharp force injuries, while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Their 6-year-old daughter, Lula Schmidt, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation, officials said. Advertisement All three family members deaths have been ruled homicides. The Schmidts 9-year-old son, who was with his family on the camping trip, survived the attack without physical injuries, but investigators have not said whether he was in the tent when the attack happened. The department confirmed Thursday that the killer was Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Nebraska, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the family was attacked early on the morning of July 22 in their tent at the Maquoketa Caves State Park campground. Sherwin was at the park camping with his parents at the time of the attack, according to police and Sherwins mother. Advertisement Investigators said all evidence collected substantiates that Sherwin acted alone, but police have not revealed a motive for the killings. Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Department of Public Safetys division of criminal investigation, said Thursday that investigators have indications as to what the motive was, but dont plan to release that information. Police who swarmed the park about 180 miles (290 kilometers) east of Des Moines in the wake of the shooting found Sherwins body outside the campground but within a wooded area of the park. A memorial to celebrate the lives of the Schmidts was held Tuesday in their hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, drawing about 200 people. Associated Press reporter Michael Tarm in Chicago contributed to this report. Alex Jones ordered to pay Sandy Hook parents more than $4M AUSTIN, Texas (AP) A Texas jury has ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay more than $4 million in compensatory damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre over Jones' repeated public claims that the attack was a hoax. The jurys decision Thursday marks the first time the Infowars host has been held financially liable for falsely claiming that the attack that killed 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged. It might not be the last such judgment against him, as a judge in Connecticut has already ruled against him in a similar lawsuit. The Texas jury must still decide how much to award in punitive damages. Typically bombastic Alex Jones makes for complicated court AUSTIN, Texas (AP) Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones bulled through the first trial that could decimate his personal fortune and media empire in his usual way: Loud, aggressive and talking about conspiracies both in and out the courtroom. Its business as usual for the gravelly voiced, barrel-chested Jones. But by courtroom standards, his erratic and, at times, disrespectful behavior is unusual and potentially complicated for the legal process. Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, were ordered to pay $4.11 million in compensatory damages by the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was killed with 19 other first graders and six educators in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. And punitive damages could be more. Trump ally Kari Lake wins GOP primary for Arizona governor PHOENIX (AP) Former television news anchor Kari Lake has won the Republican primary for Arizona governor. Lake walked away from her journalism career and was embraced by Donald Trump and his staunch supporters. Her victory Thursday is a blow to the GOP establishment, which lined up behind lawyer and businesswoman Karrin Taylor Robson. Lake said she would not have certified President Joe Bidens 2020 victory and put false claims of election fraud at the center of her campaign. Former Vice President Mike Pence, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and others tried to push the GOP to move on from the Trump era of election conspiracies and lies. Pelosi: China cannot stop US officials from visiting Taiwan TOKYO (AP) U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that China will not isolate Taiwan by preventing U.S. officials from traveling there. She made the remarks in Tokyo on the final leg of an Asia tour highlighted by a visit to Taiwan that infuriated China. Pelosi, the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years, said Wednesday in Taipei that the U.S. commitment to democracy in the self-governing island and elsewhere remains ironclad. Pelosi and five other members of Congress arrived in Tokyo late Thursday after visiting Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea. US declares public health emergency over monkeypox outbreak WASHINGTON (AP) The U.S. has declared a public health emergency to bolster the federal response to the outbreak of monkeypox that already has infected more than 7,100 Americans. The announcement Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services frees up federal funding and resources to fight the virus, which may cause fever, body aches, chills, fatigue and pimple-like bumps on many parts of the body. Xavier Becerra is the head of HHS. He says the agency is ready to take the U.S. response to the next level. US to issue ID to migrants awaiting deportation proceedings U.S. immigration authorities are planning to issue photo ID cards to immigrants in deportation proceedings. Official say the proposal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is still being developed as a pilot program, but the idea is to slash paper use and help people stay up-to-date on required meetings and court hearings. The cards would be issued for use by the Department of Homeland Security and not as an official federal ID. Critics say they're concerned about the security of the cards and whether they could be used for other purposes. The Biden administration is seeking $10 million for the so-called ICE Secure Docket Card in a budget proposal for the next fiscal year. Republicans to announce site of 2024 national convention MADISON, Wis. (AP) Republicans are to announce whether the 2024 national convention where the partys presidential nominee will be officially named will be held in Milwaukee or Nashville. The Republican National Committee is to announce its decision on Friday, the final day of its summer meeting in Chicago. Milwaukee is the odds-on favorite to get the event given Nashvilles refusal to adopt an agreement for hosting the convention. There was broad bipartisan support for the event in Milwaukee, a city that was selected to host the 2020 Democratic convention that had to be moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. EXPLAINER: What will it take to get Brittney Griner home? WASHINGTON (AP) Now that WNBA star Brittney Griner has been convicted of drug possession and sentenced to nine years in prison, attention turns to the prospect of a prisoner swap between the United States and Russia that could get her home. Secretary of State Antony Blinken went public with that possibility last week, revealing in an unusual announcement that the U.S. had made a substantial proposal aimed at securing the release of Griner and another jailed American, Paul Whelan. With her court case concluded and her sentence pronounced, such a deal is Griners best chance of being freed early. A look at what's at stake. Democrats say they've reached agreement on economic package WASHINGTON (AP) Senate Democrats say they have reached an accord on changes to their marquee economic legislation, clearing the major hurdle to pushing one of President Joe Bidens leading election-year priorities through the chamber in coming days. Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a centrist who was seen as the pivotal vote, says she is ready to move forward on the bill. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York says lawmakers have achieved a compromise that will receive the support of all Democrats in the chamber. His party needs unanimity and Vice President Kamala Harris tie-breaking vote to move the measure through the Senate over certain solid opposition from Republicans. Ogles wins House race; Tennessee Dem gov bid still too early NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles has won Tennessees bruising nine-candidate Republican primary for an open congressional seat in Nashville. The longtime Democratic incumbent, Rep. Jim Cooper, retired after GOP state lawmakers carved the city into three districts, favoring their party in each seat. The Democratic race for governor, meanwhile, remained too early to call Thursday between Nashville physician Jason Martin and Memphis City Councilman JB Smiley Jr. Smiley would be the states first Black Democratic nominee for governor if he wins the primary. Republican Gov. Bill Lee will have a strong advantage in November in the state, which has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 2006. KLAMATH RIVER, Calif. (AP) California firefighters made gains against the state's deadliest and largest wildfire of the year just as an eastern Washington town was evacuated Thursday because of a blaze that was burning homes. At about 1:30 p.m. the Adams County Sheriffs Office said on Facebook that homes in Lind had burned. At this time all residents of the town of Lind need to evacuate immediately, the sheriffs office said in the post. Later Thursday, Sheriff Dale Wagner said six homes had burned as well as eight other structures. With the help of state and local resources, Wagner said the fire was starting to calm down and all evacuations were lifted as of 8 p.m. They will be fighting it through the night to make sure it doesnt flare up anymore or get worse, he said, adding that firefighters were dealing with high heat and windy conditions. He said one firefighter suffered smoke inhalation and was flown to Spokane for treatment. Lind is a community of about 500 people approximately 75 miles (121 kilometers) southwest of Spokane. The State Fire Marshals office said the blaze had burned through about 3.9 square miles (10.1 square kilometers). Homes, infrastructure and crops were threatened. The cause of the fire was under investigation. Meanwhile, in California, forecasters warned Thursday that spiking temperatures and plunging humidity levels could create conditions for further wildfire growth. After five days of no containment, the McKinney Fire in Siskiyou County near the Oregon border was 10% surrounded by Wednesday evening. Bulldozers and hand crews were making progress carving firebreaks around much of the rest of the blaze, fire officials said. At the fire's southeastern corner, evacuation orders for sections of Yreka, home to about 7,800 people, were downgraded to warnings, allowing residents to return home but with a caution that the situation remained dangerous. About 1,300 people remained under evacuation orders, officials said at a community meeting Wednesday evening. The fire didnt advance much at midweek, following several days of brief but heavy rain from thunderstorms that provided cloudy, damper weather. But as the clouds clear and humidity levels drops in the coming days, the fire could roar again, authorities warned. This is a sleeping giant right now, said Darryl Laws, a unified incident commander on the blaze. Weekend temperatures could reach triple digits as the region dries out again, said meteorologist Brian Nieuwenhuis with the National Weather Service office in Medford, Oregon. The heat, the dry conditions, along with afternoon breezes, thats the kind of thing that could keep the fire pretty active, he said Thursday. The blaze broke out last Friday and has charred nearly 92 square miles (238 square kilometers) of forestland, left tinder-dry by drought. More than 100 homes and other buildings have burned and four bodies have been found, including two in a burned car in a driveway. The blaze was driven at first by fierce winds ahead of a thunderstorm cell. More storms earlier this week proved a mixed blessing. A drenching rain Tuesday dumped up to 3 inches (7.6 cm) on some eastern sections of the blaze but most of the fire area got next to nothing, said Dennis Burns, a fire behavior analyst. The latest storm also brought concerns about possible river flooding and mudslides. A private contractor in a pickup truck who was helping the firefighting effort was hurt when a bridge gave out and washed away the vehicle, Kreider said. The contractor's injuries were not life-threatening. The progress against the flames came too late for many people in the scenic hamlet of Klamath River, which was home to about 200 people before the fire reduced many of the homes to ashes, along with the post office, community center and other buildings. At an evacuation center Wednesday, Bill Simms said that three of the four victims were his neighbors. Two were a married couple who lived up the road. I dont get emotional about stuff and material things, Simms said. But when you hear my next-door neighbors died ... that gets a little emotional. Their names havent been officially confirmed, which could take several days, said Courtney Kreider, a spokesperson with the Siskiyou County Sheriffs Office. Simms, a 65-year-old retiree, bought his property six years ago as a second home with access to hunting and fishing. He went back to check on his property Tuesday and found it was destroyed. The house, the guest house and the RV were gone. Its just wasteland, devastation, Simms said. He found the body of one of his two cats, which he buried. The other cat is still missing. He was able to take his two dogs with him to the shelter. Harlene Schwander, 82, lost the home she had just moved into a month ago to be closer to her son and daughter-in-law. Their home survived but her house was torched. Schwander, an artist, said she only managed to grab a few family photos and some jewelry before evacuating. Everything else including her art collection went up in flames. Im sad. Everybody says it was just stuff, but it was all I had, she said. Meanwhile, firefighters expected Thursday to fully surround a 1,000-acre (404-hectare) spot fire on the northern edge of the McKinney Fire. To the southeast, wet weather was a concern for burn scars from last years big wildfires along the Sierras eastern front. The weather service issued flood watches for Thursday and Friday along the California-Nevada line. They included areas burned in the Caldor Fire east of Sacramento and the Tamarack Fire west and south of Lake Tahoe. Despite the scattered storms, California and much of the rest of the West is in drought and wildfire danger is high, with the historically worst of the fire season still to come. Fires are burning in Montana, Idaho and Nebraska and have destroyed homes and threaten communities. Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. California has seen its largest, most destructive and deadliest wildfires in the last five years. In northwestern Montana, a fire that has destroyed at least four homes and forced the evacuation of about 150 residences west of Flathead Lake continued to be pushed north by winds on Wednesday, fire officials said. The Moose Fire in Idaho has burned more than 85 square miles (220 square km) in the Salmon-Challis National Forest while threatening homes, mining operations and fisheries near the town of Salmon. And a wildfire in northwestern Nebraska led to evacuations and destroyed or damaged several homes near the small city of Gering. ANKENY Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday. Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and multiple sharp force injuries, while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Their 6-year-old daughter, Lula Schmidt, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation, officials said. All three family members deaths have been ruled homicides. The Schmidts' 9-year-old son, who was with his family on the camping trip, survived the attack without physical injuries, but investigators have not said whether he was in the tent when the attack happened. The department confirmed Thursday that the killer was Anthony Sherwin, 23, of La Vista, Nebraska, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the family was attacked early on the morning of July 22 in their tent at the Maquoketa Caves State Park campground. Investigators said all evidence collected substantiates that Sherwin acted alone, but police have not indicated a motive in the killings. Police who swarmed the park in the wake of the shooting found Sherwins body outside the campground but within a wooded area of the park. LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) The U.S. Justice Department announced civil rights charges Thursday against four Louisville police officers for their involvement in the drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose fatal shooting contributed to the racial justice protests that rocked the U.S. in the spring and summer of 2020, officials announced Thursday. The charges are another effort to hold law enforcement accountable for the killing of the 26-year-old medical worker after one of the officers was acquitted of state charges earlier this year. Federal officials "share but cannot fully imagine the grief" felt by Taylor's family, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the charges. "Breonna Taylor should be alive today," he said. The charges are against former officers Joshua Jaynes, Brett Hankison and Kelly Goodlett, along with Sgt. Kyle Meany. Taylor was shot to death by Louisville officers who had knocked down her door while executing the search warrant. Taylor's boyfriend fired a shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the door and they returned fire, striking Taylor multiple times. Hankison, who was dismissed from the department in 2020, was one of the officers at Taylor's door and one of three who fired shots that night. He was acquitted by a jury of state charges of wanton endangerment earlier this year in Louisville. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended the elected state prosecutor of Tampa on Thursday for pledging not to enforce the state's new 15-week abortion ban and for supporting gender transition treatments for minors. The Republican governor announced the suspension of Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren at a news conference in the county's sheriff's office. When you flagrantly violate your oath of office, when you make yourself above the law, you have violated your duty, you have neglected your duty and you are displaying a lack of competence to be able to perform those duties," DeSantis said to cheers. The suspension comes as DeSantis runs for reelection in Florida and builds his national profile as a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate through near constant criticism of liberal policies on abortion, policing and other culture war issues. Warren, a Democrat, was elected as state attorney by Hillsborough County voters in 2016 and in 2020. In a statement, Warren said the people have the right to elect their own leaders not have them dictated by an aspiring presidential candidate who has shown time and again he feels accountable to no one. "The governor is trying to overthrow the results of a fair and free election, two of them actually," he said later Thursday at a news conference. People need to understand. This isn't the governor trying to suspend one elected official. This is the governor trying to overthrow democracy here in Hillsborough County. Warren added that no cases regarding violations of the state's new abortion law have been brought to his office. In an executive order formally suspending Warren, DeSantis focused heavily on Warren's signing of statements where prosecutors from across the country said they won't use their offices to pursue criminal cases against seekers or providers of abortion or gender transition treatments. More than 90 district attorneys, state attorneys general and other elected prosecutors across the U.S. have signed the letter saying they dont intend to prosecute people for seeking, providing or supporting abortions. Some are in states with few or no restrictions on abortions. But others are in law enforcement in places where there are bans or deep restrictions including the counties that include Birmingham, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, along with several of Texas' biggest cities. In some cases, there might not be much to enforce because many clinics have either stopped offering abortions or have closed entirely. Besides the statements from prosecutors, city councils in places including Nashville, New Orleans and Boise, Idaho, have introduced or adopted measures telling law enforcement agencies to make abortion-related cases low priorities. Florida's new abortion restriction became effective July 1. It prohibits abortions after 15 weeks, with exceptions if the procedure is necessary to save the pregnant womans life, prevent serious injury or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It does not allow exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking. Violators could face up to five years in prison. Physicians and other medical professionals could lose their licenses and face administrative fines of $10,000 for each violation. Florida has not enacted laws criminalizing gender transition treatments for minors but these statements prove that Warren thinks he has the authority to defy the Florida Legislature and nullify in his jurisdiction criminal laws with which he disagrees, the executive order reads. The executive order also accuses Warren of having a flawed and lawless understanding of his duties as a state attorney in his presumptive non-enforcement for certain criminal violations, including trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication, and prostitution. The governor's suspension of State Attorney Warren is not political to me. It's about law and order. It's about ensuring our loved ones are safe. It's about the victims and their voices, said Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister. He said Warren has been acting as a kind of supreme authority by reducing charges, dropping cases and singlehandedly determining what crimes will be legal or illegal in our county. Asked whether hes overriding the will of the voters by suspending their choice for prosecutor, DeSantis said Warrens conduct has fallen below the standard of the Florida Constitution and that hes neglected his duty to state law. I dont think the people of Hillsborough County want to have an agenda that is basically woke, where youre deciding that your view of social justice means certain laws shouldnt be enforced, the governor said. Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat and leader-designate of the Florida House Democratic Caucus, said Warren has been using his prosecutorial discretion appropriately. Im not going to mince words: this is a shocking political attack on an elected official serving the people of Hillsborough County, she said. Andrew Warren is being removed because he assured our community that he will not be a foot soldier in Ron DeSantis extremist agenda. DeSantis appointed Hillsborough County Judge Susan Lopez to serve in Warren's place during his suspension. I have the utmost respect for our state laws and I understand the important role that the state attorney plays in ensuring the safety of our community and the enforcement of our laws, Lopez said. AP writer Geoff Mulvihill contributed to this report from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) A judge deciding if three Pennsylvania counties have to certify May primary vote counts including ballots lacking dates on their return envelopes learned this week that a fourth county is in the same situation and there may be more. The legal dispute has held up certification of primary results for governor and U.S. Senate, and created problems for a Republican state House member who has just filed a lawsuit seeking to withdraw from his reelection contest. Rep. Matthew Dowling's district is in Fayette County, where the primary results have not been certified. Until he is deemed the winner of the nomination, the state isn't letting him withdraw, and there's a looming deadline for local party officials to pick a substitute. Gov. Tom Wolf's administration is suing Berks, Fayette and Lancaster counties in an effort to force them to report ballots in envelopes without handwritten dates. Days after a lengthy hearing in the Commonwealth Court case, lawyers for the Department of State and Fayette County separately told Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer that Butler County also has not officially reported such votes. It is unclear how the oversight occurred. Butler County's lawyer informed a high-ranking state elections official in a June 21 letter that Butler County will not be canvassing ballots which are not compliant with the statutes of this commonwealth. We followed the law, the chair of Butler County's Board of Commissioners, Republican Leslie Osche, said Thursday. Osche declined to comment on a statement in a Tuesday letter to Cohn Jubelirer from Michael Fischer, a lawyer representing the Department of State, that the agency may take further action shortly with respect to Butler County if necessary. Department of State press secretary Grace Griffaton wrote in an email Thursday that state officials from her department were evaluating their options. It is disturbing that certain counties are refusing to certify valid ballots cast by their voters despite guidance on this issue from the department, and rulings from both state and federal courts," Griffaton said. State law requires handwritten dates on mail-in ballot return envelopes. But after a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in May that said the dates weren't needed in a contested Lehigh County judge race, the Wolf administration told counties they must include the disputed ballots in their tallies reported to the Department of State. After the three counties did not, the state filed suit. In addition to the official certification of primary winners in the races for governor and U.S. Senate, the issue has also held up certification of primary winners in congressional and state legislative contests in districts that include parts of the three counties, said Fayette County's attorney Tom King. There are also questions about the status of Bradford County, where officials sent in certification before being pressured by the state, after which the county's election board submitted a separate document that describes the uncertified ballots from undated envelopes. We agreed early on, the three commissioners, not to certify nor to count illegal ballots, which we deem those to be, Republican Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko said Wednesday. They weren't counted. But they were sent in separately because of the threat of a lawsuit. In the Fayette County contest, three-term incumbent Dowling announced he was dropping out last month after being charged with driving under the influence. It has been an extremely frustrating position to be in right now, having made the difficult decision to move on in my private life and not go through this election cycle already, Dowling said Thursday. On Monday, Dowling and four voters from the Republican majority district sued acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman, one of Chapman's lieutenants and the Fayette County Board of Elections, seeking a Commonwealth Court order that he be allowed to withdraw. The lawsuit says the deadline to replace him on the ballot is later this month. MADISON, Wis. (AP) Tim Michels is on the attack in the waning days of Wisconsins tight GOP governors primary, with an ad this week faulting his rival for not initially backing Donald Trump in 2016 even as it emerged Thursday that Michels himself did not vote in that primary. Michels launched the attack ad against Rebecca Kleefisch days after he said that running negative ads is just bad policy and that politicians who do it are losing. The ad faults Kleefisch for not endorsing Trump in the 2016 primary and brands her the ultimate Madison insider. Kleefisch, who is backed by former Vice President Mike Pence, is a former two-term lieutenant governor. Michels co-owns the state's largest construction company, Michels Corp. And while Michels attacked Kleefisch for not backing Trump in 2016, records show Michels did not vote in that primary. I missed the Primary, but I didnt miss the movement, Michels said in a statement to The Associated Press. Michels said he missed the primary because of a sudden, unforeseen major issue on the big Michels Corporation construction project in New York. Michels said Trump was always his top choice and he never campaigned for or supported anyone else, unlike Kleefisch. The winner of Tuesday's primary will advance to face Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in what is expected to be one of the hardest-fought elections in the country this year, with implications for the 2024 presidential race in this swing state. Evers has blocked the Republican-controlled Legislature's attempts to change election laws and enact a host of other conservative policy items. The Michels ad, circulated Thursday by the Democratic Governors Association, began airing earlier this week, after Michels said in a televised town hall that Ive never had a negative ad run by my campaign in this race. And the reason is weve never had a single piece of business by talking bad about the competition, said Michels, who co-owns energy and pipeline construction company Michels Corp. "And the reason is, its just bad policy, and if you get a reputation of doing that in my industry people immediately disrespect you. That wasn't the first time Michels took a stand against negative ads. Back in July, after Kleefisch launched the first in a series of attack ads against Michels, he came out strongly against it. When politicians are shocked to find themselves losing, they go negative out of desperation," Michels said on July 6. So it is sad that the former Lieutenant Governor has decided to go negative by falling in line with politics as usual. Michels spokesperson Chris Walker defended the attack ad, saying Thursday it came in response to spots run by Kleefisch and her supporters. The tone of the campaign has been set by her after weeks and millions spent lying about and attacking Tim, Walker said. When your opponent does that for weeks on end, it can't go unanswered forever. Kleefisch's spokesperson Alec Zimmerman said Michels going negative was a sign that Kleefisch has all the momentum. The attack ad comes amid a blitz toward the election, with Pence campaigning Wednesday for Kleefisch, calling her a proven conservative. Kleefisch served as lieutenant governor under then-Gov. Scott Walker and has amassed endorsements from Walker, legislative leaders, dozens of Republican lawmakers and others. Michels is running as the outsider candidate, and Trump has scheduled a Friday rally in Waukesha County, just 3 miles from where Pence appeared for Kleefisch, as part of a final push. Michels notes in his ad that Kleefisch did not back Trump in 2016. She, along with Walker, supported Cruz who won Wisconsin's primary that year. Cruz has endorsed Kleefisch this year. After Trump became the nominee, Kleefisch supported him in 2016 and 2020. Michels' position on Trump also shifted this week. On Monday, at the town hall, he refused to commit to backing Trump if he ran for president in 2024. But less than 24 hours later, Michels reversed himself. FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) Roses brought to honor love on that Valentine's Day in 2018 lay withered, their dried and cracked petals scattered across classroom floors still smeared with the blood of victims gunned down by a former student more than four years earlier. Bullet holes pocked walls, and shards of glass from windows shattered by gunfire crunched eerily underfoot at Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where shooter Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 students and three staff members. Nothing had been changed, except for the removal of the victims' bodies and some personal items. The 12 jurors and 10 alternates who will decide whether Cruz gets the death penalty or life in prison made a rare visit to the massacre scene Thursday, retracing Cruz's steps through the three-story freshman building, known as Building 12. After they left, a group of journalists was allowed in for a much quicker first public view. The sight was deeply unsettling: Large pools of dried blood still stained classroom floors. A lock of dark hair rested on the floor where one of the victims' bodies once lay. A single black rubber shoe was in a hallway. Browned rose petals were strewn across a hallway where six people died. In classroom after classroom, open notebooks displayed uncompleted lesson plans: A blood-coated book called, Tell Them We Remember sat atop a bullet-riddled desk in the classroom where teacher Ivy Schamis taught students about the Holocaust. Attached to a bulletin board in the room a sign read: We will never forget. Two students died there. In the classroom of English teacher Dara Hass, where the most students were gunned down, there were essays about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for going to school, who has since been a global advocate for educational access for women and girls. One of the students wrote: A bullet went straight to her head but not her brain. Another read: "We go to school every day of the week and we take it all for granted. We cry and complain without knowing how lucky we are to be able to learn. The door of Room 1255, teacher Stacey Lippel's classroom, was pushed open like others to signify that Cruz shot into it. Hanging on a wall inside was a sign reading, No Bully Zone. The creative writing assignment for the day was on the whiteboard: How to write the perfect love letter. And still hanging on the wall of a second-floor hallway was a quote from James Dean: Dream as if youll live forever, live as if youll die today." In slain teacher Scott Beigel's geography classroom, his laptop was still open on his desk. Student assignments comparing the tenets of Christianity and Islam remained, some graded, some not. On his whiteboard, Beigel, the school's cross-country coach, had been writing the gold, silver and bronze medalists in each event at the Winter Olympics, which had begun five days earlier. Prosecutors, who rested their case following the jury's tour, hope the visit will help prove that Cruz's actions were cold, calculated, heinous and cruel; created a great risk of death to many people and interfered with a government function all aggravating factors under Florida's capital punishment law. Under Florida court rules, neither the judge nor the attorneys were allowed to speak to the jurors and the jurors weren't allowed to converse with each other when they retraced the path Cruz took on Feb. 14, 2018, as he moved from floor to floor, firing down hallways and into classrooms. Prior to the tour, the jurors had already seen surveillance video of the shooting and photographs of its aftermath. The building has been sealed and was surrounded by a 15-foot (4.6-meter) chain-link fence wrapped in a privacy mesh screen fastened with zip ties. It looms ominously over the school and its teachers, staff and 3,300 students, and can be seen easily by anyone nearby. The Broward County school district plans to demolish it whenever prosecutors approve. For now, it is a court exhibit. When you are driving past, it's there. When you are going to class, it's there. It is just a colossal structure that you can't miss," said Kai Koerber, who was a Stoneman Douglas junior at the time of the shooting. He is now at the University of California, Berkeley, and the developer of a mental health phone app. It is just a constant reminder ... that is tremendously trying and horrible." Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of first-degree murder; the trial is only to determine if he is sentenced to death or life without parole. Miami defense attorney David S. Weinstein said prosecutors hope the visit will be the final piece in erasing any doubt that any juror might have had that the death penalty is the only recommendation that can be made. Such crime site visits are rare. Weinstein, a former prosecutor, said in more than 150 jury trials dating back to the late 1980s, he has only had one. In most trials, a crime scene visit wouldnt even be considered because years later it's not the same place as when the crime occurred and can give a false sense of what happened. But in this case, the building was sealed off so it could be done. Cruzs attorneys have argued that prosecutors have used what they consider provocative evidence, including Thursday's visit, not just to prove their case, but to inflame jurors passions. After jurors returned to the courtroom Thursday, the mothers of two victims testified that the massacre permanently cast a pall over not only Valentines Day but other important family celebrations. Helena Ramsay, 17, died on her fathers birthday. That day will never be a celebration and can never be the same for him, her mother, Anne Ramsay, said. Hui Wang, whose 15-year-old son Peter was killed, said the shooting occurred the day before Chinese New Year. A planned celebration was canceled that year and every year since then. This day of unity became a day that hurts the most, she said. The wife of athletic director, Chris Hixon, and their son, who has special needs, also spoke on the fourth and final day jurors heard from victims families. Hixon, a 49-year-old Navy veteran, died charging into the building trying to stop Cruz and protect the students. Corey Hixon described a weekly ritual of getting donuts with his father. BLOOMINGTON, Minn. (AP) Someone fired shots Thursday at the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis, sending shoppers running for cover, but police said it did not appear anyone was injured. Bloomington police also said they were still searching for a suspect after securing the scene shortly before 6 p.m. They said a lockdown that had forced some shoppers to shelter in place, while others fled, was in the process of being lifted, but that the mall would not reopen Thursday. Video posted to social media showed what appeared to be a man shouting as he walked near the complexs Nike store, with at least three apparent gunshots. Bloomington Police Chief Booker T. Hodges during a news conference Thursday night at the mall said two groups got into an altercation at a store, one group left, but someone in that group decided to fire three rounds into a store with people around. Fortunately, at this time it doesnt appear that anyone was injured," Hodges said. Police are looking for two people but only one had a weapon, Hodges said. He said a Bloomington police officer was on the scene within 30 seconds. Hodges said if someone decides they have no regard for human life, I dont know what we can do about that. Mall spokesman Dan Jasper said the mall will reopen Friday with more mall security and police on site. Guns are not allowed on Mall of America property, Jasper said. Gov. Tim Walz tweeted: Tonights violence at the Mall of America is unacceptable. These brazen incidents will not be tolerated. The mall, which opened in 1992, is the largest in the U.S. and is a tourist destination and community gathering spot. Video posted online showed shoppers fleeing from the amusement park at the interior on the giant malls ground level, holding their childrens hands and clutching their bags. Still other video showed a pair of police officers, including one with a rifle, moving through the mall, and people walking quickly away from the mall's large interior atrium area. Trent Turner, a salesman at a DSW shoe store one level below the Nike store, said he was near the back when he heard gunshots. Then I saw everyone stampeding toward the back, he said. One woman tweeted that she was shopping for clothes for high school senior pictures with her 17-year-old daughter when the store manager told them to move as far back as possible. The woman said she was in a fitting room with her daughter. Another person posted video of dozens of people said to be gathered in the basement as warnings to please shelter immediately repeated over mall speakers. A woman who gave her name only as Tara told The Associated Press that she and a friend were among dozens of people who ran down a hallway to get out of the mall. We were in the Lululemon store and I just saw people running and he was in the dressing room and I started banging on the door to get him to come out and he didnt have a shirt on so we just ran out of there," she said. The Mall of America bans guns on its premises, according to its website. The mall does not have metal detectors and shoppers are not searched upon entry. It was the scene of a shooting on New Years Eve, when two people were wounded during an apparent altercation. Attorney General Merrick Garland with Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke for the Civil Rights Division, speaks during a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, Aug. 4, 2022. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP) LOUISVILLE, Ky. The federal government filed civil rights charges Thursday against four Louisville police officers over the drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose fatal shooting helped fuel the racial justice protests that rocked the nation in 2020. The charges are another effort to hold law enforcement accountable for the killing of the 26-year-old medical worker after one of the officers was acquitted of state charges earlier this year. Advertisement Breonna Taylor should be alive today, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the charges, which include unlawful conspiracy, use of force and obstruction of justice. The charges named former officers Joshua Jaynes and Brett Hankison, along with current officers Kelly Goodlett and Sgt. Kyle Meany. Most of the charges stem from the faulty drug warrant used to search Taylors home. Advertisement Hankison was the only officer charged Thursday who was on the scene that night. Louisville police said they are seeking to fire Goodlett and Meany. Taylor was shot to death by officers who knocked down her door while executing a search warrant. Taylors boyfriend fired a shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the door, and they returned fire, striking Taylor multiple times. Local activists and members of Taylors family celebrated the charges and thanked federal officials. Supporters gathered in a downtown park and chanted: Say her name, Breonna Taylor! This is a day when Black women saw equal justice in America, family lawyer Benjamin Crump said. Taylors mother, Tamika Palmer, said she has waited nearly 2 1/2 years for police to be held accountable. Todays overdue, but it still hurts, she said. You all (are) learning today that were not crazy. The Justice Department is also conducting a non-criminal investigation of the Louisville Police Department, announced last year, that is probing whether the department has a pattern of using excessive force and conducting unreasonable search and seizures. In the protests of 2020, Taylors name was often shouted along with George Floyd, who was killed less than three months after Taylor by a Minneapolis police officer in a videotaped encounter that shocked the nation. Advertisement Protesters who took to the streets over months in Louisville were especially critical of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who presented only wanton endangerment charges against Hankison for a grand jury to consider in 2020. Members of the grand jury later came forward to complain that Camerons office had steered them away from charges for the other officers involved in the raid. Thank God that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not get the last word in regard to justice for Breonna Taylor, Crump said Thursday. We have always said this was a conspiracy to cover up the death of Breonna Taylor. Today the Justice Department put forth the charging documents to show we werent crazy. Cameron, a Republican running for governor next year, said in announcing the indictment against Hankison in September 2020 that he would leave issues regarding potential civil rights violations to federal officials to investigate. Cameron had not responded to a request for comment Thursday afternoon. Garland said the officers who were at Taylors home just after midnight on March 13, 2020, were not involved in the drafting of the warrant, and were unaware of the false and misleading statements. Hankison was indicted on two deprivation-of-rights charges alleging he used excessive force when he retreated from Taylors door, turned a corner and fired 10 shots into the side of her two-bedroom apartment. Bullets flew into a neighbors apartment, nearly striking one man. He was acquitted by a jury of state charges earlier this year in Louisville. Advertisement A separate indictment said Jaynes and Meany both knew the warrant used to search Taylors home had information that was false, misleading and out of date. Both are charged with conspiracy and deprivation of rights. Meany ran a police unit that focused on aggressive drug investigations. Police served five warrants simultaneously the night of the Taylor raid, four of them in a concentrated area where drug activity was suspected, and the fifth at Taylors apartment nearly 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. The warrant for Taylors house alleged that she was receiving packages for a suspected drug dealer who was a former boyfriend. The warrant, signed by Jaynes and approved by Meany, said Jaynes had confirmed with the postal service that packages for the ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, were going to Taylors apartment. Investigators later learned that Jaynes had not confirmed that with the postal inspector. Jaynes was fired in January 2021 for violating department standards in the preparation of a search warrant execution and for being untruthful in the Taylor warrant. Jaynes and Goodlett allegedly conspired to falsify an investigative document that was written after Taylors death, Garland said. Federal investigators also allege that Meany, who testified at Hankisons trial, lied to the FBI during its investigation. Federal officials filed a separate charge against Goodlett, alleging she conspired with Jaynes to falsify Taylors warrant affidavit. Advertisement Garland alleged that Jaynes and Goodlett met in a garage in May 2020 where they agreed to tell investigators a false story. Former Louisville Police Sgt. John Mattingly, who was shot at Taylors door, retired last year. Another officer, Myles Cosgrove, who investigators said fired the shot that killed Taylor, was dismissed from the department in January 2021. Taylors boyfriend, Kenny Walker, who was in her apartment that night and fired the shot at Mattingly, was initially charged with attempted murder of a police officer but that charge was dropped after Walker told investigators he thought an intruder was breaking into the apartment. The Taylor case also prompted a review of the citys no-knock warrant policy. Officers at Taylors door said they knocked and announced they were police even though the warrant didnt require that. Those types of warrants, used in drug investigations to attempt to prevent the destruction of evidence, were later banned in the city of Louisville. Police in Minnesota confirm three gunshots were fired at the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis, but say no one appears to have been hurt. Bloomington police say they are searching for two people. Video posted to social media showed what appeared to be a man shouting as he walked near the complexs Nike store, with three apparent gunshots. A mall spokesman says the mall will reopen Friday with more mall security and police on site. The mall, which opened in 1992, is the largest in the U.S. and is a tourist destination and community gathering spot. Here's some trending topics for today, Aug. 3: Rep. Jackie Walorski Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski was killed Wednesday in a car crash in her northern Indiana district along with two members of her congressional staff and another person, police said. The crash happened about 12:30 p.m. when a car crossed the center line on a state highway and collided head-on with the SUV Walorski was riding in, the Elkhart County Sheriffs Office said. Three people in the SUV, including Walorski, 58, were killed, as was a woman driving the other car, authorities said. Walorski, who served on the House Ways and Means Committee, was first elected to represent Indianas 2nd Congressional District in 2012. She previously served six years in the state's Legislature. Find out more here: Alex Jones For years, bombastic far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ranted to his millions of followers that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax, that children werent killed and that parents were crisis actors in an elaborate ruse to force gun control. Under oath and facing a jury that could hit him with $150 million or more in damages for his false claims, Jones said Wednesday he now realizes that was irresponsible and believes that what happened in the deadliest school shooting in American history was 100% percent real. Jones public contrition came on the final day of testimony in a two-week defamation lawsuit against him and his Austin-based media company Free Speech Systems brought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of a 6-year-old Jesse Lewis. Read more about it here: Eric Greitens Republican leaders got their wish with the defeat of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens in the U.S. Senate primary. Now, they face another complication: A well-funded, right-leaning political newcomer who could splinter some of the Republican and independent vote in November. Attorney General Eric Schmitt pulled off a stunningly dominant win in the GOP primary on Tuesday. Greitens, forced by sex and campaign finance scandals to resign in 2018 and accused by his ex-wife of abuse in a March court document, didn't even finish second, bested also by U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler. Schmitt will face Democrat Trudy Busch Valentine in November. Get more information here: *** Get more of today's trending topics here: "Lightyear" Kansas abortion decision Peter Meijer Episode 49: A recent Gallup poll found that small businesses are the most-respected institution in America today. And, according to the Better Business Bureau, if consumers spend $100 at a local business, roughly $68 stays within their local economy. However, a column last year by Matthew Yglesias, points out that, unlike small businesses, larger companies look for more qualified candidates for leadership jobs instead of often relying on family members when hiring for top jobs. Links to stories discussed during the podcast: Pittsburgh Steelers legend Terry Bradshaw complains about Walmart in Illinois, by Zach Roth, State Journal-Register About the hosts: Scott Rada is social media manager with Lee Enterprises, and Richard Kyte is the director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Has Fox News finally had enough of Donald Trump? This question has roiled the mediasphere over the past few weeks. Its been more than 100 days since Donald J. Trump was interviewed on Fox News, the New York Times reported last week, observing that the news network is effectively displacing him from his favorite spot: the center of the news cycle. According to the Washington Post, multiple sources have indicated that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch has lost his enthusiasm for Trump, though the paper also acknowledged that Fox has tried to pull away from Trump before. Looking for evidence to corroborate Murdochs diminishing enthusiasm? Two Murdoch-owned newspapers, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, each recently published editorials criticizing Trump for his inaction on Jan. 6, 2021. Somethings changing with regard to Trumps relationship with Fox, said CNNs Brian Stelter on a recent Reliable Sources. But what? Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Not as much as you might hope. Although Trump may not be landing as many guest spots on Fox News these days as he did in years pastand although his speeches and rallies are no longer must-air TVthe ex-president is still a frequent topic of conversation on the network. A new study by the liberal group Media Matters found that, through the first seven months of 2022, Trump was mentioned at least 8,556 times on Fox News. In comparison, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was mentioned at least 1,083 times, while former vice president Mike Pence was mentioned at least 589 times. Thats basically an 8:1 ratio of Trump mentions to DeSantis mentions. Whats more, the Media Matters study notes that the largest disparities appeared in the last three months, when Trump received 1,757; 1,664; and 1,381 mentions in May, June, and July, respectively. By contrast, DeSantis received 125, 96, and 179 mentions in those months, and Pence received 86, 218, and 140 mentions in the same time period. Advertisement Advertisement I will note that the Media Matters study does not note the context in which any of those three men were mentioned, and I suppose its possible that some of the Trump mentions did not cast the ex-president in a positive light. But, still, its hard to see those figures and think that Fox News is anywhere near being done with Donald Trump. Indeed, theres plenty of evidence to indicate that Trump still holds more sway over the rabid right-wing electorate than does the network that is allegedly trying to deplatform him. While Im willing to believe that Rupert Murdoch thinks that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would be a better candidate than Trump in the 2024 presidential election, its wishcasting to assume that Fox has the power to convince Trumps voters on that pointor that the network would even want to do so as long as those voters remain loyal to the former president. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Media commentators like to talk about the near-hypnotic effect that Fox News has on its viewers. I think that this effect is somewhat misunderstood. Repeated, long-term exposure to Fox News can indeed end up influencing a viewers political opinions toward the hard right. But this effect is most often achieved by convincing viewers that liberal policies and elitist cultural mores have brought America to the brink of crisis. When I tuned into Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning, for example, the hosts werent talking about Donald Trump, but they also werent really talking about any particular politician. Instead, they were focusing on any number of actual or exaggerated national disasters: the still-persisting baby-formula shortage; a woke kindergarten in California; an alleged increase in violence directed toward anti-abortion activists. Advertisement Advertisement These stories, in which incidents and indignities are spun into an ongoing narrative of American decline, are broadly similar to the sorts of stories that I saw on Fox every day during Trumps actual presidency. Remember the notion, mentioned often in 2018, that a dangerous migrant caravan was marching toward the U.S. border hell-bent on overrunning the border? Consider the premise, broached fairly regularly on the network since the George Floyd protests of 2020, that protest-related property damage in some cities downtown cores is tantamount to complete and total lawlessness and chaos. Contrary to what some of the Fox is turning on Trump discourse seems to imply, the network wasnt 24/7 Trump during the ex-presidents term in office. Before, during, and after the Trump presidency, Fox News has always spent the bulk of its programming hours telling its viewers that America is on fireand that the Democrats bear the responsibility for the flames. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Through repetition, exaggeration, and scapegoating, the network creates the conditions for viewers to be receptive to Republican narratives. Once a Fox viewer is primed to believe that Democrats, the media, and the academy are actively shredding the fabric of middle America, then that viewer becomes receptive to whichever Republican politicians can most loudly and convincingly assert that they alone can fix it. To this day, Donald Trump is still the loudest and most assertive narrator of this particular horror storyand his ongoing clout has been borne out at the polls. Advertisement Tuesday nights state primaries in Arizona, Missouri, Michigan, and elsewhere serve as a reminder of just how much influence Trump still wields within his own party. All across the country, GOP voters resoundingly chose candidates whose chief qualifications are their willingness to show fealty to the ex-president and his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. In Arizona, GOP primary voters chose ex-newscaster and current Stop the Steal wingnut Kari Lake as their gubernatorial candidate over the slightly more mainstream candidate endorsed by the states current governor, Doug Ducey. In Michigans 3rd congressional district, military veteran and supermarket scion Peter Meijer, who has only slightly less name recognition in his district than Sears and or Roebuck would have had among catalog enthusiasts 100 years ago, lost his primary to another Stop the Steal partisan, John Gibbs, who according to CNN has previously implied on Twitter that ex-Clintonite John Podesta is a Satanist. Advertisement Advertisement So why would a cynical pragmatist like Rupert Murdoch choose to make war with a guy whose endorsements still hold such sway over so much of the Republican electorate? As much as Murdoch might like Ron DeSantis, he likes high ratings even more. Murdoch surely has not forgotten how the networks mild pushback on Trumps false claims that he actually won the 2020 presidential election was enough to send many hard-right viewers scattering to Newsmax and OAN. Fox has won many of those lost viewers back since late 2020, and the network assuredly does not want to risk another, similar diaspora. To a very real extent, Trumps base is more loyal to him than it is to any single news source. Rather than leading Trumps voters to abandon their hero, its much more likely that the effect of Fox News actually turning on Trump would be that Trumps voters would abandon Fox News. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In a Slate piece Thursday morning, my colleague Jeremy Stahl made a compelling case for why Trump may well choose not to run for the 2024 presidential nomination. One of Stahls main arguments is that many in the GOPincluding some Murdoch-controlled news outletsseem to be exhausted by the ex-president. Theres no doubt that this is true, just as theres no doubt that there are also plenty on the right who still cant get enough of the Trump show. And this uneasy equilibrium is why Fox will end up being a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator, of Trumps waning political fortunes. The network will wait for Trump to voluntarily cede the spotlight rather than preemptively pushing him into the wings; and when that happens, the network will just shift that spotlight toward some other belligerent right-wing politician, such as DeSantis, who can sound all of the same notes as Trump without the bloat or the baggage. Even if Rupert Murdoch is indeed tired of Trumpa big ifhe will not soon tire of the cruel nativist populism that both he and the ex-president have helped to mainstream, and that the American right has now come to demand. Care and Feeding is Slates parenting advice column. In addition to our traditional advice, every Thursday we feature an assortment of teachers from across the country answering your education questions. Have a question for our teachers? Email askateacher@slate.com or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group. My son is going into sixth grade this year, and it will be his first year in GATE. He has been bored in class, and we feel the academic challenge will benefit him. However, hes really struggling with the idea from a friendship standpoint. He feels that the best socializing is in class, and since he wont be in the same classes as his friends, its all terrible. He knows kids in his future classes and is friends with somebut is so scared about losing his core group. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I both totally understand his fear and have tried to talk through the idea that there are many possible outcomes. He could make new friends, stay close with his current group at recess and lunch, have a mix of new and old friends, etc. Ive encouraged him to see those buddies this summer, but hes not that interested (its not the same, he says). I dont want to negate his feelings but am trying to figure out how to help him through this tricky time. Any suggestions or recommendations? Friendship Fears Dear Friendship Fears, It sounds like he doesnt want your help right now, which is normalthis is a tricky age. While your son isnt a teenager yet, hes approaching adolescence, a time when many kids start to pull away from their parents. This may be why he is dismissing your ideas for how to maintain his friendships: he wants to maintain them independently, but fears he cannot when hes no longer in classes with them. Your suggestions are all reasonable, of course, but he cant hear them. Advertisement Advertisement My recommendation is to stop trying to fix this for him and just listen. Sympathize. You can remind him that you have faith in him but avoid giving him advice he doesnt want. Advertisement One thing I am wondering: does he agree that he was bored in class and needs more academic challenge? If he does, then that gives me hope he will adjust quickly to this new setting once school starts. If hes 100 percent resistant to making the switch, it may be rough going for a while. I would evaluate how well hes adapted at the end of the fall semester. Good luck! Chances are, he will make friends in his new program. Whether or not he maintains his current friendships will be up to him. You and I both know that in life friendships come and gobut dont tell him that! It counts as advice. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Ms. Holbrook (high school teacher, Texas) Slate needs your support right now. Sign up for Slate Plus to keep reading the advice you crave every week. My nephew is a highly intelligent 6-year-old in some ways (capable of building complex Lego sets fast, able to regurgitate precisely much of what he learns). But its hard to hold his attention for a long conversation, like even more than a couple words. For instance, once I asked, Whats up buddy? and he said, How come you changed your voice when you talked to me? Before I could state, Because grown-ups sometimes change their voice around kids. He ran off. He does not always maintain eye contact. ADHD is possible, but the kid is able to pay attention massively when hes engagedat a museum lecture, the Lego sets, drawing, etc. He does not have too many friends, and he does not really seek it out or worry about it. He does not engage in pretend play or make-believe type activities. He does have some hyperactive elements as mentioned. His parents brought it up to his pediatrician and they were told, Well, he seems okay, but if his teachers are concerned we might be too I hate to pin a pathology on this kind and smart child. He might be on the spectrum, but so are many content and kind people. It seems weird to put the emphasis of this diagnosis on his burdened and hard-working non-medical teachers. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Should we try a special mental assessment? Does it matter? My assumption is that excellent services exist to help but that they need to start as early as possible. Should I Intervene? Dear SII, Some facts: there are specialized assessments used to determine if a child is autistic; there are services to support autistic children as they go through school; there is research that services should start as early as possible. The most important fact: this is none of your business. Advertisement I understand that you are trying to help. I understand that you may be concerned about your nephew, that you think there may be something others are not seeing. I understand what its like to be a concerned bystander in the life of a child that is not yours. However, the is not yours part here is key. This is not your child. You are not his parent or guardian. And the evidence you have here to support the idea that he might be autistic isnt particularly robust. Were you his parent, I would go over what I would look for as red flags but, again, youre not his parent or guardian. Advertisement Furthermore, his parents have done exactly the right thing. They spoke to their doctor, and their doctor gave exactly the answer I would expect: that if there were concerns from school, they would look further into the matter. All of those wonderful services are there to support children who lack certain skills or who learn abilities slower than their peers. If no one at school has flagged that he lacks those skills or learns those abilities slower than his peers, an autism diagnosis does nothing. Its just a label at that point. Labels can be extremely valuable, but I think if you only want the label for labels sake, its best to wait until he can self-determine. Autism is not an automatic qualifying disability for most services, so he would not necessarily get any supports if he isnt showing deficits, and if he is showing deficits, then a recommendation would be made to his parent or guardian about further assessment. What you can do is love him for who he is without worrying about the label. Advertisement Ms. Sarnell (early childhood special education teacher, New York) Advertisement Advertisement My January-born grandson is starting kindergarten next month. He was placed in a pre-K/K combination class. He is very small in size, but based on his birthday, he is on the older side. He can do an 18+ Lego in three days. He can easily count to 100, knows letter sounds, and can read sight words. He can do 500-piece adult jigsaw puzzles. I want him to attend this creative, project-based K-8 school, but I am worried he will be bored, especially with a brand new teacher. Should I look elsewhere so the teacher can just deal with one age group versus trying to keep this busy guy stimulated while dealing with younger kids as well? The school is so small, we could be facing a combo class ongoing as well. Advertisement Stressed-Out Grandma Dear Stressed-Out Grandma, First off, Im assuming that you are your grandsons caregiver. If not, Id suggest that you offer the gentlest advice to your grandsons parent or parents but refrain from stressing them or yourself out too much. Trust your grandsons parents to make the best choice. Advertisement Advertisement Also, no need to stress out because this model of schooling produces excellent results. It sounds like your grandson has some very good skills, but there is a lot more to learn in kindergarten beyond academics. In fact, the most important learning that takes place in kindergarten is social and emotional development, so regardless of what your grandson can do, there is most assuredly more to learn. My wife, a kindergarten teacher, would tell you that learning how to share, take turns, collaborate, be a good sport, socialize, listen, and cope are the most important things learned in kindergarten. Surely your grandson has room to grow. Advertisement Advertisement Also, a pre-k/kindergarten class will give your grandson the opportunity to learn important skills like role modeling, leadership, empathy, patience, and kindness. Hell be in a position to help others with skills that he has already learned, thus cementing his own pre-existing skills, while receiving additional instruction in areas where he needs to improve himself. Remember: A multi-grade classroom is not an environment that teaches to the youngest or most struggling student but instead seeks to meet the needs of all and perhaps stretch those younger students beyond what they thought possible. The fact that the school and class sizes are small might prove to be a blessing in terms of the amount of individual attention that your grandson will receive. Advertisement It sounds like a wonderful opportunity for your grandson. Good luck! Mr. Dicks (fifth grade teacher, Connecticut) Do you have any advice on how I should punish my 5-year-old for hitting, biting, and scratching classmates? By the time they get home from school, they dont remember why they did it. Is a punishment hours after the incident effective? Punishment to Fit the Crime The younger the child, the more immediate the consequence needs to be. With a 5-year-old child, the consequence must come almost immediately or it will be meaningless. The dots must quickly be connected. Ideally, the teacher will provide an immediate consequence for the behavior, which can and probably should include contacting you about the situation. Advertisement But what you can do after the fact is require your child to engage in empathy, by writing a letter of apology to the child who was harmed, drawing them a beautiful picture, baking the feel better cookies, or donating time and effort to a related cause. These are all important life skills that have great value and will help your child understand the world better even after the incident is in their rearview mirror. Advertisement Mr. Dicks (fifth grade teacher, Connecticut) More Advice From Slate My daughters sixth-grade elective teacher recently called me to tell me that my daughter is a great student, eager to learn, and very fun to have in class. Sounds great, right? But he also mentioned that he often asks her to partner with difficult students in class. When I asked my daughter about this, she said that these difficult students are often boys that dont pay attention and dont really want to be in the class. The more I think about it, I feel like it isnt my daughters responsibility to manage these boys in class. What should I do? Dear Prudence is Slates advice column. Submit questions here. Dear Prudence, Today, I called a Black co-worker by the name of a different Black co-worker; I am white. I work in a large hospital, we have a lot of temporary workers, and Id only met the one whose name I knew once. The scorn of the one I called the wrong name was evident and rightfully earned, though she was polite. I have a lot of excuses (the above, plus masks, plus the end of a tiring week) and justifications (I think I have just as much trouble matching the names and faces of the white temporary workers), but I know none of that matters. Embarrassingly, my husband and children are Black. I loathe myself for doing this, and not for the first time. My question is how do I respond if I do this again? and how do I stop doing this? (I dont have any condition like face-blindness, by the way.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement How Do I Stop? Dear How Do I Stop, I feel for you because I know its mortifying to be in your position. And I feel for your Black co-worker even more. Its really a downer to experience something like this because you cant help but take it as a reminder that the person whos called you by the wrong name is so fixated on your race that they cant see you as an individual with your own unique qualities. And a big, awkward apologyespecially one that makes you feel like its your job to smooth everything overcan only make you feel worse. I guarantee the last thing she wants is a Just making sure were OK Slack message or email. So I think your How do I respond if I do this again? question is a good one. I would suggest a brief, clear I am so sorry. That mistake was unacceptable and Im going to do better, rather than a longer explanation, excessive self-flagellation, or a mention of how you confuse white colleagues, too. And definitely dont ask your colleague to reassure you that its OK. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But hopefully you wont have to apologize if you dont do it again. And I think thats possible. I actually answered a question similar to yours in a different advice column many years ago. That one came from a Black person who had greeted an Asian receptionist with the name of another Asian colleague. When I made some calls to help out that letter writer, I learned about the cross race effect, which is what is at work when you have a harder time recognizing or distinguishing between members of racial ethnic groups other than your own. I spoke to Kurt Hugenberg, a professor who had spent much of his career studying stereotyping, prejudice, and cross-race face identification. You can read the whole response here, but what it boils down to is that this is a normal thing that happens when you dont see that many people of a certain race (even if you see three at home, thats not a lot!), and to overcome it, you have to make a point of paying attention to what makes the people you do see unique, rather than getting stuck on what makes them similar. Thats something you can do even when people are wearing masks, because its not all about physical appearance. So maybe one Black temporary co-worker wears fun earrings and the other is always seen with a big cup of coffee. Maybe you have a conversation and learn that one is from the Midwest and one is from California. And then you remind yourself to notice and remember these things rather than just their ethnicity. That takes a little more mental work, but maybe it can eventually become a habit. Youll avoid future mortifying moments and your colleagues will start to believewith good reason because it will actually be truethat youre actually seeing them for who they are. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Get Dear Prudence in Your Inbox We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Dear Prudence, How do you plan an event when you are unsure how many people will show up? I am an organizer for a public group on an app that is geared for meeting new friends. This often entails hosting events in public spaces where people can show just up. Most publicly accessible spaces are restaurants and businesses, so I often end up calling in a reservation ahead of time so we dont overrun the restaurant. The problem is that people are flaky and I feel bad taking up unnecessary space at a business. I recently called in a reservation for 8 people and set a limit on the app for 8 attendees to the event. The attendance starts out promising with 8 people definitely attending and 3 people on the waitlist. As the event gets closer, attendance numbers start dwindling. Day of, I dont know what the final tally of people will be who actually show. Advertisement Advertisement So whats the best way to responsibly plan these events? I dont want to be a blight on local businesses, but I also dont know how to keep people responsible who I may not even personally know. Meeting Madness Advertisement Dear Meeting Madness, Im actually very passionate about this, and not just because of the issues with reservations. I hate sitting with a group at one long table, because youre stuck talking to like three people and the conversation never flows properly. And dont get me started on splitting the bill! All gatherings of loose groups of friends (especially when you dont know who will show up) should take place at the kind of bar, restaurant, or food hall where you pay for your food individually and then find a seat, and theres plenty of space to mill around. Get there early and try to stake out a small area. After that, your job is done. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement How to Get Advice From Prudie Submit your questions anonymously here. (Questions may be edited for publication.) Join the live chat every Monday at noon (and submit your comments) here. Dear Prudence, My partner and I have been together for almost five years, and were talking about having a child soon. Were both in our late 30s, and work and instability have prevented us from really considering it until now. My partner comes from a home that had a lot of narcissistic and emotional abuse (both narcissistic personality disorder), and physical abuse between her parents. Shes done a lot of work over the years trying to heal, grow, and find ways out of these learned patterns but it still pops up occasionally. I feel Ive supported her in her healing journey, but now were at, what has come to seem, a more serious crossroad. We got into a silly argument recently that escalated very quickly and she went into a kind of trauma loop, becoming fixated on the notion that what I had said in passing was extremely hurtful (I casually said I didnt get a meme she shared, didnt find it that funny). This loop reminded me of past arguments and made me worried about the plans we are making to have a child. I brought this up later with an earnest desire to be able to talk about how we envision parenting given her past, and echoes of experiences that weve both had to navigate throughout our relationship. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Naturally, this wasnt taken well and I was accused of calling her a (potentially) bad mother. Ive noticed Ive developed my own coping strategies to deal with my partners outbursts, but I worry about our potential child, and how their experience navigating a parent with narcissistic tendencies might be much more damaging than my own experience of being in a relationship that has prioritized healing and growth but is still subject to the occasional calamity. Am I deluding myself or is it possible for this potential child to have the kind of happy and healthy home I grew up in? Advertisement Hope Beyond Narcissism Dear Hope, Listen to the instinct that is telling you that you would worry about your partners ability to be a mother. Even if youre totally off base, shell pick up on it (like she already has) and that will create a horrible dynamic between the two of you and an awful environment for a child. You two should not procreate. Advertisement Dear Prudence, Five years ago, my father had an affair with my mothers best friend while she was recovering from cancer. To be bluntit was brutal. They divorced, but he went out to marry his mistress and moved her into our childhood home. My parents were married for over 30 years, and my mom had been friends with the mistress for 30. The affair wrecked every one of my familys relationships to our father. My brothers refuse to speak to him, and he hasnt attended any of our milestone events. I was very much daddys little princess growing up and very close to him. As much as his betrayals sting even now, I miss him. Advertisement Advertisement I am engaged and the thought of my father not walking me down the aisle, let alone not seeing me marry the love of my life makes me cry. He wrote me a letter after learning of my engagement where he apologized for all the damage he has done and he knows he cant undo any of it, but he never stopped loving me or my brothers. He also included a very sizable check. My love and I are deeply in debt. The check would wipe it out and leave a lot over for the wedding. My brothers call it a bribe. My love thinks my father is sincere enough. My mother thinks I should accept this as an olive branch, that I deserve my father there on my wedding day. As hard as he hurt her, she still remembers the good times sometimes. That said, she doesnt want his new wife there. She will keep her peace with our father for my sake, but she will not breathe the same air as that bitch. I can understand. I want nothing to do with my fathers new wife. I cant forgive her or forget what she did to my mother or our family. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement My father is equally guilty but he is my father. I love my father. I miss my father. I am angry with my father. I doubt that will ever truly go away. I still want him at my wedding. Not to have him there feels like bolting that door shut. Maybe in a decade, with distance, with grandkids the hurt will fade and even heal. Maybe not. Am I stupid to hope? I have been told to take the check and leave my father hanging; to either tear it up or accept that my father will be bringing his new wife (as you dont invite one half of a couple); to invite my father solo and dont do all the traditional father-daughter stuff; or do it anyway. I need an outside perspectiveplease help! Advertisement Bride to Be Dear Bride to Be, Cash the check and thank your father for it. It didnt come with a contract about who will be invited to the wedding, or what will be on the program. I know it feels like it did, but it didnt. Totally separately, decide what would give you the wedding day you want to have. If thats having your father walk you down the aisle but not inviting his new wife, tell him that. Sure, its kind of unusual and would in normal circumstances be rude to deny him a guest. But he knows what he did, and he knew when he did it that it would make future family events difficult. He was selfish and made the choice that he thought would make him happiest. Now you do the same. Advertisement Dear Prudence Uncensored If you have a lot of money its easy to write a check, but will he inconvenience and humble himself to show remorse and make his daughter happy? Advertisement Advertisement Jenee Desmond-Harris and friends discuss a letter in this weeks Dear Prudence Uncensoredonly for Slate Plus members. Dear Prudence, My boyfriend and his 18-year-old son live with me in a house my boyfriend and I rent from my parents. My parents have already told me that I will be receiving this house in their will. The 18-year-old has been in high school since January. My boyfriend and I had already discussed that his son would have to be working full time or going to post-secondary school and begin paying a small rental fee to continue to live with us once his schooling was done. He graduated last week at the end of May. He very rarely leaves his room or this house, except to see friends and has never held a part-time job for more than a couple weeks. He quite literally plays games in his room all day and night and does not help around the house or yard at all. In fact, most days I am cleaning up after him, doing his dishes, and Im also still expected to cook for him and his girlfriend as well. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement My boyfriend gets upset and enraged if I even bring up the subject of us trying to maybe more than a little forcefully encourage his son to find work and let him know he cannot continue to game day and night and sponge off of us. I pay all bills and get reimbursed, never on time, by my boyfriend for his portion of the bills. Im not allowed to ever have an opinion or conversation with my boyfriends son letting him know he needs to get a job, but they are both living in what I feel is my house, as I pay for more of our bills and its my parents house. Im starting to resent both of them and feel this might be a deal breaker. Am I being too harsh? Im never allowed to discuss this as it just starts a fight so I feel trapped like a prisoner with no voice in my own home. What do I do? Advertisement Advertisement Voiceless in My Own Home Dear Voiceless, These people have to go, and your relationship has to end. Being a freeloader who plays a lot of video games is not the worst thing in the entire world, but the way your boyfriend is making you feel is. Youre not allowed to have certain conversations?? You feel like a prisoner?! Break up with him. Ask the two of them to leave as soon as possible, after speaking to a lawyer about what steps youll take if they dont go voluntarily. Enjoy your home, and in the future only share it with people who contribute or at least respect you. Give Prudie a Hand in Were Prudence Sometimes even Prudence needs a little help. Every Thursday in this column, well post a question that has her stumped. This weeks tricky situation is below. Join the conversation about it on Twitter with Jenee @jdesmondharris on Thursday, and then look back for the final answer here on Friday. Advertisement Dear Prudence, Whats the etiquette when you dont like your friends husband? I have a good group of girlfriends from college, and I love all their partners minus one. He hasnt done anything, I just dont enjoy his company. When hes in a bad mood, he pouts and snipes at my friend. When hes in a good mood, he tells long, boring stories. One way or another, he wants to be the center of attention (hes the guy who has a great voice, and so always wants to do karaoke when were hanging out). Our friend knows that we dont like it when he makes a big production of sulking. But theres also not a ton she can do about that, and he insists on coming even when he knows hell be a killjoy. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement So far, our strategy has been to do more and more girls nights, but that sucks because I miss the rest of the other halves. One of their partners is also nonbinary femme, so it feels weird to divide the group along gender linesbut since half of our husbands (mine included) were also in our friend group in college, saying we were doing college friends only would mostly just be excluding the guy we dont like and catching another partner in the crossfire. Any tips? Should I talk to my friend again? Should we try to manage his behavior better? Keep Him Home Dear Prudence, Do you really need to deal with childhood trauma? If repression has worked for you so far (31!), cant you just stick with it? Advertisement This question is brought to you by the fact my best friend and his wife are planning to start a family. So a bunch of us were sitting around over Last Hurrah drinks and telling funny stories about our childhood. I told them the one about the time I was 8 when my dad dug a hole in the scrub behind our house, woke me up in the middle of the night, took me out and made me stand in it, and said if you dont behave, this is where Ill bury you. And I was all and every year the idiot had to go out and make the hole bigger. It turns out that isnt funny, which I did pick up on as I was talking. If you think about it then it was actually kind of awful, or abusive as my friends wife put it. I felt dumber than my Dad out in the rain digging a bigger hole every year. Advertisement Amy, who I have dated for all of two months and now knows I spent most of my life thinking that was just Dad Jokes, thinks I need therapy. I think I need to just cut off everyone I know and move. That is kind of a joke, and kind of true. I just feel like some sort of pitiable idiot right now, and I dont want to talk to anyone who knows about this. So I dont see how more people knowing about more of my awful childhood (because Ive thought up at least three other things I never questioned that are clearly sort of abusive looking back, or actually abusive if it was to someone else) is going to make me feel better. Advertisement Advertisement Obviously, people need to deal with trauma that causes them pain, but I was fine when this was all a secret! Isnt digging all this stuff up just to see more like those people that get their legs broken so they can try and get three more inches in height? Advertisement Advertisement Bury It All Dear Bury It All, Youre feeling a lot of shame over what you endured as a child. Its so intense that you are wishing (sort of jokingly, sort of not jokingly) you could move away to a place where nobody knows about it. You say you were fine when it was all a secret, but youre not fine now! That shame and that not fine-ness should be what you talk about in therapy, even if you have decided (someone unreasonably, but thats between you and your therapist) that the abuse itself doesnt matter. Classic Prudie Last October I gave my husband an ultimatum, see the dentist or were over. In the 16 years weve known each other, he has not been to the dentist once. As a child he had a traumatic injury to his front teeth, and that the repair was not done correctly. As a result, he does not smile and show his teeth, and he talks so that his teeth can not be seen. He does have a dark/discolored top front tooth. Due to his lack of regular dental visits, I am not interested in kissing him. He has extreme halitosis and I have mentioned this to him and he gets very upset and angry with me. Ive told a couple friends about my ultimatum, they think getting divorced because of poor oral hygiene is ridiculous. What are your thoughts? MJ was a tiny, black-haired girl, just 5 years old, when her father admitted to his bishop that he was sexually abusing her. The father, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an admitted pornography addict, was in counseling with his bishop when he revealed the abuse. The bishop, who was also a family physician, followed church policy and called what church officials have dubbed the help line for guidance. Advertisement But the call offered little help for MJ. Lawyers for the church, widely known as the Mormon church, who staff the help line around the clock told Bishop John Herrod not to call police or child welfare officials. Instead he kept the abuse secret. They said, You absolutely can do nothing, Herrod said in a recorded interview with law enforcement. Advertisement Herrod continued to counsel MJs father, Paul Douglas Adams, for another year, and brought in Adams wife, Leizza Adams, in hopes she would do something to protect the children. She didnt. Herrod later told a second bishop, who also kept the matter secret after consulting with church officials who maintain that the bishops were excused from reporting the abuse to police under the states so-called clergy-penitent privilege. Adams continued raping MJ for as many as seven more years, into her adolescence, and also abused her infant sister, who was born during that time. He frequently recorded the abuse on video and posted the video on the internet. Adams was finally arrested by Homeland Security agents in 2017 with no help from the church, after law enforcement officials in New Zealand discovered one of the videos. He died by suicide in custody before he could stand trial. The Associated Press has obtained nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records from an unrelated child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon church in West Virginia. The documents offer the most detailed and comprehensive look yet at the so-called help line Herrod called. Families of survivors who filed the lawsuit said they show its part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harms way. The help line has been criticized by abuse victims and their attorneys for being inadequate to quickly stop abuse and protect victims. Yet the Utah-based faith has stuck by the system despite the criticism and increasing scrutiny from attorneys and prosecutors, including those in the Adams case. I just think that the Mormon church really sucks. Seriously sucks, said MJ, who is now 16, during an interview with the AP. They are just the worst type of people, from what Ive experienced and what other people have also experienced. MJ and her adoptive mother asked the AP to use only her initials in part because videos of her abuse posted by her father are still circulating on the internet. The AP does not publish the names of sexual abuse survivors without their consent. William Maledon, an Arizona attorney representing the bishops and the church in a lawsuit filed by three of the Adams six children, told the AP last month that the bishops were not required to report the abuse. Advertisement These bishops did nothing wrong. They didnt violate the law, and therefore they cant be held liable, he said. Maledon referred to the suit as a money grab. In his AP interview, Maledon also insisted Herrod did not know that Adams was continuing to sexually assault his daughter after learning of the abuse in a single counseling session. But in the recorded interview with the agent obtained by the AP, Herrod said he asked Leizza Adams in multiple sessions if the abuse was ongoing and asked her, What are we going to do to stop it? At least for a period of time I assumed they had stopped things, but and then I never asked if they picked up again. An old-fashioned gas station stands at Erie Street in Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2021. Erie Street is what remains of Lowell, a small town incorporated into Bisbee in the early 1900s. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP) The perfect lifestyle The Adams family lived on a lonely dirt road about 8 miles from the center of Bisbee, an old copper-mining town in southeastern Arizona known today for its antique shops and laid-back attitude. Far from prying eyes, the Adams home a three-bedroom, open concept affair surrounded by desert was often littered with piles of clothing and containers of lubricant Adams used to sexually abuse his children, according to legal documents reviewed by the AP. Pauls wife, Leizza, assumed most of the child-rearing responsibilities, including getting their six children off to school and chauffeuring them to church and religious instruction on Sundays. Paul, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol, spent much of his time online looking at porn, often with his children watching, or wandering the house naked or in nothing but his underwear. Advertisement He had a short fuse and would frequently throw things, yell at his wife and beat his kids. He just had this explosive personality, said Shaunice Warr, a Border Patrol agent and a Mormon who worked with Paul and described herself as Leizzas best friend. He had a horrible temper. Paul was more relaxed while coaxing his older daughter to hold a smartphone camera and record him while he sexually abused her. He also seemed to revel in the abuse in online chat rooms, where he once bragged that he had the perfect lifestyle because he could have sex with his daughters whenever he pleased, while his wife knew and doesnt care. He would later tell investigators the abuse was a compulsion he couldnt stop. I got into something too deep that I just couldnt pull myself out of, he said. Im not trying to say the devil made me do it. The Adams family was deeply involved in the Mormon community, and on Sundays they attended services in Bisbee. So Adams turned to his church, and to Bishop Herrod, when he sought help and revealed his abuse of MJ. Herrod later told Homeland Security agent Robert Edwards he knew from the start that Leizza Adams was unlikely to stop her husband, after he called her into the counseling sessions. The bishop, who was also Leizzas personal physician, said she seemed pretty emotionally dead when her husband recounted his abuse of their daughter. The bishop also recognized the harm being done to MJ. I doubt (she) will ever do well, he said in his recorded interview with Homeland Security agents. Herrod also told Edwards that when he called the help line, church officials told him the states clergy-penitent privilege required him to keep Adamss abuse confidential. Advertisement But the law required no such thing. Arizonas child sex abuse reporting law, and similar laws in more than 20 states that require clergy to report child sex abuse and neglect, says that clergy, physicians, nurses, or anyone caring for a child who reasonably believes a child has been abused or neglected has a legal obligation to report the information to police or the state Department of Child Safety. But it also says that clergy who receive information about child neglect or sexual abuse during spiritual confessions may withhold that information from authorities if the clergy determine it is reasonable and necessary under church doctrine. In 2012, when Herrod rotated out of his position as bishop of the Bisbee ward a Mormon jurisdiction similar to a Catholic parish he told incoming Bishop Robert Kim Mauzy about the abuse in the Adams household. Instead of rescuing MJ by reporting the abuse to authorities, Mauzy also kept the information within the church. In a separate recorded interview with federal agents obtained by the AP, Mauzy said church officials told him he should convene a confidential disciplinary hearing for Adams, after which Adams was ex-communicated in 2013. Mauzy and other church leaders still didnt report Adams to the police. Two years later, in 2015, Leizza Adams gave birth to a second daughter. It took her husband just six weeks to start sexually assaulting her, recording the abuse, and uploading the videos to the internet. The revelation that Mormon officials may have directed an effort to conceal years of abuse in the Adams household sparked a criminal investigation of the church by Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre, and the civil lawsuit by three of the Adams children. Advertisement Whos really responsible for Herrod not disclosing? McIntyre asked in an AP interview. Is it Herrod, who says he followed the church lawyers instruction not to report the abuse to authorities? Or is it the people who gave him that advice? Weeds grow over a swing set as the spire of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stands in the background, in Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 31, 2021. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP) The call comes to my cell phone When it comes to child sexual abuse, the Mormon church says the first responsibility of the church in abuse cases is to help those who have been abused and protect those who may be vulnerable to future abuse, according to its 2010 handbook for church leaders. The handbook also says, Abuse cannot be tolerated in any form. But church officials, from the bishops in the Bisbee ward to officials in Salt Lake City, tolerated abuse in the Adams family for years. They just let it keep happening, said MJ, in her AP interview. They just said, Hey, lets excommunicate her father. It didnt stop. Lets have them do therapy. It didnt stop. Hey, lets forgive and forget and all this will go away. It didnt go away. A similar dynamic played out in West Virginia, where church leaders were accused of covering up the crimes committed by a young abuser from a prominent Mormon family even after hed been convicted on child sex abuse charges in Utah. The abuser, Michael Jensen, today is serving a 35- to 75-year prison sentence for abusing two children in West Virginia. Their family, along with others, sued the church and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Child abuse festers and grows in secrecy, said Lynne Cadigan, a lawyer for the Adams children who filed suit. That is why the mandatory reporting came into effect. Its the most important thing in the world to immediately report to the police. Advertisement The lawsuit filed by the three Adams children accuses The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and several members, including Bishops Herrod and Mauzy, of negligence and conspiring to cover up child sex abuse to avoid costly lawsuits and protect the reputation of the church, which relies on proselytizing and tithing to attract new members and raise money. In 2020, the church claimed approximately 16 million members worldwide, most of them living outside the United States. The failure to prevent or report abuse was part of the policy of the defendants, which was to block public disclosure to avoid scandals, to avoid the disclosure of their tolerance of child sexual molestation and assault, to preserve a false appearance of propriety, and to avoid investigation and action by public authority, including law enforcement, the suit alleges. Plaintiffs are informed and believe that such actions were motivated by a desire to protect the reputation of the defendants. Very few of the scores of lawsuits against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mention the help line, in part because details of its operations have been a closely guarded secret. The documents in the sealed court records show how it works. The help line is certainly there to help to help the church keep its secrets and to cover up abuse, said Craig Vernon, an Idaho attorney who has filed several sex abuse lawsuits against the church. Vernon, a former member, routinely demands that the church require bishops to report sex abuse to police or state authorities rather than the help line. The sealed records say calls to the help line are answered by social workers or professional counselors who determine whether the information they receive is serious enough to be referred to an attorney with Kirton McConkie, a Salt Lake City firm that represents the church. Advertisement A document with the heading Protocol for abuse help line calls, which was among the sealed records obtained by the AP, laid out the questions social workers were to ask before determining whether the calls should be referred to the lawyers. Mormon officials in the West Virginia case said they did not recognize the Protocol and could not authenticate it. But a ranking church official in a separate sex abuse lawsuit in Oregon confirmed that those answering the help line used a written protocol to guide them. There would be a page containing various topics to discuss and handle, said Harold C. Brown, then director of the churchs Welfare Services Department. The Protocol instructs those staffing the help line to tell callers they are to use first names only. No identifying information should be given. Under the heading High Risk Cases, it also instructs staffers to ask a series of questions, including whether calls concerned possible abuse by a church leader, an employee, or abuse at a church-sponsored activity. The protocol advises those taking the calls to instruct a priesthood leader, which includes bishops and stake presidents, to encourage the perpetrator, the victim, or others who know of the abuse to report it. But it also says, in capital letters, that those taking the calls should never advise a priesthood leader to report abuse. Counsel of this nature should come only from legal counsel. That counsel comes from attorneys from Kirton McConkie, which represents the church. Advertisement Joseph Osmond, one of the Kirton McConkie lawyers assigned to take help line calls, said in a sealed deposition that hes always ready to deal with sex abuse complaints. Wherever I am. The call comes to my cell phone, he said. He then acknowledged that he did not refer calls to a social worker and wouldnt know how to do so. Osmond declined to comment through church officials. Peter Schofield, a Kirton McConkie lawyer long associated with the help line, also declined to answer questions from the AP. Maledon, the attorney for the church in the Adams lawsuit, said church clergy or church attorneys have made hundreds of reports of child abuse to civil authorities in Arizona over an unspecified number of years. But he could not say how many calls to the help line were not referred to police or child welfare officials and could not provide a referral rate. Two church practices, identified in the sealed records, work together to ensure that the contents of all help lines calls remain confidential. First, all records of calls to the help line are routinely destroyed. Those notes are destroyed by the end of every day, said Roger Van Komen, the churchs director of Family Services, in an affidavit included in the sealed records. Second, church officials say that all calls referred to Kirton McConkie lawyers are covered by attorney-client privilege and remain out of the reach of prosecutors and victims attorneys. The church has always regarded those communications between its lawyers and local leaders as attorney-client privileged, said Paul Rytting, the director of Risk Management, in a sealed affidavit. Advertisement Clouds hang over the area that what was once the home of Paul Adams and his family on the outskirts of Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2021. Adams, a Mormon and U.S. Border Patrol agent living with his wife and six children, admitted he had posted videos on the dark web of him molesting two of his children, a 9-year-old girl and a younger daughter he began raping when she was only 6 months old. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP) An ominous time Mormon leaders established the help line in 1995 and it operated not within its Department of Family Services, but instead in its Office of Risk Management, whose role is to protect the church and members from injury and liability in an array of circumstances, including fires, explosions, hazardous chemical spills and severe weather. The department ultimately reports to the First Presidency, the three officials at the very top of the church hierarchy, according to records in the sealed documents. Risk management also tracks all sex abuse lawsuits against the church, according to a sealed affidavit by Dwayne Liddell, a past director of the department who helped establish the help line. He said members of the churchs First Presidency knew the details of the help line. I have been in those type of meetings where ... the training of ecclesiastical leaders (and) the establishment of a help line have been discussed, Liddell said. When asked who attended the meetings, he answered, Members of the First Presidency and the presiding bishopric, or the top leaders of the church. Before establishing the help line in 1995, the Mormon church simply instructed bishops to comply with local child sex abuse reporting laws. At the time, child sex abuse lawsuits were on the rise and juries were awarding victims millions of dollars. The Mormon church is largely self-insured, leaving it especially vulnerable to costly lawsuits. There is nothing inconsistent between identifying cases that may pose litigation risks to the church and complying with reporting obligations, church lawyers said in a sealed legal filing. Advertisement But one affidavit in the sealed records which repeatedly says the church condemns child sexual abuse, also suggests the church is more concerned about the spiritual well-being of perpetrators than the physical and emotional well-being of young victims, who also may be members of the faith. Disciplinary proceedings are subject to the highest confidentiality possible, said Rytting. If members had any concerns that their disciplinary files could be read by a secular judge or attorneys or be presented to a jury as evidence in a public trial, their willingness to confess and repent and for their souls to be saved would be seriously compromised. A playground ahead warning stands by the side of a road on the outskirts of Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2021. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP) A global investigation In 2016 police in New Zealand arrested a 47-year-old farm worker on child pornography charges and found a nine-minute video on his cell phone, downloaded from the internet, showing a man in his 30s raping a 10-year-old girl. A global search for the rapist and his victim was on. It started with Interpol and led to the U.S. State Department, where investigators using facial recognition technology matched the rapist with a passport card photo of a U.S. Border Patrol employee living in Bisbee, Arizona, according to a Homeland Security synopsis obtained by the AP. Agents rushed to the Naco, Arizona, Border Station and arrested Adams, then a lanky, bearded mission support specialist with the Border Patrol. After some coaxing, Adams admitted to raping MJ and to sexually assaulting her younger sister, and to posting video of the assaults on the internet. When agents raided his home, they seized phones and computers holding more than 4,000 photos and nearly 1,000 videos depicting child sex abuse, many featuring the Adams daughters. But the nine-minute video stood out. This video is one of the worst Ive ever seen, Homeland Security agent Edwards later testified, adding that haunting dialogue between Adams and his older daughter helped make the video stand out in my mind and continue to stand out in my mind. Advertisement That video represented nine minutes and 14 seconds in seven years of continual and unnecessary trauma for MJ and a lifetime of abuse for her tiny sister while Bishops Herrod and Mauzy and church representatives in Salt Lake City stood by. After Paul Adams died by suicide, Leizza Adams pleaded no contest to child sex abuse charges and served two-and-a-half years in state prison. Three of the Adams children went to live with members of Leizzas extended family in California. The other three were taken in by local families. A dirt road leads to what was once the home of Paul Adams and his family on the outskirts of Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2021. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP) The survivors MJs little sister was only 2 when she met her adoptive mother for the first time. The toddler wrapped her arms and legs around Miranda Whitworths head, buried her face in her neck, and refused to look up to say good-bye to members of Leizzas family. It was the craziest thing, said Whitworth who, with her husband, Matthew, welcomed the toddler into their family. It was like when you see a baby monkey or baby gorilla cling to their mother, and they just wont let go. Over the next few days and weeks, the Whitworths would see additional markers of the unfathomable abuse the toddler endured at the hands of her father much of it recorded on video. She would howl in terror when any man attempted to touch her, whether it was Matthew or the family physician. The nurse was fine but the minute the doctor walked in she climbed onto me and started screaming bloody murder, Miranda said. The 2-year-old was also terrified of the water, which made bathing an ear-splitting ordeal. She wouldnt tolerate anything wrapped around her wrists. And at church, she would run and hide behind Miranda whenever anyone greeted her by an old family nickname. When they took in the toddler, neither Miranda nor Matthew knew very much about what had happened to her. But while sitting in on Leizza Adamss sentencing hearing, they learned about the repeated rapes, the videos, and the fact that church bishops knew about the abuse of the older daughter and did nothing to stop it. Advertisement The Whitworths were converts to the Mormon faith and, like many new followers of a religion, they were especially enthusiastic about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In particular, they appreciated the efforts Mormons make to help fellow church members in times of need through church organizations established to give special attention to women, teens and children. Its all about family, Miranda said. Thats one of the things we absolutely loved. But after learning about what Adams did to their new daughter, and the failure of the church to stop him, the scales fell from their eyes. We decided to remove our records from the church, said Matthew Whitworth. I personally couldnt continue to provide tithing money to a church that would allow young children to be abused and not do anything to prevent it. Unlike the Whitworths, Nancy Salminen has never been a member of the Mormon church. But as a special needs teacher and a rape victim herself, she has a special affinity for MJ and others like her. Over the last five years, she has opened her home to 17 girls and boys who needed a safe place to stay. Her house is a modest, ranch-style structure she bought out of foreclosure. Everythings a little broken here and thats perfect because so are we, she said. Salminen said she met MJ after receiving an urgent call on a Friday evening to rescue a 12-year-old from another family. She was pretty scared and pretty confused when I picked her up, Salminen recalled. She spent a lot of time in her closet in her room when we got home, but we got to know each other and got to like each other. Advertisement Like the Whitworths, Salminen knew very little about what MJ had endured until Leizza Adamss sentencing hearing. What I heard made me want to throw up, she said. And the more I learned the more I wanted to help her fight this fight that she didnt even know about. Safely settled in Salminens household which today includes a foster girl Salminen also plans to adopt MJ has been transformed from a victim of unimaginable abuse to a bubbly 16-year-old who plays in the high school band and proudly dons a crisp, new uniform for her job at a fast-food restaurant. She had every excuse to fail and to just fold into herself and run away, Salminen said. But instead, she came back stronger than anyone Ive ever known. So strong that she appears eager to play an active role in the battle she and her two siblings are waging against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I just want them to do what theyre supposed to do and report to the police, MJ said. The adoptive parents of the third Adams child who has filed suit declined to speak to the AP about the case. Like MJ, Miranda and Matthew Whitworth said they joined the lawsuit against the church on behalf of their young daughter not in hopes of a payday, but to change church policy so that any instance of child sexual abuse is immediately reported to civil authorities. We just dont understand why theyre paying all these lawyers to fight this, Matthew Whitworth said. Just change the policy. Advertisement Two disconnected pay phones stand near the post office in Bisbee, Ariz., Oct. 26, 2021. In 1995, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established a help line for bishops and other church leaders seeking guidance on reporting allegations of child sexual abuse. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP) The privilege That policy is the key to the churchs defense. In a recent filing asking a Superior Court judge to dismiss the case, Maledon and other lawyers for the church said the case hinges entirely on whether Arizonas child abuse reporting statute required two church bishops ... to report to authorities confidential confessions made to them by plaintiffs father. Whatever moral or public policy arguments one could make that the church should have told authorities that Paul Adams was raping his daughters are irrelevant, the lawyers argued. Arizonas reporting statute broadly exempts confidential communications with clergy, as determined by the clergyman himself, according to the church motion to dismiss the case. Reasonable people can debate whether this is the best public policy choice. But that is not an issue for a jury or this court. Bishop Herrod, in his recorded interview, said church officials told him he had to keep what Adams told him confidential or he could be sued if he went to authorities. But McIntyre, the Cochise County attorney, said thats false, noting the Arizona reporting law says that anyone reporting a belief that child sex abuse occurred is immune from any civil or criminal liability. Aside from the legal arguments over whether Bishops Herrod and Mauzy were excused from their reporting obligations under the clergy-penitent privilege, critics of the inaction by the two bishops and the broader church have raised ethical issues. Gerard Moretz, a seasoned child sex abuse investigator for the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriffs Department and an expert witness for the Adams children, is one of them. Advertisement What aspect of your religious practice are you advancing if you dont report something like this? he asked. On Wednesday, the Senate Rules Committee took a crucial step in acting to fix an almost 150-year-old statute that governs presidential elections to try to prevent a replay of the sort of attack on democracy we saw on Jan. 6, 2021. At the same time, there is still at least one major flaw in the billand it is imperative that it be revised to ensure that the democratic election of the president not be undermined in 2024. Advertisement During the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the flaws in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 were exposed as Donald Trump sought to exploit them to overturn the free and fair election. The ECAs ambiguous and archaic language left the door open to Trump and his lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman to attempt in December 2020 to get state legislatures to rescind their certifications of President Joe Bidens election, to send fake electoral slates to Congress, and to make the unlawful claim that Vice President Mike Pence could reject or delay on Jan. 6 the certification of Bidens victory. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The Electoral Count Reform Act, introduced in the Senate on July 20, is the result of a monthslong negotiation among 16 senators from both sides of the aisle, admirably led by Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Advertisement Advertisement On Wednesday, the Senate Rules Committee, chaired by Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, heard testimony about the Electoral Count Reform Act. The hearing was a model of bipartisan agreement. There was consensus that repairs to the ECA must be achieved now, before this Congress ends, so that new, agreed-upon election rules are in place for 2024. Indeed, if anything, the bipartisan agreement and sense of urgency carried with them a rush to consensus that papered over a major hole left by the bill as drafted. Sen. Angus King of Maine asked a question putting his finger on it, but the responses were unsatisfactory. King inquired about a fringe legal theory that the Supreme Court will be considering in a case to be argued this fall. King expressed concern about theindependent state legislature theory that the reactionary court majority may adopt. He asked whether it might undercut what the ECRA seeks to achieve. Advertisement Under an extreme version of this theory, state legislatures can purportedly decide whatever they want in presidential elections, without court review or concern for the majority vote, even after the ballots have been cast. (The court is considering a version of this theory that pertains to whether or not state legislatures have absolute say over redistricting without state judicial review.) Sign Up for the Surge The most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. On Wednesday, senators and witnesses alike seemed to accept that the ECRAs provision assuring that states would be bound to follow their pre-election laws for certifying elections would also protect the will of the majority expressed by the vote in each state. But that overlooked an obvious trick that a state legislature might adopt, especially if empowered under the new Supreme Court doctrine referred to by King. Election-denying legislators might change the states election result after voting is completed by inserting in the law, as the Washington Posts Jennifer Rubin described it, a trigger that it [could] activate at will to change the votes. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Thats not just hypothetical. Trumpist legislative majorities in the battleground states from which Republicans sent fake electoral certificates last time can and likely will try to enact laws ensuring their success next time. They have already adopted laws to make it harder to vote on the front end of the process, via their election suppression statutes that target minority voters. And state lawmakers have already shown their readiness to adopt election subversion measures granting legislatures or their designees the ability to tilt the election playing field to help ensure their party nominees wins.* For instance, in Georgia, which Biden won by a little more than 10,000 votes, the Republican legislature passed a law that would allow it to have election boards in Democratic-leaning counties replaced by more pliant officials who might be friendlier to false claims of voter fraud. These legislatures can enact additional laws before 2024 that provide for election denying officials to declare ballot fraud and invalidate election results from precincts carried by the opposite party. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement There is a way for Congress to address this difficult problem. The Constitutions Article II gives Congress the authority to enact laws to determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes. As recognized more than 200 years ago, Congress, through the Constitutions Necessary and Proper clause, has broad authority to adopt any means, not prohibited by the Constitution, to carry out this power. In 1877, Congress used this authority to adopt the Electoral Count Act. [Read: What the Critics Get Incredibly Wrong About the Collins-Manchin Election Bill] No court in the 150 years since has questioned Congress power to use its authority in this way. Its the source of Congress power to enact the ECA and now, the ECRA. And it would enable Congress to state explicitly that no device enacted by any state legislature may override the way the states people have decided to designate the candidate of their choice. For good measure, Congress could state that the Constitutions provision guaranteeing a republican form of government would be violated by conducting an election and then disregarding votes cast in that election based on alleged fraud in the absence of proof established in a court of law. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The ECRA is a major and necessary step forward. The perfect cannot be allowed to be the enemy of the good. But given the reality of the election-denying officials and battleground state legislature majorities, Congress should not allow the good that the current reform measure achieves to potentially be swallowed by state representatives who would enact undemocratic power grabs that all of us, including our federal legislators, might wish we didnt have to see. If you listen to their acceptance speeches, its hard to miss a certain glee in the tone of Republican primary winners this week. Election Day was Tuesday, and primaries were held in a couple of big swing states. In Arizona, the Republican who is now on the ballot for Senate is an election denier, affiliated with the Oath Keepers, and endorsed by Donald Trump. In Michigan, the newly minted Republican candidate for governor seemed to be spoiling for a fight. Trump endorsed her, too. And then, there was the victor in the House race in Grand Rapids, who called his victory an earthquake. Advertisement Jim Newell explains: Yeah, buddy, its not that big a deal. You were running against a guy who voted for Trumps impeachment. You were just the latest. But yeah, it was asymmetric. Peter Meijer, the incumbent, spent, like, $4 million. And then Gibbs spent very little until the end of the race when Democrats jumped in to help him out. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement To Newell, who covers politics for Slate, the bigger story of what went down this week at the polls is the Democratic playbook that may have led to some of these Republican victories. Its a plan to boost Trump-style conservatives in the hope theyll be easier to beat come November. This strategy relies on big ad buys. These ads call candidates too conservative and list off their more radical positionson the 2020 election, on immigration. Its a little bit like reverse psychology. Advertisement Advertisement On Thursdays episode of What Next, I spoke with Newell about this years Democratic primary strategy. Is it crazy, or crazy like a fox? Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Mary Harris: Do you remember when you first heard about this strategy the Democrats seem to be implementing to boost Trumpier candidates? Jim Newell: Yes. The one that really stuck out to me was Doug Mastrianos win in the Pennsylvania Republican governor primary. Why did it stick out there? I noticed that Mastriano was leading in the polls. And then it was Josh Shapiro, the likely Democratic nominee, that started running these ads to make sure Mastriano got over the finish line there. Advertisement What did the ads look like? Advertisement It was Doug Mastriano is too conservative for this state, handpicked by Trump, etc., etc. All those descriptors that could be positive for one group and negative for another. Right? Yeah, youre basically amplifying a Trump endorsement when you do that. And tell me a little bit about who Doug Mastriano is, because I feel like its important to put him in context. He is pretty extreme. He is a state senator from Pennsylvania. He was one of the leading voices in the state last year who said that the Legislature should just appoint its own electors. Advertisement Advertisement He bought into the whole election fraud, election denial theory. And he was saying the Pennsylvania Legislature has the constitutional right to just appoint its own electors and declare the election was fraudulent. Advertisement Advertisement Was he involved in Jan. 6? Yeah, Mastriano was there. He was, I believe, interviewed by the Jan. 6 committee. He organized to bring a lot of people to the Jan. 6 rally. Hes a very devout Christian, which makes him a pretty hard-liner on a lot of social issues. Hes attended QAnon- related conferences. Hes a really out-there guy. Advertisement Advertisement And I remember when Mastriano won because the thinking from Democrats seemed to be: Thats cool. Well just beat him. Yeah. And Republicans, too. A lot of Republicans thought they just blew this race entirely. But if you look at it, Pennsylvania is a 50/50 state. Its a really good year for Republicans. Anything can really happen. There are some polls where its within the margin of error. So its going to be really competitive going down to the finish. Advertisement That Michigan house race where a Trump-endorsed candidate declared victory this week, calling it an earthquake? Jims got his eye on that competition, too. The current rep, now a lame duck, Peter Meijer, just conceded to hardline conservative challenger, John Gibbs. And if Gibbs wins the general, Democrats will lose someone whos been an occasional ally. Peter Meijer, hes a freshman Republican representing the Grand Rapids area. He, in one of his first actions as a member of Congress, voted to certify the election, and then after Jan. 6, he voted to impeach Trump. He was one of the 10 Republicans who did that. So thats kind of putting a stake in the ground. Advertisement Advertisement Its putting a stake in the ground. Its a gutsy move for your first 10 days in Congress or whatever. Hes considered, not a moderate necessarily, but a reasonable person the Democrats can work with. Hes just someone who a lot of Democrats like. Advertisement Personally. Personally. But in redistricting, his district now is slightly more Democratic-friendly than it was last time. So its one of the few real offensive targets that Democrats have coming into the midterms. So, Democrats then want to get someone, unlike Meijer, who doesnt have a broad bipartisan appeal. Thats the genesis of all of this. John Gibbs, meanwhile, was nominated to be Trumps director of the Office of Personnel Management, which is a huge job. His nomination never made it through the Senate. It was tabled because he simply didnt have the support because hes said crazy things in the past. How crazy? This was pre-QAnon. This was Pizzagate, where he was talking about John Podesta, the counselor to Obama and campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, having satanic rituals in his house. Advertisement That did not happen. No, its a total out-there conspiracy theory. Hes had a lot of slurs against Muslims in the past. Hes locked his Twitter history now, so no one can look at it. But this was a guy who was nominated for huge job in the federal government by Trump and just couldnt get anywhere. Advertisement Advertisement So then, Trump wants someone to run against Peter Meijer, and he answers the call, gets the Trump endorsement, says all the right things about how the election was fake. So this is the choice. Its between a normal Republican who will vote to impeach Trump when Trump does an extremely impeachable thing. And a guy whos just not really living on this planet. And so that is why Peter Meijer, who put his neck on the line, politically, is extremely upset that Democrats are trying to seed Gibbs just so they can have an easier general election matchup. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I was reading this op-ed that Meijer wrote and what stood out to me was that he was calling out Democrats by name, which to me is a sign of extreme anger, because when youre a politician, you want to keep your relationships up with everyone and anyone. But this was a long op-ed that basically said this person is supporting this strategy, so is this other person, and they have no moral character. Is that rare? Its not often that you see someone write a big blog entry about their race that they have coming up in a couple of days. But yeah, he calls out Jamie Raskin and Elaine Luria, who are two members of the Jan. 6 committee whove had very lofty rhetoric about the need to get rid of this scourge of election denialism throughout the country. And then he notes that theyve actually defended the Democrats strategy of throwing some money behind John Gibbs here. So hes calling them complete hypocrites. It is a pretty aggressive move, but hes pissed off. Advertisement Advertisement So now that John Gibbs has won this race in Michigan, whos he going to be facing off with come November? Hes running against Hillary Scholten, who Meijer had actually beaten in the 2020 election. And as soon as these races were called Tuesday night, the Cook Political Report, which does election forecasting, moved the race from lean Republican to lean Democrat. Democrats will have a much better shot now of winning this race than would have against Meijer when they probably would have had zero chance of winning the race. But if they dont, then an actual election conspiracist/denier is going to be in the seat when they could have had someone who has done pretty courageous things in the past. Advertisement Advertisement Some of these contests where the Dems are messing around with Trumpism are riskier than others. Which of these races might be keeping Democratic Party bosses up at night? I think the riskiest one by leaps and bounds right now is Pennsylvania. The governors race. Just given the nature of what that office is and what Mastriano has said about the 2020 election, in the 2024 election, if Pennsylvania is the swing state on which the whole election hinges, as it often is, and Democrats win it, this is a guy with a pretty big history of baselessly saying, Well, there was fraud, and we just need the state Legislature to perform its constitutional duty of appointing electors itself. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement And he would have power, real power. He would have absolutely real power to at least attempt something like sending an alternate slate of electors that then throws us into court, which is what Trump wanted Pence and others to help him do last time. It sounds like youre saying the governors races are where its really risky because youre putting these chief executives in place and they just have access to so many levers of power. If you have some of these really hard-core election deniers in charge up and down the state, then yeah, thats going to get pretty dangerous. Theres one more state I think its worth talking about, which is Maryland, where the Democrats did get involved in boosting Dan Cox, an extreme Republican who is now the Republican nominee. I know you wrote about this in particular. Why did you want to write about Maryland, and why do you think it was important to pay attention? Advertisement Because Im from Maryland. I love Maryland. I know Maryland. I thought this one was interesting because Maryland Republicans have a history of being pretty pragmatic. They know its a 2 to 1 Democratic state. If they want to get a Republican in office, it has to be a pretty moderate person, just an administrator type and not an ideologue. Advertisement Advertisement We should set the table a little bit. Larry Hogan is the Republican governor of Maryland right now. Yeah, and hes extremely popular. And hes also a little bit of an anti-Trump. Hes totally anti-Trump. He knew that the key to winning in Maryland was he couldnt align himself with Trump. So he tried to endorse his successor in Kelly Schulz in this current gubernatorial race, who was trying to run along a similar model. Advertisement But then you had this state delegate, Dan Cox, whom Trump endorsed, because Trump hates Larry Hogan and anyone Larry Hogan endorses. Dan Cox organized buses for Jan. 6. Hes proudly the Trump candidate. He wanted to impeach Larry Hogan. On Jan. 6, he tweeted that Mike Pence was a traitor. This is not the type of Republican candidate who wins races in Maryland. So I wondered whether Maryland Republicans would actually go for this. The Democratic Governors Association put $1 million-plus in ads behind Dan Coxwhich is considerably more than Dan Cox had spent on himselfcalling him, again, handpicked by Trump, too conservative for Maryland. And sure enough, Dan Cox won pretty comfortably in that state. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement So when we talk about assessing the risk levelsI start to get a little dizzy here because Im always like, what if these are my famous last wordsbut this is one where it really doesnt seem like theres a ton of risk. For a Republican to win in Maryland, they need about 30 percent of Democrats. So you need real crossover appeal. Yes, and you cant get that if youre the guy who was organized in buses for Jan. 6, is totally opposed to abortion in all cases, touts his association with Trump everywhere, is tight with Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, whos kind of a national boogeyman to Democrats now. Advertisement Famous last words, Jim. Advertisement Famous last words, but it does seem extremely unlikely. And if he does win, then there will be a supermajority Democratic Legislature that can check him, too, which is what makes states like Pennsylvania and Arizona more dangerous. Because if a Republican gets in there, they have a supermajority Republican legislature, so they can kind of do whatever they want. I did notice that not every Democrat is on board with this strategy. A group of former Democratic leaders signed this open letter calling these tactics risky and unethical. What did you make of that letter? Advertisement It was the Meijer campaign, the ad for John Gibbs in Michigan, that really set off a lot of people. And that was because it was the DCCC funding it, so it had the official stamp of approval. Advertisement Yes. And it just seemed unseemly. It seemed like this could be a really bad election for Democrats. Why are we risking putting these people in? But also, is this the way that someone like Peter Meijer, who didnt just put his political career but also his personal safety on the line by voting for impeachment in his first week as a memberis this how we should reward him? And why should we muddy the waters here with our message that democracy is in danger, but then also theres all these news stories about how were funding these people. So thats the one that really ticked people off. The words that keep being thrown around are dishonorable, and the wrong thing to do, and everything like that. To people like the DCCC or campaign people whose one goal is to win an election, you dont think about these longer-term concerns or the moral atmosphere. Your one goal is to win elections. So youre going to do what it takes. Its your job to do whatever is necessary to win that election, to put yourself in the best shot to win it. And they dont really care if people think Peter Meijer is a nice guy. The cats out of the bag right now. The experiment is in motion, and we just have to wait till November. Yeah, Im not sure where I land in all this generally. I think its sad that this happened to Peter Meijer. But Republican primary voters are grown adults with minds of their own. And this is what they want. They want these candidates who deny the election, and have Trump support, and want to completely ban abortion. So, you can blame all these nominations on Democrats for meddling or whatever. But its Republican primary voters who see these ads, and say, That sounds great, and then go in the voting booth and press the button. So, is the problem here the Democratic Party, or is the problem with the radicalized Republican base? Subscribe to What Next on Apple Podcasts Get more news from Mary Harris every weekday. After the 2016 election, I was hanging out with a group of friends discussing how badly the press had screwed up its predictions about Donald Trumps chances at victoryseeing as how he had just won the presidency, despite the apparent odds. One attendee, a fellow political journalist, came up with a particularly evocative metaphor for the situation. Its like we were weather reporters who told viewers that it was a sunny day to go to the beach, and instead there was a Category 4 hurricane, he said. Advertisement To a certain extent, members of the national media have been trying to make up for this mistake for more than five years, seemingly vowing to themselves to never again underestimate this eras Teflon Don. The notion among the media that Trump was bulletproof only grew as he seemed to escape accountability following a series of presidential scandals that included a calamitous initial version of his Muslim ban, the illegal and monstrous family separation policy, an obstruction of justice criminal probe, an impeachment over his blackmailing of Ukraine, and ultimately a second impeachment for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement At every seemingly disastrous turn of his candidacyand then his presidencythe media would speculate breathlessly on whether this was it, the breaking point of Trumps political career, and then, it never was. Advertisement Advertisement Subscribe to the Slatest Newsletter A daily email update of the stories you need to read right now. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Famously, this dynamicTrump seeming to have finally crossed some horrifying line to the point where he had to be held accountable, but ultimately facing no real consequenceswas encapsulated on Twitter in October 2016, by the writer Jesse Farrar: Well, Id like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam! *Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily* Ah! Well. Nevertheless, These days, it seems, no national reporter wants to be seen, once again, predicting ol Donny wont be able to wriggle his way out of THIS jam. Those jams currently include continued unpopularity among the general electorate, falling support in the Republican Party, rising potential rivals in that party, public hearings that have exposed his extraordinary level of responsibility for the mob violence on Jan. 6, a civil case set to go to trial next year over an allegation that Trump committed rape, a civil investigation in New York that is pursuing allegations of fraudulent business practices against the Trump Organization, and a series of state and federal criminal investigations over Trumps actions surrounding Jan. 6. Advertisement Advertisement The point is that it should be easy to view Trump as an incredibly weakened figure who has better odds of ending up in an orange jumpsuit or losing his fortune in a lawsuit than returning to the White House. However, almost nobody in the national media seems to report it that way. As a whole, I think the press corps is overcompensating for the trauma of our admittedly terrible 2016 prognostications by defaulting to what I call ah, well, nevertheless syndrome. Under the logic of ah, well, nevertheless syndrome, Trumps wriggled out of so many prior jams that one would look foolish to predict he wont wriggle out of his current ones. No political reporter wants that, especially when it comes to Trump. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I would argue, though, that Trumps invincibility should have been viewed as broken once and for all following the 2020 election, which he lost decisively enough. Its true Trump came close to winning in a handful of statesGeorgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michiganthree or four of which would have secured him the Electoral College and the presidency. He lost all five, though, and Hillary Clinton actually came closer than Trump to flipping the three states she needed to capture the presidency in 2016, by more than 25,000 votes.* (She too lost the presidency by a fairly decisive margin, which is why she conceded, like a sane person.) Advertisement Advertisement More to the point, Trump became only the fourth elected incumbent in more than 125 years to lose the presidency, joining such illustrious company as George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover. Indeed, Trumps 4.4 percent margin of defeat was up there with men whom political watchers still consider to be historic failures. Trump lost the popular vote by a greater margin than Hubert Humphrey, Mitt Romney, Gerald Ford, and John Kerry. In terms of the share of the popular vote won, Trump did just 1.2 points better than Michael Dukakis, a man whose political career is synonymous with loser. Advertisement While, after the election, Trump mounted a weekslong attempt to remain in power through false claims of fraud, that effort was laughed out of court in nearly every single case he and his allies brought. In the end, he sparked an insurrection that (admittedly, only briefly) turned the nation against him further, and then became the first president in history to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives. While Trump was not convicted, with the Senate falling short by 10 votes after he had already been removed from office by the voters, more senators from his own party voted to convict him in that second impeachment than any other president in history. Now he faces a series of state and federal criminal probes for his actions that led to that impeachment, which are by all reported accounts heating up dramatically. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Still, reports that Trump says he has decided to run again in 2024 are treated as breaking news, even as hes been saying the same thing for more than a year. Indeed, hes been telling this to anyone who will listenand has been since he was dragged out of office literally thrashing and screaming 18 months ago. (That includes, ghoulishly, a group of first responders at an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11, where he said, For me, its an easy question. I know what Im going to do. I think youre going to be happy, let me put it that way. I think youre going to be very happy.) Personally, I dont think Donald Trump is going to win the presidency in 2024. I dont even think hes going to win the Republican nomination. In fact, I dont think hes going to run for president, not really. Maybe Ill deeply regret writing this once Trump returns to power and locks up members of the press in defamation gulags at Gitmo, or maybe this will just be the kind of embarrassing headline that haunts me the rest of my professional life. Butas far as I see itDonald Trumps career as a realistic candidate for major office is over. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement There are a several reasons Im willing to break free from my own severe bout of ah, well, nevertheless syndrome to say this. First, I take seriously the civil and criminal probes Trump is facing between now and the time our next president is elected. Two weeks ago, it was revealed that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sent target letters to people involved in Trumps efforts to overturn the election, signaling to the recipients that they are potentially facing indictment. Last week, there was news that a DOJ grand jury is looking at Trumps actions related to a scheme to use false electors to overturn the election on Jan. 6. This week, we learned Trumps own former White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating Trumps actions surrounding Jan. 6. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Even if Trump doesnt go on trial for crimes related to Jan. 6, his associates are facing possible criminal culpability and direct scrutiny that could land them in jail or cause them to testify against the former president in other forums, keeping the presidents misdeeds in the news indefinitely. Trump and his children are also facing depositions in a civil probe in New York that will drag them further into the legal morass. Last month, meanwhile, a February date was set for a likely explosive defamation trial involving E. Jean Carrolls allegation that Trump raped her, an event that could make the coverage around the Depp-Heard trial look like a small story. Advertisement Of course, its been reported that one reason Trump is considering running is to help escape his legal woes. A wise lawyer would tell him that wont work. It also has the potential to backfire: Trials are strictly run things with rules enforced by judges with the power to hold people in contempt of court, lock them up, and fine them almost infinitely. If Trump uses a presidential campaign as a way to attack prosecutors or judges involved in criminal or civil cases against him, theres nothing stopping a judge from placing a firm gag order around what the candidate can say publicly about the trial so as not to taint the jury poolor even revoking bail if Trump faces criminal charges and disobeys such a gag order. This should be a major motivation against running. Advertisement But my second reason for thinking Trump wont run is that there are numerous financial incentives in the other directionincluding one big one tied to Trumps legal woes. That is: The Republican National Committee continues to pay his sizable legal fees and has said it will only do so if he is not a candidate for president, as it has to stay neutral in any contested Republican primary. You see, paying for a candidates legal bills would break that neutrality. And theres another financial incentive for Trump to hold off on declaring his candidacy, which is that if he becomes an official candidate for president, he loses control of all but $5,000 of the more than $100 million war chest he has stockpiled in the Save America PAC. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The third reason I doubt a Trump candidacy will actually materialize is that even as he remains the most popular figure in the Republican Party, there are many, many signs GOP voters are already starting to want something different in 2024. According to a recent NYT-Siena poll, Trumps national polling share of the total vote in a widely contested primary is under 50 percent, with his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, rising up to 25 percent. Another recent Suffolk UniversityUSA Today poll found DeSantis actually leads Trump when GOP voters first and second choices are combined. So, if the Republican field were to narrow quickly enoughunlike what happened during the 2016 Republican primaryDeSantis would currently have the advantage over Trump. Perhaps more importantly, there have been a number of state polls showing DeSantis ahead of Trump, including in the home state of both menthe critical early primary state Floridaas well as in the first-in-the-nation-primary state of New Hampshire. Advertisement Further signals that GOP primary votersand the party eliteswill crave something new in 2024 abound. They include: a recent set of focus group surveys published in the Atlantic showing Trump voters cooling to a 2024 candidacy; editorials by the very conservative editorial boards of two Rupert Murdochcontrolled newspapers in recent days beseeching the party to move on from Trump in the wake of continued Jan. 6 revelations; numerous reports that GOP megadonors have stopped giving money to Trump and are turning to other candidates, with a focus on DeSantis; and a set of embarrassing primary defeats for Trump-endorsed candidates in key swing states. Advertisement My final reason for not believing Trump will mount a serious candidacy for the presidency in 2024? I think that deep down Trump knows he lost in 2020 and that there are decent odds he will lose again in 2024. Being tarnished as a two-time loser would be too devastating to his psyche to risk it. Advertisement Advertisement Admittedly, I do not have any personal insight into Trump World. Im not the only one, though, who has made this argument. In November, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton made a firm prediction that Trump would not run in 2024. He knows deep inside, although he will never admit it, he did lose in 2020 and very much fears losing in 2024, because if he hates anything in the world, he hates being called a loser, Bolton said. He will talk about running incessantly until the very last moment because if he were ever to say he was not going to be a candidate, it would turn the spotlight off, and he doesnt like that either. Advertisement Another Trump adviser, former White House chief of staff John Kelly, also gave a rendition of this calculus last year, predicting, Hell continue talking about it. He may even declare, but he will not run. And the reason is he simply cannot be seen as a loser. Advertisement Advertisement This is my view as well. He may say out loud, I am a candidate for president, at some point, but if he does I bet he will find an excuse to pull the plug on such a candidacy before the start of the primaries in early 2024 because of his fear of being branded a loser. As the Washington Posts Philip Bump cleverly put it, Trump does not want to be seen as the Buffalo Bills of the presidential popular vote. Advertisement The rebuttal to this from others who watch politics for a living is pretty straightforward and compelling: Trump denied the reality that he lost the last election; wont he just declare himself the winner of the next one no matter what happens and say he was cheated because of fraud even if he loses? Yes, Trump can do thatand, if Im proved wrong and he runs and loses, he certainly will. But such claims will be a lot harder to make if he runs in the Republican primary and loses a GOP nomination. If that were to happen, yes, Trump would claim fraud and likely tear the GOP apart at the seams. But doing so would utterly wreck his cherished place as a hero of Republican voters, and is that something he really wants to risk as a cherry on top of the label of becoming the first former president in modern primary history to seek and lose his partys nomination for the White House? To me, Trump will be a politically crippled figure heading into the 2024 primary. At his most dangerous, he will be a political albatross hanging around the neck of the Republican Party, tearing it apart. Perhaps history will repeat itself. Trump will run again, crush a split Republican field as he did in 2016, and claim the White House, or maybe lose but still bring us to the brink of another coup. Maybe, though, others in the media will also begin to shed their ah, well, nevertheless syndromes as Trump continues to look weaker and weaker and his legal woes mount and mount. We should have our answers soon enough. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, it was clear that losing the right to abortion would implicate not only homes and hospitals, but jail cells. In April, a district attorney in Texas charged a woman who had suffered a miscarriage with murder (the case was subsequently dismissed). Twenty-two states had lawsmostly unenforceable at the timethat punished abortion with incarceration ranging from several months to life in prison. Following the Supreme Courts decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, many of those laws are now going into effect, along with new ones that state legislatures are racing to enact. Some states are already planning to criminalize out-of-state abortions obtained by their residents. And, where local prosecutors choose not to charge abortion-related offenses, proposed state legislation will empower prosecutors from elsewhere to assume control and prosecute the cases themselves. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement While this post-Dobbs wave of criminalization has started with abortion, it will not end there. As underscored by Justice Clarence Thomass concurrence (as well as the three justices in dissent), Dobbs reasoning invites the court to reconsider all of this Courts substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [and] Lawrence, the cases recognizing a right to contraception and same-sex romantic relationships. If it does, we may soon return to a time when individuals risked jailtime for activities like distributing condoms and having private, consensual sex. Restoring the rights lost in Dobbs will require massive political mobilizationfar more than any one person could possibly achieve. But one person is all it takes to stave off at least some of the most devastating harms of criminalization. A single jurors vote of not guilty can spare a defendantany potential parent, doctor, friend, or anyone else prosecuted and brought to trialfrom criminal conviction. Regardless of the strength of the evidence. Regardless of what the judge believes. Regardless of how many other jurors disagree. Its every jurors super-power. Advertisement Advertisement Jury nullificationor the power of jurors to vote to acquit even in the face of overwhelming evidenceis rooted in English common law and has been an American tradition since before the nations founding. For instance, in 1735, a journalist and printer named John Peter Zenger was charged with libel for publishing articles critical of New Yorks colonial governor. Zenger did not deny publishing the articles. Instead, he argued that they were true. Although truth was not a valid defense to libel at the time, he asked the jury to acquit him on that ground nonetheless. They did. Other examples of nullification abound. Juries nullified prosecutions of abolitionists charged under the Fugitive Slave Act and businesspeople charged with alcohol-trafficking during Prohibition. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The courts have consistently upheld jurors undisputed power to nullify. In 1895, Supreme Court Justice Marshall Harlan ruled in Sparf v. United States, [Jurors] receive the instructions of the judge; but they are not obliged to follow his instructions. Twenty-five years later, in Horning v. District of Columbia, the high court again affirmed jurors power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both law and facts. In United States v. Dougherty, the D.C. Circuit lauded nullification as a necessary counter to case hardened judges and arbitrary prosecutors. The Seventh Circuit agreed, noting, tacit toleration of jury verdicts of innocence, in apparent contradiction to clear proof of guilt, affords adequate protection to the conscience function of the jury. As criminal prosecutions continue to swell in Dobbs wake, jurors willingness to exercise their conscience function will be as important as ever. Advertisement Advertisement Nullification is not easy. Judges may remove jurors who openly acknowledge that they may not apply the law as instructed. Prosecutors peremptorily strike those whom they believe are likely to acquit. And, even as courts confirm jurors power to nullify, they condone judges refusal to educate jurors about it. As the D.C. Circuit explained, the fact that the jury retains the power to nullify does not establish as an imperative that the jury must be informed by the judge of that power. Instead, the court continued, the jury must feel so strongly that it must itself independently initiate and undertake an act in contravention of the established instructions. In other words, jurors have the power, but not the right to know about it. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Nor is nullification alone a solution to the widespread, systemic harm caused by criminalization. Jurors can only nullify cases that actually make it to trial. Yet the overwhelming majority of people charged with crimes never see a jury. More than 90 percent of people charged with crimes plead guilty and give up their right to a trial, including many who are demonstrably innocent. Nullification does not undo the trauma of arrest, enmeshed penalties of a pending prosecution, or the months, if not years, spent in pretrial incarceration, isolated from homes, jobs, and families. Advertisement And yet, for those who do receive a trial, nullification can prevent the harms of conviction and sentencing. Outright acquittaland the resultant double jeopardy bar against further prosecutionrequires unanimity, but a single jurors vote of not guilty is enough to deadlock the jury and trigger a mistrial. While prosecutors may re-try the case before a new jury, mistrials commonly lead them to make more lenient plea offers or even to dismiss cases entirely. Over time, patterns of mistrials and acquittals can lead prosecutors to stop pursuing certain types of cases, or to make more favorable plea deals to avoid trials they anticipate losing. Advertisement Advertisement Nullification is also ironclad. Unlike civil jury verdicts, which may be overturned, judicial rulings, which may be reversed, or even Supreme Court precedent, whichas Dobbs itself demonstratesmay be overruled, a jurors vote to acquit is ineffable. Its the strongest veto power in the American legal system. In states across the country, Dobbs transformed the constitutionally protected to the criminal, virtually overnight. An increasingly polarized electorate and paralyzed federal government has rendered the prospect of large-scale political change both urgent and distant. In the meantime, jurors should remember that they each have the independent power to cast a vote that cannot be overridden, overruled, or gerrymandered away. When asked to condemn a human being to an inhumane system, they can vote their conscience. They can take direct, consequential, and lawful action. They can simply say, not guilty. This story originally appeared on OpenMind, a digital magazine tackling science controversies and deceptions. We dont always know where pandemic threats come from, but we do know that, with nearly eight billion people on the planet, theyre always somewhere just beyond sight. We also know that not all germs are created equal. No matter where they come from, what counts is how they behave once they enter human populations: how sick they make us (virulence), how easily they spread (transmission), and whether they spread silently, without warning (stealth). Calculating the threat is something that even infectious-disease experts find tough, however. H5N1 avian flu, hantavirus, Ebola, West Nile, SARS-CoV-1, H1N1 swine flu, COVID-19, monkeypox. Which diseases have pandemic potential, and which are likely to sputter and die? Advertisement Some infections are truly limiteddangerous under local circumstances but unlikely to cause shutdowns or massive death. However ominous West Nile and Zika initially seemed, theyre mosquito-borne diseases whose scope is restricted by the availability of screens and air-conditioning. Spillovers from animal populations, such as the bat coronavirus that killed three cave miners in China in 2012, generally go nowhere because theyre ultimately adapted to animals, not us. SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID and can be transmitted through the air, is one kind of threat. Monkeypox, a rodent disease that, in the past, only sporadically infected people in West and Central Africa and that spreads only through direct contact, is quite another. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The ur-text for the worst kind of pandemic is the Black Death, the fourteenth-century outbreak caused by the plague germ Yersinia pestis. Everything else, even COVID, pales in comparison: COVID has slain its millions, the Black Death its tens of millions. The death rate from COVID hovers between 1 and 2 percent in the United States and in some nations is as high as 5.6 percent. But the Black Death, uniquely virulent and transmissible, burned across Europe, eastern and central Asia, the Muslim world, North Africa, and Russia for seven years. At least 25 million died in Europe alone. Advertisement Advertisement Without antibiotics, Yersinia pestis kills 60 to 100 percent of its victims, depending on how it spreads. Untreated pneumonic plague transmitted by aerosol is always fatal; flea-borne bubonic plague, the mild form, kills only 60 percent of victims without access to the antibiotics of today. Much of the Black Death was pneumonic. When the outbreak subsided, in 1353, perhaps 30 to 50 percent of those in Europe and other afflicted regions lay dead. The Black Death shows us just how bad things can get. The Black Death gives us a helpful context for understanding novel infectious threats. From HIV and the AIDS pandemic to Ebola and Zika and now COVID-19 and monkeypox, how do we think about a new disease when we suddenly face it? Is it really a Black Deathlevel threat, or more like another fluor something in between? Advertisement Advertisement To evaluate how dangerous a novel disease can be, look to the three factors mentioned earlier: virulence (deadliness), transmission (how a disease spreads), and, for an extra garnish of horror, stealth (the ability to spread silently from host to host). Transmission is the major factor determining whether the disease it causes can become pandemic. Some diseases spread sluggishly, some explosively, and some (like tetanus, rabies, or anthrax) dont spread from human to human at all. With the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in 2003, later called SARS, it soon became evident that because the disease spread late in the course of infection, and mostly in hospitals, it would never explode out of control. Enabled by modern transport, it popped up in scattershot fashion around the world, infecting around 8,000 people and killing 774. But its inefficient spread allowed the ancient tools of isolation and ultimately quarantine to drive it off the earth. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Other new pathogens spread in still more limiting ways, using insectsfleas, ticks, mosquitoesas vectors (carriers). The vector must get from one host to another, and in the Western world, well protected in general by screens and air-conditioning, thats not so easy to do. This is why malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and Zika, despite how deadly they can be, have never found a foothold in modern Europe or North America. Other diseases, like cholera, are waterborne, and their spread is limited by modern sanitation. The real threat to the developed world is from lung-borne diseases, those spread by respiration, because you cant stop people from talking, coughing, or breathing. Advertisement Advertisement But transmissibility itself isnt enough to bring the world to its knees. The rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and human-adapted coronaviruses are all highly transmissible, but they dont shut societies down. Something else is needed, something the Black Death had to the maximum: virulence, or lethality. Deadly diseases abound in the world: Rabies, Hendra, Nipah, leptospirosis, Legionnaires disease, and tetanus are all virulent and may kill many or, in the case of rabies, virtually all their victims. But their assaults generally either end with the victim, like anthrax or rabies, or spread sluggishly at best. Advertisement The Black Death was different. It was both highly transmissible and lethal, which is why it remains engraved in history as a single, traumatic, fracturing event, a pandemic that broke the world. Virulence and transmissibility must both be relatively high for a pathogen to emerge as a powerful threat. Fortunately, high virulence and high transmissibility very seldom coexist, and only once in as hideous and destructive a way as our medieval ancestors experienced in the mid-fourteenth century. Fortunately, high virulence and high transmissibility very seldom coexist. Diseases that are virulent but not transmitted efficiently can, however, become deadly local threats, as virologist Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan points out. Ebola, a deadly virus spread by exposure to blood and other bodily fluids, isnt a pandemic threat because it doesnt have the capacity to spread via respiratory transmission. Yet it has caused thousands of deaths locally in West Africa because of the intimate way that people in Sierra Leone and other countries in the region care for their sick and their dead, whom they carefully wash, exposing themselves to infected bodily fluids and keeping chains of infection going. Ebola is a highly virulent disease with tremendous capacity for local disruption, and it shouldnt be minimized simply because its not highly transmissible. Still, the American panic over Ebola in recent years has been totally misplaced; despite hysterical articles warning that the virus could go airborne, diseases have never been known to change their mode of transmission, as Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello points out. The real concern should have been for the people of West Africa, facing a deadly threat and dying by the thousands, not for the Western world. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement On the other hand, influenza, which is only moderately virulent (common strains have a mortality rate of 0.1 percent), causes tens of thousands of deaths worldwide each year because flu spreads effectively through airborne transmission. The reason the 1918 flu rivaled the Black Death in its destructive force was that, despite a mortality rate of only 2.5 percent, it infected virtually the entire planet, leaving 20 million to 50 million dead. COVID-19, the pandemic disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is both virulent and explosively transmissible, making it the deadliest pandemic in living memory. While it doesnt approach the mortality of Ebola or the plague, it still has an approximate case fatality rate of about 1 to 2 percent, depending to some extent on the strain, on local conditions, on the age and health of the patient, and on whether people are vaccinated. Worse, people can be infected more than once. Worse still, perhaps 20 percent of survivors, according to some estimates, suffer long-term effectscardiac, vascular, neurological, renal, pulmonaryfor months or years. Advertisement But the real accelerant, the singular weapon, that has turned COVID into an uncontrollable pandemic is something it shares with the Black Death (and, incidentally, with polio): the ability to spread by stealththat is, by people who carry the infection while appearing well. Those who fled the Black Death spread it while asymptomatic, and presymptomatic people spread SARS-CoV-2. Stealthy transmission is another pandemic danger signal, Louisiana State University virologist Jeremy Kamil says. Advertisement Advertisement Stealthy, virulent, and transmissible, COVID still affects our lives. Stealthy, virulent, and transmissible, COVID still affects our lives. But more than two and a half years since its appearance, another disease has sprung up in its shadow: monkeypox. This well-known rodent virus, misnamed because its true reservoirs are likely small rodents like rats and squirrels, used to be confined largely to West and Central Africa. It was first recognized as a human disease in 1970, though it is certainly much older. The blisters and pustules that characterize monkeypox look like smallpox, though monkeypox patients also have swollen glands. Unlike smallpox, however, monkeypox has never spread efficiently. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Notably, victims of monkeypox have traditionally been children surreptitiously hunting small animals like squirrels and rats, according to John Huggins, who studied the disease for many years while at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Young children catch small rodents and eat them out in the jungle, he explains. There are two clades, or distinct genetic lines, of monkeypox. The one we are seeing in the United States and Europe now is known as the West African clade, which has a mortality rate of around 1 percent, comparable to variola minor, a mild strain of smallpox that has been eradicated. The so-called Congo Basin or Central African clade, which Huggins studied, kills about 10 percent, comparable to most African outbreaks of smallpox. Advertisement Advertisement Thats where the similarity to smallpox ends because monkeypox, which is a spillover from rodents, is not a human-adapted disease. Where monkeypox spreads within a single household, the first case, caught directly from an animal, has the highest level of virus. That gradually drops off as the virus spreads within the family. Unlike smallpox, monkeypox seems to spread not via aerosol but in large respiratory droplets, so transmission requires close contact. Huggins has always worried about what would happen if monkeypox entered a large, crowded city where a dense population might allow the evolution of more effective transmission. Is that what were seeing now? Probably not just yet. Monkey pox is no COVID, and it is certainly no Black Death. More than 22,000 cases have been reported worldwide, and theres no evidence to date of significant change toward greater virulence or transmissibility. While monkeypox doesnt appear to be sexually transmissible like HIV or syphilis, it clearly spreads through intimate contact via skin and large respiratory droplets. Despite a lot of speculation to the contrary, monkeypox virus has not been shown to float or hang suspended in the air like SARS-CoV-2. Advertisement Advertisement Where does that leave us with this disturbing disease? Monkeypox is frightening and painful. While the outbreak in the West is hardly as virulent or transmissible as COVID, let alone the Black Death, it is stealthy: People may have nonspecific flulike symptoms, fevers, swollen glands, and lesions in the throat (which appear before the skin pustules erupt) without realizing they have monkeypox, and in this early phase they can already transmit it to someone else. Advertisement Advertisement Monkeypox may not be a second COVID, but governments and public health officials are not reacting swiftly enough to break the chains of human transmission. We can never eliminate monkeypox, but we can drive the pathogen back into its animal reservoir in the wild. As with COVID, public health messaging has not been informative or simple enough; testing widespread or accessible enough; vaccines available enough. The chains of transmission go on. Advertisement We havent seen the last of pandemic diseases because the conditions that give rise to them remain. In the wake of global warming, animal species are pried from their usual niches and carry infections elsewhere. Insect vectors expand their ranges and the reach of the pathogens they carry. We are knit together as a global community, and the monkeypox that once intermittently plagued Central Africa has reached out to us in the West. Worse, weve created conditions that forge new, deadly livestock diseases, like African swine fever, Newcastle disease, foot-and-mouth disease. The wild animal markets found in Southeast Asia spawned both SARS-1 and SARS-2 and remain ongoing threats for the adaptation and evolution of more pathogens. Advertisement Whatever the source of a new disease, our response is at least as important as the disease itself. We should reject blind panic over threats that arent virulent, transmissible, or stealthy enough to cause a deadly outbreak. Theres no point in panicking over monkeypox; it wont force the planet into lockdown, though it stands to make many lives miserable. But if scientists find another new disease that transmits explosively, kills a significant percentage of people who contract it, andworst of allspreads from asymptomatic people, were in for another world of trouble. We would do well to recognize the danger signs and prepare now. In March, a group of massive tornadoes struck communities around Des Moines, Iowa. Seven people were killed, including two children under 5. The crisis received attention not only due to its human cost, but also because of delays in emergency wireless communications: Thanks to a broken fiber optic cable at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Weather Service offices, wireless emergency transmissions were switched to an auxiliary satellite system, which all NWS offices use. Overloaded with extreme weather messages from elsewhere in the Midwest, the satellite messaging system found itself backed up just as the Iowa tornadoes reached their peak. This caused anywhere from a two- to nine-minute delay in tornado warning messagesand may have significantly reduced warning time at a moment when seconds count. The issue lasted for several hours as the deadly tornadoes ripped through the state. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement NOAA Weather Radio, on the other hand, continued broadcasting effectively during the crisis. According to Bruce Jones, a weather radio expert and meteorologist with Midland Radio Corporation, because the NWR broadcast comes direct from the National Weather Service local forecast office, those NOAA Weather Radio alerts and warnings were unimpeded and reached folks immediately. Often referred to as the voice of the National Weather Service, NOAA Weather Radio is a 24/7 public service that broadcasts weather information from more than 1,000 stations across the United States and many of its territories. And while Des Moines was a great success story for NOAA Weather Radio, the service faces mounting issues with aging technology and infrastructure, raising concerns over whether it will be able to continue protecting communities facing extreme weather. Advertisement Advertisement Heard across several frequencies outside of the AM and FM bands, the NOAA Weather Radio system is the only radio service operated by the federal government. Federally run weather radio was first created in the 1950s, when the precursor to the NWS, the U.S. Weather Bureau, experimented with a pair of stations transmitting weather information for aviation and later, marine activities. Following the 1974 super outbreak of tornadoes across 13 states, the White House issued a proclamation that NOAA Weather Radio was the governments official emergency radio communications system. The service was gradually expanded, and since then, NOAA Weather Radio has come to cover 95 percent of U.S. territory. Its scope has also widened, growing to include natural disasters, nuclear attacks, and local weather coverage programmed into transmitters by NWS offices. Listeners in range of transmitters with the proper equipmenttypically, a specialized weather radiowill be able to hear critical broadcasts. But if a transmitter goes out, those important communications go silent. Advertisement Advertisement In parts of the United States that frequently face natural disasters, NOAA Weather Radio has proven to be an essential service for emergency communications. Radio is especially important when weather turns deadly. Following a 1997 tornado in Michigan, specialized NOAA radios were installed in every school, hospital, and nursing care facility in [Wayne] County, for a total of 860 radios. Eleven years later, the city of Madison, Wisconsin, offered weather radios to residents and quickly sold out of around 4,500 devices. Meteorologists reiterate the importance of weather radio communications to stay informed in case of TV, cell, or electrical outages. Emergency preparedness kits will often include weather radios for the same reason. Advertisement Advertisement Referring to the Des Moines incident, Jones describes weather radio as the gold standard of emergency communications, thanks to its reliability when other communication methods fail. Its coming directly from the source, the National Weather Service. From there it immediately goes to NOAA Weather Radio, he said. In addition to NWS information, NOAA Weather Radio also broadcasts other government-run warnings. That primary information, as it goes downstream from the official source, later informs additional alerts, like the FCCs Emergency Alert System, phone app notifications, and wireless alerts. Its what kicks off the entire American alerting system, Jones said. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement While NOAA Weather Radio has historically been an important, consistent, and life-saving means of emergency communication, it may not be for long. Outdated technology and failed attempts at modernization are threatening the NOAA Weather Radio system and resulting in extended outages for locations at risk. And as the climate crisis intensifies, this important technology is often vulnerable to the weather about which its meant to inform. Interviews with NWS employees about outages reveal many local technical problems that take out communications, sometimes for weeks or months. For example, a tower located in Artesia, New Mexico, has been down since January because of a power issue with the transmitter. When reached for comment, some employees described an old system reliant on phone wires that connect the offices that issue weather information with the transmitters that broadcast it. Kevin Deitsch, a warning coordination meteorologist at the NWS in St. Louis, explained via email that the severing of these telephone lines is what frequently causes NOAA Weather Radio to go down. The NWR technology began in the 1950s, with nationwide rollout completed in the late 1960s. Therefore, the technology is all based on physical landline telephone wires, he wrote. Advertisement Advertisement Extreme weather itself often disables these delicate copper phone lines. According to Ryan Aylward, a warning coordination meteorologist at the NWS office in Eureka, California, in 2017 a wildfire burned communications lines and led to an extended outage in nearby Ukiah. This year, power outages during thunderstorms in Shreveport, Louisiana, caused a breakdown in NOAA Weather Radio servicethats to say, the service was taken out by the very extreme weather it was meant to report. And during Hurricane Maria in 2017, weather radio service for the Virgin Islands was knocked out. It would remain down for four years, until the NOAA was finally able to construct a replacement tower. The service was taken out by the very extreme weather it was meant to report. David J. Nicosia, meteorologist-in-charge at the NWS in Binghamton, New York, told me via email that during a 2022 outage in his area, a failed piece of electrical equipment knocked out service. He also described systems that have started to show their age: Some of the antennas and transmission line from the transmitter to antenna are over 20 years old. The transmitters range in age from the early 2000s, he wrote. Advertisement According to Pilar Trevino, electronic systems analyst at the NWS in West Paducah, Kentucky, the transmitter at his location was installed in March 2001. In previous reporting from Freight Waves, Jones said NWS transmitters were 15 to 20 years old, on average. Though many are still in working order decades after installation, some transmitters and other radio equipment need to be replaced. And while NOAA service may work well in some places under some circumstances (remember the Des Moines tornado crisis), stories of breakdowns during extreme weather could be an alarming signal of whats to come. A lack of system updates has doubled the risks to NOAA Weather Radios reliability. According to Jones, the last major attempt to fix the weather radio infrastructure occurred with the Weather Radio Improvement Project, proposed around 2007. It gave money to create multiple ways of communicating with a transmitter, so the NWS didnt have to rely on a single copper wire going from the office to the tower, Jones said. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement According to a Department of Commerce document, WRIP was intended to create integrated high-availability communication network architecture between transmitters and weather offices. This integration, which was supposed to have happened from fiscal years 2009 to 2012, would have compiled weather data and alerts through a unified system based in NOAAs network and disseminated them via a combination of terrestrial and satellite communication. But this program never saw the light of day. In a winding snafu that was investigated by Congress, fund mismanagement at NOAA resulted in money earmarked for WRIP to be spent on the agencys Local Warnings and Forecasts budget, rather than weather radio upgrades. Later, the LWFs originally earmarked funds were used to cover budget shortfalls for the National Weather Services base operations. Susan Buchanan, director of public affairs with the NWS, declined to comment and deferred to congressional transcripts on the matter. Advertisement According to Jones, the efforts to broadly fix NOAA Weather Radio were dropped following the WRIP misappropriations scandal. Later, in 2015, the NOAA and NWS issued a request for information to find contractors able to participate in upgrades to the weather radio system, but were clear that the request did not necessarily mean they were soliciting business to implement upgrades. Advertisement Some of the major systemic updates to the NOAA Weather Radio system have involved changing the voice delivering announcements. One improvement was in the 1990s, when a console replacement system introduced a widely-panned computerized voice nicknamed Paul instead of tape-recorded messages spoken by NWS employees. In 2002, Paul was himself replaced by several other voices: in English, Donna, Craig, and Tom, and in Spanish, Javier. Finally, in 2016, a new and improved Paul was introduced for English broadcasts, and Violetta for Spanish. New Paul remains the primary announcer for NOAA Weather Radio today. Advertisement Advertisement According to Buchanan, between 2006 and 2014, the NWS also moved from vacuum tube-based transmitters to more advanced solid state ones. Buchanan noted the NWS is continuing its move away from other analog, land-based technology as opportunities present themselves. Recent congressional action, however, has given new life to the possibility of systemic weather radio modernization. Rep. Stephanie Bice, a Republican from Oklahoma, has proposed the NOAA Weather Radio Modernization Act of 2021, which passed in the House of Representatives in May but has yet to pass in the Senate. From Oklahoma, Bice was well aware of the need for consistent weather communications during natural disasters like tornadoes, which affect her constituents. Advertisement Advertisement The bill would authorize $20 million to expand coverage to the remaining 5 percent of the country without access to NOAA Weather Radio communications, as well as $40 million to modernize its hardware and software, including upgrading communication from copper wires to Internet services. According to Wesley Harkins, a representative from Bices office, this paves the way for future development and provides failsafe options, so NWR is never down for an extended period of time. Advertisement Bices office also highlighted that operations costs for NOAA Weather Radio have increased as the system has gotten older, and that increasingly outmoded technology is putting people at risk. Copper wires use technology dating back to the mid-19th century and corrode without proper upkeep, Harkins wrote in an email. The NWS itself acknowledges the benefits of this legislation. Maureen OLeary, deputy director of public affairs at the NOAA, told me via email that improvements would include expanding NWR coverage to rural and underserved communities, national parks, and recreation areas. According to Jones, the legislation is meant to put this modernization back into action, like it should have been done 10 or 15 years ago. Even as technology has progressed, NOAA Weather Radio is a mainstay of the multilayered American alert system. And in emergencies, survival often depends on having a plan Bor C. Fifteen years ago when the cellphone came out, people said You may as well pull the plug on NOAA Weather Radio, Jones said. But you cant rely on just one single thing. Everyone needs multiple, redundant ways of getting alerts. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Welcome to State of Mind, a new section from Slate and Arizona State University dedicated to exploring mental health. Follow us on Twitter. Recently, one of my friends messaged frantically, asking if I had seen the big serotonin study that had been published by scientists at University College London. The study, an umbrella review critically evaluating pre-existing research, concluded that there was little support for the idea that depression was related to abnormally low levels of serotonin. As a philosopher of medicine and psychiatry, I had to confess that I had seen the study and was utterly unsurprised at the results. Its true that the authors of the study are controversial figures, vocal to sometimes vituperative critics of the mental health status quo, leaving heated debates in their wake with each new publication. But the authors conclusion has been an open secret within mental health circles for at least a decade. The very public dispelling of this serotonin model has also removed a key plank in the widely believed but oversimplified myth of mental illness being caused by a chemical imbalance. My friend was devastated. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The chemical imbalance myth has its roots in the late 70s and 80s when psychiatry was dominated by the desire to understand mental illness in primarily biological termsas deviations in brain structure, neurochemistry, and genetics. When the first generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (or SSRI) antidepressants such as Prozac was introduced in the late 70s, a key part of their marketing claimed that they targeted specific neurochemical imbalances. Psychiatry is now interested in a wider range of factors contributing to mental illnessincluding genetics, gut microbiome, environmental influences, socioeconomic factors, and interpersonal stressorsand the marketing of psychiatric drugs is more tightly regulated. However, as the authors of the new study point out, this initial starting point has already crept into everything from public health messaging to popular websites. For instance, though the American Psychological Association takes no stance on the serotonin model when describing SSRIs, Australias Department of Health, describes antidepressants in terms of the chemical imbalance model. Advertisement Advertisement In the past year, 8.3 million people in the U.K. (about 12 percent of the population) took antidepressants. The most recent figures from the United States, collected between April and May by the National Center for Health Statistics, show that approximately 23 percent of adults took prescription medication for their mental health. The vast majority of these prescriptions, including the one taken by my friend, are for SSRIs. And its no surprise that many people who have been prescribed an SSRI believe that they work by increasing the availability of serotonin, thereby correcting the abnormally low levels of serotonin responsible for her depression. Finding out that this story of how SSRIs work was unsubstantiated made her question whether she should be taking them in the first place. Advertisement Advertisement This is a common reaction. As I write this, my social media channels are full of patients who say they now want to stop taking SSRIs. The response by concerned mental health professionals and skeptical commentators has been twofold: First, they are poking holes in the studyusually an important part of scientific method. But in this case I suspect it is sort of pointless, given that many experts already thought the serotonin model to be a nonstarter, and this is a review of existing work rather than new research. Second, they are correctly noting that though we are unsure how SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs work, we have reason to believe that they doan important distinction. Advertisement Advertisement Medical treatments, including psychiatric drugs, are primarily tested for efficacy, usually via randomized controlled trials rather than more primary research into how or why they work. In many ways, this makes sense: When there is a problem, especially with ones health, the priority is fixing the problem rather than working out why this particular fix works. Indeed, there are many common medicines and treatments where we are not entirely sure how they work, despite being fairly certain that they doincluding acetaminophen (or, as we call it in the U.K., paracetamol). Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement There are many people who swear SSRIs have improved their lives, and pooled reviews and meta-analyses point toward their efficacy. Based on such reviews, they are recommended treatments for depression (and a host of other mental illnesses) via the U.K.s National Health Service and the American Psychological Association. On the other side, critics point to a number of deep issues with this research such as the failure to publish negative results, the fact that trials tend to be funded by pharmaceutical companies, and the exclusion of severely depressed patients from the trials. And then there is the perennial problem of taking experimental results about a broader population or group and applying them to a particular individual. I am inclined to think the debate over the efficacy has distracted from the main point of the studyin the case of mental health, how and whether something works both matter. Advertisement In many ways my friend and I are very similar: prone to severe depression, from the same ethnic background, of similar ages, both philosophers. We have both spent the vast majority of our adult lives in precarious environments that incentivized a certain kind of relentless pursuit of achievements. But unlike my friend, I made the choice, not just once but at many critical junctures in my life, not to take antidepressants. Because I knew that depression doesnt necessarily come from a chemical imbalance, I knew that SSRIs would hardly be a silver bullet or the only thing that would help. I also thought about what side effects they would have. One of the primary reasons I avoided antidepressants is because a common side effect of SSRIs is disruption to sleep. My mood is very responsive to sleep, and I worried that I would just be creating a whole new set of problems for myself; a number of people end up with prescriptions for both sleeping pills and SSRIs. The possibility of sleep disruptions, the fact that my mood was very responsive to other interventions, and other potential side-effects led me to my decision. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I do not think there is a correct answer to the question of whether any particular individual should take SSRIs. I can imagine someone in my shoes whose symptoms were more severe and had tried other options making a different decision. But the persistence of the chemical myth of depression obfuscates this kind of decision-making. Though mental health professionals and academic researchers understand the distinction between whether and how a treatment works, these two things come hand in hand for patients, and it has been disingenuous to pretend otherwise. One of the main reasons my friend was so upset about the serotonin study was because she was now left with a great many questions. If she wasnt depressed because of serotonin levels, how was she to understand her propensity to depression? Was something else wrong with brain? Her genetics? Most heartbreakingly, she wondered whether it was that she was simply weak. The serotonin model of depression had not only played a part in her decision to take antidepressants; it shaped how she thought about herself. Advertisement I have spent a great many years biting my tongue when friends or acquaintances described their depression in terms of chemical imbalances. I hesitated in part because I was fearful of affecting their treatment, something I did not feel professionally qualified to weigh in on. But my biggest fear was intruding on the way in which they understood themselves and their lives. Advertisement Advertisement Because I have seen myself and my tendency toward depression in different terms, the results of the study have not disrupted my understanding of myself. Though I have sometimes wondered why I seem more inclined to low mood than other people and idly wonder whether it some variation in my particular neurochemistry or genetics, for the most part, when I am going through a depressive period, I recognize its relationship to something that is happening in my life which needs resolving or the fact that I work in a particularly demanding field. I am not suggesting that SSRIs prevent people from considering what might underlie their depression, or that in all cases depression is situational. But when such a compelling story is put forward by authoritative sources, one that explains so tidily why someone feels the way they do and what can be done about it, people tend not to look elsewhere for explanations or solutions. Just as the chemical imbalance myth has clouded making choices about treatment, it has altered how people understand themselves and their lives. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement It is a platitude to say that different treatments work for different people, but I find it interesting that both me and my friend have ended up in similar contented places. One of the reasons the study has been so painful for so many people is the sheer variety of experiences. Those who, like me, have refrained from taking SSRIs feel faintly resentful for the many years that they have been made to feel irrational about their choice. More tragic are the people like my friend who are now questioning their choices and their understanding of themselves. More tragic still are those patients who had an adverse reaction to SSRIs and have spent many years trying to make the psychiatric establishment acknowledge the myth and the way in which it has hidden the trade-offs associated with SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs. Then there are the many patients for whom SSRIs have been beneficial and continue to advocate for their use in the fear that others will miss out on life changing treatment. Advertisement Advertisement On the other side of the fence, I have colleagues I trust and respect with a wide spectrum of views. What is striking is that once you put the bruised egos and the usual financial vested interests aside, the debates, vicious as they are, seem mostly conducted in utter good faith. Both sides convinced that the other is not only mistaken but in danger of harming vulnerable patients either by peddling dangerous, ill-evidenced treatments or through vilifying treatments that many had found helpful. Though it has been upsetting, I cannot help but find it moving that for most parties involved, the priority is the patient and their well-being. State of Mind is a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University that offers a practical look at our mental health systemand how to make it better. Relax, the meatballs in Carterville are safe. They definitely dont have human body parts in them, according to the Williamson County sheriff. After a viral satirical article falsely said that a morgue assistant used male meat to win a Carterville spaghetti cook-off, Williamson County Sheriff Bennie Vicks office declared fake news. Advertisement Readers wouldnt need to look too hard to find the falsehood themselves, the sheriffs office noted. The fake news was on a fake news website, Vicks office said in a Wednesday news release. The headline of this fake news website says, News you can count on to let you down. " Advertisement Fake news alert posted on the Williamson County Sheriff's website. (Williamson County Sheriff) One must hope that readers could have discerned deceit even if they hadnt spotted the sites confessing banner. The imaginative piece claims that a Carterville woman had never been able to do better than second place in the cooking competition. To get herself over the hump and take home the top prize, the morgue worker collected the testes of dead men and used them in her meatball dish, the false article said. Her secret ingredient was discovered when one judge, who went back for a third serving, bit down on a prosthetic, the fake article continued. The totally false piece appeared in late July on KVTA4, a website that describes itself as a fabricated satirical newspaper and comedy website, but which is also designed to look like a news website. Facebook users have reacted to, commented on or shared the fake article over 300,000 times, according to CrowdTangle, a tool to analyze interactions across the social network. Some Facebook users didnt appear to notice that the article was fake. That may be the most disgusting thing I have ever read, one user wrote. What in the actual hell is going on with people, another use wrote in all caps. Advertisement The worlds gone crazy. More to come, said another. The article has been rewritten and posted on other malicious or satirical websites that share made-up stories but posture like real news outlets. Fact-checker Snopes labeled the piece as satire. Afternoon Briefing Daily Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox each afternoon. > The fake article displayed a photo of an apparently arrested woman, who the site said was the audacious chef. These kinds of satirical articles about morgues usually repurpose real-life mug shots for their fictional tales, Snopes reporter Jordan Liles wrote. The sheriffs office used the hoax articles spread to serve up tips on spotting misinformation. Readers can identify fake news by scoping out sources, with particular attention to a suspicious sites contact page, about page or an articles URL, the sheriffs office wrote. They can also check to see if other sites are reporting the story and should beware of sloppy writing, the sheriffs office said. Advertisement While readers can identify misinformation, they wont be able to identify who has the best spaghetti in the small southern Illinois town: The fake article didnt say who won the cook-off. jsheridan@chicagotribune.com Twitter @jakesheridan_ A teenager shot in the neck by a woman with a concealed carry license last week has died from his injuries, according to Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiners office. Dion Young, 13, unknown address, died at 2:42 p.m. Tuesday at Comer Childrens Hospital, according to information from the medical examiners office. He had been taken to the hospital after a woman with a concealed carry license shot him in the neck on July 28, police said. Advertisement Authorities said the fatal encounter began around 8 p.m. in the 1100 block of East 62nd Street in the Woodlawn neighborhood when a group of four or five males allegedly were attempting to break into a parked vehicle. A 34-year-old woman who owned the vehicle confronted the group, at which time one of (them) pointed a gun at (her), according to police. The woman, who had a license to carry a concealed gun, fired at least once at the group, hitting Young. He initially was taken by paramedics to Comer in fair condition with a gunshot wound to the neck area, officials said. Advertisement Other members of the group took off running and, as of this week, had not been located, police said. No arrests have been made and no weapons had been recovered. The case remains under investigation. The 2021 Box Butte County Fair Royalty have been on a roll and have enjoyed building lifetime friendships as they have performed their duties. They entered floats in two Alliance parades and the July 4th parade in Crawford. They also hosted a princess tea party last month. The contest should be a fun one this year as theres a good mixture of local girls with a variety of personalities. Keep your fingers crossed that the weather cooperates so that the contest is able to be held at the grandstands like last year instead of in the Hemingford School Gym the previous two years. Theres no rain in the forecast for that day but were still a ways out, Applegarth said. All of the farmers are like if the queen contest is what it takes to make it rain then were okay with that. Three years ago it was just pouring, she said. I was still at Mobius cleaning up from the luncheon and I thought I could hear it raining but there were no windows. I went outside and it was a typhoon! Then last year the lightning was so bad that we had to move it inside. Were so thankful that the school allows that but Im hoping we can have it at the grandstands because thats just tradition. Were not going to spend as much time on the stage decorations this year that we have the past two years the hours and hours of decorating the last couple of years has been a waste, Applegarth said. Maybe if we dont spend as much time on decorating mother nature will be nice to us like last year. We have twelve girls competing this year, said Applegarth. What I did this year was sent out about two dozen applications to girls that I thought might want to do it. This is kind of a group of girls that I think have probably wanted to do the contest since they were little. Its always my goal to get 12 contestants so I was thrilled when we reached that without having to extend the deadline, she added. Were still trying to get girls focused away from that talent. Ive had so many girls say that they would do it if it wasnt for the talent section. Well its not a talent anymore. Its two minutes to tell a little about what makes them unique. Im going to say five to ten years after I was in the queen contest they started the performance portion and I dont think it was intended that way but some of the girls started performing so thats the direction it went, Applegarth said. Just tell about yourself and what you like to do. The 2021 Box Butte County Fair Queens are: Queen Braelyn Shrewsbury, First Attendant Lilly Wagner and Second Attendant Kelsey Horton. The ladies had some advice on why girls should think about competing. I think that girls should try out for the contest because its a great opportunity to get to know others in the county, even if you dont make it onto the court, said Horton. The whole day of the contest was so much fun and there was so much bonding between the twelve of us last year. Being on the court has been so much fun and there have been so many fun activities we have done together and events we have been a part of that just help us get out there and make an impact. Being royalty has been so much fun it made me get so close to the other girls and we all have a great friendship from this experience, said Wagner. We sold snow cones in the fall at the Harvest Moon Festival for a fundraiser and put together Valentine butterfly bags and crafts to give to Highland Park residents for Valentines Day. We got to host this Princess Tea Part and we plan on doing another fundraiser this Saturday. We will be doing a dunk tank at Edward Jones parking lot after the parade so come see us! I really enjoyed the things we got to do this year like the tea party, said Shrewsbury. I think it was so important to the royalty to get into the community and show the little girls that look up to us what its like to be a princess for a day. Signing up for something like this is easy and a fun way to get your little ones involved in the community as well as dress up and have some fun for a few hours. I have mixed feelings about the upcoming contest, she said. Im excited for the new contestants and the new royalty but it is also a super bittersweet moment. Come out and watch this years Box Butte County Fair Queen Contest on Wednesday, Aug. 10 at 8 p.m. at the Grandstands. Sponsors of the 2022 Box Butte County Fair Queen Contest: Brittan Insurance Agency Carnegie Arts Center Hemingford Ledger JM & Associates Nebraska Total Office PREMA R & J Industries Plus Rock Valley Physical Therapy The Body Shop Williams Jewelers WEBB Orthodontics Firefighters made drastic gains in fighting the Carter Canyon fire Tuesday and efforts to transition management of the fire back to local departments began Tuesday. The fire is now at 85% containment, with the fires footprint remaining at 15,630 acres, Ben Bohall, public information officer for the Nebraska Forestry Service, told the Star-Herald on Wednesday. The drastic gain in containment came down to weather, he said. What it boiled down to was weather cooperated. We had a little bit of wind that was moving around that perimeter, Bohall said. An important part of that process was the mop-up efforts on Tuesday, he said. Multi-mission aircraft were used to continued surveying the canyons Wednesday, looking for heat signatures, smoke and possible flare ups. (Thanks to the) mopping up process, they were able to basically extend that perimeter pretty quickly, because weather cooperated and then at the end of the day, it was firefighters just working hard, Bohall said. ...For the most part, since the fire has maintained its footprint, weve been able to extend that perimeter. While there wasnt much in the way of rain, there were two lightning strikes that ignited a couple new fires Tuesday that were quickly handled. One was near Robidoux Road. The other was seven miles south of the Carter Canyon fire in Banner County, Bohall said. The Robidoux Road fire burned 3 acres. The Banner County fire consumed five acres of land. In both cases, the fires were quickly extinguished using a Single Engine Air Tanker (SEAT plane), Bohall said. We called in the Nebraska Forestry Service and we put them out quickly. Both were put out pretty fast. As of Wednesday, the Nebraska National Guard had been still on scene with its two UH-60 Blackhawks and one of the SEAT planes. We have them doing reconnaissance mainly right now, Bohall said. Im not sure if they will still be doing bucket drops. The gains in containment also means fewer resources are needed to continue to battle the blaze. Since we are at 85%, we are going to essentially scale down, Bohall said. The goal is we want to turn the fire back over to the locals, specifically Gering Fire Department. How were going to go about doing that is were going to do a staggered demobilization where were just kind of slowly move these resources out of the area, debrief them and hand it over (to the Gering Fire Department). He said the draw down of resources should be completed by Wednesday evening. Meanwhile, area ranches have been severely impacted by the wildfire. Carter Canyon area rancher Tom Cooper said one of the initial lightning strikes that ignited the blaze happened not too far from the property he rents from agriculture company, Vista Trend Gelbvieh. One of the strikes was on some long unused oil tanks, he said. It was two old oil storage tanks. I think, probably just from the old oil being in there they got so hot (that they fueled the fire), Cooper said. Cooper has an oil well on his property, but it was untouched. It burned all the way around it. It burnt into the settling ponds. I talked to the oil well (company) Tuesday and he said it was fine. He says they will get power to it and it will crank right back up, he said. Fortunately, Cooper said his father found out about the fire quickly and notified him. We were the first ones on top, he said. I unlocked the gate at the bottom. We got up on top and it was already in the trees. There just wasnt much a guy could do. My dad came back down this side to get the fire trucks to take him up. By the time, he got down on this side, you couldnt go up or down. I was up on top of it till about 11:30 that night. Bobby Burford came on the south side with his Ranger and picked me up. Area farmers and ranchers came together to give each other a helping hand. Ive been on horseback for three day, moving our cattle, Cooper said. We had about 325 head up there. Were moving cattle and helping neighbors. The Burford family, the Henderson family, the Cross family and the Schleicher family are just amazing. We all just work together. Weve moved everybodys cattle and got them safe. Weve been taking them to feedlots and places that have grass. People has just bent over backwards to help. Cooper said he has recovered almost all of his cattle. He has four out of 200 head that are unaccounted for. We were like 10 head short. Then we had some cows come out of the rough country. Just fire retardant all over them. They were just red. Now the farmers and ranchers will move into the recovery phase once the fire is completely extinguished. The cost of that recovery is immeasurable, Cooper said. Its devastating, he said. To put a dollar amount on it, it would be crazy. First of all, its the first of August and, you know, we usually pull those yearlings in late September. The cow\calves we usually would do that in October. It just doubles your cost, and thats just for this year. There is also the cost to redo all the fences and everything. And are you going to be able to graze it next year? I dont know where it stops. Impacted landowners are encouraged to contact the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and Farm Services Agency for information on assistance programs to help with fences, water structures, grazing lands and other issues, according to the Nebraska Forest Service. In a press release issued Wednesday evening, the Gering Fire Department, the incident management assistance team, and the State of Nebraska thanked the Gering community and local businesses for their overwhelming support and donations, including bottled water, ready-to-eat meals, and even sleeping accommodations for crews from out of town. Their contributions directly benefited our efforts, Incident Commander Nathan Flowers of the Gering Fire Department said. Our firefighters were able to do their jobs more effectively out on the line, put in long hours, and ultimately get to where we are today. We appreciate all theyve done, and our hearts go out to those who are affected by the fire. Congressman Adrian Smith, a resident of Gering, also visited incident command, thanking firefighters and first responders for their efforts. Roosevelt Public Power District utility workers continue to replace power poles throughout the interior that were impacted, coordinating with crews on the ground. The power company has reported they are 90 percent completed restoring power to the affected area. Individuals are still urged to follow all guidelines or notices put out by local authorities regarding public safety. <&rule> Demobilization efforts were completed Wednesday evening as the Gering Volunteer Fire Department takes back control of the Carter Canyon Fire. The fire reached 85% containment Wednesday and remained there on Thursday afternoon, Ben Bohall, public information officer for the Nebraska Forestry Service, told the Star-Herald on Thursday. I would expect that to stay the same throughout the day (Thursday), he said. Things have been turned over to Gering Volunteer Fire Department and some other adjacent volunteer fire departments. Wednesday night, we turned things over to Gering and a few of the other VFDs. We were establishing what their needs were. Its a priority for us to make sure that once we are leaving, we are leaving them on a good note. It sounds like they had almost all the resources they really needed at this point. Bohall said the firefighting operation in the Carter Canyon Fire is now in the end stages. There arent any significant hotspots left. What were looking at now is primarily smoldering, and thats going to be going on for quite awhile, he said. Bohall said it doesnt mean the firefighting operation is completely over. The idea is to maintain that perimeter, extend that perimeter and just contain (the fire), he said. The remaining Single Engine Air Tanker and the two Nebraska National Guard UH-60 Blackhawks have returned to their bases. Firefighters were packing up the command center that has been at the former Cedar Canyon school Thursday as well. Bohall said there may be another reconnaissance flight by the Multi-Mission Aircraft to determine the scope of the remaining fire, but was unsure if or when that might be. With the fire in its end stages, farmers and ranchers impacted by the fire may begin recovery efforts. Impacted landowners are encouraged to contact the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and Farm Services Agency for information on assistance programs to help with fences, water structures, grazing lands and other issues, according to the Nebraska Forest Service. From dining car porter to veterinarian and civic leader The Pittman building on Dodge Street is significant also for its association with the Black vet who funded his education by working as a railroad dining car porter. According to the Omaha landmark designation, Dr. Arthur B. Pittman was rejected for military service after he graduated with his Veterinary of Medicine degree in 1941. He went to work in a large animal practice, which was considered an essential occupation for the war effort. He moved from Texas to Omaha, where his clientele included area farmers and the Ak-Sar-Ben horse race track. During a 1986 interview with University of Omaha history professor Dennis Mihelich, Dr. Pittman was asked if he experienced prejudice working for a predominantly white clientele. He replied, Not at all they all call me doctor. The narrative in the landmark application goes on to say that Dr. Pittmans Omaha practice initially began in a rented former gas station in Benson. He moved to 49th and Dodge Streets, into a three-bay, brick, one-story commercial building. The 4629 Dodge St. structure, designed by John Latenser & Sons, opened for business in 1949 and was described in an Ebony magazine article as modern and streamlined and constructed for $50,000, not including the $10,000 for equipment. Also in 1949, the vets wife, the former Elizabeth Davis, received her law degree from Omahas Creighton University. She was one of the first women and the first African American woman to do so. While a vet, Dr. Pittman also was a civic leader. Among his roles was University of Omaha regent and president of the Omaha Urban League. He was the first African American on the City Planning Board. The landmark designation also described Dr. Pittman as a key developer of some of the citys first integrated housing. State Sen. Jen Day of Gretna spoke at a State Capitol rally this spring of opponents of a 'trigger' abortion bill proposed in the State Legislature. (Paul Hammel/Nebraska Examiner) LINCOLN The resounding victory by abortion-rights advocates in the deeply red state of Kansas reverberated across the border into Nebraska on Wednesday, with fellow advocates cheering the news and opponents of abortion saying more work is needed to change the culture of abortion. We were honestly expecting this, and very, very thrilled to have it confirmed to us that this is how the majority of the country feels, said Andi Curry Grubb of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Nebraska. Support for abortion rights might be higher in places like California and New York, she said, but its still there in Nebraska and Kansas. Poll showed support for abortion Curry Grubb pointed to a poll released in March by the ACLU of Nebraska showing that 55% of respondents in the Cornhusker State opposed a legislative trigger bill to ban abortion, while only 40% supported it. During Tuesdays Kansas primary, abortion-rights forces rejected, by a surprising margin of 59%-41%, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state legislature to ban abortion. Voter turnout was heavy in Johnson County in suburban Kansas City, it was twice that of the 2018 primary. Sandy Danek of Nebraska Right to Life said the vote shows that opponents of abortion rights have a lot of work to do to educate voters about life affirming alternatives to abortion. Weve created a culture of abortion on demand for more than 50 years, Danek said. That culture is not going to be changed overnight. On Wednesday, a key state senator, John Stinner of Gering, labeled as remote the chances of the Nebraska Legislature holding a special session later this year to consider banning abortion. He said its a complex issue involving medical, social, political and legal issues, making it difficult to craft a bill that could overcome a promised filibuster. Other sources told the Nebraska Examiner that efforts at compromise, to attract the needed 33 votes, have failed. Theres a lot of layers to this. Its like peeling back an onion, Stinner said. He added that he believes the issue would be better dealt with during the 90-day, regular session, which begins in January. Savagely raped Tuesdays vote prompted one abortion rights advocate, State Sen. Carol Blood, the Democratic candidate for governor, to publicly share her personal story of being savagely beaten, choked and raped at age 13. Blood, 61, said she has briefly mentioned in speeches on the floor of the Legislature that she was a victim of sexual assault but said she had never related the details until Tuesday in an email to supporters and in comments to the Examiner. The senator said the assault, when her family lived in Hastings, left her choked out and unconscious. She said that later, when she asked for help, she was treated as a promiscuous teen and shamed. Blood said that even recently, she has had a hard time donning a mask to protect against COVID-19 due to her memories of the assault. I am a survivor that not only lived to tell my story for the very first time in a public forum, but who took action to make sure that when something like this happens to anyone, there is help, Blood wrote. The senator declined to say if she became pregnant or had an abortion. She said the assault prompted her to get involved politically at a younger age and to become a stronger person, an advocate for women and a voice for the powerless. Keep government out of doctors office Blood said Tuesdays vote in Kansas indicated to her that people understand that its about more than abortion. Its about health care and personal rights, and do you want the government involved in your health care decisions? Blood said she heard similar concerns about government intrusion during a campaign swing recently through rural, central Nebraska. Her Republican opponent, University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, has said that Nebraskas current law, which bans abortions after 20 weeks of conception with few exceptions, doesnt go far enough to block the procedure. My position has always been clear: Human life is a precious gift of Gods grace, beginning at conception and continuing through natural death, Pillen said in a statement Wednesday. As governor, I will do all I can to protect Nebraskas unborn babies, support mothers and ensure the dignity of human life, Pillen added. He opposes exceptions for rape and incest. Curry Grubb, who also works for the Planned Parenthood North Central States, said the organization was closely watching the vote in Kansas because it is so similar to Nebraska, one of five states in the North Central region. Kansas, Nebraska backed Trump Kansas voters preferred Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the last presidential election by a margin of about 15 points, while Nebraska gave Trump the nod by 19 points. It should be pointed out that a Democrat occupies the governors mansion in Kansas, while Biden, a Democrat, captured one electoral vote in Nebraska, in the Omaha-dominated 2nd Congressional District. Curry Grubb said people are beginning to see the reality of a world in which abortion is illegal. A grassroots effort mobilized to win the day in Kansas, she said. I think were going to see a continuation of that in Nebraska and across the country, she said. On Wednesday, five groups that advocate for abortion rights in the state announced that they had launched a website NebraskansforAbortionAccess.com to serve as a hub for Nebraskans wishing to keep abortion legal. Its not health care Danek, meanwhile, said she believes that some Kansas voters were confused about what they were voting for. She also said that Kansas has a different history with abortion. Even before the Roe v. Wade decision recognized a right to abortion in 1973, the procedure, with some exceptions, was allowed in Kansas, she said. Its not health care. Its not good for a woman. It ultimately only takes the life of a child and leaves a woman wounded, Danek said. One of the most brilliant and inspired ideas ever conceived by the American mind is having an election every two years. Citizens in the United States have the opportunity to select their elected representatives, and they dont have to wait very long to determine whether or not they chose wisely. Every two years, a portion of politicians all over the country, from city councils and school boards, to state legislatures, state governors and the federal congress are up for election. The months leading up to the election is when the voices of the citizens are the most powerful. Ordinary citizens who have a sincere desire to promote an issue and bring about a change in how things work in some organ of government now is your time to act. Volunteering to help the campaigns of people running for elected office is the fastest and most effective way to make a friend and ally out of a politician. Donating money to a campaign is also influential, but nothing takes the place of someone willing to actually show up and participate in campaign events and donate sweat and effort. That mutual effort during a campaign can build strong relationships. Labor Day weekend is the traditional beginning of the political season. Citizens who want to see a bill introduced and passed in the Legislature should strongly consider getting involved in the process right now. Bills that are drafted, and the process of generating support for them is started in August have a much greater likelihood of passing in January when the next session begins. Now is the time for citizens to approach candidates for the legislature and ask them if they would be willing to support or even introduce particular legislation. Before a senator ever introduces a bill, there is a lot that can be done by concerned citizens to give a proposal the best chance for being made into law. Be friendly and patient with legislative staff. They will likely be the ones getting your bill drafted. Getting bills formally drafted by a senators office will mean that the bill is in a familiar form for senators to hold in their hand and read. Find out which standing committee is most likely going to conduct the bill hearing. Make an appointment with each member of that committee if possible. Visit the senator in person with a copy of the drafted bill. Even if the senator is leaving that committee before the following legislative session, they may have heard similar bills before and be able to give advice from that experience. After the essential votes are found in the committee, there are at least 20 more yes votes that will be needed to pass the bill. Personalized emails and in-person appointments with senators can make a favorable impression and help a bill succeed. Senators need to know that real people support your idea. Once a bill is introduced, that is no guarantee that it will be debated by the full Legislature even if the committee advances the bill. To ensure that the bill has a chance, it is important to find a senator who will individually prioritize it, or a committee chair who can make it a priority of their committee. Priority designations usually guarantee that a bill will be debated on the floor of the Legislature after advancing from committee. Senators should all be working for their constituents. That is the job we sign up for when we run for election. But new senators need all the help they can get if they are going to hit the ground running on Day 1 of the legislative session. As a senior in the Legislature now, I consider it part of my job to help promising new senators become effective champions for our Nebraska values. With the help of concerned Nebraskans, I am optimistic that we will be able to get some conservative points on the board when the Unicameral returns in January. Please contact my office with any comments, questions, or concerns. Email me at tbrewer@leg.ne.gov, mail a letter to Sen. Tom Brewer, Room #1423, P.O. Box 94604, Lincoln, NE 68509, or call us at 402-471-2628. Calendar for Traditional Festivals: Qixi Festival 08:21, August 04, 2022 By Kou Jie, Wu Chaolan, Sheng Chuyi, Zhang Ruohan, Ma Ruosi ( People's Daily Online The Double Seventh Festival, or Qixi Festival, falls on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. Double Seventh Festival is considered to be the most romantic of traditional Chinese festivals, earning it the title of "Chinese Valentine's Day." This romantic festival has a long history and has been celebrated since the Han Dynasty (202 BC 220 AD). It was added to the National Intangible Cultural Heritage List by the State Council of China in 2006. Origins The festival originated from the tale of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, one of the four most famous pieces of ancient Chinese folklore. The earliest-known reference to this myth dates back to over 2,600 years ago. The story tells of the love between Zhinyu (the Weaver Girl, symbolizing Vega) and Niulang (the Cowherd, symbolizing Altair). As the most capable weaver fairy in heaven, Zhinyu's love for Niulang, a mortal, enraged the gods, who separated the couple with the Silver River (symbolizing the Milky Way). Although the gods were consumed with fury, the couple's love did win some of their sympathy, and they allowed the two to meet over the Silver River once a year. On the 7th day of the 7th lunar month, a flock of magpies would form a bridge so that the lovers could be reunited. As far back as the Han Dynasty, the practices of the festival were conducted in accordance with formal ceremonial state rituals. Over time, the festival activities also came to include customs practiced by the common people. Though it originated in China, the Qixi Festival inspired the Tanabata festival in Japan, Chilseok festival in Korea, and That Tich festival in Vietnam. Customs of Qixi Festival Spot Niulang and Zhinyu in the Night Sky On this day, Chinese people will look up towards the sky to look for Vega and Altair shining in the Milky Way, while a third star forms a symbolic bridge between the two stars. Given a clear night sky, you can find Altair which is the middle of three stars to the east of the Milky Way, while Vega is in a cluster of six just to the west. Give Handmade Gifts Zhinyu was a very skilled weaver with almost magical hands. Traditionally, girls would pray for needlework ability, a traditional skill for a good wife, as well as a happy marriage. Thus this festival is also called Qiqiao Festival, literally Begging for Skills Festival. Although girls nowadays no longer need weaving skills, knitting and crafting are still rather popular among young people. Some girls like to make handmade scarves or hats for their loved ones to express their love and appreciation. Plan a Romantic Date The love story of Niulang and Zhinyu, and the Qixi Festival have been handed down for generations. People now are increasingly delving into ancient Chinese culture and history, and are giving new meaning to the Qixi Festival. Celebrations include giving gifts to romantic partners, planning romantic dates for dinners, movies, travels, etc. Many people will also choose to register as couples on this day. Related: Calendar for Traditional Festivals: Dragon Boat Festival Calendar for Traditional Festivals: Lantern Festival (Web editor: Sheng Chuyi, Liang Jun) For Jason Keating and Bishen Sen, post-traumatic stress disorder is personal. Both have been diagnosed with the condition, and that has fueled a special connection with their current project, a short film titled The Grief Counselor, which will be filmed in and around Statesville this fall. Keating, a Statesville resident who served in the Marine Corps, originally wrote the screenplay for the film as the story of a male veteran suffering from PTSD. It was very much me, he said. He then decided to reach out to Sen, a connection he met at Statesvilles Full Bloom Film Festival, and the two worked together to tell the story through a different lens. The statistics in the world of PTSD and women were eye-opening, Keating said. But most of the film projects we came across were from the male perspective. We realized there was a deeper message that could be told if we changed it to a female veteran. According to the National Alliance on Mental Health, research has shown women are more than twice as likely as men to experience PTSD, and it can take much longer for women to be diagnosed than men. At particular risk for PTSD are veterans, with 14% of those returning from recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan being diagnosed. The short film will tell the story of April, an Army veteran juggling life as a grief counselor while dealing with her PTSD and vices and reconciling a relationship with her husband. Keating said his and Sens personal experiences with PTSD have made the project even more impactful. Its a story we both can relate to and feel it needs to be told, he said. During the Full Bloom Film Festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 8-10 in Downtown Statesville, Keating and others from The Grief Counselor will hold a roundtable session to discuss various aspects of the filmmaking process. The session will be held at 8:30 a.m. Sept. 10. If we can inspire an up-and-coming filmmaker that would be a win. It would awesome if there was an investor who would like to help fund the film, he said, adding that they are also ready to begin scouting film locations in Statesville and crowd-funding to help cover expenses. The production will bring about eight cast and 10 crew members to Statesville for the filming. Keating hopes that the film will be ready to submit and be shown during the 2023 film festival, which would be a full-circle moment from when he attended and first met Sen. The film festival kind of ignited my plans to write and produce films, he said. To learn more about The Grief Counselor, visit its Facebook page at facebook.com/TGCFilm or Instagram at instagram.com/tgcfilm. To purchase tickets to the Full Bloom Film Festival and view a schedule of events, visit fullbloomfilmfestival.org. Iredell County collected more than $151.35 million in taxes in 2021 with $747,919.72 remaining in outstanding taxes according to Bill Furches, the countys tax collector. Those numbers were announced at Tuesdays meeting of the Iredell County Board of Commissioners. Furches noted that was up 3.7% from 2022 and was slightly ahead of budgeted tax collections by almost $3.93 million. He noted that collections were 99.51% of property taxes assessed. Chairman James Mallory praised Furches and his staff for their work in the high collection rate that Mallory said allows the commissioners to budget with confidence. The citizens of this county taking their civic responsibilities seriously, if not cheerfully, understandably, stroking those checks on a monthly or an annual basis, feeling that theyre getting a good return on their investment, for the services provided by our staff throughout the county, Mallory said. The following items were discussed and approved with a consent vote during the pre-meeting, which then were approved in one vote during the regular meeting: Mooresville Graded School District: Approved the conveyance of a deed for highway right of way to the North Carolina Department of Transportation for N.C. 150/N.C. 152 road widening project. According to the county, in 2003 Iredell County issued debt for the district to build East Mooresville Middle School at Oakridge Farm Highway and Wiggins Road. The original 2003 debt was refunded in 2013, and the final payment is in October 2023. Until the debt is retired, Iredell County is the owner of the property. The Transportation Department has scheduled a road project for the intersection, and through negotiations with the district, will pay $80,000 for the property. Iredell County Library: Request from the library for approval of a budget amendment to accept nonrecurring state aid to public libraries in the amount of $89,113. The funds are separate from the normal recurring state aid to public libraries and come from the U.S. Treasury Office as part of Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Funds under the American Rescue Plan Act. They will be distributed through the N.C. Pandemic Recovery. Director Juli Moore said the funds are generally for materials, salaries, equipment and operating costs. 2030 Horizon Plan: Commissioners approved the creation of a steering committee for the update to the 2030 Horizon Plan. According to the county, a 10-member committee will be established with appointments to be made at the Aug. 16 meeting. Three Planning Board members have agreed to serve, plus there will be one member each from the Farmland Preservation Board and the Economic Development Corp. This will leave five vacancies. This project is expected to take about 18 months, and the group will be meeting monthly throughout the process. Planning and development: Commissioners approved a grant of $175,000 from the Essential Single-Family Rehabilitation Loan Pool Program of the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency for the rehabilitation of eligible units. The process began in 2018, with the knowledge that funds could be available in the future. According to the county, the loan pool funds are targeted at owner-occupied units, occupied by households with elderly and/or disabled full-time household members or owner-occupied units with lead hazards and a child 6 years old or younger. Household incomes must be below 80% of the area median income. CENTRALIA Former principal with Centralia School District Neal Kirby turned 70 in April and decided he wanted to summit all five of Washingtons volcanoes before his next birthday. Over the weekend, he completed his goal, wrapping up his climb at Glacier Peak in Snohomish County. After his birthday in April, the mountain climbing aficionado decided to set a big goal: climb all five of Washingtons volcanoes Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams and Glacier Peak before turning 71. Adding to the loftiness of his goal, the climbing season is far shorter than a full year. Kirby was joined by Jake Fagerness, who works as a mailman in Chehalis, on his climbs of Glacier Peak and Mount St. Helens this year. A lot of people, they celebrate getting em all five done over their lifetime, Kirby previously told The Chronicle. I think a lot of older people dont realize what theyre capable of doing because they check themselves out before they give it a go. For whatever reason, Ive had really good health. Ive been blessed with staying in really good shape at this age. Appointed Cowlitz County Cowlitz County District 3 Commissioner John Jabusch and Republican challenger Rick Dahl will move on to the general election, according to Wednesdays unofficial primary ballot returns. The percentages didnt change much from Tuesday to Wednesday, with Jabusch, running as an independent, taking about 47% of the vote and Dahl tallying 34%. Jabusch captured 3,121 votes, a 842-vote lead over Dahl, as of Wednesday. Christie Masters got 1,292 votes, or about 19%, and wont move on to Novembers election. Im feeling pretty good about it, Jabusch said Tuesday night. Only voters in District 3 West Longview, Rose Valley, Castle Rock, Toutle, Ryderwood and rural northern Cowlitz County saw the race on their primary ballots. The general election will be countywide. Rose Valley resident Jabusch, 62, said he was encouraged by the results of the primary because he felt like hes better known in Kelso and Longview than in northern District 3. He said he worked to get some key endorsements from north county residents, including Castle Rock Mayor Paul Helenberg, former commissioner Joe Gardner and Toutle grocery owner Greg Drew. Jabusch, owner of Pro Caliber Motorsports, said his experience running businesses has served him well in the commissioner role. He said he decided to run for a full four-year term to continue contributing to the variety of county business and issues. Jabusch said the general election will be interesting, in part because of the differences in his and Dahls political philosophies. I think theres a good contrast between ... the two of us and how we think government, especially local government ought to operate, he said. Dahl, 66, who retired as senior vice president of Fibre Federal Credit Union early this year, said he decided to run to better represent the citizens. The Castle Rock resident said he feels really good about moving on to November, and his campaign will continue to include a lot of door knocking. The people we talk to understand my focus is really on them, Dahl said. (As commissioner) you do work at the county but the work is for the people of he county. I think if anything that kind of resonates. Rose Valley resident and business owner Masters, 47, decided to run after years consideration because she loves Cowlitz County and wants to serve its residents. Of course it didnt go the way I was hoping, but I wouldnt change running for this office for anything, she said. It was a really good experience. The people I met and talked to and the different issues people talked about, the things they were concerned about remain with me, be working on those regardless. In September, Gardner stepped down from the position, leaving about 15 months in his second term. Masters and Dahl were among the seven candidates to apply for the position. The commissioners remained split on who to appoint until their Nov. 2 deadline, with Arne Mortensen supporting Dahl and Dennis Weber supporting Masters. The decision was forwarded to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who appointed Jabusch in early December after he applied directly to the governors office. By the end of this year, Jabusch will have spent about a year as commissioner. At least five local law enforcement agencies hosted celebrations Tuesday as part of a national annual event to bring law enforcement and citizens together. Events in Longview, Kelso, Woodland and Castle Rock were hosted by the citys officers in honor of National Night Out. The Castle Rock event also included the Cowlitz County Sheriffs Office. For more than three decades, millions across the country have participated in National Night Out where officers throw gatherings from minor cookouts to large festivals on the first Tuesday in August to promote local police programs, like neighborhood watches and drug prevention efforts. From 6 to 8 p.m., the sheriffs office and Castle Rock Police Department hosted a gathering at the Castle Rock Middle School featuring a rock wall and reptile show. The event also included a bike giveaway, police K-9 demonstration and a dunk booth where attendees could dunk people including Cowlitz County Sheriff Brad Thurman. No prizes were given out at the dunk booth; Thurman said it was just for "the thrill of doing it." The Kalama Police Department says staff will host its National Night Out event on Oct. 4 instead. LIND, Wash. (AP) An entire eastern Washington town was being evacuated Thursday because of a growing wildfire south of town that was burning homes, officials said. At about 1:30 p.m. Thursday the Adams County Sheriff's Office said on Facebook that about 10 homes in Lind had burned. At this time all residents of the town of Lind need to evacuate immediately, the sheriff's office said in the post, adding that people could seek shelter at the Ritzville Grade School. Later Thursday, officials clarified that six homes had burned as well as eight other structures. Washington Department of Natural Resources officials said Thursday they expected the fire to pass through town, but Sheriff Dale J. Wagner said at about 5 p.m. that the fire was starting to calm down and that evacuations remained only on the south side of Lind. The information I have right now is it is starting to calm down, Wagner said about the fire via Facebook video. They will be fighting it through the night to make sure it doesnt flare up anymore or get worse, he said, adding that firefighters were dealing with high heat and windy conditions. He said one firefighter suffered smoke inhalation and was flown to Spokane for treatment. The State Fire Marshals office said Thursday that state fire assistance was mobilized to help fight the fire, estimated to have burned about 3.9 square miles (10.1 square kilometers). Homes, infrastructure and crops were threatened, officials said. The cause of the blaze was under investigation. Westbound State Route 21 at State Route 395 was temporarily closed in that area. At about 3:30 p.m., two airplanes and one helicopter had responded to help fight the fire, according to the sheriff's office. Lind, with a population of about 500 people, is located about 75 miles (121 kilometers) southwest of Spokane. The new blaze was one of several that sparked this week around Washington. A fire southwest of Spokane that started Wednesday burned at least two structures and authorities there were telling people in dozens of homes to evacuate. The state Department of Natural Resources said Thursday that the Williams Lake Fire had grown to 5 square miles (10.3 square kilometers) and was less than 10% contained. Spokane County Fire District #3 Chief Cody Rorbach said two structures were destroyed. It wasnt immediately known if those were primary residences, or actively in use. Williams Lake is about 32 miles (51.5 kilometers) south of Spokane. The Cow Canyon Fire about 12 miles (19.3 kilometers) southwest of Ellensburg was also threatening structures and prompting mandatory evacuations after starting Wednesday afternoon. That blaze prompted emergency evacuation notices for about 50 homes or structures 10 miles north of Naches, The Seattle Times reported. The fire had grown to 8.75 square miles (22. 6 square kilometers) by Thursday morning. The Vantage Highway Fire near the town of Vantage, Washington, started Monday and as of Thursday had burned a cabin and three outbuildings, officials said on Thursday. The blaze was estimated at 26.5 square miles (68.6 square kilometers) with about 25% containment. Earlier evacuation orders for residents had been lifted as of Thursday. Climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive, according to scientists. Potential solar storms may disrupt the satellite network. Heres how. Earth has been witnessing an increasing number of solar storms these past couple of months. This is due to the Sun nearing the peak of its solar cycle. This increasing frequency of storms puts satellites at risk. Solar storms occur due to Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) which are emitted from the surface of the Sun, sending dangerous solar flares hurtling towards Earth. The solar flares then interact with the Earth's electro-magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms which not only affect the power grid and causes GPS to crash, but it could potentially wreak havoc in the low-Earth orbit, which is the region of space at altitudes below 1000 kilometers, where hundreds of satellites currently revolve in their orbit around the Earth. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's Starlink lost as many as 40 satellites due to a storm which occurred in February, 2022. These satellites were lost shortly after they were put in their orbits by the Falcon 9 rocket, according to interestingengineering.com. Not only satellites, but the International Space Station could also face a potential collision with space debris due to a solar storm. The objects near Earth in space are tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) which currently tracks nearly 20,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters in low Earth orbit. The SSN keeps a record of their current position as well as their trajectories. Not all but only a handful of the objects in the low Earth orbit are satellites currently in function. The rest of the low Earth orbit is filled by defunct satellites, empty rocket stages, space debris from collisions and more. When a satellite gets close to space debris, the respective organisation in control of the satellite adjusts its course to prevent collision. However, solar storms make this task difficult. Tom Berger, a solar physicist and director of the Space Weather Technology Center at the University of Colorado told Space.com, "In the largest storms, the errors in the orbital trajectories become so large that, essentially, the catalog of orbital objects is invalidated. The objects can be tens of kilometers away from the positions last located by radar. They are essentially lost, and the only solution is to find them again with radar." Alibaba has seen its market value plummet after Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown in 2020. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba reported flat revenue growth on Thursday for the first time ever, as the country grappled with an economic slowdown and COVID-19 resurgences kept consumers jittery. Alibaba's performance is widely seen as a gauge of Chinese consumer sentiment, given its market dominance, and its revenue growth has slowed markedly over the past year. Revenue came in at 205.6 billion yuan ($30.7 billion) in the April-June quarter, beating analyst expectations despite being slightly below the same period last year, following a decline in the company's China commerce segment revenue, Alibaba said. The company has been grappling with growing competition and economic fallout from strict COVID restrictions that have battered consumer sentiment, pushed the unemployment rate up and tangled supply chains. "Following a relatively slow April and May, we saw signs of recovery across our businesses in June," said Alibaba Group's chairman and chief executive Daniel Zhang in a statement. "Despite the soft economic conditions, we managed to deliver stable revenues and narrowed losses in several strategic businesses by improving operating efficiency," he added in an earnings call. The company's revenue growth was flat "primarily due to a decline in China commerce segment revenue" although this was offset by growth in the cloud segment, Alibaba said. Many parts of China have faced harsh lockdowns in recent months, as officials struggled to stamp out the Omicron variant under the country's zero-COVID policy. Shanghai, China's biggest city and a major economic hub, was sealed off for two months due to COVID-related restrictions during the quarter. The firm cited "restrictions that resulted in supply chain and logistics disruptions in April and most of May" that bogged down performance in its China commerce sector, although there was a pick-up in demand in June during a popular shopping festival. Its profit for the latest quarter stood at 22.7 billion yuan, down from 45.1 billion yuan a year earlier. Alibaba has recently been building its international commerce businesses, such as Lazada in Southeast Asia and Trendyol in Turkey. It has also shifted from its aggressive market expansion in the past, amid slowing growth. Challenges Apart from coronavirus curbs, Alibaba has been contending with a regulatory crackdown on China's tech giants and other challenges abroad. US authorities have put the company on a watchlist that could see it delisted in New York if it does not comply with disclosure orders, causing its shares to slump. The company is seeking a primary listing in Hong Kong which could allow it to access mainland China's vast pool of investors, a move that comes as Chinese tech firms trading in New York grow increasingly worried about regulatory action by US authorities. Alibaba, a tech behemoth, has also seen its market value plummet after Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown in 2020. In recent years, Chinese officials have taken aim at alleged anti-competitive practices by some of the country's biggest names, driven by fears that major internet firms control too much data and expanded too quickly. This included a last-minute cancellation of a planned IPO by Alibaba's financial arm Ant Group, which would have been the world's largest public offering at the time. Last week, a report said Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma plans to give up control of Ant Group as part of a strategy to appease Chinese regulators and revive the digital payments unit's initial public offering. Following the latest results, Alibaba's US-listed shares rose 4.5 percent in pre-market trading. China's economy expanded just 0.4 percent in the second quarter this year, logging its slowest growth since the initial coronavirus outbreak more than two years ago. 2022 AFP CQD imager by monolithic integration of CQD photodiode array and silicon-based ROIC. Credit: Liu et al. Advances in the fields of robotics, autonomous driving and computer vision have increased the need for highly performing sensors that can reliably collect data in different environmental conditions. This includes imagers that can operate at near-infrared wavelengths (i.e., 0.71.4 m), thus potentially collecting high resolution images in complex or unfavorable atmospheric conditions, such as in the presence of rain, fog and smoke. Researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), HiSilicon Optoelectronics Co. Limited, and Optical Valley Laboratory have recently developed a near-infrared colloidal quantum dot (CQD) imager. This highly efficient imager was presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics. "Our group was founded at Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, HUST in 2012 and continuously conducts research on CQD materials and devices with Associate Prof. Jianbing Zhang," Liang Gao, one of the researchers involved in the study, told TechXplore. The recent work by Tang, Gao and their colleagues is the product of their collaboration with HiSilicon Optoelectronics Co. Limited, a renowned semiconductor company based in Shanghai, which was initiated in 2018. After they received funding from the company four years ago, the researchers have been focusing much of their research efforts on the development of a highly performing CQD imager. "We have been working on our CQD imager for a long time," Jiang Tang, lead researcher for the study, told TechXplore. "I graduated from University of Toronto under the supervision of Prof. Edward Sargent, a pioneer of CQD infrared photodetectors and founder of the company InVisage. Our team at HUST's primary mission is to build a reliable near and short infrared imager with low costs." Traditional near-infrared imagers are manufactured by heterogeneously integrating an epitaxially grown photodiode array and a silicon-based readout integrated circuit (ROIC). In contrast, the CQD imager introduced by Tang, Gao and their colleagues was created via the monolithic integration of a CQD photodiode array and a silicon-based ROIC. CQDs are semiconductor crystals of nanometer sizes that contain surface ligands, which allow them to disperse in solvents. These crystals have favorable optical, electronic and physical properties that make them highly promising for the development of numerous technologies, including imagers, light emitting diodes and gas sensors. "The CQD photodiode array transfers incident photons to electrons, and the silicon-based ROIC manipulates photo-generated electrons to output image signals," Gao explained. "The monolithic integration potentially enables smaller pixel size and higher resolution of CQD imager than heterogeneously integrated imager." Most near-infrared imagers introduced in the past have high production costs, due to the complexity of the integration between infrared photodiodes and silicon-based circuits. The new imager's distinct design and fabrication process, on the other hand, makes it easier to realize, significantly cutting production costs. "We directly deposited the sensing layer on top of the ROIC," Tang explained. "Our imager's unique advantage is the monolithic integration, which enables 12-inch wafer integration and limits production costs. We started from chemicals all the way to final chips, achieving a good imager." This team of researchers was one of the first to demonstrate the integration of a top-illuminated CQD photodiode array with silicon-based ROIC technology. In initial tests, their photodiodes (i.e., photodetectors) exhibited a spectral range of 4001,300 nm, room-temperature detectivity of 2.1 1012 Jones, 3 dB bandwidth of 140 kHz and linear dynamic range of over 100 dB. Tang, Gao and his colleagues have so far used their newly developed photodiodes to create a large imager (640 x 512 pixels). They found that this imager attained a remarkable efficiency and spatial resolution. "Our CQD imager shows the highest external quantum efficiency of 63% among the reported CQD imagers due to the developed device structure," Gao said. "The detailed presentation of our new CQD imager could serve as a reference for researchers and technicians specialized in emerging monolithically-integrated imager fields." In the future, this new CQD imager could be used to collect high resolution images of veins, biological systems and matter particles. In their next studies, the researchers plan to develop CQD imagers with longer wavelengths and higher resolutions. In addition, they would like to try to integrate other functional sensors with silicon-based circuits using their monolithic integration strategy. "In our future works, we will increase our imager's resolution (1K x 1K), its wavelength (1700 nm and beyond), and its stability (sustain 120C or even 150C to meet the stringent automobile application requirement), while also trying to create larger wafers (from 4 inch to 12 inch)," Tang added. More information: Jing Liu et al, A near-infrared colloidal quantum dot imager with monolithically integrated readout circuitry, Nature Electronics (2022). Journal information: Nature Electronics Jing Liu et al, A near-infrared colloidal quantum dot imager with monolithically integrated readout circuitry,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-022-00779-x 2022 Science X Network Credit: University of Western Ontario Holographic teleportation sounds like something out of Star Wars or Star Trek, but instead of the bridge of a flashy interstellar spaceship, a world-first technological achievement took place in a nondescript boardroom on campus at Western recently. The term holographic teleportation, or holoport, is a combination of hologram and teleport: when a hologram of a person or object is transmitted instantaneously to another location. On the afternoon of July 27, a small group of students from the Western Institute for Space Exploration (Western Space) gathered to witness and take part in the world's first international holoport demonstration. "We had the incredible opportunity to demonstrate the first international, two-way holographic teleportation," said project leader Leap Biosystem's co-founder, Dr. Adam Sirek, a faculty member at the Schulich School of Medicine Dentistry, and Western Space. In April, NASA successfully holoported a doctor on to the International Space Station (ISS), becoming the first "holonaut," but last Thursday's Western Space demonstration was the first time anyone has crossed international borders through holographic teleportation. Credit: University of Western Ontario "We transported one person from Alabama to London, Ontario, and then each of the students here on the project were able to instantly holoport themselves in holographic form down to Huntsville, Alabama," Sirek said. He joked about the team crossing the border without having to pay an airfare, but within the quick quip comes a nugget of truth about the vast potential of such technology. The team, composed largely of undergraduate and medical students, is exploring the way this futuristic technology can be used in the real world. Whether it is for people communicating or providing assistance and medical care to remote areas, even in the ISS, the possibilities are only just beginning to be understood. Precipice of opportunity The technology for holographic teleportation comes from hardware developed by Microsoft and software from Aexa Aerospace, headquartered in Houston. Aexa has partnered with Western and Canadian company Leap Biosystems to explore medical applications for the technology, which led to the demonstration of the first international holographic teleportation. The technology involves a special camera that creates a holographic image of a subject, which is then sent to the destination of choice. The user on the other end is wearing a device called a hololens, not unlike virtual reality gaming headsets. Through the hololens the individual can see the subject within their environment. If both are wearing a hololens, they can interact in their environments as if they are actually there. While the novelty of traveling a great distance instantaneously is fascinating, for medical student and project intern Adam Levschuk the possibilities for medical care are most exciting. "It's like the best of both worlds between medicine and engineering. The applications I'm particularly looking at is facilitating physical exams that a doctor would normally conduct in an examination room." Although there is still work to be done to make conducting a virtual medical exam over the hololens a reality, Levschuk said he is excited to get the opportunity to explore the possibilities. He also has the added bragging right of saying he attempted the first virtual handshake across international borders. "Every time you put it on and you see the hologram appear in front of you, it's still a little bit shocking I could reach out and virtually shake the person's hand on the other end of the line." Medical student and project intern Alex Zhou said the implications of the technology could be huge for access to health care in remote locations. "This is very much the future of health care in terms of accessing remote communities, remote environments, and providing rural health-care access," said Zhou. Sirek agreed with Zhou, emphasizing the cost of the technology is currently around $5,000 which, when compared to the cost of medivacs or even traveling for exams, leads one to conclude this kind of technology could have the potential for huge cost savings for the health-care system. "It can impact a number of factors including physician access to these (remote) areas and physician licensing. I think it is going to be a very big game-changer for rural health care." But with the promise of new technology there are inevitably limitations and hurdles to overcomeand that is where the engineering side of the project comes in. Jocelyn Whittal, a third-year engineering student at Western, found herself being part of the team after she was encouraged to apply by one of her professors. "As far as the hololens goes, I'm sort of looking at what biosensors might be really easy and also really helpful to integrate with it," said Whittal. "So whether that's like monitoring heart rate, oxygen saturation or even looking at haptics." Haptics is the science and technology of transmitting and understanding information through touch, which with a hologram is currently a hurdle. While the technology can transport a person's image across borders it can't yet interact with touch, which is a big part of a medical exam. However, Whittal said she is hoping to get haptics as part of the hololens in the future, and of the hololens itself. "I feel like Iron Man." Next steps Sirek is excited about the possibilities for the technology, which are not limited to the grand scope of space or betterment of medical care. Perhaps one of the most obtainable possibilities of this technology for the general public is its potential to connect people. Virtual meetings are the norm now, but with hololens and holographic teleportation, the physical, three-dimensional experience could become mainstream. "We look at that again from a space perspective; wouldn't it be nice if you're on a three-month deployment to the space station, and you could come down and sit in the room (at home) for a family dinner." Sirek said one of the most exciting parts is seeing this new generation of students taking on the challenges of today for a better, more connected world tomorrow. "We have three undergraduate students taking advanced technology and potentially demonstrating that to leaders and decisions-makers for the future of Canada. Our students are actively involved in pushing the boundary of what novel technology can do." A College Station man was arrested in connection to a shooting Wednesday morning in the 1200 block of Holik Drive in College Station that sent two people to the hospital, according to police records. Antoine Moreno, 20, was arrested on four charges, including theft of a firearm and tampering with evidence. As of Thursday evening, Moreno was still being held in jail on an $18,000 bond. Police said officers responded to a shots-fired call at 8:25 a.m. and determined an argument between several people led to the gunfire. Two people were taken to St. Joseph Hospital in College Station by private transportation. Police said officers reviewed doorbell video footage and observed two men running away from what was determined to be the sound of gunshots. Police said employees at St. Joseph Hospital called police at 8:35 a.m. to report a patient with a gunshot wound. Police said the man at the hospital fit the description of one of the men seen in the doorbell video footage. Soon after, police said another man, later identified as Moreno, arrived at the hospital with a face injury. Police said Moreno told officers he worked for a moving company and was on a job at the site of the shooting. Moreno said he saw someone outside a nearby residence he knew to harbor ill will toward him, according to the report. He said a car driven by an unknown woman parked near him and two men got out, including the man who was shot, who Moreno said proceeded to threaten and pistol whip him in the face with a gun. Moreno said the mans gun fell out of his hand when that happened, and Moreno grabbed his own gun. When the man reached for his gun, Moreno said he shot the man twice, police said. After Moreno was cleared from the hospital, police said he was taken to the College Station Police Department for further questioning. Police said Moreno told them he believed he committed a crime and that he hid both guns behind a tree as he fled the scene. Police said they were able to retrieve the guns and found the one Moreno used to shoot the man was stolen. Police said that Moreno said it was his gun. In addition, police have obtained a warrant for a 20-year-old from Bryan who is wanted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, which police said is a second-degree felony punishable by confinement not more than 20 years or less than 2 years and a fine not to exceed $10,000. Police are also seeking three people for questioning related to the incident. This remains an ongoing investigation. College Station police are asking anyone with information related to this incident to call 979-764-3600. WASHINGTON (AP) The Biden administration on Tuesday approved two massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to help them defend against Iran. The more than $5 billion in missile defense and related sales follow President Joe Bidens visit to the Middle East last month, during which he met with numerous regional leaders in Saudi Arabia. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been hit in recent months with rocket attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi rebel movement in Yemen. Although Tuesdays approvals are for defensive weapons, they may be questioned by lawmakers who had supported Bidens decision last year to cut Saudi Arabia and the UAE off from major purchases of offensive U.S. arms because of their involvement in the war in Yemen. The new sales include $3 billion for Patriot missiles for Saudi Arabia specifically designed to protect itself from rocket attacks by the Houthis, and $2.2 billion for high-altitude missile defense for the UAE. The proposed sale will improve the Kingdom of Saudi Arabias capability to meet current and future threats by replenishing its dwindling stock of PATRIOT GEM-T missiles, the State Department said in its notice informing Congress of the sale. These missiles are used to defend the Kingdom of Saudi Arabias borders against persistent Houthi cross-border unmanned aerial system and ballistic missile attacks on civilian sites and critical infrastructure in Saudi Arabia," the department said. For UAE, the department said the sale would support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of an important regional partner. The UAE is a vital U.S. partner for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East. Early in his administration Biden had pledged to cut off or cut back weapons sales to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE because of their actions in Yemen. 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United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe Even though he is 67, Zhang Heshan still climbs the mountain near his village every morning, which he has done since childhood. He is looking for rubbish, weeds and anything else that could pose a threat to a section of the Great Wall near his hometown. It takes Zhang five hours to conduct an inspection of this part of the wall, which spans 6 kilometers, includes 23 watchtowers and is located about 40 kilometers from Qinhuangdao, Hebei province. "The Great Wall is a precious legacy left by our ancestors. Only by protecting its integrity can we enable future generations to experience its culture and spirit in the same way that we do," he said. Zhang added that he volunteered for the protection efforts before becoming one of about 6,000 official rangers for arguably China's best-known landmark. With the nation stepping up efforts to protect cultural relics over the past decade, Zhang has won greater recognition for his work. The government also provides him with an annual subsidy of 6,000 yuan ($888) and he is regularly invited to speak at meetings called to discuss protecting and exploring the Great Wall. Preserving the wall, which has a total length of more than 21,000 km and stands as a symbol of the Chinese nation, has been prioritized by policymakers led by President Xi Jinping, who has made cultural heritage protection a centerpiece of his domestic agenda over the past decade. Xi has spearheaded a national campaign during the past 10 years to boost the conservation and exploration of China's cultural heritage with his visits to different domestic sites on numerous fact-finding trips. Liu Qingzhu, an archaeology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Xi has taken the protection of cultural heritage to an unprecedented level since being elected general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee in November 2012. "Under President Xi, cultural heritage protection has truly become a major issue for the nation," he said. Liu added that the president has visited the nation's major cultural heritage sites, where he has called for heightened attention and efforts to safeguard cultural relics. Greater emphasis Over the past decade, Xi has issued more than 100 important instructions on protecting cultural relics. He has also presided over a series of top leadership meetings called to deliberate on key policy documents aimed at safeguarding cultural heritage. "Historic culture is the soul of a city, and we must protect the historic and cultural heritage of a city in the same way that we cherish our own lives," Xi told officials in Beijing during a fact-finding trip in 2014. He highlighted the need for the city, one of the world's ancient capitals, to ensure the sound preservation of its rich cultural heritage during the urban development process. As part of the city's overall plan up to 2035, which was issued in 2016, the capital will no longer tear down its old urban areas and hutong, or alleyways, and give greater priority to the preservation and rejuvenation of ancient towns. In February, Li Qun, head of the National Cultural Heritage Administration, wrote in an article that China has placed unprecedented policy emphasis on boosting the protection and use of cultural relics and enabling various sides to play a part in conserving cultural heritage. He said the heightened policy emphasis has helped the nation better learn about the origins, development and achievements of Chinese civilization and the contributions made by the nation to humankind. According to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, the number of museums in China reached 6,183 this year, a rise of 60 percent on the total in 2012. The number of cultural heritage items placed under State protection has more than doubled since 2012, with the nation adding eight world cultural heritage sites during this period. The central government has allocated funding of more than 100 billion yuan over the past decade as part of broader efforts to improve cultural heritage protection. China now boasts nearly 767,000 immovable cultural heritage sites, 56 world cultural heritage venues and 36 national archaeological parks. Fan Jinshi, an 81-year-old archaeologist who has devoted her life's work to studying the ancient Dunhuang culture, has met with President Xi five times. The president first greeted her in 2013 at a meeting honoring role models, where he immediately recognized Fan and described her as an expert on Dunhuang cultural studies. Dunhuang, home to the Mogao Grottoes UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gansu, was the first stop on Xi's four-day trip to the province in August 2019, when he visited an exhibition of cultural relics and academic works, and presided over a symposium with experts from the Dunhuang Academy. He encouraged scholars, including Fan, to explore the philosophy, humanistic spirit, values and ethnic codes of Dunhuang culture and reveal the cultural spirit of the Chinese nation. In an interview with People's Daily, Fan said researchers at the Dunhuang Academy were overjoyed by Xi's visit. The president told them that preserving cultural relics in Dunhuang and researching them would require lifelong efforts, and he hoped the researchers would view their work as a long-term career. Xu Subin, deputy director of the International Research Center for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation at Tianjin University, said the nation is now among the leading countries in terms of the emphasis it places on preserving cultural heritage. The significance given to this issue by the top leadership has boosted the morale of those involved in safeguarding and researching cultural heritage, she said. Reliving the past One of the key messages delivered by Xi during his visits to cultural heritage sites was the need to explore the long history of the Chinese nation and the depth of its culture through relics. In 2017, he visited a cultural museum in Hepu county, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, where he inspected cultural relics, including ancient bronze items, pottery and glasses unearthed from a Han Dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) tomb. Xi said the exhibition, themed on the ancient maritime Silk Road, was a telling example of history and culture. He stressed that efforts must be made to give cultural relics, history and culture "a voice", and that historical research and inheritance should be strengthened. During a visit in 2019 to Jiayu Pass, the first fortress at the western end of the Great Wall in Gansu, Xi said the wall is a key symbol of the Chinese nation and its civilization. He called for steps to be taken to examine the cultural value of the wall and to better protect its heritage to advance the national spirit. To better protect one of China's most-prized assets, a grand plan to develop a national cultural park for the Great Wall was issued in December 2019, with the aim of integrating cultural relics and resources in the 15 provincial areas along the wall. Zhang, the ranger, said he has been invited to speak at a number of symposiums on establishing the park. To better educate the public about the wall, Zhang gives details of his observations during patrols via livestreaming platforms and short videos. He now has 392,000 fans on the short-video platform Douyin. Zhang said he is optimistic about the national cultural park, adding, "It will inevitably result in a better transportation network for our village, and perhaps some job opportunities with the development of scenic spots and the influx of tourists." Building confidence Experts said one of the reasons Xi has championed China's heritage protection over the past decade is to bolster the nation's cultural confidence. Xu, from Tianjin University, said, "President Xi has underscored cultural heritage protection to protect China's cultural genes. "Without such protection, there will be no material evidence of a civilization that has existed for 5,000 years." Liu, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Xi has emphasized the combination of Marxism and China's traditional culture, and also the close links between socialism with Chinese characteristics and the nation's civilization. He added that the president has given cultural protection a political perspective and has associated such efforts with China's cultural confidence. "The more efforts are made to explore China's fine traditional culture and historic heritage, the more confident the nation will be in its past and future," Liu said. A threat actor is said to have "highly likely" exploited a security flaw in an outdated Atlassian Confluence server to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor against an unnamed organization in the research and technical services sector. The attack, which transpired over a seven-day-period during the end of May, has been attributed to a threat activity cluster tracked by cybersecurity firm Deepwatch as TAC-040. "The evidence indicates that the threat actor executed malicious commands with a parent process of tomcat9.exe in Atlassian's Confluence directory," the company said. "After the initial compromise, the threat actor ran various commands to enumerate the local system, network, and Active Directory environment." The Atlassian vulnerability suspected to have been exploited is CVE-2022-26134, an Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection flaw that paves the way for arbitrary code execution on a Confluence Server or Data Center instance. Following reports of active exploitation in real-world attacks, the issue was addressed by the Australian company on June 4, 2022. But given the absence of forensic artifacts, Deepwatch theorized the breach could have alternatively entailed the exploitation of the Spring4Shell vulnerability (CVE-2022-22965) to gain initial access to the Confluence web application. Not much is known about TAC-040 other than the fact that the adversarial collective's goals could be espionage-related, although the possibility that the group could have acted out of financial gain hasn't been ruled out, citing the presence of a loader for an XMRig crypto miner on the system. While there is no evidence that the miner was executed in this incident, the Monero address owned by the threat actors has netted at least 652 XMR ($106,000) by hijacking the computing resources of other systems to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. The attack chain is also notable for the deployment of a previously undocumented implant called Ljl Backdoor on the compromised server. Roughly 700MB of archived data is estimated to have been exfiltrated before the server was taken offline by the victim, according to an analysis of the network logs. The malware, for its part, is a fully-featured trojan virus designed to gather files and user accounts, load arbitrary .NET payloads, and amass system information as well as the victim's geographic location. "The victim denied the threat actor the ability to laterally move within the environment by taking the server offline, potentially preventing the exfiltration of additional sensitive data and restricting the threat actor(s) ability to conduct further malicious activities," the researchers said. Brothers and sisters in blue, fellow soldiers and friends gathered Wednesday morning to say farewell to Grand Island police officer Chris Marcello, described during the memorial service as a leader, father, brother, husband, anchor, rock and teddy bear. About 1,000 people, many in uniform and all wearing solemn expressions, attended Marcellos funeral at Third City Christian Church. The father of four died of natural causes on July 27 at the age of 42. Michael Belleci, who served with Marcello in both the Nebraska National Guard and the Grand Island Police Department, described Marcello as the greatest man I ever knew. Marcello leaves behind his wife, Tami, and four children. The children are Vincent, 14, Mia, 13, Ophelia, 8, and Victor, 6. Belleci wanted the children to know that you have so many men in this room, so many men that are only a phone call away. We will be there for your special days, your highs and lows, your graduations, your birthdays, your weddings and the day when you have children. Pastor Scott Jones officiated. The crowd was large enough that some attendees parked across the street at Westridge Middle School. The Grand Island Fire Departments huge American flag flew outside the church, held up by aerial ladders. As the mourners headed for Hastings Parkview Cemetery, some people lined the route to pay their respects. Law enforcement officers in uniform cordoned off the route along Highway 281. Fire trucks were also parked along the route in somber salute. The entire Grand Island Police Department attended the memorial service. The Sheriffs Department and Nebraska State Patrol volunteered to handle all calls so that the entire department could attend, said GIPD Capt. Jim Duering. And that was awesome. I cant say enough about it. Marcellos badge number, 460, has been permanently retired. The eight pallbearers included five men who served with Marcello in the Nebraska National Guard. They were together for 18 months in Iraq and 12 months in Afghanistan as members of Alpha Troop 1/134th Cavalry Squadron. The other pallbearers included Marcellos brother, Anthony, who lives in Arizona; Grand Island police officer Jose Rodriguez and Casey Almquist, who is a Grand Island contractor. Belleci was one of the pallbearers who served with Marcello overseas. Chris was a man that showed us all how to be men. And by being a man, I refer to the way that he was always there for his friends, Belleci said. He was there to work on your house. He was there to help you move. He was there to help you figure out how to have gatherings that just brought people together. He was there when you were going through a life event and needed someone to tell you that youll figure it out, its going to be OK. And then it ended up working out just as he had predicted, Belleci said. Marcello was there for our wives and kids when they needed help, too, Belleci said. Chris friends and family describe him using words like glue, rock, anchor and the center of gravity. See, Chris was not measured by the friends he made, but by the way he made his friends better for knowing him. The other speaker, Sgt. Jason Allan, worked with Marcello on a number of assignments, including the departments tactical response team. Marcellos leadership and team mentality brought us together, Allan said. Chris goal was to make everyone feel like part of the team. He was an expert at reaching out to new officers, inviting them to shift gatherings or bringing them in on the inside joke of the day. On duty he would take officers under his wing to guide them, to learn the job and what it truly meant to be a police officer, Allan said. His gift to the department every year was Coptoberfest, a day he chose in October to donate as much valued free time and his own money to provide a barbecue feast for everyone in the department, Allan said. To prepare for those gathering, Marcello would often wake up at 4 a.m. and start smoking meat, Allan said. Marcello would stay until midnight to make sure every officer working the night shift got fed. He understood the need for brotherhood, and he did what he could to provide the catalyst to bring everybody together. On more than one occasion he told me that his mission was to make Coptoberfest something that everyone would look forward to every year a tradition that would bring officers together with their families and to continue to build that bond, Allan said. Marcello held everyone around him accountable because he understood the seriousness of police work. In the publics eye, Chris was always the consummate professional. He took his job and his responsibilities seriously, but he never took himself too seriously, Allan said. Behind the scenes, Marcello let his hair down in a figurative sense and lowered the stress level of his fellow officers by making them laugh. While he wanted everyone to understand the professionalism the job requires, he always wanted them to know its OK to laugh. Chris was often the first to laugh at himself when things didnt go his way, Allan said. With all the things that Chris was great at, there was one thing that he was never able to master. He seemed to be incapable of eating popcorn like a civilized human. I witnessed him attack many bags of popcorn, with most of it ending up on his clothes, beard and all over the floor, like the bottom fell out of the bag. He embraced it and would laugh whenever someone would mention it. Allan challenged everyone in the police department to continue where Chris left off to continue his work to build a team, to serve the community and most importantly serve your family. Allan told the Marcello family that they will always be a part of the law enforcement family, and we will continue to support you in every way we can. At the beginning of his talk, Belleci introduced himself by name. But if you know me well enough, I also go by the name of Chris Marcello. See, for as long as I can remember Ive had the privilege of being confused with Chris. Some say its the way we stand or walk, maybe our shoulders, our girlish figures or our inability to grow a full head of hair. Either way, its been the honor of my lifetime to be confused with one of the best men that God ever created, Belleci said. Chris was the father we all aspired to be, Belleci said. From the day his first child was born, I saw something change in Chris. He changed his life goals to simply being a great dad. That desire grew only stronger as the three other children arrived. Marcello became a gymnast dad, a Boy Scout dad, a dance dad and an everything-in-between dad, Belleci said. He also made his nephews and nieces feel loved from every direction they came at him, Belleci said. The children of many GIPD officers referred to him as Uncle Chris. At numerous family activities, Chris made sure that every child that knew him felt loved, Belleci said. Belleci first met Marcello 20 years ago, in the military. Anybody who knew Marcello could tell you that he was so much more than a leader of soldiers. He was our father, our brother, our equal, our guide and our lead scout, Belleci said. I cannot tell you how many times people way above his pay grade were astonished at the knowledge and skills that Chris possessed when it came to the military. Later in their friendship, both men grew in their desire to serve our communities and become police officers, Belleci said. Marcello followed Belleci into the Grand Island Police Department. And just as I knew he would, he became my brother in blue and mentor there as well, he said. The officers had each others back every step of the way, Belleci said. I always felt better for knowing that he was beside me on calls, just like we were on a mission in battle. Many times, driving back from National Guard drill weekends, the two men talked about whether or not we did enough as leaders and big brothers. Belleci was stunned the first time he met Marcellos future wife, Tami, just before the men left for Iraq in 2005. I remember thinking how in Gods graces did he pull that off? And I came to the conclusion that it must have been his big heart and personality mainly the way he made Tami laugh and feel safe. After they got married, the task of running the Marcello family was not a one-man show by any means. Tami was right there helping steer the ship the whole way, said Belleci, who is now a Lincoln police officer. They were funny and loving and picked up on each others needs and wants every facet of the way, Belleci said. When I think about the love that Tami and Chris shared, it can only be described as a love that made people jealous the kind of real love that had all the right ingredients and made people want to duplicate it. Near the end of his talk, Belleci said that Marcello is not really gone, because Chris gave us all a piece of him. To Tami Marcello, Belleci said even though we cannot take the place of Chris, we are all here for you. We are here for the motorcycle rides, were here for the Halloween parties, were here for the barbecues and were here to fix things in the house and be there for the kids. And we are all here, especially me, to give you those Chris hugs when you need them. KEARNEY Two former female patients of Kearney psychiatrist Rey de los Angeles say he had sexual contact with them in the 1990s. The womens accusations came on the second day of trial in Buffalo County Court for de los Angeles, 77, charged with one count of misdemeanor third-degree sexual assault of a third former female patient at his office on Aug. 25, 2021. The charge alleges he had sexual contact with the woman without consent that didnt cause serious personal injury. de los Angeles is a board certified psychiatrist with certification in addiction and forensic medicine and provides professional psychiatric services, care and treatment, individual and family. He also had a practice in Grand Island; however, its unclear if that office is still open. State law allowed both womens testimony into record because it was evidence of other sexual misconduct in similar sexual assault crimes. Tuesday, a Sarpy County woman said she was a client of de los Angeles and a female counselor in their Grand Island office for several years until 1999. The woman met with de los Angeles monthly, and the other counselor once or twice a week. On occasion she said de los Angeles made inappropriate comments to her during their sessions about her hair, clothing and appearance. Once, he asked her if she were sexually assaulted and got pregnant, if she would keep the baby. During one evening session when she was 19, the woman was in de los Angeles office and twice he tried to kiss and grope her. The woman claimed he pulled her close into him at his desk and touched her breast. I was like, no, and pulled away, the woman told jurors. The woman said de los Angeles took her to a back room of the office, where he again touched her breasts and buttocks over her clothing and kissed her with tongue. The woman quickly left the office and reported the incident to law enforcement. Later, the woman recorded a phone conversation with de los Angeles where she asked him why he made advances on her. I felt like I was responsible, the woman told jurors. I didnt know why I was feeling guilty about it. I had a lot of internal questions. I asked him why he did what he did. When the woman questioned de los Angeles about his actions, He mostly apologized for the circumstance. de los Angeles asked the woman to meet him at his Kearney office to discuss the matter, but she declined. de los Angeles was never prosecuted in Hall County for the womans allegations. The woman reported the incident to the Nebraska Department of Licensing in 2000, and she gave them a copy of the phone conversation. The investigation was later closed. A Kearney woman testified she was allegedly sexually assaulted by de los Angeles in the fall of 1991 while she was a nurse at Richard Young Hospital in Kearney. de los Angeles had just started at the facility, and the woman often worked with him. New to Kearney, the woman said de los Angeles asked her to show him around the town. One night after work he picked her up at her house in his Mercedes. de los Angeles said he had to go to his hotel, where he was living at the time, to change his clothes and retrieve his pager. The two went to the hotel, where the woman said she would wait for him in the car. de los Angeles convinced her to come to his room. The woman sat in a chair as de los Angeles gave her a glass of wine, put in a movie and went to the bathroom to change his clothes. I thought we were only going to be there a short period of time, she told jurors. When de los Angeles came out of the bathroom, the woman said he was only wearing his underwear. The woman claimed de los Angeles invited her over to the bed where he sat. He began touching her inappropriately on her arm, breast, leg and vagina. I wasnt real comfortable with that, she said, and she told de los Angeles, No. The woman said de los Angeles told her she was beautiful and said something about his race. He then touched her breasts and vagina under her clothes, and he took her hand and put it on his penis. Again, she claimed to say, No, and pulled away. The woman said she couldnt remember whether she had sex with de los Angeles, if they went to dinner afterwards or if he took her home. I cant remember a lot of it. I feel like I was traumatized, she said. Back at Richard Young, the woman told de los Angeles she didnt want to see him anymore after he was rude to her and making sarcastic, gross comments to her in front of others. I felt like dirt on the floor. Like I didnt matter and was nothing. The woman didnt report the incident to police but filed a sexual harassment complaint with Richard Young human resources. Back then, women, if they went out on any kind of a date, or any kind of a connection, the women were always blamed for being promiscuous. And especially since he was a doctor she said. The woman also didnt tell anyone else about the sexual assault because she was embarrassed. It wasnt until she saw media reports about the Aug. 25, 2021, allegations that the woman decided to come forward. Defense attorney Aaron Bishop of Kearney questioned the woman about a journal she kept in the 1990s and why it didnt mention the alleged sexual assault. He also questioned how many times the woman went out with de los Angeles, what they did and why she went with him to his hotel room if she only wanted to stay in his car. The woman didnt write about the hotel incident because she didnt want to remember. He was a doctor, he was flashy, had a Mercedes. Maybe I did want to go out with him once as a friend, she said while overexaggerating the word friend. I had never gone out with a doctor before. Several times the woman couldnt recall the past. Appearing agitated at Bishop, she said, This was 31 years ago. Kearney Police Department investigator Cody Bolte was given the Aug. 25, 2021, victims case, and on Aug. 30 he went to de los Angeles office. There the psychiatrist showed the officer his file on the woman that said her session on Aug. 25 lasted 1 1/2 hours. Bolte asked de los Angeles whether he touched the woman inappropriately, with his hands under her shirt. de los Angeles replied, Im not sure. I dont know if Ive ever gotten that far, Bolte said, reading from his reports. de los Angeles claimed the woman was the one making advances toward him, and when she sat on his lap, it was because she lost her balance as she left the office, and de los Angeles was trying to prevent her from falling. Instead, she fell into his lap. de los Angeles admitted hugging the woman to Bolte, but he said it was a simple hug. The psychiatrist also told Bolte the woman lifted her shirt in the back to show de los Angeles a scar on her lower back, claiming there was something wrong with her skin. When Bolte asked de los Angeles if he had put his hands down the womans pants and touched her buttocks, he replied, I dont think anything of that nature happened. Bolte also asked de los Angeles about a camera the psychiatrist had in his office lobby that was in plain sight. Bolte said he never received a clear answer from de los Angeles if the camera worked, but at one point de los Angeles said he could review it on his cellphone. During a forensic review of de los Angeles phone, no video records were found of the womans Aug. 25 office visit. On Sept. 2, 2021, police served a search warrant at de los Angeles office, where they seized the womans medical file and other record. When Bolte read the womans file, he found a progress note and two additional pages of handwritten notes outlining the womans Aug. 25 visit. Bolte said de los Angeles notes didnt appear in the womans medical file until Sept. 2 when the search warrant was served. In de los Angeles notes, Bolte read the woman went to his office at 9 a.m. on Aug. 25 and mostly talked about her boyfriend and their relationship. The psychiatrist wrote her a prescription and warned her of the consequences if she didnt take it as directed. As the woman left, de los Angeles notes said she gave him a tight hug, and she wouldnt let go until he walked to the door. The two then walked outside, where she looked at his pickup. They returned to the office, and de los Angeles penned the woman got close to him and pushed her breasts against him. She then showed him a surgical scar where she had pain, and part of her buttocks was showing. The woman, de los Angeles wrote, told him to feel her lower back, including her buttocks, where she was having spasms. de los Angeles wrote the woman didnt tell him to stop with his innocent touches, and he claimed the woman was trying to blackmail him. In other testimony Tuesday: - Amy Martin, a Medicap pharmacy technician in Kearney, and Crystle McCarty testified about de los Angeles alleged victim coming into the pharmacy with a prescription on Aug. 25, 2021. Martin said the woman handed her the prescriptions but asked her not to fill them because they werent correct. I dont want to get in trouble, Martin testified the woman said. Something happened, and I dont want to have these. Both pharmacy employees said the woman was visibly upset, crying and shaking. The woman left the pharmacy, went outside and got into a vehicle with her mother, who coincidentally was also at the pharmacy at the same time. McCarty followed the woman outside, where she and the womans mother convinced her to report the alleged assault to police. Kolby Nash, a 13-year-old from Weeping Water, just might be the catfish whisperer. He began casting his line at 3 years old, pulling keepers from his neighborhood creek. Today, he knows all the best fishing spots in town the parts of the pond that catch the big ones and he uses his array of state-of-the-art poles to reel them in. But Kolby's secret, more than his equipment and decade of experience, is his tried-and-true fish bait: a sticky red concoction that he mixes by hand in his kitchen. Known as Catfish Kolby by the locals, he began selling his bait at local gas stations three years ago. It started with a couple of jars. Then dozens. Then hundreds. Now, his product is in 30 stores in three states, including the Lincoln Scheels. Why is Catfish Kolbys Cut Bait making such a sudden splash? The boy puts it simply. Cuz it works, he said. The young fisherman had no intention of starting a business when he created his first jar. When he was 10, Kolby was enjoying a routine afternoon casting and catching when he realized he was out of bait. So, he went home and scoured the cabinets for ingredients he knew the fish would find tasty, combining them in a mixing bowl. The first go round, not much happened. But the hiccup didnt deter Kolby. The next day, he added a few ingredients to the original recipe. And when he went back to the pond with his father, Brandon Nash, something strange happened. As fast as we could put it on him and his friend's hook, we were pulling catfish off, Brandon Nash said. Catfish Kolby had found the recipe for success. One of Brandon Nashs friends suggested the young boy sell the product at the Weeping Water Express Lane. The five jars he provided sold out in an hour. They swung by the next day to deliver more, and those sold out. Local fishermen began buzzing about the 10-year-old boy from town with the magic bait so much so that other stores in the area began to call the phone number printed on the back of Kolbys jars. Louisville State Recreation Area, Wolf Tackle Shop, Caseys General Store and Branched Oak Marina all picked up the product. Last year, Catfish Kolby sold close to 3,000 jars. Even with his Scheels deal, his son doesnt realize what he's building, Brandon Nash said. He doesn't understand how big that is being 13, Brandon Nash said. I don't think hell ever understand that until he's older. The teens entrepreneurial venture has earned him local celebrity status. He has 3,000 followers on Facebook and gets recognized around town. Strangers point at the boy, who used to have a distinct 14-inch mullet, and say, "Thats Catfish Kolby!" With the mullet gone he donated it to Wigs for Kids he gets recognized less frequently. But kids around town still wear Catfish Kolby gear, and his loyal fans love to support his business. But Kolby doesnt want to be famous. He just wants to go fishing. It weirds him out that people know who he is, and he doesnt know who they are, Brandon Nash said. His neighbor and business advisor, Brittany Westover, said Kolby is a hardworking, humble teen. He's the kid that is always looking out for other kids, always caring about other people and how they're feeling, Westover said. Hes an all-around great, unique kid. She and her husband are business owners themselves and have given the Nashes advice as theyve taken on the growing venture. The family friends have helped them learn how to market their product and expand into other stores, but the product works so well it hasnt taken much convincing, she said. Shes seen Catfish Kolby transform from a few jars at a roadside shop into an established business. The Nashes all work together to package and ship the jars. Sometimes Kolby enlists a few friends in exchange for some Catfish Kolby gear. The growth so far has been incredible, Westover said. I don't see it slowing down. When it comes to his newfound success, Westover said there is no one more deserving than outdoorsy, down-to-earth Kolby Nash. I don't know another 13 year old that works as hard as he does, she said. Jenni Benson, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, has been travelling through Nebraska, speaking with educators. Tuesday she visited with newly-hired teachers at Northwest Public Schools. Grand Island Public Schools new hires had breakfast with Benson yesterday. According to its website, Nebraska State Education Association is a member-directed professional union representing 28,000 public school teachers, higher education faculty and other education professionals across the state. There is plenty to talk about. We have so many things that are in silos in the world, she said.You think about this subject in a silo, or an event. We need to let (those subjects) out of the silo(s). We need to find some common ground. Schools already house plenty of common ground, in the form of students. A kindergartener in Hyannis is the same as a kindergartener in Grand Island as far as age and development, Benson said. Still, freedom for teachers to creatively teach is important, she said. We cant say every kid is going to learn (a certain) way. We have to be able to say, how do we meet the needs of kids, and move forward? You cant be robotic, Benson added. You cant just look at a situation and be like, OK, Im never going to tell about my family (or) never going to bring in stories from other places. Honesty in education and the ability to say, there are great things happening culturally, with our families. We want every child to see themselves in school. Every kid matters. Likely one of the topics discussed at Bensons visits will be remedying the teacher shortage and how to better teachers lives. I think people forget that teachers are human beings who have their own families who have their own kids, Benson said. Were giving high school teachers, 150 kids a year, to make sure that were meeting their needs or even 25, (for elementary classes). According to Nebraska Department of Education, accredited schools (all public and most private) cannot exceed a teacher-to-student ratio of 25:1. The requirement is outlined in NDEs accreditation requirements under Rule 10. Teachers have little downtime. The three-month summer vacation is a misconception Benson said. They also have a more complicated path to having days off than many jobs, Benson added. If you think of a normal work life when you leave work because youre ill, youre not going to have to typically have a (substitute teacher) plan and do all those things. Benson said having quality communication between administrators and teachers can help lighten teachers loads. I work with 20,000 educators who all have administrators. We need to remind them of that, and we also I need to remind folks that administrators are dealing with a great deal of things, Benson said. NSEA makes a point to strive for effective communication at all levels. She said the organization works closely with administrators and school board associations. We also need to listen to whats happening, what our educators are saying, she said. If theyre telling their stories, and theyre saying, here are the things that Im missing the resources I needmental health services, behavioral services, safety issuesthey cant just be brushed under the rug. (NSEA) honestly believes that, you cant keep cutting resources and expecting more, but not provide support for educators and for families and kids. Schools are the hub of the community. Expert Viewpoint How a Poor District in NY Leveled the Playing Field with Better Communications [and Lightened the Load for School Staff] As the poorest school district in Long Island, N.Y. one of the wealthiest suburbs in the U.S. our district faces some unique challenges. Ninety-five percent of our families live below the poverty line, our entire district is eligible for free lunch through the community eligibility provision, and two of our schools have been identified for improvement. Fortunately, our team never backs down from a challenge. In assessing the current situation and our options, we saw an opportunity to strengthen our local and parental ties. We made reciprocal community and family engagement a top priority. We knew that achieving this goal would require a unified school-to-home communication platform that was safe, secure, and engaging. We were previously using another platform to send messages to families, but we werent getting much response back. Our middle and high schools werent using a communication platform at all, which basically forced teachers, students, and parents to share their cell phone numbers to communicate. We knew this was a failed approach and that something needed to be done. Our intermediate schools were using yet a different app, but that solution wasnt in compliance with the states student and privacy law. In effect since 2014, the New York State Education Law 2-d (also known as EdLaw 2-d) focuses on the privacy and security of personally identifiable information (PII) of students, classroom teachers and principals. It says New York education agencies must publish a parents bill of rights for data privacy and security, and that bill of rights must be included with every contract with a third-party contractor that receives PII. Closing the Disconnect When a colleague mentioned the ParentSquare school-home platform as a possible option for the district, I wanted to learn more about it. She worked for a district with a similar demographic makeup to ours, which serves a student body thats 60 percent Hispanic. A lot of our families are Spanish speaking, and while those students can communicate in school, were a highly monolingual staff. Theres a big disconnect with the families. If we wanted to send out a message using our previous communications solution, for instance, we had to create that message in English and then pay four different translators a stipend to translate it on demand for us. Then, a district translator would have to do the reverse when a report or message came back to the district in Spanish. It was a whole process. We decided to move forward with the implementation of our new school-home communications platform using a grant from our Boards of Cooperative Educational Services consortium in February 2021. BOCES did the EdLaw 2-d compliance work for us, effectively endorsing the platform as one that complied with our states privacy standard. This is critical because as a district privacy officer, I have to make sure that we have an agreement between my district and the company saying we are compliant with EdLaw 2-d. When I buy through BOCES, it acts as the middleman and has that EdLaw 2-d contract nailed down for us. No More Stuffing Envelopes Serving a large number of transient families, we were also spending a lot of time stuffing and addressing envelopes, adding postage, and mailing out correspondence, only to have roughly a quarter of those letters returned. Today, were sending bus passes, report cards, progress reports and other correspondence right through the Secure Documents feature of our ParentSquare communications platform a method that also helps ensure that parents actually receive the documents. This is useful for building administrators, and for me. My dashboard tells me who opened what, and when, and I can see that they have the app on their phone, and that they viewed it. We now know which parents that we are and arent reaching, versus waiting for 25 percent of our mailed correspondence to come back to us days or weeks later. Being a district thats in need of improvement, we now have a powerful technology tool that helps us broadcast our accomplishments (i.e., a high school valedictorian who has earned 33 college credits) and investments (brand new furniture for classrooms) to parents and stakeholders in the community. We can use this sharing to change the narrative and show that its entirely possible to improve if students, staff, and families are involved and working toward common goals. We wear a lot of hats in our district, and having a tool that can save us time and just let us move on to the next thing is priceless. Leveling the Playing Field Not everyone works 9 to 5, and not every student lives with their parents. With our communications platform, we can reach the dad who has a question at midnight or the mom whose childs attendance record has suddenly tanked. With our platform, we not only have two-way communications with our families, but were also meeting them where they are. Theres a lot that goes into running a district like ours; we have to do a lot of anticipating and staying out in front of things. Our school-home communications platform levels the playing field for us. A national comprehensive research program, launched in 2002, to trace the origins of Chinese civilization, has led to the excavations and studies of key sites that are about 3,500 to 5,500 years old. It has revealed a host of secrets about ancient China, including how early civilizations were formed and how they merged to create unity in diversity. China Daily speaks to experts working at these sites to decode their recent discoveries. A mystic aura, lost temples and obscure belief systems. Many unknowns remain sleeping underground in this archaeological site in Northeast China, but scholars' efforts in past decades may provide the key to decode a puzzle from the earliest days of Chinese civilization. In 1983, the groundbreaking discovery of a life-size head sculpture of a goddess at the Niuheliang archaeological site, which dates back 5,000 to 5,500 years, in Chaoyang city, Liaoning province, stunned people both at home and abroad. Despite some missing parts, the sculpture, found in the ruins of a temple, is beguiling: She has a straight fringe and sideburns, high cheekbones, a wide mouth and round ears. The corners of her eyes are raised upward, and her sparkling eyes-her most impressive feature-are made from round stones as lucent as jade. The face had originally been painted red, though it has faded over time. It presents the image of a fit, trim, gentle, though strong-minded, figure and the late archaeologist Su Bingqi (1909-97), an iconic figure in the field, described her as nothing less than "the foremother of the Chinese nation". The discovery at the Niuheliang site shook a long-standing, widely held idea that Chinese civilization developed in the Central China Plains, along the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Starting with Niuheliang, later archaeological findings across the country seemed to gradually support Su's argument that Chinese civilization was inclusive and cohesive when it was formed, like numerous tributaries merging into one great river. "Something worth noting about Niuheliang was its high level of social stratification and the hierarchal system embodied in both the architectural layout of ritual sites and the use of jade," says Guo Dashun, the honorary director of Liaoning Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. "In later generations, both found their inheritance in the core Confucian concept of li (ritual), which lasted throughout ancient Chinese history." The sacrificial altar and rubble mound tombs are located in the south of the site, and the goddess temple is at its northern end. The temple is rectangular, and the altar is round and three-tiered. The whole layout is symmetrical with a central axis. In the graveyard, major tombs were located at the center of the northern area, with smaller ones distributed to the south, suggesting the concentration of power, according to Guo, who led excavations in Niuheliang in the 1980s. Nonetheless, such structures highlighting rituals were common later in Chinese history. Guo notes that similar practices were also seen in the city planning of ancient capitals like Chang'an of the Tang Dynasty (618-907)-now Xi'an of Shaanxi province-and Beijing's Temple of Heaven and Imperial Ancestral Temple, both built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). "It indicates the continuity of culture," Guo says. "The altar, the temple and the tombs altogether formed a comprehensive belief system of the heaven, the earth and our ancestors." Niuheliang, apparently, was a center of belief. High-level tombs were buried with only jade items-no painted pottery-that were specifically designed for pursuing a spiritual life. In the eyes of archaeologists, the quality and quantity of these accessories revealed the high social status of the owners. With diversified shapes, what fascinates modern people most about the jadeware is those items in the shape of dragons, the representative totem of traditional Chinese culture, conveying a sign of power and auspice. Its chubby shape was believed to be based on the figures of the swine or the bear. Heavy rains and drainage issues forced Marions Robins Nest Learning Center to close early Thursday, as several inches of water flooded classrooms and hallways in one of the centers two buildings. Staff members telephoned parents asking them to pick up their children as others worked to mitigate the water as quickly as possible. Director Jena Parson said the center on South Virginia Avenue is in a part of Marion prone to flash flooding, but this instance is particularly severe, with several inches of water in some classrooms. Our facility is closed for the afternoon, possibly longer due to the entire building being flooded, she said, adding that staff members were moving furniture and other items off of the floor as well as using a variety of towels, rags, mops and wet/dry vacuums to prevent the spread of water. A restoration company began assisting with cleanup Thursday afternoon. Theyll do whatever they can to try to get our building back open as soon as possible." Parson said she was unsure if the facility would be open for children on Friday and expressed frustration with the situation. We understand that theres a flash flood and there are a lot of areas that are experiencing that, but we do have a drainage issue on Virginia Street that has caused this same issue before, she said. The flooding is coming in our walls and through our hallways. Parson indicated she left a telephone message for city administrators, but did not receive a return call. City of Marion Chief of Staff Cody Moake said the problem stems from too much rain over a short period of time. From what I can tell, we had 4 to 5 inches of rain in about two hours, he said. Marion was built in a bowl of sorts and we get these issues from time to time. Its affecting all parts of town and it is nothing too specific to that area. Moake said a number of city streets were closed because of the flooding and he indicated that Robins Nests property is close to a Federal Emergency Management Agency-designated floodway, which can overflow. This is a once-in-10-year rain and its presenting some challenges, he said. Parson said parents had to wade through standing water to pick up their children when the decision was made to close the facility. Health and safety is first and foremost which is why we called our families to get their children. We want our children to be safe, she said. Obviously, we are going to work to get the water out of the building as soon as possible so three is not any long-term damage. Southern Illinois University Carbondale is hosting a public employment fair on Aug. 17, inviting community members to apply for a variety of full-time, entry-level positions where they can obtain university benefits and perks. University human resources staff will be on hand to provide information about available positions and to assist with uploading documents and completing applications, simplifying the process. More than 125 jobs are available in culinary, clerical, building services, accounting services, customer service, information technology and more areas. Come prepared The job fair will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Student Center Ballrooms. Free parking will be available for participants during the fair on Lot 13, the metered parking lot located across from the Student Center. Those attending should bring required documents with them in order to complete and submit their applications: Official college transcripts to reflect any post-high school education, if applicable. Proof of any licenses or certifications that you have earned. Official DD214 military discharge documents, if applicable. Information regarding the references you wish to list on your application. While SIU does not accept resumes, some people find it helpful to bring a resume because it is then easy to transfer all of the necessary information from a resume to the SIU application forms, officials said. Generous benefits Officials said that while all applications can be completed that day, any required qualification and testing will be set at a future time and date, with notice to be given. All positions being filled are full-time university jobs, eligible for SIU benefits, including retirement benefits, generous vacation and sick leave, and health, dental and vision insurance. In addition, employees are eligible for free tuition for themselves and half-price tuition for their dependents (after working a specified time period). Many of the positions also have options for advancement. For additional details Learn more about the employment opportunities at SIU at jobs.siu.edu. Advertised vacancies are posted each Thursday at noon. For more information, contact SIU Human Resources at jobshelp@siu.edu or 618-536-3369. WASHINGTON Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana's 2nd district was killed Wednesday in a car accident, her office said. The 58-year-old South Bend native represented much of LaPorte County, as well as all or parts of St. Joseph, Elkhart Starke, Marshall, Kosciusko, Pulaski, Fulton, Cass, Miami and Wabash counties. The Elkhart County Sheriffs Office said officers were called to the scene of a two-vehicle crash shortly after noon Eastern time. Police said a car traveled left of the center lane and collided head-on with an SUV Walorski was riding in, killing Walorski, 58, and the other two occupants of the vehicle, Walorski's Communications Director, Emma Thomson, and St. Joseph County Republican Chairman Zachery Potts. A 55-year-old woman driving the other car was also killed in the crash, police said. U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan issued a statement later Wednesday afternoon mourning his the loss of his colleague. I am deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of my Indiana colleague and Congressional-district neighbor Rep. Jackie Walorski. I am grateful for our all too brief shared time together in the U.S. House of Representatives and appreciate her consistent friendship, example of public service, and openness to conversation. My thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends during this difficult time, as well as with the loved ones of her staff member Emma Thomson and St. Joseph County Republican Chair Zachery Potts. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, posted on his official Twitter account that he was "shocked and saddened to hear of the tragic death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski. My thoughts and prayers are with her family and the other victims of this terrible crash. Though we came from very different places politically, she was always prepared to work together where there was common ground, always decent and straightforward, and she cared deeply about her work and her constituents." Walorski, a South Bend native, was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012. Before that, she served three terms in the Indiana House of Representatives. South Carolina State University announced Thursday that it joins the family of recent graduate Dexter Diondre Lynah Jr. in mourning his sudden passing. He died Saturday, July 30, at age 23. Lynah was shot and killed at a Colleton County pool hall, according to abcnews4.com. A suspect is in custody. A native of Walterboro, Lynah was a 2017 graduate of Colleton County High School. He continued his education at S.C. State, where he received his bachelors degree in mechanical engineering technology in May 2022. Lynah was inducted into the Alpha Lambda Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc. He was a committee member for the Campus Activity Board. As a Dr. Emily England Clyburn Honors College scholar, he received the Presidential Scholar Award for three consecutive years. S.C. State said it offers Lynahs family its deepest condolences. Counseling services are available on campus by appointment only. Dr. Cherilyn Minniefield, director of the university's Counseling Center, suggests students call 803-536-7245, walk into the center or email her at claylo37@sest.edu to schedule an appointment. Services for Dexter Lynah include: Visitation Friday, Aug. 5, 3-7 p.m., Koger's Mortuary Service, 508 South Jefferies Boulevard, Walterboro Vigil service Friday, Aug. 5, 7:30 p.m., family's residence, 2494 Sidney's Road, Walterboro Celebration of life Saturday, Aug. 6, 11 a.m., Walterboro Christian Center, 320 Robertson Boulevard, Walterboro (TBTCO) - Thi truong chung khoan hom nay co them mot phien xanh vo o long. Ap luc ban a ro hon trong phien hom nay do khong co nhom co phieu nao noi bat dan dat, viec thi truong con giu uoc thanh qua trong phien la do luc keo tu cac co phieu tru, voi cong au en tu VIC. A Hong Kong film festival to mark the 25th anniversary of the city's return to its motherland opened in Beijing on Friday. Broadway Cinematheque MOMA in Beijing and the Hong Kong government's Beijing office joined hands again to launch the Hong Kong Thematic Film Festival to mark the Hong Kong's return to its motherland from July 29 to Aug. 7, screening seven Hong Kong classics to celebrate the anniversary. All these films will have their newly restored versions presented in Beijing. The films being shown in two cinemas across Beijing are Bruce Lee's "The Way of the Dragon" (1972), John Woo's "Last Hurrah for Chivalry" (1979), Jackie Chan's "Mr. Canton and Lady Rose" (1989), Mabel Cheung's "An Autumn's Tale" (1987), Clifton Ko's "All's Well, Ends Well" (1992), Johnnie To's "Running Out of Time" (1999) and Daniel Lee's "Moonlight Express" (1999). These films star mainland audiences' favorite Hong Kong icons, including Bruce Lee, Stephen Chow, Andy Lau, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Chow Yun-Fat, and Leslie Cheung. Several of them are making their debuts in mainland theaters. Pamela Lam, the deputy director of the HKSAR Beijing Office, said the event aims to bring classic films to Beijing's citizens while attracting younger audiences so that Hong Kong's movies and culture can be passed down to future generations. Lam also noted that ever since Hong Kong's return 25 years ago, the mainland and the special administrative region have had closer and more frequent communications, exchanges, and collaborations. Various policies and measures issued by the central government have supported mainland-Hong Kong co-productions and helped the two sides complement each other with their advantages and achieve mutual success. "You may have seen some quite popular co-productions in recent years such as 'Leap,' 'Raging Fire,' and 'The Battle at Lake Changjin.' This kind of integration is a trend. There are many excellent filmmaking talents in Hong Kong. Many of them have been pursuing new development and careers for a long time on the mainland," she said. The festival opened on Friday night with "The Way of the Dragon," a film that happens to mark its 50th anniversary this year. L'Immagine Ritrovata Asia, a highly specialized film restoration laboratory, helmed the 4K high-definition restoration of the film. Bede Cheng, managing director of L'Immagine Ritrovata Asia, met the audience via an online link after the film to share insights on restoring the celluloid footage. Organizers arranged two other post-screening events. On July 31, renowned director and scriptwriter Mabel Cheung appeared via video link after her film, "An Autumn's Tale." On Aug. 6, after the screening of "Mr. Canton and Lady Rose," award-winning Hong Kong cinematographer Arthur Wong will appear in person to share behind-the-scenes stories. As with previous years, after opening in Beijing, the festival will tour other cities around China. The new Space Campus will be divided over two sites. The campus in Kockelscheuer would focus on businesses, while the campus in Belval is meant for research. Luxembourg is in the process of reorganising its space industry, which at the moment is made up of 1,200 employees working across 75 different companies. A new research campus for the sector is planned for Belval while, a site for businesses will extend over seven hectares at 'ParcLuxite' in Kockelscheuer. The goal of both campuses is to improve synergy between all entities in the industry. Minister of the Economy Franz Fayot believes there is great demand for the project: "We have many start-ups that we support via the 'Fit for start' programme, but several of them cannot find a place to launch their operations. That is why the space campus will be so important." The headquarters of the Luxembourg Space Agency will also relocate to the main site in Kockelscheuer, which will further become the home of a new centre where small satellites can be tested in real-life conditions. The second campus, focusing on research, will be set up vis-a-vis the 'Maison du Savoir' in Belval. The campus is to extend over 69 acres, with a future possibility to expand to 1.9 hectares. Minister for Higher Education and Research Claude Meisch noted that the campus will unite three distinct entities from Luxembourg's space industry: "One is 'Esric', the European Space Resources Innovation Centre, which is currently part of LIST [Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology] and working closely with the Luxembourg Space Agency. Another entity active in space research is the SNT, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust at Uni.lu. And finally the university itself with its space master programme." Said master degree has existed since 2019. 30 students are enrolled in this year's programme, eleven from the Grand Duchy and 19 from abroad. The EU has set a goal of reducing natural gas consumption by 15% before 31 March 2023. Luxembourg currently sits slightly below the emission threshold set by the European framework, but it is not sufficient to guarantee the country's energy supply security in future. The municipal councils are expected to be key actors in the plan to meet EU targets. Back in 2018 and 2019, the municipal syndicate Syvicol established the goal of introducing a pilot project in Clervaux's nature park, which will contribute towards preserving energy and resources. Emile Eicher, Syvicol president, told RTL that heaters will be used in a targeted manner in municipal buildings throughout the region, so that they will only be deployed where absolutely necessary: "This means that as soon as staff leave the building, the heating will be set back to a base temperature of around 15 degrees or so, which will save a lot of money. At night, a sensor system will check how the buildings are being used, and the energy consumption, so they can adjust accordingly. Basically it's need-oriented heating." "No data no knowledge", added Eicher. The first stage, he said, was about collecting data, identifying weaknesses and reacting in a targeted manner. "We'll get our money back quickly, particularly if we compare to a field such as lighting, for example. After a few years you make back the money invested, and it saves money in the long run. If we look at public buildings, it's easy to save up to 80% of light, we just needed a push to say let's switch the lights off at night." However, it is also feasible to save electricity and gas in the private sector, to contribute towards reaching the goal. Eicher, who is also mayor of Clervaux, said small steps or habits, which would not reduce quality of life, would help to consciously preserve energy. "Just small steps, such as getting people to switch lights off when they leave an office, or ventilating the place properly. A lot of people don't know that putting the heating on briefly, ensuring there is good ventilation and then switching it off, can help immensely. Such small steps that can have a big result." On 8 September the Chamber of Commerce, Syvicol, the Ministry of Energy and a number of other partners will hold a conference to prepare the municipalities for the new situation and constraints ahead, while maintaining a social dimension and support for those who lack the money to invest in the private sector. Natrona Countys assessor candidates agree on one thing the way they determine property taxes needs to change. This years race, one of the most closely watched in the county, is a rematch of 2018s election. Assessor Matt Keating narrowly defeated then-interim assessor Tammy Saulsbury that year, and will be facing Saulsbury again in less than two weeks as he tries to maintain his position. In the four years since being elected, Keating has taken heat from residents who complain of dramatic increases in taxes on their homes and say the assessor isnt willing to adjust values. Mike Corrigan eventually got fed up enough to organize a protest of the assessors office. He and others plan to meet at 5:30 on Sunday night at Washington Park. Ive not talked to a single person whos happy with what hes doing, Corrigan said. The Aug. 16 Republican ballot will also include challenger Tim Haid, who owns a landscaping business and has advocated for switching the assessment model to a 10-year average a change that would, like most other proposed solutions, require a constitutional amendment. There are no Democratic candidates for assessor. All three candidates recently signed a petition that calls for a major change to the way assessors in Wyoming calculate property tax. The petition specifically advocates for switching to an acquisition model that would base taxes on a propertys purchase price. Now, property tax is determined based on recent sale prices of similar properties. Making that change would need to be done on a statewide level one county cant calculate its property taxes using a different model from the rest of Wyoming. Rozmaring Czaban, the Natrona County resident who started the petition, said she doesnt expect to collect enough signatures to put the issue directly to a public vote (Wyomings threshold for ballot initiatives is one of the highest in the country). But she still plans to deliver the signatures she does collect to state lawmakers, Gov. Mark Gordon and the state Board of Equalization, which oversees property assessments. Its not a Matt (Keating) problem, Czaban said. People always go for the tax man I think people do see it as a larger problem. Czaban has gathered signatures at candidate forums and around the Casper area this summer, and has found that most candidates are interested in adding their name. As of Thursday, she estimated the petition had around 200 signatures. Its more for accountability at this point, she said. So we can show and present something that says, this number of the population feels this way. Its the words of the people. Local candidates whove signed the petition include Casper Mayor Ray Pacheco, Rep. Pat Sweeney and challenger Bill Allemand, Rep. Chuck Gray, Sen. Drew Perkins and nearly every candidate for county commission. Commissioner Peter Nicolaysen, the boards most recent addition, said he did not sign the petition because he was concerned its language was too broad. Hes personally felt the pain of property tax increases, Nicolaysen said, but isnt convinced that changing to an acquisition model would solve the countys problems. The commissions chair, Paul Bertoglio, did sign despite not agreeing with every word on the petition. I believe its important that we support the individuals, to get their voice down to Cheyenne en masse, he said. The deck is stacked against the taxpayer were going to need legislation to this. Keating is optimistic there could be legislative changes coming to the assessment process. Hes testified to lawmakers several times about the need to give taxpayers some relief. This issue is serious enough, we have the ear of our legislature like weve never had before, Keating said Thursday. There are some potential problems with the acquisition model for one, the state doesnt have its own historic data on sale prices, so would have to rely on property owners to truthfully report their purchases. It would also result in much lower property tax revenue around the state. Haid, who signed the petition, said while he supports the acquisition model, it has several problems and he doesn't think it has a chance of passing in the state Legislature. Property taxes have been on the rise across the state in recent years, but some Natrona County residents have reported rises of 30, 40 or 50% that cant be explained purely by market increases. That may be partly due to a work order imposed on the countys assessor office in 2019, which warned that values in Natrona County were out of compliance with state standards. Since then, Keating has been commended on his work to bring the county closer to compliance, which the state Board of Equalization called herculean. But that process also brings jumps in assessed values, in an attempt to correct undervaluations from decades past. JACKSON (WNE) An organized outdoor education course turned deadly Tuesday when a 22-year old Boston student suffered fatal cardiac arrest after lightning struck his tent. Another student was injured in the strike while the group of 14 camped near Enos Lake in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Teton County Search and Rescue responded to the call at 6:25 p.m. Tuesday. The lake rests at an elevation of 7,818 feet and is located 12 miles from the Pacific Creek trailhead. Teton County Coroner Dr. Brent Blue confirmed that the deceased student, Jack Murphy, was a Boston resident and the cause of death was a lightning strike. The injured student was transferred via helicopter to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center and was released Wednesday, said Shana Tarter, NOLS associate director for wilderness medicine. NOLS National Outdoor Leadership School is a Lander-based nonprofit school that teaches wilderness and leadership skills. Murphy, along with 13 other backpackers, was participating in a NOLS outdoor educator course. According to a NOLS press release, members of the group attempted to perform CPR on Murphy for over an hour but were unsuccessful, as were the CPR attempts made by Search and Rescue members once they arrived on the scene. This is a very sad day for NOLS, our students and our families, NOLS President Terri Watson said in the press release. We extend our deepest condolences to the family of our student who passed away on this course and are focused on supporting their family through its difficult process. Here is Bob Brechtel, standing on the sidewalk protesting outside an abortion clinic that plans to open in Casper later this year. Hes been here every Thursday afternoon, usually holding signs that say Remember the Unborn or Pray to End Abortion, since the clinic was announced in April. Brechtel is adamantly, visibly, steadfastly against abortion. Hes been vocal about that fact for decades. He coordinates these weekly protests, where he says people from 37 different churches regularly participate. When Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, he said he was thankful and praised God for the decision. He co-sponsored a resolution in 2011, when he was a state lawmaker representing Natrona County, that sent a constitutional amendment aimed at curbing concerns over the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) to a public vote. The amendment allows each competent adult to make their own health care decisions. It was meant to protect Wyomingites from having to enroll in Obamacare against their will. In 2012, it was added to the state constitution after passing the ballot. Now, abortion providers contesting Wyomings trigger ban are turning to the amendment as their strongest case for keeping abortion legal in the state. Ill be very grieved if they actually use that as an instrument of death, Brechtel said this week. That wasnt our intent at all. *** When the amendment appeared on the ballot in the 2012 general election, it passed easily with 72% of the public vote. But the road to the ballot wasnt as easy. At the time, many lawmakers and lobbyists said they were concerned the resolution that authorized the amendment vote was too vague, its language too broad. The Equality State Policy Center, a non-partisan but left-of-center lobby, urged lawmakers to vote against the amendment. It wasnt specific enough, it said, and could give rise to unintended consequences. Ill bet that even the original supporters of this amendment cant tell you exactly what it will do, given the vague language and all the changes made to it during the Legislatures deliberations in 2011, ESPC Director Dan Neal said, according to news coverage at the time. For the most part, more conservative lawmakers voted to pass the amendment. A much smaller group of left-leaning legislators including now-House Minority Leader Rep. Cathy Connolly, D-Laramie, and Wyoming Democratic Party leader Joe Barbuto generally voted against it. I liked the liberty part of it its a freedom thing, said Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, who also co-sponsored of the 2011 amendment bill. I just find the irony of this so beautiful, in a way. Connolly said she cast her no vote on the amendment because of its origins. I really love our constitution, Connolly said. To put something like that, that was wholly and highly political, in the constitution I found it offensive. The amendment was never used as intended. Wyomingites were never required to have health insurance, government-issued or otherwise, and that mandate was erased federally during the Trump administration. Connolly said she doesnt think the amendment, the 38th to the state constitution, has been used much at all. It was somewhat unnecessary in that fight, but it turned out to be very necessary where we need it, Case said. I kind of love that I had a small piece in making a tool thats perfectly appropriate I just hope it works. Despite their opposing votes on the amendment in 2011, both Case and Connolly are fine with how its being used now as the center of a legal argument for overturning Wyomings trigger ban. Lawyers contesting the ban cite the amendment as an explicit protection of health care rights for Wyomingites and argue that abortion is a form of health care. Brechtel and other opponents to abortion rights say abortion has nothing to do with health care. Abortion is always the taking of a human life, and there is no connection between that and health care, Brechtel said. Theres quite an effort, it seems, to try to confuse the issues, to confuse the public. It will be up to the Teton County court, which is hearing arguments for a preliminary injunction next week, to decide whether the amendment applies in this case. Its come to bite them in the ass, Connolly said. *** The language of the amendment was rewritten several times as the bill moved through the legislature in 2011, becoming more vague and losing direct references to health care plans that would have tied it more closely to its target, Obamacare. Those of us who supported the amendment were not all necessarily lawyers, Brechtel said. We trusted the attorneys that wrote the legislation for us. We had one intent, and I can tell you our intent was not to legalize abortion. The amendment that eventually ended up in the constitution says that any person may pay, and a health care provider may accept, direct payment for health care. But the sentence that follows may become a sticking point in the ongoing lawsuit. The legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people, it reads. Connolly said the question for the court becomes whether banning abortion is a reasonable and necessary limit on the freedoms the amendment appears to grant. She remembers abortion being mentioned during closed-door discussions about the amendment, but it wasnt part of the public conversation at the time. That reasonable, thats going to be the biggest reasonable in the whole world, Case said. During a late July hearing in the abortion ban lawsuit, an attorney representing the state argued that Judge Melissa Owens should consider the context of the amendment when interpreting it in this case. The way the court does its interpretation, its looking at the black letter of the law, said Connolly, who holds a law degree. Its not typical in Wyoming for courts to look at legislative intent when interpreting laws, she said. Case said that while the trigger ban was moving through the legislature this year, he voiced concerns that it would violate the state constitution. Now, with the ban on the books but temporarily blocked as part of the ongoing lawsuit, that will be up to the courts to decide. Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct Rep. Cathy Connolly's title. She is the House Minority Leader. CHEYENNE Republican candidate for governor Rex Rammell plans to file a lawsuit against the secretary of state for failing to bring a court action to remove fellow candidate Brent Bien from the primary ballot on Aug. 16. Rammell says Bien doesnt have lengthy enough state residency, an allegation Bien denies. Rammell first publicly raised the issue last week at a candidate debate, and then spoke about it in a follow-up interview. The Election Division of the Wyoming Secretary of States Office responded Tuesday to a complaint made by Rammell and said it was determined the complaint seeks a legal analysis of the term residence, which goes beyond what is already contained in the current statute. Interpretation of that nature must be done by an appropriate judicial officer, the office stated Tuesday in an email. Similarly, the removal of a candidate from the ballot would require a court order. At this time your complaint will be closed without further action. Rammell was expected to hold a news conference on Thursday to discuss the details of his suit, which he had promised to file if the Secretary of States Office didnt act on his complaint. Four years ago, the Secretary of State brought action against then gubernatorial candidate Taylor Haynes for failures to reside within Wyoming for the previous five years, Rammells press release stated. But now a very similar situation exists with Brent Bien and the secretary has bowed out. The Committee to Elect Rex Rammell Governor of Wyoming stated that Secretary of State Ed Buchanan did not say Bien was eligible, but instead of seeking a judicial solution, Buchanan has backed out of the case in dereliction of his duty. Buchanans office declined to comment on the litigation, beyond providing the Wyoming Tribune Eagle with its recent correspondence to Rammell. Bien told the WTE that upon graduation from the University of Wyomings Engineering College in 1991, he commissioned as a U.S. Marine Corps officer. He retired from active duty in 2019. Throughout his time in the military, he maintained his Wyoming residency, Bien said. He said he never relinquished his drivers license, voted in all state elections by absentee and at least one of his vehicles, if not more, was registered in Wyoming for the duration. I spent a career voluntarily defending the freedoms of all Americans and all Wyomingites, and participated in many combat deployments, he wrote in an email Wednesday to the WTE. Article 6, Section 7 of the Wyoming State Constitution ensures that I do not lose my residency while serving in the United States military. Rep. Liz Cheneys Donald Trump-endorsed challenger, Harriet Hageman, told a crowd of people Wednesday in Casper that the 2020 election was rigged in favor of President Joe Biden. This statement is Hagemans clearest public stance on the integrity of the presidential election so far. Absolutely the election was rigged. It was rigged to make sure that President Trump could not get reelected, Hageman said on stage during Politics in the Park at Washington Park. What happened in 2020 is a travesty. Her statements were met with cheering and whistling from the crowd. Trump and his allies insist, without evidence, that the election was stolen. An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump uncovered fewer than 475 instances (not all of which were cast in favor of Biden). That figure would have had no bearing on the outcome of the election. Hageman, a natural resources attorney who grew up outside of Fort Laramie, came just shy of saying the election was rigged at a recent congressional debate and was called out by Cheney. So, Id be interested to know whether or not my opponent, Mrs. Hageman, is willing to say here tonight that the election was not stolen? She knows it wasnt stolen, Cheney said in late June. I think that she cant say that it wasnt stolen because shes completely beholden to Donald Trump. And if she says it wasnt stolen, he will not support her. Sen. Anthony Bouchard, R-Burns, was the only other congressional candidate in attendance Wednesday. Yeah, the election was stolen, Bouchard said, blaming it on mail-in ballots. He told the Star-Tribune following the forum that he believes Trump won. Because of Cheneys vehement opposition to Trump and her prominent role on the Jan. 6 committee thats investigating Trumps role in the U.S. Capitol attack, this race has been largely centered around the former president. Cheney was at a private event in Laramie on the same night, her team said. Denton Knapp was out of the country and Robyn Belinskey told the organizers she would be in attendance and did not show, said Kim Walker, president of the Natrona County Republican Women. Hageman called out Cheney for not being in the state often and almost exclusively holding private events when she does come back to Wyoming. I am the only candidate that has traveled around this state for nine solid months, covering almost 37,000 miles, the challenger said. This forum came a couple weeks after a Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy/Casper Star-Tribune survey found that Cheney is trailing her Trump-endorsed challenger by an eye-popping 22 points. Despite the fact that Hageman had not taken a solid stance on the integrity of the election before Wednesday, some of her supporters in attendance Wednesday viewed her as something of an election skeptic already. I was always going to vote for her, said Thomas Lopez, a 27-year-old Welder. Shes Trump bound. Shes Trump backed. Renea Kerr, a 65-year-old Casper resident who was raised in the Cowboy State, also believes the election was rigged, but said she has already cast her vote for Hageman despite concerns over integrity. Weve lost a lot of the integrity of our vote. Im still going to take a firm stand. Ive got to, she said with a single tear rolling down her face. A group of Hageman supporters loudly cheered throughout the forum. Dressed in ruby red Hageman t-shirts, the group moved their closer to the stage and watched from there with huge Hageman for Congress signs behind them. Its our God up there, said local Hageman volunteer Max Jacobson, gazing out at Hageman on the stage. Look at her. Plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Wyomings abortion ban filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on Wednesday. If granted, the preliminary injunction would block the bans enforcement for the duration of the lawsuit. The plaintiffs Wyoming providers and residents and a Wyoming abortion fund filed the lawsuit on July 25 following Gov. Gordons certification of the states abortion ban. The defendants are the State of Wyoming, Gordon, Attorney General Bridget Hill, Teton County Sheriff Matthew Carr and Town of Jackson Chief of Police Michelle Weber. Judge blocks Wyoming's abortion ban The court ruling stops Wyomings abortion ban from being enforced for at least 14 days. It comes hours after the prohibition went into effect. Teton County Judge Melissa Owens granted the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order, which blocks the bans enforcement, hours after the ban went into effect. That temporary restraining order is in place until Wednesday. The hearing for a preliminary injunction, which would block the bans enforcement for the duration of the lawsuit, is scheduled for Tuesday morning. A memorandum filed in support of the motion expands on the plaintiffs argument that the ban is unconstitutional. Religious freedom Another plaintiff in the lawsuit, University of Wyoming law student Kathleen Dow, is a practicing Jew. She argued in her affidavit that abortion access is an essential part of her faith which, she said, believes that abortions are permissible, and in some cases required. Former Mills Town Councilman and anti-abortion advocate Mike Pyatt doesnt hold much sympathy for that argument. Her religious views or mine dont override the right of the unborn, he said. The memorandum points to articles in Wyomings constitution that guarantee religious tolerance and freedom. It also argues that the ban could impose certain religious beliefs on people who dont hold those same beliefs, pointing to the lawsuit against Kentuckys abortion ban, in which defendants argued that life begins at conception and that it then falls under constitutional protection. The court hearing the case said that the defendants argument is a distinctly Christian and Catholic belief. Other faiths hold a wide variety of views on when life begins and at what point a fetus should be recognized as an independent human being. Equal protection Among its arguments, the memorandum asserts that the ban would only impact health care provided to women. It therefore discriminates on the basis of sex and violates the equal protection guarantees in Wyomings constitution. Men and women participate equally in the creation of a fetus, yet there is no resulting penalty under the Ban for a man and he bears no consequences for his contribution, the memorandum says. All of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are women, one of whom, Danielle Johnson, is 22 weeks pregnant. Before the door closes: The story of what could be one of Wyoming's last legal abortions Evelyn found out she was pregnant on the day Roe fell. She was certain she didn't want kids, and she didnt falter on her decision to get an abortion. I think its invalid, co-sponsor of the bill that became Wyomings trigger abortion law, Rep. John Bear, R-Gillette, said of the equal protection argument. He declined to explain why, saying he would leave that up to the defendants lawyer to argue. Pyatt said he considers abortion to be discriminatory toward the unborn. He added that he thinks the inequality between men and women will not change. Well, the fact is, women have always carried the babies, thats not going to change, he said. Look, thats part of creation, the argument that the man doesnt bear as much of a burden, thats biologically true. Health care decisions The lawyers representing the plaintiffs also draw on a 2012 constitutional amendment that was meant to protect Wyomingites from being forced to enroll in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The amendment allows each competent adult to make their own health care decisions. Proponents of the amendment did not intend for it to be used to argue against an abortion ban, the Star-Tribune previously reported. They wanted to stop Obamacare. They may have protected abortion rights in Wyoming instead. A 2012 amendment to the state constitution, meant to curb concerns over the Affordable Care Act, may present the best case for keeping abortion legal in Wyoming. When I read it, I dont see the argument there of what theyre thinking, said former lawmaker Bob Brechtel, an anti-abortion advocate who co-sponsored the resolution that sent the constitutional amendment to public vote. I just hope they dont turn it into something that it was not at all intended to be. And anti-abortion advocates dont agree that abortion should be considered a form of health care. The whole issue is confusing between abortion and actual health care, were talking about health care, Brechtel said. The concern that we have obviously is that every abortion really is the killing of human life. But some of the plaintiffs with experience as physicians and nurses Dr. Giovannina Anthony of the Jackson Womens Health Center and Family Care Clinic, Dr. Rene Hinkle of the Cheyenne Womens Health Clinic and Johnson argue that its not always so simple. There can be situations when its best to end a pregnancy because the baby wont survive once its born. There can be emergency situations where they need to make quick decisions to preserve the life and health of a woman, even if that could harm a fetus. And the providers argue that the law is unclear about when a womans health or life is at risk enough for an abortion under the ban to be legal. Where do abortion rights stand in Wyoming? Right now, a temporary restraining order granted last week has blocked enforcement of Wyoming's near-total abortion ban through Aug. 10. That means that abortion providers, though there is only one in the state, can continue offering the service until then. The temporary block was the first decision made in an ongoing lawsuit contesting the ban. Lawyers representing providers, Wyoming women and a nonprofit abortion fund say the ban is unconstitutional. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The man who attacked a private kindergarten in Anfu county of Ji'an, Jiangxi province, was arrested on Wednesday night, according to the county. The suspect, named Liu Xiaohui, 48, killed three people and injured six at the kindergarten at 10:22 am on Wednesday, according to a notice released by the Anfu public security bureau on Wednesday afternoon. He fled to the mountainous areas of Zhongshe village, Wan'an county of Ji'an, after the murder. Local authorities sent about 1,100 members of their police force to hunt him down. He was arrested at an expressway near the village. The suspect was sent to a local hospital for emergency treatment. The Jiangxi Education Department released a notice late Wednesday, saying that all-out efforts should be made to treat the injured and reduce death from the incident, and that campus safety management should be strengthened at all schools, especially private kindergartens, to guard the lives of teachers and students. Since 2020 a total of 218 people have been arrested in connection with the theft of metals i The public is advised that as at 1:05 a.m., with the exception of a small segment at St Luci The magical charm of the Manzanilla-to-Mayaro vista is not the only gift of nature that could be lost to future generations. Natural phenomena combined with the human-induced impacts of climate change are already altering our lives, and are projected to do so in even more drastic and dramatic ways within the lifetimes of most people alive today. You are here: World Flash U.S. President Joe Biden signed a new executive order on Wednesday to help ensure access to abortion. Biden, in virtual remarks from the White House, said that the measure responds to "the healthcare crisis that has unfolded" since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, which eliminated the constitutional protection of abortion rights for women. The executive order will also help women travel out of state for medical care while making sure healthcare providers comply with federal law so women don't face delays or denials of medically necessary care, according to Biden. The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to protect the rights of patients to access emergency medical care guaranteed by federal law. The suit challenged an Idaho law set to go into effect on Aug. 25 and impose a near-total ban on abortion. Abortion has been one of the most divisive issues in the United States. Without Roe v. Wade, states are allowed to impose their own legislation on the medical procedure. At least ten states have banned abortion following the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v. Wade. Voters in Kansas rejected a constitutional amendment that would have stripped residents of abortion rights in the first ballot test of abortion rights on Tuesday. Tuesdays party primaries set which candidates are advancing to the Nov. 8 general election in Tucson-area House Legislative Districts 17, 18 and 21. All three races will be competitive in November as candidates square off for the two House seats in each district. Here are the candidates who have emerged from Tuesdays primaries as the expected winners in unofficial results. Not all votes have been counted, and its not certain if any of these races will change in the coming days: House LD17 Republican candidates Rachel Jones and Cory McGarr both received 25% of the vote to beat out Anna Orth with 19%, Kirk Fiehler with 18% and Sherrylyn Young with 13%. Jones, of Tucson is a former teacher and business executive who campaigned on supporting low taxes, the right to bear arms and small government saying that is what has made Arizona great. She said Arizona values are under attack and is against vaccine mandates, critical race theory and believes the Socialist Democrats in Phoenix are threatening our rights, families and very way of life. Jones says she is part of the Arizona Freedom Team, candidates who are conservative fighters in LD17, including fellow nominee McGarr. McGarr, of Marana, is district manager of a Tucson pest control business. He is involved with anti-abortion organizations and his platform includes running for the state House to fix the broken election system, to eliminate fraud and to ensure that something like the 2020 election never happens again. McGarr says Im a rock-solid defender of the Second Amendment. District 17 includes much of the northwest side, the far eastside and the Rita Ranch area. Democrat nominees Dana Allmond, of Marana, and Brian Radford, of Tucson, were running uncontested and advance to the Nov. 8 general election. Voters will pick two representatives from among the four candidates in November. House LD18 Political newcomer Nancy Gutierrez received 34% of the vote, and incumbent Chris Mathis received 22% to represent the Democratic Party in the general election. Gutierrez is a teacher and has taught in Paradise Valley, Sierra Vista and since 2013 has taught yoga at Tucson High Magnet School. Her campaign worked to ensure that Arizona puts public education, teachers, staff and students as a priority. She supports reproductive freedom and care for all women, and is a sensible gun candidate who believes guns should never be allowed on any campus, and loopholes must be closed for sales at gun shows. Mathis was appointed in December to represent District 9 after state Rep. Randall Friese resigned. Mathis is a practicing attorney who teaches health care law at the University of Arizona law school. He campaigned as a legislator to fight back to protect voting rights, womens reproductive rights, and fully fund public schools. Gutierrez and Mathis beat out Democratic candidates Nathan Davis with 20% of the vote, Kat Stratford with 20% and Charles Charlie Verdin trailing with 4%. District 18 covers the Catalina Foothills, Casas Adobes and a swath of Tucson north of Broadway, east of Country Club Road and west of Camino Seco. Republican nominee Linda Evans was uncontested and will automatically advance to the November general election, where voters will pick two representatives. Arizona House LD21 Democratic candidates Consuelo Hernandez received 46% of the vote and Stephanie Stahl Hamilton came in second with 33%, both leading Akanni Oye Oyegbola, a third Democratic candidate with 21%. The three candidates are from Tucson. Hernandez serves as president of the Sunnyside Unified School District Governing Board and campaigned on her commitment to restoring funding for education, rebuilding Arizonas economy, and investing in infrastructure and renewable energy. Hamilton is an ordained minister and serves as parish associate at St. Marks Presbyterian Church. She was elected in 2020 as a state representative, and last October she was appointed to replace District 10 Sen. Kirsten Engel who resigned to run for Congress. As a result of redistricting, she is running in District 21 as a representative instead of the state senate. She has campaigned to fully fund education, protect the environment, and access to reproductive health care and contraception. District 21 encompasses western Pima County, about half of Santa Cruz County and the city of Bisbee in Cochise County. Republican primary voters from Tucson's northwest side, far east side and Rita Ranch area are embracing the party's MAGA wing, preliminary results for state Senate District 17 show. With nearly all precincts reported as of midday Wednesday, Justine Wadsack, who described herself as a "Pro Trump America First" conservative, was poised to defeat Vince Leach, a state senator seeking a third term, by an unofficial margin of about 1,200 votes. Wadsack, a real estate agent, captured 40% of the 25,605 ballots cast. Leach received 35.5%, according to the state's elections website. A third contender, Robert Barr, received 24% of the vote. Results are not yet official. Leach, 73, is the current state senator for District 11 and is the senate's President Pro Tempore, the second-highest-ranking leadership position. He also serves as vice chairman of the appropriations committee and the finance committee. Wadsack, 48, opposes abortion rights, the teaching of critical race theory and mask requirements to prevent the spread of COVID-19. She participated in storming a Vail school board meeting last year to protest mask requirements. Her endorsements included the Arizona Tea Party; Purple for Parents, an online group formed in opposition to the Red for Ed movement; and a group called Tucson Trump MAGA. She has appeared in election ads with Kari Lake, the Trump-backed choice for governor. Wadsack did not respond to a text message seeking comment on the results. Leach did not respond to a voicemail left at the phone number listed on his election website. Wadsack will compete in November against Democrat Mike Nickerson, 72, of Tucson, a retired pastor. The expansive district stretches from southern Pinal County down to southeast of Tucson. Dems choose climate activist An environmental law professor will carry the banner for Democrats this fall in Senate District 18, which includes the Catalina Foothills, Casas Adobes and a swath of Tucson north of Broadway, east of Country Club Road and west of Camino Seco. Priya Sundareshan, 37, who teaches at the University of Arizona, won the nomination with 53% support, compared to 47% for challenger Morgan Abraham, 30, an affordable housing developer and intelligence officer in the Army Reserve. Nearly 27,000 ballots were cast in the primary race. Though results are not yet official, Abraham conceded to Sundareshan in a phone call the morning after the election. Abraham has been a member of the Arizona House of Representatives since December when he was appointed to fill a vacancy in the District 10 House seat. Sundareshan's top issues include climate change, the states dwindling water supply and increasing public investment in green energy sources such as solar and wind power. She supports common-sense gun safety laws, access to abortion, and measures to make voting easier such as restoring and improving the permanent early voter list. She holds a bachelors degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two University of Arizona degrees, a juris doctor and a masters in natural resource economics. In a Twitter post, Sundareshan said her win "proves Southern AZ is ready for a climate change champion to represent them in the state." Her candidacy was backed by several prominent local Democrats including Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva and his daughter Adelita Grijalva, a Pima County supervisor and president of Tucson Unified School District's governing board. Pima County had about 30,000 ballots left to count from Tuesday's primary election, officials said Wednesday. The county's Recorders Office has about 22,000 early and other ballots and about 4,200 provisional ballots to process and verify for tabulation. The Elections Department also still has to count about 3,100 ballots that were cast at voting centers Aug. 2. The above number of ballots remaining is an estimate and may change as Elections and the Recorders Office work their way through the remaining ballots and the processes necessary to ensure all legally cast votes are counted, the county said in a news release Wednesday evening. Several races from Tuesday remain close, but it is not known if the number of ballots left to count will change any outcomes. Elections Director Constance Hargrove said she expects that all votes cast at vote centers should be counted by Wednesday. "We had some vote centers where the checked-in voters tally didnt match the number of ballots, and I needed to talk to the vote center inspectors to understand why. The deputy elections director spoke to them today, and we will count those ballots. In addition, one vote center had a printer problem that prevented the scanner from reading the ballot. These ballots require duplication." Provisional ballots were issued to Election Day voters who were sent a mail ballot, had a change in address or otherwise required further investigation in their voter registration. Every provisional ballot is processed, though not every ballot will be eligible for tabulation, the county said. The Recorders Office turns over verified ballots in batches of roughly 5,000 at a time to the Elections Department. The Elections Department will continue to count ballots each day until there are none left. Pima County Attorney Laura Conover will not drop criminal charges against Louis Taylor for his conviction in the 1970 Pioneer Hotel fire after her office did not find any new evidence of innocence, she announced Wednesday. The move is a reversal of Conovers previous considerations to vacate Taylors conviction and came the day after the countys Board of Supervisors held an hour-long executive session discussing the case behind closed doors. The offices Conviction and Sentencing Integrity Unit has completed its review of the case, according to a news release from Conover, who said, I have concluded that where the criminal case is concerned, I have met my ethical obligations as a prosecutor. Taylor served 42 years in prison after being convicted of starting the fire that killed 29 people in 1970. In 2013, he made a plea deal with then-county attorney Barbara LaWalls office that set aside the conviction and released him from prison with time served. At the time, LaWall insisted the move was not an exoneration. Taylor has continued to maintain his innocence. Taylor sued Pima County and the city of Tucson in 2015 for violating his right to due process and a fair trial, alleging racism and civil conspiracy led to his arrest and conviction. The amount of compensation he is seeking is undisclosed. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019, however, that Taylor could not collect damages for his time in prison because of the no-contest plea he made. Taylors lawyers have said new evidence, and evidence left out of the time of Taylors criminal case, permits a new hearing. The Arizona Justice Project, which worked on Taylors case for more than 20 years, said in a news release Thursday, The Pima County Attorney has foregone a critical opportunity to correct one of the most severe injustices Pima County has ever seen. The release states the county attorneys office was on the verge of concluding Taylor was wrongly convicted, but for reasons never explained, never did so. Since Taylors 1972 conviction, critical witnesses have recanted and numerous instances of intentional prosecutorial misconduct have surfaced including hiding exculpatory evidence from the defense, extracting false testimony from juveniles threatened with incarceration, and secretly speaking with a dismissed juror mid-trial to get a handle on the jurys leanings, the release said. The case was suffused from the outset with intent to blame the Negro or Colored boy. During Taylors trial, then-Tucson Fire Department investigator Cy Holmes said he believed the fire was set intentionally by a black teenager and that Blacks at that point, their background was to use fire for beneficial purposes. Taylor, who is Black, was 16 at the time of the fire. In a news release sent out Thursday, Taylors attorneys also expressed dismay with the decision and said Taylor remains confident that justice will be served. Ms. Conover holds herself out as a prosecuting attorney willing to correct the injustices of the past. Her decision in this case belies that and shows she is more interested in protecting the County from financial exposure resulting from her predecessors misconduct, the release said. Taylors attorneys have argued throughout the civil case that the dismissal of the 2013 convictions would permit him to receive damages from the time he spent in prison. Now, Conovers decision wont give Taylor that leg up in the case. Conover denies conflict of interest Before Conover took office in 2021, LaWalls team hired outside counsel to take over the Taylor civil lawsuit after finding her prosecution of the case would pose a conflict of interest. The basis of the conflict, they said, was that Conover conducted research for one of Taylors parole hearings while she was in law school and discussed her dismay with how the Taylor case was handled throughout her campaign for county attorney. Conover has said she never worked on Taylors case and that she didnt know outside counsel had been hired until January, after she had already directed senior counsel in her staff to discuss settlement options in the Taylor civil case. Conover said in a news release Wednesday: I have never represented or participated in the representation of Mr. Taylor, whether in law school 20 years ago or since and that The prior administrations conclusions were wrong, but rather than disrupt the defense of the County in the civil lawsuit, I chose not to contest their decision after I took office. However, Conovers Facebook page shows she replied to a comment in January 2020 asking if she had met Louis Taylor, and said: During law school I was able to provide a little research to prepare for one parole hearing, but it was sadly minimal as I was only a student. I felt powerless to help. That feeling has stayed with me. I still pray for Louis. In another Facebook comment, Conover said: He should have been compensated, in my humble opinion. The case caused outrage in me at an early age and has stayed with me. When asked to comment further on the matter, C.T. Revere, the county attorneys offices director of communications, said in an email: We are going to let the statement stand and not do any interviews on the final decision in this review. While Conover has maintained she wasnt aware of the conflict of interest finding from her predecessors office, a Sept. 28 email between Conover and then-Chief Ethics Counsel Regina Nassen shows the county attorney was informed the Taylor case was sent to outside counsel. Regardless, Conover told Nassen in an email she was left completely in the dark about her removal from the case when asked about sending counsel to mediate with Taylors attorneys. Both Nassen and former Chief Civil Deputy Andrew Flagg resigned from the office over Conovers actions in the Taylor case. You will separately receive my resignation letter, but your decision to blame Regina for this situation is unfair, greatly disappointing, and requires its own response, Flagg wrote in an email to Conover in February 2021. Flagg added later, At a minimum, I would expect that you could understand, from the clients perspective, why the election of a new county attorney who publicly espoused those views could cause a lack of harmony in the representation. Photos of the 1970 Pioneer Hotel fire in downtown Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel article Pioneer Hotel Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire, Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire, Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire, Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire, Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire, Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Pioneer Hotel fire in Tucson Louis Taylor to be free PHOENIX The Republican nominee to become the states chief elections officer is someone who has publicly denied that Joe Biden actually won the popular vote here in 2020 and who said he might not certify the results of the 2024 presidential race. State Rep. Mark Finchem of Oro Valley had about a 15-point lead over businessman Beau Lane, his closest competitor, early results Wednesday showed. Trailing further back were state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, who last year had proposed allowing the legislature to override the popular vote for president, and Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita who, while not denying the results of the 2020 race, has raised questions about how it was run. Finchem, endorsed by former President Trump, has been at the forefront of election deniers. He traveled to Washington for the Jan. 6, 2021, rally, though he said he did not enter the Capitol. He also helped organize a hearing at a downtown Phoenix hotel following the 2020 election, bringing in Trump supporters including attorney Rudy Giuliani who detailed their own theories about why Biden actually lost the Arizona race. Finchem has stood with the former president at two Arizona rallies, even proclaiming at one in Florence that we know it and they know it: Donald Trump won. He also is a plaintiff in a lawsuit, along with gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake, seeking to convince a federal judge to bar the use of equipment to tally vote totals and require all ballots to be counted by hand. No date has been set for a hearing on that. And Finchem contends the U.S. Constitution already gives the legislature the power to set aside the results of presidential elections, even without a change in state law, if they believe there has been fraud. Whoever survives the GOP primary is likely to face off against former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes. Results Wednesday showed him with a five-point lead over state Rep. Reginald Bolding. There is one other critical role for the secretary of state. Under the Arizona Constitution, that person is first in the line of succession if the governor dies in office, quits, is impeached or is convicted of criminal charges all things that have happened here. Attorney general Another Trump-endorsed candidate clinched the nomination for state attorney general. He ran far ahead of anyone else in the six-way field. That paves the way for a head-to-head with Democrat Kris Mayes, a former Republican who served on the Arizona Corporation Commission. With the attorney general as the states chief prosecutor, abortion is likely to be a key issue in the race. Even before the Supreme Court voided Roe v. Wade in late June, Mayes vowed she would never prosecute a doctor or medical provider for performing an abortion. That is based on her contention that the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy is protected by a specific right of privacy in the Arizona Constitution, something that does not exist in the national analog. And Mayes said she would give the same advice to county attorneys. Hamadeh, by contrast, described himself even before the final ruling as a pro-life activist. What we stand for are the rights of the vulnerable, to protect the vulnerable, which is the unborn child, he said in a radio interview. It is unclear how the issue might play out in the campaign. In Kansas, a decidedly Republican state, voters went to the polls and rejected a measure that would have eliminated abortion rights in that states constitution. Current Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who did not seek reelection, is involved in litigation about whether the reversal of Roe means a territorial-era law outlawing all abortions except to save the life of the mother can now be enforced. Other races In the race for state schools chief, Tom Horne, who used to have that job, outpolled business owner Shiry Sapir and state Rep. Michelle Udall. He will face off against incumbent Democrat Kathy Hoffman who ran unopposed in the primary. Incumbent Treasurer Kimberly Yee, seeking a second term, rolled up more votes than either of her two GOP challengers, state Rep. Jeff Weninger and businessman Bob Lettieri. State Sen. Martin Quezada was the lone Democratic contender. Three Republicans were running for the two available seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission, with Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers leading Kim Owens. Only two Democrats are vying for the two seats: incumbent Sandra Kennedy and Lauren Kuby, a former member of the Tempe City Council. Two legislative races also showed the Trump influence. House Speaker Rusty Bowers, seeking to move to the Senate, was trounced by former state Sen. David Farnsworth. Bowers had been targeted by Trump supporters for his refusal to allow a House investigation of the 2020 election returns and, more recently, for testifying before the Jan. 6 committee about what he said were improper and illegal efforts by Trump and his supporters to overturn the results. And incumbent Sen. Wendy Rogers won her reelection bid. She was running against fellow incumbent Sen. Kelly Townsend who found herself drawn into the same district. The U.S. Senate confirmed Roopali Desai on Thursday to be the newest judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, despite grilling by Republicans over her role fighting laws approved by Arizonas GOP legislative majority. Desai, an attorney in private practice in Phoenix, was nominated in June by President Biden to be the first South Asian on the federal court, which makes decisions of legal precedence for Arizona, eight other states and Guam. She also had the backing of the states two senators, both Democrats. The 67-29 confirmation vote included the backing of 19 of the Senates 50 Republicans. But Desais path to the bench had to first traverse the Judiciary Committee, where GOP senators pointed out the work, in the courtroom and otherwise, she has done for progressive causes. That included defense of a 2017 petition drive to give Arizona voters the last word on the Legislatures major expansion of a voucher program for parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private and parochial schools. Desai beat back challenges to the referendum, paving the way for Arizona voters to kill the expansion in 2018. She later joined the board of Save Our Schools Arizona, a group that opposes voucher expansion, getting the notice of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a supporter of vouchers. Desais court actions before her nomination also included filing motions on behalf of Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs to quash an Arizona Republican Party bid to kill all early voting in this years election. She argued that the party and its chair, Kelli Ward, have known for decades that Arizona allows anyone to vote early, yet they waited until earlier this year to go to court. That case also became an example of how Desai makes legal arguments but with a bit of political spin. The GOP claims, she wrote in court filings, are part of a broader ongoing effort to sow doubt about our electoral process to justify infringing voting rights. Noting that early and mail-in ballots made up nearly 90% of the votes cast in the 2020 general election, she added, Even though plaintiffs claims are legally baseless, they threaten our democracy. Of note, though, is that Alexander Kolodin, the attorney arguing against her in that case, submitted a letter in support of her nomination. Having faced the best litigators the other side has to offer, I can tell you with confidence nobody else holds a candle to Ms. Desai, he wrote. She has the uncanny ability to advocate for an outcome preferred by her clients by making originalist arguments that might have come from Justice (Clarence) Thomass pen. Desai also did some work on behalf of Biden, at least indirectly, getting a judge to throw out Wards 2020 lawsuit to void the results of the 2020 election that awarded the states 11 electoral votes to the Democratic presidential nominee. Desai also played a prime role in forcing the Arizona Senate to turn over records related to the audit of the 2020 election returns and at one point asked that Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott, be held in contempt for failing to comply with the court order. And she filed suit to block state lawmakers and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey from barring schools from requiring students and employees to wear masks. Desai won that case when the Arizona Supreme Court ruled the mandate against requiring masks, along with other provisions including prohibiting schools from requiring vaccinations against COVID-19 and banning the teaching of critical race theory, had been improperly enacted by the Legislature. Desai sued Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich after he threatened to take Hobbs to court over her decision to temporarily shut down, for updating, an online system that allows candidates to collect qualifying signatures for the ballot. She also did legal work on behalf of the organization that successfully got Arizona voters to approve the use of marijuana for recreational purposes. Desai had less luck protecting the voter-approved Proposition 208, which would have imposed an income tax surcharge on the earnings of the states wealthiest residents to fund K-12 education. The Supreme Court ruled it could not take effect because it bumped up against a constitutional spending limit for education. The justices also sided against her and her clients when they tried to kill a $1.9 billion tax cut enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature. And courts rejected a bid she made to allow initiative organizers to collect signatures online, something that lawmakers have reserved for themselves. A judges ruling in a lawsuit brought by Tulsa Race Massacre survivors rejects the arguments of an ongoing public nuisance but gives some plaintiffs another chance to seek relief through the courts. Lessie Benningfield Randle, 107; Viola Fletcher, 108; and Hughes Van Ellis Sr., another centenarian, are seeking declaratory relief as well as abatement by way of reparations and rebuilding the Greenwood community. Since the suit was first filed in 2020, several arguments have been made for Tulsa County District Judge Caroline Wall to dismiss it, with multiple reasons cited. In her order filed Wednesday, Wall affirmed the validity of some of those arguments while characterizing the political questions at the heart of the case. This court declines to engage in the management of public policy matters that should be dealt with by the legislative and executive branches, Wall wrote. Her order allows for plaintiffs attorneys to reframe their argument for abatement, related directly to the 1921 massacre, in a new brief to be submitted by Sept. 2. Hopeful that the order allows the case to move forward, attorneys representing the survivors spoke Thursday in a virtual news conference. The case was narrowed in certain ways. But we are studying our options right now, said Michael Swartz, an attorney with New York-based Schulte, Roth & Zabel. We are considering whether we take any additional steps with regard to that. But we are mindful that the three plaintiffs that we have, the three living survivors of the massacre, are all over 100 years old, and the community owes it to them to move forward as promptly as possible. Walls order removes all but the three survivors as plaintiffs; the lawsuit originally listed some survivors descendants, Vernon AME Church and the Tulsa African Ancestral Society. Defendants who remain named, as entities in existence in 1921, are the city of Tulsa, Tulsa Regional Chamber, Tulsa County Board of Commissioners, Tulsa County Sheriffs Office and Oklahoma Military Department. The plaintiffs attorneys had built the civil case on framework from the state of Oklahomas landmark public nuisance case against Johnson & Johnson. However, the Oklahoma Supreme Court tossed out that ruling last year, saying the pharmaceutical company could not be held liable under the states public nuisance law as the law was never intended to address a sweeping public crisis like the opioid epidemic. As to the claims of ongoing public nuisance for events in the decades subsequent to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the court finds these ongoing claims of public nuisance must be dismissed with prejudice because these claims request relief that violates the separation of powers provide by the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma, Walls order states. Eric Miller was among a group of lawyers including Johnnie Cochran who, in 2003, represented 150 survivors of the Race Massacre when a federal court declined to hear the merits of that case. On Thursday, he celebrated Walls order for paving a way for the three remaining survivors to reach the discovery stage and present the merits of their case, but he noted the limitations the judge also cited. (Wall) said that resolving the problems of the descendants and those neighborhoods is beyond her capacity, Miller said. She strongly indicated its not beyond the citys competence or capacity. Miller echoed the message of survivors attorneys Thursday that the community can help by contacting local lawmakers to demand they take action on reparations for north Tulsa, Greenwood and the diaspora. (Wall) said a large part of the remedy for this is up to the County and state of Oklahoma to do on its own, Miller said. Damario Solomon-Simmons, attorney for the survivors, pointed to specific abatement steps the city and state could take to resolve the concerns of the lawsuit: establishment of a north Tulsa hospital, profit sharing from the Greenwood Rising Black Wall Street History Center, a scholarship program and reparations. A spokeswoman confirmed early Thursday that city of Tulsa officials do not comment on pending litigation. Flash The meeting between Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and so-called human rights activists is just another farce, said a Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the remarks in response to a media inquiry on Pelosi's visit to a human rights-themed venue in China's Taiwan region and her meeting with so-called "human rights and democracy activists." These arrangements are just another farce staged by Pelosi based on her consistent anti-China, anti-Communist stance and ideological bias, with the cooperation of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities, said Ma, noting that the activists she met and bolstered on Wednesday are long-known tools and puppets of U.S. anti-China forces. Highlighting the guise of so-called "human rights" and "democracy" on the Taiwan question, Pelosi is simply seeking her own personal gain, said Ma, adding that the U.S. mid-term elections are approaching and there have been scandals around the Pelosi family. Ma also warned the DPP authorities that the agenda of roping in anti-China forces, inciting cross-Strait confrontation and engaging in secessionist acts under the guise of democracy and human rights will never succeed. The University of Tulsa next spring will host an inaugural event, in conjunction with the World of Bob Dylan, involving some of the worlds most innovative writers, thinkers and artists. On Thursday, TU officials announced plans for Switchyard, set for May 30-June 4, 2023, a national festival of literature, music and ideas expected to be something like a distinctively Tulsa version of South by Southwest. In addition to more than 35 live music performances, the event promises a literary festival, keynote sessions and lively panel discussions at venues downtown. From Council Oak through the oil boom to Cains Ballroom, Tulsa has always been a vital meeting point, organizer Sean Latham said in a statement. Switchyard will invite people to cross the tracks that once carved this city in two in order to explore our complicated histories, seek new points of connection and explore the transformative power of art, ideas and music. Bands and keynote speakers will be announced in the coming months, organizers said Thursday. Participants at Switchyard can follow tracks such as banned books and outrageous ideas, the transformative power of music, and Oklahomas Indigenous arts and histories. Organizers plan to devote most of June 1, the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, to events focusing on recovery efforts and building a more inclusive future, according to a news release. Latham, director of TUs Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, said the idea for Switchyard took shape not long after the 2019 World of Dylan event, which had sold out two months in advance with 500 attendees, the release said. It was clear we had an opportunity to grow this into something even bigger and, as we return to in-person programming, our aim is to create a unique occurrence maybe something like a distinctively Tulsa version of South by Southwest, said Latham, who also serves as director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. Ticket options, with early-bird pricing available Oct. 1, include single-event admission, music festival and full-event passes. Go to switchyardtulsa.com or search @switchyardtulsa on social media for more information. Featured video: PHOENIX (AP) Arizona voters relegated House Speaker Rusty Bowers to the history books after the conservative Republican crossed former President Donald Trump and refused to back his unsupported claims that he lost in 2020 because of fraud. Bowers was thoroughly trounced in Tuesday's GOP primary, losing to a former state senator by nearly 2 to 1 among voters in his district in the eastern Phoenix suburbs. He was trying to move to the Senate after term limits barred another state House run. Bowers knew his seat was on the line and said he had no regrets for standing up to Trump. I would do it again in a heartbeat, he said Wednesday. Id do it 50 times in a row." Bowers, who holds impeccable conservative credentials save one, had rejected Trump's pleas to help him overturn the November 2020 election results that saw him lose in Arizona, the first time a Republican had lost the presidential race in the state since Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection victory. And then he angered the former president and his backers in Bowers' district even more by testifying in June before a panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress about the president's actions. And then so did the voters. Bowers said the former president has soiled the party. President Trump is a dividing force that has thrashed our party," he told The Associated Press. "And its not enough to disagree. You have to disagree and then stomp on people and ruin their reputations and chase them down and thrash them and you just keep beating them up. Thats the Trump model. He said the state Republican Party, which broke tradition by strongly supporting Trump's candidates and denigrating those like Bowers who failed to fall in line, is in lock-step and has a bully mentality. And I think youre going to find out as all these people leave this party, that someday theres going to be a hard reckoning, Bowers said. And I have a feeling it can be later this year. Farnsworth automatically wins the Senate seat, since the heavily Republican district in the eastern Phoenix suburbs of Mesa drew no Democrats in the primary. Arizona Trump backers did very well up and down the ballot on Tuesday, with his chosen candidate for governor in the lead and candidates he endorsed for U.S. Senate, attorney general and secretary of state all winning their elections. Trump candidates succeeded in several other GOP legislative races as well. In another eastern suburban district, GOP Sen. Tyler Pace lost to a Trump-endorsed challenger. Robert Scantlebury's campaign website said Pace is a RINO like Jeff Flakey Flake (if thats even possible!), who never had a clue. Flake, who declined to seek reelection to his U.S. Senate seat in 2018 after admitting his refusal to back Trump made it impossible for him to win a Republican primary, now serves as President Joe Biden's ambassador to Turkey. Opponents call him a Republican in Name Only," or "RINO. Redistricting put two Trump-supporting state senators, Kelly Townsend and Wendy Rogers, into the same district. Rogers ended up easily beating Townsend. Rogers has faced repeated ethics charges for her inflammatory rhetoric, support for white supremacists and conspiracy-theory laden tweets. Townsend said she felt compelled to run against Rogers when she refused to denounce white nationalism after speaking at a conference in Florida in February. If I dont run against her and make that statement, win, lose or draw, then her actions become our own, Townsend said Monday. It sort of spoils the whole (Republican) party. Rogers has earned a national following, raising a whopping $3 million from donors across the country since taking office in early 2021. Townsend had raised about $15,000, much more typical for a state legislative race. Republican Rep. Joel John, who had secured the House majority by beating a Democrat in 2020 but angered some party members by opposing key school choice and social issue legislation, lost his bid for another term representing a sprawling district west of Phoenix. In the west Phoenix suburbs, former Rep. Anthony Kern, who attended Trumps Jan. 6 rally before the attack on Congress and unsuccessfully sued Democrats who asked the Department of Justice to investigate him, won his Senate primary. He was defeated in his 2020 House primary and is now aiming for a Senate seat. No Democrat is running, so Kern will automatically win the seat in November. Also making a successful political comeback was former Rep. Steve Montenegro, whose 2018 run for Congress was upended by a sexting scandal. He was the top vote-getter among four Republicans running in a west Phoenix House district for two open House seats. One Democrat ran in that district. Democratic Reps. Diego Espinoza and Richard Andrade were battling for a Senate seat after being drawn into the same district in the western Phoenix suburbs, with Espinoza holding a slight lead in a race too close to call. And Sen. Lela Alston, considered the most experienced lawmaker in the Legislature, easily beat two Democratic challengers in her central Phoenix district. One of them, political unknown Al Jones, sought attention by buying billboards across the city. WASHINGTON A bill enhancing health care and disability benefits for millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits won final approval in the Senate on Tuesday, ending a brief stalemate over the measure that had infuriated advocates and inspired some to camp outside the Capitol. The Senate approved the bill by a vote of 86-11. It now goes to President Joe Bidens desk to be signed into law. He has said the bill makes good on our sacred obligation to care for veterans and their families. The Senate had overwhelming approved the legislation back in June, but a do-over was required to make a technical fix. That process derailed when Republicans made a late attempt to change another aspect of the bill last week and blocked it from advancing. The abrupt delay outraged veterans groups and advocates, including comedian Jon Stewart. It also placed GOP senators in the uncomfortable position of delaying the top legislative priority of service organizations this session of Congress. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma was among the 11 opposition votes. He explained more about his vote on Wednesday: "The Democrats, when they were working through the Veterans Committee, decided to take this and say, Were not going to negotiate with Republicans, and we have a few things we want to do ... "(They) cut out choice ... for veterans on what hospital they go to, what doctor they would go to. They did not increase the capacity at VA centers ... and want to sneak in an additional $400 billion in funding that is non-VA related." A group of veterans and their families have been camping out at the Capitol since that vote. They had endured thunderstorms and Washington's notorious August humidity, but they were in the galleries as senators cast their votes. You can go home knowing the good and great thing you have done and accomplished for the United States of America," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told them. The legislation expands access to health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs for millions who served near burn pits. It directs the VA to presume that certain respiratory illnesses and cancers were related to burn pit exposure, allowing veterans to obtain disability payments to compensate for their injury without having to prove the illness was a result of their service. Roughly 70% of disability claims related to burn pit exposure are denied by the VA due to lack of evidence, scientific data and information from the Defense Department. The military used burn pits to dispose of such things as chemicals, cans, tires, plastics and medical and human waste. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnam War era veterans and survivors also stand to benefit from the legislation. The bill adds hypertension, or high blood pressure, as a presumptive disease associated with Agent Orange exposure. The Congressional Budget Office projected that about 600,000 of 1.6 million living Vietnam vets would be eligible for increased compensation, though only about half would have severe enough diagnoses to warrant more compensation. Also, veterans who served in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Guam, American Samoa and Johnston Atoll will be presumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange. Thats another 50,000 veterans and survivors of deceased veterans who would get compensation for illnesses presumed to have been caused by their exposure to the herbicide, the CBO projected. Truong Hai Auto Corporation (THACO), a typical successful firm in Vietnam's automobile sector, has been investing heavily in mechanics and the manufacturing of accessories. THACO leaders shared the firms journey to resolve the issue: increasing the localization rate or surrendering to auto imports flooding the local market. They also shared the one-stop model to help other Vietnamese enterprises cooperate to develop, thereby improving the internal power of Vietnams industry. THACO chairman Tran Ba Duong said at a meeting with mechanical enterprises that you have technology and machinery. We will build factories and lease them at low prices. If we fail to demonstrate our commitment, you can take your machinery away. We will not go back on our words. Only actual acts and thoughts will create values." Refreshing itself by enhancing investment Returning to Chu Lai Industrial Park in central Quang Nam Province nearly three years after Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper held the forum Last chance for Vietnams automobile industry,' a series of factories mushroomed, and container trucks have been nose to tail. The industrial park is home to not only THACO automobile assembly factories measuring thousands of hectares in area but also newly-built factories manufacturing accessories and mechanical products. Enthusiastically sharing a project to develop THACO Chu Lai into a hub manufacturing mechanical products, accessories, and devices for industries in the central region, Do Minh Tam, general director of Truong Hai Supporting Industries and Mechanics Limited Liability Company (THACO Industries), an arm of THACO, expected the project to boost the development of Vietnams industry. At first, everyone seemed dubious. They only thought of automobiles whenever mentioning THACO. However, we separated mechanics from the automobile segment in November 2021, Tam said. From 17 factories producing automobile parts, THACO Industries has developed a complex of 19 factories whose strategy is to concurrently increase the localization rate and supply accessories and mechanical products to the domestic and foreign markets. It is a must to develop the factories on a large scale and in a methodical manner as in 2019, THACO and many other automobile manufacturing and assembly enterprises faced a selection: increasing the localization rate or letting car imports flood the local market due to their competitive advantage given import tariff cuts. Fruitful results and development ambitions Nevertheless, it is not easy to develop an empire. In 2021, a meeting on the restructuring of the firm was held by key leaders to choose a new business model, restructure a board responsible for the companys products because of its more diversified product portfolio, develop a research and development (R&D) center, and boost digitalization, Tam remembered. However, the results surprised many people. With revenue from mechanics amounting to VND5.7 trillion (US$244.2 million) in 2021, THACO Industries set a target to generate revenue of $1 billion by 2025 and invest in 15 more factories, operating in the mechanics, automobile, agricultural mechanics, construction, household appliance, and product design sectors. Mechanical accessories, electric wires, car seats, specialty chemicals, and bodywork will be localized first," Tam said. Once our staff are experienced and we can research and develop as well as design products, we will expand to industrial equipment. Multifunctional model According to Tam, together with changes in supply chains, purchasers have had a higher demand for the one-stop model, which is like a food market with multiple dishes. With THACO Industries advantages in a closed manufacturing chain with lower logistics costs, THACO has repeatedly secured orders of foreign direct investment enterprises, including those ordering a combo of molds, plastic injection equipment, paint and packaging services, instead of sourcing them from four to five separate suppliers. THACO has a plan to develop industrial parks in the north and the south of the country, thus establishing new-generation specialized industrial parks to suspend the transport of huge volumes of products from Chu Lai to other provinces. The close connection and support in the three regions will contribute to optimizing the effectiveness of our value chain, reducing logistics costs, improving the competitiveness, and opening up new business opportunities, Tam noted. He added that THACO had also sought to develop a mechanical engineering outsourcing center in association with R&D to support small and medium enterprises in southern Binh Duong Province. The center will be developed under the one-stop model. This will not be a normal mechanic engineering outsourcing center. R&D services and core technology will be invested in heavily. Employees monitor a spring production system at THACO Chu Lai Industrial Park in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam. Photo: Huu Hanh / Tuoi Tre The center is expected to attract enterprises with the same sense of purpose of getting involved in global production chains and forming a sustainable mechanical engineering ecosystem. No rivals, only partners In the past, THACO manufactured and assembled automobile models for KIA and Mazda and it could be considered a rival of Hyundai and Ford. However, with the policy of making friends with partners, THACO is currently manufacturing plastic bumpers for Hyundai Vietnam and Toyota at a lower price than those offered by Thai manufacturers. It is also a supplier of springs for Isuzu Vietnam, and will be a partner of Ford Ranger in the near future. THACO has launched four cooperation models: partners manufacturing and outsourcing products for THACO; THACO manufacturing and outsourcing the entire or part of products for R&D enterprises; THACO offering R&D services and manufacturing, outsourcing and providing products for enterprises having their own markets; and THACO and partners joining hands to manufacture products. These models are expected to enhance the cooperation and competitiveness of enterprises, creating a strong industrial ecosystem and manufacturing society to pave the way for the breakthrough of the mechanical engineering sector and supporting industries. Methodical support needed Tam said state agencies support should be more methodical and specific. Amid the shift of foreign investment to Vietnam, if institutes and state agencies conduct macro-scale and specialized research, or assess the advantages and competitiveness of Vietnams mechanical engineering sector, enterprises will have more information to grasp opportunities. It will be too late to make investments after securing orders. In addition, the mechanical engineering sector requires large capital while the rate of return is low. Therefore, to secure orders, the state should issue appropriate preferential interest policies for each sector. Moreover, it is advised to focus on labor training on the basis of support packages for schools and students in engineering majors to help them approach advanced technology and techniques. Incentives in taxes, land, and site clearance are also needed for companies to scale up their investment. Notably, the development of industrial parks should involve plans to connect them with value chains, associated with expanding markets and seeking new customers. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! TAIPEI -- China fired multiple missiles around Taiwan on Thursday as it launched unprecedented military drills a day after a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island that Beijing regards as its sovereign territory. Soon after the scheduled start at 0400 GMT, China's state broadcaster CCTV said the drills had begun and would end at 0400 GMT on Sunday. It said the exercises, the largest ever by China in the Taiwan Strait, would include live firing on the waters and in the airspace surrounding Taiwan. China's Eastern Theatre Command said it had completed multiple firings of conventional missiles on waters off the eastern coast of Taiwan as part of the planned exercises. The last time China fired missiles into waters around Taiwan was in 1996. Map showing the six locations where China will conduct military drills. Taiwan's defence ministry said several Dongfeng missiles had been fired in waters to the northeast and southwest of the island. Two missiles were also launched by China near Taiwan's Matsu islands, which lie off the coast of China, at around 2 p.m. local time (0600 GMT) in the direction of drill zones announced by China, according to an internal Taiwan security report seen by Reuters and confirmed by a Taiwan security source. Taiwan officials have said the drills violate United Nations rules, invade Taiwan's territorial space and are a direct challenge to free air and sea navigation. China is conducting drills on the busiest international waterways and aviation routes and that is "irresponsible, illegitimate behaviour," Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party said. Taiwan's cabinet spokesman, expressing serious condemnation of the drills, said also that websites of the defence ministry, the foreign ministry and the presidential office were attacked by hackers. Chinese navy ships and military aircraft briefly crossed the Taiwan Strait median line several times on Thursday morning, a Taiwanese source briefed on the matter told Reuters. By midday on Thursday, military vessels from both sides remained in the area and in close proximity. Taiwan scrambled jets and deployed missile systems to track multiple Chinese aircraft crossing the line. "They flew in and then flew out, again and again. They continue to harass us," the Taiwanese source said. China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory and reserves the right to take it by force, said on Thursday its differences with the island were an internal affair. "Our punishment of pro-Taiwan independence diehards, external forces is reasonable, lawful," China's Beijing-based Taiwan Affairs Office said. 'Comrade Pelosi' China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Pelosi's visit to Taiwan a "manic, irresponsible and highly irrational" act by the United States, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Wang, speaking at a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, said China had made the utmost diplomatic effort to avert crisis, but would never allow its core interests to be hurt. The foreign ministers in a statement had earlier warned that volatility caused by tensions in the Taiwan Strait could lead to "miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers". Unusually, the drills in six areas around Taiwan were announced with a locator map circulated by China's official Xinhua news agency earlier this week - a factor that for some analysts and scholars shows the need to play to both domestic and foreign audiences. On Thursday, the top eight trending items on China's Twitter-like Weibo service were related to Taiwan, with most expressing support for the drills or fury at Pelosi. "Let's reunite the motherland," several users wrote. In Beijing, security in the area around the U.S. Embassy remained unusually tight on Thursday as it has been throughout this week. There were no signs of significant protests or calls to boycott U.S. products. "I think this (Pelosi's visit) is a good thing," said a man surnamed Zhao in the capital's central business district. "It gives us an opportunity to surround Taiwan, then to use this opportunity to take Taiwan by force. I think we should thank Comrade Pelosi." U.S. solidarity Pelosi, the highest-level U.S. visitor to Taiwan in 25 years, praised its democracy and pledged American solidarity during her brief stopover, adding that Chinese anger could not stop world leaders from travelling there. China summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing in protest against her visit and halted several agricultural imports from Taiwan. "Our delegation came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear that we will not abandon Taiwan," Pelosi told Taiwan's leader Tsai Ing-wen, who Beijing suspects of pushing for formal independence - a red line for China. "Now, more than ever, America's solidarity with Taiwan is crucial, and that's the message we are bringing here today." The United States and the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven nations warned China against using Pelosi's visit as a pretext for military action against Taiwan. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said earlier in the week that Pelosi was within her rights to visit Taiwan, while stressing that the trip did not constitute a violation of Chinese sovereignty or America's longstanding "one-China" policy. The United States has no official diplomatic relations with Taiwan but is bound by American law to provide it with the means to defend itself. China views visits by U.S. officials to Taiwan as sending an encouraging signal to the pro-independence camp on the island. Taiwan rejects China's sovereignty claims, saying only the Taiwanese people can decide the island's future. MEXICO CITY -- Mexican authorities were working on Wednesday to rescue a group of miners trapped in a coal mine in the state of Coahuila after it collapsed, Coahuila State Secretary Fernando Donato de Las Fuentes said in an interview on national television. Donato said as many as 11 miners were trapped. The mine is located in the Sabinas municipality, and local media showed footage of family members asking for information about the miners outside the premises. Authorities are pictured at the premises of a coal mine which collapsed leaving miners trapped, in Sabinas, in Coahuila state, Mexico, August 3, 2022. Photo: Reuters The coal mine started operations in January and has not received any complaints, the Labor Ministry said in a statement. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said earlier on Twitter that nine miners were "likely" trapped in the mine. "I hope we find them safe," Lopez Obrador said, adding that the collapse of the mine had caused a flood inside. Soldiers keep watch at the facilities of a coal mine that collapsed leaving miners trapped, in Sabinas, in Coahuila state, Mexico, August 3, 2022. Photo: Reuters One miner had managed to get out, Coahuila Governor Miguel Riquelme said. Some 92 soldiers arrived at the scene, as well as specialists and rescue dogs, the president said. Flash The international community should reject double standards in nuclear non-proliferation, and countries with the largest nuclear arsenals should take the lead in nuclear disarmament, a Chinese diplomat said Tuesday. The nuclear-powered submarine cooperation among the United States, Britain and Australia poses severe nuclear proliferation risks, Fu Cong, head of the Chinese delegation, told the 10th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). "The so-called 'nuclear sharing' arrangements run counter to the provisions of the NPT and increase the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear conflicts," said Fu, also director general of the Department of Arms Control of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. "The United States should withdraw all its nuclear weapons from Europe and refrain from deploying nuclear weapons in any other region," he said. Any attempt to replicate the so-called "nuclear sharing" model in Asia-Pacific would undermine regional strategic stability, be firmly opposed by the countries in the region, and face severe countermeasures when necessary, he added. On the Iran nuclear deal, Fu said all parties concerned should stay committed to bringing the deal back on track at an early date through diplomatic negotiations. The United States should completely lift its relevant illegal sanctions on Iran and long-arm jurisdiction measures on third parties, and on that basis, Iran should return to full compliance with its nuclear commitments, he said. Fu said there is a need to follow the dual-track approach and the principle of phased and synchronized actions in advancing the process toward the establishment of a peace mechanism and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Noting that the peaceful use of nuclear energy should not come at the expense of the natural environment and human health, Fu said Japan should seriously respond to the legitimate concerns of its neighboring countries and the international community at large regarding the disposal of nuclear-contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, fully consult with the stakeholders and the relevant international agencies. Vietnamese airlines have been directed to adjust flight routes in order to avoid six areas near Taiwan where military exercises are being conducted by China amid tensions sparked by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to the island, Vietnams central aviation agency said on Wednesday. The Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) released the direction after China announced its military would launch live-fire drills in six maritime areas surrounding Taiwan and their respective airspace from Thursday to Sunday and asked sea vessels and planes from other countries to avoid these zones. Accordingly, Vietnamese carriers will adjust their flight routes to ensure their planes do not fly over or near the six drill areas labeled on a map released by China, CAAV general director Dinh Viet Thang told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper. Thang also noted that Vietnamese airlines will seek out reserve airports far from these areas. Such adjustments will increase flight distances, times, and expenses a hefty burden given the already soaring coasts of Jet A1 flight fuel, according to CAAV. The agency also stated that these drills will impact routes from Vietnam to the U.S., which are regularly operated by national carrier Vietnam Airlines, as well as flights to Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Specifically, around 60 flights, including 36 by Vietnam Airlines, 22 by Vietjet Air, and several by Bamboo Airways, will be affected, according to the Vietnam News Agency. Thang said CAAV will support the carriers if they face difficulty in altering flight routes through the airspace of relevant countries. However, if there are adverse circumstances related to route adjustments, or if any significant impact arises from the exercises, airlines can proactively delay or cancel relevant flights to ensure safety, provided they notify customers in advance, Thang directed. On August 2, Chinas Xinhua News Agency released a notice that the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army will conduct important military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills in six maritime areas specified in an attached map. For safety reasons, vessels and aircraft are prohibited from entering the waters and airspace intended for the drills. These exercises were announced soon after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taipei on Tuesday evening for a visit to Taiwan, despite previous warnings against the trip from mainland China. Pelosis visit to Taiwan is a serious violation of the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China - U.S. joint communiques, Xinhua cited the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a statement on Tuesday. In response, U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby underlined at a press briefing at the White House that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan did not change Washingtons stance on the one-China policy, which recognizes Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as part of China. Kirby also insisted that the visit was within Pelosis rights and did not infringe Chinas sovereignty, according to Reuters. Regarding increased tension following Pelosis visit, Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday called for the relevant parties to exercise restraint and not to escalate tension in the Taiwan Strait area. Pelosi left Taiwan the same day. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Here are todays leading news stories: COVID-19 Updates -- The Ministry of Health documented 2,096 COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, raising the national tally to 10,785,122, with 9,940,462 recoveries and 43,094 deaths. Society -- A low-pressure area is forecast to form in the East Vietnam Sea between August 7 and 8 and will likely become a tropical depression, according to the National Center for Hydro-meteorological Forecasting. -- Lieutenant General To An Xo, spokesperson of the Ministry of Public Security, said that the ministry will add information on the holders place of birth in the new Vietnamese passport. -- Heavy rains will begin lashing northern provinces on Thursday afternoon and linger until the end of the week, while downpours in the southern region are expected to continue over the coming days. -- Six officials in north-central Nghe An Province have been arrested on suspicion of receiving VND800 million (US$34,190) worth of coffee money during the issuance of land use right certificates for local residents. -- Two boys aged four and seven were seriously injured after a bomb of unknown origin exploded in the area where they were playing in northern Son La Province on Wednesday. -- The Peoples Court in the Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap on Wednesday sentenced seven people to death for illegally transporting nearly 46 kilograms of narcotics in 2020. -- A 16-year-old boy from northern Nam Dinh Province was praised after he jumped into the river and saved a young girl from drowning last Sunday, an official confirmed on Wednesday. -- Police in northern Son La Province confirmed on Wednesday they had arrested a 14-yer-old boy for allegedly murdering and raping a 16-year-old girl before stealing a residents motorbike to run away last month. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Authorities in the northern Vietnamese province of Vinh Phuc have decided to cancel a medical project with an investment of US$125 million in Tam Dao District over its little-to-no progress after nearly ten years. The provincial Department of Natural Resources and Environment has ordered a recall of a 20-hectare land plot in Hop Chau Town, Tam Dao that was originally zoned for building the project. The provincial Peoples Committee granted the investment certificate to Health Care Services Investment Co. Ltd. for developing the structure, which is designed to include a general hospital, a complex for convalescence, health services, and leisure activities, as well as a nursing school, on December 31, 2010. The investor began construction in September 2013. However, the project now remains grassland. The inspection results issued by the provincial inspectors on April 15 showed that Health Care Services Investment Co. Ltd. failed to carry out the project as per the schedule they committed. Therefore, the inspectors proposed the revocation of the land use approval, which the provincial administration ratified on May 18. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Police in Binh Dinh Province, south-central Vietnam are investigating a case in which a 29-year-old car driver hit three teenagers on a motorbike, killing two, after they appeared to intentionally block his way on Wednesday. The third teenager suffered injuries, according to Colonel Vo Duc Nguyen, director of the Binh Dinh Department of Public Security. Tran Xuan Hai, 29, a resident of Hoai An District, Binh Dinh, was driving his four-seater car to his wifes house when Vo Phan Hoai Bao, 15, Nguyen Quoc Viet, 17, and Ngo Quang Linh, 16 all from the same district stopped their motorbike in front of Hais vehicle. Hai then drove his car into the back of the motorbike, killing Bao on the spot. Viet died en route to a medical center and Linh was injured. Colonel Nguyen said police officers are carrying out an investigation to determine whether or not the crash was intentional. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A 16-year-old boy from the northern Vietnamese province of Nam Dinh was praised for jumping into a river to save a young girl from drowning on Sunday last week, an official confirmed on Wednesday. The hero is Bui Hai An, a young resident of Hai Trung Commune in Hai Hau District, Nam Dinh, according to the local official. Footage from a security camera installed in a local house showed that two teenagers were riding a motorbike on a riverside road on the afternoon of July 31 when they saw someone struggling in the Ninh Co River. The two teens ran to a nearby house to call for help. That residence turned out to be Ans and he immediately ran to the riverside, taking off his T-shirt before jumping into the water to rescue the victim. An successfully brought the victim, a little girl, to shore. He had just recovered from an injured collarbone caused by a traffic accident a week before the rescue. The aforementioned footage was later uploaded to social media and went viral as netizens commended An for his bravery. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen has spent the past six years saving thousands of cats and dogs from slaughterhouses in Ho Chi Minh City. About six years ago, Quyens dog disappeared. Fearing the worst, she turned the search for her missing dog toward local slaughterhouses. It was during this hunt, when she discovered dozens of cats and dogs locked away in cages waiting to be butchered, that she resolved to save as many cats and dogs as she could. Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen cares for cats and dogs at the rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre On that trip she wound up buying each and every animal from the slaughterhouse. Now, more than six years later, she has saved nearly a thousand cats and dogs from sure demise. Over the years, Quyens rescue operation ballooned in size to the point that she was forced to move her rescues out of her home and into a shelter she built on a 2,000-squre-meter rented lot on Nguyen Thi Se Street in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City. Inside the shelter, Quyen has built bamboo beds and lofts for the 600 cats and dogs that currently call it 'home.' Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen and a volunteer give medicine to a sick dog at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Though some of the animals at the shelter were strays, most were rescued by Quyen from abattoirs. At first, many of these animals were terrified of strangers, but over time they began to trust Quyen. The shelter is primarily funded by the money she pulls in from running a noodle cart. I received a lot of support from my family when I first started my shelter. Other relatives thought I was insane, but I ignored them and focused on caring for the animals, Quyen said. I need to find a larger location for a new rescue center because I keep rescuing more and more cats and dogs. Fortunately, [my current] landlord sees the good things Im doing and no longer asks me to pay rent." Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen bathes a cat at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Every day, volunteers from neighboring districts and provinces join Quyen and her husband to help care for the animals. The center is currently being renovated so that we can save more cats, she shared. I hope that, in the near future, this space will not only be a place to rescue dogs and cats, but also a place for animal lovers and veterinary trainees to learn how to care for animals. Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen plays with cats and dogs at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen feeds cats and dogs at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen prepares food for cats and dogs at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen and a volunteer prepare food for the rescued animals at her shelter in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen plays with cats at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen plays with cats and dogs at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Huynh Thi Nhu Quyen and a volunteer play with dogs at her rescue center in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Ngoc Phuong / Tuoi Tre Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! 8/3/2022 Welcome to Family News Digest, a weekly newsletter especially for University of Dayton parents and guardians. THREE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW Updates, reminders to campus COVID-19 protocols for fall In an email to campus Wednesday, July 27, the University's Path Forward Team reminded the UD community about COVID-19 protocols to start the academic year. Montgomery County has a high community level of COVID-19, which means the Centers for Disease Control recommends individuals wear face coverings indoors. While optional, masks are required in health care and other specialized settings on campus, including but not limited to the Student Health Center, After Hours Urgent Care in Marianist Hall and the Bombeck Family Learning Center. The message also includes how to make an appointment at the Student Health Center, Premier After Hours Urgent Care and the Counseling Center; and information on UD's requirements for isolation and contact tracing. You can read the complete message here or visit UD's COVID-19 FAQ page. Student code of conduct; student agreement on COVID-19, other health issues updated The University updated the Student Code of Conduct, including but not limited to sections regarding damaging property and complying with University rules, contracts and policies. The Student Agreement Regarding COVID-19 & Other Health Issues also has been updated to include guidelines about health situations beyond COVID-19. All students should review the updated Student Code of Conduct and Student Health Agreement prior to the beginning of classes Aug. 22. UD Magazine digital edition The summer 2022 issue of the University of Dayton Magazine is now available online. Highlights include features about the Pride of Dayton performing in the Dublin, Ireland, St. Patricks Day Parade and the UD and Dayton communities honoring Brother Ray Fitz, S.M. Other stories spotlight Reunion Weekend 2022, a dumpster diving prof, a delayed 2020 graduation, service dogs, saving bees on campus and more. NEWS AND NOTES School of Engineering undergraduate presentations All are invited to join the School of Engineering Aug. 3 and Aug. 5 to view research presentations from students in the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (S.U.R.E) and Ethos programs. S.U.R.E presentations take place 10 a.m. to noon Wednesday, Aug. 3 in the Kettering Labs/Hathcock Hall connector, and Ethos summer immersion presentations take place noon-1:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 5, in the same location. African American Wellness Walk Aug. 13 The University is cosponsoring the 2022 Premier Health African American Wellness Walk, an annual event that raises awareness of and works to combat health disparities in African American communities. This years 5K walk starts at 7:30 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 13, at Daniel J. Curran Place. Employees, students, families, alumni and friends are encouraged to participate as part of Team UD. Gem City Black Business Month Celebrate Gem City Black Business Month in August with more than 20 events hosted by local business resource providers and entrepreneurs to celebrate and amplify Black businesses in the Greater Dayton region. The Gem City Black Business Month, now in its second year, is championed by the Greater West Dayton Incubator and collaborators across the city. Visit the Launch Dayton website for a full listing of events. Every Wednesday, the University news and communications team will share news to help you stay connected. Previous issues of Family News Digest are archived at go.udayton.edu/flyerfamilies. (Bloomberg) -- Top Taliban officials didnt know al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was hiding in Afghanistan, a spokesman said, and an investigation is underway to check the veracity of US claims he was killed in an American airstrike in the capital Kabul over the weekend. Most Read from Bloomberg The government and the leadership wasnt aware of what is being claimed, Suhail Shaheen, the head of the groups political office in Doha, Qatar, said over WhatsApp messages. There was no trace of his presence, Shaheen added. The Taliban government is investigating the matter, he added, and will share its findings. The group has already condemned the American airstrike saying it violated Afghanistans sovereignty and the 2020 Doha agreement, which resulted in the withdrawal of US troops from the country after 20 years of war. The Taliban took over shortly before the exit was completed. President Joe Biden announced Zawahiris killing Monday evening. US administration officials said the Taliban government was not notified in advance of the strike that involved several months of intelligence work. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week the Taliban had violated repeated assurances to the world that they would not allow Afghan territory to be used by terrorists to threaten the security of other countries. The Talibans chief spokesman Thursday again refuted claims that Afghanistan posed a threat as a source of terror activity. There is no danger to anyone, including America, from the soil of Afghanistan, Zabihullah Mujahed said in a Twitter post. The Islamic Emirate wants to implement the Doha Agreement and the violation of the agreement must end. If Afghan territory is violated again any consequences will be on the responsibility of the United States, the statement said. Story continues Zawahiri was instrumental in the planning of the 9/11 attacks on the US and Washington has said was the mastermind behind multiple attacks against Americans, including the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was killed Sunday in Kabul when he walked onto the balcony of his residence in a strike that used two Hellfire missiles and did not cause any civilian casualties, according to a senior Biden administration official. (Updates with Taliban spokesmans comments in the sixth paragraph.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2022 Bloomberg L.P. Flash Zhang Ming, secretary-general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), on Wednesday made comments on the visit to China's Taiwan region by Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi visited China's Taiwan region in disregard of China's strong opposition and serious representations, and the Chinese government has expressed its firm opposition to and stern condemnation of the visit, Zhang said in response to a question from the media. The one-China principle is the universal consensus of the international community and the basic norms governing international relations, he said. "The SCO adheres to the one-China principle, firmly opposes interference in the internal affairs of its member states by any external force, supports all member states in safeguarding national unity and defending their own sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will continue to promote further cooperation among member states in this regard to ensure peace, security and stability in the region," Zhang said. (Bloomberg) -- The US Senate ratified adding Sweden and Finland to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a move intended to bolster the military alliance after Russias invasion of Ukraine. Most Read from Bloomberg The vote was 95-1, far exceeding the two-thirds majority required for the approval of treaties. If the ascension wins approval from all current members of the alliance, Finland will join Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway as NATO countries that share a land border with Russia. The vote comes more than five months after Russian President Vladimir Putin shook the world order with his invasion of neighboring Ukraine. In response, NATO has moved to offer more protection to the exposed Baltic countries along the alliances eastern border. Putin is strengthening the NATO alliance and nothing shows it better than the vote, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. The vote marked a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation between the Senate leaders. If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote no, I wish them good luck, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said ahead of the vote. This is a slam-dunk for national security that deserves unanimous support. After consulting with officials from the two countries this spring the leaders dispatched a bipartisan congressional delegation to Europe in late June to build support for their inclusion at a NATO summit in Madrid. Should they join NATO, Article 5 of the organizations founding treaty would dictate a Russian attack on either country would be considered an attack against all member nations. Energy and food prices have soared since Russias invasion, causing political instability globally. After the US and its allies bombarded Russia with sanctions, NATO now looks to reposition itself militarily to curb further Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. Story continues Only GOP Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri voted against ratification, arguing that the US should focus its foreign policy on China and keep American interests the countrys priority. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul voted present. I fear that some in this town have lost sight of that, Hawley, considered a 2024 presidential contender, said. They think American foreign policy is about creating a world liberal order. The Senate did accept by voice vote an amendment offered by Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan calling for every NATO member to commit to minimum defense spending equal to 2% of its GDP as outlined in the 2014 Wales Summit Declaration. It also calls for 20% of defense budgets to be used on major equipment, including research and development, by 2024. Still, McConnell said the move was unnecessary as Finland already meets NATOs 2% spending target and Sweden is ramping up its investments to modernize its military. He said they will bring meaningful interoperable military capabilities into the alliance on Day One. Both countries already have participated in NATO exercises, developed professional fighting forces, invested in cutting edge interoperable technologies, and built robust military industrial bases, McConnell said. Together theyve set an example that many current treaty allies would do well to follow, McConnell said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised the vote, saying Finland and Sweden will continue to bring crucial support to the mission of the West and all freedom-loving countries to counter Putins aggression, bolster security and stability in the region and preserve democracy for the world. Turkey is one of seven members who have yet to ratify the treaty. The countrys leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is set to speak with Putin on Friday. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said the country would veto membership for the two Nordic countries if they dont fulfill their promises to combat terrorism and extradite suspects under a memorandum of understanding reached at NATOs summit in Madrid in July. Erdogan has criticized countries that he says shelter Kurdish groups he considers terrorists. But lawmakers said Tuesday that they were confident that Finland and Sweden will ultimately prevail. Senator Jack Reed, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview their pending membership sends a clear message to Putin. He thought he could weaken NATO and divide us, and now it appears that were not only more united, but were growing, the Rhode Island Democrat said. The Senate last voted to expand NATO in 2020, when North Macedonia joined the partnership. How Russia Pushed Finland and Sweden Toward NATO: QuickTake (Corrects to include Norway among NATO countries bordering Russia. An earlier version was corrected to add Poland and Lithuania to such countries.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2022 Bloomberg L.P. A large fire in one of Berlin's largest city forests, caused by several explosions at an ammunition dump, was still not under control by Thursday afternoon. Around 100 firefighters were on site earlier to control the blaze in the Grunewald forest in the west of the city, German news agency dpa reported. Berlin police said it was assisting their colleagues, setting up roadblocks to the forest and employing their own helicopters and water cannons in the fight against the fire amid concerns about its uncontrolled advance. "The situation is dangerous," Thomas Kirstein from the Berlin fire department told reporters. He called on residents to stay away from the forest. The fire first affected some 15,000 square metres, or 1,5 hectares of the forest, the city firefighting unit said on Thursday morning, while a one-kilometre perimeter has been set up as the situation remains high-risk. The fire was spreading quickly, and massive explosions could be heard from the site where old ammunition from World War II, fireworks and explosive ordnance are stored, and controlled explosions are carried out. The site has been in use since 1950, and the city has been looking for alternatives, but those were not available in the Berlin area and could not be approved, Berlin police said. Due to flying debris and the threat of further explosions, the authorities said the responders were working on a "cautious containment" operation that could last until Thursday evening. Berlin authorities called for additional help in extinguishing the flames, including special forces from the German army. The commuter train service to the city's west was partially interrupted, and one of the city's most important highways, the Avus, was closed. Homes were not directly threatened by the flames, but the fire department warned that the fire could further spread due to the dry conditions of the forest and the exceptional heat that was expected on Thursday with temperatures of up to 38C. Story continues Fire engines and ambulances stand on Kronprinzessinnen road at the Grunewald forest in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. - Credit: AP The Grunewald forest covers around 3,000 hectares of land, and it stretches along the western part of the city along the Havel river. The Berlin region is suffering from a particularly severe drought as well. A large forest fire in July burned more than 850 hectares in southern Brandenburg, the region surrounding the capital. A little further south, a fire in the "Bohemian Switzerland" national park, which started in the Czech Republic and spread to Germany, is still keeping firefighters busy. Harry Styles stopped his show to help a fan propose credit:Bang Showbiz Harry Styles assisted a fan with his proposal at his concert in Portugal. The 'As It Was' hitmaker brought his 'Love On Tour' jaunt to Lisbon's Altice Arena on Sunday (31.07.22), and helped a couple get engaged during his set. Harry - who is dating 38-year-old actress-and-director, Olivia Wilde - spotted the guy in the crowd and handed him a microphone, before he began singing Elvis Presley's classic ballad 'Cant Help Falling in Love' with the help of the crowd. The former One Direction star, 28, could be seen watching on as the man's partner started singing along in a clip shared on social media. He then got the ring from his wallet and asked her: "Will you marry me? She said "yes" before screaming and sharing a sweet embrace with her new fiance. Harry congratulated the pair before resuming the show. The 'Watermelon Sugar' singer is always happy to help fans with their special requests at his shows. In June, Harry helped an Italian fan come out as gay at his Wembley Stadium concert. The fan, named Matteo, was holding a sign that read: "From Ono to Wembley: Help me come out." And the 'My Policeman' star was more than happy to oblige. The 'Sign of the Times' singer declared Matteo "officially gay my boy" as he raised a Pride flag above his head. He said: "Congratulations Matteo, you are a free man." And it wasn't the first time. Last October, the pop star - who has a strong LGBTQ+ following - was performing a solo gig at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, when he assisted an audience member in their request to publicly declare their sexuality. After he spotted a girl holding a sign with "Help me come out emblazoned across it in the packed-out crowd, the 'Kiwi' singer threw up a rainbow pride flag and said: Anyone particular youd like to come out to? "Is it for yourself? When I raise this flag youre officially out, heard thats how it works! Shes oooout! The previous month, Harry did a gender reveal for a pregnant fan midway through his show. Russia backs the Myanmar junta's efforts to "stabilise" the crisis-wracked country and hold elections next year, its foreign minister said in talks with top generals on Wednesday, according to Russian state media. The Southeast Asian nation has been in turmoil since the putsch last year, with the junta accused by rights groups of committing war crimes as it struggles to crush resistance to its rule. Isolated internationally and with Western governments imposing sanctions, the military government has sought to deepen ties with major ally and arms supplier Russia -- whose invasion of Ukraine it has said was "justified". "We are in solidarity with the efforts [by the junta] aimed at stabilising the situation in the country," Sergei Lavrov said during talks in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw, according to the TASS news agency. "Next year, you will hold legislative elections and we wish you success," Lavrov added, referring to proposed August 2023 elections that opponents of the coup have said will be neither free nor fair. On Monday junta chief Min Aung Hlaing -- who travelled to Moscow last month -- said polls could only take place when the conflict-wracked country was "stable and peaceful". The putsch has sparked renewed fighting with established ethnic rebel groups in border areas, while dozens of civilian "People's Defence Force" militias have also sprung up to battle the military. Russia -- along with ally China -- has been accused by rights groups and a UN expert of arming the military with weapons used to attack civilians. Lavrov and junta chief Min Aung Hlaing also discussed opening new consulates "to promote an increase in travel" between their two countries, TASS said. The junta has yet to comment on Lavrov's visit. Lavrov is scheduled to travel on to an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers' meeting in Cambodia from which the junta's top diplomat has been excluded. The bloc joined a chorus of international outrage last week after the junta announced it had executed four prisoners, including a former lawmaker and a democracy activist, in the country's first use of capital punishment in decades. Story continues - 'Disappointed and disturbed' - ASEAN has been growing increasingly frustrated at Myanmar's lack of progress on a five-point peace plan agreed last year. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen -- the current ASEAN chair -- on Wednesday warned Myanmar against further hangings. He said the regional bloc was "disappointed and disturbed" by last month's executions, and that the further use of capital punishment would mean a "rethink" of the five-point peace plan. Isolated on the international stage, the junta has turned increasingly to allies including China and Russia. Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing was in Moscow on a "private" visit in July and reportedly met with officials from Moscow's space agency Roscosmos and nuclear agencies. In Naypyidaw, Lavrov said Roscosmos would build "new infrastructure" in Myanmar in cooperation with the junta. The army has justified its power grab by alleging massive fraud during the 2020 elections, in which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) trounced a military-backed party. Last year, it cancelled the results of the polls, saying it had uncovered more than 11 million instances of voter fraud. International observers said the voting was largely free and fair. More than 2,100 people have been killed in a military crackdown on dissent, according to a local monitor. bur-rma/pdw/ssy China speeds up construction of Hainan Free Trade Port Xinhua) 08:22, August 04, 2022 * The island province of Hainan was once a backwater of fisherfolk and poor farmers, but now, it is a vivid example of China's high-level opening-up. * In 2020, China released a master plan to build the whole of Hainan Island into a globally influential and high-level free trade port by the middle of the century. Since then, a slew of favorable policies have been issued to support the development of the Hainan FTP, including zero tariffs and easing market and foreign investment access. *Hainan will finish building all the necessary infrastructure for independent customs operations by 2023 and will realize independent customs operations throughout the whole island by the end of 2025. HAIKOU, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- When Lin Guangming came to south China's Hainan Province in late 2020, he was fascinated by the rich opportunities offered by the fledgling Hainan Free Trade Port (FTP). Lin, 42, is an overseas Chinese with Singaporean citizenship. He currently serves as the chief planner for the Yangpu Economic Development Zone management committee. Yangpu Economic Development Zone in Danzhou, a city in the northwestern part of Hainan, is a pioneer and demonstration area for the Hainan FTP. "Hainan's free trade port policy is open enough to attract foreign talents to work in Hainan and Yangpu," Lin said. Lin is among the talents coming to Hainan to seek opportunities as the construction of the FTP picks up speed. The island province of Hainan was once a backwater of fisherfolk and poor farmers, but now, it is a vivid example of China's high-level opening-up. Since the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress in 2012, Hainan has hosted a series of diplomatic, economic, and cultural gatherings, which greatly raised the island's profile and exposed the province to the very latest in business practices and pioneering services. In 2020, China released a master plan to build the whole of Hainan Island into a globally influential and high-level free trade port by the middle of the century. Since then, a slew of favorable policies have been issued to support the development of the Hainan FTP, including zero tariffs and easing market and foreign investment access. Aerial photo taken on July 22, 2022 shows a view of Yangpu port in the Yangpu Economic Development Zone in Danzhou, south China's Hainan Province. (Xinhua/Guo Cheng) STEADY PROGRESS In the past few years, major sectors in Hainan have seen steady development thanks to a variety of policies. One of them is consumption. In the Sanya International Duty-Free City in Haitang Bay, Sanya, visitor Chen Yingying was waiting in line to bring home some duty-free products. "I think it's great, because there are many different types of brands, and the prices are quite reasonable," she said. On July 1, 2020, Hainan raised its annual tax-free shopping quota from 30,000 yuan (4,443 U.S. dollars) to 100,000 yuan per person. As part of the core policies of the construction of Hainan FTP, the new policy in duty-free shopping has made consumers more willing to spend than ever before. Official data showed that from July 1, 2020, to the end of June this year, Haikou Customs counted 90.6 billion yuan in offshore duty-free product sales, with 125 million items sold. The duty-free shopping on the island could well boost the domestic consumption, and connect Hainan with the international market, according to Chi Fulin, head of the Hainan-based China Institute for Reform and Development. Duty-free shopping is only part of the broader Hainan FTP development picture. Steady progress has been made in building Hainan into an FTP, according to a press conference of the CPC Hainan Provincial Committee in July. The number of registered market entities in Hainan has increased from less than 310,000 in 2013 to more than 1.98 million, with the growth rate ranking first in the country for 28 consecutive months. Shen Xiaoming, Party chief of Hainan, said that over the past two years, over 180 policies and measures have taken effect in Hainan to facilitate trade and investment. One of the companies benefiting from these policies is AUSCA International Oils and Grains Co., Ltd., which operates Hainan's first grain and oil processing project with an annual output of 1 million tonnes. "The favorable policies in the Hainan FTP and Yangpu have given us incredible business opportunities," said Zhang Hui, chairperson of the company, located within the Yangpu bonded harbor under the Yangpu Economic Development Zone. "I think I made the right decision to come to Yangpu." According to Shen Xiaoming, the average annual growth rate of new market entities in Hainan in recent years has reached 40 percent. Meanwhile, the actual utilization of foreign investment in Hainan grew at an average annual rate of 80 percent, and the number of foreign enterprises introduced on the island grew at an average annual rate of nearly 120 percent. Tourists visit an international duty free mall in Sanya, south China's Hainan Province, June 23, 2022. (Xinhua/Guo Cheng) HUGE POTENTIAL "The construction of the Hainan FTP means a huge opportunity for foreign companies," said Stefano Fedi, from Italy. Stefano established a fashion consultancy company in Hainan in 2018. The favorable business environment brought about by deepening reform and opening-up has increased Hainan's attractiveness to talents and investment. Since 2018, Hainan has introduced more than 400,000 highly skilled personnel, an increase of nearly 10 times compared with the previous four years. Hainan's economic transformation and upgrading have also achieved remarkable results over the past two years. Tourism, modern services, high-tech, and high-efficiency agriculture with tropical characteristics have become the four leading industries on the island. "Hainan will actively meet the international high-standard economic and trade rules, promote institutional opening-up, continuously improve trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, and open up to the outside world in a wider scope, in more fields and at a deeper level," said Cui Jian, deputy head of the provincial department of commerce. A cargo ship loaded with soya beans from Brazil prepares to unload at Yangpu port in the Yangpu Economic Development Zone in Danzhou, south China's Hainan Province, July 22, 2022. (Xinhua/Guo Cheng) The construction of the first batch of nine projects related to independent customs operations throughout Hainan island began in July. The projects, with a total investment of 1.42 billion yuan, are located in the cities of Haikou, Sanya, Wenchang, Qionghai, and Dongfang, and Chengmai County. Hainan will finish building all the necessary infrastructure for independent customs operations by 2023 and will realize independent customs operations throughout the whole island by the end of 2025. Lin Guangming, the Singaporean chief planner for the Yangpu Economic Development Zone management committee, has brought his family to the island province. He has big plans for the future in Hainan. "It is my personal mission to help transfer Singapore's philosophy and best practices in urban planning to Chinese cities and now with a focus in Hainan Yangpu, which is still in its infancy stage," he said. "There will be a huge potential for this place and for professionals." (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Flash UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday affirmed the world body's one-China policy as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit has created tensions. He clarified the position at a press conference for the launch of a report of his Global Crisis Response Group over the Ukraine crisis. "Our position is very clear. We abide by General Assembly resolutions, by the one-China policy, and that is the orientation that we have in everything we do," said Guterres. The UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758 in 1971, which decides to restore the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the United Nations and to recognize the representatives of the PRC government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations. HCM CITY The 8th International Livestock, Dairy, Meat Processing and Aquaculture Exposition opened on August 3 at the Sai Gon Exhibition and Convention Centre in District 7. ILDEX Vietnam 2022 has attracted more than 200 exhibitors from 25 other countries and territories, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Thailand, the US, and the UK. There are national pavilions from countries like France, the US, Italy, Korea, Brazil, Czech Republic and big brands in the livestock industry such as EVONIK, HUALI, BEHN MEYER, PEJA, LUCTA, and MIAVIT. Besides showcasing the latest machinery, technologies and business solutions for the livestock, dairy and aquaculture industries, the expo also features specialised seminars, a business matching programme, a Potential Buyer Programme (VIP Buyer), and a bunch of other practical activities. Returning after a nearly three-year gap due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition offers a great opportunity to help exhibitors and visitors connect, diversify their supply chains, learn about the latest trends, market demands and new technologies and products, and find business opportunities, according to the organisers. Duong Tat Thang, director of the Livestock Production Department, said despite difficulties last year, the livestock sector achieved relatively high growth, making an important contribution to the growth of the agricultural sector. Livestock products not only meet the needs of 100 million people in the domestic market but are also exported to other countries. To maintain this growth and improve the industry's competitiveness, more investment is needed in advanced farming and processing technologies, he said. Organised by Minh Vi Exhibition and Advertisement Services Co., Ltd and VNU Exhibitions Asia Pacific Co., Ltd, ILDEX Vietnam will go on until August 5 and is expected to attract 10,000 visitors. VNS HA NOI State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Thursday hosted a reception for Governor of Gunma prefecture of Japan Yamamoto Ichita who is on a working visit to Viet Nam. During the meeting, the leader spotlighted the strong and comprehensive development of the Viet Nam Japan extensive strategic partnership with high political trust, saying that regular high-level delegation exchanges, economic-investment-trade and defence cooperation, and people-to-people exchanges between the two sides have been further promoted. Japan continues to be among Viet Nams top economic partners, the biggest ODA provider, the third largest investor and the fourth trade partner of Viet Nam, the President said, noting that cooperation in tourism, labour, human resources training, and local cooperation between the two countries have been also further strengthened. Cooperation between Viet Nam and Gunma Prefecture, especially in economic, investment bond and people-to-people exchanges, have been being actively developed, he added. President Phuc spoke highly of the efforts by Governor Ichita in promoting relations with Viet Nam over the past time, particularly in organising Vietnamese festivals in the Japanese locality and helping the Vietnamese community there overcome difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. He suggested businesses of Gunma pour more investment into Viet Nam, especially in high-tech green agriculture, processing and manufacturing industries, supporting industry, digital technology and artificial intelligence. The two sides should expand human resources cooperation, he said, calling on the Japanese locality to create favourable conditions for the Vietnamese community to live, work and study in the prefecture. For his part, Ichita said he will do his utmost to contribute to further promoting the Viet Nam Japan relations, especially economic cooperation between Gunma and Vietnamese localities. According to Ichita, business delegations of Gunma will visit Viet Nam to seek investment opportunities in the Southeast Asian nation in the field of digital and information technology, and manufacturing technology. VNS QUANG NAM Wiping the sweat off her face, Kring Huon continues to carry bags of cement and sand up to a house under construction. The July sunshine in the central province of Quang Nam has made her sweaty and a little tired, but she perseveres. Along with other young people in the province, she is building houses for the poor in Nam Giang District. I am very happy that I can contribute a small part of my efforts to help local poor people build new houses," Huon told Tien Phong (Vanguard) newspaper. "Looking at the happy eyes and smiles of the residents, all my hardships disappeared." She is among over 200 young people who volunteered to go to villages near the border between Viet Nam and Laos in Quang Nam Province to help residents. Ho Kring Giong, from the Ve ethnic group in ac Pring Commune, was just presented with a new house. The house is worth VN100 million (US$4,270) and is a donation from Nam Giang District's youth union. "I am so happy to have a new house. It means my family will no longer worry when the rainy season comes," Giong said. Bui The Anh, secretary of the Youth Union of Nam Giang District, said young people have helped poor households build new houses and coordinated with Tam Ky District to install solar lamps on rural roads, and joined other youth volunteer campaigns. In the first six months of 2022, Nam Giang District Youth Union has donated breeding pigs and chickens to ten poor households and 300 orange seedlings to 15 households in La Dee border commune. Thousands of gifts were also presented to poor families. The young people also planted 1,200 new trees in ac Pring District. Brao Tiem, from La Dee Commune, one of nine poor households to have received support from the Youth Union, built a farm to raise chickens and pigs and now has a stable income. "I have registered with local authorities to move my family out of the poverty list this year," he said. A Rat Ton, a resident, said his family has successfully developed a cow breeding model, creating a stable income. From a poor household, Ton's family escaped from poverty and are gradually stabilising their lives. "With the support of the Youth Union, many young people have learned new models and methods to do business and many good models are being replicated," Anh said. VNS This is an activity in the framework of the initiative Gender Stereotype Circle Breaking one of the four initiatives to be sponsored by the Asian Gender Trainers Network Programme. During the two days of training, through experiential games, role-playing, and debating methods, the teachers had the chance to gain knowledge about gender concepts, gender equality, norms, stereotypes, and domestic and international legal frameworks. In particular, teachers at Ban Lau Primary School and Muong Khuong Primary School No.1 participated in training units to find gender stereotypes and norms in textbooks and teaching activities, thereby suggesting appropriate solutions to students. I will pose questions in my lessons so that the students can realise that today's females and males have equal rights to choose a career which suits their desires and abilities, said Nguyen Thi Thua, a teacher at Ban Lau Primary School. The For Vietnamese Stature Foundation promotes gender equality in education with a training course for teachers in mountainous regions How to organise experiential games and improvisational plays are two new methods that teachers approached and practised in the training course in order to integrate knowledge about gender equality in education, as well as to encourage positivity from students. With this plan, teachers can gradually nurture an appropriate gender-neutral mindset of equality in the students and encourage them to take action, said Doan Van Chu, principal of Ban Lau Commune Primary School. At the training session, the management board, homeroom teachers, and subject teachers worked together to develop a detailed action plan to implement gender equality promotion activities in the 2022-2023 school year. This is a new step for the school to contribute to a fair and equal society in the future. With this plan, teachers can gradually nurture an appropriate gender-neutral mindset of equality in the students and encourage them to take action. The students can spread this to their relatives and friends, and in the long run, they will become active contributors to the eradication of gender stereotypes and stigmata. The training session was really meaningful," said Doan Van Chu, principal of Ban Lau Commune Primary School. As planned, the next training activity for 40 key ethnic minority students at Ban Lau Commune Primary School will be carried out this September. Teachers enrolled in the training course will directly participate in supporting this activity. Promoted participation of young journalists and communication officers in Gender and Gender Equality Youth for Environment project backed by BAC A BANK launched Hanoi The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) has given timely instructions to banks in order to prevent risks and acts that take advantage of virtual currencies in transactions, Deputy Governor Dao Minh Tu has said. SBV Deputy Governor Dao Minh Tu (Photo: VNA) Asked about whether the central bank includes cryptocurrencies in the draft Law on Anti-Money Laundering at a regular government meeting in Hanoi on August 3, Tu said the central bank is considering this issue cautiously and comprehensively in preparation for the perfection of the draft law to be submitted to the legislature during its upcoming session. The official reaffirmed that bitcoin and other similar virtual currencies are not legal means of payment in Vietnam. According to Tu, on the basis of recommendations by global anti-money laundering organisations, countries should pay attention to assets and products, the so-called technology in the financial sector, to ensure strict management and prevent money laundering or terrorism and other purposes. Apart from the law, the Government will issue documents to fight money laundering, terrorism and tax fraud or even the use of the assets as gifts, which has been seen as corruption and bribery, he continued. Credit institutions or intermediate payment service providers are not allowed to perform transactions and tasks related to virtual currencies due to possible risks of money laundering, terror financing or tax fraud, Tu said. Interest ramps up in cryptocurrencies Vietnam is a country that has been booming economically for years. It is also open to new ideas and technologies. It is therefore not surprising that Vietnam is now ranked second in the world (out of 74 countries surveyed) in the use of cryptocurrencies. According to Statista - a German company specialising in market and consumer data - 21 per cent of respondents in Vietnam said they had used or owned cryptocurrencies in 2020. Only Nigeria is ahead of Vietnam. Is there a future for crypto in Vietnam? Despite their great volatility, cryptocurrencies have experienced noteworthy milestones in the past few months, reaching record highs and fuelled by wild expectations across the globe. Vinh Luu, managing partner at Asia Legal, dives into the risks and rewards for cryptocurrencies in Vietnam in particular. New York Deputy Foreign Minister Ha Kim Ngoc had a meeting on August 3 with United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who highly valued Vietnam's active and responsible contributions to the common work of the organisation, especially the countrys strong commitments in the fight against climate change, and promised to continue supporting Vietnam in this work. Deputy Foreign Minister Ha Kim Ngoc addresses a UN conference (Photo: VNA) The UN leader said he is impressed by socio-economic achievements of Vietnam, especially the countrys post-pandemic recovery. Ngoc, who is in New York for the Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, affirmed that the UN is a reliable partner for the causes of peace, co-operation, and development, with the international body always accompanying Vietnam through its national development stages. The Deputy Minister also reiterated the invitation by State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc to the UN Secretary-General to visit Vietnam at the earliest opportunity. Guterres affirmed that he will visit Vietnam this year. Regarding regional and international issues of concern, the two sides agreed to continue enhancing multilateralism, uphold international law, and promote ASEAN-UN co-operation, as well as ASEAN's role in the regional security architecture. This includes maintaining peace, stability, security, safety, and freedom of navigation and overflight in the East Sea, while peacefully settling disputes on the basis of international law, especially the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). On the sidelines of the conference, Deputy Minister Ngoc also held bilateral meetings with representatives from Caribbean and developing countries. In addition, he is scheduled to hold meetings with the Assistant Secretary-Generals and UN leaders in charge of political, security, and legal affairs. Climate change drives Europe towards record fire year The fires that have torched through Europe are on course to make 2022 a record year for forest loss on the continent, as scientists warn climate change is already contributing to ever fiercer blazes. Tasks, solutions set to fulfill COP26 commitments Deputy Prime Minister Le Van Thanh on July 25 signed a decision approving the project on tasks and solutions to implement outcomes of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). Vietnam to clarify stance on US Indo-Pacific agenda Vietnam will soon decide on whether it will officially engage in the United States fresh economic cooperation framework which is hoped to help increase both economies investment and trade ties. The Bellmead City Council is contemplating a budget meant to ensure support for city employees, improve public safety and fund a plan to beautify and update the town. City Manager Yost Zakhary is proposing a property tax rate of 32.32 cents per $100 valuation, a decrease of about 5 cents from last year, and half-a-cent more than the no-new-revenue rate. When the city can afford to lower the rate, it will, Zakhary said during a city council meeting Tuesday. However, the number could be subject to increase in the future, he said. The budget document says the city has the lowest property tax rate and property values in the area, leading to a less robust revenue stream and difficulties creating a balanced budget in the general fund. The average market value of homes in Bellmead increased from $113,591 in 2021 to $149,453 this year, an almost 32% jump. With tax exemptions and a cap on annual increases, the average taxable value of homes in Bellmead increased from $101,824 to $114,518, a jump of about 13%. An owner of a home with a taxable value of $115,000 in 2021 would owe $431.47 in property taxes. With a 13% increase to $129,950 in 2022 and the citys proposed tax rate, the owner would owe $419.96. With the same increase and the no-new-revenue tax rate of 31.82 cents per $100 valuation, the owner would owe $413.45. The no-new-revenue rate is the rate at which the city would collect the same amount of revenue year-to-year, excluding properties newly added to the tax rolls. The city expects property taxes this year to bring in $51,144 more than last year, including $21,506 from new property added this year. A public hearing for the tax rate is set for Aug. 30. The budget document lists increasing wages as integral in maintaining a high-performing government. The citys employee turnover rate saw a high of 39.19% in 2019, city administrators wrote. The turnover rate projected for 2022 is 13.16%, and officials attribute the improvement to citys ongoing effort to increase employee morale and satisfaction. All city employees will see a 3% cost-of-living raise under the proposed budget, which would be the citys second uniform wage increase since the pay scale was adopted in 2006. The city has used the same pay scale since 2006. Public safety employees will see a brand new pay scale included in the 2023 budget that will bring wages closer to the level of comparable positions at other cities. The estimated cost of the higher pay for public safety employees is set at $250,000. In the budget document, officials wrote that pay increases are necessary to be competitive with surrounding areas and to help morale. Turnover in the citys police department is 10.71%, a significant decrease from the historic rates of 30 to 50%, according to the budget. The document says the improvement is a result of offering more competitive wages, hiring incentives and upgraded equipment, among other factors. City administrators say several budget cycles are necessary before the pay scale can be adjusted for positions of lieutenant and higher, because adjustments for those positions are more costly. Of the general fund, 57.74% of expenditures will be spent on public safety. The disparity in employee compensation must be addressed this year and for several years to come for the City to attract and retain a talented workforce, the document says. The budget lists many other proposed changes and projects, including: $300,000 put toward pavement restoration. The pavement management program began in the summer of 2021 and will continue in 2023. Bellmead contributing $1.75 million to a $31 million joint project with Waco, Lacy Lakeview and Texas State Technical College for a sewer interceptor that is expected to open up space for development. A 5% increase for all solid waste services in 2023. The budget says this will offset an increase in solid waste provider costs tied to high fuel prices. The Texas Department of Agriculture is helping fund upgrades to downtown Bellmead. Construction of Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant sidewalks and lighting downtown is expected to be completed in the spring of 2023. A 45-year-old Omaha man was sentenced Tuesday to four years of probation after pleading no contest to attempted sexual assault of a woman at a Bellevue car wash. A Sarpy County District Court judge also ordered Roberto I. Sanchez Jr. to register as a sex offender. Sanchez agreed to plead no contest to the charge after it was reduced from first-degree sexual assault. Prosecutors also dismissed a charge of third-degree sexual assault. Sanchez was found guilty of kissing and sexually assaulting a woman about 1 p.m. Nov. 29, 2020, in the car wash bay at Big Johns Car Wash in Bellevue. Bellevue police arrested him later that day. KEARNEY A woman said her former Kearney psychiatrist put his hand down her pants from behind, felt her buttocks and groped her breast during a counseling session in August 2021. The testimony came on the first day of the misdemeanor third-degree sexual assault trial in Buffalo County Court against Reynaldo A. De Los Angeles, 77, of Kearney. He is accused of having sexual contact with a victim at his office on Aug. 25, 2021, without consent that didnt cause serious personal injury. De Los Angeles is a board-certified psychiatrist with certification in addiction and forensic medicine and provides professional psychiatric services, care and treatment for individuals and families. He currently has an office in Kearney, and at one time he had a practice in Grand Island. Its unclear if the Grand Island office is still open. Chief Deputy Buffalo County Attorney Melanie Young argued that De Los Angeles used his position as a psychiatrist and addictionist to take advantage of a patient. An addictionist is a physician who deals with prescription medical management. De Los Angeles attorney, Aaron Bishop of Kearney, argued that the accusations are false. The alleged victim testified for 2 hours Monday about how she went to De Los Angeles office on Aug. 25, 2021, to straighten out her prescription medications that he had ordered for her days earlier. The woman has been a patient of De Los Angeles off and on since 2004, when she was 24, for counseling and medication management. At the time of the alleged incident, the woman had been a regular patient of De Los Angeles for about five years and relied on him for her medications. On Aug. 23, 2021, the woman said, she had a regular appointment with De Los Angeles and he adjusted her prescription medications. Two days later, the woman said, she met with him again because she felt the dosage was decreased to the point where she was nonfunctional and she felt like she may relapse. It was during the Aug. 25, 2021, appointment, which the woman estimated lasted three hours, that she alleges De Los Angeles inappropriately touched her. The woman confronted De Los Angeles about her prescriptions being significantly smaller dosages and that they caused her to start withdrawals. Feeling weak that day, she asked De Los Angeles to give her similar medications shed had in the past. Instead, the woman said, De Los Angeles avoided her concerns and asked her inappropriate personal questions, including what it was like to kiss someone with dentures, which the woman has. At one point De Los Angeles gave the woman a box of magazines, which she took to her car. When she returned to the office, De Los Angeles was sitting in a chair in his office lobby and tried to pull the woman to sit on his leg, then he tried to kiss her and hold her hand. The moment was cut short by a woman coming into the office to pick up a package from De Los Angeles. The topic of conversation was changed, and the alleged victim, who works in automotive sales, went outside to look at De Los Angeles pickup, which was leaking fluid in the parking lot. She opened the hood and inspected the engine, telling De Los Angeles what he needed to do to fix it. The two returned to the office, where the woman said she again asked De Los Angeles to correct her prescription. De Los Angeles gave the woman more magazines, which she held in her left arm along with her keys and purse. De Los Angeles wrote the woman another prescription. As she tried to leave the office, the woman says, De Los Angeles hugged her from behind. He then stuck his hand under the untucked shirt she was wearing and into her jeans, under her panties and rubbed her buttocks. The woman said De Los Angeles then reached around the right side of her body, put his hand under her shirt and groped her right breast as she turned away from him. She was lost for words. I didnt know what to say. The woman then left De Los Angeles office and drove to a Kearney pharmacy to fill her prescription. Instead she sat in her car for some time trying to absorb what had just happened. I was upset about being physically violated and not being able to trust my doctor again, she said. The woman eventually took her prescription into the pharmacist and was asked by staff why she was upset. Pharmacy staff and the womans mother, who was also at the pharmacy, encouraged the woman to report the incident, but the woman was upset, overwhelmed and unsure about what to do. I feel doctors kind of have a power over their patients, and their word might be better than mine, she recalled feeling. The woman eventually reported the incident to Kearney police and was interviewed at the Family Advocacy Network in Kearney. During cross examination, defense attorney Bishop questioned the woman to clarify the date De Los Angeles gave her the different prescription. The woman corrected her testimony, saying De Los Angeles changed her medication on Aug. 16, nine days before the alleged incident, not Aug. 23 as she first told prosecutor Young. Bishop also questioned the woman about the timeline of events while she was in De Los Angeles office on Aug. 25, what medications she thought her new prescriptions were for and how many prescriptions he wrote her. Bishop also questioned the woman about her medications being destroyed before Aug. 25, and if that was the reason she needed a different prescription. The woman said her boyfriend took her medications and De Los Angeles gave her another prescription for a week. Mondays hearing ended with the womans testimony. Additional witnesses, including pharmacists who saw the woman after the alleged incident, have been summoned to testify. Democratic State Chair Jane Kleeb of Hastings said Wednesday she believes the voters of Kansas sent a clear message on Tuesday to candidates and political parties to protect abortion rights and that the outcome has impacted the election battleground in Nebraska. "The message is loud and clear to the national (Democratic) party and to national donors that red states (like Nebraska) are worth investing in," Kleeb said during a telephone interview. And in Nebraska the Democratic nominees for two House seats and for the governorship are state senators who voted to protect abortion rights during the closing days of the 2022 legislative session, she noted. "People are waking up today shocked by the 60-40 vote in Kansas," Kleeb said, "but I'm confident a similar vote in Nebraska would have the same results." "Patty's race was the first indicator to Democrats that this issue has the potential to overwhelm predictions of a big red wave" that would favor Republican candidates across most of the nation this election year, she added. Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks of Lincoln lost a special election in June to Sen. Mike Flood of Norfolk, the Republican nominee, by a narrow 6,234 votes in a race for the 1st District House seat that has not been won by a Democrat in 58 years. They will meet again in the November general election when voters will determine who represents the eastern Nebraska congressional district for the following two years. Abortion rights are "a major motivating factor" particularly for women and young voters, Kleeb said. Sen. Tony Vargas of Omaha, who is challenging Republican Rep. Don Bacon in metropolitan Omaha's competitive 2nd District, has been "very clear" in his support for abortion rights, Kleeb said. Sen. Carol Blood of Bellevue, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, joined Pansing Brooks and Vargas in voting during the closing days of the 2022 Legislature against a motion that would have ended a filibuster blocking a bill that would have banned abortions in Nebraska once the U.S. Supreme Court overturned abortion rights that had been guaranteed in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Since then, opponents of abortion rights in Nebraska have been unable to secure sufficient support to call a special session of the Legislature to act on abortion before Gov. Pete Ricketts completes his second and final term. Kleeb said she has additional reasons to feel optimistic "when the Republican Party is eating its own" in Nebraska, pointing to the change in GOP state party leadership that wrested control away from traditional Republican leaders during a state party convention in Kearney. "The reality is the extreme took over the leadership and infrastructure of the party," she said. The ongoing challenge for her party in being able to win statewide races in Nebraska once again is to reduce the overwhelming 80%-20% Republican advantage in rural counties to 70%-30%, "or ideally 60-40," Kleeb said. That means showing respect and support for rural concerns, she said. Nebraskans have not elected a Democratic governor since Ben Nelson was re-elected in 1994 or a Democratic U.S. senator since Nelson was re-elected in 2006. Looking ahead, Kleeb said President Joe Biden should make his own decision about whether to seek a second term in 2024. "If he decides to run, we are in full support," she said. If not, Kleeb said, she sees Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as top contenders along with Vice President Kamala Harris. PRESS RELEASE The Smithsonians National Air and Space Museum will reopen half of its flagship building on the National Mall Friday, Oct. 14. Eight new and renovated exhibitions, the planetarium, museum store and Mars Cafe will open on the buildings west end. The museum has been undergoing a seven-year renovation that began in 2018 and includes redesigning all 23 exhibitions and presentation spaces, complete refacing of the exterior cladding, replacement of outdated mechanical systems, and other repairs and improvements. Only half of the building will be opening, and great interest in visiting is expected. Free timed-entry passes will be required to ensure visitors have an enjoyable experience. The passes will be available on the museums website on Sept. 14. This is one of the most exciting times in the National Air and Space Museums history, said Chris Browne, the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the museum. When we open the first reimagined galleries, we hope all visitors are inspired by artifacts on display for the first time, favorite icons of aerospace presented in new ways, and diverse storytelling. Exhibitions Opening Oct. 14: The renovated museum will feature hundreds of new artifacts to the building such as Jackie Cochrans T-38, the plane Cochrane flew when she became the first woman to break the sound barrier; the Sharp DR 90 Nemesis air racer, the most successful aircraft in air racing history flown by pilot and co-designer, Jon Sharp; and Sean Tuckers custom-built aerobatic biplane, the Aviation Specialties Unlimited Challenger III. The full-sized X-Wing Starfighter that appeared in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, on loan from Lucasfilm, will also be displayed for the first time and located outside of the planetarium. Visitors will see favorite artifacts presented in new settings. The Apollo 11 command module Columbia will be housed in a custom-designed, climate-controlled case as the centerpiece of the Destination Moon exhibition alongside Neil Armstrongs Apollo 11 spacesuit. The 1903 Wright Flyer will be displayed in a dynamic new environment that better tells the story of the invention of flying and its implication on world history. The exhibition plan will use creative and dynamic techniques to engage visitors while they are at the museum and after they leave. Instead of simply presenting information to visitors, the exhibitions will provide ways of engaging people through hands-on experiences. For example, in the Kenneth C. Griffin Exploring the Planets Gallery, visitors will tour the solar system and learn what it would be like to walk on another world through an immersive, interactive experience. The planetarium will offer significant upgrades to its technological capabilities and include new screencast abilities that will allow connection with planetariums around the country and vastly expand the museums reach. Visit the museums website for more information on the renovation. Details on free timed-entry passes will be provided in the coming weeks. The National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., is located at Sixth Street and Independence Avenue S.W. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is located in Chantilly, Virginia, near Washington Dulles International Airport. The Udvar-Hazy Center is open daily from 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. (closed Dec. 25). Admission is free, but there is a $15 fee for parking at the Udvar-Hazy Center. PRESS RELEASE All of the sections of a rare P-47 Thunderbolt WWII fighter have arrived at The Commemorative Air Force (CAF) Airbase Georgia in Peachtree City, Ga. The P-47 is expected to be a long-term restoration project and when complete it will join the noteworthy Airbase Georgia fleet of operating aircraft, including its Dauntless SBD dive bomber, P-51 Mustang, FG-1D Corsair, and P-63 Kingcobra. The Airbase is currently restoring two additional WWII training aircraft, a Boeing-Stearman N2S and a PT-19 Cornell. The Thunderbolt was a highly acclaimed WWII fighter known for its combat effectiveness. It also had a strong presence in the Georgia Air National Guard after the war when the 128th Fighter Squadron at Marietta Army Airfield was equipped with P-47N Thunderbolts. The 158th Fighter Squadron activated at Chatham Army Airfield, Pooler, also flew P-47Ns. The specific aircraft at Airbase Georgia did not see WWII combat, but it was used effectively in Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1950s. The CAF acquired the aircraft in 1962 but it was heavily damaged in 2002 when it caught fire during takeoff, severely burning part of the fuselage and the right wing. We are proud that Airbase Georgia has been selected to restore this important piece of WWII history, said Airbase leader Joel Perkins. Our skilled mechanics will restore and replace parts and eventually complete the P-47 by adding an engine and modern avionics. This will require painstaking work, but the final product will be a beautiful, flying warbird that will serve the mission of the CAF, be in demand for airshows around the country, and inspire the next generation of pilots, mechanics and citizens. Looking nearly complete, structurally speaking at least, there is a lot of work remaining, especially with the aircrafts systems, before the fighter can head aloft once more. Anyone wishing to support the project should click HERE to do so. We look forwards to bringing regular progress reports as her rebuild continues! About the CAF Airbase Georgia Warbird Museum CAF Airbase Georgia, based in Peachtree City, Ga., was founded in 1987. The Airbase is one of the largest units of the Commemorative Air Force (CAF). The group maintains and flies seven vintage military aircraft including a P-51 Mustang, an FG-1D Corsair, an SBD Dauntless, and a P-63A Kingcobra. The Airbase, which is composed of more than 400 volunteers, has hosted WWII Heritage Days since 2003. The organization is also a founding partner of the Georgia WWII Heritage Trail launched in 2021. The Airbase is part of the CAF, a non-profit, tax-exempt organization that relies on contributions of time and funds to carry out its mission. For more information, go to https://airbasegeorgia.org/. About the CAF The Commemorative Air Force is the worlds largest flying museum, with a fleet of more than 180 World War II-era airplanes assigned to unit locations across the United States. Nearly all of the aircraft are kept in flying condition, enabling people to experience firsthand the sights and sounds of vintage military aircraft in flight. Supported by 13,000 volunteer members, the CAF is dedicated to honoring American military aviation through flight, exhibition, education and remembrance. CEDAR FALLS A Cedar Falls couple and their daughter who were killed while camping last month died of stabbing and gunshot wounds, according to autopsies. On Thursday, the Iowa Department of Public Safety released the findings of the autopsies in the July 22 attack at Maquoketa Caves State Park camp ground. According to authorities, Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and multiple sharp force injuries. Sarah Schmidt, 42, died from multiple sharp force injuries. Their daughter, 6-year-old Lula, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation. An autopsy also confirmed that Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Neb., died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and his death has been ruled a suicide. The investigation into the events surrounding the homicides is ongoing. However, the known facts and circumstances, and all evidence collected to this point, substantiate Sherwin was the perpetrator of the homicides and acted alone, Mitch Mortvedt, deputy director of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, said in a news release. The three were killed in the early morning hours of July 22 while they were in their tent, according to authorities. The motive remains unknown. Sherwin had been camping with his parents, and relatives said Sherwin didnt know the Schmidts. The Schmidts son survived the attack. The autopsy results came days after family, friends and others remembered the victims in a celebration of life vigil at Overman Park in Cedar Falls. Maquoketa Caves State Park reopened to the public last week. WATERLOO A Waterloo man has been arrested for allegedly stealing copper pipes and wire and other items from a vacant home. Police arrested Derrick Alan Moore, 36, on charges of third-degree burglary, possession of burglary tools, assault on a peace officer with a weapon, interference while armed and eluding. Bond was set at $17,000. According to court records, patrol officers stopped Moore in a Toyota RAV4 leaving a Butler Avenue home known as a target for burglars around 8:40 p.m. Sunday. The Toyota turned down Dubuque Road and hit speeds of up to 75 mph in a 35 mph zone before driving off road and disappearing. Officers later found the vehicle parked at Moores home at 1502 Shultz St. When police approached Moore, he allegedly threatened them with a barstool. Officers recovered pipes, wire and a TV that had been inside the house along with other items. WATERLOO Bond has been set at $32,000 for a Waterloo man accused of assaulting two people in July. Antwan Johnson, 40, was arrested Sunday on charges of willful injury causing bodily injury and child endangerment. Witnesses allege Johnson became involved in an argument with a woman on July 20 in the 200 block of Lafayette Street and pulled her from a vehicle. The womans 13-year-old daughter intervened and Johnson allegedly punched the daughter in the stomach, according to court records. Then, on July 25, Johnson allegedly knocked an 18-year-old unconscious and continued striking him in the head. Johnson left before police arrived, and the victim suffered a concussion. The person was taken to a hospital for treatment. Photos: Missing children in Iowa(tncms-asset)4395427a-623a-11ea-9c13-00163ec2aa77[0](/tncms-asset) HUDSON -- The Hudson Community School District will host a series of upcoming meetings ahead of the Sept. 13 bond issue vote. Community members will be able to hear about the district's facility needs, the process the district used to find a proposed solution and the bond question on the ballot. Attendees will also learn about how the projects would address building safety and security, space needs, aging building systems and the district's enrollment growth. The events will take place at: Wednesday, Aug. 10, 7 to 8 p.m. at St. Timothy Lutheran Church Tuesday, Aug. 16, 12 to 1 p.m. at Hudson High School Library Monday, Aug. 22, 7 to 8 p.m. at Hudson High School Library Throughout this process, we have engaged our community in a number of ways to help us examine our most pressing high school facility needs and develop potential solutions. This led to the bond question voters will consider on September 13, Dr. Tony Voss, Superintendent said. Now, we look to continue this engagement through our upcoming community meetings. We encourage all district residents to take part in these important conversations about the future of our schools and the students we serve. In addition to the bond issue, residents will also vote on a proposed renewal of the physical plant and equipment levy and a revenue purpose statement on Sept. 13. If approved, the bond issue would allow the district to move forward on a series of projects at the high school, such as updating building systems and aging infrastructure, converting underused space into classrooms, creating a secure main entrance, rebuilding career and technical education labs and adding gym space. An approved bond would have a property tax impact of $2.70 on every $1,000 of assessed property value. The owner of a home with an assessed value of $100,000 would see a tax impact of $133.06 per year, or $11.09 per month. The impact on 100 acres of agricultural land would be $358.93 per year, or $29.91 per month. There will be a satellite voting opportunity on Friday, Sept. 2, from 4 to 9 p.m. in the Hudson School Competition Gym. All registered voters may cast their ballots early at this event. WATERLOO The classrooms of the Grout Museums got a makeover, courtesy of the Youth Art Team, and they have even more projects for the community right around the corner. On Wednesday, members of the Youth Art Team provided the finishing touches on a set of murals they painted in the rooms. The week before, a team taking part in the organizations summer camp undertook the mural project, covering the walls with representations of the different exhibits of the museum, spanning from Native American culture to industry and the stars in the planetarium. According to Heidi Fuchtman, executive and creative director for the Youth Art Team, the decision to do the Grout Museum was made in part by their older students. They help decide what projects we do and then when we do the projects, theyre making decisions about what were representing in the artwork, Fuchtman said. So all of the decisions about what you see in those murals were made by the students. The classrooms themselves are heavily used by the Museum School students. According to Carrsan Morrissey, programming and outreach director at the museum, this amounts the entire third grade class of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area or upwards of 1,400 students between September and May. The students who worked on the murals were in the classes themselves at that age. The exhibits they chose to represent were drawn from their own memories of those displays that stuck with them the most growing up. They were also allowed to go through the museum itself to gather ideas. One artist, Niara Myles, found her inspiration in the railroad tracks, which were incorporated into one of the rooms. I think the railroad shows where people started how Black people and white people were separated in what they do today and what they did back then, Myles said. It shows our progress as a community. Myles added that its her hope that the students will not only see the art, but be inspired to make their own mark on the community. I think when the kids start Museum School, the murals will show them what they can do in the future, she said. But the Youth Art Team also has other major projects on the docket. This week, it was announced that theyd been chosen for a $10,000 grant, courtesy of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs for their upcoming Vision Project. The idea behind this project is for the Youth Art Team to get together with artists who are blind and visually impaired, to learn how they go about the creative process and the tools they use. They will then put together kits to help students with visual impairments create. Having just found out about the grant, Fuchtman says they are still in the planning stages of the Vision Project and what it will fully entail. The head of the foundation that supports that Iowa Future Farmers of America is being sued by a former employee for sexual harassment. Emily Niemeyer of Polk County, a former administrative assistant for the Iowa FFA Foundation, is suing the foundation as well as Joshua Remington, the foundations executive director, and the foundations communications manager, Bryon Weesner. Niemeyers lawsuit states she was hired by the foundation in February 2020, and reported directly to Remington. Throughout her employment at the foundation, Niemeyer claims, Remington made sexually harassing comments to her, such as telling her he didnt get laid on his wedding night because his wife was so drunk, and telling her about a female classmate from his college days who wore low cut tops to curry favor with a professor. Remington is also alleged to have made derogatory and misogynistic comments about women, in part by referring to a new female board member as an entitled trophy wife. The lawsuit also alleges Weesner made sexually harassing comments to Niemeyer, telling her that a white T-shirt she was wearing would look better wet, and bragging about his previous employer having to pay a large settlement to a coworker who brought a sexual harassment claim against him. Remington and Niemeyer had regular one-on-one meetings to discuss ongoing and upcoming projects, during which Niemeyer would make suggestions that Remington adopted and presented to other Iowa FFA members as his own ideas, taking full credit for them, the lawsuit claims. He also repeatedly asked Niemeyer to help with his and Weesners social-media duties, stating that it was foolish for the foundation to pay himself or Weesner $5 for something Niemeyer could do for $1. In June 2020, after Remington learned Niemeyer and her husband were trying to start a family, Remington allegedly told her, It would be an inconvenience if you were pregnant at this time since it will impact our workflow for the foundation. If you were not here, it would require me to find someone to replace you. That same month, in anticipation of a large group event at Iowa FFA, Niemeyer told Remington her doctor suggested she avoid large-group events given the COVID-19 pandemic, but would work from home as other employees were allowed to do. When she returned to work after the event, Remington allegedly informed her that he considered her a no show for the event. She was later placed on a performance improvement plan and was issued a written warning for failure to meet work standards and insubordination or refusal to comply with instructions. She later complained to Iowa FFA Executive Committee member Ron Zelle of sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. After learning of Niemeyers complaints, Remington completely ostracized her by cutting off all lines of communication, the lawsuit alleges. The Iowa FFA board of directors later concluded Niemeyers complaints were without merit, and it upheld a previous decision denying her request that she be allowed to record her one-on-one meetings with Remington. In December 2020, Niemeyer allegedly overheard Remington make multiple comments about her during a phone conversation in which he described her as a lawsuit waiting to happen. A few weeks later, the lawsuit alleges, Iowa FFA constructively discharged her suggesting she felt forced to resign at that time. Her lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for sexual harassment, retaliation and discrimination related to gender or pregnancy. The foundation has yet to file a response to the lawsuit. Remington said Monday he had not seen Niemeyers lawsuit and declined to comment. Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. CEDAR FALLS University of Northern Iowa alumnus Aaron Wiese has been name Hy-Vees next chief executive officer, effective Oct. 1. The Cherokee native studied political science at UNI, according to a news release from the university. He began his Hy-Vee career while still a student there in 1993. Wiese is currently vice chairman of Hy-Vee Inc. and president of the companys supply chain and subsidiaries. Chairman and CEO Randy Edeker recently announced his promotion. Wiese will continue to report to Edeker, who will stay on as Hy-Vees chairman of the board. Aaron is ready to help me lead the company as chief executive officer, Edeker said in a news release. He has a strong vision for the total breadth of our company and is extremely knowledgeable in many areas. With Aaron as CEO, Hy-Vee continues to be positioned for incredible growth and innovation. After leaving UNI, Wiese held various operations leadership roles before joining Hy-Vees executive staff as director of real estate strategic planning in 2012. Over the next decade, Wiese continued to rise through the ranks at Hy-Vee and, most notably, made a tremendous impact on Hy-Vees health and wellness division. In December 2020, he was promoted to the executive vice president level and became president of digital growth and co-chief operating officer just a few months later. He has held his current position since December 2021. James Thiel Sr. will serve fewer than 90 days in jail in relation to the fatal 2020 boat crash on the Mississippi River near LeClaire. He received 365 days, concurrent, on each count, with credit for time served. All but 90 days are suspended, and Thiel will get credit for time served. The crash was on Aug. 16, 2020, and involved Thiels 35-foot Triton and a 19-foot boat operated by Craig Verbeke, 61, of Moline, who was killed. His fiance, Anita Pinc, 52, of Moline, was also killed. A minor, not Thiel, was operating the Triton, but Thiel was accused of unintentionally contributing to the fatalities by allowing the boat to be operated at a high rate of speed in a high-traffic area, resulting in a collision with another boat, according to authorities. Thiel faced four counts of involuntary manslaughter at his April trial, two felonies and two misdemeanors. The jury found Thiel guilty on the two misdemeanor counts. Each of those misdemeanor counts carries a sentence of up to two years. District Court Judge Patrick McElyea sentenced Thiel, 46, Pleasant Valley, during an afternoon court hearing. Briefing on the results of the analysis of documents related to the military biological activities of the United States on the territory of Ukraine Full Text Slides Documents #MoD #Russia #Ukraine #NBCP @mod_russia_en Work continues on the study of biological samples from Ukrainian soldiers who have voluntarily laid down their arms. As we noted earlier, high concentrations of antibiotics were found in their blood, as well as immunological markers indicative of exposure to the renal syndrome and West Nile pathogens, which were being studied by the Pentagon as part of the Ukrainian UP-4 and UP-8 projects. Particular attention should be paid to the discovery of narcotic drugs, including opioids such as methadone, codepsin, codeterp, as well as ephedrine-type substances: t-phedrine and tri-phedrine, at positions abandoned by Ukrainian military personnel. The synthetic drug methadone is used in the treatment of drug addiction as a substitute therapy. As a reminder, in Nazi Germany during World War II, especially between 1943 and 1945, pervitin tablets, an amphetamine derivative, were given to soldiers in order to reduce the psycho-emotional burden, primarily to SS troops. The drug was also used en masse by US troops in the Korean and Vietnam wars. A side effect of such addictive drugs is primarily excessive aggression, which explains the extreme cruelty towards civilians displayed by some Ukrainian servicemen, as well as the shelling of towns in Donbass. In view of the available information on the use of potent stimulants by AFU servicemen, we are studying incoming samples for the presence of this class of compounds. Their traces persist in human organs and tissues for a long time (e.g., in hair up to six months). The results will be handed over to the Investigative Committee and used as evidence in investigations into war crimes committed by the Kiev regime. A few weeks ago, during the special military operation, Rubezhnoye in Lugansk Peoples Republic was liberated. Documents have been found in the laboratory of the Pharmbiotest medical centre located at 9 Pochaivska Street, confirming that research had been carried out in Ukraine for several years on behalf of the so-called Big Pharma. Clinical trials of unregistered drugs with potentially serious side-effects have been carried out on local residents. We examined the premises of the centre responsible for clinical trials of medicinal products on volunteers. Evidence was found in them that Western customers regularly visited Pharmbiotest and were allowed access to all stages of the research process. For the convenience of their work, the inscriptions on equipment, room names and working documentation have been duplicated in English. To avoid reputational risks and legal costs in case of failed trials of new drugs, US and European companies conducted clinical trials on Ukrainian citizens. Volunteer pay was minimal and fatalities could easily be concealed. Neither have there been any serious inspections or oversight by the local authorities. This is in line with the Western concept of delocalising the most internationally controversial research. In Ukraine, military personnel, low-income citizens and one of the most vulnerable categories of the population, patients in psychiatric hospitals, have been used for this purpose. We continue to analyse the documentary material uncovered in Rubezhnoye settlement laboratory. We have already informed that more than 16,000 biological samples, including blood and serum samples, were taken from Ukraine to the US, Georgia and European countries. Against the background of the US administrations assurances that the genetic information obtained from Ukrainian citizens will be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, I would like to quote a statement by Jason Crowof the US House Intelligence Committee at the North American Security Conference in July. Crow warned Americans about the dangers of giving their DNA to private companies for testing because: there is a possibility that test results will be sold to third parties and the information obtained could be used to develop biological weapons targeting specific groups or individuals. Given the US administrations interest in the study of narrowly targeted biological agents, such statements force a fresh look at the causes of the new coronavirus pandemic and the role of US military biologists in the emergence and spread of the COVID-19 pathogen. In May 2022, Jeffrey Sachs a leading expert in the respected medical journal The Lancet and professor at Columbia University, the leading academic institution for global biosecurity, told a conference in Spain that the coronavirus was artificially created and is very likely to have been created using American advances in biotechnology. According to our experts, this is evidenced by the uncharacteristic variability of the genovariants that cause different peaks in the incidence of coronaviruses, significant differences in lethality and contagiousness, uneven geographical distribution, and the unpredictable nature of the epidemic process as a whole. It appears that despite efforts to contain and isolate the disease, the pandemic is being artificially fuelled by the introduction of new variants of the virus in a particular region. We are considering the possibility that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was involved in the emergence of the new coronavirus. Since 2009, the agency has funded the Predict programme, which has investigated new species of coronaviruses by capturing bats that carry the viruses. One of the contractors for the project was Metabiota, a company known for its military-biological activities in Ukraine. Characteristically, in 2019 before the first COVID-19 cases appeared the US Johns Hopkins Institute hosted an exercise called Event-201, which practised dealing with an epidemic of a previously unknown coronavirus, which, according to the legend of the exercise, was transmitted from bats to humans via an intermediate host, pigs. This is how the Spanish flu virus, which has killed tens of millions of people, became pandemic. The implementation of the COVID-19 scenario and USAIDs emergency wind-down of the Predict programme in 2019 suggest the deliberate nature of the pandemic and US involvement in its emergence. During the special military operation, documents were seized indicating that USAID and its main contractor, Labyrinth Ukraine, have been participating in the US military bioweapons programme since 2019. Note the letter from the head of the AFU Sanitary and Epidemiological Department to the director of Labyrinth Ukraine, Karen Saylors. In it, the Ukrainian Armed Forces command declares its readiness to cooperate with USAID on administering vaccines to military personnel and on collecting, processing and transmitting information of interest to the US side. The choice of the US Agency for International Development to coordinate the work may have been prompted by increasing Russian concern over the activities of Ukrainian bio-laboratories, an attempt to take the US defence agency out of the loop and avoid accusations of developing biological weapons. It has been established that Labyrinth Ukraine is a division of the US company Labyrinth Global Health, and its founders are former employees of Metabiota, a key Pentagon contractor in the military-biological field. Labyrinth Ukraine took part in UP-9 and UP-10 projects, which studied the spread of African swine fever in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. I would like to point out that as part of the US Department of Defenses biological threat reduction programme, one of Labyrinth Global Healths research areas has been the study of coronaviruses and monkeypox virus. On July 23, the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak of monkeypox an international health emergency, and to date the disease has been reported in 76 countries, with over 26,000 cases. Thus we see a clear trend: infectious disease agents that reach the Pentagons zone of interest are subsequently pandemic, with US pharmaceutical companies and their patrons, the leaders of the US Democratic Party, as the beneficiaries. I would like to give another example from the US military biology dossier. In 1997, the Cuban government brought to the attention of the world community the fact that the United States had violated the requirements of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The charge was based on the testimony of a Cuban pilot who recorded the spraying from a US aircraft of a quarantine biological agent, the palm thrips, which could damage one of Cubas key agricultural industries. Although it was possible to initiate an extraordinary meeting of BWC States Parties on this issue, the incident was not investigated due to the lack of a Convention verification mechanism, which the Russian Federation insists on establishing. Such impunity has contributed to the continued use of bioweapons technology by Washington in Latin America, including the assassination of undesirable politicians. On July 18, 2022, the President of the Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, publicly declared the involvement of the United States in the assassination of former head of state Hugo Chavez. According to information available to Venezuela, U.S. security services have been working since 2002 on possible ways to eliminate the Venezuelan leader, who has pursued an active anti-American policy. Numerous assassination attempts involving members of the US embassy in Caracas were uncovered and thwarted. In violation of international law, the United States has been involved in the development of drugs that, when administered in the short term, cause chronic disease and develop various forms of cancer. According to the Venezuelan side, a similar drug was used to poison Chavez by Claudio Diaz, a member of the presidential entourage. She fled Venezuela with the assistance of US intelligence agencies and was subsequently removed to the US to avoid possible publicity about the details of her cooperation with US intelligence agencies. A causal link between the Venezuelan leaders death and the development of biological weapons is confirmed by forensic evidence and the testimony of Cuban doctors who treated Chavez about the atypical course of the disease and its resistance to the use of medicines. Thanks to the special military operation, the threats posed by US bio-objects have come to the attention of many international and governmental organisations. Mass demonstrations against Pentagon-funded biolaboratories have taken place in a number of countries around the world. The Eurasian Economic Unions civil society organisations have passed a resolution to close such biosites. In this context, we are already seeing a change in the approach of the US militarys work in the biological field in other countries. For example, states in which the US conducts dual-targeted research have been asked to sign a collective statement of cooperation with the US solely to enhance global health security and reduce the impact of infectious diseases on populations. It is the word global and the rest of the text that draws attention: led by the United States. However, additional funding will be available through the Biohazard Reduction Programme for countries loyal to the US initiative. The Russian Ministry of Defence will continue to analyse the documentary evidence of the US bioweapons programme in Ukraine and will keep you informed of the results. Full Text Slides Documents #MoD #Russia #Ukraine #NBCP @mod_russia_en WtR Pan-India actor Prabhas attended the grand pre-release event last night in Hyderabad. Fans are quite happy watching their favourite actor in a public event after a long time. Everyone has fallen in love with the actors new look. Prabhas likes to be so simple and wears casual outfits. However, his simple look at the Sita Ramams event awed fans and many of them loved the black t-shirt he wore. The t-shirt designed by Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) costs around Rs. 20,000. Some fans have noticed that he wore the same t-shirt back in 2017. Coming to Sita Ramam, the flick has Dulquer Salmaan and Mrunal Thakur as the lead pair. Rashmika Mandanna played a pivotal role in this romantic period drama, which also has Tharun Bhascker, Sumanth, Prakash Raj, Gautham Vasudev Menon and others in key roles. The Hanu Raghavapudi directorial is releasing in theaters tomorrow. Articles that might interest you: Dulquer Salmaan is one of the most handsome heroes in India and has got a terrific following not just in Kerala but all throughout. His latest film Sita Ramam is releasing in theatres tomorrow worldwide. Today actor Vishwaksen posted lovely pictures of him with Dulquer Salmaan and called it his fanboy moment meeting him. He added that the content looks so promising and wished the entire team good luck for the release. The film has Mrunal Thakur as the leading lady. It is directed by Hanu Raghavapudi and produced by Swapna Cinema. Presented by Vyjayanthi Movies, the movie has music by Vishal Chandrasekhar. Articles that might interest you: Weather Alert ...Thunderstorm Chances Through Thursday... * Monsoon moisture will bring thunderstorms to the region this week, with the best chances extending through Thursday before diminishing into the weekend. * A few light showers are occurring early this morning, with thunderstorms developing again this afternoon. Most areas will see a 25-50% chance of storms in the afternoon and early evening hours today and Thursday. Nocturnal showers and thunderstorms are expected tonight as well. * Impacts will range from lightning, new fire starts, and strong outflow winds with blowing dust, to periods of heavy rainfall and flash flooding. * Ensure you have a way of receiving weather alerts. If you live in a flash flood prone area, especially near a burn scar, be ready to act quickly if heavy rainfall occurs. In what is being described as one of the largest benefit expansions in the history of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the PACT Act is poised to provide additional benefits and health services to over 5 million veterans. The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, named after a decorated combat medic who died from a rare form of lung cancer, specifically addresses veterans with toxic exposures during the Vietnam, Gulf War and post 9/11 eras. New benefits Among the benefits included in the measure: 20 more illnesses are now considered presumptive conditions for burn pit and other toxic exposures , meaning veterans will not have to prove that their service caused their condition. This reduces the paperwork required and need for a disability exam before being granted access to health care and compensation. The list includes 11 respiratory related conditions and several forms of cancer. Survivors of veterans who died due to one of these conditions may also be eligible for benefits. , meaning veterans will not have to prove that their service caused their condition. This reduces the paperwork required and need for a disability exam before being granted access to health care and compensation. The list includes 11 respiratory related conditions and several forms of cancer. Survivors of veterans who died due to one of these conditions may also be eligible for benefits. Additional presumptive exposure locations for Vietnam era veterans The enrollment period to join VA health care expands. Post 9/11 combat veterans may enroll within 10 years of their discharge date instead of five. For other veterans, a one-year open enrollment period is made to join VA health care without having to demonstrate a service-connected disability. Post 9/11 combat veterans may enroll within 10 years of their discharge date instead of five. For other veterans, a one-year open enrollment period is made to join VA health care without having to demonstrate a service-connected disability. VA will provide a toxic exposure screening to every veteran enrolled in VA health care. Improvements to research, staff education, outreach and treatment related to toxic exposures Impact on Gulf War and post-9/11 veterans These cancers are newly considered presumptive conditions: Brain, glioblastoma, kidney, melanoma, neck and pancreatic cancers, along with any type of cancer that is gastrointestinal, head-related, lymphatic, lymphoma, reproductive and respiratory. Brain, glioblastoma, kidney, melanoma, neck and pancreatic cancers, along with any type of cancer that is gastrointestinal, head-related, lymphatic, lymphoma, reproductive and respiratory. Other conditions presumed to be connected to service: Asthma diagnosed after service, chronic bronchitis, chronic COPD, chronic rhinitis, chronic sinusitis, constrictive or obliterative bronchiolitis, emphysema, granulomatous disease, interstitial lung disease, pleuritis, pulmonary fibrosis and sarcoidosis. Asthma diagnosed after service, chronic bronchitis, chronic COPD, chronic rhinitis, chronic sinusitis, constrictive or obliterative bronchiolitis, emphysema, granulomatous disease, interstitial lung disease, pleuritis, pulmonary fibrosis and sarcoidosis. Post-9/11 veterans who served in these locations are presumed to have been exposed to burn pit toxins: Afghanistan, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Uzbekistan, Yemen and any airspace above these locations. Afghanistan, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Uzbekistan, Yemen and any airspace above these locations. Gulf War and post-9/11 era veterans who served in these locations are presumed to have been exposed to burn pits: Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the UAE and any airspace above these countries. What does the measure mean for Vietnam-era veterans? New presumptive conditions for Agent Orange include high blood pressure and monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. include high blood pressure and monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. Veterans who served at an additional five locations are now assumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange if they served during specified dates. if they served during specified dates. Veterans who were a part of response efforts in three locations are now assumed to have been exposed to radiation if they served during specific dates. What is available to survivors? Survivors of newly eligible service members may be eligible for the following benefits: How to file a disability claim for a newly eligible condition Full details and eligibility information related to the PACT Act may be accessed at VA.gov/PACT or by calling 800-MyVA411 (698-2411). Claims can be filed online, by mail, in person or with the help of a trained professional from a Veteran Service Organization (VSO). Claims for conditions that were denied in the past but are now considered presumptive should be filed through a supplemental claim. Editors note: This article, originally published Aug. 2, 2022, has been updated since President Biden signed the measure into law. Laurent Fady / Alamy Stock Photo Dreaming of crisp, cool breezes and vibrant fall foliage? Us too. Its not too early to start planning a vacation for the fall since most states have dropped COVID-related restrictions, more people are traveling, and airfare and accommodations are in demand. With so many dazzling destinations across the U.S., we asked five travel writers to share their favorite vacation spots that shine brightest during the fall. Tunnel of Trees, Harbor Springs, Michigan By Elaine Glusac In wooded northern Michigan, when the maples blush and the oaks go gold, color chasers set their compasses for the stretch of M-119 known as the Tunnel of Trees. Running north from the Lake Michigan resort town of Harbor Springs, the tunnel a curvy, narrow two-laner that roughly parallels the shoreline stretches about 20 miles and is a top attraction in one of the states most beautiful counties, Emmet, occupying the northwest tip of the states Lower Peninsula. Anchored by Harbor Springs and its southern neighbor Petoskey both tourist-friendly towns packed with local galleries, shops and restaurants the drive sends visitors into kaleidoscopic forests, peppered with dark evergreens, that bend radiantly over the road in the autumn sunlight. Emerging at the crossroad that is Cross Village, motorists whether hungry or not stop at Legs Inn, a legendary stone-constructed restaurant known for its Polish pierogies, Great Lakes whitefish and riotous wood interiors filled with carvings and driftwood art. Turn around for a second run of the Tunnel or continue north less than 10 miles to Wilderness State Park, a wild stretch of coast ideal for beachcombing and catching the fall migration of birds. A 26-mile paved and level bike trail in and around Petoskey and Harbor Springs, Little Traverse Wheelway offers a slow roll through the regions leafy landscape (rental bikes are available at Bahnhof Sport in Petoskey). Many cyclists take a break at Petoskey Brewing Company, with a scenic back patio framing the foliage ringing Mud Lake. The route skirts nearby Petoskey State Park on Little Traverse Bay, a great place to hike a half-mile loop in the dunes and beach comb for local Petoskey stones, ancient fossilized coral that youll find fashioned into everything from jewelry to Christmas ornaments. Both gateway towns guarantee diversion away from the steering wheel. Petoskey to the south of Little Traverse Bay and Harbor Springs on the north shore have long been visited by anglers and second homeowners and renters who swell the population in summer (fans of Ernest Hemingway, whose family owned a summerhouse on nearby Walloon Lake, will want to visit the City Park Grill in Petoskey, as he did). Townie diversions in Petoskey include the lovingly curated McLean & Eakin Booksellers and the Crooked Tree Arts Center, home to rotating exhibits. In Harbor Springs, take a stroll around the public marina to see the sizable sailboats and yachts before they motor on for the winter. Dine: In Harbor Springs, grab one of the booths that line the windows opposite the marina at Bar Harbor, serving burgers and local beers on tap. In Petoskey, book a table at Chandlers, a north woods classic with knotty pine paneling and a steakhouse menu. Stay: A whitewashed Victorian, Staffords Perry Hotel in Petoskey abounds in history the 1899 landmark once regularly employed an orchestra to play at dinner and offers an opportunity to park the car for the night and explore the towns historic Gaslight District on foot. Fall rates start at $189. Insider tip: Fall weekends still attract crowds, though fewer families. A midweek stay virtually ensures youll be able to enjoy peak color in solitude. Elaine Glusac writes the Frugal Traveler column for The New York Times and is a national parks enthusiast based in Chicago. Page under Maintenance This page is under maintenance, while being upgraded. Please visit later. Thank you. [Go Back] WASHINGTON The Biden administration has filed its first legal challenge to a state abortion ban since the end of Roe v. Wade, arguing Idahos restrictive abortion law leaves doctors facing criminal penalties for providing abortion-related medical care to women in life-threatening medical situations. The Justice Department may have a strong argument in the Idaho case filed under federal health care law, but even if they win it wouldnt allow full access to abortion there, legal experts said. It could, though, give doctors more latitude to provide an abortion in an emergency or a situation that could become one. But Texas is already pushing back with another lawsuit over the same federal statute, arguing federal health-care law doesnt allow for abortion-related care banned under state law. Heres a look at how the dueling cases could affect the fraught medical and legal landscape after the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion: WHAT DOES THE FEDERAL LAW SAY? The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, went into effect in 1986 and was aimed at making sure people could get emergency care regardless of their ability to pay. Its been at the center of court battles before. In the 1992 case of Baby K, for example, a court sided with parents who said the federal law required a hospital to keep treating a baby born without a cerebral cortex, even though doctors said it would be medically futile and cited a state law in support, said Lindsay Wiley, a law professor and director of the Health Law and Policy Program at UCLA Law. Hospitals that violate the emergency treatment act could lose access to payments from Medicare, a major blow. The Idaho lawsuit comes after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued similar guidance, saying hospitals must provide abortion services in emergencies or situations that could become emergencies. DONT ABORTION LAWS ALREADY HAVE HEALTH EXCEPTIONS? Many abortion bans, including the law set to go into effect in Idaho, are written to allow abortions if a pregnant persons life is at risk. But they dont always say exactly what that means, and some doctors say the laws are so vague that its hard to know when the exceptions apply. Notably, Idahos exception is written so that it can only be used as a defense in a criminal trial, after the doctor has been charged. The deep uncertainty and possible criminal charges against doctors have already had profound repercussions in reproductive medicine and other areas of medical care. The risk of criminal prosecution is one of the most extreme, most heavy handed things that law can do. It has a huge chilling effect, Wiley said. Its not surprising that clinicians, if they were only focusing on state law, would be very hesitant to do what theyve always done to provide standard of care. The federal emergency-medical treatment act, by contrast, has a wider definition of emergency care and stabilization, as well as a specific set of rules and policies developed over three decades. Idaho Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, said the Supreme Court gave states the sole ability to regulate abortion and he would defend the law against federal overreach. WHO WILL WIN? WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? Federal law trumps state law under the U.S. Constitution, and that includes the federal emergency-care law, said Allison Hoffman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and expert on health-care law. Thats a pretty strong argument, she said. But I think that this case will get to the Supreme Court, and its really hard to predict what will happen when it gets there. James Blumstein, a health-care law expert at Vanderbilt University, said the emergency-care law tied to a federal spending program is fundamentally different from state abortion bans that carry criminal penalties. The federal law, meanwhile, applies mostly to hospitals while abortion bans are typically aimed at doctors. I could not advise a doctor to violate state law under the circumstances, he said in an email. If the Justice Department wins, it would likely allow abortion care in a wider set of circumstances but there would still likely be a big legal gray area for doctors and hospitals. This is really squishy territory. What does it mean to have a condition so that the absence of immediate medical attention could be reasonably expected to result in placing the health of somebody in serious jeopardy? Hoffman said. Many other lawsuits are playing out in Idaho and the rest of the country over abortion. Democratic President Joe Biden is also taking other steps to allow people to keep getting abortions, including signing an executive order Wednesday aimed in part at making it easier for women to travel between states to get abortions. WHAT ABOUT THE TEXAS LAWSUIT? Texas sued the federal government last month over the guidance from Department of Health and Human Services under the same federal law. The state argued the guidance disregards the state legislative process and leaves doctors and hospitals vulnerable to losing their licenses or being charged with crimes under state law. Texas officials also argued that the administration wants to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic and the federal emergency care law should have doctors considering how to preserve the life or health of an unborn child. A near-total abortion law enforced by the threat of civil lawsuits went into effect in Texas last year, and another law carrying criminal penalties is set to go effect in the coming weeks. Those arguments could get traction with judges there, said Elizabeth Sepper, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. If the Biden administration prevails, it would apply in an urgent but fairly narrow set of circumstances. EMTALA doesnt create a right to treatment or a right to go around the abortion ban, but it will provide some reassurance to emergency room doctors, she said. Laura Paskus is one with the land. Shes been reporting on environment issues for the better part of a decade. And the New Mexico PBS show, Our Land, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. The one-hour special will air at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 5, on channel 5.1. It will also stream on the PBS Video app. The show is really an excuse for me to talk some more about climate change, Paskus says. The time has gone by fast. Its been neat to go back and put the special together. Looking back at the show from five years ago, there are many topics that are still relevant. We are battling the same issues. Sometimes I think I get frustrated on climate change because weve been talking about global warming affects farming and fires. Were seeing those effects today in New Mexico. Our Land explores the states landscapes with an eye toward understanding issues including climate change, habitat restoration, community farming, wildfire management, traditional knowledge and more. Paskus and crew have gone from remote canyons to the wall along the border with Mexico, visited the Gila River, and explored the bosque in Albuquerque, wanting to help all New Mexicans understand forest ecology, policy, urban wildlife and more. Paskus says over the past five years, each episode of Our Land, whether it was a field piece or a studio interview, has been guided by a love of place. This is also the reason Paskus wants to bring attention to climate change. Its crazy watching these incredible heat waves, she says. Scientists have been talking about them and predicting them for some time. They are becoming longer and hotter. Clearly the impact to humans and the death toll is sobering. What is really scaring me is the impact on wildlife. In England, they are not able to deal with 104 degree temperatures. To see what we have so far, goes in terms of mitigation and adaptation. While it was difficult to pick out the highlights from five years, Paskus says here are few examples of what is featured in the special: The Rio Grandes Drier Future (April 2021): Explores something that affects all New Mexicans how climate change is making this desert state more arid. Our Land has covered groundwater wells dropping in the east mountains, the Rio Grande drying and what record low snow packs can mean. Not just during one season, but cumulatively over time. In this 2018 interview, climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck explains how warming affects the amount of water we have in the Southwest. Santa Ana Pueblo Works to Restore Habitat (Sept. 2017): At the Pueblo of Santa Ana, elders, young people and scientists are all learning from the past and looking toward the future. In this 2017 show from the first season, viewers learn about habitat restoration and wildlife. Benefits from the Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Project (Dec. 2017): New Mexico students are learning about changes in ecosystems and theyre helping scientists understand them better, too. Together for Brothers (Oct. 2021): Getting outside offers everyone great learning experiences. But many public lands, even right here in Albuquerque, arent accessible to everyone, but some young men of color are changing that. Students Call for UNM Fossil Fuels Divestment (Nov. 2021): Young people keep telling us how scary the climate changed world is. Many of them have even talked about how a lack of action on climate change has made them question the need to go to college or its made them feel like they wont someday have families of their own. Demanding action, students at UNM are calling for divestment from fossil fuel companies. SEND ME YOUR TIPS: If you know of a movie filming in the state, or are curious about one, email film@ABQjournal.com. Follow me on Twitter @agomezART. ON TV Our Land celebrates its fifth anniversary with a one-hour special at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 5, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. WASHINGTON U.S.-China relations are teetering on a precipice after House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan. Pelosi received a rapturous welcome in Taipei and was applauded with strong bipartisan support in Washington, despite the Biden administrations misgivings. But her trip has enraged Beijing and Chinese nationalists and will complicate already strained ties even after her departure. Already, China is preparing new shows of force in the Taiwan Strait to make clear that its claims are non-negotiable on the island it regards as a renegade province. And, as the U.S. presses ahead with demonstrations of support for Taiwan, arms sales and diplomatic lobbying, the escalating tensions have raised the risks of military confrontation, intentional or not. And the trip could further muddle Washingtons already complicated relationship with Beijing as the two sides wrest with differences over trade, the war in Ukraine, human rights and more. Wary of the reaction from China, the Biden administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting Taiwan. It has taken pains to stress to Beijing that the House speaker is not a member of the executive branch and her visit represents no change in the U.S. one-China policy. That was little comfort for Beijing. Pelosi, who is second in line to the U.S. presidency, was no ordinary visitor and was greeted almost like a head of state. Taiwans skyline lit up with a message of welcome, and she met with the biggest names on the island, including its president, senior legislators and prominent rights activists. Chinese officials were enraged. What Pelosi has done is definitely not a defense and maintenance of democracy, but a provocation and violation of Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said after her departure. Pelosis dangerous provocation is purely for personal political capital, which is an absolute ugly political farce, Hua said. China-US relations and regional peace and stability is suffering. The timing of the visit may have added to the tensions. It came ahead of this years Chinese Communist Partys Congress at which President Xi Jinping will try to further cement his power, using a hard line on Taiwan to blunt domestic criticism on COVID-19, the economy and other issues. Summoned to the Foreign Ministry to hear Chinas complaints, U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns insisted that the visit was nothing but routine. The United States will not escalate and stands ready to work with China to prevent escalation altogether, Burns said, according to the State Department. The White House also said that Pelosis visit doesnt change anything about the U.S. posture toward China and Taiwan. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the U.S. had expected the harsh reaction from China, even as she called it unwarranted. We are going to monitor, and we will manage what Beijing chooses to do, she added. Alarmed by the possibility of a new geo-strategic conflict at the same time the West sides with Ukraine in its resistance to Russias invasion, the U.S. has rallied allies to its side. The foreign ministers of the Group of 7 industrialized democracies released a statement Wednesday essentially telling China by the initials of its formal name, the Peoples Republic of China to calm down. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally, the G-7 ministers said. The PRCs escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region. We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means. Still, that status quo long identified as strategic ambiguity for the U.S. and quiet but determined Chinese opposition to any figment of Taiwanese independence appears to be no longer tenable for either side. Its getting harder and harder to agree on Taiwan for both Beijing and Washington, said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, an emeritus professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. In Taipei and the U.S. Congress, moves are afoot to clarify the ambiguity that has defined U.S. relations with Taiwan since the 1970s. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will soon consider a bill that would strengthen relations, require the executive branch to do more to bring Taiwan into the international system and take more determined steps to help the island defend itself. Writing in The New York Times, committee Chairman Robert Menendez, D-N.J., lambasted Chinas response to Pelosis visit. The result of Beijings bluster should be to stiffen resolve in Taipei, in Washington and across the region, he said. There are many strategies to continue standing up to Chinese aggression. There is clear bipartisan congressional agreement on the importance of acting now to provide the people of Taiwan with the type of support they desperately need. But China appears to be pressing ahead with steps that could prove to be escalatory, including live-fire military exercises planned for this week and a steady uptick in flights of fighter jets in and near Taiwans self-declared air defense zone. They are going to test the Taiwanese and the Americans, said Cabestan, the professor in Hong Kong. He said the actions of the U.S. military in the area, including a naval force led by the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, will be critical. China had ratcheted up potential confrontation weeks ago by declaring that the Taiwan Strait that separates the island from the mainland is not international waters. The U.S. rejected this and responded to by sending more vessels through it. Cabestan said that showed that something had to be done on the U.S. side to draw red lines to prevent the Chinese from going too far. Meanwhile, Taiwan is on edge, air raid shelters have been prepared and the government is increasing training for recruits serving their four months of required military service generally considered inadequate along with annual two-week annual refresher courses for reservists. The Chinese feel that if they dont act, that the United States is going to continue to slice the salami to take incremental actions toward supporting Taiwan independence, said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund. She said that domestic U.S. support for Taiwan actually gives China added incentive to take a strong stance: China does feel under pressure to do more to signal that this is an issue in which China cannot compromise. Despite the immediate concerns about escalation and potential miscalculation, there are others who dont believe the damage to U.S.-China ties will be more long-lasting than that caused by other, non-Taiwan-related issues. China is going to raise a huge fuss and there will be military exercises and there will be embargoes on importing Taiwan goods. And after the shouting is over, you will see a gradual easing, said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami. The situation never goes back to completely normal, whatever normal is, but it will definitely die down, she said. ___ AP writers Zeke Miller in Washington, Joe McDonald in Beijing and David Rising in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, contributed to this report. When two State Police officers found the crashed helicopter in San Miguel County, two men were still breathing albeit faintly. Matthew, Matthew! Can you hear me?! Officer Alexis Garcia yelled at Bernalillo County Fire Rescue Specialist Matthew King. The 44-year-old was still strapped into his seat among the wreckage, his phone lying nearby. Bernalillo County Deputy Michael Levison, 30, was lying on the ground a few feet away. Garcia pulled a large hunk of twisted metal off King and frantically unstrapped him from the seat. Come on, stay with me, stay with me, bud, he pleaded. But, after several minutes of compressions, as Garcia tried to bring King back to life, both men were pronounced dead, along with the pilot, Undersheriff Larry Koren, 55, and Lt. Fred Beers, 51. Lapel video, a 911 call and an incident report released to the Journal on Wednesday afternoon paint a picture of the chaos on July 16 as officers tried to find the helicopter, and attempted to save King and Levison. Evidence photos depict the somber remnants of the crash site afterward among them a Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office badge, half buried in the dirt. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating what led to the crash, which marked the single deadliest incident for law enforcement in state history and one of the deadliest for first responders. The men had spent hours helping local firefighters near Las Vegas, New Mexico, with bucket drops and other air logistics as crews fought the East Mesa Fire. The helicopter took off from the Las Vegas airport around 6:30 p.m. as the men headed home to Albuquerque. A rancher near Romeroville called 911 in a panic at 7:24 p.m. Listen to 911 call below We just saw a helicopter crash land on the ground I dont see fire, I see a lot of dirt, a woman told the dispatcher. The woman tried to give directions to the site, which was near a river. We saw it crash and theres a lot of dust coming up, there was a boom. It was coming in low, I was wondering what it was doing, she said. It went straight into the ground and, yeah, its not good. Around that time, King called 911 as well, according to an incident report, and was pleading for help as he tried to get out of the helicopter. Garcia and fellow Officer Conrad Mares drove toward the site, using a map in their police vehicle to try to pinpoint the location. The male does not hear or see any of his crew members, Garcia relayed to his partner. The officers arrived at a barbed wire fence and wiggled through it before they split up. After a few minutes, Garcia spotted the wreckage and called Mares over. Can anybody hear me? Garcia yelled as he approached the wreckage. On Kings phone, the dispatcher can be heard saying, Hello. Matthew? Matthew, as Garcia reached King. Garcia became emotional as he radioed for help, trying to get a response from King and Levison. Mares took over giving directions as Garcia tried to free King. Come on, come on, Garcia said, as he fumbled with many straps. Over the next minutes, Mares tried CPR on Levison as Garcia worked on King, intermittently checking for a pulse and talking to him before first responders arrived. I kept on checking for a pulse, but it kept getting fainter and fainter, Garcia wrote in an incident report. Garcia and Mares both of them out of breath and solemn then watched as first responders tried to save the men. King and Levison were pronounced dead shortly after. Aerial photographs showed the helicopter slid more than 150 feet from where it hit the ground to its final resting place, the tail separated from the rest of the mangled aircraft. Evidence photos depict the aftermath, pieces of debris strewn about the scrub brush. There were larger pieces of the rotor and tail emblazoned with an American flag bunched together. Scattered about the wreckage: a cellphone and a boot, a set of keys with a keychain with the words We make it fly, a handgun, a couple of helmets and two Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office badges, dug into the dry soil. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal A new program designed to boost employment opportunities in rural northern New Mexico is getting $6.4 million in federal support. State and federal officials on Wednesday announced the grant intended to get more residents working in health care, construction and other skilled trades. The program, dubbed the Northern New Mexico Workforce Integration Network, was among 32 to receive funding. Thats out of 509 total applications, meaning its selection is a big deal, according to Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to President Biden. We are really proud of this project, Sperling said. The program is intended to provide training and career support for 1,750 people in seven counties over a period of three years. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called the grant an investment that a state like New Mexico both needs and deserves. During an online news conference Wednesday, the governor and others say it works on multiple levels: providing rural New Mexico a much-needed skilled workforce and making sure New Mexicans have the kind of jobs that can support a family. A core element of the program is a partnership with 33 employers, unions and governments, including some of the states largest hospitals and construction companies, which have agreed to help provide career pathways for participants. New Mexicos program was chosen because it fulfills a key goal of the American Recovery Plan that we have a more enduring, equitable recovery, Sperling said. That we dont have a recovery where only some people recover. The program also will focus outreach efforts on low-skilled workers, people recovering from substance abuse disorders and formerly incarcerated people, according to a program description. One key goal is to confront generational substance abuse and addiction problems that plague northern New Mexico, said Monica Abeita, program manager of the Regional Development Corporation, an Espanola-based private not-for-profit economic development group. There are about 3,000 people graduating out of recovery centers every year throughout northern New Mexico, said Abeita, who leads the grant program. We are going to be working with them months before they are graduating from that program so they have a job placement already lined up they are working toward that goal. Five substance abuse recovery centers are listed as partners in the program. The project description lists 23 employers as partners, including Arpad Builders, Bradbury Stamm Construction, CHRISTUS St. Vincent, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Jaynes Corporation. Other employers include a variety of hospitals, medical centers and three electrical cooperatives. Together, those employers estimate an immediate need for more than 1,000 additional workers, the description said. Other partners include a variety of labor unions and several higher education institutions with a presence in the region. The program will focus on Colfax, Los Alamos, Mora, Rio Arriba, San Miguel, Santa Fe and Taos counties. The region is home to about 285,000 people, of whom 55% identify as Hispanic and 4% as Native American. Funding for the Good Jobs Challenge grants, which the U.S. Department of Commerce announced this week, comes from $500 million included in President Bidens American Rescue Plan. The grants are intended to provide well-paid jobs to 50,000 Americans in such key industries as health care, information technology, energy and agriculture. Santa Fe Community College is identified as the backbone institution in the health care sector. The grant will help ensure that students training for health care professions receive on-the-job clinical training opportunities, Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves said at the online new conference. These projects will expand access to the workforce and they are going to increase labor participation through a focus on job quality and equity, Graves said. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal SANTA FE Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishams reelection campaign is hitting GOP rival Mark Ronchetti with an unexpected attack with just over three months until Election Day that he supports defunding the police. The assertion is based largely on comments Ronchetti made during a May primary election debate, but the comments appear to have been taken out of context and Ronchettis campaign called the claim a flat-out lie. During the KOAT-TV debate, Ronchetti accused the Democratic governor of making it more difficult for New Mexico law enforcement officers to do their jobs, adding that officers dont want more money, and they dont want more guns, but instead want support from top state officials. We have to back the blue, Ronchetti also said. We have to tell them we will support them no matter what they need from us. However, the Lujan Grisham campaign seized on the money and guns comment in a new online video that claims Ronchetti would slash law enforcement funding levels if elected governor in November. A campaign spokesman for Ronchetti, who won a five-way Republican primary in June, said the video and its claims insult the intelligence of New Mexico voters. The Ronchetti campaign also released a statement from Robert Parra, the president of the New Mexico Fraternal Order of Police, who described the video as inaccurate. The New Mexico Fraternal Order of Police is surprised to hear fabrications that Mr. Ronchetti is anti-law enforcement or is planning to defund the police, Parra said. On the contrary, according to his crime plan and our numerous discussions with him personally, Mr. Ronchetti is a strong supporter of law enforcement. In defense of the claim, the Lujan Grisham campaign cited a tweet from Ronchetti criticizing state government spending growth during the governors first four years in office, asserting that means he does not support funding for State Police salary increases and law enforcement hiring and training included in this years $8.5 billion budget. New Mexicans deserve a leader with a track record of delivering on public safety not an out-of-touch, inexperienced TV weatherman who doesnt believe its his responsibility to keep New Mexicans safe and would defund the police, Lujan Grisham campaign spokeswoman Kendall Witmer said in a statement. Ronchetti has rolled out an economic plan that includes annual rebates for New Mexicans and sweeping tax cuts that could provide more financial relief for state residents and businesses, but the plan could also reduce the amount of money available for state spending on public schools and other programs. At the same time, Ronchetti has also called for an expansion of law enforcement training and recruiting. Along with the economy and abortion, crime has emerged as a top issue in this years race for governor, with Ronchetti criticizing Lujan Grisham for her handling of crime-related issues since taking office in 2019. Specifically, Ronchetti has cited a rise in violent crime and has blasted Lujan Grisham for signing the 2021 Civil Rights Act, which allows lawsuits to be filed in state court for constitutional violations committed by police officers and other types of public workers. However, while New Mexico had the nations second-highest violent crime rate in 2020, crime rates have not increased in all parts of the state. Albuquerque, Sunland Park and Farmington were among the cities that saw a rise in violent crime over a recent five-year period, while Santa Fe, Rio Rancho and Los Lunas all saw decreases in their crime rates, according to Legislative Finance Committee data. Meanwhile, charges that candidates support defunding the police have been used as political ammunition in recent years after national protests sparked by the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers prompted debate about police brutality and systemic racism. But the claims have in most cases been made by Republicans running against Democrats. Overall, public safety spending makes up roughly 6% of New Mexicos total state budget or about $491.5 million for the current budget year. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal Law enforcement officers and firefighters from various agencies escorted the flag-draped casket of Bernalillo County sheriffs deputy Michael Adam Levison into the University of New Mexico Arena on Wednesday. The 30-year-old was praised as the best of us and a guiding moral compass by family and friends at the last of four memorial services for the first responders killed in a helicopter crash in July. He was also described as compassionate, but driven, hardworking, and a highly trained deputy and patriot. Levison was among those killed in the July 16 crash south of Las Vegas, New Mexico, where they were dropping buckets of water and aiding in logistics from the air to help suppress the East Mesa Fire. The others killed were Bernalillo County Undersheriff Larry Koren, Lt. Fred Beers III and Lt. Matthew King, a rescue specialist with the Bernalillo County Fire Department. Bagpipers played as the casket was wheeled into the arena as large monitors above flashed photos of Levison, who was also a technical sergeant with the New Mexico Air National Guard, where he served for more than a decade as a combat engineer. Sheriff Manuel Gonzales said Levison was a very positive, driven, kind, hardworking and enthusiastic person. Gonzales relayed a story about Levison being among the deputies who responded to a child custody situation. Levison distracted a frightened, confused and traumatized 2-year-old by allowing the child to play with the siren and lights in his vehicle. He focused on the victim, Gonzales said. And he told that child, Dont worry, Im going to be here for you. Levison, he noted, had hundreds and hundreds of hours of training, trying to better himself, and trying to be the best Michael that he could be. As a result of that training, Levison served as a crisis negotiator, field investigator, field training officer, Emergency Response Team leader, tactical flight officer, and member of the gang recognition and intelligence unit. Levisons mother, Suzanne Pineda-Levison, told those gathered that my life is forever changed because of her sons life and death. Im no different than all of you, watching my children achieve from the first words, the first steps, their first accomplishments and being overjoyed at everything, she said. His father, Daniel Levison, said Michael was known to have a big heart and a great sense of humor. He recalled going to Michaels home for dinner once and on entering through the open garage door finding his son sitting on the floor, polishing the springs of his Camaro ZL1 with a toothbrush. Michael, he said, never did anything halfway, he was a man with a mission. Life is what you make it my son taught me that, he added Phil Levison, also a sheriffs deputy, said his brother Michael was always referred to as the best of us. He called his brother a moral compass and a person to turn to for some much needed guidance in times of need. Noelle Ashoo, Levisons longtime partner, said there was a greatness about him. It isnt because hes a patriot and a man of service that makes him great, she said. Rather, it was because of the kind of person he was. She noted that, more than a decade ago, Levison told her that no matter what happens to me, I promise youll be taken care of. He is keeping that promise, she told his family, colleagues and friends. Because of all of you and what Michael meant to you, Ive never felt alone or afraid or scared, she said. He may not be with us, but hes still watching out for us. Among the hundreds of people in the arena stands were many who shared their stories about Levison. Marissa Torrez said she met Levison through mutual friends a few years ago. Ever since then, we just clicked and he would check on me to make sure I was OK or if I needed anything. Her young children were having their birthdays at a time of COVID restrictions and Levison, she said, arranged a drive-by parade for them in front of their home, with sheriffs vehicles and fire engines. It was just amazing, Torrez said. He was amazing. Theresa Montoya, records management supervisor for Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office, not only knew Levison through her work for the department, but I knew Michael because he went to school with my son, she said, choking back tears. He was an awesome kid, very driven, very focused on what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to get into law enforcement. If there was anybody who was in need, he was the first person there to help. Levison, who graduated from Volcano Vista High School, later attended the University of New Mexico, where he earned a bachelors degree in criminology. In additon to his mother, father, brother and girlfriend, Levison is also survived by siblings Andrew Levison, Melissa Levison and Nikolaus Tremmel; his stepmother, Marie Levison; grandmother Guadalupe Pineda; and numerous nieces and nephews. Following the memorial service, Levison was laid to rest in the Santa Fe National Cemetery. Copyright 2022 Albuquerque Journal Magistrate Judge George Anaya Jr. will retire at the end of the month after a decades-long career serving the Santa Fe County courts. Anaya, born and raised in Santa Fe, was first elected magistrate judge at the age of 22 in 1986. By 1988, he was recognized as the youngest Hispanic trial judge in the nation by the Hispanic Bar Association, according to a Santa Fe County Magistrate Court news release. Throughout his career, Anaya Jr. filled a variety of positions within the New Mexico Magistrate Judges Association, including president, vice president and secretary-treasurer. He currently presides over the Santa Fe Magistrate Courts DWI Drug Court Program, the release states. Anaya was selected in 2018 by the New Mexico Attorney Generals Office to oversee the Courts in Schools Program in Santa Fe. The program allowed high school students to be present during the conviction and sentencing of DWI offenders. According to the release, Anaya has served on a few Supreme Court committees, including the New Mexico Commission on Access to Justice and the Magistrate Judge Advisory Committee. Anayas last day on the bench is Aug. 31. Since his term ends officially in December, the governor is set to appoint a successor to fill the position for the remaining months, the release states. A general election will then determine who will serve a new four-year term. SEOUL, South Korea After infuriating China over her trip to Taiwan, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met South Korean political leaders in Seoul on Thursday but avoided making direct public comments on relations with Beijing and Taipei that could further increase regional tensions. Pelosi, the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years, said Wednesday in Taipei that the American commitment to democracy in the self-governing island and elsewhere remains ironclad. In response, China on Thursday began military exercises, including missile strike training, in six zones surrounding Taiwan, in what could be the biggest of their kind since the mid-1990s. After visiting Taiwan, Pelosi and other members of her congressional delegation flew to South Korea a key U.S. ally where about 28,500 American troops are deployed on Wednesday evening, as part of an Asian tour that included earlier stops in Singapore and Malaysia. She met South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of Parliament on Thursday. After that hour-long meeting, Pelosi spoke about the bilateral alliance, forged in blood during the 1950-53 Korean War, and legislative efforts to boost ties, but didnt directly mention her Taiwan visit or the Chinese protests. We also come to say to you that a friendship, (the) relationship that began from urgency and security, many years ago, has become the warmest of friendships, Pelosi said in a joint news conference with Kim. We want to advance security, economy and governance in an inter-parliamentary way. Neither Pelosi nor Kim took questions from journalists. Kim said he and Pelosi shared concerns about North Koreas increasing nuclear threat. He said the two agreed to support their governments push for denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula based on both strong deterrence against North Korea and diplomacy. Pelosi and her delegation later spoke by phone with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on the alliance, foreign policy and other issues. Yoon is on vacation this week, but critics accuse him of intentionally shunning a face-to-face meeting with Pelosi in consideration of ties with China, South Koreas biggest trading partner. Yoons office said it had reviewed national interests and that Yoons vacation plan had already been set up when, about two weeks ago, Pelosis side contacted his office about a possible meeting. During the phone conversation, Pelosi and other members of her congressional delegation didnt bring up the Taiwan issue, and Yoon also didnt raise the matter, Yoons office said. In recent years, South Korea has been struggling to strike a balance between the United States and China as their rivalry has deepened. Yoon, a conservative, took office in May with a vow to boost South Koreas military alliance with the United States and take a tougher line on North Korean provocations. Later Thursday, Pelosi visited a border area with North Korea that is jointly controlled by the American-led United Nations Command and North Korea. She became the highest-level American to go to the Joint Security Area since then-President Donald Trump visited in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sitting inside the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) -wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer created at the end of the Korean War, the JSA is the site of past bloodshed and a venue for numerous talks. U.S. presidents and other top officials have often traveled to the JSA and other border areas to reaffirm their security commitment to South Korea. Pelosi posted several photos at the JSA on Twitter and wrote: We conveyed the gratitude of the Congress and the Country for the patriotic service of our servicemembers, who stand as sentinels of Democracy on the Korean Peninsula. Yoon earlier said Pelosis visit to the JSA would demonstrate a strong deterrence against North Korea by the allies, said Kim Tae-hyo, a deputy presidential national security adviser. North Korea didnt immediately comment on her JSA visit. On Wednesday, the Norths Foreign Ministry slammed the United States over her Taiwan trip, saying the current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the U.S. in internal affairs of other countries (is) the root cause of harassed peace and security in the region. On Thursday evening, Pelosi flew to Japan, the final leg of her Asian tour. The Chinese military exercises launched Thursday and planned to last until Sunday involve its navy, air force and other departments. They include missile strikes on targets in the seas north and south of the island in an echo of the last major Chinese military drills aimed at intimidating Taiwans leaders and voters in 1995 and 1996. Chinas official Xinhua News Agency said the exercises are joint operations focused on blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control. Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defense drills, while the U.S. has numerous naval assets in the area. Taiwans Defense Ministry called the Chinese drills unreasonable actions in an attempt to change the status quo, destroy the peace and stability of the region. China views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be annexed by force if necessary. It considers visits to Taiwan by foreign officials as recognizing its sovereignty. Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy, Pelosi said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday. Americas determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad. The Biden administration and Pelosi have said the United States remains committed to the one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing as the sole, legitimate government of China but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. The administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting. Pelosi noted in Taiwan that congressional support for Taiwan is bipartisan, and she praised the islands democracy. She stopped short of saying that the U.S would defend Taiwan militarily and emphasized that Congress is committed to the security of Taiwan, in order to have Taiwan be able to most effectively defend themselves. Tsai said at her meeting with Pelosi that facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told ABCs Good Morning America on Wednesday that U.S. officials dont believe were at the brink now, and theres certainly no reason for anybody to be talking about being at the brink going forward. On Thursday, the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations called for calm in the Taiwan Strait, which separates mainland China and Taiwan, and urged the avoidance of any provocative action. ASEAN foreign ministers, who are meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a regional forum, said they were concerned the situation could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers. Pelosis focus has always been the same, she said, going back to her 1991 visit to Beijings Tiananmen Square, when she and other lawmakers unfurled a small banner supporting democracy two years after a bloody military crackdown on protesters at the square. That visit was also about human rights and what she called dangerous technology transfers to rogue countries. China and Taiwan, which split in 1949 after a civil war, have no official relations but multibillion-dollar business ties. ___ Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan. Associated Press writer David Rising in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, contributed to this report. CATCHES OF THE WEEK Eric Baros of Los Lunas caught and released a 38-inch tiger muskie at Bluewater Lake using a crankbait July 23. Frank Rittel and Brian Rittel of El Paso, Texas, caught 26 crappie and one white bass at Caballo Lake using white grubs July 23. Eason Chapman, 5, of Aledo, Texas, caught an 18.5-inch rainbow trout at Eagle Nest Lake using a Platte River Special on July 28. At Elephant Butte Lake, Marie Cadieux of Tome caught a 14-inch white bass using a white jig July 26. Rebecca Calcutt of Albuquerque caught a 15-inch, 1.5-pound crappie using a jig July 26. Ed Engel of El Paso, Texas, caught and released a 10-pound striper using shiner minnows July 23. At Fenton Lake, Troy Quinones, 6, of Albuquerque caught a 19-inch rainbow trout using Big Gulp salmon PowerBait on July 27. Benjamin Archuleta, 12, of Albuquerque caught a 16-inch rainbow trout using rainbow garlic PowerBait on July 20. Jaxon Rael, 4, of Tucumcari caught his first fish, a 10-inch smallmouth bass, at Ute Lake using a nightcrawler worm July 23 with his grandpa, Jimmy. If you have a catch of the week story, send it to funfishingnm@gmail.com. NOTES FROM GAME & FISH Northeast fishing report Cabresto Lake had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for trout at Charette Lakes was good using salmon eggs, worms and PowerBait. Streamflow on the Cimarron River near Cimarron on Monday morning was 15.2 cubic feet per second (cfs). There were no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for trout at Clayton Lake was slow to fair using PowerBait. Fishing for catfish was fair to good using chicken liver and homemade dough baits. Fishing for walleye at Conchas Lake was fair using bottom bouncer worm harness rigs. Fishing for bass was good using curly tail grubs. At Costilla Creek, the department is implementing the final phase of a project to expand Rio Grande cutthroat trout in 120 miles of the Costilla watershed in northern New Mexico. The final phase involves the removal of fish within a designated area (Rio Costilla from Costilla Dam downstream to the Valle Vidal Boundary, including all tributaries and Comanche Creek from the road culvert crossing on Forest Road 1950 downstream to its confluence with Rio Costilla and all tributaries). Tentative stocking of Rio Grande cutthroat trout is set for spring 2023. Places to fish nearby include Costilla Creek below the fish barrier, Upper Comanche Creek, Shuree Ponds, Upper Powderhouse Creek, Little Costilla Creek, Vidal Creek and McCrystal Creek. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access including Cowles Ponds. Visit the Santa Fe National Forest webpage or call the Santa Fe National Forest office at 505-438-5300 for the latest closure information. Fishing for trout at Coyote Creek was slow. Fishing for rainbow trout at Eagle Nest Lake was good using Platte River Specials. Fishing for trout at Eagle Rock Lake was fair to good using orange PowerBait. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access including on the Gallinas River. Visit the Santa Fe National Forest webpage or call the Santa Fe National Forest office at 505-438-5300 for the latest closure information. Fishing for trout at Hopewell Lake was good using various flies. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. Fishing for trout at Lake Alice was fair using nightcrawler worms. Fishing for perch was good using small nightcrawler worms. Fishing for catfish was fair using nightcrawler worms. Fishing for trout at Lake Maloya was good using salmon eggs, and pink and green PowerBait. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access including Los Pinos River. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. Maxwell Lake 13 had no reports from anglers this week. Monastery Lake will remain closed until further notice. For more information, visit the Open Gate webpage. Morphy Lake State Park closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit Morphy Lake State Parks webpage or call 575-387-2328 for the latest closure information. Streamflow on the Pecos River near Pecos on Monday morning was 300 cfs. Fishing for trout was good using worms. National Forest and State Park closures are in place restricting fishing access to much of the Pecos River. Visit the Santa Fe National Forest webpage or call the Santa Fe National Forest office at 505-438-5300 for the latest forest closure information. Visit Pecos Canyon State Parks webpage or call 505-670-8196 for the latest park closure information. Streamflow on the Red River below the Red River Hatchery on Monday morning was 89.4 cfs. Fishing for trout was fair using salmon eggs. Streamflow on the Rio Grande below the Taos Junction Bridge on Monday morning was 601 cfs. Fishing for trout was slow to fair using worms and black and gold Panther Martin spinners near Pilar. Streamflow on the Rio Hondo near Valdez on Monday morning was 24.7 cfs. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. Streamflow on the Rio Mora near Terrero on Monday morning was 226 cfs. National Forest and State Park closures have been in place restricting fishing access to the Rio Mora. Visit the Santa Fe National Forest webpage or call the Santa Fe National Forest office at 505-438-5300 for the latest forest closure information. Visit Pecos Canyon State Parks webpage or call 505-670-8196 for the latest park closure information. Streamflow on the Rio Pueblo near Pe n asco on Monday morning was 52.2 cfs. Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. Fishing for trout at the Santa Cruz Reservoir was slow to fair using green PowerBait. Fishing for trout at Shuree Ponds was good using dry flies. Fishing for pike at Springer Lake was good using chatterbaits with plastic Roboworm trailers. Fishing for catfish was fair to good using nightcrawler worms. Fishing for trout at Storrie Lake was good using pink and orange PowerBait. Fishing for crappie was fair to good using gold Panther Martin spinners. Stubblefield Lake had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for walleye at Ute Lake was fair trolling using Flicker Shad lures and DT10 Rapala lures. Fishing for white bass was fair to good using jigging spoons in 40 feet of water. Fishing for smallmouth bass and largemouth bass was good using Berkley MaxScent General worms, 3-inch crawdad pattern plastics, Ned Rigs and topwater lures in the mornings in 8 to 16 feet of water. Fishing for crappie was slow. Fishing for catfish was good using punch bait and cut bait. Fishing for bluegill was good using worms. The main lake water surface temperature was in the lower 80s and the water clarity was clear. Northwest fishing report Fishing for walleye at Abiquiu Lake was fair using nightcrawler worms and crankbaits. Fishing for catfish was fair to good using shrimp. Streamflow on the Animas River below Aztec on Monday morning was 805 cfs. There were no reports from anglers this week. Albuquerque Area Drains had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for tiger muskie at Bluewater Lake was good using crankbaits, Whopper Plopper lures and hot dogs. Fishing for trout on the Brazos River was good using dry flies. Fishing for trout at Canjilon Lakes was good using rainbow PowerBait and orange PowerBait. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. Streamflow on the Chama River below El Vado Lake and below Abiquiu Lake on Monday morning was 781 cfs and 748 cfs, respectively. Fishing for trout below El Vado Lake was fair using worms and PowerBait. Please remember, from the river-crossing bridge on U.S. Highway 84 at Abiquiu upstream 7 miles to the base of Abiquiu Dam is special trout waters with a bag limit of two trout only. Fishing for pike at Cochiti Lake was fair to good using spinnerbaits and crankbaits. Fishing for white bass was fair to good using white spinners. Fishing for catfish was good using hotdogs. El Vado Lake can be accessed at Hargroves Day Use Area off State Road 322 and the main park area off State Road 112. The Rio Chama can be accessed at the North El Vado Day Use Area on State Road 95, 10 miles west of U.S. Highway 84. Lake levels are steady but expected to drop as crews work on El Vado Dam. The Dam Day Use Area is closed due to the ongoing construction. State Road 112 over the dam will experience periodic closures. For more information, visit El Vado Lake State Parks webpage or call 575-588-7247. Fishing for trout at Fenton Lake was good using Big Gulp salmon PowerBait, rainbow garlic PowerBait, spinners, beadhead prince nymph flies and worms. Grants Riverwalk Pond has dried up due to pump failure. The city is planning to repair the pumps but is taking this opportunity to dredge the pond. They expect the pond to be offline for at least two to three months. Fish stocking will be discontinued until all work is done. Heron Lake had no reports from anglers this week. At the Jemez Waters, streamflow near Jemez Springs on Monday morning was 48.4 cfs. Fishing for trout was good using worms and grasshopper dry flies. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Santa Fe National Forest webpage or call the Santa Fe National Forest office at 505-438-5300 for the latest closure information. Fishing for trout at Laguna del Campo was good using PowerBait and Pistol Pete spinner flies. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access including Lagunitas Lakes. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. Lake Farmington had no reports from anglers this week. Stocking efforts have been suspended at McGaffey Lake due to extremely low water levels and unstable ground conditions. Lake conditions will be monitored and stocking will resume once conditions improve. Fishing for pike at Navajo Lake was fair to good using 4-inch green grubs and swimbaits. Fishing for smallmouth bass was good using plastic worms and Ned rigs in 20 feet of water. Fishing for trout was slow to fair using spinners. Fishing for kokanee salmon was slow to fair using orange and pink spinners tipped with corn. Fishing for catfish on the Rio Grande near Albuquerque was fair to good using chicken liver and cut bait. Riverside Park Pond (Aztec Pond #1) had no reports from anglers this week. San Gregorio Lake had no reports from anglers this week. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Santa Fe National Forest webpage or call the Santa Fe National Forest office at 505-438-5300 for the latest closure information. Streamflow on the San Juan River near Archuleta on Monday morning was 397 cfs. Fishing for trout in the quality waters was fair to good using ant pattern dry flies. Fishing for trout in the bait waters was slow to fair due to heavy rainfall. Fishing for trout at Seven Springs Brood Pond was good using garlic chartreuse PowerBait and green garlic PowerBait. Tiger Park Reservoir had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for catfish at Tingley Beach was slow using cut bait. Fishing for trout at Trout Lakes was good using chartreuse PowerBait and flies. National Forest closures have been in place restricting fishing access. Visit the Carson National Forest webpage or call the Carson National Forest office at 505-758-6200 for the latest closure information. Southwest fishing report Fishing for bass at Alumni Pond was fair using blue and gold Blue Fox spinners and purple plastic worms. Fishing for catfish was slow. Bear Canyon Lake had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for bass at Bill Evans Lake was fair using worms and crankbaits. Fishing for trout was slow. Fishing for bluegill was good using red wiggler worms. Fishing for crappie at Caballo Lake was very good using white grubs and live minnows. Fishing for walleye was slow to fair using yellow and red Panther Martin spinners. Fishing for white bass was slow to fair using white grubs. Fishing for largemouth and smallmouth bass at Elephant Butte Lake was fair using live minnows and jigs. Fishing for white bass was good using live shiner minnows. Fishing for crappie was fair using jigs and live minnows. Fishing for stripers was fair using shiner minnows. Fishing for catfish was good using cut carp bait and minnows. Fishing for catfish at Escondida Lake was fair to good using shrimp chicken liver. Streamflow on the Gila River near Gila on Monday morning was 575 cfs. Fishing for catfish was good using worms. Glenwood Pond had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for trout at Lake Roberts was slow using streamers and black Woolly Bugger flies. Fishing for catfish was good using worms and chicken liver. Fishing for catfish at Percha Dam was fair using chicken liver. Fishing for trout at Quemado Lake was good using worms and light-colored dry flies. Rancho Grande Ponds had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for catfish on the Rio Grande was fair to good using cut bait and homemade dough bait. Snow Lake had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for bass at Trees Lake was slow. Fishing for catfish was good using chicken liver and stinkbait. Fishing for bluegill was good using live worms and flies. Fishing for catfish at Young Pond was good using hotdogs, dough bait and nightcrawler worms. Southeast fishing report Fishing for catfish at Alto Lake was fair to good using PowerBait and garlic-scented nightcrawler worms. Fishing for catfish at Bataan Lake was fair using chicken liver. Berrendo Creek had no reports from anglers this week. Please visit the Open Gate webpage for more information on this property. Streamflow on the Black River at Malaga on Monday morning was 0.0 cfs. There were no reports from anglers this week. Blue Hole Park Pond had no reports from anglers this week. Bonito Lake is closed until further notice by the city of Alamogordo due to fire damage. It appears that the lake will be out of commission until later this year. Bosque Redondo Lake had no reports from anglers this week. Bottomless Lakes had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for gar at Brantley Lake was fair using cut bait. Fishing for largemouth bass was fair using live worms and wacky-rigged Senko worms. Fishing for catfish was fair to good using cut bait and nightcrawler worms. Fishing for catfish at Carlsbad Municipal Lake was fair to good using shrimp. Chaparral Park Lake had no reports from anglers this week. Corona Pond had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for bass at Eunice Lake was good using dark blue soft plastic Texas rigged worms. Fishing for catfish was slow using worms. Fishing for catfish at Green Meadow Lake was good using worms. Fishing for catfish at Greene Acres Lake was good using worms and cut shad bait. Fishing for trout at Grindstone Reservoir was fair to good using Panther Martin spinners. Fishing for catfish was fair to good using worms. Fishing for bluegill was fair using worms. Fishing for catfish at Jal Lake was fair to good using worms. Lake Van had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for catfish at Oasis Park Lake was fair to good using hot dogs and worms. Pecos River had no reports from anglers this week. Perch Lake had no reports from anglers this week. Fishing for rainbow trout on the Rio Bonito was good using worms. Streamflow on the Rio Ruidoso at Hollywood on Monday morning was 8.31 cfs. There were no reports from anglers this week. Rock Lake Hatchery Kids Pond had no reports from anglers this week. Santa Rosa Lake boat ramp temporarily closed due to low water level. Fishing for walleye from the shore was fair to good using minnows. Fishing for walleye and white bass at Sumner Lake was fair using redheaded Buck Perry spoon plugs trolling in 8 feet of water. The main lake water surface temperature was in the upper 70s. Timberon Ponds had no reports from anglers this week. Source: New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Over the past nine months, police say, three Muslim men were shot to death without warning around the city.And now investigators are saying they believe there is a strong possibility the same person or persons is responsible. While we wont go into all the specifics of why we think that, theres one strong commonality in all victims: the race and religion, said Deputy Cmdr. Kyle Hartsock at a news conference in front of the Islamic Center of New Mexico Thursday morning. We are taking this very seriously. We want the publics help in identifying this cowardly individual. Hartsock, with the Albuquerque Police Departments Criminal Investigations Division, said he couldnt release more information on the investigation without compromising it. The most recent homicide that of Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27 galvanized a community that remembered him as a vibrant student leader, dedicated planning and land use director for the city of Espanola and field organizer with Melanie Stansbury campaign for congress. The shooting came six days after another man, 41-year-old Aftab Hussein, was killed in his apartment complex parking lot less than five miles away. The first shooting, that of Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, happened last November behind the Ariana Halal Market & Cafe he owned with his brother. Since detectives believe the victims were ambushed, Hartsock said that would generally tell us this person has been lying in wait. However, he said they cant say yet if the shootings were hate crimes. Weve reached out to the FBI immediately and theyve already committed to give what resources they can, Hartsock said. We cant call it a thing until we have someone identified and really know what their intention is in doing this. And we dont know enough yet to clearly say that but that could change. He said in cases like this its almost always the public who helps investigators identify a suspect. My guess is someone out there either directly knows who did this and they can provide that information to police or theyve noticed some behavior changes in someone around them that they think could possibly do this, Hartsock said. Two of these murders have happened in (a) week. Whoevers doing them, is changing up their lifestyle, their behavior, something is off more than usual. Mohammad Ahmadi Ahmadi and his older brother, Sharief A Hadi, fled threats in their native Afghanistan in the 1980s and settled in Pennsylvania before coming to Albuquerque in the mid-1990s, Hadi told the Journal last December. They opened their market on San Mateo, near Mountain NE, in 2008 and Ahmadi specialized in cooking traditional Afghan dishes. He didnt have that much friends, but he was nice with the people, everybody loved him, Hadi said. Really good cook, really good relationship. People loved him. Hadi told the Journal that on the evening of Nov. 7, his younger brother had stayed at the shop after hours to finish cooking. He suspects he was smoking a cigarette and sitting in a chair behind the building when he was shot. At 6:41 officers were dispatched to the scene in response to a shooting. When they arrived they found Ahmadi dead. Aftab Hussein Iftikhar Amirjan, from Afghanistan, moved to New Mexico in 2015 and became friends with Hussein after he moved to the state a year later. He said the two met at the mosque and he would help his friend go shopping or navigate the city. In their little free time the two would occasionally go up to the Sandia Mountains or go out to eat. Hussein, a busser for a local cafe, rented a second-story apartment on the 400 block of Rhode Island NE, near the Mesa Verde Community Center, with two roommates. Amirjan said one of the roommates called him about 1 a.m. on July 27 to tell him his friend had been shot hours earlier in the complexs parking lot. Aftab is like, he was like my brother, Amirjan said. I feel very bad for him. He said Hussein had siblings living in Pakistan and had recently gotten engaged. He was working to get his passport and other travel documents together so he could go to Pakistan and get married. He was very happy. He said Ill go to Pakistan and get married and bring my wife here and he said Ill make my life, you know, Amirjan said. He said Ill buy a house later on and have children.' On Wednesday Husseins brother flew in from the United Kingdom and Amirjan took him by the scene of the crime. In the meantime, neighbors told the Journal, Husseins roommates had hastily moved out leaving behind some furniture because they were too afraid to stay. Muhammad Afzaal Hussain On Monday night, shortly after his brother got home and began making dinner, Muhammad Afzaal stepped outside of his apartment on Cornell and Coal SE, most likely to take a walk and make a phone call. He was shot less than half a block away. Muhammad Afzaal had studied law and human resource management at the University of Punjab and moved to Albuquerque in 2017 to attend graduate school at University of New Mexico. He was elected president of the Graduate and Professional Student Association in 2019 and got a masters degree in community and regional planning. Muhammad Afzaal had been commuting to Espanola for his job for the past year. He had planned on moving up there this weekend. His death sparked an outpouring of grief from those who knew him, including U.S. Rep. Stansbury and UNM President Garnett Stokes. Deeply disturbing After news of Muhammad Afzaals death began to circulate, leaders in the community reached out to law enforcement and politicians. On Thursday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the homicides are deeply disturbing. New Mexico is a state that is proud of its diversity, which makes our state a richer and more vibrant place to call home , she said in a statement. We will provide any resources requested by law enforcement to aid in this investigation. Mayor Tim Keller said the city will continue to stand by its Muslim neighbors and offer support while they mourn. While we do not have all the answers yet, what we do know is that violence against members of our community based on race or religion will not be tolerated in Albuquerque, he said in a statement. Ahmad Assed, a defense attorney and the president of Islamic Center of New Mexico, said he didnt believe the three victims knew one another. The community certainly is in need of understanding the egregiousness of the conduct displayed in all three of theses shootings, Assed said. If its true that we were targeted as Muslims then they need to be very vigilant in protecting themselves and taking measures of precaution. They need to watch out for their surroundings. Assed spoke at the news conference along with Chief Administrative Officer Lawrence Rael, District Attorney Raul Torrez and Raul Bujanda, Special Agent in Charge of the FBIs Albuquerque Office. Police Chief Harold Medina did not attend the news conference since he is in quarantine after an exposure to COVID-19. Some members of the Islamic community stood on the outskirts to watch. I know the lack of specifics and a lot of the information that is related to this investigation is something that at this stage is going to cause great concern, Torrez said. And frankly, I think there will be more questions than answers at this point. But I think the thing to keep in mind is that law enforcement and federal levels are working together. Theyre cooperating the sharing information what we need now is the engagement of the community. LOUISVILLE, Ky. The federal government filed civil rights charges Thursday against four Louisville police officers over the drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose fatal shooting helped fuel the racial justice protests that rocked the nation in 2020. The charges most of which stem from the faulty drug warrant used to search Taylors home are an effort to hold law enforcement accountable for the killing of the 26-year-old medical worker. One of the officers was acquitted of state charges earlier this year. Breonna Taylor should be alive today, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the charges, which include unlawful conspiracy, use of force and obstruction of justice. The charges named former officers Joshua Jaynes and Brett Hankison, along with current officers Kelly Goodlett and Sgt. Kyle Meany. Louisville police said they are seeking to fire Goodlett and Meany. Hankison was the only officer charged Thursday who was on the scene the night of the killing. Taylor was shot to death by officers who knocked down her door while executing a search warrant. Taylors boyfriend fired a shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the door, and they returned fire, striking Taylor multiple times. Hankison, Jaynes and Meany had initial appearances Thursday in federal court before Magistrate Judge Regina Edwards, who set their bonds at $50,000 each, according to a court clerk official. The three men face a maximum sentence of life in prison for the civil rights charges. Calls to attorneys for Jaynes and Meany were not returned Thursday. It wasnt immediately known if Hankison had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. Goodlett has pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy, Taylor family attorney Ben Crump said Thursday, though records on her court proceedings were sealed. Goodlett faces up to five years in prison. Local activists and members of Taylors family celebrated the charges and thanked federal officials. Supporters gathered in a downtown park and chanted: Say her name, Breonna Taylor! This is a day when Black women saw equal justice in America, Crump said. Taylors mother, Tamika Palmer, said she has waited nearly 2 1/2 years for police to be held accountable. Todays overdue, but it still hurts, she said. The Justice Department is also conducting a non-criminal investigation of the Louisville Police Department, announced last year, that is probing whether the department has a pattern of using excessive force and conducting unreasonable search and seizures. In the protests of 2020, Taylors name was often shouted along with George Floyd, who was killed less than three months after Taylor by a Minneapolis police officer in a videotaped encounter that shocked the nation. Protesters who took to the streets over months in Louisville were especially critical of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who presented only wanton endangerment charges against Hankison for a grand jury to consider in 2020. Members of the grand jury later came forward to complain that Camerons office had steered them away from charges for the other officers involved in the raid. Thank God that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not get the last word in regard to justice for Breonna Taylor, Crump said Thursday. We have always said this was a conspiracy to cover up the death of Breonna Taylor. Today the Justice Department put forth the charging documents to show we werent crazy. Cameron, a Republican running for governor next year, said in announcing the indictment against Hankison in September 2020 that he would leave issues regarding potential civil rights violations to federal officials to investigate. Cameron said in a release Thursday evening that his offices primary task was to investigate whether the officers who executed the search warrant were criminally responsible for Ms. Taylors death under state law. It is important that people not conflate what happened today with the state law investigation undertaken by our office, Cameron said. Im proud of the work of our investigators and prosecutors. Garland said the officers who were at Taylors home just after midnight on March 13, 2020, were not involved in the drafting of the warrant, and were unaware of the false and misleading statements. Hankison was indicted on two deprivation-of-rights charges alleging he used excessive force when he retreated from Taylors door, turned a corner and fired 10 shots into the side of her two-bedroom apartment. Bullets flew into a neighbors apartment, nearly striking one man. He was acquitted by a jury of state charges earlier this year. A separate indictment said Jaynes and Meany both knew the warrant used to search Taylors home had information that was false, misleading and out of date. Both are charged with conspiracy and deprivation of rights. Meany ran a police unit that focused on aggressive drug investigations. Police served five warrants simultaneously the night of the Taylor raid, four of them in a concentrated area where drug activity was suspected, and the fifth at Taylors apartment nearly 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. The warrant for Taylors house alleged that she was receiving packages for a suspected drug dealer who was a former boyfriend. The warrant, signed by Jaynes and approved by Meany, said Jaynes had confirmed with the postal service that packages for the ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, were going to Taylors apartment. Investigators later learned that Jaynes had not confirmed that with the postal inspector. Jaynes was fired in January 2021 for violating department standards in the preparation of a search warrant execution and for being untruthful in the Taylor warrant. Jaynes and Goodlett allegedly conspired to falsify an investigative document that was written after Taylors death, Garland said. Federal investigators also allege that Meany, who testified at Hankisons trial, lied to the FBI during its investigation. Federal officials filed a separate charge against Goodlett, alleging she conspired with Jaynes to falsify Taylors warrant affidavit. Garland alleged that Jaynes and Goodlett met in a garage in May 2020 where they agreed to tell investigators a false story. Former Louisville Police Sgt. John Mattingly, who was shot at Taylors door, retired last year. Another officer, Myles Cosgrove, who investigators said fired the shot that killed Taylor, was dismissed from the department in January 2021. Taylors boyfriend, Kenny Walker, who was in her apartment that night and fired the shot at Mattingly, was initially charged with attempted murder of a police officer but that charge was dropped after Walker told investigators he thought an intruder was breaking into the apartment. The Taylor case also prompted a review of the citys no-knock warrant policy. Officers at Taylors door said they knocked and announced they were police even though the warrant didnt require that. Those types of warrants, used in drug investigations to attempt to prevent the destruction of evidence, were later banned in the city of Louisville. A motorcyclist was traveling east on NM State Road 104 on Monday when he struck a deer and was killed, according to a New Mexico State Police news release. Police responded to the crash near mile post 98 at around 9 p.m., the release states. According to the release, the motorcyclist, Robert S. Evans, 60, of Nara Visa, NM, was not wearing a helmet at the time of the crash. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, police said. What cant Hatch chile go on? The beloved New Mexican staple can be found on everything from burgers to grilled cheese in the state and now, it will be on sushi. National sushi chain Hissho Sushi is partnering with Albuquerque-founded Hatch Chile Co. with their crunchy Hatch chile chicken roll, which fuses Japanese and New Mexican flavors. The roll is available at Sprouts grocery stores around the country. On the Southwestern side, the roll includes green chiles, corn, avocado, and grilled chicken. It also includes more standard sushi ingredients like sriracha, nori, rice and spicy mayo. Hatch Chile Co. sends cans of its hatch green chile to Hissho Sushis distribution centers. The partnership will bring the New Mexican chile around the nation; Hissho sushi sells its products in over 40 states. Practically everybody in the Southwest is familiar with green chile, said David Gregory, president of Hatch Chile Co., but when you get out to the East Coast not everybody is familiar with green chile and green chile flavor. Hissho Sushi marketing program specialist Hayley Twigg said her first experience with Hatch chile was during the development of the roll. I grew up in South Carolina, and in the Carolinas, green chile isnt a thing like in New Mexico, Twigg said. None of our other sushi rolls have Hatch, so that was really exciting and new for me too. Hatch Chile Co. was founded in 1987 in Albuquerque by Steve Dawson. The sushi roll will be stocked in nine different Sprouts grocery stores around the state. As every celebration in India is incomplete without a gift, the same goes for this joyful occasion. There is a tradition wherein a sister brings a gift along with rakhi for his brother and he in return presents his sister with a gift to convey their warm wishes and happiness. Therefore, Rakhi gifts increase their affection, thereby making this celebration mesmerizing. The festivities begin a day before rakhi, wherein the sister or brother starts looking for a unique gift to present to each other. Moreover, a wide variety of options is available, which makes it too confusing to buy the right rakhi gift. Thus, Archiesonline has changed the way you shop by offering a collection of designer rakhi and rakhi gifts online for sisters, brothers, bhaiya & bhabhi, kids, etc. So, avoid traffic and overcrowded markets by shopping for rakhi online from the comfort of your house. Same Day Rakhi Hamper Mr. Varun Moolchandani, Executive Director of Archies, we understand your unique needs and the importance of this festival, thus we offer a great collection of rakhi gifts ideas that will convey your feelings in a special way. We bring to you the colorful, vibrant and eye-popping Rakshabandhan range that has some unique gifts like Dry fruits, Cakes, Cookies, Chocolates, Sweets, Greeting Cards and so on. To make your shopping experience an ease, we have scrutinized our rakhi gift range into categories. Why just give a rakhi to your brother, when you can complement it with a special gift that shows your care & respect and that comes within your budget too. We have different Rakhi Hampers options to cater your unique needs. Present your Rakhi with a special gift, chocolate, sweets, dry fruits and so on. Moreover, a plethora of gift options for everyone on this special occasion are available that includes kids hampers, bhai & bhabhi rakhi hampers, greeting cards, personalized gifts, etc. A collection of Hampers, Rakhis, Same Day Rakhi Hamper, Premium Rakhi Hampers and Personalized Rakhi Gift. This day needs to be celebrated with full fervor, and if your brother or sister stays away and cannot meet, still you can make their day special by sending rakhi or return gifts to their place. The distance should not spoil the celebration of this day, thus at Archiesonline we give more stress to keep you close to your sibling. For this, we offer a premium delivery service through which you can send rakhi or gifts to your sister or brother anywhere in India. We deliver gifts to almost all the major cities of India like Delhi, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Mumbai, Noida, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Ghaziabad, and much more. No matter if your cousin, brother or sister lives abroad, let them feel close to their siblings by sending a precious rakhi right to their home with our worldwide delivery service. Yes, now with Archiesonline you can send rakhi gifts to the USA, UK, Malaysia, UAE, Australia, Germany, Singapore, China, Philippines and rest of the world. To make sending online rakhi worldwide an easy to go process, we have segregated our gifts section into different countries, so that you can just order it with a mouse click. First Partners, an award-winning premier communications firm, has been appointed by Baxter Healthcare India, to provide public relations and corporate communication services for its business entities in India. In India, Baxter has a robust presence to support its work in advancing healthcare & pharmaceutical innovations globally which comprises of Baxters Commercial presence across India, Manufacturing facility in Ahmedabad, world-class Research & Development and Information Technology centres in Bangalore & Ahmedabad along with Global Centre of Excellence (COE) footprint in Gurgaon. Headquartered in US, Baxter International is a global healthcare leader with a leading portfolio of diagnostic, critical care, kidney care, nutrition, hospital and surgical products used across patient homes, hospitals, physician offices and other sites of care. CoinDCX, India's leading and most valuable crypto company, announced plans to host 'UNFOLD 2022' from August 26 - 28, 2022, in Bangalore. UNFOLD 2022 is a high-energy, immersive event which will bring together the developers, investors, Web3 startups as well as regulators to showcase and discuss how India can leverage its Web 3 talent and knowledge to be a global leader. UNFOLD 2022 will provide a platform for industry stalwarts to discuss the trends of Web 3.0 and India's readiness, and challenges and opportunities for the Web 3.0 startup ecosystem. The event, powered by BuidlersTribe and Devfolio, will also introduce the first edition of the Unfold 2022 Hackathon and Demo Day. What to expect from UNFOLD 2022: The theme for this year is Innovation. The event will be forward looking and will focus on upcoming innovations and the next frontiers in the Web3 space Unfold 2022 Web 3.0 Conference: A gathering of top minds that cut across the web3 ecosystem, geographies, and themes. Speakers will share trends and insights, witnessed across the world that will shape the future and will give practical first-hand tips on building Web3 innovations through keynotes, panel discussions, fireside chats, masterclasses, and workshops. Unfold 2022 Web 3.0 Hackathon: Devfolio will bring together developers, advisors, mentors, and companies to innovate and build decentralized applications with the potential of mass adoption. This cross-chain hackathon will be a melting pot of Web3 builders to interact and win bounties worth more than $50,000 by solving real-world problems Unfold 2022 Web 3.0 Demo Day: Web3 startups will get an opportunity to pitch their ideas to investors including CoinDCX Ventures. The perks of winning the demo day include a $1 million pool of funding and $25K of grants. Neeraj Khandewal, Founder, CoinDCX, said, "Technologies evolve for hundreds of years. And the internet is just 30 years old, where most benefits are yet to be built and harnessed. I believe Web 3.0, powered by blockchain technology, is the next Internet revolution that empowers the common man. As the first crypto unicorn of India, we believe in leading this technological revolution of Web 3.0. With UNFOLD 2022, we wish to emphasize on the role Web3 will play in peoples lives. Our flagship event will help shape conversations in making India a global hub in crypto, blockchain and Web3." BuidlersTribe's pitch competition program has led to over $2.5mn funding in the last few months. With 1100+ startups on buidl.so, we're expecting this program to attract some of the best founders in web3, said Pareen Lathia - Co-founder, BuidlersTribe COO at Devfolio said, "Devfolio is globally known to be one of the best community of builders. Historically, Devfolio has hosted hundreds of hackathons and events which have led to builders finding new jobs, learning new technology and even starting companies! Were looking forward to the UNFOLD 2022 event to attract more builders to web3 as they get in-person experience of what its like to build for the decentralized web. The three-day-long event will see over 500 participate in person at the conference, 250+ developers join 48 hours of the hackathon, and over 150 startups are expected to engage on Demo Day with the Web 3.0 investors community. The conference will also be streamed live on CoinDCXs social media channels for the benefit of both local and global audiences who cannot attend the conference in person. UNFOLD 2022, an annual event in the Web3 space is yet another initiative toward CoinDCX's commitment to realise the vision of building India's crypto/web3 ecosystem. This event will act as a guiding path into the future of the internet and will pave the way for India to become a global leader in Web3. Clarity with the right messaging is the hallmark of any successful PR campaign. Its absence leads to confusion, complacency and even chaos. This has been always the challenge for many PR campaigns to get their messaging sharp and correct in smaller towns. This becomes far more difficult and challenging when it comes to regional PR in smaller towns, where you need to speak to a cluster of different audiences in different languages. It is said that every 100 km there is a change in the language, food and purchase habits and one will definitely need a multi-prong strategy to target the smaller towns more precisely to get the desired impact. Click here to Register Now Today, most big PR companies depend hugely on stringers or local representatives in various parts of the country to run their PR campaigns in smaller towns. In most cases, the English press release is shared with translation to the stringers, who then meet the journalists of local publications and get it published. I think PR in small towns should go beyond printing just press releases. While there are several challenges, but the big PR companies need to work it out through various PR bodies on regional markets to position brands with the correct messaging and think beyond press releases. For example, if you are doing an interview or a press briefing, take along a person of your company who can speak the local language and respond to the questions of the media so that clarity is given then and there. Even while translating press releases into regional languages, a lot can be lost in translation and at times the essence of the message doesnt come through powerfully. And if you ask the publication to do the translation, one is not 100% confident how it will finally turn out. So, most agencies hand over literally translated copies to the publications, which at times may miss the key message in the language that the local population understands. Managing PR in small towns with the right messaging is a challenge. To draw a parallel example, one can relate how a politician thinks and plans his messaging for smaller towns. Of course, a big political party has party workers who do a lot of research before they craft the right message and deliver it at local meetings. Even many brands today launch their products and their campaigns which are customised to that state in smaller towns, addressing their local cultural nuances and flavour of that region. Plenty of research and focus discussion groups are done to understand the consumer and cull out insights from various discussions. It is high time PR agencies should have better understanding of the smaller towns by continuously researching instead of just blindly depending and trusting on the teams that are posted in smaller towns who are not completely exposed to the history or background of the product. In smaller towns, some of the publications are owner driven, who invariably run the editorial team of the publication. They have a huge challenge to get talent to cover and do stories. And they are not able to do the justice for all the brands due to paucity of time and resources. Every PR agency does media rounds in the city, why cant the same be done with publications in smaller towns. One could get a better understanding of the publication and audiences as to what will work best in those towns and publications. I think it is high time additional emphasis is given to look at regional PR campaign differently while working on your messaging so that the message you want to deliver is not diluted. With smaller towns being the future for brands to grow I think brands should revisit their strategy while working on their PR campaigns for the regional markets and PR agencies need to chart out some concrete plan to make regional PR more effective and meaningful. A communication veteran who has cut his teeth in the business of communication, Anup Sharma, Independent Strategic Communications Consultant, remarked, Every brand is built on a strong, unique differentiated consumer proposition, but communicating the key message without any distortion in a country like India, where more than 70% of the population speaks in vernaculars is big challenge. And its not just the hundreds of languages, and thousands of dialects but also varied local culture, media consumption habits which changes every 100 km. The marketing challenges change from language to language and region to region and for brands to connect' with their customers, the campaign has to speak to them in their local language. He also pointed out that to communicate to this varied regional audience, smart brands are going hyperlocal with vernacular versions for their brand messaging as they know that dubbed commercial dont connect. Hinglish campaigns have given way to now different campaigns for different regions, in local languages. Agencies are investing on teams with strong regional language skills and a ground level understanding of local cultures. Besides these they are extensively using AI & Big Data to understand the regional nuances and message testing and also customised apps that help create and distribute local language content. The Covid pandemic leapfrogged the usage of digital media. In the post-Jio world with inexpensive data cost there is a high growth in mobile penetration leading to digital literacy and language-enabled devices. This has helped brands to now blend their online and offline interactions and maintain their key message. Sharing his perspective,, said that the next growth engine is going to come from semi-urban and rural India and there are no two ways about it that these markets need to be cracked. From the PR perspective, one of the biggest challenges is that most of these markets have national newspapers which carry content as per their editions, however, not all locations are covered. Firstly, language is a major barrier which means we need to simplify the content in the local language and put it across. It is not just about the local language per se, but the way you structure your content, for example, insurance is a jargon-oriented sector, and hence structuring your content in a simplified way is very important. It becomes a challenge because insurance in itself is a very complex subject that becomes tough to simplify. Secondly, another challenge we face is that it is an advertiser-based market, and editorial content of value gets ignored or only gets taken in lieu of advertising content which becomes a challenge for the PR team looking to pitch editorial content across the region, Bharadwaj added. Continuing further, he said, Ours is a mobile first and quite a digitally savvy nation. Its just about getting the right platforms out there to reach out to these target media however from an online news perspective it becomes tough to do. Of course, you can reach out to regional publications and websites but the dirt of such websites and content outlets makes it tough to reach out and hence one must rely on some advertorial content and using stringer network. Till there are good content engines available, this will be a challenge area which needs to be addressed. Nitin Thakur, Head of Communications, OYO, noted out that brands and agencies often fail to comprehend the local sensitivities or contextual trends prevalent in a market. Any communication designed for the North Indian market will not work for the South Indian market if the communication is a literally a translation and is not adapted to accommodate for the regional audiences with the right nuances. Therefore, the primary way to address this is to have feet on the ground or get local expertise to guide you and bring in some local flavor to the messaging. He further remarked that often brands and agencies are far removed from regional centres as they are headquartered in metro cities. They lack the regional know-how and the innate understanding of the local populace and also brands and agencies to optimise on resources and costs often do not undertake proper due diligence prior to launching a campaign. So, to get your messaging tailored to the regional market more homework needs to be done to know your audiences and their habits so that one can frame the right message that will be relevant and will catch the eyes, he added. Shailesh Goyal, Director, Simulations Public Affairs Management Services, who has been managing PR for many big brands in the smaller towns, elaborated, The challenge in regional markets is the missing local connect. The communication strategy and the related messaging is usually drafted keeping in the audience in the Metros or the large markets. The same messaging may not have the same appeal or connect with the audience in the regional markets. In such a situation, it becomes more difficult to engage with the local media, customers, viewers, or readers of the region. What is needed is the regional/ local flavour in messaging to ensure optimal impact. As regional partners, we know the local mood better than those in metros and mini metros. This is something we have been suggesting to many corporate communication managers of brands and our national consultancies partners, and we are noticing some welcome change because of consistent advisory. He further added that the trust between the regional partner and the national partner or brand is critical here. There are various internal and external checks to ensure the key message is consistent and relevant. It is also important for the regional agencies and the national agencies must be in constant dialogue to understand what are the behaviour changes that happen in the smaller towns. Now with technology playing a pivotal role, the attention span of the audience is becoming lower by the day. Hence delivering the right your message is that much more important in regional markets. According to Madhukar Kumar, Founder & Chief Strategist, Grey Cell PR, the earlier sharp distinctions in regional audiences wants/ desires/ method of content/ media/ news communication vis-a-vis what is being served nationally is fast getting blurred because of the abundance of common media outlets beaming into their homes, smartphones, and the web world. He stressed that retaining local or regional flavour is essential, especially when communication is via the local/ regional language. There should be a solid regional connection between the brand (client) and the agency's team in understanding and identifying the peculiar distinctions about what would work when a smaller market is targeted. Agencies must devise ways to craft the best and most engaging communication creatively so that the right messages reach the right audiences. Also, gone are the days when we used to think that a regional audience didn't understand - mainstream jargon, lingos, and communication. Today, the regional audiences are more aligned to the influence of information and are willing recipients of the communication free flow across various media streams. Hence, the agency & client teams need to identify the gaps and work towards catering to the audiences correctly. Today, most audiences in smaller towns consume news media and content the same as the larger national audience either on mobile or through print. The traditional print media still continues to hold its forte and should never be ignored. So, whatever may be the language of communication, the content must be diligently crafted to engage with the audience with the right messaging which will be very focussed and engaging. Paromita Ghosh, Director, Candid Communication, was of the opinion that the rural market needs to be exploited by ruralising strategies, rather than treating them as inconvenient and poor extensions of the urban market. Therefore, even on the communications front your messaging in smaller towns to that audience has to very relevant and the local population should understand. Just like how brands create rural-specific products with the local flavour and taste, your communication strategy in the regional markets has to be customised and catch the attention of the local audience. Today consumers in smaller town are equally intelligent and hence it is all the more important to talk to them in the tone and manner they understand, she added. Bringing in an interesting observation, Ghosh further remarked that brands such as Nirma and Tata Tea are selling well in the rural market because they know their market and its needs by intuition and in addition to that, they also know how to sell it. But those engaged in the opportunistic market will not be able to sustain for long in the rural market. The message, media, channels need to be well thought out with the right messaging and also ensure that enough research is done in the regional markets to cull out some valuable insights that will help in crafting the correct message to suit that market. CS Rama Naidu, Managing Partner, Intellect PR, commented that brand targeting and communication in regional media is very limited to translation of press releases and pushing coverages in regional publications through snippets. In India everyone is in a hurry to push things fast and work on how many coverages you have got in a month, whereas if you look at West, they must have done one or two campaigns in a year but they did it with lots of research, thinking and application of mind for making these campaigns successful. He also pointed out that for brands to succeed with effective communication in the regional media, the team at the brands end needs to spend good amount of time in understanding their internal data about that region and sit with both public relations, advertising, branding and digital agencies together and build right messages and get good native writers to write and get them communicated on large regional platforms. Otherwise, the communication in regional languages by brands is like dubbing movies. For a better targeting and communication in the regional media like India where every 100 km the dialect and the language changes, the brands and agencies need to do the same kind of exercise they do it for mainstream media, like research, story ideation, finding the gaps, execution plans and large format stories to communicate what the brand wants to communicate. Prime Videos upcoming original Crash Course is just two days away from its global premiere on the service. While there is growing intrigue and curiosity surrounding the lead cast of the Amazon Original Series, three artists playing students in the show, Hridhu Haroon, Anvesha Vij and Aryan Singh share interesting anecdotes on their experience while shooting the intriguing show ahead of its launch on August 5. The youngsters also talk about being overwhelmed on having the once in a lifetime opportunity of sharing screen space with veteran actor Annu Kapoor. Here is what they said: Annu Kapoor Sir taught me to always live in the moment. He told me Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, focus on that, and try to give your best. He really inspires you with his passion towards the craft, and his commitment to his work. The experience of making Crash Course not just helped us hone our craft but also made us better human beings, added Anvesha, who plays the role of Nikki. Hridhu aka Sathya of Crash Course said, I always thought I would be an actor probably by the age of 29 or 30. So imagine my surprise when I actually got a call back from the production team and that too for such a big project like Crash Course. I'm incredibly excited, and also grateful for it. The entire journey has been a learning process. We all ended up getting so much experience in every department, which is quite fulfilling to say the least. My appearance was said to be too Delhi looking for the Haryana character in the script. So, I was rejected for the role initially. I went home and chopped off my hair to look the part. Then I came back to give the audition again. I finally heard back from the casting agency after COVID, and I am grateful that despite everything, I finally got the part. This has been one of the best experiences of my life where I worked with some of the best people of the industry including an actor of Annu Kapoor's stature, shared Aryan Singh, who will be seen as Rakesh in the series. The J6 political persecutions claimed another scalp when Guy Reffitt was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, even though he did not engage in any violence, nor enter the U.S. Capitol. The outrageous punishment, the longest prison term yet handed down, appears to be government retribution for Reffitt's "hyperbolic statements" secretly recorded in his home by his teenage son. So, once again, the D.C. Despots have thrown down the gauntlet against constitutionally protected free speech. Of all the Leviathan's fiendish and reprehensible acts these last ten years (the IRS and DOJ's targeting of conservatives, the Hillary-Obama-FBI Russia collusion hoax designed to take down a sitting president, the Pentagon's forced experimental "vaccination" of servicemembers against their religious and conscientious objections, etc.), its no-holds-barred onslaught of malicious prosecutions and vengeful incarcerations against January 6 political protesters takes the cake. The government's wildly inappropriate use of the FBI and courts to stamp out certain political speech and intimidate Americans into silence and compliance is such a blatantly un-American miscarriage of justice that it leaves me seething with anger. It can't happen here? It has happened here. And the federal government's vindictive and authoritarian response to January 6 only adds to the voluminously accumulating proof that Washington is filled to the brim with sadistic tyrants who would have felt right at home in Stalin's Soviet Union. I feel for every one of the Americans who have been made to suffer so that D.C. can huff and puff and make a show of its iron-fisted powers, intended to leave the rest of the country in a state of docility and fear. From my point of view, all of these defendants, their families, and their friends deserve our thoughts and prayers. There was a time when I might have been willing to concede that some random "trespasser" swept up in the passions of the moment went too far on January 6. That time has long passed. The harsher and more unmerciful the Gestapo has been in hunting down and persecuting patriotic Americans, the less willing I have become to care about what happened to Chuck Schumer's fax machine or Nancy Pelosi's morning liquor stash. The more irrefutable the evidence showing the presence of government agents in the protest crowds stirring up trouble, the more J6 has looked like a government-run setup job, not an organic mob riot. The more Congress's ignominious J6 Commission has preposterously insisted that the day's events were nothing less than an orchestrated conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States, the more the whole affair has been reduced to a Machiavellian charade willed into existence by a cynical and desperate bureaucracy committed to using it as a vehicle for imprisoning Donald Trump and squeezing the life out of a MAGA political movement threatening the D.C. Establishment's cushy existence. The more undeniable the proof showing that Ashli Babbitt was executed in cold blood and Rosanne Boyland was kicked and beaten to death, the more the government's preferred narratives surrounding the "Capitol attack" have sounded like pure propaganda. Every time President-in-Name-Only Joe Biden and his known associates have lied to the country and falsely claimed that J6 protesters killed police officers that day, the more certain I have become that the government's heavy-handed response is irredeemably corrupt and illegitimate. Every time Antifa and Black Lives Matter arsonists and vandals have committed real violence against innocent civilians and walked away without so much as a slap on the wrist, the more furious I have become at D.C.'s two-tiered system of politicized "justice." I have no doubts that the unscrupulous Washington syndicate intends for us to see and understand the two-tiered criminal justice system as unmistakable proof of its absolute power. If we are livid about what we see, then the D.C. Despots using J6 to punish their political enemies are giddy. If we are eager to point out the hypocritical ways in which Washington's "ruling class" showers leftist rioters with praise while condemning anyone even remotely connected to the rallies on January 6 as a "terrorist," that cabal of sanctimonious frauds couldn't care less. They want us to know they hate us. They want us to know that they have power. They want us to believe that we have none. It's a dangerous game. As a recent study attests, hardly anybody showed up to the political rallies on January 6, 2021, with even the smallest inclination to engage in what the media and political classes have assured Americans was a full-blown "insurrection." After two years of being falsely labeled "terrorists," "extremists," and "insurrectionists," though, many Americans will never view the federal government favorably again. The way Congress and the U.S. military unapologetically discarded and dishonored Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, while extolling her murderer as a hero, has not been lost on America's warriors. Babbitt's execution both physically and reputationally was a shot in the heart to any American patriot who would have eagerly run into danger for America's defense before the D.C. collective sought to sully her memory and good name. Is it any wonder, then, why the military is struggling to find new recruits? Washington's permanent bureaucracy may be quite happy to leave Americans stewing in a wasteland of ineffectual apathy and impotent anger. But what happens when the D.C. Club rubs so much salt in Americans' open wounds that anger becomes nothing less than righteous and unremitting rage? Washington instigators have inflamed tensions and pushed the "insurrection" lie for so long that one day Americans may finally give them what they so desperately seek. What happens then? Well, whatever happens, it won't take place in one of Adam Schiff's Soviet show-trial committee hearings. I want to draw your attention to the words of Nicole Reffitt, J6 political prisoner Guy Reffitt's wife. Nicole, who walked to the courthouse hand-in-hand with Ashli Babbitt's mourning mother, delivered a poignant statement to the press after Guy's stiff sentencing: We didn't expect anything more from the two-tiered justice system here in the D.C. area. There's not going to be a 1-6er who will not be persecuted for their political ideology. No matter if you're a liberal, an independent, a Republican, this is not OK. The way that people protest in the future will be determined on their political ideology, if it's OK to charge them or not to charge them. ... He went that day because the United States is the last great stand we have. And if we allow our country to be driven into the ground by the corrupt, evil politicians here in this city, one day at your kitchen table the FBI is going to come in and tell you that you stood up at the school board meeting and you are now a domestic terrorist. So wake up, America. This isn't just about Guy Weley Reffitt. This isn't just about 1-6. This is about our liberties being stomped on. We have thoughtcrimes, State-decreed lies, and political gulags haunting America a triumvirate of tyranny that now heralds the Washington way. It is the federal government's behavior not the actions of J6 political protesters that should stir in the blood of every American an uneasy sense that something within our nation is terribly amiss. Think about Nicole's words. Think about what they mean for America's future. Think about what they mean for America's place as a refuge for liberty unmatched and unknown across much of the world. Remember everyone unjustly punished for thought and speech "crimes" on January 6. Do...not...ever...forget. Image via Pxhere. According to Patrick Basham, there are such things as non-polling metrics -- things like comparative party registrations, turnouts in the primary elections, social media followings, attendance at campaign rallies and other measures that had, prior to the 2020 presidential election, predicted the outcome of presidential elections with 100% accuracy. In 2020, all these measures pointed to a Trump victory. In attendance at campaign rallies, for example, Trumps average attendance exceeded Bidens by a average ratio of 343 to 1. And yet Biden won. There were other anomalies: Biden could win only one of the 19 battleground counties around the U.S., but he supposedly won all of the battleground states. And there were hundreds of affidavits charging malfeasance, and there were whistleblowers in Pennsylvania and Georgia. There were audits in Arizona and Montana showing potential fraud. And, most recently, there was True the Vote/Dinesh DSouzas documentary 2000 Mules, which, through cell-phone geo-tracking and surveillance videotapes, showed persons, often in the dead of night, apparently stuffing ballot drop boxes. None of these, at least so far, have been sufficient evidence for bringing a charge of vote fraud against specific individuals. But, the assurances of Democrats, major media and others notwithstanding, they certainly cast legitimate doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election. In the face of such grounds for doubt, do we, with regard to future elections, really need to prove that the 2020 election was in fact stolen? In order to take remedial action, shouldnt it be enough to prove that it (and others) could have been stolen? Indeed, should we even need to do that? Shouldnt we, simply as a matter of course, have the most secure system possible, so secure that doubts do not even arise? That is, in fact, what Article 4, 4 of the Constitution -- the Guarantee Clause -- asserts: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government [that is, one ruled with the consent of the people]. Obviously, a government that rules by means of vote fraud does not rule with the consent of the people. And the clause requires no reasonable grounds for suspicion before its guarantee is activated. It is eternally activated. Of course, neither the United States, nor any earthly authority, can actually guarantee that no state will be subverted by vote fraud. All it can guarantee is that it will take every step to ensure that such an insidious, contemptible crime does not occur. In fact, all steps have not been taken. And we did not need the 2020 election to tell us that. A variety of vulnerabilities, including absentee voting, were addressed in 2004 in John Funds book, Stealing Elections. How Voter Fraud Threatens our Democracy. With respect to absentee voting, a 2005 commission on federal election reform -- co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III identified absentee ballots as the largest source of potential voter fraud. And in 2012, again on postal voting, Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote: Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner. Despite such warnings, we have not restricted mail-in voting to only those for whom it is necessary and requested, but have extended it to those for whom it is neither necessary nor requested. The stated rationale is that such voting is more convenient, and so increases turnout, and the more turnout, the better. The first and second parts of that rationale are true, the third -- apparently premised on the idea that one votes simply to promote his/her own self-interest -- is debatable at best. In any case, if mail-in such voting also increases voter fraud, then other effects are irrelevant. The Constitution guarantees election integrity, not convenience or turnout. Under it, either Congress or, (through a Constitutional challenge) the Supreme Court could act. Of course, individuals in either of these institutions may be beholden to voter fraud efforts themselves. Of the two, however, it is certainly Congress members who would be the more vulnerable. And while Congress members would certainly be more answerable to the people, it is not the legislative, but the judicial process -- one in which the opposing arguments are refined, distilled, and made public -- that actually provides the most definitive answer -- which would make it the preferable option. If our ballots were not secret, it would be easy to prove vote fraud after the fact. All a voter would have to do is check the public record to see if his or her vote were recorded correctly. But, for good reason, our votes are not public, and, if they are falsely cast or are not counted, there is, after the fact, no way of proving it. In a case challenging unnecessary mail-in voting, the plaintiff would not have to prove that compared to in-person voting, mail-in voting was more vulnerable to fraud; conversely, the defendant state would have to prove that it was not. Certainly, federal courts would have jurisdiction over such an issue. But, what about the states? While there appears to be no state constitution that expressly guarantees that the state would be ruled only by the consent of the governed, many if not all are premised on that proposition. For example, Art. 1, Sect. 1 of the Wisconsin Constitution reads: All people are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights to secure these rights, governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. If all the laws of the state are presumed to be enacted with the consent of the governed, and that fact itself comes into question, does the state court have jurisdiction to address such an issue? The Wisconsin Constitution doesnt expressly assert such jurisdiction, but if the court does not have it, and the legislature itself has been corrupted by voter fraud, then what remedy is there? Assuming that plaintiff/petitioners bring such issue to the courts, they would not have the luxury of conceding the 2022 elections to potential voter fraud while the legal process unfolds. For if such fraud occurs, and Democrats gain an operational majority in Congress, they have told us what, through election reform, they will do: federalize elections, require the option of discretionary mail-in voting and of ballot harvesting, and effectively eliminate the requirement for voter IDs. In separate measures, they would end in the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court. In such case, there could be no confidence in the integrity of the federalized elections, and no remedy for it. To eliminate the possibility that we arrive at such a scenario by means of unnecessary mail-in voting -- the very kind of voting that would be being challenged -- the courts should issue an injunction against such voting until its constitutionality is legally resolved. If we are to ensure honest elections, 2023 may be too late. The time to act is now. Image: Bryan Alexander Robert Francis O'Rourke, most known for his political runs resulting in defeat and as the author of deranged and disturbing fantasies, is evidently back in the realm of relevancy he's now a gubernatorial candidate. In a small and crowded room, filled with masked faces and trimmed in flags embroidered with the words "East Texans for Beto", O'Rourke decried the only things that ever made education and public instruction great objectivity and verity. In his own words: We don't need to tell her [a teacher] what version of history she is allowed to teach in a classroom. We don't need to scare the parents of those kids. ... About something called CRT, that I've never heard of before last year. Although he plays his part in the political theater well, stumping for the betterment of education, O'Rourke's recycled philosophy is the very origin of the current academic decay it's Howard Zinn all over again. Zinn's modus operandi can be viewed through this lens: The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest ... between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people ... not to be on the side of the executioners. Rather than being a nation "conceived in liberty," Zinn believes that America's defining traits are oppression and tyranny. Zinn's tale is contentious and false, prescribing a hatred for this nation and its privileged citizens. O'Rourke, like Zinn, completely fails to understand the job of the historian is neutrality to simply record events as they happened without inflicting opinions or agendas onto the narrative. The noblest pursuit within the historical discipline is objectivity. Rightfully, biases and fabrications are denounced as clumsy missteps, where historians have abrogated their duties as faithful chroniclers. What rose to prominence through Zinn, O'Rourke wants to revive and sustain there aren't different versions of history, as these two men would say, rather there is one version, and that is the truth. O'Rourke is wrong his ideology leads only to intellectual, societal, and cultural rot. Public school teachers are supposed to be educators, not indoctrinators. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is rapidly building a reputation for herself as the high priestess of ill-preparedness. "I would have to get back to you on that" is her typical reply to even the most elementary of questions. She also isn't exactly a wordsmith. If she continues down this path, perhaps someday she may surpass Kamala Harris. Just yesterday, Joe Biden signed an executive order that ensures access to abortion for women following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973). Biden said the order helps women travel out of state to receive abortions, ensuring that health care providers comply with federal law so women aren't delayed in getting "care," and advances research and data collection "to evaluate the impact that this reproductive health crisis is having on maternal health and other health conditions and outcomes." Jean-Pierre was asked about the timing of the order i.e., why the order wasn't signed sooner. The question was valid. Politico leaked a draft opinion on May 2, 2022 by Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito that provides the rationale on why Roe v. Wade must be overturned. Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022. This is an issue that is dear to the Democrats, with their far-left base being fanatical proponents of abortion. One would have assumed that the White House should have been prepared with the executive order the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned, at least to appease their base. Perhaps the Democrats wanted to create panic among their unenthusiastic base to ensure that people would vote for them during the midterms. They know that their base is not exactly excited about Biden or the Democrats, which could lead them to skip voting in November. Another plausible explanation is that incompetence, ineffectiveness and ineptitude are norms, not aberrations in Biden's White House. Matters have deteriorated to such an extent that they cannot even attend to the needs of their base. No wonder even Democrats are reluctant to support the idea of Biden running for re-election in 2024. Back to Jean-Pierre. She prattled on in her response. She claimed that Biden was consulting with legal experts. She also said that in government, there are "steps and processes that we have to take in order to take actions as big as as big as these." She then made a claim that raised a lot of eyebrows. "From day one, when the Supreme Court made this extreme decision to take away a constitutional right, it was an unconstitutional action by them a right that was around for almost 50 years, a right that women had to make a decision on their bodies and how they want to start their families. "And so the president has been very clear that he's going to do everything that he can. It doesn't stop with this. But we also understand that you know, it's he can't only be the only person working on this, right? That's why we continue to ask Congress to take action." Jean-Pierre says it was "unconstitutional" for SCOTUS to overturn Roe. pic.twitter.com/zQyzdZxRh8 Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 3, 2022 Jean-Pierre was merely reiterating her boss Joe Biden's assertion when he signed the executive order to protect abortion access in the wake of Roe v. Wade's reversal. "Let's be clear about something from the very start: this was not a decision driven by the Constitution," he said, adding that the Court's conservative majority was "playing fast and loose with the facts." So let's revisit the facts: Start with the basics. In the U.S., as every schoolchild is taught (at schools where they still teach), the Legislative Branch makes the law, the Executive Branch executes the law, and the Supreme Court interprets the law. That's to say, it's the Supreme Court's actual job to determine which parts of the law are constitutional and which are not. Somehow, it's now the Biden administration that claims the right to interpret the law as well as execute it now. Now let's go to the particulars: Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who authored the long Roe opinion, included the medical history of abortion, citing the views of Persians, Greeks, and Romans. He also quoted two versions of the Hippocratic oath and early English authors dating to the 13th century. What Blackmun did not quote is any provision in the Constitution that protected abortion "rights." Legal experts and the most ardent proponents of abortion have asserted that the reasoning in Roe was weak. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, years before she became a Supreme Court justice, acknowledged that the Court made a mistake by going too far, too fast in its first ruling on the constitutionality of abortion. She even delivered speeches criticizing the Court's handling of the abortion issue. The Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade does not eliminate abortion access in the U.S. It instead reverts the issue back to the states. It is also important to reiterate that there is emphatically no mention of abortion in the Constitution. Abortion is not even implicitly protected by any constitutional provision. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion returns to the state legislatures. The Democrats can pass a law that legalizes abortion. They could make it their primary campaign issue. But they don't. In truth, it won't be easy. The far-left base of the modern Democrat party are fervent proponents of abortion to the extent that they support the killing of babies until the day of birth, and they demand funding from taxpayers to do it as well as an end to the rights of medical professionals to perform the killing against their consciences and what they know by medical training. Most fair-minded people do not approve of this. Even proponents of abortion, such as U.S. president Bill Clinton, once believed that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." Once upon a time, the Democrats believed in this principle, and even Hillary Clinton said this during a presidential debate in 2008. Those days are over. Back to Jean-Pierre. Her job is to provide information rooted in facts. She isn't a social or political commentator. Providing opinions is beyond the realm of her job description. Every syllable she utters is part of the nation's history. It is therefore incumbent upon her always to be factual. If she doesn't have the right information, she can always resort to her trademark: "I would have to get back to you on that." Someone should find out if she ever does. But instead, she chose to state an opinion and make a claim that was inaccurate. A fair media establishment would have held her accountable and would have fact-checked her remarks. But alas the mainstream media function as the propaganda wing for the Democrats. Ideally, the White House should have censured Jean-Pierre. She should have been compelled to issue an immediate retraction and an apology. But nothing of the kind occurred or is likely to occur. With every passing day, the Democrats are violating many sacrosanct fundamentals. Hopefully, Jean-Pierre will be held accountable during the next White House press briefing. Perhaps Peter Doocy, who is one of the rare members of the press who challenges the White House, will once again rise to the occasion. Image: Twitter screen shot. Although Taiwan was not on Nancy Pelosi's official itinerary, a surprising Taiwan visit by the third highest-ranking official of the U.S. is now occurring. China regards Taiwan, the self-ruled democratic island, as a breakaway territory. It has the desire of bringing Taiwan back and constantly threatens to do so by force if necessary. China holds this stance on Taiwan, known as the "One China Principle," as a cornerstone of its policy. This "principle" not only governs China's Taiwan dealings, but also has been applied to China's foreign relations. For decades, China has forced countries to sever relations with Taiwan if they wanted to establish diplomatic ties with China. China succeeded in doing so through political pressure when it was still poor but a strong leader of the third world, and through economic leverage once its economy started to take off at a pace that has astonished the world. But things are changing China's political and economic leverage is losing its magic power. The first wave of resistance came from African countries, China's strongest political support, out of economic concerns. The continent has received China's lavish financial aid, needed for economic development. But the recipient countries soon discovered the reality of the generous package from China: popping up of white elephant projects that benefit only the Chinese suppliers, and the "debt trap" that China laid out for later seizure of strategic assets, along with widespread corruption and unfinished construction that are hallmarks of the Chinese model. Some African countries are re-examining their policies of overreliance on China's economic influence. China's outward aggression (e.g., toward Taiwan and claims over the Southern China Sea) and internal repression (e.g., the treatment of Hong Kong and Xinjiang) has irked many, but the Czech Republic is the first to stand up to China and show support for Taiwan despite China's threats. Milos Vystrcil, the Czech Republic's Senate president, who led the high-profile Taiwan visit by a Czech lawmaker delegation in August 2020, summarized the drive behind his Taiwan initiatives in the face of China's coercion: "I always advocate for standing up for values instead of counting pennies." Czechia's courage inspired other nations to extend support to Taiwan based on shared belief in freedom and democracy. Last October, the European Parliament called for stronger economic and diplomatic relations with Taiwan. In November, Lithuania welcomed the opening of Taiwan's de facto embassy in its capital, Vilnius. In June this year, the British government received Taiwan's trade minister John Deng to discuss bilateral trade and Taiwan's bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade body. China, as expected, reacted strongly to each of those Taiwan-friendly acts, ranging from verbal condemnations to unilateral trade sanctions. But the intimidating effects of China's counteraction became weaker each time, and each round of China's political and economic retaliation was met with yet a new round of defiance. The latest came from Switzerland the historically neutral country declared a few days ago that it would match the European Union's punitive measures against China in the event of its invasion of Taiwan. Now the U.S. is taking the same China test that many other smaller countries passed not long ago. The U.S. has a firm stance on no negotiation with hostage-takers. No reasonable person would assume that the U.S. would accept China's "cancel the Taiwan visit" order. Those who worry that Pelosi's Taiwan visit could put Taiwan in greater danger can be reassured that the opposite is true: China would perceive a canceled Taiwan visit as an indicator that its coercion tactics are in the working, and thus will apply them more broadly and more often. The faster the number of nations that openly stand with Taiwan grows, the safer Taiwan and the world will be. When facing coercion and extortion from nations like China, the surest way of inviting more danger is submitting to their demands. Image: Bruce Detorres. Despite all their floundering, and efforts to sidestep veracity, time and again, the Democrats wedge themselves into a corner they can't help but acknowledge that men are men and women are women, because that's the truth. Without even thinking, they perfectly epitomize Orwell's "doublethink" in one instance, they're parroting the "transgender" agenda talking points, and in the next, they're saying "women," not "men," are the ones losing "reproductive rights." Kurt Bardella, prominent adviser to the Democrats, even said: Then lets withhold federal to any state they enacts an abortion ban. Lets set up a government website where women can sign up to receive FDA abortion pill the way we did for COVID tests. My point is lets do something proactive! Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) June 24, 2022 Bardella understands that only women can utilize an abortion pill referring to this group of people as "women" as only biological women can get pregnant. But the consistent theme of irony prevails, and he fails to see the paradox. Now add Nancy Pelosi to the list of Democrats who accidentally blurt the truth and objectivity despite their best efforts to refrain. Pelosi threw all caution to the wind and touched down in Taiwan on August 2, 2022 purportedly to tour the factory at the center of her husband's recent stock market investments and trades. Either way, in her recognizably garbled language, Pelosi addressed an audience, saying: I think it's important to note that members of Congress, several of them have made trips just earlier this year. I think that, that um, they made a big fuss because I'm Speaker, I guess, I don't know if that was a reason or an excuse, because they didn't say anything when the men came [emphasis added]. Among others, Pelosi was referencing Republican senator Tommy Tuberville, who stated he'd made the trip along with several other colleagues earlier this year. Yet Pelosi's slight was her affirmation of an inherent truth: there are two sexes, and the differences come down to biology. Pelosi espouses a belief that the Chinese have a biased approach toward congressional visitors, one that hinges on the characteristics of being male or female. She cited heightened scrutiny of her trip all because she's a woman, and her predecessors were men. It's nothing cosmic, for as intellectuals, we certainly don't reject the observed and definitive science of biological sex, but to witness the Democrats' profound ability to normalize the absurd with such conviction continues to entrance. During World War 2, when Slovenia was under Nazi occupation, the countrys resistance movement built a large number of hospitals hidden in the forest to take care of the wounded. These hospitals were often built in hard to reach areas of the woods, in gorges and in caves, in order to keep them out of reach of the enemy, who actively sought out these medical establishments and destroyed them. Between 1942 and 1945, there were around 120 partisan hospitals active in Slovenia, giving shelter to more than 15,000 wounded and sick people of various nationalities who were fighting against Fascism and Nazism. Their existence and work were hugely dependent on the support of local inhabitants who helped transport and carry the wounded, organized undisturbed supply of food, medicine and sanitation, and protected the secret of their locations even at the price of their own security. Photo: Sl-Ziga/Wikimedia A handful of these hospitals still survive, although they no longer impart medical service. Among them, the Franja Partisan Hospital at Dolenji Novaki near Cerkno in western Slovenia was the most well-equipped with an operating room, X-ray apparatus, an invalid care facility, and a small electric plant. The Franja Partisan Hospital was located in a gorge deep inside German-occupied Europe, only a few hours from Austria and the central parts of the Third Reich. German military activity was frequent in the general region, but the hospital remained well hidden throughout its operation. The entrance to the hospital was hidden and the building could only be reached by retractable bridges that could be removed when the enemy was in the vicinity. In order to preserve the secrecy necessary for a clandestine hospital to operate, the patients were blindfolded when they were transported to the facility. The hospital was also protected by minefields and nests of machine guns. As the hospital is in a gorge, the many trees and camouflaged buildings provided protection against air reconnaissance. The hospital was built in 1943 under the supervision of Dr Viktor Volcjak, but it was named after Dr Franja Bojc who began working there in February 1944 as doctor and hospital manager. Franja Partisan Hospital during the 1940s. Photo: Wikimedia Between December 1943 and May 1945, 14 wooden cabins of various sizes and for various purposes were built in the gorge. All the necessary material was transported to the location by manual labor. In addition to cabins that housed the injured and the staff, other facilities included a surgery cabin, an X-ray unit, a kitchen, a laundry and washroom, as well as an invalid care facility. They even had their own electric plant. The hospital had a capacity of 120 patients, but saw almost ten times as many during its operation. Most of its patients were wounded anti-Nazi resistance fighters, who could not go to regular hospitals because they would be arrested. Patients of various nationalities were treated in Franja and its dislocated units alongside Slovenes and citizens of Yugoslavia, including Italians, Frenchmen, Russian, Poles, Americans and an Austrian. Among those treated was a German enemy soldier, who decided to stay back after recovery, helping in the operation of the hospital. The hospital also had their own cemetery, at the gorge entrance, but security measures prevented the graves from being visibly marked. The majority of the deceased was buried shortly after the war in a common tomb at the Cerkno graveyard. After the war, the Franja Partisan Hospital was converted into a museum and opened to the public, and to this day remains one of the most visited monuments in Slovenia. Photo: senorbulgogi/Flickr Photo: Patricia Garrido/Flickr Photo: Mauro Zoch/Flickr Photo: Mauro Zoch/Flickr Photo: Sl-Ziga/Wikimedia We know Google Meet as this video-chat platform that several businesses use to host meetings. While there are a few fun backgrounds and effects you can use on the platform, its still primarily business-forward. But, Google might make Meet more fun by letting you live-share apps like YouTube, Kahoot!, and UNO right in the call. Right now, Google is in the middle of a little transition. Its taking its previous video chat platform Google Duo and phasing it out. Google Meet is going to take its place. Right now, people who use the Google Allo app are seeing it actually change into Google Meet. The app icon on the Play Store and name are being changed to reflect Meet. Now, Google Meet could let you live-share apps while in a meeting Now, youll want to take this with a grain of salt. This was uncovered through an APK deep-dive by 9To5Google. This means that theres no guarantee that this feature will come to the platform. The code for it is in the latest version of the application, but it can be yanked out at any moment. Advertisement According to the code, it looks like Google could allow for people to live-share certain applications while actively in a call. This means that, when this is initiated, every person in the chat will be taken to the app while in a meeting, and they can interact with it. Theres a list of six apps that could be involved in this feature if it comes out. We have YouTube, Spotify, Kahoot!, UNO!, GQueues, and Heads Up! Kahoot! lets you design quizzes for other people to answer, Heads UP! is a charades game, and GQueues is a team task manager. GQueues is the only business-oriented application in the bunch, it seems. The question is: How will this work? Were still in the dark about how this will work, exactly. These applications arent implemented into Google Meet. Instead, Meet will take you to the applications independently but keeping the call together. Advertisement So, all of the users will be in their own apps. Were all wondering how Google Meet will synchronize the apps to all work together. It seems more likely that YouTube will have some integration because its owned by Google. However, for the other applications, its a head-scratcher. We will have to wait for more developments on this to get more answers. Samsung may drop the letter Z from the names of its foldables. The upcoming foldable duo could arrive as the Galaxy Fold 4 and Galaxy Flip 4, instead of the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4. This is reportedly a permanent change that will carry over to future generations as well. Samsung foldables to drop the Z branding Samsung foldables didnt feature the Z branding at the beginning. The first Fold series model launched in 2019 was simply called the Galaxy Fold. The company added the letter Z to the name with the first clamshell foldable in 2020, calling it the Galaxy Z Flip. At that time, the firm suggested that the new naming convention shows its commitment to the category. We chose Z for this series because it intuitively communicates the idea of a fold while delivering a dynamic, youthful feel, a Samsung official said. However, users felt that the company is unnecessarily complicating things. Even though the Galaxy Z Fold 2 isnt quite a mouthful, it would have been easier to simply call it the Galaxy Fold 2. However, Samsung stuck to its decision and launched the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 last year. Advertisement But the Korean firm appears to be returning to the original naming convention this year. According to noted tipster SnoopyTech, the decision may have to do with the letter Z being synonymous with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian military painted its tanks and trucks with the letter. The nations state-controlled international TV network RT is also selling merchandise with Z branding. As a result, the letter is seen as a symbol of the war. People around the world, particularly those closer to Ukraine, want to avoid associating themselves with it. In solidarity with them, Samsung removed the Z branding from its foldables in a few countries in the region earlier this year, listing its latest foldables as the Galaxy Fold 3 and Galaxy Flip 3 on its website. The company hasnt reverted the decision yet. Perhaps because it will be a permanent change going forward. The Galaxy Fold 4 and Galaxy Flip 4 arrive next week According to the latest report, Samsung will not print the letter Z on the retail boxes for the Galaxy Fold 4 and Galaxy Flip 4. But its unclear whether this will be effective globally or only in select markets. The company didnt make any official announcement when it removed the Z branding in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia earlier this year. If the change will be permanent going forward, we expect Samsung to release an official statement on it. The new foldables arrive on August 10, so its not a long wait now. (refiles, fixing typo in headline) (ANSA) - ROME, AUG 4 - An initial draft of the right/centre-right coalition's manifesto for the September 25 general election, which ANSA has seen, stresses that Italy would maintain its position at the centre of the European Union and NATO with a government led by it. The 15-point manifesto is entitled "Italy, tomorrow. Framework Programme for a Centre-right Government". The first point, written in bold, states that Italy is "full member of the Europe, of the Atlantic Alliance and of the West. "More Italy in Europe, more Europe in the world," it continues. The second point of the draft refers to the efficient use of EU funds. The third regards structural and institutional reforms, including changes that would see the Italian president elected directly by the people, instead of by lawmakers and regional representatives. The fourth pledges to deliver a "fair" tax system, with a flat-tax regime for the self-employed being extended to all those earning up to 100,000 euros a year. The manifesto also refers to the need to help families and encourage people to have children, measures to boost security and stop illegal immigration, and efforts to support the needy. The document says becoming self-reliant for energy and protecting the environment were priorities. The section on agriculture stresses that the sector is both "our history and our future". The 14th point regards school, university and research. The 15th focuses on young people and sport. Polls suggest the centre right is set to win the election, with Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, which is currently top of the opinion surveys, expected to be the driving force. If the centre right does win and FdI is the party to get most votes, Meloni is likely to become Italy's first woman premier. Last week Meloni said that Italy will be a reliable international partner if a right/centre-right coalition wins. "We reiterate that we will guarantee, with no ambiguity, the Italian position (on the international arena) and the absolute support of the heroic battle of the Ukraine people (against the Russian invasion)," Meloni told her party's national directorate. "We can say that an Italy led by Brothers of Italy and the centre right will be an Italy that is reliable at the international level". (ANSA). UniUd, 3,700 hectares forest burned on Karst Lost 194 thousand m3 of biomass between Italy and Slovenia (ANSA) - TRIESTE, 04 AGO - More than 3700 hectares of wooded areas burned with a volume of 194 thousand cubic meters of biomass lost. This is the first estimate of the damage caused by fires on the Italian and Slovenian Karst in recent weeks prepared by researchers at the University of Udine. The study was carried out by the Environment and Territory group of the Department of Agri-food, Environmental and Animal Sciences. The estimate was obtained by using satellite data provided by Sentinel-2, a mission of the European Space Agency under the European Earth observation program Copernicus. The area affected by the fire covers an area of just over 4,000 hectares, mostly in Slovenia (3480 hectares). The forest area affected was 3,693 hectares, 92 percent of the total. The municipality most affected is Miren-Kostanjevica, Slovenia, with 2,750 hectares, while on the Italian side is Doberdo del Lago (406). The forest stock of the areas affected by the fires amounted to 614 thousand cubic meters before the event; the fire destroyed 32 percent, or 194 thousand cubic meters. However, the fires do not appear to have completely destroyed the vegetation. "Thanks to the multispectral images provided by satellites," explains Luca Cadez, PhD candidate in Environment and Life, "it was possible to estimate the burned area and the intensity of the damage. This then allowed us to estimate the extent of the damage in terms of the woody volume burned." (ANSA). Copyright ANSA - All rights reserved Feature: Special initiative offers Chinese language education for school children in Ethiopia Xinhua) 08:44, August 04, 2022 Tola Beriso, head of the Oromia Education Bureau, speaks during the opening ceremony of summer training for Ethiopian Chinese language teachers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 29, 2022. (Xinhua/Wang Ping) ADDIS ABABA, Aug. 2 (Xinhua) -- Ayele Tadesse, a teacher at the Nedjo special boarding school in Oromia regional state of Ethiopia, spoke highly of exposing students to Chinese language studies at an early age. Tadesse, who studied the Chinese language at the Hawassa University in southern Ethiopia, has been teaching the Chinese language to some 88 students across three classes at the Nedjo special boarding school for the past close to eight months. "Teaching the Chinese language to school children is really an interesting thing. They are unbelievably fast in learning the language while also very active in the classroom," Tadesse told Xinhua recently. The school is one of nine special boarding secondary schools in the Oromia region of Ethiopia, where students are given the chance to voluntarily choose from Chinese, Arabic and French. Tola Beriso, head of the Oromia Education Bureau, said in line with China's growing global power, teaching the Chinese language to school children would further propel their future opportunities. "In these nine boarding schools, we enrolled high-caliber students. In addition to other subjects, students are taking Arabic, Chinese and French languages based on their preferences. We have about 1,522 students, of whom 305 have already selected the Chinese language," Beriso told Xinhua. Given that Chinese language education has been mostly available for students at the university level in Ethiopia, Tadesse believed that the rare opportunity would enable secondary school students to learn the language easily at a younger age. "Teaching the Chinese language at secondary school level is such a rare opportunity not just to let students learn the language but also to have the opportunities that are presented in having learned the Chinese language. It is a very good opportunity for these students," Tadesse said. Milky Tolemariam, a Chinese language teacher from the Bishoftu secondary special boarding school, also emphasized the crucial role of exposing secondary school students to the Chinese language. "Over the past seven months, I have noticed that the students are very active as they start learning the Chinese language earlier than how we started learning the language late at the university level," Tolemariam said. "It is a very good initiative because these young children will grow to become the future of this nation. Hence, teaching them the Chinese language at this age would further enable them toward becoming the connecting bridges between our two peoples." Tolemariam is now undertaking a summer camp of Chinese language training for Ethiopian teachers in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, along with eight other local Chinese language teachers including Ayele Tadesse. The summer camp is organized by the Oromia Education Bureau in partnership with the Confucius Institute at Addis Ababa University (AAU). Tolemariam said such opportunities enable both teachers and students to deepen their understanding of the language. "Summer camp and other similar opportunities are greatly contributing to active learning of the language. Similar summer camp opportunities had been also previously organized, enabling students and teachers to go to China for a few weeks to learn the language," Tolemariam said. Che Zhaoguang, the cultural counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Ethiopia, said at the opening of the week-long summer camp Friday that educational cooperation is playing an important role in promoting the understanding and friendship between the two countries. "Learning the language of each other will have a positive impact for deepening cooperation in education, culture, tourism, societies, economics and other aspects of the two brotherly countries," said Che. According to Beriso, as language contributes to deepening the people-to-people relations between the two countries, teaching the Chinese language would further strengthen the already blossoming people-to-people ties between the two countries. "I think teaching our children the Chinese language is very important. We are also sending students to China for (study with) scholarships. So, I think it is important to strengthen the people-to-people relationship in this regard." In addition to the AAU in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, the Chinese language is now provided as a general interest course or an academic major in many other public universities across Ethiopia, including the federal Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Institute, Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia's northwestern Amhara regional state, Hawassa University in Southern Ethiopia as well as Arsi University in Ethiopia's largest Oromia regional state. The Confucius Institute in AAU, which started operation in Ethiopia in 2012, has so far registered more than 10,000 students who passed through various levels of Chinese language studies. Among them, more than 100 were able to get their bachelor's degrees in the Chinese language, according to figures from the institute. As a growing number of Ethiopians opt to study the Chinese language, AAU has recently announced that it has finalized preparations to launch its first-ever program, titled Master of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (MTCSOL), in the East African country. According to the Confucius Institute at the AAU, the MTCSOL is a two-year, full-time program, in which students study core lessons based at the AAU in the first year, and qualified students will receive further education in Chinese language teaching at Tianjin University of Technology and Education in China. Local Chinese language teachers attend the opening ceremony of summer training for Ethiopian Chinese language teachers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 29, 2022. (Xinhua/Wang Ping) (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Bartolo, Mediterranean must become a sea of life once again Ex 'migrants' doctor', now Mep, Lampedusa has always helped (ANSAmed) - LAMPEDUSA, AUGUST 4 - European lawmaker Pietro Bartolo, who worked for years as a doctor tending to migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa, said on Thursday that the Mediterranean has taken the life of "more than 40,000 people and I had to see so many of these bodies in post-mortem inspections". Speaking in front of the island's Porta di Ponte during celebrations for the Day of Gratitude, Bartolo said he wants the Mediterranean to be once again "a sea of life, a bridge, not a cemetery, a sea of sustainment, something it has always been for the people of Lampedusa who gave their all to help those who did not have the luck to be able to stay home - people who faced terrifying journeys to land on this raft, or Lampedusa". Bartolo, who was in charge of the clinic Poliambulatorio of Lampedusa, said there are "small fringes" of people who start "opposing the hosting" of migrants, "but this is the great responsibility of those who let the migration phenomenon become a problem - a problem that doesn't exist". He went on to say that he is "very disappointed by Europe's attitude", which has transferred all responsibility "into the hands of those who rescued more than 30,000 people. This is something Europe should have done through the creation of a search-and-rescue service at sea", he noted. "NGOs would be very happy to leave the Mediterranean if such a service were in place. Migrants should not arrive in this way, they should arrive through humanitarian corridors", the lawmaker continued. Bartolo said "there is talk of economic migrants, climate-change migrants, undocumented" migrants but "they are people, they are not enemies" threatening "our borders. Borders should be defended from those who are armed, these people are just asking for help. Rescuing people is not a choice, it is a duty and the people of Lampedusa and security officers have always done it. Saying that these migrants are enemies is intolerable". (ANSAmed). Sacred treasure found in San Casciano Roman baths 'Only site like it in the ancient Mediterranean' says archaeologist Tabolli (by Silvia Lambertucci) (ANSAmed) - ROME, AUG 4 - SAN CASCIANO (SIENA) - 4 AUG - Pools bubbling with hot, therapeutic water with breath-taking scenery featuring sharp changes of altitude, terraces that merge into the greenery, fountains, colonnades and water features - thermal bath tourism is still important for San Casciano dei Bagni, a small Tuscan hamlet in the province of Siena. Archaeologists have been working here at the ancient site for three years on a dig that had already made news with the discovery at of a large pool, votive objects, altars dedicated to the gods, a stunning bas relief with the image of a big bull and a splendid bronze putto, a masterpiece of the Hellenistic period. But the real surprise, revealed to ANSA by archaeologist Jacopo Tabolli with a sneak preview, has arrived over the last few weeks with the discovery of the real size of the sanctuary here that belonged to the Etruscans and was renovated by the ancient Romans in the early centuries of the Empire to make it more lavish and monumental. It was such an exceptional place that the mint was ordered to produce a trove of shiny coins made of silver, orichalcum and bronze, perhaps for the emperor's own offerings to honour the gods tasked with watching over his health and that of the many noble Romans ready to travel to this sacred site. "It's a site without equal in Italy or in the ancient Mediterranean," said Tabolli with visible excitement. Tabolli teaches at Siena's University for Foreigners and since the off he has been leading the project organized by the local council on behalf of the culture ministry, together with Excavation Director Emanuele Mariotti, Ada Salvi of the Superintendency and several Italian and international universities. "It's an exceptional discovery because of the size of the area of the sanctuary, which is much larger than we could have imagined, with several holy buildings, altars, pools," he explained. The images from above, with the succession of marble, various structures and pools of every shape and size emerging from the dirt, are thrilling. But what is also astonishing is the quality and rarity of the objects to have emerged from the dig in recent weeks. Tabolli said that perhaps the most important is an amazing bronze womb that dates back to the years between the end of the Roman Republic and the start of the Roman Empire. "Terracotta wombs are often found in Etruscan and Roman temples devoted to fertility; bronze ones are extremely rare," the professor explained. Despite the boiling hot temperatures, the adrenaline level at the site has been high every day, he explained, with discoveries being made constantly. These went from a remarkable bronze ear from the earliest years of the Empire that a man named Aulus Nonnius had dedicated to the gods for a recovery from illness, to a leg and even a very rare penis, again in bronze. That is without counting "over 3,000 freshly minted coins" as documented by Salerno University expert Giacomo Pardini. "These left the Rome mint and were immediately taken to San Casciano to honour the sacred nature of the place and, very probably, its founding monuments," said Tabolli. These wonders are in addition to the splendid altars sculpted into local travertine. The work done in this latest excavation campaign, the seventh, which, as usual proceeded with the involvement of hordes of students, shed new light on some periods in the history of this incredible sanctuary, which was also frequented in the age of the Medici. Indeed, Federico Borromeo - that's right, the cardinal who featured in Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed - came here twice, in 1600 and 1601, to treat a painful and mysterious 'cheek ache'. "We are recovering that remains of the colonnade built in the 16th century by the Medici," said the archaeologist, explaining that they moved the thermal centre to the Fonteverde area, two kilometres from the ancient sanctuary. Evidence has also been found of a dramatic collapse in the area of the area of the Big Bath (Bagno Grande) in the final years of the 3rd century DC, when the ground opened up to a sinkhole that was over two metres deep and brought down almost everything - pools, buildings, colonnades. The Romans tried to fix the disaster, with a massive, painstaking restoration, and the devastation was interpreted as a 'prodigium', a signal sent from the gods. "In the heart of the sinkhole they erected a new altar and they build a new, small pool over e rubble with steps to make it easier to get into," he said. This determination is testament to the appeal of a place that has been loved and frequented for over 2,000 years. And with excavations resuming in the autumn, it could have many more surprises in store. (ANSAmed). Bartolo, Mediterranean must become a sea of life once again Ex 'migrants' doctor', now Mep, Lampedusa has always helped them (ANSAmed) - LAMPEDUSA, AUGUST 4 - European lawmaker Pietro Bartolo, who worked for years as a doctor tending to migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa, said on Thursday that the Mediterranean has taken the life of "more than 40,000 people and I had to see so many of these bodies in post-mortem inspections". Speaking in front of the island's Porta di Ponte during celebrations for the Day of Gratitude, Bartolo said he wants the Mediterranean to be once again "a sea of life, a bridge, not a cemetery, a sea of sustainment, something it has always been for the people of Lampedusa who gave their all to help those who did not have the luck to be able to stay home - people who faced terrifying journeys to land on this raft, or Lampedusa". Bartolo, who was in charge of the clinic Poliambulatorio of Lampedusa, said there are "small fringes" of people who start "opposing the hosting" of migrants, "but this is the great responsibility of those who let the migration phenomenon become a problem - a problem that doesn't exist". He went on to say that he is "very disappointed by Europe's attitude", which has transferred all responsibility "into the hands of those who rescued more than 30,000 people. This is something Europe should have done through the creation of a search-and-rescue service at sea", he noted. "NGOs would be very happy to leave the Mediterranean if such a service were in place. Migrants should not arrive in this way, they should arrive through humanitarian corridors", the lawmaker continued. Bartolo said "there is talk of economic migrants, climate-change migrants, undocumented" migrants but "they are people, they are not enemies" threatening "our borders. Borders should be defended from those who are armed, these people are just asking for help. Rescuing people is not a choice, it is a duty and the people of Lampedusa and security officers have always done it. Saying that these migrants are enemies is intolerable". (ANSAmed). European court rejects imam appeal against expulsion from France France accuses Iquioussen of inciting violence against Jews (ANSAmed) - PARIS, AUGUST 4 - The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday rejected a request to suspend an order of expulsion to Morocco presented by imam Hassan Iquioussen, who lives in France. France's Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin last week announced the order to expel the cleric - who is considered close to the Muslim Brotherhood - after French authorities accused him of spreading messages of hatred, targeting in particular the Jewish community. (ANSAmed) 'Athens violates Turkish minority's rights in Thrace'-Ankara Turkey criticizes move on Islamic authorities' appointment (ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, AUGUST 4 - The Turkish foreign ministry has accused Greece of "violating once again the rights and freedoms of the Turkish minority in western Thrace". In a statement issued on Thursday, the ministry slammed as "unacceptable" a new measure approved by Athens under which Greek authorities have the right to appoint Islamic religious leaders (muftis) for the Turkish minority residing in western Thrace, which includes about 150,000 people. According to Turkey, the new legislation allegedly violates international law by ignoring the role of muftis who have already been elected by the minority. (ANSAmed) (ANSA). European court rejects imam appeal against expulsion from France Hassan Iquioussen accused of inciting violence against Jews (ANSAmed) - PARIS, AUGUST 4 - The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday rejected a request to suspend an order of expulsion to Morocco presented by imam Hassan Iquioussen, who lives in France. France's Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin last week announced the order to expel the cleric - who is considered close to the Muslim Brotherhood - after French authorities accused him of spreading messages of hatred, targeting in particular the Jewish community. (ANSAmed) Lebanon: demonstrations to commemorate Beirut port blast Victims' families demand justice (ANSAmed) - ROME, 04 AGO - Dozens of people, including members of the victims' families, were scheduled to gather on Thursday afternoon in front of Beirut's criminal court to demand justice on the second anniversary of the huge explosion that rocked the city's port on August 4, 2020. The blast devastated the port and a large part of the Lebanese city. At the same time, more demonstrators are expected to stage a protest at the port, bearing banners and signs, the online edition of the newspaper L'Orient le Jour reports. Their march will then join other groups of demonstrators who will be staging a parade that will depart from the fire station of Beirut. (ANSAmed) An antique inkstand which bore witness to seminal events in Europe two centuries ago is set to go on display in the home of its former owner in Co Down. Viscount Castlereagh helped shaped Europe through his role at the Congress of Vienna, the coming together of the leaders of the victorious powers in 1814 following the defeat of French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte. He is also regarded as controversial in Ireland for his role in suppressing the 1798 rebellion, and creating the Act of Union in 1801 which saw Irish interests represented at Westminster. This year marks the 200th anniversary of his death in 1822 when he took his own life. A portrait of Robert Stewart, better known as Lord Castlereagh, by Sir Thomas Lawrence at Mount Stewart (PA) The inkstand was presented to Viscount Castlereagh in 1805 by Prime Minister William Pitt when he became Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. He later served as Foreign Secretary, In that role, he appointed Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson as well as the Duke of Wellington who led the defeat of Napoleon. The inkstand remained within the Londonderry family until it was sold in 2019 but now returns to the familys stately home, Mount Stewart, after it was acquired by the National Trust. The piece comprises of a silver box and two small bottles, one of which bears traces of the original ink it contained. The inkstand and inkwells were acquired for display at Mount Stewart, which was the home of Viscount Castlereagh (Liam McBurney/PA) Christopher Warleigh-Lack, property curator for Mount Stewart for the National Trust, said they were excited to take possession of the inkstand. We obtained it only this year and were really excited about it, he told the PA news agency. It came down through descent from the family, sold privately in 2019 and earlier this year we were lucky enough to be able to buy it and bring it back into the family here at Mount Stewart. It was the inkstand that was presented to Viscount Castlereagh in 1805 when he became Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, and it was presented to him by the Prime Minister William Pitt. At the time anyone who held a Cabinet position was given an inkstand like this, at the back it has the coat of arms of the King, George III, because it was a national position he was in, and then at the front it has the Castlereagh coat of arms which is quite rare, there are very few things that have his own personal coat of arms on them. Politically it is really significant because for the rest of his career, Castlereagh used this to write official documents. He wrote letters to the Tsar of Russia, the King of Prussia, to most of the delegates at the Congress of Vienna. We also believe the original constitution of Belgium was written, possibly, from this inkstand. Viscount Castlereagh was born in Dublin and grew up at Mount Stewart on the outskirts of Newtownards, Co Down. He became the second Marquis of Londonderry in 1821 when his father died. Mr Warleigh-Lack said Viscount Castlereagh was disappointed after the Act of Union that created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He said that both he and Mr Pitt wanted Catholic representation, which had not existed in the old Irish parliament in Dublin, but King George III blocked that part of the act. The inkstand goes on display to the public for the first time in Mount Stewart on Thursday. A new exhibition on Viscount Castlereaghs life is set to open at Mount Stewart on August 12. LOS ANGELES (AP) A suspect mistakenly released from a Los Angeles County jail where he was being held on suspicion of shooting Lady Gagas dog walker and stealing her French bulldogs has been recaptured, authorities said. James Howard Jackson, 19, was arrested Wednesday nearly five months after he was released from jail while awaiting trial due to a clerical error, the county Sheriffs Department said in a statement. Jackson was one of five people arrested in connection with the Feb. 24, 2021, attack in Hollywood. Last month, the U.S. Marshals Service announced a reward up to $5,000 for information leading to his arrest. Jackson's arrest comes as one of three men charged in the case pleaded no contest to second-degree robbery. Jaylin Keyshawn White, 20, was immediately sentenced to four years in state prison, Deputy District Attorney Michele Hanisee told NBC4. Prosecutors said Jackson and two other alleged gang members had driven around looking for expensive French bulldogs to steal, then spotted, tailed and robbed Ryan Fischer as he walked Lady Gagas dogs near the famed Sunset Boulevard. Fischer was with the pop stars three dogs named Asia, Koji and Gustav. During a violent struggle, Fischer was hit, choked and then shot in an attack captured by the doorbell camera of a nearby home. The video captured Fischer screaming, Oh, my God! Ive been shot! and Help me! and Im bleeding out from my chest! Fischer lost part of a lung. About a month after the crime, he posted on Instagram that his recovering has gone well. The pop stars dogs were returned two days later by a woman who claimed she had found them tied to a pole and asked about Lady Gagas offer of a $500,000 reward if the dogs were returned no questions asked. The singer was in Rome at the time filming a movie. The woman was charged with receiving stolen property and the father of another suspect is charged with helping him avoid arrest. Jackson already had been charged in the attack and had pleaded not guilty when the county district attorneys office filed a superseding indictment that charged him with attempted murder, conspiracy to commit a robbery and assault with a semiautomatic firearm. The first shipment of Ukrainian grain to the UK since the war began is expected to arrive in 10 days, western officials said. Millions of tonnes of grain have been stuck in Ukraine since Russia invaded just over six months ago. A UN-brokered agreement last month allowed the first Ukrainian shipment to be cleared for travel this week, with the Sierra Leone-flagged Razoni carrying corn and entering the Bosphorus Strait on the way to Lebanon on Wednesday. Speaking about the newly re-established Ukrainian grain exports, a western official said the Malta-flagged Rojen is due to arrive in the UK on August 14. .@antonioguterres warmly welcomes the departure of the M/V Razoni, the first commercial ship leaving Ukraines port of Odesa since 26 February 2022. Ensuring that existing grain and foodstuffs can move to global markets is a humanitarian imperative. https://t.co/YxCjl7XSvk pic.twitter.com/oy65FURNn4 UN Spokesperson (@UN_Spokesperson) August 1, 2022 This will almost certainly be the first shipment from Ukraine to arrive in the UK since the end of February and the start of the invasion, they said. The bulk carrier is expected to travel from the Port of Chornomorsk in Ukraine, where it is thought to be berthed and loaded, to the UK, but the official could not say which UK port is expected to receive it. However, according to the VesselFinder website, the ship is due to arrive in Teesport on August 17. The cargo is probably corn or grain, the official said, adding: What it does show is that there is which perhaps people dont realise direct supply of agricultural produce to the UK from the Ukraine. Addressing the first shipment to leave Ukraine since the agreement, the official said: It is almost certain the success of its transit will result in more frequent transits. Clearing the backlog caused by the blockade thats been in place since February will almost certainly remain a major logistical challenge, they added. But another western official, when asked about the shipment, said there is limited information available about when ships will be leaving Ukraine, and decisions are still be negotiated among the parties to the agreement. At some point soon they will agree which ships will leave and when. We dont have those details yet, they said. A western official also played down fears over the state of Europes largest nuclear power plant, located in the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Enerhodar, and currently held by Russia. UN nuclear chief Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is completely out of control, and he issued an urgent plea to Russia and Ukraine to quickly allow experts to visit the complex to stabilise the situation and avoid a nuclear accident. In terms of the safety security of that site at the moment, whilst it is degraded in terms of normal operating levels, it is still functioning and functioning effectively, the western official said, adding: These arent the ideal industrial circumstances, but nevertheless I think the circumstances are better than painted in the media. Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand terrorist attacks, including aircraft hitting reactors etc, so please dont think that we are looking at a Chernobyl-like situation. Thats not the case, they added. They said Russia may use the site as a safe zone from which to carry out defensive operations, but that, while Ukraine will consider very carefully how to avoid taking major risks around the site, it should not prevent a Ukrainian advance. The official also cast doubt on Russias explanation of a deadly incident at a jail housing prisoners of war in the separatist region of eastern Ukraine. Russia has claimed that Ukraines military used US-supplied rocket launchers to strike the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk Peoples Republic. We assess it is not a high explosive attack from the outside, its not a Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), the western official said, adding that that is clear from photographic evidence, citing as an example an image showing bunkbeds still standing which otherwise would not be the case. They added: We think its more likely some sort of incendiary, some sort of implosion. Addressing the wider outlook of the war, the official said the battle has slowed down, and they estimate that up to 20,000 Russian soldiers have been killed during the conflict. They added: We think that Russia has not given up on its maximalist objectives for Ukraine militarily we question how they can achieve those objectives in the near term. But then what we need to understand better is Russia is prepared, I think, to operate over a much longer timeframe than we think in typically. The rumors have swirled around like a chocolate-vanilla ice cream blend, and unfortunately, it's true. The Choco Taco, a beloved and unique ice cream novelty made by Klondike was discontinued late last month. As suggested by the name, this chocolatey taco was made with a waffle cone "taco" shell and stuffed with ice cream, then topped with chocolate and nuts all wrapped up in an iconic silver wrapper. While fans from across the country have been shocked and saddened by the news, a representative from the brand shares that a spike in sales prompted the discontinuation of the sweet treat. Klondike has discontinued their iconic Choco Taco. Here's how some ice cream-lovers are making their own versions at home. (Photo: Klondikebar.com) "The Klondike Choco Taco has unfortunately been discontinued in both one-count and four-count pack sizes," a representative for Klondike shares with Yahoo Life. "Over the past two years, we have experienced an unprecedented spike in demand across our portfolio and have had to make very tough decisions to ensure availability of our full portfolio nationwide." "A necessary but unfortunate part of this process is that we sometimes must discontinue products, even a beloved items like Choco Taco," they add. In February, the Choco Taco was part of a collaboration with another favorite taco brand, fast food chain Taco Bell. The nostalgic campaign offered Choco Tacos for $2.99 at 20 locations in Southern California and Wisconsin, while supplies lasted. Yahoo Life reached out to Taco Bell for comment, but the chain says it has no updates to share. Before the Choco Taco partnership in 2022, the taco chain served up the dessert tacos regularly until pausing in 2015. And there's been speculation among Choco Taco fans that the treat may return. While Klondike's Twitter account bio clearly reads: "R.I.P. Choco Taco 1983-2022," the brand has shared cryptic social media posts implying there are 912 of the frozen treats remaining. "I knew you loved me, but not this much," reads one post featuring a Choco Taco at a press conference. "While I reflect on this outpouring of support, we are discussing next steps, including what to do with the last 912." In the comments under the post, Klondike says, "We've heard our fans, and we're hoping to bring this favorite back to ice cream trucks in the coming years," leaving many speculating what the fate of the beloved ice cream taco will be. Hi there - as you can imagine, the manufacturing process is very complex, and there are many factors that impacted the decision to discontinue the Choco Taco. But weve heard our fans, and were hoping to bring this favorite back to ice cream trucks in the coming years! Klondike (@Klondikebar) August 1, 2022 While the Choco Taco may be gone from drive-throughs and grocery store freezers at least for the foreseeable future it's certainly not gone from the hearts of fans. Samantha Elliott, who lives in Seattle, Wash., says the ice cream confection will always be a symbol of summertime. "I spent a week at summer camp each year and our parents would put money into an account for us to buy treats while we were there," Elliott tells Yahoo Life. "There was a little ice cream shack where we'd pick from a Push-Up Pop, Drumstick Cone and of course, the Choco Taco." "The Choco Taco was always my choice," she adds, "and I would only have them there, so thinking about eating one brings back fond memories of summer camp songs, swimming in the lake and drying off by the lake while munching on an ice-cold Choco Taco during afternoon free time. I'm really sad to see them go." Elliott isn't the only Choco Taco fan who found a love for the dessert during their days at summer camp. Libba Durrett, the Nashville, Tenn.-based owner of Sparklers Online, says during her four weeks at camp each year, Choco Tacos were a coveted commodity. "I attended summer camp on the coast of North Carolina for many summers," she recalls. "Saturdays were extra special: The snack bar opened after dinner and we were allowed to get treats before movie night. Everyone wanted the Choco Taco but we all knew it was in limited supply." "Winning a contest was the only way you could get out the door first," she continues. "You better believe I made sure my cabin was the loudest and most enthusiastic." Durrett shares that years later, the tradition has passed on to a new generation of campers. "My children ultimately ended up attending the same camp and developing the same love for the Choco Taco," she says. "When the news broke, my teenage son circulated it on the family text. The end of an era and the end of a special memory being sparked by passing the ice cream aisle at the grocery." While Durrett and her family are superfans, Diego Segura from Seaford, N.Y. may be the biggest Choco Taco fan of all. "I'm proud to say that Choco Taco is my favorite ice cream of all time," he says. Segura always shared the love by buying rounds of Choco Tacos for friends and family who even gifted him Choco Tacos in return for special events and birthdays. "When the news broke that Klondike was discontinuing Choco Tacos, I had several people text me asking if I was OK," he says. "I was devastated. I immediately emailed Klondike voicing my frustration and sadness. I also hopped online to grab a few boxes. I didn't find any." "I'm making a vow to never have another Klondike ice cream product for the rest of my life," says Segura. "That's the commitment I'm making. Bring back Choco Tacos." While loyal lovers of the product mourn the loss of the ice cream treat, food content creators and recipe developers, like Carlena Davis, who lives in Bowie, Md., have gotten straight to work attempting to recreate the beloved recipe at home. "I made the recipe back in the summer of 2020," she says. "We were in the thick of the pandemic and I wanted to make a fun ice cream treat for my daughter. I love the Choco Taco and used to get it at Taco Bell back when I was a kid." When news broke about the discontinuation of the popular treat, Davis shared her recipe on TikTok to help fans recreate it at home as well. Her version involves homemade waffle cones pressed in a waffle cone maker and store-bought chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream. Her "taco shells" get their shape by cooling them on parchment paper, folded over the spine of a hardcover book. Davis shares some top tips for the perfect Choco Taco every time. "The key to making a good Choco Taco at home is to use very little batter in the waffle cone maker," she says. "If you add too much batter, the waffle cone will be too thick and will not form the shape of a taco." "You can also use chocolate-flavored Magic Shell Topping instead of melting chocolate to coat the tacos," she adds. Amber Lozzi's at-home version of the Choco Taco, made with a pizzelle maker. (Photo: Amber Lozzi) Amber Lozzi, a content creator and marketing expert in Springfield, Ill., says she believes this is all a marketing ploy to get fans excited about the Choco Taco. But just in case, she's also working on a recipe all her own. "I've not yet perfected it, but I'm getting close and I appreciate my husband's antique pizzelle maker, as I use it for the shells," says Lozzi. Lozzi shares what many die-hard Choco Taco fans seem to have in common: "Choco Tacos were always my number one choice growing up, whether it was [from] the ice cream man driving down the street or [purchased while] visiting the snack stand at the beach, Choco Tacos were all I wanted. I don't want them to go." Wellness, parenting, body image and more: Get to know the who behind the hoo with Yahoo Life's newsletter. Sign up here. An abducted 12-year-old managed to chew through her restraints and escape captivity at an Alabama home, where authorities later discovered the remains of at least two people. A driver spotted the young victim walking along a road in Dadeville just before 8:30 a.m. on Monday. He picked up the girl and immediately called 911, Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett told reporters during a press conference Tuesday. She told responding officers shed been held captive in a nearby residence where she was restrained to bed posts for about a week but that she eventually bit through her bonds and fled. Police said the braces on her teeth were damaged during her escape efforts and that her wrists showed marks consistent with being tied up. According to a criminal complaint obtained by WSFA, the 12-year-old had also been given alcohol to keep her in a drugged up state. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes Detectives believe the girl was abducted around July 24 and that the suspect intended to hurt or sexually abuse her. She had not been reported missing. A preliminary investigation into the matter led authorities to the mobile home of Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, who was not home at the time. Inside, authorities discovered a pair of decomposing corpses, who have not yet been identified. A forensic team is currently working on determining how they died. U.S. Marshals and local police arrested Pascual-Reyes on Monday about 25 miles away in Auburn. Hes facing a count of first-degree kidnapping, with multiple additional capital murder charges also likely, District Attorney Jeremy Duerr said No information so far has been released about the 12-year-old girl, including whether or not she knew her captor. While its unclear what information she provided police, Abbett describer her as a hero. We gave her medical attention, Abbett said. She is safe now, and so we want to keep her that way. With News Wire Services A jury in Texas found Thursday that Infowars founder Alex Jones must pay the family of a 6-year-old boy killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., $4.1 million in compensatory damages for defamation after falsely claiming that the massacre was a hoax. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis were seeking $150 million from Jones and his media company Free Speech Systems for the near decade of harassment they've been exposed to as a result of Jones and Infowars spreading the conspiracy theory that the attack that killed their son and 19 other children and six educators on Dec. 14, 2012, was staged. Lawyers for Jones argued that he should pay $8 one dollar for each of the compensation charges the jury was considering. Each parent was awarded $1.5 million for past mental anguish and $500,000 for future anguish as a result of Jones's defamatory claims. Heslin was awarded an additional $110,000 for past and future damage to his reputation after Infowars aired two reports in 2017 questioning a statement he made in an interview with Megyn Kelly that he held his dead son and saw the bullet wound to his head after the shooting. Neil Heslin pauses during his testimony against Alex Jones in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday. (Briana Sanchez/Pool via Reuters) The jury deliberated for a little more than seven hours inside Travis County District Court in Austin, where Infowars is based, before returning its verdict. Ten of the 12 jurors agreed on the verdict the minimum number required for a decision. Jones who continued to host his daily Infowars show throughout the trial was not in court when the verdict was returned. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ordered the jury to return Friday, when it will consider punitive damages in the highly watched case. Gamble admonished Jones several times during the two-week trial for speaking out of turn and going off on tangents during his testimony. "This is not your show," the judge told Jones more than once. During cross-examination Wednesday, Jones was asked about an image broadcast by Infowars showing Gamble and a judge overseeing a separate case against him on fire. Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, asked Jones if he was taking the trial seriously. "I think this is serious as cancer," Jones replied. Jones, the only witness called by his defense team, sought to portray himself as a victim who had been "typecast" for claiming the shooting was staged and said that he now believes the massacre actually happened. "It's 100% real," Jones said Wednesday. Jones listens during cross-examination at his defamation trial Wednesday. (Briana Sanchez/Pool via Reuters) Later in his testimony, however, Jones added a baseless caveat to his concession. "I think Sandy Hook happened. I think it was a terrible event," he said, adding: "I think it was a cover-up. The FBI knew it was going to happen." Heslin and Lewis told the jury that such false claims made by Jones and his Infowars guests have made their lives a "living hell." "Alex lit the flame that started the fire," Heslin said during his testimony Tuesday. "Other people brought some wood to add to it." Both Heslin and Lewis said they have received death threats from people inspired by Jones since the massacre. Heslin said his home was shot at by someone who shouted Jones's name. Their lawyer said Monday that the parents have gone into isolation with a round-the-clock security detail after an unspecified number of "encounters" while they've been in Texas for the trial. A psychiatrist hired by the plaintiffs testified that both parents suffer from a complex form of post-traumatic stress disorder. They each sleep with weapons by their bed, and dont turn on their air-conditioning out of fear they won't hear something dangerous nearby, the psychiatrist testified. "I wake up at night with panic attacks," Heslin said. "I was in the hospital a few weeks ago with heart pain." Scarlett Lewis at the Travis County Courthouse on Tuesday. (Briana Sanchez/Pool via Reuters) Lewis testified about emails she received from Wolfgang Halbig, a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist and Infowars guest, asking for detailed answers to a list of 51 questions about son Jesse Lewis's death. "You try to process the death of a child, and we've tried to do that," she said. "But you can't process this." During her testimony, Lewis also addressed Jones directly. "Jesse was real," Lewis said. "I am a real mom." The trial was the first of three separate defamation cases against Jones stemming from his portrayal of the Sandy Hook massacre as a hoax involving "crisis actors" employed by the government in order to enact stricter gun control. Jury selection began earlier this week in Connecticut in a separate trial to determine how much Jones must pay the families of eight of the victims and an FBI agent for his false claims. (The selection process was temporarily halted as Jones's attorneys asked that the trial be delayed after Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy protection.) Mark Bankston asks Alex Jones about his emails and texts on Wednesday. (Briana Sanchez/Pool via Reuters) Jones is also facing a potential new legal fight with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. While he was on the witness stand Wednesday, Jones learned that his lawyers accidentally sent two years of text messages from his cellphone to Bankston and then failed to note that the messages were protected under attorney-client privilege. Bankston said Thursday that the committee has requested the text messages and related documents, and that he intends to turn them over unless hes instructed not to do so. Gamble said she would give Joness attorneys time to research whether they have legal argument to block the committee from obtaining his text messages. Democrats are unhappy with President Biden. And a number of Republicans are fed up with their partys standard-bearer, former President Trump. But are disenfranchised voters mad enough to consider going for a third party? The idea may be tempting to voters for a few reasons. Polls show Democrats are looking for a leader other than Biden, whom many saw as a caretaker figure to end the Trump presidency rather than an inspirational figure. Survey after survey shows a majority would prefer a different choice in 2024 than the sitting president, who insists he is running for reelection. Republicans, meanwhile, are badly divided over Trump, who remains the most powerful force in the GOP. While the twice-impeached former president is weakened, he remains the favorite to win a primary. If Biden and Trump end up in a rematch as their partys nominees, plenty of people think it might give room for a credible third-party bid. I believe a healthy democracy provides more than two options for voters, said Peter Daou, a left-wing activist and political consultant whos publicly pushing for another option to what he sees as the countrys flawed political system. Ive become a strong advocate for a third party that promotes leftist values, along the lines of the Green Party, he said. As an intellectual exercise, the concept of a third option seems plausible, even appealing. A choice beyond Biden World who offers a contrast to Trump could be just right for those seeking solutions and are tired of the tenor of todays politics. The concept has sparked particular interest among progressives like Daou, who are disillusioned that Biden hasnt accomplished more. Many backed Biden in the general election. But putting together a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic nominees is much harder in reality. The recent high-water mark for a third party in a presidential race was Ross Perots independent bid in 1992. The Texas businessman took 18.9 percent of the popular vote, but not a single electoral vote. Perot won just 8.4 percent of the total tally four years later. John Anderson, another high-profile independent candidate, won 6.6 percent of the vote in 1980. Those numbers show just how hard it is to mount a third-party candidacy, even if the electorate is dissatisfied with the mainstream choices. Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, has started a new venture called the Forward Party that he hopes will allow voters to consider the possibility of something beyond the two-party system. Yang recently announced he is teaming up with the Serve American Movement, run by ex-Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.), and the Renew America Movement, co-founded by former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R), to form the new group. Yang, Jolly and Whitman announced the alliance in a recent Washington Post op-ed, but said it is not intended to compete in the next presidential cycle. This is about creating real choice for American voters, with a new party that can solve problems both large and small, starting in their own communities, spokesperson Joel Searby said in a statement to The Hill. Some of our biggest supporters are former Republicans who sacrificed party standing to defend democracy, Searby added. Others are former Democrats, disillusioned with their partys dysfunction. Still others have never felt at home in parties that always failed to represent them. Yangs announcement was met with widespread skepticism given the difficulty such movements have had in recent decades. I think theyre earnest for the most part in giving people another option, but theyre talking among themselves and all these people who voted for Joe Biden, Tim Miller, a never Trump Republican and author of the new bestseller Why We Did It, said of those taking up a third-party bid. If you believe these Republicans are an evil threat, you should be doing things that maximize the ways to beat them, he added. Some also worried that backing this kind of effort will ultimately benefit Republicans, regardless of the intention. It will disproportionately draw voters who would vote for Democrats away from Democrats, Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic pollster who served as an adviser to the Lincoln Project, said of a third-party push. I 100 percent understand why its attractive to them, but I also understand why its so dangerous. In 2016, some Democrats saw Green Party candidate Jill Stein as hurting Democrat Hillary Clinton on the margins. In 2000, many blamed Ralph Nader, another Green Party contender, for costing Democrat Al Gore the state of Florida to Republican George W. Bush. Democrats unimpressed with Biden dont necessarily think adding another party is the right solution. It ends up being much harder in the practical reality than it does in the theoretical, said Karen Finney, a Democratic operative who served as a senior adviser on Clintons 2016 presidential campaign. Yes, it is about a party, but its also about an individual and whether you trust the person and the ideas theyre campaigning on. What they will have to convince voters is not just what they stand for but they will be able to go to Washington to get those things done, Finney said. And anti-Trump Republicans are equally skeptical. All of these people are all part of the Joe Biden coalition, Miller said of those he thought might consider a third party in 2024. As a result, he argued it would almost certainly hurt a Democratic candidate, saying it would be cleaving off part of the Joe Biden coalition. Sam Anderson, a masters student at the University of Michigan and a registered voter in the state, said alterations to the way elections are cast would change his opinion on a third party. I love the idea of a third party if our election system looked different, said Anderson, who voted for Biden in 2020. In some places where ranked choice voting is being implemented, a third-party could offer more choice without being a spoiler. In ranked choice voting, voters choose candidates and list them by personal preference, creating a tiered system. The goal is for a candidate to emerge as the majority of voters first choice. If that doesnt happen, contenders are disqualified based on how few votes they get until a winner is chosen. This system is currently used in Maine. In other places where our traditional first past the post system wins out, Im seriously concerned a third party could hand the election to someone as dangerous as Donald Trump, Anderson said. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. The U.S. Border Patrol said it responded to more than 12 separate migrant landings in the Florida Keys since Wednesday, with more than six groups arriving on Thursday, and possibly four or more boats on Friday. On Friday morning, Walter Slosar, chief Border Patrol agent for the agencys Miami operations, which include the Keys, said on Twitter that a total of 108 people landed along the island chain in a span of two days. On Friday, Monroe County Sheriffs Office online calls for service records show at least four more groups arrived between 3 a.m. and noon on Friday. Those landings happened on Big Pine Key in the Lower Keys, the Middle Keys city of Marathon and an undisclosed location, the records show. The people are arriving on the types of homemade rustic vessels that have become common sights along the Keys shorelines for the past two years, as well as sturdier fishing boats. A migrant boat floats near a sea wall in Key West Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022, that Border Patrol officials said carried 25 people from Cuba to the island chain. The Keys and South Florida are experiencing an influx in migrants from both Cuba and Haiti, but that many migrant arrivals in one day is unusual. The landings happened in various parts of the island chain, said Adam Hoffner, division chief for U.S. Customs and Border Protections Miami operations. All of the migrants are Cuban, he said. It had already been a busy week for the Border Patrol, Coast Guard and other agencies tasked with policing migrants in the Keys, with more than 60 people from Cuba arriving last weekend. The exodus from Cuba and Haiti has also kept the U.S. Coast Guard the busiest its been in years patrolling the Florida Straits. Since October, the agency has stopped 3,739 Cubans and 6,534 Haitians at sea who were trying to reach South Florida. Almost all have been returned to their homelands. Both island nations are experiencing deteriorating economic and political conditions, and Haiti is going through a period of increasing gang violence that has contributed to the largest maritime migration away from its shores since 2004. A bright, young sailor from North Carolina was lost after going overboard in a European sea, Navy officials said. David L. Spearman is believed to have died after he disappeared from the USS Arleigh Burke on Monday, Aug. 1. As of Aug. 4, the Navy hadnt recovered Spearmans body, according to Richlyn Ivey, a public affairs officer for U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa. This bright, young man made an oversized positive impact on Arleigh Burke, Cmdr. Pete Flynn, a commanding officer for the USS Arleigh Burke, said in a news release. My entire crews thoughts and prayers are with Seaman Recruit Spearmans family and friends. We offer our most sincere condolences for their loss. Spearman, 19, went by the name Dee and was from the Etowah area, WLOS reported. The community is in Henderson County, roughly 25 miles south of the mountain town of Asheville. Spearman enlisted in November and trained in Illinois. He reported to the USS Arleigh Burke about three months ago, according to the Navy. Officials said Spearman went overboard while the ship was in the Baltic Sea, which borders several countries in Northern and Eastern Europe. Crews from Germany and Sweden participated in an extensive search for him, according to the U.S. military. On Aug. 2, officials said search and rescue efforts tied to Spearmans ship had stopped. Three children died at North Carolinas Camp Lejeune base on same day, military says Fellow Marines, family and friends pay tribute to young heroes who died in NC crash That Friday in June when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade threw Dr. Sabrina Markese into an emotional tailspin. She was supposed to go to dinner with her mom and stepfather the next day. But the idea of breaking bread with staunch Catholics who oppose abortion was a bridge too far. She canceled and spent the day in bed. Most physicians never speak publicly about abortion outside of putting their name on a list of supporters both for and against. Markese never thought shed have to make her private, pro-choice stance known because, well, Roe v. Wade was there. But now it wasnt. So after a day of crying in bed, after nearly 30 years as a family physician in Kansas, a career that began in Wyandotte County, Markese decided it was time to speak her mind publicly, to join the effort to reject an amendment to the state constitution that would have removed the right to abortion. Ive never really been so outspoken as I am now, said Markese, who lives in Olathe. Markese thought Tuesdays vote would be very close. But she was very wrong. Kansans resoundingly, many say shockingly, made it loud and clear that a woman should have the right to choose. The overwhelming voter turnout and lopsided, 59% share of the votes was thanks, in part, to newly minted activists like Markese. For Markese, the election wasnt about abortion. It was about her passionate belief in human rights. That patients should be able to make decisions about their own health care. That they should be able to do that in private. I have to support the womans right to her bodily autonomy, Markese told The Star. This is not so much about abortion as it is about health care. This is about health care and privacy way more than it is about abortion. So, in the language of sports, Markese left it all on the field in this fight. She schooled herself on the amendment proposal, engaged in Facebook conversations many heated ones with Catholic family members placed Vote No signs again and again in high-traffic spots in Johnson County, and, in oppressive heat at the Wyandotte County Fair, handed out signs and stickers. She tweeted. She marched at rallies in Wichita and Topeka with hundreds of other people, stood with them on the steps of the state Capitol in Topeka in solidarity. She also publicly revealed a secret that only her mother knew, personal history that bolstered her belief that patients should have the right to decide what happens to their body without intervention from politicians, or a church. Dr. Sabrina Markese of Olathe walked in vote no rallies in Topeka and Wichita, shown here, as she let her pro-choice stance on abortion be known publicly for the first time. A pro-choice Catholic Markese was born and raised in Kansas City and went to medical school in the Midwest. She grew up in a devout Catholic home. Mass every Sunday. Rosaries. Crucifixes. Believing in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As a poor medical student in Kansas City she couldnt afford to tithe, so she volunteered as a lector at Redemptorist Catholic Church, reading Scripture at Masses. Nationally, 76% of U.S. Catholics say abortion should be legal in certain cases, according to a Pew Research Center survey released in May. Just 1 in 10 said abortion should be illegal always, no exceptions. About the same number, 13%, said abortion should be legal in all cases, no exceptions. The Catholic church sank a lot of money and hours into the Kansas amendment campaign about $3 million came from the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas alone. Markese cant quite remember when she became pro-choice the Catholic church condemns abortion but that internal conflict between faith and science has long been there. This former cafeteria Catholic today describes herself as a very spiritual person. That hot day in July at the county fair, where little kids wrestled sheep and Cheap Trick and Steve Miller tribute bands played, there were three Vote Yes booths and one Vote No booth, Markese recalled. Markese worried about patients who would have to travel out of state to have an abortion if, ultimately, the Vote Yes forces won, paving the way for the state Legislature to ban the procedure. She worried about those who might use unsafe methods to terminate their pregnancies. Banning abortion? You cannot ever ban abortion. Youre just banning safe abortion, she said. She herself had considered leaving the state if, somehow, a total ban should come to pass. Dr. Sabrina Markese of Olathe, a family physician, took a public stance on the Kansas abortion amendment vote, campaigning actively for the vote no side which won resoundingly on Tuesday. Its about bodily autonomy As a family medicine practitioner, Markese does not provide abortion care. But she will support patients who decide to terminate a pregnancy and help them find that care. I feel like its my job to have an open mind for patients. Its not my job to tell a patient what to do, Markese said. I also support that woman who, if she finds out at week 26 that she has a fetus that could be nonviable at birth but she wants to keep it and progress with her pregnancy, thats her choice. I see that as a choice as well, and bless her for that. I dont want to live in a world where that choice wasnt offered either. And I cant understand why people dont see that thats a choice. I feel like the whole gamut should be its about bodily autonomy. We shouldnt be telling the woman what to do. We should be supporting them in their choice. Deciding to terminate a pregnancy, she said, is emotionally taxing. Women dont wake up one day and say, Oh, I think Ill have an abortion today. It doesnt happen that way. But it does sometimes happen this way: People will come in not knowing they are pregnant. They are having abdominal symptoms and thats kind of a slam dunk, you have to check for pregnancy, she said. Sometimes people are surprised by the fact that they have these other symptoms and its never crossed their mind that pregnancy might be the cause. And when you tell them theyre pregnant, theyve already made up in their mind thats not something they would want to deal with. So its not up to the doctor, its not my role to decide for them. My role in that is to tell them, we would start them on prenatal vitamins or would help them to find a place to do termination. And thats their choice, 100%. Dr. Sabrina Markese walked in rallies in Wichita and Topeka in July. She took this photo at the Wichita rally, where she joined hundreds of vote no supporters. Thank you, Kansas They kept taking my signs down, Markese said of the Vote No signs she posted on entrance and exit ramps off Kansas 10 highway in Johnson and Douglas counties. So there she was, a couple of times in the rain, keeping an eye on passing cars and climbing a hill in a dress and sandals to replace the signs. She figured the signs would be harder to steal if they were up high. A few people driving past honked in support. One person yelled at her: Baby killer! Things didnt get that nasty on Facebook, where she got into arguments with cousins and close friends who disagreed with her stance. It definitely has taken a toll on my family, she said. She had posted facts about how many people who have abortions are victims of rape and incest, and some of her cousins were getting in my face about it, saying pregnancies caused by rape and incest happen infrequently and arent that big a deal, she said. That hit a nerve. So she wrote on Facebook that she was sexually assaulted as a teenager. The attack did not result in a pregnancy. I was never planning on telling people, she said. My mom knew. So my mom wasnt surprised when I came out with it on Facebook, but no one else in my family knew. But thats why Ive been in tears. Thats why this has meant so much to me. Its why I stayed in bed on June 25. Its why Ive been fighting so hard. And I remember how frightened I was. What if? And I dont know what my decision would have been. I just know its not up to anybody else to make that decision for me. Nobodys business. And to take that right, to take autonomy away from someone, to force me to have been attached to that person for the next 18 to 20 years is barbaric. Before Election Day, Markese told The Star that regardless of how the vote turned out, Ill be able to lay my head on my pillow and know I did everything in my power, climbing hills in the rain and screaming at the top of my lungs. Every possible thing I could do, Ive done it. On Wednesday morning, Markese said: I can finally rest. Thank you, Kansas. CAIRO, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Egypt welcomed on Thursday the two-month extension of the UN-mediated truce in Yemen. In a press release, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Egypt hopes the extension announced by UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg could help find a permanent political solution to the Yemen crisis. "Egypt supports all efforts aiming to reach a political solution that preserves the unity and independence of Yemen and meets its people's aspirations of security, stability, and welfare," the ministry said, while praising the UN efforts in this regard. Grundberg said on Tuesday that the truce in Yemen will be extended for an additional two months from Aug. 2 to Oct. 2. Were tracking information about the coronavirus and vaccines in North Carolina. Check back every Thursday for updates. Over 31,000 new COVID cases added At least 31,848 new coronavirus cases were reported in North Carolina last week, down from 33,159 the week before, according to preliminary data from state health officials. The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services also reported 1,350 new weekly COVID-19 hospital patient admissions, up from 1,289 the previous week, according to data through July 30, the most recent metrics available. The daily average of adult coronavirus patients in intensive care was 151, an increase from 125 the week before. The figures were released Wednesday, Aug. 3, more than four months after health officials started adjusting information on their coronavirus dashboard and publishing weekly COVID-19 data. The data had previously been released almost every day. Roughly 77% of adults in North Carolina have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and about 73% are fully vaccinated. Of the states total population, about 62% are fully vaccinated and about 67% have received at least one dose. State officials round vaccination metrics to the nearest whole number. More than 3.8 million additional/booster doses have been administered in North Carolina as of Aug. 3, the health department said. Health officials have urged those who are eligible to get boosted, as data shows it offers increased protection against the omicron coronavirus variant. Across the state, virtually all new COVID-19 cases were attributed to the omicron variants lineages in the two weeks leading up to July 23, the latest time period for which data is available. Wake schools to end voluntary testing but will keep recommending masks The Wake County school district is stopping a program that allowed students and workers to get COVID-19 tests on a volunteer basis. While the tests had been offered on campuses each week, people who want to take them will now receive at-home tests. Also in the Triangle-area district, a face mask recommendation will continue ahead of Aug. 29, the start date for many of the districts nearly 160,000 students. Masks havent been required in schools since March, The News & Observer reported. Some Charlotte businesses skip making mask rules, others planning for them As coronavirus continues to spread in the Charlotte area, businesses have differed in their approaches to face mask rules. While some places said they plan to require that their workers wear face coverings, others wont implement mask rules unless the government reinstates a mandate. If something comes down from the government federal, state or local then we will certainly abide by that, said Greg McCraw of the Neighborhood Theatre music venue, where all workers are vaccinated against COVID-19. As of Aug. 2, Mecklenburg County was seeing a rise in cases tied to a branch of the omicron coronavirus variant. The subvariant BA.5 is believed to be more easily transmissible when compared to other omicron types, McClatchy News reported. Masks now recommended indoors in most NC counties Most North Carolina counties are now at the highest level for COVID-19, meaning people living in them are urged to wear face masks. Of the 100 counties in the state, 62 are labeled as being high risk. Thats up from about 50 last week, The News & Observer reported. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chooses the highest-risk counties after considering coronavirus case and hospitalization metrics. The counties at the highest risk are marked in an orange color on the CDCs map. As of July 29, those counties included several in the Triangle, such as Chatham, Durham, Harnett and Orange. People living in those counties who are at risk of getting seriously sick may want to avoid indoor activities that arent essential. They should also consider future steps if they test positive, according to the N&O. Wake ends drive-thru COVID tests Wake County, home to Raleigh, has ended its drive-thru COVID-19 testing program. The testing sites officially closed on July 29, more than a month after officials announced they would scale back testing efforts at county-run sites. Wake County Public Health has given more than 1 million tests at no cost since July 2020, according to spokesperson Leah Holdren. Before there was a vaccine, there was just testing, and it was a lifesaving tool for keeping people who were sick or exposed to the virus from spreading it to their loved ones and our vulnerable populations, Holdren said. The change came after Wake spent $131 million on tests and was also seeing lower demand. Those seeking tests can pick up at-home kits in person or order them through the mail. Appointments and drive-thru services are available at other places in the area, The News & Observer reported. Read more details about the current Wake County testing options here. NC woman accused of selling fake COVID drug A North Carolina woman accused of selling a fake COVID-19 drug has entered a guilty plea. Diana Daffin of Charlotte sent the product HAMPL to an undercover agent and sold it to customers after receiving a warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier in the pandemic, according to federal prosecutors. Officials said the drug claimed to provide a stronger immunity against CV and immunity for humans, which wasnt true. Daffin, who owned Savvy Holistic Health, didnt immediately respond to The Charlotte Observers phone message on July 27. Her sentencing is scheduled for November. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned people to be suspicious of products that claim to treat a wide range of diseases or seem too good to be true. Federal officials said teas, essential oils, tinctures and colloidal silver were among the fake products that made it onto their radar during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who test positive for COVID-19 are urged to get prescriptions for the medicines they need, the Observer reported. Lower sex drive and losing hair among long COVID symptoms, study says. What to know How widespread is long COVID? Its put millions of US adults out of work, expert says For the second time this year, Durham County will pay people to turn in their unwanted guns. The goal is to continue efforts to reduce gun violence in the county. From 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 6, anyone can turn in their unloaded weapons at either Mount Vernon Baptist Church at 1007 S. Roxboro St. or Durham County Memorial Stadium on Wisteria Avenue (visitor side lot). The Sheriffs Office will offer Visa gift cards of $100 for long guns, $150 for handguns and $200 for assault rifles. It has about $10,000 for the event, with half coming from a local businesss private donation, said David Bowser, a spokesperson for the Sheriffs Office. All weapons must be lying in plain view in peoples cars upon arrival, and deputies will give instructions on how they will retrieve and secure the firearms. Participants do not need to identify themselves, Bowser said. The firearms can be used or unused. Any weapons reported stolen will be returned to their owners. Others will be destroyed once they have been checked and a judge authorizes their destruction. Impacts on violent gun crime reduction In April, during the first Bull City Gun BuyBack program, the Sheriffs Office retrieved nearly 100 firearms and ran out of gift cards. Durham County is one of the few areas in the state to hold gun buyback programs. Winston-Salem held a drive-thru buyback event in January and in Greensboro, the Police Department let people turn in unwanted firearms and ammunition at any time without a limit. A 2019 Review of Gun Buybacks found when pursued with other methods of violent crime reduction, gun buybacks are successful in reducing the number of firearms that could lead to injury and death. The researchers also noted that non-Hispanic Black men are the most common victims of fatal firearm injury, while gun buyback participants tend to be older white men. In North Carolina, an estimated 45.8% of adults have guns in their homes, according to a 2020 RAND Corp. report. More than 220,000 residents have federal gun licenses in the state, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Forearms and Explosives. Gun sales spiked in North Carolina after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the summer of protests after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Triangle area sheriffs offices saw pistol purchase permit applications double, The N&O previously reported. Last year, gun thefts were up in Durham and the number of shooting incidents reached 430. More than 120 people were shot, 22 of them fatally. The Durham Report Calling Bull City readers! We've launched The Durham Report, a free weekly digest of some of the top stories for and about Durham published in The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun. Get your newsletter delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday at 11 a.m. featuring links to stories by our local journalists. Sign up for our newsletter here. For even more Durham-focused news and conversation, join our Facebook group "The Story of my Street." Even though a Whatcom County jogger suffered non-life-threatening injuries after encountering a black bear Wednesday, Aug. 3, along a trail north of Lake Whatcom, black bear-human encounters are relatively rare in Washington state. Before Wednesdays encounter, there had not been an encounter that resulted in a documented injury since 2015, and only 18 had been recorded since 1970, the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife reported in a news release about the incident. The last black bear encounter that resulted in a persons death was in 1974, according to the release. In general bears avoid people, but theyre naturally curious animals, Thursdays release states. But if you are out in the wild and do encounter a bear, the WDFW offered these tips: Identify yourself by standing up, waving your hands above your head and speaking in a low voice. Back away from the bear and dont make direct eye contact. Do not run away from a bear. Make noise when you are in the wilderness. Keep your pets on a leash. Be aware of your surroundings and make sure you do not startle a bear. Carry bear spray, making sure it is easily accessible and that you know how to use it. The WDFW website also offers more information on living with black bears at wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/species/ursus-americanus#living. Trail runner near Lake Whatcom injured after encountering black bear Wednesday The former wife of murder suspect Yaser Said testified on Thursday that she asked if she could go with him and their two daughters for dinner on the night of Jan. 1, 2008. Patricia Owens and 18-year-old Amina Said and 17-year-old Sarah Said had just returned home to North Texas after running away from Yaser Said, dashing off to Kansas and Oklahoma because they feared him, she said. One concern was that Yaser Said didnt want his daughters dating American boys and he had become threatening and controlling, witnesses have said. But the father, who had asked them to come home, acted kind when he saw his family back at their Lewisville home, his ex-wife said. I didnt think anything would happen, Owens testified Thursday in a Dallas courtroom. I called him after they left for dinner, but he said he was putting gas in the car and they would be home shortly. Soon afterward, Sarah and Amina Said were shot to death in Yaser Saids taxi near an Irving hotel. Yaser Said fled the scene, according to prosecutors, and stayed away from authorities for 12 years until he was arrested in August 2020 at a home in Justin. Owens testimony came on the third day of Yaser Saids capital murder trial in the deaths of their daughters. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty. If convicted, Said, 65, will be automatically sentenced to life without parole. The trial is being held in Criminal District Court No. 7 in Dallas. On Wednesday, jurors heard the 911 call made by Sarah Said. Help! My dad shot me, Sarah said in the recording. Im dying. Im dying. Whats going on, maam? the 911 dispatcher asked. Im dying. Thats whats up, Sarah said before yelling, Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Amina Said, 18, and her 17-year-old sister, Sarah, were found fatally shot Jan. 1, 2008, in Irving, TX. Their father, Yaser Abdel Said, is accused of killing them and is on trial this week in Dallas. Earlier this week, Yaser Saids defense attorney, Joseph Patton, told jurors that Said was a suspect because he is Muslim, and that evidence would indicate the investigation was botched. The defense raised questions about several of the 58 witnesses on call by prosecutors. On Thursday, Owens told the Dallas County jury that leaving Yaser Said in December 2007 was not the first time she had left him. I always came home, Owens told Patton when he questioned her Thursday. Coy West, who works with the Hill County District Attorneys Office, testified Thursday that Yaser Said was indicted on a sexual assault of a child case in 1998. The case involved Sarah and Amina Said. At the time, West worked with the Hill County Sheriffs Office. The sheriffs office is in Hillsboro, which is about 60 miles south of Dallas. There was no conviction, West testified. In 1999, a report was made that the girls recanted the story. Owens said the family moved to Bedford, and then to Lewisville in 2006. She and the girls worked at Kroger, and her daughters started dating boys. Owens told the jury that she was aware of it, but Yaser Said didnt know until December 2007 when he looked at a telephone bill which led to the boys. Yaser had threatened (the girls) with a gun, Owens said. There was a handgun in the home. On Christmas Day 2007, Owens, her daughters and their boyfriends left North Texas. The boyfriends had proposed to the girls and they had said yes. Owens said she took $4,000 and packed clothes in a trash bag to keep Yaser Said from knowing they had run away. We had to wait until he was not at the house, Owens said. It took four days, but on Christmas Day he left and we left. FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Irving (Texas) Police Department shows Yaser Said. Said, who evaded arrest for over 12 years after being accused of fatally shooting his two teen daughters in a taxi parked near a Dallas-area hotel, is on trial this week. Owens told the jury on Thursday that the family returned to Lewisville because the girls needed to finish high school. Amina had already set her sights on Texas A&M. The killings stopped all that. Former Irving police Detective John Schingle testified Thursday that the girls boyfriends arrived at the Irving police station just hours after the fatal shooting, telling authorities the two girls had problems at home, they and their mother wanted to leave and they had fled to Kansas and Oklahoma before returning back to their Lewisville home. The boys went to the Irving police station because they had heard the girls had been shot. They asked about them, and I had to tell them that they were dead, Schingle said. They were shocked and upset. Some family members said that the girls were victims of honor killings because their Egyptian-born father thought they had brought shame to the family. Yaser Said has sent several letters to the judge in Dallas, proclaiming his innocence, according to WFAA-TV. In one letter he wrote, I was not happy about my kids dating activity. But, I did not do the killings or any plan to hurt them, WFAA reported. Owens told federal authorities that members of his family had indicated to her little remorse for the victims, and indicated support for their killer, according to a federal criminal complaint. Hours before the bodies of the teens were found, Yaser Said had picked up his daughters in the taxi, and he never returned home, according to the capital murder warrant obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Two of Saids family members have been sentenced for hiding him in North Texas for years. The criminal complaints against his brother, Yassein Said, and his son, Islam Said, do not indicate where Yaser Said was from January 2008 until August 2017. Nine years after the killings, investigators got a break when a maintenance worker at the Copper Canyon Apartments in Bedford spotted Yaser Said in an apartment rented by Islam Said, federal agents said. Authorities located Yaser Said at a Justin home in August 2020. His son Islam Said, 32, pleaded guilty in January 2021 to conspiracy to conceal a person from arrest, concealing a person from arrest and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.. He was later sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Yaser Saids brother Yassein Said was sentenced in 2021 to 12 years for conspiracy to conceal a person from arrest, concealing a person from arrest and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. Throughout the investigation, federal agents and Irving police believed other members of Yaser Saids family had assisted and communicated with him. Former Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp abruptly hung up Wednesday when asked to comment on deceptive text messages that went out to voters around the state the day before a pivotal vote on abortion rights. The anonymous text messages told voters to vote yes on an Aug. 2 abortion ballot question to give women a choice. A yes vote would have removed the right to an abortion from the state constitution. Huelskamps Do Right PAC paid $26,000 to Alliance Forge, a Nevada firm that was linked to the messages in a report by The Washington Post. On Wednesday afternoon, Huelskamp answered a reporters call, but immediately hung up when asked to comment on the texts and his groups apparent involvement. Huelskamp did not pick up the phone when the reporter attempted to call him back. A hard-line conservative, Huelskamp represented Kansas 1st Congressional District from 2011 to 2017. He lost the 2016 Republican primary to Roger Marshall, who has since risen to the U.S. Senate. . Huelskamps PAC was the only major group campaigning to pass the amendment that reported paying Alliance Forge, according to campaign finance reports filed with Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. The texts had received national attention and statewide criticism in the final day before the amendment vote. Even former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius had received one. Twilio, the platform on which messages were sent out, suspended the user behind the texts for violating its disinformation policy, but declined to identify the anonymous sender. Artist Yrneh Gabon photographed in his studio. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times) The pandemic completely reshaped our relationships with food, in ways both minuscule and monumental. As mandatory lockdowns swept the nation in early 2020, grocery store lines snaked around the block. Many shoppers adopted essentials only mindsets, eschewing guilty pleasures. Restaurants slashed menus in half or shuttered completely. Some hunker-downers began cooking at home for the first time, while others sanitized their contact-free deliveries before carrying them inside. Big family feasts were postponed indefinitely. For low-income individuals and those living in underserved communities, access to food reached crisis levels. A report conducted by USC found that approximately 1.2 million households in L.A. County experienced food insecurity defined as a disruption in regular eating because of money or other limited resources between April and December of 2020. The report also found that one in four low-income households remained food insecure in 2021. Using food as a focal point, the new exhibition At the Table assembles a collection of L.A.-area artists to explore the ways the pandemic forced us all to reassess our priorities, adapt and make do. The group exhibition, which opened at Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena on July 29, includes works that are inspired by and, in some cases, made with food items. There are pieces that celebrate food-based cultural traditions. Some take a hard look at the ways citizens and natural resources have been exploited for the sake of food production. Others highlight artist-led community efforts to provide food and essentials to those in need across L.A. Gallerygoers can take part in interactive workshops that encourage personal reflection, as well as social connection. Visitors can also donate shelf-stable foods to an on-site free community pantry. In the run-up to the opening, we spoke with four of the participating artists to discuss the ways they incorporated food materials and food-based issues into their submissions. Yeu "Q" Nguyen seen through her piece "Fifth Dimension" in her Alhambra studio. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) For Alhambra-based artist Yeu Q Nguyen , food is the key to unlocking memories and emotions. Childhood moments spent helping your grandmother in the kitchen, the sublime smell of your favorite dish, the last meal you shared with family before lockdown she wants to tap into all of those sensations and feelings. Her Sweet, Sweat and Love, a set of usable dispensers filled with dessert-scented hand sanitizers, floods the senses with sweetness while acknowledging our bittersweet new normal. With an array of textile-based pieces depicting noodles, peanuts and fish heads, she harks back to her Vietnamese upbringing and, at the same time, tackles social issues that may feel familiar to a wide variety of stateside immigrants and refugees. Nguyen will conduct in-person workshops wherein visitors create fabric dumplings, stuff them with written accounts of their feelings and contribute them to her interactive sculptural work titled Emotional Dumplings. Its about everybody coming together and giving a little piece of themselves, she said. I hope that folks can come do this interactive thing and discover how my ritual makes them feel. Then, they can develop their own ritual for processing emotions and sharing them with others. Jackie Amezquita sits against her piece "Gemidos de la Tierra." (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) Jackie Amezquita was drawn to corn masa as a medium for both its practicality as a binding agent and for its deep connection with her heritage. Corn is a fundamental nourishing ingredient in Latin American culture, she said. I was raised in Guatemala, and I remember going with my grandma to the mill to grind corn. Mixing it with soil was my way of playing because we didnt have toys like kids have here. In 2020, she revived that youthful pastime to create Proclamacion, an ongoing interactive series that considers how food can provide a sense of place. She created slabs made from masa, hydrated lime and soil that she collected from 36 L.A. neighborhoods. Then, she hosted gatherings across the city and encouraged attendees to eat various dishes using the slabs in place of plates. The results offer a unique take on topography when hung side by side, the food-splattered slabs create a map, of sorts, charting the citys diverse foodways. What sparked these pieces is that sense of home and belonging, Amezquita said. I started to consider how food provides immigrants with both nourishment and a sense of identity. In L.A. theres a cross-cultural connection with all these different dishes. Meaningful interactions can happen on a personal level, and food is an invitation for us to have those conversations. Yrneh Gabon at his Santa Monica studio. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times) Yrneh Gabon s Fire and Salt series examines the impact of salt beyond its ability to add flavor to a dish. The series was inspired by a 2017 visit to Dakar, Senegal, during which the Jamaican-born artist observed the famed pink waters of Lake Retba, a massive salt-mining site. I witnessed the labor-intensive environment in which people were working, he recalled. The labor makes you weep. You see people harvest this salt for eight or nine hours. Back in his Santa Monica base, Gabon began researching the history and politics surrounding the global salt trade and traced the effects that salt mining has on the environment. He also explored health-related issues tied to salt consumption, paying particular attention to how those issues affect underserved Black communities in the U.S. The mixed-media works on display in the exhibition incorporate actual salt crystals, which change and grow over time. The pieces also prominently feature pairs of clasped hands, in homage to those West African miners. The hands, for me, are about the people that you dont see, he said. You see their labor, but you never see their faces or know their names. Francisco Palomares in his Los Angeles studio. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times) With his oil painting Food Box, Francisco Palomares pays tribute to the farmworkers who continued to work in the fields during the early months of the pandemic, even as much of society sheltered indoors. Surrounded by cardboard to give the appearance of a typical produce container, the canvas is crowded with squash, peppers, nopales and corn vegetables commonly used in Mexican dishes. A cluster of painted marigolds lines the bottom of the box, serving as an ofrenda memorializing workers who lost their lives due to COVID. Palomares also brings his interactive piece Franciscos Fresh Paintings to the exhibition. The pushcart-turned-mobile studio is part art installation, part love letter to the roadside fruit vendors he grew up seeing in East L.A. In the summer of 2020, he started setting up the cart in various locales around the city, selling made-to-order oil paintings of fruit, vegetables and handheld treats like pan dulce. A fruit cart and the person behind it are automatically seen as lower-than, he said. But I flip that upside down. Im setting myself up to not only represent myself as an artist, but to also represent the community that I come from. Any street vendor thats out there with their cart is an entrepreneur. This is a reflection of that. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Long before Boise became an official Welcoming City in 2019, Idahoans have appreciated our immigrant neighbors in our schools and communities. Business leaders know their value in filling critical shortages in agriculture, dairies and healthcare. And in my nearly two decades of experience as an Idaho immigration attorney, I have fielded many calls from farmers, diary owners, high tech entrepreneurs and construction and hospitality employers asking how they can support their immigrant employees, friends and family. However, theres a big disconnect between Idahoans positive experiences with immigrants and the way politicians talk about them. Im referring specifically to Idahos official support for an inhumane policy that has harmed thousands of migrants seeking asylum at the Southern border. Known as Title 42, the outdated public health measure was enacted early in the pandemic and forces asylum seekers to stay in Mexico or their home countries while their claims are processed. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled that the Biden Administration could legally end a similar remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers, Title 42 still remains. This is despite the fact that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control agrees that immigrants are not at risk of spreading the coronavirus. Under both American and international law, people fleeing violence or persecution have the right to apply for asylum in the United States. We have a system to process their claims, which weve used for decades. Without it, migrants are sent back to the same dangerous conditions they were forced to leave in the first place or they languish in squalid border cities often up to a year at risk of sexual violence, trafficking and exploitation. Far from protecting public health, Title 42 is causing a humanitarian crisis. Thats certainly not what Americans or Idahoans want. Idahos own Sens. Risch and Crapo have introduced legislation that would extend Title 42 until 2025. Thats three years from now when we all hope COVID will be long gone. Yet its clear this is no longer a health policy. Rather, its a misuse of a public health measure that unfairly punishes immigrants. Our senators openly say they are worried about an influx of immigrants based on reports that the number of border apprehensions has increased. These fears are overblown. A closer look at the data reveals that out of the 1.1 million people who were apprehended at the border during the first nine months of fiscal year 2021, more than one-third werent newcomers to the border. Instead, theyd been there for months already and were trying to cross again. Thats how desperate they are to flee their home countries and increasingly inhumane conditions at the border itself. Most people would present themselves to authorities if they were permitted to do so. Instead, they risk their lives to get in; last year more than 650 people died this way. That doesnt even include the 53 people who suffocated in a tractor-trailer in Texas earlier this summer. Restoring our system would reduce crossings between official ports of entry and lower the number of apprehensions. Thats crucial during the dangerous summer months when border crossings over the desert are deadly. It would also ease the burden on our overworked law enforcement agents. We also have the opportunity to restore justice for the asylum seekers who have fled horrific conditions in their home countries and are being forced to endure additional suffering now at the hands of the United States. I wish I could tell them: Dont believe the rhetoric from Idahos politicians. There are many kind people here who welcome you. In the meantime, lets stop supporting policies that make their first encounter with America so shameful. Maria E. Andrade, who has practiced immigration law for more than 20 years, is the executive director of Immigrant Justice Idaho, a nonprofit launched in 2018 to provide free and low-cost legal services. Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin wrote this week that the Idaho first ladys assistant earns more money than the lieutenant governor but thats not true. McGeachin on Monday published a column in the Idaho Statesman defending her management of the lieutenant governors office budget, including her decision to more than quadruple the salary of her lone staffer and good friend. The Statesman reported the staffers big raise and McGeachins budget problems after she used taxpayers funds to pay legal fees stemming from a public records lawsuit. The medias preoccupation with my small budget is quite ironic given how they ignore things like the personal assistant to the governors wife being paid more than the lieutenant governor, McGeachin wrote in the column. In fact, First Lady Teresa Littles executive assistant, Ann DeAngeli, has earned less money in nearly four years than McGeachin does in a single year. Annual vs. hourly wages Madison Hardy, Gov. Brad Littles spokesperson, told the Statesman by email that the first ladys executive assistant provides administrative support to the governors wife. DeAngeli also has assisted the governors office with administrative duties. She worked in the lieutenant governors office when it was held by Brad Little, before he was elected governor in 2018. As the first ladys part-time assistant, DeAngeli earned less than $40,000 in gross wages over the past four fiscal years, according to Transparent Idaho, the Idaho controllers website that tracks state spending. Her total wages each year ranged from about $2,000 in the 2021 fiscal year to nearly $14,000 in 2022. DeAngelis hours were limited in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hardy said. McGeachin, on the other hand, earns a little more than $48,000 annually. Adding in benefits, the state pays McGeachin about $70,000 a year. DeAngeli made about $8,000 in benefits over the past four years. McGeachin told the Statesman by email that when she said the assistant earns more than her, she was referring to DeAngelis $26.52 hourly wage. Factoring in a 40-hour work week, the lieutenant governors annual salary would amount to $23.27 per hour. But McGeachins position is considered part-time. McGeachins deferred wages come this week This week, McGeachin will earn additional wages. Thats because she faced a budget shortfall at the end of the 2022 fiscal year, which ended June 30. To sustain the lieutenant governors statutorily required annual salary, McGeachin deferred about $1,700 in wages to the new fiscal year, which started July 1. On Friday, McGeachin will receive more than $3,500, according to emails by financial administrators obtained by the Statesman. McGeachin gave up a second term when she unsuccessfully challenged Little for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in this years primary election. Her four-year tenure ends this year. SANAA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Severe flooding caused by heavy rains and thunderbolts killed at least 11 people in northern Yemen in the past 24 hours, local authorities reported Thursday. Nine of the victims were swept away by flooding in three districts of the northwestern province of Hajjah, while two others were killed by thunderbolts in the Haydan District in the adjacent province of Saada. Several houses, farms and roads have been damaged. In the past two weeks, 11 people were already killed by the floods in the capital Sanaa and the neighboring province of Dhamar, local authorities reported. Residents are worried about epidemics spreading in the rainy season as the ongoing civil war has damaged the country's health system and disabled much of the infrastructure for clean water and sanitation. If you want to enjoy a home-cooked meal while meeting new people, look no further than Matties Front Porch, a monthly pop-up dining experience in the Mallard Creek area. The dinner serves Southern meals that tell a story while allowing total strangers to come together. The events were created by Charlotte-native chef Lisa Brooks, the creator of Heart & Soul Personal Chef Service. Chef Lisa Brook was featured on Chopped as a judge on the shows Black History Month episode that featured all-black judges and contestants. The theme of the dinner I just wanted to bring people back to that place, Brooks said. The old school Sunday dinner. This months dinner is themed Sunday Dinner and will feature five to seven dishes, including Deviled Eggs, Beef Stew and Rice, and Blackberry Cobbler. Its so popular that a second seating was added after the first seating sold out. Every theme is chosen or just kind of imagined from something that is near me, Brooks said. Usually its something from my own experience, my own story. The first seating of the dinner (which sold out just prior to publication) will be held on Sunday, Aug. 14 from 3:30-6:30 p.m. The second seating will be on August 14 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Reservations for each dinner is limited to 24 people, creating an intimate experience. Matties Front Porch is a monthly pop-up dinner by Charlotte chef Lisa Brooks. The dinner features several courses of Lowcountry cuisine. Chef Lisa Brooks on Chopped If you are a Chopped fan, Brooks might be familiar. She was one of the competing chefs on the Black History Month episode of the popular Food Network cooking competition show. Brooks became a finalist but was eliminated in the final round. This episode was the first in the shows history to have all-Black judges and contestants. It was such a life-changing experience for me, she said. Before judging, she was terrified of going on the show. It was exciting to see herself on screen, though, Brooks said. One show Brooks does want to go on is Gordon Ramsays FOX show Next Level Chef. I love the fact that they mentor you throughout the show, she said. And its less of a cutthroat thing. She told us she would love to meet Gordon Ramsay (who recently opened the first Gordon Ramsay Food Market in the United States at the Harrahs Cherokee Casino Resort in North Carolina). Chef Lisa Brooks learned to cook while at Sunday dinners at her grandmothers house. How Brooks learned to cook Brooks cooking skills and love for food began at Sunday dinners at her grandmothers house. She said the pop-ups are preserving those Southern food traditions like Sunday dinners, Lowcountry boils, cookouts and crab feasts. Her favorite signature dishes are shrimp and grits, collard greens and fried chicken. Ive had shrimp and grits everywhere, and I think that Im the best, she said. The dishes that resonate with Brooks are those that make people feel confident, at home and at their grandmothers house. Brooks started her personal chef service Heart & Soul in 2010. She knew how to cook her entire life and learned from her great grandmother, grandmother and mother. I didnt realize it was a gift at all or anything special until people just started telling me you should really do this for a living, she said. [RELATED: Get to know these 8 Black personal chefs in Charlotte] Before starting her cooking businesses, Brooks graduated from UNC Chapel Hill to study interpersonal communications. After graduating, she stayed in Chapel Hill to work for a healthcare IT company as a receptionist. Without education directly related to the field, she later moved her way up in the company and became the manager of technical support. She left the corporate world due to the stress she was experiencing. I was having migraines and back spasms and panic attacks, she said. And I had insomnia for three years or so. She earned an associates degree in culinary arts from Central Piedmont Community College after moving back to Charlotte. She later opened Heart & Soul, which now employs 31 people, including 10 female chefs. Location: Heart & Soul Personal Chef Service, 10818 Tavernay Pkwy, Charlotte, NC 28262 Next dinner: Aug. 14 from 3:30-6:30 p.m. Price: $85 per person, plus service fees. Tips are not included. Tickets: Purchase online Every wedding week has priceless memory moments, and the week during which our youngest son Sean and his bride, Jenny, tied the knot on the Central Coast was no exception. There were so many special times as the Tanner and Hayes families melded into one. Ill certainly never forget all those hugs and laughs, or the instant acceptance by our new in-laws. Ill also remember how the fog drifted in and out at just the right times along the Ragged Point shoreline below us and the raptly devoted and ecstatic looks in the couples eyes as they said their emotional vows. Columnist and mother of the groom Kathe Tanner and co-officiant Rich Schlosser, a longtime friend, share a hug before the ceremony in which Sean Tanner and his bride Jenny Hayes get married. Hectic wedding week has a few hiccoughs There were a few glitches during the hectic wedding week such as the time we couldnt find our van keys on the night before the big day, or the moment we watched, wide eyed, as the couples tall ceremonial cake toppled. It was a small wedding, with about 35 people. Many of the attendees came from out of the area traveling from Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska and even Manchester, England! There were lots of new people to meet. We Tanners could have been overwhelmed, but warmth, kindness and humor saved the day. Like when those keys disappeared. On the night before the wedding ceremony, we gathered at the large lodge house of the beautiful Ragged Point Inn and Resort in southern Monterey County, a drop-dead gorgeous location with one of the best ocean views on the coast. Four of us had driven up from Cambria for a casual meet-and-greet meal with about 16 of Jennys friends and family members, nearly all of whom wed never met before. A precious part of weddings is reuniting far-flung family members. Tanner family members gather from near and far before the wedding on July 16, 2022. From left, Alyssa Tanner drove up from Los Angeles, groom Sean Tanner arrived from Phoenix, Caity Tanner flew in from Manchester, England, and Tina Tanner came up from Ventura. Alyssa and Caity are Seans daughters, Tina is his niece, and Sean is the son of columnist Kathe Tanner. When pizza time was over around sunset, our weary quartet was more than ready to head back home to sleep and get ready for the big day ahead. But we couldnt find the vans keys. Along the remote Central Coast shore, it gets very dark, very fast after the sun goes down. Thats great for stargazing, but it doesnt make for prime key-hunting conditions. Smartphone flashlights were less than useful for illuminating the outdoor search area, and pointing those beams into the vans dark interior was downright useless. Eventually, aided by a borrowed flashlight, Son Brian spotted the keys, tucked down where theyd been accidentally dropped, unnoticed, inside the van just as the back hatch door slammed shut. Our Plymouth Town & Countrys key fob has a special button you press to temporarily unlock that lift-gate while leaving the other doors locked. Once you put the hatch door back down, it automatically relocks. Sure, we had an extra set of keys with us inside the locked van. And there was another, even more pressing problem: The key to our homes front door was on the same ring with the van fob! Once we got to Cambria, would we be able to get into our house? Id meant to have extra house keys made earlier that week, but there had been so many pre-wedding chores, errands, activities and visits. Normally I would have just called AAA for unlock service. Thats what theyre there for. But in those remote coastal locations, theres no cell service or internet connection. Finally, someone remembered the landline phone in one of the bedrooms. After repeatedly calling AAA and being put on hold, we were finally told theyd have to find a driver, so it would probably be about 11 p.m. before the truck would arrive from Cambria. We were in a hard-to-describe location on the large resort complex, and the AAA agent wasnt understanding the description. Brian went to the inns registration office, only to learn that it would close in five minutes, at 10 p.m.. So, for an hour and a half in the chilly night air, he waited outside the office so he could be the AAA drivers tour guide. We waited. And he waited. Was the driver really on his way? Well never know. Our repeated re-calls to AAA led to voicemail messages or being on endless hold. The AAA driver never found us or the van. Amid the angst, there was an eventual stroke of luck. Sean dug in his pocket and dangled a single key in front of me. You loaned me a house key, Mom. Remember? Obviously not, son. Or Id already be home in bed. As I clutched the precious key with a death grip, Jennys younger sister Melinda Hayes stuffed us into her car and drove us home before wending her weary way down to Rigdon House in downtown Cambria. The spare van key was waiting for us at home. Vows, cake, memories and more We made plenty of other memories over the wedding weekend including a nervous newly anointed officiant, the magical ceremony and the slo-mo collapse of the wedding cake. Theyre now part of the forever lore of two families. As a former professional cake decorator, I could have patched the cake up somewhat. Fresh flowers can hide a multitude of sins. But when Sean and Jenny saw it, they roared with laughter and declared the temblor cake would be just fine. Theyd long planned an amazing, unconventional, nontraditional ceremony celebrating their union as man and wife. And so it was keys, cake and all. Yes, there were some incredible memories. Especially that tender moment Ill treasure in my heart forever: I love you, Sean. Thank you. You and Brian made me the mom I am today. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri was the lone senator Wednesday to vote against a bipartisan resolution to add Finland and Sweden to NATO. The Senate approved the resolution 95-1 with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul voting present. The resolution, approved by the House on a vote of 394-18 last month, backs the two countries entrance into the military alliance originally founded in 1949 during the start of the Cold War. Wednesdays vote was an attempt to strengthen the military alliance amid Russias ongoing war in Ukraine. But Missouris junior senator argued that expanding NATO would increase the U.S.s military commitments, spending and resources in Europe. Finland and Sweden want to expand NATO because it is in their national security interests to do so, and fair enough. The question that should properly be before us, however, is is it in the United States interests to do so? Because thats what American foreign policy is supposed to be about, Hawley said on the floor Wednesday. He added, Our foreign policy should be about protecting the United States, our freedom, our people, and our way of life, and expanding NATO, I believe, would not do that. While Hawley voted against the measure, Missouris other senator, retiring Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, spoke in favor of it. Blunt, who along with 81 senators called on the Biden administration in May to fast track the two countries applications for NATO membership, said in a floor speech Wednesday that Finland and Sweden brought good real estate and good location to the military alliance. I think it sends a signal to the world, and, hopefully, to all Americans, that not only is NATO important, but it will be stronger with Sweden and Finland than it has ever been, he said on the floor. And I look forward to the opportunity to cast this vote today. New oil and gas leasing on federal land in San Luis Obispo County and other parts of California is paused while the U.S. Bureau of Land Management re-evaluates the environmental impacts of such activities. The BLM is required to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement for the proposed new oil and gas drilling leases after it reached a settlement agreement on July 31 with the California Department of Justice and several environmental organizations. The settlement agreement arose out of a lawsuit filed by the state and environmental organizations after the BLM found in 2019 that its proposed oil and gas drilling leases for its Bakersfield field office area could go forward. That offices jurisdiction encompasses areas of San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Kern, Kings, Ventura, Tulare, Fresno and Madera counties. The office proposed opening about 400,000 acres of public lands and 1.2 million acres of federal mineral estate to oil and gas leasing. Areas that were proposed to be opened to oil and gas drilling in San Luis Obispo County include within Hearst Ranch, Montana de Oro State Park, above Reservoir Canyon in San Luis Obispo, above Whale Rock Reservoir and around Santa Margarita Lake, Lopez Lake and Lake Nacimiento. The oil and gas drilling activities could include fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, which cracks open rocks with water and chemicals to extract oil or gas. Based on the further environmental analysis required under the settlement agreement, the BLM may amend its management plan that governs where and how oil and gas drilling can occur. The BLM declined to comment regarding the settlement agreement. The settlement agreement only pauses the oil and gas leasing activities outlined by the BLM in its management plan. Other leasing activities including mining, cattle grazing and recreation opportunities can continue. A map of the planning area for Bureau of Land Management Bakersfield Hydraulic Fracturing Supplemental NEPA. State, environmental groups say settlement is necessary climate action Environmental groups and California released statements on Aug. 1 celebrating the settlement. These agreements require federal officials to disclose the harm that fracking does to the air, water and communities of Central California, said Liz Jones, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. For decades this regions people and wildlife have been paying the price of filthy fossil fuel extraction. That has to end, and well do everything possible to make sure these pauses become permanent bans. The groups also indicated their hope that the further environmental analysis could result in a management plan for the Bakersfield field office area with more stringent standards to protect the environment and public health. And the lawsuit and settlement is consistent with Newsom administration efforts to move California away from fossil fuel extraction. The governor last year directed state agencies to ban fracking by 2024 and completely phase out oil drilling by 2045. Fracking is dangerous for our communities, damaging to our environment, and out of step with Californias climate goals, said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who also commented on behalf of Gov. Newsom, the California Air Resources Board, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Water Resources. The Trump Administration recklessly opened Central California up to new oil and gas drilling without considering how fracking can hurt communities by causing polluted groundwater, toxic air emissions, minor earthquakes, climate impacts, and more. In keeping with the Bureau of Land Managements mission to preserve the health of our public lands, it must reassess this Trump-Era mistake. Will BLM find different conclusion from previous environmental reviews? This is the second time the BLM has been required under a settlement agreement to re-evaluate the environmental impacts of its proposed oil and gas leasing. In 2014, the BLM first approved a massive resource management plan for its Bakersfield field office, which outlined how the agency planned to lease and operate the land and mineral estate under its jurisdiction. That plan indicated the availability of the 400,000 acres of public lands and 1.2 million acres of federal mineral estate to oil and gas leasing. The Center for Biological Diversity and Los Padres ForestWatch filed a lawsuit in federal court in 2015 disputing the environmental review for that 2014 plan and alleged it violated the National Environmental Policy Act. The court in 2016 then issued a summary judgment in that case, finding the environmental review at the time failed to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of fracking, according to court documents. So, the BLM was required to conduct a supplemental environmental impact statement. That supplemental environmental impact statement, released in 2019, overall found that the BLMs originally proposed oil and gas leasing could move forward, which the California Department of Justice and environmental groups disputed in their lawsuit filed in January 2020. The settlement agreement requiring the BLM to re-evaluate the environmental impacts of its proposed oil and gas leasing was reached on July 31, and the lawsuit dismissed on Aug. 1. Fracking on Californias public lands in the midst of our climate crisis and drought was always a pretty dubious idea and was straight-up unacceptable without proper environmental review, said Ann Alexander, a senior attorney with Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement on Aug. 1. Its crucial that the BLM takes the time to evaluate what opening up these lands to drilling would look like for local communities, who already live with crippling water shortages and some of the worst air in the country. Jeff Kuyper, executive director of the Los Padres ForestWatch, said hes hopeful the BLM this time will perform a more thorough analysis that relies on the best science and listens to the thousands of Central Coast residents who want to see their neighborhoods, schools and open spaces protected from oil development and fracking. That would be consistent with President Bidens pledge to end federal fossil fuel leasing on public lands, and would underscore the urgency of the climate crisis we are currently facing, he told The Tribune. Two separate judges have faulted the environmental analysis of more drilling and fracking on public lands, so maybe the third time will be the charm. If not, well see them back in court to protect our communities and our climate. The most competitive legislative race in the Wichita area ended Tuesday with the incumbent losing her seat. Cheryl Helmer, a Mulvane Republican who is a controversial figure in Kansas politics, lost her District 79 primary race to challenger Webster T. Roth, a Winfield Republican. Late Wednesday afternoon, the tally stood at 1,908 to 2,223 votes in favor of Webster, a political newcomer who is a substitute teacher and owns Roth Auction Service in Winfield. The breakdown was 46% to 54%. Roth will face off in Novembers general election against Democrat Kris Trimmer, a former Winfield High School teacher who toppled her primary opponent, Cristel Heffron Love, with 80% of the vote. Helmer, who has been in the Kansas House since 2018, said Wednesday by phone that she was saddened by the election results. She has made headlines in recent years for falsely labeling Wichita as a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants, leveling transphobic attacks on the states first openly transgender legislator and co-sponsoring model legislation backed by special interest groups that would require schools and other government buildings to display the religious motto In God We Trust, according to The Eagles news archives. Today is a time of grief and shock. I didnt expect it, Helmer said of her loss, adding that shes leaving behind a lot of unfinished business that includes work on a bill to eliminate taxes for people receiving Social Security and other items aimed at helping seniors and children in foster care. I really, really loved serving the people of my District 79 and working with them, she said. District 79, located south of Wichita in Sumner and Cowley counties, is newly expanded and includes residents from Arkansas City, Belle Plaine, Mayfield, Milton, Mulvane, Oxford, Peck, Rock, Udall and Wellington. Im really sad that it came to an end like this, and I just hope that Webster can figure out whats right and wrong and make the right votes. Helmer, who said she plans to look for other ways to serve the community that may include future runs for public office, attributed her loss to her opponents backing. But Roth said he thinks voters were ready for a change. He said if hes elected in November, he will bring positive momentum and energy to the Statehouse and fulfill his campaign promise of working hard for everybody in the district including large and small businesses, individuals and families. I look forward to serving the people of the 79th District with all my heart, soul and everything in me. Trimmer said Wednesday by phone that Heffron Love was a competent opponent and that she thinks being a longtime teacher in the area plus name recognition from her husband, Ed Trimmer, who previously served in the Legislature, helped her win. Leading up to the general election, she plans to talk to residents and businesses in her district to get a feel for the goals that theyd like to see happen in Topeka. That 80% means I have to work hard to keep that trust, Trimmer said. District 101 primary results The other contested Wichita-area legislative primary race, in District 101, ended with a win for Republican incumbent Joe Seiwert, who easily fended off challenger Jamey Lee Blubaugh with 71% of the vote. Blubaugh, a former mayor of Goddard, resigned from his seat in 2020 just two days before he was arrested and charged with counterfeiting passes to the Sedgwick County Zoos annual Zoobilee charity fundraiser event along with his wife, Elizabeth. Both were granted diversions that resulted in the dismissal of their criminal charges earlier this year. Tuesdays race wasnt the first time Seiwert faced off with Blubaugh. The Pretty Prairie Republican defeated Blubaugh and another candidate in the 2012 Republican primary. Seiwert is expected to be re-elected because he has no Democratic opponent in November. House District 101 covers a small part of southwest Wichita and several small towns in western Sedgwick and eastern Reno counties. Contributing: Chance Swaim of The Wichita Eagle This is a breaking news story. Check back to idahostatesman.com for updates. To sign up for breaking news alerts, click here. A vehicle pursuit that involved multiple police agencies early Sunday left two drivers dead after one vehicle drove into oncoming traffic near Kuna. Ruben Garcia, 34, crashed his vehicle into 28-year-old Jonathan Calderons vehicle head-on at a high rate of speed shortly after midnight on Sunday, according to the Ada County Coroners Office and Ada County Sheriffs Office. The Kuna Police Department was pursuing Garcia, of Rigby, because he was driving fast and erratically, according to an Ada County news release. The collision killed both drivers and occurred near the intersection of East Kuna and North Meridian roads, commonly known as the big curve where Meridian Road transitions into Avalon Street. Law enforcement officers and deputies are expected to balance the safety of the public and themselves against ACSOs duty to apprehend violators, according to the sheriffs office policy manual. The manual also stated that vehicle pursuits expose innocent citizens, law enforcement officers, and fleeing violators to the risk of serious injury or death. Kuna police follow the same policies as the Ada County Sheriffs Office, spokesperson Patrick Orr told the Idaho Statesman. The Ada County Coroners Offices initial report said Garcia, who wasnt wearing a seat belt, was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash. Emergency crews removed Calderon from his vehicle, and he was transported to Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise. But life-saving measures were unsuccessful, and he died in an emergency room less than an hour after the crash, according to the coroners report and police. The Boise resident was wearing a seat belt, and no one else was in the vehicle. The Ada County Coroners Office did not release Calderon or Garcias cause or manner of death. Meridian, Kuna cops chase driver The Meridian Police Department attempted to stop Garcia shortly before midnight after he was driving erratically and didnt have his headlights on near Meridian Road and East Central Drive, according to a news release from the sheriffs office. Garcia took off and began driving at a high rate of speed the wrong way on Main Street, and then went south on Meridian Road toward Kuna, the release said. Meridian police initiated a pursuit but called it off when Garcia crossed Lake Hazel Road into Kunas jurisdiction, authorities said. Meridian police notified Kuna police that Garcia was headed their way. An unidentified Kuna officer was stopped at Columbia Road when Garcias Nissan Altima drove by at a high rate of speed. The officer turned on his emergency lights and began following the car, authorities said. Another unidentified Kuna officer put down spike strips across Meridian Road near the Deer Flat intersection, according to the news release, but Garcia drove around them and kept going south. Garcia shortly after that lost control of his car, drove into oncoming traffic, and hit Calderons pickup truck head-on. The investigation is being handled by Ada Countys Critical Incident Task Force, and the Boise Police Department is the lead agency because of Kuna polices involvement in the collision. Reporter Sally Krutzig contributed. An M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System fires an MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile on South Korea's East Coast, July 5, 2017. US Army/Staff Sgt. Sinthia Rosario North Korea test-launched a flurry of missiles during the first half of 2022. The US and South Korea did a joint missile test in June to show they could respond to "provocations." The joint test reflects South Korea's ongoing efforts to invest and expand its missile arsenal. In June, US and South Korean forces fired eight missiles into the Sea of Japan in a coordinated show of strength. The launches a response to North Korea's firing of eight short-range ballistic missiles into the same waters a day earlier "demonstrated the capability and posture to launch immediate precision strikes on the origins of provocations, even if North Korea launches missiles from various locations," South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said. They were just the latest in a flurry of missile tests around the Korean Peninsula. North Korea has launched over two dozen missiles since January, putting it on pace for what could be "the busiest year of missile-testing in North Korean history," according to Ankit Panda, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The US-South Korean response was a first for new South Korean President Yoon Seok-youl, and reflects the increased importance Seoul is putting on its SRBM arsenal as well as its desire to increase those capabilities after restrictions on them were lifted last year. Launch and response People watch a TV broadcast about a North Korean missile launch in Seoul, June 5, 2022. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images The eight SRBMs that North Korea launched on June 5 represented the most test-launches that Pyongyang has ever conducted in a single day. The missiles, believed to be a combination of KN-23s, KN-24s, and KN-24s, were launched from four locations within a 35-minute period. They traveled between 68 miles and 416 miles and reached altitudes of 15 miles to 55 miles. Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi called the barrage "unprecedented" and said at least one missile flew on an irregular trajectory, possibly indicating that it was designed to evade anti-missile defenses. Previous North Korean launches into the Sea of Japan were seen as messages that US bases across South Korea and as far away as Japan were well within range of Pyongyang's arsenal. A missile is fired during a joint US-South Korean exercise on South Korea's East Coast, June 6, 2022. South Korean Defense Ministry/Dong-A Daily via Getty Images Less than 24 hours after the North Korean tests, US Forces Korea and the South Korean military fired eight MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System ballistic missiles from M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems into the Sea of Japan over a 10-minute period. ATACMS missiles have a maximum range of nearly 200 miles. Firing those missiles rather than something like South Korea's larger, longer-range Hyunmoo SRBMs has led some to believe that the US and South Korea had limited ambitions for their demonstration. "My guess is this was not a very serious show of force," Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation think tank, told Insider. "This was a case where we didn't want to spend a whole lot of money, so we fired a missile that could be called a missile but we didn't choose to fire a missile that was more capable that South Korea certainly has," Bennett said. A developing arsenal A South Korean Hyunmu-2 ballistic missile is fired during an exercise on September 4, 2017. South Korean Defense Ministry via Getty Images South Korea has its own large and advanced arsenal of cruise and short-range ballistic missiles. That arsenal has a central role in two of South Korea's three main strategic defense strategies: the "Kill Chain" and the "Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation." Kill Chain refers to a plan for preemptive strikes on North Korea's missile arsenal, long-range artillery, and nuclear weapons. The KMPR is a decapitation strategy involving precision missile strikes against North Korean leadership. While South Korea has long had cruise missiles with ranges up to almost 1,000 miles, its SRBMs were limited by guidelines put in place by the US and South Korean governments in 1979. South Korea's first sub-launched ballistic missile is test-fired from a submarine in South Korean waters, September 15, 2021. South Korea Defense Ministry via AP The guidelines restricted South Korea's SRBM range to just over 100 miles and limited their payload to 1,100 pounds. As the North Korean threat to South Korea evolved, the guidelines evolved to allow larger, longer-range missiles. The restrictions were scrapped entirely in 2021. Seoul was working hard to introduce new missiles even before the restrictions were lifted. Its newest SRBM, the Hyunmoo-4, can reportedly carry a 4,400-pound warhead up to 500 miles. Last year, South Korea's navy successfully tested the Hyunmoo 4-4 submarine-launched ballistic missile, a variant of the Hyunmoo-2B, which has a range of up to 500 miles. South Korean officials have already said they will make larger missiles with longer ranges, and Seoul's recent success in launching satellites into orbit shows it is likely capable of doing. Increased deterrence North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in front of an ICBM in a photo released by the Korean Central News Agency on March 24, 2022. KCNA via Reuters With the restrictions lifted, South Korea will be able to fire SRBMs from as far away as Busan and Jeju Island, an important capability given the role SRBMs will likely have in targeting hardened bunkers in North Korea as part of the KMPR strategy. With longer-range missiles, Seoul will also be in a better position to deter other threats, the most likely of which comes from China. Though China and South Korea have a close economic relationship, South Korean perceptions of China have rapidly deteriorated, due in large part to Beijing's support for Pyongyang and its aggressive diplomacy toward South Korea. South Korea's Yoon has taken a harder stance on China than his predecessor and has already indicated a preference for less deferential relations with China. Yoon has also advocated more South Korean involvement in the region and around the world. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol. Seong-Joon Cho/Bloomberg/Pool/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images "Yoon is going to be much more careful managing that [relationship with China] in the future and probably wants to have capabilities that will go beyond 800 kilometers and allow South Korea to become a middle power on its way to an upper power," Bennett said. "I think South Koreans very much want that." Recent polls show South Koreans broadly support developing nuclear weapons. The government shows no signs of pursuing them, but more capable SRBMs would allow it to establish its own effective nuclear deterrent more quickly if it decides to do so. "In order to field a nuclear capability meaningfully, they have to have nuclear weapons and a delivery means," Bennet said, adding that Seoul already has the means to deliver nuclear weapons "at least as far as North Korea is concerned." Read the original article on Business Insider South Carolina health inspectors found a host of violations at restaurants across the Midlands in July, from rodents, roaches and flies in storage areas and kitchens to animal blood on floors. The state Department of Health and Environmental Control each month releases grades and inspection reports for food establishments across Lexington and Richland counties. Here are the restaurants that received some of the lowest ratings in July. Dickeys Barbecue Pit on Two Notch Road in Richland Dickeys had an inspection on July 8 and got a C grade. An inspector observed flies, ants and drain flies throughout the restaurant, which had not had a pest control visit. The inspector also observed blood on the floor from meat packages, grease and debris behind equipment and grime on the floor. Water was seen pooling in the prep cooler and heavy carbon buildup on the bread warmer. The restaurant had a required followup inspection on July 15 and got another C grade. A second followup inspection was held on July 22 and the restaurant got an A grade. Express China on Harden Street in Richland Express China had an inspection on July 13 and got a C grade. An inspector observed large amounts of rodent droppings in the dry storage area behind shelves. Also observed was dead roaches and ant activity in the dry storage area on shelves and in the kitchen area. Food was seen being stored inside printed grocery bags. Boxes of food were seen stored directly on the floor in the freezer. Also observed was food products not properly cooled from the previous day. The restaurant had a required followup inspection on July 22 and got another C grade. A second followup inspection has not yet been held. China Hut Ace on Broad River Road in Richland China Hut Ace had an inspection on July 11 and got a C grade. An inspector observed that the restaurant was using garbage and grocery-style bags for direct food storage. The inspector also observed rice not being held at proper temperatures. Boxes of single service items were seen being stored directly on the floor. The restaurant had a required followup inspection on July 19 and got an A grade. Menkoi Ramen on Gervais Street in Richland Menkoi Ramen had an inspection on July 19 and got a C grade. An inspector observed a bucket of covered boiled eggs not cooling properly inside the cooler and a 5-gallon bucket of sauces being stored directly on the floor in the cooler. Also observed was cases of single use articles being stored directly on the floor in the dry storage area and a smaller cooler being used to store egg noodles that was not properly certified. The restaurant had a required followup inspection on July 29 and got an A grade. Sushi and Hibachi to Go on Elmwood Ave. in Richland Sushi and Hibachi had an inspection on July 27 and got a C grade. An inspector observed dead roaches underneath a sink. Also observed was several chemical products like Miracle Grow and fabric softener stored with food and single serve items. Food was seen stored directly on the floor. Cooked chicken and other food products were seen stored inside printed grocery bags. Also, food debris was seen underneath equipment throughout the restaurant. A required followup inspection has not yet been held. El Mariachi on Sunset Blvd. in Lexington El Mariachi had an inspection on July 8 and got a C grade. An inspector observed certain foods not being held at proper temperatures. Also, a container of peppers and a large container of rice were seen not cooling properly. The restaurant had a required followup inspection on July 15 and got an A grade. KJs Market on St. Andrews Road in Lexington KJs Market had an inspection on July 1 and got a C grade. An inspector observed rodent droppings in the back storage area that had not been corrected from a previous inspection. The business then garnered C grades during two followup inspections on July 11 and July 21 for not correcting the rodent problem. Yet another followup inspection was held on July 28 and the business got an A grade. Tacos Locos and Grill on 12 Street in Lexington Tacos Locos had an inspection on July 6 and got a C grade. An inspector observed flies throughout the kitchen and prep areas. Also seen was a bus tub of raw shrimp stored on the floor of the cooler. A bucket with more than 4 inches of queso with a lid was seen not cooling properly. The restaurant had a followup inspection on July 13 and got another C grade. Another inspection was held on July 21 and the restaurant got an A grade. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that Social Security and Medicare should be up for congressional approval each year, instead of staying under their current status as federal entitlement programs. Social Security and Medicare, if you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost, Johnson said in an interview that aired Tuesday on The Regular Joe Show podcast. The Wisconsin senator, who is up for reelection in a highly contested race this fall that will help determine which party holds the majority next year, argued that the mandatory spending status of funding for the federal programs should be switched to discretionary spending so its all evaluated. Our problem in this country is that more than 70 percent of our federal budget, of our federal spending, is all mandatory spending. Its on automatic pilot. It never you just dont do proper oversight. You dont get in there and fix the programs going bankrupt. Its just on automatic pilot, Johnson said. As long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt, he added. He argued that funding for the programs should instead come before Congress for annual approval. A spokesperson for Johnsons office told The Hill in a statement Wednesday that the senator never suggested putting Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block. The Senators point was that without fiscal discipline and oversight typically found with discretionary spending, Congress has allowed the guaranteed benefits for programs like Social Security and Medicare to be threatened. This must be addressed by Congress taking its responsibilities seriously to ensure that seniors dont need to question whether the programs they depend on remain solvent, the spokesperson said. Social Security benefits are available to U.S. retirees, and Medicare health insurance is available to citizens who are over the age of 65 or disabled. American workers taxes fund the programs, with workers paying into the federal programs. In the case of Social Security, benefits are linked in part to ones earnings, which help determine a monthly payment. Democrats quickly pounced on Johnsons remarks, suggesting the majority party thinks they could hurt Johnson in his reelection bid. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that Johnsons comments showed that the programs could be cut by Republicans. Theyre saying the quiet part out loud. MAGA Republicans want to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, Schumer wrote, referring to the Trump campaign slogan Make America Great Again. Johnsons spokesperson pushed back against the majority leader, saying in a statement that Senator Schumer is lying about what Sen. Johnson said. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, said he hopes that a 95-1 vote Wednesday night to expand NATO shows countries around the world that the U.S. Senate has full confidence in Finland and Sweden. The two Nordic countries have recently sought entry into the national intergovernmental organization as a bulwark against Russia, which invaded Ukraine in February. We welcome them readily and we look forward to their accession, and this step in ratifying the treaty is a great step, Tillis said on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, was the only member against the expansion. He was joined by the 18 Republicans in the House, including North Carolinas Madison Cawthorn and Dan Bishop, who voted against the expansion last month. Hawley said the expansion would wear thin the United States security commitments in Europe when it needs to be focused on China. His position drew criticism from opponents and his own party. Tillis traveled in June with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and a group of Senators to Helsinki and Stockholm before attending the NATO Summit in Madrid to show bipartisan support for finding a path forward for Finland and Sweden to join NATO. The countries asked to join following Russian President Vladimir Putins order for his military to invade Ukraine, a war that has continued ever since. Tillis and Shaheen co-chair the Senate NATO Observer Group, which relaunched several years ago as Russias threat against the United States intensified. Tillis said on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon that he came from a family of six siblings, and one of his siblings is not ideologically aligned, but when our family gets threatened, there is no difference between us. Thats what Vladimir Putin saw on Feb. 24, Tillis said. He saw the family of nations in NATO come together like he couldnt have imagined. And he saw two nations, Finland and Sweden, after decades of being non-aligned, saying enough is enough. Tillis said Finland brings to NATO a good ground force and Sweden its Navy. Finland has already invested 2% of its gross domestic product in defense spending, according to Tillis, and he believes Sweden will meet that goal by the end of 2027. He said Finland has ordered 64 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Why is that extraordinary? Tillis said. Finland has about half the population of the state of North Carolina, about five and a half million people. They have on orders 64 Joint Strike Fighters. We have fewer than 200 on full operation here in the United States. If we on a per capita basis were to have as many Joint Strike Fighters as Finland intends to have, we would need more than 4,000. Tillis also spoke about Swedens attributes. He said the countrys industrial base is extraordinary; they have advanced fighter and submarine technology and an industrial base that can mobilize. He added that the industrial base is already developing platforms that are NATO inter-operable. Theyre not going to have to do some sort of NATO 101, Tillis said. Theyre going to get to the work theyre already doing. Wednesdays vote made the United States the 23rd country to sign off on the expansion. President Joe Biden still needs to sign off on the decision to make it official. He is expected to do so quickly. Both countries need all 30 member nations of NATO to sign off on the expansion. JERUSALEM, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Israel plans to invest 23 million shekels (about 6.9 million U.S. dollars) in subsidizing the building of eclectic car charging points across the country, the Israeli Ministry of Energy said on Thursday. The ministry said that 8 million shekels of the fund will be used for subsidizing the installation of 1,600 charging points in private-run parking lots, which is equivalent to reducing 75 percent of the cost. This allows slow regular AC charging points to be installed in parking lots at shopping centers, malls, and other privately-owned properties that are open to the public. Also, 15 million shekels will be used for subsidizing the installation of more than 1,200 rapid or ultra-rapid DC charging points in cities and towns throughout Israel. After days of scorching hot weather, Sacramento is expected to cool back down to average temperatures this weekend, according to forecasts from the National Weather Service. A shifting weather system is expected to bring in cooler temperatures to the capital region, with highs around the mid-90s starting Friday. A high-pressure system located over the desert is predicted to move slightly east and away from Sacramento over the weekend, said Scott Rowe, meteorologist with the weather service. High pressure generally correlates with warmer temperatures, and as it shifts farther east away from us, it will allow us to cool off a little bit, Rowe said. The high isnt expected to break 93 on Saturday and 95 on Sunday for the Sacramento area. High temperatures in the mid 90s brings weather back to normal for this time of year and will likely not warrant any heat advisories. Seasonable temperatures are also expected to last into the middle of next week. Expect seasonable temps through the middle of next week. If you're spending time outside, wear sunscreen and stay hydrated! Chances for afternoon and evening thunderstorms in the Sierra south of Highway 50 continue as well. Local forecast: https://t.co/WjKBsJDVhA #CAwx pic.twitter.com/q2KEd0rvQf NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) August 4, 2022 Rain in higher elevations Over the last few days, isolated thunderstorms have brought some precipitation to Northern California, particularly in areas of higher elevation such as the Sierra Nevada. Thunderstorms in the Sierra region began Wednesday and are predicted to last into Thursday. Reno recently yielded a significant amount of precipitation, with the Reno Airport recording 1.22 inches of rain Wednesday. Isolated showers and thunderstorms have dropped some rain across interior #NorCal the past few days. Here is a look at the 72 hour rain totals. Most of the precipitation fell at the higher elevations. #CAwx pic.twitter.com/VdRpBNS5WV NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) August 2, 2022 Chances for thunderstorms will continue Thursday afternoon and evening around the Sierra, with the highest chances along the east of the crest and south of Interstate 80, according to Rowe. These storms may bring lightning, hail, gusty winds and quick, heavy downpours to the area. Because these thunderstorms are quite moist, they have a lot of moisture with it, Rowe said. Its going to drop pretty quick, heavy amounts of precipitation where they develop. Rowe added that since these storms are wetter than usual, they have less of a chance to spark fires with dry lightning. However, fire starts are possible whenever lightning is involved. What do you want to know about life in Sacramento? Ask our California Utility Team your top-of-mind questions in the module below or email utilityteam@sacbee.com. Campfires, starry night skies and a quiet getaway in the great outdoors. No, youre not camping. Youre in a tiny home resort. The new Smokejumper Tiny Home Resort in Idaho City combines the latest in tiny homes with the history and outdoor activities of one of the states oldest towns. The concept for the resort is tiny luxury, which brings modern features to the homes to create a minimalist space. One of the luxury features is smart glass. With the flip of a switch, guests can turn clear windows to frost, eliminating the need for blinds. The Smokejumper Tiny Home Resort in Idaho City opened in July 2022 and includes seven tech-friendly luxury tiny homes. The Smokejumper Tiny Home Resort in Idaho City opened in July 2022 and includes seven tech-friendly luxury tiny homes. The minimalist concept really does kind of let you focus on more important things in life, versus a 4,000-square-foot house that you think is so great, and then you realize you never go in your living room or dining room, said Tim Hurlbut, co-owner of Smokejumper Tiny Home Resort. It all started with a vacation home in Oregon, which Hurlbut and his girlfriend, Lynn Wong, decided to turn into a vacation rental through Airbnb after realizing how little time they spent there. That was super successful, Hurlbut said. So then we bought a couple more properties weve had four properties on the Oregon Coast that have been extremely successful. What brought the couple to Idaho? An overland RV. When the RV, an EarthRoamer the couple was hoping to buy, ended up costing nearly $700,000, Lynn objected. My girlfriend was just not down for it at all, Hurlbut said. She was like, This is the biggest waste of money please just look at real estate for the same price before we actually buy this EarthRoamer. I didnt actually think wed find anything, so I said yes. Lucky for them, the owner of a mobile home park in Idaho City was looking to sell. We absolutely fell in love with the town of Idaho City, Hurlbut said. We know that its only 45 minutes from Boise, so [we thought], Lets give it a run. The Smokejumper Tiny Home Resort in Idaho City opened in July 2022 and includes seven tech-friendly luxury tiny homes. The Smokejumper Tiny Home Resort in Idaho City opened in July 2022 and includes seven tech-friendly luxury tiny homes. Wong worked on the floor plans and designed the interior of the homes. Hurlbut worked with construction company Drop Structures to build the homes. Each tiny home has 240 square feet and cost about $75,000 to build. Hurlbut and Wong have spent the last year in Idaho and live in one of the seven tiny homes. Now that the resort is completed, theyll be moving out. Were retired, so we just kind of float around through Oregon, California or Idaho, but weve spent Ive spent last year [here] every day, Hurlbut said. The resort opened in July. Each tiny home can accommodate up to four guests on its king-size bed and convertible sofa. The only rooms are the main room and a full bathroom, with the king bed atop the bathroom. Additional amenities include a kitchenette, a full bathroom, a desk and a 5G router. The resort offers two electric vehicle charging hookups for guests with electric cars who wish to explore without range anxiety. An old building that once housed smokejumpers on the property was turned into a community hub where guests can hang out, do laundry and enjoy the resorts coffee bar. Weve made these very productive for people that want to work remotely, Hurlbut said. The Smokejumper Tiny Home Resort in Idaho City opened in July 2022 and includes seven tech-friendly luxury tiny homes. Guests can stay in one of seven tiny homes for $149 per night. Its like camping with all the luxuries, Hurlbut said. Columbus-area law enforcement agencies offered little to no specific details about how theyd handle investigations and possible arrests under Georgias new abortion law. The Ledger-Enquirer sent four questions to law enforcement agencies in the six-county region Chattahoochee, Harris, Marion, Muscogee, Talbot and Taylor. The Muscogee County Sheriffs Office said these cases were not priorities. The Taylor County Sheriffs Office said it would refer cases to the GBI. The Columbus Police Department and the Harris County Sheriffs Office said they would investigate possible violations. The Chattahoochee, Marion and Talbot sheriffs offices did not respond to multiple requests for comments. We are operating in uncharted waters The states heartbeat abortion ban has been in effect for roughly two weeks. And while Georgias legal and medical communities have unanswered questions about the law, the local courts, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies all play a part in its enforcement. Under Georgias law, most abortions are banned once cardiac activity is detected about six weeks into pregnancy. The law includes exceptions for rape and incest so long as the following criteria are both met: Pregnancy has not passed its 20-week mark A police report has been filed The law also allows for abortions if a physician determines that a medical emergency exists or that the pregnancy is medically futile. District Attorney Stacey Jackson previously told the Ledger-Enquirer that his office would address potential violations of the law on a case-by-case basis, leaving the door open for prosecution. Decisions to prosecute, he added, would depend on whether or not law enforcement agencies made arrests and if the cases are referred to his office. That means law enforcement agencies in his six counties Chattahoochee, Harris, Marion, Muscogee, Talbot and Taylor could influence the legal process. Heres what the agencies said about how theyd handle abortion cases: COLUMBUS POLICE DEPARTMENT In a statement, Columbus police spokesperson Sgt. Aaron Evrard said the department would investigate potential violations. The Columbus Police Department will investigate violations of Georgia Law that we are aware of, he said in an email. Criminal charges may be made when and if evidence exists to support those charges as outlined by Georgia law. Columbus Police Chief Freddie Blackmon answers questions about crime in Columbus, Georgia during a recent interview with Ledger-Enquirer reporter Tim Chitwood. 01/26/2022 MUSCOGEE COUNTY SHERIFFS DEPARTMENT Muscogee County Sheriff Greg Countryman told the Ledger-Enquirer in a statement that his office would not dedicate resources to seek out these cases. The offices role in patrolling and investigating criminal cases has increased under Countrymans term. If we had to make an arrest based on the laws of the State of Georgia, we would have to consult with the District Attorney/Solicitor General to see if they are willing to prosecute the case, he said. It would not be wise to utilize manpower in this area, while our focus has been going after members of gangs, and interrupting criminal enterprises. We have made an impact and can see the difference in our community. My focus right now is taking back our county and improving the quality of life for every citizen of Muscogee County. When asked how his department would handle and investigate reports of rape and incest related to abortion cases, Countryman said his office would contact the District Attorney to determine if the office wants to prosecute. This is all new. We are operating in uncharted waters as it relates to this recent court ruling, he said. Presently, our focus is on taking back our community. Muscogee County Sheriff Greg Countryman HARRIS COUNTY SHERIFFS DEPARTMENT Harris County Sheriff Mike Jolley told the Ledger-Enquirer that his office would work any and all reports of criminal activity. The Harris County Sheriffs Office will investigate all violations of criminal law in accordance with (state) law and cases will be referred to the District Attorneys Office and local grand juries, he said in a statement. Priority on this type of investigation will be as high as manpower allows. It will be up to the DAs office to prosecute, he added. TAYLOR COUNTY SHERIFFS DEPARTMENT Taylor County Sheriffs Department spokesperson Kay Carpenter told the L-E that they would refer these cases to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As with all cases, we consider them of the highest priority and we would refer any of this nature to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. As for any investigations and/or arrests which would then, if deemed necessary by the G.B.I., would be turned over to the District Attorney, she said in an email. We really dont know how the law is supposed to work As local law enforcement offered few specific details about how theyd handle these cases, legal experts and medical professionals have said portions of Georgias abortion law remain unclear. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last month that many state agencies didnt have all the guidelines and procedures to grant embryos personhood rights under the new law. Legal experts and doctors have questions about how the abortion restrictions will be carried out in practice. The AJC also reported that DAs could potentially seek a murder charge due to the technical language of Georgias ban. Georgia State University College of Law professor Anthony Kreis told the L-E that the law leaves open questions such as: Will a pregnant person be investigated for a miscarriage? Is law enforcement obligated to investigate rape and incest cases tied to abortions? What does the law empower them to investigate? With the increasing availability of abortion pills, what happens if the first dose is taken out of state when the pregnancy is more than six weeks along, but the second dose is taken while in Georgia? Does local law enforcement investigate? Who is able to make reports of rape, incest and other possible abortion-related violations to law enforcement? How will they decide what to investigate? The uncertainty could create a chilling effect on victims of rape and incest who dont want further intrusion, he said. The first problem is: We dont really know how the law is supposed to work, Kreis said. If lawyers, public policy experts and legislators... arent sure about the actual mechanisms of it, then its also going to be unclear to law enforcement officers what they are supposed to be investigating or not. The extent to which a surveillance state is necessary to enforce all of this is overwhelming, he added. I think were at a very critical period where law enforcement needs to be asked what they think their obligations are... Its a lot of who knows. North Carolina is seeing a significant increase in store checkout errors that result in customers paying more, according to a state agency. Eight stores in Mecklenburg County four Walmarts, three Dollar Generals and one Target were fined a total of $63,505 for price scanning errors, the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Standards Division said Wednesday. It is always a good practice for consumers to check their receipts as well as the price on the shelf to make sure that they are paying the correct amount and alert managers if they are not correct, Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler said in the news release. Other fines in the Charlotte area were issued at two stores in Union County, two stores in Rowan County, one in Iredell County and one in Catawba County. In total, the state fined 61 stores in 32 counties for scanner errors recorded in the second quarter of this year. Earlier this year, several Walmart and Dollar General stores in the Charlotte area were fined a combined $42,165 for overcharges in the first quarter, The Charlotte Observer previously reported. Overcharges in stores State workers conduct periodic, unannounced inspections in retail stores to see if prices on the shelf match prices at the register. Heres what they found in the Charlotte area: Dollar General at 7322 The Plaza, Charlotte has paid $13,745 in fines. An initial inspection in November 2021 found a 40% error rate, where 20 items out of 50 had the wrong price at checkout. Subsequent inspections from December to June found 23.67%, 16.33%, 8% and 8.67% error rates, respectively. The store will be reinspected. Dollar General at 10018 Albemarle Road, Charlotte has paid $15,000 in fines. An initial inspection in November 2021 found a 24% error rate among 50 items. Subsequent inspections from December to April found 20.67%, 20% and 20% error rates, respectively. The store will be reinspected. Dollar General at 6201 South Blvd., Charlotte has paid $3,480 in fines. An initial inspection in April found a 20% error rate among 50 items. A subsequent inspection in June found 12.33% error rate. The store will be reinspected. Target at 9841 Northlake Centre Pkwy., Charlotte has paid $8,540 in fines. An initial inspection in November 2021 found a 6% error rate among 100 items. Subsequent inspections in December 2021 and February found 7% and 6.67% error rates, respectively. The store passed inspection in April. Walmart at 3209 Pineville-Matthews Road, Charlotte has paid $6,185 in fines. An initial inspection in October 2021 found a 12% error rate among 50 items. Subsequent inspections in November 2021 and February found 5.67% and 9.33% error rates, respectively. The store passed inspection in April. Walmart at 7735 North Tryon St., Charlotte has paid $9,785 in fines. An initial inspection in October 2021 found a 7% error rate among 100 items. Subsequent inspections from November to June found 7%, 9.33% and 7% error rates, respectively. The store passed inspection in June. Walmart at 11145 Bryton Town Center Drive, Huntersville has paid $5,000 in fines. An initial inspection in February found a 10% error rate among 100 items. Subsequent inspections in March and May found 13% and 4.67% error rates, respectively. The store will be reinspected. Walmart at 3240 Wilkinson Blvd., Charlotte has paid $1,770 in fines. An initial inspection in February found an 8% error rate among 100 items. A subsequent inspection in March found a 4.33% error rate. The store passed inspection in May. Dollar General at 1304 Conover Blvd. E., Conover has paid $870 in fines. An initial inspection in February found a 12% error rate among 50 items. A subsequent inspection in March found a 2.67% error rate. The store passed inspection in May. Dollar General at 218 East Plaza Drive, Mooresville has paid $1,320 in fines. An initial inspection in April found a 30% error rate among 50 items. A subsequent inspection in May found a 3.67% error rate. The store will be reinspected. Dollar General at 335 North Salisbury Ave., Spencer has paid $5,000 in fines. An initial inspection in March found a 16% error rate among 50 items A subsequent inspection in April found an 18% error rate. The store will be reinspected. Dollar General at 8790 Woodleaf Road, Woodleaf has paid $810 in fines. An initial inspection in March found a 12% error rate among 50 items. A subsequent inspection in April found a 2.33% error rate. The store will be reinspected. Dollar General at 505 Jones St., Marshville has paid $15,000 in fines. An initial inspection in October 2021 found a 20% error rate among 50 items. Subsequent inspections from November to April found 20.67%, 21%, and 12.33% error rates, respectively. The store passed inspection in June. Walmart at 2101 Younts St., Indian Trail has paid $11,745 in fines. An initial inspection in August 2021 found a 4% error rate among 100 items. Subsequent inspections from September to March found 4.67%, 3.33%, 3.33% and 3% error rates, respectively. The store passed inspection in May. Charlotte stores have been fined for overcharging. What to do if it happens to you How inspections work If inspectors are overcharged for more than 2% of items, they talk with the store manager and return later to check prices again, according to the agency. A store is fined if it fails the second inspection, and is reinspected every 60 days until its error rate falls to 2% or below. Additional fines can be issued if a store fails re-inspection, the agency said. What to do if youve been overcharged If you notice an error before you leave the store, bring it up to a cashier, manager or customer service representative. If youve already left the store, you can file a complaint with the Standards Division at 984-236-4750. Three boaters were stranded in an Alaska bay for two days with no way to communicate. When rescuers finally came for them, they were overwhelmed with joy, video shows. The boaters planned to travel from Chevak to Newtok on Wednesday, July 27, but they never made it, the U.S. Coast Guard said. They were reported missing with no way of contacting them. The boaters were reported to not have emergency communication equipment on board, the Coast Guard said in a news release. The Coast Guard and Alaska State Troopers rushed to search for the men. They were spotted on a patch of shore near Hazen Bay, officials said. The Air Station Kodiak aircrew located the boaters who were waving their arms on shore of Hazen Bay Friday evening, the Coast Guard said. Video of the rescue shows the men waving their arms and a flag in the air. Once they realized they were getting rescued, they jumped into the air and sprinted toward the helicopter. This was a great outcome for a search in such challenging visual search conditions, Lt. Cmdr. Lars Anderson, Air Station Kodiak pilot, said in the news release. But thankfully our sensor operators are highly skilled and were able to spot the boaters quite quickly due to the fire they had built. Onlooker dashes into California lake to help rescue drowning woman, video shows Boater who vanished in Pamlico Sound off NC is found ashore, US Coast Guard reports Missing womans remains found months after telling 911 she was stuck in Colorado snow Nearly a week after a suspect was arrested in Missouri, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police say they are awaiting her extradition back to Charlotte related to the shooting death of a 23-year-old man. Jasmine Howard, 25, was arrested in Lees Summit, near Kansas City, after the FBI, U.S. Marshals and other law enforcement agencies became involved in the case, according to a CMPD news release on Thursday. Howard was identified as a suspect, CMPD officials said, after the fatal shooting of Christian Lawrence Siley. He was found dead, shot multiple times, on April 30 on Woodlawn Road near Interstate 77 in southwest Charlotte. Anyone with information about this incident is asked to call 704-432-8477 (TIPS) and speak directly to a Homicide Unit detective. A woman pleaded guilty to stealing $126,900 worth of eyeglass frames from Warby Parker, Georgia officials say. The woman admitted to using the companys Home Try-On program to steal eyeglass frames, according to an Aug. 4 statement from Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr. Between October 28, 2017 and September 18, 2018, the woman opened hundreds of online accounts with Warby Parker using different email addresses to take advantage of the try-on program, the statement says. With each account, the woman used a pre-paid debit card with little to no funds that could not be charged when the sample glasses were not returned, officials said. The free try-on program gives customers the opportunity to order up to five pairs of glasses to try for five days. After the five days, customers are supposed to send back the glasses they tried, with an option to buy a new pair in the style they like that the company will then customize and mail to them, the Warby Parker website says. The woman was convicted on one charge of theft by taking and was sentenced to 10 years. She will serve one year in jail and the remaining nine years on probation, the attorney generals office said. Information for the womans attorney was not immediately available. We are proud to be in the fight against online retail crime in our state, and we will not hesitate to pursue those who engage in this criminal behavior, Carr said. Man stole $854,000 from employer then had his Missouri backyard redone, feds say Burglar returns for his keys after swiping cash at Johnny Donuts office, CA video shows Women rob casino, crash getaway car with guns into Montana elementary school, feds say The army of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Thursday conducted long-range live-fire drills targeting designated areas on the eastern part of the Taiwan Strait and achieved desired results. (The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army/Handout via Xinhua) The army of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Thursday conducted long-range live-fire drills targeting designated areas on the eastern part of the Taiwan Strait and achieved desired results. (The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army/Handout via Xinhua) YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. The Minister of Healthcare of Artsakh Mikayel Hayriyan says that 2 soldiers of the Defense Army were killed and 19 others were wounded in the August 3 Azeri attack. Those wounded suffered the injuries from drone [strikes], Hayriyan told RFE/RLs Armenian service. At this moment we have 19 wounded, and unfortunately two dead [soldiers]. 4 of those wounded are in serious condition, 1 of whom is critical. The others are in mild and moderate condition, the minister said. Some of the troops who were lightly wounded have been transferred to Yerevan for treatment, but the soldier who is in critical condition is being treated at the Republican Medical Center of Artsakh. On August 3, the Azerbaijani military used mortars, grenade-launchers, combat UAVs in attacking a permanent deployment location of an Artsakh military base. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. United States Congresswoman Jackie Speier is calling on Washington to pull all U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan immediately after the latest deadly Azeri attacks in Artsakh. Aliyev will only stop his bloody drone strike campaign against the people of Artsakh if/when the U.S. shows leadership & strength. Pull all U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan immediately until it comes to the negotiating table, Congresswoman Speier tweeted. On August 3, two Artsakh soldiers were killed and around 20 others were wounded when Azerbaijani forces violated the ceasefire and launched an attack on Artsakh military positions. The Azerbaijani military used mortars, grenade-launchers, combat UAVs in attacking a permanent deployment location of an Artsakh military base. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. United States Congressman Frank Pallone is calling on Washington to use every diplomatic tool available to halt Aliyev's dangerous actions following the latest Azerbaijani attacks in Artsakh. This is the latest example of Aliyev threatening the people of Artsakh over absurd demands like the closing of the Lachin corridor. I urge the US State Department and the US Mission to OSCE to condemn these actions and use every diplomatic tool available to halt Aliyev's dangerous actions, Pallone tweeted. On August 3, two Artsakh soldiers were killed and around 20 others were wounded when Azerbaijani forces violated the ceasefire and launched an attack on Artsakh military positions. The Azerbaijani military used mortars, grenade-launchers, combat UAVs in attacking a permanent deployment location of an Artsakh military base. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. At this moment there is no approved plan between Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan on building a new route for traffic through Lachin Corridor, PM Pashinyan said. The PM said that for their pretext of this current escalation Azerbaijan is using the issue of a new route of Lachin Corridor, as if they have completed the construction of a new route of Lachin Corridor and therefore several parts of the current corridor must be transferred under their control. This kind of terming and statements from Azerbaijan are again a gross violation of the 2020 November 9 trilateral statement, and here is why. Point 6 of the trilateral statement says: With agreement of the parties, meaning Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, a plan for the construction of a new route along the Lachin corridor shall be determined within the next three years, providing communication between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, with the subsequent redeployment of Russian peacekeeping troops to protect this route. For the record, at this moment there is no trilateral-format approved plan by Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan and for several times we have offered and continue offering to do it, to approve a plan under a trilateral format. Pay attention that the statement mentions not simply the construction of a new road, but a plan to build it and the redeployment of peacekeeping troops, which is a very difficult and trilateral process. As of this moment, we haven't given consent to any plan, because we havent even been offered any draft plan, although I have to underscore that Armenia has launched the construction of the Kornidzor-Tegh-M12 road, which must supposedly connect with the new route in Lachin corridor. But I repeat, the trilateral statement doesnt simply mention the construction of a new road. As part of the plan, several important issues must be clarified, including the electricity and gas supply to Nagorno Karabakh, security-related issues, Pashinyan said. Pashinyan said that now Azerbaijan is falsely accusing Armenia in trying to avoid the discussion of these issues. This is an absurd statement, because I have announced the abovementioned plan publicly, back during my June 27 online press conference. Furthermore, Azerbaijan resorted to escalations in Nagorno Karabakh during the days when the construction of the Kornidzor-Tegh-M12 road was launched. And before that, a public, competitive tender process was taking place to select a construction company. Azerbaijans escalation in these conditions seeks one goal to eliminate the mechanisms defined by the November 9, 2020 statement, the PM said. Prime Minister Pashinyan said that Azerbaijan considers the trilateral statement to be its victory and today it has the objective to eliminate this statement and avoid the stipulation of the realities enshrined in the statement. Pashinyan announced that Armenia fulfilled all obligations that it assumed under the trilateral statement, whereas Azerbaijan still has to fulfill three of its obligations. First, Azerbaijan has to accept the existence of the entity of Nagorno Karabakh recorded with the signature of the Azerbaijani president himself, it has to respect the existence of the line of contact in Nagorno Karabakh and it must respect the existence of the Lachin Corridor which is the most important institution ensuring Armenias connection with NK, the PM said. If not, then we must include in our agenda the international mechanisms aimed at respecting the signed obligations, so that through the launch of international mechanisms Azerbaijan respects the obligations it assumed under its own signature, the Armenian PM said. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. Armenia is ready to provide the connection of Azerbaijans western regions with Nakhijevan through its territory, but exclusively in accordance with Armenian legislation, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at the Cabinet meeting. Azerbaijan is saying that Armenia has assumed the obligation to provide connection of Azerbaijans western regions with Nakhijevan. We are ready to provide that connection every day; it is Azerbaijan that doesnt take the opportunities we offer. Today we again say, in accordance to the procedures defined by Armenian legislation come and cross the border of the Republic of Armenia, right today. Since last year, we have Armenian customs and border guard service checkpoints in several sections and we told Azerbaijan that at any moment they can cross and establish connection with Nakhijevan in accordance to procedures defined by Armenias legislation, PM Pashinyan said. Speaking about the new roads which are being built, Pashinyan said that the trilateral statement clearly states that this must take place with consent of the parties. We say that we consider the discussion of the routes of these roads to be a secondary issue, the first issue must be the stipulation and launch of legal procedures. Today, I am officially stating: Azerbaijan can cross the border of Armenia in several points and travel towards Nakhijevan. If we interpret it literally, it mentions that we must ensure the connection of Azerbaijans western regions with Nakhijevan. The westernmost region of Azerbaijan is the Gazakh district, we are ready, let them come and cross and go to Nakhijevan, we guarantee the security of that traffic. Furthermore, not only through the Gazakh-Ijevan section, they can do it through the sections of Vardenis, Sisian, Yeraskh and Goris also. During this period Azerbaijan didnt even try to use it. This must take place in accordance with the procedures defined by Armenian legislation, the PM said. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Stanislav Zas has made a statement over the latest provocative actions of Azerbaijan in Nagorno Karabakh. The CSTO Secretariat is concerned by the information about the armed clashes that took place in Nagorno Karabakh and resulted in human casualties. I express my deep condolences to the families and friends of the fallen servicemen. We urge the parties to the conflict to refrain from the use of force and to use only diplomatic methods to overcome their differences, the statement says. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. Azerbaijans another encroachments are a gross violation of the ceasefire achieved in November 2020, which aim at continuing the policy of Armenophobia and causing panic in Artsakh, the parliamentary factions of Artsakh said in a statement released today. Since August 1 the armed forces of Azerbaijan have resorted to provocative military operations in different sections of the Line of Contact between Artsakh and Azerbaijan, as a result of which we have casualties and wounded. The factions of the National Assembly of the Republic of Artsakh call these encroachments of Azerbaijan a gross violation of the ceasefire regime achieved in November 2020, which pursue a goal to continue the anti-Armenian policy and cause panic moods in Artsakh. Azerbaijan is regularly accusing Armenia and Russia of not fulfilling the trilateral agreements of November 9, in case when Azerbaijan itself has not fulfilled almost any point of that statement. This behavior is not something new for us. Azerbaijan has always carried out a policy of ethnic cleansing, forced deportation, consistently violating the vital interests and rights of the citizens of the Republic of Artsakh. The recent incidents, the presence of the victims and wounded once again prove that peaceful co-existence within Azerbaijan is ruled out for Artsakh. Peace is a highest value, however, there couldnt be peace under a threat of force and constant violations of human rights and dignity. During the 44-Day War in 2020 we witnessed the silence of the international community and at that period all crimes committed against the people of Artsakh didnt receive a proper condemnation, and as a result of this Azerbaijan continues expanding the scales of aggressive actions. We call on the parliaments of different countries and all international organizations to grossly condemn the latest actions of Azerbaijan and take practical steps to prevent new crimes. We urge the Russian peacekeepers to take all necessary actions to ensure establishment of stability in the Line of Contact. Bowing before all victims of the Artsakh liberation fight, we once again affirm our peoples right to have a free and independent state as the only guarantee of living safely, the statement says. The statement has been signed by Free Motherland-UCA, Justice, United Motherland, ARF, Democratic Party of Artsakh factions. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. Individuals and organizations from around the world are joining forces to help strengthen and develop Armenia and Artsakh within the framework of Armenians Forward Together Forum 2022, the second All-Armenian Collaboration Forum in Yerevan. The three-day Forum has been organized by volunteers living in the United States, Canada and Armenia whose purpose is to create opportunities for the collaboration of organizations and individuals. People, who want to cooperate, present their ideas and find people, who could help develop ideas not only financially, but also with their knowledge and efforts, have gathered here. There are projects both at a level of an idea and those that are already being implemented, Hripsime Mkrtchyan, Assistant-Professor at the American University of Armenia, researcher at the Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory, said. The Forum aims at gathering people with the same interests and projects in one place, enabling them to talk, know each other, collaborate and create new opportunities. Armine Karapetyan from San Francisco, representing Publicis Groupe, said that the idea of holding this Forum came after the 44-Day Artsakh War. We wanted to invest our strength and knowledge in order to be able to organize something that will help both Armenia and Artsakh, she said. On the first day of the Forum, on August 4th, 19 different organizations and initiatives were presented. In the next two days 14 seminars will be held during which educational, cultural heritage preservation, crisis management, cancer research and other projects will be discussed. The Office of the State Minister of Artsakh, the Office of the High Commissioner for Diaspora Affairs of Armenia, LeranmingMission, RepatArmenia and other organizations have also contributed to the organization of the Forum. Our primary goal was to help children of families displaced from Artsakh who were deprived of education that days. We are now assisting the schools of Syunik [province], we are opening computer laboratories in schools, provide notebooks by which teachers from US are holding online classes, Alina Vehuni, representing California-based Hye Hopes, said during the Forum. The company Hye Hopes has been founded after the 44-Day war unleashed by Azerbaijan against Artsakh. It has already opened laboratories in Kapan, Verishen, Meghri, and will soon open in schools of Sisian and Goris. The company is teaching different subjects, such as robotics, programming, leadership, English. We want to establish cooperation with the organizations that are operating in education sector, she said, commenting on their participation in the Forum. Lea Helene Briffa (2nd R), who won the "Excellent Award," receives an award at the China Cultural Center in Valletta, Malta, on Aug. 3, 2022. Two Maltese teenagers were presented with awards at the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation "Junior Cultural Ambassadors" event in Malta on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Chen Wenxian) VALLETTA, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Two Maltese teenagers were presented with awards at the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation "Junior Cultural Ambassadors" event in Malta on Wednesday. The awards - and the mascot of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games - were presented at the China Cultural Center by Counsellor Peng Yijun from the Chinese Embassy. Fourteen-year-old Amelie Calleja won the title of "Junior Cultural Ambassador," while 13-year-old Lea Helene Briffa won the "Excellent Award." Peng praised the two winners for their excellent performance in this global event, and their efforts to support the Beijing Winter Olympics. Peng encouraged them to continue to learn Chinese, to explore Chinese culture, and promote cultural exchanges and friendship between China and Malta. In their videos created for the event, both Amelie and Lea demonstrated their passion for learning Chinese, and their love for China and its culture. Amelie told Xinhua she was excited to be awarded the title of Junior Cultural Ambassador, which would motivate her to study Chinese and learn more about Chinese culture. She added that she was looking forward to visiting China again. Learning Chinese can enhance Maltese young people's understanding of China and its people, and strengthen the friendship between the two countries, Peng told Xinhua. Activities similar to the Junior Cultural Ambassadors event are helpful in promoting exchanges and mutual understanding between China and Malta, he added. The Junior Cultural Ambassadors event was organized by the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation in collaboration with China cultural centers around the world. Since the launch of the event in June 2021, a total of 209 videos made by teenagers from 32 countries from six continents have been received. The China Cultural Center in Malta and the Malta Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society worked together to promote the event. Amelie Calleja (2nd R), who won the title of "Junior Cultural Ambassador," receives an award at the China Cultural Center in Valletta, Malta, on Aug. 3, 2022. Two Maltese teenagers were presented with awards at the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation "Junior Cultural Ambassadors" event in Malta on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Chen Wenxian) YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan held a meeting with foreign ambassadors on August 4. Mirzoyan drew the attention of the ambassadors to the situation created as a result of Azerbaijans aggressive actions and provocations in Nagorno Karabakh. The FM said that the Azerbaijani Armed Forces by once again violating the November 9, 2020 trilateral statement of the leaders of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan on cessation of hostilities in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict zone launched aggression in the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping troops, which led to 2 soldiers of the Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army being killed and 19 others wounded. The Armenian FM specially emphasized that the Azerbaijani side has officially and overtly assumed the responsibility of the aggression, evidence of which are the statements released by the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry and Foreign Affairs Ministry, and the ceasefire violations recorded by the Russian peacekeeping forces in Nagorno Karabakh. FM Mirzoyan said that before the aggression, the Azeri side submitted a letter to the Russian peacekeeping contingent regarding transferring control of the Lachin Corridor, according to which the Azerbaijani side is planning to change the route which is presently passing through Lachin Corridor, which is a gross violation of the November 9 trilateral statement because point 6 of the statement clearly states that with agreement of the parties, meaning Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, a plan for the construction of a new route along the Lachin corridor shall be determined within the next three years, whereas there is no such plan approved in a trilateral format. FM Mirzoyan underscored that to Armenias efforts for achieving regional stability and peace the Azerbaijani authorities are responding with Armenophobic rhetoric, aggressive statements and undisguised threats of using force. The FM said that Azerbaijans continuous policy to subject Nagorno Karabakh to ethnic cleansing is unacceptable. The Armenian FM also addressed the outstanding humanitarian issues caused by the 44-day war, emphasizing that by violating international humanitarian law Azerbaijan continues to hold Armenian PoWs, including civilians, in captivity. FM Mirzoyan reiterated Armenias stance aimed at the peaceful resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict through the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship mandate the only international format authorized by the UN Security Council. It was also highlighted that the international communitys coordinated and united support is needed for supporting Armenias agenda of reaching peace in the South Caucasus. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. The Russian peacekeeping force in Nagorno-Karabakh recorded 4 cases of ceasefire violations by the Azerbaijani military in its area of responsibility over the past one day, ARMENPRESS reports, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation said. "During the past 24 hours, 4 cases of violation of the ceasefire by the Azerbaijani armed forces were recorded in the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping troops in the regions of Saribaba and Buzdukh Heights, as well in the Martakert region. As a result, 2 representatives of the armed forces of Nagorno-Karabakh were killed and 14 were injured (the Defense Ministry of Artsakh informs about 19 wounded, - ed.)," the message says. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation emphasized that the command of the Russian peacekeepers, in cooperation with the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides, resolved these incidents, there were no violations of the line of contact. The tension in Nagorno-Karabakh started on August 1, when, according to the Artsakh Defense Army, Azerbaijani units resorted to provocation in a number of parts of the northern and northwestern border zone of the Artsakh Republic starting at 09:00 in the morning, trying to cross the contact line. As a result of the Azerbaijani provocation, the serviceman Albert Bakhshiyan was injured. Aggressive actions of the Azerbaijani side continued in the following days. On August 3, around 3:00 p.m., Azerbaijani units launched a new attack in the northwestern direction of the contact line, using attack drones, as a result of which two servicemen of the Artsakh Defense Army were killed, and 14 more servicemen were wounded in various degrees. Probe agency interrogated Kharge for nearly seven hours and he left the Herald House at around 8.30 in the evening NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday resumed its searches at the office of the Young Indian, the holding company of the Congress-owned newspaper National Herald, after senior party leader Mallikarjun Kharge appeared before the agency officials at the Herald House building in New Delhi. Mr Kharge, who is also the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, reached the National Herald building at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg at about 12:45 pm and met the ED officials. It is learnt that the probe agency interrogated Mr Kharge for nearly seven hours and he left the Herald House at around 8.30 in the evening. The federal agency had issued a summons to Mr Kharge for his presence during the raids at YI's office in his capacity as the principal officer of the company. Launching a scathing attack on the Prime Minister, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi said he was "not afraid of Narendra Modi" and will not be "intimidated" by the EDs action in the matter. Mr Gandhi termed these actions an "attempt at intimidation". "We will not be intimidated. We are not afraid of Narendra Modi," he told reporters outside Parliament. "They may do whatever they want. It does not matter." "I will continue to work to protect the country and democracy and maintain harmony in the country. I will continue to do my work whatever they may do," Mr Gandhi said in his first response after ED sealed the Young Indian office. "But we will not be silenced," Mr Gandhi said. "What Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are doing in this country and against democracy, we will stand against it whatever they may do. It does not matter," he added. The Central financial probe agency had on Wednesday temporarily sealed the single-room office of the YI, located on the ground floor of the four-storied Herald House building, to "preserve evidence" as it could not search it during the last two days because it was locked and the authorised representatives were not available. The EDs move came in connection with the National Herald money laundering case and the searches were carried out under the criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to gather additional evidence with regard to the trail of funds. A senior ED officer said that the searches at YI's office, which were on hold, were being carried out to gather any possible evidence in connection with the money laundering matter. The federal agency on Tuesday had launched raids at a dozen locations, including at the Herald House, as part of its ongoing money-laundering probe into the National Herald-AJL-Young Indian deal and the probing team continued its searches till the early hours of Wednesday after they collected some documents, digital data and questioned some staffers too. Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Mr Gandhi, are among the promoters and majority shareholders in Young Indian. Like her son, the Congress president too has a 38 per cent shareholding. The National Herald newspaper is published by Associated Journals Ltd (AJL) and the Young Indian is the holding company. The newspaper office is registered in the name of AJL. US President Joe Biden proclaimed, like his predecessors did after killing high-value militants, that 'now justice has been delivered' Ayman al-Zawahiris elimination in an American drone attack, while lounging on the balcony of his house in Kabul, closes one chapter. US President Joe Biden proclaimed, like his predecessors did after killing high-value militants, that now justice has been delivered. As Al-Qaedas ruling head and former deputy of Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri was long sought by the United States for his role in the 9/11 attack. What does the killing signify in todays context? First, the house where Zawahiri died is in a prime Kabul locality and allegedly provided by the Haqqani family. Sirajuddin Haqqani is Afghanistans interior (home) minister. Bickering has started between the Taliban and the United States over who broke their 2020 Doha agreement. The Afghans allege a drone attack is forbidden under the deal. The US maintains it is the Taliban that reneged on their commitment to deny a free run to militants on territory under their control. Some claim that the Taliban gave sanctuary to Al-Qaedas head on the condition that he would not conduct any operations from his residence. However, recent propaganda videos released by Zawahiri would have been shot from his Kabul residence. Zawahiri, for long, has not had operational control over the globally spread Al-Qaeda networks or affiliates. He was the font which provided inspiration, encouragement and guidance to further the broad objectives of Al-Qaeda. His successor may be a fellow Egyptian, Saif al-Adel. Zawahiris death can cause internal dissensions till the next leader can assert control. How quickly this happens would show whether the terror outfit can continue to exist as a cohesive movement or its affiliates in Africa and elsewhere begin to behave even more independently. Considering that the US managed to get specific information about Zawahiris location indicates either intra-Taliban wrangling or the help of Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence or a rival radical group. Sirajuddin Haqqanis hand in relocating Zawahiri is obvious. An embarrassed Taliban regime may use this to clip the wings of the powerful interior minister, who is seen as an ISI nominee. It is possible that the sidelined moderate Taliban faction is wreaking revenge on the radicals who are holding prize posts. The Egyptian connection is interesting as Zawahiri represented the line of jihadist thinking propounded by Sayed Qutb in his widely-read book Signposts in the Road. It contains material he smuggled out of jail when incarcerated in Egypt in 1954-64, after returning from the US. After release he was rearrested and tried for treason, using material in that book. He was executed in 1966. Dr Zawahiri in his book Knights Under the Prophets Banner recalled Qutbs death as follows: The apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayed Qutbs ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern jihad movement in Egypt. When Zawahiri met Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, the two men had bonded immediately. Osama provided charisma and wealth and Zawahiri the intellectual justification for jihad which he imbibed through Qutbs life and thoughts. Al-Qaeda was a by-product of this union. Thus, the death of the surviving partner earlier this week ends one saga. Will it inspire more youth to sign up or will Al Qaeda decline as a material threat, remaining merely a powerful idea? For India, the danger is existential. During the first spell of Taliban rule in Kabul from 1996 to 2001, training was imparted to Pakistan-based anti-India jihadis. But the Pakistani military handlers ensured that Kashmir and India did not figure high on Al-Qaedas agenda. The reason for this was simple. Pakistan wanted to use terror to blackmail India into accepting Pakistans Kashmir agenda. Occasionally, Pakistan during talks with India would imply or even state that while they were not sponsoring terrorism against India, they could curtail it after a Kashmir settlement was reached. If Al-Qaeda had been allowed to list Kashmir as its core agenda, they would not have allowed Pakistan to modulate the use of terrorism. After Zawahiris killing, Al-Qaeda may converge more closely with the agenda of India-specific groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba or Jaish-e-Mohammed, etc. To deter them, India needs to swiftly restore the political process in Jammu and Kashmir and draw the main players into the political space. Are Western nations at greater danger from Al Qaedas remnants which may want revenge? Advisories have been issued by the United States and all must remain on their guard. India must also remain alert, because of instability and economic distress in Pakistan. That makes it easier for militants to move across to attack India. Pakistans former PM Imran Khan has been rabble-rousing the street with anti-American rhetoric. Under the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), when 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Sajid Mir was detained in Pakistan, the government was scared to make the news public. If Imran Khans success in recent byelections in Pakistans Punjab province show a trend, then he may well win the next Parliament election. He had referred to Osama bin Laden as a martyr. By that logic, Zawahiri would be no less. Generally, the killing of high-value militants only secure a short reprieve for the world. They are often deadlier when gone than alive. The biggest setback to Al-Qaeda was not Osama bin Ladens elimination in 2011 but the democratising Arab Spring of 2010-12, which overthrew dictators running Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. In Syria, the Shia-Sunni divide halted the progress of the wave. It also allowed Al-Qaeda to revive, albeit via assertive new groups like Islamic State. In fact, Zawahiri unsuccessfully tried to stop ISIS from targeting Shias. This illustrates that his successor, lacking his standing as Osamas companion and conscience-keeper, may find sundry jihadi affiliates very difficult to control or keep on message. A political churn in Kabul may be the first consequence as the Haqqani network moves with alacrity to cover up evidence of Zawahiris presence -- dead or alive. They would seek to silence those they calculate betrayed them, whether in Kabul or Islamabad. If moderates can gain supremacy in Kabul, then Zawahiri may in his death benefit the land that sheltered him. Alternatively, the United States may have managed to cultivate sources in the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), that wants to replace Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The next few weeks should reveal how the internal dynamics in Afghanistan plays out. The Opposition said that the amendments have made it more conducive for the government to engage in political vendetta New Delhi: Seventeen Opposition parties and an Independent MP from Rajya Sabha, including the Trinamul Congress and AAP, on Wednesday expressed apprehensions about the long-term implications of the Supreme Court verdict upholding the amendments to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 and called for a review. In a joint statement, the leaders of the Opposition parties said the judgement will strengthen the hands of a government that "indulges in political vendetta" to target its opponents and expressed hope that this "dangerous verdict will be short-lived". The statement said, "We place on record our deep apprehension on the long-term implications of the recent Supreme Court judgment upholding, in entirety, the amendments to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 without examining whether some of these amendments could have been enacted by way of Finance Act." It further added, "We are also very disappointed that the highest judicial authority, invited to give an independent verdict on the lack of checks and balances in the Act, has virtually reproduced arguments given by the executive in support of draconian amendments. We hope that the dangerous verdict will be short-lived and constitutional provisions will prevail soon." The Opposition said that the amendments have made it more conducive for the government to engage in political vendetta. The joint statement alleged that "These far-reaching amendments strengthened the hands of a government, indulging in political vendetta of the worst kind, by using these very amended laws relating to money laundering and investigation agencies, to target its political opponents in a mischievous and malicious manner." Congress leader Jairam Ramesh shared the joint statement on Twitter, saying, "17 Opposition parties, including TMC & AAP, plus one independent Rajya Sabha MP, have signed a joint statement expressing deep apprehensions on long-term implications of the recent Supreme Court judgement upholding amendments to PMLA, 2002 and called for its review." The statement comes a day after the Enforcement Directorate conducted raids on the premises of the National Herald newspaper in the national capital and elsewhere. The Opposition parties added that they hold and will always hold the Supreme Court in the highest respect. The Bill sought to establish a Data Protection Authority in the country for the protection of digital privacy of individuals New Delhi: Government on Wednesday withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2021 from the Lok Sabha after a joint parliamentary committee suggested 81 changes to it. Government will now bring in a new comprehensive bill. The Bill sought to establish a Data Protection Authority in the country for the protection of digital privacy of individuals. Union electronics and information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw moved the motion for the withdrawal of the bill in Lok Sabha. He said, "The Data Protection Bill 2021 as reported by the Joint Committee may be withdrawn." The House adopted the motion. The minister later said that the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was deliberated in great detail by the joint committee of Parliament (JCP) and 81 amendments were proposed and 12 recommendations were made towards a comprehensive legal framework on the digital ecosystem. "Considering the report of the JCP, a comprehensive legal framework is being worked upon. Hence, in the circumstances, it is proposed to withdraw The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 and present a new bill that fits into the comprehensive legal framework," he said. "JCP report on Personal Data protection bill had identified many issues that were relevant but beyond the scope of a modern Digital Privacy law," tweeted minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar. He said that the bill will be soon replaced by a comprehensive framework of global standard laws, including digital privacy laws for contemporary and future challenges. The Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on December 11, 2019 by then Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. However, it had faced stiff resistance from the Opposition parties who alleged that the bill violated fundamental rights of citizens and gave government powers to access personal data of individuals. The Bill was then referred to the joint committee of the Houses for examination and report. The report of the joint committee was presented to the Lok Sabha in December last year. The Bill sought to create a framework for organisational and technical measures in the processing of data, to lay down norms for social media platforms, cross-border transfer, accountability of entities processing data, remedies for unauthorised and harmful processing and to ensure the interest and security of the state. A senior officer of the probe agency alleged its officers were detained by Delhi Police on Wednesday when they were conducting a raid West Bengal police personnel detain three Jharkhand Congress MLAs after a huge amount of cash was found in their vehicle on Saturday, in Howrah district (PTI Photo) Kolkata: The West Bengal CID has claimed that two of its teams in New Delhi and Guwahati were prevented by the local police at the two locations from carrying out investigation in connection with the cash seizure from three Jharkhand MLAs. A senior officer of the probe agency alleged its officers were detained by Delhi Police on Wednesday when they were conducting a raid at a property belonging to an accused, a close associate of the three arrested legislators, in the national capital. Three Congress MLAs from Jharkhand -- Irfan Ansari, Rajesh Kachchap and Naman Bixal Kongari -- were arrested by West Bengal Police after over Rs 49 lakh in cash was seized from a car in which they were travelling. "On Wednesday morning, a team of West Bengal Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers was restrained by Delhi Police from carrying out a search operation at a property of an accused person closely associated with one of the MLAs, despite having a court warrant," the officer told PTI. Four CID officers an inspector, an ASI and two SIs -- were detained and restrained from conducting searches at the accused's residence under South Campus Police Station area in New Delhi in spite of having a court warrant, he said. The Delhi Police, which functions under the central government, later said it had provided all assistance to the CID team before it found certain "legal discrepancies" in the execution of the search warrant. ... Legal opinion was sought which revealed that the warrant is not executable. Hence, the same was conveyed to WB Police," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southwest) Manoj C was quoted as saying in a statement. The West Bengal government has sent a team of three senior officers to the national capital to resolve the matter, an official of the state's Home Department said. On the detention of the police personnel in Assam, the CID officer said talks are underway with authorities in the BJP-ruled northeastern state. Meanwhile, a senior officer of Guwahati Police told PTI that it had extended full cooperation to its counterparts from the neighbouring state in the investigation. "The rumour that we have detained them is completely wrong. In fact, they are moved around in the city in the vehicle provided by us," he said. The Congress, which is a part of the JMM-led government in Jharkhand, has alleged that the BJP was trying to topple the Hemant Soren government by offering Rs 10 crore each and a ministerial berth to the MLAs. The party has also named Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in the alleged conspiracy. The BJP, however, rejected the allegations, claiming that the Congress was trying to hide its own corruption. In mid-July, Jewish graves were destroyed in Haskoy, an Istanbul suburb. Previously, Christian burial sites in Mardin and Van were targeted. Dead Yazidi have been dug up, their bodies repositioned in accordance with Islamic practice. Teens aged 11 and 13 have been involved. An Armenian member of Turkeys parliament bemoans the mindset that filled those children with hatred. Istanbul (AsiaNews) In Turkey, the dead too are victims of abuse and violence, as evinced by the growing number of attacks against non-Muslim burial sites, most notably Christian, Jewish and Yazidi cemeteries. From Mardin to Van, Christians have decried vandalism against their graves, tombstones and the macabre disturbing of bones. But the latest incident involves the Jewish community, further proof of a growing climate of hatred and intolerance towards non-Muslims. The Chief Rabbinate Foundation of Turkey recently reported that the Jewish cemetery in Haskoy, an Istanbul suburb, was targeted on 15 July by extremists. The vandals desecrated 81 graves, some excavated and opened, strewing the area with bones and broken stones. Those responsible for the attack were under 18, acting on orders of a gang of adults. So far police questioned some minors, but few believe that the investigations will shed any light on what happened or bring justice. The fact that the attack on the Jewish cemetery was carried out by children aged between 11 and 13 does not alleviate the situation; it aggravates it. Who and what mentality have filled those children with hatred towards Jews? tweeted, Garo Paylan, an Armenian lawmaker with the opposition Peoples Party (HDP). Christian graves too have been disturbed. In the past two months, the graves of Syriac and Jewish communities in Turkey have been attacked and destroyed, said David Vergili, a prominent Syriac-Assyrian journalist, speaking to the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), a newswire service. The graves and holy places of the Armenian community have also experienced similar attacks before, he added. This kind of action has racist, religious motives and mostly target groups that are not part of the Turkish-Islamic ideology. For many observers, what happened in mid-July at the Jewish cemetery is part of a broader pattern of persecution and violence against minorities, including Christians. On 29 June, the feast of Peter and Paul, person or persons unknown opened a number of graves, some more than a thousand years old, scattering the bones, at an Assyrian cemetery in Yemisli, a village in Midyat district, in the south-eastern province of Mardin, already known for past episodes of intolerance. In the past, Yazidi burial sites have also been attacked. Yazidis bury their dead turned to the sun, i.e., eastward. In some cases, graves were opened, bodies taken out, and turned to point towards Makkah, following Islamic practice. Mainstream Muslims view the Yazidis as a heretical sect who must be punished and reconverted to Islam, which is what happened in Iraq under Islamic State rule. A government source spoke to AsiaNews about these incidents, expressing hope for a quick investigation and arrest of those responsible; however, no progress has been reported so far and the culprits are still at large. The desecration of Christian and Jewish cemeteries is symptomatic of certain loathing, if not outright hatred in Turkish society towards non-Muslim and anyone who does not embrace the ideology of nationalism and Islam favoured by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As long as this current and its extremist fringes are nurtured, attacks on minority cemeteries as well as churches and other places of worship, not to mention property, will continue to be an ongoing occurrence. TEHRAN, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Iran said on Wednesday that it is ready to return its crude oil production to pre-sanctions levels at the earliest possible time. Iranian Petroleum Minister Javad Owji made the remarks on the sidelines of the 31st OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting, which was held via a videoconference, reported the Iranian oil ministry's website. Owji expressed the hope that major Western governments would understand correctly the world's present sensitive and critical circumstances and adopt a logical approach toward ensuring global energy security. He warned that this year's winter is very important for the entire world, Europe in particular, calling on the Europeans to think of solutions in advance. The minister said Iran has frequently highlighted the necessity of de-politicizing the energy sector, stressing that the return of Iran's oil to the world market can help restore balance and calm to the market. He added that Iran has always held that undermining global energy security and intensification of market fluctuations is a zero-sum game for all players. Owji's remarks came as the delegations from the remaining signatories to a 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as well as the U.S. delegation, are currently in the Austrian capital of Vienna for a fresh round of the talks on reviving the agreement. Former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran, which responded by abandoning some of its nuclear commitments under the JCPOA. Eight rounds of talks on restoring the deal have been held in Vienna since April 2021, but have so far failed to reach a breakthrough. The year-long programme will end in August 2023, led by the guidelines set at the 10th World Meeting of families held in Rome in late June. Archbishop Leow will lead the inaugural Mass, on 21 August. The goal is to develop the theme chosen by the pope and study the encyclical Amoris Laetitia in depth. Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNews) The Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur is planning a number of activities to promote and support family life as the foundation of society. The initiative, which will last one year (August 2022-August 2023), is in line with the theme of the 10th World Meeting of Families (WMF) held in late June in Rome centred on Family life: a vocation and a path to holiness. Fr Peter Anthoney, ecclesiastical assistant of the Family Life Commission, told Herald Malaysia that celebrations will begin in the archdiocese with a solemn inaugural Mass in the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist on 21 August. Archbishop Julian Leow will lead the Eucharistic concelebration, marking the official start of the activities that will go on throughout the one year". Guidelines and work will be based on the indications that emerged at the end of the WMF in Rome, paying attention to the many issues affecting family life presented by couples and families. We will use some of the guidelines and input from the sessions to organise events for our local Church here in the archdiocese, Fr Anthoney said. Our aim is to develop the theme chosen by the Pope, taking into account some strong indications emerging from Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), which was very much present for the possible development of family pastoral care, he added. The agenda for 2022-2023 will include revisiting Amoris Laetitia in depth, podcasts on the WMFs main topics, family worship of the Blessed Sacrament, family rosaries and pilgrimages in October 2022 and May 203, outreach to the poor, single parents, disabled, migrants, and Family Day 2023. The Archdioceses Family Life Commission anticipates that more families will benefit from the events, noted Fr Anthoney, who is hopeful that the clergy and the various ministries will provide support and collaboration. Lastly, More information and updates will be provided from time to time. by Vladimir Rozanskij Concerned about the growth of certain religious groups, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, government and Muslim clerical leaders are working together to stop the trend. Officially, there is no persecution. Moscow (AsiaNews) The authorities in Turkmenistans Mary region have begun a campaign against the growth of non-Muslim religions. Local imams have been told to intensify their preaching against proselytising by other movements and groups, however small they may be. As of 1 August, the Mary regional administration and the local branch of the National Security Ministry summoned Muslim clergy and mosque staff at an orientation meeting, Radio Azatlyk correspondents reported. Participants were told how best to support Islam among the population and keep it away from foreign religions. The relationship between state and Islam in Turkmenistan is closer to the Byzantine Orthodox tradition than that of Islamic theocracies in which the clergy dominates the government. In practice, Turkmen mullahs and muezzins are required to attend meetings, run by state officials, sign the minutes, and have pictures taken as proof of their presence. This stems from the concern raised by the recent activism of certain religious groups, most notably the Jehovah's Witnesses. The orientation meetings focused on the various Christian denominations, including Catholics, mostly of Polish or German origin. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate are responsible for the local Catholic mission, which is not involved in any activity targeting Muslims. Fr Andrzei Madej, from Poland, is the superior of the Missio sui juris, and is responsible for religious services, which are performed in Russian, English and Polish, in the chapel of the nunciature (currently vacant). At the meetings in Mary, speakers warned that, if things went on as usual, no Muslim would be left since young people were not interested in religion. The clergys task is to preach more intensely and aggressively, especially to women, to get them to reject revealing clothes and cosmetics, which President Serdar Berdimuhamedow has preached since he took office. Men and boys too must show wisdom and discretion, avoiding wearing shorts even in the hottest of days. The president laments the gradual loss of older, more caring believers, those who could prepare the bodies of the dead for their funeral, a service no longer popular among young people. Muslim clergymen must pay more attention and act more forcefully. They must provide the authorities with intelligence about the involvement of Muslim families in the initiatives of other religious groups and try to convince the "wanderers" to return to Turkmenistans traditional religion. More efforts must be made to get young people to take part at least in the main religious ceremonies and visit mosques and Islamic schools more frequently so that they can seek the consolation of pilgrimage", recite the daily prayers, respect fasts, give alms, and observe all rules. While Turkmenistans public education programmes ban any persecution on religious grounds, pressure is mounting on men to grow a beard and refrain from drinking alcoholic beverages to the point of becoming harassment. The leaders of other religious groups have not complained so far, but, as one anonymous pastor put it, many would like to see Islam not used to feed the cult of personality that is growing around the presidents family. EXPLAINER: What will it take to get Brittney Griner home? Now that WNBA star Brittney Griner has been convicted of drug possession and sentenced to nine years in prison, attention turns to the prospect of a prisoner swap between the United States and Russia that could get her home Email Newsletters Get the best of The Aspen Daily News in your inbox. Our newsletters are free, and you can unsubscribe at any time. A Palestinian border police officer is seen at the Erez crossing point between northern Gaza Strip and Israel, on Aug. 4, 2022.Israel on Thursday deployed attack drones over the Gaza Strip and continued to close major roads in the south amid rising tensions with the Palestinians. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) JERUSALEM, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Israel on Thursday deployed attack drones over the Gaza Strip and continued to close major roads in the south amid rising tensions with the Palestinians. The Israeli Air Force deployed "dozens" of attack drones over Gaza as part of its preparations for locating and intercepting possible rockets or anti-tank fire launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza, the Hebrew-language Ynet news website reported. Chief-of-Staff of the Israeli army Aviv Kochavi toured the area near Gaza in the morning and approved "offensive plans" that might be used in case of an escalation of violence with Gaza militants, Ynet reported. Meanwhile, the closure of major roads in southern Israel continued for the third day for fear of escalation with Gaza. An Israeli military spokesperson said in a statement that the military has been denying civilians' access to the areas near the Palestinian enclave due to "a concrete warning of an attack by the Islamic Jihad in the Gaza border." The Ashkelon Regional Council in southern Israel said the train service has been suspended and farmers were required not to work on the fields near the Gaza fence. Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz held a security consultation in the morning to discuss "the security situation in the south and the steps necessary for continued security in the area." The tensions were sparked by an Israeli raid in the flashpoint Palestinian city of Jenin in the northern West Bank overnight between Monday and Tuesday, during which a 17-year-old boy Palestinian boy was killed, and members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad including the group's political leader Bassem al-Saadi were arrested. A Palestinian border police officer is seen at the Erez crossing point between northern Gaza Strip and Israel, on Aug. 4, 2022. Israel on Thursday deployed attack drones over the Gaza Strip and continued to close major roads in the south amid rising tensions with the Palestinians. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) A Palestinian border police officer is seen at the Erez crossing point between northern Gaza Strip and Israel, on Aug. 4, 2022. Israel on Thursday deployed attack drones over the Gaza Strip and continued to close major roads in the south amid rising tensions with the Palestinians. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) Some of the Impalas produced by the GM brand, however, ended up being exported to Canada, though it goes without saying the U.S. market remained the companys main focus.Enter this super-rare Canadian 1961 Impala convertible.First and foremost, the numbers. The owner of the car explains on Craigslist that this Impala is one of just two that are still known to be alive today. This is because the number of Impala convertibles fitted with the top engine and exported to Canada was rather small in the first place.Its believed only a little over 80 Impala convertibles fitted with the 348 (5.7-liter) V8 made their way to Canada. Worth knowing is that the 348 was the top V8 option on the Canadian Impala, as the 409 offered in the United States wasnt available on export models.As anyone can easily figure out, this Impala comes in very good condition, though its not necessarily a perfect 10. The body looks pretty solid, and theres absolutely no rust damage. Some fixes have already been made, including a new left full quarter.The interior is the one that requires particular attention, especially if what youre interested in is a 61 Impala in tip-top shape. The red interior, however, looks well above the average, so only minor restoration work would be required.Just as expected, this isnt the kind of Impala that you can buy with pocket money. This makes perfect sense, especially when taking into account how rare it is, and theres no doubt its place is in someones collection.The owner is willing to let it go for $65,000, and no other trades are accepted, so if you want to buy the car, you know what you have to do. The conversion is made at the Dacia factory, so customers do not have to worry about making the floor flat themselves, removing the rear seats, installing opaque window film for the cargo area, fitting a mesh bulkhead, a load cover, or even an alarm, as all the above are included in the conversion.Customers will be able to order the Duster Commercial with the company's dual-clutch automatic gearbox, called EDC, but choosing this unit instead of the six-speed manual means that they will not be able to get the car with four-wheel drive. Sadly, the compromise that we described is something that all Dacia Duster customers must face The Dacia Duster Commercial is the most affordable 4x4 LCV in the UK, and the brand describes it as being the best value 4x4 LCV as well. Customers can place an order now, with prices starting at GBP 13,995 (ca. $ 17,018) excluding VAT.Dacia does not sell its Duster Commercial in all the markets that it operates, and many small business owners will have to settle for something else, as there are currently no plans of selling it in North America or entering new markets with it.On a more amusing note, if you take a good look at the photo gallery, you might notice that the 2022 Duster Commercial was photographed in the same spot where the 2021 Duster Commercial was snapped Miraculously, the little bits of gravel on the asphalt, as well as other random elements of scenery have not changed one bit since last year's car was revealed, and the lighting conditions were identical.Somehow, the team managed to get the alloy wheels sitting in the same position if you look at their spokes and compare the old model to the new one.Now, if some people were mean, they might say that the new visual identity was "shopped," but we would not do something like that. Even if it was, as long as the finished product looks the same as it does in the pictures, nobody would mind. kWh Volkswagen is going through a major reorganization, but its plans for the U.S. market remain crystal clear. Although its CEO Scott Keogh has been assigned to reboot the Scout brand, Volkswagen of America continues on the path set by the former CEO. Starting this fall, a revised ID.4 will roll off the production lines in Chattanooga , including a new base trim aimed at price-conscious customers.The new trim named ID.4 Standard was teased last month , but few details were offered aside from the smaller battery capacity. Although rumor had it that the new entry-level ID.4 would have a less powerful motor, were glad to share that this is not the case. The ID.4 Standard has the same 201-horsepower electric motor as the ID.4 Pro, but only a 62-battery, as opposed to the 82-kWh battery of its bigger brother. This combination allows it to travel 208 miles (335 km) on a full charge, whereas the ID.4 Pro can go 275 miles (443 km).While the 201-horsepower motor is good news, this has consequences. Instead of the under $35,000 price we were expecting, the ID.4 Standard retails for $37,495. Hopefully, this will be lowered via the expected Federal tax credit of up to $7,500. If you want more equipment, you can opt for the pimped-up ID.4 S version for $42,495, but at roughly the same price as the ID.4 Pro with the bigger battery; the latter is a safer bet.Volkswagen has promised to bring the Volkswagen ID.4 closer to what the American customers want, and indeed 2023 model year comes with subtle styling updates. Inside, theres a standard 12-inch infotainment system display, while every trim looks more upmarket thanks to better materials. The most American thing is the revised center console, which Volkswagen says was modified specifically for the U.S.-built model. Expect lush equipment throughout and a plethora of driver assistance systems. With just one month left until the summer comes to an end, everybody now hopes to see Coolwalk going live in August as part of the update to version 8.0.In the meantime, however, more information on the progress made by Google on Coolwalk behind closed doors emerges thanks to a post from reddit user ahmadravat Enabled on a rooted device, Coolwalk now seems to be running smoother on smaller screen sizes, with a photo showing precisely how the new experience will be rendered on such a display. Coolwalk was designed from the very beginning to enable users to run multiple apps side-by-side on the same screen, regardless of its size, using dedicated cards.With an approach inspired by the CarPlay dashboard, Coolwalk, therefore, makes it possible to have essential Android Auto apps, including navigation software, music players, and phone calls, on the same screen, even when the display doesnt measure more than 7 inches.At this point, it looks like the navigation bar at the bottom only comes in black, and changing it to a daytime visual style isnt possible. Its not clear if Google plans to add such a setting when Coolwalk is ready for prime time or if the bar will just remain black.And last but not least, it looks like the app support for the card-based UI continues to be very limited, as not all developers have updated their software in preparation for the debut of Coolwalk. In fact, not even Google appears to be in a rush to do this, as Waze, which is currently one of the most popular navigation apps on Android Auto, doesnt come with support for the Coolwalk interface. On paper, the AirTag is a fantastic device. While its not the first GPS tracker out there, the way it works makes it a must-have piece of technology for people who want to track their belongings.With the help of the iPhone network and the Find My integration, the AirTag can be located pretty much wherever it goes, so planting it in cars just in case the worst happens is something that many people are doing these days.New Yorker Stephen Herbert did the same, as he installed an AirTag in this brand-new Honda Metropolitan. The scooter, however, was stolen only three days after the acquisition, but fortunately, the AirTag helped locate it in real-time.After reporting the location of the scooter to the police, Herbert decided to take the matter into his own hands, so he went to Bushwick, precisely where the AirTag was traced. This is when the New Yorker made a second bad call.He decided to confront the thieves, and while one of the people initially seemed to be walking away, he actually returned and attacked Herbert. Long story short, the man ended up with a broken nose, and now he needs surgery to restore the correct shape. Furthermore, he also failed to recover the scooter, as the thieves took it away.It goes without saying that confronting the thieves isnt by any means the right thing to do, especially when the police have already been alerted. In most of the cases weve seen lately, the police officers have promptly responded to locations pinpointed by AirTags, so recovering the stolen goods shouldnt by any means require the victims direct involvement. EV All Tesla cars being built today have the hardware necessary for full self-driving: 8 vision cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, radar, and this custom-designed beast of a Full Self-Driving Computer pic.twitter.com/jYMAhB5Ooc Tesla (@Tesla) April 23, 2019 This is the first case in which a Tesla customer brings up having HW 2.5 in his car. If you dont remember what this involves, Elon Musk announced on April 23, 2019, that all its vehicles made from that point on would have all the necessary hardware to become self-driving. The Tesla CEO announced on the same day that the computer that would give the company its robotaxis was called HW 3.0. In other words, all Tesla vehicles would have that computer. Things did not go as Musk said they would.Several customers around the world got cars made after April 23, 2019, with the HW 2.5 computer. In China, Tesla clients who got the wrong computer threatened to sue the company to get what they were promised. The company quickly apologized because it had also told the government it would install HW 3.0 computers in its cars. That information was included in a document Tesla sent to MEE the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment. Cars made in China must follow all specifications contained in this document.The German customer of our story said his car came with HW 2.5. It is a pity we do not know when it was produced: we only know for sure it was before June 17, 2020. However, he probably mentioned the outdated computer because he expected to have the most recent hardware. Apart from Autopilot, this customer also bought Volles Potenzial fur autonomes Fahren, or full potential for autonomous driving, an equivalent to Full Self-Driving (FSD) Legal Tribune Online said that he asked Tesla for a correction, but it does not mention which repair that was. We suspect it was a request to replace HW 2.5 for the HW 3.0 computer it should have because the Tesla customer criticized the lack of required hardware. According to the lawsuit, the car would change lanes like a drunk novice driver, would not recognize stop signs and traffic lights, and Smart Summon didnt work.In its allegations on the judgment, Teslas lawyers said the vehicle would get the HW 3.0 computer when the full potential for autonomous driving software was available in Germany. That reinforces our belief that the customer tried to get Tesla to give it the right software before suing the company.Teslas attorneys also argued that the car would only last for 250,000 to 300,000 kilometers (155,343 to 186,411 miles). This could either be an attempt to pay less money in an eventual conviction or Teslas first admission of how long it expects its cars to last.As we already discussed here at autoevolution, Hansjorg Eberhard von Gemmingen made his Model S P85+ last 1 million miles (1,609,344 km) so far. Still, he used four different battery packs and nine drive units in his. Considering a battery pack costs around $20,000, he would have spent $80,000 on these components alone if it was not for the warranty.The court did not accept Tesla's arguments. It said Elon Musk claimed Teslas vehicles would last 800,000 km (497,097 mi) and ruled it would have to buy back the car. The EV maker would just be entitled to get a small compensation for the mileage the EV got while this German customer drove it. Tesla can still appeal the decision. Considering the other two cases it lost, it does not seem it will revert it very easily nor will it prevent future lawsuits based on the same arguments. In the summer of 1997, Princess Diana and filmmaker Dodi Al-Fayed vacationed onboard Jonikal , a 64-meter (210-foot) Codecasa yacht owned by Dodis father, the former owner of Harrods in the UK, billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed. Both Diana and Dodi were killed in a car crash in Paris, France, later that summer, and Jonikal became an unwanted asset for Al-Fayed Sr.For years, he tried to sell it but had little success. It would eventually change a few pairs of hands starting with 2014, and got a new name, Sokar. Sokar sold in June 2021 to Bassim Haidar, a telecoms multi-millionaire and an experienced seafarer. He was so enamored with it that he bought it within two weeks of seeing it and taking it out for a sea trial; he renamed it Bash, after his initials.In the year following the sale, Haidar took it on several family vacations and offered it for charter when he wasnt using it. In December 2021, just half a year into ownership, he described as his dream vessel: elegant, sophisticated, fun, adventurous, and capable. Bashs most attractive feature, he said, was its vast array of water toys onboard, its long-range capabilities, and timeless styling.Amid reports that Haidar is looking to upgrade, Bash will be offered for sale in September 2022, as John Wood, director at Seawood Yachts, told Architectural Digest last week. Bash will spend the time until then in the yard being refitted, before being offered for sale for a reported price of $10 million. Wood would not confirm the amount.Aside from the Princess Diana connection , Bash is a boat that easily stands out on its own. Completed in 1990 on an 80s design by naval architect Vincenzo Ruggiero, it boasts nine staterooms and accommodation for up to 18 guests and a crew of 26. Amenities on board include a deck jacuzzi, a helipad, a generous swim platform, formal dining room and saloon, office, bar, and the aforementioned impressive offering of water toys. The interiors are described as reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts style of the early 1900s, so expect lots of brass, copper and bronze unless it too gets upgraded in the refit.With a steel hull and aluminum superstructure, Bash is powered by twin Wartsila engines that take it to a top speed of 20 knots (23 mph / 37 kph). At a cruising speed of 14 knots (16 mph / 26 kph), it has a range of 6,900 nautical miles (7,940 miles / 12,779 km). kW EV Known as the 'truck capital of the U.S.', Texas leads the way in terms of F-150 Lightning deliveries through late July. The state historically has led in gas-powered F-150 sales and has often been not just the best-selling pick-up, but the best-selling vehicle overall.California placed second in Lightning deliveries throughout the same period.The company states that early customers are finding the F-150 Lightning's capabilities suit a variety of needs regardless of the location. They highlight a couple in southern Alaska, Jeff and Tammy Head, owners of both a gas-powered F-150 and now a F-150 Lightning. They use their new electric truck to tow their boat on a three-hour drive from Anchorage to the Kenai River to go salmon fishing.From the time we watched it at the reveal, we knew that we wanted it, Tammy Head said. We had no doubt that this truck will have trademark Ford quality which gave us the confidence to transition to an electric vehicle.And the guy in me likes having the baddest truck on the planet, Jeff Head added.The 400-liter (14 cu/ft) Mega Power Frunk of the Lightning has become the most talked about and photographed feature, with owners commenting about the area to store gear and the ability to power a campsite or charge power tools while driving from the 2.4of Pro Power Onboard plug-in feature.In Texas, Emre Gol has logged over 3,000 miles (4,828 km) in his F-150 Lightning Lariat hauling hundreds of pounds of concrete in the frunk for his kitchen and bathroom remodeling business.He also used his new truck to help a stranded neighbor charge the battery of her electric sedan by connecting through the sedan's charging adapter to provide her with enough charge to reach home safely.The truck is garnering a great deal of attention fromfans. Among early reservation holders, almost 80% stated in a survey that their household's first all-electric vehicle would be the F-150 Lightning.Since its first delivery to a customer in Michigan on May 26th over 4,400 F-150 Lightning pick-ups have been delivered in the U.S. and Canada. RIYADH, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Arabia submitted on Wednesday an official letter requesting to host the 10th Asian Winter Games (AWG). The request was submitted by the Saudi Olympic & Paralympic Committee to the Olympic Council of Asia, the Saudi Press Agency reported. If approved, Saudi Arabia will be the first country in west Asia to host the event since its launch in 1986, after Japan, China, South Korea and Kazakhstan. President of the Committee, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al-Faisal, said that the request to host the AWG affirms the geographical, environmental diversity and natural wealth that the country enjoys. The Executive Office of the Olympic Council of Asia will meet in Cambodia in October before the convening of the General Assembly of the Olympic Council of Asia to review the request. More than 32 Asian countries and regions are expected to take part in the event. While the Nivus/Taigo was based on the Volkswagen Polo, the Fiat Fastback derives from the Argo, a B-segment hatchback with a wheelbase of 2.52 meters (99.2 in). Some people are framing it as the coupe version of the Fiat Pulse , which is not fair: the Fastback has a unique front end and a very different overall look.The car should only reach Brazilian customers in September or October, but it is expected to cost more than the Volkswagen competitor. So far, the Brazilian press said it would be sold solely with a 1-liter turbocharged Firefly engine delivering 130 ps (128 hp) when burning ethanol. A more potent derivative, with the 1.3-liter turbocharged Firefly engine with up to 185 ps (183 hp), will get the Abarth badge.Although the teasers released so far gave us the impression that the Fiat Fastback would be bigger, the stance shows that is not the case: the wheels seem relatively small for the Fastback body. Fiat seems to have taken studio shots and tried to insert the car in an idyllic landscape with the help of Photoshop. It is either that, or the image treatment guys exaggerated a bit trying to make the car look good in the two pictures disclosed so far. We would not exclude renderings.Although the Nivus deserved a ticket to Europe even under a new name the Fiat Fastback has more difficult possibilities to do the same. Being based on the Polo makes it easier for the Taigo to be repaired in the European market. The Fastback uses a Brazilian platform, which is not shared with any car sold in the Old Continent. If it crosses the Atlantic, it will be limited to a few markets, such as the Fiat Strada was once sold in Portugal. Just dont count on that. EV Toyota started 2022 with a promise to flood the market with electric vehicles. Nevertheless, its first attempt to compete with Tesla didnt go well, threatening its entireprogram. The Japanese carmaker had to recall the bZ4X two months after launch because of an unusual problem: the wheel bolts may loosen, causing a wheel to detach. Several cases were reported, and Toyota was able to reproduce the problem.For a carmaker that puts so much stress on reliability, its unexpected to find that its not the novel electric drive system that causes problems but something so trivial as a wheel bolt. According to the carmaker, the wheel bolts may loosen under certain severe driving patterns. And thats not even the real problem, but the fact that Toyota still doesnt have a solution. More than a month after the recall , Toyota sent letters to bZ4X owners urging them not to drive their cars until a fix is available.Toyota offered several options to affected bZ4X owners to make it right by its clients. The Japanese automaker will continue to provide a free-of-charge loaner vehicle. It will also reimburse the fuel costs incurred while operating the loaner instead of their electric vehicle. Additionally, Toyota will provide a $5,000 credit that can be used toward payments of the loan/lease or the purchase price if the car was paid in full.As if that was not enough, the complimentary charging at EVgo charging stations is extended by the end of 2024. The warranty is also extended with the time that the bZ4X is immobilized because of the recall. But wait, theres more. Toyota even offers to buy back the affected vehicles, as the original letter shared on Reddit shows. This is certainly unexpected.Alternatively, if you do not wish to proceed as described above, Toyota will offer to repurchase your vehicle, writes the letter. The terms of the repurchase may vary, depending on your state and particular circumstances.Based on the discussion on the r/bZ4X subreddit, it looks like many, if not most of the affected owners, will take the $5,000 credit and wait for a fix later. They still hope that Toyota will offer to repurchase the crossover if it cannot address its problems in the future. Currently, the offer is for U.S. customers only, which means 258 out of 2,700 affected owners. A very controversial chapter in the multi-million saga of Jeff Bezos new sailing yacht has closed. Y721 from Dutch shipbuilder Oceanco launched earlier this week, under the cover of darkness, to avoid unwanted attention.Word that Amazon founder and billionaire space cowboy Jeff Bezos had commissioned a new megayacht first started making the rounds in the spring of 2021 . That vessel turned out to be in construction with Oceanco, a luxury Dutch shipyard that also delivered the record-breaking Black Pearl, one of the largest sail-assisted superyachts and one of the most technologically advanced vessels in the world.In fact, it was said, Project 721, or Y721, was based on the Black Pearl in that it would use the same sailing technology, but would beat it in terms of size, luxury and performance. Once completed, Y721 will be the largest sailboat in the world and one of the most expensive as well, with a reported price tag of $500 million. That amount doesnt include the matching shadow yacht Neither Amazon nor a spokesperson for Bezos would confirm the fact that Y721 is his, because this kind of splurge is not of the type you want advertised. Nonetheless, it is considered a fact in the industry. The association also led to civil unrest in Rotterdam at the beginning of 2022, when it emerged that, in order to make its way out to sea trials, Oceanco would dismantle a historic bridge to allow it to pass with all three masts on top of the superstructure.Y721 is a three-masted schooner, with each of these masts measuring 70 meters (230 feet) in height. The Koningshaven bridge (also known as De Hef), a former railroad bridge that was the first to be rebuilt after the Nazis bombed the city, only offers a clearance of 40 meters (131 feet). Because Oceanco planned to have the megayacht leave the shipyard assembled, it asked to have a section of the bridge removed , to allow its passage. The request was met with outrage from historians, politicians, and most importantly of all, from Rotterdam residents. The outrage peaked with the politicization of the issue and a call to arms by a resident who organized an event to pelt the vessel with eggs as it passed under the disassembled bridge.In July this year, Oceanco announced that it had dropped its request for the disassembly of De Hef, citing civil unrest and the safety of its own staff for it. In other words, the things that were said made an impact, even if they were never carried through. One month later, it further showed that with a very unusual launch: under the cover of darkness, down a longer and less used route and bypassing De Hef altogether.Hanco Bol of Dutch Yachting is one of the few people to have seen Y721 set out for sea trials , and he tells Der Spiegel that, instead of the usual Noord Nieuwe Maas route, which would have brought the vessel under De Hef, transport company Koninklijke van der Wees chose the twice-as-long route of Noord Oude Maas Nieuwe Maas. Despite the added length, the journey was completed in just three hours, as if there was a rush to get to the destination before daybreak.Y721 was brought out at 1 a.m. and started on its journey two hours later. Choosing the longer, darker and least expected route was intentional, Bol tells the publication. When I was standing on one of the bridges, they shined a searchlight on me, so it wasn't easy for me to take pictures.One of the ships massive masts was seen on a barge, and Bol believes it will set out in the following days, with the others two coming next. Once assembled at the Greenport yard, Y721 will make its way to the North Sea, where it will start sea trials but it wont be able to get back to the shipyard for later adjustments or modifications like other ships, because of the same masts.With this chapter closed, the 127-meter (417-foot) Y721 is still some distance from delivery to the owner. Earlier reports claimed a 2022 delivery date, but its entirely dependent on how sea trials go and whatever obstacles come up along the way. SUV The luxury brand has now announced that it is bringing the Grecale PrimaSerie to North America. Two limited edition versions of its all-new 2023 Grecalewill be available, but unlike other Fuoriserie cars, the PrimaSerie will come to the States with pre-configured colors and features.The first model is the range-topper Grecale Trofeo, which comes dressed in Giallo Corse yellow livery, a paint color exclusive to the Fuoriserie program, complemented by red-gloss brake calipers and black interior with yellow stitching.The cockpit of the supercar will boast 3D carbon trim and custom PrimaSerie headrest stitching featuring the Maserati trident and will come with the Premium Plus Package, comprising heated steering wheel, ventilated front seats, heated back seats, as well as a premium 21-speaker Sonus Faber audio system with 21 speakers.The Trofeo PrimaSerie will be powered by a 523-horsepower (530 ps) Nettuno V6 engine and will also feature 21-inch Crio wheels, cargo rails at the rear, and a cargo area power outlet.The second Maserati Grecale PrimaSerie coming to the U.S. is based on the less powerful Grecale Modena. Unlike the Trofeo, which is offered in a single color option, the limited edition Modena will be available in three colors: Bianco Astro (white) metallic paint, Blu Nobile (blue) tri-coat paint, and Grigio Cangiante (silver) tri-coat paint.The special trident PrimaSerie headrest stitching will be present in all three variants, but the interior and brake caliper colors will differ for each model. The White version will feature a red interior and gloss-red brake calipers, the Blue one will have a black interior and blue brake calipers, while the Silver Modena will flaunt blue brake calipers and a white interior and grigio stitch.All three come with 21-inch Pegaso wheels and will take power from a 325-horsepower (330 ps) mild-hybrid 4-cylinder engine. The Modena PrimaSerie models are also fitted with the Premium Plus Package Maserati plans a production run of just 325 units of the Grecale PrimaSerie for North America, and the cars will be available in dealerships this fall. Theyll also come with a four-year, 50,000-mile (approx. 80,400 km) pre-paid maintenance plan. The German brand noted that the counterfeit products not only hurt its image, but also put people at risk, as the organized crime structures that are believed to be behind this industry make and sell wheels, brake pads, and numerous other components that are vital to a vehicle's safety. Sadly, for those who end up with counterfeit parts, their vehicles will not behave as intended.As Mercedes-Benz discovered after comparing seized counterfeit parts with originals, these components may only deceive the human eye, but do not perform as they should. For example, a set of counterfeit brake pads will increase the stopping distance while also becoming more worn out than a set of original ones in the same test.Counterfeit wheels might crack, chip, or even split into multiple pieces when hitting a pothole or a curb, but the risk with them is that they might do the same even when cornering hard.While in the latter two situations, you might expect an original wheel to suffer damage, in the latter case, you do not expect it to fail, which may lead to an accident because the said wheel failed.The difference between counterfeit parts and original ones is not just in price, but also in quality control, as well as in the materials that are used to make the part. Criminals have no problem skimping on quality control, and the result comes in the form of a part that tries to mimic original packaging, but does not always fit right, not to mention the way it performs under pressure.It is important to note that vehicle manufacturers do not produce brake pads or wheels themselves, but have a supplier do that for them, under their specifications. In other words, a different company makes most of the OE and OEM parts and then puts the specific branding on them.The aftermarket world involves other companies that build the same parts using the same specifications, with approval from a manufacturer to do so, but without the manufacturer branding on them. ounterfeit parts must never be confused with aftermarket parts, as the latter are entirely legal if they are made under the necessary approvals, while the former are never legal since they break the manufacturer's copyright, infringe their brand name and image, and are made without any official approval.In today's world, where you could buy almost anything online, it is easy to get counterfeit parts that are sold as original ones, which is why Mercedes-Benz wants to warn the owners of its vehicles, as well as other consumers, about the risks of these components. Beware of suspicious offers on social media, online platforms, and even local trade fairs.The worst part about counterfeit parts is that they are never sold as they are, but as something they are not, which means that their price might not raise enough red flags to the customer. When you get new car parts, be sure they have their original packaging, seals, and accompanying paperwork. An easy way to spot a fake is to find out if the company ever sold a particular kind of product with its logo on it. According to Merlin Ouboter, they have ordered two Microlino Pioneer Series units. The Microlino co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) confirmed that the electric bubble cars would work as Pumpstations ambassadors on four wheels. With the attention the Microlino will drive in Zurichs streets, any stickers it may carry will get the same exposure.The first one comes in Atlantis Blue, the only option the Pioneer Series offers. The sunroof, wheel caps, special interior, and the medium-range battery pack all come standard. The battery pack allows the Microlino Pioneer Series to run up to 177 kilometers (110 miles). Considering they will receive the second Microlino in September with a different configuration, it will surely be the Pioneer Series in Torino Aluminum.Each Microlino Pioneer Series costs CHF20,990 ($21,887 at the current exchange rate). Being a limited series that will have only 999 units is the main reason for the price tag. After all, it is already collectors' material, and the unit bought by Peclard and Qadir tends to be the most valuable.Those willing to buy the Microlino at lower prices will have to wait for the Urban derivative, promised to arrive by Q2 2023. Right now, the company will seize the interest in the bubble car to push the more expensive versions. Charging lower prices also depends on reaching a higher production scale, which helps costs go down.After deliveries in Switzerland, Germany reservation holders should be the next to get their Microlinos . At this point, the reassuring news is that the first customers already have their electric bubble car. More people should join them soon in other European markets. SUV While for some people the winter months represent a retreat to the den, for others it's a more than perfect time to put a few cars to the test in challenging off-road conditions. The New England winter driving awards were specially designed to choose the cars that best meet the qualities of an off-road, able to cope with conditions while maintaining dynamics and driving pleasure during said months.The most recently announced winner is Stellantis, and not just with one praised car, but with four: the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, Ram 1500, Jeep Grand Cherokee L, and Jeep Wrangler are the proud models that received praise.Launched in 2021, the Grand Wagoneer can't go unnoticed thanks to its elegant and imposing shape, and enough muscle to allow it to tow up to 9,850 pounds (4,468 kg). As for the 510 horsepower coming from the engine, we're told they don't even interrupt the comfort of the passengers.Winning the NEMPA top truck award two years in a row, the RAM 1500 made itself one of the most potent pick-up trucks when it got the supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI and those 12,750 pounds (5,783 kg) of towing capability.The all-new Jeep Grand Cherokee L stood out thanks to the wide-open interior space, offering a third-row capacity and a generous amount of cargo space. It was also recognized for its abundance of safety and security options.In the compact SUV category, the winner was the "old" Jeep Wrangler , which never gets tired of demonstrating its off-road capabilities, now with the first ever electrified Wrangler 4xe, being able to deliver 21 miles (34 km) of all-electric range and 49 miles (79 km) per gallon equivalent. Back in October, a Saildrone Explorer SD 1045 captured valuable footage inside Hurricane Sam, withstanding massive waves (50 ft/115.2 m) and strong winds of over 100 mph (161 kph). The brave drone remained intact and managed to send the first-ever live video footage from inside the eye of the storm. The collected data is very valuable for scientists who can use it to improve forecast models. Saildrone is now once again deploying its ocean drones, both in the Atlantic Ocean and, for the first time, in the Gulf of Mexico to gather more vital information. The USV manufacturer says that seven of its sailing drones were recently deployed with the support of NOAAs Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program. Two of them sailed into the Gulf while the rest of them were deployed into the Tropical Atlantic.With the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicting another challenging hurricane season this year, with up to 21 named storms and up to six major hurricanes, Saildrones USVs are valuable tools that can monitor the conditions that play a role in hurricane intensity changes, as explained by John Cortinas, Director of NOAAs Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML). Cortinas added that these types of real-time observing systems are crucial to better understand the processes that lead to the formation and intensification of hurricanes, helping to reduce their damage. Saildrone s oceanic drones come in three models: Explorer, Voyager, and Surveyor, with the former being the smallest, measuring 23 ft (7 m) in length and the Surveyor, the largest, at 72 ft (22 m) long. The Explorer drones are wind and solar-powered vehicles designed to cope with the harshest conditions.Seven of these Explorers will each operate in a pre-selected area and will transmit in situ meteorological and oceanographic data in real-time, such as air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction, sea surface temperature, wave height, and more. The drones will help NOAA understand hurricane intensification, with the collected data to be provided directly to NOAAs AOML and the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. EV WLTP Tesla flagships Model S and Model X were sidelined to make way for the massive expansion needed for the bestseller Model Y. This is why the redesigned models that launched two years ago faced production problems, with waiting times stretching for more than a year. Following a production shutdown in January 2021, the refreshed Model S was again available from June 2021 and the Model X from October 2021.But ongoing production glitches prevented Tesla from ramping up production of the two flagships to the planned levels. Themaker decided to prioritize the U.S. market, so the Model S and Model X became off limits to the Europeans. The plan was to reopen the order books sometime in the second half of 2022. Now things are looking up, and Tesla is again taking orders for the duo.A PR release from the company states that deliveries for the Model S and Model X will start in Europe from November to December this year. Nevertheless, when accessing the Design Studio, the estimates are pushed to December 2022-February 2023. These work only for the performance-oriented Plaid versions of the two models. The regular version will become available sometime next year.The Model S Plaid and Model X Plaid come with new interiors, powertrains, and chassis. Tesla promises better quality and reduced weight, although American owners might already question the former . Hopefully, Tesla will improve its manufacturing by the time the cars arrive in Europe. After all, we know how picky the Europeans are.The refreshed Plaid models feature three electric motors each, built with carbon-sleeved rotors for a total of 1,020 horsepower. The European specifications mention a 0-100 kph (0-62 mph) time of 2.1 seconds for the Model S Plaid and 2.6 seconds for the Model X Plaid. The estimated range according to the more optimisticstandard is listed at 600 km (373 miles) for the former and 528 km (328 miles) for the latter. As a reference, the EPA range is listed at 348 and 311 miles, respectively.Tesla Model X Plaid prices vary from 140,990 to 145,990 ($143,600 to $149,000), depending on the market. Likewise, Model S Plaid sells for 137,990 141.990. ($140,529 - $144,600). This comes a tad more than what the U.S. customers are paying for the same cars, with the Model X Plaid selling for $138,990 and the Model S Plaid for $135,990. Toyota told everyone they would try to save the manuals. Even if it was a carefully thought-out plan, having this option is a good way of remembering why adding customer-requested thrills to the driving experience can increase sales and buyers satisfaction. The automaker took the right steps and played it smart.Americans waited enough. We can now build the 2023 Toyota Supra Manual by accessing the online configurator . All one must do is enter the zip code and wait for the webpage to load properly. After all the information is displayed, choose the 3.0 or the 3.0 Premium, which has an MSRP of $55,650 which is $3,150 more than the first option. Click on the next step, and youll be met with the transmission variants. And, voila! Here it is the 6-speed Intelligent Manual Transmission. It comes at no extra cost.Youll also see the Toyota Supra A-91 MT. This is a special edition that comes with some cosmetic enhancements and a couple of extras as standard.After selecting the gearbox, the customer can pick one of the available five exterior colors. Next, youll see that the Driver Assist package for the manual gearbox is already selected. It includes various driver assisting software and hardware. The last step is picking some accessories. After this, youre all set to finish the build and request a quote.Our 2023 Toyota Supra Manual ended up costing $58,823 with no dealer markup. Thats thanks to picking the Premium version, the Nitro Yellow Color, the Connectivity Kit, and the Vehicle Protection Package. The delivery fee is also included.If you want to build your own, you must remember that Toyota isnt BMW. Even though the Supra has enough Bavarian-stamped parts underneath, the company isnt trying to trick you into picking lots of options, packages, and stuff that you might not ever need. Thats mostly why theyre prioritizing selling whatever units are already available. Thus, the website will prompt a message thatll ask for your ZIP code.For some Americans, this might bring some problems. Toyota didnt consider that some people would just like to configure their ideal Supra and leave it at that, so you might be stuck with an automatic option if thats all it is available in your region. You can use another ZIP code if you encounter this issue. As we tested it ourselves, it works perfectly fine with a Los Angeles or New York City ZIP code.Moreover, there have been complaints about the configurator not working properly or showing inaccurate information at times. The platform was first enabled almost four days ago, but it was quickly shut down to fix all the bugs. At the time of writing, the configurator for the 2023 Toyota Supra Manual works as intended. China, Cambodia vow to carry forward traditional friendship Xinhua) 08:52, August 04, 2022 Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni (2nd R) meets with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Aug. 3, 2022. (Xinhua/Wu Changwei) PHNOM PENH, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- China and Cambodia pledged on Wednesday to carry forward their traditional friendship and actively build the China-Cambodia community with a shared future. When meeting with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni thanked the Chinese government and its people for their valuable help and assistance to the kingdom's socio-economic development and its fight against COVID-19. Noting that the Cambodia-China relations have reached a historical high, the king said both countries are actively building the China-Cambodia community with a shared future and deepening mutually beneficial cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, which will bring tangible benefits to the two peoples. The Cambodian side fully supports the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative proposed by China, he said, adding that Cambodia will continue its adherence to the one-China policy and stand firmly with China. For his part, Wang said that for more than half a century, China and Cambodia have always respected and trusted each other, treated each other as equals and pursued win-win cooperation, setting a good example for state-to-state relations. The China-Cambodia friendship has not only brought tangible benefits to the people of both countries and become the most valuable asset to each other, but also contributed to international and regional peace and stability, he said. Facts have fully demonstrated that China, as a country that advocates sovereign equality, is a helpful friend and a partner of Cambodia for common development, Wang said, adding that China is willing to continue its traditional friendship and promote the community with a shared future with Cambodia, so as to inject greater vitality into China-Cambodia friendship in the new era. He appreciated Cambodia for its firm adherence to the one-China policy and stressed that any words or deeds that violate the one-China principle are a challenge to international consensus. China speaks highly of late Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk's historic contribution to the cultivation of China-Cambodia friendship, and will work with Cambodia to hold the commemorative events for the 100th anniversary of Sihanouk's birth this year, Wang said. He also pledged that China will continue to provide support and assistance within its capacity for Cambodia's socio-economic development according to Cambodia's needs. Wang is here to attend the ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) foreign ministers' related meetings and he will also pay a visit to Cambodia. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Residents try to topple a weakened wall after a fire at a residential area in Manila, the Philippines, Aug. 3, 2022. Some 500 families lost their homes in the fire, according to local media. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) Residents search for reusable materials from their charred homes after a fire at a residential area in Manila, the Philippines, Aug. 3, 2022. Some 500 families lost their homes in the fire, according to local media. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) A resident searches for reusable materials from charred homes after a fire at a residential area in Manila, the Philippines, Aug. 3, 2022. Some 500 families lost their homes in the fire, according to local media. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) Residents search for reusable materials from their charred homes after a fire at a residential area in Manila, the Philippines, Aug. 3, 2022. Some 500 families lost their homes in the fire, according to local media. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) Residents look at the charred homes after a fire at a residential area in Manila, the Philippines, Aug. 3, 2022. Some 500 families lost their homes in the fire, according to local media. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) Residents search for reusable materials from their charred homes after a fire at a residential area in Manila, the Philippines, Aug. 3, 2022. Some 500 families lost their homes in the fire, according to local media. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali) Because Champlin is a cultured and sophisticated DIY power junkie, he happens to have an old Caterpillar diesel school bus fresh from a certifiable redneck Overlanding trip. During that adventure, the bus's exhaust bottomed out on a rock, fusing it shut. All the more reason to fasten a tow hitch onto the back of the Smokestang and see just how far this remarkable beast of a Mustang can tow a big yellow school bus.With ropes attached at either end, the car proceeds to do a big smokey burnout as it towed the bus along at what can only be described as a gingerly walking pace. A heavy-duty tow truck, it may not be. As a spectacle for all petrolheads to love and adore, it's just about perfect. But that wasn't enough. Westen knew he could tow more with his prized Smokestang.So, off the two went to a California film shoot, complete with a makeup booth and Westen's own trailer. A pretty sweet gig for sure, but the star of the show is the cement truck sitting and waiting to be fastened via straps to the rear end of the Smokestang. When all was said and done, the mighty Mustang spun its wheels and belched black smoke.Slowly but surely, this torque monster of Westen Champlin's creation was trundling the burly cement truck along while Westen and a passenger sat in the cockpit laughing and yelling like it was a religious experience. We love simple content like that around here. No politics, no drama, no toxicity. Just burnouts and clouds of diesel and tire smoke. Formula One has taken its three-week summer holiday, but that doesnt mean the drivers will completely stop thinking about it. And Finnish driver Valtteri Bottas decided to combine his work life with his personal life, taking his girlfriend, Tiffany Cromwell, out on the track to show her what racing feels like. Until now, Tiffany has taken Valtteri on most of her bike rides as she trained, so it was his turn to show her part of his work.The video, posted on Bottas Instagram account, follows their adventures since leaving home. He even chartered a helicopter, so the whole ordeal would be even more glamorous. Not long after, they arrived at the Alastaro Circuit, situated in Loimaa, Finland. The track is 2.7 km (1.7 mi) long, enough to give Tiffany a taste of the fast life.When they arrived, Tiffany embarked on a high-level intensive car driving course, with none other than Bottas as her instructor. He captioned the video need for speed. On her Instagram Stories, Tiffany wrote that shes finally getting a small taste of Valterri Bottas work.Tiffany was in full racing gear, and we couldnt help but notice the fact that she sported Bottas number and initials, of course.Finally, she was allowed to get into a car, trying out several, starting with a series production convertible just to get the feel of the track. But her graduation test was a real racing car, a model that former Finnish World Champion Nico Rosberg raced when he was at Williams. She seemed to handle the speed pretty well, and even got a Williams FW29 driving diploma at the end of her training.Since both of them love adrenaline, this sounds like a perfect date. He should be careful, though, otherwise Alpine might announce Tiffany as their driver next season! Its still going to take several more years, but ZeroAvia is on track to deliver the first version of its hydrogen-electric powertrain, the ZA600, capable of powering aircraft with up to 19 seats for a 300-nautical mile (345 miles/555 km) range. The company has already signed multiple agreements with important names in the industry, including Otto Aviation, MONTE, Shell, and Edmonton International Airports.The latest to join this list happens to be the largest airline in the world, American Airlines. American announced not just an investment in ZeroAvia, but also the signing of an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) for the purchase of up to 100 hydrogen-electric motors.It seems that the version that was selected by the American airline company is the ZA2000-RJ powertrain with a 2 to 5 MW range. This green powertrain would be integrated into regional jets. Aircraft equipped with the ZA2000-RJ could start operating by the end of this decade.At the moment, ZeroAvia is focusing on the certification process for its ZA600 powertrain, with a range of up to 300 miles (483 km). Two Dornier 228 aircraft were retrofitted with the ZA600 and will conduct test flights in the UK and in California. This hydrogen-electric powertrain was developed as part of the HyFlyer II project , which is partially funded by the British government. Deliveries are expected to begin in 2024.On the other hand, American is also committed to achieving the climate targets by 2050. The future integration of these hydrogen-electric powertrains is just one of the steps its taking in that direction, in addition to purchasing and using SAF (sustainable aviation fuel). GAZA, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday that the threats of Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz against the Gaza Strip are not accepted, amid rising tensions after Israeli soldiers arrested an Islamic Jihad leader. Haniyeh made the remarks during a phone conversation with Tor Wennesland, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, according to a statement issued by Haniyeh's office in Gaza. "The threats of the Israeli leaders, especially Benny Gantz, are unacceptable," Haniyeh said. Bassam al-Saadi, a prominent leader of Islamic Jihad movement, another faction in the Gaza Strip committed to violently resisting Israel, was arrested by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank early this week. Since then Israeli forces have been on high alert near the Gaza Strip for fear of retaliation. After al-Saadi was detained, Gantz threatened to use force against the Gaza Strip to bring life back to normal in the Israeli towns in the vicinity of the coastal enclave. The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007 and is currently ruled by Hamas. "If it is not possible to return to the routine of normal life in the Gaza Strip's vicinity, there will be no normal life inside the Gaza Strip either," he told Israel Radio. Haniyeh called on the United Nations to "constrain the Israeli occupation and prevent it from harming the Palestinian people," adding that the UN "has a major role in this context." Beaumont and 24 other Texas cities on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Disney, Hulu and Netflix for allegedly not paying millions of dollars in franchise fees. The lawsuit, which was filed in Dallas County, alleges that the streaming services have not paid the cities annual franchise fees, according to a city of Beaumont news release. The fees are required by the Texas Public Utility Regulatory Act and are used to fund city services, including fire departments, libraries and road repairs. Under the act, if a streaming service is delivered using utility poles over streets, sidewalks or beneath roads, among other delivery methods, the providers are required to pay the Texas municipality a 5% franchise fee. "With this lawsuit, we hope to ensure streaming video companies compliance with their PURA obligations moving forward and also recoup unpaid franchise fees from the Disney, Hulu, and Netflix streaming services as follow-on relief, Beaumont City Attorney Sharae Reed said in the news release. Franchise fees are an important source of city revenue. If streaming companies refuse to pay these fees, the city has to cut services or seek alternate sources of revenue. We have an obligation to our residents to ensure that these companies comply with state law and pay what is owed to the city. RELATED: Beaumont poised to sue Netflix, Hulu, and Disney In the suit, Beaumont is seeking reimbursement for unpaid annual franchise fees and interest since Disney, Hulu and Netflix began streaming from their platforms in Texas in 2007, 2011 and 2019, respectively. Dallas-based McKool Smith is co-counsel on the lawsuit with Austin-based Ashcroft Sutton Reyes and St. Louis-based Korein Tillery. McKool Smith principal Steven Wolens is one of the lawyers representing the cities in the case. Disney, Hulu and Netflix have long withheld statutorily required payments to cities throughout Texas, depriving them of fees that help fund essential city services, Wolens said in the news release. This case was filed on behalf of our municipal clients to ensure future compliance with PURA and recoup significant fees owed by some of the nations largest streaming services. The other Texas cities involved in lawsuit are Abilene, Allen, Amarillo, Arlington, Austin, Carrollton, Dallas, Denton, Frisco, Fort Worth, Garland, Grand Prairie, Houston, Irving, Lewisville, McKinney, Mesquite, Nacogdoches, Pearland, Plano, Rowlett, Sugar Land, Tyler and Waco. The news release states that additional cities are expected to join in the lawsuit. The Orange County Sheriff's Office needs help in a stolen property investigation. Criminal Investigation Division detectives arrived at a Vidor property July 29 after a tip came in indicating there was a possibly stolen all-terrain vehicle at the location. After searching the property, detectives did not locate the ATV, but did locate a Kubota skid steer, parked in such a way officials believed the individual was attempting to hide its location. The skid steer's vehicle identification number plates had been removed and ground off and. The vehicle was later impounded by the sheriff's office for identification tampering. RELATED: Watch: COVID-recovered corporal gives Orange County sheriff a 'big ol' kiss' The Southeast Texas Auto Theft Taskforce was then called to assist in identifying the vehicle and found the skid steer was stolen out of Jefferson County. The investigation is ongoing and no arrests have been made. The Orange County Sheriff's Office encourages the community to report any suspicious activity. To contact the Orange County Sheriff's Office, call their Orange location at 409-883-2612 or Vidor location at 409-769-6391. olivia.malick@hearst.com twitter.com/OliviaMalick Inside Hook Greenland sharks are the longest living vertebrates in the world, capable of living up to 400 years. To put that in perspective, according to National Geographic, There could be an individual in the ocean today that was alive during the 1665 Great Plague of London and George Washingtons presidential inauguration in 1789. Yet, despite their longevity, Greenland sharks are also extremely rare. At least, sightings by humans are extremely rare. Thats due largely to the deep, Arctic waters theyve been known to inhabit (which humans typically do not). Were talking 7,200 feet deep, and between 28.4 to 44.6 degree Fahrenheit waters. That said, this past spring, scientists were able to get up close and personal with a Greenland shark. The kicker? It was in the western Caribbean, off the coast of Belize. Its no fun living through the most brutal summer Texas has seen in years. Record heat combined with lingering drought have baked the landscape and turned most of the state Texas into a tinderbox eerily similar to 2011. Several homes and thousands of acres of land have already gone up in smoke. Many streams, springs, ponds and water wells are showing signs of stress. A few have dried up completely. The good news is many lakes in east and north Texas are still in pretty decent shape compared other parts of the state. A quick visit to www.waterdatafortexas.org tells the story. In eastern Texas, lakes Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend are about 86 percent of full capacity; Athens, 93.7 percent; Nacogdoches, 88 percent; Conroe, 94 percent; Livingston, 93.8 percent; Lake O the Pines, 86.2 percent; Murvaul, 93.4 percent; Somerville, 84.4 percent; Cooper, 77.6 percent, Texoma, 99.2 percent; Ray Roberts, 97.2 percent; Palestine, 90.9 percent, Richland Chambers, 85.4 percent; Tawakoni, 87.3 percent. Lake Fork is at the lowest level (6.94 feet low) of all East Texas reservoirs, mainly due to a winter draw down performed last December so the Sabine River Authority could make repairs to the dam. The above water repairs were completed last spring, but limited rainfall have kept lake well below full pool. Its an altogether different picture out west and down south, where drought conditions and water usage demands are more intense. Lake Falcon, a 84,000-acre Rio Grande reservoir that divides Texas from Mexico, is nearing a historic low. The lake has shrunk to 11.8 percent of its full capacity due to irrigation demands and a deepening drought that has been ongoing for years. The lake has not been at full capacity since 2011. Lake Amistad near Del Rio is another Rio Grande reservoir starving for water. Amistad is about 33 percent full or 62.17 feet below conservation pool. Like Falcon, Amistad hasnt been at full capacity since 2011. The list of West Texas and Hill Country reservoirs and rivers hard hit by prolonged drought goes on and on. Lake O.C. Fisher near San Angelo is only 4.1 percent full, while Lake Medina near Bandera is 11 percent full. Lake Travis near Austin is almost 34 feet low while Choke Canyon is about 22 feet low. Portions of the Guadalupe and Frio rivers popular with tubers and swimmers have transitioned from zero flow to no water at all. Bleak as it sounds, there are huge benefits to low water where fisheries are concerned. To wit: New Lake Effect Extended periods of drought can be boon for habitat, because it allows weeds and native terrestrial vegetation like willows, salt cedars, buck brush and mesquites to sprout on the dry lake bed. The longer the water stays low, the thicker and more widespread the new growth will become. When water levels rise, all that new growth terrestrial vegetation is flooded and begins to decay. This pumps in rich nutrients that act as liquid fertilizer to promote a boom in plankton and aquatic vegetation growth. The process benefits everything from forage fish populations to predators like bass, catfish and crappie. The jungle of flooded cover also provides young game fish and forage good places to hide from predators. This usually results in extremely high recruitment among one or more year classes of fish and ultimately leads to banner fishing several years down the road as those fish mature. Fisheries biologists sometimes refer to the phenomenon as "trophic upsurge" or the "new lake effect." Let There Be Light Low water and drought usually mean clear water, because there is limited inflow from creeks and rivers to stir things up. This can spur the spread of aquatic vegetation like hydrilla on lakes where the plant is already established. Hydrilla is beneficial to fisheries because of the high-quality habitat it provides. Bass and other predators bass patrol grass edges and use it to ambush bait fish that swim dangerously close. The plant can grow at depths beyond 20 feet in the right conditions. Clear water optimizes the sunlight penetration hydrilla needs to take root and spread. As water levels drop, sunlight reaches areas that were previously too deep to penetrate. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department fisheries biologist Todd Driscoll says this is essentially what is happening on lakes Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend right now. Smaller Playing Field Low water naturally reduces the size of the playing field and confines the fish to a smaller area. With less room to roam, fish are easier to find than in a high water situation that allows them to scatter in a jungle of shore cover. Additionally, low water may expose humps, ridges, isolated stumps and other potential sweet spots that can be marked on GPS for future reference. It also may bring submerged vegetation close enough to the surface that grass or stump-lined channels or are clearly visible to the naked eye. This takes the guesswork out of following contour lines and helps anglers pinpoint grass points, guts and other potential sweet spots to toss their lures. Beating the Heat: Dressing for the Occasion Perhaps the best way to beat this torrid summer heat is to stay inside and wait for cooler weather. Those who dont mind fishing in hot weather should be smart about it and dress for the occasion to protect your skin from the suns harmful rays. Continued overexposure the sun can lead to premature aging or cause skin cancer or short and long term eye damage that can affect your vision. Its always best to protect your body from head to toe before spending a day or a few hours in the sun. Eye Protection Our eyes are among the most valuable tools we have. It make no sense not to give them some love. Sunglasses will help protect your eyes from stray bullet weights and other projectiles. Good ones will filter out damaging ultraviolet radiation and eliminate glare off the water so you can better depict fish and underwater targets from a considerable distance. Steer clear of the convenience store cheap ones and buy the very best polarized sunglasses you can afford. Costa Del Mar is among the industry leaders. Costas feature all sorts of advanced lens technologies intended to enhance colors and manage light while providing superior clarity, comfort, durability and scratch resistance with assorted frame styles designed for everyday wear to high performance situations. When choosing sunglasses look something lightweight that fits comfortably around the nose, temples and ears with limited slippage. Glasses that feel awkward the moment you slip them on are almost certain to become increasingly uncomfortable over the course of the day. I own several pair. My favorite frames are the Costa Corbina with the 580G lens in blue or sunshine silver mirror lens. Glass lenses are very resistant to scratching. The tradeoff is they are little heavier than polycarbonate. costadelmar.com. Covering Up There was a time when an anglers badges of honor were raccoon eyes and a dark tan left behind after several days spent on the water, usually with little or no protection from sun exposure. With heightened awareness about the dangers of skin cancer, many are playing it smarter these days by covering up with high performance fishing apparel. Companies like Costa, AFTCO, Huk and Columbia offer gaiters (protects the face, neck and ears), shirts, hoodies and gloves made from high-tech, durable materials designed to wick moisture, block out the sun and help keep you cool without restriction. Performance apparel is a great alternative to using messy sunscreens. Costa introduced its Voyage Performance Hoodie last spring. Fashioned from comfortable polyester/spandex, the three-piece design features a roomy hood, vented mesh under the arms and thumb holes to keep the UPF 50 fabric pulled over the tops the hands without restricting your fingers. It sells for $60. Staying Well-Heeled Standing on a boat deck all day can put a significant amount of strain on your feet, ankles and lower legs in an environment where things are prone to get wet. If youre looking for a summer fishing shoe that sheds water, is easy to get in and out of, looks good and provides tons of stability where its needed, you might want to check out the Revive by Kane Footwear. Kane is marketing the Revive as recovery shoes for all sorts of athletes. They may be just what the doctor ordered for anglers in search of a more supportive alternative to flip-flops and other slip-ons popular in fishing circles. My Revives arrived a few weeks ago and Im really liking the ergonomics of a platform designed to optimize foot support from heel-to-toe, especially around the arches. They fit almost like high quality running shoes, minus the laces and tongue. Fashioned from proprietary EVA foam made from sugarcane byproducts, the lightweight shoes feature perforated uppers that allow water to escape and cushiony soles injected with BounceBack foam that springs back with every step. The textured soles provide decent traction on wet surfaces while the raised footbed nodes massage the bottoms of your feet while active. The shoes come in several fashionable colors and unisex sizes. They sell for $70-$85, depending on color/collection. kanefootwear.com. Hydration a Must Your body depends heavily on water to survive. Water escapes through perspiration, urination and bowel movements. Water lost over the course of the day must be replenished. Otherwise, the body will dehydrate. Fishing might not seem like strenuous sport, but it can be. Especially when making hundreds of casts in a days time. Keep plenty of water handy. More importantly, drink it periodically, even if you aren't thirsty. It's always a good idea to make sure your body is well hydrated before exercising or going outdoors on a hot day. And hot is the norm this summer. BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Bi-khim Hsiao, who spared no effort in promoting the visit of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to China's Taiwan region, will face reckoning of history, said a Chinese mainland spokesperson on Thursday. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said that Hsiao has been frequently disseminating remarks on seeking "Taiwan independence" and soliciting U.S. political personages for visiting Taiwan with all her might. Hsiao has been blatantly advocating Taiwan's arms purchases from the United States, and abetting the creation of negative bills regarding Taiwan, Ma said. Ma noted that Hsiao's actions pose brazen provocation to the one-China principle, severely damage cross-Strait relationships, and further aggravate the tensions across the Taiwan Strait. In seeking personal political interests, Hsiao degrades herself to be a pawn of external anti-China forces, undermines the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation, and pushes Taiwan compatriots into an abyss of danger, Ma emphasized. He warned that anyone who betrays national interests and engages in "Taiwan independence" secessionist activities will come to no good end and face reckoning of history. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ratcheted up its criticism of member state Myanmars junta on Wednesday, as Russias top diplomat visited Naypyidaw despite international outrage of the regimes execution of four prominent democracy activists. In a speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the 55th ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose nation holds the rotating chairmanship of the bloc, acknowledged that no progress has been made on Myanmars political crisis, despite junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaings pledge in April 2021 to end violence. Hun Sen said that if the junta continues to execute its political opponents he would be forced to reconsider ASEANs role in mediating Myanmars conflict. The situation is now very volatile with the execution of the four opposition activists, and can be said to be worse than before the Five-Point Consensus (5PC), he said, referring to the agreement Min Aung Hlaing made with ASEAN in April 2021 during an emergency meeting on the situation in Myanmar. ASEAN is deeply shocked and horrified by the execution of these opposition activists. ASEANs 5PC called for an end to violence, constructive dialogue among all parties, the mediation of such talks by a special ASEAN envoy, the provision of ASEAN-coordinated humanitarian assistance and a visit to Myanmar by an ASEAN delegation to meet with all parties. Even Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged that the junta had failed to hold up its end of the bargain on the consensus in a televised speech on Monday in which he announced that the junta was extending by six months the state of emergency it declared following its Feb. 1, 2021 coup. He blamed the coronavirus pandemic and political instability for the failure and said he will implement what we can from the 5PC this year, provided it does not jeopardize the countrys sovereignty. Frustration with the junta boiled over last week after it put to death veteran democracy activist Ko Jimmy and former opposition lawmaker Phyo Zeya Thaw, as well as activists Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, despite a direct appeal from Hun Sen to Min Aung Hlaing. The executions prompted protests in Myanmar and condemnation abroad, including from outspoken ASEAN member-state Malaysia, which said no Myanmar military regime representative should be allowed at any meeting of the bloc, including this weeks gathering of foreign ministers from ASEAN countries and nearly 40 ASEAN partner nations. Wednesdays comments sounded a different tune for Hun Sen, who, on assuming the ASEAN leadership earlier this year, predicted that he would use his skill as a negotiator to resolve the situation in Myanmar. Hun Sens decision in January to become the first foreign leader to visit Myanmar following the coup was widely panned by the international community as conferring legitimacy on the junta and he has since remained relatively quiet while the crisis has worsened. Call for stronger measures Speaking to Radio Free Asia (RFA), an online affiliate of BenarNews, observers said ASEAN stakeholders should not remain silent on the junta and suggested that the bloc call on the United Nations to intervene in Myanmar if it is unable to resolve the crisis on its own. Cambodian political analyst Em Sovannara said that refusing the junta a seat at the table for ASEAN gatherings does not go far enough. For example, the ASEAN chair should start talking to Myanmars [shadow] National Unity Government (NUG), not the military government, he said. Similarly, Soeung Senkaruna, spokesman for the Cambodian rights group Adhoc, said ASEAN should review its 5PC and, if unable to resolve the crisis, seek assistance from the United Nations. There should be strong measures in place to punish the abuse and killing of innocent people, he said. We think that with no such measures, Myanmars dictatorial leaders will continue to persecute their opponents in any way they see fit. Attempts by RFA to reach Cambodian Foreign Ministry spokesman Chum Sontory for comment on the situation in Myanmar went unanswered on Wednesday. Vehicles wait at a filling station in Yangon, April 19, 2022. [AP] Russian visit While many Western governments have sought to punish Myanmars junta for killing what rights groups said are at least 2,148 civilians over the past 18 months, Russia has continued to support the regime both diplomatically and militarily. Moscow reiterated that support on Wednesday when, ahead of attending the ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in Phnom Penh, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Naypyidaw and met with Min Aung Hlaing and junta Minister of Foreign Affairs Wunna Maung Lwin. Details of the meetings were not released, but in a post on Twitter Russias foreign ministry cited Lavrov as saying that Moscow appreciate[s] the traditionally friendly nature of our partnership, which is not affected by any opportunistic processes, apparently in reference to efforts by the international community to sanction the junta. The juntas foreign ministry said Lavrov and Wunna Maung Lwin cordially exchanged views on promotion of bilateral relations and cooperation and reaffirmed their commitment to enhance cooperation between the two countries in the multilateral arena based on mutual trust and understanding. RFA was unable to reach junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on the meetings Wednesday. Lavrovs visit comes two weeks after Min Aung Hlaing traveled to Russia on an unofficial trip, which political analyst Ye Tun described as part of the juntas bid to secure weapons from Moscow. The frequent back-and-forth visits between the leaders and the Russian foreign ministers current visit all point to expanded economic ties between Russia and Myanmar and the effort to obtain military assistance especially military equipment from Russia, he said. Lavrov said in a press release on Tuesday that his trip sought not only to promote bilateral relations, but also strengthen economic cooperation and defense and security ties. Amid the uptick in cooperation between Russia and Myanmar since the coup, the two countries relationship has become increasingly complex. Complex relationship Myanmar-based political analyst Than Soe Naing said the junta is relying more than ever on Russia to uplift the countrys economy, which is in shambles due to Western sanctions. Myanmars economic situation is already in a serious state as international oil companies, like Total, are withdrawing from the country, he said. I believe that the junta is embracing Russia so that Russia can help the country in the face of an economic crisis especially a fuel shortage. Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the Thaningha Strategic Studies Group, a think tank of former military officers, said the junta has become closer to Russia as a strategic partner to reduce its dependence on neighboring China for economic and military assistance. It may be a disadvantage to be dependent on a single country, so its not uncommon to find another strategic partner with whom you can have a really close relationship, he said. Its mainly for this reason that [Myanmar is] now looking at Russia as a strategic partner. Observers also suggested that junta leaders are more impressed with Russia than China when it comes to military technology. Four months after last years coup, during his June 2021 visit to Russia, Min Aung Hlaing told Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that he was grateful to Moscow for making Myanmars army one of the strongest in the region. That same month, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution to prevent the flow of military equipment to Myanmar, but Russia abstained. Observers said Russia might see Myanmar as an important country if it hopes to expand its economic influence in East Asia. The website Global Firepower, which tracks the development of military forces from around the world, said last month that Myanmar maintains a fleet of 280 aircraft, including fighter jets and attack helicopters, 664 tanks, and 155 warships, including one submarine. A missile is launched from an unspecified location in China in this image taken from state broadcaster CCTV video, as the government announces it conducted precision strikes in the Taiwan Strait as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region, Aug. 4, 2022. Southeast Asian nations called for maximum restraint as China launched ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan on Thursday, while Western nations urged Beijing not to escalate tensions further after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi who was in Cambodias capital for meetings with counterparts from ASEAN states and other nations called the unprecedented live-fire drills reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity, as China kept venting its fury over Pelosis stop in Taipei. More than 100 aircraft and more than 10 warships took part on Thursday in the first day of live-fire exercises that will go until Sunday, Chinese state media reported. China began the exercises a day after Pelosi left Taiwan after becoming the highest ranking American official to visit the island in 25 years. The Taiwan Defense Ministry responded by scrambling jets to warn away 22 Chinese aircraft that crossed into its air defense zone and also fired flares to drive away four drones involved in the exercises, according to Reuters. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, whose foreign ministers are meeting in Phnom Penh this week along with the top diplomats from China, the United States and other powers, came out with a rare collective statement expressing worry about the tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Without naming China or the U.S., they said ASEAN was concerned about volatility that could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers. ASEAN calls for maximum restraint and for the powers to refrain from provocative action, according to excerpts from their statement. We should act together and ASEAN stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilizing ASEAN-led mechanisms to de-escalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region, the Southeast Asian foreign ministers said. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Phnom Penh on Thursday, said he did not want China to manufacture a crisis to increase military activity in the region and that the United States opposed any unilateral efforts to change the status quo on Taiwan. Retno Marsudi, the foreign minister of ASEAN member Indonesia, said her nation was worried about the increasing rivalry between the big powers. And if this rivalry is not managed properly, it will lead to an open conflict that will surely threaten peace and stability, including in the Taiwan Strait, she warned. In Manila, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs joined the chorus of regional concern about tensions around Taiwan. Diplomacy and dialogue must prevail, it said. Cambodia, this years ASEAN chair, issued its own statement where it too announced that it consistently and firmly adheres to the One China Policy, under which Beijing is recognized as the sole government of China. The United States also holds this policy, but maintains close unofficial ties with Taiwan and is obligated by law to provide defense support. Washington only acknowledges Chinas sovereignty claim over Taiwan rather than endorsing it. For its part, Cambodia said it considered issues related to Taiwan along with Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang as being under the sovereign rights of the Peoples Republic of China. Wang: Pelosi irresponsible Wang, meanwhile, took a hardline stance on what he saw as efforts against Beijing. He lashed out at Pelosi for visiting Taiwan, saying it was a manic, irresponsible and highly irrational act, CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, reported. Chinas foreign minister also rejected a statement from leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) nations on Wednesday, where they expressed concern about the proposed live-fire exercises. There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally. The PRCs escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region, the G7 said. Wang accused the G7 which includes the United States and Japan of ignoring the negative effects of Pelosis visit. It groundlessly criticizes China for taking such measures, which are reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity, Chinas foreign ministry quoted Wang as saying in response to the G7. Wang also challenged the U.S. to get on board with Beijings plan. The United States should not dream of obstructing Chinas reunification. Taiwan is a part of China. The complete reunification of China is the trend of the times and an inevitability of history, he said. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during the ASEAN Foreign Ministerial Meetings and Related Meetings, Aug. 4, 2022. [AP/Andrew Harnik, Pool] Abiding interest in peace On Thursday, Washingtons top diplomat reiterated the American governments support for Taiwan while remaining committed to the One China policy. The United States continues to have an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, Antony Blinken said in an opening statement at the ASEAN meeting where Retno Marsudi joined him. We oppose any unilateral efforts to change the status quo, especially by force, he said. And I want to emphasize [that] nothing has changed about our position. He also said that he did not want China to manufacture a crisis or seek a pretext to increase its aggressive military activity, according to a transcript from his joint press conference with Retno. We, and countries around the world believe that escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no ones interest including ASEAN members and including China. Blinken said U.S. officials had reached out to their Chinese counterparts over the last several days to convey this message. Maintaining cross-strait stability is in the interests of all countries in the region, including all of our colleagues within ASEAN, he said. Jason Gutierrez in Manila and Ahmad Syamsudin in Jakarta contributed to this report. Smoke trails from projectiles launched by the Chinese military are seen as tourists look on from China's Pingtan island, one of the closest points to Taiwan, on Aug. 4, 2022. Updated at 5:06 p.m. ET on 2022-08-04 Unprecedented Chinese live-fire maritime drills got underway on Thursday with the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) launching ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan, the Taiwanese defense ministry said. The Chinese military launched 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles into the northern, southern, and eastern surrounding waters of Taiwan this afternoon from 13:56 hours to 16:00 hours, the ministry said without specifying the range. Matsu, Wuqiu, Dongyin, and some other outlying islands have been put on heightened alert after the PLA fired long-range rockets in the surrounding areas, the ministry added. Before the launch, the PLA threatened to fire missiles over Taiwan and enter the islands territorial waters for the first time, in a scenario that analysts describe as The Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland Chinas closest points from Taiwan ahead of massive military drills off Taiwan, Aug. 4, 2022. [AFP] China has been conducting military drills in the seas around Taiwan since early this week in an angry response to a stopover by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who arrived in Taiwan late Tuesday and met top Taiwanese officials and rights groups on Wednesday. She is the most senior U.S. official to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Beijing considers the self-ruling, democratic island a breakaway province, to be united with the mainland by force if necessary, and objects strongly to high-level U.S. visits. The United States does not recognize Taiwan diplomatically as part of a One China Policy demanded by Beijing, but retains close unofficial ties with Taipei and is obligated by law to provide it with defense capabilities. U.S. assurances that Pelosis visit does not represent any change in Taiwan policy have failed to assuage Beijing, which has accompanied the naval drills and missile barrages with harsh denunciations of Washington. Chinas irrational action Chinese international state broadcaster CGTN said military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills around Taiwan island have begun. The PLA conducted long-range live-fire shooting training in the Taiwan Straits on Thursday at around 1 p.m. and carried out precision strikes on specific areas in the eastern part of the Taiwan Straits, CGTN added. The state-supported Global Times said the Chinese military conducted long-range artillery live-fire shooting drills in the Taiwan Straits, striking targets on the eastern side of the straits and achieving the expected outcome. Taiwans defense ministry said it has activated relevant defense systems and strengthened combat readiness. The Ministry of National Defense condemned this irrational action that undermines regional peace, it said in a statement. The maritime drills at six locations around Taiwan, which started on Thursday and last until Sunday, are set to be larger in scale than those in 1996 during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, and also unprecedented in many ways. For the first time, Chinese troops are expected to enter the 12-nautical-mile (22 kilometers) waters around Taiwan which, according to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, serve as the islands sovereign territorial waters. Conventional missiles are expected to be test-launched from naval vessels that are sailing to the east of Taiwan and from the mainland, according to the PLA Eastern Theater Command. Chinese analysts, quoted by state media, said the missiles would fly over the island. We need to recognize that we are in a major militarized crisis and start calling it by its name: the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, said Christopher Twomey, a China military analyst at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School who spoke to Radio Free Asia (RFA) in a personal capacity. What will get the most attention are missile tests, particularly if they land close to Taiwanese claimed waters or fly over Taiwanese territory, he said. A map showing locations where Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) will conduct military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills is seen on newspaper reports of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan, at a newsstand in Beijing, Aug. 3, 2022. [Tingshu Wang/Reuters] High level of attention Japan said it lodged a diplomatic protest after five ballistic missiles fired by China appear to have landed inside Japans exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which stretches 200 nautical miles from the outer limits of Japan's territorial seas. To have five Chinese missiles fall within Japans EEZ like this is a first, Japanese defence minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters, according to Reuters. In the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995-1996), a series of missile tests were conducted by the PLA in the waters surrounding Taiwan, and the PLA live ammunition exercises led to intervention by the U.S., which staged the biggest display of American military might in Asia since the Vietnam War. The six areas in which the PLA will execute its live-fire drills until Sunday clearly delineate a military encirclement of Taiwan. To me, it looks like a prelude or preparations for a future scenario that is not primarily focused on amphibious assault, but on blockade, said Nadege Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), a U.S. private think-tank. If this is the case, it will not only choke Taiwan, but also directly impact Japans security, and the regions civilian transit as several Asian airlines have already canceled their flights over the broader area, said Rolland, who previously served as a senior advisor on Asian and Chinese strategic issues at the French Ministry of Defense. The exercises will generate a high level of attention from both Taiwans military and that of the United States. Both will want to ensure that the exercises are not a cover for an even more offensive action, but also will want to learn about Chinese capabilities and operational practices, Twomey said. The maritime drills that see PLA troops entering an area within 12 nautical miles of Taiwan were announced on Tuesday evening when Pelosi landed in Taipei for a brief but highly symbolic visit. Pelosi is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the democratic island in the last 25 years. Beijing has repeatedly condemned the visit as a grave violation of Chinas sovereignty and integrity, and threatened the strongest countermeasures. Irresponsible drills Taiwans defense ministry said in a statement that by announcing air-naval live-fire drills around the island, Chinese leaders made it self-evidently apparent that they seek a cross-strait resolution by force instead of peaceful means. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in a media interview on Wednesday called the drills irresponsible and they would make the chance of an incident real. The actors involved are certainly the same as for the three crises in 1954, 1958 and 1995-96, but the geostrategic context is very different, said NBRs Nadege Rolland. In each of the three previous crises, the U.S. intervened militarily, and the military tensions between the PRC [Peoples Republic of China] and the ROC [Republic of China] were prolonged but diffused after a rapid initial escalation, said Rolland, referring to China and Taiwan by their official names. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. will get involved this time, she said, noting that if the survival of Taiwan and Japan is at stake, it will be impossible for the U.S. not to intervene at a minimum to safeguard the freedom of the sea lanes on which transit the majority of international commerce. On Thursday morning, the U.S. Air Force dispatched an RC-135S reconnaissance aircraft to observe the drills, but the USS Ronald Reagan, the U.S. Navys only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, seems to have moved north toward Japan, according to a Beijing-based think-tank that has been tracking regional military movements. USS Ronald Reagan and her strike group are underway in the Philippine Sea continuing normal, scheduled operations as part of her routine patrol in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific, a U.S. Navy 7th Fleet spokesperson was quoted by Reuters as saying. The U.S. should monitor to ensure there isnt greater escalation and to learn about the PLAs practices and capabilities. Beyond that, it is important to coordinate with other regional allies, said Christopher Twomey. It will be important to also signal to allies and partners that the U.S. would be a reliable ally if military aggression is undertaken by Beijing, the analyst said. In his opinion, the latest developments will have a legacy effect of deepening the militarization of the cross-strait relationship and Sino-American competition. Meanwhile, Rolland warned that in previous crises that involved the U.S. and China, tensions eventually abated thanks to a combination of factors, including the U.S.s military superiority over the PLA and Beijings overarching strategic priorities such as joining the World Trade Organization. Today, both have drastically changed, she said. Reunification by force The blockage-style operation seen in current military drills could be one of the action plans taken in the future for achieving the reunification by force, Herman Shuai, a retired Taiwan general, was quoted by Chinas Global Times as saying on Wednesday. China considers self-ruled Taiwan a Chinese province that must be reunited with the mainland at all costs. The PLAs Eastern Theater Command has already conducted military exercises around Taiwan tied to Pelosis visit. The joint naval-air exercises, which started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday, were carried out in the north, southwest, and southeast waters and airspace off Taiwan, according to the PLA Daily. Maj. Gen. Gu Zhong, deputy chief of staff of the PLA Eastern Theater Command, was quoted by the newspaper as saying that Chinese troops conducted targeted training exercises of joint blockade, strikes on land and maritime targets, airspace control operations as well as the live firing of precision-guided munitions. This round of joint military operations is a necessary response to the dangerous move made by the U.S. and Taiwan authorities on the Taiwan question, Gu said. This report was produced by Radio Free Asia (RFA), an online news service affiliated with BenarNews. Philippine Sen. Imee Marcos-Manotoc attends the premiere of Maid in Malacanang, a film about the Marcos family fleeing during the 1986 people-power revolution, at a mall in Quezon City, suburban Manila, July 29, 2022. Leaders of the influential Catholic Church and others are criticizing a new film that depicts the last 72 hours of the Marcos regime in 1986, panning it as a piece of historical revisionism by the family now back in power in the Philippines. Imee Marcos, a senator who is the eldest daughter of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos and sister of the Philippines newly elected president, co-produced Maid in Malacanang, a bio-pic feature directed by Darryl Yap. The film tells the story of life inside the presidential household through the eyes of three loyal maids during the people-power revolution that ousted the Marcoses. Malacanang is the presidential palace in Manila. Bishop Gerardo Alminaza, of San Carlos City in the central Philippines, called the film shameless and demanded that the people behind it issue an apology. The producer, scriptwriter, director, and those promoting this movie should publicly apologize to the Carmelite nuns, to President Cory Aquinos family, and the Filipino people, Alminaza said in a statement posted Wednesday on the website of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. A promotional poster for the controversial movie Maid in Malacanang, is pictured in Manila, Aug. 3, 2022. [Camille Elemia/BenarNews] The prelate was reacting to a scene that depicts the Carmelite Monasterys nuns in Cebu playing mahjong with Corazon Aquino, an opposition leader who had sought refuge at the monastery overnight during the peaceful revolution that toppled Marcos, who ruled the predominantly Catholic Philippines for 21 years. Aquino was sworn in as president on Feb. 25, 1986, the day that a mob invaded the presidential palace after Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their children fled to a U.S. Air Force base in the country. The next day, the Marcoses flew into exile in Hawaii, where the deposed president died three years later. The Catholic Church played an instrumental role in the historic revolt, as Cardinal Jaime Sin, then the archbishop of Manila, appealed on radio for Filipinos to go near the national military headquarters to back senior officials who had just withdrawn their support for Marcos. This helped the movement topple Marcos, who had ruled the country with an iron fist, including 14 years of martial law. His regime was blamed for the reported killings of thousands of political prisoners and others. A Filipino youth slashes an oil painting of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos with a stick as a mob storms the presidential palace in Manila, Feb. 25, 1986. [AP File Photo/Mari Vargas] Reprehensible In a rare move, the nuns broke their silence about the movie and denounced the scene involving Aquino. The attempt to distort history is reprehensible, Sister Mary Melanie Costillas, the head of the nunnery, told reporters. Depicting the nuns as playing mahjong with Cory Aquino is malicious. It would suggest that while the fate of the country was in peril, we could [not] afford to play leisurely games. According to Costillas, what really happened was the nuns were praying and fasting as they feared that the Marcos regime would find out where Aquino was hiding. Written accounts and reports said there was a shoot-to-kill order against Aquino. Sister Mary John Mananzan, another nun and icon of the Philippine revolution, called the film abominable, as she expressed anger about the mahjong scene. Because, my goodness, Carmelite sisters are contemplative. They are stricter than us nuns who are active, Mananzan said in a televised interview on Tuesday. Responding to criticism around the film, Sen. Imee Marcos advised the public to watch the movie first before offering searing opinions about it. Why do we have a commentary on everything? I invite everyone, no matter your political stance or opinions of politicians. Its important to watch the movie first so you can see what the film is about, she told reporters at the Senate on Wednesday. Ferdinand E. Marcos arrives at Guam after leaving the Philippines, Feb. 26, 1986. [AP File Photo] The very human side of Marcoses The film, which opened in local cinemas on Wednesday, has amplified existing online narratives that portray the elder Marcos presidency as the golden era of the Philippines rather than as the darkest chapter of the Southeast Asian countrys recent history, as critics allege. Yap, the director who is Filipino, told BenarNews that he had pitched the biopic to the Marcos family early this year, while Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was campaigning for the presidency. The project only went ahead fully after Marcos was elected in a landslide in May. Many critics of the Marcos dynasty said he won by a big margin largely because of a consistent disinformation campaign that glossed over his namesake fathers brutal rule. I am giving the public the side of the Marcoses that is very human, Yap said. Imee Marcos, as the films co-producer, had asked for some parts to be removed, Yap said but without specifying which ones were ultimately taken out. My script was very, very courageous. But [the Marcoses] wanted to stick to their creed of unity. They dont want any friction. They wanted the script to be a bit nicer, Yap said. If it were up to me, I would want to put it all out. But you know, I cannot do that. Yap admitted that if Marcos had lost the May 9 general election, he would have dropped the film project altogether because, as he put it, a Marcos defeat would have shown that the Filipino people did not accept the dynastic family. Countering the narrative Joel Lamangan, a renowned film director is among artists and activists who are criticizing Yaps film. Lamangan said he planned to make a movie that would counter Maid in Malacanang. We will need to find a producer. When it comes to money, its very difficult, especially when you will make a movie about politics. Many dont want that. Its the truth, Lamangan, a victim of the brutal Marcos regime, told a press conference on July 22. Meanwhile, a critically acclaimed film, Katips, is screening in Philippine cinemas but has not garnered as much attention as the controversial movie. Katips is a screen adaptation of a musical by the same name that came out in 2016. It is a fictionalized version of events that revealed the brutality of Marcos Sr.s martial rule. A woman has her picture taken with the bust of former Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos, as the movie Maid in Malacanang makes its debut in cinemas in Manila, Aug. 3, 2022. [Camille Elemia/BenarNews] Cristina Palabay, secretary general of the Filipino human rights group Karapatan, described Maid in Malacanang as a blatant attempt to sanitize the name of the Marcos family in the public eye 36 years after the revolt. The family matriarch Imelda, who has been convicted of large-scale graft, is now back in the presidential palace after her son became the president in a shameless display of opulence amid worsening poverty, Palabay told BenarNews, dismissing the movie as a crass vanity project. Even more brazen are their sustained efforts to distort history and to whitewash their familys atrocious legacy, she added. Palabay said the Marcos familys ongoing refusal to apologize for thousands who died or went missing during martial law paints a grim portrait of an unmistakably Marcosian governance. They are signs of worse things to come, Palabay said. TEHRAN, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Iran's ambassador to the United Nations has said that Iran will resume full implementation of its commitments under a 2015 nuclear deal, if the U.S. makes the "right decision," the official news agency IRNA reported on Thursday. Addressing the 10th Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in New York, Majid Takht-Ravanchi said Iran was fulfilling its commitments under the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 15 reports. But the U.S. pulled out of the pact in May 2018 and reimposed its unilateral sanctions on Iran as part of a "maximum pressure" campaign with an aim to deprive it of the economic interests promised under the deal, the Iranian envoy said. He noted that following the U.S. pullout from the deal, Iran behaved responsibly and exercised strategic patience to preserve the agreement through "maximum resistance." The envoy added that since April 2021, Iran has been negotiating with the other parties with goodwill to resume the JCPOA's full implementation, but the achievement of an agreement to this end has been delayed as the U.S. government has not yet decided to guarantee Tehran's promised interests under the nuclear deal. Iran signed the JCPOA with world powers in July 2015, agreeing to curb its nuclear program in return for the removal of sanctions on the country. However, former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the agreement and reimposed unilateral sanctions on Tehran, prompting the latter to drop some of its commitments under the pact. The talks on reviving the JCPOA began in April 2021 in the Austrian capital of Vienna but were suspended in March this year because of political differences between Tehran and Washington. Delegations from the remaining signatories to the JCPOA, as well as the United States, are currently in Vienna for a fresh round of talks on the revival of the agreement. If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom. A missile is launched by the rocket force of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), targeting designated maritime areas to the east of the Taiwan Island, Aug. 4, 2022. The Eastern Theater Command on Thursday conducted joint combat exercises and training around the Taiwan Island on an unprecedented scale. (Photo by Li Youzhi/Xinhua) NANJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Thursday conducted joint combat exercises and training around the Taiwan Island on an unprecedented scale. In the long-range live-fire drills held at around 1 p.m. on Thursday, new models of rockets were fired by the theater command's army, hitting targets with precision in the eastern part of the Taiwan Strait. Desired results have been achieved. On Thursday afternoon, strikes involving various types of conventional missiles were launched by the theater command's rocket force, targeting designated maritime areas to the east of the Taiwan Island. All the missiles hit targets with great precision. The force's ability to launch precision strikes and perform area-denial tasks was tested. The theater command's air force and naval aviation corps flew more than 100 warplanes including fighters and bombers to conduct combat training exercises such as joint reconnaissance, aerial refueling, airspace control, and strikes on ground targets. Over 10 destroyers and frigates from the navy of the theater command conducted joint blockade operations in waters off the Taiwan Island. Liu Dongkun, a senior officer of the theater command, said the forces have demonstrated their brave and invincible fighting spirit. Liu said the forces will firmly fulfill their tasks entrusted by the Party and the people and resolutely safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. A missile is launched by the rocket force of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), targeting designated maritime areas to the east of the Taiwan Island, Aug. 4, 2022. The Eastern Theater Command on Thursday conducted joint combat exercises and training around the Taiwan Island on an unprecedented scale. (Photo by Wang Yi/Xinhua) Video screenshot shows a missile launched by the rocket force of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), targeting designated maritime areas to the east of the Taiwan Island, Aug. 4, 2022. The Eastern Theater Command on Thursday conducted joint combat exercises and training around the Taiwan Island on an unprecedented scale. (Xinhua) A missile is launched by the rocket force of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), targeting designated maritime areas to the east of the Taiwan Island, Aug. 4, 2022. The Eastern Theater Command on Thursday conducted joint combat exercises and training around the Taiwan Island on an unprecedented scale. (Photo by Hong Zhi/Xinhua) Greg Sukiennik has worked at all three Vermont News & Media newspapers and was their managing editor from 2017-19. He previously worked for ESPN.com, for the AP in Boston, and at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass. Some 1,000 Palestinians are at risk of expulsion from an arid region of the occupied West Bank that the Israeli military has designated as a live-fire training zone A woman hugs her 10-year-old granddaughter last week as her property becomes covered by the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Ky. Despite the growing threats of climate change, many Americans oppose legislation to combat the problem for economic reasons. The Environmental Protection Agency is warning residents in 13 states and Puerto Rico about potential health risks from emissions of ethylene oxide, a chemical widely used to sterilize medical equipment, such as syringes, and decontaminate spices. President Cyril Ramaphosa (2nd L) of South Africa and President Mokgweetsi Masisi (2nd R) of Botswana attend the Botswana-South Africa Business Forum Roundtable in Gaborone, Botswana, on Aug. 4, 2022. President Mokgweetsi Masisi of Botswana on Thursday said the southern African country continues to work tirelessly to improve exports to South Africa. (Photo by Tshekiso Tebalo/Xinhua) GABORONE, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- President Mokgweetsi Masisi of Botswana on Thursday said the southern African country continues to work tirelessly to improve exports to South Africa. Addressing the Botswana-South Africa Business Forum Roundtable held on the occasion of the 28th anniversary celebrations of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in Gaborone, capital of Botswana, Masisi said the country wants to correct imbalances in its economic relations with South Africa. "The trade landscape between Botswana and South Africa remains skewed in favor of the latter and should drastically improve toward stabilization," said Masisi. Figures from Botswana's statistical agency, Statistics Botswana, indicate that Botswana exported to South Africa goods worth 31 billion pula (about 2.5 billion U.S. dollars) while it imported goods worth 210 billion pula between 2017 and 2021. On average, Masisi said Botswana imports 42 billion pula while exporting only 6 billion pula worth of goods per annum. "This needs to be reversed," said Masisi, adding that increasing exports to South Africa will result in job creation, especially for young people while also driving the much-needed export diversification to support Botswana's aspirations of an export-led economy. Botswana's exports to South Africa include diamonds, beef, soda ash while those Botswana imports include cereals, vehicles, and beverages, among others, he said. Speaking at the same event, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said even as the two nations' bilateral relations have grown over the years, far greater levels of trade and investment between the neighboring countries need to be seen. President Cyril Ramaphosa (2nd L) of South Africa and President Mokgweetsi Masisi (2nd R) of Botswana attend the Botswana-South Africa Business Forum Roundtable in Gaborone, Botswana, on Aug. 4, 2022. President Mokgweetsi Masisi of Botswana on Thursday said the southern African country continues to work tirelessly to improve exports to South Africa. (Photo by Tshekiso Tebalo/Xinhua) Before PCBs are again hauled from the Housatonic River, a legal fight may get a little mopping up of its own. This week, parties to litigation before the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals proposed new deadlines and filing rules. Thats needed, the lawyers say, because of the voluminous record headed to the court, more than two decades after a rough outline of the remedy took shape. Because the administrative record is voluminous, the Parties [seek to] avoid burdening the Court with an excessive and unnecessary amount of paper, reads a joint motion filed this week. The timetable calls for the two groups appealing the Environmental Protection Agencys current Rest of River cleanup to file their brief by Oct. 14, followed by an EPA reply by Dec. 16. After that, the General Electric Co. would weigh in by Jan. 13. GE is the polluter on the hook for a more than decade-long project to pull sediments from the river long tainted by polychlorinated biphenyls spewed from its former Pittsfield transformer factory. Thats the same proposed deadline for a filing from the Housatonic Rest of River Municipal Committee, which represents the five Berkshires towns along the river that in early 2020 agreed to the current cleanup plan and its most controversial element: an engineered landfill in a former quarry south of Woods Pond that would receive more than a million cubic yards of sediments with relatively lower levels of PCBs. By Feb. 3, the two appealing groups the Housatonic River Initiative and the Housatonic Environmental Action League must file a reply to the arguments that have stacked up by that point. The schedule suggests the case will extend well into 2023. Tim Gray, executive director of the Housatonic River Initiative, said the appeal will take the amount of time it takes. We have no control over that, over the process of how it goes, he said Thursday. PCBs, banned since the late 1970s, are a probable carcinogen. Though the EPA initially opposed local burial of PCBs in the Berkshires, that changed under an agreement reached in early 2020 after mediation. Though former town leaders backed the landfill plan, residents of Lee continue to oppose it. A town forum is scheduled for 6 p.m. Aug. 18 in the auditorium of theLee Middle/High School. It isnt known whether the appeals court will schedule oral arguments next year on the filings. Or when it might rule. Along with the newly proposed schedule, the motion asks the court to OK steps to thin down normally required filings. The panel sits in the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in downtown Boston. PITTSFIELD Incumbent Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington and her challenger, defense attorney Timothy Shugrue, sparred Wednesday night over issues from substance use, dangerousness hearings, immigration enforcement and overall public safety in the community. The Berkshire District Attorney's primary is two months away. Here's what you need to know Voters will decide whether to re-elect Andrea Harrington, who has dedicated herself to reforming how prosecutors pursue justice, or to give local defense attorney Timothy Shugrue a chance to in his words in March reinvigorate the office. The candidates stressed their differences for about 90 minutes before an audience of over 200 people during a virtual forum. The event, the first meeting of the candidates in the race for Berkshire District Attorney, was co-hosted by the Berkshire County branch of the NAACP, the Massachusetts League of Women Voters and the ACLU. The Democrats both asked voters to look at their records to make their decision on who to support in the Sept. 6 primary. Harrington said in her last 3 1/2 years in office, shes taken the big ideas that served as the foundation of her 2018 campaign and brought them into practice in the office. She said shes implemented training programs for the offices attorneys to combat bias and racial inequity in the criminal justice system, hired Spanish speakers and people of color to the offices victim services division, and opened the office up to an ongoing study on plea deals in an effort to make her office more transparent. Harrington said under her leadership the office has limited the number of people receiving criminal records, and worked to get people with substance use disorders into treatment programs. A window into plea bargains: Berkshire DA, Duke Law announce new initiative The vast majority of criminal cases never make it to trial, are resolved by plea bargain instead. But due to the closed nature of plea negotiations between prosecutors and defense lawyers, it's difficult for researchers and the public to analyze how prosecutors exercise their discretion during sentencing. A research initiative led by the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law School in North Carolina aims to change that. Weve also worked for systemic change and we have proven that I say what I mean and I do what I say Im going to do, Harrington said. We have had a huge positive impact on communities across Berkshire County. Shugrue said his 36 years as a prosecutor and then a defense attorney have given him intimate insight into how the criminal justice system works and how it can be improved. Shugrue said his experience creating and fostering the work of the Berkshire County Kids Place, a nonprofit providing services to children and families dealing with violence, has shown the type of cross-agency collaboration and ideas he is capable of producing. He said hed bring his longstanding connections with law enforcement across the county and his experience with the National College of District Attorneys association to rebuild collaboration and trust between the divisions of local criminal justice system. You have to have experience, you have to be in the arena, Shugrue said. I have seen so many things throughout my 36 years, both as a prosecutor and defense lawyer; I bring all that to the table. The courtroom is my home, my home court it's like Fenway Park for me. Moderator Meg Bossong covered a variety of topics, but spent several questions diving into the nuance of the candidates responses to defendants with substance use disorders. Harrington said that her office has a policy of dismissing cases outright that are charged for possession of personal amounts of drugs, arguing that these cases fall within a category of cases that bring charges would we feel bring more harm than good. She said her office has also increased the use of statutory diversion programs, using the statute 131 times in 2021. Shugrue said those numbers still arent high enough, and said hed turn to the diversion programs as a primary response to substance use cases over dismissing low-level possessions. You cant just dismiss them; you cant kick the can down the road, Shugrue said, pointing to the countys rising number of overdose deaths between 2020 and 2021. With the diversion program, "you give people the services paid for by our citizens so that people can have service, get off the drugs, become employed and at that point become productive members of society," he said. Thats how you break the cycle," he added. "You don't just leave these addicts out there all by themselves. Shugrue, for the most part, deferred to the programs and powers built into the states court system. He said that he would take each case on an individual basis, but would not rule out working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and would consider notifying the agency of the immigration status of defendants in particularly violent cases. My message to the immigrant community and community at large is very clearly and unequivocally that my office does not cooperate with ICE," Harrington countered. "We do not notify ICE about anything about our cases at all, ever. The district attorney said that policy is rooted in the belief that the office should be allowed to see a prosecution through to its conclusion, without concern that a defendant will be deported, and to build trust among victims within the immigrant community that their status will not be shared with the federal agency. Amid explosion of dangerousness hearings, data elusive for effect on poor, people of color PITTSFIELD Andrea Harrington campaigned for Berkshire District Attorney on a platform of criminal justice reform, promising to eliminate a c During a question on dangerousness hearings which can keep a person accused of a crime in jail for months without the possibility of bail if a judge finds them to be a danger to the community Shugrue violated the forums rules to take a direct shot at his opponent's record on the issue. Shugrue said Harrington had signed off on a recent effort by Gov. Charlie Baker to expand the dangerousness hearings, a description she resoundingly denied while stressing the utility of the hearings. Shugrue said he didnt approve of the state effort for what have been viewed as racial inequities in the bill. I think its being misused instead of bail, Shugrue said. Harrington ran during her last campaign on a promise to eliminate a cash bail system. She said shes lived up to that promise to reduce bail, which she said had become a means to hold people pretrial without a fair process. She said that she understands that there needs to be a lot of scrutiny around the use of dangerousness hearings, but said the defendants in these situations still have access to attorneys and are provided due process. It's limited to people who have committed violent crimes, Harrington said. I do think that it's an important tool for public safety. I think that in order for people to support criminal justice reform, they need to be safe, they need to feel safe. Well over two years after he was injured in a New Hampshire crash that killed seven motorcyclists in 2019, Joshua Morin is still recovering, with his 25th surgery to repair his leg upcoming. Abortion-rights activist rally at the Indiana Statehouse in June following Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a central target for Republicans over the past four decades. Now they're pouring money and effort into state elections in a bid to control enough state legislatures to call for a constitutional convention. The Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians is asking town leaders to approve a return of the site off Main Street to tribal control. The parcel, including a monument to buried tribe members, was turned over to the town in 1809. JAKARTA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The number of weekly COVID-19 cases in Indonesia rose remarkably in the past month, spokesperson for COVID-19 task force Wiku Adisasmito said on Thursday. "We have recorded around 38,000 weekly positive cases this week, very high compared to 2,000 cases in early July," Adisasmito told a virtual press conference. The number of deaths due to COVID-19 this week was recorded at 91, a sharp increase compared to 40 deaths in the previous week. The increase in bed occupancy rates was mainly in Jakarta (12.93 percent), South Kalimantan (12.79 percent), and Banten (11.85 percent). The country recorded 6,527 new daily cases on Thursday, bringing the total cases to 6,229,315, with total recoveries of 6,021,549 and deaths of 157,060 respectively. The authorities remind people of adhering to health protocols, which will protect them from being infected with COVID-19. Who Was Polycarp? In the Christian church today, the name Polycarp stands as a reminder of commitment, faithfulness, sacrifice, martyrdom, and courage in the face of opposition. He provided selfless leadership to the early church, a trait he practiced onto the grave. As he stood in the area awaiting his end, Polycarp shouted to the proconsul, Hear me declare with boldness, I am a Christian. During Polycarps life, the church in Smyrna began experiencing opposition to the point that some of the saints were put to death. These atrocious acts did not take the Christians by surprise as God had already forewarned that the church would come under persecution: And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write; These things saith the First and the Last, which was dead, and is alive; I know thy works, and tribulation and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life (Revelation 2:8-10 KJV). Polycarp, Bishop in Smyrna and a well-known figure to Christians and persecutors alike, could not go unmolested for long. He was hunted down and finally caught by his persecutors, who took him to the proconsul. He was placed in the arena with a large crowd watching him. There he met his final fate. What do we know about Polycarp? 1. Polycarp embraced the faith at a young age. It is said that Polycarp worked as an enslaved person at a young age. He was adopted and cared for by Callisto, a God-fearing woman. Callisto taught Polycarp the ways of Christ, so Polycarp embraced the doctrine of Christ at an early age. He started studying the Bible quickly and gained knowledge that further spurred his Christian beliefs onward. 2. Polycarp tried to dispel heresies by imitating the life of Christ. St. John was the last apostle to die. With all the apostles gone, heresies began to spread in the churches, and deceptions began to grow. These false teachings were close to the truth but not true teachings. Hence, many people fell into the clutches of apostasy. Polycarp saw the danger immediately and decided that he could only dispel these false teachings by living a life devoted to Christ, his Master. He became an example of Christ and made his commitment to Lord absolute. His close friend Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, once told Polycarp, Your mind is grounded in God as on an immovable rock. 3. Polycarp faced persecution willingly. As persecutors searched for him, Christians took Polycarp to a farmhouse and hid him there. However, the persecutors caught two slave boys and tortured them till they told them where Polycarp was hidden. As the tormentors arrived on the scene, Christians tried to convince Polycarp to escape. He decided to remain, saying, Gods will be done. He welcomed his enemies with open arms and ordered food to be set before them. He was willing to be arrested and suffer persecution for the sake of Christ. 4. Polycarp was a man of prayer. Polycarp spent most of his time in prayer at the farmhouse. When the tyrants confronted him in the farmhouse, he didnt resist arrest. He, however, asked for an hour to pray before they cart him off to prison. They allowed him to do this. The hour turned into two hours. As he prayed, the intimidators overheard him, and their consciences became pricked. They asked themselves why they should arrest such a man who did no one any harm. Nevertheless, they took him into custody and brought him before the authorities. 5. Polycarp cared for those Christian widows whose husbands were in chains or martyred. As persecution grew in the early church, many Christians were arrested and put in chains. Husbands who were breadwinners were either imprisoned or killed. Polycarp made sure to take up offerings for those families that were left without a breadwinner to fend for themselves in the home. He used the collected offerings to feed and clothe people who were in need. 6. Polycarp named a saint. Both Roman Catholic Churches and Eastern Orthodox Churches gave Polycarp sainthood. Each year, the 23rd of February is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church as the feast day of Polycarp. 7. Polycarp died at age 86. Polycarp reigned as bishop of Smyrna for over 60 years. Throughout, he imitated the life of Christ to the best of His ability. Even as he became elderly, his limitations didnt stop him from telling others about Jesus Christ. At age 86, he was arrested. He died in the arena. When told to deny Christ, Polycarp shouted back at the proconsul and his other accusers, saying, 86 years have I served him, and He has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Savior? 8. Polycarp was faithful until death. Polycarps faith in Christ never wavered. As he was brought into the arena where he was sentenced to die, he spoke boldly of his Savior. He never once denied Christ but instead spoke highly of the Lord. In the arena, he was told to call all Christians atheists (for not believing in the Roman pantheon). He did no such thing but pointed to the cheering bloodthirsty crowd and called them atheists. Polycarp was faithful to Christ even unto death. Who Discipled Polycarp? Polycarp was a disciple of St. John. He was maybe one of the last disciples of John before the aged apostle left the land of the living. He sat under John and learned many things from his teachings. Apostle John became his mentor, and Polycarp continued the work after Johns death. Apostle John saw the keenness in Polycarp and knew he was a promising leader in the Christian faith. Hence, Apostle John ordained him bishop over the church of Smyrna. Why Is Polycarp Considered An Apostolic Father? Polycarp belonged to the second-generation Apostolic Fathers of the early church. The twelve apostles were the churchs first-generation leaders, with St. John being the last to die. Polycarps bishopric over the church of Smyrna was one of faithfulness to Christ. Christians viewed him as an exemplary leader who would not compromise with the standards of the Bible. He spread the word of Christ everywhere he went, and lived a lifestyle true to his calling. Polycarp passed on the knowledge he gained from John to his followers and thus helped to lay the foundations of the early church. How Did Polycarp Die? Polycarp was led into the arena where the cheering mad crowd awaited him. He was first given a chance to deny and curse Christ. He refused to do this but spoke boldly of his allegiance to the Lord. He was placed at the stake. They lit a fire to burn him. As the fire grew in strength, Polycarp was not harmed by it. Some of his tormentors, realizing that the fire was not doing its job, threw spears at him. The spears pierced his body, and as they did so, blood gushed forth from his body and extinguished the fire. Thus, Polycarp died from the piercings and not by fire. Where Can We Find Polycarps Writings? It is said that Polycarp wrote a fair number of letters to Christians. However, most of those letters either cannot be found or were not published. The only evidence we have of Polycarps writings are two letters addressed to the Philippians known as The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, which he sent to the churches in Smyrna, Philomelium, and the Roman Catholic congregation. What Can We Learn From Polycarp? Modern-day Christians can learn a lot from the life of this champion of the faith known as Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. 1. Be faithful even in times of hardship: During the last years of Polycarps bishopric, persecution of Christians grew and became intense. Polycarp never flinched during the hardest times of persecution. Like Polycarp, we must also keep the faith during times of hardship. We must not grow weary, especially to the point of losing our salvation. We must remain in prayer, read the scriptures, stay in fellowship with the saints and continue to help those persons that are less fortunate than us. 2. Be prayerful: Polycarp learned the power of prayer from an early age. As Christians, we should spend quality time in prayer before our Master and King. Prayer keeps us going, and if we should stop praying, there is a danger that we can become overly relaxed in our Christian walk. 3. We must remain in the Word of God: Polycarp grew to love the scriptures at an early age. Not only the scriptures did he take after, but knowledge taught to him by elders of the faith. The word of God is given to guide, comfort, rebuke, and exhort us. We should take heed to the scriptures and not become complacent learners. Without the guiding light of the scriptures, we remain in utter darkness. The life of Bishop Polycarp was one of reverence and faithfulness to the Lord. As modern-day Christians, we should endeavor to follow in the footsteps of this champion of the faith. We should conduct our lives in such a way, knowing that whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we belong to the Lords (Romans 14:8 KJV). Further Reading: Who Was Ignatius of Antioch? The Writings of Polycarp Rediscovering the Church Fathers Photo Credit: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons/Welcome Collection Lancelot Tucker is a book author and freelance writer who writes on a vast amount of topics. In addition, he serves as an associate pastor in his hometown, Spanish Town. Lancelot loves to do research and write, and is an avid reader of other authors' works. When not writing or reading, he spends his time reaching out to the less fortunate residing in his community. This article is part of our People of Christianity catalog that features the stories, meaning, and significance of well-known people from the Bible and history. Here are some of the most popular articles for knowing important figures in Christianity: How Did the Apostle Paul Die? Who are the Nicolaitans in Revelation? Who Was Deborah in the Bible? Who Was Moses in the Bible? King Solomon's Story in the Bible Who Was Lot's Wife in the Bible? Who Was Jezebel in the Bible? Who Was the Prodigal Son? MOSCOW - Authorities are searching Jerome Creek, north of Harvard, for a fugitive out of Benewah County. Archie Hicks is wanted on a felony arrest warrant for violating the terms of his release from a witness intimidation case. He was last seen by authorities fleeing the Benewah County Courthouse in St. Maries in mid-July. Hicks has been spotted near the end of Jerome Creek Road. Latah County Sheriffs Deputies searched the same forested area for Hicks last week. Deputies believe he has been camping in that area. The U.S. Marshals, U.S. Forest Service Rangers, and the Benewah County Sheriffs Office are helping with the search. A command post was set up on Jerome Creek Road this morning. Hicks is 62 and about 235 pounds. He was last seen driving a 1998 green Ford F250 with Idaho place N8793U. Anyone who sees Archie Hicks needs to call 911 immediately. He has a history of violence and intimidation. First up, Joe Biden is thinking about dropping tariffs against China. But theres a spy in prison this morning that helps us understand why he shouldnt. Ill explain. Your second brief, If youre looking for a good paying job, you might consider being a CEO for a health insurance company. One executive made $142M dollars last year. Let's talk about that. And as always, Im keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put this one on your radar. Mexican cartels are grooming American kids online and paying them cash to traffic illegals or run drugs across the border. Ill share details. If you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief, remember to subscribe and listen daily at podfollow.com/pdb. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Mainly Jem's Birding & Ringing Exploits in the Eastern Province & Ringing Trips to Bahrain KABUL, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Several Islamic State (IS) militants were killed and one arrested in a security forces operation near the Afghan capital of Kabul on Wednesday evening, Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran said on twitter Thursday. Zadran also confirmed the death of two security force members including a policewoman and the injury of four others during the clearing operation in Karta-e-Sakhi, a vicinity west of the Afghan capital. Late on Wednesday, Zadran said that security forces surrounded a house from which they came under gunfire from unknown attackers in Karta-e-Sakhi area. Taliban-led caretaker government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid twitted on Thursday that four attackers had been eliminated during the operation and gunfire. Mujahid said the militants had planned to target thousands of Shiite Muslims who gathered to mark Muharram, one of their largest religious ceremonies, in Karta-e-Sakhi Shrine, west of the capital. A video, likely taken by security force members and posted on social media, showed that one of them threw a yellow barrel packed with explosives through a hole they dug into the house, where the attackers were launching gunfire. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Government Media Office took the top slot worldwide with a record-breaking 34 entries shortlisted in the New York Festivals 2022 AME Awards. The awards include top-scoring ground-breaking campaigns that elevated brand positioning, created engagement, and increased market share while delivering results that surpassed benchmarks. Purpose driven marketing This aligned like-minded consumers with causes that championed social and environmental issues. Shortlisted entries include AMVBBDOs Hope Reef for client Sheba, the campaign launched the worlds largest coral restoration program - a 10-year commitment starting with Hope Reef off Indonesia. Technology Agencies employed technology to build stronger brand connections, entertain, and create a personalised brand experience. Entries advancing include David's Unusables created by Special Group for Motor Neurone Disease New Zealand, the campaign used Trade Mes auction functionality in an innovative way to chart the real-life digital decline of David Seymour. Activation & Engagement Entries advancing include Inspire Activations Lonesome Hotel for Hondao Senior Citizen's Welfare Foundation, the campaign addressed public awareness and increased donations by modifying neglected seniors homes into Lonesome Hotel and turned seniors life dilemma stories into special services. MullenLowe MENAs An Invitation to the Future for UAE Government Media Office used the real-life Iron Man, jet-suit inventor Richard Browning, to fly across Dubai in his jet suit to gain attention for Dubais Museum of the Future. Outdoor/Out-of-Home Shortlisted campaigns include Liquid Billboard by Havas Middle East for Adidas Middle East. The agency transformed a traditional billboard into a 5-meter-high swimming pool for women to dive in and become the heroes of the campaign and Adidas new inclusive swimwear line. Products and Services Shortlisted entries include Grabarz & Partners The plant-based revolution by Burger King in Germany for Burger King Deutschland gave a glimpse into the future of Plant-based fast food at worlds first Burger King Plant-based pop-up restaurant. Health & Wellness Shortlisted campaigns include The Return Visit created by Deloitte Digital Us for NYU Langone Health, AMVBBDO s The Invisible Opponent for Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), Starcoms Winning the Switch Window for client Novartis Kesimpta, ALMA DDBs CRM for Tobacco Free Florida, and Grown-up Problems created by McCann Canada for client Kids Help Phone. All entries submitted into the 2022 AME Awards were evaluated based on 4 criteria and weighted according to importance: results/effectiveness, idea, execution, and challenge/strategy/objective. See all the 2022 shortlisted entries here The recent International News Media Association (Inma) Africa summit highlighted strategic developments and growth paths in the region. Source: KNILT KNILT Business growth strategies and technological developments are driving audience, advertising, and newsrooms at African news media companies. The two-day regional summit examined how business growth strategies and technological developments are driving audience, advertising, and newsrooms at African news media companies. In its third year, the virtual INMA Africa News Media Summit, held July 28-29, drew 311 delegates from 38 countries. Supported by the Google News Initiative, the Summit featured diverse case studies from the regions top publishers: Business Day in Nigeria, Independent Media in South Africa, Media 24s City Press in South Africa, Monitor Publications in Uganda, Nation Media Group in Kenya, New Times in Rwanda, Stears in Nigeria, and Pulse Senegal. Additionally, INMA added insights around the state of the global news industry with a keynote by the associations CEO, Earl Wilkinson. Key takeaways Key takeaways from the six hours of programming across four segments included: Newsrooms Nigerias Business Day shared the critical reasons why newsrooms must change their cultures: the need for agility, the 24-hour news cycle, the abundance of data, the need for continuous experimentation, the rise in reader revenue models, the emergence of multimedia storytelling, and more. In Uganda, Monitor Publications is focused on acquiring and retaining good and experienced journalists, yet is realistic about the task at hand: low pay, expanding demand for communications, and gender pitfalls. The risk of being a journalist isnt quite worth the financial reward, the thrill is gone, yet social media continues to shine. While the digital dinosaurs are gone from newsrooms, those newsrooms remain devoid of tech-savviness/depth. Nigerias Stears may have been the most intriguing case study for one reason: Its sheer lack of a legacy newsroom. They have created a newsroom from scratch with journalists sharing the stage with data, product, engineering, and marketing professionals. They take a product approach to strategy and are constantly focused on company objectives. With an embrace of data and information worth paying for, their content and business strategies are connected. Audience engagement Pulse Senegal is creatively using social media to expand its footprint. Faced with a huge youth audience, Pulses strategy is to inform and entertain with social media that has fun facts, inspirational stories, street video interviews, reader portraits, and news. They co-create content with influencers. The New Times in Rwanda is pushing back against economic headwinds with a combination of products and marketing: job board, social media, podcast, flash briefings, e-paper, and video desk. They have seen engagement grow, new market segments opened up, subscriptions tripled, and finances are up. Nation Media Group in Kenya weaved its Kusi Ideas Festival into a broader strategy that helped build relationships with policy influencers via thought leadership and created an alternative revenue stream with a regional approach. Advertising campaigns Media24s City Press is empowering readers with its Money Makeover native advertising campaign. They are enabling Absas clients to plan for and attain financial freedom. In its sixth year, the native campaign has become a staple in City Press annual calendar positioning Absa as the bank that cares. The campaign fits well with strong content that connects with audiences via authentic messaging. Also in South Africa, Independent Medias collaborative added-value campaign took Chicken Licken away from their traditional TV/outdoor investments part of a broader strategy to grow advertising segments. Innovation and creativity are keys to driving revenue growth and social media engagement. Global and strategic developments Inma CEO Earl Wilkinson talked about the emergence of the modern media companys playbook: subscriptions, product, newsroom innovation, data, advertising, and people/talent. Subscription bundles and surfing event waves are on the rise, while product is pointing to app innovation and changing how work gets done. While newsrooms get into the business of news, data is central to growth strategy and an indicator of cultural maturity. Successful digital advertising savviness is increasingly about knowing where to focus people sales vs. machine sales. And he recommended when looking to acquire and retain young digital talent, to focus on the journalistic mission. South Africas Project Goliath has joined other national consortia to navigate the regulatory, legislative, and settlement world with the Big Tech platforms. With global regulatory hotspots like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Denmark, the very competitive South African publishers have banded together, appointed competition law specialists, and are working to front inquiries and draft legislation. IC Publishers and their pan-African titles such as African Business, African Banker, and New African is managing the digital transition of their business and focused on new product development and growth. The company has grown correspondents and thought leadership events in tandem with its advertisers who have taken a regional approach seeking dominance in markets across Africa. INMAs ability to bring global insights fused with regional best practices and case studies to the region has really made this summit an important event for Africa, says Doreen Mbaya, producer of the INMA Africa summit. Our attendees really appreciated the fresh focus on newsrooms, as well as the discussions around Big Tech. Whilst many media companies across the world continue to retrench and size down their companies some are continuing with their expansion and hiring plans. According to Digiday these are the publishers with expansion plans: Buzzfeed The publisher retrenched several employees earlier in the year but is now hiring again. Digiday says the publication needs a tech editor, photo editor, breaking news reporter, lead curation editor, senior visuals editor, and curation editor. We are currently working on a broader plan for how to reinvest in our newsroom, so expect more job postings to come in the weeks ahead, says Karolina Waclawiak, the new editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Hiring was put on pause earlier in the year after BuzzFeed bought Complex Networks in December 2021. The Washington Post The Atlantics Johanna Mayer-Jones took up a position as head of global client and agency partnerships in July, a post that was newly created. Mayer-Jones will be reporting to CRO Joy Robins. Executive editor Sally Buzbee said they are on track with plans to expand later this year. Four new politics team jobs were advertised. This adds to the 70 jobs Buzbee announced would be made available in 2022. Forbes, Bloomberg and Hearst Forbes, Bloomberg and Hearst are also hiring. Bloomberg has hired three people to join their Bloomberg Green team with plans to add more. In June Forbes announced they were hiring four tech writers while at Hearst a spokesperson confirmed they will continue hiring and recruiting. Other publishers put hiring on hold Although some publications are going full steam ahead some are putting recruitment on hold. Vox Media has put their recruitment processes on hold because of uncertain economic climate ahead of a potential recession, a Vox Media spokesperson says. Meanwhile, an Insider spokesperson said they had no plans to update on recruitment plans in the third quarter of the year. In June the Linkedin hiring rate fell by 5.4% in the US. Guy Berger, principal economist at LinkedIn says this can be expected even if a recession is avoided in the second half of the year, he adds that hiring in the US was at its lowest level since December 2021. Theres good reason to expect hiring will edge down at least a little during the [second] half of the year, even if we avoid recession, says Berger. Retail has always been about understanding the customer, but now it's nothing short of imperative, according to international retail guru Ron Thurston, who believes that we are in "an important stage in the history of understanding customer expectations and customer relevancy." Ron Thurston, author, podcaster, retail thought leader and advisor. Source Supplied Thurston was a keynote speaker at the virtual Nedbank Integrated Marketing Conference (IMC), held on 26 July. Hes the bestselling author of the book Retail Pride, and has more than 25 years of leadership experience working for some of Americas most prominent retail brands, including Tory Burch and Apple. Thurston is currently on a year-long, 20-city retail tour of the United States, engaging in conversation with frontline retail workers. Living and live streaming from an Airstream trailer for the duration of the tour, he tuned in to the conference from New Mexico to deliver his keynote presentation. Market relevance Is retail dead? Are stores even relevant anymore? These questions are often bandied about and call into question the future of the traditional retail industry. Thurstons stance on the matter is this: as we become more technology entrenched, we will all crave better physical store experiences. Are stores dead? Absolutely not. Are they critically important and need transformation to provide differentiation and growth? Absolutely yes, he said. With e-commerce still contributing less than 10% to total retail sales in South Africa, physical stores still generate the bulk of profits. Physical shopping, particularly in malls and shopping centres, is an important part of the culture and community in South Africa, with some families travelling far distances to make a day of it. As a Reuters report points out, high crime rates and a scarcity of safe public spaces have long driven both retailers and shoppers into commercial complexes. Thurston referenced the PWC Total Retail: Retailers and the Age of Disruption study, which surveyed 19,000 respondents globally, of which 1,000 were from SA. The report revealed that the physical store remains the retail touchpoint with the highest frequency, driving retailers to transform in-store experiences with differentiated storefronts that turn stores into ultimate shopping destinations. He noted that retail business models, both in South Africa and the US, are largely still driven by stores, but customers expect to shop online and for brands to invest in their e-commerce presence. Acknowledging that the growth of e-commerce continues to climb, Thurston said that retailers should certainly have an online strategy in place, but urged companies to never forget about the investment in stores where the majority of business is coming from and where relevancy truly lies in South Africa right now. Employee relevance Thurston refers to himself as a champion for store teams, and has dedicated his life to inspiring people to take pride in their retail careers. In the context of South Africa, the retail industry is among the most prominent private sector employers in the country, with Shoprite Group taking the lead with more than 145,000 employees. As a key contributor to a retailers success, Thurston spoke about the importance of hiring the right employees. To those punting the myth that its harder than ever to hire great people, he advised they put effort into identifying what individuals are good at, and amplify it. Every role is different, every company has different expectations, every brand has a unique culture, and very few candidates excel in every aspect of a position. Few candidates excel in every aspect, but when it works its magical, he said. He put forward the following hiring best practices for retail employers to ensure that their brands relevance is communicated through their talented workforces: Be part of your community, and represent your company with who you hire. Be open to non-traditional work histories and experiences. Dont just settle for okay, but look for different competencies and experiences that add value. Customer relevance Thurston listed empathy, curiosity and focus as core pillars of retail success, and unpacked how theyre woven into modern customer expectations. Customers want personalised interactions, and empathy reveals itself in these exchanges. Secondly, customers want to be heard (curiosity). They want you to know who they are, and know how they shop. Their relevance to you comes through in how curious you are about who they are and how you deliver on what they expect, Thurston said. And thirdly, customers want you to be proactive in your relationship and they want it fast (focus). Speed of delivery is important, he added. Thurston went on to note that brands are engaging with their customers and employees more often than they think. That ad campaign, a meeting request, your website, signage, phone calls, conversations in stores, visual merchandising, online reviews every single moment matters when youre building relevancy for your brand, said Thurston. Be clear about what you intend for the perceived value of your brand to be, because all those touchpoints influence that perception among your current and potential customers. Based on this, they pre-evaluate the merits of your product or service, and its ability to meet their needs and expectations, especially in comparison with your competitors. To sum it up, Retail is not dead, it is thriving! Keep the customer in the focus point and identify all of the touch points they have with your brand! Thank you Ron Thurston #UngwaAfrica #NedBankIMC2022 #MarketingGetsRelevant Louisa April (@LouisaApril_) July 29, 2022 Thurston added that displaying a commitment to your brand means that youll be delivering the same message each time you have an interaction with your customer. If done consistently over time, customers will come to know what they can expect from your business. Where are you winning or losing on those touchpoints? You must aim to win at every moment that can delight customers. These moments create loyalty and future business through relevancy, and relevancy is the new frontier for growth, Thurston said. Bizcommunity is a proud media partner of the Nedbank IMC. When women support one another, we're all lifted up. A study on successful female leaders in theshows that women with an inner circle of successful female friends are more likely to land executive positions and receive higher pay. The influencing role of women in our lives can take many forms. Mentorship and general representation of women in our workplace, for example, is shown to have positive effects on the overall performance of companies and teams of staff across genders. Even more so when women mentor, support, and uplift one another. How can we ensure that women are heard and uplifted by women for the benefit of organisations and society as a whole? Nurturing at graduate level Across a range of sectors, there is a gender parity in favour of males, meaning women of all races are underrepresented. This parity is particularly prevalent in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics sectors (STEM), including the financial and accounting sectors. We know that women are incredibly underrepresented in the technology space," says Vanashree Govender, media relations and communications manager at Huawei South Africa. According to a 2021 study by Deloitte, for example, female representation at global technology firms sit at around 33%. That number shrinks to around 25% when you focus on technical roles. Perhaps even more concerning, however, is the fact that almost half of women working in technology drop out, compared with 20% in other industries. What this reflects is a need for female graduates to be nurtured from the undergraduate stage. Young women who are exposed to practical work experiences that foster their growth might be less likely to feel supported and capable enough to pursue their career ambitions. I believe that the status quo must be challenged, adds Govender. This doesnt just mean companies in the technology sector changing their cultures, but also working hard to foster and nurture female talent. Mentorship is absolutely key to that. With the support of other women who have built successful careers in the tech space, up-and-coming ICT workers are more likely to thrive. Women spearheading diversity equity and inclusion Kuppulakshmi Krishnamoorthy - Zoho for Startups Diversity, equity and inclusion policy in companies can and should be the starting point for women representation in companies. As Zoho for Startups global head, Kuppulakshmi Krishnamoorthy comments, Is it not a question of the cultural-integrity of an organisation if women employees don't feel included, feel to be deserving of opportunities and growth, and feel to be 'listened to'? Teams realising that women need to be heard is a necessary first step. To ensure there's equity in the workplace, one can begin with creating a community of senior women who have 'walked the path' before and women who can relate to the mindset and challenges of the current generation of workforce. This community should be founded on absolute trust, empathy, and solidarity. There should be enough opportunities created for peer-to-peer groups to be formed, that can lead to forging of life-long friendships or allies at the workplace, adds Krishnamoorthy. Ensuring there are women at the top In the tourism and hospitality industry, whose bread and butter is care, comfort and a guests happiness, we still see men dominating executive and managerial roles across the board. Reports have shown that on a global level, women make up nearly 70% of the workforce in hospitality and tourism. However, less than 40% of these jobs are at a managerial level. Hospitality businesses may have a willingness to promote diversity, though the pace is often slow. But one industry player has made significant in-roads. At Radisson Blu Hotel Waterfront, Cape Town, more than 90% of the management team is female, with each being a leader, mentor and friend to other women within teams. Velma Corcoran, Airbnb regional lead, Middle East Africa In South Africa, Airbnb is continuing to invest in empowering women to become tourism entrepreneurs, and last year announced a new three-year commitment to address barriers to entry in the industry, and to help rebuild a more inclusive and resilient domestic tourism economy. Velma Corcoran, Airbnb regional lead, Middle East Africa, says, With the rising cost of living, the economic benefits of hosting are proving more important than ever and we are committed to unlocking economic opportunities for women across South Africa, particularly in rural and township communities. Speaking of mentorship of young women, head of MiWay Blink, Keletso Mpisane says Leadership is a skill set honed over time. The key is not to be too lax and not to be too stern. In many cases, they show their knack for leading at an early age. Passing the baton at home SweepSouth CEO, Aisha Pandor Most domestic workers perform one primary role, such as cleaning, but a report by SweepSouth shows that the more roles a domestic worker takes on, the greater her earning capacity is. Childcare, for example, pays more than cleaning. Families can ask domestic workers about what would better their skill set. It may be a drivers licence, so one could sponsor lessons, or it could be sending her on a course in childcare or first-aid. According to SweepSouth CEO, Aisha Pandor, Domestic workers live lives far more challenging than we could ever imagine, and helping your domestic worker to start acquiring the skills needed to improve her life reinforces the message that none of us are in this alone. Women have been the driving force of the upliftment of other women and will likely continue to be each other's biggest champions as inclusion across sectors grows. As a result, we should acknowledge the importance of all the women in the workplace and their role in passing the baton. Sometimes, a small act of recognition could be all the encouragement another woman needs to push through a difficult moment, changing her perspective from wanting to give up to feeling buoyed to try again. Sakhikamva Foundation has set up a science, technology, robotics, engineering, aeronautics and mathematics (Stream) laboratory at Floreat Primary in Retreat, Cape Town. The lab offers the almost 60-year old school a head-start as South Africa prepares to roll out a new coding and robotics curriculum in primary schools next year. Source: Supplied The fully-equipped 4iR classroom can accommodate 40 learners and is the latest in Sakhikamva Foundations rollout of specialised tech laboratories that promote Stream learning in schools serving under-resourced communities. The lab has made possible through a partnership between Sakhikamva Foundation and the schools long-standing supporter, the Prescient Foundation. Shaping SA's future leaders Weve supported a variety of Sakhikamva Foundations coding and robotics education initiatives for more than five years and, similarly, we have an excellent relationship with Floreat Primary School which has been an engaging participant in our leadership programme since 2015," says Nicole Pinto, CEO of the Prescient Foundation. "Establishing the Stream laboratory at Floreat Primary now is coming full circle in our efforts to support sustainable development and community upliftment. Through our partnership with the Sakhikamva Foundation, we have the opportunity to contribute towards the development of 21st century skills at Floreat Primary School skills that we believe are fundamental in creating and shaping our future leaders. Hands-on experience Floreat Primarys new internet-connected laboratory provides a stimulating environment for the development of STEM skills. Learners will get hands-on experience with technologically advanced equipment including robotics and 3D printers. There are artificial intelligence, engineering and science kits to ignite innovation and inspire critical thinking, design thinking and problem-solving capabilities. The laboratory represents a significant asset in the school community. Says principal Noel Isaacs: As a school of more than 900 learners and 25 educators, we are so grateful for this wonderful new learning environment. The laboratory will enable us to lay a solid foundation for coding and robotics education and give our children the opportunities to develop programming and other digital skills. On a day-to-day basis, our new tech lab will promote hands-on learning and teamwork, and the entire school is looking forward to a new era of tech learning adventures. Source: Supplied Floreat is the second primary school in the country to be equipped with a 4iR Stream lab. The Sakhikamva Foundation has previously opened Stream labs at Lanseria Airport in Gauteng, as well as various Western Cape schools. Through Stream laboratories and many other STEM enrichment programmes and activities, the organisation has engaged with more than 150,000 South African learners across the country. 21st century learning experiences Fatima Jakoet, founder of Sakhikamva Foundation, says, We will be training and supporting Floreat Primary educators in Stream philosophy and teaching methodologies so that they can guide their learners through the exciting 21st century learning experiences made possible by their new facility. "When the coding and robotics curriculum is introduced next year by the Department of Basic Education, they will already have the resources, know-how and confidence to seamlessly integrate this in their weekly timetable. Despite bad news, loadshedding woes and ongoing challenges that face farmers in South Africa, many olive growers had a bumper crop harvest. According to SA Olive data, local farmers have produced around 1.6 to 1.7 million litres of EVOO over the last two years, and production is expected to be at a similar level in 2022, despite varying yields across South Africa's olive growing regions. Source: Supplied With the harvest now complete, experts indicate that table olives and Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) from the 2022 harvest will be excellent. SA Olive CEO, Vittoria Jooste says that the South African olive industry is really coming of age. "Our growers' orchard management practices are constantly improving - from the pruning of their trees to the management of soil and nutrients - and this helps achieve better yields and mitigate some of the adverse factors, such as weather." Olive production in SA The olive harvest in South Africa begins in late February and runs through to June and sometimes even July in some areas. Most olive farms are situated in the Western Cape and the majority deploy traditional methods, manually harvesting their olives and paying specific attention to quality olives that will be used to produce premium Extra Virgin Olive Oils (EVOO makes up over 95% of olive oil production in South Africa). For South Africas olive growers, the work does not stop when the harvest ends, because they now must prepare their orchards and prune their trees in readiness for the next crop. Weather conditions in the Overberg were perfect and allowed an easier harvesting process with, for example, Greenleaf Olive Company and Mardouw Olive Estate in the Swellendam area both reporting increased yields compared to 2021 Greenleafs is up by a whopping 40%. Mardouws Philip King said that a combination of factors contributed to their record harvest this year: "We prepared the trees really well last year; this and the perfect weather conditions has resulted in higher olive yields, although the actual oil yield is smaller than in previous years." Source: Supplied Source: Supplied Meanwhile, in the Klein Karoo, the olive farmers were not so fortunate. Bad weather has resulted in a smaller crop. Contributing to the low yield have been many factors apart from the weather, such as increased costs for fuel, water, fertiliser, and labour. This means that many farmers will not be exporting their products and will focus their efforts on the local market. This is good news for South African consumers who will be spoilt for choice with top-quality 2022 EVOOs, many of which have already won international accolades competing with the best in the world. Andre Conradie from Kloovenburg Wine and Olive Estate in Riebeek Kasteel says that increased fuel costs and loadshedding have challenged their operation massively. "While we currently supply the local market with olives and EVOO, we would like to export to Europe in future and, if all goes well, perhaps over the next year. Some of our trees are 35 years old and like red wine our olives are definitely getting better with age, and we are optimistic about the future." Source: Supplied Source: Supplied The manager at Tokara, Gert van Dyk and Jason de Beer, the CEO at Morgenster Estate olive farms in the Western Cape echoed that they had a much larger crop this harvest compared to 2021 and managed to produce some exceptional quality oils, with distinct organoleptic characteristics, good fruitiness, pronounced bitterness and spiciness and will most definitely meet export standards. Farmers have expressed thanks to the SA Olive Industry Association for their support during the harvest season and look forward to the upcoming SA Olive Awards which will take place in September at Laborie Estate in Paarl. Jooste adds: "With an excellent harvest, and good fruit, we expect to celebrate many of our 2022 EVOOs in the upcoming SA Olive Awards. We acknowledge the enormous challenges faced by our producers with loadshedding at its highest at the time of processing, but this is another matter altogether and one that we hope will be soon overcome." Exposure, function, convenience and experience are necessary ingredients for brand growth as the top performing brands at the Kantar BrandZ Top 30 Most Valuable South African Brands 2022 proved. Image supplied: (l to r) Stina Van Rooyen - Kantar BrandZ lead, South Africa, Natalie Otte - chief client officer SA, Insights Division, Kantar, Mapula Bodibe - chief consumer officer, MTN SA, Nomsa Mazibuko - general manager: brand and communication, MTN SA, Ivan Moroke - CEO South Africa Kantars Insights Division Revealed at an event at Kantars offices in Bryanston, Gauteng, another trait these brands have in common is that they are moving beyond their category to grow, and in this way, they are disrupting the status quo, shaking the category up and leading the way. The No. 1 brand on the rankings, MTN catapulted itself into the top position from the No. 4 slot last year by following its core vision and embracing its customers in African territories. Living its core vision General manager: brand and communication, MTN SA, Nomsa Mazibuko credits their Foundation 2025 strategy to their success and how the brand plays a crucial role in this. Brand equity is critical; it is what is driving consideration and brand love and we proved this in how we showed up today. MTN is the most salient brand in the Top 10, which means that it has built connections both rationally and emotionally. Mazibuko says that this is because the brand lives its core vision Everyone deserves a modern connected life through an orchestrated ecosystem that delivers exactly that to its customers. "Our success is through the coming together of that vision, translating it into brand equity, and connecting to our customers. She also says they believe that MTN progresses when Africa progresses. Having the brand stick in Africa across different territories and countries is the power of the brand. We tap into the nuances of the territories that we operate in as well as the customer and culture in those countries. We export MTN to those countries, and they own the MTN brand and translate it to understanding their customer, she says. Thats why we are seeing the growth in Nigeria and other African countries. It shows you can have a monolithic brand that it is truly rooted within the communities and customers that you serve, she adds. Grateful to customers FNB, ranked second this year, was also awarded the special award for Exposure (cutting through with advertising, featuring memorable icons and messages). FNB SAs chief marketing officer, Faye Mfikwe, says its been a really tough year. This is especially for financial services, as we understand the impact we need to make in society by providing services and products that make a real diffrence to our customers." She adds they are grateful to their customers. They keep us honest and continue to challenge us to deliver real help to make a difference in their lives. Taking a stand Making up the Top 3 is Vodacom. Andisa Ntsubane, Vodacom managing executive: brand, marketing and communications for Africa, says Vodacom has been an integral part of South Africa and the brand is very connected to its culture and society. This includes being connected to the issues that the county is dealing with. Leadership brands need to take leadership positions. As such, Vodacom has taken a stance on gender-based violence (GBV). We are proud of our work around GBV. That is a massive space for us to play a role. We know this is an issue that the country and women are facing, and it was important that we play a role and step in. A necessity, not a nice to have One of the only brands to have grown over the past three years is Checkers, which also walked away with the special award for Convenience. This brand has accelerated and transformed through digital and is growing through a variety of platforms amplified by great marketing such as the Swindler campaign. And then its customer experience is delivering on that. The brands Making lives easier is lived through its putting the consumer relationship first and delivering on customer experience at all touchpoints, explains Natalie Otte, chief client officer SA, Insights Division, Kantar. She adds that this has made Checkers, especially the Sixty60 app, a necessity for consumers, not a nice to have. Moving beyond the category Moving beyond their category is a characteristic of the brands in South Africa that are growing. All of them are disrupting the status quo, shaking the category up and leading the way, says Otte. A brand actively achieving this is Dis-Chem, which has returned to the rankings following an absence of two years, making it this years boomerang brand. It is also this years second most meaningful brand in the rankings. The brand has seen huge organic growth and acquisitions through which it is creating an ecosystem beyond its normal category and across categories, such as offering medical aid, says Otte. Sustainability in SA Woolworths was once again awarded the Sustainability Award this year. If you think sustainability in South Africa is about the environment then you are wrong. It is about addressing issues such as inequality, education, and poverty, amongst others, says Feroz Koor, head of sustainability, Woolworths. The Experience (offering superior experience across all touchpoints) and Function (creating a range of well-designed products and services) Awards went to Clicks. Resilience and hope This is the first year since the inception of the Kantar BrandZ Top 30 rankings in South Africa that there has been overall growth of brand value in the Top 30, with the value of the Top 30 showing a 21% increase. Otte says this is a picture of resilience and paints a more positive picture for 2022. Storytelling in advertising and marketing has seen a significant rise in recent years as an important aspect of good, and even award-winning, work. This has led to many conversations about how to make your work award-winning. Perhaps, though, the conversation should start shifting away from award-winning and more towards meaningful work. Presentations from experts at the recent Nedbank IMC examined this and why looking at making an impact as a brand is turning into the necessary strategy. An era of high social conflict Before storytelling grew to what it is today, corporate brand stories were used to draw attention to a brand. However, these stories didnt revolve much around making them relevant to their audience and often ran in a sterile way that saw little to no feedback. But thats not the case today. We are in an era of high social conflict, which often plays out as digitally clashing political ideologies through audience engagement, Lebo Madiba, managing director at Powerhouse PR, said. This is whats forcing organisations to examine their core values and how they tell their stories. Essentially, audiences, and particularly the discourse that arises from social media, has a lot of say in how brand conduct themselves and present their stories to connect with consumers. The #StopShell campaign is a good example of how the public has had an impact on companies that dont take these ideas into account. This becomes yet another case of the people vs big corp, Madiba said. The accused stand to be on the losing slide of the reputation sliding scale. We need to be asking ourselves: As a corporation, where are your principles standing? In a world that is ideologically polarised, a world that is savvy, a world that is hyper-opinionated, a world that has bad actors that are intent on disseminating misinformation, Madiba said. Essentially, brand storytelling is no longer just about crafting a narrative for the brand, but also acting as a critical lens for the corporation, the environment it is in and the impact it has on that environment. How do you craft meaningful stories? Looking back at the past 20 years, consumers have been exposed to products and brands depending on the kind of media they have been using with some consistent shifts in how consumers engage with brands and media. In the last decade, we have shifted to a social graph, where consumers get served content based on the people they follow and their connections, said Scott Thwaites, head of emerging markets at TikTok. From 2020, we have entered the era of content - and TikTok is a big part of this particular shift. TikTok is a culmination of many communities on one platform. Essentially, you are able to engage with people from law, fitness, food, house chores - nearly anything you can imagine. Its a platform that exposes the user to things they might not have been exposed to before, depending on who they were following and connecting with. The reach is also unparalleled at the moment. For example, Gold Olympic gymnast Sunisa Lees TikTok videos she makes reach up to 21 million viewers in 24 hours - compared to the total 17 million viewers the actual Olympics accumulated overall on TV. Gen Z is slowly becoming a large target market for brand advertising - and are also the generation, alongside Millennials perhaps, that care the most about where brands stand on social awareness and environmental impact. According to a study done by InSites Consulting, 45% of Gen Zs in South Africa feel high levels of stress. A lot of this stress comes from social media and comparing themselves to others - which feeds into the main issue of poor mental health. Moreover, the study also found that 71% of Gen Z in South Africa will more likely support brands that support their life goals. But how do we make use of all this data in combination with the reach that platforms like TikTok offer? Free Star, an alcohol free beer brand in the UK, launched a mentoring hotline for young people struggling to find jobs during lockdown. The hotline works over WhatsApp and allows users to connect with executives from BBC and Tesla to write an application letter or prepare for a job interview. This is just one example of how a brand has made use of data and social media to connect with audiences meaningfully, on a topic that is important to them - making a difference to both individuals and the world at large. In the end Essentially, brand storytelling is no longer about sending out a message - but making sure you engage with their audiences meaningfully and make a real, positive impact on the world around them. The rising reach and popularity of social media is calling for more creativity. It is not only an essential tool for messaging, but can be used to make the impact that is becoming so necessary. At the end of the day, brands should be looking at how they can make real change - and ask themselves the question; where is my real place in the world? Bizcommunity is a proud media partner of the Nedbank IMC CANBERRA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Health Minister has said it is too early to tell if the peak of the winter coronavirus wave has passed. Speaking ahead of a meeting with state and territory counterparts on Thursday, Health Minister Mark Butler said he is optimistic the number of new COVID-19 cases each day could fall. "Certainly the data we're seeing right now indicates that we might have reached the peak earlier than we expected to," he said in a press conference in Canberra. Butler added that "we're being a bit cautious" about that, because of the school holiday effect, which shows that numbers and transmissions take a slightly different course because of the holidays. "Hospital numbers pleasingly are down. They're still high, at about 5,000 across the country but they're certainly down from the peak we saw a couple of weeks ago," he said. Australia's coronavirus infection rates remained high over recent weeks, with more than two million new cases recorded since the start of June during which more than 3,500 deaths have been reported. As of Wednesday afternoon, a total of 9,517,174 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Australia, including 12,026 deaths, and approximately 327,464 active cases, according to the latest data from the Department of Health. On Thursday, there were more than 30,000 new cases reported across the country and more than 80 deaths. The federal government is urging as many people as possible to get their booster vaccines, with five million eligible Australians yet to receive a third dose. "I really, really encourage anyone who is eligible for a booster shot, whether it's a third dose or a fourth dose, get it now, get the vaccine that is in front of you," Butler said. China launched a host of missiles over the waters surrounding Taiwan and began aggressive live-fire military drills surrounding the island nation in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "legacy-building" trip. #China's Global Times reports that The Chinese military will launch a hypersonic missile #DF17 from the mainland for the first time across #Taiwan's airspace. pic.twitter.com/tXqAnLuh62 World Military News (@Military_News4) August 4, 2022 Video of PLA long range rockets firing from Fujian Pingtan into the Taiwan strait.#China #Taiwan #Pelosi pic.twitter.com/OYGHez1H3W Lasagna (@mmmmmlasagna) August 4, 2022 BREAKING NEWS : #China's military fires PCL 191 ballistic missiles (MLRS) across #Taiwan Strait. pic.twitter.com/t9aAHGFTAH World Military News (@Military_News4) August 4, 2022 This is a video from a #Taiwanese fisherman. showing several #Chinese military #helicopters flying out of the mainland heading for the #Taiwan Strait pic.twitter.com/xsnbV159WI World Military News (@Military_News4) August 4, 2022 Chinese state media released the following map of Taiwan showing in red where their "live-fire drills" are going to take place: "Joint military exercises around the island of Taiwan by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) continued Wednesday with a joint blockade, sea assault and land and air combat trainings, involving the use of advanced weapons including J-20 stealth fighter jets and DF-17 hypersonic missiles after the drills started on Tuesday evening, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed on the island which seriously violates China's sovereignty," China's Global Times reported. "The exercises are unprecedented as the PLA conventional missiles are expected to fly over the island of Taiwan for the first time, the PLA forces will enter area within 12 nautical miles of the island and that the so-called median line will cease to exist, experts said, noting that by surrounding Taiwan entirely, the PLA is completely blockading the island demonstrating the Chinese mainland's absolute control over the Taiwan question." In a video that went viral on social media, former Taiwan diplomat Jieh Wen-chieh was seen raging at Pelosi for "pouring oil on the flames" of region tensions with her visit. "Are you here to support Taiwan or to provoke a war?" Wen-chieh ranted. "What the hell are you doing here, Pelosi? The relationship between the mainland and Taiwan is already very tense! Supporting Taiwan? We don't need your support! You're literally pouring oil on the flames! You'll only make things worse!" Many people in #Taiwan are very worried. Former Taiwan ambassador to New Zealand lashes out at the #Pelosi provocation. Via @Dragondescendan pic.twitter.com/CvEJkk0NbA tim anderson (@timand2037) August 2, 2022 Pelosi said Wednesday that Chinese officials are only angry over her visit to Taiwan because she's a woman. Follow InformationLiberation on Twitter, Facebook, Gab, Minds and Telegram. Despite wide-ranging sanctions and import bans, Russia's vast energy sector continues to thrive, with the country managing to export nearly a billion dollars worth of fossil fuels per day in the first 100 days since its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, higher crude oil and fuel prices have allowed Russian oil and gas revenues to climb even after the sanctions forced export volumes to dip. Ultimately, there is no shortage of willing buyers lining up for cheap Russian Urals, nor is there a dearth of middlemen connecting them with Russian energy companies. Lurking behind the scenes are Switzerland's giant trading houses Vitol, Glencore, and Gunvor as well as Singapore's Trafigura, all of which have continued lifting large volumes of Russian crude and products, including diesel, amid wide-ranging Western Sanctions on Russia. Vitol has pledged to stop buying Russian crude by the end of this year, but that's still a long way from today. Trafigura promised it would stop buying crude from Russia's state-run Rosneft by May 15th but is free to buy cargoes of Russian crude from other suppliers. Glencore has promised it wouldn't enter any "new" trading business with Russia, but appears willing to maintain previous deals. Meanwhile, India and China have been making up for much of the lost markets for Russian fuels. Source: Visual Capitalist Surging Imports From Russia India has never been a big buyer of Russian crude despite having to import 80% of its needs. In a typical year, India imports just 2-5% of its crude from Russia, roughly the same proportion as the United States did before it announced a 100% ban on Russian energy commodities. Indeed, India imported only 12 million barrels of Russian crude in 2021, with the majority of its oil sourced from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Nigeria. But back in May, reports emerged of a "significant uptick" in Russian oil deliveries bound for India. According to a Bloomberg report, India spent a good $5.1 billion on Russian oil, gas, and coal in the first three months after the invasion, more than five times the value of a year ago. However, China remains the biggest buyer of Russian energy commodities, spending $18.9 billion in the three months to the end of May, almost double the amount a year earlier. And, it's all about the money. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Urals crude from Russia has been offered at record discounts. Ellen Wald, president of Transversal Consulting, has told CNBC that a couple of commodity trading firms--such as Glencore and Vitol--were offering discounts of $30 and $25 per barrel, respectively, for the Urals blend. Urals is the main blend exported by Russia. The experts say simple economics is the biggest reason why White House pressure to curb purchases of crude oil from Russia have fallen on deaf ears in Delhi. "Today, the Government of India's motivations are economic, not political. India will always look for a deal in their oil import strategy. It's hard not to take a 20% discount on crude when you import 80-85% of your oil, particularly on the heels of the pandemic and global growth slowdown," Samir N. Kapadia, head of trade at government relations consulting firm Vogel Group, has told CNBC via email. Still, it will not be lost on many readers that India has maintained a cozy relationship with Russia over the years, with Russia supplying the Asian nation with as much as 60% of its military and defense-related equipment. Russia has also been a key ally on crucial issues such as India's dispute with China and Pakistan surrounding the territory of Kashmir. Source: Bloomberg Smaller trading firms India's energy business with Russia has been booming, so much so that dozens of middlemen are muscling in, hoping to profit from the rapidly growing sector. However, it's not the Trafiguras, Glencores, and Gunvors of this world doing the work; this time around, it's smaller, less well-known trading houses cutting supply deals with Indian refineries. Bloomberg has reported that numerous mid-level commodity trading and energy firms, including Dubai's Wellbred and Coral Energy, as well as Singapore's Montfort and U.S.' Everest Energy, have entered the race to market Russian oil to Indian buyers. And Indian oil buyers are loving it. Bloomberg says that state-run refiners such as Indian Oil Corp. are warming to the idea of buying from lesser-known traders, while refinery officials say they are easier to work with due to less bureaucracy that slows negotiations with energy firms such as Rosneft PJSC. Trading houses usually serve the function of middlemen by bridging differences between sellers and buyers, and even offer different payment terms to assist in the movement of funds. Switzerland's Golden Calf That said, a lot of the companies helping finance Putin's war are based in Switzerland, with the lion's share of Russian raw materials traded via Switzerland and its nearly 1,000 commodity firms. Switzerland is an important global financial hub with a thriving commodities sector, despite the fact that it is far from all the global trade routes and has no access to the sea, no former colonial territories, and no significant raw materials of its own. Oliver Classen, media officer at the Swiss NGO Public Eye, says that "this sector accounts for a much larger part of the GDP in Switzerland than tourism or the machinery industry". According to a 2018 Swiss government report, commodity trading volume reaches almost $1 trillion ($903.8 billion). Related: Saudi Arabias Real Production Capacity: Is 15 Million Bpd Possible? Deutsche Welle has reported that 80% of Russian raw materials are traded via Switzerland, according to a report by the Swiss embassy in Moscow. About a third of those materials are oil and gas, while two-thirds are base metals such as zinc, copper, and aluminum. In other words, deals signed on Swiss desks are directly facilitating Russian oil and gas to continue flowing freely. With gas and oil exports coming in as the main source of income for Russia, accounting for 30 to 40% of the Russian budget, Switzerland's role cannot be overlooked in this war-time equation. In 2021, Russian state corporations earned around $180 billion (163 billion) from oil exports alone. Again, unfortunately, Switzerland has been handling its commodities trade with kid gloves. According to DW, raw materials are often traded directly between governments and via commodities exchanges. However, they can also be traded freely, and Swiss companies have specialized in direct sales thanks to an abundance of capital. In raw materials transactions, Swiss commodity traders have adopted letters of credits or L/Cs as their preferred instruments. A bank will give a loan to a trader and as collateral, receive a document making it the owner of the commodity. As soon as the buyer pays the bank, the document (and ownership of the commodity) is transferred to the trader. The system gives traders more credit lines without their creditworthiness having to be checked, and the bank has the value of the commodity as security. This is a prime example of transit trade, where only the money flows through Switzerland, but actual raw materials usually do not touch Swiss soil. Thus, no details about the magnitude of the transaction land on the desk of the Swiss customs authorities leading to highly imprecise information about the flow volumes of raw materials. "The whole commodities trade is under-recorded and underregulated. You have to dig around to collect data and not all information is available," Elisabeth Burgi Bonanomi, a senior lecturer in law and sustainability at Bern University, has told DW. Obviously, the lack of regulation is very appealing to commodity traders - especially those that deal with raw materials mined in non-democratic countries such as the DRC. "Unlike the financial market, where there are rules for tackling money laundering and illegal or illegitimate financial flows, and a financial market supervisory authority, there is currently no such thing for commodity trading," financial and legal expert at Public Eye David Muhlemann told the German broadcaster ARD. But don't expect things to change any time soon. Calls for a supervisory body for the commodities sector based on the model of the one for the financial market by the likes of Swiss NGO Public Eye and Swiss Green Party proposal have so far failed to bear fruit. Thomas Mattern from the Swiss People's Party (SVP) has spoken out against such a move, insisting that Switzerland should retain its neutrality, "We do not need even more regulation, and not in the commodities sector either." Borsa Italiana non ha responsabilita per il contenuto del sito a cui sta per accedere e non ha responsabilita per le informazioni contenute. Accedendo a questo link, Borsa Italiana non intende sollecitare acquisti o offerte in alcun paese da parte di nessuno. Sarai automaticamente diretto al link in cinque secondi. SYDNEY, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Lockdowns, public health restrictions and isolations saw Australians' chance for social connection fall off a cliff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the ending of the majority of these measures the country still faces a surge in loneliness. A white paper report was delivered to the Australian government on Thursday declaring Australia's surge in loneliness a "public health emergency". Loneliness researcher at Swinburne University and contributor on the report, Michelle Lim, said urgent action was needed to address this looming crisis in an article published in the Conversation. "People who have never felt the anguish of loneliness have experienced distressing loneliness for the first time in their lives due to the implementation of public health recommendations and restrictions to curb the spread of the SARSCoV-2 virus," she said in the report. One 26-year-old Canberra resident, who asked not to be named, told Xinhua that after the pandemic she has found it hard to spend time alone. "I feel like now whenever I am not with people I will be transported back to that time (lockdowns)," she said. "When I caught COVID I was more worried about having to isolate than actually being sick." Her individual experience is part of a larger trend that has hit not just Australia but the world since the pandemic in early 2020. A recent international study of 1,562 individuals from Lim and her colleagues found that the impacts of lockdowns on loneliness and other mental health conditions only eased marginally as lockdowns were eased. A report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) said that mental health hotlines experienced jumps in demand as high as 26.7 percent compared to before the pandemic. Lim said beyond the direct experienced impact of loneliness, studies have shown that persistent loneliness increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and could even impede one's immune system. She pointed to a 2021 report from Bankwest Curtin Economics Center which estimated that loneliness costs the economy 2.7 billion Australian dollars each year (1.88 billion U.S. dollars). The white paper called for three actions to address loneliness: the development of a strategic framework for social connection, strengthening the workforce in mental health care and empowering communities to help each other, and further investment in Australian research. "These actions are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can do. But taking them is the first step towards addressing the rising rates of loneliness in this country," said Lim. China releases first national standard guiding equine acupuncture Xinhua) 08:53, August 04, 2022 BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- China has approved and released a standard to guide the use of acupuncture on equine animals such as horses, which will be implemented from Feb. 1, 2023, according to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). Drafted by experts from the Lanzhou Institute of Husbandry and Pharmaceutical Sciences under CAAS, as well as other Chinese universities, the standard specifies the names and positions of 180 acupuncture points in equine animals. According to traditional Chinese medical records, acupuncture can be used to treat more than 300 equine diseases such as heatstroke, colds, pneumonia, overwork and rheumatism, said Qiu Zhengying from the Lanzhou Institute of Husbandry and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Acupuncture is also widely used in contemporary Chinese veterinary medicine as it is simple, easy to implement, and has remarkable curative effects in the treatment of pain and dyskinesia, she said. Veterinary acupuncture is also used abroad. Some groups and institutes in the United States, Canada, Japan and other countries are developing veterinary acupuncture education and clinical application, Qiu said. However, there are not yet enough clinical veterinarians who have mastered Chinese veterinary medicine and acupuncture skills, she added. The standard has important guiding significance for acupuncture point positioning, clinical application, and scientific research into the use of acupuncture on equine animals, CAAS said. The move is expected to fill a gap in the standards for Chinese veterinary acupuncture, and promote the teaching and clinical application of Chinese veterinary medicine, CAAS said. It is also expected to promote domestic and foreign academic exchanges in the field. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) JAKARTA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian government will give 4.1 trillion rupiahs (274 million U.S. dollars) of additional fund to state-owned railway company PT Kereta Api Indonesia (PT KAI) to speed up the construction of the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway (HSR). PT KAI's vice president of public relations, Joni Martinus, said Thursday in a statement, "KAI has committed to immediately complete the HSR construction. The train will be a medium for people to transport quickly and safely," he said. According to the company, the progress of the Jakarta-Bandung HSR project has reached 76 percent. Trains will operate on a 142.3-km double track that will stop at four stations. In June, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani and his aides ran into an unexpected dilemma when debating where to train the dealmaking lens of his empire next. Ambanis Reliance Industries was contemplating buying a foreign telecommunications giant, when word reached them that Gautam Adani, a name familiar to Australians and who had overtaken Ambani as Asias richest man a few months earlier, was planning to bid in the first big sale of 5G airwaves in India, according to people familiar with the matter. Mukesh Ambani has stayed cautious on spending heavily overseas amid the uncertain global outlook. Credit:Bloomberg Ambanis Reliance Jio Infocomm is the top player in Indias mobile market, while the Adani Group doesnt even have a licence to offer wireless telecommunications services. But the very idea that he might be circling ground so core to Ambanis ambitions put the tycoons camp on high alert, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing information that isnt public. One set of aides advised Ambani to pursue the overseas target and diversify beyond the Indian market, while another counselled conserving funds to fend off any challenge on the home turf, according to people familiar with the discussions. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Richard Dawkins is perched on the edge of his sofa playing his Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI), a kind of digital clarinet. He pushes a button and it imitates the sound of a cello; another button turns it into a saxophone. He plays the theme from Prokofievs Peter and the Wolf and the melody fills the sunlit living room of his Oxford apartment. For a moment, I imagine him as The Pied Piper of Atheism calling the (un)faithful to his side. He takes the instrument from his lips and shrugs off a compliment. Im trying to get better. Would he like to play with other musicians? I think I would. The novelist Alexander McCall Smith has founded something called The Really Terrible Orchestra. I wouldnt mind joining that. Richard Dawkins at 81. His ambivalence in regard to his musical talent contrasts with the certainty he exhibits in his lifes work: the study of evolutionary biology and the forensic debunking of religion. His bestselling books, The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006), represent a formidable one-two punch. The former puts the gene at the centre of the evolutionary process and argues that organisms you and I, for example are merely vehicles for successful genes, the kind whose coded information remains largely unchanged over tens of millions of years. The latter book a sensation on its release uses science to argue belief in God, any god, is not just wrong, but potentially dangerous. Dawkins is 81. Dressed in an untucked white shirt and blue Prince of Wales check trousers, he is handsome in a donnish way, but reticent, almost shy. He has been married three times, but spent lockdown with a new partner. His patrician accent and measured speech seem ill-suited to overt displays of emotion, although certain lines of poetry can move him to tears. Age has not softened his beliefs or rather his lack of belief in a higher power; dont expect a deathbed apostasy. The eulogy he has chosen for his funeral the opening lines of his 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and Appetite for Wonder goes to the heart of his secular, science-based world view. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. What will happen after he draws his last breath? It will be just like being unborn, he says evenly. A great nothing. Or rather as much of a nothing as before we were born. He recites Mark Twains famous line: I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. Advertisement Dawkins supported the first atheist advertising campaign in 2008 in the UK. Credit:Getty Dawkins is not looking forward to the process of dying because unlike a dog, Im unable to go to the vet and be painlessly put to sleep. He could visit a clinic in Switzerland perhaps? Yes, and I may well do that. In the meantime, Dawkins has plenty of living to do and books to write. He finished two during lockdown: Flights of Fancy, an exploration of human and animal flight through the prism of evolution, and a collection of essays and journalism called Books Do Furnish a Life. The Dawkins canon will expand further next year with the publication of another title, The Genetic Book of the Dead, and a speaking tour of Australia begins in Melbourne on February 17. Dawkins had a stroke in 2016 and uses a treadmill to ensure his organism stays healthy. He watches TV while he exercises and has become a fan of Young Sheldon, the sitcom about an American prodigy based on the science geek from The Big Bang Theory. He looks pained when I ask him if he was a prodigy at Oundle, the private school in England he attended after his family returned from Kenya. Oh no, certainly not. I was right in the middle of school. A late developer then? I suppose I got enthusiastic in my second year at Oxford [he studied zoology at Balliol College]. In my first year, I still thought I was at school and thought in terms of textbook education. It was only in my second year I realised that a university education is about being a scholar never touching a textbook, but going into the library and reading original research papers and thinking for yourself. He launches into a story about the water vascular systems of starfish, how the creatures use piped seawater to animate their limbs. He was told to write an essay on the subject and it triggered a Eureka moment. You can imagine that was a heady experience for a 19-year-old. The encouragement provided by the weekly tutorial meant you didnt just read about starfish hydraulics, you eat and slept it. I had seawater pulsing through my dozing brain. Advertisement TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO RICHARD DAWKINS Worst habit? Seizing any excuse to divert from the task at hand. Greatest fear? That the world might cease to respect reason. The line that stayed with you? The line between truth and falsehood. Biggest regret? The loss of friends. Favourite room? Room to manoeuvre. The artwork/song you wish was yours? Here, There and Everywhere by Lennon and McCartney. If you could solve one thing... The evolutionary significance of consciousness. It is clear he is most happy talking about science. Science, he explains, is mostly collegiate; the arguments are passionate, but generally respectful. The same cannot be said for atheism, the subject which has made him both revered and reviled. On several occasions, he has given jocular public readings of his hate mail, much of it written by American evangelicals who accuse him of doing Satans work. I ask him if the letters and emails ever make him fear for his safety? No, he says firmly. Dawkins would be aware, surely, that hate mail has changed in recent years. High-profile people who express controversial opinions can be subjected to physical threats as well as insults. I am aware of that, yes. I think of what J.K. Rowling has been subjected to [the author has been accused of transphobia and sent death threats] and I think its horrifying. I have a huge sympathy for her and I admire her bravery and the fact shes willing to speak out. Dawkins, whose own social media posts in relation to Islam and transgender issues have occasionally landed him in hot water, has admitted he occasionally censors his public statements nowadays. But when I ask him about it, he falls silent. Lets talk about my books, shall we? The subject is closed, or so I thought. Later, we return to the topic when I ask him how he reacts to criticism. Did it hurt when the American Humanist Association withdrew its humanist of the year award in 2021 because it felt Dawkins had disparaged trans people in a tweet that said: Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss. The short answer: yes. Im what Americans would call a liberal Im of the left politically and I tend to see myself as a feminist humanist. So, criticism from people who I think of as my people hurts me in a way that criticism from religious people doesnt I dont give a damn about that. Advertisement Dawkins wearing a T-shirt from his Foundation for Reason and Science. What about accusations of Islamophobia? Over the past decade his comments and tweets about Islam - suggesting the Muslim call to prayer is aggressive sounding compared to the so much nicer sound of church bells; holding Islamic doctrine responsible for the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting; calling Islam the greatest force for evil in the world today - have resulted in widespread criticism. Dawkins doesnt flinch. I am not Islamophobic. What I am is phobic against throwing gay people off buildings, against cutting off the clitorises of young girls, of forbidding the enjoyment of music and dancing. And Im phobic about making young children memorise the Koran in a language they dont speak. Im not phobic against Muslims because they are the biggest victims of Islam. There was a time when the New Atheism, championed by big beasts of disbelief such as Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, was adopted as a mantra by many on the left when some of his more controversial statements, would pass mostly without comment. But in the woke era, the more inclusive instincts of the left sometimes butt up against the science-based rationalism of the atheists. Dawkins knows times have changed. But he bridles at the idea of science making an accommodation with each generations shifting sensibilities. I dont really study trends, says the man who coined the term meme. Im not one of those people who talks about generation this or generation that. Science is about more eternal things than that things that have always been true and always will be true. Loading Surprisingly, he does not consider himself particularly combative and insists he is not an evangelist for atheism. That may come as a surprise to some of his opponents. I hope Im always polite, he says calmly. If I talk nonsense, I expect someone to tell me so. One of the reasons people think [Im combative] is that weve been brought up over the centuries to give religion a free pass; we dont criticise it. So, when you hear someone using even fairly mild language the sort of language that would be thought mild if it was applied to theatre or a restaurant it sounds very aggressive. Advertisement Mongol bikies arrested in relation to daylight shooting Were sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. Were working to restore it. Please try again later. Dismiss Have you ever stopped to think about becoming extinct? Possibly not, and Im not sure it occurs to mountain pygmy possums either, but it is one of the most vulnerable native animals to extinction because of climate change. You wont find pygmy possums in India, Indonesia or Ireland. Theyre unique one of the creatures that make Australia like nowhere else on Earth. Mountain pygmy possum, Burramys parvus. Credit:DPIE Now that its confirmed the Albanese governments climate bill will receive enough support to become law, lets be clear about whats at stake if our politicians dont work together for much greater action: there will be many extinctions in the next 20 years, and the mountain pygmy possum could be among the first to go. No one, in fact, can afford further delays to meaningful action on climate change. The national State of the Environment report released last month documented how climate change is worsening pressures on every Australian ecosystem, as well as harming our health. Victorian opposition leader rejects call to resign following donor scandal Were sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. Were working to restore it. Please try again later. Dismiss The clean-up after Perths once-in-a-year storm has begun, with record-breaking damaging winds and swells resulting in more than 500 calls for help and leaving 35,000 homes without power. State Emergency Service crews were called out to multiple severely damaged homes, including one in Butler where the entire ceiling collapsed, and another in South Lake where a 20-metre tall tree fell onto a roof. An SES member stands on a damaged roof in Cockburn after Tuesday nights damaging winds ripped off the tiling. Credit:Cockburn SES/ Facebook Bureau of Meteorology duty forecaster Jessica Lingard said three cold fronts had come through in a row, making the storm a significant weather event. If just one of these fronts came through then it would be more of a typical winter storm, but the fact they came through all at once with almost no breaks is not common, she said. And so the wind blows, the tides turn and the climate inches through change. Seven years ago, Tony Abbotts excitable forces were dancing confected jigs and high-fiving and embracing each other on the floor of the parliament in florid celebration of the end of what was misnamed the carbon tax. Teal independent MPs voted with Greens and Laborites of every factional hue to pass the climate bill. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Almost none of those self-conscious revellers remain in todays federal parliament. Cast aside by the relentless arc of time and the shifting mood of Australian voters, yesterdays merrymakers could only look on from afar, presumably aghast, as a newly triumphant band struck up the latest parliamentary victory march concerning climate change. Singapore: As Nancy Pelosi prepared to board her plane to leave Taiwan on Wednesday night, Chinese state media was working overtime to justify all the fuss. The Chinese people are infuriated by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to the Taiwan Island, thundered China Daily as Pelosi took off. But are generally optimistic and confident in Chinas ability to handle the situation and thwart any secession efforts by Taiwan separatist forces and foreign interference. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taipei on Wednesday. Credit:Getty The first sentence tells us of the scale of mainland outrage - manufactured or otherwise - at Pelosis 18-hour trip to Taipei, which ended with Taiwanese exports being sanctioned and 27 Chinese warplanes crossing Taiwans median line. The second tells us how despite the threats of Taiwan being sent into the abyss by the Peoples Liberation Army, the uneasy peace between Beijing and Taipei may just hold. Most people are cautiously optimistic, says Wen-Ti Sung, an Australian National University political scientist based in Taipei. They have seen this movie before. ISLAMABAD, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- One person was killed in a blast on Thursday morning in Jamshoro district of Pakistan's southern Sindh province, police said. The bomb disposal unit of police said it was a mobile bomb device blast that took place near the deputy commissioner office of Kotri city of the district. Police were suspecting that the killed person was planting the bomb. Evidence was being gathered while further investigations were underway, according to police. Deboarding an aircraft from the left side has been a long-lasting practice in commercial aviation. But, this changed on Tuesday, perhaps for the first time, as passengers disembarked an flight in Delhi from the right side on the front. has worked on a three-door exit formula two on the left and a front door on the right to save at least five minutes of turnaround time per flight. For the airline, which operates 1,600 flights day, this will lead to a cascading impact and save a significant amount of time across the network. The usual turnaround time...is between 30 and 35 minutes for . Using the third ramp is a simple but effective process through which we obtained results of improving turnaround time by an average of five minutes, said Sanjeev Ramdas, executive vice-president, who heads IndiGos airport operations. The operational manual of Indigo, which counts punctuality as one of its primary selling points, said after an aircraft is parked in a remote stand, all passenger ramps are positioned along the front exit and then the rear one, after which the doors are opened. When there are no passengers left in the aircraft, security check and fuelling are done, after which the aircraft is cleaned for its next flight. Achieving a faster turnaround is critical for low-cost carriers as the business model involves utilising planes for as many hours during the day as possible. ALSO READ: Q1 report card: IndiGo revenue soars 328% to Rs 12,855 crore; loss narrows Think of it like a water flow. The more outlets you have, the faster the water will flow out, he said. IndiGo under Ramdas has been using ramps instead of step ladders from Day One, which makes the boarding and deboarding faster. The airline as of now is trying the new process in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru and will only use this for aircraft arriving at remote parking stands which are away from the terminal building. Ramdas said he intended to roll out the three-door deboarding process for at least 70 per cent of IndiGos flights. Industry experts who have expertise in ground operations however said that for boarding it will be a more complicated process as the right hand side of the aircraft is used for loading cargo and catering materials and hence will obstruct passenger movement. Aviation safety expert Captain Amit Singh and founder of NGO, Safety Matters said that the airline will need to ensure that there is sufficient manpower to supervise that passengers dont wander away on a busy parking ramp. It is also for safety reasons that passenger movement is kept on one side of the aircraft. The airline will have to ensure that there is enough supervision to check passenger movement on both sides, he said. on Thursday announced it would disembark passengers from three doors of the plane, allowing the flyers to quickly get off the . "The new three-point disembarkation process will be carried out from two forward and one rear exit ramp, making the first airline in the world to use this process," the airline said in an statement. CEO Ronojoy Dutta told reporters at the Delhi airport that the three-point disembarkation will allow the airline to save five-six minutes, leading to quicker turnaround of planes. "It generally takes 13-14 minutes to disembark an A321 with two-point disembarkation. With three point disembarkation, it will take just seven-eight minutes to let all passengers get off the plane," he noted. The usual turnaround time, which is the time the plan spends on the tarmac between landing and taking off again, is anywhere between 30-35 minutes for IndiGo at the moment, Ramdas said. His comments came a day after the company reported its highest ever quarterly revenue for the three months ended June 30, boosted by a 145% increase in capacity and a load factor, representing the percentage of seats filled, of about 80%. Competition in India's aviation sector is heating up, with the launch of Akasa Air and a return of full-service carrier Jet Airways, though IndiGo's biggest rival SpiceJet Ltd is facing some turbulence after India's aviation regulator forced it to reduce its schedule by half. The CEO said IndiGo will initially implement three-point disembarkation at three cities: Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. Gradually, the airline will expand it to all the stations, Dutta added. IndiGo celebrated its 16th anniversary on Thursday. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Infrastructure major Larsen and Toubro (L&T) Group is targeting Rs 2.7 lakh crore revenue by financial year 2025-26, its Chairman A M Naik said on Thursday. "We are targeting group revenues of Rs 2,70,000 crore...by FY26. The group recorded revenues of Rs 1,56,521 crore during FY 2021-22, registering a growth of 15 per cent," he said at the company's 77th Annual General Meeting (AGM). As of March 31, 2022, the company's order book was at Rs 3,57,595 crore. Currently, the Middle East constitutes 76 per cent of the international order book of Rs 95,227 crore. In 2021-22, profit after tax was Rs 8,572 crore, a year-on-year (y-o-y) growth of 23 per cent. Naik said the company has also launched 'Lakshya 2026' plan which includes exit from non-core businesses, developing innovative business offerings, scaling up digital and e-commerce businesses, focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and shareholder value creation. The Rs 2,70,000-crore revenue target is also a part of the plan, he said. Naik further said India is expected to post "top quartile growth" among emerging markets in the medium term. The challenges on the horizon include high oil and commodity prices, supply chain disruptions and the US rate hikes affecting capital flows into India. "However, despite these roadblocks, our view is that the bold structural reforms carried out by the government in the last couple of years will pave the way for a higher trajectory of growth," Naik said. The company's board has recommended a final dividend of Rs 22 per share for 2021-22. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) has signed a long-term franchise agreement with global luxury brand Balenciaga, it announced on Thursday. With this agreement, will be Balenciagas sole India partner to launch the brand in the country. This will be Reliance Brands second partnership with Kering, the parent group of Balenciaga, said in a release. The agreement comes after it recently signed a long-term distribution agreement with Italian fashion house Maison Valentino. Balenciaga was founded by Spanish-born Cristobal Balenciaga in 1917 and established in Paris in 1937. Since his appointment as artistic director in 2015, Demna Gvasalia continues to uphold the brands vision through boundary-pushing collections, which have expanded to include womens and mens ready-to-wear, accessories and objets dart, Reliance Brands said. Few brands have actually embraced the opportunity for creative reinterpretation and reinvention quite like Balenciaga. Their avant-garde and ingenious creations, bold use of the logo, and a consequent cult in the fashion industry has already created a strong footing throughout the world. Its the most opportune time to introduce the brand to the country as the Indian luxury customer has matured and is using fashion as a form of creative expression of their individuality, said Darshan Mehta, MD of Reliance Brands. Reliance Brands is a subsidiary of Reliance Retail Ventures the retail arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambanis Reliance Group. It began operations in 2007 with a mandate to launch and build global brands in luxury to premium segments across fashion and lifestyle. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has ordered a forensic audit of the financial statements of beleaguered . has reasonable grounds to believe that the disclosure of financial information and the business transactions in the matter of Future Retail, have been dealt with in a manner which may be detrimental to the interest of investors or the securities markets and/or an intermediary or a person associated with the securities market may have violated the provisions of Act the regulator said in a letter to the company. Group firm Future Consumer and Future Enterprises on Thursday disclosed to the exchanges about the directive from the market regulator to . They further said Chartered Accountants Chokshi & Chokshi have been appointed as forensic auditor, which will audit the consolidated financial statements of and the books of accounts of the company and some other entities for FY20, FY21 and FY22. Future Retail shareholders representative, Vijay Kulkarni, said, I welcome Sebis decision on behalf of several investors, I had repeatedly addressed in April and May this year and it appears that the regulator has found substance and is, therefore, conducting the forensic audit. Last month, Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) proceedings were invoked against Future Retail. Sebis letter was sent to interim resolution professionals (IRPs) who have been appointed under the IBC. Bank of India had moved the insolvency petition against Future Retail on April 14 for non-payment of dues under the agreement between the and the bank. It was seeking admission of its petition and the appointment of an IRP. owes its 26 lenders over Rs 15,000 crore. In 2020, the Group had decided to go for a jumble sale of its unlisted and listed to Reliance Retail for about Rs 25,000 crore to repay its ballooning debt. However, e-commerce giant Amazon, which had in 2019 acquired 49 per cent in Future Coupons that owns 10 per cent in Future Retail accused of breach of contract. There are cases pending in various courts between Amazon and Future Group. Recently, the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) dismissed Future Groups plea to terminate the arbitration proceedings between the Kishore Biyani-led firm and Amazon. The order said there was no ground for the termination of the proceedings under Section 32 of the Arbitration Act. Recently, in a regulatory filing, Reliance Industries said the deal with Future Retail would not go through because the companys secured creditors had voted against it. In February, the Mukesh Ambani-led retail major had taken over 947 stores belonging to Future Retail, which it had sub-leased to it. Legal experts say Sebi typically orders forensic audits of listed if they suspect manipulation of books of accounts and its subsidiaries, misrepresentation of financials and business operations, and wrongful diversion or siphoning of company funds by promoters, directors and key managerial persons. The government is ramping up the inventory of an industrial land bank of an estimated 1,500 acres in the state ahead of the global investors summit early next year. The state aims to garner private investments of Rs 10 trillion at the January 2023 event. The state government will showcase a proverbial ready to allot menu of industrial land to woo domestic and global corporations. To increase the availability of industrial-grade property, state agencies will not only acquire new land but will also utilise the expansive plots from defunct industrial units, such as mills. According to UP industrial development minister Nand Gopal Nandi, the government will utilise the swathes of defunct textile mills, estimated to be almost 1,500 acres, for fresh allotment to . The government has decided to settle all outstanding dues of such defunct mills before formally acquiring the land for re-allotment to . These defunct mills are located at Meerut, Hardoi, Jhansi, Prayagaraj, Banda, Ballia, Mau, Rae Bareli, Barabanki, Amroha, Bareilly, Ghazipur, Fatehpur, Farrukhabad, Sitapur, Bijnor, Sant Kabirnagar, and Bulandshahar districts, a government spokesperson said. At the same time, the government is acquiring land in the vicinity of expressway projects for an array of proposed industrial corridors and parks, including toy park, medical devices park, film city, electronic city, etc. Such land acquisition is primarily undertaken by four major industrial enclaves UP State Industrial Development Authority, Noida, Greater Noida, and Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority. Earlier, the state government had said it was looking to create a robust industrial land bank of almost 22,000 acres by acquiring swathes within one km of the expressways. As many as 14 Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers from 12 state cadres are currently on deputation in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), the was informed on Thursday. Two officers each are from Gujarat and Bihar cadres and one each from Uttarakhand, Telangana, Sikkim, Manipur, Maharashtra, Nagaland, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories) cadre, according to a written reply given by Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh. To a question seeking number of officers appointed through lateral entry in the PMO, he said lateral recruitment provides for appointment of persons for specific assignments in the government of India, keeping in view their specialised knowledge and expertise in the domain area. Further, each post being filled under the lateral recruitment is a single post in a specific domain area, and the candidates are either to be appointed on contract basis or those from state governments, Union territories, public sector undertakings, autonomous bodies, statutory bodies, universities etc., on deputation basis (including short term contract), Singh said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) SYDNEY, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Police in the Australian state of Queensland said on Thursday that three people had died following a gun shooting on a rural property. On Thursday at 9:00 a.m. local time, police were called to the scene in Bogie, a small town in the state's northeast, responding to reports of multiple people being shot. "We are actively searching the area and commencing our investigations into what the circumstances were and how it came to be that these people had been shot," acting superintendent of Queensland police Tom Armitt said to local media. "At this stage, we are at very, very early stages of this investigation. We do not know who is responsible." Three people were found dead and a fourth was flown to the hospital in critical condition. Upon surveying the surrounding area police deemed the area safe. Investigations into the circumstances surrounding the incident are ongoing. The has quashed the results of PCS (Preliminary) Examination 2021 and directed the UP Public Service Commission to issue fresh results after giving benefit of 5 per cent to ex-servicemen. Justice Sangeeta Chandra passed the order on Tuesday while hearing a petition filed by four former personnel. "The results declared for preliminary examination without giving benefit of to ex-armymen are vitiated and quashed. Consequently, the second respondent is directed to recalibrate the result of the examination and give benefit of to ex- personnel on Group B and Group C posts, the court observed. After publication of preliminary examination results within one month, admit cards be issued for the main written examination accordingly and results thereof be declared giving 5% reservation on Group B posts as well to ex- personnel," it said. With above observations, Justice Chandra allowed the petition filed by four Junior Commissioned Officers (retired from the army after completing the required number of years of service) praying for a direction to be issued to the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission (UPPSC) to implement 5 per cent reservation for ex-servicemen in the ongoing selection process for Combined State Upper Subordinate Services (PCS) Examination 2021 and Assistant Conservator of Forest/Range Forest Officer Services Examination 2021. According to the petition, PCS Exam 2021 advertisement was released on February 5, 2021. The last date for submission of online application was March 5, 2021, which was later extended to March 17, 2021. Meanwhile, the amendment regarding 5 per cent reservation for the ex-servicemen was notified on March 3, 2021. The petitioners -- Satish Chandra Shukla and three others -- contended that despite the publication of the notification before the last date of application, the UPPSC refused to give the benefit of reservation to the ex-servicemen. The high court, while allowing the petition, said that when the 2021 amendment was notified, the online form filling portal was open till March 17, 2021. In such a situation, had the UPPSC been cautious, it could have given the benefit of reservation to Group B and Group C posts. It is worth mentioning that on December 1, 2021, UPPSC had declared the results of PCS (Preliminary) Examination-2021 in which 7,688 candidates were declared successful. A total of 3,21,273 of the registered 6,91,173 candidates had appeared in the examination held at 1,505 centres in 31 districts of the state on October 24, 2021. The UPPSC had then conducted PCS (Mains)-2021 for candidates declared qualified in the preliminary exam at centres in Lucknow, Prayagraj and Ghaziabad between March 23 and 27, 2022 in which a total of 5,957 candidates had appeared. UPPSC had declared the result of PCS (Mains)-2021 on July 12, 2022. A total of 1,285 candidates were declared successful in the mains examination for recruitment against 623 posts on offer. After announcing the interview schedule for Combined State/Upper Subordinate Services Examination-2021, commonly known as PCS-2021, the commission had kick-started interviews of the candidates on July 21 and is to complete it on August 5. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shortly after Nancy Pelosi's official visit to the island nation of on Tuesday, tensions between and have risen. On Thursday, started military exercises around . Also, following Pelosi's visit, 27 Chinese jets entered Taiwan's air defence zone, and 22 of them crossed the median line separating the two countries. Suspected drones reportedly flew above the Kinmen islands on Wednesday night. Taiwan, according to Reuters, fired flares to drive them away. According to Reuters, Taiwan's defence ministry also said that its website suffered cyber attacks and went offline temporarily on Thursday. Pelosi, the first US speaker to visit the country in 25 years, flew out on Wednesday. had warned the US of possible 'consequences' if Pelosi visited the country. What makes Taiwan so important? During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world faced a major shortfall in the supply of chips. These chips are used in almost every electronic device, from computers and mobile phones to even cars' brakes. The shortfall was due to the supply-demand mismatch. The demand was pushed up by the work-from-home rule as it required more electronic devices. However, the supply of the chips could not go up accordingly. The mobility bottlenecks added to the woes of the companies. Taiwan is among the largest manufacturers of these crucial chips and houses the world's largest foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The country meets over 60 per cent of the total semiconductor demand globally. TSMC alone accounts for over 50 per cent of the total market share in the semiconductor foundry market. It has some of the biggest tech companies as its clients, including Apple, NVidia and Intel. Both China and the USA are working on improving their capacities to manufacture semiconductors to reduce dependency on imports of these chips. China has, over the years, increased its investment in the industry. In 2020 and 2021, China was the world's largest buyer of chipmaking gear, worth $18.7 billion and $29.6 billion, respectively, according to industry body Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SEMI). The demand for equipment in China rose 58 per cent. On the other hand, the US passed the CHIPS Act in July to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research capabilities. The act set aside $52 billion to be used for the same. According to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS), the Americas region is expected to see the fastest growth in the semiconductor market. Compared to Asia Pacific's growth of 13.9 per cent, the Americas are expected to grow by 22.6 per cent. Both countries are racing to gain as much capacity as possible to manufacture semiconductor chips. Pelosi's visit and China's response show how important semiconductor chips have become for the global economy and geopolitics. The phase two of the Common for admission to undergraduate programmes in Central Universities (CUET UG) is all set to start on Thursday. In the entrance test, conducted by the Testing Agency (NTA), question will only be based on Class 12 syllabus and in case any question is found wrong or if any question is withdrawn, five marks will be given to the candidates in lieu of that question. On the basis of CUET results, all the Central universities will release their own cut-off and there will be no weightage of Class 12 marks in this cut-off. As many as 90 universities, including 44 Central varsities, across the country will accommodate students through the CUET. Delhi professor Hansraj Suman told IANS that the marks obtained in Class 12 is of no importance for admission in Central universities this time. Universities and the affiliated colleges will prepare their cut off list on the basis of marks secured by the students in the entrance test, he said, adding that the marks secured by the students in the CUET will be intimated to universities by the NTA. The UGC has also issued clear instructions regarding the syllabus of the . UGC Chairman M. Jagadesh Kumar has clarified that the for undergraduate courses is being conducted on the basis of Class 12 syllabus only. "No questions from the syllabus of any other class will be asked in the test," he asserted. In CUET 2022, the NTA has made important changes keeping in mind the interests of the students. It has also amended the marking scheme. This year, if any question is found wrong or any question is withdrawn, five marks will be given to the candidates in lieu of the question. However, not all students will be able to get these five marks. According to the NTA, these five marks will be given to only those students who attempt the dropped question. Overall around 14.9 lakh candidates have registered for the CUET UG within the country and outside the country. Around 8.1 lakh candidates have appeared in the first phase which held on July 15. Meanwhile, about 6.8 lakh candidates will appear in the second phase of the entrance test. --IANS gcb/shs (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) External Affairs Minister and US Secretary of State on Thursday held talks on pressing global challenges, amid rising tensions between China and Taiwan following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's high-profile visit to Taipei. In his opening remarks at the meeting that took place on the margins of an ASEAN conclave in Phnom Penh, Blinken referred to concerns over "challenges" in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and the situation in the Indo-Pacific. It is understood that the escalating tension between China and Taiwan, especially in the Taiwan Strait, following Pelosi's visit to Taipei figured in the talks. China has launched a major live-fire military exercise in the waters around Taiwan in response to Pelosi's visit to the self-ruled island, triggering global concerns. The Jaishankar-Blinken meeting also came days after the US killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader and a key plotter of the 9/11 attacks, in a drone strike in a Kabul safe house. "A warm conversation to start meetings on sidelines of ASEAN Ministerial in Phnom Penh. Discussed the ever strengthening India-US relationship and the global situation with US Secretary of State @SecBlinken," Jaishankar tweeted. In his opening remarks at the meeting, Blinken said the US and India are strong proponents of the ASEAN centrality in the Indo-Pacific, according to the US State Department. "We're both strong proponents of ASEAN centrality. We have a shared vision together for a free and open Indo-Pacific that we work on in so many different ways every single day," he said. "And of course, we have some immediate challenges that we're both concerned with, to include the situation in Sri Lanka, Burma, and a number of other number of other hot spots," he said. "So I very much look forward to once again being able to go through a number of these issues with my friend, and then we'll both head over to our meetings," Blinken added. Last month, Sri Lanka witnessed massive political turmoil following mass protests that forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country. Veteran leader Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as Sri Lanka's new president amid hopes for recovery from economic distress. The western powers were anguished over the execution of four pro-democracy activists by Myanmar's military government last month. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Ukraine-based cybersecurity researcher and journalist has claimed that about 288 million personal records, containing the full name, bank account number and nominee information of the Employees' Pension Scheme (EPS) holders in the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), were exposed online before being taken off the Internet. The security researcher's claim about the data exposed online was yet to be verified by the EPFO, national cyber agency CERT-In or the IT Ministry. Bob Diachenko, cyber threat intelligence director and journalist at SecurityDiscovery.com, claimed that their systems identified two separate IPs with Universal Account Number (UAN) data. An IP address is a unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network. IP stands for "Internet Protocol." "UAN stands for Universal Account Number and this is an important part of the Indian government registry. UAN is allotted by EPFO, he wrote in a blogpost. Each record contained personal information, including marital status, gender and date of birth, UAN, bank account number and employment status, among others. While 280 million records were available under one IP address, the other IP address had about 8.4 million data records publicly exposed, claimed the researcher. "Given the scale and obvious sensitivity of data, I decided to tweet about it, without giving any details as of source and associated info. Within 12 hours after my tweet both IPs were taken down and now unavailable," Diachenko claimed. "As of August 3rd, I did not hear back from any agency or company who would claim responsibility for the data found," he added. According to the security researcher, "both IPs were Azure-hosted and India-based". "No other information was obtained through reverse DNS analysis as well. Both Shodan and Censys search engines picked them up on August 1st, but it is unknown for how long this information was exposed before search engines indexed them," the security researcher said. He also tweeted: "[BREACH ALERT] 280M+ records in this Indian database, publicly exposed. Where to report? @IndianCERT?" Both the IPs have now been taken down from public domain, he informed. --IANS na/shb/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) SC to hear pleas filed by factions led by and Chief Minister respectively relating to the recent political crisis in Maharashtra The will hear pleas by and Chief Minister in relation to the recent political crisis in . The SC had asked the Eknath Shinde-led faction to redraft the submissions on petitions filed by group on Constitutional issues arising due to the political crisis in . Earlier, the Uddhav Thackeray faction of the told the on Wednesday that party MLAs loyal to Chief Minister can save themselves from disqualification under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution only by merging with another political party. Also Read: Aaditya Thackeray calls Shinde govt that of 'traitors', says it'll collapse The bench, headed by Chief Justice N V Ramana, asked the Shinde faction, represented in court by senior advocate Harish Salve, to redraft the legal issues of split, merger, defection and disqualification raised in petitions filed by the Thackeray camp that are to be adjudicated upon following the recent political crisis in Maharashtra. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Thackeray faction, told the bench there is no constitutional protection for disqualification under the 10th schedule. SC to hear appeals of government and Chief Minister against a High Court order holding a PIL in a corruption case against him as maintainable The will hear two separate pleas of the government and Chief Minister against a high court order that had accepted the maintainability of a PIL for a probe against the JMM leader into alleged irregularities in the grant of mining leases. On June 17, the apex court had refused to pass any interim direction on an appeal filed by the government, challenging the high court order that had accepted the maintainability of a plea seeking a probe against the chief minister in mining cases. The top court had posted the matter for hearing before an appropriate bench after the summer vacation on the request of senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi. It was submitted that the case against Soren was politically motivated to destabilise the Jharkhand government. The plea before the Jharkhand High Court had sought a probe into alleged irregularities in the grant of mining leases as also into the transactions of certain shell companies allegedly operated by the chief ministers family members and associates. SC to hear plea of Anil Kumar Sharma, jailed ex-promoter of Amrapali group, seeking bail in a criminal case SC to hear a case related to Sanjay Chandra, ex-promoter of Unitech Ltd, in which some Tihar jail officials are under scrutiny for providing undue facilities to inmates (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on July 22, launched the Har Ghar Tiranga Campaign to hoist the flag, the Tricolour, to mark the 75th . Modi, on Saturday, urged people to change the display pictures (DPs) of their social media accounts to the Tricolour during his address. This will be a part of the larger 'Azadi ka Amrit Mohatsav' celebrations. The Ministry of Culture has launched a website that allows Indians to pin a tricolour at their location, which will be considered virtual hoisting of the flag. By Thursday, over 12.5 million Tricolours had been pinned. "Get featured on our website by pinning a flag in Hotspot Location," the website said. Also, participants can send their selfies with the flag to participate in the initiative. The selfies will be displayed on the website. Over 3 million Indians have sent their selfies to the ministry. Also Read | Har Ghar Tiranga: Registration, download certificate and cash prizes "The Central Theme of the programme is to inspire every Indian to hoist the at their home and to invoke the feeling of patriotism in the hearts of the citizen and promote awareness about our National Flag," the Ministry of Finance said in a notification. How are different states participating in the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign? The office of the lieutenant governor (L-G) of Delhi directed the agencies to put the Tricolour on the roundabouts, markets, schools and hospitals. He also directed the schools to organise 'prabhat pheris'. Students from 1,530 municipal schools are expected to take part in the campaign. The Directorate of Education of the Delhi government said in a notification, "Under the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign, the Tricolour is proposed to be hoisted atop more than 200 million houses as well as government, and private institutions/ establishments across the country from August 13 and 15, 2022, through public participation." The flags have also been given to the banks and other government enterprises to be distributed to customers. 160,000 post offices across the country have also started to sell the Tricolour from August 1. Along with these, the state governments are encouraging the sale of the flag through local shops and e-commerce platforms. The has set a target of hoisting 40 million national flags to mark the 75th . The flags, made up of khadi and polyester, have been made available to the people free of cost. Out of 40 million, 15 million flags will be made by self-help groups, private sewing centres and NGOs. The chief ministers of various states, including Haryana and Punjab, have also launched the campaign in their states following PM Modi's announcement. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs allowed the companies to use their corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign under the Schedule VII of the Companies Act. On July 29, the Indian Coast Guard (ICG) performed an underwater flag demo as a part of the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign. The Centre on Thursday informed the Delhi High Court that it has approved India's updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement and it will be communicated to the Framework Convention on (UNFCCC). The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved India's updated NDC, incorporating two of the promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Glasgow conference -- reducing emissions intensity of GDP by 45 per cent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, and achieving about 50 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by that year. A bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad was informed about the development during the hearing of a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking constitution of an expert committee for the realisation of the promises made by at the UNFCCC. Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma, representing the Centre, said the Cabinet has approved the updated NDC on Wednesday itself. Taking note of the submissions, the bench allowed petitioner lawyer Rohit Madan, who was represented through advocate Akshay R, to withdraw the petition. According to the updated NDC, now stands committed to reducing emissions intensity of its GDP by 45 per cent by 2030, from 2005 level, and achieving about 50 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030. NDC means national plans and pledges made by a country to meet the goal of maintaining global temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, while aiming for 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of . The petitioner had asserted that it was the Indian government's duty to honour its international commitments. In the petition, the petitioner has said that like several other countries, made certain commitments during the 2021 UNFCCC in Glasgow also known as COP26, which included reaching 500GW non-fossil capacity by 2030, fulfilling 50 per cent of energy requirements from renewable sources by 2030, etc and the same must be fulfilled. "These commitments were made before a formal international forum of which India is also a member and a signatory. These commitments involve a shift to renewable and green energy from current coal-based energy. All businesses in India will have to adjust their practices, and make necessary changes anticipating the shift. The State is bound by the promises it made and must deliver on the same," the petition said. The updated NDC will be implemented over the 2021-2030 period through programmes and schemes of relevant ministries and departments and with support from states and union territories. At the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) of the UNFCCC last November, Modi had announced that India's non-fossil energy capacity will reach 500 gigawatt by 2030. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) As many as 43 inmates of the district jail here tested positive for Covid-19, officials said. The samples of 425 prisoners were taken, out of which 43 have tested positive for Covid, district health officer Khagendra Singh said Wednesday. They have been kept in isolation in a separate barrack, he said. A camp to test the prisoners for hepatitis and other infections was held inside the jail premises from July 28-29, the officials said. West Bengal Chief Minister is arriving here Thursday for a four-day visit during which she is likely to meet senior leaders and attend a Niti Aayog meeting on August 7, sources said. The chief, who is expected to land by this afternoon, will hold a meeting in the evening with her party MPs who have been in the forefront of protests against the government in the ongoing session. Also on the cards is a visit to the Central Hall of and a meeting with Opposition leaders, the sources said. on Thursday reported 1,862 COVID-19 cases and seven deaths, which took the tally to 80,53,965 and the toll to 1,48,124, an official said. The state had added 1,932 cases to its tally and seven to the toll a day earlier. The seven deaths comprise two each in Mumbai, Pune and Satara and one in Thane, he said. Mumbai accounted for 410 of the new cases, the health department official added. So far, 78,93,764 persons have been discharged post-recovery, including 2,099 in the last 24 hours, leaving the state with an active tally of 12,077, he said. State health department data showed that the recovery rate was 98.01 per cent. The overall number of tests in reached 8,33,21,005 after 40,123 samples were examined in the last 24 hours, it revealed. Maharashtra's figures for the day: Total cases 80,53,965; fresh cases 1,862, death toll 1,48,124; recoveries 78,93,764; active cases 12,077; total tests 8,33,21,005. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) PHNOM PENH, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here Thursday that China is ready to work with New Zealand to push forward their comprehensive strategic partnership to yield more fruits. During a meeting with New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta on the sidelines of meetings of foreign ministers on East Asia cooperation, Wang said that since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries 50 years ago, bilateral relations have progressed in a sound and stable manner and great achievements have been scored, bringing tangible benefits to the people of both countries. Under the strategic guidance of the leaders of the two countries, both sides have adhered to a long-term and strategic perspective to promote China-New Zealand relations at the forefront of China's relations with developed countries, Wang said. He noted that China appreciates New Zealand for pursuing a pragmatic policy toward China, and regards it a partner for common development and prosperity. China is willing to work with New Zealand to respect each other's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as each other's core interests and major concerns, so as to advance China-New Zealand comprehensive strategic partnership to achieve more results, Wang said. Wang elaborated on China's solemn position on the Taiwan question, stressing it is the U.S. side that stoked provocation, undermined peace and created crises in the first place. China's response is reasonable and legitimate, and China will firmly safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity, uphold international law, and maintain regional peace and stability. For her part, Mahuta said New Zealand and China are comprehensive strategic partners, with mature bilateral relations as well as strong economic and people-to-people ties. New Zealand is willing to continue strengthening effective cooperation with China in such various fields as economy and trade, agriculture, education, science and technology, climate change and environmental protection, Mahuta said, welcoming both sides to increase the frequency of direct flights and facilitate people-to-people exchanges. New Zealand continues to adhere to the one-China policy, respects China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and advocates upholding the basic norms of international relations, jointly addressing global challenges, and working together to maintain regional peace and stability, Mahuta said. She said New Zealand has noticed that China's exchanges with South Pacific Island countries are nothing new, hoping that China will continue strengthening cooperation with the island countries through the Pacific Islands Forum. New Zealand and China have different views on some issues, but both sides can maintain candid communication, Mahuta added. Noting that China has always held friendly dialogue and communication with other countries on the basis of sovereign equality and mutual respect, Wang said China is willing to enhance mutual trust with New Zealand, and hopes and believes New Zealand can well handle bilateral relations in a rational and wise manner. Wang said the exchanges between China and South Pacific Island countries have lasted for half a century, with bilateral cooperation covering a wide range of fields. He added that China always respects the sovereignty and needs of the island countries, and adheres to the principle of "island countries-led and island countries-owned." China advocates open regionalism, objects zero-sum games, and proposes win-win cooperation, he said, adding that China stands ready to work with New Zealand and other countries to carry out tripartite or multilateral cooperation in the region, so as to achieve complementary advantages and create synergies. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) said on Wednesday that it has arrested two more persons in connection with the murder of Umesh Kolhe in Maharashtra's Amravati district. The two accused have been identified as Abdul Arbaz and Maulavi Mushfique Ahmed. Both of them were associates of arrested accused persons Irfan Shaikh, Shoaib Khan, Mudassir Ahmed, Aatif Rashid, Yusuf Khan, Abdul Toufiq and Shahrukh Pathan and wanted accused, Shamim Ahmed and Firoj Ahmed. In total, nine accused have been held so far in connection with the case. Kolhe (54) was murdered on June 21 after he wrote a post on Facebook in support of suspended BJP spoesperson Nupur Sharma. The NIA mentioned in its FIR that a group of people had hatched a conspiracy to send a message to the people supporting Sharma. "They conspired to strike terror among a section of people in India to promote enmity on grounds of religion. Kolhe's murder was carried out as part of the conspiracy to 'terrorise a section of the society'," the NIA said. The counter-terror agency also said that the accused in this case might be having international links. The NIA had earlier conducted searches at 13 locations in Maharashtra, which led to the recovery of incriminating documents, digital devices, pamphlets with hate messages and knives. The Kolhe murder case was initially registered at the City Kotwali police station on June 22. However, the probe was taken over by the NIA on July 2. --IANS atk/sks/arm (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) district of has reported 176 new positive cases, which took its overall infection tally to 7,34,603, a health official said on Thursday. With this addition recorded on Wednesday, there are now 768 active cases in the district, he said. The death toll remained unchanged at 11,929 as nobody succumbed to the infection during the day, while the recovery count reached 7,22,439, the official added. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The High Court has directed that the Panna collector be impleaded in a petition challenging his decision in the poll to the vice president's post in the janpad panchayat in Gunnour in the district. Asserting that principles of natural justice were not followed while the decision on the janpad panchayat poll was taken, the High Court served notice to Collector Sanjay Kumar Mishra. "It is submitted that principles of natural justice were not followed. Collector Sanjay Kumar Mishra acted as a political agent of the ruling party. He did not act independently and the Election Commission should have removed him from the post of District Returning Officer," the HC said in its order on Wednesday. "Since serious allegations have been made against respondent number 1 (the district collector), this court directs to implead Sanjay Kumar Mishra as a party by name. Let notice be issued to the collector to explain his conduct," it said. Justice Vivek Agrawal, in his order said, the collector must explain why shouldn't a recommendation be made that no sensitive matter like election petitions of elections in the future be handed over to him. The HC was hearing a petition filed by one Parmanand Sharma, who in his plea through senior advocate Manoj Sharma, had contended that he had won the post of vice president of janpad panchayat Gunnour by securing 13 out of 25 votes in polls held on July 27. He was also issued the winning certificate, but on the same day, losing candidate Rmashiromani Mishra filed an election petition before the collector, who annulled the poll result, Sharma's plea said. Meanwhile, the State Election Commission counsel Siddharth Seth said the collector had passed the order in his capacity as 'prescribed authority' under MP Panchayat Raj Avam Gram Swaraj Adhiniyam and not as district election officer under the State Election Commission. Therefore, the SEC had no role in the matter, Seth told court. The Bharatiya Janata Party is the ruling party in the state. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government did right by withdrawing Indias first personal data protection bill and a new one should "consider all the criticisms", said on Thursday the retired judge who headed the committee of experts that wrote the first draft of the legislation. The government, after almost five years of deliberation, yesterday withdrew the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill, 2019, saying it will be replaced with one that has a comprehensive framework and is in alignment with contemporary digital privacy laws. This time they should consider all the criticisms by the internet activists, foreign companies, and the social activists that the bill was not giving enough thought to the data privacy right, said Justice B N Srikrishna. The Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha in December 2019. It was later referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC), which tabled its report in the Lok Sabha in December 2021. There was a whole lot of criticism on that 2019 bill that the government had recommended. Instead of doing further amendments, it is worthwhile to withdraw the Bill and come out with a fresh one, he said. The Bill alarmed big tech companies and advocacy players said it gives the government sweeping rights. It defined personal data, provided a base for a Authority (DPA), and a policy framework for data use. Civil society groups, internet activists, and foreign companies said rather than data privacy, it focused on the government's interests. The Bill was based on the first draft of a July 2018 report presented by the expert committee headed by Srikrishna, a former judge of the . The government, when it withdrew the Bill, said the JPC had recommended 81 amendments to it. The JPC also made 12 other recommendations, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), on Twitter. The JPC also recommended having a single law for personal and non-personal datasets, but Srikrishna disagreed with that. I've already gone on record and said it is wrong. declared by the includes only the personal data and personal privacy. Srikrishna said the right to privacy was at the central point of his committee when it was drafting the Bill. The focus was to ensure the privacy rights are protected in terms of the Supreme Courts statement. Thats why it was called personal . Later on, they watered it down and turned it into data protection, by adding non-personal data, which was not the fundamental right, he said. Senior-most judge of the Justice U U Lalit, who is in line to become the next (CJI), has been part of several landmark judgements including the one which held the practice of divorce through instant 'triple talaq' among Muslims illegal and unconstitutional. If appointed, Justice Lalit will become the second CJI who was directly elevated to the apex court Bench from the Bar. Justice S M Sikri, who became the 13th CJI in January 1971, was the first lawyer to be elevated directly to the top court bench in March 1964. Justice Lalit is in line to become the 49th CJI of India on August 27, a day after incumbent Justice N V Ramana demits the office. Justice Lalit, who was a renowned senior advocate, was appointed a judge of the on August 13, 2014. He has since been involved in delivery of several landmark judgements of the apex court. One of the path-breaking verdicts was the August 2017 judgement by a five-judge constitution bench which by a 3-2 majority ruled the practice of divorce through instant 'triple talaq' as "void", "illegal" and "unconstitutional". While then Chief Justice J S Khehar and Justice S Abdul Nazeer were in favour of putting on hold the judgement for six months and asking the government to come out with a law to that effect, Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman and U U Lalit held the practice as violative of the Constitution. Justices Kehar, Joseph and Nariman have since retired. In another important judgement, a bench headed by Justice Lalit had ruled the erstwhile royal family of Travancore has the management right over the historic Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala, one of the richest shrines, holding that the rule of "heritability must get attached to a right of Shebait" (servitor) of the temple. The bench had allowed the appeal of the legal heirs of Uthradam Thirunal Marthanda Varma, the younger brother of the last ruler, Sree Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma, setting aside the Kerala High Court's 2011 verdict which directed the state government to set up a trust to take control of the management and assets of the temple. A bench headed by Justice U U Lalit had ruled that touching sexual parts of a child's body or any act involving physical contact with 'sexual intent' amounts to 'sexual assault' under section 7 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act as the most important ingredient is sexual intent and not skin-to-skin contact. Quashing the controversial 'skin-to-skin' judgements of the Bombay High Court in two cases under the POCSO Act, the bench had said the high court erred in holding that there was no offence since there was no direct 'skin-to-skin' contact with sexual intent. The high court had held that no offence of sexual assault under the POCSO Act was made out if there was no direct skin-to-skin contact between an accused and victim. Born on November 9, 1957, Justice Lalit had enrolled as an advocate in June 1983 and practised in the Bombay High Court till December 1985. He shifted his practice to Delhi in January 1986, and in April 2004, he was designated as a senior advocate by the apex court. He was appointed a special public prosecutor for the CBI to conduct trial in the 2G spectrum allocation case. Justice Lalit is due to retire on November 8, 2022. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Document for the purchase of land jointly by and Arpita Mukherjee in 2012 at Bolpur-Santiniketan in West Bengal's Birbhum district has his college-day picture. Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials probing the multi-crore School Service Commission (WBSSC) recruitment irregularities scam are wondering whether this former minister of deliberately submitted his college day picture to hide his identity. In fact, ED sources said, that Chatterjee unknowing left the trail of his college day picture in the social media in November last year, after the sudden demise of veteran Trinamool Congress leader and the former panchayat minister Subrata Mukherjee, whom has often declared as his political mentor. After the demise of Mukherjee last year, shared his college- day photo with Subrata Mukherjee, when both were active leaders of Congress's student wing in West Bengal, Chhatra Parishad. Young Chatterjee's face in that photo, with black and thick French-cut beard, is exactly identical to the photo that he submitted with the purchase document of the land. The land purchase document done in 2012 shows that the close association between Arpita Mukherjee and Partha Chatterjee started much before the latter became West Bengal Education Minister. In 2012, or a year after the Trinamool Congress came to power ousting the 34-year-old Left Front government, Chatterjee was the state Commerce and Industries and Parliamentary Affairs minister. He became Education Minister in May 2014 and continued in that chair till May 2021. After the 2021 West Bengal Assembly polls, Chatterjee was again given the portfolio of Commerce and Industries and held it till July 28, when he was stripped of all his ministerial and party charges. ED sources said that on that land there is now a luxurious mansion christened "APA" - deemed to be derived from the first letter of her name and first two letters of his name. Although the purchase document of the land in 2012 was jointly in the name of Partha Chatterjee and Arpita Mukherjee, after the construction of the mansion, its mutation was done in 2020 and that certificate was issued only in the name of Mukherjee. --IANS src/shb/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Samples of a 9-year-old boy from Tibet, suspected of having monkeypox, have been sent to the Virus Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (VRDL) of Bengaluru Medical College and Research Institute (BMCRI) here for examination. According to sources, the kid arrived India with his parents and a Tibetan priest to New Delhi on July 1. He also visited Tibetan camps in Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra. The sample of the kid, the third suspected case of monkeypox in Karnataka, has been sent from Hubballi city. The boy had returned from Belgium and showed skin rashes and other symptoms of monkeypox. The boy had also visited Mundgod Tibetan camp in Uttara Kannada district, sources in the health department stated. However, they said it could be a case of chickenpox. "The boy had reached India on July 1 and the incubation period of monkeypox is not that long and the symptoms could have manifested earlier." The first and second suspected cases of monkeypox in have tested negative. Earlier, Health Minister K. Sudhakar said that there is no need to panic about monkeypox, adding that the government is taking all precautionary measures including thermal screening at airports and strict surveillance in districts bordering Kerala. --IANS mka/shs (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The on Thursday sought a status report on the medical condition of Anil Kumar Sharma, ex-CMD of of Companies, who is lodged in jail and is seeking bail citing his deteriorating health. A bench of Justices U U Lalit and Bela M Trivedi told Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati to file a status report by August 6 and posted the matter for hearing on August 8. Advocate Manoj Singh, representing Sharma, said that the applicant is suffering from infection and his health "condition is deteriorating". He urged the top court to grant bail to Sharma for six to eight weeks keeping in view his medical condition. "Will you in two-day times get the appropriate details, status report, and whatever the instructions are," the bench asked Bhati. "Considering the averments made in the petition, Bhati has fairly accepted that a status report shall be filed on or before Saturday (August 6) indicating the present medical condition and the line of treatment suggested to be adopted by the medical professionals," the bench said while issuing notice to the probe agencies on the plea. On June 9, the apex court allowed Sharma's surgery to be conducted at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for the repair of a "bilateral inguinal hernia" within a week. The top court, however, had refused to grant him bail for four weeks as sought by his counsel saying that allegations against Sharma were grave. Sharma is lodged in Mandoli prison here. On March 21, the top court refused to order the transfer and clubbing of over 80 criminal cases lodged by the home buyers against directors and other officials of firms, saying it would not "queer the pitch" and make life difficult for a trial judge. The top court had not agreed to the fervent submission of the counsel for one of the jailed officials of the real estate group, that like coal scam cases, the trials in 85 criminal matters, which are of similar nature, can be transferred to one court from seven different courts in the capital. The apex court has been monitoring the cases related to the embattled real estate company after many homebuyers approached it alleging malpractices and non-delivery of homes or flats. The apex court, in its July 23, 2019 verdict, had cracked the whip on errant builders for breaching the trust reposed by the home buyers and ordered the cancellation of registration of under real estate law RERA and ousted it from prime properties in the capital region (NCR) by nixing the land leases. The top court had directed a probe by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) into the alleged money laundering by realtors, providing relief to over 42,000 home buyers of Amrapali Group with the verdict. Besides ED, the Economic Offence Wing (EoW) of the Delhi Police and the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) has also been investigating various cases lodged against the former officials of the real estate group. The top court, which is trying to bring in funds for the stalled projects, had then directed the state-run NBCC to complete the stalled projects of Amrapali Group. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The plight of a large number of farmers in is miserable due to a delayed monsoon and poor rainfall in June and in July, which leads to a 20 per cent decline in cultivation across the state, officials said on Wednesday. Transplanting and broadcasting of is going on along with raising of nurseries in around 16 lakh hectares of land during the current kharif season against 20 lakh hectares by August 1 last year, according to a senior official in the Directorate of Agriculture and Food Production, The deviation is 20 per cent, he said. However, the official said that the state during the entire kharif season of 2021 had witnessed cultivation in over 35 lakh hectares of land. We have two more months in the kharif season and the target is likely to be achieved if good rainfall occurs in August, he said. Admitting that scanty rainfall in June adversely affected paddy cultivation in parts of the state, the official said that the situation has slightly improved in July and if IMD's prediction of good rainfall for August comes true, the paddy cultivation will survive. The state experienced 26 per cent excess rainfall in May while it received 43 per cent less rain in June. The actual rainfall in June was 98.6 mm this time against the average normal of 173.2 mm. However, the situation improved slightly in July, the Meteorological Centre here said. Seasonal cumulative rainfall realized between June 1 to August 3 is 522.9 mm against its normal value of 586.3 mm, the Met Centre said. During the period, only two districts (Boudh and Kandhamal) received excess rainfall while seven districts (Bhadrak, Mayurbhanj, Sundergarh, Sambalpur, Jharsuguda, Bolangir and Kalahandi) recorded deficient rainfall. The highest deficiency of rainfall was recorded in tribal-dominated Sundergarh district at minus 42 per cent followed by Sambalpur (-32 per cent), Bhadrak and Jharsuguda (-23 per cent each), Bolangir (-22 per cent) and Kalahandi (-21 per cent) till August 3, the met office said. The remaining 21 districts have received normal rainfall and paddy cultivation activities are going on smoothly there, the official said. However, the ground realities appear to be different as, farmers said, transplantation of paddy saplings has been affected due to inadequate rainfall. Though the paddy saplings are ready, we are unable to transplant them due to lack of water in agricultural fields, said Susant Samal, a farmer in Patkura area in Kendrapara district. Even as Kendrapara recorded only minus 9 per cent deficient rainfall, the farmers face difficulties as traditional irrigation channels are blocked and there is no water in canals, farmers said. Similar is the fate of farmers in almost all the coastal districts and also in Sundergarh, Sambalpur and Mayurbhanj. As cultivation is mostly dependent on rainwater due to a lack of irrigation facilities, farmers have this time a tough time meeting the target. Above 70 per cent of agricultural fields in do not have irrigation facilities for which the farmers depend on rainwater, said Akshya Kumar, the state convenor of Nabanirman Krushak Sangathan, an organisation of peasants. However, the IMD in its recent forecast said that many parts of will receive good rainfall from August 5 onwards. According to agriculture scientist Sandip Patnaik, Odisha for some years has been witnessing a different climate as most of the rain comes in the month of September and October instead of the normal monsoon months of July and August. He blamed it on climate change and said that the monsoon appeared to have been shifted two months in advance. However, late rain is not useful for the cultivation of paddy, he said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Q1 net profit rises 51% to Rs 2,157 cr on marketing margin boost (India) Ltd, the nation's largest gas utility, on Thursday reported a 51 per cent jump in its June quarter net profit on the back of bumper margins from gas marketing. posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 3,250.95 crore, or Rs 7.34 per share, in April-June compared to Rs 2,157.15 crore, or Rs 4.81 a share, net profit in the same period a year back, the company said in a regulatory filing. Read more fires 11 ballistic missiles near in biggest test in decades fired its largest missile tests in Taiwans waters in decades, the day after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied Beijing by visiting the self-ruled island it claims as its own. The Peoples Liberation Army fired 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles into waters north, east and south of between 13:56 p.m. and 16:00 p.m. local time Thursday, the islands Defense Ministry said in a statement. Sun Li-fang, a ministry spokesman, earlier said missiles had been fired from land. Read more Mumbai court extends Sena MP Sanjay Raut's ED custody till August 8 A Mumbai Special Court extended Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut's custody to the (ED) by four days till August 8, here on Thursday. Raut, who was arrested in the wee hours of Monday in an alleged money-laundering case, was remanded to ED custody till August 4 and produced before a Special PMLA Court this afternoon. Read more BoE raises rates by most since 1995 even as long recession looms The raised interest rates by the most in 27 years on Thursday, despite warning that a long recession is on its way, as it rushed to smother a rise in inflation which is now set to top 13%. Reeling from a surge in energy prices caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the BoE's Monetary Policy Committee voted 8-1 for a half percentage point rise in Bank Rate to 1.75% - its highest level since late 2008 - from 1.25%. Read more JAKARTA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Police in the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi said on Thursday that they have arrested three people for allegedly inter-country child trafficking. Officers in the province's district of Pinrang arrested the three people, identified with their initials as SU, RJ and RL in two separate operations on Tuesday after receiving reports from members of the public suspecting that there are some trafficked children in the district. The three people were still identified as witnesses and interrogated over the case. Pinrang police chief detective Muhalis Haeruddin told local media on Thursday that police and immigration officers found a house with four children believed to originate from Malaysia. He said the four children were already under the supervision of relevant authorities. The strength of undertrials in prisons is three times more than that of convicts, which explains why the jails are overcrowded. As per the prison department reports, a total of 1,12,480 prisoners were lodged in 64 jails across the state as on March 31, 2022, and 85,181 of them were undertrials, whose strength was more than three times the strength of convicts (27,299). Of the total undertrials, 78,152 were male, 3,291 female prisoners, 3,281 minors and 305 foreigners. Besides, 400 children (186 boys and 214 girls) were also staying with undertrial women inmates in jails. The undertrials constitute nearly 76 per cent of the total jail population. Of the 85,000 undertrials, nearly 850 of them have been behind bars for over 10 years without being pronounced guilty, the report said. The Supreme Court, last week, had chided the government for not taking steps for the release of undertrials jailed for more than 10 years despite the court's earlier directions. The apex court also pulled up the Allahabad High Court for not deciding the bail petitions expeditiously. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also urged the country's judiciary to speed up release of undertrials who were languishing in jails, awaiting legal aid. Former Director General of Police Sulkan Singh, who also served as IG (prison) and also heads a panel on prison reforms, said an increasing number of undertrials, with hundreds of them being in jails waiting for bail for more than a decade, was a serious reflection on the judicial system. "There are mainly two reasons for this situation. First, lower courts do not adhere to the legal doctrine of 'bail is the rule and jail is an exception', propounded by the Supreme Court long back. Second, cases are not decided expeditiously in courts," he said. An amendment to the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) in 2008 provided that police would not arrest accused for any offence where the possible maximum sentence is seven years or less, unless cops have apprehensions that the accused may flee or intimidate witnesses etc. The UP DGP office also circulated the amendment to the district police chiefs and others for compliance. The objective of the CrPC amendment was to save innocent people from being jailed and harassed but the same amendment was faulty, he said. "The amended law requires the police to record reasons for arrest of an accused as well reasons for not arresting him," he pointed out. "Because of this contradiction, police often unnecessarily arrest the accused to avoid charges being levelled against them," he added. DIG (prison headquarters) Shailendra Maitreya said the data on the number of undertrials being in jails for offences with sentence up to seven years was not yet available but a good number of undertrials in UP jails might belong to this category also. Another statistical report on the prison population since 1901 shows that the number of undertrial prisoners always used to be lower than the number of convicts. There were only 1,645 undertrials against 27,527 convicts in 1909. But the gap started narrowing down after Independence and the number of undertrials rose to 11,746 against 14,609 convicts in 1948. In 1972, the population of undertrials (19,061) exceeded that of convicts (18,787) for the first time and the gap continues to widen since. "The number of undertrials was lower earlier, especially during the British period, which shows justice was quick then," said a high court lawyer and added that "A fast-increasing number of undertrials is surely a travesty of justice." --IANS amita/dpb (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russia became India's third-largest coal supplier in July, with imports rising by over a fifth compared with June to a record 2.06 million tonnes, data from Indian consultancy Coalmint showed. Russia has historically been the sixth-largest supplier of coal to India, behind Indonesia, South Africa, Australia, and the United States, with Mozambique and Colombia alternatingly featuring in the top five. India expects its central bank's recent approval to allow payments for commodities in the Indian rupee to provide a major fillip to bilateral trade with Russia. India's imports from Russia have jumped nearly five times to over $15 billion ever since Russia invaded Ukraine. India, the world's second-largest producer, importer and consumer of coal, has historically imported more coking coal a used mainly in steelmaking a from Russia, with Australia being the other key supplier. However, steep discounts offered by Russian suppliers to Indian consumers in the recent months have incentivized higher buying of thermal coal used mainly in power generation especially as global prices have traded at near-record highs due to western sanctions choking traditional trade. Thermal coal imports from Russia jumped 70.3% in July, compared with June, to a record 1.29 million tonnes, while coking coal imports rose by over two-thirds to more than 280,000 tonnes, Coalmint data showed. Indonesia was the top supplier, while South Africa was marginally ahead of Russia, the data showed. Higher coal imports from Russia were mainly driven by cement manufacturers and steelmakers, two Indian traders said. Overall Indian coal imports, including shipments of anthracite and PCI coal, were nearly 10% lower in July at 23.8 million tonnes, compared with record imports of 26.29 million tonnes in June, the Coalmint data showed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rs 94,800-cr gains from windfall tax an overestimation: Govt sources The government would have earned less than Rs 48,000 crore in the nine months of the current fiscal year (2022-23, or FY23) if the windfall tax rates remained constant. It termed the figure of Rs 94,800 crore floating around as an overestimation, said two senior government officials. Read more Strong signal: India likely to be among top three for 5G Global telecom gear makers say that they expect India to account for about 15 per cent of the worldwide market for the 3.5 GHz-based 5G radio and network. The vendors are assuming that the telcos will be able to provide 5G coverage to over 50 per cent of the geographical area of the country in the next two years. Read more Amended Energy Conservation Bill seeks to build carbon credit market In line with the climate commitments made by India at the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties, commonly called COP26, the Centre has introduced amendments to its the Energy Conservation Act, 2001, to meet the targets embracing green fuels, industrial energy efficiency, and build the countrys own carbon credit market. Read more Airtel gears up for 5G roll-out this month; partners with Ericsson, Nokia on Wednesday signed agreements with global telecom equipment majors Ericsson, Nokia, and to commence the deployment of 5G services across the country this month. The company is likely to start with Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Pune. The launch could coincide with the Independence Day, sources indicated. Read more US Fed shrinking balance sheet at a much slower pace than planned earlier The stock market's worst fears of a "too" hawkish monetary stance by the has turned out to be unfounded. The American central bank is shrinking its balance sheet at a much slower pace than planned earlier which has kept the liquidity conditions in the market much more benign. Read more The results for Higher Secondary Common Admission Process (HSCAP) first allotment have been declared today. The Directorate of Higher Secondary (DHSE Kerala) released the list for result. The first allotment result list will be released on the official website- hscap. .gov.in. The admission process began from 11 am onwards today. Students who have qualified Class 10 and have applied for the allotment process can check the result list today. After delay in the process of trial allotment, the schedule was revised. The board conducts the admission to Class 11 through a common online system, where the students are required to submit their applications, enter their course and Plus 1 school as per their preference. Once the Kerala HSCAP first allotment list is announced, students will be able to fill up the form and complete their admission process under first allotment. The deadline to complete the admission process for various institutions is at 5 pm on August 10, 2022. Students are advised that they should download the letter presented on the official website and submit it along with the documents at the schools for confirming the admission. The final allotment for Kerala HSCAP will be released on August 20, 2022 and the session for Class 11 or Plus 1 will commence in the state from August 22, 2022. The delay in Kerala Plus One admissions this year was followed by a delay in the declaration of Class 10 CBSE board results, which was released on July 22, 2022. The seat allotment process was also deferred, thereby allowing ample time to the students to apply, if they wished. Makers of the upcoming musical crime thriller 'Joker 'Joker: Folie a Deux' is all set to hit the theatres on October 4, 2024. According to Variety, The sequel, which sees the return of Joaquin Phoenix as Batman's notorious foe, will debut on the big screen exactly five years after the first film was released. The follow-up to 2019's blockbuster "Joker" will be a musical, with Lady Gaga expected to play the Clown Prince of Crime's co-conspirator Harley Quinn. Helmed by Todd Phillips, the plot details of 'Joker: Folie a Deux.' are under tight wraps, the title 'Folie a Deux' which means shared delusional disorder, hints at how Arthur's villainy might be embraced by the residents of the fictional Gotham City. Joker's partner in crime, the famous and crazy Harley Quinn might feature in the sequel. However, these are just speculations. The first part of the film garnered more than USD 1 billion worldwide and was declared a blockbuster, reported Variety. 'Joker' earned 12 Oscar nominations for best director, best picture, and best-adapted screenplay. Further, lead actor Joaquin bagged the best actor award as well. For the unversed, Todd's film 'Joker' depicted the life of struggling comedian, Arthur Fleck played by Joaquin Phoenix who is reframed into an anti-hero, taking the name of Joker, inflicting horrific acts of violence. Apart from that, Warner bros. recently shelved the much-awaited film 'Batgirl' despite being nearly completed, and will not be released on theatres and Max. "Joker" was supposed to be a standalone film, but after the R-rated tentpole generated more than $1 billion globally and earned Phoenix an Oscar, a sequel was pre-ordained. Naturally, the actor is asking for big bucks to reprise his sinister role as Arthur Fleck; Phoenix's paycheck for "Folie a Deux" will be $20 million, Variety reported. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A cave-in at a coal mine in northern trapped nine miners, President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador said. The president tweeted that the accident happened in the town of Sabinas in the border state of Coahuila. He said 92 soldiers, specialists and four dogs were at the scene assisting rescue efforts. The Coahuila state government said in a statement that the collapse occurred on Wednesday after the miners breached a neighbouring area filled with water. The mine began operations this year, and the local government said it had not received any complaints or reports of previous incidents. Local media outlets reported that a miner managed to escape the collapse and alerted authorities. Milenio television said relatives of the trapped miners gathered outside the mine awaiting information. In June and July of 2021, cave-ins at two Coahuila mines claimed the lives of nine miners. Mexico's worst mining accident also occurred in Coahuila on February 19, 2006, when an explosion ripped through the Pasta de Conchos mine while 73 miners were inside. Eight were rescued with injuries including serious burns. The rest died and only two of their bodies were recovered. Lpez Obrador's administration promised two years ago to recover the remaining 63 bodies, a highly technical endeavour that has still not begun. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police in have issued a public warning identifying 11 men, of whom nine are of Indian origin, linked to extreme levels of gang violence. The public have been warned to avoid being near them. The Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit of British Columbia (CFSEU-BC) in partnership with Vancouver Police and BC Royal Canadian Mounted Police, on Wednesday, issued the public warning. "A public safety warning has been issuing in partnership with @VancouverPD, @BCRCMP identifying 11 individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety due to their ongoing involvement in gang conflicts and connection to extreme levels of violence," CFSEU-BC tweeted. The names on the list are Shakiel Basra (28), Amarpreet Samra (28), Jagdeep Cheema (30), Ravnder Sarma (35) Barinder Dhaliwal (39) Andy St. Pierre (40) Gurpreet Dhaliwal (35) Richard Joseph Whitlock (40), Amroop Gill (29), Sukhdeep Pansal (33) and Sumdish Gill (28). The Police said they believe that anyone with, on in the proximity to these individuals may be putting themselves at risk. Vancouver Police agencies did not write the middle name of these people. In a joint news conference, CFSEU Assistant Commander Manny Mann said that there is a chance that rival gangsters will target the listed men with violence and added that the listed men are at risk to their friends and family as well as bystanders. "We want British Columbians to know their faces," he said as quoted by CTV News. Mann went on to pledge to seize their property, including vehicles, in order to disrupt their alleged illegal activity. The warning comes after Meninder Dhaliwal, who was on last year's 11-man list, was gunned down in broad daylight in Whistler late last month. Police say his brother, Harpreet, was the man shot dead in Vancouver's Coal Harbour neighbourhood last year. And another brother, 35-year-old Gurpreet Dhaliwal, is on this year's list. Meanwhile, the Vancouver police representative revealed that the province's largest police department has been doing covert work to try and combat the problem. "I know this can be frustrating for the public when they hear about incidents of violence in their communities and feel unsafe," Deputy Chief Fiona Wilson said. She outlined several arrests that were made in coordination with other police agencies, some of which involved cooperation, according to CTV News. "We are just as concerned and frustrated that we have to stand before you again to address a series of recent events related to the drug trade and gang violence," Assistant Commissioner of the B.C. RCMP Will Ng said and adding "I am asking for your support and assistance." He said since gangsters are moving across the Lower Mainland and other areas, working with various police agencies is critical. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) As the war in Ukraine continues to rage, skyrocketing energy prices are compounding an existential cost-of-living crisis for hundreds of millions of people, warned the UN Secretary-General's Global Crisis Response Group (GCRG) on Food, Energy and Finance. Despite this alarming situation, major oil and gas companies recently reported record profits, which Secretary-General AntAnio Guterres, who launched the brief on Wednesday, called "immoral". "The combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year are close to $100 billion. I urge governments to tax these excessive profits, and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times," he said. The GCRG's third brief recommends that governments find the most effective ways to fund energy solutions, such as publicly funded cash transfers and rebate policies, to protect vulnerable communities everywhere, including through windfall taxes on the largest oil and gas companies. At the same time, the brief urges a transition to renewables. The brief comes on the heels of the landmark Black Sea Grain Initiative which was agreed between Russia, TArkiye and Ukraine, under the auspices of the United Nations, on July 22, paving the way for the first shipment of grains from Ukraine to leave the port of Odesa on August 1. There is increasing fear that the rising costs of energy may price out many developing countries, especially the most vulnerable communities, from energy markets. These countries are already bearing the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis, having experienced major setbacks on access to energy and progress on sustainable development since the Covid-19 pandemic. More worryingly, there could be a potential "scramble for fuel" whereby only countries paying the highest prices can access energy, warns the brief, adding that governments, therefore, need the fiscal space to support their most vulnerable populations to avoid worsening levels of energy poverty or losing energy access altogether. At the same time, without policies that balance the need for urgency and sustainability, there is a risk of short-term energy policies that might set developing countries on a course for a high-emission and expensive energy future. As the world charts its way forward, its plans must safeguard its commitments to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. "Developing countries don't lack reasons to invest in renewables. Many of them are living with the severe impacts of the climate crisis including storms, wildfires, floods and droughts. What they lack are concrete, workable options," added Guterres. The brief makes it clear that the war in Ukraine and the global energy crisis that it has caused is a stark reminder of the need for energy resilience and stronger push for the transition to renewable energy. However, to accelerate the transition, and as outlined by the Secretary-General, policies, including social protection measures for those affected by the transition, technology, subsidies, investments and materials to support renewables need to be in place and readily available. The brief stresses that any short-term policies and protection measures must help mitigate the crisis, including efforts to promote energy efficiency and demand reduction, and not exacerbate it, such as blanket subsidies for fossil fuels. In the medium-to-long-term, the world needs to double down on renewables to meet net-zero goals, tackle energy poverty, and boost and diversify the global energy mix. To that end, the brief calls for the need to significantly increase global investment. "Renewable energy is often the cheapest, and most quick to deploy source of electricity for many countries. But this is only true if we ensure that supply chains work well and without bottlenecks; that the workforce has the right skills and that enough funds will be made available for the initial investments," said Rebeca Grynspan, the Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), who coordinates and leads on the development of the GCRG's briefs. "To meet these conditions we have to scale up financing and technology transfer for the developing countries and the energy poor of the world," she added speaking at the launch. According to the brief, an ambitious renewable energy transition, that includes skills training, could create an additional 85 million jobs in renewable energy sources, efficiency, and other energy transition-related sectors by 2030. Moreover, renewable energy production is often the least-cost energy production source with the shortest installation times, and provides countries with energy security, reducing future exposure to the volatility of oil, gas and coal prices. --IANS vg/ksk/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Starting from Thursday, has said that it will carry out five days of "necessary and just" in the seas around following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to the island, which came in defiance of Beijing's repeated warnings, a media report said. According to the BBC report, made the announcement shortly after Pelosi left on Wednesday after her brief and controversial visit. "The exercises will take place in some of the world's busiest waterways and will include long-range live ammunition shooting," the report quoted as saying. Meanwhile in response, said that it had already scrambled jets to warn them off. It has also asked ships to find alternative routes to avoid the drills and is negotiating with neighbouring Japan and the Philippines to find alternative aviation routes. President Tsai Ing-wen said the country was facing "deliberately heightened military threats". Pelosi, the most senior US politician to visit Taiwan in 25 years, made the stop on Tuesday as part of a wider Asian tour despite China warning her against it, the BBC reported. In a statement after her visit, the House Speaker said that China cannot "prevent world leaders or anyone from travelling to Taiwan to pay respect to its flourishing democracy, to highlight its many successes and to reaffirm our commitment to continued collaboration". Accusing the US of "violating China's sovereignty under the guise of so-called democracy", Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said: "Those who play with fire will not come to a good end and those who offend China will be punished." The Chinese Foreign Ministry also summoned the US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, on Wednesday to protest Pelosi's visit as a "serious provocation and violation" of the one-China principle, state newspaper Global Times reported. China has sent 21 planes into Taiwan's air defence identification zone on Tuesday alone, the Defence Ministry in Taipei said. For days, Pelosi had declined to confirm news reports that she would visit and Taiwan was not on her official itinerary. An editorial by Pelosi was published in The Washington Post minutes after she arrived in Taipei. --IANS ksk/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) fired its largest missile tests in Taiwans waters in decades, the day after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied Beijing by visiting the self-ruled island it claims as its own. The Peoples Liberation Army fired 11 Dongfeng into waters north, east and south of Taiwan between 13:56 p.m. and 16:00 p.m. local time Thursday, the islands Defense Ministry said in a statement. Sun Li-fang, a ministry spokesman, earlier said missiles had been fired from land. It was unclear which location the missiles were fired from and if any went over Taiwan. has never sent missiles over the island before and such a move would be a provocative escalation. Taiwans defense ministry declined to comment on that point. also sent long-range rockets near the northwestern outlying islands of Matsu and Dongyin, and Wuqiu in the west, Taiwan confirmed. Its defense ministry said it had strengthened its guard around the islands, which are located closer to Chinas coastline than Taiwan. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US had engaged Chinese counterparts in recent days at every level of government to convey a message of restraint after Pelosis trip, which Beijing has called an infringement on Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. We, and countries around the world, believe that escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no ones interests, Blinken said Thursday, on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Cambodia. Earlier in the day, China said an unspecified number of its missiles had accurately hit targets in seas east of Taiwan. The Eastern Military Command of the Peoples Liberation Army said in a statement it had completed live-fire training, and lifted relevant air and sea controls. The statement didnt clarify whether that meant all military exercises had ended in six exclusion zones surrounding the island, which began at noon on Thursday and were set to last for 72 hours. At a regular briefing Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she didnt have information on whether all the drills had ended, and referred reporters back to the original Aug. 4-7 timeframe. Peoples Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, said on its official Twitter account that sea and airspace controls off the eastern coast of Taiwan had been lifted. China earlier this week warned airlines to avoid danger zones around Taiwan after it announced its most provocative drills in decades in response to Pelosis visit, including missile tests and live-fire exercises. The No. 3 American official vowed Wednesday during a meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei that the US wouldnt abandon Taiwan. The Taiwanese Defense Ministry said earlier it continues to be on high alert in response to the exercises, which the agency criticized as an attempt to undermine regional stability. Taiwanese Transportation Minister Wang Kwo-tsai said flights could use alternative air routes via Japan and the Philippines until the drills ended Sunday, while ships would be able to avoid the six exclusion zones. Shipping is different from air traffic as there is no fixed route -- its freer, Wang told reporters at a briefing late Wednesday. So whats done in the past is to avoid the areas where drills will take place. Chinese President Xi Jinping is under pressure to give a strong response to the trip, particularly after some local nationalists were disappointed that Beijing wasnt able to deter Pelosi from visiting. She left Taiwan on Wednesday and is holding meetings in South Korea on Thursday before heading next to Japan. Separately, Southeast Asian foreign ministers urged maximum restraint in a statement released during an annual meeting Thursday in Cambodia. Association of Southeast Asian Nations envoys expressed concern that developments could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers, without naming China, Taiwan or the US. On Wednesday, 27 Chinese military aircraft were detected in the skies around Taiwans airspace, with 22 crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait -- the most since the island began making the maneuvers public in 2020. Separately, Taiwan said it warned off Chinese military drones flying near its Kinmen and Beiding islands -- both of which sit close to the coastal Chinese city of Xiamen -- Wednesday night. Chinas national security agency separately detained a Taiwanese man for long-time advocacy of Taiwan independence and founding a Taiwan Nationalist Party, state broadcaster CCTV on Wednesday. Beijing has also announced some trade restrictions on Taiwan. Class Action Settlement Over Shot Mandate is a Wake-Up Call NEWS PROVIDED BY Aug. 3, 2022 CHICAGO, Aug. 3, 2022 / Christian Newswire / -- The nation's first class action settlement involving a COVID shot mandate should be a wake-up call to every employer that did not accommodate or exempt employees who opposed the COVID shots for religious reasons. NorthShore University HealthSystem will pay more than $10.3 million for unlawfully discriminating against more than 500 current and former health care workers and for denying religious exemptions from the COVID shot mandate. There is no pause button on the federal employment law under Title VII. Employees do not lose their right to reasonable accommodation for their religious beliefs simply because an employer or even the federal government pushes a vaccine mandate under the guise of a pandemic. It is past time for employment law attorneys to stop sitting on the sidelines. They need to help people obtain justice. Liberty Counsel has been working with thousands of employees who face these abusive and unlawful mandates. Liberty Counsel settled the nation's first classwide lawsuit for health care workers over a COVID shot mandate and NorthShore will pay $10,337,500 to compensate these employees who were victims of religious discrimination, and who were punished for their religious beliefs against taking an injection associated with aborted fetal cells. As part of the settlement agreement, NorthShore will also change its unlawful "no religious accommodations" policy to make it consistent with the law, and to provide religious accommodations in every position across its numerous facilities. No position in any NorthShore facility will be considered off limits to unvaccinated employees with approved religious exemptions. In addition, employees who were terminated because of their religious refusal of the COVID shots will be eligible for rehire if they apply within 90 days of final settlement approval by the court, and they will retain their previous seniority level. This is a historic, first-of-its-kind class action settlement against a private employer who unlawfully denied hundreds of religious exemption requests to COVID-19 shots. The agreed upon settlement was filed in the federal Northern District Court of Illinois and must be approved by the court. Employees of NorthShore who were denied religious exemptions will receive notice of the settlement, and will have an opportunity to comment, object, request to opt out, or submit a claim form for payment out of the settlement fund, all in accordance with deadlines that will be set by the court. The amount of individual payments from the settlement fund will depend on how many valid and timely claim forms are submitted during the claims process. If the settlement is approved by the court and all or nearly all of the affected employees file valid and timely claims, it is estimated that employees who were terminated or resigned because of their religious refusal of a COVID shot will receive approximately $25,000 each, and employees who were forced to accept a COVID shot against their religious beliefs to keep their jobs will receive approximately $3,000 each. The 13 health care workers who are lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit will receive an additional approximate payment of $20,000 each for their important role in bringing this lawsuit and representing the class of NorthShore health care workers. Liberty Counsel will receive 20 percent of the settlement sum, which equals $2,061,500, as payment for the significant attorney's fees and costs it has required to undertake a lawsuit against NorthShore and hold it accountable for its actions. This amount is far less than the typical 33 percent usually requested by attorneys in class action litigation. In October 2021, Liberty Counsel sent a demand letter to NorthShore on behalf of numerous health care workers who had sincere religious objections to NorthShore's "Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination Policy." If NorthShore had agreed then to follow the law and grant religious exemptions, the matter would have been quickly resolved and it would have cost it nothing. But, when NorthShore refused to follow the law, and instead denied all religious exemption and accommodation requests for employees working in its facilities, Liberty Counsel filed a class action lawsuit, along with a motion for a temporary restraining order and injunction. Liberty Counsel Vice President of Legal Affairs and Chief Litigation Counsel Horatio G. Mihet said, "The policy change and substantial monetary relief required by the settlement will bring a strong measure of justice to NorthShore's employees who were callously forced to choose between their conscience and their jobs." Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel said: "Let this case be a warning to employers that violated Title VII. It is especially significant and gratifying that this first classwide COVID settlement protects health care workers. Health care workers are heroes who daily give their lives to protect and treat their patients. They are needed now more than ever." Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost. SOURCE Liberty Counsel CONTACT: Mat Staver, 407-875-1776, Liberty@LC.org Related Links lc.org/ Firefighters have gotten their first hold on California's deadliest and most destructive fire of the year and expected that the blaze would remain stalled through the weekend. The McKinney Fire near the Oregon border was 10% contained as of Wednesday night and bulldozers and hand crews were making progress carving firebreaks around much of the rest of the blaze, fire officials said at a community meeting. The southeastern corner of the blaze above the Siskyou County seat of Yreka, which has about 7,800 residents, was contained. Evacuation orders for sections of the town and Hawkinsville were downgraded to warnings, allowing people to return home but with a warning that the situation remained dangerous. About 1,300 residents remained under evacuation orders, officials said. The fire didn't advance on Wednesday, following several days of brief but heavy rain from thunderstorms that provided cloudy, damper weather. This is a sleeping giant right now, said Darryl Laws, a unified incident commander on the blaze. In addition, firefighters expected Thursday to fully surround a 1,000-acre (404-hectare) spot fire on the northern edge of the McKinney Fire. The fire broke out last Friday and has charred nearly 90 square miles (233 square kilometers) of forestland, left tinder-dry by drought. More than 100 homes and other buildings have burned and four bodies have been found, including two in a burned car in a driveway. The blaze was driven at first by fierce winds ahead of a thunderstorm cell. More storms earlier this week proved a mixed blessing. A drenching rain Tuesday dumped up to 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) on some eastern sections of the blaze but most of the fire area got next to nothing, said Dennis Burns, a fire behavior analyst. The latest storm also brought concerns about possible river flooding and mudslides. A private contractor in a pickup truck who was aiding the firefighting effort was hurt when a bridge gave out and washed away the vehicle, Kreider said. The contractor had non-life-threatening injuries, she said. However, no weather events were forecast for the next three or four days that could give the fire legs, Burns said. The good news came too late for many people in the scenic hamlet of Klamath River, which was home to about 200 people before the fire reduced many of the homes to ashes, along with the post office, community center and other buildings. At an evacuation center Wednesday, Bill Simms said that three of the four victims were his neighbors. Two were a married couple who lived up the road. I don't get emotional about stuff and material things, Simms said. But when you hear my next-door neighbors died ... that gets a little emotional. Their names haven't been officially confirmed, which could take several days, said Courtney Kreider, a spokesperson with the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office. Simms, a 65-year-old retiree, bought his property six years ago as a second home with access to hunting and fishing. He went back to check on his property Tuesday and found it was destroyed. The house, the guest house and the RV were gone. It's just wasteland, devastation, Simms said. He found the body of one of his two cats, which he buried. The other cat is still missing. He was able to take his two dogs with him to the shelter. Harlene Schwander, 82, lost the home she had just moved into a month ago to be closer to her son and daughter-in-law. Their home survived but her house was torched. Schwander, an artist, said she only managed to grab a few family photos and some jewelry before evacuating. Everything else including her art collection went up in flames. I'm sad. Everybody says it was just stuff, but it was all I had, she said. California and much of the rest of the West is in drought and wildfire danger is high, with the historically worst of the fire season still to come. Fires are burning in Montana, Idaho and Nebraska and have destroyed homes and threaten communities. Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. California has seen its largest, most destructive and deadliest wildfires in the last five years. In 2018, a massive blaze in the Sierra Nevada foothills destroyed much of the city of Paradise and killed 85 people, the most deaths from a U.S. wildfire in a century. In northwestern Montana, a fire that has destroyed at least four homes and forced the evacuation of about 150 residences west of Flathead Lake continued to be pushed north by winds on Wednesday, fire officials said. Crews had to be pulled off the lines on Wednesday afternoon due to increased fire activity, Sara Rouse, a public information officer, told NBC Montana. There were concerns the fire could reach Lake Mary Ronan by Wednesday evening, officials said. The fire, which started on July 29 in grass on the Flathead Indian Reservation, quickly moved into timber and charred nearly 29 square miles (76 square km). The Moose Fire in Idaho has burned more than 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) in the Salmon-Challis National Forest while threatening homes, mining operations and fisheries near the town of Salmon. And a wildfire in northwestern Nebraska led to evacuations and destroyed or damaged several homes near the small city of Gering. The Carter Canyon Fire began Saturday as two separate fires that merged. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) needs to reduce its gas consumption by more than any other member state in order to achieve the bloc's agreed savings target of 15 per cent, according to an analysis. must somehow find a way to save 10 billion cubic metres of between the beginning of August and March next year in order to reach the bloc's target, the equivalent to the average annual gas consumption of 5 million four-person households, reveals the analysis carried out by dpa news agency using EU Commission data. Due to its high level of gas consumption, Europe's largest is required to make greater savings than any other EU state, making it responsible for almost a quarter of the gas savings across the bloc. Minister Robert Habeck has indicated that was already on track to deliver a 14-15 per cent reduction in consumption compared to the past year. However, last week Habeck also stressed that Germany would be attempting to reduce its consumption by more than the agreed 15 per cent minimum. The president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), Siegfried Russwurm, called on the government to speed up its gas saving measures and warned that companies attempting to switch from gas to oil were being slowed down by red tape. He called for expediting measures such as the replacement of gas-fired power generation with coal-fired power plants. "This is not the speed Germany needs in crisis management," Russwurm said. "Germany is in the midst of the biggest energy crisis since the founding of the Federal Republic. Business and private consumers must do their part to save gas in order to prevent production stoppages. It is now a matter of determination and speed." --IANS ksk/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India will host diplomats of the 15-nation UN Security Council in October for a special meeting on counter-terrorism. India is halfway through the second year of its two-year term as an elected non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. India's tenure at the Council will end in December this year when the country will also preside as President of the powerful UN organ for the month. India chairs the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee for 2022 and will in October host diplomats of the 15-nation Security Council, including US, China and Russia, for the counter-terrorism committee's special meeting. Current members of the Security Council are Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway and the UAE, along with five permanent members China, France, Russia, the UK and the US. Mindful of the increasing threat posed by the misuse of new and emerging technologies, the Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) has decided to hold a special meeting on this theme, with the support of its Executive Directorate (CTED), in India on October 29, 2022, according to information on the Committee's website. It said the special meeting will specifically focus on three significant areas where emerging technologies are experiencing rapid development, growing use by member states (including for security and counter-terrorism purposes), and the increasing threat of abuse for terrorism purposes, namely Internet and social media, terrorism financing, and unmanned aerial systems (UAS). It is not very frequent that the Counter-Terrorism Committee meets outside of New York but the meeting in India will be the seventh time that this is happening. The most recent special meeting of the CTC outside of United Nations headquarters took place in Madrid, Spain, in July 2015, focusing on foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). The Committee said further that with the prevalence of technology and rapid rise in digitisation, the use of new and emerging technologies to counter-terrorism is a topic of growing interest among the member states, policymakers and researchers, particularly in the context of the increasing role played by technology in terrorism and counter-terrorism. This is addressed by the Security Council in a number of counter-terrorism-related resolutions, most recently resolution 2617 (2021), which explicitly cited emerging technologies. The special meeting would be conducted in the six official languages of the United Nations and be open to the wider United Nations membership and other relevant stakeholders. India's then Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador T S Tirumurti had in January this year assumed the Chair of the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee for 2022. Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj, the country's new envoy to the UN, now assumes that role. Tirumurti had told the UN Security Council briefing on The Use of Digital Technologies in Maintaining Peace and Security' in May that there is a need for addressing the abuse of digital technologies by terrorist groups to disseminate terrorist ideologies, radicalise, incite violence, and recruit the next generation of terrorist actors taking advantage of the enhanced online presence of young people. He had informed the Security Council that India has proposed holding a special meeting of the Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee in India soon. The need for member states to comprehensively address and tackle the implications of terrorist exploitation of the digital technologies more strategically has never been more dire," he said. "I am happy to inform this Council that India has proposed holding a special meeting of the Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee in India soon, which will exclusively focus on this issue and attempt to provide the way forward, Tirumurti had said. The Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) was established in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001) had established the Counter-Terrorism Committee as a subsidiary body of the Council. On the eve of assuming Chair of the CTC in December last year, India had voted in favour of a resolution to renew the mandate of the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED). The UN Security Council, through its written silence procedure, renewed the mandate of the Executive Directorate until December 31, 2025. As the Chair of the CTC for 2022, India will make determined efforts to further enhance the role of the CTC in strengthening the multilateral response to counter-terrorism, and more importantly, ensuring that global response to the threat of terrorism remains unambiguous, undivided and effective, India had said in its explanation of vote to renew the CTED mandate. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and US held consultations on (UNSC) issues on Wednesday and exchanged views on various thematic and country-specific issues on the agenda of the UNSC. "India and USA held consultations on UN Security Council (UNSC) and other multilateral issues on 03 August 2022 in New Delhi," the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in a statement. "In keeping with the India- US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership, the two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on various thematic and country-specific issues on the agenda of the UN Security Council," the statement added. Both sides agreed to continue their ongoing cooperation on issues of mutual interest, including Counter Terrorism and UN Peacekeeping. "While the discussions also covered the priorities of both sides during the upcoming 77th Session of the UN General Assembly, the Indian side also briefed the visiting US delegation about its priorities during the upcoming Presidency of the UNSC in December 2022," the ministry said. The US delegation was also briefed by senior officials of the Centre for UN Peacekeeping (CUNPK) on the ongoing training programmes conducted by CUNPK for UN Peacekeepers, including on programmes being jointly supported by India and the USA. Prakash Gupta, Joint Secretary (UN-Political), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), led the Indian delegation, which also included officials from the Americas and UNES Divisions of MEA. The US delegation was led by Ambassador Michele J. Sison, Assistant Secretary of State for Organization Affairs, Department of State, along with other senior officials of the US Embassy in New Delhi. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Iraqi prominent Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for dissolving the parliament and holding early elections, urging his followers to continue their open sit-in in the Parliament building until their demands are met. "Most of the Iraqi people are tired of the ruling class, including some faces of the Sadrist Movement," al-Sadr said in a televised speech. "The revolution (protests for comprehensive reform) began by the Sadrist, and it will not exclude the corrupters from the Sadrist Movement," al-Sadr was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency. "I am not asking for power, but I am seeking reform," the Shiite cleric concluded. On Saturday, thousands of al-Sadr's followers began an open sit-in in the parliament, rejecting the nomination of Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani as the country's Prime Minister on July 25 by al-Sadr's opponents in the Coordination Framework (CF), an umbrella group of Shiite parliamentary parties. The CF became the largest alliance in the Iraqi parliament after al-Sadr ordered his followers in the Sadrist Movement, the biggest winner in the elections held on October 10, 2021 that secured 73 seats, to withdraw from the parliament. During the past months, the continued disputes among the Shiite parties have hampered the formation of a new Iraqi government, making it unable to elect a new president by a two-thirds majority of the 329-seat parliament under the constitution. If elected, the president will appoint the prime minister nominated by the largest alliance in the parliament, now the CF, to form a new government that would rule the country for the coming four years. --IANS int/shs (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) PRI ESPL INT .BIRMINGHAM FES9 NATO-EU-KOSOVO-CRISIS Ukraine war: Nato and the EU can turn border crisis into an opportunity to put more pressure on Russia By Stefan Wolff, Professor of Security, University of Birmingham Birmingham, Aug 4 (The Conversation) An old dispute over a decision by the government of in September 2021 to enforce the use of Kosovo-issued licence plates for Serbs in the northern municipalities rather than allowing them to continue to use plates issued by the Serbian government in Belgrade has flared up again and threatens to escalate into conflict between the two countries. Local residents in northern are also incensed that the Kosovo government now requires in addition to an ID card an entry/exit permit for visitors from Serbia. The decision on number plates was announced, and then suspended, in October last year after protests from ethnic Serb residents in northern Kosovo where approximately half of all Kosovo Serbs live, and which has been a flashpoint for years. The reinstatement of the policy prompted protesters to build roadblocks, triggering the closure of two border crossings over the weekend. Protesters also allegedly fired at Kosovo police. The permit system is actually something that both countries agreed back in 2011, and that Belgrade has long insisted on for visitors from Kosovo. The government of Kosovo, however, had so far not implemented this decision. But because of a growing sense of lack of reciprocity from Belgrade, Kosovo's leaders now seem to have reversed course, possibly to have more bargaining power in so far inconclusive negotiations on freedom of movement arrangements at the Kosovo-Serbia border. The unrest led to Nato issuing a statement that it was ready to intervene to stabilise the situation. The EU and US also urged calm. As a result, the government of Kosovo has agreed to delay the implementation of the new rules on licence plates and mandatory entry/exit permits until the beginning of September. Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vucic, denounced the attempted implementation of the new rules as a violation of previous EU-mediated agreements on freedom of movement. Unsurprisingly, Russia sided with the Serbian position. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, accused the government of Kosovo and its western allies of violating the rights of ethnic Serbs and of trying to provoke violence. But it's not clear whether Russia had an actual hand in the protests, or merely exploited them in a continuing effort to discredit the west. Tensions in the Balkans are clearly welcome to Russia, and Moscow has previously been accused of fomenting instability and unrest whether in an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016, or in the endless saga of the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially the status of its ethnic Serb entity, which is home to approximately one million ethnic Serbs (equivalent to 85% of the region's total population). Yet, over time, Russia's influence in the region has waned. The US and the EU have had varying success in mediating agreements between Kosovo and Serbia. Even though these have failed to achieve a full normalisation, they have prevented major ruptures in relations, the recent tensions at the Serbia-Kosovo border notwithstanding. While Russia's support for Serbia's position of non-recognition of Kosovo is politically very important for Belgrade, China has become a more important economic partner than Russia. Political support from Beijing, which also refuses to recognise Kosovo's independence, is apparent from the fact that China has made Serbia its regional hub in the western Balkans. Unlike Russia, China values stability in the region, which is an important transit hub and entry point to EU markets. This is likely to curb Vladimir Putin's enthusiasm for significant escalation, but not necessarily the Russian president's ruthless pursuit of an opportunity for destabilisation. Constraining Russia The priority for western policy in the Balkans should be to further curtail Russian influence. The potential for Moscow to escalate tensions in the region is already limited by the high level of Euro-Atlantic integration that these countries have achieved since the break-up of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s. Slovenia and Croatia are members of the EU. Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are official candidate countries in various stages of accession negotiations. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are potential candidate countries. At the same time, all the EU member states in the region are also members of Nato. And the EU and Nato, respectively, maintain a security presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. Yet, it is important for the EU and Nato not to be complacent about Russian influence in the Balkans, and not to create openings for the Kremlin to exploit. This requires a clear continuing commitment by Nato to stability in Kosovo and the region more generally. The EU needs to recharge membership negotiations with the region's candidate countries including Serbia. EU engagement is also required in the dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo, which needs to be infused with new momentum to help both sides make the necessary concessions and compromises to resolve the current crisis and avoid any future escalation. Russia might be tempted escalate tensions in the western Balkans in an effort to put pressure on the west against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. In the absence, for now, of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and between Russia and the west, deterring it from doing so might necessitate a different kind of signalling to Moscow. There needs to be an unambiguous message that any attempts at destabilisation would not go unanswered, and that Russia itself would be vulnerable to western pressure in Syria, Belarus, and its de-facto statelets in Transnistria in Moldova, and in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Together with continued military, economic and political support for Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, such a calibrated western strategy will ensure that the Kremlin does not overplay its hand in the Balkans. (The Conversation) SCY SCY 08040921 NNNN (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After a trip that drew China's wrath, a defiant concluded her visit to on Wednesday with a pledge that the American commitment to democracy on the self-governing island and elsewhere remains ironclad. Pelosi was the first US House speaker to visit the island in more than 25 years, and China swiftly responded by announcing multiple military exercises nearby. The speaker's departure for South Korea came just a day before China was scheduled to launch its largest maneuvers aimed at in more than a quarter of a century. Before leaving, a calm but resolute Pelosi repeated previous remarks about the world facing a choice between democracy and autocracy. America's determination to preserve democracy, here in and around the world, remains ironclad, she said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. China claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments. The Biden administration, and Pelosi, have said that the United States remains committed to the so-called one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. Nevertheless, China issued a series of harsh statements after the American delegation touched down late Tuesday in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. Taiwanese President Tsai pushed back firmly against Beijing's military exercises, parts of which will enter Taiwanese waters. Facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down, Tsai said at her meeting with Pelosi. We will firmly uphold our nation's sovereignty and continue to hold the line of defense for democracy. The exercises, including those involving live fire, are to start Thursday and will be the biggest aimed at Taiwan since 1995, when China fired missiles in a large-scale exercise to show its displeasure over a visit by then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to the U.S. In other activities, Pelosi visited a human rights museum in Taipei that details the history of the island's martial-law era. She also met with some of Taiwan's most prominent rights activists, including an exiled former Hong Kong bookseller who was detained by Chinese authorities, Lam Wing-kee. Thanking Pelosi for her decades of support for Taiwan, the president presented her with a civilian honor, the Order of the Propitious Clouds. A day earlier, China's official Xinhua News Agency announced the military operations and showed a map outlining six different areas around Taiwan. Arthur Zhin-Sheng Wang, a defense studies expert at Taiwan's Central Police University, said three of the areas infringe on Taiwanese waters, meaning they are within 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) of shore. Using live fire in a country's territorial airspace or waters is risky, Wang said, because under rules of engagement, it can be seen as an act of war. In Washington, John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, sought to tamp down fears. He told ABC's Good Morning America on Wednesday that U.S. officials don't believe we're at the brink now, and there's certainly no reason for anybody to be talking about being at the brink going forward. Pelosi's trip heightened U.S.-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her high-level position as leader of the House of Representatives. The last House speaker to visit Taiwan was Newt Gingrich in 1997. China's response came on multiple fronts military, diplomatic and economic. Shortly after Pelosi landed Tuesday night, China announced live-fire drills that reportedly started that night, as well as the four-day exercises starting Thursday. The People's Liberation Army Air Force also flew a contingent of 21 warplanes toward Taiwan. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing to convey the country's protests the same night. On Wednesday, China banned some imports from Taiwan, including citrus fruit and fish. That night, China flew an additional 27 fighter jets toward Taiwan. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said a Taiwanese citizen was detained on suspicion of inciting separatism. Yang Chih-yuan, originally from the city of Taichung, was shown surrounded by police in a CCTV video. Yang had been a candidate for a legislative position in New Taipei City, according to local media. Addressing Beijing's threats, Pelosi said she hopes it's clear that while China has prevented Taiwan from attending certain meetings, that they understand they will not stand in the way of people coming to Taiwan as a show of friendship and of support. Pelosi noted that congressional support for Taiwan is bipartisan, and she praised the island's democracy. She stopped short of saying that the U.S would defend Taiwan militarily, emphasizing that Congress is committed to the security of Taiwan, in order to have Taiwan be able to most effectively defend themselves. Her focus has always been the same, she said, going back to her 1991 visit to Beijing's Tiananmen Square, when she and other lawmakers unfurled a small banner supporting democracy two years after a bloody military crackdown on protesters at the square. That visit was also about human rights and what she called dangerous technology transfers to rogue countries. On this trip, Pelosi met with representatives from Taiwan's legislature. The speaker's visit is the strongest defense of human rights, democratic values and freedom, Tsai Chi-chang, vice president of Taiwan's legislature, said in welcome. Pelosi's five-member delegation included Rep. Gregory Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi from the House Intelligence Committee. Reps. Andy Kim and Mark Takano also traveled with the speaker. She also mentioned Rep. Suzan DelBene, whom Pelosi said was instrumental in the passage of a $280 billion bill aimed at boosting American manufacturing and research in semiconductor chips an industry that Taiwan dominates and is vital for modern electronics. Pelosi arrived Wednesday evening at a South Korea military base ahead of meetings with political leaders in Seoul, after which she will visit Japan. Both countries are U.S. alliance partners, together hosting about 80,000 American personnel as a bulwark against North Korea's nuclear ambitions and China's increased assertiveness in the South China and East China seas. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Speaker of South Korea's National Assembly Kim Jin-pyo met visiting US House Speaker on Thursday amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing in the wake of her high-profile visit to . Pelosi is the first US House speaker to visit since former Speaker Dennis Hastert in 2002, reports Yonhap News Agency. Pelosi arrived in Seoul on Wednesday night from where she reaffirmed unwavering US commitment to supporting the island's democracy. denounced her trip to Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province, and announced live-fire military drills around the island. On Thursday, she met Kim for talks about regional security, economic cooperation and other pending issues. Also attending the meeting were the floor leaders of the ruling People Power Party and the main opposition Democratic Party. Her two-day trip also includes a visit to the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom later on Thursday. Pelosi's delegation includes House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chair Mark Takano, as well as other lawmakers, such as Suzan DelBene, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Andy Kim. is one of the legs on Pelosi's Asian tour that already has taken her to Singapore, Malaysia and . After South Korea, she plans to visit Japan. --IANS ksk/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor deployed scores of planes and fired live missiles near on Thursday in its biggest-ever drills in the Strait, a day after U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a solidarity trip to the self-ruled island. China's military confirmed multiple firings of conventional missiles in waters off as part of planned exercises in six zones set to run until noon on Sunday. It activated more than 100 planes, including fighter jets and bombers, and over 10 warships, state broadcaster CCTV said. Taiwan's defence ministry said it scrambled jets to warn away 22 Chinese fighter aircraft that crossed the Taiwan Strait median line into its air defence zone, while Japan protested that five missiles appeared to land in its economic zone. "The U.S.-Taiwan collusion and provocation will only push Taiwan towards the abyss of disaster, bringing catastrophe to Taiwan compatriots," said a Chinese defence ministry spokesperson. Responding to the Chinese drills, President Tsai Ing-wen said Taiwan would not provoke conflicts but would firmly defend its sovereignty and national security. "Taiwan will never be knocked down by challenges," Tsai said in a recorded video message to the people of Taiwan. "We are calm and not impetuous, we are rational and not provocative, but we will also be firm and not shirk." Taiwan said 11 Chinese Dongfeng ballistic missiles had been fired in nearby waters - the first time since 1996. Taiwan officials said the drills violated United Nations rules, invaded its space and threatened free air and sea navigation. It has been self-ruled since 1949, when Mao Zedong's communists took power in Beijing after defeating Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists in a civil war, prompting the KMT-led government to retreat to the island. The military activity followed Pelosi's unannounced visit of support to Taiwan in defiance of warnings from . Before the drills officially began, Chinese navy ships and military aircraft briefly crossed the Taiwan Strait median line several times on Thursday morning, a Taiwanese source briefed on the matter told Reuters. By midday, warships from both sides remained in close proximity as Taiwan also scrambled jets and deployed missile systems to track Chinese aircraft crossing the line. "They flew in and then flew out, again and again. They continue to harass us," the Taiwanese source said. China, which has long said it reserves the right to take Taiwan by force, says its differences with the island are an internal affair. In Taiwan, life was largely normal despite worries that Beijing could even fire a missile over the main island as North Korea did over Japan's northern island of Hokkaido in 2017. "When says it wants to annex Taiwan by force, they have actually said that for quite a while," said Chen Ming-cheng, a 38-year-old realtor. "From my personal understanding, they are trying to deflect public anger, the anger of their own people, and turn it onto Taiwan." Taiwan said that websites of its defence ministry, foreign ministry and the presidential office were attacked by hackers, and warned of coming "psychological warfare". 'COMRADE PELOSI' Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Pelosi's visit to Taiwan a "manic, irresponsible and highly irrational" act, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Wang, speaking at a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Cambodia, said China had tried to avert crisis by diplomatic means but would never let its core interests be hurt. Unusually, the drills in six areas around Taiwan were announced with a locator map circulated by China's official Xinhua news agency - a factor that for some analysts illustrated playing to both domestic and foreign audiences. In Beijing, security near the U.S. Embassy was unusually tight though there were no signs of significant protests. "I think this (Pelosi's visit) is a good thing," said a man surnamed Zhao in Beijing. "It gives us an opportunity to surround Taiwan, then to use this opportunity to take Taiwan by force. I think we should thank Comrade Pelosi." Pelosi, the highest-level U.S. visitor to Taiwan in 25 years, praised its democracy and pledged American solidarity during her brief stopover. Chinese anger could not stop world leaders from travelling there, she said. "Our delegation came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear that we will not abandon Taiwan," Pelosi told Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, whom Beijing suspects of pushing for formal independence - a red line for China. China summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing in protest and halted several agricultural imports from Taiwan. The United States and the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven nations warned China against using Pelosi's visit as a pretext for military action against Taiwan. The United States has no official diplomatic relations with Taiwan but is bound by U.S. law to provide it with the means to defend itself. Taiwan rejects China's sovereignty claims, saying only the islanders themselves can decide their future. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Southeast Asian Foreign Ministers expressed concern over as China began the massive military drills around and warned that the situation could spark "open conflicts" and "unpredictable consequences" among major powers. China has started its large-scale military drills around self-ruled Taiwan, hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi departed from Taipei which infuriated Beijing. " is concerned with the and regional volatility, especially in the recent development in the area adjacent to the region which could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers," as per the statement released by . ASEAN countries called for maximum restraint, refraining from provocative action and asked to uphold the principles that were enshrined in the United Nations Charter and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). "We reiterate ASEAN Member States' support for their respective One-China Policy," the statement reads. According to the statement, the entire world needs the wisdom and responsibility of all the leaders to uphold multilateralism and partnership, cooperation, peaceful coexistence and healthy competition for the shared goals of peace, stability, security and inclusive and sustainable development. "We should ACT TOGETHER and ASEAN stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilizing ASEAN-led mechanisms to deescalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region," the statement added. Meanwhile, the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army on Thursday conducted military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills around island. Pelosi's visit, which is also the highest level of US visits in more than two decades, left China heavily infuriated and the communist nation warned the US that it will "pay the price" Pelosi's trip has heightened US-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her high-level position as leader of the House of Representatives. She is the first speaker of the house to come to Taiwan in 25 years since Newt Gingrich in 1997. The Chinese military had announced holding live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait after Pelosi's visit which is mainly seen to build security and economic momentum for the Indo-Pacific and is also seen as a move by the US to build pressure on China over its claim on Taiwan, responding to which the Pentagon also sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Earlier, China sent 27 aircraft to Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ), the island's Defence Ministry said on Wednesday hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Taipei. China which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments, announced multiple military exercises around the island, issued a series of harsh statements and even summoned the US ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, to protest against Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Moreover, China has decided to avoid meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Cambodia. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The caretaker administration in has said that the group was uninformed of Ayman al-Zawahiris "arrival and stay" in Kabul, although it is uncertain whether the have explicitly acknowledged or denied the American assertion that the al-Qaeda chief has been killed, media reports said. In a statement released on Thursday, senior spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group has instructed its intelligence agencies to conduct thorough and comprehensive probe into the various aspects of this case, Khaama Press reported. According to the Taliban spokesman, no country, including the United States, is under threat from . He said the Taliban intend to put the Doha Agreement into effect and that its violations has to stop. The Taliban once again denounced the US attack on Kabul as a violation of Afghan airspace and against norms and warned that the US will be held responsible for the consequences of such attacks, if repeated. On the other hand, several top American officials, including Zalmay Khalilzad, claimed that some Taliban leaders were aware of Zawahiri's presence in Kabul. The death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the eyes of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has strengthened global security. By "hosting and sheltering" the al-Qaeda chief in Kabul, the Taliban administration in violated its commitments to the community, according to Blinken. According to Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to US President Joe Biden, they are in contact with the Taliban to find out whether the Taliban sheltered al-Zawahiri, Khaama Press reported. The Taliban have officially pledged to renounce ties with terrorist organisations and prohibit the use of Afghan soil against other countries in the pact it signed with the United States in Doha in February 2020. --IANS san/arm (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is trying more and more weak with Ukraine saying Russia is constructing a army strike force to focus on the economic metropolis in central-southern Ukraine. Early Thursday, Ukraines southern army command saying the state of affairs in its operational space the place preventing is intensifying around Kryvyi Rih in addition to Zaporizhzhia to the east, and Mykolaiv and Kherson to the south is tense and complex. The enemy continues to conduct hostilities on the occupied line of defense. In order to prevent the advance of our troops and restore the lost position, the composition of the group in the Kryvyi Rih direction is increasing due to the transfer of units of the 35th Army of the Eastern Military District, the unit stated, saying that Russian plane had been turning into more active and attacking the realm south of Kryvyi Rih. Ukraines southern army command stated in a earlier replace on Wednesday that it believed Russia was making a army strike group in the Kryvyi Rih region and that its also quite likely that the enemy is preparing a hostile counter-offensive with the subsequent plan of getting to the administrative boundary of Kherson region. Officials in Ukraine have repeatedly warned in current days that Russia is redeploying an enormous quantity of troops to the south of the nation, the place Ukraine has launched counteroffensives to attempt to regain misplaced territory, significantly the occupied metropolis of Kherson. Ukrainian artillerymen within the army meeting heart examine the weapons and particular tools to make them prepared earlier than they go to their duties on the frontline in Kherson, Ukraine on July 15, 2022. In his nightly handle on Sunday night, Zelenskyy praised the bravery of residents in his hometown, in addition to different cities underneath repeated assault as Russia appears to be like to increase its territorial good points in east and southern Ukraine. I want to thank every resident of Mykolaiv for their indomitability, for protecting the city and the region. I also thank Nikopol, Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih and the entire Dnipropetrovsk region, the strong people of Zaporozhzhia and the region, all Ukrainians of the Kherson region, everyone who defends the approaches to Odessa and the region Thank you for your courage. Zelenskyy says he needs to talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping Ukrainian President is seen throughout a joint press convention with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson on July 4, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Zelenskyy is in search of a possibility for direct talks with Chinese chief Xi Jinping to assist finish Russias unprovoked struggle in Ukraine, the South China Morning Post reported. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy needs to talk straight with Xi Jinping in hopes Chinas president might use the nations affect to finish Russias unprovoked struggle in Ukraine. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Zelenskyy stated Ukraine has pursued talks with China because the starting of the struggle. He advised the newspaper that Russia would really feel way more economically remoted with out the Chinese market and will use that to strain Russian President Vladimir Putin to cease the struggle. The US Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve the accession of and to NATO, with the resolution gaining the support of 95 senators. The single dissenting vote came from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who argued that there should be less focus on security in Europe and much more on the threat from China, dpa news agency reported. US President Joe Biden has strongly backed the accession of and to NATO, and referred the matter to the Senate for consideration in July. The vote in Washington followed a vote in France's National Assembly earlier on Wednesday, in which 209 deputies voted in favour of Swedish and Finnish membership, while 46 voted against. The Senate, the second chamber of the French parliament, voted to approve the accession a fortnight ago. and applied to join the Western defence alliance in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Until now, the two countries have been close partners, but not members, of . Before the accession protocols can enter into force, they must be ratified by all 30 member states, two-thirds of which have already given their approval for the new members. --IANS int/shs (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Majority of employees in telecom and consulting sectors have returned to office with significant fall in COVID-19 cases but the is lagging, according to a survey by Colliers and Awfis. Property consultant Colliers India and co-working operator Awfis' joint report explores the status of return to work across different sectors. "As the third wave of COVID-19 started waning in February, the return-to-office gained momentum. As a result, by June 2022 about 34 per cent of the companies saw about 75-100 per cent of the employees back in office (includes hybrid work)," the report said. About 41 per cent of occupiers stated that only up to 25 per cent of their employees have returned to office. The survey showed that telecom and consulting sectors saw the highest (75-100 per cent) rate of return to office while IT and new technology companies saw the lowest (0-25 per cent) rate of return to office. "The survey has made it clear that a distributed workspace strategy is the way to go for occupiers in this new era of experiential workplaces, as occupiers emerge from the after-effects of the pandemic. Flex spaces, in particular, are leading this growth, as occupiers from varied sectors are housing teams in flex centres across cities," Colliers India CEO Ramesh Nair said. Flexible workspace operators leased about 3.5 million square feet of office space in January-June this year across the top six cities, almost three-fourths of the flexible space leasing in entire 2021, he added. The survey was conducted during May-June among occupiers to understand their strategies regarding distributed workplace. The respondents were from different sectors such as IT/ITeS, BFSI, engineering and manufacturing and others. Total 150 responses were received from C-Suite executives spanning Founders, CEOs, COOs and CHROs of various companies. The company size of the respondents varied, starting from a range of 1-500 employees to companies having over 10,000 employees. As per the survey, about 74 per cent of the occupiers are likely to adopt distributed workspace while 53 per cent of occupiers prefer working from home plus office as their preferred workplace portfolio strategy. About 49 per cent of the occupiers are likely to adopt flex centres to enable distributed workspace, followed by setting up their own offices in metro and non-metro cities. The consultant sees opportunities for flex spaces not only in metro cities but also in non-metro cities. "In fact, in non-metro cities, total flex spaces are likely to grow more than two-fold to 5.5 million square feet by the end of 2022," Nair said. Amit Ramani, Founder and CEO, Awfis said the findings of the survey are a testament to the success of the distributed work model and subsequently of flex spaces in catering to the ever-evolved workspace needs of India Inc. "Going forward, 77 per cent occupiers will include flex spaces as part of their workplace strategy. We expect exceptional demand in the future, driven largely by large corporates for de-densification of existing traditional offices," he added. According to the Colliers India data, the gross leasing of office rose to 32.9 million square feet in 2021 from 30.1 million square feet in the previous year. During 2019, the numbers stood at 44.8 million square feet across six cities -- Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. In the first six months of this year, the office leasing has risen to 27.5 million square feet from 10.3 million square feet in the year-ago period. The share of leasing by flexible workspace operators stood at 13 per cent. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shares of hit over three-year high of Rs 134.65 and rallied 14 per cent on the BSE in Thursdays intra-day trade on the back of heavy volumes. In the past two trading days, the stock of the company, engaged in printing & publishing business, has soared 28 per cent after the company reported robust earnings for the quarter ended June 2022 (Q1FY23). It traded at its highest level since September 2018. Earlier, the stock had hit a record high of Rs 194 on June 13, 2017. At 01:41 pm, traded 13 per cent higher at Rs 132.70, on the back of over five-fold jump in trading volumes. A combined 7.73 million equity shares have, so far, changed hands on the NSE and BSE. In comparison, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 0.38 per cent at 58,130 level. is an educational syllabus-based provider that offers quality content across print and digital mediums. With over 60 years of experience as an educational publisher and stationery manufacturer, the company enjoys high brand recognition and market standing in the educational content and scholastic stationery segment. The company owns a market share of approximately 65 per cent in Western India. Going ahead, the company plan to transform in-line with ever-evolving trends and aims to build a strong presence in the domain by leveraging its existing businesses. For Q1FY23, Navneent Education reported standalone profit after tax (PAT) of Rs 149.72 crore, as against Rs 44.54 crore in Q1FY22. The company surpassed its entire PAT of the previous fiscal (FY22) of Rs 146.62 crore in first quarter of current fiscal (FY23). Meanwhile, the company's standalone income from operations during the quarter more-than-doubled to Rs 682.78 crore from Rs 318.32 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (ebitda) margin improved to 31 per cent from 22 per cent. With 26.31 per cent of Indias population between the ages of 0 to14 and around 150 million children who lack access to formal education, the educational sector holds significant potential for development. That apart, the advent of new educational policy would bring changes in the curriculum of the school syllabus and will directly impact the companys business positively, acting as a strong growth driver. Going forward, students discarding the old and second-hand books to buy new supplementary books on the basis of revised syllabus or curriculum would propel growth of the company. With an increasing number of schools converting from State boards to CBSE, we see an opportunity in the CBSE Board schools since the market for these books is expected to grow rapidly. Besides, as more and more English Medium Private State Boards start repositioning as CBSE pattern schools, there will be an increased need to utilise private publishers textbooks up to grade 8, aiding our publication business growth, Navneet Education said in its FY22 annual report. Shares of New Delhi Television (NDTV) hit an over 13-year high of Rs 312.65 as they rallied 9 per cent on the BSE in Thursday's intra-day trade ahead of April-June quarter (Q1FY23) results later today. The stock of the television broadcasting & software production company has surged 20 per cent in the past two trading days. It surpassed its previous high of Rs 303, hit on July 25, 2022. In the past one month, the market price of has zoomed 85 per cent as compared to 9.8 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex. It was trading at its highest level since September 2008. The stock had hit a record high of Rs 512 on January 4, 2008. NDTV, on July 27, 2022, clarified that the company is unaware of any reason for the significant movement in price, nor is it withholding any information which could influence the significant movement in price of the shares of the company. On July 21, the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) provided partial relief to broadcaster and its promoters against orders passed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) for alleged violation of Takeover Code and disclosure regulations. The tribunal also slashed penalties imposed by the market regulator terming them excessive. The telecommunications services provider acquired 19867.8 MHz spectrum in 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100MHz, 3300 MHz and 26 GHz frequency bands through the 5G spectrum auction for Rs 43,084 crore. The telecom company said that it has acquired 19,800 MHz spectrum by securing a pan India footprint of 3.5 GHz and 26 GHz bands. In addition, the company was able to selectively bolster mid-band spectrum. This massive spectrum bank was secured for a total consideration of Rs 43,084 cr in the latest spectrum auction conducted by the Department of Telecom, Government of India. Airtel has secured 5G spectrum for 20 years in this auction. With this, the company will not need to spend any material sum on spectrum for many years to come. In addition, this spectrum acquisition has enabled Airtel to drastically reduce the payout towards spectrum usage charge (SUC) and eliminate the adverse SUC arbitrage compared to new entrants, Airtel said in a statement on Wednesday (4 August 2022). The company said it now plans to launch 5G services in every part of the country starting with key cities. The company is convinced that its higher-quality customer base will adopt 5G devices at a rapid pace in the country. In addition, Airtel's presence in the Enterprise segment will allow for a slew of industrial use cases further strengthening Airtel's position in the B2B market. In a separate announcement, Airtel said that it signed 5G network agreements with Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung to commence 5G deployment in August 2022. "Airtel has had a long-standing relationship for connectivity and Pan-India managed services with Ericsson and Nokia while the partnership with Samsung will begin this year onwards," the company said. Choice of multiple partners will enable Airtel to roll out 5G services spanning ultra-high-speeds, low latency and large data handling capabilities. The multi-year deal will see Nokia provide equipment from its market-leading AirScale portfolio along with solutions and services for network management, deployment, planning and optimization services to ensure the best end-user experiences. Airtel will also bring in South Korean Major Samsung as a network partner to deploy Airtel 5G. This is the first time that both companies will work together. Airtel is a global communications solutions provider with over 490 million customers in 17 countries across South Asia and Africa. The company ranks among the top three mobile operators globally and its networks cover over two billion people. Airtel is India's largest integrated communications solutions provider and the second-largest mobile operator in Africa. The board of Bharti Airtel will consider Q1 results on 8 August 2022. The company's consolidated net profit surged 164.5% to Rs 2,007.80 crore on 22.3% increase in net sales to Rs 31,500.30 crore in Q4 FY22 over Q4 FY21. Shares of Bharti Airtel rose 0.92% to Rs 692.95 on Wednesday, 3 August 2022. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) InterGlobe Aviation: InterGlobe Aviation posted net loss at Rs 1064.3 crore in Q1 FY23, lower than net loss of Rs 3174.2 crore in Q1FY22. Total income for the quarter ended June 2022 was Rs 13018.8 crore, an increase of 310.7% over the same period last year. Adani Wilmar: Adani Wilmar's consolidated net profit rose 10% to Rs 194 crore on 30% jump in revenue to Rs 14784 crore in Q1 FY23 over Q1 FY22. Vodafone Idea: The telecom operator posted net loss of Rs 7,296.7 crore for the quarter ended June 2022, higher than net loss of Rs 6,563.1 crore in the previous quarter. Revenue from operations rose to Rs 10,410.10 crore from Rs 10239.5 crore. Redington (India): Redington (India) reported a 33% rise in net profit to Rs 315.8 crore on 25% growth in revenue to Rs 16828.3 crore in Q1 FY23 over Q1 FY22. AU Small Finance Bank: The board of directors of the bank approved the allotment of 500 Tier II Bonds of face value of Rs. one crore each, for cash, at par aggregating to Rs. 500 crore at a coupon rate of 9.30% p.a. on a private placement basis. Karnataka Bank: Karnataka Bank signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with SCHWING Stetter India Pvt Ltd, one of India's major construction equipment manufacturers. The collaboration with SCHWING Stetter is expected to broaden the Bank's MSME financing prospects. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) SGX Nifty: Trading of Nifty 50 index futures on the Singapore stock exchange indicates that the Nifty could rise 47 points at the opening bell. The Reserve Bank of India's rate-setting panel on Wednesday began its three-day deliberations on the next bi-monthly monetary policy. The Monetary Policy Committee is scheduled to announce its decision on August 5. While a 25 bps hike is ruled out, market opinions are reportedly split between a 35 bps hike and a 50 bps hike. Global markets: Overseas, Asian stocks are trading higher on Thursday following the rally on Wall Street. Investors move on from the tensions over U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial visit to Taiwan. Pelosi met with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday amid warnings from Beijing. Pelosi has since left the self-ruled island that China views as a runaway province to continue with her Asia tour. Wall Street ended sharply higher on Wednesday, with strong profit forecasts from PayPal and CVS Health Corp lifting sentiment. A better-than-expected services PMI reading for July gave investors confidence amid concerns about a U.S. recession. The US services industry unexpectedly picked up in July as new orders grew solidly. The ISM's non-manufacturing PMI rebounded to a reading of 56.7 last month from 55.3 in June, ending three straight monthly declines. Domestic markets: Back home, the benchmark indices reversed intraday losses and ended with modest gains on Wednesday. The barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, rose 214.17 points or 0.37% to 58,350.53. The Nifty 50 index added 42.70 points or 0.25% to 17,388.15. Foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) bought shares worth Rs 765.17 crore, while domestic institutional investors (DIIs), were net sellers to the tune of Rs 518.42 crore in the Indian equity market on 3 August, provisional data showed. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At the height of the great financial crisis in January 2009, an ensemble of edgy business captains at the World Economic Forum in Davos told Christine Lagarde that one of the persisting problems since ages was that the political class had little understanding of business. Lagarde, then French finance minister, told them that it was the other way round: You do not understand politics! Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor Last week, when Ltd handed over Indian Naval Ship (INS) Vikrant to the Indian Navy, the shipyard was left with a large empty berth where Indias first indigenous aircraft carrier, or IAC-1, had been under construction. Now, demanding answers were two questions: First, is there going to be a second indigenous carrier? And, if yes, what would be the size and specifications of IAC-2? The navys answers to those questions will determine Indias naval power for decades to come. Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor A day after the ED sealed Herald House, the Congress on Wednesday stepped up attack against the government and gave multiple adjournment motion notices in the and suspension of business notice in the . Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi gave a notice in the to discuss the India-China border dispute issue. "The Union Government should clarify its stance on the restoration of status quo ante prevailing on the LAC prior to May 5, 2020 and progress made pursuant thereto." Manickam Tagore has given notice on unemployment in the while in the the Congress has moved multiple notices under rule 267. Rajiv Shukla has moved a notice on the medical students who returned from Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion there. Shakti Singh Gohil gave a notice on the deaths in cows due to the lumpy disease. The government is scheduled to pass 'The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill, 2022' in the Lok Sabha on Thursday. Power Minister R.K. Singh will move the Bill on energy conservation. Amid the growing energy needs and changing global climate landscape, the Centre has identified new areas to achieve higher levels of penetration of renewable energy by proposing certain amendments to the Energy Conservation Act, 2001. The objective will be to enhance demand for renewable energy at the end- use sectors such as industry, buildings, transport, etc. The Ministry of Power has prepared amendments, after consultations with stakeholders. The proposal includes defining a minimum share of renewable energy in the overall consumption by the industrial units or any establishment. --IANS miz/dpb (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former leader Kuldeep Bishnoi joined the on Thursday along with his wife Renuka Bishnoi here in the presence of senior party leaders, including state Chief Minister . An MLA for four terms and MP for two terms, Bishnoi lauded as the "best" Indian prime minister and praised Khattar for keeping a "spotless" reputation despite being chief minister for over eight years. He was expelled by the for voting for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Rajya Sabha polls and had resigned from the Assembly on Wednesday ahead of starting his new political innings. His wife is also a former MLA. Inducting him into the party, Khattar noted that the couple's young son is also in and said the welcomes the family. He said Kuldeep Bishnoi (52) also mentors an association of the Bishnoi community which has sizeable presence in Rajasthan as well, and added his presence in the will strengthen it in and the neighbouring state. He noted that Bishnoi has been supporting Modi's leadership and had backed the BJP during the recent Rajya Sabha polls despite being a MLA. It was a close contest and he fulfilled his assurance of voting for our candidate, Khattar said. "He has joined the BJP today, and I hope the BJP will also begin growing inside him very soon," the chief minister said of the former ally who had snapped his Haryana Janhit Party's three-year old ties during the 2014 state assembly polls. Kuldeep Bishnoi had then accused the party of going back on its "promise" of projecting him as the chief ministerial candidate. He had later merged his party with the Congress. Bishnoi is son of former Haryana chief minister Bhajan Lal, a crafty politician credited with building the non-Jat vote bank, now seen to be affiliated largely with the BJP. Speaking to reporters, he noted that he and his associates were part of the BJP-led campaign to make Modi prime minister during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. There were some differences later but there was no bitterness, he said. Lauding Modi as a "great prime minister", Bishnoi said it would not be wrong to describe him as "India's best prime minister" who always thinks about the country and the poor's welfare. He met BJP president J P Nadda after joining the party. Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, too, attended the joining ceremony in which some state MLAs were also present besides a good number of Bishnoi's supporters. Haryana BJP president Om Prakash Dhankar praised Bishnoi's work and claimed that more and more people in the Congress' state unit will find it difficult to remain in the party working in a stifling work culture. Bishnoi and all those who have joined the BJP with him will be given responsibility according to their seniority, Dhankar said. Bishnoi claimed that he had joined with no condition and only wanted respect for him and those with him. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Chief Minister on Thursday afternoon left Kolkata for a four-day trip to New Delhi, where she was likely to meet senior opposition leaders, besides attending a programme, scheduled to be held on August 7, official sources said. The TMC supremo will also be meeting party MPs at Rajya Sabha member Sukhendu Sekhar Roy's residence in the capital, shortly after reaching there in the evening, they said. Banerjee is primarily visiting New Delhi is to take part in the session, but the sources stated that a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi was likely on the cards. According to the official sources, the TMC boss might on Saturday hold discussions over certain political matters with non-Congress opposition leaders at the central hall of Parliament. During her stay there, the CM could pay a visit to President Droupadi Murmu. Banerjee was expected to return to Kolkata on Monday, the sources added. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former West Bengal education minister and his aide Arpita Mukherjee were sent to three more days in the custody of the (ED) by a special court in in the SSC scam case. The ED had sought four days of custody for Chatterjee and three days for Mukherjee, from whose apartments crores of rupees in cash and other valuables were recovered last month. They are facing charges under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Hearing the arguments, special PMLA judge Jibon Kumar Sadhu granted three days' ED custody to both the accused. They will be produced before the court again on August 5, he directed. The investigating officer was directed to arrange for the medical examinations of both the accused persons every 48 hours during their stay in ED custody. Appearing for the ED, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) SV Raju submitted that several companies and properties in the joint holding of Chatterjee and Mukherjee were unearthed, and they were needed to be questioned on these. He said that Chatterjee has so far remained tightlipped on questioning by the ED and has not been cooperating in the investigation, but Mukherjee is comparatively forthcoming. Claiming that Chatterjee is innocent of the crimes alleged, his counsel KP Das questioned whether cooperating means to admitting the accusations made by the ED. The ASG claimed that some residential flats have been found to be under the joint ownership of the two accused, and with new revelations in the case coming up every other day, they need to be confronted with these details. Praying for Chatterjee's bail on any condition that may be imposed by the court, his counsel Das submitted that to locate bank accounts of a person one does not need his custody as these can be found by using the PAN. He, however, further submitted that if Chatterjee is at all remanded to ED custody again, then it should not exceed two days as he was arrested on July 23 and a maximum of 15 days' police remand is permissible under law. Seeking a four-day ED custody for Chatterjee, Raju said that two days were wasted as he was admitted to the hospital and the agency could not question him. Opposing Mukherjee's remand prayer for three days, her counsel submitted that the court should decide whether any further ED custody is required for his client. Raju submitted that Rs 21.90 crore in cash was seized from her flat in south on July 22, and Rs 27.90 crore in cash was recovered from another flat owned by her at Belghoria along with gold valued at Rs 4.31 crore, apart from other documents on July 27, indicating large scale money laundering. The ASG submitted that the association between Chatterjee and Mukherjee goes back to at least 2012 as a conveyance deed dated January 20, 2012, registered in Bolpur, Birbhum district, in the joint names of the two accused was seized. It was also alleged that a partnership deed with an equal share of the two accused was entered into in the name of APA Utility Services on November 1, 2012. After hearing all the parties, the judge said it appears that during the course of search, various documents relating to immovable properties and appointment of staff were recovered and seized. "From the materials available on case diary, it appears that accused persons are involved in the commission of offence as alleged," the judge observed. Judge Sadhu said in his order that the investigation process in the case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) has just begun and "is in process and progress". Rejecting the bail prayers of the accused petitioners, the judge remanded both Chatterjee and Mukherjee to three days in ED custody. The alleged irregularities in the recruitment drives by the School Service Commission (SSC) took place when Chatterjee was the education minister of the state. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Rashtriya Janata Dal is gearing up for organisational polls, culminating in election of the president in October, amid uncertainties surrounding its frail founding chief Lalu Prasad, who has held the top post since the party came into being. As per the schedule released by the party at its state headquarters here, elections for units at booth, panchayat, block and district levels will start from August 16 and conclude by September 6. On September 21, elections will be held for state presidents and members of the state executive besides the party's apex body the council. The council will meet in Delhi on October 11 for the all-important election of the president. Prasad, who is on the wrong side of 70, recuperating from a shoulder injury and looking forward to getting a kidney transplant abroad, had floated the in 1997, splitting the Janata Dal. Always elected unopposed to the top party post, Prasad is at present enjoying his 11th consecutive term as the national president. The last time he got elected was in 2019, in abstentia, because of jail term he was serving in fodder scam cases. It has been a matter of speculation for some time as to whether the ailing septuagenarian would consider stepping down. The party rank and file has accepted Prasad's younger son and heir apparent Tejashwi Yadav as its de facto leader. The young leader's stature has grown since he steered the party to a handsome performance in the 2020 assembly polls, wherein the emerged as the single largest party, though falling far short of the majority mark. The elevation of Tejashwi, currently the leader of the opposition, will signal a generational shift, signs of which have been visible in moves like upper castes and women being given a greater share. However, there are apprehensions of a worsened sibling rivalry in the event of Prasad giving up even the party post for his favourite son. His eldest daughter Misa Bharti and Tej Pratap are active in politics, and though both claim to dote on Tejashwi, their stifled ambitions remains an open secret. national vice-president Shivanand Tiwary, who is a founding member of the party, however, said it was unlikely that Prasad will do anything drastic, given the compulsions of realpolitik. Tejashwi is already having his say in a lot of matters. For example, the current state president Jagadanand Singh was his choice. So, it is not that the young leader needs more backing from his father. But Lalu Prasad must remain at the helm of affairs to keep the entire flock together. I don't think he will step down. Ill-health hardly makes him unfit for the top party post, Tiwary told PTI. The JD(U) of Prasad's arch rival Nitish Kumar, with which the RJD has had a short-lived alliance in recent past, believes that the former chief minister's party is faced with a historic opportunity in the organisational polls. The RJD professes to be a follower of the ideology of Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia. We do so as well and we have no quarrels with their claim. But, they must remember that JP and Lohia were always against the of nepotism and money power, JD(U) MLC and chief spokesman Neeraj Kumar said, in an obvious reference to corruption charges in which the RJD's proverbial 'first family' is embroiled. The RJD has a historic opportunity to promote workers who neither have the advantage of pedigree nor come with deep pockets. We have been doing so in JD(U). They can do likewise if they muster the will, he said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With an aim to help Asian-owned businesses, tech giant has announced the launch of a new Asian-owned attribute that will be available on Search and Maps for business owners in the US. US businesses can now add the Asian-owned attribute to their Business Profile on Search and Maps. In the coming weeks, ad-supported publishers will be able to identify as Asian-owned in Display and Video 360's Marketplace, too. "As we were building this feature, we worked with hundreds of Asian-owned businesses to ensure the attribute celebrates our diverse and unique cultures," Leanne Luce, Product Manager, Search, said in a blogpost. Businesses can opt-in to adopt the attribute on their Business Profile and can easily opt-out at any time. Once the attribute appears on a Business Profile, users will also be able to see the attribute. This update builds on the Black-owned, Latino-owned, veteran-owned, women-owned and LGBTQ+ owned business attributes, and is another way people can support a diversity of businesses across Google's products and platforms. Over the past few years, Grow with has partnered with the US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce (USPAACC) to help Asian-owned small businesses grow. To date, said it helped more than 20,000 Asian-owned businesses expand their digital skills through workshops focusing on topics like e-commerce tools, design thinking for entrepreneurs and making decisions using analytics. "Today, we are building upon that partnership. Together, USPAACC and Grow with Google will help an additional 10,000 Asian-owned small businesses gain digital skills to help them grow their businesses," the company said. --IANS vc/svn/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) From the Interview of Dev Pragad by Professor 'Funmi Olonisakin of Kings College London. Professor 'Funmi Olonisakin is Vice President and Professor of Security, Leadership and Development at Kings College London. A founding member of the African Leadership Centre, which aims to build the next generation of African scholars generating cutting edge knowledge for security and development in Africa. Prior to this, she worked in the Office of the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict. Dev Pragad is a proud graduate of Harvard Business School and King's College London. He is a fellow of King's College London and completed the prestigious Owner/President Management program at HBS. Prior to Newsweek, Dev ran the UK edition of IBT Media. Dev retains a strong desire to continuously improve his skills and abilities and believes that the first step to being a true leader is to inspire others to lead with you. On the subject of leadership, the audience at King's, the classroom in multidimensional ways eventually engages the subject of leadership from a conceptual and practical perspective. And so, the question of whether we have someone who's a leader scholar, a scholar leader, a scholar leader practitioner is something we engage with from time to time. Dev was asked how he considers himself along this spectrum. Whether he engaged much with leadership literature itself in the act of doing leadership, if you like, and how has this affected his leadership style. Following are Dr. Dev Pragads responses to how he fits along this topic. My academic background at King's gave me a deep interest in understanding the theory behind things. I've had the privilege of meeting a lot of world leaders, prime ministers, presidents, and also CEOs of some of the top companies in the world. One of the key questions I often keep asking myself and reminding myself is that quality leadership matters, and has real genuine consequence for quality leadership and there is genuine consequence for bad leadership. And this is something that at Newsweek I had to face: the consequence of a history of bad leadership. When I came into the company, we had to go through a huge salvage operation to rebuild Newsweek into this digital powerhouse it is today with over 100 million readers and a very profitable venture and enterprise. On the flip side, one of the great successes of quality leadership is, at Harvard, where I'm wrapping up an executive course, I spent a lot of time mingling with top leaders and studying about leadership. I had the privilege of spending an hour with Stephane Bancel who is the CEO of Moderna, the vaccine manufacturer. You can almost say he probably is one of the man of the hour, coming out with vaccines that are vaccinating millions and millions of people, if not billions. And I had the privilege of going through the evolution that Moderna went through. All throughout, Moderna had struggled to be a company of significance until the pandemic hit. It was the sheer quality of Stephane's leadership that brought Moderna at that point of time where it was able to step in, produce vaccines in a matter of two months and transform the world in terms of providing an end to the pandemic. Often the question I had in my head was, what would have happened if Stephane had failed in his leadership journey? What would have been the real world consequence if Stephane and BioNTech (the two leading vaccine manufacturers) the leadership team had failed? That would have had a material impact on the world and all of us. So this obviously is an extreme case, but every leader in whatever position they are big, small, leading a country, leading a department, leading a company whatever they are, their leadership matters. If they fail, there are consequences that will follow. If they succeed, there are positive consequences that will follow. I think it's extremely important anyone who is studying leadership embraces this very deeply: that being a leader may sound very fancy and very glamorous, but it comes with huge amounts of responsibilities; and it's something that is worth spending a lot of time studying because when you go through a variety of theoretical scenarios and conceptual scenarios, and you step into the real world and leadership is often about navigating challenges and problems and finding solutions you feel confident and you feel well-equipped to have a framework in your mind that allows you to come up with solutions and solve problems and take the company, take your organisation forward. So it is something I'm extremely passionate about and something I feel you can never say, 'I've learnt enough about leadership'. There's always so much you can learn from literature, so much you can learn from your peers, and also so much you can learn from your leaders around you, who work for you. There's constantly- you got to keep an open mind and keep learning. South Africa: Nkoana-Mashabane describes KZN matric girls' murder as horrendous Minister in the Presidency responsible for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, has described the recent murder of two matric girls in Ngwangwane village, KwaZulu-Natal, as horrendous and sickening. According to reports, the perpetrator entered the house where the girls were renting and murdered them, and mutilated their bodies with an axe. Condemning the murder of the two girls, Nkoana-Mashabane said South Africa has reached extreme proportions of gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF), where women are no longer safe in society. It cannot be that we continue to live like this. Our society is experiencing a massive crisis of GBV. The rate at which women and children are being abused, raped, mutilated and murdered is unfathomable, Nkoana-Mashabane said. The Minister emphasised the need to continue to recognise and address GBV as a human rights violation. The scourge of widespread and systematic GBV against women is deeply rooted in discrimination against women and continues to shape the lives of women in South Africa, with devastating impact not only on the victims, but also on democracy itself, Nkoana-Mashabane said. The Minister commended the police in KwaZulu-Natal for acting swiftly and apprehending the suspect. We plead that the legal processes and successful conviction of the suspect happens as soon as possible because we do not have a place for murderers, abusers and rapists in our society. This will also bring justice to the family and friends of the victims, she said. The Minister also conveyed her heartfelt condolences to the parents and families of the two learners. My heart goes out to the parents and families of the young victims who lost their lives in such a brutal way. I pray that God may comfort their hearts and heal them from such a painful loss, Nkoana-Mashabane said. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2022-08-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Commissioner's office of Chinese Foreign Ministry in HKSAR condemns Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan Xinhua) 08:56, August 04, 2022 HONG KONG, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) on Wednesday voiced strong opposition and condemnation to Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region in disregard of China's repeated warnings. The visit has sent a very wrong signal to the separatist forces for "Taiwan independence," and seriously violated the one-China principle and the stipulations in the three China-U.S. joint communiques. It has severely impacted the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and gravely infringed on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, said a spokesperson for the office. The spokesperson urged the U.S. side to immediately stop playing the "Taiwan card" to "use Taiwan to contain China," stop playing with fire on the Taiwan question, stop creating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and stop acting in bad faith any longer. The spokesperson said that the one-China principle is a widely recognized norm of international relations and a consensus accepted by the international community, and the political foundation for China's exchanges with other countries, including the United States. It is at the very core of China's interests and a red line that must not be crossed. Driven by its strategy to "contain China with Taiwan," the United States has been supporting and conniving at the separatist forces seeking "Taiwan independence," and provoking China on the Taiwan question, the spokesperson said. "Some U.S. politicians make themselves enemies of the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people for selfish gains, and they will never come to a good end," the spokesperson said, adding that the farce staged by the United States to "use Taiwan to contain China" is doomed to fail. The spokesperson pointed out that Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region as a leader of the U.S. Congress is "by no means unofficial." The visit precisely shows that the United States has long been pursuing "strategic ambiguity" and playing "salami-slicing" tactics on the Taiwan question, and is trying to obscure and hollow out the one-China principle, the spokesperson said. The U.S. side has made solemn commitments to China on the one-China principle in the three China-U.S. joint communiques. But over the years it has been backpedaling on its commitments, the common understandings between the two sides and its original position on Taiwan, the spokesperson said. The spokesperson stressed that the Taiwan question is the most important and most sensitive issue at the very heart of China-U.S. relations. Noting that the position of the Chinese government and the Chinese people on the Taiwan question has been consistent, the spokesperson said it is the firm commitment of the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. "No country, no force and no individual should underestimate the strong resolve, will and ability of the Chinese government and people to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to achieve national reunification and rejuvenation," the spokesperson said. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) China Drills Force Ships to sail around Taiwan Danger Zones NDTV Taiwan says seeks no escalation, but we don't stand down when it comes to our security and sovereignty ISTANBUL (AA) In a show of power and anger against US House Speaker Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan, the Chinese military Thursday launched missiles around the self-ruled island. The Rocket Force of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) launched multiple types of conventional missiles into several designated sea regions east of Taiwan, accurately hitting targets, state-run Chinese daily Global Times reported. The missile launches tested the rocket force's strike precision and area denial capabilities, the PLA spokesperson said, adding that the "relevant sea and airspace control off the eastern coast of Taiwan island has been lifted since the live-fire missile drills have hit the targets precisely." Tan Kefei, a spokesman of Chinas Ministry of National Defense, said: The PLAs words count. The PLA joint drills encircling the Taiwan island are exactly aimed to deter the collision between the US and the island. Several videos on social media showed smoke billowing out of the southernmost tips of the Chinese mainland that appear to be a spot of Chinese weaponry from where the missiles are being fired. Hectic land, air, and naval activities were reported from Pingtan Island, one of mainland Chinas closest points to Taiwan, in the Fujian province. Taiwan's Defense Ministry confirmed that the Chinese military had launched several ballistic" and "long-range" missiles into waters around Taiwan's northeast and southwest around 1.56 p.m. (0556GMT). It said its armed forces are operating as usual and monitor our surroundings in response to irrational activities from China aiming for changing the status quo and destabilizing the region's security. We seek no escalation, but we don't stand down when it comes to our security and sovereignty, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said. - Military drills necessary Hua Chungying, spokesman of Chinas Foreign Ministry, justified Chinese military actions saying they are just, necessary and resolute." The drills are a warning to provocateurs, especially the Taiwan secessionists and external forces who interfered with Chinas internal affairs, Hua said. G7 nations and the EU "unjustly accused China on the Taiwan question, distorting black and white," over which China is extremely dissatisfied, she added. Hua also confirmed that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will not meet his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi in Cambodia where the duo, besides top diplomats and officials from over 40 countries, are participating in senior-level meetings of the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an economic and military bloc. The decision comes in the wake of a G7 statement on the current crisis in the Taiwan Strait accusing China of risking "unnecessary escalation" with its latest actions. Japan is member of G7. G7 turned a blind eye to Pelosis Taiwan visit before it happened, but now accused China of taking actions of justice. Their hypocrisy and ugliness have been fully exposed, Hua said. The one-China principle is an important political foundation for G7 to establish diplomatic ties with China. Legislators from these countries are supposed to follow the diplomatic policies that their governments acknowledged and committed to, she added. On whether Chinese military drills will become new normal in the Taiwan Strait, Hua replied: "It depends on the US and 'secessionist' forces in Taiwan." "As long as 'secessionist' actions go on," Hua said: "China will not stop displaying determination to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity." China has mounted massive military drills surrounding Taiwan, which Beijing considers its breakaway province, from Thursday until Sunday. The military response comes after Pelosi landed on the self-ruled island on Tuesday night on an unannounced visit triggering anger from Beijing which sees it as a violation of its territorial integrity. Riyaz ul Khaliq/AA News at 4Cs 4Cs to Host Two Information Sessions for Adult Learners Ready to Start College With the Fall 2022 semester just a few weeks away, starting on September 6, 2022, Cape Cod Community College is hosting two Zoom information sessions designed for adult learners interested in learning more about classes and programs. Hosted by the Adult Learner Center at the College, the two remote sessions are Wednesday, August 10 at 7:00 p.m. and Wednesday, August 24 at 7:00 p.m. The Zoom information sessions cover information about how to apply to Cape Cod Community College, details about available Financial Aid, grants, and scholarships to pay for college, what types of programs and courses are available, online and HyFlex classes, and how to get registered and ready-to-go for Fall. Guests are encouraged to come with questions, and there is ample time for conversation with the staff from the Adult Learner Center. These are the perfect sessions for students over the age of 25 that are either considering taking college classes for the first time or are looking to return and finish their degree or certificate. To obtain the Zoom link for either or both information session, email advisingcenter@capecod.edu with Adult Learner Info Session in the subject line. 14 and 7-week classes at Cape Cod Community College start September 6 on-campus and online. This Fall the College is offering classes that are either in-person, online, or in HyFlex modalities. HyFlex courses are a 4Cs signature, leveraging state-of-the-art DTEN technology that allows students to choose on a day-to-day basis whether they attend a class in-person or Zoom-in live to a real classroom. One labourer died and two others were injured in a grenade attack by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on Thursday night, police said. The Police said that both the injured labourers are stable. The Police had cordoned off the area. "Terrorists hurled grenade on outside labourers at Gadoora area of Pulwama. In this terror incident, one labourer died and two others were injured. Area cordoned off. Further details shall follow," Kashmir Zone Police said in a tweet. The deceased labourer has been identified as Mohammad Mumtaz, a resident of Sakwa Parsa, Bihar. The other two injured are also residents of Bihar. "The deceased outside labourer has been identified as Mohd Mumtaz, resident of Sakwa Parsa, Bihar. Injured have been identified as Mohd Arif and Mohd Majbool, residents of Rampur, Bihar. Both are stable," Police added. Earlier on Wednesday, terrorists fired upon a vehicle-bound police party in the Allochibagh Bund area of Srinagar district of Jammu and Kashmir, said police. The police said no injury or other damage took place. Earlier, a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist was apprehended in the higher reaches of Aloosa forest during a joint operation by 26 Assam Rifles, JKP and CRPF, said the Indian Army on Sunday. During the search, war-like stores were recovered from him. "A specific input was received from Jammu and Kashmir and Army Intelligence Unit regarding the presence of two suspected terrorists in Gen Area Aloosa Forest. On July 30, a joint operation led by 26 Assam Rifles, JKP and CRPF was launched. During a search of higher reaches in Aloosa Forest, a suspected area was identified. The area was cordoned with extreme caution," said the Indian Army. During a search of the area one suspected individual (terrorist) was seen and surrounded from all sides and apprehended. During the search, war-like stores were recovered from him, added the Army. As per sources, the terrorist belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and was planning to carry out attacks on security forces in the coming days. His aim was to cause major disruption during Amarnath Yatra. Pakistan's desperate attempts to cause fear and panic amongst the locals are aimed at disturbing the prevailing peace and normalcy in the valley. All efforts will be made by the security forces to deny terrorists any space to operate freely. By apprehending one hardcore LeT a major incident has been averted, added the Army. Meanwhile, on Tuesday the Border Security Force troops fired at an unidentified flying object in the Kanachak sector at the International Border in Jammu. According to the BSF, the object was flying with a blinking light at 9.31 PM as it tried to cross the International Border (IB). There have been many instances of drones being spotted on the international border with Pakistan. Previously, on the intervening night of July 26 and 27, BSF troops had spotted the movement of a drone along the international border in Rajasthan as it was found to be moving near the Gharsana sector of Sri Ganganagar district. In another incident on July 22, the BSF troops had fired at a drone coming from the Pakistani side near the international border in Jammu. (ANI) South Korea's cement prices rise again ICR Newsroom By 04 August 2022 Cement prices in South Korea will rise for a second time this year, leaving ready-mix concrete producers to find ways to lessen the impact, reports Korea JoongAng Daily. Sampyo Cement will increase the price of cement by 11.7 per cent to KRW105,000/t from September. Buyers of Hanil Cements product will pay out 15 per cent more at KRW106,000/t. Sampyo Cement increased its prices by 19 per cent in February 2022, along with Sungshin Cement, SsangYong Construction and Engineering and Halla Cement, which increased their price between 15-18 per cent. Hanil Cement and Sampyo Cement attributed their need for a second price rise this year to increasing raw material prices. The price of bituminous coal, used to fire South Koreas cement kilns, has soared since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The price of bituminous coal has increased 192.5 per cent YoY to US$251.45/t, according to Korea Mineral Resource Information Service. South Korea imports 71.5 per cent of its bituminous coal from Russia. Published under This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact The Chanute Tribune office at 620-431-4100 if you have any questions Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security invited Tennesseans to get ready for the new school year by downloading the SafeTN app. Every Tennessean has an active role to play in ensuring school safety, and that starts with downloading the Safe TN app, said Governor Lee. As students return to school this month, the SafeTN app is an easy way for parents and guardians to quickly and confidentially report safety concerns. The SafeTN app gives every Tennessean a direct line for confidentially reporting suspicious or concerning activity within schools. Concerns and tips are vetted by law enforcement 24/7 to address circumstances like: Violence or assault Threats of violence or a planned attack Physical injury or harm to self or others In the coming weeks, the Lee administration will share data and next steps for the governors recent executive order to enhance school safety throughout Tennessee. Additional resources will be provided to parents, schools and law enforcement throughout the fall. Learn more about Gov. Lees school safety priorities and download the free SafeTN app here. United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, released the following statement after voting in support of the accession of Finland and Sweden to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): The United States stands strong with those who step up and stand strong with us. Finland already spends two percent of its GDP on national defense, and Sweden is ramping up defense spending to meet this goal in the next few years. In addition to being strategically located in northern Europe, both countries also have modern and capable militaries. "Finland and Swedens addition to NATO will not only be accretive to our alliances overall capabilities but also send a resounding message to Vladimir Putin - and any other authoritarian world leader who would emulate his military aggression - that the free world stands united in defense of liberty and sovereignty. A woman on Carver Lane told police she was on the porch, locked out by a man, and he would not let her back in. The man told police that the woman had left earlier in the day and came home drunk and he wanted her to leave. Both of them are on the lease for the address and no crime was being committed. The woman was upset because there was another woman inside. Police explained to both of them that they needed to separate and leave each other alone until they could resolve their issues. * * * Police entered the Speedway at 1330 E. 3rd St. and observed an active verbal disorder between an employee and a customer. Police separated the two and both reported the other person was rude to them. The customer left in her vehicle without further incident. * * * A disorder was reported at a residence on 14th Avenue. Police spoke with a woman who said she was in a verbal altercation with a man about her leaving to go to Memphis. She told police that as she was approaching the driver's window, the man left the area in a red SUV. * * * Police were called to the Brown's Ferry Marina area, 648 Browns Ferry Road, for a water emergency. Police, CFD, HCEMS and TWRA responded. After a lengthy investigation, no boats were located on the water. Later a call came into dispatch for a person wanting to report damage to his boat. TWRA responded and met with the person. It was found that all people involved are safe. * * * While patrolling the HotSpot at 4400 Dorris St., police observed a white Ford Fusion, blacked out, traveling east on Workman Road. Police initiated a traffic stop and made contact with the driver, who had a Tennessee ID, but no driver's license. The woman agreed to park and lock her vehicle and continue to her destination on foot. * * * A woman on Cogswell Street told police she wanted it documented that she wanted her father to stay away from her house. The father agreed to stay across the street until the morning. * * * A man on E. 44th Street told police that when he came outside to go to work, there was a black male standing across the street holding what he believed to be a gun. He said the man saw him and then walked away. Police searched the area for the man, but were not able to locate him. * * * A man known as a pastor was inside Tupelo Honey at 1110 Market St., where he was ultimately trespassed by the business. Police told him to not return or he would be subject to arrest. He was escorted off the property by security on site. * * * An employee at Lupi's Pizza Pies, 5504 Hixson Pike, told police she arrived for work that morning and noticed the front window had been damaged. There did not appear to be damage to the glass; however, the window had been pushed inwards from the frame. The employee said she had a repair service en route to repair the window; however, at this time her best estimate on the cost to fix the damage was approximately $500. * * * A man told police someone tried to steal his catalytic converter off his F-150. He said as he was pulling into Billingsley's Automotive, 1059 Grays Dr., to pick up his car, he saw a white male with a black beard wearing a gray t-shirt under his car. He said when the man saw him, he jumped into a maroon Kia Sedan with no plates. He said he saw a white female with black hair and a nose ring in the passenger seat. He told police the man had started a cut, but did not succeed in stealing the converter. * * * A man on Shallowford Road told police that someone stole a folding stool from his front porch overnight, and his Ring camera caught the theft. The man showed police the video. The video showed a white male walking next to the man's apartment; he starts to walk past, then swings back to grab the stool and walks off. * * * A man told police that at approximately 12:15 p.m., someone stole his property from the laundromat at 3215 Rossville Blvd. * * * A man told police he lost his wallet and its contents at the Circle K, 1005 Hixson Pike, at approximately 2 p.m. * * * A man told police that around 3 p.m. he was driving his Ford north on Douglas Street, just north of E. Martin Luther King Boulevard, when he drove over a manhole cover that flew up and hit his driver's side door. * * * A man on Sharp Street told police he found his vehicle with a busted rear window. In the vehicle was a large rock, likely used to cause the damage. The man believes his neighbor is responsible for the vandalism, due to ongoing issues. Although he was more of a Southern historian of the area around Knoxville and the Great Smoky Mountains than the contemporary Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Bert Vincent of the Knoxville News-Sentinel was also widely read and respected in a column simply called Strolling. His first book The Best Stories of Bert Vincent, Sage of the Smokies, contained 70 of his articles in the first printing in October 1968 that was edited by Willard Yarbrough, Illustrated by Bill Dyer, and published by Marion R. Mangrum of Bazas Press. After his death in 1969, More of the Best Stories of Bert Vincent, Sage of the Smokies was completed and released in 1970 by the same group of individuals and with the permission and consent of his widow, Ellen Hynes Vincent. Bert and Ellen not only wrote about the historical events and people of the Appalachian Mountains and East Tennessee they also lived them in Dandridge, the second oldest community in the state of Tennessee. Like the columns and writings of Lewis Grizzard what made Berts works eternal was the simple style of his writing for 39 years in the Knoxville paper. Bert was not only a great writer who became a legend in his time but was also a humanitarian who helped many people. If you needed to help an injured or crippled friend get around his Wheel-Chair Club would loan you one. His columns would also help find a home for an unwanted pet. He is credited with helping to start the Cosby Ramp Festival in the Newport-Cocke-Polk County area in 1958 which celebrated its 64th year in April of 2022. On April 24, 1955, former President Harry S. Truman attended the ramp festival in Cosby, Tennessee. (For non-residents of Appalachia a ramp is a wild leek garlic or wild onion that grows in the higher elevations of the Appalachian Mountains. Spring has been celebrated with the arrival of the ramp which it was believed that the odious plant warded off many winter ailments. The Cherokee Indians historically have also eaten the plan as a spring tonic for colds and for croup.) Bert Vincent's humanitarianism brought him awards and his literary talents earned him honorary college degrees. He has been described as being the true Sage of the Smokies in spite of his modesty and a friend of man. An anonymous friend once described his lifetime of giving rather than receiving with the following statement: Bert Vincent has religion and doesnt know it. (If you can find a copy of one or both of the book reprints of the selective columns he wrote during his long tenure with the Knoxville newspaper it will be worth the research!) * * * Jerry Summers (If you have additional information about one of Mr. Summers' articles or have suggestions or ideas about a future Chattanooga area historical piece, please contact Mr. Summers at jsummers@summersfirm.com) The finale of HBO Maxs hit reality TV dating series, FBoy Island, dropped on Aug. 4, 2022, and audiences watched as the three women this season, Mia Emani Jones, Louise Barnard, and Tamaris Sepulveda, made their final choices in men. Did they choose a Nice Guy or a self-proclaimed FBoy? Lets take a look at who Louise chooses in FBoy Island Season 2. [WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the FBoy Island Season 2 finale.] FBoy Island stars Louise Barnard and Mercedes Knox | Photograph by Hassen Salum/HBO Max A quick refresh of Louise Barnards time on FBoy Island Season 2 Model Louise Barnard hails from Onekama, Michigan. According to her Instagram, she considers herself a blonde girl with a lil bit of swag and hella weird but also smart asf. The 25-year-old had over 42,000 followers on Instagram before the HBO show premiered, and Louises YouTube Channel had 93.7K subscribers. Shes an active influencer who helps her followers with everything from hair tutorials to fashion styling. Louise quickly developed a connection with Human Resources employee Mercedes Knox. However, she also cozied up to Benedict Polizzi, a comedian from Indianapolis, Indiana. Despite several of the other men on the show telling Louise that Mercedes wasnt a good guy, she continued to give him multiple chances. In FBoy Island Season 2 Episode 6, the remaining men revealed whether or not they came on the show as an FBoy or a Nice Guy. Benedict announced he was a nice guy, while, to absolutely no ones surprise, Mercedes revealed he was an FBoy. RELATED: FBoy Island Season 2: Why Do Casey Johnson and Peter Park Have Beef? Who does Louise Barnard choose in FBoy Island Season 2? Louise continued to whittle away the remaining men in her group until she was left with only Benedict and Mercedes. During the last ceremony, host Nikki Glaser asked Mercedes why Louise should choose him over Benedict. Louise, my love, I know our journey hasnt been perfect, but weve come out stronger after everything every time. That shows me that a relationship out of this could work, and I want you to be mine because Ive been yours since day one when you put this VIP necklace around my neck. I can confidently say that, Louise, Im falling in love with you. The FBoy continued, I know that Im not the safe choice, but Im the right choice. Glaser also asked Benedict his thoughts, but, unfortunately, his speech wasnt enough to win Louise over. Louise chooses Mercedes in the FBoy Island Season 2 finale. Did Mercedes split the cash prize or take it all for himself? Last years finale shocked audiences everywhere. FBoy Garrett Morosky managed to convince Sarah Emig she had cured him of his FBoy tendencies, and she chose him in the final ceremony. However, Garrett didnt want to continue dating Sarah once the cameras stopped rolling. Instead, he decided to keep the prize money for himself without sharing it. Luckily, Glaser had one more trick up her sleeve when she told Garrett he had to actually donate the entire sum of money to Sarahs choice of charity. Thankfully, Mercedes didnt decide to keep the prize money for himself. He chose to pursue a relationship with Louise outside of the show. This means that they split the $100,000 prize and plan to continue dating. RELATED: FBoy Island Season 2: Who Is Benedict Polizzi? Instagram, Real Job, Age, and More In the 1860s, the chemists, Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev, independently presented the first periodic system. Since then, the well-known tabular arrangement of the elements has been the guiding principle of chemistry. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Leipzig provides computational approaches based on extensive data sets from the Reaxys chemistry database that explain the development of the first periodic systems. Their results are relevant for both the history of science and the future expansion of chemical knowledge. In a recently published article in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS), the scientists look back to the beginnings of the periodic system, whose structure is characterized by similarity and order relationships among the elements. Periodic tables arose from the knowledge of the existing or potentially possible chemical elements and compounds known at that time. The total combination of these two components forms the so-called chemical space. Order relationships were initially set up based on atomic weights and similarities in terms of commonality in chemical composition. As knowledge of chemical substances grew throughout the history of science, so did potentially possible periodic systems, influenced by the state of the chemical space of the time. "We were attracted by the question of how the expansion of chemical space contributed to the formation of the first periodic systems. Little was known about that. So, we investigated in particular the chemical space between 1800 and 1869 to discover how well the periodic table corresponds to the chemical data at the time of its formulation", Guillermo Restrepo, Project leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences describes the research teams objective. Expansion of the chemical space between 1800 and 1869 Their analysis of the knowledge of chemical space revealed, that the periodic table of chemical elements converged to a clearly visible basic structure as early as the 1840s, and was thus already encoded in space about two and a half decades before its formulation. The first quarter of the 19th century was characterized by a rapid discovery of chemical elements and their compounds, leading to an unstable period with a wide variety of periodic tables, only few of which stood the test of time. In 1826, the discovery of elements slowed down, allowing chemists to further explore the properties of known substances and discover compounds that had new valences and thus new similarities among known chemical elements. These discoveries persisted for years and provided consolidation of the chemical space and thus fairly stable periodic systems. Between 1835 and 1845, the system continued to approach its basic structure, which was finally revealed in the 1860s. Impact of organic chemistry Wilmer Leal, doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Leipzig, describes the essential role of organic chemistry in the formulation of the periodic system: "The rise of organic chemistry in the 1830s played a key role in facilitating the recognition of similarities between elements that are massively represented in chemical space, such as oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, and between metals often associated to organic compounds, such as sodium, potassium, palladium, platinum, barium, and calcium. At the same time, the plethora of organic compounds obscured the identification of similarities between metals which are poorly represented in organic space. Regarding the periodic systems of Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev, both chemists could already rely on a mature chemical space and a quite stable set of atomic weights at that time. The systems they formulated were thus largely consistent with other periodic systems that would have been possible at the time, according to the computational analysis. Computational reconstruction of chemical space from atomic weights To replicate the chemical space before 1869 and account for the role of atomic weights known in the 19th century, the researchers used the Reaxys chemistry database and, based on its extensive information, introduced an algorithm to adjust the chemical space to different sets of weights. This enables current chemical formulas to be converted to fit any system of atomic weights. It allows approximations to the chemical space known to chemists of the past and estimates the resulting periodic systems of the time. Analyzing the various periodic systems formulated over time, the scientists revealed that their structure was determined mainly by the similarities between the chemical elements and less by their order based on atomic weights. "Gauging these similarities was the hardest part for us, and the results were quite surprising. It was previously assumed that periodic systems could only be formulated if a stable system of atomic weights was given. However, we were able to demonstrate that even the unstable weights reported before 1860 produced quite stable periodic systems" says Peter Stadler, Professor at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Leipzig. Review with vision The method presented in the paper to formulate a periodic system for a given chemical space is not limited to the past but can also be applied to all possible environments, such as the study of chemical spaces generated under extreme pressure and temperature conditions. The implementation of this method could provide a comprehensive picture of chemistry in real-time, which would also have implications for teaching and the future of the field. Although their approach is more computational than historical, the scientists hope it can complement other tools in the history of chemistry and contribute to the advancement of chemical knowledge. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Over the past several years, The Herald has, on numerous occasions, has offered its support for Ball & Socket Arts. The project, more than a decade in the making, has a chance to add a much-needed arts and retail hub to the West Main Street area, and the fact that the facility sits directly next to the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail ensures that it will appeal to those out for a stroll as much as it will those out for a drive. While smaller in scale, BSA can duplicate the type of success seen in Massachusetts with MASS MoCA, which took a series of 19th century mill buildings and turned them into a destination spot for art lovers. When completed, the founders of BSA hope that it can do for Cheshire what MASS MoCA did for the small town of North Adams. This week, we look at one of the underappreciated aspects of the BSA project the fact that all of this is being done on a historically significant site in a way that preserves the old bones of a wonderfully-built factory. As co-founder of BSA Ilona Somogyi explained to The Herald last month, there are people who still remember working at the Ball & Socket factory, or recall their mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers heading there for work. Though abandoned for nearly two decades, the facility holds real historical significance and it would have been a shame to see it torn down in the name of some new development. We agree with Somogyi and others when they suggest that there appears to be newfound interest in reusing everything from old household items to historic community buildings. Its a trend that seemed to be gaining steam before the events of the last three years, but with the pandemic forcing everyone to look closer to home for all their essentials, that trend appears to have accelerated. Hopefully, it continues to do so. Of course, sometimes new is better than old. There are only so many miles you can push your vehicle, only so many years you can squeeze out of a lawn mower or snow blower. And sometimes, no matter the historic nature of the facility or nostalgic qualities it may hold, age and Mother Nature take such a toll that, even if one wanted to restore rather than tear down, it just wouldnt be feasible. But in many cases, the old can be made new again with a little attention to detail, a little investment in repairs, and a little time dedicated. The assumption may be that refurbishing an old facility like the Ball & Socket factory comes at a higher cost than tearing everything down and starting fresh, but according to Somogyi and others, thats usually false. While it may take a little more time to find the right materials or the individuals skilled in bringing aged items back to life, it can be done and often for the same, if not a lower, price than if the items were replaced. There is no doubt that things were built to last in the old days. That doesnt mean quality is always lesser today than it was yesterday, or that consumers cant find top-shelf items in 2022. But it is clear that most things purchased today, whether its a stove for the kitchen or a home for living, come with a little shorter shelf life. The old bones of a facility like Ball & Socket were constructed to withstand years of New England weather, and after all that time and despite not being used for years, the bones are still strong. BSA founders saw that when first touring the facility. Somogyi described it a little like Alice looking through the looking glass for the first time. There may have been some ugly spots here and there, but Ball & Socket just needed a little love and care to come back to life. We hope Cheshire and communities like it commit to reuse in the future, and dont just assume that new is better. 3 reasons why conservative Kansas voted to uphold abortion rights High turnout among pro-choice voters and comparatively lower turnout among pro-lifer voters appear to have doomed a pro-life ballot measure in Kansas, leading to a result that pro-life activists characterize as a "huge disappointment." Unofficial returns from the Kansas Secretary of State's office show that 59% of voters in Tuesday's primary election voted to reject the Value Them Both Amendment, while 41% voted in favor. If approved, the amendment would have amended the state's constitution so that it "does not require government funding of abortion and does not create a right to abortion." Tuesday's referendum was the first opportunity voters in any state have had to weigh in on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court's June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The Dobbs decision gives states the ability to regulate abortion. Under existing Kansas law, abortions can only take place after 22 weeks of gestation to save the life of the mother or in cases of "severely compromised physical health." Additionally, the state prohibits abortion based on the sex of the unborn baby, requires a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions, mandates that women wishing to obtain an abortion view an ultrasound and prohibits telemedicine administration of abortion pills. The amendment would have enabled the state legislature to pass further restrictions on abortion. Existing Kansas abortion law will remain in place for the foreseeable future. The following pages highlight three factors that impacted Kansas' election Tuesday. 1 2 3 4 Next Christian flag raised at Boston City Hall months after Supreme Court ruling A Christian flag was raised Tuesday at Boston City Hall following a lengthy battle that resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year. The vibrant blue, red and white fabric was lifted high around 11 a.m. on Wednesday. Conservative activist Harold Shurtleff of the organization Camp Constitution first requested to fly the white and blue flag with a red cross symbol outside City Hall in 2017. Five years later, his request was granted. "I do want to give the glory to God because God's hand was in this from the very beginning," Shurtleff said at the flag-raising ceremony. "We have a great Constitution and a wonderful First Amendment, but just like when it comes to muscle, if you don't use it, then you get weak. When I got the rejection email from the city and it said 'separation of church and state,' I knew we had a case." Typically, City Hall has the Massachusetts and Boston flags flying outside and the city and occasionally removes one of its own flags to raise another flag for a temporary period. From 2005 to 2017, Boston approved 284 flag raisings by private organizations with no denials on the flagpoles that it designated a "public forum," according to the Christian conservative legal group Liberty Counsel. However, the city rejected Shurtleff's request to fly the "Christian flag" outside City Hall because doing so would be a government endorsement of religion. According to Liberty Counsel, which represented Shurtleff in the legal battle, the denial was because the application referred to the flag as a "Christian" flag. The legal group contends that if any other word were used to describe the flag, the city would have approved the application. On May 2, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of Shurtleff, with outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer writing the majority opinion. "We conclude that, on balance, Boston did not make the raising and flying of private groups' flags a form of government speech," wrote Breyer. "That means, in turn, that Boston's refusal to let Shurtleff and Camp Constitution raise their flag based on its religious viewpoint' abridg[ed]' their 'freedom of speech.'" The Boston Herald reported Tuesday the city plans to propose a change to its flag-raising policies to garner more jurisdiction over the matter. An ordinance filed to change the rule states that any person who wants to fly a flag on City Hall Plaza will need either a proclamation from the mayor or a resolution from the council, according to CBS News Boston. Embattled megachurch Pastor Tavner Smith denies reports of church foreclosure Tennessee megachurch Pastor Tavner Smith of Venue Church in Chattanooga has denied reports that his church is facing foreclosure less than a year after staffers quit over a rumored affair he had with a former church employee. Smith assured followers on Instagram that reports of the church shutting down are "absolutely not true." The post was an apparent response to a July 31 report in The Chattanooga Times Free Press stating Venue Church defaulted on its loan for the property at 6401 Lee Highway. A notice of foreclosure and sale indicated an upcoming auction on Aug. 24. According to the notice, Venue secured the original loan for $2.8 million for the property in 2019. Hamilton County records indicate the property is valued at $4.86 million. "First of all, it's absolutely not true. Venue Church is not shutting down," Smith said. "Our legal team, who is amazing, has assured me that I can tell you with confidence that our Chattanooga location is going nowhere." "The best is yet to come for Venue Church. It ain't over. We're just getting started," Smith added. He invited his followers to come to Sunday's service, where he said he would "set the record straight." Attempts by The Christian Post to reach Smith and Venue Church were unsuccessful. Venue Church, a nondenominational church of about 2,000 members, was rocked by scandal in December after Smith was accused of engaging in an extramarital affair. Before the recent turmoil, Venue Church had become one of the fastest-growing congregations in America. The Chattanooga Times Free Press obtained audio from a widely-reported Dec. 17 meeting between Smith and over 100 church volunteers at the fast-growing Venue Church after several employees resigned from the church over the alleged affair. In January, a Facebook page critical of the church called "The Venue is NO Church" published images showing that Venue Church is now only operating from the Chattanooga campus on Lee Highway. While Venue Church previously listed a campus in North Georgia, that location is no longer listed on the church's website. Around that time, Smith began a sabbatical after a video circulated online showing him kissing a church staffer who was not his wife, which drew national media attention. Upon returning from that sabbatical, Smith confessed to his congregation that he was involved in an "inappropriate relationship" and asked for forgiveness. "Before I preach a word today, I've just come to say I'm sorry. So many things I've said, that I've done, that I've not said, that I've run from were wrong," Smith said, according to a recording of the apology posted on YouTube by journalist Julie Roys. "I was involved in an inappropriate relationship. And I want to say that I'm sorry that I put you through any embarrassment, heartache or confusion. I've wounded people, and I've caused devastation that I know I can never take back," he added. "As your leader and pastor, I come to you to publicly acknowledge my mistakes and truly ask for forgiveness. It grieves me to think that my pride and my selfishness could've caused anyone hurt." Smith and his wife, Danielle, who have three kids, began divorce proceedings in May 2021. In 2008, Smith was hired as executive student pastor at Redemption World Outreach in Greenville, South Carolina, a church led by Ron and Hope Carpenter. Smith's website lists Carpenter as his mentor. In 2012, the Smiths moved to Chattanooga, where they launched Venue Church. European Court of Human Rights rejects appeal from Archie Battersbee's parents UPDATE: 8:30 a.m. ET Aug. 4: Archie Battersbee's parents submitted an application to a United Kingdom high court seeking to move their 12-year-old son to a hospice so he can receive palliative oxygen. The application was sent before the 9 a.m. Thursday deadline set by the lawyers for Barts Health NHS Trust. A hearing could come as early as Thursday afternoon. Original: The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected an urgent legal application from the parents of 12-year-old Archie Battersbee Wednesday to delay the removal of their son's life support. The parents' application was filed just before the 9 a.m. Wednesday deadline from the lawyers for Barts Health NHS Trust Tuesday. The trust, which oversees Royal London Hospital, set a deadline of 9 a.m. Thursday for the parents to file a legal bid to have their son moved to hospice. Parents Hollie Dance and Paul Battersbee are considering their options after receiving offers from doctors in Japan and Italy to treat their son, according to a Wednesday statement from The Christian Legal Centre. Battersbee was found unconscious in April with a ligature around his neck, suffering a "catastrophic hypoxic-ischaemic brain injury." He has not regained consciousness. CLC has represented the family in their efforts to prevent the Royal London Hospital from discontinuing the boy's treatment. In a letter to the family and their legal team, ECHR stated that it would not interfere with the decision of previous judges who agreed with the hospital's assessment that removal of care was in Archie's "best interests." "We regret to inform you that on 3 August 2022 the President of the Court decided not to indicate to the Government of the United Kingdom, under Rule 39 of the Rules of Court, the interim measure you are seeking," ECHR wrote. "Therefore the Court will not interfere with the decisions of the national courts to allow the withdrawal of life sustaining treatment from Archie Battersbee to proceed." Dance said that the news is another "heart-breaking development" in her son's case. The mother questioned why he couldn't be given a chance if doctors in other countries are willing to treat him. "In a worst-case scenario, we want to take Archie to a hospice, but the hospital have said that we cannot do that despite previous promises," she said. "We have been told all along that this is all about Archie dying with 'dignity,' and yet we are told we cannot take him to a hospice where it is quiet and we can spend time with him as a family without the chaos at the hospital." "We will fight to end for Archie's right to live," she added. Lawyers for Barts Health NHS Trust informed his parents Tuesday that the boy's life support could be withdrawn Wednesday. On Tuesday, the U.K. Supreme Court refused the parents' permission to appeal the removal of the child's life support. Dance and Battersbee filed a last-minute application to the court after a Monday Court of Appeal hearing. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay called for the U.K. Supreme Court to refuse the parents' urgent appeal. Government lawyers submitted to the U.K. Supreme Court on his behalf that the interim measures injunction by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) is "not binding" under international law. The UNCRPD had asked the United Kingdom last week to keep the boy on life support while it considered the case. Government lawyers wrote that "the notion that interim measures are binding has not been accepted as a facet of customary international law. There is no such consensus. On the contrary, the status of the committees' decisions is a subject of some controversy." Battersbee's parents argue that such an action breaches the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Children. Last Friday, the UNCRPD said that its special rapporteur on communications "requested the State party to refrain from withdrawing life-preserving medical treatment, including mechanical ventilation and artificial nutrition and hydration, from the alleged victim while the case is under consideration by the Committee." "[T]his request does not imply that any decision has been reached on the substance of the matter under consideration," the response states. "The Committee may review the necessity of maintaining the request for interim measures once the State party's observations have been received.'" In June, Justice Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the Royal London Hospital could discontinue Battersbee's life support, writing that the boy is likely dead "on the balance of probabilities." Arbuthnot granted the parents permission to appeal, and in a July 15 judgment, Justice Anthony Hayden ruled that it is in the child's "best interests" for his life support to be removed. Celebrity Kat Von D tosses witchcraft books, wants to surround family with 'love and light' Celebrity tattoo artist Katherine von Drachenberg, widely known in Hollywood as Kat Von D from the TLC reality show "LA Ink," said she has thrown away her extensive catalog of witchcraft literature because she realizes there is a spiritual battle underway. The 40-year-old artist is known for her dark designs and style. She once offered a tarot-themed collection and named a shade of black lipstick "Witches." But in a recent Instagram post, she disclosed that she might be turning away from the darkness to embrace the light. "In the last few years, I've come to some pretty meaningful realizations many of them revolving around the fact that I got a lot of things wrong in my past." she wrote in the post that included a slideshow of photos. "Today, I went through my entire library, and threw out books that just don't align with who I am and who I want to be," she noted. Drachenberg emphasized that she no longer wanted to have content in her home that was grim or ghastly. "I've always found beauty in the macabre, but at this point, I just had to ask myself what is my relationship with this content?" she questioned. "And the truth is, I just don't want to invite any of these things into our family's lives, even if it comes disguised in beautiful covers, collecting dust on my shelves." The Mexican native's parents were Seventh-day Adventist missionaries. Drachenberg has described her family's religion as: "Christianity, with a few Jewish traits. We kept the Sabbath, went to church on Saturdays, followed the ten commandments, and didn't eat any pork or fish without scales." Her father was a missionary doctor in Montemorelos, Mexico, and they lived a very humble life as he made it his mission to build a hospital there. Drachenberg told her 8.4 million followers she wanted only "love and light" around her family now. She also assured her followers that a "spiritual battle is taking place." "In no way is this post designed to put anyone down if you're into this stuff, because I think we are all on our own journey, and I love everyone regardless of where they might be at. But right now, it's never been more clear to me that there is a spiritual battle taking place, and I want to surround myself and my family with love and light," she wrote. Drachenberg said she hopes others make "meaningful changes" in their lives also. One of the photos captioned by Drachenberg on Instagram was of her home library. Another photo shows some of the books she removed, which included The Witches Way, A Treasure of Witchcraft, boxes of tarot cards and several other readings on Mystcisim, serpents and magic. Insider reported that Drachenberg, who had a Hell and sacrilegious Heaven-themed wedding in 2018, sold her shares in her makeup company in January 2020. She began covering up some of her tattoos with dark ink in 2020. In a social media post, she described her tattoos as "landmarks in dark times." Ohio pastor known as generous evangelist killed crossing highway: He loved everybody A pastor of a Dayton, Ohio, church known for his faithful evangelism and generous giving to his community died after being run over by a vehicle while crossing a Florida highway. Joel Burton, 42, a pastor of a Harrison Township church, Simple Street, died Sunday morning on U.S. 98 near a Holiday Inn Express. The vehicle in question also hit another Dayton-area resident, Zebulon Dill, 32, who was with him, according to the Fort Walton Beach Police Department. Dill suffered significant leg injuries and received medical treatment at Fort Walton Destin Hospital. Many who knew Burton have shared their memories of the late pastor. "We are to not question God why but this is really shook me," Butron's friend Kevin Howard wrote in a Facebook post. "This man eat, slept and breathed ministry. He and his ministry helped so many people, families, he even donated to my mission trips. When we talk 1 body that what Joel was. He worked wherever, whenever. Such a loss for our community." Ian Chadrick, Burton's friend and co-worker, told Dayton Daily News that Burton "tried to bridge that gap and get everybody connected in the city, and he loved everybody." "Anyone he met, he tried to tap them into anything they needed, any resources that they needed, any connection that they would need," Chadrick said. Chadrick said Burton wanted to help as many people as he could. "This guy would do everything for everybody if he could," Chadrick recalled. "He was one man, but the awesome part of his legacy is that he is not just one man he has rubbed off on every single person he ever met, so now we all have the ability to be someone like Joel Burton and that's what people should remember." Burton's church made headlines in July after vandals broke into the building and vandalized the property. The church also received media attention following the racial justice protests in June 2020, when it held a foot-washing ceremonial event. Burton told the news outlet that the ceremony served as a way for those who were "carrying burdens" to receive comfort and "for them to feel cleansed." "We are coming together to love on our city, love on each other and to be a point of reconciliation," Burton said at the time. The nonprofit Shoes 4 the Shoeless called Burton one of "the finest men we will ever know." "Joel was a friend to all, the best father, husband, and family member you could ask for," the nonprofit wrote on its Facebook page. "He was a brother and a shepherd to the poor, the lost, the lonely, and those rejected and hated by society. This is a valley of disbelief and great suffering." Howard told Dayton News that the pastor was passionate about serving in his ministerial role. "He had a heart of gold and a heart for the people, but most importantly, he wanted people to know Jesus. When he found what the Lord had done for him, I think he just looked around the city and saw so much brokenness and he just tried to fix it," Howard said. "And what Joel did, he really did in a way fix it because he brought so many diversities of churches and people together. He brought them together from all over Dayton, Ohio, even places across the United States as well." David Renfro, the senior pastor at Evangel Church of God, told the outlet that he was close to Burton for eight years. The pastors worked on collaborations and discussed the best ways to practice servanthood to others and Jesus. "Burton loved serving God by serving people," Renfro said. "I think that had a lot to do with his passion toward benevolence, and a lot of the things he did community-wise was about helping others." An opportunity for Christians to make history in Iran On the heels of U.S. President Joe Biden making visits to Israel and Saudi Arabia, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended meetings in Iran, prompting many Christians to revisit the End Time prophecies found in the Bible. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. When I saw the astounding photo of President Putin standing hand-in-hand with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan following a meeting in Tehran, my heart was stirred. That image is further evidence of Gods faithfulness biblical prophecies about events in the Middle East are beginning to unfold. On the one hand, its exciting to watch these developments come to pass before our eyes. On the contrary, it also means that hard days are ahead of us. Right now, theres an unprecedented opportunity to make history in Iran. I hope that we Christians are awake and ready to take advantage of the open Heaven that has presented itself. The significance of the prophecy outlined in Ezekiel 38 In Ezekiel 38, the Lord revealed a six-nation coalition that will unite to attack Israel in the Last Days. Some of the names and places the Prophet Ezekiel describes are not familiar to us today by name, but a closer look at Scripture and geography help us translate these references into modern terms. Ever so subtly, these nations are aligning together one by one, and those who are not on that list are being removed from the equation. For example, Ezekiel 38 references Russia, Iran and Turkey, along with several North African countries, as major players that will join forces to attack Israel. For years when people studied this prophecy, they questioned the absence of Arab countries among the geographical areas mentioned. Arent Arab countries the No. 1 enemy of Israel? Arent they the ones who attacked Israel in 1967 and several other times over the years? The reality is, over the last few years, Israel has made peace with these Arab countries, and they're now considered to be friends of Israel. Two Islamic nations, Iran and Turkey, want to be the leaders of the Islamic world, and now theyre uniting with Russia. That's a terrifying and evil alignment, but it's biblical, so Christians have good reason to be stirred up a bit. When we consider this and other current events around the globe, we see that the world is at a disconcerting crossroads, further indicating that biblical prophecies about the End Times are beginning to unfold. What does this mean for Iran? Putins visit to Iran follows Bidens visit to Israel, a nation Iran has repeatedly threatened to attack. An attack could be imminent, given that Iran may be dangerously close to obtaining nuclear weapons. Arab countries and Israel are certainly worried about Irans probable access to a nuclear missile. Ironically, Arab and Islamic nations trust the United States and Israel more than they trust Iran. The reality is that the Iranian government is unpredictable and untrustworthy. Its believed that once they have the weapon, theyll bully their way into the entire Middle East. Putin and Bidens recent visits to the area solidify the relationship of Arab nations with Israel and America. Israel firmly said that attacking Iran is on the table and they will not allow Iran to have nuclear bombs. That means if they must, theyll attack Iran first, with or without the involvement of the United States. Jeremiah 49 describes the destruction of Iran and promises Gods judgment, as well as his eventual blessing, specifically to Iran. I firmly believe that Iran will be the first Islamic nation that turns to Christ. Its ready for a major transformation spiritually, socially, financially and politically, and it will be a Christian nation soon, as prophesied in Jeremiah 49:38. How should Christians respond? In my work with Iran Alive Ministries, were seeing millions of Iranians become open to the Gospel for the first time. Weve never seen this level of openness before. I've seen thousands of people who were anti-Christian, pro-Islam, and pro-government choosing to reject Islam and come to Christ. Theres a historical opportunity right now to make history in Iran. Open heavens and open nations dont last forever. Theres an amazing Kingdom-building opportunity there right now, and if we miss it, we'll regret it. How do you reach a seemingly unreachable people group? The answer is prayer. Im not talking about a Bless the missionaries, Amen, type of prayer. We must truly connect with the Lord and recognize that were facing the dark spirit of Islam and confronting the Prince of Persia that was referenced in chapter Daniel 10. Lets unite as prayer warriors who know how to engage in spiritual warfare. Its this kind of prayer that pulls down strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:3-4) and binds the strong man (Mark 3:27). Its this type of prayer that crosses impenetrable borders and infiltrates the gates of the enemy. You may never enter the physical borders of Iran, but you can pray your way around the entire country and region. As we observe current events around the globe and compare them to the Scriptures, its evident that these calamities and wars were foretold to us. God prepared us so that when it happens, we wouldnt panic but would be ready to take advantage of these times and establish His Kingdom. SBC theologians clarify the meaning of pastor amid dispute over female ordination Prominent Southern Baptist theologians have published a statement clarifying the meaning of the word "pastor" amid controversy within the United States' largest Protestant denomination stemming from Rick Warren's Saddleback Church ordaining female pastors last year. The document "A Statement Concerning the Baptist Faith & Message and the Word' Pastor'" was released last week by two Southern Baptist seminary presidents and the former head of the denomination's public policy arm. The signatories are Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Chuck Kelley, president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary; and Richard Land, who served as the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission from 1988-2013 and is the president emeritus of Southern Evangelical Seminary in North Carolina. The Confession Revision Committee assigned the three men to write a study guide for the new 2000 Baptist Faith & Message Confession. Aiming to bring clarity to a fractious debate within SBC life, the theologians said that when it comes to the word "pastor," Southern Baptists have always understood the term. In keeping with the spirit of Baptist Faith and Message 2000, "pastor" means "one who fulfills the pastoral office and carries out the pastor's functions." Article VI of The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states that the scriptural offices are pastors and deacons and that "[w]hile both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." The function of the office and the office itself are inseparable, the three Baptist leaders maintained. They highlighted that the commentary they wrote on the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message notes that central to that pastoral role is "the responsibility to preach and teach." "[I]t is important to understand that the word pastor was chosen precisely because of its clarity among Southern Baptists. The statement carefully affirms that both men and women are gifted for service in the church, but the role of pastor is biblically defined and is to be held only by men as qualified by Scripture," they reiterated in the new statement. When the Baptist Faith & Message was adopted and revised in 2000, the committee established that "pastor" was not to be used to describe every ministerial position within a church, they added. Unlike other denominations with a hierarchical ecclesiastical structure, in Baptist ecclesiology, the local church calls and ordains its pastors, not the denomination as a whole or its affiliated entities. While the debate over what the Bible says about who is qualified to serve in a pastoral role is not new, the issue resurfaced at this year's annual SBC meeting in Anaheim, California. Many considered Saddleback's recent ordinations of female "pastors" contravening the Baptist Faith & Message 2000. In remarks from the floor of the annual meeting in June, Warren, the outgoing pastor of the Southern California megachurch, appealed to the denomination to stop fighting over the issue and that the subject is not a first-order doctrine. "As Western culture grows more dark, more evil, and more secular, we have to decide: Are we going to treat each other as allies or adversaries?" Warren asked. "Are we going to keep bickering over secondary issues, or are we going to keep the main thing the main thing?" Discussion of the issue, the theology surrounding it and whether to disaffiliate Saddleback Church from the SBC was ultimately tabled to a later date. It was sent to the convention's credentials committee for further study. Broadly speaking, those who oppose women being ordained as lead pastors are known as "complementarians" and believe that certain offices within the church are restricted to men. While espousing complementarian theology, there are others who believe that only the office of "senior pastor" is limited to men. By contrast, "egalitarians" believe that the specific scriptures that appear to restrict the pastoral office to men are not universal blanket restrictions. Land, one of the men involved in issuing the statement, is the executive editor of The Christian Post. He said in an interview Monday that "it should be remembered that this is a debate about ecclesiology, not soteriology, and should be treated as such in discussion among brothers and sisters in Christ." 12 years after Haitis earthquake: Remembering Haitian lives have value I dont think its any coincidence that we honor Sanctity of Life month in January the same month we mark the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that claimed more than 250,000 lives and injured an additional 300,000 victims. The ongoing impact has continued to disrupt many lives, with people dying of starvation every day in this island nation only a few hundred miles from Floridas southern tip. However, unless Haiti makes the news for something such as an earthquake, a missionary kidnapping or the assassination of its president, the ongoing loss of life doesnt seem to garner the global community's attention in the same way that other value-of-life issues do. For those concerned about babies in the womb, individuals who are being trafficked or the elderly who live in fear of being euthanized, we tend to see much higher death rates in nearly all of the above categories in Haiti right now than we ever would in the United States. My family has been serving in Haiti for more than a decade now to combat these issues on behalf of suffering Haitians. Other missions groups have been working in similar capacities all of us desperately trying to rescue orphans, feed starving children and prevent mothers and babies from dying in childbirth. We are seeing some success, but there is still much work to do. The earthquake shattered an already-shaky infrastructure. The political instability that has remained ever since signifies that few repairs have been made. Roads still contain craters, buildings continue to lay in ruins, there is little-to-no access to electricity or clean water and what little food is available is unaffordable to the average Haitian. Gangs control the streets to the extent that people would rather starve and die at home than risk kidnapping and torture to try and find work or food. Without international intervention, we will lose more and more of these precious lives every day. We have shown that a small investment of time and resources can make a world of difference. We established our LiveBeyond compound in a more rural area of Haiti, a couple of hours outside of Port-au-Prince, and by training and equipping locals giving a hand up more than a handout we have seen Haiti become more self-sustaining and mortality rates in this area have plummeted. Since coming to Haiti 11 years ago, weve been progressing with our goal to provide healthcare, clean water and nutritional support to all people of need in our area. More importantly, weve established hope that these resources could be accessed in a sustainable, Haitian-led manner into the future. In addition, we are providing American-quality education and jobs to the people who need it most. It has been incredible to witness the growth and blessings that have happened in just one part of Haiti, and we believe this could be replicated all over the country. As we recognize the Sanctity of Life this month, will you join me in also praying for and advocating for international intervention in Haiti so that hundreds of thousands of lives there might be spared? Reach out to your elected representatives and to the United Nations and indicate your support for sending peacekeeping forces back to Haiti. And if you are in a position to give, research missions groups such as ours that are working in Haiti to continually provide sustainable solutions not just a handout that is often stolen right out of the mouths it was intended to feed. In addition to LiveBeyond, I can recommend organizations we work with such as Food for the Poor and Convoy of Hope. Together, we are helping ordinary Haitians learn agricultural skills so that they can feed their communities and employ their neighbors. We are educating and equipping small business owners so that they can contribute to the economy. We are keeping workers healthy so they can continue to bring food home to their families. And most importantly, we are sharing the love of Jesus Christ so that these precious, vulnerable children of God can look forward to spending an eternity in Heaven, which is much closer for them than it is for most of us. Kids executed, raped as Haitian gang wars intensify, United Nations warns Church set on fire as gang tried to kill opponents The United Nations has warned that innocent women and children have been executed and raped as gang wars have intensified in and around the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, stating that children as young as 1 year old have had their bodies burned. The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti said in a report this week a fight between two gang coalitions killed at least 94 residents, wounded over 120 and led to the disappearance of of 12 others between April 24 and May 16. Nearly 16,000 people fled their homes to take refuge in make-shift sites or in relatives' homes. "Armed with assault rifles, but also with machetes and gas cans, gangs spared no one," the report states. "Women and children as young as one year old, were executed and their bodies burned. Young teenagers, accused of spying for the opposite side, were shot in public spaces. Rape against women and girls, some of whom were less than 10 years old, was used as a weapon to terrorize and take revenge on the local populations living in neighborhoods controlled by rival gangs." The criminal groups said to be responsible for the acts are known as "Chen Mechan" and "400 Mawozo," with the support of their respective allies the "G9 in Family and Allies." According to the U.N. Integrated Office for Haiti, coalitions between gangs are not new in Port-au-Prince and became a prominent issue during President Jovenel Moise's administration. The increased gang fighting has made it dangerous for vulnerable local communities to live in the unstable Caribbean country. "This recent outbreak of armed violence in Cite Soleil, Croix- des-Bouquets and Tabarre shows that they persist and have even intensified with the probable implication of political and economic actors already involved back then," the report reads. Last Wednesday, communities in downtown Port-au-Prince witnessed heavy gunfire as suspected members of the G9 gang coalition set a transitional church on fire and tried to kill their opponents in an attempt to gain control over more territory from rival gangs, The Associated Press reports. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated in an alert last month that 934 were killed, 684 injured and 680 kidnapped across the capital from January to the end of June. Over the five days from July 8 to July 12, at least 234 people were killed or injured in gang-related violence in the Cite Soleil area, according to OHCHR spokesperson Jeremy Laurence. Laurence urged the authorities in Haiti to ensure fundamental rights are protected and "placed at the front and center of their responses to the crisis." "The fight against impunity and sexual violence, along with the strengthening of human rights monitoring and reporting, must remain a priority," Laurence said. "Most of the victims were not directly involved in gangs and were directly targeted by gang elements. We have also received new reports of sexual violence." Gangs have grown more powerful since the July 7, 2021, assassination of President Moise, as Haiti is struggling in its social and political aftermath. The country is yet to recover from a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 2,200 people last August. Last year, the U.S. State Department urged Americans to "depart Haiti now." "The Department of State urges U.S. citizens to make plans to depart Haiti now via commercial means. U.S. citizens should carefully consider the risks of traveling to or remaining in Haiti in light of the current security situation and infrastructure challenges," a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti said at the time. Last December, the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries announced that all the 17 missionaries who were kidnapped by the notorious 400 Mawozo gang in Haiti had been released. Native American tribe rescinds ban on missionary work day after passing it A Native American tribe based in South Dakota briefly suspended Christian missionary activity on the reservation, only to rescind the policy shortly afterward over constitutional concerns. Last week, the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council voted to pass an ordinance that would have barred all activity of Christian missions on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Additionally, as reported by Native News Online, the ordinance required all religious organizations to complete an application to be allowed to engage in mission work. The next day, the tribal council voted 10-7 to rescind the ordinance, allowing missionaries and churches to continue their operations. Pastor Lori McAfee is president and founder of Wings as Eagles Ministries, which oversees The Dream Center, a non-denominational ministry that works on the reservation. In an interview with The Christian Post on Tuesday, McAfee said the current rules are for faith groups operating at the reservation to register with the tribal leadership. It was unconstitutional, so they rescinded it, McAfee noted, adding that they were now having churches and ministries register within 90 days of the ordinance being voted on. According to McAfee, the whole issue stemmed from a recent incident of another ministry coming in with a really, really bad brochure which was going around the reservation. I guess somehow we got blamed for it, she said, describing the situation as a real mess and emphasizing that the brochure came from a ministry that was from outside the reservation. McAfee, whose ministry has been working on the reservation for several years, told CP that the registration requirement was not a novel condition. Weve already done that over and over in the past, said McAfee, adding that every time there is a new tribal council, they implement rules on a host of issues. This tribal council wont be there unless they get voted back in, because they have voting in November. So, its only two years, so every two years theres a new council and they do new rules. So, it just continues. So, weve done it in the past. Kansas Voters Uphold Abortion Right, SPLC Pushes Sex Ed For Elementary Kids, Health System To Pay $10.3 Million Over COVID Vaccine link to download the audio instead. link to download the audio instead. 07:35 07:35 Kansas voters have rejected a pro-life amendment to the state constitution, a blow to the anti- abortion cause following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in June. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker has signed into law a measure establishing abortion and gender-affirming care as constitutional rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center is facing allegations that the group is promoting a book for elementary school students that normalizes sexual behavior among children. A healthcare system has agreed to pay over $10.3 million to settle a lawsuit filed by employees who were denied a religious exemption to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Massachusetts establishes constitutional rights to abortion, 'gender-affirming' care Critics say law turns the state into an 'abortion sanctuary' Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has signed into law a measure establishing abortion and "gender-affirming care" as constitutional rights, a move pro-life activists contend will turn the state into an "abortion sanctuary." Baker approved Bill H.4930, "an Act expanding protections for reproductive rights," Friday. The bill's approval follows the U.S. Supreme Court's June 24 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, which reversed the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The bill passed in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives on June 29. The House voted 136-17 to advance the legislation, with 119 Democrats, 16 Republicans and an independent supporting it, while six Democrats and 11 Republicans voted in opposition to the bill. The Senate approved H.4930 in a unanimous vote of 40-0 on July 25. "Access to reproductive health care services and gender-affirming health care services is recognized and declared to be a right secured by the constitution or laws of the commonwealth," the bill declares. "Interference with this right, whether or not under the color of law, is against the public policy of the commonwealth." The social conservative advocacy group Massachusetts Family Institute claims the legislation ensures the state will protect "abortionists who perform abortions out-of-state, even if they violate other states' laws." The group contends the bill will lower or eliminate "safety requirements for pharmacies to dispense abortion pills" and "force[s] state universities to provide the abortion pill to students." The group stresses that the bill will also force insurance companies to cover abortion "even if they have religious objections" and prohibits insurance companies "from charging deductibles or copays for abortions but allows them to do so for all other pregnancy-related services." "[The bill allows] late-term abortions when a doctor deems a baby 'incompatible with sustained life' outside of the womb, which decision is not subject to review by any medical board," the group stated in a statement. "This is also an 'intersectional' bill, as its legal protections for abortionists extend to organizations who distribute puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, even in states where they have been criminalized for use on children. You might not have realized that Planned Parenthood was also in the transgender hormone business, but they are aggressively so." Baker signed an executive order on the day of the Dobbs decision proclaiming that the state government agencies may not assist other states seeking to impose civil or criminal liability against anyone who performs an abortion in Massachusetts. The governor cited concerns that other states would "impose civil or criminal liability or professional sanctions on health care professionals who provide and persons who seek and obtain reproductive health care services in the Commonwealth as permitted by the laws of the Commonwealth." He maintained that "health care professionals lawfully providing and persons lawfully seeking and obtaining reproductive health services in the Commonwealth should be protected from legal liability premised on and professional sanctions issued under the laws of other States." "Massachusetts remains steadfast in its commitment to protect access to reproductive health care services, especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade," Baker said in a statement. "The Court's decision has major consequences for women across the country who live in states with limited access to these services, and our administration took quick action in the hours following that decision by issuing an executive order to protect access here in the Commonwealth," he added. "This new legislation signed today builds on that action by protecting patients and providers from legal interference from more restrictive laws in other states." H.4930 contains language stating that "no person shall be subject to discipline by the board, including the revocation, suspension or cancellation of the certificate of registration or reprimand, censure or monetary fine, for providing or assisting in the provision of reproductive health care services or gender-affirming health care services." The enactment of H.4930 occurred in the aftermath of failed efforts to pass the Women's Health Protection Act in U.S. Congress. The bill would codify the right to abortion into federal law and limit the ability of states to implement pro-life laws. The Women's Health Protection Act passed the Democrat-controlled House multiple times, most recently on July 15, three weeks after the Dobbs decision. However, the bill failed to gain traction in the evenly divided U.S. Senate, where most legislation requires 60 votes to pass. On May 11, 51 of 100 senators voted against invoking cloture, a procedural step that would enable debate to begin on the Women's Health Protection Act. The Senate previously rejected the Women's Health Protection Act in a 48-46 vote on Feb. 28. Even before Baker signed Bill H.4930 into law, Massachusetts had some of the most permissive abortion laws in the U.S. In late 2020, the ROE Act became law over Baker's veto. The law codifies the right to an abortion into state law, allows abortions to take place after 24 weeks gestation in the case of a fetal anomaly and permits minors between the ages of 16 and 17 to obtain an abortion without parental consent. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute has identified Massachusetts as one of 16 states with laws protecting the right to abortion. Massachusetts' establishment of a right to "gender-affirming health care" comes after a handful of states have passed laws restricting the ability of minors to obtain puberty blockers and gender transition surgeries. Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas have implemented such laws while the head of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters has classified gender transition surgeries for minors as child abuse. The state's Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an advisory opinion saying the same. Hit the floor: Bishop protects churchogoers as shooting breaks out after service The bishop of a Milwaukee church possibly saved congregants' lives as they found themselves caught in a deadly crossfire outside the church building right after the Sunday service ended. "Upon them coming out of the church, a car pulled right here and began to fire at another car that was behind them," Bishop Henry Kilpatrick of Reformation of Holiness Church told WISN 12 News. "There was a massive shooting right here. Me and one of the deacons began to push the people back on inside and tell them to hit the floor, get down on the floor, and they got down on the floor," added Kilpatrick, who founded the church 24 years ago with his late wife, Rose. No churchgoer was injured. Kilpatrick further told WTMJ-TV, that were are a lot of kids in the area. "And I'm just thanking God that no one got shot today. Because they could have, the way the bullets were flying," he said. Several shootings have taken place in the neighborhood over the last few days, but the one on Sunday was the worst, Kilpatric said. "People in this area know, as well as I know, that this is one of the worst areas in the city," he told WISN 12. "Why am I here? I chose to be here to help the people in this area." Authorities found at least 17 shell casings, including one just feet from the church's stoop, MTMJ-TV reports. WISN 12 News cameras spotted at least 20 casings and more down the block. "Most people would run away from an area like this," Kilpatrick said. "But this is an area God wants us in. An area you can witness to somebody and help better somebody else's life." Kilpatrick said he wants an increased police presence in the area. "Why not put patrols in the area where the crime is going on?" he asked. "They know this is a crime area." Apostle Reginald Alston Sr. told WISN that he was upset with how long it took for police to respond. "When I went to call 911, they said someone would be out here shortly," he said. "It was getting close to 15, 20 minutes. I used someone else's phone and called again." Pro-life teen assaulted ahead of Kansas abortion referendum; woman arrested, charged UPDATE: 1:30 p.m. ET Aug. 2: The Leawood Police Department told The Christian Post on Tuesday that a 37-year-old woman was arrested and charged in connection with an alleged attack on a pro-life canvasser Sunday. "The Leawood Police Department was contacted on Sunday by a subject. ... She stated that she had been going door-to-door regarding the upcoming election," the police statement reads. "As she was walking away from an address in Leawood, she was struck by a female resident. The victim was not injured. As part of our investigation on Sunday, the 37-year-old suspect was arrested, charged in Leawood Municipal Court with misdemeanor battery and released." Original: A pro-life student claims she was attacked while canvassing on behalf of the "Value Them Both" amendment that will go before Kansas voters Tuesday. The pro-life group Students for Life of America announced Monday that 18-year-old Grace Hartsock was assaulted in Leawood, Kansas, Sunday as she participated in the organization's door-knocking campaign. The campaign seeks to convince Kansas voters to support the Value Them Both Amendment to amend the Kansas Constitution so it "does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion." Supporters of the amendment aim to reverse the Kansas Supreme Court's creation of "a nearly unlimited 'right' to abortion" in the state constitution. In an interview with The Christian Post, Dana Stancavage, the press specialist and online editor for Students for Life of America, elaborated on the incident that occurred Sunday. Stancavage is one of several Students for Life activists on the ground in Kansas ahead of Tuesday's vote, along with Hartsock, a Texas native who is a rising freshman at Benedictine College. Stancavage told CP that Hartsock and other pro-life activists left to canvass around 11 a.m., noting that Hartsock "was with a team, but they had each broken up to different streets." While Hartsock was by herself at the time of the incident, the other pro-life activists were "very close by," Stancavage stated. About two hours into the door-knocking, Hartsock encountered a woman who shoved her "with both hands in the chest," Stancavage said. "Grace didn't fall, but the woman with closed fists began hitting her in the head, and Grace was trying to just block herself and move out of the driveway and flee from that woman." The woman also allegedly told Hartsock, "I hope you get raped" and "I hope you get hit by a car." "She did also throw a piece of bread [that] hit Grace in the face," Stancavage added. In a blog post, Students for Life of America said that Hartsock encountered the woman's mother after knocking on the door of the house. After the mother apologized and indicated that she didn't want to talk to Hartsock because she was not likely to support the amendment, Hartsock began to depart the property. As she was leaving, Hartsock reportedly heard the woman's daughter dropping expletives and reportedly uttering the words "Don't apologize to her, mom." Shortly after that, Students for Life claims she chased Hartsock and assaulted her. The pro-life teenager tried to record video footage of the encounter when the woman started retreating. Video footage released by Students for Life of America shows the woman flipping Hartsock off and appearing to direct an "F you" at the teenager before her mother meets her on the driveway and tells her to "stop it." Stancavage recalled that after taking the five-second video, Hartsock "called the other people that were door-knocking with her, and they came and picked her up immediately." The leadership team at Students for Life of America instructed Hartsock, who was "pretty shaken up for a few," to call the police and go to the emergency room. The organization "really put a priority to make sure nothing was wrong with her," Stancavage detailed. Hartsock allegedly experienced a "major headache," but a visit to the emergency room revealed that she was "all clear" with "no concussion or anything of that nature." Hartsock "doesn't have any sort of a physical injury," Stancavage said. The pro-life activist was back to canvassing on Monday. The organization's efforts in the heavily populated eastern Kansas will continue through 4:00 p.m. Tuesday. "This has never happened before," Stancavage insisted, stressing that "we engage in a lot of door-knocking." "[It's] astonishing because it's never been something we've experienced to this extent," she added. While the pro-life advocate expects to "run into people who take a different position," she reiterated that "someone running out of their house and acting this way has never happened." Stancavage believes that the door-knocking campaign, which has consisted of "smaller groups this summer" but increased to 20 this weekend, has been fruitful. "A lot of people have been receptive, which makes this particular incident very surprising," Stancavage contends. "But I will say it's helpful that we're here and working with other groups to try to educate voters on exactly what this amendment does because there has been some confusion around it. So I think our education has been effective." The canvassing team has had over 1,700 door-knocking conversations on Sunday, according to Stancavage. "So we're really trying to move the dial and have this amendment pass so that Kansas has the ability to pass pro-life laws," she said. "We've been encouraged by hearing from a lot of people who weren't planning on voting that it's been brought to their attention that there is a vote tomorrow." Hartsock told Leawood Police that she wanted to press charges against the woman who assaulted her. The police informed her that they intended to investigate the matter. In a statement, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, lamented that "a grown woman took out her frustrations over abortion on a teenager who volunteered to let people know about the Kansas ballot initiative." Hawkins cited Hartsock's return to canvassing so soon after the attack as evidence that "the Pro-Life Generation will not be forced into silence or fear because of radical pro-abortionists who show no regard for life, inside or outside of the womb, and no respect for the free speech rights of their fellow citizens." A poll conducted by co/efficient revealed that 47% of likely primary voters planned on supporting the Value Them Both Amendment while 43% would likely oppose it. The remaining 10% are undecided. The assault against Hartsock comes five weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The Dobbs decision and the leaked draft opinion have caused outrage among pro-abortion activists, leading to much vandalism of churches and pro-life pregnancy centers across the nation. Hawkins classified the assault against Hartsock as the latest incident in the "Summer of Rage" promised by pro-abortion activists if Roe was overturned. Churches and definition of marriage in civil laws How should churches think about the definition of marriage in civil law? The U.S. House of Representatives has already voted to repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage as man and woman, the U.S. Senate is now poised for a vote. The vote is mostly symbolic, as the 2015 Obergefell ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court discovered a constitutional right to marriage between persons of the same gender. But proponents claim the court, having overturned its 1973 Roe v. Wade assertion of a constitutional right to abortion, could now do so on marriage. There is a tendency for some traditional Christians to not engage on this issue because it is viewed as politically settled. But The Church has timeless and universal teachings that transcend political seasons. The definition of marriage both inside the church and in wider society is such an issue. Politicians by vocation pursue what is politically practical. Senators typically aligned with traditional Christian preferences so far have largely avoided substantive comment on legislatively affirming same-sex marriage. Polls indicate that perhaps two-thirds of Americans affirm same-sex marriage. Of course, the Churchs teachings on core doctrine do not shift to conform to the preferences of a particular society. Its core doctrines, if true, are universally true, regardless of any poll. Core Christian teachings are never determined by popularity, they are not sustained by popularity, they do not shift in response to popularity, and they do not command respect if they surrender to or accommodate popularity. In all its historic branches, the Church affirms that God made male and female, and that marriage is their unique union. This understanding of marriage as male and female of course is not unique to Christianity or biblical tradition. It is rooted organically in nature and has been common to all cultures across millennia. But Christianity has specifically refined marriage as a monogamous lifelong faithful union, in which male and female are equal, and which mirrors the eternal, cosmic union between Christ and His Church. The Church has never regarded monogamous male-female marriage as specifically for the Church, like baptism or the eucharist. Marriage, like the family and government, is created by God for all cultures and times. The government does not have the authority to redefine marriage since marriage predates government in Gods order of creation. Marriage as male and female was created for the protection and prosperity of all humanity. The Church adheres to its marriage teaching from divine obligation and in service to the good of all humanity. So the Church is not at liberty to abandon its marriage teaching in reaction to American public opinion in 2022 or at any other time and place. Doing so would betray its highest calling to reveal and mirror Gods love to the world. The U.S. Congress will do what it will according to its contemporary political calculations. These calculations play no role in the Churchs permanent treasury of teachings. American Christians are tempted to surrender the Churchs permanent treasury of teachings when they are difficult, embarrassing, or seem irrelevant. What if public opinion defies or mocks the Churchs teachings? No matter. Public opinion has often across millennia rejected the Church, but the Church and its teachings outlast passing public opinion. What seems permanent in earthly politics or public opinion often is not. Very few in 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court discovered a constitutional right to abortion expected that ruling to be overturned half a century later. The court was in sync with growing public opinion. Americas two largest states, with support from Republican governors (Reagan and Rockefeller), had already legalized abortion. Other states were following. Both political parties were largely pro-choice. The debate was ending. In response, the Roman Catholic Church did not retreat from its teaching about abortion. Already declining Mainline Protestant denominations had adopted pro-abortion rights stances starting in the 1960s. Emerging and growing Evangelical churches eventually aligned with Catholics and the historic Christian stance. The pro-life movement began with unlikely prospects. Yet with support from the Church, it prevailed. We do not know what will happen with American public opinion and the definition of marriage in the future. A new generation may emerge that reflects with sadness on the retreat of traditional marriage and accompanying family structure. Every generation reacts at least in part against the preferences of the earlier generation. No matter what happens with marriage in U.S. civil law, Christian teaching, which reflects the eternal union of Christ and His Church, will not change. Originally published at Juicy Ecumenism. Hospital trust sets deadline for removing Archie Battersbee's life support UPDATE: 8 a.m. ET Aug. 3: Archie Battersbee's parents submitted an 11th-hour application to the European Court of Human Rights just before the 9 a.m. Wednesday deadline set by the lawyers for Barts Health NHS Trust to remove their son's life support. Original: Lawyers for Barts Health NHS Trust, responsible for 12-year-old Archie Battersbee's care at the Royal London Hospital, informed the boy's parents that his life support would be withdrawn as early as Wednesday morning. On Tuesday, the U.K. Supreme Court refused permission for Hollie Dance and Paul Battersbee, Archie's parents, to appeal to prevent their son's life support from being withdrawn, according to a Tuesday statement from The Christian Legal Centre. "Heartbreakingly, the hospital Trust have told us this evening that we cannot move Archie to a hospice," Dance said in a statement. "We want to make an urgent application to the European Court of Human Rights, but the Trust are saying that that has to be submitted at 9 a.m., which gives us and our lawyers no time to prepare it." "They also demand to see a copy of it, which they have no right to see. However, if this does not happen, they say they will withdraw treatment tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. This is cruel and we are absolutely appalled." The CLC has been representing the parents in their ongoing legal battle to prevent the removal of Battersbee's life support. In April, the child was found unconscious with a ligature around his neck, suffering a "catastrophic hypoxic ischaemic brain injury." He has not regained consciousness. Doctors and judges have agreed that the boy is brain dead. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the Rt. Hon Steve Barclay, called for the U.K. Supreme Court to refuse the parents' urgent appeal on Tuesday. Government lawyers submitted to the U.K. Supreme Court on his behalf that the interim measures injunction by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) are "not binding" under international law. The UNCRPD had asked the United Kingdom last week to keep the boy on life support while it considered the case. Government lawyers wrote that "the notion that interim measures are binding has not been accepted as a facet of customary international law. There is no such consensus. On the contrary, the status of the committees' decisions is a subject of some controversy." The parents attempted to file a last-minute application with the U.K. Supreme Court Tuesday morning following a Court of Appeal hearing Monday. Representatives of Barts Health NHS Trust stated during the hearing that the institution would withdraw treatment on Tuesday afternoon if an application to the U.K. Supreme Court was not made. Sir Andrew McFarlane, president of the Court of Appeal family division, granted Battersbee's parents a brief stay on Monday so they could appeal to the Supreme Court, according to CLC. McFarlane rejected the UNCRPD injunction and said Battersbee shouldn't remain on life support and that ending treatment is in the boy's "best interests." The family applied to the UNCRPD because individuals and families can file complaints regarding potential violations of disabled people's rights. Battersbee's parents argue that stopping their son's treatment breaches the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Children. The UNCRPD said in response to Battersbee's parents that its special rapporteur on communications "requested the State party to refrain from withdrawing life-preserving medical treatment, including mechanical ventilation and artificial nutrition and hydration, from the alleged victim while the case is under consideration by the Committee." "[T]his request does not imply that any decision has been reached on the substance of the matter under consideration," the response states. "The Committee may review the necessity of maintaining the request for interim measures once the State party's observations have been received.'" Last month, Justice Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the Royal London Hospital could discontinue Battersbee's life support, writing that the boy is likely dead "on the balance of probabilities." Despite her decision, Arbuthnot granted the parents permission to appeal. In a July 15 judgment, Justice Anthony Hayden ruled that it is in the child's "best interests" for his life support to be removed. Iranian propaganda turning public against Evangelical Christians, religious minorities: USCIRF Cleric: 'Evangelical Christianity is not a religion' The Iranian government is actively inciting "derogatory public opinion" against Christianity and other faiths by using Iranian media outlets to spread religious propaganda, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. A new report from the bipartisan federal advisory committee says Iran's government uses official media, government-linked media and social media to spread "falsehoods and misconceptions" about religious minorities to turn public opinion against these communities. The report "Religious Propaganda in Iran" attributes the effort to a "systematic campaign to deny freedom of religion or belief to groups that do not conform to the government's singular interpretation of Ja'afri Shi'a Islam." For instance, the government describes some Christians as belonging to an "Evangelical Zionist cult" and uses vague national security accusations to target Christian converts. The phrase was referenced in the Nov. 3, 2021 ruling by Iran's Supreme Court, declaring that promoting Christianity and establishing home churches are not crimes and do not amount to national security crimes. The court's opinion used the phrase "Evangelical Zionist cult" to refer to the Christian converts whose case it was addressing. Under Iran's legal system, a ruling by a Supreme Court branch is not necessarily binding on lower courts. "This misinformation campaign restricts freedom of religion or belief for religious minorities in Iran," USCIRF Commissioner Sharon Kleinbaum told The Christian Post. According to USCIRF, Iranian state propaganda against Christian converts is often disguised as anti-Zionism, and Christian converts are regularly referred to as members of a "Zionist" network. Officials say the reference to Zionism in this context does not refer to specific allegations of links between Christian converts in Iran and the state of Israel but rather "a broad conspiracy in which Evangelical Christians across the world promote political viewpoints that serve Zionist ideology." The report also cites what USCIRF called "Iran's misinformation campaign against Christian converts," which officials say seeks to differentiate Christian converts from Armenians and Assyrians as recognized religious minority groups. Hojjat al-Islam Kashani, a Muslim cleric who serves as the secretary of the Islam-Christianity Dialog Association, told an Iranian media outlet, "What is being promoted today as Christianity is not traditional Christianity, but rather it is Evangelical and colonial Christianity. "Evangelical Christianity is not a religion. It is a policy-oriented towards colonialism." According to the report, Kashani accused Evangelical Christian Iranians of pursuing a political agenda of expansion designed to undermine Iran's government. Those political aims of Evangelical Christians have "resulted in their alienation from other Christians, and that Iranian Armenians are opposed to Evangelical Christians," Kashani said. Iran's history is replete with examples of outside intervention by colonial powers in its domestic affairs, so this comment appeals to the sense of injustice some Iranians may feel about foreign meddling in Iranian politics, Kleinbaum said. "The impact on Iranian Christians is that they cannot rely on the government to uphold its obligations under international law to protect freedom of religion or belief, and are more likely to face discrimination from Iranians who internalize the government's false messaging," she added. In addition to Christian converts, the USCIRF report identifies and reviews the significant themes Iran's government deploys against Jews, Sunni Muslims, Gonabadi Sufis and Baha'is. Besides providing data and analysis on religious freedom abroad, USCIRF also provides foreign policy recommendations to the president, secretary of state and U.S. Congress to fight religious persecution and promote freedom of religion and belief. Iran is one of 10 countries recognized by the U.S. State Department as a country of particular concern for tolerating and engaging in religious freedom abuses. Just one year after Iran signed a historic nuclear deal with the U.S. and other Western nations in 2015, USCIRF reported that religious minorities in Iran, including Christians, continue experiencing severe human rights abuses. The report found that religious freedom conditions "continued to deteriorate," with Christians, Baha'is and the minority Sunni Muslims facing the most persecution in the form of harassment, arrests and imprisonment. Open Doors USA, a watchdog group that monitors religious freedom abuses in over 60 countries, ranks Iran as the ninth-worst country regarding Christian persecution. Over 750K displaced by Islamic insurgency in Mozambique Growing violence by Islamic State-affiliated insurgents in the northern parts of Christian-majority Mozambique has internally displaced more than 784,000 people, according to the United Nations. Announcing the latest statistics on the internal displacement in Southern African country, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement that it is "concerned with the volatile security situation in Cabo Delgado, especially recent attacks in historically safe districts." Islamic extremists have been exploiting a crisis in the coastal province of Cabo Delgado in the country's northeast. A civil war started in 2017 over the area rich with gas, rubies, graphite, gold and other natural resources. Protesters demonstrated against what they say is profits going to an elite in the ruling Frelimo Party, with few jobs for local residents. "In 2017, jihadist insurgents began in the Cabo-Delgado province, winning over some locals due to the fact that they gave back resources to villagers from the government, and killed no one," the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern reported. "This did not last, however, as IS started setting fire to Christian villages, and killing those who lived there." In March 2021, the U.S. labeled Islamic State-Mozambique as "Specially Designated Global Terrorists." ISIS-Mozambique is also known as Ansar al-Sunna, and known locally as al-Shabaab. The group reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS as early as April 2018 and has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. According to the State Department, the group orchestrated a series of large-scale attacks that led to the capture of the strategic Indian Ocean port of Mocimboa da Praia. At least 24 countries have sent troops to support the fight against insurgents in Mozambique, whose army has been accused of being corrupt and having 7,000 "ghost soldiers," according to the BBC. The northern province of Cabo Delgado is a mostly Muslim region where at least 300 Christians have been killed for their faith, according to ICC. There have also been over 100 attacks on churches in the area. Last December, Human Rights Watch revealed that insurgents had enslaved more than 600 women and girls, many of which had been abused and sold as sex slaves for as low as $600. HRW interviewed 37 people, including former abductees, relatives, security sources and government officials, between August 2019 and October 2021. A 33-year-old woman stated that local Al-Shabaab fighters held her aunt at gunpoint so that she would identify houses with girls between the ages of 12 and 17 in Mocimboa da Praia. The source counted 203 girls but is unsure if all the girls were abducted. "Some mothers were begging the fighters to take them instead of their daughters," a 27-year-old man who was interviewed said. "But one of the [militants] said they didn't want old women with children and diseases." A former abductee from Mocimboa da Praia said he was forced to select the women and girls for sex with fighters when they return from military operations. "Those [women] who refused were punished with beatings, and no food for days," he said. In November 2020, ISIS-linked militants beheaded over 50 people, including women and children, and abducted others in weekend raids in the Miudumbe and Macomia districts of the Cabo Delgado province. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate TOKYO (AP) The construction of facilities needed for a planned release of treated radioactive wastewater into the sea next year from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant began Thursday despite opposition from the local fishing community. Plant workers started construction of a pipeline to transport the wastewater from hillside storage tanks to a coastal facility before its planned release next year, according to the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings. The digging of an undersea tunnel was also to begin later Thursday. Construction at the Fukushima Daiichi plant follows the Nuclear Regulation Authority's formal approval last month of a detailed wastewater discharge plan that TEPCO submitted in December. The government announced last year a decision to release the wastewater as a necessary step for the plants ongoing decommissioning. A massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plants cooling systems, causing triple meltdowns and the release of large amounts of radiation. Water that was used to cool the three damaged and highly radioactive reactor cores has since leaked into basements of the reactor buildings but was collected and stored in tanks. TEPCO and government officials say the water will be further treated to levels far below releasable standards and that the environmental and health impacts will be negligible. Of more than 60 isotopes selected for treatment, all but one tritium will be reduced to meet safety standards, they say. Local fishing communities and neighboring countries have raised concerns about potential health hazards from the radioactive wastewater and the reputation damage to local produce, and oppose the release. Scientists say the impact of long-term, low-dose exposure to not only tritium but also other isotopes on the environment and humans are still unknown and that a release is premature. The contaminated water is being stored in about 1,000 tanks that require much space in the plant complex. Officials say they must be removed so that facilities can be built for its decommissioning. The tanks are expected to reach their capacity of 1.37 million tons in autumn of 2023. TEPCO said it plans to transport treated and releasable water through a pipeline from the tanks to a coastal pool, where it will be diluted with seawater and then sent through an undersea tunnel with an outlet about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) away to minimize the impact on local fishing and the environment. TEPCO and the government have obtained approval from the heads of the plants host towns, Futaba and Okuma, for the construction, but local residents and the fishing community remain opposed and could still delay the process. The current plan calls for a gradual release of treated water to begin next spring in a process that will take decades. On Wednesday, Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori and the two mayors visited Tokyo and asked Economy and Industry Minister Koichi Hagiuda to ensure safety and prevent further damage to the reputation of Fukushima fishing products. Akira Ono, TEPCO chief decommissioning officer at the plant, promised the highest efforts to ensure safety and understanding. We are aware of various views on reputational impact and safety concerns (of the release) and we'll keep explaining throughly to stakeholders, he said. TEPCO said Wednesday that weather and sea conditions could delay a completion of the facility until summer 2023. Japan has sought help from the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure the water release meets international safety standards and reassure local fishing and other communities and neighboring countries, including China and South Korea, that have opposed the plan. IAEA experts who visited the plant earlier this year said Japan was taking appropriate steps for the planned discharge. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) San Francisco police say one person is dead and another wounded after shots were fired on a city bus. Officers responding to the shooting near the Cow Palace events center Wednesday afternoon found two people wounded. Both were taken to a hospital, where one of them died. WASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Thursday filed federal civil rights charges against four current and former Louisville police officers in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor amid mounting anger from civil rights activists and Taylor's family that no one has been convicted of a crime in the 28 months since her death. Former detective Joshua Jaynes and two current police officers, detective Kelly Goodlett and Sgt. Kyle Meany, are accused of falsifying information on a search warrant before and after Taylor was fatally shot in a March 2020 raid on her apartment, sparking a wave of racial justice protests across the country that intensified with the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May. Former detective Brett Hankison, who fired 10 shots through Taylor's patio door even though he could not see who he was shooting at, is charged with two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law. Hankison, the only officer to face state charges in connection with the case, was acquitted in March on three counts of wanton endangerment of Taylor's neighbors. The charges announced Thursday are the first federal counts stemming from Taylor's death. The Justice Department also has pursued criminal cases in other high-profile killings of Black people that sparked the 2020 demonstrations, convicting four former Minneapolis officers of violating Floyd's civil rights and successfully prosecuting three White men on hate-crimes charges related to the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery earlier that year. At Justice Department headquarters in downtown Washington on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the accused Louisville officers not only violated Taylor's Fourth Amendment rights but also knew the allegations listed in the indictments would lead to a dangerous situation - one that "resulted in Ms. Taylor's death." "Breonna Taylor should still be alive," Garland said. Hankison and Jaynes were fired from the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department in the year after the shooting, though Jaynes is suing to get his job back. A Louisville police spokesperson said in a statement that Chief Erika Shields "began termination procedures" for Meany and Goodlett on Thursday. Taylor, 26, an emergency-room technician, was killed early on March 13, 2020, when plainclothes police officers burst into her apartment to carry out a search warrant in a drug probe. While the officers knocked, there is disagreement about whether they identified themselves as police. Kenneth Walker, Taylor's boyfriend, fired a shot with his legally owned gun, striking an officer in the leg. He later said he did not realize the people who had entered the apartment were law enforcement officers. Several officers shot back, killing Taylor. Louisville police later fired detective Myles Cosgrove, whom the FBI determined fired the fatal shot, and Hankison, who fired 10 shots that did not hit Taylor. State officials did not charge anyone directly in Taylor's death. Ben Crump, one of the lawyers for Taylor's family, called the federal charges "a huge step toward justice." "It's about Breonna and all the other Breonnas across America," he said at a news conference. A lawyer for Walker, Steve Romines, pledged to "continue to seek justice in the civil courts and call for changes to policies and procedures that protect all our citizens. No other person should ever live through what Mr. Walker has lived through." Maurice Mitchell, a leader of the Movement for Black Lives, said the federal case against the Louisville officers "proves that Breonna Taylor's family, the community and our movement were right from the very beginning, despite being gaslit from local authorities and others." He expressed hope that the Justice Department's pursuit of cases involving Taylor, Floyd and Arbery "sends a message that you can't kill Black people with impunity. There will be a cost." As in Minneapolis, Justice Department investigators have separately launched a sprawling civil investigation into the policies and practices of the Louisville Police Department. Both probes are likely to result in court-approved plans to implement broad changes. But local activists and Taylor's family continue to demand accountability for the officers involved in the raid on her apartment. The federal indictments described officers from the Louisville police department's Place-Based Investigations unit as pursuing a reckless narcotics trafficking case in the city's West End, allegedly conspiring to falsify information on a search warrant affidavit even though they knew it could place occupants of Taylor's apartment in danger. Although the police obtained warrants to search four homes in the West End, they also raided Taylor's residence, which was 10 miles away, according to the first indictment unsealed Thursday. Prosecutors allege that Jaynes, 40, and Meany, 35, relied on "false, misleading and outdated information" in seeking the warrant. Although Jaynes did not participate in the actual raid, he sought to pressure colleagues afterward to make misleading statements to investigators, the indictment alleges. Meany is accused of falsely telling FBI agents that a provision in the affidavit seeking a no-knock warrant was included at the request of the Louisville police SWAT unit. A separate Justice Department charging document accuses Goodlett of conspiring with Jaynes to falsify the search warrant and cover up their actions afterward. Garland alleged that Goodlett and Jaynes met in a garage after Taylor's killing and conspired to lie to investigators about the circumstances that led to it. Hankison, 46, is accused of willfully using unconstitutional force for firing shots through Taylor's patio door, covered with blinds and a blackout curtain, during the raid, according to a second indictment. He is also accused of depriving several residents of nearby apartments of their rights after bullets punctured the walls of their units. If convicted, Hankison faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, since the violation he is charged with resulted "in death or involves an attempt to kill," according to the Justice Department. The obstruction counts carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and the conspiracy counts and false-statement charge carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Jaynes was previously fired by Louisville police for allegedly violating department policies in preparing the warrant for Taylor's home. Yvette Gentry, then the interim chief, wrote in a pre-termination letter that Jaynes had "lied" when he wrote in the warrant application that he had verified through a U.S. postal inspector that Taylor was getting packages related to alleged drug activity of her ex-boyfriend. Stew Mathews, who was Hankison's defense attorney in the state trial, declined to comment Thursday, saying he does not yet know whether he will represent the former officer in the federal case. An attorney for Jaynes did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear whether Goodlett and Meany had attorneys. Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, said his organization is working to ensure that the defendants receive due process in the federal case, noting that Hankison was acquitted in his state trial. "The local community, which presumably has more knowledge and far broader access to the facts, has found charges not warranted," Pasco said. "Until anyone says differently, these men are not guilty of any crime." At a news conference, Tamika Palmer, Taylor's mother, told reporters that while the Justice Department's action is satisfying, the circumstances of her daughter's death at the hands of police remain painful. "I've waited 874 days for today," Palmer said, "and it's here now." This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate AUSTIN, Texas (AP) A Texas jury Thursday ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay more than $4 million significantly less than the $150 million being sought in compensatory damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, marking the first time the Infowars host has been held financially liable for repeatedly claiming the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history was a hoax. The Austin jury must still decide how much the Infowars host should pay in punitive damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis was among the 20 children and six educators who were killed in the 2012 attack in Newtown, Connecticut. The parents had sought at least $150 million in compensation for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Jones attorney asked the jury to limit damages to $8 one dollar for each of the compensation charges they considered and Jones himself said any award over $2 million would sink us. It likely won't be the last judgment against Jones who was not in the courtroom over his claims that the attack was staged in the interests of increasing gun controls. A Connecticut judge has ruled against him in a similar lawsuit brought by other victims' families and an FBI agent who worked on the case. He also faces another trial in Austin. Jones lead attorney, Andino Reynal, winked at his co-counsel before leaving the courtroom. He declined to comment on the verdict. Outside the courthouse, the plaintiffs' attorney Mark Bankston insisted that the $4.11 million amount wasnt a disappointment, noting it was only part of the damages Jones will have to pay. The jury returns Friday to hear more evidence about Jones and his company's finances. In a video posted on his website Thursday night, Jones called the reduced award a major victory. I admitted I was wrong. I admitted it was a mistake. I admitted that I followed disinformation but not on purpose. I apologized to the families. And the jury understood that. What I did to those families was wrong. But I didnt do it on purpose, he said. The award was more money than my company and I personally have, but we are going to work on trying to make restitution on that, Jones said. Bankston suggested any victory declarations might be premature. We arent done folks, Bankston said. We knew coming into this case it was necessary to shoot for the moon to get the jury to understand we were serious and passionate. After tomorrow, hes going to owe a lot more." The total amount awarded in this case could set a marker for the other lawsuits against Jones and underlines the financial threat he's facing. It also raises new questions about the ability of Infowars which has been banned from YouTube, Spotify and Twitter for hate speech to continue operating, although the company's finances remain unclear. Jones, who has portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his First Amendment rights, conceded during the trial that the attack was 100% real and that he was wrong to have lied about it. But Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology wouldn't suffice and called on them to make Jones pay for the years of suffering he has put them and other Sandy Hook families through. The parents testified Tuesday about how they've endured a decade of trauma, inflicted first by the murder of their son and what followed: gun shots fired at a home, online and phone threats, and harassment on the street by strangers. They said the threats and harassment were all fueled by Jones and his conspiracy theory spread to his followers via his website Infowars. A forensic psychiatrist testified that the parents suffer from complex post-traumatic stress disorder inflicted by ongoing trauma, similar to what might be experienced by a soldier at war or a child abuse victim. At one point in her testimony, Lewis looked directly at Jones, who was sitting barely 10 feet away. It seems so incredible to me that we have to do this that we have to implore you, to punish you to get you to stop lying, Lewis told Jones. Barry Covert, a Buffalo, New York, First Amendment lawyer who is not involved in the Jones case, said the $4 million in compensatory damages was lower than he would have expected given the evidence and testimony. But I dont think Jones can take this as a victory, he added. The fact is, $4 million is significant even if we might have thought it would be a little higher. Jurors often decline to award any punitive damages after deciding on a compensation figure. But when they choose to, the punitive amount is often higher, Covert said. He said he expects the parents attorneys to argue that jurors should send the message that no one should profit off defamation. They will want jurors to send the message that you cant make a quarter of a billion in profit off harming someone and say youll just take the damages loss in court," Covert said. Jones was the only witness to testify in his defense, and he only attended the trial sporadically while still appearing on his show. And he came under withering attack from the plaintiffs attorneys under cross-examination, as they reviewed Jones own video claims about Sandy Hook over the years, and accused him of lying and trying to hide evidence, including text messages and emails about the attack. It also included internal emails sent by an Infowars employee that said this Sandy Hook stuff is killing us. At one point, Jones was told that his attorneys had mistakenly sent Bankston the last two years worth of texts from Jones cellphone. Bankston said in court Thursday that the U.S. House Jan. 6 committee investigating the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol has requested the records and that he intends to comply. And shortly after Jones declared I dont use email, Jones was shown one that came from his address, and another one from an Infowars business officer telling Jones that the company had earned $800,000 gross in selling its products in a single day, which would amount to nearly $300 million in a year. Jones' media company Free Speech Systems, which is Infowars' parent company, filed for bankruptcy during the two-week trial. ___ Associated Press writer Michael Tarm in Chicago contributed to this report. ___ For more of the APs coverage of school shootings: https://apnews.com/hub/school-shootings This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) Tennessees primary elections were held Thursday to determine party nominees for governor, Congress and state legislative seats. A handful of ballot initiatives and district attorney races were also on the ballot in some counties, as well as Supreme Court retention for all of the justices. Through 14 days of early voting, turnout was down 23.8% compared with that point in the August 2018 election, when there was an open governor's race with contested Republican and Democratic primaries. Compared with the same point in 2014, turnout was down 15.4%. Heres a look at some of the top contests: GOVERNOR Democrat Jason Martin, a Nashville physician who criticized Republican Gov. Bill Lee's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, won his primary race to challenge Lee in the fall. Martin defeated Memphis councilmember JB Smiley Jr. by a thin margin, and Memphis community advocate Carnita Atwater finished a distant third. Lee ran unopposed in the GOP primary as he sought a second term, marking the first time in about three decades an incumbent governor has had no primary opponent. Tennessee has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 2006. CONGRESS Earlier this year, Tennessees GOP-dominated General Assembly split left-leaning Nashville into three congressional districts with the goal of flipping a seat from Democrat to Republican. Longtime incumbent Democratic U.S. House Rep. Jim Cooper announced he wouldn't seek reelection because he felt there was no path for him to win. On Thursday, Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles, from Columbia, emerged as the GOP nominee from among nine candidates in the 5th District. Among those he defeated were former state House Speaker Beth Harwell, from Nashville, and retired Tennessee National Guard Brig. Gen. Kurt Winstead, of Franklin. State Sen. Heidi Campbell from Nashville was the only candidate running in the Democratic primary. Meanwhile, five out of Tennessees nine congressional members ran unopposed in the primary: U.S. House Reps. Diana Harshbarger, Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, John Rose and Mark Green. Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Memphis, and Republican Reps. David Kustoff and Chuck Fleischmann faced underfunded challengers in their primaries. In the 9th District, Cohen defeated M. Latroy Alexandria-Williams, with Charlotte Bergmann winning the Republican nod against Leo AwGoWhat and Brown Dudley. Kustoff defeated three primary opponents in the 8th District, Danny Ray Bridger Jr., Gary Dean Clouse and Bob Hendry, with Democrat Lynnette Williams defeating Tim McDonald for their party's nomination. In the 3rd District, Fleischmann won his race over Sandy Casey and will face Democrat Meg Gorman in the fall. In the 6th District Democratic primary, Randal Cooper defeated Clay Faircloth to advance to take on Rose. And in the 4th District, Wayne Steele beat Arnold White in the Democratic primary to challenge DesJarlais. Republicans currently hold seven of Tennessee's congressional seats, while Democrats fill two. STATEHOUSE In the Republican-supermajority Legislature, all of Tennessees 99 state House seats are up for election this year. There are currently 15 open seats, the majority of them held by Republicans. Twenty-one seats featured contested Republican primaries and nine included contested Democratic primaries. Some sitting lawmakers lost their primary races. Republican Rep. Bob Ramsey of Maryville didn't survive a challenge from the right against Bryan Richey, an insurance agent from Maryville. Republican Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver, a Lancaster gospel singer and songwriter known for her serenades at the statehouse, lost to Michael Hale, a Smithville funeral home owner and farmer. The openings include the seat of disgraced former House Speaker Glen Casada, who was ousted from the top position in 2019 after a series of scandals. Former GOP Rep. Robin Smith resigned earlier this year after facing federal charges that allege she ran a political consulting kickback scheme with Casada and his former chief of staff, neither of whom have been charged to date. Justin Jones, a Black activist known for holding demonstrations at the Capitol, was elected Thursday to a House seat for a Nashville district. Jones, 26, was once temporarily banned from the Capitol after he was arrested for throwing a cup of liquid at Casada. That ban has since been lifted. In the Senate, 17 of 33 seats are on the ballot, four with contested GOP primaries and two with contested Democratic races. SUPREME COURT All five Tennessee Supreme Court justices were retained. Jeff Bivins, Sarah Campbell, Holly Kirby, Sharon Lee and Roger Page were up for an eight-year retention election, meaning voters simply decided whether to let them keep their seats. Rejections are extremely rare. OTHER KEY RACES Tennessees most populous county, Shelby, featured a couple of key races. County Mayor Lee Harris was challenged by Memphis City Council member Worth Morgan. Harris, a Black Democrat, was seeking his second four-year term. Morgan, a white Republican, has served on the council since 2016. Republican incumbent and longtime Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich, who has held the position since 2011, faced Democratic civil rights attorney, law professor and former county commissioner Steve Mulroy. With all county precincts reporting results Friday, Mulroy defeated Weirich in the district attorneys race, and Harris outlasted Morgan in the contest for mayor. Mulroy and Weirich clashed in debates, and the issue of abortion prosecutions under the states pending trigger law became an issue. The law essentially would ban all abortions statewide and make it a felony to perform the procedure. Mulroy said he would make prosecution of those who perform abortions an extremely low priority. Weirich has not said outright whether she will or wont prosecute doctors who perform abortions, instead saying that doing so would violate Tennessee code forbidding prosecutors from issuing "a broad and hypothetical statement without an actual charge or case. SAN FRANCISCO - Thousands of gay men clad in leather, latex - and often much less - partied along Folsom Street here last weekend during the annual kink and fetish festival. Even after the city had just declared the monkeypox outbreak striking its gay community a health emergency - one day after the World Health Organization urged men to sleep with fewer men to reduce transmission - San Francisco public health officials made no attempt to rein in festivities or warn attendees to have less sex. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighs whether to recommend limiting sex partners, health officials in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other U.S. cities battling surges disproportionately sickening gay men are avoiding calls for sexual restraint, wary of further stigmatizing same-sex intimacy. Public health authorities typically emphasize safer sex over abstinence to prevent the spread of diseases through intimate contact. But monkeypox is presenting new challenges in calibrating the right message to stop the rare virus from becoming endemic while limiting government intrusion into the bedroom. "If people want to have sex, they are going to have sex," said California state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who is involved in the city's monkeypox response. "I know people who normally go to sex parties who will not. People will make their own decisions about their own risk levels." More than 6,600 cases of monkeypox have been detected in the United States, prompting the Biden administration to declare a public health emergency Thursday to galvanize awareness. The virus primarily spreads through exposure to an infected person's rashes or lesions, and this is the first outbreak in which contact during sex appears to be the significant driver. While infections are heavily concentrated among men who have sex with men, others can contract the virus through nonsexual contact and sharing contaminated items. Many public health officials and activists who spent decades on the front lines of the battle against HIV/AIDS say they have learned it is futile to tell people to have less sex. That stance puts them at odds with the WHO, a top New York epidemiologist who condemned the city's messaging and others within the gay community who say gay men deserve direct warnings before it is too late to end the outbreak. "It was devaluing gay men's lives and health not to warn gay men," said Dan Savage, a sex columnist who has criticized the public health response to monkeypox. "Now, here we are, really on the verge of monkeypox being endemic in gay communities all over the world, and how is that for stigma?" Savage, who is no prude as a proponent of non-monogamous relationships and exploring fetishes, said public health officials should have advised gay men to curb their sex lives at the start of the outbreak in May that experts suspect was supercharged by large festivals in Europe with rampant sexual activity. Savage is taking his own advice, limiting sex to his husband and his boyfriend and skipping San Francisco's Dore Alley festival this year. A dozen Dore Alley attendees interviewed by The Washington Post said they took monkeypox seriously - without the government scolding them to do so. Many revelers kept their clothes on or donned full latex outfits inside crowded bars. One man sheathed himself in a monkeypox-inspired costume - a clear plastic rain suit over a rainbow outfit decorated with white polka dots that he said he wore to "make a statement" about the importance of avoiding skin-to-skin contact. Several said they planned to avoid casual sex at afterparties. Attendance was down by thousands compared with previous years, and participants remained spaced apart as they browsed booths hawking leather harnesses and gawked at men dressed as dogs. A 30-year-old festival regular who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his nickname, Oni, citing privacy concerns, said he was being more cautious this year, especially given his day job as a massage therapist. Sporting a black leather and chain corset, lace-up mid-calf boots, chartreuse face paint and a small set of horns, Oni said he didn't plan to have sex and had received the monkeypox vaccine weeks earlier. He left as the festival became more crowded and skipped the bars entirely. For the time being, he said, "no dark room sex parties, no orgies." San Francisco Public Health Officer Susan Philip said the city has learned over decades fighting HIV in coordination with LGBTQ organizations that messages of complete abstinence are ineffective and erode trust within the community. Instead of shutting down Dore Alley, San Francisco officials focused on disseminating information about how the virus spreads to help people make their own choices. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation released a guide to a "filthy weekend - free of anxiety," encouraging people to attend while taking steps to reduce risk, including dressing head-to-toe in leather or latex to minimize skin-to-skin contact. But at the street festival itself, warnings about monkeypox were hard to find. Only one of the attendees interviewed said he received an informational pamphlet about the virus, even as organizers checked for proof of coronavirus vaccination. Public health authorities worry about placing too much emphasis on sex as a mode of transmission because monkeypox also spreads in other ways. Zandt Bryan, the sexual health and prevention program manager for the Washington State Department of Health, said urging people to have less sex unfairly places the onus on individuals to end the outbreak and distracts from other potential sources of transmission, such as dancing in packed clubs. "Approaching it from a purely [sexually transmitted infection] standpoint doesn't really meet the challenge," Bryan said. Some critics of early coronavirus restrictions accuse U.S. public health officials of hypocrisy for telling Americans to forgo in-person schooling, religious services, and weddings and funerals to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, while refraining from telling people to limit sex to contain the monkeypox outbreak. Public health officials reject comparisons to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when they mandated masks and shut down public spaces. They noted that the novel coronavirus was unfamiliar, far deadlier and airborne, with hospitals overrun with patients at various points over the past two years. Monkeypox has known treatments and vaccines, although they have been challenging to access; it also has not killed anyone in the United States, and hospitalizations are uncommon. The World Health Organization has zeroed in on sex as a major driver of the outbreak it declared a global emergency in July, noting infections were especially pronounced in men who have multiple male sex partners or attended events with frequent sexual activity. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a news conference last week said the outbreak could be stopped by a collective effort of government and individuals. He said men who have sex with men should consider reducing their number of sex partners, avoiding new ones and exchanging contact information to allow for contact tracing and post-exposure vaccination. WHO officials said asking for temporary changes in sexual behavior is a modest step many gay men are already taking. "It makes common sense: A reduced number of contacts equals a reduced risk of exposure," said Andy Seale, a WHO adviser on HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections. "It's really about sharing whatever data we get in a stigma-free, moral-free, not-making-any-judgments manner so individuals have access to the data and understand what we are seeing." Demetre Daskalakis, a top CDC official leading the U.S. monkeypox response, said at a meeting of HIV organizations this week that "it's a good plan" to consider limiting partners, stressing that "this is not a forever thing, it's a for now thing" until vaccinations are more widely available. He said the agency is revising its monkeypox guidance for safer sex, which currently tells only people with symptoms to avoid sex. In New York City, a top epidemiologist at the health department has publicly criticized agency leadership for not urging men who have sex with men to abstain from anonymous sex for several weeks. Don Weiss, director of surveillance for the agency's Bureau of Communicable Disease, also blasted the health department for issuing a news release in July advising people who choose to have sex while sick with monkeypox to avoid kissing and to cover their sores; Weiss said taking those steps does not prevent infected people from transmitting the virus. "We cannot vaccinate our way out of this, nor can we isolate our way out of this," Weiss wrote to other health officials in a June 16 email, which he posted on his personal website. "The only way out is to abstain. I know I sound like a bible thumping preacher, but this is the exposure we need to PREVENT." He continued to press his case with colleagues over the coming weeks. "This disease is entirely preventable had we the courage to send out prevention messages," Weiss wrote in a June 22 email. "We seem paralyzed by the fear of stigmatizing this disease while we totally ignore the epidemiology. If we had an outbreak associated with bowling, would we not warn people to stop bowling?" Weiss, who declined to be interviewed, posted a letter from the agency on his website showing he was reassigned after his criticisms. Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the health department, declined to comment on Weiss's reassignment but pushed back against his call for temporary abstinence. "For decades, the LGBTQ+ community has had their sex lives dissected, prescribed, and proscribed in myriad ways, mostly by heterosexual and cis people," Gallahue said in a written statement. "Our guidance and advice are grounded in science and history - including the scientific reviews of how poorly abstinence-only guidance has historically performed in preventing transmission of STIs - with this disgraceful legacy in mind." Critics of recommendations to limit sex partners say they do not heed the lessons learned from decades trying to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with public health officials emphasizing safer ways to have sex with condoms and, more recently, daily pills that drastically reduce the risk of getting HIV and adherence to antiretroviral therapy that renders the virus untransmittable for those who are infected. "We saw a lot of folks at the beginning of the HIV epidemic calling for the closure of public sex venues like bathhouses. That did not stop the spread of HIV. People still found ways to have sex," said Tyler TerMeer, chief executive of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Gay rights activists are concerned messaging that comes across as disapproval of same-sex intimacy emboldens escalating attempts by the religious right to drive gay people out of public life, including movements around the nation to remove books about LGBTQ issues from school libraries and a new Florida law that bans instruction or classroom discussion about sexual orientation for young elementary school students. Still, Jim Downs, a historian who has studied the history of HIV/AIDS, said the monkeypox outbreak has arrived in a much better environment for gay people. "The difference now is public health authorities are not demonizing, pathologizing or criminalizing gay sex; they are just putting out a different message, which is: pause," Downs said. "Gay people are still scrutinized; they are still subjects of prejudice and discrimination. But we also have more social and cultural acceptance, so we can actually put out a message about sex that doesn't indict who we are as people." - - - Nirappil reported from Washington. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) Two employees of an Albuquerque grocery store have been injured after a compressor exploded, authorities said Thursday. City fire officials said two heating, ventilation and air conditioning specialists were working on the stores HVAC system Thursday morning and it was unclear why the compressor exploded. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) Around 50 mourners escorted two caskets draped in satin through a leafy cemetery in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region Thursday, family members of two soldiers killed last week on the nearby front. One casket was opened to reveal the military fatigues-clad body of 48-year-old Oleh Panchenko, which bore visible face injuries. Our hero, I will be proud of you forever, Panchenko's mother, Lilia, said through fits of uncontrolled sobbing as she leant over her son, kissing his forehead. God, why are you taking our boys from us? The funeral in Pokrovsk brought to 20 the number of Ukrainian soldiers buried there, in a newer section of the cemetery dedicated to military fatalities. Nearly all of them were killed since Russia's invasion began on Feb. 24, though others fell during the last eight years of fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists over control of the eastern Donbas region. As Russian forces continue to make slow gains in the Donetsk province, which makes up half of Donbas, Ukraine's government is providing funeral services for soldiers killed in the fighting, and benefits for family members left behind. One such soldier, 26-year-old Serhiy Marchenko, was fighting in an artillery squad in the Donetsk region when he was killed on July 28. At the cemetery in Pokrovsk, a small group of his relatives stood by his closed coffin, draped in a Ukrainian flag, as a priest in a blue vestment wafted the smoke of incense from a golden censer part of an Orthodox funeral rite. The grieving family members jumped as gunshots rang out in the cemetery from three Ukrainian soldiers performing a three-volley salute in honor of the dead. As the priest finished the rites, Lilia, Panchenko's mother, brushed flies off her sons face with an embroidered handkerchief until it was time to cover his body and lower the coffin into the grave. Wait, just wait! she cried as family members pulled her away, before the coffin was finally closed. Panchenko's daughter, Ruslana, said he was an experienced soldier and squad commander who volunteered for the front line after hearing of alleged Russian atrocities in Irpin and Bucha, suburbs of the capital Kyiv. He was killed on July 27 after serving nearly five months on the front, she said, and was the only survivor in his unit after heavy fighting in Zolote in the Luhansk region. He said it's time to kick (the Russians) out, she said. He didn't want to sit still. He wanted to defend and he was not afraid. ___ Follow APs coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) A lightning strike at an outdoors educator course in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming killed one student and injured another, officials said Thursday. The group with the National Outdoor Leadership School was just days into their trip and had set up camp near Enos Lake, south of Yellowstone National Park, when a thunderstorm moved into the area Tuesday evening. John D. Murphy, 22, of Boston, died of cardiac arrest because of the lightning strike, Teton County Coroner Brent Blue said Thursday. Blue did not know if the lightning struck Murphy directly or passed through something else to him. The injured student was flown to an Idaho hospital for treatment and released Wednesday, Shana Tarter, the school's associate director for wilderness medicine, told the Jackson Hole News & Guide. Nine other students, three instructors and two search and rescue members stayed the night in the back country after the lightning strike, school officials said. Two people at the course who didn't think they were capable of doing the 12-mile (19-kilometer) hike from the lake to the trailhead were flown out by helicopter Wednesday morning and the rest of the group hiked out, said Matt Hansen with Teton County Search and Rescue. National Outdoor Leadership School President Terry Watson in a statement called the lightning strike a a very sad day" for the school, its students and their families. We extend our deepest condolences to the family of our student who passed away on this course and are focused on supporting their family through its difficult process," she said. The nonprofit global wilderness school based in Lander, Wyoming, teaches students to become outdoors educators. More than 330,000 students have graduated and there have been 13 deaths at school events during its 57-year history, the school said. A 20-year-old man training with the school in 2011 fell down a 300-foot (91 meter) ravine into a river while backpacking in India during rainy conditions. His mother filed a lawsuit against the school, but a Wyoming judge ruled that the contract the man signed releasing the school from liability prevented his survivors from suing the school. MILFORD The Planning and Zoning Board moved to opt out of a state law allowing accessory dwelling units on lots accompanying single-family homes. The board, at its meeting Tuesday, voted to opt out of the state PA 21-29, which allows accessory apartments in residential districts as the state now defines it, as a right starting Jan. 1, 2023. The Board of Aldermen now must also vote on whether to opt out of the coming law. The decision, however, does not mean the board is moving to craft its own regulations to allow such units, which all agree would help meet a substantial need within the community. Several people spoke during what was a continuation of a public hearing on this issue in favor of the units. Many said they supported the city opting into the state legislation, but asked that if the city does decide to opt out the board make regulation changes to allow homeowners to create these units. The city desperately needs (ADUs), said Theresa Eke of Point Beach Drive. Rachel Merva of Dart Hill Road agreed, saying that the high apartment rental costs are forcing out elderly and young people, and the present accessory dwelling regulations are too restrictive. The most restrictive aspects, according to those speaking in favor of more access, are rules calling for such units in single-family homes to be used only by relatives who need support or need to be near family members for assistance. Sarah Bromley said the state is facing a housing crisis, and Milford is no exception. The (state) legislation addresses a substantial need in Milford, board Chair Jim Quish said. It enables our elderly and young people to have a way to stay in town. It is also an opportunity for citizens to build wealth. But there are problems with the legislation. Quish said by opting out the board can create its own regulation and maintain local control over its implementation. There is potential for irrevocable harm to Milford if we do not opt out, Quish said. We do not want to be handcuffed by the state regulations. City Planner David Sulkis said between 100 and 200 such units exist under the present regulations. If the board had chosen to opt-in to the state legislation there could be potentially thousands of potential accessory dwelling units. By opting out, we keep local control over our planning destiny, said Mayor Ben Blake. If you dont opt out, you give control to the state of Connecticut, which would be harmful to Milford. Do we need to update the zoning regulations? Absolutely. Do we need to address accessory dwelling units? Absolutely. You could mirror your regulations after the state legislation, but then we could fix this ourselves. If you do not opt out, and the state plan goes into effect, it is there forever, and we cant fix any problems. State Rep. Kathy Kennedy said Milford does need more diversity in housing stock, but the states plan does not address affordability, which many who spoke in favor of the act used as a reason for its implementation. I will fight against state-mandated control, Kennedy added. We need to maintain local control. Quish said this issue is already in the hands of a board subcommittee, which will create the new language. The state passed PA 21-29 because legislators are trying to achieve more housing, but it doesnt have to be affordable, added Sulkis. Their goal is to create more housing, in a state thats viewed not to have enough housing to meet demand, he said. brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate BEIRUT - On a nationwide day of mourning, Beirut's port burned. The calm of chirping birds and lapping waters on Thursday was broken by the periodic snap of the flames attacking the silos on Lebanon's waterfront. It was two years to the day after a fire in a hangar at the port triggered one of history's largest nonnuclear explosions, a blast that killed 200 people and leveled vast swaths of the capital. The current fire is triggering anger and fear here, especially among the families of the victims and those who live near the port, recalling one of the worst days of their lives. Family members, activists and others were marching to an overlook to mark the anniversary and again demand justice and accountability when parts of the silos began to fall. Grains stored in the silos had been baking under a broiling sun and intense humidity, fermenting and toasting. Three weeks ago, the oils from the grains sparked a fire, which has been growing and licking the gutted sides of some of the 157-foot-tall structures ever since. On Sunday, four of 16 silos in the port's northern bloc began collapsing. On Thursday, the flames continued to weaken the structures. Four more silos leaned to the side and then fell, throwing up a cloud of sand-colored dust a few hundred feet away from the marchers. Emmanuel Durand, a French civil engineer who has volunteered to work alongside rescuers to monitor the structure, said the southern bloc is structurally sound. Those silos were built later, are in better condition, have stronger foundations and were mostly empty at the time of the 2020 blast, he said. There is no fire burning there. "The measurements by both laser scanning and inclinometers show that it is stable," he said. In April, the government, fearing the grain silos would all eventually collapse, announced that it had ordered their demolition. But activists and some families of victims have argued against the move, calling instead for their preservation as a memorial site. Their protest is symbolic of the outcry over a disrupted pursuit of justice: Activists, members of parliament and others are demanding the silos be left alone until an independent investigation of the causes of the blast is conducted. A judicial probe that began in 2020 has come to a slow halt: The first judge leading the investigation charged four officials with negligence for ignoring 2,750 tons of highly combustible ammonium nitrate for six years, during which time the material was stored on the waterfront in a warehouse alongside fireworks and paint thinners, on the edge of a crowded city. The judge was dismissed from the case after two of the former ministers he charged filed a complaint, alleging that he had demonstrated a lack of neutrality in choosing prominent figures to charge to appease an angry public. The judge that followed him, Judge Tarek Bitar, faced resistance from officials whom he tried to question, who argued they have immunity or that he lacks authority. They flooded the courts with complaints seeking his removal. His work has been suspended as a result: The courts that are set to rule on the complaints are on hiatus amid the retirement of judges. "Our demands are clear," said Najat Saliba, an atmospheric chemist and newly elected member of parliament. "And the top demand is the independence of the judiciary so that people at least feel that the victims and their souls didn't go to waste." Saliba won a seat in parliament in May as part of a group of new independent candidates dubbed "the forces of change." They have capitalized on a demand for new voices in a legislature ruled for decades largely by aging men from a few families. Saliba said that the silos must stand as witnesses to the disaster and that the stable ones should not be touched until justice is achieved. "The government is saying there is an economic loss over the lost basin area," she told The Washington Post. But the priority, she said, is delivering justice to the families. "We are telling [ministers], no matter what happens, the silos will have to remain straight and up," she said. "They remain so that they are a testimony of our collective memory." Thousands gathered Thursday on a bridge overlooking the port. At 6:07 p.m., the time of the explosion, they observed a moment of silence. Then, as helicopters in the background tipped containers of water over the smoldering remains of the newly fallen silos, the mother of a victim addressed the crowd. "We want to know the truth. It's our right to know those who are responsible for this horrendous crime are held accountable!" Mireille Khoury yelled into a microphone. Her son Elias, 15, was killed in the blast. "It was the right of my son and all the victims to live and to be safe," she said, her voice breaking at the word "safe." Men and women, standing underneath a large Lebanese flag marked with red splotches to represent the blood of those lost, wept silently. A woman led the gathering in an oath. "I swear by their pure blood, by the tears of mothers and siblings and fathers and children and elders," she read from a statement, "that we will not despair, we will not acquiesce, we will not comply, we will not retreat, we will not indulge, we will not underestimate. We are here, and here we will stay until the end of time." With each promise, listeners with upraised arms repeated the words "I swear." Earlier Thursday, some family members visited the port to pay their respects to the dead. Port security officers seemed unruffled by the weight of the day - some expressed annoyance at the attention the silos and port are still receiving. But others felt differently. One soldier stood guard amid mounds of dented metal crates, thick tangled rope and wrecked cars, rusted aerosol cans and curtain rods still in their packaging. Three ships that had been in the port when the blast occurred are still there, lying on their sides. One vessel, thrown clear out of the water, sits rusting on concrete. The soldier, asked whether the mountains of wreckage towering over him was all from the explosion, nodded. "And it will stay," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. "Look at it. It's a mountain of garbage. Who's going to remove it?" Asked whether he knew of plans to clear the site, he shook his head. "Who can afford it?" The soldier lost a friend in the blast, a comrade who was stationed close to the silos. "When we found his vehicle, it was this big," he said, holding his hands about 20 inches apart. He had no opinion on whether the southern block should be kept as a memorial or demolished. He said it didn't feel weird to work so close to a place where he lost a friend. "You get used to it. It's life," he said. "Those who can't are the families. For example, I knew him for one year. They lost their son." WARSAW, Poland (AP) The Polish foreign ministry on Thursday summoned the Belarusian charge daffaires to express its concerns after a journalist who had worked for Polish media was sentenced to five years in prison by a court in Belarus. Ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina said that Polands concerns over the treatment of journalists and the Polish minority in Belarus were raised at the meeting. The journalist, Iryna Slaunikava, was sentenced on Wednesday. Her arrest last year came amid a larger crackdown on independent media following mass protests against a disputed 2020 election. The country's election commission gave a sixth term to President Alexander Lukashenko in a vote widely viewed as rigged. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the conviction of Slaunikava another example of the deeply cynical and vindictive nature of the Belarusian government. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader, tweeted on Wednesday that she felt both sad & angry at the sentencing. We must do everything to support our independent journalists who risk all to report the truth, said Tsikhanouskaya, who lives outside of Belarus. Jasina said that the Belarusian diplomat told Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau that his government views Poland's complaints as interference in Belarus' internal affairs. Slaunikava had worked in the past for Belsat, a Polish state-funded station that broadcasts news into Belarus. She was found guilty of organizing or participating in gross violations of public order and creating an extremist group, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, citing media reports and human rights officials. The Polish minority in Belarus, which is represented by a union independent of the Minsk government, has also been a target of repression under Lukashenko, exacerbating tensions between the neighbors. Sheriff ARRESTS, CITATIONS Ceola A. Gardner, 32, of 328 E. Independence Ave. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 4:57 p.m. Friday on a charge of possession of methamphetamine. Dylan A. Donovan, 29, of Robertsville, Missouri, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 9:15 p.m. Monday on a charge of driving while license is revoked. Jacksonville Police ARRESTS, CITATIONS Derrick Turner, 40, of 1325 S. Fourth St., Springfield, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 4:53 a.m. Saturday on charges of driving while license is suspended, operating an uninsured motor vehicle and having no valid registration. Samantha K. Milburn, 25, of 1605 W. Lakeview Terrace South was arrested at 12:25 a.m. Wednesday on charges of retail theft and criminal trespassing. She also was arrested on a Morgan County warrant accusing her of failing to appear in court on a charge of retail theft with prior conviction. ACCIDENTS Kyli M. Schofield, 28, of Jacksonville was cited on a charge of following too closely after the car she was driving and one being driven by Michael S. Ruyle, 59, of Chatham collided at 2:50 p.m. Wednesday at Hardin and East Morton avenues. Shinte R. Moeller, 37, of Beardstown was cited at 10:55 p.m. Tuesday on a charge of improper lane use after the car she was driving left the road in the 800 block of North Independence Avenue and hit a school crossing sign. THEFTS, BURGLARIES A side-by-side ATV was stolen from Henry's Service Center, 2244 W. Morton Ave., about 3:30 a.m. July 27, according to a report filed at 9:16 a.m. Wednesday. Cass County Sheriff ARRESTS, CITATIONS Herbert Triggs, 48, of 231 E. Adams St., Virginia, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 5:50 p.m. Friday on charges of driving under the influence, improper lane use and use of an electronic communication device. In 1922, Frederick Palmers postulated that there are 36 plots on which all stories are based. Christopher Booker did similar research in 2005 and revealed only seven basic plots. Some stories are worth retelling and the following titles are retellings of classic novels and fairy tales. Adults Inspiration strikes author Sam DuChamp and he creates his character, Quichotte, a salesman, who embarks on a quest to claim the hand of a television star. Quichotte by Salman Rushdie is an homage to Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote. Cinderella by Charles Perrault was never like this. Cindy works for her stepmother, the executive producer of a reality television show. When a spot on the show opens up, Cindy sees it as an opportunity to start her career in fashion. Instead, she finds herself in the role of a body positivity icon. If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy retells Cinderella as Cindy learns to find love and individuality. Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin tells the story of Ayesha, who has accepted a teaching job to enable her to repay her debts. Her conservative family speaks of arranged marriage, which is not what Aeysha is looking for. When Khalid enters her life, she is both attracted and annoyed by him, but her family thinks he is perfect for her cousin. Rumors arise about Khalids family, and Aeysha discovers the truth about him and herself. Ayesha at Last is loosely based on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The first title in the Charlotte Holmes series by Brittany Cavallart, A Study in Charlotte, is based on the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Charlotte is the three-time great granddaughter of the legendary Sherlock Holmes. Her reputation as a hot-head has preceded her, and the new student, Jamie Watson, wants nothing to do with her. When the two are framed for the murder of a student at their school, Jamie must trust Charlotte to find the clues to prove their innocence. A modern representation of The Odyssey by Homer, An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma, is narrated by the spirit of a man who saves a womans life. The two fall in love but cannot marry because they are not equals. Efforts to better himself are thwarted and the man is forced further away from the life he is trying to build. Based on The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo is told from the perspective of a friend of Jay Gatsby and his wife Daisy. Jordan Baker is beautiful, educated and wealthy. She is also learning to navigate a world where many doors will remain closed, using her wits and her magic. Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor is also based on The Great Gatsby. Three women are suspected in Jay Gatsbys death. Told from their viewpoints, the events leading up to that fateful day are revisited, revealing their motives. Join Mr. Knightly, his wife Emma, George Wickham, and the rest of the gang for an unforgettable summer party! The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray brings together Jane Austens characters for a delicious murder mystery. Everyone dislikes George Wickham, and all are suspects when he is found murdered. Its up to young Juliet Tilney and Jonathon Darcy to follow the clues and reveal the murderer. Young adults After killing a wolf while out hunting, Feyre must face the consequences when she is taken to a place only known from legend. Once there, she finds a world quite different from what shes been told and begins to adapt to her surroundings. But a menace is approaching and threatening everything she now holds dear. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah Maas brings to life a fascinating retelling of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuves Beauty and the Beast. Journey down the yellow brick road once again in Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige, based on The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Amy Gumm is an average teenager living in Kansas when her trailer is swept up in a tornado and deposited in Oz. And nothing is the same. Dorothy has found her way back to Oz and seized power. Amy must work with others who have resisted to set things right in the magical land. The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh is a retelling of The Arabian Nights, where each day a new bride is taken and each night her life ends. When her best friend is taken to be a bride to the Caliph of Khorasan, Khalid, Shahrzad volunteers to be next and uses her storytelling skills to enchant the Caliph. Things are not as they seem at the palace, and Shahrzad must discover the truth to save the man she now loves. Witnessing a demon attack on campus, underground figures who call themselves Merlins must act quickly to keep Bree silent. The attempt has freed Brees own magical abilities, and she now knows her mothers death was no accident. Bree and her friend Nick pose as initiates to break up this group of mages. Once inside, they learn there is a magic war looming and the descendants of King Arthurs knights must stop it. What will Bree do? Bring down the mages to find the truth about her mother? Or join the fight? Legendborn by Tracy Deonn brings the King Arthur legends back to life. The Manistee County online catalog has these and other titles at manisteelibrary.org. BISBEE, Ariz. (AP) MJ was a tiny, black-haired girl, just 5 years old, when her father admitted to his bishop that he was sexually abusing her. The father, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an admitted pornography addict, was in counseling with his bishop when he revealed the abuse. The bishop, who was also a family physician, followed church policy and called what church officials have dubbed the help line for guidance. But the call offered little help for MJ. Lawyers for the church, widely known as the Mormon church, who staff the help line around the clock told Bishop John Herrod not to call police or child welfare officials. Instead he kept the abuse secret. They said, You absolutely can do nothing, Herrod said in a recorded interview with law enforcement. Herrod continued to counsel MJs father, Paul Douglas Adams, for another year, and brought in Adams wife, Leizza Adams, in hopes she would do something to protect the children. She didnt. Herrod later told a second bishop, who also kept the matter secret after consulting with church officials who maintain that the bishops were excused from reporting the abuse to police under the states so-called clergy-penitent privilege. Adams continued raping MJ for as many as seven more years, into her adolescence, and also abused her infant sister, who was born during that time. He frequently recorded the abuse on video and posted the video on the internet. Adams was finally arrested by Homeland Security agents in 2017 with no help from the church, after law enforcement officials in New Zealand discovered one of the videos. He died by suicide in custody before he could stand trial. The Associated Press has obtained nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records from an unrelated child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon church in West Virginia. The documents offer the most detailed and comprehensive look yet at the so-called help line Herrod called. Families of survivors who filed the lawsuit said they show its part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harms way. The help line has been criticized by abuse victims and their attorneys for being inadequate to quickly stop abuse and protect victims. Yet the Utah-based faith has stuck by the system despite the criticism and increasing scrutiny from attorneys and prosecutors, including those in the Adams case. I just think that the Mormon church really sucks. Seriously sucks, said MJ, who is now 16, during an interview with the AP. They are just the worst type of people, from what Ive experienced and what other people have also experienced. MJ and her adoptive mother asked the AP to use only her initials in part because videos of her abuse posted by her father are still circulating on the internet. The AP does not publish the names of sexual abuse survivors without their consent. William Maledon, an Arizona attorney representing the bishops and the church in a lawsuit filed by three of the Adams six children, told the AP last month that the bishops were not required to report the abuse. These bishops did nothing wrong. They didnt violate the law, and therefore they cant be held liable, he said. Maledon referred to the suit as a money grab. In his AP interview, Maledon also insisted Herrod did not know that Adams was continuing to sexually assault his daughter after learning of the abuse in a single counseling session. But in the recorded interview with the agent obtained by the AP, Herrod said he asked Leizza Adams in multiple sessions if the abuse was ongoing and asked her, What are we going to do to stop it? At least for a period of time I assumed they had stopped things, but and then I never asked if they picked up again. THE PERFECT LIFESTYLE The Adams family lived on a lonely dirt road about 8 miles from the center of Bisbee, an old copper-mining town in southeastern Arizona known today for its antique shops and laid-back attitude. Far from prying eyes, the Adams home a three-bedroom, open concept affair surrounded by desert was often littered with piles of clothing and containers of lubricant Adams used to sexually abuse his children, according to legal documents reviewed by the AP. Pauls wife, Leizza, assumed most of the child-rearing responsibilities, including getting their six children off to school and chauffeuring them to church and religious instruction on Sundays. Paul, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol, spent much of his time online looking at porn, often with his children watching, or wandering the house naked or in nothing but his underwear. He had a short fuse and would frequently throw things, yell at his wife and beat his kids. He just had this explosive personality, said Shaunice Warr, a Border Patrol agent and a Mormon who worked with Paul and described herself as Leizzas best friend. He had a horrible temper. Paul was more relaxed while coaxing his older daughter to hold a smartphone camera and record him while he sexually abused her. He also seemed to revel in the abuse in online chat rooms, where he once bragged that he had the perfect lifestyle because he could have sex with his daughters whenever he pleased, while his wife knew and doesnt care. He would later tell investigators the abuse was a compulsion he couldnt stop. I got into something too deep that I just couldnt pull myself out of, he said. Im not trying to say the devil made me do it. The Adams family was deeply involved in the Mormon community, and on Sundays they attended services in Bisbee. So Adams turned to his church, and to Bishop Herrod, when he sought help and revealed his abuse of MJ. Herrod later told Homeland Security agent Robert Edwards he knew from the start that Leizza Adams was unlikely to stop her husband, after he called her into the counseling sessions. The bishop, who was also Leizzas personal physician, said she seemed pretty emotionally dead when her husband recounted his abuse of their daughter. The bishop also recognized the harm being done to MJ. I doubt (she) will ever do well, he said in his recorded interview with Homeland Security agents. Herrod also told Edwards that when he called the help line, church officials told him the states clergy-penitent privilege required him to keep Adamss abuse confidential. But the law required no such thing. Arizonas child sex abuse reporting law, and similar laws in more than 20 states that require clergy to report child sex abuse and neglect, says that clergy, physicians, nurses, or anyone caring for a child who reasonably believes a child has been abused or neglected has a legal obligation to report the information to police or the state Department of Child Safety. But it also says that clergy who receive information about child neglect or sexual abuse during spiritual confessions may withhold that information from authorities if the clergy determine it is reasonable and necessary under church doctrine. In 2012, when Herrod rotated out of his position as bishop of the Bisbee ward a Mormon jurisdiction similar to a Catholic parish he told incoming Bishop Robert Kim Mauzy about the abuse in the Adams household. Instead of rescuing MJ by reporting the abuse to authorities, Mauzy also kept the information within the church. In a separate recorded interview with federal agents obtained by the AP, Mauzy said church officials told him he should convene a confidential disciplinary hearing for Adams, after which Adams was ex-communicated in 2013. Mauzy and other church leaders still didnt report Adams to the police. Two years later, in 2015, Leizza Adams gave birth to a second daughter. It took her husband just six weeks to start sexually assaulting her, recording the abuse, and uploading the videos to the internet. The revelation that Mormon officials may have directed an effort to conceal years of abuse in the Adams household sparked a criminal investigation of the church by Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre, and the civil lawsuit by three of the Adams children. Whos really responsible for Herrod not disclosing? McIntyre asked in an AP interview. Is it Herrod, who says he followed the church lawyers instruction not to report the abuse to authorities? Or is it the people who gave him that advice? THE CALL COMES TO MY CELL PHONE When it comes to child sexual abuse, the Mormon church says the first responsibility of the church in abuse cases is to help those who have been abused and protect those who may be vulnerable to future abuse, according to its 2010 handbook for church leaders. The handbook also says, Abuse cannot be tolerated in any form. But church officials, from the bishops in the Bisbee ward to officials in Salt Lake City, tolerated abuse in the Adams family for years. They just let it keep happening, said MJ, in her AP interview. They just said, Hey, lets excommunicate her father. It didnt stop. Lets have them do therapy. It didnt stop. Hey, lets forgive and forget and all this will go away. It didnt go away. A similar dynamic played out in West Virginia, where church leaders were accused of covering up the crimes committed by a young abuser from a prominent Mormon family even after hed been convicted on child sex abuse charges in Utah. The abuser, Michael Jensen, today is serving a 35- to 75-year prison sentence for abusing two children in West Virginia. Their family, along with others, sued the church and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Child abuse festers and grows in secrecy, said Lynne Cadigan, a lawyer for the Adams children who filed suit. That is why the mandatory reporting came into effect. Its the most important thing in the world to immediately report to the police. The lawsuit filed by the three Adams children accuses The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and several members, including Bishops Herrod and Mauzy, of negligence and conspiring to cover up child sex abuse to avoid costly lawsuits and protect the reputation of the church, which relies on proselytizing and tithing to attract new members and raise money. In 2020, the church claimed approximately 16 million members worldwide, most of them living outside the United States. The failure to prevent or report abuse was part of the policy of the defendants, which was to block public disclosure to avoid scandals, to avoid the disclosure of their tolerance of child sexual molestation and assault, to preserve a false appearance of propriety, and to avoid investigation and action by public authority, including law enforcement, the suit alleges. Plaintiffs are informed and believe that such actions were motivated by a desire to protect the reputation of the defendants. Very few of the scores of lawsuits against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mention the help line, in part because details of its operations have been a closely guarded secret. The documents in the sealed court records show how it works. The help line is certainly there to help to help the church keep its secrets and to cover up abuse, said Craig Vernon, an Idaho attorney who has filed several sex abuse lawsuits against the church. Vernon, a former member, routinely demands that the church require bishops to report sex abuse to police or state authorities rather than the help line. The sealed records say calls to the help line are answered by social workers or professional counselors who determine whether the information they receive is serious enough to be referred to an attorney with Kirton McConkie, a Salt Lake City firm that represents the church. A document with the heading Protocol for abuse help line calls, which was among the sealed records obtained by the AP, laid out the questions social workers were to ask before determining whether the calls should be referred to the lawyers. Mormon officials in the West Virginia case said they did not recognize the Protocol and could not authenticate it. But a ranking church official in a separate sex abuse lawsuit in Oregon confirmed that those answering the help line used a written protocol to guide them. There would be a page containing various topics to discuss and handle, said Harold C. Brown, then director of the churchs Welfare Services Department. The Protocol instructs those staffing the help line to tell callers they are to use first names only. No identifying information should be given. Under the heading High Risk Cases, it also instructs staffers to ask a series of questions, including whether calls concerned possible abuse by a church leader, an employee, or abuse at a church-sponsored activity. The protocol advises those taking the calls to instruct a priesthood leader, which includes bishops and stake presidents, to encourage the perpetrator, the victim, or others who know of the abuse to report it. But it also says, in capital letters, that those taking the calls should never advise a priesthood leader to report abuse. Counsel of this nature should come only from legal counsel. That counsel comes from attorneys from Kirton McConkie, which represents the church. Joseph Osmond, one of the Kirton McConkie lawyers assigned to take help line calls, said in a sealed deposition that hes always ready to deal with sex abuse complaints. Wherever I am. The call comes to my cell phone, he said. He then acknowledged that he did not refer calls to a social worker and wouldnt know how to do so. Osmond declined to comment through church officials. Peter Schofield, a Kirton McConkie lawyer long associated with the help line, also declined to answer questions from the AP. Maledon, the attorney for the church in the Adams lawsuit, said church clergy or church attorneys have made hundreds of reports of child abuse to civil authorities in Arizona over an unspecified number of years. But he could not say how many calls to the help line were not referred to police or child welfare officials and could not provide a referral rate. Two church practices, identified in the sealed records, work together to ensure that the contents of all help lines calls remain confidential. First, all records of calls to the help line are routinely destroyed. Those notes are destroyed by the end of every day, said Roger Van Komen, the churchs director of Family Services, in an affidavit included in the sealed records. Second, church officials say that all calls referred to Kirton McConkie lawyers are covered by attorney-client privilege and remain out of the reach of prosecutors and victims attorneys. The church has always regarded those communications between its lawyers and local leaders as attorney-client privileged, said Paul Rytting, the director of Risk Management, in a sealed affidavit. AN OMINOUS TIME Mormon leaders established the help line in 1995 and it operated not within its Department of Family Services, but instead in its Office of Risk Management, whose role is to protect the church and members from injury and liability in an array of circumstances, including fires, explosions, hazardous chemical spills and severe weather. The department ultimately reports to the First Presidency, the three officials at the very top of the church hierarchy, according to records in the sealed documents. Risk management also tracks all sex abuse lawsuits against the church, according to a sealed affidavit by Dwayne Liddell, a past director of the department who helped establish the help line. He said members of the churchs First Presidency knew the details of the help line. I have been in those type of meetings where ... the training of ecclesiastical leaders (and) the establishment of a help line have been discussed, Liddell said. When asked who attended the meetings, he answered, Members of the First Presidency and the presiding bishopric, or the top leaders of the church. Before establishing the help line in 1995, the Mormon church simply instructed bishops to comply with local child sex abuse reporting laws. At the time, child sex abuse lawsuits were on the rise and juries were awarding victims millions of dollars. The Mormon church is largely self-insured, leaving it especially vulnerable to costly lawsuits. There is nothing inconsistent between identifying cases that may pose litigation risks to the church and complying with reporting obligations, church lawyers said in a sealed legal filing. But one affidavit in the sealed records which repeatedly says the church condemns child sexual abuse, also suggests the church is more concerned about the spiritual well-being of perpetrators than the physical and emotional well-being of young victims, who also may be members of the faith. Disciplinary proceedings are subject to the highest confidentiality possible, said Rytting. If members had any concerns that their disciplinary files could be read by a secular judge or attorneys or be presented to a jury as evidence in a public trial, their willingness to confess and repent and for their souls to be saved would be seriously compromised. A GLOBAL INVESTIGATION In 2016 police in New Zealand arrested a 47-year-old farm worker on child pornography charges and found a nine-minute video on his cell phone, downloaded from the internet, showing a man in his 30s raping a 10-year-old girl. A global search for the rapist and his victim was on. It started with Interpol and led to the U.S. State Department, where investigators using facial recognition technology matched the rapist with a passport card photo of a U.S. Border Patrol employee living in Bisbee, Arizona, according to a Homeland Security synopsis obtained by the AP. Agents rushed to the Naco, Arizona, Border Station and arrested Adams, then a lanky, bearded mission support specialist with the Border Patrol. After some coaxing, Adams admitted to raping MJ and to sexually assaulting her younger sister, and to posting video of the assaults on the internet. When agents raided his home, they seized phones and computers holding more than 4,000 photos and nearly 1,000 videos depicting child sex abuse, many featuring the Adams daughters. But the nine-minute video stood out. This video is one of the worst Ive ever seen, Homeland Security agent Edwards later testified, adding that haunting dialogue between Adams and his older daughter helped make the video stand out in my mind and continue to stand out in my mind. That video represented nine minutes and 14 seconds in seven years of continual and unnecessary trauma for MJ and a lifetime of abuse for her tiny sister while Bishops Herrod and Mauzy and church representatives in Salt Lake City stood by. After Paul Adams died by suicide, Leizza Adams pleaded no contest to child sex abuse charges and served two-and-a-half years in state prison. Three of the Adams children went to live with members of Leizzas extended family in California. The other three were taken in by local families. THE SURVIVORS MJs little sister was only 2 when she met her adoptive mother for the first time. The toddler wrapped her arms and legs around Miranda Whitworths head, buried her face in her neck, and refused to look up to say good-bye to members of Leizzas family. It was the craziest thing, said Whitworth who, with her husband, Matthew, welcomed the toddler into their family. It was like when you see a baby monkey or baby gorilla cling to their mother, and they just wont let go. Over the next few days and weeks, the Whitworths would see additional markers of the unfathomable abuse the toddler endured at the hands of her father much of it recorded on video. She would howl in terror when any man attempted to touch her, whether it was Matthew or the family physician. The nurse was fine but the minute the doctor walked in she climbed onto me and started screaming bloody murder, Miranda said. The 2-year-old was also terrified of the water, which made bathing an ear-splitting ordeal. She wouldnt tolerate anything wrapped around her wrists. And at church, she would run and hide behind Miranda whenever anyone greeted her by an old family nickname. When they took in the toddler, neither Miranda nor Matthew knew very much about what had happened to her. But while sitting in on Leizza Adamss sentencing hearing, they learned about the repeated rapes, the videos, and the fact that church bishops knew about the abuse of the older daughter and did nothing to stop it. The Whitworths were converts to the Mormon faith and, like many new followers of a religion, they were especially enthusiastic about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In particular, they appreciated the efforts Mormons make to help fellow church members in times of need through church organizations established to give special attention to women, teens and children. Its all about family, Miranda said. Thats one of the things we absolutely loved. But after learning about what Adams did to their new daughter, and the failure of the church to stop him, the scales fell from their eyes. We decided to remove our records from the church, said Matthew Whitworth. I personally couldnt continue to provide tithing money to a church that would allow young children to be abused and not do anything to prevent it. Unlike the Whitworths, Nancy Salminen has never been a member of the Mormon church. But as a special needs teacher and a rape victim herself, she has a special affinity for MJ and others like her. Over the last five years, she has opened her home to 17 girls and boys who needed a safe place to stay. Her house is a modest, ranch-style structure she bought out of foreclosure. Everythings a little broken here and thats perfect because so are we, she said. Salminen said she met MJ after receiving an urgent call on a Friday evening to rescue a 12-year-old from another family. She was pretty scared and pretty confused when I picked her up, Salminen recalled. She spent a lot of time in her closet in her room when we got home, but we got to know each other and got to like each other. Like the Whitworths, Salminen knew very little about what MJ had endured until Leizza Adamss sentencing hearing. What I heard made me want to throw up, she said. And the more I learned the more I wanted to help her fight this fight that she didnt even know about. Safely settled in Salminens household which today includes a foster girl Salminen also plans to adopt MJ has been transformed from a victim of unimaginable abuse to a bubbly 16-year-old who plays in the high school band and proudly dons a crisp, new uniform for her job at a fast-food restaurant. She had every excuse to fail and to just fold into herself and run away, Salminen said. But instead, she came back stronger than anyone Ive ever known. So strong that she appears eager to play an active role in the battle she and her two siblings are waging against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I just want them to do what theyre supposed to do and report to the police, MJ said. The adoptive parents of the third Adams child who has filed suit declined to speak to the AP about the case. Like MJ, Miranda and Matthew Whitworth said they joined the lawsuit against the church on behalf of their young daughter not in hopes of a payday, but to change church policy so that any instance of child sexual abuse is immediately reported to civil authorities. We just dont understand why theyre paying all these lawyers to fight this, Matthew Whitworth said. Just change the policy. THE PRIVILEGE That policy is the key to the churchs defense. In a recent filing asking a Superior Court judge to dismiss the case, Maledon and other lawyers for the church said the case hinges entirely on whether Arizonas child abuse reporting statute required two church bishops ... to report to authorities confidential confessions made to them by plaintiffs father. Whatever moral or public policy arguments one could make that the church should have told authorities that Paul Adams was raping his daughters are irrelevant, the lawyers argued. Arizonas reporting statute broadly exempts confidential communications with clergy, as determined by the clergyman himself, according to the church motion to dismiss the case. Reasonable people can debate whether this is the best public policy choice. But that is not an issue for a jury or this court. Bishop Herrod, in his recorded interview, said church officials told him he had to keep what Adams told him confidential or he could be sued if he went to authorities. But McIntyre, the Cochise County attorney, said thats false, noting the Arizona reporting law says that anyone reporting a belief that child sex abuse occurred is immune from any civil or criminal liability. Aside from the legal arguments over whether Bishops Herrod and Mauzy were excused from their reporting obligations under the clergy-penitent privilege, critics of the inaction by the two bishops and the broader church have raised ethical issues. Gerard Moretz, a seasoned child sex abuse investigator for the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriffs Department and an expert witness for the Adams children, is one of them. What aspect of your religious practice are you advancing if you dont report something like this? he asked. ___ Associated Press editor Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this story. To contact the AP's investigations team, email investigative@ap.org. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) The government of the Solomon Islands has taken tighter control over the nation's state-owned broadcaster a move that opponents say is squarely aimed at controlling and censoring the news. The government said Friday that the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, known as SIBC, would retain editorial control and that government officials would not censor or restrain the outlet. But earlier this week, the government had lashed out at the broacaster, accusing it of a lack of ethics and professionalism and saying the government has a duty to protect our people from lies and misinformation" it said was propagated by the SIBC. In an interview with The Associated Press, Johnson Honimae, the SIBC chief executive, said he was proud of the broadcaster's award-winning journalism. He said it was business as usual for the broadcaster and there were no government censors vetting stories before they were broadcast, contrary to what was reported by some news outlets. The government's move came at a politically tumultuous time in the Solomon Islands. There were riots in the capital of Honiara last November, followed by a no-confidence vote in Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare in December, which he survived. Then in April, Sogavare signed a security pact with China that has caused deep alarm in the Pacific and around the world. The SIBC has reported those developments and has included the views of Sogavare's opponents. The broadcaster, which began as the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service, has been a fixture for 70 years in the Solomon Islands. Employing about 50 people and operating under the slogan Voice of the nation," the broadcaster is the main source of radio and television news for the nation's 700,000 people and is listened to and watched from the capital to the smallest village. In late June, the government moved to delist the SIBC as a state-owned enterprise and take more direct control, saying the broadcaster had failed to make a profit, something which has been expected of such state-owned businesses. Opposition Leader Matthew Wale said Wednesday the delisting was a scheme orchestrated by Sogavare as a clear attempt to directly control and censor the news content of SIBC. This will hijack well-entrenched principles of law on defamation and freedom-of-speech, thus depriving the public using SIBC to freely express their views, or accessing information on government activities, Wale said. Honimae told the AP that the broadcaster took critical calls from Sogavare's office in recent months. They believe we've been running too many stories from the opposition side, causing too much disunity, Honimae said. Honimae said the broadcaster and its staff won several journalism awards this year from the Media Association of Solomon Islands, including newsroom of the year and journalist of the year. He also said the broadcaster plays the national anthem when broadcasts begin each morning at 6 a.m. and again when they finish at 11 p.m. We believe we are a great force for unity and peace in this country, Honimae said. Honimae added that the broadcaster needed to balance our stories more and leave no opportunity for criticism. He said Sogavare who is also the government's broadcasting minister had said in Parliament that the government wouldn't tamper with the broadcaster's editorial independence. There is no censorship at the moment, Honimae said. We operate as professional journalists. DETROIT (AP) A Florida man who was killed in a traffic crash last month could be the 20th death in the U.S. caused by exploding Takata air bag inflators. Authorities say the driver of a 2006 Ford Ranger pickup truck was killed in a crash last month near Pensacola, Florida. The driver's air bag inflator apparently exploded, spewing shrapnel that hit the unidentified driver, a 23-year-old man. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Thursday it is working to confirm details of the crash before deciding if more action is needed. Takata used ammonium nitrate to create a small explosion to inflate air bags in a crash. But the chemical can become more volatile over time when exposed to moisture in the air and repeated high temperatures. The explosion can blow apart a metal canister and hurl shrapnel into the passenger compartment. Potential for the dangerous malfunction led to the largest series of auto recalls in U.S. history, with at least 67 million inflators recalled. The U.S. government says that millions have not been repaired. About 100 million inflators have been recalled worldwide. If the air bag is confirmed as the cause, the death would be at least the 29th worldwide caused by the inflators. Most of the deaths have been in the U.S., but they also have occurred in Australia and Malaysia. According to a Florida Highway Patrol report, the crash happened just before 6 p.m. on July 7 when a white sedan failed to yield and pulled out in front of the gray pickup truck. The driver of the Ford pickup truck died as a result of his injuries, the report said. A person who said they were a Florida Highway Patrol trooper later filed a complaint with NHTSA, saying that the driver suffered fatal injuries due to the driver's side air bag deployment. The complaint posted in the agency's database said the driver was pronounced dead at the scene after a minor traffic crash. In January of 2016, Ford recalled about 391,000 Rangers in the U.S. and Canada from the 2004 to 2006 model years to replace the drivers inflators. Before the Florida crash, two drivers had been killed. The Ranger in the Florida crash had been recalled and notices were sent out, according to Ford spokesman Said Deep, but repairs were not done. The company said it sent a representative to the owner's home in an effort to schedule recall repairs. Ford is urging all Ranger owners to get recall repairs done due to the safety risk, Deep said. The last death caused by a Takata air bag occurred in a Honda in Lancaster County, South Carolina in January of 2021. NHTSA said vehicle owners should go to the agency's website and key in their 17-digit vehicle identification number to see if there are any open recalls. The agency says people should get the free recall repairs done as soon as possible. The recalls drove Japans Takata into bankruptcy and criminal charges were brought against the company. Eventually it was purchased by a Chinese-owned auto parts supplier. ___ AP Writer Freida Frisaro contributed from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. ___ This story has been corrected to say that the Florida death apparently is the 20th in the U.S. and at least the 29th worldwide due to exploding Takata air bag inflators, not the 19th in the U.S. and 28th worldwide. POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) Ukrainian forces have exposed civilians to Russian attacks at times by basing themselves in schools, residential buildings and other places in populated areas, according to a report Amnesty International published Thursday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy angrily denounced the report, saying Amnesty International tries to amnesty the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim. If you provide manipulative reports, Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, then you share the responsibility for the death of people with them. AP journalists observed several scenes in recent weeks that mirrored the findings of Amnesty's researchers, including the aftermath of weapon strikes in eastern Ukraine where Ukrainian fighters, their vehicles or items such as ammunition were at attack sites. At two locations, the AP was told a soldier or soldiers had been killed. At a third, emergency workers blocked reporters from filming victims of a Russian strike on a residential building, which was unusual; locals said military personnel had been staying there. In a report released Thursday, Amnesty International said its researchers, between April and July, found evidence of Ukrainian forces launching strikes from within populated residential areas, as well as basing themselves in civilian buildings in 19 towns and villages in three regions. Amnesty also said it found Ukrainian forces using hospitals as military bases in five places, in a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The report noted that parties to a conflict must avoid locating, to the maximum extent feasible, military objectives within or near densely populated areas. Combatants also must remove civilians from the vicinity of military objectives and warn of possible attacks, the report said, adding that viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians, such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas. At the same time, its authors stressed that the Ukrainian militarys practice of locating military objectives within populated areas does not in any way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks. Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly asked the remaining residents of the Donetsk region to evacuate, but starting anew elsewhere is not that easy. Tens of thousands of people who left their homes since Russia's invasion have returned after running out of support or feeling unwelcome. The AP reported last week that one evacuee was killed in a missile strike two days after returning home to the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. Neighbors expressed anger that Ukrainian fighters had set up base in their residential area on the citys outskirts. As AP journalists looked at the missile crater, a uniformed fighter walked over from the adjacent plot of land and questioned their presence. In the city of Kramatorsk, closer to the front line, residents told the AP after a strike in a residential area that soldiers had been staying there. The AP saw soldiers entering and leaving a Kramatorsk apartment building hit by a separate strike. And in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, the AP saw soldiers and military vehicles at a teaching university that was hit. Soldiers and supplies also were present at a school for the disabled where a Russian strike left two craters in the schoolyard. Aside from witness accounts, Amnesty International relied on satellite imagery and remote sensing. Its researchers heard outgoing fire from nearby Ukrainian positions while examining damaged residential areas in the regions of Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Donbas. The Donbas region, which consists of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, is where the war's most intense fighting has taken place since April. The mother of a man killed in a rocket attack in a village near Mykolaiv told researchers that Ukrainian forces had stayed in a house next to theirs. The researchers found military uniforms and equipment there, according to the report. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba released a video statement denouncing the report as unfair and expressing his outrage about it. Such behavior by AI is not about seeking the truth and bringing it to the world, it is about creating a false balance between a criminal and a victim, between a country that is annihilating civilian populations by the hundreds and the thousands, (is destroying) cities and entire areas, and a country that is desperately defending itself, saving its people and the continent from this invasion, Kuleba said. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov also weighed in with a Facebook post. Any attempts to even in passing equate the unprovoked Russian aggression and Ukraine's self-defense, like it is done in the Amnesty International report, is evidence of losing adequacy and a way to destroy one's authority, Reznikov wrote. Presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, in turn, accused the group on Twitter of participating in a disinformation and propaganda campaign by Moscow to discredit Ukraine's armed forces. Russian state and pro-Kremlin media have extensively quoted the report, whose findings somewhat align with Moscows official narrative. Russia has justified attacks on civilian areas by alleging that Ukrainian fighters are setting up firing positions there. Were talking about it all the time, calling the actions of Ukraines armed forces the tactics of using the civilian population as a human shield, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram of the report. Ukrainian soldiers also have routinely based themselves in schools, Amnesty said. Even though Ukraine's schools have been closed since Russias invasion, most are near residential neighborhoods. The rights group's researchers found soldiers or evidence of military activity at 22 out of 29 schools visited. In at least three towns, after Russian bombardment of the schools, Ukrainian soldiers moved to other schools nearby, putting the surrounding neighborhoods at risk of similar attacks, the report said. The full scope of the issue is unknown. A Human Rights Watch report last month identified three occasions when Ukrainian forces were based among residential homes and four occasions when Russian forces set up military bases in populated areas of Ukraine. ___ Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine Teachers across Connecticut and America are leaving their unions in record numbers and joining two nonpolitical education associations. Constitution State Educators, a Connecticut Facebook group, can assist teachers in taking this career- and financial-enhancing step. Since 1958, teachers in Connecticut have been forced to join one of two national teachers unions and pay dues as a condition of employment, an outrage in a free country. Roughly 80 percent of the $850 paid annually by Connecticut teachers supports political activities of their state and national affiliates, virtual adjuncts of the Democratic Party. Nationally, 80 percent of union members, both public and private, oppose using dues for partisan politics. WFO BINGHAMTON Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING The National Weather Service in Binghamton has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Chemung County in central New York... Southwestern Tioga County in central New York... * Until 215 PM EDT. * At 120 PM EDT, a severe thunderstorm was located over Elmira, moving east at 15 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and half dollar size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Hail damage to vehicles is expected. Expect wind damage to roofs, siding, and trees. * Locations impacted include... Elmira, Southport, Barton, Horseheads, Waverly, Elmira Heights, Erin, Litchfield, Spencer and Wellsburg. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Heavy rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO BINGHAMTON Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING The National Weather Service in Binghamton has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Central Otsego County in central New York... * Until 430 PM EDT. * At 348 PM EDT, a severe thunderstorm was located over Hartwick, or 8 miles southwest of Cooperstown, moving northeast at 30 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and penny size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Expect damage to roofs, siding, and trees. * Locations impacted include... Middlefield, Hartwick, Cooperstown, Westville, Springfield, Westford, Milford, Laurens, Bowerstown and Elk Creek. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Heavy rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. ...A strong thunderstorm will impact portions of east central Albany and central Rensselaer Counties through 430 PM EDT... At 349 PM EDT, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorm over Delmar, moving east at 30 mph. HAZARD...Winds in excess of 40 mph and pea size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Gusty winds could knock down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. Minor damage to outdoor objects is possible. Locations impacted include... Albany, Troy, East Greenbush, Watervliet, Rensselaer, Colonie, Delmar, Guilderland, Menands, Voorheesville, Green Island, Loudonville, West Sand Lake, Center Brunswick, Wyantskill, Averill Park, Feura Bush, Wynantskill, North Greenbush and Brunswick. This includes the following highways... Interstate 90 between exits 10 and 24. Interstate 87 between exits 23 and 4. Interstate 787 between exits 1 and 9. If outdoors, consider seeking shelter inside a building. LAT...LON 4252 7391 4269 7397 4281 7347 4258 7339 TIME...MOT...LOC 1949Z 257DEG 26KT 4262 7385 MAX HAIL SIZE...0.25 IN MAX WIND GUST...40 MPH _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO BINGHAMTON Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT Special Weather Statement National Weather Service Binghamton NY 359 PM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...Strong thunderstorms will impact portions of southeastern Broome, southwestern Delaware, eastern Susquehanna, northern Lackawanna, northwestern Wayne, northern Luzerne and Wyoming Counties through 445 PM EDT... At 359 PM EDT, Doppler radar was tracking strong thunderstorms along a line extending from near Sherman to Harveys Lake. Movement was east at 20 mph. HAZARD...Wind gusts up to 40 mph and pea size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Gusty winds could knock down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. Minor damage to outdoor objects is possible. Locations impacted include... Scranton, Falls, Dunmore, Carbondale, Old Forge, Pittston, Archbald, Blakely, Taylor and Dickson City. This includes the following highway exits... Interstate 86/Route 17 between 87 and 90. Pennsylvania Interstate 81 between 175 and 223. Interstate 476 between 115 and 131. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... If outdoors, consider seeking shelter inside a building. Heavy rainfall is also occurring with these storms and may lead to localized flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. Frequent cloud to ground lightning is occurring with these storms. Lightning can strike 10 miles away from a thunderstorm. Seek a safe shelter inside a building or vehicle. These storms may intensify, so be certain to monitor local radio stations and available television stations for additional information and possible warnings from the National Weather Service. LAT...LON 4136 7625 4201 7558 4206 7496 4163 7539 4164 7546 4156 7546 4126 7575 TIME...MOT...LOC 1959Z 273DEG 18KT 4195 7545 4138 7606 MAX HAIL SIZE...0.25 IN MAX WIND GUST...40 MPH ...HEAT ADVISORY IS CANCELLED... Heat indices have dropped below criteria, therefore the advisory has been cancelled. The National Weather Service in Albany has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Southeastern Saratoga County in east central New York... Southern Washington County in east central New York... * Until 500 PM EDT. * At 400 PM EDT, a severe thunderstorm was located over Ballston Spa, or 7 miles southwest of Saratoga Springs, moving east at 30 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Hail damage to vehicles is expected. Expect wind damage to roofs, siding, and trees. * Locations impacted include... Saratoga Springs, Salem, Ballston Spa, Cambridge, Greenwich, Round Lake, Burnt Hills, Rock City Falls, Country Knolls, North Ballston Spa, Gates, Malta, Greenfield, Porter, Lee, Northumberland, Easton, Stillwater, Schuylerville and Victory. For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Please report hail size...damaging winds and reports of trees down to the National Weather Service by email at Alb.Stormreport@noaa.gov... On Facebook at www.facebook.com/nwsalbany or twitter @nwsalbany ...A strong thunderstorm will impact portions of east central Otsego and north central Delaware Counties through 415 PM EDT... At 401 PM EDT, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorm near Schenevus, or 16 miles east of Oneonta, moving east at 25 mph. HAZARD...Wind gusts up to 50 mph and pea size hail. Davenport, Worcester, Maryland, Kortright, Schenevus, Cooperstown Junction, East Meredith, Butts Corner, Fergusonville and Davenport Center. Interstate 88 between 17 and 19. Heavy rainfall is also occurring with this storm and may lead to Frequent cloud to ground lightning is occurring with this storm. LAT...LON 4238 7495 4251 7499 4262 7464 4260 7464 4255 7468 4252 7471 4242 7462 TIME...MOT...LOC 2001Z 258DEG 21KT 4250 7475 MAX WIND GUST...50 MPH _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO BUFFALO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING The National Weather Service in Buffalo has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Southeastern Allegany County in western New York... * Until 215 PM EDT. * At 127 PM EDT, a severe thunderstorm was located near Shinglehouse, or 12 miles southwest of Wellsville, moving northeast at 35 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Minor damage to vehicles is possible. Expect wind damage to trees and power lines. * Locations impacted include... Wellsville, Whitesville, Andover, Alma, Stannards and Paynesville. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Large hail, damaging winds and continuous cloud to ground lightning is occurring with this storm. Move indoors immediately. Lightning is one of nature's leading killers. Remember, if you can hear thunder, you are close enough to be struck by lightning. Torrential rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO AMARILLO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING The National Weather Service in Amarillo has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Armstrong County in the Panhandle of Texas... Southeastern Randall County in the Panhandle of Texas... Southeastern Carson County in the Panhandle of Texas... Southern Gray County in the Panhandle of Texas... Donley County in the Panhandle of Texas... * Until 600 PM CDT. * At 455 PM CDT, severe thunderstorms were located along a line extending from 7 miles north of Groom to 4 miles southwest of Goodnight to Vigo Park, moving east at 30 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Minor damage to roofs, siding, and trees is possible. Hail damage to vehicles is expected. * Locations impacted include... Clarendon, Claude, Groom, Lefors, Howardwick, Hedley, Lelia Lake, Lake Mcclellan, Wayside, Palo Duro Canyon, Goodnight, Alanreed and Greenbelt Lake. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather China firm as rock in its resolution to achieve reunification of the motherland People's Daily) 09:00, August 04, 2022 In disregard of China's strong opposition and serious representations, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited China's Taiwan region. This is a serious violation of the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiques. It has a severe impact on the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and seriously infringes upon China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. It gravely undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for "Taiwan independence". China's firm countermeasures are completely legitimate and justified. All the consequences arising therefrom must be borne by the U.S. side and the "Taiwan independence" separatist forces. Adherence to the one-China principle is the basic foundation for China to establish diplomatic relations with other countries, and constitutes a part of the post-World War II international order. It's made clear in the China-U.S. Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations that "The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People's Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China. Within this context, the people of the United States will maintain cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan." Congress is a part of the U.S. Government, and Pelosi the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. Government. They are inherently obliged to strictly observe the one-China policy of the U.S. Government and adhere to the political promises made by the U.S. side to China. China is all along opposed to the visit to Taiwan by U.S. congressional members, and the U.S. executive branch has the responsibility to stop such visit. However, the U.S., saying one thing but doing the opposite, has no integrity at all. It has reiterated that the one-China policy of the U.S. has not changed and will not change, and that the U.S. does not support "Taiwan independence." However, Pelosi insisted on visiting Taiwan in total disregard of U.S.' political promises. It further showed to the international society who's the one that's changing the status quo of the Taiwan Strait, destroying China-U.S. relations, undermining regional peace and stability and violating international order. Whoever tries to reverse the historical trend of peace and development will end up being etched into the historical pillar of shame. Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region is another dangerous act of the U.S. to distort, obscure and hollow out the one-China principle. For some time, the U.S. Government has repeated wrong acts and remarks regarding the Taiwan question, and continued to upgrade the levels of official exchanges with Taiwan. There are many people in the U.S. Government and media believing Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region will lead to major risks in the situation across the Taiwan Strait and severely impact U.S.-China relations. There are many people with vision and insight from the international society stressing that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is dangerous and irresponsible and seriously violates the basic norms governing international relations. Besides, regional countries have repeatedly urged the U.S. to eye on the bigger picture of China-U.S. relations and regional peace and stability. However, the U.S. side still gave a "green light" to Pelosi's erroneous act. On the one hand, the U.S. is promising to safeguard the stability and maintain the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, and set "guardrails" for bilateral relations; on the other hand, it is indulging Pelosi to visit Taiwan and make new troubles for China-U.S. relations. This indicates that the true intention of the U.S. is to play the Taiwan card and contain China's development with the Taiwan question. No country would compromise on issues of principles concerning territorial integrity. The one-China principle is the premise and foundation for China to develop relations with all foreign countries, and China allows no one to cross the red line. The Taiwan question concerns China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and involves China's core interests. It is the most important and sensitive issue at the core of China-U.S. relations. Doubling its efforts to contain China with the Taiwan question and further escalating the tensions in the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. will definitely pay a heavy price for its mistakes. The position of the Chinese Government and people on the Taiwan question has been consistent. It is the firm commitment of the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people to resolutely safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity. China has made a solemn statement that it will take forceful measures to thwart the interference by external forces and the separatist schemes for "Taiwan independence" if the U.S. is bent on going down the wrong path. The Chinese people always keep their word. No one should ever misestimate their firm resolve, strong will and great capability to defend state sovereignty and territorial integrity. The historical ins and outs of the Taiwan question are clear, and so are fact and the status quo that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. The Democratic Progressive Party authorities ignore the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation and the well-being of the people in Taiwan, and act as a pawn of external forces, which fully reveals their dangerous intention to seek U.S. support for their independence agenda. The Chinese nation has an honorable tradition of opposing division and safeguarding unity. Secession aimed at "Taiwan independence" is the greatest obstacle to national reunification and a grave danger to national rejuvenation. Those who forget their heritage, betray their motherland, and seek to split the country will come to no good end; they will be disdained by the people and condemned by history. Chinas reunification is a historical trend and the right path, while Taiwan independence goes against the tide of history, and it is a path to nowhere. In front of this historical trend, any attempt to seek "Taiwan independence" is doomed to failure. The will of the people is not to be defied, and the trend of the times cannot be reversed. The reunification of the motherland and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation have become a historical inevitability. The time and tide of achieving the reunification of the motherland have always been held firmly in our hands. The resolve of the Chinese Government and people to achieve reunification of the motherland is as firm as a rock, and will never change because of any individual, force or country. China firmly opposes separatist moves toward Taiwan independence and interference by external forces, and never allows any room for Taiwan independence forces in whatever form. (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) WFO EL PASO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, August 3, 2022 _____ SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT Special Weather Statement National Weather Service El Paso TX 427 PM MDT Wed Aug 3 2022 ...A strong thunderstorm will impact portions of central Hudspeth County through 500 PM MDT... At 427 PM MDT, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorm 7 miles northwest of Sierra Blanca, moving west at 10 mph. HAZARD...Winds in excess of 40 mph and nickel size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Gusty winds could knock down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. Minor damage to outdoor objects is possible. Locations impacted include... Finlay, Sunset Ranches and Round Top Mountain. This includes Interstate 10 in Texas between mile markers 91 and 100. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... If outdoors, consider seeking shelter inside a building. LAT...LON 3135 10540 3124 10533 3117 10560 3139 10567 TIME...MOT...LOC 2227Z 075DEG 9KT 3128 10542 MAX HAIL SIZE...0.88 IN MAX WIND GUST...40 MPH ...A strong thunderstorm will impact portions of central San Jacinto and southwestern Polk Counties through 600 PM CDT... At 527 PM CDT, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorm over Lake Livingston State Park, or near Livingston, moving north at 10 to 15 mph. HAZARD...Winds in excess of 40 mph. unsecured objects. Livingston, Onalaska, Coldspring, Goodrich, Lake Livingston State Park, West Livingston and Leggett. If outdoors, consider seeking shelter inside a building. Heavy rainfall is also occurring with this storm and may lead to localized flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. Frequent cloud to ground lightning is occurring with this storm. Lightning can strike 10 miles away from a thunderstorm. Seek a safe shelter inside a building or vehicle. This storm may intensify, so be certain to monitor local radio stations and available television stations for additional information and possible warnings from the National Weather Service. To report severe weather, contact your nearest law enforcement agency. They will relay your report to the National Weather Service office in League City. LAT...LON 3053 9486 3055 9512 3082 9520 3083 9483 TIME...MOT...LOC 2227Z 187DEG 19KT 3063 9500 MAX HAIL SIZE...0.00 IN _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO HOUSTON/GALVESTON Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, August 3, 2022 _____ SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT Special Weather Statement National Weather Service Houston/Galveston TX 517 PM CDT Wed Aug 3 2022 ...A strong thunderstorm will impact portions of northeastern Montgomery, southwestern San Jacinto and west central Liberty Counties through 545 PM CDT... At 516 PM CDT, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorm near Splendora, or 8 miles west of Cleveland, moving north at 5 TO 10 mph. HAZARD...Winds in excess of 40 mph. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Gusty winds could knock down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. Locations impacted include... Cleveland, Splendora, Cut And Shoot and North Cleveland. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... If outdoors, consider seeking shelter inside a building. Heavy rainfall is also occurring with this storm and may lead to localized flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. Frequent cloud to ground lightning is occurring with this storm. Lightning can strike 10 miles away from a thunderstorm. Seek a safe shelter inside a building or vehicle. This storm may intensify, so be certain to monitor local radio stations and available television stations for additional information and possible warnings from the National Weather Service. LAT...LON 3023 9511 3023 9531 3050 9536 3050 9505 TIME...MOT...LOC 2216Z 180DEG 12KT 3031 9521 MAX HAIL SIZE...0.00 IN MAX WIND GUST...40 MPH _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Canada's immigration system is entering a new era where the provinces want to have even more control than the federal government. Analysis: Canadas provinces are seeking a new deal on immigration Canada's immigration system is entering a new era where the provinces want to have even more control than the federal government. Analysis: Canadas provinces are seeking a new deal on immigration Canada's immigration system is entering a new era where the provinces want to have even more control than the federal government. Analysis: Canadas provinces are seeking a new deal on immigration Canada's immigration system is entering a new era where the provinces want to have even more control than the federal government. Kareem El-Assal Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif Sans Font Size A A On July 28, 2022, the Government of Saskatchewan released a statement that it is seeking greater control over its immigration system. The statement came on the same day Saskatchewans immigration minister Jeremy Harrison attended a meeting in New Brunswick with the rest of Canadas immigration ministers, including his federal counterpart, Sean Fraser. Discover if You Are Eligible for Canadian Immigration The biggest outcome from the meeting is the ministers agreeing to develop a multi-year Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) allocation plan by March 31, 2023. This will provide PNP allocations to each province and territory over a three-year period which will help them plan in advance to support their economic development goals. Such efforts are still not enough to supporting local economic development, say several provinces. Saskatchewan is requesting a new bilateral immigration deal with the federal government similar to the one Quebec has. Due to its unique francophone character in Canada, the province of Quebec has the most control over its immigration system among all of Canadas ten provinces and three territories. Under the Canada-Quebec Accord, signed in 1991, the province has the ability to set its own immigration levels, select all of its economic class immigrants, control temporary residence admissions, and have a say on the family and refugee classes. It also has full control over settlement funding provided to it by the federal government to service newcomers with a variety of assistance such as language training, job training, among other supports. Canadas nine other provinces and the Yukon and the Northwest Territories each have bilateral immigration agreements with the federal government. These agreements are most known for enabling the provinces and territories to operate the PNP. They also contain details on a wide range of matters, such as how the two levels of government will work together on providing immigrant settlement services. However, these agreements do not give the provinces and territories considerable authority outside of what they can do with their respective PNP. As such, Saskatchewan wants what Quebec has. Under its proposal called the Canada-Saskatchewan Immigration Accord, Saskatchewan wants sole authority over economic class immigration to the province, control over family class immigration, control over federal settlement funding, and a guaranteed PNP allocation that corresponds with Saskatchewans demographic weight within Canada. Saskatchewans current PNP allocation is 6,000 principal applicants for 2022, but it believes 13,000 spots would be fair since it would be Saskatchewans proportionate share of all immigration to Canada. The day before the June 28 meeting, Harrison, as well as his provincial counterparts from Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario submitted a joint letter to minister Fraser requesting more control over their respective immigration systems. Earlier in the week, Ontarios Immigration Monte McNaughton told CIC News he is requesting the federal government provide Ontario with greater autonomy over economic class selection. Quebecs Premier Francois Legault has also said he will seek full control over immigration to the province if he wins another majority government in provincial elections scheduled to be held by October. The requests made by Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec put the federal government under a significant deal of pressure. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) continues to struggle with application backlogs, a point which the provinces argue could be addressed by giving them more selection power. The provinces also have a Constitutional right to request more control. While the Constitution clearly states the federal government has control over immigrant admissions, it still defines immigration as one of the few policy areas in Canada that is under shared federal-provincial control. Canadas leading immigration law, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) also mandates the federal government with working closely with the provinces and territories to support regional economic and social objectives. Moreover, that Quebec has significant control over immigration while the rest of the country does not puts the federal government in an increasingly difficult position. Unlike in 1991, when the Canada-Quebec Accord was signed, provinces and territories across Canada are now dealing with historic labour shortages amid the countrys rapidly aging population. With more baby boomers retiring, provinces and territories are becoming more reliant on the PNP to support their population, labour force, and economic growth. In a sense, the calls by the provinces for more control appear to be inevitable. Following the signing of the Canada-Quebec Accord, some provinces went to the federal government asking for similar immigration authority. Fearing that it would lose control over the immigration system by signing similar agreements with the rest of the country, the federal government came up with the idea of the PNP. The provinces and territories bought on, leading to the significant growth of the PNP from just 400 immigrant admissions in 1999 to a target of over 80,000 immigrants this year and 90,000 immigrants by 2024. While Canadas PNP targets are at record highs, some provinces are arguing that the distribution of 80,000 immigrants across the eleven provinces and territories who run the PNP is insufficient in light of the significant labour shortages they face, and that are expected to continue as all nine million of Canadas baby boomers reach retirement age within the next decade. The significance of these recent developments cannot be understated. Prior to Quebec gaining control of its system, the federal government selected all immigrants to Canada. Gradually, since the introduction of the PNP in 1998, the pendulum has swung and the two levels of government now share a roughly equitable split of economic class immigrant selection. The federal government continues to have control over family and refugee class admissions. The provinces are essentially saying they want to have the majority control over selection. Ultimately, it will be the federal governments decision on whether to relinquish control even further. It certainly has the ability to simply reduce the proportion of immigrants it brings in through federal pathways such as Express Entry, and increase the proportion of immigrants welcomed through the PNP. However it remains to be seen if the federal government has the appetite to reduce its control. Either way, the emboldened stance by the provinces represents a new era in Canadas immigration system, whereby they are no longer content with simply having a say over selection via the PNP, but rather success for these provinces appears to be defined by relegating the federal government to the junior partner in their immigration relationship. Discover if You Are Eligible for Canadian Immigration CIC News All Rights Reserved. Visit CanadaVisa.com to discover your Canadian immigration options. Moldova pentru Pace si Laolalta anunta concursul de selectare a unui expert/unei experte sau companii/organizatii specializate pentru elaborarea de politici In August 2022 the United Nations in Moldova launches a new project Building sustainable and inclusive peace, strengthening trust and social cohesion in Moldova. This project, led by UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), will be implemented primarily by OHCHR, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women in partnership with civil society organizations, decision-makers and professionals from both banks of the Nistru-river. Under this project, OHCHR will work on strengthening the cross-river engagement and productive interaction at the level of government and de-facto structures, civil society organizations (CSO), National Human Rights Institution (Peoples Advocate Office) and the human rights focal point on the left bank, community level. The project will also aim at strengthening responses to divisive narratives and misinformation, to reduce social tensions. The work of OHCHR under the project will be funded by the United Nations Peace Building Funds. The implementation duration of the OHCHR component will be 24 months, starting in August 2022. The major interventions under the OHCHR-led component of the program will be: Empowerment of rights-holders communities, CSOs, the Peoples Advocate (Ombudsman) and the Human Rights focal point on the left bank, to strengthen their engagement and contributions to the cross-river dialogue and ultimately to the settlement talks on human rights issues. Increased capacity of duty-bearers settlement process actors will have their knowledge and skills increased from a human rights and gender equality perspective, so that these are better integrated into the negotiation agenda. Awareness raising among society about the misinformation, divisive narratives and hate speech. Support implementation capacity of authorities in regard to the new legal framework tackling hate speech. Support initiative on monitoring, reporting, and combating misinformation and divisive narratives. The two main outcomes the project aims to achieve are the following: Outcome 1 Strengthened cross-river engagement and productive interaction through the advancement of human rights, the Women, Peace and Security agenda and improved access to social services; Outcome 2 Strengthened responses to divisive narratives and misinformation thereby reducing inter-community tensions. The UN Human Rights Office (Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights OHCHR) represents the world's commitment to universal ideals of human dignity. It has a unique mandate from the international community to promote and protect all human rights. The OHCHR field presence in Moldova, led by the UN Human Rights Adviser, assists the UN Resident Coordinator Office, UN Country Team in Moldova (UNCT), Government and civil society in strengthening human rights and human rights-based approaches, working closely with the UN Country Team on capacity building and mainstreaming human rights in their work, as well as providing support in engagement with national actors on human rights, including advising national authorities upon request. Thematic priorities for work are: (1) Strengthening rule of law and accountability for human rights violations; (2) Enhancing equality and countering discrimination; (3) Integrating human rights in sustainable development; (4) Enhancing civic space and peoples participation. Starting from 2022 OHCHR Moldova jointly with other UN entities (UNDP and UN Women) will be implementing the project Building sustainable and inclusive peace, strengthening trust and social cohesion in Moldova. There are currently 14 MPs engaged in the Give-as-you-earn (GAYE) programme, according to data obtained by Civil Society News through a freedom of information request. Donations through the GAYE scheme are taken from your pre-tax pay, making it tax-effective. Philippa Cornish, head of corporate clients at Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) explained employees can use GAYE, CAFs payroll giving scheme, to set up charitable donations directly from their wages to charities of their choice. She said: Payroll giving works in a similar way to salary sacrifice and saves the charity administrative costs, since they do not need to claim back the tax paid through Gift Aid it is included in the donation. Roughly 2% of MPs use payroll giving The basic annual salary for an MP from 1 April 2022 is 84,144. MPs also receive expenses to cover the costs of running an office, employing staff, having somewhere to live in London or their constituency, and travelling between parliament and their constituency. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), which has set and administered MPs' pay since 2011, confirmed eight Conservative, four Labour and one SNP MP use the payroll giving scheme. The UK is currently divided into 650 parliamentary constituencies, and one MP in the House of Commons represents a single constituency. Therefore, about 2% of MPs use payroll giving. It has been estimated that about 80% of companies do not offer payroll giving, and around 4% of UK employees use it. IPSA noted there are many different ways of donating to charity, and states it would not necessarily know if an MP was making donations to charity once they had received their salary. Payroll Giving is a chronically under-utilised form of tax relief Nicole Sykes, policy and communications director at Pro Bono Economics, said: At a time when demand for charitable services is high and income is lagging, better use of Payroll Giving could boost donations and help alleviate some of the cost of living pressures on charities. Currently, Payroll Giving is a chronically under-utilised form of tax relief, which has seen very little change in annual donations in recent years. Sykes said it has potential to work harder, and a Philanthropy Champion in government could help unlock that potential, as called for by the Law Family Commission on Civil Society and Beacon Collaborative. She added: With businesses more focused on purpose than ever before and keen to honour the S in ESG, there is a real opportunity to encourage more companies to take up Payroll Giving and increase charity donations at this critical time. Cornish noted CAF recently awarded clients with a government backed accreditation in the form of a Payroll Giving Quality Mark, which is based on the percentage of employees giving through CAFs Give As You Earn scheme from their workforce. sign up to receive the Civil Society News daily bulletin here . For more news, interviews, opinion and analysis about charities and the voluntary sector, Donations and legacy income at the British Library rose by 112% last year, according to recently filed accounts. The charitys annual report and accounts for the year to March 2022 show that income from donations and legacies was 20.1m in 2021-22 compared with 9.5m the previous year. The increase was mostly driven by generous pledges and donations from private individuals and trusts. It helped provide critical funding in support of the charitys purposes, the accounts say. Meanwhile, income from charitable and other trading activities increased by 35% to 10.8m. Income, donations and trading activities The British Librarys overall income for 2021-22 was 141.4m, up from 125.9m on the previous year. Of this, 110m was Grant in Aid, the charitys main source of funding. Charitable and other trading activities brought in 10.8m last year compared with 8m from the year prior. Commercial activity had been hugely impacted by the pandemic-induced lockdown but rebounded thanks to the reopening of its sites. Last year, commercial margin stood at 4m, well above the 1.3m recorded in 2020-21. However, it remains below the level seen in 2019-20 (6.9m). Writing in the introduction to the accounts, chair Carol Black and chief executive Roly Keating note that visitor confidence is slowly returning, with attendance now reaching about 90% of the levels seen before Covid-19. Redundancies, gender pay gap and diversity The charity had seven fewer full-time equivalent staff during the year, at 1,558. It spent 107,000 in redundancies costs last year, up from 41,000 in 2020-21. The median gender pay gap at the charity was 1.89% in 2021, well below the national median pay gap of 15.4%. The accounts read: We continue to make improvements on our gender pay gap, making considerable effort to close this through recruitment, retention and promotional opportunities, as well as mentoring, networking and diversity and inclusion training. They add: Although we compare well to both national and sector averages we are determined to eliminate our gender pay gap by 2023. In June, the British Library committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation. The accounts reveal that it has now pledged to hire 15% of staff in senior management roles from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds by 2027. This will help address the long-standing lack of representation in senior management, the accounts say. sign up to receive the Civil Society News daily bulletin here . For more news, interviews, opinion and analysis about charities and the voluntary sector, Pennsylvanias workers compensation law authorizes modifications to a home to accommodate an injured employees needs. It also may require paying for a new van for a disabled worker. However, does the law go so far as to require an employer to pay any costs for the purchase of a new home? No, that would be unreasonable, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania has ruled. The law also does not require an employer to pay for home modifications that are considered but never done, according to the court. The court has reversed a Workers Compensation Appeal Board order that Ralph Martin Construction and its insurer, Lackawanna American Insurance Co., contribute to the cost of a new home purchased by injured employee Miguel Castaneda- Escobar who decided to move rather than renovate the home he was living in after he was seriously injured. Citing the state Supreme Court, the Commonwealth Court opinion notes that the particular circumstances of the claimant must be considered in determining the obligation of the employer. There is no precedent under the Workers Compensation Act that an employer can be held liable to purchase an entire house for a claimant or to pay for modifications that were never undertaken, the justices concluded. Escobar fell off a roof and injured his cervical spine in 2010, which rendered him a paraplegic. Ralph Martin Construction and Lackawanna Insurance accepted liability for the injury. At the time of his injury, he resided in his brothers rowhouse in Reading, Pennsylvania, where the bedrooms and bathroom are located on the second floor. A construction firm estimated that it would cost $119,722.21 to modify the Reading home with the construction of a first-floor addition that included a new bedroom and bathroom. That firm and another firm advised that it might be more cost effective for Escobar to relocate to a single-floor residence with wheelchair accessibility and that modifying the structure might not be the best long-term solution especially given that Escobar did not own the home. Modifications to the Reading home were never done. In 2018, Escobar bought a home for $230,000 in Leesport. The Leesport home accommodates his needs with a first-floor master bedroom and bathroom; however, the shower had to be modified to provide wheelchair accessibility. His employer reimbursed him for the $5,905.04 he spent to modify this bathroom. Because the modifications to the house where Escobar resided at the time of his injury were projected to cost $119,722.21, the appeal board required the employer to contribute that amount towards his purchase of his new one-story home that required few modifications. While Pennsylvania courts have required employers to pay for the purchase of a wheelchair-accessible van, they have not required employers to pay for the purchase of a new home. But the appeal board concluded that the purchase of the Leesport home did not relieve the employer of its obligation to renovate the Reading home. Accordingly, the board ordered the employer to pay the cost of that renovation, with a credit for the $5,905.04 it had already paid for the bathroom renovation in the Leesport home. It ordered the employer to pay $113,817.17 and litigation costs. Ralph Martin Construction and Lackawanna Insurance petitioned the Commonwealth Court for review, arguing that the board erred in requiring the employer to pay for home modifications that were never done. Second, it argued that the board erred by making the employer liable for the claimants litigation costs because Escobar should not have prevailed. Escobar argued that the boards adjudication was consistent with the humanitarian purposes of the workers compensation act. The states workers compensation statute states in part: [T]he employer shall provide payment for medicine and supplies, hospital treatment, services and supplies and orthopedic appliances, and prostheses. Consistent with the acts humanitarian principle, the term orthopedic appliances has been construed to cover the acquisition of vehicles and the construction of home modifications, where necessary. But, the employer argued, an orthopedic appliance cannot be construed to include the acquisition of an entire house. It maintained it fulfilled its statutory obligation by paying for the new roll-in shower. The firm noted that the state Supreme Court has cautioned that claimants are not entitled to windfalls in connection with their right to orthopedic appliances. Escobar did not testify to explain his decision to purchase a home, which, apparently, was facilitated by his receipt of third-party settlements that totaled at least $6 million. He abandoned his original claim that his employer pay the entire cost of his new home and, instead, sought an award of $119,722.21, the cost to modify the Reading home. However, the employer noted that Escobar did not have the Reading home modified. Why he elected not to modify the Reading home or why he elected to move to Leesport is simply not part of the record as he did not testify. Commonwealth Court in its analysis concluded that when Escobar made the bathroom renovations to his newly purchased home, the employer promptly fulfilled its obligation to pay for the modification. The fact that the claimant spent less to modify his new home than it would have cost to modify his prior residence does not make the new home an orthopedic appliance. The fact that claimant eliminated an expense that was never incurred by purchasing the new home is not the equivalent of modifying the home, the court wrote. The court agreed with employers brief that the purchase of a new home extends the phrase orthopedic appliances beyond a reasonable construction. A federal appellate court revived a former insurance agents race discrimination claim against Farmers Insurance Exchange. A panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the trial court erred by determining that a managers alleged comment about a crazy brown man running around with a gun was inadmissible hearsay. The panel said US Magistrate Judge Michael E. Hegarty in Denver misapplied the federal rules of evidence when dismissing a lawsuit filed by former Farmers agent Michael Cruz. Because the case was dismissed before any findings of fact were made, the appellate panel said it had to view the facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. Viewed in such a light, we conclude that this statement constitutes direct evidence of racial discrimination, thereby raising a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Farmers terminated the contract based on Cruzs race, the opinion says. Cruz, who is of Mexican descent, worked as an independent contractor for Farmers more than 30 years under an agency appointment agreement. The ruckus that led to the termination of that contract started in January 2017 when Cruz received a complaint by a customer who was upset about receiving junk mail from the insurer. Dan French called Cruzs office in Greeley, Colorado and asked to be removed from Farmers mailing list. Cruz says French was rude and disrespectful, so he hung up the phone. French called back. Cruz hung up again. French reached out to a Farmers executive, sending a message through Linkedin. The executive referred the complaint to a territory manager, who asked area sales manager Curt Elsbury and district manager Clint Sales to look into it. In the meantime, French called Cruzs office a third time and reached Cruzs office assistant, who also happened to be his wife Candace Diekman. She says French was raging, belligerent and screaming and threatened to come to the office personally to fix it. Diekman used her husbands email account to send a message to Sales about the incident. In it, she said she carries a firearm and if I feel threatened I will blow a hole in him the size of Uganda. About two weeks later, Elsbury wrote a letter to Cruz explaining that he had resolved the issue with French by removing him from Farmers mailing list. He also cautioned Cruz to maintain professionalism. But that didnt end the matter. Upper-level Farmers managers reopened the investigation when they learned about Diekmans email a month or two later. Elsbury told Sales to notify Cruz that the company was considering terminating his agency contract. Sales called the office and spoke with Diekman. When she asked why Farmers had reopened the investigation, he allegedly said: [I]t comes down to[,] they dont want a brown man running aroundsome crazy brown man running around with a gun. Sales denies making that comment. Elsbury reviewed Cruzs file and discovered an incident seven years earlier in which Cruz had allegedly threatened a claims adjuster. Farmers terminated Cruzs agency contract. Cruz filed a lawsuit accusing Farmers of violating US Code Section 1981, which prohibits treating parties to contracts differently because of their race. Cruzs attorney, Ralph Lamar IV, said Wednesday that Farmers executives apparently thought Cruz had written the email with the veiled threat about gunplay. He said Elsbury made no effort to correct that misunderstanding. Like a childhood game of telephone, each time the story about Diekmans mention of firearms and the Uganda-sized hole was relayed from one Farmers executive to another, the narrative changed slightly, he said. Lamar said the comment by Sales about a crazy brown man is direct evidence of discrimination. You wouldnt say a crazy white man, he said. Thats the distinction. At the end of the day, it just had the smell of discrimination on it. In its opinion, the 10th Circuit panel said the magistrate judge who dismissed the case incorrectly determined that Sales comment was hearsay under Rule 801 because he did not have ultimate decision-making authority over Cruz. The judge overlooked the fact that Sales was an agent for Farmers and is alleged to have made an admission about the companys motives. Previous cases have established that such admissions by a partys agent may be entered as evidence, the panel said. And because that admission constitutes direct evidence of discrimination, it precludes summary judgment for defendants, the panel concluded. The panel reversed the order dismissing the lawsuit and remanded the case to the trial court. The state of Tennessee sued Walgreens on Wednesday, accusing the retail pharmacy giant of fueling the states opioid epidemic by willfully flooding the market with an oversupply of prescription narcotics in violation of consumer protection and public nuisance laws. According to the lawsuit, Walgreens used its position as one of the states largest pharmacy chains to dispense over 1.1 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills within Tennessee from 2006 to 2020, roughly equivalent to 175 tablets for every resident of the state. The sheer volume of opioids that Walgreens released into Tennessee was unreasonable and highly suspicious on its face, said the 148-page lawsuit, filed in Knox County Circuit Court. Walgreens utterly saturated the state of Tennessee with narcotics. Tennessee, home to nearly 7 million residents, has been one of the hardest-hit in the U.S. opioid crisis, documenting at least three opioid-related overdose deaths every day, according to the lawsuit. Walgreens did not flood the state of Tennessee with opioids by accident. Rather, the fuel that Walgreens added to the fire of the opioid epidemic was the result of knowing or willfully ignorant corporate decisions, it said. Walgreens has been the target of similar lawsuits brought by other jurisdictions. In May, its corporate parent, the Illinois-based holding company Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., reached a $683 million settlement with Florida to resolve claims that the pharmacy chain exacerbated an opioid epidemic in that state. But Walgreens did not admit to wrongdoing under the agreement. We will continue to defend against the unjustified attacks on the professionalism of our pharmacists, dedicated health professionals who live in the communities they serve, the company said in a statement emailed to Reuters on Wednesday. Walgreens never manufactured or marketed opioids, nor did we distribute them to the pain clinics and pill mills that fueled this crisis, the company said. According to the lawsuit, Walgreens effectively became part of an unlawful controlled substance selling scheme by ignoring numerous signs of suspicious opioid prescription practices. The suit cited such red flags as a lack of individualized dosing; multiple prescriptions for the strongest dose available; many customers with the same diagnosis codes; high percentages of patients paying in cash; customers frequently seeking early refills; and customers traveling long distances to fill prescriptions. Tennessees greatest jump in opioid dispensing, according to the lawsuit, coincided with the years 2006 to 2014 when Walgreens operated as a wholesale distributor for its own pharmacies, thus occupying two rungs of the supply chain. Operating some 200 to 300 stores statewide, Walgreens pharmacies collectively purchased 795 million opioids from distributors during that period, the suit said. Some were sourced from other wholesalers, but Walgreens self-distributed 81% of its own retail opioid supplies in that era, according to the complaint. A similar lawsuit brought against Walgreens and two pharmaceutical companies by the city of San Francisco is now under consideration by a federal judge following an 11-week trial during which the two other firms reached a $58 million settlement with the city last month. Separately, a federal court jury decided in November that Walgreens, along with fellow pharmacy chain CVS Health Corp CVS.N and discount retail giant Walmart Inc WMT.N, was liable for helping create a public nuisance with an alleged flood of pain pills that wound up on the black market in two Ohio counties. It is now up to a federal judge to decide what the companies should pay. Just two weeks after the Demotech financial rating firm set off a firestorm of controversy by warning that it could soon downgrade as many as 17 Florida property insurers then promised to hold off the firm has now downgraded three significant carriers. The actions could potentially add to the confusion and concern about the stability of the Florida insurance market and Demotechs long-term role in it. The announcements also raised questions about whether the three downgrades are part of the 17 that the rating firm signaled were on the way. Demotech President Joe Petrelli could not be reached for comment Monday. The financial stability rating change for United Property Casualty Insurance Co., from A Exceptional to M Moderate, may come as little surprise. The insurer stopped writing in Florida in January and has undergone significant reorganization in recent months But Demotech also said the rating for Weston Property & Casualty Insurance Co. had been withdrawn. Until this week, the 11-year-old company, based in Coral Gables, had enjoyed an A exceptional stability rating. Weston reported having 19,655 policies in force at the end of June. UPC does not report its policy numbers. UPC and Weston officials could not be reached for comment Monday. Demotech late Monday also announced that FedNat Insurance Co.s stability rating had been withdrawn as of Aug. 1. The withdrawal came three months after Demotech downgraded FedNat from an A rating to an S Substantial. The carrier, facing heavy losses in the last two years, is under a restructuring plan required by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. Rating withdrawals have historically preceded insolvencies or rehabilitation for struggling carriers. The M rating may not be as severe, but it is not generally accepted by federal home loan buyers, known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means the lesser mark could wreak havoc with policyholders who have mortgages and are insured by United. After Demotechs mid-July letter to the 17 carriers, warning of the potential downgrades, Florida regulators reacted with outrage and sprang into action. Last week, they devised a plan to allow Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-created insurer of last resort and now practically the largest property insurer in the state, to act as a reinsurer for carriers that become insolvent. The novel cut-through endorsement idea would, at least temporarily, help solve the Fannie and Freddie issue, the OIR said last week, obviating the need for Demotech ratings. The corporations allow an exception to ratings if carriers claims are fully backed in case of financial troubles. After the Florida Insurance Guaranty Association pays its statutory limit on claims for a defunct carrier, Citizens would pay the rest, according to the plan. The president of the Florida Association of Insurance Agents, which blasted Demotech in a blog post last week, could not be reached for comment this week about the latest ratings reports. FAIA and others in the industry have questioned if Demotech has outlived its usefulness in Florida. And regardless of whether the Citizens cut-through plan works out for the long term, some have asked if other financial rating firms cant take on the task of measuring the strength and stability of more Florida carriers. To help answer that, the Insurance Journal interviewed officials with the AM Best rating firm and with the Kroll Bond Rating Agency, both of which rate a number of Florida insurers. Both firms said they would welcome the opportunity to review more insurers in the Sunshine State: All carriers have to do is ask. The companies come to us and request a rating. Thats how the conversation starts, said Jeff Mango, managing director at AM Best since 2004. When we are engaged to do a rating, it gets turned over to the local team and the team has initial meetings with the companies. Peter Giacone, head of insurance ratings for KBRA, said the same: We already rate several carriers in the Florida market and there is no reason we couldnt rate more of them if they come to us and request that we do so. It may not be as simple as asking and receiving, though. Mango said his organization, which rates about 3,500 insurers around the world and 13 that are domiciled in Florida, performs a deep dive on insurers finances, looking at the risk of major losses, premiums versus capital ratios, surplus levels, and more. He was asked why AM Best doesnt already rate more Florida companies. We get that question a lot, he said. If you look at the population that is not rated by us, they tend to have more very high-leveraged premium. I think other agencies may have different standards than what we do. KBRA, in the Florida market since 2017 and which rates seven Florida insurers, said as much. KBRAs insurance rating methodology is different from other agencies and employs rigorous quantitative analysis, robust stress testing and a detailed overlay of qualitative factors, Giacone said in an email. KBRA does not use a proprietary capital model but follows a more holistic, transparent, and interactive process, Giacone said. Our ratings are forward-looking and account for differences in individual company risk profiles, business strategies, capital structures and operating environment. This leads to ratings which we believe are more accurate and stable over time. He added: In order to best serve the markets and those who rely on credit ratings, KBRA rates to credit fundamentals, NOT headlines. Demotechs Petrelli has pointed out that his firm was one of the only ones that stepped up in Florida in the 1990s, after Hurricane Andrew drove some insurers into insolvency and scared some major carriers away from the state. Why did no one else step forward in 1996 when contacted by the state of Florida to review take-out carriers? Petrelli said. They should be asked. He has said Demotech, too, puts companies finances under the microscope. Some insurance industry professionals have praised the firm for doing its job and for shining a light on the fact that many carriers in Floridas distressed market are in deep trouble. Others have said that Demotechs recent letter to carriers lumped healthy insurers with those in dire straits, and that the firm has not adhered to its own standards and methodology. So, its not crystal clear, technically speaking, how AM Best and KBRAs methodologies differ from Demotechs, or if Florida insurers would fare any better under the firms scrutiny. AM Best has a 95-page book explaining its methodology. A condensed version is here. If AM Best were asked to review more property insurers in Florida, it could take a minimum of eight weeks before a rating is published, Mango said. It really depends on the company, Mango said. The reason why it stretches out sometimes is that a company may not be ready to pull all the information together. It may be sidetracked with other priorities. A common belief is that AM Best rates only the largest insurers, and some of those have eschewed the Florida market for years. But Mango said thats something of a myth. If the question is, Does AM Best only rate companies that are $50 million in surplus or higher, the answer is no. Theres no minimum, he said. We look at each company. They could have a small capital base or equity base, but if they write premium and have constraints in place and they underwrite prudently and dont write an exorbitant amount of premium on their books, and have to rely on reinsurance carriers to step in, then, as long as the have the capital base and match it with a prudent premium base, then we can rate those companies. The question of who rates whom may end up being a moot one. Some in the industry have suggested that with Citizens providing the backstop for teetering insurers, the Fannie and Freddie problem is solved. Otherwise, the ratings are not needed. The Citizens cut-through endorsement could also have a positive impact on carriers strength ratings, perhaps solving the problem that way, at least for some companies. My initial thought is that prior to assigning any level of FSR (financial stability rating), we would want to view the reinsurance cut-through endorsement, Petrelli said in an email. Second, although Citizens is a government-backed agency, we would also need to do a review of its ability to be a reinsurance company. KLAMATH RIVER, Calif. (AP) Roger Derry, 80, and his son have lived together in the tiny scenic hamlet of Klamath River in Northern California for more than 40 years. They know most of the towns 200 or so residents. Now, theyre one of the few families left after Californias largest and deadliest wildfire of the year raged through the modest homes and stores of the riverside town. Its very sad. Its very disheartening, Derry said. Some of our oldest homes, 100-year-old homes, are gone. Its a small community. Good people, good folks, for the most part, live here and in time will rebuild. But its going to take some time now. The McKinney Fire that erupted last Friday remained out of control, despite some progress as firefighters took advantage of thunderstorms that dumped rain that temporarily took a bit of heat out of the parched, scorched region not far from the Oregon border. The area saw another thunderstorm Tuesday that dumped heavy rain and swelled rivers. The fire has burned nearly 90 square miles (233 square kilometers), and is the largest of several wildfires burning in the Klamath National Forest. The blaze grew very little Tuesday, and fire officials said crews were able to use bulldozers to carve firebreaks along a ridge to protect homes and buildings in and around the small city of Yreka. But several thousand people remained under evacuation orders, 100 buildings ranging from homes to greenhouses have burned and at least four bodies have been found in the region. The destruction of a small community has sadly become a real possibility as wildfires become fiercer in the Western United States. Wildfires in Montana, Idaho and Nebraska have destroyed some homes and continue to threaten communities. Just four years ago, a massive blaze in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California virtually razed the Butte County town of Paradise, killing 85 people. Scientists have said climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. When it began, the McKinney Fire was only a couple hundred acres and firefighters thought they would quickly have it under control. But then, a thunderstorm cell came in with ferocious wind gusts that within hours had pushed it into an unstoppable conflagration. Roger Derry and his son, whose name is spelled Rodger Derry, decided not to evacuate when the fire broke out and said their home, which theyd tried to safeguard by trimming away nearby bushes, survived. Firefighters also showed up and dug firebreaks around the neighborhood. But they could see the fire as it tore its way through the places around them. When that fire came over that ridgeline, it had 100-foot flames for about 5 miles and the wind was blowing. It was coming down like a solid blowtorch, Roger Derry said. There was nothing to stop it, The fire destroyed most of the homes, including those in a trailer park, along with the post office, community hall and other scattered businesses. The cause hasnt been determined. In northwestern Montana, a fire that started Friday near the town of Elmo on the Flathead Indian Reservation has burned some structures, but authorities said they didnt immediately know if any were homes. The blaze measured 25 square miles (66 square kilometers) on Tuesday, with 10% containment, fire officials said. Some residents were forced to flee Monday as gusting afternoon winds drove the fire. The Moose Fire in Idaho has burned more than 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) in the Salmon-Challis National Forest while threatening homes, mining operations and fisheries near the town of Salmon. It was 23% contained Tuesday, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center. And a wildfire raging in northwestern Nebraska led to evacuations and destroyed or damaged several homes near the small city of Gering. The Carter Canyon Fire began Saturday as two separate fires that merged. It was more than 30% contained by Tuesday. Weber reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press reporters Amy Hanson in Helena, Montana; Margery Beck in Omaha, Nebraska; and Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report. About the photo: Timber walks past the remains of a lodge that burned in the McKinney Fire, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022, in Klamath National Forest, Calif. The property owner, whose adjacent home survived the blaze, was surveying damage. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Colorado Politics is published both in print and online. Our website features subscriber-only news stories daily, designed for public policy arena professionals. Member subscribers also receive the weekly print edition of our award-winning newspaper, containing outstanding features and news stories, in their mailboxes every Saturday. Are you a current print subscriber to Columbia Gorge News? If so, you qualify for free access to all content on columbiagorgenews.com. Simply verify with your subscriber id to receive free access. Your subscriber id may be found on your bill or mailing label. Donde esta mi gente? KBIA's special series Donde esta mi gente? (Where are my people?) features Engagement Producer and reporter Kassidy Arena as she investigates where Hispanic and Latino people are throughout mid-Missouri and why the state has one of the lowest percentages of Hispanic and Latino people in the Midwest. Donde esta mi gente? documents her journey in a six-part, narrative that highlights successes and gaps in demographics, business, community outreach, higher education and identity. Listen the series all week on KBIA 91.3 FM during Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Read all of the installments in the series online. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form 1st grain ship leaving Ukraine resumes journey after inspection off Istanbul's coast Xinhua) 09:01, August 04, 2022 ISTANBUL, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- A team of representatives from the recently established Joint Coordination Center (JCC) wrapped up their inspection of a ship carrying Ukrainian grain off Istanbul's coast on Wednesday. Two boats carrying the inspectors, accompanied by two escort vessels from the Turkish Coast Guard, approached the ship anchored on the northwestern entrance of the Bosphorus Strait. Representatives of Ukraine, Russia, Turkiye, and the United Nations under the umbrella of JCC boarded the ship around 10:30 a.m. local time (0730 GMT) to conduct examinations to ensure the ship transported no cargo unaccounted for. The Sierra Leone-flagged ship Razoni, which left the Odesa port in Ukraine early on Monday with 26,527 tons of corn for Lebanon, reached the entrance of the Bosphorus Strait on Tuesday evening. It is the first successful large-volume grain shipment in almost half a year from Ukraine to international markets via the Black Sea. The inspection took around one and a half hours, and Turkiye's Defence Ministry announced that Razoni would start its passage from the Bosphorus Strait in the afternoon. Russia and Ukraine signed the deal on July 22 with Turkiye and the United Nations, aiming to resume food and fertilizer exports from the Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, namely Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Pivdennyi. Last week, the JCC was inaugurated in Istanbul with a total of 20 representatives from Ukraine, Russia, the United Nations, and Turkiye to monitor the implementation of the grain shipment process. According to the state-run Anadolu agency, 20 million tonnes of grain are still in Ukraine, waiting to be shipped. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Drawing from last year's acquisition of RiskIQ, Microsoft is adding two new threat-intelligence applications to its Defender product family, and separately offering new detection and response capabilities for SAP ERP systems to its Sentinel SIEM (security information and event management) product. Combining intelligence from the security research team at RiskIQ with existing in-house security findings, Microsoft has developed Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, a standalone library of raw adversary data. Microsoft says it is offering the library for free, accessible directly by all users, or from within its existing Defender family of security products, according to a blog post from Vasu Jakkal, a Microsoft vice president for security, compliance, identity, and management. Microsoft has also released Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, designed to scan users' computing environments and connections to provide security teams with the same view an attacker has of their organization while selecting a target. Threat library offers real-time adversary intelligence According to Jakkal, Microsoft will combine its in-house security datagathered from a tracking network of 35 ransomware families, 250+ unique nation-states, cybercriminals, and threat actorswith the intelligence acquired by RiskIQ, for real-time updating of the new Defender Threat Intelligence (DFI) library. The library will provide raw threat intelligence detailing adversaries by name correlating their tools, tactics, and procedures (TTPs)and will provide updates when new information is distilled from a host of sources including Microsofts nation-state tracking team, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), and the Microsoft 365 Defender security research teams. DFI is aimed at helping security operations centers (SOCs) understand the specific threats their organizations face and harden their security posture accordingly, added Jakkal. The DFI intelligence is also expected to enhance the detection capabilities of Microsoft Sentinel and the entire family of Microsoft Defender products. More sources of information for DFI are expected to be added later this year, Jakkal said. Defender EASM provides "attacker view" of assets Designed to provide security teams with the ability to discover unknown and unmanaged resources that are visible and accessible from the internet, Defender External Attack Surface Management (EASM) will essentially scan the internet and connected assets to catalog a customers environment and its internet-facing resources. Identified resourcesincluding endpoints, agentless and unmanaged assetscan then be brought under secure management with SIEM and extended detection and response (XDR) tools. With the same view an attacker has, Defender External Attack Surface Management helps customers discover unmanaged resources that could be potential entry points for an attacker, Jakkal said in the blog post. The company did not immediately detail pricing for the product. Sentinel gets new SAP monitoring features Meanwhile, Microsoft Sentinel, the companys cloud-native SIEM and SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) application, will offer support for SAP alerts. SAP ERP applications, which can be run from both on-premises and cloud infrastructure, are complex and may have risks such as privilege escalation and suspicious downloads. These can be monitored, detected, and responded to by new features being added to Microsoft Sentinel, the company said. The Microsoft Sentinel monitoring capabilities for SAP will be generally available with a six-month free promotion starting this month, and billing will start on February 1, 2023, as an add-on charge to the existing Microsoft Sentinel consumption-billing model, Microsoft said. The U.S. Secret Service (USSS) has been under intense political fire since mid-July when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General's office told Congress that the text messages surrounding the important events of January 6 had been permanently deleted for twenty-four key agents. The USSS currently operates under DHS. The facts of this high-stakes national drama are unclear, and conflicts between lawmakers and DHS and DHS and the Secret Service further muddy the waters. But in essence, the Secret Service claims that it lost the texts in January 2021 after it reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration that entailed instructing agents to back up their phones. The emerging and still-jumbled story of the Secret Service's lost text messages, although a political firestorm in Washington, is also an object lesson for all security personnel on the challenges in securing mobile communications and the role that document destruction and retention policies play in organizational security. The Secret Services missing texts: A timeline The following timeline recaps the developments of the missing texts controversy. It underscores the current chronic lack of clarity about what happened, which has been heightened by intra-agency finger-pointing over who is responsible for the lapses that led to the crisis. January 16, 2021: Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, along with other committee chairs, wrote a letter to DHS and other agencies requesting that they produce documents and materials that relate to the January 6 insurrection. February 26, 2021: The DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) reportedly requested records of electronic communication from the Secret Service for its own investigation into the January 6 attack. March 25, 2021: Several House committees asked the White House, National Archives, the Attorney General, DHS, and other government agencies for communications received, prepared, or sent between January 5 and January 7. February 2022: DHS informed Inspector General Joseph Cuffari's office that text messages sent or received by then-Acting Secretary Chad Wolf, then-Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and Acting Under Secretary for Management Randolph D. "Tex" Alles could not be found. Cuffari's office withheld this information from Congress for more than five months. July 14, 2022: A letter sent by the DHS Inspector General to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees said the Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021. After news of the letter broke, Anthony Guglielmi, Chief of Communications for the United States Secret Service, issued a statement explaining how the text messages disappeared. He said that the Secret Service began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. Several reports say that the Secret Service told agents to back up their phones before the reset, giving them instructions on how to do so. Somewhere in that process, data resident on the phones was lost. Guglielmi contends that the DHS Inspector General requested electronic communications for the first time on February 26, 2021, after the migration was well underway, even though House officials asked DHS to hand over all documents and materials related to January 6 on January 16, 2021. July 16, 2022: The January 6 committee issued a subpoena to the Secret Service seeking the missing texts, and any reports issued related to events of January 6, 2021. July 19, 2022: The National Archives demanded more information from the USSS about "the potential unauthorized deletion" of agency text messages, likely to determine if the agency violated federal record retention requirements. July 19, 2022: According to a letter sent by a DHS official to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, the Secret Service was able to produce only one text message, a conversation from former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund to former Secret Service Uniformed Division Chief Thomas Sullivan requesting assistance on January 6, 2021. July 21, 2022: DHS deputy inspector general, Gladys Ayala, directed the Secret Service to halt its internal search for purged texts sent by agents around January 6 so that it does not "interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation." July 29, 2022: Sources and internal records suggest that Cuffari scrapped his investigative team's efforts to recover the deleted texts early this year. August 1, 2022: Representatives Maloney and Thompson sent a letter to Cuffari saying he botched any investigation into the missing January 6 texts. That failure, combined with a lack of reporting on the Secret Service's role on January 6, constitutes a coverup that warrants his stepping aside so that a new inspector general be named, the congressional leaders say. Major questions remain unanswered Many questions remain unanswered for a development that has received massive press coverage. Two questions, in particular, are crucial to fully grasping what happened. What phones were involved, and which text messaging system was used? Although media coverage and government statements reference "text" messages and devices, it's unclear what texting protocol was used by the Secret Service agents, what phones were used, or even if the missing texts were sent on personal or government-issued phones. Although some experts believe that the text messages were unarchived iMessages sent on agency-issued iPhones, that has not been verified. Lending credence to the notion that iMessage was used and not SMS, Signal, WhatsApp, or any other protocol, USSS spokesperson Guglielmi indicated that his agency is considering turning off employees' ability to send iMessages on their work-issued iPhones. If the Secret Service was using iMessage, it's unlikely they were using the version generally available to all consumers, Robert Falzon, head of engineering and CTO for Check Point, tells CSO. "I can't say for certain, but it's likely they're not using the generic service. Instead, they probably have modifications they've requested or changes to those services that are specifically accommodating to the Secret Service." Why weren't backups available? Infosec professionals consider backing up systems before migration an extraordinarily routine and easy task. The Secret Service said it began planning in the fall of 2020 to move all devices onto Microsoft Intune, a mobile device management (MDM) service. But, they left it up to agents to back up their phones as part of a mandatory "self-enroll" process according to a step-by-step guide issued by the agency. Allowing agents to back up their phones would be an extraordinarily unusual step for the agency, one running counter to prevailing security practices. "To me, it would be an egregious failure of process," Check Point's Falzon says. "It strains credibility." He also says that he finds it "strange that you would have an irreversible migration. This is the opposite of what most competent IT infrastructure administrators would try to achieve." Mark Rasch, of counsel at the law firm KJK and the creator of the DOJ's Computer Crime Unit and Cyber-Forensics practice, tells CSO that by deploying an MDM solution, an employer can assert control over the devices and how they are used and force things to be saved and force things to be wiped. If the Secret Service did not use an MDM before migrating to Intune or otherwise maintain a central backup system of some kind and instead relied on agents to save, delete, or back up their messages, no backups likely existed. "Think of your own phone. When you send a text message instead of an email, a copy of it is not saved with your employer," Rasch says. "So, from a document management standpoint, SMS and MMS relies on individuals to store and secure the communications." The likelihood that all the agents goofed by collectively not backing up their phones is small. "I have a long philosophy, which has proved mostly accurate, that one should never attribute to venality that which mere stupidity will adequately explain," Rasch says. But, "the circumstances with this one, that it would require twenty individual agents to each individually make the same mistake, is inconceivable." Security lessons to be learned Infosec professionals can draw some lessons from this high-level drama. "The first thing is that document retention and destruction policies are themselves security policies. If you have data, but definitely sensitive data that you don't need, the sole thing it does is creates a vulnerability," Rasch says. "On the other hand, if you have data that you're required to keep and get rid of it, that also creates liability. So, you need robust and reviewed document retention and destruction policies. Then you need to have technology that will help you enforce it. Identify what needs to be deleted and what needs to be preserved," Rasch. "Then you need training and awareness so people know what they're allowed to keep and delete. And then, lastly, you need to have some form of centralized control that allows you to deploy this policy across the enterprise." And Rasch says, "the message for security-conscious people is that if you have a mobile workforce, which you do, you should have a mobile device management solution, or at least evaluate whether it'll work in your environment." Falzon thinks the questions raised in this controversy apply to any enterprise. "The simple fact that we don't know what service was being used on these devices, were they on personal or company devices, how were they locked down, those are the same challenges faced by any enterprise, even the smaller mom-and-pop organizations. Mobile devices sit at the core of our personal and business lives. So, they are probably the richest target that you can imagine for an exploit," says Falzon. Contributed photo I write this letter enthusiastically for Cindy Harrison because she represents the kind of action and commitment that we all need at this time. Cindy has a 100 percent voting record. She cast a vote for every one of the 426 pieces of legislation put before the Connecticut General Assembly in 2021. During the 2022 session, she voted on every one of over 200 pieces of legislation to date this year. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate AUSTIN, Texas The attorney for a Sandy Hook family says the U.S. House Jan. 6 committee has requested a copy of Alex Jones cellphone records that the Infowars owners lawyer mistakenly gave to the attorney. Attorney Mark Bankston told a Texas judge during a hearing on Thursday morning that the records include intimate messages with Roger Stone, an ally of former President Donald Trump who was subpoenaed by the House committee alongside Jones last year. The data also includes mental health records for the plaintiffs in similar Connecticut defamation lawsuits filed against Jones that will go to trial. His Connecticut attorney Norm Pattis and his Austin attorney Andino Reynal, who it appears inadvertently released the records, are now required to appear before a Connecticut judge in the next few weeks to discuss possible discipline, court records show. Stone, who was born in Norwalk and was a longtime informal adviser to Trump, was indicted by federal authorities on charges of lying and witness tampering in connection with the release of Democrats' hacked emails in 2016. Trump later commuted Stones sentence and granted him a pardon, according to the Associated Press. The messages between Jones and Stone were of a personal nature unrelated to matters of public importance and wont be revealed, Bankston said. Im not going to smear him (Jones) with his private life, Bankston said during a brief press conference Thursday afternoon. Otherwise Bankston is willing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee by providing whatever information from the data they request, he said. I dont even know if it covers the time period they are interested in, or what time period they are interested in, said Bankston who determined that the records include Jones text messages dating back to 2019. The messages show that Jones lied during testimony, Bankston said. We already proved Mr. Jones lied about it, Bankston said. Ive never seen a moment like that in a courtroom, I never thought I would have a moment like that in a courtroom. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, meanwhile, refused to call for a mistrial in the Sandy Hook defamation awards trial after Jones attorney filed a protective order Thursday morning seeking to bar the parents that his client defamed from using the emails and text messages in the punitive damages portion of the proceedings. Reynal, representing Jones, asked for a mistrial while seeking the order, after it was revealed during Wednesdays testimony that he seemed to have inadvertently sent attorneys for Sandy Hook parents Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin volumes of information including texts and emails from his client to others, including Donald Trump ally Roger Stone. Reynal contended that he had asked Bankston, representing Lewis and Heslin, to disregard the link to the information. I told him that it was sent in error and to please disregard the link, Im working on sending a new one, Reynal told Gamble. But Bankston told the judge that he didnt have to since Reynal never formally specified what privileged or confidential information should be removed under a court rule that allows him to keep the data after a 10-day grace period. If Reynal wanted the information kept sealed, he would have had to state what portions were confidential or privileged materials within the 10-day period, Bankston said. None of that has happened, Bankston told the court. We have Mr. Reynal asking to seal things up that should have been produced a minimum of six months ago, Bankston said. The information includes psychiatric records for other Sandy Hook families who are suing Jones in Connecticut court on similar defamation grounds, Bankston said. He said he immediately destroyed those confidential medical records. It was apparent from the documents that Pattis, representing Jones in the Connecticut case, sent Reynal the mental health records for the Texas case, Bankston said. Norm Pattis was passing them along to Mr. Reynal, and that is also independently very troubling, Bankston said. A Connecticut judge has determined that Reynal may sit at the defense table in the Connecticut case, but may not actively try the case. We shared information with lawyers working on the defense of Mr. Jones, Pattis said by text message Thursday afternoon. I disagree that this was inappropriate. He declined to comment further on the Connecticut judges order to appear at a 2 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 10 hearing to consider whether he should be referred to disciplinary authorities or sanctioned by the court directly over the purported release of medical records of the plaintiffs, in violation of state and federal statute and this court's protective order, to unauthorized individuals. The case Pattis is litigating on behalf of Alex Jones is stalled as his client filed for bankruptcy on the eve of a trial in Connecticut, where jury selection started and then stopped on Tuesday. While these three consolidated lawsuits between the parties are presently pending in the bankruptcy courts, this disciplinary matter is directed to counsel and not the parties, such that the court has jurisdiction to address the disciplinary issues, Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis wrote in her order. Reynal must appear at a 10 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 17 hearing. The texts and emails showed Jones had been communicating with others about Sandy Hook in recent years, Bankston said. Jones had said on the stand this week that he searched his phone and didnt have any communications on Sandy Hook. Twelve days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text, Bankston said to Jones while he was on the stand. Do you know what perjury is? Among the messages that Bankston showed to Jones and the jury were text messages between Jones and Infowars employees discussing the companys finances. Another message included a warning from one of Jones producers that the sites coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic contained falsehoods that were reminiscent of debunked theories Jones had spread about Sandy Hook. The financial information culled from the data will be presented during the second phase of the trial to determine punitive damages, Bankston said. There will be more witnesses about what Mr. Jones net worth is and they (the jury) are going to have to decide a second number and that number is going to be whats necessary to both punish Mr. Jones and deter others from doing what he did, Bankston said. Gamble asked Reynal to review the contents of the information that was mistakenly sent to Bankston to determine what should be considered confidential or privileged. The hearing on the texts and emails was held as the jury is deliberating how much in compensation Heslin and Lewis should receive for intentional infliction of mental anguish by Jones who repeatedly called the death of their son a hoax committed by crisis actors. Staff writers Jordan Nathaniel Fenster and John Moritz contributed to this story. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Four people were found dead Thursday in two burning homes in a small community in northeastern Nebraska, authorities said. Nebraska State Patrol Col. John Bolduc said at a news conference that a man was seen driving away from the city of Laurel before the bodies were discovered and that investigators would like to speak to him. Firefighters responding to a call Thursday morning about an explosion and fire at one of the homes found the body of a person inside, Bolduc said. A short time later, firefighters were called to a second burning home a few blocks away, where the bodies of three people were found inside. On Thursday night, the Nebraska State Patrol said investigators had determined that gunfire played a part in the incident at both homes." An investigation also found that both fires had started just after 3 a.m. Thursday, the patrol said. Authorities didn't release the names of the dead or say how they died, but they said witnesses reported seeing a man leaving Laurel in a silver car. Bolduc referred to the man as a suspect in the deaths and said he may have picked up a passenger on the way out of town. Later, the patrol said the silver car may have left Laurel much later after the fires than investigators previously thought. The patrol asked that that anyone who saw something unusual in Laurel between midnight and 4 a.m. to contact authorities. Investigators believe whoever set the fires may have suffered burns, Bolduc added. He would not say how or whether the victims were related and declined to speculate on the circumstances leading to the killings. Were not categorizing it as anything right now, Bolduc said. Laurel is home to fewer than 1,000 people and is located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Omaha. Laurel is a very safe community, said Cedar County Sheriff Larry Koranda. It shakes everybody up. Most businesses, a senior center and schools in the community voluntarily went on lockdown around the time the bodies were discovered. That came at the recommendation of the city's lone police officer, said Lori Hansen, a clerical assistant at the Laurel City Hall. But even community officials were scrambling for information about what was unfolding in the normally quiet town, she said. Weve been listening to TV to try to find out whats going on, Hansen said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate AUSTIN, Texas (AP) An attorney for the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre who are suing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his false claims about the attack said Thursday that the U.S. House Jan. 6 committee has requested two years' worth of records from Jones' phone. Attorney Mark Bankston told the Texas court where Jones is on trial to determine how much he owes for defaming the parents that the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has requested the digital records. He later said outside of court that he plans to comply with the request. A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment Thursday. As Jones testified at the trial on Wednesday, Bankston revealed that the Infowars host's lead attorney, Andino Reynal, had mistakenly sent him the last two years worth of texts from Jones cellphone. Reynal asked Judge Maya Guerra Gamble to declare a mistrial over the mistaken transfer of records and said they should have been returned and any copies destroyed. Gamble rejected the request. Reynal also accused Bankston of trying to perform for a national audience. He said the material included a review copy of text messages over six months from late 2019 into the first quarter of 2020. Bankston said his team followed Texas' civil rules of evidence and that Jones attorneys missed their chance to properly request the return of the records. "Mr. Reynal is using a fig leaf (to cover) for his own malpractice, Bankston said. He said the records mistakenly sent to him included some medical records of plaintiffs in other lawsuits against Jones. "Mr. Jones and his intimate messages with Roger Stone are not protected, Bankston said, referring to former President Donald Trump's longtime ally. Rolling Stone, quoting unnamed sources, reported Wednesday evening that the Jan. 6 committee was preparing to subpoena the data from the parents attorneys to assist in the investigation of the deadly riot. Bankston said outside of court Thursday that the committee had requested the phone records, but hadn't subpoenaed them. He also said he wasn't familiar with everything that was in the records yet, including whether they include any information that the committee is seeking, because there was so much information in them. We dont know (yet) the full scope and breadth, of the material, Bankston said. We certainly saw text messages from as far back as 2019. ... In terms of what all is on that phone, its going to take a little while to figure that out. The Jan. 6 committee doesnt have any more information about whats on that phone than I do. I dont know if it even covers the time period they are interested in, he said Jones didn't attend Thursday's court proceedings. But on his Infowars show Thursday, he said the records were from a year before Jan. 6 and had nothing to do with it. And if anything, I say more radical things on air than I do on text messages. And the idea that theres some type of criminal activity on there is preposterous, he said. The jury in Austin is deciding how much Jones should pay to the parents of a child killed in the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, because of his and Infowars' repeated false claims that the shooting was a hoax created by advocates for gun control. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents suing Jones, are seeking at least $150 million in damages. Last month, the Jan. 6 committee showed graphic and violent text messages and played videos of right-wing figures, including Jones, and others vowing that Jan. 6 would be the day they would fight for Trump. The committee first subpoenaed Jones in November, demanding a deposition and documents related to his efforts to spread misinformation about the 2020 election and a rally on the day of the attack. In the subpoena letter, Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman, said Jones helped organize the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse that preceded the insurrection. He also wrote that Jones repeatedly promoted Trumps false claims of election fraud, urged his listeners to go to Washington for the rally, and march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Thompson also wrote that Jones made statements implying that you had knowledge about the plans of President Trump with respect to the rally. The nine-member panel was especially interested in what Jones said shortly after Trumps now-infamous Dec. 19, 2020, tweet in which he told his supporters to be there, will be wild! on Jan. 6. You went on InfoWars that same day and called the tweet One of the most historic events in American history, the letter continued. In January, Jones was deposed by the committee during an hourslong, virtual meeting in which he said he exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination almost 100 times. ___ Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri in Washington, D.C., and Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, contributed to this report. ___ Find more of the AP's coverage of Alex Jones: https://apnews.com/hub/alex-jones NEW YORK (AP) ABC's The View has named two Republicans Alyssa Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro as regular panelists on the daytime talk show, and neither are fans of former President Donald Trump. Farah Griffin fills the chair left empty when Meghan McCain quit last summer after four years on the show. Farah Griffin is a communications strategist who worked as a spokesperson at the Pentagon and for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence during the last administration. Navarro, a familiar face as a frequent guest host at The View since 2015, was also officially named as an addition to the show's group of five hosts on Thursday. McCain was a magnet for controversy and attention during her time at The View, where she often fought onscreen with her more liberal co-hosts, and complained after she left of a toxic work environment. The View took its time replacing her, spending a year with conservative guest hosts in informal on-air tryouts. Farah Griffin appeared 29 times. If there's one thing that I believe, it's that there's more that unites this country than divides it, Farah Griffin said. I think we can demonstrate at this table what our elected leaders often can't, which is disagreeing but doing so respectfully and doing so in a fact-based manner. We don't need any of these conspiracies and lies that have taken up so much of news. Farah Griffin, who is also a CNN contributor, quit the Trump administration in December 2020. She publicly turned against her old boss following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and spoke to the House committee investigating the event. She said the last two years have been turbulent for her, including dealing with death threats. I worked for an administration that I ended up speaking out against fervently and continue to do so daily, she said. It changes a lot in your life. I lost a lot of friends. I'm estranged from family members, but I have to say this: I am so proud to have found my voice. Not everyone has been quick to turn the page, and there's a social media campaign to boycott The View because of her hiring, with some fans unwilling to forgive the new host's service to Trump. Many in the media are still trying to normalize these folks, MSNBC host Tiffany Cross said on her weekend show. And why? The View discusses the day's hot topics on its show and is seen by many politicians as an important conduit to women voters during national campaigns. Yet it's also a target: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' office recently turned down an invitation to appear on the show, and publicly pointed to hostile comments made by the show's hosts about him. Led by veterans Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, the show is generally dominated by its liberal hosts. Goldberg refuses to even say Trump's name. Farah Griffin told her co-hosts, who also include Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines, that she knew it was going to get sporting sometimes. It's going to get more than sporting, Hostin replied. Navarro has worked for GOP figures John McCain and Jeb Bush. She had a Twitter tiff with the former president's son last September; after Donald Trump Jr. made an online comment about Navarro's weight, she called him a dimwit. She said she was pleased to be joining the show officially, even if it means a commute from her home in Miami. We're finally putting a ring on it, she said. - This story corrects the spelling of Sara Haines' first name. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate KLAMATH RIVER, Calif. (AP) A week ago, the scenic Northern California hamlet of Klamath River was home to about 200 people and had a community center, post office and a corner grocery store. Now, after a wildfire raged through the forested region near the Oregon state line, four people are dead and the store is among the few buildings not reduced to ashes. At an evacuation center Wednesday, Bill Simms said that three of the four victims were his neighbors. Two were a married couple who lived up the road. I dont get emotional about stuff and material things, Simms said. But when you hear my next-door neighbors died ... that gets a little emotional. The 65-year-old retiree bought his property six years ago as a second home with access to hunting and fishing. He said Klamath River is a place people are attracted to because they can have privacy and enjoy nature. He went back to check on his property Tuesday and found it was destroyed. The house, the guest house and the RV were gone. Its just wasteland, devastation, Simms said. He found the body of one of his two cats, which he buried. The other cat is still missing. He was able to take his two dogs with him to the shelter. The McKinney Fire broke out Friday and was still out of control on Wednesday, despite progress by firefighters who took advantage of rain from thunderstorms and lower temperatures. But even the welcome precipitation brought problems. On Tuesday, heavy rain swelled rivers and creeks and a private contractor in a pickup truck who was aiding the firefighting effort was hurt when a bridge gave out and washed away the vehicle, said Courtney Kreider, a spokesperson with the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office. The contractor was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, she said. More than 100 buildings ranging from homes to sheds have burned. Identifying the four people who were killed could take several days, Kreider said. The fire has charred nearly 90 square miles (233 square kilometers) and is the largest in California so far this year. The cause is unknown. With the rain and cooler temperatures, the blaze grew very little and fire officials said crews used bulldozers to carve firebreaks along a ridge to protect homes and buildings in and around Yreka, which has about 7,800 residents and is the largest city in Siskiyou County. On Wednesday, evacuation orders for residents of Yreka and Hawkinsville were downgraded to warnings, allowing people to return home. But they were warned the fire remains a threat and were urged to be ready to flee again if necessary. Skies were mostly clear on Wednesday and temperatures were in the mid- to high 90s, baking an already parched landscape. California and much of the rest of the West is in drought and wildfire danger is high, with the historically worst of the fire season still to come. Fires are burning in Montana, Idaho and Nebraska and have destroyed homes and threaten communities. Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. California has seen its largest, most destructive and deadliest wildfires in the last five years. In 2018, a massive blaze in the Sierra Nevada foothills destroyed much of the city of Paradise and killed 85 people, the most deaths from a U.S. wildfire in a century. When it began, the McKinney Fire burned just several hundred acres and firefighters thought they would quickly bring it under control. But thunderstorms came in with ferocious wind gusts that within hours had pushed it into an unstoppable conflagration. Roger Derry, 80, and his son, Rodger, were among the few families from Klamath River whose homes were spared by the inferno. The elder Derry, who has lived in the unincorporated town for more than four decades, said the fire was terrifying. When that fire came over that ridgeline, it had 100-foot flames for about 5 miles and the wind was blowing. It was coming down like a solid blowtorch, he said. There was nothing to stop it. Harlene Schwander, 82, lost the home she had just moved into a month ago to be closer to her son and daughter-in-law. Their home survived but her house was torched. Schwander, an artist, said she only managed to grab a few family photos and some jewelry before evacuating. Everything else including her art collection, went up in flames. Im sad. Everybody says it was just stuff, but it was all I had," she said. In northwestern Montana, a fire that has destroyed at least four homes and forced the evacuation of about 150 residences west of Flathead Lake continued to be pushed north by winds on Wednesday, fire officials said. Crews had to be pulled off the lines on Wednesday afternoon due to increased fire activity, Sara Rouse, a public information officer, told NBC Montana. There were concerns the fire could reach Lake Mary Ronan by Wednesday evening, officials said. The fire, which started on July 29 in grass on the Flathead Indian Reservation, quickly moved into timber and had charred nearly 29 square miles (76 square km). The Moose Fire in Idaho has burned more than 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) in the Salmon-Challis National Forest while threatening homes, mining operations and fisheries near the town of Salmon. And a wildfire in northwestern Nebraska led to evacuations and destroyed or damaged several homes near the small city of Gering. The Carter Canyon Fire began Saturday as two separate fires that merged. ___ Weber reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press reporters Amy Hanson in Helena, Montana; Margery Beck in Omaha, Nebraska; and Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) Roses brought to honor love on that Valentine's Day in 2018 lay withered, their dried and cracked petals scattered across classroom floors still smeared with the blood of victims gunned down by a former student more than four years ago. Bullet holes pocked walls, and shards of glass from windows shattered by gunfire crunched underfoot at Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where shooter Nikolas Cruz killed 14 students and three staff members. Nothing had been changed, except for the removal of the victims' bodies and some personal items. Twelve jurors and 10 alternates who will decide whether Cruz gets the death penalty or life in prison made a rare visit to the massacre scene Thursday, retracing Cruz's steps through the three-story freshman building, known as Building 12. After they left, a group of journalists was allowed in for a much quicker first public view. The sight was deeply unsettling: Large pools of dried blood still stained classroom floors. A lock of dark hair rested on the floor where one of the victims' bodies once lay. A single black rubber shoe was in a hallway. Browned rose petals were strewn across a hallway where six people died. In classroom after classroom, open notebooks displayed uncompleted lessons. A blood-coated book called, Tell Them We Remember sat atop a bullet-riddled desk in the classroom where teacher Ivy Schamis taught students about the Holocaust. A sign attached to a bulletin board read: We will never forget. Two students died there. In the classroom of English teacher Dara Hass, where the most students were gunned down, there were essays about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for going to school, and who has since become a global advocate for educational access for women and girls. A bullet went straight to her head but not her brain, one student wrote. We go to school every day of the week and we take it all for granted, wrote another. "We cry and complain without knowing how lucky we are to be able to learn. The door of Room 1255, teacher Stacey Lippel's classroom, was pushed open like others to signify that Cruz shot into it. Hanging on a wall inside was a sign reading, No Bully Zone. The creative writing assignment for the day was on the whiteboard: How to write the perfect love letter. And still hanging on the wall of a second-floor hallway was a quote from James Dean: Dream as if youll live forever, live as if youll die today." In slain teacher Scott Beigel's geography classroom, a laptop was still open on his desk. Student assignments comparing the tenets of Christianity and Islam remained, some graded, some not. On his whiteboard, Beigel, the school's cross-country coach, had been writing the gold, silver and bronze medalists in each event at the Winter Olympics, which had begun five days earlier. Prosecutors, who rested their case following the jury's tour, hope the visit will help prove that Cruz's actions were cold, calculated, heinous and cruel; created a great risk of death to many people and interfered with a government function all aggravating factors under Florida's capital punishment law. Under Florida court rules, neither the judge nor the attorneys were allowed to speak to the jurors and the jurors weren't allowed to converse with each other when they retraced the path Cruz took on Feb. 14, 2018, as he moved from floor to floor, firing down hallways and into classrooms. Prior to the tour, the jurors had already seen surveillance video of the shooting and photographs of its aftermath. The building has been sealed and was surrounded by a 15-foot (4.6-meter) chain-link fence wrapped in a privacy mesh screen fastened with zip ties. It looms ominously over the school and its teachers, staff and 3,300 students, and can be seen easily by anyone nearby. The Broward County school district plans to demolish it whenever prosecutors approve. For now, it is a court exhibit. When you are driving past, it's there. When you are going to class, it's there. It is just a colossal structure that you can't miss," said Kai Koerber, who was a Stoneman Douglas junior at the time of the shooting. He is now at the University of California, Berkeley, and the developer of a mental health phone app. It is just a constant reminder ... that is tremendously trying and horrible." Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of first-degree murder; the trial is only to determine if he is sentenced to death or life without parole. Miami defense attorney David S. Weinstein said prosecutors hope the visit will be the final piece in erasing any doubt that any juror might have had that the death penalty is the only recommendation that can be made. Such crime site visits are rare. Weinstein, a former prosecutor, said in more than 150 jury trials dating back to the late 1980s, he has only had one. In most trials, a crime scene visit wouldnt even be considered because years later it's not the same place as when the crime occurred and can give a false sense of what happened. But in this case, the building was sealed off so it could be done. Cruzs attorneys have argued that prosecutors have used what they assert is provocative evidence, including Thursday's visit, not just to prove their case, but to inflame jurors passions. After jurors returned to the courtroom Thursday, the mothers of two victims testified that the massacre permanently cast a pall over not only every Valentines Day but other important family celebrations. Helena Ramsay, 17, died on her fathers birthday. That day will never be a celebration and can never be the same for him, her mother, Anne Ramsay, said. Hui Wang, whose 15-year-old son Peter was killed, said the shooting occurred the day before Chinese New Year. A planned celebration was canceled that year and every year since then. This day of unity became a day that hurts the most, she said. The wife of athletic director, Chris Hixon, and their 26-year-old son, who has special needs, also spoke on the fourth and final day jurors heard from victims families. Hixon, a 49-year-old Navy veteran, died charging into the building trying to stop Cruz and protect the students. Corey Hixon described a weekly ritual of getting donuts with his dad. I miss him, he said, simply. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate PHOENIX (AP) Officials in an Arizona county that was plagued with issues during Tuesday's primaries have fired their elections director and said he is no longer employed. Pinal County officials had promised swift changes during a Wednesday news conference where they did not assign blame directly on Elections Director David Frist, who was just hired in March. In a Thursday news release, they said elected Pinal County Recorder Virginia Ross had resigned and agreed to become the new elections director in order to restore confidence for voters. Ross has been the county recorder since being elected in 2012. The office oversaw elections until county supervisors separated the Elections Department from her office in 2017. There have been at least three election directors since then. Hundreds of voters complained Tuesday that they were unable to immediately vote at the polls because the county had run out of some ballots. One polling place was opened hours late because keys were not available. At Wednesday's news conference, Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer and Jeffrey McClure, chair of the Board of Supervisors, both blamed the problems on human error. McClure called it a major screw-up. Frist's county cell phone was disconnected. The problems were the second in the primary. When mail ballots were sent out early in July, many were missing city races and the county a growing suburban area south of metro-Phoenix and home to over 425,000 residents was forced to send supplemental ballots to those voters. On Tuesday, that earlier issue played a role during in-person voting at some of the countys 95 polling sites. Each site may have had as many as 10 ballot styles. A surge of people going to the polls led to some sites either running short or out of ballots. The county tried to print new ballots but old printers were limited and it took a long time in some cases to get new ballots to the affected polling sites. At most, about 750 voters could have been affected, out of about 50,000 total mail and in-person votes tallied from Tuesdays election, but that is purely a guess, Volkmer said. Many likely did vote. Quite frankly, we underestimated, he said of the ballot shortage. There were more people who showed up than we thought were going to show up. County officials were questioned by at least two state lawmakers at Wednesday's news conference. A voting rights group and the state and national Republican Party both complained about voters possibly losing their right to vote and the GOP called for Frist to resign. The party called his removal an important step towards restoring Arizonans faith in their elections." McClure said in a statement that the Board of Supervisors was deeply embarrassed and frustrated by the mistakes and were taking immediate action to ensure November's general election runs smoothly. It is vital that we restore trust with Pinal County voters, and I can assure the community that there is no better leader to take control of our Elections Department than Virginia Ross," McClure said, The board plans to appoint someone to fill the remainder of Ross' term on Friday. County recorders handle voter rolls and early ballot mailing and record and maintain documents like property records. BRIDGEPORT A Bridgeport man was sentenced to more than two years in prison Wednesday for laundering money obtained from lottery and romance schemes, according to federal prosecutors. U.S. Attorney Vanessa Roberts Avery said the schemes defrauded mostly elderly victims across the country of millions of dollars. Stanley Pierre, 35, of Bridgeport, used his personal bank accounts, and established business bank accounts, to launder these funds. U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill in Bridgeport sentenced Pierre to 30 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for his role in the scams. He is released on $100,000 bond and is required to report to prison Sept. 21, the U.S. Attorneys office said in a news release. From August 2015 to March 2020, Farouq Fasasi, Rodney Thomas Jr. and others used lottery scams, romance scams and other fraudulent means to convince elderly victims to give them money, gifts and personal details. Fasasi, Thomas and others lived together for a time at a home on Sherman Avenue in New Haven where they received many packages containing cash, checks and money orders from victims, according to the U.S. Attorneys office. Investigators started looking into the group when they noticed a significant number of packages being sent to addresses in New Haven and Hamden, according to court documents. Some victims also transferred money directly into Pierres bank accounts with at least one deposit being about $91,000, the U.S. Attorneys office said. Pierre also recruited others to launder proceeds from the scheme. Through an investigation, law enforcement learned that the scams defrauded more than 200 people across the United States of more than $5 million. Many of the victims were elderly and vulnerable, and some victims lost their life savings, the U.S. Attorneys office said. One Connecticut victim lost more than $1 million. Pierre pleaded guilty to money laundering on Jan. 27, 2022. On Feb. 15, 2022, Fasasi, Thomas and another co-conspirator, Ralph Pierre, were found guilty of multiple charges stemming from this scheme. On June 28, 2022, Ralph Pierre was sentenced to 36 months in prison. Fasasi and Thomas await sentencing. For seniors who may be victims of financial fraud, please call the National Elder Fraud Hotline at 833-FRAUD-11 (833-372-8311). This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate LONDON (AP) The family of a comatose boy who have fought to prevent doctors from ending his life-support treatment have filed a legal action requesting permission to move their son from a London hospital to a hospice. Archie Battersbees parents announced the move after the European Court of Human Rights late Wednesday rejected a request to intervene in the case following a series of rulings by U.K. courts that backed doctors who said further treatment was not in the 12-year-olds best interests because he is brain dead. The family is now seeking permission to move Archie from the Royal London Hospital in east London to a hospice. They say the hospital informed them that life support would be withdrawn at 11 a.m. Thursday unless a legal challenge over the hospice move was submitted by 9 a.m. I would like him out of here as quick as possible, really, and in a peaceful hospice to say goodbye and spend time with his family, uninterrupted by the noise and chaos, his mother, Hollie Dance, told the BBC. The dispute is the latest U.K. case pitting the judgment of doctors against the wishes of families. It is common for British courts to intervene when parents and doctors disagree on the treatment of a child. In such cases, the best interests of the child take primacy over the parents right to decide what they believe is best for their offspring. Archie was found unconscious at home with a ligature over his head on April 7. His parents believe he may have been taking part in an online challenge that went wrong. Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs the Royal London Hospital, said it understands the motivation behind the familys request but a previous High Court ruling requires that Archie remain in the hospital while his treatment is ended. The boys condition is so unstable that moving him would hasten the deterioration of his condition, the trust said. As directed by the courts, we will work with the family to prepare for the withdrawal of treatment, but we will make no changes to Archies care until the outstanding legal issues are resolved, Alistair Chesser, chief medical officer of the trust, said in a statement. Archies parents took their campaign to prolong his treatment all the way to the U.K. Supreme Court. After exhausting their legal options in Britain, they asked the European Court of Human Rights to intervene. The ECHR late Wednesday said it would not interfere with the decisions of the national courts to allow the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from (Archie) to proceed. LINCOLN, Del. (AP) A North Carolina man was found dead along the side of the road in southern Delaware over the weekend, officials said Wednesday. Troopers were called to the area of Staytonville Road west of North Union Church Road in the Lincoln area of Sussex County around 1:30 a.m. Sunday for a report of a person lying near the road, Delaware State Police said in a news release. When troopers arrived, police said they found a man dead. ISLAMABAD (AP) The Taliban said Thursday they are investigating what they described as claims that al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the Afghan capital. However, the group insisted in a statement that it has no knowledge of the arrival and residence of al-Zawahri in Afghanistan. The statement marked the first time the Taliban leadership addressed the U.S. announcement that al-Zawahri was the target of Sunday's strike. However, despite the Taliban denial of knowledge of al-Zawahri's presence, U.S. officials have said the al-Qaida head was staying at a Kabul safe house linked to the deputy leader of the Taliban. The strike killed al-Zawahri when he stepped out onto the safe house's balcony. His presence in Kabul and the killing have further strained relations between the Taliban and the West, particularly as Afghanistan's rulers seek an urgent infusion of cash to handle the catastrophic collapse of the economy that came after the U.S. withdrawal a year ago. The Taliban had promised in the Doha Agreement not to harbor al-Qaida members or those seeking to attack the U.S. In the accord, the U.S. committed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and not to attack the Taliban. On Tuesday, the Taliban's first statement on the strike only confirmed it had taken place, without mentioning al-Zawahri. In it, they condemned the strike as a clear violation of ... the Doha Agreement. In the new statement Thursday, the Taliban appeared to be trying to avert escalated tensions, particularly at ta time when they and U.S. officials have been holding talks over $3.5 billion in Afghan assets frozen in the United States. The Taliban said they ordered "the investigative and intelligence agencies to conduct serious and comprehensive investigations on various aspects of the mentioned event. The statement also assured the West there is no danger from the territory of Afghanistan to any country, including America. Pakistan, which has lobbied the world to improve ties with the Taliban, said Thursday that its airspace was not used for the strike that killed al-Zawahri. Although U.S. officials have not confirmed from where the drone with precision-guided Hellfire missiles was launched, there was speculation it used Pakistani territory. There is no evidence of this action having been undertaken using Pakistans airspace, Foreign Ministry spokesman Asim Iftikhar said. U.S. officials have said al-Zawahri had been staying for months at the Kabul home of a top aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani is the top deputy of the Taliban movement's supreme leader, Mullah Haibatallah Akhundzada. He also serves as interior minister in the Taliban-run government and heads the Haqqani network, a powerful faction within the movement. The Haqqani network is an Afghan Islamic insurgent group, built around the family of the same name. In the 1980s, it fought Soviet forces and over the past 20 years, it battled U.S.-led NATO troops and the former Afghanistan government. The U.S. government maintains a $10 million bounty on Sirajuddin Haqqani for attacks on American troops and Afghan civilians. However, the Haqqanis also have opponents within the Taliban leadership, some of whom feel Sirajuddin Haqqani is amassing too much power. Haqqani's apparent sheltering of al-Zawahri could exacerbate frictions within the movement, though his power in the leadership leaves him nearly untouchable. Regardless of who knew about al-Zawhari's presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban as a whole has never ended its longtime alliance with al-Qaida. The terror network has greatly diminished in manpower and strength the past decade, making it more reliant on allies like the Taliban. Al-Qaida has enjoyed greater freedom in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, according to a July report to the U.N. Security Council by monitors of militant groups. However, the monitors said its unlikely al-Qaida will seek to mount direct attacks outside Afghanistan, owing to a lack of capability and restraint on the part of the Taliban, as well as an unwillingness to jeopardize their recent gains such as having a safe haven and improved resources. Dennis Bradley is a fighter for Bridgeport. He has represented me well as my senator, and on Aug. 9 I will be voting for him. I was elected to serve four terms in the Senate where Dennis has served. I also had the honor and the challenge of being Bridgeports mayor for eight years. I know how difficult it can be to represent Bridgeport to the rest of the state. It isnt easy to bring home the bacon, to provide the tools for our city to grow and create jobs. But Dennis and the other members of the Bridgeport delegation have all fought hard for the education funding and the public projects Bridgeport deserves. One of the factors I take into consideration when supporting a candidate is what does law enforcement have to say about them. So, when law enforcement officials cast their support for Jayme Stevenson, it spoke volumes. Recently endorsed by Connecticut State Fraternal Order of Police as well as our own Trumbull Police Union, they know that Jayme puts safety above all else. By committing her support to the men and women in blue, she is supporting the safety of all in our communities communities where crime rates have increased dramatically the past two years. India offers a fantastic variety of unique flora and fauna species. The animals, especially, are found roaming freely in protected wildlife sanctuaries. With such a large number of exotic wildlife and plant species, theres no wonder why India is tourists dream destination. Of around 560 wildlife sanctuaries, here we are presenting the top 21 frequently visited by millions of tourists annually. So the next time you plan a vacation, add a wildlife sanctuary in India to your travel bucket list. Lets take a look at the list of wildlife sanctuaries in India. 1. Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary is the best wildlife sanctuary in Karnataka, featuring green vegetation and beautiful sceneries. Located within the reserve is a Bhadra river where many wildlife species can be spotted in the daylight. The sanctuary is stretched over 490 sq km and is home to endangered species, like Orangutan and Malabar Giant Squirrel. In addition to wildlife, Bhadra wildlife sanctuary offers you a plethora of adventurous activities, including trekking and boat safari. Best Time to Visit: March to May Timings: 68:30 AM, 3:306 PM Entry Fees: Safari trip costs INR 400 per person 2. Hemis National Park Located about 6000 m above sea level, Hemis National Park in Jammu & Kashmir has the highest elevation of all wildlife sanctuaries in India. Visitors can find exotic animals, including Shapu, leopards, and Bharal, among others. Besides that, abundant flota add to the beauty of this national park. It also has obver 73 species of birds, including the Himalayan Whistling Thrush. If you want some adrenaline rush, visit Hemis National Park. Best Time to Visit: May to October Timings: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM. Entry Fee: Indian - INR 20 per head. Foreigner - INR100 per head. 3. Grizzled Square Wildlife Sanctuary Covering a vast area of the Madurai district in Tamil Nadu, the Grizzled Square Wildlife Sanctuary is named after this rare and endangered bird species. The lush greenery and gorgeous landscape in this park attract tourists from all over India and foreign countries. You must book a safari trip to explore its beauty. Best Time to Visit:Throughout the year except March, April and May Timings: Open from 5 AM to 6 PM Entry Fee: INR 15 per person 4. Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve Located in the Chandrapur district, Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve is Maharashtras largest and most popular wildlife sanctuary. This thick jungle is home to 88 tigers with Hyenas, jungle cats, Nilgai, barking deer, and sambar. The sanctuary was established in 1995 when the authorities merged a national park and a wildlife sanctuary to build this reserve, covering an area of 625.3 sq kilometers. Theres also a lake where you can spot rare bird species, like the grey-headed fish eagle. Best Time to Visit: November to March Timings: Open from 6 AM - 6 PM Entry Fee: 20 per person and 100 for a guide. 5. Askot Musk Deer Wildlife Sanctuary Askot Wildlife Sanctuary was developed for musk deer and to protect other deer species in 1986. Stretched over 600 sq kms, this wildlife sanctuary is home to a fascinating variety of flora and fauna. Its approx 50 kilometers ride from the Pithoragarh district in Uttarakhand. Askot Wildlife Sanctuary is for tourists who love to explore nature in tranquillity. Its one of the hidden gems in Uttarakhand. Best Time to Visit: April-September Timings: Open from 8 AM to 5 PM Entry Fee: No Fee 6. Ranthambore National Park The largest wildlife sanctuary in India is home to many tigers and over 270 bird species. You can book a tiger safari to spot some majestic tigers. If you are lucky, you might spot a leopard, Sambar, and Nilgai. Besides tigers and other endangered wildlife species, Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan is famous for having Indias largest banyan tree. Best Time to Visit: October-March Timings: 7-11 AM, 2-5:30 PM Entry Fee: 974 per person for booking a jeep 7. Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary A trip to this Kerala wildlife sanctuary will show you one of the most endangered species of India the Great Grizzled Squirrel. The park has over 34 animal species, of which Elephant, Panthers, and Nilgiri are the most commonly spotted ones. The jungle has 240 bird species and the mesmerizing Thoovanam Waterfalls, which makes it an ideal trekking location for adventure junkies and nature lovers. If you are lucky, you might spot the Mugger Crocodile. Best Time to Visit: December to April Timings: 8am to 5pm Entry Fees: INR 10 per person for adults and 5 per person for children below 12 years age. INR 100 per person for foreigner. 8. Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary This one is famous for a vast land filled with stunning views and pink flamingos. This Gujarats most beautiful wildlife sanctuary covers a massive 7505 sq kms and is considered the most beautiful and famous wildlife sanctuary in India. Some of the popular species spotted in this Gujarats popular wildlife sanctuary are the Great Flamingos, Wild Ass, and Indian Cormorant. The water has the perfect depth, creating an ideal environment for flamingoes to breed. In fact, it is the only wildlife and bird sanctuary in India where pink flamingoes are found in large numbers. Best time to visit: November-March Timings: Open from 6 AM to 6 PM Entry Fees: INR 250 per person 9. Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary If you are looking for an adrenaline rush and some adventure, try Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary. Its a famous wildlife sanctuary in Maharashtra in the Satara district and is famous for the worlds most venomous King Cobra. The area receives a cool climate, which makes the weather here pleasant all year round. Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary is declared a world heritage site. Thanks to its stunning landscapes, an amazing variety of fauna species, and abundant flora. Best Time to Visit: In winter (October-February) Timings: Open from 7 AM to 6 PM Entry Fee: INR 20 per person. 10. Panna National Park Panna National Park is in the Chattarpur district of Madhya Pradesh and is one of the most mesmerizing wildlife sanctuaries in India. Stretched over 542 sq kms, Panna National Park is the Tiger Reserve Forest. The area receives heavy rainfall, which has led to the lush greenery and many species of fauna residing here. This wildlife sanctuary is home to five famous wild cats, including the Bengal Tiger. Wildlife lovers can spot endangered wildlife species, including hyenas, wild dogs, and tigers, here. Best Time to Visit: October to March Timings: 6:30 AM to 10:30AM, 2:30 AM to 5:30 PM Entry Fee: INR 40 per head for Indians and 500 per head for foreigners. Full vehicle permit, in a vehicle registered by park management for tourism purpose maximum six persons. : Rs. 1200 Full vehicle permit in a mini bus, maximum twenty persons: Rs. 4800 11. Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary Located in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh is the smallest wildlife sanctuary in India Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary. Its a dream destination for photographers and bird-watchers. It houses 700 species of birds, giving you a fascinating and colorful view in all seasons. The sanctuary rose to popularity for finding Bugun Liocichla a bird species we didnt know existed. In addition to birds, the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary is famous for golden cats, leopards, gaur, and wild dogs. Best Time to Visit: November-April Timings: 5 AM to 4 PM Entry Fee: INR 100 per person 12. Jhajjar Bachauli Wildlife Sanctuary This 15-kilometers drive from Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, will lead you to the states most beautiful wildlife sanctuary. Jhajjar Bachauli Wildlife Sanctuary covers a massive area of 289 acres and is blessed with popular wildlife species, including barking deer, jackal, hare, rat snake, monitor lizards, blue bulls, etc. The sanctuary is located near the Sutlej river and has plenty of natural sceneries that will keep you here for hours. Best Time to Visit: November to March Timings: 6AM to 10 PM Entry Fee: Safari charges INR 400 per person 13. Karakoram Wildlife Sanctuary A tour of the Karakoram Wildlife Sanctuary in Jammu & Kashmir will be a visual treat for adventure lovers. Considering its elevation, its obvious that only the bravest fauna species that have the ability to tolerate freezing weather live here. Professor Chandrakala Prakash did extensive research on medicinal plants in this region, despite the limited vegetation. The sanctuary is home to migratory wildlife species, like Arnebia Euchroma, Bergenia Strachey, and Wooly Hare. Best Time to Visit: May and October Timings: 6 AM to 6 PM Entry Fee: INR 20 per head for Indians and INR 100 per head for foreigners. 14. Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary Its another beautiful wildlife sanctuary in Punjab, developed for the conservation of Black Buck. The entire Bishnoi Community in the region worked together to protect the wildlife. Black Buck, especially, is considered a sacred animal. There are around 4000 of them found roaming freely in the villages and sanctuary. It is also home to Blue Bull and an extensive variety of flora and fauna species. Located in the Fazilka district of Punjab, Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary is spread over a massive 18,650 hectares. Best Time to Visit: October to March. Timings: 5 AM to 5 PM Entry Fee: DATA NOT AVAILABLE 15. Pangolakha Wildlife Sanctuary Despite being one of the smallest Northern states, Sikkim always attracts local and international tourists with its beautiful sightseeing locations. This hilly state is also renowned for its wildlife sanctuaries. Pangolakha Wildlife Sanctuary is a must-visit for all Sikkim tourists. Spread over 124 sq kms, this Sikkimattraction is home to over 300 red pandas. Featuring over 100 plant species, including some rare plants, and a wonderful variety of birds, Pangolakha is the most gorgeous Sikkim wildlife sanctuary, in terms of landscape and exotic animals. Best Time to Visit: November-May Timings: 5 AM to 5 PM Entry Fee: INR 200 per person 16. Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary This second-largest, one of the most frequently visited, and a famous wildlife sanctuary in Karnataka feature a wonderful variety of animals and birds. You can spot black panthers, flying squirrel, and leopards (to name a few). Best Time to Visit: October to May Timings: 6 AM to 10 PM Entry Fee: INR 40 per head for Indians and 80 per head for foreigners 17. Rollapadu Wildlife Sanctuary In the Rollapdu village in Andhra Pradesh, this exquisite wildlife sanctuary gives you a golden chance to encounter exotic wildlife from close, of course, with a guide. Its stretched over 614 sq kms and is frequently visited by researchers and wildlife fans who come here to spot some rare animal species roaming freely in the thick jungle. Rollapadu Wildlife Sanctuary has Lesser Florican and the Great Indian Bustard, among other wildlife species. It might not be as famous as other national parks in India. But considering the variety of flora and fauna species that this park is abode to, this one is worth your visit. Best Time to Visit: November-February Timings: Open from 7 AM to 6 PM Entry Fee: INR 30 per head for adults and INR 20 per head for children 18. Rajaji National Park A gorgeous and frequently visited wildlife sanctuary in India, Rajaji National Park boasts 49 mammal species and various forests. The cool climate and fascinating landscape make this wildlife sanctuary the best attraction in Uttarakhand. You will find over 300 bird species and 60 types of butterflies here. Best Time to Visit: November to June Timings: 6 AM to 6 PM Entry Fee: INR 150 per person for Indians and INR 600 per person for foreigners. (Vehicle charges-INR 250 per vehicle for Indians and INR 500 per vehicle for foreigners.) 19. Silent Valley National Park Located amidst green vegetation and incredibly gorgeous views, Silent Valley National Park is another tourist attraction in Kerala. It features 150 species of birds, over 1000 species of flora, and 200 types of butterflies. Grey-headed Bulbul and the Great Indian Hornbill are the major attractions of this wildlife sanctuary. Best Time to Visit: between December and February Timings: 8 AM to 1 PM Entry Fee: INR 50 per person for Indians and INR 250 per person for foreigners. 20. Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary Located in Molem, Goa, Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary is surrounded by thick jungle and lush greenery, making it an exotic place for all wildlife and nature lovers. In addition to wildlife, this sanctuary is famous for its wide variety of avifauna. Check out the Devils Canyon Viewpoint to get a clean and scenic view of this wildlife sanctuary. Best Time to Visit: November-March Timings: Open from 9 AM to 5:30 PM Entry Fee: INR 10 per person 21. Fambong Lho Wildlife Sanctuary Do you want to escape the citys noise? Sikkim has this mesmerizing wildlife sanctuary located away from the citys crowd and in a tranquil location where you can explore Indias northern wildlife peacefully. The area is famous for being home to many avocado trees and the three small yet gorgeous villages in the middle of this jungle. Fambong Lho Wildlife Sanctuary is for trekkers, bird-watchers, and nature lovers. Best Time to Visit: April-July Timings: Open from 8 AM to 3 PM Entry Fee: INR 55 per person for Indian adults Conclusion These animals live safely in dense forests. Whether you are a local or an international tourist, India will surely amaze you with the rare wildlife species that you might not find anywhere else. These were some of the most important wildlife sanctuaries in India. The next time you plan a trip to the Indian states, check out the popular wildlife sanctuaries and schedule a visit. All the accused were arrested from their separate hideouts and remanded to judicial custody. (Representative Image) Hyderabad: One of the juveniles in the Jubilee hills minors gang-rape who received bail recently is reportedly being sent abroad. His parents are keen on sending him abroad for further studies, it is alleged. They have warned him against meeting or speaking to the other accused. On May 28, a 17-year-old girl was allegedly raped in a car by five juveniles and one Mohamad Saduddin Malik. Three days later on May 31, the victim lodged a complaint with the Jubilee Hills police, against the accused. All the accused were arrested from their separate hideouts and remanded to judicial custody. All five were granted conditional bail. Sources revealed that the juveniles parents took away their mobile phones so that they do not interact with outsiders. The contact list of the phone has been deleted, the sources said. Advertisement China could either starve Taiwan into submission or carry out the most violent amphibious assault the world has ever seen as part of Beijing's bid for global dominance, military expert Samuel Cranny-Evans writes today. Tensions between China and Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory, have escalated in recent days following a historic visit to the island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. China's President Xi Jinping announced that the country would hold its largest-ever live-fire drills around Taiwan from today, and used Pelosi's trip to the island as an excuse. Today, China fired nine missiles towards Taiwan - five of which landed in Japanese waters - as Beijing ignored warnings that a miscalculation during the live-fire drills could spark war. Beijing also scrambled fighter jets and sent some of its most up-to-date warships to surround the island, in what state media said is a rehearsal for an invasion. The drills are due to last until Sunday, and are due to including long-range bombers and hypersonic missiles. China's two aircraft carriers are also holding position nearby. Self-governed Taiwan's 23 million people live under the constant threat of invasion by China, which views the island as its territory and has vowed to one day seize it, by force if necessary. Beijing tries to keep Taiwan isolated on the world stage and opposes countries having official exchanges with it. Amid the heightened tensions, Mr Cranny-Evans, a research analyst at London's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), details how China could force Taiwan to accept its will in a comment piece for MailOnline: This graphic shows areas Chinese troops are likely to launch from and where in Taiwan they are likely to land if Beijing did launch an invasion There are two scenarios that defence analysts tend to settle on when thinking about China's military options against Taiwan. The first is a naval blockade, an enormous challenge for an island nation that is reliant upon its ports for survival as only 35 per cent of its food is produced domestically - according to 2018 figures - with the rest of it imported. It is thought that a naval blockade conducted by the People's Liberation Army Navy and the People's Armed Forces Maritime Militia would present a significant challenge to the US Navy. And, as demonstrated by China's frequent flights into Taiwan's air defence identification zone, Taiwan is within easy reach of the PLA Air Force. The only way for most US aircraft to reach the island would be to rely upon bulky tanker planes to re-fuel them mid-air, or for aircraft carrier strike groups to approach the island. China's navy would be capable of encircling Taiwan, which it is currently demonstrating via military drills being carried out in the wake of Pelosi's visit. Beijing's warships operate a large quantity of anti-ship cruise missiles that would pose a threat to America and Taiwan's naval forces. The Type 022 missile boat, for example, is a small and highly mobile catamaran that carries up to eight YJ-83 anti-ship missiles that have a range of just over 110 miles. The Type 052D destroyer, meanwhile, can carry dozens of YJ-18 anti-ship missiles which can range up to 310 miles. China can also equip its fighter planes with various weapons designed to take out naval vessels, while the country's land-based rocket forces wield the mighty DF-26B - which has a range of up to 2,500 miles. The Rocket Force under the Eastern Theatre Command of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts conventional missile tests into the waters off the eastern coast of Taiwan on Thursday The Ground Force under the Eastern Theatre Command of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts a long-range live-fire drill into the Taiwan Strait on Thursday Video shows Chinese military forces firing live ammunition in drills near to the coast of Taiwan overnight as tensions continue to escalate However, focusing only on weapons is often misleading. It is the way that weapons are targeted and used to engage an opponent that is key. Whilst impressively armed, few of China's surface vessels have the sensor suites to enable over-the-horizon engagements - put bluntly, they cannot shoot what they cannot see. To get around this flaw, Beijing has developed the Type 055 destroyer which is designed to act as 'command and control centre' for nearby ships. In simple terms, it receives targeting data from spy planes and drones and passes that information on to other ships. Vessels near the Type 055 then use this data to program targets for their missiles to hit before firing. The weapons then fly towards their targets while skimming just above the ocean making them difficult for US or Taiwanese radars to detect. In the final stages a radar installed in the nose of the missile activates to locate a target and adjust its flight path. The Chinese navy would likely launch dozens of missiles in salvos designed to arrive at the target location simultaneously. This would be almost impossible for a fleet to defend against with a 100% success rate. In sum, a naval blockade would enable China to deny Taiwan the vital food and minerals that the island relies upon, whilst simultaneously presenting a defensive nightmare for the US, Taiwan, and any partners trying to break the blockade. The goal would be to coerce Taiwan into accepting China's will. A Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan Island, one of mainland China's closes points to Taiwan. The Asian country has started 'live-firing' war games in the waters around Taiwan today The second scenario is the one which sees China's vast army embark on an amphibious invasion of Taiwan in a similar fashion to the D-Day landings. This scenario, which might happen as an extension of the naval blockade, would include an extensive preparatory period that Beijing would be unable to hide. An invasion would require at a conservative estimate between half a million, and a million personnel, as well as the transport ships to get them to Taiwan. This would include a mix of navy and civilian vessels that are required to provide their services to China by law. At some point, the airspace over the Taiwan Strait would be closed and China's army, air force, and navy would begin a massed air and missile attack. Cruise and ballistic missiles would be directed at Taiwan's air defences, logistics hubs, airfields, and government buildings in the hope of decapitating its ability to maintain and coordinate resistance. At the same time, drones would maintain a constant presence, filling in for when the air force's aircraft were refueling or focused elsewhere. And, alongside all of this battles would be fought silently over the internet with massed cyber attacks from both sides crippling government websites, banks, and even military command systems. Both sides have had decades to plan for this occasion, so China is likely aware of where Taiwan's critical infrastructure sits, and Taiwan has hardened that which cannot be hidden. At the same time, China and Taiwan's air forces those Taiwanese aircraft that survive the initial bombardment would take to the skies in an attempt to defeat each other. Air defence batteries on both sides would be activated to engage missiles and aircraft. Fratricide, where pilots could accidentally kill their own comrades in the intensity of battle, would be likely. Once the PLA's leadership was satisfied that Taiwan's defences had been sufficiently softened, it would begin the invasion in earnest. The first wave may well include helicopter-borne special forces as well as the PLA Airborne Forces, which have their own armoured vehicles designed to be parachuted into combat. They would aim to deploy to the rear of Taiwan's conventional forces and disrupt logistics and reserves, eliminate commanders and senior political figures, and seize key locations. The Rocket Force under the Eastern Theatre Command of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts conventional missile tests into the waters off the eastern coast of Taiwan on Thursday Chinese missile batteries open fire from the coast near Pingtang Island across the Taiwan Strait as Beijing begins its biggest-ever war games around the self-governing island Taiwan would rush its conventional forces to the most likely line of advance in an effort to stem the flood of China's troops, all the while trying to mobilise and arm its reserves and pushing supplies into the mountains and cities to prepare for a prolonged and violent war. The first wave would likely consist of soldiers from the Chinese army's Eastern Theatre Command as well as the Marine Corps climbing apprehensively into ZBD-05 armoured personnel carriers armed with 30 mm cannons. The interior of the vehicles would be cramped and dark, illuminated only by red lightbulbs. The armoured personnel carriers would be packed onto amphibious assault ships, perhaps the future Type 075 expected to be commissioned by 2025 and sent towards Taiwan. Taiwan would respond with a hail of its own anti-ship cruise missiles, including the domestically designed and manufactured Hsiung Feng III with a range of 400 km, and the US-made Harpoon with a range of 125 km, likely sinking many Chinese vessels with their amphibious assault assets on board, but suffering attrition in return. At a given point the surviving Chinese assault ships would disembark their armoured personnel carriers to steam onto the target beach. The ZBD-05 family is amphibious - they are tracked and heavily armed enabling them to assault a beach without the panoply of artillery and missiles that the Chinese army relies upon. This means that they could be launched many kilometers from the beaches to advance independently and present a smaller target than the Type 075. In the closing kilometers some of the armoured personnel carriers would launch drones whilst at sea to provide targeting data for naval gun fire and the 105 mm guns arming the ZTD-05. Nonetheless, once on the beach they would face fierce resistance from Taiwan's armed forces in prepared defences. They would be faced by coordinated artillery and rocket fire from Taiwan's batteries of M142 HIMARS. China's ground troops would be tasked to secure ports and cities enabling the follow-on waves to disembark heavy armour from their roll-on roll-off car transporters, ships that are not too dissimilar from the cross-channel ferries that go from Dover to Calais. If Taiwan is unable to stop the first waves, its forces will gradually fall back into the mountains and cities to draw the Chinese military into a violent and bloody prolonged conflict, all in the hope that US intervention will bring the war to a close or tilt the balance of forces in their favour. Whatever the outcome, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be unimaginably violent, and greater in scale than any amphibious assault conducted to date. He's largely grown up away from the limelight - but James, Viscount Severn, has made himself firmly seen this week following a spate of appearances with his family. The 14-year-old, thought to be one of the 'Queen's favourite' grandchildren, has joined his parents, Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex, and his sister Lady Louise Windsor, 18, at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham for the last three days. He also appeared alongside the rest of the royal family throughout the Queen's Jubilee celebrations earlier this year and the Easter service at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle in April. Appearing smart in a check shirt and trouser combo yesterday, the teenager is said to be a keen and talented fly fisher - a pastime loved by several of his relatives, such as Prince Charles and the late Queen Mother. James is also thought to be a much-loved addition to the party when attending the royal family's annual summer holiday in Balmoral, where he joins in enthusiastically with outdoor activities. But while he's clearly an important member of the Queen's family in private, he's rarely seen on any official engagements with his parents, and wasn't styled as a prince at birth in order 'to avoid some of the burdens of royal titles'. He's largely grown up away from the limelight - but James, Viscount Severn (pictured), has made himself firmly seen this week following a spate of appearances with his family Sophie, Countess of Wessex, James, Viscount Severn and Lady Louise Windsor react during the Platinum Party at Buckingham Palace on June 4, 2022 as part of the Queen's Jubilee celebrations James and Lady Louise pictured during this year's Trooping The Colour Sophie, Lady Louise, James and Prince Edward attend the Easter Service at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle in April 2022 Upon the Earl and Countess of Wessex's marriage in 1999, Buckingham Palace announced that their children would be styled as the offspring of an earl, rather than as a prince of princess. 'It is thought this decision was made to avoid some of the burdens of royal titles,' according to the BBC. His styling as Viscount Severn (one of his fathers subsidiary titles) is believed to have been chosen to acknowledge Sophies Welsh heritage because the name is taken from the River Severn in Wales. The Countess told the Sunday Times in 2020: 'We try to bring them up with the understanding that they are very likely to have to work for a living 'Hence we made the decision not to use HRH titles. They have them and can decide to use them from 18, but its highly unlikely.' She also spoke in 2016 about her attempts to keep her son and daughter out of the public spotlight while they are children. The 14-year-old, thought to be one of the 'Queen's favourite' grandchildren, has joined his parents, Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex, and his sister Lady Louise Windsor, 18, at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham for the last three days The teenager (pictured right on Tuesday) is said to be a keen and talented fly fisher - a pastime loved by several of his relatives, such as Prince Charles and the late Queen Mother James (left) is said to be a much-loved edition when attending the royal family's annual summer holiday in Balmoral, where he joins in enthusiastically with outdoor activities But while James (pictured centre on Monday) is clearly an important member of the Queen's family in private, he's rarely seen on any official engagements with his parents, and wasn't styled as a prince at birth in order 'to avoid some of the burdens of royal titles' Sophie told the BBC: 'Certainly when they were very young we tried to keep them out of it. Only because for their sakes, to grow up as normally as possible we felt was quite important. 'And theyre going to have to go out and get a job and earn a living later on in life and if theyve had a normal a start in life they possibly can get, then hopefully that will stand them in good stead.' Yet the lack of HRH title hasn't stopped James from being honoured - and a Canadian lake has already been named after him. His father Prince Edward was presented with a pair of framed notices naming two Northwestern Manitoba lakes after his two children during his visit to the Canadian province of Manitoba in 2008, reported the Vancouver Sun. James, full name James Alexander Philip Theo, was born at Frimley Park Hospital on 17 December 2007. Sophie and Edward pictured with baby James as he makes his first appearance at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey in 2007 Sophie and James in 2010, left, and the royal in 2013 at the Royal Windsor Horse Show Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, Lady Louise Windsor, James Viscount Severn, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Charles, Prince of Wales on the balcony at Buckingham Palace during the annual Trooping the Colour Ceremony on June 15, 2013 Prince Edward described his newborn son at the time as 'like most babies, rather small, very cute and very cuddly', reported the BBC. James is currently - following the birth of Princess Beatrice's baby last year - 15th in the line of succession to the British throne. He was eighth in line at the time of his birth, ahead of his older sister Lady Louise. The Succession of the Crown Act made it so that no male offspring now takes precedence over females in the Royal Family. However, the Act was passed in 2013, and only applies to those born after October 28, 2011. As such, James's place in the order of succession remains ahead of Louise and was unchanged following the birth of Zara Tindall's third baby Lucas, last year. The Earl of Wessex (right) and James, Viscount Severn arrive at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle for the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry in 2018, pictured The Countess of Wessex, Lady Louise Windsor, James Viscount Severn and the Earl of Wessex on Christmas Day in 2018 This is because while Zara's mother Princess Anne is older than Edward, she was also born before the Act came into force. James was baptised in the Private Chapel of Windsor Castle in April 2008 and became the first royal baby to wear the newly-made replica of the royal christening gown. The original gown dated back to the christening of Queen Victoria and Prince Alberts eldest child, also named Victoria, in 1840. It has now been preserved and most royal babies since the Viscount have also been christened in the replica. James, who lives with his parents and sister at the family home of Bagshot Park in Surrey, is said to be among the Queen's favourites, according to Tatler. He was reportedly educated at two nearby independent, co-educational prep schools, Eagle House School and St Georges School Windsor Castle. Sophie, Countess of Wessex and James, Viscount Severn feed a giraffe as they visit The Wild Place Project at Bristol Zoo on July 23, 2019 However, both these establishments only teach pupils until the age of 13, meaning he likely began attending a new school last year. He appeared on his fist overseas engagement in April 2015, aged just seven, with his then 11-year-old sister, as they joined their parents on a visit to the Ubunye Foundation in Grahamstown, South Africa. Sophie acts as patron for the non-profit organisation, which helps rural communities become self-reliant, and said at the time: Its very important for my children to see immediately from the moment that they come to South Africa that its not just about wonderful, beautiful animals and beautiful scenery. That there is a huge need to support, protect and nurture the communities that live around and within these beautiful surroundings, she added, reported The Express. In 2020, Sophie revealed her children are 'not into social media' but she and husband Prince Edward intend to teach them how to use it 'successfully' as they get older. The Earl and Countess of Wessex take part in a Great British Beach Clean with their children, Lady Louise Windsor and James Viscount Severn, in Southsea in 2020 The mother-of-two said the virtual world can be 'unkind' at times and she hopes her 'open' relationship with her children will help them navigate it better. Speaking to Good Housekeeping, the Countess of Wessex, who is patron of the NSPCC and Childline, added that it's 'so important' for young people to have adults in their lives who support and affirm them. 'Social media is here to stay, so it's important for them to understand it and for us to equip them with the tools to navigate it successfully,' she explained. 'I think openness is one way families can support their teenagers. If children feel they can discuss issues and worries with their parents, without fear of them, or their friends, being judged, this may give opportunity to help them with what can be a complex and very pressured area. 'Particularly when the virtual world can be, at times, unkind. Young people need to know they can trust someone with a problem, be that a person directly involved in their life or, of course, Childline is always there for them.' James spends his summers at the Queens Scottish estate with other members of the royal family and is rather good at flipping burgers and liked to get fully involved whenever there was a family barbecue at Balmoral, claimed a source. The insider also told The Sun in 2019: His enthusiasm for fly fishing delighted Her Majesty because its a sport beloved of Jamess great-granny, the late Queen Mother. James was in the Dee as often as possible, waders up to his armpits. His mother Sophie, who is a keen fisherwoman herself, liked to stand with him. The Balmoral ghillies [gamekeepers] were impressed with both of them. James has also previously been spotted driving a Land Rover in the grounds of Windsor Castle with his mother in the passenger seat. A father whose daughter enlisted him to model her crochet designs has become an online star thanks to both his poses and his unwavering support for his child. Jeff Beaver, 53, from Arkansas, has been proudly showing off his midriff in colorful crop tops and shorts created by his daughter, Emily Beaver, 28, who sells the items on her online shop, LoveBeav. 'My dad has never been afraid to look silly, especially if he's having fun doing it, so there was never any hesitation on his part,' Emily told Good Morning America. Jeff Beaver, 53, has been showing off his midriff in crop tops created by his daughter, Emily Beaver, 28, who sells the items on her online shop, LoveBeav The proud dad has been photographed striking pose after pose in his daughter's designs Emily started crocheting in 2015, but it wasn't until 2021 that her business got a boost thanks to social media and her supportive parents The artist started crocheting in 2015, and she soon developed a passion for making special pieces for her loved ones. 'I set out with a mission to make unique crochet clothing specifically for myself, and found that I very much enjoyed seeing my creations on friends and the joy they get from wearing my art,' she wrote on her website. But it wasn't until 2021 that social media and her supportive parents gave her business a boost. Emily, who markets her designs on Instagram and TikTok, asked her father to start modeling for her after she noticed that a video of her mother, Amy Beaver, in one of her crochet pieces did particularly well. After noticing that a video of her mother, Amy Beaver, modeling one of her designs did particularly well, she decided to enlist her father as well Emily joked on TikTok that her father wears nothing but her crochet designs these days In her interview with GMA, she recalled thinking, 'Why not try including Dad, as well?' When Jeff isn't posing by himself, he is joined by his daughter and wife, making the business a full family affair. 'The internet totally ate it up, and every time I included my parents, I knew that there was something special about the concept of a family wearing crochet tops together, Emily explained. She added that she went from having 'barely any sales at all' to 'selling out [her] entire restock each month.' In one video, Jeff is seen climbing a ladder in an original LoveBeav crop top to pose for pictures on the roof Another shows the family shaking their hips to Usher's Confessions Part II in crochet crop tops to hit back at a commenter The online success has allowed her to quit her day job to focus on crocheting and content creation full time with her parents' support. She has also been able to partner with some of her favorite brands, including Michael's Craft Store. Jeff has proven to be a fan favorite, and Emily now has nearly 600,000 followers on TikTok and 28,800 followers on Instagram. In one video, the dad is seen climbing a ladder in an original LoveBeav crop top to pose for pictures on the roof 'My dad doing whatever it takes to sell my crochet tops,' Emily wrote in the on-screen text. Jeff has proven to be a fan favorite, and Emily now has nearly 600,000 followers on TikTok and 28,800 followers on Instagram The family's online success has allowed Emily to quit her day job to focus on crocheting and content creation full time Another shows the family shaking their hips to Usher's Confessions Part II to hit back at a commenter who told her she 'can't just keep wearing crotchet in the street with your family and calling it content.' Emily shared that she and her parents have become so popular on TikTok that they were recognized by fans while attending the Electric Forest music festival together. And while her parents are 'loving' their newfound fame, their favorite thing about the family venture is being with their daughter. 'The most important thing for me and my parents is that we are spending quality time laughing and enjoying what we are doing,' Emily told GMA. 'We could care less what other people think about how silly it might look.' A leading dating expert and matchmaker has revealed the five simple words singles should stop saying if they want to find 'the one.' Louanne Ward, from Perth, Western Australia, knows what makes men and women tick, but claims eligible bachelor and bachelorettes are unintentionally driving their perfect match away. The Australian dating expert and matchmaker took to Instagram to share a video explaining why both men and women should avoiding saying: 'I don't have any expectations.' According to Louanne, the statement pushes people away and is 'a bit of a lie' and an 'orange flag' when dating. She noted the statements people make while in the beginning stages of dating could be misinterpreted, causing challenges in your dating life. Scroll down for video Louanne Ward, from Perth, Western Australia, shared a video online explaining why singles should avoid telling others they have 'no expectations' She noted the statements people make while in the beginning stages of dating could be misinterpreted, causing challenges in your dating life Why these statements are stopping you from finding your perfect match Louanne Ward, a dating expert from Australia, shared both men and women should avoid saying: 'I don't have any expectations' She added that the five words inadvertently drive people away in the beginning stages of dating The matchmaker said there are always expectations when dating, such as their date arriving on time, looking like their photos and being who they said they are The 'orange flag statement' could mean you're date isn't emotionally ready for a relationship and that they are 'wasting your time' 'I don't need a man,' was the next statement the matchmaker warned women to stop saying She said those five words cause men to loose interest because dating is a game to them and finding their soulmate is their 'prize' While she noted independent, confident and successful women don't need a man, they might need all the things a man can give, such as, support, affection and love Advertisement On Instagram, Ms Ward questioned if it's possible for someone to date without any expectations, and if there's a 'hidden meaning' that could be an 'orange flag'. 'These little lies aren't big red flags but they are certainly orange flags and can give you an insight into where your date is at emotionally and if they are wasting your time,' she said. Particularly with online dating, singles usually have the bare minimum expectations that their date will look like their photos, be who they say they are and arrive to the first date on time. 'When you hear this what it probably means is, "I've been rejected so many times [and] I don't hold out any hope that this is going to work",' she said. 'You're probably dealing with someone who's quite a jaded dater and they're never that fun to hang out with.' She also warned your date may have no intensions of wanting a relationship. In the comments other singles had conflicting opinions about Ms Ward's advice. 'We date to connect with someone! To me thats an expectation, to say otherwise might label you as a player,' one man wrote. But Ms Ward replied: 'Half the joy in meeting someone new is the expectation that it might work out!' Another person said: 'Depends on what stage you are in dating. First meeting I think it would be unrealistic to expect anything more than liking having fun and being interested in getting to know each other.' Ms Ward said: 'I couldn't agree more and the expectation of having fun, being treated respectfully and enjoying new opportunities is keeping expectations positive and realistic.' Earlier this month in another video, Ms Ward made headlines when she revealed the five most common words single women should avoid saying if they're looking for a relationship. 'Every time you say "I don't need a man", what you're doing is you're putting out there exactly what you're attracting back,' she said. Ms Ward said when most men hear these words, they 'automatically begin to lose interest' because to men dating is a challenging game and finding their soulmate is the 'prize.' 'You might not need a man, but you actually need all the things a man can give you - the affection, the support, the love, the laughter, the sex, the caring,' Ms Ward said The self-fulfilling prophecy women utter is common among those who are independent, confident and successful. And while the certified relationship expert fully embraces feminism and the idea that a relationship isn't the only fulfill aspect of life, she wants to help women find the person they want to marry. 'It's true, you don't need a man; You earn your own money, you can support yourself, you've got your own life, you're happy,' Ms Ward said in the video. Poll Is the phrase 'I don't need a man' a turn off? Yes, it's a red flag No, it shows independence Is the phrase 'I don't need a man' a turn off? Yes, it's a red flag 1185 votes No, it shows independence 482 votes Now share your opinion 'You might not need a man, but you actually need all the things a man can give you - the affection, the support, the love, the laughter, the sex, the caring.' Ms Ward dubbed the statement as a 'ridiculous thing to say' as there's 'no shame' in needing a man to fulfill your needs. 'You do need him for all the things he can give you,' she said. 'Start being brave enough to say: 'Actually I do need a man for all of the things that I can't give myself'. 'There's no shame in having a need, which is very different than being needy.' The video received a flood of attention online and many agreed with Ms Ward's advice. 'Very well said,' one person wrote, another added: 'Yes it's the same for the other sex as well. We need all the same things.' 'You actually need masculine energy from a man as well,' a third added. 'UNSEXY' MISTAKES WOMEN MAKE 1. Taking one hour to put make-up on to go for Sunday breakfast 2. Saying 'I don't need a man' 3. Too much eagerness texting too frequently 4. Being over-sensitive and crying as a strategy 5. Saying 'You could be an axe murderer or a rapist, for all I know' Advertisement The Queen's social media accounts have yet to send a public birthday message to Meghan Markle as she celebrates turning 41 today - while Prince William and Kate Middleton and Prince Charles and Camilla shared near- identical photographs of the Duchess online. The official @RoyalFamily Instagram and Twitter account have not posted any kind of birthday wish with the Duchess of Sussex - instead sharing photos of Princess Anne's visit to Edinburgh. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's Instagram and Twitter accounts posted a photograph of the Duchess of Sussex from the Queen's Jubilee celebrations in June this morning alongside the simple message: 'Wishing a happy birthday to the Duchess of Sussex!' Shortly afterward, the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall went on to share a similar message and image of the mother of two. The images selected by both couples show Meghan at the Queen's Service of Thanksgiving at St. Paul's Cathedral and don't feature her husband, Prince Harry. The service was the only event from the Queen's Jubilee the Duke and Duchess of Sussex publicly attended. It marked the first time the couple were seen with 'The Firm' since the frosty Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey in March 2020, shortly before they officially stepped down as senior royals. Prince William and Kate Middleton and Prince Charles and Camilla shared near identical photographs of Meghan Markle from their only public meeting with her in two years on her 41st birthday The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's Instagram and Twitter shared a simple message wishing the Duchess a 'happy birthday' Last year, the Queen lead the royal family in wishing the Duchess a happy 40th birthday. However today, the accounts have been largely silent, except for sharing a series of images about the Princess Royal's visit to Edinburgh. Instead, it was Prince William and Kate, as well as Charles and Camilla, who posted birthday messages and photographs of the royal at the Queen's Jubilee. Prince Harry and Meghan missed both the Platinum Jubilee Party and Pageant, as well as the Epsom Derby during the four-day festivities. The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall went on to share a similar simple message alongside an image of the Duchess from the Jubilee The service was the only event from the Queen's Jubilee the Duke and Duchess of Sussex publicly attended The couple made only one public appearance over the Jubilee weekend, despite flying in from the United States with their two children, Archie and Lilibet. They didn't appear on the Buckingham Palace balcony during Trooping of the Color and were also seemingly relegated to the second row during the Thanksgiving service. Palace aides were said to have choreographed timing for the Platinum Jubilee service to ensure that William and Kate didn't bump into Meghan and Harry. The couple sat apart from Prince William, Kate, Prince Charles and Camilla in the church after royal aides ensured they sat on separate sides of the aisle. Departure and arrival times were also carefully considered by Palace aides, so as to avoid the brothers and their spouses bumping into each other. The Queen's official social media accounts have not shared any kind of birthday wish with the Duchess of Sussex The Royal Family's official accounts shared a series of images from Princess Anne's visit to Edinburgh today Harry and William have had a long-standing feud. Harry has also accused his father of cutting him off financially while Meghan claimed an unnamed royal made a comment about Archie's skin tone before he was born, which she told Oprah Winfrey last year in a bombshell interview. Meghan is celebrating her big day shortly after it emerged her friend and favored author, Omid Scobie, is writing yet another book, promising a new chapter of the royal story that will dish out exclusive revelations. The journalist previously co-wrote the bestseller 'Finding Freedom,' a sympathetic account of Meghan and Harrys relationship and how they came to leave the United Kingdom and step away from royal duties. That tome went into exhaustive detail about the Sussexes over 400 pages, including specifics about luxury holidays and Meghans cravings for sweets. But Scobie doesnt seem to have tired of the subject that has proved so lucrative: The new book as yet untitled and written solo is due for release next year. While Meghan admitted that she authorized a friend to give interviews for 'Finding Freedom,' it's not clear if she has given the nod to the follow-up. Scobie does, however, promise deep access to the royals and their entourage. Some royal-watchers believe the new volume may counter claims made in acclaimed biographer Tom Bowers new book, 'Revenge,' which is critical of the Duchess. Kate and Prince William were the first members of the royal family to publicly send their best wishes to Meghan The book, which Meghans estranged father Thomas contributed to includes a slew of allegations, including that the Duchess once made Kate Middleton cry. Meanwhile, Prince Harry is releasing his own ghostwritten memoir this year, which he has described as a first-hand account of my life thats accurate and wholly truthful. The news comes as it was claimed Prince Harry and Meghan won't be visiting the Queen when she takes her summer break at Balmoral, despite an invitation. Her Majesty reportedly asked the couple and their two children, three-year-old Archie and Lilibet, one, to stay at her Scottish residence and told royal staff to prepare. Meghan is celebrating her big day shortly after it emerged her friend and favoured author, Omid Scobie, is writing yet another book, promising a new chapter of the royal story that will dish out exclusive revelations It was said that the Sussexes would not have to spend time with other royals, like Charles and William. But the couple, who last went to Balmoral in 2018, are said to not be planning to attend the Scottish Highlands estate over the next few months. A Balmoral insider told The Sun and Page Six: 'Staff have been told to expect the full list of royals including Harry, Meghan and their children. They are preparing for the Sussexes.' Another source is reported to have said: 'I would be stunned if they did turn up.' It's understood the couple are planning to stay in the US before the release of Harrys memoir. Nearly 100 students of E1 and E2 of IIIT Basar reportedly suffered from headaches and stomach aches and took treatment at the hospital on the campus till Thursday evening from Wednesday night. (Representational Photo:DC) ADILABAD: Nearly 100 students of E1 and E2 of IIIT Basar reportedly suffered from headaches and stomach aches and took treatment at the hospital on the campus till Thursday evening from Wednesday night. However, only 10 members were admitted to the hospital and treated. The medical staff at the hospital sent the students to their hostels after treating them. The students who were affected said they had developed symptoms of food poisoning but the impact was low when compared to the previous incident. A senior student told the Deccan Chronicle that many students who were affected were not revealing exactly what happened to them since they were not affected severely. The senior student said the exact picture would come out only after going through the patient register at the hospital as to how many students were treated on Wednesday evening. A student who checked the register at the hospital said about 100 students took treatment and among them, 70 were girls. Students were continuingly visiting the hospital with health complaints, he added. The medical staff sent the students to their hostels after giving treatment allegedly to avoid an embarrassing situation and to cover up the whole incident. According to reliable sources, all these students developed vomiting, headache, stomach ache and motions. Students had samosa as a snack on Wednesday evening and uthappa for breakfast on Thursday morning. Dr Susmitha, duty medical officer at the hospital on Basar IIIT campus, said only six students were undergoing treatment in the hospital and four among them were suffering from viral fevers and two were from gastroenteritis and were safe. She refuted the news that a large number of students fell sick due to food poisoning and said the news was false. She added that the students fell sick due to seasonal change. She said the students were undergoing treatment and were safe and there was no food poisoning. The most unpopular baby names so far for 2022 have been revealed, with Kristen, Suzanne, and Lorraine in the rankings. For the boys, Bill, Chad and Stuart were included as monikers which are failing to inspire new parents. The list, released by baby experts Bella Baby, used statistics from Baby Name UK and Google Trends to collate the results. The most unpopular baby names so far for 2022 have been revealed, with Kristen, Suzanne, and Lorraine in the rankings (stock image) The most unpopular girls names included the Italian and English origin Angela, ranked at 683 out of 5493. Kimberly - meaning 'from the wood of the royal forest' and 'from the royal fortress meadow'' - came in at 1,013, and Alexa - a form of the male name Alexander - was 1687. The name Nicole - of Greek origin - also failed to impress, and placed at 279. Elsewhere on the most unpopular list was Ashley and Sophia. Geographical Japanese name Kobe made the boys' list at 298 of 5493, as did Jeffrey at 1825 out of 4608. Nigel - meaning 'champion' - also fell out of favour, as did Ashton, Graham and Gary. Most unpopular baby names of 2022 Boy names Kobe Jeffrey Nigel Ashton Graham Stuart Chad Gary Bill Girl names Angela Kimberly Alexa Nicole Ashley Sophia Lorraine Kristen Suzanne Advertisement 'It is to be expected that some names begin to get out of fashion or popularity over time, whether that be an association with the name or just that it has been so overly used that it is no longer desired by new parents,' the baby experts explained. 'While some names will always be firm favourites and are ever-lasting, there are certain names you wouldn't expect people to fall out of love with but that is the nature of choosing baby names.' Bella Baby added: We imagine that this may change each year with new names being added and others increasing in popularity again.' It comes as the most popular UK baby names so far for 2022 were released last month - with Lily knocking Olivia off the top spot for girls for the first time in seven years. A list of the top 100 names for baby boys and girls in the UK has been released by BabyCentre which gives an insight into the on-trend names parents are turning to this year. Although the top girls' names have shifted, firm favourites for boys' names have remained fairly stable, with Muhammad clinging onto number one. While some trends remain strong, such as members of the royal family inspiring parents, other high-profile events appear to have affected parents' decisions too. One such event making parents wince is the defamation trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp following their bitter divorce in 2016. Depp successfully sued his ex-wife Heard for defamation after she wrote an article in The Washington Post about surviving domestic violence. She was ordered to pay Depp 8.43million ($10.35million) in damages after she was found to have defamed him. And it seems the trial, which was televised throughout, has put prospective parents off the names Johnny and Amber. After years of hanging around in the top 100 names for girls, Amber has dropped off the list for the first time. Top 100 boy names 2022 1. Muhammad 2. Noah 3. Jack 4. Theo 5. Leo 6. Oliver 7. George 8. Ethan 9. Oscar 10. Arthur 11. Charlie 12. Freddie 13. Harry 14. Zayn 15. Alfie 16. Finley 17. Henry 18. Luca 19. Thomas 20. Aiden 21. Archie 22. Teddy 23. Lucas 24. Ryan 25. Kai 26. Liam 27. Jaxon 28. Louie 29. William 30. Jacob 31. Ali 32. Caleb 33. Isaac 34. Joshua 35. Jude 36. James 37. Jayden 38. Adam 39. Arlo 40. Daniel 41. Elijah 42. Max 43. Tommy 44. Ezra 45. Mason 46. Theodore 47. Roman 48. Dylan 49. Reuben 50. Albie 51. Alexander 52. Toby 53. Yusuf 54. Logan 55. Rory 56. Alex 57. Harrison 58. Kayden 59. Nathan 60. Ollie 61. Ayaan 62. Elliot 63. Ahmad 64. Kian 65. Samuel 66. Hudson 67. Jason 68. Myles 69. Rowan 70. Benjamin 71. Finn 72. Omar 73. Riley 74. Zachary 75. Brodie 76. Michael 77. Abdullah 78. Matthew 79. Sebastian 80. Hugo 81. Jesse 82. Junior 83. Oakley 84. Abdul 85. Eli 86. Grayson 87. Mateo 88. Reggie 89. Gabriel 90. Hunter 91. Levi 92. Ibrahim 93. Jasper 94. Syed 95. Zion 96. Luke 97. Seth 98. Aaron 99. Asher 100. Blake Advertisement BabyCentre also did not record any instances of parents registering their baby boys as called Johnny so far this year. For boys' names in particular, there was little change in the top spots, with Muhammad and Noah clinging to first and second place. However Oliver, which had solidly occupied third place for several years, dropped down the list while Jack soared to take its place. Freddie and Harry also fell out of the top 10 while Ethan and Oscar climbed up the ranks to occupy eighth and ninth place. For the first time since 2015 a new name took over the top spot for girls' names, with previous number one Olivia dropping down to third place. Lily claimed the top spot instead, followed by Sophia in second. Sarah Redshaw, managing editor for BabyCentre, shed some light on why she thought new trends were appearing. In addition to the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, Redshaw explained parents were also put off names like Coleen, Rebekah and Wayne due to the infamous Wagatha Christie trial. One trend that appears to have stuck around is parents taking inspiration from members of the royal family. Top 100 girl names 2022 Fact-box text 1. Lily 2. Sophia 3. Olivia 4. Amelia 5. Ava 6. Isla 7. Freya 8. Aria 9. Ivy 10. Mia 11. Elsie 12. Emily 13. Ella 14. Grace 15. Isabella 16. Evie 17. Hannah 18. Luna 19. Maya 20. Daisy 21. Zoe 22. Millie 23. Rosie 24. Layla 25. Isabelle 26. Zara 27. Fatima 28. Harper 29. Nur 30. Charlotte 31. Esme 32. Florence 33. Maryam 34. Poppy 35. Sienna 36. Sophie 37. Aisha 38. Emilia 39. Willow 40. Emma 41. Evelyn 42. Eliana 43. Maisie 44. Alice 45. Chloe 46. Erin 47. Hallie 48. Mila 49. Phoebe 50. Lyla 51. Ada 52. Lottie 53. Ellie 54. Matilda 55. Molly 56. Ruby 57. Ayla 58. Sarah 59. Maddison 60. Aaliyah 61. Aurora 62. Maeve 63. Bella 64. Nova 65. Robyn 66. Arabella 67. Eva 68. Lucy 69. Eden 70. Gracie 71. Jessica 72. Amaya 73. Anna 74. Leah 75. Violet 76. Eleanor 77. Maria 78. Olive 79. Orla 80. Abigail 81. Eliza 82. Rose 83. Talia 84. Elizabeth 85. Gianna 86. Holly 87. Imogen 88. Nancy 89. Annabelle 90. Hazel 91. Margot 92. Raya 93. Bonnie 94. Nina 95. Nora 96. Penelope 97. Scarlett 98. Anaya 99. Delilah 100. Iris Advertisement George has remained a firm favourite in the top 10 while Louie - a cute play on Louis, held firm in the top 30. In the year of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations, it seems many parents have been inspired, with the name Elizabeth climbing two places in the top 100. And it is thought the increase in popularity of the name Lily is down to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle who named their daughter Lilibet in 2021. Princess Charlotte appears to have given lots of parents food for thought as the name climbed four places to number 30 this year - while its diminutive form Lottie also climbed the ranks to sit at 52. Some classic 70s names appear to be dying out altogether including Kelly, Gail, Brenda and Susie for women - while Keith, Leslie, Glenn and Terry have been shunned by parents too. As popular Netflix show Stranger Things returns for its fourth series, names inspired by the cult programme have also increased in popularity. Robin, Maxine, Elle, Mike, Billy and Steve (all names of main characters in the programme) saw a rise in popularity. Balenciaga has been blasted for selling 1,470 'trash pouches' which resemble plastic bin bags. The luxury Spanish fashion house is selling the drawstring calfskin pouch, which the brand call a 'trash pouch', in four different colours including black, white, blue and yellow. Many people have taken to Twitter to question whether the brand is conducting a social experiment, or simply trolling the masses. On the Balenciaga website the label revealed: 'The Trash Pouch is inspired by a garbage bag.' Balenciaga is blasted for selling 1,470 ($1,790) 'trash pouches' which resemble plastic bin bags The piece first debuted as part of the opening look from Balenciaga's Fall 22 show during Paris Fashion Week in March. The heartbreaking narrative for the show evoked the million-plus Ukrainians fleeing the war. Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga's creative director, who was once a child refugee himself, said the headlines 'triggered the pain' for him. Therefore, he wanted the show to pay homage to the victims resistance and to focus on the 'victory of love and peace.' The piece first debuted as part of the opening look from Balenciaga's Fall 22 show during Paris Fashion Week in March When asked about the controversial product Demna, told WWD: 'I couldn't miss an opportunity to make the most expensive trash bag in the world, because who doesn't love a fashion scandal?' However, people were baffled by the Trash Pouch and disappointed fans took to Twitter to voice their thoughts. One user said: 'Luxury fashion' is legal theft. High fashion is a joke at this point. Balenciaga made a 'trash bag' pouch for $1,790. And on top of shit like that, a lot of you fashion n***as just simply can't dress.' However, people were baffled by the Trash Pouch and disappointed fans took to Twitter to voice their thoughts Another said: 'Balenciaga has a trash bag for sell for $1795. I think designer fashion is a morbid social experiment.' Others wrote: 'I'm convinced Balenciaga is a social experiment because there is no way they are charging 1.8K for a trash bag???' Someone else wrote: '@BALENCIAGA deliberately sells ultra expensive signals of low status. 'The rich buy them to differentiate themselves from the middle class, who are afraid to wear them for fear of being mistaken for low class.' However one person seemed to be confused by all the negative Tweets, saying: 'Everyone seem to hate that Balenciaga trash bag but I love it.' A touching video of a grandpa updating his grandson's photo after he transitioned has earned him the title of 'grandpa of the year' after the video went viral on TikTok. Nicolas Cazorla Fernandez, 20, from South Carolina, was visiting his family in Spain when his grandfather asked him for a new photo to update the one in his home. Nicolas, a transgender man, who attends college in Charleston, South Carolina, documented the heartwarming moment his 'abuelo' switched out his pre-transition photo with a new picture of him. Nicolas Cazorla Fernandez, a transgender man, 20, from South Carolina, shared a touching video of his grandpa updating his photo after he transitioned The college student was visiting his family in Spain when his 'abuelo' asked him for a new photo to update the one he had, which was before Nicolas's surgery The viral video, which racked up over 1.3 million views, showed his grandpa beaming while he updated the picture frame of a new photo of his grandson. The transgender man began sharing his story shortly before he received his gender confirmation surgery. Now, with over 10,000 followers, Nicolas frequently posts about what his surgery entailed. The college student shares his story to his followers in an attempt to help those too afraid to come out and to help others in the trans community. In an interview with Newsweek, Nicolas said: 'I posted this one specifically because a lot of trans youth are scared about what their family members will think or do when they come out, 'I was certainly worried about that too. I posted the video to show that it isn't a generational issue that being old isn't an excuse to be unsupportive of family you are supposed to love.' The viral video showed his grandpa beaming while he updated the picture frame with a new photo, which made Nicolas grin from ear to ear The 20-year-old regularly shares his story to his TikTok followers in an attempt to help those too afraid to come out and to help others in the trans community The transgender man began sharing his story shortly before he received his gender confirmation surgery (pictured post-op) He further explained that his family, specifically his grandpa, were extremely supportive of his decision early on. He added that he expected his family to 'mess up' his pronouns or accidentally dead name him, which is when someone uses a person's birth name, despite them having changed their name when they transitioned. To Nicolas's surprise, his family and his grandfather never had any issues. He added that his 'abuelo' has 'never flinched once.' And when his grandfather wanted to update his photo, the college student admitted he grinned from ear to ear, smiling like 'an idiot.' In the caption of the video, Nicolas dubbed him 'grandpa of the year.' 'He looks so happy,' the grandson exclaimed while his grandfather added his new photo to the picture frame. The video captured the hearts of TikTok users who flooded the comments section celebrating the relationship between the grandson and grandfather The video captured the hearts of TikTok users who flooded the comments section celebrating the relationship between the grandson and grandfather. 'He looks so proud! Congratulations,' wrote one user. Another user commented: 'We love abuelo, absolute legend.' 'Just proves that it's not about what generation you're from it's about a willingness to understand and keep from loving.' Another user added: 'What an excellent gentleman, proof that age is not an excuse.' Melanie Lynskey has opened up about how she and other actresses were body shamed on the set of Coyote Ugly, recalling how she starved herself to be a size four for the 2000 movie. The 45-year-old actress reflected on her experience filming the cult classic in a joint interview with her Yellowjackets co-stars Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci for a cover story featured in The Hollywood Reporter. 'All the girls had this regimen they had to go on. It was ridiculous. I was already starving myself and as thin as I could possibly be for this body, and I was still a [size] four,' she said of the pressure to lose weight. Melanie Lynskey opened up about how she was body shamed on set of the 2000 film Coyote ugly, saying she and her co-stars 'had this regimen they had to go on' 'I was already starving myself and as thin as I could possibly be for this body, and I was still a [size] four,' she told The Hollywood Reporter of playing Gloria in the cult classic (pictured) Lynskey played Gloria, 'the best friend from Jersey,' in the film, which stars Piper Perabo as Violet Sanford, an aspiring songwriter who moves to New York City and gets a job at a women-run bar. The New Zealand native detailed the harsh criticism she faced behind the scenes, including how she was treated by the film's original costume designer. '[There were] already people putting a lot of Spanx on me in wardrobe fittings and being very disappointed when they saw me, the costume designer being like, "Nobody told me there would be girls like you,"' she said. 'Really intense feedback about my physicality, my body, people doing my makeup and being like, "Im just going to help you out by giving you a bit more of a jawline and stuff." Just the feedback was constantly like, "Youre not beautiful. Youre not beautiful."' Lynskey noted that the film's lead, Piper Perabo (left), faced even more scrutiny when it came to her body, appearance, and what she was eating Lynskey (pictured at the Coyote Ugly premiere in 2000) recalled how she was put in Spanx and the movie's original costume designer told her: 'Nobody told me there would be girls like you' Lynskey noted that Perabo faced even more scrutiny as the film's lead, recalling 'the way people were talking about her body, talking about her appearance, focusing on what she was eating.' The Don't Look Up star later clarified her comments on Twitter, explaining that she was not referring to the costume designer who is credited on Coyote Ugly. 'The costume designer who initially worked on Coyote Ugly left for some reason, & a lovely kind woman named Marlene Stewart took over and she was AWESOME. The first person was mean, the person credited was not,' she tweeted. Lynskey added that while she has been criticized by makeup artists in the past, this did not happen on the set of Coyote Ugly. Lynskey reflected on the experience during a joint cover interview with her Yellowjackets co-stars Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci Lynskey later clarified her comments on Twitter, saying she was not referring to the costume designer and makeup artists who were credited on Coyote Ugly 'My answer was kind of a jumble I had experiences with makeup artists offering to help my face look better but that did not happen on Coyote Ugly,' she explained. 'The hair and makeup team were amazing and so kind and among the best Ive ever worked with.' Earlier this year, Lynskey (pictured in Yellowjackets) revealed that a member of the production team on the show made comments about her weight and asked her 'what she planned to do' Earlier this year, Lynskey shared that she had a similar experience while filming Yellowjackets, saying a member of the production team questioned her about how she was planning to lose weight before filming. 'They were asking me, "What do you plan to do? I'm sure the producers will get you a trainer. They'd love to help you with this,"' she told Rolling Stone. Lynskey noted that she was supported by co-stars, with Lewis going as far as to pen a letter to the producers about the comments she had received. 'It was really important to me for [Shauna] to not ever comment on [her] body, to not have me putting a dress on and being like, "I wish I looked a bit better,"' she explained. 'I did find it important that this character is just comfortable and sexual and not thinking or talking about it, because I want women to be able to watch it and be like, "Wow, she looks like me and nobody's saying she's the fat one." 'That representation is important.' Since the premiere of Yellowjackets at the end of last year, Lynskey has faced a barrage of social media comments attacking her body and appearance. Lynskey and her husband, Jason Ritter (pictured), have both clapped back at body shamers on Twitter following the premiere of Yellowjackets late last year In late January, the actress slammed online trolls who make unsolicited comments about her weight under the guise of concern for her well-being The next day, Ritter took to Twitter to post a scathing comment in support of his wife In late January, the actress clapped at online trolls who criticized her figure while pretending to care about her health. 'The story of my life since Yellowjackets premiered. Most egregious are the "I care about her health!!" peopleb***h you don't see me on my Peleton [sic]!' she wrote in response to a now-deleted tweet. 'You don't see me running through the park with my child. Skinny does not always equal healthy,' she added. Lynskey's husband, Jason Ritter, took to Twitter the next day to defend her. The couple welcomed their first child together in late 2018. 'If anyone has any further unsolicited comments about *anybody* else's body, they can feel free to write them in permanent ink onto their own foreheads and swan dive directly into the sun,' Ritter wrote, retweeting his wife's original post. Mormon influencer Taylor Frankie Paul has revealed that she already has a new boyfriend just a few months after the 'soft swinging' drama that ended her marriage and it's not the guy she cheated with. The 28-year-old blew up #MomTok a group of TikTok content creators who are mostly Mormon in May when she claimed her husband, Tate Paul, was divorcing her after she crossed the line while swapping partners with their friends in Utah. Taylor featured her new beau, Dakota Mortensen, in a video last week after a fan asked her: 'Where's the guy you cheated with...' Taylor Frankie Paul, 28, revealed her new boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen, on TikTok, just a few months after the fallout of her 'soft swinging' scandal The TikTok star used the lyrics of rapper Young M.A.'s Beatbox Freestyle to explain that she and the guy she had cheated on her husband with are done, and she is seeing someone new In the caption, Taylor poked fun at her swinging scandal, writing: 'I will not be sharing this one' The TikTok star used the lyrics of rapper Young M.A.'s Beatbox Freestyle to explain that she and the other guy whose name has never been confirmed are done, and she is now seeing someone new. 'I wear that red until I'm dead / I know that he watching (R.I.P) / Left my ex b***h cause she toxic (Goddamn) / Got this new b**h now we toxic,' she lip-synced right before Dakota slid into the camera frame. In the caption, Taylor poked fun at her swinging scandal, writing: 'I will not be sharing this one.' The video has been viewed 4.9 million times and has received over 2,000 comments from viewers who were living for the latest update in the ongoing saga. 'Did anyone else run to the comments for the drama,' one person asked, while another added: 'Any[one] else can't keep up? I'm confused as hell.' Taylor blew up #MomTok in May when she claimed she and her husband, Tate Paul (pictured), were getting divorced after soft swinging with their pals Dakota is a real estate agent and owns Basin Tiling, according to his Instagram profile. He opens up about being a recovering addict and alcoholic in his TikTok videos Some TikTok users couldn't resist joking about how fast she's moved on from her ex-husband and the man she cheated with. Others defended her and gushed that Dakota is 'cute' and an 'upgrade.' 'She moved on faster than I could run to the comments,' one commenter wrote. 'Ive had laundry in my dryer longer than she was single,' someone else shared. 'GET IT GIRL!!!!' 'Omg. Some of yall act like she cant move on. The marriage was obviously over long ago,' another noted. 'Go her !!' Dakota works as a real estate agent and is the owner of Basin Tiling, according to his Instagram profile. He is also a content creator and has more than 160,000 followers on TikTok, where he opens up about his life as a recovering addict and alcoholic. While he and Taylor are technically 'TikTok official,' she has yet to make an appearance on his social media pages. Taylor alluded to being single when she answered fans' questions in a video posted on July 19 The influencer said she is still Mormon and is 'single and ready to mingle' Just days later, Taylor hinted that she was seeing someone new after being 'heart broken twice this summer' Just a few weeks ago, Taylor shared in one of her videos that she is 'single and ready to mingle.' However, days later, she hinted that she was seeing someone new. 'Been heartbroken twice this summer and this cute sweet mf comes out of nowhere,' she wrote in the on-screen text of a follow-up clip. In the comments, Taylor claimed her soon-to-be ex-husband, Tate, was also seeing other people after someone noted that her 'divorce ain't even final.' 'Yup not stopping Tate nor me,' she clapped back. Taylor later addressed concerns that she was moving too fast, sharing how someone allegedly told her: 'You just got divorced maybe just stay single and take things slow.' 'I think I'll do whatever tf I want,' she wrote in the clip. In a recent clip, she hit back at commenters who warned her to 'take things slow' while she is going through a divorce Taylor made it clear that she would be ignoring people's advice to 'stay single' After Dakota commented on the video, Taylor flirtatiously responded Dakota responded to the video, writing: 'I like ur glasses.' 'I like you,' Taylor replied. The mom, who shares two young children with her ex, recently got flack for answering a fan's question about their custody arrangement while taking on the Time X Kashy dance challenge in a now-viral video. Taylor bared her stomach in a crop top and shorts as she sexily danced for the camera while the written details of their agreement popped up on the screen. According to the mom, she and her ex have 50-50 custody, and they do three days on, three days off with their kids. Taylor stunned #MomTok on May 20 when she announced that she and Tate were getting a divorce. Three days later, she alluded to there being more to the story when she posted footage of herself lying in bed and packing moving boxes. Taylor recently got flack for divulging the details of her custody agreement with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Tate, with a literal song and dance According to the mom, she and her ex have 50-50 custody, and they do three days on, three days off with their kids Taylor and Tate have a four-year-old daughter, Indy, and a two-year-old son, Ocean 'My entire life is falling apart,' she wrote in the on-screen text. 'And I can't even speak on why... without bringing them down with me.' Taylor and Tate have a four-year-old daughter, Indy, and a two-year-old son, Ocean, and she painted a rosier picture of their separation in a follow-up video, saying she is 'excited to co-parent with my best friend.' However, Tate didn't appear to feel the same way, and he deleted all photos and videos of Taylor from his social media pages. As rumors swirled that Taylor had been unfaithful, other moms in their content-creation group allegedly unfollowed her and liked comments that suggested she had cheated on her husband, according to Rolling Stone. Then, in a bombshell TikTok Live, Taylor opened up about her divorce, claiming that she and Tate were soft swinging with their friends. Taylor's introduction of her new boyfriend comes weeks after she dropped the bomb on TikTok Live that she and her husband were allegedly soft swinging According to the Mormon influencer, their friend group had an agreement that they would switch partners but not 'go all the way,' which is known as a 'soft swap' According to Taylor's account, their friend group had an agreement that they would switch partners but not 'go all the way,' which is known as a 'soft swap.' 'We had an agreement, like all of us, and I did step out of that agreement,' she admitted. 'That's where I messed up, and I, obviously, am losing everything that I have, so that is true.' Taylor alleged that she and the other wives in the group would make out with each other and each other's husbands when they were drinking 'No one was innocent. Everyone has hooked up with everyone in this situation,' she claimed. 'So, yes, I'm getting shunned for doing that, but it wasn't like I was going around hooking up with my friend's husband. 'We were at a party, I got belligerent, and we went and messed [around] by ourselves rather than with the whole group,' she explained, insisting it was a 'one-time thing.' However, she said there were some feelings involved, which complicated the situation. Taylor admitted she 'did step out of that agreement' when she got drunk and went off with a friend's husband, but she noted that 'everyone has hooked up with everyone in this situation' Taylor first sparked rumors of infidelity when she announced on TikTok on May 20 that she and Tate were getting a divorce. The clip shows her standing in her empty home ahead of her move Three days later, she alluded to even more drama when she posted footage of herself lying in bed and packing moving boxes 'I was friends with these people, and we spent a lot of time together. We were intimate on several occasions, she said. 'It sucks that I have to admit this because...no one really wants to admit they're involved in something like that.' Taylor noted that she and Tate had other issues in their marriage before they separated, but 'this was like the tip of the iceberg.' 'Tate has made out with several girls and [done] other things, and I've made out with all of the husbands and [done] other things,' she added. She refused to name names, but she stressed that fans could easily figure out which couples she was referring to in the TikTok Live. Sam and Camille Munday; Brayden and Mckenna Rowley; Chase and Miranda Hope McWhorter; Selver and Victoria Zalic, and Conner and Whitney Leavitt are among the couples that have been mentioned in regards to the alleged swinging, though many of them have denied the claims. Taylor claimed in another clip that she was 'excited to co-parent' with Tate following their divorce Taylor (pictured with her fellow #MomTokers) refused to name names, but she stressed that fans could easily figure out which couples were in her alleged swinging group Taylor noted that she and Tate had other issues in their marriage before they separated, but 'this was like the tip of the iceberg' Taylor made it clear she has nothing to lose at this point, saying she and Tate had told their families everything that had happened. She admitted her parents were 'disgusted' by the revelation. She insisted that she has proof of her swinging claims in the form of videos and texts if she ever needs it. Taylor also alleged that there are 'three divorces in the friend group,' but one of the breakups is not related to the swinging situation. 'They're going to deny it, and that's fine,' she said. 'I'm speaking my truth, and they can speak theirs.' Former Bachelor star Nick Viall dished about the drama on his podcast The Viall Files in June, saying he had called Taylor, who told him that two other couples were involved but only one of them are influencers. He was admittedly skeptical of Taylor's story because of the speculation that she is making this up for clout, but he said she 'sounded sad' and 'frustrated with the situation.' Nick also noted that she made it seem like her husband, Tate, was divorcing her out of principle because she broke their agreement and not because he wanted to. Looking back, I should have known from the minute his hand accidentally brushed mine that Ed was a philanderer, both irredeemable and utterly irresistible. I can still remember the jolt caused by his touch, the electric charge that crackled constantly between us, the sheer heat of being in his presence. And more than two decades on I still kick myself for not realising sooner that Ed was a man who couldnt, and wouldnt, stop his eye roving. I thought of Ed this week, as I read ex-newsreader Jan Leemings interview in the Daily Mail in which she declared that she had known many womanisers and had concluded that you can never tame a ladies man. Five-times married Jan knows more than most about the subject, and said: I get so angry when its, Whats this harridan done that no man stays with her? Every single one of my men has been a womaniser every single one and you cant keep a man if he has wandering eyes. As intoxicating as my time with Ed was, I have to agree. As I now know, thanks to the wisdom gained both through my own life and through my work as a therapist, I dont believe you can find happiness with a man whose eyes are ceaselessly on the romantic horizon, whose head turns at the merest swish of skirt. When I first met Ed, he was married with four children, and I was about to leave the country to settle in New York with my then partner and small baby son, now 25. Lucy Cavendish's salutary story of love and betrayal and you may think forgiveness is for fools Describing Ed on paper makes him sound like a hunk from a Jilly Cooper novel. Handsome and funny, he worked as a highly-acclaimed stonemason, building fireplaces and sculpting commissioned pieces of work. When I was with him hed tell me all about his work and I listened, rapt, as hed use his hands to show me the shape of the things he was working on. Romantic but practical, he made me feel like the centre of the world. At friendly lunches and dinners, wed drink and talk until the restaurants had emptied everyone, apart from us. Ed loved his food and would talk endlessly about how he cooked for his wife and family. I admit that Id look at him longingly even in those early days, imagining us together but we were both with other people and I was moving across the Atlantic, so the relationship never progressed further than a flirtatious friendship. Then, a few years on, my then partner and I split up. I flew home, bereft, with a two-year-old child and nowhere to live. I found a cottage on a farm in Oxfordshire, and licked my wounds. Then, one day, Ed called. He and his wife had also separated, and he had nowhere to go. Why dont you come to visit me? I asked rapidly. My cottage wasnt palatial, but there was a certain romance about it. Cows wandered round outside the door. I once found a badger asleep in the kitchen. There was a stream I could swim in. It was pretty isolated, just me and my son. Pictured: Jan Leeming who spoke this week about how her former husbands were womanisers I was lonely. Ed seemed lonely, too and I think we both knew what the implication of my invitation was. Within hours of him coming in the door we were entwined and, the next day, went on a long walk and professed our love for each other. When I asked if we were moving too quickly, he looked surprised (I should have queried this at the time because of course we were moving too quickly, but Ed was a man in a hurry). He told me hed always loved me. Hed thought of me continually. Yet when I asked where hed been living since he got divorced, he was evasive. Here and there, he said. Have you been with anyone else since your marriage broke up? I asked him. It felt important to know. But he stroked my hair and murmured how much he loved me. I was so delighted I didnt pursue the question. The visit ended up with him moving in. I was utterly in love and used to watch him over the breakfast table, pinching myself at how happy we were. At first, everything was idyllic. We went for walks, we swam in the stream. He cooked food, I read books. He didnt have much work but I was beavering away as a journalist, so we existed off my earnings. I was happy to share my money and world with him. He was sweet to my son and everything felt hunky-dory. What I didnt know about myself then is that I am incapably driven by romance. As a child, I spent vast amounts of time reading novels and wondering when my prince would come. I dont think I had any idea of healthy boundaries something I am trying to cure myself of now. And Id seen my dad have a wandering eye. He was of the generation that thought women were all about being ogled and would chat up anything in a skirt. Meanwhile, my mother would be holding the fort at home. No one ever said anything, but I think she put up with quite a lot of bad behaviour. Id seen my dad have a wandering eye. He was of the generation that thought women were all about being ogled and would chat up anything in a skirt while my mother held the fort at home My father would travel a lot, saying he had to go to London on business or spend time abroad working on projects. I had grown up with this absent-present father so when Ed said he was going to need to be away a bit more at weekends to drum up work and see his children who were living two hours away from us in Devon, it never occurred to me to question anything. Then, one weekend, he started staying away for longer than the usual Friday-to-Sunday, saying he needed to spend more time with his children and also needed longer to pin down some projects. He never told me what these projects were and I never asked. I was just happy to have him in my life and, anyway, I trusted him. Over time, him being away became the norm. Hed started spending longer in Devon. Then, out of the blue, I was offered a free two weeks in a friends finca in Spain helping run a writing retreat. I decided to take the opportunity and left with my son. Ed promised hed come out for a week but, just before I left, announced he couldnt, claiming he needed to stay home to work. When I got back from Spain, I could tell something had changed. Initially, Ed was delighted to see me. Hed cooked a fabulous meal and had opened a lovely bottle of wine. However, the next day he said he had to go back to Devon for work and wasnt sure when he would return. Even then, I refused to acknowledge the truth: that Eds actions were not of a man devoted to his partner. He was very evasive when I asked where he would be staying. When I got back from Spain with my son, I could tell something had changed. Initially, Ed was delighted to see me. Hed cooked a fabulous meal and had opened a lovely bottle of wine The next day the phone bill came through, showing one number Ed had been calling continuously, with a Devon code. I felt physically sick. When I called it, a woman picked up. Hi, this is Rosie, she said. I slammed the phone down. Who on earth was Rosie? I called her back. It emerged she and Ed had been seeing each other for about the same time Id been seeing him. Even worse, she didnt know who I was. It didnt end there. It wasnt just Rosies number on the telephone bill. There was also Diana and Anna . . . on and on it went. I called them all. Some were one-night flings, other relationships felt more serious. Of course, I look back and wonder why I hadnt spotted it. But I was so obsessed with him I just wouldnt let myself see reality. Should I have spotted the signs? Of course. There was plenty of evidence that he was an unapologetic ladies man. For starters, I think if Id given him enough encouragement back when we first met, hed have happily embarked on an affair with me while he was still married. I wanted to think he was a man of morals, that we shared the same values but his hand would often brush mine. He kissed me on the lips all the time. I blamed it all on him desperately hunting for unconditional love but, as soon as he found that love, I reasoned, he destroyed it. Like my father hed been sent to boarding school at a very young age as his parents lived abroad. Even after his schooldays had passed, he barely saw his parents and often described to me a very lonely, sad childhood. He just needed help, I thought. The phone bill came through, showing one number Ed had been calling. I felt physically sick. It wasnt just Rosies number on the bill. There was also Diana and Anna... on and on it went Sure enough, not long after the Rosie revelations, Ed turned up professing undying love and looking so abject, so sad, so remorseful I took him back. I was still so entranced by him and wanted to heal his hurt, to have him love me and only me. He was like a lost, sad puppy. But his philandering didnt stop. On one memorable occasion, I found a sweet, loving note from Clare that he was using as a book mark. Every time I chucked him out, hed come back looking hurt and wounded, telling me we were meant to be together. And I would fall for it, believing his hurt could be solved by me. Two decades on, its more than apparent that Ed was just a liar, a very accomplished one. But back then, aged 30, I wanted to play happy families but couldnt comprehend I was trying to do it with a man who simply wasnt equipped for that. After a year or so, in which I kicked him out four or five times for cheating, I came to my senses, realising my endless crying and wailing was not good for me or for my son. I told Ed to leave for good and never heard from him again. So what would I tell a friend keen on a man with a similarly roving eye today? In short: save yourself the heartbreak. Ive thought long and hard about Ed since we split and, after a lot of therapy myself, realise there are things I needed to take responsibility for not least wilfully ignoring the signs and being so fixated on our romantic love story that I refused to see what was in front of me, as well as letting him come back so many times. I didnt have any sense that I was worth more than the scraps he was offering me. Ed wasnt a bad man in many ways, although I do understand people might think Im being too forgiving. He just had a huge gaping hole inside him that my love just couldnt fill. Indeed, no love not even that of his many adoring women could fill it. But as well as his own emotional void, I also think he was just incapable of changing, as is the case with so many people who cannot seem to remain faithful. I see it all the time in my work as a relationship therapist. Part of its down to our desire to constantly experience everything as new, shiny and exciting. Many people also struggle with a full-time commitment to one person for all the years of their life. And sometimes its about getting an ego-boost and wanting to feel attractive and interesting yourself, not to mention that some people think they have the right to take their affection anywhere and everywhere, despite the damage it may do. Even if I had talked this through with Ed, though, I dont think it would have helped. I dont think he had the capacity to commit to anyone. When I think about him, it still hurts. I will never forget hearing Rosies voice, and the pain in her voice, too, as I explained that I also thought Ed was my boyfriend. Back then, I thought I would never love again. Thankfully, that wasnt the case. Perhaps some wandering eyes eventually settle down. No doubt some women will say they have fixed a previously philandering man. But in my experience, if you see the signs, walk away and save yourself the heartbreak. n Eds name has been changed. An Australian mother-of-three has detailed exactly how she lost a whopping 53 kilos in just 18 months using a weight loss challenge and portion control. Jasmine Ready, who lives with her family in Queensland, has embarked on two successful weight loss journeys using The Healthy Mummy workouts and cooking tips. Growing up Ms Ready admitted that she was 'never really that into fitness' and watched as the number on the scales steadily increased - until having kids made her more determined than ever to get in shape. 'I've been overweight my whole life and the one thing I don't want is my kids to go down the same path I did,' she said. Jasmine Ready, who lives with her family in Queensland, has embarked on two successful weight loss journeys using The Healthy Mummy workouts and cooking tips Ms Ready had tried a number of different strategies before following the 28 Day Weight Loss Challenge by The Healthy Mummy, including cutting out food, working out all the time and opting for 'healthier meals' 'I want to be positive about my body and show my little ones how important it is to nourish yourself with good food and also take care of yourself.' Ms Ready had tried a number of different strategies before following the 28 Day Weight Loss Challenge by The Healthy Mummy, including cutting out food, working out all the time and opting for 'healthier meals'. 'The lightbulb moment for me was when I realised the best thing to do was to watch my portion sizes. I learnt you don't need to cut out certain food groups to lose weight,' she said. 'In fact, by cutting down my portion sizes and meal prepping my family's grocery bill is now down by $400 a month!' What is Healthy Mummy? The aim of The Healthy Mummy has always been to empower mums to live a healthier life and it started off with just a few hundred mums using the programs on Facebook to more than 825,000 mums being part of The Healthy Mummy Community and transforming their health, life and body on the plans. The two biggest products are the 28 Day Weight Loss Challenge and the Healthy Mummy Smoothies. There are also over 52 books, supplements, singlets, active range, snack bars and lots more which cover Healthy Kids products and Healthy Pregnancy products. There are also 130 Healthy Mummy Consultants who are working mums themselves. Free healthy recipes can be found here Healthy pizza recipes are popular among those who follow the Healthy Mummy program Pasta is also encouraged but is often loaded up with vegetables and low fat cheese Advertisement After finishing the 28 day challenge - and losing 39 kilos in the process - Ms Ready continued to lose weight just by using the program's app and watching her food intake. 'My success has been that I don't eat after 7pm, I eat five times a day and I exercise 30 minutes a day,' she said. 'My food diary is very boring but it's easy and cheap.' Breakfast used to start with a smoothie but now Ms Ready prepares overnight Weetbix so she can be on the move quickly. Morning tea is watermelon before she prepared a fresh sandwich with meat and salad for lunch. 'My success has been that I don't eat after 7pm, I eat five times a day and I exercise 30 minutes a day,' she said After finishing the 28 day challenge - and losing 39 kilos in the process - Ms Ready continued to lose weight just by using the program's app and watching her food intake Afternoon tea is watermelon again followed by an Uncle Toby's Milo bar before a dinner of either meat and veggie bake, apricot chicken bake, risotto, spaghetti, or pumpkin soup. What's more, Jasmine is a big fan of The Healthy Mummy smoothies, salted caramel being her favourite. 'I love the smoothie range so quick and easy, my favourite flavour is salted caramel tummy powder with strawberries and milk,' she said 'Set yourself small goals and little rewards. I was always excited when I reach every five kilos down and would reward myself with either new gym wear, hair or pedicure.' Travelling foodies are rushing to dine in an enchanting high-end restaurant inside a jaw-dropping cave in Bali. The Cave is a subterranean fine dining restaurant that serves a seven-course meal alongside a spectacular lightshow in The Edge resort, Uluwatu, an hour south of Denpasar. Diners are treated to an immersive experience as magical moving images are projected onto the ancient cave's walls while they feast on the deliciously elegant dishes and sip on wine and cocktails. Scroll down for video Aussie travellers are raving about an incredible underground restaurant in Bali aptly named The Cave The Cave is a subterranean fine dining restaurant that serves a seven-course meal alongside a spectacular lightshow in The Edge resort , Uluwatu, an hour south of Denpasar Diners are treated to an immersive experience as magical moving images are projected onto the cave's walls while they feast on the deliciously elegant dishes and sip on wine and cocktails The cave was discovered in 2013 during the construction of a new villa on the resort and was transformed into a one-of-a-kind restaurant where guests sit among the stalactites and stone walls. Popular TikToker Adrian Widjonarko recently shared his 'surreal' visit to The Cave with his 102,000 followers in a now-viral video. 'It was another most unique dining experience I've ever encountered! The light performance displays are simply mesmerising! Must check out when visiting,' the Sydney foodie captioned the clip. One viewer said The Cave had 'full Aladdin vibes' while another called it 'absolutely amazing'. The cave was discovered in 2013 during the construction of a new villa on the resort and was transformed into a one-of-a-kind restaurant where guest sit among stalactites and stone walls The seven-course men has been meticulously planned by head chef Ryan Clift who's worked in restaurants all over the globe and alongside tops chefs including Melbourne Shannon Bennett With three services a day and seats for only 22 guests, booking is essential and fills up quickly so keen diners need to be quick to secure their spot There are several intermissions between dishes and light shows where guests have the opportunity to explore the stunning cave with their own hardhat and headlamp. The modern seven-course degustation has been meticulously planned and put together by head chef Ryan Clift who's cooked in world-renowned restaurants all over the globe and alongside top chefs including Melbourne's Shannon Bennett. With three services a day and seats for only 22 guests, booking is essential and fills up quickly so keen diners need to be quick to secure their spot. Visitors can choose a standard seven-course set menu for 1,400,000Indonesian Rupiah which is about $134AUD or the seven-course set menu with wine and cocktails pairing for 3,200,000IDR equal to around $307AUD. America is facing a shortage of Adderall as supply chain issues striking the nation's largest manufacturer of the drug combined with record demand have left manufacturers of the popular drug reeling. Teva Pharmaceuticals, an Israeli company, told Bloomberg that 'supply disruptions' affecting one unnamed manufacturing facility have led to packaging constraints. The shortage will affect branded and generic forms of the drug. These issues arise as increased scrutiny is placed on the amount of Adderall being distributed in the U.S. Popular online clinics like Cerebral and Done have faced allegations of misusing and over-prescribing the drugs. Data also shows the number of people receiving the drugs in America outweighs the amount who have been diagnosed with ADHD. Teva accounts for more than a quarter of Adderall market share in the U.S., meaning a shortage in its ranks could lead to some having a hard time finding the drug. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not yet report a shortage of the drug, though, according to Bloomberg. Teva reports that it could soon face a shortage of the ADHD medication Adderall due to supply issues. They say some prescriptions may end up on back-order (file photo) Teva is America's leading producer of both name brand and generic versions of the drug. Adderall is classified as an amphetamine and is commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactive disorder, colloquially known as ADHD. It reports having an 'active supply' of both at the moment with some ability to continue production. The firm warns that demand can be fluid though, meaning a person could unluckily end up in a backorder. 'For both branded and generic Adderall, Teva is actively shipping to customers, and we expect full recovery for all inventory and orders in the coming weeks, at which point we expect no disruption at the pharmacy level,' a spokesperson told Fierce Pharma. These shortages could end up lasting into fall, the company fears. America is just coming out of a previous reported shortage of the drug, which lasted from 2019 until May 2022. Misuse of the drug has been rampant and well-documented as well, especially among high schoolers and college students in America. 'Many of these college students think stimulants like Adderall are harmless study aids... but there can be serious health risks and they need to be more aware,' Dr Ramin Mojtabai, a mental health professor at Johns Hopkins said in 2016. A study at the time found that misuse of the drug among adults aged 18 to 25 had increased 67 percent over a five year period, with associated emergency room visits jumping 156 percent. With companies like Cerebral and Done emerging to make these drugs more widely available than ever, some fear these figures have increased even further in ways that are harder to detect. Teva does not expect any disruptions to the distribution of Adderall to arise in the coming weeks, the company said (file photo) The companies are a part of a budding, yet controversial, new industry in medicine that developed in recent years before rocketing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Telehealth companies that provide patients with quick consultations, and even potentially offer prescriptions written by certified medical professionals, have been appearing across the U.S. Adderall and Xanax, meant to treat anxiety but also often misused by college students, were often distributed through these channels. It became such a problem that the Department of Justice (DoJ) issued subpoena over the alleged misuse of the drugs. In America, where many young people are uninsured or under-insured and access to a therapist and other psychological help may be hard to find due to long waitlists, these companies became popular. They have also fueled a surge in demand for the drugs, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic where these telehealth became the primary form of care for many. Watchdogs have today announced a clamp down on beauty clinics promoting 100 hay fever injections. The decision comes after MailOnline revealed dozens of practices were advertising Kenalog which was withdrawn by the NHS a decade ago for being too risky. The powerful drug suppresses the immune system, dampening the allergic reaction hay fever sufferers experience. Its effects can last months. But it was phased out of routine use a decade ago after the safety watchdog decided the risks outweighed the benefits. While Britons can still legally get Kenalog privately, clinics are banned from promoting prescription-only medications under advertising rules. After a string of rule breaches , officials are now taking targeted action to try and stop it from happening. The crackdown reminds clinics that they must remove all references to Kenalog in adverts, including terms that allude to it like 'hay fever injection' and 'hay fever jab'. Syringe emojis, patient testimonials and memes deemed to be promoting the jabs will also be in the advertising watchdog's sights. The Met Office is predicting medium levels across every area of England and Wales today Tomorrow will bring some relief to hay fever suffers in the North West of England where pollen levels will drop to low Pollen levels will remain at medium for England and Wales for the entirety of the weekend While hay fever sufferers in England and Wales will be dealing with medium pollen levels those in Scotland and Norther Ireland will be enjoying low levels WHAT IS KENALOG AND WHY WAS IT PULLED FROM NHS? What is Kenalog? Kenalog is a steroid injection used to treat hay fever. The jab, usually administered to the buttocks, contains triamcinolone a corticosteroid hormone. Rather than curing hay fever, it is a blunt tool that works by suppressing the body's immune response, so that symptoms are alleviated. One injection may be enough for hay fever sufferers to get through the year but others may need a booster dose two weeks after the first. As well as hay fever, the drug is used to treat arthritis, gout and skin diseases. Why did the NHS stop offering Kenalog? The jabs were routinely given to severe hay fever sufferers until around a decade ago. But guidelines found their side effect risk was too high, compared to the benefits of the jab. It was found to leave people vulnerable to other infections like chicken pox, shingles or the flu, and cause serious side effects like irregular heartbeats, depression and high blood pressure. Advertisement The scheme, run by the UK's Committees of Advertising Practice (CAP) and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), will use internet monitoring technology to remove ads that violate these rules from August 29. CAP director Shahriar Coupal said regulators were particularly concerned about the rise in clinics promoting Kenalog injections on social media and were acting. 'Through our use of technology and data science, we will proactively monitor and take enforcement action against any advertiser that is unable to stick to the rules so there is a level playing field for businesses and consumers are protected,' he said. The MHRA's head of advertising, Claire Tilstone, urged private clinics to review their advertisements now to avoid potential penalties. 'Social media offers a powerful advertising tool for clinics but they must remain aware of the rules that surround it for medicines,' she said. 'Clinics should now urgently review their websites and social media before the August 29 deadline to ensure that they are not advertising the prescription-only medicine Kenalog, to avoid further enforcement action.' Those found to be violating UK advertising rules could face action from Trading Standards, who can push for criminal prosecution for those involved, which can result in hefty fines or even imprisonment. Kenalog injections were withdrawn by the NHS as a hay fever treatment because they left recipients vulnerable to infections like chickenpox, shingles or the flu. The drug, triamcinolone acetonide, was also linked to causing irregular heartbeats, depression and high blood pressure. But clinics advertising hay fever shots don't always mention any of the potential risks in their advertisements. Some even suggested budget cuts are the reason the NHS withdrew the injections, rather than the risks. Several clinics have already been told to take down Kenalog ads by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK body that enforces CAP advertising guidelines. Kenalog injections for hay fever suppresses the immune system, dampening the allergic reaction sufferers experience however it is no longer routinely offered by the NHS due to increased risk of infection from viruses due to the body's defences being weakened One clinic advertising the jabs earlier this year on Instagram was Sassy Cosmetics Essex. The post claimed the NHS stopped offering Kenalog due to 'budget cuts' and that delivering the injections was taking too much of GP's time Another Instagram post uploaded this year by Sassy Cosmetics urged its 6,500 followers 'don't let hay fever get you down, book your six months relief' Yesterday, Elite Aesthetic Clinic, a beauty and wellness business in Northern Ireland, was told to take down three ads published Facebook and Instagram in March and April this year. One ad read: 'If you're plagued with severe sniffles, sneezing, watery eyes and an itchy throat as soon as warmer weather arrives and medicines and nasal sprays don't give you any reprieve the hay fever injection could be the solution you're looking for.' Accepting the ASA ruling, Elite Aesthetic Clinic said they did not initially believe the ad would violate the rules as it did not reference Kenalog directly and have now agreed to take them down. Four private clinics, Sarean Aesthetics in Bedfordshire, Skincodes Aesthetics in Milton Keynes, The Skin Clinic Faversham in Kent and Lucy Isabella Beauty & Aesthetics were sanctioned earlier this year over similar ads. Ads for hay fever infections are prolific on social media sites like Instagram, with dozens of clinics from across the UK offering them for as little as 35. Allery charities urged hay fever suffers to be cautious about getting the Kenalog injections earlier this year. Allergy UK instead advised people suffering from hay fever symptoms to first try 'very effective' antihistamines before considering other treatments. Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao inaugurated the Integrated Command Control Centre (ICCC) of the state police at Banjara Hills on Thursday. (Photo: By Arrangement) HYDERABAD: Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao inaugurated the Integrated Command Control Centre (ICCC) of the state police at Banjara Hills on Thursday. Home minister Mahmood Ali, ministers, MLAs, Director General of Police (DGP) M. Mahendar Reddy, Cyberabad commissioner Stephen Raveendra and senior officials from the state and the city police were present. Chandrashekar Rao had laid the foundation stone for its establishment on November 22, 2015. Giving credit to DGP Mahendar Reddy for the creation of the ICCC, the Chief Minister said nobody would have anticipated such a powerful system to be founded in Hyderabad. "Mahendar Reddy was the primary engineer, developer and individual responsible for building this structure. All credit should go to him. I also thank all ministers and departments concerned who contributed to it. Heartfelt congratulations to the Telangana police for setting up a great platform to display great work, Chandrashekar Rao said. The Chief Minister said that he hoped that Telangana's policing system would certainly stand as an idea for the country. Speaking on the occasion, Hyderabad city police commissioner C.V. Anand said that in a bid to modernise police infrastructure and make it future-ready, the Chief Minister had envisioned the 20-storey multi-tower building, which caters to all safety needs of the public. This state-of-the-art ICCC is a prologue to the modern technological revolution in the police department and first of its kind in the country, '' Anand said. The centre will house the Hyderabad city police commissionerate and the technology fusion centre, he said. Tower-A, the tallest amongst all towers, houses the Hyderabad police commissionerate, including all staff officers of special branch, IT, administration, finance, cyber wing etc. The latest technological advancements and IT office infrastructure equip city police personnel to tackle any challenges in the state capital, which is a home for 10 million diverse people. The fusion centre spread across Towers A, B and E has three crucial components which will help in collating data, analysis, and using results to make mission-critical decisions. The ICCC is equipped with an emergency operational centre, multi-agency operations and disaster management centre, data centre, two centres of excellence and three state police operational wings, the commissioner said. This facility can enable monitoring the entire facility virtually, including virtual engagement with field staff. The facility is a green building with a gold medal from Indian Green Building Council. There are solar panels which will generate up to 0.5 megawatts and a sewerage treatment plant on the site itself. A museum showcasing the history of Telangana police and a 360-degree viewing gallery exists on 14th and 15th floors. With nearly 35 per cent of land dedicated to greenery, other amenities include gym and health and wellness centre. A woman almost died from an orgasm, medics have revealed in a new case report. The 'pop' she felt in her chest during sex turned out to be a life-threatening injury to her main artery. The unidentified 45-year-old was having sex with her husband with her legs 'pressed against her chest'. She felt the strange popping sensation when she climaxed, which was accompanied by a sudden, stabbing pain near her heart. Tests carried out when she got to her local hospital in Mississippi revealed her blood pressure was 220/140mmHg. Doctors found a leak in her aorta, the largest artery carrying blood through the body, which is over an inch in diameter. A woman nearly died after feeling a 'pop' in her chest during an orgasm that turned out to be a serious injury to an artery What is an aortic intramural hematoma and how can they be caused by sex? An aortic intramural hematoma is when blood leaks through the inner wall of the artery and gets trapped by the outer wall. High blood pressure coupled with soaring heart rates such as those caused by sex can trigger a leak, if the vessel is already weakened. Doctors say it is more likely in intercourse when people are cheating, having sex with a prostitute or masturbating. The loss of blood flow means there is less oxygen for vital organs like the brain, kidneys and even the heart, which can be deadly. If left untreated, up to half of patients progress to a full tear of the aorta which can kill instantly, with the risk of death increases by 1 per cent every hour without medicine. Advertisement Her condition, medically known as aortic intramural haematoma, can lead to a full tear of the aorta if untreated, which kills up to 40 per cent of sufferers instantly. It occurs in an area of the aorta that has been weakened over time, which can be due to having high blood pressure. High-intensity weightlifting is already a known risk factor because of the extra pressure it puts on blood vessels. Doctors who treated her claim the 'shear stress' of sex can also make a weakened aorta vulnerable to leaking. She was discharged after three days after being given blood pressure-lowering drugs. But medics at Merit Health Wesley in Hattiesburg warned the bizarre cause of her issue could have meant she was not diagnosed quickly enough to avoid long-term complications. The woman's case was reported in the American Journal of Case Reports. At the time of the injury, her back became hot and she felt a tightening in her chest, leaving her panicked and feeling sick. The women, who was not named, rushed to the hospital, where she told doctors her pain levels were 10 out of 10. She was given morphine and fentanyl to soothe her pain. Dr William Bryan Bishop III and the team asked her about her medical history, which revealed she had smoked for nearly two decades. High blood pressure coupled with soaring heart rates such as those triggered by sex can trigger a leak in the aorta. It usually only occurs in areas of the blood vessel that have been severely weakened already. If left untreated, up to half of patients progress to a full tear of the aorta which can kill instantly, with the risk of death increases by 1 per cent every hour without medicine. The loss of blood flow means there is less oxygen for organs like the brain, kidneys and even the heart, which can be deadly. A full tear known as aortic dissection is incredibly rare, with only five to 30 cases per million people occurring in a year. It is more common in men aged 60 and over. Emergency doctors quickly consulted with the surgery team, who decided it would be better to treat her with medication first. She did not have to under the knife, which is usually reserved for when the leak is closer to the heart. The team said the woman's rare case can help doctors treat similar patients in future. The wrote: 'An aortic intramural hematoma in 45-year-old woman during sexual intercourse, as seen in the patient in our case, is not a commonly reported occurrence. 'Understanding the physiologic changes and stress of sexual intercourse and how this effects hemodynamics can help predict adverse outcomes in patients with pre-existing cardiovascular risk factors.' Hard to detect cancers and heart conditions could be picked up faster, thanks to a new test. Researchers hope the technology will stop patients having to wait days or weeks for blood tests to come back from labs. Instead, they think their system could one day be rolled out straight in GP practices themselves. Current tests for cancer and heart disease, available on the NHS, look for disease in the blood and urine. These trawl through samples to look for certain 'biomarkers', substances which can indicate illness. For example, high levels of a prostate specific antigen (PSA) can sometimes serve as sign of the cancer in men. Meanwhile, troponin tests can detect if a patient has had a heart attack. The new test, called CrisprZyme, works in the same way. Imperial College London scientists have detected a new test that analyses bodily fluids like blood for proteins that could indicate a patient has cancer or heart disease that could one day skip the need for lab analysis and deliver results in a GP's office (stock image) However, it skips the timely process of amplification replicating a sample enough times so that the minute traces of substances can be detected. Instead of needing to send samples to a lab to search for biomarkers, CrisprZyme simply gives results by changing colour if a certain chemical is present like a litmus test. A darker colour would indicate more of the substance, in theory. Lead author Professor Molly Stevens, of Imperial College London, said: 'Our test, like others, indicates when a biomarker is present. 'But CrisprZyme is a simpler diagnostic than those currently available. 'What also sets it apart is it can tell us just how much biomarker is present, which can help us not just with diagnosing a disease, but with monitoring its progress over time and in response to treatment.' Fellow researcher Dr Marta Broto added: 'As well as potentially boosting access to diagnostics in developing countries, this technology could bring us a step closer to personalised diagnostics at home or at the GP surgery. 'By making clinical diagnostic tests simpler, we will be able to provide clinicians with the right tools to test at the same GP surgery instead of having to reschedule for follow-up analyses and blood tests.' The results were published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. A 68-year-old woman suffered a whole-body rash and 103 F (39.5 C) fever after catching Japanese spotted fever from a tick that bit her right ankle. The unnamed woman came to Narita Hospital just outside Tokyo, Japan, five days after a pinpoint dot-like rash erupted on her arms and legs. Doctors then saw it advance onto her palms and soles of her feet. Lesions opened up before a two-week course of antibiotic minocycline got it under control. Testing revealed she was infected with bacteria scientifically named Rickettsia japonica which were carried by the tick. More than 300 cases of the disease are recorded annually in Japan where it is native, but few in other countries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns, however, that it could still be detected in the U.S. in travelers who recently returned from the Asian country. Pictured abve is the palsm of the woman who was infected with Japanese spotted fever. She said she suffered a bite from a tick on her right ankle about a week before symptoms started The pinpoint dot-like rash also spread to her legs, trunks, arms, palms and soles of her feet. It cleared up after she began a two-week course of antibiotics Dr Kosuke Ishizuka, a medic at International University of Health and Welfare Narita Hospital who led the research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, hoped it would raise awareness about the disease. It is not clear when she came to doctors for care. Her condition resolved after two-weeks of care. What is Japanese spotted fever? This is a disease sparked by a bacteria people may pick up from a tick bite. It is known in Japan and South Korea, but medics are advised to be on the look out in other countries where it could have been imported. Symptoms tend to emerge up to two weeks after someone is bitten. In most cases, patients face rashes covering large areas of the body, fever and headaches. But in more serious cases they can also face liver dysfunction. About one in 100 people who become infected die from the disease. Antibiotics are used to clear it, and are often deployed before tests have even confirmed the infection. About 300 cases are diagnosed every year in Japan. Source: National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan. Advertisement Japanese spotted fever can only be caught from tick bites, and at least eight species in Japan and several in South Korea are known to carry the illness. Patients tend to suffer rashes covering large areas of their body, fever and headaches. In more severe cases they can also face liver dysfunction. About one in 100 people who become infected die from the disease. Japanese health authorities recommend patients are treated with an antibiotic as soon as the infection is suspected, even before tests have confirmed it. Warning it could reach the U.S., the CDC says: 'People may be exposed to these tick-borne bacteria when traveling outside of the United States. 'Healthcare providers should be aware of these illnesses in patients who have signs and symptoms common to other spotted fevers and a history of travel within two weeks of illness onset.' Japanese spotted fever is sparked by bacteria in the family Rickettsia, with some types also carried by ticks in the United States. The most dangerous among these named Rickettssia rickettsii sparks Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Recorded in every U.S. state except Alaska and Hawaii, sufferers tend to face fever and headache in the early stages. But the infection can then rapidly progress into a serious and life-threatening illness. These patients may face amputation of legs, arms, fingers or toes due to damage to blood vessels, alongside hearing loss, paralysis and mental disability. Rashes usually erupt two to four days after a fever, and can look like 'red splotches' or 'pinpoint dots'. As with the Japanese type, patients are administered with an antibiotic to fight the infection. More than 6,000 cases are reported of this disease every year nationwide. About four percent of patients die from the disease, but among those who do not receive treatment this can rise as high as 30 percent. Social isolation and loneliness throughout life can significantly increase a person's risk of suffering from a heart attack or stroke - and with more people in America lonely than ever experts fear their could be a surge in these cases in the future. A scientific statement published Thursday in the Journal of the American Heart Association states that social isolation and loneliness are linked to a 30 percent jump in heart disease and stroke risk. While a lack of social interactions is linked with all kinds of health issues, it's strongest link could be to cardiovascular problems. The added stress that could often come with isolation can add an unneeded load to the body and cause harm. Experts warn that two groups in particular are at risk. Elderly Americans - who through retirement and widowhood often end up alone - and generation Z, a group described as the loneliest generation ever. The long-term loneliness of Gen Z is particular poses significant future health concerns. Experts warn that social isolation and loneliness can increase a person's risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke later in life by around 30%. Surveys have found that Gen Z- the youngest American adults - are the most lonely (file photo) 'Over four decades of research has clearly demonstrated that social isolation and loneliness are both associated with adverse health outcomes,' Dr Crystal Wiley Cene, who chaired the writing of the statement and serves at the University of California, San Diego. Experts write that social isolation is linked to an increase in all causes of death, with men being at an especially high risk. Dr Crystal Wiley Cene (pictured) of the University of California, San Diego, said that the findings are 'quite significant' judging by how many Americans are suffering from loneliness People who are lonely are more likely to suffer from chronic stress, one of the main factors that can impact heart health. They explain that social isolation is also linked to increased levels of inflammation across the body - raising the risk of heart disease and stroke, among other health issues. 'There is strong evidence linking social isolation and loneliness with increased risk of worse heart and brain health in general; however, the data on the association with certain outcomes, such as heart failure, dementia and cognitive impairment is sparse,' Cene explained. These data put two particular groups in general at high risk, both the adults and youngest parts of the U.S. adult population. Loneliness among the elderly is a well documented phenomena. Elderly people often do not have the ability or energy to take part in social events the way they could in their youth. How Gen Z became America's loneliest generation Americans are lonelier than ever, and experts warn that it is actually the youngest generations feeling it the most A UCLA study published in 2019 found that 43% of Americans feel lonely, and 27% feel that there are rarely or never people they meet that they connect with The loneliness of each generation was scored by UCLA researchers, and they astonishingly found that Gen Z was the most socially isolated Older generations actually reported being less lonely than their younger peers, a break from standard thinking People who are lonely offer suffer worse overall heath - both physically and mentally One of the most common causes of issues like depression and anxiety is loneliness Experts also warn loneliness can put a person at an increased risk of some cardiovascular or neurological issues Source: UCLA Loneliness Scale Advertisement Many close friends and family members will also have died over the years as well, causing them to lose connections. Younger family members generally grow up and enter their own lives away from their older Isolation among generation Z is a relatively new concept, though. Generally accepted as people born between 1997 and 2012 - it includes Americans currently aged nine to 25 years old. It would be expected for people that fall into these age groups to have bustling, busy, social lives, but that has proven to not be the case. The statement cites a Harvard report that finds Gen Z adults to be the 'loneliest generation' in American right now. They point to increased social media use and less in-person engagement with their peers as reasons for the bizarre distinction. 'Given the prevalence of social disconnectedness across the U.S., the public health impact is quite significant,' Cene said. The COVID-19 pandemic likely played a role as well. Closures of schools and many recreational activities has been blamed for a surge in mental health issues among the youngest of Americans in recent years. Loneliness and social isolation are two of the leading causes of depression in particular, the statement reads. Now that the issue has been raised by experts, Cene says it is time to respond with solutions: 'There is an urgent need to develop, implement and evaluate programs and strategies to reduce the negative effects of social isolation and loneliness on cardiovascular and brain health, particularly for at-risk populations. 'Clinicians should ask patients about the frequency of their social activity and whether they are satisfied with their level of interactions with friends and family. 'They should then be prepared to refer people who are socially isolated or lonely especially those with a history of heart disease or stroke to community resources to help them connect with others.' America's monkeypox outbreak was declared a public health emergency by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Thursday afternoon after the nation's infection tally hit 6,617 cases. Its Secretary Xavier Becerra revealed the shift to an emergency status in a press conference, saying he was prepared to go 'to the next level' and urging every American to 'take monkeypox seriously'. The declaration will make more resources available for states, allow for federal officials being deployed nationwide and enhance data collection on cases, hospitalizations and testing. Cases have been surging by more than a hundred per day for three weeks now, with CDC director Rochelle Walensky admitting today officials were unsure whether this was due to the virus spreading quickly or older infections being picked up. She said the nation was only utlizing about 10 percent of its testing capacity or 1,000 of 10,000 swabs per day , and called for more swabs to be sent to labs. The federal declaration comes after New York, California and Illinois which are facing the biggest outbreaks all declared their own public health emergencies last week. The World Health Organization made declared an international public health emergency two weeks ago, after the virus was reported in 70 countries where it is not endemic. There is 'huge concern' that monkeypox which is spread via physical contact could reach more vulnerable groups after at least five cases have been recorded in children, who are more at risk of serious disease from the virus. Federal officials have been slammed for a delayed response to the virus so far, allowing it to potentially spread unrestricted for weeks before expanding access to testing and rolling out vaccines to the population. At current, the country can perform up to 80,000 monkeypox tests each week. The above map shows which states have recorded monkeypox cases as of yesterday afternoon. The outbreak is biggest in New York, California and Illinois The above shows state's ranked by monkeypox cases. Only Montana and Wyoming are yet to report an infection Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra made the announcement this afternoon. The conference was also attended by Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which has been slammed for a slow response to the virus Declaring the emergency, Becerra said: 'In light of all of these developments and the evolving circumstances on the ground, I want to make an announcement today that i will be declaring a public health emergency on monkeypox. 'We are prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus and we urge every american to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus.' Federal officials were expected to make the move last week, amid alarm over the ever-rising tally of infections. Timeline of monkeypox in the United States 1958: Monkeypox is discovered when an outbreak of pox-like disease occurred in monkeys kept for research. 1970: First human case of the disease is recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was later detected in a number of other central and western African countries. 2003: America's former largest monkeypox outbreak occurs. A total of 47 people are infected after having contact with pet prairie dogs that picked up the disease at a farm. July, 2021: Monkeypox case detected in the U.S. in a citizen who had recently returned from Nigeria. November, 2021: Monkeypox is detected in another U.S. resident who recently returned from Nigeria. May, 2022: A man in Massachusetts is diagnosed with monkeypox, becoming the first case in the current outbreak. There are now more than 2,000 cases nationwide. July, 2022: First cases are confirmed in children and a pregnant woman, who are more at risk from the virus. August, 2022: America set to declare public health emergency over outbreak after its case tally becomes the highest in the world. Advertisement Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admitted today that officials were not sure whether the outbreak was slowing down. She said: 'Two things are happening at once that I think account for the rise in cases that we are seeing. One is the more widely available testing, and two is potentially more infections that are actually happening as a result of infections that happened two or three weeks ago. 'It is hard to disentangle those right now, but we do expect cases to continue to rise as we get more access to testing people and have more access to testing people.' She said 51 jurisdictions although the type was not specified have agreed to share data so far, although she hoped the rest would soon be able to. She also called for more samples to be sent for tests, saying America is only using 10 percent of the 10,000 swabs it can do a day. Almost every case detected so far has been in gay or bisexual men, officials say, although there are growing concerns the outbreak will spread to other groups. To date five children have tested positive for the virus two in California, two in Indiana and one traveling through Washington D.C. who are believed to have caught the virus from 'household contacts'. A pregnant woman has also tested positive for the disease. Both groups are more at risk of serious illness if they contract monkeypox, health officials said, and there is 'huge concern' about them catching the disease. During the briefing, HHS chiefs also revealed they had now delivered 600,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine to states. There is no data available on how many people have been jabbed, becuase initially states were not required to report this to the CDC. Within a week of America's first case being detected in a middle aged man in Massachusetts who had recently returned from Canada in May, both New York and Florida also declared their first infections. Since then cases have continued to surge upwards and over the last three weeks rose by more than a hundred infections per day. The biggest rise was the more than 1,000 cases in 24 hours on July 27, but CDC officials said this was mostly down to 'historical' cases only just being reported from California. The disease has also now spread to all U.S. states except Montana and Wyoming which are very rural with New York being the national hotspot having registered more than 1,600 infections. Men pictured queuing to get the monkeypox vaccine at Obregon Park, Los Angeles, today. More than 600,000 doses have been rolled out to states so far Men pictured preparing to get the monkeypox vaccine in Encino, California, earlier this week The above map shows the states that have reported monkeypox infections up to August 2nd, the latest date available. It reveals that almost every one has now detected it except Montana and Wyoming JULY 20 (left) and JULY 27 (right): The CDC starts to report far more cases once testing is ramped up. It has recorded more than a hundred every working day for the past few weeks JUNE 22 (left) and JULY 6 (right): The virus was detected in yet more states and in larger numbers following celebrations for Pride. It has mostly been detected among gay or bisexual men MAY 18 (left) and JUNE 8 (right): The above maps show which states have detected cases of monkeypox virus, as it began to spread across the United States Dr William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, told DailyMail.com yesterday that the virus was now 'very widespread' in the U.S. and 'not under control'. He also said there was 'huge concern' that it could spill over into other groups like children and pregnant women who are much more vulnerable to the disease. Asked about it spreading to more vulnerable groups, Hanage said this was a 'huge question' that was causing 'a great deal of concern'. 'It is unquestionably true that the virus can infect other groups,' he said, '[but] it is not clear how sustainable transmission is within those other groups.' 'The population as a whole remains at low risk, but [officials] are going to have to be watching extremely closely to start checking how much transmission can occur within the other networks. The CDC has been repeatedly blasted for its slow response to the outbreak, with it appearing to repeat many of the same mistakes as with Covid. It took weeks for the agency to ramp up testing, with barely a hundred a day being carried out at the beginning and doctors left faced with hours of paperwork just to get a swab approved to be sent to labs. But they have now signed on five commercial labs, increasing capacity from up to 1,000 to 10,000 tests that can be processed a day. Medics are also being encouraged to send swabs forward. There have also been problems accessing vaccines, with many states saying that they have received too few from the national stockpile. Thousands have been dished out to date, but most of the jabs available when the disease first struck have spent weeks stuck in Denmark while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) completed a factory inspection. BOOK OF THE WEEK SAVING FREUD by Andrew Nagorski (Icon 20, 336pp) With enemies like these, you do need friends. This was the life-lesson and indeed the life-saving lesson that Sigmund Freud learned in 1938, when the Nazis walked into his beloved home city of Vienna and started terrorising the Jewish population. When your enemies are the Nazis, you need not just any friends, but ones in high places wholl swing into action, pull strings with the Gestapo, negotiate the extortionate flight taxes and sort out the complicated paperwork in two countries that will enable you to escape to safety. Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna arrive in Paris in 1938, just after fleeing Austria from the Nazis In his fascinating new book Saving Freud, American author Andrew Nagorski pieces together the story of an eccentric bunch of friends and admirers of Freud, who did precisely this for the man they revered. Thanks to their single-minded efforts, not only Freud himself but 24 members of his extended family managed to emigrate to England in June 1938. Freud comes across as infinitely more likeable than in the 2017 demolition of him by Frederick Crews, who portrayed him (as I summed it up in these pages) as the most vile, medically useless, misogynistic, snobbish, petulant, jealous, crazy, sexobsessed creep you could ever hope not to look up at from a couch. Nagorski resets the balance here, depicting him as a kindly old cigar addict with oral cancer, a family man of regular habits, who relished his fame and success but never took them for granted. The love of his life seems to have been not his wife Martha (mother of their six children), but his daughter Anna, who ministered to him like an unflagging nurse and angel. Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (center), escorted by Marie Bonaparte (Princess Marie of Greece), a French psychoanalyst and wife of Prince George of Greece, and by American ambassador to France William Bullitt, shortly after his arrival in Paris after leaving Vienna en route to London In the people who came under his spell from 1905 onwards, Freud inspired a fierce and lifelong devotion. His disciples, who would eventually play their part in saving his life, were all damaged in various ways. One gets the sense that Freud was a magnet for the damaged. Heres the motley crowd. Ernest Jones, Welsh psychoanalyst, met Freud through Jung in 1908, and was enchanted by his theories. Jones had been accused of indecent behaviour by two pupils at a school for mental defectives, and was then accused by a severe hysteric of having sex with her. He fought to save his reputation, became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society and married his Viennese secretary, who had been introduced to him by Freud. Marie Bonaparte, great-grandniece of Napoleon, came to Vienna to be treated by Freud in 1925, when she was unhappily married to Prince George of Greece and unable to achieve orgasm. She and Freud fell instantly in platonic love with each other. She called him dear Father in her copious letters to him written from her grand house in Paris. Freud didnt manage to cure her orgasm problem, though, and she went ahead with a mad operation to have her clitoris moved nearer to her vagina which didnt do the trick either. American author Andrew Nagorski pieces together the story of an eccentric bunch of friends and admirers of Freud William Bullitt, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, 35 years younger than Freud, came under his spell when he visited Vienna in the mid-1920s, and both men agreed strongly that the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster: not a recipe for peace but a recipe for continued war. The two men co-wrote a book psycho analysing Woodrow Wilson, which was not published till 1967. It was Bullitts recommendation that led to the appointment of his former No. 2 in Moscow, John Wiley, as the U.S. Consul General in Vienna in 1937, with a special assignment of keeping a protective eye on Freuds family. Then there was Max Schur, Freuds personal physician, who saw the approaching danger and made arrangements for his own family to emigrate to the U.S. But, bravely, he stayed on in Austria to care for Freud. And it was Schur who would inject him with the doses of morphine that would ease him into death on 23 September 1939, when his oral cancer became unendurable. Why hadnt Freud emigrated earlier in the 1930s? His son Ernst (father of Clement, Lucian and Stephen) had foreseen the coming danger and got out in 1933. But Sigmund was in a state of deep, almost pathological denial. When the Nazis burned his books in 1933 one of them declaiming, just before throwing them onto the fire, Against the soul-destroying over-estimation of the sex-life, and on behalf of the nobility of the human soul, I offer to the flames the writings of one Sigmund Freud! Freud naively remarked, In the Middle Ages they would have burned me; nowadays they are content with burning my books. SAVING FREUD by Andrew Nagorski (Icon 20, 336pp) That was a reversal of Heinrich Heines astute remark on that same subject: Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people. Freud might have been a world expert on the human psyche, but he was far from being the Mystic Meg of current affairs. The brutalities in Germany seem to be diminishing, he said blithely in mid-1933, while thousands were being carted off to Dachau. And, A nation that produced Goethe could not possibly go to the bad. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But his mind would be changed, at last, just a few days after the Nazis marched into Vienna, when a gang of armed Nazi brownshirts barged in to his apartment. His wife Martha politely asked them to put their guns in the umbrella stand in the hall. She got all the cash in the house and said, Would the gentlemen like to help themselves? They did, and left saying, Herr Professor, well be back. On that same day, Nazi thugs marched into Freuds publishing house a few doors down, and held his son Martin at gunpoint while raiding the office for incriminating evidence. A few days later, Anna was taken away by the Gestapo for a day of interrogation. Freud knew the family needed to leave, and fast. Operation Freud swung into gear. In Britain, Ernest Jones went straight to the top, securing an introduction to Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, who gave carte blanche for entry permits for the whole extended Freud family. John Wiley made sure an American diplomatic car draped in the U.S. flag was parked all day outside Freuds apartment, putting off the Nazis, who didnt yet want to make enemies of the Americans. Marie Bonaparte paid the whole flight tax, amounting to the value of a quarter of Freuds assets. And off they were whisked, first to Paris in two private compartments of the Orient Express, and then to London with Freuds beloved chow dog Lun, who had to go straight into quarantine at Dover. And Freud could die in the freedom of the country he called This England ...a blessed, a happy country inhabited by well-meaning, hospitable people. His four younger sisters, who didnt manage to get out, would die in concentration camps. Were it not for those friends, this would almost certainly have been the fate of Freud and the majority of that lucky party who boarded the Orient Express on June 5, 1938. If only six million other Jews had had such friends in high places. MEMOIR ONE PLACE DE L'EGLISE by Trevor Dolby (Michael Joseph 14.99, 193pp) The French call it a coup de foudre: when you fall totally and helplessly in love at first sight. Thats how it was for Trevor Dolby when he was shown round a dilapidated 12th-century house in the south of France. The estate agent pleaded with him not to buy it but Dolby was so enchanted that I could hardly hold a thought in my head. This account of buying a house and settling into village life abroad is in the same vein as books such as A Year In Provence, Under The Tuscan Sun and Driving Over Lemons. If youve read them youll know the problems with builders, loving descriptions of sumptuous meals and sublime wines, and wry vignettes of life in a country that is full of unexpected rules and customs. Trevor Dolby fell in love with a dilapidated 12th-century house in South of France. The literary agent documents buying his dream house and his new village life Dolby, a literary agent by profession, is cheerfully aware that for a comfortably-off British couple to buy a second home abroad is a thumping great cliche. If you are middle-aged, middle-class and can borrow a few bob, then a place in France is as important as owning a four-by-four, shopping at Ocado. .. and being able to name every shade of Farrow & Ball. Everything about it was crumbling, and when Dolby looked up from the cellar he could see straight into the attic several floors above Yet he writes with genuine emotion of this ancient house in a village in the Languedoc. Everything about it was crumbling, and when Dolby looked up from the cellar he could see straight into the attic several floors above. His wife, Kaz, a splendidly trusting woman, had never seen the house but gave him the go-ahead to buy it. Shortly afterwards they had handed over 100,000 euro and 1Place de lEglise was theirs. Despite its sunny, upbeat tone, there is also a hint of melancholy in this book, which is explained in the final two pages Dolby rather skates over the renovation of the house (16 years on, the roof is still leaking), but he writes beautifully about life in a French village. How does a foreigner try to fit in? Say bonjour in a jolly fashion to anything that moves, but dont make the mistake of being overly friendly and chatty. However bad your French, making an effort to learn it will go down well. Make sure you regularly visit the nearest bar, but dont make the mistake of buying a round for everyone or youll be dismissed as flash. And the more you know about wine and bread, Dolby declares, the more you will both understand the French and be respected down the bar. The most enjoyable parts of this book are his descriptions of the French countryside. Looking out over a local river on a summers day, Dolby writes, The pools are packed with fish, herons drift in to dine . . . lift your head, and above you is the bell tower, so often in early summer buzzed by a swarm of swifts so high they look like gnats. This account of buying a house and settling into village life abroad is in the same vein as books such as A Year In Provence, Under The Tuscan Sun and Driving Over Lemons A long mountain hike takes him to the top of the world ...in front are the peaks of the Pyrenees, to the left the sparkling blue Mediterranean. ONE PLACE DE L'EGLISE by Trevor Dolby (Michael Joseph 14.99, 193pp) This book is an unabashed love letter to France, from someone who admires the country deeply. If the Dolbys have ever struggled with Frances endless bureaucracy, or met an unfriendly local, the author is too tactful to say so. He has never regretted his impulse purchase: There is something in the bones of 1 Place de lEglise that sings to us. Despite its sunny, upbeat tone, there is also a hint of melancholy in this book, which is explained in the final two pages. Dolby reveals that his son, George, who flits in and out of the book along with his sister, Freya, died in 2018 at the age of 28. Time for me is divided into whole and broken. When George was in the world and when he is not, he says. His sons bedroom in France is now a study, but its still Georges room and always will be until the house becomes someone elses, and then it will become part of their story.' HOW THE COUNTRYSIDE MADE ME by Matt Baker (Michael Joseph 9.99, 336pp) HOW THE COUNTRYSIDE MADE ME by Matt Baker (Michael Joseph 9.99, 336pp) He made his name presenting Blue Peter, Countryfile and The One Show, but Matt Baker has always been a farmer at heart. He grew up on the family sheep farm in the Durham dales, and even when he left to pursue a career in television, he ran a smallholding in the Chilterns. In 2020, Matt had just left The One Show to set up a production company when his mum broke her leg in a farm accident. Matt, his wife Nicola, and children Luke and Molly, along with all their animals, drove up to Durham to help out. It was clear that for the farm to survive, big changes would have to be made, a process chronicled in Matts TV series, Our Farm In The Dales. In this delightful memoir, Matt reflects on his deep roots in the countryside, and explores how the farm has made me who I am. THE LONG WEEKEND by Gilly Macmillan (Penguin 8.99, 400pp) THE LONG WEEKEND by Gilly Macmillan (Penguin 8.99, 400pp) Three couples are looking forward to a long weekend at a remote holiday house in Northumberland. But old schoolfriends Mark, Toby and Paul have all had to delay their arrival, so their wives, Jayne, Ruth and Emily, plan to spend the first night together. Privately, both Ruth and Emily are worried about the trip. Struggling to cope with new motherhood and her job as a GP, Ruth has started drinking heavily. Emily, a decade younger than the others, feels left out. And when they arrive at the barn, a shock awaits them: a bottle of Champagne, with a note announcing that one of the husbands has been murdered. With no phone or wi-fi, they have no way of finding out if it is true or a cruel joke. Gilly Macmillans tense thriller remorselessly exposes the web of secrets and betrayal behind the facade of friendship. THE COWARD by Jarred McGinnis (Canongate 9.99, 320pp) When 26-yea THE COWARD by Jarred McGinnis (Canongate 9.99, 320pp) When 26-year-old Jarred McGinnis wakes up in hospital after a car crash, it takes him a while to realise that he will never walk again. Worse still, he has no one to help him except his estranged father, Jack. They last spoke ten years ago, but when Jarred calls, Jack agrees to take him back to the suburban house in Austin, Texas, where Jarred grew up. Back in his childhood bedroom, Jarred struggles with wounds of the present and the past: his mothers death when he was ten, Jacks alcoholism and their fractured relationship. Black comedy alternates with fragile tenderness in this vivid and fiercely honest novel, as Jarred (who shares his name and his paraplegia with the author) navigates his changed life with rage, wit (he makes a T-shirt reading I am not your good deed for the day) and the possibility of forgiveness. UP IN SMOKE by Leigh Hosy-Pickett (Trapeze 18.99, 272pp) How does it feel to sprint towards a burning building when everyone else is running away from it? As he watched the TV coverage of the September 11 attacks in New York, Leigh Hosy-Pickett knew what was going through the minds of the fire crews pounding up the stairs of the Twin Towers. Every man and woman preparing to hurry into that hell would have felt excited and adrenalised. I knew because thats how I too would have felt. Leigh Hosy-Pickett (pictured) is a third-generation fireman, who first applied to join at 18. Firefighters really do rescue cats from trees, but only if stuck for 24 hours Hosy-Pickett is a third-generation fireman, who first applied to join at 18. The men in my family smelt of smoke, he says. He gives a vivid account of the gruelling 17-week training for new recruits: Ladders, pumping...Cutting equipment techniques and swathes of breathing apparatus... repeated again and again. Even so, you wonder what can truly prepare anyone for the reality of being in the middle of a fire: an animal, a monster, untamed...if I didnt respect it, the flames would eat me up. Worse than the fires are the calls to traffic accidents, where the firefighters role is to cut injured people from their tangled vehicles, knowing full well that the fuel tank could explode at any minute. What helps firefighters cope day to day is the camaraderie. The Fire Service is a massive family and bloods thicker than water, he says. Most of this familial bond seems to manifest itself in elaborate schoolboy pranks, such as sugar bowls filled with salt and eager new recruits being sent off to buy tins of tartan paint. Hosy Pickett says that humour and light-heartedness are an essential coping mechanism for firefighters... laughter allows light into dark spaces. UP IN SMOKE by Leigh Hosy-Pickett (Trapeze 18.99, 272pp) Firefighters, he reveals, really do rescue cats from trees, but only if theyve been stuck for at least 24 hours. And as for avoiding starting a fire in your own home: dont position a barbecue next to a wooden fence; steer clear of paint-stripping guns; and plan your Christmas decorations with care because the combination of cheap fairy lights and flammable ornaments is an accident waiting to happen. Never assume a fire wont happen to you, and be prepared: keep the keys to your front door somewhere youll be able to find them in the dark, and work out which room you will retreat to if you cant get out. (Make it the room nearest the street so you can be rescued easily.) And, above all, he says again and again, have working smoke alarms in your house and check them regularly. Despite the breezy tone of Up In Smoke, Hosy-Pickett eventually developed post traumatic stress disorder. It took months of intensive therapy for him to be able to manage the stress. Yet 25 years after he first became a firefighter, he still believes its the best job in the world. AFTER SHE'D GONE by Alex Dahl (Head of Zeus 20, 416pp) AFTER SHE'D GONE by Alex Dahl (Head of Zeus 20, 416pp) Alex Dahl has written a truly revealing book about the disgusting side of the modelling world, but her powerful messaging never bogs the plot down with clunky virtue-signalling. Told from the points of view of three women and a boy, the story moves between the lives of Selma, an investigative journalist in Oslo, Anastasia, a model in Milan surrounded by the glamour and dangers of the catwalk life, and Liv, a single mother living with her son in a seaside town in Norway. It is the voice of Adrian, Livs neuro diverse, selectively mute nine-year-old, who steals the show. Selmas investigation starts to join the dots between the women and uncovers the lengths to which powerful people will go to protect themselves. Not for the faint-hearted but an irresistible read. THE IT GIRL by Ruth Ware (S&S 14.99, 432pp) THE IT GIRL by Ruth Ware (S&S 14.99, 432pp) There is an inexhaustible appetite in thriller writers for using the dreaming spires and glamorous students of Oxford as a backdrop, but Ruth Ware steers her latest elegant book away from the normal cliches, thanks to her firm grip on the psychology of the two main characters. Hannah Jones is an impressionable, earnest middle-class girl who is drawn into the circle of the uber-confident, super-wealthy April Coutts Cliveden. But Hannahs Oxford bubble bursts when April is found murdered and a university porter is found guilty of killing her. Fast forward ten years and Hannah has still not recovered from losing April and now the death of the porter in prison raises questions about whether he was actually guilty or if the murderer was one of her fast-living friends. Hannahs decision to get to the truth means she faces up to some unpleasant hidden facts about her past and puts her future in jeopardy. DAISY DARKER by Alice Feeney (Macmillan 14.99, 352pp) DAISY DARKER by Alice Feeney (Macmillan 14.99, 352pp) During a tense family reunion on a small, tidal island in Cornwall, 80-year-old Nana is found dead on the kitchen floor at the stroke of midnight. It becomes clear she is just the first to be killed. This is the tantalising premise behind this very clever book. The eccentric Nana had predicted her death and seems intent on teaching a lesson. The story is seen through the eyes of Nanas favourite, Daisy, who was born with a heart defect and has led a sheltered life. The familys secrets the neglect of their children and the triumph of ambition are gradually and artfully revealed. Fans of Agatha Christies classic And Then There Were None will savour this, but Feeney makes it so much more than a witty homage. Though media personnel reached the entrance at 12 noon on Thursday, they were asked to sit in a congested room and later asked to leave. (Image By Arrangement) HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad city police apologised to the journalist fraternity on Thursday for causing inconvenience to reporters who went to cover the inauguration of Telangana police Integrated Command Control Centre (ICCC) at Banjara Hills. In response to a complaint by a journalist, a city police official wrote on their Twitter handle, Sir, inconvenience regretted, we will keep in the notice of concerned, so that it will not repeated (sic). Media personnel were invited to cover the event two days in advance, but were not allowed to go near the main building. Though they reached the media entrance at 12 noon on Thursday, they were asked to sit in a congested room and later asked to leave. CULT CLASSIC by Sloane Crosley (Bloomsbury 16.99, 304pp) CULT CLASSIC by Sloane Crosley (Bloomsbury 16.99, 304pp) Funny, clever and spiky, protagonist Lola lives in New York with a perfect-on-paper fiance shes not convinced about. Shes out for dinner when she bumps into an ex-boyfriend with whom she shared insanely intense chemistry. Rattled, Lola does not tell her betrothed. The next day, a friend wants to go to the same restaurant where Lola runs into another ex, the most physically attractive man shes ever been with. She cannot explain the coincidence to her fiance without revealing that she didnt tell him about her first encounter, so she says nothing. Then it keeps happening again and again. This genre-busting romcom follows Lola as she attempts to gain closure from awful dating experiences by reliving them through the medium of these magical realist encounters. Sharp and compelling. SKIP TO THE END by Molly James (Quercus 16.99, 368pp) SKIP TO THE END by Molly James (Quercus 16.99, 368pp) Amy has a psychic gift which means that whenever she kisses someone for the first time, she has a premonition of how their relationship will end. The unhappy endings are so vivid and visceral that none of her relationships get much further than that. Despondent about her lonely fate while a bridesmaid at her best friends wedding, Amy gets drunk and kisses three men. She wakes up the next morning hungover but also delirious, because for the first time in her life shes seen a perfect ending alongside two painful ones. The trouble is, Amy was so drunk she cant remember whom she kissed or which ending belongs to which man, let alone which one is her Mr Right. This means that shes living in the present for the first time, with no idea about the outcomes. I raced through it. LOVE & OTHER HUMAN ERRORS by Bethany Clift (Hodder 16.99, 480pp) LOVE & OTHER HUMAN ERRORS by Bethany Clift (Hodder 16.99, 480pp) Set in London in 2030, this futuristic novel describes a world in which our offices have been converted into flats housing single tech workers who are mostly under 35. One of these is Indiana, so focused on her data harvesting company TRU that she has no interest in any other aspects of life beyond her work. Somewhat ironically, TRUs main function is as a dating app that claims to find everyone their soulmate. Where it differs is that it removes the potential for human error. Lina and Jack work for the company which funds TRU. They dont get on but one thing theyve got in common along with Indiana is that none of them is looking for a relationship. Lina is a workaholic and Jack is grieving but never talks about his wife. This original story is wonderful on love, loss, loneliness and the vital importance of human connection. Earlier this year, I parked my car in a local shopping centre which offers free parking. But I was issued with a Penalty Charge Notice by the operator, Premier Park, for 100. The reason given was that I had occupied more than one marked bay. That is true - but I didn't have any other option. I had parked my car between two others already parked, and to enable everyone to get in and out of their vehicles I parked equidistant between them, which put me over the marked line. Parking palaver: Our reader has been trying to appeal his 100 PCN from Premier Park as he feels it is unfair, but has so far been unsuccessful (stock image) If I hadn't, I would have not only blocked in the other drivers but risked damage to my own car and theirs. I was just being sensible and don't know why I should be punished for others' bad parking. I appealed to the independent appeals service Popla, but it rejected my appeal saying that I broke the car park's rules. Is there anything else I can do? I.W, Nottinghamshire Helen Crane of This is Money replies: These private parking firms regularly drive motorists up the wall and we at This is Money hear plenty of horror stories. From payment machines that don't work to opaque 'rules' about where, when and for how long you can park, it is easy for drivers to get caught out and have a dreaded PCN land on their doorstep - despite thinking they had done the right thing. Change seemed to be on the horizon this year as the Government drew up new official guidelines on the private parking code of practice. CRANE ON THE CASE Our weekly column sees This is Money consumer expert Helen Crane tackle reader problems and shine the light on companies doing both good and bad. Want her to investigate a problem, or do you want to praise a firm for going that extra mile? Get in touch: helen.crane@thisismoney.co.uk These aimed to cut private parking charges in half from 100 to 50 and provide drivers with more powers to dispute unfair tickets. However, the guidelines were temporarily withdrawn by minsters in June and are now pending review, after parking firms launched a legal action to challenge the proposal. This is Money's deputy editor Lee Boyce recently wrote about his run-in with a private parking firm, which sent him a 100 fine despite him having paid for a ticket. He managed to get the charge overturned, but not before some frustrating administrative back-and-forth. His tips are to always appeal a fine if you weren't in the wrong, never tell the company who was driving, and to put your case together as well as you can. Lee also urged drivers who had appeals rejected to persevere, as parking companies' tactics seem to be to turn down a first appeal, however reasonable or right you are. You approached me after Popla rejected your appeal, not knowing which way to turn next. I agreed that the charge seemed unfair in this case - after all, you were just trying to park safely and without obstructing other drivers, although it does also breach the terms and conditions spelled out on signs. I contacted Premier Park to drive home your point. After a couple of weeks, you told me it did a u-turn and offered an 80 reduction in the charge, meaning 20. Private parking firms are notoriously inflexible as I am sure many motorists will attest, so I am chalking that up as a win. Premier Park did not respond to my request for a comment. You do still have the option to take the company to court and challenge it for the outstanding sum. But the hassle of motoring on with the claim - which has already taken up a lot of your time - would likely outweigh the 20 gain and I suspect they know this. This compromise, I think, spells the end of the road. You broke the rules, unintentionally, and it serves a parking reminder to other motorists - don't do the same just because others have. Bathroom blunder: Kate's soft-close toilet seat stopped working, but Royal Bathrooms replaced it quickly and at no cost Hit and miss: This week's naughty and nice list Every week, I look at the companies who have fallen short when it comes to customer service, and those who have gone above and beyond. Hit: Reader Kate told me she was left feeling flush after scoring a free replacement toilet seat from Royal Bathrooms. She bought a vanity suite from them earlier in the year, including a soft close toilet seat which recently stopped working as intended, leading to some bathroom mishaps. When she contacted Royal Bathrooms, she expected she would just be told to buy a new one. But they asked her to send a video of the toilet seat in action, and within two days a new seat arrived by courier, free of charge. It's nice to hear of a company acting with a wee bit of compassion and am glad that you found its service more than bog standard. Camer-gloom: Our reader saw her trip to Yaounde cancelled when the flight was called off Miss: More tales of travel chaos this week, as reader H. from Manchester wrote in to tell me she was still awaiting a refund for a flight that should have happened in February. That was well before this summer of holiday hell started, which doesn't bode well for those trying to get their money back for more recent trips. She said: 'I planned a holiday to Cameroon for February 2022 and booked a round trip from Manchester to Yaounde on British Airways via Lastminute.com, paying 822.67. 'The first leg of the journey was a flight from Manchester to London. When I got to the airport it was delayed for hours, before finally being cancelled. 'I am disabled and was left stranded at the airport with no support, being forced to go around the airport trying to locate my luggage so I could go home. 'I then had to ask a friend to come and pick me up in a rented van, and pay for car parking. The cancellation also rendered the transport I had initially booked to take me to and from the airport a total waste of money. On top of the flight costs, this was about 400. 'After all this hassle and expense, I just wanted my money back so I could plan another trip. I have been calling Lastminute for four months and keep being told I will get the money "in a few days," but it never arrives. 'I think the refund should be for the full round trip, given that the first leg of the journey was cancelled.' Lastminute.com initially said it wouldn't give a refund until it had been paid back by BA I contacted Lastminute.com to ask why the refund was taking so long. It apologised for the delay, and told me: 'When a standalone flight ticket is purchased we act as an agent and the consumer's contract for a flight ticket is between the customer and the airline directly. 'This, unfortunately, means we are obliged to follow the rules and timings set out by the airline. 'It is also important to note that since the changes and subsequent cancellation happened at the last minute, we had no prior information about this in order for us to be able to proactively reach out to the customer. 'Our teams have been investigating this case and we can confirm that we have not yet received the funds from the airline.' As a gesture of goodwill, however, it agreed to 'anticipate' the refund and paid you back the full return fare straight away. That wasn't so hard, was it? With delays and cancellations wreaking havoc with travel plans this summer, holidaymakers should note that if they book with an agent their refund will likely take longer to process. This is because they usually insist on getting the money they paid the airline back, before they will pass it on to the customer. Travel torment: Holidaymakers are being plagued by flight cancellations this summer I regularly hear this excuse from agents, and, while I understand that they can't pay everyone back out of their own pocket, something clearly needs to change here. Either airlines and agents find a way to get customers their money back in good time, or agents need to make it abundantly clear to customers at the time of booking that any refunds will take longer to procure. Judging from the emails I have been receiving, airlines are not being particularly expedient about refunding customers who book with them direct either. Often, booking a package holiday rather than standalone flights offers better protection when things go wrong, as they are usually ATOL protected. But for those who are booking standalone flights and hotels, cutting out the middleman and going direct to the airline for the flights could make the refund process a little less painful if things go wrong. I also asked Lastminute about the extra costs you incurred due to the cancellation. It said you needed to go direct to BA for these, which you are doing. I sincerely hope it agrees to your claim, as your airport experience sounded horrendous - and if it doesn't, I will be straight on the phone. A top detective found dead inside his police station is from a highly regarded law enforcement family and solved some of Sydney's toughest cases in a two-decade career with the homicide squad. Shocked colleagues discovered Detective Sergeant Adam Child dead from a gunshot wound inside a room at Ermington police station, in Sydney's west, about 12.30pm on Monday. The 46-year-old father, who worked in the force alongside his wife, has been remembered as 'one of the finest humans and detectives' by relatives of murder victims whose cases he helped solve. Police do not believe Mr Child's death was suspicious. He was on duty at the time and a police-issued firearm was used in the incident. Friends and former colleagues have expressed horror at learning of the father-of-two's untimely death and questioned what support services were in place. Colleagues found Detective Sergeant Adam Child dead inside a room at Ermington police station in Sydney about 12.30pm on Monday 'I am just heartbroken. [Adam] was one of the finest humans and detectives,' said one woman, who met Mr Child when he was assigned to the case of her loved one. She added Mr Child would be remembered for his 'compassion and steely determination for justice'. He was publicly involved in the investigation into murdered mother Jody Galante, and was praised by her relatives for his kindness and dogged search for the truth. The case was the subject of an Australian Story episode in 2008 which featured Mr Child, as he explained the steps he took to solve the murder and put Mrs Galante's husband, Mark, behind bars for 27 years. 'Adam Child and Anthony Agnew were so caring, they knew they were asking us to do hard things,' Mrs Galante's mother Julie-Anne Hand said at the time. Mr Child had suspicions Mrs Galante's husband was responsible for her death but did not have enough evidence to make an arrest. He asked her family to continue publicly supporting him while the investigation was ongoing to lull him into a false sense of security. Mr Child was publicly involved in the investigation into murdered mother Jody Galante (pictured with her husband, who was eventually convicted of her murder), and was praised by her relatives for his kindness and dogged search for the truth Following Galante's arrest, the 27-year-old pleaded guilty to his wife's murder and was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment, with a non-parole period of 20 years Almost two months later, he asked them to help clear out Mrs Galante's daughter's belongings from the house, noting 'she wouldn't be going back there'. Following Galante's arrest, the 27-year-old pleaded guilty to his wife's murder and was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment, with a non-parole period of 20 years. Mrs Galante's family could not praise Mr Child enough for his work on the case. The homicide squad in NSW leads the response to major criminal investigations, including murders, suspicious deaths, critical incidents and coronial inquiries. Mr Child has been commended for his role in countless investigations over his 20-year career. 'I'm so sick at heart right now, the ripple affect of the loss of Adam will be felt by many families today, his own family and the his family in Blue,' one friend said. 'It's a very sad day. Adam was a good man and detective... Rest well brother.' Mr Child was usually based at the Parramatta head office but was stationed at Ermington while working on an active investigation in the region. Mrs Galante's family couldn't praise Mr Child any more for his work on the case A critical incident has been declared as part of standard procedures within NSW Police when an employee dies in the vicinity of other officers. NSW Police said in a statement Mr Child's colleagues and all officers at Ermington station will be offered support to deal with the grief and shock. Mr Child's death is the latest in a string of tragic police deaths in recent years. Just two years ago in November 2020, Sergeant Matthew Theoklis died by suicide at the Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills. Between 2017 and 2019, a further five Australian Federal Police officers took their own lives on the job. A 24-hour trauma response hotline was established in NSW and 1,200 officers were trained as part of a state-wide peer support program. Lifeline: 13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 or beyondblue.org.au Police do not believe Mr Child's death was suspicious. He was on duty at the time and a police issued firearm was used in the incident The man who claims he 'made' Jennifer Hawkins has become embroiled in a 'secret rort to breach donation laws' that Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is relishing. Mitch Catlin abruptly resigned as chief of staff to Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy on Tuesday after it was revealed he asked wealthy party donor Jonathan Munz to pay $100,000 to his private marketing company. While the blowback has helped take the heat off the recent finding of 'extensive misconduct' by Labor MPs by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC), it is far from the first time Mr Catlin has made headlines. The self-styled 'marketing guru' is well known in fashion and retail circles for claiming to have made Hawkins into a huge success when he was PR boss for Myer and she was the star face of the department store chain. Mitch Catlin (pictured), who claims to have 'made' Jennifer Hawkins, is now embroiled in a political scandal involving Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy Jennifer Hawkins (pictured) worked closely with Mitch Catlin when she was the face of Myer Though this claim is not backed by Hawkins, it didn't do Mr Catlin any harm. In another PR coup, Mr Catlin and his team turned a potential disaster into a huge success by using a cardboard cut-out of Kim Kardashian for guests to pose with when the superstar failed to show up at Melbourne's Flemington Racecourse in 2011. 'It was when Instagram was taking off, and it became this social media phenomenon where people posed with it and then, later, wondered where it had gone,' he told The Age. Kim Kardashian is pictured in Melbourne, Australia on November 18, 2014, three years after a cardboard cut-out of her was used in the same city when she was a no-show The former TV journalist - he was chief of staff at Ten and Los Angeles correspondent for Seven - went on to high-profile roles in marketing and public relations, including a stint working for Karl Stefanovic. In 2018, when Stefanovic's ratings on Nine's Today show were falling after his high-profile divorce, he hired Mr Catlin to help save his brand as a knockabout everyday bloke. Mr Catlin is also credited with signing Nicole Kidman for vitamin company Swisse, but naysayers have sniped that he 'is best known for walking celebrities into marquees at the Melbourne Cup'. Mr Catlin's proposed contract with Mr Munz would reportedly have required the wealthy donor to pay $8,333 a month. The payments to Mr Catlin's Catchy Media Marketing and Management were to be for services described as 'supporting business interests'. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is savouring a political scandal involving the Victorian Opposition leader's former chief of staff Mitch Catlin Mr Catlin hired lawyers to draw up a contract - which was never enacted - then sent it to his boss Mr Guy, asking him to 'forward onto' Mr Munz. 'Hey MG. Attached is the proposed agreement between (Mr Munz) and Catchy Media Marketing and Management,' Mr Catlin wrote in an email sent to Mr Guy's private email address, which was obtained by Nine newspapers. 'It's as per the original email agreement between you and me. 'Can I leave you to forward onto him? (Lawyers) will liaise with him when you do.' Mr Munz, the billionaire founder of plumbing manufacturer Reliance Worldwide Corporation, was reportedly surprised by Mr Catlin's proposal. Mitch Catlin is also great at self promotion - he is pictured with pop star Delta Goodrem He told the Herald Sun that he immediately rejected the 'unsolicited' contract. 'I do not know how many people received this unsolicited and unwanted email, but when I got it, I rejected it out of hand,' Mr Munz said. Mr Guy said the proposal was 'considered and never progressed'. 'I value integrity. I want to make that very clear... We didn't do this. We didnt agree to this. Nothing was signed.' The Andrews government has asked IBAC to investigate whether Mr Guy or Mr Catlin may have committed a crime by conspiring to engage in potentially corrupt conduct. Mitch Catlin (centre) is pictured with American TV host Ellen DeGeneres (left) and her wife Portia De Rossi (right) It said Mr Guy must answer questions about the contract, calling it a 'secret rort to breach donation laws'. The Liberal Party's chances of winning the Victorian state election in November have taken a battering over the scandal, and it remains to be seen if either Mr Guy or Mr Catlin recover from it. But, as Mr Catlin told the Herald Sun in 2018, 'brands must regularly pause, review and change according to the times, otherwise you get left behind'. His career is now in pause mode and a review and change look likely. Daily Mail Australia has sought comment from Mr Guy and Mr Catlin. Mr Ayres has resigned after a separate inquiry called his actions into question The scandal surrounding the appointment of John Barilaro to a New York trade role has dragged in three high-flying female executives and destroyed a friendship between two of them. The public servant in charge of hiring for the job, Investment NSW executive Amy Brown, told a parliamentary inquiry looking into the recruitment process on Wednesday that the experience had been a 'confusing' and 'disheartening' one. The political drama has also drawn in highly accomplished businesswoman Kimberley Cole and former NSW Investment executive Jenny West, once a friend of Ms Brown's. Investment NSW chief executive gave her second session of evidence before a parliamentary inquiry looking into how former deputy premier John Barilaro was appointed to a plum New York trade ambassador role Ms Brown outlined the processes that saw two high-flying women passed over for trade role that eventually went to former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro Both lost out to former NSW deputy premier Mr Barilaro for the New York role even after Ms West received a text, complete with champagne and Statue of Liberty emojis, from Ms Brown that she had job before seeing it ripped away in 2021. The job was readvertised this year and Ms Cole was the preferred candidate after interviews but failed to impress trade minister Stuart Ayres after being given just 12 minutes to chat with him over video link. The job eventually went to Mr Barilaro, who signed a contact in June but stepped down last month after public outcry. Ms Brown detailed to the inquiry on Wednesday how the hopes of the two business women were dashed. KIMBERLEY COLE Ms Brown told the inquiry that after the second set of candidates were interviewed in March she told Mr Ayres there were two standout candidates - Ms Cole and Mr Barilaro. 'I actually said to the minister: there are two candidates who both performed really well at the interview, they have very different offerings in terms of their characteristics and experience and ability to do the job,' Ms Brown told the inquiry. Kimberley Cole was placed behind Mr Barilaro as the preferred candidate after she apparently failed to impress Mr Ayres in their 12-minute meeting Ms Brown said there was a preference to hire a women as other trade commissioner roles had all gone to men. However, she worried Ms Cole might not be able to mix well with politicians. To prove herself, Ms Cole was allowed just a 12-minute Microsoft Teams meeting with Mr Ayres. Ms Brown defended the interview method, saying she had often briefed ministers using Teams and 'you don't have a lot of time with ministers'. Award-winning Australian businesswoman Kimberley Cole was given a 12-minute Microsoft Teams session to impress Mr Ayres 'I think she was given a good opportunity to pitch herself' Ms Brown said. During her testimony, Ms Brown directly contradicted the claim by Mr Ayres that he kept at 'arm's length' from the recruitment process. 'In my view, he (Mr Ayres) was not arm's length from the process, there were multiple intersections throughout,' she said. 'A lot of it was actually initiated by me, because I felt the need that I had to keep checking, partly because of this grey area that we were in around public service or ministerial (appointments). 'Broadly speaking, I wanted to make sure he was comfortable.' Stuart Ayres (pictured) resigned as a minister in the NSW Government in the wake of the John Barilaro US trade envoy job scandal Ms Brown admitted to being nervous about her eventual selection of Mr Barilaro. 'I was nervous about it because he had some history with the NSW government that would make it difficult to take up the role without media and public controversy,' she said. JENNY WEST AND AMY BROWN Despite sending Ms West the text congratulating her on getting the job in August 2021, Ms Brown was adamant that the deal was not sealed. 'I want to reiterate my previous evidence that, by the end of the first recruitment process, no suitable candidate had been found,' Ms Brown told the inquiry. 'A number of factors had changed that resulted in both Ms West and the other candidate being determined by me alone to be no longer suitable.' Former Investment NSW senior executive Jenny West told inquiry in July that Ms Brown said the New York trade job 'present for someone', which Ms Brown denies The first round of recruitment was overseen by Ms West up until she put in her own application for the job, which was after the official closing date. Ms Brown accepted the application despite admitting that Ms West would have a head start due to being involved in drafting the job descriptions and seeing the other applications. Ms West was texted by her manager celebrating her scoring the coveted role Ms Brown said the choice of Ms West in 2021 as preferred candidate had prompted a 'flurry from the deputy premier's office', which was Mr Barilaro's office at the time, which led her being told the job would become a political appointment. 'I got the impressions the ministers weren't overly impressed I had appointed a public servant in the role, Ms Brown said. Ms Brown repeated claims that she began getting negative feedback about Ms West's work. 'I began to be made aware of serious performance issues that would likely result in a need to have her performance managed [and it would be] unwise to appoint her to an overseas role,' Ms Brown said. In previous evidence before the inquiry Ms Brown said concerns were raised about Ms West often being absent during working hours, taking work trips without meetings planned in her diary and embellishing her CV. In her evidence to the inquiry last month Ms West strongly denied that any of those concerns had been raised with her. In September, Ms Brown broke the news to Ms West that her appointment to New York had been put on hold and also informed her that the job she held at the time would be abolished as part of a restructure. During an October 'walking meeting' on Sydney's Balmoral Beach, she told Ms West the job offer had been rescinded. During these conversations Ms West said Ms Brown told her the US trade job was to be 'a present for someone'. Ms Brown strongly denied this claim and said she was disappointed to see the conversation had been noted down and sent to lawyers. 'I would not have used the word 'present'. (It) is not a phrase I would have used,' Brown told the inquiry. Ms Brown told the inquiry that although she made the final decision to hire Mr Barilaro she had been influenced by ministerial considerations 'I also have a particular taste in my mouth around the fact that she [took] file notes [of] personal conversations and sent it to lawyers that I didn't know she engaged. 'However, it wouldn't be surprising to me that people write down what they want to hear.' Ms Brown said what she told Ms West as a 'friend' was that the government's indication the job was going to a political appointment had undone all the recruitment work up to that date. 'I think it's fair to say that me and my close colleagues were quite disillusioned by the conversion to ministerial appointments,' Ms Brown said. 'We'd done so much hard work to get the international network rolled out. It was kind of undoing our work and perhaps we saw this as not having faith in our decision-making. Mr Barilaro, who was then-NSW trade minister, intervened to change the process for hiring the state's trade ambassador to the US and eventually claimed the job himself 'I began to be made aware of serious performance issues that would likely result in a need to have her performance managed [and it would be] unwise to appoint her to an overseas role.'. Ms Brown said that, although she had been friends with Ms West, the relationship deteriorated in following months. 'We were only communicating through lawyers so it was distant and fraught,' she said. Ms West has now left the public service. Ms Brown also said it was customary for the responsible minister to give their opinions on senior executive roles, such as the trade commissioner positions. 'Any conversations I had with the Minister were therefore, to a degree, influential on my decision. But in my view, it did not amount to undue influence because at all times, I felt that the decision was mine, ultimately mine to make,' she said. She said Mr Ayres had also mentioned at one point that Mr Barilaro would be a strong candidate. Ms Brown admitted that ministerial conversations played a role in her thinking for the high profile role, especially as it was to flagged as being a political appointment in the future and this made it a confusing process. 'It was even a struggle for me to get straight in my head,' she said. However, she insisted she made the final call. 'Any conversations I had with minister were, therefore, to a degree influential on my decision,' she said. 'But in my view, it did not amount to undue influence because at all times, I felt that the decision was mine, ultimately mine to make.' Mr Barilaro will give evidence to the inquiry on Monday. A big surge in venomous adder sightings is threatening families on staycation summer holidays on Britain's beaches. Many of the reports have come from coastal areas where the snakes are basking in sand dunes close to crowded bucket-and-spade beaches. Adders are Britain's only venomous snake and are not usually aggressive, preferring to slither away, but they will bite if they feel cornered, or threatened by dogs. In Wales, Bridgend council has seen an increase, specially in the Rest Bay area of Porthcawl. It follows new research published in the Clinical Toxicology journal which revealed that more people in the UK are reporting injuries caused by snakebites than ever before. Most are said to have been caused as a result of exotic snakes being kept as pets, but the risk of adder bites in the countryside and along coasts will grow as the summer progresses. Between 50 and 100 people in the UK are bitten each year, but three in four victims have only a 'negligible' reaction. However the elderly and frail can die without urgent treatment and the Reptile and Amphibian Conservation Trust say there have been 14 recorded human deaths from adder bites since 1876, the last in 1975. Adders are Britain's only venomous snake and are responsible for 14 recorded human deaths from 1876 to 1975 Bridgend council warned: 'With people flocking to the coast, the stunning bays and beaches of Porthcawl are proving to be popular with more than just tourists and visitors. 'If you think that you may have been bitten by an adder, stay calm and do as little walking as possible. 'Go directly to A&E or call 999 for assistance, and remove any jewellery and watches from the bitten limb. Never tie a tourniquet, try to cut or suck the venom out or attempt to catch or kill the snake.' Councillor John Spanswick, cabinet member for communities, said: 'Most reported incidents involve dogs rather than humans, and in the vast majority of cases, a full recovery is made. 'Adders and grass snakes, which are also native but are harmless, can often be seen at the side of rural paths, and can be identified by their distinct markings. 'Adders have a zig-zag pattern running along their backs, while grass snakes have a distinctive yellow collar and two small black triangles just below their heads. 'The council and its partners have produced a handy guide called Snakes of the Bridgend Coast to help people spot snakes and other reptiles within Bridgend County Borough, and which offers advice on what to do if you come across one. 'The best advice for anyone who encounters a snake while out and about is to simply leave them alone, and try not to disturb them. 'All British reptiles are protected under law, and the adder is a species that is considered to be particularly at risk.' In April the parents of eight-year-old Jake Closier, of Camden Town, London, told how they were on a day trip to Hemsby beach in Norfolk when he was bitten. His hand ballooned to nearly five times the normal size and he needed anti-venom treatment at James Paget University Hospital in Great Yarmouth to stop him going into anaphylactic shock. Pet owners were also warned in April after a dog on a Norfolk holiday beach was attacked by one of the hissing vipers. Indi, a Hungarian Vizsla, was saved after treatment at the vets, but owner Rebekah Mann says it was a close-run thing. Three-year-old Indi was being monitored for long-term effects after she was bitten in Winterton on the Norfolk coast. Rebekah, a 38-year-old pharmacist, was walking the dog with friends along the sand dunes on the beach. People are advised to keep their dogs on leads along sand dunes and to give the snakes, which are a foot to 18 inches long with a zig-zag pattern, a wide berth Indi was bitten by an adder's fangs but surprisingly did not react at the time. It was only when she was back at home in Norwich that Rebekah noticed her pet's leg was swollen and getting worse all the time. Rebekah called the vets, not realising at the time what had happened. At the surgery in Taverham, the dog's leg was shaved, revealing the tell-tale puncture wounds where the poison had entered. Taverham Vets posted advice on its Facebook page advising people carry their dog if they suspect it has been attacked to prevent the venom circulating around the body. Penmellyn Vet Group in Cornwall, who had to treat six dogs in a five-day spell after they were bitten last year, urged people to keep pets on leads, specially while walking in sand dunes or grassland. The vets said: 'Keep your eyes to the ground and if you do see any black and white snakes do give them a very wide berth.' Only about a foot to 18 inches long, their venom can even put humans in hospital though they rarely attack unless they feel threatened or they're defending their young. There are two other species of snake found wild in Britain - the grass snake, which can grow to four or five feet, and the much smaller and rarer smooth snake - but they are harmless. Adders love open heaths and grassy banks, and are often found on clifftops and seaside dunes. It is one of Australia's iconic traditions that doubles up as both a hazing punishment or celebratory ritual - made increasingly popular by famed sportsmen like Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo and UFC fighter Tai Tuivasa. But the shoey - the practice of pouring alcohol into a sweaty shoe then sculling it - has come under attack as critics - including prominent Australian musicians - call for it to be banned after an American rapper was left 'objectified' by punters at a popular festival. Tyler, The Creator, was performing at Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay last month when his show was repeatedly disrupted by members of the crowd chanting 'Shoey'. He was not the only musician who was subjected to the cry - which made a regular appearance during many acts. Tyler was again acquainted with the unusual request to drink from his shoe when his Call Me If You Get Lost tour visited Sydney's Qudos Bank Arena last weekend. There are calls for the 'shoey' chants to be banned from live music festivals. Pictured: Australian artist G Flip's father thrills the crowd by drinking out of his shoe at the 2022 Splendour in the Grass Tyler, the Creator (pictured) was harassed by Aussie fans to drink out of his shoe at a series of his live gigs in Australia After the irritated star declared 'no, I don't give into peer pressure', many revellers started shouting 'boo'. 'Y'all can do that [chant] all you want, I'm not going to do it,' he said. 'I don't give into peer pressure.' As the boos rang out, the rapper compromised, offering to spit on his leg instead - leading the crowd to erupt in a rapturous cheer. Taken aback by their joyous response, Tyler said: 'Y'all are f***ing weird.' But while some have found delight in trying to convince artists to carry out the stunt between sets, others have been left 'embarrassed' to be Australian. Music blog Purple Sneakers this week shared one of its articles on Instagram calling for Shoeys to be barred from live gigs. The post was quickly flooded with support - including from a series of Australian artists like Eilish Gilligan, Gordi, and Slowly Slowly. 'It's soooo boring and embarrassing every time Australian crowds do this,' one social media user wrote. Many artists were asked to partake in the Aussie tradition at Splendour in the Grass last month. Pictured: Festival-goers at the Byron Bay festival on July 23 'They even do it to artists who are sober and whose music explores themes of addiction and sobriety!? Why the f*** are you at the show if your only interest is seeing someone swig booze from a boot?' Another said: 'It's also just stupid to think that an international artist even knows what a shoey is! It's a footy thing... Keep it in that realm or shout it to Aussie artists. People who more fully understand bogan culture.' Gordi wrote 'Bloody Amen', while Eilish Giligan commented a raised hands emoji. 'I literally can't even go to a festival these days because of the younger generation's misunderstanding of how to behave... It's totally demoralising and not okay,' another person said. Canberra music store Songland Records said they were glad Purple Sneakers had drawn attention to how embarrassing the custom is for Australians. Pictured: women cheer in excitement as they watch musicians at the Byron Bay festival last month 'It [the shoey] really needs to be forgotten about as it's an ugly blight on our live scene,' the business wrote on Facebook. 'It's off putting to (nearly all) our Australian performers, and can only make our international performers shake their heads and mark down our report cards. 'The ONLY time we should be calling out Shooey in Australia is when we see [musician] John Schumann on stage....or if you see him riding around the streets of Adelaide.' However, while some artists have been less than impressed by rowdy Aussie crowd's requests - others have taken it in their stride. During Melbourne musician G Flip's performance at the 2022 Splendour in the Grass, her father thrilled the audience by walking onto the stage and doing a shoey. In 2017, UK musician Stormzy wowed the crowd after sculling champagne from his trainers in Sydney's Enmore Theatre to celebrate his 24th birthday. He was slammed for bringing food that could have foot-and-mouth disease A traveller has been caught trying to bring in McMuffins from Bali An Australian traveller has been slapped with a hefty fine for not declaring 'two egg and beef sausage McMuffins from McDonald's after bringing them back into the country from Bali. With the Australian government cracking down on foot-and-mouth-disease, the traveller, upon arriving from Bali to Australia, didn't declare the McMuffins and was fined $2,664. Biosecurity detector dog Zinta managed to sniff out the contraband at Darwin Airport. A traveller has bought what's been coined as the most expensive McDonald's meal ever after they were fined thousands of dollars for trying to bring two McMuffins from Bali into Australia Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Minister Murray Watt slammed the traveller for bringing in food that could have the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease. 'This will be the most expensive Maccas meal this passenger ever has, this fine is twice the cost of an airfare to Bali, but I have no sympathy for people who choose to disobey Australia's strict biosecurity measures, and recent detections show you will be caught,' Murray Watt said. 'Australia is FMD-free, and we want it to stay that way,' he added. Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Minister Murray Watt slammed the traveller for bringing in food that could have the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease What is foot and mouth disease? It is a highly infectious and contagious 'zoonotic' disease that infects cattle, sheep, pigs, goat and deer with blisters, they also drool and limp The meat of infected animals is not safe to eat Exports from any country with infection are banned Milk production stops as humans can catch the disease from drinking milk Healthy animals must be killed and burned inside a quarantine zone The disease was detected in Indonesia in May 2022 and has spread to Bali People can spread the disease from contact with animals including on shoes, thongs and luggage The estimated threat to the Australian economy is $80billion Over six million cattle had to be destroyed during an outbreak in the UK in 2001 Advertisement In recent weeks biosecurity has ramped up at airports across Australian as the the threat of foot-and-mouth disease grows. Indonesia has been dealing with the spread of the disease for months with the virus also recently detected in Bali, a holiday hotspot for Australian travellers. The farming industry has warned if foot-and-mouth was transported from irresponsible travellers into Australia it could cost the cattle industry $80 billion in the next decade as the country would lose its FMD-free title. Mr Watt previously said an immediate three-day standstill on livestock movements would be implemented if the disease entered Australia. 'The reason this would be such a devastating blow is that the rest of the world would treat Australia as having foot and mouth disease, which would pretty much shut down our livestock export industry overnight,' he told the ABC. 'But there is a comprehensive plan that's been developed over a number of years between federal and state governments about how we manage outbreaks (including) movement controls.' 'I feel very confident that Australia's world-leading biosecurity system stands us in very good stead to resist this outbreak arriving.' An outbreak could cost the economy up to $80billion and affect most Australians by raising the prices of everything from a morning coffee to a takeaway burger and the weekly grocery shop. Former NSW Trade Minister Stuart Ayres' swift fall from grace has been compounded by a $300,000 income drop for him and his partner. Mr Ayres resigned on Wednesday in the wake of the John Barilaro 'dream job' saga. A draft review into the Barilaro job scandal - in which a senior public servant was promised the $500k posting in New York only for it to be then handed to former Deputy Premier Barilaro - found Mr Ayres may have breached the ministerial code of conduct over the matter. Mr Ayres and Liberal senator Marise Payne were for many years known as the leading NSW political power couple, with a combined salary of almost $700,000 to match. Political power couple Stuart Ayres (left) and his partner Marise Payne are pictured in 2016 But when the Liberal-National Coalition lost power in May, Ms Payne lost her job as Foreign Minister and her income fell overnight from $364,410 to $217,060. If that sharp fall caused the tightening of belts in the Payne-Ayres household, it was nothing compared to this week, when Mr Ayres moved from the ministry to the backbench and had his salary sliced from $333,072 to $172,576. The household's income has now fallen from $697,482 to $389,636 in just three months. That overall yearly loss of $307,846 per year works out to a combined drop of $5,920 per week for Ms Payne, 58, and Mr Ayres, 41, who have been together since 2007. But they are still on a combined $7,500 a week before tax. By comparison, the average Australian disposable household income for the last financial year was $1,124 per week. The Payne-Ayres household's disposable income could take another serious hit seven months from now, though. While Ms Payne is showing no sign of wanting to leave parliament - despite Peter Dutton excluding her from his shadow cabinet - Mr Ayres faces a stiff electoral test in the NSW state election in March. Marise Payne (left) who was then the Australian Foreign Minister, is pictured with her partner, the then NSW Minister for Jobs Stuart Ayres at Royal Randwick Racecourse in Sydney, on April 6, 2019 He holds his seat of Penrith by a 1.3 per cent margin, making it very vulnerable to Labor if it can capitalise on a horror few months for the Liberal-National Coalition. Mr Ayres was the second NSW ministerial casualty in just four days. On Sunday Premier Dominic Perrottet sacked NSW Fair Trading Minister Eleni Petinos over bullying allegations in her office. Ms Petinos was accused of calling a staff member 'retarded' and 'stupid', which she strenuously denies. In July, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption also found former minister John Sidoti engaged in 'serious corrupt conduct' over family-owned properties. Stuart Ayres (right) shares a moment with his partner, Liberal senator Marise Payne at Government House, Sydney, on December 9, 2013. The political power couple's combined income has taken a $300,000 hit in recent months, with the Coalition losing power federally and Mr Ayres resigning his NSW ministerial role And Kiama MP Gareth Ward resigned from the ministry and moved to the crossbench due to a police investigation into him. In March, Ward was charged over allegations of sexual abuse against a man and a 17-year-old boy. Mr Perrottet hinted that Mr Ayres had little choice but to resign, saying 'Very simply, I based my decision making on the information that I received'. Mr Ayres said the interim report raised 'a question as to whether I breached the ministerial code of conduct. 'In my view, no such breach has occurred. However, I agree it is important that this matter is investigated appropriately and support the Premier's decision to do so.' A university vice-chancellor has been charged for allegedly touching a 16-year-old girl's face and commenting on the colour of her skin. The University of New England's Brigid Heywood, 65, was charged by NSW police on Monday following an investigation into an alleged assault against the girl that took place in March. The teenager was reportedly not physically harmed. UNE vice chancellor Brigid Heywood (pictured) has been charged by police for allegedly assaulting a 16-year-old girl Police will allege Professor Heywood assaulted the girl at an event at Armidale Services Memorial Club. The charges laid against her include common assault and offensive behaviour. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) said it was shocked to learn about the charges in a statement, with calls being made for professor Heywood to step down. 'Professor Heywood is one of just 39 vice chancellors of Australia's public universities. She holds a position of public trust and national significance,' said NTEU NSW Secretary Dr Damien Cahill. 'Professor Heywood is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Nevertheless, the seriousness of the allegations requires an appropriate response.' Dr Cahill said considering the 'present circumstances' the only appropriate course of action was for her to 'step aside with immediate effect pending the outcome of matters before the courts'. 'If Professor Heywood does not voluntarily step aside then the University must act to stand her down,' he added. In a statement, police told Daily Mail Australia that the alleged assault occurred on Tuesday March 8 and a report was filed on Thursday, March 17. 'Following extensive inquiries, officers attached to New England Police District issued a 65-year-old woman a future court attendance notice for common assault and behave in offensive manner in/near public place/school,' they said. Ms Heywood (pictured) allegedly touched the girl's face and commented on the colour of her skin at an event at Armidale Services Memorial Club in March Professor Heywood has been UNE's vice-chancellor and chief executive since 2019. She will front Armidale Local Court on Monday, September 26. Daily Mail Australia has contacted the university for comment. Referring to incidents in Udaipur and Amravati in connection with Nupur Sharma's remarks and other consequences of the incident, IB officials have cautioned people to be on alert while participating in Independence Day celebrations on August 15. (DC Image) HYDERABAD: Ahead of the Independence Day, officials from Intelligence Bureau (IB) have warned of a possible threat from terror outfits in sensitive areas in the country, including state capitals. Intelligence officials have served circulars to all states, including to Telangana police, asking them to be vigilant while deploying additional forces at sensitive places where there were communal riots in the recent past. Referring to incidents in Udaipur and Amravati in connection with Nupur Sharma's remarks and other consequences of the incident, IB officials have cautioned people to be on alert while participating in celebrations on August 15. While some of the suspects from Hyderabad questioned for their role in the murder case of a tailor in Udaipur, National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials picked up some suspects while raising funds for alleged terror outfit activities from Nizamabad. Intelligence officials have urged Telangana police to take precautionary measures at sensitive areas to prevent untoward incidents. Sources said that the state police would take measures not only for I-Day celebrations but also consider the inputs for a week-long vigilance on suspicious movements in the state. The police commissioner and SPs were instructed to monitor the movements of suspects and increase day and night patrolling in sensitive areas. The district unit officers were also asked to keep a tab on the movements of people, who indulged in offences in such violence-prone areas. Even more rain is on the way for Australia after one of the wettest starts to the year for the east coast on record. The Bureau of Meteorology confirmed on Wednesday that a negative Indian Ocean Dipole event is underway, which increases rain and wind over the country during winter and spring. The wild weather has already set in, with five states in line to be battered by rain and damaging winds from one of the more powerful cold fronts to hit the nation this winter. WA was slammed with the extreme weather event earlier this week before it moved across to South Australia and Victoria. NSW and Tasmania are next in line for the weekend. Houses had their roofs ripped off in Perth while the severe weather cut power to parts of Perth Airport, pushing back check-ins, flights, and leading to the delay of the city's flight schedule, after a high-voltage transmission pole was damaged. The unprecedented rain and record-breaking floods which have ravaged Australia's east coast this year could be here to stay, with new research revealing climate change has loaded our atmosphere with more moisture. Pictured: Sydneysiders brave the rain In WA, destructive winds wreaked havoc with tress knocked down and fences blown over. At one point there were some 35,000 people without power in WA but that number is understood to have dropped to around 10,000 The Bureau of Meteorology confirmed on Wednesday that a negative Indian Ocean Dipole event is underway, which increases rain and wind over the country during winter and spring In NSW, a severe weather warning has been issued for the southeast of the state, with a cold front forecast to bring heavy rain and damaging winds. The Bureau of Meteorology warned of flash flooding in the Illawarra, Southern Tablelands, the Hunter, South Coast, Central Tablelands, North West Slopes and Plains, Central West Slopes and Plains, South West Slopes, Snowy Mountains, and Riverina. 'There were wind gusts up to 128km/h in alpine areas and up to 90km/h in the Melbourne metropolitan area on Wednesday,' bureau meteorologist Dean Narramore said. 'On Thursday, that cold front is going to tap into tropical moisture and that will bring strong rainfall to large parts of NSW and northeastern parts of Victoria Thursday morning and especially Thursday afternoon.' 'That will continue into Thursday evening before easing, while on Friday there will be lighter rainfall in southern Queensland as it moves north.' 'The rainfall could lead to minor to moderate flooding with isolated falls up to 150mm in some areas'. The Snowy Mountains and the south western slopes could cop six-hourly rainfall totals between 45 and 60mm on Thursday, with localised falls up to 100mm possible. Meanwhile, the Thredbo snowfield has shut down operation of its ski lifts due to the storm threat. 'The safety of our team and guests is paramount,' Thredbo said in a statement. 'Given the extreme weather forecast for heavy rain and gale force winds, we have made the decision to not operate any lifts today.' The Bureau of Meteorology said Thredbo Top Station was already clocking wind gusts exceeding 90km/h about 11.30pm on Wednesday as thunderstorms develop across the region. Thredbo is expected to get between 120mm to 200mm of rain on Thursday as wild weather lashes the region. Wind gusts could peak around 90km/h over the ranges to the west of the ACT, as well as the eastern Great Dividing Range from Bombala to south of Crookwell, extending north to the Blue Mountains. The cold front is sweeping up from the Southern Ocean and moving east over the lower half of Australia (pictured) Emergency crews across the state responded to more than 300 call-outs on Tuesday as several homes in Port Kendi and in Joondalup north of Perth suffered extensive damage 'Saturated soils in the Central Tablelands and Illawarra bring an increased risk of gusty winds toppling trees and powerlines,' the BOM said. A flood watch is current for areas including Braidwood, Goulburn, Bombala, Tumbarumba, Tumut, Khancoban and Thredbo Top Station. NSW SES superintendent Barry Griffiths said volunteers in Wagga Wagga were preparing for riverine flooding of the Murrumbidgee River around Tumut and Gundagai. 'We have mobilised two high clearance vehicles, a fixed wing and been engaged with the local government agencies in those affected areas since Monday,' he said on the Nine Network on Thursday. There are a number of strong wind warnings for northern parts of Tasmania, as well a several minor flood warnings for the state. Thousands of Victorian households and businesses were without power yesterday after winds took out power lines. AusNet Services reported the most unplanned outages on Wednesday morning, with more than 15,000 as of about 9am. The outages were significant east of Melbourne and in the state's far southeast. By about 11am, the number of properties without power had dwindled only slightly to nearly 12,900. Victoria's State Emergency Service fielded 254 calls for help in the 12 hours to 8.20am on Wednesday, with 214 for fallen trees. The Bureau of Meteorology warns another cold front would approach the state late on Wednesday evening, with further damaging winds expected in the southwest. Victorian State Emergency Service chief operations officer Tim Wiebusch advised people to prepare. 'Ensure you listen to the advice of emergency services, and secure loose items in and around your home, park your vehicle undercover, away from trees and remain indoors until the severe weather has passed,' Mr Wiebusch said. 'As we are expecting heavy rain in parts of Victoria, it's important you never drive through floodwater. Sydney's total rainfall smashed a 132-year-old record last month reaching 1500mm faster than ever seen before. Pictured: Rescue volunteers patrol floodwaters in Windsor near Sydney In Queensland, Brisbane will get some of the rain and wind by the weekend but the north of the state will avoid most of the rain. While the cold front causing the damage this week is not directly related to the negative Indian Ocean Dipole, the weather event which causes wind to blow from the east over the country is helping push the cold front further along. The negative IOD could also increase the chance of another La Nina event being declared. Last summer's La Nina was only declared over in June, the IOD increases the chances of another La Nina developing - which would be the third summer in a row for Australia. A good Samaritan has pocketed $5,000 after reuniting a beloved French bulldog with his concerned owners after he went missing for 24 hours. On Monday afternoon, Gold Coast couple Conner Malan, 29, and wife Elly, 33, kicked off a frantic search after their two-year-old French bulldog Herbie vanished from their Robina home. The couple, who are agents for Ray White Real Estate, used their large following on social media to spread the word. Gold Coast couple Elly Malan (left), 33, and Conner Malan (right), 29 were reunited with their two-year-old French bulldog after he went missing from their Robina home on Monday afternoon The couple used their large social media following to try and spread the word throughout the community about Herbie (pictured) The couple's friends, family and community banded together and, after a full day of searching, Herbie was found by a Robina resident on Tuesday afternoon, not far from his home. Herbert Schulz had noticed the pup running down his street and quickly reached out to Conner and Elly. 'What are the odds that his name is Herbert, like how's that for an omen that the guy that found our dog is name Herbert,' Conner told 9News. The couple went and paid him a visit to give him the $5,000 reward. Conner told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday: 'We were so elated when we found him.' Robina resident Herbert Schulz (pictured, right) found Herbie walking in his front yard and quickly got in contact with Conner and Elly (left). They gave Herbert the $5,000 reward for finding their dog 'The whole experience was pretty traumatic given all the French bulldogs that have recently been stolen in the area...the whole situation felt super fishy.' Conner said they offered the reward early in the hopes of finding Herbie quickly. 'Herb had a collar on with a phone number that was never called and he pretty much vanished. Hence our serious concern,' he said. 'We added the $5,000 reward early thinking it would turn up the heat on anyone who may be holding him and considering keeping him.' After being reunited with their pet, the couple were excited to take him home. 'We were just drained after a super intense and emotional 24 hours...we didn't sleep or eat,' he said. 'Us and Herb all went home ate and passed out.' The PM defended the decision to scrap it, claiming it will empower communities The card quarantines payments so money can't be used for alcohol or gambling The 2GB host said 'kids are going to go hungry' if the card is scrapped Ben Fordham has slammed the govt's decision to scrap the cashless welfare card The scrapping of the controversial cashless welfare debit card is one step closer, but many are up in arms calling the move 'terrible'. The card, which was introduced into certain communities by the Coalition government in 2016 and prevented up to 80 per cent of welfare money from being spent on alcohol and gambling, has seen legislation to scrap it passed in the Lower House and will now go to the Senate. 2GB radio breakfast host Ben Fordham blasted the federal government's move to scrap the cashless welfare card on Wednesday, saying 'kids are going to go hungry' and it is all because the government listened to the wrong people. Ben Fordham (pictured) has slammed the government's decision to get rid of the cashless welfare card. The 2GB host said 'kids are going to go hungry' if the card is scrapped 'This one is a shocker. Once it is gone all together more kids are going to go hungry thats the bottom line,' he said. 'Actions have consequences and the consequences of this action are horrendous. 'More money will be spent on alcohol, more money will be spent on drugs, more money will be spent on cigarettes and more money will be spent on gambling.' The 2GB host said more importantly it is the kids who will suffer from the government's move. 'Kids will go hungry. They will miss out on fruit and vegetables and on breakfast cereal, and school lunches and warm dinners,' he said. 'Because some people just cannot help themselves. They are so unwell, so sick with addiction issues they have no control. Thats why we brought in the cashless welfare card. 'It was introduced to help people, to help people spend 80 per cent on essential items, to help people look after their children and give them things they need. 'The card is about to vanish and it is all because the prime minister isnt prepared to follow through with a bit of tough love.' The card, which was introduced into certain communities by the Coalition government in 2016 and prevented up to 80 per cent of welfare money from being spent on alcohol and gambling, has seen legislation to scrap it passed in the Lower House and will now go to the Senates The cashless debit card scheme has been controversial since being introduced as critics say it unfairly targets First Nations communities and stigmatises users. The Labor government has been highly critical of the scheme, with Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth saying it has been ineffective. 'The former Coalition government imposed the cashless debit card as a magic fix-all to complex and social problems experienced in some of our most vulnerable populations,' she said. Ben Fordham said the government had listened to the wrong people, namely Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe who just 'thinks that everything is racist'. 'Lidia Thorpe said the card is racist. Well Lidia Thorpe thinks that everything is racist,' he said. 'She thinks that the police are racist, she thinks the defence force is racist, she thinks parliament house is racist, she thinks Australia is racist, she thinks the Australian anthem is racist, she thinks the flag is racist. 'Racism, racism, racism, Lydia Thorpe always plays the race card and she did with this.' If the card is to be abolished, anyone who wants to remain involved voluntarily will be transferred to the BasicsCard. The BasicsCard, was introduced in 2007 under the Northern Territory Intervention policy. It was a voluntary program and quarantines 50 per cent of an individual's income, to similarly make sure they spend money on essentials. Much like the welfare debit card it aims to minimise harm in regional and rural communities stemming from addiction, such as gambling and alcohol. Last week the Prime Minister defended his government's decision to ditch the card, saying it will empower communities where it had been rolled out. Despite criticism from the opposition, Mr Albanese said there was a mandate for the scheme's removal. 'We had a welfare system that was paying a private company to engage in activity with for-profit motive, which was resulting in... issues being imposed on communities,' he told parliament. He added that it was important for people to have control over their money. 'One of things we have done is to make sure we're about empowering communities, not taking power away from them.' A new Greens MP has laughed after being scolded by an opposition member for not wearing a tie while asking a question in the House of Representatives. Max Chandler-Mather - the 30-year-old MP for Griffith in Brisbane - only spoke for three seconds at Wednesday's Question Time before he was interrupted by an angry Nationals MP. Pat Conaghan, the member for Cowper in regional NSW, raised a point of order, saying: 'Mr Speaker, I draw your attention to the state of undress of the member.' Poll Should MPs wear ties in Parliament? Yes No Don't care Should MPs wear ties in Parliament? Yes 623 votes No 136 votes Don't care 236 votes Now share your opinion Speaker Milton Dick dismissed Mr Conaghan's interjection and allowed Mr Chandler-Mather to continue with his question on public housing, saying: 'That is not a point of order. Resume your seat.' There is no set dress code for Parliament, with the rule book saying 'ultimate discretion rests with the Speaker'. After the incident, Mr Conaghan released a statement blasting Mr Chandler-Mather's attire. 'This is not a barbecue. This is Question Time in the Australian Parliament. What next, board shorts and thongs? Maybe a onesie in winter,' he said. 'Some may say that it's a minor matter to not comply with the dress standard but what it says to many, including me, is that there is little respect for the tradition and history of our parliament.' Pat Conaghan (pictured), MP for Cowper in regional NSW, raised a point of order, saying: 'Mr Speaker, I draw your attention to the state of undress of the member' Mr Chandler-Mather defended his decision, telling Nine newspapers: 'It's completely bizarre that I need to dress up like a businessman when this place is supposed to represent all Australians. 'I stood up to talk about the housing crisis and the Libs wanted to talk about my tie.' Greens leader Adam Bandt blasted the Coalition for caring about ties. 'A Nationals MP who hasn't been wearing a mask all week just got angry that Max Chandler-Mather wasn't wearing a tie,' he wrote on Twitter. '@MChandlerMather was asking the PM a question about public housing. Ties. That's what the Coalition is angry about.' The incident came days after his Greens colleague Lidia Thorpe strode onto the floor of the Senate to take her oath with her fist raised, and then proceeded to call the Queen a coloniser and then mockingly read out the pledge. Earlier on Wednesday the Greens leader Adam Bandt revealed his party will support Labor's climate change bill, meaning it will almost certainly pass parliament. The government's bill enshrines an emissions reduction target of 43 per cent by 2030 and net zero by 2050, and will require the minister of the day to report annually to parliament on the nation's progress. Negotiations between Mr Bandt and Mr Bowen had been ongoing after the Greens voiced concerns about the bill. The Greens wanted faster action on climate change, calling for a 2030 emissions reduction target of 75 per cent during the election campaign. Greens leader Adam Bandt is seen leaving Kensington Primary school with his partner after voting on Federal Election day Labor needs the support of all 12 Greens senators plus one crossbencher in order for the bill to pass the upper house. Independent David Pocock, former Wallabies captain, has indicated he will support the bill, meaning it will now almost certainly pass the senate. Mr Albanese said he was 'very confident' the bill would pass, and urged the Coalition to also back it. 'This is an opportunity for the whole of the parliament to be on the right side of history,' he said. Advertisement Liz Truss has backed Nancy Pelosi in a row over her visit to Taiwan, as officials in Taipei brace for China blockade ahead of four days of military manoeuvres in the region. Taiwan scrambled a squadron of fighter jets last night to ward off a Chinese incursion as Beijing began its threatened intimidation of the island earlier than anticipated. It comes as House Speaker Pelosi departed the country following a three-day visit, as she heads to meet her South Korean counterpart, National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo and other ruling party members today. Her visit was seen by China as an affront because it regards Taiwan, an island of more than 23million people, as a breakaway nation and wants to reunify it with the mainland, by force if necessary. Last night, Foreign Secretary and leadership hopeful Ms Truss said Pelosi, 82, was well within her rights as speaker of congress to visit the island's capital Taipei a visit which sparked an international incident. Speaking at the Tory hustings in Cardiff, Ms Truss added that the real issue was the retaliatory action from China and she demanded de-escalation by Beijing. 'The issue here is the language and the escalatory language that we have heard from China and I think that is irresponsible and I urge them to de-escalate,' she said. Last month, a source in Team Truss said: Liz has almost single-handedly dragged the Government into a tougher position on China.' It came as Rishi Sunak accused his rival of allowing Beijing to extend its propaganda machine into Britains universities through its Confucius Institutes, which he pledged to shut down and declared Beijing to be the biggest long-term threat to Britain. Today Taipei is bracing itself for a blockade by China, with warships and planes set to surround Taiwan at the start of four days of aggressive military drills that will come within ten miles of its coast and inside its territorial waters. The six exercises will encircle the island, cutting it off by air and sea. They will heighten fears that China is practising for a possible future invasion, a scenario that has already been brought into focus by the war in Ukraine. Taiwans defence ministry said it would resolutely defend national sovereignty, but warned commercial planes and ships to avoid the area as the drills, set to begin at noon today local time, would involve long-range live firing and missile launches. Beijing yesterday sent 27 of its aircraft, including 16 Russian-made Su-30 fighters, into Taipeis air defence zone in an early act of menace, with 22 jets crossing the Taiwan Strait separating the two countries. Foreign Secretary and leadership hopeful Ms Truss said Pelosi, 82, was well within her rights as speaker of congress to visit the island's capital Taipei a visit which sparked an international incident. Pictured at the Cardiff hustings China considers Pelosi's visit an affront because it regards Taiwan, an island of more than 23million people, as a breakaway nation and wants to reunify it with the mainland, by force if necessary China has announced military drills that will take place in these locations around Taiwan between midday Thursday and midday Sunday with the sea and airspace closed - effectively blockading the island. Three of the drills will breach Taiwanese territorial waters, in what Taipei has called a serious breach of international norms. Dozens of Chinese warplanes entered Taiwan's air defence zone today (demonstrated by purple, blue and green arrows on the above map) The drills were announced in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting the island, becoming the most-senior US politician to do so since 1997 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her 5-member congress delegation depart Taipei Songshan Airport to South Korea after Pelosi's visit within her Pacific tour in Taipei, Taiwan on August 3, 2022. The tensions over her visit are following her on her next leg, to South Korea China warns of 'criminal punishment' over Pelosi's 'brazen' Taiwan visit China has reacted with fury to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial trip to Taiwan that has inflamed tensions between the two superpowers. China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, branded the trip a 'complete farce' and repeated the much-used phrase by Chinese diplomacy that 'those who play with fire will perish by it.' Last week Chinese premier Xi Jinping had used the same expression in a phone call to US President Joe Biden. Early on Wednesday, the Chinese foreign ministry slammed Pelosi for 'brazenly' going ahead with the trip that was still unconfirmed as late as Monday, claiming it 'maliciously infringes on China's sovereignty and blatantly engages in political provocations.' 'It proves once again that some US politicians have become 'troublemakers' of China-US relations,' the statement said. China's Taiwan Affairs Office weighed in, threatening 'criminal punishment measures' targeted at 'die hard' Taiwanese supporters of independence. And late Tuesday night, after Pelosi's arrival, the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister summoned the US Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, to protest the visit. Advertisement Taipei's generals have defied the threats, saying yesterday that they are not looking for a fight with China but 'won't shy away from one' either. 'We are resolved to uphold our sovereignty, liberty and democracy' they said in a statement posted alongside a video of fighter jets, submarines, attack helicopters and warships on manoeuvres. 'We fear no threat or challenges. We are not eager for a fight, nor will we shy away from one. We have the capacity and the will to uphold our valued liberty and democracy, and maintain our region's stability,' the generals added. The Chinese war games are a response to the controversial whistle-stop visit to Taipei by Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives, the most prominent US politician on Taiwanese soil in 25 years. To Beijings fury, she met with the president and human rights leaders yesterday after landing in Taipei on Tuesday night. China considers the visit an affront because it regards Taiwan, an island of more than 23million people, as a breakaway nation and wants to reunify it with the mainland, by force if necessary. Xi Jinping has reacted furiously to Pelosi's visit, which comes weeks before he is due to assume an historic third term as China's leader at the Party Congress. Matthew Henderson, associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, told MailOnline: 'Xi has made so-called 're-unification' with Taiwan his chosen cause and hoped-for legacy as China's greatest leader since Mao. 'It would be as well to assume that in the run-up to the Party Congress, when he intends to secure permanent autocracy, Xi will be willing to take significantly greater risks than [Chinese governments of the past.]' While the risk of immediate conflict around Taiwan is low, Mr Henderson added that 'it would be an error to assume that the Xi regime is able to hold back from disastrous adventurism when it has painted itself into such a corner over the right to 'reunite' with Taiwan, whose people want nothing of the kind and which the liberal world must not allow.' Nancy Pelosi speaks alongside Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei on Wednesday, during which she said America's commitment to preserving democracy on the island is 'ironclad' Pelosi departs Taiwan on Wednesday following her flying visit, and will now visit fellow allies Japan and South Korea Pelosi waves to crowds at Taiwan's main airport as she departs the country Wednesday, following a meeting with the island's president Tsai Ing-wen Beijing says the drills are being conducted in response to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, which is the first by a House Speaker since Newt Gingrich travelled there in 1997 A Chinese Type 052C destroyer is pictured taking part in military drills around Taiwan today, that will continue until Sunday and effectively blockade the island Pelosi stokes China's fury as she slams country for 'standing in the way of Taiwan' Nancy Pelosi has accused China of 'standing in the way' of Taiwan's participation in international affairs and cautioned that America's commitment to preserving democracy 'remains ironclad'. Pelosi also met with Taiwan's female president Tsai Ing-wen - telling her that the controversial visit shows the US 'will not abandon its commitment' to the island. The Democrat specifically called out China, whose leaders warned the trip was pushing Taiwan into a 'disastrous abyss,' by telling reporters: 'They didn't say anything when the men came.' Her remark referred to the surprise one-day visit made by bipartisan congressional delegation in April 2021. The group included Senators Lindsey Graham, Bob Menendez, Richard Burr, Ben Sasse and Rob Portman, as well as Rep. Ronny Jackson. Pelosi criticized Beijing for preventing Taiwan from 'participating and going to certain meetings' but noted the government would 'not stand in the way of people coming to Taiwan.' China furiously condemned the visit as Pelosi hailed self-ruled Taiwan as 'one of the freest societies in the world' in her speech to the parliament in Taipei. Advertisement He continued: 'Xi is already using the whole gamut of coercive state powers- including hostile military activity, to try to erode Taiwanese resolve and that of Taiwan's supporters. 'Xi could bring down the Taiwanese government by blockading the island which depends heavily on imported food and other staples. But confidence and resilience is growing, and Xi will not welcome this. 'We should not rule out the possibility of sudden, devastating missile attacks on the central government that would bring a rapid collapse of resistance. Then the rest of the world could protest and sanction to no avail. 'Xi could, if he felt compelled to do so by threats to his personal authority, authorise such an assault at very little notice indeed. He may be counting in this as an element in his current campaign of bluff and coercive pressures on a global front. 'There is still time for the concerted energies of the free world to make it clear to Xi that his agenda to annexe Taiwan and impose unaccountable totalitarian rule on 23 million citizens of a vibrant democracy will never be allowed to succeed.' During a press conference yesterday, Mrs Pelosi said: Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy. Americas determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and around the world remains ironclad. In a rebuke to Beijing, the speaker, a longtime China critic who defied US President Joe Biden to make the trip, added that China has stood in the way of Taiwan. She even suggested her sex could be the reason why there was such an angry reaction, saying: They didnt say anything when the men came, in reference to previous US delegations. In a statement released after the Democrat, 82, had left for South Korea to continue a tour of Asia, she said that China cannot prevent world leaders or anyone from travelling to Taiwan to pay respect to its flourishing democracy. Foreign ministers from the G7 group of nations said in a joint statement: There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. A Xian H-6 Chinese bomber jet takes part in military drills in the skies near Taiwan yesterday, as Beijing puts on an unprecedented show of force after Nancy Pelosi visited the island The view from the deck of a Chinese missile destroyer taking part in military drills in the Taiwan Strait yesterday, as Beijing menaces its democratic neighbour Chinese anti-aircraft forces in its Eastern Theatre - which covers the Taiwan Strait - take part in live-fire exercises last night in an effort to intimidate Taipei and the US Anti-aircraft fire streaks into the skies over Fujian, the Chinese province closest to Taiwan, last night in a show-of-strength intended to intimidate America and the democratic government in Taipei A Chinese anti-aircraft crew open fire with a mobile gun during live-fire drills that began on Tuesday and will last until Thursday, when even larger sea and air drills begin A Chinese anti-aircraft battery lines up for live-fire drills taking place in Fujian province - the closest region to Taiwan - as Beijing rattles its sabres over Pelosi's visit to the island Putin 'will help China if it goes to war over Taiwan', Russian senator says A leading Russian senator has vowed that Vladimir Putin will come to China's aid if it goes to war over Taiwan. But Vladimir Dzhabarov also pleaded for more support from Beijing for the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. 'I see no grounds to refuse to help China,' said the politician who is first deputy chairman of the international committee in Russia's Federation Council, the upper house of parliament. 'But I would like to see a two-way movement with China. 'It means that we should have some benefits from this cooperation.' There is concern in Moscow that Putin's wooing of China has failed to produce better results in support for his war in Ukraine. Close Putin ally Dzhabarov made clear that Russia will ready back China in any conflict over disputed island Taiwan, revelling in an anti-Western alliance. 'I am convinced that in this case China hopes for a certain assistance from Russia,' he said. This was the case 'because it will be difficult for China to confront the United States without Russia's support.' Advertisement They added that Chinas escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilising the region. Among those calling for calm was Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. She added of Mrs Pelosis visit: Its perfectly reasonable what is taking place and I urge China to de-escalate. The Chinese exercises will lead to a standoff not seen since the mid-1990s, when they were much further away from Taiwan. In 1996, the US navy dispatched two aircraft carriers close to the strait to effectively end the crisis. Such a move would be more challenging now given Chinas military growth, including vastly more capable missiles. Beijing sought to further punish Taiwan yesterday by curbing imports of fruit and fish and halting exports of sand, though it avoided disrupting the flow of microchips, which would send shockwaves through the global economy. Pelosi met with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei yesterday, where she pledged continued US support for the island's democracy. 'Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy' she said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen. 'America's determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad.' Ms Ing-wen added that the island of 23 million would not be cowed. 'Facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down. We will... continue to hold the line of defence for democracy,' Tsai said at an event with Pelosi in Taipei. She also thanked the 82-year-old US lawmaker for 'taking concrete actions to show your staunch support for Taiwan at this critical moment'. Pelosi has now departed Taiwan, and will head to US allies Japan and South Korea next. China tries to keep Taiwan isolated on the world stage and opposes countries having official exchanges with Taipei. Chinese troops fire shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft launchers as part of military drills announced by Beijing on Monday Chinese troops carry ammunition containers to their positions for live-fire exercises taking place on the mainland, in areas close to the self-governing island of Taiwan Chinese troops fire anti-aircraft missiles during drills aimed at intimidating Taiwan and its US allies during Pelosi's visit to the island, which began on Monday Chinese radar operators take part in live-fire drills by anti-aircraft forces in the eastern province of Fujian on Monday 'Today, our delegation... came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear we will not abandon our commitment to Taiwan,' Pelosi said at the event with Tsai. Earlier, Pelosi said her group had come 'in friendship to Taiwan' and 'in peace to the region'. Taiwan views itself as an independent nation separate from mainland China, but Beijing views it as a breakaway province that it has vowed to 'reunify'. The island is home to the remnants of the Nationalist Party which fought against, and lost, a war to China's Communist Party after the Second World War. America officially recognised the Communists as legitimate rulers of China in 1979 when they established diplomatic relations with Beijing, which also involved acknowledging that there is only 'one China' and Taiwan is part of it. However, Congress passed a bill shortly afterwards that compels the US to supply arms to Taiwan to allow it to defend itself in the event it is attacked. An uneasy truce has held around the island ever since, but tensions have been ramping up since President Xi Jinping said in 2019 that he reserves the right to 'reunify' Taiwan by force, if it is deemed necessary. Pelosi's visit has prompted the Chinese to raise those tensions even further with military drills, going far beyond the last Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996. A Chinese warship takes part in military exercises around the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday, the second in six days of drills that will effectively blockade the self-governing island in the most-serious threat to its independence in decades Chinese jets from its Eastern Theatre, which borders Taiwan, are pictured taking off in early-morning drills on Wednesday as Beijing attempts to intimidate its democratic neighbour Chinese sailors rush to battle stations on board a warship as drills take place in and around the Taiwan Strait as Beijing ramps up tensions over Nancy Pelosi's visit Dawn breaks over the Taiwan Strait as seen from the side of a Chinese military plane circling above the island as massive exercises take place in a fresh threat to the self-governing territory Chilling footage shared on Chinese social network Weibo appears to show amphibious tanks on the coast of Fujian along the Taiwan Strait On that occasion, China also held military drills around the strait - but much further from the island than its exercises planned for this week. None of the drills in '96 crossed Taiwan's territorial waters, and none took place on the eastern side of the island. This time, three of the planned zones intrude into Taiwan's waters and three are positioned to the island's east - effectively cutting it off from the Pacific. Taiwan officials said the live fire drills violate United Nations rules, invade Taiwan's territorial space and are a direct challenge to free air and sea navigation. China's Eastern Theatre Command said a multi-force exercise involving the Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, Strategic Support Force and Joint Logistics Support Force, took place in the air and sea to the north, southwest and southeast of Taiwan on Wednesday. Chinese military practiced operations including seal and control, assault at sea and strike on land. Analysts spoken to by Reuters say it remains unclear if China will fire cruise or ballistic missiles directly over the island, or attempt a blockade for the first time. Song Zhongping, a Hong Kong-based military commentator, said it appeared the People's Liberation Army wanted to practise blockading the island if it had to in a later war. 'The goal of these exercises, to put it bluntly, is to prepare for the military fight with Taiwan.' Further footage shows military equipment on the move in the Chinese city of Xiamen Pro-China demonstrators slam Pelosi during a march in Hong Kong, another autonomous territory where Beijing has begun exerting control thanks to a sweeping anti-democratic security law put in place in 2020 A police officer watches as pro-China demonstrators gather in Hong Kong to oppose Pelosi's visit to Taiwan Unusually, the drills were announced with a locator map circulated by the official Xinhua news agency - a factor that for some analysts and scholars shows the need to play to both domestic and foreign audiences. 'We can see China's ambition: to make the Taiwan Strait non-international waters, as well as making the entire area west of the first island chain in the western pacific its sphere of influence,' said a Taiwanese official familiar with its security planning. If China got what it wanted, the official said, the impact would 'be fatal for the safety and stability of regional countries, as well as for the regional economy.' Singapore-based security scholar Collin Koh said the Pelosi visit had trapped China between having to show a resolute and sweeping response while avoiding a full-blown conflict. 'Even if they want to avoid that outcome, there are still significant possibilities for an accidental escalation,' said Koh, of the of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. The administration of President Joe Biden said in the run-up to the visit that US policy towards Taiwan remained unchanged. This means support for its government while diplomatically recognising Beijing over Taipei, and opposing a formal independence declaration by Taiwan or a forceful takeover by China. While the White House is understood to be opposed to Pelosi's Taiwan stop, its National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said she was entitled to go where she pleased. After Pelosi touched down Tuesday night in a military aircraft following days of feverish speculation about her plans, Beijing summoned US Ambassador Nicholas Burns. The Chinese military declared it was on 'high alert' and would 'launch a series of targeted military actions in response' to the visit. The drills will include 'long-range live ammunition shooting' in the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from mainland China and straddles vital shipping lanes. The zone of Chinese exercises will be within 20 kilometres (12 miles) of Taiwan's shoreline at some points, according to coordinates released by the Chinese military. 'Some of the areas of China's drills breach into... (Taiwan's) territorial waters,' defence ministry spokesman Sun Li-fang said at a press conference Wednesday. 'This is an irrational move to challenge the international order.' Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, which sets the government's China policies, accused Beijing of 'vicious intimidation' that would 'seriously impact the peace and prosperity of the entire East Asia'. It added that democratic countries should 'unite and take a solemn stand to punish and deter' Beijing. Japan, a key US ally in the region, said Wednesday it had expressed concern to China over the exercises, while South Korea called for dialogue to maintain regional peace and stability. Both countries are on Pelosi's Asia itinerary, following stops in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. Maps of the drills produced by China show they go far beyond the missile firings in the straits in 1996 when Beijing protested the island's first direct presidential election in what became known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. Significantly, in the north, east and south, the proposed exercise areas bisect Taiwan's claimed 12 nautical miles of territorial waters - something Taiwanese officials say challenges the international order and amount to a blockade of its sea and air space. In 1996, the United States navy dispatched two aircraft carriers close to the straits to effectively end the crisis - a move many analysts consider more challenging now given China's military growth, including a vastly more capable missile inventory. A U.S. Navy official confirmed to Reuters on Tuesday that the 7th Fleet had deployed the USS Ronald Reagan carrier and four other warships, including a guided missile cruiser, in the Philippine Sea east of Taiwan as part of a 'routine deployment'. The Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii did not immediately respond to Reuters' questions on the Chinese drills on Wednesday. Koh said advanced U.S. and Taiwanese reconnaissance aircraft would see the drills as an opportunity to probe Chinese military systems and communications, potentially adding to risks if Chinese planes responded. While war with Taiwan would be a global catastrophe greater than the Ukraine crisis, China has the most to risk as untold millions in the country could face unemployment, poverty and worse By Charles Parton For The Daily Mail The eruption of war between China and Taiwan would be a global catastrophe on a scale far greater than the Ukraine crisis. Yet again Chinese military jets invaded Taiwanese airspace this week, this time following American politician Nancy Pelosis provocative visit to the sovereign island off the Communist mainland. Beijing staged live-fire exercises close to Taiwan, effectively blocking those regions to traffic. Meanwhile, the secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, warned that the world was just one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation. Charles Parton OBE is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, who spent 22 years as a senior diplomat in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan No one is more aware of the dangers of that miscalculation than the Chinese leadership. President Xi Jinping knows that if he takes a gamble and loses, the repercussions could destroy Chinas economy or might even bring down the Communist Party that has ruled since 1949. We should not doubt the level of Chinese anger at the actions of Mrs Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives and a figure so senior that she is third in line to the Oval Office, after the president and vice president. But neither should we kowtow to their anger. Her high-profile visit is a declaration that the West regards this island north of the Philippines, with its 23.5 million inhabitants, as a sovereign state the last thing that China wishes to admit. We also must not underestimate Beijings international ambitions. President Xi has stated that he wants his nation to be the worlds greatest superpower by 2049 though of course this was dressed up in party-speak about a strong, democratic, civilised, harmonious, and modern socialist country. But all that could be derailed if a military assault on Taiwan fails. And a seaborne invasion is an exceptionally risky business. The sea between the mainland and the island is 100 nautical miles of rough water and unpredictable weather for most of the year. There are only 14 beaches that make feasible landing sites and the topography is much more easy to defend than to attack. In the past, Taiwans defence strategies have been questioned by analysts. It could never match its superpower neighbour for ships, tanks or aircraft. But now it is switching to a porcupine defence, bristling with drones, high-speed boats and missiles of all sizes. These weapons are harder to take out in a pre-emptive strike. Taiwan has also taken strides to safeguard its communication systems. Its possible that the island could hold off an invasion force indefinitely, though at a terrible cost to its own population. Defeat is unthinkable for Beijing. But the economic repercussions could be even more seismic. If China attacks, the West will surely impose onerous sanctions, just as we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine six months ago. The loss of imported Taiwanese semi-conductors, the basis of all computer devices and mobile phones, would devastate Chinas economy on its own. About half the semi-conductors manufactured anywhere in the world and two-thirds of the high-quality ones come from the island. China has flown 27 fighters including six J-11 jets into Taiwan's air defence zone as Beijing continues to threaten Taipei over its ties with the US Without those components, Chinas electronics sector is frozen. And that is the most profitable sector of its exports market. Taiwans trade with Chinas businesses amounts to about 165billion. Much of that consists of components which go into Chinas own exports. Disrupting the Taiwan trade could thus affect ten times the amount of Chinas exports. The net effect of that could be to shrink the entire economy by trillions. We would see a worldwide recession, on a scale not seen in our lifetime. But the epicentre would be China. And with a social security network hopelessly ill-equipped to support its 1.4billion people, if the Chinese economy collapses, untold millions would face unemployment, poverty and worse. Already in the cities, youth unemployment is running at nearly 20 per cent. There is no way of knowing how much worse it is in the rural areas, because those figures are not available. Recent weeks have seen protests and riots. When people are angry in a one-party state, the government takes all the blame. The Communist Party will be held responsible and this is an existential threat to its survival. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, it was the act of a desperate man. President Xi is not desperate. He has much better options and a long-term plan. But China cannot afford to let the Pelosi visit go unchallenged. There will be much sabre-rattling to keep the pressure on Taiwan and deter the Americans from doing anything so flagrantly insulting again and to ensure that other countries, including Britain, do not think of doing so either. Thats bullying on a global scale. There are more ways to fight a war than all-out invasion, and the Chinese are experts at it. Charles Parton OBE is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, who spent 22 years as a senior diplomat in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan A despairing Scottish family is being kicked out of Australia after 10 years in a heartbreaking visa row despite doing nothing wrong. Electrical expert Mark Green, 44, was headhunted for his specialist solar installation skills in 2012 and flown to Australia with his wife Kelly, 45, and daughter Rebecca, 19. He moved to his new home with the promise of their permanent residency being sponsored by the company flying him in. But every time he's been eligible, the employers have folded before the paperwork could be completed - and it's now happened seven times to the devastated family. They will now be thrown out of the country next week, unless the government intervenes to save them. 'I dont want to go home. I dont. I really dont... mother-of-two Kelly sobbed in their empty Adelaide home after they sold off everything ahead of the family's forced exit. Relocating to the UK is set to cost $60,000 - and will force them to leave behind beloved pet dog Maisie because of the prohibitive $35,000 cost of flights and quarantine fees. The Greens have already spent more than $150,000 on immigration lawyers and visa and residency applications but must leave the country before they can apply again. 'We sold it all to come out here and then we started again,' Mr Green told Daily Mail Australia. 'And now we're having to sell it all, to go back to Scotland, to try and apply to come back again, to restart again. For the third time. 'I'm nearly 50. We can't go through this anymore. There's nothing for us back in Scotland now.' He added: 'This is where I live. This is where my heart is. It'll never change. Even if I go back to Scotland, here is where I will class as home.' The family have been on a sponsored work visa since arriving which has meant they need to pay for everything Australians take for granted, on top of paying their taxes. They were denied access to Medicare or free public state schooling for daughter Rebecca, which costs them $8,000 a year - but they say they paid without complaint. Electrical expert Mark Green, 44, was headhunted for his specialist solar installation skills in 2012 and flown out to Australia with his wife Kelly, 45, and daughter Rebecca, 19 'It was the best day of our lives coming here. The best day ever,' said Kelly, 45, originally from Kilbirnie, 40km south-west of Glasgow. They want to stay in Australia permanently but currently just need their bridging visa changed from an E-type to a C-type to allow them to apply to stay without leaving. The family has been undone by firms sponsoring Mark as an employee and starting a three year route to residency, but going bust before the process is complete. 'The company went into liquidation and which means I have to start again, all three years, all over again,' said Mr Green, originally from Prestwick, Ayrshire. 'That's happened seven times to me. Most of them closed because of warranty issues - they don't want to guarantee the warranty of the product. 'It ends up costing them money, so what they do is they shut up shop and they open up under another business name.' Relocating to the UK is set to cost the family $60,000 - and will force them to leave their beloved pet dog Maisie (pictured with mum Kelly, left, and daughter Rebecca) behind because of prohibitive $35,000 flights and quarantine fees The final straw came after one employer told him he'd applied for the Greens' residency and paid their fees - but hadn't, causing them to unwittingly overstay their working visa. 'I was let down by my former employer,' he said. 'I trusted him and he lied to me. 'The government has a responsibility to protect me as a foreign worker who was invited to come to Australia to work and was let down by an Australian company.' Their son Jamie has already flown home to Scotland after the visa conditions meant he was unable to work in Australia for years. The family has been fighting to stay in the country for a year but time is now running out and they've had to sell up ahead of next week's deportation. Mr Green won't even be able to work in his industry when he arrives back in Scotland as his UK electrical qualifications are now out of date after a decade in Australia. The final straw came after one employer told Mark Green he'd applied for their residency and paid their fees - but hadn't, causing them to unwittingly overstay their working visa He has nothing in Scotland and nowhere to live, with his elderly parents unable to cope with the family joining them while they wait for their visa to be approved. 'Everything I hoped for here is gone,' said Mr Green. 'The stress is terrible. Absolutely terrible. It's not fair. Not fair at all. 'Nobody has been in contact with me about trying to sort this out. All they say to me is I have to leave the country. 'My mum and dad are nearly 80 - as much as they would love to see us, they don't want a family staying with them. It could take up to two years. 'I thought I'd have my own company and my own home by now but instead our life is in turmoil.' Their case has now been taken up by Adelaide politician Frank Pangallo, who compared them to the Tamilese Murugappan family from Bilgoela in Queensland, who had their visa conditions changed to let them stay despite arriving by boat. 'They didn't do it legally, unlike the Greens, and they got preferential treatment,' Mr Pangallo, of South Australia's Best Party told Daily Mail Australia. 'Forcing a family to leave a country theyve called home for 10 years simply to return to their country of origin to re-apply to return to Oz seems pointless and ridiculous. 'And this is all happening while governments grapple with changes to the countrys skilled migration program due to massive shortages across the country.' A plea to the previous Liberal immigration minister Alex Hawke was rejected and fresh appeal to the new Labor immigration minister Andrew Giles has fallen on deaf ears. Mr Pangallo added: 'If you want skilled migrants to come into this country, you better give them an undertaking they'll be able to stay here and not be booted out when it suits you. 'It's absolutely disgusting.' A spokesman for Mr Giles insisted the immigration minister never commented on individual cases, despite commenting extensively on the Biloela case. She then told Daily Mail Australia: 'The minister does not comment on the individual circumstances regarding the Green family.' A teenage boy was on a lobstering expedition in the Florida Keys when he suddenly came face-to-face with a shark which bit him in on his lip. Fischer Hricko, 13, was looking for the crustaceans with his father and was going after a particularly big specimen when he suddenly felt a tap on the back of his leg. A nurse shark managed to jump up and bit him in the face. 'He just popped up screaming 'Mom, mom, shark! Get me out of here! Get me out of the water!,'' said Fischer Hricko's mom, Rhiannon, said to FOX 35. 'I saw a big one and I got it in my hand. On the way up, when I had the lobster in my hand, I felt a little tap on the back of my leg, and I looked behind me and the shark was in my face,' Fischer explained. Fischer Hricko, 13, was looking for the crustaceans with his father and was going after a particularly big lobster when he suddenly felt a tap on the back of his leg and a shark bit him The 13-year-old was looking for lobsters together with his parents in the Florida Keys Fischer was bitten by a nurse shark - a species which is normally docile (file photo) 'It was scary, like, I tried getting away, but it was so fast,' he said. Fischer's mom was in charge of the boat, while the teen and his dad were in the water together. 'It was honestly the scariest five minutes of my life. Just hearing that terror in your child's voice it's something that I can't actually get out of my head,' Rhiannon said. 'I guess it was always in the back of my head. That's why I don't jump in!' she said. 'When I'm approaching him, I'm just seeing blood gushing out of his face, and at that point, I'm like, 'What happened?'' dad, Kent, said to News 6. 'It was honestly the scariest five minutes of my life. Just hearing that terror in your child's voice it's something that I can't actually get out of my head,' mom, Rhiannon, said Fischer's mom was in charge of the boat, while the teen and his dad were in the water. 'He was definitely shocked, a little bit of crying but not much. He was being tough. He's going to have a cool story to tell when he goes back to school!' Once Fischer and his father were back on the boat, they rushed back to the dock in order to get him to a hospital. Fischer received 10 stitches in his lip following the bite from a nurse shark, which are normally docile. 'It hurts every so often, but it's fine now,' he said. Fisher says that despite the close encounter, it won't put him off getting back in the ocean. According to site Tracking Sharks , there have been 31 attacks in the U.S. this year as of August 3. Eighteen of those incidents have taken place in Florida. A beach in the Keys is pictured (file) 'I'm ready, but I feel like the first few times I'll be a little scared, but I'll get in the water,' he said. According to the website Tracking Sharks, there have been 31 attacks in the U.S. this year as of August 3. Eighteen of those incidents have taken place in Florida, six in New York, three in South Carolina, and two in California. The recent increase in attacks on New York beaches might be the result of a combination of conservation efforts and climate change, CNN reported last week. 'The country is warmer than it's ever been. And that's going to drive more people to the water than ever before, which just simply increases your probability of somebody getting accidentally bit,' California State University Shark Lab director Christopher Lowe told CNN on Saturday. More than 1,000 miles north along the Atlantic coast, bites have also been frequent, spurring multiple closures and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to issue an order to state agencies to increase shark surveillance. The order followed a series of 'Jaws'-like attacks off Long Island that saw four bitten after several sightings across multiple beach communities. Prior to 2022, there were only 12 recorded unprovoked bites in New York's history, including four from the past decade, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History. 'We are taking action to expand patrols for sharks and protect beachgoers from potentially dangerous situations,' Hochul said while announcing the order at a press conference in New York's Suffolk County earlier this month. 'I encourage all New Yorkers to listen to local authorities and take precautions to help ensure safe and responsible beach trips this summer.' The governor said that heightened safety measures would include the deploying patrol boats, drones, and helicopters along the Sound's South Shore, as well as increased public outreach to residents on the dangers of the marine predators. 'Whether it's land, sea or air,' the governor said, 'we are going to be having more robust patrols on the shorelines.' Since July 3, the New York-area has seen four shark bites at three different beaches on Long Island, as well as another six shark sightings, according to PIX11. Out on the island, about 80 miles from Rockaway, the village of Quogue is asking area swimmers and boaters to be careful after a dead, 7-8 foot shark washed ashore. Earlier this month on Long Island, about 80 miles from Rockaway, a 7-8 foot shark washed on the beach off the small village of Quoge The sighting was reported by a resident of the area and washed out to shore before it could be secured by the authorities, according to Lieutenant Daniel Hartman Shark sightings continue to plague New York-area beaches, with a video captured of one leaping from the water in Queens The video, captured by the Rockaway Times , sees the shark emerging from the Atlantic Ocean briefly to do a little spin before returning to the water The sighting was reported by a resident of the area and washed out to shore before it could be secured by the authorities, according to Lieutenant Daniel Hartman. Police in the region are in touch with local shark researchers to see what can be done and are asking people to contact them if it is seen again. Over six miles of ocean beachfront were closed between East Atlantic Beach and Long Beach last week as a result of the attacks. Those beaches have since opened, but are still on high alert. The Florida of Natural History and the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File (ISAF) reported that there have been six possible bites at Big Appel beaches from June 30 to July 20, 2022. Close by in Massachusetts, tens of confirmed sightings forced closures Cape Cod, according to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy's Sharktivity app, with multiple sightings reported off of Nauset Beach and North Beach Island. The app recorded 25 sightings during two days last week - with the most recent issued Saturday morning after a shark was spotted off Nauset Beach about 75 yards off shore. Dozens of white shark sightings have been reported in the area in the past week, fueled in part by the unseasonably high temperatures couple with recent conservation efforts to protect native shark species. Sightings have been made as far north as Maine, with the state's most popular beach, at Popham Beach State Park, closed Wednesday after a shark sighting at roughly 5:20pm. Residents also reported another unconfirmed sighting nearby off Small Point, last week, as beaches continue to close in the face of the flood of sightings. The odds of getting fatally attacked by a shark remain less than 1 in 4 million, according to the International Shark Attack File. Beachgoers look on as swimmers rush out of the waters during the Saturday encounter Snaking through a Moscow shopping centre, shoppers wait to buy their last items from H&M before the retailer closes its Russian stores. Brands including H&M, Ikea and Nike had suspended operations in the country, but H&M reopened to sell off its goods before leaving the Russian market for good, costing the company nearly 170million. Customer Ekaterina said: 'The reason why this is happening is awful. Everything else is meaningless, like how we are going to manage [without H&M].' Russian shoppers wait to buy their last items from H&M in a Moscow shopping centre before the retailer closes its Russian stores 'The reason why this is happening is awful. Everything else is meaningless, like how we are going to manage [without H&M],' a customer said. Pictured left: A customer at the closing H&M in Moscow. Pictured right: Shoppers stand in line to the entrance of the H&M store 'Well, it is closing, that's why we are standing here,' another customer, Irina, told Reuters. 'I'm going to buy whatever there is.' Furniture giant IKEA has reopened for an online-only sale, but H&M opted to allow customers back in person. Exiting Russia, H&M's sixth-biggest market, is expected to cost the company almost $200 million and affect 6,000 staff. Exiting Russia, H&M's sixth-biggest market, is expected to cost the company almost $200 million (around 165m) and affect 6,000 staff H&M did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A company spokesperson in July said H&M would temporarily reopen physical stores in August to sell the remaining inventory in Russia. H&M, the world's second-biggest fashion retailer, rents its 170 physical stores in the country and operates them directly. Australian gender clinics face a new investigation into their methods of treating teenagers after a similar centre in the UK was closed over safety worries. The Tavistock Clinic in London was shut down last week after doctors said young patients were being put on gender-changing paths too quickly. Doctors were concerned over the long-term impacts of transitioning, noting it wasn't known how safe puberty blockers were for teenagers both cognitively and physically. Among many things, puberty or hormone blockers can stop periods, breasts from developing, and facial hair. The Tavistock Clinic in London was shut down last week after doctors said young patients were being put on gender-changing paths too quickly Queensland Paediatrician Dylan Wilson (pictured) said the UK report should promote a changing attitude to treating kids with gender dysphoria The UK shutdown was prompted by a review by Dr Hilary Cass - the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics' and Child Health. The report said the tax-payer-funded gender development service was not a 'safe or viable long-term option'. The move has prompted Australian doctors to call for an independent review into the prescription of puberty blockers to teens. Dr Dylan Wilson from Leading Steps Paediatrics Clinic said the UK closure should prompt doctors to change the way they treat children and teenagers with gender dysphoria. 'The concerns that have been raised with the UK Tavistock Clinic translate directly to the same concerns that can be applied to gender clinics here in Australia,' the Queensland doctor told The Australian. The Tavislock Centre in London (pictured) was shut down over doubts that hormone treatments may affect patients in a bad way - cognitively and physically 'The fact that Dr Cass noted that there is insufficient evidence to recommend puberty blockers but they have been used by gender clinics in Australia is of huge concern.' A prominent gender clinic at the Royal Melbourne Children's Hospital said its methods were above board. But the clinic, which developed the standards of treating gender dysphoria in Australia, told The Australian they welcome any development that helps transgender people. 'We will continue to closely monitor how services nationally and internationally develop and evolve and welcome all actions that ensure that trans children and young people continue to receive the highest possible quality of care, regardless of where they live,' a hospital spokesman said. The Children's Hospital at Westmead said patients in their trans and gender services get thoroughly assessed before being given puberty blockers - and the treatment is reversible. Trans advocates defended the 'life-saving' treatment and rejected any clinic closures that impact such a 'highly vulnerable population'. A push to a more 'holistic' care plan for patients was recommended by Dr Cass, including promoting their mental health. Meanwhile, puberty blockers will now be prescribed in the UK via clinical trials that follow children into adulthood. The gender services clinic at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne (pictured) said their methods are in 'best practice' The Duchess of York has reportedly splashed 5million on a luxury property in the upmarket borough of Mayfair in central London - despite frequent gripes about her financial woes. Sarah Ferguson, 62, is said to have purchased the home from her friend the Duke of Westminster, 31, who became one of the wealthiest men in the country when he inherited his father's 10billion fortune in 2016. It comes despite the red-headed royal complaining of financial difficulties in recent years, describing herself as 'continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy' in a 2010 TV interview in the US. A spokesperson for Fergie's ex-husband Prince Andrew said he had not been personally involved in the purchase. MailOnline has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment. Fergie and Andrew currently reside in the Royal Lodge in Windsor, owned by the Queen, 96. Sources told the Sun the new Mayfair property is thought to be 'a long-term investment for daughters Princess Beatrice and Eugenie', describing it as 'picturesque' and in 'one of the very smartest areas of London.' They added: 'It had previously been a couple of flats but has been converted to a single property. Sarah Ferguson (pictured with ex-husband Prince Andrew in 2019), 62, is said to have purchased the home from her friend the Duke of Westminster, 31, who became one of the wealthiest men in the country when he inherited his father's 10billion fortune in 2016 The Duke of Westminster (pictured), 31, is believed to have sold a 5million Mayfair property to Sarah Ferguson, reports the Sun One source told the Sun the new Mayfair home is 'picturesque' and in 'one of the very smartest areas of London' (Stock image of Mayfair in central London) 'If the girls are going to inherit it at some stage they're extremely lucky. 'It's a short walk from the best bars and restaurants in the city, beautiful parks and other hot spots. But God knows where the money has come from everyone thought they were totally skint.' Fergie's representatives confirmed the purchase to the Sun but were unable to provide any more specifics of the sale - which has yet to be published by Land Registry officials. It is not the first time the couple's property deals have come under scrutiny. In January MPs called for a 'dirty money' probe into the 15million sale of Prince Andrew's Sunninghill estate to a Kazakh oligarch who became the centre of corruption claims. The Duke, 61, sold the home in Ascot, Berkshire, to Timur Kulibayev, 55, the son-in-law of Kazakhstan's autocratic former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, in 2007. But questions had been raised over the sale of the property, originally gifted by the Queen to Andrew when he married Sarah Ferguson, after it went for 15million - 3million over its asking price. That is despite the property languishing on the property market for five years at an asking price of 12million. Then: Sunninghill House, on the edge of Windsor Great Park near to Ascot, which was sold by Prince Andrew in 2007 In 2015, Kulibayev razed Sunninghill Park - which had been compared to a Tesco superstore due to its ugly appearance - so that he could build a new home. Last year, images (above) showed how the home's sprawling ultra-modern replacement was nearing completion Andrew, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, was once a special trade envoy for the UK. Asked about the deal, Mr Kulibayev said at the time that the decision to pay 3million over the asking price for a property that had been on the market unsold for five years had come about because of a briefing from Prince Andrew's camp that other parties were interested in it. 'We can confirm at the time of purchase we were told that there were several interested parties,' said his spokesman. Andrew is also struggling to sell his 18m ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland, due to an alleged 1.6m debt to a Swiss couple. According to reports in the Swiss media, the debt to the mystery couple is preventing the Duke of York from completing the sale of his much-loved Chalet Helora. It has been claimed that the disgraced royal was intending to use money from the sale of the property to help finance his 10million sex assault lawsuit settlement with accuser Virginia Giuffre. In February of this year it was reported that Andrew had found a buyer for the chalet, after settling a separate 6.6million debt to French socialite Isabelle de Rouvre, 74, who he purchased the property from in 2014. But the process appears to have stalled because the chalet is 'under sequestration' as a result of the alleged debt. The chalet was frozen as an asset by Swiss authorities on December 15, 2020 according to Le Temps newspaper. The chalet in Verbier has an indoor pool, sauna, boot room and terrace with spectacular views Sources close to Prince Andrew previously told MailOnline that the dispute will not prevent the property's sale, and that while the Duke 'did not deny owing the money' to the couple he was 'questioning the amount'. The source said: 'This has nothing to do with the original purchase of the chalet, it's a completely separate business transaction between the couple and the Duke. 'It shouldn't affect the sale of the property despite what the Swiss media says and is expected to go through as planned. 'Talks are underway to resolve the matter, which are expected to be concluded satisfactorily for all parties.' Prince Andrew has not been to the chalet in Verbier for several years, but his ex-wife Sarah and two daughters Beatrice and Eugenie spent the New Year in the luxury property with their families. He stepped back as a senior royal in May 2020 after allegations emerged over his relationship with the disgraced sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. A high profile court case in which Virginia Guiffre, a victim of Epstein's, accused the Duke of York of rape and other sexual crimes was settled out of court in March of this year. The total settlement is believed to be around 12 million, and includes Ms Guiffre's legal bills and an unspecified amount to a charity of Ms Guiffre's choice. He did not accept any liability when he made the settlement and vehemently denies the claims. Cross-provincial river basin eco-compensation mechanism helps lift ecology in China 09:05, August 04, 2022 By Liu Fawei ( People's Daily Henan province, an economic powerhouse in central China located in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, recently received 126 million yuan ($18.67 million) of ecological compensation from Shandong for its outstanding performance in improving the water quality of the river. Photo shows a picturesque scene on the Xin'an River, Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang province. (People's Daily/Ning Wenwu) In April last year, the two provinces inked the first cross-provincial compensation agreement for horizontal ecological protection in the Yellow River basin. According to the agreement, if the quality of water in the Henan section of the Yellow River improves by one level from category-III over the course of one year, Shandong, which lies in the lower reaches of the river, will pay Henan 60 million yuan as a reward, and if the quality worsens by a level, Henan will pay 60 million yuan to Shandong as compensation. In 2012, the first cross-provincial river basin eco-compensation mechanism was piloted in the Xin'an River basin. The river, which rises from Xiuning county, Huangshan, east China's Anhui province, is the largest river flowing into the coastal province of Zhejiang in east China. It provides over 60 percent of the water in Qiandao Lake, an important water source for Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang. The pilot program offered annual compensation of 500 million yuan, including 300 million yuan from the central government, 100 million yuan from Anhui and 100 million yuan from Zhejiang. According to the program, if the water quality made the grade, Zhejiang would pay Anhui 100 million yuan as a reward. Otherwise, Anhui would pay Zhejiang 100 million yuan as compensation. The Miyun Reservoir in Beijing has witnessed improving water quality since a compensation mechanism for horizontal ecological protection was implemented in the Chaobai River in the upper reaches of the reservoir. (People's Daily Online/Chen Zhenhai) The water quality in the Xin'an River has remained good and steadily improved since the pilot program between the two provinces was implemented. The quality of water sampled in the cross-provincial section has reached category-II level, and the river is sending nearly 7 billion cubic meters of clean water to the Qiandao Lake. The water quality of the Qiandao Lake is on the rise, too. In 2018, Beijing and its neighboring province Hebei jointly started a compensation mechanism for horizontal ecological protection in the Chaobai River in the upper reaches of Beijing's Miyun Reservoir. So far, Beijing has paid Hebei a total of 950 million yuan as compensation, and the fund was mainly used to advance water environment governance, water ecological restoration and water resource conservation in five counties of Hebei's Zhangjiakou and Chengde. The mechanism has set an example of joint river protection for regions with scarce water resources in north China, said an official with the Department of Water Ecology and Environment, Ministry of Ecology and Environment. The agreement includes water volume and total nitrogen, which is unique among all similar pilot programs in China, the official said. The five counties, making joint efforts to promote river protection, pollution treatment, and water conservancy, have effectively safeguarded the quality of the water flowing into the Miyun Reservoir from the Chaobai River, and laid a solid foundation for the long-term river basin eco-compensation mechanism in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the official said. The cross-provincial compensation mechanism is an important tool to motivate joint protection efforts of ecological products between the supplying and benefiting regions. Over the past 10 years, the mechanism has been piloted in 13 river basins and sections in 18 provincial-level regions. Nearly 70 percent of the river basins and sections have received compensation at least once, and five have received at least twice. In 2018, east China's Jiangxi province implemented an ecological compensation mechanism in the Poyang Lake, the Jiujiang section of the Yangtze River and the Dongjiang River. Photo shows the Poyang Lake, (People's Daily Online/Fu Jianbin) The compensation mechanism for horizontal ecological protection has achieved positive progress. It has steadily improved water quality and the environment at cross-provincial river sections, and enhanced coordinated protection by regions in both the upper and lower reaches of rivers. Thanks to the implementation of the mechanism, the regions in the upper reaches of rivers have made great efforts to advance pollution treatment and rural environmental governance, which has led to steady improvement in water quality and the environment, as well as constant upgrading of the ecological environment. (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) Hyderabad: With heavy rains lashing the city, knee-deep water entered the homes of Brahmanwadi residents, leaving a foul odour all over. At least 70 houses have been surrounded by drainage water for two weeks, and the murky water has entered at least 30 of them. Residents have developed fever and vomiting as a result of the drain water entering their homes. The pungent odour and mosquito infestation not only affect their health, but they are also forced to walk through the drainage water to complete their daily tasks. For the past 30 years, drainage water has been entering the houses, especially during the monsoon season in Lane Number 7 in Brahmanwadi. The residents' plight is so dire that they must frequently change their clothes after wading through the murky waters. "I work for a multinational company, and I have to change my clothes every day after passing through the drainage water," said a resident, Anil Kumar. Children have been trapped inside their homes for two weeks and have missed school. People are tired of drainage water entering their homes and have given up hope on GHMC officials, who have not visited the site in over a week. They tried to pump out some water, but it wasn't much help," he said. Residents are concerned that sewage water entering their homes is causing diseases. Many residents in Lane Number 7 are becoming ill as a result of the drainage water remaining in their homes for an extended period of time, causing fever, vomiting, and other skin diseases. Children are also suffering as a result of the mosquito infestation. Despite several complaints to the GHMC, Anil Kumar claimed, the problem had remained for 30 years. The open nala is an eyesore for residents. Furthermore, there is no compound wall to prevent drainage water from flowing into the lane. Residents claim that drainage work has begun in the last nine months, resulting in drainage water entering their homes, causing damage to electronic and furniture items and negatively impacting their health. "Despite my complaints to GHMC officials, no action has been taken. When the drainage water and rain water enter our houses, TRS leader Kuna Venkatesh Goud who lives in lane number 4 makes a token gesture of distributing food to the residents. At least 40 kg of stored rice grains and other items have been spoiled by the drainage water. During the monsoon, the mosquito menace is severe, with the stagnant pool becoming a breeding ground," said Lalitha Rathod, a Lane 4 resident. Another resident, Rajesh Singh, stated that there has been no anti-mosquito fogging in the area in the last five months. Kuna Venkatesh Goud, on the other hand, stated that the GHMC was working on a project to install a new drainage pipeline and build a new compound wall. "It's a Rs 45 crore project, so it'll take time," he explained. In fact, garbage is dumped in front of houses where there is open nala, and people have begun to take it casually. When this correspondent visited the area, children were seen defecating in the open. When asked why they were defecating in the open in front of their houses, the children said it didn't matter because there was garbage all around. The residents clean the drainage water themselves, and the most difficult part, they say, is clearing the debris and garbage that gets stuck on the floor as a result of the drainage water entering their house, and cleaning it is an unpleasant task. In the Daily Mail today, Attorney General Suella Braverman signals a major new offensive in the culture wars this country has been losing for far too long. As in the witch trials of the Middle Ages, she writes of a 'priestly' caste of inquisitors on a mission to seek out and cancel anyone who contradicts the woke orthodoxy of 'diversity, equality and inclusion'. They hound and bully with impunity, trampling over free speech. Yet instead of challenging them, our schools, universities, institutions and major corporations bow down in spineless appeasement. In the Daily Mail today, Attorney General Suella Braverman (pictured) signals a major new offensive in the culture wars this country has been losing for far too long Northampton railway manager Simon Isherwood (pictured) was sacked for daring to ask, in the privacy of his own home, whether black privilege exists in Africa A rail worker sacked for daring to ask, in the privacy of his own home, whether black privilege exists in Africa. Shrill demands for the 'decolonising' of museums and removal of public statues. The National Trust obsessively hunting down slavery connections and shaming families who bequeathed their homes to the nation. Asian grooming gangs from Rotherham to Telford left to abuse hundreds of young girls because police were afraid to stop them for fear of being seen as racist. JK Rowling vilified and black barrister Allison Bailey discriminated against for believing that transgender women can't change their biological sex. As Mrs Braverman (herself of ethnic minority heritage) puts it: 'How did we get to the place where stating the facts of biology can get you sacked?' How indeed. More importantly, how do we get out of it? The Attorney General should know she and the next PM will have an almighty fight on their hands to turn this supertanker around. The diversity industry is deeply entrenched and will not go quietly. She is beginning the fightback in her own department, where taxpayer-funded lawyers spent a staggering 2,000 hours last year on diversity training. Staff are lectured on the injustice of white privilege, the importance of the 'lived experience' of others and the dangers of 'micro-incivilities'. Do they really not have better things to do? To her huge credit, Mrs Braverman plans a radical overhaul of the system, starting with diversity training. Yes, we must be aware of each other's sensibilities. Yes, bad things were done in the name of empire. Yes, slavery was an abomination. And yes, discrimination on the grounds of race, religion or gender is always wrong, wherever it may happen. But must we spend our lives in cringing apology for the sins of our ancestors? The slave trade was abolished over 200 years ago by the British. For better and for worse, the British Empire once covered a quarter of the world. By any measure that was an astonishing achievement. To be ashamed of it and to judge its excesses by today's standards is a futile exercise in self-flagellation. Progress is about looking forward, not back. JK Rowling (left) vilified and black barrister Allison Bailey (right) discriminated against for believing that transgender women can't change their biological sex Far from the racist hellhole the Left loves to portray, this country is among the most tolerant, welcoming and freest in the world. That's why so many want to come here. Whoever wins the Tory leadership contest should make this war on woke their priority. All around Britain, ordinary people feel alienated and bemused by the rise of the new orthodoxy but are afraid to object for fear of being branded bigots. Aptly described by Mrs Braverman as 'the long tail of Blairism', the witchfinders still have Labour so much in their grip that Sir Keir Starmer quivers like a jelly when asked to define what a woman is. The new PM must make that a key point of difference between the parties. By speaking plainly and taking up cudgels on behalf of the silent majority, she (or he) can and must neuter the power of this modern inquisition. For that, they will win not only plaudits but also votes. Vulnerable Australians could receive a vaccine for monkeypox as soon as next week as the government looks to combat growing case numbers. There have been 53 cases of monkeypox reported in Australia and 25,000 across the world. Australia currently has a stockpile of the ACAM2000 monkeypox vaccine, which can be used before or after exposure to the virus. Unlike other vaccines, people taking it are required to take precautions and cover the injection site until the scab falls off. There are also rare but serious side effects associated with it. The alternative vaccine, known as JYNNEOS, which is a third generation vaccine, has fewer potential side effects, while also being easier to administer. Health Minister Mark Butler has confirmed that the government has now secured additional doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine, which can be used before or after exposure to monkeypox. 'We've secured supplies of new third generation vaccines,' he said in a statement. WHO'S ELIGABLE FOR A MONKEYPOX VACCINE IN AUSTRALIA The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) has listed five key groups that are eligible for the vaccine. These include: Anyone considered high risk of being in contact with monkeypox in the past 14 days, such as healthcare workers, laboratory staff who work with the smallpox or monkeypox virus Gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men who have a high number of sexual contacts or live with HIV Sex workers, particularly those whose clients are in high-risk categories Anyone in the above categories who is planning travel to a country where there is a significant outbreak Immunisation providers who are administering the ACAM2000 smallpox vaccine Advertisement The federal government is set to make an announcement on Thursday about a monkeypox vaccine rollout in Australia (stock image) Further details about the vaccine rollout are set to be announced later today, but they will likely be administered by the states and territories to those vulnerable to the virus. ATAGI has recommended vaccination be considered for select groups including men who have sex with men with a high number of sexual contacts, and sex workers. Monkeypox is transmitted through close physical contact, with the majority of cases being men who have sex with men. Identifiable symptoms include unusual rashes or lesions appearing on the skin. People who contract monkeypox are required to isolate until their sores fully clear, which can be up to 21 days. In May, NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant sent out a warning for gay men in particular to watch out for symptoms and seek immediate help if concerned. In May, NSW's chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant sent out a warning for gay men in particular to watch out for the symptoms and seek immediate help if worried 'We know it's transmitted by that close skin to skin contact - you can be infectious and that close droplet contact in a very sort of close prolonged way,' Dr Chant said. 'We're particularly urging men who are gay or bisexual, or men who have sex with men, to be aware of any unusual rashes or lesions and to contact by phone a sexual health clinic or GP without delay if they have any concerns.' The rare tropical disease is transmitted through close physical contact. It has been predominant amongst men who have sex with men (stock image) Nurses and doctors are being advised to stay 'alert' to patients who present with a new rash or scabby lesions (like above) Heath Paynter, acting CEO of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations, commended the Commonwealth for securing the vaccines. 'The swift procurement of these vaccines is a very positive step. While local transmission of Monkeypox has so far been limited, we can't rely on that to continue. 'The availability of MPX vaccine for people who need it is a critical forward defence against transmission. It will help people look after their own health as well as that of people they are intimate with. 'Gay and bisexual men are already taking Monkeypox very seriously, monitoring for symptoms and regularly seeking medical advice. This is a very welcome additional tool.' Alexis Apostolellis, CEO of the Australasian Society for HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine said: 'Australia's clinical workforce has learned a lot over the past two months about how to detect, treat and prevent monkeypox, and vaccination is the critical next step.' The Justice Department on Wednesday sued former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro for emails he sent through a private account while conducting work in the Trump White House. Navarro, a rare Trump aide whose White House job lasted the entire tenure of Trump's, had 'at least one non-official email account ... to send and receive messages constituting Presidential records,' according to the DOJ. According to the lawsuit the National Archives learned of the private email account from the House committee investigating the government's response to Covid-19. Between 200 and 250 emails from a ProtonMail account linked to Navarro should have been handed over to the Archives, prosecutors say. When the archivist tried to contact Navarro about the emails, he did not respond. When the Justice Department contacted him, he said he would not be handing over the emails 'absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents.' Navarro had a heavy hand in Trump's coronavirus response and was named policy coordinator of his use of the Defense Production Act to drum up more supplies. Navarro had a heavy hand in Trump's coronavirus response and was named policy coordinator of his use of the Defense Production Act to drum up more supplies Navarro, outside a courthouse, claimed he had been arrested, put in 'leg irons' and placed in John Hinckley's cell when he ignored a congressional subpoena The lawsuit alleges Navarro 'is wrongfully retaining Presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration.' The civil lawsuit has been assigned to Clinton appointee District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. Separately Navarro is entangled in a criminal lawsuit after he was arrested and indicted for contempt of Congress for denying a subpoena to testify in front of the Jan. 6 committee. In July the former trade adviser rejected a plea deal, claiming that former President Trump assured him he is covered by executive privilege. His trial is scheduled for November. The chances of him winning are slim after former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress earlier this month for denying a congressional subpoena. Navarro has publicly blasted the agents who arrested him after they confronted him while he was boarding a flight to Nashville. 'I actually live right next to the FBI. It's like a 100-yard walk to my door. What did they do instead of that? They let me get all the way to the airport, try to board the plane, come at me, put me in handcuffs, not let me use my phone, take me down, and put me in a jail cell,' he told reporters outside the courthouse. 'Who are these people? This is not America,' Navarro said. 'I was a distinguished public servant for four years!' Navarro told reporters he'd been locked up in Ronald Reagan shooter John Hinckley's cell. 'They seemed to think that was like an important historical note.' He said he'd been shackled in handcuffs and leg irons. Navarro called the manor of his arrest 'terrorism' and akin to 'Stalinist Russia.' He then went after the House Minority Leader: 'Shame on Kevin McCarthy.' Navarro claimed McCarthy had not done enough to push back on the select subcommittee investigating Jan. 6. The Los Angeles City Council voted to crackdown on homelessness near schools as a crowd of people protested the measure inside City Hall. The council's latest bill, which passed 11-3 on Tuesday, prohibits homeless people from setting up tents within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers, the Los Angeles Times reported. The bill led to scores of people protesting the vote inside the city council chambers, causing a one-hour intermission as police cleared the room of the angry crowd. The protesters shouted, 'Shut it down,' and 'We won't go,' as Council President Nury Martinez instructed officers to get rid of them. 'I think people were intent this morning to shut this place down and keep us from doing the very job that we were all elected to do,' Martinez said. 'And that, I think, is incredibly disturbing.' The LA City Council voted 11-3 to prohibit homeless camps within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers on Tuesday as protesters stood against the bill inside City Hall LA school district officials said there were 120 homeless encampments set up near schools over the past year which create unsafe conditions for children. Pictured, a homeless encampment set up in downtown LA Police officials were instructed to clear the room of the demonstrators after they began shouting and chanting against the city council members Council President Nury Martinez (top center) condemned the protest as she voted in favor of the bill, which will need a second vote next week to pass Martha Alvarez, of the LA Unified School District, told the city council that there have been 120 schools with homeless encampments identified near over the last year. 'These conditions are a public health hazard,' she said on Tuesday. 'They are unsafe and traumatic for students, families and staff as they enter school campuses.' Supporters of the blanket ban said homeless camps are a health and safety threat to schoolchildren, especially because of the disruptive presence of people with drug addictions or mental illness. City Councilman Joe Buscaino, a long-time proponent of the ban who received the bulk of the jeers from the audience, said he supported housing for homeless people and that it was clear the encampments had no place near the schools. 'I've supported Bridge Home shelters. I've supported tiny homes, Project Roomkey, Project Homekey, permanent supportive housing,' Buscaino said on Tuesday. 'But what I don't support are drug dens near our schools, parks or anywhere children congregate.' Opponents, including homeless advocates, said the measure would further criminalize homelessness. City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who voted against the restriction, told reporters the passage of the bill would represent 'inhumanity that is beneath the citizens of the city.' Pictured: Protesters calling for the city council to reject the ban on homeless camps withing 500 feet of schools and day-care facilities Chants and boos from opponents of the 41.18 expansion to ban homeless encampments near schools after Councilmember Joe Buscaino who proposed the ordinance rose to speak have forced the LA City Council to take a 15 minute recess. Theyve been chanting for over 10 minutes now pic.twitter.com/2LlvYTyOfm Eric He (@erichejourno) August 2, 2022 Opponents, including homeless advocates, said the measure would further criminalize homelessness in the city City Council President Nury Martinez (not pictured) called the scene 'incredibly disturbing' Opponents said the bills passage would create about 2,000 areas of enforcement against homeless encampments in Los Angeles Councilmember Bonin, who also voted against the measure, predicted the areas of police enforcement would skyrocket from 200 sites, to about 2,000. About 750 public school sites are within the city limits, Los Angeles Unified School District officials told the Los Angeles Times, which said nearly 1,000 commercial day-care businesses are registered with the city. The council's vote also drew the criticism of the People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) organization, which builds low-income housing and provides services to the local homeless community. 'Enforcement of anti-camping ordinances... only displaces people and makes it harder for trained outreach staff to establish trust again,' PATH spokesman Tyler Renner said in a statement. The ban comes as several hotels are set to end their involvement in the government's Project Roomkey, which paid them to provide hundreds of rooms to unsheltered people. Although the ban passed on Tuesday, a second and final vote will be held next week to ratify it. The debate over the bill comes as crime continues to rise in LA, with many of the high profile incidents involving vagrants attacking law-abiding residents. The ban comes as several hotels are set to end their involvement in the government's Project Roomkey, which paid them to provide hundreds of rooms to unsheltered people and would see many more homeless individuals flood the streets of LA Pictured: A homeless encampment lining up an entire street in Los Angeles Supporters of the blanket ban said homeless camps are a health and safety threat to schoolchildren, especially because of the disruptive presence of people with drug addictions or mental illness out in the open Billionaire real estate tycoon Caruso, left, is running against career politician Bass, right. She beat him in the primary but only marginally, and now both will run for mayor in November On Tuesday, billionaire LA Mayoral hopeful Rick Caruso slammed his opponent Karen Bass for her 'failing record' on tackling homelessness and safety in the city. He is running on a platform of cracking down on crime and disorder in the increasingly lawless city, and wants to bring an end to the famously left-wing leaders who he says are to blame for the current state of affairs. Among them, he says, is Bass - who has served as the Democratic congresswoman for California's 37th District since 2011. In a tweet on Tuesday night, after Biden and Harris endorsed her, he said: 'No endorsement will hide the fact that Karen Bass has a track record of failing to address LA's homelessness, public safety, and corruption. 'These endorsements have absolutely nothing to do with what this campaign is really about. 'After 20 years of representation from Karen Bass, LA needs fresh leadership who can take our city in a positive direction and make it more livable. 'The same old from establishment politicians won't stop this city from sliding into an even more desperate situation,' he said. A Royal Navy captain has been 'suspended' amid claims he 'mentored' female sailors in his quarters on board an aircraft carrier. Captain Steve Higham was placed on 'directed leave' in May following allegations of 'inappropriate behaviour' while he was commanding officer of the HMS Prince of Wales' for nine months. A 'number' of junior servicewomen claimed they felt 'uncomfortable' following the 'one-to-one sessions' in Capt Higham's cabin, reports The Sun. However, friends of the sailor have leapt to his defence and said he is a 'true patriot' and all the meetings held were 'above board'. Capt Higham, who previously served as Boris Johnson's defence advisor, gave up command of the vessel on May 24 and was due to jump two ranks and become Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff. But following the claims, he was suspended and the role was put on hold by bosses 'without prejudice' pending the outcome of the investigation. Captain Steve Higham (pictured) was placed on 'directed leave' in May following allegations of 'inappropriate behaviour' while he was commanding officer of the HMS Prince of Wales' for nine months Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales arrives back into Portsmouth Harbour in February A Navy source told the newspaper: 'There are suggestions he invited a number of female sailors into his cabin alone and this made them uncomfortable. 'He says the meetings were totally above board, that he was mentoring them and offering career development, but it has raised concerns.' The Royal Navy said: 'An investigation is under way and it would be inappropriate to comment further.' Capt Higham was commanding the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales back in January in a show of force to Russia following the war in Ukraine - for its first major mission to head Nato's rapid response task force. The 65,000-tonne warship was appointed the command ship of Nato's Maritime High Readiness Force at a ceremony held onboard at Portsmouth Naval Base. The UK took over from France to run the task force, which was formed to deal with major global incidents. The task force runs for the next four months by Commander UK Strike Force - the most senior sea-going staff of the Royal Navy, headed by Rear Admiral Mike Utley. The 900ft long carrier, which has a crew of 1,600, is based at Portsmouth and was formally commissioned in December 2019. Alongside its sister ship HMS Queen Elizabeth, the vessel makes up part of the UK's Carrier Strike Group designated CSG21. Capt Higham, who previously served as Boris Johnson's defence advisor, gave up command of the vessel on May 24 and was due to jump two ranks and become Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff The carriers can be pressed into action for various work such as high intensity war fighting or providing humanitarian aid and disaster relief. However, the ship has been beset with technical problems and was stranded in Portsmouth in December 2020 after sea water poured into the vessel's engine room for more than 24 hours and damaged the electrics. The vessel was banned from setting sale until repairs were made, with defence minister Jeremy Quin revealing the fix would cost 3.3million. It marked the second leak for the 65,000-tonne ship in less than a year. The engine room had already been flooded to the depth of 3ft during a leak in May 2020. Later, it was revealed that the carrier had spent just 87 days at sea during its first two years in service. HMS Queen Elizabeth also suffered leaks in 2017 and 2019, with the former costing several million pounds to repair. The Duchess of Cornwall is greeted by a guard of honour as she arrives for a visit to HMS Prince of Wales at Her Majesty's Naval Base in May In May 2020, the Royal Navy launched an investigation after a pipe leaked on HMS Prince of Wales and caused an ankle-high flood. The leak was said to have taken place on the carrier while it was at Portsmouth Naval Base. A video later posted on Facebook showed water gushing through the ceiling and flooding an entire room of the warship. It is understood that the pipe was isolated quickly and the water was soon mopped up by the crew on board. Elon Musk has been shamed publicly on Twitter after pieces of of his SpaceX capsule crash landed back onto Earth and trashed an Aussie farmer's property. Farmer Mick Miners, who owns property south of Jindabyne, in NSW's Snowy Mountains region, was shocked this week to find pieces of space junk littered across fields. On Wednesday, ABC reporter Adriane Reardon called out Musk, a billionaire through his Tesla and SpaceX ventures, on Twitter, calling on him to come and clean up his mess. Ms Reardon asked if anyone from Musk's team was coming forward to collect the pieces of debris that had fallen. ABC reporter Adriane Reardon (left) called out Elon Musk (right) after pieces of space junk from his SpaceX spacecraft had landed on farmland in the Snowy Mountains in NSW On Tuesday, ABC reporter Adriane Reardon put out a statement on Twitter (pictured), questioning whether Elon Musk will take action Farmer Mick Miners (pictured) discovered the huge piece of space junk stuck in his property in the Snowy Mountains, south of Jindabyne The three-metre piece of junk - a section from Musk's SpaceX Crew-1 craft - was discovered speared into the ground after Mr Miners went to investigate a loud bang that was heard by his daughters. Australian National University space expert Brad Tucker told radio host Ben Fordham he was called out to investigate the discovery. 'This is most definitely space junk which was part of the SpaceX Crew-1 trunk,' he said on Ben Fordham Live on Monday morning. 'SpaceX has this capsule that takes humans into space but there is a bottom part... so when the astronauts come back, they leave the bottom part in space before the capsule lands.' Mr Tucker said the part has been in space since November 2020 and was starting to de-orbit. 'There was a plan of having it come down on Earth and purposely hitting the Earth's atmosphere so it would break apart and land in the ocean,' he said. It's understood swathes of people across southern NSW saw an explosion and heard the loud bang when it crashed into Mr Miners' farm. 'We saw most pieces land in the ocean but clearly some hadn't because this three-metre piece was speared into the ground from space,' Mr Tucker said. He said the object had landed a long way from Mr Miners' home, which was why it took some time to actually locate it. 'From a distance it looks like a tree almost, like a burnt tree, and then you get closer and you realise 'hey that's not right',' Mr Tucker said. Australian National University space expert Brad Tucker confirmed it was part of Elon Musk's SpaceX Crew-1 (pictured) Mr Miners' neighbour Jock also had a piece of space junk on his property. 'The Australian Space Agency is now handling it because there is actually a legal protocol... so technically it's still SpaceX's,' Mr Tucker said. 'We assume they don't want it back because the whole point was to break in the ocean. 'Now if SpaceX said they want it back, well then they have to essentially pay Mick and Jock to get it all back. 'However, if they are able to keep it, they have options including giving it to a museum, selling it on eBay.' Mr Tucker said there would be plenty people who would like to collect the space junk. 'They get a little tidy sum for all the trouble they have been put through,' he said. Bushfire hero Shane Fitzsimmons is reportedly set to be dumped from is new role as Resilience NSW Commissioner. Premier Dominic Perrottet is reportedly poised to scrap the entire agency which was set up in May 2020 following the 2019 bushfires. The agency was considered the brainchild of former Premier Gladys Berejiklian and opposed by then Treasurer Mr Perrottet. Bushfire hero Shane Fitzsimmons is reportedly set to be dumped from is new role as Resilience NSW Commissioner A recent flood inquiry recommended it be dismantled after failing to deliver results for the state, with critics saying it was 'missing in action' during floods in March. There are also concerns about its cost, with the agency spending $38.6million on wages and almost $30million on operating costs. It was allocated $1.4billion in the latest budget, with most of the cash earmarked for flood relief grants. Mr Fitzsimmons was the Commissioner of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service between September 2007 and April 2020. Devastating flooding in the state's Northern Rivers and Hawkesbury Nepean region in February and March killed 13 people and destroyed more than 4,000 homes. Premier Perrottet launched an independent inquiry in March to learn from the disaster, saying in April he wanted 'no holds barred' feedback and did not care if it impacted his government. An interim report was due on June 30, however a decision was made to scrap the interim report and bring forward the final report date to last Sunday, July 31. Pictured: Floods at a Leeton property adjacent to the Hawkesbury River in Sydney NSW Labor have demanded the government publish the report's findings, which were released to Mr Perrottet on Sunday, saying devastated communities have a right to know how to better prepare. 'The government does not have a right to sit on this report until it is politically expedient for them to release it,' opposition spokesman for the North Coast, Walt Secord, said on Wednesday. A spokesperson for the NSW government said the premier had the report and intended to release it soon. 'The Premier received the final Flood Inquiry Report (Sunday morning) and he is currently reviewing it,' the spokesperson said. 'The government will consider the recommendations and release it as well as its response in the near future.' The inquiry took submissions from impacted residents, emergency responders and organisations, and held public forums in flood-affected communities. RFS volunteers and NSW Fire and Rescue officers fight a bushfire in southern NSW in December 2019 During one heated community meeting in Mullumbimby in June, locals lashed out at the response in their town, saying red tape forced them to make 10-kilometre treks to find people stranded by landslides. Captain of the Byron Bay Rural Fire Service, John Brierley, said a lack of disaster planning prevented RFS members from outside Mullumbimby from assisting for five days. The fire captain said disaster plans were available in every council except Byron Shire Council. 'We're going to have conversations about this and I hope that you open the doors for us because it will solve a lot of problems,' he told the inquiry. Meanwhile, some $47million worth of grants was announced for victims of the June and July floods, in the Back Home scheme, to be jointly funded by the state and federal governments. Advertisement Chinese missiles fired towards Taiwan have landed in Japanese waters, Tokyo says, as Beijing ignored warnings that a miscalculation could spark war to hold its largest-ever live-fire drills around the island. Five out of nine ballistic missiles launched by China landed in Japan's 'exclusive economic zone', the country's defence minister said today, adding that he had lodged a protest with Beijing. The island of Yonaguni, which belongs to Japan, sits around 70 miles off Taiwan's eastern coast and Japan's 'economic zone' - waters in which it has special rights - covers about half the distance between the two. China has fired ballistic missiles at its neighbour before, but this is the first time they have landed in the Japanese zone. Taiwan says China fired a total of 11 ballistic missiles into waters off its south-western and north-eastern coasts today, in several salvos that began around 2pm local time and lasted until 4pm. Beijing also scrambled fighter jets and sent some of its most up-to-date warships to surround the island, in what state media said is a rehearsal for an invasion. The drills are due to last until Sunday, and are due to including long-range bombers and hypersonic missiles. China's two aircraft carriers are also holding position nearby. American forces - including the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier which is forward-deployed with the Pacific Fleet - are thought to be lurking nearby, while missile-tracking spy planes have been sent to watch over the drills. Xi Jinping announced the exercises using US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to the island - which took place from Tuesday and Wednesday - as an excuse. She is the most-senior politician to visit since Newt Gingrich in 1997, but her trip came shortly after a Senate delegation visit drew no response. China fires short-range ballistic missiles into waters near Taiwan on Thursday, as four days of live-fire exercises kick off that will effectively blockade the island in the biggest threat to its independence in decades Ballistic missiles are launched from bases in China's Fujian province towards Taiwan during military drills that state media has said are a rehearsal for an invasion Chinese missile batteries open fire from the coast near Pingtang Island across the Taiwan Strait as Beijing begins its biggest-ever war games around the self-governing island Chinese beach-goers watch as missiles streak into the sky over Pingtan Island, close to Taiwan, on Thursday afternoon The Chinese military has encircled the island, with some training exercises taking place within Taiwan's territorial waters A Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan Island, one of mainland China's closes points to Taiwan. The Asian country has started 'live-firing' war games in the waters around Taiwan today Chinese helicopters fly out over the Taiwan Strait on Thursday morning, as Beijing carries out the largest-ever live-fire military drills around the self-governing island Chinese tourists look at smoke trails from missiles fired over the Taiwan Strait as huge war games got underway on Thursday, in the largest threat to the island's independence in decades Pelosi - a long-time critic of China's human rights record and anti-democratic rulers - justified the visit by saying it showed America's continuing support for its ally. Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwanese president, also welcomed the move. But it came at a bad time for Xi, as he tries to project an image of strength ahead of Party Congress this autumn where he is expected to be given an historic third term in power which would mark the start of autocratic rule. Xi has made the so-called 'reunification' of Taiwan with China his hoped-for legacy as he aims to become the country's greatest leader since Mao, despite the fact that the Communists have never ruled the island. Lu Shaye, China's diplomat to France, today accused Taiwan of spreading 'propaganda' among people that has made people oppose 'reunification' - though the Communists have never actually ruled Taiwan - and said ominously that 're-education' will be necessary after the territory is conquered. China's state-run Global Times newspaper meanwhile said the drill exclusion zones have been drawn up in such a way as to blockade all the island's main ports, which would likely be the battle plan if Beijing were to invade. Song Zhongping, a 'military expert' quoted by the Times, said the 'comprehensive and highly targeted' operations showed 'the determination of resolving Taiwan question once and for all'. 'In the event of a future military conflict, it is likely that the operational plans currently being rehearsed will be directly translated into combat operations,' he added. 'It means that our battle plan has been made clear to the US and the Taiwan authorities, and we are confident enough to inform them of the consequences of further provocation in this way.' The war games threaten major disruption to one of the world's busiest shipping lanes which runs through the Taiwan strait, and have forced the island to divert huge amounts of air traffic that it relies upon to get crucial supplies - including food. Nearly half the world's ships passed through the narrow Taiwan Strait - which separates the island from the Chinese mainland - in the first seven months of this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The dramatic escalation in tensions was sparked by Pelosi's visit earlier this week as she became the highest-profile elected US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years. She said her presence made it 'unequivocally clear' that the United States would 'not abandon' a democratic ally like Taiwan. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Pelosi's visit to Taiwan a 'manic, irresponsible and highly irrational' act, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The exercises, which began around 12pm (4am GMT), involve 'live-firing', according to state media. 'Six major areas around the island have been selected for this actual combat exercise and during this period, relevant ships and aircraft should not enter the relevant waters and airspaces,' state broadcaster CCTV reported. China sent 22 fighter jets across the 'median line' running down the Taiwan Strait, Taipei's defence ministry said. The Ministry of National Defense said 'air defense missile systems' were deployed to track the jets and radio warnings were broadcast, according to an update on its website. Taiwanese troops also fired flares into the air to drive away four drones that flew over the outlying islands of Kinmen late on Thursday. China's military exercises will take place in multiple zones around Taiwan - at some points within just 20 kilometres (12 miles) of the island's shore - and will conclude at midday on Sunday. Taiwan accused China of 'following the example of North Korea in wilfully test-firing missiles into waters near other countries'. Taiwan's defence ministry said it was closely watching the drills and that the island was prepared for conflict, but would not seek it. 'The Ministry of National Defence stresses that it will uphold the principle of preparing for war without seeking war, and with an attitude of not escalating conflict and causing disputes,' it said in a statement. The ministry said the Chinese missiles flew high into the atmosphere and constituted no threat to Taiwan, responding to public concern about whether they passed over the main island. It added that it would not disclose the Chinese missile flight path due to intelligence concerns. Nancy Pelosi speaks alongside Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei on Wednesday, during which she said America's commitment to preserving democracy on the island is 'ironclad' A Xian H-6 Chinese bomber jet takes part in military drills in the skies near Taiwan yesterday, as Beijing puts on an unprecedented show of force after Nancy Pelosi visited the island The view from the deck of a Chinese missile destroyer taking part in military drills in the Taiwan Strait yesterday, as Beijing menaces its democratic neighbour Chinese anti-aircraft forces in its Eastern Theatre, which covers the Taiwan Strait, take part in live-firing exercises overnight Video shows Chinese military forces firing live ammunition in drills near to the coast of Taiwan overnight as tensions continue to escalate Pelosi stokes China's fury as she slams country for 'standing in the way of Taiwan' Nancy Pelosi has accused China of 'standing in the way' of Taiwan's participation in international affairs and cautioned that America's commitment to preserving democracy 'remains ironclad'. Pelosi also met with Taiwan's female president Tsai Ing-wen - telling her that the controversial visit shows the US 'will not abandon its commitment' to the island. The Democrat specifically called out China, whose leaders warned the trip was pushing Taiwan into a 'disastrous abyss,' by telling reporters: 'They didn't say anything when the men came.' Her remark referred to the surprise one-day visit made by bipartisan congressional delegation in April 2021. The group included Senators Lindsey Graham, Bob Menendez, Richard Burr, Ben Sasse and Rob Portman, as well as Rep. Ronny Jackson. Pelosi criticized Beijing for preventing Taiwan from 'participating and going to certain meetings' but noted the government would 'not stand in the way of people coming to Taiwan.' China furiously condemned the visit as Pelosi hailed self-ruled Taiwan as 'one of the freest societies in the world' in her speech to the parliament in Taipei. Advertisement Beijing's nationalist state-run tabloid Global Times said, citing military analysts, that the exercises were 'unprecedented' and that missiles would fly over Taiwan for the first time. 'This is the first time the PLA will launch live long-range artillery across' the Taiwan Strait, the newspaper said using the Chinese military's formal name, the People's Liberation Army. Taiwan has described the exercises as 'an irrational move to challenge the international order'. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen criticised the drills in a public video address, saying China 'destroyed the status quo and violated our sovereignty' with its 'irresponsible actions.' She urged China to be 'reasonable and restrained.' 'We are calm and not impulsive, we are reasonable and not provocative,' she said. 'But we will also be firm and not back down.' Tsai said Taiwan is in communication with its allies to ensure that things do not escalate further. The Group of Seven industrialised nations also condemned the drills, saying in a statement there was 'no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait'. Taiwan's Defense Ministry said its forces are on alert and monitoring the situation, while seeking to avoid escalating tensions. Civil defense drills were held last week and notices were placed on designated air raid shelters months ago. China's 'irrational behavior' intends to alter the status quo and disrupt regional peace and stability, the ministry said. 'The three service branches will combine efforts with all the people to jointly safeguard national security and territorial integrity' while adapting to the situation as it develops, the statement said. China's official Xinhua News Agency reported the exercises were joint operations focused on 'blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control.' Ma Chen-kun, a professor at Taiwan's National Defense University, said the drills were aimed at showing off the Chinese military's ability to deploy precision weapons to cut off Taiwan's links with the outside and facilitate the landing of troops. The announced drills are 'more complete' than previous exercises, he said. 'If the People's Liberation Army actually invades Taiwan in an all-out invasion, the concrete actions it will take, it's all in this particular exercise,' Ma said. 'The main thing is they will cut off Taiwan's links to the outside world, from their sea, they would suppress the coastal defense firepower,' he said. Taiwan's Maritime and Port Bureau issued warnings on Wednesday to ships to avoid the areas being used for the Chinese drills. Even a small disruption in global supply chains, already battered by the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, could prove costly. 'China's planned live-fire exercises are occurring in an incredibly busy waterway,' Nick Marro, the Economist Intelligence Unit's lead analyst for global trade, wrote in a note. 'The shutting down of these transport routes - even temporarily - has consequences not only for Taiwan, but also trade flows tied to Japan and South Korea.' But several shipping companies contacted by AFP said they were waiting to see the impact of the drills before rerouting. The ongoing typhoon season made it riskier to divert ships around the eastern coast of Taiwan through the Philippine Sea, some added. Others said they would stick to their schedules. 'We don't see any impact during (this) period and we don't have any plan on re-routing our vessels,' said Bonnie Huang, a spokesman for Maersk China. The drills have also hit air routes. Over the last two days, more than 400 flights were cancelled at major airports in Fujian, the Chinese province closest to Taiwan, signalling that the airspace could be used by the military. The Taiwanese cabinet said the drills would disrupt 18 international routes passing through its flight information region (FIR). Beijing has defended its military operations as 'necessary and just', pinning the blame for the escalation on the United States and its allies. 'In the current struggle surrounding Pelosi's Taiwan visit, the United States are the provocateurs, China is the victim,' foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular briefing Wednesday. A Chinese military source also told AFP the exercises would be staged 'in preparation for actual combat'. 'If the Taiwanese forces come into contact with the PLA on purpose and accidentally fire a gun, the PLA will take stern countermeasures, and all the consequences will be borne by the Taiwanese side,' the source said. Taiwan's 23 million people have long lived with the possibility of an invasion, but that threat has intensified under President Xi Jinping, China's most assertive ruler in a generation. The increased tensions come after a visit by senior US politician Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan earlier this week. Here she is pictured with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen yesterday Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a press conference yesterday that 'the United States are the provocateurs, China is the victim' China warns of 'criminal punishment' over Pelosi's 'brazen' Taiwan visit China has reacted with fury to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial trip to Taiwan that has inflamed tensions between the two superpowers. China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, branded the trip a 'complete farce' and repeated the much-used phrase by Chinese diplomacy that 'those who play with fire will perish by it.' Last week Chinese premier Xi Jinping had used the same expression in a phone call to US President Joe Biden. Early on Wednesday, the Chinese foreign ministry slammed Pelosi for 'brazenly' going ahead with the trip that was still unconfirmed as late as Monday, claiming it 'maliciously infringes on China's sovereignty and blatantly engages in political provocations.' 'It proves once again that some US politicians have become 'troublemakers' of China-US relations,' the statement said. China's Taiwan Affairs Office weighed in, threatening 'criminal punishment measures' targeted at 'die hard' Taiwanese supporters of independence. And late Tuesday night, after Pelosi's arrival, the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister summoned the US Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, to protest the visit. Advertisement Just 130 km wide at its narrowest point, the Taiwan Strait is a major international shipping channel and all that lies between democratic Taiwan and its giant authoritarian neighbour. It is now a flashpoint between the United States, Taiwan and a Chinese leadership keen to project strength ahead of a crucial ruling party meeting this autumn at which Xi is expected to be given an unprecedented third term. 'China's announced military exercises represent a clear escalation from the existing baseline of Chinese military activities around Taiwan and from the last Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995-1996,' said Amanda Hsiao, senior analyst for China at the International Crisis Group. 'Beijing is signalling that it rejects Taiwan's sovereignty.' Nevertheless, analysts have told AFP that China is not aiming to escalate the situation beyond its control - at least for now. 'Clearly they recognise that there are some limits to what they are willing to do,' Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, told AFP. And Titus Chen, an associate professor of political science at the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan, said: 'The last thing Xi wants is an accidental war.' Matthew Henderson, associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, told MailOnline: 'Xi has made so-called 're-unification' with Taiwan his chosen cause and hoped-for legacy as China's greatest leader since Mao. 'It would be as well to assume that in the run-up to the Party Congress, when he intends to secure permanent autocracy, Xi will be willing to take significantly greater risks than [Chinese governments of the past.]' While the risk of immediate conflict around Taiwan is low, Mr Henderson added that 'it would be an error to assume that the Xi regime is able to hold back from disastrous adventurism when it has painted itself into such a corner over the right to 'reunite' with Taiwan, whose people want nothing of the kind and which the liberal world must not allow.' He continued: 'Xi is already using the whole gamut of coercive state powers- including hostile military activity, to try to erode Taiwanese resolve and that of Taiwan's supporters. 'Xi could bring down the Taiwanese government by blockading the island which depends heavily on imported food and other staples. But confidence and resilience is growing, and Xi will not welcome this. 'We should not rule out the possibility of sudden, devastating missile attacks on the central government that would bring a rapid collapse of resistance. Then the rest of the world could protest and sanction to no avail. 'Xi could, if he felt compelled to do so by threats to his personal authority, authorise such an assault at very little notice indeed. He may be counting in this as an element in his current campaign of bluff and coercive pressures on a global front. 'There is still time for the concerted energies of the free world to make it clear to Xi that his agenda to annexe Taiwan and impose unaccountable totalitarian rule on 23 million citizens of a vibrant democracy will never be allowed to succeed.' A stepfather has admitted to sexually assaulting his ex-wife's daughter from when she was 12 years old, after the victim secretly recorded his confession. The 47-year-old man from Mackay in Queensland pleaded guilty to indecent treatment at Mackay District Court and was sentenced to 15 months jail, according to The Courier Mail. The victim recalled her trauma in an impact statement, saying, 'I will not let what he did to me haunt me for the rest of my life'. 'Nobody believed me and believed what I had gone through. Even my own mother didn't believe me.' A stepfather had admitted to indecently assaulting his ex-wife's daughter when she was a young teenager after she secretly recorded him confessing to his crimes (stock image) Her former stepfather assaulted her from when she was just 12 years old in mid-2013. The prosecution claimed in the first instance he stripped naked and joined his stepdaughter in the shower at his former Mackay residence. When she exited the shower and left the bathroom, he reportedly called her back into the bathroom to get him a towel as he stood naked in front of her. A day after the shower incident, he touched his stepdaughter's genitals while she was doing the splits in her sister's room, the court heard. The series of assaults continued, taking a toll on the girl's physical and mental health during her teenage years. She 'found it difficult to concentrate' when she was at school because she had anxiety about going home. She divulged details of the abuse to a school counsellor who noticed the girl had begun to self harm. In 2015, the girl's mother was contacted by the counsellor and police but thought her daughter was lying. The victim was forced to withdraw the allegations 'under the direction of her mother,' Crown prosecutor Caitlin Penfold claimed. The girl explained in her impact statement that she felt she 'couldn't talk to anyone at home' about the assaults and the abuse made her feel compelled to act out to 'unload the emotional burden'. She said her mother had called her a 'troublemaker' due to her consequent behaviour and 'threatened' to put her into foster care. The mother later split with the stepfather and started a relationship with another man. She left both of her daughters in the care of the stepfather between 2015 and 2017. The 47-year-old man from Mackay in Queensland fronted Mackay District Court (pictured) and was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment The victim said she felt 'abandoned' by this decision and revealed her mental health rapidly deteriorated during the years she was in his care. In 2021, she made the decision to speak to her stepfather over the phone to try and get a confession about the abuse while her boyfriend secretly recorded the conversation, the court heard. The prosecution claimed the stepfather admitted to the years of abuse and 'apologised for touching her and messing up her life'. He told her he'd 'never do it again' and the she was the only person he had done it to. He later admitted his assaults to the girl's mother. The man then handed himself into police, where he was arrested and charged. Judge Tony Moynihan said the abuse by the 47-year-old was a 'gross breach of trust'. He was sentenced him to 15 months jail, suspended for two years after serving three months. Alex Jones may have more than civil penalties to worry after he finishes his $150 million defamation case brought by the parents of a six-year-old slain at Sandy Hook Elementary school - he could be looking at prison time for perjury. Jones, who was sued for defamation by the family of Jesse Lewis for spreading false theories that the massacre was a hoax, claimed he had turned over all text and cell phone information pertinent to the case. But Mark Bankston, the lawyer for parents, revealed Jones's lawyer accidentally sent two years of the conspiracy theorist's text messages that appear to directly contradict his sworn testimony. 'I'd be very concerned if I were Mr. Jones's lawyers,' Dallas attorney William Dippel told DailyMail.com. The inconsistency in the testimony could serve to undermine Jones's credibility in the civil case, but legal experts say he exposed himself to a perjury charge that could carry up to 10 years in prison in Texas. Alex Jones appears to be dumbstruck by the revelation that his lawyer accidentally sent two years worth of text messages that the InforWars hosted had denied having Mark Bankston, the lawyer for the parents of a six-year-old Sandy Hook Massacre victim, dropped a bombshell that he had evidence that Alex Jones perjured himself Neil Heslin, father of Sandy Hook Victim Jesse Lewis, 6, said his family's life had been turned to a 'living hell' after Alex Jones spread conspiracy theories about the massacre F. Andino Reynal, pictured, looks over text messages that he had accidentally sent to the opposition lawyers in the defamation case against Alex Jones 'You were ordered to turn over any text messages regarding Sandy Hook, right?' Bankston asked a sweating, twitchy Jones on the witness stand. 'Yes,' Jones replied. 'And you said that you didn't have any, right?' Bankston continued. 'Not that we could find,' Jones said. 'You, in fact, told me in your sworn testimony that you had searched, right?' the lawyer said. Legal experts said Wednesday that it's pretty clear case of perjury. Jesse, 6, was one of the 26 victims shot and killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. His parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis have both testified against Jones in the trial 'I'd be very concerned if I were Mr. Jones's lawyers,' Dallas attorney William Dippel told DailyMail.com. There are two kinds of perjury in Texas, misdemeanor perjury which involved making a false statement under oath. Aggravated perjury, a felony, must happen during an official proceeding and must involved an issue that would effect the outcome of the case. 'Clearly this is an official proceeding, any courtroom is an official proceeding,' Dippel said. 'It sounded to me like it could be aggravated perjury because it had to do with whether or not he turned over discovery,' the Dallas lawyer said. There seems to be very little wiggle room, according to Dippel. 'It's hard for him to say that he didn't know he wasn't telling the truth because he had the judge reminding throughout his testimony,' Dippel said. 'It's difficult for him to say that he accidentally perjured himself. The case could be referred to the Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza in Austin, Texas where the trial is being held. Or the prosecutor could take up the case himself. 'This case has caught so much publicity, I would think that there's a heighten opportunity for the DA to take a look at this because it's right up in their face,' Dippel said. 'It will be in the paper tomorrow. There's one loophole for aggravated perjury, but it seems that Jones has missed the window to use it. 'There is a retraction defense,' Dippel said. 'If you retract what you said during the proceeding before anyone else points it out. I don't think that applies here at all.' Jones repeatedly claimed that the 2012 massacre, which left 20 students and six teachers dead, was a 'hoax' and had been 'staged' Judge Maya Guerra Gamble seemed to barely tolerate the internet host, shaking her head once at a printout of a composite image on InfoWars of her engulfed in flames. At one point the judge sent the jury out of the courtroom and strongly scolded Jones for telling the jury he had complied with pretrial evidence gathering even though he didn't and that he is bankrupt, which has not been determined. 'It seems absurd to instruct you again that you must tell the truth while you testify,' she said. 'Yet here I am.' The plaintiffs' attorneys were furious about Jones mentioning he is bankrupt, which they worry will taint the jury's decisions about damages. 'This is not your show,' Gamble told Jones. 'Your beliefs do not make something true. You are under oath.' Last September, the judge admonished Jones in her default judgment over his failure to turn over documents requested by the Sandy Hook families. A court in Connecticut issued a similar default judgment against Jones for the same reasons in a separate lawsuit brought by other Sandy Hook parents. Parents of the Sandy Hook victims did hear Jones admit on the witness stand reversing his previous statements that the slaughter of 20 children and six adults in the Connecticut school was a hoax. He told the court room that '100 percent' he believed the shooting took place. Jones was asked if he felt repeatedly claiming the shooting was a hoax was irresponsible, replying 'it was, especially since I've met the parents.' He claimed he was 'under a lot of pressure' at the time he claimed the slayings were a hoax, adding: 'I truly meant it when I said those statements. 'When I say something, I mean it, that I really could believe that it was totally staged, that point.' But the parents of Jesse Heslin, 6, who was among the 26 people killed in the 2012 attack at the school in Newtown, Connecticut, have said an apology will not be enough. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis said that Jones needed to be held accountable for repeatedly spreading falsehoods about the shooting, and are seeking at least $150million. The January 6 House Committee will subpoena Alex Jones' emails and text for any contact with Donald Trump after his lawyers mistakenly sent them to the lawyers of Sandy Hook parents. Sources told Rolling Stone that the committee is preparing to request the data from Jones' attorneys after it was revealed they sent emails and texts to Sandy Hook families despite swearing under oath that the messages didn't exist. The sources added that the committee began discussing how to get the messages within minutes after Sandy Hook lawyer Mark Bankston made the revelation in court on Wednesday. Bankston was also caught on hot mic speculating what the news of the messages would mean for Jones and the January 6 committee. 'There's going to be months of fallout from this,' he said. 'You know what no one's thought about yet? What happens when that phone goes to law enforcement?' 14,000 of the 16,044 families identified by the government as flood-affected families have recieved Rs.10,000 each into their bank accounts as compensation. (R. Pavan/DC) BHADRACHALAM: People of Bhadrachalam are a surprised lot with those affected by recent floods in Godavari River getting Rs. 10,000 each as compensation in keeping with the promise made by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao. When Telangana CM visited the temple town in the wake of recent floods, he promised Rs. 1,000 crore to save Bhadradri from recurrent floods, apart from Rs. 10,000 to each of the flood-affected families. People of the holy town, however, took these promises with a pinch of salt. This is because Chandrasekhar Rao had made several promises in the past when it comes to Bhadrachalam. For example, he had declared that Rs. 100 crore will be spent to develop Bhadradri as an ideal spiritual centre. But he remained silent with regard to implementation of the promise he made. Unlike past CMs, Chandrasekhar Rao has not been attending Sriramanavami celebrations as chief guest representing the state government. Offering Mutyala Thalambralu to the divine couple during Kalyanam has been an age-old practice since the Nizam times. Despite leaders of political parties and Bhadradri Parirakshana Samithi (BPS) making several representations regarding KCRs Rs. 100 crore promise, state government did not release even a single rupee. People of Bhadrachalam had no expectations when recent floods in Godavari affected 30,000 people living in 110 habitations of the district and the Chief Minister promised Rs. 1,000 crore to save the holy town from recurring floods, apart from Rs. 10,000 to each of the flood-affected families. Thus, it turned out to be a major surprise after officials identified 16,044 families as flood-affected and deposited Rs. 10,000 each into bank accounts of 14,000 families, stating that the process of paying compensation to the remaining victims is on. BPS convenor B. Sankar Reddy said, I am thankful to the CM for fulfilling the promise of paying Rs. 10,000 to each flood-affected family. KCR should also fulfil his two other promises of allotting Rs. 100 crore for development of the holy town and Rs.1,000 crore to save Bhadrachalam division from recurrent floods. Burgampahad mandal is worst affected by the floods where compensation has been paid to 7,108 affected families. Likewise, payments have been made to 2,289 families in Charla mandal, 1,936 in Dummugudem, 1,535 in Aswapuram, 1,431 in Bhadrachalam and 392 families in Manuguru mandal. Officials are ready to give compensation if any other affected family approaches them with full details. N. Sitamma of Kotha Colony in Bhadrachalam said she has received financial assistance of Rs. 10,000 into her account. A safer alternative to silicone breast implants has been unveiled and Aussie surgeons are at the forefront of the breakthrough. The world-first surgery was done at Brisbane's Metro North Health hospital, paving the way for women worldwide who require breast reconstructions. The procedure is based on decades of research with a clinical patient trial undertaken on Moana Staunton, who had her silicone implants removed and replaced with 3D printed 'bioresorbable scaffold' on June 23. It is made from a medical-grade material known as polycaprolactone-PCL, and was inserted in the breast area and injected with Ms Staunton's own fat cells. The scaffold will completely dissolve and metabolise, leaving patients with their natural tissues in the body two years after insertion, and was jointly made by Metro North and German medtech company BellaSeno. A safer alternative to silicone implants has been unveiled and Australian surgeons are at the forefront of the breakthrough (stock image) Director of the Comprehensive Breast Cancer Institute Owen Ung said Ms Staunton is one of many women experiencing breast implant illness with a number of unexplained symptoms believed to be linked to her implants. 'In Moana's case, she was experiencing dizziness and generally feeling unwell, and we'll often see patients who believe their silicone implants may be making them ill,' Prof Ung said. 'But it's not just those experiencing complications from their implants that will benefit, as we roll out our clinical trial in patients just like Moana.' Prof Ung said the research will be moving into further studies for those who have experienced cancer, 'changing the lives of women who require a mastectomy and have limited reconstructive options until now. 'We are still in phase one of clinical trials, but this work has hugely promising implications for women all over the world.' BellaSeno's co-founder and CEO Mohit Chhaya said the regenerative breast scaffold is a milestone in the group's plans to ultimately design and manufacture these implants in Australia. Common breast implant complications Breast pain and sagging Changes in nipple and breast sensation Breast asymmetry (one side is a different size or shape to the other) Displacement of implant Can cause cancer in very rare cases Bleeding Implant rupture Infection Skin rash Source: NSW Health Advertisement 'Our goal is to further advance novel products in the field of natural tissue and bone reconstruction, working with our key partners in Australia such as Metro North Health,' he said. 'This key milestone would not have been achievable without the outstanding efforts of the entire BellaSeno team and our scientific advisers over the past five years.' The clinical phase one trial with Metro North will recruit 15-20 eligible patients and will run until they each have received two years of follow up. The development follows the closer scrutiny of closer of doctors who perform breast implant surgery, in a bid to protect women after decades of dangerous methods and bungled operations. Robust new guidelines, issued by NSW Health in March, emerged as the Australian regulator launched a wide-ranging review of the billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry. 'We have seen class actions, breast implant illness and women dealing with ongoing pain,' Anand Deva, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Macquarie University, told Nine newspapers. 'These guidelines put a bottom line on safety. Doctors need to get proper, educated, informed consent from patients and make sure women have regular check-ups so problems are picked up early,' he said. 'Too many patients regret implants.' A 3D printed scaffold breast implant is seen during the announcement of a world-first surgery in Brisbane, paving the way for women worldwide who require breast reconstructions An investigation revealed last year that serious safety and hygiene breaches were also made in medical facilities that left women in extreme pain. Former president of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons Mark Ashton said it is vital that patients are made more aware of the potential risks. He said that the industry lacked transparency on the qualifications of medical practitioners and that anyone with a medical degree, a GP or dermatologist can say they are a cosmetic surgeon. Plastic surgery experts say women need more protection from unskilled medical practitioners 'There is no transparency that some doctors are just unskilled in certain types of operations. We hope guidelines like these will be implemented Australia-wide,' he said. 'Guidelines are helpful, but they aren't legally enforceable. We need AHPRA (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) to have real teeth to punish outliers in cosmetic care who are performing surgery outside the guidelines of accepted medical care.' The body of a man has been found in a submerged car near a busy Australian boat ramp. The grisly discovery was made in waters off the West Beach boat ramp in Adelaide, South Australia on Thursday morning. It is understood the man's body was pulled from a Mitsubishi Pajero, which was removed from the water at 9am. The body itself was removed from the scene just before 2pm on Thursday. It is understood the man's body was pulled from a Mitsubishi Pajero, which was removed from the water at 9am in Adelaide on Thursday The grisly discovery was made in waters off the West Beach boat ramp on Thursday morning after police responded to reports of two cars entering the water SA Police are investigating after receiving reports that two cars were seen on the beach and had driven into the sea 'sometime overnight'. Reports said both cars had New South Wales licence plates, the Advertiser reported. Western District CIB detectives, the state's major crime squad, a forensic response team and Water Operations Police are in attendance. Two cars were pulled from the ocean at Adelaide's West Beach on Thursday morning. One contained the body of an unidentified man Western District CIB detectives, the state's major c rime squad, a forensic response team and Water Operations Police are in attendance They have been seen conducting interviews in the nearby West Beach Caravan Park. Officers were called to the ramp at 6am on Thursday and made the grim find after a search. 'Water Operations Police attended the scene to assist with a search of the water and subsequently located the body of a man in the submerged vehicle,' a statement from SA police said. Police urged anyone who was at the boat ramp overnight or has information that might assist investigation to contact Crime Stoppers. The ramp, located west of Adelaide Airport, in the city's western suburbs, is currently closed to the public. The SA State Emergency Services are also in attendance on the beach. A restless baby has caused a scene in Parliament when a politician sparked uproar by appearing to make the little boy cry. Labor MP Lisa Chesters brought her 16-month-old son Charlie into the House of Representatives during a vote on the climate change bill on Thursday. Charlie wriggled around in his mum's lap, climbing on the benches either side and tugging at Ms Chesters' mask as they waited for a vote to be counted. Ms Chesters' neighbour Sam Rae tried to entertain the increasingly bored child but as Charlie tried to climb on to the bench in front his hand slipped and he fell slightly towards Mr Rae before his mum pulled him back up. As the little boy let out a loud cry, the rest of the chamber heckled Mr Rae with shouts of 'what did you do to him, Sam?' The mortified MP stood up with his hands raised to flee the scene, but this only increased the heckling as he was told to sit down. MPs are not allowed to leave their seats when a vote has started, which Mr Rae as a newly elected member may not have remembered. Speaker Milton Dick scolded Mr Rae, Charlie settled down quickly, and the vote on one of many proposed amendments continued smoothly. Charlie was earlier seen being read Thats Not My Elf by Early Childhood Education Minister Anne Aly, fittingly, while Ms Chesters held him still. 'How awesome is Minister for Early Childhood Education, Dr Anne Aly MP? Voting for Labors Climate Change Bill whilst reading to little Charlie,' Ms Chesters later tweeted. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised a more 'family friendly' Parliament with late nights curtailed and children welcome at some times. Charlie was earlier seen being read Thats Not My Elf by Early Childhood Education Minister Anne Aly (right), fittingly, while his mother Lisa Chesters (left) held him still The House was at the time voting on an amendment by Greens leader Adam Bandt to increase the climate bill's 43 per cent emissions reduction to 75 per cent. Mr Bandt argued the goal was too soft and would not make enough of an impact on climate change. 'If you think what we are seeing now is bad with the fires and the floods, Labors targets mean twice as worse,' he said. Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the government would not support the amendment as it took the 43 per cent target to the election and had a mandate for it. The bill eventually passed the House 89 votes to 55, without the Greens' amendment, and will go to the Senate later on Thursday. Advertisement Arizona police saved a grandma delivering DoorDash with her dog from her sinking SUV that was caught by floodwaters during a monsoon. Sue Teders, of Apache Junction, said she was stuck in the mud last Thursday when a flash flood pushed her car through trees and slammed it against a guardrail, where officers rushed to her rescue. Dramatic footage captured the moment the officers arrive at the scene, warning Teders that her car was going to be completely submerged by the waters as they break the SUV's windows and urge her to reach out for them. Teders desperately pleads for them to rescue her dog first, but the officers tell her they need to get her out first before the car sinks into the rushing floodwaters. 'Give me your hand. Come on,' the officer reaching for Teders desperately yells as the woman cries for her dog. 'Hurry, the water is coming.' The harrowing save in Arizona mimicked the countless rescues taking place in Kentucky, where unprecedented floodwaters have submerged whole streets and claimed at least 37 lives, including four children. Apache Junction Police officers pulled out grandmother Sue Teders from her sinking car after it was caught in a sudden monsoon last week. The officers desperately pleaded for Teders to reach out for them Teders was out delivering DoorDash with her pup in tow when a flash flood took control of her vehicle The officers were able to break the SUV's windows and pull Teders out of the sinking vehicle The grandmother pleaded with officers to rescue her dog, but they said they needed to ensure her safety first Teders (pictured) said she was grateful to the police department for getting to her quickly and saving her life Teders grandson, Connor Smith, said he came to her aid after her SUV was taken by the flood, but the dangerous waters made it impossible for him to reach her, AZ Family reported. Smith immediately called 911, and although the officers were able to rescue Teders, they were unable to get the dog out of the car before it was taken by the water. Teders said she was heartbroken over losing her 11-weeks old pup, Claire, who she decided to take with her during the DoorDash delivery. 'It was my turn to be her support, to get her out. And I couldn't,' Teders told AZ Family. 'So the guilt of that, first of all for taking her with me, which I very seldomly did, taking her with me and having that happen, I was telling my granddaughter, how do you get over that?' Since the rescue last week, neighbors have come out to help the family look for the missing dog in hopes that it survived, but there is still no sight of the pooch. Despite her grief, Teders said she was ultimately grateful to the Apache Junction Police Department for saving her. 'They were there as quickly as they could go and I know they had other rescues to deal with,' Teders said. 'Without them where would I have been? So thank you.' Officers arriving at the scene found Teder's SUV nearly completely submerged by the floodwaters The rescue workers desperately clung onto Teder's hands as they managed to pull her out Throughout the rescue, Teders was crying for officers to rescue her dog as well, but they could not locate her Teders said she was heartbroken over the loss of her pup, Claire, who neighbors are still trying to locate Teder's rescue was one of several conducted in the Apache Junction after a monsoon suddenly struck the area on Thursday, and it resembled the rescue of a 17-year-old Kentucky teen and her pup from their flooded home after the state suffered its deadliest storm in history. Quick-thinking Chloe Adams put her dog, Sandy, in a plastic container that could float before swimming to her neighbor's roof, where she waited five hours to be rescued amid the calamitous flash floods in Whitesburg, Kentucky. In an image posted online by her father, brave Chloe was seen sitting on the peak of a rooftop, soaked through, and completely encircled by unprecedented floodwater. She sat on the summit with her pup in the torrential rain for five hours before being saved on Thursday during Kentucky's most deadly flood in history. Speaking about the horrific ordeal, Chloe told DailyMail.com: 'When I realized I had to get out I instantly began to put a plan together to get me and my dog out safely. 'I tested to see if Sandy would be able to swim and when she couldn't I looked for floating objects that would safely get her across. 'I first tried her dog bed and that quickly sunk, so then I tried a plastic container but she was too heavy for that, then I found a couch cushion and put the plastic container on top allowing her to get across the waters safely.' Chloe's father Terry Adams wrote on social media: 'My daughter is safe and whole tonight. She saved her dog by putting her in a container that would float and then swam with her to a neighboring rooftop. 'She waited hours until she could be rescued. She is a hero. I love you Chloe. You are simply amazing. We lost everything todayeverything except what matters most.' The family have started a GoFundMe page after their lives were devastated by the flooding in eastern Kentucky. Chloe Adams, 17, is pictured sitting on her neighbor's rooftop with her dog Sandy, curled up in a plastic container, after the horrific flooding destroyed her home and she was forced to wait five hours to be rescued last Thursday Chloe said she 'prepared herself for death' in the moments she realized she had to evacuate her home and swim to a neighboring roof to safety. She has been hailed a hero for her brave actions, while the death toll in Kentucky rises to 37 A group of stranded people are rescued from the flood waters of the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Kentucky This comes as the death toll hit 37 in Kentucky, with hundreds of people displaced and temporarily housed and thousands still without power. Gov Bashear said that the number of fatalities is expected to increase Tuesday after telling a press conference: 'I know we found more bodies overnight and this number will grow.' He updated the nation this morning since the state is set to be hit with another intense weather front in the coming days - scorching temperatures. After days of catastrophic rainfall, he said: 'It's going to be really hot, and really dangerous.' Kentucky are now having to set up cooling centers because the state is bracing for high temperatures this week - fearing that there may not be enough drinking water available. So far, Kentucky Police have provided over 1,000 wellness checks for missing people desperately try and locate lost friends and family in the hardest-hit areas. TRAGIC SIBLINGS: From left to right - Maddison Noble, eight, Nevaeh Noble, four, Riley Jr., six, and Chance Noble, one and a half, all drowned in the Kentucky floods, according to their mother's cousin 'MULTIPLE FAMILIES WILL BE LOST': Lewis Ritchie, pulls a kayak through the water after delivering groceries to his father-in-law on July 28 outside Jackson, Kentucky DEADLY STORM: A house is seen half submerged by flood waters from the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Kentucky. The death toll, which is expected to continue rising, has now reached 19 DESTRUCTION: A car is submerged in flood waters along Right Beaver Creek, following a day of heavy rain in in Garrett, Kentucky Dramatic drone footage over Hindman, one of the hardest hit cities in eastern Kentucky, showed several homes and buildings almost completely submerged by the flooding, with only their rooftops of some visible. Last week, homes with families inside were 'completely swept away in the middle of the night, possibly while they were sleeping,' in the violent mega storms that have plagued the state. Raging thunderstorms pummeled the area, causing mudslides and 'years' worth of damage in what has been Kentucky's most devastating flood in history. Waterlocked, saturated ground continued to swell on Friday while rivers and creeks burst their banks with additional downpours over the weekend. It will take the hundreds of people whose homes have been submerged in the dire flooding years to rebuild and recover from this cataclysmic disaster, Beshear said on Friday. Devastating images show the catastrophic destruction the flooding has caused, with vehicles floating through streets which now resemble rivers and lakes. DEADLY FLOODS: A shocking aerial view of homes submerged under flood waters from the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Kentucky, on July 28 Reggie Ritchie comforts wife Della as they pause while clearing out their destroyed home destroyed by the flooding in Fisty, Kentucky on July 29 A rescue team evacuate residents from their homes in a boat through flooded streets, in Breathitt County, Ky. President Joe Biden declared a federal disaster to direct relief money to more than a dozen Kentucky counties. The flooding extended into western Virginia and southern West Virginia. Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency for six counties in West Virginia where the flooding downed trees, power outages and blocked roads. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin also made an emergency declaration, enabling officials to mobilize resources across the flooded southwest of the state. The deluge came two days after record rains around St. Louis dropped more than 12 inches and killed at least two people. Terrified residents posted alarming videos and photos of submerged cars and flooded basements on social media as the catastrophic flood levels rose. Emergency water rescue teams in Missouri were dispatched to assist with the historic flooding in the area - as many woke up to see their homes and vehicles submerged. John Ward, left, and a firefighter help Lynn Hartke wade through the flash floodwater on Hermitage Avenue in St. Louis last Tuesday following the severe flooding in the area Matthew Robinson holds onto his dog, Bebe, as he and his girlfriend Kimberly Tat are rescued from their home Vehicles were completely overrun with floodwater this morning after intense floods caused serious disruption Steven Bertke and his dog Roscoe are taken to dry land by St Louis firefighters who used a boat to rescue people from their flooded homes on Hermitage Avenue The rain came as unprecedented weather systems battered the entire nation in July, including record-breaking heat waves in New York and Pennsylvania as roughly 85 million Americans suffered through the scorching temperatures. Last month, heavy rain on mountain snow in Yellowstone National Park triggered historic flooding and the evacuation of more than 10,000 people. In both instances, the rain flooding far exceeded what forecasters predicted. Extreme rain events have become more common as climate change bakes the planet and alters weather patterns, according to scientists. That's a growing challenge for officials during disasters, because models used to predict storm impacts are in part based on past events and can't keep up with increasingly devastating flash floods and heat waves like those that have recently hit the Pacific Northwest and southern Plains. Suspected Chinese drones flew over Taiwan and hackers attacked its defense ministry website, authorities in Taipei said on Thursday, a day after a diplomatic visit from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outraged the Communist nation. China was to begin a series of military exercises around Taiwan on Thursday in response to Pelosi's visit, some of which were to take place within the island's 12-nautical-mile sea and air territory, according to the defense ministry in Taipei. That has never happened before and a senior ministry official described the potential move as 'amounting to a sea and air blockade of Taiwan'. Taiwanese army units fired flares at suspected Chinese drones that flew over the island nation's airspace after Pelosi' visit Nancy Pelosi, center, with New York Congressman Gregory Meeks, far right, just before they boarded her US Air Force jet in Taipei and left Taiwan following a historic visit that enraged China and escalated tensions between Beijing and Washington Taiwanese defense officials reported unidentified aircraft, probably drones flying over the Kinmen Islands China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, said on Thursday its differences with the self-ruled island were an internal affair. 'Our punishment of pro-Taiwan independence diehards, external forces is reasonable, lawful,' China's Taiwan Affairs Office said. China's Xinhua news agency has said the exercises, involving live fire drills, will take place in six areas which ring Taiwan and will begin at midnight. Taiwan is a set of islands located around 80 miles off the coast of mainland China, where the East China Sea meets the South China Sea Pelosi, the first woman speaker of the US House of Representatives, celebrated her Wednesday meeting with Taiwan's female president Tsai Ing-wen, saying it shows the US 'will not abandon its commitment' to the island A handout photo made available by the Taiwan Presidential office shows Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen (R) and US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bumping elbows during their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Taipei on Wednesday On Wednesday night, just hours after Pelosi left for South Korea, unidentified aircraft, probably drones, had flown above the area of the Kinmen islands, Taiwan's defense ministry said. Major General Chang Zone-sung of the army's Kinmen Defense Command told Reuters that the drones came in a pair and flew into the Kinmen area twice on Wednesday night, at around 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. 'We immediately fired flares to issue warnings and to drive them away. After that, they turned around. They came into our restricted area and that's why we dispersed them,' he said. The heavily fortified Kinmen islands are just off the southeastern coast of China, near the city of Xiamen. The defense ministry also said its website suffered cyber attacks and went offline temporarily late on Wednesday night, adding it was working closely with other authorities to enhance cyber security as tensions with China rise. Pelosi, the highest-level U.S. visitor to Taiwan in 25 years, praised its democracy and pledged American solidarity during her brief stopover, adding that Chinese anger could not stop world leaders from travelling there. China summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing and halted several agricultural imports from Taiwan. Security in the area around the U.S. Embassy in Beijing remained unusually tight on Thursday as it has been throughout this week. Although Chinese social media users have vented fury on Pelosi, there were no signs of significant protests or calls to boycott U.S. products. The view from the deck of a Chinese missile destroyer taking part in military drills in the Taiwan Strait today, as Beijing menaces its democratic neighbour A Chinese anti-aircraft crew open fire with a mobile gun during live-fire drills that began on Tuesday and will last until Thursday, when even larger sea and air drills begin Chinese anti-aircraft forces in its Eastern Theatre - which covers the Taiwan Strait - take part in live-fire exercises overnight in an effort to intimidate Taipei and the US A Xian H-6 Chinese bomber jet takes part in military drills in the skies near Taiwan today, as Beijing puts on an unprecedented show of force after Nancy Pelosi visited the island China has flown 27 fighters including six J-11 jets (pictured today) into Taiwan's air defense zone as Beijing continues to threaten Taipei over its ties with the US Chinese anti-aircraft batteries take part in military drills aimed at intimidating Taiwan Taiwan scrambled jets on Wednesday to warn away 27 Chinese aircraft in its air defense zone, the island's defense ministry said, adding that 22 of them crossed the median line separating the island from China. Pelosi arrived with a congressional delegation on her unannounced but closely watched visit late on Tuesday, defying China's repeated warnings and amid sharply deteriorating U.S.-Chinese relations. 'Our delegation came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear that we will not abandon Taiwan,' Pelosi told Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, who Beijing suspects of pushing for formal independence - a red line for China. 'Now, more than ever, America's solidarity with Taiwan is crucial, and that's the message we are bringing here today.' China considers Taiwan part of its territory and has never renounced using force to bring it under its control. The United States and the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven nations warned China against using the visit as a pretext for military action against Taiwan. 'Sadly, Taiwan has been prevented from participating in global meetings, most recently the World Health Organization, because of objections by the Chinese Communist Party,' Pelosi said in statement issued after her departure. 'While they may prevent Taiwan from sending its leaders to global forums, they cannot prevent world leaders or anyone from travelling to Taiwan to pay respect to its flourishing democracy, to highlight its many successes and to reaffirm our commitment to continued collaboration,' Pelosi added. Three people in the same family were shot dead in a horrific mass shooting linked to a property dispute as police send out an urgent warning that the gunman is still on the loose. The tragic incident unfolded on Thursday at about 9am at a rural property in the small mining town of Bogie, about 40km west of Bowen in the Whitsundays region of north Queensland. Just over 200 people live in the community. Police said the investigation is still in the early stages and that the identity of the gunman is yet known. A fourth victim of the attack was also shot but the man in his 30s miraculously survived but was airlifted to Mackay Hospital in a critical condition suffering a gunshot wound to the stomach. All four victims are members of the same family. Locals say it's not the first time there's been an issue between those involved. It's believed the incident was linked to a property dispute over boundary lines between the owners of two properties in the area. Police said the investigation is still in the early stages and that the identity of the gunman is not yet known. Three people are dead while a gunman remains at large in North Queensland. A fourth person was also shot in the stomach and was airlifted to hospital in a critical condition 'We are actively searching the area and commencing our investigations into what the circumstances were and how it came to be that these people had been shot,' Acting Superintendent Tom Armitt told reporters. 'At this stage, we are at very, very early stages of this investigation. We do not know who is responsible.' Police are yet to reveal the genders and ages of the deceased victims. The injured man had been able to make his way to another home - which police said was 'many, many kilometres away' from where the shooting on a remote property took place - and contacted the authorities. He was flown to Mackay Base Hospital to undergo emergency surgery and is now in intensive care in a serious but stable condition. 'He was able to tell police that he had been shot and three others (were) also shot,' Inspector Armitt said. 'We believe the male was able to extract himself from the area. He was fleeing from the scene.' 'Originally, when the male person spoke to us, he was obviously in a very distressed state and there was some confusion about where the shooting had occurred. 'We were able to conduct searches ourselves based on the scant information that was provided and we had to update the location as to where the incident occurred based on the crime scene that we located.' A rescue helicopter has been sent to Bogie in rural Queensland after four people were injured in a shooting Four people were injured in a shooting in Bogie, near Bowen in north Queensland After searching the area where the injured man was found, police deemed the location safe 'and a further exclusion zone was established at a property along Shannonvale Road where the shooting is believed to have occurred'. The shooting took place on a sprawling cattle property which is 'rural, remote, very hilly and heavily forested'. 'It has taken a number of hours for police to search and clear the area, however we have declared a crime scene in the remote rural location where we believe we have located three deceased persons,' Inspector Armitt said. Neighbours say the property was sold last year to a young family and that there was an ongoing dispute with a neighbouring property owner over boundary lines. An emergency declaration for the area was issued at around 11.30am. 'Investigations remain ongoing into the circumstances leading up to the shooting,' the police said. 'Police are currently conducting emergency operations in the area and requesting members of the public and aircraft to not attend the declared location.' Police are clearing the 'extensive' property and will remain in place 'as long as we need to do our job', Acting Superintendent Armitt said. Though there are no other people living in the exclusion zone, the police have urged everyone to avoid the area. A woman who works on Peter Delamothe Road, which connects Bogie to Bowen, earlier told Daily Mail Australia she saw several police cars racing towards scene of the shooting. 'I saw at least three police cars while I was outside and heard a few more sirens after that,' she said. 'It's not usually what you see. I thought straight away that something bad had happened.' The tragedy has rocked the local community. 'It's come as a big shock for that particular area and it's certainly very concerning,' Burdekin state MP Dale Last said. Whitsunday Regional Councillor Jan Clifford added: 'To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened in the Whitsunday region before. 'We are all deeply saddened by the tragedy.' Cr Clifford said the community of Bogie - with a population of 207, according to the latest census data - was more of a community than a township. 'It's a little village. Everyone will know everyone ... It's just awful.' It is understood doctors and nurses with blood supplies and other medical resources were sent from Bowen Hospital to Collinsville Hospital - the closest facility to the shooting - to assist. Three people have been confirmed deceased following a shooting at a rural property in Bogie near Collinsville this morning. https://t.co/6iYwYfktIc pic.twitter.com/smwHlVn7y5 Queensland Police (@QldPolice) August 4, 2022 Up to eight ambulances were dispatched from as far as Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville. Elly Colls, who works at Opal Ridge Motel, told the Guardian she learned of the incident at about 11am when someone rang to let them know there had been 'a shooting at the Bogie'. 'Better lock up the house,' she said. 'Cause I don't think (they) found him.' Other locals described the shooting as 'unusual' and 'strange' for the usually quiet area. 'We're traditional owners of this land around Collinsville. I wouldn't have thought it could happen here. It's a small town,' one woman told The Courier Mail. Another told AAP: 'The whole town is a bit rattled that something like that could happen here.' 'We don't know the full story, but we've definitely heard about it. It's a small town, everyone knows everyone. 'But out in 'the boge'? Well, it's tiny.' The View's Joy Behar has spoken of the moment she suffered a health scare in the 1970s when she had an ectopic pregnancy which very nearly killed her. During Wednesday's broadcast, Behar explained how she came close to dying were she not have been afforded the right to have an abortion to terminate her pregnancy which had gone horribly wrong. 'In 1979, I had an ectopic pregnancy and I almost died,' she began. 'The doctor the next day said we almost lost you,' Behar said. Longtime host of talk show The View, Joy Behar, said she 'almost died' from an ectopic pregnancy on Wednesday's episode The discussion came about as the program discussed the news of how voters in Kansas turned out to protect abortion rights in the state during Tuesday night's primary. 'One of the things that I worry about is you know, people like Herschel Walker who's running, he supports abortion bans without any exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother,' Behar said, outlining Georgia Senate Republican candidate, Walker's hardline views. Walker is known to support total abortion bans with no exceptions for medical emergencies, rape or incest. 'The fetus is growing in the fallopian tube, and there is nowhere to go from that. You can't give birth from your fallopian tube, and the fetus will not grow,' Behar detailed. Behar criticized Georgia Senate Republican candidate, Herschel Walker's hardline views. Walker is known to support total abortion bans with no exceptions for medical emergencies, rape or incest The heated issue of abortion was discussed on The View on Wednesday Thousands of protesters marched in the streets in various US cities after the Supreme Court decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision on June 24, 2022 'It just grows, but not to full term. So it will grow just enough to make the tube burst, which what happens then is that you bleed internally and then you die. 'They rushed me to the hospital. The doctor the next day said we almost lost you,' Behar explained. 'I was in a situation where I could go to the hospital and they took care of it there. I'm thinking, what are these people thinking about when they talk about the health of the mother? Herschel Walker, people like that cannot be in positions of power,' she concluded. An ectopic pregnancy is a serious medical emergency that can be life-threatening and occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus. It is the leading cause of death in the first trimester of pregnancy. Most often, it occurs in one of the fallopian tubes but it can also occur in other areas of the body, like on an ovary or in the abdominal cavity. The fertilized egg cannot survive outside the uterus and, if left untreated, the 'growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding.' Co-host Whoopi Goldberg then chimed in adding how she believed God supports abortion during a heated debated that involved recently returned conservative co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck. Goldberg, 66, who is known for her stronghold opinions, didn't hold back on her religious beliefs insinuating that God supports abortion because Americans have the right to choose. 'God made us smart enough to know when it wasn't going to work for us. That's the beauty of giving us freedom of choice,' Goldberg said. Hasselbeck, 45, who has returned as the token Republican among the slew of liberal hosts, immediately disagreed, with a flat-out 'No.' Goldberg continued to talk, saying that her 'relationship with God is always choppy' which showed Hasselbeck holding back a laugh before informing the controversial co-host that she was God's 'favorite.' 'I also know that God made me smart enough to know that if there are alternatives out there that can work for me, I will investigate them. But I also know God said do unto others as you would have them do unto you [and] I will not make that decision for anybody,' she slammed. Only moments earlier, Hasselbeck said she believed that women were only getting 'half the information' and that the US was failing to provide pregnant women with all the options available to them. Whoopi Goldberg, 66, said God supports abortion during a heated debated on The View. 'God made us smart enough to know when it wasn't going to work for us. That's the beauty of giving us freedom of choice,' Goldberg said Elizabeth Hasselbeck, 45, who just recently returned to the show, proudly held up a towel that read 'I'd agree with you, but then we would both be wrong' as Goldberg continued to talk. The returning host repeated suggested to viewers to use 'agencies' to help 'create a birth plan and match you with an adoptive family' rather than choosing an abortion She informed viewers she believes the best option is to 'look for the non-profits' that 'help you create a birth plan and match you with an adoptive family' rather than choosing an abortion. 'That option's real,' she lamented. 'I think that lives have a precious value on them.' Goldberg agreed, stating that 'God doesn't make mistakes,' but that choice is important. Hasselbeck, who left the show three years ago, was finally given her moment to pull out a dish towel she had been hiding under the table, which stated: 'I'd agree with you, but then we would both be wrong.' The newly returned host seemed pleased with herself as she threw the decorative item onto the table. 'I say this with love in my heart,' Goldberg started. 'I don't ever think that I can make any decision for you and your family that you are not smart enough to make for yourself.' Kansans voted Tuesday to preserve abortion rights in the first post-Roe v. Wade election test. Several other states are lining up to have citizen vote on abortion rights in upcoming elections Just as the commercial break was about to cut off Goldberg, she got her dig in. 'Just before we go, no one at this table is not pro-life. I just want to make sure we all know that,' she smirked as she insinuated that pro-choice people were not anti-life. 'Nobody is happy about going to get an abortion. That's not pro-life, it's not fun.' As the music played in the background as producer tried to quiet the ladies into an ad break, Hasselbeck spoke again, saying: 'It's a hard, hard decision but that life has a plan and a purpose, and there are absolutely agencies out there that will help you keep that baby alive.' Goldberg insinuated again that 'everyone has the right to their options.' Another co-host, Sara Haines, 44, reiterated that she wasn't 'murdering a baby' if she chose an option, but rather, 'choosing to do the right thing for my life.' She also said 'there's a chance that each one of us could be wrong' and said the 'maker' will decide if they were on 'judgement day.' Hasselbeck wasn't alone at the table on her view of abortion being 'murder,' as Sunny Hostin agreed, however, the latter still believed Americans needed the right to choose. Hasselbeck continuously implored the other hosts that there were 'agencies out there,' but the other hosts didn't seem to buy it due to the high number of children in the system. 'Some people don't adopt certain types of babies,' Haines said, although she didn't specify what she meant by 'certain types.' She went on to say that the 'system fails them.' Many women have protested the overturn of Roe v. Wade as several conservative states threaten to pull women's right to choose When pressed about the importance of the mother's life, Hasselbeck questioned whether or not there had a be a choice at all. Goldberg snappily replied as the segment closed: 'Sometimes you do, just like you have to choose this conversation or the commercial.' The ladies were on the topic of abortion - a hot-button issue since the controversial Roe v. Wade overturn by the Supreme Court - after Kansas citizens voted to protect abortion rights in the state. Kansas voters sent a resounding message on Tuesday that they wanted to protect a woman's right to an abortion but they are not the only Americans who will be able to cast ballots on the hot-button issue. By a landslide, roughly a 20-point margin, Kansans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have empowered state lawmakers to restrict or ban abortions in the state of nearly 3 million people. People cheer at a watch party in Overland Park, Kansas, on Tuesday after learning that voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed the Legislature to restrict or ban abortion Even voters in many rural, conservative areas of Kansas voted against the proposal, in what was a big victory for pro-choice groups after weeks in which many southern and Midwest states restricted or banned the procedure. Abortion was automatically outlawed in 18 US states as soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned, thanks to specially-devised 'trigger laws' and historic bans that were automatically reenacted after June's ruling. The ruling has led a number of states to ban the procedure. But in Kansas voters decided to protect abortion rights in the state with 58.8 percent backing the protecting of abortion rights. Abortion rights are likely to be a key issue in this fall's midterm elections. A man literally caught with his pants down claims he exposed himself to get the attention of passing motorists. The public masturbator was released from custody only days earlier for exposing himself in front of children at a Queensland beach. Police were conducting patrols along Fairfield Road, Yeronga when they saw Shane Bernard James Tynan exposing himself to traffic at about 2am on July 31, the Brisbane Magistrates court heard on Wednesday. Police prosecutor Sergeant David Parfitt said the 65-year old man ran into Hyde Road Park when he saw police and was taken into custody a short time later. Shane Tynan, 65, claims he was sleepwalking after being caught exposing himself to oncoming traffic 'The defendant stated that he had Alzheimer's and was trying to get the attention of other motorists to help him and that's why he had his pants off. Police were unable to find his pants,' Sgt Parfitt said. Tynan pleaded guilty to aggravated wilful exposure. His lawyer, Patrick O'Donnell, said his client was in fact sleepwalking at the time and doesn't remember doing it. 'He instructs that he's very remorseful and that he was sleepwalking at the time, he doesn't have any recollection,' Mr O'Donnell said. The court heard Tynan was sentenced to 12 months jail in 2021 for an indecent act in a public place where he exposed his genitals in front of children at the Streets Beach in the South Bank Parklands. Magistrate Mark Nolan said the elderly man's behaviour was 'disgusting' and if it continued he will spend longer time behind bars. 'There is no place in a civilised society for people such as yourself to take their pants off and masturbate in front of other people,' said Magistrate Nolan. Tynan was sentenced to three months behind bars wholly suspended for a year. South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol has come under fire from domestic commentators for what is seen as a 'snub' of visiting US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after it emerged the president would not meet her as he is on holiday. The pair today shared a 40-minute phone call instead, according to Yoon's office, who said the president declared to Pelosi that her planned trip to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating his nation from the North was seen as 'a sign of strong deterrence between South Korea and the US against North Korea'. Pelosi will visit the heavily fortified DMZ where North and South Korean forces stand face-to-face after she agreed to support Seoul's efforts to denuclearize Pyongyang. But local media and lawmakers from Yoon's party have pointed to the fact that no official delegation was sent to greet Pelosi, even as Yoon was photographed attending a play in central Seoul the same night where he shared dinner with the actors. 'What should we make of the fact that [Yoon] is watching a play and have a gathering [with the actors] but not meeting the US House Speaker?' a former lawmaker from Yoon's People's Power party, Yoo Seung-min, wrote on Facebook Thursday. 'Speaker Pelosi is visiting the (DMZ) today. It is undesirable to think that the leader of our ally's parliament visits the forefront of our security but there won't be any meetings between our president and her.' Their anger comes as Biden administration officials told Bloomberg that the White House was fuming over Pelosi's unannounced visit to Taiwan. They said senior members of the National Security Council and State Department officials tried to discourage her from the visit but she refused to call off the trip which enraged Beijing. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi poses with South Korean National Assembly speaker Kim Jin-pyo before their meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul on Thursday Pelosi, who arrived in Seoul late Wednesday after her high-profile trip to Taiwan , has planned a visit to the border with the nuclear-armed North. She ics pictured waving to media after a joint press announcement with South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo on Thursday U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, front, center left, and South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo, center right, inspect an honor guard upon her arrival at the National Assembly in Seoul on Thursday Nancy Pelosi speaks during a joint press conference on Thursday with South Korea's National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo Pelosi and South Korea's National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo reached an agreement Thursday to achieve 'practical denuclearization and peace' after sharing concerns that 'North Korea's level of threat is heightening.' The alliance between the two nations comes as North Korea issued a stark warning it would 'never tolerate' the United States' criticism of the its nuclear program. The pariah state slammed Washington the 'kingpin of nuclear proliferation' and said it would not allow any encroachment of its sovereign rights. Pelosi would be the highest-ranking US official to visit the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom since then-president Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un there in 2019. 'Both sides expressed concern over the grave situation in which North Korea's level of threat is heightening,' Kim said, reading a joint press statement following the meeting earlier today. 'We agreed to support the efforts of the two governments to achieve practical denuclearization and peace through international cooperation and diplomatic dialogue, based on the strong and extended deterrence against the North.' To better support their expanding ties, the speakers reportedly agreed on to review a resolution that would mark the 70th anniversary of the two countries. Parliamentary leaders of S. Korea, U.S. meet South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo (R) and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed on Thursday to support efforts to maintain a strong deterrence against North Korea and achieve its denuclearization Pelosi (left) met with Kim Jin-pyo (right) and other senior members of parliament Thursday to discuss topics including regional security and economic cooperation US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks with South Korean National Assembly speaker Kim Jin-pyo during their meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul on Thursday Later on Thursday, Pelosi plans to visit the Joint Security Area (pictured on July 19) near the heavily fortified inter-Korean border, patrolled together by American-led UN Command and North Korea Nancy Pelosi is pictured with US Embassy in Seoul's US Marine Detachment Later on Thursday, Pelosi plans to visit the Joint Security Area near the heavily fortified inter-Korean border, patrolled together by American-led UN Command and North Korea, a South Korean official confirmed. An official at Yoon's office said it welcomes Pelosi and wishes her smooth travel, but did not comment on those reports. 'Our position on her visit to Taiwan is that we will continue close communications with other countries based on the view that maintaining regional peace and stability via dialogue and cooperation is important,' the official told reporters. Yoon took office in May, vowing to boost ties with the US, including ramping up joint military drills that always infuriate North Korea. Any statement critical of North Korea by Pelosi during her visit to the DMZ is certain to draw a furious response from Pyongyang. On Wednesday, the North's Foreign Ministry slammed the US over her Taiwan trip, saying that 'the current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the U.S. in internal affairs of other countries.' Pelosi had defied repeated Chinese warnings to visit the self-ruled island nation, which Beijing considers its territory and had said it would consider her trip a major provocation. Beijing has since announced massive military drills around the island. China is North Korea's key ally and trade partner. White House sources meanwhile have revealed that the visit to Taiwan angered senior officials in the Biden administration, who accused Pelosi of using the trip as a 'capstone for her career' at a moment of highly delicate relations with Beijing, according to Bloomberg. US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said the Biden administration wanted to avoid any escalation of tensions with Beijing and scrambled to keep all lines of communication open as Pelosi pressed on with the visit, while various attempts at persuading her to abandon the incendiary trip were ignored. The White House has thus far declined to say whether the president personally supported the speaker's trip. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, right, and U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, stand together prior to their bilateral meeting at the presidential office, August 3, 2022 in Taipei, Taiwan US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her 5-member congress delegation depart Taipei Songshan Airport to South Korea after Pelosi's visit within her Pacific tour in Taipei, Taiwan on August 3, 2022 The White House has thus far declined to say whether the president personally supported the speaker's trip, though sources in the Biden administration told Bloomberg Pelosi was repeatedly urged not to visit Taiwan Back in 2019, Pelosi called for then-president Trump to take action to denuclearize North Korea when he visited the DMZ between the North and the South. 'Nuclear nonproliferation is a pillar of America's national security, and serious diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal on the Korean peninsula must be respected and supported,' she wrote at the time. 'Sadly, it has taken President Trump two summits to figure out that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is not committed to denuclearization. Disturbingly, the IAEA this week reported indications of ongoing nuclear weapons production-related activities by North Korea at the Yongbyon complex. She urged Trump to brief Congress on the North Korea summit, citing 'national security' concerns, and provide details on the 'status of North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.' 'As Members of Congress, we must honor our responsibility to ensure that our government shows smart, strong, and strategic leadership to keep the American people and our allies safe,' Pelosi concluded. Pelosi would be the highest-ranking US official to visit the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom since then-president Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un there in 2019. Trump and Kim Jong-Un are pictured during the meeting Donald Trump, left, meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the North Korean side of the border at the village of Panmunjom in Demilitarized Zone, on June 30, 2019 Pelosi had called for Trump to take action to denuclearize North Korea when he visited the border in 2019. Kin Jong-Un is pictured with North Korean military members on July 22, 2022 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, third from left, is escorted by South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo, front right, upon her arrival at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea on Thursday U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi meets with South Korea's National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo in Seoul, South Korea on Thursday Nancy Pelosi is pictured during her visit to South Korea's Parliament on Thursday North Korea has conducted missile tests at an unprecedented pace this year and international experts believe it is readying its seventh nuclear test, the first since 2017. The North's permanent mission to the United Nations issued the statement on Wednesday as diplomats gathered in New York for a month-long UN conference to review the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during the meeting the North 'continues to expand its unlawful nuclear program' and 'is preparing to conduct its seventh nuclear test.' 'It is the peak of busy blaming that the United States alleges somebody's 'nuclear threats' given the fact that it is the kingpin of nuclear proliferation,' North Korea said in the statement. The North also said it pulled out of the non-proliferation treaty a long time ago, so nobody had the right to impinge on the country's right to self-defense. South Korean protesters shout slogans and hold banners reading 'Stop Ulchi Freedo Shield (UFS)' during a rally against Nancy Pelosi's visit and Joint military exercises Ulchi Freedom Shield between the US and South Korea on Thursday South Korean policemen stand guard as a protester holds a placard during a rally against US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's visit on Thursday South Korean protesters wearing masks of US President Joe Biden (L) and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (R) perform during a rally Thursday against Nancy Pelosi's visit and Joint military exercises Ulchi Freedom Shield between the US and South Korea, 'We will never tolerate any attempt by the US and its servile forces to groundlessly accuse our State and encroach upon our sovereign rights and national interests,' the North said in its statement. Last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country was ready to mobilize its nuclear war deterrent and counter any US military clash. South Korea and the DMZ between the North and South is the fourth stop in Pelosi's Asia tour, following Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. Pelosi is scheduled to fly to Japan later on Thursday for the final leg of her Asia trip. The search is underway to locate a man who allegedly threatened a teacher at a school in Sydney's west. NSW Police said the incident took place at a school on Percy Street, Auburn just after 2.30pm on July 27. The offender is accused of intimidating and threatening the teacher before fleeing the scene. Police believe the man pictured can assist them with inquiries NSW Police said the incident took place at a school on Percy Street in Auburn around 2.35pm on July 27 Officers from Auburn Police arrived at the school and an investigation has been running for a week. Images of a man police want to speak to have now been released. He is described as being of Mediterranean/Middle Eastern appearance, of medium build, with black hair, dark eyes and some facial scarring. The man was wearing a maroon jumper, grey tracksuit pants with black gloves and sneakers. Anyone with information is being urged to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. Carrying the party flag, BJP state president Bandi Sanjay Kumar leads a large following on day two of the third phase of his Praja Sangrama Yatra on Wednesday. DC HYDERABAD: The byelection to the Munugode Assembly seat, when it takes place, will not just be about that one constituency but the future of Telangana. When the BJP wins this bypoll, will Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao learn the lesson that the state is tired of the TRS and its misgovernance, Telangana BJP president Bandi Sanjay Kumar said on Wednesday. He also criticised state Congress president A. Revanth Reddy, saying that the Congress leader has been assured by Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao that the cash-for-vote case in which the TPCC is the prime accused, will not be pursued. This was the reason why Revanth Reddy was going hammer and tongs at the BJP. Addressing a meeting at Bhongir in the evening on the second day of the third phase of his Praja Sangrama Yatra, Sanjay said there will be no stopping the BJP from coming to power in Telangana if 80 per cent of the population who are Hindus decide to join forces against the TRS, which is in cahoots with the AIMIM. Sanjay, however, made it clear that the BJP was not against any religion. Where KCR is hand in glove with the MIM which insults Hindu deities we will not stay silent and will bend their necks. If all the Hindus unite, there is no reason why the BJP cannot defeat the TRS in the Assembly elections, he said. Sanjay started the second day of his padayatra from Basvapur and reached Bhongir in the evening. He said the Cheneta Bima announcement was forced out from the TRS government only because of his Praja Sangrama Yatra, and added that none of the promises made by the Chief Minister have been kept, be it financial aid under Kalyana Laxmi, Shaadi Mubaarak schemes, giving two-bedroom houses for the poor, or pensions for the poor and the aged. He also said the Bhongir municipality had been left to its device and the TRS government did not take up any development works, but this will change and the town will be fully developed once the BJP comes to power in the state. An official consumer watchdog has warned people not to do business with a company selling water filters after receiving hundreds of complaints about goods not being sent, wrong orders arriving and difficulty in getting refunds. NSW Fair Trading Executive Director Valerie Griswold advised consumers not to buy from from Tru Water, which sells water filtration systems and purification tablets primarily through two websites: truwater.com.au and truwater.co.nz. Ms Griswold said that since April 2020 Fair Trading received 355 complaints and 164 enquiries concerning the company and its websites. An image from the Tru Water website with NSW Fair Trading issuing a warning to consumers not to deal with the company 'Consumers complain about delayed and partial delivery of orders, products substituted without customer consent, and misrepresentation of goods advertised on the website,' Ms Grisworld said. On the productreview.com.au website the company averages a one-star rating with almost unanimous scathing feedback. 'What a dreadful experience,' one reviewer wrote. 'Placed an order for an item, was told 5-10 days to ship. A month later nothing.' Tru Water operates websites with Australian and NZ domain names but NSW Fair Trading has warned people to steer clear of them Orders not arriving was a common complaint. 'I ordered two water filter candles three months ago from this company and after following up multiple times, my order is still "processing",' a website user wrote. 'I ordered two water filter candles three months ago from this company and after following up multiple times, my order is still "processing",' a website user wrote. "The first time I followed up my order (after waiting two months) the company was apologetic and said they had had a glitch and actually not processed my order from their end, but that I could expect the order to now be shipped in the next five days. Tru Water customers have taken to online review websites to complain about products not arriving 'That was a month ago, and after following up again, I still have not heard back and my order has still has not been shipped. I asked the company for a refund for my $84 dollars which has gone unanswered. Very disappointed.' Some customers say the products they have received are not the ones they ordered through the website Others complained they did not get the product they ordered 'Bought water filter listed as in stock and had no shipping update for 2 weeks,' another reviewer wrote. A number of customers have complained that they had trouble getting their money back 'Followed up and finally received a "compatible" product rather than the genuine water filter after a month. Go elsewhere.' Tru Water has been contacted for comment. Calling the numbers advertised on the company's website resulted in getting an automated message that the 'number is not connected'. Tru Water sells a number of water filtration and purification products but customers have complained they haven't received what was advertised Ms Griswold urged anyone who was unsatisfied in their dealings with Tru Water to contact NSW Fair Trading by calling call 13 32 20 or using their website. Primary school students have been temporarily banned from stand-up paddle boarding while on school camps after seven children were washed out to sea. WA Education Department director-general Lisa Rodgers enforced the ban two weeks ago following the 'terrifying incident' involving Year Six students and one teacher last December. The group from Melville Primary School were paddle boarding while on a school camp at Point Peron cove in Rockingham, Perth, when they were blown off course. Primary school students in WA have been temporarily banned from stand-up paddle boarding while on school camps The ban comes after seven Year Six students were washed out to sea while paddle boarding at Point Peron cove (above) last December Fortunately, all of them were rescued and only one child was treated for minor injuries. However, the incident was enough to spark concern from Ms Rodgers. She said although there have been no other paddle boarding incidents, 'safety is my priority'. 'We have also strengthened the safety requirements of paddling activities for all school students, and further consideration is being made to reduce any risks,' she added. WA Education Department director-general Lisa Rodgers (above) said 'safety is my priority' when considering the ban, despite no other paddle boarding incidents being reported 'We want students to develop skills and confidence in water-based activities, but this needs to be done in a safe and age-appropriate way.' The temporary ban on paddle boarding will remain in place until the Education Department can review its current policy. Primary school-aged students are still allowed to participate in 'seated paddling activities' on other floatation devices but only in 'calm water environments', like swimming pools. This is the breathtaking moment a humpback whale leapt out of the water at Boston Harbor. Stunned onlookers filmed the gigantic sea mammal at Massachusetts Bay, between Deer Island and Long Island, as it made an incredible splash Monday morning. Fishermen Joe Fabiano and Paula Brogna saw the huge humpback swimming just feet away from their small boat just after 5am. Fisherman Fabiano's video shows the immense whale (left and right) leaping out of the water as the iconic Boston skyline is visible not too far away in the background Video shows the whale making the jump once, with Boston's iconic skyline clear in the background, before taking another leap much closer to the fishing boat minutes later. Small for a humpback, the adopted Bostonite is thought to be one of several adolescent whales seeking fish in Massachusetts Bay over the past few weeks. But none have been filmed getting quite so close to the city. Fabiano told Fox News: 'Ive lived in Winthrop my whole life and boating and fishing out in that area many times. A second, much closer jump was filmed by stunned onlookers. The apparently juvenile humpback made its way above the water's surface just a few feet from the pair's boat 'Not once have I [seen] a whale, so it was pretty amazing to me.' Brogna told NBC10: 'I was like, "Oh my God."' Monday's sighting follows the striking moment a humpback whale was seen smashing into a fishing boat at Plymouth Harbor, smashing its skylight while terrified passengers were onboard. Eyewitness Ryder Pankhurst said of the incident late last month: 'It was insane. The guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's all. 'Pops up, bang! Right on the bow of the guy's boat.' Thankfully, none of the passengers inside the vessel were hurt. 'If someone was on the bow of that boat, this really could have been a tragic story,' Plymouth Harbormaster Chad Hunter told CBS News Boston. Marine biologists believe that whales and dolphins jump out of water, making splashes that can be heard by fellow mammals miles away, as a form of communication. But the National Marine Fisheries Service advises mariners to stay at least 100ft from whales for their own safety. A man has been brutally mauled to death by his own dogs in New Zealand - before authorities were forced to shoot one of the animals dead. The 69-year-old was walking through his property in a remote area in Hokianga in the country's North Island when he was set upon by his pets. Four of his six dogs had become aggressive before attacking the elderly man. A man has been brutally mauled to death by a pack of dogs on a remote property in New Zealand (stock image) Emergency services attended the area on Puketawa Road in Panguru where they found the dogs roaming the area. They attempted to restrain the canines but they continued to attack, with one officer forced to shoot one dead. The remaining three involved in the attack remain on the loose. Emergency services attended the area on Puketawa Road in Panguru where they found the pack roaming the area A spokesperson for local police confirmed the 69-year-old died of wounds sustained from the mauling. 'Earlier today Police responded to a sudden death, where initial indications suggested the deceased was subject to a dog attack,' they said. 'Police and animal control have attempted to secure the dogs on the property. 'However, four of the dogs got loose, and were behaving in an aggressive manner. 'Police risk assessment showed the dogs posed a risk to their safety. In the process of trying to contain the dogs, unfortunately one was shot by police, and died.' Authorities have warned the public to be wary of the area as the dogs are extremely aggressive. Ofgem today confirmed the energy price cap will be updated quarterly, rather than every six months, as it warned that customers face a 'very challenging winter ahead'. The energy regulator said this switch to changes every three months means 'prices charged to bill-payers are a better reflection of current gas and electricity costs'. Ofgem added that this will also allow 'energy suppliers to better manage their risks, making for a more secure market helping to keep costs down for everyone'. The London-based regulator claimed that the change to when the energy price cap is updated 'will go some way to provide the stability needed in the energy market'. But charities warned that while it could reduces costs in the long term, the change in frequency 'does the opposite of help this winter - in the middle of an energy crisis'. Others tweeted that 'a price cap every three months is effectively not having a price cap' - and Ofgem must be 'brought under control' and 'isn't fit for purpose'. A Cornwall Insight forecast shows the energy price cap will stay higher than 3,300 from October to at least the start of 2024 Ofgem said it is also aiming to 'reduce the risk of further large-scale supplier failures which cause huge disruption and push up costs for consumers,' adding: 'It is not in anyone's interests for more suppliers to fail and exit the market.' The regulator added that although Britain only imported a small amount of Russian gas, as a result of Russia's actions, the volatility in the global energy market experienced last winter had lasted much longer, with much higher prices for both gas and electricity than ever before. Cornwall Insight predictions on energy costs over next year Cornwall Insight, one of the country's most respected energy consultancies, said bills will hit a staggering 3,359 per year from October for the average household, and not fall below that level until at least the end of next year: October 2022: 3,359 January 2023: 3,616 April 2023: 3,729 July 2023: 3,569 October 2023: 3,470 Advertisement As expected, Ofgem also warned that as a result of the market conditions, the price cap would have to rise to reflect increased costs. The next price cap level will be published at the end of this month. Ofgem chief executive Jonathan Brearley said: 'I know this situation is deeply worrying for many people. As a result of Russia's actions, the volatility in the energy markets we experienced last winter has lasted much longer, with much higher prices than ever before. 'And that means the cost of supplying electricity and gas to homes has increased considerably. 'The trade-offs we need to make on behalf of consumers are extremely difficult and there are simply no easy answers right now. 'Today's changes ensure the price cap does its job, making sure customers are only paying the real cost of their energy, but also, that it can adapt to the current volatile market. 'We will keep working closely with the Government, consumer groups and with energy companies on what further support can be provided to help with these higher prices.' Changes to the price cap come as household energy bills are likely to remain at more than two-and-a-half times their pre-crisis levels until at least 2024, according to latest predictions. Cornwall Insight, one of the country's most respected energy consultancies, said bills will hit a staggering 3,359 per year from October for the average household, and not fall below that level until at least the end of next year. What reasons does Ofgem give for changing the energy price cap frequency? Ofgem has issued this list today of what it describes as 'the wider benefits of a quarterly price cap': 'The energy market moves far more quickly now so six months is too long and its not sustainable for people to pay a rate up to six months old' 'Every six months means either consumers paying more than the current rate for months if wholesale prices fall or suppliers having to sell gas at a loss for months if wholesale prices go up risking collapse of suppliers which costs all consumers more money' 'It also simply delays the inevitable and means bigger changes twice a year instead of smaller changes four times a year' 'In the meantime, suppliers could go bust causing huge disruption and extra cost for consumers' 'The cap cannot artificially hold down prices, but it can stop rapid fluctuations, which weve seen in the wholesale market, being passed straight onto consumers and ensures that prices dont rise fast but fall slowly the quarterly price cap will strengthen this further' 'Reduces the need for backwardation as the price cap can more accurately reflect the current wholesale rates' Advertisement The price cap on energy bills, which regulates what 24 million British households pay, will hit 3,616 from January and rise further to 3,729 from April, it said. It will begin to fall after that, but only slowly, reaching 3,569 from July before hitting 3,470 for the last three months of 2023. The latest predictions are hundreds of pounds above previous forecasts from Cornwall Insight, but are slightly lower what another consultancy, BFY, has predicted. In May, the Government announced an energy costs support package - worth 400 per household - in response to predictions that bills would rise to 2,800 for the average household in October. The package also promised extra support for more vulnerable households. Last month, Cornwall Insight predicted that annual energy bills would typically rise to 3,244 from October and 3,363 from January, but circumstances have changed significantly since then. The latest forecasts come after the Kremlin further strangled the flow of gas to Europe. While the UK gets very little of its gas directly from Russia, the price paid here is determined by what happens across the Continent. If the predictions come to pass they will put enormous pressure on already squeezed households. It would be a near-doubling of today's record price cap which at 1,971 is already hundreds of pounds more than the previous high. Although it is still early days for the January prediction, analysts already have most of the data they need to accurately forecast October's rise. National Energy Action director of policy and advocacy Peter Smith said: 'Ofgem moving ahead now with passing price cap changes on to households quarterly rather than every six months wasn't necessary and unfortunately means further significant price increases in January are inevitable. 'Average annual bills are already predicted to increase by 1,200 a year - a 177% increase since last October. Now, householders can expect further hikes just after Christmas, in the middle of heating season when energy costs are typically at their highest. 'January is also usually a time of increased mental health problems and further hikes in bills will sadly lead to increased misery and huge anxiety for energy consumers across Great Britain, particularly for the poorest households. 'It's disappointing that Ofgem has not listened to these concerns. They could have used their discretion to offset this avoidable outcome by starting the reforms in April when energy demand starts to fall. 'This change also strengthens the growing calls for deeper price protection for the poorest households, something Ofgem can and must help support.' And Matt Copeland, head of policy and public affairs at National Energy Action, said: 'Confirmation from Ofgem this morning that the price cap will update quarterly. Probably means it will increase in January. One week after Christmas. 'Possibly reduces costs in the long term, but does the opposite of help *this* winter - in the middle of an energy crisis.' Gillian Cooper, head of energy policy at Citizens Advice, said: 'Something that's added to all our bills is the cost of supplier failures. Changing to a quarterly price cap should limit the risk of any more suppliers going bust, which is a good thing. But our bills are already incredibly high and still rising. 'The Government was right to bring in financial support for people, but it may not be enough to keep many families afloat. It must be ready to act again before winter draws in. 'Ofgem must make sure suppliers are helping customers who are struggling to pay. It should hold energy companies to account so people aren't chased by debt collectors or pushed onto prepayment meters when they can't keep up with bills.' Consumer expert Harry Wallop tweeted: 'Ofgem confirms energy cap will change every three months. In order to protect companies from going bust something that ultimately adds costs to consumers' bills. 'But all those companies went bust last winter because Ofgem was asleep at the wheel when times were good.' The extension of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras to enforce congestion zones may be illegal and the UK extends its use 'at our peril', the government's surveillance tsar has said. Responding to London Mayor Sadiq Khan's plan to expand the city's low emission zones to include all of greater London, he said the legality of the use of ANPR in this way is 'questionable' and 'there is little evidence that it would benefit society'. A public consultation on Mr Khan's proposal to expand the ultra-low emission zones to cover all of London's boroughs from August 2023 closed on Friday (July 29). The fine for not paying the 12.50 daily charge increase to 180 - but data last year suggested as many as a third of fines are never paid. As of September 2021, 982,145 non-compliance penalties had been issued by TfL, but 336,637 of these remained unpaid. Motoring and independent groups have criticised the roll out for its timing with the cost of living crisis and 'dangerous' surveillance precedent. Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Professor Fraser Sampson, released a statement on the UK government's site on behalf of the ANPR Independent Advisory Group, which he chairs. Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Professor Fraser Sampson, says the legality of expanding ULEZ surveillance across London is 'questionable' Car dealers blast ULEZ expansion plans: The NFDA says the proposal to extend the charging zone in August 2023 is the 'wrong move at the wrong time' during a cost-of-living crunch The Mayor has proposed for the ULEZ boundary to be widened from the North and South Circular roads to cover all 33 London boroughs from 29 August 2023 in a bid to reduce toxic air pollution in the capital Sadiq Khan has often discussed the poor air quality in parts of London and drawn attention to climate change (Pictured: Sadiq Khan atan air quality monitoring station) Professor Sampson was clear that he supports government policies surrounding reducing emissions and encouraging drivers to switch to more environmentally-friendly vehicles such as electric cars, The Telegraph reports. But he added: 'members of the ANPR Independent Advisory Group (IAG) which I chair have expressed concerns that an extension of ANPR functions is not justified and there is limited evidence that it would benefit society. 'Therefore, its legality is questionable.' He highlighted the responsibility of government to ensure companies and processes involved in the use of ANPR are all behaving environmentally responsibly, if it is to be used to enforce this expectation on the general public. Professor Sampson continued to say further democratic debate is needed on whether the enormity of the risks caused by climate change mean the State 'can use whatever methods it likes in the name of combatting climate change.' The surveillance tsar said the use of ANPR has now expanded beyond its initial purpose, causing 'further concern over its legitimacy.' Worries over the proportionality of ANPR to try and curb emissions, as well as who will receive the data recorded by the cameras, were also cited by the group. The Surveillance Camera Code, set out in law states: 'A surveillance camera system should only be used in a public place for the specific purpose or purposes it was established to address. It should not be used for other purposes that would not have justified its establishment in the first place.' Professor Sampson points out that ANPR was not initially introduced to target high-polluting vehicles, and the government must question whether this use would have justified their use in the first place. He also pointed to the use of ANPR to identify those breaking lockdown rules during the pandemic. He questioned how the use had affected communities and the public's confidence, saying 'we should probably find out.' Although government has rights to intervene in times of emergency beyond their its usual means carries risk of 'permanent and irreversible incursion' into people's lives, and this must be urgently considered to retain public support for the use of ANPR, he added. Sadiq Khan is proposing to extend the scheme's boundary from the North and South Circular Roads to the whole of Greater London from August 29 next year Professor Sampson has questioned the use of surveillance cameras for purposes which they were not initially installed for, saying further public debate is needed Who is the government's surveillance tsar? Who is the tsar? Professor Fraser Sampson became the government's new Surveillance Camera Commissioner and Biometrics Commissioner in March 2021. He has nearly 40 years of experience working in the criminal justice sector, first as a policeman at West Yorkshire Police. He later moved to work for the British Transport Police before becoming a solicitor specialising in policing law, conduct and governance. Professor Sampson is also an Honorary Professor and member of the Advisory Board at the Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research (CENTRIC). Professor Fraser Sampson became the government's new Surveillance Camera Commissioner and Biometrics Commissioner in March 2021 What does his role involve? The roles of Biometrics Commissioner and Surveillance Camera Commissioner were both created under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. They involve working closely with the police to promote compliance with the rules on the legitimate, proportionate and accountable use of DNA, fingerprints and surveillance cameras respectively. A decision was made to appoint a single person to both roles because of the confluence of existing and emerging regulatory issues around police use of automated facial recognition, a type of surveillance camera technology with biometrics capabilities. He works with the ANPR IAG and also with leading experts in both fields to support self-accreditation schemes and interrogate policy. Source: gov.uk Advertisement The professor said: 'Will people still be as accepting of ANPR once it can recognise the occupants of a moving vehicle, identifying their children, when and where they got their flu jabs, their passport and if they've paid their tax bill?' Mr Khan says an expansion of the zone is necessary to tackle the 'triple challenges of tackling toxic air pollution, the climate emergency and traffic congestion'. He says: 'We simply don't have time to waste. 'The climate emergency means we only have a small window of opportunity left to cut harmful emissions to help save the planet. 'Toxic air pollution is still permanently damaging the lungs of young Londoners and leading to thousands of premature deaths every year.' Drivers and campaign groups have previously criticised Sadiq Khan's decision to allow police access to the data recorded by TfL on ANPR cameras. Big Brother Watch UK said: 'ANPR is one of the biggest surveillance networks in the UK, yet remains dangerously unregulated. 'The Mayor of London's decision to expand police access to this database of the public's movements is deeply concerning. 'Local authorities shouldnt be conducting this mass-scale snooping at all, and it deserves urgent parliamentary scrutiny.' It was announced yesterday (August 3) that London Assembly member Sian Berry is leading a legal challenge against the Mayor over his decision to allow the Met police access to cameras monitoring the expanded Ultra Low Emission Zone. She said: 'I am deeply disappointed that the Mayor has not listened to repeated warnings that sharing the cameras from the expanded clean air zone with the police was a huge increase in surveillance of Londoners that should not be signed off by his office. 'I have been telling the Mayor since 2019 that sharing this data with the police is wrong and that Londoners must have their say in any decision. 'With so many awful revelations bringing trust and confidence in our police to an all-time low, Londoners should have been asked if they would trust them with this massive database about their daily movements. 'The expanded Ultra Low Emission Zone has been helping cut air pollution for many months already, without all this data being shared with police, and the Mayor must now reverse his hasty decision and instead protect Londoners' privacy.' Sian Berry is a Green Party members and is working with digital rights campaigners Open Rights Group. The expansion of ULEZ would occur in August 2023 would mean Londoners in all of the capital's 33 boroughs would face having to trade in their car if it is not classed as a low-emission vehicle, or face a daily charge of 12.50. ULEZ was also expanded last year in an effort to clamp down on dangerous emissions in the city. Other major UK cities such as Birmingham and Manchester are also considering imposing similar low emission zones. But the plan has faced criticism over its introduction during the cost of living crisis, as many families and individuals will not be able to afford a new car. The easiest way to establish whether you will need to pay for using the ULEZ is by using Transport for London's number plate checker here. The zone operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year except Christmas Day. Its expansion could have a 'disproportional and adverse effect on London's most deprived communities and motorists' at a time when family finances are significantly squeezed by escalating energy bills, higher food prices and inflated petrol and diesel bills, the National Franchised Dealers Association warned. Sue Robinson, chief executive of the NFDA, said: 'Although action to counter London's air pollution is necessary, the proposed extension of the ULEZ scheme is being brought through with little consideration to affected stakeholders. 'The additional cost to some of London's poorest communities will push some families over the brink and force a reduction in their access to private mobility, this in the backdrop of Britain's worst cost of living crises, which hasn't been fully considered by TfL.' RAC head of roads policy Nicholas Lyes said: 'While expanding the ULEZ is a more preferable option to some of the other universal charges the Mayor has previously mooted, it's undeniably a bad time to be inflicting a new charge on drivers given the high cost of fuel and the wider cost-of-living crisis. 'Given there are still many cars on our roads that are non-compliant with ULEZ standards, coupled with the fact that many drivers are holding on to their existing vehicles for longer, we're concerned more people will be impacted by the ULEZ expansion than originally estimated. 'For those reasons we encourage the Mayor to delay the expansion by six months or longer.' To avoid the daily 12.50 charge to enter the ULEZ, diesel cars must generally have been registered after September 2015, while most petrol cars registered from 2005 are exempt. An extra 3.5 million people will live within the ULEZ if the area is expanded as planned, according to analysis by the PA news agency. The mayor's office estimated that an additional 135,000 vehicles a day would be affected. The Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner's office is an independent body oversees use of cameras such as CCTV, ANPR and facial recognition, advising ministers on their legality. The European Union has delayed plans to tighten entry rules for people travelling from the UK in a temporary boost to the holiday sector. A new procedure called the European Travel Information and Authorisation System was set to be introduced next May for Britons entering Europe. The ETIAS is similar to the Esta which is American and essentially a visa waiver and will cost around 5 and last for two years. People travelling from the UK will have to apply for them online before they go to Europe. They will not be allowed to enter without one. But a new and time-consuming entry and exit system is still coming into place in May. This will need all non-EU arrivals which includes Britons after Brexit to have four fingerprints scanned and a photograph taken. Vehicles queue at the Port of Dover on July 22, 2022 in Dover, England. The Port of Dover declared a 'critical incident' A biometric system which can scan eyes and fingerprints. A similar procedure awaits Britons from May entering the EU News of the ETIAS delay will come as some relief to the tourism sector, which is still reeling from airport chaos and queues at the Channel Tunnel to France. The EES is expected to add to these delays at the relevant borders as French law says the capture of the data has to be done under an official's supervision. John Keefe, the director of public affairs for Getlink, which operates the Eurotunnel, told The Times: 'We are exploring all options. 'The issue is that the checks have to be done by a French border official and it cannot be subcontracted. The latest delay to tightening rules have been welcomed amid chaos at the borders 'Under the current plans everyone will have to get out of their car to be processed, which comes with the added risk of people walking around in lines of live traffic.' 'We would be looking at 1,600 to 1,700 passengers per hour to be processed for the first time. That's an impossible task in the space that we have available. The risk of congestion is to our motorways, to the M20, the A20 and A2. Once all of those areas are congested, Kent becomes impassable.' Last year concerns were also raised by Tim Reardon, head of EU exit for the Dover Harbour Board to MPs. He said at the time: 'In our context, virtually everybody crosses the border in a vehicle and in a group. 'There is no such thing as an e-gate for a car, and there is no such thing as an e-gate process for people travelling as a group. They're all one-at-a-time processes.' A father-of-four whose wife and children were all killed when his van was hit in a horrific head-on collision with a wrong-way driver has also died after succumbing to critical injuries. Thomas Dobosz, 32, of Rolling Meadows, Illinois, was driving a Chevrolet full-size van carrying his 31-year-old wife, Lauren, and five children aged 5 to 13 when it collided with a car around 2am Sunday on Interstate 90 in rural McHenry County, roughly 50 miles northwest of Chicago. Illinois State Police said Jennifer Fernandez, 22, of Carpentersville, Illinois, was driving a 2010 Acura TSX the wrong way on I-90 for 'unknown reasons' when she smashed into Dobosz's van. Both vehicles burst into flames on impact. Fernandez was found dead at the scene, state troopers said, along with all of the passengers in the van, including Thomas' wife, four children and one other child who is believed to have been a friend of the eldest Dobosz daughter. Thomas was the sole survivor of the crash but was rushed to Loyola University Medical Center with serious injuries, to which he succumbed Wednesday. Lauren Dobosz, 31, of Rolling Meadows and five children, were killed in the crash on Sunday. Her husband Thomas Dobosz, 32, who was driving the van, was seriously injured and also died in hospital on Wednesday Lauren Dobosz, 31, of Rolling Meadows and five children ages 5-13, all in a Chevrolet full-size van, were killed, according to Illinois State Police Five children were killed in the crash Sunday, including all four of the children of Thomas and Lauren Dobosz. Lauren died at the scene, along with the children. Thomas later died in hospital The aftermath of the scene showed both vehicles had been demolished in the crash and the van was engulfed in a fire Scene of the crash on I-90 when Jennifer Fernandez, 22, drove the wrong way on the highway for 'unknown reasons' and smashed into the van. Both vehicles burst into flames on impact Local Illinois man Alan Wiedmeyer told DailyMail.com that he was on his way to a fishing tournament in the early hours of Sunday morning when he was nearly hit head-on by a car that had made a sudden U-turn on I-90 in front of him. 'It headed straight for me as I was in the middle lane, and luckily I was able to swerve out of the way before it hit me,' he said, adding that he flashed his lights at them but the car kept going. 'The cars behind me also veered out of the way just in time.' Wiedmeyer said he received texts about 10-15 minutes later from fellow tournament-goers who alerted him that I-90 was closed after two vehicles had collided and burst into flames. 'Immediately my mind went to the car going in the wrong direction,' he said. 'My heart just sunk, especially finding out that five kids had lost their lives,' Wiedmeyer said. 'I felt guilt too that I could have stopped it and hit the other vehicle before it got to them,' he added. 'I have a two-year-old of my own, and I couldn't imagine losing a child in such a horrific accident.' The five children who were killed in the crash were two 13-year-old girls, a 7-year-old boy, a 6-year-old boy, and a 5-year-old girl, all of Rolling Meadows. Their names have not been released. Dobosz' children are pictured here. All four were killed, along with another child. They were aged 5-13 A charred van is hauled away from the scene of a crash in Illinois. A mother and five children were among the seven killed when a wrong-way driver slammed into the van early Sunday The fiery crash happened around 2:11 a.m. on Interstate 90 in McHenry County, Illinois, roughly 50 miles from Chicago. Seven people were killed, including five children 'When you find out it is people you've known for many years, it kind of hits a little harder,' Dobosz family neighbor David Moreno said. 'Losing your family in a split-second like that is not going to be easy for anybody.' 'My understanding is one of the eldest daughters had a friend with them,' Moreno added. 'I know it's going to be devastating for the community just to know that it was somebody that people have known.' Lauren Dobosz' co-worker Kenny Felton said she started working at Lulu's Gaming in Rolling Meadows two months ago and described her as creative and always willing to help. 'She loved her kids and her husband,' Felten said. 'That was her life.' Other neighbors along Owl Drive in Rolling Meadows told FOX 32 Chicago that the children would always say hello. They said the couple took care of elderly grandparents who had lived in the home on Owl Drive for some time. Investigators are working to determine why Fernandez was traveling in the wrong direction in the fatal crash that caused another collision. In the aftermath of the collision, a semi-truck rear-ended another semi when it stopped suddenly to let a medical helicopter land, officials said. A trailer on one of the trucks was damaged and boxes were scattered on the highway. One person suffered minor injuries. Tributes have poured in from 'devastated' family members and friends after an experienced climber died in a tragic accident on Ben Nevis. Rob Brown, 33, who lived in Fort William, Highland, was enjoying a day out climbing the North Face of Scotland's highest mountain on July 29 when the freak accident occurred. His father Martin Brown paid tribute to his late son. 'This is so hard - I am so proud of my wonderful son,' he said on Facebook. Mr Brown's body and belongings were retrieved from the mountain by members of the Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team. The experienced climber's loved ones have revealed that the tragic death could not have been prevented and his death was 'quick and pain free'. Tributes have since poured in from friends and loved ones for Mr Brown who owned a Ben Nevis tour guide company. A statement about Mr Brown's death was posted on his Facebook page on Wednesday. Experienced climber Rob Brown, 33, tragically died on Ben Nevis in a freak accident which loved ones say 'could not have been prevented' Mr Brown was originally from Cambridge but was living in Fort William, Highland before his death Tributes have poured in for the late Mr Brown, with his father Martin Brown saying, 'This is so hard - I am so proud of my wonderful son' It said: 'On Friday 29th July 2022 we lost Rob to a climbing accident on the North Face of Ben Nevis. 'It was a beautiful day and he was excited to enjoy it in the mountains, as he always loved doing with his free time. 'Anyone that knows Rob knows he is experienced, calm, confident and not a risk-taker on the hill and Friday was no different. 'It was a tragic accident that couldn't have been prevented and we want everyone to know it was quick and painless for him. He left us whilst having a great day out and was happy and content with his life. 'We are all absolutely heartbroken and devastated that he has had to leave us when he had so much more life left to give and with such an exciting future ahead. 'We are grateful for everyone that has reached out to us so far - to help and support us in so many ways - whilst we navigate the unimaginable..' It continued: 'Thank you to the Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team members who helped retrieve Rob and his belongings. 'Many of whom knew Rob personally and we are so grateful. 'We would like to host a celebration of Rob's life in the next few weeks and will share plans and a date when we can. 'It would mean the world to all of us if you knew Rob and could join, to help share your memories and stories of him.' The post was inundated with messages from friends and devastated family members. Si Cherrett said: 'Such sad, sad news. An amazing man, a true gentleman. 'My sincere condolences to his family and everyone who ever had the pleasure to have met him.' Meanwhile Craig McDonald paid tribute to his 'one of a kind' close friend. He said: 'Absolutely heartbroken to lose such a colourful, amazing and much loved friend. 'He was one of the funniest, most inspiring people I ever met and I am devastated for his family, Eilidh and the many, many friends he leaves behind. Slainte Rob, you really were one of a kind.' A friend also paid tribute to the late climber. 'Such awful news. Rob was one of the kindest, selfless, level-headed, and friendliest people I've met,' he said. 'A hole in the Fort William community which can never be filled. 'Thoughts are with Eilidh, his family, friends, climbing partner that day, and the rescue team. 'Rest in peace Rob.' A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: 'At around 11.15am on Friday, 29 July, we received a report of a man having fallen at Zero Gully, Ben Nevis. 'Following a mountain rescue, the body of a 33-year-old man was recovered. There are no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death. 'A report has been submitted to the Procurator Fiscal.' Advertisement A despairing Scottish family is being kicked out of Australia after 10 years in a heartbreaking visa row - after the company sponsoring their stay went bust. Electrical expert Mark Green, 44, was headhunted for his specialist solar installation skills in 2012 and flown to Australia with his wife Kelly, 45, and daughter Rebecca, 19. He moved 10,000 miles from Prestwick, Ayrshire, to his new home in Adelaide, on Australia's southern coast, with the promise of their permanent residency being sponsored by the company flying him in. But every time he's been eligible, the employers have folded before the paperwork could be completed - and it's now happened seven times to the devastated family. They will now be thrown out of the country next week, unless the government intervenes to save them. The family have already spent more than 85,000 (AU$150,000) on attempting to stay in the country, while relocating to the UK is likely to set them back a further 35,000 (AU$60,000). And, in another cruel twist of fate, it will force them to leave behind beloved pet dog Maisie because of the prohibitive 20,000 (AU$35,000) cost of flights and quarantine fees. Mother-of-two Kelly, speaking from her empty Adelaide home after they sold off their belongings ahead of their exit, said: 'I don't want to go home. I don't. I really don't...' Electrical expert Mark Green, 44, was headhunted for his specialist solar installation skills in 2012 and flown out to Australia with his wife Kelly, 45, and daughter Rebecca, 19 The Greens have already spent more than 85,000 (AU$150,000) on immigration lawyers and visa and residency applications. How does Australia's immigration system work? Australia has a number of different immigration systems, all of which are tightly controlled. One popular method is to be sponsored by an Australian-based company. Employers must select a role that needs to be filled from the Government's defined list of skilled occupations. Once a role is selected, immigration authorities will evaluate the nomination and determine whether it meets their criteria. Applicants will then be assessed on a number of different factors, including age, English language ability, training, health, character and what the market salary rates are. There are also other methods of migrating to Australia as a skilled worker, including its points-based system. Points are awarded to applicants based on age, qualification, experience and English language skills. The priority regularly changes in terms of what type of skilled workers are required, based on the needs of industry. The Skilled Independent visa is the most desirable visa, because it is permanent and gives holder the freedom and flexibility to live and work anywhere in Australia. Applicant must be under 45-years-old, have a job in Australia's desired skills list, and score at least 65 points in its points test. Other visas are based in individual areas of Australia, known as territories, and are based on local needs. There are also visas specifically aimed at engineering graduates, under the age of 31, who wish to gain up to 18 months of skilled work experience in Australia. People can also obtain 'travel visas' that allow them to go on 'working holidays' - commonly known in the UK as 'gap years' - that run for up to a year. In recent years Australia has also relaxed its visas for low-skilled workers - including visas aimed specifically at agriculture and fishing - amid a global demand for people to fill low-skilled labour. Advertisement But they have now been told that they must leave the country before they can apply again. 'We sold it all to come out here and then we started again,' Mr Green told Daily Mail Australia. 'And now we're having to sell it all, to go back to Scotland, to try and apply to come back again, to restart again. For the third time. 'I'm nearly 50. We can't go through this anymore. There's nothing for us back in Scotland now.' He added: 'This is where I live. This is where my heart is. It'll never change. Even if I go back to Scotland, here is where I will class as home.' The family have been on a sponsored work visa since arriving which has meant they need to pay for everything Australians take for granted, on top of paying their taxes. They were denied access to Medicare or free public state schooling for daughter Rebecca, which costs them 4,500 (AU$8,000) a year - but they say they paid without complaint. 'It was the best day of our lives coming here. The best day ever,' said Kelly, 45, originally from Kilbirnie, 40km south-west of Glasgow. They want to stay in Australia permanently but currently just need their bridging visa changed from an E-type to a C-type to allow them to apply to stay without leaving. The family has been undone by firms sponsoring Mark as an employee and starting a three year route to residency, but going bust before the process is complete. 'The company went into liquidation and which means I have to start again, all three years, all over again,' said Mr Green, originally from Prestwick, Ayrshire. 'That's happened seven times to me. Most of them closed because of warranty issues - they don't want to guarantee the warranty of the product. 'It ends up costing them money, so what they do is they shut up shop and they open up under another business name.' The final straw came after one employer told him he'd applied for the Greens' residency and paid their fees - but hadn't, causing them to unwittingly overstay their working visa. 'I was let down by my former employer,' he said. 'I trusted him and he lied to me. 'The government has a responsibility to protect me as a foreign worker who was invited to come to Australia to work and was let down by an Australian company.' Their son Jamie has already flown home to Scotland after the visa conditions meant he was unable to work in Australia for years. The family has been fighting to stay in the country for a year but time is now running out and they've had to sell up ahead of next week's deportation. Relocating to the UK is set to cost the family $60,000 - and will force them to leave their beloved pet dog Maisie (pictured with mum Kelly, left, and daughter Rebecca) behind because of prohibitive $35,000 flights and quarantine fees Mr Green won't even be able to work in his industry when he arrives back in Scotland as his UK electrical qualifications are now out of date after a decade in Australia. He has nothing in Scotland and nowhere to live, with his elderly parents unable to cope with the family joining them while they wait for their visa to be approved. 'Everything I hoped for here is gone,' said Mr Green. 'The stress is terrible. Absolutely terrible. It's not fair. Not fair at all. 'Nobody has been in contact with me about trying to sort this out. All they say to me is I have to leave the country. 'My mum and dad are nearly 80 - as much as they would love to see us, they don't want a family staying with them. It could take up to two years. 'I thought I'd have my own company and my own home by now but instead our life is in turmoil.' Their case has now been taken up by Adelaide politician Frank Pangallo, who compared them to the Tamilese Murugappan family from Bilgoela in Queensland, who had their visa conditions changed to let them stay despite arriving by boat. The final straw came after one employer told Mark he'd applied for their residency and paid their fees - but hadn't, causing them to unwittingly overstay their working visa 'They didn't do it legally, unlike the Greens, and they got preferential treatment,' Mr Pangallo, of South Australia's Best Party told Daily Mail Australia. 'Forcing a family to leave a country they've called home for 10 years simply to return to their country of origin to re-apply to return to Oz seems pointless and ridiculous. 'And this is all happening while governments grapple with changes to the country's skilled migration program due to massive shortages across the country.' A plea to the previous Liberal immigration minister Alex Hawke was rejected and fresh appeal to the new Labor immigration minister Andrew Giles has fallen on deaf ears. Their case has now been taken up by Adelaide politician Frank Pangallo (pictured), who compared them to the Tamilese Murugappan family from Bilgoela in Queensland, who had their visa conditions changed to let them stay despite arriving by boat Mr Pangallo added: 'If you want skilled migrants to come into this country, you better give them an undertaking they'll be able to stay here and not be booted out when it suits you. It's absolutely disgusting.' A spokesman for Mr Giles insisted the immigration minister never commented on individual cases, despite commenting extensively on the Biloela case. She then told Daily Mail Australia: 'The minister does not comment on the individual circumstances regarding the Green family.' Last month Mark revealed how he was 'done in' after working 'seven days a week' to try and afford the cost of coming home. He told the Daily Record: 'I'm working seven days just now to afford to come home in August. I'm really done in. 'All we want to do is start living life without worrying.' Meanwhile, Kelly also faces having her life uprooted. She has been employed at local business Vili's since she arrived in Australia. Her boss Mary told Australian news channel 'A Current Affair' last month that she couldn't be happier with Kelly's work ethic and said losing her would be a massive lost to her company. She added: 'I can't get enough retail and factory staff and if I lose a great worker like Kelly, it will affect my business.' HYDERABAD: A day after announcing his resignation from the Congress and the Legislative Assembly, Komatireddy Rajgopal Reddy attacked the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee, calling its chief A. Revanth Reddy a blackmailer. This was in response to the TPCCs chief claim that Rajgopal Reddy had sold himself to the BJP. Addressing a press conference at his Jubilee Hills residence, Rajgopal Reddy asked that he be spared a moral lecture, as Revanth Reddy was now serving his fourth political party. This was the same man who termed Sonia Gandhi a bali devatha (deity who seeks sacrifice) while in the TD. He didn't even spare the late Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy when he died and made fun. You know how Revanth Reddy amassed wealth without any business. Even now, he is misusing his current position, which he received through manipulation, to blackmail builders and contractors, Rajgopal Reddy said. The TPCC, however, dismissed his claims and likened him to former minister Etala Rajendar, saying that both of them joined the BJP to protect their business interests. Rajgopal Reddys brother Komatireddy Venkat Reddy said that the former was never on good terms with the TPCC chief, who was jailed in the cash for vote scam, and others like Sangareddy MLA T. Jagga Reddy were also unhappy with his leadership. While Revanth Reddy did not respond to Rajgopal Reddys allegations, rank and file members of the TPCC responded sharply to his comments. TPCC senior vice-president Mallu Ravi said, You have backstabbed the party which has given an opportunity in politics. You worked as a brand ambassador to the BJP staying in the Congress. The partys official spokesperson, Addanki Dayakar, said that now it was clear that the BJP and TRS were both targeting the Congress state leadership. Congress is the party which gave an opportunity to Komatireddy brothers in politics. It is a lie that Rajgopal Reddy took on TRS and BJP while he was in the Congress. He is no different from Etala and proved he is also opportunist, he said. Advertisement The Duchess of York's new 5million luxury property in the heart of Mayfair is just a ten minute walk from Ghislaine Maxwell's mews house where Prince Andrew was pictured with his arm around the waist of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, MailOnline can reveal today. Sarah Ferguson, 62, is moving into one of London's most exclusive streets - popular with The Beatles in the 1960s and also Rihanna when she comes to the UK - despite previously describing herself as being 'continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy' and having 'little understanding' of money. One neighbour, who lives a few doors away from Fergies new house, said today: 'I suppose the property values will go up with royalty here - unless Andrew moves in of course'. MailOnline can reveal that her bijou terrace is just a third of a mile from Maxwell's former home in central London, where she is alleged to have groomed young girls. It is also where her friend the Duke of York allegedly had sex with Ms Giuffre, then 17 - an allegation in the civil claim the royal paid her around 12million to settle in the US. Ms Maxwell sold her mews to a developer for 1.75million last year to help towards her legal bills before she was jailed for 20 years in New York for grooming children for her paedophile boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked Virginia and other girls around the world on his private jets - treating them as sex slaves. Fergie is said to have purchased her new home from her friend the Duke of Westminster, 31, who became one of Britain's wealthiest people when he inherited his father's 10billion fortune and the Grosvenor property empire in 2016. He is also a close friend of Prince William and Prince Harry. The 5million house is said to be viewed as an investment opportunity for her daughters Beatrice and Eugenie - but for now it is Fergie's only home in London amid questions about where she could have found the cash. Her multi-million pound purchase came despite her repeated complaints of financial difficulties in recent years, describing herself as 'continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy' in a 2010 TV interview in the US. She also admitted to having 'little understanding' of money and there were reports she had run up as much as 4.2million in debt during her marriage to Andrew. She received 3million from their divorce and most of her income is now likely to come from her books. Her first bodice-ripper crept onto the bestseller charts last year - despite critics branding it a 'slog' with no sex. Critics branded the book 'boring' but it initially sold 1,000 copies a week when it was released. People on the street said the Duchess had been spotted viewing the house in the late spring - and seen running into a waiting vehicle. They admitted they were happy to have yet another famous neighbour - as long as her ex-husband stays away. A local housekeeper said: About two months ago I saw her coming out of the house. She seemed in a hurry and got into a car'. A man parking his car in the garage said spaces on the street cost 3,000-a-year - but said he believed the Duchess of York had got one. The mews was once two flats now converted back to a house and formed part of the giant Grosvenor Estates portfolio, but has now been transferred to the Duchess, who spends most of her time living with her ex-husband at his grace-and-favour home - the Royal Lodge in Windsor. Pictured: The 5million house reportedly bought by Sarah Ferguson in Mayfair from the Duke of Westminster amid questions about where she got the money from Sarah Ferguson (pictured with ex-husband Prince Andrew in 2019), 62, is said to have purchased the home from her friend the Duke of Westminster, 31, who became one of the wealthiest men in the country when he inherited his father's 10billion fortune in 2016 Disgraced British socialite Ghislaine Maxwells mews house in Belgravia was bought by a property developer for 1.75 million. It is a gentle stroll from Fergie's new home The property is said to be where the Duke of York was photographed with his arm around the bare waist of then 17-year-old Virginia Roberts. In the background, Ghislaine Maxwell Prince Harry files his second lawsuit against UK government and Scotland Yard over decision to ban him from paying for police protection in Britain Prince Harry has filed a second lawsuit against the British government and Scotland Yard over the decision not to allow him to pay for police protection when he visits from California. The Duke of Sussex is already suing the Home Office over its decision in 2020 to remove his taxpayer-funded protection, which he says makes it unsafe for him to come to Britain with his wife, Meghan Markle, and two children, Archie and Lilibet. Now he has filed a second lawsuit against the Home Office which also names the Metropolitan Police, the High Court confirmed to MailOnline. 'It is at an early stage, no hearings have been listed yet and no decisions have been made,' the Judicial Office added. The new case will focus on a decision in January by the Royalty and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC), which concluded that private individuals should not be allowed to pay for police to protect them. The revelation of a second court case - which emerged on Meghan's birthday - threatens to raise tensions with the Royal Family due to claims that the Queen's Private Secretary, Sir Edward Young, was involved in the decision to deny Harry protection. 'Significant tensions' are said to have existed between the Duke of Sussex Sir Edward, according to the prince's legal team. Today's news is also likely to dismay the government, which has spent 100,000 on its legal battle so far, according to a report last week. Advertisement A spokesman for her ex-husband Prince Andrew, who has had his own financial woes after settling the case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre for 12million, said he had not been personally involved in the purchase. The Duke and Duchess of York have also been trying to sell their 17.5million Verbier ski chalet, but this has been held up by legal woes. MailOnline has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment. Fergie and Andrew currently reside in the Royal Lodge in Windsor, owned by the Queen, 96, who resides in the nearby castle. Sources told the Sun the new Mayfair property is thought to be 'a long-term investment for daughters Princess Beatrice and Eugenie', describing it as 'picturesque' and in 'one of the very smartest areas of London.' They added: 'It had previously been a couple of flats but has been converted to a single property. 'If the girls are going to inherit it at some stage they're extremely lucky. 'It's a short walk from the best bars and restaurants in the city, beautiful parks and other hot spots. But God knows where the money has come from everyone thought they were totally skint.' Fergie's representatives confirmed the purchase to the Sun but were unable to provide any more specifics of the sale - which has yet to be published by Land Registry officials. It is not the first time the couple's property deals have come under scrutiny. In January MPs called for a 'dirty money' probe into the 15million sale of Prince Andrew's Sunninghill estate to a Kazakh oligarch who became the centre of corruption claims. The Duke, 61, sold the home in Ascot, Berkshire, to Timur Kulibayev, 55, the son-in-law of Kazakhstan's autocratic former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, in 2007. But questions had been raised ever since over the sale of the property, originally gifted by the Queen to Andrew when he married Sarah Ferguson, after it went for 15million - 3million over its asking price. That is despite the property, which was mockingly called 'SouthYork' due to its supposed similarity to the garish ranch of SouthFork in the US series Dallas, languishing on the property market for 5 years at an asking price of 12million. The chalet in Verbier has an indoor pool, sauna, boot room and terrace with spectacular views. The couple have been trying to sell it for around 17.5m Then: Sunninghill House, on the edge of Windsor Great Park near to Ascot, which was sold by Prince Andrew in 2007 In 2015, Kulibayev razed Sunninghill Park - which had been compared to a Tesco superstore due to its ugly appearance - so that he could build a new home. Last year, images (above) showed how the home's sprawling ultra-modern replacement was nearing completion Andrew, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, was once a special trade envoy for the UK. The Duke of Westminster (pictured), 31, is believed to have sold a 5million Mayfair property to Sarah Ferguson And he had been accused of acting as a fixer in Kulibayev's business deals and is a close friend of the tycoon's Nazarbayev. Andrew is also struggling to sell his 18m ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland, due to an alleged 1.6m debt to a Swiss couple. According to reports in the Swiss media, the debt to the mystery couple is preventing the Duke of York from completing the sale of his much-loved Chalet Helora. It has been claimed that the disgraced royal was intending to use money from the sale of the property to help finance his 10million sex assault lawsuit settlement with accuser Virginia Giuffre. In February of this year it was reported that Andrew had found a buyer for the chalet, after settling a separate 6.6million debt to French socialite Isabelle de Rouvre, 74, who he purchased the property from in 2014. But the process appears to have stalled because the chalet is 'under sequestration' as a result of the alleged debt. The chalet was frozen as an asset by Swiss authorities on December 15, 2020 according to Le Temps newspaper. Sources close to Prince Andrew previously told MailOnline that the dispute will not prevent the property's sale, and that while the Duke 'did not deny owing the money' to the couple he was 'questioning the amount'. The source said: 'This has nothing to do with the original purchase of the chalet, it's a completely separate business transaction between the couple and the Duke. 'It shouldn't affect the sale of the property despite what the Swiss media says and is expected to go through as planned. 'Talks are underway to resolve the matter, which are expected to be concluded satisfactorily for all parties.' One source told the Sun the new Mayfair home is 'picturesque' and in 'one of the very smartest areas of London' (Stock image of Mayfair in central London) Prince Andrew has not been to the chalet in Verbier for several years, but his ex-wife Sarah and two daughters Beatrice and Eugenie spent the New Year in the luxury property with their families. He stepped back as a senior royal in May 2020 after allegations emerged over his relationship with the disgraced sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. A high profile court case in which Virginia Guiffre, a victim of Epstein's, accused the Duke of York of sexual abuse was settled out of court in March of this year. The total settlement is believed to be around 12 million, and includes Ms Guiffre's legal bills and an unspecified amount to a charity of Ms Guiffre's choice. He did not accept any liability when he made the settlement and vehemently denies the claims. Russian airline pilots have been told to go easy on their aircrafts' brakes to save them from wear and tear amid a shortage of spare parts due to Western sanctions. Internal memos from four Russian airlines have given the instructions as officials fear that the existing fleet of Western-made jets will only last about five years before being depleted. Russian airlines are desperately scrabbling for alternative plans to manage their aircraft, overwhelmingly manufactured by Toulouse-based Airbus and Virginia-based Boeing, before commercial air travel in Russia effectively comes to a halt. It is estimated that by the end of summer Russian airlines will have to start cannibalising relatively healthy jets for spare parts. S7 Airlines have advised their pilots to use reverse engine thrust instead of their brakes and avoid autobrake mode if the runway is long enough, the Aviatorshina Telegram channel reported. Pilots should also avoid going hard on brakes in order to speed up the landing process to make way for other planes. Russian airline pilots have been told to go easy on their aircraft's brakes to save them from wear and tear amid a shortage of spare parts due to Western sanctions Internal memos from four Russian airlines have given the instructions as officials fear that the existing fleet of Western-made jets will only last about five years before being depleted. Pictured: Putin in a flight simulator at Aeroflot training centre March 5 A vice-president of Russia's aircrew trade union told the Ridus website the advice to pilots to go easy on the brakes 'does not compromise safety in any way'. 'If the runway is long, you may as well not use brakes at all: The plane is going to stop at the end of the runway due to air brakes, reverse thrust of the engine and other things,' Oleg Prikhodko said. 'It's about a rational use of resources.' Urals Airlines, Rossiya and Pobeda published similar memos instructing pilots to 'pay close attention to a temporary policy of fuel efficiency and economising the aircraft's resources'. Traffic control should also help pilots by giving them longer slots for landing and taxiing to the runway. While Russia's state-owned carrier Aeroflot did not send out similar memos, one of their pilots was quoted by Aviatorshina, a popular aviation media outlet in Russia, as saying they had been told to spare their brakes as well. Yuri Borisov, a deputy Russian prime minister in charge of civil aviation, acknowledged the problem at a conference earlier this summer. The advisory to Russian airline pilots comes as a new report has claimed that Russia is losing the economic war with the West and its economy is in catastrophic and irrevocable decline. This is the verdict from a Yale-authored report that has looked beyond the Kremlin's cherry-picked economic figures to access private Russian language and other unconventional data sources. The report looked at high frequency consumer data, cross-channel checks, releases from Russias international trade partners and mining of complex shipping data to produce an economic analysis measuring the state of Putin's economy and what the future might have in store for it. Imports of crucial inputs and technology needed for domestic manufacturing have mostly dried up, meaning that cars manufactured in Russia come without ABS or airbags. Imports of crucial inputs and technology needed for domestic manufacturing have mostly dried up, meaning that cars manufactured in Russia come without ABS or airbags, and all kinds of consumer goods are unavailable to the average Russian The retreat of Western businesses, which accounted for some 40 per cent of Russian GDP, has reversed nearly three decades of foreign investment, which, coupled with a mass exodus of young and educated Russians has massively deteriorated the Russian economic base. Furthermore, Russia is unable to borrow the capital it will need to restart its crippled economy, with domestic financial markets - the worst performing in the world - having priced in 'sustained, persistent weakness.' Every single sector of the Russian economy is slammed - both its imports and its exports are down and its allies are not helping, and in some cases actively taking advantage. Russia's position as a leading commodities exporter has irrevocably deteriorated, the report states, as it now deals with countries like China and India from a 'position of weakness' with the loss of its main markets. And Putin has been burning through his once-hefty rainy day funds that he had set aside - precisely in the event of a confrontation with the West - in an unsustainable effort to paper over the cracks. An upset cafe boss has rushed to defend one of his employees after a nasty online review criticised the barista's disability. Adam Kakaati, the owner of Nuriyah Cafe in the southwest Sydney suburb of Gregory Hills, said Vari Desho is the best barista in town despite suffering from Tourette Syndrome. However, an angry customers said Mr Desho's 'tics' - involuntary noises or movements - caused them to leave the cafe without eating or paying for their food because they were uncomfortable. Adam Kakaati, the owner of Nuriyah Cafe (left) in the southwest Sydney suburb of Gregory Hills, said Vari Desho (right) is the best barista in town despite suffering from Tourette Syndrome The customer gave Nuriyah Cafe a one-star review because Mr Desho's Tourettes Syndrome made them uncomfortable (pictured, the negative review) 'Unfortunately the front of house team member had a physical condition which we initially dismissed,' the review said. 'It causes him to 'bark' and as we said, we thought it would pass especially as when he took our order it stopped completely. 'Unfortunately it then got much worse and much louder and more constant. We felt sooo bad and really wanted to stay but when it got so bad we couldn't even have a conversation we very reluctantly had to cancel our order and leave.' Mr Kakaati was quick to fire back with a post of his own. 'Today at Nuriyah it was brought to our attention that a customer took it upon themselves to post a negative review regarding one of our employees,' he wrote on Facebook. 'Here at Nuriyah we treat all our staff & customers like family and we wanted to address how we feel about the incident that occurred, over the weekend. 'We welcome and support anyone with a life changing condition.' The defensive boss later said the review made him 'so angry' because Mr Desho isn't able to help his condition. 'His knowledge towards coffee, everything about the machine, and the way he makes it, no one does it better than him,' Mr Kaakati told the Herald Sun. Adam Kakaati said his employees at Nuriyah Cafe are 'like family' and said the review made him 'so angry' because Mr Desho didn't do anything wrong (pictured, food from Nuriyah Cafe) 'I told him don't ever say sorry to someone like that. You haven't done anything wrong. 'People said 'he might affect your business', but I don't care. He has a family to provide for and he's one of the best workers I have.' Commenters underneath Mr Kakaati's emotional post also defended Mr Desho and called out the reviewer for being insensitive. 'I know this man personally, and it is very heartbreaking to see someone go to such lengths to write a review like that,' one person wrote. 'He is such a nice man, who would do anything to make sure you are happy and comfortable. Shame on you.' 'It makes me so happy to see a business that supports inclusion and stands by it when challenged. It's people like this that will make positive change when it comes to stigma and judgement,' another said. The wife of a British millionaire who died when he was thrown from his luxury yacht after it hit rocks off the coast of Sardinia says her 'life changed in a matter of seconds'. Company director Dean Kronsbein, 61, suffered a fatal heart attack after he landed in the water when the captain of his yacht, Amore, was forced to take evasive action to avoid another vessel bearing down on them. His wife Sabine, 59, suffered serious injuries in the incident as did their daughter Sophia, 27, who has undergone treatment in a specialist head injuries hospital. Sabine told investigators asking her what happened: 'All I remember is the other yacht coming for us at speed and then our captain said "everyone on the floor, everyone down" and then we hit the rocks. 'My life has changed in a matter of seconds, I'm devastated by what's happened, everything has changed but I want to defend the captain of our yacht for his actions, he was trying to save us. He didn't do anything wrong.' MailOnline revealed earlier this week how Amore's captain, Mario Lallone, 67, had been placed under investigation, along with Luigi Cortese, the skipper of Sweet Dragon, another boat involved in the tragedy which happened off the coast of the Italian Mediterranean island of Sardinia. Both men face possible manslaughter and wounding charges and have been questioned by local prosecutors and coastguards following the incident which happened on Sunday evening as the Amore headed to the exclusive resort of Porto Cervo where Mr Kronsbein has a villa. Sabine, 59, (pictured with her husband Dean Kronsbein) suffered serious injuries in the incident as did their daughter Sophia, 27, who has undergone treatment in a specialist head injuries hospital This terrifying image taken after the crash laid bare the full extent of the damage - with the bow of the Amore completely torn off with the force of the impact on the rocks Pictured: Dean Kronsbein's 70ft yacht Amore is seen impounded by local authorities Sabine, 59, with her husband Dean Kronsbein, 61, who died in Italian yacht crash The captain of the Amore has already told investigators he was forced to take evasive action as the Sweet Dragon which is owned by controversial former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi headed towards Mr Kronsbein's yacht. In 2009 Sweet Dragon was at the centre of a scandal after pictures emerged showing scantily clad models being shuttled to Berlusconi's villa on Sardinia onboard the boat. Berlusconi who once hosted former counterpart Tony Blair and wife Cherie at his home on the island was not onboard the Sweet Dragon but extended members of his family were and they will also be questioned. As both vessels involved are less than 25 m there is no 'gps blackbox' on board and sources close to the case revealed that phones, I-pads and laptops were being seized from those onboard to try and track the courses taken by the yachts. Both yachts have been impounded pending the end of the investigation which is being carried out by prosecutors Gregorio Capasso and his colleague Enrica Angioni. Dean Kronsbein holds up a trophy for the longest journey after he and his wife Sabine (pictured in the car) drove their 1959 Bentley S1 Continental from Dusseldorf to Lake Como, Italy, for the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este event for classic and vintage cars Pictured: The damage to the yacht's bow is seen in pictures taken after it was towed ashore Luigi Cortese, the captain of the Sweet Dragon (pictured in 2008) - owned by controversial former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi - is under investigation along with the captain of Amore The captain of Amore, Mario Lallone, has been placed under investigation by Italian authorities in connection with the incident Lawyer Egidio Caredda told MailOnline: 'They just want to find out exactly what happened so they have the full picture of the circumstances leading ti Mr Kronsbein's death.' MailOnline can also reveal that Sabine and Sophia will fly back to the UK later on Thursday on board two specially chartered medical flights. A source said: 'They still have some way to go in terms of recovery but it is felt they would be better returning home so doctors in Britain can continue their care. 'They will fly from separate airports as both are being treated in different parts of the island. The daughter will go from Alghero while the mother will fly from Olbia. The mother will be taken directly onto her plane in an ambulance which will drive her to hospital in England.' Paint was also left imprinted on the rocks that the vessel hit, killing one and injuring six - two of them with serious wounds. Mr Kronsbien's wife Sabine, 59, and daughter Sophia, 27, were also seriously injured and taken to a hospital at Olbia before being transferred to a more specialist unit at Sassari 60 miles away The crash happened near a set of islands called Il Nibani, which are around two miles off the coast from Porto Cervo, Sardinia Dean's sister, Sarah Kronsbein, posted on Instagram: 'RIP my older brother Dean Kronsbein. I can not find words which explain what I feel. I will love you ! My thoughts are with Dean's family.' Grimsby born Mr Kronsbein owned Ross-on-Wye based Ultrafilter, a Herefordshire company that makes specialist medical equipment including high quality surgical masks. During the pandemic the firm distributed millions of masks across the country and took part in the Big Mask Giveaway. Mr Kronsbien's owns 5 million Cubberley House, a beautiful country home close to Ross on Wye and also a four bedroom villa on the outskirts of Porto Cervo (pictured) Former Top Gear star Richard Hammond (left) told MailOnline on Tuesday how he had been left 'heartbroken' at news of Mr Kronsbein's death Mr Kronsbein owns 5 million 100 acre Cubberley House close to Ross-on-Wye and last month hosted a part for the Bentley Drivers Club which was attended by neighbour and close pal Top Gear star Richard Hammond as well as Prince Michael of Kent. Earlier this week Richard told MailOnline he had been left 'heartbroken' at the news of Mr Kronsbein's death. He said:' He really was a larger than life character and I know people often say this but he really was and the world needs more people like him. He was a big hearted fun character, who wanted people to enjoy themselves and he was an astute businessman.' An autopsy is due to be carried out on Mr Kronsbein on Friday and the family have hired independent medical and maritime experts. A Texas teacher convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old student in her classroom during three years of abuse does not have to report to jail until next year because she has just given birth. Marka Bodine, 31, was sentenced Tuesday to 60 days in prison followed by ten years probation. But she will not have to report to jail in Harris County, east Texas until June 2023 because she recently had a child. The student, who is now 16, said Bodine befriended him by playing Fortnite, abc13 reported. His English teacher later began texting him, sending 25 to 40 explicit photographs of herself to the teen between April 2020 to February 2021. The abusive sexual relationship continued for over two years, with Bodine driving to her student's home two to four times a month until March 2021, when it eventually ended after he called the cops 'begging for help.' The baby is not the result of Bodine's years-long relationship with the student. Marka Bodine (left, mugshot image and right, a social media upload) was convicted of abusing her male student from when he was 13 until just months ago. She will serve 60 days in jail The Tomball Intermediate School teacher will spend the rest of her life on the sex offenders' register. Bodine's charge, continued sexual abuse of a child under 14, carries a maximum life sentence. Prosecutors had asked for a minimum 20 years behind bars. Christopher Downey, a criminal defense attorney, told abc13 that that a possible contributing factor to Bodine's light sentence could be evidence of her mental state at the time of the abuse. 'I think no small part of an explanation for this sentence may lie in any psych info they provided to the court,' Downey said, but noted that social factors likely had a hand in Bodine's fate. 'By all accounts, this is an unusual outcome. I am sure that the gender of the person on trial, the fact that this was a woman accused of having sex with a young boy, that's gonna factor into it as well,' Downey said. The abused boy left the courtroom midway through sentencing as he was 'very upset with the outcome,' attorney Janna Oswald said. Ms Oswald added: 'Im heartbroken for the complainant and his family. 'Im really disappointed in the outcome as a prosecutor, a child abuse prosecutor, and Im disappointed as a citizen of Harris County,' she told NBC Houston. Bodine's attorney said her sentence was 'appropriate', but the victim left the courtroom midway through the judge's remarks as he was 'very upset with the outcome', his lawyer said Bodine's defense attorney said: 'No case is like another and not every case deserves prison. 'We believe the Judge followed the law and handed down an appropriate punishment', attorney Dustan Neyland wrote in a statement to KPRC 2. The investigation into Bodine was launched in April after the ex-student came forward with allegations of continued and ongoing sexual misconduct. 'It was definitely a cry out for help,' Tomball Police Chief Jeff Bert said. 'He had reached out to a school, and he reached out to the police department as well, so I think he just became overwhelmed with it and reached out to us.' Bodine (left and right) abused the boy in her classroom and in her car on several occasions, the court in Harris County, east Texas heard. Prosecutors had asked for a minimum 20 years jail The boy told authorities that Bodine moved into his apartment complex after her divorce - and that the two had sex in her classroom and her car on numerous occasions, his affidavit stated. Tomball parent Jennifer Kratky, whose daughter was taught English by Bodine at the time of her arrest, told NBC: 'Its really hard to wrap our minds around why someone would do such a thing, but evil exists in the world. 'Its even now more upsetting to find out that she was given this ridiculously light sentence.' Court documents suggested Bodine had gone to the police, claiming that her former sixth grade student was harassing her and threatening to harm himself. A parent of one of Bodine's students at Tomball Intermediate School (pictured) said: 'Its really hard to wrap our minds around why someone would do such a thing but evil exists in the world' Bodine later admitted to having a three-year sexual relationship with that same boy, beginning in 2018 when he was just 13 years old, and sending him dozens of explicit videos and photos. Chief Bert said the investigation has uncovered evidence in the form of social media posts and text messages, suggesting that Bodine had been grooming the victim for sex. The Tomball Independent School District released a statement to ABC13, stressing that the case involved a former student 'who does not currently attend Tomball ISD schools.' According to district officials, as soon as they learned of the allegations against Bodine, she was placed on administrative leave and has since resigned. Her LinkedIn profile indicates that Bodine had taught English at Tomball ISD for nearly six years. The grieving parents of Simone Strobel (pictured) have been seeking answers for years since her 2005 alleged murder A German-born surfer who allegedly suffocated his backpacker girlfriend in their campervan and dumped her naked body in the bush 17 years ago will walk free from jail after his wife's wealthy family offered $450,000 for bail. Tobias Suckfuell Moran is charged with murdering his former partner Simone Strobel - who was allegedly suffocated with a pillow or plastic bag in Lismore, northern NSW, in 2005. He was extradited from Western Australia to Sydney last month after being charged with the alleged killing - and acting with intent to pervert the course of justice. Daily Mail Australia can reveal the Perth-based relatives of Moran's wife Samantha made a frenzied last-minute bid at Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court on Thursday to put up cash, property and even luxury rugs to secure his release on bail from Parklea jail in the city's west. Respected Perth dentist John Moran - Samantha's father - put up $200,000, while $100,000 each was offered by his wife Sandy, his son Michael, and his daughter - Samantha - who is expecting her third child with the accused. But the court requested records of property, bank balances and other financial assets from the Moran family. John Moran offered screenshots of his son Michael's bank accounts, but court officials demanded mortgage documents relating to the family's Perth properties, equity valuations and contracts. There was a discussion about the value of rugs belonging to the accused killer's mother-in-law - and mention that her January 2022 bank balance of around $25,000 might not be enough for the bail offer. John Moran told court officials in Sydney his family's legal representatives were racing to Fremantle court in Western Australia to do more to secure the release of his daughter's husband. It seemed Tobias Moran would not be walking from Parklea prison and returning to his luxury life with his pregnant wife and their two children in her family's multi-million dollar Perth beach house. But a late application by the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions to block bail after Magistrate Margaret Quinn had granted, was subsequently dropped and Mr Moran will now be released and return to Western Australia. Accused killer Tobias Moran (above) has been granted release after his wife's wealthy Perth family offered up property, cash and rugs to secure his return to his luxury beach shack Tobias Moran spent the past week in Covid isolation in Parklea prison after being extradited from Perth and charged with murder. Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court heard on Wednesday that police allege Ms Strobel, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher, died 'of asphyxia' at the hands of Mr Moran at Lismore caravan park in February 2005. The accused left Australia soon after his long-time girlfriend's death and returned to Germany after Lismore locals raised $6,000 for his plane ticket home. He later met wealthy Perth ski instructor, yoga teacher and lawyer Samantha Moran in South Africa and the couple married, and returned to live in Australia. Magistrate Margaret Quinn said the 2007 inquest into Ms Strobels death and an inquiry in Germany had found there had been fights between Mr Moran and Ms Strobel, drinking and they had been 'perhaps on drugs' on the night she died. She said statements from witnesses said there were screams heard on the night and indications of 'some aggression on behalf of Mr Moran, who had denied there had been drinking or drugs'. Ms Quinn granted bail because of the substantial surety, the delay before going to trial and the fact that 'it is not the strongest circumstantial case that I have seen'. She ordered him to report to a WA police station three days a week, surrender his passport, and not to go within 500metres of any international departure point. Tobias Moran is not expected to go to trial for Ms Strobel's alleged murder until late 2024. Samantha Moran and husband Tobias are expecting the birth of their third child as he is charged with the murder of his former girlfriend at a Lismore caravan park 17 years ago Ms Moran put up $200,000 for her husband's bail and her parents, Perth dentist John Moran and his wife Sandy were prepared to forfeit a further $250,000 surety against his flight before a 2024 trial While Tobias Moran's lawyer claims police have 'no evidence' against his client, prosecutor Kim Gourlie said the accused had told police lies about Ms Strobel, including 'lies in relation to the nature of their relationship, lies in relation to the use of alcohol, lies in relation to the clothing she was wearing'. Tim Game SC told the court on Wednesday that the police case is a 'weak theory' with more than 300 witness statements and would be a complex case to defend. Before being granted bail Mr Moran appeared in court via video link from Parklea prison wearing a blue forensic gown over his prison greens, with his hair drawn back in a ponytail beneath a white surgical mask. Mr Game argued against a letter Chief Investigating Officer, Detective Sergeant David David Mackie, which was submitted to the court by prosecutors. Tobias Moran (above in an artist's court sketch on Wednesday) appeared by video link from Parklea prison to apply for bail with the help of $450,000 from his wife's family Toby Moran (above when he was Tobias Suckfuell with then girlfriend Simone Strobel) has been charged with her 2005 murder in Lismore Defence lawyers said there was 'no evidence' to suggest Moran murdered Ms Strobel in the couple's campervan (pictured) after a night out at Lismore's Gollan Hotel in February 2005 Mr Game repeatedly said there was 'no evidence' for the allegations against Mr Moran, which assert the now 42-year-old man murdered Ms Strobel in the couple's campervan after a night out at Lismore's Gollan Hotel. Describing the police statement of facts in the case as 'an overstatement and exaggeration', the lawyer said his client had supplied DNA and had been excluded from 53 samples cited in the police case. The DNA of an 'unknown male' had also been found on a 'black item' by police near the crime scene. The court also heard there was evidence in the police case to suggest there were marks visible on Ms Strobel's neck, however, Mr Game maintained her cause of death was not certain. 'There is no evidence to support the supposition that the cause of death is suffocation,' he told the court. 'There were some marks, but no evidence to suggest that was the cause of death. That cannot be relied upon as cause of death.' Moran (pictured) sat with his hands clasped in front of him, staring at the screen, occasionally flexing the thumb of his left hand when he appeared in court on Wednesday As Mr Moran spent a week in a Sydney jail after being extradited from Perth to be charged with murder, his wife Samantha (above, the couple together) is preparing to give birth to their third child He said the case against Mr Moran had been 'hitched up' by police ahead of another inquest into Ms Strobel's death, to be held later this year. 'Without any explanation or any attempt to explain why, he has been charged ... now suddenly gets arrested one morning in Perth early last week,' Mr Game said. Police expressed concern the accused could take off overseas with his family - an assertion that Mr Game described that assertion as 'outrageous'. Prosecutor Kim Gourlie said screams from Lismore caravan park had been heard on the night Simone Strobel disappeared 'while she was still at the campsite'. He said her body had shown 'bruising' and that her death was due to 'the action of one or more persons'. He said the police case would include statements from German witnesses about the 'nature of the relationship' between Ms Strobel and Mr Moran back in 2005. 'When he was an important suspect around the time of her death, he left the jurisdiction,' Mr Gourlie said. 'At critical times when Simone was killed he doesn't co-operate' he said, adding that the accused had been 'compelled' to give police DNA samples. 'The reason he returned is he married an Australian. before he returned he changed his name.' Simone Strobel is pictured left and right, on CCTV six days before her naked decomposing body was found pushed through a fence near the Suckfuell siblings' campsite Simone Strobel and Tobias Suckfuell (right) are seen on CCTV leaving Lismore's Gollan hotel on February 11, 2005 when it is said the couple argued over tensions in their relationship Ms Strobel's body was found six days after she vanished following a drinking session between the four German tourists in a local Lismore hotel. Her decomposed body was found covered in palm fronds and pushed through a fence 90m from where she and Mr Moran had been camping with his sister Kathrin and her friend, Jens Martin. A Supreme Court judge ruled in a civil case there are 'reasonable suspicions' that Mr Moran killed Ms Strobel. Mr Moran left Australia after the alleged murder and led a carefree nomadic, existence surfing the world's top beaches, before he met Samantha in South Africa. Tobias Suckfuell (above) in a NSW Police interview following the discovery of his then girlfriend's body pushed through a fence near their campsite in Lismore Photo of Tobias and Simone during their backpacker holiday in Australia which has been signed by him with a romantic message to his then girlfriend of more than six years Neither Mr Moran nor his sister Kathrin returned to Australia to appear at the subsequent inquest into Ms Strobel's death. But Jens Martin did testify and claimed that all three had lied to police at Mr Moran's behest about their actions before Ms Strobel disappeared. Ms Strobel's grieving parents Gustl and Gabi Strobel have spoken to German newspapers over the years, saying they have endured 'agonising uncertainty' since their beloved daughter's death. The former Tobias Suckfuell, has been living under his new name Toby Moran with wealthy lawyer and yoga instructor wife Samantha Moran (pictured above) in the elite Perth suburb of City Beach for more than a decade Toby and Samantha met in South Africa after he left Australia following Simone's alleged murder and have lived a comfortable life with the help of her rich Perth family Ms Strobel's mysterious death also became the subject of a book, Have You Seen Simone? written by Virginia Peters. In 2014, Mr Moran took out an injunction to prevent its publication, and then launched a defamation suit against Ms Peters and Schwarz Publishing, but dropped the lawsuit in 2017. However, during the defamation suit's process called discovery, the defence applied for the release of papers called 'the 100-page Document'. In 2017, Mr Moran applied to block these documents on the grounds they were the subject of legal professional privilege and included notes written by himself and Samantha in South Africa which allegedly discuss the circumstances of Ms Strobel's death. NSW Police told the inquest they believed Ms Strobel had been killed by smothering, most likely with a pillow. In 2020, the NSW government offered a $1 million reward for information over the alleged homicide. Tobias Moran is pictured being extradited back to NSW to face murder charges. Pictured: His arrival at Sydney airport A 14-year-old boy who tragically fell to his death from a seventh floor balcony in East London may have been 'trying to look up at the stars'. Marcel Bruchal, from Newham, was at his grandparent's house in Bow when he plummeted onto the tarmac at around 9.15pm on March 19. At the inquest a family member recalled him looking over a balcony 'in a weird way' twice before his death. An ambulance got to the scene for 9.35pm and found a badly injured Marcel in cardiac arrest. He died later at Royal London Hospital. Marcel was 'well liked' and 'respected' student at Oasis Academy Silvertown, in North Woolwich, who had a love of astronomy. A devastating statement by his grandma Iwoulia Wozniak recalled their last moments together before his tragic death. She said: 'That evening was a very starry night and there was a comet going past. Maybe he lent out to have a look...We know for sure Marcel did not plan it.' Marcel Bruchal, 14,who was a budding astronomer may have fallen after 'trying to look up at the stars' The 14-year-old fell from his grandparent's seventh floor balcony onto the tarmac in Bow, East London The inquest heard how Marcel and another family member were 'very excited' to stay with Marcel's grandparents and they had a 'fantastic time' and they 'danced around'. His grandmother Iwoulia said: 'While we were dancing salsa Marcel left to go to the toilet for a while. 'A family member followed him out and he saw Marcel standing by the balcony and looking down. He described Marcel looking at it in a weird way.' Iwoulia then took them to Tesco to shop and noted Marcel was 'joined at my hip' and 'thought it was weird at the time'. But Marcel's mother Karolina told her it was normal and he was 'clingy'. Iwoulia remembered opening the balcony door and Marcel and the family member went outside. According to Marcel's grandma he was excited to be staying with her and her husband in their towerblock flat (pictured) for the weekend Tributes and flowers have been left near where Marcel fell, with Marcel's family describing his as, 'beloved, beautiful, smart, intelligent and sensitive' Iwoulia's world suddenly turned upside down as she heard the cries of the family member. She said: 'I heard him shout 'Marcel no Marcel no Marcel why?' He was next to me shouting and crying but I could not make sense of what he was saying. 'He grabbed my hand and took me to the balcony. I looked out over the balcony, I did not know what he wanted me to look at. I was told 'Marcel is laying there'. 'Then I recognised Marcel's top, we ran out of the block and we saw him laying there. He was not on the pavement, he was laying far from the building. 'My husband moved him around a bit, but I was shouting hysterically, I was shaking. 'I told my husband not to touch him, because I wanted to cover him up with the patchwork but at that point the ambulance turned up. Iwoulia said she did not know why Marcel 'might have jumped'. The family member told her Marcel was bullied at school and she recalled an incident a few months earlier where 'there was a boy making smacking noises at him and saying 'are you gay?'. Despite this, she added: 'I do not think bullying was the reason.' Marcel was a 'great student and loved astronomy' and they were not aware of 'mental health issues', according to his grandma. She guessed: 'That evening was a very starry night and there was a comet going past. Maybe he lent out to have a look...We know for sure Marcel did not plan it.' Marcel's grandad Krzys also recalled the terrible evening. He said: 'I was on my way downstairs when I heard a family member screaming 'Marcel no Marcel no Marcel why?'... I was pulled over towards the balcony and all three went there. I looked over the side and saw Marcel laying on the floor. 'I was not aware of any problems Marcel was having to make him do this.. I know there were some small issues at school a few months ago, I can only think something triggered this we are not aware of, or a very unlucky accident.' The inquest heard there was an incident of bullying at Marcel's school a few months earlier but his family are confident this did not cause his death Floral tributes have been left to him, including this one which says: 'Such a huge loss - with my deepest sympathy. RIP young man' A family member said Marcel had gone out to the balcony 'three to four times' and would often 'go on his tiptoes using his hands to grab himself up to get a better view and put his head over to look at the ground'. But, the final time they saw Marcel do this they told him to come inside. Marcel's father attended the court and wept as coroner Mary Hassell read the distressing evidence onto the record and said he was 'not aware of any bullying'. In an investigation into his death, detectives found 'nothing untoward' after checking his mobile phone for messages with evidence of bullying or searches for suicide. They also found no suicide note after looking in his school bag. Police were also confident he was well cared for by his family. Oasis Academy acting principal Emily Boxer said: 'Marcel was well liked, respected, and appeared happy at school. Students described him as very loyal, calm, and a kind friend. They said he had a big future.' A toxicologist ruled there was nothing abnormal in Marcel's blood test and a pathologist ruled his death 1A Multiple Injuries after 'devastating' damage to his body from the fall. Coroner Mary Hassell said the likelihood is the fall was an 'accident' as Marcel had a 'love of astronomy' and 'developed an interest in getting up on balconies' Concluding the hearing, Coroner Mary Hassell said: 'Some elements of how Marcel died are clear to me, but some are more difficult to understand. No other person was involved with that. She remarked he 'obviously developed an interest in getting up on balconies' and maybe his 'love of astronomy' could have led him to look at the stars. 'The likelihood is that he fell from the balcony and that this was an accident fall.' Leading tributes after his death, Marcel's mum Karolina Bruchal said: 'In our lifetime, we never thought we would be in this situation. My worst nightmares never thought I would ever write these words. And I write because we are so lethargic and helpless, because we would like to wake up so much. There are no more tears. Our beloved, beautiful, smart, intelligent and sensitive Marcelek.' A letter, left by his grandparents at the scene, read: 'Dearest Marcel, it is hard to put in words how empty our lives have become one day to another. You will stay in our hearts forever, you will always be our beloved first grandson. 'We love you more than life itself, as hard as it is only possible. We are in despair and feel an overwhelming emptiness without you. Grandma and Grandpa.' The United Nations chief has called for 'greedy' oil and gas companies to have their enormous profits taxed at at time of spiraling energy bills as ordinary people pay the price. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made his comments as energy prices surge and the big energy firms make record profits off the back of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been restricting the flow of Russian gas to Europe in retaliation for Western sanctions, creating an acute energy shortage that has driven prices globally and seen some European cities introduce energy rationing. 'This grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home,' Guterres said. 'I urge all governments to tax these excessive profits, and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times.' UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was 'immoral' for energy firms to be profiting from the Ukraine crisis and called for a one-off windfall tax British oil majors BP and Shell have reported record profits. BP broke a 14-year record and Shell broke its record for profits from the April-to-June period Guterres warned that rocketing energy prices had the potential to destabilize the global economy and usher in 'a wave of economic, social and political upheaval that would leave no country untouched.' 'Many developing countries - drowning in debt, without access to finance, and struggling to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic - could go over the brink.' UK energy bills are expected to reach up to a staggering 3,359 per year for the average household, starting in October and it's not expected to fall below that level until at least the end of next year. British oil majors BP and Shell have reported record profits. BP broke a 14-year record and Shell broke its record for profits from the April-to-June period. What is a windfall tax? A windfall tax is a one-off imposed on a company deemed to have profited excessively from a situation for which they weren't responsible. In essence, the profit was 'unearned.' It often comes at the expense of wider society. In this case, BP and Shell are bystander beneficiaries of Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine on February 24, while ordinary citizens are being made much poorer for it. A previous windfall tax was imposed in 1997 by then-Labor Chancellor Gordon Brown on utility companies formed by Tory privatizations, including on BT, Scottish Power and United Utilities. Advertisement Four of the biggest energy firms, Exxon, Chevron, Shell and TotalEnergies, have seen their profits double in the last quarter to nearly $51billion. After months of prevaricating on the issue, the British government finally approved a windfall tax in July that will see a one-off 25 percent taxation on energy firm's profits that is hoped will raise the treasury roughly $25 billion. The government can then put the money toward shielding households from energy bills that otherwise threaten to drive families into debt and poverty. Italy has followed suit, but French lawmakers rejected such a move, where energy companies - and therefore profits - are already publicly owned. But the US has ruled out a windfall tax that was floated by some members of Congress, with lobbyists calling the idea 'misguided.' 'Policymakers should be focused on increasing energy supply and reducing costs for Americans,' Frank Macchiarola, a senior vice president for oil and gas lobby group the American Petroleum Institute, said. 'Imposing new taxes on our industry will do the exact opposite and only discourage investment at a time when it's needed most.' Downing Street and MPs have been urged to get off TikTok over fears about the social media giant's links to the Chinese state. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, urged politicians and government departments to follow the example of Parliament, which closed its account yesterday. The account was set up on the popular app, owned by Chinese parent firm ByteDance, as a way of engaging young people with politics. But tensions have been rising between Beijing and the West in recent years with Westminster banning Chinese firm Huawei from involvement in the UK's 5G network. Fears have been raised that ByteDance, TikTok's owner, could send user data to the Communist regime - something it denies. Sir Iain is one of a number of British politicians sanctioned by Beijing over their criticism of the authoritarian regime accused of widespread human rights abuses. He today urged other MPs and ministers to act, saying: 'We are pleased that Parliament, immediately they were told, understood there was a problem and shut it down. 'It's important for others to look at that now and we need to start talking to people about not using TikTok.' He told the Guardian that Government accounts should be 'scrapped right away, adding; 'The message from the UK parliament itself is that TikTok is a risk, so MPs should be taking their accounts down'. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, urged politicians and government departments to follow the example of Parliament, which closed its account yesterday. The account was set up on the popular app, owned by Chinese parent firm ByteDance, as a way of engaging young people with politics. The UK Parliament TikTok app has been locked and deleted just a week after being set up over concerns about the app's links to the Chinese A letter signed by senior Tory MPs who called for the account to be closed What is TikTok and who owns it? TikTok is a social media app whose parent company ByteDance is Chinese. Users can live stream, create short videos and music videos and Gifs with a host of functions. TikTok's tagline is 'Make every second count'. In 2019, it became the second-most downloaded app globally behind Whatsapp. TikTok is known in China as Douyin where it was launched in 2016 and then made more widely available around the world in 2017. Douyin is still the version of the app used in China, available to download separately to TikTok. The app is most popular among children and young people who use it to film themselves dancing and lip-syncing to chart hits. It offers users a raft of colourful modification and editing tools including overlaying music, sound, animated stickers, filters and augmented reality (AR) for creating short videos. The Beijing-based social network TikTok reached one billion global users in the third quarter of 2021 and is expected to reach 1.8 billion by the end of 2022. Advertisement The account, which went live on July 27, has been locked and its content has been deleted less than a week on. A UK Parliament spokesman said: 'Based on Member feedback, we are closing the pilot UK Parliament TikTok account earlier than we had planned. 'The account was a pilot initiative while we tested the platform as a way of reaching younger audiences with relevant content about Parliament.' Followers of the account are met with an updated bio that reads: 'This account is now closed. Find us at www.parliament.uk.' China sanctioned seven MPs and peers who have criticised Beijing over its treatment of the Uighur Muslim minority group - claims China has described as 'malicious lies'. ByteDance is based in China and MPs have raised concerns about user data being sent to Beijing. In a letter to the Speakers of the Commons and Lords, seen by the Politico website, a group of senior Tory MPs including Tom Tugendhat, Nus Ghani and Iain Duncan Smith - who have been sanctioned by the Beijing government for speaking out about human rights abuse - complained about the TikTok account. 'The prospect of Xi Jinping's government having access to personal data on our children's phones ought to be a cause for major concern,' the letter said. Theo Bertram, the app's vice president for government relations and public policy in Europe, told MPs in July 'we have never been asked to provide TikTok user data to the Chinese government, nor would we if asked'. TikTok confirmed that they had written to the members that had signed the letter to help them understand the data protection process, and reassure them that the data is stored in the US and Singapore. A TikTok spokesperson said: 'While it is disappointing that Parliament will no longer be able to connect with the millions of people who use TikTok in the UK, we reiterate the offer to reassure those Members of Parliament who raised concerns and clarify any inaccuracies about our platform.' Just last month, there were also calls for the UK to ban two Chinese CCTV cameras that can recognise faces, eavesdrop on conversations and judge a person's mood. A group of 67 MPs and Lords including Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey urged the government to ban the sale and use of Kikvision and Dahua cameras. The question of the privacy of UK TikTok users grew with the eruption of hostilities over Huawei and Hong Kong after the UK Government's decision to previously ban the Chinese telecoms firm from the 5G network over security fears. Telecoms firms were prohibited from buying Huawei 5G while all of the firm's existing 5G technology is set to be stripped out of the network by the end of 2027. This sparked a further deterioration in relations between the UK and China, with tensions already strained over Beijing succeeding in forcing through a sweeping security law that brought Hong Kong under its control. And the most recent tension comes over the independence of Taiwan. China claim Taiwan as their own as the UK looks to stand up and support the democratically run island along with the US. Beijing has repeatedly warned against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan but after she did, it has urged Britain not to follow in her footsteps. This is the horrifying moment a thug shoulder-barges a man before kicking him against a passing bus, which drags him under its wheels as onlookers gasp in shock. Victim Guilherme Ramos Camargo, 21, miraculously survived the attack, spending 32 days in hospital - 27 of them in intensive care - and is now recovering at home in Cascavel, a city in the state of Parana, in southern Brazil. CCTV footage of the attack - filmed on May 15 - shows the victim being bumped in the shoulder by Rodrigo Simao, 25, as he walks on the sidewalk. After the clash, Guilherme stops to shout at Simao, who wheels around and kicks him straight in the chest. As Guilherme falls backward, he falls into the road and against a passing bus and then dragged beneath the wheels. A second piece of footage shows the assailant simply walking away afterward. CCTV shows that as Guilherme falls backward into the road, he falls against a passing bus and is dragged beneath the wheels The bus then sweeps him under its wheels in a horrifying flash as onlookers gasped in shock The assailant, Rodrigo Simao, 25, simply walked away after kicking Guilherme under the bus in what looked like a fatal incident Aptly, the attack took place outside a bar called 'Hooligans.' Guilherme was treated at the scene for serious injuries and then taken to hospital. Media reports in Brazil say prosecutors in Parana have accused Simao, who turned himself into police three days after the crime, of aggravated attempted murder. In his statement, he said he didn't know the victim and that his act wasn't premeditated. He added that he had briefly argued with Guilherme, which, he said, was his reason for kicking him. He claimed to police that he hadn't seenthe oncoming bus. After giving his statement, he was released. Victim Guilherme Ramos Camargo, 21 wrote a social media post on August 2 that said: 'Exactly 80 days ago in this very place I was lying on the ground washing the pavement with blood, and with God's permission today I came back here to prove that every bad phase passes. Everything passes.' The lawyer representing the victim argued there was intent to kill, while the suspect's lawyer has called the prosecution's complaint disproportionate. In a social media post on August 2, Guilherme wrote: 'Exactly 80 days ago in this very place I was lying on the ground washing the pavement with blood, and with God's permission today I came back here to prove that every bad phase passes. Everything passes.' Brazil has the seventh-highest crime rate in the world, according to World Population Review, with 'exceptionally high rates of violent crimes.' For every 100,000 people, 23.6 are murdered. In 2020 alone, 43,879 people were murdered, though the murder rate has been moderately trending downward since. Telangana BJP has started making preparations to contest the byelection in Munugode Assembly constituency by organizing a meeting of its leaders next week. (DC File Photo) HYDERABAD: The Telangana BJP has started making preparations to contest the byelection in Munugode Assembly constituency by organizing a meeting of its leaders next week. Tarun Chugh, state BJP in-charge and party national general secretary, is expected to chair the meeting of senior party leaders here on August 12. It is also expected that there would be some leaders joining the BJP from other parties in his presence. Munugode MLA Komatireddy Rajgopal Reddy, who on Thursday sent his resignation letter from the Congress to party Sonia Gandhi, is expected to submit his resignation as an MLA to Assembly Speaker Pocharam Srinivas Reddy on Monday. Rajgopal Reddy is expected to join the BJP and is the presumptive candidate for the party for the Munugode bypoll. Five energy giants have paid no income tax over the past seven years despite generating a combined $138 billion in profit - while millions of Australians are hit with skyrocketing energy bills. A startling report from the Australia Institute found four of the five members of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) - which includes some of the world's biggest firms - are paying no tax despite massive income. Chevron, ExxonMobil, Arrow Energy and Australia-Pacific LNG are 'violating laws' in avoiding taxation according to experts, with the greed of the multinational companies laid bare. 'If we look at the gas cartel on the east coast of Australia, two of its multinational members - Shell and Exxon - pay no income tax on over $20 billion worth of revenues,' energy finance analyst Bruce Robertson told The Project. 'On the royalties side, the companies pay very little royalties onshore, and in many cases no royalties at all offshore. So we are giving away our gas for free.' Five energy giants have paid no income tax over the past seven years despite generating a combined $138 billion in profit The APPEA estimated the members of the association would pay roughly $11billion in tax by 2020 - saying the gas and oil exploration would bring significant revenue to Australia. Instead, the energy giants have paid no money in tax - while Australian venture Santos paid just $6million income tax from $28.9billion. Host Waleed Aly asked Mr Robertson which loopholes the companies were exploiting, assuming there had been no legal foul play - something the expert objected to. 'All of which is perfectly legal from what I gather? No-one is claiming that this is a rort of some description, or it somehow violates laws, so what would have to change?' Aly asked. 'Well, some people are claiming it is a rort and it does violate laws and one of those people would be the Australian Tax Office and myself to back them up,' Mr Roberston responded with a smile. Energy finance analyst Bruce Robertson said the companies are committing 'illegal' behaviour and the ATO and federal government should clamp down on their abuse 'If you have a look, the ATO reached a settlement with Chevron in 2018 that involved nearly $1 billion worth of tax being paid and at the moment Exxon Mobil is shortly going to make a settlement with the ATO. 'Gemina, the gas pipeline company, owned by the government of Singapore and the government of China, it is currently under investigation for transfer pricing on its convertible nodes. So there is illegality going on.' Mr Robertson called for the ATO to be given more power to prosecute and bigger fines handed out to major companies abusing Australia's tax system. He suggested all of the gas and oil powers were committing 'illegal taxation practices'. Former prime minister Scott Morrison opened the APPEA conference in Brisbane on Tuesday. Energy giants' Australian tax rort In a 2012 APPEA claimed Queensland coal seam gas LNG companies would have paid around $11.2 billion in federal income tax by 2020. They have paid almost none. In 2015 Chevron estimated it would have paid around $4 billion in 'direct taxations and royalties' by 2020. It has paid no income tax or resource tax over that period. In 2013 Shell claimed that its Prelude floating LNG project would pay $12 billion in taxes over the life of the project. Shell has since acknowledged it will never pay PRRT has paid no income tax since 2015. An eighth company, Australian company Santos, paid just $6 million income tax on $28.9 billion of income, and paid no income tax from 2015 to 2018 and 2020. Source: Australian Institute Advertisement Mark Ogge, the principal adviser at the Australian Institute, lamented Morrison's federal government 'giving the resource away for free' to these multi-national companies and said the industry needed a complete overhaul. 'It's unbelievable that you can make $138 billion and pay nothing in tax. Our governments should not be letting this happen and we need an overhaul of how the oil and gas industry is taxed in Australia,' he said. 'The gas companies promised us billions in revenue and instead we end up with little in our pockets and a whole lot more climate impacts. 'We trust our politicians to tax our natural resources to the benefit of all Australians, but instead some of the largest gas miners, members of APPEA, are paying absolutely nothing. 'The federal government is virtually giving the resource away for free, gift wrapped in subsidies, mostly to foreign-owned companies, many of whom pay little if any tax.' Mr Ogge called for Anthony Albanese to impose 'far greater scrutiny' on the giants who are forcing massive price hikes on customers despite paying no tax. 'Imagine if you trusted an agent to sell your house to get the best deal possible, but instead they gave it to their mate for next to nothing. This is what is happening with our gas resources,' he said. 'Far greater scrutiny should be given to the close ties between some of our political representatives and the oil and gas companies who benefit from their largesse with our money.' The independent police watchdog has launched an investigation after a 14-year-old black schoolboy with asthma was mistakenly stopped and forced to the ground by Met Police officers. De-Shaun Joseph, 14, feared for his life as he was handcuffed and pinned on the ground as he walked home from school in Croydon, South London. Officers said he matched the description of a robbery suspect after a primary school pupil had his phone stolen in the area - a young black man in a blue hoodie. De-Shaun was wearing his school uniform with a grey top over it when he was stopped outside Blackhorse Road tram station. He said officers forced him up against a wall, handcuffed him and took his phone without explanation before pinning him to the ground. Police held De-Shaun - who is asthmatic - face-down with his hands behind his back as they kneeled on top of him, he said. He told ITV News: 'I thought I was going to die.' The Metropolitan Police originally found that 'no misconduct was apparent' during the mistaken detention - but the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has now launched an investigation. The body is appealing for anyone who witnessed the incident to come forward. It said: 'We are investigating a complaint by the child's mother, who alleges excessive force was used by officers and that he was treated differently because of his age and that he is black. 'We began an independent investigation into this incident in July and have obtained police body worn video in addition to the mobile phone footage, and also conducted a trawl of CCTV in the area. 'We have also obtained police incident logs and relevant force policies and procedures.' IOPC Regional Director Graham Beesley said: 'I'm aware of the concern the footage of this incident has caused. 'We know the use of stop and search can have a negative impact on black and minority ethnic groups and erode public confidence in policing, so it is vital we thoroughly investigate this matter and establish the full circumstances around the officers' interaction with this child. 'We would really like to speak to anyone who witnessed the incident so they can help us to paint as full a picture as possible of what happened.' While being held by police officers De-Shaun managed to shout his mother's mobile number to a bystander, who was able to contact her and tell her what was happening. Janet Joseph raced over to where police were holding De-Shaun and was in tears about the incident. Janet feared her son would be the next George Floyd, and said what De-Shaun went through was 'every parent's worst nightmare.' She said: 'It's the same old story - every black boy fits the description. De-Shaun Joseph, 14, was forced to the ground by police without - he said they gave him no explanation 'There's no excuse for what they did to my son and the excessive force they used on a 14-year-old black boy.' The Met later released De-Shaun without arrest and admitted they had detained the wrong person. A spokesperson for Met Police said at the time of the incident: 'Police were called at 5.17pm on Thursday, 23 June, after a primary schoolboy had been robbed of his mobile phone by a group of teenagers who intimated they had a knife in Woodside Green, Croydon. 'Officers responded and conducted an area search. 'A teenage boy was stopped in Blackhorse Road at 5.27pm after officers saw his clothing matched the description given of one male within the suspect group.' The force claimed that after being stopped, De-Shaun 'verbally abused officers and became obstructive.' Police held De-Shaun - who is asthmatic - face-down with his hands behind his back while officers kneeled on top of him. He told ITV News (pictured): 'I thought I was going to die.' De-Shaun was wearing his black and yellow school uniform with a grey top at the time Chief Inspector Richard Berns of the violent crime taskforce said 'no misconduct is apparent', but added there would be an investigation following a complaint. He said: 'Our officers patrol each day to prevent violence and seek out those who would do others harm. 'Officers were responding to reports of a robbery involving a young victim and had to conduct their 'on the street' investigation under very challenging circumstances after some onlookers began directing verbal abuse at them. 'All officers understand that their actions are subject to scrutiny. An initial review of the incident, including body-worn video, has been conducted by the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards and no misconduct is apparent. 'However, a public complaint has been made and will be investigated thoroughly by the professional standards unit.' Anyone who witnessed all or part of the incident can contact the IOPC by emailing BlackhorseRoad@policeconduct.gov.uk or calling 0300 303 5736. Cops in New Jersey put out an urgent appeal for help after a bloodied woman was seen screaming for help inside a truck. Surveillance footage shows the tractor-trailer pull up next to a Toyota garage parking lot by Ridge Road, South Brunswick, around 2pm Wednesday. The woman then shouted to passersby for immediate assistance, police said. A man is then seen running toward the vehicle, but it swiftly drives away before he can help. The eyewitness, whose car was parked elsewhere, called 911 and said the man was older and white, with a white beard. The tractor-trailer cab carrying the woman was seen by surveillance cameras across the street The woman is white or Hispanic and in her 20s, with long black hair, he added. She was wearing a brown flannel shirt. The truck turned off Route 130 at the Ridge Road exit just outside Dayton. South Brunswick PD posted the grainy video on Twitter, with the clip swiftly gaining hundreds of likes, retweets, and well-wishing messages for the woman. The man (pictured left) runs over to the truck (upper center) but it swiftly drove away Surveillance footage shows the tractor-trailer cab pulling away down Route 130 soon later It captioned the post: 'ALERT - NEED PUBLIC HELP.' Detective Sergeant Timothy Hooper told News12: 'The witness started to advance toward the vehicle and as he did, the woman got yanked back up into the car and the vehicle sped off going 130 southbound. '[Truck is] likely between a 2006 to 2018 Volvo or Mac Bobtail truck. At the time it wasn't carrying a trailer with it.' Cops added they are treating the situation as a 'domestic dispute' and have already received tips from the public. A beloved sprocker spaniel dog has finally been returned to her owner seven years after she was stolen by breeders who used her for illegal puppy farming. Emma Drewett, 49, from Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire, was reunited with pup Flash, 11, after she was stolen from the family by criminal breeders in 2015, who made her produce litter until her old age. Gamekeeper Emma and her teenage son Luke feared they would never see their dog again as on average, sprocker spaniels live to 12-15 years. A nationwide appeal proved fruitless and the family's hopes waned over the following seven years, with 'thousands' of people helping share the missing posts all over social media - but to no avail. But incredibly Flash was found by a dog-lover almost 200 miles away from Emma's home. Michelle Burrow, who lived in South Wales, contacted Emma after having bought Flash from a local breeder. Beloved sprocker spaniel pup Flash, 11, has finally been returned to her owner Emma Drewett, 49, from Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire, pictured at home together, after going missing for seven years while being used for breeding After a check-up at the vets, Michelle discovered the elderly dog was microchipped and belonged to Emma and her family. Michelle and Flash had been living together for seven months already, and had forged a close bond, but handed back the dog to her original owners last weekend. Unbelievably, before the microchip scan revealed all, a friend of Emma's had stumbled upon Michelle with Flash, and alerted Emma of the dog who bore a striking resemblance to her friend's missing pup. Dog thefts in the UK jumped to a seven-year high of 2,760 last year, the equivalent of eight pets being snatched every day and a 16 per cent rise from 2015. A nationwide appeal proved fruitless and the family's hopes waned over the following seven years, with 'thousands' of people helping share the missing posts all over social media - but to no avail. But incredibly Flash was found by a dog-lover almost 200 miles away from Emma A total of 45 French Bulldogs were stolen last year, up 29 per cent on the previous year, while a further 24 Jack Russells were also taken - a 140 per cent rise on the ten recorded in 2020. Other smaller breeds such as Chihahuas, Pugs and American Bulldogs were also highly sought after among criminals, according to new figures revealed under a Freedom of Information request and compiled by Direct Line Pet Insurance. Staffordshire Bull Terriers were previously the most popular target breed for thieves, but dropped to seventh last year following an 88 per cent fall. London was the UK's hotspot for dog thefts, with 422 incidents reported to The Metropolitan Police last year, more than double the next highest areas of West Yorkshire and Kent. Emma said: 'It's quite unbelievable that after seven years Flash is back home with us. Dog thefts in the UK jumped to a seven-year high of 2,760 last year, the equivalent of eight pets being snatched every day and a 16 per cent rise from 2015. Flash is pictured with Emma's teenage son, Luke Emma said: 'Flash was only found because she was microchipped and this case shows how vital it is for owners to get their dogs chipped and keep information updated.' Pictured together 'At first she just stared at me and my partner, but then the manic tail wagging started and she was jumping all over us. 'There have thousands and thousands of shared posts by people on social media and I wish I could thank each of you personally. 'It's the end of a weird chapter, seven years of living hell not knowing where she was or what had happened, but she's home now. 'I would really like to thank Michelle Burrow who bought Flash not knowing she'd been stolen and gave her a loving home for seven months. 'It was really difficult for her to hand Flash back as they had developed a close bond. 'If it wasn't for Michelle we'd still be searching.' She added: 'Flash was only found because she was microchipped and this case shows how vital it is for owners to get their dogs chipped and keep information updated.' In May, data revealed that the price of a puppy dropped by 40 per cent after hitting record highs during the pandemic as families across the country rushed to get lockdown companions. The puppy mania fuelled by multiple Covid lockdowns in the UK drove average prices up to 2,237 last year but the demand for puppies has started to recede, according to figures from pet experts Pets4Homes. One of the main reasons for the drop in price is the surge in the number of hobby breeders who are meeting the demand, fuelled by people now working from home and having more time to tend to litters, Pets4Homes found. The average price between January and April this year has fallen by almost 1,000 and now sits at 1,329 as the country returns to normal following months of strict Covid measures, while the price of cats has declined by just 20 per cent. Rescuers in Mexico are in a desperate race against time to reach 10 workers left trapped inside a coal mine after it flooded on Wednesday. Dozens of military personnel and rescue dogs were deployed to the scene of the accident in the state of Coahuila, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said. The miners became trapped following the collapse of an inner wall, the ministry handling the disaster said. Local media outlets reported that a miner managed to escape the collapse and alerted authorities. 'At 1:35 pm (1835 GMT) a coal mine collapsed in the municipality of Sabinas, Coahuila, which caused a tunnel to flood' and trapped the workers, Obrador tweeted. 'We hope to find them safe.' Three miners had been rescued and hospitalized, the Security and Citizen Protection Ministry said in an update on the rescue efforts at the mine. 'The work will not stop until they are found,' the ministry said in a statement. 'The Mexican government guarantees all the necessary resources to carry out the search and rescue operations,' it said. Rescuers in Mexico are in a desperate race against time to reach 10 workers trapped inside a coal mine after it flooded on Wednesday. Pictured: A crane is used as rescue workers strive to reach 10 miners who have been trapped below Dozens of military personnel (pictured) and rescue dogs were deployed to the scene of the accident in the state of Coahuila, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Relatives await news of the miners trapped after the collapse in a coal mine in the municipality of Sabinas, state of Coahuila, Mexico, August 3 The miners became trapped following the collapse of an inner wall, the ministry handling the disaster said. Pictured: A soldier salutes as a car enters the area of the coal mine Rescuers and colleagues of the trapped miners carry out rescue work after the collapse of a coal mine in the municipality of Sabinas, state of Coahuila, August 3 President Obrador had first said nine miners were missing, but the security ministry said later that three had been rescued and taken to hospital while 10 were still believed to be inside. Some 92 soldiers were working at the scene, as well as specialists and rescue dogs, the president said. Sabinas is about 70 miles south-west of Eagle Pass, Texas. Television footage showed anxious relatives gathered to wait for news, with some crying and comforting each other at the site, about 700 miles north of Mexico City. The mother of one of the workers wept inconsolably, unable to answer questions from the press. Through tears, another woman at the scene said two of her children worked in the mine, though one of them had managed to escape after the accident. As night fell hours later, the families gathered under tents outside the mine in silence as state police, the national guard, medical teams and other rescuers worked to find the trapped workers. Three miners had been rescued and hospitalized, the Security and Citizen Protection Ministry said in an update on the rescue efforts at the mine in the Sabinas municipality of the northern state of Coahuila. Pictured: People work to reach the trapped miners Pictured: Relatives await news of the miners trapped after the collapse in a coal mine in the municipality of Sabinas, state of Coahuila Pictured: Soldiers arrive at the facilities of a coal mine which collapsed leaving miners trapped, in Sabinas, in Coahuila state, Mexico, August 3 Coahuila's state government said that the miners had been carrying out excavation work when they breached an adjoining area full of water, causing the shaft to collapse and flood. 'The mine began operating in January of this year and until now there have been no reports of any type of anomaly,' it said in a statement. State governor Miguel Riquelme said he had asked labor authorities and the local prosecutor's office to prioritize the rescue and investigation. The Labor Ministry said it had not received any complaints about safety at the mine, which began operations in January. Coahuila, the country's main coal-producing region, has seen a series of fatal mining accidents over the years. Pictured: Relatives of a trapped miner hug and cry as they away news of their loved one Pictured: The relative of a miner wipes the tears from her eyes while waiting for information outside the premises of a coal mine which collapsed leaving miners trapped Pictured: A rescue worker runs across the area over the mine. An ambulance is seen in the background Pictured: Relatives today await news of the miners trapped after the collapse in a coal mine in the municipality of Sabinas, state of Coahuila In June and July of 2021, cave-ins at two Coahuila mines claimed the lives of nine miners after becoming trapped. But Mexico's worst mining accident also occurred in Coahuila on February 19 2006, when an explosion ripped through the Pasta de Conchos mine while 73 miners were inside. Eight were rescued with injuries including serious burns. The rest died and only two of their bodies were recovered. Mr Lopez Obrador's administration promised two years ago to recover the remaining 63 bodies, a highly technical endeavour that has still not begun. Rishi Sunak defended his decision to quit Boris Johnson's government, blaming economic rows with the Prime minister and a refusal to cover up for Chris Pincher over groping allegations. The former chancellor was accused of a 'cynical' move designed to put him in No10 tonight as he faced Tory members at a Sky News debate. He resigned last month, helping prompt a walkout by more than 50 other ministers that led to the end of Mr Johnson's administration. Boris loyalists including Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries have accused him of stabbing the PM in the back with a calculated move. But when this was put to him by an audience member called 'Steve' tonight he defended his actions. When the Tory member suggested he had been plotting for months, including setting up a campaign website last December, he said: 'That is simply not true. I was due to give a speech with the prime minister the next week (after the resignation) and in the conversations about putting that speech together on the economy it was clear our differences were too big to reconcile. So that was the reason. 'Plus, let's not look at the past with rose-tinted spectacles here. Everyone remembers what was going on with Chris Pincher. Tamworth MP Mr Pincher, 52, resigned as deputy chief whip in late June after being accused of drunkenly groping a man. The former chancellor was accused of a 'cynical' move designed to put him in No10 tonight as he faced Tory members at a Sky News debate. 'That was a serious ethical question that the government was on the wrong side of - again - and I could not defend it. 'Maybe you are ok to defend that but I was not ok to defend it, 60 other remembers of the government were not ok to defend it, because it was wrong. 'And that is why we are here because we need to change things to bring trust and integrity and decency and honesty back into politics. That is what I want to do as prime minister.' Tamworth MP Mr Pincher, 52, resigned as deputy chief whip in late June after being accused of drunkenly groping a man. He admitted that he had 'embarrassed himself and other people', after drinking too much at the elite Carlton Club in London. The action to suspend the Tory whip from Mr Pincher was taken after a formal complaint about him was made to Parliament's harassment watchdog. But Mr Johnson was criticised for the time it took to take the action. Three family members who were shot dead at a remote property have been identified as a couple and their son, as police continue to hunt the gunman. The tragic incident unfolded on Thursday at 9am on a rural cattle property in the small mining town of Bogie, about 40km west of Bowen in the Whitsundays region of north Queensland. Married couple Mervyn and Maree Schwarz and her son Graham Tighe died from gunshot wounds alleged to have been inflicted by a neighbour. Ross Tighe, Grahams brother and Marees son, miraculously survived but was airlifted to Mackay Hospital in a critical condition suffering a gunshot wound to the stomach. The gunman remains at large and police believe they are still in the area but don't believe there is any ongoing danger to the public. Investigators confirmed they are speaking to five people who were in the rural property in relation to the incident. All people involved are known to each other as investigations continue. Locals say it's not the first time there's been an issue between those involved. It's believed there had been a property dispute over boundary lines between the owners of two properties in the area. Maree and Mervyn Schwarz died from gunshots wounds, along with Maree's son Graham Tighe. Another son is in hospital Maree Schwarz was shot dead at the property on Shannonvale Rd, Bogie on Thursday. Her husband and a son were also killed The couple and their son died during the incident, with another son fighting for life in hospital after being shot in the stomach (pictured, the helicopter which airlifted him to hospital) 'We continue to process the crime scene and police do not believe there is any ongoing danger to the public,' police confirmed on Thursday night. Despite his injuries, Ross managed to flee the scene and make his way to another home - which police said was 'many, many kilometres away' from where the shooting on a remote property took place - and contacted the authorities. He was flown to Mackay Base Hospital to undergo emergency surgery and is now in intensive care in a serious but stable condition. 'He was able to tell police that he had been shot and three others (were) also shot,' Inspector Tom Armitt said. 'We believe the male was able to extract himself from the area. He was fleeing from the scene.' He explained Ross was in a 'very distressed state' and had been 'confused' during the call. A rescue helicopter was sent to Bogie in rural Queensland in a desperate attempt to save the family The couple and their son were killed and another son injured in the shooting in the rural town of Bogie, near Bowen in north Queensland After searching the area where Ross was found, police deemed the location safe and discovered a property along Shannonvale Road where the shooting is believed to have occurred. The shooting took place on a sprawling cattle property which is 'rural, remote, very hilly and heavily forested'. 'It has taken a number of hours for police to search and clear the area, however we have declared a crime scene in the remote rural location where we believe we have located three deceased persons,' Inspector Armitt said. Neighbours say the property was sold last year to a young family and that there was an ongoing dispute with a neighbouring property owner over boundary lines. An emergency declaration for the area was issued at around 11.30am. 'Investigations remain ongoing into the circumstances leading up to the shooting,' the police said. 'Police are currently conducting emergency operations in the area and requesting members of the public and aircraft to not attend the declared location.' Investigators are clearing the 'extensive' property and will remain in place 'as long as we need to do our job', Acting Superintendent Armitt said. Though there are no other people living in the exclusion zone, the police have urged everyone to avoid the area. A woman who works on Peter Delamothe Road, which connects Bogie to Bowen, earlier told Daily Mail Australia she saw several police cars racing towards scene of the shooting. 'I saw at least three police cars while I was outside and heard a few more sirens after that,' she said. 'It's not usually what you see. I thought straight away that something bad had happened.' The tragedy has rocked the local community. 'It's come as a big shock for that particular area and it's certainly very concerning,' Burdekin state MP Dale Last said. Whitsunday Regional Councillor Jan Clifford added: 'To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened in the Whitsunday region before. 'We are all deeply saddened by the tragedy.' Cr Clifford said the community of Bogie - with a population of 207, according to the latest census data - was more of a community than a township. 'It's a little village. Everyone will know everyone ... It's just awful.' It is understood doctors and nurses with blood supplies and other medical resources were sent from Bowen Hospital to Collinsville Hospital - the closest facility to the shooting - to assist. Three people have been confirmed deceased following a shooting at a rural property in Bogie near Collinsville this morning. https://t.co/6iYwYfktIc pic.twitter.com/smwHlVn7y5 Queensland Police (@QldPolice) August 4, 2022 Up to eight ambulances were dispatched from as far as Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville. Elly Colls, who works at Opal Ridge Motel, told the Guardian she learned of the incident at about 11am when someone rang to let them know there had been 'a shooting at the Bogie'. 'Better lock up the house,' she said. 'Cause I don't think (they) found him.' Other locals described the shooting as 'unusual' and 'strange' for the usually quiet area. 'We're traditional owners of this land around Collinsville. I wouldn't have thought it could happen here. It's a small town,' one woman told The Courier Mail. Another said: 'The whole town is a bit rattled that something like that could happen here.' 'We don't know the full story, but we've definitely heard about it. It's a small town, everyone knows everyone. 'But out in 'the boge'? Well, it's tiny.' A fourth person has been arrested on suspicion of murder by Met police detectives investigating the disappearance of 24-year-old student nurse Owami Davies. A 22-year-old man was arrested at a property in Croydon, South London yesterday evening (August 3). Three other men, aged 23, 27 and 32, who were previously arrested on suspicion of murder as part of the investigation also all remain in custody after police obtained warrants for their further detention. Owami Davies, 24, of Grays, Essex, was last seen 'in a vulnerable state' just after midnight on July 7 in west Croydon - three days after leaving her family home. She has now been missing for four weeks and police say their priority remains finding her. CCTV footage released by the Metropolitan Police shows Owami crossing Derby Road in west Croydon with a mystery man as a white van pulls out into the road. The van driver would have had a good opportunity to see them both clearly and officers are appealing this possible witness to come forward. Owami is described as a 'caring', 'loving' and 'doting' by her distraught mother, Nicol. Owami Davies, 24, of Grays, Essex, was last seen 'in a vulnerable state' just after midnight on Derby Road, west Croydon, on July 7 after leaving her family home three days earlier. Here she is pictured on CCTV in a shop the same night she disappeared Owami's mother, Nicol Davies, said: 'There are many friends and family who love and care for Owami and all of them want to see her safe return. Owami - if you see this appeal please believe you are not in any trouble, we just want you to come back to us' The Metropolitan Police released an image of Owami (figure on left) walking on Derby Road in west Croydon when she was last seen on July 7 and said to be 'in a vulnerable state' A timeline of events from the moment Ms Davies left her family home in Grays, Essex, to the point where two men were arrested on Monday in the Croydon area Owami was captured on CCTV in this shop on Derby Road, Croydon Ms Davies said: 'It is obvious that someone out there has seen something, someone out there knows something, someone out there heard something. 'I am begging, I am asking for the public's help, from the people, to say if you know, if you have heard or seen her, or she passed you, please speak up.' She added: 'All we really want is to find her, all we really need is for her to come home or to know her whereabouts. 'I sit here as a desperate mother at the mercy of anyone that knows or heard something to help me find my baby, that's all I'm asking, just help to find her.' She added: 'Or her, if she's somewhere and hears this, to please come home. 'We miss her so much, her brothers and myself miss her, need her. 'We are not complete, we just want her to come home and, again, if she is listening she should know she's not in trouble. 'She's a lovely person. Owami's caring, she likes to help. She doesn't hold grudges. She loves her brothers, she dotes on her brothers. She loves me. As much as we love her.' Ms Davies said Owami was 'really happy' prior to her disappearance, and had about two months left of her studies. She had recently secured a job with Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital and was interested in doing research on diseases. Mrs Davies said: 'There are many friends and family who love and care for Owami and all of them want to see her safe return' Police appealed to the public for help in piecing together Owami Davies' movements. Pictured: Police tape outside a property on Derby Road Owami's mother Nicol Davies (pictured) has pleaded for anyone with information to assist the police investigation Detective Chief Inspector Nigel Penney said: 'Owami is very vulnerable and the longer she is missing the more we worry that she has come to harm. Owami's family are living through a nightmare and are desperate for news' Police search a home on Derby Road in connection with Owami's disappearance yesterday (August 3) Nicol, a mother of three, said they had holidays planned to Spain and Disneyland Paris, saying her daughter's nickname is 'Princess' due to her love of Disney. She said: 'We had so many things on our calendar that we still needed to do.' Detective Chief Inspector Nigel Penney from the Met's Specialist Crime Command leads the investigation and said: 'While a further arrest has been made, this remains a missing person investigation and our priority is, and has always been, finding Owami. 'I would continue to appeal to anyone who has information about Owami's whereabouts to please get in contact with my team. If you don't feel comfortable speaking to police, then you can call the independent charity Crimestoppers they will not ask for your identity and will not trace your call.' Owami from Grays, in Essex, left her family home on Monday, 4 July and was last seen at 00:03hrs in Derby Road, West Croydon, on Thursday, 7 July. Owami's family are being kept updated about the progress of the investigation. DCI Penney added: 'We are working hard to find Owami but we really do need the public's help - the longer she is missing the more we worry that she has come to harm. 'As a result of extensive CCTV enquiries we have a clearer idea of Owami's movements, but we still need the public to contact us and tell us what they know. We would obviously like to speak to the driver of the white van that passed Owami in Derby Road, but anyone with information should call.' Police are asking any witnesses or anyone with information to call 020 8721 4622, or 101, quoting reference 22MIS025307. To give information anonymously people can also contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or online. A Russian female commander who boasted about how she enjoyed killing Ukrainians and whose troops fired on civilians in the Donbas region has been killed in a missile strike. Lieutenant Colonel Olga 'Kursa' Kachura, 52, was killed instantly after a Ukrainian missile hit her car as she was driving in the city of Horlivka, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Kachura, who is Russia's first female officer to die in the war in Ukraine, was a colonel of a rocket artillery division which shelled civilians in the Donetsk People's republic. Her unit fired on civilians in the Donbas region and Kachura later boasted that she enjoyed killing Ukrainians in interviews on Kremlin propaganda channels. Kachura, a Ukrainian native who worked in the Horlivka Police department, reportedly defected to the pro-Russian side in 2014 after Putin fomented a rebel uprising in the Donbas. She would often disguise herself as a member of regular Ukrainian forces to commit war crimes in order to discredit them, according to Ukraine's armed forces. '(Kachura was) guilty of the shelling of the cities of Donbas and the deaths of civilians,' Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazanskyi said. 'In Ukraine, she was sentenced to 12 years in prison in absentia.' Lieutenant Colonel Olga 'Kursa' Kachura, 52, was killed instantly after a Ukrainian missile hit her car as she was driving in the city of Horlivka, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine The mother-of-two, who has been granted the posthumous Hero of Russia honor, was a colonel in the forces of Russian puppet state Donetsk People's Republic, where she commanded a rocket artillery division deployed against Ukraine She becomes one of the latest Russian high-ranking officers to be killed in Ukraine amid the Russian president's brutal on-going invasion of the country, that has seen Ukrainian forces put up fierce defence of their country. Kachura is the 97th known officer to have been killed in Putin's war in Ukraine. Putin granted Kachura the posthumous Hero of Russia honour - the Kremlin's highest award - 'for her courage and heroism shown in the performance of military duty'. Margarita Simonyan, the head of the sanctioned RT network, said: 'Legendary Korsa died in Horlivka... May she rest in peace 'The Chief [Putin] awarded Korsa the title of Hero of Russia. That's how it's supposed to be. These are our common heroes.' Kachura was a career police investigator rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before switching to the forces of Putin-backed separatists. She served in the 3rd separate motorised rifle brigade Berkut of the 1st Army Corps of the DPR, and commanded a Grad MLRS division in Horlivka. There were 140 gunners under her command. The mother-of-two had been wounded several times in previous attacks. She had held the rank of colonel in the DPR forces since 2015. Putin granted Kachura the posthumous Hero of Russia honour - the Kremlin's highest award - 'for her courage and heroism shown in the performance of military duty' Last year, Ukraine sentenced Kachura to 12 years in prison in absentia with confiscation of property for 'participation in a terrorist group or terrorist organisation'. It is thought she ordered the shelling of cities in the Donbas which resulted in civilian deaths. She was head of the powerlifting federation of Horlivka, and an honorary citizen of the city, which was twinned with Barnsley in England. Mayor of Horlivka Ivan Prikhodko said: 'A brave and wise woman who was there from the start of the People's Militia of the DPR has tragically died. 'Olga Kachura, victorious and unshakeable Korsa.' Kochura's death comes after the first female Russian solider killed in Ukraine was buried last month. Corporal Anastasia Savitskaya, 35, a married mother-of-two said to be a 'real hero', was buried on July 13 in her native Volgograd, a city on southwest Russia. 'The deceased became the first servicewoman who died during the special military operation,' said Alexander Strukov, the local veterans' leader. A friend of Savitskaya said: 'She had dreamed of serving in the army since childhood, and signed a contract at the age of 18.' Going to war in Ukraine 'was her choice,' they said. Her bereft husband - a former soldier, not named - said at her funeral: 'How will I carry on living now? Why did I let you go there? Beloved, beautiful, best.' Corporal Anastasia Savitskaya, 35, a married mother-of-two said to be a 'real hero', was buried today in her native Volgograd, a city on southwest Russia. Pictured: Savitskaya is seen in a photograph during her funeral last month Pictured: Russian soldiers guard Corporal Anastasia Savitskaya's coffin at her funeral last month Unlike some Western countries it remains rare for Russian servicewomen to go to war. Ukraine, for example, has seen several female soldiers join the fighting. A eulogy at the woman's funeral said: 'A female warrior has always been an exception to the rule. But Anastasia, having mastered the 'home' front, went without fear to a dangerous special operation, accomplishing a double feat.' Meanwhile Putin has this week also lost two more colonels in his Russian forces, the latest proof of the devastating toll his high ranks have suffered. Paratrooper Lt Colonel Ivan Pozdeev served in the Kutuzov Airborne Assault brigade in Ulyanovsk. Acting Head of Komi Republic Vladimir Uyba said he 'died as a hero during the special war operation in Ukraine'. Russia has sought to obscure the number of high-ranking deaths in Ukraine. It also came to light that Lt Col Denis Sorokin, a married father of two, died near Melitopol earlier in the war. He was commander of an assault battalion, also awarded the Hero of Russia posthumously. A dozen generals have been killed in the war. Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao on Thursday appointed Eslavath Ramchander Naik as chairman of the TS Scheduled Tribes Cooperative Finance Development Corporation Ltd (TSSTCFDC) in the tribal welfare department for a period of two years with immediate effect. Naik belongs to Nalgonda district. The appointment assumes political significance in the backdrop of impending byelection to the Munugode Assembly constituency of Congress MLA Komatireddy Rajgopal Reddy submits his resignation to the Speaker. The Munugode constituency has a considerable chunk of ST voters and the move is aimed at attracting them to the ruling party fold. Rao is expected to shower some more sops on Munugode in the coming days besides nominating a few more leaders to various nominated posts in the government. A wealthy Nigerian politician, his wife and a London doctor face a provisional trial next May on charges linked to an alleged organ-harvesting plot. Ike Ekweremadu, 60, a lawyer and district senator for the People's Democratic Party in Nigeria, his wife, Beatrice Nwanneka Ekweremadu, 55, an accountant, and Obinna Obeta, 50, a doctor, are accused of the organ-harvesting plot after allegedly taking the man off the streets of Lagos, Nigeria. Prosecutors claim they planned to have his kidney removed at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north west London, so it could be given to their daughter who suffers from kidney failure. The man is said to have refused to consent to the procedure after undergoing tests. The Ekweremadus, from Willesden Green, north-west London, allegedly treated him as a slave before he 'escaped' and went to Staines police station in Surrey. The alleged offences are said to have taken place between between August 1 last year and May 5. Wealthy Nigerian politician Ike Ekweremadu, 60, his wife, Beatrice Nwanneka Ekweremadu, 55 (pictured together) and London doctor Obinna Obeta, 50, face a provisional trial next May on charges linked to an alleged organ-harvesting plot The couple were arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 21 after arriving on a flight from Turkey. Ike Ekweremadu and Obinna Obeta, from Southwark, south London, are charged with conspiring to arrange or facilitate the travel of a man with a view to him being exploited. Mrs Ekweremadu and Obeta are charged with arranging the travel of the man with a view to him being exploited. On Thursday, Mrs Ekweremadu, who is on bail, appeared at the Old Bailey for a plea and directions hearing, with Ekweremadu and Obeta also attending by video link from Wandsworth and Belmarsh prisons. The defendants were not asked to enter pleas during the hearing and spoke only to confirm their identities. Judge Richard Marks QC said the case would be heard by a High Court judge. The trio are accused of the organ-harvesting plot after allegedly taking the man off the streets of Lagos, Nigeria. Pictured, Ike Ekweremadu, 60, a lawyer and district senator for the People's Democratic Party in Nigeria He identified a provisional trial from May 2 next year with an estimated length of three to four weeks. A further plea and case management hearing was rescheduled for October 31. The judge granted Mrs Ekweremadu continued conditional bail and remanded the male defendants into custody. Prosecutor Tim Probert-Wood said previously that the case involved exploitation and the harvesting of an organ. He said: The case began on 5 May 2022 when the complainant presented himself at Staines Police Station and claimed he had been transported to this country for the purpose of his kidney being removed. Prosecutors claim they planned to have his kidney removed at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north west London, so it could be given to their daughter who suffers from kidney failure. The Ekweremadus (pictured), from Willesden Green, north-west London, allegedly treated him as a slave before he 'escaped' and went to Staines police station in Surrey He arrived on 20th February 2022 and was taken to Royal Free Hospital where tests were conducted. For the purpose he was there he did not consent to the taking of his kidney. He returned to the house he was staying and his treatment changed dramatically. He described being treated effectively as a slave. Martin Hicks, QC, defending Ike, has said: We deny that there was any exploitation or any intent to do so. The argument will be factual denial. An Afghan evacuee who has been living in hotels for almost a year has no energy to get up anymore because there's nothing for her to do while her family await news of permanent accommodation from the Home Office. Marwa Koofi, 21, fled Kabul, Afghanistan when the city fell to the Taliban in August last year and has lived in two hotels over the last 12 months. But she feels like her family's 'lives are paused' as they sit and wait to find out when they will have a permanent home. The Taliban entered Kabul on August 15 last year taking control of the city, leading Afghan President at the time Ashraf Ghani to flee the country and the government to collapse. They took control of the borders and made it extremely difficult for Afghans to flee the country. And on 26 August, an ISIS suicide bomber targeted Kabul Airport during an evacuation mission where more than 170 Afghans and 13 US service members were killed. In a letter seen by the BBC, refugees minister Lord Harrington appealed to councils to help house the 10,500 Afghans currently staying at hotels across the UK. Ms Koofi said the year has been 'wasted' and there has been further trauma inflicted after recently being split up from family members after three of them were moved from a hotel in Selby, North Yorkshire to one near Crawley, West Sussex. The 21-year-old, who is set to study International Relations at King's College London in September, said: 'I stayed in a hotel for 11 months, I don't want to stay in a hotel for another 11 months. 'I have wasted a year because my hotel [in Selby] was in a location where I couldn't do anything. 'When I think back to the year, I just see it as a blank - it's nothing, I haven't done anything. Marwa Koofi, 21, who fled Afghanistan when the city of Kabul fell to the Taliban, has been staying in hotels for the last 11 months The 21-year-old described how her family's 'lives are paused' while they wait for permanent accommodation from the Home Office. The family were separated when she was moved to a hotel near Crawley in July with her mother and brother 'You don't even have the energy to get up from your bed because you know your day is nothing. 'I feel like our lives are paused, I just want our lives to be played.' On July 26, Ms Koofi was moved to the hotel near Crawley where she is staying with her mother and brother. Her 35-year-old sister remains at the hotel outside of Leeds while Ms Koofi's two brothers, aged 23 and 26, were sent to a hotel in Manchester. She said being separated from her family has reopened psychological wounds inflicted after leaving their home in Afghanistan. 'With Leeds, all of us were together and we were there for each other,' she said. 'We had a wound from leaving Afghanistan and with each other, we tried to bandage it and we were fine and the wound wasn't bleeding anymore. 'But after splitting the families, it's like the bandages are removed and they've started bleeding. 'The memories of Afghanistan come every day and since we are alone, we have more time to think about what happened to us.' Ms Koofi has said that her family being separated has opened up psychological wounds of having to leave their home in Kabul. Pictured: A bomb at Kabul Airport's Abbey gate killed more than 170 Afghans Ms Koofi said Lord Harrington's push to house Afghan refugees is only 'a great idea' if it is going to materialise. 'This is something that Afghans really want, I hope this one doesn't fail,' she said. 'I want to have that feeling after losing my house in Afghanistan and what I want is to have a house that feels like I'm at home. 'Once you feel like you're in a house and it's your own home and you can clean your room, arrange your house, maybe it won't feel like your own country but you might feel like it's your house.' The student revealed that she and her family have started to lost hope they might find permanent accommodation. 'There is always hope and there is always a bright light but I want to feel that word again,' she said. 'I don't feel it anymore. No one else does - none of my family.' A Home Office spokesperson said: 'The response to the crisis in Afghanistan last August was one of the most challenging, intense and complex overseas operations undertaken by the UK, and the largest air evacuation operation in recent memory. 'We are proud this country has provided homes for more than 7,000 Afghan evacuees in such a short space of time, but we face a challenge of there currently not being enough local housing accommodation in the UK not just for Afghans and those in need of protection but also British citizens who are also on a waiting list for homes. 'While hotels do not provide a long-term solution, they do offer safe, secure and clean accommodation. 'We will continue to bring down the number of people in bridging hotels, moving people into more sustainable accommodation as quickly as possible.' P&O Ferries has been accused of 'gangster behaviour' after nearly 200 sacked workers' valuables allegedly went missing during the company's mass firing. Former workers on the company's Dover ferries were unable to return to their onboard accommodation to collect their belongings in March as entire crews were dismissed in a single day over Zoom. The under-fire ferry firm- which is owned by Dubai-based DP World- has now confirmed almost 200 of the 786 people who lost their jobs believe items have gone missing. One former P&O Ferries worker, who wished to remain anonymous, said 'people are fuming' about the possessions lost during the replacement of UK workers by foreign agency staff. Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT union which represents seafarers said: 'There is seemingly no end to the gangster capitalist behaviour of P&O.' Former workers on the company's Dover ferries were unable to return to their onboard accommodation to collect their belongings in March as entire crews were dismissed in a single day over Zoom. Pictured: P&O Ferries ship arrives in to the Port of Dover P&O Ferries workers are pictured leaving the Port of Dover with their personal belongings and bags containing large white envelopes after being fired Pictured: Former P&O Ferries staff members collect their belongings at the Port of Dover Union leaders protest against the dismissal of P&O workers at the terminal in Cairnryan, Dumfries and Galloway, on March 23 They said: 'Had they just let people on to collect their gear all of this could have been avoided.' Of the 177 seafarers who requested claim forms to P&O Ferries for missing belongings, 132 submitted their claims by the June 30 cut-off date set by their former employer. It is understood the firm expects to have resolved around three quarters of the claims by the end of this week. The shocking claims come just three months after the criminal and civil investigations were launched into the company's decision to sack 786 workers without notice. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the Insolvency Service has started 'formal criminal and civil investigations' and that he will be 'follow this matter closely' along with Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. The probe comes after P&O Ferries admitted to breaking the law in the manner in which it terminated staff on March 17 to hire cheaper agency workers, a move that has caused a major backlash from politicians and workers. P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite told a joint hearing of the Commons' business and transport committees that his company broke the law by not consulting with trade unions before sacking workers. P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite told a joint hearing of the Commons' business and transport committees that his company broke the law by not consulting with trade unions before sacking workers Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT union which represents seafarers said: 'There is seemingly no end to the gangster capitalist behaviour of P&O. 'Not only did they unlawfully sack 800 staff, but they also frogmarched them off preventing many returning to collect their possessions' The Insolvency Service said: 'Following its inquiries, the Insolvency Service has commenced formal criminal and civil investigations into the circumstances surrounding the recent redundancies made by P&O Ferries.' Comments in a Facebook group for the sacked workers suggest many people who have submitted claims are not receiving the full amount they believe they are owed, often because of difficulty proving ownership of items worth more than 50. Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT union which represents seafarers said: 'There is seemingly no end to the gangster capitalist behaviour of P&O. 'Not only did they unlawfully sack 800 staff, but they also frogmarched them off preventing many returning to collect their possessions. 'The government should immediately cancel all contracts they have with P&O, impound their vessels and take over the running of the ferries in British waters.' A P&O Ferries spokesman said the 25 per cent of claims outstanding require further details in order to be resolved. They added: 'We appreciate the frustration that a small number of our ex-seafarers have experienced with regard to the return of their personal items. 'Our top priority remains either reuniting everyone with their possessions or compensating individuals with proven claims.' A World War Two ammunition dump has exploded spectacularly in a Berlin forest, sparking a huge fire on one of the hottest days of the year. Around 100 firefighters were battling the blaze across some 15,000 square metres in the German capital's Grunewald forest in the west of the city. The fire was thought to be triggered by several explosions at the munitions storage facility buried in the woods, where old ammunition from the Second World War, fireworks and explosive ordnance is stored and controlled explosions are carried out. The flames are spreading quickly and massive explosions could still be heard from the site, keeping fire crews from tackling the blaze. 'The situation is dangerous,' Thomas Kirstein from the Berlin fire department told reporters, calling on residents to stay away from the forest. Homes are not directly threatened by the flames but the fire department warned that the blaze could further spread due to the dry conditions of the forest and the exceptional heat that is expected on Thursday, with temperatures of up to 38C. An explosion can be seen in the middle of Berlin's Grunewald forest, one of many that rattled the edge of the city A World War Two ammunition dump has exploded spectacularly in a Berlin forest, sparking a huge fire on one of the hottest days of the year Firefighters said they had not yet begun to systematically extinguish the fire as emergency forces had to keep a distance of a kilometre from the flames and explosions Smoke billows in the distance over sailing boats at the German capital's popular Lake Wannsee 'The situation is dangerous,' fire department spokesperson Thomas Kirstein said, as they maintain a one kilometre perimeter around the site Due to flying debris and the threat of further explosions, the firefighters said they had not yet begun to systematically extinguish the fire as emergency forces had to keep a distance of a kilometre from the flames. 'The forest is bone dry,' said Jan Thomsen, spokesman for the Berlin Senate's Department for Environment, Mobility, Consumer and Climate Protection. It is unclear what caused the initial explosions, a police spokesperson said. The site is used to store and conduct controlled explosions of ammunition or weaponry secured by Berlin police's weapons disposal units. Images showed smoke billowing in the distance over sailing boats at the German capital's popular Lake Wannsee. Berlin authorities called for additional task forces to help extinguish the flames, including special forces from the German army. Water cannons, helicopters and special evacuation tanks were also on the scene. The commuter train service to the city's west was partially interrupted and one of the city's most important motorways, the Avus, was closed. The city of Berlin is facing a weather warning currently, with the German weather service DWD forecasting temperatures on Thursday of between 34 and 38 degrees. The 3,000-hectare Grunewald is one of Berlin's largest green spaces, starting on the western edge of the city and stretching out towards Potsdam. Stephen Hawkings Volkswagen minivan, which was used as his wedding vehicle in 1995, has gone up for auction with his disabled parking permit still in the glovebox. The 1988 Volkswagen Caravelle, purchased new by the late Professor Hawking and still in excellent original condition, was used as his personal transportation for ten years. The Brief History of Time author, who died in 2018, also used the van, which was big enough to fit his motorised chair, to travel to his wedding with his second wife Elaine Mason. The vehicle has been put up for auction by the theoretical physicists family who would like it to be bought by somebody who appreciates the vehicles history and connection to the academic. The Volkswagen Caravelle was bought new by Professor Hawking in 1988 and he used it as his personal vehicle for ten years. Pictured outside King's College, Cambridge The theoretical physicist travelled to his 1995 wedding to Elaine Mason in the blue minivan Professor Hawking's disabled permit is still in the glovebox of the vehicle, which is up for auction with Silverstone The minivan was big enough to fit Professor Hawking's wheelchair but he had to give it up in 1999 when a new chair could no longer fit It was donated by Professor Hawkings nephew who said the decision to sell the slice of family history was a dilemma. He said: It has been a real dilemma as to what to do with my uncles VW, as its not being used and taking up room in a much-needed garage. The family would like a science or Professor Hawking enthusiast to be the next custodian of it, rightly appreciating it for its special connection to such an enigmatic and important British figure. Cambridge residents knew the vehicle well and would regularly wave as it drove through the city. Pictured outside Senate House, Cambridge The 1988 Caravelle minibus is quite a rare bus and hard to find in original specification/ condition The minivan is up for auction without reserve with Silverstone who said it is very privileged in being offered this vehicle. A spokesperson said: This vehicle was a very significant element to the later life of Hawking; it has a full continuity of Hawking-family ownership, having never been owned by anyone other than his close relatives. This humble VW is all the more special, unique and important to collectors of items that have been owned by important figures. Professor Hawking's family hopes that the vehicle can go to someone who appreciates its special connection to such an eminent scientific figure The minivan, which has been sparingly used since 1999, comes with 90,000 miles, Cambridge-based servicing records and a current MOT Professor Hawking eventually had to retire the minivan in 1999 when it became incompatible with his disability requirements and it has only done a few thousand miles since. It has an automatic gearbox, has covered 90,000 miles and comes with Cambridge-based servicing records and a current MOT until May 2023. The vehicle comes with Professor Stephen Hawking documented on the original V5C log book and his disabled parking permit still in the glovebox. The teal blue VW was a well-known vehicle in and around Cambridge during the decade Mr Hawking owned it and film footage of him in the Caravelle features in a recent Sky documentary Can you hear me?. Another 200 migrants arrived in the UK today after being caught trying to cross the English Channel in a small boat. A total of 39 migrants made the crossing on Tuesday in one boat, but no crossings were recorded on Wednesday, according to figures from the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Almost 700 people made the dangerous journey on Monday, the busiest day for Channel crossings so far this year, as the total soared past a record 17,000. They were taken to the Port of Ramsgate due to concerns about traffic around the Port of Dover. The cumulative number of crossings this year now stands at a provisional total of 17,134. Border Force ship Hurricane brought around 40-50 people, including a small number of children, into Dover on Thursday morning, and activity in the Channel suggested there would be more later in the day. A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel Border Force ship Hurricane brought around 40-50 people, including a small number of children, into Dover on Thursday morning, and activity in the Channel suggested there would be more later in the day The cumulative number of crossings this year now stands at a provisional total of 17,134 The influx came amid reports the Home Secretary could announce another multimillion-pound deal with France in a bid to curb Channel crossings. On April 14, Priti Patel signed what she described as a 'world-first' agreement with Rwanda under which the east African nation will receive migrants deemed by the UK to have arrived 'illegally' and are therefore inadmissible under new immigration rules. But the first deportation flight - due to take off on June 14 - was grounded amid legal challenges. Several asylum seekers, the Public and Commercial Services union and charities Care4Calais, Detention Action and Asylum Aid are challenging the legality of the Home Office policy, with the next court hearings due in September and October. Now, Ms Patel is intending to pay the French tens of millions of pounds for more beach patrols and surveillance equipment, in addition to more than 80 million already provided over the last few years, according to The Times. Nearly 12,000 people have arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel since the plans - designed to try and deter migrants from making the journey - were first unveiled. Almost 700 people made the dangerous journey on Monday, the busiest day for Channel crossings so far this year, as the total soared past a record 17,000 A total of 39 migrants made the crossing on Tuesday in one boat, but no crossings were recorded on Wednesday, according to figures from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) The influx came amid reports the Home Secretary could announce another multimillion-pound deal with France in a bid to curb Channel crossings A Government spokesperson said: 'The rise in dangerous Channel crossings is unacceptable. 'Not only are they an overt abuse of our immigration laws, but they risk lives and hinder our ability to help refugees who come to the UK through safe and legal routes. 'The Nationality and Borders Act will enable us to crack down on abuse of the system and the evil people smugglers, who will now be subject to a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. 'Under our new Migration and Economic Development Partnership with Rwanda, we are continuing preparations to relocate those who are making dangerous, unnecessary and illegal journeys into the UK in order for their claims to be considered and rebuild their lives.' Prince Harry has filed a second lawsuit against the British government and Scotland Yard over the decision not to allow him to pay for police protection when he visits from California. The Duke of Sussex is already suing the Home Office over its decision in 2020 to remove his taxpayer-funded protection, which he says makes it unsafe for him to come to Britain with his wife, Meghan Markle, and two children, Archie and Lilibet. Now he has filed a second lawsuit against the Home Office which also names the Metropolitan Police, the High Court confirmed to MailOnline. The Duke of Sussex has begun a second court case against the Home Office over its decision in 2020 to remove his taxpayer-funded protection 'It is at an early stage, no hearings have been listed yet and no decisions have been made,' the Judicial Office added. The new case will focus on a decision in January by the Royalty and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC), which concluded that private individuals should not be allowed to pay for police to protect them. The revelation of a second court case - which emerged on Meghan's birthday - threatens to raise tensions with the Royal Family due to claims that the Queen's Private Secretary, Sir Edward Young, was involved in the decision to deny Harry protection. 'Significant tensions' are said to have existed between the Duke of Sussex Sir Edward, according to the prince's legal team. Today's news is also likely to dismay the government, which has spent 100,000 on its legal battle so far, according to a report last week. The Duke, 37, has been taking legal action against the department after being told he would no longer be given the 'same degree' of personal protective security when visiting from the US. His representatives have previously told of how he wants to bring his family to visit from the US, but that they are 'unable to return to his home' because it is too dangerous. The case is understood to have cost the Home Office 90,094.79 from September 2021 and May earlier this year. The new case has been filed against the Home Office, while it also names the Metropolitan Police, the High Court confirmed That sum is understood to include 55,254 on the government's Legal Department, 34,824 on counsel and 16.55 on couriers, The Sun reports. Two hearings have taken place at the High Court in London since May, so it is predicted that the total bill will surpass 100,000. And that figure will rise further after a judge granted Harry's legal team permission for part of his claim to have a judicial review into the Home Office's decision. The cost to the taxpayer would be reduced if the Home Office is awarded its costs back by the court and the Whitehall department run by Priti Patel has already said it will demand their legal costs back from Harry if his High Court battle fails. A Government spokesperson said: 'The UK Government's protective security system is rigorous and proportionate. It is our long-standing policy not to provide detailed information on those arrangements, as doing so could compromise their integrity and affect individuals' security. 'It would not be appropriate to comment on ongoing legal proceedings.' MailOnline has contacted Schillings, the Duke of Sussex's UK lawyers, and the Met for comment. Sandi Toksvig has said the lives of LGBTQ+ people are 'at stake' after the Archbishop of Canterbury made a 'horrible mistake' and reaffirmed a 1998 Anglican declaration rejecting same-sex marriage. In an open letter published on Twitter last night, the Danish-British author and comedian, who is gay, criticised Justin Welby who confirmed on Tuesday that the 'validity' of a resolution made in 1998 is 'not in doubt'. At the Lambeth Conference of that year bishops made resolution 1.10, that marriage is 'between a man and a woman', and that same-sex relationships are 'incompatible with scripture'. In a speech to more than 650 bishops this week, Justin Welby, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, tried to appease conservative bishops while also insisting he will not punish churches who conduct same-sex marriages. Amongst these were members of the Global South Fellowship, which includes all African evangelical congregations - including in countries where homosexuality is still illegal. The Church of England forbids clergy to carry out same-sex marriages, while the Anglican Church in Wales and Scotland gives blessings to gay and lesbian relationships and the Episcopal Church in the U.S. has allowed same-sex marriage since 2015. Ms Toksvig said Mr Welby has made a 'mistake', and offered to talk to him over coffee. He subsequently accepted her invitation. She described losing her faith due to the treatment of LGBTQ+ people by the church around the world. Sandi Toksvig is one of the UK's most-loved comedians, and until recently presented QI and Stephen Fry left the programme Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (front centre) with bishops from around the world at University of Kent in Canterbury during this year's Lambeth Conference Sandi Toksvig tweeted a letter to the Archbishop describing her hurt and experiences as a gay woman, and appealing for him to meet her for coffee so they can discuss the issue She wrote: 'So, you and your other religious pals got together at the Lambeth Conference and the main takeaway seems to be that gay sex is a sin. 'It was a sin in 1998 and you just wanted to make clear in 2022 that no-one in your finely frocked gang has moved on from that. 'Seriously, with the state the world is in, that is what you wanted to focus on? You didn't have other more pressing matters like, I don't know, war or poverty?' She drew attention to research by Just Like Us in 2021, which found that young LGBTQ+ people are twice as likely to contemplate suicide and three times more likely to self-harm than their peers. Ms Toksvig said: 'Do you know why? For many it's because they don't feel loved and love, Justin, is supposed to be at the core of what you do. It's like top of the job description.' The former QI host added: 'This is a serious matter. The lives of LGBTQ+ people are at stake here. 'I have had several credible death threats over the years, sometimes requiring the very kind assistance of the police hate crime squad. 'Each and every one of those threats has come from an evangelical Christian. Inevitably they have wanted to kill me on God's behalf. 'I'll cope but what about my brothers and sisters who won't? Ms Toksvig also questioned the Church of England's interpretation of Jesus's views on homosexuality. She said: 'There are seven texts in the Bible which are often pointed to as proof that God hates a homosexual, but everyone who has ever studied the matter knows that the 'proof' lies only in extremely fallible interpretation. None of it is clear cut.' She added: 'Oh Justin, how can you be so stuck? [...] Jesus doesn't mention sexuality at all. It clearly wasn't a big deal for him.' Ms Toksvig said she and her wife will be in attendance at her local church on Saturday. She said: 'We have been too hurt over the years to have any faith left but I am hosting a concert to raise money for Ukrainian refugees. 'I am happy to do it but I will not feel welcome knowing the long shadow my sin casts.' She added: 'After the concert I will leave the church and never set foot in an Anglican building again. I'll come back when you decide to welcome all of 'God's children' again.' Mr Welby faced criticism for his attempt to please both sides, with one prominent Anglican saying he was 'trying to ride two horses at once'. Jayne Ozanne, a campaigner for LGBTQ+ equality within the church, criticised Mr Welby's attempt to reaffirm the church's traditional stance. She said: 'Archbishop Justin Welby is trying to ride two horses at once, which is impossible. 'It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that one of the horses is trying to trample LGBT+ people underfoot! 'I feel deeply angry that yet again priority has been given to saving a man-made institution over protecting LGBT+ people's lives. 'Let us be clear that Lambeth 1.10 encourages 'conversion therapy'. It is a stick with which many will continue to be beaten and suffer around the world.' Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby seemingly tried to placate conservative bishops from the Global South Fellowship by upholding the 1998 declaration that said 'gay sex is a sin'. Pictured: Mr Welby with bishops from around the world at the opening of the 15th Lambeth Conference last week Ms Toksvig's comments have been praised and supported by celebrities including Lorraine Kelly, who described her letter as a 'must-read'. Radio presenter Kate Bottley added: 'You're glorious and I love you. Love is love.' Historian and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann said Ms Toksvig is a 'national treasure, adding: 'I hope the Archbishop reads this moving letter.' The Archbishop did read the letter and posted on social media that he 'would love' to sit down with Ms Toksvig over coffee. He said: 'The hatred and threats that you - and so many other LGBTQI+ people - have experienced in the name of Jesus Christ and a sin. 'I have absolutely no doubt about that and want you to be in no doubt of my position.' The Lambeth Conference is a meeting of Anglican bishops which is convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury once every 10 years. It is taking place at the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral and Lambeth Palace between July 26 and August 8. The conference, which first took place in 1867 and is supposed to convene once a decade, is being held for the first time in 14 years, having been postponed by the pandemic as well as fears of divisions in the church. In a letter to Anglican bishops written on Tuesday, Mr Welby said: 'I write therefore to affirm that the validity of the resolution passed at the Lambeth Conference 1998, 1.10, is not in doubt and that whole resolution is still in existence. 'Indeed the Call on Human Dignity made clear this is the case, as the resolution is quoted from three times in the paragraph 2.3 of the Call on Human Dignity.' 'The Call states that many Provinces - and I think we need to acknowledge it is the majority - continue to affirm that same-gender marriage is not permissible. 'The Call also states that other Provinces have blessed and welcomed same sex union/marriage, after careful theological reflection and a process of reception.' Speaking at the conference on Tuesday, the Archbishop added that he could not and would not punish churches for conducting gay marriages. He said: 'I neither have, nor do I seek, the authority to discipline or exclude a church of the Anglican Communion. I will not do so.' The war in Ukraine is the most dangerous moment for Europe since World War Two, and Russia must not be allowed to win, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday. To prevent Moscow from succeeding, NATO and its member countries may have to continue to support Ukraine with arms and other assistance for a long time to come, he said. 'It's in our interest that this type of aggressive policy does not succeed,' the former prime minister of Norway said in a speech in his native country. 'What happens in Ukraine is terrible but it would be much worse if there was a war between Russia and NATO,' he said. Describing what Moscow calls a 'special military operation' as an attack on the current world order, Stoltenberg said the alliance had to prevent the war from spreading. 'This is the most dangerous situation in Europe since World War Two.' The war in Ukraine is the most dangerous moment for Europe since World War Two, and Russia must not be allowed to win, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday Sweden's Foreign Minister Ann Linde and Finland's Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto attend a news conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, after signing their countries' accession protocols at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium July 5 Stoltenberg warned Putin (pictured) that if he 'even thinks' attacking a NATO country 'as he has done to Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine,' then all of NATO will be involved immediately 'If President (Vladimir) Putin even thinks of doing something similar to a NATO country as he has done to Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine, then all of NATO will be involved immediately,' Stoltenberg said. The war has led previously non-aligned Finland and Sweden to seek NATO membership, with the request so far ratified by 23 of the 30 member states, including the United States. 'This is not just an attack on Ukraine, an independent democratic nation with more than 40 million people, it's also an attack on our values and the world order we want,' the NATO chief said of the war. Stoltenberg spoke at Utoeya island where a far-right extremist in 2011 killed 69 people in a shooting spree targeting members of the governing Labour Party's youth wing. In the years since the attack, the small Norwegian island has become a centre for teaching democratic values. An NHS surgeon who was sacked for dozens of 'unnecessary' bowel mesh operations has told a court that the media attention of his case had affected his libido. Former patients of colorectal surgeon Tony Dixon say they were left 'disabled' and physically and mentally damaged after undergoing mesh surgery with him at his old workplace in Southmead Hospital, Bristol. Mr Dixon was suspended by North Bristol NHS Trust in 2017 after an 18-month investigation, and was dismissed from his job in 2019 for his part in the string of operations leaving women in severe pain. He is now suing his former employer Southmead Hospital to stop documents being released to ex patients solicitors - but his attempt at the High Court to not be named in that case has failed, the BBC reports. Mr Dixon started use of artificial mesh to lift prolapsed bowels, often caused by childbirth - with some of his surgeries dating as far back as the early 2000s. His lawyer said being identified could harm his mental health and that he had suffered suicidal thoughts, adding that he is also experiencing problems with his libido because of the media attention of the case. Women who were left in severe pain after controversial bowel mesh surgery by NHS surgeon Tony Dixon, pictured, are furious after he told a court that the media attention had affected his libido A psychiatrist gave a statement to the court saying Mr Dixon was suffering from moderate depression which included 'disturbed sleep' and 'a loss of libido'. In a judgement published on 26 July, Judge Mr Justice Nicklin said media attention was the 'price to be paid for open justice and the freedom of the press'. One of his ex patients, Paula Goss, who founded a support group for women who were treated by Mr Dixon, Rectopexy Mesh Victims and Support, said his claims were 'outrageous'. Paula said: 'Why should he be allowed to have an anonymous trial? 'We have to live our lives with what he did, we have to see him out in the world causing distress. 'It's more than just the fact he's complaining about suicidal thoughts and depression which many of his victims suffer from, it's that he said we don't even matter. Dixon is facing dozens of negligence claims but has now failed to stop reporting restrictions being applied to a legal case. He is suing former employer Southmead Hospital, in Bristol, pictured, to stop documents being released to ex patients solicitors - but his attempt at the High Court to not be named in that case has failed 'People have waited so long since the review in 2017 for justice they have since passed away. 'So him complaining about suicidal thoughts and depression over media coverage seems very unfair compared to what we have suffered through. 'It's because he's been in the media that people who have been suffering realised that they can get support and can get justice. 'Some of our group do find seeing his face in the media difficult, but they understand that he needs to be out there facing justice and being seen in the public. 'It's like his Achilles heel, he can't stand facing the consequences of his actions in public - so he should have to face the media. 'He should think about all the hundreds of patients that he harmed that have not got any libido as well, and that have suicidal thoughts like he is trying to profess he has.' Legal papers from the hearing state: '[The Claimant] stated that during the past three weeks there has been a worsening in his mood and he described his mood as: 'It's down. Definitely down, I feel as though I'm relapsing'. 'He described the presence of sleep disturbance, loss of appetite and loss of libido; these are biological symptoms that can be seen in people suffering from a depressive disorder. 'He also described the presence of depressive symptoms* He stated that he considers the possibility of there being further media attention extremely distressing and that in the event of him not being offered anonymity there would likely be a further deterioration in his mental health.' One of Mr Dixon's patients, Paula Goss, said she felt let down emotionally and physically A review by Southmead Hospital concluded more than 200 of Mr Dixon's patients should have been offered less invasive treatment first, and while the surgery was satisfactory, it was unnecessary. Dixon has previously said any surgery could have complications and that his operations were done in good faith with most being successful. A North Bristol NHS Trust spokesperson said: 'We welcome the court's ruling that this matter is one to which the usual principles of open justice should still apply. 'It would however be inappropriate to comment any further given that the main application hasn't yet been heard in court.' A GMC inquiry into the operations carried out by Mr Dixon will take place at a later date. Speaking about the mesh surgery she underwent, one victim said: 'Having to undergo further procedures was difficult and the whole ordeal has really had a massive impact on me. 'My mental health really took a turn for the worse. 'While nothing can make up for what's happened I feel I deserved answers so at least I could try and begin to understand what happened. 'I just hope steps can be taken so no one else is affected in the future.' Another victim previously told the BBC: 'I felt violated. Beyond angry, beyond upset. 'It affects your everyday life. Your body aches, you have to run to the toilet, you've got no control over it whatsoever.' When contacted for a comment Mr Dixon told the BBC: 'I am unable to comment while proceedings are ongoing.' The North Bristol NHS Trust, which runs Southmead Hospital, dismissed Mr Dixon in 2019. Today marks the third anniversary of the sweeping constitutional changes the Narendra Modi government forcibly effected to end the constitutional autonomy of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Its people were not consulted, disregarding a basic constitutional principle that undergirds the federal basis of our polity. Crucially, none of the objectives that were advanced to justify the dramatic changes leading to the bifurcation of the state and its reduction to Union Territory status have been realised. It was officially stated that the existence of Article 370 produced a separatist mindset and stoked terrorism. It was argued that J&Ks autonomy must end for economic development to proceed apace. Data available in the public domain mocks these claims. There are more foreign terrorists in Kashmir today than before August 2019. Data of civilian fatalities remain in the same bracket as before. Earlier, if the targets of militancy and terrorism were generally confined to the official establishment, now Kashmiri Pandits (KPs), other Hindus in the Valley, elected panchayat officials, and migrant workers are routinely killed. This harks back to 1990 when the Indian State in J&K had collapsed in the face of a terrorism storm fuelled by Pakistan. It was an important objective of the government to protect and rehabilitate KPs, who have become a displaced minority deprived of their cultural and human rights, but short-sighted official actions and questionable policy preferences have produced opposite results. If the reasons of the State advanced to strip J&K of its autonomy were questionable, the fully compromised human rights of the ordinary people of the former state the inevitable outcome of the process that was set in motion appear to evoke little sympathy with the Centre and the UT administration. If thousands of Kashmiris were locked away overnight in the garb of preventive detention on the eve of August 5, 2019, three years on, unconscionably large numbers continue to languish as undertrials. At 91 per cent, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, J&K has the highest proportion of undertrial prisoners in the country. Articles 21 and 19 of the Constitution, which protect personal liberties and freedoms, appear to have little meaning, especially in the Valley. Without due process, people can have their liberty taken away in the blink of an eye and a speedy trial is unlikely. These constitute serious human rights violations. Citizens are barred from protesting. The right to peaceful assembly does not exist in the UT. Curfew and Section 144 of CrPC are unrolled by the administration without reference to laid down procedures. The media is muzzled, and journalists are intimidated and arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or sedition and held for long. Citizens have no forum to express their views. Official statements fill newspapers on demand and not news or views that are fit to print. Citing security considerations, Internet disruptions are routine, particularly harming business and economic life and the education sector. J&K, first as a state and then as UT, has been denied an elected Assembly for four years. This would not have been tolerated in any state. According to Supreme Court judgments, democracy is a basic feature of the Constitution and elections must be conducted at regular, prescribed intervals. Fresh Assembly elections brook no delay as a starting point in J&K. A father killed his wife and three daughters at their home before he turned the gun on himself in a horrific murder-suicide in Orlando, Florida. Donovan Michael Ramirez, 45, is believed to have murdered his wife Stephanie Renee Ramirez, 39, and daughters Alyssa Berumen, 22, Sunny Ramirez, 11, and Shelby Rose Ramirez, seven, in a domestic abuse-related attack. Police confirmed that they found a firearm at the grisly scene on Tuesday afternoon after they were called for a wellbeing check - but the cause of deaths of the tragic family have not yet been confirmed. When officers arrived to the scene on Lake District Lane in Lake Nona, one of the cops on duty had to step outside after becoming sick because of the upsetting nature of the ordeal. Friends and family of the victims laid flowers outside the home as classmates of 11-year-old Sunny paid tribute to their 'caring' friend last night. According to locals, the family moved into the neighborhood from Los Angeles in 2020. Friends of the family laid flowers outside the house in Orlando, Florida, after the father Donovan Michael Ramirez killed for members of his family. His wife Stephanie Renee Ramirez, 39, and daughters Alyssa Berumen, 22, Sunny Ramirez, 11, and Shelby Rose Ramirez, seven, were killed in what is believed to be a domestic abuse-related attack Sunny Ramirez, 11, was one of the victims in the murder-suicide. Classmates of the young girl paid tribute to their 'caring best friend' last night Orlando Police Department said: 'At this time, it appears this is a domestic violence-related incident.' A firearm was found at the home, but the cause of the deaths is not yet clear Katelyn Rampersad and Amarie Padovani, both 11, attended Northlake Park Community School with Sunny - and said she was their 'best friend' who made them feel at home in Florida. The motive behind the murder-suicides is not yet clear. Orlando Police Department said: 'At this time, it appears this is a domestic violence-related incident.' One neighbor Heather Collins told WESH: 'I think it's like a worst nightmare truly. I don't even know what happened exactly. My heart goes out to the family. I can't even begin to wrap my mind around any of this, especially if there were family involved. 'I didn't hear anything, I wish I did. I definitely would have liked to have been that concerned neighbor that did something in this situation.' Another local Jose Sanchez said that he would see the family out in the yard and that the neighborhood has never seen anything like this before. He said: 'See them out in the yard when I do my walks in the morning. Say hi, nothing out of the ordinary or anything strange. Shocking. First thing I thought was like about the kids, that's the first thing you think is the poor kids, you know, small children. 'Been here seven years in this neighborhood and first time we've seen something like this happening. You don't know how to react, really.' Dr. Lisa Spector, a mother whose daughter was friends with the two victims, said: 'I wanted to honor this sweet, beautiful, young lady and her sister and her family.' The investigation continues. Amarie Padovani (left) and Katelyn Rampersad (right) went to school with the two young victims. They paid tribute to their beloved classmate last night Cards, stuffed animals, and flowers were placed outside the home where the tragic family were found dead House buyers in Welsh-speaking communities may have to start proving they can speak the language in a bid to curb the number of second home buyers in the country. The proposed 'Fair Chance' scheme has been brought in to tackle the lack of affordable housing in Wales, particularly in places where there are large numbers of second homes. In some areas, second homes make up almost 40% of housing in Wales which has been further increased by Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. But the new scheme means that Welsh-speakers could be pushed to the front of the property queue in the latest move to address the housing crisis in Wales. It is believed that the scheme will be voluntary and sellers may be able to offer their properties to locals for a set period before they go onto the open market to everyone else. The trend of buying second homes has created a social crisis with a generation of young people unable to buy homes in the places where they grew up, driving migration and fuelling resentment. Residents of Welsh-speaking communities have formed the Hawi i Fyw Adra (Right to Live Locally) pressure group to raise awareness around second homes and the lack of safeguards for Welsh communities Steps to protect Welsh place names will also be announced by the Welsh Government today at the National Eisteddfod in Tregaron, Ceredigion. Overseeing the measures will be a new ten-strong Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities in Comisiwn Cymunedau Cymraeg, where experts will combine to help protect the Welsh language. In Tregaron, Jeremy Miles, minister for education and Welsh language, will give a taste of Cardiff's plans to safeguard Welsh-speaking communities - and to stem the rise of second homes. 'For the Welsh language to thrive, we need sustainable communities and good job opportunities in the areas where it is widely spoken,' he said. 'This isn't about imposing solutions, so everything we do will be in line with local communities' aspirations.' But there is still major concern over whether houses will even be affordable, given their sharp rise in price in recent years. Critics have called for the supply of affordable housing to increase before the property crisis can be eased. The Welsh Government said it will work with estate agents in worst-hit communities ahead of the publication of the final Welsh Language Community Housing Plan (WLCHP) in the autumn. Second home buyers have played a role in pushing house prices up but new curbs may force them out as the Welsh government looks to offer Welsh-speakers priority in the property queue. Pictured: Abersoch, North Wales - known by some as Cheshire by the Sea due to its popularity What are the new Welsh housing rules? In Wales at the moment the rules for second homes and holiday lets are far more generous. Under current legislation properties available for let for at least 140 days, but only let for 70, only have to pay business rates. The new rules - which come in next year in April - are much stricter. They say properties will need to be made available for at least 252 days, and actually let for 182. If they don't fulfil these criteria they will have to pay council tax, which will be more expensive for owners. Councils will be given discretionary powers to increase council tax premiums on second homes - and long-term empty homes - by up to 300%. Advertisement This plan will also include support for social enterprises and community housing co-operatives, as well as steps to protect Welsh place names from erosion by English language alternatives. Chairing the Commission is Swansea University academic Dr Simon Brook whose appointment stems from an independent review of second homes policy he undertook for the Welsh Government in 2021. The report led to a handful of interventions implemented by Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru as part of their Co-operation Agreement, most notably when it was announced councils will be given discretionary powers to increase council tax premiums on second homes - and long-term empty homes - by up to 300%. From next April, self-catered accommodation must be let for half the year to avoid council tax premiums. The measures appear to be having an effect already, with second home numbers falling slightly in counties like Gwynedd as owners grapple with a 100% council tax premium. Despite the interventions, there is still concert that there is little being done to address the rise of Airbnb short-term holiday lets which has further tightened property supplies. Mr Miles expects the Commission to provide more solutions and warned some may be 'difficult' to swallow. 'I've said many times that the Cymraeg belongs to us all, as does the responsibility for its future,' he said. 'We'll have to be brave and tackle things together that might be difficult. 'I'm sure that some of the things the Commission will tell us will be challenging, but that's important - that's what will help us find the most effective answers!' Comisiwn Cymunedau Cymraeg will produce a report spanning policy areas from education to the economy. Its views are expected to be 'candid'. As chair, Dr Brooks said the report will 'examine the linguistic reality of Welsh-speaking communities' in order to 'safeguard them for future generations'. Advertisement A despairing Scottish father whose family is being kicked out of Australia - despite living and working there for more than ten years - says he faces returning to the UK 'practically penniless' and essentially homeless. Electrical expert Mark Green, 44, was headhunted for his specialist solar installation skills in 2012 and flown to Australia with his wife Kelly, 45, and 19-year-old daughter Rebecca - who was eight at the time. He moved 10,000 miles from Prestwick, Ayrshire, to his new home in Adelaide, on Australia's southern coast, with the promise of their permanent residency being sponsored by the company flying him in. But on the seven occasions he has been eligible, his employer has folded before the paperwork could be completed - or failed to submit it all together. The family will now be thrown out of the country next week, unless the Australian government intervenes to save them. But with little hope of an 11th-hour reprieve, Mr Green has already spent 6,000 (AU$10,500) on three flights back to Scotland - where he will likely have to rely on his elderly parents to provide temporary accommodation. The family have spent more than 85,000 (AU$150,000) on attempting to stay in the country, while relocating to the UK is likely to set them back a further 35,000 (AU$60,000). And they face the added despair of leaving behind their two beloved pets, five-year-old miniature labradoodle Maisie and 10-year-old rabbit Marmaduke, because of the prohibitive 20,000 (AU$35,000) cost of flights and quarantine fees. A despairing Mr Green told MailOnline: 'I'm practically penniless. This has essentially been a decade-long bankruptcy holiday. 'It's devastating. Everything I've been working for for the last 10 years is gone. I feel completely let down by the Australian government - because they've got the power to sort this out.' Electrical expert Mark Green, 44, was headhunted for his specialist solar installation skills in 2012 and flown out to Australia with his wife Kelly, 45, and daughter Rebecca, 19 He moved 10,000 miles from Prestwick, Ayrshire, to his new home in Adelaide, on Australia's southern coast, with the promise of their permanent residency being sponsored by the company flying him in Relocating to the UK is set to cost the family $60,000 - and will force them to leave their beloved pet dog Maisie (pictured with mum Kelly, left, and daughter Rebecca) behind because of prohibitive $35,000 flights and quarantine fees They face the added despair of leaving behind their two beloved pets, five-year-old miniature labradoodle Maisie (pictured) and 10-year-old rabbit Marmaduke, because of the prohibitive 20,000 (AU$35,000) cost of flights and quarantine fees 'Me and my family just want to stay here - we've been here for 10 years, I've paid taxes and I've never been off work. 'I feel like I'm being treated as a criminal or that I've upset someone, but I've not done anything wrong. I've had speeding tickets - like anyone has - but it's not like I've been to jail or anything.' The Greens have already had to empty out their rented house of belongings ahead of Wednesday's return to the UK. They are currently living with just two beds, a sofa, a television and a fridge-freezer as they await Wednesday's deadline, hopeful of a change of heart by Australian immigration officials. How does Australia's immigration system work? Australia has a number of different immigration systems, all of which are tightly controlled. One popular method is to be sponsored by an Australian-based company. Employers must select a role that needs to be filled from the Government's defined list of skilled occupations. Once a role is selected, immigration authorities will evaluate the nomination and determine whether it meets their criteria. Applicants will then be assessed on a number of different factors, including age, English language ability, training, health, character and what the market salary rates are. There are also other methods of migrating to Australia as a skilled worker, including its points-based system. Points are awarded to applicants based on age, qualification, experience and English language skills. The priority regularly changes in terms of what type of skilled workers are required, based on the needs of industry. The Skilled Independent visa is the most desirable visa, because it is permanent and gives holder the freedom and flexibility to live and work anywhere in Australia. Applicant must be under 45-years-old, have a job in Australia's desired skills list, and score at least 65 points in its points test. Other visas are based in individual areas of Australia, known as territories, and are based on local needs. There are also visas specifically aimed at engineering graduates, under the age of 31, who wish to gain up to 18 months of skilled work experience in Australia. People can also obtain 'travel visas' that allow them to go on 'working holidays' - commonly known in the UK as 'gap years' - that run for up to a year. In recent years Australia has also relaxed its visas for low-skilled workers - including visas aimed specifically at agriculture and fishing - amid a global demand for people to fill low-skilled labour. Advertisement Mother-of-two Kelly, speaking from her empty Adelaide home, said: 'I don't want to go home. I don't. I really don't...' Mr Green said his biggest concern is for his 19-year-old daughter, who has grown up in Adelaide. He added: Im devastated for her. She came here when she was eight, leaving her friends in primary school behind in Scotland. 'She knows Scotland a bit, but really Australia is her home and is what she knows. She loves it here.' His other concern is for his parents, who are in their 80s and who end up putting him and his family up until they can find their feet again in Scotland. He added: 'They are elderly, they don't need a young family living with them, especially as we don't know how long it will be. 'And I don't want to put on them or anyone else. We want to go back, but it depends on the visa application which could take three months of it could take up to two years.' Since arriving in Australia 10 years ago on a temporary Skilled Workers visa - known as a 457 visa - Mr Green has he has gone through 26 different types of visas. The family has spent more than 85,000 (AU$150,000) on immigration lawyers and applications in that time. But they have now been told that they must leave the country before they can apply again. 'I'm nearly 50. We can't go through this anymore. There's nothing for us back in Scotland now,' Mr Green told Daily Mail Australia. He added: 'This is where I live. This is where my heart is. It'll never change. Even if I go back to Scotland, here is where I will class as home.' The family have been on a sponsored work visa since arriving which has meant they need to pay for everything Australians take for granted, on top of paying their taxes. They were denied access to Medicare or free public state schooling for daughter Rebecca, which costs them 4,500 (AU$8,000) a year - but they say they paid without complaint. 'It was the best day of our lives coming here. The best day ever,' said Kelly, 45, originally from Kilbirnie, 40km south-west of Glasgow. They want to stay in Australia permanently but currently just need their bridging visa changed from an E-type to a C-type to allow them to apply to stay without leaving. The family has been undone by firms sponsoring Mark as an employee and starting a three year route to residency, but going bust before the process is complete. 'The company went into liquidation and which means I have to start again, all three years, all over again,' said Mr Green, originally from Prestwick, Ayrshire. 'That's happened seven times to me. Most of them closed because of warranty issues - they don't want to guarantee the warranty of the product. 'It ends up costing them money, so what they do is they shut up shop and they open up under another business name.' The final straw came after one employer told him he'd applied for the Greens' residency and paid their fees - but hadn't, causing them to unwittingly overstay their working visa. 'I was let down by my former employer,' he said. 'I trusted him and he lied to me. 'The government has a responsibility to protect me as a foreign worker who was invited to come to Australia to work and was let down by an Australian company.' The family (pictured) have been on a sponsored work visa since arriving which has meant they need to pay for everything Australians take for granted, on top of paying their taxes The Greens are currently in the process of trying to find a new home for Maisie (pictured), with Mr Green saying: 'I've had a few offers but no-one within a 1,000 mile radius - and you don't know who these people are. It's heartbreaking. To me, she's part of the family so I want her to go to a good home.' Their son Jamie has already flown home to Scotland after the visa conditions meant he was unable to work in Australia for years. The family has been fighting to stay in the country for a year but time is now running out and they have had to sell up ahead of next week's deportation. They say they will have to give their 10-year-old rabbit to an animal shelter as they will not be able to bring him back with them. And they are currently in the process of trying to find a new home for Maisie, with Mr Green saying: 'I've had a few offers but no-one within a 1,000 mile radius - and you don't know who these people are. It's heartbreaking. To me, she's part of the family so I want her to go to a good home.' In a further blow, Mr Green believes he will not even be able to work in his industry when he arrives back in Scotland as his UK electrical qualifications are now out of date after a decade in Australia. 'Everything I hoped for here is gone,' said Mr Green. 'The stress is terrible. Absolutely terrible. It's not fair. Not fair at all. 'Nobody has been in contact with me about trying to sort this out. All they say to me is I have to leave the country. 'I thought I'd have my own company and my own home by now but instead our life is in turmoil.' The final straw came after one employer told Mark he'd applied for their residency and paid their fees - but hadn't, causing them to unwittingly overstay their working visa Their case has now been taken up by Adelaide politician Frank Pangallo, who compared them to the Tamilese Murugappan family from Bilgoela in Queensland, who had their visa conditions changed to let them stay despite arriving by boat. 'They didn't do it legally, unlike the Greens, and they got preferential treatment,' Mr Pangallo, of South Australia's Best Party told Daily Mail Australia. 'Forcing a family to leave a country they've called home for 10 years simply to return to their country of origin to re-apply to return to Oz seems pointless and ridiculous. 'And this is all happening while governments grapple with changes to the country's skilled migration program due to massive shortages across the country.' Their case has now been taken up by Adelaide politician Frank Pangallo (pictured), who compared them to the Tamilese Murugappan family from Bilgoela in Queensland, who had their visa conditions changed to let them stay despite arriving by boat A plea to the previous Liberal immigration minister Alex Hawke was rejected and fresh appeal to the new Labor immigration minister Andrew Giles has fallen on deaf ears. Mr Pangallo added: 'If you want skilled migrants to come into this country, you better give them an undertaking they'll be able to stay here and not be booted out when it suits you. It's absolutely disgusting.' A spokesman for Mr Giles insisted the immigration minister never commented on individual cases, despite commenting extensively on the Biloela case. She then told Daily Mail Australia: 'The minister does not comment on the individual circumstances regarding the Green family.' Last month Mark revealed how he was 'done in' after working 'seven days a week' to try and afford the cost of coming home. He told the Daily Record: 'I'm working seven days just now to afford to come home in August. I'm really done in. 'All we want to do is start living life without worrying.' Meanwhile, Kelly also faces having her life uprooted. She has been employed at local business Vili's since she arrived in Australia. Her boss Mary told Australian news channel 'A Current Affair' last month that she couldn't be happier with Kelly's work ethic and said losing her would be a massive lost to her company. She added: 'I can't get enough retail and factory staff and if I lose a great worker like Kelly, it will affect my business.' Advertisement A house fire on Long Island in the early hours of Wednesday morning left two young sisters from Maryland dead. Jillian and Lindsay Wiener, 21 and 19, were fast asleep at around 3:30 a.m. in the family's vacation home in Noyack Bay on Long Island when it caught fire. Lewis Wiener, the girls' 60-year-old father, a senior partner with the global law firm Eversheds Sutherland and a beloved member and leader of the family's synagogue, was awoken by the sound of broken glass and immediately attempted to evacuate his family. Fire officials in the area all say the house was fully engulfed in flames by the time they got to the house on Spring Lane. However, while Lewis' wife, 52-year-old Alisa Wiener and son, 23-year-old Zachary, were both able to get out, Jillian and Lindsay were trapped in their upstairs bedroom, according to WUSA. A lieutenant with local police said that Zachary had to jump out of a second-floor window of the 1,624-square-foot, three-bedroom, two bathroom home to safety, the East Hampton Star reported. The house is located off a busy road near Long Beach, but a large hedge blocks it from view from the road, according to the paper. It is listed for about $1.8million on Zillow, with rent running you about $26,000 a month, and was last sold in 2016. Jillian and Lindsay Wiener, 21 and 19, were fast asleep at around 3:30 a.m. in the family's vacation home in Noyack Bay on the island when it caught fire The family of five was known to vacation at this home in the Long Island Hamptons town of Noyack Bay, listed on Zillow in the range of $2million A lieutenant with local police said that Zachary had to jump out of a second-floor window of the 1,624-square-foot, three-bedroom, 2 bath home to safety. The three surviving family members were treated for minor injuries Lewis Wiener, the girls' 60-year-old father (pictured center), was awoken by the sound of broken glass and immediately attempted to evacuate his family Lindsay, 19, was weeks shy of starting her sophomore year at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her high school described her as 'a bright spirit and a leader, who was also dedicated to service, particularly getting young people involved in politics and generally promoting volunteerism.' She served as president of the Community Service Club and Jewish Culture Club Jillian, 21, was about to begin her senior year at the University of Michigan, where she was an earth and environmental science student. An e-mail sent out by her high school said Jillian was a soccer and ice hockey player as well as an artist, and her passions were yoga and community service Lt. Susan Ralph said in a statement: 'The father awakened to the sound of glass breaking and alerted the family to get out. The father and wife escaped the home. When they realized the children hadn't exited the home, the father attempted to gain entry back in; however, the flames prevented him from gaining access.' The girls' father, Lewis, is the president of the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a group that refers to itself as a 'progressive, inclusive, caring, and compassionate, we embrace our connection to Reform Judaism and the warmth and wonder of God' Local officials have said that the cause of the fire does not appear to be suspicious, according to the New York Post. Local fire chief Kevin O'Brien Jr. said that upon arrival, firefighters tried to enter the house but were pushed back by the flames. Jillian was about to begin her senior year at the University of Michigan, where she was an earth and environmental science student, according to her LinkedIn. While her younger sister Lindsay was just weeks shy of starting her sophomore year at Tulane University in New Orleans. An e-mail sent out by the girls' high school, Holtern-Arms in Maryland, said Jillian was a soccer and ice hockey player as well as an artist, and her passions were yoga and community service. She would teach yoga to younger students as a licensed instructor. The school described Lindsay as 'a bright spirit and a leader, who was also dedicated to service, particularly getting young people involved in politics and generally promoting volunteerism.' She served as president of the Community Service Club and Jewish Culture Club. The e-mail to the school community read: 'Jillian and Lindsay's passing is a great loss to the Holton-Arms community and both will be deeply missed by their family, friends, and the school community'. Their father, Lewis, is the president of the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a group that refers to itself as a 'progressive, inclusive, caring, and compassionate, we embrace our connection to Reform Judaism and the warmth and wonder of God.' He's also a trial attorney and previously spent six years working for the Department of Justice. The family's Maryland synagogue said in a statement: 'The world has lost two beautiful lights today, and the Washington Hebrew Congregation community is heartbroken. Through their leadership and service, acts of kindness, and friendship, the Wiener family - Lewis, Alisa, Zach, Jillian, and Lindsay has touched so many lives at Washington Hebrew.' Lt. Susan Ralph said in a statement: 'The father awakened to the sound of glass breaking and alerted the family to get out. The father and wife escaped the home. When they realized the children hadn't exited the home, the father attempted to gain entry back in; however, the flames prevented him from gaining access' Local officials have said that the cause of the fire does not appear to be suspicious but local officials say it remains under investigation Lewis, Alisa and Zachary Wiener were all hospitalized with what officials called non-life threatening injuries. The family was known to vacation at this home in the Long Island Hamptons town of Noyack Bay. Police said it was unclear why the home was listed on Zillow. Police told Newsday the home had been rented but said there was no known relationship between the Wieners and the listed owners of record, while the town's emergency management administrator said there was no rental permit on file and no safety inspection taken place that would have been a part of an application for one. Ryan Murphy said: 'It's a tragic situation. Had there been a rental permit on the property, perhaps additional safety standards might have been in place that could have made this preventable. But you can do everything right and still have an accident. It's just nice to be able to say you checked all the boxes.' The administrator told DailyMail.com that, with the advent of renting online, this has become a major problem, one he described as like a whack-a-mole game, 'where we identify one and two or three pop up some place else'. Murphy warned potential renters of avoiding inspection and permits in the future: 'I think that this is an absolute tragedy obviously, we never wanna see something like this happen and the loss of life is horrendous. But I do, at the same time, hope that if there is any sort of positive messaging that can come out of this and that's hard to even imagine that, it serves as kind of a call to action on the tenants side and the property owners' side'. Goli Azhdam, a family friend, said: 'My heart is just full of sadness hearing this news. I knew them since they were born and it's truly shocking. Truly, extremely sad news.' The cause of the fire remains under investigation. The sisters (Lindsay left and Jillian right) were only two years apart in age and both attended the private Holton-Arms School in Bethesda Maryland for high school. Their father, Lewis Wiener, serves on the school's board of trustees Lindsay Wiener graduated high school in 2021 Older sister Jillian, 21, shared many pictures from her summer on the east coast before she was killed in a fire in her family's Hamptons vacation home on August 3 Neighbors of the family in Potomac, Maryland, say they are beloved in the community. Father Lewis Wiener is an attorney and president of Washington Hebrew Congregation where he's been a member since 1985 and a member of the board of directors since 2012 Eight university students are fuming after their landlord turned their home into a 'Big Brother' den by secretly installing eight cameras around the property. Three of the tenants, Nathan Thomas, Daniel Delaney and Ameya Tidke, exposed their Queensland landlord for installing the cameras without their permission after they signed their lease. They claim the landlord told them an electrician was coming to the property but found a number of cameras in the home's common areas a short while later. While the group joke that they're inside the Big Brother house, they feel their privacy as been violated. 'No matter where I go in the house, unless I'm in my room, I'm being watched,' Mr Thomas told A Current Affair. The eight cameras are located inside and outside of the home so the group is watched while they're cooking dinner, watching TV, even while doing their laundry. 'It's very, very uncomfortable to see somebody's watching you like that that really just never goes away and it's kind of disturbing,' Mr Tidke said. Queensland students Nathan Thomas, Daniel Delaney and Ameya Tidke have exposed their landlord for filling their rental home with eight security cameras without their permission (pictured, the group pointing to one of the cameras) When the group contacted their landlord they were told they could either break their lease for a hefty fee or live with one or two less cameras. 'Nothing will make it better except throwing all the cameras away,' Mr Delaney said. Hive Student Accommodation, the group's real estate agency, also refused to help them, saying the landlord had 'the best intentions at heart'. Fortunately, the group has successfully sought the help of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland and Residential Tenancies Authority and now their landlord has agreed to remove all cameras from inside the home. The tragic death of a 2-year-old boy in Kansas is suspected to have been caused by heat after he was found unresponsive in a car on Sunday, officials have said, amid a 92F heatwave in the Midwestern state. Osage County Sheriff's Office officers were called to an address, which has not been made public, in Scranton at around 3.40 p.m. local time. Sheriff Chris Wells said the child was rushed to Topeka's Stormont Vail Health, where he was pronounced dead. Wells said the toddler appeared to have 'got into the car' by himself and had not been left there by an adult, as is often the case. The case remains under investigation, and an autopsy will take place soon to determine the boy's exact cause of death. According to the National Weather Service, temperatures in Topeka - around 23 miles north on Scranton - reached peaks of 92F on Sunday, while averaging 80.5F throughout the day. At 4 p.m., 20 minutes after the police were called to the scene, a temperature of 90F was recorded with a heat index of 101. Should heat be confirmed as the cause, it would make the boy's death the 14th hot car death so far this year, according to data from Kids and Cars Safety. The tragic death of a 2-year-old boy in Kansas is suspected to have been caused by heat after he was found unresponsive in a car on Sunday, officials have said. Pictured: A car is seen with a reflective cover (file photo) The national non-profit organization - which tracks car deaths and works to prevent the risks of leaving children and pets it cars - says around 38 children die each year in America from being left in a hot car. Approximately 87 percent of them are aged three or under, it says. The name of the deceased child has not been released, but Sheriff Wells confirmed to Newsweek that it was a boy - and that early indications suggested he had climbed into the car by himself. He told the news outlet: 'This incident is still under thorough investigation. All evidence as of this moment indicates this was a tragic accident, and that no crime was committed. 'The child was a boy, and information we are gathering indicates the child was likely playing and climbed into the vehicle, rather than being left in the vehicle. 'At this time, we will not be releasing the name of the child or the child's family.' Officials and health experts have urged parents and others looking after children to take extra care in hot temperatures, with Amber Rollins, a director at Kids and Cars Safety, telling ABC News that hot car death have been trending upwards. 'In the '90s, we realized children were being killed by overpowered airbags and children are still safer riding in the back seat. We moved them to the back seat because that's where they're the safest. However, now they're out of sight of the driver,' Rollins told the the network's Good Morning America. 'So they're in the back seat, they're rear-facing now until age 3 or even longer, depending on the size of the child. And that car seat looks the same for the driver whether there's a baby in there or not.' She added: 'This is not like parents didn't just all of a sudden overnight become neglectful and irresponsible. This is an unintended consequence of moving them to the back seat.' In the last two months alone, there have already been a number of cases. Osage County Sheriff's Office officers were called to an address, which has not been made public, in Scranton (pictured) at around 3.40 p.m. local time. Once there, they found an unresponsive child who was rushed to hospital, but was later pronounced dead On July 11, a three-year-old boy died after being 'mistakenly' left in a hot car for eight hours outside a Miami preschool where both his parents were staff members. Temperatures outside were in the mid-90s Fahrenheit on the day, with the heat index indicating 103 Fahrenheit as the highest temperature that day. The unresponsive child was rushed to Jackson North Medical Center by helicopter, where he was pronounced dead. The Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner confirmed Tauber died of hyperthermia, and heat exhaustion, and listed the death as as accidental, according to NBC Miami. In another tragic case, a Virginia father killed himself after he found his toddler son dead in the backseat of his car when he mistakenly went to work. Aaron Beck, 37, killed himself in the woods behind his home in Midlothian on June 28, after finding his son lifeless in the car. Aaron Beck killed himself on June 28 after discovering his son, Anderson Beck, dead in his car. He had mistakenly left the 18-month-old toddler in the hot car while he went to work Kendrick Engram Jr, three, was found asphyxiated in the third row of a Nissan SUV in June The child's family alerted police that the boy had not shown up to daycare. Officers went to the home after his family told cops Aaron had made suicidal statements. The father was found shortly after, where the family said he would be. Officers speculated that Aaron went to work in the morning for three hours and forgot to drop his son off at daycare during an ongoing heatwave. Temperatures in the area reached a high of 80F on the day they died. In late June, a three-year-old Georgia boy died in a hot car at a Wendy's drive-thru after his grandmother had forgotten about him in the back seat. Kendrick Engram Jr, was discovered by his uncle at the fast-food restaurant on Wynnton Road Sunday in Columbus after he had been left inside of the car for about 2 hours and 45 minutes, according to the Muscogee County Coroner's Office. He died of asphyxiation after being left in the car in the scorching heat; the day's highest temperature was 96F, the lowest 90F, the National Weather Service reported in its three-day history forecast. Rollins suggested using a visual reminder - such as a stuffed toy - to remind drivers they have a child in the back of the car as they are about to leave the vehicle. She said if the parents puts a stuffed animal in the toddler's car seat, when they go to put the toddler in the seat they will see the toy. By then taking the toy into the front of the car and putting it somewhere it will be noticed when leaving the vehicle, this will create a visual reminder of the child. A woman in Florida was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly having sex with her dog while her ex-boyfriend faces charges for filming it all on camera and storing it on a hard drive, local authorities said. Christina Calello, 36, 'willingly engaged in sexual activity with the dog' several times over the course of nearly eight years, according to an arrest report shared by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office. Geoffrey Springer, 39, who once dated Calello, was also arrested after he 'recorded the sexual activity and placed it on a flash drive.' The dog was confiscated from the ex-couple by deputies and taken to a local pet hospital for routine examination. It's breed has been undisclosed, although police said it suffered no visible injuries. Calello and Springer were taken into custody and charged with sexual activity involving animals. Christina Calello, 36, who lives in Safety Harbor, Fla., was arrested and charged Tuesday for having sexual encounters with her dog over the course of eight years. She posted a $5,000 bond to be released from Pinellas County jail Calello's ex-boyfriend, Geoffrey Springer, 39, would film the sexual encounters before placing them on a USB flash drive. He was released from Pinellas County jail on his own recognizance They were then booked into the Pinellas County Jail. Since then, Calello, who is a New Jersey native but lives in Safety Harbor, was released after posting a $5,000 bond, according to county jail records. Further prison records show Calello was arrested and charged in May with domestic battery. Springer, who doesn't have any prior arrests, was released without bail and on his own recognizance. As of Thursday, no court date for the couple has been released. Bestiality is considered a misdemeanor of the first degree in the Sunshine State and penalties include a prison sentence of up to a year. Offenders also usually pay a $1,000 fine, according to law firm Muscala Law. Calello, pictured with her father (right) was previously arrested and charged in May for domestic battery DailyMail.com has contacted the Pinellas County Sherriff's Office for comment as the investigation continues. Bestiality is illegal in most places throughout the United States except for four states: Wyoming, New Mexico, Hawaii, and West Virginia, where there are no explicit laws on sexual activity with an animal. Instead, it is considered as animal abuse. There are no reliable statistics on people engaging in bestiality but research says 'classic studies indicate that 5 to 8 percent of males engage in bestiality, while between 3 to 4 percent of women do,' according to The Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology. The White House defended President Joe Biden's new executive order making it easier for women on Medicaid to travel across state lines to obtain an abortion, saying it would 'follow the law.' But it's unclear how the Hyde Amendment - a long-standing policy that prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions - would interfere with the order. The president and other administration officials on Wednesday provided few details on how the order would work or a timeline for its implementation. But White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre said it would follow the law. 'This EO does not will not violate the Hyde Amendment. It is law, and we follow the law here,' she said at her daily press briefing. She also blasted the June decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, calling it 'unconstitutional.' 'It was an unconstitutional action by them - a right that was around for almost 50 years, a right that women had to make a decision on their bodies and how they want to start their families,' she said. White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre said new executive order follows the law ; 'This EO does not will not violate the Hyde Amendment. It is law, and we follow the law here,' she said at her daily press briefing President Joe Biden signed a new executive order on Wednesday making it easier for women on Medicaid to travel across state lines to obtain an abortion Biden's executive order, which he signed on Wednesday, directs Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra to consider actions that would expand access for individuals seeking reproductive healthcare services, including expanding Medicaid to cover travel costs. But the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal money from being spent on abortion except in cases of rape, incest and to save the pregnant person's life. It is not a permanent law, but has been attached as a temporary 'rider' to the Congressional appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It must be renewed annually by Congress. And it affects funding for abortions under Medicaid, a state and federal health program for low-income individuals. Medicaid is jointly funded by states and the federal government so states can choose to pay for abortions under Medicaid in other instances, but must use their own revenues - not federal funds. There are just 16 states that use their own funds to provide abortion coverage under Medicaid. In 34 states, people covered by Medicaid have extremely limited abortion coverage. Because the Hyde amendment must be included annually in the HHS budget, Congress will have to include it this fall during the annual budget process. If, for example the Hyde Amendment were to have been lifted in 2019, it could have provided federal support for abortion coverage for 13.9 million reproductive-age women enrolled in Medicaid, as well as millions of others in similarly restricted federal programs, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated. Jean-Pierre referred answers to questions about how the new executive order would work and how the Hyde Amendment would apply - to the Department of Health and Human Services. 'HHS will be clearly leading this effort and will have more details to share,' she said. 'We're going to leave it to HHS to come up with the details on the specifics on how they're going to work with states if a state asks for a waiver and what that's going to look like,' she noted. This is going to be in their purview. They're going to come up with the specifics again, with the details on how this is going to work.' Abortion rights demonstrators protest outside the Indiana Statehouse last week - abortion protests have sprung up across the nation Anti-abortion rights demonstrators protest in Indianapolis, Indiana - President Biden has been using executive orders to protect abortion rights but those could be challenged in court This is the second executive order Biden has signed on reproductive rights. Last month, the president signed an executive order intended to ensure access to abortion medication and emergency contraception. Both of his orders could be challenged in court. 'The president has been very clear that he's going to do everything that he can. It doesn't stop with this,' Jean-Pierre said. 'But he can't only be the only person working on this, right? That's why we continue to ask Congress to act.' The Biden administration is also pushing Congress to codify through federal law a woman's right to an abortion. Democrats see abortion as an issue to rally their base ahead of the 2022 midterms amid fears Republicans could win control of Congress. Many activists were heartened by Tuesday's election results in Kansas, where voters in the red state rejected - by almost a 20-point margin - a proposed amendment to the state Constitution that would have added language stating that it does not grant the right to abortion. President Biden has attacked extremists Republicans for wanting to ban abortions in all circumstances. Speaking at a virtual event sponsored by the Democratic National Committee on Wednesday night, the president vowed he 'will never, never, allow MAGA extremists in the Republican Party to pass a national ban on a woman's right to choose in America no matter what the circumstances, which is what MAGA extremists are determined to do.' 'Let me tell you, the Supreme Court and the MAGA Republicans don't have a clue about the power of women in this country,' he said. Polls show a majority of Americans support abortion rights. A recent Pew poll found that 61% of U.S. adults said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Biden's new order, however, falls short of what many Democratic lawmakers and abortion advocacy groups have asked: for Biden to declare a public health emergency on abortion. White House officials argue that doing so will do little to free up federal resources or activate new legal authorities. The San Diego Unified School District has found itself under fire after it was revealed administrators are railing against heterosexuality and are encouraging students to explore their gender identities. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, made the shocking revelation on Wednesday when he tweeted out screengrabs of the training documents administrators use to broach the topic. Among the documents Rufo made publicly available are some explaining that heterosexuality is a form of oppression and encouraging students to examine their gender identities with terms like 'transgender' and 'two-spirit.' The training documents also instruct teachers to do away with the terms 'men' and 'women' in favor of the terms 'people with a penis' and 'people with a vulva' suggesting women can have a penis and men can have a vagina. They come just years after outraged parents pulled their children out of school over what they deemed to be an inappropriate sex education curriculum, which included learning about gender identity. DailyMail.com has reached out to administrators at the San Diego Unified School District for comment. The San Diego Unified School District has found itself under fire after it was revealed administrators are railing against heterosexuality and are encouraging students to explore their gender identities. The build for the district's headquarters is pictured here In training documents to teachers, district administrators explain that heteronormativity is a form of privilege and oppresses those who do not conform to the idea The school district argues that School District argues that heterosexuality is a social construct that is harmful to children according to the key tenants of academic queer theory Academic queer theory the new doctrine infiltrating schools Academic Queer Theory examines how power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. It is predicated on the idea that all sexual behaviors and gender expressions, and their categorization into 'normal' or 'deviant' sexualities or gender, are constructed socially and create certain gender norms. Queer Theory therefore problematizes and challenges rigid identity categories, norms of sexuality and gender and the oppression and violence that it claims these categories stigmatize. It also seeks to destabilize sexual and gender identities allowing and encouraging multiple, unfettered interpretations of gender. Source: University of Massachusetts Advertisement In the documents Rufo published on Wednesday, the San Diego Unified School District argues that heterosexuality is a social construct that is harmful to children according to the key tenants of academic queer theory. According to the theory, Rufo writes for City Journal, white Europeans created the gender binary, and used the categories of 'male' and 'female' to dominate racial and sexual minorities. In fact, a training for facilitators of LGBTQ groups in the school district argues that heteronormativity forces students to conform to gender norms. It then goes on to describe the 'gender binary' as a 'limited system [that] excludes and oppresses trans, nonbinary, intersex and gender non-conforming people.' The second largest school district in California also claims in the training document that the gender binary distributes 'heterosexual and cisgender privilege.' It explains that a 'heterosexual/cisgender person automatically receives' this privilege, which 'benefits members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups' and 'results in institutional power' for straight men and women.' The document also says that this type of privilege does not exist within a vacuum and is connected to other forms of oppression. 'Racism, classism, heterosexism, etc. do not exist independently,' the training document reads. 'Multiple forms of discrimination interrelate, creating a system of oppression.' To combat this, Rufo writes, the district created a curriculum that promotes sexual identities like 'transgender,' 'gender queer,' 'nonbinary,' 'pansexual,' 'asexual' and 'two-spirit.' It encourages teachers to do away with the terms 'men' and 'women' in favor of the terms 'people with a penis' and 'people with a vulva' A series of curriculum documents he published encourages students to study the basic tenants of queer theory. The documents were made publicly available by Chris Rufo (pictured), a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute One also asks students to examine photos of gender nonconforming role models, including a woman with a beard, a boy in a dress, a teenage girl with a 'genderqueer' identity, a boy wearing a tiara and an infant with a 'gender neutral name.' And in another document, district administrators celebrate 'nonbinary identities' arguing there must be a 'linguistic revolution' to move beyond gendered terms and instead use terms like the controversial 'Latinx' to refer to people of Latin American descent. They argue those terms 'make room for people who are trans, queer, agender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming or gender fluid.' Another training produced by the school district, in conjunction with Planned Parenthood, advises teachers on a slew of new identities, and advises them to eliminate traditional language from their vocabulary. Instead, the training argues, men should be called 'people with a penis' and women should be called 'people with a vulva.' Other documents show that the district encourages teachers to be able to answer questions like: 'How do gay people have sex?' 'What is porn?' 'Is it OK to masturbate?' and even 'What does semen taste like?' The San Diego Unified School District also instructs teachers in its training documents to assist a child's gender transition without notifying parents pointing out that under California law, minors of any age can consent to pregnancy testing, birth control and abortion. And the district encourages teachers to be able to answer questions like: 'How do gay people have sex?' 'What is porn?' 'Is it OK to masturbate?' and even 'What does semen taste like?' In a related presentation, the district advises teachers to lead discussions on 'how to use a condom' as well as 'how to engage in safer oral sex' and 'safer anal sex.' But the district previously faced a backlash for similar sex education instruction back in 2018. It comes years after a group of parents railed against the district for teaching sixth-graders about issues of gender identity, STIs, HIV, anatomy and stages of pregnancy The parents argued in 2018 that the curriculum was not age appropriate At the time, parents upset over what they deemed to be an inappropriate sex education curriculum kept their children out of school as they rallied outside the district headquarters. The parents called the new curriculum for sixth graders which included topics of STDs, HIV 101, birth control, consent, anatomy, the stages of pregnancy, and gender identity and gender roles 'graphic and inappropriate,' saying it's 'too much too soon' for sixth graders. In addition to learning about these topics, students played a STD game and filled out a male reproductive crossword puzzle. 'We're going to ask them to suspend this new curriculum because it's not a curriculum for the adolescent brain; it's an adult curriculum,' mom Angela Beaver told CBS 8 at the time. But district administrators defended the lesson plan, saying it is backed by the Centers for Disease Control and is age appropriate. The BBC should have further explored issues raised about radio DJ Tim Westwood during his time at the broadcaster, an internal review into allegations of sexual misconduct has concluded. Former Radio 1 star Westwood has vehemently denied any wrongdoing or illegality. The BBC are currently probing six misconduct allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct against him. The broadcaster has appointed an independent barrister to lead a broader review to 'fully examine' his conduct during the two decades he spent working there. The Metropolitan Police are investigating alleged incidents that stretch back 40 years into the mid-1980s, it was also announced today. The veteran DJ, who left the BBC in 2013, stepped down from his show on Capital Xtra in April following accusations by several women of misconduct and predatory behaviour. In July, the BBC said it had received six complaints against Westwood, including one that was referred to police, despite director-general Tim Davie previously saying he had seen 'no evidence of complaints'. Mr Davie subsequently launched an internal audit, which reported to the BBC board's senior independent director, Sir Nicholas Serota. Following the report's publication on Thursday, the corporation has now appointed an independent reviewer to lead a broader review into what was known about concerns raised about Westwood. Barrister Gemma White, supported by law firm Linklaters, will aim to complete her investigation in six months. The corporation also said it is in contact with the Metropolitan Police, and that as part of the 'ongoing work any relevant information will be passed to them'. The new independent inquiry would be the first the BBC has launched since its investigation by Lord Dyson into the way Martin Bashir obtained his interview with Princess Diana in 1995. Hip-hop DJ Tim Westwood facing fresh sex pest claims following new claims made last month The Former Radio 1 star has previously vehemently denied any wrongdoing or illegality A woman, 40 claimed the hip-hop star, 64, had been a relationship with her when she was 14 Sir Nicholas said: 'I am grateful to the BBC's investigations team for the work they have done. 'It is an important piece of work, but I see it as a first step. New allegations and issues are emerging as time passes and more people are prepared to come forward. For this reason the work must continue. 'In light of the issues identified by the internal review, I have asked, on behalf of the BBC board, that a broader review is now conducted and a full report is produced. 'It is vital that this work is able to command the full confidence of those who have, or may wish, to come forward, as well as the wider public, and it is for that reason the BBC board believes there should be independent oversight. 'I have therefore asked Gemma White QC to lead this work. She is a hugely respected barrister who has relevant expertise and experience in this area. 'I have asked that the next stage of this work be completed within the next six months. 'However, I want to be clear this is not a hard deadline and if new issues emerge, then time will be made available to properly explore them. Our main objective must be to discover the facts.' The BBC wants to include Westwood's other employers, MTV and Global - owner of Capital Xtra - in the independent review. The DJ, who is the son of Bill Westwood, the former Anglican bishop of Peterborough, who died in 1999, began his career on local radio before joining Capital Radio in London. He was later given his own show by BBC Radio 1. He left Radio 1 and Radio 1Xtra in 2013 after nearly 20 years and returned to Capital Xtra to host a regular show on Saturday nights, where he was referred to as 'The Big Dawg'. A statement from a representative of Westwood in April said: 'Tim Westwood strongly denies all allegations of inappropriate behaviour. 'In a career that has spanned 40 years, there have never been any complaints made against him officially or unofficially. Tim Westwood strongly rejects all allegations of wrongdoing.' His representatives have been contacted for further comment. The Met - who will not identify any person who may, or may not be, subject to an investigation - said it treated claims of abuse as very important. A spokesman said: 'Detectives from the Met's Central Specialist Crime continue to investigate four reports relating to allegations of non-recent sexual offences allegedly committed by a man. 'The offences are alleged to have occurred in London in 1982, 1985, 2010 and 2016. There have been no arrests, enquiries continue.' No-one has been interviewed under caution or similar so far. Westwood said in a statement in 2020 claims of inappropriate behaviour made against him on social media were fabricated, false and without foundation. He said: 'I can categorically say that I have never had an inappropriate relationship with anyone under the age of 18.' So far ten women have come forward to accuse the former Radio One DJ of sexual misconduct. None of the 10 initially reported the incidents to the police. Another woman claims she was 16 when the renowned hip-hop DJ, who was in his 40s at the time of the alleged incident, kickstarted their 'controlling' relationship. DJ Tim Westwood was today accused of being a 'predator' after a woman claimed he had sex with her multiple times starting when she was just 14-years-old One woman, using the pseudonym Isabel, alleges she was 19 and the DJ was 53 when he exposed his genitals to her in a car A third, who was 20 when she first met Westwood while he toured clubs and student unions across the country, claims he pushed his penis into her mouth despite her resisting. Two more women claim they were sexually assaulted by Mr Westwood. The new allegations have come forward as part of a BBC News documentary, entitled Tim Westwood: Hip-Hop's Open Secret, that details more than two decades worth of sexual misconduct allegations against the DJ stretching from 1990 to 2012. Mr Westwood was contacted to provide comment. 'Lydia', another woman claiming to have been targeted by Westwood, says she was approached by him during a night at Caesars club in Streatham, south London. Although she was only 16 at the time while he was in his 40s, 'Lydia' and Mr Westwood allegedly began an 18-month sexual relationship in which he is accused of isolating her from friends and family. 'It was quite controlling in lots of ways,' she told the BBC. 'I had a home phone, and he demanded to have the password to it so he would often listen to my messages. A woman using the alias Pamela claims Westwood drove her to a flat in central London and initiated unwanted sex when she was 19 and he was 53 A woman, using the alias Tamara, alleges Westwood, then aged in his mid-thirties, also subjected her to unwanted sex when she was 17 'I wish more people had stepped in, I wish the adults who were around him, the bodyguards, the secretaries, the people who I would say were bystanders.' Following social media allegations published in 2020, Westwood has previously 'categorically' denied claims he has had an 'inappropriate relationship with anyone under the age of 18'. Seven women came forward to accuse the DJ of initiating unwanted sexual behaviour following a joint investigation by the BBC and the Guardian earlier this year. Following the allegations, Mr Westwood resigned from his weekly Capital Xtra radio show 'until further notice'. A statement from a representative of Westwood in April said: 'Tim Westwood strongly denies all allegations of inappropriate behaviour. 'In a career that has spanned 40 years, there have never been any complaints made against him officially or unofficially. 'Tim Westwood strongly rejects all allegations of wrongdoing.' 10 more women have since come forward to share their allegations against the DJ since the investigation broke in April. Several claim they engaged with Mr Westwood while they were under the age of 18. Veteran DJ Tim Westwood is facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by women who claim he abused his position to take advantage of them. The DJ has strenuously denied all allegations Westwood, pictured above in 2005, is at the centre of a sexual misconduct storm after allegations were levelled against him in recent years The DJ, who is the son of Bill Westwood, the former Anglican bishop of Peterborough who died in 1999, began his career on local radio before joining Capital Radio in London. He was later given his own show by BBC Radio 1. The radio presenter left Radio 1 and Radio 1Xtra in 2013 after nearly 20 years and returned to Capital Xtra to host a regular show on Saturday nights, where he was referred to as 'The Big Dawg'. A representative for Westwood was contacted for comment. The news comes after the Guardian and BBC published testimonies in April from seven women who made allegations of predatory sexual behaviour against Westwood. In 2020, Westwood was forced to deny involvement in similar allegations when the hashtag #survivingTimWestwood appeared on Twitter. Westwood's name and the allegations began trending on Twitter after an unnamed woman posted messages describing a four year relationship. Using the Twitter name @survivingtimwestwood she admitted she was in love with the DJ and had not gone to police with any of her allegations. Others responding to the Twitter messages called on bosses at Global Radio, where Westwood works for Capital Xtra, to investigate his behaviour towards young black women. The renowned DJ vehemently denied sensational allegations on social media that he behaved inappropriately with student fans. In October 2013, Westwood was condemned by students for a 'vulgar and sexist' stage show he put on during a freshers' event at the University of Leicester. While performing as guest DJ at the O2 Academy he was heard shouting over the microphone: 'Girl in the front row with the black dress on, I will be f****** you later.' Earlier this year, Westwood was heard in unearthed clips urging a fan to stay in her bra as he ogled her on stage in the BBC3 film Tim Westwood: Abuse of Power. The DJ was accused of groping black women at gigs in the scathing documentary. Westwood was also filmed cat-calling a woman as she scrambled to cover up as he shouted from the decks: 'Yo baby you don't have to put your top back on'. He was also caught clutching a woman while looking down her top and asking: 'I like your rack is it real?'. The documentary also showed him refusing to let go of a woman's arm after he allegedly whispered something sexual in her ear while backstage at a festival. And another clip shows Westwood interviewing rapper Cardi B during a 2017 interview for Capital FM. The American artist asks him: 'Do you have sex with a lot of like, you know, black girls?' Westwood replied after a pause: 'Not as much as I'd like to' in an interview where he was accused of being inappropriate towards the star. TAIPEI: Major Taiwanese government websites were temporarily forced offline by cyber attacks believed to be linked to China and Russia during US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island, Taipei said Thursday. The websites of the presidential office, foreign ministry and the main government English portal came under attack Tuesday night when Pelosi arrived for a landmark visit that enraged Beijing. China, which claims self-ruled democratic Taiwan as part of its territory to be seized one day, kicked off its largest ever military drills around the island on Thursday in response. Taiwan's defence ministry also said its website was offline for an hour around midnight Wednesday because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS is a simple disruption attack that overloads a website with requests for information. It does not involve hacking. According to Taiwan's foreign ministry, the attacks on its website and the government's English portal were linked to Chinese and Russian IP addresses that tried to access the websites up to 8.5 million times per minute. "As cyber attacks from foreign hostile forces could still occur at any time, the foreign ministry will continue to remain vigilant," spokeswoman Joanne Ou told reporters Thursday. The presidential office said it would up its monitoring in the face of "hybrid information warfare by external forces". Taipei has accused Beijing of ramping up cyber attacks since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, who views the island as a sovereign nation and not a part of China. Officials have said Taiwanese government agencies face around five million cyber attacks and probes a day. In 2020, Taiwanese authorities said Chinese hackers infiltrated at least 10 Taiwan government agencies and gained access to around 6,000 email accounts in an attempt to steal data. Democrat Rep. Carolyn Maloney apologized to President Joe Biden on Thursday in an awkward CNN interview after the longtime New York lawmaker said Biden would not be running for re-election in 2024. It's the second time Maloney has been forced to backpedal over her apparent gaffe, which occurred during a debate on Tuesday night for the hotly contested Democratic primary race in New York's 12th Congressional District. Maloney was asked multiple times about her comments during the tense Thursday morning interview, each time giving an increasingly more exasperated response. She pledged to support the president's 2024 re-election bid on Thursday morning - but doubled-down on doubting the campaign would come to fruition. 'Mr. President, I apologize. I want you to run. I happen to think you won't be running, but when you run or if you run I will be there 100 percent,' Maloney said toward the end of her appearance on CNN's New Day. 'You are a great president. And thank you for everything you've done for my state, and all the states and all the cities, in America. Thank you, Mr. President.' Newly-redrawn district lines in the Empire State have placed Maloney in direct competition with fellow longtime Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler. For decades the pair have worked hand-in-hand with Maloney representing much of Manhattan's Upper East Side, as well as parts of Queens and Brooklyn, while Nadler led much of the West Side. Rep. Carolyn Maloney was forced to backpedal multiple times after saying she did not believe Joe Biden will run for president again in 2024 The new 12th Congressional District they are competing for includes 61 percent of Maloney's old seat and 39 percent of Nadler's current 10th Congressional District, according to Daily Kos. That means that House Democrats are guaranteed to lose one of their senior-most leaders in either Oversight Committee Chair Maloney or Judiciary Committee Chair Nadler. During a rapid-fire round of their Tuesday debate, the lawmakers along with challenger Suraj Patel were asked whether Biden should run again in 2024. Patel quickly answered in the affirmative, while Nadler launched into a meandering explanation that it was 'too early to say' and that it 'doesn't serve the purpose of the Democratic Party' to answer the question ahead of November's midterm races. Maloney answered, 'I don't believe he's running for re-election.' Republicans immediately seized on the video clip, and Biden's critics insisted it was no accident that a seasoned political veteran would cast doubt on the future of her party leader. The New York Democrat posted on Twitter the next day that she 'will absolutely support President Biden, if he decides to run for re-election' and insisted she was focused on November's general race and her upcoming August 23 primary. She first made the comment during a debate in her hotly contested Democrat primary for New York's 12th Congressional District On CNN Thursday, Maloney heaped praise on Biden when she was first asked about the debate report. 'First of all, I think we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to President Biden, who saved the country by running against former President Trump,' the congresswoman said. 'I think he's done an incredible job in his giving us a record to run on in the '22 elections. Let's finish the 2o22 elections before we get to '24.' Asked more directly why she thought Biden would not run, Maloney insisted it was a 'personal belief' - rather than any information she may have as a senior member of the president's own party. She added, 'I will support him if he runs, and it's totally his decision.' 'Why do you have that personal belief?' CNN host Brianna Keilar pressed. Maloney bristled, 'Well, we're all entitled to have our own information and our own beliefs. But I will support him if he runs for president. He's already been an outstanding president.' Several Democrats have shied away from backing Biden for a second term in recent months It comes after several other high profile Democrats have shied away from declaring their support for Biden's re-election bid. West Virginia moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin demurred when asked about supporting the president during an interview on NBC's Meet The Press this past Sunday. 'Im not getting into 2022 or 2024,' Manchin said while pushing Senate Democrats' new $740 billion climate change and deficit-reducing spending bill. And in June, progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to commit to getting behind a Biden 2024 campaign during a CNN interview, stating: 'I think if the President has a vision, then that's something certainly we're all willing to entertain and examine when the time comes.' Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota issued the strongest opposition from a House Democrat yet last week in a radio interview on WCCO's The Chad Hartman Show point-blank that he did not want Biden to run. 'I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.' Phillips had said. A trip to the doctor could soon become much more painful for Australians with the nation's bulk billing system on the brink of collapse as patient demand skyrockets. Hundreds of clinics are struggling to survive due to a drop in GP numbers and a shortfall of overseas-trained doctors coming to Australia. Rising operating costs are also hurting practices as revenue from Medicate rebates continues plummet. The average out-of-pocket expenses for GP services have risen by 60 per cent in the last decade. Many clinics have been left with no other choice but to start charging gap fees to all patients, including those who need their services the most in order to keep their doors open. GPs have begun advising to patients that they can no longer bulk bill - a practice that's becoming more widespread. A growing number of GPs are making the heartbreaking decision to end bulk billing and slug patients with the full cost (stock image) 'It's now got to a point where practices can no longer sustain bulk billing,' Royal Australian College of General Practitioners vice-president Bruce Willett told The Australian. Some of Australia's biggest medical centre operators joined forces earlier this year to form the Primary Care Business Council to address the many challenges facing GPs. Director Peter Stratmann said the sector is on the brink of collapse because bulk billing is no longer financially viable. The Medicare Benefits Schedule rebate for a standard consultation recently rose by 65 cents to $39.75. 'We've seen practices having to close and increasingly in the last number of weeks we've seen practices impose private billing fees, because otherwise they won't make it,' Dr Stratmann said. 'They just can't make ends meet without imposing some private fees.' He admitted the dire situation puts pensioners in a terrible position and fears they will overwhelm the hospital system for non-urgent care at a higher cost to taxpayers. GPS clinics are struggling to keep their doors open, despite growing patient demand (pictured patients queueing at a doctor's clinic during the pandemic) Almost nine out of 10 GP visits across Australia in 2021 were bulk billed with no out-of-pocket cost for the patient. According to the latest Medicare data, GP bulk billing rates grew to a record high of 88.4 per cent in the December quarter 2021, a slight increase of 0.3 per cent from 12 months prior. The news comes days after health minister Mark Butler warned primary care is in 'worse shape than it's been in the entire Medicare era' while addressing the annual Australian Medical Association conference. 'It's hard enough to get a GP right now and we know that the current generation of older GPs are pretty exhausted, particularly over the last two and a half years, and we just do not have the pipeline coming through,' Mr Butler told the conference. 'It is probably the most terrifying trend that I see in primary care.' Anthony Albanese's government has set up the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce boosted by a $750m Strengthening Medicare fund as part of its commitment to general practice. 'The government is committed to ensuring Australians get the care they need, when they need it and without worrying about the cost,' Mr Butler said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to de-escalate tensions after Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and called out China for trying to 'manufacture a crisis.' Speaking at the ASEAN-US Ministerial meeting in Cambodia, the secretary said: 'We remain committed to our One China policy guided by our commitments to the Taiwan Relations Act, communiques. And I want to emphasize: nothing has changed our position and I hope very much that Beijing will not manufacture a crisis or seek a pretense to increase its aggressive military action.' 'Many countries around the world believe that escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no one's interests, including ASEAN members and including China,' Blinken said. Blinken confirmed that the Biden administration had reached out to Beijing to urge them against escalating the situation, but warned the CCP against encroachment. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to de-escalate tensions after Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and called out China for trying to 'manufacture a crisis' (L-R) Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Indonesia's Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi handshake in the "ASEAN-way" for a group photo 'Maintaining cross-strait stability is the interest all countries in the region, including all of our colleagues within ASEAN.' 'The United States continues to have an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. We oppose any unilateral efforts to change the status quo, especially by force,' Blinken added. Blinken's remarks came just as the Chinese military's Eastern Theatre Command announced multiple of their missiles had been fired into the sea off the eastern part of Taiwan. They boasted that all missiles had hit their targets. Meanwhile, Biden administration officials told Bloomberg the White House was fuming at Pelosi's unannounced visit to Taiwan, despite President Biden's public warning. 'The military thinks it's not a good idea right now,' Biden had said when rumors of the trip began to circulate. They said senior members of the National Security Council and State Department officials tried to discourage her from the visit but she refused to call off the trip which enraged Beijing. Officials said they were furious that the speaker, who has long been a vocal supporter of Taiwan, would use the trip to capstone her career at a time of such fraught tensions. Pelosi is the first House speaker to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. While she's likely to hold on to her San Francisco House seat, Republicans looked poised to take over the House. Pelosi refused to confirm the trip ahead of her departure, and reportedly was displeased with the Biden administration after it leaked, believing them to be responsible for sharing information with the press. The speaker kept quiet on Taiwan in public remarks during the next leg of her journey in South Korea. After she arrived, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declined a meeting with the speaker and was instead seen out attending a play and dining with actors. Instead, the pair had a 40-minute phone call. Pelosi will now visit the heavily fortified DMZ where North and South Korean forces stand face-to-face after she agreed to support Seoul's efforts to denuclearize Pyongyang. Pelosi and South Korea's National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo reached an agreement Thursday to achieve 'practical denuclearization and peace' after sharing concerns that 'North Korea's level of threat is heightening.' The alliance between the two nations comes as North Korea issued a stark warning it would 'never tolerate' the United States' criticism of the its nuclear program. The pariah state slammed Washington as the 'kingpin of nuclear proliferation' and said it would not allow any encroachment of its sovereign rights. Pelosi would be the highest-ranking US official to visit the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom since then-president Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un there in 2019. Speaker Nancy Pelosi leaves the parliament in Taipei, Taiwan on Wednesday Pelosi walks next to Legislative Yuan Vice President Tsai Chi-chang U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, front, center left, and South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo, center right, inspect an honor guard upon her arrival at the National Assembly in Seoul on Thursday 'Both sides expressed concern over the grave situation in which North Korea's level of threat is heightening,' Kim said, reading a joint press statement following the meeting earlier today. Even North Korea took Pelosi's visit to Taiwan as a threat, with the Foreign Ministry saying 'the current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the U.S. in internal affairs of other countries.' North Korea has conducted missile tests at an unprecedented pace this year and international experts believe it is readying its seventh nuclear test, the first since 2017. Last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country was ready to mobilize its nuclear war deterrent and counter any US military clash. South Korea and the DMZ between the North and South is the fourth stop in Pelosi's Asia tour, following Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. Pelosi is scheduled to fly to Japan later on Thursday for the final leg of her Asia trip. Advertisement Amazon deliveries could face delays after hundreds of workers walked out from an Essex warehouse after being offered a 'pathetic' hourly wage increase of 35p per hour - as they vow to carry on until a better offer is made. Around 800 employees took part in a 'sit-in' at the work canteen in Tilbury on Wednesday and Thursday, according to the trade union GMB, which is demanding a 2 hourly increase for its members. One 24-year-old vowed to continue the walk-out, saying he has been working six days a week and eating one meal a day just to get by, while another insisted she would not back down despite being threatened with getting sacked, as she declared: 'I just need to get a proper salary.' It comes as the cost-of-living crisis and soaring inflation has sparked a summer of strikes which look set to continue into the autumn, as Brits struggle to keep up with the rising cost of food and other essential items - while interest rates were also bumped up to a new high of 1.75% today. Amazon, which is owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has faced criticism from workers in several countries over its low pay and allegedly poor working conditions in some factories and warehouses. There was fury in the US in May this year when the $400bn-plus company announced that workers who become infected with Covid would no longer be granted paid leave, leading to accusations of putting 'profits above people.' Today GMB, which branded the company's 35p offer 'pathetic', said workers at the Essex warehouse, which has seen 178 ambulance call-outs since 2018, are 'seeking a 2 per hour pay rise to better match the demands of the role and cope with the cost-of-living crisis'. Videos posted on Twitter and TikTok today showed scores of employees sitting in the cafeteria, refusing to work. Amazon has not commented on whether the walk-out has led to any delivery delays. MailOnline has contacted the company for comment. The U.S. tech and retail giant, whose UK sales topped 23 billion last year, first sparked fury at the Tilbury plant when it said the starting hourly rate would increase from 11.10 to 11.45 in an email to staff. Up to 800 Amazon workers at a warehouse in Tilbury, Essex (pictured) have walked out in a protest over pay The offer comes as the Bank of England today warned that inflation could hit 13% this year. A 24-year-old packer said he joined the sit-in protest because he doesn't think he should have to work six days in order to pay rent 'and live a normal life'. Marius Brezeanu told the BBC: 'For a couple of months, I have been eating just one meal a day [to save money]. 'We will continue [to protest], everyone is still motivated to do it.' Another warehouse worker said the pay offer was a 'joke' seeing as most of her bills had doubled in recent months. The woman said she would not back down until she got fair pay, adding that some of her colleagues had 'chickened-out' after the General Manager told them they wouldn't get paid if they didn't get back to work. She told MailOnline: 'There were about a thousand of us until the General Manager came and said if we didn't go back we won't get paid. 'She said if we are not happy we are free to go home and find another job. If I do not get paid I don't care, I just need to get a proper salary.' Steve Garelick, GMB Regional Organiser, said: 'Amazon is one of the most profitable companies on the planet. With household costs spiralling, the least they can do is offer decent pay. 'Amazon continues to reject working with trade unions to deliver better working conditions and fair pay. Their repeated use of short-term contracts is designed to undermine worker's rights. 'The image the company likes to project, and the reality for their workers could not be more different. They need to drastically improve pay and working conditions.' An Amazon spokesman said: 'Starting pay for Amazon employees will be increasing to a minimum of between 10.50 and 11.45 per hour, depending on location. 'This is for all full-time, part-time, seasonal, and temporary roles in the UK. 'In addition to this competitive pay, employees are offered a comprehensive benefits package that includes private medical insurance, life assurance, income protection, subsidised meals and an employee discount among others, which combined are worth thousands annually, as well as a company pension plan.' The warehouse workers were offered a 35p-per-hour pay increase, more than five times less than the 2 demanded by union GMB Amazon said their workers receive a 'competitive' salary that is above the Real Living Wage but workers are not happy with the 35p-per-hour pay rise in light of the current cost-of-living crisis The spokesperson said the minimum hourly rate paid to Amazon associates in the UK has increased by 29% since 2018 and added that the wages being offered to warehouse staff are well above national minimum wage, currently 9.50 per hour, and the Real Living Wage, 9.90 per hour or 11.05 in London. Last month Amazon drivers and warehouse staff signed an open letter calling on the online retail giant to stop forcing them to work at an 'inhumane pace'. With increased pressure in the lead up to Prime Day, the workers pleaded with the company to 'bin unfair targets' and end the 'constant surveillance'. They said: 'Working in an Amazon warehouse today is so stressful. Even the tools we use, like scanners, are tracking us. Videos shared on social media show Amazon workers at the Tilbury warehouse sitting in the canteen instead of working Warehouse workers are staging a 'sit-in' to protest the pay offer, with the impact on deliveries currently unknown 'We're always worried about how many seconds we have left to pick up a parcel. We can't even see all of the targets you track - and it makes it impossible for us to know if our jobs are ever safe. We try to keep up, but it wears people out.' With nine in ten UK shoppers using Amazon, the company's UK sales have grown from 3 billion to nearly 27 billion in a decade. It currently employs around 33,000 people within its warehouse and logistics workforce - and more than a million people worldwide, according to Forbes. The pandemic has only added to the rise of online shopping, with over half (55 per cent) of shoppers saying Amazon had proven essential during the lockdowns in 2020. But staff have told how the pressure put on them to deliver such targets has turned them into 'slaves' and robots'. It was reported last year that ambulances had been called to the firm's 'fulfilment centres' nearly 1,000 times since 2018 - including 178 callouts to the site in Tilbury. Pay and conditions at Jeff Bezos' online retail giant have been criticised by employees from around the world. Pictured: The Amazon founder and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez in London today Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $165 billion while his workers at the Tilbury warehouse have just been offered a 3% pay rise Amazon could run out of warehouse staff to hire in the US by 2024 Amazon could run out of new people to hire by 2024, with the company burning through its entire warehouse workforce annually thanks to grueling shifts, a leaked internal document reveals. The document, first reported by Recode, includes the words: 'If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024.' The document was published internally in 2021. According to Recode, an Amazon spokesperson did not refute its authenticity. Read more Advertisement One worker who works at Amazon's Midlands site told how they had been 'unfairly' sanctioned over a recurring health issue. They claimed they had to keep coming in to work while unwell as a single day off would extend the sanction and lead to more disciplinary issues. Speaking to the Daily Mail under the condition of anonymity, they said: 'This led me to feel worthless for talking about my illness in the first place as it only made the situation worse.' In May, Amazon sparked fury by axing its paid time-off policy for employees with Covid in the US. Staff across the pond were told they would get five days of excused, unpaid leave if they could provide proof of a positive test result. The company said it would also cease informing staff if someone at their warehouse tested positive. The changes prompted outrage as social media users accused the world's second richest man Jeff Bezos of placing profits over people. The company had benefited hugely from the pandemic online shopping boom before shares dived a few days before the announcement, following a devastating quarter in which the company recorded its first net loss since 2015, a $3.8billion hit due in part to its investment in Rivian Automotive. One person raged online: 'This is outrageous. Covid is not over, Amazon. Leave for sick of exposed workers is an investment in health, well-being and productivity. 'You can't advertise great benefits and then do this.' 'We can continue to safely adjust to our pre-Covid policies,' the company said, citing the sustained easing of the pandemic, the availability of vaccines and treatments, and updated public health guidance. The company's founder Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of $165 billion, was pictured with his model partner Lauren Sanchez as they left the Ham Yard Hotel in Soho, London last night. Ms Sanchez, 52, carried a pink crocodile Hermes Birkin bag that is worth around $100,000 in the latest picture from their UK trip. Bezos is thought to have spent $109 (90) per ticket for up to 30 of his family members to be shown around Buckingham Palace's art collection on Monday. It's unclear when exactly the businessman first started dating Sanchez, but it's been said that they got together while he was still married to his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott. Their affair was exposed by the National Enquirer in January 2019. Soon after, the businessman split from his wife of over 25 years and the mother of his four children. The sole survivor of a horrific mass shooting that left three members of the same family dead miraculously survived the horror ordeal by making it several kilometers away to raise the alarm after being hit with a bullet in the stomach. Mervyn and Maree Schwarz, and Maree's son Graham Tighe, were shot dead at their rural property in the small mining town of Bogie, in the Whitsundays region of north Queensland, at about 9am on Thursday. The gunman still remains on the loose as the public are warned to take extreme caution while police continue their desperate search for the triple murderer. Daily Mail Australia can reveal the family had only bought the huge 300-square-kilometre plot of land for $10million in May 2021, which is zoned for cattle grazing, breeding and farming purposes. Investigators haven't revealed what sparked the tragedy, but locals say there has been a heated dispute over property boundaries between neighbours in the area. Graham Tighe's younger brother Ross was able to alert police to the threat after escaping the chaos at the farm despite his life-threatening injuries. Police said the blood-soaked victim made it to another property 'many, many kilometres away' and contacted authorities. He was airlifted to Mackay Hospital in a critical condition and rushed into emergency surgery where he remains in a stable condition in the intensive care unit. Maree and Mervyn Schwarz died from gunshots wounds, along with Maree's son Graham Tighe. Another son is hospital Maree Schwarz - who recently became a grandmother - was shot dead at the property on Shannonvale Rd, Bogie on Thursday. Her husband and one of her sons were also killed 'He was able to tell police that he had been shot and three others (were) also shot,' Mackay District Superintendent Tom Armitt said. 'We believe the male was able to extract himself from the area. He was fleeing from the scene.' Police said Mr Tighe was 'obviously in a very distressed state' when he originally spoke to officers. This led to some initial confusion about where the scene of the crime took place. 'We were able to conduct searches ourselves based on the scant information that was provided and we had to update the location as to where the incident occurred based on the crime scene that we located,' Superintendent Armitt said. After searching the area where he was found, police deemed the location safe 'and a further exclusion zone was established at a property along Shannonvale Road where the shooting is believed to have occurred'. Three people are dead while a gunman remains at large in North Queensland. A fourth person was also shot in the stomach and was airlifted to hospital in a critical condition Mr and Mrs Schwarz, along with Graham Tighe, purchased the land last year - netting the previous owners a profit of almost $7million after holding onto the property for just three years. Mrs Schwarz became a new grandmother just 18 months ago, sharing a photo of herself cradling the newborn with a beaming smile on her face. Tragically, when word spread throughout the community of a shooting, several of Mrs Schwarz' friends reached out via social media wishing her well. 'Hope all are safe,' one friend wrote on the notice, tagging Mrs Schwarz in her message. Five people are currently assisting police with the early stages of the investigation to try and piece together what happened. Multiple crime scenes were established throughout the small mining community of just 200 people and along Shannonvale Road. Three members of the family were killed and another critically injured in the shooting in Bogie, near Bowen in north Queensland Forensic specialists will return to the scenes on Friday morning to continue examining the regions for clues. Police revealed on Thursday afternoon the rugged terrain had proven difficult to navigate and would pose further challenges throughout the course of the investigation. An emergency declaration at a Bogie cattle farm remains in place. 'We continue to process the crime scene and police do not believe there is any ongoing danger to the public,' a spokesman said. Whitsunday Regional Councillor Jan Clifford said 'everybody knows everyone else' in their 'little village', adding the community would be 'devastated'. 'To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened in the Whitsunday region before. 'We are all deeply saddened by the tragedy.' A woman who works on Peter Delamothe Road, which connects Bogie to Bowen, earlier told Daily Mail Australia she saw several police cars racing towards scene of the shooting. 'I saw at least three police cars while I was outside and heard a few more sirens after that,' she said. 'It's not usually what you see. I thought straight away that something bad had happened.' It is understood doctors and nurses with blood supplies and other medical resources were sent from Bowen Hospital to Collinsville Hospital - the closest facility to the shooting - to assist. Up to eight ambulances were dispatched from as far as Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville. Three people have been confirmed deceased following a shooting at a rural property in Bogie near Collinsville this morning. https://t.co/6iYwYfktIc pic.twitter.com/smwHlVn7y5 Queensland Police (@QldPolice) August 4, 2022 Elly Colls, who works at Opal Ridge Motel, told The Guardian she learned of the incident at about 11am when someone rang to let them know there had been 'a shooting at the Bogie'. 'Better lock up the house,' she said. 'Cause I don't think (they) found him.' Other locals described the shooting as 'unusual' and 'strange' for the usually quiet area. 'We're traditional owners of this land around Collinsville. I wouldn't have thought it could happen here. It's a small town,' one woman told The Courier Mail. Another said: 'The whole town is a bit rattled that something like that could happen here.' 'We don't know the full story, but we've definitely heard about it. It's a small town, everyone knows everyone. 'But out in 'the boge'? Well, it's tiny.' A rescue helicopter has been sent to Bogie in rural Queensland after four people were injured in a shooting HOW CRITICALLY INJURED FATHER WAS ABLE TO SOUND THE ALARM ABOUT MASS SHOOTING It's believed young father Ross Tighe alerted authorities to the critical situation while suffering a gunshot wound to the abdomen. The injured man had been able to make his way to another home - which police said was 'many, many kilometres away' from where the shooting on a remote property took place - and contacted the authorities. He was flown to Mackay Base Hospital to undergo emergency surgery and is now in intensive care in a serious but stable condition. 'He was able to tell police that he had been shot and three others (were) also shot,' Inspector Armitt said. 'We believe the male was able to extract himself from the area. He was fleeing from the scene.' 'Originally, when the male person spoke to us, he was obviously in a very distressed state and there was some confusion about where the shooting had occurred. 'We were able to conduct searches ourselves based on the scant information that was provided and we had to update the location as to where the incident occurred based on the crime scene that we located.' After searching the area where the injured man was found, police deemed the location safe 'and a further exclusion zone was established at a property along Shannonvale Road where the shooting is believed to have occurred'. The shooting took place on a sprawling cattle property which is 'rural, remote, very hilly and heavily forested'. 'It has taken a number of hours for police to search and clear the area, however we have declared a crime scene in the remote rural location where we believe we have located three deceased persons,' Inspector Armitt said. An emergency declaration for the area was issued at around 11.30am. 'Investigations remain ongoing into the circumstances leading up to the shooting,' the police said. 'Police are currently conducting emergency operations in the area and requesting members of the public and aircraft to not attend the declared location.' Police are clearing the 'extensive' property and will remain in place 'as long as we need to do our job', Acting Superintendent Armitt said. Though there are no other people living in the exclusion zone, the police have urged everyone to avoid the area. Advertisement The bitter battle in an Australian city over plans to remove the statue of a disgraced politician is over after the council voted to remove it. The statue of William Crowther, who removed the skull of Aboriginal man William Lanne in 1869 and sent it to London nine years before he became Tasmania's premier, will be torn down after years of debate and criticism. The removal of the sculpture from Franklin Square, in Hobart's CBD, will cost around $20,000 but there are also plans to move it somewhere else. The bronze statue, erected in 1889, has long been contentious in Hobart. On Thursday evening, Hobart City Council members met and agreed it would be replaced with interpretative material. Indigenous activists have praised the decision, labelling the statue 'racist' and 'barbaric'. The council estimates it will cost a further $50,000 needed to install a new momument. The statue of William Crowther, who removed the skull of Aboriginal man William Lanne in 1869 and sent it to London nine years before he became Tasmania's premier, will be torn down William Lanne was thought to be the last 'full-blooded' Aboriginal when he died in 1869 A row has blown up over 'woke' plans to remove the statue of disgraced colonial Australian politician, William Crowther, who mutilated an Aboriginal man's dead body In 2021, an artist painted its head and hands red as part of a reimagining of the statue, symbolising the body part Crowther removed and that he had 'blood on his hands' over the mutilation. The proposal was outlined in a Hobart council report that claimed too many white men were memorialised in the city and that there would be more 'removals', The Australian reported. Council member Simon Behrakis attacked the plan as a 'distraction with woke left wing issues over working on solving issues that actually affect the lives of Hobartians'. 'It's important that we acknowledge all aspects of history, including the bad parts. That is not the same as sanitising or censoring history,' he said in an earlier social media post about the statue. Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania chair Michael Mansell, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of the William Crowther statue, said the plan to move it somewhere else was 'illogical'. 'If the reason you're taking a statue down is because what the person did was so offensive, you couldn't put it up in any other context because people will remember what that guy stood for,' he said. 'Cutting up dead bodies just because they are Aboriginal and treating them as fair game, (as) animals, it wouldn't matter what good that person did, the scale of the atrocity stands out.' Mr Mansell said any other statues with similarly 'horrible histories' should also be taken down. Lanne was regarded as Tasmania's last 'full-blooded' Aboriginal man when he died from cholera and dysentery at 34. In a gruesome piece of history, Crowther broke into the morgue where Lanne's body lay, on behalf of London's Royal College of Surgeons. Inside, Crowther 'decapitated (Lanne), sliced open his face and peeled off the skin, removing his skull and replacing it with the skull of a white man, stolen from another corpse in the morgue. He then stitched him back up, attempting to cover his crime.' The move was condemned even back then. Lanne's brain was put on show in an exhibition in London in 1912. Crowther was known as a naturalist and surgeon but his life was defined for his infamous actions in exhuming and mutilating bodies in the name of science. Council member Simon Behrakis attacked the plan as a 'distraction with woke left wing issues over working on solving issues that actually effect the lives of Hobartians' Crowther is believed to have exhumed the remains of other Aboriginal Tasmanians including a seven-year-old girl named Mathinna. After removing Lanne's head, Crowther was suspended from his role as an honorary medical officer at Hobart General Hospital. In 2021, historian Reg Watson told the ABC that statues such as Crowther's could be left in place and their stories explained, whether good or bad. 'To me, politics comes into play here. The statue should be left alone and my fear is, what statue is next?' 'A suitable interpretation plaque can be placed next to the statue in the future, with the sad story told, but attacking statues is an American fashion.' A Baltimore ex-gang member who uses graffiti to designate 'no shoot zones' to discourage gun violence around the city was shot in his back, neck and jaw on Wednesday. 'I was shot three times,' Tyree Moorehead, 46, told reporters on Wednesday. 'A bullet went through my jaw, my neck and one is still in my back.' He is known for creating over 250 'no shoot zones' across Baltimore in places where someone was shot and killed to raise awareness for the issue. A former gang member himself, Moorehead has admitted to shooting up to 20 people as a teenager before serving 11 years in jail following a shootout with police at age 15. In a video posted to what appears to be Moorehead's Instagram page, he said he was shot near Monument Street while going to the store in central Baltimore. Moorehead apparently made it home after the shooting before police arrived, and the injured 46-year-old can be heard saying to medics 'I've been shot in my neck and my back, I think.' Tyree Moorehead, 46, shows reporters where he was shot on Wednesday, saying a bullet went through his jaw, another went through his neck and another is still in his back Moorehead claims he is responsible for shooting up to 20 people as a teenager before being imprisoned for over a decade after a shootout with police at age 15 The ex-gang member has created over 200 different 'no shoot zone' signs, each placed where someone was shot and killed #HAPPENINGNOW: Tyree Moorehead walked out of the hospital He says hes been shot twice in his neck and a bullet is still in his back The creator of the No Shoot Zones says police have been at his house for the past 3 days, before he was shot this morning@wjz pic.twitter.com/GhSThq6g2U Annie Rose Ramos (@AnnieRoseNews) August 3, 2022 Moorehead was then taken to hospital before leaving without being discharged. A video recorded by Fox45 showed him walking down a Baltimore street in hospital scrubs and a blue hair net. He told a reporter he was 'good,' and also said 'nothing went wrong, you just have someone that's trying to protect a community that obviously doesn't want to be protected.' A heavy police presence was seen outside of Moorehead's home before he was taken back to the hospital by paramedics on Wednesday evening, where his condition is currently unknown. Videos posted to his Facebook show frequent encounters with police at his home, especially in the last few days where they can be seen questioning him outside his door. Moorehead has now dedicated much of his time to spray painting buildings and sidewalks with messages that encourage peace, and calls himself someone who came home and 'saved his city instead of killing it.' After leaving the hospital without being discharged, Moorehead returned to his home where he was again taken to the hospital by paramedics #HAPPENINGNOW: Tyree Moorehead walked out of the hospital He says hes been shot twice in his neck and a bullet is still in his back The creator of the No Shoot Zones says police have been at his house for the past 3 days, before he was shot this morning@wjz pic.twitter.com/GhSThq6g2U Annie Rose Ramos (@AnnieRoseNews) August 3, 2022 Moorehead is shown wearing a shirt emblazoned with his 'no shoot zone' message, meant to discourage Baltimore residents and gang members from using guns to harm each other But according to his social media, many seemingly disagree with Moorehead's methods, with some comments calling him 'sad' and 'a scammer.' Neighbors told CBS reporter Annie Rose that Moorehead is 'aggressive and antagonizing' and described the 46-year-old as a 'pariah to the community.' It is unclear what Moorehead does for work, but he frequently shares his Cashapp account name on Facebook while asking for funds, which prompted some users to call him a beggar. Baltimore has seen an unusually deadly year, with 179 homicides recorded in Maryland's capital in the first six months of this year. The Baltimore Police Department reported there were 10 shootings, resulting in the deaths of five people, over the past weekend alone. A prominent French physicist has been forced to apologise for a photograph that he said was from NASA's new space telescope but which was in fact a piece of chorizo. Etienne Klein, a renowned philosopher and research director at the French Atomic Energy Commission, informed his followers that 'no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth.' He had posted a tweet last Sunday that he claimed was the latest astonishing photograph from the cutting edge James Webb Space Telescope of the star Proxima Centauri. The photograph purports to show a furious red ball of cosmic energy, pockmarked with glowing solar storms roiling across the neighbouring star's surface. 'Photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years from us,' Klein tweeted. 'She was taken by the JWST. This level of detail A new world is revealed day after day.' This is the picture which Etienne Klein, a renowned physicist, philosopher and research director at the French Atomic Energy Commission, posted to Twitter claiming - as a joke - that it was the latest astonishing photograph from the cutting edge James Webb Space Telescope of the star Proxima Centauri NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory took this photo of our sun on January 8 2022 Etienne Klein, a renowned philosopher and research director at the French Atomic Energy Commission The photograph resembled famous portraits of the sun taken by the European Space Agency's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), which captures detailed solar storms on our home star's surface at a distance of 75 million miles. Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the earth, is 5.9 trillion miles away. While most Twitter users were able to recognise that the photo posted by the preeminent physicist was in fact a slice of Spanish sausage, others were more gullible. 'The last photo of Proxima Centauri was this,' said one user, posting a photo of a distant star. 'This is a huge step forward.' 'I can't tell if it's a prank or really proxima that looks like a chorizo,' wrote another. However, Twitter user Ned Boeuf wasn't fooled. 'Fake, it's a slice of chorizo.' Then the Twitter backlash began. 'Coming from a scientific research director, it's quite inappropriate to share this type of thing without specifying from the 1st tweet that it is false information when you know the speed at which a false information spreads,' came one indignant reply. Twitter user impressed with the huge step forward in space telescopy that the JWST represented This user was more sceptical but still on the fence about whether it was a joke or serious However, not everyone was fooled The backlash began with users accusing Klein of spreading misinformation 'Indeed, there has been a loss of resolution which makes the joke more believable and therefore more toxic!' wrote another. Klein acknowledged that many users had not understood his joke which he said was simply aimed at encouraging people to question and not automatically accept 'eloquent images' from people in positions of authority. On Wednesday he wrote his apology. 'In view of some comments, I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of amusement,' he tweeted to his 89,200 followers. 'Let us learn to be wary of arguments from authority as much as of the spontaneous eloquence of certain images.' 'Well, when it's time for the aperitif, cognitive biases seem to have a field day Elon Musk posted this meme last month making light-hearted fun of the JWST's astronomy photos 'Beware, then, of them. According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth.' 'I come to present my apologies to those who may have been shocked by my prank, which had nothing original about it,' he said, describing the post as a 'scientist's joke'. Prior to that he posted the James Webb Space Telescope's capture of the Chariot Wheel galaxy and its companion galaxies, ('REAL this time'). 'Located 500 million light-years away, it was undoubtedly spiral in its past, but took on this strange appearance following a furious galactic pile-up.' Last month Elon Musk posted a meme making fun of the JWST, comparing the granite slab of a kitchen with a visual of the space, in a light-hearted joke targeting the NASA. Pauline Hanson will make herself the face of the 'no' campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament after claiming it would be 'Australia's version of apartheid' in an extraordinary speech to the Senate. The One Nation leader tripled-down on Wednesday on her strident opposition to voters being asked to enshrine the advisory body into the constitution. Her office has since registered 46 website domains as they ramp up their efforts against the legislation, with VoicetoParliament.com.au and Ulurustatement.com.au among the group, the Telegraph reported. 'I'm confident Australians will resist giving a minority of people more power than the majority based on race,' she told the publication. 'That sort of thing was known as apartheid and it was rightly consigned to the dustbin of history. How can we possibly be contemplating this in Australia?' Pauline Hanson will make herself the face of the 'no' campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament The One Nation leader put herself forward to lead the movement because she was fed up with dealing with the Coalition and claimed they 'basically agree with it'. 'I'm sick and tired of the separatism,' Ms Hanson said. The speech to a largely empty chamber while most were distracted by Greens leader Adam Bandt's National Press Club address was just a week after she sensationally stormed out of the Senate during an acknowledgement of country. 'The risk is very real that the sovereignty that all Australians have over their land and country will be handed to a racial minority,' she said. 'Why does this have to be in the constitution? What is the real ulterior motive? This can only be about power - creating a nation within a nation. 'This can only be about taking power from whitefellas and giving it to blackfellas. This is Australia's version of apartheid. 'Are they prepared for the compensation or reparations which will be demanded when the High Court decides that traditional ownership means sovereign control?' Lidia Thorpe strode into the Senate with her fist in the air and then mockingly called the Queen a 'coloniser' Senator Hanson, without missing a beat, moved on to another attack on the entire concept of acknowledgement of country speeches. One is read at the start of Parliament every day, and she after her walkout complained they were now even delivered on airplanes. 'Where will you stand, given that you acknowledge traditional ownership every day? Do you acknowledge that I, like millions of Australians, legally own my land and worked very hard for it?' she said. What is apartheid? Apartheid was an oppressive, racist system in South Africa between 1948 and 1991. Wide-ranging laws divided the country by race with the ruling white minority at the top and black Africans at the bottom. Sexual relations and marriage across races was banned and black people were denied the right to vote and discriminated against in housing and employment. Millions of black Africans were forced to live in segregated communities and forbidden to mix with other races. The system was eventually overturned after intense international pressure. Advertisement 'Do I have rights to my land, too? Can't you acknowledge my connection to my land and my love for my country?' Senator Hanson then attacked her most forceful critic, Greens senator Lidia Thorpe, who caused her own scene on Monday by raising her fist in a 'black power' gesture and called The Queen a 'coloniser' as she gave her oath of allegiance. 'I note Lidia Thorpe's racist interjection in the past when she told me to go back to where I came from,' the One Nation MP continued. 'She can rest assured that I did, indeed, go back to where I came from - back to Queensland, where I was born and where I raised my children, and where my parents and grandparents were born. 'There is nowhere else for me to go. Australia is my home. Australia is our home - indigenous and non-indigenous alike.' Senator Hanson's entire five-minute speech was her most unequivocal rearguard against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. It included strong praise for controversial Aboriginal senator Jacinta Price, who is the lone indigenous MP who opposes the advisory body. Senator Price claimed Australia was 'saturated' with tokenistic 'virtue signalling' like acknowledgement of country, and the Indigenous Voice was not universally accepted among her people. 'I personally have had more than my fill of being symbolically recognised,' she said in her maiden speech last week. 'No, prime minister, we don't need another handout and no, we indigenous Australians have not come to agreement on this statement.' The Country Liberal former deputy mayor of Alice Springs even backed up Senator Hanson's walkout and position on the issue. 'I think I understand Pauline's frustrations. We don't want to see all these all these symbolic gestures. We want to see real action,' she said. Senator Hanson stormed out as Senate President Sue Lines acknowledged the indigenous community at Parliament's opening, yelling; 'No, I won't and never will' Senator Hanson on Wednesday claimed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had 'contempt' for anyone opposing the Indigenous Voice, even First Nations elders. 'His contempt for those who rightly and justly request details of the proposed voice, such as its powers, functions and costs, has also been very clear,' she said. 'He is not promoting unity at all. The prime minister is deliberately stoking division and stoking it on racial lines.' She said elders contacted her saying they never had a say in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, on which the new initiative is based, and did not agree with it. Mr Albanese hit back at Senator Price's concerns on Monday and maintained the Indigenous Voice would not delay practical solutions. 'I think with respect, when Senator Price has a look at what is proposed in terms of the wording, then the idea that this is anything other than a unifying moment for the nation is, I believe just doesn't stack up,' he said on Sky News. Senator Hanson appeared to have based her speech around this comment, as she referred to its language and criticism of Senator Price. 'This comment has come from an Aboriginal woman. The prime minister has dismissed her comments saying, 'they don't stack up',' she said. 'No. His comments do not stack up. That's because the prime minister is listening only to the Aboriginal industry, whose gravy train relies on separating Australians by race and entrenching indigenous disadvantage. 'I've been saying this for decades.' Anthony Albanese said the Voice to Parliament would be an opportunity to 'uplift our nation' Senator Hanson said nothing in the proposed Voice addressed practical issues like violence and poverty in Aboriginal communities, and there was no real detail about how it would operate. 'There is much in this proposal that is open-ended, ill-defined and fraught with peril,' she said. She claimed a referendum would cost taxpayers $120 million and could wait until the next election in three years as 'what's the rush?' Senator Hanson finished by turning to another of her frequent topics - claiming too many people said they were Aboriginal. 'We need a stronger definition of Aboriginality. From 2016 to 2021, the number of Australians identifying as indigenous rose by 92,000 or 26 per cent, while our overall population increase, including immigration, was only eight per cent,' she said. 'This is what we call 'jumping on the bandwagon'.' This morphed into closing remarks suggesting the entire idea of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was invented by white people wanting to pat themselves on the back. 'There is much in this proposal that reeks of the empty gestures and symbolism which make progressives feel good about themselves but otherwise achieve nothing,' she said. 'It's also reeking of the disgusting, patronising attitudes that privileged bureaucrats and lawmakers routinely adopt towards indigenous Australians proud members of a culture which has endured for tens of thousands of years. 'This is an attempt to rewrite the past, manipulate the present and destroy the future. 'Unlike both sides of this chamber, I have listened to indigenous Australians and their elders. Stop using them as fodder for your own purposes.' New Aboriginal senator Jacinta Price has slammed welcome to country ceremonies for being token gestures and 'throwaway lines' after Pauline Hanson's walkout from the Senate The debate about the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which appears set to clear both houses and be put to voters, has been a huge distraction to Mr Albanese's agenda in the first two weeks of Parliament. Senator Hanson's walkout last Wednesday also dragged the issue of displaying the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags in Parliament into the debate. Displaying the two flags alongside the Australian one in both houses was one of the first acts of the Albanese Government last week. The Indigenous Voice to Parliament is proposed to be an elected body of First Nations representatives enshrined in the constitution that would advise the government on issues affecting them. Trump lawyer John Eastman pitched a plan on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration (which President Donald Trump skipped) to try to sue to overturn two runoff elections in Georgia that flipped control of the U.S. Senate. Eastman, who has emerged as a key architect of what the House Jan. 6 committee calls the fake electors scheme to try to overturn Biden's win, proposed the course in an email to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani while also maneuvering to try to collect hefty legal fees for his efforts. 'A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,' Eastman wrote Giuliani, according an an email obtained by the New York Times. 'If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump's claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.' Eastman also sought assistance from Giuliani in getting paid for his efforts. Trump lawyer John Eastman, who helped shape the former president's election overturn effort, also proposed suing over the Georgia election results that flipped control of the Senate, according to a newly unearthed email He had billed the Trump campaign $10,000 for legal services, in an email he had written the day before the transfer of presidential power. That included his legal advice in a critical White House Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4th, when Eastman clashed with White House lawyers and argued that then Vice President Mike Pence could either refuse to count electoral votes certified by states or send them back, which would have delayed the congressional count. Eastman wanted Giuliani's help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had submitted, according to the Times, which reported that it appears not to have been paid. The email illustrates how a cadre of lawyers and loyalists continued to fight to the bitter end for Trump, even after dozens of adverse court rulings knocked down various election fraud claims. Eastman cast the effort as a way to 'keep up the fight' and potential obtain information that might bolster their previous arguments. 'We need to figure out how to keep up the fight,' he wrote Giuliani. 'I'm inclined to pursue an election challenge to the Georgia runoff election, using what we already have learned (huge statistical anomalies, violations of Georgia law, etc.) as the basis. Under Georgia law, a challenge can be brought by any qualified voter, even if the candidates themselves are not interested.' Eastman also sought Giuliani's assistance getting hefty legal bills paid 'A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,' Eastman wrote Giuliani Eastman wanted to sue over the Georgia elections White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, whose slashing comments in testimony have made their way into multiple Jan. 6th hearings, testified that he smacked down Eastman when he proposed suing over the Georgia elections Jan. 7th, a day after Congress certified Biden's win hours after the Capitol riot. Those elections, which swung to Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, flipped control of the Senate to Democrats. (The Senate would soon vote to acquit Trump during his second impeachment trial). He started to ask me about something dealing with Georgia, preserving something, potentially for appeal. And I said to him: Are you out of your effing mind? I said. 'I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: orderly transition. I said I don't want to hear any effing words coming out of your mouth, no matter what, other than orderly transition.' 'Now I'm going to give you the best free legal advice you've ever getting in your life. Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer, you're going to need it. Then I hung up on him,' he said. Democratic Rep. Pete Aguillar (Calif.) said at a hearing that a few days later, Eastman emailed Giuliani seeking to be included on a list of those seeking a potential presidential pardon. The paper reported Giuliani's team had contacted the Trump campaign seeking $20,000 a day for his efforts, although Trump said his longtime advisor would only be 'paid on the come,' meaning after achieving success. The Taliban claims it had no idea Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was hiding in a safe house owned by a senior government official in Kabul before the US killed him. Zawahiri masterminded the 9/11 terror attacks and had been hunted by America for more than two decades before he was finally killed in the Afghan capital early Sunday at a safe-house owned by an aide to interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. His death has been held up as evidence that deep links still exist between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which returned to rule Afghanistan last year with a pledge that terror groups would not be allowed safe haven in the country. But a spokesman for the Islamist group has now claimed to have 'no information about Ayman al-Zawahiri's arrival and stay in Kabul'. Al-Zawahiri masterminded the 9/11 terror bombings and had been hunted by the US for more than 20 years before being killed shortly after 6am Sunday Ayman al-Zawahiri, a mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks and leader of Al Qaeda following Osama Bin Laden's death, was killed early Sunday in a drone attack on his safe house in the Afghan capital Kabul An MQ-9 Reaper drone fired two R9X 'ninja' Hellfire missiles at Zawahiri as he stood alone on his balcony watching the sun come up, obliterating him with 100lbs metal warheads and six blades that popped out of the fuselage before impact A carefully-worded government statement did not acknowledge that Al-Zawahiri was actually in the city, and also did not confirm his death. Instead, it said: 'The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has instructed the investigative and intelligence agencies to conduct a comprehensive and serious investigation into the various aspects of the incident.' But US security services say they are sure that Zawahiri was killed shortly after 6.18am Sunday when two R9X 'ninja' missiles - equipped with 100lbs steel warheads and six katana-like blades that pop out the sides - landed on him. The CIA said six months of painstaking intelligence work had gone into confirming Zawahiri's presence at the house, including multiple sightings of him on the rooftop balcony where he was killed. A further 24 hours of work then went into confirming he had definitely been killed. Zawahiri's assassination is the biggest blow to Al-Qaeda since US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. It was after Bin Laden's death that Zawahiri was promoted to head of Al Qaeda. He was on the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list and there was a $25 million reward for information leading directly to him. But the Taliban now claims it has 'no information' about al-Zawahiri being in the house (pictured) - saying it will 'investigate' the strike, but without confirming his death Zawahiri was killed by two R9X hellfire missiles loaded with 100lbs metal warheads and six katana-like blades designed to shred the target President Biden announced his death in an address to the American people late Monday, saying it provided some measure of 'justice' for the victims of 9/11. 'We made it clear again tonight that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out,' he said. Biden laid out al-Zawahiri's role in the terrorist organization, noting that, in addition to the 9/11 attacks, he was behind the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. 'He carved a trail of murder and violence against American citizens, American service members, American diplomats, and American interests,' Biden said. Biden concluded his remarks with a warning: 'To those around the world who continue to seek to harm the United States, hear me now. 'We will always remain vigilant, and we will act, and we will always do what is necessary to ensure the safety and security of Americans at home and around the globe.' Four current and former Louisville Police officers have been charged by the FBI in connection with the deadly raid at Breonna Taylors apartment in 2020. Ex-LPMD detectives Joshua Jaynes, 40, and Brett Hankison, 46 are all facing federal civil rights charges for their actions in the Taylor investigation. Current LMPD Sergeant Kyle Meany, 45, and detective Kelly Hanna Goodlett are facing the same charges. Jaynes was fired by the Louisville Metro Police in January 2021, in Kentucky, for adding a false statement to his sworn affidavit for the 'no knock' warrant to search Taylor's apartment over her drug dealer ex-boyfriend. As a result EMT Taylor, 26, was fatally shot by LMPD officers on 13 March 2020, sparking widespread protests around the country. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke today announced the charges - which include violating Taylor's civil rights, unlawful conspiracies, unconstitutional use of force, and obstruction offenses. They claim that the LMPDs Place Based Investigations Unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant for Taylors home, which then led to her death. Garland also confirmed that Hankison, who was cleared of criminal charges earlier this year, has been charged with two two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law. Jaynes, pictured, was fired by the Louisville Metro Police in January 2021, in Kentucky, for adding a false statement to his sworn affidavit for the 'no knock' warrant to search Taylor's apartment over her drug dealer ex-boyfriend Kelly Hanna Goodlett, pictured, allegedly met with Jaynes in a garage in May 2020 to discuss telling investigators a false story to 'cover up their unlawful conduct' Jaynes, 40, was sacked in January 2021 for adding a false statement to his sworn affidavit for the 'no knock' warrant to search Taylor's (pictired) apartment Meany, pictured, has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI, while Jaynes is accused of falsifying records in a federal investigation Hankison, pictured, was cleared of criminal charges earlier this year and has now been charged with two two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law Until now Hankison was the only officer to be charged in relation to Taylor's death, after firing shots through her window and sliding glass door. He was found not guilty of three counts of wanton endangerment for firing shots into a neighboring apartment. Taylors boyfriend Kenneth Walker returned fire with a shot that struck an officer in the leg. Police then opened fire, hitting Taylor six times and killing her in the incident. He was found not guilty of three counts of wanton endangerment for firing shots during a highly charged court case in March this year. The Department of Justice confirmed that he will now face further charges, for reportedly using 'unconstitutionally excessive force' while acting in his official capacity. A separate indictment filed on Thursday claimed that after Taylor was shot a Hankison moved from the doorway to the side of her apartment and fired 10 more shots. These went through a window and a sliding glass door, both of which were covered with blinds and curtains, therefore depriving three of Taylor's neighbors of their constitutional rights. . The first count charges him with depriving Taylor and her boyfriend by firing shots through a bedroom window that was covered with blinds and a black out curtain. Both counts allege that Hankison used a dangerous weapon, and that his conduct involved an attempt to kill. Jaynes, the leading investigator in the case, is accused of falsifying information on an affidavit used to approve the warrant to raid Taylors arrest. He claimed that he had verified through a U.S. Postal Inspector that Taylor's ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover, a suspected drug trafficker, had been getting packages delivered to her apartment. Joshua Jaynes has been arrested and charged by the FBI for lying on a search warrant which led to the deadly raid Ex-detective Brett Hankison, pictured, has also been charged with civil rights charges in connection with the incident. He was cleared earlier this year of wanton endangerment for firing rounds into a neighboring apartment Attorney General Merrick Garland and Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke today announced the charges - which include violating Taylor's civil rights, unlawful conspiracies, unconstitutional use of force, and obstruction offenses Sergeant Kyle Meaney, pictured during Hankison's trial, reportedly 'lied to the FBI' during its investigation of Taylors death, and has also been charged But he had actually spoken to a fellow officer, Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly, who had received the information from Shivley Police. Mattingly later resigned from the force, and has not been charged in connection to Taylors death. Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison were also fired from their roles in the police over the Taylor case. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron failed to charge Mattingly and Cosgrove with a crime last year, saying that both cops were justified in returning fire against Walker. Both Cosgrove and Hankison were fired from the Louisville Metro Police Department for their actions during the raid. Garland said the federal charges allege that the officers falsified information on the search warrant used to enter Taylor's home. He said that this violated her fourth amendment rights, which resulted in her death, with Jaynes and Goodlett 'knowingly falsifying' a document created after her death. The charged claimed that the pair had allegedly met in a garage in May 2020 to discuss telling investigators a false story to 'cover up their unlawful conduct.' Sergeant Kyle Meaney reportedly 'lied to the FBI' during its investigation of Taylors death, and has also been charged. Affidavits sworn by Jaynes and approved by Meany were used to obtain warrants to search five properties, including Taylors home. The indictment claims that both Jaynes and Meany knew that the affidavit used to obtain the warrant was false, misleading and out-of-date. It also states that both offices knew that the warrant would be carried out by armed LMPD officers, creating a dangerous situation for officers and anyone at Taylors home. Breonna Taylors family and lawyers today said that the charges were ' a huge step toward justice' for her Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke confirmed that a civil investigation into the pattern or practice of law enforcement misconduct by the LMPD is still ongoing A separate indictment filed on Thursday claimed that after Taylor was shot a Hankison moved from the doorway to the side of her apartment and fired 10 more shots Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison were also fired from their roles in the police over the Taylor case The death of Breonna Taylor sparked a movement following her shooting by police officers. Her family today praised the government for the charges brought Jaynes and Meany have both been charged with one count of deprivation of rights under the colour of law and one count of conspiracy. Meany has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI, while Jaynes is accused of falsifying records in a federal investigation. Goodlett has been charged with conspiring with Jaynes to falsify the search warrants and covering up their actions afterwards. Garland added: 'Breonna Taylor should be alive today. The Justice Department is committed to defending and protecting the civil rights of every person in this country.' Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke confirmed that a civil investigation into the pattern or practice of law enforcement misconduct by the LMPD is still ongoing. In a statement, Taylors family and lawyers said: These nearly two and a half years have been extremely difficult for Tamika, Juniyah, and their family as theyve endlessly fought for justice on behalf of Breonna. Likewise, it has been a tough fight for the attorneys, advocates and community members who have rallied to support Breonnas family in their quest for justice. Today was a huge step toward justice. We are grateful for the diligence and dedication of the FBI and the DOJ as they investigated what led to Breonnas murder and what transpired afterwards. The justice that Breonna received today would not have been possible without the efforts of Attorney General Merrick Garland or Assistant AG for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke. We hope this announcement of a guilty plea sends a message to all other involved officers that it is time to stop covering up and time to accept responsibility for their roles in causing the death of an innocent, beautiful young Black woman. Drag Queen Aida H Dee posed for photos with police officers as they joined council security staff at protests and counter-protests outside Cornish libraries this week where he was reading stories to children. The Drag Queen Story Hour tour of libraries across the country saw clashes between rival groups in Bristol and Reading last week. Yesterday, supporters waved the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag while protesters in Bodmin, Cornwall while protesters against held signs stating 'We are against grooming', 'Leave our kids alone', 'Let kids be kids' and 'We are not transphobic'. But large contingents of counter-protesters have begun showing up to the libraries Aida visits, and the publicity is attracting families to sign up for the reading hours. Unlike in previous protests, when Sab Samuel, the children's author and drag performer behind Aida H Dee, had to be escorted off-site for his own safety, protesters left Cornish libraries before he and families exited the building. Drag Queen Story Hour originally started in America to 'inspire a love of reading, while teaching deeper lessons on diversity, self-love and an appreciation of others'. Aida H Dee (centre), also know as Sab Samuel, poses with police officers at Bodmin Library on Tuesday after protesters showed up to the story hour Protesters at Bodmin library said they were 'concerned parents and grandparents' who believe that the existence of drag queens and the LGBT+ community is an 'adult matter' Counter-protesters (pictured in the back of this image) also arrived at Bodmin library to show their support of inclusivity UK organisers say it is about teaching inclusion and encouraging children to express their 'creative' and 'fabulous' sides. Both Aida H Dee and Irish-based drag queen Cherrie Ontop have spoken openly about the horrific abuse and death threats they receive on a daily basis since participating in the project. Those calling for an end to Drag Queen Story Hour have called the queens 'groomer', 'paedophile' and said they are 'abusing children' - all claims which have no factual basis. As with the majority of people who come into contact with children as part of their job, all the drag queens involved in the project have a full DBS check before they can work in libraries. Mr Samuel said: 'I'm disappointed that they haven't come out with anything original.' He said events have largely gone ahead as planned, and posted on social media explaining libraries have phoned ticketed attendees and told them a new place and time to avoid confrontational protests - but this did not work for his most recent Cornwall events. He described the protesters as extremists, citing online abuse he has received which is 'almost constant'. Mr Samuel added: 'The vast majority [of protesters] are not even from this area. 'They will get bored and they will move on. The problem is that nobody, the police, nobody is stopping them. 'They are inciting hate.' A statement from the community who came out in support of the Drag Queen Story Hour across Cornwall over the last two days, said: 'Cornwall has been out in force to support Drag Queen Story Hour against bigoted hate that's been perpetrated by the far right Patriotic Alternative organisation. 'Masquerading as protecting kids, this organisation is the one that's putting our communities at risk. 'In libraries across the region, children have turned up to hear stories and have been met with bigotry and homophobic signs. 'But communities across Cornwall have made it clear that this hate does not represent us. We are both from the LGBTQ+ community and stand in solidarity with the LGBQT+ community. 'While we are proud to have stood up for a diverse and tolerant Cornwall, we are saddened that we have had to stand outside our libraries to counter these abusive messages.' A security guard at the Bodmin reading commented that the kids were 'laughing their heads off' at Aida, who was a 'great storyteller'. Cheering could be heard from the library as the drag queen read stories, including his own book about three goats, which tackles bullying. As the families left the story hour session, parents and children asked for selfies with Aida, who said the protests were a 'distraction'. In Bristol last week, protesters showed up with giant banners from the far-right group Patriotic Alternative Protesters have repeated baseless claims that drag queens are 'grooming' children and perpetrating 'child abuse' The drag queen, who said Cornwall's libraries have been the most supportive on the UK tour, added: 'I do have concerns for my own safety and that of families who are coming to see me. 'I thought the protests might put people off, but it's actually attracting more people who are really supportive. My biggest concern is whether the council will be willing to do it again.' At the majority of events, anti-LGBT+ protesters have carried large banners identifying them as members of the far-right organisation Patriotic Alternative. The organisation spreads widely debunked conspiracy theories such as the great replacement theory, which claims mass waves of immigrants are entering the UK with the aim of making white Brits a minority. The group is fiercely against the LGBT+ community. Its website states: 'The central building block of our nation is the traditional, nuclear family, which consists of a mother, father and children. 'The traditional family will be promoted as an ideal to be striven for and emulated. No public body will promote any alternative as either equal or superior to the traditional family. 'To that end, children will be protected from exposure to sexualised material or LGBT propaganda in all public institutions.' In on of the latest examples of the protests, at Henleaze library in Bristol video footage shows a protestor explaining the group's opposition to the drag queen story hour and claiming they have protest groups 'all over the country', mobilised to 'put an end to this sexual exploitation of children.' Mark Nelson, one of those protesting in Bodmin, told CornwallLive: 'This is the seventh library protest I have attended. 'Upon arriving at Bodmin library today I was told by a security guard the area was 'out of bounds' and he wouldn't let me use the public car park or enter the building. 'At each of these protests we have been met by far left-wing counter protesters who insist on keeping their faces covered. When we try to open dialogue with these people we get called all sorts of names such as 'transphobic' and 'racist'. 'This is simply not true. We are only concerned parents and grandparents who believe this is an adult conversation that has no place being pushed on to toddlers and young children.' Pro-LGBT+ protesters disagree, and Aida H Dee does too: 'It's not about being dressed in drag, it's about having someone to relate to. 'What I am doing is saving lives. How many kids have I read my stories to and been that role model that I wish I'd had? 'How many children have I saved?' Many people have been supportive of the programme on social media and thanked him for his efforts in rearranging the story hours. According to a survey released in May last year, young LGBT+ people are three times more likely to self-harm and twice as likely to contemplate suicide as their non-LGBT+ peers. The research by group Just Like Us found that 68% of LGBT+ young people had experienced suicidal thoughts, compared with 29% of young people who were not LGBT+ during lockdown. Nearly a third of the young people surveyed had self-harmed, compared with 9% of non-LGBT+ young people. For LGBT+ young people of colour the figures are even higher - 89% had experienced suicidal thoughts and feelings, compared with 67% of the white LGBT+ young people. Cornwall Council leader Linda Taylor said: 'There is so much going on in Cornwall's libraries with activities to suit every age group to get children engaged, listening and learning whilst having a lot of fun. 'Drag Queen Story Hour is one example. These events offer children a rich experience in story telling in an interactive way. 'Developing reading skills and an understanding of different communities provides children with a positive start in life that in turn can reduce inequalities. 'The events are being held as part of a national tour of libraries and institutions including the British Museum, and they demonstrate that Cornwall's libraries are inclusive, vibrant, and wholly positive spaces open to everyone. Feedback from one parent in Cornwall said: 'The Drag Queen Story Time event was fabulously joyous. Colourful, amusing and very engaging, brilliantly delivered by a performer that clearly knows the audience they are working with. My seven-year-old absolutely loved it'.' Another mum from Bodmin who attended Tuesday's event added: 'It was hilarious and really good fun - my kids loved it and wanted to come because they love RuPaul's Drag Race. There was nothing sexual about it.' Meanwhile Cherrie Ontop said: 'I want to make Northern Ireland a better society for young people. A better society that I grew up in where I was terrified that I was gay. I was terrified that I maybe wanted to wear a dress and still be a boy. 'The books that I choose are all about acceptance and equality and diversity. 'People think that I was trying to brainwash children. I don't really understand that because for me, being a gay person is not a choice, and it is nothing that can be forced upon you.' Advertisement America's floodgates broke open last week after three once-in-a-thousand-year rain storms left 38 people dead across the midwestern United States. The massive flooding began on July 25, when record-breaking rainfall drenched St. Louis, Missouri trapping cars in more than 10 inches of flood water, closing roads and causing at least one death. Just a few days later, on July 28, rural parts of eastern Kentucky were flooded after the National Weather Service received reports of up to 14 inches of rainfall. At least 37 people died in the catastrophic storm as of Monday, as dozens were still reported missing after bridges collapsed and houses were torn from their foundations. And as residents in Illinois were still reeling from the storm last Monday, which caused an estimated $10 million in damages and economic impact in East St. Louis, the southern part of the state was drenched by eight to 12 inches of rainfall in just 12 hours from Monday night into Tuesday morning. All three incidents are considered once in 1,000 year rain events because the amount of rain that fell during such a short amount of time has only a 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year. But experts now warn that these devastating storms may become even more common as the Earth's average temperature continues to increase. ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: Brian Kreitner, looked down at broken pieces of glass in the flood water after a storm dumped more than 10 inches of rainfall on the city last week EAST ST LOUIS, ILLINOIS: Gateway Pet Guardians used a boat to help pet owners rescue two cats and a dog from their flooded homes. The pets had been trapped since the homeowners were forced out due to the rising flood waters EASTERN KENTUCKY: An aerial view provided by the Tennessee Army National Guard shows the extent of the devastation in the state after the National Weather Service received reports of up to 14 inches of rainfall The extreme weather began last week when a 100-year weather record was obliterated in St Louis after more than eight inches of torrential rain drenched the city last Monday night into Tuesday. According to the National Weather Service, 8.81 inches of rain fell on the city from midnight Monday to 9am Tuesday morning after the thunderstorms eased across the area by mid-morning beating the city's old record of 6.85", which was previously set on August 20, 1915. Some parts of the city even recorded more than 11 inches of rain, with parts of St Charles County recording 10 inches. One person died in the powerful storm after he was left stranded in his car and drowned in about eight and a half inches of water. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said Monday that officers were dispatched to the intersection of Rosedale and Enright Avenues just before 10am on July 26, and when they arrived they found a good Samaritan pulling a man from his car. But the man, who was later identified as 60-year-old Kumsa Heyi, was pronounced dead on the scene. Authorities also reported that several puppies drowned when the water got into a building at Stray Paws Adoptables, a stray dog rescue operation in St Peters, but firefighters were able to rescue other dogs from the building. The St Louis Fire Department also rescued people from 18 homes in the same general area after floodwaters entered the homes, and said on Twitter that six people and six dogs were rescued by boat. Fifteen other people declined to leave their homes. ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: A man bravely helped two people walk through the flood waters after their car became submerged in the storm last week ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: Santo Albright, of Fenton, tried to run to his car as the heavy rain began ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: According to the National Weather Service, 8.81 inches of rain fell on the city from midnight Monday to 9am Tuesday morning after the thunderstorms eased across the area by mid-morning. Some parts wound up recording more than 11 inches of rain ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: St Louis firefighters helped a group of adults and students off a bus that got stuck in the rising water Other residents posted alarming videos and photos of submerged cars and flooded basements on social media as flood levels continued to rise last week. Images of Forest Park DeBaliviere Metrolink station in St Louis showed the tracks and platforms completely under water - with just half of the information boards and steps still visible. Interstate 70 east of Mid Rivers Mall Drive was also rendered completely impassable by the flash flooding, and in the St. Louis County town of Brentwood, residents were forced to evacuate when Deer Creek overflowed. The rising waters also threatened homes in Ladau, one of the wealthiest cities in Missouri, the Associated Press reports, and the flooding became so bad that the iconic Gateway Arch had to close. The city is now facing another flash flood, with a warning in effect until 11.45am Thursday, covering about half a million people in the communities of Kirkwood and Overland, CNN reports. Between two to four inches of rain had already fallen in the area Thursday morning, with rain pounding the region at rates of one to three inches per hour as wind gusts reached up to 60mph. Overnight, authorities reported that creeks in the area were once again rising, and had exceeded the levels they were at last week. The flood waters swamped Covered Bridge RV Park near the Saline Creek, according to FOX 2 News, and rescuers there went door to door Wednesday night to make sure everyone got out safely. 'I came down here around 10.30pm to keep an eye on it because I knew the water was coming up quick, owner Phil Tracy said. 'It was raining hard and might come up quick, and sure enough by 11.30pm it started creeping into the park, and then by 12am, it was in the park pretty bad. 'We went around, knocked on everyone's doors and just let them know what was happening and try to get everyone to start moving and at least get themselves and their vehicle out.' Down the road, FOX 2 reports, first responders had to use boats to access the free people stuck in their homes but the water was rushing so fast that the first boat that was deployed had to return to drier land to get a bigger motor. ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: Lynn Hartke looked over his possessions following the record-breaking flooding last week ST LOUIS, MISSOURI: The St Louis Fire Department also rescued people from 18 homes in the same general area after floodwaters entered the homes EASTERN KENTUCKY: In Kentucky, flooding last Thursday left 37 people dead after it overflowed creeks and rivers EASTERN KENTUCKY: Search and rescue efforts are still ongoing in the state as cellphone service remains down EASTERN KENTUCKY: Rescuers carried a woman to a US Army National Guard Blackhawk helicopter during the rescue efforts In Kentucky, meanwhile, flooding last Thursday left 37 people dead after it overflowed creeks and rivers. Bridges in the Appalachian region collapsed, isolating communities as homes were torn from their foundation as mudslides poured into the valleys. Some areas in eastern Kentucky reported receiving more than eight inches (20cm) of rain within 24 hours. The water level of the North Fork of the Kentucky River at Whitesburg rose to a staggering 20 feet (6.09m) within hours, well above its previous record of 14.7 feet (4.4m). On Monday, Gov. Andy Beshear tweeted that the death toll 'has risen to 37' after they remained unaccounted for for five days, and on Sunday the Federal Emergency Management Authority announced that another 37 people were still missing. Beshear has since predicted bodies will continue to be found 'for weeks,' and suggested many of those who are still unaccounted for may be located when cellphone service resumes. 'This is one of the most devastating, deadly floods that we have seen in our history... And at a time that we're trying to dig out, it's raining,' he told NBC's Meet the Press. 'We're going to work to go door to door, work to find, again, as many people as we can. We're even going to work through the rain. But the weather is complicating it.' He added: 'We're going to be finding bodies for weeks, many of them swept hundreds of yards, maybe a quarter mile-plus from where they were lost.' But some areas in the mountainous region are still inaccessible following the flooding in the state's east that turned roads into rivers, washed out bridges and swept away houses in a region that was already suffering from grinding poverty, driven by the decline of the coal industry that was the heart of its economy, taking everything from people who could least afford it. 'It wiped out areas where people didn't have that much to begin with,' Beshear said. President Joe Biden has issued a disaster declaration for the Kentucky flooding, allowing federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts. EASTERN KENTUCKY: A man is seen being rescued from flooding by the crew of the US Army National Guard EASTERN KENTUCKY: One woman was placed on a stretcher upon exiting a helicopter following her rescue And in Illinois, as officials are still trying to clean up from the storm that slammed East St Louis last week, southern areas were once again soaked Monday night into Tuesday. Some areas received eight to 12 inches of rain in less than 12 hours, according to the Washington Post and the area south of Newton recorded 14 inches. Even after the storm seemed to have dissipated, it reappeared around sunrise on Tuesday morning, drifting back over the hardest hit areas. It then continued to rain through midday with flash flood warnings extending into the afternoon, dropping at least two inches of rain per hour on the state. During that time, the National Weather Service office in Lincoln received about 20 flash flooding reports in roads and intersections. It also caused a secondary dam in Washington County to overflow as minor flooding was reported at several rivers. Nearly 30,000 customers were without power on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Gov. JB Pritzker declared a disaster proclamation, but admitted he does not know if the flooding caused enough damage for Biden to issue a federal disaster proclamation for the area, even though East St Louis Mayor Robert Eastern III has asked for federal assistance. He said that the ongoing flooding has caused an estimated $10 million in damages and economic impact, according to the Belleville News-Democrat, and asked his staff to find out whether homes in the low lying areas by the Harding Ditch could be purchased by the federal government. Eastern explained that the ditch was so full during last week's storm that the pump stations automatically shut off. He also said that the ditch needs to be dredged, but has been told by the federal government that it did not have the funds for that. EASTERN KENTUCKY: Some areas in eastern Kentucky reported receiving more than eight inches of rain within 24 hours EASTERN KENTUCKY: The water level of the North Fork of the Kentucky River at Whitesburg rose to a staggering 20 feet within hours, well above its previous record of 14.7 feet EASTERN KENTUCKY: Bridges in the Appalachian region collapsed, isolating communities as homes were torn from their foundation as mudslides poured into the valleys But experts say the situation may only become more dire in the coming years as the Earth's average temperature continues to rise. Experts say that the ever increasing concentrations of heat trapping gases, mainly from the combustion of fossil fuels, have caused the average temperature to increase by 1.1 degrees Celsius, or two degrees Fahrenheit, every year since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And with each degree Celsius the temperature increases, the air can hold 7 percent more moisture, leading to more severe storms. Making matters worse, flooding associated with sea level rise is already accelerating, according to an annual report released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 'Sea level rise impacts are happening now, and are growing rapidly,' William Sweet explains in the report, noting that the rising sea level could exacerbate the flooding from storms, which push more ocean water onto land. The saltwater could also fill underground drainage pipes, which means rainwater could back up and collect in the streets. By 2050, the report estimates, high tides could send water into neighborhoods dozens of days each year. Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have each testified in the New York AG's probe of the Trump Organization, following a court fight and a delay for their late mother Ivana's funeral. The president's eldest son, who helps run the Trump Organization along with his brother Eric, testified last week, NBC News reported. Ivana Trump, whose testimony has been a feature of the House Jan. 6th hearings, appeared Wednesday, sources told the network. Eric Trump previously testified, but according to state AG Letitia James' Office invoked his 5th Amendment rights more than 500 times. Donald Trump Jr. testified in the New York AG's probe of Trump Organization finances last week A New York appeals court in May ruled that Trump and his adult children must testify in James' probe of the Trump Organization's financial dealings. Trump's legal team had sought to block a subpoena in the matter. James is investigating whether the Trump Organization inflated real estate prices when seeking financing, but used lower estimates when providing information to tax authorities. Her office has accused the company of providing misleading financial statements over a decade. New York authorities obtained Trump tax information after a lengthy court fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. An appeals court in New York also ruled that former President Donald Trump, here with Republican Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, must testify Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump are seen at the funeral of Ivana Trump on July 20, 2022 in New York City. Ivanka's testimony was delayed by the event New York attorney general Letitia James agreed to delay the deposition of Donald Trump and his children following the passing of their mother Ivana Trump Donald Trump, Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump had been set to testify in James' civil investigation last month. Above they are pictured at the ground breaking ceremony for the Trump International Hotel in Washington in 2014 Trump has called the civil probe a witch hunt. The court offered to delay scheduled proceedings last month that were interrupted by the sudden death of Trump's former wife Ivana Trump, who is Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka's mother. 'In light of the passing of Ivana Trump yesterday, we received a request from counsel for Donald Trump and his children to adjourn all three depositions, which we have agreed to,' James' communications director Delany Kempner said when announcing the delay. 'This is a temporary delay and the depositions will be rescheduled as soon as possible. There is no other information about dates or otherwise to provide at this time.' The mother of a black girl snubbed by a Chuck E. Cheese mascot said she is preparing to sue the franchise, a week after another family opened a $25million lawsuit against Sesame Place for a similar incident of alleged discrimination. Naney D. Muhammad told TMZ she was unimpressed by an apology she was given by Chuck E. Cheese corporate and that she planned to litigate to find some resolution. 'My next step after they released the unapologetic statement is, yes, I do plan to take legal action,' she said in an interview. Muhammad tweeted footage over the weekend which appeared to show her two-year-old daughter being ignored by Chuck E. Cheese himself at a chain in Wayne, New Jersey. In it, Cheese could be seen handing out a hearty helping of high fives to a stage full of white children, before seemingly completely ignoring the ebullient and jubilant black two-year-old at his feet. 'My 2-year-old was racially discriminated against,' Muhammed wrote with the video, 'As you can see, he gives all of the yt kids hi-5s and PURPOSELY ignored my black baby.' It comes after an incident where two other black girls were apparently snubbed by a character at a Sesame Street theme park outside Philadelphia, prompting a deluge of people to share what they claim is a pattern of racism harbored by mascot employees across the country. But many have questioned whether the incidents could instead be chalked up to the fact that staff members are often wearing unwieldy costumes with low visibility - therefore making them unable to see every child reaching out for their attention. A photo Nancy Muhammed said Chuck E. Cheese management 'insisted' her daughter take after she complained about the mascot's behavior Muhammed told TMZ the incident with her daughter was just another case of what she characterized as an increasingly evident pattern of behavior, and that a lawsuit might bring about some form of justice. 'I'm hoping my attorney will at least be able to give us some justice, because at this point it seems like it's becoming a pattern,' She said, 'With little black kids getting ignored at amusement parks and indoor playgrounds where they're supposed to feel like a child, feel like, you know, loved and appreciated.' 'This is becoming a pattern so we definitely need to get some justice done.' Her plans to litigate come after Chuck E. Cheese released what Muhammed felt was a lackluster apology statement. 'Chuck E. Cheese is saddened when any family or child has a less than perfect experience,' Chuck E. Cheese HQ said, 'We want to thank the family who brought this to our attention... and for giving the onsite manager an opportunity to apologize and address their concerns in person'. That apology, Muhammed said, was dismissive. 'Gave the onsite management the opportunity to apologize when she said, 'I'm sorry you feel that way,'' Muhammed told ABC 7, 'Was that the apology?' She said management instead 'insisted' her daughter take a picture with the mascot. Rather than the frantic force of energy her daughter was in the video of the snub, that photo shows her despondent and detached, while Cheese, unblinking, flashes a furry thumbs up. 'Her demeanor changed from she was excited, happy, jumping, high five - to when it was time to take a picture, just stood right beside him,' Muhammed said, 'I hugged her, told her that she would never have to beg for love, because she is loved by many.' Nancy Muhammed and her daughter, now two-years-old. Muhammed said she is suing Chuck. E. Cheese after a mascot snubbed her daughter at a New Jersey location As Cheese approaches, ecstasy ensues. But the mouse leaves the two-year-old hanging and walks off The latest lawsuit announcement comes after the family of the two girls who were seemingly snubbed by a character at a Sesame Place in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, revealed they were suing the park for $25million. 'Just looking at her face, it makes me want to cry every time I see it,' the girls' father Quinton Burns said during a press conference announcing the suit. In that video, the two black girls from New York were passed over by the character Rosita, who had just moved on from interacting with a number of white children. Sesame Place apologized in a statement for that incident and explained that the actor inside the costume simply couldn't see the girls due to the actor's limited field of vison. During their press conference, one of the family's attorneys called for transparency from SeaWorld - which owns Sesame Place - and for the company to compensate the Burns family. 'She was ignored amongst a sea of other young white children who were able to interact, give hugs, high fives,' said attorney Malcolm Ruff. 'Kennedi was forced to experience racism at the age of 5. This is unacceptable and we will not stand by and let this continue.' The lawsuit comes in the wake of a video, shared widely on social media, showing two other black girls from New York apparently being snubbed by a costumed employee during a parade at the park in Langhorne, outside Philadelphia A few years ago, a similar incident happened at a New Orleans Chuck E. Cheese, when Damon Payne said one of the chain's mascots 'ignored' his daughter and hugged a number of white kids instead. Payne recorded video of her meeting the mouse, which shows her looking expectantly at Cheese with her arms outstretched. He uploaded a short clip of the video to his Instagram page with the caption, 'MY KIDS WILL NEVER STEP FOOT BACK IN Chuck E Cheeses. #racismdoesn'tcarewhat age.' When Payne reported the incident and showed the footage the location's staff, they reportedly offered him 50 free tickets to redeem at the store's shop. The Air Force has filed criminal charges against an airman in connection with an April explosion that injured U.S. troops at a base in eastern Syria. Tech. Sgt. David Dezwaan Jr., an explosive ordnance disposal specialist, is facing several charges including dereliction of duty, destroying military property, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault in the blast that injured four service members. He has been held in confinement by the Air Force, in the U.S., since June. Officials have provided no insight into any motivation for the attack. Tech. Sgt. David Dezwaan Jr., an explosive ordnance disposal specialist, is pictured during a training exercise in May 2016 in California. He has been held in custody since June and will go on trial in August The U.S. military initially reported that the injuries from the April 7 attack on the Green Village base, in Deir ez Zor province, were caused by artillery or another form of indirect fire. But the Pentagon later said the April 7 attack was carried out by the 'deliberate placement of explosive charges' by one or more individuals at an ammunition holding area and shower facility on the base. The Air Force, in a statement on Thursday, said a preliminary hearing date has been set for August 23 at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Dezwaan also was charged with accessing a government computer with an unauthorized purpose and obtaining classified information. The Air Force said Dezwaan joined the military in October 2007. He was assigned to the 775th Civil Engineer Squadron at Hill. Dezwaan (left) is seen in a May 2016 training scene in California Pictured: US soldiers patrol the town of al-Qahtaniyah in Syria's northeastern Hasakeh province near the Turkish border in March. Around 900 US troops remain in Syria, and in April their base in the east came under attack, from what is now known to be an insider The Air Force has filed criminal charges against an airman in connection with the April explosion Security footage shows two figures in the middle of the night roaming the base, CNN said. It was unclear whether the two incidents were different sightings of the same person, or whether more than one person was involved. Officials are also investigating whether lookouts were on duty. The blasts hit two support buildings and four service members were evaluated for minor injuries and possible traumatic brain injuries. The U.S. has several hundred troops in eastern Syria as part of its effort to counter the Islamic State group. Advertisement There is no more hiding it. After two outings keeping a respectable distance from each other as they strolled around Los Angeles, Malia Obama and her new man are showing they are a real couple. And DailyMail.com can reveal exclusively the identity of the new man in the life of the former First Daughter. The handsome mystery hunk is music producer Dawit Eklund who, just like Malia's dad, has one American and one African parent. And besides resembling a younger Barack Obama, he has the same smoking habit as the 44th president, a vice that Obama has often admitted he found hard to kick. Eklund, who turns 33 next week, is nine years older than Malia who celebrated her 24th birthday on July 4. The look of love. Malia is all smiles as Dawit places his hand on her bare back as they visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Like Malia's father, Dawit has one American parent and one African. His mother Yessi, is from Ethiopia Malia and Dawit made no attempt to hide their feelings for each other on Thursday Malia is working with Donald Glover also known as Childish Gambino. She is a screenwriter on his upcoming Amazon show On Thursday morning the pair paid a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the third time they have been seen together in just nine days. She was wearing baggy green pants and a tight-fitting crop top that showcased her tight tummy. He was in green shorts with a picture of reggae legend Bob Marley and a pink t-shirt The pair have been spotted walking close together twice in a a week. First they were seen picking up a takeout lunch on July 26 and then again they went for a casual stroll together on August 2. DailyMail.com was also the first to reveal the identity of Malia's first serious beau, Rory Farquharson. The closeness of Malia and Dawit has led to speculation that her long-time romance with her British beau may be over. Eklund is the son of retired State Department officer Jon Eklund, 72, who worked at several US embassies in Africa and his Ethiopian wife Yeshi, 66. Dawit is co-founder of Washington, D.C.-based record label 1432 R, which specializes in Ethiopian music. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is also a registered Democrat. A Washington Post article about the label in 2016 said: 'Their music seamlessly brings together house music grooves, the stutter of U.K. garage, an uneasy electronic ambience, and perhaps most notably Ethiopian folk music.' First sighting: The pair kept a respectful distance while walking around Los Angeles on July 26 Getting closer. Exactly one week later they were that little bit closer Joined at the hip! There's no attempt to hide the relationship now as the lovebirds went on their third outing in the City o Angels on Thursday morning History. Malia's long-time British beau Rory Farquharson, who she met when they both studied at Harvard, is now out of the picture Dawit told the paper: Ethiopian music is super distinct. There are only four or five musical scales that they play in; each has its own meaning and attitude and mood.' A separate Post piece called him 'one of Washington's most exciting dance music producers,' adding: 'Its not because hes splicing styles from around the globe, its because he spent a lot of his young life learning how to communicate with different kinds of people.' He was educated at the International Community School in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, before going to George Washington University where he studied International Development in Africa. Dawit who also goes by David, the Anglicized version of his name is one of four children. His father Jon was heavily involved in helping the refugee crisis caused by the war in Sudan in the early 2000s, when hundreds of thousands fled to Ethiopia to escape the fighting. Eklund is the son of retired State Department officer Jon Eklund, 72, who worked at several US embassies in Africa and his Ethiopian wife Yeshi, 66. He was educated at the International Community School in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, before going to George Washington University where he studied International Development in Africa Dawit is co-founder of Washington, D.C.-based record label 1432 R, which specializes in Ethiopian music. His mother Yeshi comes from a successful family of business people in Ethiopia. His sister Sara Eklund was featured in a 2019 Vogue article for introducing menstrual cups to Ethiopia Since his retirement, John and Yeshi have settled in Abidjan, the capital of the West African nation of Cote d'Ivoire, although they also have a house in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Chantilly, Virginia. Malia moved to Los Angeles last year, after graduating from Harvard, to pursue a career as a screenwriter. She is currently working as a screenwriter on Donald Glover's upcoming Amazon show. In March, Donald revealed that he had given the 24-year-old her first job as a writer on his new series, which is reportedly about 'a Beyonce-type character,' with the actor calling her 'amazingly talented' and 'really focused.' 'Shes just like, an amazingly talented person,' Donald, 38, who is also known by his stage name Childish Gambino, told Vanity Fair at the time. 'Shes really focused, and shes working really hard.' Politically correct: Dawit is a registered Democrat, which will no doubt go down well with Malia's parents Malia's new love is co-founder of Washington, D.C.-based record label 1432 R, which specializes in Ethiopian music They make each other laugh too. Malia and Dawit are the picture of happiness during their trip to LACMA Malia's younger sister Sasha has also relocated to the west coast where she is studying at USC He did not share how Malia landed the job after she graduated from college but he added that he believed she has a promising future in the industry. While Malia who previously interned on Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls in 2015 and at The Weinstein Company in 2017 is working as a screenwriter, her younger sister, Sasha Obama, 21, is also building her own life in Los Angeles. The 21-year-old is studying at the University of Southern California after transferring from the University of Michigan. DailyMail.com exclusively revealed a few months ago that she was in a relationship with Clifton Powell Jr., 24, who is the son of Ray actor Clifton Powell. Clifton Jr. and Sasha are understood to have met after she relocated to the West Coast, and he is already close with the family, as he has been seen hanging out with Malia a few times in recent months. In April, Sasha and Malia's mother, former First Lady Michelle Obama, opened up about how both of her daughters are all grown up during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Ellen, 64, reminded Michelle, 58, of how Sasha and Malia had first visited the show when they were little girls who wanted to see the Jonas Brothers. But over a decade later, they've graduated from boybands to boyfriends. 'Now they're bringing grown men home,' Michelle said. 'Now they have boyfriends and real lives and all that stuff. They have grown up right before our very eyes and they are doing well.' While the mom-of-two gushed about the 'amazing young women' her daughters have become - 'Women, I know! Scary,' she said - and divulged that they were both now dating, she was much more discreet about the details of their love lives and didn't share any further details. FBI Director Christopher Wray promised whistleblowers would be protected under his watch during a Senate hearing on Thursday. It comes after Republican lawmakers claimed to have heard from current and former bureau officials and Justice Department employees who accused the FBI of attempting to discredit probes into Hunter Biden in 2020. Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley, then its chairman, along with then-Senate Oversight Committee Chair Ron Johnson had launched an investigation into President Joe Biden's son after a leaked hard drive from Hunter Biden's laptop appeared to show signs of leveraging his father's position to further foreign business dealings. Grassley wrote a letter to the FBI last month claiming to have heard 'highly credible' allegations from within the DOJ that the bureau coordinated to dismiss 'derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden' as disinformation. Without going into specifics on the president's son's case, Grassley pressed Wray on Thursday on the need to shield whistleblowers from retaliatory measures. 'I think retaliatory conduct against whistleblowers is unacceptable. They serve a very, very important role in our system,' Wray said. The Trump-appointed FBI chief did not answer directly when Grassley asked whether he'd commit to not seeking the whistleblowers' identities. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday 'We will be scrupulous in our adherence to the rules related to whistleblowers,' Wray said instead. 'Obviously, if there are allegations of misconduct by FBI employees, we want to make sure that- that we get that information, so that we can use the tools that we have to go after that conduct.' He repeated, 'But certainly I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, any prospect of retaliation against whistleblowers.' Again keeping his question vague, Grassley asked Wray if evidence of foreign actors making 'improper or unlawful financial payments' to US elected officials or 'politically exposed persons' would be a 'national security concern' for the FBI. 'I think the kind of conduct you're describing is typically something that we would look at very closely,' Wray said. 'It starts to shade into a blend of what we call malign foreign influence, with potentially public corruption. And it's something that we take seriously.' Wray was grilled on FBI whistleblower protections by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, the committee's ranking Republican Hunter Biden's laptop was allegedly discredited within the DOJ as disinformation around the same time as it was being ignored by most major media outlets. Intelligence experts dismissed the hard drive as 'Russian disinformation' at the time. It landed in the mainstream media's news cycle when its contents were authenticated by the Washington Post earlier this year. Also this year, it was revealed that Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings are at the heart of a federal tax investigation - though there have been no public updates or reporting on that case since June. The separate 2020 probe by Grassley and Johnson found that Hunter Biden had 'cashed in' on his family name when his father was vice president and even set off some alarm bells within the State Department over the 52-year-old recovering drug addict's lucrative work on the board of an energy company in Ukraine. However, the matter found no wrongdoing on the part of now-President Biden himself. Both Grassley and Johnson have stated they will look deeper into the matter if Republicans retake the Congressional majority in November. It comes after Grassley wrote a letter to several Defense Department agencies claiming to have 'credible' whistleblower testimony that the FBI sought to dismiss damaging information on Hunter Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election House GOP leaders have also promised to open inquiries into Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and China if they win enough seats in the midterms. Johnson said he has 'no faith' in Wray's leadership on matters relating to Hunter Biden during an interview on Fox News this past Sunday. 'I'm not shocked, but it's outrageous that the FBI would be tipping the scales of justice the way they're doing,' he said reacting to the whistleblower allegations. 'I have no faith in Christopher Wray of conducting this investigation, but it's important that the American public understand the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December of 2019. They certainly saw the evidence of what I think is that criminal activity on that laptop.' Johnson accused the FBI of having 'done nothing' with the supposed evidence. 'Here we are in the end of July, early August 2022. What have they done with it?' the senator posed. 'No, you can't you can't trust this Department of Justice, the FBI, to get to the bottom of this.' Police have changed their description of the crash that killed Indiana Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, saying Thursday that it was the SUV in which she was a passenger that crossed a state highways centerline and caused the head-on collision. Walorski and two members of her congressional staff died in the Wednesday afternoon crash in northern Indiana, along with the woman driving the other vehicle, the Elkhart County Sheriffs Office said. The department's initial account was that the car driven by Edith Schmucker, 56, Nappanee, Indiana, crossed into the SUVs path, but the office released a statement Thursday saying investigators had talked with witnesses and viewed video evidence that their preliminary determination was wrong. Investigators determined that the SUV driven by Zachery Potts, 27, of Mishawaka, Indiana, crossed the centerline for unknown reasons in a rural area near the town of Wakarusa. Potts was Walorskis district director and the Republican chairman for northern Indianas St. Joseph County. Also killed was Emma Thomson, 28, of Washington, D.C., who was Walorskis communications director. Walorski, 58, was first elected to represent northern Indianas 2nd Congressional District in 2012 and was seeking reelection this year to a sixth term in the solidly Republican district. Walorski was a reliable Republican vote in Congress, including against accepting the Arizona and Pennsylvania electoral votes for President Joe Biden following the Capitol insurrection. Police have changed their description of the crash that killed Indiana Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, saying Thursday that it was the SUV in which she was a passenger that crossed a state highways centerline and caused the head-on collision Investigators determined that the SUV driven by Zachery Potts, 27, (left) crossed the centerline for unknown reasons in a rural area near the town of Wakarusa. Walorski communications director Emma Thomson (right) was also killed Under Indiana law, it will be up to local Republican officials to pick a candidate to replace Walorski on the election ballot. Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb has the authority to schedule a special election to fill the remainder of Walorskis current term, which ends this year. The governors office and the state Republican Party both said Thursday it was too soon to say when those decisions would be made, as tributes to Walorskis public service continued. The U.S. Senate chaplain included her, Thomson and Potts in the chambers opening prayer, and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell praised all three in his opening remarks. He acknowledged 'how great a hole Jackie and her team are leaving behind' at the Capitol. In Indianapolis, members of the Indiana House, where Walorski served for six years before running for Congress, bowed their heads Thursday while Republican Rep. Timothy Wesco said a prayer for Walorski. Wesco, who took over Walorskis legislative district, called Walorski a 'mentor' who was 'passionate in everything that she did.' 'Her faith was central to her as a person, and her faith is what gives us hope today,' Wesco said. 'None of us are guaranteed tomorrow.' Indianas last special election for a congressional seat was in 2010, when Republican Rep. Mark Souder resigned soon after winning the May primary. Then-Gov. Mitch Daniels decided to hold the special election at the same time as the November general election for the full two-year term, citing the potential cost of a separate election and convenience for voters. Indiana Republican U.S. Sen. Todd Young described Walorski as incredibly smart with a great sense of humor. 'She wore her values and her conviction on that on her sleeve,' Young said. 'Unlike so many people in public life, she wasnt really guarded about who she was and why she believed different things.' Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer, who was one of the last people to speak with the lawmaker, claims she was in town to learn more about recent successes in the medical device industry. Cars are pictured being towed away from the crash site Walorski and her staffers were in Warsaw, Indiana earlier Wednesday visiting Medartis Headquarters. A car is being towed away from the scene after the crash Walorski and her staffers' southbound vehicle collided with a northbound vehicle that veered into their lane Indiana House lawmakers bow their heads while Republican Rep. Timothy Wesco (left) honors GOP U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, The final days of 12-year-old Archie Battersbee are following a grim pattern we have seen many times before. Remember Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans? Chronically sick children whose parents refused to accept their babies would die, who took to social media conducting impassioned campaigns accusing the NHS of not trying hard enough. These parents gave daily press conferences and online updates, taking their battle through the courts in a futile attempt to gain control of their childrens lives. The strength of their love and commitment is heart -breaking. Archies distraught parents have fought so hard to try to remove their brain-damaged son from the London hospital bed where he is being kept alive on a ventilator. On social media their supporters claim that more should be done. That the NHS is failing a sick child, adding that foreign doctors might be able to bring about a change in Archies condition if he was taken abroad. Underlying everything is a dispute about how and when a sick childs life should end. Poor Archie lies at the centre of it all, unconscious. This phoney war around the final days of a sick child involves unscrupulous doctors seeking publicity for unproven cures and politicians like Donald Trump (who blabbed a vague offer of help for Charlie Gard) using a sick child for political gain. The Catholic Church can usually be relied for an opinion - the Pope said he was praying for Charlie - along with right wing pro-life and anti-abortion groups. Not to mention opportunistic countries like Turkey and Japan, anxious to promote their latest medical facilities with a high profile case they might fund for the coverage. In the midst of all this, who benefits? The legal profession will be claiming far fees, fighting for distraught parents who refuse to accept that their child will die because there is no other option. Now, a hospital ward has stopped being a place of healing and become a battleground. Doctors, nurses, and support staff find themselves pitted against angry and combative parents who believe they know best, who will use social media to fan support for their cause, and who will go to every court in the land- and eventually Europe- to try and take over the fate of their child. Archies distraught parents have fought so hard to try to remove their brain-damaged son from the London hospital bed where he is being kept alive on a vent. Pictured: Archie Battersbee In this situation, who is the winner? Wheres the dignity in death when grieving parents call press conferences outside hospitals and claim their child is not receiving proper care, that he would be better treated elsewhere, even taken thousands of miles to Japan or Turkey? In disputes like these, judges are being asked to rule on what is the best outcome for a terminally ill child, and if that ruling doesnt align with what parents are seeking, the process will be repeated all over again at vast expense until every option has been exhausted. The European Court of Human Rights have said they will not overrule the original High Court decision- and so Archies life will end shortly after his ventilator is turned off. That could be as early as today. Archies mother has gone back into to court to ask for her son to be removed from the London hospital where he lies, a beautiful boy who cannot see, hear, or speak, or use any muscles at all- and taken to a hospice where (she says) he will die with dignity. She says that when his ventilator stops, she will give mouth to mouth resuscitation to try and prolong his life. Pictured: File photo of Charlie Gard who died aged 11 months and 24 days in July 2017 Pictured: Alfie Evans who was also at the centre of a legal battle and died in 2018 aged one Heartbreaking, but understandable. Every parent believes they know whats best for their child. And when the medical profession say no more can be done to keep that child alive, a parents first reaction is of disbelief, followed by rage and sorrow in equal measures. They are ready to do anything. Archie was found unconscious at home on April 7 his mum thinks he was attempting a TikTok blackout stunt that went horribly wrong- and has never regained consciousness. His parents think he shows signs of life and so there is grounds for hope. But any slight movement is involuntary, and doesnt signify any improvement at all. I know about that because my only nephew died after a seizure- he was on life support for weeks but never regained consciousness before he died. Sadly, hands and eyes moving are no sign of meaningful life. The hospital has made it clear that Archie suffered irreversible brain damage at the time of the accident, and since then has been artificially kept alive. In the doctors eyes it is kinder to withdraw the life support and let him die with dignity. According to Archies loving parents, he had an infectious enthusiasm for life. Hard though it is, they must accept that it is more loving to let their sons life end gracefully and quietly. To allow the doctors and the staff at his hospital to devote their precious time and resources to other sick children who need their skills just as urgently. Twenty years ago, cases like these rarely made the news, because social media played no part in increasing our awareness. The Charlie Gard case saw the little boys parents post updates on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook and twitter, tagging followers #Charliesarmy. Hollie Dance, mother of 12-year-old Archie Battersbee, with an unidentified man, speaks to the media outside the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel, east London, after the European Court of Human Rights refused an application to postpone the withdrawal of his life support Charlie had been born with MMDS, an extremely rare genetic disorder which leads to progressive brain damage and muscle failure- there is no treatment and most babies diagnosed with the condition die soon after birth. A neurologist in New York was working on an experimental treatment, but did not come at the UK -even thought the NHS has said it would pay for the treatment, if it was thought it offered any hope of improvement. As Charlie deteriorated, his parents raised 1.3 million to try and take him to New York for treatment. The courts stopped the baby being taken out of Great Ormond Street Hospital. Sadly, Charlie experienced a series of seizures and by the time the expert finally arrived from the USA the following July, it was decided that there was no point in operating as the outcome would not undo the severe brain damage that had resulted. Faced with the prospect of no further treatment for their terminally ill son, Charlies parents posted increasingly angry messages attacking doctors and staff at GOSH. In the end, Charlie died in a hospice on July 28th, 2017. Unless the medical profession, the government and the legal profession all work together, we will see more cases like Charlie, Alfie and Archie. Before relations between doctors and parents deteriorate to the point where both sides end up in court, there should be a form of arbitration, a neutral mediator who can win the trust of both sides. Death is not what anyone wants in this situation. But if a childs death is unavoidable, let it be the best it can be. Climbers wishing to conquer Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Europe, will have to pay 12,640 (15,000) before they start in case they need rescuing or die. The deposit will apply to adventurers who attempt to reach the 15,773ft summit via a popular path in France, after the local mayor blasted 'pseudo-mountaineers' who play 'Russian roulette' with their lives. Jean-Marc Peillex, the mayor of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, from where climbers can make it to the top along the Gouter Route, introduced the measure after dozens of people continued to defy warnings. The considerable deposit is split up in two sections, 10,000 covers the cost of a mountain rescue and 5,000 covers the cost of a funeral. Mountaineers who wish to ascend Mont Blanc (pictured) will have to pay a 12,640 euro (15,000) deposit if they climb along the Gouter Route The mayor of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, who introduced the fee, said the money would cover the cost of a rescue and funeral (pictured: climber on Mont Blanc) Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe at 15,773ft and is situated along the border between France and Italy The route is accessible to anyone of any skill level and officials have said the number of inexperienced climbers in increasing. Heavy rockfall in mid July caused the local administration to strongly advise people avoid climbing and local guides suspended their operations. A recent heatwave has made conditions on the mountain more dangerous and exposed giant cracks in the mountain and triggered the rockfalls. 'Sometimes silly people only respond to silly ideas,' Mr Peillex told The Telegraph in a phone interview on Thursday. 'They have the same approach of someone who wants to commit suicide. So I say, let's do things properly and ask them to pay us the costs that this will entail.' In a statement posted on Twitter, Peillex said the idea for the deposit came after five Romanian visitors attempted the ascent 'wearing shorts, trainers and straw hats' and had to be turned back by mountain police. 'People want to climb with death in their backpacks,' he added. 'So let's anticipate the cost of having to rescue them, and for their burial, because it's unacceptable that French taxpayers should foot the bill.' A mayor on the Italian side of the mountain called the decision 'surreal' and said they would not be charging a deposit Climbers will still be able to attempt to reach the peak without having to save up more than 10,000 if they decide to start on the Italian side of the mountain. Roberto Rota, mayor of Courmayeur which sits at the foot of Mont Blanc on the Italian side of the border, called the decision 'surreal' and stated the Italian side 'will not limit the ascent of hikers.' 'The mountain is not a property. As administrators, we limit ourselves to indicating when the paths are not in the best condition, but asking for a deposit to climb to the top is really surreal. You can decide to close a path or a passage if there is an actual risk,' Rota told Italian daily, Corriere Della Sera. Between 1990 and 2017, 102 people died between two mountain huts on Mont Blanc, the Tete Rousse Hut and the Gouter Hut, a stretch that takes most people about three hours to hike. The biggest causes of death were falls, being hit by a falling rock, and 'stranding' getting lost or caught in bad weather In just the past two years 20 hikers have died on the mountain and around 50 have been rescued from the range. Concern over the safety of mountain activities has increased after 11 people were killed when a huge mass of ice broke away from a glacier on the north side of the Marmolada, the highest peak in the Italian Dolomites, in early July. An illegal immigrant has been charged with kidnapping a 12-year-old girl who alerted cops to the decomposing bodies of his girlfriend and her son, after she chewed through her restraints. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, drugged the girl with alcohol and has been charged with three counts of capital murder after police in Dadeville, Alabama, made the gruesome discovery. He has also been charged with two counts of abuse of a corpse and one count of first-degree kidnapping according to Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett. Pascual-Reyes reportedly smothered his girlfriend Sandra Vazquez Ceja, 34, and kicked and punched her son, 14, to death after kidnapping the girl. He was reportedly deported from the United States previously, and it is not clear when he is believed to have re-entered the country. Sheriff Abbett confirmed that Pascual-Reyes is considered a re-entry non-immigrant unlawful presence foreign national. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, has been charged with murdering his girlfriend Sandra Vazquez Ceja and one count of first degree kidnapping. Pascual-Reyes, pictured with his girlfriend, has been charged with abuse of a corpse after police found two bodies in his home He has been charged with three counts of capital murder after police were led to his mobile home by the girl, who managed to escape by chewing her restraints off Officers were led to the mobile home of Pascual-Reyes, where they discovered the bodies of Ceja and her son,who has not been named. The alarm was raised after a driver spotted the girl wandering on 3547 County Road 34 at 8.30am on Monday. She was reportedly assaulted, drugged with alcohol, and tied to a bedpost during her week-long captivity and only managed to escape by chewing through her restraints, damaging her braces. Authorities did not indicate whether or not the pair knew each other or how she was taken. Abbett said that the girl was not considered a missing person at the time the passerby found her, and that she escaped while Pascual-Reyes was at work on a construction site in Auburn. Reyes was arrested by State Marshalls and the Auburn Police Department after state, local, and federal investigators worked to identify him and he was taken to the Tallapoosa County Jail. Officers were led to the mobile home of Pascual-Reyes, where they discovered the bodies of Ceja and her son, who has not been named. Ceja had reportedly been on parole pending an asylum claim according to Fox News Digital. A family friend paid tribute to the tragic pair, saying; I hope God received them in his holy glory. My comrade, my confidante, my other flip flop. Fly high my beautiful angels. Sheriff Abbett praising the tortured girl as a hero, saying she was doing as 'well as expected in the circumstances' The girl was reportedly bound to a bedpost and drugged with alcohol during her week-long captivity. She managed to escape by chewing through her restraining, damaging her braces The little girl was found walking on the same road Reyes' mobile home was located and where the bodies were found The girl, who was not identified by police, was found walking down County Road 34 and was picked up by a motorist, who immediately called 911. After police arrested Reyes, they found two decomposing bodies in his home According to court documents, investigators believe that Pascual-Reyes killed Ceja by smothering her with a pillow, before murdering her son by hitting and kicking him. Both bodies were reportedly cut into small pieces at the joints to hide evidence, with Ceja using the address where the bodies were found on court records for a speeding ticket in April. Sherriff Abbett said that the girl is doing well and has been placed in the custody of the state of Alabama through its Department of Human Resources. It is thought that the girl was abducted around July 24, and was kept captive for ten days. Court documents also appear to show that Ceja and the boy were killed around the same time as the abduction. He added: Were praying for her and making sure shes going to be safe and provide everything that she may need. There were other residents in the home when police arrived at the scene on Tuesday, but Abbett did not say whether or not they would be charged too. Reyes is now awaiting a bond hearing and Homeland Security is helping the local department with the investigation. Capital Murder is a Class A felony, carrying with it a potential ten years to life sentence or even a possible penalty of death. Ukraine's military intelligence chief has revived a theory that Vladimir Putin is using body doubles and has pointed at his changing ears over the years as proof. The 69-year-old Russian president's health has been the topic of fierce discussion among commentators. His close ally Nikolai Patrushev is said to have stood in for the president during his medical appointments. This week, Ukraine's Major General Kyrylo Budanov appeared on TV to claim to viewers that Putin's height and ears have changed in recent appearances, The Sun reports. He said: 'The picture, let's say, of the ears, is different... And it's like a fingerprint, each person's ear picture is unique. It cannot be repeated.' Budanov further alleged that Putin body doubles 'have different habits, different mannerisms, different gaits, sometimes even different heights if you looked closely'. Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) pictured with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2006 Same person? Putin is pictured delivering a speech in the Kremlin on April 11 2018, but Ukraine's intelligence chief says the ear is different to Putin's past appearances Russian President Vladimir Putin is pictured at the Winter Olympics in 2014 (left) and chairing a metallurgy conference at the Kremlin on August 1 (right) Major-General Kyrylo Budanov (right) raised suspicions over an alleged body double of the Russian premier, whose health has been the subject of intense speculation in recent months Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of Russia's Security Council, has allegedly stood in for the Russian leader during medical appointments Budanov had previously claimed a Vladimir Putin body 'double' may have been used for his arrival at a summit in Tehran last month. While the Russian leader looked awkward as he came down the steps of his presidential plane in Tehran, Ukrainian sources noted that he moved unusually quickly and was more alert than in prior public appearances. The Russian premier looked animated when greeting the waiting party, before removing his jacket and clambering into a heavily armoured limousine. Budanov said he was suspicious of Putin's appearance in a live interview on Ukraine's 1+1 news channel. Ukrainian reports said Budanov suggested that a Putin lookalike could have flown to Tehran to meet with the presidents of Iran and Turkey. 'I will only hint,' he said. 'Please look at the moment of Putin's exit from the plane. Is it Putin at all?' A Vladimir Putin body 'double' may have been used for his arrival at a summit in Tehran, according to the head of Ukrainian military intelligence While the Russian leader looked awkward as he came down the steps of his presidential plane in Tehran, Ukrainian sources noted he moved unusually quickly and was more alert than in prior public appearances The Russian leader's visit to Tehran where he met Iran's leadership, plus Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, attracted worldwide attention. It is only the second time Putin has been abroad since launching his brutal invasion of Ukraine five months ago. In one video, Erdogan kept Putin waiting, with the Russian ruler appearing ill at ease as he shuffled his feet and made strange facial movements. But earlier Ukraine did not suggest this was a Putin double. At the time, official Anton Gerashchenko posted on Telegram: 'Erdogan made Putin wait during the meeting in Tehran. 'The whole spectrum of emotions of the humiliated and insulted Fuhrer is on his face. 'The bunker is indeed the best place to stay with such a face.' A thug who strangled his partner and tried to suffocate her with a pillow has become one of the first to be sentenced under a new law designed to punish domestic violence. Tyler Lowe, 28, was jailed for two years under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 after pleading guilty to strangulation, suffocation, assault and damaging his victim's phone. A judge used powers under the act to jail him for the use of non-fatal strangulation or suffocation, which became a specific offence in June, punishable with a jail term of up to five years. Before then abusers who strangled victims could often only be charged with common assault, which has a maximum sentence of six months in prison. Lowe was also issued a restraining order and banned from contacting his victim for 10 years. Bolton Crown Court heard how he had previously been jailed for attacking his partner, who moved towns to get away from him and start a new life. Tyler Lowe (pictured), 28, was jailed for two years under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 after pleading guilty to strangulation, suffocation, assault and damaging his victim's phone David Farley, prosecuting, said Lowe was released from prison on licence with conditions to stay away from her. But just after 10pm on June 28, police were called to her home by concerned neighbours who heard a 'bad argument' and she opened the door to them. Mr Farley said: 'In their view she was visibly shaken and upset. She reluctantly confirmed that it was the defendant who had been at the address.' The woman told officers she had agreed to start seeing Lowe again after he promised things would be different. She suffered bruises and stated that, two days earlier, Lowe had tried to strangle her and had held a pillow over her face. She feared that he would kill her, the court heard. Lowe had run from the address but police found him there again on July 5 and arrested him. The court heard Lowe has multiple previous convictions for violence including affray and criminal damage. In 2019 he was jailed for headbutting and punching his girlfriend in the face. Nicholas Ross, defending, said at the time of the offences, Lowe's mental health treatment was not working properly. Bolton Crown Court (pictured) heard how Lowe had previously been jailed for attacking his partner, who moved towns to get away from him and start a new life. He added: 'Coupled with some drink on the two days in question with the victim, that, unfortunately, sent him over the edge. 'He is devastated for the victim and he understands this sort of conduct is shameful and has no place whatsoever in society. 'He understands he has a lot of work and learning to do.' Sentencing, Judge Tom Gilbart told Lowe: 'This was vulnerable victim - a woman in her own home. 'Holding a pillow over a victims face and strangling her risked the most serious consequences.' Choking a partner became a specific criminal offence under new domestic abuse legislation brought in last year. The proposal was first put forward by campaigners after statistics showed that one in five sex assault victims are strangled by their partner. Choking or throttling was previously only punishable under common assault law, which carries a maximum sentence of six months. Choking a partner became a specific criminal offence under new domestic abuse legislation brought in last year (stock image) Referring to choking, Victims' Commissioner Dame Vera Baird (pictured) previously told The Daily Telegraph: 'It is a very frequently used and very effective way of terrifying someone. It is a very frightening tool of coercive control.' But domestic abuse groups argued perpetrators were rarely prosecuted because defendants commonly claimed choking took place as part of consensual sex and there can be little sign of physical injury. They said that treating choking as common assault undermined its severity and the terror inflicted on its victims. Nearly a third of female murders in the UK were due to strangulation or suffocation in 2018, compared with three per cent of male murders. Referring to choking, Victims' Commissioner Dame Vera Baird previously told The Daily Telegraph: 'It is a very frequently used and very effective way of terrifying someone. It is a very frightening tool of coercive control. 'For the same price as a tiny slap, you let her know you are in control but with only the risk of a tiny mark so police never take notice.' Researcher Dr Catherine White, director of St Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre in Manchester, said last year that a fifth of women who had been raped by their partner said they had been choked. Research in America also found victims of non-fatal strangulation are seven times more likely to be killed in domestic abuse than non-victims. Advertisement She is better known for her financial woes than investment acumen but things appear to have taken a surprising turn for the Duchess of York. Sarah Ferguson has purchased a pair of flats costing up to 7million in the heart of Mayfair. The pretty mews house which contains the properties is said to be a 'long-term investment' for her daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. It is not known how much she paid the owner the Duke of Westminster one of Britain's wealthiest men and a close friend to the royals for the house The property, part of the duke's Grosvenor estate, had been split into two separate luxury apartments and put on the market separately earlier this year for a combined total of 6.75million. The duchess is converting the two flats, which boast a bijou terrace, bar, two reception rooms and a parking garage, into one home. But sources say she has no plans to leave the grace and favour 30-room Windsor mansion she shares with disgraced ex-husband Prince Andrew and instead plans to rent out the new property. Sarah Ferguson (pictured with ex-husband Prince Andrew in 2019), 62, is said to have purchased the home from her friend the Duke of Westminster, 31, who became one of the wealthiest men in the country when he inherited his father's 10billion fortune in 2016 Pictured: The property offers a stunning reception room with a cast-iron fireplace, large window and two floor to ceiling bookcases The second floor compromises of a principal bedroom suite with a walk-in wardrobe, a second bedroom suite as well as a private roof terrace The property's large living room features a neutral decor and horizontal skylight to open up the space. The walls feature panelled mirrors alongside built-in cupboard space The large open plan kitchen features a black marble island and worktops with a sky light and large windows to ensure maximum light The pricey purchase will raise questions over how the duchess, who has spoken of her debts and bankruptcy fears, could afford to splash out. Sources close to the 62-year-old claim her financial status improved after she launched a writing career that secured various book deals. In 2010 she told US television she was 'continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy' and had 'little understanding' of money. She lost more than 3.2million in the collapse of Hartmoor, her US 'lifestyle and wellness' company, and was later caught in a tabloid sting offering access to Prince Andrew for 500,000. In 2011 she accepted 15,000 from Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier who introduced Prince Andrew to Virginia Roberts, now Giuffre, to help her avoid bankruptcy. A source told the Sun: 'This is a beautiful home ... If the girls are going to inherit it at some stage they're extremely lucky. 'But God knows where the money has come from everyone thought they were totally skint.' This year she published a romantic novel, Her Heart For A Compass, and recently signed a 22-book deal to write fiction for children and young adults. A spokesman for Prince Andrew said he had no involvement in the purchasing of the property. He is facing huge legal costs after reaching a settlement of up to 12million over allegations of sexual assault brought by Mrs Giuffre, which he denies. He did not accept any liability when he made the settlement and vehemently denies the claims. The new Mayfair property is a stone's throw from Ghislaine Maxwell's house where he was pictured with his arm around the waist of the then Miss Roberts. The house is nestled on a quiet cobbled street home to an eatery popular with The Beatles in the 1960s and more recently Prince Harry, Rihanna and stars of reality series Made In Chelsea. Locals said the duchess had been spotted viewing the house earlier this year. A neighbour who lives a few doors away from Fergie's corner house said: 'The builders have been in for ages and it has been empty. Two flats have been knocked together to make a house. The Duke of York was photographed with his arm around the bare waist of then 17-year-old Virginia Roberts. In the background, Ghislaine Maxwell 'I didn't know she had bought that property. I'm a bit surprised that she has bought it right next to the garage. Because there are cars coming in and out all the time. 'But I suppose the property values have just gone up with royalty here unless Andrew moves in of course!' Fergie will be welcomed to the area by the local landlord who has offered her the first drink on the house. 'This is a pub which is very popular with the residents of this street,' publican Afrim Neli said. 'I will welcome her and offer her a free drink. 'The Beatles would come in as their manager Brian Epstein lived here and Rhianna comes in when she is in London. So we are used to famous faces.' The Yorks have been involved in several property controversies. Their former marital home, Sunninghill in Ascot, Berkshire, was sold by Prince Andrew for 3million more than the asking price of 12million in 2007 to a Kazakh oligarch. It later emerged that Andrew had been acting as a fixer in business deals for the wealthy businessman. The duke is also trying to sell his 18million ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland. Bought in 2014, it was also described as a nest egg for the children. But the sale has been stalled by a couple who claim he also owes them a business debt of 1.6million. The Duchess of York's representatives last night confirmed the latest purchase. But they refused to comment or disclose any details on the particulars of the sale. Disgraced British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell's mews house in Belgravia was bought by a property developer for 1.75 million. It is a gentle stroll from Fergie's new home A local housekeeper said: 'About two months ago I saw her coming out of the house. She seemed in a hurry and got into a car. 'I didn't really look too closely as we are used to famous people around here.' Prince Harry files his second lawsuit against UK government and Scotland Yard over decision to ban him from paying for police protection in Britain Prince Harry has filed a second lawsuit against the British government and Scotland Yard over the decision not to allow him to pay for police protection when he visits from California. The Duke of Sussex is already suing the Home Office over its decision in 2020 to remove his taxpayer-funded protection, which he says makes it unsafe for him to come to Britain with his wife, Meghan Markle, and two children, Archie and Lilibet. Now he has filed a second lawsuit against the Home Office which also names the Metropolitan Police, the High Court confirmed to MailOnline. 'It is at an early stage, no hearings have been listed yet and no decisions have been made,' the Judicial Office added. The new case will focus on a decision in January by the Royalty and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC), which concluded that private individuals should not be allowed to pay for police to protect them. The revelation of a second court case - which emerged on Meghan's birthday - threatens to raise tensions with the Royal Family due to claims that the Queen's Private Secretary, Sir Edward Young, was involved in the decision to deny Harry protection. 'Significant tensions' are said to have existed between the Duke of Sussex Sir Edward, according to the prince's legal team. Today's news is also likely to dismay the government, which has spent 100,000 on its legal battle so far, according to a report last week. Advertisement A man parking his car in the garage said: 'The spaces normally cost about 3,000 a year. I believe there was one space available too. Maybe she'll get that.' Ms Maxwell sold her mews to a developer for 1.75million last year to help towards her legal bills before she was jailed for 20 years in New York for grooming children for her paedophile boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked Virginia and other girls around the world on his private jets treating them as sex slaves. Fergie is said to have purchased her new home from her friend the Duke of Westminster, 31, who became one of Britain's wealthiest people when he inherited his father's 10billion fortune and the Grosvenor property empire in 2016. He is also a close friend of Prince William and Prince Harry. The house is said to be viewed as an investment opportunity for her daughters Beatrice and Eugenie but for now it is Fergie's only home in London amid questions about where she could have found the cash. Her multi-million pound purchase came despite her repeated complaints of financial difficulties in recent years, describing herself as 'continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy' in a 2010 TV interview in the US. She also admitted to having 'little understanding' of money and there were reports she had run up as much as 4.2million in debt during her marriage to Andrew. She received 3million from their divorce and most of her income is now likely to come from her books. Her first bodice-ripper crept onto the bestseller charts last year despite critics branding it a 'slog' with no sex. Critics branded the book 'boring' but it initially sold 1,000 copies a week when it was released. People on the street said the Duchess had been spotted viewing the house in the late spring and seen running into a waiting vehicle. They admitted they were happy to have yet another famous neighbour as long as her ex-husband stays away. The mews was once two flats now converted back to a house and formed part of the giant Grosvenor Estates portfolio, but has now been transferred to the Duchess, who spends most of her time living with her ex-husband at his grace-and-favour home the Royal Lodge in Windsor. A spokesman for her ex-husband Prince Andrew, who has had his own financial woes after settling the case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre for 12million, said he had not been personally involved in the purchase. The Duke and Duchess of York have also been trying to sell their 17.5million Verbier ski chalet, but this has been held up by legal woes. MailOnline has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment. Fergie and Andrew currently reside in the Royal Lodge in Windsor, owned by the Queen, 96, who resides in the nearby castle. Sources told the Sun the new Mayfair property is thought to be 'a long-term investment for daughters Princess Beatrice and Eugenie', describing it as 'picturesque' and in 'one of the very smartest areas of London.' They added: 'It had previously been a couple of flats but has been converted to a single property. 'If the girls are going to inherit it at some stage they're extremely lucky. 'It's a short walk from the best bars and restaurants in the city, beautiful parks and other hot spots. But God knows where the money has come from everyone thought they were totally skint.' Fergie's representatives confirmed the purchase to the Sun but were unable to provide any more specifics of the sale which has yet to be published by Land Registry officials. It is not the first time the couple's property deals have come under scrutiny. In January MPs called for a 'dirty money' probe into the 15million sale of Prince Andrew's Sunninghill estate to a Kazakh oligarch who became the centre of corruption claims. The Duke, 61, sold the home in Ascot, Berkshire, to Timur Kulibayev, 55, the son-in-law of Kazakhstan's autocratic former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, in 2007. But questions had been raised ever since over the sale of the property, originally gifted by the Queen to Andrew when he married Sarah Ferguson, after it went for 15million 3million over its asking price. That is despite the property, which was mockingly called 'SouthYork' due to its supposed similarity to the garish ranch of SouthFork in the US series Dallas, languishing on the property market for five years at an asking price of 12million. The chalet in Verbier has an indoor pool, sauna, boot room and terrace with spectacular views. The couple have been trying to sell it for around 17.5m Then: Sunninghill House, on the edge of Windsor Great Park near to Ascot, which was sold by Prince Andrew in 2007 In 2015, Kulibayev razed Sunninghill Park - which had been compared to a Tesco superstore due to its ugly appearance - so that he could build a new home. Last year, images (above) showed how the home's sprawling ultra-modern replacement was nearing completion Andrew, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, was once a special trade envoy for the UK. The Duke of Westminster (pictured), 31, is believed to have sold a Mayfair property to Sarah Ferguson And he had been accused of acting as a fixer in Kulibayev's business deals - Andrew has always denied any impropriety - and is a close friend of the tycoon's Nazarbayev. Andrew is also struggling to sell his 18m ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland, due to an alleged 1.6m debt to a Swiss couple. According to reports in the Swiss media, the debt to the mystery couple is preventing the Duke of York from completing the sale of his much-loved Chalet Helora. It has been claimed that the disgraced royal was intending to use money from the sale of the property to help finance his 10million sex assault lawsuit settlement with accuser Virginia Giuffre. In February of this year it was reported that Andrew had found a buyer for the chalet, after settling a separate 6.6million debt to French socialite Isabelle de Rouvre, 74, who he purchased the property from in 2014. But the process appears to have stalled because the chalet is 'under sequestration' as a result of the alleged debt. The chalet was frozen as an asset by Swiss authorities on December 15, 2020 according to Le Temps newspaper. Sources close to Prince Andrew previously told MailOnline that the dispute will not prevent the property's sale, and that while the Duke 'did not deny owing the money' to the couple he was 'questioning the amount'. The source said: 'This has nothing to do with the original purchase of the chalet, it's a completely separate business transaction between the couple and the Duke. 'It shouldn't affect the sale of the property despite what the Swiss media says and is expected to go through as planned. 'Talks are underway to resolve the matter, which are expected to be concluded satisfactorily for all parties.' One source told the Sun the new Mayfair home is 'picturesque' and in 'one of the very smartest areas of London' (Stock image of Mayfair in central London) Prince Andrew has not been to the chalet in Verbier for several years, but his ex-wife Sarah and two daughters Beatrice and Eugenie spent the New Year in the luxury property with their families. He stepped back as a senior royal in May 2020 after allegations emerged over his relationship with the disgraced sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. A high profile court case in which Virginia Guiffre, a victim of Epstein's, accused the Duke of York of sexual abuse was settled out of court in March of this year. The total settlement is believed to be around 12 million, and includes Ms Guiffre's legal bills and an unspecified amount to a charity of Ms Guiffre's choice. He did not accept any liability when he made the settlement and vehemently denies the claims. The Biden administration postponed a routine test launch of an Air Force Minuteman III intercontinental missile on Thursday to avoid further enflaming tensions with China, according to officials. The U.S. has repeatedly delayed tests this year as Beijing ramps up its rhetoric over Taiwan, which it views as Chinese territory, and as Russia waged war in Ukraine. This time, the test was postponed after China deployed dozens of planes and fired missiles near Taiwan in a show of strength in response to the visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The test was due to be conducted from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. White House security spokesman John Kirby said the decision to delay was taken by President Joe Biden. 'As China engages in destabilizing military exercises around Taiwan, the United States is demonstrating instead the behavior of a responsible nuclear power by reducing the risks of miscalculation and misperception,' he said. Rep Mike Rogers (R-AL), lead Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, condemned the decision which he said was designed to 'placate Xis tantrums.' The U.S. military postponed a previously scheduled test of its intercontinental ballistic missile on Thursday in an effort to avoid enflaming tensions with China. The Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile is pictured during a test launch in October 2019 An official told the Wall Street Journal that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin postponed the test to 'remove any misunderstandings given the PRC's actions around Taiwan' Republicans quickly accused the Pentagon of trying to placate Chinese leader Xi Jinping Minuteman III nuclear missile: The $7 million warhead that can travel 6,000 miles at 15,000 mph The Minuteman III makes up the Unites States' land-based ICBM of the nation's nuclear triad, along with the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and nuclear weapons carried by long-range strategic bombers. It is a strategic weapon system using a ballistic missile of intercontinental range. Missiles are dispersed in hardened silos to protect against attack and connected to an underground launch control center through a system of hardened cables. The $7,000,000 Minuteman III weighs 79,432 pounds and can travel 6,000 miles at 15,000mph. Development of the missile began in the 1950s, and was named after the Colonial Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War, who could be ready to fight on short notice. The Minuteman entered service in 1962 as a deterrence weapon that could hit Soviet cities, with the Minuteman-II entering service in 1965 with a number of upgrades to its accuracy and survivability in the face of anti-ballistic missile (AMB) systems. In 1970, the Minuteman-III became the first deployed ICBM with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV): three smaller warheads that improved the missile's ability to strike targets defended by AMBs. By 1970 during the Cold War, 1,000 Minuteman missiles were deployed, but by 2017, the number had shrunk to 400, deployed in missile silos around Malmstrom AFB, Montana; Minot AFB, North Dakota; and F.E. Warren AFB, Wyoming. From 2027 onwards, Minuteman will be progressively replaced by the new Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) ICBM from 2027 onwards to be built by Northrop Grumman. Advertisement 'This news comes after China conducted live-fire exercises following the Speaker of the House's visit to Taiwan,' he said. 'These weak-kneed pearl-clutching attempts at appeasement hurts our readiness and will only invite further aggression by our adversaries.' Kirby said the test would be rescheduled but did not offer a new date. Earlier a defense official said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the delay to prevent tensions being raised further. 'This is a long-planned test but it is being postponed to remove any misunderstandings given the PRCs actions around Taiwan,' the official told the Wall Street Journal, referring to the People's Republic of China. The Minuteman III is a vital part of the U.S. military's strategic arsenal. The nuclear-capable missile has a range of more than 6,000 and can travel at speeds of up to 15,000 miles per hour. Development of the original Minuteman began in the 1950s and it took its name from the Colonial Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War, who were ready to fight at short notice. A March test was also delayed after Russia said it was putting its nuclear forces on high alert. It was postponed till April before being delayed again. Washington said at the time that it was important both nations 'bear in mind the risk of miscalculation and take steps to reduce those risks.' However, officials said the intent was only to delay the test 'a little bit,' not cancel it. This time it comes as China holds live fire exercises in the waters around Taiwan. The autonomous island said China fired 11 ballistic missiles into waters off its south-western and north-eastern coasts on Thursday during a two-hour period. Beijing also scrambled fighter jets and sent some of its most up-to-date warships to surround the island, in what state media said is a rehearsal for an invasion. The drills are due to last until Sunday, and are due to including long-range bombers and hypersonic missiles. China's two aircraft carriers are also holding position nearby. American forces - including the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier which is forward-deployed with the Pacific Fleet - are thought to be lurking nearby, while missile-tracking spy planes have been sent to watch over the drills. China fires short-range ballistic missiles into waters near Taiwan on Thursday, as four days of live-fire exercises kick off that will effectively blockade the island in the biggest threat to its independence in decades Chinese missile batteries open fire from the coast near Pingtang Island across the Taiwan Strait as Beijing begins its biggest-ever war games around the self-governing island In this image taken from video footage run by China's CCTV, a projectile is launched from an unspecified location in China, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China says it conducted 'precision missile strikes' in the Taiwan Strait Xi Jinping announced the exercises using Pelosi's trip to the island - which took place from Tuesday and Wednesday - as an excuse. She is the most-senior politician to visit since Newt Gingrich in 1997, but her trip came shortly after a Senate delegation visit drew no response. Earlier, Secretary of State Antony Blinken attempted to ease tensions and accused China of trying to manufacture a crisis. 'We remain committed to our One China policy guided by our commitments to the Taiwan Relations Act, communiques. And I want to emphasize: nothing has changed our position and I hope very much that Beijing will not manufacture a crisis or seek a pretense to increase its aggressive military action,' he said at the ASEAN-US ministerial meeting in Cambodia. Much of the world believed that escalation could have 'unintended consequences' that would serve no-one's interests,' he added. Washington has reached out to Beijing to deescalate tensions, he said. A huge fire broke out in a block of flats in Shoreditch on Thursday with local residents reporting a 'large explosion' that 'sounded like a bomb'. Around 100 firefighters and 15 vehicles were called to the scene of the inferno at a block of flats on Granby Street in east London at 5.53pm on Thursday evening. The London Fire Brigade (LFB) confirmed it received more than 40 calls alerting them about the huge blaze inside the eight-storey building, with flames on the third and fourth floors. Firefighters from Whitechapel, Shoreditch, Shadwell, Dockhead, Islington and surrounding fire stations are all currently at the scene. Footage shared on social media shows plumes of flames and black smoke erupting through the block of flats while fire engines showered the blaze with water. The LFB told MailOnline they were 'called to reports of a large explosion' but are yet to determine the cause of the fire. On witness took to Twitter and said: 'It sounded like a bomb just went off, this is just behind St Matthews Road. Felt like an earthquake, I am so shook.' Firefighters have rescued one person from a second floor flat who has been taken to hospital by crews. Another four people have been led to safety. Crews are now carrying out a systematic search of the building. Around 100 firefighters and 15 vehicles were called to the scene of the inferno at a block of flats on Granby Street in east London at 5.53pm on Thursday evening The London Fire Brigade (LFB) confirmed it received more than 40 calls alerting them about the huge blaze inside the eight-storey building, with flames on the third and fourth floors The LFB told MailOnline they were 'called to reports of a large explosion' but are yet to determine the cause of the fire Bethnal Green Road is shut from Brick Lane to Queensbridge Road and motorists are advised to avoid the area where possible. The horror blaze was seen ripping through the windows of the building - which partially collapsed - as terrified onlookers heard screams from the scene. Mayor Lutfur Rahman said: 'I am on site supporting affected residents and liaising with our brave emergency services who are tackling the blaze. 'The building remains unsafe and we are urging everyone to avoid the area until further notice. I am ensuring that my officers make emergency housing available to all residents who have been displaced from their homes.' The Metropolitan Police said they have officers in the surrounding areas redirecting traffic away from the inferno. They wrote on Twitter: **Warning** Bethnal Green Road is closed both directions near junction with Brick Lane, as we deal with a serious incident with London Ambulance and London Fire Brigade. Please avoid the area.' In a statement shared online, LFB said: 'Fifteen fire engines and around 100 firefighters have been called to reports of a fire and explosion on Granby Street in Shoreditch. 'Flats on the third and fourth floor of an eight-storey block are alight. 'The Brigade's 999 Control Officers have taken 42 calls to the blaze. Footage shared on social media shows plumes of flames and black smoke erupting through the block of flats while fire engines showered the blaze with water 'Part of Bethnal Green Road has been closed and motorists are advised to avoid the area where possible. 'The Brigade was called at 1753. Fire crews from Whitechapel, Shoreditch, Shadwell, Dockhead, Islington and surrounding fire stations are at the scene. 'The cause of the fire is not known at this stage.' A London Ambulance Service spokesperson told MailOnline: 'We were called at 5:54pm today (4 August) to reports of an incident at Bentworth Court, E2. 'We have sent a number of resources to the scene including three ambulance crews, a tactical response unit and members of our Hazardous Area Response Team. We have also dispatched London's Air Ambulance. 'The incident is ongoing and we are working with our emergency service colleagues.' Advertisement Armie Hammer has been pictured reuniting with estranged wife Elizabeth Chambers for the first time since he was forced out of Hollywood and went to work as a timeshare salesman in the Cayman Islands. Despite infidelity and allegations of rape and cannibalism, the pair appeared amicable as they spent quality time with their two kids Harper, seven, and Ford, five, in Los Angeles on Thursday. Hammer wore a blue 'Florida State Parks' t-shirt, khaki shorts and flip flops. He was in the same Florida tee the last time DailyMail.com caught up with him a couple weeks ago. The actor was with his two youngsters walking their dog Archie, the same dog that left Hammer with stiches in his hand 2020. The doting dad could be seen chatting with his kids and watching over his son as he picked up after their dog. He then took the children to meet up with Chambers, who appeared sporty in black biker shorts, a t-shirt and sneaker. The mom-of-two enjoyed a sushi dinner with her kids. Armie Hammer, 35, was seen Thursday in Los Angeles with estranged wife Elizabeth Chambers, 39, and their two kids, Harper, seven, and Ford, five Despite infidelity and allegations of rape and cannibalisms, the pair appeared amicable as they spent quality time in Los Angeles on Thursday Though Hammer and Chambers separated in 2020 after he allegedly cheated on her at least twice, she has characterized him as 'My best friend' Hammer wore a blue 'Florida State Parks' t-shirt, khaki shorts and flip flops. He was in the same Florida tee the last time DailyMail.com caught up with him last month Hammer took the children to meet up with Chambers, who appeared sporty in black biker shorts, a t-shirt and sneakers The doting dad could be seen chatting with his kids and watching over his son as he picked up after their dog Archie Hammer's life was thrown into chaos last year after a number of women claimed that he had sexually abused them to satisfy his kinks, which reportedly included rape and cannibalism fantasies The mom-of-two enjoyed a sushi dinner with her kids and was seen carrying a tired Ford, five, while daughter Harper walked alongside Chambers previously confirmed reports that Robert Downey Jr. had helped fund Hammer's rehab stint, and insisted that her husband was in a good place, DailyMail.com exclusively revealed Hammer's life was thrown into chaos last year after a number of women claimed that he had sexually abused them while fulfilling his kinks, which allegedly included rape and cannibalism fantasies. Hammer posted a photo of his hand with stitches in 2020 with the caption 'F**king Archie' - the family dog Two women said he told them he wanted to remove their ribs, barbecue them and eat them, and one accused him of slicing the letter 'A' into one her thighs before sucking the blood out of her fresh wound. After the accusations were made public, the actor was dropped by his agency, WME, and was subsequently let go from various film projects, including Paramount Plus series The Offer, Jennifer Lopez's Shotgun Wedding, as well as the thriller Billion Dollar Spy. He and Chambers had announced their split a few months before the allegations surfaced. Hammer checked into a rehabilitation center to treat sex, drug and alcohol abuse, where he stayed from May through December 2021. He had been laying low in the Cayman Islands after the rehab stint, supposedly staying with Chambers and their two kids. Hammer returned from the Caymans after he was mobbed by media when photos showed him working as a timeshare salesman went viral. DailyMail.com previously caught up with Chambers who confirmed Robert Downey Jr. had helped fund Hammer's rehab stint and said 'everybody needs help.' 'Everything is good,' Chambers said last month as she stepped out for dinner in Hollywood. She declined to comment on whether Hammer had been selling timeshares while in the islands, and but insisted that he was happy. 'I really couldn't talk about that,' she said, 'But I think he's happy and that's good.' Though Hammer and Chambers separated in 2020 after he allegedly cheated on her at least twice, she characterized him as 'my best friend.' Asked whether she felt her husband had healed since his scandal and rehab stint, she paused and said 'I think everyone is always going through a process.' As to any chance of rekindling their romance, Chambers only laughed. Hammer and Chambers pictured at a red carpet premiere in 2017. Asked whether she felt her husband had healed since his scandal and rehab stint, Chambers said 'I think everyone is always going through a process' Hammer returned from the Caymans after he was mobbed by media when photos showing him working as a timeshare salesman went viral Earlier in July, Hammer's attorney denied that the actor was working as a salesman, following a viral tweet with an image that that showed his face on a pamphlet as concierge for a hotel Armie Hammer has been staying at a home owned by Robert Downey Jr. in Malibu where he is also attending AA meetings. Pictured: Downey Jr's sprawling seven-acre compound. It's unclear whether Hammer is staying at this property or another owned by the Ironman star Earlier in July, Hammer's attorney denied that the actor was working as a salesman, following a viral tweet with an image that that showed his face on a pamphlet as concierge for a hotel. The since-deleted tweet's caption read: 'My friend's parents went on vacation in the Cayman Islands and Armie Hammer was their concierge.' The pamphlet included discount vouchers and advertised that Hammer would take guests to swim 'with wild turtles' and point them to the 'best snorkeling and diving spots.' The source told Variety Hammer was working the job because he was 'broke.' 'He is working at the resort and selling timeshares. He is working at a cubicle,' the source said, 'The reality is he's totally broke, and is trying to fill the days and earn money to support his family.' According to the source, Hammer, who is the great-grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer - who was worth an estimated $800 million at the time of his death - 'is not on the family payroll' and has been forced to work a regular job after his Hollywood downfall. The insider also shared that Hammer previously managed an apartment complex in the Cayman Islands. Three thieves with hammers were caught on camera stealing more than $100,000 worth of high-end jewelry at a Florida mall on August 2. The masked suspects in black hoodies arrived with hammers at the Diamond Galleria located at the Citrus Park Town Center after 1.30 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. Surveillance footage captured the scene unfold as the robbers broke display cases filled with high-end watches at the front of the store as a bystander appears to be walking throughout the store. Three masked thieves with hammers were caught stealing from the Diamond Galleria located at the Citrus Park Town Center after 1.30 p.m. on Tuesday The thieves were caught breaking the glass of a display of high-end watches at the front of the store as a bystander appeared to be walking through the store After the thieves grabbed what they could from the front display, they quickly ran inside and targeted another display. More than $100,000 was stolen in high-end merchandise The suspects are seen in the video running inside the store to break more displays before rushing out the employee entrance they entered through earlier and hoping into a 2022-22 silver Nissan Murano, according to police. Police are also seeking the driver of the vehicle, the fourth suspect in the investigation. No arrests have been made. 'These suspects are seen on camera and video, so it's only a matter of time before they are caught for the crimes they committed today,' Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement. No injuries in the smash-and-grab were reported. The Diamond Galleria was not immediately available for comment. Police are seeking a fourth suspect driving a 2022-22 silver Nissan Murano. The suspect was waiting for the three thieves outside the employee entrance of the mall. The four took off in an unknown direction The August 2 incident mocked a similar smash-and-grab incident in California reported in January after horrific footage showed a group of thugs with hammers stealing more than $100,000 in jewelry from a mall. Nine thieves with masks and hoodies grabbed gold necklaces and other valuables from the Heart of Gold jewelry store in San Jose. Amid the robbery, Eric Orozco, the store owner, insisted the state needed to implement stricter punishments for state criminals. Pictured: A group of men use sledgehammers to try to smash open a display case containing jewelry during a January 3 mall heist in San Jose, California Then, in early July, a trio robbed a Zales jewelry store at Queens Center mall in New York City. Two men and one woman, believed to be in their mid-20's, were seen walking into the store just before 7pm. The men managed to snag around $111,175 worth of jewelry, police said. After taking the jewels, the trio fled from the mall in an unknown direction. The three suspects in the Zales Jewelry store heist are seen entering the mall, both men wearing white caps and the woman in a white shirt and jeans The series of smash-and-grabs have been making headlines in the last few years, resulting in the US Chamber of Commerce in March insisting that lawmakers take action to address the criminal activity. The business organization wrote a letter to Congress urging them to 'pass legislation to stop the sale of stolen goods on online marketplaces.' The letter cited a survey of small businesses that claims 54% of owners experienced an uptick in shoplifting in 2021. Meanwhile, a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation found that large retailers are suffering from an average of more than $700,000 per $1 billion in sales in 2020 - an increase of more than 50 percent from the past five years. 'Some retailers have been forced to shutter locations in response to rampant theft,' the letter says while citing that 25% of small businesses report increasing their prices to combat shoplifting. Aside from urging lawmakers to halt the online sale of stolen goods, business owners also sought an update to the 'definition of organized retail crime and increase criminal penalties.' Overseas Chinese condemn Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, voice resolute support for China's reunification Xinhua) 09:09, August 04, 2022 BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in China's Taiwan on Tuesday evening for a visit, drawing strong condemnation from overseas Chinese. They believed that Taiwan has been a part of the Chinese territory since ancient times and the Taiwan question is purely China's internal affair, which brooks no external interference. Realizing China's complete reunification is the common aspiration of all the Chinese at home and abroad, which is an irresistible and unstoppable trend of the times, they said, expressing full support for all the countermeasures China takes to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. INALIENABLE PART OF CHINA "Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory, and no one or any force can change it," said Yuan Yi, executive vice president of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in Russia. Pelosi's visit to Taiwan severely violated China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and seriously undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, Yuan said, adding that all the Chinese people strongly condemn and resolutely oppose it. Wang Haijun, president of the Association of Overseas Chinese in South Korea, said that Taiwan has been an inalienable part of China since ancient times and that there is only one China in the world, and both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. The Taiwan question is purely China's internal affair, and brooks no external interference, Wang said. There is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, which is an unquestionable historical fact with legal basis and is generally recognized by the international community, the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in Ghana said in a statement, adding that safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity is the common responsibility of the Chinese people all over the world. Hu Lanbo, director of Cina in Italia magazine, said that China has repeatedly expressed its firm opposition to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. China's position on the Taiwan question has been consistent, Hu said, adding that it is the firm will of the 1.4 billion Chinese people to resolutely safeguard China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Yu Hua, president of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in Georgia, said that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory, which is a historical fact and has been recognized by the international community. Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region severely violated the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiques, damaged China-U.S. relations and seriously undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, Yu said. NEVER ALLOW EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE "We will never allow the United States to provoke China and interfere in China's internal affairs," said Han Jun, head of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in East Africa. "Pelosi's visit has seriously hurt the feelings of all the Chinese people around the world. Any attempt to use the Taiwan question to interfere in China's internal affairs or undermine China's peaceful reunification process is playing with fire," Han said. The China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in Zambia said in a statement that Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region sent a serious wrong signal to the "Taiwan independence" forces, which is extremely dangerous and provocative. The visit grossly interfered in China's internal affairs, seriously undermined China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and trampled on the one-China principle, the council said, adding that it will also severely undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and damage China-U.S. relations. "Using the Taiwan question to interfere in and suppress China will never end well!" said Wang Zhimin, head of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in Thailand, noting the council strongly condemns and protests Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, which seriously violated the one-China principle and the three joint communiques between China and the United States. Zhu Jianrong, professor at Toyo Gakuen University of Japan, said the one-China principle is the political foundation of China-U.S. relations and any attempt to challenge it will be firmly countered by the Chinese people. The "Taiwan independence" elements who seek independence by relying on the United States and creating secession will surely be spurned by history, he said. Chen Zhixiang, president of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said, "The overseas Chinese living in the UAE stand side by side with the Chinese government and people, and are determined to safeguard national sovereignty and security interests." COMMON ASPIRATION FOR NATIONAL REUNIFICATION "China must and will be reunified; this is an unstoppable trend of history, and also a common aspiration of all overseas Chinese," said Yu, noting that "the tricks played by the U.S. politicians and 'Taiwan independence' separatists get no support, will surely be opposed by people who love peace and uphold justice, and are doomed to fail." Sha Quan, an overseas Chinese from Jordan, stressed that realizing the complete reunification of the motherland is the common aspiration of all the Chinese people. "No matter where we are, we will firmly support the motherland's will and actions to safeguard national unity and territorial integrity, and firmly oppose separatist activities for 'Taiwan independence' and interference by external forces including U.S. politicians," Sha said. "No force can stop the great cause of the reunification of the motherland, and all attempts to split the motherland will eventually be judged by history!" the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in Switzerland said in a statement, saying that no force can contain China's development and that the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will surely be realized. The reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability as well as the common aspiration and determination of all the Chinese people, Wang said, adding that overseas Chinese in South Korea firmly oppose Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, resolutely reject external interference in China's internal affairs, and will continue to take concrete actions to promote China's complete reunification at an early date, so as to contribute to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Advertisement A yacht owned by controversial former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and involved in the fatal crash which saw millionaire British businessman Dean Kronsbein lose his life has been pictured. Investigators are still piecing together the circumstances which led to the 70ft Magnum yacht Amore crashing into rocks off the coast of Sardinia on Sunday. The ship's skipper reportedly took evasive action to avoid another vessel. Mr Kronsbein, a 61-year-old German-British dual national, owned the face mask supplier Ultrafilter Medical, based in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire. Although he was pulled still conscious from the sea, Mr Kronsbein, a close friend of TV presenter Richard Hammond, suffered a fatal heart attack onboard a passing yacht that rescued him. The ship's captain Mario Lallone and Luigi Cortese, the captain of a boat called Sweet Dragon owned by controversial former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, have both been placed under investigation by the Italian authorities. Sources said Berlusconi, who has a home in Sardinia, was not aboard Sweet Dragon at the time of the incident but 'members of his extended family' were and they are expected to be questioned as witnesses. Now MailOnline can reveal exclusive pictures taken of the luxury Sweet Dragon yacht on July 2, before the accident. This is the yacht involved in the accident that resulted in the death of British millionaire Dean Kronsbein in the waters in front of Porto Cervo, Sardinia, Italy. The yacht is called Sweet Dragon and is owned by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Pictured on July 2, before the accident The captain of the yacht Sweet Dragon, Luigi Cortese, is under investigation for the incident Silvio Berlusconi goes out on the magnum called 'Sweet Dragon' with his wife Marta Fascina on the wharf of Villa Certosa The Sweet Magnum's captain is being question by police over the incident which led to Mr Kronsbein's death (Pictured: Silvio Berlusconi and his family in the boat on a separate occasion) The yacht is called Sweet Dragon and is owned by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi Sabine, 59, (pictured with her husband Dean Kronsbein) suffered serious injuries in the incident as did their daughter Sophia, 27, who has undergone treatment in a specialist head injuries hospital This terrifying image taken after the crash laid bare the full extent of the damage - with the bow of the Amore completely torn off with the force of the impact on the rocks A pleasant day on the water off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia turned to tragedy late on Sunday as Mr Kronsbein's yacht headed towards the millionaire playground resort of Porto Cervo, where he owns a property. Both skippers Lallone and Cortese face possible manslaughter and wounding charges, and it comes as investigators probe the possibility the yachts were racing in a stretch of water out of bounds to them. Witnesses spoke of the two boats being on a 'parallel course' at the time of the incident. There are also reports that both vessels were in a stretch of water by a tiny island called Il Nibani that is technically out of bounds for large vessels. Pictured: Dean Kronsbein's 70ft yacht Amore is seen impounded by local authorities Pictured: The damage to the yacht's bow is seen in pictures taken after it was towed ashore The vessel (pictured after the crash surrounded by rescue vessels) ploughed into a stretch of rocks and lost its bow in the force of the impact which happened at Il Nibani, just off the coast of Porto Cervo on the island of Sardinia The captain of Amore, Mario Lallone, has been placed under investigation by Italian authorities in connection with the incident Both yachts have been seized by investigators while local prosecutors in Tempio Pausania investigate possible manslaughter and wounding charges. Onboard Amore were Mr Kronsbein's wife Sabine, 59, and daughter Sophia, 27, who were both seriously injured and taken to hospital for treatment where they are still recovering. The captain of the other yacht had been identified as Luigi Cortese and the vessel is owned by scandal-ridden Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi (pictured) who has a home in Sardinia Two other couples who were also on board one British and the other Italian were slightly injured and have stayed in Sardinia to be questioned by authorities and Mr Kronsbein's lawyer Egidio Caredda. Caredda told MailOnline: 'The investigation is continuing, and we are speaking to witnesses and so are the relevant authorities. 'The family just want to know how Mr Kronsbein died and we have appointed our own pathologist to look at the autopsy reports as well as an independent maritime expert.' The captain of the other yacht was identified as Luigi Cortese and the vessel is owned by scandal-ridden Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi. The Sweet Dragon was at the centre of controversy in 2009 after pictures emerged of scantily clad women being ferried onboard to Berlusconi's nearby Villa Certosa. Grimsby born Mr Kronsbein was director of Ultrafilter Medical, based in Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire, which makes specialised medical equipment including surgical masks. Vessels are showed moored in Porto Cervo late on Sunday night after the stricken craft was towed back to shore, where it was met by emergency services Pictured: The 70ft Amore is seen on-land in Porto Cervo, Sardinia after being seized by the local authorities while an investigation into the crash is carried out Paint was also left imprinted on the rocks that the vessel hit, killing one and injuring six - two of them with serious wounds. Mr Kronsbien's wife Sabine, 59, and daughter Sophia, 27, were also seriously injured and taken to a hospital at Olbia before being transferred to a more specialist unit at Sassari 60 miles away The crash happened near a set of islands called Il Nibani, which are around two miles off the coast from Porto Cervo, Sardinia Mr Kronsbien's owns 5 million Cubberley House, a beautiful country home close to Ross on Wye and also a four bedroom villa on the outskirts of Porto Cervo (pictured) Former Top Gear star Richard Hammond (left) told MailOnline on Tuesday how he had been left 'heartbroken' at news of Mr Kronsbein's death During the pandemic the company distributed millions of masks for free across the country and took part in the Big Mask Giveaway. His family owns 5 million Cubberley House close to Ross-on-Wye as well as a four bedroom villa in Porto Cervo close to where he died. Former Top Gear star Richard Hammond told MailOnline on Tuesday how he had been left 'heartbroken' at news of Mr Kronsbein's death. 'He really was a larger than life character and I know people often say that but he really was and the world needs more people like him,' Hammond said. 'He was big hearted, fun character who wanted people to enjoy themselves when they were with him and he was also an astute businessman. He opened factories in Ross-on-Wye, who does that for goodness sake!?' 'I just can't believe I won't see him again in his colourful waistcoat and looking at his pocket watch.' The former governor of Puerto Rico was arrested on Thursday for allegedly removing a high-ranking government official in return for over $300,000 in funds for her 2020 gubernatorial campaign. Wanda Vasquez, 62, allegedly accepted the bribe in exchange for ousting the head of Puerto Rico's Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions, who was investigating a San Juan bank owned by Julio Martin Herrera Velutini. Each are charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and honest services fraud. She replaced the director with somebody hand-picked by Velutini and his consultant, FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini, according to the Department of Justice. Vasquez, the second female governor of Puerto Rico, was running for reelection at the time after she'd assumed the office in 2019 when her predecessor, Gov. Ricardo Rossello, was was forced out amidst protests over his own corruption. She 'demanded' the official's resignation in February of 2020, and replaced them in May of 2020. Despite the $300,000 bribery boost which the DOJ says was transferred to her accounts, Vasquez went on to lose the election. 'Public corruption erodes the people's trust in our institutions and fuels civil unrest,' said the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Juan Field Office, Joseph Gonzalez, 'No one is above the law and the victim of this crime, the People, deserve better.' While being assailed by reporters outside the Federal Court in San Juan on Thursday, she insisted she was 'innocent' and had not committed 'any crime.' 'I am innocent. I have not committed any crime,' she said, 'I assure you that they have committed a great injustice against me.' Wanda Vasquez, 62, allegedly accepted the bribe in exchange for ousting the head of Puerto Rico's Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions, who was investigating a San Juan bank owned by Julio Martin Herrera Velutini Vasquez was assailed by reporters after leaving the Federal Court, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She insisted she was innocent Vasquez previously denied being involved in any criminal activity when reports that charges might be headed her way began to circulate last spring. 'I can tell the people of Puerto Rico that I have not committed any crime, that I have not engaged in any illegal or incorrect conduct, as I have always said,' she told the Associated Press in May. The ex-governor left the office in 2021. She was Governor of the territory when it was ravaged by Hurricane Maria in 2020 and left desperately short of resources due to government mismangement. 'There have been actions by government officials that have been completely unacceptable,' she said at the time. She also once told the Associated Press fighting corruption was one of her administrations priorities. Vasquez was charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and honest services fraud Vasquez's successor, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, condemned the news of her charges, saying 'no one is above the law in Puerto Rico.' 'Faced with this news that certainly affects and lacerates the confidence of our people, I reiterate that in my administration, we will continue to have a common front with federal authorities against anyone who commits an improper act, no matter where it comes from or who it may implicate,' he said in a statement. Vasquez, Rosini, and Herrera all face up to 20 years in prison if convicted for the crime. 'She is unequivocally, absolutely and totally innocent of all the charges against her,' said her attorney, Ignacio Fernandez Lahongrais, 'She looks forward to her day in court.' Two others involved in the crime, CEO and president of the San Juan bank Frances Diaz, and Vasquez's political consultant, John Blakeman, have both already pleaded guilty to charges of pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to arrange bribes, according to the DOJ. They face up to five years in prison. The arrest embarrassed and angered many in Puerto Rico who believe the island's already shaky image has been further tarnished Thursday's arrest also was a blow to Vazquez's pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which is pushing to hold a referendum next year in a bid to become the 51st U.S. state The arrest embarrassed and angered many in Puerto Rico who believe the island's already shaky image has been further tarnished. Thursday's arrest also was a blow to Vazquez's pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which is pushing to hold a referendum next year in a bid to become the 51st U.S. state. Former Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila of the opposing Popular Democratic Party was charged with campaign finance violations while in office and was found not guilty in 2009. He had been the first Puerto Rico governor to be charged with a crime in recent history. The northeastern United States faces a second heat wave in a matter of weeks, with over 70 million people potentially falling under heat advisories through the coming weekend. The National Weather Service is predicting that record temperatures could be equaled or topped in Boston, Hartford, Newark and New York City. The city of Boston is preparing for temps to hit 99 Thursday, according to NWS, which would break a record last set in 1928. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement: 'I urge everyone to stay cool and safe, and check on your neighbors during the week.' In Hartford, the forecast is set for the Connecticut capital to hit 101 degrees Thursday. That would break their 1944 record by five degrees. Newark, New Jersey, which is often home to the hottest temperatures during northeast heat waves, could tie a nearly 30-year-old record of 100. The northeastern United States faces a second heat wave in a matter of weeks, with over 70 million potentially falling under heat advisories through the coming weekend The city of Boston is preparing for temps to hit 99 Thursday, according to NWS, which would break a record last set in 1928. Children cool off in the Childrens Fountain at the Christian Science Plaza in Boston during the heat wave on August 13, 2021 A man cliff jumps at Wissahickon Valley Park in Philadelphia. Philadelphia may tie their record from 1995, hitting 95 degrees. Both New York and Philadelphia have seen heat deaths in the past two weeks Construction workers in Philadelphia sport long sleeves to protect from the sun. Both New York and Philadelphia have seen heat deaths in the past two weeks The National Weather Service is predicting that record temperatures could be equaled or topped in Boston, Hartford, Newark and New York City The Brick City has issued what's known as a 'Code Red' insisting residents take caution from the heat. Governor Phil Murphy has also reiterated warnings to stay cool. In nearby New York City, they're predicting temperatures to reach 94 degrees for Thursday, which would break a record last set in 2006. Energy company Con Edison is imploring New Yorkers to save energy amid what will be an increased demand for electricity. The city faced its longest heat wave in nine years just two weeks ago, lasting six days with peak temperatures reaching 97 degrees. Further south, Philadelphia may tie their record from 1995, hitting 95 degrees. Both New York and Philadelphia have seen heat deaths in the past two weeks. New York and Philadelphia have seen heat deaths in the past two weeks, and both cities are now seeing temperatures ramp up again The National Weather Service has said the scorching temps will peak Thursday, dip a little bit through the weekend before rising again on Sunday, as well as several thunderstorms throughout the region Heat advisories are in place across much of the Northeast as temperatures exceed 100 degrees across most of the region The National Weather Service has said the scorching temps will peak Thursday, dip a little bit through the weekend before rising again on Sunday, as well as several thunderstorms throughout the region. Just two weeks ago, over 210 million faced temperatures over 90 degrees and nearly 60 million of those saw temps soar over 100 degrees. The center says that 60 different high temperature records were either tied or broken that week alone. Cities like Las Vegas (115 degrees), Phoenix (113 degrees), Memphis (102 degrees), San Antonio (101 degrees) and Oklahoma City (100 degrees) all hit the 100 mark. Eight men have been arrested on suspicion of trespassing and criminal damage after storming the Azerbaijan Embassy in central London on Thursday. Metropolitan Police confirmed the arrests tonight after video footage showed a group of men from the Mahdi Servants Union on the balcony of the government building, based in the upmarket borough of Kensington. In a series of clips shared on Twitter, they can be seen waving their distinctive blue flag while writing messages on the wall in Arabic with white paint. Some were using head dresses, or a keffiyeh, to cover their faces as they chanted messages to the crowds who had gathered below, before replacing the Azerbaijani flag with their own. One video showed the building on Kensington Court cordoned off as several police officers with helmets and shields prepared to storm inside. The Mahdi Servants Union is a Shia Muslim organisation headed by the cleric Yasser Al Habib. MailOnline has contacted the group for comment. Police officers outside the Azerbaijan Embassy in London on Thursday after it was seized by protesters Metropolitan Police confirmed the arrests tonight after video footage showed a group of men from the Mahdi Servants Union on the balcony of the government building, based in the upmarket borough of Kensington In a series of clips, shared on twitter, the protesters can be seen waving their distinctive blue flag while writing messages on the wall in Arabic with white paint. It was not immediately clear what the protest was over, but Al Habib's group has been openly critical of the Azerbaijan government, which they claim is oppressive against Muslims. The former Soviet state is considered the most secular Muslim-majority country in the world, and its government actively discourages women from wearing a veil. A Met Police spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Police were called at approximately 16:30hrs on Thursday, 4 August to the Azerbaijan Embassy in Kensington to reports of protestors who had entered the premises. 'Officers attended and engaged with those present. Eight men were arrested on suspicion of trespass and criminal damage. 'They were taken into custody where they remain.' The force said no injuries were reported while 'enquiries are ongoing.' Al Habib, 43, made headlines in June when his film, The Lady of Heaven, was cancelled by two UK cinema chains following a spate of protests from the Muslim community. The Mahdi Servants Union is a Shia Muslim organisation headed by cleric Yasser Al Habib (pictured) Protests, who branded Al-Habib's Lady Of Heaven film 'blasphemous', pictured protesting outside a Cineworld chain in Birmingham in June Hundreds of demonstrators turned out in Bradford, Bolton, Birmingham and Sheffield to protest venues showing screenings of The Lady of Heaven. Pictured: A protest outside Cineworld in Birmingham Mr al-Habib, a Shia Muslim campaigner, has regularly taken to social media to rail against Islamic figures exalted by Sunni Muslims, accusing them of being 'culprits' who 'conspired' to take over Islam after the Prophet Muhammed. Protestors claimed that this is reflected in The Lady of Heaven, which is offensive to their beliefs and is a 'dangerous attempt to spread sectarian hate with the UK's Muslim community.' Other aspects of the film the protestors considered blasphemous are that it portrays the Prophet Muhammed's face and that of his close associates through computer generated imagery, while their voices can also be heard - something that is forbidden in Islam. Mr Al-Habib's website openly proclaims his involvement in The Lady of Heaven claiming that it is an attempt to 'enlighten the world'. The film follows the life of Lady Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammed, but also suggests that key figures around him 'usurped' the faith, which is considered highly offensive to many mainstream Muslims. Dick Cheney eviscerated Donald Trump as the greatest threat to the United States in history in a new campaign ad for his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, who is facing a defeat in the Republican primary in Wyoming next week. 'In our nation's 246 year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump,' veteran Republican Cheney said in a new clip released on Thursday. The congresswoman brought out her 81-year-old former vice president father as a last ditch effort to defy recent polling that puts her squarely behind primary rival Harriet Hageman ahead of an August 16 primary. Hageman led Cheney by more than 20 points in a late July poll by the Casper-Star Tribune and Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy. The challenger held a 52-percent majority in the survey, while just 30 percent of people backed Cheney. Eleven percent said they were undecided. Hageman is former President Trump's choice to unseat Cheney for her loud opposition to his election fraud claims and key role in the January 6 subcommittee. 'He tried to steal the last election with lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,' Cheney said of Trump. 'He is a coward. A real man wouldn't lie to his supporters. 'He lost his election and he lost big. I know it, he knows it, and deep down I think most Republicans know it.' 'Lynn and I are so proud of liz for standing up for the truth doing what's right,' the vice president added. 'Liz is fearless. She never backs down from a fight and there is nothing more important she will ever do than make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.' Dick Cheney eviscerated Donald Trump as the greatest threat to the United States of all time in a new campaign ad for his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, who is facing steep primary prospects Harriet Hageman is running in Wyoming's August 16 Republican primary to unseat Rep. Liz Cheney, the state's lone lawmaker in the House of Representatives Respondents were quick to point Cheney's heavy hand in the Iraq War launched by President Bush. 'Isn't your dad a war criminal?' one user wrote back on Twitter. In a July 4 tirade Trump called Cheney a 'despicable human' who is 'hated' by her state. 'Warmongering and despicable human being Liz Cheney, who is hated by the great people of Wyoming (down 35!), keeps saying, over and over again, that HER Fake Unselect Committee may recommend CRIMINAL CHARGES against a President of the United States who got more votes than any sitting President in history,' Trump wrote in a July 4 tirade on his Truth Social account. Cheney's high-profile role on the Jan. 6 committee has earned her praise from across the aisle - but criticism from Trump-allied Republicans who say she is out of touch with voters back at home. Last week Cheney touted an endorsement from Academy Award-winning actor 'Yellowstone' star Kevin Costner. Rep. Liz Cheney brought out her 81-year-old former vice president dad as a last ditch effort to defy recent polling that puts her squarely behind primary rival Harriet Hageman ahead of an Aug. 16 primary Cheney is pictured at her father and mother's home in McLean, Va. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (right) shakes hands with Cheney in March 2008 during a trip to Baghdad Hageman mocked the Hollywood endorsement. 'I'll take the support of the people of Wyoming any day of the week over a liberal actor who voted for Joe Biden,' she told DailyMail.com. After walking a fine line avoiding comment on the 2020 election, Hageman publicly claimed the election was rigged against Trump Wednesday. 'I think this question is so interesting because the press just absolutely cannot get over this. The election was rigged,' Hageman said at a candidate forum. Ten House Republicans - including Cheney - voted to impeach Trump. Four of those Republicans have announced their retirements and the other six have faced a revenge campaign from Trump. Three of those Republicans were on the ballot on Tuesday - Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan lost to Trump-backed John Gibbs, but Washington Republican Reps. Jaime Huerrera-Beutler and Dan Newhouse look poised to advance to the general election as votes are still being counted. Another, Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina, lost his re-election bid to Trump-endorsed state politician Russell Fry. A man who was camping at an Iowa park with his parents before ruthlessly murdering two parents and their daughter is found to have shot, stabbed and strangled his victims on the morning of July 22 according to autopsies. Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Nebraska, murdered married couple Tyler and Sarah Schmidt, both 42, and their daughter Lula, aged 6 at Maquoketa Caves State Park but the couple's young son, 9-year-old Arlo, escaped the grisly incident unharmed. Autopsies revealed Tyler was killed by a gunshot wound and 'multiple sharp force injuries,' while his wife Sarah was solely killed by sharp force injuries. Their daughter Lula died from a gunshot wound and strangulation. Sherwin's mother Cecilia said that she was awoken by gunshots and a young boy - the Schmidt's 9-year-old son Arlo - who told her that a man clad in black just killed his family. Married couple Tyler and Sarah Schmidt, both 42, and their daughter Lula, aged 6 were shot, stabbed and strangled by Anthony Sherwin, 23, while camping at Maquoketa Caves State Park Sherwin was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a wooded area of the park. Police confirmed they believe Sherwin was the killer Pictured: An undated photo of Tyler playing with his daughter Lula. Family members were distraught at knowing they would not see the child grow up A relative of the Schmidt family reads a statement from the Schmidt family during the Celebration of Life event for Tyler, Sarah, and Lula Schmidt held in Cedar Falls, Iowa The shooter's mother said that her son was wearing green, not black, and refused to believe he is behind the horrific triple-murder suicide. It is unclear if he used the family weapon to kill his victims and himself. Cecilia told the Omaha World-Herald: 'We think (Anthony) might have sensed trouble and grabbed the gun for safety. We refuse to believe the news. We are deeply saddened as he had so much to live for and gave us no indication that anything was wrong.' It is unclear if Arlo was in the same place as his sister and parents when they were murdered, and further information about how he was spared has not emerged. Sherwin was found dead later from a self-inflicted gunshot wound just west of the campgrounds, in a wooded area. The Iowa Department of Public Safety confirmed Sherwin was the killer, but department officials have yet to publicly disclose a motivation for the attack. Cedar Falls Mayor Rob Green speaks during the Celebration of Life event for the family. Green said 'please offer some extra grace to the Schmidts' many friends, neighbors, and coworkers as we try to process this horrible tragedy' No motive for the murders has emerged. Sherwin was visiting Iowa from Nebraska. His empty Facebook profile is pictured above 'Without getting into the fine details of it, with everything that we have learned, we are confident that everything we have reported is how it played out and that he is responsible,' assistant director of the Department of Public Safetys division of criminal investigation Mitch Mortvedt said. Mortvedt added 'the investigation has not revealed any early interaction between the Schmidt family and him.' The La Vista Police Department in Nebraska released records showing Sherwin had no prior arrests, and Cecilia called her son 'kind, sensitive, an exceptional student and an aspiring businessman.' His Facebook page is completely blank, bar a black square that he used as his profile picture. Sarah's sister, Jana Morehouse, mourned the loss of her sibling and called the attack 'a random act of violence.' Pictured: Sarah and Tyler Schmit. The couple were neighbor's of Cedar Falls Mayor Rob Green, who urged the community to support their son Arlo, who survived the ordeal Officials are unsure if Sherwin had any connection to the victims as no evidence has been discovered so far that the 23-year-old ever interacted with the family 'Today, my life has been shattered,' Morehouse wrote. 'My beautiful, smart, funny, curly haired sister, her husband, and their 6 year old daughter were victims of a random act of violence while camping as a family in Iowa. 'Their 9 year old son was able to survive and has a lifetime of trauma ahead.' The family of the victims have set up a GoFundMe page to help support Arlo and set up an education fund for his future. She added that it was unthinkable for life to go on without her sister or young niece. I cannot fathom that [Sarah] will no longer be on the other side of the phone,' Morehouse said. 'I cannot fathom that I don't get to see Lula grow up.' Cedar Falls Mayor Rob Green, a neighbor of the Schmidts, also mourned the family's tragic death on Friday, urging residents to help support Arlo. Green, who knew Sarah as she worked at the Cedar Falls Public Library, wrote: 'Please offer some extra grace to the Schmidts' many friends, neighbors, and coworkers as we try to process this horrible tragedy.' By Thursday afternoon, the GoFundMe for the Arlo raised more than $276,000, with a Meal Train fundraising page also collecting $850 for the 9-year-old's food budget. The driver of an SUV cut in half in Orlando, Florida was killed in the early hours of Thursday morning, while another person was left injured. Footage of the crash shows a car cut in two pieces, as well as debris spread out on East Colonial Drive and Shine Avenue. The incident took place at around 3:15 a.m., according to the Orlando Police. Two people were involved, with the only survivor being taken to a local hospital. There have been no updates on the living victim's condition, as of Thursday evening. The car allegedly surged off a curb, skimmed off a building and crashed straight into a telephone pole, splitting it in half, according to WESH. No other vehicle is believed to have contributed to the crash. The identities of the vicitms have yet to be released. DailyMail.com has contacted Orlando Police Department for comment. One person was killed while another was injured in a car crash in which an SUV was split in two Bill West, a construction worker with GDP Design and Construction, witnessed the wreck while refurbishing a vacant business nearby. He said the impact of the crash was so severe that metal parts from the SUV flew into the air and shattered the window of the business that he was working on. 'All of the sudden I see my window broke and they are trying to figure out what happened,' he told Click Orlando. It took investigators roughly six hours to clear the area and collect evidence. It also took two tow truck to pick up the remaining parts of the SUV. 'If it happened during the day, people could've been hurt in here,' West said. The SUV is believed to have hit a telephone poll after bouncing off a curve and skimmering a building. The condition of the surviving passenger has not been known It took two tow trucks to clear the debris on Thursday morning before the area reopened Police have not yet offered an explanation for the crash. Both lanes of Colonial Road, also known as State Road 50, reopened around 9 a.m. There were 35,766 fatal motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2020 in which 38,824 deaths occurred, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a non-profit organization that focuses on road safety. This resulted in 11.7 deaths per 100,000 people and 1.34 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. In Florida, 3,098 crashes were reported in 2020, accounting for 3,331 deaths. John Legend says his friendship with Kanye West is not what it used to be because of the rapper's support for former President Donald Trump. Legend spoke out about the pair's now-tarnished friendship on an episode of CNN's The Axe Files and revealed that they publicly disagreed on Kanye's running for office, supporting Trump and that it became 'too much for us to sustain our friendship, honestly.' West was an outspoken supporter of Trump when the former president was in office, while Legend has been a longtime Trump critic. In the podcast episode released on Thursday, Legend revealed that their falling out was also a result of West getting upset because he did not support Trump's run for the presidency. 'He was upset that I didn't support his run for presidency of the United States of America for understandable reasons,' Legend said. John Legend (pictured here in July) says his friendship with Kanye West is not what it used to be because of the rapper's support for former President Donald Trump Kanye West (pictured in May) was an outspoken supporter of Trump when the former president was in office, while Legend has been a longtime Trump critic 'Let me ask you about your relationship with him,' podcast host David Axelrod said, 'Because I know you're friends still, but he's, you know, his behavior and his politics, I guess his politics are much different or have been much different than yours?' Legend responded: 'Well, you know, we aren't friends as much as we used to be because I honestly think because we publicly disagreed on his running for office, his supporting Trump, I think it became, uh, too much for us to sustain our friendship, honestly.' 'He was upset that I didn't support his run for presidency of the United States of America for understandable reasons,' he added. 'You weren't alone in that by the way,' Axelrod said. 'I wasn't alone in that, but, you know, he was not happy about that. And we really haven't been close since then,' Legend said. 'What don't people understand about him?' Axelrod asked. 'Well, I think people get a lot about him. I think. Um, he's been very open with who he is and his struggles with mental health and he's very real, honestly,' Legend replied. Legend spoke out about the pair's now-tarnished friendship on an episode of CNN's The Axe Files and revealed that they publicly disagreed on Kanye's running for office, supporting Trump (pictured) and that it became 'too much for us to sustain our friendship, honestly' 'So I think there's not a lot about him that people don't get, like he's been pretty upfront with his opinions, his struggles, all the things that he's dealing with,' he added. 'And, uh, I think what you see with him is pretty much what you get. I don't feel like he's a whole separate person in private than he is in public. I think you're pretty much seeing the real Kanye publicly.' Last November, Kanye revealed that he still supports Donald Trump. 'I've still got a red hat on today, I'll let y'all know that,' he said. 'I might not got it on [at the moment] but I'll let y'all know where I stand,' he said at the time. The public display of support is a huge turn around from 2020, when in a bizarre interview for Forbes the rapper, he said, was 'taking the red hat off' after an apparent falling out with the President. Kanye West said in November 2021 that he still supports Donald Trump as he lashed out at ' Cancel Culture ' and the #MeToo Movement in a candid chat on Revolt TV's Drink Champs. Pictured: West meets Trump at the White House in 2018 Kanye first formally met then president-elect Trump in December 2016 on a visit to Trump Tower in New York. He later said it was wrong to assume that Trump was using him to siphon black votes from the Democrats with his presidential bid in 2020 He has, however, previously spoken out in support of Trump and wore a Make America Great Again hat when he visited the White House in 2018. In a rambling speech to Trump and reporters in the Oval Office, he said the former president 'is on his heros journey'. West told Trump, 'I love you,' as he came around to give him a hug. Kanye first formally met then president-elect Trump in December 2016 on a visit to Trump Tower in New York. But on July 4, 2020, he announced that he no longer supported Trump as he launched his own presidential bid. 'I am taking the red hat off, with this interview,' he told Forbes, although it was unclear whether Trump's handling of the pandemic - which Kayne called 'one big mess' - may also have been a reason. He also said it was wrong to assume that black people will always vote for Democrats. 'To say that the Black vote is Democratic is a form of racism and white supremacy,' he claimed. The rapper has denied claims that he is being used by Trump to siphon black votes from the Democrats with his presidential bid last year. Reports at the time said that in return Trump had 'kind words for West, but also said he had "loony tendencies".' Comanchero boss Mark Buddle has been dragged onto a private jet and extradited from Darwin to Melbourne to face two charges for allegedly importing about $40million worth of cocaine. The nation's most wanted man was apprehended by Australian Federal Police in Darwin on Tuesday after being deported from Turkey, where he was arrested last month for visa issues. After spending the past few days in a cell, Buddle was flown from Darwin to Victoria on Friday morning, where he will front court for allegedly importing more than $160kg of cocaine in the state's capital city in March, 2021. Footage released by AFP shows at least four officers escorting the handcuffed 37-year-old across the tarmac and onto the plane, with two of the officers holding Buddle under each arm while pressing his back. Mark Buddle was extradited from Darwin to Melbourne on Friday morning (pictured) After boarding, Buddle was shuffled down the aisle and thrusted into a seat while officers watched guard from neighbouring rows. Assistant Commissioner Nigel Ryan said Buddle, who was the subject of an Interpol red notice, said Buddle touched down in Australia after Turkey made an 'independent decision' to deport him. 'He was escorted by Turkish authorities by charter flight to Darwin where he was taken into AFP custody and arrested,' Assistant Commissioner Ryan told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. Buddle faced court in Darwin on Tuesday, where AFP applied to have him extradited to Melbourne to face one count of importing and another of conspiracy to import a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug. Each offence carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. The AFP will allege that Operation Ironside South-Britannic linked the man to a transnational criminal syndicate operating out of Asia and Europe, which used dedicated encrypted communications to coordinate the shipment of the cocaine from Hong Kong to Melbourne via Sydney. Five people were arrested in Australia in May 2021 under the same operation. AFP officers escorted Buddle onto the charter flight to Victoria, where he is facing two drug importation charges AFP will allege Buddle imported 160kg of cocaine - which has a street value of about $40million into Melbourne in March 2021 The AFP alleges that in mid-2021 it identified Buddle as the sender of encrypted communications about the alleged cocaine import, leading the AFP to launch Operation Gain-Orion to target his activities. In October, AFP engaged with the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions in preparation to seek a warrant for Buddle's arrest, with a full brief of evidence submitted in January. A Melbourne Magistrates Court issued an arrest warrant in relation to the alleged cocaine importation in mid-July, with an Interpol Red Notice put out days later. Assistant Commissioner Ryan said Buddle had been a target of Operation Gain, a transnational off-shore disruption task force, since March 2021. 'This is the first time the AFP has publically revealed the existence of this taskforce, which targets Australias biggest organised crime threats offshore, disrupts their criminal activities and ultimately ensures these alleged criminals face prosecution,' he said. 'Operation Gain harnesses the AFPs extensive international network, sophisticated capabilities, and Australian law enforcement partners, such as the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.' Assistant Commissioner Ryan said the AFP had strong global partnerships and recently hosted Turkish authorities in Canberra, where crucial intelligence was shared between agencies. Comanchero boss was taken into police custody in Darwin on Tuesday (pictured) after being deported from Turkey Mark Buddle pictured with his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his two kids Mel Ter Wisscha Buddle became leader of the infamous Comanchero gang in 2009 after the former leader, Mahmoud 'Mick' Hawi, was jailed for a fatal brawl at Sydney Airport. He left Australia for Dubai in 2016 with his glamorous long-time girlfriend Mel Ter Wisscha and their two children. The AFP alleges Buddle moved overseas to avoid the scrutiny of Australian law enforcement. Buddle then flitted between a range of countries including Greece, Turkey and Iraq before settling in the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus where he received a residency permit on the grounds his 'high income' would bring wealth to the territory. Australian authorities had been working tirelessly behind the scenes to extradite Buddle from Turkey. White House spokesman John Kirby slapped down an 'insulting' question Thursday that President Biden had time on his hands as he isolates after repeatedly testing positive for the coronavirus. Kirby, the communications coordinator for the National Security Council, took the question as China took a series of aggressive actions after Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. That included live fire exercises, air incursions across the Taiwan Strait, and other moves. 'Hes been working through his illness, Peter, so thats a little bit insulting,' White House communications coordinator John Kirby said when asked why President Biden hadn't phoned Chinese President Xi Jinping Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy wanted to know why Biden wouldn't call Chinese President Xi Jinping, who Biden regularly says he has spent hour upon hour within and knows perhaps better than any other world leader does. 'I know you said there is not a call scheduled with XI. Is there a reason why?' Doocy asked him. 'Because President Biden's known him for decades. He's got a lot of free time up there in the residence this week,' he needled, after earlier saying Biden was much 'tougher' on Russia than he has been on China. Biden phoned Xi Jinping before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit 'He's got a lot of free time up there in the residence this week,' Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked Kirby Biden announced from isolation at the White House the killing of Al Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri Kirby, a retired rear admiral and former State and Pentagon spokesman, is just the latest White House official to spar with Doocy from the podium 'He doesnt have free time, Kirby shot back to Doocy, who wanted to know if there was a reason he didn't 'He can't just pick up the phone and call.' 'Hes been working through his illness, Peter, so thats a little bit insulting, Kirby told him. 'Its not insulting that someone who is isolating by himself,' Doocy pushed back. It is. It is, Kirby told him. 'You suggested hes had a lot of free time as if hes not doing anything and you know thats not the case, Mr. Doocy,' said Kirby. Using Doocy's surname. Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had frequent clashes with Doocy, but usually called him simply 'Peter.' As for a call with Xi, Kirby said he didn't have any information to speak to. 'He's talked to Xi five times. It's not like he's afraid to call President Xi. If a call's the right answer, I'm sure that President Biden will do that.' He said lines of communication were 'still open' with Beijing. The back-and-forth came on a day when Biden held a 'virtual' event with business and labor leaders, but didn't otherwise appear publicly on his fifth day of 'rebound' isolation. China ratcheted up its military intimidation of Taiwan yesterday by firing ballistic missiles which flew over the island and landed in Japanese waters. As promised by the ruling Communist Party, four days of war games encircling Taiwan began just before 2pm (local time) with wave after wave of rocket launches, while Chinese jets took to the skies and ten warships patrolled the sea. Five high-powered missiles fired from the mainland flew over Taiwan, Japanese officials said, and plunged into the sea south of Hateruma Island, part of Okinawa. The series of islands are part of Japans exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from its coast. The test-firing, which triggered widespread international condemnation, was Beijings response to US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosis controversial visit to Taiwan earlier this week. China ratcheted up its military intimidation of Taiwan yesterday by firing ballistic missiles which flew over the island and landed in Japanese waters It prompted an immediate diplomatic protest by Tokyo and raised fears a further miscalculation by China could spark war. Japans defence minister Nobuo Kishi said: This is a grave issue that concerns our countrys national security and peoples safety. Foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi called for an immediate stop to the military drills, adding: Chinas actions this time have a serious impact on the peace and stability of the region and the international community. And US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned: Countries around the world believe escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no ones interests. I hope very much Beijing will not manufacture a crisis or seek a pretext to increase its aggressive military activity. But the concerns were seemingly dismissed by the Chinese government last night as the Peoples Liberation Army resumed its dangerous drills. Taiwan held its breath for two hours yesterday as China flexed its military muscle, with the firing of 11 ballistic missiles being backed up by an array of smaller, shorter-range rockets which landed north-east and south-west of the island Four of Beijings vast fleet of unmanned drones were spotted over Taiwans Kinmen Islands, near the Chinese mainland, prompting troops to fire flares in a bid to alter their course. In another dramatic move, China announced it intended to extent the war games by a day, meaning the missile assaults could continue until Monday. Tensions in the South China Sea remained high last night, with US Navy vessels patrolling international waters. US missile-tracking spy planes have been sent to watch over the drills. Taiwan held its breath for two hours yesterday as China flexed its military muscle, with the firing of 11 ballistic missiles being backed up by an array of smaller, shorter-range rockets which landed north-east and south-west of the island. Beijings state media claimed more than 100 planes, including fighter jets and bombers, and ten warships had joined in the exercises. Taipei would not confirm if missiles had flown directly over the island but Taiwanese politician Wang Ting-yu said there would be dreadful consequences for any military attack. We have to make our enemy know: we are prepared. If you dare to do something stupid, you will fail and the price is too high. Taiwans sincere hope is that we can keep the peace and our sovereignty for ever. And we hope China can become a reasonable and more civilised country. But a country cannot survive on dreams. For as long as the exercises continue, Beijing will effectively be blockading its neighbour in what analysts fear could be a practice for a full-scale invasion. The Global Times, the English-language state-run newspaper in China, openly described the activities as a rehearse reunification operation. The war games also threaten to disrupt one of the worlds busiest shipping lanes. Nearly half the worlds ships passed through the narrow Taiwan Strait which separates the island from China in the first seven months of this year. Chinese president Xi Jinping has pledged to reunify Taiwan and mainland China, who split in 1949 after a civil war. The military exercises he has sanctioned were backed up by a barrage of rhetoric from Beijing officials last night. Military expert Song Zhongping said the comprehensive and highly targeted operations showed Chinas determination of resolving Taiwan question once and for all. Suella Braverman has attacked the diversity industry for painting her as a victim of white privilege because of her background. The Attorney General said the 'patronising' training given to civil servants would assume she must be oppressed because she is an ethnic Asian woman with working-class roots. She described the courses as 'brainwashing' and said that taxpayers' money should instead be spent on making sure passports and driving licences are issued quickly. Attorney General Suella Braverman (pictured) said the 'patronising' training given to civil servants would assume she must be oppressed because she is an ethnic Asian woman with working-class roots Her comments came after the Daily Mail revealed that Mrs Braverman, the Government's chief legal adviser, has scrapped diversity and inclusion training in her department having discovered that hundreds of her lawyers spent 1,900 hours on the woke lectures last year. Speaking to Talk TV yesterday, she said: 'I looked at the training materials and I was very sad at what very intelligent, fair-minded, professional people were being taught. 'This training stuff was based on a premise that someone like me, an Asian woman from a working-class background, must necessarily be a victim, must necessarily be oppressed, must necessarily be a victim of white privilege and white fragility.' She said that rather than uniting people, it divides them by cohorts 'based on different kinds of grievances'. 'I don't think it's the right way to spend taxpayers' money, I don't think it's the right way to use vital civil service resource when we've got a Passport Office that needs to work harder on delivering passports and we've got a DVLA that needs to be quicker at issuing driving licences,' she added. Asked if Liz Truss whom Mrs Braverman is backing to be the next Tory leader and prime minister would ban diversity training across Whitehall, she replied: 'Liz has been very forthright on this and she said she wants to really bring an end to this waste of money.' Mrs Braverman added: 'It's politically motivated, it's based on a contested ideology and frankly it's brainwashing our civil servants.' She said Britain is the 'best place in the world' to be a minority. 'Liz [Truss] (left) has been very forthright on this and she said she wants to really bring an end to this waste of money,' Mrs Braverman said. Cabinet Office minister Jacob Rees-Mogg (right) also hit out at the 'woke rubbish' being taught to officials this week Non-affiliated peer Baroness Fox agreed with her, saying that although equality, diversity and inclusion sounds like a good thing, 'it's become a watchword for a particular, very prescriptive, narrow political agenda'. 'If you don't go along with it, that's when you can get yourself labelled transphobic or racist,' she said. Mrs Braverman used an article in yesterday's Mail to launch a fightback against the woke 'witch trials' gripping Britain. She branded the diversity industry a 'new religion' in which zealots seek to punish unbelievers while others are too scared to speak out about what is happening. Cabinet Office minister Jacob Rees-Mogg also hit out at the 'woke rubbish' being taught to officials this week, telling LBC radio he had discovered one course called Check Yo Privilege, while another 'offered to tell people about witchcraft'. It has emerged that a training video on the Department for Levelling Up's website tells civil servants to acknowledge they 'are part of a society, norm, culture or a system that is racist'. Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1 million to the parents of a Sandy Hook victim after claiming the massacre was a hoax and that he could not pay anything over $2 million. A 12-person jury in Austin, Texas, reached the verdict on Thursday on how much the conspiracy theorist owed Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis, 6, was among the 26 killed in the massacre. The parents had sought at least $150 million dollars in compensation for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress for all the damage and harm his lies have caused them over the span of a decade. Jones' attorney asked the jury to limit damages to $8 one dollar for each of the compensation charges they are considering and Jones himself said any award over $2 million 'would sink us.' Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1 million to the parents of Sandy Hook victims after Thursday's verdict Neil Heslin (left) and Scarlett Lewis (right), parents of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis, 6, said their family's life had been turned to a 'living hell' after Alex Jones spread conspiracy theories about the massacre Jones said any award over $2 million 'would sink us' as the family of the victims sought $150 million against the Infowars host for the damage he caused them It marks the first time the Infowars host has been held financially liable for repeatedly claiming the deadliest school shooting in US history was a hoax. The Texas award could set a marker for other cases against Jones and underlines the financial threat he is facing. It also raises new questions about the ability of Infowars which has been banned from YouTube, Spotify and Twitter for hate speech to continue operating, although the companys finances remain unclear. Jones, 48, conceded during the trial that the attack was real and that he was wrong to have lied about it. But Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology would not suffice and called on them to make Jones pay for the years of suffering he has put them and other Sandy Hook families through. Jones' media company Free Speech Systems, which is Infowars parent company, filed for bankruptcy during the two-week trial. On Wednesday, the accountant who oversees Free Speech Systems' finances testified that Jones withdrew $62 million dollars from the company over the last 14 years and that $9 million in cryptocurrency donations to Infowars 'went directly to Mr. Jones.' The verdict comes a day after Sandy Hook lawyer Mark Bankston revealed that Jones' lawyers had sent him two years worth of emails and text messages that they testified didn't exist F. Andino Reynal, the attorney representing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in his defamation trial, flipped his middle finger at plaintiff lawyer Mark Bankston during a heated argument A separate, shorter trial to discuss punitive damages will be discussed following the jury's verdict. The damages are awarded when the court finds the defendant's behavior to be especially offensive. During the final days of the trial, the Infowars host got into a row with the family's attorney, with Jones' lawyer F. Andino Reynal flipping off Bankston in court. On Tuesday, Jones once again argued with Bankston and his team, accused the lawyers of feeding the jury 'fake videos' during the trial, causing one of the attorneys to lash out against him. 'Oh shut your mouth,' the lawyer told Jones as he walked away. Jones responded: That's what you're trying to do, shut my mouth, you'll never succeed.' Then on Wednesday, Jones appeared shocked as he was told his lawyers had accidentally handed over hundreds of text messages by mistake after testifying that they did not exist. The Infowars host squirmed in his seat after confirming his phone number was linked to the texts, after previously declaring under oath at the defamation hearing that there were no messages about Sandy Hook on his phone. Jones called it their 'Perry Mason' moment during the trial, with Jones being accused of perjuring himself while giving evidence. He previously testified that he was unable to find any emails regarding the Sandy Hook massacre, and was shocked when one was shown on screen to the court. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble instructed the jury that the entire contents of the phone was 'not properly turned over when it should have been'. Jesse, 6, was one of the 26 victims shot and killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School Jones repeatedly claimed that the 2012 massacre, which left 20 students and six teachers dead, was a 'hoax' and had been 'staged' Aside from the hearing over punitive damages, Wednesday's verdict brings a close to the four-year court saga between Jones and Heslin and Lewis over his claims that the grieving parents were crisis actors. Both parents broke down during the final day of testimony on Tuesday as they confronted Jones over his lies and the harassment they faced for 10 years from those who believed the claims Jones made on Infowars. Heslin and Lewis both said they fear for their lives and have been confronted by strangers at home and on the street after Jones spread conspiracy theories about them. Heslin said his home and car have been shot at as the jury also heard a death threat sent on the phone to another Sandy Hook family. 'I can't even describe the last nine and a half years, the living hell that I and others have had to endure because of the recklessness and negligence of Alex Jones,' Heslin said. Jones has claimed the trial is a way for others to attack his Freedom of Speech. Pictured: Jones arrived in Texas court for his defamation trial with a piece of tape over his mouth that read 'Save the 1st' Amendment In a gripping exchange, Lewis spoke directly to Jones, who was sitting about 10 feet away. Earlier that day, Jones was on his broadcast program telling his audience that Heslin is 'slow' and being manipulated by bad people. 'I am a mother first and foremost and I know you are a father. My son existed,' Lewis told Jones. 'I am not deep state... I know you know that... And yet youre going to leave this courthouse and say it again on your show.' At one point, Lewis asked Jones: 'Do you think I'm an actor?' 'No, I don't think you're an actor,' Jones responded before the judge admonished him to be quiet until called to testify. Jones has previously been ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to the nine families of Sandy Hook victims who have sued him over the years. Another trial over damages awarded is expected to start in September, in Connecticut, after families of the victims won a default judgment against Jones. The huge success of 'Top Gun: Maverick' shows that even Hollywood has now realized the threat posed by China, according to military contractor Erik Prince, who praised the movie on Thursday for restoring a Taiwan patch to Tom Cruise's famous jacket. A trailer for the movie in 2019 raised fears that producers were bowing to China's new financial might by removing two of the patches that were seen on Cruise's back in the original movie. However, they were eventually restored despite worries the presence of a patch representing the autonomous island nation would offend Beijing. 'It's amazing to see Hollywood has come alive to the fact that a movie like Top Gun that is pro-America, and kind of stands up to China because China was complaining about the mere patch of Taiwan on Tom Cruise's jacket,' Prince told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast, which was recorded at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas. Prince and Bannon have long railed against the threat of communist China. Tom Cruise's original jacket (left) showed patches with the flags of Japan and Taiwan. In the 2019 trailer (right) they had been replaced with patches with generic symbols On Thursday, military contractor Erik Prince said the reinstatement of the Taiwan patch showed that Hollywood was now alert to the threat from an emboldened China Prince made his comments on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, which was broadcast from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas And they have criticized liberals for being too slow to react and mistakenly believing that helping China develop would turn the country into a peace-loving democracy. In recent years, Hollywood has tried to cash in with Chinese audiences by avoiding using China as an aggressor in action movies. But Prince said the producers of Top Gun had managed to make money by standing up to the Chinese. 'And that movie did over a billion dollars,' he said. 'Amazing. 'And so Hollywood has woken up.' The controversy erupted in 2019 when eagle eyed viewers of a trailer for the sequel noticed something strange. Two patches on the back of Cruise's iconic jacket, which marked port visits to Japan and Taiwan, had been changed to generic symbols. Reports suggested the change was made to appease Chinese censors and one of the movie's backers, the Chinese company Tencent Pictures. But the patches were restored when the Chinese backer pulled out. However, the film does not yet have a Chinese release date. Analysts have also spotted another trend. After years of action movies set among Afghan mountains or dusty Iraqi villages, with U.S. soldiers tackling counter-terrorism operations, the latest Top Gun movie depicts big, bold American power. It features huge aircraft carriers patrolling the oceans, and the latest generation of warplanes flying daring missions. It comes as the U.S. refocuses its military posture with billions of dollars of assets and retools its alliances in the Indo-Pacific region to confront an emboldened China. 'Are you on the side of freedom? Or on the side of the [Chinese Communist Party] and all its tentacles,' asked Prince. The threat was on full display on Thursday as China held live fire exercises in the waters around Taiwan following the visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. China ratcheted up its military intimidation of Taiwan on Thursday by firing ballistic missiles which flew over the island and landed in Japanese waters China fires short-range ballistic missiles into waters near Taiwan on Thursday, as four days of live-fire exercises kick off that will effectively blockade the island in the biggest threat to its independence in decades Chinese missile batteries open fire from the coast near Pingtang Island across the Taiwan Strait as Beijing begins its biggest-ever war games around the self-governing island The autonomous island said China fired 11 ballistic missiles into waters off its south-western and north-eastern coasts on Thursday during a two-hour period. Beijing also scrambled fighter jets and sent some of its most up-to-date warships to surround the island, in what state media said is a rehearsal for an invasion. The drills are due to last until Sunday, and are due to including long-range bombers and hypersonic missiles. China's two aircraft carriers are also holding position nearby. American forces - including the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier which is forward-deployed with the Pacific Fleet - are thought to be lurking nearby, while missile-tracking spy planes have been sent to watch over the drills. Prince said he did not believe China was preparing for an invasion. 'I'm glad I'm glad to see representatives of the US government visiting Taiwan,' he said 'My worry is that it only gives them a casus belli to do this and to lash out at Taiwan. I still don't think they're trying to go the distance right now.' The neighbour accused of shooting dead three family members and wounding another had arranged to meet them at the boundary line of their properties the previous night, police say. Mervyn and Maree Schwarz, and Maree's son Graham Tighe, were shot dead at their rural property near the remote town of Bogie, in north Queensland's Whitsundays region, at about 9am on Thursday. Graham Tighe's younger brother Ross survived the horror ordeal - despite being shot in the abdomen - clambering into a ute and driving several kilometres away where he raised the alarm. Queensland Police Acting Superintendent Tom Armitt said a 59-year-old man has been taken into custody and is expected to be charged later today. Acting Superintendent Armitt said the man had invited the Schwarz-Tighe family to meet him at the boundary line of the property. 'I can't go into detail but what I can say is that there was an invitation for them to go there,' he said. Maree and Mervyn Schwarz died from gunshots wounds, along with Maree's son Graham Tighe. Another son is hospital Maree Schwarz - who recently became a grandmother - was shot dead at the property on Shannonvale Rd, Bogie on Thursday. Her husband and one of her sons were also killed 'We understand that there was a conversation that occurred the night before, which was the reason why the parties had met at the gate on the property.' Acting Superintendent Armitt said the man arrested was a 'long-time resident of the area'. 'He will be remaining in our custody, and we expect to lay criminal charges in relation to the matter sometime later on this afternoon,' he said. Police have released four of the five people that were taken into custody on Thursday night to assist with their inquiries. Acting Superintendent Armitt said two of those persons were involved in a power company and after taking statements from them, they were released. He said the three others included the 59-year-old man, his son, and another female family member, both of whom have also since been released. Daily Mail Australia can reveal the family had only bought the huge 300-square-kilometre plot of land for $10million in May 2021, which is zoned for cattle grazing, breeding and farming purposes. Investigators are still working to determine the motive behind the alleged shooting. Ross was able to alert police to the threat after escaping the chaos at the farm despite his life-threatening injuries. Police said the blood-soaked victim made it to another property 'many, many kilometres away' and contacted authorities. He was airlifted to Mackay Hospital in a critical condition and rushed into emergency surgery where he remains in a stable condition in the intensive care unit. 'He was able to tell police that he had been shot and three others (were) also shot,' Acting Superintendent Armitt said. 'We believe the male was able to extract himself from the area. He was fleeing from the scene.' Acting Superintendent Armitt said on Friday Ross was able to be interviewed by police overnight. The family had only bought the huge 300-square-kilometre plot of land (pictured) for $10million in May 2021 Three people are dead while a fourth person was also shot in the stomach. He was airlifted to hospital in a critical condition 'He is recovering from his injuries and we will be able to speak to him again this morning,' Acting Superintendent Armitt said. Police said Mr Tighe was 'obviously in a very distressed state' when he originally spoke to officers. This led to some initial confusion about where the scene of the crime took place. 'We were able to conduct searches ourselves based on the scant information that was provided and we had to update the location as to where the incident occurred based on the crime scene that we located,' Superintendent Armitt said. After searching the area where he was found, police deemed the location safe 'and a further exclusion zone was established at a property along Shannonvale Road where the shooting is believed to have occurred'. Acting Superintendent Tom Armitt said the parties involved met at the boundary line of their properties on Thursday morning Mr and Mrs Schwarz, along with Graham Tighe, purchased the land last year - netting the previous owners a profit of almost $7million after holding onto the property for just three years. Mrs Schwarz became a new grandmother just 18 months ago, sharing a photo of herself cradling the newborn with a beaming smile on her face. Tragically, when word spread throughout the community of a shooting, several of Mrs Schwarz' friends reached out via social media wishing her well. 'Hope all are safe,' one friend wrote on the notice, tagging Mrs Schwarz in her message. Multiple crime scenes were established throughout the small mining community of just 200 people and along Shannonvale Road. Three members of the family were killed and another critically injured in the shooting in Bogie, near Bowen in north Queensland TIMELINE OF BOGIE MASS SHOOTING May 2021: The Schwarz family buy the 300-square-kilometre Bogie farm for $10million Thursday, August 4, 2022 9am: Mervyn and Maree Schwarz, and Maree's sons Graham and Ross Tighe meet neighbours at the boundary lines of their properties. An altercation occurs and all four are allegedly shot. Ross escapes and makes it to a property several kilometres away where he raises the alarm. 10am: Queensland Police confirm they have sent units to a rural property following reports four people have been shot 11am: Police announce they have located one man some distance from the property and he is being treated for gunshot wounds An emergency declaration is set up by police and members of the public are told to avoid the area 4pm: Police confirm three people have been found deceased at the Bogie property Friday, August 5, 2022 7.15am: Queensland Police Acting Superintendent Tom Armitt announces the alleged gunman has been taken into custody Advertisement Forensic specialists will return to the scenes on Friday morning to continue examining the regions for clues. Police revealed on Thursday afternoon the rugged terrain had proven difficult to navigate and would pose further challenges throughout the course of the investigation. An emergency declaration at a Bogie cattle farm remains in place. 'We continue to process the crime scene and police do not believe there is any ongoing danger to the public,' a spokesman said. Whitsunday Regional Councillor Jan Clifford said 'everybody knows everyone else' in their 'little village', adding the community would be 'devastated'. 'To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened in the Whitsunday region before. 'We are all deeply saddened by the tragedy.' A woman who works on Peter Delamothe Road, which connects Bogie to Bowen, earlier told Daily Mail Australia she saw several police cars racing towards scene of the shooting. 'I saw at least three police cars while I was outside and heard a few more sirens after that,' she said. 'It's not usually what you see. I thought straight away that something bad had happened.' It is understood doctors and nurses with blood supplies and other medical resources were sent from Bowen Hospital to Collinsville Hospital - the closest facility to the shooting - to assist. Up to eight ambulances were dispatched from as far as Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville. Three people have been confirmed deceased following a shooting at a rural property in Bogie near Collinsville this morning. https://t.co/6iYwYfktIc pic.twitter.com/smwHlVn7y5 Queensland Police (@QldPolice) August 4, 2022 Elly Colls, who works at Opal Ridge Motel, told The Guardian she learned of the incident at about 11am when someone rang to let them know there had been 'a shooting at the Bogie'. 'Better lock up the house,' she said. 'Cause I don't think (they) found him.' Other locals described the shooting as 'unusual' and 'strange' for the usually quiet area. 'We're traditional owners of this land around Collinsville. I wouldn't have thought it could happen here. It's a small town,' one woman told The Courier Mail. Another said: 'The whole town is a bit rattled that something like that could happen here.' 'We don't know the full story, but we've definitely heard about it. It's a small town, everyone knows everyone. 'But out in 'the boge'? Well, it's tiny.' A rescue helicopter has been sent to Bogie in rural Queensland after four people were injured in a shooting HOW CRITICALLY INJURED FATHER WAS ABLE TO SOUND THE ALARM ABOUT MASS SHOOTING It's believed young father Ross Tighe alerted authorities to the critical situation while suffering a gunshot wound to the abdomen. The injured man had been able to make his way to another home - which police said was 'many, many kilometres away' from where the shooting on a remote property took place - and contacted the authorities. He was flown to Mackay Base Hospital to undergo emergency surgery and is now in intensive care in a serious but stable condition. 'He was able to tell police that he had been shot and three others (were) also shot,' Inspector Armitt said. 'We believe the male was able to extract himself from the area. He was fleeing from the scene.' 'Originally, when the male person spoke to us, he was obviously in a very distressed state and there was some confusion about where the shooting had occurred. 'We were able to conduct searches ourselves based on the scant information that was provided and we had to update the location as to where the incident occurred based on the crime scene that we located.' After searching the area where the injured man was found, police deemed the location safe 'and a further exclusion zone was established at a property along Shannonvale Road where the shooting is believed to have occurred'. The shooting took place on a sprawling cattle property which is 'rural, remote, very hilly and heavily forested'. 'It has taken a number of hours for police to search and clear the area, however we have declared a crime scene in the remote rural location where we believe we have located three deceased persons,' Inspector Armitt said. An emergency declaration for the area was issued at around 11.30am. 'Investigations remain ongoing into the circumstances leading up to the shooting,' the police said. 'Police are currently conducting emergency operations in the area and requesting members of the public and aircraft to not attend the declared location.' Police are clearing the 'extensive' property and will remain in place 'as long as we need to do our job', Acting Superintendent Armitt said. Though there are no other people living in the exclusion zone, the police have urged everyone to avoid the area. Advertisement Advertisement The four Vietnamese nationals who are believed to have been inside a mill when a blaze ripped through the building in May have been named by police, who are also probing if they were all illegally trafficked to the UK. Specialist officers began searching Bismark House Mill, in Oldham, Greater Manchester, after human remains were found by demolition workers last month following a blaze on May 7. On Friday, a spokesman for Greater Manchester Police named four people believed to have been in the mill at the time of the fire. The four men, Cuong Van Chu, Uoc Van Nguyen, Duong Van Nguyen and Nam Thanh Le, were all reported missing to Greater Manchester Police (GMP) on July 21. It comes as yesterday, police found a third body in the building, where suspected human trafficking victims were being held. It came amid increasing publicity about people smuggling and modern slavery after Sir Mo Farah said that he was trafficked into the UK illegally as a child and forced to be a servant. And in 2019 the bodies of 39 Vietnamese people 31 men and 8 women were found dead in the trailer of an articulated refrigerator lorry in Grays, Essex, after being smuggled into the UK. In Oldham specialist officers declared a major incident and began the search of the fire remains after the first set of remains were discovered by demolition workers two weeks ago. It took four days for firefighters to put out the blaze on Bower Street, a built-up area with many commercial units. However they believed at the time that no one was inside the building. Specialists confirmed the recovery of remains of three victims, though they have not yet been formally identified. Left: Cuong Van Chu, 39, arrived in the UK in June 2019. He maintained regular contact with his wife and children but they have not heard from him since May 7. Right: The wife of Uoc Van Nguyen (picutred), 31, has also not heard from her husband since May 7 Left: Duong Van Nguyen, 29, told his family that he was residing in 'an abandoned house' whilst looking for work. Right: Nam Thanh Le, 21, last contacted his family on May 4 It took four days for firefighters to put out the blaze ripping Bismark House Mill in Oldham, Greater Manchester Police said they suspect that the four nationals named 'may' have been in the building at the time but are 'keeping an open mind'. Cuong Van Chu, 39, arrived in the UK in June 2019. He maintained regular contact with his wife and children but they have not heard from him since May 7. The wife of Uoc Van Nguyen, 31, has also not heard from her husband since May 7. The couple maintained regular contact, and he said he was in a mill on that day. Duong Van Nguyen, 29, arrived in the UK approximately 12 months ago and last contacted his family approximately three months ago. He told them that he was residing in 'an abandoned house' whilst looking for work. Nam Thanh Le, 21, last contacted his family on May 4 and told them that he was residing in 'a derelict house' in 'Dam', believed to be Oldham, while looking for work. He arrived in the UK in January 2022. Teams have been searching the remnants of the mill since demolition workers discovered human remains on July 23. The first set of remains were discovered by demolition workers two weeks ago and a major incident was declared Specialist officers declared a major incident and began the search of the fire remains after the first set of remains were discovered by demolition workers two weeks ago It took four days for firefighters to put out the blaze in Bismark House Mill on Bower Street, a built-up area with many commercial units Detective Superintendent Lewis Hughes, GMP's Victim Identification lead, said: 'Our thoughts remain with Cuong, Uoc, Duong and Nam's loved ones. 'Specially-trained officers have been in direct contact with them and continue to make every effort to ensure they are fully updated and supported in Vietnam, as they would be in the United Kingdom. 'We are continuing to search Bismark House Mill to ensure the recovery of all human remains and any objects of significance. 'Meanwhile, the investigation team is following several lines of enquiry relating to the fire and activities at the mill beforehand. 'Though we have reason to suspect that Cuong, Uoc, Duong and Nam may have been in the mill during the fire, we are keeping an open mind with regards to how many people were present and their whereabouts. 'I, therefore, appeal to them or anyone with information about their whereabouts before or after the fire to contact us. I stress that their safety and welfare is our number one priority.' Detective Superintendent Hughes also appealed for information about the fire and activities at the mill beforehand. A red glow can be seen coming from the building in Oldham as it burnt on May 7. Fire crews believed at the time that no one was inside the building The possibility that the remains of three people found were victims of human trafficking is among the lines of inquiry being considered by police, MailOnline understands. Another line of inquiry is whether the flames developed in an illegal cannabis factory it is speculated may have been underneath a legitimate tile warehouse, it was previously reported. Oldham councillor Aftab Hussain said yesterday: 'It's very worrying if the Vietnamese people were being kept in a mill like that. 'It does concern me that there may have been some human trafficking involved here. It needs thoroughly investigating. 'If anything illegal is found to have happened, anyone involved should be brought before the courts and punished.' Speaking yesterday, Detective Superintendent Lewis Hughes said: 'I speak on behalf of all involved in this operation when I say that our thoughts are with the potential family members in Vietnam. 'Specially trained officers have been in direct contact with them and continue to liaise with partner agencies to ensure they are fully updated and supported. 'At the scene, extensive search and recovery work continues to ensure any further remains are respectfully recovered. 'Any criminal offences identified as part of their investigation will be progressed immediately and appropriately. Yesterday, police found a third body in the building, where suspected human trafficking victims were being held Assistant chief fire officer for Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service Leon Parkes said firefighters followed correct procedures when a decision was made not to enter the mill. Pictured, police and fire crews at the scene Police have been in direct contact with the family of the victims in Vietnam, but the remains of a suspected fourth victim have not yet been found Detective Superintendent Hughes also appealed for information about the fire and activities at the mill beforehand. Pictured, police and fire crews at the scene 'Anyone with information which may assist us should contact Greater Manchester Police or Crimestoppers, anonymously.' The cause of the fire has not been revealed. Assistant chief fire officer for Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service Leon Parkes said firefighters followed correct procedures when a decision was made not to enter the mill, due to concerns about the fire and the building's structural stability. But he said there would be a review of the incident and how it was managed. The incident was also referred to Greater Manchester Police's Professional Standards Branch for review. Anyone with information can contact Greater Manchester Police via 101 quoting Operation Logan. Information can also be submitted in English or Vietnamese via the Major Incident Public Portal Anonymous reports can be made to independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. A South American shrunken head has been confirmed as real human remains and not a counterfeit, a new study reveals. New CT scans show the 3.3-inch shrunken head, donated to a museum in Canada in the 1940s, is genuine and was once the head of a Peruvian Indian woman. Researchers say hair shafts can be seen to pierce the upper layer of skin, in precisely the same way as human hair follicles are embedded in the dermis (the skin's inner layer). Shrunken heads or 'tsantsas' are cultural artefacts that were produced by certain indigenous cultures of Ecuador and Peru until around the middle of the 20th century. It was believed that tsantsas contain the spirit and knowledge of the individual from whom they were produced, and so were thought to hold supernatural power that could be conferred to the owner. However, some convincing counterfeit shrunken heads, made from animal body parts or other alternatives often used in commercial reproductions, make it hard to distinguish the real from the fake. Commercial tsantsas were often made from animal skins, including pigs, monkeys, and sloths. South American shrunken heads, some known as tsantsas, are common in many museum collections. However, it is currently difficult to identify whether they are authentic, including whether they were created from human remains. Researchers studied the tsantsa currently held in the collection at Chatham-Kent Museum in Chatham, Ontario, Canada (pictured) THE HEAD SHRINKERS Tsantsas (shrunken heads) are cultural artefacts that were produced by certain indigenous cultures of Ecuador and Peru until around the middle of the 20th century. These cultures included the Amazonian Shuar, Achuar, Awajun/ Aguaruna, Wampis/Huambisa and Candoshi-Shampra. Typically crafted by men in an elaborate, multi-step process, shrunken heads are made from made from the cranial skin of enemies slain in combat. It was believed that tsantsas contain the spirit and knowledge of the individual from whom they were produced, and were thus regarded to hold supernatural power that could be conferred to the owner of the head. Advertisement Using clinical computed tomography (CT) and high-resolution micro-CT scans, researchers were able to determine the tsantsa currently held in the collection at Chatham-Kent Museum in Chatham, Ontario, is in fact real human remains. CT scans produce two-dimensional images of a 'slice' of a body or body part, which are then collected and layered to construct three-dimensional images. 'This technique really redefines archaeology because traditionally, archaeology can be aggressively destructive,' said Lauren September Poeta at Western University. 'Digital archaeology, including computed tomography, provides a whole new dimension of validity and refreshes the field by making it far less invasive.' Researchers don't know how old the 'Chatham tsantsa' is, although it they say it likely dates back several centuries. Typically crafted by men in an elaborate, multi-step process, tsantsas were made from the cranial skin of enemies slain in combat. The gruesome process involved making an incision at the back of the head, peeling the skin and hair off the skull, and soaking them in hot water and hot sand. It's thought tsantsas were created as early as the 1500s, to trap the soul inside the remains, as the eyes and mouth were sewn shut, the researchers say. By shrinking the head of a fallen enemy, the victor was believed to harness their spirit for servitude and prevent the soul from avenging the enemy's death. Tsantsas were used in ceremonial rituals in which the power of a given shrunken head could be transferred to a household. Following the ritual, the supernatural power was regarded to have left the shrunken head, at which point the tsantsas itself originally became nothing more than a keepsake. However, the influence of European and colonial visitors in the nineteenth century saw post-ceremony tsantsas acquire a commercial value, with their owners willing to trade them away. New CT scans show the shrunken head donated to a museum in Ontario in the 1940s is genuine, and was once the head of a Peruvian Indian woman. Pictured, a 3D rendered image of the micro-CT scan of the tsantsa Demand for the curios soon outstripped supply, resulting in a market of inauthentic tsantsas, some made from human remains, others from animal heads or synthetic materials, for export to European and North American purchasers. This particular tsantsa was donated to the museum in the 1940s by a local family, after it was purchased on a tour of the Amazon basin. The original accession record lists the tsantsa as coming from 'Peruvians Indians' in South America and nothing else, which is not unusual, but this was not enough to conclusively determine whether it was real or counterfeit. But the team knew they were looking at human remains when examining the eyes, ears and hair using high-resolution micro-CT scans. 'You can see the individual skin layers on the clinical CT scan, but on the micro-CT scan you can actually see the individual follicles, and it becomes really clear what's going on,' said Andrew Nelson, chair of Westerns department of anthropology. Micro-CT image shows the incision at the rear of the skull, windowed and leveled to remove the hair The stitching that was used to close incisions, as well as the eyes and lips, can also only be critically examined using a micro-CT scan. Although the team attained conclusive evidence that the tsantsa is human remains, they were unable to determine whether the purpose of the head shrinking was ceremonial or commercial. Further study of the materials used to seal the eyes and the lips could reveal more. 'If vine materials were used to seal the eyes and the lips, it would likely identify the tsantsa as ceremonial, but if a more modern, cheaper thread was used it is more indicative of commercial interests when it was being made,' said Poeta. The researchers won't know for certain the details and ultimate purpose of the shrunken head construction until more tsantsas those that are guaranteed as ceremonial and those expected as fakes are examined. 'We always work respectfully and intentionally with the subjects of our research, and we look forward to working with our Ecuadorian colleagues, including the Shuar and Achuar, to guide any future work,' said Poeta. The findings were published today in the journal PLOS One. Advertisement Last week, a snorkeller was left 'screaming for help' after being bitten by a shark off the coast of Cornwall in the first attack of its kind in British waters for 175 years. The woman - who has not been identified - was in Penzance, Cornwall, with Blue Shark Snorkel Trips when the accident happened last Tuesday. While unprovoked shark attacks are extremely rare in the seas around the UK, they're much more common in other parts of the world. The Florida Museum has produced a handy interactive map that lets you explore the number of unprovoked shark attacks around the world. It reveals that the USA is the shark attack hotspot of the world, with 1,563 unprovoked attacks since 1580, followed by Australia (682 attacks), Republic of South Africa (258 attacks) and Brazil (110 attacks). The Florida Museum has produced a handy interactive map based on data from The International Shark Attack File (ISAF) that lets you explore the number of unprovoked shark attacks around the world since 1900 While unprovoked shark attacks are extremely rare in British waters, they're much more common in other parts of the world. Pictured: a great white shark Countries with the most unprovoked shark attacks since 1580 USA - 1,564 Australia - 682 Republic of South Africa - 258 Brazil - 110 New Zealand - 56 Papua New Guinea - 48 Mascarene Islands - 47 Mexico - 41 Bahama Islands - 33 Iran - 23 Advertisement The interactive map is based on data from The International Shark Attack File (ISAF). 'The (ISAF) is the world's only scientifically-documented, comprehensive database of all known shark attacks,' The Florida Museum explains on its website. 'Initiated in 1958, there are now more than 6,800 individual investigations covering the period from the early 1500s to the present.' A slider at the bottom of the map allows you to change the date range from 1900 to 2021, while you can also use toggles to select certain shark species, and whether or not the attacks were fatal. You can then explore the number of unprovoked shark attacks around the world by drawing a box around data points you're interested in. In 2021, there were 137 alleged shark-human interactions worldwide, according to the ISAF. This included 73 unprovoked bites - those in which a bite on a live human occurred in the shark's natural habitat - and 39 provoked bites. 'Of the remaining 25 cases, four involved bites to motorized or non-motorized marine vessels ("boat bites") and one involved shark-inflicted post-mortem bites ("scavenge"),' Florida Museum explains. 'Five cases were regarded as "doubtful" or incidents that likely did not involve a shark. 'These included one case attributed to a stingray, three attributed to bony fish and one to injury associated with scraping against a rock.' The map reveals that the USA is the shark attack hotspot of the world, with 1,563 unprovoked attacks since 1580, followed by Australia (682 attacks), Republic of South Africa (258 attacks) and Brazil (110 attacks) In Europe, Greece is the area with the most shark attacks since 1847 (15), followed by Italy (13) and Spain (6). However, there have only been three attacks recorded in British waters Sharks found in British waters Smooth hammerhead shark - North Atlantic off the western tip of Cornwall Blue shark - 10 miles off the southern coast of Cornwall Thresher shark - English Channel off the Devon coast Shortfin mako shark - Bristol Channel and off the coast of Wales Porbeagle shark - Most common on south coast Basking shark - Sea of the Hebrides Advertisement Of the 73 unprovoked shark bites recorded last year, the vast majority (47) were recorded in the US, with one proving fatal. Twelve of the attacks took place in Australia, where three proved fatal. Meanwhile, Brazil, New Zealand and South Africa all had three bites and one fatality each in 2021, while New Caledonia reported two incidents, both of which were fatal. Most of the bites were found to be related to surfing and board sports. 'Following recent trends, surfers and those participating in board sports accounted for most incidents (51 per cent of the total cases),' Florida Museum said. 'This group spends a large amount of time in the surf zone, an area commonly frequented by sharks, and may unintentionally attract sharks by splashing, paddling and "wiping out." 'Swimmers and waders accounted for 39 per cent of incidents, with the remaining incidents divided among snorkelers/free divers (four per cent) and body-surfers (six per cent.' While the these statistics may sound alarming, Florida Museum reassures that the risk of being bitten by a shark remains extremely low. 'While the incidence of fatal bites in 2021 was higher than is typical, we do not consider this cause for alarm,' it added. 'At this time, there is no evidence that the recent spike in fatalities is linked to any natural phenomena. 'Rather it is likely the consequence of chance, a conclusion underscored by the fact that the number of unprovoked bites is in line with recent five-year trends.' Last week, a snorkeller was left 'screaming for help' after being bitten by a shark off Cornwall in the first attack of its kind in 175 years - in what the victim branded a 'very scary incident' at sea. Pictured: a blue shark Last week, a snorkeller was left 'screaming for help' after being bitten by a shark off Cornwall in the first attack of its kind in 175 years - in what the victim branded a 'very scary incident' at sea. The woman - who has not been identified - was in Penzance, Cornwall, with Blue Shark Snorkel Trips when the accident happened last Thursday. The unlucky adventurer had been swimming some 15 miles out to sea during the 180 per person excursion when the shark, unprovoked, suddenly bit her leg. The swimmer was rushed back into the chartered boat where she was given immediate first aid and taken ashore for further treatment. It is the first shark attack of its kind on a person in British waters since 1847. Several fishermen have been bitten in recent years but only after bringing the sea creatures on board their vessels. Fascinating time-lapse footage has captured a never-before-seen view of the fiery aftermath from a collision between two stars. For the first time, scientists recorded millimetre-wavelength light from the merger of at least one neutron star with another star, which left behind one of the most luminous afterglows on record. The light travelled some 6 to 9 billion light-years across the Universe and was picked up by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile. Led by Northwestern University and Radboud University in the Netherlands, the team also confirmed this flash as one of the most energetic short-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) ever observed. The data could help scientists learn more about these extreme events, and the effect they have on the space around them. Stellar event: Fascinating time-lapse footage has captured a never-before-seen view of the fiery aftermath caused by the collision of two stars For the first time, scientists recorded millimetre-wavelength light from the merger of at least one neutron star with another star, which left behind one of the most luminous afterglows on record The light travelled some 6 to 9 billion light-years across the Universe and was picked up by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile. Pictured is an artist's impression of the merger between a neutron star and another star Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe Gamma ray bursts (GRBs), energetic jets of gamma rays that come from black holes, can be created in two different ways resulting in long or short GRBs. They are created from some of the most violent deaths in the Universe. Long GRBs last about a minute, and scientists think they are produced by supernovae: when the core of a massive star collapses to become a black hole. Short GRBs last a second and are produced when two neutron stars merge. Advertisement 'This short gamma-ray burst was the first time we tried to observe such an event with ALMA,' said Northwestern's Wen-fai Fong, principal investigator of the ALMA program. 'Afterglows for short bursts are very difficult to come by, so it was spectacular to catch this event shining so brightly. ' Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful known explosions in the Universe. In just 10 seconds, they can emit more energy than a star the size of our sun gives off in 10 billion years. Long GRBs last about a minute, and scientists think they are produced by supernovae: when the core of a massive star collapses to become a black hole. Short GRBs last a second and are usually produced when two neutron stars merge. They are also important because it is in explosions like these that elements heavier than iron are forged and ejected throughout space. 'These explosions take place in distant galaxies which means the light from them can be quite faint for our telescopes on Earth,' said astrophysicist Tanmoy Laskar, of Radboud University in the Netherlands. 'Before ALMA, millimeter telescopes were not sensitive enough to detect these afterglows.' Located in the high-altitude Atacama Desert in Chile, the ALMA array comprises 66 radio telescopes, making it the largest radio telescope in the world. Laskar added: 'ALMA's unparalleled sensitivity allowed us to pinpoint the location of the GRB in that field with more precision, and it turned out to be in another faint galaxy, which is further away. 'That, in turn, means that this short-duration gamma-ray burst is even more powerful than we first thought, making it one of the most luminous and energetic on record.' Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful known explosions in the Universe In just 10 seconds, they can emit more energy than a star the size of our sun gives off in 10 billion years GRBs are also important because it is in explosions like these that elements heavier than iron are forged and ejected throughout space Located in the high-altitude Atacama Desert in Chile, the ALMA array comprises 66 radio telescopes, making it the largest radio telescope in the world Fong said: 'After many years observing these bursts, this surprising discovery opens up a new area of study, as it motivates us to observe many more of these with ALMA and other telescope arrays in the future.' Last year, a massive gamma-ray blast more than a billion light-years from Earth was revealed to be the largest explosion in the Universe ever detected and recorded by astronomers. The explosive event was the death of a star and the start of its transformation into a black hole, according to experts from the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg. This was a massive gamma-ray burst, made up of a combination of bright X-ray and gamma-ray flashes observed in the sky, emitted by distant extragalactic sources. It was detected by space-based Fermi and Swift telescopes, with support from the Earth-based High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S) telescope in Namibia. The new research has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is available on arXiv. Two out of three regions of the Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest amount of coral cover in 36 years, new data shows. Scientists have revealed the latest stats regarding 'coral cover' the area on a reef that's covered by live coral in the world-famous reef on Australia's east coast. They show that the north and central Great Barrier Reef have seen coral cover increase in the past year up 9 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively. Coral cover in the north region is now at 36 per cent and coral cover in the central region is at 33 per cent. This marks the highest amount of coral cover in these regions since 1985, when the scientists started to monitor the reef. However, average coral cover in the southern Great Barrier Reef has decreased to 34 per cent, down from 38 per cent in 2021. The north and central Great Barrier Reef have seen coral cover increase in the past year up 9 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively. Coral cover in the north region is now at 36 per cent and coral cover in the central region is at 33 per cent. This marks the highest amount of coral cover in these regions since 1985, when the scientists started to monitor the reef. However, average coral cover in the southern Great Barrier Reef has decreased to 34 per cent, down from 38 per cent in 2021 The Great Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contains the worlds largest collection of coral reefs, with 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish and 4,000 types of mollusc CORAL RECOVERS IN TWO-THIRDS OF THE GREAT BARRIER REEF North region: 36% coral cover (up 9% from 2021) South region: 34% coral cover (down 4% from 2021) Central region: 33% coral cover (up 7% from 2021) 87 reefs across the three regions were surveyed between August 2021 and May 2022 Advertisement The new stats have been published by Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), which began monitoring the world-famous reef in 1985. Its CEO, Dr Paul Hardisty said the decrease in the south is due to outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish, which feeds on corals. 'A third of the gain in coral cover we recorded in the south in 2020/21 was lost last year due to ongoing crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks,' he said. 'This shows how vulnerable the reef is to the continued acute and severe disturbances that are occurring more often, and are longer-lasting.' The new data is somewhat surprising, because the reef suffered its fourth mass bleaching event in just seven years earlier this year. During bleaching, the coral animal loses its symbiotic algae and pigments, causing it to turn white and potentially die. Corals can survive a bleaching event, but they are under more stress. In all, the Great Barrier Reef has seen five mass bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022 but the last two haven't been as severe in terms of coral death, according to AIMS. Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef outside Cairns Australia during a mass bleaching event. The Great Barrier Reef has seen mass bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022 Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef's (GBR) northern is at its highest in 36 years of the monitoring initiative It's also higher than ever before in the reef's central region (albeit not as high as in the northern region) WARM OCEANS CAUSE CORAL BLEACHING Corals have a symbiotic relationship with a tiny marine algae called 'zooxanthellae' that live inside and nourish them. When sea surface temperatures rise, corals expel the colourful algae. The loss of the algae causes them to bleach and turn white. This bleached states can last for up to six weeks, and while corals can recover if the temperature drops and the algae return, severely bleached corals die, and become covered by algae. In either case, this makes it hard to distinguish between healthy corals and dead corals from satellite images. This bleaching recently killed up to 80 per cent of corals in some areas of the Great Barrier Reef. Bleaching events of this nature are happening worldwide four times more frequently than they used to. The ARC Centre of Excellence in Australia previously estimated that only the southern third of the Great Barrier Reef has escaped unscathed from coral bleaching. Advertisement 'The 2020 and 2022 bleaching events, while extensive, didn't reach the intensity of the 2016 and 2017 events,' said Dr Hardisty. 'As a result, we have seen less mortality. These latest results demonstrate the reef can still recover in periods free of intense disturbances.' However, Dr Hardisty added that the increased frequency of mass coral bleaching events was 'uncharted territory' for the reef. 'In our 36 years of monitoring the condition of the Great Barrier Reef we have not seen bleaching events so close together,' he said. 'Every summer the reef is at risk of temperature stress, bleaching and potentially mortality and our understanding of how the ecosystem responds to that is still developing.' A year ago, AIMS reported coral cover increases across all three regions north, south and central, showing that the growth in the south region has unfortunately since gone the other way and started decreasing. Coral increases in the north and central regions were a sign the reef could still recover, but the loss of coral cover in the southern region shows how 'dynamic' the whole reef is. According to AIMS, most coral cover increases in the north and central regions have been driven by fast-growing Acropora corals. However, these corals are particularly vulnerable to wave damage, which can be generated by strong winds and tropical cyclones. Unfortunately, Acropora corals are also very susceptible to coral bleaching when water temperatures get too high, and are the preferred prey for crown-of-thorns starfish. 'This means that large increases in hard coral cover can quickly be negated by disturbances on reefs where Acropora corals predominate,' said AIMS monitoring program team leader Dr Mike Emslie. A year ago, AIMS reported coral cover increases across all three regions north, south and central, showing that the growth in the south region has unfortunately since gone the other way and started decreasing Two out of three regions of the Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest amount of coral cover in 36 years, new data shows. Pictured, live coral reef and tropical fish swimming underwater at the Great Barrier Reef Queensland, Australia Dr Zoe Richards, a Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University in Perth who is not part of AIMS, hailed the significance of the new data. 'The finding that coral cover has already reached comparative high levels in the northern and central sectors is good news because the corals provide habitat for thousands of other plants and animals,' she said. 'It is also good news for the tourism industry as reefs with high coral cover are often visually spectacular. 'However, as stated in the report, this recovery trend is driven by a handful of Acropora species which often grow in a boom-and-bust pattern. 'This means that the next thermal stress event could easily decimate these coral communities once again. 'We are already finding evidence that each mass bleaching event leads to local extinctions of rarer species, so the short-term success of a handful of fast-growing coral species masques the full story about the largely hidden losses of biodiversity on the internationally significant Great Barrier Reef.' Chelsea have reportedly opened talks with Barcelona as they are interested in signing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang before the transfer window closes. Chelsea have already acquired the services of Raheem Sterling but Thomas Tuchel is eager to add another forward to his ranks following the departure of Romelu Lukaku. Having only joined in February, Aubameyang wants to stay at Barcelona but he is a player they would be willing to move on to raise funds to register their new signings. According to Fabrizio Romano, Chelsea identified Aubameyang as a potential new striker and contacted Barcelona to begin negotiations. Chelsea have opened talks with Barcelona as they look to sign Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang New Chelsea owner Todd Boehly held talks with Barcelona chiefs earlier this summer over potential transfers. The Premier League giants have not yet tabled an official offer for the former Arsenal captain. However, Tuchel has a close relationship with Aubameyang from their time at Dortmund and Chelsea could try to use that to their advantage. Boehly will also push to get a deal confirmed as he is eager to deliver everything Tuchel wants - including a left back, right back, centre back, midfielder and forward. Boehly has not had as much success as he would have liked during the summer transfer window so far. Chelsea have already acquired the services of Raheem Sterling but Thomas Tuchel (right) is eager to add another forward to his ranks following the departure of Romelu Lukaku (left) Therefore, Chelsea owner Todd Boehly (above) has turned his attention to signing Aubameyang as his future at the Nou Camp remains in doubt He has struggled to progress in negotiations with top-flight clubs this summer and subsequently missed out on a host of high-profile players following the departure of Petr Cech and Marina Granovskaia - who brought more financial caution and market knowledge to the table. Chelsea's decision to turn to Aubameyang came after Boehly missed out on signing Robert Lewandowski. The former Bayern Munich striker decided to join Barcelona in a 42.5million deal instead of linking up with Tuchel's side. Tuchel (right) worked with Aubameyang (left) during his time at Borussia Dortmund and previously spoke highly of the former Arsenal captain Aubameyang could be seen as a worthwhile alternative - considering he has scored 68 goals in 128 Premier League matches. He also got his hands on the Golden Boot in the 2018-2019 campaign after equalling Liverpool duo Mohamed Salah and Sadio to share the award. However, Aubameyang's time in the English top-flight ended unfavourably after being frozen out of the Arsenal squad by Mikel Arteta. Chelsea's decision to turn to Aubameyang came after Boehly missed out on signing Robert Lewandowski - who joined Barcelona instead of the Premier League giants Aubameyang had not played for the Gunners for three months and had been stripped of his Arsenal captaincy by Arteta when he left in February 2022. The 33-year-old scored 92 goals in 163 appearances for Arsenal, but his time at the club was also chequered with disciplinary breaches. The Gabonese international was 'reminded of his responsibilities' by the club after he breached COVID-19 rules to get a tattoo. Aubameyang left Arsenal after being frozen out of the squad by manager Mikel Arteta He signed for Barcelona and hit the ground running - scoring 13 goals in all competitions He also turned up late to training on several occasions and saw himself dropped to the bench as a result. Aubameyang was not the first Arsenal player to find himself ostracised by Arteta with Mesut Ozil and Matteo Guendouzi among the others. Nevertheless, Aubameyang managed to turn his career around at Barcelona - scoring 13 goals in all competitions and helping his new club secure a Champions League spot. Chelsea have confirmed the 20m signing of Carney Chukwuemeka from Aston Villa. The Blues have seen off competition from Borussia Dortmund and Barcelona to land the midfielder just one day ahead of the new Premier League season. The 18-year-old had previously rejected a new contract at Villa, with it being understood he wanted 100,000 per week, and he has now agreed a six-year deal at Stamford Bridge. Carney Chukwuemeka has completed his 20million move to Chelsea from Aston Villa The England Under 19 international admitted he is now relieved the deal has been done and that he can now finally fully focus on his game. 'It's been quite hectic but I couldn't get Chelsea out of my head the last few days so I'm just happy and relieved that it's all done', he told Chelsea's website. 'I'm so excited and just can't wait to get on the pitch, meet all the players and try to win games and trophies with Chelsea.' Chukwuemeka stands outside Chelsea's training ground at Cobham after completing move The highly rated midfielder is understood to have penned a deal across six years AC Milan had offered 3m prior to Chelsea agreeing to meet Villa's asking price. Chukwuemeka had a year left on his Villa deal but had opted against signing an extension due to concerns about his playing time. He made 14 appearances last season but only three of them were starts. Villa CEO Christian Purslow once described him as 'probably the best 16-year-old in England' and he starred for the Young Lions during the summer, helping them win the Under 19 Euros and being named in the team of the tournament. Chelsea have raided Aston Villa to sign highly-rated midfielder Carney Chukwuemeka The U19 Euros winner made 14 Villa appearances last term, but only three of them were starts Meanwhile, Chelsea are close to signing Marc Cucurella from Brighton for around 52.5million. Brighton insisted on Wednesday night no agreement had been reached despite widespread reports to the contrary, but figures close to the deal are adamant the deal will go through. A medical is booked for Thursday and Cucurella is poised to sign a six-year contract. She is currently enjoying a holiday in the Italy with husband Lee Elliott and friends. And on Wednesday, former Bachelorette star Georgia Love showed off her bikini body as she went boating in Capri. The 33-year-old looked tanned and toned in a bright yellow swimsuit. La Dolce Vita! Bachelorette star Georgia Love showed off her bikini body on Wednesday as she went boating in Capri with husband Lee Elliott and friends Georgia's one piece was white and featured a lemon print and she teamed the look with an oversized white boat hat emblazoned with the word 'Capri'. 'Postcards from paradise,' one post was captioned. She later changed into a bright blue swimsuit during a swim at a beach club on the island. Georgia looked trim and toned as she stripped off into a bright yellow swimsuit, sharing pictures on Instagram 'Postcards from paradise,' one post was captioned 'My dedication to matching my clothes to my surroundings knows my bounds,' she said as she posed up for a happy snap while sunbathing on a bright blue towel. It comes after Georgia and plumber husband Lee suffered intense backlash from fans following a trip to Saudi Arabia. The star and husband Lee were recently given an all-expenses paid trip by Visit Saudi to help promote tourism in the nation. The couple were reportedly asked to delete their posts by Saudi tourism officials. She later changed into a bright blue swimsuit during a swim at a beach club on the island But their holiday attracted plenty of controversy, with many fans flagging the Middle Eastern country's horrific human rights record. Shortly afterwards, both Georgia and Lee removed all of their social media posts, supposedly at the direction of Saudi tourism officials, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph reported. Lee later addressed the backlash in a post on Instagram, explaining that he understood the anger their holiday had garnered. 'We thought long and hard about coming and we decided to come as the world is changing for the better and Saudi along with it,' he wrote. The Andrews Government has slammed the creators of Channel 10's new reality show Hunted for 'failing to apply for a permit' before filming inside Victoria's Metro rail network. Produced by Endemol Shine, Hunted follows 18 contestants going on the run as they try to avoid being captured by a team of former intelligence agents and police officers. Hunted, which was filmed in Victoria earlier this year, included several scenes filmed at Flinders Street Station and inside public train carriages. The Andrews Government has slammed the creators of Channel 10's new reality show Hunted for 'failing to apply for a permit' before filming inside Victoria's Metro rail network. Pictured are the cast of Hunted Production was backed by government tourism agency Visit Victoria, who touted the show as a unique way to attract interstate visitors following the pandemic. Yet this week, the very same government publicly blasted producers for failing to adhere to red-tape regulations. Speaking to The Herald Sun, a spokesperson from Victoria Metro claimed Endemol Shine 'did not apply for a permit prior to filming' on the rail network. Hunted, which was filmed in Victoria earlier this year, included several scenes filmed at Flinders Street Station and inside public train carriages. Pictured is as a scene from Hunted filmed at Flinders Street Station Production was backed by government tourism agency Visit Victoria, who touted the show as a unique way to attract interstate visitors following the pandemic. Yet this week, the very same government publicly blasted producers for failing to adhere to red-tape regulations. Pictured is Victoria Premiere Dan Andrews The Metro website stipulates that applicants must receive 'express permission from Metro Trains Melbourne before accessing Metro premises for filming and photography'. 'This is not acceptable as Metro has strict protocols in place for filming which should have been followed to ensure the safety of staff and passengers,' the spokesperson said. 'We have written to the production company involved to remind them of their obligation to apply for a permit before filming.' Speaking to The Herald Sun , a spokesperson from Victoria Metro claimed Endemol Shine 'did not apply for a permit prior to filming' on the rail network. Pictured are Hunted contestants buying tickets at Flinders Street Station on the show The Herald Sun reported that Government authorities are 'furious' about the breach. Pictured Hunted contestants The Herald Sun reported that Government authorities are 'furious' about the breach. Public Transport Minister Ben Carroll also told the publication that 'appropriate action' had been taken to to prevent such a breach from happening again. The Andrews-led Victorian Labor Government has earned quite a reputation for its draconian regulations in recent years. Mr Andrews even earned himself the nickname 'Dictator Dan' for his hardline response to the Covid pandemic. He dragged Victoria through the longest lockdown in the world after plunging the state into six lockdowns that lasted a consecutive 262 days. Scott Cam went on another fiery rant about The Block 'quitters' Joel Patfull and Elle Ferguson on Thursday. The TV host told The Kyle and Jackie O show the couple didn't tell producers about the AFL star's sick mother before fleeing the set of the series. Fashion blogger Elle, 36, and retired AFL player Joel, 37, were meant to star on The Block's upcoming 'Tree Change' season, but quit just two days into filming. New twist in The Block quitters saga as host Scott Cam (pictured) claims Elle Ferguson and partner Joel didn't tell him about AFL star's sick mother before walking off set He said The Block would have been prepared to temporarily shut down production to accommodate the couple's visit to see Joel's mother, who had injured herself in a nasty fall at her home in Adelaide, if they had been made aware of the situation. 'They didn't mention the sick mum to us. If they had said to us we need to go see my mum, of course family comes first. We would have flown them back to Adelaide and flown them back,' the long-time host said. Scott comments come as he was spotted at Perth airport on Wednesday 'They spoke to our producer and said they had decided The Block isn't on brand for them. It was chaos.' Scott went on to say Elle also insisted on bringing 'a lot of designer outfits' for filming, despite a strict dress code. 'You have got to wear the hi-vis [workwear] and the boots but [Elle] did have a lot of outfits there ready to go,' he said. Fashion blogger Elle, 36, and retired AFL player Joel, 37, were meant to star on The Block's upcoming 'Tree Change' season, but quit just two days into filming Scott previously said at the Logie Awards that Elle and Joel giving up so soon into the competition was 'unAustralian' and 'p**s poor'. He told TV Tonight: 'We had a 48-hour challenge to choose the house that you get and they scarpered after 48 hours. It's something that's never happened before.' 'Forty-five thousand people applied to be on The Block and win life-changing money. These guys got on and they just couldn't handle the pace after 48 hours,' he continued. 'Which to me is a bit unAustralian! Have a go! It's p**s poor.' 'They didn't mention the sick mum to us. If they had said to us we need to go see my mum, of course family comes first. We would have flown them back to Adelaide and flown them back,' the long-time host said on Thursday Scott reportedly told the other contestants Elle and Joel left because the renovation show wasn't 'on brand' for them as Bondi influencers. He also said they had complained 'the toilet paper was too scratchy'. The pair made the difficult decision to leave the Channel Nine show two days into filming in mid-April, after Joel's mum suffered the nasty fall. The former footy star's mother reportedly broke her coccyx and fractured her wrist. Scott went on to say Elle also insisted on bringing 'a lot of outfits' for filming, despite a strict dress code. Pictured at Perth airport on Wednesday According to reports at the time, they initially tried to stay on the show but left after they 'couldn't get a definitive answer' from producers as to whether Joel could 'come and go' from the construction site in Gisborne to visit his ailing mother in Adelaide. However, The Block's executive producer Julian Cress has since disputed this, telling the Herald Sun that Joel and Elle 'never' made such a request. Mr Cress added that The Block is always willing to accommodate teams during family emergencies, and once shut down production for an entire week in 2013 when the mother of one of the contestants fell ill. Their exit from The Block will be a major storyline in the first few episodes of the new season, which premieres Sunday, August 7, on Channel Nine and 9Now. Scott looked downcast as he flew out of Western Australia Kim Kardashian took to Instagram on Wednesday to show off the work that goes into achieving her perfectly taut tummy. The reality TV star, 41, showed off a close-up snap of her red abs while getting a laser procedure to 'tighten' her stomach, and though she called the procedure a 'game changer' she did admit that it's 'painful.' 'This is a game changer!!! I did Morpheus laser to tighten my stomach at @DrGhavami's spa,' she wrote, adding, 'I think this is my fave laser but it's painful lol but worth it!' Price of beauty: Kim Kardashian took to Instagram on Wednesday to show off her taut tummy while getting a laser procedure to 'tighten' her stomach, which she shared was 'painful' And the SKIMS founder certainly has the results to back up her tips for achieving the ideal flat tummy, as she showed off her impressive figure in recent bikini snaps. Earlier this week the star shared some snaps of herself sporting a wet T-shirt over a white bikini as she splashed around in the ocean. The mom-of-four recently shared a sneak peak into her favorite skincare procedures as well. Impressive results: Despite the pain, the SKIMS founder, 41, called the procedure 'worth it' and she certainly has the results to back up, as she recently showed off her abs in bikini snaps The star sat down for a skin-strengthening session with Dr. Ghavami last week, and discussed getting light therapy which helps eliminate age spots and wrinkles. Kardashian wrote: 'I'm obsessed with skin care and facial treatments and lasers so wanted to share what this is.' The beauty shared that she typically fits in her laser treatment after her four children - whom she shares with ex-husband Kanye West, 45 - North, 9, Saint, 6, Chicago, 4, and Psalm, 3, are sound asleep, in a July Allure interview. The secret: The beauty said she typically fits in her laser treatments after her four children North, 9, Saint, 6, Chicago, 4, and Psalm, 3, are sound asleep, in a July interview with Allure 'I do my beauty treatments usually late at night. After everyones in bed, Im doing laser treatments,' she revealed. Elsewhere in the interview she insisted that she has never had fillers, but admitted to having Botox in her forehead. Kim insisted that she she currently doesn't have any filler in her lips or cheeks, before adding: 'Never filled either one, ever.' Taking care of herself: Kardashian also recently gave fans a glimpse into her skincare procedures with a set of videos that were posted on her Instagram Story Filling everyone in: The influencer made sure to include detailed descriptions of each other her treatments with every video she shared There they are: Kardashian was also featured in a snap that was shared to the Instagram account of her hairstylist, Chris Appleton, on Wednesday Cause to celebrate: The social media personality also shared a snap to her Instagram Story to show off her bone density measurements Her passion for skincare is something she has in common with her younger boyfriend Pete Davidson, 28. The star - who launched her skincare line SKKN line in June of this year - said the couple 'bond' over skincare, while appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. 'That's, like, one of the reasons why... that's, like, one of our major bonding things,' Kim admitted. 'We go to dermatologists together, we inject our pimples together at the same time. The dermatologist is like, "Is this contagious? You guys always have pimples at the same time,' she said with a laugh. Kim and Pete started dating in October 2021 shortly after Kardashian appeared on SNL. Real Housewives Of Dubai's Sara Al Madani and Caroline Brooks exchanged heated words on the ninth episode of the show's first season, titled Dancehall It Out. Brooks, 37, felt like Sara had been judgmental of her parenting during a previous dinner, and though co-stars Chanel Ayan, 43, and Nina Ali, 42, tried to make them put their differences aside, it did not go according to plan. 'You're very judgy, you kind of go a little bit too far sometimes,' Brooks said, before telling Sara to 'shut the f*** up' which promoted her to reply: 'You say "shut up" to me one more time and I'll deal with you differently.' Heated! Real Housewives Of Dubai's Sara Al Madani and Caroline Brooks exchanged heated words on the ninth episode of the show's first season, titled Dancehall It Out The episode started out with Brooks having lunch with her ex-husband, a Dubai-based businessman named Zoran, whom she was married to for seven and a half years. The star was seen asking her ex to help her build her business, saying, 'I couldn't think of a better business partner.' After Zoran complemented Brooks on looking nice, the two switched topics and began discussing why their marriage did not work out. Hurt: Brooks, 37, felt like Sara has been judgmental of her parenting during a previous dinner Judgmental: 'You're very judgy, you kind of go a little bit too far sometimes,' Brooks said, before telling Sara to 'shut the f*** up' Zoran admitted that he was feeling peaceful with his life right now, which made Brooks question why he didn't feel like that when they were married. 'Why didn't you find that peace when we were married? Because in our marriage I think that I was a great wife, and you drove me absolutely crazy,' she asked. 'You're not Mother Teresa,' he snapped back. Lunch with the ex: The episode started out with Brooks having lunch with her ex-husband, a Dubai-based businessman named Zoran, whom she was married to for seven and a half years Tough: After Zoran complemented Brooks on looking nice, the two switched topics and began discussing why their marriage did not work out 'But you're certainly not a Saint either. Anger, you took it out on everyone around you, including me,' she told him. 'And that's what made me leave our marriage. It was just the behavior. I couldn't take it anymore,' she continued. Zoran seemed understanding to why that might have been upsetting for her and replied: 'That was a difficult period of my life when you were with me. I was mentally, psychologically not in a good place. But I found myself now. And my apologies, really.' Difficult questions: 'Why didn't you find that peace when we were married? Because in our marriage I think that I was a great wife, and you drove me absolutely crazy,' she asked him Brooks accepted his apology, saying: 'Hearing Zoran apologize, it finally brings closure to something that has been so dark in my life for so long.' 'It has shaped the way I view people. The way I react to situations. He made me really hard, and made me become a person who didn't trust people anymore,' she revealed. The scene then switched to the ladies all receiving an invitation from Lesa Milan, 33. She asked them to attend a dancehall party and 'come dressed as dancehall queens.' Appologies: Zoran seemed understanding to why that might have been upsetting for her and replied: 'That was a difficult period of my life when you were with me. I was mentally, psychologically not in a good place. But I found myself now. And my apologies, really' Caroline Stanbury, 45, wasn't thrilled by the idea, telling her daughter: 'Ugh, Lesa Milan just organized some sort of dance party that she wants me to go to.' However, it soon became apparent why she wasn't excited, when her daughter teased her saying: 'You actually can't dance for the life of you.' In the next scene Nina met with Sara and Chanel to go to a gold market where they looked at jewelry and bargained for better prices. Party time!: The scene then switched to the ladies all receiving an invitation from Lesa Milan, 33. She asked them to attend a dancehall party and 'come dressed as dancehall queens' Not thrilled: Caroline Stanbury, 45, wasn't thrilled by the idea and it became apparent why when her daughter teased her saying: 'You actually can't dance for the life of you' While the other ladies looked stylish, Chanel took it to another level, sporting an outlandish lavender gown. 'Never basic,' she said of her incredible outfit. While the ladies shopped for gold, she tried on a crown, saying: 'This way my husband knows who the Queen of the house is.' Lavish: In the next scene Chanel Ayan, 43, Nina Ali, 42, and Sara met up to go to a gold market where they looked at jewelry and bargained for better prices After they got their fill of retail therapy, the trio sat down on a bench for a chit chat. Chanel then invited them to dinner, and revealed Brooks would be coming as well, in hopes that her and Sara could talk their issues out. 'I am open to talking. I don't mind. As long as I get a sober Brooks that is willing to listen, and understand, and be coherent, then I'm ready,' Sara stated. Talk it out: Afterwards Chanel invited them to dinner, and revealed Brooks would be coming as well, in hopes that her and Sara could talk their issues out The next scene showed Caroline Stanbury practicing dancing with her younger husband Sergio Jose Carrallo Pendas, 27, while her daughter Yasmine watched in horror. Sergio was then seen showing his potential wardrobe choices for the dancehall party. Yasmine proceed to make fun of every single outfit choice, joking: 'You're going to look like an idiot.' Dancing queen: The next scene showed Stanbury practicing dancing with her younger husband Sergio Jose Carrallo Pendas, 27, while her daughter Yasmine watched in horror Poking fun: Yasmine proceed to make fun of every single outfit choice Sergio made for the party, joking: 'You're going to look like an idiot' In the next scene, Chanel, Nina and Sara were seen together for lunch as they waited for Brooks to arrive. 'My only advice to you would be like try to listen to hear and understand her,' Chancel advised Sara. However, when Brooks arrived, things quickly got heated between then women. Advice: Chanel gave Sara some advice before Brooks arrived to dinner: 'My only advice to you would be like try to listen to hear and understand her' 'What bothered me the most was I felt like my parenthood was being judged. I told my child, "Okay, you can go upstairs." Sara goes, 'You're not gonna go tuck him in?"' Brooks recalled a prior dinner incident which caused her to be upset with Sara. 'The statement was made verbatim, "You should be more affectionate with your child"' she went on. 'Do not give me advice about my child,' she then stated, while Sara continued to deny that she had said any of that. However flashback clips revealed she did indeed say that. Not good: However, when Brooks arrived, things quickly got heated between then women Feeling judged: 'What bothered me the most was I felt like my parenthood was being judged. I told my child, "Okay, you can go upstairs." Sara goes, 'You're not gonna go tuck him in?"' The ladies continued to argue, with Brooks turning to Chanel to say, 'You even said to me that you think she's very judgmental, and that she comes off way too strong, and she doesn't mind her business.' 'I don't mind my business?' a surprised Sara asked. 'I said to her that I felt you were being judgmental and preachy,' Chanel clarified. 'I feel like you come across as very, very like you know, you want to be therapeutic, you're very judgy, you kind of go a little bit too far sometimes,' Brooked stated. Denying: 'Do not give me advice about my child,' she then stated, while Sara continued to deny that she had said any of that 'Do I have an issue with you? Not really. Do I want to set my boundaries in place? Sure. Do not ask me questions about my child,' she added. 'You need to stop this bull****,' a frustrated Sara replied. 'Sara, shut the f*** up,' Brooks replied in the heat of the moment. Too far: 'I feel like you come across as very, very like you know, you want to be therapeutic, you're very judgy, you kind of go a little bit too far sometimes,' Brooked stated Done: 'You need to stop this bull****,' a frustrated Sara replied After arguing back and forth, Sara decided to leave, claiming Brooks wasn't 'on her level.' Meanwhile Brooks called Sara a 'fake doctor' in a separate sit-down: 'I'd like for her to go buy herself an education and get a real doctorate degree, because she is no doctor.' 'And she's not going to teach me how to be a parent when she's a fake doctor,' she said. Escalating: 'Sara, shut the f*** up,' Brooks replied in the heat of the moment The situation got more heated when Brooks told Sara to 'shut up' one more time as Sara was leaving. 'You say "shut up" to me one more time and I'll deal with you differently,' Sara said. 'What are you going to do?' Brooks asked, getting out of her chair. 'Honey, sit down,' Sara replied while finally leaving. Upset: After Brooks told Sara to 'shut up' one more time, she replied: 'You say "shut up" to me one more time and I'll deal with you differently' Wow: 'What are you going to do?' Brooks asked, getting out of her chair 'This kind of energy is the reason I go to therapy, so I don't end up like her,' Sara told Nina outside. The three ladies then continued arguing inside. Chanel was then left to eat all of the Ethiopian food by herself. The entire group met up the the next scene, as they joined Lesa in a dancing class. Fed up: 'This kind of energy is the reason I go to therapy, so I don't end up like her,' Sara told Nina outside 'We were supposed to have dinner. Sara and Brooks basically got into it. It just went from 0-100,' Nina told Lesa about the dinner incident. However Lesa was more concerned with her party, saying in a separate confessional: 'I don't care what Brooks and Sara have going on. I need everyone to show up today and have a great time.' They were then joined by Sara, and then both of the Carolines, and split into two dancing groups, with Sara, Chanel, and Brooks on one, and Stanbury, Lesa, and Nina on the other team. Dance therapy: The entire group met up the the next scene, as they joined Lesa in a dancing class 'I am going to pretend she's not here,' Sara said of Brooks. However, they ended up having a good time during the class and, sat down to talk afterwards. 'I just want to let everything go,' Brooks told Sara. 'It's been so heavy. And I know that you are a really good person. And I feel like maybe I was hyper sensitive. I apologize.' Making amends: Brooks and Sara ended up having a good time during the class and, sat down to talk afterwards Letting it go: 'I just want to let everything go,' Brooks told Sara. 'It's been so heavy. And I know that you are a really good person. And I feel like maybe I was hyper sensitive. I apologize' Sensitive: 'Adam is all I have. So anytime his little name comes up, it is a trigger,' she revealed 'I should have been able to express myself to you. We are building our friendship. I haven't fully opened up to you about everything that is a trigger for me or things that hurt,' she went on. 'Adam is all I have. So anytime his little name comes up, it is a trigger,' she revealed. Sara accepted the apology, and in a separate confessional said, 'I want to make it work. Let's make this work.' Making it work: Sara accepted the apology, and in a separate confessional said, 'I want to make it work. Let's make this work' It was then time for the dancehall party, with the ladies showing up in their incredible outfits and later taking part in a dance competition. However, they did not take to Chanel's dancing, with Lesa calling her 'Big Bird.' Stanbury also didn't do too well, which she explained saying: 'By the time I get to dancing I think I've had like three vodkas.' Party in full swing: It was then time for the dancehall party, with the ladies showing up in their incredible outfits and later taking part in a dance competition Funny: However, they did not take to Chanel's dancing, with Lesa calling her 'Big Bird' However Lesa felt generous in the end and said 'I have to give everybody A for effort.' Brooks then went on to win the award for the 'Best Whine' while 'Best Energy' went to Nina.' 'Most likely to never dance again' went to Stanbury, though she protested and said Chanel should have gotten that. Best whine: Brooks then went on to win the award for the 'Best Whine' while ' Best Energy' went to Nina' Valuable: 'The most valuable player' then went to Chanel, while 'Best Dressed' went to Sara 'Clearly Ayan should have got that crown,' she said. 'The most valuable player' then went to Chanel, while 'Best Dressed' went to Sara and her afro. Lesa saved the last award for herself, winning the 'Dancehall Queen' title. She is well known for showing off her impressive sense of style on social media and runways alike. And Gigi Hadid turned the streets of New York City into her personal catwalk while running errands on Wednesday afternoon. The 27-year-old model cut a quirky figure in a colorful knitted crop top that gave a glimpse at her toned tummy. Stylish: Gigi Hadid turned the streets of New York City into her personal runway while stepping out solo on Wednesday The influencer styled her funky top with a pair of baggy light wash jeans with holes in the knees. For a sporty flair, Hadid slipped her feet into a pair of classic black Converse All Star sneakers. She accessorized with a single gold choker necklace and a pair of round gold-framed sunglasses with a dark brown tint. Her platinum blonde locks flowed out from underneath a brown suede bucket hat. Quirky: The 27-year-old model cut a quirky figure in a colorful knitted crop top that gave a glimpse at her toned tummy Distressed: The influencer styled her funky top with a pair of baggy light wash jeans with holes in the knees Hadid's outing occurred just days after she shared a promotional image for the drugstore makeup brand Maybelline to her Instagram account. The influencer - who became one of the many faces of the brand in 2015 - shared the snap in order to celebrate National Lipstick Day. The sister of fellow model Bella Hadid donned a sleeveless white top and a matching cap as she posed for the ethereal sna. She accessorized with several necklaces and tied part of her hair into a braid, while much of it fell onto her back. Pucker up! Hadid's outing occurred just days after she shared a promotional image for the drugstore makeup brand Maybelline to her Instagram account. The influencer - who became one of the many faces of the brand in 2015 - shared the snap in order to celebrate National Lipstick Day. Hadid previously signed on to serve as a brand ambassador for Maybelline in 2015. The fashion industry personality also works in the same capacity for footwear company Reebok. The runway regular has since appeared in numerous promotional materials for the cosmetics brand. Collaborator: Hadid previously signed on to serve as a brand ambassador for Maybelline in 2015 Hadid spoke about utilizing Instagram to promote herself during an interview with InStyle, where she noted that she had been using the social media outlet ever since its early days. 'I got lucky that my timing with social media was perfect. I got Instagram as it was building when I was in high school and no one cared. I just did what felt natural,' she said. The model also discussed her public perception and noted that she was not always striving to get everything right during promotional photoshoots. 'People think that models are always going for perfection, but when I look at the computer screen, I don't check to see if I look good. I look at myself as part of the image,' she stated. She has already spent $60,000 on cosmetic procedures. And on Wednesday, Married At First Sight bride Jessika Power revealed she recently underwent a hip dips procedure and buttocks enhancement surgery. The busty blonde said she felt her hips and bottom were 'lacking volume' and a fat transfer operation would ensure those areas looked their best. Married At First Sight bride Jessika Power recently underwent a hip dip and buttocks enhancement surgery The 29-year-old shared a gallery of videos of the results on Instagram, and explained the reasoning behind her decision to splash out on these cosmetic makeovers. 'I wanted my hip dips filled out as I lost a lot of volume there when I had my fat transfer,' she told her followers. In early 2019, she had fat removed from 'problem areas' on her thighs and transferred to her breasts, taking her from a small C-cup to a large D-cup. The procedure, which was handled by Double Bay surgeon Dr Anoop Rastogi, produced more natural-looking results compared to traditional silicone implants. 'I had fat sucked outside of my thighs and injected into my boobs. Don't stick me too close to a candle - I might melt!'' she told her fans last year in a trailer for her reality series Big Brother VIP. The 29-year-old shared a a gallery of videos of the results on Instagram, and explained the reasoning behind her decision to splash out on these cosmetic makeovers The busty blonde said she felt her buttocks and hips were 'lacking volume' and a fat transfer operation would ensure those areas looked their best The $13,000 fat transfer isn't the only cosmetic procedure Jessika has undergone, as she has also had cheek and lip fillers and reportedly spent $40,000 on veneers. Jessika rose to fame on MAFS back in 2019 and has since become a huge star on the adults only platform OnlyFans. The blonde bombshell has long been transparent with her fans about the cosmetic surgery operations she has undergone Cosmetic procedures FAQs: Buttocks enhancement surgery: This cosmetic procedure involves removing fat from various areas of the body, treating it and then transplanting it into the buttocks. Through this procedure the general shape and tone of the buttocks is enlarged. People may undergo this surgery for several reasons, including an improved look, reduced fat and an improvement of the body's overall proportions. Hip dips surgery: This procedure is also known as liposculpting, and is a form of fat redistribution surgery. Fat is taken from one area of the body, such as the thighs or stomach, and redistributed to the 'indents' on your outer upper legs, colloquially known as your hip dips. It is a popular procedure as it helps improves body aesthetics and image by beautifully sculpting one's hip and thigh region. Advertisement The influencer opened up about her staggering OnlyFans earnings earlier this year, which allows her to fund her cosmetic makeovers, after sharing she'd been raking in six figures every month. Back in June, Jessika boasted about her OnlyFans earnings by saying she makes more money than the average businessman does. Sharing a satisfied selfie to Instagram, Jessika wrote: 'Sitting on a train down to London surrounded by men in business suits knowing full well I make the most money from capitalising on my reality TV fame.' Outside of OnlyFans, Jessika earns money through endorsement deals and sponsored social media posts. In early 2019, she had fat removed from 'problem areas' on her thighs and transferred to her breasts, taking her from a small C-cup to a large D-cup Bluey has become the target of Anime trolls who have set out to review bomb the beloved Australia children's show. The show's executive producer Daley Pearson recently shared a tweet celebrating Bluey's popularity. Posting a screenshot from the IMDb website, Pearson said an episode of the wildly popular program had been ranked by fans on the platform as the No.2 show of all time. Bluey has become the target of anime trolls who have set out to review bomb the beloved Australia children's show An episode of Breaking Bad held the top spot. The Bluey episode, called 'Sleepytime', was awarded the highest score possible by users, a star rating of 10 out of 10. But three days after Pearson's tweet, the show plunged to No.17 in the ratings, with many users giving the episode only one star. Meanwhile, episodes from Anime series like Attack on Titan and Code Geass surged into the top ranks of the IMDb's most popular episodes. The show's executive producer Daley Pearson recently shared a tweet celebrating Bluey's popularity The Bluey episode, called 'Sleepytime', was awarded the highest score possible by users, a star rating of 10 out of 10, but three days after Pearson's tweet, the show had plunged to No.17 in the ratings, with many users giving the episode only one-star Fans speculated that Pearson's Twitter thread caused Bluey to fall victim to trolls. 'Since this tweet went out some people went and messed up the user score,' wrote one irate fan under Pearson's story. The controversy has created a storm on social media site Reddit, which openly speculated that Anime fans are responsible for reviewing bombing the show. 'Its a badge of honour really,' said one user. 'Anything starts to get haters once it gets enough elevation.' They continued: 'The fact that its getting review bombed, the silly recent attacking articles - all just testament to how good this show is that its hit that level. And that its a kids show makes this all more amazing.' The controversy has created a storm on social media site Reddit, which openly speculates that Anime fans are responsible for reviewing bombing Bluey Bluey follows the adventures of 'a loveable, inexhaustible six-year-old Blue Heeler dog' along with her family and friends. The much-loved 'Sleepytime' episode won a Kids Emmy in 2019 and involves characters Bingo and Floppy in an intergalactic adventure. Launched in 2018 on the ABC, Bluey was soon hailed for its refreshing characters - particularly Bandit as a capable and astute father as opposed to a bumbling background character common in kids' programming. It also earned rave reviews from critics and parents alike, who applauded its good-natured storylines and riffs on modern parenting. The cartoon has become wildly popular in the U.S. after premiering on the Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney+ in September 2019. Last year, The New York Times described the show as 'the biggest Australian export since The Wiggles' - the country's most famous children's band. Kyle Sandilands is looking to ramp up his sex life with the help of an expert. During Thursday morning's Kyle & Jackie O Show, the 51-year-old radio host discussed the idea of building a sex room in his newly purchased home with fiancee Tegan Kynaston, which is currently under renovation. The room is set to be situated behind a 'secret door' linked to the home library. Mr Sandilands will see you now! Radio host Kyle has revealed plans to build a secret sex room in his new mansion with fiancee Tegan Kynaston Kyle and his co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson talked about the room after both watching the new Netflix series How to Build a Sex Room, a show which features luxury interior designer Melanie Rose as she creates 'sex rooms' for couples looking for more excitement in the bedroom. Kyle was taken by surprise when Jackie revealed she had invited Melanie on the radio show to discuss building a sex room. 'If you were to do a sex room, let's build it now,' Jackie said to Kyle. The conversation began quite tame as Melanie asked the former Australian Idol judge about how much space he has. 'About four-car-garage-space. Double height and you could fit four cars in there, he said. 'Melanie's worked with some s****y rooms, this is a good room,' Jackie added. 'We can really go hell for leather here.' Kyle also noted that the room would need to be sound proof, as he is expecting his first child with Tegan , 37, and doesn't want to have to hear the newborn crying while he's 'smashing his missus'. The KIIS FM host has spent a cool $3 million on a mansion in Glenorie, a rural suburb of Sydney around 44kms from the city centre When Melanie asked what kind of 'adult toys' he brings into the bedroom, Kyle appeared squeamish when responding. 'Um,' he replied as Jackie began to laugh. 'There's a couple of dildos,' the father-to-be added. 'But we don't use them very often.' 'Why not?' the designer asked. The house sits on 9580sqm of acreage and adjoining bushland, and is quite spacious, with five bathrooms in addition to the generous number of bedrooms According to the original listing, the mansion also has 'grand living areas with high ceilings' and a 'huge eat-in kitchen with plenty of storage' 'Well, because I'm a man's man and I like the meat to do all the work,' he responded. 'Every now and then if I'm not performing well, I'll throw her the old battery thing and... "there you go sweetie."' The group then tried to 'broaden' Kyle's ideas and talked about what kind of 'apparatus' would work for him, as well as whether or not he was into roleplaying like BDSM. 'I don't like the hitting and paddles and whips. I'm not into that,' he said, before explaining that he used to get 'flogged' by his step father. The eight bedroom home will be transformed into a 'Hamptons-style family home' 'It triggers me,' the former Big Brother host explained. Kyle then said he wasn't into 'sensual play' either. 'Am I missing out on something?' he asked, to which Melanie answered, 'You might be missing out on quite a lot actually!' He also discussed the colour scheme of the room, as well as tossed around the idea or Kyle doing 'boudoir photography' with Tegan. 'I'd rather me in a tuxedo with the old fella hanging out. Would that work?' he asked. 'We could do that as well,' Melanie responded. 'But would you be semi-erect?' Jackie burst out laughing as Kyle joked: 'Well, you'd definitely give it a slap around. You wouldn't want the "asleep turtle" on display.' Jackie then pointed out that the only thing that her co-host had actually said yes to having in the sex room was a picture of himself, adding that Kyle has probably been Melanie's most difficult client to work with. 'Maybe you want a full-length mirror so you can watch yourself,' Melanie added. Other options for the room included a spanking bench, a St. Andrews Cross and an inversion table. Other options for the room included a spanking bench, a St. Andrews Cross (pictured) and an inversion table 'I reckon you might like that,' Jackie said to Kyle. 'I'll take a golden inversion table with with black leather accents,' Kyle said. 'What about a Tantra Chair?' Melanie asked, before explaining the love chair that is designed enhance sex life while also blending into the aesthetic of a home. 'What about a Tantra Chair?' Melanie asked. Pictured: A Tantra love chair 'It's got an ergonomic curve so that you can actually lie down and relax and then have your wife positioned on top of you,' she added. 'Okay, I'll take that,' Kyle replied. 'Throw in one of those.' Concluding their chat, the radio presenter said he wouldn't turn down the offer of building a sex room in his new home, saying that he'd ask his fiancee for her opinion. 'Maybe I'm not satisfying her,' he said. 'Maybe she wants to be tickled and strapped up.' 'You should put it on offer at least,' Jackie added. Last month, Kyle dropped $3 million on an eight bedroom Sydney mansion, which he plans to turn into 'Hamptons-style' home with Tegan ahead of the birth of their son. Kyle is making big moves with his pregnant fiancee Tegan ahead of the birth of their first child. Both pictured Tegan is due to give birth to her first child with fiance Kyle next week The rural home is ten minutes from Glenorie Village and was previously rented out at $1200 per week. Kyle and Tegan are currently living at a rented home in Sydney's upmarket Bellevue Hill. Meanwhile, Tegan is due to give birth to their son - who they've already named Otto - next week. The high-profile couple got engaged in Port Douglas last year, before announcing in February that they were expecting a baby. Married At First Sight bride Susie Bradley was left fearing for life on Wednesday after her car broke down in a 'middle of nowhere' area of rural Queensland. The cosmetic nurse let her imagination run wild after finding herself alone and stranded following her split with NRL bad boy, Todd Carney. The 29-year-old posted a gallery of scary videos on Instagram of her undergoing a frightening walk to the nearest service station. Married At First Sight bride Susie Bradley (pictured) was left fearing for life on Wednesday after her car broke down in a 'middle of nowhere' area of rural Queensland A frazzled-looking Susie vented to her followers, 'I have watched way too many horror movies and totally thought this was my demise.' The mother- of-two solemnly added: 'If I die, tell my babies I love them.' Fortunately her ordeal had a happy ending as she later posted a cute selfie from the comfort of her bedroom where she reassured worried fans, 'I'm okay everyone.' The 29-year-old posted a gallery of scary videos on Instagram of her undergoing a frightening walk to the nearest service station Susie rose to fame on the fifth season of Married At First Sight, which aired in 2019. The series partnered her with barista Billy Vincent, but they split before their final vows. She later hooked up with NRL star Todd, but they called off their engagement in June after three years together, prompting Susie to say she was done with dating. Fortunately her ordeal had a happy ending as she later posted a cute selfie from the comfort of her bedroom where she reassured worried fans The pair began dating in 2019, with Todd stepping into the role of stepfather to Susie's eight-year-old daughter, Baby, and they welcomed their first child, a boy named Lion Daryl, in April last year. The reality star launched her own beauty business, 'Injectables by Susie Pearl' in May 2019, and regularly celebrates her business success on social media. 'Injectables by Susie Pearl has only gone from strength to strength, and I plan to do everything I can to continue that moving forward!' she wrote on Instagram. Sebastian Stan played a heartbreaking scene for his upcoming movie A Different Man in New York City this week. The 39-year-old heartthrob plays a man with the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis, which results in tumors developing on the sufferer's nerves. In the scene he shot this week, Sebastian's character is thrown to the ground by a cruel thug who then whips out his phone and takes a picture. Violence: Sebastian Stan played a heartbreaking scene for his upcoming movie A Different Man in New York City this week Over the course of the movie the character reportedly has reconstructive surgery to turn back the disfiguring effect that his condition has had on his face. The scene being filmed this week apparently occurs after the surgery, as Sebastian's normal face was in full view, unobscured by any makeup or prosthetics. Sebastian could be glimpsed clutching at his knee and keeping a hold of his briefcase as he crumpled onto the sidewalk. His costume that day included a floral top over black trousers, plus an attractive brown leather jacket that matched his shoes. Tough time: In the scene he shot this week, Sebastian's character is thrown to the ground by a cruel thug who then whips out his phone and takes a picture Premise: The 39-year-old heartthrob plays a man with the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis, which results in tumors on the sufferer's nerves Details: Over the course of the movie the character reportedly has reconstructive surgery to turn back the disfiguring effect that his condition has had on his face Plot point: The scene being filmed this week apparently occurs after the surgery, as Sebastian's normal face was in full view, unobscured by any makeup or prosthetics The fall: Sebastian could be glimpsed clutching at his knee and at other times keeping a hold of his briefcase as he crumpled onto the sidewalk The look: His costume that day included a floral top over black trousers, plus an attractive brown leather jacket that matched his shoes During the movie, Sebastian's character purportedly becomes the subject of a play after he undergoes the facial surgery. He is then said to develop a fixation on the actor who portrays him onstage, according to a report in the Independent. In other scenes, Sebastian has been pictured with his face covered in heavy prosthetics showing the severe effects of neurofibromatosis on his character. Storyline: During the movie, Sebastian's character purportedly becomes the subject of a play after he undergoes the facial surgery Ideas: He is then said to develop a fixation on the actor who portrays him onstage, according to a report in the Independent He has posted to Instagram revealing his character's pre-op face was the work of makeup artist Mike Marino. Movie fans could catch a glimpse of Mike's recent work in starrer The Batman, where he was responsible for Colin Farrell's look as the Penguin. A Different Man is written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, who has previously worked with the actor Adam Pearson, himself a neurofibromatosis type one sufferer. Details: A Different Man is written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, who has previously worked with the actor Adam Pearson, himself a neurofibromatosis type one sufferer Laughs: The filmmaker has a locked Instagram page whose bio jokes: 'It would mean a lot to me to accept your friend request and then introduce you to Sebastian' Smack: Adam is also appearing in A Different Man, possibly as the actor who portrays Sebastian's character in the stage play What a cast: The cast includes Renate Reinsve, who shot to international acclaim last year in the Norwegian movie The Worst Person In The World The filmmaker has a locked Instagram page whose bio jokes: 'It would mean a lot to me to accept your friend request and then introduce you to Sebastian.' Adam is also appearing in A Different Man, possibly as the actor who portrays Sebastian's character in the stage play. The cast includes Renate Reinsve, who shot to international acclaim last year in the Norwegian movie The Worst Person In The World. Aussie model Lara Worthington has been announced as an ambassador for the skincare brand, Emma Lewisham. The 35-year-old Cronulla-born beauty stars in a new campaign for the brand, promoting the new Supernatural Sleeping Mask which retails for $121. Lara looks nothing short of stunning in the shots as she shows off her natural beauty going makeup free. Lara Worthington, 35, shows off her flawless complexion going makeup free in a new campaign - as she's announced as an ambassador for skincare brand Emma Lewisham She also puts the sleeping mask on her face in some playful images. Lara sits in an all-black outfit as she poses and shows off deep tan in the images, with her blonde locks pulled back and off her face. The mask is an at-home treatment that is said to hydrate skin and boost collagen. The 35-year-old Cronulla-born beauty stars in a new campaign for the brand, promoting the new Supernatural Sleeping Mask which retails for $121 She also puts the sleeping mask on her face in some playful images 'While you sleep, 22 active ingredients work to powerfully rejuvenate the skin - regenerating collagen, stimulating cell turnover, removing toxins and repairing the skin barrier for visibly brighter, plumper, firmer and deeply nourished skin by morning,' a product description reads. Lara shared one of the campaign images on Instagram and captioned it: 'This is my new favourite bedtime activity: Emma Lewisham's Supernatural Sleeping Mask.' 'Proud to begin as the first official face of Emma Lewisham... your beauty sleep awaits you.' Lara shared one of the campaign images on Instagram and captioned it: 'This is my new favourite bedtime activity: Emma Lewisham's Supernatural Sleeping Mask' Lara is no stranger to skincare and beauty, having her own line, The Base by Lara Bingle which is a not-for-profit cream makeup product. The blonde bombshell previously revealed some of her beauty secrets and her favourite go-to products. In an interview with Mecca, the model said she 'never leaves the house' without a spritz of Tom Ford's $480 Lost Cherry fragrance. She also loves to wear a red lip when going out and loves makeup from Tom Ford. Elsa Pataky enjoyed a shopping trip with her sons Tristan and Sasha in Byron Bay on Wednesday. The Spanish actress, 46, looked stylish in loose beige pants and a matching coloured cardigan as she visited a local bookshop with her eight-year-old twin boys. The Interceptor star completed her look with a brown shirt and a pair of comfortable white sneakers. Elsa Pataky looked stylish in loose pants and a cardigan as she took her twin sons Tristan and Sasha to a bookshop in Byron Bay on Wednesday The Interceptor star completed her look with a brown shirt and a pair of comfortable white sneakers Elsa left her long blonde hair out and let her natural beauty shine by going makeup free for the outing. The actress' two boys appeared excited as they held several books after they visited the book store. The trio were then spotted enjoying a meal from a nearby cafe. Elsa left her long blonde hair out and let her natural beauty shine by going makeup free for the outing The actress' two boys appeared excited as they held several books after they visited the book store They were even spotted sitting on the foot path and reading their new books Elsa lives with her husband Chris Hemsworth and their three children, daughter India, nine, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan near Byron Bay, NSW. Chris and Elsa met in early 2010 and married in December that year. They reside in a $30million mansion in Broken Head, near the celebrity enclave of Byron Bay. The trio were then spotted enjoying a meal from a nearby cafe Elsa lives with her husband Chris Hemsworth and their three children, daughter India, nine, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan near Byron Bay, NSW They spent years renovating their home, which sits on 4.2 hectares of land, with the help of Sydney-based MCK Architects - but the development faced some resistance from locals, who compared it to a multi-storey car park or shopping centre. Elsa, who previously lived in Los Angeles with Chris and their three children, said she enjoys the more laid-back lifestyle Down Under. 'We did the move three years ago and I'm so happy with it,' she revealed to Women's Health in April 2017. They reside in a $30million mansion in Broken Head, near the celebrity enclave of Byron Bay Emily Ratajkowski's husband Sebastian Bear-McClard is reportedly hoping for another chance to save his marriage. The model, 31, and the movie producer, 41, were rumored to have split last month, with Ratajkowski planning to file for divorce following allegations that he had cheated. 'Sebastian is begging her to give him another chance,' a source close to the star told Page Six, adding that she isn't interested: 'That's not going to happen because she did her own digging and discovered even more s**t he did behind her back.' One more chance: Emily Ratajkowski's husband Sebastian Bear-McClard is reportedly 'begging her to give him another chance' following cheating allegations; Pictured 2020 Though the beauty - who shares one-year-old son, Sylvester Apollo Bear with Sebastian - hasn't hired an attorney yet, the publication claims that she is planning to file for divorce. And the couple's friends are allegedly sad to see the demise of the marriage. 'All of their friends loved watching them in the papers and in the headlines,' a source revealed, adding, 'I don't know what the truth is about Sebastian's behavior, and I'm not defending him, but I know they're both reeling. It's so sad.' Nope! The model, 32, is said to be not interested: 'That's not going to happen because she did her own digging and discovered even more s**t he did behind her back' 'Everyone was really excited for them, they got married so fast, but they made sense,' the insider added. 'I think people didn't think Sebastian was good enough for Emily, but she understood [him]. She's the ultimate woman, he's a hunky man and they're both really smart.' Last month a source claimed to Page Six that the Good Time producer cheated: 'Yeah, he cheated. He's a serial cheater. It's gross. He's a dog,' the source said. Ratajkowski seemed to affirm that was the case as she 'liked' multiple tweets discussing the split as well as his alleged cheating. Over it: Though the beauty hasn't hired an attorney yet, the publication reports that she is planning to file for divorce; Pictured on May 9 Ratajkowski sparked breakup rumors in July, when she was seen out and about without her wedding ring on multiple occasions. She was recently seen out on Monday, taking a stroll with their son and once again not wearing her ring. Meanwhile Bear-McClard was seen still wearing his gold band on his finger that same day, as he hit the Dogpound gym for a grueling workout. Sad: Ratajkowski seemed to affirm that was the case as she 'liked' multiple tweets discussing the split Telling: Emily also chose to like a tweet which specifically mentioned her estranged partner's alleged infidelity Emily did not post any public Father's Day wishes to her husband of four years last month, though she did mark their fourth wedding anniversary on Instagram in February, with various throwback photos. The Inamorata founder and Sebastian were married during a civil ceremony in New York City on February 23, 2018, with just a few friends as witnesses. Two and half years later the couple announced they were expecting a baby. They welcomed their son into the world on March 8, 2021. Bear-McClard is best known for producing several films directed by the brothers Benny and Josh Safdie, including Heaven Knows What, the Robert Pattinsonstarring crime film Good Time and Adam Sandler's critically acclaimed thriller Uncut Gems. Gone quiet: It comes after the star marked their fourth wedding anniversary on Instagram in February Emily and Sebastian were last spotted together mid-June while on vacation in Italy, and appeared in good spirits as they relaxed on Porto Ercole beach together. The couple was also among the many celebrity guests at Ari Emanuel's wedding to Sarah Staudinger in St. Tropez in late May. All seemed well with the pair on Monday, May 23, when they were spotted touching down in Nice ahead of the Cannes Film Festival. Ratajkowski even lovingly adjusted Sebastian's sunglasses while at the airport. Neither Emily nor her husband have made any public comments in regards to the status of their marriage as of yet. Baby boy: The couple welcomed their son Sylvester Apollo Bear, one, into the world on March 8, 2021 The Islanders were forced to vote off two of their own on Wednesday's episode of Love Island USA, ultimately choosing Bria Bryant and Andy Voyen. Host Sarah Hyland made a surprise appearance during Tuesday's episode, revealing the two couples with the least amount of votes were up for elimination. Hyland told the boys and girls to split into their groups, deciding which boy and girl to eliminate, ultimately choosing Bryant and Voyen... just before a trio of new Islanders arrived. Voted off: The Islanders were forced to vote off two of their own on Wednesday's episode of Love Island USA, ultimately choosing Bria Bryant and Andy Voyen New Islanders: Hyland told the boys and girls to split into their groups, deciding which boy and girl to eliminate, ultimately choosing Bryant and Voyen... just before a trio of new Islanders arrived Two couples - now-exes Bria Bryant, 24 of Clifton, New Jersey, and Timmy Pandolfini, 29 of New York City and 26-year-old Texas native Mady McLanahan and 23-year-old Minneapolis, Minnesota native Andy Voyen - were up for elimination. During Tuesday's episode, Timmy got back with his ex, Zeta Morisson, 29, of Surrey, United Kingdom, while Bria seemed to be starting something with Zeta's ex, Jeff Christian Jr., 25 of Cincinnati, though the votes didn't reflect the new coupling and threatened to split them all up. Sarah said one couple would leave the villa tonight and that the decision would be down to their fellow Islanders and not the public, the results of which will be revealed on Wednesday's episode. Sarah said: Sarah said one couple would leave the villa tonight and that the decision would be down to their fellow Islanders and not the public, the results of which will be revealed on Wednesday's episode Hyland asked the guys and girls to sit together in groups, tasking them to decide which to save - Timmy or Andy for the guys or Mady or Bria for the girls. The groups each started their deliberations, with the guys saying that Timmy and Zeta definitely have a 'strong connection' and they don't want to break that up. Sarah says it's time for the groups to make their decisions as she turns to the guys first. Girls: Hyland asked the guys and girls to sit together in groups, tasking them to decide which to save - Timmy or Andy for the guys or Mady or Bria for the girls Guys: The groups each started their deliberations, with the guys saying that Timmy and Zeta definitely have a 'strong connection' and they don't want to break that up Jesse Bray, 27, of Springfield, Ohio, stands up and says, 'By far, this decision was not easy, not easy at all, but this boy genuinely has a heart of gold.' 'The boy we're going to save is Timmy,' Jesse says, as Andy is eliminated as Zaya flashes Timmy a smile and he goes to join the group. Sarah asks the girls who they want to save, as Deborah 'Deb' Chubb, 26, of Dallas, stands up for the group. Not easy: Jesse Bray, 27, of Springfield, Ohio, stands up and says, 'By far, this decision was not easy, not easy at all, but this boy genuinely has a heart of gold' Timmy saved: 'The boy we're going to save is Timmy,' Jesse says, as Andy (left) is eliminated as Zaya flashes Timmy a smile and he goes to join the group. Deb: Sarah asks the girls who they want to save, as Deborah 'Deb' Chubb, 26, of Dallas, stands up for the group 'This was a very difficult decision but we have decided to save this girl because we believe she truly deserves a fair shot at love,' Deb says. 'This has been an extremely difficult decision and it is not easy to send a girl home. The girl we want to save is Mady,' Deb says, as Mady and Bria hug. The eliminated Andy smiles at Mady, as Sarah tells Bria and Andy that their time on Love Island is over, teasing that they will see the rest 'very soon.' Fair shot: 'This was a very difficult decision but we have decided to save this girl because we believe she truly deserves a fair shot at love,' Deb says Hug: 'This has been an extremely difficult decision and it is not easy to send a girl home. The girl we want to save is Mady,' Deb says, as Mady and Bria hug. Everyone says their goodbyes, as Timmy tells Bria he hates to see her go, as Bria hugs her brother Chazz, 21, saying she's 'so proud of you.' Chazz says in confession that he's, 'definitely feeling all the feels' and that it 'sucks she has to end her journey so soon.' Andy and Mady hug last, as Andy says she 'deserves the best' and Mady says he is 'the best person I've ever met. Proud: Everyone says their goodbyes, as Timmy tells Bria he hates to see her go, as Bria hugs her brother Chazz, 21, saying she's 'so proud of you' Best: Andy and Mady hug last, as Andy says she 'deserves the best' and Mady says he is 'the best person I've ever met She adds in confession that she, 'hasn't felt that strongly about someone in so long and the 'hardest part is I was finally starting to let my walls down and I haven't done that with someone in a really long time.' Bria hugs her ex Jeff, who says in confession he wished he had more time to grow a connection with Bria. Andy chats with Isaiah inside the house, with Isaiah adding in confession that they had their 'ups and downs' but he 'can't hold grudges on people' and he didn't want to see him go home. Walls: She adds in confession that she, 'hasn't felt that strongly about someone in so long and the 'hardest part is I was finally starting to let my walls down and I haven't done that with someone in a really long time' Jeff and Bria: Bria hugs her ex Jeff, who says in confession he wished he had more time to grow a connection with Bria Andy says he's excited to watch them all before he and Bria left the house together. 'I still feel there was unfinished business for me at the villa. I feel like I left too soon,' Bria says in confession. She thinks the connection between her and Timmy might have 'worked differently' but she didn't have any regrets. Together: Andy says he's excited to watch them all before he and Bria left the house together Unfinished: 'I still feel there was unfinished business for me at the villa. I feel like I left too soon,' Bria says in confession Andy said he was 'sad' to be leaving and he wasn't expecting it, adding he could have 'definitely had a true relationship outside the villa' with Mady. 'I'm gonna really miss her and I'll be waiting on the outside, and if she wants to re-connect, I'll be here,' Andy adds. Mady has a drink with Deb, with Mady saying she had a 'gut feeling that would happen. Waiting: 'I'm gonna really miss her and I'll be waiting on the outside, and if she wants to re-connect, I'll be here,' Andy adds Gut feeling: Mady has a drink with Deb, with Mady saying she had a 'gut feeling that would happen 'It's like he felt like home, you know,' Mady says, adding, 'God it sucks,' as they both hug while Mady says she's scared to like someone new. 'This is why I have a hard time opening up to people and telling them how I feel because something ruins it,' Mady says. 'That's why it's so hard for me to tell people how I feel because I don't want to jinx it,' Mady tells Deb. Sucks: 'It's like he felt like home, you know,' Mady says, adding, 'God it sucks,' as they both hug while Mady says she's scared to like someone new Hard time: This is why I have a hard time opening up to people and telling them how I feel because something ruins it, Mady says Mady says in confession she thought Andy was 'her chance' to have someone and she 'can't catch a break.' Zeta has a chat with Timmy, asking how he felt about being in the bottom two, and he said he didn't think about that. 'I just knew I wasn't with you so anything could happen. I'm very grateful for more opportunities to make you feel special and you're the only girl that matters,' Timmy says. Chat: Mady says in confession she thought Andy was 'her chance' to have someone and she 'can't catch a break' He adds in confession that he's grateful that the 'homies looked out for me' and he will 'cherish these moments moving forward.' Timmy asks to sleep on the day bed with her as they share a kiss, while Zeta adds in confession that he makes her 'so happy.' 'I don't know what this experience would be like without him. It certainly wouldn't be as amazing as it feels right now,' Zeta says as they keep kissing. Grateful: He adds in confession that he's grateful that the 'homies looked out for me' and he will 'cherish these moments moving forward' Kiss: 'I don't know what this experience would be like without him. It certainly wouldn't be as amazing as it feels right now,' Zeta says as they keep kissing Chazz speaks with his girl, Sereniti Springs, 28, of Clovis, California, saying it was 'definitely rough' to see his sister Bria leave. 'Yeah I think you handled yourself very well and it was very attractive to see how you handled yourself with your sister,' Sereniti adds. 'I love that they see something great between us,' she says of the public vote and Chazz says 'that's good enough for me.' Chazz and Sereniti: Chazz speaks with his girl, Sereniti Springs, 28, of Clovis, California, saying it was 'definitely rough' to see his sister Bria leave Very well: 'Yeah I think you handled yourself very well and it was very attractive to see how you handled yourself with your sister,' Sereniti adds Good enough: 'I love that they see something great between us,' she says of the public vote and Chazz says 'that's good enough for me' Sereniti says in confession that she sees potential but there is 'always room for growth' and she hopes they can solve their issues together. Mady keeps crying in their room as the other girls like Zeta are there to support her as everyone gets ready for bed. Mady is in bed alone as Jeff says she'll find a good man one day and she deserves that as they show shots of everyone sleeping. Potential: Sereniti says in confession that she sees potential but there is 'always room for growth' and she hopes they can solve their issues together Crying: Mady keeps crying in their room as the other girls like Zeta are there to support her as everyone gets ready for bed The next morning arrives as Sydney Paight, 22, of Houston makes coffee for her boyfriend, Isaiah Campbell, 21, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They are all getting along with their days, discussing dance styles and what their children will do when they grow up, when Mady gets a text. 'Islanders, Tonight three new arrivals will enter the Villa. They have each chosen two of you to cook them dinner #HungryForLove #Tasty,' the text reads. Sydney and Isaiah: The next morning arrives as Sydney Paight, 22, of Houston makes coffee for her boyfriend, Isaiah Campbell, 21, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota Text: 'Islanders, Tonight three new arrivals will enter the Villa. They have each chosen two of you to cook them dinner #HungryForLove #Tasty,' the text reads Deb wonders if the arrivals are 'girls are boys' as the viewers get the first look at the new arrivals before the Islanders do. The first is Jared, who says he is 'bringing emotional intelligence to the Villa' and adds that, 'there is a lot of boys out there and I'm a man.' The next is Nadjha, who, 'wants a man to like throw me around and be just a manly man in the bed,' while the last is Kat, who has 'a very clear type' adding 'right now Isaiah is the top option.' New arrivals: Deb wonders if the arrivals are 'girls are boys' as the viewers get the first look at the new arrivals before the Islanders do They are all seen arriving at the villa, which comes just hours after Isaiah himself made it explicitly clear to Sydney that he has no interest in any other girls. Meanwhile, Isaiah gets a text, which reads, 'Isaiah, Katherine has selected you to prepare her entree.' Isaiah gives his girlfriend Sydney a hug, as she can only awkwardly respond, 'Have fun' as he can be heard mumbling, 'This sucks.' Text: Meanwhile, Isaiah gets a text, which reads, 'Isaiah, Katherine has selected you to prepare her entree' Chazz gets the next text, as Sereniti shakes her head and says, 'You don't need to check your phone baby.' The text reads, 'Chazz, Katherine has selected you to prepare her dessert,' as Sereniti immediately says, 'We've got popsicles in the freezer. She adds in confession, 'Chazz is a hot commodity. I am very spoiled because he does cook very well and ladies want what I got.' Chazz text: The text reads, 'Chazz, Katherine has selected you to prepare her dessert,' as Sereniti immediately says, 'We've got popsicles in the freezer The next text goes to Mady, causing them all to cheer, as the text reads, 'Mady, Jared has selected you to prepare his entree.' They all clap as she jokes, 'The entree is me,' while adding in confession, 'I feel excited, definitely what I needed today. I was feeling a little bit down but it's gonna be scary letting my guard down.' Deb gets the next text, as they all joke that Jared 'has a type' since he texted the two blonde women in the villa. Mady: The next text goes to Mady, causing them all to cheer, as the text reads, 'Mady, Jared has selected you to prepare his entree' 'Deb, Jared has selected you to prepare his dessert,' the text reads, as Deb says, 'Aww s**t,' with her man Jesse standing behind her. Deb adds in confession that she thinks she can do dessert, adding she's not the best at following directions, but she will, 'put on my thinking pants and I'm really gonna give it my all.' Jeff gets a text that reads, 'Jeff, Nadjha has selected you to prepare her entree, while Isaiah gets a text reading, 'Isaiah, Nadjha has selected you to prepare her dessert.' Deb text: 'Deb, Jared has selected you to prepare his dessert,' the text reads, as Deb says, 'Aww s**t,' with her man Jesse standing behind her Confession: Deb adds in confession that she thinks she can do dessert, adding she's not the best at following directions, but she will, 'put on my thinking pants and I'm really gonna give it my all' Double text: Jeff gets a text that reads, 'Jeff, Nadjha has selected you to prepare her entree, while Isaiah gets a text reading, 'Isaiah, Nadjha has selected you to prepare her dessert' 'Honestly, my emotions are all over the place. I mean, being picked twice is definitely a good feeling. I don't know. I definitely can't say I'm not nervous for it, because I am nervous. Sydney's definitely gonna be in the back of my f***ing mind the whole time,' Isaiah says in confession. Sydney is seen saying, 'You better stretch if you wanna reach,' adding in confession she is 'not happy' about this. 'Worst case scenario is them snatching him away from me. That would f***ing suck,' Sydney says in confession. Emotions: 'Honestly, my emotions are all over the place. I mean, being picked twice is definitely a good feeling. I don't know. I definitely can't say I'm not nervous for it, because I am nervous. Sydney's definitely gonna be in the back of my f***ing mind the whole time,' Isaiah says in confession Stretch: Sydney is seen saying, 'You better stretch if you wanna reach,' adding in confession she is 'not happy' about this Suck: 'Worst case scenario is them snatching him away from me. That would f***ing suck,' Sydney says in confession Jeff says in confession that it's a 'blessing' and as soon as she sees him, she'll, 'fall in love instantly.' Sereniti tells Chazz that she expected Chazz to get chosen but he's not worried and says she shouldn't be worried either. Chazz says in confession that he, 'definitely did want a new girl to come and apply some pressure on Sereniti's side.' Blessing: Jeff says in confession that it's a 'blessing' and as soon as she sees him, she'll, 'fall in love instantly' Expected: Sereniti tells Chazz that she expected Chazz to get chosen but he's not worried and says she shouldn't be worried either Sereniti says in confession she doesn't want to be 'blindsided' so she's keeping herself on her toes, adding she's expecting some 'fire to come through the door.' Sydney tells Isaiah that Timmy got coupled with Bria because, 'he gave her signs to get coupled with her,' and Isaiah says he knows. 'I just hope they don't snatch you from me,' Sydney says, adding, 'Me not liking this,' before they kiss, adding in confession she knows this was coming. Blindsided: Sereniti says in confession she doesn't want to be 'blindsided' so she's keeping herself on her toes, adding she's expecting some 'fire to come through the door' Signs: Sydney tells Isaiah that Timmy got coupled with Bria because, 'he gave her signs to get coupled with her,' and Isaiah says he knows She jokes that she hopes he burns dinner, dessert and 'the kitchen burns down and they need to evacuate.' Sydney goes to chat with the rest of the girls, saying she needs to 'wear something f***ing hot' as they all laugh. On the boys side, Jesse asks how he's feeling about having two dates, as he responds that he's 'blessed to see some beautiful women, but it's also like, you know, if I show any interest, bro, I'm pitched.' Feeling: On the boys side, Jesse asks how he's feeling about having two dates, as he responds that he's 'blessed to see some beautiful women, but it's also like, you know, if I show any interest, bro, I'm pitched' Jesse adds that Sydney is a 'jealous girl' and Isaiah says he should be 'jubilant as f**k' but at the same time he shouldn't. The boys and girls all get ready for the night, as Sydney says this night 'cuts deeper cause of hideaway,' referring to her and Isaiah spending the night in the private hideaway. They all start preparing their meals as Jeff says he's preparing Nadjha his 'specialty,' as Mady says she can cook her ground beef in a pot of skillet. Specialty: They all start preparing their meals as Jeff says he's preparing Nadjha his 'specialty,' as Mady says she can cook her ground beef in a pot of skillet Mady says in confession that personality is very important for her, while Deb is worried because she burned the bottoms of whatever she was cooking. The new arrivals reveal a bit more about themselves, with Nadjha saying she is 23 years old and she is 'coming to Love Island 'cause I am trying to find love.' Kat reveals she is 21 years old and she knows what she wants: 'a real man.' Nadjha: The new arrivals reveal a bit more about themselves, with Nadjha saying she is 23 years old and she is 'coming to Love Island 'cause I am trying to find love. Kat: Kat reveals she is 21 years old and she knows what she wants: 'a real man' Jared says he is 23 and, 'these guys don't intimidate me because they all seem like little boys. I don't think the Villa is ready for the flow I'm about to bring.' They all arrive as they take their seats, even Sydney admitting,' They are hot.' Isaiah says in confession that it feels good to be picked and they're gonna tell him everything he wants to hear, 'but obviously the whole Sydney situation is definitely a big factor.' Jared: Jared says he is 23 and, 'these guys don't intimidate me because they all seem like little boys. I don't think the Villa is ready for the flow I'm about to bring' Good: Isaiah says in confession that it feels good to be picked and they're gonna tell him everything he wants to hear, 'but obviously the whole Sydney situation is definitely a big factor' Isaiah delivers his meal to Kat, who is impressed that he made the meal himself before introducing herself. Isaiah tells her she's gorgeous while Mady delivers his meal of tacos to Jared as they share a hug, as Jared says he loves tacos. Jeff delivers his steak meal to Nadjha, who says it's nice to meet her and Jeff says, 'It's nice to meet your a** too' adding she is 'fine as hell.' Delivered: Isaiah delivers his meal to Kat, who is impressed that he made the meal himself before introducing herself Gorgeous: Isaiah tells her she's gorgeous while Mady delivers his meal of tacos to Jared as they share a hug, as Jared says he loves tacos Fine: Jeff delivers his steak meal to Nadjha, who says it's nice to meet her and Jeff says, 'It's nice to meet your a** too' adding she is 'fine as hell' He said he wasn't expecting her to be that fine, as she asks if her name threw him off and he admitted it did. Kat reveals to Isaiah that her job involves 'mukbang' where she eats, 'copious amounts of unhealthy like very large tables worth and then I film it, but it's essentially for people who eat alone so they feel like a comfort of watching the video and they feel like they're eating with someone.' Isaiah says he has never heard of that but she says that's good because now he can learn about it. Name: He said he wasn't expecting her to be that fine, as she asks if her name threw him off and he admitted it did Kat's job: Kat reveals to Isaiah that her job involves 'mukbang' where she eats, 'copious amounts of unhealthy like very large tables worth and then I film it, but it's essentially for people who eat alone so they feel like a comfort of watching the video and they feel like they're eating with someone' Nadjha says she was born in Colombia and she moved to Atlanta when she was 5 and spent the rest of her life there. Jeff tells her he's from Cincinnati and he'll take her home to his family right now. Mady asks Jared how long he's been single for, and he says his entire life, but he's definitely been in love before. Colombia: Nadjha says she was born in Colombia and she moved to Atlanta when she was 5 and spent the rest of her life there Mady and Jared: Mady asks Jared how long he's been single for, and he says his entire life, but he's definitely been in love before Mady says she's been single for six years and Jared says he wanted to become more self-aware of what he wanted in life, 'before I included somebody else in it.' Mady says that is how she is too and she hasn't been in the best relationships in the past, as they both toast to 'independence.' Nadjha says she loved all the tattoos but she loves the sweet side, as Jeff says that's how he was raised and he can switch from being sweet to being real. Six years: Mady says she's been single for six years and Jared says he wanted to become more self-aware of what he wanted in life, 'before I included somebody else in it' Toast: Mady says that is how she is too and she hasn't been in the best relationships in the past, as they both toast to 'independence' Sweet: Nadjha says she loved all the tattoos but she loves the sweet side, as Jeff says that's how he was raised and he can switch from being sweet to being real Mady asks why Jared chose her and he thinks she has a wonderful personality, which is the 'biggest thing for me' but he also thinks she's beautiful. Kat asks Isaiah how many relationships he's been in and he says only one but it lasted three years, while Sydney can't even stand to look at them. Kat tells Isaiah that she hasn't been in a 'real relationship,' but she has been in a lot of 'situation-ships' but now she hopes she can find love in the Villa. Why: Mady asks why Jared chose her and he thinks she has a wonderful personality, which is the 'biggest thing for me' but he also thinks she's beautiful One: Kat asks Isaiah how many relationships he's been in and he says only one but it lasted three years, while Sydney can't even stand to look at them Situation: Kat tells Isaiah that she hasn't been in a 'real relationship,' but she has been in a lot of 'situation-ships' but now she hopes she can find love in the Villa Sydney says in confession, 'I mean, look at him. If for some reason he finds interest in one of these girls, I want to be the first person to know, and if I'm not, I'm gonna be pissed off.' Jared asks if Mady is happy he chose her, with Mady saying Andy left and it's been a rough 24 hours and as soon as she saw him she knew he was definitely her type. Jeff says he's definitely gonna try to scoop her up and Nadjha is very excited to meet him. Definitely: Jared asks if Mady is happy he chose her, with Mady saying Andy left and it's been a rough 24 hours and as soon as she saw him she knew he was definitely her type Scoop: Jeff says he's definitely gonna try to scoop her up and Nadjha is very excited to meet him Kat admits Isaiah is still her 'number one' choice and Isaiah says he's 'super close' with Sydney as she asks if he's comfortable getting to know other people. 'I mean, really it's just yeah yeah for sure, this is definitely a good start,' Isaiah says, as Kat says, 'Great' and she's 'feeling the vibe' and Isaiah says he is too. Sydney is still watching from the balcony, asking, 'Why is he smiling,' as Kat casually says, 'Wherever s**t goes, s**t goes,' as Isaiah smiles and says, 'S**t happens,' while Sydney starts crying and leaves the balcony while Isaiah and Kat share seductive looks as the episode comes to an end. Comfortable: Kat admits Isaiah is still her 'number one' choice and Isaiah says he's 'super close' with Sydney as she asks if he's comfortable getting to know other people Good start: 'I mean, really it's just yeah yeah for sure, this is definitely a good start,' Isaiah says, as Kat says, 'Great' and she's 'feeling the vibe' and Isaiah says he is too Jonathan Scott and Zooey Deschanel were among the stars at opening night of Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man And The Pool at Mark Taper Forum in Downtown Los Angeles. On the heels of his award-winning Broadway show The New One, which made its West Coast premiere on the Ahmanson stage, Birbiglia makes his return to Center Theatre Group with 'a tale of life, death, and a highly chlorinated YMCA pool.' Along with his one man shows, including Sleepwalk With Me (2012), the stand-up comedian, writer and actor is best known for film roles in Your Sister's Sister ( (2011), Cedar Rapids (2011) and Trainwreck (2015). Opening night: Jonathan Scott and Zooey Deschanel were among the stars at opening night of Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man And The Pool at Mark Taper Forum in Downtown Los Angeles For their night out at the theater, Scott kept it casual-cool in fitted blue jeans with an olive-green jean jacket over a white and brown patterned shirt. He also donned a pair of black boots, and had his dark hair cropped short. The Property Brothers star, 44, snuggled up next to his ladylove out front of the theater, which holds more than 700 seats. Deschanel looked lovely decked out in a full-length black dress that was cinched in at the waist with a pink belt. Sweet: The couple cozied up to one another just steps away from the theater The 500 Days Of Summer star also wore brown slip-on shoes, and styled her dark brown tresses long and flowing well past her shoulders with bangs and a center part. The couple met while filming an episode of Carpool Karaoke: The Series in August 2019, and just weeks later they were spotted out on a date in Los Angeles. Deschanel is best known for her roles in Almost Famous (2000), The Good Girl (2002), 500 Days Of Summer (2009) and the Fox sitcom New Girl (2011-2018), for which she received and Emmy Award nomination and three Golden Globe Award nominations. Most fans know Scott from the reality show Property Brothers that he stars alongside his twin brother Drew Scott, as well as a number of other spin-offs. Gal Pals: Allison Brie and Cyrina Fiallo looked eager for a night at the theater Stylish: Both ladies, who held hands during an impromptu photoshoot, went with stylish dresses and matching heels Actresses Alison Brie, 39, and Cyrina Fiallo, 30, looked eager to catch the opening performance of the show while looking fashionable in their floor-length dresses of choice. Brie, who's best known for her role on Mad Men (2007-2015), went with a brown number with a slit up one leg and matching heels. The Good Luck Charlie alum Fiallo opted for a black floral dress and platform heels. Kristen Schaal, 44, was also on hand to show her support for the show decked out in a black and white ensemble that consisted of black high-water pants with a black leather jacket over a white-patterned blouse. Unique: Kristen Schaal, 44, showed off her unique fashion sense in a black and white ensemble Fashionista: The Flight of the Conchords star wore baggy high-water pants with a black leather jacket over a white blouse and a cool cap With his unique form of comedic storytelling, Birbiglia chronicles a coming-of-middle-age story that asks the big questions: 'Why are we here? Whats next? What happens when the items at the doctors office that you thought were decorative become functional?' according to the Center Theatre Group website. The show runs at Mark Taper Forum at the Los Angeles Music Center in Downtown Los Angeles through August 28. Birbiglia, 44, opened his one man show that straddled standup comedy and theater, Sleepwalk With Me (2008), during an off-Broadway run at Bleecker Street Theater in New York City back in 2008. That material was eventually adapted into a book Sleepwalk with Me, and Other Painfully True Stories (2010) and the album Sleepwalk With Me Live (2010. The Massachusetts native would end up making his directorial debut with the film version of Sleepwalk With Me (2012), based on his one-man show which he wrote, directed, and starred in. Emmy Rossum donned a vintage 1970s costume as she threw himself into character while filming The Crowded Room in Brooklyn on Wednesday . The actress, 35, chomped on a hot dog as she shot scenes for the upcoming Apple TV+ series where she is set to play Spiderman star Tom Holland's mother - despite only being nine years older. Emmy looked gorgeous in the retro fern green co-ord, which featured a polo neck and figure hugging checked midi skirt. Hungry: Emmy Rossum, 35, sported a 70s-inspired outfit as she tucked into a hot dog on the set of The Crowded Room in Brooklyn on Wednesday with co-star Christopher Abbott The Crowded Room 'is an anthology series that will explore inspirational stories of those who have struggled with mental illness and learned to live successfully with it'. The former Shameless actress wore her dark tresses in a half up half down style as the costume department accessorised the look with silver jewellery. Slipping her feet into patent black shoes, she also carried a brown leather bag over her shoulder. A bite to eat: The actress purchased a hot dog from a cart as she got to work on set In the scenes the brunette beauty purchased a hot dog from a cart as she was joined by co-star Christopher Abbott, 36. The former Girls actor sported a handlebar moustache and a vintage grey suit for day's filming. Season one of The Crowded Room, which will be 10 episodes, is based on the life of writer and producer Akiva Goldsman as well as parts of the Daniel Keyes biography The Minds of Billy Milligan. Stylish: Emmy looked gorgeous in the retro fern green co-ord, which featured a polo neck and figure hugging checkered midi skirt Tom Holland is set to portray Danny Sullivan, a character based on Milligan, who was the first individual to be acquitted of a crime due to multiple personality disorder. Multiple Personality Disorder is a now defunct diagnosis currently known as dissociative identity disorder. According to the Cleveland Clinic, those living with DID, a mental health condition, 'have two or more separate identities.' The identities each have their own 'personal history, traits, likes and dislikes' and 'lead to gaps in memory and hallucinations (believing something is real when it isnt).' Stretch: The actress made sure to stretch between the intense scenes for the anthology Milligan was arrested in the late 1970s for three rapes on the campus of Ohio State University. His lawyers pleaded insanity, claiming that two of Milligan's alternate personalities committed the crimes. The cast also includes Emmy Rossum, who will play Danny's mother Candy, and Amanda Seyfried, who has been cast as 'a clinical psychologist faced with the most challenging case of her career.' Filming on the series began on March 31 with a release date yet to be confirmed. Talulah Riley put on a loved-up display with her beau Thomas Brodie-Sangster at Cowes Week 2022. The actress, 36, stood out from the crowd in white lacy dress that showed off her long legs. Talulah, who is the ex-wife of billionaire Elon Musk, 50, beamed while sporting a pair of navy shoes and a red beaded necklace. Smitten: Talulah Riley put on a loved-up display with her beau Thomas Brodie-Sangster at Cowes Week 2022 She wore her blonde tresses in loose waves and sported minimal makeup to let her natural beauty shine through. Meanwhile Thomas, 31, cut a dapper figure in yellow polo shirt, and beige trousers held up by a brown belt. The couple, who met on the set of Disney's Pistol, were all smiles as they cosied up to one another for photos at the event, with Talulah planting a kiss on Thomas' cheek. Stunning: The actress, 36, stood out from the crowd in white lacy dress that showed off her long legs Stylish: Talulah, who is the ex-wife of billionaire Elon Musk , 50, beamed while sporting a pair of navy shoes and a red beaded necklace Flawless: She wore her blonde tresses in loose waves and sported minimal makeup to let her natural beauty shine through Handsome: Meanwhile Thomas, 31, cut a dapper figure in yellow polo shirt, and beige trousers held up by a brown belt Getting stuck in: Since 1826 Cowes Week has played a key part in the British sporting calendar and is the worlds oldest and best known yacht racing regatta Since 1826 Cowes Week has played a key part in the British sporting calendar and is the worlds oldest and best known yacht racing regatta. Thomas is co-starring with Talulah in Danny Boyle's Sex Pistols drama, playing pop Svengali Malcolm McLaren to her fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. They began dating during filming over the summer and their relationship remained undetected until The Mail on Sunday learned that Talulah's previous romance with Matthew Rice had come to an abrupt end. Joining them at the event was a very glamorous Charlotte Hawkins, who looked stunning in a sunshine yellow dress. Hello, yellow! Joining them at the event was a very glamorous Charlotte Hawkins, who looked stunning in a sunshine yellow dress She wore her golden locks in neat curls and sported a full face of makeup, to accentuate her pretty features. Also in attendance was Victoria and Nicola Pendleton, who both looked incredible as they posed for photos. Victoria put on a leggy display in a black dress, decorated with snakes to match her serpent tattoo. While Nicola wore a white blouse which she teamed with a pair of cream trousers and navy loafers. Lizzie Cundy has compared Rebekah Vardy's new interview to Prince Andrew's car crash Newsnight appearance as she discussed the fallout from the Wagatha Christie trial. Rebekah, 40, recently gave her first interview since losing her 3million libel case against rival WAG Coleen Rooney, 36, with the TV personality becoming emotional as she claims she was 'let down' by the justice system. And addressing Rebekah's TV appearance during Thursday's Lorraine, Lizzie, 54, branded the interview a 'mistake', before slamming the mother-of-five for not 'apologising' for her alleged wrongdoings. Having her say: Lizzie Cundy has compared Rebekah Vardy's new interview to Prince Andrew's car crash Newsnight appearance as she discussed the fallout from the Wagatha Christie trial When asked by stand-in host Ranvir Singh if Rebekah's TalkTV interview was a 'mistake', Lizzie responded 'without a doubt' before comparing it to the Duke of York's now infamous interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019. During the sit down with the presenter (widely considered one of the most disastrous interviews in royal history), Prince Andrew denied he had sex with Virginia Giuffre, who said she was trafficked by Jeffery Epstein on three separate occasions, including when she was 17 - still a minor under US law. He also dismissed one of the American's claims - that he was sweating heavily as they danced at London nightclub Tramp - as factually wrong because he had a medical condition at the time which meant he did not sweat. Speaking out: Rebekah, 40, recently gave her first interview since losing her 3million libel case against rival WAG Coleen Rooney, 36, with the TV personality becoming emotional as she claims she was 'let down' by the justice system Disaster: When asked by stand-in host Ranvir Singh if Rebekah's TalkTV interview was a 'mistake', Lizzie responded 'without a doubt' before comparing it to the Duke of York's now infamous interview with Emily Maitlisin 2019 Lizzie explained: 'This is like the Prince Andrew interview. Different charges, obviously, but no one is believing.' Giving her advice to Rebekah, Lizzie went on: 'If I were Rebekah, I would have gone away, reflected, maybe apologised. Theres one thing I did notice there was no apology.' She continued: 'The judge has given a verdict. Its not like being in a players bar lounge where theres gossip. 'For court, you need your facts, you need your evidence and sadly for Rebekah there wasnt any.' During the Lorraine interview, Lizzie insisted that she attempted to stop the Wagatha Christie trial from going ahead for the sake of her pal Coleen. Opinion: Addressing Rebekah's TV appearance during Thursday's Lorraine, Lizzie, 54, branded the interview a 'mistake', before slamming the mother-of-five for not 'apologising' for her alleged wrongdoings She said: 'It didnt have to happen. I dont think it should have ever got to court and shes the one that forced it. She wanted her day here and its caused so much stress, so much upset. 'I said countless times to Coleen, I would negotiate. I said sort it out over a prosecco and a bowl of nuts. Dont go to court. Its so stressful. 'If she hadnt taken it to court, we wouldnt be talking about it today.' Rebekah recently told how she would take Coleen for a 'Caffe Nero' to discuss what happened should she bump into her in the street. Verdict: Giving her advice to Rebekah, Lizzie went on: 'If I were Rebekah, I would have gone away, reflected, maybe apologised. Theres one thing I did notice there was no apology' Drama: During the Lorraine interview, Lizzie insisted that she attempted to stop the Wagatha Christie trial from going ahead for the sake of her pal Coleen Thoughts: It didnt have to happen. I dont think it should have ever got to court and shes the one that forced it. She wanted her day here and its caused so much stress, so much upset' And giving her opinion on whether Coleen would want to talk things through with her WAG rival, Lizzie said her friend - whom she spoke to after the trial result on Friday - just wants to put the whole debacle behind her. She added: 'She's had a tough time and I think just wants to move on from it.' Looking to the future, Lizzie said of Rebekah: 'As a PR person, I would say to Rebekah: reinvent yourself, do something for waterproof phones or waterproof mascara she cried a lot in court. Dont go back to this, this is over. Try and move on.' Rebekah spoke about losing her libel case to Coleen in an extraordinary interview broadcast on TalkTV after being accused of leaking stories about her to the press. Emotional: Rebekah spoke about losing her libel case to Coleen in an extraordinary interview broadcast on TalkTV after being accused of leaking stories about her to the press She said that she withdrew from the public gaze due to the stress she felt when being abused both in the street and online, and that she felt the High Court judge, Mrs Justice Steyn, did not understand the libel case She spoke extensively about the impact that the trial, and the lead-up to it, had on her family. The mother-of-five was pregnant with her youngest daughter when Mrs Rooney first accused her of leaking stories about to The Sun in her famous 'Wagatha' post on social media ending 'It's.Rebekah Vardy's account'. Speaking to Kate McCann, Mrs Vardy said she felt as though she 'didn't even want to be here anymore', and isolated herself from the public. Tough time: She said that she withdrew from the public gaze due to the stress she felt when being abused both in the street and online, and that she felt the High Court judge, Mrs Justice Steyn, did not understand the libel case She's currently enjoying a sun-soaked Mykonos getaway. And Oti Mabuse, 31, looked incredible on Tuesday as she posed up a storm in her hotel room before heading out to enjoy the gorgeous Greek weather. The former Strictly star put on a very busty display in a spotty bikini top which she teamed with a pair of high-waisted leather shorts. 'Ready to catch some sun!': Oti Mabuse, 31, put on a very busty display in a spotty bikini top and leather shorts on a getaway in Mykonos on Tuesday Oti - who has a collaboration with Bravissimo, a lingerie retailer for women who are a D-L cup flaunted her figure as she layered the look with a flowing gold over shirt with extra large cuffs. Ready for the beach the professional dancer shielded her eyes behind oversized shades and added an extra pop of colour with a slick of pillar box red lipstick. Oti opted to wear her locks in a half up half down style as she slipped her feet into a pair of summery wedges. Golden girl: Oti flaunted her incredible figure as she layered the look with a flowing gold over shirt with extra large cuffs Fun in the sun: She opted to wear her locks in a half up half down style as she slipped her feet into a pair of summery wedges Beach body ready: She captioned the stylish snaps: 'Ready to catch some sun, Ya mas' She captioned the stylish snaps: 'Ready to catch some sun, Ya mas'. On Thursday the stunner again took to her social media as she donned a figure hugging red camo dress by Club London. The strapless frock clung to her curves as she joined friends for dinner at the swanky Scorpios restaurant before later heading to a nightclub. Curves! On Thursday, the stunner again took to her social media as she donned a figure hugging red camo dress by Club London Perfection: Strutting her stuff in clear perspex heels the television personality added extra sparkle with gold jewellery Beaming: Oti beamed as she enjoyed some downtime from her busy TV schedule Evening out: She wrote: 'Dinner and a sunset' Strutting her stuff in clear Perspex heels the television personality added extra sparkle with gold jewellery. Oti showcased her award winning moves while taking to the busy dance floor as she was cheered on by pals. She wrote: 'Dinner with the sunset'. Heidi Klum shared a video of herself dancing in a miniscule bikini on Instagram on Thursday. The German supermodel, 49, looked incredibly youthful in the two piece which had an animal print design and the tiniest briefs which tied up at the sides. The post comes after Heidi shared lots of PDA videos and pictures of herself and husband Tom Kaulitz as they celebrated their three-year anniversary, Wow! Heidi Klum posed in a miniscule bikini for a dance video on Instagram on Thursday after sharing countless videos with husband Tom Kaulitz on their three-year anniversary Heidi shared a clip of herself looking sensational in a pink bikini as she held hands with her musician love and ran into the ocean with him. She posted another a clip of herself and her husband cuddling up in bed with one another. The mother-of-four captioned it with the words: 'Ich liebe Dich uber alles', meaning: 'I love you more than anything.' Running into love: Heidi shared a clip of herself looking sensational in a pink bikini as she held hands with her musician love and ran into the ocean with him Sweet: The couple got engaged on Christmas Eve 2018 and wed February 2019 privately and held a ceremony on a yacht in Italy on August 2019 Pucker up: The couple could be seen kissing one another on the back of a boat Heidi then shared a video of herself slow dancing with Tom by the pool in Miami, writing: 'As long as it is you and I feeling like the luckiest person in the world.' Wearing the same outfits, they then shared a kiss in another post. Heidi has been in Miami for several weeks on holiday with husband Tom Kaulitz.She married Tom, the guitarist for the band Tokio Hotel, in 2019. They were first linked March 2018 and went public with their relationship two months later. Slow-dancing: She shared another intimate moment poolside Love is all you need: Lots of friends and family posted anniversary messages which Heidi reposted They got engaged on Christmas Eve 2018 and wed February 2019 privately and held a ceremony on a yacht in Italy on August 2019. She has four children: a daughter named Leni, 18, with ex flame Flavio Briatore, 72; Leni was later adopted by her second ex-husband Seal. Heidi and Seal, 59, had three children together during their marriage, which was from 2005 to 2014: Henry, 16, Johan, 15, and Lou, 12. Golden hour: The couple could be seen kissing by the water's edge Myleene Klass commanded attention on Thursday as she left the Global Radio studios in central London after her Smooth FM show. The television and radio host, 44, showed off her svelte figure in a bold green animal print shirt dress, with a belt which cinched in her waist. The brunette beauty boosted her height in a pair of chic beige heels as she strut down the street, making it her own personal catwalk. Gorgeous: Myleene Klass commanded attention on Thursday as she left the Global Radio studios in central London after her Smooth FM show Myleene carried a stylish brown handbag and accessorised with chunky gold jewellery. The star opted for a bronzed makeup palette with a nude lip and scraped her dark locks back into a bun. She shielded her eyes from the sun with a pair of oversized shades after presenting her show. Wow! The television and radio host, 44, showed off her svelte figure in a bold green animal print shirt dress, with a belt which cinched in her waist Beauty: The star opted for a bronzed makeup palette with a nude lip and scraped her dark locks back into a bun It's been all go for Myleene and her family since they returned from their holiday at the weekend. On Monday, the broadcaster shared an adorable video of her son Apollo celebrating his third birthday. Alongside the montage, she wrote on Instagram: 'Happy 3rd Birthday Apollo, our little Snoopy. We are so lucky to have you in our lives. We love you baby boy xxx.' Stylish: She shielded her eyes from the sun with a pair of oversized shades after presenting her show Myleene shares Apollo with her PR executive fiance Simon Motson, 47. The former pop star also has two older daughters, Ava, 14, and Hero, 11, from her marriage to bodyguard Graham Quinn. Simon has a boy and a girl the same ago as Ava and Hero from his first marriage. Last month, Myleene revealed she has recorded a lullaby album with her musically-gifted children. The album titled My Lullabies: Motown is a collection of 13 re-interpreted classic tracks, including Stevie Wonder's My Cherie Amour and My Girl by The Temptations. Myleene told HELLO! magazine: 'They're my girls. We're the Klass girls, that's how we see ourselves. It's been a phenomenal collaboration and I've got my own band.' The musician revealed she has also dedicated song What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted on the album to all of her 'angel babies', having previously suffered four miscarriages. David Panton was all smiles on Thursday night when he stepped out for his first public appearance following his shock split with former foreign minister, Julie Bishop. Panton allegedly dumped Ms Bishop, 66, over dinner in Sydney just weeks ago after an eight-year relationship. The co-founder of medical technology company Pantonic Health, 61, looked dashing in Sydney as he posed for photos at the launch of Mercedes-Benz's newest electric vehicle. David Panton was all smiles on Thursday night when he stepped out for his first public appearance following his shock split with former foreign minister, Julie Bishop Panton ensured all eyes were on him - wearing an impeccably tailored navy suit with a pocket square. He teamed the stylish ensemble with a crisp white shirt, designer tie, polished black shoes and a pricey watch. Panton didn't appear heartbroken after ending his romance with Ms Bishop last month. During their partnership, Ms Bishop took Mr Panton to the United Nations to meet world leaders, Buckingham Palace to hobnob with British royalty and to the White House where he met Donald and Melania Trump. The pair first stepped out publicly in 2014, and were pictured at countless celebrity events over the years including the 2018 wedding of Karl Stefanovic and Jasmine Yarbrough. The co-founder of medical technology company Pantonic Health, 61, looked dashing in Sydney as he posed for photos at the launch of Mercedes-Benz's newest electric vehicle Panton ensured all eyes were on him - wearing an impeccably tailored navy suit with a pocket square They had appeared to be going strong when they recently visited St James' Palace in London for an event honouring Prince Charles' charity. Ms Bishop was understood to have been 'blindsided' by the sudden breakdown of her relationship, sources close to the former politician said. Daily Mail Australia understands she had been finding more ways to be in Sydney with Mr Panton. He teamed the stylish ensemble with a crisp white shirt, designer tie, polished black shoes and a pricey watch Ms Bishop emerged for the first time since the split smiling happily for photos at a Perth mining conference on July 11, although insiders said she was hurting in the wake of the bust-up and was shocked at the way he'd pulled the pin so suddenly. Another source close to Ms Bishop was slightly less diplomatic about the sudden end to the affair, hinting that Mr Panton's presence in her inner circle 'divided' some of her friends and colleagues. But 'JBish', as she was referred to in Canberra, remained smitten. Panton allegedly dumped Ms Bishop, 66, over dinner in Sydney just weeks ago after an eight-year relationship 'Let's just say a there are a few who might be relieved that it's over,' said one, adding: 'His personality didn't always gel with everyone.' Mr Panton met Ms Bishop while she was in the midst of her political career, serving as Australia's Minister of Foreign Affairs. The pair maintained a long-distance relationship for years, with Ms Bishop based in Perth while he lived in Sydney. She's preparing to become a mother again when she welcomes her second daughter into the world later this year. And Romee Strijd unveiled her beautiful baby bump in all its glory as she posed completely nude to celebrate 26 weeks of pregnancy on Thursday. The Dutch model, 26, looked incredible as she snapped away while naked, saying she 'can't wait to be a family of four' with her fiance Laurens van Leeuwen, 31, and their daughter Mint, 20 months. Stunning: Romee Strijd unveiled her beautiful baby bump in all its glory as she posed completely nude to celebrate 26 weeks of pregnancy on Thursday Romee, who is currently holidaying in Mallorca with her family, swept her hair up in a bun and was sporting a full face of make-up as she pouted for the camera. The Victoria's Secret vet covered her modesty with her hand in the snap which she captioned: '26 weeks and counting'. Laurens, who is a model and consultant who co-founded the Party Pants clothing company, also featured on her Stories. The Victoria's Angel covered her modesty with her hand in the snap which she captioned: '26 weeks and counting' Aw! Romee shared a snap of her beau walking hand in hand with their daughter, who was wearing a sweet frilly outfit on a family outing Working mama! Sharing further updates from her life, Romee also posted from a recent shoot, as she showcased her bump in a black dress while little Mint sat at her feet Romee shared a snap of her beau walking hand in hand with their daughter, who was wearing a sweet frilly outfit on a family outing. Sharing further updates from her life, Romee also posted from a recent shoot, as she showcased her bump in a black dress while little Mint sat at her feet. The catwalk star also shared a funny clip of herself trying to sing while someone poured water in her mouth - a trend that's currently doing the rounds on Tik Tok. Ha! The catwalk star also shared a funny clip of herself trying to sing while someone poured water in her mouth - a trend that's currently doing the rounds on Tik Tok In two snaps Romee was seen wearing pink, after announcing she's expecting another baby girl at a gender reveal in June. The media personality wrote underneath a photo of her with Laurens and Mint: 'Boy or girl? Swipe to see.' The next snap revealed that the couple will be welcoming a little girl soon, as Laurens held a confetti cannon shooter that burst with pink smoke and paper. Baby on the way: In two snaps Romee was seen wearing pink, after announcing she's expecting another baby girl at a gender reveal in June She looked stunning as ever, in a form-hugging black dress, which she paired with a black leather jacket and white combat boots. Her long blonde tresses were parted in the middle and cascaded down her shoulders in waves. Meanwhile her other half was casual cool in a grey hoodie, white pants and grey Converse sneakers. It's a girl! Laurens was seen holding a confetti cannon shooter that burst with pink smoke and paper, while Romee held on to their daughter Mint The couple's adorable daughter sported a white top and a cream tulle skirt, and looked excited to be a big sister as she reached out for the confetti cannon. Romee's 7.5M followers were thrilled by the news, with her model friend Iskra Lawrence, 31, commenting 'Congrats [heart eye emoji] they will be the cutest eligible besties.' Socialite Paris Hilton also chimed in, writing, 'Congratulations love!' and adding two pink bow emojis. Stunning mama: The runway sensation recently shared a sultry pregnancy update, showing off her burgeoning baby bump in a set of lavender lingerie Romee recently shared a sultry pregnancy update, showing off her burgeoning baby bump in a set of lavender lingerie. The Netherlands native announced that she was expecting her second child with Laurens in late May, with an adorable photo of the trio that showed daughter Mint kissing her belly, posted to her Instagram. 'Soon we will be a family of 4. Cant wait,' she wrote in the caption, adding a teary eye emoji along with a white heart. In January of this year, Romee's parter of 12 years proposed to her during a romantic trip to the Swiss Alps. Cute: The Netherlands native announced that she was expecting her second child in late May, with an adorable photo of the trio that showed daughter Mint kissing her belly The blonde bombshell shared the happy news to her Instagram, posting a photo of her beau on one knee, as he waited for her answer. 'I said YES,' the caption underneath the photo - which showed the spectacular Switzerland mountains in the back - read. While announcing her first pregnancy in May of 2020, Romee spoke about motherhood being her 'biggest dream' amid fears about 'natural' conception following her diagnosis of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome after not getting her period for 7 years. Tammy Hembrow recently welcomed her third child, Posy Poole. And the star flaunted her incredible post-baby curves in a skimpy pink floral bikini on Instagram on Thursday. Tammy looked sensational as she slipped into the swimwear which highlighted her toned midriff and ample chest. Tammy Hembrow (pictured) flaunted her post-baby curves in a very revealing bikini on Thursday, after giving birth to her third child The Gold Coast star let followers know about her upcoming fitness retreat in Bali. 'Bali is forever one of my fave places to travel. I'm so excited to meet some of you beautiful people & spend the week soaking up the sunshine,' Tammy wrote. Tammy's post comes six weeks after she welcomed daughter Posy with her Ironman fiance Matt Poole on June 19. She's also mother to son Wolf, six, and daughter Saskia, five, from her relationship with ex-fiance Reece Hawkins. Tammy looked sensational as she slipped into the swimwear which highlighted her toned midriff and ample chest The star flaunted her incredible post-baby curves in a skimpy pink floral bikini Less than two weeks after giving birth, Tammy revealed her slim and toned post-baby body on Instagram. She explained she 'stayed as active as possible' before and during her pregnancy. Last year, Tammy made her debut on the AFR's Young Rich List which ranks the wealthiest Australians aged 40 and under. Tammy's post comes six weeks after she welcomed daughter Posy (pictured) The fitness influencer is ranked 96th with an estimated net worth of $38million. She has two fitness-related companies, Saski Collection and Tammy Fit. Tammy also boasts 13.4million followers on Instagram and 1.31million subscribers on YouTube. Georgia Love and Lee Elliot are currently enjoying their long-awaited honeymoon in Capri, Italy. And on Thursday, the former Bachelorette star, 33, and her husband packed on the PDA for their adoring Instagram followers. In a photo uploaded to the social media platform, the former reality stars are seen shamelessly canoodling in front of a breathtaking sunset. Get a room! The Bachelorette's Georgia Love packed on the PDA with husband Lee Elliot in Capri, Italy on Thursday 'When the world seems to shine like youve had too much wine - that's amore,' Georgia captioned the image. Georgia wore a flowy yellow and orange sundress as they shared a kiss, while Lee, 40, donned a colourful stripped shirt and white shorts. Lee also shared a snap showing the lovebirds leaning into one another as they sat down to share a drink with their wedding rings on display. 'Working out how to break it to Pawdrey Hepburn that were never coming home,' the plumber wrote, referring to the cat they share. Lee also shared a snap showing the lovebirds leaning into one another as they sat down to share a drink with their wedding rings on display The couple, who tied the knot early last year, began their honeymoon in Spain two weeks ago and have been documenting the trip on their social media ever since. It comes after Georgia revealed to The Daily Telegraph she was thankful for the exposure the Bachelorette brought her as it helped launch her Georgia Elliott Sleepwear brand, which she founded in 2020. 'Having a large audience on social media was a huge help in getting Georgia Elliott kickstarted. I had that platform to immediately take it to a lot of eyes from day one,' she said. She further explained the decision to launch her own sleepwear brand was an easy one as 'the favourite thing I have always loved is pyjamas'. The couple, who tied the knot early last year, began their honeymoon in Spain two weeks ago and have been documenting the trip on their social media ever since. (Pictured in Capri) Georgia added her love for pyjamas is so strong that she puts them on the 'second' she gets home from work. 'Home is where I can be myself, relax and wear my pyjamas full-time,' she explained. Georgia rose to fame on The Bachelorette Australia in 2016, where she found love with Lee. It comes after Georgia revealed to The Daily Telegraph she was thankful for the exposure the Bachelorette brought her as it helped launch her Georgia Elliott Sleepwear brand, which she founded in 2020 The two have since gone on to marry and purchased their first home together this year. The couple made headlines in March after receiving criticism over their decision to holiday in Saudi Arabia, causing them to delete their online holiday photos from the region. Georgia was ridiculed on Instagram, with one of her followers asking: 'We're really promoting Saudi now? With their appalling human rights record??' She's been enjoying a summer of fun in the sun as she hops around Europe. And Megan Barton-Hanson was soaking up the Spanish sunshine on Thursday as she set pulses racing in a skimpy bikini. Taking to her Instagram Stories the Love Island star, 28, showcased her jaw-dropping figure as she dined at a trendy beach bar in Marbella. Saucy: Megan Barton-Hanson, 28, set pulses racing in a busty tie-dye bikini as she soaked up the sun in Marbella, Spain on Thursday The stunner put on a sizzling display in the navy two-piece which she teamed with a teamed with a matching figure-hugging skirt. Megan flashed her taut abs in the clip as the bikini's striking colour popped against her sun-kissed skin. To complete her beachy look, she opted for bronzed makeup and enhanced her pout with a slick of glossy red lipstick. The blonde beauty gazed seductively into the camera as she ran her finger through her long locks. Dinner time: Taking to her Instagram Stories, the Love Island star showcased her jaw dropping figure as she dined at a swanky beach restaurant Gorgeous: The stunner put on a sizzling display in the navy two-piece which she teamed with a teamed with a matching figure-hugging skirt Bombshell: The blonde beauty gazed seductively into the camera as she ran her finger through her luscious blonde locks She accessorised the eye-popping look with gold name chains around her neck that spelled out Megan as well as her star sign Pisces. The television star cheekily captioned the clip: 'Feed me'. Megan stepped out hand-in-hand with a mystery man as they headed to a pool in Marbella earlier this month. The OnlyFans star has been putting on a cosy display with her unknown companion during their getaway, which comes just weeks after she looked loved-up with her ex boyfriend James Lock, 35. The outing caused confusion, after Megan appeared to have rekindled her tumultuous romance with James when they were seen holding hands on a trip to the Costa del Sol last month. Svelte: Megan flashed her taut abs in the clip as the bikini's striking colour popped against her sun kissed skin Megan and the TOWIE star previously split up following a hotel room bust-up in March. But it recently appeared their romance was back on as they put on a cosy display during their outing, with James wrapping his arm around the glamour model. Their reunion comes after Megan was reportedly left terrified after her hotel room door was 'kicked in' during a heated row with James in March. According to The Sun, the reality star alerted the hotel staff who dialled 999, with police spotted arriving by onlookers at the hotel shortly after. Exes: The outing comes after Megan and James Lock previously split up following a hotel room bust-up in March (pictured in March) Megan had been staying at the 350-a-night Courthouse Hotel in central London, after she enjoyed a date with another reality star at the same club where James was also partying. Megan was leaving a nightclub at 1.30am with Life On Marbs star Adam Graham shortly after her ex James arrived with a mystery women. Things then reportedly took a serious turn hours later when it is believed that TOWIE star James was informed of Megan's room number. A source told the publication: 'At one point, the hotel door was kicked. There was a lot of shouting. Megan was shocked. It was all very aggressive'. The source believed James was handed a key by staff after he showed them photos of himself and Megan. The insider added: 'This all happened in broad daylight in a busy hotel. It was very dramatic and Megan's hotel door was damaged in the chaos'. James and Megan ended their relationship for the second time earlier this year and both later stepped out with new romantic interests. The on-off pair went Instagram official with their rollercoaster romance in October 2021 after meeting on Celebrity Ex On The Beach, but their union lasted just two months before they split after Christmas. They reunited when James gifted Megan with a cake shaped like her breasts. While Megan was said to be 'upset' over what happened, it was claimed that pals thought their 'weird connection' meant this might not be the end. She recently revealed she's expecting her third child with husband Greg Shepherd. And Billie Faiers looked every inch the glowing mother-to-be on Thursday as she showed off her baby bump in a green dress at the launch of sister Sam's Revive Collagen Vegan product. Meanwhile, Sam cut a glamorous figure as she joined her sibling at London's Pantechnicon, with the former TOWIE star clutching onto her newborn son Edward. Stunner: Billie Faiers looked every inch the glowing mother-to-be on Thursday as she showed off her baby bump in a green dress at the launch of sister Sam's Revive Collagen Vegan product Billie, 32, oozed confidence as she strutted down the street in the form-fitting dress which perfectly hugged her growing stomach. The beauty teamed her eye-catching dress with a coordinating clutch bag and stylish gold heels. She further accessorised her chic look with a plethora of gold jewellery and trendy sunglasses, while she left her platinum locks loose for the occasion. Fabulous: Meanwhile, Sam cut a glamorous figure as she joined her sibling at London's Pantechnicon, with the former TOWIE star clutching onto her newborn son Edward Green Goddess: Billie, 32, oozed confidence as she strutted down the street in the form-fitting dress which perfectly hugged her growing stomach Sam, 31, meanwhile looked simply lovely in a lime green mini dress which featured puff sleeves and a frilly skirt, with the number allowing her to flash her toned legs. The mother-of-three teamed her look with nude heeled mules and a smattering of delicate gold jewellery. She looked in good spirts as she held on to her baby son, who she welcomed in May with partner Paul Knightley. Sisters: The beauty teamed her eye-catching dress with a coordinating clutch bag and stylish gold heels, while Sam looked simply lovely in a lime green mini dress It comes after Billie displayed her blossoming baby bump as she took to Instagram to offer a behind the scenes glimpse of a family photoshoot with children Nelly, seven, and Arthur, five. The TV personality struggled to keep a straight face during the session when the youngest member of the family opted instead to dance around as Billie bemoaned: 'Someone has other ideas today'. Modelling looks from her latest range with Asda, Billie looked gorgeous in an alabaster knitted dress which hugged every inch of her gorgeous belly. Cheeky: It comes after Billie displayed her blossoming baby bump as she took to Instagram to offer a behind the scenes glimpse of a family photoshoot with children Nelly, seven, and Arthur, five The reality star wore her blonde tresses in a high ponytail as strands framed her beautiful face. The trio opted to go barefoot for the shoot as they were joined by a photographer in their lavish home. Meanwhile daughter Nelly looked adorable in a navy Chanel inspired dress with white trim and silver buttons. Dancer: The TV personality struggled to keep a straight face during the session when the youngest member of the family failed to strike a pose and instead opted to dance around as Billie bemoaned: ' someone has other ideas today' Gorgeous: Modelling looks from her latest range with Asda, Billie looked gorgeous in an alabaster knitted dress which hugged every inch of her gorgeous belly The youngster wore her hair in plaits as she lovingly cradled her mother's growing stomach. Cheeky Arthur donned a grey and navy sweater for the occasion which was teamed with matching trousers. The TV star took to Instagram last month to announce the happy news about her pregnancy while enjoying a family holiday in Abu Dhabi. She wrote: 'Baby number 3 we can't wait to meet you. We are so happy and excited.' The beauty showed off her baby bump while posing in the sea with husband Greg while wearing a white bikini and a sun hat. This blog covers software patent news and issues with a particular focus on wireless, mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers, connected cars) as well as select antitrust matters surrounding those devices. Advertisement Joy Corrigan looked incredibly toned as she posed in an exotic strappy silver bikini for a late summer photo shoot in new images shared to her Instagram page on Wednesday. The 27-year-old Victoria's Secret veteran flaunted her formidable figure in the metallic strappy bikini from Naked Species, which she tagged. 'Galaxy bikini is everything! We finally dropped the new collection!' shared the blonde bombshell in her caption as she added a carousel of photos. Hot stuff: Joy Corrigan looked incredibly toned as she posed in an exotic strappy silver bikini for a late summer photo shoot in new images shared to her Instagram page on Wednesday. The 27-year-old Victoria's Secret veteran flaunted her formidable figure in the metallic strappy bikini from Naked Species, which she tagged The fun suit highlighted her trim waist and endless legs as she added rollerskates that were also silver. The 5ft 8in runway sensation wore her long blonde hair down in glamorous barrel curls. The Massachusetts-born influencer accessorized the beach outfit with a pair of white gold and diamond hoops and a matching bracelet. Highlighting her stunning facial features she wore a touch of delicate makeup, including light pink blush and matching lipstick on her pout. Galaxy gal: 'Galaxy bikini is everything! We finally dropped the new collection!' shared the blonde bombshell in her caption as she added a carousel of photos Making sure everyone knows who the designer is: And she had on a bucket hat with the name of the swimsuit designer Joy further accessorized the look with a bucket hat that said Naked Species on the front, making it clear she was plugging the brand. The model recently looked nothing short of sensational as she showed off her figure while hula hoping down the runway at Beach Bunny's fashion show at Miami's The Paraiso Tent. The cover girl sizzled in a tiny pink thong bikini as she strutted down the catwalk before showcasing her hoop skills at the South Beach venue amid Miami Swim Week. Just hanging out at home in her swimsuit: The 5ft 8in runway sensation wore her long blonde hair down in glamorous barrel curls Joy looked in her element as she wowed onlookers with her incredibly lean and toned figure, with her tiny two-piece showing plenty of skin. Her swimwear featured gold chain detailing on the halterneck top and bottoms and a crossover section which went across her washboard abs. The beauty boosted her height with a pair of towering nude platform heels, with Joy donning no other accessories so not to draw attention away from her killer body. In a January interview with Maxim , the model discussed her laid back attitude towards showing her body in front of the camera. Bling it on: The Massachusetts-born babe accessorized the beach outfit with a pair of white gold and diamond hoops and a matching bracelet. Here she is seen in her fun skates Have a seat: The star sat down in the entrance way of the home as she held onto one skate Ready to skate: The siren looked ready to skate even though she had on no knee pads or elbow guards 'I love to be sexy and I love to show skin 'cause I work out really hard to get the body that I have. I've always been very free-spirited about it,' she explained. The stunner added: 'I try to keep every shot I do very classy and a visual showcase of the beauty of what a woman can look like. That's my goal.' She was raised on a backwoods farm, surrounded by livestock, with six brothers and three sisters in North Carolina. 'I would never have dreamed I would be where I'm at today. I knew there was something else, and something bigger, but I had no idea what it was. I just knew I had to get out of that town, and as soon as I was old enough I moved. I love my family, but I realized there's more out there,' the model explained. She has confidence: In a January interview with Maxim, the model discussed her laid back attitude towards showing her body in front of the camera When she was young, she said she 'would go to church every Sunday and every Wednesday' and wasn't 'allowed to wear skirts above' the knees. 'But there was a part of me that wanted to be free and show the world I can be sexy,' she said of bucking her strict upbringing. 'They [her parents] werent too proud of me cause they didnt get that I wanted to show my body and promote feeling sexy as a woman. Now theyre proud of their daughter.' The entrepreneur, who has worked for brands like Guess, Victoria's Secret, and Jimmy Choo, has been modeling since she was 14-years-old after getting scouted in a mall in Raleigh, North Carolina. Corrigan has created Naked Species, a clothing line with her sister, Gina. The 5'8" beauty described the line as 'streetwear with a twist.' The brand includes clothes, jewelry and swimwear for both men and women. Ten percent of Naked Species profits are donated to protect wild animals. The Marvel cinematic universe appears to be heading in a 'woke' new direction, as it was confirmed on Thursday that RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars' Shea Coulee is joining the cast of its new Ironheart series. Following the news that DC will not be releasing their $90m Batgirl movie after pushing of a politically-correct agenda by producers, Shea's casting was confirmed on Thursday, though her role is currently unknown. Comic book fans have expressed outrage that Batgirl will not be released on HBO Max as planned after it was deemed 'awful' in test screenings, with movie critics pointing to the film's 'woke' lead character as a reason for its failings. New role: RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars' Shea Coulee is joining the cast of Marvel's new Ironheart series Shea starred on the seventh season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, and is set to appear in Ironheart as a series regular when it debuts on Disney+. Sharing the news on Instagram, she posted: 'I'm trying to find the words to express the deep excitement I feel over this project. Acting was my first love long before Drag. 'So it only seems fitting to end my Drag Race journey and begin my acting career in the biggest way I could imagine. Drama! It comes after rival company DC canned their $90m Batgirl movie after pushing of a politically-correct agenda by producers Exciting! Shea shared the news of her casting with her followers on Instagram 'Stepping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been like stepping into OZ. Ironheart is top to bottom going to be an absolutely STUNNING experience for the viewers, and I'm so humbled everyday that I get to work on set with some of the best and most dedicated artists in the industry. 'Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout my journey, and I look forward to sharing the exciting new chapter with you all.' Based on the comic book character of the same name, Ironheart follows Riri Williams (who will be played by Dominique Thorne) as a genius inventor who devises an armour suit. How much? Batgirl was canned, despite already wrapping production at an eye-watering cost of $90million (75million) (pictured filming in Glasgow in January) Dominique will make her debut as the character in the upcoming Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever ahead of the series' release. Other previously announced cast members include Anthony Ramos, Manny Montana, Lyric Ross and Alden Ehrenreich. While Shea's role is yet to be announced, the Queen already has a connection to the comic book universe, as in December 2018, the Iceman series introduced a drag queen character called Darkveil/Darnell Wade, who was reportedly inspired by multiple Drag Race stars, including Shea. This casting has come just days after it was revealed that rival comic book company DC's upcoming Batgirl has been canned, despite already wrapping production at an eye-watering cost of $90million (75million). The decision to axe the film which was slated to be released on HBO Max later this year came after a series of test screenings were panned by audiences, and studio execs thought it would hurt the future of the brand as they seek to streamline the DC Extended Universe. The film's untimely demise has inevitably prompted critics to point to the movie's 'woke' character as a reason for its failure. It's done! The decision to axe Batgirl came after test screenings were panned by audiences, though critics have pointed to the film's 'woke' character as a reason for its failure Batgirl's screenplay was by Christina Hodson, the British writer of ultra-feminist film Birds Of Prey, accused by one critic of 'hating on men all men... [and] dull to the point of numbing'. Batgirl also featured a transgender character, Alysia Yeoh, Barbara Gordon's flatmate, played by the trans actor Ivory Aquino. The impression, critics say, is of a film putting its 'progressive' values ahead of all other concerns. El Arbi and Fallah, who also directed Bad Boys For Life and Disney+'s Ms Marvel, wrote in a statement on Instagram: 'We are saddened and shocked by the news. We still can't believe it. 'As directors, it is critical that our work be shown to audiences, and while the film was far from finished, we wish that fans all over the world would have had the opportunity to see and embrace the final film themselves. Maybe one day they will insha'Allah (if God wills).' The directors continued: 'Our amazing cast and crew did a tremendous job and worked so hard to bring Batgirl to life. We are forever grateful to have been part of that team. 'It was a dream to work with such fantastic actors like Michael Keaton, JK Simmons, Brendan Fraser, Jacob Scipio, Corey Johnson, Rebecca Front, and especially the great Leslie Grace, who portrayed Batgirl with so much passion, dedications and humanity. Breaking her silence: Batgirl's star Leslie Grace took to Instagram after the film was shelved to say she was proud of her hard work on the film 'In any case as huge fans of Batman since we were little kids, it was a privilege and an honor to have been a part of the DCEU even if it was for a brief moment. Batgirl For Life.' Batgirl was first given the greenlight in 2021 as part of a company-wide effort to create feature films specifically for HBO Max. It would have featured Grace in the titular role as she battled Brendan Fraser's Firefly who turned to a life of crime after he is fired from his job, loses his health insurance and could no longer care for his sick wife. Warner Bros spokesperson said on Tuesday: 'The decision to not release Batgirl reflects our leadership's strategic shift as it relates to the DC universe and HBO Max. 'Leslie Grace is an incredibly talented actor and this decision is not a reflection of her performance. We are incredibly grateful to the filmmakers of Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt and their respective casts and we hope to collaborate with everyone again in the near future.' Filmmakers were told the decision came down to a 'purchase accounting' maneuver available to Warner Discovery because the company changed hands earlier this year. Watch RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars only on Stan in Australia. On Thursday, Starz announced it's developing a prequel to critically-acclaimed hit show Outlander titled Blood of My Blood with author Diana Gabaldon serving as a consulting producer. The romantic drama will be centered on Highland warrior Jamie Fraser's (Sam Heughan) late parents - Brian Robert David Fraser and Ellen Caitriona Sileas MacKenzie. Brian Fraser died, age 49, from apoplexy in 1740 three years before the magical time-traveling arrival of WWII military nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) who falls for Jamie. Ready for more? On Thursday, Starz announced it's developing a prequel to critically-acclaimed hit show Outlander titled Blood of My Blood with author Diana Gabaldon serving as a consulting producer British actor Andrew Whipp (Cursed, The White Princess, Emmerdale Farm) previously portrayed Brian in two episodes of Outlander's first season in 2014-2015. Against his father Lord Lovat's wishes, Brian eloped with Ellen, an accomplished painter, in 1715 during the Great Gathering and they went on to have four children - William, Jenny, Jamie, and Robert. Ellen tragically passed away, age 38, in 1729 while giving birth to their youngest son Robert, who was stillborn. Outlander showrunner Matthew B. Roberts will oversee production on the prequel alongside executive producers Maril Davis and Ronald D. Moore. Origin tale: The romantic drama will be centered on Highland warrior Jamie Fraser's (L, Sam Heughan) late parents - Brian Robert David Fraser and Ellen Caitriona Sileas MacKenzie Gravestone: Brian Fraser died, age 49, from apoplexy in 1740 three years before the magical time-traveling arrival of WWII military nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) who falls for Jamie Will he return? British actor Andrew Whipp (Cursed, The White Princess, Emmerdale Farm) previously portrayed Brian in two episodes of Outlander's first season in 2014-2015 Backstory: Against his father Lord Lovat's wishes, Brian eloped with Ellen, an accomplished painter, in 1715 during the Great Gathering and they went on to have four children - William, Jenny, Jamie, and Robert 'Outlander is a riveting show that from season to season has captured the hearts of its fans around the world,' Starz president of original programming Kathryn Busby said in a press release. 'We are excited to peel back the layers of this vibrant world to bring our audience the origin of where it all began. Matthew, Maril and Ronald will continue to bring their excellent vision and creativity to this new iteration, and we cant wait to see what happens next.' On June 1, Starz released a minute-long behind-the-scenes video from the Scotland set of Outlander's 16-episode seventh season. Christine McGuinness teased that she is working on a new project as she posed with film camera in a beaming new snap shared to her Instagram account on Thursday. The Real Housewives Of Cheshire star, 34, shared a positive caption saying she was 'starting something new' and vowed to 'trust in the magic of beginnings'. It comes amid her split from husband Paddy after 11 years of marriage after she reportedly found Instagram messages from the Top Gear host to a BBC presenter. Exciting: Christine McGuinness teased that she is working on a new project as she posed with film camera in a beaming new snap shared to her Instagram account on Thursday - after her marital split from Paddy In her latest snap Christine looked happy and healthy as she donned a pair of denim shorts, white T-shirt and bright pink jacket teamed with blue Nike trainers. Beside her was a huge black backpack, film camera and personalised white suitcase. She wrote in the caption: And suddenly you know... It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings' along with a camera emoji. Representatives for Christine have been contacted by MailOnline for further information. Difficult: It comes amid her split from husband Paddy after 11 years after she reportedly found Instagram messages from the Top Gear host to a BBC presenter The blonde beauty also took to her Instagram Story on Thursday as she travelled by train to London, shared a clip of the city at night and a selfie posing in her hotel. She then shared a second shot of the camera on the car seat next to her - potentially meaning she is filming another documentary after the success of her autism documentary last year. It comes following news of Christine's split from husband Paddy after 11 years of marriage. Happy: The blonde beauty also took to her Instagram Story on Thursday as she travelled by train to London to start work on the project Paddy, 48, who made his name on the dating show Take Me Out, is understood to have exchanged a series of messages with another woman in March, shortly before he and Christine decided to live separate lives. While there is no suggestion that the messages went beyond friendship, informed sources said that Christine was upset after finding them on his phone. One friend said: 'Paddy had been messaging the woman for some time. They were direct messages and were quite friendly. It's unclear how they met but they followed one another for a while. 'There have been various issues between him and Christine, but this was definitely one of the driving forces that began to make them assess their future as a married couple.' Interesting: She then shared a second shot of the camera on the car seat next to her - potentially meaning she is filming another documentary after the success of her autism documentary last year Speaking to The Sun On Sunday this month, Christine hinted at serious strains in the marriage, adding: 'I don't want to go into it too much, but I will just say that I didn't cause this situation. 'You've got to expect it when you've been together for so long. Everyone grows and changes, and we've grown as a family, which is amazing. That family bond will always be there, no matter what. 'But I was a teenager when I met him and I'm a 34-year-old woman now, so I suppose what I might have put up with in the past, I probably wouldn't put up with now and the same for him.' City life: She also shared a short clip as she explored the bright lights of London after travelling there for the project MailOnline exclusively revealed late last month that the pair had called an end to their marriage. A source told MailOnline: 'Paddy and Christine have given everything to their marriage over the years. 'Sadly, they have made the tough decision to part ways for the sake of their young family, who they will continue to co-parent together. 'It's been no secret within their inner circle that it's been a difficult few years for them as a couple but they still very much support each other and will continue to do so throughout their separation.' Tough: The couple announced on Instagram last month they had decided to split, but would still live together at their 2.1million home in Cheshire for the sake of their children The couple announced on Instagram last month they had decided to split, but would still live together at their 2.1million home in Cheshire for the sake of their children twins Leo and Penelope, nine, and six-year-old Felicity - all of whom have autism. Sharing a joint statement, they wrote: 'We hadn't planned on sharing this publicly until we were ready but after the lack of privacy surrounding our personal life, we feel left with no other option but to clarify. 'A while ago we took the difficult decision to separate but our main focus as always is to continue loving and supporting our children. Finished: Paddy shared a photo of himself with Christine just hours before the couple of 15 years announced their split last month 'This was not an easy decision to make but we're moving forward as the best parents we can be for our three beautiful children. We'll always be a loving family, we still have a great relationship and still live happily in our family home together. 'We hope this now draws a line under anymore unwanted and unnecessary intrusion into our private life. 'Although we work in the public eye we ask kindly if you could respect our wishes for privacy on this matter. We'll be making no further comment.' Advertisement Irina Shayk and Stella Maxwell put their bikini bodies on full display as they enjoyed a fun-filled day off the coast of Spain. The models wowed as they basked in the sunshine on a boat in Ibiza on Wednesday. Irina, 36, cooled down by taking a dip in the sea while Stella, 32, kicked her feet in the water, clad in a black bikini. Fun in the sun! Irina Shayk and Stella Maxwell put their bikini bodies on full display as they enjoyed a fun-filled boat day in Spain H2-Whoa! Irina flashed a massive smile once she sank into the water, perhaps adjusting to the temperature of the water Irina were a patterned two piece and little else as she splashed in the water with her hair down. She flashed a massive smile once she sank into the water, perhaps adjusting to the temperature of the water. After her refreshing dip, it was time to join the others back on board. She looked absolutely stunning as she climbed back onto the boat with her svelte physique on full display. Bikini babe! Stella, 32, kicked her feet in the water, clad in a black bikini Cheeky! Irina put her pert behind on display as she basked in the sunshine Style icon: The beauty wore a patterned two piece and little else When Irina wasn't swimming about in the water, she was enjoying herself with her pals on the boat. The beauty goofed around with Stella and her friends, even jokingly flashing her behind for pals as they hung out on the edge of the vessel. Stella was present with her, and she wore a plaid top and black leather purse slung over her shoulder. The duo were also spotted exploring dry land together with their friends. Vitamin sea! Shayk gazed at the water as she relaxed on the edge of the vessel Soaking up the sun! Maxwell dipped her feet into the water Boat loads of fun! Shayk raised her arms in the air as she approached her pal Life is good! When Irina wasn't swimming about in the water, she was enjoying herself with her pals on the boat Here she comes! Shayk returned to the boat after her refreshing dip in the water Irina wore a black top and sandals as she made her way down a rocky path with her pals while Stella tied a sarong around her trim waist. The ladies appeared to be making their way to a smaller boat, which may have transported them to their larger vessel. Earlier this year, during an interview with British Vogue, Irina spoke about starting out in the modeling industry at a young age, and going to Paris to model when she was was 19-years-old. 'It was an apartment with eight models sharing two bathrooms,' she explained. Va va voom: Shayk stunned in her skimpy swim suit Making waves! The catwalk queen couldn't hide her delight as she cooled down in the water If you've got it! The women put on a head-turning display as they dried off on the boat What's over there? Something nearby caught Irina's eye Although she didn't make a lot of money and some days, couldn't afford to eat, Irina added, 'But, you know, it was the most beautiful time Ive ever had.' She also shared that she stuck true to who she was and didn't follow society's standards to lose a lot of weight to be a model. 'I didnt feel pressure to lose kilos and color my hair, and I always, still now, stick to that. 'I think the industrys changing for the better,' the Burberry model stated. Summer style: Stella was spotted wearing a sarong while Irina stepped out wearing sandals and a black top Goofing around! The beauty goofed around with Stella and her friends, even jokingly flashing her behind for pals as they hung out on the edge of the vessel Smile bright: Shayk seemed to be having the time of her life Off they go: Irina wore a black top and sandals as she made her way down a rocky path with her pals while Stella tied a sarong around her trim waist Adventure time: The group were spotted piling into a boat The model also weighed in about her past relationship with Bradley Cooper. The two began dating in 2015, and their daughter, Lea, was born two years later in 2017. In 2019, the couple split. However, the former couple still stay in touch to be good parents for their daughter. Staying hydrated! On Thursday, Irina showcased her phenomenal 5ft10in figure in a neon bandeau and matching thong on the beach Takes a village! The Lions Model regularly treats herself to non-surgical face lifts (ranging $250-$550) at the Nolita spa, Daphne, and she loves Emsculpt Neo sessions with Dr. Arash Akhavan at the Dermatology and Laser Group in Midtown Who's this? Shayk (born Shaykhlislamova) rested her head against a mystery man's back 'Life after Bradley is definitely reflective, and I think in all good relationships you bring your best and your worst, its just the nature of a human being,' she told the publication. Cooper is now reportedly dating 45-year-old political staffer Huma Abedin who is close to Hillary Clinton, 74. The duo, who were introduced to each other by Vogue editor Anna Wintour, 'are dating but it's not a full-speed-ahead type thing yet,' according to People. The insider revealed that 'Bradley is fascinated by her. Huma is very international and has seen and one so much.' Hey girl! The Ivy Park beauty took a dip with a gal pal while chatting up another bikini-clad friend on a Redwood paddle board Mom's Ibiza getaway: Missing from her fun in the sun was Irina's five-year-old daughter Lea De Seine Cooper Refreshing dip: Shayk and nine-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper share 50/50 joint legal and physical custody of Lea after amicably ending their four-year relationship in 2019 'He finds this intriguing and challenging,' the source told the outlet. Huma, who has been an advisor and an aide to Hillary Clinton for 25 years, was previously married to Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who in 2017 pleaded guilty to sexting with a minor. She shares son Jordan, 10, with the disgraced congressman. Advertisement Hollywood veteran Claire Danes normally spends her time in New York City, but on Thursday the actress enjoyed the sand and sea in Malibu in California. The Homeland star, 43, displayed her fit physique in a black and white topical print bikini with a halter top and low rise bottom as she enjoyed a little personal time at the beach. The Emmy winner's freshly cut blonde bob was styled straight but the wind pushed her tendrils around. Fit physique: Claire Danes, 43, displayed her fit physique in a tropical print bikini as she enjoyed a little personal time at the beach in Malibu Thursday Natural: The Shopgirl star appeared to be makeup free, showcasing her natural beauty. She appeared to get quite a bit of sun on her back and shoulders The red carpet fixture appeared to be makeup free and wore large dark sunglasses to protect from the glare of the sun. The busy artist has been working on the FX Limited series Fleishman Is In Trouble, starring as the estranged wife of Jesse Eisenberg's Toby Fleishman. The nine-episode limited series was created by author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, following character Toby Fleishman, a doctor and recent divorcee who wades into the mysterious world of online dating. Tone: The Homeland star showcased her toned legs and arms as she enjoyed the sand and sea Trim: The Emmy winner's trim abs were on full display as she rocked the black and white swimsuit with a low rise bottom and halter top While he finds himself having much more success than he imagined, his life is turned upside down when his Claire's character, Rachel, disappears and leaves him with the kids. Toby finds himself juggling his parental responsibilities with a new promotion at the hospital where he works and all of the eligible women Manhattan has to offer... while also finding out what happened to Rachel and their failed marriage. Claire currently calls New York home where she lives with her husband, Hugh Dancy, 47, and their two children Cyrus, 12 and Rowan three. Easy hair: The Brigsby Bear actress wore her easy to style blonde bob straight She can currently be seen on the Apple TV+ mini series, The Essex Serpent. Claire stars as a widow who travels to a small town following reports of the re-emergence of a mythical serpent. The program co-starring Tom Hiddleston, 41, and Clemence Poesy, 39, received a 76 percent from Rotten Tomatoes. Love Island winners Ekin-Su Culculoglu and Davide Sanclimenti were dressed to the nines as they posed for a glamorous picture together ahead of filming the reunion show on Thursday night. The Turkish actress, looked incredible in a busty white dress ahead of heading to the set as she cosied up to the Italian hunk, also 27, who was dapper in an open shirt. Also getting their glam on before the show were the other three finalist couples Tasha Ghouri, Andrew Le Page, Dami Hope, Indiyah Polack, Gemma Owen and Luca Bish - who reunited on social media after claims of him being snubbed on her Instagram. All smiles: Love Island winners Ekin-Su Culculoglu and Davide Sanclimenti were dressed to the nines as they posed for a glamorous picture together ahead of filming the reunion show on Thursday night Ekin wowed in her revealing number that had a thigh-split and showed off her tan and was teamed with bow silver heels. She wore her honey tresses in loose waves over her shoulders while opting for a glamorous makeup look as she wrote in the caption: 'Guess who's back!' Elsewhere dancer Tasha, 23, showed off her abs in a silver co-ord as she slipped into a crop top and high-waisted trousers with belt detailing. Here we go! Also getting their glam on before the show were Gemma Owen and Luca Bish - who reunited on social media after claims of him being snubbed on her Instagram Stunning: Elsewhere dancer Tasha, 23, showed off her abs in a silver co-ord as she slipped into a crop top and high-waisted trousers with belt detailing as she posed with Andrew ahead of the reunion show filming Beside her estate agent Andrew Le Page, 27, held her and looked smart in a white T-shirt and navy chinos. In a second shot shared to the their Instagram they packed on the PDA with a steamy kiss. Dressage rider Gemma, 19, also took to her Stories as she travelled in a car to the reunion show with fishmonger Luca, 23, by her side. Cute! In a second shot shared to the their Instagram they packed on the PDA with a steamy kiss She looked beautiful in a silk black slip dress and had her brunette tresses swept up into a sleek pony tail, a hairstyle which Luca complimented in the clip. Luca looked smart in a black shirt as he posed next to Gemma while she filmed them together. Earlier in the day Gemma showed off her getting ready process as she captioned a stunning selfie 'Love Island Reunion Glam' and asked fans how she should do her hair. Lovely: Former hotel worker Indiyah, 23, took to her Stories too as she posed in a striking orange leather and feather dress while having hr hair and makeup done ahead of the reunion filming Former hotel worker Indiyah, 23, took to her Stories too as she posed in a striking orange leather and feather dress while having hr hair and makeup done ahead of the reunion filming. Earlier on Thursday Gemma posted her first Instagram picture since leaving the Love Island villa on Monday evening - and it didn't feature her beau Luca. The Love Island runner up posed for the solo shot after returning to her family home in North Wales, Lower Soughton Hall, a Grade II listed manor house near Mold. While Luca was notably absent from the snap, he did comment on the post - finally admitting he was 'punching' with Gemma, after insisting he wasn't. Reunion: Dressage rider Gemma, 19, also took to her Stories as she travelled in a car to the reunion show with fishmonger Luca, 23, by her side It came after Love Island fans spotted an apparent snub towards Luca from Gemma's family on social media. Following Gemma and Luca's second-place finish, the fishmonger's family were quick to congratulate the couple, posting a snap of them together with a gushing caption. It read: 'Thank you SO much from the bottom of our hearts for all of the support you've shown this gorgeous couple. So excited to continue watching your journey from the outside. You really did win by finding each other.' Beauty: She looked beautiful in a silk black slip dress and had her brunette tresses swept up into a sleek pony tail, a hairstyle which Luca complimented in the clip This was in stark contrast to Gemma's Instagram, which noticeably only posted solo snaps of the brunette beauty in the lead-up and following the final, with beau Luca noticeably absent. Ekin-Su and Davide were crowned the winners of Love Island 2022 on Monday night, and voting figures have revealed they secured more than half of the public vote. Across Sunday and Monday, viewers were able to vote for their favourite couple to be crowned as winners and go home with the 50,000 cash prize - which for the first time ever wasn't offered as a 'split or steal' deal. Glowing: Earlier in the day Gemma showed off her getting ready process as she captioned a stunning selfie 'Love Island Reunion Glam' and asked fans how she should do her hair And final voting figures released by ITV have revealed that fan favourites Ekin-Su and Davide, both 27, secured a staggering 63.69 per cent of the public vote. They won the ITV2 dating contest by a landslide as runners-up Gemma and Luca secured just 14.47 per cent of the viewers' final votes. Gemma and Luca followed behind as runners-up, while Indiyah and Dami came in third place and Tasha and Andrew were fourth. Getting ready: Tasha shared her excitement for the reunion show filming as she shared another solo picture of her outfit Incredible: Earlier in the day the blonde beauty showed off her hair and makeup being done by the pros All smiles: Paige Thorne and Adam Collard also made their way to the reunion show together in a cab After Ekin-Su and Davide's landslide victory, the Essex-based actress has already been tipped to become the show's highest earner in history. She has already scooped 25,000 in prize money, and a source has told MailOnline she's already being inundated with lucrative offers, meaning she could surpass multi-millionaire Molly-Mae Hague, 23, who was runner-up on the 2019 series, to become the show's richest ever star. Ekin-Su, who entered the villa on the third day as a bombshell, has already had a taste of the spotlight, having starred in Turkish soap operas and reality shows before entering the Love Island villa, and the brunette is now set to cash in with an estimated 1 million payday. A source close to Ekin-Su told MailOnline: 'We've never seen the likes of the deals that are already coming through the door. It's not just your typical reality TV fodder. 'She's absolutely inundated with lucrative offers from brands and they're prepared to pay big money to get her onboard. She's going to be the new Molly-Mae Hague!' In the studios: Danica and Jamie also posed together for a sweet selfie ahead of filming the show In the studio! Dami shared a clip to his Instagram Story as he got ready for the reunion show too Commanding attention: Indiyah made sure all eyes would be on her in the orange dress as she shared a pre-show selfie Back together: Paige and Adam looked as loved-up as ever as they posed together in the back of the car Advertisement Food Network star Valerie Bertinelli of the show Valerie's Home Cooking has listed her sprawling ranch style mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The One Day At A Time actress is asking $2.5 million for the one story hilltop home after purchasing it in 2000 for $1.92 million, according to The Dirt. The 2,500-square-foot house has three bedrooms and three bathrooms with a swimming pool and stunning views of the San Fernando Valley below. Goodbye! Food Network star Valerie Bertinelli of the show Valerie's Home Cooking has listed her sprawling ranch style mansion in the Hollywood Hills She could make a cool $500K profit: The One Day At A Time actress is asking $2.5 million for the one story hilltop home after purchasing it in 2000 for $1.92 million Sweet spot: The 2,500-square-foot house has three bedrooms and three bathrooms with a swimming pool and stunning views of the San Fernando Valley below. Seen in 2011 This listing comes amid her ugly divorce from financial planner Tom Vitale where he is contesting their 2010 prenup after they separated last year. Prior to tying the knot with Vitale, the brunette beauty was married to the rock star Eddie Van Halen, with whom she had son Wolfgang. Eddie passed away in October 2020. The listing agents are Compass realtors Renee Ogiens and Emily Trebek. 'Valerie Bertinelli and her team designed a true cook's kitchen and stunning living spaces. As seen in her Food Network show, Valerie's Home Cooking, prepping and entertaining family and friends is her joy! Ogiens shared. The house has a light gray exterior with white and dark gray trim as well as plenty of large windows to let in the steady California sunshine. The agents: The listing agents are Compass realtors Renee Ogiens and Emily Trebek A pad used well: 'Valerie Bertinelli and her team designed a true cook's kitchen and stunning living spaces. As seen in her Food Network show, Valerie's Home Cooking, prepping and entertaining family and friends is her joy! Ogiens shared. The house has a light gray exterior with white and dark gray trim as well as plenty of large windows to let in the steady California sunshine Not a happy time! This listing comes amid her ugly divorce from financial planner Tom Vitale where he is contesting their 2010 prenup after they separated last year. Bertinelli has responded to Vitale after he challenged the validity of their December 2010 prenuptial agreement in early July. The former couple was snapped in 2011 In front is a drive up driveway that leads to an attached garage. The entrance way has a step up with a glass front door that leads into the living room which has a high ceiling, hardwood floors and a fireplace. The kitchen is perfect for chef Valerie with a big island for prepping foods. The bedrooms are spacious with views to the back yard. And a spacious swimming pool is perfect for glamorous Hollywood icon Bertinelli. In mid July it was revealed that she had responded to Vitale after he challenged the validity of their December 2010 prenuptial agreement. The Food Network star has now asked for a separate trial regarding their prenup which could stall their divorce proceedings, according to a Monday report from People. In early July Vitale asked to be awarded $50,000 per month in spousal support and $200,000 in legal fees but the beauty has maintained that their prenup has a 'waiver of temporary and permanent spousal support.' An open floor plan: The living room which has a high ceiling, hardwood floors and a fireplace So much to take in: There is also a chandelier, large windows with a view of the valley, and space for more than one sofa The Touched By An Angel actress and Vitale married on New Year's Day 2011 at their Malibu, California residence after dating for years. The Hot In Cleveland actress filed for separation from Vitale in November 2021 stating 'irreconcilable differences.' She filed for divorce in May. On Wednesday, Valerie filed a 13-page request to bifurcate her marital status from financial issues in her and Vitale's divorce, according to court records obtained by People. The backyard is easy on the eyes: The backyard can be seen from the living room as can the kitchen and dining room The place where all the food magic happens: Her kitchen is roomy with an island that allows for four stools Another take on this big room: The island is close to the dining room area which fits a long table that can seat eight Still going strong: Here the star smiles as she is seen on Instagram on July 8 in the same kitchen The docs reportedly explain that Bertinelli hopes for 'an early and separate trial on the issue of validity of Premarital Agreement.' And if it moved forward, the divorce proceedings would be delayed until validity is determined. Bertinelli's lawyers have argued that bifurcation could 'assist the parties to achieve settlement of remaining issues.' This comes after Vitale asked to receive $50,000 per month in spousal support and $200,000 in legal fees in early July, according to the records. But she maintains that their 2010 prenup has a 'waiver of temporary and permanent spousal support.' He also tried to block his estranged spouse from requesting spousal support. Valerie and Tom's split has not been easy. In her book Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, Bertinelli described her parting from Vitale as slow and painful. 'We have drifted from the interests that made us a couple and found that those differences can't be fixed,' she said. A nice room to wake up in: The master bedroom is very private with high windows and a sliding glass door to the backyard A place to unwind after a hard day of work: This space includes a stand alone bath tub, showers, and tiled floor Another place to wash your hands: A second bathroom has double sinks too 'He is a good man who is going through many of the same issues that I have faced: What can he do to add meaning and purpose to his life? 'Where can he find joy? What is he passionate about? What has he learned? And what does he do differently going forward? The paths we thought we were on changed.' Bertinelli had previously been wed to late rock legend Eddie Van Halen between 1981 and 2007, and they are parents to musician son Wolfgang Van Halen, 31. The legendary guitar player died at 65 in October 2020 following a stroke and longtime cancer battle. In the book she released earlier this year, Bertinelli opened up about her final moments with the late rock star and her son. She wrote: ''I love you' are the last words Ed says to Wolfie and me, and they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing.' Bertinelli told the outlet in January that her parting from Vitale was not linked to her love for the late rock musician, as they 'grew apart.' She added: 'The decision has nothing to do with my love for Ed. I wish Tom the best and I know he feels the same way about me.' Wolf has proposed to his girlfriend Andraia Allsop, it was shared in early July. Yolanda Hadid cut a chic figure when she was spotted arriving home at her apartment in Soho on Thursday. The 58-year-old mother of three donned a chic all-black ensemble as she parked her car in the upscale New York City neighborhood. The former model showed off her trim physique in a form-fitting high-necked black t-shirt that she tucked into cropped black trousers. Out and about: Yolanda Hadid cut a chic figure when she was spotted arriving home at her apartment in Soho on Thursday The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alumna sported strappy black leather stiletto ankle boots as she strolled down the sidewalk. The blonde beauty wore her platinum tresses down around her shoulders and had on a natural makeup palette that included a rosy blush and a light pink lipstick. The former Making A Model host accessorized with several layered gold necklaces including one that had a large crystal pendant. Monochromatic: The 58-year-old mother of three donned a chic all-black ensemble as she parked her car in the upscale New York City neighborhood Yolanda shares daughters Gigi, 27 and Bella, 25, and son Anwar, 23, with her ex-husband Mohammed Hadid, 73. The Netherlands native was married to Mohammed from 1994 to 2000. She wed music icon David Foster in 2011 but the pair split in 2015. Since 2018, she has been dating construction company CEO Joseph Jingoli after the pair met on her farm in Pennsylvania. Fit: The former model showed off her trim physique in a form-fitting high-necked black t-shirt that she tucked into cropped black trousers. Stylish: The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alumna sported strappy black leather stiletto ankle boots as she strolled down the sidewalk Trendy:The former Making A Model host accessorized with several layered gold necklaces including one that had a large crystal pendant Earlier in the week, Yolanda made a grand return to social media and uploaded an endearing Instagram post to announce the end of her 'detox.' She typed out a list of reasons as to what prompted her hiatus, including focusing on both her mental and physical health. The television personality detailed her struggles with depression following her mother's passing and her battle with Lyme disease. Detox: Earlier in the week, Yolanda made a grand return to social media and uploaded an endearing Instagram post to announce the end of her 'detox.' Yolanda shared a photo of herself sitting on soft cushions with her face upturned towards the sky with glistening water stretched out behind her. The former runway star wrote out a lengthy caption to her 3.8 million fans and followers. After stating her return, she jumped into expressing her reasons for stepping away from social media for such a long time. 'After the loss of my mother I really struggled with depression followed by a lyme relapse.the emotional stress and grief strongly effected my immune system.' Personal struggles:She typed out a list of reasons as to what prompted her hiatus, including focusing on both her mental and physical health If left untreated, Lyme disease can lead to health issues such as joint pain and in other cases, can cause severe neurological problems such as 'weakness or impaired muscle movement', according to Mayo Clinic. 'My phone addiction didnt help either, it started to take so much time away from being present in my life. Its so easy to get lost in other peoples stories while forgetting to live and love your own,' she continued. Yolanda also reflected on the past and how phones have caused people to 'lose the art of communication.' She then expanded on how the hiatus has had an amazing and positive impact on her life. Health battle: The former model has been suffering with Lyme disease for years, and took a break from social media due to a 'lyme relapse'; Pictured 2020 Needing a break: The TV star also explained that the loss of her mother caused her to lapse into depression: 'After the loss of my mother I really struggled with depression followed by a lyme relapse.the emotional stress and grief strongly effected my immune system' 'Anyway this has been a wonderful reset, time to break the habit of picking up my phone 50 times a day.' The Real Housewives alum stated that she was able to, 'focus on myself, my health journey and being present in this moment of my life.' To finish off her caption, Yolanda added how her life has changed for the better since her nine month break. 'Time has slowed down and feels a lot calmer, more time to just sit and actually read a book, time to reconnect with people, be creative and most importantly time with my family.' Bella seemed to also share her mother's joy and typed out, 'We love you,' in the comment section. Focus: Yolanda explained that she took the nine month break from social media to focus on herself and her family; Pictured with daughters Bella and Gigi Devoted grandmother: Yolanda is pictured with Gigi's daughter, Khai, one, as she learns to ride a pony During an interview on the Wendy Williams Show, Yolanda opened up about her struggle with Lyme disease and the time it took to properly diagnosis the health problem. 'At first, for maybe a year, a year and a half, I was just kind of thinking I'm tired, I have the flu,' she explained. Doctors at first told her that she had chronic fatigue, but she expressed that, 'Something was eating my brain. I can't think anymore. I mean, I forgot the alphabet, I forgot how to read a book.' After meeting with a specialist abroad in Belgium, the mom of three was officially diagnosed with 'chronic neurological Lyme disease.' Both Bella and Anwar also have the disease. Forget J.K. Rowling, Sally Rooney and David Walliams, there is a new publishing phenomenon in town. Alice Oseman, 27, has sold nearly a million pounds worth of books every month and is on course to pocket 60 million globally in 2022 alone. The secret to the author's staggering success? The Heartstopper series, which started life as a crowd-funded, self-published graphic novel for teens, about a shy 15-year-old boy called Charlie who falls in love with a rugby- playing lad in his class called Nick. The books were already a big hit with young adults but, after being adapted for TV by Netflix, have gone from cult status to global brand. Alice Oseman, 27, has sold nearly a million pounds worth of books every month and is on course to pocket 60 million globally in 2022 alone. The Netflix show, simply called Heartstopper, launched in April, and stars a clutch of teenagers, most of whom are in their first acting jobs. Despite this, it has made it to the streaming giant's Top 10 in more than 50 countries and two more series have been commissioned, with the second going into production later this year. Unusually, Oseman adapted her own novels for the screen. Oscar-winner Olivia Colman plays the screen mum of Nick (Kit Connor, who has just signed with the A-list talent agency WME). TikTok star Yasmin Finney Doctor Who's new companion is also in the cast. Buoyed by the show, sales of the graphic novels (and even the colouring book) have gone through the roof. The Heartstopper series alone has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide and is a Top 10 bestseller in 10 markets including the U.S. with publishing rights secured in 33 countries to date. In the UK, Oseman titles netted 5.5 million from January to June. That puts her ahead of David Walliams (4.7 million), J.K. Rowling (3.8 million), Lee Child (2.1 million) and Sally Rooney (1.3 million). She looks set to earn more than 10 million domestically; and the popularity abroad, particularly in America, suggests she could make as much as 60 million worldwide. The Netflix show, simply called Heartstopper, launched in April, and stars a clutch of teenagers, most of whom are in their first acting jobs Critics rave about the wholesome and emotional impact of the uplifting books, which tell the story of sweet, awkward first love and are set in a school modelled on Rochester Grammar, which the author attended. Oseman wrote the first of the series in 2016, though its heroes Charlie and Nick appeared in an earlier book, Solitaire (which earned her a publishing deal at 17 and drew comparisons with The Catcher In The Rye). Charlie has already come out as gay, but is enduring homophobia. Oseman said: 'I do believe things have improved, even since I started writing Heartstopper; but definitely since I was in school myself. There's still a lot of homophobia, transphobia, and bullying out there, though; so I'm sure some people will relate.' Critics rave about the wholesome and emotional impact of the uplifting books, which tell the story of sweet, awkward first love and are set in a school modelled on Rochester Grammar, which the author attended Heartstopper started out as a free- to-read webcomic in 2016. In 2017, she crowd-funded a self-published edition, raising 58,000 and mailed the first 2,000 books out herself. Her books are now published by Hachette and HarperCollins. In 2020, Oseman released novel Loveless, about sexual identity. She told an interviewer: 'It explores asexuality and aromanticism which is what I am. I'm an asexual aromantic. It was kind of a coming-out journey, a deep dive into something that had affected me throughout my life.' She is believed to have completed the Heartstopper series eight books and is considering moving on from teen fiction to the adult market. Why Lesley prefers rags to riches... Lesley Manville says it was easier playing Ada, a cleaning woman, than portraying Princess Margaret in The Crown. Manville takes the title role in the heartwarming film Mrs Harris Goes To Paris, an adaptation of the beloved 1958 Paul Gallico novel. Manville, 66, said: 'It is in my bones. That was the life I knew, because I had working-class parents. It's been more of a stretch when I'm playing someone like Princess Margaret, because I had no knowledge of that life.' The film, out here next month, tells the story of widowed Ada, a hard-working housekeeper who decides she wants to spend her life savings on a Dior dress, after seeing one being worn by a wealthy client. She scrimps and saves (and gambles at the dog track) to raise enough money and finally arrives at Dior's Avenue Montaigne headquarters, where she charms everyone. Lesley Manville says it was easier playing Ada, a cleaning woman, than portraying Princess Margaret in The Crown The fairy tale is complete when she moves to Paris and starts making some changes for the better at the fashion house. Manville reflects: 'I didn't know the book at all. It came to me as an offer, so it was nice to read it, knowing it was mine if I wanted it.' Manville got on so well with co-star Isabelle Huppert that the pair are now thinking about doing a play together. Manville said: 'She's got such style, which appeals to me, because we both love clothes.' She admitted she ad-libbed various lines in the film, including exclaiming 'Gordon Bennett!' and observing that things had gone 't**s up' both of which may prove slightly puzzling for international audiences. An intriguing dinner in Mayfair, London, last week with Tom Cruise joining Jeff Bezos, Amazon's former CEO, and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez. Cruise, famously, is on a mission to save films from the threat streaming poses to the cinema experience. Bezos, meanwhile, remains a major shareholder in Amazon, which offers exactly that, via Prime Video. Might Bezos be softening Cruise up for a project with its film division? He'd need a lot of charm to pull that one off. More likely is the two men have a connection via personal trainer Wesley Okerson, tasked with making Bezos buff and who used to work with Cruise. Dame Maureen Lipman thinks the Queen should be nominated for an acting gong, after her star turn opposite Paddington Bear, complete with marmalade sandwich, in a short film shot for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. 'I'm going to put forward to BAFTA that the Queen should get the best newcomer prize, for best appearance in a short film,' Lipman joked. Though she conceded that giving her a best newcomer award was like 'giving Dolly Parton a trainer bra'. Kylie keeps schtum... Kylie Minogue's return to Ramsay Street for the last ever episode of Neighbours sporting a throwback denim boiler suit and retro curls is one of the great TV moments of the year. But there has been much speculation on social media as to why she kept so tight-lipped, only uttering: 'Home sweet home'! However, I'm told the problem was a lack of time. A friend said: 'There was only one half-day where Kylie and Jason's schedules aligned. They would have loved to film scenes with Guy Pearce, too, but this wasn't possible. 'For Kylie and Jason it was less about a storyline which would have been hard, given the complexities of the final episode but just to be in the street, and for viewers to see the love still between them. It was very emotional for Kylie to be back on set. She loved being a part of the finale.' Clooney to take on the Krays? Is George Clooney planning to make a film about notorious London gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray? The double Oscar winner is currently on holiday in Italy with his wife Amal and their five-year-old twins, having wrapped up production on The Boys In The Boat, a movie about a U.S. rowing team. However, I understand he and long-time producer friend Grant Heslov are considering the possibility of making a film about the gangster twins (pictured). Heslov was spotted on the set of The Boys In The Boat with a copy of Ron Kray's My Story, ghost written by TV legend Fred Dinenage, poking out of his pocket. Is George Clooney planning to make a film about notorious London gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray? The book was published two years before Ronnie died and, in it, he talks at length about his bisexuality and mental health issues, as well as his faith (he found God while in Broadmoor), and how he engaged in telepathic communication with brother Reggie, who was incarcerated in Lewes. Since 2006, Heslov and Clooney have run Smokehouse Pictures which has made films including Good Night, And Good Luck, Argo and Ocean's 8. The Krays have made it to the big screen before. Tom Hardy played both twins in the film Legend in 2015; and Gary and Martin Kemp were in the 1990 film The Krays. Dinenage, now 80, tells me that the rights to the book have not yet been bought by Clooney, but he would be delighted if it came to pass. He adds: 'I'd be happy to make a cameo appearance.' Maigret may make a return put that in your pipe and smoke it! Rowan Atkinson has been reflecting on TV drama Maigret, a rare disappointment in an otherwise glittering career. The show was dumped by ITV after just four episodes. 'It wasn't my decision to pull the plug,' Atkinson said of the demise of the pipe-smoking detective. 'That was down to ITV, who made some kind of judgment about what kind of shows they wanted to make and I guess how well or not our show was going down. It was their prerogative; and it's not for me to raise any defence against that decision. But never say never. I wouldn't rule out filming more.' Atkinson played Chief Inspector Jules Maigret in the whodunnit set in mid-1950s France. It was launched over Christmas 2016, but disappeared from our screens less than a year later. The show was based on the books by Georges Simenon, published between 1931 and 1972. Rowan Atkinson has been reflecting on TV drama Maigret, a rare disappointment in an otherwise glittering career. The show was dumped by ITV after just four episodes Harry's covering up for his bedroom scenes Harry Styles is a handsome and debonair leading man in the film Don't Worry Darling. However, it took an enormous amount of work to prepare him for the frank love scenes with screen wife Florence Pugh (both pictured, above) because he has so many tattoos. The former One Direction star, who now has a huge career as a solo musical artist, has 60 of them: covering his arms, legs and torso. Make-up artists first had to colour-correct each design, sponging red pigment over the black. Then they were covered in green pigment, followed by powder to seal. Finally, a cream foundation was applied, to cover them. The whole process took around three hours. Jason Collins is credited with special make-up effects on the film he is also the man who supervised Lily James's transformation into Pamela Anderson for Pam & Tommy, using prosthetics and cosmetics. Don't Worry Darling, directed by Styles's girlfriend Olivia Wilde, is set in the 1950s, in a suburban Utopia where the men work on the 'Victory Project' and their wives don't ask too many questions about what, exactly, that is. It will premiere at the Venice Film Festival later this month. She has been working out like a demon in the gym over the past few weeks. And Nadia Bartel showed off the fruits of her labour as she stripped down to a tiny black and white string bikini while during her European summer holiday on Thursday. The mother-of-two, 37, shared a sizzling snap of herself sunbathing on Instagram. Ex-WAG Nadia Bartel showed off her incredible figure and washboard abs in a tiny string bikini during her trip to Europe this week The Melbourne-based WAG turned designer looked relaxed as she lounged on a sunbed at a beach club. She showed off her long legs and her washboard abs as she tugged on her bikini bottoms. Nadia teamed the look with a beige Fendi Roma hat, with prices averaging $600. The Melbourne-based WAG was spending time at a busy beach club Nadia indulged during her getaway, ordering a dozen oysters She also shared a picture of the beach club and some oysters, clearly indulging on her break. Nadia was recently forced to defend herself after trolls criticised her for posting a photo of her 'mummy tummy' on Instagram. She raised eyebrows after she shared a video of her smooth midsection, which she followed up with a 'realistic' photo of her stomach skin bunching up as she sat down. 'My tum today that has carried two boys. Don't forget that you always see the angles that people want you to see online so be kind to yourself,' she captioned the post. Unfortunately, Nadia's empowering message fell flat, with some followers accusing her of overstating her 'flaws' in order to seem more relatable. Nadia was recently forced to defend herself after trolls criticised her for posting a photo of her 'mummy tummy' on Instagram She returned to defend herself against the naysayers. 'I've had a lot of comments and messages... mostly a lot of them positive, but quite a few of them thinking I'm just posting that to try to stay relevant, and that I'm not sending the right message posting it,' she said in a video recorded in her car. 'I didn't think about it too much, to be honest. It was basically just that I get a lot of messages from people thinking I look really fit and my stomach is really toned and flat, but the reality is that it's just the same as most other mums out there.' 'Once you have a few babies, you have loose skin on your stomach. It doesn't matter how much you work out', Nadia added. She reminded fans that not everything they see on social media is reality. 'We're always posting our best angles and that's just human nature... you want to show yourself looking your best,' she said. 'But if you actually saw most of these people that you follow online every single day, you'll see that they don't look perfect. 'And everyone is going through the same s**t, basically.' Unfortunately, Nadia's empowering message fell flat, with some followers accusing her of overstating her 'flaws' in order to seem more relatable Nadia insisted that even the most famous Instagram models have insecurities about how they look - including herself. 'It doesn't matter who you are. Try not to compare yourself to others. I know it's really hard and I am also guilty of it,' she said. She concluded by sharing an uplifting message about body positivity. 'Just know that you're doing the best thing for yourself, for your situation, for your family. You're setting up a really beautiful, positive body image, and you just know that every single day you're doing little steps to make yourself happy,' she said. James Franco has been cast as late Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the upcoming film Aline of Cuba from director Miguel Bardem. The Oscar-nominated actor, 44, will be joined in the cast by actress Mia Maestro, 47, who will play the role of socialite Natalia 'Naty' Revuelta, who was Castro's one-time mistress, Deadline reported Thursday. The pair join actress Ana Villafane, 33, in the cast, as she is playing the role of Alina Fernandez - the daughter of Castro and Revuelta - in the motion picture. The latest: James Franco, 44, has been cast as late Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the upcoming film Aline of Cuba from director Miguel Bardem. The actor was snapped in Italy in June The motion picture - of which the script was penned by Jose Rivera and Nilo Cruz - will depict the life story of Fernandez, a Cuban exile and social activist. When she was 10, Fernandez found out that she was Castro's daughter, as her mother revealed to her the truth after Castro had visited the family home secretly for years. Revuelta had given her and her doctor husband's wealth to finance the beginning stages of the communist revolution. Fernandez eventually became an anti-communism activist who was arrested multiple times for her attempts to depart Cuba, and banned from traveling outside the country. Fernandez in 1993 defected to Spain and eventually settled in Miami. The film will begin shooting August 15 in the Colombian cities of Cartagena and Bogota, according to the outlet. Actress Mia Maestro, 47, will play the role of socialite Natalia 'Naty' Revuelta, Castro's one-time mistress. She was snapped in LA in 2020 Ana Villafane, 33, is playing the role of Alina Fernandez in the motion picture. She was pictured in NYC in 2020 Producer John Martinez O'Felan told Deadline that 'finding and convincing James Franco to play Castro, was a fun and challenging process and has been the collaborative work of the universe, because our director's original order was to find an actor who holds a close physical resemblance to the real Castro to build from, along with finding someone Alina Fernandez would strongly endorse. 'To get there on such a tough look to cast, we used Fidel Castro's ancient Galician heraldry as our focal compass, and then combed through the entire ranks of actors with Latin roots in Hollywood to find someone who has a similar facial structure.' O'Felan said that after a comprehensive search 'into our hopefuls through the eye of Spanish and Portuguese genealogy which the Galicians held,' Franco was found to have 'had the closest facial likeness of our industry's leading actors, meaning that the focus would be to build out his character accent and we'd have a stunning on-screen match to intrigue audiences and bring the story to life with true visual integrity.' He said that casting Villafane and Maestro 'were no-brainers because, besides the trajectory of their past work, one represents modern Cuban-America and the other Argentina.' O'Felan told the outlet that the focus of the project is to 'produce an artistic piece of modern Hispanic history, with the vision for the project as being truly inclusive through uniting actors and creatives from both intergenerational and recent Latin roots from the U.S, Latin America, and the world.' Kylie Jenner defended herself against accusations she failed to follow proper sanitary protocols while visiting a lab in Milan for her makeup collection. Jenner, 24, responded specifically to Kevin James Bennett, an Emmy-award winning makeup artist who called out Kylie on Instagram after she posted photos from the lab on Wednesday. Jenner insisted the photo he posted was not actually taken in a manufacturing facility, and insisted she would 'never' bypass sanitary protocols. 'I would never bypass sanitary protocols': Kylie Jenner defended herself against allegations she failed to follow proper sanitary protocols while visiting a lab in Milan for her makeup collection The reality star hit back at Kyle in the comments section of his post, writing: 'kevin - this picture is not taken in a manufacturing facility. i would never bypass sanitary protocols and neither would any other celeb or beauty brand owner. thats completely unacceptable i agree. 'this is a small personal space creating my own fun samples and taking pictures for content nowhere near the mass manufacturing. no one is putting customers at risk ! shame on you kevin for spreading false information !!!!' A back-and-forth ensued between the duo as Kyle accused Jenner of 'gaslighting' her followers. 'So you were standing on a platform, looking into an expensive homogenizing kettle that had processed at least 50 liters of a complexion product (the product still covering the mixing paddles) without PPE or your hair tied back , wearing a @weareregi lab coat? But this is not a cosmetics manufacturing facility? Its a personal space? Wow, theres some serious gaslighting going on here,' he replied. 'shame on me? NO, shame on you or whoever takes care of your social media for trying to gaslight everyone into thinking Im the one to blame. Just take responsibility for your mistake and move on,' he wrote in a separate comment. Kylie hit back once again, this time insisting she would have to change her dog Kevin's name due to the altercation. 'oh were you there kevin ? ugh now i have to change my dogs name,' she added. 'Are you seriously going to lie and then troll me? Wow,' he posted. Bennett, an Emmy-winning makeup artist and cosmetic professional, posted a critique of the images she posted on Wednesday Kylie faced scrutiny on Wednesday after she posted snaps of herself at the lab where her Kylie Cosmetics products are made. The Los Angeles-born star captioned the clip, 'In the lab creating new magic for you guys ... better than ever,' tagging the name of her brand into the post. This led to commenters pointing out Kylie was not wearing a hair cap, gloves, and mask as she checked out the facility with her long hair dangling down. One user wrote, 'Wear a hair cap,' while another asked aren't you 'suppose to wear gloves, mask and the hair net thingy???' Another user said, 'I just see so many lab rules not being followed,' while another said, 'No gloves or a hair net in a lab??? or even a mask???' Sources told Dailymail.com that Kylie was not on the production floor and was in the accessible lab area where she could play around with colors and ideate concepts. A number of Instagram commenters were critical of the protocols being followed in the clip Eventually, the images caught the attention of Bennett, who weighed into the matter. 'I'm a cosmetic developer and work with cosmetic manufacturers (and their labs) as part of my job,' Bennett said. 'I have very short hair, and I've NEVER been allowed into the lab or onto the manufacturing floor without a hair net, shoe covers, mask...and disposable GLOVES.' Bennett claimed Jenner was 'gaslighting her followers into thinking she is creating cosmetics,' adding he questioned 'what ignorant manufacturer ... let her stage this photo-op in their lab and on the manufacturing floor - without following proper sanitation protocols. 'I need the name because I want to make sure my clients NEVER work with them.' He wrapped up in saying, 'Folks, this is not the way we create cosmetics and misrepresents how our industry works. Credible manufacturers follow STRICT sanitation protocols to protect you.' Dailymail.com has reached out to Jenner's reps for comment on the criticism. Called out: Jenner faced criticism after she posted photos of herself at a lab for her cosmetics collection Skip to main navigation Places to Hunt in New York Public Lands Many state lands, including Wildlife Management Areas, State Forests, Forest Preserve and State Parks are open for hunting and trapping during the appropriate seasons. Private Lands Eighty-five percent of the state is privately-owned and over 90 percent of all hunters will hunt on private lands during the hunting seasons. See "Hunting on Private Lands" below for more information. Get Maps of Public Lands View a list of DEC Wildlife Management Areas and other State Lands and conservation easements by DEC region and county. Many of these web pages include easy-to-print maps. The DECinfo Locator can be used to create custom maps of trails and hunting areas on state lands. You can also view DEC lands in Google Earth (Google Earth must be installed on your computer). Regional DEC Contacts DEC Regional Wildlife staff can suggest possibilities for the county where you would like to hunt or trap, depending on the type of game you would like to pursue. Regional forestry staff and NYS Forest Rangers can provide details on state forest lands and the Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve lands. Permits and Regulations Written permission or permits are sometimes required to use state lands. In addition regulations can vary, depending on the type of state land. It is best to check with the nearest DEC Regional Office or a NY Forest Ranger for specific requirements or regulations for the area you are interested in. Hunting in State Parks Many state parks offer waterfowl, small game and big game hunting. See State Parks that Allow Hunting. Other Areas to Hunt New York City Watershed Lands: The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) allows deer, bear, turkey, and small game hunting on designated City Water Supply lands as provided by New York State regulations. DEP is no longer issuing Hunting Tags for hunting on City Water Supply Lands. Hunters must possess the appropriate, valid New York State hunting license and a valid Access Permit to hunt on designated hunting areas on City Water Supply Lands. DEP Access Permits are not required on Public Access Areas. For more information, visit the off-site link "New York City Watershed Lands" in the right-hand column. Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge: Located on the south shore of Long Island in Suffolk County. This area is open for deer hunting on a controlled basis during both the archery and regular seasons. Permits are required. For current information on seasons, permits, maps and regulations, contact: Refuge Manager, Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge, 340 Smith Road, Shirley, NY 11967; Telephone: (631) 286-0485 or visit the off-site link "Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge" in the right-hand column. Fort Drum Military Base: Located in Jefferson County, 3 miles northeast of Watertown between state Route 11 and state Route 3. The facility has an active outdoor recreation program that enhances the quality of life for soldiers, their families, military retirees, civilian employees and the general public. Outdoor recreation includes hunting, fishing, trapping, birdwatching, primitive camping, hiking, and berry-picking. Fort Drum provides one of the largest tracts of land in the northeast region available to the general public for recreational use with approximately 69,000 acres available for hunting and trapping as well as other outdoor recreational activities, dependent upon current military training operations. Fort Drum requires special permitting. Call their outdoor recreation office (315-772-9636 or 772-4999) for information or visit the off-site link "Hunting at Fort Drum" in the right-hand column. Finger lakes National Forest: Located east of Seneca Lake in Schuyler and Seneca counties. Small and big game hunting. No special hunting permits required. Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge: Located at the north end of Cayuga Lake in Seneca County. This area is open for deer hunting on a controlled basis during both the archery and regular seasons. Permits are required. When deer management permit use is allowed, WMU 8J permits are valid. For current information on seasons, permits, maps and regulations, contact: Refuge Manager, Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, 3395 Route 5-20 east, Seneca Falls, NY 13148; telephone: (315) 568-5987 Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge: Located east of Lockport in Genesee and Orleans counties. This area is open for deer hunting during both the archery and regular seasons. Further information is available from: Refuge Manager, Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge,1101 Casey Road, Alabama, NY 14013;telephone: (585) 948-5445 Hunting on Public Campgrounds Hunting is not permitted within DEC campgrounds, although some campgrounds in the Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserves allow camping during big game season. DEC operates 52 public campgrounds in the Forest Preserves. Unloaded firearms are allowed on public campgrounds only during the spring and fall hunting seasons for hunting. A valid hunting license is needed. Firearms cannot be discharged in the campground or day use facilities at any time. For more information contact the Bureau of Recreation at (518) 402-9055. Campgrounds outside the Forest Preserves are operated by the NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) (see link at right). For all campgrounds, reservations can be made by calling 1-800-456-CAMP or on line at Reserve America (see offsite links at right). Hunting on Private Lands Rights-of-way, such as power lines and railroads that cross private property are NOT public lands, and trespassing on these areas without permission from the landowner is illegal. Federal law prohibits hunting and possession of firearms on lands administered by the National Park Service, including the Appalachian Trail. Ask Permission First Always ASK permission to hunt on private land, whether or not it is posted. Even landowners who post are likely to say "yes" to people who show their respect for private property by asking first. Most rural landowners are generous people who will gladly help visitors. Trees and other plants on private land are private property. It is illegal to cut or remove them, or to cut limbs or damage bark (such as from putting up blinds or tree stands, or cutting shooting lanes or trails) without the landowner's permission. Some landowners use ASK Permission stickers on their signs. These symbols, a product of the State Fish & Wildlife Management Board in cooperation with DEC, express the landowners' willingness to allow access to their property to those people who ASK. The ASK stickers are available free from DEC. Please send your ASK sticker requests to NYSDEC, Bureau of Wildlife, 5th Floor, 625 Broadway, Albany, N.Y. 12233-4754 or wildlife@dec.ny.gov. A poor image of outdoor recreationists is one main reason why access to some private property is denied. If recreationists demonstrate courtesy to landowners and respect for property, the situation could improve. If, however, trespassing, littering and vandalism occur, access will continue to be denied. Ask permission poster Ask permission poster Be courteous, ASK: Permission well in advance of your trip. Don't show up on opening day, or at inconvenient times, or with a gun in your hand, or your snowmobile or ATV running in the front yard. When you can go. Just because you hunted there in October, don't assume you can go back the next year without asking permission. What is permitted on the property. Do not park off-road vehicles, camp, damage vegetation, construct a permanent structure (tree stands, blinds or platforms) or store personal property without the landowner's permission. Where certain activities are allowed. Shooting may disturb nearby farm animals or neighbors. Who is welcome. More than two or three people can be an unwelcome crowd. About special concerns -- if the landowner's family is likely to be in the woods or fields and where the property boundaries are located. And lastly, but very importantly, thank the landowner for his/her generosity. Show your appreciation by offering to share your game or buy a bushel of his/her crops, such as apples. Whether or not the land is posted, New York State General Obligations Law protects landowners from liability for non-paying recreationists engaged in hunting, trapping and fishing on their property. Because of this protection, recreational liability lawsuits against rural landowners are uncommon. This protection does not apply in cases of willful or malicious failure to guard or warn against dangers. FWMA Cooperative Areas Through cooperative agreements under New York's Fish & Wildlife Management Act (FWMA), Cooperative Hunting Areas provide access and management services to privately-owned lands in order to increase public hunting opportunities. When using these areas, remember that you are a guest on private property and act accordingly. Hunters are strongly advised to contact the DEC Regional Office for current information about the status of these areas. Following is a list of the areas arranged by county. Cooperative Hunting Areas County Cooperative Area DEC Region / Phone Cayuga/ Tompkins King Ferry Region 7 / (607) 753-3095 x 247 Jefferson Fort Drum Region 6 / (315) 772-9636 or 772-4999 Ulster Shaupeneak Ridge Area Region 3 / (845) 256-3098 Wyoming Sulphur Springs Region 9 / (716) 372-0645 Safety While Afield Check out the Hunter Safety Basics page for tips on firearm safety and reasons why wearing hunter orange can keep you from harm. If you come across suspected Abandoned Oil & Gas Wells please report the location to the DEC; these can pose an environmental or safety threat. More about Places to Hunt in New York: Skip to main navigation For Release: Thursday, August 4, 2022 DEC Announces Completion of New York's First-Ever Pollinator Distribution Survey Empire State Native Pollinator Survey Documents Conservation Status of 451 species New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos today announced the release of a multi-year survey of hundreds of pollinator species in New York State. The Empire State Native Pollinator Survey 2017-2021 (leaves DEC website) provides the foundation for future pollinator research and conservation efforts. "This new multi-year survey provides critical baseline information about hundreds of pollinator species in New York," Commissioner Seggos said. "With the assistance of our academic and other expert partners, the survey helps assess the health of these species, which are critically important for our environment and our economy, and identifies recommendations to help restore pollinator populations in the future." In 2016, concerns over global declines in pollinators led to creation of New York's Pollinator Protection Plan (PDF), which called for an inventory of the state's native pollinators. With support from New York State's Environmental Protection Fund, DEC contracted with the New York Natural Heritage Program (NYNHP) to develop and implement the survey. The full survey can be found at the NYNHP website (leaves DEC website). The goal of the project was to determine the conservation status of a wide array of native insect pollinators, including four groups of bees, two groups of flies, two groups of beetles, and two groups of moths. Butterflies were not included because the current status of butterflies is better understood than the other species studied. To help design the survey, NYNHP assembled a team of experts from DEC, the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), Cornell University, SUNY Cobleskill, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York State Museum, Vermont Center for Ecostudies, and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. During the project, biologists conducted hundreds of field surveys across the state, compiled data from museum collections, and reviewed observations from citizen scientists. Hundreds of volunteers provided tens of thousands of insect specimens, photographs, and observations. In total, biologists gathered more than 230,000 insect records. Using data from the study, NYNHP scientists generated maps of current and historical distributions and seasonal observation charts for 451 species. One of the biggest take-aways from our New York State Pollinator Protection Plan was the critical need for continued research to broaden our understanding of pollinator decline," said State Agriculture Commissioner Richard A. Ball. "We have been working to ensure funding is consistently directed in this area and have seen tremendous results with research conducted by Cornell, and now with this survey, which provides us important insight into our pollinator populations and the future of this crucial sector to agriculture." Erin White, Zoologist and Project Coordinator with the NYNHP, said, "NYNHP is proud to continue our mission of documenting the status of New York's biodiversity with this report on our native pollinators. We could not have done this without our dedicated partners and community scientists who allowed us to reach far and wide throughout New York. It is a sobering finding that more than a third of native pollinators surveyed are potentially imperiled and I hope this will prompt swift conservation actions to benefit these species." Dr. Melissa Fierke, Chair, Professor, and Director, Cranberry Lake Biological Station at SUNY ESF said, "ESF is proud to contribute to this vital survey of New York state's native pollinators. These insects play a key role in the health of our ecosystems and our state's agriculture. Knowing the extent of peril our native species face is the first step in developing a conservation plan to not only preserve the pollinator population but restore it as well." Dr. Carmen Greenwood, Associate Professor of Fisheries, Wildlife and Environmental Science at SUNY Cobleskill, said, "The Empire State Native Pollinator Survey, as designed by the New York Natural Heritage Program, is truly an outstanding model that should serve as an example for other states as they assess the status of their pollinators. The fact that so many of these species are potentially imperiled or too sparse to make a determination of their status supports the critical importance of assessing these animals and continuing to assess their status into the future." Findings from the study confirm concerns about the health of some pollinator populations in New York State. The survey found that between 38 and 60 percent of the species studied are potentially imperiled or critically imperiled. Although the survey documented 16 bee and fly species for the first time in New York State, recent sightings or records could not be confirmed for 79 pollinator species previously recorded in New York. The study found that more than one-third of the native pollinators surveyed are at risk of becoming extinct in New York. Pollinator populations can be helped by conserving habitat, controlling invasive plants, changing mowing regimes, converting lawns into meadows, paying attention to the siting and density of honey bee hives to reduce competition and spread of disease to native species, controlling deer browsing of the understory, retaining logs and snags in forests, and reducing unnecessary outdoor lights for nocturnal species. Consistent with the Pollinator Plan, DEC is advancing actions to protect habitats and further research to study the causes of pollinator loss. Pesticides also represent one of many factors that stress pollinators, and neonicotinoids, in particular, have been identified as a group of pesticides that, in general, are highly toxic to pollinators. Reducing pesticide use is another key way to help pollinators and earlier this year, DEC announced actions to limit the unrestricted use of pesticides that can harm bee and other pollinator populations. DEC is reclassifying certain products containing the neonicotinoid (neonic) insecticides imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, and acetamiprid as "restricted use" to ensure applications are limited to trained pesticide applicators in specific situations. Restricting the use of these pesticides enables DEC to collect new data to determine where, when, and how they are used, as well as their potential impacts. For more information, go to DEC's website. Hyderabad: The Mahbubia High School in Gunfoundry, which is more than a century-old, seems brand new with a fresh coat of paint and upgraded facilities, but its exterior conceals the disproportionate teacher-student ratio. Although the school has been upgraded with new benches and boards, there is a severe teacher shortage. Sources said there are 507 students in the school with only 17 teachers on board. The students' joy from the renovation, therefore, was fleeting because no teacher had been hired in the recent past. There are 450 students in the primary section, including 200 new admissions this year, but with just seven teachers. According to Sudha Rani, headmaster of the primary section, the teacher-to-student ratio is 1:50. The PTR at the high school ranges from 1:60 to 80:1, worse than the national average. Recently, two teachers were deputed, and there was an urgent need to appoint teachers at the school. Additionally, there are worries that the school administration would struggle to maintain the "good infrastructure" due to the lack of cleaners. The facilities are good; we have brand-new boards and benches. Due to a shortage of teachers, these amenities are rarely fully utilised. We are unable to pay attention to every student. We have two sections for each class. We want to add one more section but are unable to even when we have the facilities, said the headmistress incharge G. Neeraja. The school staff hires private cleaners at their own expense and pays them `5,000 a month because they are not government appointed. What is the use of having good infrastructure when we are unable to maintain it? The cleaners were paid `3,000 per month prior to Covid-19, but they are now asking for `8,000, she said. She claimed that there was an urgent need to appoint teachers for Telugu and ohysics. The curriculum for these two subjects is being managed by other subject teachers. Additionally, the school requires instructors to teach Hindi, Urdu, and Telugu. Neeraja informed that half the students speak Urdu and are primarily from North India. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh students make up the other half of the students. "The student-to-teacher ratio for second language classrooms often rises to 1:80, and it is quite difficult for one instructor to handle them, Neerja said. Despite bridge classes being offered in schools for more than a month, over 50 per cent of students receive a "C" or lower. Few students receive B grades, and just a small number, roughly 510 pupils, receive A. Further, Neeraja stated that the government had promised to deliver the bilingual textbooks by July, but they haven't arrived yet. Granting bail, the court stated that Malik should give attendance before the Investigation Officer twice a month (Representational image) Hyderabad: The prime accused in the Jubilee Hills gang-rape case was granted conditional bail by the Nampally criminal court here on Wednesday. Saduddin Maliks counsel argued that the charge-sheet had been filed and the five juvenile accused had already got bail. Granting bail, the court stated that Malik should give attendance before the Investigation Officer (IO) twice a month, respond whenever required and should not leave the city without prior information, police sources said. Malik was arrested in the first week of June from his hideout in the city outskirts. Meanwhile, parents of the victim, the minor, lodged a complaint with the women's security department that photos and videos related to the gruesome incident were posted on social media. They demanded that they should be removed immediately. The women's security department transferred the case to the cybercrime cell, police sources revealed. Cybercrime police registered a case under the Juvenile Justice Act and are investigating. Vijayawada: Union Law and Justice Minister Kiren Rijiju has said a complete proposal on the shifting of the high court to Kurnool is yet to reach to the Centre from the AP Government. He was replying to an unstarred question from Telugu Desam MPs Kanakamedala Ravindra and Mopidevi Venkataramana in Rajya Sabha on Thursday. Their question was, whether the Centre received any request to shift the high court from Amaravati to Kurnool and whether it had taken a decision. The Union minister said that both the state government and the AP high court should first discuss and form their opinion and then submit a complete proposal to the central government. He said it is the responsibility of the state government to fund the running of the HC while the Chief Justice would run its day-to-day administration. Chief Minister Jagan Reddy had proposed the shifting of the high court from Amaravati to Kurnool in February, 2020. The HC in Amaravati was established under the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014 and it has been functioning from January 1, 2019, the minister told Rajya Sabha. HYDERABAD: Munugode MLA Komatireddy Rajgopal Reddy on Thursday formally sent a letter of resignation to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, requesting her to relieve him from the partys primary membership. He will be meeting Assembly Speaker Pocharam Srinivas Reddy to submit his resignation as MLA on August 8 or 9, after getting his appointment. In the letter addressed to Sonia Gandhi, Rajgopal Reddy reiterated that as a loyal worker of the party he had faced humiliation in the TPCC led by its president A. Revanth Reddy. It has pained me that those who once indulged in personal attacks on you are at the helm of the affairs in the state. Since I no longer could endure this, I decided not to work under a man who is a turncoat and who has brought disrepute to the position of a public representative and served in jail while trying to fulfil his selfish goals, he explained. Rajgopal Reddy also lamented that Telangana, which became a reality owing to the initiative taken by the Congress president, has fallen into wrong hands of Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and family. It is high time that Telangana was relieved from their clutches and it was only possible with another round of peoples movement. Since the Congress has failed to come up with a proper plan of action (to unseat Chandrashekar Rao), I have decided to choose a different path to fight it out, he added. Rajgopal Reddy will be meeting the partys top leadership including home minister Amit Shah and others in Delhi before he joins the BJP. Vijayawada: The National Green Tribunal observed that the Telangana government was flouting its own undertaking by constructing the Palamuru-Ranga Reddy lift irrigation scheme (PRLIS) on the Krishna river by not obtaining environmental clearance. The NGTs Chennai bench which was hearing a petition of the AP government on the PRLIS on Thursday observed that for utilising six tmc ft (thousand million cubic feet) of water for drinking purposes, there was no need for construction of a huge reservoir with 67 tmc ft capacity. The tribunal said that the government was taking up the project by avoiding the scrutiny of the Unioin ministry of environment and forests. The AP government had filed a contempt of court petition against the Telangana government as it was proceeding with construction of the lift scheme even as the court had issued a stay order against construction works and an undertaking given by it. AP Advocate-General S. Sriram submitted to the NGT that five workers were killed while working at an underground pump station at The PRLIS. This was countered by the Telangana additional AG J. Ramachandra Rao who said the mishap took place at works related to Mission Bhagirathi. Despite delayed arrival of southwest monsoon, AP received around 18% of surplus rainfall in the first two months of the southwest monsoon. (Representational image/DC image) VISAKHAPATNAM: A low pressure area is likely to form over northwest and adjoining west central Bay of Bengal around August 7, IMD Amaravati report said on Thursday. Issuing a warning for Andhra Pradesh, the IMD forecast heavy rainfall likely at isolated places in Rayalaseema and coastal Andhra Pradesh for three days. The IMD also predicted that heavy rainfall likely at isolated places in Rayalaseema, thunderstorms accompanied with lightning likely to occur at isolated places in north coastal Andhra Pradesh (NCAP), south coastal Andhra Pradesh (SCAP), Yanam and Rayalaseema on Friday. Heavy rain is likely at isolated places in NCAP, SCAP and Yanam, thunderstorms accompanied with lightning likely to occur at isolated places in NCAP, Yanam, SCAP and Rayalaseema on Saturday and Sunday. Despite the delayed arrival of the southwest monsoon, Andhra Pradesh received around 18 per cent of surplus rainfall in the first two months (June and July) of the southwest monsoon (water year). According to the statistics provided by IMD-Amaravati, from June 1 to July 31, as against the normal rainfall of 229.4 mm, the state received 271.2 mm. In June this year, the rainfall was scanty and deficit till June 18 and in the next two weeks and after that there was some good rainfall in all parts of the state. Subsequently, there were some good spells of rain in July this year. The organised trolling against Aamir Khans upcoming movie, Laal Singh Chaddha, an Indianised remake of the Hollywood epic, Forrest Gump, a movie based on a book by Winston Groom, is totally misplaced. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Gump won six Academy awards, including for the Best Picture and the Best Actor for the male lead actor playing the eponymous protagonist, Tom Hanks, and has now found place in the all time great movies made. Aamir Khan, who possibly fancies himself a bit as Indias Hank, faces the ire of the fundamentalists on the Hindutva side, who accuse him of being a bigot who insults Hinduism, its gods and sentiments, and is also on the wrong side of nationalism debate, for purportedly stoking the intolerance issue years ago. Once the #Boycott hashtag took centrestage on social media, a panicky Aamir understandably took to the media to dispel the notions that he either insulted Hinduism or is against the country. It would be wrong to organise a collective boycott of the movie. For these purported reasons. Instead, people should simply not go see it. For an altogether different set of reasons. Aamir, who earlier used the inspiration of Memento by Christopher Nolan and Indianised it to offer us Ghajini, must understand that originality is a significant trait of a great movie. Remakes are at best legally paid off and acknowledged plagiarism. Indians should stop rewarding a movie which declares India does not have a single original story worthy of being made into a film. If there was anything to learn from Gumps success, it was that great movies can be made from good books. Aamir had literature in every single Indian language to search from. Instead, we have a hamburger chole bhature on the plate on offer. Secondly, Kareena Kapoor Khan, the co-lead, had famously justified nepotism in the film industry saying, in the end, people pay money and watch star children. Listen to Kareena, and dont watch Laal Singh Chaddha. But dont boycott it. The protection of personal data is a very important subject globally, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told a news conference after a cabinet meeting. The cabinet of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved a data protection bill on Wednesday for tabling in parliament, taking the country a step closer to framing a privacy law. The protection of personal data is a very important subject globally, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told a news conference after a cabinet meeting. How that will be done (here) and how work will progress keeping Indias interest and peoples interest in mind, this is what this bill is about. The Personal Data Protection bill, drafted by a panel headed by a former Supreme Court judge and submitted to the government last year, is key for how firms including global tech giants Amazon, Facebook, Alphabets Google and others process, store and transfer Indian consumers data. Although the full extent of changes in the bill is not known, the draft cleared by the cabinet expects social media firms to develop a voluntary method for users to verify themselves, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. The bill mandates that personal data categorised as sensitive will be stored or processed only in India, the source said, declining to be named as details about the bill in its current form are not public. It also says that data deemed sensitive will have to be stored in India but can be processed outside of the country, the source said. Indias banking regulator last year directed foreign firms such as Mastercard and Visa to store their payments data locally for unfettered supervisory access. It later clarified that transactions made in India could be processed outside of the country but the related data should be brought back for local storage within 24 hours. Other non-critical or non-sensitive data could be stored outside India, the source said. Companies proven to be in breach will face a penalty of up to 150 million rupees (2.09 million USD) or 4 per cent of their global turnover, whichever is higher, the source said. Indias technology ministry was did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Five ballistic missiles fired by China appear to have landed in Japan's exclusive economic zone (EEZ), Japanese defence minister Nobuo Kishi said on Thursday, adding that it was the first such incident. He added that Japan had lodged a protest via diplomatic routes. A 1,200-year-old Hindu temple here in the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province has been formally opened to the public after it was reclaimed from a Christian family following a lengthy court battle, according to a federal body. The Evacuee Trust Property Board (ETPB), the federal body overseeing minority worship places in Pakistan, last month reclaimed possession of the Valmiki Temple situated near the famous Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore from a Christian family, which had grabbed the place of worship more than two decades ago. Besides the Krishna Temple, the Valmiki Temple is the only functional Hindu temple in Lahore. The Christian family, which claims to have converted to Hinduism, had been facilitating only the Valmiki caste Hindus for worship at the temple for the last two decades. ETPB spokesperson Amir Hashmi said Valmiki Temple was formally inaugurated on Wednesday with over 100 Hindus, some Sikh, Christian and Muslim leaders gathered there to celebrate the occasion. Talking to PTI on Thursday, Hashmi said the Hindu devotees performed their religious rituals and had langar (food) for the first time it was retrieved from the grabbers. "Valmiki Temple will be fully restored in accordance with a master plan in the coming days," the spokesperson said. The ETPB said the temples land was transferred to it in the revenue record, but the family 2010-2011, claiming to be the owner of the property, filed a case in a civil court. Besides going into litigation, the family also made the temple only for the Valmiki Hindus, it said. This left the ETPB with no option but to fight the case in court. This time, the court also reprimanded the petitioner for false claims, the ETPB added. Pakistan Hindu Mandir Management Committee (PHMMC) President Krishan Sharma said the ETPB'S move was a goodwill gesture and also a step towards mainstreaming the community and should be applauded, the Dawn newspaper reported. The Valmiki sect of Hindus are a poor segment of the society who have no say or access, Sharma explained, adding they had regained access to this temple now. The role of Valmikis is very significant in Hindu mythology; had they not written the Ramayan, no one would know Ram. Earlier, this temple was not being used for worship, those possessing it didnt allow anyone to enter. But now, every Hindu can come in and pray, he added. Were making efforts to promote religious tourism and rehabilitate many other temples and religious sites across the country. There are issues everywhere in the world, which are exploited by inimical forces in the region. So, such steps could silence them and counter their narrative, Sharma added. In 1992, in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition in India, an angry mob wielding weapons stormed into the Valmiki Temple. It smashed the idols of Krishna and Valmiki, broke utensils and crockery in the kitchen and seized the gold with which the statues were embellished. The temple was demolished to rubble and the building was set on fire. The shops in the neighbourhood also caught fire and it took days for the authorities to extinguish the flames. The ETPB spokesman told the Dawn newspaper that a one-person commission constituted by the Supreme Court of Pakistan presented its recommendations to the government, stating that the temple must be renovated to provide better workshop facilities to the Hindu community. But the ETPB, in the wake of the litigation, was unable to start restoration work at the temple constructed on 0.025 hectares worth millions in the heart of the city, the spokesperson said. The ETPB looks after the temples and land left over by Sikhs and Hindus who migrated to India after the Partition. It oversees 200 Gurdwaras and 150 temples across Pakistan. Assam Rifles and Mizoram Police in a joint operation seized 458 gm of heroin worth Rs 1.92 crore in Aizawl on Thursday. A Myanmarese national has been arrested for possessing the contraband, an Assam Rifles statement said. The seized contraband and the accused were handed over to the state police for further legal action, it said. India on Thursday reassured Sri Lanka of its continued support to economic recovery of the neighbouring island nation. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had a bilateral meeting with newly appointed Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Ali Sabry at Phnom Penh in Cambodia on the sideline of the ASEAN conclaves. Reaffirmed Indias commitment, as a dependable friend and reliable partner, to the economic recovery and well being of Sri Lanka, Jaishankar tweeted after his meeting with Sabry. After Sri Lanka plunged into an economic crisis early this year, India has so far provided assistance worth over $ 3.8 billion to help the cash-strapped island nation and also sent consignments of food, fuel, medicines, fertilizers and other essentials. Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took over as President of Sri Lanka recently, said that India had provided the island nation "a breath of life" by providing timely economic assistance as it faced the worst economic crisis in decades. A labourer was killed and two others were injured in a grenade attack by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on Thursday night, police said. "Terrorists hurled grenade on outside labourers at Gadoora area of Pulwama. In this terror incident, one labourer died and two others were injured. Area cordoned off," a police official said. Additional police parties have reached the spot and an operation has been started to nab the attackers. Congress will go ahead with the 'gherao' of the Prime Minister's residence against price rise on Friday even as Delhi Police threatened to take legal action if leaders violated prohibitory orders imposed in New Delhi district except for Jantar Mantar. The main Opposition party had announced a nationwide protest against record-breaking price rise with MPs marching to Rashtrapati Bhavan and gherao of the official residence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Lok Kalyan Marg. Also Read: Congress steps up attack on government after Herald House seal, gives multiple notices in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha The protest also coincides with the Enforcement Directorate searching the premises of Herald House and barricading the houses of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and former president Rahul Gandhi, who were questioned in the National Herald case. Deputy Commissioner of Police (New Delhi) Amrutha Guguloth wrote to Congress General Secretary (Organisation) K C Venugopal that police has received information "through reliable sources" that he along with his supporters are going to hold the protest. She said Section 144 (CrPC) will be in force in the "entire area of New Delhi district except Jantar Mantar". In such a scenario, she said, dharna or gherao in the area of New Delhi district on August 5 cannot be permitted due to "security/law and order/traffic reasons and existing guidelines" framed by the Supreme Court in 2018. "Any violation of the direction may invite legal action against you," Guguloth said in her letter to Venugopal. Responding to the letter, Venugopal said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman agreed in Parliament that there is price rise but the government is not doing anything and it is the duty of the Opposition to protest for people's causes. "Yesterday, I got the letter. It is a threat note saying you are not allowed to hold a protest and if you will, then I will face legal action. Is there no freedom to protest in this country? We will go ahead," he said. Also Read: National Herald case: ED resumes raid at Young Indian office According to the Congress plan, all elected representatives of the Congress from village to district level court mass arrest in their block or district headquarters while in state capitals, the state units will organise a gherao of Raj Bhavan in which MLAs, MLCs, former MPs and senior leaders will participate. Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs will hold Chalo Rashtrapati Bhavan protest from Parliament to register protest against price rise and unemployment, Congress General Secretary (Organisation) KC Venugopal said in a letter to party leaders. Party will also organise Prime Minister House Gherao in the capital in which Congress Working Committee members and senior leaders will participate. Tsai Ing-wen's words confound right and wrong: mainland spokesperson Xinhua) 09:22, August 04, 2022 BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday blasted Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen's words for confusing right and wrong. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the comments in response to a media query about the remarks Tsai made when meeting with Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Ma noted that by making these remarks, Tsai whitewashed the "Taiwan independence" secessionist agenda as so-called "upholding democracy" while defaming the mainland's justified actions of safeguarding national security and territorial integrity as "military threats." The current tensions across the Taiwan Strait originate from the collusion between "Taiwan independence" secessionists and external forces, Ma said. He added that Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities actively solicit foreign support and deeply engage in provocative actions, and the United States has been constantly fueling the tensions in an attempt to use Taiwan to contain China. There is no denying that the DPP authorities and the United States are the ones who seek to instigate cross-Strait confrontations, disrupt peace and stability across the Strait, and damage the interests of the Taiwan people, Ma said. He warned Tsai and the DPP authorities that relying on the United States to seek "Taiwan independence" will inevitably fail, and that "seeking independence by force" will only hasten their demise. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Maldives President Ibrahim Solih visited India earlier this week, with a high-level official and business delegation and met Indias top political leadership as well as business leaders in Delhi and Mumbai. Six agreements were signed on fishing zone forecast capacity-building, cybersecurity, womens development, disaster management, police infrastructure, and social housing. Both countries agreed to further deepen institutional linkages for cooperation in the areas of defence and security, investment promotion, human resource development, infrastructure development, including climate and energy. As Jaishankar observed, India and Maldives share a deep and abiding friendshipIt is also a partnership of great consequence and a real force of stability and prosperity for the Indian Ocean Region.India is considered a net security provider by the Maldives. India-Maldives relations have been described as close, cordial and multidimensional. Maldives occupies a very special place in the Neighbourhood First policy and SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) vision of the Government of India. Notably, Indias relationship with the Maldives is free of contentious issues. Proximity with India is a big advantage for the Maldives as evident in how Indian help quickly reached the atoll-State during the 1988 coup attempt, the 2004 tsunami, the 2014 water crisis, and 2020-21 pandemic. Indias comprehensive strategy of development cooperation with the Maldives compliments the national framework for development of the latter. The quantum of development partnership is around $3 billion, covering every facet of development in Maldives -- budgetary support, infrastructure development, education, capacity-building, health and sanitation. India is also one of Maldives largest trading partners. Indians constitute the second-largest expatriate community there. However, there are at least two issues that impinge on India-Maldives relations: Islamic radicalisation, and the increasing role of China in the atoll-State. Over the past decade, the number of Maldivians drawn to the ISIS and Pakistan-based madrasas and jihadist groups has risen. Protests by Islamists bearing ISIS flags are frequent on the island. Evidently, political instability and socio- economic uncertainty are the main drivers that have fuelled Islamic radicalism in Maldives. It is the same fores that are involved in anti-India activities in the archipelago. Pakistan-based jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) have exploited these fault lines through their charitable fronts to establish a foothold, especially in southern Maldives, in the garb of relief operations post-2004 tsunami. Developments in West Asia and the Af-Pak region have also influenced Maldivians toward radicalisation. The youth, who return from religious studies in Pakistani madaris controlled by various jihadist groups, and from Saudi Arabian madaris, return not only with radical ideas, but also with jihadi connections. The madrasa-educated youth are indoctrinated to wage jihad in trouble spots like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Chechnya. These battle-hardened Maldivians help to recruit Maldivian youth for Islamic militant groups in these areas. New Delhi needs to take note of anti-Indian radical groups operating in the archipelago. Secondly, Chinas strategic footprint has lately increased in Indias neighbourhood. Maldives has emerged as an important pearl in Chinas String of Pearls construct. Given Maldives strategic location in the Indian Ocean, Beijing has been vying for a naval base in the atoll to secure the flow of energy supplies from Africa and West Asia through the Indian Ocean. During Chinese President Xi Jinpings visit in 2014, Maldives agreed to become a partner in Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Accordingly, China has provided grants and soft loans to Maldives to build a bridge from its capital Male to the airport, named the China-Maldives Friendship Bridge. Also, Chinese companies were involved in airport development and awarded contracts for resort development. This includes the strategically important Feydhoo Finolhu island near the capital. During former President Abdullah Yameens reign, the Maldivian Constitution was amended to permit foreigners to own land, including investments over a billion dollars for projects on reclaimed land. China was intended to be the beneficiary. Chinese nationals now account for the largest tourist arrivals on these islands. In the process, Beijings largesse to Maldives neutralised Indias economic diplomacy, and Maldives did not hesitate to play the China card against India. Indias concerns stem from the increasing Chinese strategic presence in the Indian Ocean region. Though the present MDP government is favourably disposed toward India, it may not be in a position to completely avoid Chinese presence and role in Maldives. India has to respond to the new realities. The major challenge for Indias diplomacy is how to balance its cordial relations with its neighbours, but without compromising its core national interests. (The writer is Director, Centre for East Asian Studies, Dept of International Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru) Released: August 4, 2022 John S. Deihl was formally sworn in as Chief of the Delaware County Park Police during a ceremony attended by friends, family, Park Police officers, and Delaware County elected officials on August 2 in the Delaware County Government Center Complex in Media. Chief Deihl, a 42-year veteran of law enforcement, the long-time Captain of the Park Police, and its acting Chief for the past year, was sworn in by Delaware County Court of Common Pleas Judge Kevin F. Kelly. As the head of the Park Police, Chief Deihl oversees 110 officers and staff, including not only the Park Police but the newly formed bike unit and the Constables Division. All of County Council extends its warm congratulations to Chief Deihl on this well-earned promotion. Chief Deihl has served the County with distinction for decadesthe Park Police are in good hands, said Delaware County Council Chair Dr. Monica Taylor who was in attendance along with other members of Council. In addition to members of County Council, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer, Delaware County Sheriff Jerry L. Sanders, Jr., Delaware County Controller Joanne Phillips, County Solicitor William Martin, County Executive Director Howard Lazarus, and numerous Department heads were in attendance to congratulate Chief Deihl. A native of Delaware County, Chief Deihl grew up in Darby Township and attended Saint Joseph's in Collingdale and Monsignor Bonner High School in Drexel Hill before moving to Norwood, his current home, in 1982. He met his wife, Debbie Deihl, in the Delaware County Courthouse (where she worked in the Sheriffs Office) and they have raised a family with two children and three grandchildren. He began his career in law enforcement in 1980 as a patrolman before being promoted to Corporal in 1983, Sergeant (1984), Lieutenant (1988), Captain (1989), Interim Chief (2021) and now Chief. Over his career, Chief Deihl has worked with several law enforcement agencies throughout Delaware County, in addition to multiple Federal agencies including the United States Secret Service to provide security for VIPs and dignitaries visiting the Delaware County Courthouse and Government Center Complex. Chief Deihl is also the recipient of multiple awards during his career, including the Delaware County Council Distinguished Service Award in 1996 and 2011, a Life-Saving Award, unit citations, and an award for Meritorious Conduct. Delaware County Council extends its congratulations to Chief Deihl and commends and thanks Chief Deihl and the entire Park Police Force for their service and dedication to keeping the residents of Delaware County safe. An angry County Derry pensioner has branded the conditions of the new bus stop in Dungiven as 'filthy'. The commuter, who did not wish to be identified, is a regular user of the 212 service from Belfast to Derry and has hit out at the conditions she encountered last Friday when using the service. I had to walk up through Dungiven on uneven footpaths first of all, with rough surfaces and stones and part of the footpath was actually closed for road works. Then when I got to the bus stop there was this disgusting black bin bag full of rubbish just hanging on the outside of the shelter. It had started to rain and I had to move around the bag to try and get inside to sit down to catch my breath after the long walk, but when I went inside the shelter it was absolutely filthy. There were food wrappers and empty bottles, there was broken glass lying around and the wasps were just hovering around this smelly big black bin bag it was disgusting. I didn't know what was worse, the smell or the wasps, to be honest, said the angry local. I didn't feel it was safe for me to sit down and rest because I was frightened in case there would be mice or rats around the bag which was stuffed full of rubbish, so I had to step back outside and stand for a long time waiting on the bus. I use my pensioners bus pass to get to and from hospital appointments at the Altnagelvin and so I rely on this service, but these conditions are just no good for old people. I was exhausted by the time I reached the bus stop, then I couldn't even get a sit down to rest so by the time the bus came I was so tired I could hardly get up the steps, said the lady. To make it worse, I had used that same bus earlier in the week and that bag was just hanging then but it only had some stuff in the bottom of it why can't someone come and remove the rubbish, or put an actual bin there somewhere safe and away from where you have to sit, added the pensioner. Speaking to the County Derry Post, councillor Sean McGlinchey hit out at those responsible for maintaining this area saying, I've actually gone up and cleaned that bus stop out myself twice. People have mentioned it to me and I've reported it to the main contractor there several times, it's actually the road contractor's responsibility not Translink. "I'm calling on them to clean it up at least twice per week and keep it in good condition," he added. Over 700 of the noise complaints received by councils covering County Derry related to animal noises, a recent report has revealed. Data published by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) showed that the category accounted for 719 of the 1,415 noise complaints received by the county's councils. The figure makes up 51% of the total number of complaints, with Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council leading the way on 291, ranking fourth overall in Northern Ireland. Derry City and Strabane District Council recorded 234, with Mid Ulster registering the least on 194. Complaints related to music, television and parties were the second most common, accounting for 215 reports across the county's three areas, while 'other neighbourhood noise' made up 105. 12% of all noise complaints in the North were recorded in County Derry's three local government districts. The report groups categories into six main areas; Industrial, Commercial, Domestic, Construction, Transport and Noise in the Street. Mid Ulster (49) and Causeway Coast and Glens (32) ranked second and third in the 'Industrial' category, with Causeway Coast and Glens and Derry City and Strabane (both 21) ranking third and fourth for 'Noise in the Street'. Across Northern Ireland despite 11,356 noise complaints being made, just 570 notices calling on the noise to be ceased or reduced in volume were served in total over the eleven council areas. In Mid Ulster, the 375 reports resulted in four notices being served, with 1.07 notices being served for every 100 complaints. Just one notice was issued in Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council from their 566 reports, while Derry City and Strabane saw one notice from their 474 complaints. Of County Derry's three areas, Causeway Coast and Glens had the highest concentration of complaints, with 35.0 per 10,000 population. Derry City and Strabane had a figure of 31.2, with Mid Ulster posting the lowest figure at 25.2, the third lowest in Northern Ireland overall. Three categories across the county's districts attracted zero complaints; Civil Aircraft, Street Traders and Road Works, while one report in Derry City and Strabane related to 'Children Playing'. A total of 891 adopted persons and relatives applied to the new Contact Preference Register last month following the commencement of the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022. The landmark legislation, which was enacted on July 1, provides legal entitlement to full and unrestricted access to birth certificates, birth, early life, care, and medical information for any person who was adopted, boarded out, had their birth illegally registered, or who otherwise has questions in relation to their origins. The new law also establishes a Contact Preference Register (CPR) to which applications can be made by those wishing to make contact, to request privacy, or to seek or share information with a relative. The Adoption Authority of Ireland operates the CPR. Of the 891 people who applied to register their preferences in relation to contact, 786 applications were from adoptees, 90 were from birth parents, and 15 were other relatives. There were 820 people who expressed a preference for contact at some level. There were 32 people who expressed a desire for no contact (24 adoptees and 8 relatives) while 39 applicants (30 adoptees and nine relatives) did not want contact but were willing to share information. As part of a public information campaign around the Birth Information and Tracing Act, a booklet on the important services to be provided under the new legislation is being delivered to every household in Ireland. Patricia Carey, CEO of the Adoption Authority, said: We are very encouraged by the number of people who have registered on the Contact Preference Register. These are mostly adoptees but also birth parents and other relatives for whom the Birth Information and Tracing Act is a really important piece of legislation. Come October, when the free services under the legislation open, adoptees will finally have the right to access all of their birth information held by the State. This wasnt the case previously, so it is a big deal. If they have applied to the Contact Preference Register, the Adoption Authority will also be able to facilitate contact between adoptees and birth parents and other relatives, at a level with which both parties are comfortable. The 1.85 million booklets landing on doorsteps throughout the country explain what the new legislation means and how this works. I would urge anyone impacted by the legislation to read and consider the information it contains, and perhaps talk to a trusted friend, before deciding what they want to do. The majority of all applications, 786, came from people in Ireland, with 105 applications from those who live overseas. The greatest number of applications from outside Ireland came from the UK, with 50 people registering contact preferences. Next was the US with 17 applications, followed by Australia with four. The county in Ireland with the most applications in July was Dublin, with 253 people registering preferences, followed by Cork with 118 applications, and Meath with 48. The county with the fewest applications was Leitrim with four. The oldest applicant to the CPR was 81, while the youngest, aged five, had an application submitted by their adoptive parents. The mean age of both adoptees and relatives was 50. Of the 786 adoptees who applied to the CPR, 74% of them (580 people) are seeking contact with their birth mother. Almost 17% (130) of applicants stated they wanted to trace their birth father, with 9% (69) seeking contact with a sibling, and 1.3% (10) seeking contact with a grandparent, cousin, aunt, or uncle. Of the 105 relatives who applied to the CPR, 86% of them (90 people) are seeking contact with their child, just under 5% (five people) said they wanted to contact siblings, and almost 10 % (10 people) are seeking contact with a grandparent, cousin, aunt, or uncle. More than 48,000 children were adopted from 1953 to 2021. An additional 2,000+ children were sent from Ireland to other countries mainly the United States and adopted in these countries. In addition, an estimated 20,000+ children were boarded out sent to live with foster families at a time before 1953 when there was no legal adoption in Ireland. Ms Carey added: Most families in Ireland have been touched by adoption at some stage. The Adoption Authority is determined to reach as many people as possible to let them know they can find out about their origins and to encourage all those eligible under the legislation to register their preferences on the Contact Preference Register. In October, both Information and Tracing services under the legislation will open. Applications for these services can be made to the Adoption Authority of Ireland and Tusla, the Child and Family Agency. A website, www.birthinfo.ie, has been established for people seeking to make an application under the Act or seeking further information. Manoj Bajpayee on Sonchiriya - 'Even Though My Role Is Not Lengthy, My Learning Has Been Huge And Immense' Pankaj Tripathi reveals filmmakers willing to wait till 2024 to cast him as he's all booked up till 2022: 'It is very difficult to say no When Aamir had asked Hrithik to do Rang De Basanti Indian government withdraws data protection bill JPC suggested 81 amendments to the existing bill in its review New bill could be introduced in Budget session 2023 The Indian Government on Wednesday withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, two years and seven months after it was introduced in the parliament. The Data Protection Bill was supposed to usher in a new era of data protection and privacy laws in India for Indian citizens as currently there are no common regulations to protect the peoples privacy even though the Supreme Court of India has granted the Right to Privacy as a fundamental right of citizens. As per an official statement issued by Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, the Personal Data Protection Bill was being reviewed by a Joint Parliamentary Committee which suggested over 81 amendments and 12 major recommendations to the bill. It was therefore decided to withdraw the Data Protection Bill altogether and work on a new bill that encapsulates all the amendments suggested by the JPC. Personal Data Protection Bill has been withdrawn because the JCP recommended 81 amendments in a bill of 99 sections. Above that it made 12 major recommendations. Therefore the bill has been withdrawn and a new bill will be presented for public consultation, Ashwini tweeted out last evening after announcing the development. It has been close to 10 years since the A.P. Shah on Privacy, 5 years since the Puttaswamy Judgement and 4 years since the Srikrishna Committees report they all signal urgency for a data protection law and surveillance reforms. Each day lost, causes more injury and harm. 3/3 Apar (@apar1984) August 3, 2022 The IT Minister also told Reuters that the government has already started working on the new bill which is in good advanced stages and that he expects to present it in the budget session of Parliament in 2023. The Personal Data Protection Bill proposed regulations on the processing, storage and transfer of personal data across the different sectors and empowered users with more control over their private data. This had raised some concerns with the Big Tech companies like Google, Meta and more as it could have incurred increased costs due to provisions such as data localization. While privacy advocates were concerned about the power it granted the Central Government such as the provision to exempt any government agency from the data protection laws in the interest of national security. It remains to be seen how the new data protection bill takes shape and whether it will be robust enough to protect the privacy of over 1.38 billion people. Subscriber content preview Photo from Cintas [enlarge] Headlands Lodges restroom features a dark, wave-like concrete sink with touchless faucets. Cintas Corp. has announced its top 10 finalists for the 2022 America's Best Restroom contest, and one is in the Pacific Northwest. The 21st annual contest celebrates businesses that develop and maintain innovative restroom facilities. . . . College or bust is no longer the only option Candidates are in a position where they can be selective about where they want to work. By NIDA MOLODIH I&E Construction Molodih Between the Great Resignation of early 2022 and the wave of baby boomers retiring, we are amid one of the biggest opportunities of this lifetime when it comes to accelerating and choosing the trajectory of ones career in construction. The labor shortage woes of this year have been felt across all industries, but in one with an aging population, the construction industry will be forced into an unprecedented position over the next few years. Unfortunately, we havent seen the peak of this labor shortage yet. According to NCCER, 23% of the construction industrys workforce will retire over the next nine years. The Associated Builders and Contractors reports that, assuming construction spending growth slows next year, the industry will still need to bring in roughly 590,000 new workers on top of normal hiring to meet industry demand. That is only if the industry slows down in the next year. If the market stays on pace, the association estimates that the industry will need to add 650,000 workers on top of normal hiring. This gap will leave companies at the mercy of the labor pool. Candidates are in a position where they can be choosier about where they want to work, what they want to do, and to what capacity, forever altering the industrys work model. Some will coast through this period, while others will seize the opportunity and thrive. In this new environment, employees with the right aptitude will be able to accelerate their careers at a rate never seen before. Photo courtesy of I&E Construction [enlarge] Identifying star candidates and ensuring low turnover has been a major focus for I&E in the last five years. Identifying these star candidates and ensuring low turnover has been a major focus for us in the last five years. Foreseeing this play out, I&E Construction has implemented many programs and incentives leading up to this period. These initiatives have helped us lower our turnover to an all-time low, well below this last years industry average of 57.5% reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are also a major contributor to the exponential growth weve experienced and become one of Oregons top 100 fastest-growing companies for four years running. One of these initiatives has been recognizing and educating as many potential candidate pools as possible. With the institutional education focus shifting away from the trades in the last decade, there is a lack of understanding and awareness at the entry-level, when it comes to careers in construction. We have spent a lot of time speaking to high school and college students about career opportunities in the construction industry. What we have observed among the younger generation is that there is a shared misconception that pursuing a successful and rewarding career in construction can only be obtained through post-secondary education or union jobs. Based on the makeup of our organization, we know this not to be true. There is a large population of students who are looking for options outside of college but dont know what opportunities are out there.?Our focus in the last year has been to work with high schools and educate students on the different career paths. I&E has partnered with a local school district to help design its new Career Technology Education (CTE) construction program. Serving on the board allows us to help shape the program throughout the planning and implementation phase. This initiative will give thousands of students in our area the possibility of hands-on learning while still in school Additionally, as industry professionals, we believe it is our responsibility to pay it forward to the next generation through education and mentorship. To fulfill that responsibility, weve established a paid internship program that is built to accommodate students from different educational backgrounds. Students are invited to participate at the high school and college levels. Each year is designed to give students at different levels the best real-world experience, so they are set up for a successful entry into the workforce. The only way this industry makes it through this gap period favorably is with a collective effort in attracting new talent and bringing interest back to construction. With the right exposure, the construction industry will gain new traction as a worthwhile career path for many undecideds.?? Nida Molodih has been the human resource and safety manager of I&E Construction for more than five years and oversees the Oregon and Florida divisions. Other Stories: Building careers while building buildings There is no one-size-fits-all path into a career in construction. By KEVIN MCCAIN Skanska USA Building McCain The growing diversity in the construction industry and within our own company is something that we at Skanska are particularly proud of. Every day on jobsites and in our offices, we see more people of color, more women, more young people, more people who have chosen construction as a second career, and more who have taken non-traditional paths into the industry. Because of that, we are a more creative, resilient, stronger company and industry. Just like every construction worker is one of a kind, there is no one-size-fits-all path into a career in construction, especially given the diversity of roles available across the broader architecture, engineering and construction industry, and even within our own company. While many roles do require a college education, just as many begin with a high school diploma, a willingness to learn, and hard work. Many senior-level employees here at Skanska and in the larger industry began their careers in the construction trade, for example, as a carpenter apprentice, before becoming a journeyman with apprentices working under them, and then moving on to higher levels of leadership. Apprenticeships, on-the-job training, and other learning and career growth opportunities continue to afford the more than 7 million men and women in the construction industry people of every race, creed, and national origin a well-paying future with good benefits. Skanska has several programs in place to help bring awareness to the many career choices that exist for people interested in the construction industry. Photo courtesy of Skanska [enlarge] Skanska and AAMA earlier this year hosted a Youth in Construction event that included a tour of Sound Transits L-300 light rail jobsite in Lynnwood. YOUTH IN CONSTRUCTION When working with school districts and administrators, we often hear how great it would be if we were able to help show students the wide range of careers available in our industry, as many students have no idea the breadth of roles available. Many assume that the construction industry is populated primarily by folks who excelled in the industrial arts (aka, the shop class kids). In 2021, Skanska established a partnership with the Office of African American Male Achievement (AAMA) at Seattle Public Schools, forming Skanskas Youth in Construction program. The partnership is designed to raise awareness of and bring equitable access to career paths at competitive salaries in the construction industry. Since then, Skanska and AAMA have hosted three highly successful Youth in Construction events, which showcase the breadth of careers available within the industry, including jobs that literally can take them around the world. Through Youth in Construction, AAMA and Skanska are helping showcase roles including civil engineers, building information modeling technicians, environmental health and safety officers, estimators, quality control professionals, superintendents, project managers, financial managers, marketers, human resources professionals, labor relations specialists, apprenticeship coordinators, and, yes, tradespeople carpenters, ironworkers, plumbers, electricians, HVAC specialists and dozens more. Many students have no idea how extensive the construction industry really is. Building a building is complex and it takes an extensive team of people working together utilizing their diverse skill sets to make it all happen. We want to make sure these kids understand that and can envision a future where theyre the ones designing, engineering, and building the next school, airport, highway, office tower or shopping mall. To that end, this summer, Skanskas inaugural class of high school interns will begin a groundbreaking new program with us. These students, selected from participants in the Youth in Construction program, have shown drive and dedication to the craft and we believe this new internship program will help further prepare them for a rewarding career in construction. ACE MENTORS Skanska has been a proud participant in the ACE Mentor Program here in the Puget Sound region since its inception in Seattle in 2001. Since then, it has expanded to Bellevue in 2006 and Tacoma in 2016. ACE is a free after school program open to any high school student with the curiosity and drive to learn about the various career paths in the design and construction industry. The program runs November through May each year and typically pairs a group of 10 to 15 professionals with 20 to 25 students. Over the course of 15 two-hour meetings every other week, the students learn about the various disciplines and then they put that learning to the test by responding to a mock RFP. This is high-level, career-building work. ACE pairs architects, engineers and contractors with high school students, and introduces them to people in related fields interior design, urban planning, marketing, law and more to give the students real world experience prior to graduating high school and provide a head-start confirmation of their career path before entering college. Since its inception locally, more than 1,500 industry professionals have volunteered as mentors to nearly 3,500 students. The ACE Mentorship Program has awarded more than $1.1 million in scholarships to local students pursuing a college education in one of the ACE fields. SWINGING A HAMMER People who dont work in construction often get a certain mental picture when I mention that I work in construction, but as those of us in the industry know, this field encompasses a wide variety of career paths. At Skanska alone, we have three main divisions in the U.S. Building, Civil and Commercial Development all of which offer wonderful opportunities for people looking to get into this business. For example, careers in development are not limited to those who studied real estate but have an interest in the built environment. The team at Skanska USA Commercial Development have degrees that span across real estate, architecture, finance, urban planning and design. They welcome people energized by creative problem solving and working amongst diverse mindsets that will bring forward highly sustainable and resilient buildings. Roles on their team include development, leasing, sustainability, innovation/emerging technology, safety, finance, strategy, legal, asset management, communications, marketing, HR, diversity and inclusion, and office management. Whats more, they have two current employees who started in administrative roles and have since completed the USC Ross Minority Program for Real Estate, progressing to now become development associates. Another thing I love about this industry and our company is how many people have joined us from areas outside of construction. Case in point is Margot vanSwearingen, one of our senior project managers. Margot initially wanted to be an architect. She went to UW, majored in architecture and spent six years at an integrated design firm on their architecture staff working on K-12 design. She was really invested in designing for how kids learn and the best environments for teachers the very things we value at Skanska, as well. Her interest in construction operations was piqued while performing construction administration on projects she worked on while at the firm and talking with a friend who worked for Skanska gave her the confidence that contracting would be a right fit, so she made the move. On Margots most recent project, she was senior project manager overseeing construction of the new Highline High School. She oversaw client contact, cost management, schedule management, mitigating risk, COVID mitigation, estimates, working with design team on preconstruction, course setting, owner communication, establishing processes and methods, labor negotiations and more. Another job people normally dont associate with the construction industry is strategy. Addy Duffany certainly didnt. While she is very passionate about our industry today, when she was studying urban planning at Arizona State University, she had given very little thought to working for a construction company and no thought to working in strategy. But after joining Skanska and gaining experience in both preconstruction and in operations as a project engineer, she noticed that the company had a business need to plan our new business initiatives in the same way we plan our projects. So, Addy did what forward-thinking people do she put together a business case for a role she called Strategy Manager, which needed someone well-versed in the industry and with the technical skills to relate to our project teams while thinking futuristically to do the job right. We agreed with her analysis and recommendations 100% and then moved her into the role because she was the perfect fit. At the end of the day, our industry is about building things. In construction, that can mean building strategies, building plans, building teams, building budgets, building consensus and more. Because without all of that, none of us would be building buildings or building our careers. Kevin McCain is executive vice president and general manager, Skanska USA Building. Other Stories: Tips for finding a successful, fulfilling AEC role Bring passion, positivity and grit with you to work, and youll undoubtedly be a success. By GEORGE THEO Coughlin Porter Lundeen Theo The greater construction industry is full of benefits, but one of its greatest differentiators is the lasting impact it has on cities and communities. From the houses we live in and the schools our kids attend, to the offices we work in and the plazas we stroll through, all were developed, designed and built by this incredible AEC community. Driving past a project youve had a hand in creating and being able to do so for the lifetime of the building, is truly a special experience. At Coughlin Porter Lundeen, we celebrate these contributions as much as possible. Several times a year, our office splits into small groups and explores past projects via neighborhood walking tours. Together we walk through plazas, explore retail spaces, and view classrooms. Experienced principals and project managers provide context and project details, and talk about the history of a neighborhood, how its current master plan came to be, and how we as civil and structural engineers have contributed. What better way to celebrate work than being able to physically be there and witness how it fits into the community! START SHARING Photos courtesy of Coughlin Porter Lundeen [enlarge] Civil associate principal Kyle Malaspino stops at the Amazon Spheres during an intern group tour. A career in construction involves so much more than traditional desk work, and one of the best and most rewarding out-of-office opportunities involves community support and giving back. AEC professionals can donate their time and talent to organizations like Sawhorse Revolution (where high school students are partnered with professional carpenters, architects and engineers, and work side-by-side to create needed community projects), ACE Mentor Program of America (an after school program designed to attract high school students into pursuing careers in architecture, construction, and engineering), and Washington Alliance for Better Schools (providing hands-on STEM learning experiences for grade and middle school levels). These early exposure opportunities are so valuable and allow staff to share their excitement and expertise with Seattle-area youth. Its important to not be stunted on your own learning journey too. Once settled into a role, dont let the learning stop! Continued learning will keep you passionate, excited and inventive. Professional organizations can help greatly on this front, as they not only provide a platform for purposeful networking and industry collaboration, but regularly facilitate workshops, panels, conferences, and meetings. These allow members to share best practices, learn from others experiences, and consider challenges as a team. Many companies are happy to cover employee membership fees or continued education costs. Take advantage! FIND A MENTOR Theres a reason apprenticeship has been around since the stone ages: it works! Great mentors will invest time in getting to know you, your strengths and your goals. Theyll support your day-to-day work, provide constructive evaluations, and help you plan for career checkpoints. Most likely, a workplace wont have one single person who represents everything you want to achieve. Diversify! Everyone at our office has something to teach you. If you find someone particularly competent in tough situations, study that. If you admire the way a coworker stays organized, take notes. If you find someone you connect with, take responsibility for the mentor/mentee relationship and pursue it with intention. Take them to coffee and tell them youd like to learn from them! Mentors very much appreciate seeing the mentee put in effort and take initiative. Many organizations have established mentor programs, but if youre finding it difficult to find a mentor, talk to your manager. It undoubtedly will be well received, as it shows a commitment to growth and is an indirect way of saying, I value our in-house expertise and talent and I want to build my career here. ASK FOR SUPPORT Less than 20% of engineering graduates in the U.S. are women and retention is an industry challenge. Many in AEC are working to buck these trends, Coughlin Porter Lundeen included. Women make up approximately 40% of our staff. A womens group was established to support this large group. The company-endorsed platform determines priorities, articulates suggestions, and helps the full team understand how to create a better environment and opportunities to advance. Young employees should be on the lookout for similar opportunities at their offices. If theres no platform, dont be afraid to speak up and spearhead an initiative. Companies value fresh ideas and energy and your coworkers will be grateful for the avenue to be heard. Additionally, many firms cover membership dues of staff in professional groups and support employees out-of-office efforts related to women in STEM. Be sure to look beyond your own office! For example, many Coughlin Porter Lundeen team members serve as ACE mentors, encouraging high school students to pursue careers in STEM. We also sponsor and provide panelists for UWs WiSE (Women in Science and Engineering) Conference; and have staff serving on Structural Engineers Association of Northern Californias SE3 (Structural Engineering Engagement and Equity) committee, working to improve engagement and equity in the structural engineering profession (nationally). BE INSPIRED You are so much more than an engineer (or architect, or construction manager)! Embrace your out-of-office interests. Pursuing what you love, be it hobbies, travel, cooking, fitness, service, etc., makes you more creative, motivated and happy! Study after study reveals that when we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive. Finding the right work/life balance can be a challenge, especially when youre new and eager to learn and put in your time. Just remember that balance is good, and that pursuing interests beyond the office helps avoid burnout and improves our work product. Everyone brings a unique perspective to projects, and its a teams varied backgrounds, interests, and talents that make our project teams dynamic and successful. BE YOURSELF We saved the best, and arguably most important, for last. When beginning a new role, its easy to be overwhelmed with the desire to make a good first impression. You want to impress, prove your worth, find your footing we get it! But you dont need to be the exaggerated extrovert if youre naturally shy. And you dont need to curb your friendliness if you find yourself in a quieter office. Relax, trust yourself, youre sure to make a better impression than any facade would. Plus, youll allow your co-workers to know the authentic you. The attitude you bring to work matters enormously. It determines how your co-workers interact with you, how you approach tough tasks, how open you are to growth and learning. Its contagious too, your attitude is a huge factor in office morale! Teamwork is a big part of every industry and there will be times where your product is dependent on how well your team functions. Bring passion, positivity and grit with you to work, and youll undoubtedly be a success. A human resources and business manager at Coughlin Porter Lundeen, George Theo partners with staff of all levels to support team members, navigate the firms growth and evolution, and shape the employee experience. Other Stories: Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider contributing and/or subscribing to our free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. The discovery of ancient desert footprints that were only seen when drenched with water in the salt flats in a Utah desert is said to be a discovery of a lifetime. Since they disappeared when it was dry, they prompted scientists to call them ghost footprints. Ancient Footprints Discovered in the Desert The earth's makeup renders it almost invisible, so these ancient human traces are not visible. If it dries out, it will be visible if it rains, according to Live Science. Early in July, while traveling to another nearby archaeological site at Hill Air Force Base in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert, researchers stumbled upon strange impressions. The footprints were found using ground-penetrating radar (GPR), with 88 footprints seen, ranging from adults to five-year-old children, reported Science Alert. All were barefoot, and about 10,000 years ago, when the Utah desert used to be drenched with water. But the authors think it is 12,000 years old during the last part of the ice age in the Pleistocene Era. Anya Kitterman, a cultural resource manager at Hill Air Force Base who oversaw the archaeological work, said the find and how many prints are once in a lifetime. The sheer number of individuals is more than expected. The study is still underway and not yet peer-viewed, as the ancient desert footprints are still being studied. Desert Was Once a Great Salty Lake The Great Salt Lake Desert, which bears the same name as the nearby Great Salt Lake, the biggest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, was previously covered by a sizable, salty lake. Read Also: Cave Sealed Off for 5 Million Years Contains 33 Blind Creatures, Surviving Without Oxygen Climate change dried up the ancient lake in the last Ice Age, and salt in the desert is a remnant of it, At the time of the human crossing that left the prints, the shift from lake to dry salt flats was a wetland about 10,000 years ago, citing News Cornell. The lead researcher Daron Duke, an archaeologist, said the ancient peoples were walking in shallow water, leaving prints as if on a sandy beach. Since the wetlands dried up, salt has been added to the footprints, blending them with the surrounding terrain when they are dry. Rain makes the sediment wet and returns its natural color. If it weren't for trapped rainfall, it would remain invisible. A hunter-gatherer camp from 12,000 years ago was discovered less than a mile from the prints, implying that the people who left the prints may have lived nearby. At the location where the prehistoric hunter-gatherers lived, numerous artifacts, including charred tobacco leaves and over 2,000 animal bones, were discovered. Some of the footprints were retrieved by the researchers involved in the latest discovery to determine their exact age. Researchers plan to use radiocarbon dating to analyze microscopic fragments of organic material that may have been caught in the silt by the foot of whoever left the traces. These ancient desert footprints drenched with water appear; they reveal ghost prints lost in time. They are physical connections to ancestors long gone. Related Article: Astrophysicists Propose More Insights About Life Stages of Supermassive Black Holes Based on Study @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Westlife star Nicky Byrne has reflected on the bands history ahead of their first Wembley Stadium performance, saying the Irish groups hiatus led to two completely different bands. Byrne, 43, found fame with Westlife along with Shane Filan, Mark Feehily, Kian Egan and Brian McFadden. The band disbanded in 2012 after 14 years of success, before reuniting in 2018. Speaking about the changes he has witnessed since the bands formation in 1998, including the departure of McFadden, 42, in 2004, Byrne told the PA news agency: To be honest with you, its weird, I think we are actually like two different bands. The band that we are now and the band that we were from 98 onwards, are two completely different bands. Obviously were the same people, and all those hit songs we had in our early years are fundamental to the continuation of our career. However, we had a seven-year sabbatical in the middle of it all and I think we all grew up in that time. We got together as kids, we did 14 years straight, we lost Brian after five years, then we had eight years without Brian, people forget that it was such a long time after Brian, that we didnt stop. And then when we broke up in 2012, we literally we looked each other in the eye, and we went: this is it. He added: Then when we were all ready to come back to the band we all had a different approach of how we saw Westlife 2.0. Reflecting on the legacy of the band, which has secured 14 UK number one singles and eight number one albums, Byrne looked back on the growth of its fanbase. We got back on stage after seven years, and we saw in the concerts in 2019, the people, the fans, also seem to have grown up and enjoyed the break, he told PA. All of a sudden we have lads coming to the concerts, husbands, boyfriends, partners of our younger fans who are now women and boys who are now men. I dont know how to explain it. Its nearly like a family day out, there are now kids coming to the concerts who have no clue who Westlife are but their parents are bringing them along, theres lads coming along going never f****** liked Westlife but this is a great night out. So have we changed? I would say unrecognisably so. Looking at the future of the band, Byrne didnt rule out the use of AI technology, similar to that used by Abba in their current Abba Voyage concert residency and recently praised by Sir Mick Jagger. He said: I havent seen the Abba show in real life but Ive seen clips online and it looks phenomenal. I dont think Westlife are at any stage where we need to consider something like that and were also nowhere near the legacy or the level of Abba or The Rolling Stones, but we do keep surprising ourselves. I mean were doing Wembley Stadium for the first time in our lives And there is things in time where you go, this isnt slowing down. Ahead of playing Wembley Stadium for the very first time on August 6 which will also be broadcast live into cinemas across the UK Byrne added: Were ready for one of the most iconic, if not the most iconic, stadiums in the world. We dont take that lightly because weve never done Wembley Stadium. All the things weve been through, 23 years, everything from number ones to losing a band member to marriages and kids. Adding: Were leading up to something quite emotional actually. Westlife Live From Wembley Stadium will be broadcast at 8.30pm on Saturday August 6. There will be encore screenings at 3pm in cinemas on Sunday August 7. For more information and to find cinema locations visit westlifeincinemas.com. Years after serving as Usama bin Laden's deputy during the 9/11 attacks, U.S. intelligence officers tracked down Ayman al-Zawahri. The CIA established his "pattern of life" at his protected residence in an upscale Kabul area for months and noticed he frequently sat by himself on his balcony in the morning. It was where he was finally attacked by US drones. When Osama bin Laden was eliminated by a Navy SEAL team in 2011, Ayman al-Zawahri took over the terrorist group al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahri was recognized by the US government on "multiple occasions for sustained lengths of time on the balcony," according to a senior Biden administration official as reported by Fox News. US President Joe Biden said al-Zawahri was the only one killed in the Al Qaeda Leader Drone Strike. On Monday, Biden said that on July 25, Ayman al-Zawahri would be terminated permanently from the battlefield after having "authorized a precision strike." Biden confirmed that the U.S. killed Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri in a strike in Afghanistan, saying 'justice has been delivered' in an address https://t.co/6SUwfnhiRV The Taliban condemned the drone strike as a violation of a U.S. troop withdrawal agreement https://t.co/oljo06bl2Q pic.twitter.com/iZISQpk3Df Reuters (@Reuters) August 1, 2022 Perfect Timing According to a report from CNN, one of the preparations was a small-scale model of Zawahiri's safe house, constructed by intelligence officials and placed inside the White House Situation Room for Biden to examine as he considered his options. The media outlet published photos of al-Zawahri's house damaged by the drone attack that killed one of the world's most wanted terrorists. Before he gave the order to kill the terrorist leader, Biden wanted to intimately understand the area in which he was hiding. The potential to eliminate the terrorist while reducing the risk to his family, who CIA officers knew also lived in the residence, was ideal because the terrorist frequently stepped out onto the balcony in the early morning hours and he was always alone. In recent weeks he had made videos calling for violence, including telling followers to "attack the United States and our allies." Al-Zawahri appeared to never leave the home, where his wife, daughter, and grandchildren also reportedly resided, according to US surveillance. Read Also: Kansas Voters Reject Lawmakers' Efforts To Eliminate State Abortion Protections Biden instructed officials to take every precaution to reduce the likelihood of killing al-family Zawahri or other civilians after being informed of the whereabouts of the terrorist. Watch: Until he was killed by a drone, al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahri was one of the world's most wanted men. His name is now crossed off the #FBIs most wanted list, but there are about two dozen more names of suspected #extremists.https://t.co/56fcZ5vjxT pic.twitter.com/Wp8sKZr3LK Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) August 3, 2022 Al-Zawahri was killed in a "successful" counterterrorism operation last Saturday at 6:18 a.m., in Kabul according to Biden's announcement on Monday. An Outstanding Job by The US Since bin Laden died in 2011, al-Zawahri, according to him, "managed al Qaeda's branches all over the world," setting priorities" for "offering operational guidelines that call for and motivate attacks against U.S. targets. Former senior CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos told BBC that it is possible that several intelligence techniques, including agents on the ground and signals intelligence, were employed before the strike. Some have even believed that US drones or aircraft alternately kept watching over the area for weeks or months while remaining undetectable on the ground below. Polymeropoulos said there must be "near certainty" that it is the target, and the operation must be executed without causing any collateral damage, or civilian casualties. He added that there was "a lot of patience" required. The Al Qaeda Leader Drone Strike, Polymeropoulos continued, benefited from the decades-long expertise of the US intelligence community in locating specific members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist targets. He remarked that the US is "outstanding at this. It's something that the US government has gotten very good at for over 20 years. And Americans are far safer for it." Related Article: Russia Warns US of 'Point of No Return' in Diplomatic Relations Over Sponsor of Terrorism Label @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. In the first half of the year, rhino poaching increased in South Africa, where 259 rhinos were killed for their horn. In the country as a whole, 259 rhinos were stolen between January and June 2022 as opposed to 249 during the same time last year. Just the Kruger National Park saw 82 rhinos stolen. The majority of rhinos slain this year have been in private reserves and KwaZulu-Natal, according to recent trends in rhino poaching. The Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, Ms. Barbara Creecy, stated that this makes it even more crucial for the national government to refocus its efforts on assisting provincial authorities and private reserves in the fight against rhino poaching. According to poaching figures from 2022, there have been losses of 49 privately held parks and 210 on state-owned land. As previously mentioned, KwaZulu-Natal suffered the most at this time, losing 133 rhinos. This is more than three times the 33 rhinos that were wiped out in the first half of the year. As long as criminal organisations continue to operate within our borders, the demand for rhino horn poses a continuing threat to our rhino herds. The National Prosecuting Authority, the SAPS, the DPCI, and the Green Scorpions, as well as Customs personnel, can all be credited for the number of successful arrests and prosecutions that have been made over the past six months. Private security is assisting these attempts, Creecy said. Collaborations between the public and business sectors are still essential to stopping the trafficking of wildlife. The partnership now spans the financial and transportation industries, as well as transit and end-user nations in Southeast Asia, particularly with the Peoples Republic of China, Malaysia, and Vietnam, the Minister said. This is in addition to the work being done within the seven Integrated Wildlife Zones. 69 persons were detained between January and June in relation to rhino poaching and rhino horn trafficking. According to the ministrys statement, 13 alleged poachers were among those who were detained in the Kruger National Park. China has issued trade restrictions on Taiwan after United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island nation despite Beijing's threats that the trip undermines its sovereignty. The sanctions include the suspension of some fruits and fish imports from Taiwan and exports of natural sand to the island nation. China is known to be Taiwan's largest trading partner, with bilateral trade worth $273 billion just last year, and accounts for 33% of the island's total trade with the rest of the world. China's Sanctions on Taiwan Furthermore, experts have a growing concern about the impact that escalating tensions between Taipei and Beijing may have on Taiwan's semiconductor industry. The island nation is home to roughly 24 million people and is known to be a global leader in the supply of semiconductor chips to other nations, which are seen as vital components for virtually all modern electronics. On Wednesday, China's Taiwan Affairs Office said that it was suspending imports of grapefruit, lemons, oranges, and other citrus fruits, as well as chilled white striped hairtail and frozen horse mackerel from Taiwan, as per CNN. Chinese customs officials said in a separate statement that the suspension of imports of citrus fruits is a result of "pest control" and "excessive pesticide residues." It cited "COVID prevention" for the implementation of the suspension on seafood imports. Meanwhile, China's commerce ministry suspended exports of natural sand to the self-governing island nation, which is a key component in the production of semiconductor chips. Analysts from ING Group said on Wednesday that Pelosi's trip to Taiwan has triggered the expected ire of Chinese authorities. Read Also: World War 3 Feared To Begin as China Expands Nuclear Testing Site While Russia Repeats Message Against Arsenal Battle According to Fortune, chip stocks plunged after Pelosi arrived in Taiwan and the chip sector, in particular, could lose big if China continues its sanctions. China repeatedly called the American official's visit a direct threat amid its claims that Taiwan is part of its territory. Semiconductor Industry Beijing has also warned that the Chinese army will not "sit idly by'' and will take "strong countermeasures." On Tuesday, semiconductor stocks plunged in anticipation of Pelosi's visit to the self-governing island nation. Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's biggest and most valuable semiconductor manufacturer, valued at $440 billion, fell 2.4% on Tuesday. Its Taiwanese peers, United Microelectronics and MediaTek dipped by 3% and 1.6% respectively. On the other hand, U.S. chipmaker Intel's stocks dropped 1.5% on the same day. While Pelosi was preparing to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday, technology investors were monitoring her moves closely while looking out for any sign of retaliation from China. Chipmakers, particularly those in Taiwan, are at high risk of becoming collateral damage if there is a falling out between the United States and China. Taiwan has a sizable role in the global chip supply chain, as its manufacturers are especially important suppliers of advanced chips. On top of the effects on the semiconductor industry, China also said it would launch a series of military exercises around the island in response to Pelosi's trip, parts of which will enter Taiwanese waters, NBC News reported. Related Article: Furious China Slams Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan Visit, Immediately Sets Up Live Ammunition Military Drill @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Founded in 2005 as an Ohio-based environmental newspaper, EcoWatch is a digital platform dedicated to publishing quality, science-based content on environmental issues, causes, and solutions. Across Caribbean coasts, sargassum is covering the beaches. This smelly seaweed doesnt just stink it also kills fish and other marine life and impacts local economies by making activities like kayaking and snorkeling nearly impossible. In June, the amount of sargassum broke the all-time record for the amount of this brown seaweed in the Atlantic, which then floated down into the Caribbean Sea in unprecedented amounts, by 20%, University of South Floridas Optical Oceanography Lab reported. This year, seaweed levels reached over 24 million tons, far higher than the previous all-time high in 2018. This seaweed floats in bundles on waters, and at normal levels, it provides food and habitat to many species, including various types of fish, crabs, sea turtles, birds and more. While scientists are still determining the cause of rapidly increasing levels of sargassum, the United Nations Caribbean Environment Program speculates several possible influences, including rising water temperatures and runoff of fertilizers, sewage, and other waste and nutrients. This year has been the worst year on record, said Lisa Krimsky, a university researcher with Florida Sea Grant. It is absolutely devastating for the region. According to Krimsky, the floating masses of seaweed can impact water temperatures and pH levels as it decays, harming seagrasses, coral and sponges that are smothered by the large amounts of sargassum. Sea turtles can also become entangled in the algae or struggle to lay their eggs ashore with the sargassum covering beaches. As the sargassum washes up on shores, it begins to rot, releasing noxious gases such as hydrogen sulfide gas, which smells like rotten eggs. The CDC warns that hydrogen sulfide gas exposure can cause irritation to the eyes and respiratory system. Some countries have tried using heavy machinery to remove the sargassum from beaches, but scientists warn that this can destroy sea turtle nests and cause erosion. Its also an expensive method. Larger than normal amounts of sargassum in the region were first noticed in 2011, and it has become a recurring problem year after year. Aside from the impacts on local wildlife and risks to human health, the sargassum boom has also hit local economies that make money from tourism this time of year. Some resorts on Union Island have had to close for up to 5 months. Oswen Corbel, owner of St. Martin-based Caribbean Paddling, has lost $10,000 or more from closing this business because of the seaweed masses. Maybe I should give up Sometimes I think I should go into the mountains and herd sheep, but this is what I know to do, Corbel said. Whats next? We had Hurricane Irma, we had COVID, we had the sargassum, and now Im pretty scared of global warming. The Biden administration declared a federal emergency for St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands in July after sargassum was clogging the machines at a nearby desalination plant, leaving residents without enough water during a drought. U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Albert Bryan has asked the Biden administration to declare a federal emergency for the three-island territory, to no avail. A summer storm near the skyscrapers of the Four Towers Business Area in Madrid, Spain on Aug. 2, 2022. A heat wave brought temperatures over 104F to some areas of the city. Marcos del Mazo / LightRocket via Getty Images Spain is set to forbid public buildings from turning their air conditioners below 27C (80.6F) in an effort to contend with the spiking cost of gas amid scorching summer heat and an energy supply crisis driven by the Russian war in Ukraine. A decree published by the Spanish government Tuesday requires public places such as offices, shops, bars, theaters, airports, and train stations to limit their cooling in an effort to conserve energy, and recommends residents do the same in their homes. Alongside a heating limit of 19C (66.2F) in the winter, the decree will carry forward through at least next November. Meanwhile, high demand has Spanish supermarket chains rationing bags of ice, and some bars and restaurants have resorted to charging patrons an extra fee to have ice in their drinks. Spains efforts are the latest in a string of strategies imposed by European governments as they try to minimize dependence on Russian oil and gas while contending with exceptionally high temperatures across the continent. Beyond thermostat controls: French shops are required to keep doors closed and reduce lighting or face fines, and most illuminated advertising is banned; Germany is shutting off spotlights on public monuments and cutting off hot water to showers at public pools and gyms; Greece is installing window shields on public buildings and updating heating and cooling systems; Ireland is encouraging residents to limit boiling only the amount of water they need rather than filling up their kettles. These measures, seemingly extreme now, may soon become the norm so long as the world remains dependent on fossil fuels that cause climate impacts to worsen. For a deeper dive: EuroNews, The Verge, The Guardian, The Times For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, sign up for daily Hot News, and visit their news site, Nexus Media News. Laos urges businesses to make more investments in producing animal feed Laos is encouraging private businesses to invest more in the production of fertiliser and animal feed in response to the surge in market demand. The move supports the government's efforts to reduce imports and strengthen domestic production while also stabilising the value of the country's currency amid an economic downturn. Farmers in Laos need about two million tonnes of fertiliser a year but only 600,000 tonnes of organic fertiliser can be produced in the country, equal to 30% of the amount required. "Our ministry will encourage Lao and Vietnamese companies to team up in a joint venture to manufacture fertiliser," Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Dr. Phet Phomphiphak told the National Assembly recently. "We have invited a major fertiliser manufacturer from Vietnam to come to Laos next month to meet with Lao business operators and discuss a possible partnership." The minister was asked if the fertiliser issue could be resolved by 2023 under the government's National Agenda to tackle ongoing economic and financial problems. Dr. Phomphiphak said he could not confirm whether more companies would be able to produce enough fertiliser to meet farmers' needs. "I'm sure that the amount of fertiliser produced in Laos will increase significantly by next year, but I don't think we can produce sufficient to meet the total need," he said. Additionally, farmers require about 600,000 tonnes of animal feed, but the six manufacturing plants in Laos can supply less than 400,000 tonnes, equal to just 60% of demand. Animal feed is currently produced mainly for supply to farms and agricultural projects, with a very limited quantity available at local markets. "Several businesses in Laos have expressed interest in setting up factories to produce animal feed for use in Laos," Dr. Phet said. This year, farmers have been hard hit not only by the rising cost of fuel and depreciation of Laos currency, as well as the high price of animal feed purchased from Thailand. The cost of feed for piglets rose by 29%, the cost of feed for chicks rose by 8% and the cost of fish feed surged by 60%, according to a study conducted by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. The figures were collected in April to compare with those recorded in January, to indicate how rising costs are affecting producers and farmers. Laos imports more than it exports. In June, the country's two-way trade was worth US$1,000 million, with a trade deficit of US$133 million. The study stressed the need to strongly promote domestic production for the purposes of export, saying this would help to boost foreign currency reserves and stabilise exchange rates in the long term. - Vientiane Times/ANN Eighth edition of ILDEX Vietnam started in Ho Chi Minh City The 8th International Livestock, Dairy, Meat Processing and Aquaculture Exposition (ILDEX Vietnam 2022) opened on August 3 at the Saigon Exhibition and Convention Centre in District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. ILDEX Vietnam 2022 has attracted more than 200 exhibitors from 25 other countries and territories, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Netherlands, Thailand, the United States and the United Kingdom. There are national pavilions from countries like France, the US, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Czech Republic as well as major big brands in the livestock industry. Besides showcasing the latest machinery, technologies and business solutions for the livestock, dairy and aquaculture industries, the expo also features specialised seminars, a business matching programme, a Potential Buyer Programme (VIP Buyer) and a bunch of other practical activities. Returning after a nearly three-year gap due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition offers a great opportunity to help exhibitors and visitors connect, diversify their supply chains, learn about the latest trends, market demands and new technologies and products and find business opportunities, according to the organisers. Duong Tat Thang, director of the Livestock Production Department, said that, despite difficulties last year, the livestock sector achieved relatively high growth, making an important contribution to the growth of the agriculture sector. Livestock products not only meet the needs of 100 million people in the domestic market but are also exported to other countries. To maintain this growth and improve the industry's competitiveness, more investment is needed in advanced farming and processing technologies, Thang said. Organised by Minh Vi Exhibition and Advertisement Services Co., Ltd and VNU Exhibitions Asia Pacific Co., Ltd, ILDEX Vietnam will go on until August 5 and is expected to attract 10,000 visitors. - Vietnam Plus Following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, US-China ties are on the verge of collapsing. Despite the Biden administration's reservations, Pelosi was greeted warmly in Taipei and enjoyed widespread bipartisan backing in Washington. Her trip, however, has infuriated Beijing and Chinese nationalists, complicating already tense ties even after she departs. Already, China is preparing major displays of force in the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate that its claims to the island are unassailable. US Says Pelosi Visit Doesn't Change Stance Toward China, Taiwan As the US pushes on with pro-Taiwan protests, arms sales, and diplomatic pressure, the dangers of armed conflict, deliberate or not, have increased. The trip might exacerbate Washington's already delicate relationship with Beijing, as the two sides grapple with disagreements over trade, the Ukraine crisis, human rights, and other issues. Pelosi tweeted today and says that the Us stands with the people of Taiwan as well as to those who are engaged to democracy and human rights. I led a Congressional delegation to Taiwan to make crystal clear that America stands with the people of Taiwan and all those committed to Democracy and human rights. Check out this video of our historic visit to Taipei. pic.twitter.com/TON6zB3x4s Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) August 3, 2022 Concerned about China's reaction, the Biden administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting Taiwan. It has gone to great lengths to assure Beijing that the House Speaker is not a member of the executive branch and that her travel signifies no change in the US "one-China" policy. The White House also stated that Pelosi's travel makes no difference to the US policy toward China and Taiwan. Karine Jean-Pierre, the US press secretary, said the US expected China's aggressive reaction, which she called unnecessarily, according to AP News. Pelosi landed late Tuesday with a congressional group on an unannounced but highly watched visit, ignoring China's repeated warnings, on a journey she claimed underscored the US's enduring support for Taiwan's democracy. Pelosi, a long-time opponent of China, particularly on human rights, and a political supporter of US President Joe Biden, met with a former Tiananmen Square protester, a Hong Kong bookseller arrested by China, and a Taiwanese activist recently freed by China. Newt Gingrich was the last US House Speaker to visit Taiwan in 1997. Pelosi's visit comes at a time when US-China ties are deteriorating rapidly. China has grown into a significantly more formidable economic, military, and geopolitical powerhouse during the last quarter-century. China believes Taiwan to be part of its territory and has never refrained from using force to seize control of it. The US and the Group of Seven foreign ministers advised China not to use the visit as a pretext for military action against Taiwan. Read Also: Russia Warns US of 'Point of No Return in Diplomatic Relations Over Sponsor of Terrorism Label China Claims Nancy Pelosi's Visit Damages Stability in Taiwan China's military planned combined air and sea operations near Taiwan and conventional missile test launches in the waters east of the island, with Chinese state news agency Xinhua reporting live-fire drills and other activities from Thursday to Sunday. According to China's foreign ministry, Pelosi's travel jeopardizes peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, undermines the political underpinning of US-Chinese ties, and violates China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, as per Reuters via MSN. Taiwan has claimed that Chinese military maneuvers in the waters surrounding the island country amount to a blockade in reaction to Nancy Pelosi's visit. According to the state-run Global Times, the drills included J-20 stealth fighter planes and conventional missile test firings, which might cause delays or impede transportation to and from the island. Taiwan's defense ministry claimed in a statement on Wednesday that Chinese maneuvers in the waters surrounding the island country amounted to a blockade of its air and maritime space. Taiwan is also negotiating alternate aircraft routes with its neighboring Philippines, according to its official Central News Agency. Taiwan, a worldwide chip manufacturing powerhouse, does not need to find alternate maritime transit, according to Transport Minister Wang Kwo-tsai, because its ships can bypass Chinese drill zones. Meanwhile, China claims that military drills surrounding Taiwan caused no navigation problems. The Chinese foreign ministry's spokesperson, Hua Chunying, stated that the country's military measures were legal and intended to discourage Taiwan, Independent reported. Related Article: World War 3 Feared To Begin as China Expands Nuclear Testing Site While Russia Repeats Message Against Arsenal Battle @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder thinks the war in Ukraine could reach a ceasefire due to the grains deal mediated by Turkey. He told the media after a Moscow visit to the Kremlin that the idea seemed to be receptive to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Solution To End the Russia-Ukraine Conflict Chancellor Schroeder said that he spoke to Putin about the matter a week ago, and he was open to a resolution of the conflict via talks last Wednesday, reported RT. Schroeder told Germany's Stern magazine and the RTL/ntv channel that a current "first breakthrough" in grain export negotiations in Istanbul might be used to gradually establish a ceasefire. Following negotiations that included Turkey and the UN, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a package of papers in July aimed at unblocking Ukrainian agricultural exports held at Black Sea ports due to Russia's military campaign. Furthermore, Moscow and the UN negotiated a second treaty to ease sanctions on Russian agricultural products, noted Mass News. Schroeder added that the Kremlin wants a negotiated solution, but there may be a denigration of the concessions that Kyiv should agree to. Moscow wants genuine peace, not imposed peace, which could prove to be a grave mistake. The former chancellor maintains that Donbas and Kyiv are declaring neutrality are viable alternatives. He complimented then-Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier for opposing Ukraine's accession to NATO in 2008. He suggested that Ukraine could do more than join NATO, as Austria has done, citing Good Word News. Kyiv Made the Donbass Dilemma Worse The ex-German chancellor acknowledged that the Donbass is not easily undone due to Zelensky's decision to attack the separatists of the war in Ukraine, breaking its promise of autonomy for the Russia-aligned province. Ukrainians have been fighting them since 2014. Read Also: Donald Trump Net Worth 2022: Did Trump Get Richer Since Leaving the US Presidency? He advises using the Swiss cantonal model or finding a middle ground. But, he emphasizes that Russia is in a place where it will not give up what it has achieved at the contact line since February 24. Kyiv will not reclaim the lost territories that Moscow has captured. Schroeder scoffed at Zelensky's fantasy that the Ukrainian army could pry Crime from the clutches of the Russian Federation, even calling the shrill Ukrainian leader's plan absurd. Instead, tensions on the Crimean Peninsula, which re-joined Russia in a vote in 2014, may be resolved in due course. It will not take 99 years to settle like Hong Kong, but it can happen sooner than everyone thinks. The former German leader also lauded Turkish authorities for their mediating role, saying they are currently very helpful in negotiations over grain exports. However, Schroeder believes that no talks can be successful without a positive contribution from the US. In the same interview, Schroeder also proposed activating Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to solve the energy situation. There is a solution, and Germany must choose whether to use it or face the consequences. The former chancellor plainly stated that he stands by his ties to Moscow. Schroeder said the war in Ukraine could be resolved but has layers to it, but the grains deal shows hope for it. Related Article: Ukrainian Forces Face Challenges as German-Supplied Artillery Begins Breaking Down With Heavy Use @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Team IOM Medals >> 0 0 0 Day Seven: Jessica Li through to next round of Women's Singles Thu, 04 Aug 2022 Jessica Li has made it through to the next round in the Women's Badminton Singles at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. The 23-year-old faced Sabrina Scott from Barbados in Court 3 at the NEC in Birmingham. She defeated the Barbadian 2 games to nil. Jessica will next be in action in the Round of 16 tomorrow. She said she was pleased with her performance: Media Jessica Li Post Thurs Clip for 6pm More than 700 warehouse workers at an Amazon warehouse in England walked out this week in a dispute over a pay increase, reported Reuters. Amazon did not agree to the hourly rate increase of 2 (or $2.44) requested by the trade union representing the employees, instead offering a raise of 34 pence. GMB, the trade union representing the employees at the Tillbury facility (a suburb of Essex in Eastern England), said workers walked out on both Wednesday and Thursday. Amazon is one of the most profitable companies on the planet," Steve Garelick, a regional organizer for GMB, told ABC. With household costs spiraling, the least they can do is offer decent pay. Garelick posted video footage of the protesting Tillbury workers, who began their walkout shortly after Amazon delivered the news that it would not meet the unions demands. Management reportedly "withdrew catering" at the facility, and told workers that they would be terminated if they left the premises. Turn on browser notifications to receive breaking news alerts from Engadget You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. Not now Turned on Turn on 16.00 at Amazon Tilbury Essex today pic.twitter.com/bKWnv7BUow Steve Garelick (@steve_garelick) August 4, 2022 GMB began campaigning for higher pay and better health standards for Amazon warehouse workers in the UK in 2013, even calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the companys labor practices. Amazon doesnt recognize the GMB union at Tillbury or any of its other warehouses across the UK. Luxury EV startup Lucid Motors changed its yearly production target again, lowering it to an expected output of between 6,000 and 7,000 vehicles, the company announced today. Thats only a fraction of the 20,000 cars that Lucid initially promised to deliver in 2022. The Tesla competitor has only produced 1,405 vehicles so far this year, giving it a mere four months to build thousands of new cars. Supply chain woes and a shortage of parts and raw materials are to blame for the slow output, the company claims. In a call with investors, the California-based companys CEO Peter Rawlinson said it is planning a number of structural changes to amp up production. "Our revised production guidance reflects the extraordinary supply chain and logistics challenges we encountered," said Rawlinson. "We've identified the primary bottlenecks, and we are taking appropriate measures bringing our logistics operations in-house, adding key hires to the executive team, and restructuring our logistics and manufacturing organization." NASA will soon require a retired astronaut to serve as mission commander on all private flights to the International Space Station, according to an agency notice posted today. The policy which has yet to be finalized is intended to both increase passenger safety and reduce any strain on existing ISS operations. The former astronauts would provide experienced guidance for the private astronauts during pre-flight preparation through mission execution." A number of changes will also have an impact on the space tourists themselves, including new medical standards for private astronauts, more lead time for private research projects, changes to the policy for return cargo and additional time for private astronauts to adjust to microgravity. According to the notice, the new changes were a result of lessons learned on last Aprils Axiom Space flight, where passengers paid $55 million each to fly on the first private astronaut mission to the ISS. The hectic, two-week trip where passengers also worked on their own research took a toll on both the ISS crew and the Axiom crew themselves, according to interviews with astronauts following the missions return. Turn on browser notifications to receive breaking news alerts from Engadget You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. Not now Turned on Turn on The Ax-1 mission actually had a former NASA astronaut at its helm Michael Lopez-Alegria, who currently is the Chief Astronaut at Axiom. The company was considering crewing future missions without a professional astronaut on board as that would free up space for an extra (paying) passenger on board, Axiom president Michael Suffredini said at a press conference earlier this year. The new policy by NASA is likely an effort to prevent such unsupervised missions. Capable astronauts arent exactly a dime a dozen. Currently, there are well over 200 living retired NASA astronauts, according to the agencys website though its unclear how many would be willing to command future missions or meet the medical requirements. NASA itself is in the middle of an astronaut shortage its current corps of 44 astronauts is the smallest since the 1970s. An agency report from January said a lack of working NASA astronauts could complicate future missions to the ISS and the moon. You might think a network-specific streaming services like Paramount+ doesn't stand a chance in a grim market when even Netflix is floundering, but it's apparently thriving. The company has revealed that Paramount+ added 3.7 million subscribers in the second quarter, with more than 43 million total users. And that's after withdrawing from Russia if it weren't for that, the service would have added 4.9 million viewers. ViacomCBS partly credited the surge to expansions to more countries, including the UK, Ireland and South Korea. However, it also pointed to success with content that included its Halo series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, movies like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and live Champions League matches. Paramount+ is still leaning on its sci-fi audience, then, but not as much as it has in the past. The overall Paramount+ subscriber count is still tiny compared to Netflix (220.7 million) and Amazon Prime Video (over 200 million). Its growth is a sharp contrast to Netflix's nearly 1 million lost subscribers, though. The firm is also keen to note that it had the most sign-ups and net additions of any US-based premium subscription streaming service in the quarter, according to Antenna data. In other words, Paramount+ was outperforming all its main rivals, including Apple TV+, Hulu and Peacock. Turn on browser notifications to receive breaking news alerts from Engadget You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. Not now Turned on Turn on Whether or not that trend continues is uncertain. Paramount+ is still expanding to more countries, and should be available in 60 markets by the end of the year. It can count on those newcomers to boost its numbers for a while. Eventually, though, the streamer will be more reliant on the quality of its catalog to grow its audience. And while there have clearly been some hits, heavyweights like Amazon and Netflix still have plenty of money and momentum in their favor. San Diego is joining the ranks of cities clamping down on surveillance technology. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports the City Council has given a final greenlight to an ordinance requiring approval for tech that can identify and track individuals, such as body and streetlight cameras. Municipal government workers will have to outline the intended uses of a surveillance system, while a new privacy advisory board and residents will be asked for input. Councillors will also conduct yearly reviews of in-use systems. The city has a year-long grace period to both form the advisory board and give departments a chance to examine their surveillance tech inventories. Organizations that already use these systems will need authorization to continue use. An exception will allow police on federal task forces to use surveillance, however. San Diego Police Department Chief David Nisleit requested the carve-out over concerns that local officers couldn't participate in federal operations that bar disclosure of surveillance tech. The council first approved the ordinance in November 2020. The late approval comes after multiple employee groups exercised their right to review the new rules. That process alone took about 18 months, The Union-Tribune said. Turn on browser notifications to receive breaking news alerts from Engadget You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. Not now Turned on Turn on San Diego is relatively late to such regulations. San Francisco and other cities have banned facial recognition, for instance. Even so, its approval might increase pressure on other local governments to either restrict surveillance hardware or offer more transparency regarding their monitoring tools. The Attorneys General of all 50 states have joined forces in hopes of giving teeth to the seemingly never-ending fight against robocalls. North Carolina AG Josh Stein, Indiana AG Todd Rokita and Ohio AG Dave Yost are leading the formation of the new Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force. In Stein's announcement, he said the group will focus on taking legal action against telecoms, particularly gateway providers, allowing or turning a blind eye to foreign robocalls made to US numbers. He explained that gateway providers routing foreign phone calls into the US telephone network have the responsibility under the law to ensure the traffic they're bringing in is legal. Stein said that they mostly aren't taking any action to keep robocalls out of the US phone network, though, and they're even intentionally allowing robocall traffic through in return for steady revenue in many cases. Stein said in a statement: Turn on browser notifications to receive breaking news alerts from Engadget You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. Not now Turned on Turn on "We're... going to take action against phone companies that violate state and federal laws. Im proud to create this nationwide task force to hold companies accountable when they turn a blind eye to the robocallers theyre letting on to their networks so they can make more money. Ive already brought one pathbreaking lawsuit against an out-of-state gateway provider, and I wont hesitate to take legal action against others who break our laws and bombard North Carolinians with these harmful, unlawful calls." The Attorney General referenced data from the National Consumer Law Center, which previously reported that American phone numbers get more than 33 million scam robocalls a day. Those include Social Security scams targeting seniors and gift card scams, wherein bad actors pretend they're from the IRS. In that report, the center warned that consumers will keep on getting robocalls as long as phone providers are earning from them. Stein already has experience sparring with shady gateway providers. Back in January, he sued Articul8 for routing more than 65 million calls to phone numbers in North Carolina and inundating residents with up to 200 fraudulent telemarketing calls every single day. He previously urged the FCC to implement measures designed to put a stop to illegal foreign calls made through providers like Articul8, as well. And in 2019, Stein became instrumental in the development of an agreement between the US Attorneys General and 12 carriers in the country to use the STIR/SHAKEN call-blocking technology. Authorities say a small girl chewed through shackles to flee a rural Alabama house where investigators subsequently discovered two decaying remains. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, is charged with kidnapping and numerous counts of capital murder in connection with the deaths discovered inside the residence after a 12-year-old girl was spotted roaming along a roadside in Dadeville early Monday. Alabama Girl Escapes Kidnapper According to AL.com, Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett informed reporters at a news conference that a car picked up the youngster and called 911, culminating in Pascual-Reyes' arrest and the awful discovery. Pascual-Reyes was detained in Auburn and is in jail pending a bail hearing. The remains were located near the location where the girl was discovered walking alone in his Dadeville home. The rotting remains have been transferred to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for identification, according to Abbett, who added that it is unclear how long they have been there. Court documents acquired by WSFA, the girl had been bound to bedposts for over a week, she was abused and plied with a drink before escaping by biting through her shackles. "I'd call her a hero," Abbett remarked. "It's one of those things we'll discuss later." We treated her medically. She is now secure. "We want to keep her that way," Abbett said of Pascual-Reyes, who has been at the house since February. When officers came, other people were there, but he did not elaborate, New York Post reported. Read Also: Al Qaeda Leader Drone Strike | Here's How the US Killed Ayman al-Zawahri; Images Show Aftermath of Attack Victim's Mother Killed by Kidnapper Prior to Her Abduction Pascual-Reyes appeared in court for the first time on Wednesday and was ordered jailed without bail. It wasn't apparent who was representing him. According to the sheriff, deputies who responded treated the youngster and began an investigation. When investigators entered the residence, they discovered two rotting remains, which Sheriff Abbett recognized as the girl's mother and brother. Sheriff Abbett stated that Pascual-Reyes was the mother's lover. The child was abducted on July 24 and bound to bed posts for almost a week while she was raped and given alcohol to keep her incapacitated. When deputies found her, they saw she had injuries on her wrists from being restrained. As per court papers, the mother was suffocated to death with a pillow on July 24, and the brother was bludgeoned to death the same day. Sheriff Abbett stated that he was under the age of 14. He said that both bodies had been dismembered. The girl who escaped had not been reported missing. Sheriff Abbett stated that Pascual-Reyes was in state custody and was "doing well." Pascual-Reyes worked at a construction site in Auburn, Alabama, some 25 miles southeast of Dadeville, and had been residing there since February. Before Pascual-Reyes appeared in court for the first time on Wednesday, Kevin Hall, an assistant district attorney, stated that prosecutors expected to oppose his release on bail due to the seriousness of the accusations and the fact that he was a flight risk. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are assisting in the investigation, as are local authorities, as per New York Times. Related Article: Iranian Journalist Forced To Flee After Arrest of Man With Loaded AK-47 Outside Her Brooklyn Home @YouTube @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate As the Texas power grid girds for what could be another sweltering day of record-breaking power demand today, CPS Energy said all its power plant units were running and ready after recent breakdowns. Three of the utilitys largest plant units broke down for weeks in May and June. But heading into todays heat, the utility's power plants are hanging on pretty good, said Benny Ethridge, a senior vice president at CPS who manages energy generation. Weve got everything in the mix running, Ethridge said Wednesday, adding that CPS has a good chance to see record power demand in San Antonio today. Its previous record for demand was set in July. Temperatures in San Antonio are expected to hit 103 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasts for Austin and Dallas call for heat well over 100 degrees, while the high in Houston is to expected to hit 99. On ExpressNews.com: July was the hottest on record in San Antonio with little relief in sight Early Wednesday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas the state grid operator had been forecasting record-setting power demand of more than 80 gigawatts today, but revised its forecast down. Still, its expecting todays demand to top 79 gigawatts. The current record of 79.8 gigawatts was set July 20. Bob Owen, Staff / San Antonio Express-News Temperatures have been hotter than weve dealt with before, Ethridge said. Across the statewide grid, ERCOT has said it has adequate energy reserves to meet demand even record demand. For its part, CPS operates six power stations in San Antonio and is partial owner of the South Texas Nuclear Project plant in Matagorda County. CPS plants down At a CPS Energs board meeting last week, Ethridge told trustees that three of its primary power plants including the Spruce 2 coal unit, CPS largest plant were out of service in May and June for as much as three weeks at a time. That was because of a variety of mechanical breakdowns such as a tube leak or a broken feed water pump. Parts shortages prolonged some repair work, Ethridge said. Such failures are a growing concern across the state as record-setting demand continues. Nuclear, natural gas and coal-fired power plants across Texas have been running hard during this summers intense heat. As theyve been asked to generate more electricity to allow Texans to keep cranking up air conditioners, utilities have had less time to perform maintenance necessary to maintain reliability. Bob Owen/San Antonio Express-News On ExpressNews.com: Things are going to break: Texas power plants are running nonstop amid record-breaking heat Such maintenance is typically performed during mild-weather months in the spring and fall, when demand for power is lowest. But after Winter Storm Uri last year, CPS didnt take any plants offline for maintenance in January or February to ensure the city would have enough electricity if another deep freeze hit. This years hot spring also kept many plants across the grid running and without routine maintenance. Were shortening the period of time between unit maintenance outages, Ethridge said. Were running more this year than we did last year, and significantly more than we did the year before. From May to July, CPS generated 5.2 million megawatt hours of electricity. That was up from 5 million in the same period last year, and 4.3 million the year before. Even with ERCOTs 11 days of record-breaking electric demand so far this year, the state has so far avoided major outages. Thats in part because ERCOT now pays some power plants to remain on standby, ready to fire up and produce power whether its needed or not. Previously, plants were only paid for the power they sold onto the grid. While that has helped keep the lights on this year, it has also strained plants that wouldnt be running if ERCOT wasnt forcing them to stay online. Were running these units out of an abundance of caution, and putting more hours on them than we would ordinarily, Ethridge said. S.A. VOTES Voter Guide: What to know for the Texas runoff election A breakdown of key state and local races and candidates in the May 24 primary runoff. Demand going up ERCOT expects demand for electricity to continue increasing in the years ahead as the states population grows and economy expands. The growth of energy-hungry industries such as crypto mining figure to pose challenges for the Texas grid as miners set up operations here. Population growth is also pushing demand. In San Antonio, CPS expects more than 1 million new residents in the next two to three decades. We have seen a continued uptick in our demand, Ethridge said. Weve got hot temperatures and we have more citizens now, more people moving into our city. On ExpressNews.com: CPS Energy bills jump more than 50 percent in June as temperatures and gas prices rise CPS plans to bolster its generation fleet by signing a tolling agreement this year with a natural gas plant located somewhere in Texas. CPS will provide the natural gas to fuel the plant and take back the electricity it generates. Ethridge said contracting with another plant would help the utilitys reliability. If Ive got alternate power to call on than what weve got here in our aging fleet, thats just another level of protection, he said. Still, he said its not just wind and solar farms that are intermittent contributors, but also traditional power plants. Weve got to have the ability to make up generation when we lose the renewables. The same applies for our traditional thermal generation. This equipment fails too, Ethridge said. No technology is 100 percent. diego.mendoza-moyers@express-news.net The scandal enveloping ex-San Antonio attorney Chris Pettit has developed into a deeper tragedy. Charles Joseph Pettit, Chris Pettits younger brother, died in an apparent suicide after the disgraced former attorneys alleged misdeeds were made public. A redacted version of an incident report released by the San Antonio Police Department shows Chris Pettit asked July 12 for officers to make a welfare check on his brother. He was concerned because the two hadnt been in touch since a text message June 16. Chris Pettit was living in Florida at the time. A locksmith unlocked a side entrance to the house in the 15700 block of Deer Crest where Charles Pettit had lived alone. A strong odor overwhelmed the officers as they entered the house. Charles Pettit was found on his back in a front bedroom covered in plastic over what could be seen of his upper/body head, according to an unredacted version of the police report obtained by the Express-News. There were obvious signs of decomposition. Officers reported no signs of suspicious circumstances were present. Several cats were in the house and packages had accumulated outside the front door. A vehicle was in the garage. Police are treating the death as a suicide, a spokesman said. However, the Bexar County Medical Examiners Office said the cause and manner of death was pending. An autopsy report was not available. On ExpressNews.com: A San Antonio high school has a Chris Pettit problem Charles Pettits body was discovered 18 days shy of his 50th birthday. He was Chris Pettits last surviving sibling. Two older brothers, Jonathan and Martin, died previously. The former attorney entered the spotlight in late May after being sued numerous times for allegedly absconding with millions of dollars in clients money. He and his law firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection June 1, reporting $40.5 million in assets and $112.2 million in liabilities. He also surrendered his law license and closed his law firm. Chris Pettit had been practicing law for more than three decades, specializing in estate planning and personal-injury cases. The allegations against him have sparked an FBI investigation. Jerry Lara, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer According to the police report, Chris Pettit told police he was going through some legal issues that made the news and that his family members had also been pulled into the matter. He said he believed his brother had had enough and had possibly taken his life. There were no allegations of wrongdoing against Charles Pettit, who worked at the law firm Chris Pettit & Associates. The Deer Crest house was among seven properties Chris Pettit sold less than two months before the bankruptcy. The other real estate included his main law office at 11923 Rustic Lane and a house on Canyon Lake. He said he retained a right to buy back the properties. On ExpressNews.com: Calling his decision draconian, judge rules Chris Pettit has to live on $140 until Monday Chapter 11 trustee Eric Terry said during a three-day court hearing last month that the transactions represented a fraudulent transfer that was schemed up by the parties involved. The death came up during the proceeding, which regarded Terrys motion to hold Chris Pettit in contempt for withdrawing $125,000 from his retirement accounts. He had spent about $260,000 in the 50 days after filing for bankruptcy, including on trips to Disney World and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. S.A. VOTES Voter Guide: What to know for the Texas runoff election A breakdown of key state and local races and candidates in the May 24 primary runoff. He also spent some of the money to pay more than $12,000 to former law firm employees who didnt get paid before the firm shut down. And he cut a check for $1,266 to his brother on June 14, a court exhibit shows. Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Craig Gargotta issued an interim order last month allowing Chris Pettit to spend $5,000 for his brothers funeral expenses. While on the witness stand July 20, Chris Pettit testified he had not spent any of the funeral money because the body had not been released to the funeral home. Theyre still trying to rule out foul play, he said. It later emerged that Chris Pettit had been staying at a hotel rather than the home he owns in a gated community in Stone Oak. Michael Colvard, his bankruptcy lawyer, said Chris Pettit had concerns for his personal safety because the trustee changed the house locks and kept a key for himself. I think he has some security concerns, Colvard said. Obviously, with the death of his brother Visitation for Charles Pettit is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Saturday at Porter Loring on McCullough. A graveside service will follow at 11 a.m. at Mission Burial Park North, 20900 Interstate 10 West. pdanner@express-news.net The bartender takes your order. The bartender makes your drinks. The bartender brings your food. The bartender does everything but park your car. But the bartender will validate your parking. This is the way of the world at Double Standard, the American-style tavern that opened in late May at the Rand Building downtown. After 16 plates and 16 drinks, I am left with this conclusion: If bartenders ran the world, the world would be a better place. Its a world created by Chad Carey, the steam engine behind full-tilt restaurants such as Hot Joy and Barbaro. His Empty Stomach group also fosters creative side hustles like the coffee shop cafe Extra Fine, the wine bar Little Death, the music club Paper Tiger and the new Lavaca neighborhood bar Hands Down. Double Standard was carved from the former home of Rosella at The Rand, an ambitious and stylish bistro laid low by the pandemic. They pulled out the booths and banquettes, and replaced them with sturdy wooden tables that can seat 10 close friends or two sworn enemies. They filled every shelf, wall and parallel plane with artifacts: steins, souvenir plates, figurines, ferns, Falstaffian oil paintings of drunken surrender. Mike Sutter/Staff file photo But they left the bar in place, a marbled marvel of a thing that follows the length of the long room and curves like a racetrack at the end, with backlit bottles cheering from stadium shelves. That bar is where it all happens. And theres a lot happening. During happy hour a bacchanalia that runs from noon to 6 the double-shot well drinks that give the bar its name (doubles are standard) run half-price at $3. A well drink here means any one and one, like a rum and coke, a gin and tonic or a whiskey and soda, all with the nostalgic taste of the sweaty glasses I boosted from my parents card table when they went for a smoke. Draft beers are just $2 in that window, and the bars happy to pour a curated shot of midshelf liquor as a sidecar for a few dollars more: mezcal with Modelo, sweet amaro with a pecan porter. Call it a blind date with possibilities. On ExpressNews.com: Mike Sutter's Top 10 San Antonio restaurants But happy hours greatest gift is $1 East Coast oysters, served on ice with hot sauce, mignonette and crackers. A few of them went sideways the first time out, from a batch that would win no tiaras in the beauty-shell pageant. But the second time I sat down, they were as clean and pearly as any of the East Coast oysters in town, daring them to match prices on a dozen with two beers for just 16 bucks. Mike Sutter/Staff file photo Happy hour or not, the bar cooks. A gin martini, besides being perfectly balanced against a suggestion of vermouth, came in a bantam-size glass with a decanter on the side resting in ice to keep every sip frosty on the refills. Two hurricane-glass cocktails transcended their clown-shoe presentations with a deft mix of rum and bitters (Queens Park Swizzle) and a layered blend of sherries and fig (Sherry Cobbler). And dont come at me with your social media pearl-clutching over white negronis, because bartender Andy Pennington made one with mezcal that brought smoke to the party for a gratifyingly bittersweet aperitif. On the other hand, come at me hard for even ordering shots masquerading as miniature cocktails. Neither a paloma nor a Painkiller and sure as hell not an espresso martini belong in a squeeze bottle on a speed rack. If thats a lot of drinking and not much food, credit the impressive World of Barcraft run by Myles Worrell of Esquire Tavern renown. But theres food worth talking about, too, from the kitchen of John Philpot, the chef behind Hot Joy and Careys gone-too-soon Southtown restaurant The Monterey. Opening a can of sardines in oil or some tinned-can squid takes no kitchen skill, but it takes a sense of knowing how conservas play into drinking cultures around the world. From there, the knives and kitchen craft kicked in for a menu that feels like theyre making it up as they go along, with a burger, a shrimp cocktail, some sandwiches, salads and a few bigger plates so you can call home and say, No, Im not at a bar. Its a restaurant. A thick white bean dip with bacon breath and toast gave starch-and-fat counterarguments to the first few rounds of drinks. With a half-dozen big shrimp in full coral blush, a shrimp cocktail forgot it was in a tavern and not a high-tone seafood joint, where it might have shared a menu with Double Standards first-class Caesar salad, layered with Little Gem lettuce, showers of pecorino cheese and dried flakes of smoked tuna for the funk we want from a good Caesar. It was far better than a kale salad priced like a dinner salad but plated more like a side, a rough and underdressed pileup diminished even more by a salt-bomb grilled chicken add-on. A much better chicken option, a juicy thigh with blackening spices, couldnt make up for hard-toasted bread and a sloppy overdress that made it an impolite handheld even for a bar. On ExpressNews.com: Chuck Blounts Top 10 San Antonio-area breweries Mike Sutter/Staff file photo A Scotch egg is a bar-food usual suspect, a boiled egg wrapped in sausage and deep-fried. Those are good things. Double Standard made it better by adding an acidic flavor agent to the mix with schmear of pickled carrot puree. The tired idea of avocado toast got a wake-up call from Bentons country ham, a legendary Southern staple, in a square dance with ricotta, burnt onion molasses and pickled tomatillos. On toast. No avocado necessary. You could get by on oysters, appetizers and a cool buzz at Double Standard, if thats all it wanted to be. But steak frites would argue otherwise, with the underappreciated coulotte steak sliced in high-blush rounds saturated by foie gras butter over crisp fries for a surprisingly low $19. When I say crisp fries, I mean it. Maybe too crisp, if theres such a thing, knocking on the door of cooked to the point that the middle falls away into feathered shale. Its a style, just not my style. Shrimp scampi rounded out the big-plate options, with way more plus-size shrimp than youd expect for $19, and a big etouffee-style swagger instead of the standard dainty dress of lemon, garlic and white wine. Theres nothing dainty about Double Standard. Its broad-shouldered, unapologetic, a little buzzed and posted up right in the heart of downtown, ready for the world to step up and order. Double Standard *** 1/2 114 E. Houston St. in the Rand Building, 210-977-0005, doublestandardsatx.com Quick bite: American-style tavern with craft cocktails and solid bar food Hit: Steak frites, Benton's country ham, gin martini Miss: Kale salad, chicken sandwich, one-shot cocktails Hours: Noon-midnight, Monday-Saturday Price range: Appetizers, $6-13; oysters, $24 dozen ($1 each until 6 p.m.); burgers and sandwiches, $13-$16; salads, $12-$14; entrees $19; desserts, $11 Alcohol: Cocktails, beer and wine ***** Excellent, an almost perfect experience **** Good, among the best in the city *** Average, with a few standouts ** Poor, with a redeeming factor or two * Bad, nothing to recommend Express-News dining critics pay for all meals. See More Collapse The bartenders wouldnt have it any other way. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate AUSTIN, Texas Alex Jones lawyers may have mistakenly sent a digital copy of his personal cellphone containing years worth of emails and text messages to a legal team that is suing Jones for defamation, one of the plaintiffs attorneys revealed Wednesday. During parts of his testimony stretching over two days in a Texas courtroom, Jones repeatedly told jurors that he does not use email and that he had searched the contents of his phone for messages pertaining to Sandy Hook after he was sued by several family members of the victims for falsely saying the shooting was a hoax. The parents attorney suggested the cellphone records show Jones perjured himself on the stand. The Jan. 6 House Committee on Wednesday is reportedly planning to request Jones text messages and emails as part of its investigation into the insurrection, according to Rolling Stone. Jones was subpoenaed by the committee last year over his role in organizing the rally on Jan. 6 that preceded the insurrection. Jones said that his phone search, done during the discovery phase of the trial, did not turn up any relevant messages. Texas Judge Maya Guerra Gamble has already ruled in favor of Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis by default, saying that Jones did not comply with the rules of discovery in the case. Mark Bankston, who is representing Heslin and Lewis in their defamation case against Jones, asked the Infowars host again on Wednesday whether he had an email account or used text messages to discuss Sandy Hook. Jones reply to both questions, under oath, was that he did not. Twelve days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text, Bankston said. Do you know what perjury is? Among the messages that Bankston showed to Jones and the jury were text messages between Jones and Infowars employees discussing the companys finances. Another message included a warning from one of Jones producers that the sites coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic contained falsehoods that were reminiscent of debunked theories Jones had spread about Sandy Hook. Bankston, grilling Jones about his emails and text messages, told Jones, When your attorneys sent me your whole phone, they didnt mean to do that. Jones attorney, F. Andino Reynal, objected to the statement, prompting Gamble to advise the jury that no evidence had been presented to show that the emails or texts had been shared by mistake. However, she also noted for the jury that any records relevant to the case should have been provided to the plaintiffs months ago during discovery. When asked about Bankstons assertion during a brief recess, Reynal replied I do my talking in the courtroom. Whoops, thats the wrong link Bankston later told reporters on Wednesday that the records were sent by one of Reynals legal assistants through a file sharing platform, and that the file included several hundred gigabytes of data covering at least 27 months of phone records. Under the legal rules of Texas, Bankston said he notified Reynal of the apparent mistake, kicking off a 10-day period in which Jones attorneys could notify the parents attorneys of any privileged records that needed to be returned. Bankston said that neither he nor other members of his legal team looked at the records during that period. All Reynal said at the time was Whoops, thats the wrong link, disregard, Bankston said. Once the 10-day period ended, Bankston said he and co-counsel began combing through the phone records, uncovering messages that he said Jones lawyers should have turned over during discovery along with a trove of Jones private, personal communications. That review is ongoing, Bankston said, adding that his team needs more time to dig through all of the voluminous file. Lewis and Heslin are seeking $150 million from Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, after the court previously ruled he was liable for defamation. On redirect, Reynal asked Jones if he trusted his lawyers to do their jobs in turning over evidence. Jones replied Yes. When asked if he has any more questions for Jones, Banktson said I think we are done with Mr. Jones. After the court went into a brief recess, Bankston was heard in court saying that there would be months of fallout from the contents of the cellphone. You know what nobodys thought about yet? What happens when that phone goes to law enforcement, he said, his comment picked up by live mics broadcasting the trial over the internet. While Bankston said that he is prepared to make newsworthy messages public, he added that he would keep the most intimate messages out of the public eye out of his own sense of morality. When asked about news reports on Wednesday that investigators from the Jan. 6 committee were interested in reviewing Jones phone records, Bankston said that he fully intends to comply with any local, state or federal law enforcement investigations. However, Bankston said he had yet to receive any subpoenas for Jones cellphone records. Jones said outside the courthouse on Wednesday that he doesnt have a care in the world" about the records being passed to state or federal investigators. I havent seen what theyre claiming they have but I havent done anything wrong, so no, Im not worried, absolutely not, he said. Also included in the file, Bankston said, were private mental health records for several plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit brought by other Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent. Those records were included elsewhere in the file shared with Bankstons team, and not on Jones cellphone, he said. Reynal, who was recently added as an out-of-state attorney in that case, would likely have access to those records, Bankston said. But the accidental sharing of the medical records appears to violate a court order to place them under seal in Connecticut, Bankston said. Bankston said he ordered his team to destroy the medical records, and notified the attorneys for the other plaintiffs in the Connecticut case of the issue. United States Coast Guard Four Mexican nationals were detained Tuesday after 40 sharks that had been illegally captured were found dead in their fishing boat, the Coast Guard said in a news release. Acting on a tip from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Coast Guard intercepted the men's lancha, or fishing boat, about seven miles north of the Maritime Boundary Line off the South Texas coast. The news release said officials found 40 dead sharks on board the fishing boat, which was about 30 feet long with a slender profile and an outboard motor. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A jury convicted a San Antonio man for fatally shooting his girlfriend in 2020 and leaving her body in a pool of blood to be found the next morning by the couples young children then sentenced him to 50 years in prison the same day. Jurors took a little more than two hours to find Jorge Izquierdo, 31, guilty of murder Thursday. Supporters of the defendant and the victim erupted in tears at the verdict. The jury took less than two hours to decide the sentence. Izquierdo could have received life in prison for shooting Cora Nickel, 27, his on-and-off girlfriend, on Aug. 20, 2020, at her duplex in the 8900 block of Maverick Draw on the Northwest Side. He took the stand after the verdict to testify in the sentencing phase of the trial, telling Nickels mother, Lynette Robinson, who was in the audience, Im sorry for your loss and give my condolences. Prosecutor Kristen Mullinar rose, leaning forward in her chair to ask, Do you take responsibility for shooting her in the head? Thats not what happened, so Im not agreeing with that, Izquierdo replied in an even tone. I dont remember everything that happened that night. A large man in black glasses, he went on to ask for leniency from the jury and said he was writing letters to his two girls every month. He has not been allowed to have any contact with them while in custody. Robinson called San Antonio police to the house on the morning of Aug. 20, 2020, after finding her body. She had received a text from her granddaughters, then 8 and 5, that said, Somethings happened, theres red stuff all over the floor. I think mom is dead. Investigators found no weapon at the scene. Izquierdos car was parked in Nickels driveway, and his car keys were located near the backyard fence, but he was not there. A few days later, Izquierdo, then 29, was arrested in California. Arguing for a guilty verdict, prosecutors Mulliner and Oscar Pena said Izquierdo fled after shooting his girlfriend in the head while holding her over a sink as their two daughters were upstairs asleep. The girls, now 10 and 7, testified earlier this week and said on the stand everything that they told police, Pena said that their parents argued, she was yelling at him to leave, but he refused to go. Defense attorneys Jennifer Zarka and Sean Simpson argued that prosecutors delivered nothing but circumstantial evidence. They implied that Nickel committed suicide and that Izqueirdo reacted the way he did because he was traumatized. Nobody wins in this case, Simpson told the jury. This is terrible. Guilty will not bring Cora back. He criticized the police investigation, suggesting that investigators and officers did not properly secure the scene and could have left behind other evidence. Pena reminded the panel that experts testified that gunshot residue found on the victims hands was not unusual when a gun was in close proximity but not necessarily being held, and that the Bexar County medical examiner ruled the cause of death a homicide, not a suicide. Zarka said there were too many unknowns for the jury to come back with a guilty verdict. Jorge and Cora had a relationship some say was toxic; they had two children together; we know they argued, and their kids, family and friends said it was not unusual, she told the panel. In her closing statement before the guilty verdict, Mulliner noted Izquierdo left the kids in the house to find their dead mom for 10 hours, and didnt come back. Everything he did, he did to save his own skin. He didnt answer calls or texts from his kids, from his mom, from his best friend, Mulliner said. In the sentencing testimony, relatives of Izquierdo said he was supportive of their dreams and always stood up for an older male cousin who was bullied in the neighborhood for being gay. My cousin probably knew I was different, said the cousin, as family members wiped their eyes. But Junior would protect me even though I was the older one. And he would do it (when I was not there) so that I would not be ashamed. I loved him for that. Zarka asked the six men and six women of the jury to give Izquierdo the lower end of the sentencing scale. Hes not a lost cause. Hes not a monster, she said. Its a tragic event and he is so sorry that Cora is gone. Once again, Mulliner had little patience for sentimentality. I want you to think about what he destroyed. Why would you give him leniency? she said to the jury. He cussed at her. He pushed her around. Thats the guy he was and he left her body there for someone else to find. ezavala@express-news.net | Twitter: @elizabeth2863 This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A jazz singer from Mexico, a folk music group from New York City and a duo of pianists one Israeli, the other Palestinian came in March. In April, it was a soprano from Ukraine. In May, a French-Korean pianist. Last October, an Argentinian musician played the bandoneon, an accordion-like instrument, in San Fernando Cathedral, accompanied by a singer and a tango band. All of this is thanks to the performing arts nonprofit Musical Bridges Around the World, led by its founder, artistic director and CEO, Anya Grokhovski. On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio Symphony board pulls the plug on 83-year-old orchestra A classical pianist who has performed in Carnegie Hall, Grokhovski found a new home in the U.S. after leaving her native Russia at the end of the Cold War. She quickly developed a love for her new country and its diversity of people, she said. Her passion for music helped her form relationships and connect with a new culture. Today, through her nonprofit, she uses music to bring together people of different cultures. The makeup of this country I found amazing. You know, the Soviet Union was a pretty homogeneous country, she said. Thats what makes this country unique its melting pot. I think that with music and art, its an expressive medium, a connector. With the demise of the San Antonio Symphony 83 years after its founding, 2022 has been a dismal year for the performing arts in San Antonio. Yet Musical Bridges continues to expand by experimenting with new ways of spreading awareness of musical cultures. The nonprofit is finishing its first documentary, which celebrates African American genres such as blues, jazz, soul and hip hop. It will be released next year. On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio Symphony owes $10 million to musicians pension fund Musical Bridges will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year. It has a staff of eight and a budget of about $1.2 million. Along with other nonprofits such as Ballet San Antonio, OPERA San Antonio, the Olmos Ensemble and the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, Musical Bridges is providing crucial support to the performing arts community in the symphonys absence. Through its Kids to Concerts program, it has brought performers from around the world Japan, Mexico, China, India and Romania, among other countries to perform in schools. Its a testament to Anya and her leadership skills and vision to be able to grow a performing arts company in a city that over the past few years has lost several, said Suhail Arastu, the nonprofits director of advancement. Grokhovskis reputation as a pianist, and the connections shes made with other musicians, have helped draw performers here from across the globe, he said. Shes very straightforward. She says whatevers on her mind, Arastu said, adding. She really wants input, because were sort of like a family that shes created. Cultural exchange is all the more important as San Antonio absorbs new immigrants, including refugees from countries such as Afghanistan, Grokhovski said. She pointed out that some schools in the area have students speaking dozens of languages. The makeup of San Antonio is changing. Its still primarily Hispanic, but theres so many different cultures moving in, she said. Our mission is celebrating common humanity through making global arts accessible to all. All the artists we bring, theyre representatives of different cultures. We believe that music not only has to be accessible to all financially, it also needs to be relevant to all. From the USSR to the Alamo City Grokhovski is from a family of musicians. Both her parents were violinists, and her father performed with the Moscow Philharmonic. She began playing the piano at age 5 and later studied at the Russian Academy of Music in Moscow. In Eastern Europe, it is a tradition: Kids normally do what the parents do, she said. Every country, in every structure, there are some pluses and some minuses. There were a lot of minuses, but the plus was there was a free education, a very well-developed classical education. She came to the U.S. with her then-husband and their 6-year-old son in 1989 as part of an exchange program. At the time, she knew hardly two words of English, she said. They settled in Bloomington-Normal, Ill., where her husband was a visiting professor at Illinois State University. In 1991, the family moved to San Antonio after he got a full-time job at the University of Texas at San Antonio. On the drive south from Illinois, she recalls listening to radio news reports about a failed coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, an event that hastened the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A couple months after the familys arrival in San Antonio, she was hired as a staff accompanist at UTSA. She also began giving private piano lessons. Grokhovski didnt set out to become the CEO of a nonprofit. She says that she learned how to do the job by making a lot of different mistakes Little by little, you try not to repeat the same mistakes. Musical Bridges has its roots in a misunderstanding between Grokhovski and a former professor of hers from the Russian Academy, himself a pianist. In 1998, while she was at UTSA, she invited him for a visit so that she could show him around and he could play a few concerts. I also was hoping he would inspire me; there was a time when I kind of felt I needed some inspiration to perform more, do some exciting stuff in life, she said. She didnt hear from him for several months, until he called unexpectedly to tell her that hed bought a plane ticket and would arrive the following week. In a panic, she followed the suggestion of one of her students to organize a concert in someones house, where the attendees could make donations to help pay the pianists way. The concert was so popular that she decided to bring another former professor to San Antonio to perform. She went on to turn the effort into a nonprofit. This is literally how it all started out of the free will of just a group of women who felt that theres something special, and lets keep it alive, she said. On the recommendation of Father David Garcia, then of San Fernando Cathedral, she began recruiting performers to play in the nearly 300-year-old basilica. Garcia had just returned from a sabbatical in Europe where he took in concerts in the continents great houses of worship. Thus began the Musical Evenings at San Fernando Cathedral series, which celebrated its 24th season this year. Trying new things Over the years, Musical Bridges has grown to offer a wide variety of events and services, including the Gurwitz International Piano Competition and the International Music Festival. Its Kids to Concerts and Musical Sprouts programs bring music and dance performances to students, while the Golden Age program brings them to seniors. I think its important for children to see the world through positive eyes, which is a challenge these days, Grokhovski said. When we hear something about the world, its bad news. The nonprofits cultural offerings go beyond music: It displays artwork and holds exhibitions in its offices along Interstate 10 on the far Northwest Side. Bob Leckie, a retired lawyer and business executive who is a Musical Bridges board member, said he has spent some time considering the rare combination of traits that has made Grokhovski a success. She is good with details, yet she has vision and dreams. Ive worked with several really good visionaries, and Ive spent all my time cleaning up after them, you know? said Leckie, who spent part of his career running a manufacturing company. Ive worked with lots of really good people who could execute but need guidance going to the next level. Anya has both. When the pandemic hit and the nonprofit could no longer bring musicians to San Antonio to perform, Grokhovski led an effort to hire video crews to film the musicians performing and giving lessons in their home countries. The videos were shown as part of the Musical Sprouts program. The nonprofit continues to produce videos and online-learning ebooks for schools. Grokhovski is excited about a new venture launched during the national conversation about race after the murder of George Floyd: a childrens documentary called The Quilt: A Living History of African American Music. Set to premiere early next year, it was produced with local talent in collaboration with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, the Carver Community Cultural Center, the African American Quilt Circle of San Antonio and other organizations. The films trailer declares that it will show how genres of African American music blues, ragtime, jazz, soul, R&B and hip hop are connected just like a quilt. Musical Bridges couldnt find any other documentary about African American music geared to children, Grokhovski said. The nonprofit is creating a curriculum to accompany the film. Our mission is celebrating common humanity by making global art accessible to all. American art form is part of the global community of arts, she said. We wanted to show the creative culture that the African American community contributed to the general arts scene of this country, and celebrate it. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A wildfire crept up on a picturesque hilltop home north of Fredericksburg on Wednesday afternoon. Within a few hundred yards of the house, the Big Sky Fire turned the yellow grass covering the hillside charcoal black. A fluorescent yellow helicopter dumped water on the blaze. Fire trucks were positioned near the house, and firefighters rested in the shade nearby. As bad as Ive ever seen it: Wilson County fire marshal, on the job 25 years, says wildfire threat is off the chart The wildfire broke out about noon Tuesday. It spread across 200 acres over the next three and a half hours, feeding on dry grass and brush and driven by sustained winds of 15 mph, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. By Wednesday afternoon, the blaze about eight miles north of Fredericksburg had destroyed 1,400 acres of land and forced the closure of nearby Enchanted Rock State Natural Area and Pedernales Falls State Park. In separate tweets on Thursday morning, both parks said they have reopened. The fire is 50 percent contained as of Wednesday night and has not spread, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. About 40 residents were evacuated from the area Tuesday afternoon but were allowed to return home Wednesday. City of Fredericksburg spokeswoman Lea Feuge said the fire posed no imminent danger to the city. No homes had been destroyed and no life lost. Still, the fire had damaged three barn-like structures, Feuge said. The cause of the Big Sky Fire, which broke out off Eckert Road near Big Sky Drive and Foster Ranch Road in Gillespie County, is under investigation. The regions ongoing drought and dead, dried trees remaining from the winter freeze of February 2021 factored into the fires size, Feuge said. Outdoor burn bans and the lack of rain did not allow for controlled burns to clear the area of dead trees, resulting in plenty of fuel for the blaze. Authorities asked people to avoid the area around Eckert and Lower Crabapple roads. A Texas A&M Forest Service spokesperson said Wednesday evening that about 100 ground personnel from Gillespie County and the Forest Service were working to contain the blaze. With the unrelenting summer heat hitting record highs around the state and turning grasses and brush into fire fuel, 224 Texas counties have imposed outdoor burn bans, including Gillespie County, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. The Big Sky fire was among 26 wildfires that sparked across the state Tuesday, burning more than 3,500 acres. Officials with the forest service said the upper-level ridge of high pressure that is responsible for the hot and dry conditions fueling the fires is here to stay through next week. Wednesday, crews were battling several blazes in Central Texas, including in Hays, Travis, Caldwell and DeWitt counties, though those fires were nearing full containment. In Blanco County, multiple agencies responded to a wildfire that had burned 800 acres and was 60 percent contained as of Wednesday evening. Billy Calzada, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer The Smoke Rider Fire started Tuesday afternoon, and the Texas Department of Transportation had to close FM 165 between FM 2325 and U.S. 290. Multiple evacuations were issued for the areas around the fire as it continued to move north and northwest, and a shelter was opened at the Blanco Methodist Church at 61 Pecan St. At least four agencies, plus additional air assets, were assisting with the brush fire. Blanco County Emergency Management said crews were able to stop the forward progression of the Smoke Rider Fire overnight into Wednesday and reported that the containment line was doing well. The cause of the Smoke Rider Fire is under investigation. All mandatory evacuations have been lifted and homeowners allowed back to their residences, but the shelter at Blanco Methodist Church remained open Wednesday for people who needed it. All roads have reopened, though drivers are warned to expect frequent emergency vehicle traffic and to travel with extreme caution. A temporary flight restriction remains in place over the fire area. The National Weather Service said that elevated to near critical fire weather conditions would continue through the week. Staff writer Jacob Beltran contributed to this report. Eight years before Uvalde school police Chief Pedro Pete Arredondo led a disastrous law enforcement response to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, he was demoted from a high-ranking position at the Webb County Sheriffs Office. Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar said he demoted Arredondo from an assistant chief to a commander in October 2014 because he couldnt get along with people. Basically, thats what happened, Cuellar said on Thursday. He was difficult to get along with with his coworkers, especially upper staff. The basic thing I want to say is he just didnt fit the qualifications or the work that I set out for him. Before coming to Webb County, Arredondo served 16 years with the Uvalde Police Department. Even in Uvalde PD, when he was over there, they disliked the (expletive) out of him, Cuellar said. They were hoping he would get a job in Laredo. CUATE SANTOS Cuellar said Arredondo clashed with then-Webb County Chief Fred Garza, who was the departments second in command and Arredondos supervisor. Garza, who is now police chief of Eagle Pass, declined to comment on Thursday. CHRISTOPHER LEE, STR / NYT An Oct. 8, 2014, letter from Cuellar to Arredondo said he was being reassigned from Assistant Chief to Commander. Two days earlier, someone had written demotion in a payroll worksheet for Arredondo. Neither Arredondo nor his attorney responded to messages seeking comment Thursday morning. Records show Uvalde Consolidated ISD might not have fully reviewed Arredondos employment history when it hired him as its police chief in 2020. RELATED DOCUMENTS: - See Arredondo's demotion record - Read clips from Arredondo's service record On Feb. 13, 2020, the school district announced on Facebook that it was proud to introduce our District Chief of Police, Pedro Pete Arredondo, a native of Uvalde who was focused on providing safety for all students, staff and our community. Six days later, a human resources coordinator at Uvalde CISD emailed Arredondos previous employer, United ISD in Laredo, seeking a copy of his service record, according to emails obtained by the San Antonio Express-News. Arredondo worked as a captain in the Laredo school district for about three years after leaving the Webb County Sheriffs Office in 2017. Uvalde CISD spokeswoman Anne Marie Espinoza did not respond to questions about whether the Uvalde school district was aware of Arredondos demotion in Webb County when it hired him. Cuellar said Uvalde CISD never called him directly to ask about Arredondos job performance in Webb County. If the school district had called, Cuellar would not have recommended Arredondo for the job, he said. I dont think I would, based on the performance, he said. If Uvalde had asked the proper questions, especially on the chief position, the high-ranking position, I would have said, I dont think (Arredondo was) capable of running even a small department. But they never asked. Cuellar added, They do investigations based on, Hey, I worked here, I worked there. But then they never asked us. To do a good, clean background on somebody, they need to ask the sheriff. I would have been honest with them and said, Hey, this is why he was demoted. Basically, he didnt fit my criteria of being a chief. In his application to work at United ISD in Laredo, Arredondo listed Garza as a reference. CUATE SANTOS Arredondo also boasted in the application that the Webb County Sheriffs Office had awarded him a Life Savers Award for 2 different incidents and 6 different lives saved during my actions as a hostage negotiator. Cuellar said he recalled one standoff in 2012 at a house in El Cenizo with a man who was holding four or five undocumented immigrants hostage. Arredondo was among many officers who spoke to the suspect, Cuellar said. Danny Zaragoza, Staff Photographer It wasnt him, Cuellar said. It wasnt him completely. I think he exaggerated a little bit on the application. Cuellar said he and Victor Escalon of the Texas Department of Public Safety were primarily responsible for ending the standoff, persuading the suspect to drop his gun before moving slowly into the house and handcuffing him. I know that (Arredondo) was in the command center talking, Cuellar said. This is teamwork. You cant say, I did it all myself. Everybody talked to (the suspect), even Victor Escalon. It was a team effort. It wasnt just one person. Botched response to rampage On May 24, a gunman entered Robb Elementary with an assault-style rifle and killed 19 children and two teachers inside two classrooms. Arredondo, a 29-year law enforcement veteran, was among the first officers to arrive about three minutes after the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos of Uvalde, entered the school and started shooting inside the classrooms. But it took officers on the scene more than an hour to breach a door to the classrooms to confront and kill the gunman. Investigators said the door likely was unlocked the entire time. Arredondos own policy placed him as incident commander during the mass shooting. But he wasted vital time inside the school looking for a master key and trying unsuccessfully to negotiate with the shooter, who was not responding, even as injured students inside the classrooms called 911 pleading for help. CHRISTOPHER LEE, STR / NYT Uvalde CISD placed Arredondo on unpaid leave last month. The school district was scheduled to hold a termination hearing for Arredondo on Thursday, but postponed the meeting for a second time to once again ensure Pete Arredondos due process rights are met, Espinoza said in a written statement. A Texas House committee investigating the law enforcement response to the massacre learned from DPS in June about Arredondos demotion in Webb County, said state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, a member of the committee. Moody said DPS told the committee about the demotion during a closed-door meeting that included Steve McCraw, the director of DPS. At the time, DPS officials told the three-member committee including its chairman, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock; former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman; and Moody that they did not know the reason that Cuellar demoted Arredondo, Moody said. But the state agency was hyper-critical of Arredondo nonetheless, Moody said. I remember it shocking me, the pointed language they used, Moody said. They gave us the impression that this is a guy who was essentially bouncing from one place to the next. Arredondo received active-shooter training before he joined Uvalde CISD. United ISD Police Chief Ray Garner told the Express-News in June that Arredondo was responsible for the Laredo districts north side schools before he joined Uvalde CISD. Down here, we do a lot of training on active-shooter scenarios, and he was involved in those, Garner said. We train (officers) to go straight for the shooters and neutralize them. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, officers have been trained to confront and kill active shooters swiftly, prioritizing the lives of victims over those of officers. That didnt happen at Robb Elementary. Instead, Arredondo treated the crisis as if Ramos were hunkered down inside the classrooms. He told the Texas House committee that he prayed no children were inside, and he treated the gunman as a barricaded subject rather than an active shooter because he couldnt see any injuries, according to the committees report. Body-camera footage, however, captured Arredondo saying, Theres probably some casualties, the report said. Courtesy City of Uvalde Arredondo was born in Uvalde, a town of 16,000 that serves as a gateway for recreation along the Frio River, Garner State Park and the South Texas shale. His first job after graduating from the Southwest Texas Junior College law enforcement academy in 1993 was as a 911 dispatcher for the Uvalde Police Department. He served 16 years with the Uvalde PD and had multiple roles, including patrol officer, detective and an assistant chief. Arredondo was hired at the Webb County Sheriffs Office in January 2009. He spent about a year from 2011 to 2012 working as a jailer there. He was promoted to an assistant chief before his demotion in 2014 to commander. He applied to work at United ISD in Laredo in 2017. In his application, Arredondo described an array of responsibilities as assistant chief in Webb County, including oversight of all the divisions. A description of his subsequent role as commander of the patrol division was more limited: Supervise the division, work and create policy as needed, internal affairs, human resources, armory and evidence management, departmental inventory. Joshua Eaton is a freelance investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C. bchasnoff@express-news.net UVALDE Freshly painted and in-progress murals honoring the teachers and students murdered in the Robb Elementary School massacre can be seen outside the St. Henry de Osso Family Project building. Inside this building, late last month, divine healing was in progress for Uvalde children. It could be seen in the art they made and heard in their voices, lifted in song. This little light of mine, Im going to let it shine. All around Uvalde, Im going to let it shine. let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, the elementary students sang as Sister Clarice Suchy strummed her guitar. They made gestures to act out the music and played tambourines and maracas. Some smiled. Darkness has overwhelmed these children since the May 24 massacre, the second-deadliest school shooting in America, in which a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers, injuring more than a dozen others. Now Playing: Uvalde children attend Camp I CAN in wake of Robb Elementary tragedy. Video: San Antonio Express-News UVALDE: Police response was lackadasical during Robb Elementary massacre, House report says Amid the anguish and division in Uvalde, the scene at the Henry de Osso building in the last week of July offered hope for healing. This old building, where the air conditioner struggles, became sacred ground for 22 rising third-, fourth- and fifth-graders, some of whom were in Robb Elementary classrooms and on the playground when the shooting began. Two campers survived injuries; another campers best friend and cousin were killed. Every student here lost friends and teachers. One volunteer was a Robb teacher, present the day of the massacre. Camp I CAN Inner strength, Commitment, Awareness, Networking is the vision of Sister Dolores Aviles, 67, who grew up in Uvalde and recently marked 46 years with the Society of St. Teresa of Jesus. Catholic Extension, a nonprofit headquartered in Chicago, and Hustle Fitness in Uvalde, sponsored the free camp. Aviles, who holds a masters degree in educational leadership, has worked as a teacher and principal at Catholic schools in Texas and other states for nearly 50 years. Her latest service is leading the St. Henry de Osso Family Project after-school tutoring organization, which began in 1993 as a home-based program. The nonprofit hasnt provided tutoring since the start of the pandemic, but in the aftermath of the tragedy, Aviles saw use for its 13,200-square foot building, built at the turn of the century. It was once the Uvalde Wool & Mohair Co. In 2008, Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoes family donated the building to the St. Henry de Osso Family Project. To get the word out about this camp, Aviles distributed flyers and placed an ad in the Uvalde Leader-News. Her mission was to help students from Robb find their inner strength. The camp was a massive effort. Aviles, a Teresian sister, led the program with help from Suchy, Sister Mary Lou Aldape and 10 sisters from San Antonio, Kalamazoo and Los Angeles. Other volunteers from the local community included a Robb teacher and her daughter, a Uvalde college instructor. And some parents helped. The sisters gently encouraged campers to pray about the tragedy. They didnt hesitate. IN MEMORY: Remembering the lives lost in Uvalde The children repeated Suchys prayer: We remember in a special way our friends who were killed. We remember those who were hurt. We ask you to bring healing to our hearts, to our families, to our friends and to our town. Help us Jesus to know that you are always with us. And we turn to you when we are scared, when we are frightened, when we are hurting. Help us to know that our parents, and our teachers and other friends are here to help us through these times. Amen. Again, they sang This Little Light of Mine. Sam Owens, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer Finding strength Campers began each day together before splitting into four small groups White Daisy, Red Daisy, Star and Peace for 15-minute stations of prayer, song, arts, crafts, games, exercise and mindfulness. At the end of the day, they would gather again as a group. Im thinking of a word. A word that begins with F and it ends with N, Aviles said on the first day. Fun! the kids yelled. Thats what this week is about. Its about having fun! Are you ready to have fun? she asked. Yes! Were ready! The second day began with a group photo and a prayer led by Aviles: Thank you Jesus, for being in the center of our lives. Help us Jesus to be like you. To think like you. To have fun like you. To love like you. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Then, she reminded them of the fun they had the day before: cornhole, pingpong, art and play. The children enjoyed the meals, chicken strips from Good-N-Crisp, Little Caesars pizza, sandwiches, and grilled hot dogs and burgers cooked by a parent volunteer but the fellowship that began with prayer was the camps essence. It provided comfort and invoked the faith the sisters believe Uvalde needs to go forward. Sam Owens, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer We are on a journey together. We really have to lean on each other now so we can continue walking forward. This massacre this tragedy has broken us all, Aviles said. We are broken earthen vessels and the one that can heal us is Jesus Christ. He uses us as his instruments for healing. Its a process. UVALDE: 'My whole body aches for her': A Uvalde High School senior graduates without her little sister Kathryn Ayala, a Southwest Texas Junior College psychology instructor who grew up in Uvalde, volunteered at the camp with her mother, Mary Santos, who taught second grade at Robb. Santos hid in her classroom with three other classes that had run inside from the playground. Throughout the shooting and standoff, Ayala sat a couple blocks away in her vehicle, trying to calm herself and support her mom. In texts, she told her mom she was loved and offered prayers. She told her mother to model deep breathing and calm to her students. Hiding in her classroom, Santos did just this. Two months later, at the camp, mother and daughter returned to this practice, leading children through sensory and deep breathing exercises. Students ran their hands through flour and cake mixes looking at, feeling and smelling them using all senses except taste. They took balloons and filled them with the cake mix. Hands on their hearts, they closed their eyes, slowly squeezing the balloons, breathing deep to Ayalas guidance. Other children could be heard singing This Little Light of Mine in the next room. This little light of mine, Hide it under a basket? No! Im going to let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Sam Owens, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer In their hearts Every survivor here carries a story of pain and resilience. Not every victim was shot. Some were in rooms 111 and 112. Some were in other wings. Some werent even in the building. Before the shooting, Levi Cervantes, a rising fourth-grader, had nightmares about someone turning into an evil robot. He wanted to attend awards day, which was celebrated the morning of the shooting May 24, but his mother, Melissa Cervantes, kept him home. His good friend Jose Manuel Flores Jr. was murdered in his classroom that day. Campers shared their fears on hearts made out of construction paper. On one side, they drew their fears. On the other, they drew how Jesus helps. How do you spell Jesus? Ezekiel Casarez, a rising third-grader who was a student at Robb, asked Suchy. Jesus. Help me with my fear, another camper wrote. I hate guns. Dont sell guns, wrote Noah Orona, who was injured in the shooting. In green crayon, Vivian Trevino, an 11-year-old rising fifth-grader who attends the Uvalde Dual Language Academy, wrote about her second cousin Eliahna Torres and best friend Maite Rodriguez, considered a part of her family. Hello, Jesus. I just want to say that all I want is my best friend Sophia Cantu and me, Vivian, to see my best friend Maite and my cousin Eliahna. Please. Her mom, Cassandra Trevino, said the day after the shooting, she took Vivian to meet Sophia at Maites home. They spent time in Maites bedroom. Trevino, also the mother of another camper, rising fourth-grader Soila Trevino, described grappling with guilt because her children were OK. Im holding her, and I felt so guilty. Ana (Maites mother) was just there watching me. I felt like I should let go, but I couldnt. Sam Owens, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer Day to day Ten-year-old Noah Oronas dad, Oscar Orona, said survivors have been forgotten in the massacres aftermath. Orona tries to stay away from meetings and videos, but he recently watched an unedited video of the Robb hallway that included childrens screams. He couldnt sleep. I told myself I wasnt going to look at that stuff, but part of me needed to, he said. Noahs teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles, were murdered shielding their students. Noah has said he witnessed at least one of his teachers get shot, his classmates dying, their mouths full of blood. He saw teeth on the floor. UVALDE: A Uvalde teachers family finds a measure of solace in mural meant to heal In the days after his surgery, Noah was concerned about his best friend, Samuel Salinas. The two were together in photos at the award ceremony just before the shooting began. Samuel had suffered shrapnel wounds but was OK. Noah, one of the first to be shot, missed the first day of camp because of a therapy appointment. On the camps second day, he stayed close to Samuel, a rising fifth-grader, as they went through the stations. Orona has vivid memories of May 24. Noah, a rising fifth-grader at Robb, received a music award that morning a pleasant surprise. Noah often went to math tutoring instead of music class, yet Mireles and Garcia chose to recognize him, a reflection of those two teachers who cared for him a lot, Orona said. Noah wanted to go home after the awards ceremony, but his dad said he would have to come to work with him. Besides, it was Bubble Day. Noah chose to stay at school. After receiving the shooter alert, Orona drove to Robb, parking near the funeral home across the street from the school. He smelled gunpowder. People ran behind the funeral home, yelling, The shooters outside. The shooters outside. Searching for his son, he went to the civic center, where he saw buses and Border Patrol vans bringing students. No Noah. Whos your sons teacher? someone asked. One of them is Mireles. He was told she was inside, but it was a different Mireles. Two more buses arrived. No Noah. His wife then received a call from the Uvalde Memorial Hospital emergency room, seeking to admit Noah. They joined a sea of other panicked parents and relatives at the hospital. UVALDE: In Uvalde, a stepgrandfather grieves About 30 to 40 minutes later, they met with Noahs pediatrician, Dr. Roy Guerrero, who said they were airlifting Noah to Methodist Childrens Hospital in San Antonio for emergency surgery. Orona briefly saw Noah. I just broke down. His whole shoulder was bandaged. I said, Son, how are you? Dad, my clothes are ruined. Theyre all bloody, Noah said. Dont worry about your clothes, the father said. The bullet had entered Noahs back and exited from his shoulder. After a two-hour surgery and about a week in the hospital, Noah was released. But the healing continues. Each week, he goes to trauma counseling, physical therapy and occupational therapy. His shoulder may never look normal. A conversation piece, one doctor said. Noahs trauma is so severe, his parents are careful not to make sudden noises. He doesnt want to be left alone. He has sleep tremors. We live our life day to day now because we dont make plans because we dont know how the day will go, Orona said. Sam Owens, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer Hard questions, hope Some students asked Suchy, who has served with the Teresian sisters in Uvalde since 1990, what she calls the hard question: Why does God allow bad things to happen? I dont know that I know the answer to that question, she said. But I do know that God takes events and allows them to change us and brings out the good of people and gives us the grace that so even though bad things happen, God also provides the grace to come together. Later, Aviles answered this way: We know we have suffering because of sin. But we dont have to stay in that suffering. We go through our calvary. We go through our pain. We feel like we are crucified, but God doesnt let us stay crucified. Though darkness endures, some light shines. Aviles savors small signs of progress, like when children smiled and skipped at camp. You dont skip if youre sad or tired. If you skip, thats a sign of happiness. Oh, Lord, thank you! she exclaimed. Gathered in a circle, campers were asked to describe in one word how they felt at that moment. They were happy, excited, joyful and grateful. The sisters and volunteers were delighted. Noah, smiling, answered: Im blessed. Nancy.Preyor-Johnson@express-news.net The Pelosi stunt brought about a bunch of negatives on Taipei, like a trade backlash with Asian stock markets experiencing bad trading. US Provoked China With Pelosi's Visit Beijing has halted the import of a variety of Taiwanese goods as tensions rise over US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the self-governed island, reported RT. Chinese regulators sanctioned Taiwanese oranges and blocked several seafood imports. According to them, such limits were imposed due to excessive pesticide residue found many times, as well as some frozen fish packages, found positive for coronavirus, noted Azerbaycan 24. Separately, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce confirmed it would restrict sand exports to Taiwan based on pertinent legal papers. The agency didn't provide any extra details. An earlier restriction on 100+ Taiwanese food items, including tea, honey, and seafood goods, was lifted on Monday, before the state visit. One explanation given by Beijing is that their export registrations are not renewed. Taiwanese products will be available through the end of July. Taiwan Food and Drug Administration chief Wu Shou-mei reacted to the news by suggesting that the limitations might be politically influenced, charging Beijing with discriminating against Taiwanese producers unfairly compared to those from other nations, citing Trusted Bulletin. Before this, the island had been subjected to trade restrictions for a year ago. One such embargo was imposed on pineapple imports due to the discovery of bugs in multiple shipments. However, Taiwanese leaders were sure that nothing was wrong; the fruit was exported at the export level with the highest quality requirements and was also globally certified. The Pelosi stunt was followed by a trade backlash that Taiwanese officials felt was not deserved, coupled with erratic Asian stock markets that are affected by financial instability leaching from the Ukraine conflict. Read Also: Xi Jinping: 5 Things To Know About China's President Beijing is Taiwan's largest export partner, spending $328.3 billion on the island last year. At the same time, Taiwan's exports outnumber imports by $172 billion. China Sanctions Taiwan The mainland administration would have avoided the economic blowback caused by the confrontational visit of the American politician, which was not welcome. Foreign Minister Wang Yi chastised the United States for undermining Chinese sovereignty and denigrating the One China Policy. Worse, they are planning an incident that disregards the security of the Indo-Pacific and the Taiwan Strait. Last Wednesday, the PLAN conducted military exercises near the enclave to frighten Taiwanese leaders by firing missiles and engaging in other military activity. During her working tour to Taiwan, she met with members of the Taiwanese parliament and US delegates in a closed-door conference. Previously, themes such as security, the economy, and government were on the agenda. Asian stock markets fell on Tuesday as tensions between Beijing and Washington rose ahead of a visit to Taiwan by a senior US official. The escalation put Chinese financial markets into a tailspin, with the Shanghai Composite and Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index both plunging over 3% on Tuesday. Taiwan's TAIEX fell more than 2% during the day, while the leading indices in Japan, South Korea, and Australia fell between 0.5 and 1.6 percent. Going through the Pelosi stunt has led to trade backlash on Taiwan, lost a lot and Asian stock markets went through tumult that was not beneficial at all. Related Article: China Brandishes 'Hypersonic Aircraft Carrier Killer' as Indo-Pacific Seethes Over Pelosi Trip @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Low cost carrier Ryanair and the Slovenian government are set to hold a second round of talks this month over the potential introduction of flights. This time around, the budget airline is expected to outline exact routes it is willing to establish and ways in which the Slovenian government could provide support to the carrier. The Slovenian Ministry for Economic Development and Technology, which has been negotiating with Ryanair, has run the airline through the existing subsidies the state is providing to airlines operating into Ljubljana Airport, although this is unlikely to satisfy Ryanairs needs as the funds are only available to carriers already maintaining flights to the Slovenian capital and are small in value, with ten airlines sharing 1.7 million euros, which is unevenly distributed among them. Low cost carrier Ryanair and the Slovenian government are set to hold a second round of talks this month over the potential introduction of flights. This time around, the budget airline is expected to outline exact routes it is willing to establish and ways in which the Slovenian government could provide support to the carrier. The Slovenian Ministry for Economic Development and Technology, which has been negotiating with Ryanair, has run the airline through the existing subsidies the state is providing to airlines operating into Ljubljana Airport, although this is unlikely to satisfy Ryanairs needs as the funds are only available to carriers already maintaining flights to the Slovenian capital and are small in value, with ten airlines sharing 1.7 million euros, which is unevenly distributed among them. Ryanair has already criticised Ljubljana Airport over alleged high fees, but the budget airline is mainly interested in serving the Slovenian capital from 2023. The Slovenian government has proposed Maribor Airport as an alternative to the Fraport-operated Ljubljana. Earlier this year, Maribor Airport held talks with Wizz Air over the potential introduction of seasonal flights to Slovenias second largest city, with the airline requesting a subsidy valued at almost one million euros, which was unfeasible for the airport. However, Maribor could have more luck in the government-led talks with Ryanair. The budget airline last served the city fifteen years ago. The Slovenian government has said it will analyse appropriate means of support to improve the countrys air connectivity to key destinations under economically justified conditions. However, it conceded that the country urgently needs to improve its connectivity. Two and a half years since Adria Airways bankruptcy, Slovenia is still struggling to fill the void left by the former national carrier, which was further exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In June, Airports Council International ranked Slovenia as having the worst connectivity in Europe, while Ljubljana Airport ranked 378th out of 476 of the continents airports based on its number of flights and connections. Some of the UKs rarest breeds of cattle are at risk because rising farm costs mean cows are worth more dead than alive, a meat retailer has said. Farmison & Co has issued the stark warning as the nation's cattle farmers faces unprecedented pressures due to rising costs. One of the firm's long-term beef suppliers, David Harrison from Grewelthorpe, said that for the first time in his life, he would get more money for selling a cow at auction for slaughter rather than for breeding. John Pallagi, CEO of Farmison & Co, said it was a "remarkable and potentially devastating development". If it continues then up and down the country, farmers and producers will be incentivised to sell off their breading stock for meat, never to calve again. It speaks to the huge and risings costs involved in farming right now that the long-term prospects of making a profit on new members of the herd are becoming more remote, and producers are simply selling up. It is unprecedented in modern times. Mr Pallagi warned that small farms, including those that had helped revived heritage breeds, were particularly vulnerable to the impact of rising oil and feed costs. He has written to Conservative Party leadership candidates Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss asking them to set out their strategy for UK agriculture and food supply. Within hours of his post going out to customers and going live on the companys website, Mr Pallagi said his inbox was full of messages of support. These include: It is a huge loss to this country to loose heritage breeds with such long ancestors only to be put up for slaughter." Unless our government in Westminster starts helping farmers, who knows what the next 3 - 5 years will bring." I would really look forward to a UK that could be self-sufficient in the face of such uncertainty." It breaks my heart what is happening to the whole farming community. It is a huge loss to this country to loose heritage breeds with such long ancestors only to be put up for slaughter. Mr Pallagi said the feedback showed that the public 'care very deeply' about British farming and food security. He said: "We must not lose this vital cornerstone of our economy and our countryside. "Whoever is the next prime minister must show a commitment to food and farming and to provide support to our farmers to rear better meat. UK consumers could face dramatic increases in highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs) in food if the government rushes through a trade deal with India, according to research. The UK is looking to negotiate the new free trade agreement (FTA) in record time in order to double trade with India by 2030. It is likely to face considerable pressure to water down pesticide standards from the Indian government, which is infamous for lobbying aggressively against protections. Whilst negotiations are taking place behind closed doors, the new agreement looks likely to significantly increase food exports from India to the UK. According to new research from Pesticide Action Network UK, Sustain Alliance and trade expert Dr Emily Lydgate, this could see Indian-produced staples with illegally high levels of pesticides, such as rice, wheat and tea, reach the UK. Josie Cohen, head of policy and campaigns at PAN UK said: Pesticide regulations arent bargaining chips, they are there to protect peoples health. "Watering them down to secure a new trade deal would create serious public health risks at home whilst also making our farmers less competitive abroad. "Deals of this size typically take years to complete - rushing through negotiations without fully thinking through the consequences is a recipe for disaster. According to the report, India currently allows the use of 62 percent more HHPs than the UK, and it tends to allow larger amounts of chemicals to appear in food. For example, common foods such as apples and grapes can contain 200 times the levels of the insecticide Malathion, which has been linked to cancer, the researchers said. The trade deal could also mean an increase in Indian wheat exports to the UK. India allows wheat to contain 50 times the amount of chlorpyrifos than its UK equivalent. Chlorpyrifos was banned for use in the UK in 2019. And in 2021, 200 tonnes of Indian rice was rejected globally each month for containing pesticide residues that exceeded the legal limits of importing countries. With a relaxation of the rules, the report says this produce risks ending up on UK shelves, especially given border controls are stretched following the UKs EU exit. The deal is also likely to have major impacts on UK agriculture, with Indian farmers able to produce food more cheaply using toxic pesticides that are banned in the UK. The UK Governments own expert body has warned that this double standard threatens to hand foreign agribusiness a competitive advantage and undercut UK Dr Emily Lydgate, Reader in Environmental Law at the University of Sussex, said: The Indian government has a long record of lobbying to relax levels of permitted pesticide residues, and UK negotiators will inevitably face pressure to weaken domestic regulation. "Indian produce regularly contains illegally high levels of pesticides, and with an already under-resourced UK border force following Britains exit from the EU, an FTA that weakens the rules could weaken pose a risk to public health. A government spokesperson said: We have strict statutory limits for pesticide residue levels on imported food and a robust programme of monitoring. "An FTA with India wont change this products which dont meet our requirements wont be permitted to enter the UK market. Any deal we sign will include protections for the agriculture industry. We will not expose UK farmers to unfair competition or compromise our high standards. The Scottish Land Commission has today issued a new protocol to landowners and farmers on responsible natural capital and carbon management. The Commission has set out practical expectations to ensure that landowners approach to natural capital and carbon management recognises their responsibilities, as well as their rights, in relation to land and contributes to a just transition. The protocol builds on existing work to ensure Scotlands net zero targets are met while benefiting communities, landowners and businesses fairly. Hamish Trench, chief executive of the Scottish Land Commission, said: There is no need to wait for market regulation or new legislation, change in practice can happen now. "The protocol will help landowners, investors and communities take a responsible approach in what is a rapidly developing sector of land use and investment. The protocol is part of a suite that has been published by the Commission to support the practical implementation of the Scottish governments Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement (LRRS). Together they are helping drive improved transparency, accountability and governance of Scotlands land. Environment Minister Mairi McAllan said: Investment in Scotlands natural capital is vital to tackle the climate and nature emergencies but we must ensure that our people and communities are not disadvantaged and indeed can benefit from this opportunity. This new protocol... will help us to focus investment in the right types of natural capital in the right places such as in nature-based solutions, like peatland restoration and woodland creation, which bring benefits for the environment, the economy and society as a whole. We are currently consulting on proposals for our ambitious new Land Reform Bill which will be introduced by the end of 2023, and will be another significant step forward in ensuring our land is owned, managed and used in the public interest." Among the expectations set out by the Commission is that landowners and managers should engage with communities on land decisions before actioning, so that the communities are able to influence the decisions made. Communities and local economies should also benefit from the management of natural capital in ways which support local priorities and aspirations. The protocol also highlights how existing natural capital owned by landowners should be protected and enhanced alongside the development of any other carbon activities. It shows that investment in carbon management to offset emissions should always be made in addition to action to reduce emissions at source as close to zero as possible. Hamish Trench added: Weve worked closely with stakeholders to develop a protocol that sets out practical expectations for ownership, use and decisions. "Using it should maximise the opportunity while minimising the risk of Scotlands changing landscape and contribute to a just transition. When managed responsibly, there is real opportunity for Scotlands land and natural capital to create positive social, environmental and economic impacts. "There are some great examples already where landowners, investors and communities are providing leadership and this protocol seeks to help make this the norm by ensuring the long-term benefits are shared fairly by all. The protocol will be discussed in depth at the Scottish Land Commissions upcoming Natural Capital and Land online event being held on Wednesday 17 August. The industry has paid tributes to well-known Northern Irish cattle breeder Ian Davidson, who passed away on Sunday. The British Limousin Cattle Society said it was with much sadness that members were being informed of his death. The County Antrim breeder, of the Ballyrickard herd, was a strong supporter of the Limousin breed, the society said on a social media post. He was also actively involved with Young Breeders, the society said, adding that he took "great pleasure in helping new breeders on their way, and had many friendships across the British founded in Limousins." Mr Davidson passed away in Larne on Sunday 31 July. The cause of death is not known. The society's post said: "In particular he loved sourcing and trying out new and old bloodlines which resulted in multiple show winners, sale leaders and herd competition awards over the years. "Ians remains will leave his home on Saturday at 11am, to arrive at the Church of the Holy Family, Ballygowan for 11.30am Requiem Mass. His funeral afterwards is at Roselawn Crematorium at 2.00pm. "Sincere condolences are extended to Ians parents, Ian and Ellen, his sister Seaneen, partner Karen and to all wider family and friends." Only subscribers with PAID Print or E-Edition subscriptions enter here to gain access. If you are not a Current Paid subscriber do not go through this portal. Please return to the subscription page to purchase one of our offers. Thank you! Brad Pitt made the unusual action of mentioning one of his children this week, calling his 16-year-old daughter Shiloh "beautiful" on Monday. Later, when speaking with Vanity Fair, the 58-year-old Bullet Train actor made a remark about one of his other children, 17-year-old Zahara. Brad Pitt Talks About His Daughters This follows Jolie's announcement that Zahara has accepted a position at the historically black liberal arts institution for women and would be traveling to Atlanta, Georgia, in the coming months. Angelina Jolie published a photo of her daughter with some of her classmates, some of whom were wearing Spelman shirts. Meanwhile, Maddox, the former couple's eldest son, enrolled at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, until his lessons were relocated online and he returned to the United States during the COVID-19 outbreak. Pax, their second son, graduated last summer but is not thought to have enrolled in college. Pitt also noted at the Los Angeles premiere of his new action film Bullet Train on Monday that Shiloh is beautiful. He told ET's Nischelle Turner that Shiloh's outstanding dancing talents are so good that "it brings a tear to the eye, yeah." Shiloh has lately been seen on social media executing dance routines with her friends. Shiloh was spotted dancing to Doja Cat's song Vegas in a video broadcast on YouTube by Los Angeles-based choreographer Hamilton Evans in June. When asked if he believes his children will become actors like him or Angelina Jolie, he responded he simply wants them to be happy. Read Also: Johhny Depp-Amber Heard Unsealed Docs: Revelations from Actress Being Former Escort, Actor's Erectile Dysfunction, and More! Brad Pitt's Relationship With Son Maddox Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie divorced in 2016, with their son Maddox Jolie-Pitt playing an unexpectedly important part in their breakup and its aftermath. Pitt allegedly had a verbal argument with Maddox aboard the family's private plane, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigations to probe him on abuse allegations. Despite claims that Maddox and Pitt's relationship has now worsened, The Sun reported in February 2020 that Pitt skipped the 2020 BAFTA Awards to spend more time with his son. Maddox offered Brad the chance to talk, and he dropped everything, a source told the publication, adding that Pitt considers parenting to be the most important thing. However, by July 2020, the couple appeared to be on the outs once more, with a Us Weekly insider describing their relationship as nonexistent. With Maddox testifying against his father in Pitt's ongoing custody battle against Jolie in March 2021, a source described Pitt's biggest regret as the fractured relationships he's had with all of his children, but Maddox is the toughest, adding that he hasn't given up hope on a full reconciliation. Brad Pitt is allegedly missing his son Maddox Jolie-Pitt behind closed doors while on the 'Bullet Train' press tour. Pitt truly misses Maddox and has reached a wall in his continued efforts to mend their relationship. Brad and Maddox not only bonded on a loving father-son level but also intellectually during Pitt's marriage to Angelina Jolie, Nicki Swift via MSN reported. Related Article: [Report] Angelina Jolie's Lawyers Try To Serve Brad Pitt Court Papers at SAG Awards, Oscars @YouTube @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Today,have presented my credentials to the Secretary General of the United Nations @antonioguterres as Permanent Representative/Ambassador to the @UN. A privilege to be the first Indian woman to be given the honour to hold this position To the girls out there,we all can make it! pic.twitter.com/i1D7Qof2tc Ruchira Kamboj (@RuchiraKamboj) August 2, 2022 Next Story : From Sweeper To Asst General Manager, Is The Story Of Pratiksha Tondwalkar Image: Instagram As Indias first female ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj handed her credentials to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday at the UNs New York headquarters.Former Indian ambassador to Bhutan, Ruchira, 58, is a member of the 1987 batch of the Indian Foreign Service. In June, she was appointed as Indias permanent representative to the UN in New York.In her tweet, she stated, Today, have presented my credentials to the Secretary General of the United Nations @antonioguterres as Permanent Representative/Ambassador to the @UN. A privilege to be the first Indian woman to be given the honour to hold this position. To the girls out there, we all can make it!Image: twitter Indias tenure on the Council will end in December of this year, and for that month, it will also preside over the crucial UN body. Ruchira also served as a counsellor at Indias Permanent Mission to the UN in New York from the years 2002 to 2005. In India, Ruchira was the top female applicant for both the 1987 Foreign Service and Civil Services batches.Ruchira started her career in diplomacy in Paris, where she worked for the Indian Embassy in France from 1989 until 1991. But Ruchira then went back to Delhi, where she served from 1991 to 1996 as an undersecretary in the ministry of external affairs Europe West Division.She served as the Indian High Commissions First Secretary (Economic and Commercial) and Head of Chancery in Port Louis, Mauritius, from 1996 and 1999. From July 2017 until March 2019, Ruchira represented India as the Indian High Commissioner to South Africa and was accredited to the Kingdom of Lesotho.On May 17, 2019, she was appointed as the Indian ambassador to Bhutan. One of the other female ambassadors to the Council is the US ambassador to the UN. Mona Juul is the Permanent Representative (PR) of Norway to the United Nations in New York, as are Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Barbara Woodward, the Permanent Representatives (PRs) of the United Kingdom, are some examples.In a time of rising international tensions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Security Councils limitations due to the permanent members veto power, Ruchira will take up her post there. India is a member of the Security Council and is an elected body. China emerged as thein May this year leaving behind India, which was at the top in the previous two months, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), whose data showed China-Bangladesh trade in May stood at Tk 1.8 trillion and China had nearly 17 per cent share in the country's total trade. Industry and trade experts in Bangladesh feel the uptrend in Bangladesh-China trade would continue in future as Chinese products are cheaper and vastly diversified. India had nearly 13 per cent share in the bilateral trade amounting to Tk 1.3 trillion during May this year. China emerged as the top trading partner of Bangladesh in May this year leaving behind India, which was at the top in the previous two months, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), whose data showed China-Bangladesh trade in May stood at Tk 1.8 trillion and China had nearly 17 per cent share in the country's total trade.# Bangladesh exported merchandise worth Tk 335 billion in May to China while its goods import from there was worth Tk 1.77 trillion. The countrys exports to India were worth Tk 113.23 billion in May against imports worth Tk 1.228 trillion, Bangladeshi media outlets reported. Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS) Bangladesh seeks the abolition of anti-dumping duty (ADD) on jute by India. However, Indian jute industry may not be happy as it is still facing a stiff competition and has complained about the financial incentives provided to Bangladeshi industry. Data shows very limited impact on Bangladeshi supplies of jute to India after imposition of duty in 2017. The Indian jute industry has complained about Bangladeshs monetary incentives for jute exports, claiming that Indias jute industry is suffering due to Dhakas subsidised operations. In 2017, India introduced a protectionist anti-dumping duty to protect its local jute industry. The duty was imposed on jute yarn, burlap and sacks in 2017 at the rate of $19-352 per ton supplied from Bangladesh, for a period of 5 years till 2022. Bangladesh says that the export of jute yarn, twine, sacks and bags showed a negative growth of 14 per cent in 2021-22 compared to the previous years exports. But data from Fibre2Fashions market insight tool TexPro shows only mild impact of Indian imports of jute products. Fluctuations in the trade can be attributed to many factors including COVID-19. Bangladesh seeks the abolition of anti-dumping duty (ADD) on jute by India. However, Indian jute industry may not be happy as it is still facing a stiff competition and has complained about the financial incentives provided to Bangladeshi industry. Data shows very limited impact on Bangladeshi supplies of jute to India after imposition of duty in 2017. # The data shows that Indias import of jute and other products (chapter 5307) was $42.120 million in 2017 when the duty was imposed. It decreased slightly to $40.542 million in 2018. But the import surged to $51.218 million in 2019. It had witnessed a downtrend in 2020 at $45.541 million. But the import again increased to $48.129 million in 2021. The import was noted at $19.523 million in the first four month of 2022. As per TexPro, Bangladesh was a dominant supplier of jute products with great margin for India. Indias total imports of jute products from the world was $52.094 million in 2021. Bangladesh had supplied jute products of $48.129 million which is more than 90 per cent of the total jute imports. Indian industry is worried about the official import as well as about the illegal supply of the products through Nepal. Indian Jute Mills Association (IJMA) had last month alleged that hessian jute bags are making their way to India from Nepal illegally, which is affecting the domestic jute industry. The trade body shot off a letter to Jogbani integrated check post in Bihar adjoining Nepal to highlight the alleged situation and urged it to take prompt action. IJMA said in the letter that traders in Nepal are resorting to unfair trade practices of passing off 'jute sacking bags' as 'hessian fabric'. The practice is very common to avoid duty. The body urged the authorities to take immediate action against this practice which is hurting the domestic jute industry and leading to lower levy collection by the government. Fibre2Fashion News Desk (KUL) German exports were up by 4.5 per cent and imports by 0.2 per cent in June this year on a calendar and seasonally-adjusted basis compared with May, according to provisional data released by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). Exports in the month increased by 18.4 per cent and imports by 27.9 per cent over June 2021 figures, it reported. The countrys total goods exports in June this year were worth 134.3 billion and goods imports worth 127.9 billion. The foreign trade balance showed a surplus of 6.4 billion in June this year. The calendar and seasonally-adjusted surplus had been 0.8 billion in May this year and 13.5 billion in June 2021. German exports were up by 4.5 per cent and imports by 0.2 per cent in June this year on a calendar and seasonally-adjusted basis compared with May, according to provisional data released by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). Exports in the month increased by 18.4 per cent and imports by 27.9 per cent over June 2021 figures, it reported.# Exports to Russia in June this year were up by 14.5 per cent to 1.2 billion over May the 2022 figure, whereas they were down by 40.3 per cent over the June 2021 figure. Imports from Russia rose by 4.8 per cent to 3.5 billion in June from May 2022. Germany exported goods to the value of 72.9 billion to the member states of the European Union (EU) in June this year, while it imported goods worth 62.8 billion from those countries in the month. Compared with May 2022, exports to EU countries rose by 3.9 per cent and imports from those countries by 0.3 per cent. The value of the goods exported to euro area countries totalled 50.7 billion and the value of the goods imported from there was 43.1 billion. Goods worth 22.2 billion were exported to EU countries not belonging to the euro area, while the value of the goods imported from those countries was 19.7 billion. Exports of goods to countries outside the EU (third countries) amounted to 61.4 billion in June this year, while imports from those countries totalled 65.1 billion. Compared with May 2022, exports to third countries increased by 5.3 per cent and imports from those countries by 0.1 per cent. Most German exports went to the United States in June this year. Exports to the United States rose to 14.2 billion. Exports to China increased by 2.4 per cent to 8.9 billion, and exports to the United Kingdom by 4.2 per cent to 6 billion. Most imports to Germany in June came from China. Goods to the value of 17 billion were imported from therea 3.9 per cent decrease compared with the previous month. Imports from the United States rose by 14.7 per cent to 8.5 billion. Imports from the United Kingdom dropped by 6.6 per cent to 3.2 billion in the same period. Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS) The Chemical Industries Council of Malaysia (CICM) recently called on the government to ratify at the earliest the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to benefit domestic chemical companies, which can access and boost their exports to Canada, Mexico and Peru using better price competitiveness following substantial elimination of tariffs. Canada, Mexico and Peru now impose tariffs of up to 270 per cent, 30 per cent and 9 per cent respectively, a CICM statement said. The high tariffs affect key exports, including those of organic and inorganic chemicals, to CPTPP countries, it was quoted as saying by a news agency. The Chemical Industries Council of Malaysia has called on the government to ratify at the earliest the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership to benefit domestic chemical companies, which can access and boost their exports to Canada, Mexico and Peru using better price competitiveness following substantial elimination of tariffs# With CPTPP, these tariffs will be fully eliminated by 2034 across all signatory countries. CPTPP countries accounted for almost 22 per cent of Malaysias chemical exports in 2019, with major export destinations being Singapore, Japan and Vietnam, according to the association. The deal can also increase investment attractiveness of Malaysia and spur develop domestic capabilities, especially in specialty chemicals, by establishing high standards of protection for investors and further strengthen the countrys competitive advantage, CICM added. Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS) President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi expressed his support towards the promotion of Egypts textile and readymade clothing industry at a recent meeting with his ministers. The countrys minister of public enterprise Hisham Tawfik also assessed their plans to set up the largest spinning factory in the world in the city of Mahalla. The factory will be inaugurated in 2023 and will cover an area of 62,000 sqm. President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi expressed his support towards the promotion of Egypt's textile and readymade clothing industry at a recent meeting with his ministers. The country's minister of public enterprise Hisham Tawfik also assessed their plans to set up the largest spinning factory in the world in the city of Mahalla, which will be inaugurated in 2023.# The factory in Mahalla will be equipped with the latest industrial machinery similar to what major international companies use and deal with different types of cotton, especially long staple and extra-long cotton. It is intended to leverage Egypts competitive advantage in global cotton production thanks to its high quality and demand in international markets. President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi expressed his support towards the promotion of Egypt's textile and readymade clothing industry at a recent meeting with his ministers. The country's minister of public enterprise Hisham Tawfik also assessed their plans to set up the largest spinning factory in the world in the city of Mahalla, which will be inaugurated in 2023.# At the meeting, Tawfik mentioned in detail about a company formed by his ministry that was established especially for the marketing, sales, and supply chain management of Egyptian textile products. President Al-Sisi also reviewed samples of the luxury cotton textiles presented to him that the company had been marketing. President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi expressed his support towards the promotion of Egypt's textile and readymade clothing industry at a recent meeting with his ministers. The country's minister of public enterprise Hisham Tawfik also assessed their plans to set up the largest spinning factory in the world in the city of Mahalla, which will be inaugurated in 2023.# There were also discussions about implementing a bidding system for Egyptian cotton in collaboration with the Egyptian Commodity Exchange at the meeting. Fibre2Fashion News Desk (NB) exporters expect to earn $45.7 billion this year amid decent business since the year started and positive market developments. As of mid-July, garment-textile was among the four sectors posting high export revenues, with a record of $20.4 billion--up by 19.7 per cent year on year (YoY), according to the general department of Vietnam customs. Garment-textile was also among the six groups whose export value increased by over $1 billion, the authority was quoted as saying by a news agency. Some 14,000 businesses are operating in the sector, with a combined capital of more than $46 billion. These employ nearly 200,000 labourers. Vietnamese garment-textile exporters aim to earn $45.7 billion this year amid decent business since the year started and positive market developments. As of mid-July, garment-textile was among the four sectors posting high export revenues, with a record of $20.4 billion--up by 19.7 per cent year on year, according to the general department of Vietnam customs# The Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (VITAS) had earlier said textile-garment producers aim to earn up to $21 billion from exports in the second half this year, raising total shipments of the year to around $42-43 billion. The industry, which has gradually recovered this year, witnessed a trade surplus of $8.86 billion in the first half of the year. Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS) Brunei welcomes more investment from China: senior official Xinhua) 09:26, August 04, 2022 BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Brunei is looking forward to welcoming more foreign direct investment (FDI) from China in all sectors, Haji Khairuddin, the country's deputy minister of finance and economy said here on Wednesday. When delivering his keynote speech at the Brunei-China Trade and Economic Forum, Haji Khairuddin said that this forum was timely as "we celebrate the elevation of ASEAN and China's dialogue relations to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership". "Over the years, Brunei and China have worked closely to build a partnership that benefits our people and covers many areas including trade and investment," he told the online forum. "Brunei values China's participations in various sectors such as logistics, aquaculture, downstream oil and gas and banking services as not only they contribute to the creation of employment and GDP of this country, they also become an important contributor to our economic diversification effort," Haji Khairuddin said. According to the deputy minister, China continues to be one of Brunei's top trading partners and largest investors. "This positive trend reflects the importance we accord to our trade ties with China and its contribution to Brunei's economic growth and development," he said. "The Brunei government is stepping up efforts to diversify its economy away from the oil and gas sector to other sectors such as food, downstream oil and gas, tourism, services and information and communications technology, and we continue to welcome FDI from China to invest in these sectors," Haji Khairuddin said. "Efforts are underway in enhancing the already business-friendly environment for FDI and we encourage further business and investment collaboration between Brunei and China," he added. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) A senior Russian lawmaker has pledged that, if China goes to war over Taiwan, Vladimir Putin will come to its rescue. However, Vladimir Dzhabarov, the first deputy head of Russia's Federation Council's foreign committee, said the Kremlin's assistance would be conditional on Beijing providing in-kind help for the Ukrainian conflict. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping Foster Close Ties Putin and China's President Xi Jinping appear to have formed close ties in recent years, but Moscow is anxious that Beijing has yet to openly support the Kremlin's "special military operation," which began on February 24. It comes amid rising tensions between China and Taiwan, following an unexpected diplomatic visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the self-governing island republic that Beijing claims as its own. Dzhabarov, a close Putin friend, stated unequivocally that Russia is prepared to support China in any battle over the disputed island of Taiwan, therefore strengthening Russia's anti-Western coalition. The renowned Alexander Nevsky order was bestowed to the 69-year-old Russian legislator and former FSB officer in 2018 as a result of a presidential decree signed by Putin. Dzhabarov made his assertion as China sharply attacked Pelosi's travel to Taiwan and announced a large military exercise that will block off the air and sea transportation owing to intensive live-fire drills in Taiwanese waters. Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, called the speaker's trip a total farce and echoed the oft-said Chinese diplomatic adage that those who play with fire will perish by it. In a phone discussion with US President Joe Biden last week, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping used the same language. The Chinese foreign ministry criticized Pelosi early Wednesday for shamelessly proceeding with the trip, which was still unconfirmed as of Monday, stating it maliciously infringes on China's sovereignty and blatantly engages in political provocations, according to Daily Mail. However, amid renewed tensions between Washington and Beijing over US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's travel to Taiwan, a Russian spokeswoman confirmed that President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping will not meet. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, standing with China in the face of Beijing's harsh language against the US over Pelosi's journey to Taiwan, stated that the US Speaker's visit demonstrates Washington's impunity to the rest of the globe. There is no other purpose, according to Lavrov, for generating "such a nuisance practically out of nowhere," knowing full well what it means for the People's Republic of China, Republic World reported Read Also: Liz Truss Forced To Reverse Pay Plan Pledge Following Backlash From Conservatives, Fellow Opposition Parties Ukraine Urges China To Refuse Helping Russia Meanwhile, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Australian university students that China should not aid Russia in its war against his country and should instead remain neutral. Zelensky spoke to 21 Australian universities in an online conversation organized by the Australian National University in Canberra on Wednesday. When asked about China's attitude, Zelensky said he would like Beijing to join countries such as the United States and Australia in condemning the Russian invasion, which began in February. In deference to Moscow, China has failed to denounce Russia's conflict in Ukraine or even refer to it as an invasion, while also criticizing US-led sanctions against Russia and accusing the West of inciting Moscow. According to Chinese President Xi Jinping, implementing sanctions may be a two-edged sword, and the global community would suffer as a result of politicizing, mechanizing, and weaponizing global economic patterns and financial flows. Zelensky previously spoke at similar online university forums in Canada in June and Japan last month. He commended the Australian government for giving more assistance to Ukraine than any other country outside of NATO, as per New York Post. Related Article: World War 3 Feared To Begin as China Expands Nuclear Testing Site While Russia Repeats Message Against Arsenal Battle @YouTube @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Shakespeare's works are some of the most widely adapted materials out there. Between Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet, Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, there exists a treasure trove of text-to-screen adaptations. But as far as cross-cultural adaptations of Shakespeare go, filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj's has been the most inventive, if not the best. The director's filmography boasts not one but three notable films inspired by Shakespeare plays, and each movie has a unique way of localising the English playwright's narratives. While Vishal Bhardwaj celebrates his birthday today, we're looking back at Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello) and Haider (Hamlet) as gifts that keep giving. Vishal Bhardwaj has done more than transcend language barriers by bringing Shakespeare's work to Hindi cinema. He truly captured the essence of the plays and offered a fresh testament to their universality. Macbeth Converted Into A Crime Drama In Maqbool Shakespeare's works are dramatic by themselves. Take Macbeth, for example, the story of a man tempted by his ambitions for the throne. With a little nudging from three witches who came bearing a prophecy of him becoming King and his wife, Lady Macbeth's biting taunts, he was driven to kill King Duncan and usurp the throne. Of course, it doesnt end well for him. In Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, high treason finds a new address in an Indian setting. The film, starring Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri and more, tells the story of the wannabe king through Maqbool, who plots the murder of the local kingpin, Abbaji (played by Pankaj Kapur), with some help from the gangster's young mistress, Nimmi (played by Tabu). Perhaps the most interesting interpretation of Shakespeare's characters in the Indian context is the role of the three witches. Instead of mysterious apparitions, Maqbool's prophecy is delivered by two corrupt policemenPandit and Purohit. Played by Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, the cops speak of Maqbool's fate not in the woods amidst mist but over drinks. They show him his future through patterns made of tomato ketchup and chutney. And so begins Maqbool's moral decline, and it all started with samosa relish. The film is as bloody as it gets and captures the horrific crimes and brutality. Othello Set In The Up Badlands In Omkara While Vishal Bhardwaj borrowed Shakespearean elements, he grounded them in Indian sensibilities. His 2006 film Omkara, adapted from Othello, is both brilliant and relevant. The play has themes of jealousy and racism. While the "Moor of Venice" is subjected to discrimination owing to the colour of his skin, the theme finds fresh meaning within Indian society. Omkara, starring Ajay Devgn, Saif Ali Khan, Naseeruddin Shah, and more, is set in Uttar Pradesh. While all the characters are from a higher caste, Omkara (played by Ajay Devgn) is a half-Brahmin in a position of power, in love with the "fair" Dolly (played by Kareena Kapoor Khan). Instead of an Iago, the film's villain is the scheming Langda Tyagi (played by Saif Ali Khan). Meanwhile, the handkerchief that is used to make Othello suspicious is replaced with a kamarbandh, which Omkara gives Dolly, the film's Desdemona. The film is an effective revenge story that's just as nail-biting as Othello. Hamlet Relocated To The Politically Conflicted Region Of Kashmir In Haider Hamlet tells the story of the titular character, who is asked by the ghost of his father, the King of Denmark, to kill his uncle. In his quest for revenge, Hamlet pretends to be insane while his uncle also plans to kill him. In Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider, that spookiness is dialed up a notch. The film, starring Shahid Kapoor, Tabu, Irrfan Khan, and more, is set in the valleys of Kashmir against the backdrop of political turmoil Indians are familiar with. It's as haunting as it gets, with the setting supporting Haider's mental and emotional state. It also gets a new layer of meaning with the director attempting to comment on the collective problems of the region and its people. The film interestingly interprets the Ghost as the Roohdaar, (Irrfan Khan's extended cameo), a stranger who relays the message urging Haider to avenge his father. Apart from nailing the characters and atmospheric horror, one of the film's standout moments is Shahid Kapoor's performance in a chilling graveyard sequence. While Omkara had the memorable item song Beedi, Haider has Aao Na, which is one of those onscreen moments you can't take your eyes off of. Shakespeares plays were written for a very different audience than the Indian cinema-goer. It only took Vishal Bhardwaj three ambitious, genre-bending Indian adaptations to successfully break down his works for Bollywood fans, and thats a commendable feat worth reflecting on. Heres wishing ace filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj a very happy birthday. ARLINGTON, VA / ACCESSWIRE / August 3, 2022 / The latest Atlantic menhaden stock assessment accepted today by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) confirms once again that Atlantic menhaden is healthy, not overfished, and that overfishing is not occurring. Significantly, this assessment was completed using new ecological reference points, standards that account for the needs of predator species when determining menhaden's sustainable status. Atlantic menhaden are not overfished and overfishing is not occurring, according to the latest ASMFC stock assessment using ecological reference points. In the past, single-species stock assessments that found menhaden to be healthy and not overfished were criticized by some for not taking into account interdependencies between species. The ASMFC's ecosystem-based reference points were developed over years, with support from industry, recreational fishermen, and environmental groups, to move away from managing species in isolation and consider the needs of predator species and the ecosystem as a whole. Two years ago, the consideration and adoption of these ecological reference points were publicly praised by numerous sportfishing and conservation groups including: Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership American Sportfishing Association Coastal Conservation Association Maryland Marine Retailers Association of the Americas Pew Charitable Trusts Today, using these stricter standards that incorporate the forage needs of predators, the new assessment has found that the menhaden fishery is sustainable, and that menhaden fishing does not negatively affect predator populations. Despite this scientific finding, recreational special interests are continuing a campaign to end the menhaden fishery in the Chesapeake Bay. Keep America Fishing, a project of the American Sportfishing Association, accuses the fishery of "[ depleting] a critical striped bass food source ," calls menhaden fishing " unsustainable ," and together with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership calls on its supporters to sign a petition urging Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin to "move Omega Protein's boats out of the Bay until science demonstrates that industrial menhaden fishing can be done without negatively affecting the broader Bay ecosystem." These statements are not consistent with the latest scientific findings on either menhaden or Atlantic striped bass reviewed and accepted by the ASMFC. According to the ASMFC, "the last striped bass stock assessment found the stock was overfished and that overfishing was occurring." There is no evidence that a lack of menhaden is affecting striped bass populations, but there is evidence that recreational over-harvesting of striped bass is harming the species. If recreational anglers are concerned about the striped bass stock, they should stop overfishing rather than try to blame the results of their own actions on another fishery. While the American Sportfishing Association's goal to "Keep America Fishing" is laudable, it is not appropriate to keep America overfishing. The management of natural resources should not be based on politics and self-interest but must be based on science, provide for the common good, and look out for working families and the economy. Menhaden fishermen are willing to share the bay. Are recreational anglers? About the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition (MFC) is a collective of menhaden fishermen, related businesses, and supporting industries. Comprised of businesses along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition conducts media and public outreach on behalf of the menhaden industry to ensure that members of the public, media, and government are informed of important issues, events, and facts about the fishery. Press Contact Bob Vanasse (202) 333-2628 bob@stoveboat.com SOURCE: Menhaden Fisheries Coalition View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/710815/With-Ecosystem-Based-Reference-Points-in-Place-Atlantic-Menhaden-Assessment-Again-Shows-Fishery-Healthy-Sustainable-Not-Overfished The 1.5 million city Sharjah reduces emissions withnext level of mobility management Sharjah, the capital city of the Emirate of Sharjah, is actively developing the next level of intelligent traffic management capabilities together with Kapsch TrafficCom. The 1.5 million city Sharjah is the third-most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The new, centralized control system will help with providing improved traffic flow and shorter travel times to drivers across the majority of the city and increase the safety of citizens. Additionally, a state-of-the-art traffic control center will enable the city with the ability to manage traffic in a comprehensive and coordinated way directly across 48 key junctions all over the city. The system will also further strengthen the city's position as a "healthy city", as improved traffic flow also means fewer emissions and higher quality of living for city residents, while also cutting down fuel costs for commuters. "We at Kapsch TrafficCom are delighted to support Sharjah City in a project of this magnitude and are thankful for the excellent cooperation with the team in the traffic engineering department of SRTA. The technology will optimize the city's traffic for the benefit of residents' quality of life, resulting in less time in the car throughout their journey," says Fakhar Munir, Country Manager UAE at Kapsch TrafficCom. "It also helps in reducing the carbon emission of the city, which supports His Highness Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, the ruler of the Emirate of Sharjah's commitment towards cutting down carbon emissions. This project reinforces Sharjah's position as one of the leading cities in the UAE when it comes to traffic management." Over a period of 12 months, which started in May 2022, Kapsch TrafficCom will supply and install 48 controllers, cameras and its EcoTrafiXTM software, integrate the system and design a traffic control center for city authorities. Beyond the initial 12 months, the company is also tasked with maintaining the system for three additional years. The EcoTrafiXTM Expert software that is installed at the central control center receives the traffic data collected by the video cameras and traffic controllers, and through calculations identifies the optimal cycle and split for each intersection based on traffic volume, stop duration, and more. www.kapsch.net/ktc Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220803005790/en/ Contacts: Ingrid Riegler P +43 50 811 1724 ingrid.riegler@kapsch.net Accomplished Senior Executive to Provide Strategic Leadership to Develop New and Emerging Markets, Expanding the Company's Global Capabilities SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Encora , a leader in outsourced software engineering services, today announced Deepak Bhandari, the founder and former managing director of Marylebone Capital Advisors, has been appointed executive vice president, head of Corporate Development, effective immediately. Bhandari's appointment underscores Encora's strategy to continue to expand the company's service capabilities. In this role, Bhandari will provide strategic leadership to support the business with a focus on expanding the company's strategic presence in Latin America and India, and entering new markets such as Central and Eastern Europe. "We are delighted to have Deepak as a member of our Global Leadership Team," said Venu Raghavan, CEO of Encora. "His deep experience in corporate development and market expansion, combined with the thought leadership he brings to partnerships, mergers and acquisitions complement Encora's strengths and create opportunities to grow our business." An accomplished professional with extensive global experience in diverse industries, Deepak offers 25+ years of expertise in investment banking and strategic capital advisory, investment funds structuring, and mergers and acquisitions. Within the tech sector, his focus has been on building relationships with founders of high growth companies across several global markets and providing strategic advise to such founders in their quest to seek successful exits through mergers and acquisitions. "I am excited to join Encora and support the organization in expanding their global footprint in new markets through strategic partnerships and acquisitions," said Bhandari. "I am also honored to be joining Encora's team of extraordinary leaders and be part of this unprecedented period in the company's growth." About Encora Headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and backed by private equity firm Advent International, Encora is an established leader in Digital Product Development services. The preferred innovation partner to some of the world's leading technology companies, Encora provides next-gen services such as Predictive Analysis, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Cloud, and Test Automation. Encora has deep cluster vertical capabilities in HealthTech, FinTech, HiTech, IAM & Cybersecurity, Digital Commerce, EdTech, Supply Chain & Logistics, Telecom and other specialized industries. With over 7,300 associates in 40+ offices and innovation labs across U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Canada, India, and Asia Pacific, Encora's global talent pool, micro-industry vertical expertise and proprietary Agile Engineering capabilities enable clients to improve their speed to impact. For more information, please visit www.encora.com. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1223481/Encora_Logo.jpg After signing a conditional acquisition agreement in July 2022, Wavestone announces the acquisition of PEN Partnership, a UK-based consulting firm. PEN Partnership: an independent business consulting firm specialising in Financial Services and Life Sciences Founded in 2012, PEN Partnership has established itself as a trusted partner for its clients operating across the Financial Services and Life Sciences sectors. PEN Partnership serves some of the most reputable organizations within these industries across four core specialisms: Customer Experience & Digital, Operations & Automation, Data & Technology and Change Delivery & Capability. PEN Partnership is headquartered in London, with a headcount of circa 60 permanent employees and an additional circa 40 contractors. Over the past 10 years, PEN Partnership has successfully grown and scaled the business to reach 19.6m revenue for its fiscal year ending in March 2022, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 15%. A boost in the UK development, aligned to Wavestone's Impact strategic plan The project fits perfectly with Wavestone's strategic plan 'Impact': to accelerate the firm's external growth in its target geographies. The acquisition is a great opportunity to enrich Wavestone's value proposition in the UK. The addition of PEN Partnership's expertise in Financial Services and Life Sciences to Wavestone's technological capabilities will offer a first-class proposition to clients to help tackle their transformation challenges, across the two industries and the wider UK market. Chris Gibson, PEN Partnership's CEO, comments: "Wavestone and PEN Partnership together make a powerful combination and this is really great news for our clients and staff. The two companies provide complementary services and share very similar corporate culture and values. Wavestone has an ambitious growth plan and I am very excited for the PEN team to play a key role in building a leading consultancy player in the UK market." Reza Maghsoudnia, Strategic Development Director of Wavestone, says "This merger enhances Wavestone's ability to deliver global transformation programmes. With PEN Partnership, we can accelerate our growth in the UK and deepen our value proposition in Financial Services and Life Sciences globally. It's clear from our discussions with PEN Partnership that there are synergies not only in the services provided, but the company culture. There is strong alignment on topics such as CSR, Diversity & Inclusion, as well as Great Place to Work, and this is a key success factor for our project." Terms of the operation Wavestone has acquired 100% of the PEN Partnership's share capital. The purchase price is 22.5m in enterprise value, plus an additional consideration of up to 7.5m conditioned by PEN Partnership's performance over the next 18 months. The acquisition has been financed by Wavestone's own funds. PEN Partnership will be integrated in Wavestone's accounts as of 1st August 2022. PEN Partnership's leadership team is expected to play a key role in the merged practice to be formed at the end of the integration period. Next events: H1 2022/23 revenue: Thursday, October 27, 2022, after Euronext market closing. About Wavestone In a world where knowing how to drive transformation is the key to success, Wavestone's mission is to inform and guide large companies and organisations in their most critical transformations, with the ambition of a positive outcome for all stakeholders. It's an ambition anchored in the firm's DNA and embodied in the signature "The Positive Way." Wavestone draws on about 4,000 employees across Europe - where it is a leading independent player in consulting, the United States and Asia. Wavestone is listed on Euronext Paris and recognised as a Great Place to Work. Wavestone Pascal Imbert CEO Tel.: +33 (0)1 49 03 20 00 Benjamin Clement Financial Communication Tel.: +33 (0)1 49 03 20 00 Actus Mathieu Omnes Investor and Analyst Relations Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 67 36 92 Deborah Schwartz Press relations Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 67 36 35 ------------------------ This publication embed "Actusnews SECURITY MASTER ". - SECURITY MASTER Key: lJxqkcVnY5mdxp2dYpmWapaYZmiXx2SUapPIx2malJqanHFllm5imZXGZnBmnW5t - Check this key: https://www.security-master-key.com. ------------------------ Copyright Actusnews Wire Receive by email the next press releases of the company by registering on www.actusnews.com, it's free Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-75897-pr-shakespeare-closing-en.pdf DGAP-News: VT Markets / Key word(s): Miscellaneous VT Markets wins Best Affiliate Programme at iFX EXPO International and Best Mobile App Europe 2022 (Forex Division) 04.08.2022 / 08:15 The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. VT Markets wins Best Affiliate Programme at iFX EXPO International and Best Mobile App Europe 2022 (Forex Division) Best Affiliate Programme, Ultimate Fintech Awards 2022 SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - Media OutReach - 4 August 2022 - VT Markets, the international multi-asset broker, is proud to announce that it has clinched the "Best Affiliate Program" at the prestigious Ultimate Fintech Awards 2022, hosted by iFX EXPO International. This globally respected award recognises VT Markets' large and trusted affiliate network across the world. VT Markets' impeccable industry-leading Affiliate Partnership programme consistently delivers innovative trading product and service offerings, attractive and transparent commissions, advanced marketing and institutional solutions designed to ensure the success of its affiliates. Yiangos Georgiou, Director of Business Development, comments: "Fostering successful affiliate partnerships has always been one of our top priorities as we understand the importance of our international affiliates in expanding our markets globally. We are committed to developing and nurturing these partnerships to help our affiliates achieve sustainable growth as an essential part of our global expansion journey." Best Mobile App Europe 2022 (Forex Division) VT Markets won the "Best Mobile App Europe 2022 (Forex Division)" award with its recently relaunched trading app. It is recognised for creating a secure and integrated trading app that stays true to the brand promise of "Trading can be easy". It provides clients with real-time price alerts, performance analytics and smart signals newsletter. It gives in-depth product information with corresponding market analysis and economic news. The enhanced user interface offers excellent accessibility and over 80 payment methods. An exciting new feature is "Big Movers" which alerts clients on major market shifts and trading opportunities in the previous 24 hours. The "Learn" feature provides valuable educational trading content. Timothy Lee, Integrated App Marketing Manager comments: "VT Markets has made tremendous investments to bring significant improvements to our mobile offerings and trading platform and this is reflected in the positive feedback from our global clients since our app relaunch. We will continue to invest in innovative features to provide the most optimal trading experience for all our clients." The VT Markets trading app is available for download from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Other Awards VT Markets have received numerous awards that recognises it as the innovative market leader in the industry: Best Forex Broker Europe 2022, International Business Magazine Best Partnership Programme Global 2022, Global Business Review Magazine Best Customer Support UK 2022, World Business Outlook Awards Media Contact: Joey.tan@vtmarkets.com 04.08.2022 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases. Archive at www.dgap.de Sun Life also establishes long-term strategic partnership with UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business TORONTO and LONDON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sun Life Financial Inc. (TSX: SLF) (NYSE: SLF) announced today it has entered into an agreement to sell SLF of Canada UK Limited ("Sun Life UK") to Phoenix Group Holdings plc ("Phoenix Group") (LSE: PHNX). Headquartered in London, Phoenix Group is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business with more than 13 million customers and 310 billion of assets under administration. Sun Life UK manages life and pension policies and annuity blocks for UK Clients. The company is closed to new sales and has been operating as a run-off business in the life and pension policies segment since 2001. Sun Life will sell Sun Life UK to Phoenix Group for a closing price of 248 million (approximately C$385 million) and will retain its economic interest in UK's payout annuities business. This transaction will also provide further growth opportunities for Sun Life's asset management businesses. As part of the sale, Sun Life will form a long-term partnership to become a strategic asset management partner to Phoenix Group. Sun Life's asset management companies, MFS and SLC Management, will continue to manage approximately C$9 billion of Sun Life UK's general account upon the close of the sale. Phoenix Group has set a goal to invest approximately US$25 billion in North American public and private fixed income and alternative investments over the next five years. MFS and SLC Management will be material partners to Phoenix Group in achieving this goal. "We're excited to partner with Phoenix Group. A great deal of consideration was taken to find the right buyer and partner for our UK business. Phoenix Group is a purpose-led company with similar values to Sun Life and a strong focus on delivering outcomes for their customers. We're also pleased about our asset management partnership, which will bring the strength of MFS and SLC Management to Phoenix Group customers," said Kevin Strain, President and CEO of Sun Life. "Thank you to our UK team for all of their efforts in delivering solid results year-after-year in our life, pension and annuities businesses. We believe Phoenix Group will be a great organization for our UK employees and Clients." "This acquisition is highly attractive for Phoenix Group. As the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business with a strong track record of UK closed book integrations, we look forward to offering a safe home for Sun Life UK Clients over the long term and enabling them to benefit from our broad range of Standard Life products in our Open division," said Andy Briggs, Phoenix Group, CEO. "I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the colleagues who will join us from Sun Life UK. We are also pleased to enter into a new, long-term strategic asset management partnership with MFS and SLC Management, Sun Life's Asset Management businesses. This partnership will complement our existing relationships and further enhance our liquid and illiquid credit capabilities in North America by building on their strong presence in the region." Since 2016, Phoenix Group has successfully completed four acquisitions totaling approximately 7.5 billion. This has supported increasing their assets under administration by more than 300% over the past five years through organic and inorganic growth. Strain added, "The sale of the Sun Life UK business is consistent with our strategy to grow fee-based and capital light businesses. It also frees up capital to continue on our journey of creating long-term value for our shareholders. This transaction also aligns with our objective to continue building our Sun Life asset management pillar by creating an attractive long-term partnership with the UK's leading long-term savings and retirement business." This transaction is expected to close during the first half of 2023, subject to receipt of regulatory approvals and satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Fenchurch Advisory Partners acted as a financial advisor to Sun Life for this transaction and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP served as legal counsel. Slides related to this announcement are available at www.sunlife.com. About Sun Life Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance and health solutions to individual and institutional Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of June 30, 2022, Sun Life had total assets under management of C$1.26 trillion. For more information, please visit www.sunlife.com. Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF. About Phoenix Group Phoenix Group is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business. With 0.3 trillion of assets under administration, we offer our c.13 million customers a broad range of products across our market-leading pensions, savings and life insurance brands which include Standard Life and Sun Life. We support people throughout their savings cycle, and our vision is to help even more people on their journey to and through retirement, providing the right support at the right time. A member of the FTSE 100, we're a sustainably growing business united by a common purpose - to help people secure a life of possibilities. This drives everything we do and means taking responsible and sustainable investment decisions and using our presence and voice to drive forward change for the better for our customers, our colleagues, and our wider community. We have been recognised as a leading employer for many years. We are accredited as a Living Wage Employer and as a Carer Positive Exemplary Employer for offering the best support to colleagues who are carers. Linkedin: PhoenixGroup-UK Twitter: @PhoenixGroupUK Forward-looking Statements From time to time, Sun Life makes written or oral forward-looking statements within the meaning of certain securities laws, including the "safe harbour" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements contained in this release include, without limitation, statements (i) relating to our strategies, (ii) relating to our anticipated divestiture of Sun Life UK, (iii) relating to our growth initiatives and other business objectives, (iv) relating to the expected timing of the closing of the transaction, (v) relating to the expected impact of the transaction on our business and financial results, (vi) that are predictive in nature or that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, and (vii) that include words such as "intends", "expect", "will", and similar expressions. These statements represent our current expectations, estimates, and projections regarding future events and are not historical facts, and remain subject to change, particularly in light of the ongoing and developing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the global economy and its uncertain impact on our business. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. The forward-looking statements in this news release do not reflect the potential impact of any non-recurring or other special items or of any dispositions, mergers, acquisitions, other business combinations or other transactions that may be announced or that may occur after the date of this news release. If any non-recurring or other special item or any transaction should occur, the financial impact could be complex and the effect on our operations or results would depend on the facts particular to such item and we cannot describe the expected impact in a meaningful way or in the same way we could present known risks affecting our business. Forward-looking statements are presented for the purpose of assisting investors and others in understanding our expected financial position and results of operations as at the date of this news release, as well as our objectives for the transaction, strategic priorities and business outlook following the transaction, and in obtaining a better understanding of our anticipated operating environment following the transaction. Readers are cautioned that such forward-looking statements may not be appropriate for other purposes and undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements. The following risk factors are related to our intention to divest Sun Life UK that could have a material adverse effect on our forward-looking statements: (i) the ability of the parties to complete the transaction; (ii) failure of the parties to obtain necessary consents and approvals or to otherwise satisfy the conditions to the completion of the transaction in a timely manner, or at all; (iii) our ability to realize the financial and strategic benefits of the transaction; and (iv) the impact of the announcement of the transaction and the dedication of our resources to completing the transaction. These risks all could have an impact on our business relationships (including with future and prospective employees, Clients, distributors and partners) and could have a material adverse effect on our current and future operations, financial conditions and prospects. Other important risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking statements in this presentation are set out in our MD&A for the period ended June 30, 2022 and in SLF Inc.'s other annual and interim regulatory filings filed with Canadian securities regulators or furnished to U.S. securities regulators, which are available for review at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov, respectively. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this document or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. Sun Life Media Relations Contact: Sun Life Investor Relations Contact: Rajani Kamath Yaniv Bitton Associate Vice-President Vice-President, Head of Investor Corporate Communications Relations & Capital Markets T: 647-515-7514 T: 416-979-6496 rajani.kamath@sunlife.com yaniv.bitton@sunlife.com Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1872290/Sun_Life_Financial_Inc__SUN_LIFE_ANNOUNCES_INTENTION_TO_SELL_ITS.jpg Flashbox is a New Generation of High Performance, Low-Power and High-Available Storage Appliances Powered by Kalray's DPU Processor San Clara, California - USA & Grenoble - France, August 4, 2022 - Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris: ALKAL), a leading provider of the new generation of processors and acceleration cards specialized in Intelligent Data Processing from Cloud to Edge, is delighted to announce it has won the coveted Flash Memory Summit award for most innovative technology. Flash Memory Summit (FMS) is the world's premier flash memory conference and exposition, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California, USA. The Flash Memory Summit Awards represent an industry recognition of innovation that Kalray's Flashbox solution brings to the market. "Designing an enterprise storage array today can benefit from a disaggregated architecture that can address performance at the highest levels and capacity expansion in a cost-effective manner." said Jay Kramer, Chairman of the Awards Program and President of Network Storage Advisors Inc. "We are proud to recognize the collaboration between Viking and Kalray which provides an integrated storage solution delivering seral millions of IOPS using 12x 100 Gb/s network interface connections distributed across six DPUs-based acceleration cards." Flashbox is a new concept of All-Flash-Array, based on Kalray's MPPA DPU processor ("Data Processing Unit") and co-designed with Viking Enterprise Solutions. Whereas most advanced All-Flash Array solutions currently use multiple adapter cards with power-hungry and expensive CPUs (x86) that run storage services, the concept of Flashbox is to run all of the critical functions of a disaggregated storage appliance on a single chip: the Kalray MPPA DPU. This solution delivers an unprecedent level of integration, speed, scalability and performance at an affordable cost. Thanks to Flashbox All-Flash-Array, data centers can reduce critical metrics such as $/IOP and IOPs/watt. "It is a great honor to win a Flash Memory Summit award for our innovative concept of Flashbox All-Flash Array." said Kalray CEO, Eric Baissus. "We strongly believe that wide adoption of NVMe requires adopting new innovative approaches. This is Flashbox. Flashbox is a unique high-performance, low power, cost-effective, high-available new generation of storage appliances based on Kalray's DPU technology. Powered by our Smart Storage Acceleration Card, Flashbox allows data center customers to disaggregate their Flash tier while maintaining the same performance of local NVMe, thereby optimizing both Flash performance and capacity across the compute tier of their data center." A unique concept on the market today, Flashbox benefits from ultra-fast interfaces and low power consumption. It can deliver unprecedent performance figures using 12x 100 Gb/s network interface connections distributed across six K200-LP cards and is based on market standards such as Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), NVMe/TCP or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv1/v2). Flashbox is a 2U array, with support for 24 U.2 NVMe SSDs. Flashbox JBOF (Just A Bunch of Flash) replaces x86 servers of traditional storage nodes with Kalray PCIe cards (K200-LP) which incorporate the Kalray DPU. The high-availability Flashbox has two Viking Enterprise Solutions fabric modules, each module has a PCIe switch network and supports three PCIe add-in card slots (half-height, half-length). Each Kalray DPU PCIe add-in card can run all the critical functions and data services required of a storage appliance. Flashbox can scale from two to six of the K200-LP PCIe add-in cards allowing the end customer to scale performance independently of capacity of the array. This unique solution is lower cost and significantly lower power from a traditional NVMe storage array. Additionally, users will be able to take advantage of current and future data services integrated into the solution software stack such as data reduction (compression or deduplication), data availability (RAID or erasure encoding) or data security (encryption). This will further enhance critical business metrics by offloading these services from the data center compute tiers. Flashbox offers the ideal SDS (software defined storage) solution by abstracting and disaggregating the Flash tier from the compute tier. About KALRAY Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris - FR0010722819 - ALKAL) is a fabless semiconductor company, a leading provider of a new class of processors, specialized in Intelligent Data Processing from Cloud to Edge. Kalray's team have created and developed its leading-edge technology and products to help its clients maximize the market possibilities presented by a world dominated by massive, disparate and pervasive data. Thanks to Kalray's patented manycore architecture, Kalray's MPPA Intelligent Data Processors are natively capable of managing multiple workloads with no bottlenecks to enable smarter, more efficient and energy-wise data-intensive applications. Kalray's offering includes processors, acceleration cards with associated software environment and appliances, allowing its customers to design the best solutions in fast growing sectors such as modern data centers, 5G, AI and Edge Computing, autonomous vehicles and others. Founded in 2008 as a spin-off of CEA French lab, with investors such as Alliance Venture (Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi), Safran, NXP Semiconductors, CEA and Bpifrance, Kalray is dedicated through technology, expertise and passion to offer more: More for a smart world, more for the planet, more for customers and developers. www.kalrayinc.com About Viking Enterprise Solutions Viking Enterprise Solutions, a product division of Sanmina Corporation, provides advanced data center products including solid-state memory and disk-based storage server appliances, JBOD storage systems and other products for a variety of data center and storage applications. Viking Enterprise Solutions award winning products are tailored for integration into OEM, system integrator and data center products, reducing development and operating costs while improving time-to-market. www.vikingenterprisesolutions.com INVESTOR CONTACTS Eric BAISSUS contactinvestisseurs@kalrayinc.com Tel.+33 (0)4 76 18 90 71 ACTUS Finance & Communication A nne-Pauline PETUREAUX kalray@actus.fr +33 (0)1 53 67 36 72 PRESS CONTACTS Loic HAMON communication@kalrayinc.com Tel. +33 (0)4 76 18 90 71 ACTUS Finance & Communication Serena BONI sboni@actus.fr Tel. +33 (0)4 72 18 04 92 ------------------------ This publication embed "Actusnews SECURITY MASTER ". - SECURITY MASTER Key: m26dYZaZk2yamp+akpiZmmpja25hw5bFlmqbxpVsZsyYnJxlm5piaMaaZnBmnmVo - Check this key: https://www.security-master-key.com. ------------------------ Copyright Actusnews Wire Receive by email the next press releases of the company by registering on www.actusnews.com, it's free Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-75902-pr-kalray-flashbox-fms-award-august-4-2022-vdef-en.pdf Approval marks the first all-oral, once-daily, fixed-duration Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor-based regimen for first-line treatment of CLL The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson Johnson announced today that the European Commission granted marketing authorisation for the expanded use of IMBRUVICA (ibrutinib) in an all-oral, fixed-duration (FD) treatment combination with venetoclax (I+V) for adults with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). The approval is based on the pivotal Phase 3 GLOW study that demonstrated superior progression-free survival (PFS) in patients treated with I+V versus chlorambucil-obinutuzumab (Clb+O), and the FD cohort of the Phase 2 CAPTIVATE study, which showed deep and durable responses in patients treated with I+V, including those with high-risk features.1,2 "Developing innovative therapies remains vitally important in CLL, to ensure we have the option and ability to best tailor treatment to meet individual patient needs and preferences," said Edmond Chan, MBChB, M.D. (Res), EMEA Therapeutic Area Lead Haematology, Janssen-Cilag Limited. "Over the past 11 years, the efficacy and safety profile of ibrutinib has been established in clinical trials and real-world settings. With this approval, healthcare professionals will now have the flexibility to use ibrutinib either in a fixed-duration combination with venetoclax or as a continuous monotherapy in first-line CLL." In Europe, ibrutinib is already approved as a continuous therapy in several indications across three blood cancers (CLL, mantle cell lymphoma and Waldenstrom's macroglobulinaemia).3 In CLL, patient outcomes have improved over the last decade.4 A wave of innovation, including the advent of novel oral therapies that target the underlying disease biology, has shifted the standard of care from chemoimmunotherapy to targeted agents and combination therapies.4 Unmet needs remain, including time-limited combinations of targeted therapies that provide durable remissions and the flexibility to better tailor first-line therapy.1 "The distinct and complementary mechanisms of action of ibrutinib and venetoclax, and the potential of this combination regimen to provide treatment-free remissions, mark important progress for how we approach first-line CLL therapy," said Arnon Kater, M.D., Ph.D., Deputy Head of Haematology, Amsterdam University Medical Centres, University of Amsterdam and Chairman of the HOVON CLL Working Group, the Netherlands and GLOW principal study investigator. "These highly active blood cancer treatments not only combine to deliver superior progression-free survival versus chlorambucil plus obinutuzumab, but also demonstrate robust disease clearance in lymphoid tissue, blood and bone marrow, and early sustainability of those responses after stopping treatment." The EC approval is supported by data from the pivotal Phase 3 GLOW study (NCT03462719), which demonstrated that I+V was superior to Clb+O with respect to the primary endpoint, PFS assessed by an independent review committee, in elderly or unfit patients with CLL (PFS hazard ratio [HR]: 0.216; 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.131 to 0.357; P<0.001).1 The improvement in PFS with I+V was consistent across predefined subgroups, including older patients and those with comorbidities and high-risk features.1 It is also supported by the FD cohort of the Phase 2 CAPTIVATE study (NCT02910583) which evaluated I+V in patients with previously untreated CLL who were 70 years or younger, including patients with high-risk CLL disease.2 Data from these studies were recently published in NEJM Evidence1 and Blood,2 respectively, and primary analyses were originally featured as oral presentations at the European Hematology Association (EHA) 2021 Congress. Secondary analyses from GLOW were presented at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) 2021 Annual Meeting, and additional data from the CAPTIVATE study including clinical outcomes at three years and evidence of immune restoration post-treatment were presented at the EHA 2022 Congress. Updated data for both studies showed the safety profile of the I+V regimen was consistent with known safety profiles of ibrutinib and venetoclax.1,2 In GLOW, the most common adverse events (AEs) were diarrhoea (50.9 percent) and neutropenia (41.5 percent) in the I+V arm and neutropenia (58.1 percent) and infusion-related reactions (29.5 percent) in the Clb+O arm.1 AEs of Grade 3 or greater occurred in 75.5 percent and 69.5 percent of patients in the I+V and Clb+O arms, respectively.1 Any-grade atrial fibrillation occurred in 15 patients (14.2 percent) receiving I+V and two patients (1.9 percent) receiving Clb+O, however, only two patients (1.9 percent) discontinued ibrutinib due to atrial fibrillation while continuing venetoclax.1 Although overall survival data is not mature, with a median follow-up of 34 months, there were 11 deaths in the I+V arm and 16 deaths in the Clb+O arm (HR: 0.760; 95 percent CI, 0.352 to 1.642).1 In the CAPTIVATE FD cohort, the most common AEs were diarrhoea (62 percent), nausea (43 percent), neutropenia (42 percent), and arthralgia (33 percent) and were primarily Grade 1 or 2 in severity.2 The most common Grade 3/4 AEs were neutropenia (33 percent), hypertension (6 percent), and neutrophil count decreased (5 percent). Serious AEs occurred in 36 patients (23 percent) and one fatal AE occured.2 "Ibrutinib is the first approved BTK inhibitor globally, which has helped transform outcomes and quality of life for patients living with blood cancers, such as CLL," said Craig Tendler, M.D., Global Head of Late Development, Diagnostics Medical Affairs, Hematology Oncology, Janssen Research Development, LLC. "This approval reinforces our relentless ambition to advance and optimise treatment regimens, including this all-oral, once-daily, fixed-duration combination of ibrutinib-venetoclax, delivering deep and durable remissions for patients with previously untreated CLL." ENDS# About Ibrutinib Ibrutinib is a once-daily oral medication that is jointly developed and commercialised by Janssen Biotech, Inc. and Pharmacyclics LLC, an AbbVie company.3 Ibrutinib blocks the Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) protein, which is needed by normal and abnormal B-cells, including specific cancer cells, to multiply and spread.5 By blocking BTK, ibrutinib may help move abnormal B-cells out of their nourishing environments and inhibits their proliferation.6 Ibrutinib is approved in more than 100 countries and has been used to treat more than 250,000 patients worldwide.7 There are more than 50 company-sponsored clinical trials, including 18 Phase 3 studies, over 11 years evaluating the efficacy and safety of ibrutinib.3,8 In October 2021, ibrutinib was added to the World Health Organization's Model Lists of Essential Medicines (EML), which refers to medicines that address global health priorities and which should be available and affordable for all.9 Ibrutinib was first approved by the European Commission (EC) in 2014, and approved indications to date include:3 As a single agent or in combination with rituximab or obinutuzumab or venetoclax for the treatment of adult patients with previously untreated CLL As a single agent or in combination with bendamustine and rituximab (BR) for the treatment of adult patients with CLL who have received at least one prior therapy As a single agent for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory (RR) mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) As a single agent for the treatment of adult patients with Waldenstrom's macroglobulinaemia (WM) who have received at least one prior therapy, or in first line treatment for patients unsuitable for chemo-immunotherapy. In combination with rituximab for the treatment of adult patients with WM For a full list of adverse events and information on dosage and administration, contraindications and other precautions when using ibrutinib please refer to the Summary of Product Characteristics for further information. About the GLOW study The Phase 3 GLOW study (N=211; median age, 71 years) is a randomised, open-label trial which evaluated the efficacy and safety of first-line, fixed-duration I+V vs. Clb+O in elderly patients (=65 years of age) with CLL/SLL, or patients aged 18-64 with a cumulative illness rating scale (CIRS) score of greater than six or creatinine clearance less than 70 mL/min, without del(17p) or known TP53 mutations.1 Patients in the study were randomized to receive either 3 cycles of ibrutinib lead-in, followed by 12 cycles of I+V (n=106), or 6 cycles of Clb+O (n=105).1 The primary end point was PFS assessed by an independent review committee.1 About the CAPTIVATE study The Phase 2 CAPTIVATE study evaluated previously untreated adult patients with CLL who were 70 years or younger, including patients with high-risk disease, in two cohorts: an MRD-guided cohort (N=164; median age, 58 years) and a fixed-duration cohort (N=159; median age, 60 years).10 Patients in the fixed-duration cohort received 3 cycles of ibrutinib lead-in followed by 12 cycles of I+V (oral ibrutinib [420 mg/d]; oral venetoclax [5-week ramp-up to 400 mg/d]) and the primary endpoint was complete response (CR) rate.2 About Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) is typically a slow-growing blood cancer of the white blood cells.11 The overall incidence of CLL in Europe is approximately 4.92 cases per 100,000 persons per year and is about 1.5 times more common in men than in women.12 CLL is predominantly a disease of the elderly, with a median age of 72 years at diagnosis.13 While patient outcomes have dramatically improved in the last few decades, the disease is still characterised by consecutive episodes of disease progression and the need for therapy.4 Patients are often prescribed multiple lines of therapy as they relapse or become resistant to treatments.14 About the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson Johnson At Janssen, we're creating a future where disease is a thing of the past. We're the Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson Johnson, working tirelessly to make that future a reality for patients everywhere by fighting sickness with science, improving access with ingenuity, and healing hopelessness with heart. We focus on areas of medicine where we can make the biggest difference: Cardiovascular, Metabolism Retina; Immunology; Infectious Diseases Vaccines; Neuroscience; Oncology; and Pulmonary Hypertension. Learn more at www.janssen.com/EMEA. Follow us at www.twitter.com/janssenEMEA for our latest news. Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Janssen Biotech, Inc., Janssen-Cilag Limited and Janssen Research Development, LLC are part of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson Johnson. Dr. Kater has served as a consultant to Janssen; he has not been paid for any media work. Cautions Concerning Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding IMBRUVICA (ibrutinib). The reader is cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations of future events. If underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or known or unknown risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results could vary materially from the expectations and projections of Janssen Research Development, LLC, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Janssen-Cilag Limited, Janssen Biotech, Inc, any of the other Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies and/or Johnson Johnson. Risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: challenges and uncertainties inherent in product research and development, including the uncertainty of clinical success and of obtaining regulatory approvals; uncertainty of commercial success; manufacturing difficulties and delays; competition, including technological advances, new products and patents attained by competitors; challenges to patents; product efficacy or safety concerns resulting in product recalls or regulatory action; changes in behavior and spending patterns of purchasers of health care products and services; changes to applicable laws and regulations, including global health care reforms; and trends toward health care cost containment. A further list and descriptions of these risks, uncertainties and other factors can be found in Johnson Johnson's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 2, 2022, including in the sections captioned "Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements" and "Item 1A. Risk Factors," and in Johnson Johnson's subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Copies of these filings are available online at www.sec.govwww.jnj.com or on request from Johnson Johnson. None of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies nor Johnson Johnson undertakes to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information or future events or developments. References 1 Kater AP, et al. Fixed-Duration Ibrutinib-Venetoclax in Patients with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Comorbidities. N Eng J Med Evidence. 2022. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1056/EVIDoa2200006. 2 Tam et al. Fixed-duration ibrutinib plus venetoclax for first-line treatment of CLL: primary analysis of the CAPTIVATE FD cohort. Blood. 2022. 139(22):3278-3289. 3 Imbruvica Summary of Product Characteristics, January 2022. Available at: Imbruvica, INN-ibrutinib (europa.eu). Last accessed: June 2022. 4 Moreno C. Standard treatment approaches for relapsed/refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia after frontline chemoimmunotherapy. Hematology Am Soc Hematol Educ Program. 2020;2020:33-40. 5 Turetsky A, et al. Single cell imaging of Bruton's tyrosine kinase using an irreversible inhibitor. Sci Rep. 2014;4:4782. 6 de Rooij MF, et al. The clinically active BTK inhibitor PCI-32765 targets B-cell receptor- and chemokine-controlled adhesion and migration in chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Blood. 2012. 119(11):2590-2594. 7 Janssen Data on File (RF-152098). Global number of cumulative patients treated with Ibrutinib since launch. October 2021. 8 Pollyea DA, et al. A Phase I Dose Escalation Study of the Btk Inhibitor PCI-32765 in Relapsed and Refractory B Cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Use of a Novel Fluorescent Probe Pharmacodynamic Assay. Blood. 2009. 114(22): 3713. 9 World Health Organisation. WHO prioritizes access to diabetes and cancer treatments in new Essential Medicines Lists. Available at: https://www.who.int/news/item/01-10-2021-who-prioritizes-access-to-diabetes-and-cancer-treatments-in-new-essential-medicines-lists. Last accessed: June 2022. 10 ClinicalTrials.gov. Ibrutinib Plus Venetoclax in Subjects With Treatment-naive Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia /Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma (CLL/SLL) (CAPTIVATE). Available at: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02910583. Last accessed: July 2022. 11 American Cancer Society. What is chronic lymphocytic leukemia? Available at: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/chronic-lymphocytic-leukemia/about/what-is-cll.html. Last accessed: June 2022. 12 Sant M, et al. Incidence of hematologic malignancies in Europe by morphologic subtype: results of the HAEMACARE project. Blood. 2010. 116:3724-34. 13 Eichhorst B, et al. Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia: ESMO Clinical Practice Guidelines for diagnosis, treatment and follow-up Ann Oncol. 2021 Jan;32(1):23-33. 14 Bewarder M, et al. Current Treatment Options in CLL. Cancers (Basel). 2021;13(10):2468. CP-331271 July 2022 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220801005417/en/ Contacts: Media Enquiries: Jenni Mildon Mobile: +44 7920 418552 Email: jmildon@its.jnj.com Investor Relations: Raychel Kruper Mobile: +1 732-524-6164 Email: rkruper@its.jnj.com AACHEN, Germany, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Grunenthal and Shionogi announced today that they have entered into a licensing agreement for Grunenthal's investigational medicine Resiniferatoxin ("RTX"). Shionogi obtained the exclusive rights to commercialise Grunenthal's asset in Japan for pain associated with osteoarthritis of the knee. RTX is currently in Phase III of clinical development for the treatment of patients with moderate to severe pain associated with knee osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis, a progressive and often painful joint disease, is an indication with high unmet medical need. If approved, RTX could become a well-tolerated, non-opioid therapy option for patients, providing long-lasting pain relief and functional improvement of the affected knee joints. Under the terms of the agreement, Shionogi will obtain the exclusive commercialisation rights for RTX in Japan for a total consideration of up to $ 525 million plus additional sales based payments. Thereof, Shionogi will pay $ 75 million upon signature, and further milestone payments of $ 70 million prior to regulatory approval. The agreement includes competitive investment commitments for launch and commercialisation. Manufacturing and supply of RTX to Shionogi will be carried out exclusively by Grunenthal. "RTX is a promising asset for more than 300 million patients worldwide who suffer from osteoarthritis[1] and seek a meaningful non-opioid therapy option", says Gabriel Baertschi, Chief Executive Officer, Grunenthal. "With their established presence, strong commercial capabilities and wealth of experience in the pain market, Shionogi is our partner of choice to successfully bring RTX to patients in Japan." RTX is a highly potent Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) agonist with a well-validated mechanism of action. An ongoing clinical Phase III programme across sites in Europe, the US, Latin America, South Africa and Japan aims to enable marketing approval for the investigational medicine. New drug applications, including Japan, are targeted for 2024, leading to a potential market entry of RTX in 2025. If the outcome of the Phase III programme is positive, Grunenthal intends to explore the potential of RTX for the treatment of osteoarthritis-related pain in other joints beyond the knee. The global osteoarthritis market is expected to grow to approximately $ 11.0 billion in 2025[2]. Japan represents one of the most important markets in Asia, with significant revenue potential for RTX. About RTX RTX is an intra-articular injection of resiniferatoxin developed for the treatment of pain in patients with moderate to severe pain associated with knee osteoarthritis. Resiniferatoxin is a highly potent Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) agonist. Its administration can reversibly defunctionalise TRPV1-expressing nociceptors. This may result in long-lasting pain relief. Initial data shows a long-lasting and significant analgesic effect and functional improvements compared to placebo, as well as a favourable safety profile. About Osteoarthritis Osteoarthritis (OA) can be defined as a group of distinct but overlapping diseases. They may have different etiologies but similar biological, morphological, and clinical outcomes that affect the articular cartilage, subchondral bone, ligaments, joint capsule, synovial membrane, and periarticular muscles. OA is the most common joint disease in people aged 65 and over. Its etiology is not fully understood, although several related factors include female gender, genetics, metabolism, and excessive mechanical stress. The diagnosis of OA is primarily based on the clinical history and physical examination. The cardinal radiographic features of OA are focal/non-uniform narrowing of the joint space in the areas subjected to the most pressure, subchondral cysts, subchondral sclerosis, and osteophytes.[3] Osteoarthritis is a joint disease in which the tissues in the joint break down over time. Common symptoms of osteoarthritis include joint pain, stiffness and swelling, as well as changes in how the joint moves and feeling like the joint is loose or unstable. The most commonly affected joints include the knees, hips, hands, neck and lower back. Treatment of osteoarthritis usually includes exercises, maintaining a healthy weight, wearing braces to help with stability, and taking medication, if prescribed.[4] Many patients will ultimately require joint replacement surgery. About Shionogi Shionogi & Co., Ltd. is a leading global research-driven pharmaceutical company based in Japan, dedicated to bringing benefits to patients based on its corporate philosophy of "supplying the best possible medicine to protect the health and wellbeing of the patients we serve." We have declared that it will focus on psychoneurological diseases and pain as priority diseases as well as infectious diseases and contributed to improving the activities of daily living and quality of life and productivity of people suffering from pain. For more information, please visit https://www.shionogi.com/global/en/contact.html About Grunenthal Grunenthal is a global leader in pain management and related diseases. As a science-based, fully-integrated pharmaceutical company, we have a long track record of bringing innovative treatments and state-of-the-art technologies to patients worldwide. Our purpose is to change lives for the better - and innovation is our passion. We are focusing all of our activities and efforts on working towards our vision of a world free of pain. Grunenthal is headquartered in Aachen, Germany, and has affiliates in 28 countries across Europe, Latin America and the US. Our products are available in more than 100 countries. In 2021, Grunenthal employed around 4,500 people and achieved sales of 1.5 bn. More information: www.grunenthal.com Click here for our Grunenthal Report 2021/2022 Follow us on: LinkedIn: Grunenthal Group Instagram: grunenthal For further information please contact Florian Dieckmann Head Global Communication Grunenthal GmbH 52099 Aachen Phone: +49 241 569-2555 E-mail: Florian.Dieckmann@grunenthal.com Christopher Jansen Communication Business Partner Grunenthal GmbH 52099 Aachen Phone: +49 241 569-1428 E-mail: Christopher.Jansen@grunenthal.com [1] Cieza, A., Causey, K., Kamenov, K., Hanson, S. W., Chatterji, S., & Vos, T. (2020). Global estimates of the need for rehabilitation based on the Global Burden of Disease study 2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet, 396(10267), 2006-2017. [2] MarketsAndMarkets Report; Osteoarthritis Therapeutics Market by Anatomy (Knee, Hand), Drug Type (NSAIDs, Analgesics, Corticosteroids), Route of Administration (Parenteral), Distribution Channel (Hospital Pharmacies),Purchasing Pattern (Prescription Drugs) - Global Forecast to 2025; 2020. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/osteoarthritis-therapeutics-market-209565994.html [3] ICD-11 https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int%2ficd%2fentity%2f558562409 [4] National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases; What Causes Osteoarthritis, Symptoms & More | NIAMS (nih.gov) The United States Senate has unanimously voted in support of Finland and Sweden's application to join the Western NATO alliance, with only Sen. Josh Hawley being against the resolution. The Wednesday vote provides support for the two nations to join NATO as the House approved a resolution in a bipartisan 394-18 vote last month that formally supported the two Nordic countries' application. All of the opposition votes in the House came from the Republican Party. Senate Supports Finland, Sweden NATO Applications Hawley's lone opposition vote against the resolution did not come as a surprise to other lawmakers. He had previously announced his intent to vote no to the resolution earlier this week, outlining his opposition in an op-ed published by The National Interest. The senator said that he does not believe the United States should expand its security commitments in Europe because the U.S.'s "greatest foreign adversary" is China. The official also argued that growing the nation's security commitments in the region would make Americans less safe, as per The Hill. The Republican wrote that the two Nordic countries wanted to join NATO to head off further Russian aggression in Europe. He said that this was entirely understandable given their location and security needs. However, he noted that this was not the case for the U.S. as it was in Asia. Read Also: Nancy Pelosi Breaks Silence on Taiwan Visit, China Still Angry After 'Dangerous Provocation' Hawley said that the threat was the People's Republic of China and noted that when it comes to Chinese imperialism, the American people should know the truth. This was that the United States was not ready to resist it. According to the New York Times, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Finland and Sweden's membership will strengthen NATO even further. He noted that this was made all the more urgent given Russian aggression in Europe and Russian President Vladimir Putin's immoral and unjustified war against Ukraine. Western Military Alliance The Democrat noted that Putin was indirectly strengthening the NATO alliance and that nothing shows it better than the Senate's resounding approval of the resolution. All of the 30 current members of NATO must ratify the accession of the two Nordic countries for their applications to be approved. So far, 22 countries have shown their support but as recently as two weeks ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to block the membership bids, which could prolong the process. However, the U.S. support of the applications is seen as a crucial step and the vote is considered a major victory for President Joe Biden. The Democratic president previously sent the protocols for ratification to the Senate in July, which paved the way for the vote that needed two-thirds of the Senate to succeed. The next stop now is for Biden to sign an instrument of ratification to the treaty. A spokesperson for the State Department said that once Biden has signed an instrument of ratification, that instrument is deposited (in the case of a multilateral treaty) with the treaty's depositary, which is the case for NATO. These final steps will not happen on the same day as the Senate's vote and final arrangements for depositing the instrument of ratification have not yet been made, CNN reported. Related Article: China Slaps Taiwan With Trade Sanctions After Nancy Pelosi Visit, Fears Grow Semiconductor Industry Could Suffer @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. SINGAPORE, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Smart Ship Hub(SSH) is a ready to deploy digital platform for global maritime logistics. SSH is disrupting the maritime industry the way avionics did in airline industry. Cloud based and on demand, SSH provides "unified platform and a single source of truth" for Ship owners, Ship Operators, Charter Parties, maritime insurers, Port authorities. The platform caters for merchant ships, naval ships, oil rigs, river going barges and fishing vessels. Global maritime , despite being the largest mode of transport suffers from operational inefficiencies, lack of visibility, transparency leading to commercial leakages. Ship owners, operators, chartering agencies, insurance companies are now focussed on technology backed smarter processes to ensure "High vessel uptime , Sea worthiness and Predictability" with digital systems. SSH's "ship-to-shore and shore-to-ship" based management of fleet using smart sensors, IOT, big data is saving substantial operational costs while enhancing voyage efficiencies . The digital platform is helping predict possible machinery down time, malfunctioning, identify performance deviations, vessel routes to improve voyage and vessel performance. SSH's " Marine Insights " is a unique maritime big data platform providing actionable intelligence, smart alerts and performance advisory for entire fleet using millions of records. SSH's global customers are able to achieve their target of " minimal breakdown maintenance", "optimum fuel utilization", "staying in total compliance including for emissions", " optimize costs with condition based maintenance" and a much higher level of " voyage control" . "Performance Advisory" feature is reducing number of incidents for these ships while saving maintenance and fuel costs . Future ready maritime companies are helping in creation of a connected ecosystem: connected ships, shared services (routes, capacity, procurement) and "pay per use" model with SSH digital. Joy Basu , Founder of Smart Ship Hub adds: "Digital platforms will play a fundamental role in disrupting maritime legacy processes. Inefficient & legacy workflows in ships and shore is gradually giving way to automated remote management. This fund raise will allow us to pass on more value to our customers globally. Customers will now have captive performance centre for a fraction of the cost they incur today. Ship owners, Operators, Charter parties can get digital upgrade for "Zero" capex , allowing them to unblock their capital and upgrade more vessels". About Ideaspring Capital " Ideaspring Capital is very happy to be part of Smart Ship Hub's growth and its journey towards being the digital platform of choice for global maritime companies. As a venture capital firm, we are focused on organizations that are into IOT, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data Analytics, AR, VR, Cyber Security, Computer Vision and we have seen SmartShip are leveraging these technologies through their world-class platform. We are very impressed with the team and the product" says Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner, Ideaspring Capital . About StartupXseed "StartupXseed is a sector agnostic fund with investments from SaaS to Space (Tech), including the areas of Cyber Security, Semicon, AI/ML, Drones and New Frontier Startups in India with a Global Focus. Smart Ship Hub is a early growth stage company, we are particularly impressed with their product and marquee customers base developed globally in a very short span of time, says Ravi Thakur, designated partner , StartupXseed ventures. SmartShip has a unique advantage of a powerful promoter team of successful maritime professionals, Singapore headquarters and a strong technology team. We are glad to have partnered as they disrupt global maritime domain: BV Naidu, Managing partner StartupXseed ventures. Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1864898/Smart_Ship_Hub_1.jpg Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1864899/Smart_Ship_Hub_Logo.jpg LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Rolls Royce Holdings plc. (RYCEF.PK, RR.L, RYCEY.PK) reported Thursday that its first-half loss was 1.61 billion pounds, compared to profit of 394 million pounds last year. Loss per share was 19.29 pence, while last year's profit per share was 4.73 pence. Underlying loss was 188 million pounds or 2.24 pence per share, compared to profit of 104 million pounds or 1.25 pence per share a year ago. Revenue grew to 5.60 billion pounds from 5.16 billion pounds a year ago. Underlying revenues also improved from last year. Looking ahead for fiscal 2022, the company continues to expect low-to-mid-single digit underlying revenue growth, and underlying operating profit margin to be broadly unchanged on the prior year's 3.8 percent. The company still expects modestly positive free cash flow in 2022. For more earnings news, earnings calendar, and earnings for stocks, visit rttnews.com Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Quantum Technology Camera Monitors and Quantifies Methane Emissions and Flare Efficiency CARDIFF, England, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- QLM Technology Ltd, a UK-based photonics technology company with headquarters in Cardiff and operations in Bristol and San Francisco, announces the closing of its Series-A funding and the signing of a Collaboration Agreement with Schlumberger. With support from Innovate UK, QLM has developed a new type of LiDAR camera based on quantum technology that can see and accurately quantify greenhouse gas emissions. The gas imager enables customers to monitor, detect and accurately locate and quantify Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission sources for rapid repair. A related version of the product enables remote quantification of flare efficiency. QLM's LiDAR technology is inherently scalable to low cost at high volume, enabling wide deployment. "The technology is unique in the emissions monitoring marketplace in its potential to achieve the greatest amount of GHG abatement at the lowest cost of ownership," said Murray Reed, Chief Executive officer, QLM. "The funding and strategic relationship with our new lead investor, Schlumberger, and expanded backing of initial and new investors will allow us to scale our manufacturing, enabling significant cost reduction, as we launch our solution into the various GHG-intensive industries and markets." Through the strategic collaboration, QLM's technology will be part of the new Schlumberger End-to-end Emissions Solutions (SEES) business offering for the oil and gas industry. SEES's methane monitoring offering is based on previous investments in satellite-, airplane-, and drone-mounted sensors, along with additional sensors developed internally. QLM's differentiated LiDAR technology complements those mobile monitors by providing accurate and sensitive measurements where continuous monitoring is required. The ability to quantify flare efficiency will ensure optimal efficiency for flares that cannot yet be eliminated. "SEES selects partners following rigorous technical evaluation to identify innovative technology that complements our existing measurement solutions," said Kahina Abdeli-Galinier, Emissions Business Director, Schlumberger. "The unique QLM LiDAR technology will allow operators to continuously monitor their facilities for methane emissions, and the technology is differentiated in its ability to detect even small emissions; to quantify emission rates accurately; to provide actionable information by locating the emission source precisely; and to fit upstream, midstream, and downstream facilities of all sizes." Beyond emissions monitoring for the oil and gas market, the QLM solution is well-suited for use in tracking and reducing methane emissions in other applications such as in biogas production, at landfills, at wastewater treatment plants, and in coal mines. In addition to lead investment from Schlumberger, existing investors Green Angel Syndicate, Enterprise100 Syndicate, Development Bank of Wales, Newable Ventures, and several private investors joined in this round of funding, as well as new investor Quantum Exponential. For more information about QLM, please visit: https://qlmtec.com/ Media contact: Aaron Van Pelt Chief Commercial Officer marketing@qlmtec.com New research highlights the urgent need for organisations operating in three of the UK's 'high trust' sectors aerospace, defence and government to gain digital advantage 85% of senior decision-makers say digital capability is key to mitigating increased threats from adversaries, while increasing innovation, but almost all (97%) face barriers to gaining the digital advantage required Over two-thirds say they need to 'completely overhaul' or 'significantly improve' their security savviness or ability to innovate Achieving a digital advantage is more important than ever, with factors including climate change, the COVID-19 crisis and Brexit accelerating digital strategies. This is one of the findings in a new report, published today, by BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, which has found that digital advantage is critical to protecting UK society and maintaining the public's trust. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005076/en/ Story in Numbers (Graphic: Business Wire) The report, Unlocking Digital Advantage in High Trust Sectors, looked at the challenges faced by over 120 senior IT and business decision-makers within the UK's aerospace, government and defence organisations when it comes to using technology to gain an advantage. 'Digital advantage': not a nice to have, but essential for the protection and advancement of UK society For high trust organisations, having a digital advantage is seen as mission critical to protecting UK society and maintaining the public's trust in today's landscape. The research found that the vast majority (85%) of decision-makers see digital capability as key. James Hatch, Chief Digital Officer, BAE Systems Digital Intelligence commented: "High trust organisations are responsible for handling the country's most sensitive and secret data, delivering services to citizens and safeguarding democracy. Society fundamentally needs, and expects, to be able to have faith in these organisations. They therefore have the double challenge of accelerating their digital advantage while continuing to deliver critical value to society reliably and responsibly." Respondents also highlighted the consequences of not having a digital advantage, citing an increased threat from adversaries, slower innovation and a reduced ability to protect and serve democracy as potential severe societal impacts. Lifting the lid on digital barriers for government, defence and aerospace However, almost all (97%) are facing significant people, technology and data barriers when it comes to achieving the digital advantage required today. These include: Organisations are struggling to attract and retain talent, facing a number of external obstacles. Decision-makers said the Great Resignation (38%), changes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic (36%) and changes to working patterns (36%) are key threats facing their organisation. There is a lack of confidence around current digital capabilities. For example, over two-thirds (70%) of respondents said they need to 'completely overhaul' or 'significantly improve' their ability to innovate, their agility (68%) and their security savviness (67%). Nearly half (46%) of decision-makers dealing with secret or top secret data, said the nature of this highly sensitive information makes it harder to advance their digital capabilities. Over half (53%) of respondents said that using data ineffectively would prevent their ability to solve challenges within society. A third (33%) cited more sophisticated threats from external vectors enemy states as a key data barrier preventing them from becoming more digitally mature. Air Commodore Julian Ball OBE, Head of Defence Space Capability, at the UK Ministry of Defence said: "A major barrier today is when people look to deliver digital transformation, they still default to thinking about the hardware first. In the space context, everyone will straight away start talking about how we can optimise the satellite. But it's not about the hardware, it's about the data that runs behind it. "What I'm interested in is how we can get the information from the satellite to the ground and the end user safely and securely. We therefore need to optimise the data management layer first before we start thinking about developing sensors or getting the ship into space. Satellites are useless if the data isn't doing its job. It's the ability to use and understand the data in a meaningful way that will deliver digital advantage." Sneha Dawda, Research Fellow in Cybersecurity and Cyber Threats, RUSI said:"Governments have traditionally struggled with a lack of digital agility and a large amount of bureaucratic processes that slow down innovation. Disjointed procurement has been another challenge, whereby different departments speak to different people and use different technology which not only slows down innovation but can also lead to cybersecurity issues. There needs to be a degree of centralised management to accurately calculate and manage cyber risks." Higher stakes but higher rewards Despite the many challenges to achieving digital maturity, 83% of respondents agree the reward in doing so is worth it. Hatch concludes: "For high trust sectors, the stakes for unlocking digital advantage are higher, but so are the rewards. If we collaborate as an industry, the future will host a richer and safer society and the UK will have an increased global influence, across defence, technology and science, and cybersecurity." To read more about the solutions, download the report today: www.baesystems.com/digitaladvantage -ENDS- Note to editors Further notable findings: For many (55%) of the respondents surveyed, having an advantage aligned directly with agility, namely having the ability to quickly and easily change processes to keep up with advances in today's connected world. Other potential outcomes include: Accelerating innovation and transformation (48%) Meeting and exceeding organisational goals (45%) Ensuring seamless delivery of essential services (45%) Staying ahead of the adversary (35%) 51% of decision-makers said that data breaches were the biggest threat facing their organisation. Over half (52%) of respondents cited climate change as a geopolitical factor which has caused them to accelerate or attempt to accelerate their digital strategies over the last 12 months. Adopting a digital culture that employees are on-board with was highlighted as the top people roadblock (36%); followed by attracting STEM talent (34%); the ability to implement a hybrid working model (33%); and finding DevOps employees that work in a secure way (33%). Sector-specific barriers include: Aerospace respondents are more likely to cite new systems being incompatible with legacy systems (49%) and being unable to easily move data from one environment to another (44%) as barriers to digital maturity. Government respondents are more likely to cite the ability to implement a hybrid working model (43%) and a lack of diversity when it comes to recruiting STEM talent (33%) as key challenges. Almost a third of defence respondents (32%) said concerns over the security of new technology were preventing digital transformation. Methodology: This research commissioned for this report was led by independent market research agency Vanson Bourne on behalf of BAE Systems Digital Intelligence. The study, which was in the field between May June, 2022, surveyed 120 senior IT and business decision-makers from organisations with 1,000 employees within the aerospace, defence and government sectors. All interviews were conducted using a rigorous multi-level screening process to ensure that only suitable candidates were given the opportunity to participate. About BAE Systems Digital Intelligence: BAE Systems Digital Intelligence is home to 4,800 digital, cyber and intelligence experts. We work collaboratively across 16 countries to collect, connect and understand complex data, so that governments, nation states, armed forces and commercial businesses can unlock digital advantage in the most demanding environments. Launched in 2022, Digital Intelligence is part of BAE Systems, and has a rich heritage in helping to defend nations and businesses around the world from advanced threats. www.baesystems.com/digital Issued by: BAE Systems plc Media hotline: +44 (0) 7801 717739 www.baesystems.com @BAESystemsplc Ref: 111/2022. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005076/en/ Contacts: For further information, please contact: Charlotte Marshall, BAE Systems, charlotte.marshall@baesystems.com Charlotte Kelly, Clarity, +44 7891 496946, digitalintelligence@clarity.global BANGKOK, Aug 4, 2022 - (ACN Newswire) - Looking ahead to 2030, humans hope for an improved quality of life that requires a wide range of 5G connected digital services. Decreasing traffic congestion, producing green energy, using robots for dangerous work, making health computable, using farm management systems for enhanced crop productivity and implementing a smart transportation system are all part of the so-called networked economy. It is important to understand how to secure the ecosystem of devices and applications evolving from that network to shape a trusted digital future.VNU Asia Pacific is launching ?BYOND MOBILE? from 28-29 September 2022 at Samyan Mitrtown Hall, Bangkok to set a platform for the digital infrastructure. The two-day conference and exhibition will be the meeting place for the 5G ecosystem, where industries can connect with established suppliers and disrupting start-ups across the world. The show will provide the latest technology solutions and services in the field of Health, Agriculture, Manufacturing, Smart City and Future Mobility.BYOND MOBILE will be the yearly physical touchpoint to discuss the latest developments and newest policies but also network among like-minded business owners, entrepreneurs, network specialists and solution architects from all across the globe entering Southeast Asia."The Asia Pacific region will account for 40% of the world's connectivity within the next 5 years. With Southeast Asia being the growth engine of that region, BYOND MOBILE will set the stage to drive the super-connected economy in the heart of Asia -- a region being strategically contested by the 5G superpower heroes," Isabelle Springfeld, project manager of BYOND MOBILE states.On 3,000 sqm at Samyan Mitrtown hall, BYOND MOBILE will showcase 5G products and solutions from 50+ leading brands such as Nokia, RV Connex, True Corporation, and BT Group as part of the UK Pavilion.The exhibitors cover the fields of infrastructure components, cloud data & IT services, network operations, cybersecurity, device manufacturing and 5G/IoT-products and applications. In the Start Up Pavilion supported by depa Digital Start Up Institute Southeast Asia's young and innovative 5G solutions will be showcased.During the 2 days, more than 1,000+ visitors are expected to meet and network with the exhibiting companies, evaluate product demonstrations and explore new ideas and innovations to make their business more productive and efficient. The main stage within the exhibition hall hosts 40+ thought leaders within keynote speeches, fireside chats and panel discussions. At the end of the first day, qualified startups will live pitch their solutions in front of a top-class jury in the Start Up Challenge. On the breakout stage adjacent to the exhibition hall visitors gain deep knowledge insights through master classes and product demonstrations from companies and associations.Be a part of the 5G revolution and drive your business to the next level by unlocking the potential of the IOT area.Save the date: BYOND MOBILE 2022 | 28-29 September 2022 at Samyan Mitrtown Hall, BangkokPre-registration is now open at https://eventpassinsight.co/el/to/Q87OY [Free ticket]For more information, please visit https://byondmobile.asia or Tel. +662 1116611 Ext. 251, 254PRESS CONTACT:Marketing & Communications of VNU Asia Pacific, Email: communications@vnuasiapacific.comTel. +662 1116611 Ext. 330 or 335, Website: https://byondmobile.asia or www.vnuasiapacific.comSource: VNU Asia PacificCopyright 2022 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved. NFC-enabled sticker to verify origin and authenticity of Johnnie Walker, Hennessy, Terrazas and Moet & Chandon bottles with a simple scan of a smartphone SAN MARINO and LAS VEGAS, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic slowly fading, many economies are witnessing a sharp rebound in consumer demand, especially for high-quality, luxury goods. During this resurgence, the inefficiencies of traditional logistics models have become starker than ever, with cases of fraud skyrocketing, especially in developing economies. VeChainThor, the world's leading Enterprise-grade public blockchain, was conceived specifically to resolve trust gaps in data. Blockchain creates a level playing field where any party can review the claim of another independently, removing the need for intermediaries. For producers and importers of luxury products, digital technologies that can guarantee origin, logistics trails and legitimacy of a product present a significant opportunity. Unsurprisingly, the adoption rate of digital tools such as blockchain is rapidly picking up pace. A Digital Future Attwood Import Export, recognized as the largest premium alcoholic beverage importer and distributor in Cambodia, recently announced the implementation of an entirely new kind of security sticker built using the VeChainThor blockchain, the NFC-enabled 'Attwood Blockchain Sticker' (ABS). Mr. David Wang, General Manager of VeChain Tech SEA, attended the launching ceremony on July 27, 2022, an event attended by various major Cambodian news outlets and televised on the CTV8 Cambodia news channel. Attwood Import Export is a leading company that has exclusively imported and distributed luxury brands for almost 30 years, notably, Johnnie Walker, Hennessy, Moet & Chandon, Terrazas, Chandon Sparkling, Budweiser beer, Corona beer, and Coronita beer. By applying ABS to each bottle of product, Attwood enhances its liquor distribution capabilities, drastically improves transparency, and guarantees product authenticity to partners and consumers. With key data hashed on the blockchain, salient product information becomes immutable and trustworthy, allowing clients and customers to verify the origin and authenticity of products with a simple scan of a smartphone, preventing fraud and protecting consumers. Attwood is known for going to great lengths to take care of its customers. Mr. Tan Se Chhay, CEO of Attwood commented: "As a leading import export trading company, Attwood has always played an important role in bridging the gap between brands and consumers. Through the partnership with VeChain Tech, we strengthen the ability to take responsibility for our customers and products." As a mature, scalable, and commercially proven blockchain, VeChainThor's versatility continues to garner industrial interest. With an array of advanced tools and solutions already on the market, the VeChainThor blockchain is cementing its position as the de facto blockchain for industrial, commercial, and other kinds of application. VeChain Tech will continue its mission of developing and deploying digital solutions for Attwood and other visionary businesses, push the fore of digital transformation and unlock new value while solving complex industrial problems. With blockchain mass adoption unfolding globally, VeChainThor stands ready to deliver its powerful blockchain technology to enterprises and businesses of all sizes. About VeChain Launched in 2015 as a private consortium network, the VeChain Foundation went on to launch the VeChainThor public blockchain in 2018, a fully programmable, EVM-compatible layer one smart contract platform. Its unique two-token model ensures stable, low transaction costs while an advanced Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism guarantees high throughput, scalability, and security with minimal energy consumption. VeChainThor's robust architecture has seen zero downtime for the network after almost 4 years of continuous operation. Strong independent capabilities combined with the professional compliance guidance of strategic partners PwC and DNV has seen VeChain to establish partnerships with leading enterprises including Walmart China, Bayer China, BMW Group, BYD Auto, PICC, H&M Group, Shanghai Gas, LVMH, D.I.G, ASI Group and more. VeChain continues to pioneer real-world blockchain applications across the globe with offices in Luxembourg, China, Singapore, San Marino, Milan, Ireland, Japan, France and the United States, working on wide-ranging applications from supply chain & logistics, sustainability & SDGs, carbon emissions, energy, medicine, De-Fi, NFTs and much more. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1871907/VeChain_Attwood_Blockchain_Sticker___ABS.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/738221/VeChain_Logo.jpg BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - French stocks were moving higher on Thursday, with sentiment underpinned by earnings optimism and better-than-expected factory orders data from Germany. German factory orders fell 0.4 percent sequentially in June while analysts had expected a 0.9 percent drop. U.S.-China tensions remained on investors' radar after China said that it conducted 'precision missile strikes' in the Taiwan Strait as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades. Market participants await the outcome of a Bank of England policy meeting later in the day, with analysts expecting the central bank to stick to a 25-bps hike. The benchmark CAC 40 rose 28 points, or 0.4 percent, to 6,500 after rallying 1 percent the previous day. Credit Agricole surged 4.3 percent. The lender posted better-than-expected quarterly profits, driven by record activity in its investment banking division. Rival BNP Paribas advanced 1.2 percent and Socite Generale added 2 percent. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Second quarter revenues of $1.195 billion , up 35.6% year-over-year GAAP Income from Operations was 7.8% of revenues and Non-GAAP Income from Operations was 14.9% of revenues for the second quarter Second quarter GAAP Diluted EPS of $0.32 , a decrease of 83.5%, and Non-GAAP Diluted EPS of $2.38 , an increase of 16.1% on a year-over-year basis For the third quarter, EPAM expects revenue to be at least $1.210 billion , GAAP Diluted EPS to be at least $1.65 and Non-GAAP Diluted EPS to be at least $2.48 NEWTOWN, Pa., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM), a leading digital transformation services and product engineering company, today reported results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022. "Our strong second quarter results reflect EPAM's resiliency, agility and focus as the Company navigates the impact of the war in Ukraine," said Arkadiy Dobkin, CEO & President, EPAM. "The acceleration of our strategy will enable EPAM to continue our growth trajectory by developing our consulting and next generation delivery capabilities, investing in our people and communities as well as leading the change for customers through strategy and execution, simultaneously. I remain confident we will continue to execute through this near-term challenge, and emerge as a more diverse, more resilient and more relevant global company." Second Quarter 2022 Highlights Revenues increased to $1.195 billion , a year-over-year increase of $313.5 million , or 35.6%. On a constant currency basis, revenues were up 40.1% compared to the second quarter of 2021. Acquisitions completed in the last twelve months contributed 6.2% to revenue growth in the quarter; , a year-over-year increase of , or 35.6%. On a constant currency basis, revenues were up 40.1% compared to the second quarter of 2021. Acquisitions completed in the last twelve months contributed 6.2% to revenue growth in the quarter; GAAP income from operations was $93.0 million , a decrease of $32.3 million , or 25.7%, compared to $125.3 million in the second quarter of 2021; , a decrease of , or 25.7%, compared to in the second quarter of 2021; Non-GAAP income from operations was $177.5 million , an increase of $22.2 million , or 14.3%, compared to $155.2 million in the second quarter of 2021; , an increase of , or 14.3%, compared to in the second quarter of 2021; Diluted earnings per share ("EPS") on a GAAP basis was $0.32 , a decrease of $1.62 , or 83.5%, compared to $1.94 in the second quarter of 2021 largely driven by the impact of appreciation of the Russian ruble on our intercompany payables denominated in Russian rubles and U.S. dollar denominated assets held by our subsidiaries in Russia as well as the decrease in GAAP income from operations; and , a decrease of , or 83.5%, compared to in the second quarter of 2021 largely driven by the impact of appreciation of the Russian ruble on our intercompany payables denominated in Russian rubles and U.S. dollar denominated assets held by our subsidiaries in as well as the decrease in GAAP income from operations; and Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $2.38 , an increase of $0.33 , or 16.1%, compared to $2.05 in the second quarter of 2021. Cash Flow and Other Metrics Cash provided by operating activities was $25.7 million for the first six months of 2022, compared to cash provided by operating activities of $81.7 million for the first six months of 2021; for the first six months of 2022, compared to cash provided by operating activities of for the first six months of 2021; Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash totaled $1.296 billion as of June 30, 2022 , a decrease of $153.7 million , or 10.6%, from $1.449 billion as of December 31, 2021 ; and as of , a decrease of , or 10.6%, from as of ; and Total headcount was approximately 61,300 as of June 30, 2022 . Included in this number were approximately 54,850 delivery professionals, an increase of 28.1% from June 30, 2021 . Third Quarter Outlook EPAM expects the following for the third quarter: Revenues will be at least $1.210 billion on a GAAP basis for the third quarter reflecting a year-over-year growth rate of at least 22% which includes an unfavorable foreign currency translation impact of approximately 4%. Revenue growth on a constant currency basis will be at least 26%. The Company expects acquisitions will contribute approximately 4% to reported revenues; on a GAAP basis for the third quarter reflecting a year-over-year growth rate of at least 22% which includes an unfavorable foreign currency translation impact of approximately 4%. Revenue growth on a constant currency basis will be at least 26%. The Company expects acquisitions will contribute approximately 4% to reported revenues; For the third quarter, EPAM expects GAAP income from operations to be in the range of 9.5% to 10.5% of revenues and non-GAAP income from operations to be in the range of 15% to 16% of revenues; The Company expects its GAAP effective tax rate to be approximately 19% and its non-GAAP effective tax rate to be approximately 22%; and EPAM expects GAAP diluted EPS will be at least $1.65 for the quarter, and non-GAAP diluted EPS will be at least $2.48 for the quarter. The Company expects weighted average diluted shares outstanding for the quarter of 59.4 million. Conference Call Information EPAM will host a conference call to discuss the results on Thursday, August 4, 2022, at 8:00 a.m. EDT. The conference call will be available live on the EPAM website at https://investors.epam.com . Please visit the website at least 15 minutes prior to the call to register for the event. For those who cannot access the live webcast, a replay will be available in the Investor Relations section of the website. About EPAM Systems Since 1993, EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM) has leveraged its advanced software engineering heritage to become the foremost global digital transformation services provider - leading the industry in digital and physical product development and digital platform engineering services. Through its innovative strategy; integrated advisory, consulting, and design capabilities; and unique 'Engineering DNA,' EPAM's globally deployed hybrid teams help make the future real for clients and communities around the world by powering better enterprise, education and health platforms that connect people, optimize experiences, and improve people's lives. In 2021, EPAM was added to the S&P 500 and included among the list of Forbes Global 2000 companies. Selected by Newsweek as a 2021 Most Loved Workplace, EPAM's global multi-disciplinary teams serve customers in more than 50 countries across six continents. As a recognized leader, EPAM is listed among the top 15 companies in Information Technology Services on the Fortune 1000 and ranked as the top IT services company on Fortune's 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list for the last three consecutive years. EPAM is also listed among Ad Age's top 25 World's Largest Agency Companies for three consecutive years, and Consulting Magazine named EPAM Continuum a top 20 Fastest-Growing Firm. Learn more at www.epam.com and follow EPAM on Twitter and LinkedIn . Non-GAAP Financial Measures EPAM supplements results reported in accordance with United States generally accepted accounting principles, referred to as GAAP, with non-GAAP financial measures. Management believes these measures help illustrate underlying trends in EPAM's business and uses the measures to establish budgets and operational goals, communicate internally and externally, for managing EPAM's business and evaluating its performance. Management also believes these measures help investors compare EPAM's operating performance with its results in prior periods. EPAM anticipates that it will continue to report both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures in its financial results, including non-GAAP results that exclude stock-based compensation expenses, acquisition-related costs including amortization of intangible assets, impairment of assets, expenses associated with EPAM's humanitarian commitment to its professionals in Ukraine, unbilled business continuity resources resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, costs associated with the geographic repositioning efforts in Russia and Belarus, employee separation costs in Russia, certain other one-time charges and benefits, changes in fair value of contingent consideration, foreign exchange gains and losses, excess tax benefits related to stock-based compensation, and the related effect on income taxes of the pre-tax adjustments. Management also compares operating results on a basis of "constant currency," which is also a non-GAAP financial measure. This measure excludes the effect of foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations by translating the current period revenues and expenses into U.S. dollars at the weighted average exchange rates of the prior period of comparison. Because EPAM's reported non-GAAP financial measures are not calculated in accordance with GAAP, these measures are not comparable to GAAP and may not be comparable to similarly described non-GAAP measures reported by other companies within EPAM's industry. Consequently, EPAM's non-GAAP financial measures should not be evaluated in isolation or supplant comparable GAAP measures, but rather, should be considered together with the information in EPAM's consolidated financial statements, which are prepared in accordance with GAAP. Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes estimates and statements which may constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the accuracy of which are necessarily subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. Our estimates and forward-looking statements are mainly based on our current expectations and estimates of future events and trends, which affect or may affect our business and operations. These statements may include words such as "may," "will," "should," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "estimate" or similar expressions. Those future events and trends may relate to, among other things, developments relating to the invasion of Ukraine, political and civil unrest or military action in the geographies where we conduct business and operate, developments relating to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, and the effect that they may have on our revenues, operations, access to capital, profitability and customer demand. Other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied include general economic conditions, the risk factors discussed in the Company's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and the factors discussed in the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, filed on or after the date of this press release, particularly under the headings "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and "Risk Factors" and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although we believe that these estimates and forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, they are subject to several risks and uncertainties and are made based on information currently available to us. EPAM undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities law. EPAM SYSTEMS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF INCOME (Unaudited) (In thousands, except per share data) Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 Revenues $ 1,194,861 $ 881,366 $ 2,366,475 $ 1,662,141 Operating expenses: Cost of revenues (exclusive of depreciation and amortization) 846,323 583,728 1,627,159 1,103,056 Selling, general and administrative expenses 232,527 151,910 469,804 288,299 Depreciation and amortization expense 22,991 20,454 47,250 38,261 Income from operations 93,020 125,274 222,262 232,525 Interest and other income, net 1,579 2,580 1,414 7,954 Foreign exchange loss (85,941) (4,693) (108,726) (2,394) Income before provision for income taxes 8,658 123,161 114,950 238,085 (Benefit from)/ provision for income taxes (9,946) 8,490 6,627 14,368 Net income $ 18,604 $ 114,671 $ 108,323 $ 223,717 Net income per share: Basic $ 0.33 $ 2.03 $ 1.90 $ 3.97 Diluted $ 0.32 $ 1.94 $ 1.84 $ 3.80 Shares used in calculation of net income per share: Basic 57,240 56,463 57,078 56,317 Diluted 59,020 59,011 58,981 58,896 EPAM SYSTEMS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (Unaudited) (In thousands, except par value) As of June 30, 2022 As of December 31, 2021 Assets Current assets Cash and cash equivalents $ 1,293,518 $ 1,446,625 Trade receivables and contract assets, net of allowance of $18,554 and $5,521, respectively 929,217 768,928 Short-term investments 60,098 - Prepaid and other current assets 76,845 53,927 Total current assets 2,359,678 2,269,480 Property and equipment, net 211,119 236,214 Operating lease right-of-use assets, net 159,726 184,841 Intangible assets, net 89,032 101,143 Goodwill 521,267 530,723 Deferred tax assets 172,807 143,928 Other noncurrent assets 50,335 56,898 Total assets $ 3,563,964 $ 3,523,227 Liabilities Current liabilities Accounts payable $ 22,488 $ 24,847 Accrued compensation and benefits expenses 414,674 502,997 Accrued expenses and other current liabilities 181,525 142,014 Short-term debt 6,701 16,018 Income taxes payable, current 18,190 27,440 Operating lease liabilities, current 41,125 50,104 Total current liabilities 684,703 763,420 Long-term debt 30,221 30,234 Income taxes payable, noncurrent 45,441 42,454 Operating lease liabilities, noncurrent 130,891 142,802 Other noncurrent liabilities 48,702 48,480 Total liabilities 939,958 1,027,390 Commitments and contingencies Stockholders' equity Common stock, $0.001 par value; 160,000 shares authorized; 57,373 and 56,868 shares issued, 57,353 and 56,849 shares outstanding at June 30, 2022 and December 31, 2021, respectively 57 57 Additional paid-in capital 760,975 711,912 Retained earnings 1,937,855 1,829,532 Treasury stock (177) (177) Accumulated other comprehensive loss (76,357) (54,207) Total EPAM Systems Inc. stockholders' equity 2,622,353 2,487,117 Noncontrolling interest in consolidated subsidiaries 1,653 8,720 Total stockholders' equity $ 2,624,006 $ 2,495,837 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 3,563,964 $ 3,523,227 EPAM SYSTEMS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Reconciliations of Non-GAAP Financial Measures to Comparable GAAP Financial Measures (Unaudited) (In thousands, except percent and per share amounts) Reconciliation of revenue growth as reported on a GAAP basis to revenue growth on a constant currency basis is presented in the table below: Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 Revenue growth as reported 35.6 % 42.4 % Foreign exchange rates impact 4.5 % 3.8 % Revenue growth on a constant currency basis(1) 40.1 % 46.2 % (1) Constant currency revenue results are calculated by translating current period revenues in local currency into U.S. dollars at the weighted average exchange rates of the comparable prior period. Reconciliation of various income statement amounts from GAAP to non-GAAP for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021: Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 GAAP Adjustments Non-GAAP GAAP Adjustments Non-GAAP Cost of revenues (exclusive of depreciation and amortization)(2) $ 846,323 $ (27,272) $ 819,051 $ 1,627,159 $ (27,218) $ 1,599,941 Selling, general and administrative expenses(3) $ 232,527 $ (51,439) $ 181,088 $ 469,804 $ (105,693) $ 64,111 Income from operations(4) $ 93,020 $ 84,467 $ 177,487 $ 222,262 $ 143,911 $ 366,173 Operating margin 7.8 % 7.1 % 14.9 % 9.4 % 6.1 % 15.5 % Net income(5) $ 18,604 $ 121,634 $ 140,238 $ 108,323 $ 178,958 $ 287,281 Diluted earnings per share $ 0.32 $ 2.38 $ 1.84 $ 4.87 Three Months Ended June 30, 2021 Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 GAAP Adjustments Non-GAAP GAAP Adjustments Non-GAAP Cost of revenues (exclusive of depreciation and amortization)(2) $ 583,728 $ (11,261) $ 572,467 $ 1,103,056 $ (22,378) $ 1,080,678 Selling, general and administrative expenses(3) $ 151,910 $ (14,744) $ 137,166 $ 288,299 $ (30,122) $ 258,177 Income from operations(4) $ 125,274 $ 29,966 $ 155,240 $ 232,525 $ 59,601 $ 292,126 Operating margin 14.2 % 3.4 % 17.6 % 14.0 % 3.6 % 17.6 % Net income(5) $ 114,671 $ 6,467 $ 121,138 $ 223,717 $ 3,621 $ 227,338 Diluted earnings per share $ 1.94 $ 2.05 $ 3.80 $ 3.86 Items (2) through (5) above are detailed in the table below with the specific cross-reference noted in the appropriate item. Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 Stock-based compensation expense $ 14,732 $ 11,261 $ 14,308 $ 22,378 Humanitarian support in Ukraine (a) 3,279 - 22,435 - Unbilled business continuity resources (b) 9,261 - 11,831 - Discretionary compensation (c) - - (21,356) - Total adjustments to GAAP cost of revenues(2) 27,272 11,261 27,218 22,378 Stock-based compensation expenses 13,161 12,637 20,697 26,073 Other acquisition-related expenses 91 2,099 670 4,032 One-time charges 2,513 8 3,876 17 Humanitarian support in Ukraine (a) 5,088 - 11,588 - Geographic repositioning (d) 14,366 - 33,072 - Russia long-lived asset impairment charges (e) - - 19,570 - Russia business restructuring (f) 16,220 - 16,220 - Total adjustments to GAAP selling, general and administrative expenses(3) 51,439 14,744 105,693 30,122 Amortization of acquired intangible assets 5,756 3,961 11,000 7,101 Total adjustments to GAAP income from operations(4) 84,467 29,966 143,911 59,601 Change in fair value of contingent consideration included in Interest and other income, net 2,733 (692) 6,106 (5,636) Impairment of financial asset - - 1,300 - Foreign exchange loss 85,941 4,693 108,726 2,394 Provision for income taxes: Tax effect on non-GAAP adjustments (36,930) (6,525) (53,399) (10,259) Excess tax benefits related to stock-based compensation (7,382) (20,975) (20,491) (42,479) Net discrete benefit from tax planning (g) (7,195) - (7,195) - Total adjustments to GAAP net income(5) $ 121,634 $ 6,467 $ 178,958 $ 3,621 (a) Humanitarian support in Ukraine includes expenses related to EPAM's $100 million humanitarian commitment in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine to support EPAM professionals and their families in and displaced from Ukraine. These expenses are incremental to those expenses incurred prior to the crisis, clearly separable from normal operations, and not expected to recur once the crisis has subsided and operations return to normal. (b) Given the uncertainty in the region introduced by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, EPAM has assigned delivery employees in locations outside of the region to ensure the continuity of delivery for customers who have substantial delivery exposure to Ukraine or other delivery concerns resulting from the invasion. These employees are not billed to clients and operate largely in a standby or backup capacity. These expenses are incremental to those expenses incurred prior to the crisis, clearly separable from normal operations, and not expected to recur once the crisis has subsided and operations return to normal. (c) Discretionary compensation includes the reduction of previously accrued amounts associated with the Company's variable compensation program for the year ended December 31, 2021. This adjustment was made in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and is not expected to recur in the future. (d) Geographic repositioning includes expenses associated with the Company's accelerated efforts to relocate employees in Russia and Belarus to other countries and includes the cost of accommodations, travel and food. These expenses are incremental to those expenses incurred prior to the crisis, clearly separable from normal operations, and not expected to recur once the crisis has subsided and operations return to normal. (e) As a result of the Company's decision to no longer serve customers in Russia, the Company incurred impairment charges for long-lived assets in Russia including charges of $15.1 million associated with property and equipment, $3.8 million associated with right-of-use assets and $0.7 million associated with goodwill for the six months ended June 30, 2022. Consistent with the Company's historical non-GAAP policy, impairment charges have been excluded from non-GAAP results as these are one-time and unusual in nature. (f) As a result of the Company's decision to no longer serve customers in Russia and begin the process of a phased exit of its operations in Russia, the Company incurred charges associated with employee separation. Consistent with the Company's historical non-GAAP policy, employee separation costs incurred in connection with formal restructuring initiatives have been excluded from non-GAAP results as these are one-time and unusual in nature. (g) A one-time benefit related to the implementation of tax planning to disregard certain foreign subsidiaries as separate entities for U.S. income tax purposes. Consistent with the Company's historical non-GAAP policy, the benefit related to the implementation of tax planning has been excluded from non-GAAP results as it is one-time and unusual in nature. EPAM SYSTEMS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Reconciliations of Guidance Non-GAAP Financial Measures to Comparable GAAP Financial Measures (Unaudited) The below guidance constitutes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws and is based on a number of assumptions that are subject to change and many of which are outside the control of the Company. Actual results may differ materially from the Company's expectations depending on factors discussed in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reconciliation of expected revenue growth on a GAAP basis to expected revenue growth on a constant currency basis is presented in the table below: Third Quarter 2022 Revenue growth (at least) 22 % Foreign exchange rates impact 4 % Revenue growth on a constant currency basis (at least) (6) 26 % (6) Constant currency revenue results are calculated by translating expected revenues in local currency into U.S. dollars at the weighted average exchange rates of the comparable prior period. Reconciliation of expected GAAP to non-GAAP income from operations as a percentage of revenues is presented in the table below: Third Quarter 2022 GAAP income from operations as a percentage of revenues 9.5% to 10.5% Stock-based compensation expenses 3.1 % Included in cost of revenues (exclusive of depreciation and amortization) 1.6 % Included in selling, general and administrative expenses 1.5 % Humanitarian support in Ukraine (a) 0.6 % Unbilled business continuity resources (b) 0.3 % Geographic repositioning (d) 0.6 % One-time charges 0.3 % Other acquisition-related expenses 0.1 % Amortization of purchased intangible assets 0.5 % Non-GAAP income from operations as a percentage of revenues 15% to 16% Reconciliation of expected GAAP to non-GAAP effective tax rate is presented in the table below: Third Quarter 2022 GAAP effective tax rate (approximately) 19 % Tax effect on non-GAAP adjustments 2.1 % Excess tax benefits related to stock-based compensation 0.9 % Non-GAAP effective tax rate (approximately) 22 % Reconciliation of expected GAAP to non-GAAP diluted earnings per share is presented in the table below: Third Quarter 2022 GAAP diluted earnings per share (at least) $ 1.65 Stock-based compensation expenses 0.64 Included in cost of revenues (exclusive of depreciation and amortization) 0.34 Included in selling, general and administrative expenses 0.30 Humanitarian support in Ukraine (a) 0.12 Unbilled business continuity resources (b) 0.06 Geographic repositioning (d) 0.14 One-time charges 0.09 Other acquisition-related expenses 0.01 Amortization of purchased intangible assets 0.10 Provision for income taxes: Tax effect on non-GAAP adjustments (0.23) Excess tax benefits related to stock-based compensation (0.10) Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share (at least) $ 2.48 Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1872293/D528_Q2_2022_PR_final.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/722474/EPAM_Logo.jpg LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / August 4, 2022 / Marijuana Company of America, Inc. (OTC PINK:MCOA) ("the Company"), which operates, invests, and acquires companies in the cannabis sector; today announced that the Company's subsidiary, cDistro distribution has signed a Master Distribution Agreement with Miami-based Kind Grade, a multi-brand cannabis beverage company that created "Cool Out" Delta 8 Seltzers. The agreement covers the launch and distribution of Cool Out Delta 8 Seltzers in the growing cannabis beverage space. cDistro distributes THC - free cannabis brands and smoke and vape shop-related products to wholesalers, c-stores, specialty retailers, and consumers in North America. The Master Distribution Agreement is for cDistro to launch and distribute Kind Grade's Cool Out line of Delta 8 beverage products that offer a light, low-key way to unwind body and mind. The launch will include a portfolio of three different SKUs: Cool Out Citrus, Mixed Berry, and Tropical flavors. All Cool Out Delta 8 Infused Seltzers are offered in 12oz cans infused with 10mg of Delta 8, so one can easily regulate the quantity that's right for them. In addition, all Cool Out beverages are made with no sugar, no carbs, are gluten-free, and have zero calories. Kevin Chipman and Chirag Vyas, the founders of Kind Grade, have 18 years of beverage experience building their craft brewery (St. John Brewers) in the Virgin Islands. Since starting their brewery in 2004, they have created a wide range of products, including hazy IPAs, stouts, hard seltzers, and craft sodas. The duo enjoys cannabis, and their goal in creating Cool Out is to bring more hemp-based drinks into the American beverage culture. "We feel beverages are the best way to enjoy cannabis over other edibles in social settings or to unwind after a day of work, and to be able to chat with friends while enjoying a delicious beverage that helps you relax is a win-win," says Vyas, Co-Founder of Kind Grade. "MCOA's cDistro continues to offer distribution and marketing for innovative products with a strategy to build long-term value proving an excellent fit for our services." Jesus Quintero, MCOA CEO, said, "We are excited about the prospect of offering Cool Out products through our cDistro distribution channels. The Cool Out beverages will resonate well with consumers and generate rapid traction in the markets we intend to bring them to." In addition, MCOA CEO, Jesus Quintero, said, "We continue to build up our distribution product portfolio, and we are excited to initiate our distribution and marketing efforts on behalf of Cool Out. The cannabis beverage industry offers many exciting distribution opportunities for MCOA and cDistro. "Consumers who are just starting out using cannabis products are looking for accessible, discreet, and regulated amounts of substance, which in turn continues to drive market growth in this cannabis category." Grand View Research states, "The global cannabis beverages market size is expected to reach USD $2.8 billion by 2025." Experimentation is the best part of making beer, and the transition to hemp-based drinks has been fun to explore with new ingredients and flavor profiles," said Kevin Chipman, Co-Founder of Kind Grade. Chipman added, "Cannabis beverages offer a familiar form factor that consumers are gravitating toward and effect-related benefits such as fast-acting effects. We are thrilled to establish this important partnership with cDistro, who will market and distribute our products to their vast network." For more details and information about the Cool Out brand of hemp-derived beverages, please visit: www.drinkcoolout.com. About Marijuana Company of America, Inc. MCOA is a vertically integrated cannabis company whose core mission is to expand and innovate in the cannabis sector by developing its portfolio of cannabis assets through acquisitions of distressed cannabis companies strategically aligned with our blueprint for business development. This strategy drives innovation, pace, cooperative management, and capital efficiency to optimize growth opportunities and long-term investments. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains "forward-looking statements," which are not purely historical and may include statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions regarding the future. Such forward-looking statements include, among other things, the development, costs, and results of new business opportunities and words such as "anticipate," "seek," "intend," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "project," "plan," or similar phrases may be deemed "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. Such factors include, among others, the inherent uncertainties associated with new projects, the future U.S. and global economies, the impact of competition, and the Company's" reliance on existing regulations regarding the use and development of cannabis-based products. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and we assume no obligation to update the forward-looking statements or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Although we believe that any beliefs, plans, expectations, and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that any such beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions will prove to be accurate. Investors should consult all of the information set forth herein and should also refer to the risk factors disclosure outlined in our annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other periodic reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For more information, please visit www.marijuanacompanyofamerica.com or visit www.sec.gov. CONTACT: info@marijuanacompanyofamerica.com info@mcoainvestments.com 888-777-4362 SOURCE: Marijuana Company of America Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/710814/MCOA-Distributor-Signs-Master-Agreement-with-Kind-Grades-Cool-Out-Delta-8-Seltzer-Product-Portfolio Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Cabral Gold Inc. (TSXV: CBR) (OTC: CBGZF) ("Cabral" or the "Company") is pleased to provide assay results from eleven new trenches excavated along strike and immediately west of the previously drilled Machichie Main zone within the Cuiu Cuiu gold district. Highlights are as follows: Trench CT0049 returned 96.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold including; 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold, including 0.5m @ 77.3 g/t gold including 1.1m @ 5.4 g/t gold, including 0.5m @ 11.6 g/t gold Trench CT0045 returned 138m @ 0.5 g/t gold including three distinct higher-grade zones: 8m @ 1.5 g/t gold 15m @ 1.7 g/t gold 2m @ 8.9 g/t gold including three distinct higher-grade zones: Other notable intercepts include 0.7m @ 11.3 g/t gold in trench CT0040, 1.6m @ 6.6 g/t gold in trench CT0041 and 0.5m @ 10.9 g/t gold in trench CT0047 All of the Machichie West trenches encountered gold mineralization in weathered bedrock, and cut multiple mineralized structures within a 500m x 300m area indicating the presence of a large new mineralized area on the western side of the east-trending Machichie Main zone Alan Carter, Cabral's President and CEO commented, "These recent trench results are highly significant for three reasons. Firstly, they indicate that the east-trending Machichie Main zone can be traced for at least 350m west of previous drilling, significantly increasing the strike extent, and in particular extending the high-grade zone previously identified in recent trenching. The Machichie Main zone remains open to the west. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, these results suggest the presence of a large new mineralized body in intrusive rocks comprising a swarm or array of numerous gold-bearing quartz veins and veinlets. Trenching suggests that this new zone is northeast-trending parallel to the general trend of the veins. The array extends over an area of at least 500 x 300m, and includes the previously identified Machichie SW veins. This mineralized area remains open in every direction. Finally, the trenching program suggests a significant amount of oxide material has likely resulted from the weathering of this new mineralized zone which should add to the overall inventory of gold-in-oxide mineralization, which already includes three gold-in-oxide blankets discovered thus far at Cuiu Cuiu". Machichie West Trench Results The Machichie target is located 500m north-west of the MG gold deposit (Figure 1). Previous drilling at the Machichie Main zone identified a persistent mineralized zone which is east-trending and dips steeply to the north. This main zone consists of a high-grade core zone surrounded by a low-grade alteration envelope which is similar in style to the primary bedrock gold deposits at MG and Central, as well as the recently announced PDM basement discovery. Figure 1: Map showing the location of the Central and MG gold deposits, the recent discoveries at PDM and Machichie, the three oxide blankets and the new Machichie West area. Other key gold targets are shown as yellow circles To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/3900/132827_da6a1cb9c46a088f_002full.jpg The immediately adjacent Machichie SW target comprises an array of narrow steep-dipping, northeast-trending structures that have returned some very high-grade intercepts, which had been recognized to the southwest of the Machichie Main zone. These veins were initially only recognized south of the Machichie main zone, but trenching has now identified multiple parallel and north-east trending mineralized vein structures immediately north of the Machichie Main zone. This suggests the presence of a much more extensive sheeted vein array than previously envisaged covering an area of 300 x 500m and open in three directions. Table 1 summarizes the results from all eleven recent trenches excavated in the new Machichie West area. The following discusses some of the more significant results and observations. Trench CT0049 Trench CT0049, was excavated in a northwest direction on the extreme west of the main Machichie mineralized zone (Figure 2), approximately 50m west of the trench CT0035A which returned 5m @ 8.3 g/t gold including 1m @ 37.8 g/t gold (see press release dated February 2, 2022). Trench CT0049 was characterized by numerous veins and veinlets within broad zones of hydrothermal alteration. The trench averaged 96.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold and mineralization remains open across strike to the south. Several higher-grade zones are evident within this trench (Table 1, Figure 2) and are associated with zones of more intense veining. These returned: 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold (open to the south) including 0.5m @ 77.3 g/t gold 1.5m @ 1.2 g/t gold 1.1m @ 5.4 g/t gold 1.6m @ 0.6 g/t gold The 7.7m higher-grade intercept is 50m west of the high-grade mineralization that was cut in trench CT0035A which returned 5m @ 8.3 g/t gold. Based on vein orientations and structures evident in both trenches, it is almost certainly the same zone, and is now interpreted to represent the western extension to the east-trending Machichie Main zone. The intercept in CT0049 of 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold starts from the beginning of the trench and is open to the south indicting that the higher-grade zone may be wider than the mineralized interval suggests. Furthermore, CT0049 is the westernmost trench excavated to date in the Machichie West zone indicating that both the Machichie Main zone and the Machichie West vein array are open to the west. Trench CT0045 Trench CT0045, was excavated 50-100m east of trench CT49. It is oriented in a north-south, and occurs immediately north of CT0035A (Figure 2).This trench was designed to test for the presence of more northeast-trending veins. The trench returned 138m @ 0.5 g/t gold. Several of the more significant intervals of gold mineralization displayed northeast-trending foliations, fractures, and vein structures similar to veins in the Machichie SW area. Higher-grade intervals in Trench CT0045 include: 2m @ 8.9 g/t gold 0.5m @ 3.9 g/t gold 8m @ 1.5 g/t gold 15m @ 1.7 g/t gold Other Trenches Three other trenches were excavated along the surface projection of the interpreted western extension of the Machichie Main Zone. Trenches CT0040 and CT0041 returned 0.7m @ 11.3 g/t gold and 1.6m @ 6.6 g/t gold, respectively, and are located approximately 150m east of trench CT0035A. CT0042 was also excavated on the projection of the main Machichie structure immediately east of trench CT0041 and returned 4m @ 1.5 g/t gold with the mineralized intercept being open across strike, and of unknown width. Two short trenches CT0046 and CT0047 were developed to the north and each cut narrow high-grade structures. These trenches returned 1.1m @ 3.5 g/t gold and 0.5m @ 10.9 g/t gold respectively. All of the other trenches excavated on the western side of Machichie are mineralized along their entire length and include; CT0038A 112m @ 0.4 g/t gold CT0036 34.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold CT0045 138m @ 0.5 g/t gold CT0049 96.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold CT0044 90m @ 0.2g/t gold Figure 2: Detailed map showing the E-W trending Machichie Main and the NE-SW trending veins of the Machichie SW target. The Machichie West Vein array comprising an area of 300 x 500m is also shown and is coincident with a magnetic low (blue background). Current and recent trench results are shown, as is the outline of the main mineralized structures identified to date (yellow) To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/3900/132827_da6a1cb9c46a088f_003full.jpg Trench Weathering Length of Trench From to Width Grade # m m m m g/t gold CT0039 Oxide 12.5 13.0 0.5 2.3 42.0 CT0040 Oxide 3.0 3.7 0.7 11.3 6.7 CT0041 Oxide 3.0 4.6 1.6 6.6 6.6 CT0042 Oxide 3.0 7.0 4.0 1.5 7.0 CT0043 Oxide 14.0 15.4 1.4 0.4 24.0 34.0 10.0 0.4 34.0 CT0044 Oxide 0.0 90.0 90.0 0.2 incl. 7.0 12.0 5.0 0.7 and 44.5 45.2 0.7 1.6 and 67.5 68.5 1.0 1.7 90.0 CT0045 Oxide 0.0 138.0 138.0 0.5 incl. 18.0 20.0 2.0 8.9 incl. 18.7 19.2 0.5 35.0 and 43.2 43.7 0.5 3.9 and 74.0 82.0 8.0 1.5 and 90.7 93.0 2.3 0.4 and 102.5 117.5 15.0 1.7 incl. 116.5 117.0 0.5 41.8 138.0 CT0046 Oxide 2.5 3.6 1.1 3.5 12.0 CT0047 Oxide 9.0 9.5 0.5 10.9 12.0 CT0048 Oxide 26.0 32.0 6.0 1.3 86.0 CT0049 Oxide 0.0 96.5 96.5 0.6 incl. 0.0 7.7 7.7 5.8 incl. 6.5 7.0 0.5 77.3 and 12.5 14.0 1.5 1.2 and 32.4 33.5 1.1 5.4 incl. 32.4 32.9 0.5 11.6 and 93.2 94.8 1.6 0.6 96.5 Table 1: Gold values in trenches CT0039 to CT0049 from Machichie / Machichie West area Interpretation The trenching program immediately west of Machichie was initially designed to test the western extension of the main east-trending Machichie Main zone and has been very successful in that regard, with trench CT0035A returning 5m @ 8.3 g/t gold. That trench is located 300m along strike and due west of the most westerly drill hole. Trench CT0049 was excavated 50m further west and returned 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold (open) including 0.5m @ 77.3 g/t gold suggesting that the mineralized zone at Machichie extends at least 900m along strike. Whilst drilling will be required to confirm the down-dip extent of the western extension to the Machichie Main zone, previous and ongoing drilling in the central and eastern part of the Machichie Main zone, as well as geological considerations, suggest that gold mineralization should extend to depth. A number of northeast-trending individual veins are known to exist immediately south of the Machichie structure and comprise the Machichie SW target. Whilst drilling thus far has been limited, individual veins have returned high-grade intercepts, e.g. 3.4m @ 36.9 g/t gold, including 0.7m @ 162.7 g/t gold in DDH182 (see press release dated February 28, 2019). The recent trenching program identified numerous new northeast-trending veins in weathered intrusive rock to north of the Machichie Main zone. The density of these veins and veinlets within the weathered intrusive host rock appears to increase steadily to the west and to the north. The extensive low-grade values that were encountered in most trenches include zones of higher grade (Table 1). These are comparable with the gold values from the recently identified gold-in-oxide zones at MG, PDM and Central suggesting that the Machichie area could contain a significant amount of additional oxide material in weathered basement. Since this oxide material occurs in structures within weathered and oxidized intrusive rocks, the mineralization is expected to continue below the weathering profile into the hard underlying intrusive rocks, although drilling will be required to confirm. The northeast-trending vein swarm has now been traced over an area that is 500m northeast to southwest, and over 300m northwest to southeast, and is open along strike to the northeast, southwest, and across strike to the northwest and at depth. It is also coincident with a magnetic low. Magnetic lows are characteristic of all of the known gold deposits at Cuiu Cuiu. The size and intensity of the veining noted from the recent trenches at Machichie West suggests that it could be a major new mineralized body. Drilling / Resource Update Results are pending on 12 diamond-drill holes at MG. Results for 21 RC holes are also pending at PDM. Results are pending on 14 follow-up diamond-drill holes at Machichie. Results are also pending on 6 diamond-drill holes at the Indio target and additional drilling is planned. The preparation of an updated resource estimate for the Cuiu Cuiu project is in progress. The NI 43-101 estimate is being carried out by SLR Consulting (Canada) Ltd. and is expected to be completed during August. About Cabral Gold Inc. The Company is a junior resource company engaged in the identification, exploration and development of mineral properties, with a primary focus on gold properties located in Brazil. The Company has a 100% interest in the Cuiu Cuiu gold district located in the Tapajos Region, within the state of Para in northern Brazil. Two gold deposits have so far been defined at Cuiu Cuiu and contain 43-101 compliant Indicated resources of 5.9Mt @ 0.90g/t (200,000 oz) and Inferred resources of 19.5Mt @ 1.24g/t (800,000 oz). The Tapajos Gold Province is the site of the largest gold rush in Brazil's history producing an estimated 30 to 50 million ounces of placer gold between 1978 and 1995. Cuiu Cuiu was the largest area of placer workings in the Tapajos and produced an estimated 2Moz of placer gold historically. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: "Alan Carter" President and Chief Executive Officer Cabral Gold Inc. Tel: 604.676.5660 Guillermo Hughes, MAusIMM and FAIG., a consultant to the Company as well as a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, supervised the preparation of the technical information in this news release. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as such term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-looking Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively "forward-looking statements"). The use of the words "will", "expected" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. This news release contains forward-looking statements and assumptions pertaining to the following: strategic plans and future operations, and results of exploration. Actual results achieved may vary from the information provided herein as a result of numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors. The Company believes the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. Notes Gold analysis has been conducted by SGS method FAA505 (fire assay of 50g charge), with higher grade samples checked by FAA525. Analytical quality is monitored by certified references and blanks. Until dispatch, samples are stored under the supervision the Company's exploration office. The samples are couriered to the assay laboratory using a commercial contractor. Pulps are returned to the Company and archived. Drill holes results are quoted as down-hole length weighted intersections. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132827 According to a royal specialist, Prince Andrew's ambitions of re-entering the royal fold would be shattered when Prince Charles becomes king. Prince Andrew's ambitions of re-entering the royal fold would be shattered when Prince Charles becomes king. Even though the Duke of York's reputation has been severely harmed as a result of the sex scandal, he is said to have a strong connection with the Queen and has made efforts to return to the center of royal life. Prince Andrew Expected to Use Daughter to Regain Royal Spot Due to his connections with millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, he was deprived of royal titles and is no longer a functioning member of the family. Earlier this year, Prince Andrew resolved a legal lawsuit for sexual assault brought against him by Virginia Giuffre for an unspecified sum estimated to be in the neighborhood of $12 million. The charges have been continually refuted by the Duke of York. It has been reported that Andrew is attempting to re-enter the royal family through his two children, but royal expert Jonathan Sacerdoti believes this is improbable, as per Mirror. Read Also: Johhny Depp-Amber Heard Unsealed Docs: Revelations from Actress Being Former Escort, Actor's Erectile Dysfunction, and More! Prince Andrew Photo Would "Shake The Monarchy" Meanwhile, Prince Andrew was reportedly recorded laughing his head off during a 2019 interview in which he refuted charges of raping an underage girl because he felt it had gone quite well. The image has not been released, but the BBC photographer who took it stated that releasing it would embarrass the royal family. Former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister's book on the notorious interview will include the photograph. A film based on the interview is also expected to be released. Mark Harrison, the photographer who took the photo, worked for the BBC on the night of Prince Andrew's catastrophic 'Newsnight' interview. He has previously stated that if the snap was implemented, it would disturb the monarchy. Prince Andrew discussed his acquaintance, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in an interview with Emily Maitlis on 'Newsnight.' The producers of the next film may reproduce their version of the photograph as a dramatization. According to the Daily Mail, a person close to the 'Newsnight' interview who has seen the original image indicated that if it got public, it would be quite stunning if it was decontextualized. For the uninitiated, Prince Andrew was accused of sexual assault by Epstein's victim, Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre said that she was forced to be sexually exploited by Epstein's adult male colleagues, including royalty, politicians, professors, business owners, and other professional and personal contacts." Giuffre sued Prince Andrew for sexual assault in London, New York, and on Epstein's private Caribbean island. After the two struck an agreement, the lawsuit was finally dropped on March 8, this year. The lawsuit was effectively resolved earlier this year when Manhattan federal court Judge Lewis A Kaplan signed a dismissing agreement. According to the court statement, Guiffre and Prince Andrew will bear their legal costs and fees. Earlier last month, Prince Andrew was embroiled in another issue after the attorneys for an alleged victim of Epstein threatened to serve him with legal documents. Representatives for the accused victim, Caroline Kaufman, said Andrew was visiting the convicted financier's house in New York on the night Kaufman, now 28, said she was assaulted by Epstein. The alleged attack occurred in December of 2010. Kaufman had stated that she had felt suicidal after being raped by Epstein. She also claimed that being smacked in the face by the millionaire caused her to acquire osteomyelitis, a dangerous bone condition. According to reports, the condition produces severe discomfort and muscular spasms. Andrew has been asked by Kaufman's lawyers to make a statement as a prospective witness to events that occurred in the Upper East Side townhouse during his visit. However, Andrew is not accused of any misconduct in the civil complaint. It also does not state if he was aware of any attack on Kaufman, who was 17 at the time, Meaww reported. Related Article: Queen Elizabeth II Warns Against Mentioning Royal Family in Prince Harry's Memoir; Duke of Sussex Refuses To Share Details with Prince Charles @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - While reporting second-quarter results on Thursday, Cigna Corporation (CI) said it now expects 2022 adjusted income from operations per share of at least $22.90, up $0.30 from prior guidance. Adjusted revenues are now estimated to be at least $178 billion, an increase of $1 billion from prior guidance. The outlook includes the impact of expected future share repurchases and anticipated 2022 dividends. Second quarter earnings totaled $1.56 billion, or $4.90 per share compared with $1.47 billion, or $4.25 per share, last year. Excluding items, adjusted earnings was $1.98 billion or $6.22 per share for the period. Analysts on average had expected the company to earn $5.48 per share, according to figures compiled by Thomson Reuters. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. The company's revenue for the quarter rose 5.4% to $45.43 billion from $43.11 billion last year. For more earnings news, earnings calendar, and earnings for stocks, visit rttnews.com. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. 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. RoslinCT and Lykan Bioscience Combine to Create Leading Advanced Cell Therapy CDMO Combination creates global leader in process development and GMP manufacturing ofadvanced cell and gene therapies with transatlantic footprint in the US and UK Key leadership, staff and shareholders of both businesses will remain and have reinvested in the new entity, with a shared strategic vision for growth EDINBURGH, UK AND HOPKINTON, MA, 4August 2022 - RoslinCT, a cell and gene therapy Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation ('CDMO') developing life-changing therapies in Edinburgh's BioQuarter, and Lykan Bioscience ('Lykan'), an innovative CDMO focused on cell-based therapies, today announce that they have entered into a business combination agreement to form a global leading innovative advanced therapies CDMO. The combined group will offer process development expertise and cGMP manufacturing for a broad range of autologous and allogeneic cell therapies, with unparalleled expertise in gene editing and industry-leading induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (iPSC) capabilities. The group will benefit from significantly expanded capacity, with process and analytical development laboratories and cGMP manufacturing facilities in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Lykan has a 64,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art cell therapy manufacturing facility and innovation/development laboratories with 16 cGMP processing suites running by the end of 2022. Further laboratory and cGMP capacity expansion in Scotland is planned to build on RoslinCT's existing 40,000 sq. ft facilities, including 8 cGMP suites. With demand for high-quality development and manufacturing capacity increasing across the world, this complementary pairing of RoslinCT and Lykan will shorten development and manufacturing timelines for advanced therapy sponsors, facilitating clinical and commercial GMP product release on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier in 2022, Global Healthcare Opportunities, or GHO Capital Partners LLP ("GHO"), the European specialist investor in global healthcare, announced its investment in RoslinCT. As part of the new agreement, GHO is making a majority investment in Lykan and is backing the funding of the combined entity. WindRose Health Investors, previously the majority owner of Lykan Bioscience, have reinvested in the new combined group along with Lykan Management. RoslinCT CEO Peter Coleman and Lykan President & CEO Patrick Lucy will remain in their current roles. Together, the new entity will have a global headcount of ~300 employees. Peter Coleman, Chief Executive Officer of RoslinCT said:"This combination puts usin a strong position as a leading global CDMO in the process development and manufacturing of advanced cell therapies, and we look forward to working with our new colleagues at Lykan to fuel future growth and meet the increasing demand forinnovative therapies." Patrick Lucy, President & Chief Executive Officer of Lykan Bioscience, commented:"We are delighted to combine with RoslinCT to better servethe growing demand for manufacturing capacity and expand the range of innovative services we can provide our partners to support the development of advanced cell and gene therapies." The Partners at GHO Capital, said, "This is a significant step towards the realisation of our shared ambition for RoslinCT and Lykan to builda leading global CDMO in the development and manufacture of advanced cell therapies.The collaboration represents an important step in the continued growth and internationalisation of the two businesses and we look forward to partnering with the combined Management teams and WindRose Health Investors to realise this vision." CJ Burnes, Partner at WindRose Health Investors, said,"Lykan has grown tremendously during our ownership, including completion of their state-of-the art facility and the subsequent doubling of cGMP manufacturing capacity. The combination of RoslinCT and Lykan will further accelerate this growth as it creates a unique platform providing key value-added services to the highly complex segment of advanced cell therapies and we look forward to partnering with GHO, RoslinCT and Lykan Management through this next phase." Advisors Ropes & Gray and Slaughter & May acted as legal advisors to GHO, Alvarez & Marsal as financial and tax advisor, Dark Horse Consulting Group as technical advisor and ERM as ESG advisor. McDermott Will & Emery LLP acted as legal advisor to Lykan, and William Blair & Company served as financial advisor. ENDS About RoslinCT RoslinCT is a leading UK Cell Therapy Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation. About Lykan Bioscience Lykan Bioscience is an innovative contract development and manufacturing services organization About GHO Capital Global Healthcare Opportunities, or GHO Capital Partners LLP, is a leading specialist healthcare investment advisor based in London. We apply global capabilities and perspectives to unlock high growth healthcare opportunities, targeting Pan-European and transatlantic internationalisation to build market leading businesses of strategic global value. Our proven investment track record reflects the unrivalled depth of our industry expertise and network. We partner with strong management teams to generate long-term sustainable value, improving the efficiency of healthcare delivery to enable better, faster, more accessible healthcare. For further information, please visit www.ghocapital.com About WindRose Health Investors WindRose makes equity investments in companies that operate within the services sectors of the healthcare industry. The firm focuses on companies with profitable business models and a demonstrated ability to deliver cost-effective solutions. WindRose manages over $2.6 billion in investments. WindRose is based in New York City. For more information, please email us at info@windrose.com. INDIANAPOLIS (dpa-AFX) - Eli Lilly and Company (LLY) has lowered its 2022 reported EPS guidance by $0.34 to now be in the range of $6.96 to $7.11 and lowered non-GAAP EPS guidance by $0.25 to now be in the range of $7.90 to $8.05. The company said the $0.25 reduction in the non-GAAP EPS range is driven entirely from the impact of foreign exchange rates. The company still anticipates 2022 revenue to be between $28.8 billion and $29.3 billion. This includes an additional $400 million of unfavorability from foreign exchange rates, offset by additional revenue from the COVID-19 antibody, bebtelovimab. The additional revenue from bebtelovimab is inclusive of $275 million from the U.S. government purchase agreement announced in June 2022 as well as estimated revenue from the commencement of non-U.S. government distribution. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to report profit per share of $8.08 on revenue of $28.27 billion. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. On a non-GAAP basis, second quarter net income and EPS were $1.13 billion and $1.25, respectively, compared with $1.68 billion and $1.85, a year ago. The company noted that second quarter 2022 non-GAAP EPS was inclusive of $0.46 of acquired IPR&D and development milestone charges, compared with $0.04 in prior year. On average, eight analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $1.68, for the quarter. Net income and earnings per share were $952.5 million and $1.05, respectively, compared with $1.39 billion and $1.53, last year. Worldwide revenue was $6.49 billion, a decrease of 4% from a year ago, driven by an 11% decrease due to lower realized prices and a 3% decrease from the unfavorable impact of foreign exchange rates, partially offset by a 10% increase in volume. Excluding revenue from Alimta, which lost exclusivity in major markets, sale of the rights to Cialis in China in second quarter 2021, and COVID-19 antibodies, worldwide revenue increased 6%, for the quarter. Analysts on average had estimated $6.67 billion in revenue. 'The inclusion of acquired in-process research and development and development milestone charges in our non-GAAP results will continue to impact comparisons to prior years,' Lilly CFO Anat Ashkenazi noted. Also, Eli Lilly said the FDA has accepted, with Priority Review designation, donanemab for Alzheimer's disease for review under the accelerated approval pathway. The FDA accepted, with Priority Review designation, pirtobrutinib for mantle cell lymphoma for patients previously treated with a BTK inhibitor for review under the accelerated approval pathway. Shares of Eli Lilly are down 4% in pre-market trade on Thursday. For more earnings news, earnings calendar, and earnings for stocks, visit rttnews.com. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX ELI LILLY-Aktie komplett kostenlos handeln - auf Smartbroker.de Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Ridgestone Mining Inc. (TSXV: RMI) (OTCQB: RIGMF) (FSE: 4U5) ("Ridgestone" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has amended the Guadalupe y Calvo (the "GyC Project") project agreement with Endeavour Silver, in addition providing a Corporate Update. Guadalupe y Calvo (GyC) Amended Property Option Agreement The Company is pleased to announce it has amended the property option agreement dated January 27, 2021 with Endeavour Silver Corp. to acquire a 100%-interest in the Guadalupe y Calvo project. The GyC project, which is located in the prolific Sierra Madre gold belt in Chihuahua State, Mexico, is host to NI 43-101 gold-equivalent resource of 356,000 ounces in Indicated and 460,000 ounces in Inferred. The revised agreement effectively extends the cash, share and work commitments (inclusive of any shortfalls) in Year 2 of the agreement to March 1, 2024 (from February 19, 2023). Additionally, the Year 3 commitment date has been revised to March 1, 2025 (from February 19, 2024) and Year 4 commitment date has been revised to March 1, 2026 (from February 19, 2025). The total commitments and expenditures for the entire agreement remain unchanged. "The revised agreement provides the Company with additional financial flexibility to complete, effectively extending the second-year commitments over a two-year period, and extends the overall agreement by an additional year," commented Brian Goss, Interim CEO and Director. "Given the current market conditions in addition to the logistical challenges due to COVID-19 globally, this allows us to better plan the next steps for expanding the maiden resource tabled last year." Appointment of Interim CEO The Company is pleased to announce the appointment of Brian Goss as Interim Chief Executive Officer and President, effectively immediately, given the recent resignation of Mr. George from his director and officer positions with the Company. Mr. Goss graduated from Wayne State University with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Geology in 2003, and apart from a short stint working for Kennecott Exploration during the early exploration stages of the Eagle Project in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, has been based in Northern Nevada since. On arrival in Nevada, he worked as a staff geologist for Cameco Corporation, and its subsequent spin out company, Centerra Gold Inc., where he helped contribute to the expansion of the +1-million-ounce REN gold deposit that was eventually taken over by Barrick Gold. Mr. Goss has held several other project geologist positions prior to eventually founding Rangefront Mining Services in early 2008. Brian has built Rangefront into a premier geology and mining services company that caters to a large spectrum of clients in the mining and minerals exploration industries. Mr. Jonathan George, former CEO and Director, remains President and Director of the Company's Mexican subsidiary. The Company would like to thank Jon for his efforts in the formation of the Company's property portfolio in Mexico and exploration endeavours. Proposed Share Consolidation The Company intends to seek shareholder approval, at its upcoming Annual General Meeting (the "AGM"), to consolidate its outstanding common shares on a ratio of up to 20 pre-consolidation common shares for one post-consolidation common share (the "Consolidation"). The proposed Consolidation remains subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary shareholder and regulatory approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. About Ridgestone Mining Inc. Ridgestone Mining has assembled a highly-experienced and dynamic team to explore and advance its projects in Mexico. The Guadalupe y Calvo gold-silver project, for which Ridgestone can earn a 100% interest, is host to an Indicated Resource of 356,000 gold-equivalent ounces plus an Inferred Resource of 460,000 gold-equivalent ounces. Ridgestone's 100%-owned Rebeico copper-gold project has high-grade copper and gold pervasive throughout the property with highlights including 1.56% copper plus 1.80 g/t gold intersected over 19.3 metres from surface at the New Year Zone and 2.78% copper plus 8.69 g/t gold over 2.0 metres from the Alaska Vein. For further information, please contact: Rad Rajaram - Manager Corporate Relations and Business Development Telephone: 416-732-0604 This news release contains forward-looking statements or information (collectively referred to herein as "forward-looking statements"). Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements and are not guarantees of future performance of the Company. In this news release such statements include but are not limited to any ongoing drilling programs, timing of such programs, or exploration results. No assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will occur or, if they do occur, what benefits the Company will obtain from them. These forward-looking statements reflect management's current views and are based on certain expectations, estimates and assumptions which may prove to be incorrect. A number of risks and uncertainties could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including those described in the Company's regulatory filings available on www.sedar.com. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should any of the Company's assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary in material respects from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list of risks, uncertainties and other factors is not exhaustive. Unpredictable or unknown factors not discussed could also have material adverse effects on forward-looking statements. The impact of any one factor on a particular forward-looking statement is not determinable with certainty as such factors are dependent on other factors, and the Company's course of action would depend on its assessment of the future considering all information then available. All forward-looking statements in this news release are expressly qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements. Except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements should circumstances or management's estimates or opinions change. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132798 The Best You debuts the first digital skincare experience for medical aesthetic clinics in Canada, guiding customers on their skincare journey of healthy self-image enhancement. Helsinki, Finland and Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Today, The Best You, a privately-held network of six medical aesthetic clinics in the province of Ontario, announced its partnership with Revieve, a personalized digital brand experience company working with global brands, retailers and digital service providers in the beauty, skin, health and wellness categories. Together, Revieve and The Best You will deliver a unique range of skincare products and best-in-class cosmetic treatments to the hands of consumers in one seamless experience powered by AI. The partnership marries The Best You's medical assortment of innovative products and skincare treatments to the Revieve Health-Beauty-Wellness Platform. Leveraging Revieve's virtual skin analysis functionality, clients of The Best You can now find the best products which are customized to their needs. The Best You was the first Canadian medical spa to introduce memberships in the early 2000s and the first to introduce limitless hair removal in 2021. Today, their vision continues to move the Canadian medical aesthetics industry forward by utilizing digital skincare experiences to bring more knowledge and expertise to consumers in Canada. Through this partnership, The Best You further enhances the customer experience and with the help of AI-powered technology, transforms consumers' lives using the best solution to inform individuals about their skin care needs. How does it work? The Best You and Revieve provide consumers with a 3-step journey in helping them become the best experts on their own skin. With a combination of clinical skin treatments and products, The Best You offers its clients greater flexibility and convenience whilst guiding customers throughout the journey. Visitors to The Best You's website can take or upload a selfie and answer a few questions related to their skin type, skin goals and concerns. The user is then offered personalized product recommendations based on an in-depth analysis from their photograph and the supplemental information. Revieve x The Best You To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8994/132820_6f4e83c614427825_001full.jpg This innovative approach is based on Revieve's proprietary computer vision technology and mobile skin diagnostics that analyze over 120 skin metrics from the user's face. Additionally, several dozen different expert algorithms specifically-trained to diagnose distinct skincare and beauty-related facial features from specific areas of the user's face are incorporated into this technology. Developed to provide a step-by-step guide to help users obtain personal medical diagnostics to enhance their skincare journey, the experience enables them to achieve their skin goals by automatically recommending products and treatments which match their concerns and profile data such as age, skin type and location. Revieve x The Best You To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8994/132820_6f4e83c614427825_002full.jpg "The Best You is excited to be the first medical spa in Canada to bring breakthrough AI/AR technology to the industry. This technology puts the power in the consumers' hands as they can make informed decisions about their skincare needs and receive recommendations on products that will help them achieve their skincare goals. The best part is that they can do their skin analysis from the comfort of their own homes. We are privileged to partner with Revieve whose international track records with big conglomerates in the skin care and health industry is unparalleled, " said Sebastien Charles, President and COO at The Best You. "Beauty consumers want to invest in products with multiple benefits that align with their needs and the needs of others. Brands that stand for something other than the bottom line - on a local and global level - are at the forefront of a radical change where efficacy and transparency play a critical role in their success," said Sampo Parkkinen, CEO and Founder at Revieve. "We are thrilled to partner with The Best You to create inclusive and intimate customer experiences and make beauty more accessible to customers across the country." As of today, all The Best You customers can utilize the revolutionary experience across desktop and mobile devices on all browsers. The Best You Digital Skin Advisor experience is live at https://shop.thebestyou.com/. Revieve x The Best You To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8994/132820_6f4e83c614427825_003full.jpg About Revieve Revieve is the preferred provider to brands and retailers across five continents for delivering a digitally-driven, personalized brand experience leveraging state-of-the-art AI/AR technology. Working with our partners, Revieve has transformed the customer experience for skin care and colour cosmetics through its proprietary technology, the Revieve Health-Beauty-Wellness Platform. With easy-to-use self-diagnostic modules that personalize search, product discovery and shopping experiences, Revieve's digital beauty platform delivers consumers targeted products, services and treatments. Encompassing all facets of the health, beauty, and wellness industry, Revieve's trusted powered-by modules include the AI Skincare Advisor, AI Makeup Advisor, AI Haircare Advisor, AI Suncare Advisor and AI Nutrition Advisor. The Revieve platform seamlessly integrates personalized shopping solutions, in-person and live-video consultations with health and beauty advisors, driving tangible business value by increasing consumer engagement, conversion and basket size across all digital in-store and online brand touchpoints. About The Best You The Best You has been a leading provider of safe and effective cosmetic medical, laser and surgical procedures and skin cancer management. The clinics, together with their affiliated physicians and specialists, provide private pay cosmetic procedures such as injectable neuromodulators and fillers, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) procedures, popular cosmetic surgery procedures as well as a full range of non-invasive skin care and cosmetic offerings. The Best You also carries a full range of skin care and dermatology products that are available in-clinic and on their online shop (https://shop.thebestyou.com). The clinics also provide skin cancer screening and surgical treatments which are covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) via its network SkinCancerCare.ca For more information Revieve EMEA and APAC: Kim Oguilve, kim@revieve.com and Vitalia Vasilkova, vitalia@revieve.com US: Cynthia Patoni, cynthia@apccollective.com France: Camille Dor, camille@apccollective.com LATAM: Margarita Robles-Martinez, margarita@nasci.com.mx Japan: Yusuke Mori, yusuke@revieve.com www.revieve.com The Best You Megan Goodridge, info@thebestyou.com www.thebestyou.com https://shop.thebestyou.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132820 BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - China fired several ballistic missiles into waters around northeastern and southwestern Taiwan within hours of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leaving the island nation. The Chinese military's Eastern Theater Command said the Dongfeng ballistic missiles hit their target accurately Thursday. 'The entire live-fire training mission has been successfully completed and the relevant air and sea area control is now lifted,' it said in a statement. This was part of Chinese military's planned exercises to simulate an air and sea 'blockade' around Taiwan. Cargo ships were forced to deviate their channels and dozens of flights bound for Taiwan were cancelled following the military drills. Taiwan's Defense Ministry said China sent more than 20 fighter jets across the median line in the Taiwan Strait Wednesday. The Chinese government had earlier warned that Taipei will pay a price for hosting Pelosi, who has a long history of criticizing Beijing. Her visit had irritated China, which considers the autonomous region of Taiwan as its part. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Firefighters were able to extinguish a fire that broke out on Aug. 1 in the transformation center of the Ekian solar park in Alava, Spain.From pv magazine Spain Firefighters in the city of Alava, Spain, have revealed on Twitter that they managed to extinguish a fire that broke out on the morning of Aug. 1 at the transformation center of the Ekian solar park, in the municipality of Ribera Baja. The fire did not cause significant damage to the facility. The cause of the blaze remains unknown and an investigation is now underway. The 24 MW Ekian solar park is located in the Arasur Industrial Park ... 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. HELSINKI (dpa-AFX) - The Senate has overwhelmingly endorsed the NATO Accession Protocols for Sweden and Finland. The Upper chamber of the U.S. Congress voted 95 to 1 in favor of the accession Wednesday. This marks the United States' first step in giving its approval to Finland and Sweden's NATO membership bid. The North Atlantic Council's approval of the applications for NATO membership requires ratification by the parliaments of all the countries of the 30-member bloc. With Biden signing the accession protocols, the United States will become the 23rd NATO member to ratify the two Baltic countries' membership bid. President Joe Biden thanked the members of the Senate - especially Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senators Bob Menendez and James Risch - for their leadership and for quickly advancing the ratification process, the fastest Senate process for a NATO protocol since 1981. 'This historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan U.S. commitment to NATO, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow,' Biden said in a statement. Finland and Sweden joining the Alliance will further strengthen NATO's collective security and deepen the transatlantic partnership, according to him. Biden had told Finland's President Sauli Niinisto and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson when he hosted them at the White House in May that the United States remains committed to the security of Sweden and Finland. NATO leaders took a historic decision to invite Finland and Sweden to become members of the Alliance at their summit in Madrid in June. The Protocols were signed on behalf of the United States and other Parties to the North Atlantic Treaty on July 5 in Brussels. Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which outlines NATO's Open Door policy, is part of the doctrinal foundation of the Alliance. The defense alliance currently has 30 members. A potential expansion of the defense bloc with the addition of these two countries is seen as a big political challenge by Russian President Vladimir Putin as his war to conquer Ukraine grinds ahead. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de China began its largest-ever military drills in the vicinity of Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi's turbulent trip to the island nation. Taipei referred to the island-wide military exercises as "illegitimate and irresponsible". According to Taiwan's defense ministry, China fired two Dongfeng ballistic missiles into the ocean at about 2:00 p.m. local time near Matsu 2 p.m. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) reportedly launched several Dongfeng series missiles into the waters northeast and southwest of Taiwan's main island. The PLA had earlier claimed to have launched long-range "precise attacks" into the Taiwan Strait at 1:00 pm, and social media was flooded with footage purporting to show civilians seeing projectiles allegedly launch from behind a beautiful Chinese beach in Pingtan, per The Guardian. Taiwan's Official Statement on China's Reported Missile Launch In its official statement Taiwan's foreign ministry said: "On 4 August, China launched multiple ballistic missiles into waters to the northeast and southwest of Taiwan, threatening Taiwan's national security, escalating regional tensions, and affecting regular international traffic and trade." "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of the Republic of China (Taiwan) strongly condemns the Chinese government for following the example of North Korea in wilfully test-firing missiles into waters near other countries and demands that China exercise self-restraint," it added. China fired 'multiple' ballistic missiles during drills pic.twitter.com/ezfSZvjP9y Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) August 4, 2022 Moreover, MOFA urges the world to denounce China's military intimidation of Taiwan. The ministry also requests that nations "continue to speak up in support of a free and democratic Taiwan to jointly safeguard the values of freedom and democracy", uphold the rules-based international system, and "ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific." Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party said that China's drills on the busiest international waterways and aviation routes are "irresponsible, illegitimate behavior." Read Also: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema Raises Concern on Proposed Tax Bill as Democrats Race To Get a Vote for Manchin-Backed Spending Agenda Taiwan said on Thursday that it had fired flares to drive away an unidentified aircraft - probably drones - that had flown in on Wednesday night above the area of its Kinmen islands. Beijing warned of "punishing" those who offend it, while Chinese state media called the speaker's trip an "opening salvo of war". Speaker Pelosi met with Speaker Kim Jin Pyo of the South Korean National Assembly and other senior lawmakers on Thursday to discuss regional security, economic cooperation, and climate challenges, as reported by The Independent. Tensions Could Still Rise Further The Taiwanese military would respond carefully, but Bonnie Lin, an analyst, told BBC that there was still a chance of conflict. The expert warned there is a possibility that Taiwan may try to intercept Chinese jets if they decide to fly over Taiwan's airspace, and "we could see a mid-air collision" as well as several other situations. On Wednesday, Taiwan claimed to have sent jets to warn off Chinese airplanes and to have used flares to chase away unknown aircraft over the nearby Kinmen islands. The Taiwanese government reported that several ministries have recently been the target of cyberattacks. Taiwan is talking with Japan and the Philippines to seek alternate aviation routes, and it has also asked ships to take alternate paths. Lu Shaye, Chinese ambassador to France, said on French television that after the "reunification" of Taiwan and China, Beijing will concentrate on "re-education." Related Article: Russian Official Guarantees Vladimir Putin's Participation If China Starts War Over Taiwan Issue @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Women and girls who seek to advance their STEM education have long faced incredible challenges in a field traditionally dominated by men. At the same time, recent events have highlighted the soaring population of 89.3 million refugees, displaced and stateless people around the world - almost 27% of whom are women and girls under 18. International education, and especially virtual exchange, is rarely used to address such issues, even though it can be a powerful way to broaden opportunities for marginalized groups. Helping Young Women Enter the World of STEM & Sustainability AFS Intercultural Programs, a global non-profit renowned for its intercultural exchanges has run programs funded by bp since 2011 for young people in STEM. In 2021, the two organizations launched an ambitious 5-year initiative aimed at giving 5,000 young people scholarships, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, and a particular focus on supporting young women. The AFS Global STEM Accelerator program, which launched in June 2022, is a full-scholarship, virtual exchange program designed to provide 180 young women worldwide with access to education in sustainability, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), and positive social impact. Giving Refugees Equal Access to Education The refugee crisis affects more than 89.3 million people globally, including the millions of displaced people from Syria, Venezuela, Sudan, and Myanmar. Since February 2022, the world has seen millions of Ukrainians being forced to flee their homes. The immediate public response to refugee crises is often focused on meeting urgent humanitarian needs. However, education is a basic human right that is often denied to refugee youth. This is especially true of young refugee women. It's also, according to the UNHCR , a critical part of any international refugee response. With this in mind, AFS, with support from bp, increased the number of scholarships to ensure that young refugee women were included in the AFS Global STEM Accelerator Program . Recognizing the need to execute outreach thoughtfully, AFS partnered with SPARK, an international non-governmental development organization active in 14 regions throughout the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa. For over 28 years, SPARK has created pathways for young people to rebuild their futures, and provide opportunities for youth, particularly women and refugees, to study, work and grow their own businesses in fragile communities. "Global citizenship education has to be accessible to everyone. We are so excited that we could work with bp and SPARK to make this program accessible to young people that are often excluded from these opportunities, but in reality need them the most," says Daniel Obst, AFS President and CEO. Over 1,000 applicants from 71 Countries The AFS Global STEM Accelerators program received 1,083applications from 71 countries worldwide, including applicants from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Nigeria, and Syrian refugees in Turkey. Applications were open to young women (ages 15-17.5) globally, with a keen interest in becoming changemakers in their communities. AFS allocated 20% of scholarships specifically for refugees and girls from displaced populations, whether from war, violence, or natural disaster. The 180 scholarships awarded to young women from 61 countries reflect the diversity and inclusion the program seeks to achieve: 20% of recipients identify as refugees or from displaced communities 82% of recipients identify as People of Color 51% of recipients come from low-income households 10% will be the first in their families on track to graduate from high school AFS and bp recognize that access to technology and internet connectivity is inequitable globally and are prepared to support these needs. "It is exciting to see such strong interest from these brilliant young women," says Kerry Dryburgh, EVP people & culture, bp. "With their passion to make a difference and the skills they will learn, they are future changemakers, leaders and innovators - we wish them the very best for their journey." The words of the scholarship recipients further support the claim that virtual exchange is a powerful tool for expanding access to educational opportunities. "I am from a traditional Pashtun society, where in my province girls don't even have the right to go to school. In each corner of my country, gender inequality is vivid. All these challenges give me the strength to create my own identity and to be different from my surroundings. Participating in this program will be my first step toward achieving my goal to explore the world and become someone influential in improving sustainable societies." - Harira, from Afghanistan What's Next for These Young Women The AFS Global STEM Accelerators program culminates with scholars developing social impact capstone projects and presentations that offer potential solutions to real-world challenges, with an emphasis on sustainability. Participants receive the Advanced Certificate on Global Competence for Social Impact, awarded by AFS and the University of Pennsylvania, along with official validation on their capstone projects from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Social Impact Strategy. Students' learning and capstone development is guided by a diverse facilitation team representing twelve qualified facilitators (all women) from nine countries. Upon program completion, scholars will be invited to join the alumni community offering diverse mentoring opportunities, skills development sessions, panel discussions and further development opportunities. Scholars will also be invited to participate in the AFS Youth Assembly , a global gathering of young people actively tackling the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1809272/AFS_Logo.jpg Farfetch Limited (NYSE: FTCH), the leading global platform for the luxury fashion industry, announced that the company's second quarter 2022 financial results will be released after the U.S. market close on Thursday, August 25, 2022. Farfetch will host a conference call to discuss its results at 4:30 p.m. ET the same day. The live webcast of the call, along with the company's earnings press release, can be accessed at the Farfetch Investor Relations website at www.farfetchinvestors.com. Following the call, a replay will be available at the same website. About Farfetch Farfetch Limited is the leading global platform for the luxury fashion industry. Founded in 2007 by Jose Neves for the love of fashion, and launched in 2008, Farfetch began as an e-commerce marketplace for luxury boutiques around the world. Today the Farfetch Marketplace connects customers in over 190 countries and territories with items from more than 50 countries and over 1,400 of the world's best brands, boutiques and department stores, delivering a truly unique shopping experience and access to the most extensive selection of luxury on a single platform. Farfetch's additional businesses include Browns and Stadium Goods, which offer luxury products to consumers, and New Guards Group, a platform for the development of global fashion brands. Farfetch offers its broad range of consumer-facing channels and enterprise level solutions to the luxury industry under its Luxury New Retail initiative. The Luxury New Retail initiative also encompasses Farfetch Platform Solutions, which services enterprise clients with e-commerce and technology capabilities and innovations such as Store of the Future, its connected retail solution. For more information, please visit www.farfetchinvestors.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005877/en/ Contacts: Investor Relations: Alice Ryder VP Investor Relations IR@farfetch.com Media: Susannah Clark VP Communications, Global susannah.clark@farfetch.com +44 7788 405224 Brunswick Group farfetch@brunswickgroup.com US: +1 (212) 333 3810 UK: +44 (0) 207 404 5959 Partial exercise of the Over-Allotment Option with the final amount of the Offer increased to 20.5 million Signing implementation of a liquidity contract with Portzamparc BNP Paribas Regulatory News: OKwind Group, the renewable energy self-consumption specialist announcesthe end of the stabilization period and the partial exercise by Portzamparc of the Over-Allotment Option for 83.3% in the context of its IPO on the Euronext Growth market in Paris (ISIN code: FR0013439627 Ticker symbol: ALOKW). This transaction results in the issuance of 30,810 new ordinary shares at the Offer Price of 10.81, representing a total amount of 0.3 million, bringing the size of the Offer to 20.5 million. As a result, the free float now represents approximately 21.34% of OKwind Group's share capital. The total number of shares offered in the initial public offering amounts to 1,897,345 shares, of which 1,757,466 new shares and 139,879 shares sold. End of the stabilization period The Company has received notification that Portzamparc, acting as Stabilization Agent in the context of the first admission to trading of ordinary shares of OKwind Group on Euronext Growth Paris, has carried out stabilization activities (as defined in Article 3.2(d) of Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 (the "Market Abuse Regulation")) on the following securities: Issuer: OKwind Group Securities: Ordinary shares with a par value of EUR 1.00 (ISIN: FR0013439627) Offering size: 1,866,535 ordinary shares (excluding the Over-Allotment Option) Offer price: EUR 10.81 per ordinary shares Market: Euronext Growth Paris Stabilization Agent : Portzamparc BNP Paribas The stabilization period, which started on 8 July 2022, ended on 4 August 2022. Pursuant to Article 6, paragraph 2, of the Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1052 supplementing the Market Abuse Regulation with regard to technical regulatory standards concerning the conditions applicable to buyback programs and stabilization measures, OKwind Group, on the basis of the information provided by Portzamparc, is publishing in this press release the information relating to the stabilization activities carried out by Portzamparc as Stabilization Agent: Execution date Intermediary Buy Sell Number of shares Average transaction price (in ) Lowest highest price (in ) Aggregate amount (in ) Market 08/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 3,096 10.7295 10.00 10.81 33,218.53 Euronext Growth 11/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 1,000 10.8099 10.79 10.81 10,809.90 Euronext Growth 12/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 13/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 200 10.8099 10.8/10.81 2,161.98 Euronext Growth 14/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 24 10.81 10.81 10.81 259.44 Euronext Growth 15/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 25 10.81 10.81 10.81 270.25 Euronext Growth 18/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 250 10.6188 10.61 10.81 2,654.70 Euronext Growth 19/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 85 10.7535 10.69 10.81 914.05 Euronext Growth 20/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 21/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 87 10.6785 10.60 10.81 929.03 Euronext Growth 22/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 25/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 26/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 27/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 1,147 10.81 10.81 10.81 12,399.07 Euronext Growth 28/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 29/07/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 01/08/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth 02/08/2022 Portzamparc Buy 86 10.77 10.77/10.77 926.22 Euronext Growth 03/08/2022 Portzamparc Buy 190 10.80 10.80 10.80 2,052.00 Euronext Growth 04/08/2022 Portzamparc Buy 0 0 0 0 Euronext Growth The detailed list of transactions is available on OKwind Group's website (https://www.okwind-finance.com). This press release is issued also on behalf of Portzamparc pursuant to Article 6, paragraph 2, of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1052. Breakdown of Capital and Voting Rights Following the Offering and the partial exercise of the Over-Allotment Option, the share capital and the voting rights of the Company are distributed as follows: Shareholders Numbers of shares % of capital Voting rights % of voting rights Maurice Family 1,557,295 18.92% 3,084,703 21.20% Salle Family 1,818,021 22.08% 3,594,524 24.70% Heulot Family 1,156,399 14.05% 2,286,789 15.72% Subtotal 4,531,715 55.05% 8,966,016 61.62% Christian Blais 534,596 6.49% 1,068,465 7.34% Frederic Bellanger 449,904 5.47% 898,354 6.17% Thierry Bernard 413,318 5.02% 817,185 5.62% Others 546,257 6.64% 1,043,891 7.17% Public 1,756,636 21.34% 1,756,636 12.07% Total 8,232,426 100% 14,550,547 100% Liquidity contract OKwind Group also announces that it has entrusted Portzamparc with the implementation of a liquidity contract, in accordance with the legal framework in force, and in particular with the provisions of the French Financial Markets Authority's (AMF) decision n 2021-01 of 22 June 2021. It complies with the AMAFI Charter of Ethics. This liquidity contract is concluded for a period of one year, automatically renewable, taking effect as of 5 August 2022. A sum of 200,000 in cash has been allocated to the liquidity account. Execution of the liquidity contract may be suspended: under the conditions referred to in Article 5 of the AMF decision n 2021-01 of 22 June 2021; if the share is listed outside the thresholds authorized by the Group's Shareholders' Meeting; and at any time upon OKwind Group's request, under its responsibility. The liquidity contract may be terminated at any time and without prior notice by OKwind Group at any time by Portzamparc subject to a one month notice. About Groupe OKwind Founded in 2009 by Louis Maurice, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Groupe OKwind develops solutions for the production and consumption of green energy in short supply chains. Our comprehensive approach, combining energy generation and management, aims to strengthen energy autonomy and thus accelerate the ecological transition. Thanks to its unique technological ecosystem, Groupe OKwind enables self-consumption to assert itself as a new avenue for energy. A solution that can be quickly deployed, managed in real time and at a competitive price, without subsidies. Every day, we work to deploy local, low-carbon, fixed-cost energy for professionals and individuals. In 2021, Groupe OKwind generated consolidated revenue of 25.2 million and had 131 employees, with more than 2,000 installations throughout France. For further information: https://www.okwind.fr/en/ Disclaimer This announcement is not being made in and copies of it may not be distributed or sent, directly or indirectly, into the United States of America, Canada, Australia or Japan. The distribution of this document may be restricted by law in certain jurisdictions. Persons into whose possession this document comes are required to inform themselves about and to observe any such restrictions. This press release is provided for information purposes only. It does not constitute and should not be deemed to constitute an offer to the public of securities, nor a solicitation of the public relating to an offer of any kind whatsoever in any country, including France. Potential investors are advised to read the prospectus before making an investment decision in order to fully understand the potential risks and rewards associated with the decision to invest in the securities. This announcement is an advertisement and not a prospectus within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2017 on the prospectus to be published when securities are offered to the public or admitted to trading on a regulated market, as amended (the "Prospectus Regulation"), also forming part of the domestic law in the United Kingdom by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "EUWA"). With respect to the member States of the European Economic Area and to the United Kingdom, no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of the securities referred to herein requiring a publication of a prospectus in any relevant member State other than France or the United Kingdom. As a result, the securities may not and will not be offered in any relevant member State other than France or the United Kingdom except in accordance with the exemptions set forth in Article 1(4) of the Prospectus Regulation, also forming part of the domestic law in the United Kingdom by virtue of EUWA, or under any other circumstances which do not require the publication by OKwind Group of a prospectus pursuant to Article 3(2) of the Prospectus Regulation, also forming part of the domestic law in the United Kingdom by virtue of EUWA, and/or to applicable regulations of that relevant member State or the United Kingdom. In France, an offer to the public of securities may not be made except pursuant to a prospectus that has been approved by the French Financial Markets Authority (the "AMF"). The approval of the prospectus by the AMF should not be understood as an endorsement of the securities offered or admitted to trading on a regulated market. It does not constitute an offer to purchase or to subscribe for securities in the United States or in any other jurisdiction. Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in the United States of America, Canada, Australia or Japan View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005881/en/ Contacts: Groupe OKwind Investor Relations investors@okwind.com NewCap Mathilde Bohin Thomas Grojean Investor Relations okwind@newcap.eu T.: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 94 NewCap Nicolas Merigeau Media Relations okwind@newcap.eu T.: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 98 San Francisco-based product design firm Milkinside continues to set industry standards with their extraordinary designs - and the world is again taking notice. San Francisco, California--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Milkinside recently added to its string of prestigious international awards with wins including an iF (International Forum Design GmbH), several awards from the German Design Council, and three CSS Design Awards. Milkinside's Recent Design Awards To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8535/132861_766ff75f94bac9ac_001full.jpg Milkinside founder and creative director Gleb Kuznetsov was bolstered by the recent awards, crediting the agency's big wins to their commitment to designing extraordinary user experiences. "We love what we do and have a passion for the craft," said Kuznetsov. "At Milkinside we know that this excellence is not an accident but a habit we bring to every project. These recent awards are really a validation of our collective effort." At the German Brand Convention held June 9, Milkinside received Gold for their iOS mobile app Tripset, a product of their multi-year collaboration with airplane manufacturing giant, Airbus. The design was recognized for Excellence in Brand Strategy and Creation, Brand Communication, and Digital Solutions and Apps. German Brand Award To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8535/132861_766ff75f94bac9ac_002full.jpg The German Brand Award provides acclaim and unique visibility for successful brands and design teams. The independent judges and organizers recognized the unique creations from the Milkinside team. These awards, sponsored by the non-profit German Design Council, recognize leading design excellence from around the world to help professional firms identify quality designers and improve communication for everyone involved in the design community. Milkinside's Tripset application also earned the award in the User Interface (UI) category, earning high judge's scores for Idea, Form, Function, Differentiation, and Impact from the International Forum (iF) in 2022. Milkinside's staggering 395 points total secured them this iF Design Award, their third in recent years. Tripset from Airbus To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8535/132861_766ff75f94bac9ac_003full.jpg "We've always focused first on the people that will use and engage with the digital products we design," says head of Experience Design, Jeshua Nanthakumar. "With every one of our project partners, we are looking to combine cutting-edge technology with elegance and artistry in ways that elevate the user experience, and provide moments of delight and joy." Just recently, Milkinside also took home three separate prizes from the CSS Design Awards, earning recognition for Best UI Design, Best UX Design, and Best Innovation. CSSDA is an international web design award recognizing excellence in intuitive design and interactivity. Awards are meant to recognize those teams that capture the best of what is new and exciting in web design. It has been a banner year for the team at Milkinside, adding to its roster of Fortune 100 clients while completing projects in product design, mobile application development, computer graphics, and automotive HMI. "These awards are a testament to Milkinside's commitment to creating exceptional products. We are especially adept at understanding both the user and the business needs of our project partners," says co-founder and Managing Partner Kevin Davis. "This is the alchemy that makes us great, and allows us to achieve greater excellence even as our business grows." Milkinside Brand Photo To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8535/132861_766ff75f94bac9ac_004full.jpg About Milkinside Milkinside is an award-winning global design agency intent on making the future of technology beautiful. This talented and versatile team believes that design is what transforms a technology into a product and that storytelling should be at the center of any user experience. They are headquartered in San Francisco, but always looking to hire the most talented creative professionals, wherever they may live. For more information, please visit www.milkinside.com. Contact Information: Name: Kevin Davis Company Name: Milkinside Email: interact@milkinside.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132861 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Tudor Gold Corp. (TSXV: TUD) (FSE: TUC) (the "Company" or "Tudor Gold") announced today that, further to its news releases dated July 13, 2021, February 1, 2022 and July 8, 2022 (the "Initial News Releases"), the Company obtained an interim order from the Supreme Court of British Columbia (the "Court") on August 3, 2022, authorizing the holding of its annual general and special meeting (the "Meeting") and matters relating to the conduct of the Meeting, including approval of the Arrangement (as defined below). At the Meeting, shareholders of the Company (the "Shareholders") as of the record date, being August 3, 2022 (the "Record Date"), will be asked, among other things, to consider and, if deemed advisable, pass a special resolution (the "Arrangement Resolution") to approve a spin-out transaction (the "Arrangement") in accordance with the terms of the arrangement agreement entered into by the Company and Goldstorm Metals Corp. ("Goldstorm"), its wholly-owned subsidiary, on July 6, 2021, as further amended and restated on January 31, 2022, July 8, 2022 and July 28, 2022 (the "Arrangement Agreement") by way of a statutory plan of arrangement under section 288 of the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia). Pursuant to the Arrangement, among other things: Shareholders as of the Record Date will receive approximately 0.251 of a common share of Goldstorm (a "Goldstorm Share") for every one common share of Tudor Gold held; and Goldstorm will acquire the Company's six contiguous Golden Triangle Area mineral properties, being the Mackie East, Mackie West, Fairweather, High North, Delta and Orion and Electrum properties in consideration for Goldstorm issuing 49,847,967 Goldstorm Shares to the Shareholders as of the Record Date. For further information on the Arrangement, please refer to the Initial News Releases. Additional details of the Arrangement will be included in the Company's information circular prepared in connection with the Meeting, which will be mailed on or before August 11, 2022 to Shareholders as of the Record Date. The Meeting will be held on September 7, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. (Vancouver time) at 10th Floor, 595 Howe Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6C 2T5. Assuming no adjournment or postponement to the Meeting, the cut-off time to vote by proxy will be 10:00 a.m. (Vancouver time) on September 2, 2022. The Arrangement is anticipated to be completed during the week of September 12, 2022, subject to obtaining Court, Shareholder and regulatory approval and the satisfaction of conditions set forth in the Arrangement Agreement. About Tudor Gold TUDOR GOLD Corp. is a precious and base metals exploration and development company with properties in British Columbia's Golden Triangle (Canada), an area that hosts producing and past-producing mines and several large deposits that are approaching potential development. The 17,913 hectare Treaty Creek project (in which TUDOR GOLD has a 60% interest) borders Seabridge Gold Inc.'s KSM property to the southwest and borders Pretium Resources Inc.'s Brucejack property to the southeast. In April 2021 Tudor Gold published their 43-101 technical report, "Technical Report and Initial Mineral Resource Estimate of the Treaty Creek Gold Property, Skeena Mining Division, British Columbia Canada" dated March 1, 2021 on the Company's SEDAR profile. The Company also has a 100% interest in the Crown project and a 100% interest in the Eskay North project, all located in the Golden Triangle area. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF TUDOR GOLD CORP. "Ken Konkin" Ken Konkin President and Chief Executive Officer For further information, please visit the Company's website at www.tudor-gold.com or contact: Chris Curran Head of Corporate Development and Communications Phone: (604) 559 8092 E-Mail: chris.curran@tudor-gold.com or Carsten Ringler Head of Investor Relations and Communications Phone: +49 151 55362000 E-Mail: carsten.ringler@tudor-gold.com Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information All statements, trend analysis and other information contained in this press release about anticipated future events or results constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "seek", "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect" and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, including, without limitation, statements regarding the completion of the Arrangement and the results of the Meeting are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements and/or information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements since the Company can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements, including the risks, uncertainties and other factors identified in the Company's periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators, and assumptions made with regard to: the Company's ability to complete the proposed Arrangement on the terms and conditions contemplated, or at all; the Companies' ability to secure the necessary shareholder, Court and regulatory approvals required to complete the Arrangement; the estimated costs associated with the Arrangement; the timing of the Meeting and the Arrangement, and the general stability of the economy and the industry in which the Company operates. Forward-looking statements are subject to business and economic risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results of operations to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company expectations include risks associated with the business of the Company; risks related to the satisfaction or waiver of certain conditions to the closing of the Arrangement; non-completion of the Arrangement; risks related to the Company failing to obtain the requisite shareholder approval required for the Arrangement; risks relating the number of dissenting shareholders requiring fair value for their securities in connection with the Arrangement; risks related to exploration and potential development of the Company projects; business and economic conditions in the mining industry generally; fluctuations in commodity prices and currency exchange rates; the need for cooperation of government agencies and native groups in the issuance of required permits; the need to obtain additional financing to develop properties, and uncertainty as to the availability and terms of future financing; and other risk factors as detailed from time to time and additional risks identified in the Company filings with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR in Canada (available at www.sedar.com). Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and opinions of management at the date the statements are made. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132899 WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Social media giant Twitter Inc. (TWTR) and Elon Musk, who are suing each other over Musk's efforts to exit their $44 billion merger, couldn't even agree on how much should be made public about the dispute. The presiding judge, Chancellor Kathleen McCormick of Delaware Chancery Court, had ruled on Wednesday that Musk's countersuit shall be made public by the afternoon of August 5, two days later than what Musk had asked for. According to sources, Musk's countersuit may be released as soon as Thursday. McCormick ruled after San Francisco-based Twitter accused Musk of trying to release his 163-page countersuit on Wednesday without giving it a chance to redact, or black out, confidential information about the company. Hours later, Musk's lawyers shot back, accusing Twitter of trying to bury 'the side of the story it does not want publicly disclosed' and undermine the public's First Amendment constitutional right to know what both sides are arguing about. Twitter had received a copy of the countersuit on July 29, and said court rules allowed it five business days to work on redactions. Musk said three business days were enough. The dispute highlights the acrimony between Twitter and Musk. He agreed to buy Twitter on April 25, but sought to back out on July 8 without paying a $1 billion breakup fee, citing Twitter's failure to provide details about the prevalence of bot and spam accounts. Twitter sued him four days later, accusing him of sabotaging the merger because it no longer served his interests, and demanding he complete the merger. The next trial is scheduled for October 17 and Twitter has this week issued dozens of subpoenas to banks, investors and law firms that backed Musk's bid, while Musk issued subpoenas to Twitter's advisers at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Musk had offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, saying he believed in the power of free speech. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Sunnyvale, California--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Facemoji Keyboard (Facemoji), an emoji-centric keyboard app that features speech recognition technology, an emoji prediction feature, stickers, and customizable keyboards, has released its State of Emoji Report 2022. The report, which can be read in full here, lists the most popular emojis of the past year, including those most frequently used in Argentina, France, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, the UK, and the U.S. "We are excited to release our report, which is based on data drawn between June 1, 2021-June 15, 2022, on the top emoji used around the world by Facemoji Keyboard users on Android and iOS," says Facemoji. "It also features data on the top emoji used by country and by app." The report, the company states, reveals a few surprises as well as suggests a continuing preference for certain emojis. "We hope that readers will have as much fun learning about the most popular emojis as we had compiling the report," Facemoji says. "Emojis are loved around the globe and continue to be a source of inspiration and creativity for millions of people." Key findings of the State of Emoji Report 2022 include: All of 2022's most popular emojis were from Unicode 11.0 or earlier. The top five emojis included "Rolling on the Floor Laughing" and "Red Heart," which remained in their same spots as the previous year. The top three emoji, as seen in many countries, all featured tears. Holidays continued to be a favorite time for those who communicate using emojis. Valentine's Day saw major usage spikes for "Roses." "Folded Hands" was popular on Eid al-Fitr, and people used more "Two Hearts" and star-emojis on New Year's Day. Indonesia and Russia were the only countries with emoji from Unicode 14.0 appearing in their top 12. Mexico and the United States also saw high usage of animal emojis while Argentina and Mexico often used the sparkles emoji. Instagram and Snapchat users had a clear consensus on their favorite emoji, with the same top five across both platforms. Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder were the only apps without "Red Heart" in their top five used emoji. Emoji stories, emoji text art, and emoji special symbols are being incorporated into messaging, often by younger users on social media. "Overall, what we have learned is that there is a diverse global community of people who love to use emojis to show others how they feel," Facemoji says. "We are betting that over the coming year, we will continue to be surprised by the innovative incorporation of emojis in online conversations." Facemoji Keyboard is a free keyboard app that helps people around the world to express themselves in new ways with fun, creative emoji. With 5000+ Emoji, WhatsApp Stickers, Emoticon, Kaomoji, GIF, Cool Fonts, TikTok Emojis, Auto-Paste, Cute Symbols, and Stylish Themes on this emoji keyboard, Facemoji Keyboard spices up your chats and posts on social media. Facemoji Keyboard highly respects the privacy of its users. Any/all data that went into the creation of the State of Emoji Report 2022 was fully anonymized, as are all user messages sent via Facemoji Keyboard. To download Facemoji Keyboard, please visit https://ftt.onelink.me/XPjG/FacemojiPR The Hoffman Agency Kyra Hanson 408-286-2611 khanson@hoffman.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132014 Bacon, a Provo, Utah-based on-demand workforce app provider, raised $8m in Series A-1 funding. The new investors included Grayhawk Capital in Phoenix, 2.0 Ventures in Salt Lake City, and Elevate Capital in Portland. They are joining follow-on investors, Hall Venture Partners in Provo, Utah, and Assure Syndicates, in Salt Lake City. The company intends to use the funds to hire key team members and expand to 40 more markets in the next 18-24 months. Led by Hunter Sebresos, founder and CEO, Bacon lets companies with variable temporary staff requirements select, screen and hire qualified workers. Likewise, the free app allows workers to find and select hourly shifts to fit their own schedule and lifestyle. The company has provided more than 240,000 shift work opportunities to more than 165,000 workers and 650 companies in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. FinSMEs 04/08/2022 Everytable is a multi-channel, fresh-prepared, ready-to-eat food business blending storefronts, subscriptions, and SmartFridges supplied by a central kitchen with meals priced according to the neighborhood. Everytable, a Los Angeles, CA-based mission-driven food company that makes fresh, nutritious food accessible and affordable for all, closed a $55m Series C funding round. The round was led by Creadev, Desert Bloom Food Ventures and Gullspang Re:food with participation from Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Kimbal Musk, The Beacon Fund, Brener International Group, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and The Libra Foundation. The company will use the funding to accelerate omni-channel growth throughout Southern California, the Bay Area, and New York City by building new stores, expanding its subscription delivery service, and increasing its food service business. Led by Sam Polk, CEO and founder, Everytable is a multi-channel, fresh-prepared, ready-to-eat food business blending storefronts, subscriptions, and SmartFridges supplied by a central kitchen with meals priced according to the neighborhood. In 2021, the company expanded beyond the greater Los Angeles area into Orange County and San Diego County. This spring, Everytable launched its e-commerce delivery service in the Bay Area with plans to open storefronts in the Bay Area in 2023. Furthering the brands expansion beyond Southern California, Everytable also opened its first three New York locations this spring, with three more stores slated to open by the end of the year. FinSMEs 04/08/2022 Flashpoint Venture Capital, a London, UK-based international technology investment firm, closed VCIII Fund, at US$102m. The firm manages equity and debt funds that are focused on global Series A tech startups originating in Emerging Europe and Israel. Szechenyi Funds, a Hungarian fund manager, is to invest $20m, which allows VC III to reach its target fund size of over US$100 million, becoming Flashpoints first institutional limited partner. While Szechenyi Funds focus is on financial institutions, large corporates, and more mature SMEs, Flashpoint provides start-ups with smart money through domestic incubators and accelerators and especially through fund of funds investments. Led by Michael Szalontay and Alexander Konoplyasty, Flashpoint is an international investment group with over . US$450m AuM and a focus on Western Tech Companies founded by expats from Emerging Europe & Israel. Flashpoint manages six venture funds: four VC funds, a Venture Debt Fund, and a Secondary Fund. Investors in Flashpoints funds include more than 130 major family offices and HNWIs. The company has offices in London, Tel-Aviv, Budapest, Warsaw, Riga, and Nicosia. The funds have made investments in over 55 companies including names such as Guesty, Chili Piper, and Office RnD. Flashpoint has completed eleven exits, including the sale of its stakes in Shazam (to Apple) and Chess.com (to PokerStars founders and General Atlantic). Led by Denes Jobbagy, CEO and president, Szechenyi Funds is one of the largest and most active investors in the domestic capital market. It manages assets of over USD 400 million, including 80+ portfolio companies. It works closely with its owner, the Rudolf Kalman Foundation for the Obuda University, which allows for a high degree of synergy between technical and economic disciplines and practical business. The aim of the Szechenyi Funds is to contribute to the long-term growth and stability of the Hungarian economy by investing capital in high value-added enterprises. FinSMEs 04/08/2022 A California startup specializing in automating solar panel installation raised $44 million in funding from several investors. A three-year old solar technology startup has been backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy, among other investors. Terabase Energy is a solar technology company based in Berkeley, California, that specializes in the automation of solar panel installation. According to its LinkedIn page, Terabase Energy's mission is "to reduce the cost and increase the scalability of solar by building an interconnected digital and automation platform" used to develop, construct, and operate utility-scale PV power plants. On Tuesday, the company took to Twitter to announce that it had raised $44 million in Series B funding co-led by Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, and SJF Ventures, among other existing investors. Terabase Energy Looking to Develop More Solar Technology Software Terabase Energy's total funding has risen to $52 million following the support of its new investors. Now, the California-based solar technology company is looking to use the funds to scale up its system for mass installation of solar panels and bring down the cost of developing utility-scale solar projects, Bloomberg reported. Terabase Energy currently offers software to design solar panels and improve efficiency amidst changing weather conditions. The company's co-founder and CEO explained that there are existing methods in automating or digitizing the steps involved in solar construction and deployment; however, Terabase Energy automates the entire process. Campbell remarked that while the solar industry has "come a long way," many of the project development methods being used today are still "manual." This is where Terabase Energy comes in. Read Also: Solar Panel Buying Guide - Save Money on Electricity (or Pay Nothing at All!) How Does Terabase Energy's Automation Work and What Issues Does It Address? Initially, Terabase Energy would set up a pop-up factory within the worksite. Here, robotic arms attach solar panels, which each weigh nearly a hundred pounds, are attached to a solar tracker. The robot does this every 20 seconds, ensuring that the panels are attached to a steel structure that rotates these panels towards the direction of the sun. The entire steel structure is then transported to the solar array on special vehicles. While these are not yet automated, Campbell said Terabase Energy is also already looking to develop an autonomous version. Carmichael Roberts, who co-leads the investment committee at Breakthrough Energy remarked that Terabase Energy's automation processes can help with staffing problems, especially when workers are unwilling to set up solar panels under the hot sun. He added that the issue had been persistent even before the unemployment rate fell very low. Carmichael added that workers no longer "want those jobs," causing a "bottleneck" in solar companies' abilities to deploy quickly. The solution was to leverage automation, just as Terabase Energy does. In a PRNewswire press release, Carmichael expressed excitement that Breakthrough Energy was getting to work with Terbase Energy to "decarbonize" by financially supporting the startup in its Terawatt-scale deployment of solar panels. Terabase Energy's Intersect Power, said through its CEO Sheldon Kimber that they were hopeful that deploying the Terabase platform could help solve the climate crisis sooner. Related Article: Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures to Invest $20 Million in Startup Blue Frontier's Sustainable Air Conditioning ImIn,Inc., an Atlanta, GA-based absenteeism management company, closed a $1m seed funding round. The round was led by Collab Capital. The company intends to use the funds to scale and automate its on-demand employee scheduling app, which has been in its beta stage since June 2021. Led by founder and CEO Lauren Wilson, ImIn provides its on-demand employee scheduling app, which allows workers, particularly those in hourly, wage positions, to have full control of their work schedules while also earning rewards and incentives. Companies can, in turn, fill scheduling gaps by sending out push notifications to their talent pool. In addition to providing flexibility for the full-time employee, the company also has the ability to offer hours to a pool of on-demand staff, which helps fill gaps in hours and ultimately minimize a companys revenue lost on a daily basis. For employees, the application supports work-life balance while also helping them maintain their employment and consistent income. FinSMEs 04/08/2022 New insights service provides access to primary research to help business and investment professionals evaluate billion-dollar investment opportunities Information services company Dialectica has launched B2B Surveys, a new service that enhances its comprehensive portfolio of bespoke insights services. B2B Surveys enables business and investment professionals including the worlds leading consulting, hedge fund, and private equity firms to gather proprietary quantitative insights using research methods that have historically been limited to the world of B2C insights. The solution addresses demand for a bespoke survey offering that matches Dialecticas expert interview service. At a time when the appetite for validated and trusted business insights and market data is soaring worldwide, businesses and investment professionals are looking for innovative ways to access primary research and real-time information to inform business decisions and evaluate billion-dollar investment opportunities, says Fred Corkett, Managing Director and Co-founder at Dialectica. Corkett also leads the companys innovation unit. According to Corkett, Dialectica architected its B2B Surveys service to ensure research datasets are representative of the niche markets of interest to their clients. They also provide assurance that survey responses are from vetted B2B experts. He notes that, helping our clients make smarter, better, and faster decisions is our teams passion and this new service is built with their needs in mind. Dialectica positions its B2B Surveys service as a one-stop-shop offering that includes survey design advisory, programming of the survey, custom recruitment of expert respondents, and visualization of survey outputs. The service provides transparency in survey respondent identity and generates high-speed insights to meet tight M&A deal- and decision-making timetables. Roula Zaarour, who was recently appointed Dialecticas Managing Director for the Americas and is responsible for leading the company in the region, notes that the company is rapidly scaling its operations and doubling its workforce in the Americas, and expanding its product portfolio to meet client demand for fast access to real-time data and information to inform critical business decisions. Zaarour adds that, B2B Surveys strengthen our positioning in the market by supporting clients who need to gather survey insights and make evidence-based decisions within niche B2B markets. Commenting on its growth plans, Zaarour says that Dialectica plans to continue investing in its talent, the companys most important asset, as well as its research excellence capabilities, along with its robust compliance framework, and cutting-edge technology. The company positions itself to become a global leader in the information services industry. Dialectica, which is headquartered in the UK and leads its Americas operations from Montreal, has grown from a team of 100 to more than 750 employees across Europe and the Americas in just three years. Dialecticas Client Service team follows an agile research-first approach. By rapidly iterating its expert search based on a deep understanding of client projects, its employees are focused on sourcing the most relevant insights from hard-to-find experts from any global industry. Dialecticas vision is to shape better business decision-making worldwide for clients, which include the worlds leading investment and consulting firms, as well as the largest corporations. Dialectica enables these organizations to collect real-time information and market insights from industry experts across markets, industries, and regions. The company counts hundreds of success stories across numerous markets, from commercial drones, biotechnology, and medical imaging to agriculture, grocery retail, and many more. Dialectica has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe in 2022 and 2021 by the Financial Times and Statista. In 2021, Dialectica grew by 100% and was named a Best Workplace in Europe for its continued commitment to investing in its employees development and fostering a culture of trust and open communication. By 2025, Dialectica aims to reach the milestone of 1,200 team members across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Dialectica plans to continue expanding its commercial ventures and develop more information services products in the next three to five years. Orange EV e-TRIEVER Pure Electric Yard Truck Orange EV, a Kansas City, MO-based EV manufacturer of heavy duty zero-emission trucks, closed a $35m funding round. The round was led by S2G Ventures and CCI, an affiliate of Henry Crown and Company. The company intends to use the funds to scale its manufacturing, deliver vehicles to new markets, and develop new technologies that will increase the lead in the Class 8 commercial vehicle segment. Founded in 2012, Orange EV is a manufacturer of heavy-duty, electric vehicle solutions. Building both new and re-powered terminal trucks, the company offers electric Class 8 vehicles which have been chosen by more than 130 fleets across 28 states, Canada, and the Caribbean. FinSMEs 04/08/2022 QLM Quantum LiDAR Gas Imaging Camera Visualization & Quantification of an Emission Source QLM Technology Ltd, a Cardiff, England, UK-based photonics technology company, closed a 12M Series-A Funding round. The round was led by Schlumberger, which also signed a Collaboration Agreement with the company, with participation from existing investors Green Angel Syndicate, Enterprise100 Syndicate, Development Bank of Wales, Newable Ventures, and several private investors, as well as new investor Quantum Exponential. Led by Murray Reed, Chief Executive officer, QLM has developed a new type of LiDAR camera based on quantum technology that can see and accurately quantify greenhouse gas emissions. The gas imager enables customers to monitor, detect and accurately locate and quantify Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission sources for rapid repair. A related version of the product enables remote quantification of flare efficiency. QLMs LiDAR technology is inherently scalable to low cost at high volume, enabling wide deployment. Through the strategic collaboration, QLMs technology will be part of the new Schlumberger End-to-end Emissions Solutions (SEES) business offering for the oil and gas industry. SEESs methane monitoring offering is based on previous investments in satellite-, airplane-, and drone-mounted sensors, along with additional sensors developed internally. QLMs differentiated LiDAR technology complements those mobile monitors by providing accurate and sensitive measurements where continuous monitoring is required. Beyond emissions monitoring for the oil and gas market, the QLM solution is well-suited for use in tracking and reducing methane emissions in other applications such as in biogas production, at landfills, at wastewater treatment plants, and in coal mines. The company has headquarters in Cardiff and operations in Bristol and San Francisco. FinSMEs 04/08/2022 Xona Engineer Nick Manglaviti setting up hardware-in-the-loop testing at Xonas R&D lab in San Mateo, California. (Photo: Xona Space Systems) Xona Space Systems, a San Mateo, CA-based pioneer in navigation technologies from Low Earth Orbit (LEO), raised a financing round that brings their total funding to over $25M. The round was led by First Spark Ventures who is joined by numerous new investors including Lockheed Martin Ventures, SRI Ventures (of SRI International), Velvet Sea Ventures, Gaingels, Airstream Venture Partners, and Space.VC. Existing investors Seraphim Space, Toyota Ventures, 1517 Fund, MaC Venture Capital, and Stellar Ventures also participated. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate the development of its high-performance commercial satellite navigation network. Led by CEO Brian Manning, Xona is focused on the development of Pulsar a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite navigation system designed to provide resilient and trusted centimeter-level position anywhere on the globe. Within the past year the company more than doubled their full-time headcount, launched their first orbital mission, and signed agreements with major players across the GPS/GNSS ecosystem such as Hexagon | NovAtel and Spirent Federal. The new capital will accelerate the development of Pulsar through several critical design milestones by expanding the team and building out Xonas new R&D and manufacturing facility in Burlingame, CA to enable more rapid design cycles and prepare for production. Xonas first demonstration mission, Huginn, was successfully launched in May 2022, and their second mission, Muninn, is planned to launch in 2023. FinSMEs 04/08/2022 Campaigners are naming some of the worlds top multinational food companies in a report revealing items high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) are often mislabeled as... Read More Just when the 2022 heat wave is about to end, Valve comes out of nowhere with a SteamOS update that was sorely needed a month ago. Valve recently released the latest update to its SteamOS for the Steam Deck, fixing various bugs and adding a handful of features that includes a notification if the device is overheating. The SteamOS 3.3 update also comes with an updated version of the Steam Deck client; the update is available to download for Steam Deck users. SteamOS 3.3 Update Details Valve mentioned in the SteamOS 3.3 update patch notes on the official Steam Deck website that it has added a notification when a Steam Deck's internal temperature is going outside the safe operating range. You may remember that Valve warned Steam Deck users in late July not to use the device in temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, especially since it was the height of the heat wave back then, per The Nerd Stash. The custom AMD CPU within the handheld console is built to operate up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit and is durable enough to withstand any outside weather. However, the deciding factor in the CPU's durability is the air temperature. In New York City alone, people experienced temperatures as high as 99 degrees Fahrenheit in late July, per Reuters. Valve isn't alone in issuing warnings to those who use its handheld consoles. Nintendo also reached the high-temperature alarm for those using the Switch during the heat wave with public service announcements on its official Japanese Twitter page. Read More: James Webb Space Telescope Catches the Most Distant Star in the Universe in Latest Image As such, it is important to not use the Steam Deck during an especially hot day. PC Gamer mentioned in its article that once a Steam Deck reaches an internal temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the device's chip will begin to throlle. However, if the device's internal temperature reaches 221 degrees Fahrenheit, the device will automatically shut down to preserve itself and cool down. The notification is useful for Steam Deck users as they will be able to shut the device down themselves to spare the device from hot internal temperatures and the headache of having the device repaired should they not shut it down in time. However, Valve's update might have been fashionably late as the heat wave is reported to be ending during the past few days, per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. SteamOS 3.3 Update Other Features Aside from the temperature notification, the SteamOS 3.3 update has fixes for various bugs in its system as well as new features, such as support for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in its keyboard, and the addition of the achievements page in its overlay. Additionally, Steam Deck users will also have the ability to set the time for the device to enter night mode automatically. Steam Deck's Firefox will now be installed as a Flatpak rather than from the OS repositories to ensure timely updates while launching the program for the first time will prompt for installation through the Discover Software Center. The Discover Software Center will handle Firefox's updates as they are published. Related Article: Steam Deck Reservation Orders Will Arrive by the End of the Year, Says Valve Facebook will no longer provide live shopping, but Instagram will as the platform focus on Reels in response to the changing consumer watching habits. Live Shopping Will go on Facebook but Stay on Instagram Facebook is discontinuing live shopping, a service that allows artists to broadcast and sell goods to an audience in a manner similar to QVC. According to Facebook, the function will be formally discontinued on October 1 as part of the company's attempt to move attention to Reels. The firm notes that it is concentrating on Reels on Facebook and Instagram, Meta's short-form video product, "since customers' viewing patterns are moving to short-form video." Live shopping will no longer be an option on Facebook but will remain on Instagram. Live shopping gave Facebook developers access to a new source of income when it was first introduced in Thailand in 2018. Influencers may showcase and sell a range of items during their live shopping events, either from their store or via an affiliate. In 2020, around the time it unveiled a specific shopping tab, Facebook expanded the feature's availability. Live shopping is still quite popular in China, but it doesn't appear to have caught on elsewhere. Even TikTok stated that it curtailed live shopping in the US and Europe last month. Live shopping's demise shows Facebook's increased devotion to Reels, a short-form video tool launched last year. Meta, Facebook's parent company, has updated Instagram's algorithm to make it more like TikTok. All Instagram videos are now Reels, like Facebook, boosting short-form content. Longtime Instagram users worried about the concentration on Reels. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri was met with backlash after announcing the service would become video-centric, forcing Instagram to take back several changes. Read Also: Wikipedia Articles Have Influenced Legal Judgments, Experiment Shows TikTok Might Exceed Facebook in Influencer Marketing Spending Instagram may be worried about TikTok's impact, but it still dominates influencer marketing expenditure in the US Instagram is anticipated to spend $2.23 billion on influencer marketing in 2022, double TikTok's $774.8 million. However, although Instagram is doing better compared to TikTok in this regard, Facebook, another program from Meta, is not doing as well. According to the most recent information, which experts provided at Insider Intelligence (formerly eMarketer), TikTok is currently on course to surpass Facebook in terms of influencer marketing expenditure this year and to surpass YouTube, the No. 2 platform, by 2024. In comparison to Facebook's $739.0 million, YouTube now sees influencer marketing spending on its platform in the US of $948.0 million. The survey also mentions that TikTok has already surpassed YouTube regarding marketer use for influencer-based marketing. Instagram has been progressively altering its algorithm and feed to favor creator content, suggested posts, and advertising, despite objections from users who want to see more of their friends' images and videos. However, as Instagram changes how content is ranked in its main feed, some artists are concerned that continual adjustments may hurt their reach. After complaints from two Kardashians last week, Instagram rolled back recent changes that turned the app like TikTok with a full-screen main page and more recommended posts. Changing Instagram's algorithm to spotlight more small artists might hurt the Kardashians. Related Article: eBay Live Shopping Launches: Here's What You Have to Know Sweet Homes population is growing and speculated to reach 10,000 people, as residents search for affordability and a small town atmosphere. Bordering the Willamette National Forest and Foster Lake, Sweet Homes basin-like valley has a history tied to logging. But with the closure of the saw mills, and jobs lost, a lot of residents left in the 1980s, according to records provided by the Sweet Home genealogical society. Since then, people are coming back to Sweet Home, and forecasters predict it will reach 10,000 people sometime in 2025. Ninety-one-year-old Carla Healy remembers what Sweet Home was like when she was a teenager in the 1940s. She and her friends would bike and walk everywhere they went, read together at the library and sat up on high stools drinking milkshakes at the local drug store. I always just loved it here, she said with a smile as she ran her hands across old black and white photographs of her town. Nestled between the shelves of the Sweet Home Genealogical Societys books and records, she sits down in a room named after her a nod to her work as a librarian. But a lot has changed since she first arrived at 15 years old: more cars, more houses and more people, she said. But Healy doesnt mind. I think its a good thing, people are friendly here, she said. She believes having a place where people know each other has drawn people to Sweet Home. That small town atmosphere is only part of the reason, according to Community and Economic Development Director Blair Larsen. Most Oregon cities are growing, he said, but what makes Sweet Home particularly attractive is its affordable housing and nearby amenities, like Foster Lake and the Willamette National Forest. During the pandemic, many people transitioned to remote work, and there was a desire to live in more rural areas, Larsen said. Forecasters at Portland State Population Research Center predict Sweet Home will reach 10,000 residents by 2025. Predictions are formed by looking at birth and death rates as well as migration at the county level and survey responses to determine housing, according to Ethan Sharygin, director of the Population Research Center. When it comes to the significance of reaching 10,000 people, Sharygin said, you have to think about the infrastructure and development to support a growing population. Population growth can change how a city was planned, compared to the last 20-30 years, Cindy Chen, a population forecast manager at Portland State, said. Despite what academicians prognosticate, Larsen believes Sweet Home already has reached the five digits. In 2020, the census reported 9,828 people in Sweet Home, and since then, theres been a lot of development, he said. Apartment complexes and subdivisions for single family housing have been approved, and some are already housing tenants. Theres no slowdown on building permits, he said. Twisting the cinematic theme of "Field of Dreams," Sweet Home is proof that if people come, developers will build the amenities, Larsen said. Plans are underway for more health care services, including, memory care, assisted living facilities, clinics and a Samaritan care facility. And when it comes to basic needs, like water, Larsen isnt worried. Its just a matter of connecting new development to existing development, he added. Once that water is consumed, however, is another matter. There is some concern about wastewater overflowing during storm events, Larsen acknowledged. He hopes to finish the water equalization project in the next couple years to accommodate for the citys next 20 years of growth. There are also plans to make Sweet Home a more walkable city, Larsen said. He hopes to increase bike and pedestrian access. For Angela Thoma, president of the Sweet Home Genealogical Society, it will need more infrastructure to draw people to Sweet Home. The best thing that can happen to Sweet Home is to have the businesses filled, Thoma said. Buildings need to be open to renters to support the towns economy, she said. Larsen is optimistic this will happen. I am very positive about meeting the needs and demands, Larsen said. Larsen believes Sweet Home has the infrastructure to support its growing population, and that there is a desire for growth. And for Carla Healy, shes happy to welcome newcomers to the town she has called home for over 75 years. Editor's note: This article has been edited to correct the attribution of a quote. Related stories: Private flights to the ISS will soon be manned by retired astronauts. NASA has changed its guidelines on private missions to the International Space Station or ISS to require retired astronauts to serve as mission commander on these trips. On Wednesday, the space agency issued a notice that has yet to be finalized but indicated that the goal was to improve passenger safety and lessen any strain on existing ISS operations. NASA recommended retired astronauts to serve as mission commanders because they would provide "experienced guidance for the private astronauts during pre-flight preparation through mission execution," Engadget reported. Other benefits of having retired astronauts as mission commanders on private flights to the ISS include new medical standards for private astronauts, increased lead time for private research projects, improvements to policies involving return cargo, and more time for private astronauts to adjust to microgravity. New NASA Requirements Resulted from Learnings of Previous Private ISS Trip NASA's notice explained that these updates to the requirement for private flights to the ISS were drawn from "lessons learned" during the Axiom Space flight in April, wherein passengers paid $55 per head to fly on the first private astronaut mission to the space station. The two-week trip, which required passengers to conduct their own research, took a toll on the ISS crew and the Axiom crew, spurring NASA to create a new set of guidelines for private trips to the ISS. The Axiom Space flight was helmed by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who now serves as the Chief Astronaut at the Texas-based private space company. Axiom had already been considering equipping future missions with a professional astronaut because it would free up another seat for more paying passengers on board, the company's president Michael Suffredini said during a press conference earlier this year NASA's new requirement of having retired astronauts serve as mission commander on private trips to the ISS is seen as an effort to prevent unsupervised missions to the International Space Station. Read Also: SpaceX's Crew-5 Mission Launch Has to Wait for a Little Longer Axiom Shares Learnings From Previous Private Space Flights Axiom is set to host another private mission to the ISS in 2023, which will be manned by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson as mission commander, CBS News reported. But before then, they are expected to apply several learnings from the previous private flights to the ISS to the next one. Axiom or Ax-1 crew Larry Connor admitted that on the previous mission, they were "way too aggressive on our schedule," with Lopez-Alegria agreeing, adding that it was truly "fast-paced." The arrival of the people on board the private space flight also impacted the daily workload of the ISS crew. Back in May, former NASA astronaut and member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Susan Helms remarked that there were costs involved in how the private flights to the ISS caused "overly stressing [of] the workload" of the crewmembers on the space station as well as the mission controllers who supported them. There are currently more than 200 retired living NASA astronauts today, but it remains unclear how many of them would be capable enough to serve as mission commander on future private flights to the ISS. Related Article: SpaceX Postpones ISS Cargo Mission Again-When is the New Launch Date? Denver, CO, July 27, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Direct Travel, Inc. has launched a new global service for clients seeking a consolidated sustainability solution, Direct ATPI Halo. Developed in conjunction with Direct Travels global partner, London-based ATPI, Direct ATPI Halo will serve as an incubator of new ideas and services focused on long-term sustainability goals. We share the philosophy of our global partner, ATPI, and many others in the industry that the travel sector can be a pioneer in mitigating the impact of business on the environment, said John Coffman, Chief Financial Officer for Direct Travel. Particularly as we grow and rebuild after two years of disruption, its important we lead with a sustainability-first approach. Direct ATPI Halo supports businesses in their efforts to reduce the environmental impact of their travel through measuring, offsetting and reducing related carbon dioxide emissions. It has been designed to support existing client-focused business units around the world as they grow and evolve, while making meaningful inroads toward the goals set out by governments worldwide to become net zero by 2050. This is the next step in evolving our existing sustainability efforts to provide even more choice and value for our clients, said Donna Brokowski, Executive Vice President of Global Supplier Management and Consulting for Direct Travel. The carbon offset projects that Direct ATPI Halo utilizes are selected for their quality, integrity and effectiveness in addressing global environmental challenges. Direct ATPI Halos team provides recommendations and carbon neutrality consultancy services backed by accredited partners, including Respira and the Climate Neutral Group (CNG). The team has sourced more than 15 esteemed carbon credit projects in core business markets, prioritizing projects that provide a direct community benefit in developing countries. Additionally, Direct ATPI has invested in carbon credits at attractive bulk-buy prices for clients in a market that is increasing in value. To learn more about Direct ATPI Halo, visit www.halo.directatpi.com. About Direct Travel, Inc. Direct Travel is a leading provider of corporate travel management services. The company has been providing travel management for over 40 years, working with clients to develop highly customized travel programs. By leveraging both the expertise of its people and innovative solutions, Direct Travel enables clients to derive the greatest value from their travel program in terms of superior service, progressive technologies and significant cost savings. The company operates globally as Direct ATPI, a joint organization between Direct Travel and London-based ATPI. Direct Travel has offices in over 70 locations across North America and the UK, and is currently ranked 11th on Travel Weeklys Power List. For more information, visit www.dt.com. Media Contact Amanda Wesley Vice President, Strategic Corporate Communications awesley@dt.com 225.439.8876 Actor Lee Jung-jae / Courtesy of Megabox Plus M By Kwak Yeon-soo Lee Jung-jae, who rose to global stardom after appearing in Netflix's most-watched series, "Squid Game," said he suffered sleepless nights while writing, directing and acting his directorial debut feature, "The Hunt." Set in the turbulent 1980s, the action-packed film centers on two rival agents, Park Pyong-ho (Lee) and Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung), who are tasked with uncovering a North Korean spy inside the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). They investigate each other in the process of discovering a larger plot to assassinate the president. The 50-year-old found acting and directing at the same time daunting and he barely managed to keep up his energy levels to complete the project. "From writing a screen adaptation to directing and acting, I was sleep-deprived. Some people think transitioning to directing can be risky for an actor, so I felt a greater sense of responsibility," he said. "I was also terrified that I might ruin my 30-year acting career because of this one project." Wanting to produce "Hunt," Lee had reached out to a string of directors to direct the film. However, they all eventually declined the offer. "I literally contacted the top 20 filmmakers in Korea. They thought the project was too difficult, so that left me with no other choice but to direct it myself," he said. The first thing he did was rewrite the original script. "The early draft of the film focused on a single protagonist, but I changed it to center on two unit chiefs in the KCIA. The overall message of the film and relationship between the characters changed over time," he said. Actor Lee Jung-jae in a scene from the film, "Hunt" / Courtesy of Megabox Plus M "Hunt" had its world premiere in the non-competition Midnight Screening section of the 75th Cannes Film Festival. There he received feedback that the film was "too local" and global audiences cannot keep up with the story because they aren't familiar with Korean politics in the 1980s. "That was totally understandable. On my flight back home, I started revising some parts of the lines to be able to explain political and social life in Korea during the 1980s. Then, I reedited the entire film and asked the actors to re-record the dialogue," he said. Lee said he wants the film to capture the attention of global audiences. "Hunt" has been invited to the Gala Presentations section of the 47th Toronto International Film Festival, scheduled for Sept. 8 to 18. "The film has been sold to 140 countries. Thanks to the global popularity of Korean content, Korean films are also attracting more international buyers at global film markets," he said. Lee said he still spends sleepless nights promoting "Hunt" during the daytime and being on video calls late into the night as part of his campaign for the Emmy Award. Lee was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role as Seong Gi-hun in "Squid Game." His nomination, for best lead actor in a drama, was one of 14 the series picked up. "I realized that Emmy nominees must campaign aggressively in order to lead to successful results. I cannot be in the U.S., so I've been participating in a group of meetings via Zoom late at night, like 2 a.m.," he said. "It's a whole new experience for me. After I got nominated, the organizers even sent me a nomination certificate so I can hang it on my wall, and a couple of gifts, like wine and soap." COMPANY ANNOUNCEMENT NO. 12-2022 Today FLSmidth signed a contract, valued at around DKK950 million, to supply a range of mineral processing equipment to ShalkiyaZinc, the operator of a zinc and lead mine in the Kyzylorda Region, located in the south of Kazakhstan. The equipment will transform the plant into a world-class facility that efficiently separates minerals with a minimised environmental impact. Under the agreement, FLSmidth will supply two underground crushing stations with a materials handling system to the process plant, a full package of comminution and separation equipment, including SAG and ball mills, mill circuit pumps and cyclones, the zinc-lead concentrate flotation and regrinding circuit, including nextSTEP, VXP vertical mills, concentrate thickeners, and Pneumapress filters, reagents preparation and dosing area. Full plant automation is also included, as well as installation and commissioning supervision services. The new concentrator will be supported from our new in-country service Supercentre in Karaganda. The contract is worth around DKK950 million and is subject to receipt of the down payment by FLSmidth. The equipment delivery is to be completed during 2024, with commissioning to start before the end of that year. We are excited to receive this first order from ShalkiyaZinc, which highlights our full flowsheet expertise. The wide range of equipment included in the order will help ShalkiyaZinc save on both CAPEX and OPEX; our new nextSTEP flotation technology will improve the quality of the concentrates, the SAG mill will provide more flexibility, while the automation and digital solutions will further enable water and energy savings alongside safer operations. We look forward to making this a success on so many levels, comments Mikko Keto, Group CEO at FLSmidth. After testing and basic design work executed by FLSmidth, we are pleased to enter this new phase of collaboration with the procurement of critical technologies to improve the productivity and sustainability of our plant. We believe in successful execution and look forward to receiving the ordered equipment according to the schedule for installation and to continue working with FLSmidth on commissioning services and spare parts, comments Assel Rakhimova, Chief Project Director of Tau-Ken Samruk. Until all conditions are met and the contract becomes effective, it will not be part of the order intake. A separate company announcement will be issued when the order becomes effective. The order will not change the Companys financial guidance for 2022. Contacts: Investor Relations Jannick Lindegaard Denholt, +45 21 69 66 57, jli@flsmidth.com Therese Mollevinge, +45 41 37 16 38, tmo@flsmidth.com Mikkel Johansen, +45 23 30 29 50, mjoh@flsmidth.com Media Relations Rasmus Windfeld, +45 40 44 60 60, rwin@flsmidth.com About FLSmidth FLSmidth provides sustainable productivity to the global mining and cement industries. We deliver market-leading engineering, equipment and service solutions that enable our customers to improve performance, drive down costs and reduce environmental impact. Our operations span the globe and we are close to ~10,100 employees, present in more than 60 countries. In 2021, FLSmidth generated revenue of DKK 17.6 billion. MissionZero is our sustainability ambition towards zero emissions in mining and cement by 2030. FLSmidth works within fully validated Science-Based Targets, our commitment to keep global warming below 1.5C and to becoming carbon neutral in our own operations by 2030. www.flsmidth.com Attachment SARASOTA, Fla., Aug. 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes issued the following statement today on the tragic passing of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana: I'm shocked and dismayed by the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski and her two aides, Zach Potts and Emma Thomson. I had the privilege of working alongside Jackie on the Ways and Means Committee. She was an excellent committee member who cared deeply about the work we were doing and the overall cause for which we were fighting. I saw up close that Jackie worked extremely hard for her constituents and for the American people, and she had a particular passion for helping children. She was an exceptional public servant, and I'm lucky to say, she was a close friend of mine. I'll miss her deeply and will pray for her family and those of Zach Potts and Emma Thomson. Investor Relations Contact: MZ Group - North America tmtgir@mzgroup.us Media Contact: press@tmtgcorp.com NEW YORK, Aug. 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of Waste Management, Inc. (NYSE: WM) redeemable senior notes (the Notes) between February 13, 2020 and June 23, 2020, inclusive (the Class Period), including the following senior redeemable notes issued by WM in May 2019: (i) 2.95% Senior Notes due 2024; (ii) 3.20% Senior Notes due 2026; (iii) 3.45% Senior Notes due 2029; and (iv) 4.00% Senior Notes due 2039, of the important August 8, 2022 lead plaintiff deadline. SO WHAT: If you purchased Waste Management Notes during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Waste Management class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=6891 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than August 8, 2022. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually handle securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate the cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs Bar. Many of the firms attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers. DETAILS OF THE CASE: The complaint filed in this class action alleges that throughout the Class Period, defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements, as well as failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Companys business, operations, and prospects. Specifically, defendants failed to disclose to investors that: (1) the U.S. Department of Justice had indicated to Waste Management that it would require Waste Management to divest significantly more assets than the $200 million Antitrust Revenue Threshold; (2) as a result, the merger would not be completed by the End Date; and (3) the Notes would be subject to mandatory redemption at 101% of par. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. To join the Waste Management class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=6891 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investors ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. ------------------------------- Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 lrosen@rosenlegal.com pkim@rosenlegal.com cases@rosenlegal.com www.rosenlegal.com MONTREAL, Aug. 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AM Resources Corporation (AM or the Corporation) (TSXV: AMR) (Frankfurt: 76A) announces that it has received a cease trader order (CTO) from lAutorite des marches financiers (AMF) as a result of the Corporation's inability to file its audited annual financial statements and corresponding managements discussion and analysis for the year ended December 31, 2021, including the CEO and CFO certifications, as well as the interim financial statements and corresponding managements discussion and analysis for the period ended March 31, 2022, including the CEO and CFO certifications (collectively, the Financial Documents), by their respective filing deadlines of April 30, 2022 and May 30, 2022 (the Filing Deadlines). The order will remain in effect until the Corporation files its Financial Documents. This situation is due to several factors that are beyond our control. We are working with our auditors to resolve it as soon as possible and we anticipate that well be able to file the Financial Documents no later than August 19, 2022. Once resolved, we will focus on taking the necessary actions to ensure that this does not happen again, said David Grondin, President and CEO of AM Resources. The Corporation will provide updates as further information relating to the Financial Documents becomes available. About AM Resources AM Resources Corporation (TSXV: AMR) is a mining exploration company with interests in coal and natural bitumen projects in Colombia. AM is betting on Colombia's excellent mineral potential and favourable climate to pursue its Colombian venture. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. For further information: David Grondin AM Resources Corporation President and Chief Executive Officer 1-514-360-0576 www.am-resources.com Sydney, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Proactive, provider of real-time news and video interviews on growth companies listed in Australia, has covered the following companies: Surefire Resources NL (ASX:SRN) discovered a new mineralised gold trend in a recent reverse circulation (RC) drilling campaign at the Yidby Gold Project in Western Australia. Click here Creso Pharma Ltd (ASX:CPH, OTCQB:COPHF) has secured firm commitments to raise approximately A$7 million from institutional, professional and sophisticated investors through the issue of 175 million fully paid ordinary shares at A$0.04 per share. Click here Emyria Ltd (ASX:EMD) has kicked off a series of human cell-line pre-clinical studies to advance its MDMA-inspired drug discovery partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA). Click here Moho Resources Ltd (ASX:MOH) is making strong progress with nickel sulphide exploration programs at the Silver Swan North Project in Western Australia. Click here West Wits Mining Ltd (ASX:WWI)'s revised definitive feasibility study (DFS) for the Phase 1 Qala Shallows operation at Witwatersrand Basin Project (WBP) in South Africa demonstrates robust financials and an opportunity to grow beyond the initial phase, the company says. Click here Cobre Ltd (ASX:CBE) has completed a share placement to raise $7 million (before costs) with commitments from sophisticated and both international and domestic institutional investors to support the acquisition of Kalahari Metals Ltd, which owns the Ngami Project in Botswana. Click here American Rare Earths Ltd (ASX:ARR) has grown the Halleck Creek Rare Earth project in Wyoming, US, to more than 6,000 acres or 24.5 square kilometres with the addition of the newly staked Bluegrass area, which has demonstrated its potential with surface samples up to 5,065 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxide (TREO). Click here Chase Mining Corporation Ltd (ASX:CML) welcomes the news that Red Fox Resources (ASX:FXR) Pty Ltd, in which Chase holds a 40% stake, has been granted exploration permits (EPMs) across all tenements at the Selwyn Project, south of Cloncurry in northwest Queensland. Click here Lindian Resources Ltd (ASX:LIN) has a new CEO with Alistair Stephens to step into the role from Monday, August 8, 2022, and his first task will be to oversee the acquisition of Malawi company Rift Valley Resource Developments Limited and its globally significant Kangankunde Rare Earths Project. Click here Blue Star Helium Ltd (ASX:BNL, OTC:BSNLF) has spudded the Sammons 315310C helium well the first asset to target the companys Serenity prospect in Las Animas County, Colorado. Click here Dart Mining NL (ASX:DTM) is pleased with the findings from a regional soil survey at its Granite Flat Copper-Gold Project in Victoria, where its one step closer to understanding the scale of a base and precious metals system. Click here Radiopharm Theranostics Ltd (ASX:RAD) has secured key agreements with leading diagnostics and biopharmaceuticals companies Lantheus and Nanomab a strategic collaboration to develop the NM-01 imaging agent and a licensing agreement for imaging rights in China and worldwide IP rights for NM-01, respectively. Click here Kingwest Resources Ltd (ASX:KWR) has upsized its share purchase plan to $2.5 million amid strong shareholder demand. Click here Anson Resources Ltd (ASX:ASN) has delivered a material increase of up to 70% in lithium brine assays with drilling in the Clastic Zones of the Long Canyon No.2 well at the Paradox Lithium Project, in Utah, USA. Click here Jindalee Resources Ltd (ASX:JRL) has welcomed highly experienced lithium industry executive Darren Wates to the board as an independent non-executive director. Click here Brookside Energy Ltd (ASX:BRK) had notched up another success in the SWISH Area of Interest (AOI) in Oklahomas world-class Anadarko Basin with commercial production of oil and rich gas underway at the high-impact Flames 3-10-1S-3W WXH1 Well. Click here Frontier Energy Ltd (ASX:FHE) has positively assessed the hydrogen potential of its WA-based Bristol Springs green energy project in Western Australia through a pre-feasibility study (PFS). Click here Galileo Mining Ltd (ASX:GAL) has underscored the considerable potential of the Callisto discovery within the Norseman Project in Western Australia with extensive continuity of rhodium mineralisation unearthed in the second reverse circulation (RC) drilling program on the tenure. Click here About Proactive Proactive is a unique tech-enabled platform providing companies globally with a comprehensive investor engagement solution across their business lifecycle. With six offices on three continents, Proactive works with innovative growth companies quoted on the worlds major stock exchanges, helping executives to engage intelligently with investors. In 2020, Proactive featured in 809 million search results, our content was viewed over 165 million times and our readers spent over 10 million hours on our websites. Proactive has produced over 300,000 articles and 20,000 executive interviews since it was established in 2006. For more information on how Proactive can help you make a difference, email us at action@proactiveinvestors.com English Estonian In Q2 2022, Enefit Green group total revenues increased by 30% y-o-y to 47.3m and EBITDA was up by 51% y-o-y at 30.7m. During the quarter, the group earned net profit of 16.9m (0.06 per share), which is 80% more than in Q2 2021. Aavo Karmas, Chairman of the management Board of Enefit Green comments: Energy prices in the region continued to break new records in the second quarter, keeping consumers and industry under intense pressure across Europe. European countries are abandoning Russian gas and oil and are searching for new and alternative solutions. The only viable long-term solution for the energy crisis is electrification through renewable sources replacing fossil energy sources such as motor fuels in transport or natural gas in heat production. The more we can produce green electricity, the less we will depend on uncertain and expensive fossil fuel supplies. Enefit Green is currently constructing four new wind farms in Estonia, Lithuania and Finland and three solar farms in Estonia and Poland. Investments in new assets amounted to about 40 million euros during the second quarter. In order to accelerate the deployment of renewable electricity and reduce the carbon footprint in the region, we will quadruple the current production capacity (457 megawatts) to about 1900 megawatts by 2026. For this purpose, we are investing ca 1.5 billion euros in new development projects. The most recent step in the implementation of the growth plan is the acquisition of the Tootsi wind farm. We plan to simultaneously build the Tootsi (74 MW) and Sopi (161 MW) wind farms and double the current production of Estonian wind power by doing so. The implementation of the growth strategy is also supported by the construction of the new 32MW Purtse solar farm. Together with the wind farm to be built nearby (21 MW), it will become Estonia's first hybrid farm for large-scale electricity production. In May, the general meeting of shareholders of Enefit Green decided to pay investors a dividend of 0.151 euros per share for financial year 2021. In total, we distributed investors nearly 40 million euros in dividends, or 50% of the net profit in 2021. Just as prescribed by our dividend policy. To grow production of renewable energy, and together with it our financial results and dividends in the future, we plan to make investment decisions for the construction of new wind and solar parks in the amount of 358 MW before the end of this year. Webinar to present the results of Q2 2022 Today, August 4, 2022 at 13.00 EEST Enefit Green will host a Webinar in English to present and discuss its Q2 2022 results. To participate, please follow this link . Significant events Approval of the updated strategy Final investment decision on 32MW Purtse solar farm (Estonia) Sale of minority stake in Wind Controller Annual general meeting of shareholders and dividend distribution 74MW Tootsi wind farm project acquisition (July 2022) Change in the management board composition (July 2022) Key figures Q2 2022 Q2 2021 Change Change % PRODUCTION VOLUMES Electricity, GWh 270 256 15 6% Heat, GWh 152 146 6 4% Pellets, th t 36 26 9 35% TOTAL REVENUES, m 47.3 36.2 11.0 30% Sales revenue, m 41.5 29.4 12.1 41% Renewable energy support and other income, m 5.8 6.8 -1.1 -16% EBITDA, m 30.7 20.3 10.4 51% NET PROFIT, m 16.9 9.4 7.5 80% EPS, (post-IPO number of shares) 0.06 0.04 0.03 80% Sales revenues and other operating income Groups electricity production in 2Q 2022 was 270 GWh, increasing 6% year-on-year. The implied captured electricity price (including various subsidies) received by the group across markets was 127/MWh in Q2 2022, compared with 87 /MWh in Q2 2021. The most important revenue driver was the surge in the electricity price in the Estonia price area of the Nord Pool (NP) power exchange, which increased the groups revenue by around 11.5m. The average market price in the NP Estonia price area in Q2 2022 was 142.0 /MWh compared with 54.6 /MWh in Q2 2021. The implied captured electricity prices of the groups Estonian production entities in the two periods were 115.9 /MWh and 45.0 /MWh. The implied captured electricity price differs from the average NP price because wind farms do not produce the same amount of electricity in each hour and the figure also includes the effects of long-term fixed-price power purchase agreements (PPAs). Wind conditions in Q2 2022 were comparable to Q2 2021 and their influence on the production results was relatively neutral. Heat energy production increased by 4% and sales price increased by 8% compared with a year earlier. Other income for Q2 2022 was strongly affected by a decrease in the renewable energy support received by the groups Estonian wind farms, which dropped by 0.9m year on year. The eligibility period of the Tooma 1 wind farm expired in April 2022 and that of the earliest completed part of the Aulepa wind farm (39 MW) expired in July 2021. EBITDA and segmental breakdown Groups EBITDA increased by 51% y-o-y to 30.7m in Q2 2022 driven mostly by the elevated Estonian electricity prices and somewhat by higher wind energy production volume in Estonia. Variable costs have increased by 7.0m, which is largely due to the increase in the price of balancing energy transactions due to the increased price of electricity and the change in the financial accounting of intraday Nord Pool transactions (2.9m), which has no effect on EBITDA. In addition, the cost of technological fuel (2.4m) and other direct production costs (1.8m) have also increased. Groups fixed expenses increased by 19% or 1.4m of which around half derived from payroll expenses, driven mainly by expanded development team and growth in compensation. Based on total revenues and EBITDA, the groups largest segment is Wind energy with 57% of total revenues and 67% of EBITDA for the reporting period. The Cogeneration segment contributed 34% to total revenues and 35% to EBITDA. The smallest reportable segment is Solar energy, which accounted for 8% of the groups total revenues and 4% of the groups EBITDA for Q2. Among reportable segments, Wind and the Cogeneration delivered the strongest EBITDA growth supported by high electricity prices. Net profit The groups net profit increased 80% compared to Q2 2021, amounting to 16.9m for the reporting period. The most significant positive contribution came from high market prices of electricity , but also from lower net financial expenses. At the same time 4.3m increase in corporate income tax expense (primarily related to the dividend distribution from Estonian profits) had considerable negative effect on net profit growth. Capital Expenditures The groups Q2 capital expenditures grew by 4.8m year on year, rising to 40.9m. Growth resulted from development investments, which extended to 39.9m. Out of the total, 37.8m was invested in the construction of three wind farms: 24.9m in the Akmene wind farm, 6.9m in the Silale 2 wind farm and 6.0m in the Tolpanvaara wind farm. The largest investment in solar power was 1.1m, which was invested in the execution phase of the Purtse solar farm. Baseline investments (expenditure on the improvement and maintenance of existing assets) amounted to 1m in Q2 2022 compared with 1.8m in the same period last year and were mainly related to operating turbines. Baseline investments may differ significantly quarter by quarter because they depend on the wind turbines repair and maintenance needs during the period. Condensed consolidated interim income statement thousand Q2 2022 Q2 2021 1H 2022 1H 2021 Revenue 41,505 29,408 99,646 63,522 Renewable energy support and other income 5,773 6,833 14,352 14,886 Change in inventories of finished goods and work-in-progress 4,646 (3,158) 2,579 (5,942) Raw materials, consumables and services used (16,365) (9,508) (30,499) (19,086) Payroll expenses (2,169) (1,477) (4,612) (3,307) Depreciation, amortisation and impairment (9,644) (9,547) (19,292) (19,126) Other operating expenses (2,645) (1,772) (5,150) (3,688) OPERATING PROFIT 21,101 10,778 57,025 27,259 Finance income 1,117 50 1,525 145 Finance costs (626) (1,022) (1,188) (1,576) Net finance costs 491 (972) 337 (1,431) Profit (loss) from associates under the equity method (76) (58) (72) (36) PROFIT BEFORE TAX 21,516 9,748 57,290 25,792 Corporate income tax expense (4,592) (328) (5,441) (760) PROFIT FOR THE PERIOD 16,924 9,420 51,849 25,032 Basic and diluted earnings per share Weighted average number of shares, thousand 264,276 4,793 264,276 4,793 Basic earnings per share, 0.06 1.97 0.20 5.22 Diluted earnings per share, 0.06 1.97 0.20 5.22 Basic earnings per share based on post-IPO number of shares Post-IPO number of shares, thousand 264,276 264,276 264,276 264,276 Basic earnings per share, 0.06 0.04 0.20 0.09 Condensed consolidated interim statement of financial position thousand 30 June 2022 31 Dec 2021 ASSETS Non-current assets Property, plant and equipment 647,634 612,503 Intangible assets 68,578 68,239 Right-of-use assets 4,298 2,750 Prepayments 20,030 20,710 Deferred tax assets 734 442 Investments in associates 427 578 Derivative financial instruments 6,703 - Long-term receivables 40 78 Total non-current assets 748,444 705,300 Current assets Inventories 16,267 9,529 Trade and other receivables and prepayments 23,479 22,373 Cash and cash equivalents 90,845 80,454 Derivative financial instruments 12 - Total current assets 130,603 112,356 Total assets 879,047 817,656 thousand 30 June 2022 31 Dec 2021 EQUITY Equity and reserves attributable to equity holder of the parent Share capital 264,276 264,276 Share premium 60,351 60,351 Statutory reserve capital 3,259 479 Other reserves 158,317 151,793 Foreign currency translation reserve (1,209) (965) Retained earnings 166,836 157,673 Total equity 651,830 633,607 LIABILITIES Non-current liabilities Borrowings 132,297 93,884 Goverment grants 7,344 7,458 Non-derivative contract liability 23,207 23,207 Deferred tax liabilities 12,384 12,568 Other long-term liabilities 3,000 3,000 Provisions 12 13 Total non-current liabilities 178,244 140,130 Current liabilities Borrowings 22,936 29,572 Trade and other payables 25,791 14,291 Provisions 55 56 Derivative financial instruments 191 - Total current liabilities 48,973 43,919 Total liabilities 227,217 184,049 Total equity and liabilities 879,047 817,656 Further information: Sven Kunsing Head of Finance Communications investor@enefitgreen.ee https://enefitgreen.ee/en/investorile/ Enefit Green is one of the leading diversified renewable energy producers in the Baltic sea area. The Company wind farms in Estonia and Lithuania, cogeneration plants in Estonia and Latvia, solar farms in Estonia and Poland, a pellet plant in Latvia and a hydroelectric plant in Estonia. In addition the Company is developing several wind and solar farms in the mentioned countries and Finland. As of the end of 2021, the Group had a total installed electricity production capacity of 457 MW and a total installed heat production capacity of 81 MW. During 2021, the Company produced 1,193 GWh of electricity and 618 GWh of heat. Attachments English French RELEASE AND AVAILABILITY OF THE 2022 HALF-YEAR FINANCIAL REPORT Clichy, France, August 4th, 2022 The 2022 Half-Year Financial Report of SOCIETE BIC (Paris: BB) was sent to the A.M.F. Autorite des Marches Financiers (Paris Stock Exchange Authority) on August 4, 2022. The document is available on BICs website on this link. ABOUT BIC A world leader in stationery, lighters and shavers, BIC brings simplicity and joy to everyday Life. For more than 75 years, the Company has honored the tradition of providing high-quality, affordable, essential products to consumers everywhere. Through this unwavering dedication, BIC has become one of the most recognized brands and is a trademark registered worldwide. Today, BIC products are sold in more than 160 countries around the world and feature iconic brands such as BIC Kids, BIC FlexTM, BodyMark by BICTM, Cello, Djeep, Lucky Stationery, Rocketbook, Soleil, Tipp-Ex, Us. TM, Wite-Out, Inkbox and more. In 2021, BIC Net Sales were 1,831.9 million euros. The Company is listed on "Euronext Paris"," is part of the SBF120 and CAC Mid 60 indexes and is recognized for its commitment to sustainable development and education. It received an A- Leadership score from CDP. For more, visit www.bic.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. CONTACTS Sophie Palliez-Capian VP, Corporate Stakeholder Engagement +33 1 45 19 55 28 + 33 87 89 3351 Sophie.palliez@bicworld.com Michele Ventura Senior Manager, Investor Relations + 33 1 45 19 52 98 Michele.ventura@bicworld.com Albane de La Tour dArtaise Senior Manager, Institutional Press Relations + 33 1 45 19 51 51 + 33 7 85 88 19 48 Albane.DeLaTourDArtaise@bicworld.com Isabelle de Segonzac Image 7 + 33 6 89 87 61 39 isegonzac@image7.fr 2022/2023 AGENDA ALL DATES TO BE CONFIRMED 3rd Quarter 2022 Results October 27, 2022 4th Quarter and Full-Year 2022 Results February 14, 2023 1st Quarter 2023 Results April 25, 2023 Attachment Dublin, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "UAE Cold Chain Market Outlook to 2025 - the Cold Chain Market in UAE is Thriving With the Advent of Government'S Economic Diversification Plans Coupled With UAE's Increasing Adoption of Technology and Automation" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The report provides a comprehensive analysis on the Cold Chain Market in the UAE The report covers various aspects including overview and market size, market segmentation, stakeholders, value chain analysis, major players, competitive landscape, operating and profitability model, end-user potential in the cold chain industry and many other influential factors. The report concludes with market projections and analyst recommendations highlighting the major opportunities and cautions for the cold chain market players. UAE Cold Chain Market Overview and Size The cold chain market in UAE is at growth stage. It has consolidated its position as a global transhipment hub due to its central location in the GCC region. The high dependence of the country on imports to meet its food requirements has necessitated the development of cold chain facilities. In the review period 2015-2020, the UAE cold chain market has increased at a positive CAGR of 5.0% largely due to heavy government and direct foreign investments in transportation and storage infrastructure, increase in retail and consumer spending especially in groceries, dairy, meat, international food and EXPO 2020. UAE Cold Chain Market Segmentation Cold Warehousing The cold storage market is dominating the market and contributed majority revenue share to the cold chain industry. Majority of the cold storage warehouses are located in free-zones in Dubai and Abu Dhabi like JAFZA, DIP, DIC, Al Aweer, etc. Some of the key growth drivers include increase in retail distribution cold storage, set up of new warehouses, creation of large food and Pharma reserves by government, growing end users in emerging markets. Seasonal surge in demand is seen especially during the Ramadan festival. UAE Cold Chain Market Future Outlook and Projections The Cold Chain market in UAE is expected to experience medium level of growth at a single digit CAGR in terms of revenue during the period 2020-2025F. Positive growth in the market is attributed to rise in manufacturing activity in the pharmaceutical sector, investments in infrastructure, growth in dairy industry and rising import export volumes. The industry is expected to witness entry of new players and new mergers and acquisition between the players. Additionally, increasing adoption of warehouse automation technologies such as EDI, RFID, AS/AR and others are expected to improve operational efficiency in UAE cold chain market over the forecast period 2020-2025F. Competitive Landscape Competition in UAE Cold Storage Market is highly fragmented with ~20 large companies acquiring chunks of market share. The market is highly concentrated in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi ports and free zones. The rising urban population, developed transport infrastructure in these regions along with the proximity to the sea and air ports has been the key factors leading to the growth of the cold chain businesses in these areas. The cold chain companies in the country compete on a host of parameters such as location, price, temperature range, product range, warehouse infrastructure, industry expertise, clientele, etc. Major players in the cold chain market include GAC, GSL, Mohebi Logistics, CEVA Logistics, RHS, Hellmann, DB Schenker and others. Cold Transportation The market experienced a slight slowdown in growth during 2020 owing to global pandemic Covid-19, which led to lockdown across the country for few months. Some of the key growth drivers include increase in retail distribution, growing end users in emerging markets, increasing import of perishables, tech advancements such as Transport Management Systems used by cold chain players. UAE Cold Warehousing Market Segmentations By Temperature Range (Ambient, Chilled and Frozen): Chillers and freezers were quite high in demand in the year 2020 given the increase in the consumption of frozen and fresh food items. By Ownership (Integrated and Contract Warehouses): Integrated logistic facilities generate larger revenue share. This is majorly due preference of logistics companies to invest into warehouses and closely monitor operations themselves as opposed to outsourcing them. By End-User Application (Meat and Seafood, Dairy Products, Pharmaceuticals, Fruits and Vegetables and Others): Meat and Seafood contributed the highest revenue share owing to the tremendous increase in the demand for meat during the lockdown. The demand for pharmaceutical products was quite high due to the onset of the pandemic. By Major Emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Others): Dubai accounts for the highest share in the revenue of the cold storage market as it acts as a hub from where products are transported to other regions. By Areas (JAFZA, DIP, DIC, Al Aweer and Others): Jebel Ali Free Zone accounted for the maximum share in the revenue of the cold storage market and hosts over 8,700 companies. It is considered as the world's largest free zone. UAE Cold Transportation Market Segmentations By Mode of Transport (Land, Sea and Air): Cold transport through land contributed the highest revenue to the cold transport industry as food imports into the country through ports are transported to different cities via land transport. Majority of the domestic transportation takes place through the well-developed road infrastructure in the country as most places are quite accessible via road. By Type of Freight (Domestic and International): Cold transportation to international markets accounted for majority of the revenue of the UAE cold transport industry due to the reliance of the country on imports for its food requirements. By End-User Application (Meat and Seafood, Dairy Products, Pharmaceuticals, Fruits and Vegetables and Others): Meat and seafood has positively impacted cold chain industry followed by Dairy Products. UAE has the highest consumption levels for meat and seafood in the world. By Contract and Integrated Logistics: The cold chain market in the UAE is dominated by 3PL facilities, generating largest share in market revenue. This is majorly due to the large number of 3PL operators providing wide variety of services and increasing shift towards outsourcing cold transport requirements by cold chain companies. Key Segments Covered By Type of Market Cold Storage By Temperature Ambient Chilled Frozen By Ownership Integrated Contract By End-User Application Meat and Seafood Dairy Products Pharmaceuticals Vegetables and Fruits Others By Major Emirates Dubai Abu Dhabi Sharjah Others By Major Areas JAFZA DIP DIC Al Aweer Others Cold Transport By Mode of Freight Land Sea Air By Type of Freight Domestic International By Contract and Integrated Logistics Integrated Contract By End-User Application Meat and Seafood Dairy Products Pharmaceuticals Vegetables and Fruits Others Time Period Captured in the Report Historical Period: 2015-2020 Forecast Period: 2020-2025F Companies Covered GAC GSL Mohebi CEVA RHS Hellmann DB Schenker Khalidia Shipping Kuehne and Nagel Agility Al Futtaim DSV Panalpina Triburg RSA Cold Chain Sharjah cold stores Bhatia Brothers Tameem logistics For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/6ap6a1 Dublin, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Coal: Global Markets" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This market study assesses the leading coal types currently used globally for electricity, steel, cement, etc. The coal discussed in this report is in use across these industries, and many more and new emerging sectors are driven by technological innovation In 2021, global coal output recovered from the supply and demand disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In 2021, an expansionary economic climate favored coal fundamentals. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global coal production increased by around REDACTED% to approximately REDACTED metric tons in 2021. China is the world's most significant coal producer, accounting for over half of total production. According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, China produced about REDACTED billion metric tons of coal in 2021. India, Indonesia, U.S., Australia and Russia are other big coal producers. In 2021, U.S. coal production climbed by approximately REDACTED%, following a more than REDACTED% decline in 2020 owing primarily to weaker demand for electricity generation and muted exports. Coal production in the U.S. has roughly halved over the last decade as demand for coal-fired energy has continued to decline. The U.S. is currently the fourth-largest producer, having previously trailed only China. While the coal sector is one of the most contentious globally, it is also crucial. Although economically developed countries have pushed for renewable energy sources to be used to generate electricity rather than fossil fuels due to the environmental impact of carbon emissions, coal still accounts for at least REDACTED% of global electricity generation, and it saw a REDACTED% increase in the seaborne coal trade in 2019. Coal is the most widespread fossil fuel, accounting for REDACTED% of all recoverable fossil fuels. Even in 2021, there was a rise in seaborne coal commerce owing to increased coal imports from growing economies such as Malaysia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan and the Philippines. Indeed, these are a few countries responsible for the significant growth in coal volumes in 2019, with India, China, the Philippines and Vietnam contributing the most. The electricity generation in these countries is critical since many of their citizens lack access to power. Globally, over REDACTED people lack access to electricity. Thus, reconciling the demand for increased electricity generation with reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a tricky balancing act that the world needs to master."Nitrogen gas is a major type of industrial gas utilized across an array of applications in production, processing, storage and shipping. It is primarily used for the purpose of purging and blanketing in order to offer protection from various contaminants. It plays a key role in preventing combustible dust explosions and allows safe storage of flammable products. In addition, through the process of sparging and stripping, this gas also aids in removal of contaminants. The massive surge in demand has driven the numerous methods of production as well as supply to attain higher reliability, cost and performance efficiency and convenience. Moreover, the market is also characterized by novel technologies, which are highly advanced and are able to meet desired requirements for purity, portability, footprint and usage pattern. The chemical sector leads in terms of contribution of demand to the nitrogen gas market. Rising applications in gas blanketing and refineries are further propelling global demand. In addition, healthcare, food and beverages, and other segments are also key demand contributors. Regions such as Asia-Pacific and the Americas are expected to drive demand in coming years owing to growing industrial manufacturing sector in emerging nations such as India, China, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. The market is highly consolidated in nature. It is dominated by few leading players such as Linde plc, Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Messer Group GmbH, Nippon Sanso Corp., Air Liquide, Gulf Cryo and other players. Regional and country-level markets will be segmented and analyzed by type and application. The report also covers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The market sizes and estimations are provided regarding revenue, with 2021 serving as the base year; market forecasts will be given for 2022 to 2027. Report Includes Analyses of the global market trends, with historic revenue (sales) data for 2021, estimates for 2022-2023, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2027 Market assessment of the coals used in numerous end-user industries with emphasis on power generation (thermal coal), coking feedstock (coking coal), and other industries Estimation and forecast the worldwide coal consumption market size in value and volumetric terms, projected growth trends, and corresponding market share analysis by type of coal, mining/extraction process, end-user industry, and geographic region Insights into regulatory framework and general idea about the coal industry standards, new technological improvements and developments leading to increase in demand for thermal coal, and higher annual prices in the international market over the last five years In-depth information on R&D investment, key technology issues, industry specific challenges, major types of end-user markets, and the impact on mining, procurement, distribution and selling of coals Review of recent industry trends, value chain analysis, competitive landscape, and COVID-19 implications within the marketplace Company profiles of major players, including China Shenhua, Coal India Limited (CIL), China Coal Energy Company Limited and Glencore Key Topics Covered: Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Summary and Highlights Chapter 3 Market Overview Introduction Overview of Coal Uses of Coal Advantages of Coal Coal Characteristics Pricing Analysis SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats Market Dynamics Drivers Restraints Opportunity Challenges Trends Utilizing Self-Driving Vehicles in Underground Mining Utilization of Three-Dimensional Mine Visualizers Port Improvements for Coal Shipping Innovation in Coal Mining Production Implementing IoT in Coal Mining Implementing of Electric Machines in Underground Mining Chapter 4 Impact of a COVID-19 on the Global Coal Market Overview Following Steps Should be Taken by Coal Mining Companies Post COVID-19 Impact of COVID-19 on Employment in Mining Two Critical Points Must Be Emphasized Chapter 5 Value Chain Analysis of the Global Coal Market Value Chain Analysis Discover Plan and Construct Mine Process Move and Market Coal Mining Process Coal Extraction Treatment Transport and Storage Mine Rehabilitation Chapter 6 Market Breakdown by Coal Type Overview Thermal Coal Metallurgical Coal Chapter 7 Market Breakdown by Extraction Process Overview Environmental Impacts of Coal Mining Surface Mining Mining Methods and Equipment Strip Mining Contour Mining Mountaintop Removal Mining Underground Mining Equipment for Underground Mining Longwall Mining Continuous Mining Room and Pillar Mining Blast Mining Shortwall Mining Retreat Mining Chapter 8 Market Breakdown by End Use Overview Environmental Impacts of Coal Mining Electricity Advantages of Using Coal to Generate Power Disadvantages of Coal Pollution Control of Coal Power Plant Steel Coal is Required as a Reductant An Energy Source Carbon Source in the Product Cement Others Coal Gasification Aluminum Transportation Non-energy Uses Production of Chemicals Chapter 9 Market Breakdown by Region Overview North America U.S. Canada Europe Russia Kazakhstan Germany Poland Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific China India Indonesia Australia Rest of Asia-Pacific LAMEA South Africa Rest of LAMEA Chapter 10 Global Competitive Landscape Recent Developments Environmental Policies, Regulations and Implementation U.S. Europe China India New Innovations in Coal Industry Chapter 11 Company Profiles Anglo American Arch Resources Inc. Bhp China Shenhua Coal India Ltd. China Coal Energy Company Limited Glencore Shaanxi Coal Industry Chemical Group Co. Ltd. Teck Resources Ltd. Yancoal For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/id1uqr RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Asensus Surgical, Inc. (NYSE American: ASXC), a medical device company that is digitizing the interface between the surgeon and the patient to pioneer a new era of Performance-Guided Surgery, today announced that a Senhance Surgical System was sold to the Companys distribution partner, and will be placed in a hospital in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region. We are excited to be partnering with yet another institution to initiate a Senhance program to deliver better patient outcomes, said Anthony Fernando, Asensus Surgical President and CEO. With the combination of unique instrumentation, including 3mm and articulation, advanced safety features such as haptic feedback, and the industry's only intelligent Artificial Intelligence platform, Senhance provides the opportunity to revolutionize a surgical teams capabilities when performing laparoscopic procedures. Leveraging the Performance-Guided Surgery framework, the Senhance Surgical System advances clinical intelligence by providing surgeons with augmented intelligence and digital tools to perform consistently superior surgery. Asensus Surgical's technology platform, Senhance Surgical System, is the first of its kind digital laparoscopic platform that leverages augmented intelligence to provide unmatched performance and patient outcomes through machine learning. Senhance goes beyond the typical surgical robotic systems, providing surgical assurance through haptic feedback, eye-tracking camera control, and 3D visualization, and is the first platform to offer 3mm instruments (the smallest instrument available in the world on a robotic surgical platform). The Senhance Surgical System is powered by the Intelligent Surgical Unit (ISU). The ISU enables machine vision-driven control of the camera for a surgeon by responding to commands and recognizing certain objects and locations in the surgical field, and allows a surgeon to change the visualized field of view using the movement of their instruments. About Asensus Surgical, Inc. Asensus Surgical, Inc. is digitizing the interface between the surgeon and patient to pioneer a new era of Performance-Guided Surgery by unlocking clinical intelligence for surgeons to enable consistently superior outcomes and a new standard of surgery. This builds upon the foundation of Digital Laparoscopy with the Senhance Surgical System powered by the Intelligent Surgical Unit (ISU) to increase surgeon control and reduce surgical variability. With the addition of machine vision, augmented intelligence, and deep learning capabilities throughout the surgical experience, we intend to holistically address the current clinical, cognitive and economic shortcomings that drive surgical outcomes and value-based healthcare. Learn more about Performance-Guided Surgery and Digital Laparoscopy with the Senhance Surgical System here: www.senhance.com. Now available for sale in the US, EU, Japan, Russia, and select other countries. For a complete list of indications for use, visit: www.senhance.com/indications. For more information, visit www.asensus.com. Follow Asensus Email Alerts: https://ir.asensus.com/email-alerts LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asensus-surgical-inc Twitter: https://twitter.com/AsensusSurgical YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/transenterix Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/asxc Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes statements relating to the Senhance Surgical System and the sale of a Senhance System to a distribution partner, which will be ultimately placed at an end user hospital in the Commonwealth of Independent States. These statements and other statements regarding our future plans and goals constitute "forward looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that are often difficult to predict, are beyond our control and which may cause results to differ materially from expectations and include whether the Senhance Surgical System provides the opportunity to revolutionize a surgical teams capabilities when performing laparoscopic procedures. For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties associated with the Companys business, please review our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, filed with the SEC on February 28, 2022 and our other filings we make with the SEC. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements, which are based on our expectations as of the date of this press release and speak only as of the origination date of this press release. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. INVESTOR CONTACT: Mark Klausner or Mike Vallie 443-213-0499 invest@asensus.com MEDIA CONTACT: Lauren Stredler 847-271-6891 CG Life lstredler@cglife.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/24cd4ee5-138f-47e8-b0b0-fd04ebb2844e KB Kookmin Bank headquarters in Seoul / Korea Times file By Yi Whan-woo The union of KB Kookmin Bank said Thursday that it filed a lawsuit calling for management to pay employees the amount of salary that was cut due to a disputed peak wage system. Adopted by numerous businesses, the system put a ceiling on wages and gradually cut the annual salaries of senior-level workers several years before retirement after their pay reached what's deemed as the peak. In May, the Supreme Court ruled that the peak wage system is illegal by discriminating against workers on the basis of age. The lawsuit by KB Kookmin Bank's union is the first case in the financial industry where workers have taken legal steps to oppose the peak wage system. Employees of other banks are anticipated to follow suit. "The purpose of the lawsuit is to have management pay the garnished wages to some of our unionists," the union said in a statement, noting that 41 of its members are entitled to receive the money. It did not specify the total amount. KB Kookmin Bank adopted the system in 2008 after consulting with the union as part of efforts to free up more money to hire more workers and ease the work burden on existing staff. "But nothing has been changed concerning the workload while the wages of senior unionists have been reduced," the union said. It said 40 percent of annual salaries are cut when a worker reaches the age of 56, and an additional 5 percent afterward so that the wage is cut by half when a worker becomes 58. "We hope the court will come up with a sensible ruling again for our case," the union said. The management responded, "We will take corresponding measures after going over the arguments of the plaintiffs." Revenue growth of 23% Record high customer retention and recurring monthly revenue balance Continued sequential and year-over-year improvement in revenue and subscribers Affirming 2022 guidance metrics BOCA RATON, Fla., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ADT Inc. (NYSE: ADT), the most trusted brand in smart home and small business security, today reported results for the second quarter of 2022. Financial highlights for the second quarter of 2022 are listed below. Variances are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Total revenue of $1.6 billion, up 23%, and end of period recurring monthly revenue (RMR) of $369 million, up 5% Record high customer retention with gross customer revenue attrition at 12.7% Revenue payback of 2.2 years, down sequentially from prior quarter GAAP net income of $92 million, or $0.10 per diluted share, up $217 million Adjusted net income of $50 million, or $0.06 per diluted share, up $105 million Adjusted EBITDA of $597 million, up $55 million or 10% We demonstrated tremendous momentum in our business and delivered record high customer retention, our highest-ever recurring monthly revenue balance, and our first reported positive adjusted net income since our IPO, said ADT President and CEO Jim DeVries. With our team dedicated to providing unrivaled service to our customers, ADTs progress continues on our key initiatives outlined earlier this year during our Investor Day to meaningfully grow our revenue, earnings, and cash flows through 2025. BUSINESS HIGHLIGHTS Foundation for Growth Strength from core business ADTs Consumer and Small Business (CSB) segment, its core smart home security business, posted revenue growth of 6% with 14% improvement in Adjusted EBITDA, and margin expansion over the prior year period. Continued growth of RMR The end of quarter RMR balance was $369 million, representing a 5% increase over the prior year period. Approximately 80% of total CSB and Commercial revenue was generated from this durable recurring revenue. Record customer retention With strong customer satisfaction, trailing twelve-month gross customer revenue attrition was 12.7% at the end the second quarter. This performance reflects a sequential improvement and a 60 basis point improvement versus the prior year period. Continued expansion of Solar ADT Solar expanded into Colorado and Maryland and now provides solar offerings in 23 states. Additionally, approximately 15% of new solar sales in the second quarter of 2022 were generated from the ADT ecosystem, demonstrating our progress with cross-selling. Innovative Offerings Enhanced Google offerings As part of ADTs partnership with Google, the Company now nationally sells, installs, and services a full suite of Google Nest products, including doorbells, cameras, and thermostats. During the second quarter of 2022, the attachment rate for the Google doorbell was 48%, helping drive a 23% increase in residential installation revenue per unit in the quarter. Multi-location app for small businesses In June 2022, ADT rolled out multi-location app functionality to help small business owners better manage their businesses. The app provides customers with the ability to manage and monitor their ADT smart security systems from the palm of their hand, enhancing the customer experience. Next generation of smart apartments In June 2022, ADT acquired IOTAS, a smart home apartment company. The ADT brand, paired with IOTAS innovative platform, furthers ADTs commitment to becoming the top choice in the fast-growing multifamily security and automation space. Unrivaled Safety Recognition for ADTs SMART monitoring solutions ADT was awarded the 2022 Police Dispatch Quality Award in recognition of the Companys ongoing efforts to reduce false alarm dispatches. ADTs patented SMART (System Monitoring and Response Technology) monitoring helps prioritize responses, enhance response policies, and send data to emergency response centers directly. Expanding Commercials geographic footprint In May 2022, ADT Commercial acquired Key-Rite Security, a Denver-based security provider specializing in access control, surveillance, intrusion, and intercom systems. The acquisition expands ADT Commercials service coverage and offerings across Colorado and provides a foundation to extend its reach in the region. Premium Experience ADT Virtual Assistance program ADTs Virtual Assistance program provides customers with more flexibility, convenience, and choice through video service and installation options. The program is generating high customer satisfaction at a lower cost to the Company. Over 230,000 virtual appointments were executed in the quarter, lowering the Companys carbon footprint by eliminating thousands of vehicle trips each day. Progress on our ESG Journey False alarm reduction In the second quarter of 2022, ADTs patented SMART monitoring innovations have reduced false alarms by 52%, eliminating over 500,000 unneeded trips by local first responders better utilizing community resources and reducing environmental impact. Safe, Smart, and Sustainable Habitat for Humanity Home In June and July, employees helped build three Habitat for Humanity homes in Florida, Louisiana, and Colorado with each homeowner receiving free rooftop solar and a smart home security system. Additionally, ADT contributed over $50,000 to help Habitat for Humanity in its mission to solve the affordable housing crisis. 2022 FINANCIAL OUTLOOK The Company is affirming its previously provided financial guidance for the full year 2022. Each metric shown below represents an improvement over the same measure in 2021. (in millions) Total Revenue $6,200 - $6,400 Adjusted EBITDA $2,335 - $2,435 Adjusted Free Cash Flow $550 - $625 See Note (1) for an explanation of why the Company is not providing a quantitative reconciliation of its non-GAAP financial outlook to the corresponding GAAP measures. TOTAL COMPANY RESULTS (2)(3) (in millions, except revenue payback, attrition, and per share data) Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 GAAP Total revenue $ 1,601 $ 1,304 $ 3,146 $ 2,609 Net income (loss) 92 (126 ) 143 (174 ) Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities 515 426 823 786 Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities (402 ) (378 ) (807 ) (777 ) Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities (85 ) (19 ) 7 (60 ) Net income (loss) per share of Common Stock - diluted $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.15 $ (0.21 ) Net income (loss) per share of Class B Common Stock - diluted $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.15 $ (0.21 ) Other Measures Adjusted EBITDA $ 597 $ 542 $ 1,198 $ 1,084 Adjusted Free Cash Flow 185 164 143 227 Trailing twelve-month revenue payback 2.2 years 2.2 years Trailing twelve-month gross customer revenue attrition 12.7 % 13.3 % End of period RMR $ 369 $ 352 Adjusted Net Income (Loss) $ 50 $ (55 ) $ 43 $ (112 ) Adjusted Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share $ 0.06 $ (0.07 ) $ 0.05 $ (0.15 ) SEGMENT RESULTS (3) CSB (in millions) Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 $ Change % Change Monitoring and related services $ 1,011 $ 965 $ 46 5 % Installation, product, and other 77 57 20 34 % Total CSB revenue $ 1,088 $ 1,023 $ 66 6 % Adjusted EBITDA $ 581 $ 510 $ 71 14 % Adjusted EBITDA Margin (as a % of Total CSB Revenue) 53 % 50 % Total CSB revenue for the second quarter was $1,088 million. This performance was driven by a $46 million, or 5%, increase in monitoring and related services (M&S) revenue resulting from higher average pricing, subscriber growth initiatives, and improved customer retention. CSB Adjusted EBITDA increased 14% to $581 million in the second quarter on higher M&S revenue and improved cost performance. The Companys Virtual Assistance program allowed ADT to reduce service costs year over year even as the Company achieved an increase in subscribers and RMR. Commercial (in millions) Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 $ Change % Change Monitoring and related services $ 134 $ 118 $ 16 14 % Installation, product, and other 163 163 % Total Commercial revenue $ 297 $ 282 $ 16 6 % Adjusted EBITDA $ 31 $ 32 $ (1 ) (2 )% Adjusted EBITDA Margin (as a % of Total Commercial Revenue) 11 % 11 % Total Commercial revenue for the second quarter increased 6% year over year to $297 million driven by an increase in M&S revenue. Sales remain strong, resulting in a growing backlog, though installation revenue was flat year over year due to supply chain delays. Commercial Adjusted EBITDA was $31 million in the second quarter, relatively flat versus the prior year period as increased M&S revenue was offset by the impact of cost inflation on materials, labor, and fuel. Solar (in millions) Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 $ Change % Change Installation, product, and other $ 215 $ $ 215 N/M Total Solar revenue $ 215 $ $ 215 N/M Adjusted EBITDA $ (15 ) $ $ (15 ) N/M Adjusted EBITDA Margin (as a % of Total Solar Revenue) (7 )% % Note: Sunpro Solar, now referred to as ADT Solar, was acquired on December 8, 2021. M&S revenue is not applicable to the Solar segment. Total Solar revenue for the second quarter was $215 million driven by the installation of approximately 5,600 systems, an increase of 50% compared to the corresponding result for Sunpro Solar in the prior year period. Solar Adjusted EBITDA was a $15 million loss, driven primarily by impacts from a third party lenders insolvency and associated installation delays. BALANCE SHEET, CASH, AND LIQUIDITY Operating cash flow during the second quarter of 2022 was $515 million with Adjusted Free Cash Flow of $185 million. The company returned $32 million to shareholders in dividends in the quarter. At the end of the second quarter of 2022, the Company had total debt of $9.8 billion with continued improvements in GAAP and adjusted leverage ratios. During the second quarter, the Company reduced the outstanding balance of its revolving credit facility by $90 million, ending the quarter with $80 million of revolver borrowings. Dividend Declaration Effective Aug. 4, 2022, the Companys board of directors declared a cash dividend of $0.035 per share to holders of the Companys Common Stock and Class B Common Stock of record as of Sept. 15, 2022. This dividend will be paid on Oct. 4, 2022. _____________________ (1 ) The Company is not providing a quantitative reconciliation of its 2022 financial outlook for Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted Free Cash Flow to net income (loss) and net cash provided by operating activities, which are their respective corresponding GAAP measures, because the Company is unable to reliably predict or estimate these GAAP measures without unreasonable effort due to their dependence on future uncertainties, such as the adjustments or items discussed below under the heading Non-GAAP Measures. Additionally, information that is currently not available to the Company could have a potentially unpredictable and potentially significant impact on its future GAAP financial results. (2 ) All variances are year-over-year unless otherwise noted. Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin, Adjusted Free Cash Flow, Adjusted Net Income (Loss), Adjusted Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share, and Net Leverage Ratio are non-GAAP measures. Refer to the Non-GAAP Measures section for the definitions of these terms and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures. The operating metrics such as Gross Customer Revenue Attrition, Unit Count, RMR, Gross RMR Additions, and Revenue Payback are approximated as there may be variations to reported results in each period due to certain adjustments the Company might make in connection with the integration over several periods of acquired companies that calculated these metrics differently, or otherwise, including periodic reassessments and refinements in the ordinary course of business. These refinements, for example, may include changes due to systems conversion or historical methodology differences in legacy systems. (3 ) Amounts may not sum due to rounding. Conference Call As previously announced, management will host a conference call at 10:00 a.m. ET today to discuss the Companys second quarter of 2022 results and lead a question-and-answer session. Participants may listen to a live webcast through the investor relations website at investor.adt.com. A replay of the webcast will be available on the website within 24 hours of the live event. Alternatively, participants may listen to the live call by dialing 1-877-407-3982 (domestic) or 1-201-493-6780 (international) and requesting the ADT Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. An audio replay will be available for two weeks following the call and can be accessed by dialing 1-844-512-2921 (domestic) or 1-412-317-6671 (international) and providing the passcode 13730413. A slide presentation highlighting the Companys results will also be available on the Investor Relations section of the Companys website. From time to time, the Company may use its website as a channel of distribution of material Company information. Financial and other material information regarding the Company is routinely posted on and accessible at investor.adt.com. About ADT Inc. ADT provides safe, smart and sustainable solutions for people, homes and businesses. Through innovative products, partnerships and the largest network of smart home, security and rooftop solar professionals in the United States, we empower people to protect and connect what matters most. For more information, visit www.adt.com. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS ADT has made statements in this press release and other reports, filings, and other public written and verbal announcements that are forward-looking and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included in this document are, or could be, forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are made in reliance on the safe harbor protections provided thereunder. These forward-looking statements relate to anticipated financial performance; managements plans and objectives for future operations; our acquisition of Sunpro Solar, now ADT Solar, and its anticipated impact on our business and financial condition; business prospects; market conditions; our ability to successfully respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 Pandemic; our strategic partnership and ongoing relationship with Google; the expected timing of product commercialization with Google or any changes thereto; the successful internal development, commercialization, and timing of our next generation platform and innovative offerings; the successful commercialization of our joint venture with Ford; the successful conversion of customers who continue to utilize 3G services; and other matters. Forward-looking statements can be identified by various words such as expects, intends, will, anticipates, believes, confident, continue, propose, seeks, could, may, should, estimates, forecasts, might, goals, objectives, targets, planned, projects, and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements are based on managements current beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. ADT cautions that these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside of ADTs control, and could cause future events or results to be materially different from those stated or implied in this document, including among others, risks and uncertainties related to the Companys ability to successfully integrate and operate the ADT Solar business, the Companys ability to commercialize its joint venture with Ford, the Companys ability to successfully generate profitable revenue from new and existing partnerships, the Companys ability to continuously and successfully commercialize innovative offerings, the Companys ability to successfully implement an Environmental, Social, and Governance program across the Company, the Companys ability to successfully convert all remaining customers away from the use of a 3G platform, and risk factors that are described in the Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the sections entitled Risk Factors and Managements Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations contained therein. Any forward-looking statement made in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. ADT undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. ADT INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS (in millions, except per share data) (Unaudited) Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 $ Change % Change 2022 2021 $ Change % Change Monitoring and related services $ 1,146 $ 1,084 $ 62 6 % $ 2,267 $ 2,146 $ 121 6 % Installation, product, and other 455 221 234 106 % 879 463 416 90 % Total revenue 1,601 1,304 297 23 % 3,146 2,609 537 21 % Cost of revenue (exclusive of depreciation and amortization shown separately below) 508 382 126 33 % 1,018 763 255 33 % Selling, general, and administrative expenses 487 446 41 9 % 969 895 74 8 % Depreciation and intangible asset amortization 399 474 (75 ) (16 )% 876 944 (69 ) (7 )% Merger, restructuring, integration, and other (4 ) 5 (9 ) N/M (3 ) 25 (29 ) N/M Operating income (loss) 211 (2 ) 212 N/M 287 (18 ) 305 N/M Interest expense, net (82 ) (167 ) 85 (51 )% (88 ) (214 ) 126 (59 )% Loss on extinguishment of debt % N/M Other income (expense) 1 2 (5 )% 3 3 (11 )% Income (loss) before income taxes and equity in net earnings (losses) of equity method investee 130 (167 ) 297 N/M 202 (229 ) 431 N/M Income tax benefit (expense) (38 ) 41 (79 ) N/M (57 ) 56 (113 ) N/M Income (loss) before equity in net earnings (losses) of equity method investee 92 (126 ) 218 N/M 144 (174 ) 318 N/M Equity in net earnings (losses) of equity method investee (1 ) (1 ) N/M (1 ) (1 ) N/M Net income (loss) $ 92 $ (126 ) $ 217 N/M $ 143 $ (174 ) $ 317 N/M Net income (loss) per share - basic: Common Stock $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.16 $ (0.21 ) Class B Common Stock $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.16 $ (0.21 ) Weighted-average shares outstanding - basic: Common Stock 848 766 846 764 Class B Common Stock 55 55 55 55 Net income (loss) per share - diluted: Common Stock $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.15 $ (0.21 ) Class B Common Stock $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.15 $ (0.21 ) Weighted-average shares outstanding - diluted: Common Stock 911 766 911 764 Class B Common Stock 55 55 55 55 Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding ADT INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (in millions) (Unaudited) June 30, 2022 December 31, 2021 Assets Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 44 $ 24 Accounts receivable, net 528 442 Inventories, net 314 277 Work-in-progress 83 71 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 215 178 Total current assets 1,184 993 Property and equipment, net 369 364 Subscriber system assets, net 2,981 2,868 Intangible assets, net 5,238 5,413 Goodwill 5,967 5,943 Deferred subscriber acquisition costs, net 969 850 Other assets 607 463 Total assets $ 17,315 $ 16,894 Liabilities and stockholders equity Current liabilities: Current maturities of long-term debt $ 844 $ 118 Accounts payable 462 475 Deferred revenue 388 374 Accrued expenses and other current liabilities 670 737 Total current liabilities 2,365 1,703 Long-term debt 8,999 9,575 Deferred subscriber acquisition revenue 1,431 1,199 Deferred tax liabilities 927 867 Other liabilities 214 301 Total liabilities 13,936 13,646 Total stockholders equity 3,379 3,249 Total liabilities and stockholders equity $ 17,315 $ 16,894 Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding ADT INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS (in millions) (Unaudited) Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 Cash flows from operating activities: Net income (loss) $ 92 $ (126 ) $ 143 $ (174 ) Adjustments to reconcile net income (loss) to net cash provided by (used in) operating activities: Depreciation and intangible asset amortization 399 474 876 944 Amortization of deferred subscriber acquisition costs 39 30 76 59 Amortization of deferred subscriber acquisition revenue (58 ) (41 ) (112 ) (78 ) Share-based compensation expense 17 14 33 30 Deferred income taxes 34 (41 ) 50 (63 ) Provision for losses on receivables and inventory 27 4 46 19 Loss on extinguishment of debt Intangible asset impairments 18 Unrealized (gain) loss on interest rate swap contracts (59 ) 14 (205 ) (92 ) Other non-cash items, net 13 32 79 71 Changes in operating assets and liabilities, net of effects of acquisitions: Deferred subscriber acquisition costs (103 ) (80 ) (196 ) (148 ) Deferred subscriber acquisition revenue 85 72 166 130 Other, net 29 73 (134 ) 70 Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities 515 426 823 786 Cash flows from investing activities: Dealer generated customer accounts and bulk account purchases (157 ) (141 ) (342 ) (340 ) Subscriber system asset expenditures (196 ) (195 ) (379 ) (339 ) Purchases of property and equipment (49 ) (42 ) (88 ) (84 ) Acquisition of businesses, net of cash acquired (13 ) (1 ) (13 ) (16 ) Proceeds from sale of business, net of cash sold 27 27 Other investing, net (14 ) 1 (13 ) 2 Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities (402 ) (378 ) (807 ) (777 ) Cash flows from financing activities: Proceeds from long-term borrowings 100 380 11 Proceeds from receivables facility 93 42 140 71 Repayment of long-term borrowings, including call premiums (198 ) (14 ) (340 ) (32 ) Repayment of receivables facility (26 ) (9 ) (47 ) (17 ) Dividends on common stock (32 ) (29 ) (63 ) (58 ) Payments on finance leases (11 ) (7 ) (22 ) (14 ) Payments on interest rate swaps (11 ) (14 ) (25 ) (28 ) Deferred financing costs Other financing, net 1 13 (15 ) 7 Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities (85 ) (19 ) 7 (60 ) Cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash and restricted cash equivalents: Net (decrease) increase during the period 27 29 22 (51 ) Beginning balance 28 127 33 208 Ending balance $ 56 $ 157 $ 56 $ 157 Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding ADT INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES SEGMENT INFORMATION (in millions) (Unaudited) Total Revenue by Segment Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, (in millions) 2022 2021 2022 2021 CSB: Monitoring and related services $ 1,011 $ 965 $ 2,004 $ 1,916 Installation, product, and other 77 57 147 145 Total CSB $ 1,088 $ 1,023 $ 2,151 $ 2,061 Commercial: Monitoring and related services $ 134 $ 118 $ 263 $ 230 Installation, product, and other 163 163 325 318 Total Commercial $ 297 $ 282 $ 588 $ 548 Solar: Installation, product, and other $ 215 $ $ 407 $ Total Solar (1) $ 215 $ $ 407 $ Total Revenue $ 1,601 $ 1,304 $ 3,146 $ 2,609 _______________________ (1) M&S revenue is not applicable to the Solar segment. Adjusted EBITDA by Segment Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, (in millions) 2022 2021 2022 2021 CSB $ 581 $ 510 $ 1,141 $ 1,029 Commercial 31 32 55 55 Solar (15 ) 2 Total $ 597 $ 542 $ 1,198 $ 1,084 Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding Adjusted EBITDA Margin by Segment Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 CSB (as a % of Total CSB Revenue) 53 % 50 % 53 % 50 % Commercial (as a % of Total Commercial Revenue) 11 % 11 % 9 % 10 % Solar (as a % of Total Solar Revenue) (7 )% % 1 % % ADT INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES NON-GAAP MEASURES ADT sometimes uses information (non-GAAP financial measures) that is derived from the condensed consolidated financial statements, but that is not presented in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the U.S. (GAAP). Under SEC rules, non-GAAP financial measures may be considered in addition to results prepared in accordance with GAAP, but should not be considered a substitute for or superior to GAAP results. The following information includes definitions of our non-GAAP financial measures used in this release, reasons our management believes these measures are useful to investors regarding our financial condition and results of operations, additional purposes, if any, for which our management uses the non-GAAP financial measures, and limitations to using these non-GAAP financial measures, as well as reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures. Each non-GAAP financial measure is presented following the corresponding GAAP measure so as not to imply that more emphasis should be placed on the non-GAAP measure. The limitations of non-GAAP financial measures are best addressed by considering these measures in conjunction with the appropriate GAAP measures. In addition, computations of these non-GAAP measures may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures reported by other companies. With regard to our financial guidance for 2022, the Company is not providing a quantitative reconciliation for forward-looking Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted Free Cash Flow to net income (loss) and net cash provided by operating activities, respectively, which are the most directly comparable GAAP measures. These GAAP measures cannot be reliably predicted or estimated without unreasonable effort due to their dependence on future uncertainties, such as the adjustment of items used in the following reconciliations. Additionally, information about other adjusting items that is currently not available to the Company could have a potentially unpredictable and potentially significant impact on its future GAAP financial results. Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA Margin, and Reconciliation to GAAP Net Income or Loss We believe the presentation of Adjusted EBITDA provides useful information to investors about our operating profitability adjusted for certain non-cash items, non-routine items that we do not expect to continue at the same level in the future, as well as other items that are not core to our operations. Further, we believe Adjusted EBITDA provides a meaningful measure of operating profitability because we use it for evaluating our business performance, making budgeting decisions, and comparing our performance against that of other peer companies using similar measures. We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income or loss adjusted for (i) interest; (ii) taxes; (iii) depreciation and amortization, including depreciation of subscriber system assets and other fixed assets and amortization of dealer and other intangible assets; (iv) amortization of deferred costs and deferred revenue associated with subscriber acquisitions; (v) share-based compensation expense; (vi) merger, restructuring, integration, and other; (vii) losses on extinguishment of debt; (viii) radio conversion costs net of any related incremental revenue earned; and (ix) other income/gain or expense/loss items such as impairment charges, financing and consent fees, or acquisition-related adjustments. There are material limitations to using Adjusted EBITDA as it does not reflect certain significant items which directly affect our net income or loss (the most comparable GAAP measure). The Adjusted EBITDA discussion above is also applicable to its margin measure, which is calculated as Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of total revenue. Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, (in millions) 2022 2021 2022 2021 Net income (loss) $ 92 $ (126 ) $ 143 $ (174 ) Interest expense, net 82 167 88 214 Income tax expense (benefit) 38 (41 ) 57 (56 ) Depreciation and intangible asset amortization 399 474 876 944 Amortization of deferred subscriber acquisition costs 39 30 76 59 Amortization of deferred subscriber acquisition revenue (58 ) (41 ) (112 ) (78 ) Share-based compensation expense 17 14 33 30 Merger, restructuring, integration and other (4 ) 5 (3 ) 25 Loss on extinguishment of debt Radio conversion costs, net(1) 1 61 10 119 Acquisition related adjustments(2) 1 38 Other, net(3) (9 ) (8 ) Adjusted EBITDA $ 597 $ 542 $ 1,198 $ 1,084 Net income (loss) to total revenue ratio 5.7 % (9.6 )% 4.6 % (6.7 )% Adjusted EBITDA Margin (as percentage of Total Revenue) 37.3 % 41.5 % 38.1 % 41.5 % Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding _______________________ (1) Represents net costs associated with replacing cellular technology used in many of our security systems pursuant to a replacement program. (2) During the six months ended June 30, 2022, primarily represents amortization of purchase accounting adjustments related to the Sunpro Solar Acquisition. (3) During the three and six months ended June 30, 2022, primarily represents the gain on sale of a business. Free Cash Flow, Adjusted Free Cash Flow, and Reconciliation to GAAP Net Cash Flows from Operating Activities We define Free Cash Flow as cash flows from operating activities less cash outlays related to capital expenditures. We define capital expenditures to include accounts purchased through our network of authorized dealers or third parties outside of our authorized dealer network, subscriber system asset expenditures, and purchases of property and equipment. These items are subtracted from cash flows from operating activities because they represent long-term investments that are required for normal business activities. We define Adjusted Free Cash Flow as Free Cash Flow adjusted for net cash flows related to (i) net proceeds from our consumer receivables facility; (ii) financing and consent fees; (iii) restructuring and integration; (iv) integration-related capital expenditures; (v) radio conversion costs net of any related incremental revenue collected; and (vi) other payments or receipts that may mask our operating results or business trends. We believe the presentations of Free Cash Flow and Adjusted Free Cash Flow are appropriate to provide investors with useful information about our ability to repay debt, make other investments, and pay dividends. In addition, we believe the presentation of Adjusted Free Cash Flow is also a useful measure of our cash flow attributable to our normal business activities, inclusive of the net cash flows associated with the acquisition of subscribers, as well as our ability to repay other debt, make other investments, and pay dividends. There are material limitations to using Free Cash Flow and Adjusted Free Cash Flow. These metrics adjust for cash items that are ultimately within managements discretion to direct, and therefore, may imply that there is less or more cash available than the most comparable GAAP measure. Free Cash Flow and Adjusted Free Cash Flow are not intended to represent residual cash flow for discretionary expenditures since debt repayment requirements and other non-discretionary expenditures are not deducted. Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, (in millions) 2022 2021 2022 2021 Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities $ 515 $ 426 $ 823 $ 786 Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities $ (402 ) $ (378 ) $ (807 ) $ (777 ) Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities $ (85 ) $ (19 ) $ 7 $ (60 ) Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities $ 515 $ 426 $ 823 $ 786 Dealer generated customer accounts and bulk account purchases (157 ) (141 ) (342 ) (340 ) Subscriber system asset expenditures (196 ) (195 ) (379 ) (339 ) Purchases of property and equipment (49 ) (42 ) (88 ) (84 ) Free Cash Flow 112 48 15 23 Net proceeds from receivables facility 67 32 93 55 Financing and consent fees 3 Restructuring and integration payments 3 6 6 7 Integration-related capital expenditures 3 1 7 Radio conversion costs, net 72 12 123 Other, net(1) 3 3 16 9 Adjusted Free Cash Flow $ 185 $ 164 $ 143 $ 227 Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding _______________________ (1) During the six months ended June 30, 2022, primarily represents costs related to the ADT Solar acquisition. Adjusted Net Income (Loss), Adjusted Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share, and Reconciliations to GAAP Net Income (Loss) and GAAP Diluted Net Income (Loss) per Share We define Adjusted Net Income (Loss) as net income (loss) adjusted for (i) merger, restructuring, integration, and other; (ii) losses on extinguishment of debt; (iii) radio conversion costs net of any related incremental revenue earned; (iv) share-based compensation expense; (v) unrealized gains and losses on interest rate swap contracts not designated as hedges; (vi) other income/gain or expense/loss items such as impairment charges, financing and consent fees, or acquisition-related adjustments; and (vii) the impact these adjusted items have on taxes. Adjusted Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share is Adjusted Net Income (Loss) divided by diluted weighted-average shares outstanding of common stock. In periods of GAAP net loss, diluted weighted-average shares outstanding of common stock does not include the assumed conversion of Class B Common Stock and other potential shares, such as share-based compensation awards, to shares of Common Stock as the results would be anti-dilutive. We believe Adjusted Net Income (Loss) and Adjusted Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share are benchmarks used by analysts and investors who follow the industry for comparison of its performance with other companies in the industry, although our measures may not be directly comparable to similar measures reported by other companies. There are material limitations to using these measures, as they do not reflect certain significant items which directly affect our net income (loss) and related per share amounts (the most comparable GAAP measures). During the third quarter of 2021, Net Income (Loss) before special items was renamed Adjusted Net Income (Loss), and Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share before special items was renamed Adjusted Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share. There has been no change to the calculation of these measures. Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, (in millions, except per share data) 2022 2021 2022 2021 Net income (loss) $ 92 $ (126 ) $ 143 $ (174 ) Merger, restructuring, integration, and other (4 ) 5 (3 ) 25 Loss on extinguishment of debt Radio conversion costs, net 1 61 10 119 Share-based compensation expense 17 14 33 30 Unrealized (gain) loss on interest rate swaps(1) (59 ) 14 (205 ) (92 ) Acquisition related adjustments 1 38 Other, net (9 ) (8 ) Tax impact on adjustments 12 (22 ) 34 (20 ) Adjusted Net Income (Loss) $ 50 $ (55 ) $ 43 $ (112 ) Weighted-average shares outstanding - diluted(2): Common Stock 911 766 911 764 Class B Common Stock 55 55 55 55 Net income (loss) per share - diluted: Common Stock $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.15 $ (0.21 ) Class B Common Stock $ 0.10 $ (0.15 ) $ 0.15 $ (0.21 ) Adjusted Diluted Net Income (Loss) per share(3) $ 0.06 $ (0.07 ) $ 0.05 $ (0.15 ) Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding. Refer to the reconciliation from Adjusted EBITDA to net income (loss) herein for an explanation regarding radio conversion costs, net, acquisition related adjustments, and other, net. _______________________ (1) Represents the change in the fair value of interest rate swaps not designated as cash flow hedges. (2) Refer to the Companys Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Annual Reports on Form 10-K for further discussion regarding the computation of diluted weighted-average shares outstanding of common stock. (3) Calculated as Adjusted Net Income (Loss) divided by diluted weighted-average shares outstanding of Common Stock. Debt to Net Income (Loss) Leverage Ratio and Reconciliation to Net Leverage Ratio Net Leverage Ratio is calculated as the ratio of net debt to last twelve months (LTM) Adjusted EBITDA. Net debt is calculated as total debt excluding the Receivables Facility, including capital leases, minus cash and cash equivalents. Refer to the discussion on Adjusted EBITDA for descriptions of the differences between Adjusted EBITDA and net income (loss), which is the most comparable GAAP measure. We believe Net Leverage Ratio is a useful measure of the Companys credit position and progress towards leverage targets. There are material limitations to using Net Leverage Ratio as the Company may not always be able to use cash to repay debt on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Debt to Net Income (Loss) Leverage Ratio: (in millions) June 30, 2022 Total debt (book value) $ 9,843 LTM net income (loss) $ (24 ) Debt to net income (loss) leverage ratio (413.4x ) Net debt and Net Leverage Ratio: (in millions) June 30, 2022 Revolver $ 80 First lien term loan 2,744 First lien notes 5,550 Receivables facility 292 Finance leases 94 Other 4 Total first lien debt $ 8,763 Second lien notes 1,300 Total debt(1) $ 10,063 Less: Cash and cash equivalents (44 ) Receivables Facility (292 ) Net debt $ 9,728 LTM Adjusted EBITDA $ 2,327 Net leverage ratio(2) 4.2x Note: amounts may not sum due to rounding _______________________ (1) Debt instruments are stated at face value. (2) During Q4 2021, we began presenting net leverage ratio excluding the Receivables Facility. ANN ARBOR, Mich., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. (OTCQB: KBLB) ("Company" or "Kraig Labs"), the biotechnology company focused on the development and commercialization of spider silk, announces the release of the second behind the scenes look into its recombinant spider silk production operations. This video brings the viewer inside the laboratories at its R&D facility in the U.S. and its quality control lab at its production facility in Vietnam. This video tour edition highlights the laboratory facilities and the team of dedicated researchers and scientists creating and commercializing the world's first cost-effective and eco-responsible spider silk. "Our research and quality assurance teams are leading the way, creating and commercializing some of the most amazing materials on earth," said Company COO Jon Rice. Interested viewers can find the video at www.kraiglabs.com/videos or through the Company's YouTube Channel https://youtu.be/AxBd1H4orcU, where they can subscribe to be notified of future video releases in this series. In upcoming video releases, the Company expects to bring viewers along for tours inside the rearing and breeding operations and the opportunity to meet some of the team creating tomorrow's super fibers. To view the most recent news from Kraig Labs and/or to sign up for Company alerts, please go to www.KraigLabs.com/news . About Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. ( www.KraigLabs.com ), a fully reporting biotechnology company, is a developer of genetically engineered spider silk-based fiber technologies. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward Looking Information Statements in this press release about the Company's future and expectations other than historical facts are "forward-looking statements." These statements are made on the basis of management's current views and assumptions. As a result, there can be no assurance that management's expectations will necessarily come to pass. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by phrases such as "believes," "plans," "expects," "anticipates," "foresees," "estimated," "hopes," "if," "develops," "researching," "research," "pilot," "potential," "could," "will" or other words or phrases of similar import. Forward looking statements include descriptions of the Company's business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions and goals. All such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security. NORTHWOOD, Ohio, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Telesystem, a leading nationwide provider of voice, networking and cybersecurity solutions, has announced the launch of a nationwide brand awareness marketing campaign centered around 'trust'. Telesystem's 'IT's About Trust' campaign will highlight the importance of trust in I.T. solutions and will focus on the idea that technology is not perfect, may fail from time to time, and it's important for businesses to choose a technology provider that they can trust to provide the highest level of support in the most difficult of times. The robust campaign includes newspaper and television spots in various markets, 15 and 30-second spots on various OTT digital platforms and websites, as well as search engine keyword and website retargeting ads. Beyond branding, Telesystem will also serve call-to-action email and digital marketing efforts targeted to decision makers in specific vertical market segments. As part of the campaign, Telesystem is simultaneously launching a makeover of its website, with focused content demonstrating why businesses in each market segment trust Telesystem. Each landing page will feature vertically relevant statistics, case studies, and testimonials from key customers. The Telesystem website will receive a new URL as part of the campaign; www.TrustTelesystem.com, which will redirect to the current site (www.Telesystem.us), and industry-specific pages will also have unique and easily remembered URLs. "As we move into an aggressive phase of growth that includes significant network expansion and groundbreaking new products, we feel that the time is right to amplify our brand with a strong and clear message - Trust," said Telesystem Chief Revenue Officer Bruce Wirt. "More than anything else, decision-makers in the SME and enterprise sectors choose their technology provider for performance and peace of mind. They want a partner that will walk side by side with them through the most challenging times. Ultimately, they want a provider that brings them the best mix of technology combined with job security. They want to sleep well at night knowing their network is being cared for by a provider they trust." The campaign launched on Aug. 1, 2022. About Telesystem For over 25 years, Telesystem has been empowering businesses across the country with a range of innovative network, communication and collaboration solutions designed to address the business-specific needs of each customer. Guided by strategic partnerships and a customer-centric mission, these customized solutions are backed by and end-to-end managed experience and 24/7 U.S.-based support. Telesystem currently delivers enterprise collaboration solutions and networking services to businesses in 45 states, D.C. and four foreign countries. Their customers include hospitals, universities, local public and private school districts, banks, multi-location retail establishments and regional government offices, to name a few. Related Images Image 1: Telesystem - Trust Telesystem - Trust This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. Attachment VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Highlights Preliminary Heavy Liquid Separation (HLS) tests on drill core from the CV5 Pegmatite (CF21-001 and 002) at two different crush sizes support a potential flowsheet using Dense Media Separation (DMS) process followed by magnetic separation to produce a 6+% Li 2 O spodumene concentrate HLS tests followed by magnetic separation produced a 6+% Li 2 O spodumene concentrates at overall lithium recoveries exceeding 70% The recoveries achieved from the HLS testing has resulted in the Company commencing a DMS metallurgical testing program A DMS process test run is underway to confirm the applicability of DMS to the flowsheet and is targeted to produce over 10 kg of marketable spodumene concentrate Fe 2 O 3 content of ~0.65% in final spodumene concentrate following magnetic separation on HLS concentrate HLS testing is the industry standard lab bench scale testing to be done before larger scale DMS metallurgical testing O spodumene concentrate The spodumene in the metallurgical samples from the CV5 Pegmatite is very coarse grained and liberates effectively at -6.5 mm and -9.5 mm crush sizes which has the potential to reduce the power intensity of the flowsheet due to less grinding (typically the most energy intensive part of the flowsheet) A Phase II mineral processing program is currently being planned for this fall and is anticipated to include five (5) x 400+ kg samples of composited drill core intervals, each representing a different section of the principal mineralized pegmatite at Corvette Tantalum recovery remains a reasonable target for the Project by further processing of the combined DMS undersize (-0.85 mm) and middlings fractions Patriot Battery Metals Inc. (the Company or Patriot) (TSX-V: PMET) (OTCQB: PMETF) (FSE: R9GA) is pleased to announce the results of preliminary metallurgical test work on a 225 kg drill core composite sample collected from the CV5 spodumene pegmatite at the Corvette Property (the Property), located in the James Bay Region of Quebec. The CV5 Pegmatite is the principal pegmatite occurrence on the Property, located approximately 13.5 km south of the regional and all-weather Trans-Taiga Road and powerline infrastructure, and is currently being delineated by three (3) drill rigs active on site. The Company is pleased to report that the HLS results (following magnetic separation) completed on drill core from the CV5 Pegmatite drill holes CF21-001 and 002 have resulted in 6+% Li 2 O spodumene concentrates at very high lithium recoveries exceeding 70%, and at an iron content of approximately 0.65% Fe 2 O 3 . These recoveries are significantly higher than those of certain peer projects being advanced globally where DMS has been incorporated into their flowsheets. Although HLS results are only an indication of a DMS circuits performance in operation, the results are a strong indication that DMS is applicable to the Projects flowsheet as a primary driver for lithium recovery. Blair Way, Company President, CEO and Director, comments: These preliminary metallurgical results are a significant milestone for the Corvette Project due to the potential ripple effects of a coarse spodumene grain size and a DMS flowsheet. Developing a new mining operation is not just about exploration geology but also producing a marketable product in a sustainable way and de-risking the project development path. Grinding is normally the most power intensive part of a spodumene concentrate flowsheet and with DMS fine grinding is not required. The coarse nature of the spodumene from these initial metallurgical samples of the CV5 pegmatite lay the foundation of potentially a very robust and cost effective process flowsheet. I look forward to updating our investors on the results of the DMS metallurgical work in the fall. A primary reason for the strong HLS results is the very coarse-grained nature of the spodumene at CV5 which allows for strong liberation at coarse crush sizes. In this case, crush sizes of -6.5 mm and -9.5 mm are indicated to be effective. What this means for the company is that the spodumene at CV5 may be effectively processed at coarse crush sizes using the most preferred and conventional mineral processing technique in the industry without the need to consume incremental power in the grinding circuit to achieve a fine grind size. A DMS focused operation is strongly preferred to a flotation only operation as DMS is a less complicated process to operate, more cost effective, and may be commissioned over a significantly shorter timeframe compared to a flotation operation, and therefore, carries a significantly reduced technical risk. A DMS test run is planned to be completed in the fall of 2022, as immediate follow-up to the HLS test work. The primary objective of the DMS test run is to confirm the preliminary HLS results as well as to refine the mineral processing flowsheet for the Project. Additionally, a total of 10+ kg of on-spec, marketable spodumene concentrate is expected to be produced from the test run. Flotation test work remains as part of the Phase I metallurgy program and will utilize the DMS undersize (-0.85 mm) and the DMS middlings as a combined feed. This material is expected to comprise about 1/3 of the pre-processed sample mass (i.e. whole rock) and 20-30% of the lithium not recovered directly from the combined DMS and magnetic separation circuit. This test work will help confirm the expected recovery of lithium from the combined DMS undersize and middlings fractions. Additionally, tantalum recovery remains a reasonable target for the Project through this further processing of the combined DMS undersize and middlings fractions by flotation. The preliminary test work indicates that roughly 65% of the tantalum reports to these fractions and may be recoverable through flotation and/or gravity separation into a secondary marketable product with negligible impact on the overall lithium recovery. Although the dominant focus is optimizing lithium recovery, the Company will continue to monitor the tantalum deportment throughout the flowsheet and evaluate its recovery into a secondary concentrate. The metallurgical test program is being completed by SGS Canada Inc. at their facility in Lakefield, ON, and is focused on industry standard and cost-effective processing techniques applicable to spodumene pegmatite. The program includes heavy liquid separation (HLS) test work, which is used to assess the viability of a dense media separation (DMS) circuit in the flowsheet, as well as DMS test work, magnetic separation, and flotation (see news release dated June 7, 2022). A Phase II metallurgical program is currently being planned for this fall and is anticipated to include five (5) x 400+ kg samples of composited drill core intervals (including a reasonable dilution), each sample composite representing a different section of the principal mineralized pegmatite (CV5-6-1) at Corvette. This Phase II test work will therefore be comprised of a larger and more representative sampling of the mineralized pegmatite body compared to the initial Phase I test work. The program will focus on mineral processing and assess variability in processing between samples with the overarching objective to further develop and refine the front-end flowsheet through to marketable spodumene concentrate at high lithium recovery. Figure 1: Non-magnetic (left) and magnetic (right) products on HLS sink (2.85 SG) following -6.3 mm crush. Non-magnetic concentrate grades 6.23% Li 2 O and 0.66% Fe 2 O 3 https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/151dc4c6-ac46-4434-a677-5fc8d61fb7c7 About the CV Lithium Trend The CV Lithium Trend is an emerging spodumene pegmatite district discovered by the Company in 2017 and spans more than 25-km across the Corvette Property. The core area includes an approximate 2 km long corridor hosting numerous spodumene pegmatites, highlighted by the large CV1 and CV5 pegmatite outcrops, and has returned drill intercepts of 1.22% Li 2 O and 138 ppm Ta 2 O 5 over 152.8 m (CV22-030), 1.45% Li 2 O and 177 ppm Ta 2 O 5 over 84.0 m (CV22-028), and 2.22% Li 2 O and 147 ppm Ta 2 O 5 over 70.1 m, including 3.01% Li 2 O and 160 ppm Ta 2 O 5 over 40.7 m (CV22-017). Drilling to date indicates a principal spodumene-bearing pegmatite body of significant size and has been traced by drilling over a distance of at least 1.9 km, and therefore, is considerably larger than that observed in outcrop. The high number of well-mineralized pegmatites in this core area of the trend indicate a strong potential for a series of relatively closely spaced/stacked, sub-parallel, and sizable spodumene-bearing pegmatite bodies, with significant lateral and depth extent, to be present. Qualified Person Darren L. Smith, M.Sc., P. Geo., Vice President of Exploration of the Company, a registered permit holder with the Ordre des Geologues du Quebec, and Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed the technical information in this news release. About Patriot Battery Metals Inc. Patriot Battery Metals Inc. is a mineral exploration company focused on the acquisition and development of mineral properties containing battery, base, and precious metals. The Companys flagship asset is the 100% owned Corvette Property, located proximal to the Trans-Taiga Road and powerline infrastructural corridor in the James Bay Region of Quebec. The land package hosts significant lithium potential highlighted by the CV5-1 spodumene pegmatite corridor with drill intercepts of 1.22% Li 2 O and 138 ppm Ta 2 O 5 over 152.8 m (CV22-030), and 2.22% Li 2 O and 147 ppm Ta 2 O 5 over 70.1 m, including 3.01% Li 2 O and 160 ppm Ta 2 O 5 over 40.7 m (CV22-017). Additionally, the Property hosts the Golden Gap Trend with grab samples of 3.1 to 108.9 g/t Au from outcrop and 10.5 g/t Au over 7 m in drill hole, and the Maven Trend with 8.15% Cu, 1.33 g/t Au, and 171 g/t Ag in outcrop. The Company also holds 100% ownership of the Freeman Creek Gold Property in Idaho, USA which hosts two prospective gold prospects - the Gold Dyke Prospect with a 2020 drill hole intersection of 4.11 g/t Au and 33.0 g/t Ag over 12 m, and the Carmen Creek Prospect with surface sample results including 25.5 g/t Au, 159 g/t Ag, and 9.75% Cu. The Companys other assets include the Pontax Lithium-Gold Property, QC; and the Hidden Lake Lithium Property, NWT, where the Company maintains a 40% interest, as well as several other assets in Canada. For further information, please contact us at info@patriotbatterymetals.com Tel: +1 (778) 945-2950 , or visit www.patriotbatterymetals.com. On Behalf of the Board of Directors, BLAIR WAY Blair Way, President, CEO, & Director Disclaimer for Forward-Looking Information This news release contains forward-looking statements and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as will, may, should, anticipate, expects and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Companys expectations include the results of further exploration and testing, and other risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators, available at www.sedar.com. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company will update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements as expressly required by applicable law. No securities regulatory authority or stock exchange has reviewed nor accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release. LOS ANGELES, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Irwin Naturals Inc. (CSE: IWIN) (OTC: IWINF) (FRA: 97X) (Irwin or the Company), whose herbal supplements are already available in in 100,000 stores in North America, has reached a licensing agreement with Entourage Health Corp. (TSX-V:ENT) (OTCQX:ETRGF) (FSE:4WE), a Canadian producer and distributor of award-winning cannabis products, through its wholly owned subsidiary Irwin Naturals Cannabis, Inc. Under this exclusive arrangement, Irwin Naturals famous brand will be enhanced with cannabis and made available to dispensaries across Canada in a line of softgels in five different varieties: CBD, THC and three additional formulations that include both THC and another cannabinoid. Klee Irwin, CEO of Irwin Naturals said, Weve set out to become the first household brand to have its products available on dispensary shelves across America. This partnership with Entourage takes that plan international, pairing our trusted, proven herbal supplement business with a cutting-edge cannabis company to open a new frontier in our business. Entourages sustainable growth hub and its state-of-the-art extraction practices make it the perfect company to provide an array of new cannabis products for the customers who have come to love and trust Irwin Naturals over the past 28 years. George Scorsis, CEO and Executive Chairman, Entourage, Irwin Naturals needs no introduction. The history of its products, the loyalty theyve inspired, speak for themselves in health and wellness. Adding our expertise in the cannabis space creates a game-changing pairing that will put the Irwin Naturals brand on dispensary shelves all across Canada. Third-party data1 estimates the Canadian market for edibles and other alternative cannabis products to be worth C$2.7 billion annually. Cannabis alternatives were legalized in October 2019, offering more discreet and accessible alternative such as edibles that avoid the stigma that can be attached to smoking. This line of Irwin Naturals cannabis products will be offered as softgels that utilize hempseed oil and medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs). There will be five different formulations: THC (10 mg THC), CBD (25 mg CBD), 1:1 (10 mg CBD, 10 mg THC), 5:1 (50 mg CBD, 10 mg THC) and a 2:1 formulation that combines THC and the cannabinoid CBN (10 mg THC, 5 mg CBN). Entourage is one of the largest cannabis processors in Canada, and its most recent quarterly report was its strongest operating performance to date. It fulfilled some of its largest orders with exemplary delivery rates. In May, Entourage announced the debut of TeaPot, a cannabis-infused iced-tea beverage developed in conjunction with the Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams and Twisted Tea. Irwin Naturals was founded in 1994 and its best-in-class nutraceuticals have built it into a brand that is now recognized in 80 percent of American households.2 It has operated profitably for the past 27 years,3 and it is now seeking to use the equity and power of that brand in emerging markets like cannabis and psychedelic mental-health clinics. Irwin Naturals first entered into the cannabis industry in 2018 when it began infusing hemp-based CBD into its herbal supplements available in the United States. This year, it began formulating its products with THC with the goal of becoming the first household brand to have its products available in all 38 states where cannabis is currently legal. Because cannabis is not legal at the federal level in the United States, Irwin Naturals has gone state by state, reaching licensing agreements with cannabis manufacturers. It has already announced agreements in California, Colorado, Ohio and New Mexico. This agreement with Entourage in Canada means that Irwin Naturals cannabis products will achieve not just national, but international distribution. About Irwin Naturals Irwin Naturals has been a household name and best-in-class herbal supplement formulator since 1994. It is now leveraging its brand to enter into both the cannabis and psychedelic industries. On a mission to heal the world with plant medicine, Irwins growing portfolio of products is available in more than 100,000 retail doors across North America where nearly 100 million people know the Irwin Naturals brand.4 In 2018, the Company first leveraged its brand to expand into the cannabis industry by launching hemp-based CBD products into the mass market. The Company is now leveraging its famous halo of brand trust with an objective to become one of the first household name brands to offer THC-based products and psychedelic mental health treatment. Irwin Naturals became a publicly traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) in August 2021. The Companys shares began to be traded on the OTCQB Venture Market in November 2021. More information on the Companys stock can be found via Bloomberg as well as the Wall Street Journal. Klee Irwin _______________________ Klee Irwin Chief Executive Officer T:310-306-3636 investors@irwinnaturals.com IR Information For investor-related information, please visit ir.irwinnaturals.com/, call (800) 883-4851, or email Investors@IrwinNaturals.com. Press Contact Irwin Naturals Investor Relations Cassandra Bassanetti-Drumm T: 310-306-3636 investors@irwinnaturals.com Forward-Looking Information This news release contains certain forward-looking statements that reflect the current views and/or expectations of management of the Company with respect to performance, business and future events. Forward-looking statements can often be identified by words such as "may", "will", "would", "could", "should", "believes", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "expects", "plans", "intends", "anticipates", "targeted", "continues", "forecasts", "designed", "goal", objective, or the negative of those words or other similar or comparable words. Forward-looking statements are based on the then-current expectations, beliefs, assumptions, estimates and forecasts about the business and the industry and markets in which the Company operates. Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements related to information concerning the ability of the Company to perform the terms of the transaction referenced herein; the receipt of all necessary approvals, including regulatory approvals; expectations for other economic, market, business and competitive factors; and the Company actually entering into and doing business in the U.S. cannabis and psychedelics markets. Except for (i) the License and Supply Agreement announced herein and (ii) the other license and supply deals entered into referenced herein (with The Hive Laboratory, LLC, as described in the Companys April 19, 2022 press release; with Assurance Laboratories as described in the Companys May 13, 2022 press release; with BeneLeaves Ltd. as described in the Companys May 24, 2022 press release; Larsen Group II LLC as described in the Companys May 20, 2022 press release), the Company does not have any other active operations or agreements with respect to the entrance into the THC and/or cannabis markets. The potential entrance by the Company into these new business segments are in their preliminary stages and may be subject to approval from the board of directors of the Company as well as any regulatory approval, including that of the Canadian Securities Exchange. These statements are based on numerous assumptions that are believed by management to be reasonable in the circumstances, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including without limitation: board and regulatory approval, including the approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange; Irwin being able to acquire and/or enter into business relationships to enter into these new markets; the Company obtaining the required licenses; and changes to regulations and laws regarding cannabis or psychedelics. Further information on the regulatory environment and risks will be contained in future disclosures. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from that which are expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions which are difficult to predict. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information, which are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The Company does not undertake any obligation to release publicly any revisions for updating any voluntary forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable securities law. Neither the CSE nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. __________________ 1 Nurturing New Growth: Canada Gets Ready for Cannabis 2.0, Deloitte. 2 Consumer brand recognition information is based on a formal Company survey with a sample size of 500 randomly selected adults. 3 Under several corporate structures, Klee Irwin has operated the Irwin brand profitably since 1994, as measured by EBITDA adjusted for extraordinary costs. 4 Consumer brand recognition information is based on a formal Company survey with a sample size of 500 randomly selected adults. Westford, USA, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Computer vision market has seen a rapid increase in popularity recently, with businesses and consumers alike turning to the technology for a number of applications. Some of the most common uses for computer vision include recognizing objects, identifying faces, and tracking vehicles. As computer vision becomes more prevalent, there is an increasing need for developers who can build and maintain these applications. This is where the computer vision workforce comes in; skilled professionals who can design algorithms, develop software, and deploy computer vision solutions. According to SkyQuest, the global computer vision workforce will grow from 190,000 in 2016 to almost 485,000 by the end of 2023. This growth is due in part to the growing demand for applications such as facial recognition and autonomous driving. Thanks to advancements in digital photography and video processing, businesses and individuals are increasingly turning to computer vision technology to improve their productivity. This field of study deals with the application of artificial intelligence algorithms to image or video data in order to make decision or create new products or services. Get sample copy of this report: https://skyquestt.com/sample-request/computer-vision-market Start-ups in Computer Vision Market are Poured with Funding Global computer vision market is booming. With the development of autonomous cars, Internet of things, and medical devices, demand for computer vision technology is on the rise. However, funding for computer vision companies can be difficult to come by. This is due in part to the complex and abstract nature of the field. Additionally, the technology is still in its early stages and does not have a widespread consumer uptake. Fortunately, there are a number of sources of funding for computer vision startups. Investors can provide funds either through Angel investing or venture capital. In addition, governments and universities are also active in funding computer vision research. In 2021, the global computer vision market witnessed influx of around $21.1 billion in fundings as per SkyQuest study. The huge investment was spanned across 900+ companies. Globally, more than 1,700 start-ups are active in the global computer vision market. Wherein, these start-ups raised around half of the funding in just last 3 years. In the last few years, Techstars, Y Combinator, Plug and Play Tech Center, Deep Learning, and Venture Kick remained the largest investors in the computer vision market. Following are some of the key investments in the global computer vision market: In July 2022, Drover AI through Series A funding raised over $5.4 million In July 2022, Ensuredit raised over $4.2 million In July 2022, Theator raised over $39.5 million in series A funding. Wherein, the company had initially raised over $15.5 million, but secured another funding of around $24 million in extended round In July 2022, The Brisbane company raised around $1.5 million in early-stage funding In July 2022, Lyro Robotics secured funding to build 20 more robots integrated with computer vision SkyQuest has published a report that provides a detailed insights into global computer vision market. The report covers in depth analysis of the influx of funding being raised by the start-ups and inclination of investors towards the computer vision. The report would help you identify where the market is leading and what start-up are doing with the money that they have raised. The report also focuses on future prospective of the start-up environment. Top 5 Trends in Computer Vision Market Deep Learning 3D reconstruction Image segmentation Object Detection Motion Estimation Computer Vision has Potential to Make Urban Transportation More Efficient and Sustainable Urban transportation is vexingly frustrating, time-consuming, and expensive. But with the help of computer vision, there is potential to make it more efficient and sustainable. One example is using computer vision to optimize route selection for buses or bikes. By better understanding where pedestrians and cyclists are located, buses and bikes can travel through dense traffic more quickly and without wasting time waiting in line. This could make a big difference in cutting down on transportation delays, which would also save people money on their commute in the global computer vision market. Computer vision can also be used to monitor traffic conditions on a wider scale. If a person sees an area near a bus stop becoming congested, they could send out a notification to the bus driver so that the bus can avoid that area. By optimizing traffic flows on an individual level, we can tackle larger issues such as congestion on major streets. All of these applications of computer vision market have the potential to make urban transportation more efficient and sustainable. By looking at transportation from a different perspective, we may be able to make it easier for people to get around town without wasting time or money. One company, Citymapper, is using computer vision to identify pedestrians and cyclists in city streets. This information is used to create digital maps of the city that show where people are located at any given time. The digital maps are then used to calculate how much traffic is flowing around each street, and this information is used to modify traffic signals accordingly. This system has already resulted in significant reductions in traffic congestion in some cities, and it is expected to play a similar role in other cities in the future. Similarly, Google has developed an algorithm called Street View that captures images of city streets from orbit. This data is then used to create 3-D models of the city that can be used for navigation purposes or for planning road repairs. Street View has also been used to generate detailed maps of major Olympic venues, such as the Olympic Stadium in London. Browse summary of the report and Complete Table of Contents (ToC): https://skyquestt.com/report/computer-vision-market Demand for Computer Vision is on the Rise in AR and VR A lot has changed in the world of computer vision market over the past few years. With the introduction of virtual reality and its growing popularity, there is an increasing need for accurate and efficient methods of recognition and analysis. By leveraging this technology, developers can create truly immersive and exciting experiences for users. One such application is facial recognition. In VR, users are already accustomed to being surrounded by other people. Requiring them to look at a computer screen to input information can be jarring and frustrating. Facial recognition solves this problem by allowing users to interact with software without having to look away from their surroundings. Starbreeze Studios, a player in computer vision market, has been using facial recognition in its own VR games such as Dead by Daylight and Surviving Mars. The company was recently acquired by Warner Bros., which indicates that the technology is likely to become more prevalent in the near future. With so many potentials use for computer vision in VR, developers are currently racing to develop innovative ways to apply the technology. There are still many breakthroughs left to be made, but this field is poised for explosive growth in the coming years. In addition, the report provides complete market analysis, market dynamics, market trends, growth forecast, pricing analysis, competitive landscape, market share analysis. What Does Future Holds for Computer Vision Market? The market for computer vision is expanding tremendously, with new products and services being developed every day. This trend is likely to continue in the coming years, as businesses around the world begin to realize the value of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). One of the most important aspects of AI is understanding what people are doing. This is where computer vision comes in. Computer vision can be used to track objects and people as they move around a scene, capturing detailed information about their surroundings. This information can then be used to generate 3D models, which can be used for a variety of applications. As this computer vision market continues to grow, so too will the number of companies that are able to use computer vision technology. This will lead to more innovative products and services, and greater improvements in our understanding of how people interact with the world around them. Some of the leading vendors in the computer vision market are companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. These companies offer a range of software products that allow users to capture images, track objects, and create 3D models. These vendors are also focusing on developing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications. Speak to Analyst for your custom requirements: https://skyquestt.com/speak-with-analyst/computer-vision-market Leading Players in Computer Vision Market Cognex Corporation (US) Intel Corporation (US) Keyence Corporation (Japan) Matterport, Inc. (US) National Instruments (US) OMRON Corporation (Japan) Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation (Japan) Teledyne Digital Imaging Inc. (US) Allied Vision Technologies (Germany) Texas Instruments Inc. (US) Related Reports in SkyQuests Library: Global Field Service Management (FSM) Market Global Smart Label Market Global Human Resource (HR) Technology Market Global Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Software Market Global Core Banking Software Market About Us: SkyQuest Technology is leading growth consulting firm providing market intelligence, commercialization and technology services. It has 450+ happy clients globally. Address: 1 Apache Way, Westford, Massachusetts 01886 Phone: USA (+1) 617-230-0741 Email: sales@skyquestt.com Dublin, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "US Back to School Market (2022-2027) by Product Type, Distribution Channel, Competitive Analysis and the Impact of Covid-19 with Ansoff Analysis" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The US Back to School Market is estimated to be USD 13.14 Bn in 2022 and is projected to reach USD 16.88 Bn by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 5.14%. Market dynamics are forces that impact the prices and behaviors of the US Back to School Market stakeholders. These forces create pricing signals which result from the changes in the supply and demand curves for a given product or service. Forces of Market Dynamics may be related to macro-economic and micro-economic factors. There are dynamic market forces other than price, demand, and supply. Human emotions can also drive decisions, influence the market, and create price signals. As the market dynamics impact the supply and demand curves, decision-makers aim to determine the best way to use various financial tools to stem various strategies for speeding the growth and reducing the risks. Company Profiles Some of the companies covered in this report are Acco Brands, Adidas AG, Canson, Faber-Castell, Harlequin International Group Pty Ltd, ITC Ltd, etc. The report provides a detailed analysis of the competitors in the market. It covers the financial performance analysis for the publicly listed companies in the market. The report also offers detailed information on the companies' recent development and competitive scenario. Competitive Quadrant The report includes Competitive Quadrant, a proprietary tool to analyze and evaluate the position of companies based on their Industry Position score and Market Performance score. The tool uses various factors for categorizing the players into four categories. Some of these factors considered for analysis are financial performance over the last 3 years, growth strategies, innovation score, new product launches, investments, growth in market share, etc. Ansoff Analysis The report presents a detailed Ansoff matrix analysis for the US Back to School Market. Ansoff Matrix, also known as Product/Market Expansion Grid, is a strategic tool used to design strategies for the growth of the company. The matrix can be used to evaluate approaches in four strategies viz. Market Development, Market Penetration, Product Development and Diversification. The matrix is also used for risk analysis to understand the risk involved with each approach. The analyst analyses the US Back to School Market using the Ansoff Matrix to provide the best approaches a company can take to improve its market position. Based on the SWOT analysis conducted on the industry and industry players, The analyst has devised suitable strategies for market growth. Market Dynamics Drivers Increasing Usage of Notebooks with Interactive Origami Paper and 3D front Covering among Consumers Government Initiative towards Primary Education Restraints Major Population Reside in Rural Areas Opportunities Increase in Innovations in Back-to-School Supplies Prominence of Online Learning Create Opportunity Challenges Toxicity of Certain Stationery Products Market Segmentations By Product Type, the market is classified into Backpack, Electronic, Stationery, Clothing, Shoes, and Others. the market is classified into Backpack, Electronic, Stationery, Clothing, Shoes, and Others. By Distribution Channel, the market is classified into Hypermarket/Supermarket, E-Commerce, Variety Stores, Specialty Stores, and Others. Companies Mentioned Acco Brands Adidas AG Canson Faber-Castell Harlequin International Group Pty Ltd ITC Ltd Izod Mitsubishi Pencil Co. Ltd Nike Pelikan International Corp Berhad Puma SE Schwan stabilo group Skybags Staedetler Staedtler. WH Smith plc Wildcraft Zebra Pen Corp For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/4upgx5 Attachment Record Quarterly Building Supply Segment Sales of $10.8 Million, Up 10.4% Net sales for the second quarter of 2022 were $17.4 million, down 2.4%, compared to $17.8 million for the second quarter of 2021. Building Supply segment sales increased $1.0 million, or 10.4%, to the highest quarter on record of $10.8 million, compared to $9.8 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. Disposable Protective Apparel segment sales decreased 18.1%, to $6.6 million, compared to $8.0 million for the same period of 2021. Net income for the second quarter of 2022 was $693,000, or $0.05 per diluted share, compared to $1.7 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2021. Cash of $15.3 million and working capital of $51.1 million with no debt as of June 30, 2022. NOGALES, Ariz., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alpha Pro Tech, Ltd. (NYSE American: APT) (the Company), a leading manufacturer of products designed to protect people, products and environments, including disposable protective apparel and building products, today announced financial results for the three and six month periods ended June 30, 2022. Lloyd Hoffman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Alpha Pro Tech, commented, Building Supply segment sales for the second quarter of 2022 resulted in the all-time highest quarter on record. In addition, the Company achieved record quarters in each of the past seven quarters, as compared to each respective prior year comparative quarter. Management is encouraged by the current demand for the Companys Building Supply segment products and anticipates continued growth in the remainder of 2022. The Company has continued to enjoy increased sales, and being vertically integrated and having control of manufacturing, unlike most competitors, aides in minimizing the effects of worldwide supply chain issues. The synthetic roofing market was strong in 2021 and into early 2022, although the Company has recently seen some retraction in new home starts and re-roofing expenditures, as well as excess inventory in the market. By adding dealers, distribution channels and products in the roofing sector, we remain optimistic with respect to achieving sales growth in the future. Assuming new home construction remains high, we expect our housewrap sales will continue to grow despite the aforementioned retraction, as our distribution channels continue to expand and we introduce new products for this market. Sales of the Disposable Protective Apparel segment products in the second quarter of 2022 were lower as compared to the same period in 2021, primarily driven by a decrease in protective garments sales. Although our sales were down compared to the prior-year period, disposable protective garments sales were significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels. In addition, garments sales in the second quarter last year were a quarterly record, as a result of strong COVID-19 demand. Protective garment sales increased sequentially from the first quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2022 by approximately $900,000, or 21.9%. Hoffman continued Sales of face masks in the second quarter of 2022 were basically flat compared to the second quarter of 2021. Face mask sales continue to be somewhat aided by the Omicron variants of COVID-19 and were higher than pre-pandemic levels but are expected to be lower in the second half of 2022 than during 2020 and 2021. Additional demand from increased infection rates or new variants is possible, but not included in the expected forecast. Our face shield sales in the second quarter of 2022 increased by 172.1% compared to the same period last year, which increase was driven by demand associated with COVID-19, primarily from one distributor. Face shield sales in the second quarter of 2022 were significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels but are expected to be lower in the near term, although future visibility in relation to COVID-19 is uncertain. Net Sales Consolidated sales for the three months ended June 30, 2022, decreased to $17.4 million from $17.8 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021, representing a decrease of $433,000, or 2.4%. This decrease consisted of decreased sales in the Disposable Protective Apparel segment of $1.5 million, partially offset by increased sales in the Building Supply segment of $1.0 million. Building Supply segment sales for the three months ended June 30, 2022 increased by $1.0 million, or 10.4%, to the highest quarter on record of $10.8 million, compared to $9.8 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. The Building Supply segment increase during the quarter was primarily due to a 7.7% increase in sales of housewrap and a 116.4% increase in sales of other woven material, partially offset by a decrease in sales of synthetic roof underlayment of 7.7% compared to the same period of 2021. The sales mix of the Building Supply segment for the three months ended June 30, 2022 was approximately 40% for synthetic roof underlayment, 42% for housewrap and 18% for other woven material. This compared to approximately 48% for synthetic roof underlayment, 43% for housewrap and 9% for other woven material for the three months ended June 30, 2021. Second quarter Building Supply growth was led by a quarterly record in sales of housewrap. The housewrap line of products experienced significant growth with the economy REX Wrap and REX Wrap Plus brands through additional market penetration on the retail side, and to a lesser extent increased sales of accessory items, which includes window and door flashing and seam tapes. Premium housewrap REX Wrap Fortis brand increased sales were driven by entry into more multi-family and light commercial markets. One of the ongoing growth strategies is to pursue additional market share of the multi-family building market, through the education of architects and introducing new products, which are currently in development to meet the needs of ever changing building code requirements and the needs of customers. Synthetic roof underlayment sales in the second quarter of 2022 were negatively affected due a decline of sales in the premium REX SynFelt brand, which reflects an industry trend and flat sales of the economy TECHNO SB brand as there has been an overall increase in retail inventory levels of economy underlayment products. The higher inventories as well as a general retraction in the building market are expected to continue into the third quarter but we do expect growth in the future. Other woven material sales increased in the second quarter of 2022 compared to the same period of 2021 by a significant 116.4%, due to increased sales to our major customer and sales to a new other woven material customer. The Company expects continued substantial growth in the remainder of 2022 with this product line. The Company has committed to increasing production capacity in the Building Supply segment by investing approximately $4.0 million in new equipment, a part of which became operational in the latter part of the third quarter of 2021. This equipment, which is expected to increase our production capacity, has been further delayed as a result of supply chain issues, and is now expected in the latter part of the third quarter of 2022 and is expected to be operational in the following quarter. Sales for the Disposable Protective Apparel segment for the three months ended June 30, 2022, decreased by $1.5 million, or 18.1%, to $6.6 million, compared to $8.0 million for the same period of 2021. This segment decrease was due to a 28.9% decrease in sales of disposable protective garments and a 0.7% decrease in sales of face masks, partially offset by a 172.1% increase in face shields. Sales of disposable garments and face masks were affected due to reduced customer demand in the second quarter of 2022 compared to demand in the second quarter of 2021 associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Face shield demand was positively affected primarily by sales to one distributor. The sales mix of the Disposable Protective Apparel segment for the second quarter was approximately 74% for disposable protective garments, 14% for face masks and 12% for face shields. This sales mix is compared to approximately 85% for disposable protective garments, 11% for face masks and 4% for face shields for the three months ended June 30, 2021. Sales for the disposable protective garments decreased in the second quarter of 2022, primarily due to record sales in the second quarter of 2021, resulting from strong orders received from our major international channel partner in 2020 in response to COVID-19, which flowed through in 2021 due to the extended logistics timeframes. Although sales were down during the second quarter of 2022, disposable protective garment sales were significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels and increased sequentially by over 20% from the first quarter of 2022. Consolidated sales for the six months ended June 30, 2022 decreased to $35.0 million from $41.0 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021, representing a decrease of $5.9 million, or 14.5%. This decrease consisted of decreased sales in the Disposable Protective Apparel Segment of $8.8 million, partially offset by increased sales in the Building Supply segment of $2.9 million. Building Supply segment sales for the six months ended June 30, 2022 increased by $2.9 million, or 16.1%, to $21.1 million, compared to $18.1 million for the same period of 2021. The Building Supply segment increase was primarily due to an increase in sales of housewrap of 12.5%, an increase in sales of synthetic roof underlayment of 2.8%, and an increase in sales of other woven material of 116.4%, compared to the same period of 2021. Building Supply segment sales during the first six months of 2022 experienced continued significant growth due to strong demand for both our housewrap products, other non-woven products and to a lesser extent synthetic roof underlayment products. The housewrap family of products continued to grow with a 12.5% year to date increase over the prior year to date due to growth in new market share as well as increased demand especially in the earlier part of the year for new home construction. Other woven material sales increased year to date by a significant 116.4% due to increased sales to our major customer, as well as a new customer. Synthetic roof underlayment sales increased by 2.8% compared to the first six months of 2021, which was primarily due to robust sales of our economy TECHNO family of products that have increased 11.6% year to date, partially offset by an industry-wide decline in premium synthetic roof underlayment sales. The sales mix of the Building Supply segment for the six months ended June 30, 2022 was 44% for synthetic roof underlayment, 41% for housewrap and 15% for other woven material. This compared to 50% for synthetic roof underlayment, 42% for housewrap and 8% for other woven material for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Sales for the Disposable Protective Apparel segment for the six months ended June 30, 2022, decreased by $8.8 million, or 38.8%, to $14.0 million, compared to $22.8 million, for the same period of 2021. This segment decrease was due to a 35.0% decrease in sales of disposable protective garments, a 51.2% decrease in sales of face masks, and a 27.7% decrease in sales of face shields, all primarily due to increased customer demand associated with the pandemic in 2021. Although sales of disposable protective garments, face masks and face shields are down year to date, they are above pre-pandemic levels. The sales mix of the Disposable Protective Apparel segment for the six months ended June 30, 2022 was 63% for disposable protective garments, 23% for masks and 14% for shields. This sales mix is compared to 59% for disposable protective garments, 29% for masks and 12% for shields for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Gross Profit Gross profit decreased by $620,000, or 9.9%, to $5.6 million for the three months ended June 30, 2022, from $6.2 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. The gross profit margin was 32.3% for the three months ended June 30, 2022, compared to 35.0% for the three months ended June 30, 2021. Gross profit decreased by $3.4 million, or 21.8%, to $12.1 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, from $15.4 million for the same period of 2021. The gross profit margin was 34.4% for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to 37.6% for the same period of 2021. Management believes that gross profit margin likely will continue to be negatively affected by continued significant increases in ocean freight and other transportation costs. Additionally, our portfolio of products has been affected by much higher than normal raw material costs and increased labor costs. In the current environment, cost increases may rise more rapidly than our sales prices, which could continue to decrease gross profit. In order to mitigate cost increases the Company expects to increase prices during the latter part of the third quarter of 2022. Selling, General and Administrative Expenses Selling, general and administrative expenses decreased by $134,000, or 3.2%, to $4.1 million for the three months ended June 30, 2022, from $4.2 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. As a percentage of net sales, selling, general and administrative expenses decreased to 23.4% for the three months ended June 30, 2022, down from 23.6% for the same period of 2021, primarily as a result of lower expenses. Selling, general and administrative expenses decreased by $406,000, or 4.6%, to $8.4 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, from $8.8 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021. As a percentage of net sales, selling, general and administrative expenses increased to 23.9% for the six months ended June 30, 2022, up from 21.4% for the same period of 2021, primarily as a result of lower net sales. Income from Operations Income from operations decreased by $510,000, or 27.9%, to $1.3 million for the three months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $1.8 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021. The decreased income from operations was primarily due to a decrease in gross profit of $620,000 and an increase in depreciation and amortization expense of $24,000, partially offset by a decrease in selling, general and administrative expenses of $134,000. Income from operations as a percentage of net sales for the three months ended June 30, 2022 was 7.6%, compared to 10.3% for the same period of 2021. Income from operations decreased by $3.0 million, or 48.0%, to $3.2 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $6.2 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021. The decreased income from operations was primarily due to a decrease in gross profit of $3.4 million and an increase in depreciation and amortization expense of $38,000, partially offset by a decrease in selling, general and administrative expenses of $406,000. Income from operations as a percentage of net sales for the six months ended June 30, 2022 was 9.3%, compared to 15.2% for the same period of 2021. Other Income Other income decreased by $618,000, or 328.7%, to a loss of $430,000 for the three months ended June 30, 2022, from other income of $188,000 for the three months ended June 30, 2021. The decrease was due to a loss on fixed assets of $490,000 and a decrease in equity in income of unconsolidated affiliate of $138,000, partially offset by an increase in interest income of $10,000. The loss on fixed assets was due to equipment for the Disposable Protective Apparel segment that was not delivered and the Company has recently filed a lawsuit in this matter. Other income decreased by $891,000 to a loss of $380,000 for the six months ended June 30, 2022, from other income of $511,000 for the same period of 2021. The decrease was primarily due the $490,000 loss on fixed assets discussed above and a decrease in equity in income of unconsolidated affiliate of $411,000, partially offset by an increase in interest income of $10,000. Net Income Net income for the three months ended June 30, 2022 was $693,000, compared to net income of $1.7 million for the three months ended June 30, 2021, representing a decrease of $978,000, or 58.5%. The net income decrease for the three months ended June 30, 2022 compared to the same period of 2021 was due to a decrease in income from operations of $510,000 and a decrease in other income of $618,000, resulting in a decrease in income before provision for income taxes of $1.1 million, partially offset by a decrease in provision for income taxes of $150,000. The loss on assets of $490,000, mentioned above, significantly decreased our net income for the three months ended June 30, 2022 by approximately $.03 per share. Net income as a percentage of net sales for the three months ended June 30, 2022 was 4.0%, and net income as a percentage of net sales for the same period of 2021 was 9.4%. Basic earnings per common share for the three months ended June 30, 2022, and 2021 were $0.05 and $0.13, respectively. Diluted earnings per common share for the three months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021 were $0.05 and $0.12, respectively. Net income for the six months ended June 30, 2022 was $2.2 million, compared to net income of $5.4 million for the same period of 2021, representing a decrease of $3.2 million, or 58.9%. The net income decrease comparing the 2022 and 2021 periods was due to a decrease in income from operations of $3.0 million and a decrease in other income of $891,000, resulting in a decrease in income before provision for income taxes of $3.9 million, partially offset by a decrease in provision for income taxes of $705,000. As mentioned above, the loss on assets has negatively impacted net income for the first half of 2022. Net income as a percentage of net sales for the six months ended June 30, 2022 was 6.3%, and net income as a percentage of net sales for the same period of 2021 was 13.2%. Basic earnings per common share for the six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021 were $0.17 and $0.41, respectively. Diluted earnings per common share for the six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021 were $0.17 and $0.40, respectively. Balance Sheet As of June 30, 2022, the Company had cash of $15.3 million compared to $16.3 million as of December 31, 2021. The decrease in cash from December 31, 2021 was due to cash used in investing activities of $222,000 and cash used in financing activities of $1.7 million, partially offset by cash provided by operating activities of $ 943,000. Working capital totaled $51.1 million as of June 30, 2022 and the Companys current ratio was 21:1, compared to a current ratio of 20:1 as of December 31, 2021. Inventory decreased by $1.8 million, or 7.3%, to $23.2 million as of June 30, 2022, from $25.0 million as of December 31, 2021. The decrease was due to a decrease in inventory for the Disposable Protective Apparel segment of $1.7 million, or 10.2%, to $14.6 million and a decrease in inventory for the Building Supply segment of $161,000, or 1.8%, to $8.6 million. Colleen McDonald, Chief Financial Officer, commented, During the three months ended June 30, 2022, we repurchased 225,500 shares of common stock at a cost of $960,000. As of June 30, 2022, we had repurchased a total of 18,945,417 shares of common stock at a cost of approximately $44.2 million through our repurchase program. We retire all stock upon repurchase. Future repurchases are expected to be funded from cash on hand and cash flows from operating activities. As of June 30, 2022, we had $2.4 million available for additional stock purchases under our stock repurchase program. The Company currently has no outstanding debt and believes that the current cash balance and expected cash flow from operations will be sufficient to satisfy projected working capital needs and planned capital expenditures for the foreseeable future. The Company has made approximately $4.0 million in commitments for capital investments to increase its production capacity in the Building Supply segment, of which approximately $1.0 million is unpaid as of June 30, 2022. About Alpha Pro Tech, Ltd. Alpha Pro Tech, Ltd. is the parent company of Alpha Pro Tech, Inc. and Alpha ProTech Engineered Products, Inc. Alpha Pro Tech, Inc. develops, manufactures and markets innovative disposable and limited-use protective apparel products for the industrial, clean room, medical and dental markets. Alpha ProTech Engineered Products, Inc. manufactures and markets a line of construction weatherization products, including building wrap and roof underlayment. The Company has manufacturing facilities in Salt Lake City, Utah; Nogales, Arizona; Valdosta, Georgia; and a joint venture in India. For more information and copies of all news releases and financials, visit Alpha Pro Techs website at http://www.alphaprotech.com. Certain statements made in this press release constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include any statement that may predict, forecast, indicate or imply future results, performance or achievements instead of historical facts and may be identified generally by the use of forward-looking terminology and words such as expects, anticipates, estimates, believes, predicts, intends, plans, potentially, may, continue, should, will and words of similar meaning. Without limiting the generality of the preceding statement, all statements in this press release relating to estimated and projected earnings, expectations regarding order volume, timing of fulfillment of orders, production capacity and our plans to ramp up production and expand capacity, product demand, availability of raw materials and supply chain access, margins, costs, expenditures, cash flows, sources of capital, growth rates and future financial and operating results are forward-looking statements. We caution investors that any such forward-looking statements are only estimates based on current information and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the results contained in the forward-looking statements. We cannot give assurances that any such statements will prove to be correct. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those estimated by us include the risks, uncertainties and assumptions described from time to time in our public releases and reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K. Specifically, these factors include, but are not limited to, changes in global economic conditions; the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and operations, the business and operations of those within our supply chain and global economic conditions generally; changes in order volume by our customers; the inability of our suppliers and contractors to meet our requirements; potential challenges related to international manufacturing; our partnership with a joint venture partner; the inability to protect our intellectual property; competition in our industry; customer preferences; the timing and market acceptance of new product offerings; security breaches or disruptions to the information technology infrastructure; the impact of legal and regulatory proceedings or compliance challenges; and volatility in our common stock price and our investments. We also caution investors that the forward-looking information described herein represents our outlook only as of this date, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or developments after the date of this press release. Given these uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results. Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets (Unaudited) June 30, December 31, 2022 2021 (1) Assets Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 15,342,000 $ 16,307,000 Accounts receivable, net of allowance for doubtful accounts of $64,000 as of June 30, 2022 and as of December 31, 2021 6,452,000 3,397,000 Accounts receivable, related party 1,597,000 1,383,000 Inventories 23,157,000 24,969,000 Prepaid expenses 7,118,000 6,943,000 Total current assets 53,666,000 52,999,000 Property and equipment, net 5,848,000 6,064,000 Goodwill 55,000 55,000 Definite-lived intangible assets, net 2,000 3,000 Right-of-use assets 2,191,000 2,648,000 Equity investment in unconsolidated affiliate 6,219,000 6,120,000 Total assets $ 67,981,000 $ 67,889,000 Liabilities and Shareholders Equity Current liabilities: Accounts payable $ 914,000 $ 528,000 Accrued liabilities 797,000 1,250,000 Lease liabilities 891,000 883,000 Total current liabilities 2,602,000 2,661,000 Lease liabilities, net of current portion 1,352,000 1,817,000 Deferred income tax liabilities, net 791,000 791,000 Total liabilities 4,745,000 5,269,000 Commitments and contingencies Shareholders equity: Common stock, $.01 par value: 50,000,000 shares authorized; 12,728,173 and 13,115,341 shares outstanding as of June 30, 2022 and December 31, 2021, respectively 128,000 132,000 Additional paid-in capital - - Retained earnings 63,108,000 62,488,000 Total shareholders equity 63,236,000 62,620,000 Total liabilities and shareholders equity $ 67,981,000 $ 67,889,000 1) The condensed consolidated balance sheet as of December 31, 2021 has been prepared using information from the audited consolidated balance sheet as of that date. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income (Unaudited) For the Three Months Ended For the Six Months Ended June 30, June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 Net sales $ 17,373,000 $ 17,806,000 $ 35,034,000 $ 40,967,000 Cost of goods sold, excluding depreciation and amortization 11,761,000 11,574,000 22,980,000 25,556,000 Gross profit 5,612,000 6,232,000 12,054,000 15,411,000 Operating expenses: Selling, general and administrative 4,065,000 4,199,000 8,371,000 8,777,000 Depreciation and amortization 227,000 203,000 439,000 401,000 Total operating expenses 4,292,000 4,402,000 8,810,000 - 9,178,000 Income from operations 1,320,000 1,830,000 3,244,000 6,233,000 Other income: Loss on fixed assets (490,000 ) - (490,000 ) - Equity in income of unconsolidated affiliate 50,000 188,000 99,000 510,000 Interest income, net 10,000 - 11,000 1,000 Total other income/(loss) (430,000 ) 188,000 (380,000 ) 511,000 Income before provision for income taxes 890,000 2,018,000 2,864,000 6,744,000 Provision for income taxes 197,000 347,000 649,000 1,354,000 Net income $ 693,000 $ 1,671,000 $ 2,215,000 $ 5,390,000 Basic earnings per common share $ 0.05 $ 0.13 $ 0.17 $ 0.41 Diluted earnings per common share $ 0.05 $ 0.12 $ 0.17 $ 0.40 Basic weighted average common shares outstanding 12,834,332 13,246,676 12,945,981 13,294,571 Diluted weighted average common shares outstanding 12,908,223 13,511,497 13,032,313 13,621,101 CHON BURI, Thailand, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Panus, Thailand's leading trailer manufacturer, has successfully entered the U.S. market with their first delivery of 150 semi-trailers (container chassis) in March 2022. Teaming up with North America's leading equipment leasing professionals, Panus Assembly Co. Ltd. has signed an exclusive distribution agreement to supply intermodal equipment to the newly established Panus USA LLC. Under the new agreement, Panus will supply over 3,000 semi-trailers to the North American Market in 2022, with a further 7,000 trailers in 2023 and 12,000 in 2024. CEO of Panus Assembly Mr. Panus Watanachai said: "This is a new and exciting era for Panus, bringing quality Thai-made trailers to the North American market. Putting us in the position to expand our global footprint." Director of Panus USA Mr. Ayman Awad said: "We are pleased to announce the creation of a new and long-term venture - Panus USA. "The container chassis market in the United States is quite significant - more than 800,000 units operating in the service of ocean carriers, railroads, truckers, and leasing companies. Demand exceeds supply, and both additional and replacement equipment are needed. "Panus USA is managed by a team of highly qualified and experienced individuals who expect and provide nothing less than first-class equipment and service. The innovative design and container chassis workmanship and quality are on a par, often exceeding, the typical USA chassis. "The container chassis will be built to USA market specifications by Panus Assembly Thailand, and with the advantage of some creative design and pending patents, be shipped to the USA where they will be competitive cost-wise, and often superior quality-wise. Looking forward, we believe Panus USA has a bright and exciting future. "Panus Assembly Thailand has proved to be a viable partner equipped with know-how, experienced management and engineering, qualified labor force, and a new automated facility fully equipped to meet the aggressive production targets set forth by Panus USA." Panus has developed and manufactured a new line of trailers for North America to meet the market's growing chassis demand and has patents pending on their unique twist locks system and the innovative loading process that allows Panus to drop ship chassis in any port or inland location in the USA loaded in 40 HC containers. Founded over 50 years ago, Panus Assembly Thailand has a long history of manufacturing quality transportation solutions and growing a quality workforce while establishing themselves as Thailand's market leader. Full news can be seen here: Panus News For further information please contact: Website: www.panusinternational.com Email: i-marketing@panus.co.th Related Files PanusUSA-PressRelease.pdf Related Images Image 1: Panus celebrates USA deal Thailand's leading trailer manufacturer successfully enters U.S. market. This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. Attachment Charlotte, NC, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen LLP), the eighth largest accounting firm in the United States, announced Jen Leary, CEO, was named Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Leader of the Year by NABA Inc., a nonprofit member-based association for accounting, finance, and business professionals. Each year, NABA recognizes stellar achievers who have gone beyond the call of duty to reach distinct success in their careers and within NABA, the profession, or their community. NABA is thrilled to recognize Jen as she and the CLA team deepen their commitment to fostering meaningful change in the industry, said NABA President and CEO Guylaine Saint Juste. Our relationship with CLA is built on collaboration, and we look forward to continuing to work together to pave a path to a more just world. The NABA award was presented to Leary at the NABA RECHARGE convention held in Hollywood, Florida June 21 24. I am honored and humbled by this recognition, said Leary. At CLA, we believe in continuous learning and taking action to drive change. Our collaboration with NABA is critical to helping us have a strong, diverse CLA family and industry well into the future. CLA sponsored the NABA RECHARGE convention at the Founder level and hosted two sessions. During the NABA convention, the CLA Foundation presented a $1 million five-year commitment grant to NABA to help seed the nonprofits new Pathway to College program, support human capital needs, and create scholarships. CLA and NABA commemorated their relationship in September 2021 with a first of its kind corporate sponsorship to help fuel the organizations mission to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion within the profession. Through this work with NABA, CLA continues to increase workforce diversity and expand its pool of talent and improve the representation of Black individuals within the firm and the accounting profession. About CLA CLA exists to create opportunities for our clients, our people, and our communities through industry-focused wealth advisory, outsourcing, audit, tax, and consulting services. With more than 7,500 people, 121 U.S. locations, and a global vision, we promise to know you and help you. For more information, visit CLAconnect.com. CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen LLP) is an independent network member of CLA Global. See CLAglobal.com/disclaimer. Investment advisory services are offered through CliftonLarsonAllen Wealth Advisors, LLC, an SEC-registered investment advisor. About NABA NABA, Inc. is a nonprofit membership association dedicated to bridging the opportunity gap for Black professionals in the accounting, finance, and related business professions. Representing more than 200,000 Black professionals in these fields, NABA advances people, careers, and the mission by providing education, resources, and meaningful career connections to both professional and student members, fulfilling the principle of our motto: Lifting as We Climb. To learn more about NABA and its programs visit: http://www.nabainc.org. Attachment Taiwan resident suspected of endangering national security detained in E China Xinhua) 09:29, August 04, 2022 HANGZHOU, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Yang Chih-yuan, a Taiwan resident suspected of engaging in separatist activities and endangering national security, was detained by the national security organ of Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province on Wednesday. Yang, born in Taichung in 1990, has long been advocating "Taiwan independence," and colluded with others to establish an illegal organization with the aim to "push for Taiwan to become a sovereign state and join the United Nations." Having planned and carried out separatist activities for "Taiwan independence," Yang is suspected of crimes of splitting the country and inciting others to do so. The national security organs will leverage legal weapons such as the Anti-Secession Law and the National Security Law to punish the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces in accordance with the law for their attempts to seek "Taiwan independence," resist reunification and undermine peace, said a national security official. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) KakaoBank's Pangyo headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province / Newsis By Anna J. Park KakaoBank's stock price rose by 4.78 percent, ending at 32,900 won ($25) on Thursday's trading session, following the previous day's solid first-half earnings report. The digital bank raked a record-high net profit of 123.9 billion won in the first half, which is 6.8 percent year-on-year increase. Despite enjoying a stock price high since late June, employees of the internet-only bank cannot enjoy the ride to the fullest. Many of them are monitoring the stock price anxiously, as the stock price at Thursday's closing is still more than 15 percent lower than its initial offering price of 39,000 won, set last summer at the time of the bank's listing debut on the main benchmark KOSPI. At the time of the IPO, KakaoBank allocated 19.5 percent of its offering shares to its employee stock ownership plan, or a total of 12.7 million shares at a price of 39,000 won per share, which is the same as the initial offering price. Given that the total number of employees at the time was 1,014, each employee of the bank purchased 12,567 shares on average. That means, on average, each employee bought 131 million won worth of bank shares. As Thursday's closing price is about 15 percent lower than the initial price, it means that they suffered a loss of over 19 million won per employee, on average. The reason that they could not sell the shares following the IPO last August, when the prices nearly reached 100,000 won per share, was that they were subject to a one-year lock-up period. Now that it's been nearly a year since the bank's IPO, the lock-up period is slated to end this Saturday, and employee shareholders would be able to sell their stocks on the market. However, due to the sluggish stock price much below the initial offering price, it's not likely that the company employees would cut their losses by selling on the market next week. "Of course, employees who purchased the stocks through the stock ownership plan cannot be feeling good about this. But in general, we're hoping for the share price to increase in the near future, given the company's solid earnings. The company is also actively communicating with employees about earnings prospects," an employee of the bank told The Korea Times on condition of anonymity. Austin, Texas, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leading education technology solutions provider Lightspeed Systems (Lightspeed or the Company) announced today that it has appointed Brook McShane Bock to the newly created position Chief Product Officer (CPO). The addition deepens Lightspeeds leadership team and enables the Companys continued growth and innovative approaches to advancing student safety and engagement. Ms. Bock joins Lightspeed with decades of experience advancing technology to solve customer problems and improve results. Notably, she led the product vision, portfolio strategy, and global expansion for top tier K-12 serving companies such as College Board and Blackboard. Most recently Ms. Bock served as CPO for Vanco Payments, a financial services company based in Minnesota, where she drove the product portfolio for community markets, including education; enhanced organic growth by launching and migrating clients to next generation donations software with integrated omni-channel payments and live streaming; and created inorganic growth by integrating food, childcare, and mobile software acquisitions. She has also worked with Corporate Executive Board, AT&T, and CyberCash in a variety of product management and business consulting roles. As the market-leading safety and efficacy platform for U.S. schools, we are growing rapidly to serve even more students and to build upon our Lightspeed platform, said Brian Thomas, Chief Executive Officer of Lightspeed Systems. "To provide the level of excellence our customers deserve, we are committed to a visionary and customer-centric product platform. Were excited to have Brook join the team and lead our continuously evolving product portfolio. We look forward to deepening our relationships with customers and innovating on technology that keeps students safe and enhances learning. In her new role at Lightspeed, Ms. Bock will be responsible for Lightspeeds product strategy and platform growth to ensure educators and school staff have the tools they need to advance student safety and educational effectiveness. Her work will directly maximize the value of Lightspeed products for Lightspeeds current customer base of more than 28,000 schools in the U.S. and abroad as well as new ones to come. Lightspeed is rapidly growing as it continues its mission and drives increased adoption of its platform. The Company also recently received a strategic growth investment from Genstar Capital, joining existing investor Madison Dearborn Partners, to extend Lightspeeds market leadership position and continue the successful execution of its strategy. In January, Lightspeed acquired CatchOn, the most advanced educational analytics solution, to expand its product offerings. Lightspeed is a trusted partner for technology in student safety and education, said Ms. Bock. There has never been a more important time to provide educators and students with proven and innovative technology to keep children safe and optimize learning outcomes. I am thrilled to help lead this very exciting next chapter of growth and lend my expertise to accelerate the mission within this education sector. Ms. Bock graduated with a degree in economics from St. Olaf College in Minnesota and received an MBA from the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. About Lightspeed Systems With over 20 years of providing technology to meet the needs of schools, Lightspeed Systems is the market leader in online student safety and effectiveness. The purpose-built Lightspeed ecosystem of cloud-based solutionstailored to meet todays evolving challengesprovides schools worldwide with the most effective web filter, student safety monitor, classroom management software, device management tool, and analytics program available. Lightspeed Systems is a proven partner for schools, serving over 20 million students in 39 countries and 28,000 schools globally. To learn more, visit www.lightspeedsystems.com. Attachment English Lithuanian LITGRID AB, company code 302564383, registered office address Karlo Gustavo Emilio Manerheimo str. 8, Vilnius, Lithuania delivers results of the Company for the 1st half of 2022: Revenue for the 1st half of 2022 - EUR 145.2 million (the 1st half of 2021 EUR 112.4 million); Net loss for the 1st half of 2022 - EUR 9.2million (the 1st half of 2021 net profit EUR 17.4 million); EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) for the 1st half of 2022 amounted to EUR 0.1 million, 1st half of 2021 - EUR 31.8 million). Attachments: 1. AB LITGRID Interim report and financial statements as of 30 June 2022. 2. Press release. The individual authorized by LITGRID AB to provide additional information on the material event: Jurga Eivaite Communications Manager tel. +370 613 19977 e-mail: jurga.eivaite@litgrid.eu Attachments The Biocodex Microbiota Foundation is looking for academics and scientists in Canada to apply for a 25,000 research grant aimed at helping advance the study of the gut microbiome MONTREAL, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Biocodex Microbiota Foundation, an organization founded by Biocodex and dedicated to inspiring scientific projects that explore the microbiome, is calling for grant proposals from innovative researchers at Canadian institutions. The Biocodex Microbiota Foundations annual call for projects is part of a multi-year research initiative to further the understanding of the human microbiome. The 2022 theme for Canada is the microbiome in human health and diseases and is open for applicants with an appointment at a Canadian institution or university (visiting scientists performing research at a Canadian institution may apply). The deadline for the 2022 call for projects in Canada is October 16, 2022 and the final decision of the independent scientific committee will be communicated in November 2022. The 2022 rules and application form can be found at the Biocodex Microbiota Foundations website. 5 Grants of 25,000 each have been already awarded to Canadian scientists since 2017, and the latest for the 2021 edition went to: Dr. Mamatha Bhat, from Soham & Shaila Ajmera Family Transplant Centre, University Health Network of Toronto Ontario, for her project entitled : "Does Immunosuppression Contribute to Metabolic syndrome via the Intestinal Microbiome?". About Biocodex Founded in France in 1953, Biocodex is a multinational company, based on the higest scientific and manufacturing standards. Biocodex currently holds 20 subsidiaries (including Biocodex Canada Inc. based in Montreal Quebec) and multiple long-term partnerships spanning more than 124 countries. With over 65 years of successful international operations, the mission of Biocodex is to remain a worldwide leader in expertise within the microbiota realm. www.biocodex.ca/en/ About Biocodex Microbiota Foundation The Biocodex Microbiota Foundation is a non-profit, general interest organization that supports research into microbiota and their interaction with various pathologies. Both foundational and applied research grants are awarded. Projects investigating the implication of microbiota in human health are selected annually by committees of independent international scientists. www.biocodexmicrobiotafoundation.com Contact: diffusion@biocodex.ca A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a090da6c-cfc9-4da0-965e-19949167b1a6 Richmond, VA, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Allison M. Stelter, an experienced attorney who advises clients on the federal income tax aspects of asset securitization, partnerships and capital markets transactions, has rejoined Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP as a counsel in the firms Richmond office. As a member of the firms tax practice, Stelter represents issuers and underwriters on federal tax issues relating to private and public securitized real estate mortgage investment conduits (REMICs), debt, and grantor trust offerings in connection with a variety of assets including real estate, forward and reverse performing, reperforming, and nonperforming mortgage loans, online marketplace loans, merchant cash advances, auto loans and other financial assets. She regularly counsels real estate investment trusts (REITs) on securities offerings, acquisition transactions including tax protection agreements, roll-up transactions and UPREIT structures, initial public offerings, investment structuring, taxable REIT subsidiary structures, mezzanine loans and distressed debt. Stelters experience includes: Represented various parties in connection with the federal tax aspects of purchases, sales, financing and securitizations of forward and reverse performing, reperforming and nonperforming mortgage loans, REO, online marketplace loans, auto loans, credit card receivables and other financial assets. Represented issuers and underwriters concerning tax issues in private and public mortgage-backed and asset-backed security offerings, including the representation of U.S. government agencies and government sponsored enterprises in mortgage loan securitization transactions. Tax structuring and evaluation of various securitization, resecuritization, debt, and grantor trust transactions, including issues regarding real estate assets, distressed assets and U.S. withholding. Allison is a highly regarded attorney whose professionalism, experience and insight make her a valuable complement to our national tax practice, said Cecelia Philipps Horner, who serves as co-head of Hunton Andrews Kurths Tax and ERISA practice. We are excited to have her back on our team. Stelter returns to the firm from Honigman LLP. She originally joined Hunton Andrews Kurth as an associate in 2007, following her graduation from law school. Stelter earned her undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and her law degree from William & Mary Law School. She also serves as an adjunct professor teaching Partnership Taxation at Michigan State University College of Law. Attachment VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Christina Lake Cannabis Corp. (the Company or CLC or Christina Lake Cannabis) (CSE: CLC) (OTCQB: CLCFF) (FRANKFURT: CLB) is pleased to announce that Mark Aiken, a seasoned cannabis executive has joined CLC as Chief Executive Officer pending a mandatory security clearance by Health Canada and approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange. CLC anticipates it can benefit significantly from Mr. Aikens leadership as the Company seeks to enhance and optimize its B2B sales pipeline across Canada. Christina Lake Cannabis has continued to focus on cultivating and extracting sun-grown cannabis from a curated selection of proprietary in-house engineered strains for maximum yield and cannabinoid profile. Currently in its third operating year with an expanded team of over 52 personnel CLC delivers highly sought-after quality distillates and concentrates used to create Cannabis 2.0 products servicing B2B customers that include top brands across the Canadian Cannabis market. Fluent in English, French, and Spanish, Mr. Aiken began his career in sales positions with organizations to include Rema Tip Top AG (German producer of tire repair and surface protection products based in Munich Germany), Vortex Aquatic Structures (Quebec-based developer of waterpark features), and Plombco (Quebec-based automotive wheel balance weight manufacturer) for whom Mr. Aiken grew annual sales by 82% in six years from CAD $17 million to CAD $31 million. In 2009, Mr. Aiken was awarded a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Queens University. From 2014 through 2019 Mr. Aiken served as a management consultant for the Automotive sector, across North America focusing on strategy, marketing and distribution growth in preparation for M&A activities. Most recently, Mr. Aiken was Vice President of Strategic Business Development for HEXO Corp. (TSE: HEXO), currently Canadas #1 Licensed Producer by Market Share and an international player in medicinal and recreational cannabis. Mr. Aiken played a pivotal role in facilitating key CPG relationships and multiple international supply agreements for expansions into Israel, Australia, and South Africa growing HEXOs international sales by 320%. Upon Mr. Aikens appointment as CEO of Christina Lake Cannabis, current interim-CEO Joel Dumaresq will step down from his position. Mr. Dumaresq will remain a member of CLCs Board of Directors. CLC would like to thank Mr. Dumaresq for his dedication, commitment, and leadership in helping to build the foundation for the Company. Pending a mandatory security clearance from Health Canada that is currently underway, Mark Aiken is to become Chief Executive Officer of Christina Lake Cannabis as the Company carries out its cultivation activities during its third year of operations. Mr. Aiken has 25 years of experience in various sales, business development, and executive management roles to include his most recent position as VP of Strategic Business Development for HEXO; a publicly traded Canadian producer of medicinal and recreational cannabis. Readers using news aggregation services may be unable to view the media above. Please access SEDAR or the Investor Relations section of the Companys website for a version of this press release containing all published media. Regarding his upcoming appointment as CEO of Christina Lake Cannabis, Mark Aiken commented, This is a very exciting time to join CLC and its experienced Board of Directors to lead a premiere cannabis organization with solid fundamentals. Our outdoor-grown BC bud benefits from the desirable properties created by sunlight and other natural growing conditions that can only be found in the Kootenay region of British Columbia. This unique environment provides CLC with a cost advantage for our core input material. The cannabis space is becoming increasingly sophisticated both domestically and around the world, and I believe CLC is well positioned to capture market share by delivering top quality products tailored to individual client needs. CLC premium distillates are highly regarded by our customer base due to our best-in-class production methods and high attention to detail. We provide consistent reliable outputs that Licensed Producers and Contract Manufacturing Organizations can count on for their formulation needs. Our capacity and offerings are benefiting from our investments in technology, and I look forward to capitalizing on these opportunities. Joel Dumaresq added, I am most pleased to be welcoming Mr. Aiken to the CLC family. His unparalleled acumen and enthusiasm are expected to be invaluable to the Companys operations as we seek to expand our market position as a premier extraction and processing facility benefiting from the cultivation of proprietary cannabis strains grown outdoors under the ideal natural conditions. I am eager to be working alongside Mr. Aiken while remaining on the Board of Directors of Christina Lake Cannabis, and I anticipate we will all work very well together in the years to come as we continue to scale our organization. About Christina Lake Cannabis Corp. Christina Lake Cannabis is a licensed producer of cannabis under the Cannabis Act. It has secured a standard cultivation license and corresponding processing amendment from Health Canada (March 2020 and August 2020, respectively) as well as a research and development license (early 2020). Christina Lake Cannabis facility consists of a 32-acre property, which includes over 950,000 square feet of outdoor grow space, offices, propagation and drying rooms, research facilities, and a facility dedicated to processing and extraction. Christina Lake Cannabis also owns a 99-acre plot of land adjoining its principal site. CLC focuses its production on creating high quality extracts and distillate for its B2B client base with proprietary strains specifically developed for outdoor cultivation to enhance extraction quality. For more information, please visit www.christinalakecannabis.com and www.sedar.com (CLC.CN). On behalf of Christina Lake Cannabis Corp.: Joel Dumaresq Joel Dumaresq, CEO and Director For more information about CLC, please visit: www.christinalakecannabis.com Jamie Frawley Investor Relations and Media Inquiries jamie@clcannabis.com 416-268-9432 THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE (CSE) HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE, NOR HAS OR DOES THE CSES REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER. Forward-Looking Information: This news release includes certain statements that may be deemed forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words anticipate, continue, estimate, expect, may, will, would, project, should, believe and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this News Release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Companys disclosure documents which can be found under the Companys profile on http://www.sedar.com . Statement Regarding Third-Party Investor Relations Firms Disclosures relating to investor relations firms retained by Christina Lake Cannabis Corp. can be found under the Company's profile on http://sedar.com . A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a7bd4007-14eb-4cf7-afbe-b4755e453a66 NEW YORK, United States, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Facts and Factors has published a new research report titled Satellite Market Size, Share, Growth Analysis Report By Type (Large Satellite, Mini Satellite, Micro Satellite, Nano Satellite, By End User (Commercial, Civil, Government, Others), By Application (Scientific Research, Technology Demonstration and Verification, Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, Scientific Research, Communication), and By Region - Global Industry Insights, Comparative Analysis, Trends, Statistical Research, Market Intelligence, and Forecast 2022 2028 in its research database. According to the latest research study, the demand of global Satellite Market size & share was valued at approximately USD 3,264.9 million in 2021. The market is expected to grow above a CAGR of 6.5% and is anticipated to reach over USD 4,763.9 million by 2028. The report analyses the Satellite markets drivers and restraints, as well as the impact they have on-demand throughout the projection period. In addition, the report examines global opportunities in the global Satellite market. What is Satellite? How big is the Satellite Industry? Market Overview: A satellite is an object that is set on a path to orbit a certain body like the moon orbiting the earth and but usually, satellites in our lingo mean a machine that is launched into space or the topmost atmosphere for special purposes or functions. Satellites are mostly used for communication, broadcasting, and location tracking services. Increasing technological proliferation and rising demand for advanced services are expected to propel the demand for Satellite over the forecast period. Rising advancements in space technology also influence the Satellite market potential. Get a Free Sample PDF of this Research Report for more Insights with Table of Content, Research Methodology, and Graphs - https://www.fnfresearch.com/sample/satellite-market (A free sample of this report is available upon request; please contact us for more information.) Our Free Sample Report Consists of the Following: Introduction, Overview, and in-depth industry analysis are all included in the 2022 updated report. The COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak Impact Analysis is included in the package About {no of pages}+ Pages Research Report (Including Recent Research) Provide detailed chapter-by-chapter guidance on Request Updated Regional Analysis with Graphical Representation of Size, Share, and Trends for the Year 2022 Includes Tables and figures have been updated The most recent version of the report includes the Top Market Players, their Business Strategies, Sales Volume, Revenue Analysis, SWOT Analysis, Industry Major Players, Historical and Forecast Growth, Porter's 5 Forces Analysis Facts and Factors research methodology Key Insights from Primary Research As per the analysis, the Satellite market is likely to grow above a CAGR of around 6.5% between 2022 and 2028. between 2022 and 2028. The Satellite market size was worth around US$ 3,264.9 million in 2021 and is estimated to hit approximately US$ 4,763.9 million by 2028 . Due to a variety of driving factors, the market is predicted to rise at a significant rate. and is estimated to hit approximately . Due to a variety of driving factors, the market is predicted to rise at a significant rate. In terms of end users, the commercial segment is projected to account for a major market share and is anticipated to have a bright outlook through the coming years. The Communication segment is expected to have a bright outlook over the forecast period on the basis of application. The region of North America accounted for a major market share in the global Satellite market landscape owing to the presence of developed infrastructure and the presence of key Satellite manufacturers. Competitive Players The report contains qualitative and quantitative research on the global Satellite Market, as well as detailed insights and development strategies employed by the leading competitors. The report also provides an in-depth analysis of the market's main competitors, as well as information on their competitiveness. The research also identifies and analyses important business strategies used by these main market players, such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), affiliations, collaborations, and contracts. The study examines, among other things, each company's global presence, competitors, service offers, and standards. Some of the main players in the global Satellite market include; Intelsat SES S.A. Eutesat Communications S.A. Lockheed Martin Corporation Airbus S.A.S. Boeing Thales Group Orbital Sciences Corporation Planet Labs Inc. Millennium Space Systems, Inc. Directly Purchase a copy of the report with TOC @ https://www.fnfresearch.com/buynow/su/satellite-market Satellite Market Dynamics Rising technological proliferation has also influenced the demand for satellite services and hence is driving the Satellite market potential across the world. Satellites are usually man made machines that are set to orbit the earth from space and provide desired functionality as well. Satellites are major utilized for broadcasting, communications, observation, and imaging purposes. As technology is advancing the scope of application of satellites has substantially increased and is projected to rise over the forecast period as well. The rising demand for better and secure satellite communications in the defense industry is expected to provide lucrative opportunities for Satellite manufacturers and is anticipated to boost market potential over the coming years. Increasing government spending is also expected to positively boost Satellite market growth through 2028. However, high costs associated with manufacturing and launching these satellites is anticipated to have a hindering effect on the global Satellite market potential. Satellite Market: COVID-19 Impact Analysis The sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to major changes in the global economy and had a negative impact on almost all aspects of the world resulting in a slowdown of economic growth across multiple nations. The Satellite market also experienced a downfall in its growth trend due to the pandemic which caused the Satellite manufacturers to incur big losses. Slow economic growth and hampered manufacturing and research activity during the pandemic led to negative growth in the Satellite market. The Satellite market is expected to make a good comeback in the post-pandemic era as the world returns to normal and lockdowns are lifted. As economic growth picks up we will see good growth in the Satellite market potential as well. Browse the full Satellite Market Size, Share, Growth Analysis Report By Type (Large Satellite, Mini Satellite, Micro Satellite, Nano Satellite, By End User (Commercial, Civil, Government, Others), By Application (Scientific Research, Technology Demonstration and Verification, Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, Scientific Research, Communication), and By Region - Global Industry Insights, Comparative Analysis, Trends, Statistical Research, Market Intelligence, and Forecast 2022 2028 Report at https://www.fnfresearch.com/satellite-market Satellite Market: Segmentation Analysis In terms of end-user, the commercial segment is projected to account for a dominant outlook in the years to come. This can be attributed to the rising demand for satellite-based commercial applications such as high-speed live broadcasts, communication, imaging, monitoring, and observation. However, the government segment is expected to see a rise in market share owing to an increase in government spending for satellite launches and manufacturing. The Observation and Remote Sensing segment is predicted to see good growth in demand over the forecast period as the focus on remote technologies increases. The rising incidence of natural calamities and increasing need for observation of changing climate trends are projected to drive demand in this segment through 2028. Regional Analysis: The North American satellite market is expected to lead the global satellite industry owing to rising investments in the development of satellites and the presence of key manufacturers. Increasing investments in the technology sector by the governments are also expected to positively impact the Satellite market potential over the forecast period. Increasing spending on defense satellites and rising focus on advanced technologies will also boost demand for satellites in this region. The United States will be the most notable market in this region owing to its rapid adoption of novel technologies and high defense spending potential. In September 2020, The Space Development Agency (SDA) announced that it had awarded a contract for Space Transport Layer to aerospace giant Lockheed Martin which was aimed at demonstrating a mesh network containing 10 small satellites that will be crucial in terrestrial war fighting with satellite links. Have Any Query? Ask Our Experts: https://www.fnfresearch.com/inquiry/satellite-market Key questions answered in this report: What is the market size and growth rate forecast for Satellite industry? What are the main driving factors propelling the Satellite Market forward? What are the leading companies in the Satellite Industry? What segments does the Satellite Market cover? How can I receive a free copy of the Satellite Market sample report and company profiles? Report Scope: Report Attribute Details Market Size in 2021 USD 3,264.9 Million Projected Market Size in 2028 USD 4,763.9 Million CAGR Growth Rate 6.5% CAGR Base Year 2021 Forecast Years 2022-2028 Key Market Players SES S.A., Eutesat Communications S.A., Lockheed Martin Corporation, Airbus S.A.S., Boeing, Thales Group, Orbital Sciences Corporation, Planet Labs Inc., Millennium Space Systems, Inc., and Others Key Segment By Types, End User, Applications, and Region Major Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa Purchase Options Request customized purchase options to meet your research needs. Request for Customization on this Report as per your requirements - https://www.fnfresearch.com/customization/satellite-market (We tailor your report to meet your specific research requirements. Inquire with our sales team about customising your report.) The global Satellite market is segmented as follows: By Type Large Satellite Mini Satellite Micro Satellite Nano Satellite By End User Commercial Civil Government Others By Application Scientific Research Technology Demonstration and Verification Earth Observation and Remote Sensing Scientific Research Communication By Region North America The U.S. Canada Europe France The UK Spain Germany Italy Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan India Southeast Asia Rest of Southeast Asia The Middle East & Africa GCC South Africa Rest of the Middle East & Africa Latin America Brazil Argentina Rest of Latin America Request Your Free Sample Report of the Global Satellite Market @ https://www.fnfresearch.com/sample/satellite-market Key Offerings: Market Size, Trends, & Forecast by Revenue | 20222028 Market Dynamics Leading Trends, Growth Drivers, Restraints, and Investment Opportunities Market Segmentation A detailed analysis by Types, End User, Applications, and Region and by Region Competitive Landscape Top Key Vendors and Other Prominent Vendors Browse Other Related Research Reports from Facts & Factors Geospatial Imagery Analytics Market: https://www.fnfresearch.com/geospatial-imagery-analytics-market-by-type-image-analytics-208 Internet of Things (IoT) in Energy Market: https://www.fnfresearch.com/internet-of-things-iot-in-energy-market-by-569 Television Broadcasting Services Market: https://www.fnfresearch.com/television-broadcasting-services-market-by-service-platform-subscription AI Radiation Dosing Market: https://www.fnfresearch.com/ai-radiation-dosing-market AI for Drug Discovery Market: https://www.fnfresearch.com/ai-for-drug-discovery-market Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE) Solutions Market: https://www.fnfresearch.com/healthcare-information-exchange-hie-solutions-market About Facts & Factors: Facts & Factors is a leading market research organization offering industry expertise and scrupulous consulting services to clients for their business development. The reports and services offered by Facts and Factors are used by prestigious academic institutions, start-ups, and companies globally to measure and understand the changing international and regional business backgrounds. Our clients/customers conviction on our solutions and services has pushed us in delivering always the best. Our advanced research solutions have helped them in appropriate decision-making and guidance for strategies to expand their business. Follow Us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fnfresearch Follow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/fnfresearch Follow Us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/factsandfactors/ Contact Us: Rushikesh Dorge USA: +1 347 690-0211 United Kingdom: +44 2032 894158 Japan: +81 50 5806 9039 India: +91 73877 19999 Email: sales@fnfresearch.com Web: https://www.fnfresearch.com PUSLINCH, Ontario, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Spruce Ridge Resources Ltd. (Spruce or the Company) (TSX-V: SHL) announces that at the shareholder meeting held today, the following individuals were elected to the Board of the Company: Vance White, Steve Balch, J. Birks Bovaird, Michael Dehn and Dr. Kasi Sethu Raman. Mr. Dehn was an incumbent director of the Company and the other directors are new appointees duly elected at the meeting of shareholders. Also at that meeting, the shareholders approved the reappointment of Grant Thornton LLP as auditors of the Company and approved the Companys Stock Option Plan. John Ryan has resigned as President and CEO of the Company, and Mr. Steve Balch has been appointed as President and CEO of Spruce on an interim basis. Mr. Ryan continues as a consultant to assist with an orderly transition. Mr. Ryan commented, I am pleased to welcome the new Board and I look forward to working with the new management. Property Update Spruce Ridge announces that assessment reports for three mineral licences covering its South Pond Copper-Gold Property within Spruces Great Burnt Property (2,890 ha) located in Central Newfoundland are being filed after the applicable deadlines. The Company has held the mineral claims since 1999. Acceptance of the late filing has been requested from the Newfoundland and Labrador Mineral Lands Division. The South Pond Copper-Gold Property was most recently discussed by the Company in its news release of July 19, 2022. Shareholders are advised that the exploration results discussed in that news release (and in prior news releases) relate to a property area for which Spruce may no longer have the required mineral licenses. The Great Burnt Copper Zone is contained in a separate mining lease and remains in good standing. The mineral claims covering the Pipestone nickel prospect (4,575 ha) have expired due to lack of sufficient assessment work required to keep the claims in good standing. This property was not under active exploration. Background of New Directors The Company is pleased to provide the following information regarding the members of its newly constituted Board of Directors. Steve Balch, a resident of Ontario, Canada, is a registered geoscientist who currently serves as VP Exploration of Canada Nickel Company Inc. He is one of Canadas leading experts on geophysical techniques used to identify nickel-copper sulphide and platinum-group-metal targets. He has 36 years of experience in geophysics, specializing in the magnetic and electromagnetic methods, but also with experience in large exploration compilations. After working at Inco for six years in the Sudbury Basin and at Voiseys Bay, Steve joined Aeroquest in 2001 and helped develop the AeroTEM system, focusing on the on-time measurements of the linear triangular waveform. In 2007, Mr. Balch founded Triumph Instruments and developed the AirTEM system, a multi-coil helicopter-borne EM system that is now in use in Mexico, China, Canada and Eastern Europe. Steve has also been active in borehole geophysics and has worked to develop new technology including north-seeking gyros, temperature compensated induction conductivity probes and high sensitivity magnetic gradiometers. He has previously served as President and director of Triumph Instruments and of Canadian Mining Geophysics Ltd. He was President, CEO, and a director of Chevrier Metals Corp. (formerly Tawsho Mining Inc.) as well as a director of RHC Capital Corporation (formerly Rockefeller Hughes Corporation) from 2013 to 2016. Mr. Balch also serves as a consultant to Noble Mineral Exploration Inc. and other exploration and mining companies. Michael Dehn, a resident of Ontario, Canada, is a Partner of Avanti Management and Consulting Limited. He has over 21 years of experience in the mining industry, serving as director of publicly traded and private junior mining companies, with listings on various exchanges. He is currently President and CEO of Temas Resources Corp. and United Lithium Corp. He has been a director of Spruce since December 2020 and served on its Audit Committee until todays shareholder meeting. H. Vance White, a resident of Ontario, Canada, has been President, CEO and director of Noble Mineral Exploration Inc. since 2003. He has held positions as a director and as an officer with numerous other reporting issuers, including AfriOre Limited and Dickenson Mines Limited. Dr. Kasi Sethu Raman, a resident of Ontario, Canada, is a prolific mine finder and successful entrepreneur with more than 52 years of experience in all phases of exploration, mine development and acquisitions. Dr. Raman played a leadership role in the recent Crawford Nickel discovery near Timmins. He has served as President and CEO of Holmer Gold Mines Ltd. and as director and Advisor to Lake Shore Gold Corp. He has held management positions for several other resource companies including serving as Vice President for International Corona Resources Group of companies. He holds a Ph.D. in Geology from Carleton University and a UNESCO Post-Graduate Diploma from the University of Vienna, Austria. J. Birks Bovaird, a resident of Ontario, Canada, is the Chair of the board of Energy Fuels Inc., a uranium and vanadium mining and development company. He is also a director of Noble Mineral Exploration Inc. The dominant focus of Mr. Bovairds career has been the provision of corporate financial consulting and strategic planning services. He has previously been involved with numerous public resource companies, both in management and as a director, and was formerly the Vice President of Corporate Finance for one of Canadas major accounting firms. He holds an ICD.D designation and is a graduate of the Canadian Director Education Program. Cautionary Statement: Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. This news release contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and include, but are not limited to, disclosure regarding possible events, that are based on assumptions and courses of action, and in certain cases, can be identified by the words expects, plans, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates, projects, potential and similar expressions, or that events or conditions will, would, may, could or should occur, or the negative forms of any of these words and other similar expressions. Forward-looking statements include: the intention of management to review and evaluate the property holdings and exploration initiatives of the Company to preserve and maximize shareholder value; the Companys intention to seek a waiver of the late filing of assessment reports; and statements related to future plans for the Company. Forward-looking statements are based on various assumptions including with respect to management plans and mineral property curative steps, as well as results of operations, performance, business prospects and opportunities. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based upon what management of the Company believes are reasonable assumptions on the date of this news release, such assumptions may prove to be incorrect. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, they should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results, and they will not necessarily be accurate indications of whether or not such results will be achieved. A number of factors could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to: the inability to develop and successfully implement exploration strategies, the inability to successfully recover mineral property interests, general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; the lack of available capital; impact of COVID-19 on the business of the Company; and other risks detailed from time-to-time in the Companys ongoing filings with securities regulatory authorities, which filings can be found at www.sedar.com. The Company cannot assure readers that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements in this press release. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release and the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless otherwise required by law. Contacts: Steve Balch, President & CEO (interim) Phone: 905.407.9586 Email: steve@beci.ca The Recognition Will Honor Individuals Who Have Made a Significant Difference in the Lives of Those Affected by Multiple Myeloma CRANBURY, N.J., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CURE Media Group, the industry-leading multimedia platform devoted to cancer updates and research that reaches more than 1 million patients, survivors and caregivers, today announced the opening of nominations for the 2022 Multiple Myeloma Heroes award program. The program will recognize three individuals who have demonstrated significant impact on improving the lives of those affected by multiple myeloma. We are proud to bring back our Multiple Myeloma Heroes award program to celebrate the amazing work members of the health care community do on a daily basis, said Mike Hennessy Jr., president and CEO of MJH Life Sciences, parent company of CURE Media Group. These awards allow us to express our deep appreciation for the true heroes dedicated to making a difference in the lives of every patient. This years program also includes a second award the 2022 Multiple Myeloma Health Equity Hero which will honor an individual who has made a substantial difference in breaking down systemic barriers, creating solutions that resulted in health equity or led efforts to help address disparities in the multiple myeloma community. Nominations for the awards are open until August 31, 2022. The winners and their nominators will be interviewed by CURE Media Group and honored at a reception to be held at the 2022 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition taking place December 10-13 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Visit the CUREwebsite for more information on the Multiple Myeloma Heroes and Health Equity Hero awards and to submit an essay nomination. This program is sponsored by the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. About CURE Media Group CURE Media Group is the leading resource for cancer updates, research and education. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, CURE has become the most widely distributed and read consumer publication in the United States for patients with cancer, survivors and their caregivers. The platform includes its industry-leading website curetoday.com; innovative video programs; a series of educational and inspirational events; and CURE magazine, which reaches more than 1 million readers. CURE Media Group is a brand of MJH Life Sciences, the largest privately held, independent, full-service medical media company in North America, dedicated to delivering trusted health care news across multiple channels. BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The nation's leading profitability consulting firm, OnCentive, announced today the ability to fund clients' COVID-19 Employee Retention Credit (ERC), helping businesses secure a much-needed infusion of cash flow without waiting on the Internal Revenue Service. Through a newly secured funding partner, OnCentive will qualify, calculate, file, and fund clients' COVID-19 Employee Retention Credits within weeks, forgoing the typical eight-to-nine-month turnaround IRS times. "We constantly strive to generate new profitability solutions for our clients and partners," said Shannon Scott, OnCentive's CEO. "This credit was passed to assist the recovery of small businesses and unfortunately, the delays in processing the payments have stifled some of that recovery. Reducing payment waiting from months to weeks for our clients will be a game changer." Originally established by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), the ERC assists businesses struggling from the pandemic with a refundable tax credit of up to $26,000 per W-2 employee for 2020 & 2021. Businesses of various sizes and industries can take advantage of this opportunity, but delays caused by various factors led to an unprecedented amount of unprocessed tax returns causing employers to experience delays of 8 months to almost a year in receiving their refunds. If your business has not claimed the ERC or has been told that you do not meet the requirements, contact OnCentive for a risk-free assessment. The Qualifications Team at OnCentive goes beyond the surface-level metrics and digs into the impact the pandemic had on your business's processes, supply chain, and inner workings to determine & calculate eligibility for ERC and other lucrative tax credits. "If you haven't already looked into the ERC for your business, now is the time," stated Scott. "Many organizations are still feeling impacts from the pandemic and have struggled to recover. Through our new funding partnership, companies can now quickly capitalize on the ERC, without having to play the IRS waiting game, and put those much-needed funds back into their business." About OnCentive Leveraging their leaderships' 100 years of combined credit expertise and their state-of-the-art custom technology, OnCentive helps businesses maximize government incentives and tax credits. OnCentive has helped their clients capture over $2 billion in government incentives & recovery programs. Contact Vanessa Tyndall press@oncentive.com Related Images Image 1: OnCentive Announces Employee Retention Credit Funding Partnership to Accelerate Clients' Payments OnCentive Clients Can Receive COVID-19 Employee Retention Credit Within Weeks Versus Months This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. Attachment ST. JOHNS, Newfoundland and Labrador, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Atlas Salt Inc. (TSXV: SALT) (OTCQB: REMRF) (the Company or Atlas Salt) is pleased to provide the following update on its proposed spinout of 226 sq. km of mineral licenses in southwest Newfoundland, outside of its flagship Great Atlantic Project, highlighted by the Fischells Brook Salt Dome. Highlights: A Special AGM will be held August 31, 2022 , to vote on the proposed Plan of Arrangement as per an information circular posted on SEDAR and mailed to Atlas Salt shareholders; , to vote on the proposed Plan of Arrangement as per an information circular posted on SEDAR and mailed to Atlas Salt shareholders; Subject to receipt of Atlas shareholder, regulatory and court approvals, the Date of Record for the distribution of 23,750,000 Triple Point Resources Ltd. (Triple Point) shares will be on or about September 21, 2022. All Atlas shareholders qualify to receive one Triple Point share for approximately four Atlas shares owned as of the Date of Record; Triple Point Resources Ltd. (Triple Point) shares will be on or about September 21, 2022. All Atlas shareholders qualify to receive one Triple Point share for approximately four Atlas shares owned as of the Date of Record; Triple Point has applied to list its common shares on the CSE following completion of the Plan of Arrangement, and Atlas Salt will continue to hold a significant ownership position in Triple Point; has applied to list its common shares on the CSE following completion of the Plan of Arrangement, and Atlas Salt will continue to hold a significant ownership position in Triple Point; A NI-43-101 compliant Technical Report on the Fischells Brook Property is discussed in the information circular and available on SEDAR. From the unconstrained three-dimensional gravity inversion model, the Fischells Brook Salt Dome, or FB-1 anomaly, measures 4.1 km x 1.3 km extending to a depth of greater than 2.4 km, providing significant volume potential. Mr. Rowland Howe, President of Atlas Salt, commented: The salt endowment of the Bay St. George Basin exceeds expectations. The spinout allows Atlas Salt to focus all of its energies on Great Atlantic, a potential disrupter in the eastern North America road salt market, while a separate team at Triple Point unlocks the full value of Fischells Brook, 15 km south of Great Atlantic, and other mineral licenses prospective for salt dome-type deposits that are also in demand for their salt cavern renewable energy storage potential. PRmediaNow Interview with Rowland Howe & Patrick Laracy So much salt: Atlas Salt President Rowland Howe and CEO Patrick Laracy discuss this news release with PRmediaNows Cyndi Edwards click on the link below to view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-3JUZuRYM4 Fischells Brook NI-43-101 Technical Report The Fischells Brook Technical Report, prepared independently by APEX Geoscience Ltd. of Edmonton, AB, had five major objectives: 1) Provide a geological introduction to the property; 2) Summarize historical work completed on the property; 3) Detail a 2021 ground gravity geophysical survey conducted on behalf of Atlas; 4) Disclose a conceptual exploration target for the Fischells Brook Salt Dome with cautionary and explanatory statements; and 5) Provide recommendations for future exploration programs. Atlas Salt in the Bay St. George Basin is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0ed9bb5a-a98c-4cef-ab44-a5110b533754 Geological Background The Fischells Brook deposit is in the heart of the Bay St. George Sub-Basin (160 km x 60 km) which formed as a pull-apart trough adjacent to, and west of, the northeast trending Long Range Fault, a major strike-slip fault and part of the Cabot Fault system. The marine sedimentary rocks of the Codroy Group, which hosts the Fischells Brook Salt Dome, include salt units of the evaporite-dominated Woodville Formation highlighted by the clean, thick sequence of the Basal Halite Member. Historical Work Six diamond drill holes, totalling 4,820 metres, are reported to have been completed at Fischells Brook by four different operators from 1968 to 1998, including Hooker (1968), Amax Exploration Ltd. (1976), Pronto Exploration Ltd. (1980), Canadian Nickel Company Ltd. (Inco) (1987) and Leeson Resources Inc. (1998). The holes were drilled vertically, with depths of between 358 and 1,099 metres, averaging 803 meters. The discovery drill hole, Hooker #1, was drilled at the centre of the negative gravity anomaly from approximately 100 metres off the Trans-Canada Highway. The Pronto and Inco drill holes were located on the northern and western flank of the anomaly. Four of the six drill holes ended in the Basal Halite Member, with end-of-hole depths ranging from 642 to 1,099 metres. The historical drilling data pertaining to Fischells Brook was collected prior to the current CIM definition standards and guidelines (2014, 2019). However, the information presented in historical assessment reports appear to meet the technical standards that were employed at the time of exploration. The Technical Report Qualified Persons conducted verification of the following historical information and data: Historical drill hole data, including drill logs, down-hole geophysical logs, assay analytical results and laboratory certificates; Historical collar locations (n=2 drill collars); Historical drill core archived at the Newfoundland Department of Mines and Energy Mineral Core Library in Pasadena, NL (n=1 drill hole); Independent Qualified Person geochemical analysis of the Basal Halite Member in the Hooker drill hole yielded between 92.6% and 97.8% NaCl with an average of 95.0% NaCl (n=4 samples); Historical salt quality test work data and laboratory certificates; Historical geophysical data. 2021 Ground Gravity Survey During October-November 2021, Atlas Salt commissioned Abitibi Geophysics of Val- dOr, Quebec, to conduct a high-resolution ground gravity survey over Fischells Brook. The objective of the geophysical program was to provide an initial geological framework of the property with emphasis on the size, geometry, depth, and structure of the Fischells Brook Salt Dome. A total of 974 gravity stations including one base station were recorded. Spacing of the gravity stations ranged from 175 to 200 metres. The 2021 geophysical gravity survey delineated the FB-1 anomaly gravity low with an estimated amplitude of -5.43 milligal (mGal). The FB-1 anomaly correlates with the known Fischells Brook Salt Dome which was originally delineated by historical drill holes. The dimensions of the anomaly were derived from an unconstrained three-dimensional gravity inversion. Conceptual Exploration Targets The conceptual total (global) in-situ Basal Halite Member exploration target within the Woodville Formation at Fischells Brook is estimated to include between 1.763 billion tonnes and 3.126 billion tonnes of salt (NaCl). The Fischells Brook Salt Dome exploration targets potential quality and grade is conceptual in nature, there has been insufficient exploration to estimate a mineral resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the estimation of a mineral resource. The exploration target expressed should not be misrepresented or misconstrued as an estimate of a mineral resource or ore reserve. The exploration target was prepared by the Technical Report Qualified Persons as follows: Used an average Basal Halite Member salt concentration of 94% salt based on 36 historical analyses; Multiplied the mean volume of the wireframed Basal Halite Member domain and the average salt concentration of the Basal Halite Member by +/- 10% to calculate the estimated range of the exploration target; Used a density of 2.20g/cm3 to convert the volume of the exploration target into a range of tonnages. The density value was defined in the 2021 gravity survey. The Basal Halite Member is one of three Woodville Formation sub-members at the Fischells Brook deposit. The composition and the overall consistency of the salt for the Upper/Middle members is not well defined. Hence, conceptual exploration target tonnages were not calculated for these stratigraphic members of the deposit though a conceptual range of volumetrics were derived as described in the Technical Report. The authors of the Technical Report also noted that the exploration target 3D geological modelling and estimation process was constrained by the limited number of historical drill holes and the limited depth of the drill holes at Fischells Brook. The gravity 3D model might also have larger dimensions, especially eastward, where modelling has identified a potential second deeply rooted salt dome of vertical cylindrical shape with a diameter of 1.5 km and an average density of 2.35 grams per cubic centimetre. This target area, known as Fischells Brook East, has never been drilled and further work is required to evaluate the potential target. Work Program Recommendation Additional exploration work is required by Triple Point. A two-phase work program totalling approximately $4,246,000 (CND) including a 10% contingency, is recommended in the Technical Report to advance the Fischells Brook Salt Dome Project. This includes completion of a 2-hole diamond drill program. The objective of the drill program would be to 1) Delineate the lateral and vertical extent of the Salt Dome, and in particular, the Basal Halite Member; 2) Introduce Quality Assurance - Quality Control protocols; 3) Define the thickness and mechanical properties of the unconsolidated, water-bearing and structurally complex waste overlying the Salt Dome including glacial till and sedimentary rock; and 4) Advance the property toward potential mineral resource estimations prepared in accordance with CIM definition standards and guidelines (2014, 2019) and the disclosure rule NI-43-101. The Technical Report has been filed under the Companys profile on www.sedar.com. Qualified Person Mr. Roy Eccles, P.Geo., of Apex Geoscience Ltd, independent of Atlas Salt and Triple Point and a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this news release. About Atlas Salt Atlas Salt owns 100% of the Great Atlantic Salt Project strategically located in western Newfoundland in the middle of the robust eastern North America road salt market. The project features a large homogeneous high-grade resource. Atlas Salt also owns the Fischells Brook salt dome and other mineral licenses in western Newfoundland, forming the proposed spin-out of Triple Point Resources Ltd. We seek Safe Harbor. For information, please contact: Patrick J. Laracy, CEO (709) 754-3186 laracy@atlassalt.com MarketSmart Communications Inc. Adrian Sydenham Toll-free: 1-877-261-4466 Email: info@marketsmart.ca Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider, (as the term is defined in the Policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This press release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, without limitation, statements relating to the future operating or financial performance of the Company, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "potential", "possible", and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions, or results "will", "may", "could", or "should" occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements in this press release relate to, among other things: completion of the proposed arrangement, receipt of required shareholder, court, stock exchange and regulatory approvals for the arrangement and the timing of the shareholder meeting. Actual future results may differ materially. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Forward-looking statements reflect the beliefs, opinions and projections on the date the statements are made and are based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the respective parties, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and the parties have made assumptions and estimates based on or related to many of these factors. Such factors include, without limitation: receipt of all required shareholder, court, stock exchange and regulatory approvals for the arrangement; fluctuations in the securities markets and applicable stock exchange approval for listing of the Triple Point common shares. Readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release concerning these times. Except as required by law, the Company does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law. gettyimagesbank By Yoon Ja-young U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is having an unexpected positive effect on Korean confectionary companies. Their stock prices rose steeply on Wednesday on reports that China banned importation of Taiwanese food items on the eve of the contentious visit. Crownhaitai Holdings, a major player in the country's confectionery industry, closed at 8,470 won on Wednesday, rising 18 percent from the previous day. Crown Confectionery closed at 11,150 won, soaring as much as the daily limit of 30 percent. Haitai Confectionery and Foods rose 14 percent to 8,000 won. Orion, whose Choco Pie products are popular in the global market, rose 2.7 percent to 102,000 won. The surge comes amid expectations among some investors that Korean confectionery products, especially those of Crownhaitai Group subsidiaries, may replace Taiwanese products in the Chinese market. In the case of Orion, exports to China already account for over 40 percent of its total sales, while they account for less than 10 percent for Crownhaitai. According to Taipei Times, China's customs agency announced bans on more than 100 Taiwanese food brands, claiming that they failed to renew export registration. However, Park Sang-jun, an analyst at Kiwoom Securities, said it isn't clear yet whether Korean confectionery will see increased sales in China. "Multinational companies can benefit if (Taiwanese) companies with high market shares are banned in China. However, it remains to be seen whether it will actually lead to an increase in sales," he commented. Investors are advised to remain cautious as Crownhaitai Group shares have previously fluctuated over various issues. Most recently, their shares surged steeply on expectations by some retail investors that the company would benefit from President Yoon Suk-yeol's presidency, for reasons such as the Crownhaitai's chairman coming from the same Papyeong Yoon clan as President Yoon, the company having a production facility in South Chungcheong Province, which is where President Yoon's father is from, and one of its external board members having gone to the same school as the president. The share prices, however, soon fell back to their previous levels. English French Spanish MONTREAL, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Saputo Inc. (TSX: SAP) (Saputo or the Company) announces that the nominees listed in the management information circular dated June 9, 2022, were elected as directors of Saputo at the annual meeting of shareholders held on August 4, 2022. Each of the following ten nominees proposed by the board of directors was elected as a director of Saputo, pursuant to a vote conducted by ballot. The outcome of the proxies received by the Company and the ballots cast was as follows: Voted For Withheld from Voting % For % Withheld Lino A. Saputo 340,212,899 9,681,648 97.23% 2.77% Louis-Philippe Carriere 348,363,535 1,525,918 99.56% 0.44% Henry E. Demone 346,753,548 3,140,999 99.10% 0.90% Olu Fajemirokun-Beck 344,266,470 5,627,983 98.39% 1.61% Anthony M. Fata 343,768,561 6,125,986 98.25% 1.75% Annalisa King 346,671,063 3,223,484 99.08% 0.92% Karen Kinsley 348,488,584 1,405,869 99.60% 0.40% Diane Nyisztor 347,404,221 2,490,326 99.29% 0.71% Franziska Ruf 347,421,396 2,473,057 99.29% 0.71% Annette Verschuren 345,278,680 4,615,867 98.68% 1.32% About Saputo Saputo produces, markets, and distributes a wide array of dairy products of the utmost quality, including cheese, fluid milk, extended shelf-life milk and cream products, cultured products, and dairy ingredients. Saputo is one of the top ten dairy processors in the world, a leading cheese manufacturer and fluid milk and cream processor in Canada, and the top dairy processor in Australia and Argentina. In the USA, Saputo ranks among the top three cheese producers and is one of the largest producers of extended shelf-life and cultured dairy products. In the United Kingdom, Saputo is the largest manufacturer of branded cheese and a top manufacturer of dairy spreads. In addition to its dairy portfolio, Saputo produces, markets, and distributes a range of dairy alternative cheeses and beverages. Saputo products are sold in several countries under market-leading brands, as well as private label brands. Saputo Inc. is a publicly traded company and its shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol SAP. Follow Saputos activities at Saputo.com or via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Investor Inquiries Nicholas Estrela Director, Investor Relations 1-514-328-3117 Media Inquiries 1-514-328-3141 / 1-866-648-5902 media@saputo.com Seoul, South Korea, Aug. 05, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As per detailed industry analysis by Fact.MR, a market research and competitive intelligence provider, expanding at a CAGR of 3.6%, the global medical equipment cooling market is projected to increase from a valuation of US$ 210 million in 2022 to US$ 278.67 million by 2030. Systems for cooling medical equipment are used to reduce the heat load produced by diagnostic tools. Medical cooling systems can help achieve the goal of delivering high-quality patient care by extending the lifespan of imaging equipment. The cooling strategy is used to reduce high-watt density heat loads on devices such as medical lasers and imaging equipment. For Critical Insights on Medical Equipment Cooling Market, Request a Sample Report https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=7565 For the refrigerant cycle cooling of large medical equipment, compressor-driven air conditioning units are widely used. Compressor, condenser, evaporator, expansion valve, and system monitoring devices for temperature and pressure transduction make up the refrigeration cycle. Market players are teaming up with medical equipment manufacturers, hospitals, and outpatient clinics to satisfy the highest reliability, efficiency, and design standards. Which Application of Medical Equipment Cooling Drives High Market Growth? Effective Working of High-Power Medical Devices Requires Efficient Medical Equipment Cooling Systems The market for medical equipment cooling is segmented into medical devices and analytical & laboratory equipment based on application. The market segment for medical devices is anticipated to develop at the fastest growth rate. This is due to the worldwide expansion of hospital networks, which is expanding rapidly. The hospital that treats patients with life-threatening illnesses needs to be outfitted with the powerful equipment required for therapy, as well as the appropriate cooling equipment. To learn more about Medical Equipment Cooling Market, you can get in touch with our Analyst at https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=AE&rep_id=7565 Key Segments Covered in the Medical Equipment Cooling Industry Survey By Type : Liquid-based Cooling Air-based Cooling By Configuration : Packaged Systems Modular Systems Split Systems By Compressor : Scroll Compressors Screw Compressors Centrifugal Compressors Reciprocating Compressors By Application : Medical Devices Analytical & Laboratory Equipment Competitive Landscape To expand their market shares, key players are using a range of strategic actions, including mergers and acquisitions, technological collaborations, partnerships, and the development and release of cutting-edge solutions. Laird Thermal Systems unveiled a new website with cutting-edge engineering tools in 2019. Engineers can specify, search for, and choose the best thermoelectric module and liquid cooling system for a variety of applications. In July 2019, liquid cooling expert Lytron was purchased by Boyd Corporation, a world authority in thermal control. This acquisition is in line with Boyd's commitment to expanding its technology portfolio with additional chiller system solutions and developing specific volumes of liquid cold plates and heat exchangers for the medical and aerospace markets to meet the growing demand for liquid-cooled solutions. Get Customization on Medical Equipment Cooling Market Report for Specific Research Solutions https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=7565 Key players in the Medical Equipment Cooling Market American Chillers Drake Refrigeration, Inc. General Air Products, Inc. Haskris Johnson Thermal Systems Laird Technologies, Inc. Cold Shot Chillers Filtrine Manufacturing Company Key Takeaways from Medical Equipment Cooling Market Study The global medical equipment cooling market is to reach a valuation of US$ 278.67 million by 2030. Demand for medical equipment cooling systems is expected to increase at a CAGR of 3.6% from 2022 to 2030. Medical equipment cooling device sales growth is aided by hospitals treating patients with terminal conditions needing to have the necessary heavy machinery and adequate cooling devices installed. The Asia Pacific & Latin America regions are the most profitable markets for medical equipment cooling system suppliers. About the Healthcare Division at Fact.MR Our healthcare consulting team guides organizations at each step of their business strategy by helping you understand how the latest influencers account for operational and strategic transformation in the healthcare sector. Our expertise in recognizing the challenges and trends impacting the global healthcare industry provides indispensable insights and support - encasing a strategic perspective that helps you identify critical issues and devise appropriate solutions. Explore Fact.MR's Coverage on the Healthcare Domain- mHealth Market- The global mHealth market is poised to be valued at US$ 57 Billion in FY2022, and is expected to flourish at a staggering 12% value CAGR throughout the 2022-2032 forecast period. By the end of the aforementioned assessment period, the market is poised to be valued at over US$ 177 Billion. Disposable Endoscopes Market- The global disposable endoscopes market is anticipated to hold a value of US$ 2.1 Bn in 2022 and reach US$ 9.26 Bn by 2032. The projected market growth is 16% during the forecast period from 2022 to 2032. The usage of disposable endoscopes reduces the spread of infectious diseases. Endoscopes Market- The global sales of endoscopes is likely to garner a market value of US$ 13 Bn and is expected to register a CAGR of 10% by accumulating a market value of US$ 34 Bn through the assessment period 2022-2032. Huntingtons disease Treatment Market- The global Huntingtons disease treatment market was estimated to have a market size worth US$ 360 Mn in 2021 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20% from 2022-2032. The market is estimated to reach US$ 2.7 Bn by the end of 2032. Amniotic Membrane Market- The global amniotic membrane market is estimated to hold a value of US$ 11.12 Bn in 2032 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 14% during the forecast period from 2022 to 2032. mHealth Apps Market- The global market for mental health apps was valued at US$ 6.2 Bn in 2022 and the market is foreseen to close in on a value of US$ 30 Bn by the end of 2032, surging at CAGR of 17% during the same period. Aesthetic Medicine Market- Newly-released aesthetic medicine industry analysis report by Fact.MR shows that global sales of aesthetic medicine market in 2021 was held at US$ 64.6 Bn. With 10.3%, the projected market growth during 2022 - 2032 is expected to be significantly higher than the historical growth. Regulatory Affairs Outsourcing Market- The global regulatory affairs outsourcing market is estimated to secure a market value of US$ 15.11 Bn by 2032. The worth of the market is anticipated to be US$ 7 Bn in 2022, and the projected growth rate is 8% during the forecast period from 2022 to 2032. Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Services Outsourcing Market- The global biotechnology and pharmaceutical services outsourcing market is anticipated to hold a market value of US$ 70 Bn in 2022 and US$ 112.31 Bn by 2032. The projected growth rate is nearly 5% during the forecast period from 2022 to 2032. About Us: Market research and consulting agency with a difference! Thats why 80% of Fortune 1,000 companies trust us for making their most critical decisions. While our experienced consultants employ the latest technologies to extract hard-to-find insights, we believe our USP is the trust clients have on our expertise. Spanning a wide range from automotive & industry 4.0 to healthcare & retail, our coverage is expansive, but we ensure even the most niche categories are analyzed. Our sales offices in United States and Dublin, Ireland. Headquarter based in Dubai, UAE. Reach out to us with your goals, and well be an able research partner. Contact: Mahendra Singh US Sales Office: 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 Email: sales@factmr.com Tel: +1 (628) 251-1583 Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter gettyimagesbank Protective policy for SMEs did not lead to enhanced competitiveness: KDI report By Yi Whan-woo The Yoon Suk-yeol administration is being urged to scrap a longstanding, over-decade-old policy aimed at holding back conglomerates from entering businesses designated exclusively for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), by a state-run think tank in a recent report. Introduced in 2011, the policy was intended to protect SMEs from larger businesses and help them enhance their competiveness. Conglomerates are barred from entering the aforementioned sectors for up to six years after they are designated. The sectors have varied from kimchi making to tofu processing, designated driver services and ready-mixed concrete manufacturing. Released by the Korea Development Institute (KDI), the report said that the policy turned out to have less of an effect on bolstering the competitiveness of the targeted SMEs. The overall value of the SME-only markets grew 46 percent to 57.5 trillion won ($43.8 billion) between 2008 and 2018, compared to the 52-percent growth of markets where conglomerates were allowed to operate. During the cited period, the overall employment rate in the SME-only markets shrank to 10.9 percent from 12.5 percent. The report went on to say that some SME-only markets grew after they were delisted and the much larger conglomerates stepped in. "The policy may have protected the SMEs to go on with their business, but it had limitations in terms of enhancing the achievements or competitiveness of the SMEs," the report analyzed. "It is possible that they saw no need to develop their competence under the protective policy." It suggested lifting the entry ban on conglomerates gradually, saying that such move would be in line with the joint prosperity of the businesses regardless of their size in the long term. The report called on the government to support SMEs to develop technologies and enhance patent rights to protect such technologies as well as other intellectual property rights. "A policy should be directed in a way to as to have any companies contribute to growth in employment and industries, not the other way around," it said. President Yoon has said that he intends to "set the market economy upright" as an economic recovery strategy by easing business regulations. For SMEs, the Yoon government has promised to help them "utilize the Fourth Industrial Revolution as an opportunity for new growth." It also promised to expand SME-focused investment in research and development (R&D) and provide more tax incentives for R&D spending. While the Yoon administration's policy direction is to serve both conglomerates and SMEs fairly, some argue the measures taken so far such as lowering the maximum corporate income tax rate. Truth or Consequences, NM (87901) Today Cloudy in the morning with scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High around 80F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.. Tonight Widely scattered showers and thunderstorms early. Clouds lingering later. Low 66F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%. Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. North Korea's permanent mission to the United Nations has issued a rare press statement in response to U.S. condemnation of its nuclear program during a U.N. session, according to state media Thursday. It slammed Washington over its "anti-DPRK confrontational clamor" during the 10th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the U.N. headquarters in New York. DPRK is the acronym for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "Today, the mastermind that undermines the foundation of the non-proliferation regime is none other than the United States," read the English-language statement issued Wednesday and carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. "It is the peak of busy blaming that the United States alleges somebody's 'nuclear threats' given the fact that it is the kingpin of nuclear proliferation." "We will never tolerate any attempt by the U.S. and its servile forces to groundlessly accuse our state and encroach upon our sovereign rights and national interests," it added. Addressing the NPT conference on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Pyongyang continues to expand its "unlawful nuclear program" and continues its "ongoing provocations against the region." (Yonhap) U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, left, is welcomed by U.S. Ambassador to Korea Philip Goldberg, center, and Gen. Paul LaCamera, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, after arriving at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, Wednesday, to meet with Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo amid heightened regional tensions in the wake of her high-profile visit to Taiwan. Captured from the Twitter account of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol plans to speak by phone with visiting U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi later Thursday, his office said, after officials said earlier that a meeting between the two is not planned as Yoon is on summer vacation. Pelosi arrived in Seoul on Wednesday night amid heightened tensions between the United States and China in the wake of her visit to Taiwan. China denounced Pelosi's trip and announced live-fire military drills around Taiwan in protest. Electric vehicle manufacturers are searching for a significant increase in energy density, an improvement of fast-charging capabilities, and a reduced cost for lithium-ion batteries. A graphene nanotube dispersion, developed by OCSiAl, allows for a substantial increase in key battery parameters and is now experiencing growing interest from Chinese battery manufacturers. Introducing OCSiAls graphene nanotubes into anode and cathode formulations makes it possible to reach 300 Wh/kg energy density and even go beyond this. In the anode, nanotubes unlock industrial-scale use of silicon, which has more than nine times the energy density of traditionally used graphite. Nanotubes create long, flexible, conductive, strong bridges to keep silicon anode particles well connected to each other even during severe volume expansion and cracking, which previously limited market use of silicon anodes. This leads to long-lasting, fast-charging batteries for electric vehicles. Electrode sample with 0.06% of SWCNTs shows good coverage of the particles surface. To meet the markets needs, the licensed manufacturers of OCSiAls graphene nanotube dispersion in China are ramping up production capacities. Shenyang East Chemical Science-Tech (East Chem) and Shanghai Haiyi Scientific Trading (Haiyi) both plan to increase output of the nanotube dispersion in the next two years. According to the manufacturers, the combined capacity of their facilities will reach 40,000 tonnes in 20232024. East Chem and Haiyi, which are among the leading chemical manufacturers in China, launched local productions of OCSiAls graphene nanotube dispersion for batteries in 2019 to develop a sustainable and reliable supply chain of nanotube solutions for batteries to the Chinese market, which dominates globally in lithium-ion technology. Green River Police Department reports for July 21 At 11:48 a.m., officers responded to a report of a two-vehicle collision. It was reported one vehicle was traveling West on East Flaming Gorge Way, and a second vehicle was parked facing east on the east side of the roadway. The first vehicle crossed the center line then collided with the second vehicle, then the vehicle overturned and came to rest on the hood of the vehicle. GRFD and EMS personnel assisted in getting the driver of the first vehicle out of the vehicle and the driver was transported by ambulance. Officers notified the owner of the second vehicle, gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 8:40 p.m., officers responded to a report of threats or harassment. Officers met with an individual who reported being harassed by an individual. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the the incident. The GRPD did not release the address officers responded to. July 22 At 11:16 a.m., officers responded to a report of a two-vehicle collision. It was reported two vehicles were stopped at the stop sign in the westbound lane on East 4th South Street when the second vehicle began to pull forward and the front of the vehicle collided with the rear of the first vehicle. Officers met with the drivers, gathered information, issued the driver of the second vehicle, Kaila Spain, of Green River, a citation for alleged inattentive driving, then completed a report of the incident. At 2:07 p.m., officers responded to a report of malicious mischief on Mountain Fuel Station Road. Officers met with an individual who reported finding broken eggs on the back door of the residence. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. July 23 At 12:29 a.m., officers responded to a report of a suspicious incident on Wilkes Drive. Officers met with individuals who reported an unknown person banged on their door several times and attempted to turn the door knob. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 12:55 a.m., officers conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle at the intersection of River View Drive and Wilkes Drive for a lane use violation and no tail lights. Officers met with the driver and detected the odor of an alcoholic-based beverage emitting from inside the vehicle. Officers ascertained the individuals drivers license status was suspended out of Wyoming and they also had an active warrant out of Green River Municipal Court. Officers placed Trea Johnson, of Green River, under arrest and issued citations for alleged DWUI, DWUS, improper lane use, and tail lights required violation. Officers transported Johnson to the Sweetwater County Detention Center and completed a report of the incident. At 7 a.m., officers responded to a report of a hit and run collision at FMC Park. Officers met with an individual who reported property damage at the archery barn. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 5:33 p.m., officers responded to a report of lost property at the Hampton Inn and Suites. Officers met with an individual who reported missing or stolen rings. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 8:43 p.m., officers responded to a report of a two-vehicle collision at the Loaf N Jug on Bridger Drive. It was reported that a vehicle was traveling northbound on East Teton Boulevard approaching the intersection with Bridger Drive. Another vehicle was traveling east on Bridger Drive approaching the intersection with East Teton. The first vehicle did not come to a complete stop at the stop sign and rolled through the stop sign into the intersection. The front passenger side corner of the first vehicle struck the front driver side corner of the second vehicle. Officers gathered information, issued the driver of the first vehicle, Li Lin, of Green River, a citation for alleged inattentive driving, then completed a report of the incident. July 24 At 7:03 p.m., officers responded to a report of domestic violence. Officers met with the individuals involved in an altercation. Officers gathered information, the parties separated, and officers completed a report of the incident. The GRPD did not release the address officers responded to. At 7:20 p.m., officers responded to a report of a larceny on Schultz Street. Officers met with an individual who reported multiple tools being stolen from inside the residence. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. July 25 At 1:51 p.m., officers responded to a report of property damage on Monroe Avenue. Officers met with an individual who reported their window being broken as they were traveling on Monroe Avenue. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 3:03 p.m., officers responded to a report of a scam reported at the GRPD office. Officers met with an individual who reported their mailing address had been changed without their permission. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 3:41 p.m., officers responded to an agency assist on Arizona Street. Officers assisted GRFD for reports of a house filled with smoke. It was reported an individual was using the self-cleaning on their oven when the house filled with smoke. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 6:49 p.m., officers responded to a report of malicious mischief on Reynolds Street. Officers met with an individual who reported finding a punctured tire on their vehicle. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. At 9:18 p.m., officers responded to a report of a larceny on South 5th West Street. Officers met with an individual who reported items missing from their property. Officers gathered information and completed a report of the incident. July 26 At 1:27 a.m., officers responded to a report of a disturbance at the Hampton Inn and Suites. Officers met with staff who reported that an individual had caused a disturbance and wished for officers to speak to the individual. Officers met with the individual, gathered information, and completed a report of the incident. At 7:26 p.m., officers responded to a report of juveniles shooting nerf guns at individuals from a vehicle at Logan Park. Officers attempted to locate the vehicle and gathered information. July 27 At 9:02 a.m., officers responded to a report of a citizen assist on Logan Street. Officers met with an individual in regards to concerns for a family member. Officers met with the individual, gathered information, and completed a report of the incident. At 11:15 a.m., officers responded to a report of a disturbance. Officers met with the individuals involved in a verbal dispute, the parties separated, officers gathered information, and completed a report of the incident. The GRPD did not release the address officers responded to. After vendors collected $169,123 in excess sales tax revenue, communities and hospitals in Sweetwater County received a small bonus from the 1% special purpose tax that was in effect from 2013 to 2018. The 1% SPT was approved by voters in 2012 and included $60.5 million in projects for county and municipal projects. Another $21.3 million was approved for projects at Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County and Castle Rock Hospital District. After funding for those projects was fulfilled in 2018, the treasurers office of Sweetwater County has continued to receive some excess tax revenue from vendors. In July, Treasurer Joe Barbuto distributed $30,556 of the revenue to the city of Green River. Rock Springs received $57,164 while $16,478 was sent to the towns of Granger, Superior and Wamsutter. Because Sweetwater Memorial and Castle Rock werent original sponsors of the 2012 ballot initiatives, their disbursements needed approval from the Sweetwater County Commissioners, Barbuto said. Commissioners voted Tuesday to send $40,014 to Sweetwater Memorial and $5,219 to Castle Rock. The language of the 2012 resolution requires the entities to use excess tax funds on construction, operation, equipment and maintenance of the original projects funded by the 1% tax. Its not as though were collecting extra money and using it for something random or putting it into a general fund, Commissioner Lauren Schoenfeld said. It does have to go directly back into the maintenance of those specific projects that were approved by voters. Of the $169,123 in excess tax revenue collected, Barbuto withheld $10,000 from disbursement in case there are any refund requests submitted through the Wyoming Department of Revenue. The alternative to keeping ($10,000) is disbursing it along with the rest, but if there are refund requests from the Department of Revenue, which is not unheard of and has been large numbers at times, we would have to go back to these municipalities and ask them to give some of that money back, so I think this is the better course of action, Barbuto said. Other commission business At their Tuesday meeting, county commissioners also agreed to allow the countys fire warden, Jim Zimmerman, to enact fire restrictions for Sweetwater County as soon as the Bureau of Land Management enacts similar restrictions for the land it governs. Once fire restrictions are enacted this summer, commissioners will ratify them at their next meeting. That plan follows the practice Sweetwater County has used in previous years, Commissioner Doc Wendling said. Zimmerman has weekly meetings with his BLM counterparts to discuss the status of fire danger in the county, Commissioner Rob Lloyd said. The county board also gave approval for Barbuto to invest funds in the Wyoming Cooperative Liquid Securities System, an investment pool for political subdivisions that invests participants funds in short-term fixed income instruments. I dont have any immediate plans to invest but Ill talk to them about what they have to offer and if its right for Sweetwater County, Barbuto said. The cities of Green River and Rock Springs already participate in the investment pool, which Barbuto described as stable and safe. At their next meeting, commissioners plan to discuss the possibility of creating a CEO position for Sweetwater County. I have had multiple calls this week from the public about a rumor that we are going to be putting in a potential CEO after the election and kind of sneak it in, Lloyd said. I dont think any of us have that intention. Its looking at options as a county to provide the most efficient services and those detailed conversations will be happening in public in an open manner. Commissioner Mary Thoman wanted to add that discussion to Tuesdays agenda, but her motion died on a 3-2. I think if were going to have that discussion, it should be on the agenda and well advertised so that the public can tune in if they want to . . . rather than be blindsided by an additional agenda item, Wendling said. South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin, 5th from left, and representatives from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) pose for a photo during their meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Aug. 4. Yonhap South Korea will strengthen "strategic dialogue" with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on regional challenges, Seoul's top diplomat said Thursday during a group meeting in Phnom Penh with his counterparts from the members of the key regional bloc. "Our partnerships (with ASEAN) will focus on strengthening strategic relations in the economic field and beyond," Park Jin, the first foreign minister of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, stressed during the ASEAN-South Korea Ministerial Meeting. The annual session has been held every year since 1997. Park was briefing the ASEAN members on the Yoon government's regional policy less than three months after it replaced the Moon Jae-in administration that campaigned for the New Southern Policy intended to bolster Seoul's strategic ties with the ASEAN and India. Myanmar is ruled by a military regime and was absent from this year's event. The minister pointed out Seoul's stated plan to play a more proactive role in promoting freedom, peace and prosperity worldwide as a "global pivotal nation." "In that regard, the ASEAN, which is a core part of the Indo-Pacific region, will naturally become the center of South Korea's new initiative," he said. For the ASEAN, he added, South Korea is a "trustworthy and reliable partner." Park also explained the conservative Yoon administration's approach towards North Korea and requested ASEAN members' support for efforts to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula and resolve the nuclear problem. Later in the day, he joined an enlarged ASEAN Plus Three meeting, also involving the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa. It marked the first in-person trilateral foreign ministerial talks in three years as the ASEAN-hosted meetings were held virtually in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their gathering came at a time of heightened tension between Washington and Beijing following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier this week. In his opening remarks, Wang did not mention the sensitive issue. South Korea and Japan have agreed to strengthen security cooperation with the U.S. to counter North Korean military threats, and Washington has asked the East Asian nations to join the so-called Chip 4 alliance with Taiwan in the semiconductor industry. (Yonhap) Howard Daniel "Danny" McCoy, Jr. passed away July 30, 2022 at his home in Rock Springs. He was born on October 11, 1952 in Ardmore, Oklahoma to Howard D. McCoy Sr. and Fontella (Sally) Bean. Danny was the oldest of four children. The family moved to Colorado in 1958, settling in Buena Vista where he lived until he enlisted in the Army in 1971. After being discharged he moved back to Colorado where he met and married Sally Baltzell and they had their first two children. They moved to Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1981 where Danny started his 28 year career at Bridger Coal and their son was born. He later divorced and met his current wife, Nancy, in 1996 and they made it official in 2006. Danny had always said he grew up in paradise (Buena Vista, CO.) but he loved all that WY had to offer such as fishing, hunting, and all the wide open spaces. He was also able to pursue his all-time favorite hobby of buying high and selling low. He always had projects going on fixing up old cars, trucks, and one rat rod. Danny was always available to help you fix your vehicles and actually worked on a ford, once. He loved tinkering in his garage and bs-ing with his friends. Danny worked hard and played harder. He was a great dad, the best brother, and a caring husband. You knew when he was around because he had such a distinctive voice and infectious laugh. Danny retired from Bridger Coal in 2009 and started spending winters in Arizona when the Wyoming cold got too much. He absolutely loved his time with his grandkids. Survivors include his wife Nancy; children Erin Larson and husband Damon of Mack, CO, Ryan McCoy; brother Benny and wife Mary of Casa Grande; sisters Jane Smith and husband Bill of Alburquerque, NM, Cindy Stange and husband John of Casa Grande; grandchildren Addison Larson, Easton Larson, Mallory McCoy, and Paxton, McCoy; as well as several nieces, nephews, and two uncles. He is preceded in death by his parents Howard and Fontella McCoy, and several aunts and uncles. A Celebration of life with military honors will be held at 11:00 am, Saturday, August 6, 2022 at the Young at Heart Senior Center, 2400 Reagan Ave, Rock Springs, WY. Inurnment will take place in the Veterans Memorial Cemetery of Western Colorado at a later date. The family respectfully requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made in Dannys name to the Red Dessert Humane Society or Young at Heart Senior Center. Condolences can be left at http://www.foxfh.com. VERNON The day after she accused Connecticut State Police Trooper Jaime Solis of hitting her so hard in the face, she needed 13 stitches to close the wound, the victim again talked to police, saying he attacked her about 40 times in the past year, according to the warrant for his latest arrest. Five and a half hours after Solis appeared in court on a felony assault charge Tuesday, the woman walked into the Vernon Police Department and described to investigators what she said was a history of abuse by the state trooper, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. Solis, 29, has slapped her, punched her in the stomach and hit her with a belt, she told police, according to the warrant. She told police that during one of the attacks, she was pregnant, the warrant stated. Solis also threatened to hurt her and even threatened to kill their dog, the woman told police, according to the affidavit. And thats not a threat, he wrote in a text about the dog on June 16, the warrant said. That is. Promise. No thats not even close to what Im capable of. The woman presented the text messages and other evidence of what Solis allegedly did and said to her, including an audio recording of a violent clash and pictures of her injuries, the warrant said. Solis was arrested again Wednesday on additional charges stemming from the new allegations. Solis, a Vernon resident, remains on desk duty with his police powers suspended, until the outcome of criminal and internal investigations. The woman told police she wanted to leave Solis, but she was scared her child would be taken away from her, the warrant stated. She also said she was scared of Solis retaliating if she left him, the warrant said. According to the warrant, one assault happened around Christmastime 2020. The woman said she tried to stick up for herself, which upset Solis, who began to verbally attack her, she told police, according to the warrant. He then got physical, the warrant said, pushing her backwards so she fell into a washing machine and dropped to the floor. When she tried to stand back up, Solis backhanded her in the face so hard, the strike split open my head, leaving an open wound, which was bleeding a lot, she told police, according to the warrant. Solis bought butterfly bandages to close the wound, which left a scar, the warrant said. I was approximately three months pregnant at this time, she told police, according to the warrant. On May 16 of this year, Solis hit her with a belt at least 10 times, the warrant said. The woman gave police several photographs that showed numerous bruises on her arm, lower back, hip, buttocks, outer thigh, hamstring and calf areas, the warrant said. The woman also gave police screen shots of text messages that included the June 16 threat on the dogs life, according to the warrant. I promise you something is happening to the dog, he said, according to the warrant. On June 24, the two were arguing about money, the woman told police. She recorded a video of the dispute on her cellphone, which she kept in her back pocket. Jaime refused to give me money and became very angry. ... In the video, you can hear me scream, which is directly after Jaime shoved me backwards, the woman told police, according to the warrant. Jaime then slapped me in the face and began punching me in the stomach. Jaime continued to shove me, slap me in the face and punch me in the stomach numerous times. The woman also said a child was crawling on the floor at the time, and after Jaime shoved me the first time, I stumbled backwards and accidentally stepped on (the childs) fingers, the warrant said. Police listened to the recording, and it was consistent with her account, including sounds of a woman screaming, impact noises and the sound of a child crying, according to the warrant. The most recent assault occurred Monday, the woman told police, and it led to Solis first arrest this week. Solis is accused of hitting the woman with his hand while she was holding the baby. The child was not physically hurt. Solis was charged with second-degree assault, disorderly conduct and risk of injury to a child, police said. On Wednesday, based on the womans statements and evidence, he was charged with two counts each of threatening, disorderly conduct and third-degree assault. He also was charged with an additional count of risk of injury to a child, police said. Solis posted bail both times he was arrested, first $25,000 and then $50,000. In Superior Court in Rockville Thursday, Solis was handed another protective order, forbidding him from having contact with the victim and was referred to a family relations program. He received the same no-contact order and referral on Tuesday as well. Judge Kathleen McNamara told him to return to court Sept. 13. He declined to comment about the charges both before and after the brief court proceeding, saying, Leave me alone, outside the courthouse. Solis didnt have a lawyer with him but was with a supporter who appeared to be a family member. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate PHOENIX (AP) Officials in an Arizona county are vowing to overhaul their election procedures after a shortage of some ballots at about two dozen voting sites during Tuesday's primary election led to some voters leaving without being able to cast their ballots. Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer and Jeffrey McClure, chair of the Board of Supervisors, both blamed the problems on human error. McClure called it a major screw-up. I have not seen evidence of a nefarious act, McClure said at a Wednesday news conference. I've seen mistakes made on a grand scale. The problems were the second in the primary. When mail ballots were sent out early in July, many were missing city races and the county a growing suburban area south of metro-Phoenix and home to over 425,000 residents was forced to send supplemental ballots to those voters. On Tuesday, that earlier issue played a role during in-person voting at some of the county's 95 polling sites. Each site may have had as many as 10 ballot styles. A surge of people going to the polls led to some sites either running short or out of ballots. The county tried to print new ballots but old printers were limited and it took a long time in some cases to get new ballots to the affected polling sites. At most, about 750 voters could have been affected, out of about 50,000 total mail and in-person votes tallied from Tuesday's election, but that is "purely a guess," Volkmer said. The actual number of people impacted, we have no ability to really assess, Volkmer saiud. Quite frankly, we underestimated, he said of the ballot shortage. There were more people who showed up than we thought were going to show up. Some of those people were voters who had an early ballot, but because of the problems with missing races and the supplemental ballots, decided to spoil that ballot at the polls and request a new one. We know that that was happening, he said. "That's not something that happens very often its not what we expect." Adding to the crush was a 10% population increase since the 2020 election and more independents asking for partisan Republican ballots on Election Day. "We just, we didn't order enough ballots," Volkmer said. We're all human, but for the grace of God there go I, he added. There is nothing sinister, and the problems affected voters of both parties. This was widespread, it was equal opportunity, it was simply a mistake, Volkmer said. There were also problems with a voting site in the city of Maricopa. That site did not open as scheduled at 7 a.m. Tuesday, and voting rights advocates tried and failed to get a judge to extend the hours to make up for that lost time for about 2,000 affected voters. The Arizona Democracy Resource Center called the countys actions anti-democratic, alarming, and unacceptable. Volkmer said keys to the voting site were not available after the person set to open was unable to do so. The state and national Republican Party also slammed the county, whose government is dominated by Republicans. They said in a joint statement that their poll observers reported "multiple failures" with mail ballots and precincts running out of ballots. This is a comprehensive failure that disenfranchises Arizonans and exemplifies why Republican-led efforts for transparency at the ballot box are so important, the statement said. Republican Rep. John Fillmore, who was trailing in his reelection bid, demanded action, saying the average voter doesn't have faith. Why the hell was the county not prepared for people showing up at the polls, Fillmore asked at the news conference. There has to be a change in the administration, in the people running the elections. The Republican Party called for county Elections Director David Frisk, who was just hired in March after an exodus of county election officials following the 2020 election, to immediately resign. Frisk was processing the approximately 8,000 remaining ballots and did not attend the news conference, which was streamed on the county website. No voter was turned away at the polls, and some locations remained open for more than an hour after the normal 7 p.m. close time to allow those in line to cast ballots. But "there were those people who felt they were disenfranchised, Volkmer said, There were people who said, I didnt get to vote because I had to go somewhere else.' Brad Horrigan / Hearst Connecticut Media GREENWICH The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has identified the man who was killed by a train on Wednesday. MTA officials said Scott James Harrington, 59, of Riverside, was struck near the Cos Cob station by a New York-bound train around 3:35 p.m. Wednesday. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON (AP) Now that WNBA star Brittney Griner has been convicted of drug possession and sentenced to nine years in prison, attention turns to the prospect of a prisoner swap between the United States and Russia that could get her home. Secretary of State Antony Blinken went public with that possibility last week, revealing in an unusual announcement that the U.S. had made a substantial proposal aimed at securing the release of Griner and another jailed American, Paul Whelan. With her court case concluded and her sentence pronounced, such a deal assuming one can be reached with the Russians is Griner's best chance of being freed early. Though the guilty verdict was seen as a foregone conclusion, the imposition of a sentence her lawyers decried as far longer than average could give the U.S. extra impetus to strike a deal palatable to Russia as soon as possible. And the formal end of the court case could be the opening both sides need to forge a diplomatic resolution, too. A look at what's at stake: WHAT DID THE U.S. OFFER? Blinken did not specify the terms other than to describe the offer as substantial and something that he intended to discuss with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. A person familiar with the situation said that the U.S. offered to release Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms dealer serving a 25-year prison sentence on charges that he conspired to sell tens of millions of dollars in weapons to Colombias former FARC guerrilla army. At the time of his conviction, the group was classified by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization, though that designation was lifted last year. The officials did wind up speaking by phone last Friday, the highest-level known contact between the two sides since Russia invaded Ukraine. They are also in Cambodia for meetings involving foreign ministers of Southeast Asian countries. WHAT HAS BEEN THE RUSSIAN RESPONSE? Minimal, at least in public. Blinken did not provide details after his call with Lavrov about his response. The Russians gave no hint about their interest in the offer, other than a statement chiding the U.S. to pursue the Americans freedom through quiet diplomacy, without releases of speculative information. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Russian government had responded in a bad faith manner with an offer that U.S. officials did not regard as serious. She did not elaborate, though CNN reported last week that Moscow also wanted the release of a former colonel from one of its spy agencies who was convicted of murder in Germany last year. WOULD THERE BE A PRECEDENT FOR A PRISONER SWAP? In many ways, yes and a recent one too. In April, Russia traded Marine veteran Trevor Reed, convicted of a physical altercation with police in Moscow, for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot imprisoned for a cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Yet that involved a Russian with far less notoriety than Bout, a former Soviet air force officer who once inspired a Hollywood movie and who earned the nickname the Merchant of Death over allegations that he supplied weapons used for civil wars in countries around the globe. He has adamantly maintained his innocence. But there's not much recent precedent for public discussions of prisoner swaps, at least by the U.S. government, before the deal is done and planes are in the air. That's what made Blinken's announcement from the State Department briefing room all the more striking. On one hand, it seemed intended to communicate to the public that the administration will do whatever it needs to do to bring home wrongfully detained Americans. But such a public overture also risks weakening the administration's negotiating hand to the extent it makes the U.S. look overly desperate for a deal, or signals to other countries that it is willing to meet potentially unreasonable demands. SO WILL THE DEAL TAKE PLACE? It's hard to say, but the contact between Blinken and Lavrov does suggest more progress than has been made before. It also reinforces the idea that the two countries are willing to maintain communication despite extraordinary tensions related to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. Griner is the most prominent American detained by a foreign country. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist detained since February when police said they found vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage at an airport in Moscow. And though some Republicans including former President Donald Trump have expressed opposition to a deal, the conviction and sentence will only ramp up pressure on the administration to reach an agreement that can get her out soon. Todays sentencing of Brittney Griner was severe by Russian legal standards and goes to prove what we have known all along, that Brittney is being used as a political pawn, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, Griner's agent, tweeted Thursday. She said getting a deal done for Griner and Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive imprisoned on an espionage conviction he and his family says is baseless, may be difficult but it is urgent and the right thing to do. The U.S. government also regards Whelan as wrongfully convicted. For their part, Russian authorities have suggested that they regard a conviction as basically a prerequisite for a prisoner swap. On Thursday, President Joe Biden again urged Russia to release Griner immediately. My administration will continue to work tirelessly and pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittney and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible, he said in a statement. ___ Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP NEW ORLEANS (AP) The attorney who represented Mystikal on rape and kidnapping charges that were dropped in late 2020 said Thursday that he is once more representing the 51-year-old rapper and is confident that he will again be cleared. I think theres zero chance this goes to trial, Joel Pearce said as he drove back to Shreveport from the Ascension Parish jail in Gonzales, where he met with Michael Tyler. Tyler, who served six years in prison after pleading guilty in 2003 to sexual battery, was arrested Sunday on charges accusing him of raping and choking a woman at his home Saturday. Pearce represented him in December 2020, when prosecutors in northwest Louisiana's Caddo Parish dropped rape and kidnapping charges that had kept him jailed for 18 months On Tuesday, Tyler was denied bond at what is called a 72-hour hearing. State District Judge Steven Tureau said evidence against the rapper, his past history and the victims fears met the standard for holding him without bail There was no evidence given on my clients part, Pearce said. He said he will request a full bond hearing at which evidence can be presented. Defense attorney Roy Maughan Jr., who had asked for $250,000 bond, told The Advocate after Tuesday's hearing that Tyler probably wouldn't appeal the bond ruling. Maughan is no longer on the case, Pearce said. He said he is working with Timothy Yazbeck of New Orleans, who worked with him on the Caddo Parish case. He said he will also ask for what's called a preliminary examination. Tyler hasn't been indicted, so we get to test the states case. Its a little mini-trial, Pearce said. Mystikal, who grew up in New Orleans and now lives in Prairieville, is accused of attacking the woman, taking her keys and holding her against her will, according to an arrest warrant. He never threatened her, never choked her, Pearce said. Sheriffs Detective Garrett Keith testified that the woman went to Tylers home Saturday night to talk about alleged financial commitments he had made to her. According to the detective, Tylers behavior reportedly changed abruptly after he went into the bathroom and returned: He accused her of stealing cash, choked her and pulled out her hair. Keith also said she had many cuts and bruises. I want to see the actual medical report, Pearce said. He said he also will be looking for a protective order that Tyler told him he was granted against the woman about eight years ago. A few days ago Valve announced that it has cleared up a major hurdle in the production of Steam Decks and that it will be able to fulfill demand faster than expected. Today the company announced that it is launching its handheld console in new regions. Soon fans in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong will be able to pick up a Steam Deck. This launch is in partnership with Komodo, Valves authorized reseller for those regions. The site for Japan is already up you can check it out here. The base 64GB eMMC model starts at JPY 59,800, the 256GB NVMe SSD model is JPY 79,800 and the top 512GB model is JPY 99,800. Here are the starting prices for the other regions: KRW 589,000 for South Korea, NT$ 13,380 for Taiwan and HK$ 3,288 for Hong Kong. Valve notes that the reservation queues in the new regions are separate from those from the current regions, so this launch does not mean the delivery of your Steam Deck will be delayed. Valve is pretty bold to try to push into Japan, home of Nintendo and Sony, two big names in handheld consoles. Well, mostly Nintendo these days. Still, home console gaming is much more popular in the country than PC gaming, which is what the Steam Deck offers. That is why the company will set up a large booth at the Tokyo Game Show to introduce the Steam Deck to the attending gamers. Source | Via National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo, right, and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attend a joint press announcement after their meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul, Thursday. Newsis Kim, Pelosi agree to foster cooperation in defense, technology By Jung Min-ho The parliamentary leaders of South Korea and the United States vowed to expand the bilateral alliance further in defense and technology, Thursday, the day Beijing launched unprecedented live-fire military drills near Taiwan in a warning to Washington. National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met for talks in Seoul, where they agreed to improve the bilateral relationship to the "comprehensive" level through cooperation in security and the economy, including high-tech fields like semiconductors, to handle challenges facing both countries more effectively. The meeting comes just a day after Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, where she pledged Washington's "ironclad" commitment to defending democracy on the self-governing island at her meeting with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen. Beijing, which claims the island as its territory, reacted furiously with military drills that would effectively blockade it. Her visit was also denounced by China's allies, including Russia and North Korea. In a joint statement, Kim and Pelosi reaffirmed their joint efforts for dealing with the North's evolving nuclear and missile threats. "Both sides expressed concerns about the dire situation of North Korea's growing threat," it says. "We support the efforts of the two governments to achieve practical denuclearization and peace through international cooperation and diplomatic dialogues, based on the strong and extended deterrence against the North." North Korea is believed to have completed preparation of its seventh nuclear weapons test. But some experts say the regime may delay it for at least a few months until the end of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the country's most important political event in years. The next year marks the 70th anniversary of the Seoul-Washington alliance. Kim and Pelosi said they would work to adopt a resolution to celebrate the occasion in each of their legislatures. Calling security, economy and governance the "three pillars" of the delegation's visit, Pelosi said the alliance has matured into "a warm friendship" after it was born out of urgency and security crisis on the Korean Peninsula. She added that the Wall of Remembrance, which was unveiled to the public in Washington July 27 to mark the 69th anniversary of the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, stands as a symbol of the two countries' alliance. Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan Island in Fujian province, one of mainland China's closest points from Taiwan, Thursday, ahead of major military drills off Taiwan following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the self-ruled island. AFP-Yonhap Moving to Guam from the Philippines in eighth grade, Eunice De Belen didnt know much about U.S. universities. Now, the class valedictorian of John F. Kennedy High School is a rising freshman at Stanford University. What comes with being thrown into such an unfamiliar situation is you tend to undermine and doubt yourself a lot, which could be why I was so shocked about my acceptance at Stanford, the 18-year-old said. The Harmon resident first heard about Stanford from High School Musical, when the female lead, Gabriella Montez, was admitted to the university. After researching more about the institution, De Belen decided to apply to Stanford because of its reputable quality education, and the opportunity to be part of a tight-knit community. Reading its students anecdotes, it felt like a welcoming place with a good sense of community, she said. I thought that this was important as Id be living far away from family for the first time. The ability to explore the different interests I have genuinely appealed to me too, said the daughter of Elvie De Belen and Francisco De Belen Jr. The privilege of having the opportunity to study in such an amazing environment is definitely worth the try. Questbridge Unlike many college applicants, who apply through the Common App, Eunice De Belen applied through the Questbridge program a nonprofit organization based in Palo Alto, California, that bridges talented low-income students to Americas prestigious colleges. I was shaking while logging in to my QuestBridge account, even inputting the wrong password out of excitement and fear, she said. I was just curious since I had no idea if I even stood a chance. Thats the unique thing about the QuestBridge Match process the element of surprise, the suspense of not knowing the school youll be matched with and whether youll even get into any. Seeing Stanford University on my match decision, I couldnt believe what I saw was real, Eunice De Belen said. Whether it was some sick joke, like my eyes just magically started to see different things, the first thing I did was wake my sister up to bear the news. My mom woke up and cried when my sister told her about the acceptance and, along with that, my dad woke up because of the crying and repeated utterances of I cant believe it from all of us, she added. Everything felt surreal; the idea of getting into Stanford felt impossible to me. Preparing During her years at John F. Kennedy High, Eunice De Belen mainly focused on writing for The Guam Daily Posts The Scoop as her extracurricular activity in high school. Back when I was younger, I have always been immersed and interested in writing and knowing more about current events, she said. I became aware of the things happening around me at an early age, which prompted my interest in writing and doing the best I could to possibly be of help to other people. Eunice De Belen also participated in organizations that had a community service component, such as the National Honor Society, Close Up and the Environmental Club. She and other Guam teens were able to attend an educational trip with Close Up, a federal organization that unites students across the country in civic education programs. It was a trip Eunice De Belen said was very informative for her. That helped me be more independent and learn to navigate a foreign place, Eunice De Belen said. In a sense, it also helped me get out of my comfort zone, hence why I feel a little less anxious about going to Stanford. Service She plans to continue writing and being involved in community service once she arrives on campus. By engaging with other people through community service, a lot of things can be learned, she said. The idea of helping someone motivates me to continue the things I do. With writing, it has become a creative and emotional outlet for me, hence why I want to keep doing it in college, she added. As of now, Eunice De Belen plans to major in biology as she wishes to pursue a medical career. It has become an interest of mine as Ive always been curious about the intricacies of the field and making a difference not just in the patients lives but also in their families; the large-scale positive impact is what motivates me, she said. She also wants to explore engineering and humanities-related courses in her first year. Perspective Eunice De Belen is also thrilled to teach her future Stanford community about the beauty of Guam and its people. Knowing about local issues in relation to national ones offers this perspective to the college community, she said. I also wish to connect with the Pacific islanders on campus, as it would be nice to meet people from your home and bond over the similarities we share. Despite her excitement, Eunice De Belen worries about feeling small amidst the 8,180-acre campus. As someone from a low-income family, getting into a prestigious university comes with thinking about not fitting in or finding your place in this huge community because of how different your peers are from you, she said. But I think thats what makes it interesting; you can connect and create relationships with people of different backgrounds who have their own stories with them, she added. I know that the feeling of not being smart enough, the constant doubting and the overwhelming feeling will always be there, so I just need to learn to manage it better. Eunice De Belen plans to break the mold of being part of a minority group in college by trying out different opportunities and by being open to learning more about diverse topics. I will take risks and go out of my comfort zone to lead me to the path I wish to be in and ultimately grow as a person, she said. Early start Stanford students start school in late September, but Eunice De Belen will have an early start among her peers this month. She was accepted to Stanford Universitys Leland Scholars Program, which helps students from under-resourced high schools and low-income backgrounds transition into college. This will allow her to get accustomed to living in the dorms and university coursework. To prepare for it, I make sure I have a checklist of the things I need to bring, as moving in can get really overwhelming, she said. I remind myself not to stress too much and just enjoy the moment. These such transformative years in life are fleeting; hence the more reason why I should savor them, she added. Although, of course, worrying about significant things would not magically stop, the stress would probably just lessen. Reminiscing about her past years on Guam, Eunice De Belen will miss her family and friends. I dont think I wouldve survived high school if not for the support and love I receive from them, she said. Id also miss the warm community, amazing environment and great food here. The island welcomed me with open arms, and I honestly wouldnt have been the person I am today if not for the years Ive lived here, Eunice De Belen said. A 73-year-old man with two previous convictions for criminal sexual conduct was charged Thursday in the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl, according to a magistrates complaint filed in Superior Court. Albert Blas Camacho is listed on Guams Sex Offender Registry as having been convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct as a first-degree felony in 1991 and second-degree criminal sexual conduct as a first-degree felony in 2009. His victims, according to the registry, included two 12-year-old girls and a 7-year-old girl. On Tuesday, he asked the 13-year-old to hug him. She said he smelled her and kissed her a lot, then asked her inappropriate questions, according to the complaint. On Wednesday, he hugged the girl, then rubbed her back and pressed his leg between hers before sexually assaulting her, according to the complaint. Police noted the girl teared up and spoke at a lower volume when describing the assault, the complaint stated. Camacho served five years in prison after the 2009 conviction, according to the complaint. The National Weather Service Guam Weather Forecast Office issued a short-term forecast for Guam and the coastal waters. Through 2 p.m., heavy showers will bring up to 1.5 inches of rain, and some heavy showers could be accompanied by lightning. A thunderstorm advisory is in effect for the airport until 2 p.m. Thunderstorms are possible within 20 nautical miles of the airport. The Offices of Guam Homeland Security and Civil Defense advise the community to be alert and take precautions as required. If outdoors or boating, seek shelter if lightning is seen or thunder is heard. If driving, be alert for sudden downpours and water ponding on roads. Practice caution while traveling in rainy conditions, driving below the speed limit and allowing enough braking distance between vehicles. Robert Underwood is the former president of the University of Guam and Guams former delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks with South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo during their meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap Presidential office says Yoon-Pelosi meeting was not held due to time conflict By Kang Seung-woo President Yoon Suk-yeol spoke with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the phone, Thursday, opting for an alternative that dispelled worries he was snubbing the No. 3 official in the U.S. government by not meeting her in person. Pelosi arrived in Seoul on Wednesday night following a controversial stop in Taiwan as part of her Asian trip. According to Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo, Yoon and Pelosi spoke by phone for 40 minutes to discuss pending issues, such as North Korea's nuclear challenge and the alliance between Seoul and Washington. Referring to Pelosi's visit to the Joint Security Area near the heavily fortified inter-Korean border, Yoon was quoted as saying, "Her visit will become a sign of deterrence between South Korea and the United States against North Korea." In response, Pelosi told Yoon the allies need to jointly build a free and open Indo-Pacific order, according to Kim. The presidential office said the phone talks were also accompanied by five other members of Congress and U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Philip Goldberg. Yoon is on a five-day summer vacation until Friday, so the presidential office said, Wednesday, the president had no plan to meet with Pelosi. The presidential office added that the U.S. side fully understood Yoon's situation. But the presidential office changed its stance and announced that they would have a phone meeting. The announcement came as none of the senior officials of the Yoon administration had planned to hold a meeting with Pelosi, raising speculation that the South Korean government faced a dilemma amid the U.S.-Sino rivalry. The U.S. is a staunch ally of South Korea, while China is its largest trading partner. The conjecture was further fueled by the fact that no one from the South Korean government was present at Osan Air Base to welcome Pelosi. According to Yoon's office, the protocol for her visit was coordinated between Pelosi's side and the National Assembly. But a media report said Pelosi was unhappy with the treatment, citing an official at the U.S. Embassy in South Korea. Pelosi says her trip to S. Korea reaffirmed strong US-S. Korea relationship Presidential office says Yoon, Pelosi couldn't meet due to scheduling conflict Pelosi's visit triggers debate about Yoon's diplomacy Korean, US parliamentary leaders vow to expand alliance amid mounting tensions near Taiwan The presidential office denied speculation that Yoon chose to skip a meeting with Pelosi because he was wary of the potential impact on South Korea-China relations. Choi Young-bum, senior presidential secretary for public relations, said Yoon and Pelosi were not able to meet in person because of conflicting schedules. He told reporters that the presidential office had informed the U.S. earlier that Pelosi's visit coincided with Yoon's summer vacation and thus it would be difficult for the president to find time for a meeting with the House speaker, which the U.S. fully understood. "Decisions are made based on national interest," he said when asked why Yoon's face-to-face meeting with Pelosi was not held, noting that what he meant by his comments is something the media should interpret. In response to the absence of a Yoon-Pelosi meeting, some lawmakers in the ruling People Power Party (PPP) criticized Yoon for not meeting the visiting U.S. official, while having time to dine with theater actors during his vacation. "While the U.S. Congress plays an important role in the South Korea-U.S. alliance, Pelosi is its leader. It is not reasonable that the president skips a meeting with such an important figure just because he is on vacation," Yoo Seong-min, a former four-term lawmaker and presidential candidate, said on Facebook, Thursday, adding that previous presidents traditionally met with U.S. congressional officials and other defense and state secretaries when they visited South Korea. Rep. Ha Tae-keung of the PPP also recommended that Yoon meet Pelosi in consideration of national interests, although it may be uncomfortable to meet her right after her visit to Taiwan that drew a strong backlash from China. "Their common interest is North Korea's nuclear issue and the South Korea-U.S. alliance, not matters linked to Taiwan," Ha said on Facebook. Pelosi's visit also comes as South Korea is caught in a dilemma amid the intensifying strategic competition between Washington and Beijing as both countries are pressuring Seoul to take sides with them. Currently, the United States has asked South Korea to respond to its invitation by the end of August to participate in an envisaged strategic alliance of four global chip powerhouses that also includes Japan and Taiwan, also known as the Chip 4 or Fab 4, a platform apparently aimed at countering China's growing influence in global supply chains. On the other hand, the Chinese government has pressured and persuaded South Korea against edging away from Beijing, using its status as Seoul's largest trading partner. The choice to hold a phone meeting was positively viewed by diplomatic observers. "The Taiwan issue may stretch to the Korean Peninsula no matter how limited the impact would be as China has strongly responded to Pelosi's visit to Taipei. In that respect, it can be a strategic option for Yoon to skip a meeting with her," said Cho Han-bum, a senior researcher of the Korea Institute for National Unification. Haiti - FLASH : Results of 9th AF exams (2022) for 4 departments (by school and by subject) The Ministry of National Education has made available the results of the 9th fundamental year exams 2022 https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-36927-icihaiti-education-203-440-candidates-are-preparing-to-undergo-the-state-exams.html for 4 departments: Grand'Anse, Nippes, North-East and Centre. According to the figures provided by the National Bureau of State Examinations (BUNEXE), the success rates are : GrandeAnse : Success rate 79% (down) previous year 79.28%; Nippes : Success rate 65.54% (down) previous year 78.68%; Northeast : Success rate 78.33 (up) previous year 72%. Center : Success rate 75.29 (up) previous year 72%. As announced by the Minister of National Education, the results are published by school and by subject and by department in order to allow each parent to better appreciate the quality of the educational services provided in the schools where they decide to entrust their children. Download the results by department, by school and by subject : GrandAnse: https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/9af-Grand-Anse-2022.PDF Nippes : https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/9af-Nippes-2022.PDF North-East : https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/9af-Nord-Est-2022.PDF Centre : https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/9af-Centre-2022.PDF School officials are encouraged to withdraw their institution's rankings in the school district of their respective zone. According to the Ministry, the results of the other departments will be published gradually, as soon as the data processing is finalized. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-37298-haiti-flash-results-of-the-9th-af-2022-exams-for-3-departments-by-school-and-by-subject.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-37283-haiti-flash-results-of-the-9th-fundamental-year-exams-2022-for-2-departments.html https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-36927-icihaiti-education-203-440-candidates-are-preparing-to-undergo-the-state-exams.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-11781-haiti-education-exam-results-disappointing-the-minister-manigat-announced-a-package-of-measures.html HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - News : Zapping... One of the leaders of "400 Mawoso" killed by the PNH Wednesday August 3, 2022 "Koleg" Leader of the "Nan Remy" gang and member of "400 Mawozo" and his right arm "Ronald" as well known, were killed in exchanges of fire with the police, in Croix-des-Bouquets. An AK-47 rifle was recovered, confirmed Divisional Inspector Gary Desrosiers, spokesperson for the National Police of Haiti (PNH). Clandestine fuel warehouse destroyed by fire Wednesday August 3, 2022 in Conassa, an area of the locality of Petite-Anse (Cap-Haitien), a house which was storing petroleum products clandestinely was destroyed by fire. No casualties were reported. NOTICE : ENARTS suspends classes on its premises Following the deterioration of the security climate in the capital and particularly at the bottom of the city, Philippe Dodard Director General of the National School of Arts (ENARTS) advises that the institution is obliged to temporarily suspend the courses which held on the premises of the institution. Until further arrangements are made, online classes will continue as usual. While inviting all staff to be cautious, the ENARTS Board of Directors is increasing its meetings and will notify you of new decisions at the appropriate time. Patronal celebrations The patronal festivals or country festivals, an integral part of our culture, are in full swing in the country. These are annual events celebrated particularly during the summer taking place especially in areas renowned for their mystical virtues. This is the case, for example, of Bois Caiman which will take place on August 14, of Cap Haitien and Ouanaminthe, on August 15 and the Grande Riviere du Nord on the 29th of the month. Starving in prison Acting Prime Minister Dr. Ariel Henry chaired an important working meeting on Tuesday on the issue of malnutrition in Haitian prisons, an intolerable and very worrying situation for the Government. See alos : https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-37260-icihaiti-health-the-national-penitentiary-on-the-verge-of-rioting.html https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-20064-icihaiti-justice-3-prisoners-die-of-hunger-in-the-prison-of-les-cayes.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-37033-haiti-news-zapping.html Turkey 2022 Amputee Football World Cup The Office of the Secretary of State for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities (BSEIPH) welcomes the Government's mobilization around the urgent need to come to the aid of the selection of qualified Amputees for the Amputee World Cup in Turkey 2022 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-36227-haiti-flash-our-grenadiers-qualified-for-the-amputee-football-world-cup-turkey-2022-video.html . In addition, the BSEIPH would like to count on civil society and other partners to support the Haitian Amputated Football Association (AHFA) in its mission. HL/ HaitiLibre The top diplomats of Korea and Japan met bilaterally in Phnom Penh on Thursday on the sidelines of annual gatherings led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It marked the second one-on-one talks in less than three weeks between Korea Foreign Minister Park Jin and his counterpart Hayashi Yoshimasa, as they were visiting the Cambodian capital for a series of ministerial sessions. In their previous talks in Tokyo last month, the two agreed on the need for an early settlement of issues related to Korean victims of wartime forced labor. But there have been no reports of a tangible breakthrough. In 2018, Korea's top court ordered Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Nippon Steel to compensate Korean forced labor victims. The firms refused to pay the compensation, as the Japanese government has claimed that all colonization-linked reparation issues were settled under a 1965 accord to normalize bilateral relations. (Yonhap) Page Content The Hawaii State Department of Education Leadership Institute announced its 2022-24 Hawaii State Teacher Fellows cohort. Selected from 10 complex areas and the public charter schools system through a rigorous application process, this years fellows were recognized for their collaborative, innovative and solutions-oriented leadership. The fellowship will provide opportunities for peer and community engagement, tools to facilitate focus groups, and strategies for communication and public education advocacy. Fellows will explore individual and collective areas of interest, interact with various stakeholders including community members and legislators, and increase teacher collaboration and professional development to create the best conditions for student learning. Congratulations to the following educators: Christina Chan - Highlands Intermediate - Highlands Intermediate Lucas Dembart - SEEQS: the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability - SEEQS: the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability Kim Dempsey - Kealakehe Intermediate - Kealakehe Intermediate Akemi Faria - Kaumana Elementary - Kaumana Elementary Pinky Grace Francisco - Kau High and Pahala Elementary - Kau High and Pahala Elementary Kelli Kaanaana - Holomua Elementary - Holomua Elementary Jessica Kato - Campbell-Kapolei Complex - Campbell-Kapolei Complex Natalie Lalagos - Kealakehe High - Kealakehe High Janice Lee - Mililani Uka Elementary - Mililani Uka Elementary Cliffordneal Lim - Kalakaua Middle - Kalakaua Middle Tanya Mau - Hawaii Teacher Induction Center - Hawaii Teacher Induction Center Corey Obungen - James B. Castle High - James B. Castle High Christine Russo - James Campbell High - James Campbell High Devika Sewpaul - Maui Waena Intermediate - Maui Waena Intermediate Heidi Unten - Kailua High Over the last eight years of the program, teacher fellows have shared their expertise and experience in discussions with Department leaders, Board of Education members and legislators, helping to close the gap between practitioner and policy. The fellows have facilitated focus groups with hundreds of educators that helped to inform Department decisions around such issues as project-based learning, strategic planning and professional development. Learn more at bit.ly/hawaiistateteachers. Apple Ambassador eager to get to work Apple Ambassador Payton Snider The first time Payton Snider went to the North Carolina Apple Festival she was just a little girl. This year, the rising senior at West Henderson High School will arrive at the festival as its 2022 Apple Ambassador. Though the festival is a few weeks away, Snider is eager to get to work on her ambassador duties. She has already started public outreach and relations within the Hendersonville community. The Apple Festival starting has given me so many opportunities and has helped me especially with public speaking and things like that, she said. Snider began thinking about the possibility of becoming Apple Ambassador about a year ago. At last years festival, she noticed the Apple Ambassador preparing to ride a float and greet the throng lining Main Street for the King Apple Parade. I thought to myself, thats something that I would want to do. So, right after I got home, I searched up and figured out some of the background of it, Snider said. I realized applications would come out the following couple months. Although her family has no history of apple growing or working in orchards, Snider felt drawn to the role as a chance to give back to her community. Ill go around to a lot of booths and talk to a lot of apple growers, and just a lot of people in the community too, she said. The daughter of Darby and Cassie Snider, Snider plans to use the $2,000 scholarship she won by becoming Apple Ambassador to study elementary education. As a part of her apple industry ambassadorship, she hopes to meet with children in schools to raise awareness about the festivals varying activities. I babysit for a lot of families in my neighborhood regularly, especially in the summer, she says. I just love kids, and it will be a chance to interact with them. Snider is also a member of West Hendersons cheerleading team, among other club organizations. Her involvement may have helped her application stand out to the selection committee. I feel like I definitely had a lot more roles, she says. I guess I kind of had a little bit of a spark to be the Apple Ambassador. The 76th North Carolina Apple Festival will be held in Hendersonville over Labor Day weekend Sept. 2 through Sept. 5. Labor agency hosts $19/hour 'Work-Life Balance Job Fair' Mountain Area Workforce Development will host a Work/Life-Balance Job Fair 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 11, at the WNC Agricultural Center Expo Building (Gate 5), 775 Boylston Highway, Fletcher. The Gate 5 entrance is located across from the Asheville Regional Airport. This job fair will feature over 90 local employers who are offering flexible scheduling, education & training support, paid leave, health, and wellness benefits as well as many other opportunities to help employees enjoy a work-life balance. This job fair will also feature over 2,000 jobs paying more than $19 per hour. To learn more visit Work Life Balance Job Fair Mountain Area Workforce (mountainareaworks.org) Employers are in a talent war to attract the best candidates and this job fair is an opportunity to highlight many of the best career opportunities in Western North Carolina. Participating employers include A-American Electric, Advanced Superabrasives, AdventHealth Hendersonville, Anderson Automotive, Asheville City Schools, Biltmore Company, Biltmore Farms LLC, Buncombe County Government, City of Asheville, Eaton, Elkamet, Four Seasons, Gentry Service Group, Givens Communities, Glatfelter Industries, Harrison Construction, Henderson County government, Ingles Markets, Katie Button Restaurants, Kimpton Hotel Arras, Kyocera International, MB Haynes, Mills Manufacturing Corporation, MAHEC, NC Department of Public Safety, Raumedic Inc, Reich LLC, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Survival Innovations, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Wilsonart, YMCA of Western North Carolina and many more. This job fair follows the successful $19 per Hour and Beyond Job Fair which both attracted over 300 job seekers. To increase awareness of the many career opportunities in the region and the benefits employers are offering we are highlighting work-life balance. Recent surveys show that as many as 60 percent of job seekers say a poor work-life balance is a dealbreaker when considering a new job. To participate employers must offer benefits that promote a work-life balance. There is no cost for employers or job seekers to participate. Lunch will not be provided but snacks and drinks will be offered to employers. There will be an employer networking event at 10 a.m. prior to the job fair. Ingles Markets will be sponsoring the breakfast for the networking event. AN award-winning pub in Shiplake has closed due to spiralling costs and a downturn in trade. Landlord Simon Cromack said he had no option but to shut the Baskerville on Monday as it was no longer financially viable. He said energy costs had trebled, suppliers had increased their prices two or three times this year and the rent had increased by four per cent. An acute staff shortage over the last fortnight meant the kitchen at the free house in Station Road was unable to open, which made trading more difficult. Mr Cromack, who took over the pub two years ago, said he had looked at ways to reduce costs, including passing some on to customers but he didnt think this was acceptable. In an online message to customers, he said it was a gut-wrenching decision to close the pub, which his parents, Graham and Mary, ran for four years before retiring to Spain in 2008. Pub regulars and residents were upset at the closure, which means the village no longer has a pub as the former Plowden Arms at Shiplake Cross closed in January 2019. It is due to re-open as the Plough later this year. Mr Cromack, an experienced business caterer, said: It is with huge sadness that I have had no option but to call it a day. Over the past couple of weeks in particular we have struggled hugely to staff our kitchen as well as having a few shortages in front of house and no housekeeping. However, this has really only been the tip of the iceberg. The combination of huge operating costs never before seen in hospitality, alongside a very significant downturn in business, has set us on this path. Our energy costs have now surpassed three times what they were since our last full years trading accounts in 2019, pre the coronavirus pandemic. We did all we could to lock ourselves into the best of the terrible energy deals available but our hands were tied. Overall, we have seen the majority of our suppliers prices increase twice this year and in some cases three times. I appreciate all industries have seen big price increases, however pretty much everything we touch in the hospitality industry has seen unprecedented hikes. This has naturally meant that trying to find the sweet spot with regards to what to charge for our offer has been a relentless task. To charge the normal margin on much of our food and drink would have seen prices that made it untenable for lots of our customers. The downturn in anticipated trade has been vast over the past month-and-a-half without any further price increases, hence my decision to not risk further increases. Perhaps for some households fortunate enough to have sufficient disposable income it would have been acceptable but from the trading footfalls we have seen and the average spends, I believe this was the right decision. Mr Cromack, who lives in Ashampstead in West Berkshire, said he and the two chefs had looked at simplifying the menu and buying in quality ready-to-use items, such as burgers, sauces and pates, to reduce preparation time but this would have meant smaller profit margins. He said: Against high fixed costs such as rent, utilities and other general costs just to keep a building this size open, it would not fare any better than the current menu offer and we already had a substantial casual menu selection which included burgers, fish and chips and so on. Mr Cromack said that usually at this time of year, the business would have generated enough cash to see it through the leaner months ahead but this year it had not even come close to doing this. He said: To go into the autumn and winter in deficit, let alone a standing still position, is impossible. The additional money to fill the hole is vast and with such an uncertain future with regards to the cost of living crisis I cannot put myself or the business in such a vulnerable position. Mr Cromack said he needed to think of his family, his wife Steff, who works for the Horticultural Trades Association, and teenage daughters Ella and Nelle. He said: Its not the hours that comes with the territory but recently these have become ridiculous and the kids do wonder who you are. I cannot afford to support my family based on the minimal salary I take from the business. My ambition was to build the business to become a viable proposition 12 or so months down the line but two years and two months later, this is not the case and I have had to react quickly. He said he and the staff had tried to create a business at the heart of the community with an appeal and a reputation to draw in people from further afield. Overall, I think we have hit the mark, said Mr Cromack. I appreciate we were never going to tick everyones boxes but I think we have come close. My team have gone above and beyond to make what we do very special. They are an extremely special bunch of people and I am forever grateful to them. I am so sorry I have not been able to keep the pub open and I hope someone will come along and get it back up and running soon. Mr Cromack took over the pub, which is owned by Tavern Propco, from Kevin and Kate Hannah, who ran it for almost nine years after Mr Hannahs parents, Allan and Kathleen, handed the lease to him after 10 years. For the last four of those years Mr Cromacks parents took charge of the day-to-day running of the pub. In 2020, the Baskerville won pub of the year in the Visit England Awards for Excellence. It was awarded one AA rosette in 2021 and featured in the AA Restaurant Guide 2022. Mr Cromack attended Shiplake College and then studied hotel and catering management at Westminster College. He spent five years training with the Savoy Management Group in London. He was one of the organisers of the original Henley Food Festival, which took place in 2006, 2007 and 2009. He owns a food and drink agency which an associate has been running so he could devote his time to the pub. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks during a meeting with National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo during her visit to the Assembly on Yeouido, Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corps By Nam Hyun-woo A huge question has arisen in Korea as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Seoul as part of her high-profile Asia trip: did the Yoon administration handle the reception of the high-ranking U.S. official appropriately? Pelosi arrived in Seoul on Wednesday night from Taiwan for a two-day visit, during which she met her counterpart, National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo, and visited the Panmunjom Joint Security Area standing between the two Koreas. Her visit to Korea became the subject of heated debate here, just as her previous stop in Taiwan did though for slightly different reasons due to the possible impact on Seoul's relations with Beijing of her bold efforts to show her support of democracy in Taiwan and stand up against China's autocracy. The South Korean government was cautious of Pelosi's visit. President Yoon Suk-yeol has already showed a hard tilt toward Washington in the face of the intensifying U.S.-China rivalry several times, triggering temperamental responses from Beijing. Neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the National Assembly sent a South Korean delegation to welcome Speaker Pelosi when she arrived at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek. Broadcaster TV Chosun and other media reported that Pelosi was "very displeased" that no one from the Korean side was there to greet her, citing an unnamed official at the U.S. embassy here. While the Assembly said it had consulted with the U.S. prior to her visit and decided not to hold a welcoming ceremony, the foreign ministry placed the blame on the Assembly for being in charge of ceremonies to welcome foreign dignitaries. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is welcomed by U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Philip Goldberg and Gen. Paul LaCamera, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, after arriving at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, Wednesday. Yonhap Spokesperson denounces Pelosi's meeting with so-called human rights activists Xinhua) 09:31, August 04, 2022 BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The meeting between Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and so-called human rights activists is just another farce, said a Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the remarks in response to a media inquiry on Pelosi's visit to a human rights-themed venue in China's Taiwan region and her meeting with so-called "human rights and democracy activists." These arrangements are just another farce staged by Pelosi based on her consistent anti-China, anti-Communist stance and ideological bias, with the cooperation of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities, said Ma, noting that the activists she met and bolstered on Wednesday are long-known tools and puppets of U.S. anti-China forces. Highlighting the guise of so-called "human rights" and "democracy" on the Taiwan question, Pelosi is simply seeking her own personal gain, said Ma, adding that the U.S. mid-term elections are approaching and there have been scandals around the Pelosi family. Ma also warned the DPP authorities that the agenda of roping in anti-China forces, inciting cross-Strait confrontation and engaging in secessionist acts under the guise of democracy and human rights will never succeed. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) President Yoon Suk-yeol calls cardinal Lazzaro You Heung-sik from his office in Yongsan District, Seoul, in this May 30 file photo. Yoon had a phone call with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Thursday. Courtesy of presidential office By Nam Hyun-woo Speculation was rampant on Thursday about why President Yoon Suk-yeol and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were unable to meet during her visit to Seoul, as the two agreed to talk over the phone instead. Some claimed Yoon might be wary of the possible impact on Korea-China relations amid Beijing's furious reaction to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan before she landed in Seoul on Wednesday. But the presidential office denied such speculation and said the key reason was simply a scheduling conflict. Korea has participated in a U.S.-led multinational space security exercise, its officials said Thursday, as Seoul seeks to strengthen defense cooperation in the increasingly crucial security domain. Seoul sent two Air Force personnel, one official from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one from the state-run Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute to the 10-day Global Sentinel exercise that kicked off at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 25. The exercise focused on promoting collaboration among participating countries over combined space situational awareness operations and other security missions. Korea has taken part in the exercise since 2017. Around 150 personnel from 25 countries participated in this year's training. (Yonhap) (JNS) A new limited podcast series from the American Jewish Committee features interviews with Jews whose families left or were forced to flee from Arab lands and Iran in the mid-20th century. The Forgotten Exodus, premiering on Monday, consists of at least six episodes, each focusing on a different tale about a Jewish family from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Iran. According to AJC, its the first narrative podcast series to exclusively focus on the stories of the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven out of their centuries-old communities throughout the Middle East an... The defense chiefs of South Korea and Australia agreed during their talks Thursday on the need to bolster bilateral cooperation, especially in the arms industry and combat readiness, officials here said. South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup met with his counterpart, Richard Marles, in Canberra for discussions on measures to follow up on the summit between President Yoon Suk-yeol and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese held on the margins of a NATO gathering in Madrid in June, according to Lee's ministry. Lee and Marles agreed to continue expanding bilateral partnerships via such channels as the "two plus two" session involving their defense and diplomatic ministers, and various combined military drills in the region, it said. In particular, Marles expressed hope for and closer cooperation in the defense industry and space sector, it added. On Friday, Lee and Marles plan to visit Geelong, a southeastern city, where a K9 self-propelled howitzer production line of South Korean firm Hanwha Defense is under construction. Late last year, Australia signed a contract, known to be worth 930 billion won (US$709 million), to acquire 30 units of the K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer from South Korea. (Yonhap) Occasionally, a name or a phrase such as "Remember the Maine," or "Watergate" enters the national lexicon. One such name has been burned into the collective memory of American Jewry: the St. Louis, a German luxury cruise ship which on May 27, 1939, steamed into Havana harbor with more than 900 German Jewish refugees from Nazi oppression, each with the letter "J" stamped in red on their passport. When the St. Louis arrived in Havana, its Jewish passengers were forbidden to come ashore. Despite the efforts of the American and Cuban Jewish communities to persuade the Cuban government to let... So many famous ones ... I refer to Jewish comedians. Most, if not all, I can name are Jewish. And to me, it shows super-strength after decades upon decades of hate encountered by my people. I am so proud to be one of them! And speaking of Jewish comedians, BILLY CRYSTAL comes to mind. Born in New York City in 1945, William Edward Crystal was raised initially in the Bronx and when still a toddler, he and his family moved to Long Beach, N.Y. His family owned the Commodore Music Store. Billy's dad was also a jazz promoter and a producer (Involved in show business) The family emigrated from Au... (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) The California State University Board of Trustees voted Wednesday to remove the name of an unrepentant antisemite and Nazi sympathizer from the main library on its Fresno campus, putting an end to the legacy of longtime former librarian Henry Miller Madden at Fresno State after an internal investigation. The building will be referred to as the Fresno State Library until a replacement name is chosen. In a press release sent to the campus community, Fresno State University President Saul Jimenez-Sandoval said he was thankful that the... (Israel Hayom via JNS) Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has implemented measures that could turn the P.A. into a dictatorship, according to a new report, published just two weeks before the 29th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords. The report was authored by Israeli NGO Palestinian Media Watch, which has followed developments in the P.A. virtually since its inception in 1994. Over the past four years, the report states, Abbas has made decisions and implemented fundamental changes to the Palestinian political system, the overall purpose of which is to completely a... (JTA) The Democratic primary next week in Michigans 11th District could end a four-decade Jewish political dynasty and spending by the countrys biggest pro-Israel lobby is playing a significant role. Because of redistricting, the race pits two incumbent Democrats against each other: Rep. Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat who favors conditioning aid to Israel and counts some of Congresss most outspoken Israel critics as his friends, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a non-Jewish centrist whose Israel commitments lie mainly in assuring its military security. Stevens has been the recipient... Art lovers look at the large painting "People's Justice" (2002) by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi, covered with black cloth, on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, Germany, June 28, 2022. Several antisemitic motifs could be seen on the banner, prompting a debate about the show's handling of antisemitic content. (JTA) - The director of a major international art exhibition has resigned after a work that included caricatures of Jews and Israelis ignited a reckoning over antisemitism. The scandal leaves Documenta - a sweeping, decentralized exhibition staged every five years in Kassel, Germany - on uncertain territory for the future. Documenta announced that the Anne Frank Education Center in Frankfurt, would review all of the work in the exhibition, but the center's director said announced on Friday that the exhibition's management had not supported the endeavor. Sabine Schormann's abrupt resignation... (JNS) On Sunday afternoon, Ben Shapiro, the editor emeritus of The Daily Wire, ascended to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to pray with his parents and a group of followers. Shapiros first visit to the Temple Mount was during the holiday of Sukkot back in October 2019. That visit was cut short after someone in his group was found to be carrying a willow branch in his pocket as a mitzvah for the last day of Sukkot, leading to the groups removal from the holy site. While waiting for security to clear the group to enter the complex this time around, Shapiro told JNS that he hoped to... (JNS) The Jewish Federations of North America has announced the launch of a Ukrainian Resettlement Grant Initiative to support refugees seeking safety in the United States. The new funding is in addition to the more than $70 million that JFNA has already pledged to help resettle refugees from Ukraine abroad. The Jewish people have been refugees in so many countries, yet we have been blessed with freedom and protection in the United States, said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of JFNA. Supporting refugees and vulnerable populations is a Jewish value, and we see it as both ou... (Israel Hayom via JNS) Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid has instructed the countrys Foreign Ministry to prepare a series of political measures against Russia to be implemented in the event it closes the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a nonprofit organization that promotes immigration to Israel. Although Moscow gave no reason for shuttering the agencys offices, officials have said it is possibly due to Israels stance on Russias invasion of Ukraine. Lawmakers met on Sunday to discuss the matter, during which some even suggested that Jerusalem should change... (JTA) Israels top immigration official says the country will not award citizenship to Baruch Lanner, a rabbi and convicted sex offender from the United States. Interior Minister Ayelet Shakeds announcement, made Tuesday to the Jerusalem Post, came a day after nearly 200 American rabbis and Jewish scholars sent a letter to Israels prime minister, Yair Lapid, urging him to reject Lanners citizenship application. Lanner, an American rabbi and former official of the Orthodox Unions NCSY youth group, served a three-year prison sentence for sexually assaulting students at a J... A man charged with biting off part of an acquaintance's finger during a fight has been given a one-year prison sentence, court officials said Thursday. The Seoul Central District Court made the ruling after convicting the unnamed 58-year-old man of inflicting injury in connection with the assault that occurred at a Seoul restaurant last year, the officials said. The man was indicted for biting off part of the index finger of his acquaintance's left hand amid an argument at the restaurant in October last year, they said. The victim went to a hospital with his severed finger and underwent a replantation surgery. The defendant pleaded not guilty during the trial, claiming the incident occurred while he tried to defend himself after his acquaintance attempted to punch him. But the court did not accept his claim, saying the method of the crime was very bad and the victim sustained a grave injury. (Yonhap) Steve Dettelbach speaks during an event about gun violence in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington D.C., April 11, 2022. (JTA) - When Steve Dettelbach was confirmed last week as the director of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he became the beleaguered bureau's first head to pass a Senate confirmation in eight years. For some, the confirmation offered hope of a changing tide in America's sea of mass shootings. But a county Republican group in Kentucky saw a different story: that Dettelbach is part of a "Jewish junta" that "is getting stronger and more aggressive." The Bracken County Republican Party, representing a rural county with a population of around 8,400 along the Ohio R... When he took the oath of office, Governor Ron DeSantis promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in the nation and he has delivered. Our governor has proven time and time again his commitment to combatting antisemitism and standing with Floridas Jewish communities. Governor DeSantis allocated millions of dollars to guard and protect Jewish schools, synagogues, and other institutions all across Florida. He has also worked to ensure the next generation of Floridians never forget the evils of the Holocaust. Fighting antisemitism in Florida We all need to speak with one voice an... (JNS) From the moment it began operations, the left-wing lobby J Streets assertion that its mantra of pro-Israel and pro-peace better represented the true sentiments of American Jews than the position of mainstream groups was disingenuous. While its leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami, claimed that the new organizations efforts provided a way for Americans to support peace in the Middle East, its goals were really always more about the politics of the United States than that of the Jewish state. That has been never more apparent than lately as J Street has taken an active role in the... (JNS) In an interview last week at the White House with Israeli Channel 12s Yonit Levi, U.S. President Joe Biden reiterated his administrations desire to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran from which his predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew in 2018. The only thing worse than the Iran that exists now is an Iran with nuclear weapons, he said during the one-on-one chat that was taped on the eve of his trip to the Middle East and broadcast in Israel after his arrival in the country. And if we can return to the deal and hold th... Lee Yong-soo, a 93-year-old victim of Japan's wartime military sexual slavery, waits for U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outside a hotel in Seoul, Wednesday. Newsis Lee Yong-soo, a South Korean victim of Japan's wartime military sexual slavery, suffered minor injuries after being pushed off her wheelchair while waiting to meet visiting U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Seoul on Thursday. According to a group of activists aiding Lee, the 93-year-old had been hoping to speak with Pelosi at the National Assembly. With Pelosi about to arrive at the compound, members of the National Assembly's security detail pushed Lee's wheelchair aside to make room, sending the elderly woman to the ground. One activist claimed "about a dozen" security guards forcibly grabbed Lee's wheelchair to move it out of the way. Lee sustained cuts to both hands and was "quite shaken up" by the incident, the activist added. A civic group pushing to bring the sexual slavery issue to the U.N. International Court of Justice released a video clip of the incident, in which Lee could be heard yelling: "Let me go. You're going to kill me," while several security guards were trying to calm her down. Lee was transported to a nearby hospital and didn't suffer serious injuries, though the meeting with Pelosi never materialized. The aforementioned civic group had asked Pelosi on Wednesday to speak with Lee and to resolve the sexual slavery issue in accordance with the U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 121. The 2007 resolution called on Japan to "formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility" for its coercion of young women into sexual slavery in Asia during the 1930s and World War II. Pelosi played an instrumental role in the passing of the resolution. In light of the incident, the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan condemned the parliamentary security guards' action. "(The guards) committed an abominable act of causing an elderly woman grave physical and psychological shock," the statement read. "We denounce violence perpetrated on the (sexual slavery) victim in her 90s by the National Assembly security force. We demand a thorough investigation, an official apology and punishment on those responsible." (Yonhap) Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo, right, bumps fists with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prior to their talks at the National Assembly in Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday they agreed to support efforts by Seoul and Washington for the denuclearization of North Korea, voicing concerns over the North's escalating threats. "The two sides expressed concern over the grave situation in which North Korea's level of threat is heightening," said Kim, reading a joint press statement following a meeting between the two speakers. "Based on a powerful and extended deterrence against North Korea that our public can recognize, we agree to support the two governments' efforts for denuclearization and peace through international cooperation and diplomatic dialogues," the statement said. The speakers noted the expanding ties between the allies, mentioning how the South Korea-U.S. alliance has been widening to areas, such as defense security, the economy and technology. To better support these ties, Kim said the speakers agreed on reviewing a resolution marking the 70th anniversary of the two countries. Calling security, economics and governance the "three pillars" of the congressional delegation's visit here, Pelosi emphasized that the relationship between Seoul and Washington in these areas is "very strong" and that the two countries "learn from each other." "This is special for us because the U.S.-Republic of Korea relationship is special to us," she said, noting how "a relationship that began from urgency and security many years ago has become the warmest of friendships." Yoon to speak by phone with US House Speaker Pelosi Seoul wary of 'Pelosi effect' on ties with Beijing Nancy Pelosi vs. Lee Jun-seok Pelosi proposed strengthening ties on a congressional level. "We want to strengthen that interparliamentary role as we work together as countries," she said. "It's shared values. It's about fighting the pandemic. It's about saving the planet. So many things to discuss, so much opportunity better served by a discussion in the interparliamentary level as well as in addition to the heads of state and heads of state." The U.S. speaker also voiced gratitude for Seoul's role in supporting Ukraine against Russia's invasion. North Korea has conducted a series of short- to long-range missile tests so far this year and has widely been expected to carry out what would be its seventh nuclear test. Thursday's meeting came amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and China in the wake of her high-profile visit to Taiwan. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, center, accompanied by Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo, right, arrives at the National Assembly in Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap Pelosi arrived in Seoul on Wednesday night from Taiwan where she reaffirmed unwavering U.S. commitment to supporting the island's democracy. China denounced her trip to Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province, and announced live-fire military drills around the island. Her two-day trip also includes a visit to the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom later Thursday. She is also expected to speak by phone with President Yoon Suk-yeol, who is currently on holiday. Pelosi's delegation includes House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chair Mark Takano, as well as other lawmakers, such as Suzan DelBene, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Andy Kim. Better alliance should not hurt ties with China U.S. House Speaker Nany Pelosi's visit to South Korea was a rare opportunity for the two countries to deepen their alliance and partnership. On Thursday, the last day of her two-day stay here, she and National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo agreed to support the allies' efforts to expand the alliance from defense and security into economy and technology. The agreement is in line with a commitment made by President Yoon Suk-yeol and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden during their summit in Seoul in May that Seoul and Washington will turn the alliance into a comprehensive strategic partnership. It reflects the two countries' move to defend freedom and democracy. It is also meaningful that the two speakers agreed to help Seoul and Washington to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea. The Yoon administration needs support from the U.S. and its allies in prodding the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program, especially when the Kim Jong-un regime is ready to conduct a seventh nuclear test. Pelosi stressed the importance of international cooperation and diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal. She came here after her visit to Taiwan which heightened tensions with China. Beijing responded with a show of force, denouncing her visit to the island, which it claims as its territory, of violating the "one China" principle. The Chinese Air Force flew 21 war planes toward Taiwan on Tuesday in protest. However, Pelosi made it clear that the U.S. would not abandon Taiwan. After meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, Pelosi said, "America's determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad." Her visit, however, has contributed to escalating the great power rivalry between the U.S. and China. For this reason, many people expressed concerns that her visit could make it more difficult for South Korea to strike a balance between the U.S. and China. South Korea has long relied on America, the country's traditional ally, for security. On the other hand, it has been dependent on China, its largest trading partner, for economic growth. However, the growing Sino-U.S. strategic competition is increasingly forcing Seoul to choose between Washington and Beijing. The conservative Yoon administration has opted for the strengthened alliance with the U.S. to ensure peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. This, however, raised concerns among Chinese officials that South Korea might join the U.S.-led international coalition against China. Pelosi's Asian tour and the resultant escalation of the Sino-U.S. conflict are also posing a dilemma for Korea. The closer South Korea moves to the U.S., the more pressure it may face from Beijing not to join the anti-China coalition. This will leave little room for Seoul to maneuver diplomatically. That's why the Yoon administration should engage in careful and prudent diplomacy to maintain good relations with China, to which one-fourth of Korea's exports go. At the same time, the government must make strenuous efforts to stick to "principled" diplomacy so it will not be swayed by the emerging new Cold War between U.S.-led Western democracies and autocracies such as China, Russia and North Korea. We hope South Korea can avoid being caught in the crossfire of the Sino-U.S. confrontation. By Casey Lartigue Jr. A great thing about the internet is the many great quotes of wisdom. Sometimes, however, that wisdom can come into conflict. For example, I have long loved the comment from former South African leader Nelson Mandela: "I never lose. I either win or learn." Every opportunity, challenge or situation can be a chance to learn and improve. I also love the advice (from various sources) on putting together a "failure resume" of non-successes. Life is not only about success, but also about failure which can give people perspective and teach even more lessons than success does. But wait? How can I have a "failure resume" if I win and never lose? Some successes are easy to spot. Last month, my organization clearly won when six North Korean refugees in FSI's North Korean Refugee Keynote Speakers Network gave speeches to tourists visiting South Korea. We also won earlier this year when, working with volunteers, we published two books by North Korean refugees. And we will win later this month when we hold our 16th English speech contest. Those are clear success stories. But was the following a failure? A North Korean visited our office two weeks ago to apply to join our organization. She had known about us for a few years, but I didn't meet her until a few months ago when she energetically introduced herself at an event. The tough lady with charisma cried in our office as she told us secrets she said she had hidden for 17 years. Some North Korea watchers might say her story is "out-of-date," but the pain is fresh in her mind and heart. After thinking about it for more than a week, she decided it was too painful to talk publicly about her life in North Korea and China. It may count as a failure because a dynamic woman decided not to tell her story, but we still felt like winners. Our humble organization has enough credibility with North Korean refugees that even a woman who hasn't told her South Korean family her full story and has remained silent for almost two decades confided in us as her possible book publisher. As with all North Korean refugees who come to us, we were transparent with her about the pros and cons of going public. North Korean refugees who make it to the stage or the publication process must prepare themselves psychologically for a range of critics (North Korea sympathizers, North Korea watchers, researchers, psychopaths, jealous and disgruntled people) questioning their motives and stories. Then there are the threats from North Korea. Several North Korean refugees participating in our organization have dropped out because of attacks and threats. North Korean refugee YouTuber Cherie Yang was silent for three years (at her mother's request) after her face was shown on North Korean TV. A North Korean refugee canceled her plans to speak at an international conference after family members let her know they were getting threatened by North Korean agents. Another North Korean refugee abruptly deleted her SNS accounts and ended her TV career after she was shown in a North Korea propaganda video. Some North Korean refugees are apologetic about withdrawing, but the "failure" meetings are upbeat and even celebratory. We are happy when North Korean refugees reach their goals of becoming public speakers or authors, but when those are no longer goals we find other ways to collaborate. No matter how many times it happens, however, we still aren't prepared for the tears. When I worked with Songmi Han on her memoir "Greenlight to Freedom," she surprised me when she cried a few times. She had been silent for a decade and only began to open up after going through psychological counseling. When her tears began falling, I had second thoughts. Her response to my suggestion that we stop the project? "Mr. Casey, of course, we are going to finish this book! This is good for me. I have the chance to think and talk about things I had been blocking out of my mind." Writing the book turned out to be an extended form of therapy for her to get over demons still troubling her. Last month, none of the North Korean refugee speakers and authors who gave speeches to tour groups cried. One of the speakers wrote on his social media: "It's always joyful to share my story." In our debriefing sessions, another speaker told us she is "floating in the clouds" whenever she gives a speech in English and another said she hasn't stopped stop smiling since giving her first public speech earlier this year. There were tears, but not from the speakers. Rather, it was from some of the tourists listening. Casey Lartigue Jr. is co-author along with Song-mi Han of the book, "Greenlight to Freedom," and co-founder along with Eun-koo Lee of Freedom Speakers International (FSI). He teaches public speaking and debate at the Seoul University of Foreign Studies. He can be reached at CJL@alumni.harvard.edu. Liza Stone joined Virgin Hotels as General Counsel in April 2022. As the chief legal officer of the company, Stone oversees Virgin Hotel's domestic and international legal affairs, including corporate governance, regulatory compliance, labor and employment, intellectual property, and litigation matters. Stone brings to Virgin Hotels over 25 years of legal experience in domestic and cross-border hospitality transactions. Prior to joining Virgin Hotels, Stone was a senior member of the Global Hospitality Group at Sidley Austin LLP, an internationally recognized law firm. At Sidley, Stone represented institutional owners, investors, and lenders as well as major hotel brands in connection with acquisitions and dispositions, financings, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions for hospitality assets. Prior to Sidley, Stone worked at internationally recognized law firms, and served as Associate General Counsel of the Real Estate Healthcare Lending Group of a publicly traded commercial finance company. She has a bachelor's degree from the University of Santa Barbara, as well as two Law Degrees from the McGeorge School of Law at the University of The Pacific. Virgin Hotels Miami, Florida United States Website CapitaLand Investment Limiteds (CLI) wholly owned lodging business unit, The Ascott Limited (Ascott) is acquiring a freehold asset in Tokyo, Japan via the Ascott Serviced Residence Global Fund (ASRGF), Ascotts private equity fund with Qatar Investment Authority. The asset will be refurbished to introduce Ascotts first lyf-branded coliving property in the city. The acquisition follows Ascotts signing of over 7,500 units in 1H 2022, a 32% increase compared to the same period last year. Ascott has also opened 20 properties with more than 4,500 units in 1H 2022, a 56% year-on-year increase in units. In addition, Ascott has recently completed its acquisition of Oakwood Worldwide (Oakwood) in July 2022, expanding its portfolio by about 15,000 units to over 153,000 units across over 900 properties. The newly signed and opened properties as well as the addition of Oakwood will further boost Ascotts recurring fee income. The 140-unit coliving property to be named lyf Ginza Tokyo is ASRGFs fourth acquisition in 2022, deploying close to S$400 million across four countries in under five months. Slated to open in June 2023, lyf Ginza Tokyo is set to meet the lodging demand of conglomerates and start-ups located nearby and cater to leisure travellers visiting the capital city. With the acquisition of lyf Ginza Tokyo, ASRGF will hold 12 properties with over 2,300 units across 91 countries. Mr Kevin Goh, CLIs Chief Executive Officer for Lodging, said: Ascott has completed our acquisition of Oakwood, and achieved strong organic growth in 1H 2022 with the addition of newly signed and opened properties across our brands. This allows us to build upon our recurring fee income stream. We have kicked-off the integration of Oakwood with Ascott, placing us in a stronger position to drive further growth, deliver higher returns to our property owners and offer better experiences to our guests. As a vertically-integrated global lodging business, Ascott is able to leverage our full suite of real estate investment and management capabilities for expansion. In addition to increasing our recurring fee income via new management and franchise contracts, we see opportunities to grow our funds under management through our private funds such as ASRGF and our Student Accommodation Development Venture. We will continue to step up our growth as demand for lodging increases with the resumption of international travel, added Mr Goh. Note: 1 ASRGFs properties are in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney), China (Ningbo), France (Paris), Indonesia (Jakarta), Japan (Tokyo), Netherlands (Amsterdam), Singapore, United Kingdom (London) and Vietnam (Hanoi). By Park Jung-won When news emerged in November 2019 that two North Korean fishermen, who had been detained by South Korea after crossing repeatedly into South Korean waters and had confessed to murdering their fellow crewmembers, were forcibly repatriated by the Moon Jae-in administration after five days, a number of scholars, media and international human rights experts raised the alarm about the case's legality. Although there have been 194 cases of repatriation of North Koreans by the South since 2010, this case was the first time since the Korean War ended in 1953 that South Korea had repatriated North Koreans back to the North against their will. Such a shocking event has raised a fundamental question as to whether South Korea is truly a liberal democratic country in which the principle of rule of law is guaranteed for all. One may consider the Moon administration's explanation and insistence at the time that one should fully examine the characteristics of the two fishermen's confessed alleged murders of 16 people and the "peculiarities of inter-Korean relations," for a country such as South Korea that possesses relevant domestic laws which should be directly applicable to this kind of case, and is a contracting party to relevant international human rights treaties. Given this situation, however, the fact that the Moon government sent the suspects back to North Korea without having put them through a trial and affording them procedural due process cannot be excused. Is it a "highly political question" to treat North Korean escapees in accordance with international law? North Korea may be regarded internationally as having statehood because it is a U.N. member state. However, the status of the North's U.N. membership itself does not automatically oblige the South to recognize its statehood. Whether a state grants such state recognition to a political and territorial entity is up to its political discretion under international law. The two Koreas have not recognized each other as states, and through the 1991 Inter-Korean Basic Agreement, they have viewed each other as having a "special relationship" status rather than a purely "state-to-state" one. It might be possible to reestablish inter-Korean relations at a state-to-state level in the future, but doing so will require a clear and definite consensus on the part of the South Korean people as a whole, and relevant legislative measures such as a constitutional amendment must first be implemented. As long as the existing constitutional provisions and related legal interpretations through the judiciary regard North Korean defectors or escapees entering the territory of South Korea as South Korean citizens without need for naturalization (unless they genuinely want to return to North Korea), any political regime in South Korea, regardless of its political colors, cannot and should not violate this principle. On Jan. 28, 2020, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and the special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment jointly sent a five-page inquiry letter to the Moon administration concerning the repatriation. A month later, the Moon administration submitted a 16-page response which included logical flaws and inconsistencies with international law. Even if the two fishermen could not be treated as South Korean citizens due to the allegations of murder, as argued by the Moon administration, they should not have been sent back to North Korea in such a hasty manner without seriously taking into account the risks of such a move. The U.N. Convention against Torture, which South Korea joined in 1995, contains the principle of prohibiting forced repatriation, known as the principle of non-refoulement. Article 3(1) of the Convention stipulates that "no state party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." The protection provided by these provisions is applicable to all human beings, not just refugees. The risks of torture should be evaluated strictly by the competent authorities under Article 3(2) of the Convention. North Korea is notorious for committing large-scale human rights violations which have been consistently monitored by the international community, as confirmed in the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) report published in 2014 as well as by multiple resolutions adopted by the U.N. Human Rights Council and General Assembly. The officials under the Moon administration did not properly evaluate the risks before repatriating the detainees to North Korea. In the aforementioned response, there was no statement of whether a sufficient risk assessment had been undertaken; instead it affirmed that handing them over to North Korea on the grounds that they had committed heinous crimes was justified in accordance with the relevant domestic laws of South Korea. The response should have also reviewed diverse aspects surrounding the coverage of Article 3 of the U.N. Convention against Torture in conjunction with sufficient reference to international human-rights law. For instance, Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which South Korea is also a contracting party, provides for the prohibition of torture and other inhumane treatment, embracing contextually and teleologically the principle of non-refoulement. A liberal democratic government's legitimacy is based, among other principles, on the protection of individual human rights. If it tries to make an exception to this protection, it must explain its reasons to the people and take responsibility for the consequences. It is thus rather disappointing that while the Moon administration as a whole has provided explanations, former President Moon, who was a human rights lawyer, has not stepped forward individually to explain the forced repatriation in 2019. A universal value is not universal if it is applied selectively according to political preferences and partisan logic. The photos of the two fishermen fiercely resisting deportation will be remembered as a dark chapter in the history of human rights in South Korea. Park Jung-won (park_jungwon@hotmail.com), Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics (LSE), is a professor of international law at Dankook University. The Spanish energy provider Iberdrola and RIU Hotels & Resorts have signed a long-term contract for the former to supply 100% green energy to the hotel chains establishments and head offices in Spain, which consume a total of around 70 gigawatt hours per year. This agreement, which came into effect on 1 August, will allow the hotel group to sustainably power the more than 11,000 rooms at RIUs 27 hotels in Spain with 100% renewable energy. This will prevent 30,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of planting approximately 300,000 trees. Whats more, Iberdrola and the RIU group are studying the possibility of expanding the contract to include establishments in other European countries and Mexico, where both companies also operate. The companies different international sections have already made preliminary contact for this purpose. The Chief Procurement officer of RIU Hotels & Resorts, Bartolome Ensenat, believes that this agreement is a big step forward in our aim to make our operations sustainable. We are very proud to announce to our customers and colleagues that, from today, all the energy we use in Spain is 100% renewable, as certified by the Spanish National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC). Iberdrola was the perfect partner to help us reach this goal and we hope that this is just the beginning, as weve set our sights high when it comes to sustainability. Miquel Cardona, Iberdrolas sales representative in the Balearic Islands, thanked the RIU group for choosing the companys green energy to supply its customers in Spain in a more sustainable and environmentally friendly manner. We hope to continue working with RIU on different projects to jointly increase the electrification of its activity. Iberdrola with green energy as the basis of a sustainable economy For the past 20 years, Iberdrola has followed a sustainable growth strategy based on electrification. The company plans to invest 150 billion euros in renewable energy, electricity grids and energy storage by 2030 to stay at the forefront of the energy revolution. This pioneering commitment has turned the Iberdrola group into a global energy leader with an installed green capacity of more than 38,300 MW, 19,300 MW of which are in Spain (2,200 MW of solar capacity). The company aims to be carbon neutral before 2050 and reduce its global emissions intensity to 50 g CO2/kWh by 2030. It is well on the way to meeting this target after having already reached a figure of 60 g CO2/kWh in Europe thanks to its commitment to the energy transition and the Paris Agreement. RIUs commitment to sustainable establishments The creation of the energy purchasing department is one of the RIU Sustainability area's greatest achievements this year, and this agreement is its first major project. Reducing CO2 emissions is one of the main aims of the chain, which is also working simultaneously on other projects related to the circular economy. This comprehensive commitment involves waste management and reuse and having a positive impact on the local economy, as well as process digitalisation which allows us to reduce the amount of paper we use and improve working conditions and processes and sustainability certifications which represent a global commitment in terms of hotel operations. About RIU Hotels & Resorts The international RIU chain was founded in Mallorca by the Riu family in 1953 as a small holiday firm and is still owned by the family's third generation. The company specialises in holiday resorts and over 75% of its establishments offer its acclaimed All Inclusive by RIU service. With the inauguration of its first city hotel in 2010, RIU is expanding its range of products with its own line of city hotels called Riu Plaza. RIU Hotels & Resorts now has 100 hotels in 20 countries. In 2021, the chain welcomed 4,2 million guests and provided jobs for a total of 28,004 employees. RIU is currently the world's 32nd ranked chain, one of the Caribbean's most popular, the second largest in Spain in terms of revenue and the fourth largest in number of rooms. For further information please visit: www.riu.com. RIU Press Department +34 971 743 030 RIU Amsterdam is in the province of North Holland, in the heart of the Randstad, Europes sixth-largest metropolitan area. The city of Amsterdam is the capital and the largest city in the Netherlands, with a population of just over 900,000 recorded in 2021. While Amsterdam is known globally for its historic canals, art museums (Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum), red-light district and coffee shops, it is also a significant European financial and business centre. More than 2,000 foreign companies have established offices in the metropolitan area, and more than 200 of these companies have headquarters in the city. Following Brexit, Amsterdam benefited from an inflow of new businesses, with 133 international offices opening up in 2021 (including 32 headquarters). The city is highly accessible, with well-developed local, national and international transport links, including Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, the European high-speed rail network and the North Sea Canal. Source: HVS Sources: HVS Research; 2020 RAI Amsterdam Annual Report Photo by HVS Economic Indicators The Netherlands Source: IMF Photo by HVS Tourism Demand Visitation to Amsterdam grew at a compound annual growth rate of 6.4% from 2010 to 2019, with international visitation leading the growth (6.8% CAGR 2010-19). The main international feeder markets in 2019 were the UK (15.5%), the USA (11.1%), Germany (10.1%) and France (5.2%), while the domestic market accounted for 17.8% of the total visitation. In 2020, visitation was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a 70% decrease compared to a record high in 2019. Visitation in 2021 was broadly stable compared to 2020, with some signs of recovery from the domestic market and neighbouring countries (Belgium and France). Owing to strict cross-border restrictions, demand from the UK experienced a further decline of 74% in 2021, compared to 2020 levels, resulting in only 3% of the total visitation to Amsterdam that year. Following the lifting of restrictions in March 2022, visitation to Amsterdam rebounded strongly. Year-to-May data for 2022 indicates strong growth compared to year-to-May 2021 with visitation almost quadrupling, but still some 40% below year-to-May 2019 levels. Visitation and Accommodated Bednights The Netherlands (000s) Sources: TourMIS, April 2022 Photo by HVS Hotel Performance The Amsterdam market experienced healthy growth in both occupancy and average rate pre-pandemic, reaching record RevPAR levels in 2018 and 2019. The severe contraction caused by the pandemic resulted in a RevPAR drop of 80% year-on-year in 2020, as was the case for all major European cities; The duration of the strict measures imposed by the Dutch government throughout the pandemic resulted in little to no recovery in 2021; Recent evidence from the market indicates a strong pick-up in demand following the lifting of restrictions in March 2022. Most notably, the city-wide average rate is experiencing a robust recovery, with RevPAR levels for the months of May and June having almost recovered to 2019 levels. Key Metrics Source: HVS Research Photo by HVS Hotel Supply Overall, hotel supply increased at a compound annual rate of 4.7% from 2010 to 2020, with around 2,000 new rooms recorded in 2018. Total hotel supply currently stands at around 39,000 rooms, and it is fairly equally distributed across the Upscale category (27.4%), the Upper Midscale category (23.7%) and the Upper Upscale category (22.6%). The largest average growth (CAGR 2010-22) was recorded in the Upper Midscale class, at 6.3% or around 5,000 rooms. The ban that was placed on new hotel developments in the Canal District in 2015 resulted in planned projects moving out to more fringe areas. However, at the end of 2016, the city of Amsterdam implemented further restrictions on new hotel construction in order to better manage tourism flow within the city. These restrictions essentially prohibit the development of hotels except in designated areas (such as Overhoeks, Buiksloterham and Indische Buurt) for which development applications can be submitted. This has had a substantial impact on the future hotel pipeline. Hotel Pipeline Source: HVS Research Photo by HVS Investment Market Amsterdams hotel investment market was, pre-pandemic, one of the most liquid and attractive in Europe with a substantial number of transactions happening in recent years. Key sales from 2019 onwards included the 557-room DoubleTree Amsterdam for approximately 430,000,000 (770,000/per room) by Anbang Insurance to AXA IM Real Assets, the 90-room Sir Albert hotel for around 58,000,000 (645,000 per room) by Sircle Collection to WestInvest, and the 579-room Maritim Hotel Amsterdam forward sale for 155,000,000 (268,000 per room) by Invester United Benefits and IES Immobilien to Union Investment. Compared to the strong activity in 2019, only two transactions took place in the whole of 2020, and a further three in 2021, of which the largest was the sale of The Albus hotel (72 rooms) for approximately 25,000,000 or around 350,000 per room by Hilver-Heuvel to Vischjager Vastgoed BV. For the latest value trends, please refer to our annual European Hotel Valuation Index (HVI), which showcases the year-on-year value growth of hotel assets in key markets, including Amsterdam. Hotel Transactions Source: HVS Research Photo by HVS Outlook The Amsterdam hotel market was strongly impacted by government restrictions imposed during the pandemic, which resulted in particularly weak performances for this market in 2020 and 2021. However, data to the end of June 2022 portray the enduring appeal of this market for both its leisure and corporate demand bases. We expect the post-pandemic recovery to continue to benefit from the limited new supply allowed in the market. This, coupled with the strong fundamentals of this market and generally well-diversified demand sources, should allow Amsterdam to quickly recovery its position as one of Europes more coveted hotel markets. As indicated in our European Hotel Valuation Index, hotel values have already started to recover in 2021, and remain amongst the highest in Europe. Value Trends Source: HVS Research Photo by HVS Sophie Perret Associate Director +44 20 7878 7722 HVS View source This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The Mahogany Project has come a long way from five years ago, when its primary funding source came from its founders Uber job. At the time, Verniss McFarland III was still in shock and distraught by the recent killing of Chyna Gibson, a Black trans woman who was killed in New Orleans in 2017. The two had never met, but McFarland knew people close to Gibson and was heartbroken by her death. McFarland, a former organizer for get-out-the-vote groups, opted to use previous experience to found the nonprofit, driving for Uber and taking other odd jobs to raise the few thousands of dollars needed to initially get it up and running. I wanted to do something that didn't continue to just allow Black trans women and Black trans people to continue to become hashtags, McFarland said. FROM THIS AUTHOR: Racial justice donations soared after George Floyds murder so why can't many groups find funding? Now, the Mahogany Project, a Houston nonprofit that assists local Black trans people with housing, health, employment and education, has received a boost. It recently won $45,000 in grant funding, and in February moved into a west Houston office building that has become its headquarters amid a growing wave of violence and threats to trans people and rights including as recently as last week, when a trans woman in Houston was killed. McFarland hopes the extra money will help the Mahogany Project provide key needs for Houstons trans community, while also fighting back against the stigmas. A lot of time and resources are compiled around HIV-related services, instead of really honing in and understanding that trans people also need safety, McFarland said. They need housing, educational services, food, jobs. Funding issues The additional money will be a godsend the small nonprofit after years of heavy reliance on McFarland and small donations from friends to stay afloat. Nonprofits serving trans people often struggle to get funding they receive less than one cent of every dollar donated to charitable causes, according to Sean Ebony Coleman, founder of Destination Tomorrow, a New York City-based nonprofit that recently won Gilead Sciences TRANScend Community Impact Fund. The Gilead funding has been used to assist other trans-led charities with funding, including the Mahogany Project. Historically, we haven't gotten the same level of support, Coleman said. RELATED: At Pride Houston, growing threats to LGBTQ rights weigh heavy And ongoing violence and stigmas towards trans people has made fundraising particularly difficult and costly because of security concerns. We have to think about the safety of our community and people, McFarland said. Whether the people who are going to knock on the doors are trans or not, we still have to think about the violence that those people may face. The grant comes as the Mahogany Project expands its footprint in Houston, and tries to meet demand for services that have only grown during the pandemic. McFarland said COVID-19 has been particularly difficult for trans people because it cut them off from access to support groups and resources that assist with housing, employment and other needs that they are frequently denied because of discrimination. And the pandemic has exacerbated feelings of loneliness and social isolation that were already particularly high in trans communities. Thats where the Mahogany Project stepped in, McFarland said. Earlier this year, the organization opened up what it says is Houstons first headquarters for primarily Black, trans initiatives. McFarland expects to remain busy amid a growing wave of threats to LGBTQ people, both physically and legislatively. Republican leaders in Texas and other states have increasingly targeted trans rights, and right-wing media has routinely used anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric to stoke fears. Last year was the deadliest year on record for transgender people in America, with at least 45 killings, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nations largest LGBTQ advocacy group. Transphobic violence has similarly been on the rise in Texas, where at least 14 trans people were killed between 2017 and 2020, according to the Transgender Law Center, a California-based trans-led civil rights group. ONLINE: Marisela Castro a trans woman killed in east Houston remembered as loving friend, positive force Of those killed in Texas, eight were Black and all but one were under 30 years old. Texas accounts for 10 percent of the 148 transgender individuals who have been murdered since 2017, according to the Transgender Law Center. And, on Friday, a transgender woman in Houston, Marisela Castro, was killed by a man who police say shot her in the back as she walked down an east Houston street. Castro is at least the 23rd transgender person to be killed in the United States in 2022, according to the Human Rights Campaign, and at least the third Texan. robert.downen@chron.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Two big players in the nations most productive oil basin said Wednesday they made billions of dollars in the second quarter of year as rising demand and tight supply mostly kept oil above $100 per barrel. Houstons Occidental Petroleum and Irvings Pioneer Natural Resources both produce hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil daily in the Permian Basin, the countrys most prolific oil field spanning parts of West Texas and New Mexico. The shale basin is expected to produce a record 5.6 million barrels of oil per day by the end of 2022, according to Norwegian firm Rystad Energy. For the quarter ending June 30th, Occidental Petroleum reported $3.6 billion in profits, compared to a $97 million loss during the same period last year. Globally, Occidental produces about 1.1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, a measurement which includes natural gas. Of that, around 493,000 barrels nearly half came from Oxys Permian operations. On HoustonChronicle.com: Exxon Mobil and Chevron preach capital discipline in shale while reporting multibillion dollar profits Pioneer Natural Resources, which operates exclusively in the Permian, earned $2.4 billion in the second quarter of the year, compared with $380 million during the same time period last year. Pioneer forecasts its production will hit between 623,000 and 648,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2022, compared to 617,332 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2021. The stellar earnings reports come as Europe and its allies are working to replace oil and gas imports from Russia in retaliation for Moscows invasion of Ukraine. That has put a renewed focus on producers in the U.S. to increase output in hopes of both meeting the worlds energy needs while bringing down oil prices. Investors in oil and gas companies, however, have been pushing for capital discipline and increased returns. The result is, instead of spending to quickly ramp up production in oil fields such as the Permian, companies are sticking to already planned production increases providing only modest relief to tight supplies and high prices while passing on a good chunk of their blockbuster profits to investors. Our ability to consistently deliver outstanding operational results combined with our focus to improve our balance sheet has positioned us to increase the amount of capital returned to shareholders, Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub said to investors. Occidental said it expects to buy back $3 billion worth of shares this year, a one-time method of returning money to shareholders. On HoustonChronicle.com: U.S. is worlds top LNG exporter as companies added capacity in Texas, Louisiana Scott Sheffield, Pioneers CEO, said the companys strong second quarter results yielded $2.7 billion in free cash flow during, allowing the company to also engage in share buybacks. Sheffield said Pioneers willingness to aggressively repurchase shares lead to $750 million worth of buy backs since the beginning of April. On Wednesday Pioneers stock fell $7.23, or 3 percent, to close at $220.68 per share. Occidentals stock fell $4.07, or 6 percent, to close at $60.99 a share. Occidental and Pioneer were not the only Permian players reporting more than a billion dollars in profits and share buy backs for the second quarter. Earlier this week Midland-based Diamondback Energy said it made $1.4 billion in the second quarter and would increase its share repurchasing program to total $4 billion. Last week, oil major Chevron reported $11.6 billion in second quarter profits, while Exxon Mobil made $17.9 billion in the three month period. Both oil giants have major operations in the Permian. kyra.buckley@chron.com Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Cheniere Energy said Thursday its earnings more than doubled during the second quarter as the Ukraine war drove European demand for Gulf Coast gas. The Houston liquefied natural gas company said it made $741 million compared with a loss of $329 million during the same period last year. Revenues also more than doubled to $8 billion from $3 billion in the same period of 2021. Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee on Thursday fought the release of records related to the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School, saying such a move would compromise the ongoing investigation into the shooting and law enforcement actions that day. Busbee was testifying before a district court in Travis County, where Democratic state Sen. Roland Gutierrez argued that the Department of Public Safety should release several law enforcement records related to the shooting. Days after the massacre, he submitted a public records request for ballistics reports and a full account of law enforcement response, but the department refused at Busbees direction. The district attorney said she feared the informations release would jeopardize criminal charges she may pursue down the line, and we would lose a lot of cooperation from witnesses. If theres information placed out in the public, then people would be apt to come to a conclusion without hearing the full story, the full investigation there, Busbee said. There is no way that I would be able to see that justice was done. RELATED: Who is the Uvalde DA? And who if anyone will she prosecute in school-shooting probe? DPS had offered to provide the records to Gutierrez alone on July 21 for his legislative purposes with the condition that he did not release the documents publicly. The senator declined, saying the public deserves transparency. This community is broken, Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, told the court. And theyre broken because theyve gotten bits and pieces and shards of information, mostly from the Department of Public Safety, pointing fingers at different law enforcement agencies, showing them bits of evidence from other law enforcement agencies, but never ever pointing that mirror to themselves. Lawyers for the state also argued that Gutierrez did not properly submit a public records request since he sent it to a DPS employee instead of the open records division, invalidating his lawsuit. Gutierrez has been pushing for months for a public release of Uvalde records, noting that law enforcement officials and politicians have repeatedly changed their stories about the events of May 24. In the days immediately following the shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott and other leaders praised police for their quick response to the incident, only to find out shortly after that hundreds of officers declined to confront the teenage gunman for more than an hour. Nineteen children and two teachers died that day. Another 17 people were injured. Busbee said the release of some videos and documents related to the shooting has already negatively affected the Uvalde community and law enforcement investigations. One witness changed her testimony after reading a Texas House committees initial findings on the shooting, Busbee said, and last months release of footage from the hallway outside the classrooms re-traumatized the victims families. WATCH: Video shows hour-plus wait to enter classrooms during Uvalde massacre Too much information, too much disclosure, adversely affects the investigation, she said, adding that distributing evidence in pieces and without context raises more questions than answers. Busbee asked concerned members of the public for time and patience as multiple officials including DPS, the House committee and the Federal Bureau of Investigation complete their probes. These take a long time, and I understand the frustration, but they have to take the time in order to make sure we do the job right, to make sure that we do not impede the rights of any suspect, and to make sure that we have a complete and thorough investigation, she said. The judge, Catherine Mauzy, gave all parties until Monday to submit additional documents and said she would decide the case sooner than later. cayla.harris@express-news.net University of Houston-Clear Lake is launching the safety-and-communications service SafeZone this fall to deliver more rapid response via a smartphone app to calls for assistance on campus. We are always exploring ways to make UHCL even safer for our students, faculty and staff, Russell Miller, the universitys police chief and executive director of public safety, said of the service, provided through CriticalArc. SafeZone is the future of campus public safety. Miller said with the app, anyone in the campus community can request assistance with a push of a button on a smartphone. Whether its an emergency, a medical issue or they want to check in as a lone worker after hours, SafeZone is a powerful tool to help us deliver the best possible service to our stakeholders, Miller said. CriticalArc Chief Operating Officer Darren Chalmers-Stevens said that in an emergency, a person can call 911, but on a campus, its often challenging for responders to find an individuals exact location. If students call for help with the SafeZone solution, first responders will know who called for assistance, where they are, and the nature of aid required to speed up the response and optimize incident outcomes, he said. The service features strict privacy safeguards based on opting in SafeZone users real-time locations are shared only if they activate an app-based alert or choose to check in. Miller hopes that as Safezone gains traction across the campus, users will find that it is a tool for positive engagement while promoting a safety culture. To spread word about the service, information will be shared via social media, in-person meetings and e-mail and will move forward in phases, including student groups and organizations, orientations, and faculty and staff groups, Miller said. Meal program applications available online Pasadena Independent School District is asking families to complete an application for free and reduced-price school meals, according to a recent press release from the Nutrition Services office. The application will determine a childs eligibility for the program as well as other state or federal benefits. Eligibility is based on income, special assistance program participation and students status, such as runaway, homeless or migrant. Learn more at www.pasadena.schoollunchapp.com. Applications in English and Spanish also are available at the districts nutrition services office, 1515 Cherrybrook Lane. College-bound students honored Galveston College highlighted the efforts of more than 75 Upward Bound students during a recent awards banquet. Were excited to still be there for those students who will continue going to Galveston College in the fall and support those who are going away, program director Priselda Perez said. We had a really great class this year that pushed and challenged themselves. Dual-credit graduate Jillian Hester was honored with an Outstanding Academic Achievement Award. Hester maintained a 3.9 GPA at Galveston College and earned an associate degree before graduating from Ball High School in May. These accomplishments have helped me set new goals, she said. They did not come easy and took a lot of work. Hester encouraged her classmates to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the college preparatory program. Upward Bound is one of the best things to happen to me, she said. I went to school, did dual credit at Galveston College, was in Upward Bound, worked, played softball at Ball, and I somehow managed to be a normal teenager. Learn more at www.gc.edu/students/trio-programs/index.php. Pasadena native earns academic recognition Kevin Cayetano, of Pasadena, has been named to the spring 2022 deans list at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. To qualify for the honor, students must achieve a 3.5 GPA. Cayetano is a business management major. Learn more at www.champlain.edu. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate SEOUL, South Korea (AP) After infuriating China over her trip to Taiwan, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met South Korean political leaders in Seoul on Thursday but avoided making direct public comments on relations with Beijing and Taipei that could further increase regional tensions. Pelosi, the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years, said Wednesday in Taipei that the American commitment to democracy in the self-governing island and elsewhere remains ironclad. In response, China on Thursday began military exercises, including missile strike training, in six zones surrounding Taiwan, in what could be the biggest of their kind since the mid-1990s. After visiting Taiwan, Pelosi and other members of her congressional delegation flew to South Korea a key U.S. ally where about 28,500 American troops are deployed on Wednesday evening, as part of an Asian tour that included earlier stops in Singapore and Malaysia. She met South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of Parliament on Thursday. After that hour-long meeting, Pelosi spoke about the bilateral alliance, forged in blood during the 1950-53 Korean War, and legislative efforts to boost ties, but didnt directly mention her Taiwan visit or the Chinese protests. We also come to say to you that a friendship, (the) relationship that began from urgency and security, many years ago, has become the warmest of friendships, Pelosi said in a joint news conference with Kim. We want to advance security, economy and governance in an inter-parliamentary way. Neither Pelosi nor Kim took questions from journalists. Kim said he and Pelosi shared concerns about North Koreas increasing nuclear threat. He said the two agreed to support their governments push for denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula based on both strong deterrence against North Korea and diplomacy. Pelosi and her delegation later spoke by phone with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on the alliance, foreign policy and other issues. Yoon is on vacation this week, but critics accuse him of intentionally shunning a face-to-face meeting with Pelosi in consideration of ties with China, South Koreas biggest trading partner. Yoons office said it had reviewed national interests and that Yoons vacation plan had already been set up when, about two weeks ago, Pelosis side contacted his office about a possible meeting. During the phone conversation, Pelosi and other members of her congressional delegation didnt bring up the Taiwan issue, and Yoon also didnt raise the matter, Yoons office said. In recent years, South Korea has been struggling to strike a balance between the United States and China as their rivalry has deepened. Yoon, a conservative, took office in May with a vow to boost South Koreas military alliance with the United States and take a tougher line on North Korean provocations. Later Thursday, Pelosi visited a border area with North Korea that is jointly controlled by the American-led United Nations Command and North Korea. She became the highest-level American to go to the Joint Security Area since then-President Donald Trump visited in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sitting inside the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) -wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer created at the end of the Korean War, the JSA is the site of past bloodshed and a venue for numerous talks. U.S. presidents and other top officials have often traveled to the JSA and other border areas to reaffirm their security commitment to South Korea. Pelosi posted several photos at the JSA on Twitter and wrote: We conveyed the gratitude of the Congress and the Country for the patriotic service of our servicemembers, who stand as sentinels of Democracy on the Korean Peninsula. Yoon earlier said Pelosis visit to the JSA would demonstrate a strong deterrence against North Korea by the allies, said Kim Tae-hyo, a deputy presidential national security adviser. North Korea didnt immediately comment on her JSA visit. On Wednesday, the Norths Foreign Ministry slammed the United States over her Taiwan trip, saying the current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the U.S. in internal affairs of other countries (is) the root cause of harassed peace and security in the region. On Thursday evening, Pelosi flew to Japan, the final leg of her Asian tour. The Chinese military exercises launched Thursday and planned to last until Sunday involve its navy, air force and other departments. They include missile strikes on targets in the seas north and south of the island in an echo of the last major Chinese military drills aimed at intimidating Taiwans leaders and voters in 1995 and 1996. Chinas official Xinhua News Agency said the exercises are joint operations focused on blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control. Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defense drills, while the U.S. has numerous naval assets in the area. Taiwans Defense Ministry called the Chinese drills unreasonable actions in an attempt to change the status quo, destroy the peace and stability of the region. China views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be annexed by force if necessary. It considers visits to Taiwan by foreign officials as recognizing its sovereignty. Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy, Pelosi said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday. Americas determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad. The Biden administration and Pelosi have said the United States remains committed to the one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing as the sole, legitimate government of China but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. The administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting. Pelosi noted in Taiwan that congressional support for Taiwan is bipartisan, and she praised the islands democracy. She stopped short of saying that the U.S would defend Taiwan militarily and emphasized that Congress is committed to the security of Taiwan, in order to have Taiwan be able to most effectively defend themselves. Tsai said at her meeting with Pelosi that facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told ABCs Good Morning America on Wednesday that U.S. officials dont believe were at the brink now, and theres certainly no reason for anybody to be talking about being at the brink going forward. On Thursday, the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations called for calm in the Taiwan Strait, which separates mainland China and Taiwan, and urged the avoidance of any provocative action. ASEAN foreign ministers, who are meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a regional forum, said they were concerned the situation could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers. Pelosis focus has always been the same, she said, going back to her 1991 visit to Beijings Tiananmen Square, when she and other lawmakers unfurled a small banner supporting democracy two years after a bloody military crackdown on protesters at the square. That visit was also about human rights and what she called dangerous technology transfers to rogue countries. China and Taiwan, which split in 1949 after a civil war, have no official relations but multibillion-dollar business ties. ___ Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan. Associated Press writer David Rising in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, contributed to this report. BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) Two North Dakota Democratic lawmakers on Monday called for an attorney generals opinion on the states abortion restrictions, saying clarity in needed to ensure care is not denied in or delayed in emergency situations. Reps. Zac Ista, of Grand Forks, and Karla Rose Hanson, of Fargo, said discrepancies in state law could result in victims of rape having to get permission from a spouse to obtain an abortion, or in doctors not treating ectopic pregnancies, which occur when an embryo grows outside the womb and often are life-threatening to the women involved. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate GERING, Neb. (AP) Fire crews made substantial headway in containing a western Nebraska wildfire that has destroyed some homes, despite getting significantly less rain than officials hoped for. Officials believed the Carter Canyon Fire south of Gering was about 85% contained by Wednesday morning after being only about 30% contained a day earlier, Ben Bohall with the Nebraska Forest Service said. Fire crews had hoped storms Tuesday would bring heavy rains to help douse the flames, but Bohall said the area instead only saw light showers and lightning strikes that sparked two additional fires. The first fire was sparked inside the wildfire parameters and was extinguished after burning a little more than 3 acres (12,140 square meters), Bohall said. The second fire erupted in Banner County south of the wildfire and was put out after burning about 5 acres (20,234 square meters), he said. A jump in humidity has helped keep the wildfire from gaining energy, Bohall said. There also was a slight chance of thunderstorms and showers Wednesday night, but crews weren't expecting much in they way of help from Mother Nature, he said. Still, we're hoping that by tomorrow, we'll end up turning this effort back over to the Gering Fire Department, Bohall said. The wildfire has scorched about 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of mostly grass and timberland, destroying three homes and damaging several others over the weekend. Officials confirmed late Tuesday that the fire was started by several lightning strikes Saturday evening. It gained ground early on due to tinder-dry conditions, rough terrain and high winds. The National Weather Service has forecast scorching temperatures over 100 degrees (37.7 Celsius) each day through Friday, with the heat receding somewhat to the upper 80s on Saturday. Other large fires are raging in the West, including a Northern California fire that has burned roughly 90 square miles (233 square kilometers) in the Klamath National Forest. In northwestern Montana, a fire that started Friday on the Flathead Indian Reservation had 25 square miles (66 square kilometers) by Tuesday, and the Moose Fire in Idaho had burned more than 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. By Lee Hyo-sik Cutera, a leading cosmetic and laser equipment maker in the U.S., has expanded its lawsuit against Lutronic USA to include the latter's parent company in Korea, according to legal documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Wednesday. In January 2020, Cutera filed the suit against the U.S. subsidiary of the Korean aesthetic laser device maker for allegedly stealing trade secrets by hiring its former employees. The company also sued the former workers, most of whom are salespeople including former executive Larry Laber, for violating their contracts and duties. The amount of damages sought by Cutera has not yet been determined but is rumored to be in the tens of millions of dollars. The court in early 2021 issued a preliminary injunction against Lutronic USA, ordering it not to use Cutera's trade secrets and not to destroy any related documents. In its complaint filed with the court, Cutera said it decided to file new complaints against Kosdaq-listed Lutronic, headed by CEO and board Chairman Hwang Hae-lyung, and a former contractor, seeking damages that could be in the tens of millions of dollars. The company, headquartered in California, also claimed the ongoing litigation will create a significant overhang for Lutronic and severely hamper its potential efforts to pursue an initial public offering in the U.S. "There have been several new developments in Cutera's efforts to stop Lutronic from stealing confidential information and trade secrets, and luring away Cutera employees with false promises, including new revelations about Lutronic's wrongdoings from a former executive and extensive detailing of how an independent contractor played both sides," read a legal memo filed. The firm makes numerous claims against its Korean competitor, including misappropriation of trade secrets, violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and unfair competition. Cutera claimed, citing Lutronic's former CFO, that Hwang met with its executive to learn about its trade secrets, including one 14-hour-long meeting where Cutera employees divulged trade secrets to Hwang and the CFO. "Lutronic has used Cutera trade secret information to develop new products that it had no plans to develop before hiring Cutera employees, and the former sales employees continue to use Cutera sales information to unlawfully compete against Cutera," the company said in the complaint. "Lutronic hired a former Cutera consultant, James Bartholomeusz, to acquire the firm's trade secrets and to create for Lutronic a product that copied a Cutera product that the consultant worked on while at the company. Lutronic and Hwang also hired the head of Cutera's sales organization, Laber, so that he could transfer the firm's sales team to Lutronic. Lutronic wanted to destroy Cutera's sales team." It then alleged Lutronic knew Laber was violating his legal duties to Cutera and that Hwang as well as Lutronic's CFO and CTO helped him do so, adding Lutronic interfered with the employment contracts of the former Cutera employees and committed acts of unfair competition in violation of law. Kim Byung-wook, a lawyer at Haewoo Law Office in Seoul, said luring away employees from competitors with the promise of higher salaries and stock options has for years been a widely known method for many to acquire trade secrets and technological knowhow. "I do not know about U.S. laws in detail regarding unfair competition. But under Korea's Prevention of Unfair Competition Act, there is significant ground that Lutronic's hiring of former Cutera employees could be ruled illegal," Kim said. "In principle, the courts tend to view recruiting key employees from competing companies as problematic and if there is evidence showing attempts to steal trade secrets, the plaintiff is in a much better position than the defendant." Founded in 1997, Lutronic produces various laser devices for aesthetic purposes, and generates most of its revenue from exports. It operates subsidiaries in the U.S., Japan, Germany and China. In the second quarter of 2022, it posted 44.7 billion won ($34.4 million) in sales and an operating profit of 12.1 billion won. Lutronic officials could not be reached for comment. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) The commander of the United States military in the Pacific said Monday he wants to expand and strengthen its ties with New Zealand. The visit to Wellington by Adm. John Aquilino, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, comes as the U.S. is looking to increase its presence in the region amid deep concerns over China's growing ambitions in the Pacific. They include most recently the Solomon Islands, where the U.S. and several Pacific nations expressed deep concern about a security pact the Solomons signed with China in April, which many fear could result in a military buildup in the region. Aquilino was greeted with a traditional Maori welcome ceremony and laid a wreath at the Pukeahu National War Memorial Park. He spoke briefly to media ahead of meetings with top New Zealand defense force and government officials. Our partnership runs very deep, Aquilino said. We are doing many things together to continue to ensure peace and prosperity for both of our nations and for all the nations in the region. Aquilino said he wanted to identify new areas where the U.S. could work with New Zealand. He said the leadership of Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific was critically important." "The one thing you will never hear out of me is big or small. This is a partnership," Aquilino said. All nations deliver those things that they can deliver. He said the U.S. understood the security implications of climate change in Pacific island nations, including for food security and water security, and the importance for island nations to be able to fish in exclusive zones. The United States has been a Pacific nation our entire life. We will continue to operate in the Pacific no matter what else you might hear, Aquilino said. Air Marshal Kevin Short, chief of New Zealand's defense force, said the relationship with the U.S. had been strong for decades, and it regularly interacts with U.S. forces so they can both operate better in the region. Trent Nelson/AP SANDY, Utah (AP) Police said on Wednesday that an attack against a gay couple in suburban Salt Lake City is being investigated as a hate crime. Stefanie Peacock said her 18-year-old son, Christian, and his boyfriend Jacob Metcalf, also 18, were attacked just after midnight Saturday. They were standing outside of the Peacocks' home in Sandy, a 97,000-person suburb southeast of Salt Lake City. A video recorded by Metcalf and posted on social media shows young men using homophobic slurs while Christian Peacock demands they leave. Firefighters battling a grass fire in northwest Harris County found a man's body amid the blaze, according to the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office. The body was found in the 16600 block of Bobcat Trail, the fire marshal's office said in a tweet. The man was described as an elderly male, according to the tweet. Bobcat Trail in Cypress, near the Grand Parkway. At 4 p.m., Harris County Fire Marshall Laurie Christensen said man's death was still under investigation and it's not clear if his death was related to the fire. Officials believe the man lived near where his body was found, Christensen said. The Rosehill Fire Department and seven other fire departments were also responding to the fire, Christensen said. The wildfire near where the body was reported found was 25 acres in size, according to Texas A&M Forest Service. As of 6 p.m., the fire was 100 percent contained, according to the forest service. No people or livestock have been evacuated because of the fire, Christensen said. john.ferguson@chron.com OnScene.Tv A southwest Houston was charged Wednesday in connection with the death of his 1-month-old son at a motel in west Houston earlier this week, according to court documents. Jamal Robertson, 33, is charged with injury to a child serious bodily injury in the 177th State District Court, according to court records. He is also facing charges of aggravated assault of a family member, felon in possession of a firearm and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors say Robertson struck and hit the child with his hand and against a blunt object, according to the criminal complaint. A teen has been charged with capital murder in the fatal shooting of two men on an Eastex/Jensen road last week after the pair allegedly attacked him earlier, according to court documents. Kurt Whitten, 19, was arrested around 11 a.m. at his home on the 2100 block of Wellington Street near Burden on Tuesday morning, according to authorities. He was booked and subsequently charged Wednesday with capital murder for the deaths of 20-year-old Jeremiah Ponce and 26-year-old Thomas Alvarado. More on Crime: Houston police seized thousands from him in a raid led by a disgraced cop. He never got it back. Ponce and Alvarado were shot and killed around 10 p.m. at intersection of Aldine Westfield and Parker roads, according to Houston police. Both men were shot in the torso and found on the ground near the passenger side of the car before being pronounced dead at the scene by Houston firefighters. Court documents state both men attacked Whitten before he gathered a group of friends in a black Ford truck to search for the pair. Whitten found the men at the location, shot one of the men with an AK-47 as he got out of the passenger seat of a white Honda Accord and then shot the driver as the he attempted to check on the first victim. One gun was found near one of the victim's body while another gun was found inside the car on the driver's side, according to investigators. It is currently unclear if either of the victims were able to fire back. TRENDING: How starting teacher salaries stack up in Houston-area districts after a summer of pay raises On Wednesday, Harris County Magistrate Jim Callan denied bail for Whitten, according to court records. Initially, Whitten's attorney argued he be given a $45,000 bond by reiterating the claims that the deceased men attacked Whitten and arguing the deadly shooting was an act of self defense, records show. Whitten is scheduled to appear for the first time in front of Judge Colleen Gaido of the 337th District Court on Thursday morning, court records show. A spokesperson for the Harris County District Attorney's Office Thursday morning could not confirm if charges were going to be brought against the friends Whitten allegedly gathered to help him find Ponce and Alvarado. No other information is available at this time. Joel.Umanzor@Chron.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 2 1 of 2 OnScene.TV Show More Show Less 2 of 2 OnScene.TV Show More Show Less Two men were killed Wednesday night in shootings at a Third Ward convenience store and a nearby bike trail, according to the Houston Police Department. The men, who werent immediately identified, were shot in the parking lot at the Scott Food Store, at the corner of Tierwester and Winbern and on a bike trail in the 3100 block of Anita. Houston will begin monitoring its wastewater for monkeypox in late August as cases of the blister-causing contagion continue to climb, health officials said. Scientists will begin testing for the monkeypox virus in city sewage samples starting in about three weeks, Houston Health Department spokesperson Porfirio Villarreal said Thursday morning. LIVING IN HELL: A Houston monkeypox victim on his battle against the disease There are 152 cases in Harris County, 131 of those in Houston, the countys Public Health Department reports. More than 6,300 Americans had tested positive for monkeypox as of Wednesday, nearly 500 of them in Texas. Many cases have been among gay and bisexual men, but the disease can be spread among anyone via close contact. To collect the data, Houston scientists will take weekly samples from flushed wastewater at sewage treatment plants across the city. Once tested, the samples will give scientists a snapshot of which neighborhoods have the most monkeypox virus. Health officials have used wastewater tracking to monitor COVID-19 levels in the citys sewage since the beginning of the pandemic to understand how quickly the virus is spreading among the citys two million inhabitants. The tracking project, a joint effort by Rice University and the Houston Health Department, offers clues to the severity of the pandemic that may be invisible in testing data. The news that health officials would begin applying the same data collection method to monkeypox comes as the city attempts to course-correct a vaccine rollout that has been marked by confusion and frustration among residents seeking shots. Houston received a shipment of 6,740 monkeypox vaccines this week, Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday, less than one week after the city abruptly paused and then quickly reinstated distribution amid strong demand. An additional 10,000 shots are expected in the coming weeks, Villarreal said Thursday. A third of that supply will be given to Harris County for distribution. More from Nora Mishanec: Vulnerable Houstonians struggle to get a monkeypox vaccine as city battles shortage The influx of several thousand more shots will allow health officials to fully vaccinate about 3,370 people with the two-shot regimen, currently available to people who have been exposed to someone who later developed a case of monkeypox. Monkeypox is spread through skin contact or touching fabrics and other shared surfaces, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The viral contagion, which causes fever and painful lesions that can take up to four weeks to resolve, began circulating in the Bayou City in late June, when four Houston residents who had recently traveled abroad developed symptoms. Houston residents who have contracted the virus in recent weeks have described debilitating pain as large blister-like lesions spread across their bodies, which tend to appear on a persons face, hands, mouth or genitals. nora.mishanec@chron.com Eight years before Uvalde school police Chief Pedro Pete Arredondo led a disastrous law enforcement response to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, he was demoted from a high-ranking position at the Webb County Sheriffs Office. Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar said he demoted Arredondo from an assistant chief to a commander in October 2014 because he couldnt get along with people. Basically, thats what happened, Cuellar said on Thursday. He was difficult to get along with with his coworkers, especially upper staff. The basic thing I want to say is he just didnt fit the qualifications or the work that I set out for him. Before coming to Webb County, Arredondo served 16 years with the Uvalde Police Department. Even in Uvalde PD, when he was over there, they disliked the (expletive) out of him, Cuellar said. They were hoping he would get a job in Laredo. CUATE SANTOS Cuellar said Arredondo clashed with then-Webb County Chief Fred Garza, who was the departments second in command and Arredondos supervisor. Garza, who is now police chief of Eagle Pass, declined to comment on Thursday. CHRISTOPHER LEE, STR / NYT An Oct. 8, 2014, letter from Cuellar to Arredondo said he was being reassigned from Assistant Chief to Commander. Two days earlier, someone had written demotion in a payroll worksheet for Arredondo. Neither Arredondo nor his attorney responded to messages seeking comment Thursday morning. Records show Uvalde Consolidated ISD might not have fully reviewed Arredondos employment history when it hired him as its police chief in 2020. On Feb. 13, 2020, the school district announced on Facebook that it was proud to introduce our District Chief of Police, Pedro Pete Arredondo, a native of Uvalde who was focused on providing safety for all students, staff and our community. Six days later, a human resources coordinator at Uvalde CISD emailed Arredondos previous employer, United ISD in Laredo, seeking a copy of his service record, according to emails obtained by the San Antonio Express-News. Arredondo worked as a captain in the Laredo school district for about three years after leaving the Webb County Sheriffs Office in 2017. CUATE SANTOS Uvalde CISD spokeswoman Anne Marie Espinoza did not respond to questions about whether the Uvalde school district was aware of Arredondos demotion in Webb County when it hired him. Cuellar said Uvalde CISD never called him directly to ask about Arredondos job performance in Webb County. If the school district had called, Cuellar would not have recommended Arredondo for the job, he said. I dont think I would, based on the performance, he said. If Uvalde had asked the proper questions, especially on the chief position, the high-ranking position, I would have said, I dont think (Arredondo was) capable of running even a small department. But they never asked. Cuellar added, They do investigations based on, Hey, I worked here, I worked there. But then they never asked us. To do a good, clean background on somebody, they need to ask the sheriff. I would have been honest with them and said, Hey, this is why he was demoted. Basically, he didnt fit my criteria of being a chief. In his application to work at United ISD in Laredo, Arredondo listed Garza as a reference. Arredondo also boasted in the application that the Webb County Sheriffs Office had awarded him a Life Savers Award for 2 different incidents and 6 different lives saved during my actions as a hostage negotiator. Cuellar said he recalled one standoff in 2012 at a house in El Cenizo with a man who was holding four or five undocumented immigrants hostage. Arredondo was among many officers who spoke to the suspect, Cuellar said. Danny Zaragoza, Staff Photographer It wasnt him, Cuellar said. It wasnt him completely. I think he exaggerated a little bit on the application. Cuellar said he and Victor Escalon of the Texas Department of Public Safety were primarily responsible for ending the standoff, persuading the suspect to drop his gun before moving slowly into the house and handcuffing him. I know that (Arredondo) was in the command center talking, Cuellar said. This is teamwork. You cant say, I did it all myself. Everybody talked to (the suspect), even Victor Escalon. It was a team effort. It wasnt just one person. Botched response to rampage On May 24, a gunman entered Robb Elementary with an assault-style rifle and killed 19 children and two teachers inside two classrooms. Arredondo, a 29-year law enforcement veteran, was among the first officers to arrive about three minutes after the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos of Uvalde, entered the school and started shooting inside the classrooms. But it took officers on the scene more than an hour to breach a door to the classrooms to confront and kill the gunman. Investigators said the door likely was unlocked the entire time. Arredondos own policy placed him as incident commander during the mass shooting. But he wasted vital time inside the school looking for a master key and trying unsuccessfully to negotiate with the shooter, who was not responding, even as injured students inside the classrooms called 911 pleading for help. CHRISTOPHER LEE, STR / NYT Uvalde CISD placed Arredondo on unpaid leave last month. The school district was scheduled to hold a termination hearing for Arredondo on Thursday, but postponed the meeting for a second time to once again ensure Pete Arredondos due process rights are met, Espinoza said in a written statement. A Texas House committee investigating the law enforcement response to the massacre learned from DPS in June about Arredondos demotion in Webb County, said state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, a member of the committee. Moody said DPS told the committee about the demotion during a closed-door meeting that included Steve McCraw, the director of DPS. At the time, DPS officials told the three-member committee including its chairman, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock; former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman; and Moody that they did not know the reason that Cuellar demoted Arredondo, Moody said. But the state agency was hyper-critical of Arredondo nonetheless, Moody said. I remember it shocking me, the pointed language they used, Moody said. They gave us the impression that this is a guy who was essentially bouncing from one place to the next. Arredondo received active-shooter training before he joined Uvalde CISD. United ISD Police Chief Ray Garner told the Express-News in June that Arredondo was responsible for the Laredo districts north side schools before he joined Uvalde CISD. Down here, we do a lot of training on active-shooter scenarios, and he was involved in those, Garner said. We train (officers) to go straight for the shooters and neutralize them. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, officers have been trained to confront and kill active shooters swiftly, prioritizing the lives of victims over those of officers. That didnt happen at Robb Elementary. Instead, Arredondo treated the crisis as if Ramos were hunkered down inside the classrooms. He told the Texas House committee that he prayed no children were inside, and he treated the gunman as a barricaded subject rather than an active shooter because he couldnt see any injuries, according to the committees report. Body-camera footage, however, captured Arredondo saying, Theres probably some casualties, the report said. Arredondo was born in Uvalde, a town of 16,000 that serves as a gateway for recreation along the Frio River, Garner State Park and the South Texas shale. His first job after graduating from the Southwest Texas Junior College law enforcement academy in 1993 was as a 911 dispatcher for the Uvalde Police Department. He served 16 years with the Uvalde PD and had multiple roles, including patrol officer, detective and an assistant chief. Arredondo was hired at the Webb County Sheriffs Office in January 2009. He spent about a year from 2011 to 2012 working as a jailer there. He was promoted to an assistant chief before his demotion in 2014 to commander. He applied to work at United ISD in Laredo in 2017. In his application, Arredondo described an array of responsibilities as assistant chief in Webb County, including oversight of all the divisions. A description of his subsequent role as commander of the patrol division was more limited: Supervise the division, work and create policy as needed, internal affairs, human resources, armory and evidence management, departmental inventory. Joshua Eaton is a freelance investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C. bchasnoff@express-news.net With as many officials as it takes to run a place as big as the Houston area, occasionally someone is going to be accused of doing something they shouldn't. Mayor Sylvester Turner's council liaison pleading guilty to accepting a bribe from a local bar owner to help pass building inspections is just the latest black eye officials have dealt with in recent years. LATEST SCANDAL: Turner aide was offered more than $10K to help bar pass inspection, fast-track permit, records show Here is a breakdown of the most recent controversies that have been a headache for Houston and Harris County officials: William-Paul Thomas, Turner's council liaison, pleaded guilty July 25 to conspiracy to accept a bribe after it was discovered he accepted money to use his position to help a bar owner pass a building inspection. Jamaal Ellis / For the Chronicle The bar owner hoped to open a bar/nightclub as a restaurant and offered Thomas more than $13,000 to help him pass the inspections, unsealed court documents show. Thomas contacted a fire official and "pressured other officials" to approve the permit. He was then paid an undisclosed amount of money. Thomas retired Tuesday, July 26, for health reasons, he told Turner in an email. Affordable housing deal scandal The mayor himself was accused of corruption in 2021 by then Housing and Community Development Director Tom McCasland. Turner was accused of attempting direct affordable housing money to a company run by his longtime law partner for a $15 million development for senior living, instead of $16.2 million for four projects to provide 362 family units. The move allegedly was made against his staff's recommendations. RELATED: Everything that's happened since Mayor Turner was accused of corruption over housing deal Callaghan O'Hare/Bloomberg Turner said he didn't know his former law partner, Barry Barnes, was involved in the deal and didn't see a reason for him not to get the funding. Theres no reason why he should excuse himself, Turner said. Theres no conflict. The mayor fired McCasland soon after and appointed Keith Bynam as interim director, before he eventually was put in the position permanently. COVID contract corruption Two current aides and one former staffer to Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo are accused of using their positions to steer a vaccine outreach contract to a politically connected vendor. The three were indicted on charges of misuse of official information and tampering. Law enforcement raided Hidalgo's offices in March. Policy director Willis Nader, chief of staff Alex Triantaphyllis and senior adviser Aaron Dunn face one felony count on each charge. Dunn no longer works for Hidalgo. Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer According to affidavits, the three exchanged text messages with Elevate founder Felicity Pereyra months before the office requested proposals for the program. Hidalgo canceled the program after Republican county commissioners accused her of steering the $11 million contract toward Elevate Strategies, which they said had no public health expertise. The way its being politicized is getting in the way of getting people vaccinated, Hidalgo said. Its really sad, but its the truth of the matter. We need to focus on so many other efforts. Hidalgo has maintained the innocence of her staffers and herself. Houston ISD vendor corruption charges Former HISD chief operating officer Brian Busby and contracted vendor Anthony Hutchison face public corruption charges related to a bribery scheme that cost the school system millions of dollars. Five other former employees were also charged. Busby and Hutchison were later charged with income tax fraud in April. Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Busby is accused of of helping award construction and grounds maintenance contracts to Hutchison for cash bribes and hundreds of thousands of dollars in home remodeling. The newer indictments allege they both underreported their incomes on federal tax returns to hide bribes or gambling debts. If convicted, the men could face up to 5 years for conspiracy, up to 10 years for bribing a public official, up to 20 years for wiretapping, up to 20 years for witness tampering and up to 3 years for each tax count. Five accused former employees have accepted plea deals. Iran says to launch sensing satellite using Russia's carrier Xinhua) 09:35, August 04, 2022 TEHRAN, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Iran's remote sensing satellite "Khayyam" will be launched by Russia's Soyuz satellite carrier next week, Iranian Space Agency (ISA) said Wednesday. The satellite, which will be launched from the Baikonur space station in Kazakhstan, can help smarten different parts of the country by virtue of its accurate sensors that can be used in different areas, according to a report published on the ISA website. Khayyam will monitor the country's agricultural productivity as well as mining and mineral discoveries, and deal with deforestation and natural or environmental hazards, said the report. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Hyundai Motor, Mercedes-Benz Korea and two other companies will voluntarily recall more than 52,000 vehicles to fix faulty components, the transport ministry said Thursday. These are the latest in a series of recalls by carmakers operating in Korea due to problems with vehicle components. The four companies, including Ford Sales Service Korea, are recalling a combined 52,375 units of 16 different models, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement. The problems include a faulty safety belt system in Hyundai's Venue subcompact, air suspension problems in Mercedes-Benz's E 400 4MATIC sedan, and a possible fire in the fuse box of Ford's Expedition SUV, it said. Mercedes-Benz began to provide repair and replacement services on July 29, with Dasan offering the services on Thursday. Ford and Hyundai are set to begin the services on Friday and Aug. 25, the ministry said. (Yonhap) Whats the matter with Kansas? This time, nothing at all. A state once considered to be a national model for the rise of cultural conservatism, and for the growing trend of middle class Americans to vote against their own interests, turned that reputation on its head Tuesday night at least on the issue of protecting abortion rights. Kansas primary voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to allow for abortion bans. It turns out that conservative voters were not nearly as eager to block abortion access as the states Republican legislature was. Roughly 60 percent of Kansas voters supported preserving abortion rights. In blunter terms, the pro-abortion rights side won a larger percentage of votes than Donald Trump, who carried Kansas by roughly 15 percentage points in 2020. The referendum results are a resounding victory for abortion rights advocates in Kansas and a profound rejection of restrictions that came into effect after the Supreme Courts decision in June to dismantle the constitutional protections afforded by Roe v. Wade. It was also a victory for women in every neighboring state where abortion is illegal Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa who now have a relatively nearby safe haven to pursue the option. Lastly, it was a win for the majority of Americans who still believe that some degree of bodily autonomy is a human right. The Kansas results are proof that the radical laws passed by anti-abortion politicians across the nation are woefully out of touch with what mainstream voters want, which is at least some rights for pregnant women to make choices that affect their bodies, their families, including other children, and their destinies. Texas voters are no different. A University of Texas poll in July found only 15 percent of Texans support a complete ban on abortion access. There is even some evidence that Latino voters in our state, often assumed to be an anti-abortion monolith, believe the procedure should be legal in most cases. The fact that nearly 50 percent of Kansas voters showed up to vote in this summer election 60 percent higher than the 2018 primary should be a loud wake-up call to Texas Republicans on the ballot this fall. Weve all heard the well-worn axiom that Texas isnt so much a Republican state as it is a non-voting state. Now Democrats might finally have a chance to build a sturdy enough coalition of voters to prove that one critical issue, or perhaps two if you count gun safety, can transcend partisanship. After all, Texas the state that birthed the Roe v. Wade case legalizing abortion has since become ground zero for the national assault on abortion rights. The state in 2021 passed an unprecedented abortion ban after six weeks, before many women even know theyre pregnant. The law is so gratuitously oppressive it includes a bizarre bounty hunter provision allowing private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone who aids or abets an abortion. Kansas still has a 22-week abortion ban, but it has also become a crucial hub for abortion procedures in the Midwest, especially after states such as Texas and Oklahoma have now essentially banned the procedure. But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the states five abortion clinics could barely keep up with the demand. In Texas alone, providers were performing close to 55,000 procedures per year, even before the ban passed in September. Having one regional island of abortion access is an untenable reality for most Texans. Whether pro-choice Texas candidates who support abortion rights can effectively appeal to voters on this issue is still an open question. Kansas is a mostly white state with a large evangelical constituency; Texas is a fast-growing, large state with a globally competitive economy and one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the nation. Texas also wont have an abortion rights ballot referendum to drive turnout. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto ORourke said he would work to repeal the abortion ban if elected, a promise that will be hard to keep unless his coattails are long enough to carry other down-ballot, pro-choice candidates to victory. But ORourke does have a useful foil in Gov. Greg Abbott, a politician widely scorned for Texas severe rollback of abortion access under his watch. That Abbotts position on abortion rights has shifted before signing Texas abortion ban, Abbott said in 2014 he supported abortions for up to 20 weeks of pregnancy presumably to satisfy the extremist wing of his party, could make him uniquely vulnerable. It will be up to ORourke and other candidates who favor abortion rights to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters on this issue with a unifying message. Something like: Freedom is a good thing. For speech rights. For gun rights. And for a womans right to control her own body. They all need limits. And they all need protection. It worked for Kansas. Texans who agree have a chance to say so in the fall and prove that Tuesdays results in Kansas were a harbinger, not an outlier. Just three days after the mass shooting that killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Houston-area special education teacher Nick Morgan got the call to place his classroom in lockdown. He turned the lights off and the kids packed into a corner, taking care to be quiet. As the minutes ticked by, they realized this wasnt a drill, and they stayed on lockdown for several hours. Morgan instructed ninth-grade boys to barricade the door with tables. Kids begged to call their parents. Morgan had to tell them no, that they should only text because a child in that classroom in Uvalde was killed when the shooter heard noise. GOVERNORS RACE: Beto ORourke disrupts Abbott news conference in Uvalde: This is on you. The students were crying. Morgan, who has a young daughter at home and whose wife is pregnant, was crying too. A ninth grade boy approached the teacher. This young man put his hand on my shoulder and said Mister, if someone comes I will protect you, I wont let them shoot you. You need to meet your son, and be with your daughter. I tried to say that I couldnt let him do that, that my job was to keep him safe and to make sure he goes home to his parents, Morgan recalled. I was having a real hard time holding it together at this point. A child volunteering to die for you is not something you ever forget. I cant stop thinking about it. Morgan shared his story on social media, and this week the Beto ORourke campaign highlighted it in a campaign advertisement. In the last two days, the video has garnered more than 8,000 likes on Instagram. TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox A woman had been seen with a gun outside the building, Morgan would learn later, initiating the lockdown. Morgan said in an interview he wanted to get his story out there because, even though no one was hurt physically, the day was traumatizing for everyone. For about three hours, 1,000 people didn't know no one was going to die that day, he said. It has become a ubiquitous part of being a child in the United States over the last 20 years to consider in detail how you would respond if a madman with a military-style rifle stormed into your school and started firing indiscriminately, and schools frequently hold drills to practice. The reality is that there is going to be another Uvalde, Morgan said in the ad, blaming Gov. Greg Abbott for rejecting gun control measures since the tragedy. In response to the ORourke advertisement featuring Morgan, Abbotts campaign spokeswoman Renae Eze wrote: Gov. Abbott and First Lady Abbott join all Texans in mourning every single innocent life lost that tragic day, and we pray for the families who are suffering from the loss of a loved one. The governor continues meeting with local leaders and victims families privately in Uvalde to ensure they are receiving all the resources and support needed to heal and discussing what Texas can do to prevent future tragedies. Eze said Abbott has worked with legislative leaders to free up more than $100 million in funding to make schools safer in the wake of the tragedy, listing as focuses mental health, firearm safety, police training, social media, and more. He has directed multiple state agencies to offer assistance and resources to the Uvalde community, she said. On the other hand, ORourke has advocated for stricter gun laws and has said including famously after the El Paso Walmart massacre in 2019 I dont believe any civilian should own an AR-15 or AK-47. The twin issues of gun violence and abortion access, coming in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Courts decision to remove any federal protections for abortion, have been major focuses of ORourkes campaign this summer. The race appears to have tightened, with ORourke now running in single digits behind Abbott and ORourkes campaign setting new fundraising records for the state. The El Paso Democrats campaign posted a similar advertisement several weeks ago, this one with more than 60,000 likes, sharing the story of a West Texas couple whose unborn child had a rare genetic condition that made it impossible for him to survive outside the womb. The mother suffered from underlying health conditions that made pregnancy particularly risky, so the couple decided to seek an abortion in New Mexico that would have been illegal in Texas, rather than waiting. They said the experience caused them to decide to support ORourke in the governors race. edward.mckinley@chron.com WFO RENO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, August 3, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... Alpine County in northern California... Northern Mono County in northern California... Douglas County in western Nevada... * Until 500 PM PDT. * At 303 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. The expected rainfall rate is 0.25 inches in 15 minutes. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. Excessive rainfall over the burn scar will result in debris flow moving through the Tamarack burn scar. The debris flow can consist of rock, mud, vegetation and other loose materials. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Topaz Lake, Alpine Village, Woodfords, Grover Hot Springs, Mesa Vista, Alpine County Airport, Indian Creek Reservoir, Junction CA 89 And CA 4, Indian Creek Campground, Turtle Rock Campground, Markleeville and Holbrook Junction. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... A Flash Flood Warning for a recent burn area means that flooding and/or debris flows are imminent or occurring. Residents living in or immediately downstream should take immediate precautions to protect life. Quickly move away from the burn area only if it is safe to do so, otherwise shelter in place and move to a second story or the highest location in your home to stay out of the path of fast-moving water and debris flows. Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Stay away or be swept away. River banks and culverts can become unstable and unsafe. Please report observed flooding to local emergency services or law enforcement and request they pass this information to the National Weather Service when you can do so safely. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO RENO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... The Tamarack burn scar in... Alpine County in northern California... Northern Mono County in northern California... Douglas County in western Nevada... * Until 345 PM PDT. * At 104 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain over the Tamarack Burn Scar. The expected rainfall rate is 0.15 inches in 15 minutes. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. Excessive rainfall over the burn scar will result in debris flow moving through the Tamarack. The debris flow can consist of rock, mud, vegetation and other loose materials. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms in and around the Tamarack Burn Scar. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flooding of areas in and around the Tamarack Burn Scar. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Alpine Village, Grover Hot Springs, Mesa Vista, Alpine County Airport, Indian Creek Reservoir, Indian Creek Campground, Turtle Rock Campground, Markleeville and Holbrook Junction. CA Highway 89 between Woodfords and CA Highway 4, and US Highway 395 north of Topaz to Double Spring. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... This is a life threatening situation. Heavy rainfall will cause extensive and severe flash flooding of creeks...streams...and ditches in the Tamarack Burn Scar. Severe debris flows can also be anticipated across roads. Roads and driveways may be washed away in places. If you encounter flood waters...climb to safety. Stay away or be swept away. River banks and culverts can become unstable and unsafe. Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO NEW YORK CITY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Friday, August 5, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New York NY 327 PM EDT Wed Aug 3 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THURSDAY TO 8 PM EDT FRIDAY... * WHAT...Heat index values between 95 to 104 expected on Thursday and Friday. * WHERE...Northeast New Jersey, interior southern Connecticut, and the lower Hudson Valley in southeast New York. * WHEN...From 11 AM Thursday to 8 PM EDT Friday. * IMPACTS...The combination of heat and humidity may cause heat related illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... A Heat Advisory is issued when the combination of heat and humidity is expected to make it feel like it is 95 to 99 degrees for two or more consecutive days, or 100 to 104 degrees for any length of time. Seniors and those with chronic health problems or mental health conditions are at an increased risk. Homes without air conditioning can be much hotter than outdoor temperatures. Use air conditioning to stay cool at home or go to a place that has air conditioning. Check on vulnerable friends, family members and neighbors. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! In cases of heat stroke call 9 1 1. * WHAT...Heat index values 95 to 100 expected. * WHERE...Coastal Connecticut and Long Island. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather Wait! Before you go Please sign up for our Evening Digest and Breaking Newsletters Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request. * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content. When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to. After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS! OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those. The recent sharp job growth in Korea was mostly driven by increased employment among youngsters and senior citizens, a central bank report said Thursday. "The economically-active population has exceeded pre-pandemic levels," the Bank of Korea (BOK) said in the report. "In particular, increased labor supplies by youths and senior citizens have played a major factor behind the increase in the number of people employed." Earlier government data showed that the number of employed people came to 28.49 million in June, up 841,000 from a year earlier. This marked the largest job addition in 22 years for the month. The BOK report said that younger people aged 15-29 and senior citizens aged 60 or older mostly drove the recent job creation, though it did not provide detailed figures. Of them, employment among senior people expanded mostly at small businesses with fewer than 30 employees and in farming, forestry and fishing sectors apparently due to other age groups' reluctance to work in such areas. Women accounted for 67.5 percent of job growth seen among younger people in the first half of this year, the report showed. The report, however, noted that government-arranged jobs, mostly short-term work, saw their ratio for employment among senior citizens down from 19.8 percent in the first two months of this year to 5.9 percent in the March-June period. The report predicted that job growth among young and senior people will not likely grow as fast going forward amid worries about a coronavirus resurgence and an economic slowdown. (Yonhap) Weekend Outlook: Block Parties, Artwalks, and More It's going to be a hot and steamy weekend in the Berkshires but there's plenty of cool things to do. First Friday Block Party Eagle Street, North Adams North Adams will be closing Eagle Street to turn this First Friday into a block party from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. The monthly downtown event will feature music, street games, activities and gallery openings. Mayor Jennifer Macksey will host a downtown gathering and Desperados Mexican Restaurant on Eagle Street will offer beer and wine for sale. Pittsfield First Friday ArtWalk Various Venues, Pittsfield It's the First Friday of the month! Artists and artlovers know what that means, Pittsfield's First Friday Artswalk is here starting at 5 p.m. until 8 p.m. Art exhibits will be on view at a variety of venues in downtown Pittsfield with most of the art being on display all month long. During the event, participants will have the opportunity to meet the artists. Participants can download the Downtown Pittsfield Inc. app from the Google Play or App Store to get a virtual walking tour. Participating venues include, Hotel on North, Barrington Stage Company's Wolfson Theatre Center, Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, The Marketplace Cafe, Indoors Out! Free Kids' Paint & Sip, and more For a complete list of participating venues and artist visit the Art Walk website. BCHS Contemporary Artist Exhibit Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, Pittsfield Berkshire County Historical Society launches its contemporary artist exhibit at Lichtenstein Center for the Arts this weekend starting on Aug. 5. Participants will explore several different themes including the effect of industrialization on the natural world, ethnic stereotypes, queerness and disability through contemporary artists Jim Jasper and Christopher Volpe's work. The exhibition runs through August 26. More information here Movies Under The Stars The Adams Visitor Center, Adams The Adams Visitor Center will be showing the Walt Disney Animation Studios' film "Encanto" this Friday, Aug. 5, starting at 7:30 p.m. Families can bring their blankets and lawn chairs to watch the majestic Madrigals as family member Mirabel attempts to save the magic that was gifted to her family. Comedy Night at TurnPark TurnPark Art Space, West Stockbridge TurnPark, located at 2 Moscow Road, will be hosting a stand-up comedy night this Friday, Aug. 5, featuring comedian, actress and writer Kate Willet. The venue will start to serve drinks and snacks starting at 7 p.m. and the show will begin at 8 p.m. More information here Pittsfield Suns The Pittsfield Suns will be concluding their season with three games this weekend. On Friday, they will face off against the Westfield Starfires at Bullens Field in Westfield starting at 6:30 p.m. On Saturday, they return to Wahconah Park to play against the Nashua Silver Knights starting at 6:05 p.m. They will finish off their season on Sunday at 4:05 p.m. when they will be up against the Norwich Sea Unicorns. Band Jam 2022 to benefit PopCares Greylock Community Club, North Adams Local non-profit PopCares is hosting its annual Band Jam this Saturday at Greylock Community Club, located at 548 State Road, from 2 until 10 p.m. The event will feature auctions, live music, food, raffles, and more. This fundraising event costs $10 for entry and all proceeds will go to Berkshire County residents struggling with cancer. Tickets are available with the bartender at Greylock Community Club. More information here Fresh Takes Play Reading: Escaped Alone The Mount, Lenox WAM Theatre will be presenting a play reading of "Escaped Alone" by Caryl Churchill this Sunday, starting at 2 p.m. in the The Mount's Stable auditorium. The play follows the visions of apocalyptic horror that play out inside their minds of three old friends and a neighbor who chat during a series of summer afternoons. Tickets cost $25 for in-person and $15 for virtual. Tickets can be purchased on the WAM Theater website More information here Chvrches With Special Guest Cafune? Mass MoCA, North Adams The Scottish electro-pop trio Chvrches will be performing in Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art's Hunter Center on Friday starting at 8 p.m. Performing alongside Chvrches will be indie, pop, reggae, hip-hop, and rap artist Cafune? Tickets are $49; members receive a 10 percent discount. Preferred seating has sold out. More information here Farmers' Markets Lenox Farmer's Market 80 Church St., Lenox The market will be open in its new location 80 Church Street, formerly the Cafe Lucia, this Friday from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. Participants can pursue local vendors while enjoying food and listening to music. For more information visit Lenox's Chamber of Commerce page. Sheffield Farmers' Market 125 Main Street, Sheffield The Sheffield Farmers' Market is open this Friday from 3 until 6 p.m. at First Congregational Church located at 125 Main St. The market will feature healthy food and products from a variety of local vendors in an attempt to nourish the community by protecting "local small farms, land, bees, and economy." For more information visit the market's website. Pittsfield Farmers Market The Common, Pittsfield Powered by Roots Rising, the market is open every Saturday rain or shine from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. through Oct. 8. Each week the market will have fresh locally grown fruits and vegetables, along with meat, eggs, cheese, baked goods by local vendors. Participants can shop for flowers, and artisan goods while listening to music and participate in family activities. For more information, visit the website. Great Barrington Farmers Market 18 Church St., Great Barrington The market is open every Saturday from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. until the end of October. Every week there will be locally grown food, flowers, and plants along with other local vendors. For more information, visit their website. Lee Farmers Market Town Park, Main and West Park Streets, Lee This market is open every Saturday from 10 until 2 p.m. It accepts SNAP/HIP, Senior Coupons, WIC coupons, and offer market match. More information here. North Adams Farmers Market St. Anthony Municipal Parking Lot The market is open every Saturday from 9 until 1 p.m. into October in the parking lot across from St. Elizabeth's Church. More information here. Williamstown Farmers Market Spring Street, Williamstown The market is open every Saturday from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. into October in the parking lot at the bottom of Spring Street. This year the market will feature returning and new vendors, including a fish monger, knife sharpener, baker, chef, and much more. More information here. Randy Parker to be chief executive officer of Hyundai Motor America / Courtesy of HMA By Kim Hyun-bin Hyundai Motor America (HMA) has promoted Randy Parker as its chief executive officer starting this month. In this role, Parker assumes responsibility for Hyundai's commercial automotive operations in the U.S. "Randy is the perfect person to continue Hyundai's recent successes in sales, market share, and growth in the U.S.," said Jose Munoz, CEO of Hyundai Motor North America. "I have no doubt that he will continue to strengthen the full Hyundai team and our dealer network." "Hyundai has an incredible team assembled by Jose and our Korean leadership," Parker said. "I am humbled and honored by the opportunity to lead this organization and continuing the success of the past few years." Parker is one of the first African Americans to be named CEO of a major OEM regional market. In May 2019, Parker was named vice president of national sales at Hyundai Motor America and was promoted to senior vice president in February 2021. During his tenure, Hyundai became one of the fastest growing mainstream brands in the U.S., setting an all-time retail sales record in 2021 and growing retail market share 31 percent since 2020. Prior to joining Hyundai, Parker was the vice president of Infiniti North America, where he led the brand's overall performance in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. He has more than three decades of automotive industry experience and leadership roles at General Motors (GM), GM Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), Nissan, and Infiniti. Parker holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Texas Christian University. He also completed executive management programs at Harvard and Penn State. In 2021, Parker was named to the Automotive News All-Star?list and was also recognized by the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2022. The Hyundai Motor booth for CES 2022 won the grand prize in the 2022 Red Dot Awards exhibition hall category, Thursday. / Courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group By Kim Hyun-bin Hyundai Motor Group received Best of the Best awards in two categories at the 2022 Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design hosted by the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Germany, as well as Winner awards in six categories. The Hyundai Motor booth for CES 2022, which embodies the robotics vision of the company, portrayed at Consumer Electronics Show 2022 (CES) in January, and the exclusive exhibition hall, called Genesis Suzy, were named the Best of Best in the Brand Stores category. The Best of Best award goes to outstanding entries in each category. At CES 2022, Hyundai Motor Company unveiled a robotics vision based on what it calls, "metamobility" that innovatively expands the user's mobility experience, the "Mobility of Things (MoT)" ecosystem, and acts as an "intelligent robot" for humans. Another Best of Best award winner, Genesis Suzy, is the second independent exhibition hall of Genesis, which opened in 2020. It is the largest Genesis vehicle exhibition base in Korea that captures the brand's unique sensibility. "The efforts of Hyundai Motor, Kia, and Genesis to provide customers with differentiated brand value ??and experiences have resulted in the valuable result of winning awards in the Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design 2022. We will continue to carry out various activities to convey the value of the brand," a Hyundai Motor Group official said. In addition, Hyundai Motor Group won Winner awards in six categories: the Genesis Studio Anseong and the Hyundai Songpa-daero Exhibition Center in the Showrooms section; Genesis House New York in the Brand Stores section; the Genesis GV60 Instore Campaign: Light & Wonder in the Exhibition Design category; the Genesis Connected Car Integrated Cockpit (CCIC) infotainment system in the User Interface category and the Kia CI Guidelines in the Corporate Design Guides category. Two DBC News journalists, Saiful Islam Jewel and Azad Ahmed, were assaulted on August 2 while investigating alleged irregularities in the procurement of medical equipment. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the attack and calls on the Bangladeshi authorities to bring all perpetrators to justice. DBC News journalists Saiful Islam Jewel and Azad Ahmed were assaulted while investigating allegations of corruption at the Victor Trading Corporation office on August 2. Credit: DBC News On August 2, Jewel and Ahmed were investigating allegations of corruption and irregularities made against the Victor Trading Corporation in their procurement of medical equipment. As they reported outside the Corporations office, the owner of Agargaon Taltola trading house, Kawsar Bhuiyan, and other employees proceeded to beat the journalist and cameraperson. Jewel said that the assailants first attacked Ahmed, seizing and vandalising his camera and deleting all audio and video. After asking for their camera and equipment back, Ahmed and Jewel were again beaten by approximately 12 assailants, leaving both seriously injured. The journalists colleagues at DBC news reported the men received immediate medical care at the Shaheed Suhrawardy Media College Hospital in Sher-e-Bangla Nagar. The current state of their injuries remains unclear. Sher-e-Banglanagar police inspector, Shahjahan Mandal, confirmed that Jewel has since filed a police report in relation to the assault, and all eight persons identified have been placed in custody. Information surrounding other assailants or related persons has yet to be revealed. Media associations and press freedom organisations in Bangladesh have condemned the assault and called for further action of protect journalists and media workers. The IFJ has documented several recent incidents of violence against Bangladeshi media workers. On June 6, the body of DBC News Journalist Abdul Bari was found with multiple stab wounds. The IFJs South Asia Press Freedom Report 2021-22 also recorded the assault of Prothom Alo journalist Shahadat Hossain at a protest organised by the Bangladesh Chhatra League in June 2021, while Bahannor Alo correspondent Selim Shamrat was assaulted while investigating similar allegations in July 2021. The IFJ said: Any attack on a journalist performing their duties is a violation of the fundamental rights to freedom of the press and freedom of expression. The safety and security of journalists in the field must be made a priority. The IFJ strongly condemns the attack on Saiful Islam Jewel and Azad Ahmed and urges the Bangladeshi authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice. Working journalists in Myanmar continue to face growing security and safety threats, with one journalist imprisoned and another detained on July 29 and 30 respectively for covering ongoing insurgencies in the country. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the military juntas crackdown on press freedom and calls on authorities to protect the safety of journalists across Myanmar. A group of activists protest the detainment of Japanese citizen Toru Kubota in Myanmar during a rally in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo on July 31, 2022. Credit: Philip Fong / AFP On Friday 29 July, freelance journalist Maung Maung Myo was sentenced to six years in prison for the possession of images and interviews with members of several insurgent groups fighting Myanmars military government, a violation of Section 52(a) of the nations Counter Terrorism Law. Maung Maung Myo was arrested earlier this year while travelling from Myawaddy Town in southeastern Myanmar to Mandalay. Maung Maung Myo had been working for Mekong News Agency since 2020, reporting on a range of local news stories, including the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-coup protests, and clashes between the military and resistance movements. In a separate incident on Saturday July 30, authorities arrested and detained Tokyo-based video journalist, Toru Kubota, while filming a flash protest in Yangon. Kubotas work focused on providing a platform for the voices of marginalised groups, particularly Rohingya refugees. Supporters of Kubota have demanded his immediate release and an online petition has received over 41,000 signatures to date. Japanese embassy officials have also called for Kubotas release. Kubota is the fifth foreign journalist to be arrested in Myanmar since the military coup in February 2021. In 2021, authorities arrested two US journalists, Nathan Maung, editor-in-chief of Kamayut media, and Danny Fenster, managing editor of Frontier Myanmar. Maung was later released on 15 June 2021, while Fenster was sentenced to 11 years in prison before being pardoned by Myanmars military government. Another Japanese journalist, Yuki Kitazumi, was also detained in Yangon on 18 April 2021 for allegedly spreading fake news, but was released on 14 May 2021. Myanmars authorities have arrested at least 135 journalists since February 2021. The IFJ said: Continued detainment and attacks against journalists demonstrate a grave decline in press freedom in Myanmar. The IFJ urges Myanmars military junta to end its ongoing persecution of the media and release all journalists and media workers currently detained. After a series of British journalists, Russia has banned, on Monday morning, the Danish public television correspondent in Moscow, Matilde Kimer. The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ-EFJ) call for the reversal of these decisions. On the morning of 1 August, on arrival at Moscow's Vnukovo airport, Matilde Kimer had passed through passport control but was arrested after collecting her luggage. At an airport office, she was handed a document stating that she was denied entry to the Russian Federation "for security and defence reasons" and should therefore be deported immediately. After a five-hour wait at the airport in Moscow, Matilde Kimer was escorted on board a flight to Istanbul. The ban is imposed for a period of ten years. This means that it is not possible for Matilde Kimer, who has covered Russia for the past 13 years, to travel to Russia before 2032. "The Danish Union of Journalists protests against the Russian authorities' rejection of Matilde Kimer's entry into Russia and the subsequent deportation," reacted Allan Boye Thulstrup, an IFJ-EFJ affiliate. "It is highly objectionable that the Russian authorities prevent freedom of the press and freedom of expression. It is an obvious violation of the rights that citizens in general and journalists in particular should be entitled to in a civilized, democratic society." Matilde Kimer is the latest foreign journalist to be expelled from Russia. But she is not the only one to have had her access restricted in Russia. In a statement released on 14 June, Russia's foreign ministry announced that 29 British journalists, including editors at the BBC, Times, Daily Mail and Guardian, will no longer be permitted into Russia. A further 12 British journalists were added to the list on 1 August, chosen because, the Russian government said, they contribute to Londons hostile course aimed at the demonisation of our country and its international isolation. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ), an IFJ-EFJ affiliate, condemned this "deliberate move to stifle press freedom and curtail accurate reporting about events in Russia." The IFJ and EFJ consider that banning foreign journalists from entering Russia is a severe threat to the rights of journalists to freely collect information. Both organisations call on Russia and all European countries to fulfil their OSCE commitments and refrain from any steps to restrict the free flow of information. The IFJ and EFJ call on the Russian government to withdraw any ban on European journalists. GCash, the leading digital mobile wallet in the Philippines, is partnering with the United States International Agency for Development (USAID) Fish Right Program to plant 125,000 mangrove trees in Culion, Palawan, as part of the companys ambitious goal to integrate sustainability into its core business by planting 2.3M trees in 2023. This newly launched alliance leverages USAIDs decades-long experience in marine biodiversity conservation, climate resilience and fisheries management. The initiative was announced at a day-long launch event on 26 July, coinciding with International Mangrove Day, which included a celebratory tree planting ceremony. The event featured speakers from Culion Foundation, Inc. (CFI), one of the implementing partners on sites, with Alberto A. Lim, CFI President, Culion Mayor Virginia Vera, Deputy Chief of Party William Jatulan, USAID Fish Right Representative, and a recorded message from Martha Sazon, President and CEO of GCash and other local partners and interested stakeholders among its 400 attendees. The event started with a fun run and culminated in a tree planting activity together with beneficiaries of the cash for work on the rehabilitation of mangrove sites as follows; fisherfolks, Calamian eco-warriors, indigenous groups and women leaders who are directly engaged in the strict monitoring and enforcement of science-based approach to the management of these reforestation sites and the protection of the seascapes and coastlines. We all live on the same planet, but the impacts of climate change are felt more strongly by the most vulnerable communities, said Sazon. GCash recognizes the environmental importance of mangroves, and we are excited about our partnership to build communities rich in biodiversity and disaster-resilient, she added as part of the official rollout. USAID Fish Right Deputy Chief of Party William Jatulan commended the partnership's efforts toward climate resilience, We support GCash's efforts in engaging more Filipinos in protecting our coastal areas. These mangrove forests not only protect fish habitats, but they also serve as blue sinks that sequester more carbon and mitigate the effects of climate change. Let's work together for the safety and livelihood of millions of Filipinos for today and for generations to come." This unique partnership engages GCash users in mangrove planting efforts through GForest, an environmental sustainability feature on the app where you can grow your own forest and support tree planting in GCashs partner locations through 'green energy points' or GEnergy. GForest encourages users to reduce their carbon footprints by rewarding these points for every cashless transaction done through GCash. Since GForests launch in 2019, more than 11 million users have contributed to planting around one million trees in various locations nationwide. Through the GCash USAID partnership, Culion Foundation and the local government of Culion co-manage mangrove nurseries and planting of seedlings in eight barangays namely Osmena, Carabao, Galoc, Binudac, Malaking Patag, Luac, Baldat and Burabod since April 2022. During the launch, Mayor Vera committed to sustaining Culion's mangroves by engaging the community and educating them on its importance. The mayor has since issued an executive order for the annual observance of International Mangrove Day in the municipality, requiring tree planting with the scholars availing of education assistance from LGU. The partnership sets to scale this initiative to engage neighboring municipalities and USAID partners across different marine protected areas in the Calamian Islands and South Negros as part of GCashs 2.3 M trees by 2023 target. The partnership supports USAID Fish Right's efforts towards mangrove rehabilitation, which is critical in protecting coastlines from natural disasters and in mitigating the effects of climate change. Healthy mangroves also serve as nursery grounds for many fish, crab and shellfish species that support the livelihood of fisherfolk and mangrove-planting communities. Researchers at Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) conduct a final check of Danuri at the institute's headquarters in Daejeon in May. Courtesy of KARI By Lee Kyung-min Korea's lunar orbiter, Danuri, is fully prepared for a successful launch on Friday, according to the state-run aeronautics and space agency, Thursday. The orbiter, otherwise known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), was developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), with assistance of the U.S.'s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Danuri left Incheon International Airport, July 5, and arrived at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) in Florida, July 7. It will be launched for its moon mission at 8:08 a.m., Friday, carried by SpaceX's Falcon 9, a U.S. rocket. The liftoff had been initially scheduled for Wednesday, but faced a two-day delay due to rocket maintenance issues. The orbiter was erected around 3 p.m., Thursday, for a final checkup before countdown including fueling. The Falcon 9 will release Danuri about 40 minutes after the launch at an altitude of 1,656 kilometers, following first- and second-stage separations. Its computer will activate a program before entering the expected trajectory. The first communication with KARI will be possible about 60 minutes after launch. About four months of operation thereafter will be monitored jointly by KARI and their counterparts at NASA. Danuri will use Ballistic Lunar Transfer (BLT), a "low-energy" transfer from the Earth to the moon using the gravity of both and that of the sun. The method uses less energy and thus conserves fuel by about 25 percent, but takes longer to reach the destination. The orbiter will first enter lunar orbit, Dec. 16, and make five trajectory corrections thereafter to approach low lunar orbit, a mark below 100 kilometers in altitude, Dec. 31. It then will commence initial operation and conduct function tests for one month, before beginning 11 months of full operation through December. SpaceX's Falcon 9 carrying Danuri remains ready for liftoff at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, Aug. 3 (local time). Courtesy of Ministry of Science and ICT Friday's liftoff followed a press briefing in early June, organized after KARI officials completed a pre-shipment review. They carried out extensive space environment simulation tests, as measured by extreme temperature and electromagnetic condition simulations. KARI said the liftoff will proceed as planned, without any issues. "We are fully prepared for the liftoff, an assessment by researchers who have been closely monitoring since Danuri's arrival in the U.S.," a KARI official said. "We are aware of high anticipation from the public. We hope the years of efforts by scientists and researchers will advance the country's space exploration initiative." With the many news reports highlighting the damages of cyberattacks against businesses and countries as a whole, Kasperskys fresh study revealed the heightened awareness of business executives in Southeast Asia (SEA) about the sophisticated risks online. Data theft, alongside Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks and ransomware infections, are the highest on their list of concerns. The study titled How business executives perceive ransomware threat surveyed a total of 900 senior non-IT management (such as CEOs, VP, and Director level) and business owners or partners at companies with 501000 employees. Conducted last April, the study was done globally with 100 executives from SEA. Kasperskys study however uncovers that more than half believe a ransomware attack against their business is too small to worry about When asked to assess the possibility of different types of cybersecurity incidents, data theft, also known as data breach, is the threat that the respondents from SEA are most concerned about (77%). This does not come as a surprise as news about data breaches across the region were being reported almost regularly with wide victimology from e-commerce companies, digital services provider, hotel chains, insurance and health companies, and even government agencies. Data theft the illegal transfer or storage of personal, confidential, or financial information is closely followed by an APT attack (75%), and a ransomware attack (73%). An APT attack uses continuous, clandestine, and sophisticated hacking techniques to gain access to a system and remain inside for a prolonged period of time, with potentially destructive consequences. Because of the level of effort needed to carry out such an attack, APTs are usually leveled at high-value targets, such as nation states and large corporations, with the ultimate goal of stealing information over a long period of time. Ransomware, as the name suggests, is malicious software designed to block access to a computer system or encrypt its data until a sum of money (a ransom) is paid. These attacks have been carried out on individuals or corporations. The anticipation for these three damaging attacks is higher among SEA-based business leaders as compared to the global average by more or less double-digit margins. However, the same study revealed that while the majority of the respondents anticipate a ransomware attack, almost 7 in every 10 (65%) of them believe that the possibility of my organization being exposed to a ransomware attack is too small to worry about. A majority (81%) of the surveyed non-IT executives in SEA also trust that the security measures they have in place are enough to protect them from a ransomware attempt. At first glance, it is good to see that the business executives here are confident about their security posture to defend their organizations against damaging online attacks such as ransomware. We should, however, be careful about not letting confidence breed complacency because the reality is a ransomware attack is not something too small for enterprises to be worried about, comments Yeo Siang Tiong, General Manager for Southeast Asia at Kaspersky. Even though 72% of our respondents from SEA believe that ransomware attacks are being shown as a bigger threat than they actually are by the media, this type of threat is actually evolving and is transforming into a bigger menace that our security systems and IT staffs should be ready for, adds Yeo. Since 2020, Kaspersky experts have been warning about Ransomware 2.0. Almost always a targeted ransomware, Ransomware 2.0 refers to cybercriminal groups who moved from hostaging data to exfiltrating data coupled with blackmailing. The aftermaths of a successful attack include significant monetary loss and damaging reputation loss. This type of attack goes beyond kidnapping a companys or an organizations data. These groups are utilizing the increasingly valued digital reputation to force their prey to pay a hefty ransom. As of 2020, at least 61 entities from the region were breached by targeted ransomware groups including companies from light industry including the manufacturing of clothes, shoes, furniture, consumer electronics and home appliances; public service, media and Technology, heavy industry including oil, mining, shipbuilding, steel, chemicals, machinery manufacturing; finance, and logistics. The infamous ransomware groups Kaspersky experts closely monitor include REvil, LockBit, Conti, and more. To help organizations protect their systems from ransomware and other sophisticated attacks, Kaspersky experts recommend the following: Always keep up-to-date copies of your files so you can replace them in case they are lost (e.g. due to malware or a broken device). These should be stored not only on a physical device but also in cloud storage for greater reliability. Make sure you can quickly access your backups in the event of an emergency. Keep your OS and software patched and up to date. Train all employees on cybersecurity best practices while they work remotely. Only use secure technologies for remote connection. Carry out a security assessment on your network. Enterprise companies are recommended to use anti-APT and EDR solutions, enabling capabilities for advanced threat discovery and detection, investigation and timely remediation of incidents, as well as to have access to the latest threat intelligence. An MDR provider could help to effectively hunt any advanced ransomware attack. All of the above is available within Kaspersky Expert Security. Follow the latest trends via premium threat intelligence subscriptions, like Kaspersky APT Intelligence Service. Know your enemy: identify new undetected malware on premises with Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine. If you become a victim, never pay the ransom. It wont guarantee you get your data back but will encourage criminals to continue their business. Instead, report the incident to your local law enforcement agency. Try to find a decryptor on the internet you can find some of these available at nomoreransom.org. Never follow the demands of the criminals. Do not fight alone - contact Law Enforcement, CERT, security vendors like Kaspersky. For companies looking to improve the expertise of their in-house digital forensics and incident response teams, as well as for IT security practitioners looking to upgrade relevant skills, Kaspersky has also expanded its online expert training portfolio. The Windows Incident Response training was developed by experts from the companys Global Emergency Response Team (GERT) with more than 12 years experience in the field. The self-guided training course includes 40 video lessons and 100 hours of virtual lab time for hands-on learning. The estimated training duration is 15 hours, but participants will have six months of access to the platform to finish the training. More information about the Windows Incident Response course is available via this link. Starpay Corporation is now the official partner of the City of San Juan Business Permit and Licensing Office (BLPO). Residents and entrepreneurs can now conveniently process their business permits anytime, anywhere without visiting the LGUs physical office. In photo (from left). Starpay Chief Financial officer Ulysses Lao, Corporate Secretary, Atty. Philip Co Jr. City Administrator Atty. Dennis Pamintuan, Mayor Francis Zamora, Starpay Operations Head Richard Rosettes and Director Ryan Uy. This partnership is in line with Mayor Francis Zamoras commitment to transforming San Juan into a Smart City. The official tie-up between San Juan and Starpay for the digitalization of our Business Permit and Licensing Office will allow our investors, [and] our business sector to process payments on time, said Mayor Francis Zamora during the launch.City Administrator Atty. Dennis Pamintuan added that since 2019, it has been the thrust of Mayor Zamoras administration to digitalize San Juan, and that these efforts would help in the fight against corruption. Starpay is committed to supporting the government and LGUs. We have been helping our fellow Filipinos during the pandemic through the efficient delivery of financial support. We intend to continue assisting the government and even private institutions in delivering reliable digital services, shared Starpay Operations Head Richard Rosettes. Also present at the event were Starpay Chief Financial officer Ulysses Lao, Corporate Secretary, Atty. Philip Co Jr. and Director Ryan Uy. San Juan business owners can pay their permits via Starpay With the Staypay partnership with the City of San Juan, those applying for business permits can log in to the LGUs e-service portal, fill up the form and attach all required scanned documents. The BPLO office will conduct the assessment, and once approved applicants will receive an email, which includes the online payment procedure. Applicants will receive a Starpay QR code which can be scanned with Starpay application. Users can also use a compatible QRPH-compliant application to settle payments. The app is equipped with an interoperable QRPH standard, even non-Starpay users can settle their payments by simply scanning the Starpay QR code. Starpay foresees tremendous growth of its platform, with more Filipinos appreciating the convenience of digital financial technology. With Starpay, users can pay their bills online, buy e-load, send money through InstaPay, and purchase gaming pins. The company is currently focused on addressing the needs of unbanked communities. Organizations and LGU units who wish to kickstart the transformational efforts can send an email to partnerships@starpay.com.ph. Starpay Corporation is a licensed electronic money issuer, regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Starpay is available to download on the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and Huawei App Gallery. There's an old saying I learned in law school. It went something like this: When the law is on your side, pound on the law. When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. And when neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound on the table. I thought of that saying Wednesday after I saw that the Federal Election Commission has a draft advisory opinion that suggests some changes Google could make to Gmail and spam, despite the fact that hundreds or even thousands of Gmail users have objected. Here's the background. Last month, Google asked the FEC for an advisory opinion on whether it could "launch a pilot program" to allow some political emails to be exempted from "forms of spam detection to which they would otherwise be subject." Instead, messages from some FEC-registered political committees would be routed into Gmail users' inboxes, and users would then have to manually signal that they wanted future political messages from those senders to be routed to spam. Also, Google would provide data to the political candidates and committees about how many of their emails wind up in people's Gmail inboxes, as opposed to going to spam. Why does Google want or need the FEC's blessing? Let's set the context: Back in April, some Republican politicians complained to the FEC that Google was sending Republican fundraising emails to spam at a higher rate than Democratic emails. The disparity, the Republicans complained, was the equivalent of "illegal, corporate in-kind contributions" to Democrats. In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai flew to Washington in June, and pitched top Republicans on the no-spam-for-all idea. But now Google had a new problem: ensuring that if it did try this change, the government would not later claim that the new plan amounted to illegal corporate campaign contributions. The irony -- although this is just my conjecture -- is that Google might rather not be doing any of this, except that the company's hand was forced by the Republicans who complained. Anyway, just over 2,500 people have submitted comments so far to the FEC (the deadline to comment on the draft opinion is now August 11). The overwhelming majority said they were against the idea. But I noticed something in reading many of these objections: It's that while most of those who commented said they didn't want political spam in their inboxes, most also didn't address why they thought the FEC should characterize the no-spam treatment as an in-kind campaign contribution. This seemed like a big deal because the FEC's job is to enforce campaign finance laws, not to regulate email. That in turn made me wonder whether the objections would have any bearing at all on what the FEC would do in the end -- or whether it was the equivalent, as we used to say, of pounding on the table. Sure enough, looking at the draft opinion by the FEC's general counsel, two things were evident: First, there's no mention in the draft opinion of any of the objections. Second, the draft opinion, if adopted, would answer the question about Google's plans very clearly: Yes, Google may offer the proposed pilot program to Eligible Participants because Google would offer the program at the usual and normal charge and in the ordinary course of its business. Now, we should be clear that this isn't a done deal just yet. The draft opinion is just that -- a draft -- and it's difficult to predict what the six FEC commissioners who have to vote on it will do. "It's possible that they discuss it and they split; it could be a 3-to-3 vote, and no opinion gets issued," said Bill Powers, a partner in the law firm Nossaman LLP in Washington, D.C., who previously worked as assistant general counsel for enforcement at the FEC. "Or they could have their discussion, and it appears they find common ground, and they instruct the office of general counsel to draft something along the lines of the discussion. We don't know what will happen." The next step: more public comments and a public meeting on August 11. The FEC has already set up a YouTube link to watch the proceedings that day, so I'll include the link below. The bottom line is that while nothing is final until it's final, if you're Google, and you actually want to go ahead with this new idea, you'd have to feel pretty good about where things stand. "[T]hings do change," Powers said, "but it's better [for Google] than having a negative draft." Joseph Frost an Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) member in Nebraska, is a decentralized entrepreneur, university professor of entrepreneurship, and a three-time founder. He is the founder of yorCMO, the first decentralized leadership franchise business, and heads the Fractional Professionals Association, the first and only community for decentralized, fractional executives and leaders. We asked Joe to explain the benefits of decentralized leadership. Here's what he shared: The world is changing at a faster-than-ever pace. Out of those changes emerges a new model for leadership and hiring: fractional. Fractional hiring implies that an executive leader joins an organization on a flexible, part-time basis, spending a fraction of the time of a full-time leader--at a fraction of the cost. After speaking on the subject at EO's annual One Canada Conference called "The Great Rethink," it struck me just how fascinated entrepreneurs are with new hiring models. Not only do new hiring models profitably impact a business, but so many entrepreneurs (more than I realized) feel the "pain points" of the hiring-onboarding-offboarding cycle that repeats ad nauseum with full-time, permanent employees. Entrepreneurs want alternatives, and the timing is ripe because the market has officially changed. The fractional leadership model became more of a viable reality after the pandemic. Thrust into the future of work, we are permanently altering the ways we run companies and the types of companies we run. Research confirms it: Over the next 5 years, 52 percent of the U.S. adult workforce will either be working or will have worked as an independent contributor. And, 63 percent of executives say they would become independent contractors, given the opportunity. The independent economy is one of the fastest-growing phenomena in the country. Then, the "Great Resignation" occurred. So many entrepreneurs I knew panicked: Retention, hiring, ROI on labor, the ability to raise capital--everything was up in the air without the right people in place. I realized that the "Great Resignation" would become our greatest opportunity. The "fractional" model implies smallness, fragmentation, and incompleteness. However, leaders joining an organization in a fractional capacity are anything but small or fragmented--and neither is the impact they bring to a company. The new hiring model isn't fractional--it is decentralized. If decentralization reminds you of the governing philosophy behind Blockchain, you're right. You remember Blockchain: a few years back, every entrepreneur was talking about it and wondering how to integrate Blockchain into their business. Blockchain popularized it, but "decentralization" is emerging as the reigning philosophy for the future of work. A decentralized hiring model flattens hierarchies and creates a deeper sense of interdependence, rather than authority, between leaders and teams. Decentralized leadership comes with flexibility, relinquishes control, and brings creative ideation--and is future-of-work ready. Here are three primary benefits decentralized companies experience: 1. Diversity of Thought Decentralized hiring, the strategic implementation of fractional and part-time leaders within the C-suite, is non-geo-centric. In a remote-first world of work, organizations have access to a broader, more diverse talent pool. With traditional geographic boundaries eliminated, companies have more options to bring niche expertise from across their industry or outside of their industry. Expertise within the organization can reach new heights and diversity increases--both in terms of cultural background and of thought. Hidden biases stemming from an entirely local talent pool, like conformity bias (AKA groupthink), get eradicated. 2. A Culture of Decision-Making Decentralized leaders are often only physically (or virtually) present for a fraction of the work week. As a result, decentralization begets a culture of decision-making: mid-level teams become empowered to own their decision-making without turning to an ever-present leader for continuous approvals. It's been said that "meaning is the new money." If nine out of ten people are willing to earn less money to do more meaningful work, the companies of tomorrow should incentivize meaningful work, autonomous decision-making, and satisfaction at the core of operational culture. As a result of a shift in decision-making hierarchies, the C-suite becomes liberated, with more time to focus on strategic planning. Micro-management is systematized out; strategic thinking is systematized in. 3. Empowered Equity Decentralization fosters a more equitable culture by flattening an organization's structure. Fractional executives, as part-time or independent leaders, often bring genuine, deep enthusiasm to a company's success--one that is entirely different from the traditional employer-employee work dynamic. The paradigm shift from "You work for me" to "I work for me and you," interlinking each person's success, creates an environment where all employees and leaders share common objectives and aligned incentives. Teams feel more supported, and a strong sense of belonging is created. Power dynamics shift when aggregated control centers, as with Blockchain, are eliminated. Ultimately, decentralized work environments empower employees to make their own decisions in local matters and take higher ownership over their roles. Entrepreneurs and leadership teams gain heightened efficiency, speedier decision-making, and more diverse work culture. Organizations overall become more creative, more flexible, save more costs, are infused with energy, and have access to talent and ideas they would not normally encounter. Hannah Williams, a 25-year-old data analyst, has been ranking up millions of views on TikTok for her series Salary Transparent Street, in which she asks strangers in cities across America how much they earn. A surprisingly large number are willing to answer. If a stranger holding a microphone came up to you on the street and asked you to tell your salary to millions of TikTok viewers, would you do it? As an employer, how would you feel about someone asking that question of your employees? In either case, you might be horrified. And yet, answering this question honestly and encouraging those who work for you to do the same could be a really good idea. As you likely know, a movement toward pay transparency is sweeping the nation as some legislators and employers seek to undo centuries of pay imbalance between men and women, and between white and non-white people of all genders. New York City, Colorado and Washington State all have voted in laws that require employers to reveal compensation information in job ads, and more pay transparency laws are likely coming. Proponents reason that the more public information is available about how much a position or contract job pays, the better equipped everyone will be to negotiate fair compensation--including those who have traditionally been paid less. How much will pay transparency cost? Since women currently earn, on average, 82 cents for every dollar men do, paying people equally could well mean that employers have to spend more on payroll. So it's not surprising that many employers, especially large ones, are fighting hard against pay transparency initiatives. In New York City, some business groups made a mind-boggling and convoluted argument that the new pay transparency law would force them to pay women and people of color less--deliberately ignoring a huge amount of data that shows the opposite is true. Instead, employers should give up the fight and embrace pay transparency. Not only because transparency laws are spreading but also because pay transparency might help them retain some of their most valuable employees. In my new book, Career Self-Care, I describe discovering that a male employee who was doing the same job as I was but had much less seniority was earning substantially more. I felt like I'd been sucker punched. My first reaction was not to ask my boss or HR about it. Instead, I brushed up my resume and began going on job interviews. You may think that if you manage to keep salary information secret, lesser-paid employees will keep on working for you in blissful ignorance, but the opposite could happen. They might learn the information via a back channel, as I did, and, lacking any context or explanation, they could simply get angry and leave. In my case, there was in fact some context and an explanation that made the pay gap a bit easier to understand. More importantly, my boss was quite ready to give me a raise in order to get me to stay. But the only reason I found that out is that, in those high-unemployment days, I didn't immediately find another job and so eventually I talked to my boss about what was troubling me. If it had happened in today's tight labor market, I'd have been out the door before we ever had that conversation. In this photo released by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Enrique Mora, a leading European Union diplomat, left, shakes hands with Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani in Tehran, Iran, March 27. AP-Yonhap Iran, the United States and the European Union said Wednesday they would send senior representatives to Vienna amid what appears to be a last-ditch effort at reviving talks over Tehran's tattered 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. It wasn't immediately clear if all other parties to the landmark accord would attend the surprise summit, nor if there had been any progress after a monthslong stalemate and recent fruitless round of indirect talks between Iran and the U.S. in Doha. The European Union official who chairs the talks, Enrique Mora, said the negotiations would focus on the most recent draft to restore the agreement, while Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, said he was heading to the Austrian capital ''to advance the negotiations.'' U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley wrote on Twitter that he was preparing to travel to Vienna for talks. He cautioned that American ''expectations are in check'' ahead of the negotiations. ''The United States welcomes EU efforts and is prepared for a good faith attempt to reach a deal. It will shortly be clear if Iran is prepared for the same,'' Malley added. Iran's U.N. Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi said Wednesday that Iran has negotiated ''in good-will'''' since April 2021 to resume full implementation of the 2015 deal and blamed the U.S. for failing to reach agreement. ''Achieving this objective has been delayed because the United States is yet to decide to give assurances that Iran will enjoy the promised economic benefits in the agreement,'' he told a high-level conference reviewing the landmark Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty at U.N. headquarters in New York. ''When the U.S. makes the right decision,'' Ravanchi said, ''Iran, in turn, will cease its remedial actions and resume the full implementation of its nuclear-related measures in accordance with the 2015 agreement.'' The German Foreign Ministry said Berlin would be represented at an ''expert level'' at the talks in Vienna, adding it supported efforts to fully revive the deal ''even if hopes are very small.'' It again pushed Iran to conclude the deal and said that would mean ''giving up maximalist positions in areas beyond'' the nuclear agreement. Russia's chief representative at the talks, Mikhail Ulyanov, also wrote on Twitter that negotiators from Russia, a key signatory of the nuclear deal, ''stand ready for constructive talks in order to finalize the agreement.'' The prospects for the deal's restoration have darkened in the past few months with major sticking points remaining, including Tehran's demand that Washington provide guarantees that it won't again quit the pact and that it lift terrorism sanctions on Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. The abruptly called meeting in Vienna comes after EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has repeatedly pushed to break the deadlock and salvage the deal in past weeks. He recently wrote in The Financial Times that ''the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted.'' Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, which lifted most international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for tight restrictions on Iran's nuclear program. Since then, Iran has massively expanded its nuclear work and now has enough highly enriched uranium to fuel one nuclear weapon, according to nonproliferation experts. However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, likely a monthslong project. Iran insists its program is for peaceful purposes, though U.N. experts and Western intelligence agencies say Iran had an organized military nuclear program through 2003. (AP) The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has extended the license application window for payment aggregators that were in existence as of March 17, 2020. These entities can now apply for a license seeking authorization from the RBI by September 30, 2022. To be eligible, the payment aggregators should have had a minimum net worth of INR 150 million as of March 31, 2022. The timeline for payment aggregators to achieve net worth of INR 250 million by March 31, 2023 remains unchanged. As per a notification dated July 28, 2022, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has extended the license application window for online non-bank payment aggregators till September 30, 2022. Previously, all payment aggregators as existing on March 17, 2020 were required to apply to the RBI by September 30, 2021 for seeking authorization under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 (PSS Act). However, the application window was extended by a year due to the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, several payment providers like Razorpay, Pine Labs, Stripe, 1Pay, and Innoviti Payments have received in-principle (provisional) approval from the RBI for a payment aggregators license. Who are payment aggregators? Payment aggregators are intermediaries that facilitate payments in online commercial transactions. These entities enable e-commerce websites, mobile apps, and merchants to accept various payment instruments from customers for completion of their payment obligations without the need for merchants to create a separate payment integration system of their own. The payment aggregators receive payments from the customers buying online, and subsequently pool and transfer these payments to the merchants after a specific time period. What are Indias regulatory guidelines for payment aggregators? In 2020, the RBI released the Guidelines on Regulation of Payment Aggregators and Payment Gateways, which mandated that only the companies approved by the regulator would be allowed to acquire and offer payment services to merchants. The RBI has prescribed various eligibility criteria for payment aggregators to be able to apply for a license, including the minimum net worth requirement. The guidelines also mandate that all payment aggregators must comply with the rules and adopt the technology-related recommendations made by the RBI. The guidelines also govern all domestic import and export related payments facilitated by payment aggregators. To be noted, these guidelines are not applicable to the Cash on Delivery (CoD) e-commerce model. Authorization process Entities seeking authorization as payment aggregator from the RBI under the PSS Act, shall apply in Form A to the Department of Payment and Settlement Systems (DPSS), RBI, Central Office, Mumbai, on or before September 30, 2022 . Entities regulated by any of the financial sector regulators shall submit a No Objection Certificate from their respective regulator alongside their application, within 45 days of obtaining such a clearance. Eligibility requirement for license to operate as payment aggregator The payment aggregator applying to the RBI for a license must be a company incorporated in India under the Companies Act, 1956/2013 and the Memorandum of Association (MoA) of the applicant entity must cover the proposed activity of operating as a payment aggregator. The RBI guidelines state that such payment aggregators shall be allowed to continue their operations till they receive communication from RBI regarding the status of their application. According to reports, almost 180 applications have been received till date, of which many have been approved while some have been rejected. Capital requirements Payment aggregators should have a minimum net worth of INR 150 million as of March 31, 2022 and a net worth of INR 250 million by the end of March 31, 2023. The net-worth of INR 250 million shall be maintained at all times thereafter. Payment aggregators that are not able to comply with the net-worth requirement within the stipulated time frame shall wind-up their payment aggregation business. The banks maintaining nodal / escrow accounts of such entities shall monitor and report compliance in this regard. The net-worth shall consist of paid-up equity capital, preference shares that are compulsorily convertible to equity, free reserves, balance in share premium account and capital reserves representing surplus arising out of sale proceeds of assets but not reserves created by revaluation of assets adjusted for accumulated loss balance, book value of intangible assets and deferred revenue expenditure, if any. The compulsorily convertible preference shares can be either non-cumulative or cumulative, and they should be compulsorily convertible into equity shares and the shareholder agreements should specifically prohibit any withdrawal of this preference capital at any time. Prevent Unauthorized Transactions in your demat / trading account Update your Mobile Number/ email Id with your stock broker / Depository Participant. Receive information of your transactions directly from Exchanges on your mobile / email at the end of day and alerts on your registered mobile for all debits and other important transactions in your demat account directly from NSDL/ CDSL on the same day." - Issued in the interest of investors. KYC is one time exercise while dealing in securities markets - once KYC is done through a SEBI registered intermediary (broker, DP, Mutual Fund etc.), you need not undergo the same process again when you approach another intermediary. No need to issue cheques by investors while subscribing to IPO. Just write the bank account number and sign in the application form to authorise your bank to make payment in case of allotment. No worries for refund as the money remains in investor's account." www.indiainfoline.com is part of the IIFL Group, a leading financial services player and a diversified NBFC. The site provides comprehensive and real time information on Indian corporates, sectors, financial markets and economy. On the site we feature industry and political leaders, entrepreneurs, and trend setters. The research, personal finance and market tutorial sections are widely followed by students, academia, corporates and investors among others. According to figures from the Indian consultancy Coalmint, with imports climbing by more than a fifth from June to a record 2.06 million tonnes, Russia overtook China as India's third-largest coal supplier in July. With Mozambique and Colombia alternately appearing in the top five, historically, Russia has been the sixth-largest exporter of coal to India, trailing only Indonesia, South Africa, Australia, and the United States. The recent decision by India's central bank to permit payments for commodities in Indian rupees is expected to provide bilateral trade with Russia a significant boost. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, India has increased its imports from Russia by roughly five times, totaling over $15 billion. India, the second-largest producer, importer, and user of coal, has historically purchased more coking coal from Russia than from Australia, with Australia serving as the other major supplier. Coking coal is used primarily in the production of steel. However, the recent steep discounts provided by Russian suppliers to Indian consumers have encouraged higher purchases of thermal coal, which is primarily used in power generation. This is especially true given that global prices have traded at close to record highs as a result of western sanctions that are stifling traditional trade. In July, compared to June, thermal coal imports from Russia increased by 70.3 percent to a record 1.29 million tonnes, while coking coal imports increased by more than two-thirds to more than 280,000 tonnes, according to Coalmint statistics. The statistics indicated that the leading provider was Indonesia, while South Africa narrowly beat out Russia. According to two Indian traders, steel and cement producers were the key drivers of higher coal imports from Russia. In July, India imported 23.8 million tonnes of coal overall, including shipments of anthracite and PCI coal, compared to a record 26.29 million tonnes in June, according to statistics from Coalmint. OTTAWA, ON The Honorable Marc Miller, Minister of CrownIndigenous Relations; the Honorable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Indigenous Services and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario; and, the Hono... More than 28 lakh Indians went abroad for employment between January 2020 and July 2022, reveals government data. Unsplash The data also reveals that at least 4.16 lakh Indians have left India for private jobs in the Emigration Check Required (ECR) countries during the said period, a report by CNN News 18 said. Disclosed verbally The ministry added that Indians who verbally disclosed their purpose of visit either as employment, work or produced work visa of the destination country while going abroad in the said period. The numbers suggest that there has been a consistent increase in the tally. Unsplash In 2020, around 7.15 lakh Indians went abroad for work, while in 2021, this increased to 8.33 lakh. This year, up to the end of July, 13.02 lakh Indians had left the country for work, the report said. ECR Record In another reply, the ministry said it maintains the data in respect of Indian workers holding ECR passports who emigrate through legal channels (e-Migrate portal) to any of the ECR countries for overseas employment. Out of the total 4.16 lakh Indians, 1.31 lakh, or nearly 32 per cent, were from Uttar Pradesh alone. It was followed by 69,518 from Bihar. As per the ministry, emigration clearance is required only for 17 countries Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Indonesia, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, UAE, and Yemen. Unsplash It said that the Emigration Act, 1983, provides that no citizen of India shall migrate unless he or she obtains emigration clearance from the Protector of Emigrants. All persons, having ECR-endorsed passports and going to any of the 17 ECR countries for taking up employment require emigration clearance. However, ECR passport holders going to any ECR country for purposes other than employment do not require emigration clearance. For more on the news, sports, and current affairs from around the world, please visit Indiatimes News. Not all heroes wear capes and it's absolutely true, at least for food delivery executives who toil all day long but their efforts still go unseen. Many times food delivery agents have gone above and beyond their call of duty to perform random acts of kindness. Here are 7 times, these real-life heroes won over our hearts. Take a look. 1) Saves Life Of Little Girl Who Got Into A Freak Accident Early in July, a Twitter user identified as Pratik Salunke in his post talked about the freak accident that happened in Thane, Maharashtra. He said that a girl was playing at her school gate. Suddenly, the metal gate came loose and a part of it pierced through her cheek, missing her right eye by an inch. Ravi, delivery boy of @amazonIN helped a girl who fet with a freak incident in Thane. She was playing on her school gate when it gave away and a part of iron pierced through her cheek, missing her right eye by an inch. Ravi hold on to the gate for 30 min untill help arrived.(1/2) pic.twitter.com/ydH700G72j Pratik Salunke (@pratik_salunke) July 1, 2022 The Amazon delivery person identified as Ravi who was in the area saw the accident and rushed to help the girl, holding the metal piece in place to stop excessive bleeding or aggravating the injury. According to the post, he held onto the metal piece for 30 minutes until help arrived. People were in awe of Ravi and praised him for restoring their faith in humanity. Many also urged Amazon to reward him for going above and beyond to help those in need. 2) Saves Man's Life, Takes Him To Hospital The official Instagram handle of Swiggy shared a short story about how a delivery person on their fleet who went over and above the call of duty to help save a man's life. The incident dates back to December 25, 2021, when the delivery executive named Mrunal Kirdat, selflessly came to the aid of retired Colonel named Man Mohan Malik. Man Mohan had fallen seriously ill and his son decided to rush him to the Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai. However, there was heavy traffic that day and thus the commute was taking longer than usual. His son requested for some help from two-wheeler riders as they could navigate through the traffic faster, but to no avail. Finally, Mrunal came and without any hesitation rushed Man Mohan to the hospital. Mrunal asked other people stuck in the traffic to make way and quickly took the ailing man to the hospital, where he also informed the staff about the mans serious condition. 3) Gives Petrol From His Bike To Stranded Sibling Duo A woman from Mumbai shared how a Swiggy delivery driver came to her and her brother's rescue when they were stranded on a road at midnight. Akshita Changan took to LinkedIn to share the incident - She was riding with her brother when their bike ran out of petrol and stopped in the middle of the road at 12.15 am. "A silent night with no passengers in sight, just me and my brother waiting at the roadside for some help until we discovered a delivery man checking out for an address on his mobile phone," Akshita wrote. Linkedin Akshita's brother approached the delivery guy and asked him to tow their bike. The driver politely refused and said, "Sir, Im going the other way round and I can't be late for delivery." However, then the driver enquired if they had a bottle of water, and when they said no, he emptied his own water bottle and gave petrol from his bike so that Akshita and her brother could reach the nearest petrol pump. 4) Risked His Own Life To Rescue 5 Kids From Burning Building Nicholas Bostic, 25, was driving past midnight when he noticed a house on fire. He quickly turned around and parked in the driveway. Without thinking much, he immediately rushed inside the burning house to rescue four siblings (aged 1, 6, 13 and 18) and a 13-year-old who had come for a sleepover. The incident happened in Indiana, US, on July 11. Heres the video to go along with the story. pic.twitter.com/TvZ5wzCg1f LafayetteINPolice (@LafayetteINPD) July 15, 2022 5) Alerts Police After Customer Leaves 'Last Meal' Note In Order A food delivery executive in China is being hailed as a hero after saving the life of a suicidal customer. The incident took place in Henan Province. The customer had left an ominous note while placing his food order, which read: "The last meal in my life." When the delivery guy arrived at the customer's place, no one answered the bell. Suspecting that something was not right, he alerted the police, Global Times reported. istock When the police and firemen arrived, the man refused to open the door and threatened to jump out of the window. The cops persuaded him to calm down while the firemen quietly slid into the room and saved him, the report said. The man, who had taken a large number of sleeping pills, was starting to lose consciousness when rescuers managed to enter his apartment in the time and pulled him away from danger. 6) Helps Specially-abled Man On The Street A video went viral on the internet which showed a delivery boy helping a specially-abled man on a street. In the video, the delivery worker stopped his vehicle and ran towards the specially-abled man seated on his wheelchair struggling to get on a sidewalk. The delivery boy gently pushed the chair forward and helped the man get on the sidewalk. This act of selflessness has won the hearts of netizens on social media. Some appreciated his kindness while others were seen recalling their tough times and how someone came to help them. 7) Riding A Bike, Pulled Along Another Agent Riding A Bicycle In July 2022, a video that was posted online is absolutely heartwarming. In the said clip, a Swiggy rider lent a helping hand to the Zomato delivery man who was riding a bicycle in Delhis scorching heat. The Zomato guy was on a bicycle while the swiggy guy was on a motorcycle. The swiggy guy held the Zomato guy's hand so that he would not have to pedal in the heat. This video was shared on Instagram by a user named Sannah Arora. Along with the video, she wrote: True friendship seen on these extremely hot and unbearable days in Delhi! She tagged food delivery platforms Swiggy and Zomato in her post. For more on news and current affairs from around the world please visit Indiatimes News. Tourists look on as a Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, in Fujian province, Aug. 4, ahead of massive military drills off Taiwan following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the self-ruled island. AFP-Yonhap China says military exercises by its navy, air force and other departments are underway in six zones surrounding Taiwan. The drills were prompted by a visit to the island by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi this week and are intended to advertise China's threat to attack the self-governing island republic in response to moves to solidify its de facto independence from Chinese rule with support from key ally the U.S. An MMA fighter puts his skills to good use after he helped subdue a man who was allegedly attacking people in New York, US. Ro Malabanan, 44, was heading to work on Wednesday when he saw the suspect sucker-punch a construction worker in SoHo neighbourhood before running away. MMA fighter takes down assault suspect After checking up on the victim, Malabanan then ran after the suspect and took him down from behind. After pinning him to the ground, the martial arts expert stayed on top of the suspect until police arrived. Screengrab/Instagram "I walked up to the guy that (was) hit, to check to see if he was OK. He said he wasnt okay ... Immediately, my martial arts side kicks in and I'm like, lets go stop this guy," Malabanan posted on his Instagram. "I immediately just jumped on his back, he tried to fling me off of him. I had what's called the seat-belt position, which helped me to drag him down to the ground," he said. Police later arrested the accused, who was identified as Samuel Frazier. An initial police investigation revealed that Frazier delivered an unprovoked attack to the heads of a 50-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy, according to the NYPD. The accused was charged with two counts of assault, according to police, who noted that Frazier did not have a home address. Former MMA fighter rescues cop who was under attack Earlier in May, a former MMA fighter choked a man, who was fighting a cop on the side of the road in Indiana, US. William Cassoday was on his way to visit his mother when he saw a cop being attacked, the Lake Geneva Regional News reported. NBC Chicago As soon as he noticed this, Cassoday pulled over down the road and ran back to the scene as suspect Christopher Delgado, 37, was swinging at the cop, the report said. Cassoday ensured not to startle the cop and put Delgado in a rear-naked choke. He was able to subdue Delgado long enough for the patrolman Jamison Smith to put him in handcuffs and eliminate any threat Delgado may have posed. Delgado was stopped by Smith for an outstanding warrant for auto theft. The suspect initially pretended he was someone else before subsequently confronting the officer. He was charged with a felony count of battery on a law enforcement officer resulting in bodily injury, misdemeanour resisting law enforcement and false informing. For more trending stories, follow us on Telegram. Canadian company drone AltoMaxx is engaged in a mission to search for the bodies of missing indigenous children. The drones, armed with ground-penetrating radar technology, scan unmarked gravesites at former residential schools in Sagkeeng First Nation land in eastern Manitoba. Meanwhile, US retail giant Amazon has unveiled plans to begin drone deliveries later this year. Customers in the California town of Lockeford can soon sign up to have thousands of products shipped to them by drone, though the pilot program for Prime Air is still pending final regulatory approval. Read more: Contactless drone inspections ease challenges of social distancing But as commercial drone usage takes off, how should insurance develop in parallel? Trehane Oliver (pictured left), managing director of specialist loss adjuster McLarens Aviation, spoke to Insurance Business about the boom in drone insurance. [Insurance] products that drone operators buy are similar to those that an aviation operator would buy. Theres cover for physical loss or damage to the drone, and cover for liability, Oliver said. The main liability from the operator standpoint is damage done to persons or property on the ground. Thats also similar exposure to what you would have with an aircraft. As the risk profile for commercial drones becomes clearer, underwriters concerns are becoming easier to address. The concern from insurers at the beginning was around the liability exposure: UAVs coming down on houses or people or busy road intersections. But in our experience, there are very few claims that result in significant liability, or anything more than incidental liability losses, shared Oliver. The other assumption that was made early on was that there wasnt much repairability around a drone. Thats also not been the case. Drones are generally repairable unless they come into contact with water, he added. Case study: South Africa One market that has embraced commercial drone usage on a notable scale is South Africa, where operations range from surveying mines, to crop dusting, and anti-poaching missions. On the heels of this rapid growth, the insurance market evolved quickly, thanks to regular dialogue between loss adjusters, brokers, and underwriters. Drones have picked up quite a lot, especially in the mapping and surveillance categories. We also see a lot of agricultural and security surveillance claims. Id say those industries are the biggest one fastest growing at this stage, Lara Vivier (pictured right), drone surveyor at McLarens Aviation, told Insurance Business. Based in South Africa, Vivier regularly advises brokers and underwriters on drone risks. She said common claims that arise involve pilot error and software glitches. Weve seen a bit of pilot error in our experience, and it comes down to sometimes [the pilot] is a little bit overwhelmed and might be new to the industry or fresh out of training. Incidents and accidents do happen. Weve also had a couple of claims where the drones will experience signal loss or connectivity issues, shared Vivier. Weve had a couple of bird strikes, which you cant control, as in aviation. Weve also had claims on motor failure, again like aviation. Read more: Drone exposures causing sky-high headaches for insurers Both Oliver and Vivier said claims related to injuries and property damage caused by drones were comparatively uncommon. In North America, for instance, its common now for realtors to have flyover video of a house. I have seen a case where a drone taking a video of a house landed on its roof. But that only resulted in replacing four roofing tiles; nothing more than incidental damage, Oliver shared. For Vivier, damage claims from drones were more likely to involve chemical spills in a field where a drone crashes or damage to a fence or power cables. We havent had any claims where a person was injured in a drone incident, she said. But as drone technology becomes more sophisticated, so do the exposures. Concerns have been raised over possible cyber hacking or privacy violations as liabilities, but Oliver and Vivier said they have yet to encounter claims related to such issues. The [drone] industry is heavily regulated in terms of what you can and cannot do. Of course, privacy laws arent varied by the fact that there are drones. Generally, the drone operations are well managed from that standpoint, but of course, there is the opportunity for misuse of equipment, Vivier noted. Regulatory barriers The surge in drones capabilities and operational efficiency are accelerating demand and creating new opportunities for commercial use. However, strict regulations may hinder the markets growth. For instance, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) doesnt allow drone operations beyond visual line of sight over long distances, meaning pilots must always keep their device in sight, making remote deliveries unfeasible. Transport Canada also prohibits drones from flying out of human eyesight. In 2019, the Canadian federal government adopted strict new regulations governing the use of UAVs in the countrys airspace, prohibiting them from being flown near airports and emergency scenes. Owners must register their drones, and operators of larger drones must also be certified. But as calls grow to lower barriers, governments are gradually changing their rules to balance safety concerns and allow expanded drone use. Last year, the FAA published new guidelines allowing routine small-drone operations over people and at night under certain conditions. Oliver sees operations like those in South Africa spreading as people become more confident about the safety of drones. The uses [of drones] are almost limitless, so its up to individual countries to decide what is safe or not. But the cost savings and the opportunity that drones provide is enormous. I think there will be a lot of pressure for continued use, he concluded. The report found that 31% of claimants were not fully satisfied with their home and auto insurance claims-handling experiences over the past two years. Of that 31%, six in 10 cited settlement speed issues, and 45% cited issues with the closing process. Dissatisfaction with the claims experience is a key driver in convincing customers to switch insurers. Thirty percent of dissatisfied claimants said they had switched carriers in the past two years, and another 47% said they were considering switching. Overall, the customers who reported dissatisfaction could represent up to $34 billion in premiums annually, or up to $170 billion over the next five years. AI technologies could improve the claims process, according to the report. For example, 79% of the claims executives surveyed said they believe that automation, AI and data analytics based on machine learning can bring value across the entire claims value chain, from flagging fraudulent claims to damage assessment and loss estimation, reserving, adjusting and more. Read next: How big an impact could digital insurance services have on traditional premiums? However, the adoption of these technologies has been slow. Only 35% of claims executives surveyed said that their organizations are advanced in their use of these technologies. That could be changing, however 65% of insurance companies plan to invest $10 million or more in these technologies over the next three years, prioritizing AI-based applications and automation technologies. The report also said that insurers could cut underwriting operating costs through the adoption of AI technologies, making up to $160 billion in efficiency gains by 2027. With many underwriters currently struggling with aging systems and inefficient processes, the report found that up to 40% of their time is spent on non-core and administrative activities an annual efficiency loss between $17 billion and $34 billion. Sixty percent of underwriters surveyed believed that improvements could be made to the quality of their organizations processes and tools. AI is no longer a technology of the future, but an established capability that many insurance innovators are already putting to work to deliver better customer experiences and empower their workforce, said Kenneth Saldanha, head of Accentures insurance industry group globally. As humans and AI collaborate ever more closely in insurance, companies will be able to reshape how they operate, becoming more efficient, fluid and adaptive. Those that are already moving to leverage AI will be able to create sustained competitive advantage. It was in May 2020 that the OIR ordered Weston to create a capital management plan to improve its liquidity and reduce the receivable amounts owed. The regulator also required the insurer to file monthly financial statements. Weston later began to drop customers in 2021 and merged its two companies. The affidavit also revealed that Westons net underwriting loss last year was $58,378,023, and its net loss of income was $57,681,556 both considerably higher than its combined surplus of $28,294,519 last year. ABC Action News reached out to the Insurance Information Institute, which revealed that Weston has about 20,000 policies in Florida. Weston is one of three financially troubled Florida insurers who were hit with a ratings update by Demotech earlier this week. The ratings agency withdrew Westons A rating, as well as the rating of FedNat Insurance Company. Another insurer, United Property & Casualty Insurance Company, saw its rating downgrade from A to M. There is no official word on whether FedNat will also be referred to receivership, but Demotech announced that it has withdrawn the ratings of two more insurers: Bankers Specialty Insurance and First Community Insurance both insurance businesses under the Bankers Insurance Group. Read more: Ratings downgrade of 17 insurers granted stay of execution for now Demotech initially planned to downgrade the ratings of 17 insurers operating in Florida all at once last week but chose to delay the action due to various circumstances. The identity of all 17 companies has yet to be disclosed. Class action litigation related to security breaches has been increasing in number and trending in the United States. Companies and their cyber insurers are starting to feel the heat with a wave of new state-regulated data privacy laws that opened doors for plaintiff attorneys to file class action lawsuits. We took note of changes in data privacy legislation right before the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The courts modified their schedules due to COVID and restricted in-person hearings and settings. We saw a lull in litigation activity, but were now starting to see an influx of class action lawsuits, said Tamara Ashjian (pictured), Director of Cyber & Tech Claims at Tokio Marine HCC Cyber & Professional Lines Group (CPLG), a member of the Tokio Marine HCC group of companies based in Houston, Texas. Enforced since July 1, 2020, the CCPA grants data breach victims the right to file individual or class action lawsuits against businesses that allow unauthorized access to their private personal information because of a failure to implement appropriate security practices. To date, California is the only state with a private cause of action for breach of its data privacy statute. Read next: Whats changed in the cyber insurance market? CCPA eliminates the requirement for plaintiffs to show evidence of damages. Instead, all they have to do is show evidence that their personally identifiable information (PII) and/or their Protected Health Information (PHI) was compromised (i.e. proof of exfiltration or unauthorized viewing of their private personal information). For this reason and others, California is an attractive forum for plaintiff attorneys, said Ashjian. In all states, its becoming more common to see class action lawsuits shortly after data breach notifications are issued, especially in California. This evolving legal landscape is unchartered territory for cyber insurers, according to Ashjian. We havent seen a US carrier try a third-party privacy breach class action lawsuit in court. Most of these cases get settled, and typically at large figures, so were keeping a close watch, she said. Class action lawsuits move very slowly. In the initial phase, the defense can file dispositive motions to try and dispose of all or some of the claims without the need for further trial court proceedings. If the lawsuit is not dismissed, then typically the plaintiff files a motion for a class certification. The goal is to cap exposure and minimize expenses, Ashjian told Insurance Business. Its not a perfect science, so insurers are still trying to figure out how to best handle these cases. Facts and circumstances that give rise to security breach cases brought by consumers may be unique. The issue is that no-one wants to be the first to go through trial and test the defense case. No-one has yet rolled the dice. This is still very new. Read more: How underwriters prepare for the cybercrime battle The exfiltration, or unauthorized viewing, of private personal information constitutes a cybersecurity breach, but Ashjian said there are proactive measures businesses can take with the help of their brokers, carriers, and IT forensic vendors/service providers, to mitigate their exposure to lawsuits. Brokers should encourage insureds to review their systems and ensure they have all of the recommended cybersecurity controls in place, she said. With the right protection against cyberattacks, you are less likely to suffer a breach and hopefully wont have to deal with the class action lawsuits that are increasing following data breach notifications. Employee education and training are equally important. Phishing emails and employee negligence are still the primary [vectors] for network intrusions, and once the [bad actors] are in the system, there are so many ways that businesses are being affected, which can lead to class action lawsuits. CPLG is actively monitoring live class action litigation to determine whether its underwriters need to change their strategy around data privacy exposures. Ashjian commented: We havent seen any big [underwriting appetite] changes from the market yet because this is still a new trend, but its one that we are watching very closely. Alera Group has announced that it has acquired Jowers-Sklar Insurance, a Georgia-based independent agency specializing in property and casualty insurance with customers throughout the Southeast. At Jowers-Sklar Insurance, our responsibility is to protect property and assets from all types of loss and give clients peace of mind, said Marc Sklar, president and CEO of Jowers-Sklar Insurance. We dont just sell insurance. We work closely with clients to help them make important and informed decisions every day when it comes to protection and their future. A Cheng Kung class frigate fires an anti air missile as part of a navy demonstration in Taiwan's annual Han Kuang exercises off the island's eastern coast near the city of Yilan, Taiwan on July 26, 2022. AP-Yonhap China fired multiple missiles around Taiwan on Thursday, launching unprecedented military drills a day after a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the self-ruled island that Beijing regards as its sovereign territory. The exercises, China's largest ever in the Taiwan Strait, began as scheduled at midday and included live-firing in the waters to the north, south and east of Taiwan, bringing tensions in the area to their highest in a quarter century. China's Eastern Theatre Command said at around 3:30 p.m. (0730 GMT) it had completed multiple firings of conventional missiles in waters off the eastern coast of Taiwan as part of planned exercises in six different zones that Beijing has said will run until noon on Sunday. Taiwan's defense ministry said 11 Chinese Dongfeng ballistic missiles had been fired in waters around the island. The last time China fired missiles into waters around Taiwan was in 1996. Taiwan officials condemned the drills, saying they violate United Nations rules, invade its territorial space and are a direct challenge to free air and sea navigation. Tensions had been building ahead of Pelosi's unannounced but closely watched visit to Taiwan, made in defiance of heated warnings from China. Before Thursday's drills officially began, Chinese navy ships and military aircraft briefly crossed the Taiwan Strait median line several times in the morning, a Taiwanese source briefed on the matter told Reuters. By midday, warships from both sides remained in the area and in close proximity, and Taiwan scrambled jets and deployed missile systems to track multiple Chinese aircraft crossing the line. "They flew in and then flew out, again and again. They continue to harass us," the Taiwanese source said. China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory and reserves the right to take it by force, said on Thursday its differences with the self-ruled island are an internal affair. "Our punishment of pro-Taiwan independence diehards, external forces is reasonable, lawful," China's Beijing-based Taiwan Affairs Office said. In Taiwan, life was largely as normal, despite worries that Beijing could take the unprecedented step of firing a missile over the main island, similar to a launch by North Korea over Japan's northern island of Hokkaido in 2017. Taiwan residents are long accustomed to Beijing's threats. "When China says it wants to annex Taiwan by force, they have actually said that for quite a while," said Chen Ming-cheng, a 38-year-old realtor. "From my personal understanding, they are trying to deflect public anger, the anger of their own people, and turn it onto Taiwan." However, Taiwan said that the websites of its defence ministry, foreign ministry and the presidential office were attacked by hackers, and warned of the likelihood of stepped up "psychological warfare" in coming days. 'COMRADE PELOSI' Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi smiles before the start of ASEAN-China Ministerial Meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Thursday, Aug 4, 2022. AP-Yonhap Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Pelosi's visit to Taiwan a "manic, irresponsible and highly irrational" act by the United States, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Wang, speaking at a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, said China had made the utmost diplomatic effort to avert crisis, but would never allow its core interests to be hurt. Unusually, the drills in six areas around Taiwan were announced with a locator map circulated by China's official Xinhua news agency earlier this week - a factor that for some analysts and scholars shows the need to play to both domestic and foreign audiences. On Thursday, the top eight trending items on China's Twitter-like Weibo service were related to Taiwan, with most expressing support for the drills or fury at Pelosi. "Let's reunite the motherland," several users wrote. In Beijing, security in the area around the U.S. Embassy remained unusually tight as it has been throughout the week. There were no signs of significant protests or calls to boycott U.S. products. "I think this (Pelosi's visit) is a good thing," said a man surnamed Zhao . "It gives us an opportunity to surround Taiwan, then to use this opportunity to take Taiwan by force. I think we should thank Comrade Pelosi." U.S. SOLIDARITY In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, left, and Taiwanese President President Tsai Ing-wen gesture during a meeting in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. AP-Yonhap The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been the top global news story for 2022, and rightly so. The war has disrupted the economies of the two countries, which are major agricultural and energy providers for countries across Europe and even beyond. The Russian invasion has also raised concerns about the state of global geopolitics, with some observers fearing the eruption of a third world war and a possible nuclear conflict. During the recent Airmic conference in Liverpool, one of the keynote speakers was Sir Richard Shirreff (pictured above), former NATO deputy supreme allied commander for Europe, co-founder and managing partner of Strategia Worldwide, and executive vice chairman of risk platform Sigma7. Shireff, who has seen frontline action in Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and the First Gulf War, said that the world is in a geopolitical perfect storm that started when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Lets make no mistake about it, we are engaged in war with Russia, albeit via a proxy in Ukraine, Shireff said. This is a war that affects every single one of us and is already having global implications and will continue to have global implications for some time to come. According to Shireff, the war in Ukraine was a foreseeable event, marked by a staggering and egregious failure of risk management. He disagreed with the idea that no one couldve seen the 2022 invasion coming, as the signs have been there for eight years. In 2014, after the Russian Federation took over Crimea, Vladimir Putin made a speech, which Shireff described as chilling, laying out his thinking that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century and centering on the threat the West poses to Russia. Putin also said that the most appropriate security settlement for Europe is a new Yalta, harkening back to the 1945 Yalta Conference, which gave the USSR near-uncontested influence in Eastern Europe. You could imagine what chills are sent down the spines of our Eastern European friends and allies who remember their enslavement under Stalin and under the old Yalta, Shireff said. However, the West did not take notice that the Russian leader was a real existential threat, Shireff said, with a goal to rebuild a Russian empire by eliminating Ukraine as a free-standing, democratic, and liberal state and controlling the Black Sea coast. Shireff said that Putins plans came to a culmination on Feb. 24, when the next phase of the invasion of Ukraine began. But Putin made three major miscalculations underestimating the resolve of Ukrainian resistance, overestimating the capability of Russian armed forces, and underestimating the Western response, emboldened by the absence of backlash over annexing Crimea in 2014. Shireff said that the outcome of the war rests on NATO and the West stepping up to the mark. If the Western allies do not take sufficient action, the grinding war of attrition will continue, with Russia gradually taking over Ukrainian territory and eventually overwhelming the resistance. According to Shireff, had NATO intensified its support for Ukraine in the Battle of Kyiv in March, the momentum couldve greatly swung towards Ukraines favor. However, the West hesitated, leading to Ukrainians struggling to maintain their defense. But its not too late, he said. Weve seen the American decision to deploy their long-range precision missiles, weve seen the British decision to deploy their multiple launch rocket systems, and there will be other nations ramping it up. But its got to happen quickly. Shireff said that the only way forward for NATO is to inflict military defeat on Putin, as appeasement by letting him take a portion of Ukraine will only lead to more conflict later. This, he said, can only be achieved by giving Ukrainians the tools to do the job and taking a significant risk, which includes the risk of escalation. But Shireff said that the use of nuclear and chemical weapons by Russia remains a low possibility. There is a massive risk, Shireff said. But the way to manage that risk is to tighten our belts and prepare ourselves for the worst case prepare our societies, our nations, and our armed forces for war with Russia. The preparation includes massive ramping up of defense spending, raising it to 4% or 5% of GDP, or possibly more, to fuel rearmament of NATO members, he said. But this comes at a huge sacrifice, with Europe struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, high energy prices, transportation problems, and leadership vacuums following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also related these crises to the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy, saying that what happened there is a direct result of the Russo-Ukrainian war. For businesses, Shireff said that to build resilience, they must understand the external forces at work and rethink their risk approach and crisis management plans by avoiding looking at risk in silos and teasing out the relationships between risks by war-gaming their plans. We are in that perfect storm right now, Shireff said. But the way to ensure we are resilient as possible against that perfect storm is through preparing for the worst case and accepting the sacrifices. Because anything else will be much worse. New You can now listen to Insurance Journal articles! Pennsylvanias workers compensation law authorizes modifications to a home to accommodate an injured employees needs. It also may require paying for a new van for a disabled worker. However, does the law go so far as to require an employer to pay any costs for the purchase of a new home? No, that would be unreasonable, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania has ruled. The law also does not require an employer to pay for home modifications that are considered but never done, according to the court. The court has reversed a Workers Compensation Appeal Board order that Ralph Martin Construction and its insurer, Lackawanna American Insurance Co., contribute to the cost of a new home purchased by injured employee Miguel Castaneda- Escobar who decided to move rather than renovate the home he was living in after he was seriously injured. Citing the state Supreme Court, the Commonwealth Court opinion notes that the particular circumstances of the claimant must be considered in determining the obligation of the employer. There is no precedent under the Workers Compensation Act that an employer can be held liable to purchase an entire house for a claimant or to pay for modifications that were never undertaken, the justices concluded. Escobar fell off a roof and injured his cervical spine in 2010, which rendered him a paraplegic. Ralph Martin Construction and Lackawanna Insurance accepted liability for the injury. At the time of his injury, he resided in his brothers rowhouse in Reading, Pennsylvania, where the bedrooms and bathroom are located on the second floor. A construction firm estimated that it would cost $119,722.21 to modify the Reading home with the construction of a first-floor addition that included a new bedroom and bathroom. That firm and another firm advised that it might be more cost effective for Escobar to relocate to a single-floor residence with wheelchair accessibility and that modifying the structure might not be the best long-term solution especially given that Escobar did not own the home. Modifications to the Reading home were never done. In 2018, Escobar bought a home for $230,000 in Leesport. The Leesport home accommodates his needs with a first-floor master bedroom and bathroom; however, the shower had to be modified to provide wheelchair accessibility. His employer reimbursed him for the $5,905.04 he spent to modify this bathroom. Because the modifications to the house where Escobar resided at the time of his injury were projected to cost $119,722.21, the appeal board required the employer to contribute that amount towards his purchase of his new one-story home that required few modifications. While Pennsylvania courts have required employers to pay for the purchase of a wheelchair-accessible van, they have not required employers to pay for the purchase of a new home. But the appeal board concluded that the purchase of the Leesport home did not relieve the employer of its obligation to renovate the Reading home. Accordingly, the board ordered the employer to pay the cost of that renovation, with a credit for the $5,905.04 it had already paid for the bathroom renovation in the Leesport home. It ordered the employer to pay $113,817.17 and litigation costs. Ralph Martin Construction and Lackawanna Insurance petitioned the Commonwealth Court for review, arguing that the board erred in requiring the employer to pay for home modifications that were never done. Second, it argued that the board erred by making the employer liable for the claimants litigation costs because Escobar should not have prevailed. Escobar argued that the boards adjudication was consistent with the humanitarian purposes of the workers compensation act. The states workers compensation statute states in part: [T]he employer shall provide payment for medicine and supplies, hospital treatment, services and supplies and orthopedic appliances, and prostheses. Consistent with the acts humanitarian principle, the term orthopedic appliances has been construed to cover the acquisition of vehicles and the construction of home modifications, where necessary. But, the employer argued, an orthopedic appliance cannot be construed to include the acquisition of an entire house. It maintained it fulfilled its statutory obligation by paying for the new roll-in shower. The firm noted that the state Supreme Court has cautioned that claimants are not entitled to windfalls in connection with their right to orthopedic appliances. Escobar did not testify to explain his decision to purchase a home, which, apparently, was facilitated by his receipt of third-party settlements that totaled at least $6 million. He abandoned his original claim that his employer pay the entire cost of his new home and, instead, sought an award of $119,722.21, the cost to modify the Reading home. However, the employer noted that Escobar did not have the Reading home modified. Why he elected not to modify the Reading home or why he elected to move to Leesport is simply not part of the record as he did not testify. Commonwealth Court in its analysis concluded that when Escobar made the bathroom renovations to his newly purchased home, the employer promptly fulfilled its obligation to pay for the modification. The fact that the claimant spent less to modify his new home than it would have cost to modify his prior residence does not make the new home an orthopedic appliance. The fact that claimant eliminated an expense that was never incurred by purchasing the new home is not the equivalent of modifying the home, the court wrote. The court agreed with employers brief that the purchase of a new home extends the phrase orthopedic appliances beyond a reasonable construction. Topics Workers' Compensation Talent New You can now listen to Insurance Journal articles! A New Jersey construction company and its principal have been charged with willfully violating federal workplace safety regulations at a Poughkeepsie, New York construction site where a wall collapsed, killing a worker in 2017. Prosecutors allege that the death was the result of violations of federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations. According to the charges, the contractor, OneKey, and principal Finbar ONeill built and placed dirt loads on a concrete wall without considering whether the wall could withstand the weight. They also charge that OneKey and ONeil failed to warn workers about the dangers of the wall that later collapsed. The arraignment was announced by U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and Jonathan Mellone, special agent for the Department of Labor. It took place before U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith C. McCarthy. OneKey and ONeill endangered the safety of their workers by disregarding regulations and taking shortcuts to sidestep their safety obligations. This conduct led to the death of a worker on a construction site, Williams stated. Prosecutors contend that the contractor implemented a soil compaction plan that involved piling large quantities of dirt on top of the sites of three future buildings. The contractor did not follow the plan designed by an engineering firm. Workers complained that construction machines were continuing to add dirt and later that day, the wall collapsed. As it fell, the victim ran away from the wall, but he could not get away in time and was killed. The New Jersey corporation faces a maximum fine of $500,000, while ONeill faces a maximum sentence of six months in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. The charges are merely accusations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Topics Contractors New Jersey Construction Training Development As U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a brief visit to Taiwan this week that enraged Beijing, the welcome she received from government officials and the public was in sharp contrast with a different sort of message that began popping up elsewhere on the island. On Wednesday, in some branches of 7-11 convenience stores in Taiwan, the television screens behind cashiers suddenly switched to display the words: Warmonger Pelosi, get out of Taiwan! The largest 24-hour convenience store chain on the island was the victim of what Taiwanese authorities are calling an unprecedented amount of cyber attacks on government websites belonging to the presidential office, foreign and defense ministries as well as infrastructure such as screens at railway stations, in protest against Pelosis visit. Taipei has not directly blamed the attacks on the Chinese government, but has said that the attacks on government websites which paralyzed the sites operations originated from addresses in China and Russia. It also said the firms whose displays were changed had used Chinese software that could have contained backdoors or Trojan horse malware. Taiwans digital minister Audrey Tang said the volume of cyber attacks on Taiwan government units on Tuesday, before and during Pelosis arrival, surpassed 15,000 gigabits, 23 times higher than the previous daily record. Lo Ping-cheng, Taiwan Cabinet spokesman, said on Wednesday that the government had stepped up security at key infrastructure including power plants and airports and increased the cyber security alertness level across government offices. On Thursday, he said no related damage had been detected so far. Government departments have been very careful. In these past few days, in terms of public security, we have set up a three-tier government security and communication mechanism, it is already tough and defensive enough so these adaptations have been beneficial, he told a briefing. Theater, Rather Than Threat Pelosis visit triggered furious responses from the Chinese public and Beijing, who said the trip to the self-ruled island it regards as its territory infringed its sovereignty. On Thursday, China fired missiles around Taiwan as part of a series of unprecedented military drills. A cyber-security research organization said the attacks against Taiwanese government websites before Pelosis visit were likely launched by Chinese activist hackers rather than the Chinese government. Hacker group APT 27, which has been accused by Western authorities of being a Chinese state-sponsored group, claimed responsibility for the cyber attacks on Taiwan on Wednesday, saying on YouTube that they were done to protest how Pelosi had defied Chinas warnings with her visit. It also claimed it had shut down 60,000 internet-connected devices in Taiwan. Asked about the cyber attacks in Taiwan on Thursday at a regular Chinese foreign ministry briefing, a spokesperson declined to comment. The Cyberspace Administration of China, which regulates the countrys internet, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Experts said that the cyber attacks, combined with Chinas live firing exercises, provide Taiwans leaders with a preview of what an invasion from China would look like. In recent years, several reports from think tanks in Taiwan and the United States have emphasized the high likelihood that, in the event of a military assault of Taiwan, China would first launch a debilitating cybersecurity attack on Taiwans key infrastructure, such as its power grid. Still, Eryk Waligora, a cyber threat intelligence specialist at Accenture, said the latest ones appeared to be more theater than threat so far. He said past attacks, like a campaign between November last year to February that forced several financial institutions in Taiwan to suspend online transactions, were more sophisticated technically, and damaging. There have certainly been far worse cyber attacks, he said. (Reporting by Sarah Wu and Eduardo Baptista; Additional reporting by Yimou Lee and Martin Pollard, Writing by Brenda Goh; editing by Kim Coghill) Topics Cyber UK Insurer Aviva has agreed to sign a binding agreement with the specialist managing general agent Azur Underwriting Ltd., to acquire its high-net-worth personal lines business in the UK and Ireland. Financial details of the transaction, which will be funded by Aviva Insurance Ltd, were not disclosed. The acquisition supports Avivas ambition to become the market leader in high-net-worth personal lines. The Aviva Private Clients business has grown significantly during the past year with the successful transfer of the AXA XL Private Clients team and business, said Aviva, noting that the Azur acquisition provides an opportunity to further strengthen Avivas presence in a profitable and growing market. Under the agreement, Azurs team will transfer to Aviva and will manage the run-off of the existing Azur underwriting book. New business written following completion of the deal will be under the Aviva brand, as part of the Aviva Private Clients business. Im delighted to confirm we have signed a binding agreement with Azur Underwriting. Once completed, it will confirm our place as the market leader in the UK and Ireland private clients market, which is our stated ambition, commented Adam Winslow, CEO, Aviva UK & Ireland General Insurance. In agreeing the transaction with Azur, we are bringing together a formidable team of experts from within Aviva as well as Azur. It builds on the successful transfer of the AXA XL private clients team, which has already extended our reach and capabilities, he added. This acquisition gives us an unrivaled position, enabling us to provide a specialist service to those customers with very high value homes and possessions. Source: Aviva Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Carriers New You can now listen to Insurance Journal articles! Parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre urged a U.S. bankruptcy judge on Wednesday not to allow the parent company of far-right website InfoWars to send any money to its founder, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, or his companies until they have an opportunity to get to the bottom of InfoWars finances. As a jury deliberates in Austin, Texas, over how much Jones must pay two parents for his false claims that the deadly shooting was a hoax, families of Sandy Hook victims who have sued Jones for defamation in that trial and others who have sued in Connecticut warned a bankruptcy judge in Houston that Jones might continue to pull assets from InfoWars parent company Free Speech Systems LLC while using its bankruptcy case to avoid paying court judgments in the defamation cases. Marty Brimmage, an attorney for the Sandy Hook parents, told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston on Wednesday that Jones had told his audience that the bankruptcy would tie up any defamation judgment for years. Judges in the Texas and Connecticut cases have already found Jones liable for defamation. The parents in the Texas trial are seeking a judgment of $150 million. Jones testified Wednesday in Austin, admitting that the Sandy Hook shooting was real and that it was crazy of him to call it a hoax. The jury has begun deliberations. The companys attorneys told the bankruptcy judge on Wednesday that they were only making a boring request for permission to make routine payments on debts during the first weeks of its Chapter 11. The company filed for bankruptcy last Friday. But the Sandy Hook families said the company could not be trusted to make accurate statements about its finances. They also allege that Jones took $62 million from the company while burdening it with $65 million in fabricated debt owed to PQPR Holdings, a company owned by Jones and his parents. Lopez approved a two-week budget that would allow the company to pay its bills, but he limited the amount it could pay Jones and the companys consultants during that period. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said Wednesday that he now understands it was irresponsible of him to declare the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre a hoax and that he now believes it was 100% real, a day after the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the attack testified about the suffering, death threats and harassment theyve endured because of what Jones has trumpeted on his media platforms. It was especially since Ive met the parents. Its 100% real, Jones testified at his trial to determine how much he owes for defaming the parents of a 6-year-old who was among the 20 students and six educators killed in the 2012 attack at the school in Newtown, Connecticut. But the parents who sued Jones said a day earlier that an apology wouldnt be enough and that the Infowars host needed to be held accountable for repeatedly spreading falsehoods about the attack. They are seeking at least $150 million. Closing arguments are expected to begin later Wednesday after more testimony from Jones, who has portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his First Amendment rights. Jones is the only person testifying in defense of himself and his media company, Free Speech Systems. His attorney asked him if he now understands it was absolutely irresponsible to push the false claims that the massacre didnt happen and no one died. Jones said he does, but added, They (the media) wont let me take it back. He also complained that hes been typecast as someone that runs around talking about Sandy Hook, makes money off Sandy Hook, is obsessed by Sandy Hook. Jones testimony came a day after Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis was killed in the attack, testified that Jones and the false hoax claims pushed by Jones and his Infowars website made their lives a living hell of death threats, online abuse and harassment. They led a day of charged testimony Tuesday that included the judge scolding the bombastic Jones for not being truthful with some of what he said under oath. In a gripping exchange, Lewis spoke directly to Jones, who was sitting about 10 feet away. Earlier that day, Jones was on his broadcast program telling his audience that Heslin is slow and being manipulated by bad people. I am a mother first and foremost and I know you are a father. My son existed, Lewis said to Jones. I am not deep state I know you know that And yet youre going to leave this courthouse and say it again on your show. At one point, Lewis asked Jones: Do you think Im an actor? No, I dont think youre an actor, Jones responded before the judge admonished him to be quiet until called to testify. Heslin and Lewis are among several Sandy Hook families who have filed several lawsuits alleging that the Sandy Hook hoax claims pushed by Jones have led to years of abuse by him and his followers. Heslin and Lewis both said they fear for their lives and have been confronted by strangers at home and on the street. Heslin said his home and car have been shot at. The jury heard a death threat sent via telephone message to another Sandy Hook family. I cant even describe the last nine and a half years, the living hell that I and others have had to endure because of the recklessness and negligence of Alex Jones, Heslin said. Scarlett Lewis also described threatening emails that seemed to have uncovered deep details of her personal life. Its fear for your life, Scarlett Lewis said. You dont know what they were going to do. Heslin said he didnt know if the Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy theory originated with Jones, but it was Jones who lit the match and started the fire with an online platform and broadcast that reached millions worldwide. What was said about me and Sandy Hook itself resonates around the world, Heslin said. As time went on, I truly realized how dangerous it was. Jones skipped Heslins Tuesday morning testimony while he was on his show _ a move Heslin dismissed as cowardly _ but arrived in the courtroom for part of Scarlett Lewis testimony. He was accompanied by several private security guards. Today is very important to me and its been a long time coming to face Alex Jones for what he said and did to me. To restore the honor and legacy of my son, Heslin said when Jones wasnt there. Heslin told the jury about holding his son with a bullet hole through his head, even describing the extent of the damage to his sons body. A key segment of the case is a 2017 Infowars broadcast that said Heslin didnt hold his son. The jury was shown a school picture of a smiling Jesse taken two weeks before he was killed. The parents didnt receive the photo until after the shooting. They described how Jesse was known for telling classmates to run! which likely saved lives. An apology from Jones wouldnt be good enough, the parents said. Alex started this fight, Heslin said, and Ill finish this fight. Jones later took the stand and was initially combative with the judge, who had asked him to answer his own attorneys question. Jones testified he had long wanted to apologize to the plaintiffs. Later, the judge sent the jury out of the room and strongly scolded Jones for telling the jury he had complied with pretrial evidence gathering even though he didnt and that he is bankrupt, which has not been determined. The plaintiffs attorneys were furious about Jones mentioning he is bankrupt, which they worry will taint the jurys decisions about damages. This is not your show, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told Jones. Your beliefs do not make something true. You are under oath. Last September, the judge admonished Jones in her default judgment over his failure to turn over documents requested by the Sandy Hook families. A court in Connecticut issued a similar default judgment against Jones for the same reasons in a separate lawsuit brought by other Sandy Hook parents. At stake in the trial is how much Jones will pay. The parents have asked the jury to award $150 million in compensation for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The jury will then consider whether Jones and his company will pay punitive damages. Jones has already tried to protect Free Speech Systems financially. The company filed for federal bankruptcy protection last week. Sandy Hook families have separately sued Jones over his financial claims, arguing that the company is trying to protect millions owned by Jones and his family through shell entities. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A Texas jury on Thursday ordered conspiracy theorist and media personality Alex Jones to pay $4.1 million to the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim who sued him for defamation after he repeatedly claimed the school shooting was a hoax. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis were seeking $150 million from Jones after he told listeners of his Austin-based website and broadcast Infowars that the nations second deadliest school shooting in which 20 children and six adults were killed was faked by the government in order to take away Americans guns. His claims led his listeners to harass the victims families and make death threats against them for years. The jurys verdict delivers far less than that, but there is still an opportunity to award more money. Thursdays verdict was to determine compensatory damages for the family. The case will now enter a new phase to determine punitive damages, which can be rewarded to punish a defendant for reckless, negligent or outrageous behavior or to deter future bad acts. Jones has spread misinformation about national tragedies, COVID-19 and elections for years to a broad national audience. But lately, financial pressures in part from multiple lawsuits from Sandy Hook parents have put him in dire financial straits. His companies have filed for bankruptcy multiple times in recent months, including most recently during the defamation trial. The Austin American-Statesman reported that Jones attorney, F. Andino Reynal, asked jurors to award a total of $8 a dollar for each of the eight harms the court has already found Jones and his main company, Free Speech Systems, to have inflicted on Heslin and Lewis. Jurors decided the amount of damages Jones owes the parents after listening to evidence and testimonies from a range of witnesses for seven days. During their testimonies Tuesday, Heslin and Lewis said Jones needed to be held accountable for the lies he told about the tragedy in order for them to try to heal from the trauma and loss they experienced. Heslin said he wants the outcome of this lawsuit to restore his own credibility and reputation, which was tarnished by Jones, as well as the legacy of his son, 6-year-old Jesse Lewis. The parents have previously described their son as a hero. During the Sandy Hook shooting, he ran into the elementary school hallway when he first heard shots, they said in a legacy.com obituary. Jesse confronted the shooter and yelled for other children to run. Nine children were able to escape the classroom where they were hiding. During his testimony Wednesday, Jones admitted that the Sandy Hook shooting was 100% real. One of the plaintiffs attorneys, Mark Bankston, confronted Jones on Wednesday with several pieces of evidence that suggested Jones had lied during his testimony. Bankston told him that Jones own attorneys had accidentally sent the opposing counsel the contents of Jones phone from the last two years. He then pointed out several texts and other evidence that contradicted Jones previous testimony. Throughout his testimony, Jones repeatedly portrayed himself as a victim. He said his identity was stolen and he was made into a monster by mainstream media after talking about the Sandy Hook shooting on Infowars. This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/04/alex-jones-sandy-hook-trial/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org. New You can now listen to Insurance Journal articles! Theres not much in Greene County, a place that stands out even in impoverished west Alabama for its neediness. So the April tornado that settled down upon a housing community full of seniors and low-income families felt like a particularly cruel blow. Swirling winds ripped roofs off apartments, toppled walls and shattered windows. Eula Dell Lanier, 64, cried out to God as her home came apart. I was calling Jesus as the walls were coming down, she said. Yet the tornado wasnt one of the memorable monsters that devastates so many in places the South or Midwest; no one was killed or even badly injured. While about 40 homes in the 200-unit development were damaged, only a handful were as bad as Laniers house. Still, the recovery seems tough to some residents nearly four months later because of what housing officials say are shortages of workers and supplies, geographic isolation and lethargy caused by generational poverty. And with what is typically the worst part of hurricane season ahead for the U.S. Gulf Coast, the experience at William McKinley Branch Heights named for an area civil rights leader shows just how hard it can be to move on from even a small disaster when life was a struggle beforehand. Laniers home was heavily damaged in the twister on April 13 and now she lives in a small replacement apartment nearby. Shes so sad about the lingering damage and debris that she doesnt drive by her old place, where crumbled brick walls still lie in the yard and a hole in the roof lets in rain. The inside reeks of mold and mildew. You come into Branch Heights and see all that stuff and its like theyre not even trying to clean it up. Its depressing, and it just seems so slow, she said. In a community of both privately owned homes and government subsidized apartments, Lanier owned her home and has insurance, but repairs have yet to begin. While the area didnt qualify for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because the damage wasnt bad enough, officials say they are trying hard to repair the community, and plenty of progress has been made. The Alabama Rural Coalition for the Homeless provided $30,000 for temporary housing for dozens of residents, who settled in a small motel for as long as two months because nowhere else was available in the rural county. School buses were rerouted to the EconoLodge, and donors provided clothes, shoes, food, gift cards and more to the victims. Contractors are still repairing apartments in sweltering summer temperatures. About 125 residents displaced by the storm are back at Branch Heights, albeit in temporary homes. Still, Anita Lewis, executive director of the Greene County Housing Authority, has heard the complaints about what feels like a slow-motion recovery to some. It was not a major storm, but because of the size of the development it was major to us, said Lewis. It was devastating to the families and the community. The head of a group that provides assistance in some of the poorest parts of Alabama worries what the recovery at Branch Heights could portend for other underprivileged parts of the Gulf Coast region that might get hit this summer. I think one major disaster like a hurricane could be devastating for our area, said Cynthia Burton, executive director of Community Service Programs of West Alabama, which assisted in Eutaw and operates in 10 counties. Weak in terms of a tornado, the twisters winds peaked at 90 mph (145 kph) as it traveled about 18 miles (29 kilometers) across an area almost 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of Birmingham. The entire county has only 7,600 residents, 80% of whom are Black, and it typically has one of the worst jobless rates in the state. Nearly 30% of its residents live in poverty. The lack of an organized disaster volunteer group in Greene County complicated the recovery in Eutaw because coordinating needs and solutions was more difficult, according to Melinda Stallworth of the Governors Office of Volunteer Services, which is still assisting with the work. The agency hopes to get a group organized within a matter of weeks, before hurricane season has a chance to intensify, she said. Recovery takes a while in the first place, she said. With these additional struggles it takes longer. Most homes are OK in Branch Heights, but blue tarps, fractured walls and debris piles are still visible on some streets. The mix of government housing and privately owned homes complicates the recovery, said the housing director. But Branch Heights is hardly the only place to struggle after a natural disaster. In coastal Louisiana, some members of Native American communities live in the wreckage of Category 4 Hurricane Ida nearly a year later, and residents of rural Mayfield, Kentucky, are still rebuilding after much of the town was shattered during a tornado outbreak that killed about 90 people in the Midwest and South in December. Poorer communities often have a harder time recovering from natural disasters than richer places because they get less aid, have less insurance, less credit and lack the resources to seek aid, according to the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania. More aid, better preparation and simpler application processes are needed, it found. Lewis said its hard to repair a residence when the nearest big-box home supply store is about 35 miles (56 kilometers) away in Tuscaloosa. The damage wasnt enough to result in a disaster declaration, she said, so only limited outside aid was available. Private groups and the state helped, she said, but the community center at the middle of Branch Heights is still cracked open months later. A gym full of donated items can only be opened now and then because of the structural damage and a lack of manpower, she said. Just down the street from the community center, Jacqueline Allen wonders what might be living in a huge pile of debris near her home months after the twister. A child rode a hoverboard under the scorching summer sun just a few feet away from the mess. We worry that snakes and things will be coming in there, she said. Its hot and theyre moving, and theres children who live right next door to that. Photo: Nearly four months after a small tornado shattered Branch Heights, a rural housing community in Eutaw, Ala., debris piles remain. Some worry the continuing recovery shows how hard it may be to get over a big storm as the heart of hurricane season approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Hurricane New You can now listen to Insurance Journal articles! Eight Florida men have been charged with contracting without a license and failing to obtain workers compensation insurance, after a sting operation led by state and local authorities. The Manatee County Sheriffs Office and the Florida Department of Financial Services did not provide details about the sting operation. But in previous stings, conducted around Florida about twice a year, authorities have advertised for construction services. When the men showed up to see the property, investigators checked their credentials and found no contractors licenses and no evidence of workers comp insurance to cover workers. Performing construction work without workers compensation insurance and the required contractors licenses is not only illegal, but dangerous, Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, head of DFS, said in a news release. Taking advantage of hard-working Floridians just to save a few bucks is despicable and puts customers and employees at risk. The operation was done in conjunction with the DFS Division of Investigative and Forensic Services, the National Insurance Crime Bureau and the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Patronis said his offices detectives have made more than 1,500 arrests for workers comp fraud since he took office in 2017. Topics Florida Workers' Compensation Contractors Numbers New You can now listen to Insurance Journal articles! Weston Property & Casualty Insurance Co. is insolvent and should be placed into receivership, making it the fifth Florida property insurer this year to be dissolved, according to state regulators. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation on Tuesday filed notice with the Department of Financial Services that the 10-year-old Weston, with about 22,000 policies in the state, is insolvent or about to become insolvent, and DFS should initiate delinquency proceedings. The filing was made one day after the Demotech financial rating firm announced that it had withdrawn the financial stability rating for the Coral Gables-based Weston. But the companys board of directors on July 29 had already agreed to the receivership after more than $94 million net losses in the last two years and a spike in reinsurance costs, the OIR information showed. The carrier also had shown on its books that it was including funds from an affiliate captive firm, a move that was never approved by OIR. Without the captive arrangement, Weston did not have enough surplus, the OIRs referral letter to DFS explained. Westons CEO is Deanne Nixon, who succeeded Michael Lyons in early 2021, according to company information. The firm did not mention the delinquency on its website Wednesday. Company officials could not be reached Thursday morning. The OIR referral letter included an affidavit from Virginia Christy, the offices director of property & casualty financial oversight, which detailed the financial ups and downs that Weston has been through: In summer 2020, the OIR required Weston to file a capital management plan to improve its liquidity and reduce the millions of dollars in loans it owed to its managing general agent, Weston Insurance Management. About the same time, in July 2020, Hudson Structured Capital Management took a 50% stake in the company, Christys affidavit explained. In December 2020, Weston requested that it be allowed to start cancelling more than 1,500 wind-only policies. The OIR approved a smaller number of early cancelations. In December 2021, West Insurance Co. merged with Weston Specialty Insurance, a Texas-domiciled company. The merged firm redomesticated to Florida and was renamed Weston Property & Casualty. Its combined surplus was reported as $28 million, which included capital infusions of almost $50 million. Despite the actions taken by Weston to reduce its unprofitable policies in force, revise its corporate structure, modify its reinsurance program, and increase paid-in capital, surplus continued to deteriorate, Christy said in the affidavit. In June of this year, Weston said it could not complete its reinsurance program due to the cost and unavailability of a lower-layer reinsurance plan. The company participated in the Reinsurance to Assist Policyholders, or RAP program, a $2 billion fund created by the Florida Legislature in May as a type of hurricane reinsurance program for Florida carriers. That apparently made little difference. Also in June, Weston floated the idea of using a captive program known as the Weston Cell, through an affiliate. The insurer did not fully commit to that plan but instead proposed the siphoning off of funds from Weston Insurance Management, to be repaid later with higher fees to the MGA. The OIR said no to the idea. OIR then discovered that Weston for months had been accounting for the captive cell funds as if the move had been approved. Without those funds, Westons surplus would dip below the $15 million minimum required by Florida law, the affidavit explained. On July 27, OIR held a conference call with Weston leadership to discuss unwinding the captive arrangement. Company officials then revealed that the carrier also owed about $50 million in premium payments to reinsurers, which had not been included on its list of liabilities in its financial statement. The premium payments owed by Weston, but not recorded as a liability, would, when added to the liabilities reported on its May 31, 2022 financial statement, exceed the amount Weston reported as assets, Christys affidavit said. During the July 27 conference call, Weston officials admitted the firm was insolvent. The insurer had stopped writing new business July 15 and had stopped renewals three days later. The OIR filing did not indicate when liquidation proceedings will begin. The Weston insolvency is the latest blow to the beleaguered Florida market and to agents who have had to work overtime this year to find new coverage when insurers go bust. Its become the new normal right now, said Jarett Coleman, vice president and personal lines manager at Zarahn Insurance Agency in Pensacola, in northwest Florida. Its really created a mad havoc in residential. He said that this year alone, his agency has had to find new coverage for about 520 homeowners, all in less than 35 days, as four carriers slid into receivership. And most policyholders dont understand that agents are now swamped with the work, and that placing new coverage can take time. One issue is that many carriers that remain in Florida require home inspections before picking up an HO policy. But with all the new demand, home inspectors are slammed and could take weeks to get to a new property, Coleman said. Many of Westons jilted policyholders will likely end up with Citizens Property Insurance. But as other Florida agents have said repeatedly, Citizens rates are less than other carriers in much of the state, which keeps business out of the books of private insurers and means lower commissions for agents. Coleman estimated that 65% of the policies that were written by now-defunct carriers have gone to Citizens, which was designed to be the insurer of last resort. Its completely backwards of the way it should be, he said. Topics Carriers Florida A Utah man has been arrested on accusations he started a wildfire while trying to burn a spider with his lighter. Cory Allan Martin, 26, told deputies that he spotted the spider Monday while he was in a hiking area in the foothills south of Salt Lake City near the city of Springville, shows a probable cause statement. He acknowledged starting the fire, but didnt explain why he was trying to burn the spider. Deputies found a jar of marijuana in his belongings, but he didnt appear to be high, said Utah County Sheriffs Sgt. Spencer Cannon. There is no evidence to suggest he intentionally started the blaze, said Cannon, but he called it a reckless and puzzling decision. This area and most of Utah are bone dry amid extreme drought conditions. What led him to stop and notice a spider and decide to try to burn it, we dont know, Cannon said. There may not be a why. He might not even know a why. Martin was arrested on suspicion of reckless burn and possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, court documents show. He was in the Utah County jail Tuesday on nearly $2,000 bail. It was unknown if he had an attorney. The wildfire quickly spread up the mountain and had burned less than 1 square mile, according to fire officials. No homes had been damaged. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire News Global market trend 2023-2028 Soaring energy prices are adding to the cost-of-living crisis for hundreds of millions of people, which is also having an impact on shanghai composite by Newsintegra927 The UN Secretary-General's Global Food, Energy and Financial Crisis Response Group (GCRG) issued its third report on Tuesday, warning that soaring energy prices are exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis for hundreds of millions of people as the conflict in Ukraine continues to rage. Major oil and gas companies have recently reported record profits despite the ongoing energy crisis, in what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called "unethical" behavior. "In the first quarter of this year, the largest energy companies had combined profits of almost $100 billion. I urge governments to tax these excessive profits and use the funds to support the most vulnerable through these difficult times." The newly released report focuses on energy and recommends that governments find the most effective ways to fund energy solutions, such as publicly funded cash transfers and tax rebates to protect vulnerable communities everywhere, and including a windfall profits tax on the largest oil and gas companies. At the same time, the report urges a transition to renewable energy. The report said there was growing concern that rising energy costs could cost many developing countries, particularly the most vulnerable communities, from energy markets. These countries have already borne the brunt of the crisis and have suffered major setbacks in access to energy and sustainable development since the COVID-19 pandemic. More worryingly, the report warns, there could be a potential "energy scramble" where only the countries paying the highest prices get access to energy. Governments, therefore, need fiscal space to support their most vulnerable populations to avoid worsening levels of energy poverty or a complete loss of energy supply. Guterres proposed four major proposals, including imposing an "excessive profit tax" on energy companies, saving energy in developed countries, accelerating the shift to renewable energy and increasing investment in clean energy. Factors affecting freight forwarder shanghai composite Freight transportation In international freight transport, one of the most concerning issues is the price of freight transport. The cost is directly related to the cost of transportation. Because many exporters do not understand the price of transportation very much, and often have a lot of extra spending, then today to understand the factors of the price of international freight transportation? Do You Need Freight Forwarders? China DDP for World is a full-service and shipping forwarder dedicated to assisting our clients in focusing and growing their businesses. Send an Email to info@ddpforworld.com and get the latest freight price. The transportation prices are different for different shanghai composite In the general international trade process, the price of transport according to different modes of transport, price is also different. International freight rates are divided into sea freight, air freight and rail freight. The specific shanghai composite freight rate can also be subdivided. For example, rail freight can be divided into passenger freight and freight. Shipping rates are also divided into tramp rates and liner rates. Tramp rates are also affected by market supply and demand relations at that time, while liner transport costs are relatively fixed. Airfreight can be divided into general goods, designated goods and special goods, and the specific transportation price is also determined according to the weight of transportation, at the same time, even if the volume is small, the weight is also counted by weight, but if the opposite is large, small weight, also according to the specific volume to calculate. The choice of international logistics, the quality of logistics will affect the seller's store score, but also affect customer satisfaction rate. Logistics advantages of the shanghai composite in the destination country and region In Eastern Europe, DHL has advantages in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Hungary and other places while EMS has advantages in Greece, Russia, Turkey and other places. Western Europe, Northern Europe, southern Europe can use DHL international express, TNT international express, these two kinds of customs clearance capacity. TNT has a clear advantage in the Netherlands and Belgium. For Canada, the United States and other American countries, FedEx, UPS and DHL are all suitable for their strong customs clearance capacity and fast time. Applicable to Asia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries DHL, FedEx. DHL and FedEx are time-saving, but THE price of DHL is higher. Indonesia also suggests USING DHL because it has a stronger customs clearance capacity. In Oceania, DHL and UPS aging fast, with high prices; TNT and FedEx have lower prices but relatively few outlets. Particular attention should be paid to the "Made in China" label on the packaging of Australian products. Middle East express ARAMEX, EMS for Middle East region. Commercial express in Africa is very expensive. In remote areas, IT is suggested to send EMS international express. EMS countries have the strongest customs clearance capacity. The air express shanghai composite can reach many countries and regions that commercial express and postal express cannot reach, so the wide range of shanghai composite transportation is its advantage. Factors affecting the shipping price of shanghai composite In the process of international transportation, there are many factors affecting the price of transportation, in addition to some fuel and labor costs, there are many important factors. For example, the nature of the shanghai composite, its own value and packaging form, as well as stowage factor and transporter's requirements for transportation, etc. There will be some fixed costs during the use of the ship, such as the ship's maintenance insurance and fuel consumption. There is also the change of supply and demand in the shanghai composite market. In the transport off-season, transport prices are relatively low, in the transport of the peak season, transport prices will be relatively high. Contact a professional freight forwarder- DDPFORWORLD - Professional freight forwarder in China Do You Need Freight Forwarders from China ? DDP for World is a full-service and shipping forwarder dedicated to assisting our clients in focusing and growing their businesses. We do DDP shipping since 2015 by handling home decor, Pet products, battery, power banks, DG cargo, general cargo and Amazon FBA shipping forwarding service. We make your shipping easier and faster by Sea, Air, Express, Truck or Railway. If you have any questions or needs about freight forwarder, please feel free to contact us, we will serve you wholeheartedly. Email: info@ddpforworld.com Inquery us A judge has refused to set any bond for rapper Mystikal, who is accused of raping and choking a woman at his home in Louisiana. State District Judge Steven Tureau ruled that evidence against the 51-year-old, real name Michael Tyler, his history and the victims fears met the standard for holding him without bail, The Advocate reported. Tyler served six years in prison after pleading guilty in 2003 to sexual battery. In December 2020, prosecutors in Caddo Parish, north-west Louisiana, dropped rape and kidnapping charges that had kept him jailed for 18 months. He was not convicted of other charges, including marijuana possession and misdemeanour domestic violence, that had been brought against him since the mid-1990s, the newspaper reported. Mystikal (Robb D Cohen/Invision/AP) Defence lawyer Roy Maughan Jr, who had asked for a bond of 250,000 dollars (205,000), maintained that Tyler is innocent of the most recent charges, including rape and domestic abuse battery by strangulation, but told the newspaper after the hearing that Tyler will probably not appeal against the bond ruling. Mr Maughan failed to get the court record to reflect that Tyler made all of his court dates in those cases and, as a celebrity, would have a hard time evading capture if he fled. He had been released on a 3 million dollar (2.5 million) bond in February 2019, nearly two years before the Caddo Parish charges were dropped. Mystikal, who grew up in New Orleans and now lives in Prairieville, is accused of attacking the woman, taking her keys and holding her against her will, according to an arrest warrant. Sheriffs Detective Garrett Keith told the court on Tuesday that the woman went to Tylers home on Saturday to talk about alleged financial commitments he had made to her. He said the woman reported that Tylers behaviour changed abruptly after he went into the bathroom and returned, accusing her of stealing cash, choking her and pulling out her hair. Tyler later apologised, prayed with her and threw rubbing alcohol on her to cleanse her bad spirits before raping her, Mr Keith said. Mr Maughans cross-examination tried to show that the prayer and apology indicated that things were calmer and the woman was not afraid, the newspaper reported. Mr Keith later told prosecutors the woman was praying for her safety and did not know what Tyler said. The woman was cut and bruised, and officers found some of her braids, an earring and a broken nail in the house, the detective said. Some wounds were consistent with rape, he added. Mr Maughan cross-examined Mr Keith about whether and how the woman had objected to sex. Mr Keith quoted her as saying Tylers threats had made her afraid to object at first, but she later clearly told him no. Irish folk musician Andy Irvine, who has been at the helm of legendary bands such as Planxty, is celebrating after instruments worth 16,000 which went missing last month en route from Dublin to Copenhagen were returned to him. The 80-year-old musician, who plays the mandola, bouzouki, harmonica and hurdy-gurdy was upset when two of his instruments vanished after he flew from Dublin Airport to the Skagen Folk Festival in Denmark in late June. His prize guitar bouzouki and mandola disappeared on the journey. Andy had travelled through Frankfurt and on to Copenhagen with his carriers being Lufthansa and Scandinavian Airlines. To everybody who has helped me or shown concern about my missing instruments, I give my heartiest thanks. On Monday I got an email from SAS to tell meTHEYD FOUND MY INSTRUMENTS!!! They were rushed to Dublin & delivered to my door yesterday evening!! Andy Irvine (@andyk_irvine) August 3, 2022 Posting on social media, Mr Irvine said that he had received an email from Scandinavian Airlines to tell him they had found his instruments. "They were rushed to Dublin and delivered to my door yesterday evening. I can't tell you how it feels to have them back. I have a permanent smile on my face. To everybody who has helped me or shown concern about my missing instruments, I give my heartiest thanks. " Posting on his Facebook page last month Mr Irvine, who earlier this year celebrated his milestone birthday with a celebratory gig at Vicar Street in Dublin, said: "My two Sobell instruments, a guitar-bouzouki & a mandola, probably valued in excess of 16,000, failed to arrive and have not been traced yet. "The chaos at airports is such that they may be in Dublin, Frankfurt or Copenhagen." Mr Irvine was in possession of the instruments for about four decades. He has been part of bands like Sweeney's Men in the mid 1960s and Planxty in the 1970s. Following Planxty, Irvine joined fellow trad outfits Patrick Street, Mozaik, LAPD and recently Usher's Island. An Irish mother whose son gave up his counselling course to serve on the Ukrainian frontline has admitted that she feared he was dead when he failed to contact her for nearly four days. Bailey Patchell and two other Irish volunteers travelled to Ukraine earlier this year with the intention of carrying out medical assistance. Instead they ended up joining the International Legion for the Territorial Defence of Ukraine. His mother Pam told Liveline, on RTE Radio 1, that it was very difficult to face in to the dreary nighttime hours not knowing if her beloved 23-year-old son would still be alive in the morning. "There was about three times where we had no radio contact. He was very good for keeping in touch so when he didn't it was very stressful. We knew it was very serious because Bailey had texted saying 'I am going out to the front. I don't know whether I will get to see you again or not'. "There was a little video of him saying his goodbyes. Fast forward three-and-a-half days and we hadn't heard anything. I had a number for his commander. I was given it for emergencies. I was sitting here with his dad and we were looking at each other saying 'If this isn't an emergency I don't know what is.' My husband and I didn't know what to do. "I just texted his Commander and said 'Is Bailey alive?' and I got a text saying 'Yes he is. Please don't worry. I will get him to text you tomorrow.' He wasn't hurt and thankfully we spoke to him the next day." Pam and her family were consumed by coverage of the war. "We were watching every video clip. My dad was watching every clip pausing and saying 'Is that him?' Looking at every YouTube clip that the different news agencies were putting up. "And then there was an actual video of him (Bailey) training that we managed to see. Which was amazing and we really started to understand why he had gone. He is quite talented at what he does. Those few days of not hearing from him was just miserable. " International Legion for the Territorial Defence of Ukraine Meanwhile, Bailey said that a month after his arrival he had a javelin missile launcher on his shoulder, although he had never intended to fight. "We were intending to go over to do medical aid but one thing led to another and we ended up joining the International Legion for the Territorial Defence of Ukraine. It wasn't a deception on any part it was just how things played out." Bailey said he and two others landed in Krakow and were transported in to Ukraine with the help of volunteers. They were brought to a location he can't disclose and training began. Read More Ukrainian cities shelled including one near nuclear power plant He joined a unit set up for foreigners who wished to assist Ukraine on the frontline. His comrades were individuals from Brazil, Italy, the Baltic states, England, Scotland, Wales, America, Taiwan and Korea. He found the Korean volunteers to be particularly able and friendly. Within a few days of being in Ukraine his unit was under fire. "It wasn't attacked by the Russian army itself. They struck it with long-range missiles. "This is going to sound quite silly but when I woke up to the bang I remember going 'Oh God' and thinking 'this is real?' and within five seconds I realised there was glass on the floor. And then I got myself dressed and got out. When I got out that is when the panic started. Hearing that and seeing that for the first time. Feeling the earth shake beneath your feet. It is something else. But it doesn't matter how afraid you feel you just keep moving. "There is a little voice in your head screaming 'this is insane what are you doing?' And then the rest of your body takes over and is like 'We have got to keep moving. We have got to keep doing things.' I knew we had to keep safe." Outnumbered Bailey, who has undertaken some Army training but had to leave the Irish military arising out an injury which has since resolved, said that he was involved in counter-defensive operations. "Trying to take back ground that had been lost earlier in the war. Doing things like reconnaissance, monitoring areas and so on. We were kind of doing a little bit of everything. In terms of being outnumbered we were up against a superpower. Hopefully the Ukrainians will be able to muster a million men by the end of the year. The Russians just have way more equipment. " Bailey has called on Ireland and other countries to support Ukrainians in terms of supplying aid and equipment. "They [the Russians] have most of the Old Soviet stockpiles so even if their new stuff is destroyed they have tonnes more tanks, tonnes more artillery, a lot more helicopters and aircraft and they can just keep going. Bailey Patchell in Ukraine: "I got knocked up in to the air by a blast. Not far. That was quite frightening." "So that is why the Ukrainians need more support. They are up against something that is so much bigger than them. The Russians were planning this war for four years." The young volunteer recalled a terrifying incident where the 70 men in his group ended up having 1,000 Russian soldiers shooting in their direction. He said he survived because of the "wonderful soldiers" and the "legend" of a commander they served under. "He gave a damn about us. As soon as they could, they got us out of there. You would get in to trenches and in to structures that could take hits. A lot of places have these half-bunker, half-cellar things and the Russians were doing that too. "We were well equipped and supplied and had vehicles to get out. But we we were pretty outnumbered. I got knocked up into the air by a blast. Not far. That was quite frightening. My hearing was gone for a bit and my vision was a little funny. Very luckily, I was never seriously hurt." Friends for life Bailey, who has since returned to Ireland, added that he would mourn all those who died in his unit for the rest of his life. "It is not something you easily forget. When you are in that situation, although you don't know people very long, there is a depth of connection. It is not like anything else. "I said it to my friends when I came home. I was like 'I miss those guys over there as much in such a short space of time as you who I have known 10 years. And it is true. I even feel guilty being home. My mates are still there. I miss them terribly. The effect of losing people. You can only grieve after the fact. When it happens you have to do your job. " Bob Geldof is to tell audiences at the West Cork History Festival this weekend how the depiction of famine conditions near Skibbereen inspired Band Aid. The legendary musician says Band Aid's tactics to highlight famine in Africa in 1980s mirror the way a 19th-century campaigner described the horrors of famine at South Reen near Skibbereen to ignite a response from British authorities. The Boomtown Rat will tell audiences at the West Cork History Festival this weekend that Irelands population and culture was decimated during the Great Famine in a similar fashion to what he saw unfolding in Ethiopia in the early 1980s. Mr Geldof was spurred into action and recruited colleagues in the music industry to record a Christmas record in 1984, and the legendary Live Aid concert the following summer, with the proceeds aimed at relief efforts in the region. During his speech this weekend, the musician will pay homage to NM Cummins, who successfully appealed to Queen Victoria and the British and international public to respond to the horrors unfolding during the famine in Ireland. Mr Cummins's letter to the Duke of Wellington was published in the London Times on Christmas Eve in 1846, and goes into great detail of the plight he had seen in West Cork. He wrote: In the first six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horse-cloth, naked above the knees. I approached in horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive, they were in fever four children, a woman, and at what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the details, suffice to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. By far, the greater number were delirious, either from famine or fever. Their demonic yells are still yelling in my ears, and their horrible images and fixed upon my brain. Mr Cummins imploring of authorities to take auction and his use of the media to reach the widest audience is what Band Aid was trying to do well over a century later according to Mr Geldof. He will tell attendees that in anybodys language what happened during the Famine must be deemed a holocaust just sweeping through a land taking their people, their language, and all that vast culture away from them. He will say: One of the people who couldnt turn away was Nicholas Cummins he seems to me to be a very modern man. Its a bit embarrassing that its me talking about this, but all the language of this letter and the people to whom he addresses it, and the moral armlock he puts on them, is very reminiscent to me of that time in 1984 when we were alerted to the great African famine. Bob Geldof with Roma Downey. Picture: Kyran O'Brien It lasted roughly the same length of time and wasnt as devastating as what happened to the Irish. Mr Geldofs comments will launch the West Cork History Festival, which takes place near Skibbereen and will also be live-streamed online from this Saturday. The audience for Mr Geldofs video presentation will include Taoiseach Micheal Martin. Attendees will also hear from historians on the 175th anniversary of Black 47 and about the Bandon Valley Killings of 1922, as part of the decade of centenaries. A "national conversation" is needed about the future of agriculture and food production in Ireland, the Labour Party has said. The ecological impact of agriculture has been the focus of intense debate in recent weeks as the Government agreed a 25% reductions target for the sector's carbon emissions. However, that figure, which was arrived at after weeks of negotiation between ministers, was criticised for being both not ambitious enough and too punitive on farmers. Sean Sherlock, Labour TD for Cork East, believes that the sector should be the subject of a Citizens' Assembly convened to discuss the future of farming and food production in Ireland. "The evidence is clear, the cuts that will have to be made across the agriculture sector will have to be at the higher end of the scale proposed closer to 30% than 22%," Mr Sherlock said. The Labour TD said that farmers were under pressure to repay moves into dairy which had been encouraged by government policy. In reaching these targets, it cant be felt by any one sector that the targets are being foisted on them. The cost of living crisis impacts farmers also, and we need specific programmes identified to support farm families. I have great sympathy for the many farmers who were told to leverage up, gear up and move into dairy. Many of those farmers have taken on serious debt to increase their output but theyre under serious pressure from banks and co-ops to meet capital repayments and get their milk proteins to desired levels. One bad silage season and many of these folks are gone to the wall. We need to have a national conversation on what the future of agriculture would look like. In order to take the next steps together, free of political short-termism, Labour is calling on Government to convene a Citizens Assembly on the future of Agriculture and Food productions in Ireland." Speaking as the emissions cuts were agreed, Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue said the agriculture target of 25% reflected a very challenging, but ultimately achievable, ambition for the sector. However, the Irish Farmers' Association called the move a "potentially devastating blow for Irish farming and the rural economy". According to a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report, agriculture remains by far the largest contributor to overall emissions in Ireland, at 37.5% of the total. Agriculture emissions rose 3% in 2021 which the report puts down to increased use of fertiliser nitrogen and increased numbers of dairy cows, pigs, and other livestock. In 2021, total cattle numbers increased by 0.8%. China has said military exercises by its navy, air force and other departments are under way in six zones surrounding Taiwan. The drills were prompted by a visit to the island by Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi this week and are intended to advertise Chinas threat to attack the self-governing island republic in response to moves to solidify its de facto independence from Chinese rule with support from key ally the US. Chinas official Xinhua News Agency said the exercises were joint operations focused on blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control. Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defence drills, while the US has numerous naval assets in the area. The drills are due to run from Thursday to Sunday and include missile strikes on targets in the seas north and south of the island in an echo of the last major Chinese military drills aimed at intimidating Taiwans leaders and voters held in 1995 and 1996. The exercises involved troops from the Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, Strategic Support Force and Logistic Support Force under the Eastern Theatre Command. It comes as a group of 10 south-east Asian countries have called for calm in the Taiwan Strait as it urged against any provocative action in the wake of a visit to Taipei by Ms Pelosi. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) foreign ministers meeting in Cambodias Phnom Penh said they were concerned the situation could destabilise the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers. It was a rare such statement from the 10-nation group, some of whose members drift more toward China in allegiance and some toward the United States. Both US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi were taking part in the ongoing Asean meetings in Phnom Penh on Thursday and Friday. Ms Pelosi received a euphoric welcome as the first US House speaker, and highest ranking US official, to visit Taiwan in more than 25 years, and China swiftly responded by announcing multiple military exercises nearby. China claims the self-governing island of Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments. Beijing has accused the US of breaking the status quo with the Pelosi visit, while Washington insists there has been no change to its one-China position of recognising the government in Beijing while allowing for informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. Shortly after Pelosi landed Tuesday night, China announced live-fire drills that reportedly started that night, as well as the four-day exercises starting Thursday. The Peoples Liberation Army Air Force also flew a contingent of 21 warplanes toward Taiwan. Meantime, the US has an aircraft carrier group and other naval assets in the region. In their statement, the Asean foreign ministers called for maximum restraint and for all sides to refrain from provocative action. We should act together and Asean stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties The world is in dire need of wisdom and responsibility of all leaders to uphold multilateralism and partnership, cooperation, peaceful-coexistence and healthy competition for our shared goals of peace, stability, security and inclusive and sustainable development, they said. We should act together and Asean stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilising Asean-led mechanisms to deescalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region. Asean comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Burma Kachin Resistance Attacks Myanmar Junta-Allied Outposts Kachin Independence Army fighters. / The Irrawaddy One of the major ethnic armed groups in Myanmar, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), has been attacking ethnic Lisu militias in Waingmaw Township in Kachin State since mid-July. KIA Brigade 5 has been attacking at least three Lisu militia bases along the road between Waingmaw and Sadone since July 14, alleging that they are cooperating with the regime. Militias from the Lisu National Development Party (LNDP) led by U Shwe Min and junta troops are deployed at the outposts, said Waingmaw residents. KIA troops attacked and torched a Lisu militia base to the south of the Waingmaw-Sadone road on Tuesday morning, according to KIA sources. Some shells landed on a village during the fighting and villagers fled their homes, said residents. KIA troops and the Kachin Peoples Defense Force attacked a Lisu militia base by the road in the east of Waingmaw on July 28. At least six Lisu militia members and a KIA fighter died in the two hours of fighting, said a resident. Militias do not have heavy guns and they only defended themselves from inside the base with rifles, as they were surrounded. I heard it was the KIA and PDF that attacked them. I dont know the casualty numbers. I heard around six Lisu militia members were killed. There were gunshots until dawn. I heard around 30 to 40 shells land, said the resident. The KIA also occupied and torched a Lisu militia base to the south of the road on July 14. A junta jet fighter bombed the base following the attack, said residents. A Kachin analyst said the KIA attacked the junta-affiliated Lisu militia base to expand its control of the road. Tensions are running high between the KIA and regime which has brought in reinforcements from Light Infantry Battalion 58 and Division 88 to the road. Founded in 2013, the LNDP contested in both the 2015 and 2020 general elections. It won two seats each in the Lower House and Shan State parliament in 2015. It is a political party that has transformed from a militia group and is estimated to have around 100 armed groups. U Shwe Mins troops form a splinter group from Zakhung Ting Yings New Democratic Army Kachin militia. Zakhung Ting Ying split from the KIA in 1993 and made peace with the previous military regime, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. The group came under regime control when it transformed itself into a Border Guard Force in 2009. Burma Myanmar Coup Leader Requests Russia Move its Embassy to Naypyitaw Russias foreign minister Sergei Lavrov (left) and Myanmar regime chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing in Naypyitaw on Wednesday. / Russian MFA Myanmar junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing told Russias foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to move the Russian Embassy from Yangon to the capital Naypyitaw, according to Russian state media the TASS news agency. Russias foreign minister arrived in Myanmar on Wednesday for a working visit and met his Myanmar counterpart and coup leader Min Aung Hlaing in Naypyitaw. Lavrovs trip was the second high-profile visit by a foreign government since last years coup, following the January visit of Cambodias Prime Minister Hun Sen and foreign minister Prak Sokhonn. Min Aung Hlaing suggested moving Russias Embassy to Naypyitaw and opening a consulate in Mandalay, according to TASS. He also suggested that Myanmar open consulates in the Russian cities of St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. We need new institutions for diplomatic contacts so that we can increase travel between our countries, Min Aung Hlaing was quoted by TASS as saying. It is not yet clear how Russia will respond to Min Aung Hlaings proposal. Lavrov met the junta boss ahead of attending the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. The military regimes top diplomat, U Wunna Maung Lwin, has been excluded from the ASEAN meeting, after the junta sparked fresh international outrage last week by executing four political prisoners including a former lawmaker and a veteran democracy activist. We stand in solidarity with the efforts [by the regime] to stabilize the situation in the country, Lavrov reportedly said in his meeting with U Wunna Maung Lwin. The two foreign ministers discussed strengthening economic cooperation, defense and security ties and the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Myanmar, said sources in Naypyitaw. There were reports ahead of Lavrovs visit to Myanmar that the regime is interested in acquiring BrahMos supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles manufactured by BrahMos Aerospace, a joint Russian-Indian venture, with a loan from the Indian government. After China, Russia is a major arms supplier to the Myanmar regime and the two countries have become closer since the 2021 coup that has thrown Myanmar into chaos. Lavrovs visit comes two weeks after Min Aung Hlaing traveled to Russia on an unofficial trip during which he visited weapon factories. Russia has sold six SU-30 fighters that can use BrahMos anti-ship cruise missiles to Myanmar. Two fighters were handed over to the Myanmar military before the Armed Forces Day in March last year, with Russian pilots training their Myanmar counterparts. David Scott Mathieson, an independent researcher on conflict and peace in Myanmar, said that the visit of Russias foreign minister is a sign that Moscow will continue to sell arms to the regime as long as it can pay for them, which is bad news for resistance forces in Myanmar. Mathieson added that Russia will likely continue to defy the United Nations Security Councils actions and arms embargo on the Myanmar regime. Russia is important for the isolated junta, which is increasingly relying on air power to crush resistance forces, noted Mathieson. The Myanmar people will continue to suffer from junta air and artillery strikes unless the supply of weapons from Russia is stopped, he added. Since becoming military chief in 2011, Min Aung Hlaing has visited Russia at least ten times. Observers say that the Russian foreign ministers visit is a sign that the two countries are looking to promote cooperation in other sectors besides the military. As part of Russia-Myanmar economic cooperation, operations are set to resume in 2023-24 at the No. 2 steel factory (Pinpet) in Shan State, after the plant was shuttered for over four years. The plant, located near the Shan State capital Taunggyi, is a joint iron exploitation and processing project between the military-owned Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) and the state-owned Russian company Tyazhpromexport. Min Aung Hlaing visited the plant in October last year. The junta is also trying to join the SPFS (Sistema Peredachi Finansovykh Soobscheniy) bank transfer system run by the Central Bank of Russia, to avoid using the SWIFT (The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system mainly used by western countries. Burma Myanmar Junta Charges Japanese Filmmaker With Incitement Pictures of Japanese citizen Toru Kubota, who is detained in Myanmar, at a protest at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo on July 31. / AFP Detained Japanese documentary filmmaker Toru Kubota faces charges of incitement and violations of visa and immigration rules for his alleged connections with anti-regime protesters, according to the juntas information ministry. The 26-year-old was detained on Saturday in South Dagon Township, Yangon, along with two protesters, while documenting an anti-regime rally against the executions of four pro-democracy activists. He entered Myanmar through Thailand with a tourist visa on July 1 and contacted protesters on July 29, the ministrys statement said. Kubota had been charged with incitement under 505(a) of the Penal Code and for breaching visa rules under Article 13 of the Immigration Act. The charges of incitement carry up to three years in prison and violating the Immigration Act carries up to five years. No details were given about the two protesters arrested with him. A Japanese government representative on Sunday said Tokyo was calling for Kubotas release. A small crowd gathered outside the foreign ministry in Tokyo on Sunday to demand his release. Since the 2021 coup, the regime has targeted journalists with arrests, lawsuits, raids on newsrooms and violence to suppress coverage of junta atrocities. More than 130 journalists have been detained since the coup. Many of them were charged with incitement and contacting illegal organizations. Kubota is the fifth foreign journalist arrested by the junta. The previous four have been released. Last year Japanese filmmaker Yuki Kitazumi was detained while covering Myanmar. Under international pressure, he was released and returned to Japan in May 2021 after 25 days in detention. Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai was killed at point-blank range while he was covering protests in Myanmar, during firing on protesters during the Saffron Revolution led by Buddhist monks in 2007. Burma Saddened Suu Kyi Questions Legitimacy of Myanmar Activists Executions Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as Myanmar State Counselor in 2019. / AFP The Myanmar juntas executions of four democracy activists in late July saddened the countrys ousted leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, prompting her to question the legitimacy of the death sentences handed down to the four men, who included a former lawmaker from her National League for Democracy (NLD) Party. Former NLD MP Ko Phyo Zeya Thaw, prominent democracy activist Ko Jimmy and anti-coup activists Ko Hla Myo Aung and Ko Aung Thura Zaw were hanged by the junta at Yangons Insein Prison. A military regime tribunal sentenced them to death, accusing them of masterminding and being involved in anti-regime activities. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was visibly saddened upon learning of the executions when she appeared at a recent court hearing, according to sources close to the court. Can they be hanged under the law? Why did it [the regime] do that? They cant do that, said the sources, citing Suu Kyi. Sources also revealed that ousted President U Win Myint looked very upset when he learned about the hangings. U Win Myint has been held under house arrest since last years coup and, like Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, faces a series of charges from the junta. Suu Kyi was detained by the regime on the day of the coup. Last month, the 77-year-old was moved to solitary confinement in a prison in Myanmars capital Naypyitaw. The executions of the four activists spurred global outrage, with United Nations (UN) Special Envoy for Myanmar Noeleen Heyzer saying that the UN views the hangings as a blatant violation of a persons right to life, liberty and security. The United States, along with other countries, blasted the regime for its disregard for human rights and the rule of law. Close ties Of the four victims, both Ko Phyo Zeya Thaw and Ko Jimmy were friends with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ko Jimmy had known her since he was a young student taking part in the 1988 pro-democracy uprising that aimed to topple the then military regime. Later, he became a member of the prominent 88 Generation Peace and Open Society and continued to promote peace in Myanmar. Along with former student leader Ko Min Ko Naing, Ko Jimmy was frequently spotted holding friendly conversations with Suu Kyi at state dinners during the time the NLD was in power from 2016 to 2021. Former rapper Ko Phyo Zeya Thaw became close to Suu Kyi after they were both elected as NLD MPs in the 2012 by-elections. Ko Phyo Zeya Thaw was part of her delegation when she traveled to Europe and also accompanied Suu Kyi on her first trip to China in 2015. Many senior NLD members knew that he had high respect for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and had earned her trust. NLD Secretariat member U Win Htein, who is also being detained by the regime, said that Zeya Thaw is almost like a son to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma Three Resistance Fighters Detained by Myanmar Junta Found Dead in Mandalay Junta soldiers and police carry out checks in Mandalay. / CJ Three of 10 resistance fighters seized by the Myanmar military regime in Mandalays Aungmyaythazan Township earlier this week were killed and their bodies dumped by the roadside, according to local resistance groups. Junta troops raided a resistance safe house and detained around 10 fighters in Aungmyaythazan on Monday. The following day, the bodies of three of them, including the leader of the Myanmar Return Ranger Force (MRRF), were found dumped by the roadside. The MRRF confirmed the death of its leader Bo Aung Myay. The resistance fighters were arrested while planning to move to another place, it said. A spokesman for Mandalay-based underground group the Mandalay People Rescue Force said: We can confirm the [identity] of Bo Aung Myay. But we cant identify the two other bodies. The whereabouts of the other detainees are still unknown, he said, adding that the fighters are feared dead. The regime has stepped up security checks and arrests of young people since early July, according to residents and resistance groups. More than 80 resistance fighters and civilians have been detained so far. Junta soldiers, police and armed men in civilian clothes are carrying out increased security checks on roads, using private cars and vehicles from charities and monasteries, said local resistance groups. The regime has also been checking houses for overnight guests as it hunts for protest leaders and resistance fighters. Troops surround areas before knocking on doors to prevent suspects escaping, said resistance fighters. Some resistance groups have suspended operations, while others have left Mandalay. South Africa: SA-Botswana business roundtable kicks off President Cyril Ramaphosa says the historical ties between South Africa and Botswana spanning over thousands of years can provide a solid foundation for the deepening of economic and bilateral relations between the two countries. The President was speaking at the opening of the High Level South Africa-Botswana Business Roundtable held in Botswana on Thursday. The roundtable brought together at least 50 business people from both countries, President Ramaphosa and Botswana President, Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi and several ministers from the two countries. President Ramaphosa said one of the key areas for improvement in economic relations is mutual investment. Over the past five years, South Africas foreign direct investment stock in Botswana has increased year-on-year, reaching US$ 5.1 billion in 2021. While we will continue to encourage South African investment into Botswana, we are encouraged by the Botswana companies that have already invested in South Africa. Between January 2003 and December 2021, we saw nine FDI projects from Botswana to South Africa. They attracted capital investment worth R3.9 billion, resulting in the creation of over 2 000 jobs. We would like to see these numbers grow exponentially, President Ramaphosa said. The President said the work being done in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) by Botswana and South Africa will bode well for the two countries ability to take full advantage of the operationalisation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). He said that this will open new markets in the rest of the continent, which hold immense potential for the two countries. The joint export promotion platforms that are being discussed at SACU level for leveraging AfCFTA trade opportunities are promising. I urge that the same vigour be given to concluding the work of creating industrial value-chains in the SACU. Through these value-chains, we will be able to grow our industrial exports to the rest of the continent. New markets in West, East, North and Central Africa hold immense potential for both South Africa and Botswana. We will be able to produce and export local goods, products and services to our fellow African countries, which would otherwise be sourced from outside the continent, President Ramaphosa said. The President highlighted some of the many opportunities which the two countries can create through cooperation. Work is already underway on leather and leather products, fresh produce, meat and meat products, textiles, clothing, cosmetics and essential oils. These sectors present opportunities for the development of regional value chains across the region. They also present opportunities for SACU exports to the rest of Africa, to the United States under AGOA (African Growth and Opportunity Act), to the European Union under the EPA (Economic Partnership Agreements), and to other strategic markets in Asia and the Middle East, he said. Reflecting on South Africas status as one of the continents most industrialised countries, President Ramaphosa said this can be used a spring board for the entire region. It is through this base that we should lift all the countries in Southern Africa and use this endowment to ensure that we do grow and capture the opportunities that are to be found on the continent, President Ramaphosa said. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2022-08-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Political parties of various countries strongly oppose Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region Xinhua) 09:38, August 04, 2022 BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Political parties of various countries on Wednesday expressed strong opposition to the visit by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to China's Taiwan region, saying it severely violated China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Through messages received in various ways by the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the political parties also reiterated their adherence to the one-China principle, and urged the U.S. side to immediately stop interfering in China's internal affairs. Ivan Melnikov, first deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), also first deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma or the lower house of parliament, said Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region is an open provocation to China, it is contrary to a series of consensuses reached between the Chinese and U.S. governments, and is yet another example of how the U.S. side sabotages global stability. Melnikov said the CPRF firmly supports the efforts made by the Chinese people in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The secretariat of Mazdoor Kisan Party of Pakistan released a statement to express serious concern over Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, saying that the U.S. deeds of interfering in China's internal affairs are unacceptable. The statement also urged the U.S. side to earnestly comply with the three China-U.S. joint communiques and respect China's efforts in realizing national reunification. The Funcinpec Party of Cambodia said that it is impossible for anyone, any force, to stop the historical trend that China will achieve national reunification. The party reiterated its adherence to the one-China principle and firm support to China's efforts in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Communist Party of Egypt said it strongly condemns Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region, fully supports the one-China principle, and believes that the Communist Party of China has the wisdom and ability to achieve victory from this crisis and defeat the insidious conspiracies of the U.S. side. Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region violates the one-China policy, and is a provocative action that damages China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, posing a serious threat to regional security and stability, said Ahmed Majdalani, secretary-general of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, who also expressed firm opposition to other countries' interference in China's internal affairs. Pelosi's move is a provocation by the U.S. side against China, and all progressive countries in the world should condemn it, said Tandai Chirau, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) politburo member, deputy secretary for security, noting ZANU-PF supports the one-China principle and the Chinese side's actions to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Masonwabe Sokoyi, 2nd deputy secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the Western Cape province, said that Pelosi insisted on making the visit to China's Taiwan region is an unjust act in violation of the UN Charter and relevant resolutions. The progressive forces of the world, including the SACP, regard China as an example for various countries in the world and firmly support the one-China policy, Sokoyi added. Luciana Santos, president of the Communist Party of Brazil, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a blatant violation of the commitments made by the U.S. side in the three China-U.S. joint communiques. Taiwan has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times, Santos added, expressing firm opposition to the U.S. threat to world peace. Victor Gorodeki Kot, general secretary of the Communist Party of Argentina, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a grave provocation, which blatantly violates UN Resolution 2758 and the commitment of the Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America. The Communist Party of Argentina calls on the governments and people of all countries, as well as the political parties, trade unions and governmental organizations of Argentina, to speak out against the actions of the United States, said Kot. The Hungarian Workers' Party said Pelosi's visit to Taiwan would have serious consequences. Taiwan is a region of China, and recognizing the one-China principle is an important part of safeguarding world peace. Jose Luis Centella, president of the Communist Party of Spain, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a clear provocation and shows that the United States intends to put its will above international law and the United Nations, which is very dangerous to the international community. Patrik Koebele, chairman of the German Communist Party, said Pelosi's sole purpose of visiting Taiwan is to provoke China. The whole world, including the United States, clearly knows and recognizes that there is only one China. In addition, more than 60 political parties in more than 40 countries also expressed firm opposition to Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, including the Workers' Party of Korea, the Mongolian Civil Will-Green Party, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist-Leninist), the People's Movement of Tunisia, the Communist Party of Lebanon, the Communist Party of Swaziland, the AVANA party of Madagascar, the Communist Party of Chile, the Communist Party of Portugal and France's Solidarity and Progress Party, among other parties. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Telecommunications company Ericsson and Vodafone have launched a service continuity for private networks aimed at improving manufacturing and industrial efficiency. The solution is now being deployed by Vodafones enterprise customer, electronics manufacturer and technology solutions provider Foxconn in its factory in Komarom, Hungary. Ericssons private networks are offering enterprises such as Foxconn a wireless connectivity that can transform the core of business-critical operations. Ericsson said the solution can prevent network outages and reduces the risk of costly downtime by identifying and averting such as risks. Based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, it can pre-emptively sense if something might result in a degradation of performance. Corrective actions are then taken by Vodafone locally together with Ericssons centralised team to avert such an occurrence, ensuring uptimes that are better than in traditional telecom networks. Foxconn relies on non-fixed 5G-based test cars, on which newly manufactured PCs are tested before packaging at their plant in Hungary. To ensure that the private network connecting these test cars is as reliable as possible, Vodafone and Ericsson have jointly developed and deployed the custom-built service contunuity for private networks support and technical assistance for enterprises that ensures smooth network operations, Ericsson said in a statement. We are very conscious of the trust placed by Foxconn in Vodafone and have worked jointly with Ericsson to create this unique technical assistance offering for enterprises to ensure that the operation of their private networks is free of unplanned interruptions, said Vodafone business director Matyas Dobo. We are constantly working with Vodafone to evolve the private networks space for enterprises, and this AI and ML-based support service is a testimony to that work. Added to this is the flexibility to change production setup without disruption, and to adapt to changing business needs, said Ericsson business area networks head of strategy and portfolio management Nello Califano. This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 3 August 2022. Venafi, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today announced the findings of a dark web investigation into ransomware spread via malicious macros. Conducted in partnership with criminal intelligence provider Forensic Pathways between November 2021 and March 2022, the research analysed 35 million dark web URLs, including marketplaces and forums, using the Forensic Pathways Dark Search Engine. The findings uncovered 475 webpages of sophisticated ransomware products and services, with several high-profile groups aggressively marketing ransomware-as-a-service. 87% of the ransomware found on the dark web has been delivered via malicious macros to infect targeted systems. 30 different 'brands' of ransomware were identified within marketplace listings and forum discussions. Many strains of ransomware being sold such as Babuk, GoldenEye, Darkside/BlackCat, Egregor, HiddenTear and WannaCry have been successfully used in high-profile attacks. Ransomware strains used in high-profile attacks command a higher price for associated services. For example, the most expensive listing was US$1,262 for a customised version of Darkside ransomware, which was used in the infamous Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack of 2021. Source code listings for well-known ransomware generally command higher price points, Babuk source code is listed for US $950 and Paradise source code is selling for US$593. "Ransomware continues to be one of biggest cybersecurity risk in every organisation," said Venafi vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence Kevin Bocek. "The ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline was so severe that it was deemed a national security threat, forcing President Biden to declare a state of emergency." Macros are used to automate common tasks in Microsoft Office, helping people to be more productive. However, attackers can use this same functionality to deliver many kinds of malware, including ransomware. In February, Microsoft announced a major change to combat the rapid growth of ransomware attacks delivered via malicious macros, but they temporarily reversed that decision in response to community feedback. "Given that almost anyone can launch a ransomware attack using a malicious macro, Microsoft's indecision around disabling of macros should scare everyone," said Bocek. "While the company has switched course a second time on disabling macros, the fact that there was backlash from the user community suggests that macros could persist as a ripe attack vector." In addition to a variety of ransomware at various price points, the research also uncovered a wide range of services and tools that help make it easier for attackers with minimal technical skills to launch ransomware attacks. Services with the greatest number of listings include those offering source code, build services, custom development services and ransomware packages that include step-by-step tutorials. Generic ransomware build services also command high prices, with some listings costing more than US$900. At the other end of the price spectrum, many low-cost ransomware options are available across multiple listings with prices starting at just US$0.99 for Lockscreen ransomware. These findings are another example of the need for a machine identity management control plane to drive specific business outcomes including observability, consistency and reliability. In particular code signing is a key machine identity management security control that eliminates the threat of macro-enabled ransomware. "Using code signing certificates to authenticate macros means that any unsigned macros cannot execute, stopping ransomware attacks in its tracks," Bocek concludes. "This is an opportunity for security teams to step up and protect their businesses, especially in banking, insurance, healthcare and energy where macros and Office documents are used every day to power decision making." About the research This research was carried out between November 2021-March 2022 by Venafi in partnership with Forensic Pathways, which has developed Dark Search Engine (DSE), an automated crawler/scraper of the Tor. Onion Dark Web. The intelligence tool contains >35 million URLs in the index. Publicly available information, such as PC Risk, was used to determine if malicious macros were used in the initial attack vector. For more information read the blog. About Venafi Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity management. From the ground to the cloud, Venafi solutions manage and protect identities for all types of machinesfrom physical and IoT devices to software applications, APIs and containers. Venafi provides global visibility, lifecycle automation and actionable intelligence for all machine identity types and the security and reliability risks associated with them. Jetstack, a Venafi company, is a cloud native products and strategic consulting company working with enterprises using Kubernetes and OpenShift. An open source pioneer, Jetstack has achieved notable industry recognition as the creator of cert-manager, the open source industry standard for cloud native machine identity management. Jetstack's open source products and solutions protect the application environments and platform infrastructure of global banks, multinational retailing companies and defense organizations by providing enterprise platform and security teams the power to build, scale and security their cloud infrastructure. With more than 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative machine identity management solutions for the world's most demanding, security-conscious organisations and government agencies, including the top five US health insurers; the top five US airlines; the top four credit card issuers; three out of the four top accounting and consulting firms; four of the five top US retailers; and the top four banks in each of the following countries: the US, the UK, Australia and South Africa. www.venafi.com www.jetstack.io About Forensic Pathways Incorporated in 2001, Forensic Pathways provides innovative technologies within the criminal intelligence arena. Focused primarily on the provision of digital forensic technologies, Forensic Pathways offers its international clients unique technologies in the management of mobile phone data, image analysis and ballistics analysis. Today Mostly sunny. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 108F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Tonight Mostly clear. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Tomorrow Except for a few afternoon clouds, mainly sunny. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 108F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. In Defence of Marxism is committed to safeguarding your privacy. At all times we aim to respect any personal data you share with us, or that we receive from other organisations, and keep it safe. This Privacy Policy (Policy) sets out our data collection and processing practices and your options regarding the ways in which your personal information is used. This Policy contains important information about your personal rights to privacy. Please read it carefully to understand how we use your personal data. We may update this Policy from time to time without notice to you, so please check it regularly. The provision of your personal data to us is voluntary. 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Please let us know if you have any queries or concerns whatsoever about the way in which your data is being processed by emailing the Data Protection Manager at webmaster@marxist.com TWO NEW GENERAL MANAGERS AT STEIGENBERGER HOTELS & RESORTS IN EGYPT Walid Nabil and Mehdi Othmani to head up the Steigenberger Pyramids Cairo and the Steigenberger Al Dau Beach Hotel TWO NEW GENERAL MANAGERS AT STEIGENBERGER HOTELS & RESORTS IN EGYPT Walid Nabil and Mehdi Othmani to head up the Steigenberger Pyramids Cairo and the Steigenberger Al Dau Beach Hotel Egypt - Careers - Appointments This is a press release Category: Africa Indian Ocean This is a press release selected by our editorial committee and published online for free on 2022-08-04 The Steigenberger Hotel in the Egyptian capital of Cairo has welcomed a new General Manager. Walid Nabil took charge at the Steigenberger Pyramids Cairo and at its partner hotel the Cairo Pyramids Hotel with effect from 15 June 2022. The Steigenberger Al Dau Beach Hotel in Hurghada has also been under fresh leadership since 4 July 2022. As the new General Manager Mehdi Othmani is responsible for the of the exclusive five-star deluxe hotel. In addition, Mr. Othmani took over operational responsibility at the Steigenberger Al Dau Resort, which includes the Steigenberger Aqua Magic and the Steigenberger Pure Lifestyle alongside the Steigenberger Al Dau Beach Hotel itself. Both new additions are distinguished by their long careers in the hotel industry, which will now continue at Steigenberger Hotels & Resorts. We warmly welcome Mr. Nabil and Mr. Othmani to our company and are very much looking forward to working with them, said Kai H. Gehrmann, Vice President Franchise at Deutsche Hospitality. With their long-standing expertise, their management experience and their country-specific knowledge of Egypt and its hotel landscape, they perfectly match the profile we are looking for in management at our Steigenberger Hotels & Resorts in Egypt." During a professional career stretching over three decades, Walid Nabil has been employed by well-known hotel chains such as Hilton Worldwide Hotels & Resorts und Best Western. He started his career in the USA in the early 1990s and worked at the Caesar Palace Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City before moving on to the Hilton New York in 1996. Walid Nabil moved back to his home country of Egypt in 2002 but remained loyal to the "Hilton" brand as Regional Director of Sales & Marketing. Further positions in Sales & Marketing followed, as well as assignments as Hotel Manager in Spain, Sudan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. He returned to Egypt in 2018, where he most recently acted as Cluster General Manager for SUNRISE Resort & Cruises in Hurghada. Mehdi Othmani boasts more than 20 years of international experience with renowned hotel chains and prominent tour operators. He has worked for luxury hotel brands such as Movenpick Hotels and Resorts and Hilton Worldwide as well as REWE Touristik. Mr. Othmanis career in the hospitality industry has taken him to a wide range of countries and regions such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Morocco, Kenya, Egypt, Uganda, and Oman. Most recently, he was responsible for the Hilton Budapest City as General Manager. About Deutsche Hospitality Vision, passion and cosmopolitanism. Deutsche Hospitality delivers the perfect guest experience. Tradition and an eye for the future come together in an inimitable portfolio of eight brands operating across more than 160 hotels globally. Celebrating luxurious simplicity.: Steigenberger Icons are extraordinary luxury hotels which combine historical uniqueness and modern concepts. The Steigenberger Porsche Design Hotels brand is generating innovative impetuses in the Luxury Lifestyle Segment. Steigenberger Hotels & Resorts represent the epitome of upscale hospitality on three continents. Jaz in the Citys Lifestyle Hotels dictate the rhythm in the Upscale Sector. House of Beats unites a passion for the hotel business with the fascination of lifestyle, fashion and music. IntercityHotel is located at the very hub of any destination and offers a true home of comfort and mobility in the Midscale Segment. MAXX by Deutsche Hospitality is a charismatic conversion brand which is also positioned in the midscale area of the market. Zleep Hotels provide a smart marriage of design and functionality in the Economy Segment. All of these brands are unified under H-Rewards, Deutsche Hospitalitys loyalty program which yields benefits from the first booking onwards. Ukrainian forces are violating international law and endangering civilians by establishing bases in residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, Amnesty International said Thursday, drawing a furious response from Kyiv. Kyiv said the rights group was drawing a "false equivalency" between the actions of Russia's invading forces and Ukrainians defending their homeland. Amnesty had tried to "amnesty the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim", Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said later on Thursday in his daily address. "There is no condition, even hypothetically, under which any Russian strike on Ukraine becomes justified. Aggression against our state is unprovoked, invasive and terrorist. "If someone makes a report in which the victim and the aggressor are supposedly equal in some way, if some data about the victim is analysed, and the aggressor's actions at the same time is ignored, then this cannot be tolerated," he added. Amnesty said in its report the tactics "in no way justify Russia's indiscriminate attacks", and some Russian "war crimes" including in the city of Kharkiv were not linked. But it listed incidents when Ukrainian forces appeared to have exposed civilians to danger in 19 towns and villages in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. "We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas," Amnesty secretary general Agnes Callamard said. "Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law." Residential areas where Ukrainian soldiers based themselves were miles away from frontlines, and "viable alternatives" were available that would not endanger civilians, the report said. But it said the soldiers had failed to tell civilians to evacuate the areas, despite launching strikes on Russian forces that exposed them to retaliatory fire. Amnesty researchers witnessed Ukrainian forces using hospitals as "de facto military bases" in five locations, and in 22 schools. Although the schools have been shut during the conflict, they were located in civilian neighbourhoods. "We have no say in what the military does, but we pay the price," the report quoted one resident as saying. Ukraine's government pushed back hard at the report, with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba branding the allegations "unfair". "This behaviour of Amnesty International is not about finding and reporting the truth to the world, it is about creating a false equivalence -- between the offender and the victim, between the country that destroys hundreds and thousands of civilians, cities, territories, and a country that is desperately defending itself," he said. Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov called the report a "perversion" as he said it questioned the right of Ukrainians to defend their country. Top presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak insisted Ukraine's armed forces take all measures to move civilians to safer areas and suggested Amnesty was complicit in spreading Kremlin disinformation. "The only thing that poses a threat to Ukrainians is (Russian) army of executioners and rapists coming to (Ukraine) to commit genocide," he tweeted. Kang Tae Oh continues to captivate fans as he stars in the A-lister court drama "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" with Park Eun Bin. In the series, he boasts of his kindhearted nature and unknowingly falls in love with a unique and bright lawyer. As his popularity skyrockets, fans wonder whether the heartthrob is currently single or dating someone. Keep on reading to know more! Kang Tae Oh Dating 2022: 'Extraordinary Attorney Woo' Star's Romantic History Since he was young, Kang Tae Oh dreamed of appearing on the silver screen and becoming a worldwide star. With his hard work and perseverance, he slowly rose to the top: from having smaller roles in dramas to becoming the handsome male lead. Because of this, he didn't have the chance to explore his personal life, and truth to be told, he wasn't able to date due to hectic rosters. In 2019, he reaped what he sowed when he was awarded the Best New Actor Award at the KBS Drama Awards for his performance in "The Tale of Nokdu." Although the South Korean star possesses a masculine yet gentle aura, there is no news of the actor seeing someone at the moment. Despite his loveless life, the actor boasts a remarkable ability to synchronize with his acting roles and chemistry with his leading ladies. Kang Tae Oh's Ideal Type and More During the wrap-up interview of Kang Tae Oh's 2021 romance drama "Run On," he was asked whether he likes older women in real life. In the drama, he played the role of a young man who fell in love with a woman older than him. Kang Tae Oh, born in 1994, confirms that he's into women older than him. But if a woman catches his attention, it doesn't matter whether she's younger or older. The South Korean star revealed that he was once in a relationship with someone younger than him. As for his ideal type, Kang Tae Oh didn't say much as he doesn't have a set of ideals. "I rarely fall in love at first sight, but I like women who look great in short hair," he stated. Kang Tae Oh also jokingly said he looks back once more when he sees someone beautiful, even with short hair. On a more serious note, Kang Tae Oh just wants to be with a woman with positive energy. According to him, the positivity of one's person can take one's stress and problems away. Currently, Kang Tae Oh isn't seeing anyone publicly and is focused on his career and upcoming military service. Don't miss Kang Tae Oh in ENA's "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" every Wednesday and Thursday on Netflix! KDramaStars owns this article. Written by Elijah Mully. From Ji Chang Wook to Girls' Generation Sooyoung to Park Ho San, the first week of August is packed with new exciting, and promising K-dramas for avid Korean drama junkies! The new wave of releases boasts various genres, including romance, fantasy, and horror- which fit every viewer's tastes! Keep on reading to know more! 'Poong, the Joseon Psychiatrist' After the success of his recent rom-com drama "Dali and Cocky Prince," Kim Min Jae couples up with Kim Hyang Gi and returns with the new medical drama "Poong, the Joseon Psychiatrist"! In the series, Kim Min Jae transforms into Se Poong, a doctor who unexpectedly gets expelled from the palace after serving them all his life. He then relocates to a new village and meets the aberrant teacher Gye Ji Han (Kim Sang Kyung) and widow Seo Eun Woo (Kim Hyang Gi), who work together to create harmonious life in the small village. The new tvN drama aired for the first time on August 1. It will be available every Monday and Tuesday at 10:30 p.m. KST. 'Hunted' Park Ho San, who appeared in the award-winning work "Monstrous," headlines the limited MBC drama "Hunted" this summer! He takes on the role of Young Soo, a middle-aged man who hunts boars that damage local crops in his village. The spine-chilling story begins when he meets an older woman named Ok Soon (Ye Soo Jung), who has Alzheimer's disease. She believes that someone from Young Soo's village killed her son. Later, Young Soo's son also goes missing. Don't miss Park Ho San's "Hunted" on MBC every Monday and Tuesday! 'If You Wish Upon Me' South Korean heartthrob Ji Chang Wook couples up with Girls' Generation Sooyoung as they return to the small screen with the upcoming romance series "If You Wish Upon Me." Ji Chang Wook transforms into Yoon Gyu Rye, an orphan who has spent his life struggling inside juvenile detention and prison. Turning a new leaf, he begins volunteering at a hospice, where he meets nurse Seo Yeon Joo (Girls' Generation Sooyoung). She just doesn't inspire him, but she also changes his life for the better. Their romantic pursuit as they care for dying people in the hospice will be depicted in the series, which airs for the first time on August 10 on KBS2. 'Jinxed At First' Na In Woo and Girls' Generation Seohyun's fantasy romance drama "Jinxed At First" is now closing its curtains! With its remaining two episodes, the two will finally achieve their much-deserved happy ending as Seohyun's true identity gets revealed to the public. After a series of bumps, the witch and the unlucky man will finally become one. Don't miss KBS2's "Jinxed At First" finale this August 3! 'Today's Webtoon' Kim Sejeong returned to the limelight with a new romantic comedy series, "Today's Webtoon," with Choi Daniel and Nam Yoon Su! In the series, she portrays the role of a Judo athlete-turned-webtoon producer, showcasing the competitive world of webtoons and the hardships and struggles that come with it. The first two episodes of the series drew positive feedback from the public and even scored promising viewership ratings. "Today's Webtoon" is expected to break its record in its second week. Catch Kim Sejeong as a webtoon producer this Friday, August 5, on SBS TV and Viu! KDramaStars owns this article. Written by Elijah Mully. Park Eun Bin sees herself in a predicament as a new case tests her morals and what her heart tells her to do. But, unfortunately, she also witnesses a tragic incident that triggers her meltdown. Here's what happened in "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" episode 11! 'Extraordinary Attorney Woo' Episode 11: Woo Young Woo Settles Dispute Between Married Couple In the new episode of "Extraordinary Attorney Woo," Woo Young Woo (Park Eun Bin) and senior attorney Jung Myeong Seok (Kang Ki Young) take on a new case after a married couple seeks legal advice. Shin Il Soo (Heo Dong Won) wins the grand prize in a lottery. However, after agreeing to split the money evenly, he pooled the tickets with his gambling buddies. The couple begs for the attorney's help to retrieve his money back to provide for his family and wife. Despite seeing low chances of winning, the Hanbada attorneys push through and win the case, all thanks to the witness who reveals the truth. As they close another case, Shin Il Soo visits Woo Young Woo in her office, asking for legal divorce advice, sparking concern. Woo Young Woo Introduces Attorney Soy Sauce Despite not being allowed to contact Shin Il Soo's wife as he was a previous client in the firm, Woo Young Woo pays a visit to Sung Soo Ji's (Park Ji Yeon) kimbap (Korean rice delicacy) shop. Woo Young Woo and Lee Jun Ho (Kang Tae Oh) are in shock as they hear Shin Il Soo curse out his wife and break things left and right due to his wrath. According to the poor wife, his husband has gone cold to her after receiving his lottery prize. As a result, the sweetness in their relationship turned sour. Woo Young Woo feels the need to meddle and introduces Attorney Soy Sauce, a condiment used for kimbap, subtly giving out advice to the wife, whom she referred to as Ms. Pepper. Sung Soo Ji then visits Hanbada to seek help. Since Woo Young Woo and Jung Myeong Seok previously worked with their husband, the two referred the poor wife to their colleague who specializes in divorce cases. At home, she sees Shin Il Soo coming out of a car worth 300 million USD, which he has wanted to buy since he received the prize money. When her husband realizes she met up with the Hanbada attorneys, he chases her with his new car. Unfortunately, a truck passing by hit the brand new car, resulting in Shin Il Soo's death. Woo Young Woo bursts into a meltdown. Thankfully, Lee Jun Ho immediately embraces her and calms her down. At the end of the episode, Sung Soo Ji is able to inherit the money and life insurance of her late husband, which amounts to 1.4 billion USD, the same amount as the divided lottery money. Woo Young Woo and Lee Jung Ho Meet Halfway In the latest episode, Woo Young Woo and Lee Jun Ho's relationship gets deeper. The latter walks Woo Young Woo home and talks about what happened when they witnessed a sudden death. Lee Jun Ho tells her about the hug chairs in France, which calms down an autistic person when they experience sensory overload. When Woo Young Woo suggests buying one, Lee Jun Ho tells her he'll be her own hug chair. The two then shared another sweet kiss, symbolizing their love. On the other hand, Kwon Min Woo (Joo Jong Hyuk) joins hands with Woo Young Woo's mother, Tae Su Mi (Jin Kyung), to make her quit Hanbada. KDramaStars owns this article. Written by Elijah Mully. MBC's newly premiered legal drama "Big Mouth" starring Lee Jong Suk and YoonA had a successful pilot week broadcast. Here are proofs of the series' latest achievements. Keep on reading for all the details! 'Big Mouth' Ranks No.1 in Different Countries in Asia With just two episodes released, "Big Mouth" and its stars already left impressions on viewers, making it receive recognition on different media platforms. From topping charts to buzzworthy lists of stars, these are what the whole production achieved early since it aired. According to the data released by flixpatrol on August 3, "Big Mouth" already gained incredible popularity as it entered the top five on Disney+ across Asia. It has been said that since episode 1, it ranks number 1 in Hong Kong, number 2 in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. From number 2, it climbed to the number 1 spot in Taiwan and number 3 in Indonesia. Lee Jong Suk, YoonA, and 'Big Mouth' Enter Most Buzzworthy Actors and Drama Lists In the latest source from Good Data Corporation, "Big Mouth" made a big leap and was able to sweep the lists. Apart from "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" consecutively being on top, MBC's newly debuted series and its stars immediately found their spots on the chart. Lead actor Lee Jong Suk was impressively named as the third most buzzworthy K-drama actor, while his on-screen partner Im YoonA made it to the top 7. Furthermore, the series surpassed the ongoing drama "Alchemy of Souls" on the list. "Big Mouth" is hailed as the second most buzzworthy K-drama today, beating Ji Sung's "Adamas" and Kim Sejeong's "Today's Webtoon." Which also premiered last week. 'Big Mouth' Kicks Off With Good Viewership Ratings Based on Nielsen Korea, "Big Mouth" episode 1 garnered an average viewership rating of 6.2 percent. However, it had a slight dip during episode 2, which recorded a score of 6.1 percent. Hence, the first two episodes of Yoona and Lee Jong Suk's drama already hooked many with its electrifying yet interesting storyline. Though it will still be a long run for the series, "Big Mouth" is expected to receive much anticipation as the story progresses in the upcoming weeks. Now that Park Chang Ho (Lee Jong Suk) is on the verge of getting out of the Gucheon prison, will he be able to successfully escape the place and start a new life knowing that he has been wrongfully accused as the person behind the dangerous scammer 'Big Mouse.' Catch "Big Mouth'' every Friday and Saturday on MBC and Disney+. What are your thoughts about Lee Jong Suk's drama comeback with "Big Mouth"? Tell us in the comments! IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Lee Jong Suk Garners Massive Praises For Performance in 'Big Mouth' For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at Kdramastars. Kdramastars owns this article. Shai Collins wrote this. May it be a villain, supporting role, or a lead star, Kwak Si Yang could perfectly portray every character given to him. Currently, he is starring in the comedy crime K-drama "Cafe Minamdang" as former detective Gong Soo Cheol. Viewers are entertained by his chemistry with Seo In Guk and his on-screen romance with Kang Min Na. Just like other celebrities, he was also caught up in dating rumors which involved his co-star. Kwak Si Yang Relationship Rumors: Did He Date Im Ji Yeon? In 2019, a rumor sparked that he is secretly dating his "Welcome 2 Life" co-star Im Ji Yeon. At the time, industry officials shared that they became close while filming the comedy fantasy series. While some outlets pointed out that the two are indeed in a relationship, Kwak Si Yang and Im Ji Yeon's respective agencies clarified that the rumors are false. "The dating rumors with Kwak Si Yang are not true," the actress' label said, while Kwak Si Yang's agency expressed the same thought and responded, "the dating rumors with Lim Ji Yeon are not true." Kwak Si Yang Becomes Kim So Yeon's Husband in Reality Show 'We Got Married' In 2012, MBC launched a reality show titled "We Got Married," where Kwak Si Yang is coupled up with award-winning actress Kim So Yeon, who at that time was not married yet to her now-husband, Lee Sang Woo. The duo appeared in season 4, starting in episode 287 and ending in episode 316. Throughout the 209 days of marriage, Kwak Si Yang and Kim So Yeon entertained viewers with their undeniable chemistry. Despite the seven-year age gap, there's s no denying they looked good together, especially how the actor swooned over Kim So Yeon's beauty. As the reality show featured a honeymoon stage between the "couple," Kwak Si Yang showed off his romantic side and was not afraid to express his feelings by holding So Yeon's hand. At one point, he even says, "We're married. We shouldn't be walking so far apart from each other," He tries to make the actress more comfortable with the PDA. At the end of their virtual marriage, fans dubbed them the Si-So couple. During the show's interview, Kim So Yeon described Kwak Si yang as a "great man," while the actor responded, "Thank you for being with me. I really appreciate it. Interestingly, in a 2016 interview, Kwak Si Yang recalled his experience with the MBC reality show and addressed rumors that they were dating in real life. Sharing that they check on each other from time to time and watch each other's drama, he said, "some people ask if we are dating in real life, but no one can tell what might happen in the future," however, Kim So Yeon is now happily married to Lee Sang Woo. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: 'Lovers of the Red Sky' Star Kwak Si Yang Shares What It's Like to Work With Kim Yoo Jung + Actor Reveals Who His Inspiration Is KDramastars owns this article Written by Geca Wills Dawn Walker and her seven-year-old son Vincent Jansen are shown in these Saskatoon Police Service handout photos. A woman who went missing with her son last month is one of three people nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.Dawn Dumont Walker, whose book was published under the name Dawn Dumont and who police have identified as Dawn Walker, was last seen in Saskatoon with her seven-year-old son Vincent on July 22. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Saskatoon Police Service **MANDATORY CREDIT** This 2022 HarborPark Jazz, Rhythm & Blues Festival, Saturday, Aug. 20, will feature a hot battle between members of two of Wisconsins most charitable fire departments. Members of the Kenosha Professional Firefighters Local 414 and their brothers and sisters from the Greenfield Firefighters Local 1963 will showcase their Firehouse cooking skills during the Summer Slider Showdown. The event supports the Mary Lou and Arthur F. Mahone Fund. This contest between the fire departments will be featured in the events Cooking Studio. This popular interactive cooking demonstration kicks off the daylong music festival at Kenoshas HarborPark Celebration Place. The cooking festivities begin at 12:45 p.m. We are so excited to welcome Greenfield Firefighters Local 1963 to the Cooking Studio this year, Cooking Studio co-captain Teri Jacobson said. Their friendly rivalry with Kenoshas Local 414 will delight the audience with their banter and delicious food for our Summer Slider Showdown. Jeremy Holm, president of IAFF Local 1963 Greenfield Professional Fire Fighters, said Greenfield firefighters were excited when Kenosha firefighters offered a chance for Greenfield to get involved with the Mahone Jazz Festival. Kenosha Firefighters have always had a positive impact on the community through their organization, Kenosha Firefighters C.A.R.E., Holm said. Greenfield Firefighters care, too; not only about the community, but we also care enough to show Kenosha Fire how to cook a proper meal. Were happy to give the Local 414 team some pointers during the Summer Slider Showdown. Were pretty sure theyll need it. At the most recent HarborPark Jazz, Rhythm & Blues Festival, in 2021, the Kenosha firefighters group prevailed over their friendly foes from Waukegan Professional Firefighters Local 473. We are happy to host this fine event here in Kenosha for such a worthy cause, Jeffrey Weidner, of Kenosha Firefighters C.A.R.E., said. As hosts, we are obligated to treat all our guests the same. So, this year, we intend to uphold our tradition of giving all our competing guests a parting gift: second place. Ardis Mahone Mosley, co-chair of the Cooking Studio along with Jacobson, said the cooking competition is a great way to kick off a fun day of music on the lakefront. Everyone who attends the Cooking Studio will get an inside look into what its like to cook for a firehouse, and theyll get some great recipes and delicious samples, Mahone Mosley said. In the past weve gotten great tips and treats; Im sure this year will be even better! Mahone Mosley said this year, they will welcome former scholarship recipient Andre Adams to the cooking studio. Adams is an Olympian and the owner of Snap Fitness Kenosha, as well as a certified fitness nutrition specialist. He will be using his education and experience to help us raise money for future scholarships by offering tips to the audience on ways to tweak recipes to make them more nutritious, Mahone Mosley said. Adams said he will offer a nutritionist perspective on healthy substitutes and portion control to make health and fitness more sustainable. The HarborPark Jazz, Rhythm & Blues festival is a major annual fundraiser for the Mahone Fund, which provides educational opportunities for economically and academically deserving youth, while also supporting healthy lifestyle initiatives in communities of color. Created in 1999 to perpetuate the legacy of local social justice leaders and education advocates Mary Lou and Arthur F. Mahone, the fund is a component of the Kenosha Community Foundation. This years festival will include performances by internationally acclaimed jazz saxophonist Richard Elliott as well as legendary Chicago Blues artist The Mike Wheeler Band. The music program will kick off with a performance by Lake Countys favorite Lady A, followed by a 90-minute Stepping for Academic Excellence featuring Chicago-style stepping DJ Tony Lane. Advanced general admission tickets to the festival are $30 and $35 at the gate. VIP Lounge tickets which include concert admission, food and complementary beer, wine, soda and water are $90 each. More information about the festival, including how to purchase tickets, is available at https://www.mahonefund.org. Two people were reportedly shot on the porch of a house located on 14th Avenue and 50th Street, across from the Imagination Station playground Wednesday night. According to the department, Kenosha Police responded to the 5000 block of 14th Avenue to a report of a shooting just after 6:30 p.m. There, police say they encountered a hostile crowd and evidence of multiple gunshots that were fired. Two victims were located from the shooting, one juvenile and one adult. Both victims were transported to local hospitals and were subsequently transferred to Milwaukee area hospitals due to serious injuries. Unconfirmed reports from witnesses at the scene said a man jumped onto the back porch of the house and ran to the front of the house and opened fire. One person was reportedly shot in the face and the other was shot in the leg. Police remained on scene for several hours after the incident. Due to the size of the crime scene, Kenosha Police requested assistance from the Wisconsin State Patrol Traffic Reconstruction Unit to assist with the Crime Scene mapping. Authorities blocked off 14th Avenue as they questioned witnesses and neighbors. Bystanders and passersby gathered outside of the crime scene and watched police investigate. It remains an active and ongoing investigation and there were no suspects in custody, according to the police department. Kenosha Police is requesting the publics assistance and cooperation when investigating crimes, especially with senseless gun violence. It is asking anyone with information regarding Wednesdays shooting incident to contact the Kenosha Police Detective Bureau at 262-605-5203. Callers wishing to remain anonymous may contact the Kenosha Area Crime Stoppers at 262-656-7333. 174 Shares Share I lay on an examination table while a plastic surgeon surveyed my skin to determine if a suspicious mole should be excised. I joked with him that I had once considered plastic surgery as a career. I knew he still worked at the hospital and fired a rhetorical question at him, enquiring if the hospital was still as busy as it was two years ago when I had worked there? I caught a glimpse of a faint grimace as he explained to me that he was pretty sure he was close to burnout. I would be lying if my heart didnt skip a beat. This man was about to operate on me, and I was met with a wave of emotion associated with flashbacks of my previous experiences. Two years ago, I was so burned out that I saw no other option but to leave the psychiatry profession altogether for fear of it consuming my mental health and wellbeing. I was shocked by his response. I never expected to hear a surgical consultant being frank about his risk of burnout. His response only confirmed my suspicions that nothing had changed and, unsurprisingly, worsened. We all heard about the toll that the COVID-19 pandemic had taken on our frontline workers. Long periods without time off and dealing with extremely unwell and infectious patients. Doctors and nurses were dying from treating COVID-infected patients worldwide, and there was continued fear that they would infect their families. These knock-on effects of the pandemic have ultimately exposed the gaping wounds within our health system. The NZRDA (doctors union) has recently highlighted doctor shortages, with nationwide vacancies reaching a crisis point. Hospital administrators expect junior doctors to cover the shortfall, covering other teams, working back-to-back shifts, and covering additional duties. This might not sound like a big deal, but a very junior, inexperienced, tired doctor looking after dozens of hospital-level patients is not good for anyone. I even heard of a situation where a junior doctor (3 months into the job) had no registrar or consultant but was expected to care for a group of patients. A task that junior doctors are never expected or are even qualified to do. I can recall a time when my consultant took two weeks off when I became the newly minted psychiatry registrar. He left thinking he had appropriate cover. However, the rostered consultant was uncontactable for two weeks. It isnt very reassuring to hear that after all this time, nothing has changed and that almost every junior doctor had a similar story. Yet, we are at a precipice where evident change is needed within our health system. Clinicians are leaving, either to greener pastures or the profession altogether, thus resulting in nationwide shortages. As a system, we have had an overreliance on international doctors. However, the flow of these clinicians has stagnated due to COVID-19 and global economic issues. The universities have offered to increase training numbers but are cut short by lack of government funding and knowing it will take at least ten years to show any meaningful benefit. Change is needed, but it cant happen if our leaders deny that there are issues in the first place. I have learned that the best way to address a problem is to acknowledge it and not let it fester; much like an infected wound, it will only get worse. Let me be very frank, the hospital system is a wound that has been festering for a long time, and we have gone septic. If this isnt a crisis, then nothing is. Its time that we need to look after the people that help look after us. Its simply not just a factor of remuneration. Being a clinician comes with sacrifices. However, the sacrifices are becoming even more significant to the point where people simply leave. Its hard being a clinician in our current climate, and no amount of money and hard work will buy you time to be with the most important people in your life. Or allow you to be there for those crucial moments. These are the things we sacrifice to ensure people have good healthcare. A recent survey showed that nearly 50 percent of psychiatrists would quit their job if they could and at a time when we need them most. We hear of reports that mental health services have waiting times of over 13 weeks, putting patients lives at risk. We know the pressure is on within other medical disciplines, where people wait for months before having a colonoscopy to rule out bowel cancer. Emergency departments are overrun with unwell people, resulting in unheard-of waiting times. What can we do about it? There needs to be a multimodal approach as any intervention will likely affect other parts of the system, causing more of an imbalance that we see today. There is no one answer, but many intersecting solutions play a role in improving the overall picture, much like treating a patient. Here is a very brief list. increase the number of clinicians increasing the scope of other clinicians: nurses having widened roles bonding medical students better community access to health education to improve health literacy family supports health information architecture and IT systems improve workflow processes for clinicians Yet again, I found myself in another appointment, but this time with a sleep specialist. She was taken back by how well it seemed I had sorted out my life. I vividly remember her saying, Youre one of the only doctors I know who generally have their life sorted. Most doctors lives are a shambles. I left that appointment thinking it didnt have to be that way. We can start improving the lives of doctors and our ability to help our patients, and we can do that now. Jamie Ioane is a general practitioner in New Zealand. Image credit: Shutterstock.com This August Barnstorm Theatre Company is presenting Malachy McKennas brilliant short play The Quiet Land as a lunchtime treat for local and visiting audiences. Set where two small farms meet, the play is a celebration of an older generation as it struggles to survive in the isolated rural Ireland of today. Two stalwarts of theatre in Kilkenny take on the roles of Nashee and Eamon in this unique offering. BRENDAN CORCORAN (Eamon) Brendans theatrical training began in 1964 with his introduction to Kilkenny Youth Theatre where he spent the first eight years gaining valuable experience. He attended the Drama League of Ireland annual summer school from 1971 to 1978 working with renowned international tutors. From 1971 to 1992 he appeared in 35 productions with various adult theatre groups. With the acquisition of the Watergate Theatre in 1993 he became part of an in-house company, Watergate Productions. From 1993 to 2018 he appeared in a further 40 productions by Irish, English, and American authors. Memorable achievements include his portrayal of Willy Loman in Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman and Joe Keller in All My Sons and his acclaimed performance of Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. His most recent roles include the title role of Dracula and Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond. Brendans talents have also brought him to the musical world. He has graced the stage in over 30 musicals with various societies in the South East of Ireland and has guested with many drama groups throughout the South East also. His film work began with Young Irish Film Makers, and he has completed several short films over the years paving his way to feature work. Recent films include The Tale of Billy OC (Feature 2019), Mr. Sun (2021 Short), and the Reburial of Jackie Brett (2021 Short). Brendan is a multi-award-winning actor and is in constant demand for theatre and film work. [Image: Brendan Corcoran and Ger Cody are performing in The Quiet Land] GER CODY (Nashee) Ger has been involved with theatre in Kilkenny since the 1970s and has appeared on stage with many local and regional groups. He was Artistic Director at The Watergate Theatre for 25 years where, apart from day-to-day operations, he was involved in 50 plus in-house productions, helping to raise much needed funds for the venue. In 2018 he was one of the founding members of Lake Productions, who have produced such shows as Trad, After Sarah Miles, War of The Worlds and The Kings of the Kilburn High Road. Over the last few years Ger has worked with The Involvement Centre and The Recovery College in Kilkenny. As a result of this collaboration, two poetry books have been produced with a third publication scheduled for 2022. In conjunction with The Involvement Centre, he has produced two radio plays - A River Walk by Frank Marshall and The Pink Milky Goo by Andrei Markewitz. He is currently working on four radio documentaries on Irish authors (Seamus Heaney, JB Keane, WB Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh) with The Involvement Centre and Community Radio Kilkenny. His last performance was in The Liam MacCarthy Story by Barry Henriques, performed in 2021 with Lake Productions member, Derek Dooley. Ger is a regular contributor to Pat Shortalls programme Sunday Serendipity on CRKC. Renowned local actors Ger Cody and Brendan Corcoran play Nashee and Eamon respectively; directed by Philip Hardy with design team Harry Harris, Joan Brennan, and Vincent Dempsey. Barnstorm launches its Lunchtime Theatre programme in collaboration with the Home Rule Club as part of AKA the fringe festival during the Kilkenny Arts Festival from August 4 to 14 at 1pm at The Home Rule Club. A set lunch will be served to be enjoyed as part of the theatre experience. Tickets incl. set lunch 15 are available to book on https://barnstormquiet land.eventbrite.ie On Friday the Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI) welcomes Minister Malcolm Noonan TD, Minister For Heritage and Electoral Reform to launch the Conjuring Form exhibition at its National Design & Craft Gallery. DCCI will unveil its new publication celebrating 50 years of Irish craft, Irish Craft Heroes, as well as announcing the 2022 RDS Irish Craft Bursary recipient at the exhibition opening. Speaking ahead of the event, CEO of DCCI Rosemary Steen, said: This exhibition of beautiful work, together with the Irish Craft Heroes publication and the RDS Irish Craft Bursary, showcases the growing impact of Irish design and craft nationally but also internationally. It demonstrates the strong heritage of this sector and encourages future talent to grow their skills. I am delighted to be joined by the RDS to recognise the importance of the role of craft and design in shaping Irelands future economically, culturally, and socially. I hope all these activities further generate even greater public and government support for these important sectors. Opening at 3pm on Friday (August 5), Conjuring Form is an exhibition of work from 38 makers in Design & Crafts Council Irelands PORTFOLIO Critical Selection 2021/22. The exhibition is curated by Alice Stori Liechtenstein, founder of Schloss Hollenegg for Design. PORTFOLIO: Critical Selection is a biennial publication of leading Irish contemporary design and craft with makers selected by an international expert panel for achieving excellence by comparative world-wide standards. These makers are an example of leading Irish contemporary design and craft, as they illustrate a deep understanding of their respective techniques, materials and mastery used to conjure form. Each has reached their highest standard of practice through years of refinement. Conjuring Form takes place at the National Design & Craft Gallery, Castle Yard, Kilkenny runs from August 5 to October 15. The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5.30pm. Stephen Doyle is a Cork-based artist working from Backwater Studios. He focuses on exploring issues of queer identity through the relationship between figuration and the politics of representation. Doyle makes figurative depictions of LGBTQIA+ people, and often includes objects in the paintings, a gesture of othering the art that mirrors the subject matter it investigates. For Kilkenny Arts Festival, Doyle will be exhibiting a carefully curated selection of work which will showcase the artists investigations over the course of their career. Some topics within the show examine The hyper-masculine and its relevance in contemporary culture, Gender expression in portraiture outside of binary terms, and Drag Culture, to highlight a few. Given that these artworks have not been presented together in one space before, it will allow for a greater insight into the beginnings of the artist and their trajectory into contemporary art in Ireland. Stephen Doyle is the recipient of multiple national and international art prizes. They have been granted the Visual Art Bursary Award (2020) by the Arts Council of Ireland, added to the National Collection of Ireland (2021), included in the Art History syllabus for the Leaving Cert and added to the peer panel for the Arts Council of Ireland. Stephen Doyle will discuss his work in conversation with Anna O'Sullivan the Parade Tower on Sunday 7 August at 12pm. Stephen Doyle Self Identity: An Exploration at the Festival Gallery @ St Kieran's College Daily 7-14 August 10.30am 5.30pm. Admission free. Kilkenny rider Jack Ryan is preparing to take part in the upcoming five-star competition at the RDS Dublin Horse Show. The Inistioge native is the son of parents Marguerite and John, along with siblings Conor and Ciara. He is currently based in Belgium where he trains with Olympic Gold medallist Jos Lansink. He is looking toward the Dublin Show, from August 17-21, with his horse McGregor. The Show, which combines sport, style and socialising is back for the first time since 2019. Looking ahead to the event, Jack says: "I think the Dutch team could be very strong, theyve won their home cup in Rotterdam. They have a very good team going to the World Equestrian Games even though its a week before the Dublin Horse Show, as they also have a very good second team. They won the three-star in Prague as well. This is the first year I am hoping to do the five-star. Ive been coming to Dublin for so many years and it would be fantastic to be there this year and jump the five-star." A major theme for this summers Show is celebrating the positive impact that equestrian has on society in general. The RDS has created a key focus for the return of the Dublin Horse Show by creating a new zone called Positive Strides in the Main Hall of the RDS. Featured amongst the exhibitors are Ability Equine Assisted Therapy, ChildVision, Clondalkin Equine Club, Corballis Farm TTRC, Festina Lente and the Irish EAGALA Network equine assisted growth and learning association. Each organisation has been given a platform to celebrate the amazing work that they do on the ground in providing equine therapy solutions. There will also be panel discussions featuring some of the exhibitors and Rupert Isaacson - Founder Horseboy Foundation and partner ChildVision, on equine therapy and the benefits that can be gained from it. There is also top-class international sport, with the Longines International Grand Prix of Ireland (Sunday, August 21), with a prize fund of 350,000 and the Longines FEI Jumping Nations Cup of Ireland (Friday, August 19) with a prize fund of 250,000, along with 166 other competitions over the five days, both national and international, all with a total prize fund of 1,253,568. One of the premier style events of the summer, the Very Best Dressed competition takes place on Ladies Day Thursday 18th August with new sponsor Very taking up the reins. With a substantial first prize of a 10,000 shopping voucher for very.ie, it promises to be a day of high-end fashion and fantastic fun, judged by independent.ie fashion editor Bairbre Power and hosted by Laura Woods alongside Paul Ryder. A total of 891 adopted persons and relatives applied to the new Contact Preference Register last month following the commencement of the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022. Of these, 7 adoptees and 2 relatives of adopted people were from County Kilkenny. The landmark legislation, which was enacted on July 1, provides legal entitlement to full and unrestricted access to birth certificates, birth, early life, care, and medical information for any person who was adopted, boarded out, had their birth illegally registered, or who otherwise has questions in relation to their origins. The new law also establishes a Contact Preference Register (CPR) to which applications can be made by those wishing to make contact, to request privacy, or to seek or share information with a relative. The Adoption Authority of Ireland operates the CPR. Of the 891 people who applied to register their preferences in relation to contact, 786 applications were from adoptees, 90 were from birth parents, and 15 were other relatives. There were 820 people who expressed a preference for contact at some level. There were 32 people who expressed a desire for no contact (24 adoptees and 8 relatives) while 39 applicants (30 adoptees and nine relatives) did not want contact but were willing to share information. Patricia Carey, CEO of the Adoption Authority, said: We are very encouraged by the number of people who have registered on the Contact Preference Register. These are mostly adoptees but also birth parents and other relatives for whom the Birth Information and Tracing Act is a really important piece of legislation. Come October, when the free services under the legislation open, adoptees will finally have the right to access all of their birth information held by the State. This wasnt the case previously, so it is a big deal. If they have applied to the Contact Preference Register, the Adoption Authority will also be able to facilitate contact between adoptees and birth parents and other relatives, at a level with which both parties are comfortable. The 1.85 million booklets landing on doorsteps throughout the country explain what the new legislation means and how this works. I would urge anyone impacted by the legislation to read and consider the information it contains, and perhaps talk to a trusted friend, before deciding what they want to do. The majority of all applications, 786, came from people in Ireland, with 105 applications from those who live overseas. The greatest number of applications from outside Ireland came from the UK, with 50 people registering contact preferences. Next was the US with 17 applications, followed by Australia with four. The county in Ireland with the most applications in July was Dublin, with 253 people registering preferences, followed by Cork with 118 applications, and Meath with 48. The county with the fewest applications was Leitrim with four. Of the 786 adoptees who applied to the CPR, 74% of them (580 people) are seeking contact with their birth mother. Almost 17% (130) of applicants stated they wanted to trace their birth father, with 9% (69) seeking contact with a sibling, and 1.3% (10) seeking contact with a grandparent, cousin, aunt, or uncle. Of the 105 relatives who applied to the CPR, 86% of them (90 people) are seeking contact with their child, just under 5% (five people) said they wanted to contact siblings, and almost 10 % (10 people) are seeking contact with a grandparent, cousin, aunt, or uncle. More than 48,000 children were adopted from 1953 to 2021. An additional 2,000+ children were sent from Ireland to other countries mainly the United States and adopted in these countries. In addition, an estimated 20,000+ children were boarded out sent to live with foster families at a time before 1953 when there was no legal adoption in Ireland. Ms Carey added: Most families in Ireland have been touched by adoption at some stage. The Adoption Authority is determined to reach as many people as possible to let them know they can find out about their origins and to encourage all those eligible under the legislation to register their preferences on the Contact Preference Register. In October, both Information and Tracing services under the legislation will open. Applications for these services can be made to the Adoption Authority of Ireland and Tusla, the Child and Family Agency. A website, www.birthinfo.ie, has been established for people seeking to make an application under the Act or seeking further information. Libraries in Kilkenny have been granted 21,767.60 in funding for the provision of additional support services as part of a national 700,000 package announced today by Minister Heather Humphreys and Minister Joe OBrien TD. The funding, under the Dormant Accounts Action Plan, is designed to assist libraries in reaching out to older people, children from disadvantaged communities, people with disabilities and other marginalised groups. Minister Humphreys stated that this initiative 'will create a more welcoming and engaging library experience for thousands of people'. "Comic book clubs for children with dyslexia, online in no time courses for older citizens and sign language storytime are just a few examples of the great supports this funding will allow our libraries across the country to host," she said. "While this funding is small in nature, it will have a big impact in terms of improving peoples lives. I want to pay tribute and thank all our library staff, who play such an important role in cities, towns and villages right across the country. This year, a number of libraries submitted projects designed to reach out to Ukrainian families who are living in Ireland after fleeing the war. Minister O'Brien stated that the funding package 'will build on the excellent projects which have been delivered over the past three years'. "It will also help our public libraries to continue to foster community well-being and build community cohesion in their role as community hubs," he added. Kilkenny County Council contributed 2,176.76 to the 21,767.60 total sum. Cambodian PM meets with China's Wang Yi Xinhua) 09:43, August 04, 2022 PHNOM PENH, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen on Wednesday met with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, reiterating his country's firm support for China in maintaining its core interests. Asking Wang to convey his sincere greetings to Chinese leaders, Hun Sen wished the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China a complete success. Hun Sen stressed that Cambodia firmly adheres to the one-China principle, viewing Taiwan as an inalienable part of China's territory. Cambodia firmly opposes any words or deeds that infringe on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will continue to firmly support China in safeguarding its core interests and stand together with the 1.4 billion Chinese people, said the prime minister. Hun Sen said the iron-clad bilateral friendship has taken root in both nations, enjoying fruitful results from joint construction of the Belt and Road, which have brought huge benefits to their peoples. During the joint fight against COVID-19, the prime minister said, Chinese vaccines have effectively helped Cambodia protect people's life and health, and accelerated the country's economic recovery and return to normal life. The two sides will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of former Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk this year and the 65th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties in 2023, Hun Sen said. He noted his country looks forward to advancing the efforts to build the Cambodia-China community with a shared future, deepen the synergy between their development strategies, strengthen cooperation in various areas including economy and trade, infrastructure, mining, energy, agriculture and defense. For his part, Wang said Cambodia adheres to the development path in line with its own national conditions, which is widely supported by its people, safeguards its national independence and dignity, and plays an ever-increasing role in international and regional affairs. He said China-Cambodia relations have withstood the test of changing international landscape and remain rock-solid and unbreakable. China appreciates Cambodia's adherence to the one-China principle and supports China in safeguarding its core interests, Wang said, adding that China is also a reliable partner of Cambodia and stands firmly behind it in the process of its development and revitalization. Wang said China is willing to work with Cambodia to safeguard their respective sovereignty, security and development interests, to uphold the non-interference basic norms governing international relations, and to uphold international equity and justice. He said China is also willing to deepen strategic communication with Cambodia and carry forward the traditional friendship, so that the friendship between the two countries will be passed on from generation to generation. Wang said the high-quality Belt and Road cooperation between China and Cambodia has been yielding fruitful results and shown broad prospects for development. Both sides should stay firmly committed to the direction of building a community with a shared future and constantly upgrade all-round bilateral cooperation, Wang said. China will continue providing sufficient vaccine assistance to meet Cambodia's needs, import more high-quality agricultural products from Cambodia, and increase flights from Cambodia to China to help Cambodian students return to China for their studies, Wang said. Wang also elaborated on China's position on the Taiwan question. He stressed that the provocative act of the U.S. side on the Taiwan question is not accidental, but a carefully planned farce, which exposes its ugly face of treachery. The U.S. attempt to "contain China with Taiwan" cannot succeed at all, nor will it change the historical trend that Taiwan will inevitably return to the motherland, but will only inspire the 1.4 billion Chinese people to unite as one and speed up the construction of a great modern socialist country with Chinese characteristics, said Wang. The Taiwan question, which arose out of national weakness and chaos at that time, will surely come to an end with national rejuvenation, and the "Taiwan independence" forces will surely be judged by history, said Wang. Both sides pledged to strengthen communication and coordination on regional affairs, uphold the centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the regional architecture, and oppose bloc confrontation in the region and coercion of countries to take sides. The two sides also exchanged views on the Myanmar issue and the Ukraine crisis. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) For copyright information, check with the distributor of this item, Springfield News-Leader. Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. By Anna J. Park Hana Securities has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with BIDV Securities Company (BSC), a Vietnamese brokerage firm, aiming to consolidate its foothold for further expansion in the Southeast Asian country. According to Hana Securities, the company chief, Lee Eun-hyung, who's also Hana Financial Group's co-vice chairman, signed the cooperative MOU with the Vietnamese firm at Melia Hanoi Hotel in Vietnam's capital city, Wednesday. Under the bilateral strategic partnership, Hana Securities plans to share the firm's know-how in operating its top-notch research centers with BSC. The Korean securities company also aims to facilitate the development of innovative digital brokerage platforms for the Vietnamese market. Founded in November 1999, the Hanoi-headquartered BSC was the 11th-largest brokerage firm in Vietnam as of last year, with an annual net profit of 18.8 billion won ($143 million) and its rate on equity (ROE) standing at 22.2 percent. In March this year, Hana Securities acquired a 35 percent stake in BSC, which is a subsidiary of the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV), Vietnam's largest state-run bank. While BIDV holds 79.94 percent of BSC's shares, KEB Hana Bank is the second-largest shareholder of the state-run Vietnamese lender, as it acquired a 15 percent stake in BIDV for around 1 trillion won in late 2019. "Hana Securities' business capabilities and unique features will maximize synergy effects through the partnership. We will do our best to help BSC grow into one of the top three brokerage firms in Vietnam," said Lee Jong-seung, head of global business at Hana Securities. Lee also highlighted that Hana Securities will continue strengthening its global operations and strategic investments in overseas markets. No Yes, a light case Yes, two or more light cases One serious case Two or more serious bouts Vote View Results CHINESE ambassador to Zimbabwe, Guo Shaochun, yesterday shot down claims of abuse of workers by Chinese employers, describing the conflicts as mere misunderstanding and cultural clashes. There have, however, been several reports of physical abuse of workers at Chinese-owned companies while mine workers have complained about low wages being paid at Chinese operations. Addressing the media yesterday, Guo said Chinese employers were doing everything above the law, adding that the few incidents were fuelled by misunderstanding. Most Chinese employers keep good relationships with local workers. Some allegations of improper practices by a few Chinese employers are mainly because of misunderstanding or cultural differences. The embassys position is clear that all Chinese companies are encouraged to do more for local people and must comply with the laws, regulations, culture and customs of the host country, Guo said. He called for strengthening of relations between foreign investors and locals must be strengthened. Wrongdoers must be held accountable. The embassy also encourages and supports the Zimbabwean government, the media, local communities and other stakeholders in promoting mutual understanding and good relations between Chinese employers and local workers, he said. For years, Chinese companies have not only created thousands of local jobs, but also actively conducted their social responsibilities for the local communities by building hospitals, schools and roads, drilling boreholes and donating foodstuffs. The embassy also refuted claims that Chinese businesses do not bank money in the country and write their invoices in Mandarin to avoid paying taxes. Chinese companies have been investing in and growing with Zimbabwe for years. They have created thousands of local jobs, increased the countrys tax revenues and forex inflows, upskilled local workers and generated business opportunities for local companies. Our basic position is clear. All businesses, including those from China, must comply with the laws and regulations in the host country. Wrongdoers must be held accountable. We support Zimbabwe in strengthening its regulatory framework and law enforcement, Guo added. We call for compliance monitoring teams composed of government officials, local councillors, and community representatives to be set up in foreign-invested companies. If anyone finds the possible wrongdoings of Chinese companies in Zimbabwe, he or she is welcome to file official complaints to the relevant Zimbabwean authorities, but we suggest such complaints consist of necessary basic elements. Newsday POLICE claim they have been fair in implementing provisions of the Maintenance of Peace and Order Act (Mopa), and have instead blamed opposition parties and civic society organisations (CSOs) of failing to adhere to the Acts provisions when applying to hold rallies or protests. On several occasions, police have blocked opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) rallies and planned protests by CSOs. Ruling Zanu PF party events have, however, never been barred or disrupted. National police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi told NewsDay that some of the reasons opposition rallies and protests by CSOs are barred included their failure to employ marshals, and to stick to scheduled times, which police believe pose security threats. Nyathi also said the opposition and CSOs were failing to advise local residents of their planned events. There is a difference between notifying and working on the security modalities with the police, if you are to go by Mopa, he said. There are certain parameters which conveners of meetings, public gatherings and demonstrations have to comply with on their part. Merely notifying does not mean that a person has fulfilled all the conditions that are outlined under Mopa. The public must be adequately advised on the security measures they have put in place when they want to do some of these gatherings in consideration of the rights of others. It is not just a matter of notifying and ending there. There are security considerations that have to be made by the conveners. When they go to the police and are told that they have not met these security considerations, they start complaining. Last week, police used Mopa to ban a CCC event in Glen Norah, where the partys local legislator Wellington Chikombo wanted to celebrate his March 26 by-election victory. Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (CiZC) had also planned a protest on July 22, but it was stopped under Mopa. CiZC president Peter Mutasa said: We submitted our notification after engaging a group of law experts to craft the notification to ensure that we did not err. But we failed, despite that which shows that the law enforcement officer wants to effect a blanket ban on protests. Section 8 of Mopa allows for negotiation and consultation of the concerned party with the police. The law appreciates that not every ordinary person could be fully cognisant of it. The opposition CCC feels that Mopa was now a new tool of oppression. Party spokesperson Fadzayi Mahere said: Its not correct that we do not adhere to the requirements of Mopa. Rather, when we do invoke the provisions of this statute, we are met with flimsy reasons for the banning of our rallies such as the fact that there isnt enough manpower or misrepresentations, and that someone else is using our chosen venue when this is not true. What is beyond doubt is that the playing field is not free and fair, but that will not stop us from escalating our nationwide mass mobilisation programmes. Newsday ZANU PF Mutasa South legislator Misheck Mugadza survived a road accident on Wednesday afternoon after his vehicle was involved in a head on collision with a haulage truck in Macheke, Mashonaland East province. He was on his way to Harare. Mashonaland East deputy police spokesperson Assistant Inspector Misheck Denhere confirmed the accident to NewsDay yesterday. I can confirm the accident, but I cannot give you finer details because I am out of office, Denhere said Mugadza, who is also a Zanu PF Manicaland provincial member, is reportedly admitted at West End Hospital in the capital. Zanu PF Mutare District Coordination Committee chairperson Binali Yard yesterday said Mugadzas condition was stable. Mugadza was involved in a road accident with a haulage truck, but he is in a stable condition, Yard said. We are overwhelmed by the number of people who want to find out how Mugadza is copying after the accident. Mugadza won the Mutasa South constituency after defeating Citizens Coalition for Change candidate Regai Tsunga in the March 26 by-elections. The seat had fallen vacant after Tsunga was recalled from Parliament by then MDC-T leader Douglas Mwonzora. Meanwhile, national police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi yesterday said there had been a 22% increase in road accidents since the beginning of this year. Officiating at the launch of the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe (TSCZ) Heroes and Defence Forces Safety campaign, Nyathi said: There is need for change of mindset if we are to achieve road safety. The country has had a 22% increase in road accidents since the beginning of the year, with 2 480 hit and run accidents resulting in people getting injured and loss of life taking place. TSCZ chairperson Kura Sibanda urged motorists to minimise accidents during the holidays. As we launch the 2022 Heroes Holiday Road Safety Campaign, we do so under the shadow of a dark cloud, which is a stark reminder of why we should redouble our efforts to arrest the carnage on our roads. A week ago, six people died after two heavy vehicles collided along the Masvingo Highway, Sibanda said. He said the Highway Code would be translated into Shona and Ndebele. Newsday The state Department of Natural Resources is investigating an oil spill near a Native American reservation in northern Wisconsin. Enbridge Energy reported Wednesday that a contractor had encountered contaminated soil along the Canadian companys Line 5 pipeline south of Ashland and about a mile from the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation, according to the DNR. Enbridge said they could not find a leak and believe the contamination was from a past spill, according to the DNR, which said agency staff have visited the site and not found evidence of an ongoing leak. Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner said crews found a trace amount of product near a valve and shut down the line as a precaution while they investigate the source. Enbridge has excavated and stored the contaminated soil, according to the DNR, and will be required to document all actions taken to address the suspected spill, the amount of contaminated soil and how it is disposed of. The DNR says the investigation is ongoing and the agency declined to provide additional information, which it said will be posted once available on the agencys publicly accessible spills database. The 645-mile line runs from Superior to Ontario, Canada, moving about 540,000 barrels of petroleum products per day. As a result of a lawsuit filed by the Bad River band, Enbridge is seeking to bypass the reservation with about 41 miles of new pipe through Ashland, Bayfield and Iron counties. The DNR is working to complete an environmental review of the project before deciding whether to grant construction permits. According to the draft review, the $450 million project would cross some 185 waterways, including the Bad River, and temporarily disturb about 135 acres of wetlands. Opponents, including Madison and Dane County governments, say the project endangers waters, including Lake Superior, and goes against warnings from international scientists to halt new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The project has support from Republican lawmakers, labor unions and the states business lobby, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. Last year, the DNR cited Enbridge for waiting more than 15 months to report a leak in Jefferson County that contaminated soil and groundwater with petroleum products and toxic chemicals. BURLINGTON New signs of racial tension are surfacing in Burlington as a task force provides a fractured assessment of efforts to implement strategies for improving race relations. On a night when the Burlington City Council expected to hear about progress, aldermen instead were confronted Tuesday night with a new account of conflict sparked by a Confederate flag display. Members of the task force exhibited their own disharmony, too, when they differed openly on the question of how much has been accomplished to implement anti-racism ideas that have been on the table for more than a year. One leader of the task force lashed out at Mayor Jeannie Hefty, who appointed the task force, in an exchange that took place during Tuesdays City Council meeting. Laura Bielefeldt, president of the Burlington Coalition for Dismantling Racism and a member of the task force Hefty created, referred to the new episode of a Confederate flag being prominently flown in the community and called out Hefty for inaction on such incidents. These are the things, Mayor Hefty, that people of color are looking to you to make a statement on, Bielefeldt said. Bielefeldt then challenged the mayor to explain why she created the task force. Heftys response: I did not like the way Burlington was being portrayed. Seizing upon the word portrayed, Bielefeldt replied, If youre more worried about the perceptions of the community than the actual community, theres a problem. Hefty and council members offered no response. The exchange followed a presentation to the City Council moments earlier by Josiah Angley-Thorngate and Brittany Angley-Thorngate, a couple who moved to Burlington in November from the West Coast. Brittany Angley-Thorngate, a mixed-race woman, said the couple has been distressed to find a Confederate flag displayed at a neighboring property. She called it a symbol of hate that carries an implicit threat of violence toward racial and ethnic minorities. The message that flag sends to me and to all other people of color is clear: We are not welcome in this community, she said. Alderman Bob Grandi was the only council member to respond to the couples concerns. Noting that the couple lives in his aldermanic district, Grandi said hearing their story about feeling unwelcome in Burlington broke my heart. A task force out of the public eye Following several such incidents of racial tension in recent years, Hefty last year announced the creation of a task force to explore the issue and make recommendations. The groups membership was not disclosed to the public, and its meetings were held behind closed doors. But the city agreed to spend $10,500 to hire Brookfield-based Organization Development Consultants to facilitate the discussions. Last July, the group produced a report listing ideas for addressing racism, including public education forums, targeted action in the schools, a strategy for diversity and inclusion, a new community feedback strategy, and what the group called formal and systematic activity on racism. The City Council has never taken action on the recommendations. The Burlington Area School District, which has created separate initiatives to address racism in its schools, has not taken action on proposals from the city that relate to the schools. Instead, discussions have continued with a new task force that includes some members of the original group and some new members, including Bielefeldt. Hefty and city administrators have continued to withhold the names of those serving on the task force and have continued to permit the group to meet privately rather than in public. As the one-year mark passed with few public signs of progress in implementing the recommendations from July 2021, the mayor asked task force leaders to give Tuesdays presentation to the City Council. David Thompson, a former school board president who is leading the group, did not cite any specific proposal that has been implemented. Thompson said attendance has been sporadic, and much work has involved getting the task force organized, even as recently as this spring more than half a year after the group was created. He provided meeting minutes showing that there has been discussion about holding ethnic festivals, training police officers, conducting a community survey and engaging with businesses. The coalition failed to come together and did not co-sponsor or otherwise support the Burlington Coalition for Dismantling Racisms annual Juneteenth celebration two months ago; Juneteenth celebrates the end of legalized slavery in the U.S. Thompson told aldermen that the group will attempt to meet more frequently, once a month, starting in September. This task force has been anything but dormant, he said. It has been moving right along. Another task force leader, current school board member Marlo Brown, was in attendance, too, but did not address the council. Bielefeldt told aldermen that she disagreed with Thompsons assessment, and that she felt like the task force was ineffective and was suffering from resistance among city leaders to cope with signs of racism. Its been pretty stagnant, she said of the group. Bielefeldt also questioned why the groups name was being changed. Hefty announced Tuesday that she was changing the name to simply Burlington Community Task Force. That came after, earlier this summer, members adopted the name, Mayors Task Force on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, despite resistance from some members who objected to the word equity because they disagreed that Burlington has ever been a place of inequity. As she was introducing Thompson to the council, the mayor also recounted her formation of the task force last year, saying the city would not turn a blind eye to race relations issues. I strongly stated that I did not feel the City of Burlington was racist, but that mistakes were made on both sides to create this portrayal, she said. That is why the mayors task force was created, to work these issues out, as we all are Americans whatever race we are. Officials from the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection have announced that Walworth County will host the 76th Alice in Dairyland Finals May 11 through May 13 in 2023. The county hosted the 73rd Alice in Dairyland Finals virtually in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 76th Alice in Dairyland Finals planning committee invites residents from Walworth County and surrounding communities with an interest in donating their time or resources to contact 76th Alice in Dairyland Finals Committee Chairperson Susan Earle at alicewalworthcounty2023@gmail.com. Alice in Dairyland is a communications professional who works to educate people about Wisconsin agriculture. Each May, a new Alice is selected from a group of candidates during a public job interview process, and, each year, a different county hosts the finals. Walworth County will host the 76th Alice in Dairyland Finals and DATCP is currently accepting applications for host counties through the 80th Alice in Dairyland Finals in 2027. The 75th Alice in Dairyland, Taylor Schaefer, will visit Walworth County more than 10 times before the finals. Her appearances will include stops at the Walworth County Dairy Breakfast, Pearces Farm to Table event, official first Christmas tree cutting event and the Walworth County Fair. Each visit will bring an increased awareness to the many agri-tourism events and offerings in Walworth County. Schaefer of Franksville started her term as Alice in Dairyland on July 5. The selection of the 76th Alice in Dairyland will take place on May 13, 2023. The Alice in Dairyland interview process includes the three-day finals event each May, as well as a two-day briefing event several weeks earlier. These events include press conferences, agribusiness tours, interviews with local media and speeches. Some of the finale events are open to the public and include opportunities to showcase the host countys local businesses and products. According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, Walworth Countys 941 farms manage more than 192,000 acres, or 54% of the county total. The countys agriculture industry provides more than 4,900 jobs and $1.1 billion in economic activity, and ranks fifth in the state for the production of sheep and goats. Producing grain, milk, cattle, hogs, and nursery and greenhouse products, the countys agriculture industry is diverse. Alice in Dairyland is a full-time communications professional for DATCP. The program is supported by several partner organizations, including Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, Kettle Moraine Mink Breeders Association, Wisconsin Corn Promotion Board, Midwest Jewelers Association, Ginseng Board of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Beef Council. For more information about the Alice in Dairyland program, visit https://www.aliceindairyland.com/ and follow Alice online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. RACINE A 28-year-old Racine man who was killed Tuesday night was shot by someone who was playing with a gun, police said Wednesday. The shooting was reported Tuesday around 8:40 p.m. on the 800 block of Yout Street. Upon arrival, Racine Police Department officers located Romelle Miller, 28, of Racine, deceased inside of the residence with an apparent gunshot wound to the head. Isaiah Martinez Phillips, 21, of Racine, was taken into custody at the scene. Martinez Phillips was charged Wednesday with first-degree reckless homicide by use of a dangerous weapon and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety. According to a criminal complaint: When police arrived, Martinez Phillips said he was sorry and that it was his fault. Inside the residence, a dark-colored revolver was present on a coffee table, along with at least five live rounds, and what appeared to be one spent cartridge. Later, in an interview room with law enforcement, Martinez Phillips immediately began to say that the incident was his fault and that he had shot his friend, Miller, in the head accidentally. Additional interviews were conducted with four people who had been present at the time of the shooting. All four individuals provided statements that were very similar: Martinez Phillips had been playing with the mentioned revolver, and had initially emptied the cylinder of all live rounds. Martinez Phillips then replaced a single round in the cylinder and began pointing it at individuals inside the residence. First, Martinez Phillips had pointed the gun at two people and pulled the trigger, without it discharging. Then he pointed the firearm at Millers head. The weapon discharged a bullet and struck Miller in the head. He died on the scene. Martinez Phillips was given a $25,000 cash bond in Racine County Circuit Court on Wednesday. His preliminary hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. Aug. 10, online court records show. Prior to Tuesday, the City of Racine has seen seven criminal homicides so far in 2022, all of which had been committed with a firearm. A candidate for Wisconsin governor and the chair of the state Assembly's elections commission are among those calling for "decertifying" the state's Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election results that gave the state's 10 electoral votes to Joe Biden. But decertifying the election is a fantasy, and it will not happen. There is no provision under state and federal law or the Wisconsin and U.S. constitutions by which the government can wipe out millions of citizens' votes and act as if an election didn't happen. Candidates can challenge election results, but every legal challenge related to the 2020 election has already failed. Even if new objections could be found, the deadlines to make such claims have long since passed. "'Decertifying' (or any variant, such as 'voiding') a presidential election after the fact is simply not a thing," UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer said. Under state law, which governs the manner in which federal elections are held: County boards of canvassers were required to meet no later than Nov. 10, 2020, to canvas results and declare them official. County clerks had to deliver the results to the state Elections Commission by Nov. 17. The deadline for requesting a recount of the presidential election results was Nov. 18. The campaign of then-President Donald Trump did file such a request, in Dane and Milwaukee counties, which resulted in Biden picking up 74 additional votes. Candidates had until five business days after the end of a recount to challenge its results in court. The chair of the Elections Commission was required to certify election results by Dec. 1. Under federal law: After Dec. 8, Congress must accept election results from states where those results were challenged but upheld as accurate under state law. This is known as the "safe harbor" deadline. On Dec. 14, the electors corresponding to the party that won the elections for president and vice president met at the state Capitol to cast their votes for their candidates. Dec. 23 was the deadline for the vice president to receive election results from the states. The newly elected Congress counted electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Congressional Republicans made objections to counting some electoral votes and 147 of them including Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, and Tom Tiffany, R-Minocqua voted to uphold objections to Pennsylvania's electoral votes, Arizona's or both. Those electoral votes could only have been excluded if both the full House and Senate voted to accept the objections. That did not occur. Under the U.S. Constitution: The new president and vice president were inaugurated on Jan. 20. "There are processes under state law for determining the winner of an election, and though it can potentially be litigated if there is actual uncertainty about the result (which there was not in 2020), once the Electors have voted, it's over," Mayer said. "The certification is a one-way door." "The complete absence of any decertification mechanism in either the constitution or federal statutory law is a fundamental point," UW-Madison law school associate professor Robert Yablon said. "That legal silence is glaring given that other aspects of the presidential election process are set out in detail, including in Article II Section 1, the 12th Amendment, and the Electoral Count Act." Even former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who is leading a Republican-backed probe of the 2020 election and once suggested decertification was possible, echoed that point. After declaring on March 1 that state lawmakers "take a very hard look" at decertifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, Gableman wrote in a memo two weeks later that it is a "practical impossibility." First, there's the "absence of any statutory process or procedure for its accomplishment," he said. Second, there is the "absence of precedent for the completion of the decertification process in a presidential election. "And just as the absence of any statutory process or procedure for the act of decertification would of necessity require their construction while the proceeding is underway," he said, "similarly, the absence of precedent would require the legislature to 'make it up as it goes along,' as it considers the substantive question." New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI): Rajya Sabha member and Aam Aadmi Party leader Raghav Chadha on Thursday met Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to demand a rollback of what he termed as GST imposed on hotel accommodation, which also includes Sarais meant for devotes of the Holy Shri Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar. At the latest GST Council meeting held in Chandigarh in late July, recommendations were made to impose 12 per cent GST on "hotel accommodations" priced up to Rs 1,000. Also Read | Chhattisgarh Shocker: Irked Over His Demand For Mobile Phone, 16-Year Old Boy Kills Younger Brother in Raipur. Reports claimed that 12 per cent GST on the accommodation was imposed in three Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee-run "Sarais" -- Baba Deep Singh Yatri Niwas, Mata Bhag Kaur Niwas and Sri Guru Gobind Singh NRI Niwas -- all located outside the shrine's premises. "I will be meeting the Hon'ble Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman ji today to demand rollback of 12 per cent GST imposition on Sarais meant for devotes of the Holy Shri Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar. Will discuss several other issues pertaining to Punjab as well," Chadha tweeted moments before meeting the Union minister Sitharaman. Also Read | CWG 2022: Why is Neeraj Chopra Not Participating at Commonwealth Games in Birmingham? Check Reason. On Wednesday, Chadha gave a suspension of business notice in Rajya Sabha to discuss the imposition of GST on such Sarais. Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the foremost organisation of Sikhs, too demanded a rollback in GST on such accommodations. "Sarais (inns) by SGPC are for convenience of pilgrims arriving at Gurdwaras are not commercial; any kind of tax on them is government's injustice. This decision putting additional burden on the Sangat (pilgrims) should be immediately withdrawn," the SGPC tweeted on August 2. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Pulwama (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], August 4: One labourer died and two others were injured in a grenade attack by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on Thursday night, police said. The Police said that both the injured labourers are stable. Also Read | Haryana Police STF Recovers Explosive Device Packed with RDX from Busy Highway in Kurukshetra; 1 Arrested. The Police had cordoned off the area. "Terrorists hurled grenade on outside labourers at Gadoora area of Pulwama. In this terror incident, one labourer died and two others were injured. Area cordoned off. Further details shall follow," Kashmir Zone Police said in a tweet. Also Read | Jammu And Kashmir: 1 Migrant Labourer Killed, 2 Injured After Terrorists Throw Grenade in Pulwama The deceased labourer has been identified as Mohammad Mumtaz, a resident of Sakwa Parsa, Bihar. The other two injured are also residents of Bihar. "The deceased outside labourer has been identified as Mohd Mumtaz, resident of Sakwa Parsa, Bihar. Injured have been identified as Mohd Arif and Mohd Majbool, residents of Rampur, Bihar. Both are stable," Police added. Earlier on Wednesday, terrorists fired upon a vehicle-bound police party in the Allochibagh Bund area of Srinagar district of Jammu and Kashmir, said police. The police said no injury or other damage took place. Earlier, a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist was apprehended in the higher reaches of Aloosa forest during a joint operation by 26 Assam Rifles, JKP and CRPF, said the Indian Army on Sunday. During the search, war-like stores were recovered from him. "A specific input was received from Jammu and Kashmir and Army Intelligence Unit regarding the presence of two suspected terrorists in Gen Area Aloosa Forest. On July 30, a joint operation led by 26 Assam Rifles, JKP and CRPF was launched. During a search of higher reaches in Aloosa Forest, a suspected area was identified. The area was cordoned with extreme caution," said the Indian Army. During a search of the area one suspected individual (terrorist) was seen and surrounded from all sides and apprehended. During the search, war-like stores were recovered from him, added the Army. As per sources, the terrorist belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and was planning to carry out attacks on security forces in the coming days. His aim was to cause major disruption during Amarnath Yatra. Pakistan's desperate attempts to cause fear and panic amongst the locals are aimed at disturbing the prevailing peace and normalcy in the valley. All efforts will be made by the security forces to deny terrorists any space to operate freely. By apprehending one hardcore LeT a major incident has been averted, added the Army. Meanwhile, on Tuesday the Border Security Force troops fired at an unidentified flying object in the Kanachak sector at the International Border in Jammu. According to the BSF, the object was flying with a blinking light at 9.31 PM as it tried to cross the International Border (IB). There have been many instances of drones being spotted on the international border with Pakistan. Previously, on the intervening night of July 26 and 27, BSF troops had spotted the movement of a drone along the international border in Rajasthan as it was found to be moving near the Gharsana sector of Sri Ganganagar district. In another incident on July 22, the BSF troops had fired at a drone coming from the Pakistani side near the international border in Jammu. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday said the ultimate aim of governance should be to empower the people and move towards a minimum government. This can happen only when the last mile has been traversed and the people at the bottom of the pyramid have been reached, he said. Also Read | Justice UU Lalit Set to Take Over NV Ramana As the Next Chief Justice of India; Here's Everything You Need To Know About Him. The success of good governance lies in including and making the toiling masses equal stakeholders in the process of development, Naidu said according to a statement issued by the Vice President Secretariat said. Addressing participants of a course being conducted by the Indian Institute of Public Administration here, the vice-president said the key to good governance lies in inclusivity, use of technology and maintaining high moral standards. Also Read | Nokia 8210 4G & Nokia 110 Launched in India, Check Price & Other Details Here. "Technology fosters transparency and hence accountability, which is the basic feature of good governance, while moral standards impart legitimacy," he said. The vice-president hoped these two together will usher in a new political culture preparing the ground for bringing in transformational reforms. Underlining that people's participation is very important for inclusive and responsive governance, Naidu said reforms are only initiated by the government but actually bear fruit only when people proactively work for the future of their country. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Chittoor, August 4: Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy began his constituency-wise interaction with the party cadre programme here on Thursday by meeting with the YSRCP leaders of the Kuppam constituency. During the meeting, the Chief Minister said that Kuppam was as important to him and is like his own constituency Pulivendula in Kadapa, and assured to develop it in the coming days, besides supporting it in every possible way. Andhra Pradesh CM YS Jagan Mohan Reddy Says, Families Displaced by Polavaram Project Not Happy With PM Narendra Modi. He stated that YSRCP Government has developed Kuppam much more in the last three years, far better than what Chandrababu Naidu had done in several decades, and sanctioned Rs 65 crore for various developmental works to Kuppam municipality. Speaking on the occasion, he said that a majority of people think that Kuppam is a stronghold of TDP, which always supported Chandrababu, but the constituency has more BCs and YSRCP can win Kuppam by taking welfare schemes to BCs. He said that YSRCP had fielded IAS officer Chandramouli in the previous polls, and after his demise, his son Bharat was chosen to contest in the coming polls. Bharat has been doing excellent work for the party in the constituency and played a major role in the party's victory in the local body and municipal elections, he said and asked the cadre to support him. He promised to take him in his cabinet on winning Kuppam. He asked the cadre to focus on winning the Kuppam seat and break the illusion that Naidu created among the people in such a way that they don't entertain TDP or Chandrababu Naidu anymore. He said that the current government had already prioritized Kuppam and did more development than in Naidu's rule. Schemes like Nadu-Nedu, Village clinics, RBKs, and village/ward secretariats have taken governance to the village level in a transparent manner. The Chief Minister assured to stand by the party in Kuppam by all means to pave way for victory, just like the victories in Panchayat, ZPTC, MPTC, and Municipal polls. He asked the cadre to aim for winning 175 out of 175 seats, starting from Kuppam and working with zeal. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Guwahati, Aug 4 (PTI) Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Thursday wrote to his counterparts in other states requesting them to include a chapter on Ahom general Lachit Borphukan in the school and college syllabus. Sarma, in his letter, said that despite being a shining example of patriotism and love for one's motherland, Lachit Borphukan's accomplishments remain comparatively unknown in many parts of the country. Also Read | PM Narendra Modi Urges People To Take COVID-19 Vaccine Precaution Dose. Requesting his counterparts to include the history and valour of Lachit Borphukon in the curriculum, the Assam chief minister said this will contribute to spreading patriotic ideals among the youth and inspire them to dedicate themselves to the service of the nation. Lachit Borphukan was a great army commander of the Ahom kingdom. He is known for his leadership in the 1671 'Battle of Saraighat' that thwarted an attempt by the Mughal forces to take back Assam. Also Read | Kerala Rains: Death Toll Mounts to 22, Red Alert in 14 Districts. The National Defence Academy has been awarding its best cadet with the Lachit Borphukan Gold Medal every year since 1999. In February, former president Ram Nath Kovind launched the 400th birth anniversary celebrations of Lachit Borphukan. Sarma's letter is a part of the Assam government's series of initiatives related to the year-long birth anniversary celebrations of the 17th century great Ahom army general, the Chief Minister's Office said in a statement. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI): The Centre on Thursday informed Delhi High Court that the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi a day ago has approved India's updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to be communicated to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The submissions of Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma, appearing for the central government today during the hearing of public interest litigation seeking the constitution of an expert committee for the realisation of the promises made by India at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2021. Also Read | @AgriGoI @narendramodi Rishi Kumar of Meerut Thanked the Central and State Governments for Latest Tweet by DD News. After the status report of Centre, the Bench of Justice Satish Chander Sharma and Subramonium Prasad today allowed the petitioner to withdraw the petition from the Delhi High Court. The petition was filed by lawyer Rohit Madan through Advocate Akshay R. India at the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Glasgow, United Kingdom, expressed to intensify its climate action by presenting to the world five nectar elements (Panchamrit) of India's climate action. This update to India's existing NDC translates the 'Panchamrit' announced at COP 26 into enhanced climate targets. The update is also a step towards achieving India's long-term goal of reaching net zero by 2070. Also Read | Jharkhand PGT Recruitment 2022: JSSC Notifies Vacancies For Over 3100 Post Graduate Teacher Posts At jssc.nic.in; Check Details Here. According to the Centre communication, as per the updated NDC, India now stands committed to reduce Emissions Intensity of its GDP by 45 per cent by 2030, from 2005 level and achieve about 50 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030. Cabinet approval, also takes forward the Prime Minister's vision of sustainable lifestyles and climate justice to protect the poor and vulnerable from adverse impacts of climate change. The updated NDC reads "To put forward and further propagate a healthy and sustainable way of living based on traditions and values of conservation and moderation, including through a mass movement for 'LIFE'- 'Lifestyle for Environment' as a key to combating climate change". The decision on enhanced NDCs demonstrates India's commitment at the highest level for decoupling of economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions. India's updated NDC has been prepared after carefully considering our national circumstances and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC). India's updated NDC also reaffirms our commitment to work towards a low carbon emission pathway, while simultaneously endeavoring to achieve sustainable development goals. Recognizing that lifestyle has a big role in climate change, the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India, at COP 26, proposed a 'One-Word Movement', to the global community. This one word is LIFE...L, I, F, E, i.e. Lifestyle For Environment. The vision of LIFE is to live a lifestyle that is in tune with our planet and does not harm it. India's updated NDC also captures this citizen-centric approach to combat climate change. The updated NDC also represents the framework for India's transition to cleaner energy for the period 2021-2030. The updated framework, together with many other initiatives of the Government, including tax concessions and incentives such as Production Linked Incentive scheme for promotion of manufacturing and adoption of renewable energy, will provide an opportunity for enhancing India's manufacturing capabilities and enhancing exports. It will lead to an overall increase in green jobs such as in renewable energy, clean energy industries- in automotives, manufacturing of low emissions products like Electric Vehicles and super-efficient appliances, and innovative technologies such as green hydrogen, etc. India's updated NDC will be implemented over the period 2021-2030 through programs and schemes of relevant Ministries /departments and with due support from States and Union Territories. The Government has launched many schemes and programs to scale up India's actions on both adaptation and mitigation. Appropriate measures are being taken under these schemes and programs across many sectors, including water, agriculture, forest, energy and enterprise, sustainable mobility and housing, waste management, circular economy and resource efficiency, etc. As a result of the aforesaid measures, India has progressively continued decoupling of economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions. The Net Zero target by 2030 by Indian Railways alone will lead to a reduction of emissions by 60 million tonnes annually. Similarly, India's massive LED bulb campaign is reducing emissions by 40 million tonnes annually. India's climate actions have so far been largely financed from domestic resources. However, providing new and additional financial resources as well as transfer of technology to address the global climate change challenge are among the commitments and responsibilities of the developed countries under UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. India will also require its due share from such international financial resources and technological support. India's NDC do not bind it to any sector-specific mitigation obligation or action. India's goal is to reduce overall emission intensity and improve energy efficiency of its economy over time and at the same time protecting the vulnerable sectors of economy and segments of our society. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) The Delhi Board of School Education (DBSE) has signed an agreement with Burlington English to help students in developing global competencies in the language. The programme named Innovation in Communication aims at strengthening the schools' efforts to develop an immersive English language learning environment by also building the capacity of the respective school teachers through digital and offline interventions. Also Read | BECIL Recruitment 2022: Apply for Engineer, Assistant Manager, Test Driver And Other Posts At becil.com; Check Details Here. "The DBSE recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Burlington English, a leading global provider of English language learning solutions. As a result of the partnership, students will be provided support to develop global competencies in the English language thereby making them confident and future ready," Burlington English said in a statement on Thursday. Himanshu Gupta, Director Education, Government of NCT of Delhi, said the partnership opens up a plethora of opportunities for students in the future. Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: Ukraines Ground Situation Does Not Permit Return of Indian Students, Govt Tells Rajya Sabha. "We are pleased to partner with Burlington English to deliver learning opportunities to our students and teachers. It is important for 21st century learners to confidently communicate in English. We have initiated Project Voices in Delhi government schools to boost students' confidence and communication skills," he said. As part of this partnership, more than 200 students will get all-round support for developing English language communication, which will be powered by deep technology, the statement read. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 4 (PTI) Senior CPI(M) leader Thomas Isaac on Thursday termed as "harassment" the Enforcement Directorate (ED) notice seeking his appearance before it in connection with its probe into alleged violations in the financial dealings of KIIFB when he was Finance Minister in the previous LDF government in Kerala. Also Read | OnePlus 10T 5G With OxygenOS 13 Launched in India at Rs 49,999. Confirming that summons have been sent to him again by the agency to appear before it on August 11, Isaac said that this time round ED has sought from him details in the last 10 years regarding his bank accounts, assets, foreign remittances, the companies he is a director in, etc. Also Read | Apple iPhone 14 Price Tipped Online Ahead of Its Launch: Report. He said that while he would reply to the notice in a day or two, after discussions with his lawyers, whether or not to appear before the ED would be decided later after exploring the possibilities of challenging the agency's notice. "This is a clear cut case of harassment. I have no idea as to what their objective is, but it is harassment. Further course of action, including whether to challenge the notice and whether to appear before the ED would be decided after discussions with legal experts and lawyers," he said while speaking to reporters here. In any case, it will take time to collate the details for 10 years that the ED has sought, he added. He also said that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) never said there was any Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) violation by the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB). "They think I will be scared by such actions. Others might have been in their (ED) experience," Isaac said. Earlier, the ED had served a notice to the senior Marxist leader last month, seeking his appearance before it on July 19. He, however, did not appear before the probe agency, saying he had to attend classes at a party-run institute in the state capital. Then, Isaac had termed the ED notice to him as a 'political move' by the BJP government at the Centre, alleging it was misusing all investigation agencies for its political gains. He had said before the last Assembly election, the ED, the CAG and even the Income Tax Department was after the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board. "Then what happened? KIIFB is the primary agency of the state government for financing large and critical infrastructure projects and had last year raised Rs 2,150 crore through its debut masala bond issue as part of its plan to mobilise Rs 50,000 crore to fund large and critical infrastructure projects in the southern state," Isaac had written on his Facebook page reacting to the first ED notice. He had also detailed the positive impact of KIIFB in the state. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Faridabad, Aug 4 (PTI) The Vigilance Bureau has arrested four senior officials of the municipal corporation here in connection with a Rs 200-crore scam. The accused were identified as the civic body's audit branch joint director Deepak Thapar, senior accounts officer Vishal Kaushik, finance controller Satish Kumar and senior accounts officer Hargulal Phagna. Also Read | CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan Invites Investors As Madhya Pradesh Signs MoU for First Phase of Omkareshwar Floating Solar Project. Vishal Kaushik was caught from Yamunanagar while three others were arrested from different places in Faridabad. The arrested accused were produced in a city court today and we have taken them on a one-day police remand. We are questioning them, said Kuldeep Yadav, SP, Vigilance Bureau, Faridabad. Also Read | Justice UU Lalit Set to Take Over NV Ramana As the Next Chief Justice of India; Here's Everything You Need To Know About Him. According to sources, all accused held important positions in the municipal corporation and passed bills without any audit and inspection. In this way, crores of rupees were paid to a contractor without any work. The Vigilance has already arrested contractor Satbir, suspended chief engineer Daulatram Bhaskar, JE Deepak and another official Raman Sharma, who have got bail from the court. The scam was exposed in May 2020. Four councillors had complained to the then municipal commissioner that the civic body's Accounts Department made payment to contractor Satbir's various firms without any work. After irregularities were found, the municipal commissioner recommended a probe by the Vigilance. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI): After the Enforcement Directorate (ED) questioned the Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge in the money laundering case involving the National Herald newspaper, Congress MP KC Venugopal on Thursday said "Horrible raj" is going on in the country while alleging that the government does not want democracy at all. "Horrible raj is going on in the country. There are parliamentary systems. We are law-abiding citizens, but when parliament is in session and LOP (Mallikarjun Kharge) is participating in a debate, ED is summoning him at 12:30, what is the point?" Venugopal told ANI. Also Read | Union Bank Robbery: Robbers Loot Rs 44 Lakh From Union Bank's Ankleshwar Branch in Bharuch, One Held; Caught on CCTV. "Same thing happened when Sanjay Raut was arrested, they did not inform the parliament so far. Privilege for members of parliament exists for the safeguarding of democracy. But this government does not want democracy at all. We are not scared, we will fight it out. We are not cowards. Tomorrow's protest is on price rise and unemployment. We will do it all over India and in parliament," he added. Mallikarjun Kharge on Thursday was quizzed for around eight hours by the ED office in the national capital in connection with the money laundering case involving the National Herald newspaper. Also Read | Assam Shocker: Man Poisons His Two Minor Kids, Kills Self in Sivasagar. The Congress MP arrived at ED headquarters at around 12:30 pm on Thursday. Earlier in the day, Kharge informed the Rajya Sabha that the Enforcement Directorate had issued summons against him amid ongoing proceedings of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, accusing the Central government of attempting to intimidate the Congress party. Congress Interim President Sonia Gandhi and party leader Rahul Gandhi have already been questioned in the case over alleged evasion of tax. Notably, ED on Wednesday partially sealed the offices of Young India Limited -- the firm that owns Associated Journals, which runs the outlet -- at Herald House in Delhi. The probe agency took action a day after the ED carried out raids at 12 locations in the national capital and at other places in connection with the National Herald case in which top Congress leaders are accused of violating norms. Kharge is the authorised representative for the company, and the sealing had to be done as he was not there. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi termed the sealing of the Young Indian office at the Herald House building as an "intimidation attempt" by the ruling BJP and asserted that he is "not scared" of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's suppressive government. Speaking to the reporters here, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi said, "You are talking about National Herald, it is an intimidation attempt. They think they will be able to silence us with a little pressure...We won't be intimidated. We are not scared of Narendra Modi. They can do whatever they want..." ED in April this year examined senior Congress leader Kharge here in connection with its money laundering probe into the National Herald case and recorded his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). The National Herald case pertains to the alleged financial irregularities under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and was registered about nine months ago after a trial court took cognisance of an Income Tax department probe carried out on the basis of a private criminal complaint filed by former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Subramanian Swamy in 2013. The petitioner had approached the court alleging that the assets of Associated Journals Limited (AJL), which published the National Herald newspaper, were fraudulently acquired and transferred to Young Indian Pvt Limited (YIL), in which Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi owned 38 per cent shares each.Swamy had alleged that the Gandhis cheated and misappropriated funds, with YIL paying only Rs 50 lakh to obtain the right to recover Rs 90.25 crore that AJL owed to Congress. The raids were conducted days after the investigative agency questioned Congress interim-president Sonia Gandhi for nearly three hours on July 27. It was the third round of questioning of the senior leader in the case. Following the summoning of Sonia Gandhi by the ED, Congress workers and leaders staged protests in various parts of the country alleging misuse of probe agencies by the government. Sonia Gandhi was questioned by ED on July 26 also. She had reached the ED office accompanied by her daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.Officials said on that day, the party president's response was sought to around 30 questions regarding her involvement with the National Herald newspaper and Young Indian Pvt Ltd.During her questioning, the Lok Sabha MP from Rae Bareli was asked about the functioning and running of the newspaper, the role of its various office bearers. Prior to that, she was also questioned by ED on July 21. Further, in June this year, the ED questioned Rahul Gandhi for five days. Rahul Gandhi was questioned by the ED for over 27 hours for three straight days from June 13 to June 15 and was again summoned on June 20. On June 20, he was questioned for around 14 hours. The Congress leader was deposed before the ED investigators in the case for the first time on June 13.He initially sought an exemption from appearance on June 16, following which he was called on June 17. But the senior Congress leader wrote to the ED to postpone his questioning citing the illness of his mother Sonia Gandhi.The ED then allowed him to join the probe on June 20 at his request. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday conveyed to his Sri Lankan counterpart Ali Sabry that India, as a "dependable friend" of Sri Lanka, remained committed to assisting it in its economic recovery. Jaishankar met the newly-appointed Sri Lankan foreign minister on the margins of an ASEAN conclave in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Also Read | BECIL Recruitment 2022: Apply for Engineer, Assistant Manager, Test Driver And Other Posts At becil.com; Check Details Here. The external affairs minister also met Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, Vietnamese foreign minister Bui Thanh Son and Australian foreign minister Penny Wong. "A warm first meeting with FM Ali Sabry of Sri Lanka. Congratulated him on his new responsibility. Reaffirmed India's commitment, as a dependable friend and reliable partner, to the economic recovery and well being of Sri Lanka. Neighbourhood First," Jaishankar tweeted. Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: Ukraines Ground Situation Does Not Permit Return of Indian Students, Govt Tells Rajya Sabha. Sri Lanka has been reeling under an unprecedented economic turmoil, the worst in seven decades, that left millions of people struggling to buy food, medicine, fuel and other essentials. Last month, Sri Lanka witnessed massive political turmoil following mass protests over the economic crisis that forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country. This year, India extended a support of over USD 3.8 billion to Sri Lanka to help it deal with the economic crisis. On his meeting with the Cambodian prime minister, Jaishankar said the issues which figured in the talks included economic cooperation, development and defence and cultural partnership. "Thank PM Hun Sen of Cambodia for receiving me. Conveyed personal greetings of PM @narendramodi. Appreciated his warm words on our covid cooperation. Discussed enhancing our economic, development, defence and cultural partnership," he tweeted. "Assured our continued assistance on heritage conservation. Valued his views on regional developments," he added. On his meeting with the Vietnamese counterpart, Jaishankar said both sides agreed to maintain the momentum of in the comprehensive strategic partnership. "Another good meeting with @FMBuiThanhSon of Vietnam. Agreed to keep working to maintain the momentum of our Comprehensive Strategic Partnership," he tweeted. Referring to his meeting with Australian foreign minister Wong, Jaishankar said they exchanged perspectives on regional and global issues. "Pleasure meeting FM @SenatorWong of Australia again. Took positive note of the progress in our bilateral relations. Benefited from the exchange of perspectives on regional and global issues," he said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, August 4: India on Thursday successfully test-fired indigenously developed laser-guided anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) at a military installation in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar. The defence ministry said the missiles destroyed the targets with precision at two different ranges. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh complimented the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the maker of the ATGMs, and the Indian Army on the successful trial of the weapon. "Indigenously developed laser-Guided anti-tank guided missiles were successfully test-fired from Main Battle Tank (MBT) Arjun by the DRDO and Indian Army," the ministry said. The test firing of the missiles was carried out at KK Ranges in Ahmednagar with support from Armoured Corps Centre and School. IIT Roorkee, DRDO Join Hands to Develop Indigenous Defence Equipment. "The missiles hit with precision and successfully destroyed the targets at two different ranges. Telemetry systems have recorded the satisfactory flight performance of the missiles," the defence ministry said. "The all-indigenous laser guided ATGM employs a tandem High explosive anti-tank (HEAT) warhead to defeat explosive reactive armour (ERA) protected armoured vehicles," it said. The ATGM has been developed with multi-platform launch capability and is currently undergoing technical evaluation trials from 120 mm rifled gun of MBT Arjun. DRDO Chairman G Satheesh Reddy also congratulated the teams associated with the test firing of ATGMs. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Imphal, Aug 3 (PTI) Journalists protested in Imphal on Thursday by ceasing their work, alleging that senior editor W Shyamjai was harassed by the NIA. Members of All Manipur Working Journalists Union (AMWJU), Editors Guild Manipur (EGM) and Manipur Hill Journalists Union (MHJU) staged a sit-in protest in the Keisampat area from 10 am to 4 pm. Also Read | Justice UU Lalit Set to Take Over NV Ramana As the Next Chief Justice of India; Here's Everything You Need To Know About Him. Shyamjai, the editor-in-chief of evening daily Kangleipakki Meira, was summoned by the NIA to its office on August 2 at 10 am "over alleged involvements of two other journalists aiding the underground groups", the Indian Journalists Union (IJU) said in a statement. Shymjai, the president of AMWJU, was kept in a small room without being interacted to till noon and was then asked "unrelated" questions regarding underground groups, it said. Also Read | Nokia 8210 4G & Nokia 110 Launched in India, Check Price & Other Details Here. The interrogation went on till 5 pm, and according to Shyamjai, he was also "intimidated" by NIA officers the next day, the statement alleged. Protesting against the "harassment", the press organisations submitted a memorandum to Governor La Ganesan and Chief Minister N Biren Singh. They urged the governor and the chief minister to ensure that journalists are not harassed any further. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Palghar, Aug 4 (PTI) An assistant municipal commissioner and an engineer of the Vasai Virar City Municipal Corporation were detained by the Maharashtra Anti Corruption Bureau for allegedly demanding and accepting a bribe from a builder, an official said on Thursday. Also Read | Gujarat Shocker: Baby Buried Alive at Farm in Gambhoi Village of Sabarkantha District. A case under Prevention of Corruption Act has been registered against the two officials, who are yet to be arrested, and a contract labourer, Palghar ACB Deputy Superintendent of Police Navnath Jagtap said. Also Read | Punjab: Bhagwant Mann Government Waives Off Outstanding Electricity Bills Till December 2021. "The complainant had taken the contract of renovating a shop in Zavarpada in Nalasopara. The AMC and engineer demanded Rs 50,000 for not taking action on some irregularities. They had tried to take money from the complainant several times in June," he said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) Ahead of the August 6 vice presidential election, Opposition's joint candidate Margaret Alva on Thursday appealed to all MPs to vote without fear or political pressure for the "best suited" candidate. In a video appeal, she claimed she is the "best candidate" as she has the experience and will work impartially from the chair, besides committing herself to forge consensus on issues of national importance. Also Read | PM Narendra Modi Urges People To Take COVID-19 Vaccine Precaution Dose. "I appeal to each member of Parliament to vote for me in the election on August 6 without any fear. For, truly there is nothing to fear but fear itself. "With your support if elected Vice President, I commit myself to forge consensus on issues of national importance and to work with you - respected members to restore the glory of Parliament," she said. Also Read | Kerala Rains: Death Toll Mounts to 22, Red Alert in 14 Districts. "My video message, to Members of Parliament, across party lines. The VP election on August 6th is not subject to party whip and is by secret ballot. MPs are expected to vote without fear, or political pressure, for the candidate they believe is best suited for this critical office," she also tweeted while sharing her video message. Alva said it is a privilege and an honour for her to be a candidate in the election to the post of vice president of India after being supported by a large number of political parties. She said she has worked for 50 years as member of both houses of Parliament, as a union minister and as a governor. "The vice president's election is not just any other election. It must be seen as a referendum on the manner in which Parliament is being run. Today, Parliament is virtually at a standstill with communication between members non-existent. This diminishes Parliament in the eyes of the people," the former governor said. Noting that the election to the post of the vice president is not like any other election, she said the makers of the Constitution ensured that there would be no whip for this election and that it will be a secret ballot. "And this is for a reason. It gives members of Parliament an opportunity to choose the best candidate available without pressure from their political parties. A candidate who has experience and who will work impartially from the chair. I believe I am that candidate," she claimed. Veteran Alva remained in public life for over 50 years as a Congress member. She is pitted against former West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankar, who is the NDA nominee. The numbers are stacked in favour of Dhankar, as the BJP has a majority support in both houses of Parliament. All MPs of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha are eligible to vote to elect the successor to incumbent M Venkaiah Naidu. The result for the vice presidential poll will be out on the same day. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Varanasi (UP), Aug 4 (PTI) A district court hearing the Gyanvapi mosque-Shringar Gauri complex case here gave the Anjuman Intezamia Masjid Committee time till August 18 to file its response in the case. The Muslim side had sought 15 days' time to present its response to the Hindu petitioners' arguments as their main advocate had died of heart failure a few days ago, according to Madan Mohan Yadav, the lawyer representing the Hindu side in the case. Also Read | BECIL Recruitment 2022: Apply for Engineer, Assistant Manager, Test Driver And Other Posts At becil.com; Check Details Here. Taking this into consideration, the court fixed next hearing for August 18. Rakhi Singh and others had filed a petition seeking permission for daily worship of Hindu deities whose idols are located on an outer wall of the mosque but the Muslim side had urged the court to dismiss the case. Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: Ukraines Ground Situation Does Not Permit Return of Indian Students, Govt Tells Rajya Sabha. Earlier, a lower court had ordered a videography survey of the complex. The survey work was completed on May 16 and the report was presented in the court on May 19. The Hindu side had claimed in the court that a Shivling was found during the videography survey of the Gyanvapi mosque complex but the Muslim side had claimed that it was part of a fountain mechanism. The Muslim side had filed an application in the Supreme Court against the survey, citing the violation of the Places of Worship Act 1991, which prohibits the conversion of any place of worship and provides for maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947. The apex court refused to stay the videography survey, it had directed that the matter be heard in the district court instead of the lower court. At present, the district court is hearing arguments on the maintainability of the case. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) No foreign entity or government has any locus standi to comment on the fundamental rights of Indian citizens, the government said on Thursday, rejecting a report by the US state department on the alleged curtailment of religious freedom in India. Replying to a question in Rajya Sabha on the International Religious Freedom Report, 2021, Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said it reflected a lack of understanding of India, its constitutional framework, plurality and democratic ethos. Also Read | History Created! Indian Navy's All Woman Officers Completes Maritime Mission in North Arabian Sea. Days after the report was released, the Ministry of External Affairs on June 3 trashed the criticism against India and instead expressed concerns over racially motivated attacks, hate crimes and gun violence in the US. In his comments, Muraleedharan also said that the government is "fully committed" to the rights of Indian citizens enshrined in the Constitution and the laws. Also Read | 7th Pay Commission: No 8th Pay Commission to Revise Allowances And Pensions? Here's An Update. "The comments on India in this year's report reflect a lack of understanding of India and its constitutional framework, plurality and democratic ethos, and misrepresent facts," Muraleedharan said. "In any case, no foreign entity or government has any locus standi to pronounce on our citizens' fundamental rights," he said. The annual report alleged that attacks on members of the minority communities, including killings, assaults, and intimidation, took place throughout 2021 in India. "India is a naturally vibrant and pluralistic society, where the Constitution provides for freedom of religion, and where democratic governance and rule of law further promote and protect fundamental rights," Muraleedharan said. To a separate question, he said two Afghan nationals, including an Afghan Sikh community member, lost their lives in the terrorist attack on Gurdwara Dashmesh Pita Sahib Shri Gobind Singh Sahib in Kabul on June 18. "In order to facilitate the evacuation of Afghan Sikhs and Hindus, the government of India has been providing e-visas since August 2021," he said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Chennai (Tamil Nadu) [India], August 4 (ANI): AIADMK leader O Panneerselvam and General Council (GC) member P Vairamuthu on Thursday requested the Madras High Court to change Justice Krishnan Ramasamy from hearing the case they have filed against the July 11 General Council Meeting stating that the judge has made personal comments about OPS. The case was listed for hearing before the judge on Thursday. Also Read | Justice UU Lalit Set to Take Over NV Ramana As the Next Chief Justice of India; Here's Everything You Need To Know About Him. Justice Krishnan Ramasamy is investigating the cases related to the AIADMK General Committee meeting. The single judge strongly condemned Panneerselvam's side for filing a complaint with the Chief Justice to change the judge, and said "The act of bringing the judiciary into disrepute is an act of contempt and displeasure." Also Read | Nokia 8210 4G & Nokia 110 Launched in India, Check Price & Other Details Here. To this, OPS explained that they requested to be transferred to another judge because he had made personal comments about him. OPS requested to Chief Justice that he need a different Judge to take care of the case, so Judge Krishnan Ramaswamy mentioned OPS's side that he could have appealed to himself if there was an amendment. "Your side has acted to justify its views expressed in the July 11 order," said Justice Krishnan Ramasamy. Earlier on July 29, the Supreme Court forwarded to the Madras High Court a plea filed by former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister O Panneerselvam's faction against the recent All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) general council meeting in which OPS was expelled from the party. A bench headed by Chief Justice NV Ramana asked the High Court to decide the case within three weeks. It also asked OPS and Edappadi K Palaniswamy (EPS) factions of the AIADMK to maintain the status quo with regard to the affairs of the party. In its General Council meeting held on July 11, the dual-leadership model in the AIADMK was ended and OPS was expelled from the party for "anti-party" activities during the party meeting. In the meeting, EPS was elevated as the interim general secretary of the party. On July 6 the Supreme Court stayed the June 23 division bench order of the Madras High Court order that had restrained the AIADMK General Council from amending the party bye-laws during its meeting. A single judge of the High Court had earlier refused to restrain the General Council from passing resolutions aimed at amending its by-laws to pave the way for a unitary leadership instead of dual leadership. It had rejected a batch of applications for an order against the passing of any such resolutions and held that it was for the General Council to decide upon its functioning and not for the court to dictate which resolution could be passed and which should not be passed. Panneerselvam's camp, however, challenged the single judge order before a division bench which had restrained the General Council from passing any resolution other than the 23 drafts that had been approved by the party coordinator Panneerselvam. Then EPS filed an appeal before the top court against a division bench order stating that in the General Council meeting held on June 23, the majority of members sought for the abolition of the dual leadership model and for adopting a unitary leadership structure. The top court then stayed the division bench order and asked a single judge to decide the case. Since the passing away of former Chief Minister and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) general secretary J Jayalalithaa, the party has been having a dual leadership with Panneerselvam and Palaniswami leading it as coordinator and joint coordinator respectively. However, recently, disputes arose between both the leaders, with the EPS group pressing for unitary leadership In the Supreme Court, Palaniswami had contended that the High Court division bench had erroneously interfered with the internal democratic process of the AIADMK, and the General Council, the supreme body of the AIADMK, was prevented from deciding on internal party affairs. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) Over 71 thousand cases are pending with the Supreme Court, out which over 10,000 are awaiting disposal for over a decade, Rajya Sabha was informed on Thursday. In a written reply, Law Minister Kiren Rijiju said 71,411 cases as on August 2 were pending before the top court, which included over 56,000 civil matters and over 15,000 criminal matters. Also Read | CWG 2022: Kidambi Srikanth Advances to Mens Singles Round of 16, Defeats Daniel Latest Tweet by ANI Digital. He said of the total 71,411 pending cases in the apex court, 10,491 were pending for more than ten years. Over 42,000 cases were pending for less than five years and 18,134 between five and 10 years. Also Read | Delhi | Suspicious Object Found in Rohini, Police Personnel on the Spot. Further Details Latest Tweet by ANI. In reply to another question, Rijiju said while 40,28,591 cases were pending in the various high courts in 2016, their numbers went up to 59,55,907 as on July 29 this year -- a rise of 50 per cent. The district and subordinate courts also saw a 50 per cent hike in cases between 2016 and July 29 this year. In 2016, over 2.82 crore cases were pending, the figure stood at over 4.24 crore this year. Disposal of pending cases in courts is within the domain of the judiciary. Though filing and disposal of cases in different courts is a continuous process, no time frame has been prescribed for disposal of various kinds of cases by the respective courts, the minister said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Shillong, Aug 4 (PTI) Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Thursday assured the outlawed Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC) that its leaders will get safe passage for attending peace talks with the government. The outfit on Wednesday demanded safe passage for its leaders taking part in the dialogue, in case the talks fail. Also Read | Assam Shocker: Man Poisons His Two Minor Kids, Kills Self in Sivasagar. Let me assure them (HNLC) and everybody that it is the duty of the government to ensure that the safety of each and everybody who comes for the talks is maintained, Sangma told reporters here. The chief minister expressed hope that the talks will be successful. Also Read | Jammu And Kashmir: 1 Migrant Labourer from Bihar Killed, 2 Others Injured After Terrorists Throw Grenade in Pulwama. All concerns raised by the members of the HNLC will be addressed including the safety of their leaders, he said. The outlawed HNLC deputed its vice chairman Manbhalang Jyrwa and two others to attend a tripartite peace talk involving the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Meghalaya government. MHA interlocutors AK Mishra, Peter Dkhar of the Meghalaya government and HNLC representative Sadon Blah have already had several rounds of meetings in the past few weeks. At present, there are over 30 active cadres of the outfit who will be joining the peace process, according to a senior home department official. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) A parliamentary standing committee has recommended that the government should reconsider spending on advertisements under the 'Beti Bachao Beti Padhao' scheme and focus on planned expenditure allocation for sectoral interventions in education and health. The panel noted that out of a total of Rs. 446.72 crore released during 2016-2019 for the government's flagship scheme, 78.91 per cent was spent only on media advocacy. Also Read | CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan Invites Investors As Madhya Pradesh Signs MoU for First Phase of Omkareshwar Floating Solar Project. The Sixth Report of the Committee on Empowerment of Women (2021-22) on the action taken on the subject "Empowerment of Women through Education with Special Reference to 'Beti Bachao Beti Padhao' Scheme", was presented in Lok Sabha on Thursday. The panel said over the last six years, through focused advocacy BBBP has been able to capture the attention of political leadership and national consciousness towards valuing the girl child. Also Read | Justice UU Lalit Set to Take Over NV Ramana As the Next Chief Justice of India; Here's Everything You Need To Know About Him. "Now, it is time to focus on other verticals by making ample financial provisions to help achieve measurable outcomes related to education and health envisaged under the scheme," it said. Calling it one of the most important schemes of the government to improve child sex ratio in backward regions and ensure education of the girl children, the committee recommend that the government should, hereafter, reconsider spending on advertisements under the scheme and focus on planned expenditure allocation for sectoral interventions in education and health. The committee said according to the scheme's guidelines, regular or quarterly meetings are to be conducted to review the progress at the district level. Regular process of documentation of all activities conducted at the district/block and gram panchayat level is required to be undertaken through regular reports and photographic documentation at the district level, it said. "However, the Committee finds that there is a lapse in undertaking required number of task force meetings and collecting monthly reports or statement of expenditure from districts on time. Such examples of non-compliance of the guidelines are clear indicators that the scheme is not being reviewed or monitored properly," the committee said. The panel noted that regular audits and real time updating of activities are necessary to ensure compliance. "The committee also find that records of the activities held for information, education and communication at the state/district level with the national task force authorities are not maintained, it said. The panel recommended that being the nodal ministry of the Beti Bacho - Beti Padho scheme, the Ministry of Women and Child Development must ensure that review meetings of national, state and district task forces are conducted as per the scheme's guidelines. In order to achieve better oversight, the committee said the ministry should develop without further delay the online management information system portal for monitoring and supervision at state, district, block and village level and to make available the data in the web portal for transparency and real time monitoring. "Social audit of BBBP should compulsorily be got done either by the civil society group or third party/expert at the district level and the outcome may be communicated to this committee," it said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI): The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice on a plea filed by Amrapali group founder Anil Sharma seeking bail on medical ground. A bench headed by Justice UU Lalit asked Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati to file a report on the medical condition of Anil Sharma and listed the matter for further hearing on next Monday (August 8). Also Read | West Bengal | After PM, Announced Har Ghar Tiranga Campaign, the Sale of Tricolour Has Latest Tweet by ANI. Amrapali Group's ex-directors including Anil Kumar Sharma, are behind bars after multiple cases have been registered against them for allegedly diverting homebuyers' money. Earlier Anil Sharma and others were arrested by investigating agency on the complaint of homebuyers. Homebuyers have alleged that Amrapali Group former directors have cheated them. Various investigating agencies are probing the matter against them. Also Read | Jharkhand PGT Recruitment 2022: JSSC Notifies Vacancies For Over 3100 Post Graduate Teacher Posts At jssc.nic.in; Check Details Here. On January 25 2019, the top had given a go-ahead to the government-owned National Buildings Construction Corporation (NBCC) to start the process of completing two stalled Amrapali housing projects. On July 23 2019, the court asked the NBCC to complete the unfinished housing projects of Amrapali in Noida and Greater Noida areas and hand over these to the homebuyers as soon as possible. The court had also cancelled the RERA (Real Estate Regulatory Authority) registration of Amrapali Group. On July 18 2022, the top court had said that "Monetary claim raised by the Company shall be looked into after the claims of all the flat- buyers for possession of the respective apartments booked by them and the statutory entities or corporations like Noida/Greater Noida and Electricity Company are considered and satisfied." On July 18, 2022 the top court also said that after considering the plight that the flat-buyers and the progress of construction, it directed the Electricity Company to restore the electricity supply. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Lucknow, Aug 4 (PTI) The Allahabad High Court has told the Uttar Pradesh government that it would be appropriate to disburse compensation in cases registered under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act after the conviction of the accused and not merely on the filing of an FIR or charge-sheet. The Lucknow Bench of the court said it is noticing a trend where victims enter into a compromise with the accused after taking compensation from the government. Also Read | Rahul Gandhi to Address Press Conference Tomorrow Ahead of Congress's Nationwide Protest on Price Rise And Unemployment. The court of Justice Dinesh Kumar Singh observed that this way taxpayers' money is being misused in the process. The court further said in cases where the complainant has entered into a compromise with the accused for quashing of the proceedings, the state is free to realise the compensation given to the victim. Also Read | Haryana Police STF Recovers Explosive Device Packed with RDX from Busy Highway in Kurukshetra; 1 Arrested. The order was passed on July 26 and uploaded on Thursday. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, Aug 4 (PTI) Manappuram Finance on Thursday posted an over 35 per cent decline in its net profit at Rs 282 crore for the quarter ended June 2022 as income from operations fell. The non-banking financial company had posted a net profit of Rs 437 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal. Also Read | LIC HFL Recruitment 2022: Apply for 80 Assistant Manager and Other Posts at lichousing.com; Check Details Here. Its income from operations dipped 4 per cent to Rs 1,502 crore in the April-June quarter of 2022-23 as against Rs 1,563 crore in the same period of 2021-22, Manappuram Finance said in a release. However, its assets under management (AUM) grew by over 24 per cent to Rs 30,759.52 crore as of June 30, 2022. Also Read | BECIL Recruitment 2022: Apply for Engineer, Assistant Manager, Test Driver And Other Posts At becil.com; Check Details Here. It declared an interim dividend of Rs 0.75 per share. The company's MD and CEO V P Nandakumar said: "We have not only improved upon the performance in the preceding quarter but also managed our cost position in a competent manner. Year-on-year, our gold loan AUM has picked up significantly despite the fact that our LTV (loan-to-value) is well below the peer group. Asirvad, our microfinance business, is poised for significant growth in the days to come." Stock of the company closed 0.29 per cent down at Rs 101.65 apiece on BSE. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Nation leads the way on heritage protection (China Daily) 10:01, August 04, 2022 Repairs are made to a 14th century sculpture in a grotto near the Yangtze River in Chongqing. XINHUA President's visits to cultural sites underscore need to safeguard the past Editor's note:China Daily is publishing a series of stories reviewing President Xi Jinping's visits at home and abroad in the past decade to showcase his vision for development in China and the world. Even though he is 67, Zhang Heshan still climbs the mountain near his village every morning, which he has done since childhood. He is looking for rubbish, weeds and anything else that could pose a threat to a section of the Great Wall near his hometown. It takes Zhang five hours to conduct an inspection of this part of the wall, which spans 6 kilometers, includes 23 watchtowers and is located about 40 kilometers from Qinhuangdao, Hebei province. "The Great Wall is a precious legacy left by our ancestors. Only by protecting its integrity can we enable future generations to experience its culture and spirit in the same way that we do," he said. Zhang added that he volunteered for the protection efforts before becoming one of about 6,000 official rangers for arguably China's best-known landmark. Murals are copied at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu province. CHEN BIN/DU ZHEYU/XINHUA With the nation stepping up efforts to protect cultural relics over the past decade, Zhang has won greater recognition for his work. The government also provides him with an annual subsidy of 6,000 yuan ($888) and he is regularly invited to speak at meetings called to discuss protecting and exploring the Great Wall. Preserving the wall, which has a total length of more than 21,000 km and stands as a symbol of the Chinese nation, has been prioritized by policymakers led by President Xi Jinping, who has made cultural heritage protection a centerpiece of his domestic agenda over the past decade. Xi has spearheaded a national campaign during the past 10 years to boost the conservation and exploration of China's cultural heritage with his visits to different domestic sites on numerous fact-finding trips. Liu Qingzhu, an archaeology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Xi has taken the protection of cultural heritage to an unprecedented level since being elected general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee in November 2012. "Under President Xi, cultural heritage protection has truly become a major issue for the nation," he said. Liu added that the president has visited the nation's major cultural heritage sites, where he has called for heightened attention and efforts to safeguard cultural relics. Murals are copied at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu province. CHEN BIN/DU ZHEYU/XINHUA Greater emphasis Over the past decade, Xi has issued more than 100 important instructions on protecting cultural relics. He has also presided over a series of top leadership meetings called to deliberate on key policy documents aimed at safeguarding cultural heritage. "Historic culture is the soul of a city, and we must protect the historic and cultural heritage of a city in the same way that we cherish our own lives," Xi told officials in Beijing during a fact-finding trip in 2014. He highlighted the need for the city, one of the world's ancient capitals, to ensure the sound preservation of its rich cultural heritage during the urban development process. As part of the city's overall plan up to 2035, which was issued in 2016, the capital will no longer tear down its old urban areas and hutong, or alleyways, and give greater priority to the preservation and rejuvenation of ancient towns. In February, Li Qun, head of the National Cultural Heritage Administration, wrote in an article that China has placed unprecedented policy emphasis on boosting the protection and use of cultural relics and enabling various sides to play a part in conserving cultural heritage. He said the heightened policy emphasis has helped the nation better learn about the origins, development and achievements of Chinese civilization and the contributions made by the nation to humankind. According to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, the number of museums in China reached 6,183 this year, a rise of 60 percent on the total in 2012. The number of cultural heritage items placed under State protection has more than doubled since 2012, with the nation adding eight world cultural heritage sites during this period. The central government has allocated funding of more than 100 billion yuan over the past decade as part of broader efforts to improve cultural heritage protection. China now boasts nearly 767,000 immovable cultural heritage sites, 56 world cultural heritage venues and 36 national archaeological parks. Fan Jinshi, an 81-year-old archaeologist who has devoted her life's work to studying the ancient Dunhuang culture, has met with President Xi five times. The president first greeted her in 2013 at a meeting honoring role models, where he immediately recognized Fan and described her as an expert on Dunhuang cultural studies. Dunhuang, home to the Mogao Grottoes UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gansu, was the first stop on Xi's four-day trip to the province in August 2019, when he visited an exhibition of cultural relics and academic works, and presided over a symposium with experts from the Dunhuang Academy. He encouraged scholars, including Fan, to explore the philosophy, humanistic spirit, values and ethnic codes of Dunhuang culture and reveal the cultural spirit of the Chinese nation. In an interview with People's Daily, Fan said researchers at the Dunhuang Academy were overjoyed by Xi's visit. The president told them that preserving cultural relics in Dunhuang and researching them would require lifelong efforts, and he hoped the researchers would view their work as a long-term career. Xu Subin, deputy director of the International Research Center for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation at Tianjin University, said the nation is now among the leading countries in terms of the emphasis it places on preserving cultural heritage. The significance given to this issue by the top leadership has boosted the morale of those involved in safeguarding and researching cultural heritage, she said. Bronzeware is repaired at the Yunnan Museum in Kunming, Yunnan province. HU CHAO/XINHUA Reliving the past One of the key messages delivered by Xi during his visits to cultural heritage sites was the need to explore the long history of the Chinese nation and the depth of its culture through relics. In 2017, he visited a cultural museum in Hepu county, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, where he inspected cultural relics, including ancient bronze items, pottery and glasses unearthed from a Han Dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) tomb. Xi said the exhibition, themed on the ancient maritime Silk Road, was a telling example of history and culture. He stressed that efforts must be made to give cultural relics, history and culture "a voice", and that historical research and inheritance should be strengthened. During a visit in 2019 to Jiayu Pass, the first fortress at the western end of the Great Wall in Gansu, Xi said the wall is a key symbol of the Chinese nation and its civilization. He called for steps to be taken to examine the cultural value of the wall and to better protect its heritage to advance the national spirit. To better protect one of China's most-prized assets, a grand plan to develop a national cultural park for the Great Wall was issued in December 2019, with the aim of integrating cultural relics and resources in the 15 provincial areas along the wall. Zhang, the ranger, said he has been invited to speak at a number of symposiums on establishing the park. To better educate the public about the wall, Zhang gives details of his observations during patrols via livestreaming platforms and short videos. He now has 392,000 fans on the short-video platform Douyin. Zhang said he is optimistic about the national cultural park, adding, "It will inevitably result in a better transportation network for our village, and perhaps some job opportunities with the development of scenic spots and the influx of tourists." Building confidence Experts said one of the reasons Xi has championed China's heritage protection over the past decade is to bolster the nation's cultural confidence. Xu, from Tianjin University, said, "President Xi has underscored cultural heritage protection to protect China's cultural genes. "Without such protection, there will be no material evidence of a civilization that has existed for 5,000 years." Liu, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Xi has emphasized the combination of Marxism and China's traditional culture, and also the close links between socialism with Chinese characteristics and the nation's civilization. He added that the president has given cultural protection a political perspective and has associated such efforts with China's cultural confidence. "The more efforts are made to explore China's fine traditional culture and historic heritage, the more confident the nation will be in its past and future," Liu said. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Chandigarh, Aug 4 (PTI) Punjab Power Minister Harbhajan Singh on Thursday said the state government has waived outstanding electricity bills of all domestic consumers till December 2021. A notification has been issued by power utility Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL), Singh said in an official statement here. Also Read | Justice UU Lalit Set to Take Over NV Ramana As the Next Chief Justice of India; Here's Everything You Need To Know About Him. The pending electricity bills till December 31, 2021, of domestic consumers who have not paid their dues till June 30, 2022, have been waived, he added. The state government had already announced waiving pending electricity bills of domestic consumers till December 31, 2021. Also Read | Nokia 8210 4G & Nokia 110 Launched in India, Check Price & Other Details Here. The minister further said, "The disconnected power connections, which are not possible to restore, will be issued again by the PSPCL at the request of the applicant". The charges incurred for the new domestic electricity connections, which are to be paid by the consumers, will also be reimbursed by the Punjab government to the PSPCL, the minister added. He said the Punjab government has been providing 300 units of free electricity since July to all the eligible residents every month. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi [India], August 4 (ANI): Indian Army Staff Chief General Manoj Pande on Thursday held a video telephonic interaction with South Korean counterpart Jeong Hwan and discussed steps to enhance bilateral defence ties between the two countries. "Chief of the Army Staff, General Manoj Pande had a video telephonic interaction with General Park, Jeong Hwan, Chief of Staff, the Republic of Korea Army and discussed steps to enhance bilateral defence ties between the two Nations," Indian Army tweeted. Also Read | Pakistan: PM Shehbaz Sharif-Led Ruling Alliance Prepares To Have Imran Khan Disqualified. This phone call comes amid heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait after the brief trip of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei. India and the Republic of Korea, as Special Strategic Partners, continued to have high-level engagements last year, according to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) annual report. Also Read | Chinese Military Conducts Precision Missile Strikes Over Taiwan Strait a Day After Nancy Pelosi's Visit. Former South Korea Defence Minister Suh Wook visited India in March 2021. During this visit, India-Korea Friendship Park in Delhi was inaugurated. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations in December 1973, relations between India and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea have been cordial. India has been consistently supportive of efforts to bring about peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and diplomacy. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Islamabad [Pakistan], August 4 (ANI): The US drone that killed Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahri on July 31 in Afghanistan's capital city Kabul was possibly launched from an airbase in Kyrgyzstan, according to reports. Pakistani publication Dawn reported that the attack was launched from Ganci Airbase, a US transit facility at Manas in northern Kyrgyzstan. Also Read | US Shooting: McDonald's Worker Shot Dead in New York Over Cold Fries. Ganci is a former American military base in Kyrgyzstan, near the Bishkek international airport, according to the US Department of Defence as cited by Dawn. It was operated by the US Air Force, which handed it over to the Kyrgyz military in June 2014. However, the US administration did not comment on over the exact location of where the drone take-off from and what route it used. Also Read | Elon Musk's Response to Twitter Lawsuit To Be Made Public by Tomorrow. "Zawahiri was killed in an over-the-horizon operation in downtown Kabul, where he was residing as a guest of the Taliban. The house was struck by two Hellfires missiles in a precision, counterterrorism operation at 6:18am Kabul time on Sunday," the Department of Defence said in a statement. The US said that the Haqqani network terror outfit was aware of the al-Qaeda chief's presence in Kabul. Moreover, the US State Department has issued a worldwide alert after the death of Zawahiri. Zawahiri was one of the world's most wanted terrorists and a mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He was killed in a drone strike carried out by the US in the Afghan capital Kabul on Saturday. An Egyptian surgeon, Zawahiri was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11 and he also acted as Osama Bin Laden's personal physician. The strike was conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was carried out by an Air Force drone.An official claimed that Zawahiri was the only person killed in the strike and that none of his family members were injured. Meanwhile, the Taliban confirmed the killing of Zawahiri and condemned the drone strike carried out by the United States in Kabul over the weekend. In a statement, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that a strike took place on a residence in the capital and called it a violation of "international principles," responding to which the US secretary of state Antony Blinken said that the Taliban had grossly violated the Doha Agreement by hosting and sheltering the Al-Qaeda chief. The US and the Taliban signed a peace agreement in February 2020 under then US President Donald Trump. The deal called for withdrawal of US troops from Afghan soil and that the Taliban would abate violence and guarantee that its soil will not be a safe haven for terrorists. Zawahiri's targeted killing comes a year after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban's takeover of the country. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) added a "deceased" caption under the profile image of Zawahiri on its website. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Tokyo [Japan], August 4 (ANI): Japanese government on Thursday condemned the firing of five ballistic missiles by the Chinese military in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and characterised this action as an "extremely coercive" move. China is conducting live-fire drills in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. The missiles that China launched today fell in an area located southwest of Hateruma Island in the southern prefecture of Okinawa. Also Read | Chinese Military Conducts Precision Missile Strikes Over Taiwan Strait a Day After Nancy Pelosi's Visit. Japan's Kyodo News reported that Tokyo has asked Beijing to immediately stop the military drills. "This is a grave issue that concerns our country's national security and the safety of the people," said Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi. The Fumio Kishida government also lodged a diplomatic protest with the Chinese government. The Japanese publication has said the government slammed Chinese drills near Senkaku Islands, saying that the area overlaps with the EEZ. Also Read | French PM Elisabeth Borne Announces the Creation of New LGBTQ Ambassador Job. Taiwan has strongly condemned China's "North Korea" style missile firing into waters near the self-governed island as it asked Beijing to exercise self-restraint. "On August 4, China launched multiple ballistic missiles into waters to the northeast and southwest of Taiwan, threatening Taiwan's national security, escalating regional tensions, and affecting regular international traffic and trade," the Taiwan foreign ministry said in a statement. "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of the Republic of China (Taiwan) strongly condemns the Chinese government for following the example of North Korea in willfully test-firing missiles into waters near other countries, and demands that China exercise self-restraint," it added. Live-fire drills began in at least six identified zones around the island, that regard its own and threaten to take over. The Chinese PLA organized joint combat training exercises near Taiwan waters and airspace, Xinhua news agency reported. The Taiwan government has urged the international community to condemn China's military coercion toward Taiwan. "The ministry also calls on countries around the globe to continue to speak up in support of democratic Taiwan in order to jointly safeguard the values of freedom and democracy, to maintain the rules-based international order, and to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific," it said. Pelosi's high-stakes visit marks the first visit by a US House Speaker in 25 years since Newt Gingrich came to Taiwan in April 1997. It was also Pelosi's first trip to Taiwan in 22 years. After Pelosi left Taipei, China sent 27 aircraft into Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ). Pelosi on Wednesday said the Congressional delegation's visit should be seen as a strong statement that America stands with Taiwan. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Wellington [New Zealand], August 4 (ANI): New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta met her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit and said that de-escalation is needed in the Taiwan Strait, as China started its military drills in the region. According to the statement released by the New Zealand government, "the Minister restated Aotearoa New Zealand's interest in peace and stability in the region, including across the Taiwan Strait, and emphasised the importance of de-escalation, diplomacy and dialogue. Also Read | Red Hot Lava Continues To Flow After Volcanic Eruption on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula. This meeting came after Beijing commenced its military drills around Taiwan's main island, in retaliation for United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting the democratically led island nation. Mahuta, who is in Cambodia to participate ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting, expressed concerns regarding the human rights situation in Xinjiang and the erosion of rights and freedoms in Hong Kong. Also Read | China Launches Multiple Dongfeng Ballistic Missiles Near Taiwan Waters A Day After US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Depart. "Minister Mahuta acknowledged the importance of Aotearoa New Zealand and China's relationship - this year marking 50 years of diplomatic relations - and our significant economic, people-to-people, and cultural connections. Both sides highlighted the areas where China and New Zealand cooperate, including trade, agriculture, climate change and the environment. Both sides underbred the importance of organising high-level visits when COVID conditions allowed," the statement reads. Mahuta also pointed to the need to look beyond the "firsts" to a mature relationship that respects New Zealand's independent foreign policy. In relation to the Pacific, the minister emphasised the importance of the Pacific Islands Forum, and Pacific-led responses to Pacific priorities, including in the field of security. She also stressed the importance of all ASEAN partners, making the utmost efforts to help return Myanmar to the path of peace and democracy. Mahuta expressed concern at the record number of ballistic missile tests conducted by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea this year in violation of UN Security Council resolutions; as well as over developments in the South China Sea. "The Minister urged China to be clear, in line with its commitment to the UN Charter, that it does not support Russia's unlawful aggression against Ukraine, and encouraged China to use its access and influence with Russia to promote a return to diplomacy," the statement reads. New Zealand minister also accepted Wang Yi's invitation to visit China when conditions are met. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Dhaka [Bangladesh], August 4 (ANI): Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who was on his way to Cambodia, made a brief stopover at Chittagong airport in Bangladesh where he met with the country's Information and Broadcasting Minister Dr Hasan Mahmud and they exchanged books from each other's countries as gifts. According to a press release, Zardari was received by Mahmud at Chittagong on Wednesday when the former was on his way to Cambodia to attend the 29th Ministerial Meeting of ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), being held in Phnom Penh from Thursday, reported Bangladesh's local media outlet Dhaka Tribune. Also Read | Yudh Abhyas: India-US To Hold Military Exercise Near LAC in Uttarakhand Amid Rising Tensions with China. The two ministers also exchanged books from each other's countries as gifts. The Pakistani foreign minister stayed for around 40 minutes at the airport. During his transit in Chittagong, he conveyed his compliments and message of goodwill to the Foreign Minister of Bangladesh Dr AK Abdul Momen and the people of Bangladesh, the release added. Also Read | Indian-American Sentenced to 51 Months in Jail By US Court for Cheating Elderly Citizens. Meanwhile, it is worthy to note that though relations between Pakistan and Bangladesh have improved to some extent yet Pakistan remains reluctant to apologize for the horrific violence it unleashed on millions of Bangladeshis. Pakistan is trying to justify the massacre of Bangladeshi residents by its military during the 1971 Bangladesh war, denying the extent of the military oppression and blaming the whole incident on Bangladesh for the separation. Pakistani scholars jointly agree on sabotaging the Bangladesi uprising in 1971, accusing the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, of recasting the killings of non-Bengalis as a struggle conducted by the Awami League and of implementing it against the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), reported by Global Strat View, an independent media group. Pakistan believes the mock trials of war criminals to be absurd and deems that "those accused of attacking, killing and raping members of their community will never be brought to justice. In official memory, as institutionalized by the Bangladeshi state, only crimes against Bengalis are remembered." Pakistan even lends its support to war groups like the Khalistan movement, fighting against the Indian state. Pakistan also claims that Bangladeshi Hindu professors spread secessionist sentiments amongst its students, reported Global Strat View, an independent media group.Aggressive think tanks cover the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan with a certain biasedness, highlighting only those issues that comply with the official policy while ignoring anything that violates the guidelines. The Pakistani authorities oppose Bangladesh's efforts to deliver justice to the victims who suffered in the Pakistani war crimes, criticizing the execution of two convicted war criminals, Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, leader of BNP, and Ali Ahsan Mohammad, leader of Jamaat-e-Islami.Also, countries like China and The United States suppressed the genocide reports as well, provoking both activists and academics. Thus, in turn, the Bangladeshi uprising of 1971 has been reduced to a civic-political demand.Recognition of the brutal massacre and the qualitative widening of the current legal understanding of genocide during the Liberation Struggle of Bangladesh is ethically demanded. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Islamabad [Pakistan], August 4 (ANI): Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) protesters gathered at Islamabad's F-9 park on Thursday to protest against the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sikandar Sultan Raja on the call of party chief Imran Khan. Decked in red and green scarves and bands, the crowd raised slogans against the poll body demanding the resignation of all its officials, the Dawn reported. Also Read | Pakistan: PM Shehbaz Sharif-Led Ruling Alliance Prepares To Have Imran Khan Disqualified. Earlier, in the day, the PTI lawmakers assembled outside the electoral watchdog's office in Islamabad and registered their protest. The protesters included PTI leaders Faisal Javed Khan, Fawad Chaudhry, Pervez Khattak, Asad Umar, Azam Swati, Shibli Faraz, and Kanwal Shauzab among others, reported Dawn. Also Read | Chinese Military Conducts Precision Missile Strikes Over Taiwan Strait a Day After Nancy Pelosi's Visit. The submission of a memorandum against Raja and his role as the CEC came right after the ECP's August 2 verdict in PTI's prohibited funding case. In the August 2 judgment, it had declared PTI to be a "foreign-funded party". Imran and his party members had rejected the decision, calling it "illegal and unconstitutional". Blaming the CEC for being biased, the lawmakers stated "From the investigation to its verdict, the case is surrounded by severe doubts," the memorandum stated, adding that Imran Khan had also, on multiple occasions, expressed his reservations with the ECP and the CEC. It also alleged that the verdict of the poll body was influenced by the CEC's meeting with the coalition parties last week. Ahead of the protest, PTI chief Imran Khan said, " "Today, I am calling all our people to come out in [a] peaceful public protest against the CEC and ECP in F-9 park at 6 pm. I will be addressing the gathering between 7-7:30 pm." However, Islamabad authorities denied the PTI's request to stage a protest against the ECP at the nearby Nadra Chowk and suggested F-9 park and H-9 ground as alternate venues. According to Dawn, Section 144 had been imposed on all kinds of public gatherings in the federal capital including in and around Red Zone on July 23. In a statement, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah claimed yesterday that the government had received information that the PTI was planning to create an "anarchic situation" outside the ECP, warning of stern action in case of any violence or attempt to cross the "red line". The show cause notice issued by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on prohibited funding to PTI is likely to put Imran Khan's leadership in danger as the funds received by the PTI chief from foreign countries including the US, UAE, Australia and UK could lead to several numbers of cases against the party. The move by ECP came right after it was revealed that the money received from the foreign countries was used by Khan to fund PTI and he made false declarations in 2018 before the elections. The ECP in its decision issued a show-cause notice to the PTI, as to why the prohibited funds may not be confiscated as confiscation of the prohibited funds is the domain of the ECP. The foreign funding case is pending since November 14, 2014, and it was filed by PTI founding member Akbar S Babar who had alleged that there are some financial irregularities in the PTI's funding from Pakistan and abroad. (ANI) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Kyiv, Aug 4 (AP) Russian forces shelled a Ukrainian city close to Europe's biggest nuclear power plant Thursday, reinforcing warnings from the UN nuclear chief that the fighting around the site could lead to a disastrous accident. Dnipropetrovsk's regional governor said Russia fired 60 rockets at Nikopol, across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been under Russian supervision since Moscow's troops seized it early in the war. Also Read | Pakistan: PM Shehbaz Sharif-Led Ruling Alliance Prepares To Have Imran Khan Disqualified. Some 50 residential buildings were damaged in the city of 107,000, and residents were left without electricity, Valentyn Reznichenko wrote on Telegram. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had warned on Tuesday that the situation was becoming more perilous daily at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the city of Enerhodar. Also Read | Chinese Military Conducts Precision Missile Strikes Over Taiwan Strait a Day After Nancy Pelosi's Visit. Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated at the plant, he said. What is at stake is extremely serious and extremely grave and dangerous. He expressed concern about the way the plant is being operated and the danger posed by the fighting going on around it. He cited shelling at the beginning of the war when it was taken over and continuing instances of Ukraine and Russia accusing each other of attacks there. Experts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said they believe Russia is shelling the area intentionally, putting Ukraine in a difficult position. Either Ukraine returns fire, risking international condemnation and a nuclear incident which Ukrainian forces are unlikely to do or Ukrainian forces allow Russian forces to continue firing on Ukrainian positions from an effective safe zone,' the think tank said. The Russian capture of Zaporizhzhia renewed fears that the largest of Ukraine's four nuclear power plants could be damaged, setting off an emergency like the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the world's worst nuclear disaster, which happened about 110 kilometers (65 miles) north of the capital, Kyiv. Also in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the Russian military struck two Ukrainian munitions depots near the village of Novoivanivka and a fuel depot near the Zaporizhzhia railway station. In northern Ukraine, the country's second-largest city, Kharkiv, was shelled by the Russians, Ukraine's presidential office said. Several industrial sites were hit in the city, which has been a frequent target. In the nearby city of Chuhuiv, a rocket hit a five-story residential building. Fighting continued in the fiercely contested Donetsk region in the east, with Ukrainian authorities saying a school was destroyed in the village of Ocheretyne. The attacks have disrupted supplies of gas, water and power, and the region's residents are being evacuated. In the town of Toretsk, artillery shells hit a bus stop, a church and apartment buildings, killing at least eight people, regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said. In the city of Donetsk, Russian-backed separatist authorities accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the central part of the city Thursday. The area hit was near a theater where a farewell ceremony for a prominent separatist officer killed a few days ago was being held. Donetsk Mayor Alexei Kulemzin said six people were killed. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied Ukrainian involvement. He alleged, without offering evidence, that Russian or separatist forces were responsible for the shelling. Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of firing on territories under their own control. Russian forces have already seized the Luhansk region that neighbors Donetsk. Its Ukrainian governor, Serhiy Haidai, said on social media that local residents are being mobilized by the Russian side to fight against Kyiv's forces and that even indispensable mine workers are being taken. Ukrainian authorities reported another abduction of a mayor who reportedly refused to collaborate with the Russians in the southern Kherson region, which is also almost entirely occupied. The reported kidnapping of Serhiy Lyakhno, mayor of the village of Hornostaivka, comes as Russia amasses more troops in the area in anticipation of a counteroffensive by Kyiv and ahead of a planned referendum on the region becoming part of Russia. (AP) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) New Delhi, August 4: Amid the uncertainty surrounding the future of Indian students who returned from war-ravaged Ukraine, the Centre has said that the ground situation in that country does not permit the return of Indian students. The government issued these remarks in Rajya Sabha in response to questions pertaining to students who were studying in Ukraine prior to the Russia-Ukraine war. "The government has been in touch with the educational authorities in Ukraine regarding the continuation of studies by Indian students who returned from Ukraine. Currently, the ground situation in that country does not permit the return of Indian students. The Ukrainian side has reiterated its willingness to allow Indian students to continue their courses online," Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs Meenakashi Lekhi informed Rajya Sabha in a written response. The Union Minister said National Medical Commission (NMC) has devised a scheme to help Indian medical students who did not undergo physical clinical training due to the extraordinary situation. She also informed that students who returned from Ukraine will be permitted to appear in the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE). Parliament Passes the National Anti-Doping Bill 2022. "Upon qualifying the FMGE, such students will be required to undergo Compulsory Rotating Medical Internship (CRMI) for a period of two years in order to be eligible for registration in India," the minister added. The MoS also said that issues relating to the education of Indian medical students from overseas are being dealt with as per regulations of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the National Medical Commission. India has brought back 22,500 Indian citizens and 147 foreign nationals belonging to 18 countries from Ukraine since February 2022 in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war. A number of medical students evacuated from war-torn Ukraine have been seeking admission to Indian medical universities in order to secure their future. They have urged the government that the students be accommodated as a one-time measure to prevent an academic year's loss. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Washington, August 4: US President Joe Biden expressed grief over the death of Indiana Republican representative Jackie Walorski along with two members of her staff in a car accident on Wednesday (local time) in Indiana. Walorski, who was 58, represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional District and had previously served as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives. She began serving in Congress in 2013. The announcement of Walorski's death was made by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. "Dean Swihart, Jackie's husband, was just informed by Elkhart County Sheriff's office that Jackie was killed in a car accident this afternoon. She has returned home to be with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Please keep her family in your thoughts and prayers. We will have no further comment at this time," read a message from the congresswoman's office that McCarthy tweeted. Following the news, there was an outpouring of grief and remembrances from lawmakers and aides who paid tribute to the lives and careers of the congresswoman and the two staffers. "Jill and I are shocked and saddened by the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana along with two members of her staff in a car accident today in Indiana," a White House Statement read. Born in her beloved South Bend as the daughter of a meat-cutter and firefighter, she spent a lifetime serving the community that she grew up in - as a journalist, a nonprofit director, a state legislator, and eventually as a Member of Congress for the past nine and half years. "We may have represented different parties and disagreed on many issues, but she was respected by members of both parties for her work on the House Ways and Means Committee on which she served," it added. "She also served as co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, and my team and I appreciated her partnership as we plan for a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health this fall that will be marked by her deep care for the needs of rural America." Biden expressed his deepest condolences to her husband, Dean, to the families of her staff members, Zachery Potts and Emma Thomson, who lost their lives in public service, and to the people of Indiana's Second District who lost a representative who was one of their own. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Nepal PM Sher Bahadur Deuba summons cabinet meeting today In meeting dates for federal & provincial elections expected to be announced. In y'day's meeting of coalition,it was decided to hold polls on 20th Nov. Formal decision needs to be made today,a sitting minister tells ANI pic.twitter.com/2UJ1XzEIHj ANI (@ANI) August 4, 2022 (SocialLY brings you all the latest breaking news, viral trends and information from social media world, including Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. The above post is embeded directly from the user's social media account and LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body. The views and facts appearing in the social media post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY, also LatestLY does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.) LIVE: NASA briefing with SpaceX Crew-5 mission astronauts NASA holds a briefing at Johnson Space Center in Houston with SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts to discuss their upcoming mission to the International Space Station. https://t.co/eyVsZ9iOKM Reuters (@Reuters) August 4, 2022 (SocialLY brings you all the latest breaking news, viral trends and information from social media world, including Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. The above post is embeded directly from the user's social media account and LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body. The views and facts appearing in the social media post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY, also LatestLY does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.) UN announces fact-finding mission to investigate Olenivka tragedy. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the UN hopes that independent experts will be given access to all the necessary data and find out the truth about what happened. The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) August 3, 2022 (SocialLY brings you all the latest breaking news, viral trends and information from social media world, including Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. The above post is embeded directly from the user's social media account and LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body. The views and facts appearing in the social media post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY, also LatestLY does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.) One of the largest school cheating trials in U.S. history drew to a dramatic close Wednesday with a jury finding 11 Atlanta elementary school teachers and administrators guilty of taking part in a racketeering conspiracy to illegally boost students test scores. Some of the educators face up to 35 years in prison. Shock swept through the courtroom as the verdicts were announced, with defense attorneys for the majority of defendants rushing to seek bond for their clients. Now the rubber has met the road, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter said, noting that throughout the trial he had tried to persuade defendants of the seriousness of the charges. They are now convicted felons, as far as Im concerned. I dont like to send anyone to jail but they have made their bed and theyre going to lie in it. Ten of the convicted educators were led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. One, who is pregnant and weeks from her delivery date, was allowed to remain free on bond. After eight days of deliberation, jurors in the landmark case found 11 of 12 defendants guilty of violating Georgias Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a charge that carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. Advertisement Some of the defendants were also found guilty of other felonies influencing a witness, theft by taking, false swearing, or making a false statement or writing that carry lesser sentences. Im shocked and stunned, said Gerald Griggs, a defense lawyer who represents Angela Williamson, a former elementary school teacher who was convicted of racketeering, plus two counts of false statements and two counts of false swearing. The evidence in my clients favor was strong, yet she now faces 35 years in prison. Only one educator, Dessa Curb, an elementary school teacher, was acquitted on all charges. I knew God had my back, Curb told reporters outside the courthouse after the verdict was announced. Her case was a little different from the others, her attorney Sanford Wallack noted, because the states erasure analysis contradicted what its own witnesses had said. The jurys verdict in the six-month trial presented a stunning outcome for those convicted. They face the possibility of decades in prison while scores of their former colleagues avoided jail time after confessing and accepting plea agreements. About 180 people were originally identified in the scandal. Weve been fighting for the children in our community, particularly those children who were deprived by this cheating scandal, Fulton County Dist. Atty. Paul Howard Jr. told reporters in a hastily arranged news conference. Our entire effort in this case was simply to get our community to stop and take a look at our educational system. Sentencing hearings should take place in coming weeks, Howard said. It was a major victory for prosecutors, who had presented thousands of pages of documents and called more than 130 witnesses in an attempt to demonstrate a pattern of widespread academic corruption in Atlantas public school system. It is the first academic misconduct trial in the nation in which elementary school teachers were convicted of violating a RICO act, a law often associated with mobsters. Legal experts had debated whether the state was overreaching, and even the judge who presided over the trial appeared to have misgivings. In December, Baxter told the court he was somewhat doubtful about whether the central racketeering charge would hold up and urged the two sides to come to an agreement, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A lengthy state investigation, commissioned in 2009 by then-Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue after suspicious jumps in tests, implicated at least 178 teachers and administrators in organized and systemic misconduct in 44 Atlanta elementary and middle schools. By 2011, more than 80 educators had confessed to test tampering some immediately, and others later, in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution. In 2013, 35 educators were indicted, yet that number gradually dwindled as one defendant passed away and 21 pleaded guilty to lesser charges before the trial began. The alleged ringleader former Supt. Beverly L. Hall had her case severed from the others as she received chemotherapy for breast cancer. She died March 2. Five elementary school teachers, two testing coordinators, an assistant principal, a principal and three superintendents insisted on their innocence and ended up going to trial. Prosecutors accused all 12 defendants of conspiring to change students answers on tests to ensure schools met new high-stakes testing goals. The evidence, one prosecutor claimed in closing arguments, was overwhelming. During the trial, the jury of six men and six women heard scores of witnesses testify that educators had stolen exam booklets before tests, or met with other teachers after tests to change wrong answers. Some witnesses said they saw defendants cheating, including blatantly holding pencil erasers over test sheets. Yet defense attorneys for each of the 12 defendants countered that prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their clients had knowingly or willingly entered into any conspiracy. Throughout, they questioned the moral credibility of the prosecutions witnesses, arguing that many had admitted to cheating and received immunity in exchange for testifying, while others made contradictory statements or were driven by personal grievances. In closing arguments, one attorney claimed prosecutors were operating according to a Salem witchcraft mentality. Another claimed the states use of unreliable witnesses was a recipe for wrongful convictions. Asked if he thought the prosecution team was right to accept plea deals from so many of the 35 indicted educators, Howard said he believed the extent of witness testimony helped convince jurors that the racketeering accusations were not some fantasy created by the DAs office. We absolutely did the right thing, he said. The Atlanta school cheating trial is the most extensive of recent cases that have troubled districts across the nation in the data-driven era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. A 2013 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that officials in 40 states detected potential cheating in tests given to public school students between 2010 and 2012. Yet while some welcomed the Atlanta trial as a chance to resolve an episode that has roiled the city for nearly six years, others complained that teachers and administrators all African Americans who worked in low-income neighborhoods were being unfairly prosecuted using Georgias RICO statute. You could cut the tension in here with a butter knife, one Fulton County sheriffs deputy said to another as the prosecution team wrapped up its news conference and the courtroom gradually emptied. Jarvie is a special correspondent reporting from Atlanta. Florida parents are worried for their children as monkeypox cases in the Sunshine State surpasses 500. Monkeypox cases in Florida continued to grow, as the state recorded on Wednesday that hundreds of people were stricken with the virus. According to CBS News, the Sunshine State's health department tallied the total cases of monkeypox in the state at 525. With the number of monkeypox cases in Florida reaching hundreds, parents, including Jamie Lyn-Kee-Chow, are worried about kids due to the virus. "Just the number spike alone is making me more anxious... I feel a little bit more on edge about Monkeypox because kids are everywhere," Lyn-Kee-Chow underscored. Florida University infectious disease expert, Dr. Aileen Marthy, noted that in Florida, five teenagers were stricken with monkeypox. Marthy added that two of them were from Miami-Dade. Marthy then acknowledged the importance of communication between families, citing cases of monkeypox between children in some states. The World Health Organization (WHO) noted that children can catch monkeypox if they have "closed contact" with somebody who has symptoms. "There have been a small number of children with monkeypox in the current outbreak," WHO added. The organization further noted that newborn infants and people with underlying immune deficiencies may also be susceptible to more serious symptoms of monkeypox and even death. However, Dr. Marthy underscored that parents from Florida and other states should not worry. "They're not at an increased right now of getting monkeypox because it's not spreading in that population," Marthy said. Marthy also shared that the monkeypox virus can live on surfaces, including towels, which is why keeping surfaces clean can minimize the risk. The doctor added that handwashing and wearing face masks can also reduce the risk of having the disease. READ NEXT: California: Gov. Gavin Newsom Declares State of Emergency on Monkeypox Virus | Hispanics Among the Most Affected in the State? Florida Monkeypox: Gov. Ron DeSantis on the Virus On Wednesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed politicians and the media for the fear felt by the public over the monkeypox cases in the U.S. "I am so sick of politicians, and we saw this with Covid, trying to sow fear into the population," DeSantis noted. DeSantis also blasted New York Governor Kathy Hochul for declaring a state of emergency over monkeypox, contending that the move will only make officials abuse their emergency powers and restrict the public's freedom. Rep. Charlie Crist criticized the governor over his response, claiming that the governor dismissed monkeypox. Crist then stressed that Floridians need better testing, information, and vaccines for prevention. Data from the U.S. Department of Health and Services showed that the Sunshine State was allocated over 36,000 doses of Jynneos vaccines last week. Jynneos was recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to treat monkeypox. Monkeypox Cases in the US As of Wednesday, the CDC reported 6,617 cases of monkeypox across the U.S. and its territories. New York remains to be the state with the highest case of the virus amounting to 1,666. California comes next with at least 826 cases. Illinois remains the third state with the highest number of monkeypox cases with 547 infected people. Globally, the WHO reported that 25,000 cases of monkeypox were reported in 83 countries. READ NEXT: Mexico Monkeypox Case Confirmed! [Symptoms, Transmission, Potential Vaccines, and Treatment] This article is owned by Latin Post. Written By: Joshua Summers WATCH: Monkeypox cases increase in South Florida - From WPLG Local 10 Peru is facing even more political uncertainty amid the myriad of criminal investigations against President Pedro Castillo. Now, things are looking even more uncertain as Prime Minister Anibal Torres wrote a letter to the president and announced his resignation. In his letter, he said that he is resigning for "personal reasons." Torres previously served as the minister of justice and is actually Castillo's fourth prime minister. He took the post last February. However, his resignation is not yet official as the president still has to accept it. So far, President Castillo has not yet commented on whether he will reject or accept Torres's resignation. Torres had been a very vocal supporter of Castillo amid all the corruption scandals the president has been embroiled in. CNN reported that the prime minister wished "his friend" President Castillo all the success. He lasted only six months as the prime minister. He defended Castillo and said that those attacking him were under right-wing elites. Anibal Torres Resignation to Force a Cabinet Reshuffle If Castillo accepts his resignation, this will ultimately lead to another cabinet reshuffle. However, as Bloomberg pointed out, with all the corruption scandals currently happening in Peru, many had been expecting a cabinet reshuffle anyway. Castillo had been repeatedly shuffling his cabinet recently, and many were already expecting another one to happen, whether or not the current prime minister resigned. Many of the reshuffles were made to appease the socialist members of his Peru Libre party while still maintaining a working relationship with congress. Torres became Castillo's fourth and longest-serving prime minister after former Prime Minister Hector Valer stepped down while he was facing domestic violence allegations. Valer was only in office for four days before he resigned. He denied all the allegations against him. READ MORE: Peru Ex-President Francisco Morales Bermudez Who Oversaw Country's Return to Democracy Dies President Pedro Castillo Also Facing Calls to Resign President Castillo was a former teacher in rural Peru. However, he shocked the world by winning the top seat in the land and defeating many of Peru's political elite. He campaigned on a platform to improve education, health care, and other services, according to the Associated Press. However, his presidency has been marked by constant turmoil, and he is just in his first year of office. Castillo survived two impeachment attempts in his first year of office. He is currently facing five different investigations, including an investigation into whether he plagiarized his thesis for his Master's degree. The four other charges are looking into various corruption allegations against him. Castillo talked about his allegations on a speech during Peru's National Day on July 28. He admitted that he had made mistakes and announced he was willing to cooperate with any investigation. Many of his close friends, family members, and allies are also under investigation. He currently has a 71% dissatisfaction rating. READ NEXT: Peru: Inca Mummies Making Peruvian Home's Construction Complicated This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: Peruvian protesters call for President Castillo's resignation - Al Jazeera English A Mexican journalist and three other people were killed inside a beer shop in Mexico. The Mexican journalist was identified as Ernesto Mendez, director of the news site Tu Voz, or Your Voice. San Luis de la Paz Mayor Luis Sanchez identified the 13 Mexican journalists killed this year, according to an ABC News Go report. Four other men were with the media worker, with the fifth person being seriously wounded and was taken to a hospital. Guanajuato Gov. Diego Rodriguez Vallejo condemned the recent media worker killings on Tuesday. Sanchez noted that it was not known whether the attack was related to Mendez's journalistic work or his role as a representative of local businesses in the planning of an upcoming fair. The Mexican journalist had also worked until three years ago at Zona Franca, another news site, according to the site's director Carmen Martinez. It was not yet known if Mendez was also part of the federal government's protection program for four journalists and human rights defenders under threat. READ NEXT: Mexico: 400 Missing Persons Found Dead in Guanajuato State Plagued by Mexican Drug Cartels Mexican Journalists Killed In May, Mexican journalist Luis Enrique Ramirez has been found dead in Sinaloa state. He was a veteran journalist and columnist at El Debate, as reported by The Guardian two months ago. Enrique was found dead on the side of the highway. He was discovered by security forces in a black bag and wrapped in plastic, according to his employer. The veteran journalist had previously received aggression, according to Article 19's Juan Vasquez. In an interview with local media several years ago, Enrique said that he felt the "imminent danger that I am the one who follows." He added that there is a pattern of murders in which he fits. In June, a Mexican reporter was killed. He was identified as Antonio de la Cruz, who was a journalist for the local newspaper Expreso. De la Cruz was shot and killed in his home in the Tamaulipas state. His daughter was also injured in the attack and was reported to be in critical condition. Reuters reported that Expreso has also been the target of several attacks in the past, with a 2012 car bomb exploding in front of its office. In 2018, a severed head was left in a cooler outside the office. Media Worker Killings in Mexico Human Rights Watch noted that the rising violence against journalists in Mexico undermines press freedom. The organization then called Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to take urgent steps to promote the federal government protection mechanism. HRW also called to stop official harassment of journalists who criticize the government. Tyler Mattiace, the Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that Lopez Obrador has not only failed to address violence against the media but also used his daily morning conferences to harass and intimidate Mexican journalists. Mexico is considered to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Meanwhile, officials rarely, if ever, investigate the crimes against media workers. READ MORE: Mexico: 9th Mexican Journalist Killed This Year Found Wrapped in Black Bag on Sinaloa Road This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Mary Webber WATCH: Murdered in Mexico: the final interview with a legendary journalist - from The Guardian With conditions worsening in their own countries, people have been trying to seek a better life in the United States illegally. Many of these migrants risk extreme heat, long walks, and gang violence just to get to live in the U.S. However, many of them have been fed false information by smugglers on social media, particularly on Facebook and WhatsApp. The Texas Truck Migrant tragedy, where over 50 migrants died of heat and exhaustion after their driver abandoned them, highlighted the misinformation fed to these migrants. The Internet watchdog group, the Tech Transparency Project, recently released a report which found that while they are aware of the risks and potential deceptions by smugglers, many of them still get their information about getting smuggled into the United States via social media. They have also found that the misinformation these smugglers often post leads many potential migrants to think that crossing over to the United States is actually easier than it is in reality. Smugglers Outright Lie in Social Media Posts, Many Potential Migrants Buy These Lies Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, spoke to CNN about their findings. She stated that the volume of the information makes it difficult to know which is real or which is misinformation. The report also stated that posts on platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp have various claims that were untrue. Several posts claim that border authorities let pregnant women into the United States. These misrepresent several hard facts, such as the migrants still having to cross rivers and offer fake documents. The online watchdog also conducted a survey among migrants. They found that many know the risk and that there is indeed misinformation. However, they also found that some of the false information about environmental conditions influenced the respondents' decision-making, According to the former temporary head of the Department of Homeland Security's intelligence division John Cohen. smugglers often infiltrate online communities and provide information there. The information they spread within these communities is often false, as they show that there is an opportunity to enter the United States. In addition, Cohen stated that they will also organize large groups of migrants to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border en masse. READ MORE: Mexico: 94 Migrants Who Almost Died Inside Truck Managed to Escape After Driver Abandoned Them Misinformation Also Played Into the Texas Truck Migrant Tragedy Two of the migrants who perished in the tragedy were Pablo Ortega and Julio Lopez. Both paid huge amounts of money to be able to be smuggled into the United States, with Ortega paying around $13,000 and Lopez paying around $12,000. This is part of an alleged "VIP Package" which promised that they won't have to go through the desert heat and there would not be any danger. The smugglers also told them that the journey would have been "100% safe." On June 27, the truck the two migrants boarded was found in San Antonio, Texas. Both of them were among those who died due to the extreme heat. The promises of the smugglers about the trip being "100% safe" are now exposed as a lie, much like the misinformation regularly fed to migrants on social media. READ MORE: Texas Truck Tragedy: VIP Trips Offered to Migrants on Smuggling Activity That Killed 53 This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: Migrants Are Falling Prey To Social Media Misinformation About U.S.-Mexico Border - NBC News Uvalde School District's termination hearing for Chief Pete Arredondo over the Texas school shooting was postponed for the 2nd time. The termination hearing for Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo in the aftermath of the fatal Texas school shooting was postponed once again. The cancellation of the said hearing was confirmed by a Uvalde School District spokesperson, who was not named, according to Fox News on Wednesday. "To once again ensure Pete Arredondo's due process rights are met, the District has agreed to postpone the second date of the hearing at the request of Pete Arredondo's attorney due to a scheduling conflict," the spokesperson from Uvalde School District said. Arredondo was originally due for a termination hearing on July 23. However, the schedule was pushed back to August 4. The Uvalde School District has not yet announced when Arredondo will be due for the termination hearing. He will remain on unpaid leave until the Uvalde School District officials determine when he will be summoned. It can be recalled that Arredondo faced harsh criticism over their department's response to the Texas school shooting that killed children and teachers at Robb Elementary School in May. Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McGraw blamed the Uvalde chief for the more than 70-minute delay in confronting the suspect in the Texas school shooting. READ NEXT: Texas Department of Public Safety Facing Legal Heat Over Alleged Witholding of Uvalde Shooting Docs Texas School Shooting: Consequences Robb Elementary School Principal Chief Arredondo was not the only authority who received repercussions in the aftermath of the Texas school shooting. Last week, Principal Mandy Gutierrez from Rob Elementary School was suspended by the school district. Gutierrez's attorney, Ricardo Cedillo, confirmed the suspension of the principal. Gutierrez was suspended with pay in the light of the special legislative investigation into the Texas school shooting. The said probe discovered that Gutierrez was aware of the security problems before the massacre took place on May 24. However, she did not have the said problems fixed. Days later, Gutierrez was reinstated to her post, after she responded to the Uvalde School District's questions about her actions. Texas School Shooting The Texas school shooting at Robb Elementary School killed 19 children and two teachers after an 18-year-old shooter, Salvador Ramos, entered the school with his AR-15-style rifle. Tactical officers were able to kill the gunman of the said shooting. Surveillance footage first acquired by Austin-American Statesman revealed how the police responded to the shooting. The said surveillance footage was reportedly 77 minutes long, covering the moment when Ramos entered the school premises until he entered the building where the tragic deaths happened. In the footage, officers were seen running towards the exit of the hallway when Ramos appeared to fire shots inside the classroom at around 11:37 a.m. that day. At one point, an officer was also seen using hand sanitizer at Robb Elementary School amid the tragedy. The Uvalde Police were placed under public scrutiny over their botched response to the incident. READ NEXT: California Border Agents Confiscate Drugs Worth $200K in 1 Day This article is owned by Latin Post. Written By: Joshua Summers WATCH: Texas School Shooting Leaves a Community Heartbroken - From ABC News Mexico's Attorney General's Office is spearheading a general investigation against former President Enrique Pena Nieto after accusations of money laundering emerged in the past few weeks. Last July, a financial probe took place after the former president was found to have received millions of dollars from a relative in Mexico. He is now living in Madrid, Spain after governing the country from 2012 to 2018. Pena Nieto cleared himself of any wrongdoing in a statement published on his Twitter account, but Mexico's attorney general still pushed through with the investigation. Mexico Former President Enrique Pena Nieto's Money Laundering Charges The Attorney General's Office has officially opened "several lines" of investigation against Enrique Pena Nieto, the Associated Press reported. According to a statement from the Attorney General's Office, the former president is under investigation for election-related crimes tied to company, money laundering, and illicit enrichment. Although he was not explicitly named on the statement released because of Mexican policies in place, someone from the prosecutor's office confirmed that "Enrique' P," who was listed on the release, was, in fact, the former president. The investigation came after he was accused of handling and receiving illegally obtained money from someone in the country. Last month, Mexico's Financial Investigation Unit (FIU) launched a similar probe on his "unexplained enrichment," after detecting a scheme that gave Pena Nieto "economic benefits" of around $1.3 million. Initial investigations found that the money was wire transferred separately three times to the ex-president in Madrid, Spain in August and October 2021. The money was reportedly sent to Pena Nieto, who resides in Spain, from a blood relative in Mexico in the form of three separate wire transfers. "In addition, the former president has corporate links to two companies... in which we observed fiscal and financial irregularities," Mexico's Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) director Pablo Gomez Alvarez said last month. Enrique Pena Nieto earlier tweeted that he obtained the funds legally. READ NEXT: Mexico: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Seized Land From Owners for Mayan Train Construction Mexico Attorney General Names Company Linked to Enrique Pena Nieto's Money Laundering Scandal The Attorney General's announcement on Tuesday did not provide additional details about the case. However, it did name a company linked to Enrique Pena Nieto's money laundering issue. The three separate wire transfers to the former president did not only come from a relative in Mexico. According to reports, it also came from OHL, a Spanish construction company with a subsidiary in Mexico receiving government contracts. As early as 2016, OHL was flagged by the National Banking and Stock Commission for irregularities amounting to more than $4 million. They were also involved in a corruption scandal related to highway contracts in the country. Meanwhile, no charges have been filed yet against the former president. But should there be, The New York Times reported that it would be an "unprecedented" step for the country as many leaders have already been accused of corruption, but no one has been put on trial yet. READ MORE: Mexican Journalist, 3 Others Killed; Media Worker Killings in Mexico Reach 13 This Year This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Ivan Korrs WATCH: Mexico: Attorney General's Office Has Opened an Investigation Against Enrique Pena Nieto - From TeleSUR Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista revolution was a huge turning point in the country's history. Decades later, its leader, Daniel Ortega, sits as Nicaragua's president. However, his rule has reportedly been mired in corruption and oppression. Daniel Ortega Humble Beginnings: From Bank Robber to Revolutionary to President and Dictator Jose Daniel Ortega Saavedra was the son of a shoemaker before he joined the left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Before he became Nicaragua's dictator, he was fighting another dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled Nicaragua since 1936. Daniel Ortega tried to get a law degree as a student but soon dropped out to commit to the Sandinistas. According to BBC, he tried robbing a branch of Bank of America in the capital, Managua, using a machine gun in a bid to raise funds. He was eventually arrested and tortured and stayed in prison for seven years. A deal between the Nicaraguan government and Cuba sent him and other Sandinistas to the communist country. There, he was trained in guerrilla warfare before secretly returning to his home country. The Sandinista Revolution turned into a full-scale civil war and forced President Somoza into exile in 1979. The Sandinistas took power, and Ortega was elected to become his successor in 1984. However, during his first presidency, the United States sanctioned Nicaragua and conducted its Contra war against them. While the U.N. ultimately found that the United States violated international law in its intervention, the Contra war and U.S. sanctions ultimately led to the Sandinista downfall. READ NEXT: Nicaragua Continues Media Crackdown, 6 Catholic Radio Stations Shut Down Crippling economic issues led to Ortega's defeat at the hands of liberal candidate Violeta Chamorro, a former Ortega ally. Ortega then went on to lose two more elections in 1995 and 2001, and charges of rape and child abuse by his stepdaughter Zoilamerica Narvaez did not help him. He avoided a trial by invoking his immunity as a member of Congress. However, after all those election losses, Ortega had a comeback in 2006. He campaigned on moving away from his communist roots and seeking foreign investments. However, he still embraced his Sandinista roots as he carried out Marxist slogans. He also received praise from the Catholic Church for his staunch anti-abortion stance. Ortega won that election and became president once again. Since he retook power, Ortega quashed the opposition, went after the media, and even feuded with the Roman Catholic Church over their criticism of his rule. His crackdowns led to a 2018 uprising, with calls for him to resign. However, this too was quashed violently. It has led to an even tougher crackdown on opposition and independent media. Opposition leaders, journalists, and even Church leaders were forced into exile. Daniel Ortega also arrested all of those who ran against him in last year's elections, which he won unopposed. The U.S. and EU called his win "a farce." How Much is Daniel Ortega's Net Worth in 2022? Nicaragua is currently ranked as one of the poorest countries in Latin America. However, as a politician, Daniel Ortega may be loaded with cash. According to Celebrity Net Worth, he is worth around $50 million. Unfortunately, like many other South American politicians, this number must be taken with a grain of salt, as many of them have undeclared assets at home and abroad. READ MORE: Nicaragua Police Have Taken Over 5 Opposition-Held Towns Ahead of Elections This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: How Daniel Ortega 'Demolished' Democracy in Nicaragua - From PBS NewsHour Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will reportedly spend some time visiting Balmoral Castle in Scotland, one of Queen Elizabeth's royal residences, later this year with their children Archie and Lilibet. However, a source told Closer magazine that it could be a "bittersweet invite" for the Duchess of Sussex, who fears her husband may want to return to the royal family in the U.K. one day amid royal experts claiming Harry is homesick. The insider claimed that Markle does not doubt Harry's commitment to wanting to spend the rest of his life in the U.S. However, the duchess worries "over how these types of visits can pull at his heartstrings," Express News reported. The invite from the Queen showed that she and Harry are still part of the family, but she fears that Harry will be lured back into the royal family and would want to return to the U.K. Markle was reportedly aware of Harry's "homesickness" for some time. The source also said Meghan Markle sees how excited Prince Harry is to show more of his heritage to their children. The insider noted that Harry wants to spend as much time with the Queen as he still can. READ NEXT: Queen Elizabeth Takes Note of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Daughter Lilibet in Her Christmas Speech Meghan Markle in Royal Family Biographer Tom Bower claimed that Meghan Markle hopes to turn the royal family into a "Hollywood celebrity game." However, it was turned off after claiming the royal title. The royal biographer noted that he believed Markle struggled to accept the "realities of royal life" after she married the Duke of Sussex. She then became upset when she was reportedly denied her time in the spotlight, according to the Daily Star. Bower said Markle complained because "she wanted the spotlight, she wanted to be number one." Bower also hit Markle for abandoning his first husband, film producer Trevor Engelson to "build a new life" after she started finding fame on "Suits." Meghan Markle and Royal Title Royal expert Neal Sean earlier claimed that Meghan Markle's involvement in politics had left Prince Harry as a "house husband," Express News reported. Sean claimed that they found out that Markle will be going to Washington to support causes that are "close to her heart." Royal commentator Hilary Fordwich slammed the Duchess of Sussex for getting involved in politics while using her title. Fordwich noted that Harry "obviously can't control his wife," knowing that one cannot be a "renegade royal" in the U.S. as they would be breaking centuries of the royals staying out of politics. She noted that it is not just American politics but all politics. Bower cited an incident wherein Markle called two senators to campaign for women's maternity pay and introduced herself with the title of Duchess of Sussex. Bower said that Meghan Markle plays the royal card the whole time, adding that he does not think it will play well during an election for Congress or even the Senate, Geo TV reported. READ MORE: Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Opt Not to Hold Daughter Lilibet's Christening in the U.K. As It's Likely Be in California: Royal Sources This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Mary Webber WATCH: Queen Invites Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to Balmoral for Summer - From TODAY With monkeypox spreading across the country, parents are worried about the virus affecting their children. If there is something that the coronavirus pandemic has taught people, it is that vaccines do prevent and safeguard them from the deadly virus. Although some are still hesitant about the side effects and the science behind it, a relatively large population of the United States has become inoculated - especially children. Can Children Be Affected With the Monkeypox Virus? Yes, children can be infected with the monkeypox virus. Last month, the United States reported that the monkeypox virus infected a toddler and an infant, according to Reuters. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has pointed out that the two cases were unrelated and "probably" a result of household transmission. CDC Deputy Director Dr. Jennifer McQuiston is not surprised by the emergence of the monkeypox virus in pediatric cases. However, McQuiston suggested it was a rare case considering almost 99% of the record cases were from members of the LGBTQ+ community who had male-to-male sexual contact with multiple partners. "The social networks that we have as humans mean that we have contact with a lot of different people. And while this outbreak is spreading in a particular social network right now, I think we've messaged from the start that there could be cases that occur outside those networks and that we need to be vigilant for it and ready to respond and message about it," McQuiston said as CNN reported. However, worried proactive parents must know that monkeypox vaccines are not yet readily available for everyone. READ NEXT: California: Gov. Gavin Newsom Declares State of Emergency on Monkeypox Virus | Hispanics Among the Most Affected in the State? Monkeypox Vaccine for Children According to KVUE's VERIFY, children are currently not eligible for the monkeypox vaccine as a preventive shot. However, they may be eligible if they have had direct exposure to someone with monkeypox. Because of the nationwide shortage of monkeypox vaccines, states inoculating the Jynneos and ACAM2000 jabs prioritize the most vulnerable community first - members of the LGBTQ. However, CDC confirmed that children who are already exposed and infected could be vaccinated if available. Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital Infectious Disease Division Director Allison Messina corroborated the current CDC eligibility standards. "Right now, there's not a big push to provide routine vaccinations for monkeypox for children. Now, that may change if it continues to spread," Messina said. Because the disease is so far affecting a particular adult group, Messina believes that the current monkeypox vaccine requirements are making sense. Meanwhile, the entire United States is suffering from the monkeypox vaccine shortage. The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services failed to secure bulk orders of the monkeypox vaccine. The federal government is now providing 1.1 million doses of the requested 3.5 million jabs. Reports said the next half a million doses will be delivered in October. Both New York and California preserve the monkeypox vaccine by inoculating many people with the first dose and delaying those who need the final jab until the new supply arrives. The two states continue to be hotspots for the monkeypox outbreak. READ MORE: Can Monkeypox Virus Spread Through Clothes, Linens? Kentucky Doctor Explains How This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Ivan Korrs WATCH: Children Are Not Eligible for Monkeypox Vaccine Unless They've Been Exposed to Virus - From VERIFY The son of the Gulf Cartel boss Osiel Cardenas Guillen has pleaded guilty to gun smuggling charges. According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office, Osiel Cardenas Jr., 30, was arrested by undercover federal agents in the parking lot of a store in Brownsville, Texas on April 22, 2021. The release noted that the son of the Gulf Cartel boss ordered another person to cross into Mexico to pick up the $15,000 for the weapons and to inform him when the transaction was complete. According to Border Report, Cardenas Jr. and two accomplices attempted to purchase five Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifles and five Zastava M90 rifles at the time. Cardenas was reportedly indicted with Azhuan Martinez and Jose Roberto Molina-Medrano, who was in the country illegally and previously convicted of illegal reentry. The son of the Gulf Cartel boss also faces charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Osiel Cardenas Jr. Cardenas Jr. reportedly admitted that he committed the crime while on supervised release for a previous felony. Borderland Beat reported that U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. will sentence him on November 8. The son of the Gulf Cartel boss faces up to 10 years in prison with a maximum fine of $250,000. READ NEXT: Mexico: 9 Killed in Massacre Inside Home; Mexican Drug Cartel Gunmen Eyed as Suspects Gulf Cartel Boss' El Gordo' Arrested, Extradited From Mexico to the U.S. Last May, the uncle of Osiel Cardenas Jr., Mario Cardenas Guillen, also known as "El Gordo" or "El M-1," was extradited from Mexico to the U.S. to stand trial in a Texas court. The former leader of the Gulf Cartel is facing drug trafficking charges in Texas. According to reports, he was previously responsible for the large-scale importation of cocaine into Houston, Texas. El Gordo previously controlled the Gulf Cartel with Eduardo Costilla, also known as "El Cos," who was arrested in 2012 and extradited to the U.S. in 2015. El Gordo has reportedly run the cartel since his brother, former leader Antonio Cardenas Guillen or "Tony Tormenta," was killed in a gunfight with the Mexican government in 2010. Mario Cardenas Guillen is also the brother of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, a co-leader of the Gulf Cartel who was arrested in 2003 and extradited to the U.S. in 2007. Osiel Cardenas Guillen was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $50 million to the United States. According to reports, El Gordo was initially arrested and convicted on organized crime charges in 1995. He was imprisoned in Matamoros city, across the U.S.-Mexico border from Brownsville, Texas, where he was caught organizing large shipments of cocaine and marijuana from behind bars. El Gordo was then reassigned to a prison in Jalisco state and was released in 2007 after he finished his sentence. He reportedly rejoined the Gulf Cartel after his release. Because of this, the DEA has maintained him on its fugitive list for violations of federal law on conspiracy charges. El Gordo was arrested a second time in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas in 2012. He was reportedly caught with weapons, ammunition, and four small envelopes containing cocaine. El Gordo, who was incarcerated at the Altiplano maximum-security federal prison in Mexico State, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in April last year. The Gulf Cartel The Gulf Cartel is considered to be one of the oldest and most powerful criminal groups in Mexico. However, the group has lost territory and influence over the years due to its rivals. Its rivals include its former enforcer wing, the Zetas, Insight Crime reported. During its most powerful term, the drug cartel was led by its kingpin Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who was considered to be the country's most powerful leader. The cartel was reportedly pulling in billions in revenues at the time. Today, alliances with smaller splinter cells have allowed the Gulf Cartel to retain a significant place in the organized crime world in Mexico. READ MORE: Brother of El Chapo, 3 Other Sinaloa Cartel Members Charged on Drug Trafficking Charges This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Mary Webber WATCH: Mexican Cartels: The Gulf Cartel - From RANE A 12-year-old girl in Alabama managed to escape her kidnapper's home after she chewed through the restraints and fled. A motorist then found her walking down the road. Authorities then arrested the kidnapper on Monday and raided his home. Police then found the decomposing bodies of two other victims inside the house. Police arrested Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37. His home is located in Dadeville, Alabama. This was where the abducted girl was kept tied to a bedpost for about a week. According to Crime Online, Pascual-Reyes is now under investigation for the murder of the two people in his house. Two Dead Bodies in Alabama Home Identified Authorities identified the two decomposing bodies as one adult female and one teen boy. The first victim was 29-year-old Sandra Vazquez Ceja, who was killed when she was smothered with a pillow. The 14-year-old boy's identity was protected as he was still a minor, but he was hit and kicked to death. Police identified him only by his initials, according to the Associated Press. Both bodies were reportedly cut into small pieces in order to hide the evidence. Authorities have not disclosed how the two victims and the abducted girl are connected to Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes. However, the AP reported that Ceja used the suspect's current address for traffic tickets she received in April. Pascual-Reyes was arrested in Auburn, around 25 miles from his house in Dadeville. He is currently being held in Tallapoosa County Jail. The location of his home in Dadeville is still undisclosed. Reports said the Alabama man was charged with first-degree kidnapping, capital murder, and corpse abuse. READ NEXT: Colorado Mom, Teen Daughter Killed by Ex-Husband, Who Shot Himself in the Chest After the Shooting How the 12-Year-Old Girl Managed to Escape the Alabama Man's House of Horrors Authorities said the girl was abducted from an undisclosed location around July 24. She was then restrained and tied to a bedpost to be sexually abused, according to a complaint filed in court by local authorities. Records also showed that the two people were killed around the same time as the girl's abduction. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes allegedly kept the girl in a "drugged state" with alcohol. He also assaulted her in the head. According to the court document, the girl slowly chewed her way out of her restraints. This act damaged her braces, and her restraints left visible marks on her wrist. After slowly chewing on her restraints, the girl finally managed to escape to freedom. She then traveled down the road, where a driver found her, picked her up, and notified the authorities. That led to the police investigation into the mobile home owned by the suspect. Police reported that other people also lived in the home, but nobody was there at the time of the investigation. Authorities said the girl was not reported to be missing. The girl received medical attention before she was placed in the custody of child welfare officials. Authorities said she is now doing well. READ MORE: Brazilian Cop Shot Himself Dead After Killing 8 People, Including His Wife, 3 Kids, Mother and Brother in Southern Brazil This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: Alabama Kidnapping: Girl's Escape Leads Officials to 2 Decomposed Bodies; Jose Reyes Arrested - From ABC7 A flag which was presented to Col James Fitzmaurice during his victorious trip around America following the first East West Transatlantic Flight will be presented to Laois County Council during Heritage Week. The successful flight in 1928 of the Bremen across the Atlantic from East to West against the prevailing wind represents a historic achievement. The crew consisted of one Irishman and two Germans. Colonel James Fitzmaurice from Portlaoise was one of the original members of the Irish Air Corps, and was co-pilot on the ground breaking trip. The Bremen lifted off from what is now the military airdrome at Baldonnell. For that reason, the Irish Air Corps pays attention to this important element in our air history. W. T. Cosgrave, Irelands first Taoiseach and his son Liam Cosgrave also a future Taoiseach attended the take-off. The flight represented the bringing together of two continents. All America celebrated and in particular the Irish American diaspora who went wild. The aviators were feted in many cities across the United Stated, during which time they were presented with an American flag. The flag of that era ( 1912-1948) has 48 stars arranged in six horizontal rows of eight. A label stitched on to it carries the words Government Reg. Pat. Office. Government Quality. Mr B. Ross MacMahon is presenting this flag to Portlaoise where the young James Fitzmaurice grew up. The flag has passed to him through a family connection with Fitzmaurice. Mr MacMahon said, Laois are cherishing Irelands air heritage and the flag should rightfully rest with them. One of the first planes to fly in Ireland was built by the Aldritt Brothers in their motor garage with the help of carpenter John Conroy and mechanic William Rogers. "It was to inspire the young James Fitzmaurice first gained his enthusiasm through the kindly disposition of those in the garage. I am delighted to add to the treasure trove of aviation artefacts already in Portlaoise by formally presenting this flag to Laois County Council. The flag will be formally presented at an event in the Midlands Park Hotel in Portlaoise on Saturday 20th August at 3pm. In addition to the presentation, the event will include a talk by the foremost expert on Fitzmaurice in Laois Teddy Fennelly, Fitzmaurices time in America, and the formal launch of the Fitzmaurice Archive, a digital archive of conserved newspapers and other documents relating to the first flight, presented by Teddy Fennelly to the Laois Local Studies Digital Archive All are welcome to the event, which will mark Heritage Week in Laois. For more information on events happening nationwide for Heritage Week, visit www.heritageweek.ie. For details of events taking place in Laois see www.laois.ie/heritageweek The only resistance to further development of services along the Ballybrophy to Limerick railway line is coming from the National Transport Authority, according to campaigners to get better services on the line. The Ballybrophy line serves Laois, Roscrea, Cloughjordan, Nenagh, Birdhill and Castleconnell in Limerick. Members of the North Tipperary Community Rail Partnership met Nenagh councillors at the Nenagh Municipal District Council July meeting to give them an update on where the 17-year campaign is at present. Edward Kelly told councillors that Irish Rail was very supportive of their aims, but the NTA was now a stumbling block. We need you to contact them, he said. Mr Kelly said that the campaign had received some positive news this year. Once the final track renewal works are completed on November 20 that will see the end of the long closures that have negatively impacted the line. This project will deliver a modern continuous welded rail track, a safer railway with faster line speeds and shorter journey times, he said. Mr Kelly said that once the track renewal project was completed, Irish Rail had committed, where appropriate, that the speeds trains can travel on the line will be increased from 30mph to 50mph. The timetable will be revised to reflect more frequent, faster, shorter journey times in 2023 subject to NTA approval and funding, he said. Mr Kelly told councillors that the revised timetable will be a more passenger friendly version with an earlier morning train from Roscrea and Cloughjordan to Limerick and a later train departing Limerick in the evening. We also believe that Irish Rail are considering a project to resurface the car park of Cloughjordan railway station and some renovation works will be carried out on the station house with a long term goal of making Cloughjordan into a commuter railway station. The campaign met Irish Rail CEO Jim Meade and the CEO expected Iarnrod Eireann to have sufficient drivers based in Limerick from 2023 to support the introduction of additional services, such as the middle of the day service the NTCRP was campaigning for. However, Mr Meade had made it very clear that Iarnrod Eireann required support and approval from the NTA through the annual PSO grant to support the introduction of an additional middle of the day service. This is why it is of vital importance that our local political representatives in the Nenagh Municipal District use their significant political capital and take this issue directly to the NTA for their attention on behalf of communities and voters living along the line, he said. Campaign chair Virginia ODowd said they had moved from trying to maintain the line to developing the line. She said the line had been raised at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, as well as in the Southern Assembly by Cllr Michael OMeara, and through Parliamentary Questions by TDs Alan Kelly, Michael Lowry and Jackie Cahill and Martin Browne. We are lucky to have Deputy Lowry on the Transport Committee and that it is chaired by Limerick TD Kieran ODonnell, she said. Deputy Brian Leddin of Limerick is also on the committee. The Limerick to Ballybrophy line is one of the most discussed lines in the country, and Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan is very familiar with it, she said. Ms ODowd hoped that funding could be got through the Committee of the Regions in Brussels to help fund the closure of level crossings on the line, particularly into Limerick. If this were done, then journey times would be around 45 minutes. District Cathaoirleach Cllr Hughie McGrath proposed asking Cllr Michael Murphy, head of the Irish delegation on the EU committee to a meeting. He also backed a meeting with councillors in the Castleconnell local electoral area. Cllr Joe Hannigan said the campaign had kept the line alive and agreed that eliminating the level crossings was key to allowing the line work efficiently. Cllr Michael OMeara said that the potential for the line was huge as the era of the car is on the way out. Cllr Ger Darcy agreed that the timetable and the speed were killing the line. Because of your persistence we have a railway line, said Cllr Seamus Morris. I see a huge future for that train, particularly for Nenagh. Cllr Fiona Bonfield highlighted that Tipperary County Council had made a submission to the recent rail review and that rail ticks all the right boxes. Cllr John Rocky McGrath also agreed that the line will be a major benefit to the town. District Manager Marcus OConnor said that it was critical to get the journey time down to 45 minutes. He said that the council was pushing for Nenagh railway station to become a transport hub, akin to models on continental Europe. The station is ideal for that because of its location, he said. A huge block of land is on sale in Laois that could add hundreds more houses to Portlaoise's largest residential area. What is described as "one of the last remaining sizeable land-banks" suited for development near Portlaoise town centre, has come on the open market. A block of over 32 acres (13.1 hectares) of land stretching from the N80 Mountmellick road to the Ridge road, is up for sale at an undisclosed price. It includes a mature bungalow on the Mountmellick road between the Liogard and Lake Glen housing estates. It stretches back behind those estates through six fields, around the town's sewage treatment plant to road frontage on the Ridge Road. Video of site below. The auctioneer describes it as a "high profile development site, one of the last remaining sizeable land-banks that is suitable for development, in such close proximity to Portlaoise town centre. "Such an opportunity to purchase a large and strategically located development site in Laois rarely comes to the market like this. The subject property offers developers, state agencies and investors alike, the potential to develop a key block of lands, which is primarily zoned for new residential and transport & utility uses". Over half of the site - 16.6 acres - is zoned Transport & Utilities, which makes it suited for car parks and commercial development related to public transport services. This zoning is also for services such as electricity, telecommunications, water and wastewater. Another 13.5 acres is zoned Residential 2 which allows mainly homes but also open space, schools, creches, small shops, doctor's surgeries, playing fields. The final 2.5 acres is un-zoned. There is also an option to buy the lands in two blocks, one being the residential zone, the other the transport and unzoned lands. Below: the zoning of the site. "The majority of the site (except the dwelling house and it's curtilage) is currently in grass, being used for agricultural purposes and its topography is relatively flat throughout. The site is naturally divided into seven distinct fields by existing hedgerows and the river triogue traverses it. The site has the benefit of dual access from the N80 (well within the 50km/h speed limit zone) to the west and the Ridge Road to the east. No planning permission currently in place. Being sold with vacant possession." The auctioneer Gaynor Miller describes Portlaoise in glowing terms to potential buyers. "Portlaoise is the largest town in County Laois with a population including environs in the region of 25,000 and increasing each year. It is one of the fastest growing towns in Ireland, with multiple state agency employers in situ, such as the Dept. of Agriculture, Portlaoise and Midlands Prisons, Portlaoise General Hospital, Laois County Council, Portlaoise Garda Station etc. The IDA Business Park, J17 National Enterprise Park and Clonminam Industrial Area in Togher also provide for additional employment." Another 20 acres of development land has also gone up for sale in the town, on the Borris Road, as Portlaoise continues to mushroom in size and population. A former governor of Mountjoy Prison said there is a sense that the system has failed when a prisoner is killed in an attack. John Lonergan, who was governor of Mountjoy, in Dublin, for more than two decades, said a prisoners death can lower morale and is upsetting for staff and prisoners. He was speaking after Robert OConnor, 34, was attacked and fatally injured in Mountjoy Prison on Friday. It is understood he was assaulted in his cell. Mr Lonergan told RTEs Morning Ireland that the fundamental purpose of the prison service, and the top priority of the prison service, is the safe custody of prisoners. There are more than 400 prisoners in protection in Irelands prisons, Mr Lonergan said, which is about one tenth of the prison population. I always felt myself personally that was a failure of Mountjoy and the system, myself included, when somebody lost their lives, especially lost their lives, because thats the ultimate that can happen. So from a management and staff perspective, it is a depressing occurrence and it does certainly lower morale, and its certainly upsetting for people because again, the culture is to ensure the safety of people. When that does happen, there is that sense of failure. We have failed to carry out our number one priority, which is the safety of prisoners, but unfortunately the reality is that you could never guarantee in a prison environment that will never happen again. He said that prisoners should expect that their safety is guaranteed in the prison. The reality is, of course, that theres always a risk factor and unfortunately on rare occasions it actually comes into reality, and people do suffer serious injury and often a very small number of cases lose their lives, he added. He also said that attacks are common. He said that gangland and drugs feuds have been the biggest single contributing factor in a rise in the level of prison violence. Theres a massive increase in violence in prisons over the last 20 years, and this despite a huge amount of resources being put into security and to preventative measures, Mr Lonergan added. Staff are highly trained and there is a huge amount of emphasis on reducing the opportunities that prisoners would have to arm themselves with weapons. There is intelligence that would identify prisoners at risk and the movement of prisoners and the containment of prisons. He said that 400 prisoners in protection have been taken out of the mainstream areas of prisons and are under a confined and reduced regime. Ireland operates on whats called a free association basis, which means that prisoners generally can mix and socialise within the prisons, he added. Free association brings with it the risk that if an individual prisoner or a group of prisoners set out to damage another prisoner, that opportunity will be there. There is very much a gangland, drug-feud environment, and anybody whos involved in that type of activity on the outside, its almost inevitable that particular activity will continue on the inside because the gangs are imprisoned eventually. They establish themselves in all prisons. Ireland needs a full-time Minister for Defence to help protect Ireland as war wages in Ukraine, according to Kildare TD Cathal Berry. The last senior Minister for Defence was Willie ODea who left office in 2010 and Minister Simon Coveney currently shares the portfolio alongside his role as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Ex Army Ranger Wing soldier Mr Berry said that the war in Ukraine and Brexit have made the security and defence of Ireland more important than ever. He added that Ireland also needs a military-grade radar system to defend Irish airspace as well as more military planes, helicopters, armoured vehicles and new navy ships. The South Kildare TD said: Willie ODea was Irelands last full-time Minister for Defence and the Cabinet position was since downgraded to a part-time role. To this day Ireland and tiny Malta remain the only two of 27 European Union countries without a dedicated defence minister." Earlier this month, the government agreed in a landmark move to increase Defence Forces spending to 1.5 billion by 2028 the largest in the history of the state and designed to help transition the Army into a modern military force. The funding was prompted the report of the Commission on the Defence Forces published in February which claimed the Army was not prepared to meaningfully defend the country against attack. Referring to Ireland's neutral status in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mr Berry also added: We are at a point where we have the largest land war in Europe in nearly 80 years. This conflicts trajectory and outcome have yet to be decided as does the extent to which Ireland might become involved or affected. Mr Berry made his hard-hitting comments in the current edition of SIGNAL magazine the official subscription-only publication of the Representative Association of Commissioned Officers (RACO). Calling for a primary radar system and coastal sensors to protect Irish territory, Mr Berry also said: "Transport aircraft capable of extracting our soldiers or citizens from dangerous situations overseas are also badly needed. As are more helicopters, armoured vehicles and replacement naval vessels." Mr Berry said that it was ironic that the report of the Commission on the Defence Forces was published almost 100 years to the date in 1922 when valuable military infrastructure was handed over by the British in good order to the new Irish state. But he added: Yet our contemporary Defence Forces is understaffed, underpaid, inadequately equipped and working in poorly maintained buildings. Six train journeys in Ireland have been highlighted as "beautiful" to UK holidaymakers in The Guardian this week, including the rail trip through Leitrim. The piece makes notes of Carrick-on-Shannon and Boyle as places to stop off. The Guardian newspaper and online publication have recommended that British tourists ditch the car and take this island's most scenic rail routes instead. UK holidamakers were informed that fares on Irish public transport were cut by 20% in April until the end of this year and halved permanently for those aged 19 to 23, the first such reductions in Ireland since 1947. It says Dublin to Rosslare, Cork to Cobh, Belfast to Dublin, Derry to Coleraine, Galway to Limerick and Longford to Sligo are the most beautiful trips on the island. Writing about the Loughford - Sligo route, the article says, "From Longford, rail and river intertwined for an 80-minute journey. Within 40 minutes, the train crosses a bridge over the Shannon, the longest river in both Great Britain and Ireland. It links Counties Roscommon and Leitrim, before running alongside Albert Lock, where pleasure cruisers wait patiently on a canal. "On the approach to Carrick-on-Shannon, Connaughts boating capital, the river disappears from sight periodically, then might magically reappear beyond a thicket. Linger in this pretty, flower-drenched marina town to see Irelands smallest chapel, before moving to Boyle. Its the home town of actor Chris ODowd and silver-screen legend Maureen OSullivan, mother of Mia Farrow as well as a magnificent medieval abbey. The last leg of the journey ventures into hilly Yeats country Sligo." Irish Water is working with Donegal County Council to restore water as quickly as possible to impacted customers following a burst on the trunk water main between the main storage reservoir at the water treatment plant and Bundoran Town. Whilst every effort is being made to maintain supply to as many customers as possible through reconfiguring the network, the burst is impacting the water supply to homes and businesses in the following areas including Bundoran Town, Ballyshannon South, and surrounding areas, including Askill Group Water Scheme in North Leitrim. Dedicated water service crews have mobilised and repairs are underway and are expected to be completed by 4pm this evening. Typically, it takes two to three hours following repairs for normal supply to restore to all customers affected by an unplanned outage. Speaking about the repair works Seamus OBrien, Irish Water said: The repairs are being conducted as quickly and efficiently as possible to minimise disruption to the community and restore water for all customers. We understand the inconvenience unplanned outages can have on customers and we appreciate their patience. The repairs are being conducted as quickly as possible to minimise disruption to the community and restore water for all customers. Vulnerable customers who have registered with Irish Water receive direct communications from us for planned and unplanned outages lasting more than four hours. Irish Water understands the inconvenience when a burst occurs and thanks customers for their patience while we work to restore normal supply to impacted customers. The Irish Water customer care helpline is open 24/7 on 1800 278 278 and customers can also contact us on Twitter @IWCare with any queries. For updates please visit the Water Supply Updates section of the Irish Water website. Irish Water is responsible for the delivery of all public water and wastewater services in Ireland. We are committed to continuously upgrading and developing critical infrastructure to support the growth needed in housing and across our economy, while protecting the environment and safeguarding water supplies. A Drumshanbo man pleaded guilty to six counts of dangerous driving in what the judge called a frightening episode. Samual Flynn, aged 23, from Aughriman, Drumshanbo, Co Leitrim pleaded guilty to six counts of dangerous driving on July 27, 2020, at Priests Lane, Carrick-on-Shannon, at Leitrim Road, Carrick-on- Shannon, at Grange, Carrick-on-Shannon, at Fawn, Leitrim Village, at Tullylannon, Leitrim Village and at Cloonmore Upper, Drumkeerin. Two other charges of dangerous driving at Mullaghcashel, Drumkeerin and Modarragh, Drumkeerin were withdrawn and struck out. Sgt Gerry Curley outlined the facts to the court. He said at 12.25am on that date an off duty member contacted Carrick-on-Shannon Station to report a blue Peugeot 407 driving the wrong way on the one-way system at Priests Lane in Carrick-on-Shannon. The car proceeded out the Leitrim Road and was driving erratically. The back doors of the car opened and closed a number of times. Followed by the off duty member, the car turned off the R280 onto the R209 Ballinamore road. It then turned left at Fawn and into Tullylannon, Leitrim Village, connecting back with the main road in Leitrim Village. The back two doors of the car opened and the passengers gave the two fingers to the off duty member. It continued towards Drumshanbo and then took a sharp left turn onto the Drumkeerin-Manorhamilton road. The back doors of the car again swung open and closed. The car turned left for Arigna and pulled in at the church, disappearing from the members sight before reappearing again. Meanwhile, Gardai arrived from the Drumkeerin direction heading towards Carrick-on-Shannon and came across the Peugeot travelling towards them. They signalled for it to stop but it failed to do so and took a right turn for Dowra, travelling in excess of 80kph on a narrow country road. The conditions were poor at the time and it was raining heavily. At one stage the vehicle became visibly airborne as it crossed a small bridge. It later crashed into an eir pole. The driver and two passengers made their escape while gardai apprehended another passenger. Later that day Samual Flynn presented himself at Carrick-on-Shannon Garda Station saying he was the driver. All his documents were in order. He had no previous convictions. Solicitor, Peter Collins, said a number of things conspired against his client that night. He said the new one-way system in Carrick-on-Shannon had just come into effect and there was a lot of confusion at the time. Mr Flynn didnt realise he was doing anything wrong. He also said there had been an altercation between Mr Flynn and his friends and another group of people and when they saw a vehicle behind them flashing its headlights they thought they were being chased by the other group. Mr Flynn, who was 21 at the time, said he panicked and was getting advice from some in the car to stop and from others to keep going. He was attending University of Limerick at the time and has received a Degree in Construction Management Engineering and is working in Dublin. Mr Collins said this incident was seriously out of character for Mr Flynn. He works in Dublin but lives at home in Drumshanbo where he rents land and rears cattle and sheep. He described it as a very serious aberration and asked the judge to treat it as one continuous incident and be as lenient as possible. Judge Sandra Murphy described it as a very, very serious incident and said the persistent nature of the chase was really irrelevant. It was like an episode of Gran Turismo (video game). He was treating the car as if it was not real, she said. He is a young man and young men unfortunately behave like this, but thats no excuse, she added. Mr Flynn said that if he loses his licence then his career is over. Judge Murphy replied that once he had pleaded guilty there was a mandatory disqualification and she had no control over that. This was a frightening episode, she remarked, and remanded Mr Flynn on continuing bail to October 18 next to allow him to carry out a pro-social driving course and said she would finalise the matter then. Tourists look on as a Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, in Fujian province on August 4, 2022. HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP Chinese forces fired "multiple" ballistic missiles into waters around Taiwan during Thursday's military drills, Taipei's defense ministry said, condemning what it described as "irrational actions that undermine regional peace". "The Ministry of National Defence stated that the Chinese Communist Party fired multiple Dongfeng series ballistic missiles into the surrounding waters of northeastern and southwestern Taiwan from approximately 13:56 this afternoon," the defense ministry said in a brief statement. Nancy Pelosi left Taiwan on Wednesday, August 4, after a trip that defied a series of stark threats from Beijing, which views the self-ruled island as its territory. Second in line to the presidency, Ms. Pelosi was the highest-profile elected US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years. She said her presence made it "unequivocally clear" that the United States would "not abandon" a democratic ally like Taiwan. It sparked a furious reaction from Beijing, which vowed "punishment" and announced military drills in the seas around Taiwan some of the world's busiest waterways. The exercises, which began around 12 pm (0400 GMT), involve "live-firing", according to state media. "Six major areas around the island have been selected for this actual combat exercise and during this period, relevant ships and aircraft should not enter the relevant waters and airspaces," state broadcaster CCTV reported. Missiles over Taiwan The exercises will take place in multiple zones around Taiwan at some points within just 20 kilometers of the island's shore and will conclude at midday on Sunday. Read more Subscribers only Beijing steps up threats during Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit Taiwan's defence ministry said it was closely watching the drills and that the island was prepared for conflict, but would not seek it. "The Ministry of National Defence stresses that it will uphold the principle of preparing for war without seeking war, and with an attitude of not escalating conflict and causing disputes," it said in a statement. Beijing's nationalist state-run tabloid Global Times said, citing military analysts, that the exercises were "unprecedented" and that missiles would fly over Taiwan for the first time. "This is the first time the PLA will launch live long-range artillery across" the Taiwan Strait, the newspaper said using the Chinese military's formal name, the People's Liberation Army. Taiwan has described the exercises as "an irrational move to challenge the international order". The Group of Seven industrialised nations also condemned the drills, saying in a statement there was "no justification to use a visit as a pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait". 'Preparation for actual combat' Taiwan's Maritime and Port Bureau issued warnings on Wednesday to ships to avoid the areas being used for the Chinese drills. The Taiwanese cabinet said the drills would disrupt 18 international routes passing through its flight information region (FIR). Beijing has defended its military operations as "necessary and just", pinning the blame for the escalation on the United States and its allies. Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, in Fujian province on August 4, 2022. HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP "In the current struggle surrounding Pelosi's Taiwan visit, the United States are the provocateurs, China is the victim," foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular briefing Wednesday. A Chinese military source also told Agence France Presse (AFP) the exercises would be staged "in preparation for actual combat". "If the Taiwanese forces come into contact with the PLA on purpose and accidentally fire a gun, the PLA will take stern countermeasures, and all the consequences will be borne by the Taiwanese side," the source said. Read more Pelosi says US will not abandon Taiwan despite China's threats 'Some limits' Taiwan's 23 million people have long lived with the possibility of an invasion, but that threat has intensified under President Xi Jinping, China's most assertive ruler in a generation. "China's announced military exercises represent a clear escalation from the existing baseline of Chinese military activities around Taiwan and from the last Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995-1996," said Amanda Hsiao, senior analyst for China at the International Crisis Group. "Beijing is signalling that it rejects Taiwan's sovereignty." Nevertheless, analysts have told AFP that China is not aiming to escalate the situation beyond its control at least for now. "Clearly they recognise that there are some limits to what they are willing to do," Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, told AFP. We are interested in your experience using the site. Send feedback And Titus Chen, an associate professor of political science at the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan, said: "The last thing Xi wants is an accidental war." Read more Subscribers only How the Taiwanese view Pelosi's visit Le Monde with AFP The Marine Medicine Consultation Center (CCMM) at Purpan University Hospital in Toulouse ERIC CABANIS / AFP It doesn't look like much, a small room nestled in the heart of Purpan University Hospital in Toulouse with three computer screens, a set of headphones, a planisphere hanging on the wall and a few magazines about navigation lying on a desk. The room is in the Louis-Lareng building, named after the Toulouse professor who created the French medical emergency services known as SAMU in 1968. And it is here that the medical emergencies of those sailing under the French flag around the world are treated. Each year, the Centre de Consultation Medicale Maritime (CCMM, Maritime Medical Advisory Centre) takes more than 6,000 calls. Created in 1968, it was incorporated within the SAMU of Haute-Garonne, southwest France, in 1983 and provides consultations and telemedical assistance for crew members and passengers, free of charge. "In addition to clinical data sent to us by the person in charge of care on board, teleconsultations in emergency, general and specialized medicine are based on the remote transmission of medical data. This includes digital images, videos and electrocardiograms," said the head of the unit, Professor Patrick Roux, although symptoms are diagnosed most often with help of photographs as video transmission is not always reliable. Minor ailments, anxiety, fractures, cuts, cases of Covid-19... all are dealt with here from sometimes several thousand miles away. The service has to treat patients without being able to send resources to them, as SAMU does, explained Prof. Roux, who has 30 years of experience to his name. 'Commanding officers are our hands' Doctors take calls during the week from 8am to 6pm, then at the weekend the SAMU center takes over from the bigger room next door. Prof. Roux treated about 30 patients when he was on duty a few days ago, but on this afternoon, things are very quiet. Only the Moby-Dick, a sailing boat off the coast of Croatia, and the Pont-Aven, a passenger ship between Spain and England, have dialed 196 the emergency number at sea. "The regional operational centers for surveillance and rescue receive the calls, then put them through to us," explains Dr. Alexandre Saccavini. We are interested in your experience using the site. Send feedback Read more Subscribers only A new screening system in French hospitals helps to ease strain on emergency departments There are five centres in mainland France and four in France's overseas departments. Over the phone, it is the ship's captain who must be the point of contact. A ship's situation can sometimes be a headache. "We might talk to a French captain sailing on a Danish vessel in the Adriatic Sea," said Prof. Roux. Or, as in the previous week, they could speak to a French tourist on a Norwegian boat heading for the North Pole, who had to be evacuated. You have 56.39% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only. INTER-COUNTY hurling stars of yesteryear are coming out of retirement for a special charity game between Limerick and Tipperary later this month. Boher GAA field hosts the inter-county hurling fixture on Saturday August 13 at 2pm all in aid of Crumlins Children Hospital. Boher native Alan Foley is organising the special charity match. A couple of years ago our daughter, Mollie, needed to spend some time in the Crumin Childrens Hospital. Thankfully it turned out to be nothing too serious but she needed to be checked out after she was born so we had to spend some time in Dublin with her, explains the Limerick man, who now resides in Mullinahone, Co Tipperary. I could see the fantastic work that the nurses and doctors do and afterwards I just wanted to be able to give something back, he said. Foley previously held a raffle for the hospital but with Covid-19 restrictions now gone, Foley started to plan the charity hurling match. Im from Boher and live in Mullinahone and I love hurling so I decided to combine all that and came up with a match between Limerick and Tipperary and started to contact ex-players, outlined Foley. I have to say a big Thank You to everyone so far for their positive response and now hopefully we can get as many people as possible along to the match in Boher, said Foley. Richie Bennis and Eamonn Cregan will be the guest managers of Limerick and Conor ODonovan will be at the helm of The Premier County. Entry to the charity game is 10 for adults, 5 for U16s and U5 are free tickets can be purchased online on eventbrite.ie or on the day at the venue. Ciaran Carey, Mark Foley, Stephen McDonogh, Joe Quaid and Tom Condon are just some of the former inter-county stars to wear the green and white once more along with Murroe-Bohers Tobin brothers, Seanie, Pat and Kevin. The Tipperary line-up will include Brendan Cummins, Michael Cleary, Eoin Kelly and Paul Curran among others. It is also hoped to have the Liam MacCarthy and Mick Mackey Cups in attendance along with a number of current Limerick hurling heroes like Aaron Gillane, Barry Nash, Diarmaid Byrnes, Cian Lynch and others. After the on-field activity, there will be a BBQ and raffle afterwards in Pa McGraths in Boher. Among the items up for grabs are signed jerseys, concert tickets, hotel vouchers and hampers. A NATIONAL conference on the biodiversity emergency will be held in Limerick and has been described as essential. The conference will take place at the Strand Hotel in Limerick City on September 22 and 22 and will focus on the challenges and opportunities for local authorities to address the biodiversity emergency along with highlighting best national and international practices. Mayor of the City and County of Limerick Cllr Francis Foley said: This is a timely conference and I am delighted that Limerick City and County Council is collaborating with the National Biodiversity Data Centre as it is essential that Ireland moves towards decarbonisation against a backdrop of maintaining and enhancing our national, regional and local biodiversity. The conference intends to embrace every sector including: local authorities, the National Biodiversity Data Centre, national parks and wildlife service and the wider public sector, non-governmental organisations, private business, climate action regional offices (CAROs), special interest groups, Tidy Towns and other community groups. The conference aims to identify and prioritise key actions that will feed into the national biodiversity action plan, along with supporting climate actions that will assist Ireland to achieve its 2030 targets. Director of National Biodiversity Data Centre Dr Liam Lysaght also commented: Local Authorities can become a hugely important catalyst for change in addressing Irelands biodiversity emergency through the adoption of new and innovative approaches to biodiversity management. This conference will be the first of its kind where local authorities and key partners come together to explore the key issues and identify the best actions that can help to address biodiversity loss, Dr Lysaght added. The Conference sessions will feature guest speakers who will address biodiversity in relation to infrastructure, community, climate action and management. Each session will be followed with round-table discussions and the outcomes will feed into the National Biodiversity Plan. A MAN stole his then partners life savings while she was caring for her terminally ill mother, Limerick Circuit Court heard. Judge Tom ODonnell said it was as mean spirited as I have come across for a long time. Anthony Fleming, aged 61, with an address at Shannonvale, Old Cratloe Road, Limerick city was charged with and pleaded guilty to the theft of 10,000. He denies stealing a sum of 32,000 which the victim alleges. Prosecuting barrister, John O'Sullivan, instructed by state solicitor Padraig Mawe, said a relationship commenced between the victim and the accused. He said they resided in Shannonvale, Old Cratloe Road after purchasing a house in joint names. Mr OSullivan said Mr Fleming stole certain monies from his then partner which she says were her life savings. The court heard how the victim made a number of cash withdrawals from her bank in September and October of 2012. Mr Sullivan said 20,000 was put in a biscuit tin and placed in the attic. A further 12,000 was put in an envelope in a cupboard under the stairs. The victim was prevailed upon by the accused to take the money out over concerns regarding the safety of deposits in financial institutions. The stability of the Greek economy was to the fore at the time. She was in a vulnerable position as she was under considerable stress and pressure as she was taking care of her ill mother, said Mr OSullivan. The barrister said after her mother died in May 2016 she enquired with the accused about the money. She said he told her, Its all gone. I used it. There is nothing that can be done about it. She said, That is my life savings. She said he had no remorse, said Mr OSullivan. Mr Fleming was arrested in May 2016 and admitted taking 10,000 from the biscuit tin. He said there was 10,000 in the biscuit tin, not 20,000. He denies taking money under the stairs. She maintains it was in excess of 30,000, her life savings, that was taken. A prosecution was brought in respect of 10,000, said Mr OSullivan. Sergeant Dermot Keating confirmed that in a garda interview the defendant said: I didnt take 32,000. She will get her 10,000 back when I get sorted. Mr OSullivan asked the sergeant if the injured party had received a penny? No, said Sgt Keating. Mr OSullivan said the victim says she was manipulated and Mr Fleming told her, No court will believe you. No judge will take it seriously. It was a gross breach of trust. Her mental state was undermined. She was at a financial loss and it was extremely traumatic, said Mr OSullivan. Sgt Keating concurred. Pat Whyms BL, who represented Mr Fleming, said his client has no previous convictions and has been charged with the theft of 10,000. He put it to the sergeant that Mr Fleming admitted over a period of time taking amounts of 100/200 and spent the money on household bills and nights out. Yes, said Sgt Keating. The sergeant agreed that Mr Fleming accepted he had done wrong but stated I did not wrong her out of 32,000. Mr Whyms said: He admitted taking 10,000 and is charged with taking 10,000. The injured party read out her own victim impact statement in which she said she discovered in 2016 that Mr Fleming stole my life savings of 30,000 plus. It was everything I saved over the years. I was devastated. He stole my life savings while I was caring for my mother who was terminally ill. He showed no remorse. He said nobody would believe me. I continue to feel traumatised. I took early retirement. I do not trust anybody. I lost my confidence, I became very depressed and afraid of everything. I want him out of my life completely, said the victim, who thanked Sgt Keating, Garda Lisa Griffin and the DPP. In mitigation, Mr Whyms said his client is on disability due to having COPD and diabetes and has had stents inserted. He is ashamed of what he did. He started using the 10,000 towards paying bills and funding his own leisure pursuits. He knows nothing about a sum of money in an envelope under the stairs. There is no charge, said Mr Whyms. The barrister said his client has engaged with a solicitor through the legal aid board to transfer his share in the house to the victim. The financial benefit will be far greater than 10,000, which is the subject of the court, or even the 30,000 referred to. The transfer is an acknowledgement of his guilt and wrong doing, said Mr Whyms. Judge ODonnell said it was as mean spirited as he has come across for a long time. He adjourned matters to October to have a letter in respect of the transfer of the house. I will factor that in. If not I will factor that in. There is a history I find appalling. I will stay my hand. I will keep all my options open, said Judge ODonnell. Business owner Derrick Amrein, Minister of State Niall Collins and Mark OBrien, English teacher at the hub at Chisel and Oak MORE than 200 members of Limericks local Ukrainian community are using a special hub set up at a city business, on a daily basis. Chisel and Oaks founder Derrick Amrein normally focuses on upcycled furniture through his business in OCurry Street. Through this social enterprise, he gives employment to people from marginalised communities across Limerick, and also offers youth training. Now he has extended his reach to Limericks newest residents the refugees displaced from their homeland of Ukraine following Russian president Vladimir Putins invasion of the neighbouring territory. Chisel and Oak provides a spot where they can meet, socialise and discuss issues in a safe environment. Derrick is being helped out in providing this support by the Limerick Youth Service bakery, whose staff provide Ukrainian bread and scones on a daily basis. A free shop is in place providing clothing, nappies, toiletries and food free of charge. While Derrick is providing the facility, its currently being managed by two Ukrainian nationals who speak fluent English and co-ordinate the needs of the visitors. Last week, the Minister of State for Skills and Further Education Niall Collins paid a visit to the facility. The Limerick TD was full of praise for the work being done at the centre. He said: This is a great initiative. Derrick is a great ambassador for the city. He and his staff are doing great work there, and it once again shows the level of kindness and empathy that exists among the people of Limerick. Derrick is providing free bicycle transport to some of the Ukrainian refugees. And on top of practical support, emotional and physical help is being given through the Community, Health and Educate Ireland team led by Edel Ryan. However, the businessman said there is a need for more supports for the centre to continue to cover the spiraling cost of insurance, light and heat. I have to date carried these costs myself not for altruistic reasons but because the need has just been there, said Derrick, The only support we have received to date has been from the Limerick Youth Service Centre and from Fr Seamus Enright of the Redemptorists who has kindly contributed 850 towards public liability insurance. THE UNIVERSITY of Limerick have announced a new 80 bedroom student village to address the shortfall in accommodation. The new village will consist of 20 A-rated houses in Rhebogue and construction is expected to commence next month with work to finish by August 2023. The new student village at Rhebogue will be constructed by a private developer and purchased by the University through the UL subsidiary Plassey Campus Centre. UL Provost and Deputy President Professor Shane Kilcommins has warmly welcomed the announcement of the new UL student village, the purchase of which has this week been approved by the UL Governing Authority. "We are looking at every single possibility we can to try to meet the huge demand for accommodation for our student community. "This new development at Rhebogue will allow for community and multi-generational living for our students among the existing vibrant community of Rhebogue. Over 200 Ukrainians a day using one-stop-shop in Limerick Business owner Derrick Amrein, Minister of State Niall Collins and Mark OBrien, English teacher at the hub at Chisel and Oak "The village will be fully managed by the University in the same way as our on-campus accommodation and we very much hope to work with the residents of Rhebogue to establish local initiatives, volunteering and community engagement between the UL students along with our neighbours. "We will be connecting with local residents associations to ensure they are fully informed of plan for the student village." Professor Kilcommins continued: "The current student accommodation crisis cannot solely be resolved by the higher education institutions. "There needs to be a multi-stakeholder approach, supported by Government, to ensure third level students are adequately and appropriately accommodated. "The purchase of these 20 new houses is just one of the short to medium term responses identified by UL, however the demand for student accommodation is likely to persist in line with our national housing shortage. "UL is also working with our HEI partners Mary Immaculate College and the Technical University of the Shannon, Midlands and Midwest (TUSMM) on an advertising campaign to encourage local homeowners in the Limerick area to rent rooms in their homes to Limerick higher education students." A NEW ANALYSIS has revealed 19 pubs across Limerick closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. And last orders have been called at almost one in three local bars since 2005. The report from the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI) reveals there has been a decline of 29.1% in terms of pubs operating across Limerick city and county since the middle of the first decade of the new millennium. The Treaty County has been one of the hardest places hit in the State with 139 bar closures in the last 16 years. In 2005 there were 478 pubs across Limerick, while at the end of last year, that had fallen to 339. Pre-pandemic in 2019, 359 pubs were trading in Limerick. The only areas to see more pub closures in percentage terms were the midlands counties of Laois and Offaly. Elsewhere, Meath and Dublin appear to have suffered the least in terms of closures, with a 1.4% closure rate in the Royal County and a 4.3% cessation of trade in the capital. The finds have prompted DIGI to call on government to ease the cost burden on rural drinks businesses to ensure their sustainability by reducing Irelands high alcohol excise tax over the next two years In Kerry, there was a 15.3% drop off in pub numbers, with the fall being 28.5% in Cork, 24.7% in Clare and 26.3% in Tipperary. The #IrishPubDecline means the loss of almost 2,000 independent businesses, impacting local jobs. @Paschald @mmcgrathtd the hospitality sector needs your support. Our report details how reducing excise tax can help to protect the Irish pub. https://t.co/vdQhWinhTv #SYL22 pic.twitter.com/bR5ByF5eIb Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (@DIGI_Ireland) August 4, 2022 The report highlights that many public houses operate at relatively low levels of sales volume. One of the factors which influence business sustainability at these low sales volumes, which is within the control of the Government, is the high Irish alcohol excise level which represents a significant cost on the business. The chief executive of the Vintners Federation of Ireland Paul Clancy described the report as "alarming". "1,829 rural pub closures represent businesses that provide jobs, a hub in the local community for socialising and community integration and a cultural centre which has long been documented as among the main attractions for tourists visiting Ireland. The pace of decline increased as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic which saw the drinks and hospitality industry suffer the worst of all, with one of the longest lockdowns recorded globally," he said. Kathryn DArcy, the recently appointed Chair of DIGI added: "The Irish pub has been in a steady decline for years, and these stark figures once again highlight the need to secure the sustainable future of our pubs. Central to this is introducing policy measures which can make both an immediate difference and a long-term impact in terms of delivering sustainable policy to support these businesses. DIGI is seeking a reduction in Irelands high excise tax rate which would deliver on this. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is arriving today in Delhi on a 4-day visit, during which she will attend the Niti Aayog meeting on August 7 and is also likely to meet Senior opposition leaders. She is likely to raise issues related to non-payment of GST dues and Federalism at this year's meeting. The NITI Aayog governing council meets regularly since 2015. This year issues related to agriculture, health and economy would be discussed in a meeting led by PM Modi. The first thing on her agenda is meeting with TMC MPs who have been right at the center of protests in the ongoing session of Parliament. Mamata Banerjee is also expected to meet opposition leaders and visit the central hall of Parliament, according to reports. She is also likely to meet the Congress Interim President Sonia Gandhi, who along with her son is under investigation by the Enforcement Directorate in a money laundering case. She could also meet President Droupadi Murmu and call on PM Modi for a one-on-one discussion on matters related to West Bengal. According to reports, it is unlikely that Mamata Banerjee will address the media during her visit with her former minister Partha Chatterjee under the Enforcement Directorate scanner in the Bengal SSC recruitment scam. Thursday, 4 August, 2022 marks two years since a massive explosion ripped through Beirut. The port-side blast of haphazardly stored ammonium nitrate, killed more than 200 people, wounded thousands more and decimated vast areas of the capital. Amid political interference the investigation into the blasts has been stalled and no state official has yet been held accountable over the tragedy. This has led some rights defenders and victims' families to demand an international probe. Many burnt silos at the site of blast have collapsed and experts have warned that more are dangerously close to coming down. These crumbling silos present the grim symbol of the two year old disaster. Tatiana Hasrouty, a victim of the tragedy, who lost her father in the blast while talking to AFP said, "I hope that seeing the silos fall will give people the will to fight for justice, to battle with us," Politicians "are doing everything in their power to stop the investigation" into the explosion, she said. The blasts that shook the nation at the coast of Mediterranean Sea has failed to recover from the nightmarish moment mired in its worst-ever economic crisis marked by blackouts, runaway inflation and widespread despair. The wreckage at the site of the blast still portray the dismal remnants of the blast with smell of the smoke wafting from the silos where fermenting grain is smouldering in the blistering summer heat. the protesters in three separate marches starting from 1200 GMT will converge at the port, witnessing this grim scene. Second anniversary of the 'nightmare' The war-like explosion two years ago was felt as far away as Israel and Cyprus and sowed the kind of devastation normally caused by disasters. It further scarred the crisis-tested population and accelerated a massive exodus. Even as the people endure shortages of fuel, medicine and clean water, Lebanon's ruling class, accused of misrule, graft and gross negligence, has however clung firmly to power. Hasrouty said "This ruling class is killing us every dayIf we did not die in the blast, we are dying of hunger, from a lack of basic human rights." The irony of the blasts is such that the districts are left to be illuminated by the fires in the silos while there are power cuts that last more than 23 hours. Lara Khatchikian, 51, whose apartment was badly hit two years ago, has watched the blazes, while talking with AFP called the sight "a nightmare". "I have felt fear, we couldn't sleep," she said. "It takes superhuman strength to live when you are constantly reminded of the blast." Still no sight of justice View Full Image UN chief Antonio Guterres on Thursday reiterated his call for an 'impartial, thorough and transparent investigation into the explosion' (REUTERS) In April the government ordered the silos' demolition, but this has been suspended, partially because of objections from victims' relatives who want them preserved as a memorial. French civil engineer Emmanuel Durand, who monitors the silos with sensors, has warned that he expected four more towers to collapse Thursday. Meanwhile, the probe in the matter is also at risk of falling apart like the crumbling silos, as officials close to the powerful Hezbollah movement have curtailed the work of the lead investigator Tarek Bitar with a series of lawsuits. A judicial official close to the investigations said judge Bitar's work had been paused since December 23. Hezbollah, a Lebanese political party has repeatedly accused Bitar of bias, on Thursday condemned what it described as a two-year "intense political and media campaign, which contained false accusations" against it, and called for a "fair" investigation. UN chief Antonio Guterres on Thursday reiterated his call for an "impartial, thorough and transparent investigation into the explosion". UN experts and groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had earlier relaunched an appeal to the United Nations to send a fact-finding mission. The rights groups jointly declared that "it is now, more than ever, clear that the domestic investigation cannot deliver justice". Aya Majzoub of HRW said that an international investigation "may be the only hope for the millions of Lebanese people... to get the answers they deserve". With inputs from wire agencies. Since landing at Mars in February last year, Ingenuity helicopter that was attached to the Perseverance rover, has vastly exceeded the expectations. NASA's first helicopter successfully collected 11 samples of the Red Planet's surface. Now, the US space agency is planning to send two more helicopters as part of its Mars Sample Return Program. The reason behind sending these helicopters to Mars is to bring Mars rocks and dust back to Earth. As per the details shared by NASA, the helicopters' design will be based on its first success Ingenuity helicopters. NASA is conducting this Mars mission in collaboration with the European Space Agency. NASA shared that both the helicopters will possess the ability to grab and transport small tubes filled with bits of Martian rock just like an extraterrestrial drone. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has already completed 29 flights to Mars and has survived more than a year beyond its lifetime; collecting rocks and dust from the planet's surface. The Martian rocks will be used for examination by scientists using state-of the-art laboratory equipment on Earth that cannot fit into a spacecraft. NASA, shared a brief of the plan explaining how the Perseverance rover will be used to transfer the rocks to a spacecraft for the return journey. "We're bringing a piece of Mars back to Earth," NASA said. Perseverance rover is currently rolling through Jezero Crater, and picking up samples from the Red Planet that would be lifted off in the Mars Ascent Vehicle and hitch a ride back home in the European Space Agency's Earth Return Orbiter, NASA shared. Jeff Gramling, director of NASA's Mars sample return program said,"We have confidence that we can count on Perseverance to bring the samples back, and we've added the helicopters as a backup means." According to the plan announced by NASA on 27 July , 2022, NASAs Perseverance rover will do double duty and transport samples to the rocket that will launch them off Mars a decade from now. If this mission under the Mars Sample Return Program is completed successfully, Martian rocks will be the first scientific samples to have ever been brought back from another planet. The Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander are scheduled to launch in fall 2027 and summer 2028, with samples expected to return on Earth in 2033. Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) have carried out more than 50 attacks against people in the Japanese city of Yamaguchi (the macaques in the photo are not associated with the recent violence). A marauding monkey thats been harassing people in Japan was recently tracked down and executed by a team of "specially commissioned hunters." The macaque was part of a "monkey gang" that is responsible for more than 50 attacks in the city of Yamaguchi. For close to one month, a mob of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), the northernmost species of non-human primates, has terrorized the city, biting and scratching residents. The monkeys havent just attacked people in the streets they have also learned how to open sliding doors and climb into windows, the BBC reported. In one incident, a monkey broke into a kindergarten classroom and leapt on a 4-year-old girl. In another incident, a monkey climbed through a window and supposedly tried to snatch a baby. "I heard crying coming from the ground floor, so I hurried down," the baby's father told Mainichi Shimbun Daily, as reported by the Guardian . "Then I saw a monkey hunching over my child." Related: Monkey 'queen' led a violent coup to become her troop's first female leader. Now her reign is in jeopardy. Some residents have begun arming themselves with umbrellas and pruning shears to protect themselves from the macaques, The Guardian reported. The school where the kindergartener was attacked is keeping kids away from the playground, where macaques are still at large. The recently euthanized monkey was a 4-year-old male implicated in at least one of the attacks in the city although its unclear whether hes the main culprit or not. Either way, its unlikely that the gang will leave Yamaguchis residents alone. Conflict between macaques and humans has been escalating in the region for decades, especially in rural areas where the monkeys feast on farmers crops, according to a study published April 2021 in the journal Mammal Study . Japanese macaque populations are steadily increasing, according to the paper in Mammal Study, and the species is classified as one of least concern by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List . However, these monkeys were once in danger of extinction. At the end of the 19th century, roughly half of Japans forests, where macaques reside, were lost to deforestation. In addition to habitat loss, widespread hunting dealt a blow to these primate populations, so that by World War II, macaques were threatened across Japan and were locally extinct in many areas of their former range. After World War II, Japan banned macaque hunting. But this movement to conserve these monkeys proved to be a little too successful. The macaques two natural predators, the mountain hawk-eagle (Nisaetus nipalensis) and the Japanese wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax), are endangered and extinct, respectively. Without these predators to keep their numbers in check, macaque populations have exploded, increasing interactions with people and contributing to the kind of conflict seen in Yamaguchi. Japans changing demographics could also be contributing to increasing conflict between macaques and humans, the authors of the 2021 study reported . Over the past 50 years, people have moved away from rural areas and towards cities. Its possible that with fewer people living in these small villages, some of which have been abandoned, animals including roving gangs of bold macaques are moving in and taking over, according to the study. That change has a ripple effect on urban centers like Yamaguchi, NBC News reported. These farming regions used to act as a buffer between wildlife and cities. The disappearance of rural villages is bringing city-dwellers contact with wildlife more often. But the loss of one member hasnt stopped the rest of the monkey gang, Insider reported. Almost a week later, the macaques continue to wreak havoc on Yamaguchi. Originally published on Live Science. Click here to read the full article. SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not watched the 11th episode of Better Call Saul Season 6, titled Breaking Bad. When set decorator Ashley Marsh found out Better Call Saul was going to revive the iconic RV from Breaking Bad, she was psyched. And luckily, the original Krystal Ship had been kept safely stored at the Sony lot. There was only one issue: the RV was completely gutted on the inside. Now, Breaking Bad had always used two RVs one fully functional vehicle for exterior and driving shots, and a separate soundstage for shooting the interior. To recreate that set for Better Call Saul, Marsh religiously rewatched Breaking Bad' and took 8,000 screen grabs. With careful attention to detail, the team had to replace every beaker, tub of methylamine, round-bottom flask and more. Everything we see inside the RV on Better Call Saul was new. We had to go back and buy everything, Marsh tells Variety. We literally just stared at photos until we figured out what these items were. To make sure the RV interior looked exactly like it did in Breaking Bad, Marsh then set out to find a 1986 Bounder the same model used for the exterior shots to gather seats, lights, a mini-fridge door and window coverings. Her search ended with Frank Sandoval, who runs a Breaking Bad RV tour company in Albuquerque. (He also appeared in Breaking Bad Season 5 as an extra.) After signing an ironclad NDA, Sandoval was happy to lend some parts of his Bounder which shuttles tourists around Albuquerque to fan-favorite Breaking Bad locations to the Better Call Saul team. According to Marsh, Sandoval was the only person they could find that had the exact window coverings shown in Breaking Bad. While the typical TV viewer would never notice such a minor incongruity, Marsh says that series co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould emphasized that fans will inevitably cut together side by side the flashback scenes from Better Call Saul with the original ones from Breaking Bad. We had to be hyperaware of how right this needed to be, she says. What was exciting for Marsh is that this episode of Better Call Saul shows the RV interior in a way Breaking Bad never did: in motion, with Walt and Jesse preparing to go somewhere. This allowed the set decorators, along with Gilligan and writer-director Thomas Schnauz, to imagine how the meth cooking duo might pack up their equipment for travel. When shooting the interior in motion, the special effects team attached airbags underneath the set to make the RV rock back and forth, emulating driving through the desert. To reshoot the Breaking Bad scene in which Walt and Jesse hold Saul (Bob Odenkirk) at gunpoint in front of a shallow grave, the Better Call Saul construction team dug a grave behind the studios in terrain that was similar to the desert, while the greens crew brought in dirt. Working on Saul, as well as 2019s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, Marsh has had her fair share of set-decorating challenges. When Breaking Bad introduced Ed the Disappearer (Robert Forster), who runs a witness protection program out of his Best Quality Vacuum shop, the location was a vacuum store in real life, which required very little alteration. When they returned for El Camino, it had since been completely turned into a furniture store. So, Marsh and set decoration buyer Rachel Srigley were tasked with transforming it back into Best Quality Vacuum, a process that took three months. Rachel was doing research on vacuums to find the exact same models, the exact same colors, Marsh says. We cleaned out every vacuum store in town for all of their parts anything that was close, just to get the volume. Nonetheless, Marsh says the trickiest task shes had in the Gilligan-verse is decorating the department store in last weeks Gene-centered Better Call Saul. In the episode, Gene orchestrates an elaborate heist of Armani suits, Air Jordans and linen shirts for cab driver Jeffy (Pat Healy), while distracting the mall security guards with fresh-baked Cinnabons. It was an empty Sears, Marsh says, with literally nothing inside. Not a rack, no pegs, not one single thing to hang anything on. The team had to import tons of couches, racks, fixtures and lamps, as well as truckloads full of clothing. Meanwhile, Genes rhyming instructions for Jeffy (One, Armani suits and run! Two, Air Jordan shoes for you! etc.) served as a guide for designing the store. It wasnt the first time Marsh had to build a store from scratch. In fact, between Season 4 and 5 of Better Call Saul, the Cinnabon that Gene works at in Omaha (which is filmed in Albuquerques Cottonwood Mall) went out of business. Luckily, the production team was able to purchase a lot of what was left tables, chairs, Coke machines, the massive cake mixer but Marsh says they nonetheless had to painstakingly go back and reverse engineer what was missing and put it all back together. Teaming up with Cinnabon, they were also able to reacquire the specialty oven, dough sheeter and proofers. Im a nerd, admits Marsh. Part of why I really love going back and recreating sets is you can really dive in and get excited about things that most people would find boring. Its like playing a big game of iSpy, but on a professional level. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. James Morosini really does love his dad, and he proves it when his father calls in the midst of our conversation. Morosini takes the call and explains hes on an interview. Ill call you back, the younger Morosini says before adding: Love you. The complicated father-son relationship inspired Morosinis acclaimed new film, I Love My Dad, which hits theaters this week and arrives on VOD Aug. 12 after winning both the grand jury prize and audience award at this years South by Southwest Film Festival. Patton Oswalt stars as Chuck, a man who is cut off by his son Franklin (played by Morosini) and creates a social media profile based on a waitress he knows, Becca (Claudia Sulewski.) Though Chuck is just trying to connect with Franklin, his son ends up falling hard for Becca and Chuck goes to increasingly elaborate lengths to keep up the ruse. Hearing the premise, people tend to laugh or wince sometimes both. Its a delicate balance kept afloat by Morosinis skilled script and direction as well as a fantastic ensemble that also includes Amy Landecker, Lil Rel Howery and Rachel Dratch. Its also based on a true story in real life, Morosinis father sent him a friend request under the guise of an attractive young woman. And while it does make for some uncomfortable (if hilarious) on-screen moments, its also surprisingly empathetic toward all of its complex characters. Most recently seen in The Sex Life of College Girls, the 32-year-old actors previous venture behind the camera was the 2018 comedy Threesomething, which he says was shot on a budget of around $10,000. So while helming I Love My Dad was a steep learning curve Morosini calls it the hardest thing Ive ever done he says it was also the most rewarding. I know this is based on something that really happened to you, but from what I understand, your real story didnt go quite this far. It went farther than I would have liked. (Laughs.) I kind of took a kernel of what happened and tried to extrapolate upon it and asked myself what would I have done if it had gone even further. Emotionally, the whole movie is very, very true. This happened quite a while ago, around the age of 20? Yeah. I stopped talking to my dad he lied about something and we had a big fight and I cut him out of my life. I think when youre 20, you see things in a very black-and-white way and I was very absolute about things. At that point, I didnt know how to set clear boundaries in my life. I got home one day and this really pretty girl had sent me a friend request. She was awesome and had all the same interests and all these amazing pictures. And then I soon found out it was my dad. Thats horrible, but did the writer in you immediately realize it was a good story? I definitely recognized something in there at the time. Im really interested in stories being told from a perspective we wouldnt normally see. For me, thats the value of storytelling. Im somebody that likes to consider the other perspective and try to understand what people are doing. So I felt like it was a worthwhile exercise in empathetically exploring what he must have been going through at the time and why he would ever do this. The film is shockingly empathetic toward Chuck, while never pulling any punches about how terrible he can be. I can understand why a lot of people see Chuck as a terrible father or horrible person, but I dont really see people in that way. I think people have limited tools and we use them how weve been taught to use them. Nobody knows how to be a perfect parent, especially if they didnt have perfect parents. So for me, the is about forgiving people for being limited and trying to find ways to connect with them, even when it seems impossible to do so. Did you talk to your father when you were writing to really get his perspective? I did quite a bit. I went to Colorado and I spent a lot of time with him. He also gave me his journals from earlier in his life, and those were so informative in crafting the characters perspective as I was writing it. Did he speak to Patton before shooting? No, I think Patton wanted it to be a separate character than my actual dad, so I understand. And really, Chuck is quite different from my dad. I understand that originally you didnt intend to act in the film, but Patton encouraged it? Yes. We were talking, and the idea of it came up. And then I went to his house and we read a few scenes on camera, just to see if it made sense. And we both enjoyed acting together. Im ultimately glad I did, just because it made it so much more personal for me. And because I was able to do things in it that I wouldnt necessarily know how to convey to an actor. Theres so many moments where the audience is on edge wondering how far things are going to go. It walks a precarious balance; how did you master that tone? Was it in the writing or shooting, or even the editing? I think it was a mix of all of those things. In the writing, I felt lets go as far as we can. And then we can pull it back if it doesnt work. When we were shooting, it was important to make sure that the performances aligned and Chuck could never be having too much [fun] with his deception. He always needed to be kind of tortured by going through with this with only glimmers of satisfaction, because hes getting closer to his son, not because hes enjoying pretending to be this person. Thats where Patton and Claudia are so invaluable with these performances because shes saying what Patton is typing and it has to be so precise. In editing, it was about the juxtaposition between the characters. When Franklin is having his best moments, Chuck is having his worst moments. Because for Franklin, the more intimate he is with Becca, the happier he is, and the more intimate Chuck is having to be as Becca, the more tortured and freaked out he is. Are you okay with the film being called a cringe comedy? Sure. You can put something down by saying its cringe but if the intent is for it to be cringe, then I guess its a compliment. Its like calling a horror movie scary for some people, its going to be too scary. And for some people, this movie might be too cringey. But for people who like that, I think theyll really enjoy it. Im a big fan of Reddit cringe, which is a subreddit of Reddit where its just all the cringy best things ever. Ive been trying to understand why Im so interested in cringe. I think its because its just so relatable. We can see somebody working too hard to or lying to make it seem like theyre someone else, and its very human. Its so honest it almost hurts. Of course I have to ask: what does your real dad think of the movie? He saw it for the first time at South By and I was very nervous about showing it to him. I was worried that he wouldnt like it, or he would take it personally or get his feelings hurt. And then halfway through the movie, he leaned over and said: This is a really good movie! And he has a great sense of humor I think I get my sense of humor from my dad. And so he loves the film and gets it and is able to laugh at himself. Im proud of him, that hes able to have a sense of humor about this. This whole process has strengthened our friendship and our relationship. And, you know, the title of the movie is true. I love my dad. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. A judge in Louisiana denied bond for Mystikal Tuesday following the rappers arrest over allegations he raped and held a woman against her will at his Baton Rouge-area home last weekend. According to The Advocate, Mystikal, real name Michael Tyler, was booked into the Ascension Parish jail July 31 on first-degree rape, felony domestic abuse battery by strangulation, simple robbery, and and simple criminal damage to property. Following a search of his home, authorities added five drug counts to Tylers charges. The Shake It Fast rapper will remain in custody while awaiting trial. In his ruling, State District Judge Steven Tureau stated the nature of the crime, as well as the 51-year-old rappers past criminal history, provided a clear and convincing argument against granting bond. Tyler is a lifetime registered sex offender, following an incident in 2004 in which he sexually assaulted his hairstylist. He was sentenced to six years in prison and was released in 2010. In 2017, the rapper was once again charged with rape, however the charges were ultimately dropped for lack of evidence in 2020. During Tuesdays hearing, Sheriffs Detective Garrett Keith testified that the woman went to Tylers home the evening of July 30 to discuss an alleged financial agreement the two had made. According to the Associated Press, Keith said the woman stated that Tylers behavior changed abruptly, taking her keys, choking her and pulling her hair. He later apologized and began praying with the woman before throwing rubbing alcohol on her to remove her bad spirits. After this bizarre incident, Keith testified that the woman said Tyler raped her and that a medical examination found injuries consistent with sexual assault. Tylers attorney, Roy Maughan Jr., maintains his clients innocence and noted Tuesday that the alleged victim has been in a relationship with the rapper since the late Nineties. I just dont think thats in Mr. Tyler to do that, Maughan told reporters after the hearing. So, we need to contact promoters and we need to let them know that hes not going to be available and do our best to mitigate the damage from this. Click here to read the full article. Russian trolls loom large in American political lore, thanks to their meddling in the 2016 election that Team Clinton has repeatedly suggested helped hand the White House to Donald Trump. Now, the pro-Putin troll team is back, this time attempting to whip up support for Russias invasion of Ukraine. But when it comes to whipping up support for Russias bloodiest conflict since World War II, the troll factory is failing badly and with cringeworthy missteps. The trolls from Cyber Front Z, as the new operation calls itself, are directing harassment at the wrong social media accounts, accidentally copy-pasting pro-Ukrainian content, and cranking out comically obvious photoshops to an audience of nearly no one. And theyre doing an especially bad job of concealing the fact that their supposedly grassroots activists are hired rent-a-shitposters. Researchers at Meta (popularly known as Facebook) announced on Thursday that theyve linked Cyber Front Z posts to a Russian troll factory. The factory is run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch and close Putin ally sanctioned by the U.S. for his role in meddling in the 2016 election. The investigation into Cyber Front Z was sparked by the independent Russian news outlet Fontanka, which first linked Cyber Front Z to Prigozhin in an undercover investigation, which was launched just days after the groups debut. Facebook researchers dubbed the effort clumsy and largely ineffective and definitely not A team work. The effort involved calling out targets for harassment Russian liberals skeptical of the war, Western politicians supportive of Ukraine and directing followers to comment on their social media accounts. But few took up the call to troll, and in the absence of grassroots harassment, Cyber Front Z had to make up the difference with comments from paid employees, according to Facebook. Despite their bumbling, Western countries are still paying close attention to the troll factory. The U.K.s Foreign Office has hyped the rent-a-trolls as sick masterminds in a May study linking Cyber Front Z to the Internet Research Agency, the front company originally created to house Prigozhins meddling campaigns. But others, particularly observers in Russia, arent as impressed by the troll factorys work. Job advertisements for Cyber Front Z on Vkontakte, a Russian social media platform akin to Facebook, have been met by skepticism from users in a St. Petersburg job-seekers group. Requirements: 1) IQ less than 70, one user on Russias VKontakte social media platform quipped at the posting. Outside experts agree with Facebooks own skepticism of the troll factorys skills. I personally am of the opinion that the attention paid to [the Internet Research Agency] by the Western media and the national security bureaucracies tends to almost be half of the operation itself, says Gavin Wilde, a former Russia analyst at the National Security Agency and National Security Council who studies influence operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mark Ralson/AFP/Getty Images Mark Ralson/AFP/Getty Images Even with its shoddy trolling attempts, the Internet Research Agency still remains a focus for the U.S. national security bureaucracy. Federal prosecutors indicted a Russian man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, and charged him with acting as an illegal agent on behalf of Prighozins U.S.-focused influence campaigns. And in an appearance at a cybersecurity conference last month, FBI director Chris Wray said that he was quite confident the Russians can walk and chew gum in balancing a focus on the war in Ukraine and any attempts to meddle in future U.S. elections. Behind the self-branding of Information troops of Russia who fight back in the information battlefield against the propagandists of the Kyiv junta are a small staff of poorly paid trolls 100 in each shift tasked with cranking out 200 comments a day, according to Fontankas undercover investigation. At times, Cyber Front Zs activities make it seem like a mercenary Dollar Store version of Ukraines social media activist campaigns. Facebook researchers found the trolls cribbing from organically made pro-Ukrainian posters calling for the release of prisoners in Mariupol to try to deface them, painting all Ukrainians as far-right Nazis. In their haste to counter Ukraines mostly organic social media activism, the Cyber Front Z trolls frequently stumbled, directing users to the wrong social media accounts. In one case, the groups Telegram account attempted to muster outrage at U.K. Foreign Secretary and Putin critic Liz Truss by directing followers to troll what they believed to be her Facebook page. The call to arms, as Facebook researchers noted, linked to a fan Page with about 30 followers that had not posted since 2018. And even when the trolls directed harassment at the correct target, their campaigns flopped. When the Cyber Front Z team tried a similar attempt at flooding the mentions of Finlands defense minister, Facebook found that of the 255 posts in the thread called out, the troll factory only managed to muster 20 inauthentic comments in the feed. Neil Hauer, a reporter who has covered the war in Ukraine, noticed a similar lack of impact when Cyber Front Z trolls called for users to flood the replies of one of his tweets. Yeah, I noticed basically no response like that to that thread, Hauer tells Rolling Stone. I remember it was overwhelmingly just people thanking me, expressing pro-Ukrainian sentiments, etc. When outrage against criticism of the war isnt enough, the Cyber Front Z team turns to forgeries. The Telegram channels staff occasionally tell their Russian readers that nonexistent subscribers in Europe are sending them evidence of popular opinion turning against Ukraine or sanctions backfiring on European consumers in an apparent attempt to paint Russias isolation as less severe and the costs of the war as more distributed. One post a picture of the subway in Lyon, France, with a sign saying hours of operation have been cut short attempts to soothe any Russian anxieties about the impact of sanctions by claiming Europeans are suffering, too. The image, purportedly showing France suffering from high energy prices as a result of European sanctions on Russia, is stolen from a Russian tourists vacation photos from a 2015 travel blog post. The trolls tried to photoshop the fake cutbacks notification, Colin Gerard, the doctoral researcher studying Prigozhins influence operations who discovered the attempt, wrote. Except they did it with their feet. In early July, Cyber Front Z trolls also tried to convince their readers that Germans were turning against Ukraines bid for European Union membership by showing pictures of what purported to be stickers on German cars with a hashtag #EUwithoutUA denouncing Ukraines campaign to join the bloc. Rolling Stone asked Roger Cozien, the founder of the software company Exo Makina, to review the picture with his companys forensic imagery analysis platform, Tungstene. According to us, it is quite obvious the the EU signs with #EUwithoutUA are fake, Cozien wrote. It seems that they have been patched and tampered. Cyber Front Z/Image Analysis by eXo maKina Cyber Front Z/Image Analysis by eXo maKina The shoddy work may be because of the minimal requirements necessary to work for the troll farm. Rolling Stone found an early advertisement for creative copywriters sought by Cyber Front Z using salary information in Fontankas story and contact information provided by Cyber Front Zs Telegram channel. Applicants for the creative copywriters positions needed only to master literacy, punctuality, and an ability to express their thoughts in writing to earn 45,000 rubles (or a little more than $700). Others, however, think the trolls work may not have necessarily gotten worse lately but rather that their inflated reputation is now being brought back in line with reality. I tend to think they were always this bad. Its just that the West and certainly the United States prior to 2016 had just not been paying attention. Now, I think we collectively have become more resilient and aware of this and are starting to realize it. Wilde says. We just didnt have any of the mechanisms to deal with it. Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski, 58, died in a car accident on Wednesday afternoon along with two of her staffers. Reactions and tributes to the congresswoman who has served since 2013 have been pouring in, with Laredo's Rep. Henry Cuellar among those who have shared his condolences. Cuellar states that he met Walorski in 2012 when she was elected to her congressional seat. He calls her a vibrant, good woman that always had a smile and worked with a good attitude. I knew her. She was a very good lady that we lost, and apparently we also lost her communications and district director with her (during the accident), Cuellar said. I must say that it is sad losing her, as she was so nice. A very nice individual, as every time I would see her on the floor, she would say, 'Hi.' She was just a very, very nice individual. Cuellar said that even though she was from an opposing party, their working relationship was "very good." They did not see each other too often -- members of Congress usually work more closely with the members of the committees they are a part of -- but Cuellar said that every time they did meet, they greeted each other courteously. I can tell you that on the floor, she was always the friendliest person. She always had a smile on her face and always had a nice thing to say, even though how partisan it is in D.C., Cuellar said. She was one of the good ones, would always say hello and always reach you with a smile. That is how I will remember her, as a very civil, nice lady, and it is unfortunate that we have lost her. Cuellar said traveling is a big part of a member of Congress' job, as they must travel constantly from their district to Washington D.C. but also within their district, such as Cuellar from Laredo to San Antonio, Duval, JimHogg, McAllen and elsewhere in District 28. When you get to D.C., you then start again traveling, traveling and traveling, and that is some of the situation that is part of the job, Cuellar said. You have to do it because you visit your district, you have to campaign and go announce things, and that is the way it has to be. Cassy Garcia, the Republican nominee for Congressional District 28 who is currently running against Cuellar, also expressed her condolences. She said it was a troubling development, and the fact that other individuals of her staff were also killed in the tragedy made it that much worse. I am saddened to learn of the passing of Rep. Jackie Walorski, Zachary Potts and Emma Thomson, Garcia said. Rep. Walorski served our country honorably in Congress and was a champion for veterans and the unborn. We pray for the families of everyone involved in this tragedy. Laredo Main Street has a plan to bring a new landmark to downtown, and it is asking for Laredoans to help decide on the design. On Wednesday, Laredo Main Street unveiled plans to bring a monument sign to the area. The sign would be positioned on the corner of Iturbide Street and San Ursula Street. Voting will conclude Aug. 8 at midnight. There are three very different designs locals will be able to choose from. Each has the words Iturbide Street" and "Fun on the Border" worked into them in different ways. Laredo Main Street said that all monument signs have programmable LED lights that can change sequence. The first design featured is the simplest, featuring a wide dark red pillar that unlike the other two focuses more on the motto than the street name. This option prominently features the history around Agustin de Iturbide, the Mexican army general and politician who the street is named after due to him having a major role in the Mexican War of Independence in 1821. The second and third each focus more on featuring "Iturbide Street" in large letters. The second is red and has more of a retro theme. It also has a circular LED screen which will be able to be customized to have different logos or messages. The third is orange and is a more modern design which actually slants so that its top will be over the road and passing cars. Courtesy/U.S. Border Patrol A stolen 18-wheeler was used in the smuggling attempt of 40 migrants, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. The incident unfolded on Aug. 3, when a commercial vehicle arrived at the primary inspection lane of the I-35 checkpoint. Agents referred the vehicle to secondary inspection following a K-9 alert. Douglas Sacha/Getty Images On Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard said the agency seized 40 sharks that were illegally caught by fishermen in federal waters off the Texas coast. Four men were illegally fishing on a lancha a 20 to 30-foot-long fishing boat used by fishermen about seven miles from the Maritime Boundary Line when the Coast Guard Sector in Corpus Christi received a notification from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the release said. NEW ORLEANS (AP) Albert Woodfox, a former inmate who spent decades in isolation at a Louisiana prison and then became an advocate for prison reforms after he was released, died Thursday of complications from COVID-19, his family said. He was 75. Woodfox and two other men became known as the Angola Three" for their decades-long stays in solitary at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and other prisons. In 2016, Woodfox pleaded no contest to manslaughter in the 1972 death of prison guard Brent Miller and was released after about half a century in prison, almost all of it in solitary. Woodfox consistently maintained his innocence in Miller's death. Carine Williams, one of Woodfoxs longtime attorneys, said Woodfox had contracted the coronavirus in early July but rebounded. Then about a week ago, he started experiencing shortness of breath and was admitted to a New Orleans hospital. Doctors were initially optimistic he would make it, Williams said. When his condition worsened, he was intubated and never regained consciousness. With heavy hearts, we write to share that our partner, brother, father, grandfather, comrade and friend, Albert Woodfox, passed away this morning," the family said. Whether you know him as Fox, Shaka, Cinque, or Albert - he knew you as family. Please know that your care, compassion, friendship, love, and support have sustained Albert, and comforted him. Woodfox first entered prison in 1965 on an armed robbery sentence. Then in 1972, immediately after Millers body was found in an empty prison dormitory, officials put him in solitary where he was kept on extended lockdown every 90 days for decades. Woodfox and two other prisoners Robert King and Herman Wallace became known as the Angola Three because of their long stretches in solitary confinement. Woodfox and Wallace said they were singled out for harsh treatment, including isolation, because of their political activism. They had helped establish a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party at Angola in 1971, set up demonstrations and organized strikes for better conditions. Officials said they were kept in solitary confinement because their Black Panther Party activism would otherwise rile up inmates at the maximum-security prison farm, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of Baton Rouge. Despite those decades confined to a cell 6 feet (1.83 meters) wide by 9 feet (2.74 meters) long for 23 hours a day, Williams said it was a matter of survival for him to not lose himself to anger or bitterness. In the book titled Solitary released after he got out of prison, Woodfox wrote about how in his 40s he chose to take his pain and turn it instead into compassion. Whenever I experienced pain of any origin I always made a promise to myself never to do anything that would cause someone else to suffer the pain I was feeling at that moment. I still had moments of bitterness and anger. But by then I had the wisdom to know that bitterness and anger are destructive, he wrote. I was dedicated to building things, not tearing them down. Wallace, who was convicted with Woodfox of murder in Miller's death, died days after a judge in 2014 freed him and granted him a new trial. King was released in 2001 after his conviction in the death of a fellow inmate in 1973 was reversed. At the time of his release, Woodfox was awaiting a third trial in Millers death after earlier convictions were thrown out by federal courts for reasons including racial bias in selecting a grand jury foreman. In a statement at the time, Woodfox said he had been looking forward to proving his innocence in court but that concerns about his health and age caused me to resolve this case now and obtain my release with this no contest plea to lesser charges. He said at the time he wanted to visit the gravesite of his mother, who died while he was in prison. Woodfox said he was not allowed to go to the funeral. After his release, Woodfox initially moved to Houston and then about a year later returned to New Orleans where he had grown up in the citys Treme neighborhood, said his brother Michael Mable. In New Orleans, he enjoyed walking on the levee with his partner and at one point as Woodfox described it to Williams he was adopted by a lost dog he found. Woodfox loved the outdoors and visited Yosemite National Park after his release, Williams said. His lawyer said on the first day he was released she noticed that he kept touching his wrists: For him it was just so fun and beautiful not to have shackles on his wrists. In the years after his release, Woodfox frequently spoke publicly about his life in prison and his views on issues like prison reforms or racial injustice. His book titled Solitary" detailed his teenage years when he was frequently arrested in New Orleans and his time in prison. The book, written with Leslie George, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Mable said when Woodfox first got out of prison, he struggled a bit but that he never let his mind stay in prison. He continued to advocate for people in prison and shined a light on issues such as mass incarceration or disparities in how Black and white people were sentenced. Mable said other men might have lost their sanity living for so long in such a tiny cell, but his brother was determined that the experience would not break him. He wasnt bitter and angry. He just wanted change. He wanted justice. It wasnt justice for himself. It was for every inmate there," Mable said. In his book, Woodfox wrote that he was often asked what he would change about his life. My answer is always the same: Not one thing.' All I went through made me the man I am today. I had to be a better person, a wiser person, a more disciplined person to survive," he wrote. I paid a heavy price." ___ Follow Santana on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ruskygal. ___ This story has been corrected to show that Woodfox contracted the coronavirus in July, not June. PHOENIX (AP) Eviction filings in Arizonas largest county have surged higher than at any time in the last 13 years. Data released Thursday by the Maricopa County Justice Court shows that the July filing figure of 6,405 is higher than any month since October 2008, when the number hit 6,975. Its also the second month in a row that the court that includes Phoenix metro has seen a monthly filing total higher than any seen in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic. Not all eviction filings result in lockouts by landlords, which can be forestalled with last minute payments with rental assistance or court agreements. Maricopa County had among the highest levels of evictions in the United States before state and federal eviction moratoriums slowed lockouts during the pandemic. Those eviction bans have long since ended. The White House is calling on states to find ways to prevent evictions as federal emergency rental assistance funds made available during the pandemic start to wind down. New Mexico was lauded this week during a White House summit for its successful programs to rein in evictions, said the state's Supreme Court Chief Justice C. Shannon Bacon. Bacon credited a court-based eviction prevention program that was phased in this year to help tenants and landlords. New Mexico has awarded over $148 million for rent, utilities, emergency housing and moving costs to help more than 44,000 households, the court's administrative office said Thursday. ___ This story has been updated for correct the timeframe for the eviction increase. The surge marked the highest number of monthly eviction filings made within the last 13 years, not 23 years. TonyFuse/Getty Images/iStockphoto An older man was found dead Thursday near the scene of a grass fire burning in Rosehill area just north of Cypress, which is northwest of Houston, according to the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office. The man's cause of death is currently not known and it's not clear if he was killed in the blaze, officials said. They said they believe the man lives in the area but they've been unable to identify him. Officials said that the fire started at approximately 12:50 p.m. and burned through 20 to 30 acres along Bobcat Trail, which has been closed due to the fire. As of 4 p.m. Thursday, the fire had been about 45 percent contained. Xavier Lorenzo/Getty Images The cost of literally everything seems to be going up in 2022, and particularly with gas prices. If you're looking to take the sting off everywhere else in your weekly budget, Sams Club and Costco are still two of the top places to fill up your tank (and find other deals on homewares, groceries, and other essentials too, since you have the membership and all). According to Consumer Reports, gas prices at warehouse clubs like Costco and Sams Club are typically always lower than filling up from a regular gas station pump sometimes savings can be up to 25 cents per gallon, which adds up to pretty significant savings. Alexander Spatari/Getty Images If your fall travel schedule involves time on the coasts or in Mexico, youre going to want to tune into this deal: Right now and literally right now, as the deal is just good through 11:59 p.m. EST Wednesday you can get $25 off one way per person with JetBlue Airlines. Heres how to take advantage of the deal: Head to the airlines website, jetblue.com, select your flight, and use the code FALLSALE when prompted to get the discount off. As a reminder, JetBlue flies direct to LAX, Boston, Cancun, NYC and Fort Lauderdale, so there are some great destinations included in this discount. Democratic candidate for Hamilton Co. Mayor claims Republican opponent trying to trick voters with text message Irish Water is facing renewed calls to clarify its investment plans to upgrade south Longford's supply network following a recent spate of outages and unannounced stoppages. The plea was one which was aired at last week's monthly meeting of Ballymahon Municipal District by a number of local representatives. Cllr Paul Ross said he was particularly perturbed at how anticipated interruptions are relayed to both local politicians and the wider public. The Ballymahon Municipal District Cathaoirleach told of how in one recent episode he learned of a breakdown in supply affecting the outer fringes of his own parish in Legan via social media. There is a serious issue in relation to how they (Irish Water) notify stakeholders, he said. When one recent burst happened in Legan I was on a WhatsApp group and was asked had I water? The Fine Gael county councillor described the way in which breakdowns in water supply are passed onto consumers as ad hoc and in need of urgent review. He also revealed how Ardagh National School has been forced to forego four school days already this calendar year as a consequence of unforeseen disruptions. Fianna Fail's Mick Cahill underlined may of those same anxieties, saying the time had come for the utility provider to disclose its expenditure plans in upgrading Ballymahon's water network. My concern is we are after having a number of leaks in the Ballymahon area and how this has affected both businesses while also creating a lot of annoyance among the general public, he said. I think they (Irish Water) need to set out their plan for the area and where we fit in with their investment programme. A man who failed to show for a court application by probation services regarding his failure to complete a community service order was warned he would be the subject of a bench warrant if he was not before Judge Bernadette Owens at the start of September. Michael Nevin of 12 Glebe View, Longford was sentenced to 240 hours of community service for a breach of Section 3 of the non fatal offence against the person. Probation officer Helen Lowe brought the application for the breach of a community service order before Judge Owens at the sitting of Longford District court. The probation officer said that on May 24 the matter was adjourned to allow the subject of the application, Mr Nevin, complete 50 hours of community service. However Mr Nevin had not attended on any occasion. Solicitor for the defendant Frank Gearty, explained that his client had been in court that morning, but left because he was on his way to a community service appointment. Mr Gearty pointed out that his client has completed 190 hours of community service adding: His behaviour is considerably better and he is moving in the right direction. Judge Owens said she would give the defendant the benefit of the doubt and adjourned the matter to September 6, but warned that if Mr Nevin wasn't not in court on that date a bench warrant would be issued. Security staff will can look forward to a modest pay increase later this month, after an agreement was reached on a new pay rate. A minimum pay rate of 12.50 per hour will come into effect from Monday, 29th August 2022. Damien English TD, Minister of State for Business, Employment and Retail confirmed he has accepted a proposal for an Employment Regulation Order for the Security Industry. The Order also provides for a second increase to a minimum 12.90 per hour from the 1st February 2023. "I would like to thank the members of the Joint Labour Committee and those interested parties who submitted submissions as part of the public consultation for their contributions to this process. The Security Industry Joint Labour Committee is a good example of how effective the reformed Joint Labour Committee system can be when representatives of employees and employers voluntarily negotiate together to identify a mutually beneficial agreement," Minister English said. "I believe that for workers, the advantage of Joint Labour Committees is that they see fair secure terms and conditions such as wage rates, sick pay etc. agreed and, for some employers, the advantage of the system, based as it is on the principle of self-governance, means that they can agree and set minimum pay and conditions, agree on work practices which are custom-made to their industry. This ERO replaces the ERO that was signed in 2017 for the Sector SI 231 of 2017. It provides for an increase in the minimum rate of pay for an adult worker in the sector of 12.50 per hour from the date of signature by the Minister, 12.90 per hour from the 1st February 2023. Since 1 June 2019, the minimum rate of pay has been 11.65. An unsocial hours premium will be paid for hours worked between 21:00 hours and 07:00 hours, provided the worker works at least 3 hours in that period. This will apply from the date of signature by the Minister and is a minimum payment of 8.40 per shift. The proposals set out that a worker who has not attained the age of 18 years shall be remunerated at an hourly rate of pay that is not less than 70 per cent of the rate specified. Overtime rates apply to all hours worked in excess of an average 48 hours per week in the roster cycle and will be paid at a rate of time and a half, a rostered cycle shall be a predetermined working pattern, which can be up to a maximum of six weeks, which has been issued to the worker in writing prior to the commencement of the roster cycle. The Irish premier has said the controversy over a letter about the Ukraine conflict written by the presidents wife has not caused embarrassment for the Government. Micheal Martin said Sabina Higgins has clarified the matter after she issued a statement in defence of the letter which critics claimed drew an equivalence between the actions of Russia and Ukraine. Mrs Higgins, the wife of President Michael D Higgins, condemned Russias illegal invasion of Ukraine and said she was dismayed at the criticism she has received in recent days. Mr Martin said Ireland is a democracy and people are entitled to their own viewpoints, and everyone agrees on the need for peace in Ukraine. Mrs Higgins wrote a letter to the Irish Times last week to criticise an editorial on the conflict. The letter said the fighting would go on until the world persuades President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire and negotiations. Government senators and commentators criticised Mrs Higgins for the letter, which was also published on the presidents official website, before being removed a short time later. Mr Martin said Mrs Higgins has clarified the situation. Asked if the matter had caused embarrassment for the parties involved, Mr Martin said it had not. I think the president, to be fair, also reiterated his strong condemnation of the Russia invasion of Ukraine, Mr Martin added. The Irish Governments position has been consistent from the outset, and remains the position that the invasion is both illegal and immoral and was a terrible act against the people of Ukraine. We live in a democracy too, and we have to be conscious people are entitled to their viewpoints. I think we are all agreed on the need for peace, so theres no argument there. I think we need to keep everything in perspective. I think clarity has come from the president, clarity has come from Sabina Higgins herself, and I think everybody accepts there is no equivalence between Putin and President Zelensky. The spouse of a president may go to a particular opening or a adopt a particular cause for the benefit of communities so that has been happening for some time. That informal practice has built up over the years. The Fianna Fail leader said he did not speak to Mr Higgins about this issue. I think in my view, its time to move on from it now, Mr Martin added. I visited Kyiv myself and met people whose families were very affected by the terror of the war and the crimes that were committed in terms of the murdering of innocent civilians. The towns I visited had no military installations. Our position, along with others in the European Union, is unequivocal, that Russia should withdraw to a minimum to the positions before the war started. Many efforts were made by European leaders to get Vladimir Putin to deter him from starting the war in the first instance. There were many engagements with him. Unfortunately he has a imperialist 19th-century view of life and he resolved to invade Ukraine and he did. The Governments view is that Russia has to stop the violence, stop the war and withdraw from the territories that it is now occupying. The fundamental point is that I dont think anyone is in any doubt of the Irish Governments position. I dont think the Ukrainian government is. Language barriers and mental health issues among Syrian refugees who have settled in Ireland are key areas of concern, a report has found. The Voices of Syrians report, published on Thursday, describes the experiences of 153 Syrian refugees who arrived in Ireland between 2015 and 2019 through the Irish Refugee Resettlement Programme. The report found that healthcare quality is, on the whole, affected primarily by one concern, and that is language. Access to interpreters is inconsistent and frequently falls below standards established in the Irish health system. Refugees from Syria often suffer from trauma, separation from family members and isolation, and in some cases, physical health problems with access to healthcare and supports hampered by language difficulties. In the report, Syrian refugees also described their relationships with family overseas and here in Ireland, their relationships with neighbours, their efforts to convert qualifications and work experience for the Irish labour market, supporting their children and partners, and the challenges of becoming fluent in another language. The report concluded that the area of most significant concern overall is that of language. Despite an overwhelming enthusiasm to learn the language amongst the interviewed refugees, provision of formal language education, supplementary resources, and opportunities for natural language acquisition (through community events and interpreter-supported participation in cultural events) have not been able to keep pace with the demands that refugees face in acquiring the new language and using it in day-to-day life while establishing their new lives. It said that this also has a significant impact in finding work. Family reunification also remains one of the most significant concerns for 43% of participants in this study. Some 30% said they were worried about their family due to unsafe conditions, war, lack of financial support, mandatory military service for young men, and risk of torture of family members. Some had to give up the names of their family members or friends in the Syrian Arab Republic under torture, and they carry guilt and fear from this. Participants described this affecting their mental health, concentration, and ability to learn new languages and skills, the report said. On education, Syrian parents said they were mostly happy with their childrens experiences in schools, with a small percentage experiencing bullying, and participants in the study said they mostly feel safe in their neighbourhoods. Almost all participants said they have made a close friend since arriving in Ireland, over half in their local neighbourhood, while 37% retain a close friend they made in a reception centre. And 99% of participants said they speak daily or weekly with family outside Ireland, and that this is important to their wellbeing. The study found that 95% of participants in this study felt a sense of belonging, and around a third feel confident to ask their neighbours of all backgrounds for help, like in filling forms. There is a strong sense of commitment to live in Ireland, increasing independence and fully engaged citizenship, the report concluded. Under the UNHCR-led refugee resettlement programme, Ireland brought 2,108 Syrian refugees from Lebanon and Jordan by 2021. The majority of those arriving under the programme are family groups, with 40% minors of whom three-quarters are children under 12. The UN said recently that in the first 10 years of the Syrian conflict, which started in 2011, more than 300,000 civilians have been killed the highest official estimate of civilian casualties. More than 13 million Syrians have been displaced by war, with half of them located outside of the Syrian Arab Republic. Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Roderic OGorman said: This report gives voice to refugees and provide important insights for those providing services to those hoping to make a home in Ireland. It is evident from this report that refugees have a wealth of experience to contribute to the Irish State. The report entitled Voice Of Syrians Resettled Refugees in Ireland was commissioned on behalf of the Irish Refugee Resettlement Programme and was undertaken by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Ireland. Lalini Veerassamy, chief of mission of IOM in Ireland, also welcomed the report. She said: The Voices of Syrians report provides invaluable insights on the experience of resettled Syrian refugees in Ireland and emphasizes on the importance of integration indicators. The Minister for Justice said lessons will be learned from the murder of a prisoner who died following a vicious beating at Dublins Mountjoy Prison. Helen McEntee said that while the killing of prisoners is very rare, the tragic death of Robert OConnor is not acceptable in the prison service. Gardai are now treating the investigation as a murder. The 34-year-old died at the Mater Hospital on Wednesday morning, days after he was attacked by a group of men in his cell. Ms McEntee said it is a tragic situation and offered her condolences to Mr OConnors family. I would stress that this is a very rare type of incident to happen within our prisons, its the first time in eight years, Ms McEntee added. Saying that, any type of death of this kind is simply not acceptable within the prison service. There are very strict rules, there are very strict protocols in place within prisons to keep people safe. But obviously this has been upgraded to a murder investigation. Its important that An Garda Siochana are able to conduct that investigation to ascertain exactly what happened. I think with any type of incident of this kind and of this severity, we have to make sure that any lessons are learned and that anything that we can take from this to ensure that it doesnt happen again. Obviously no situation is without risk, but every effort is made and every protocol is put in place within our prisons to prevent this from happening. I think its a very, very sad day for everybody that this has happened. Ms McEntee said there be a review carried out by the Inspector of Prisons, as well as the Irish Prison Service. Obviously, there will be an investigation carried out. There will be a criminal investigation on top of that, and as Ive said, there will always be something that we can learn from a situation like this. As tragic as it is, we need to make sure that if there are to be changes or new mechanisms put in place then we will. Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said Mr OConnors murder is subject to a very thorough investigation. I have to say theres an investigation ongoing, were obviously gathering all the evidence in terms of what the prison authorities can tell us and also then physical evidence around CCTV of the scene itself, Mr Harris said on Thursday. Its subject of a very thorough investigation, obviously a murder investigation and in time then well report the matters to the DPP, but we also are very aware of our responsibility in terms of the system, the Irish prison service and safety in the prisons. Obviously if there are immediate things that we can see within investigation, we need to bring to their attention, we will do so. On a day-to-day basis, there is an exchange of information on intelligence between ourselves and the Irish Prison Service and thats all about preventing crime and the safety and good running of the prisons. He said that gardai are very conscious of the tensions outside prisons, particularly among gangs, and how those can effect what happens inside prisons. We are in day-to-day contact with the prison authorities, that is about that exchange of information around those sorts of tensions, and ongoing feuds that there may be between different crime gangs outside of prison and how they may reflect in the prison, Mr Harris added. So that is an ongoing fundamental piece of the information on intelligence that we would exchange. Meanwhile, a former governor of Mountjoy Prison said there is a sense that the system has failed when a prisoner is killed in an attack. John Lonergan, who was governor of Mountjoy for more than two decades, said a prisoners death can lower morale and is upsetting for staff and prisoners. Mr Lonergan told RTEs Morning Ireland that the fundamental purpose of the prison service, and the top priority of the prison service, is the safe custody of prisoners. There are more than 400 prisoners in protection in Irelands prisons, Mr Lonergan said, which is about one tenth of the prison population. I always felt myself personally that was a failure of Mountjoy and the system, myself included, when somebody lost their lives, especially lost their lives, because thats the ultimate that can happen. So from a management and staff perspective, it is a depressing occurrence and it does certainly lower morale, and its certainly upsetting for people because again, the culture is to ensure the safety of people. When that does happen, there is that sense of failure. We have failed to carry out our number one priority, which is the safety of prisoners, but unfortunately the reality is that you could never guarantee in a prison environment that will never happen again. He said that prisoners should expect that their safety is guaranteed in the prison. The reality is, of course, that theres always a risk factor and unfortunately on rare occasions it actually comes into reality, and people do suffer serious injury and often a very small number of cases lose their lives, he added. He also said that attacks are common. He said that gangland and drugs feuds have been the biggest single contributing factor in a rise in the level of prison violence. Theres a massive increase in violence in prisons over the last 20 years, and this despite a huge amount of resources being put into security and to preventative measures, Mr Lonergan added. There is intelligence that would identify prisoners at risk and the movement of prisoners and the containment of prisons. Police investigating the suspected illegal importation of animals into Northern Ireland have seized 57 puppies, three adult dogs and a cat. A 44-year-old man has been arrested following the operation at the Belfast harbour estate. Detectives believe the animals may have been brought to Northern Ireland from the Republic and were destined for sale in England or Scotland. PSNI Detective Inspector Conor Sweeney said: The male was arrested on suspicion of a number of offences including fraud by false representation and possession of articles for use in fraud. A quantity of cash was also seized. He remains in custody helping with ongoing enquiries. The seized puppies are of assorted breeds including golden retriever, cockapoo, miniature terrier, French bull dog, American bull dog, cocker spaniel, dachshunds and roan spaniel. They are being examined by a vet. Mr Sweeney added: We suspect many of the dogs had been illegally imported into Northern Ireland from Republic of Ireland for onward sale within England and Scotland. Police are absolutely committed to tackling the smuggling of illegal commodities through Northern Irelands ports. Most recent seizures by the Organised Crime Unit have been in relation to illegal drugs. However, as this operation has shown, drugs are not the only items being traded illegally. Smuggling is often conducted by sophisticated cross-border organised criminal groups. Such groups will not discriminate when it comes to the commodity being smuggled should that be drugs, cigarettes, people, or in this case, animals. I use the word commodity as this is how crime gangs view the people and animals they smuggle as nothing but commodities which they can exploit to line their own pockets. Those involved in puppy smuggling do not care about the horrendous impact this type of criminal activity can have both on the animals and on the victims who innocently buy them as family pets. If anyone has information about any illegal activity, please contact police on 101. Health & Wellness By Chris Boyle Published: August 04 2022 Governor Also Announces New York State Department of Health will Launch New Monkeypox Vaccine Equity Effort. Governor Kathy Hochul has announced the latest round of the JYNNEOS vaccine that will be distributed to local health departments. To ensure all vaccine allotments across the country are being put to optimal use, the Phase 3 allocations are being divided by the federal government into three installments and delivered as the states administer vaccines. The first installment for the New York State Department of Health will be made up of 11,840 vaccines (or 40 percent of the Phase 3 total allocation to New York State). New York City will receive approximately 32,000 doses in the first installment of Phase 3, sent directly to the city health department from the federal government. "We continue to distribute more monkeypox vaccines to communities across New York State as we build on our ongoing aggressive efforts to confront this public health emergency head on," Governor Hochul said. "This latest allocation from the federal government will help us reach and protect more people, and we will continue to work around the clock to secure more vaccines, expand testing capacity, responsibly educate the public, and protect those most at-risk." NYSDOH also remains strongly committed to an equitable distribution of vaccine, and eligibility remains focused on individuals with known or likely exposure in areas with the highest number of cases. As part of this effort, 1,000 doses will be designated to launch a new pilot program with AIDS Institute partner providers to ensure equitable access to vaccines and target underserved populations. On Friday, the Governor welcomed federal plans to send approximately 110,000 more vaccines to New York State and New York City in Phase 3 of the federal distribution, with the State getting 30,000 of these doses in the coming weeks through three separate ordering stages. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will be getting approximately 80,000 doses over the same time period. State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett said, "We continue to work aggressively to ensure New Yorkers have the tools needed to slow this outbreak and protect themselves, including equitable access to vaccine, testing, and treatment, as well as, the information needed to understand the virus, identify symptoms, and reduce risk to exposure. With these tools, New Yorkers can protect themselves and their loved ones from this painful virus." Of the 11,840 doses allocated to New York State from the federal government in installment 1 of Phase 3, a total of 4,020 will be distributed to Suffolk County; 860 to Erie County; 600 to Onondaga County; 500 to Albany County; 500 to Monroe County; 80 to Rockland County; 80 to Sullivan County. Another 4,000 doses will be allocated to New York City, which has the vast majority of cases in the state. Certain counties that received allocations in prior phases are still in the process of distributing and administering Phase 2 allotments and will not receive more vaccines at this time. The department will also reserve 200 for cases in counties not yet identified. In accordance with CDC guidance advising Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) for the current Monkeypox outbreak, those already exposed or likely to have been exposed are prioritized in the State allocation to counties. Eligibility includes the following New Yorkers: Individuals with recent exposure to monkeypox within the past 14 days. Those at high risk of a recent exposure to monkeypox, including members of the gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender non-conforming community and other communities of men who have sex with men and who have engaged in intimate or skin-to-skin contact with others in the past 14 days areas where monkeypox is spreading. Individuals who have had skin-to-skin contact with someone in a social network experiencing monkeypox activity, including men who have sex with men who meet partners through an online website, digital application ("app"), or social event, such as a bar or party. Today's announcement builds on New York State's ongoing response efforts on monkeypox, including efforts to secure more vaccines, expand testing capacity, and distribute the latest information and resources to New Yorkers. Last week, Governor Hochul issued an Executive Order declaring a State Disaster Emergency in response to the ongoing monkeypox outbreak. The Executive Order enables the state to respond more swiftly to the outbreak and allows health care professionals to take additional steps that will help get more New Yorkers vaccinated. The Executive Order specifically extends the pool of eligible individuals who can administer monkeypox vaccines, including EMS personnel, pharmacists and midwives; allows physicians and certified nurse practitioners to issue non patient specific standing orders for vaccines; and requires providers to send vaccine data to the New York State Department of Health. Recently, Governor Hochul announced that the federal government had secured an additional 110,000 vaccine doses, resulting in a total of 170,000 doses to New Yorkers to date. Governor Hochul and the Department of Health are continuing their ongoing coordination with White House, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response (ASPR) to ensure that New York continues to receive its fair share of vaccine supply as soon they are available, especially for those New Yorkers in communities with high transmission rates. Last week, New York State Commissioner of Health Dr. Mary T. Bassett declared monkeypox an Imminent Threat to Public Health (ITPH) in New York State. Earlier this month, NYSDOH launched a new SMS-text notification effort to deliver the latest monkeypox information directly to New Yorkers. New Yorkers can sign up for text messageswhich will include alerts about cases, symptoms, spread, and resources for testing and vaccinationby texting "MONKEYPOX" to 81336 or "MONKEYPOXESP" for texts in Spanish. By providing a zip code, New Yorkers can also opt-in for location-based messages. NYSDOH's dedicated website , which stays updated with the latest information, has free, downloadable materials including a palm card, information card, handout, and posters available in both English and Spanish. NYSDOH has already distributed these resources to LGBTQ+ organizations, local county health departments, healthcare providers, and businesses. NYSDOH has also engaged in a paid, digital advertising campaign to get information to communities experiencing higher rates of monkeypox cases. Arts & Culture By Chris Boyle Published: August 04 2022 Visit Montauks first design will be a unique take on a seascape by resident artist, Kylie Ogburn. This week, Montauk Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center , will unveil a new take on a traditional artist in residence program, featuring a rotation of mural-style artwork by resident artists in the community. On an annual basis, artists will be encouraged to submit a piece of work that reflects their vision of the destination to be prominently displayed on the destinations six-foot-tall 3D MTK sign welcoming residents and visitors to the town center. While Montauk is a year-round destination for visitors from around the globe, we are proudly home to a community of talented professionals of which we are thrilled to showcase their authentic perspective on our unique destination, said Paul Monte, co-president of Montauk Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center. This new annual program is a true reflection of the spirit of Montauk and we look forward to sharing this fresh take with those who come from afar to visit our shores. Visit Montauks first design will be a unique take on a seascape by resident artist, Kylie Ogburn, showcasing an above and below ocean scene spotlighting the destinations iconic Shadmoor Cliffs and a surfer surrounded by a school of fish swimming in the sea below. This inaugural piece pays homage to Montauks deeply rooted surf culture and foundation in the fishing industry. Visitors can catch additional works by Ogburn at the newly reopened Bird on the Roof cafe where her hand stenciled designs are proudly displayed on the walls of the restaurant. It is an honor to be the first artist featured in what will, Im sure, become a prestigious program within our community, said Kylie Ogburn, resident artist. My inspiration for this piece pulls from what I feel are core aspects of Montauk that not only draw people to visit, but also make it a special place for everyone who lives here. Im very excited for this opportunity to showcase both my work and highlight parts of Montauk that play a big role in making this place so special to so many people. Locals and visitors can view the newly unveiled signage on Friday, July 29 and snap a picture with the famed MTK sign using #thisismontauk for a chance to be featured on the destinations social media platforms. The finished letters will be unveiled on Friday but locals are invited to stop by the Visitors Center to preview the design while it is in progress. The Montauk Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center will introduce new local artists to the program on a seasonal basis to reflect elements of local culture, events and anniversaries driving visitation to the destination and building pride within the community. Local artists that are interested in showcasing their artwork on the iconic letters may reach out directly to the chamber to learn more about the proposal process. Community, Charity & Cause By Chris Boyle Published: August 04 2022 37 Vietnam War Veterans Receive Long Overdue Recognition and Thanks for Military Service. On Saturday, August 13, 2022, the American Airpower Museum and Honor Flight Long Island will host a reunion of 37 Vietnam era veterans and one WWII veteran. On June4, 2022, Honor Flight escorted this group of veterans on an early-morning free flight to Washington, D.C. Veterans and their guardians visited WWII and Vietnam Memorials, plus ArlingtonNational Cemetery for a Changing of the Guard. They returned to Islip later that evening for a rousing welcome by the Eastern Long Island Police Pipes and Drums Band, plus thunderous applause from hundreds of family and supporters! According to Bill Jones, President, Honor Flight Long Island, West Point 1972 Graduate and U.S. Army veteran, This special flight included37 Vietnam veterans who received long overdue recognition and thanks for their military service. They were accompanied on this flight by one elder comrade, a WWIIveteran of the Greatest Generation. What this flight representedwas a Big Hug to all our veterans from Honor Flight, their families and supporters who make such flights possible, hesaid. On August 13th the museum opens at 10:30 a.m. and the reunion is from 11:00a.m. to 1:00p.m. at AAMs Hangar 3, 1230 New Highway, Farmingdale, NY. The publicis encouraged toattend, applaud and cheerour veterans during the Ceremony of Honors, as each is presented with a personalized Tribute Journal full of photographs taken during their historic day in Washington, D.C.Admission for the 38veterans, their guardians and families, is free. Members of the public arriving for the event from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. may attend free of charge. After 12:00 p.m., regular museum admission is $15for adults, $12for seniors and veterans, and $10for kids (ages 5-12). This great patriotic event includes speeches by HFLI President Bill Jones and AAM President and Founder Jeff Clyman. Elected officials are expected to attend and present citations to the veterans. The U.S. Coast GuardAuxiliary Flotilla Band will play a patriotic medley known as the Armed Forces Salute, featuring five official melodies of the U.S. Armed Forces: Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. Free refreshments will be provided by HFLI. Come honor Long Islands home-grown heroes! HFLI is accepting applications from veterans of WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Long Island veterans are encouraged to sign up by going to the website, www.honorflightlongisland.org . Its important to submit an application, as that will insure placement on our list. Veterans fly for free, thanks to donations from across Long Island. They are accompanied by guardians, able-bodied volunteers who donate $400 (tax deductible) to offset their travel costs. If there is no family member to act as a guardian, HFLI has volunteers ready to step up for the privilege of escorting our heroes to their memorials. Questions? Call Jamie Bowden at (631) 702-2423 or by email at JBowden@southamptontownny.gov AAM and HFLI invites the news media to cover our special Veterans Reunion on Saturday, August13, 2022.Pleasecontact Robert F. Salant, Public Affairs for American Airpower Museum and Honor Flight Long Island, to confirm your participation: (516) 328-3959 or rsalant123@outlook.com Local News, Crime By Chris Boyle Published: August 04 2022 State Police Report 104 Percent Increase in Gun Seizures in 2022 Compared with Same Period in 2021. Governor Kathy Hochul has announced that State Police are reporting a 104 percent increase in gun seizures this year, statistics boosted by a months-long investigation that resulted in the recovery of a large cache of firearms and the arrest of multiple suspects who were involved in a gun trafficking ring. The successful investigation was conducted by the State Police Gun Trafficking Interdiction Unit. Governor Hochul secured $2.5 million to fund 14 GTIU positions in the FY 2023 Budget following the creation of the unit last summer. This substantial uptick in gun seizures is a direct result of these types of strategic investments to support law enforcement initiatives that crack down on illegal firearms. "We continue to make real progress in our aggressive fight against the gun violence that has plagued New York," Governor Hochul said. "Through our support for the new State Police Gun Trafficking Interdiction Unit, we are focused on investigating and bringing to justice those who are trafficking guns into the state and selling them illegally to other criminals who are intent on circumventing the state's gun regulations. I was proud to help secure $2.5 million in State Budget funding for this specialized unit to support their critical work, and today we send a strong message to gun traffickers everywhere: we will hold them accountable for their role in bringing violence to our streets and will continue to seize illegal guns." State Police Superintendent Kevin P. Bruen said, "I want to thank the Governor for her continued support. We are fully committed to slowing the flow of illegal guns into our state, through the commitment of our own resources and collaboration with law enforcement partners at all levels." Late last year, the State Police GTIU started its very first investigation into a gun trafficking ring operating in multiple jurisdictions. The months-long investigation resulted in the execution of search warrants at multiple locations in various counties. Overall, the case resulted in the seizure of 30 guns, including six assault rifles, seven high-capacity magazines, twelve ghost gun pistols and assorted ghost guns parts. Multiple individuals have been arrested. Additional information is being withheld at this time because of pending prosecution. The State Police GTIU was created last summer to target the trafficking of illegal guns in New York, and conducts complex, long-term investigations that focus on mitigating the source of supply. The goal of the GTIU, along with other law enforcement agencies who are partnering on investigations, is to reduce illegal gun possession and the violent crime that often follows. So far this year, State Police have seized 795 guns, a 104 percent increase compared with the 389 guns seized over the same period last year. Overall, 3,166 gun seizures have been reported by all law enforcement agencies in the state compared to 2,181 during the same period last year, an increase of 45 percent. The State Police GTIU is one of several initiatives supported by Governor Hochul to aggressively attack the gun violence epidemic in New York State. This includes the Interstate Task Force on Illegal Guns, a first in the nation initiative bringing together law enforcement representatives from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Quebec, as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and the New York City Police Department, to share intelligence, strategies and tactics related to gun trafficking investigations. Teenager on Bicycle Struck by Car and Air Lifted to Hospital Local News By Long Island Published: August 04 2022 A Serious Vehicular Accident involving a bicyclist occurred on Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 2:45 p.m. in Valley Stream. The Fifth Squad is investigating a Serious Vehicular Accident involving a bicyclist that occurred on Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 2:45 p.m. in Valley Stream. According to Detectives, while attempting to cross Mill Road from the west side to the east side at Roosevelt Avenue, a male was struck by a 2013 Gray Honda Accord traveling northbound on Mill Road. After striking the victim, the vehicle stuck a 2015 Honda Accord that was traveling southbound on Mill Road and continued northbound. The male, 14, suffered multiple injuries and was transported by Nassau County Police Helicopter 6 to a local hospital for treatment. The victim is currently in stable condition. A thorough investigation was conducted and Shakyai Brownlow, 24, of 27 S. Montgomery Street, Valley Stream, was arrested without incident. Defendant Brownlow is charged with Assault 2nd Degree, Leaving the Scene of Incident, Criminal Mischief 3rd Degree, Reckless Endangerment 2nd Degree and Reckless Driving. He will be arraigned on Thursday, August 4, 2022 at First District Letter from space sends Hong Kong student over the moon China Daily) 10:06, August 04, 2022 Hong Kong student Chen Man-lin, 15, receives a letter of reply from Chen Dong, an astronaut aboard the Tiangong space station, on July 19. The letter was delivered and handed to the student by Hong Kong Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong. CHINA DAILY Most people remember the excitement of receiving the first letter from their pen pal. The beauty of the letter is the anticipation, the waiting and the curiosity of what is in the note. Chen Man-lin, a 15-year-old Hong Kong student, was over the moon. Her pen pal was orbiting in the Tiangong Space Station when he wrote inspiring words to her. Chen, a Form 3 student, or ninth-grader, at Pui Kiu Middle School in North Point, Hong Kong, learned in June about a national campaign of writing to astronauts in the Tiangong space station in a campaign called "Bring my dream to Tiangong". She drafted an outline of her letter that evening and detailed every moment of her planned journey and how she gradually got to know what astronauts do and about the nation's aerospace development program. It was not done on impulse. The seed was planted back when Chen was 6-years-old. She had watched a live broadcast of a science lecture by female astronaut Wang Yaping, which was beamed back from space in 2013. Over 60 million primary and middle school students watched the class. The scene of floating water balls and spinning tops, experiments performed by Wang in space to demonstrate the concepts of weight and mass in a zero-gravity environment, captured the heart of Chen and many other youngsters. Since then, Chen has paid special attention to news and developments in aerospace. She put her passion for space into writing, along with her frustration and doubts about her studies and making choices in life. A three-page letter of reply arrived in about a month. Shenzhou XIV astronaut Chen Dong responded to the student. Chen Man-lin was one of the 30,000 students from all over China who took part in the campaign and became the only one chosen in Hong Kong to receive a letter sent from space. Her school threw a big party on July 19, when Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong hand delivered the letter of reply. Astronaut Chen Dong talks to students in Hong Kong in a video. CHINA DAILY Along with the letter, Chen Dong also recorded a video in the space station to share the student's letter and his reply. Teachers and students from the school gathered to watch the video together. In encouraging the student, Chen Dong recalled how he fumbled along the way to becoming an astronaut. He shared how he had conquered drowsiness when he had to start over to learn astronomy, physics, aerospace technology and everything necessary to become an astronaut. He told her how he was tested to the limit during hypergravity training, a technique that largely involves wearing weights for several hours a day. "During the training, every inch of my skin, my cells was put under unbearable pressure. It felt like my internal organs were being 'displaced'," he said. His intense training went on for six years. He almost cut himself off from the outside world during that time and was finally able to qualify for the mission in space. It was his dream that kept him going when he was feeling lost and fatigued, he wrote. On Oct 17, 2016, during his first space mission, Chen Dong was amazed when he saw the universe unfold in front of his eyes for the first time. "To level with you, life is like the sky, which comes with different weather. It is not all sunny days. There will be rainy, snowy and stormy days, making the sky a riot of color. Don't worry about stumbling blocks in life, or you will not have been at your best. Every day you encounter is a valuable sight to behold, making you one of a kind. Please cherish those days, which will reward you with great surprise," he said. "Before I went to bed in the space station, I would always like to search for our country through the windows of the spacecraft. In the gleams of the lights of every household, it is a thriving country. That is what I have been fighting for," he added. The letter from space was also a fitting tribute to mark the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland. Recalling the joy of celebrating the return of Hong Kong 25 years ago, the astronaut also encouraged young people in Hong Kong to follow their dreams and contribute to the development of the city and the country. The letter stuck in Chen Man-lin's mind. "I'll do what he said in the letterstudy harder and work out to keep healthy and stay curious about the universe and make contributions to the nation's aerospace development in the future," she told China Daily. Sun, Hong Kong's secretary for innovation, technology and industry, encouraged the students in the city to contribute to the nation's legacy of aerospace development by challenging themselves, getting to know the nation's development, and getting more involved in the field of technological innovations. Jack Ng Wun-kit, the principal of Pui Kiu Middle School, was also among those feeling the encouragement from space. Ng told China Daily that Hong Kong students need not become astronauts themselves to contribute to the legacy. They could also contribute via Hong Kong based satellite and communication companies in order to help aerospace development. The connections can be small but meaningful. In October 2003, China's first man in space, Yang Liwei, visited the school and planted a tree on the school grounds. That tree now stands tall and strong on the campus. Last year, a delegation of leading aerospace experts and scientists visited the city. During the visit, they met with students, gave lectures on the nation's aerospace development and brought along samples collected from the moon during the country's fifth lunar exploration mission in late 2020 for exhibitions in the city. Professor Quentin Parker, who teaches physics and directs the Laboratory of Space Research at the University of Hong Kong, said the letter campaign is crucial in promoting subjects in the natural sciences to Hong Kong students. As for Chen Man-lin, she had already made up her mind to become a researcher and hopes she can contribute to China's aerospace development. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) (Alliance News) - BlueRock Diamonds PLC on Thursday reported a marked increase in diamond production during July and announced the sale of two large diamonds. The diamond producer explained that weather improvements had increased production during July, with diamonds produced increases to 70,000 tonnes from 57,000 tonnes the previous month. Overall development mined tonnes were improving, BlueRock added, though they remain behind target in the year to date. The firm said it expects the grade will be back to 4 carats per hundred tonnes in September. In its July tender, two diamonds were sold for a total of USD121,716, averaging over USD9,000 per carat. The company said that the market had stabilised since its "exceptionally strong" first quarter, but added that high quality rough diamonds remain in demand. The firm's average price stood at USD607 per carat for the year-to-date. Looking forward, Chair Mike Houston said: "There appears to be a number of good opportunities to both improve and de-risk the Kareevlei operation, particularly in poorer weather conditions, and these are being reviewed with additional investigatory work being completed." BlueRock owns and operates the Kareevlei diamond mine in the Kimberly region of South Africa. Shares in BlueRock were up 0.6% at 8.05 pence on Thursday in London. By Heather Rydings; heatherrydings@alliancenews.com Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. (Alliance News) - Falanx Group Ltd on Thursday said it expects to report organic revenue growth of 14% in the first half of 2022 on the back of improved professional services revenue. The cybersecurity service provider said it now expects to report revenue at GBP3.5 million in the six months that ended June 30, up 14% from GBP3.1 million the previous year. Falanx also said it expects to have narrowed its adjusted loss before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation in the half-year, as it has been trading in line with expectations since the start of the year. Chief Executive Mike Read said: "We are very pleased with the group's performance over the past few months which is benefiting from the focus on growing a pure play cyber security business. The recent investments in sales, marketing and new products has created a considerable pipeline of new business which is more significant than at any time in the group's history." Falanx said this pipeline was not only larger in terms of financial value but also has a "high level of advanced prospects", with the bulk of the pipeline consisting of recurring revenue opportunities for cybersecurity monitoring. Falanx said its full interim results will be released in mid-September. Shares in Falanx were up 14% at 0.66 pence on Thursday in London. By Heather Rydings; heatherrydings@alliancenews.com Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. First Property Group PLC - London-based property fund manager and investor - Leases a further 1,115 square metres of its office building in Gdynia, Poland, representing 9% of the net internal area. Once occupied, which is expected to be in January 2023, around 28% of the building will be occupied. In February 2021, following the expiry of the lease to the former sole tenant, the building was 97% vacant. Says that the rent and service charge payable by tenants will exceed EUR65,000 per month, around EUR800,000 per year, resulting in a net operating loss of EUR30,000 per year from the building. When fully let it is anticipated that the building should yield rent of around EUR2.1 million per year. Chief Executive Officer Ben Habib comments: "The speed at which we are making leasing progress at our office building in Gdynia, against significant market headwinds, is testament to the underlying strength of the Polish economy, this building's location, the quality of space on offer and our leasing team." Current stock price: 28.00 pence 12-month change: down 11% By Sophie Rose; sophierose@alliancenews.com Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. Wildfires raging through Europe this summer have burned the second-largest area on record, even though the region is only halfway through its typical fire season, according to data from the European Union's Joint Research Centre. A dozen European countries have suffered major blazes this year, forcing thousands to evacuate and destroying homes and businesses. Countries including Italy, Spain and France still face extreme fire risk. Wildfires have burned 600,731 hectares in EU countries this year so far, the data showed. That ranks as the second-highest total for any year since 2006, when records began. In 2017, 987,844 hectares were burned. This year's burned area is more than double the size of Luxembourg. No other year in the dataset had seen such a high amount of burned land in Europe by August. The Mediterranean region's typical fire season runs from June to September. Climate change is exacerbating fires, by increasing the hot and dry conditions that help them spread faster, burn longer and rage more intensely. Hotter weather saps moisture from vegetation, turning it into dry fuel - a problem exacerbated by shrinking workforces in some areas to clear this vegetation. Victor Resco de Dios, professor of forest engineering at Spain's Lleida University, said the large fires France and Portugal suffered in early July were "extremely unusual" and demonstrated how climate change is causing the fire season to start earlier and last longer. "Today's fires in the Mediterranean can no longer be extinguished... Large fires are getting bigger and bigger," he said. The JRC data covers wildfires bigger than 30 hectares, so if smaller fires were included the total burned would be even higher. Southern European countries such as Portugal and Greece experience fires most summers, but hotter temperatures are pushing severe wildfire risk north, with Germany, Slovenia and the Czech Republic among those hit this season. Some action can help to limit blazes, such as setting controlled fires that mimic the low-intensity fires in natural ecosystem cycles. But without steep cuts to the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, scientists concur that heatwaves, wildfires and other climate impacts will worsen significantly. China and the United States are experiencing a state of tension never seen before in recent times. The visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has strained relations between the two countries, with China threatening the United States over their actions. But why is the island of Taiwan so important and what has brought the relationship between the two powers to such an extreme? China's threats Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is part of an Asian tour, with Japan and South Korea next on the agenda. However, the choice of Taiwan has infuriated the China, who hit out at the US through statements made by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. "Whoever offends China will be punished," Wang told CCTV. "Those who play with fire will not end well and those who offend China must be punished." It should be recalled that, although Taiwan and the United States have no trade relations, the US is their main arms supplier, making it an important enclave in the event of armed conflict between the two powers. Taiwan, on the other hand, is considered a rebellious province by Beijing, and their alignment with the United States is a cause for concern. Taiwan's importance in this conflict China have intensified their military manoeuvres near the island to demonstrate their displeasure. However, Taiwan has also responded with similar actions, amidst China's fears of possible financial consequences. Therein lies the importance of Taiwan, who are producing 65 percent of the world's microchips, which are key parts for electronic devices such as mobile phones. Patrick Semansky/AP WASHINGTON (AP) The Air Force has filed criminal charges against an airman in connection with an April explosion that injured U.S. troops at a base in eastern Syria. Tech. Sgt. David Dezwaan Jr., an explosive ordnance disposal specialist, is facing several charges including dereliction of duty, destroying military property, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault in the blast that injured four service members. He has been held in confinement by the Air Force since June. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate OXFORD, Mich. (AP) An armed security officer told investigators she thought an active shooting at a Michigan high school was a drill and that one of the bleeding students simply was wearing really good makeup, an attorney suing the school district said Wednesday. Attorney Ven Johnson said he is asking a judge to add the security officer's name to a lawsuit he filed in January against Oxford Community Schools. The suit also names Oxford High School's dean of students, two counselors and three teachers as defendants. Johnson said in an amended complaint that school surveillance video he recently reviewed shows the security officer casually walking around in the hallway" during the Nov. 30 shooting at the high school about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Detroit. She apparently, according to what she told investigators, she was confused because she heard on the radio that there was an ALICE drill, Johnson told reporters. ALICE is an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate. Johnson said the explanation makes no sense because there is no indication that anyone else at the school was notified that a drill was scheduled that day. Such notifications are routine to prevent panic. The security officer, who also is a retired deputy with the Oakland County sheriff's office, can be seen in the surveillance footage opening a door to a bathroom and saw two of the students one who was later killed and one who was later injured. She did not go inside, Johnson said. Prosecutors have said student Ethan Crumbley entered a bathroom with a backpack and came out with a semi-automatic handgun, firing at students while moving down the hallway. The four students who were killed were 16-year-old Tate Myre, 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana, 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin and 17-year-old Justin Shilling. Had she done her job, at least the death of Justin (Shilling) would have been prevented for sure," Johnson said. He wrote in the complaint that the officer also "saw Tate Myres body on the floor with him bleeding to death and informed the investigators that she thought he had really good makeup on. Timothy Mullins, an attorney for the school district, dismissed Johnson's allegations as untrue, suggesting that not only did the security officer not believe the shooting was a drill but suggested she acted courageously. When the facts are known, a single woman without any backup will be shown to be going towards the shooter, Mullins told The Associated Press Wednesday. No backup, unaided, no Kevlar, no waiting, (but) singularly exposing herself to the event." Crumbley, now 16, faces murder and other charges. His trial is expected to start in January. His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, are charged with involuntary manslaughter and accused of failing to keep the gun used in the shooting secure at home and failing to reasonably care for their son when he showed signs of mental distress. They have pleaded not guilty. Also, at least two lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the families of the students who died, were injured or traumatized by what happened. State investigators continue to widen the net with their water sampling at and downstream of the area Tribar Manufacturing reportedly leaked hexavalent chromium into a sewage treatment system that discharges into the Huron River. If hexavalent chromium sounds familiar, it should because it was the topic of discussion in the dramatized biopic Erin Brockovich, which told the story of her legal fight with Pacific Gas and Electric Company and its poisoning of one small town's groundwater. "Hexavalent chromium is a known carcinogen that can cause a number of adverse health effects through ingestion, skin contact or inhalation," a Michigan Department of Heath and Human Services press release reads. According to the release, at 3:21 p.m. Aug. 1, Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy was notified by Tribar Manufacturing that it had released "several thousand gallons of a liquid containing 5% hexavalent chromium into the sewer system." "The sewer feeds the Wixom wastewater treatment plant, which discharges to the Huron River system," the release reads. "The company says it discovered the release Monday but indicated it may have started as early as Saturday morning according to Wixom city officials," the release later read. "It is believed that much of the contaminant already made its way through the treatment plant by the time the release was discovered." Following being notified of the release of hexavalent chromium, MDHHS issued a warning to area residents. "MDHHS is recommending until further notice that all people and pets avoid contact with the Huron River water between North Wixom Road in Oakland County and Kensington Road in Livingston County. This includes Norton Creek downstream of the Wixom Wastewater Treatment Plant (Oakland County), Hubbell Pond (also known as Mill Pond in Oakland County) and Kent Lake (Oakland and Livingston counties)," the warning read. The state began performing river water samples and on Aug. 3 expanded the area the samples were being collected. "EGLE sampled nine locations today, with results expected tomorrow, to help track the pollutants location as it moves downstream," an Aug. 3 release read. "The agency, in concert with partners from across the watershed, is developing a testing plan for coming days and weeks. State investigators also met with Tribar Wednesday to gain information about how the release occurred and other details that may help regulators better protect the public." The first two tests taken Monday did not detect the presence of hexavalent chromium. However, officials said the first two data points aren't sufficient to draw conclusions on the spill. In the meantime, MDHHS issued the following recommendation for the section of Huron River impacted: Michigan Philharmonic Orchestra to play in Port Austin as part... As part of an initiative to bring more art to Port Austin, the Michigan Philharmonic Orchestra... Harbor Beach football kicks off second week of practice Monday, Aug. 15, marked the start of the second week of MHSAA fall practices across the state.... Huron Community Fair 'able to plan for everything without worry' The Huron Community Fair ran at full steam from the fairgrounds in Bad Axe with no more... BARRYTON The owners of 2 Men & A Hen will be showing off more than a hen Saturday with its first annual Farm Day. The inaugural event will be from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 6, and will allow attendees to enjoy a pig roast alongside getting a tour of the 160-acre farm based just south of Barryton. There also will be two raffles for 50 pounds of meat, including chicken, pork and beef. Attendees will get to see rare cattle, including traditional and legacy Irish Dexter cattle, which together have a population of 3,000 in the world according to Ryan Thatcher. Ryan and his husband Christopher Thatcher have owned the farm for six years and specialize in raising unique cattle, chickens, and other meat birds. Ryan Thatcher explained why they wanted to host a farm day on their property. We have a lot of people that always want to come out to our farm and see the animals with a tour and see how we're doing things here." Thatcher said. "It's really hard with our lives to make that a cheap and easy experience for people. So, our goal is with the Farm Day is to do that essentially for free. Doing this event for free is a considerable deal considering normal tours for the 2 Men & A Hen farm cost $150 due to the limited time both men have in their lives with other full-time jobs. Thus, tours are usually geared towards interested buyers. Irish Dexter cattle are not the only unique breeds of animals that 2 Men & A Hen raise on the farm. They also raise pure mangalica pigs, which are a Hungarian breed of pig that entered the U.S. less than 20 years ago. They cant be imported anymore due to the swine flu, thus making this breed rare in the United States. Only 150 are registered in the country, according to Ryan Thatcher. Currently, the farm has over 75 head of cattle, between 40-50 pigs, over 100 egg chickens, and over 160 meat birds including turkey. My husband and I are both nurses, and we were very, very interested in knowing where our food came from." Thatcher said. "We wanted it to have a purpose. So not only do we have super healthy food, because that's our goal, based on how we raise it, but also the other purposes to help save in breeds that are slowly, or very quickly now, disappearing. Because of the specialty of these breeds, they take much longer to raise and provide meat that is high in fat. Our pork is probably the best example, and that is our pork is not anything like what you would see at the store." Thatcher said. "It's true red meat with a nice beautiful white fat. It is the best pork that you can eat or buy. For more information, visit www.twomenandahen.com or visit their Facebook page at 2 Men & A Hen. LANSING The Mecosta County prosecutor soon will find herself on the other side of the bench. Gov.Gretchen Whitmer has appointed Amy C. Clapp to the 49th Circuit Court of Mecosta and Osceola counties. Clapp replaces Scott Hill-Kennedy, who recently retired after serving a judge for the 49th Circuit Court since 2005. Clapp was appointed as prosecutor for Mecosta County in 2021 after serving six years as the chief assistant prosecutor since 2015. During that time, she has served with the Mecosta County Domestic Violence Task Force and the Mecosta County Multi-Disciplinary Team for Child Abuse and Neglect, according to a news release from the governor's office. Prior to her roles in Mecosta County prosecutor's office, Clapp worked as an attorney with Heidi L. Wolf, P.C. According to the news release, she represented clients charged with criminal misdemeanors and felonies, in addition to estate planning, divorce and child custody and civil litigation. She also worked as a assistant prosecutor for Allegan County and as an adjunct professor for Aquinas College, her alma mater, where she taught Constitutional law. Her Juris Doctor degree is from Michigan State University Law School. I am so grateful to Gov. Whitmer for this appointment to the 49th Circuit Court, Clapp said in the release. I have dedicated my career to public service, and I'm honored to have the opportunity to continue that service for the citizens of Mecosta and Osceola counties. "As judge, I hope to increase accessibility and transparency of the court, promote civility and respect, and apply the law fairly and justly. I'm humbled by this opportunity and excited beyond measure. Clapp lives in Stanwood with her husband, Andrew. Her term begins Aug. 22 and run through Jan. 1, 2025. To continue in the role after finishing out the partial term, she will need to run for reelection in November 2024 Whitmer also appointed Amanda L. Eicher to the 1st District Court of Monroe County. I am proud to appoint Amy and Amanda, two skilled legal professionals with a range of experience, to the bench, Whitmer said in the release. They will both serve the people of Michigan honorably and uphold the law, ensuring that our families and communities are safe and justice is delivered. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate ISTANBUL (AP) The first grain ship to leave Ukraine and cross the Black Sea under a wartime deal passed inspection Wednesday in Istanbul and headed on to Lebanon. Ukraine said 17 other vessels were loaded and waiting permission to leave, but there was no word yet on when they could depart. A joint civilian inspection team spent three hours checking the cargo and crew of the Sierra Leone-flagged ship Razoni, which left Odesa on Monday carrying Ukrainian corn, a U.N. statement said. The Joint Coordination Center team included officials from Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the United Nations, who signed deals last month to create safe Black Sea shipping corridors to export Ukraine's desperately needed agricultural products as Russia's war upon its neighbor grinds on. Ukraine is a major global grain supplier but the war had blocked most exports, so the July 22 deal aimed to ease food security around the globe. World food prices have been soaring in a crisis blamed on the war, supply chain problems and COVID-19. Although U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Razoni's journey a significant step, no other ships have left from Ukraine in the past 48 hours and no explanations have been given for that delay. A U.N. statement said inspectors gained valuable information from the Razoni's crew about its voyage through the Black Sea maritime humanitarian corridor and the coordination center was fine-tuning procedures. The Turkish Ministry of National Defense tweeted a picture of an inspector reaching into the Razoni's hold and touching some of its 26,527 tons of corn for chicken feed. The Razonis horn rang out as the inspectors left the ship, and then it headed off to Lebanon. The checks seek to ensure that outbound cargo ships carry only grain, fertilizer or food and not any other commodities, and that inbound ships are not carrying weapons. An estimated 20 million tons of grain most of it said to be destined for livestock has been stuck in Ukraine since the start of the 6-month-old war. Ukraines top diplomat said Wednesday that more ships are ready to carry much-needed grain and food out of the countrys Black Sea ports. Further ships are already ready for departure. They will depart from the ports that are part of the grain initiative in accordance with the agreed schedule, and we hope that everything will work out and the Russian Federation will not take any steps that would destroy these agreements, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said at a joint press conference in Kyiv with his Estonian counterpart. Kuleba said the U.N.-backed deal is beneficial to Ukrainian farmers, it is beneficial to the Ukrainian economy, and it is beneficial to the world. " It is now Ukraine that is, literally, saving the world from further growth in food prices and from hunger in individual countries, he said. Still, a Black Sea voyage entails significant risks because of the war. Two civilian ships hit explosive devices there last week near the Danube Rivers Bystre estuary, according to Bridget Diakun, a data reporter at Lloyds List, a global shipping publication. Analysts say authorities' first priority is bringing out vessels that have been stuck for months at the three Ukrainian ports covered by the deal. Sixteen ships loaded with grain have been stuck at the ports of Odesa and Chernomorsk since Russia's invasion, according to Lloyds List. The U.N. official who helped negotiate the Russian deal with the U.N. aimed at ensuring unrestricted access to world markets for the countrys food and fertilizer says there are still obstacles to overcome. U.N. trade chief Rebeca Grynspan told a U.N. news conference Wednesday by video from Geneva that some obstacles Russia faces in terms of finance, insurance, shipping and transport of its grain and fertilizer have been clarified by the United States and European Union. But she said there is still a major bottleneck -- getting the private sector to accept that the U.N.-Russia agreement will enable their companies to be involved in getting Russian grain and fertilizer shipped to global markets without the threat of sanctions. There are no U.S. or EU sanctions on food or fertilizer exports, but companies engaged in related fields have been reluctant to take part. Russias war with Ukraine has had a chilling effect on the private sector, Grynspan said. So, an important part of the private sector has stopped their dealings in food and fertilizer. Grynspan, the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, said some grain and fertilizer are being exported from Russia but at very high costs. She explained that half the increase in grain prices comes from increases in transport and logistics costs. That is the pressure that we want to ease, she said. Grynspan said the U.S. and EU clarifications are being evaluated by the private sector as we speak. Grain stockpiles are expected to keep growing. Despite the war, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal estimated his country would harvest up to 67 million tons of grain this year, up from 60 million tons last year. A senior official from a leading Ukrainian farm association reckoned Ukraine would have about 50 million tons of grain for export this year. Before the war, Ukraine exported around 5-6 million tons of grain per month, according to Denys Marchuk, the deputy head of the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council. In other news Wednesday: __ U.S. officials believe Russia is working to fabricate evidence concerning a deadly strike on prison housing prisoners of war in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia is looking to plant false evidence to make it appear that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the July 29 attack on Olenivka Prison that left 53 dead and wounded dozens more, a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence finding told The Associated Press. Russia has said that Ukraines military used U.S.-supplied rocket launchers to strike the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk Peoples Republic. __ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy referred to Russia as number one among global sponsors of terror, and called for the creation of a bolstered global security architecture that ensures that no state can ever again resort to terror against another state. __ Russian forces kept up their bombardment of the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv. Regional governor Vitaliy Kim said the shelling damaged a pier, an industrial enterprise, residential buildings, a garage cooperative, a supermarket and a pharmacy. The mayor of Mykolaiv, Oleksandr Sienkevych, told The Associated Press that 131 civilians have died so far in the city from Russian shelling and 590 others have been seriously injured. __ The Ukrainian military said Ukrainian forces pushed back over a dozen Russian assaults in the key eastern province of Donetsk and claimed that none of the Russian attempts to advance over the previous 24 hours were successful. Still, Russian shelling killed at least four civilians in Donetsk province, Ukraines presidential office said. Zelenskyy has ordered all those in the embattled province to evacuate as soon as possible. __ The U.N. chief says he's appointing a fact-finding mission in response to requests from Russia and Ukraine to investigate an explosion at a POW prison in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine that reportedly killed 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war and wounded another 75. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters that he doesnt have authority to conduct criminal investigations but does have authority to conduct fact-finding missions. ___ Robert Badendieck and Mehmet Guzel in Istanbul, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, Joanna Kozlowska in London and Edith Lederer in New York contributed to this report. ___ Follow APs coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday. Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and multiple sharp force injuries, while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Their 6-year-old daughter, Lula Schmidt, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation, officials said. All three family members deaths have been ruled homicides. The Schmidts 9-year-old son, who was with his family on the camping trip, survived the attack without physical injuries, but investigators have not said whether he was in the tent when the attack happened. The department confirmed Thursday that the killer was Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Nebraska, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the family was attacked early on the morning of July 22 in their tent at the Maquoketa Caves State Park campground. Sherwin was at the park camping with his parents at the time of the attack, according to police and Sherwin's mother. Investigators said all evidence collected substantiates that Sherwin acted alone, but police have not revealed a motive for the killings. Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Department of Public Safetys division of criminal investigation, said Thursday that investigators have indications as to what the motive was, but don't plan to release that information. Police who swarmed the park about 180 miles (290 kilometers) east of Des Moines in the wake of the shooting found Sherwins body outside the campground but within a wooded area of the park. A memorial to celebrate the lives of the Schmidts was held Tuesday in their hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, drawing about 200 people. ___ Associated Press reporter Michael Tarm in Chicago contributed to this report. ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) A Florida woman has sued Equifax claiming she was denied a car loan because of a 130-point mistake in her credit report that she says was part of a larger group of credit score errors the ratings agency made this spring due to a coding problem. The class action lawsuit was filed in federal court in Atlanta on behalf of Nydia Jenkins and potentially millions of others who applied for credit during a three-week period earlier this year. The Jacksonville, Florida woman was forced to accept another, less favorable loan that was $150 per month more than the one she was turned down for because of the error, according to the lawsuit. Credit scores provide lenders with a picture of how a big a risk a borrower is, and they typically range from 300 to 850 points, with a higher score usually resulting in better terms for people applying for mortgages, auto loans or mortgages. The lawsuit says the errors violated federal law that governs credit reporting agencies. In the modern economy, millions of Americans rely on credit to make the most important purchases of their lives, from homes to cars to appliances and everything in between," John Morgan and John Yanchunis, the attorneys representing Jenkins, said in a statement. We believe that many of the people impacted some of whom may still be unaware of what happened suffered severe financial consequences." The errors occurred over three weeks from mid-March to early April. An analysis Equifax conducted shows that there was no shift in a majority of credit scores, and for those who did experience a change, only a small number would have received a different credit decision, Equifax said in an emailed statement on Thursday. While the score may have shifted, a score shift does not necessarily mean that a consumers credit decision was negatively impacted," the Equifax statement said. Equifax said in another statement earlier this week that the problems stemmed from a coding issue that resulted in the potential miscalculation of certain attributes used in model calculations." In that statement, the firm said less than 300,000 consumers had a score shift of 25 points or more. Again, we do not take this issue lightly," Equifax said. Besides seeking an undisclosed amount of damages to the fullest extent allowable by law," the lawsuit is asking for an audit to identify which customers' credit scores were affected; money for credit repair services; and the establishment of a fund to reimburse customers for any out-of-pocket expenses they incurred from the errors. In 2017, hackers broke into Equifax in a breach that exposed the financial information of 147 million Americans. A federal court in 2020 approved a $380 million settlement of class actions lawsuits, with no finding or judgment of wrongdoing made. The settlement required Equifax to invest a minimum $1 billion over five years on data security. ___ Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) African nations are free to buy grain from Russia but could face consequences if they trade in U.S.-sanctioned commodities such as Russian oil, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Thursday. Countries can buy Russian agricultural products, including fertilizer and wheat, Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. But she added that if a country decides to engage with Russia, where there are sanctions, then they are breaking those sanctions. We caution countries not to break those sanctions because then ... they stand the chance of having actions taken against them, she said. Thomas-Greenfield spoke in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, after a meeting with President Yoweri Museveni, a U.S. ally who has not criticized Russias invasion of Ukraine and has expressed sympathy with Moscow. Uganda is the U.S. official's first stop on an African tour that will include visits to Ghana and Cape Verde. Her trip comes a week after the Africa visit of Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who dismissed charges that his country's invasion of Ukraine is solely responsible for a dangerous food crisis in countries ranging from Somalia to South Sudan. Lavrov blamed food shortages in the market on the absolutely inadequate reaction of the West, which announced sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are key global suppliers of wheat, barley, corn and sunflower oil, with fighting in the Black Sea region, known as t he breadbasket of the world, pushing up food prices, threatening political stability in developing nations and leading countries to ban some food exports. Many African countries including some with areas that are on the threshold of famine depend heavily on grain imports from Russia and Ukraine. Thomas-Greenfield insisted that sanctions imposed by Washington are not to blame for rising food prices in Africa and elsewhere. She said the U.S. seeks to strengthen existing partnerships in African countries such as Uganda and spoke of Museveni, an authoritarian who has held power for 36 years, as a regional leader with whom the U.S. has mutual interests. Uganda is one of 25 African nations that abstained or didnt vote in the U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Russias invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. Many countries on the continent of 1.3 billion people have long-standing ties with Moscow, dating back to the Cold War when the Soviet Union supported their anti-colonial struggles. Museveni said during Lavrov's visit that Russia has been a friend to the East African country for more than 100 years, suggesting he felt under pressure to support the U.S. position on the war in Ukraine. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate DANBURY A steady trickle of people walked through the ornate doors of a local church Thursday afternoon to attend the wake for a woman and her three children who police say died in a triple-murder-suicide last week in their home. The wake is slated to go until 9 p.m. Thursday at St. Peter Church in Danbury. The funeral will take place at 10 a.m. Friday at the church. Danbury police said 36-year-old Sonia Loja killed her three children Junior Panjon, 12, Joselyn Panjon, 10, and Jonael Panjon, 5 before taking her own life on July 27. Family and friends were left reeling last week in the wake of the deaths, as a makeshift memorial grew on the front step of the familys Whaley Street home. The childrens father, Pedro Panjon, said through an interpreter last weekend that his wife became concerned about paying for bills after state officials ordered her to shut down her day care business. Staff from the state Office of Early Childhood visited the home multiple times in June after receiving a complaint of an unauthorized day care being run at the home. Panjon said his wife used the earnings from that business to help cover their expenses and was sending money to her family in Ecuador. One of Lojas day care clients was Gabi Vasquez, who attended the wake Thursday afternoon. Loja babysat Vasquezs 6-year-old son. She took care of my son as if he were her own, Vasquez told CTInsider in Spanish. She was the best person I could have found to take care of my son. Vasquez said she didnt notice a large change in Lojas behavior. However, she said Loja did confide in her that she was suffering from depression. On the day of the murder-suicide, Loja called Vasquez around 9 a.m., saying she wouldnt be able to watch her son until she got a license from the state. I believe she did what she did because she was depressed, Vasquez said. If she had been well, she was incapable of doing something like that. Efren Otabalo, Panjons cousin, said people should talk to each other more about their emotions and how theyre feeling. We should be more united, so that something like this does not happen again, Otabalo said in Spanish outside the wake on Thursday. Family and friends were not the only ones in attendance at the wake Thursday. A handful of police cars surrounded the church while members of the community went inside. Andrea Montoya, an Ecuadorian woman from the community, went to the wake with her two children. It has affected the community a lot, she said in Spanish. Montoya said she couldnt understand why Loja took the lives of her own children. Only she and God know why she did it, Montoya added. Cecilia Guallpa, an Ecuadorian resident of Danbury, was in tears outside of the church. It hurts a lot, she said. It has affected us a lot. She, like others, called for community members to better communicate with one another, especially about mental illness. It has affected all of Danbury, she said. Pedro Panjon said he found his wife and children when he returned home from work last week. When I came back from work, I found them, Pedro Panjon said in Spanish last week. I opened the door and the first thing I found was a letter, and it explained to me that my wife was taking my kids, that she heard voices. He said his children were happy, joyful, sociable. Normal, like any happy kids, he added. Walter Garcia, who runs the Facebook page Danbury Al Dia with information for the Hispanic community in the city, said members have raised over $5,000 for Pedro Panjon. He presented him with a check on Thursday. He said Sonia was a member of the group and was often recommended on the page as a good babysitter. Julio Lopez, another Ecuadorian community member, said the murder-suicide has had a big impact on the community. As an Ecuadorian, it hurts me a lot, he said. Previous reporting by Sandra Diamond Fox and Alex Putterman contributed to this report. The Defense Department will extend its program meant to help provide care for military dependents diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder through 2028 to evaluate its effectiveness, the agency announced Thursday. In a Federal Register notice, DoD officials said research at the University of Rochester, as well as a newly required review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, need additional time, and they have decided to extend the program past its current Dec. 31, 2023, sunset date to support the studies. The program, formally known as Tricare Comprehensive Autism Care Demonstration, was started in 2014. Read Next: Airman Accused of Insider Attack on US Base in Syria That Injured 4 Troops "While much information has been learned about [applied behavior analysis therapy, or ABA] while administering services under the demonstration the department needs time to further evaluate the goals of the demonstration," officials wrote in the notice. "In addition, by extending the Demonstration, the Department will not only be able to fully implement the program improvements, but also will continue to gain greater insight and understanding of the effectiveness of ABA services being delivered to Tricare beneficiaries based on outcome data," they added. The program provides ABA services to Tricare-eligible beneficiaries diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. ABA therapy consists of intense, one-on-one instruction to autism patients that focuses on promoting appropriate behavior, social skills, communication and emotional expression. The demonstration project also covers telehealth services to provide support and training for parents, introduced at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2021, the program underwent significant changes, with the DoD combining several benefits under one umbrella and broadening services beyond ABA. Under the revised program, Tricare began covering group treatment for autism, if deemed appropriate, and families were assigned a care coordinator to develop care plans and coordinate therapy and treatment. From its inception, the demonstration project has drawn both support and criticism, with proponents pressing for broad access to early, intense intervention they say contributes significantly to improved quality of life for patients and their families, and the DoD raising concerns about the effectiveness of ABA therapy. A 2020 DoD report to Congress noted that the current demonstration project "and the delivery of ABA services, is not working for most Tricare beneficiaries." But a year later, the 2021 report found that 57% of participants in the program made "statistically significant improvements," while 43% showed no improvement or worsening symptoms. Given the total cost of the program -- $385.6 million in fiscal 2020, more than double the cost in 2015 -- the DoD believes it is prudent to study the therapies and treatment and keep close watch on the program's providers. The University of Rochester was awarded a contract in 2018 to evaluate traditional intensive ABA compared with modified ABA services to see whether less intensive, time-limited ABA is as effective as the more extensive traditional therapy. The National Academies is studying the effectiveness of the DoD's Autism Care Demonstration and will make recommendations to the DoD based on its analysis. "The findings may offer more clinical program choices to families, potentially identifying variables beneficial to clinical success. Findings may also lead to lowering costs to families and payers while also increasing access to effective and targeted ABA services," DoD officials wrote in the Federal Register notice. According to the report, the average age of children enrolled in the program was 8 in 2020 and the average cost per participant is $24,569. Of the 16,610 enrolled, more than 3,700 children exceeded the annual $36,000 threshold for expenditures, while services for 325 patients exceeded $100,000 each per year. -- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime. Read Next: Tricare Seeking Right Mix of Therapies for Kids with Autism The Department of Defense announced Thursday that Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder will be the Pentagon's newest spokesperson -- putting a uniformed officer in the role of press secretary. Ryder currently serves as the Air Force's director of public affairs and will replace John Kirby, who left the position this spring. Kirby, a retired rear admiral who has served as press secretary twice, was also the last spokesperson to serve in uniform when he assumed the role for the first time in 2013. "Pat will fill a critical role, leading our efforts to provide timely, accurate information to the media, and through the media to the American people," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a press release Thursday. Read Next: Veterans Can Start Filing New Claims Now for 23 Illnesses Covered Under New Law Ryder began his military career in 1992 when he was commissioned into the Air Force through the University of Florida's Reserve Officer Training Corps program. Over the last 30 years, he has held junior public affairs roles in peacekeeping missions in the '90s, a strategic planning job in Iraq, a spokesman role for the U.S.' counter-ISIS operation, and a top media relations job with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "He brings a wealth of experience, including joint and deployed assignments that will serve him well as he informs the media of our activities around the world," Austin said. Some have questioned whether a uniformed officer should serve as spokesperson -- performing at times overtly political work for a political appointee -- given the military's traditional reluctance to take on a political stance. Kirby was the first press secretary to serve in uniform as a Navy rear admiral. In 2015, he was ousted from the position by newly appointed Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who wanted to "revisit" the job, according to Politico. "One of the questions that I think [Carter] wants to rhetorically ask, or consider, is not just who the individual is, but what that individual represents, and whether it's appropriate or not to have a uniform up here," Kirby said almost 10 years ago. "Those are fair questions for him to ask as he comes into the job." Austin voiced his support in a press release for the one-star taking on the press secretary job. "I am confident that I will benefit from his counsel, and that the American people will benefit from his ability to clearly and consistently communicate our efforts to protect the United States and its interests around the world, take care of our people, and strengthen our unrivaled alliances and partnerships," Austin said in the statement. Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct how long Ryder has served. -- Drew F. Lawrence can be reached at drew.lawrence@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @df_lawrence. Related: Kirby to Step Down as Pentagon Press Secretary By October 1944, World War II was looking pretty bleak for the Axis powers, especially in Europe. The Allies had landed in Normandy and were advancing inland in France. In Italy, they captured Rome. The Italian government had fallen, and the Allies were pushing northward past Florence. Lt. Martin James Monti was desperately flying an unarmed, modified P-38 Lightning photo reconnaissance plane across the Italian Front. Monti was an Army Air Forces pilot, but he wasn't on a recon mission. He had stolen the plane and was headed for the Nazi-occupied city of Milan to defect to the German Army. Monti was 23 years old when he left his duty station near Karachi, in what is today Pakistan, and made his way to Italy to steal an aircraft. He'd grown up in St. Louis,born into a German and Italian family. When the U.S. entered World War II, Monti and his four brothers joined the military. The brothers had all joined the Navy in 1942. Monti would report for training in the Army Air Forces in 1943. Before he left for training, however, he made a pit stop in Detroit. It was there he met Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin was a radio priest whose weekly broadcasts were cut off by the U.S. government in 1939 for their anti-Semitic messages and outspoken support for some of the anti-Bolshevik policies enacted by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Martin James Monti was one of Father Coughlin's millions of listeners, and had grown up tuning into the Catholic priest's fiery speeches. Monti stopped in Detroit to meet with the priest before reporting for duty. It's believed that the two discussed how Monti could support Coughlin's ongoing support for Nazi Germany and work against the Soviet Union, as an airman. When Monti landed the plane on the Nazi airfield on Oct. 13, 1944, he was captured as a regular prisoner of war, but soon convinced his captors that he was defecting. His plane was seized for intelligence purposes, and Monti "offered his services to assist in the German war effort." From there, he was sent to Berlin, where he began broadcasting for the Overseas Service of the German State Radio under the name Capt. Martin Wiethaupt, using his mother's maiden name. He told his American listeners that he was a U.S. Army officer who had deserted the American forces, because they were fighting the wrong enemy. Nazi Germany wasn't America's enemy. He believed the Germans should be an American ally, and that the entire war was a Communist plot to defeat the Soviet Union's Fascist enemies and enslave the whole world. But Monti wasn't much of a radio broadcaster, and before long, Mildred Gillars (also known as "Axis Sally") was back in his time slot. Monti was then made an officer in the Waffen-SS, where he helped create propaganda leaflets for Allied prisoners of war. This job didn't last long, either. As the Allies closed in on Berlin, he escaped, making his way back to Italy where he could surrender to American forces. He was captured just 48 hours after V-E day. The Army had no idea Monti had defected to Nazi Germany. They charged him only with desertion and theft of the reconnaissance plane, for which he received a 15-year suspended sentence and was shipped back to the U.S. In 1947, he was readmitted to the Army as a private. By the time he was ready to leave the military in 1948, the FBI had figured out what happened after Monti stole the P-38. He was rearrested as he was leaving with his discharge papers and charged with 21 counts of treason, which potentially carried a death sentence. He confessed and pleaded guilty. At his 1949 hearing, his defense attorney argued that Monti (now a sergeant) was raised in a vehemently anti-Bolshevik family to believe that Communism was the enemy of the church and the government -- to a "fanatical" degree. Yet, among the millions of listeners of Father Coughlin and the millions who joined the armed forces during World War II, Monti was the only soldier to defect to Nazi Germany. The judge sentenced Monti to 25 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for his treason. Monti showed no emotion as the sentence was read and went to Fort Leavenworth Prison. He wasn't paroled until 1960, when he tried to have his confession tossed out and sentence reversed. It didn't work. He moved to South Florida, where he died in 2000. -- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook. Want to Learn More About Military Life? Whether you're thinking of joining the military, looking for post-military careers or keeping up with military life and benefits, Military.com has you covered. Subscribe to Military.com to have military news, updates and resources delivered directly to your inbox. The Nationals announced theyve placed infielder Alcides Escobar on unconditional release waivers. The move clears an active roster spot for Luke Voit, who is expected to join the club tomorrow. Washingtons 40-man roster count drops to 39. Escobar has spent the past season and a half in the nations capital. The veteran had been playing on a minor league deal when the Nats acquired him last July while Trea Turner was battling an injury. Washington brought Escobar almost immediately to the big leagues, and he became the primary shortstop after Turner was dealt to the Dodgers at the trade deadline. It was his first MLB action in three years, and the longtime Kansas City shortstop acquitted himself well. Through 349 plate appearances, Escobar hit .288/.340/.404 with four home runs and a trio of steals. He didnt walk often or hit for much power, but he only struck out at a 16% clip and hit for a high enough batting average to remain productive. Unsurprisingly, he no longer rated as highly with the glove as he had at his peak, but he was a valuable enough experienced presence that Washington signed him to a $1MM extension last October. Escobars 2022 production hasnt been good, however. Hes seen his offensive output plummet to .218/.260/.282 through 131 trips to the plate. Hes striking out more often than average (24.4%) for the first time in his career, and hes collected just six extra-base hits (four doubles and two triples). Escobar has also been charged with five errors in 307 2/3 innings at shortstop, and hes lost playing time as the rebuilding Nats have looked to younger players. Luis Garcia has taken over as the primary shortstop, and while the 22-year-old is miscast there, Washington just brought in rookie shortstop C.J. Abrams in the Juan Soto trade. Given Escobars struggles, its hard to envision another team claiming him on waivers. The 35-year-old would be a free agent if he passes through unclaimed and seems likely to explore minor league opportunities elsewhere. Nationals reliever Tanner Rainey underwent Tommy John surgery this afternoon, the club informed reporters (including Mark Zuckerman of MASNsports.com). Its a predictable development after the hard-throwing reliever landed on the 60-day injured list with a UCL sprain in his elbow last month. Acquired from the Reds heading into the 2019 season, Rainey has been one of Washingtons better relievers over the past couple years. Hes racked up huge strikeout and swinging strike numbers commensurate with a fastball that sits in the upper-90s and can get into the triple digits. Raineys control has wavered, but his high-octane arsenal has led manager Dave Martinez to progressively give him higher-leverage work the past three seasons. This seasons 28.1% strikeout percentage was one of the lower rates of Raineys career, but its still a few points north of the league average. Hed trimmed his walk rate to a more manageable 10.2% after issuing free passes at a massive 16.6% clip last year, and he carried a 3.30 ERA through 30 innings before the injury. The rebuilding Nationals seemed likely to shop Rainey in advance of the trade deadline, but the elbow injury scuttled those plans. Rainey will miss most or all of the 2023 campaign rehabbing, with Tommy John recoveries often taking 14-plus months. Its a disappointing blow for the 29-year-old. Rainey has surpassed three years of service this year, and hell remain arbitration eligible through the 2025 campaign. Hes making $860K this year and will be in line for a small raise next winter if tendered a contract. Actress and TV host, Nana Ama McBrown, has justified why women should undergo liposuction without any fear if they have the resources. According to her, it is one of the process for women to maintain and enhance their bodies and they should be able to go through it if they find it necessary. She made the statement during SHE Summit Mentorship Africa Series in Kumasi under the theme, Breaking the Bias: Leading by Example for a Sustainable Tomorrow'. Liposuction. I am saying it and Im not shy because if you are growing and you are comfortable and you have the resources and you are healthy. You still need maintenance. If you buy a car in the year 2000 and you drive it through to the year 2002, so cant you spray the car? Please tell me, so wont you change the bonnet, Eii. If you live a comfortable life and you can afford it please do, she said. The statement followed recent allegations that Nana Ama had undergone the knife to enhance her buttocks. Given the country's current economic difficulties, the Deputy Majority Leader in Parliament, Alexander Afenyo-Markins has acknowledged the current economic challenges. According to the lawmaker, it is clear Ghanaians are unhappy with government. He added during a discussion on the Accra-based PM Express show on Tuesday, August 2 which Modernghana News monitored that many Ghanaians blame the government for the failure of their businesses. We have been doing some research, and it shows people are frustrated with this government. The ordinary Ghanaian whose business has been affected will find someone to blame, and that is the government, he stated. He is concerned that if nothing is done to resolve the crisis, Ghanaians will kick them out in the 2024 general elections. We are in very challenging times so if you allow any vacuums, the frustration will force people to boot you out. So I have been working. There is a lot of frustration in the system, and the opposition will have a windfall if we relax, he admitted. Mr. Afenyo Markins continues If you don't explain or engage, the people will vote against you. Sometimes people vote for the opposition not because they are better but because people are frustrated. He added that in spite of all the criticism, The NDC in opposition has not proposed any alternatives that resonate with the people." Final year students of the Bolgatanga Technical Institute (BOTECH) say the closure of the school will affect their academic performance in the ongoing Technical and Vocational Education Training Examination. The Upper East Regional Security Council on Tuesday shut down the school following a riot by the students that resulted in the destruction of school property and vehicles of teachers. The students were demanding to see their teachers and colleagues, who had been picked up by officers from the National Intelligence Bureau for engaging in examination malpractices. The students while demanding to see the arrested persons vandalized school properties including seven vehicles. The Regional Security council directed the students only to report to the school to write their papers and leave when they were done. Some students speaking to Citi News said they were left stranded last night as they had nowhere to sleep. I can say, I am zero percent prepared because of what happened yesterday. I was unable to sleep because I didnt have anywhere to sleep, and when it happens like that, how are you able to learn? Another said, I am hungry, and how can you learn when you are hungry? I am leaving everything to God. I know God will help me, I dont know what I will do now, but I know I will pass. I am also from Salaga and there is no place for me to sleep, so I am just hanging around, so I am unable to learn. The students are thus appealing to the Upper East Regional Security Council (REGSEC) to review its directive. REGSEC shut down the Bolgatanga and Bawku Technical Institutes on Tuesday, August 2, 2022, following students riot. The students will only be permitted to write their Technical and Vocational Education and Training Examination from home. The female students of BOTECH, say, REGSECs decision will worsen their vulnerability and possible exploitation by men to survive until the end of the examination, hence their call for a review. Only final year students are allowed to report to their schools to write the examination and immediately leave the schools premises after the end of the paper. On Wednesday morning, final year students of BOTECH were thoroughly searched and exams halls changed before writing an Integrated Science paper in order to reduce examination malpractice. But a few minutes into the paper, some foreign materials were taken from some students. However, at the end of the paper, students commended invigilators for their professionalism. ---citinewsroom All but one passengers on-board a bus travelling from Kumasi to Takoradi in the Western Region are feared dead after a head-on collision at Ayensudo in the Central Region. The 14 out of 15 passengers died instantly on Wednesday afternoon when the bus they were travelling in collided head-on with a truck loaded with cement. Eyewitnesses told 3news.com that the truck with registration number GM 2670-12 was overtaking other vehicles at a point on the highway engulfed in smoke due to a near-by bush burning. Richard Karikari told 3news.coms Kwame Karkarba that the truck driver, who took to his heels after the accident, may have been blinded by the smoke. He is said to have run his truck straight into the Takoradi-bound bus, which had 15 passengers aboard. The only survivor, a female, is said to have been rushed to the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital for emergency care. The Elmina Command of the Motor Transport and Traffic Directorate (MTTD) immediately deployed officers to the scene to ensure free flow of traffic. Source: 3news.com|Ghana 04.08.2022 LISTEN The NPP Germany branch has accused the main opposition NDC of peddling lies and deception following the recent appointments of some Supreme Court judges by President Akufo-Addo pending parliamentary approval. President Akufo-Addo on Tuesday, 26 July 2022, appointed four new justices to the Supreme Court bench. A former Ranking Member of the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee of Parliament, Mr Inusah Fuseini, has expressed worry that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in his view, continues to appoint his party members to the Supreme Court. Reacting to the nominations on 505 News on Class91.3FM, Mr Fuseini made reference to an earlier appointment of Justices to the Court of Appeal by the president, in which two of the nominees were allegedly cited as being members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). It is definitely worrying that the president has chosen to appoint people who contested on his political party ticket in elections in the parliamentary primary and even parliamentary elections, Mr Fuseini said. In a press statement issued on Tuesday and signed by the NPP Germany Communications Director, Nana Osei Boateng, he noted that there is a stipulated criterion for which one must meet before he/she can be appointed to the Supreme Court as a Justice. He added that there is nothing unlawful about the Presidents decision. The modalities and procedures for appointment are engraved in the Ghana 1992 constitution and have not changed, the statement added. Below is the full statement: PRESS RELEASE NPP Germany 02.08.22. JUDGES APPOINTMENTS TO THE SUPREME COURT IS NON-PARTISAN Lawyer Inusah Fuseini and some NDC folks have found a new deception catalyst in the appointments made by the President to the Supreme Court of Justice. Their new lie and deception is that the President of the Republic is appointing NPP party folks to the position of Supreme Court Justice. First of all, this is not factual. There is a stipulated criterion for which one must meet before he can be appointed to the Supreme Court as a Justice. The modalities and procedure for the appointment is engraved in the constitution and have not changed. If the NDC had any sense of intellectual honesty in this matter, they should be challenging the wrong they say has been done, based on the constitution and the procedures not the persona of the appointees and their own classification of appointees as party people. It is incongruous with what has been done and their duty as opposition. Many citizens have kicked against their way of handling things. When Jerry John Rawling had power in 1992 under a new constitution, he appointed almost everyone on the Supreme Court panel, he appointed more than half of the judges in our courts before he ended his term in office. Does that have any bearing on the judges in their service to the nation? Absolutely no. Inusah Fuseini and the NDC in their quest to taint government as selfish and planners of an unrealistic grand scheme finds this as another tool to derail the people of Ghana from focusing on nation building at this material moment. The President shall continue in his seat and rule as President of the Republic and not of NPP. For the betterment of our nation and not for our party only. All naysayers and detractors can do all they can but the battle is still the Lords. Building back together a prosperous Ghana! Signed Nana Osei Boateng NPP Germany Branch Communications Director. Dr Bossman Asare, Deputy Chairman of EC 04.08.2022 LISTEN The Electoral Commission (EC) has said after a series of meetings with the political parties and civil society organisations, it has been agreed among the parties that the Ghana card be used as the sole document for voter registration. It was agreed that now that the Ghana card has made a lot of impact in our society as we speak now, almost 17 million Ghanaians have registered for the Ghana card, so, the Commission, in collaboration with our partners, took the decision that: Now, lets have the Ghana card as the main requirement, Dr Bossman Asare, Deputy Chairman of the EC in charge of Corporate Services, has said. So, what this means is that as soon as you acquire your Ghana card, with the continuous registration, you just go to our district office then you go and register then your name will be put on the roll of voters, he said in an interview on Accra-based Joy News. His comments come a few days after Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia hinted at the likelihood of using the card for voter registration for either the 2024 or 2028 general elections. Dr Bawumia promised Ghanaians at the 2022 Civil Service Awards ceremony in Accra on 29 July 2022 that with the Ghana card and digitalisation drive, very soon, youd see that our problems with voter registration would disappear. Its only a matter of time. If not at the next election then the next election after that because we spend so much on voter registration but once unique identification is determined and you cannot have underage people coming to register to vote and all of that, I think the Ghana card would be a good identification document as we are already seeing so that we sanitise the voter registration system, Dr Bawumia said. He noted: In many countries, once you are 18, you are essentially on the voter register and that is it. Theres no complication to this and going to fight and break legs and so on, as we register to vote, he noted. I mean the system is the system, added Dr Bawumia, stressing: If you are 18, you are on the register simple! And, I think this is where we are headed, he hinted. In his view, Ghana has been stuck in the brick-and-mortar model of development, which, in his estimation, has not generated the needed transformation. Systems, as being put in place by the Akufo-Addo government through the digitalisation drive, are what will transform the country, Dr Bawumia argued, in support of his earlier assertion that he would prefer the Ghana card which, he observed, is the fulcrum of the establishment of those systems to 1,000 interchanges. A lot of the time, we have, as a country, really focused on brick and mortar for development: build this road, you build this and build that but we have not focused on systems for the longest time but systems and data and institutions are what develop countries, its not brick and mortar, he explained. So, these systems that we are putting in place digitalisation of the various public sector offices and all of that: national ID, mobile money and all of that is what will transform Ghana; its really what will transform Ghana and that is why as we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have to pay attention to this. The Ghana card is a valid verification document issued by the National Identification Authority (NIA) to Ghanaians and resident foreign nationals living everywhere for the purpose of identification. The card bears personal information about the individuals whose identity can be verified at all times. The NIA National Identity System utilises three types of biometric technology for identification purposes. These are the fingerprints unique to each individual in the form of digitised templates, and facial templates in the form of a digitised colour photo of the cardholder and the iris. The card contains basic identification information including a photograph of the cardholder, along with a name, date of birth, height, and a personal identification number that has been randomly generated and assigned to the holder and has an expiry date. Source: Classfmonline.com Gambian authorities should swiftly investigate and hold to account the police officers who harassed journalist Yusef Taylor, drop any charges against the journalist, and allow him to work freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday. On July 5, police officers blocked Taylor, editor and manager of the privately owned Gainako news website, from reporting about a land dispute in Gambias West Coast region, and then arrested him and charged him with obstructing police, according to the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview, and a statement by the local press freedom group Gambia Press Union. On July 7, police summoned Taylor and said they would drop the charges, he said, adding that officers later requested Taylor report back to the station on four different occasions, and each time officers refused to clarify whether the charges had in fact been dropped. CPJ was unable to determine whether Taylor still faces a criminal charge. If charged and convicted of obstructing police, he could face up to two years in prison, according to the Gambian criminal code . Authorities in Gambia must immediately drop any pending charges against journalist Yusef Taylor and stop harassing him, said Angela Quintal, CPJs Africa program coordinator, from Durban, South Africa. Journalists should never be detained for doing their jobs, and police officers should not be permitted to intimidate the press with impunity. On July 5, Taylor reported on his Facebook, where he uses the alias Flex Dan and has 630 followers and 4,900 friends, that a local court had ruled that a piece of disputed land belonged to the Global Hearts of Medical Mission, a local healthcare organization, and that, despite the ruling, several of its members were arrested for visiting the land and one was allegedly beaten by police. Later that day, Taylor arrived at the Senegambia police station to report on the people arrested over that dispute and was taking photos when an officer stopped him and asked to see his press identification card, the journalist said. After Taylor complied, the officer insisted he stop taking pictures, he told CPJ; when Taylor objected, explaining that he was only doing his job, five officers joined in shoving the journalist out of the station. An officer then grabbed Taylor, tearing his shirt as he dragged him back to the station, arrested and charged him. Police detained Taylor for four hours and released him following intervention by a representative of the Gambia Press Union and other local journalists, according to Taylor and the unions statement. Taylor said he reported his arrest and experience with the police to the Gambia Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on July 18, which assured him that it would investigate the matter. When CPJ called the police officer whom Taylor said grabbed him and tore his shirt, the officer declined to give his full name and requested that CPJ visit his office in Gambia or speak with the police public relations officer. CPJs calls and text messages to Emmanuel Daniel Joof, commissioner and chair of the Gambia NHRC, and Lamin Njie, a public relations officer for the Gambian police, went unanswered. President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has called for an end to the rampant encroachment of airport lands across the country. The practice he says, if not tackled, may affect future expansion works at the various airports. President Akufo-Addo disclosed this in Sunyani in the Bono Region during the commissioning of the first phase of the Sunyani Airport project. Rehabilitation works of the Sunyani Airport began in February 2019 after it was shut down in March 2016 following defects on the runway. The airport was rehabilitated at the cost of GH52.2 million and was jointly funded by the Government of Ghana and the Ghana Airports Company Limited. DAA Construction Limited constructed the wall, while Resources Access Limited was in charge of the runway. The runway has been extended from 1,280 meters to 1,400 meters. There is a wild spread of encroachment on airport lands. This phenomenon threatens the future expansion of airports in the country. It has to be stopped. The operators and regulators of our airport as well as the Lands Commission and Nananom need to sit up to ensure that the lands belonging to the airports are managed properly and protected and not only for future expansion but also safeguarding lives and properties. The President also disclosed that the processes to commence phase two of the Sunyani Airport project will end soon. The Minister of Transport, Kwaku Ofori Asiamah, said the government will continue to invest in the aviation industry to make Ghana an aviation hub in the West Africa sub-region. He also disclosed that there are feasibility studies ongoing to develop airports in the Central Region. The Managing Director of the Ghana Airport Company Limited, Mrs Pamela Djamson-Tettey on her part thanked the consultant and the contractor for ensuring the completion of the project. The President of the Bono Regional House of Chiefs who is also the Omanhene of the Dormaa Traditional Area, Osagyefo Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu II, on his part commended the government for the facelift given to the airport. Osagyefo Agyemang Badu II appealed to the inhabitants of the Bono Region to patronize the services of the newly refurbished airport. He also called on the President to construct deplorable roads dotted across the Bono Region. ---citinewsroom China's largest-ever military exercises encircling Taiwan kicked off Thursday, in a show of force in vital international shipping lanes. The performance follows a visit to the island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi left Taiwan Wednesday after a trip that defied a series of stark threats from Beijing, which views the self-ruled island as its territory. Pelosi was the highest-profile elected US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years, and said her trip made it "unequivocally clear" that the United States would not abandon a democratic ally. The visit sparked a furious reaction from Beijing, which vowed "punishment" and announced military drills in the seas around Taiwan -- some of the world's busiest waterways. The exercises, which began at 0400 UT, involve "live-firing", according to state media. "Six major areas around the island have been selected for this actual combat exercise and during this period, relevant ships and aircraft should not enter the relevant waters and airspaces," state broadcaster CCTV reported. The exercises will take place in multiple zones around Taiwan -- at some points within just 20 kilometres of the shore -- and will conclude at midday on Sunday. Taiwan prepared for a war it does not want Taiwan's defence ministry said it was closely watching the drills. "The Ministry of National Defence stresses that it will uphold the principle of preparing for war without seeking war, and with an attitude of not escalating conflict and causing disputes," it said in a statement. Beijing's state-run tabloid Global Times said, citing military analysts, that the exercises were "unprecedented" and that missiles would fly over Taiwan for the first time. "This is the first time the PLA will launch live long-range artillery across" the Taiwan Strait, the newspaper said using the Chinese military's formal name, the People's Liberation Army. The Group of Seven industrialised nations has condemned the drills, saying in a statement there was "no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait". Drills are 'necessary and just' Beijing has defended the drills as "necessary and just", pinning the blame for the escalation on the United States and its allies. "In the current struggle surrounding Pelosi's Taiwan visit, the United States are the provocateurs, China is the victim," foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular briefing Wednesday. A Chinese military source also told the AFP news agency the exercises would be staged "in preparation for actual combat". "If the Taiwanese forces come into contact with the PLA on purpose and accidentally fire a gun, the PLA will take stern countermeasures, and all the consequences will be borne by the Taiwanese side," the source said. Xi under pressure from ruling party Taiwan's 23 million people have long lived with the possibility of an invasion, but that threat has intensified under President Xi Jinping, China's most assertive ruler in a generation. The island is once again a flashpoint between the United States and a Chinese leadership keen to project strength ahead of a crucial ruling party meeting this autumn at which Xi is expected to be given an unprecedented third term. "China's announced military exercises represent a clear escalation from the existing baseline of Chinese military activities around Taiwan and from the last Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995-1996," said Amanda Hsiao, senior analyst for China at the International Crisis Group. "Beijing is signalling that it rejects Taiwan's sovereignty." Astronomy gives impoverished township in SW Chinas Guizhou a facelift People's Daily Online) 13:19, August 04, 2022 People visit a planetarium in Kedu township of Pingtang county, southwest Chinas Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu) In order to prepare for the construction of the FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope), or the China Sky Eye, in 2007, Pingtang county in southwest Chinas Guizhou Province launched a relocation program that involved 6,633 rural residents from Kedu and Tangbian townships. A visitor looks at a model of the FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) at a planetarium in Kedu township of Pingtang county, southwest Chinas Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu) In September 2015, Kedu township started a project to transform itself into an astronomy-themed township. It has put more than 20 projects into action to popularize astronomical science, and many relocated rural residents have since secured jobs or started their own businesses in the township. The FAST, which was first put into use in September 2016, is the worlds largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Homestay owner Liu Chengliang, who is now 32 years old, makes up beds at his homestay in Kedu township of Pingtang county, southwest Chinas Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu) Photo shows Yang Li, a relocated villager, who works at an embroidery factory in Kedu township of Pingtang county, southwest Chinas Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu) Photo taken on July 22, 2022, shows the FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope). (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu) Photo shows a picture of Huang Xiaomei (right), a villager who relocated to Kedu township in July 2016, alongside her husband, inside their new home in Kedu township of Pingtang county, southwest Chinas Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu) This combo photo shows a relocation site in Kedu township of Pingtang county, southwest Chinas Guizhou Province on March 29, 2018 (top) and July 19, 2022 (bottom), respectively. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu) (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) ANC leaders led by Cyril Ramaphosa cut a giant cake to mark the ANC's 110th birthday in January. - Source: Phill Magakoe/AFP via Getty Images 04.08.2022 LISTEN One of the sources of social discontent in post-apartheid South Africa is the legacy of white racism. This toxic legacy is evident in racialised poverty and inequality. It is a historical fact that the economic prosperity of whites in South Africa is based on the racist exploitation and impoverishment of blacks. The long history of racism enabled white South Africans to enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world by the 1970s. In his new book, titled Can We Unlearn Racism? , Jacob R Boersema, a New York University academic, shows that by the 21st century white South Africans' lifetime work-related earnings on average are four times higher than for Africans. Add to this corruption , rampant crime , frightening levels of gender based violence and failing political institutions : the outcome is a social horror show that produces misery for millions of black people. This is what former president Thabo Mbeki was referring to in his recent scathing critique of the governing African National Congress (ANC). Mbeki also criticised the party for not being able to organise a racially diverse audience for the memorial service of the late ANC deputy secretary general Jessie Duarte . That, he said, showed that the ANC had failed to embody its fundamental value of non-racialism . Read more: Pandemic underscores gross inequalities in South Africa, and the need to fix them Mbeki's thinking reveals deep confusion about race, racism, diversity and non-racialism. He falsely assumes that diversity means harmony. Non-racialism is one of the unexamined dogmas of the ANC. It has its roots in the politics of Christian humanism that inspired the formation of the party in 1912. That humanism regarded Christianity as transcending race by offering an ultimate goal of inter-racial harmony based on the brotherhood of man . Whatever solidarity there was between different racial groups in political structures like the Congress Alliance which drew up the ANC's Freedom Charter in 1955 did not translate to the social world outside politics. The world outside politics was defined by racial segregation. That has not changed much. Apart from the workplace and in schools, ordinary blacks and whites continue to live racially segregated lives . Read more: How South Africa's white liberals dodge honest debates about race The ANC, since its formation, has been ideologically trapped in the 19th century black Cape politics of Victorian liberalism which advocated for loyalty to the British Crown. This resulted in blacks making moral appeals to white benevolence for justice and freedom, instead of making political demands. The ANC has never fully understood how white racism functions. The history The ANC's establishment in 1912 was driven by an ideological blending of British liberalism and a Christian vision of non-racialism . This equipped it poorly to respond to and make sense of racism and modern South Africa. Black commuters defiantly board a train reserved for whites during apartheid in 1952. Bettman via Getty Images For most of the early 20th century, the ANC thought it could defeat racism by appealing to Britain's sense of common justice. In his presidential address to the South African Native Congress (now ANC) in 1912 which was published in the Christian Express, the Christian missionary journal published by the Lovedale Press Reverend John Dube encouraged black people to show deep and dutiful respect for the rulers whom God has placed over us because the sense of common justice and love of freedom so innate in the British character (would) ultimately triumph over all other baser tendencies to colour prejudice and class tyranny. Consequently, from its formation to the 1950s, when its leaders were subjected to government bans, the ANC failed to win a single political victory over white racism, as historians have pointed out. From the 1950s, it moved away from black Victorianism and incorporated a Pan-Africanist worldview, as well as Das Kapital Karl Marx's critique of capitalism. The Marxists in the ANC argued that the aim of the struggle was to overthrow capitalism, which they saw in terms of class rather than race . Black people thus focused their hostility on the apartheid government, and never on whites as such . Black people who dared to use race as an analytical category were eventually purged from the ANC. By the turn of this century the ANC had rid itself of British liberalism and Christian politics. But it remained committed to the idea of non-racialism. And it has embraced capitalism in particular the capitalism entrenched in South Africa by white people. There are three consequences. Firstly, the ANC is an intellectually impoverished organisation that rewards incompetence and greed, and encourages individuals to strive to be the king of the rubbish pile. Secondly, corruption and blatant disregard for the law have achieved ambient levels. Thirdly, South Africa is dysfunctional and social cohesion has broken down. Failure of non-racialism Mbeki is one of the few ANC politicians to admit publicly that non-racialism has failed to unite South Africans. The black intellectual ecosystem has yet to develop a compelling analysis of the relationship between white wealth and black poverty. The white narrative that blames the black elite for the persistence of racialised inequality erases white racism from post-apartheid South Africa. According to Statistics South Africa : The labour market experiences of different population groups in South Africa continue to diverge substantially, and still reflect the strongly persistent legacies of apartheid policies Thus, black African unemployment rates are between four and five times as high as they are amongst whites. The black middle class remains largely an academic construct. It consists of a mere 4.2 million people whereas blacks make up 80% of the population of 60 million . Research shows no sign of a decrease in racialised wealth inequality since apartheid. Read more: Why 'pro-poor' policies on their own won't shift inequality in South Africa The ANC's failures mean that the vast majority of black people are trapped in poverty, with few prospects of escaping. Thabo Mbeki is right to be worried. And it is not only the ANC that does not have the solution to the country's problems. Until black people break from the ideological capture of non-racialism, the legacy of white racism will never be dislodged. Mandisi Majavu 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 their academic appointment. By Mandisi Majavu, Senior Lecturer, Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University The Ghana Police Service has confirmed the arrest of four of the seven gang of armed robbers who killed two people during a robbery attack on a gold buying company at Asaman Tamfoe. The arrest of the four has been confirmed by an official statement from the security service after an intelligence-led operation. The robbers, numbering seven, attacked a gold buying company in the town, shot and killed the security man on duty and robbed the company of an unspecified amount of money. While attempting to escape, they also shot one other person who later died. Through ongoing painstaking investigations and intelligence, four of the gang members have been arrested so far. The Police through sustained intelligence-led operation over a nine week period have arrested four armed robbery suspects in who were involved in a robbery attack that led to the death of two people at Asaman Tamfoe in the Eastern Region on 27-05-2022, part of a police statement has said today. Suspect Moro Saado was arrested on 3rd June, 22 in Kumasi, suspect Aliu Ousmanu who shot the security man was arrested on 14th June at Akanten, near Asesewa in the Eastern Region, Elvis Kwaasie was arrested on 15th June at Asaman Tamfoe and Issaka Abdul alias Baba Liman was arrested at Sofoline, Kumasi on 2nd August. The Police insists that the remaining three members of the gang, can run and hide, but not forever. We will surely get them arrested to face justice, the Police statement adds. 04.08.2022 LISTEN The Senior Staff Union of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has backed directives from the Public Utility Workers Union (PUWU) for staff of the company within Krobo land to stay away from work over safety concerns in the area. PUWU issued the directive on Tuesday, citing threats to the life of ECG staff and property. Chairman of the ECG Senior Staff Union, Peter Fletcher, in backing the calls told Citi News that they will not return to work until their security is assured. Our people have been threatened, offices have been vandalized, even to the point that our people have to relocate. If the place is not safe, we cannot go and work. So we expect the security apparatus, to take the necessary action other than that, we cannot serve residents. That is our decision, he said. Mr. Fletcher also urged the security agencies to arrest persons issuing threats to ECG Staff. We know the ring leaders of these actions, and they are walking in town freely. What are the security agencies doing? We expect them to move into the town and cause the arrest of these people. In a related development, PUWU has called on its members to restrict their services to places they deem safe in the Eastern Region. Some workers of the Electricity Company of Ghana were prevented from installing prepaid meters in parts of Yilo Krobo and Lower Manya Krobo municipalities, despite being in the company of security officials. The municipalities have subsequently been in darkness for eight days now. In an interview with Citi News, the General Secretary of the Public Utility Workers Union, Michael Adumattah Nyantakyi said the workers would return to the affected communities only when their safety is assured. We have not asked our members not to go to work but what we have said is that, if going to the field is a bit dangerous because the authorities in the area have not given assurances to ensure the safety of our staff, they should remain in the district office. ---citinewsroom Professor Ransford Gyampo, a political science lecturer at the University of Ghana (UG) has expressed dissatisfaction with the Akufo-Addo administration's handling of the current economic situation in the country. He said instead of working hard to secure their "breaking the 8" slogan, the NPP government is doing things that will send them packing. Prof. Gyampo in a Facebook post seen by Modernghana News on Wednesday, August 3 stated, Publicly, a few paint an impression that a certain EIGHT is gonna be broken but in reality, they are focused more on packing rather than governing in a manner that sacrifices the quest for legacy in governance. According to Prof. Gyampo, the real issue should not be "breaking the 8" but how to solve the country's problems. It's not about breaking any EIGHT, and it's not about packing for a possible exit. It's about governing well and effectively discharging tasks reposed for the benefit of posterity, said Prof. Gyampo He continues How have others handled a situation like the one we have on hand? Our leaders have travelled and have seen it all. A little bit of selflessness would do for our development and leave a great legacy, he stressed. Find below Prof. Gyampo's post: The problem in Ghana is wicked leadership. Our political elites have service passports and they've all travelled before. They've seen how others have developed their countries. But have hidden under the cloak of public ignorance about what pertains elsewhere, to do little or nothing for us. There was a lot of hope as evidenced in the outcome of the 2016 elections. But there appears to be hopelessness now, with virtually every appointee preparing to survive after possible exit, while still nursing some infinitesimal hope of keeping on. Publicly, a few paint an impression that a certain EIGHT is gonna be broken but in reality, they are focused more on packing rather than governing in a manner that sacrifices the quest for legacy in governance. It's not about breaking any EIGHT, and it's not about packing for a possible exit. It's about governing well and effectively discharging tasks reposed for the benefit of posterity. How have others handled a situation like the one we have on hand? Our leaders have travelled and have seen it all. A little bit of selflessness would do for our development and leave a great legacy. Good Evening. Yaw Gyampo, A31, Prabiw P.A.V Ansah Street Saltpond Suro Nipa House Kubease Larteh-Akuapim Stephen Asamoah Boateng, widely known as Asabee, the immediate Director-General of the State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA) believes Ghanaians are over-reacting to President Akufo-Addo to reshuffle his ministers. He said the President will reshuffle his ministers at the right time. Speaking on Accra-based Asaase radio's Breakfast show on Tuesday, August 2, the former Mfantsiman West Member of Parliament (MP) said I will ask that people calm down a bit." Asabee continues I have been in government before. I was very close to former President J A Kufuor during our time. Sometimes people come up with this reshuffle idea, we think about it, President Kufuor will consider and say this is not the time. He explains that By our constitution, the president is an executive president, he has the prerogative, and we should give him the credit, that at the appropriate time he will act. I am not sure the president wants his government to collapse, that is not his job. He adds, His job is to pull us along and make sure the economy is managed properly and whoever he can find in the party or in Ghana to help him perform a function, he will. Many people, including the opposition NDC's National Communications Director Sammy Gyamfi have called for a cabinet reshuffle to remove non-performing such as Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta. According to critics, Ken Ofori-Atta and other ministers are not up to the task following the current economic hardship. An animal scientist at the School of Agriculture of the University of Cape Coast, Prof. Julius Hagan has said Ghana lacks accurate and up-to-date data on the quantity of maize consumed. The situation, he noted, is making government not able to plan in terms of the number of bags of maize needed for households and industries. "We don't have accurate, up-to-date data on how much maize we consume, how much for animal feed, how much maize is needed for industrial purposes and how much we export," he stated. According to him, this is one reason why maize normally becomes scarce in most parts of the country which makes people blame government. The animal scientist shared these observations today 4th August, 2022 on GBC Radio Central's special holiday morning show hosted by Mr. Issah Otoo and produced by DC Kwame Kwakye on the assessment of government flagship programme 'Planting for Food and Jobs'. He noted that the problem of lack of accurate data has affected planning for the cultivation of the crop a situation that has always resulted in shortages. According to Prof Hagan, most of the animals supplied to farmers for rearing under the Rearing for Food and Jobs module are imported. "There's therefore the need to revamp the breeding stations established under the Nkrumah's regime, to be able to supply the needed foundation stock for supply to farmers instead of relying on import to fill the gap". He argues, "If we develop the breeding areas as was done by Nkrumah's government it would increase the employment potential of the programme and benefit our country." He noted that Ghana must be thankful to Burkina Faso because "Most of our livestock (cattle, sheep and goats), crops like onion and tomatoes are imported from there. Should we have any problem with them even for three months and they decide not supply us, we shall be in trouble". He added "we are a blessed country and need to up our game to be able to be self-sufficient in food production. The actual benefits of Planting for Food and Jobs would fully be realised in about 10 years from now. The politicians don't have that time because of the four-year mandate which is affecting our country." Speaking on the same show, Dr. Kusi Amoah, a Crop Scientist also underscored the fact that the Planting for Food and Jobs policy is doing quite well but more needs to be done to make it very efficient and more beneficial to the nation. Residents of Tilli, Zebilla and Kobori townships on the main Bolga-Bawku-Pulmakom highway in the Upper East Region are appealing to the Ghana Highway Authority for speed ramps to curb pedestrian knockdowns. With about 30 people knocked down within a spate of one year, resulting in deaths and various degrees of injury the residents say authorities must not waste time. The residents hit the streets with drumming and dancing to register their displeasure over the needless deaths caused by speeding vehicles and motorbikes in the township. The demonstrators later presented their petition to the District Chief Executive, Alhaji Issahaku Ahmed Tahiru at his office. The DCE assured the demonstrators and the residents of making sure the speed ramps are fixed to save lives. According to the agitated residents, although blocking the road remains the only option for them, they have been restrained from taking such an action for now. Narrating their frustrations to Modernghana News, the Kusaug Youth for Development leader, Jonas Azurago, said there have been numerous knockdowns recorded in the town including children. He said those who have lost their lives prematurely might have lived to become useful future leaders to society. "It could be me or you and so let's all appeal to the highways for urgent solutions," he added. Jonas Azurago, however, applauded the past and present governments for fixing the Bolga Bawku-Pulmakom road. A midwife of Zebilla government hospital, Esther Aluguni, wants urgent intervention from the authority. According to her, there is no day without cases of accidents recorded at the hospital as a result of overspeeding. She also wants children under 15 years to be banned from riding motorbikes due to the lack of speed ramps in the area. She bemoaned the speed at which cars move when approaching the township. According to her, cars are supposed to be moving at 50km/h when approaching the town but that has not been the situation. She indicated that vehicles move on top speed in the town. Another resident, Simon Anyagre, said the Bawku West District whip up its road safety effort of making sure cars, motorbikes and 'Mahama can dos' are cleared on the shoulders. According to him, they take over the shoulders making the road very narrow and difficult for vehicles to move freely. Consumers of petroleum products can now heave a sigh of relief, as the LPG Marketing Companies Association of Ghana has called off its strike action. The move according to the group follows Cabinets decision to lift the ban on the construction of new LPG stations across the country. The association had embarked on a nationwide strike over the issue, as they argued that it has for the past five years cost its members over USD 10 million. In a statement, the LPG Marketers Association of Ghana urged all LPG operators to resume operations. We, the LGP Marketing Companies Association of Ghana, welcome governments decision to lift the ban on the construction of LPG retail outlets across the country. We are by this statement calling off the industrial action commenced on Monday, August 1, 2022, with immediate effect, parts of the statement read. The LPG marketing companies shut down their stations in solidarity with a strike by the Ghana National Tanker Drivers Association in protest of treatment by the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company Limited and the National Petroleum Authority. The drivers also raised concerns with the seals and tracking devices that check the integrity of the fuel in the transportation process and the continuous ban on LPG Stations under construction since 2017. citinewsroom Commrade Ahmed Agbenyadzi, Akuapem North NDC Deputy Youth Organiser 04.08.2022 LISTEN The nomination of the Member of Parliament for Walewale Hon. Lariba Zuweira Abudu as Minister-designate for Gender, Children and Social Protection has been criticised by the opposition National Democratic Congress, (NDC). The NDC noted that the nominee has nothing better to offer the Ghanaians despite being the deputy minister to the dismissed Sarah Adwoa Sarfo. President Akufo-Addo appointed Hon. Lariba Zuweira Abudu who was the deputy minister as the substantive minister after dismissing the Dome-Kwabenya lawmaker in a letter signed by the Director of Communication at the Presidency, Eugene Arhin. Akuapem North NDC Deputy Youth Organiser, Ahmed Agbenyadzi in an interview with this reporter said the minister-designate has not proven to be capable of holding such a ministerial portfolio. According to him, Hon. Zuweira Abudu has been seen performing when the former minister was away and wondered why President Akufo-Addo has suddenly nominated her for such a top position. "I am surprised to hear the President mentioning the deputy minister to take up the position of her former boss. Where was she when Adwoa Sarfo was away? We did not even hear anything about her and that is unfortunate," he stressed. Ahmed Agbenyadzi added, "Why was she not made to act in the absence of the former minister if she is capable of being the substantive minister? Why must it take another sector minister to be Caretaker of the Gender ministry when there was a deputy minister?" The NDC Communicator was, however, not hopeful the minister designate can resolve the many challenges the ministry is facing. The Commission for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (CTVET) has organized a one-day community durbar at James Town around the Central Business District of Accra. Recognizing the role of effective communications in improving the perception of citizenry about Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and its associated role of skills development in Ghana the Commission for TVET launched the MyTVET campaign to change the negative perceptions about TVET in Ghana and to increase enrolment in Technical and Vocational Institutions in Ghana. The campaigns objective is to inspire world-class excellence in skills development and to introduce the youth to a variety of skilled careers, using such tools as the National Skills Competition, TVET clubs in Junior High Schools, Career Guidance Counselling and the use of TVET Ambassadors and Role Models. The Community durbar was organized on Tuesday, 26th March, 2022to among other things explain the activities of CTVET to the community, promote TVET to parents, students and opinion leaders and also to create awareness about the ongoing Ghana Jobs and Skills Project being implemented by the Commission. CTVET was established by the Education Regulatory Bodies ACT 2020(ACT 1023) to regulate, promote and administer technical and vocational education and training, for transformation and innovation for sustainable development in Ghana. In a speech read on behalf of the Director General of CTVET, Dr. Fred Kyei Asamoah by Mr. Albert Opare, Head of Corporate Affairs for CTVET, he indicated, government over the years has made significant investment in TVET because it is part of His Excellency the Presidents vision of industrializing Ghana. The commission was set up to ensure that duplicity in the TVET sector is curtailed among other things, and also to ensure the progress being made in the sector is sustained. Mr. Opare added that, Skills acquisition today holds a great importance in societies the world over particularly following the global employment crisis that has shaken our world. Young people are drivers of change and must be fully engaged in decisions affecting their future. This is why the Commission for TVET is organizing this event to provide a platform for the community to be informed about what the government is doing in the TVET space and also build relevant connections and networks to ensure that our collective objectives are realized. He further added that, the government of Ghana has commenced the implementation of the Ghana Jobs and Skills Project. This project seeks to expedite the development of competency-based training curricula on the National TVET Qualification Framework for 100 trades/professions from level one (1) (National Proficiency 1) to level five (5) (Higher National Diploma) as well as training some 25,000 beneficiaries. It will also seek to implement the Ghana Labour Market Information System, and upgrade of district public employment centres and services. Overall, the project is expected to create between 199,500 to 252,000 jobs in the country over the next five years. Erica Younayel, a 14-year-old JHS 2 student who received a brain tumor treatment and had been detained for inability to pay hospital bills at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital has finally been discharged thanks to Emmanuel Addo. The young female patient who is a student of the Krobo Junior High School in the Afigya Kwabre South District of Ashanti Region had been detained for almost one and a half months, according to reports. This in turn got her parents stranded and helpless, thus after their inability to raise the GHS5,000 to clear her medical bills. Members of Emmanuel Addo Fan Club in Afigya Kwabre South presented the money on behalf of Emmanuel Addo. It was revealed that the help came in after a UK-based Emmanuel Addo, the Founder and President of the Fan Club got the news of the sad incident. The bill together with other food items funded by Emmanuel Addo was presented by the members of the Fan Club at the D2A (E.N.T) ward on Friday, 29 July 2022. Dr. Karikari Simon, who led the group to do the presentation explained that Emmanuel Addo chanced on the unfortunate situation of the girl from the headmistress of her school through Krobo executives and the women organizer of the Fan Club that the girl. It was revealed that the girl had been detained at the hospital for more than one month due to her parents inability to pay her bills. According to him, after Mr. Emmanuel Addo was informed, he took it upon himself to fund the bills and other items worth over GH5,000 for the girl. Mr. Yuonayel Anthony, the father of the girl expressed his profound gratitude to Emmanuel Addo for the timely intervention which gave him and his family a great sigh of relief. He however urged them to continue with the good works. The father lamented how some known well-to-do persons within the Afigya Kwabre South Constituency ignored him when he called on them for assistance. I called one popular and a wealthy man I dont want to mention his name. He sadly snubbed me when I called him assistance over my daughters ailment. He told me point blank he was not ready to help me, and after that, he hung up the call. We had lost all hopes until Emmanuel Addo came to rescue us. Were most grateful to them, he said. He pleaded with other corporate and civil organizations to emulate the good example set by the Emmanuel Addo Fan Club to help put smiles on the faces of other families and individuals who may be in need. Ms. Miranda Melody Boadiwaa, the Principal Nursing Officer (PNO) at the D2A Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) department commended Emmanuel Addo for the kind gesture She urged them to keep up with the good work. The Nigeria Digital Identification for Development (ID4D) project says it is committed to partnering with the National Commission for Persons with Disabilities (NCPWD) in the implementation of the project. Project Coordinator of Nigeria Digital ID4D, Musa Odole Solomon disclosed this at a courtesy call on the Executive Secretary of the Commission, Wednesday. According to him, it is a constituency that the Nigeria Digital ID4D project is very particular about. The project had since identified the NCPWD as an important ecosystem partner, hence this visit. The Nigeria Digital ID4D is interested in promoting inclusion of marginalized groups because of the realization that historically, ID systems often lead to exclusion due to logistics and social stigma which may hinder participation of women and persons with disability. Continuing, he stressed that The project will establish a national consultation mechanism, to sustain dialogue with stakeholders and marginalized groups, in order to receive feedback that would improve project implementation. The aim of the project is to strengthen the foundational ID system, and in the process improve national data protection, bolster Nigerias digital economy and close the inclusion gaps in access to identification and related key services, while fostering inclusion for marginalized groups, such as persons living with disability, the rural poor, among others. The project shall facilitate the development of mechanisms for continuous capture of biometric data for those living with disability. We therefore seek your collaboration and active participation in the project implementation process. Responding, Executive Secretary, National Commission for Persons with Disabilities, Mr. James David Lalu expressed delight at the visit, describing it as timely. He mentioned Identity as a major challenge of persons living with disability in Nigeria, even as he called on the project to come to their rescue. Lalu lamented a trend that he described as persons with fake disability in Nigeria, calling on relevant authorities to rise to the occasion. I am happy that you chose to make us a special institution. You are coming at the right time. One of the major problems we have with accessing services is identification. Again, we have started having persons with fake disabilities in Nigeria. Collaborating with Nigeria Digital ID4D will help to solve our problems, particularly, in the area of identification and verification. We are very open to partner with you. Those on the Nigeria ID4D delegation were: the Project Coordinator, Musa Odole Solomon, Internal Communications Manager, Dr. Walter Duru, External Communications Manager, Mouktar Adamu and Social Safeguards Officer, Seunayo Adebayo. Others were: Social Accountability Officer, Aminu Abdulrahman; Communication Assistant, Mikail Muhammad and Stakeholders Engagement Manager, Helen Nkemakolam-Ekeh. Nigeria Digital Identification for Development is a Nigerian project, jointly funded by the World Bank, European Investment Bank and French Development Agency. Walter Duru, Ph.D Manager, Communications Nigeria Digital Identification for Development project August 4, 2022. An official of the National Identification Authority (NIA) official at Awutu Bereku in the Central Region has sustained injuries in the arm after he attempted to prevent a Nigerian national and his Ghanaian accomplice, Nicholas Odoom from duping people. The two are alleged to have been extorting monies from applicants who join long queues in the name of helping them acquire their Ghana cards. According to the injured NIA official, Richard Ekow France, the Authority had received numerous complaints of some individuals extorting monies from applicants in the name of helping them acquire their Ghana cards. Ekow France says the individuals demand between GH20 to GH50 from applications. I only got wind of the activities of these individuals this morning that they extort monies from prospective Ghana cardholders in the name of helping them secure the card. We quickly invited the gentleman and questioned him about his activities. We managed to refund the monies but in an attempt to hand him over to the police he pushed me and I hit my hand into a glass substance and sustained injuries, the NIA official Richard Ekow France told Citi News. The two suspects are currently in the grips of the Awutu Bereku Police Command after the Police were called in to arrest them. citinewsroom The Yilo Krobo Municipal Health Directorate in the Eastern Region owes over GH30,000 in fuel purchase to power generators in the various health facilities over a two-week period. The accumulated debt was as a result of the disconnection of electricity supply by the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to the Yilo and Lower Manya municipalities. While the lowest fuel expenditure for a health centre is GH200 for 24 hours, others spend as high as GH5,000 during the same period depending on its operations. The health facilities are now on the verge of closure if electricity supply is not restored immediately. The affected health facilities are Atua Government Hospital, St Martins Hospital, Yilo District hospital, Somanya Policlinic and the various CHPS and health centers. Speaking to the issues on Wednesday, August 3 with Alfred Ocansey on 3FM's Sunrise, the Municipal Health Director, Mrs. Irena Offei, explained that the bill as at August 1, 2022 was GH30,000. For example, St Martins spends GH5,000 within 24 hours and we are paying it from our internally generated funds (IGF). She explained that at health directorate, we spend between GH300 and GH500 on fuel a day, that is within 24 hours. Mrs. Offei noted that [the health facilities] have been in darkness for more than a week without electricity and we are appealing to the government to restore power supply. She said there was a meeting on the issue [on Tuesday] but we have not heard anything from the MCE. MCE reacts The Yilo Krobo MCE, Eric Tetteh, when contacted, explained that he was not part of the said meeting. I was not part of the meeting because it was scheduled by the two MPs [Ebenezer Okletey Terlabi for lower Manya Krobo Constituency and Albert Tetteh Nyakotey for Yilo Krobo Constituency] who are NDC MPs. He said we are working on it. We have spoken to the ECG MD and he said the issue is National Security issue so the National Security also came in. 3news.com |Ghana Shortly after the 1989 coup that brought Sudans former dictator, al-Bashir, to power, the Islamist movement became a key political authority in the country and the nation was forced to follow a hard-line interpretation of Islamic law. In 2020, Sudans transitional government, established after the Sudanese Revolution that ousted al-Bashir, agreed a deal with rebel groups that ended 30 years of Islam being the official state religion. No citizen shall be discriminated against based on their religion. For Sudan to become a democratic country where the rights of all citizens are enshrined, the constitution should be based on the principle of 'separation of religion and state, in the absence of which the right to self-determination must be respected, the agreement read. The deal received an enthusiastic welcome from Sudans multi-cultural and multi-religious society and represented an important step towards achieving lasting peace. It was also a starting point in a promising transition towards democracy and the rule of law. But now, in the new post-coup order, al-Burhan is bringing Islamists back into the government, sparking fears that jihadists will yet again dominate the political scene. Rise and fall of Bashirs political Islam The 1989 coup was orchestrated by Hassan Al-Turabi, a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan and the leader of the National Islamic Front, which was one of only two Islamic movements that had political power in the twentieth century, with the other being the Islamic Republican Party in Iran. Bashir built his extremist regime on Turabis ideas and started institutionalising Sharia law at a national level. His Islamist rule was characterised by discrimination, support to radical Islamic group such as al-Qaeda, and brutal attempts to suppress religious minorities, especially in the south of the country where many communities are Christian or animist. The war he waged against the population in the south is estimated to have killed more than 2 million people. After a few years of Bashir being in power, he changed the name of the National Islamic Front to National Congress and, in 1999, he put al-Turnabi in jail. He also expelled his supporters from the party, which led to them establishing the Popular Congress Party that became the key opposition force in Sudan. After Bashir and Tarnabi fell out, the Islamist regime started losing momentum and policies started becoming gradually more pragmatic. But even then, Bashir continued politicising the army and giving it control over sectors within the economy. He began losing grip over the military when the insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Eventually, Bashir became dependent on Rapid Support Forces (RSF), paramilitary forces that would use state sponsored slaughter, to suppress protests in the region. After years of Sudan being designated as terrorist state and facing severe sanctions, Bashirs regime was not only bankrupt but also widely disliked. The nations frustration reached its culmination in 2018 when the most intense nationwide protests against Bashirs rule erupted and persisted until, in April 2019, he was forced to step down. People were hopeful that such a significant change would mean the end of the self-proclaimed Islamist government. Post-coup Islamist revival When Bashir fell, civilian members of the Transitional Sovereign Council excluded Islamists from the government and focused on protecting peoples right to self-expression and freedom of worship. However, after the coup this past October, a number of key Islamist figures secured positions in the intelligence services. For instance, generals Abdel Nabi al-Mahi and Abdelmonim Jalal, both of whom are Islamists in the Sudanese Armed Forces, were appointed to lead Military Intelligence. A few months later, Burhan reappointed more than one hundred Islamist diplomats to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They had previously been fired because of links to Bashirs administration. In April, members of a number of Islamists factions, including the Muslim Brotherhood-linked National Congress Party, announced the establishment of a political coalition named Broad Islamist Current, which marked their return to politics. On top of intensifying tensions between the military government and Sudanese people, a direct consequence of these changes has been the Sudanese Foreign Ministry taking on a confrontational position towards the international community and international actors such as the UN or the African Union. Facade of strength While coup leaders giving Islamists leadership positions might be interpreted as them having control over Sudans political direction, in reality, it is a sign of the military not being able to manage the countrys affairs on its own. As Sudan remains cut off from international aid, prices of food and other necessities are skyrocketing, and anti-coup protests persist, pressure on the military government grows. By turning to Islamists who were once in charge, the military has been trying to shift the responsibility for administering the country onto someone else while maintaining its grip on power. Under the guise of unity and strength, Sudans army is at a stalemate. Generals want to be in control but have no plan on how to govern and move forward. An evidence of that is, for example, the militarys inability to appoint a prime minister or the excessive use of violence in response to peaceful demonstrations. Tightening the ties with Islamists is, therefore, a tactical choice but it could soon turn out counterproductive if coup leaders do not learn from Bashirs experience. About the author: Katarzyna Rybarczyk is a political correspondent for Immigration Advice Service, an immigration law firm operating globally and helping people claim asylum. She covers humanitarian issues and conflicts. A Corruption Watch investigation has uncovered grand schemes existing in some second cycle institutions for assisting candidates to cheat in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE). The investigation, conducted in the Ashanti and Bono regions of Ghana before and during the conduct of the 2021 WASSCE for School Candidates, reveals that some schools have instituted special levies which they charge students in return for help to solve examination questions. Corruption Watch discovered at All For Christ Senior High/Technical School and Duadaso Number 1 Senior High/Technical School, both in the Bono Region, that the said levies are put in a pool and used to compromise teachers and invigilators to solve questions for students in the examination hall. All For Christ Senior High/Technical School also charged special fees to award unearned continuous assessment marks to unqualified persons whom they register as school candidates to allow them to retake the WASSCE. Agnes Norkor Teye-Cudjoe, head of Public Affairs at the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), disclosed to Corruption Watch that at the All For Christ Senior High/Technical School, WAECs investigative team that was on the ground detected and reported some incidents of malpractice. So we have reports on malpractices that occurred at All for Christ, she said. In a two-page letter to Corruption Watch, Mr Owusu Gyaase, the Headmaster of All For Christ Senior High/Technical School, denied that the school charged fees for continuous assessment marks or engaged in examination malpractice. On the other hand, Mr. Peterson Aning, the headmaster of Duadaso Number 1 Senior High/Technical School, did not offer a response to our findings in spite of indicating in a phone call that he would do so. The investigation shows that school authorities, teachers, parents and security officials are all complicit in the school-based schemes that allow students to cheat at examination halls. In addition, the content of some secretly recorded audio-visual materials indicates the involvement of some unidentified top officials of WAEC who allegedly help school authorities to perpetrate malpractices as well as escape sanctions. Background In July 2021, Corruption Watch received tip offs about the intention of some schools and individuals to perpetrate examination malpractice during the 2021 WASSCE. Consequently, in September, this reporter set out to investigate the potential examination malpractices, paying special attention to orchestrated efforts by some school authorities to assist candidates to cheat at examination halls. I also focused on the role of racketeers in the leakage of some question papers. Before the 2021 WASSCE, there were clear indications that malpractices were going to move a notch higher as some school authorities were prepared to facilitate examination malpractices in their schools. In the course of the examination, WAEC confirmed that it was aware of some of the school-based schemes. George Ohene Mantey, head of the Test Administration Division of WAEC, revealed that The following schools in respect of which tip offs were received on intents to cheat are being closely monitored for evidence to validate the claims. The schools are: Ejisu Senior High Technical School located at Ejisu, Anlo-Afiadenyigba Senior High School at Afiadenyigba, Tepa Senior High School at Tepa, Yeji Senior High Technical School at Yeji, King David College at Somanya, Ideal College, Sunyani, Christ the King Senior High School, Obuasi, Modern Senior High School, Kpong and another Modern Senior High School at Kintampo, Oyoko Methodist Senior High School, Klo Agogo Senior High School. By the time WAEC put out the list of the eleven (11) schools, which were allegedly planning to cheat, Corruption Watch was already monitoring the conduct of the examinations in four other schools, which WAEC did not include in their list, across the Ashanti and Bono regions. However, it was in the Bono Region where our cameras and audio devices captured moments in two schools where some authorities assisted students to cheat in examination halls. Corruption Watch discovered syndicated schemes for cheating before and during the WASSCE at All For Christ Senior High/Technical School and Duadaso Number 1 Senior High/Technical School. The schools are located about 90 kilometers apart but they employed similar strategies to assist their candidates to cheat, especially during the conduct of core subjects. All For Christ Senior High/Technical School is a popular private second cycle institution located at Kato, a suburb of Berekum, whereas Duadaso Number 1 Senior High/Technical School is a state-funded institution located at Duadaso Number 1, a cashew growing community near Sampa. Pre-exams arrangement for cheating Regarding pre-WASSCE arrangements for cheating, our investigations revealed both schools admitted students who should otherwise register as private candidates for a fee. In the case of All For Christ Senior High/Technical School, authorities charge the students about two hundred and fifty Ghana cedis (GHC250) in return for unearned continuous assessment marks in order to process them as school candidates for WASSCE. For the purpose of this investigation, a Corruption Watch agent called the Headmaster of All For Christ Senior High/Technical School, Mr Owusu Gyaase to enquire about the conditions for admission into third year. This was what transpired. Corruption Watch (CW): I want to make enquiries about writing Owusu Gyaase (OG): the WASSCE? CW: Yes, please. OG: Alright! Initially, when you come here you pay for continuous assessment, which is two-point-five. CW: Continuous assessment? OG: Aaahh! Which is two-point-five. CW: As in two hundred and fifty cedis? OG: Yes. Are you going to be a day [student] or boarder? CW: ...the issue is Im working. OG: ...sign for day [student]. The day school fee is four-point-one (four hundred and ten cedis), boarding is five-point-one (five hundred and ten cedis). CW: And then the main reason why I am interested is that Ive written my [core] math several times and its still not working. OG: Here, it is going to be a last stop for you. CW: Oh okay. Im praying so. OG: You know the continuous assessment helps the student to pass. Every exam you take is marked over 70 (percent); 30 percent is in the school. And for this thirty (30) percent...the lowest mark we arrange is twenty-five (25) over thirty (30). Twenty-seven (27), twenty-eight (28), twenty-nine (29) could be your classwork. We use the big numbers for the difficult subjects. And, as you are a day student, you only buy the school uniform; when it is time for you to write the WASSCE then you put it on. CW: Do I need to always come for classes because itll be difficult [for me] to get permission from my boss. OG: You beg your boss, come down here and sign. One day will do. Then when it is the time for writing the WASSCE then you come in. CW: So, Mr Owusu, please are you the headmaster? OG: Im the headmaster. At the Duadaso Number 1 Senior High/Technical School, popularly known as Duhigh, some school authorities laid the foundation for assisting students to cheat at the beginning of the academic year. By February 2021, these school authorities had directed that final year students should pay a sum of three hundred Ghana cedis (GHC300). Corruption Watch intercepted copies of bank pay-in slips, indicating that the students paid a sum of three hundred Ghana cedis (GHC300) into an account that the school has with the Duadaso Number 1 agency of the Brong Ahafo Catholic Co-Operative Society for Development (BACCSOD Limited). Another pay-in slip in the possession of Corruption Watch indicates that a separate category of students paid two thousand four hundred Ghana cedis (GHC2400) into the same account that the school holds with BACCSOD Limited. In addition, a receipt in possession of Corruption Watch shows the payment of two thousand six hundred (GHC2600) directly to the schools account office. Corruption Watch sources say the payment of the two thousand four hundred Ghana cedis (GHC2400) and two thousand six hundred (GHC2600) were by students that the school admitted into third year for a fee without the approval of the Ghana Education Service (GES). To confirm the allegation of unapproved admissions to year three, a Corruption Watch agent called a number advertised on the Facebook page of Duhigh. We found out that the number belongs to Emmanuel Peh, the senior housemaster of the school. Emmanuel Peh spelled out the terms and conditions for midstream admissions when our agent called to feign interest in securing admission to the school. He told our potential student to prepare to pay about three thousand cedis (GHC3,000), inclusive of hostel fees. Corruption Watch (CW): I am a worker but I want to...further my education. So, I decided to contact you to find out how you can help me join the school and then I want to know if I can join, like, as a third-year student. Emmanuel Peh (EP): Yeah...it may be possible but as at nowI cant give you hundred percent answer that yes! Now what Ill do is that you call me back somewhere in January [2022]. CW: January? EP: Registration will start somewhere January-February thereabout. So, what you need to do is that, which course please? CW: Oh, I want to do my [core] math and [core] science. Sorry, Im a General Arts student, actually. EP: You know you cant do just two subjects. All you need to do is that you register as a candidate. You know school candidates you cant register some courses CW: ...yeah, sure. I will do everything. No problem. EP: So, you register everything. CW: Okay. EP: And when the time is due, maybe, if you are able to....we are very sure that youll pass everything correctly. CW: Okay. So EP: so you be preparingaround three thousand Ghana (GHC3,000) CW: Three thousand cedis (GHC3,000)? EP: Yes. Last year or this year they paid two thousand six hundred (GHC2,600). CW: Okay. So plus, or minus three thousand? EP: Yeah. CW: Okay, thats fine. So, would I need to buy uniforms or its all part of the three thousand [cedis] I should be preparing? EP: If it becomes possible that you can be registered here, everything is inclusive. The uniform is part of it. CW: Okay. Alright. And would I buy books or? EP: Yes. For that onefor sure youll have to buy. You have to buy. What well be giving you is, maybe, the uniform; and that onewell give you only one because what Ive seen is that youll not be a regular student. CW: Yeah. EP: You just wait when the exams, the date is about a weeks time, then you come and then join your colleagues. CW: Please sir, your name? EP: My name is Emmanuel. CW: Emmanuel? EP: Yes. Im the senior housemaster. In view of Senior House Master, Emmanuel Pehs request that the Corruption Watch undercover agent should follow up in January/February 2022 for possible admission to the school, we made four calls to his phone in February 2022 but none of the calls was answered. To be continued Story by: Frederick Asiamah, Journalist, Corruption Watch E-mail: [email protected] 04.08.2022 LISTEN More than 200 members of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) have been disqualified from contesting the August 2022 Branch Executive elections of the party in the Ayawaso West Wuogon constituency of the Greater Accra Region. The aggrieved members say the party disqualified them on grounds that they were not permanent residents of the University of Ghana Legon campus. The aspirants went for vetting on Tuesday and received text messages of their disqualification yesterday. Speaking to Citi News, one of the disqualified aspirants, Adam Zakari said: The reason we were given was that we're not permanent residents on campus therefore we cannot be branch executives at the various polling stations on campus. He later stated that the aggrieved members will petition the regional leadership for redress We have engaged the regional executives, and they have asked us to submit a petition to the regional office, so we will do exactly that. The opposition party last month announced a roadmap for its internal elections. It has planned to hold the elections from July 20 to September 2, 2022. ---citinewsroom Senegalese President Macky Sall's coalition has lost its absolute majority in parliament but finished first by a narrow margin in parliamentary polls, provisional results showed Thursday. It is the first time since the historically stable West African country's independence in 1960 that the ruling party's camp has lost that majority and will have to rely on other forces in parliament to pass legislation. The president's coalition, which includes his party Alliance for the Republic (APR) and other parties, won 82 seats of the National Assembly's 165, the national vote-counting commission said, down from the 125 it won in 2017. Opposition parties had already begun gaining momentum in municipal elections in January, when they won major cities including the capital Dakar, Ziguinchor in the south and Thies in the west. In Sunday's election, they gained 80 seats in total in the single-chamber parliament. Three other seats were won by three small coalitions, who could serve as kingmakers. The final figures are to be published by the country's highest court within five days of the announcement, if no parties appeal the results. For Sall, who has been accused by the opposition of wanting to break the two-term limit and run for president again in 2024, the disappointing legislative results could curb any such ambitions. The president, who was elected in 2012 for seven years and re-elected in 2019 for five years, has so far remained vague about his future plans. He has, however, promised to appoint a prime minister -- a position he abolished in 2019 and reinstated in December 2021 -- from the winning party of Sunday's election. Conflicting claims On Monday, both the opposition and Sall's ruling coalition claimed to have won the vote. The main opposition coalition, Yewwi Askan Wi (which means "Liberate the People" in Wolof), had formed an alliance for the election with the Wallu Senegal ("Save Senegal") coalition, led by former president Abdoulaye Wade. They won 56 and 24 seats respectively, the results Thursday showed. Senegal. By Jonathan WALTER (AFP) Earlier on Thursday, the opposition alliance asked the electoral commission for "the right to verify the minutes (of polling stations) in order to make observations and possible claims within the legal deadlines". Aida Mbodj, another opposition leader, on Wednesday accused the government of "ballot box stuffing" in the northern regions of Matam, Podor, Ranerou and Kanel, all strongholds for the president. Yewwi Askan Wi's highest-profile member, Ousmane Sonko, came third in the 2019 presidential election. But he was prevented from running in Sunday's vote over a technicality. On Wednesday, he said the opposition would "not allow victory to be confiscated". Sall on Wednesday however said the elections had run smoothly, "in calm, serenity and transparency". Voter turnout was a little below 47 percent, the national vote-counting commission said. International observers from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Collective of Civil Society Organisations for the Elections (COSCE) said the vote was peaceful and transparent. 'Out of breath' Senegalese lawmakers are elected according to a system that combines proportional representation with national lists for 53 lawmakers and majority voting in the country's departments for 97 others. The diaspora elects the remaining 15 members of parliament. While the 21-day election campaign passed in a mostly calm atmosphere, the pre-campaign period was marked by violent demonstrations that left at least three people dead. A woman chooses her voting card in Dakar on July 31. By JOHN WESSELS (AFP) Those followed a decision by the interior ministry -- which was confirmed by the country's highest court -- to toss out the first-choice election candidates submitted by Yewwi Askan Wi, citing technical grounds. The ban, which applied specifically to first-choice candidates for seats contested by national lists, barred Sonko from running. "The ruling coalition is out of breath," political analyst Maurice Soudieck Dione told AFP. He said this was due to "the high cost of food, the increase in the price of water (and) the authoritarian practices around the demonstrations, followed by deaths". Lydia Boakye Benson, mother of the deceased woman, Ernestina Gyaama Boakye 04.08.2022 LISTEN The family of the lady who died mysteriously with her husband at Abuakwa Maakro in the Atwima Nwabiagya South Municipality of the Ashanti Region have made shocking revelation about the deceased. According to them, their daughter, Ernestina Gyaama Boakye known as Ernestina Jackson, now deceased, renounced his family two years ago when she returned from the Netherlands. The mother of the deceased woman, Lydia Boakye Benson in an exclusive interview with this reporter on Thursday, August 4, 2022, disclosed that her daughter told her she wouldn't want to have anything to do with the extended family again. "She told us two years ago that, she has adopted her nuclear family, that's her husband and two children as the only family she has and so therefore wouldn't have anything to do with her extended family. "That was the last time I saw my daughter and her family," she stated. She added, "All this while, I was made to believe that my daughter was leaving in the Netherlands with her family not knowing she was staying in a rented apartment at Abuakwa. "I only got to know about my daughter's stay in Ghana after she was found dead in her room." Madam Lydia Boakye Benson told this reporter that it had been the most difficult moment in her life after she finally found out that her eldest daughter who was supposedly leaving in the Netherlands had indeed died mysteriously. Background The Police at Abuakwa in the Ashanti Region on August 3, 2022 begun investigating circumstances that led a man to keep his wifes dead body in their home for some months. The mans body according to police was also discovered in the familys bathroom, sitting on the toilet. Two children of the couple, aged 11 and 13 were also rescued in an unconscious state. They were in a locked room in the house. The family has been identified as the Jacksons who lived in a rented apartment at Abuakwa Maakro, in the Atwima Nwabiagya District of the Ashanti Region. The family is said to have relocated from the Netherlands about seven years ago to Ghana Lithium junior Sayona Mining [ASX:SYA] said it was on track to recommence spodumene production in Q1 2023 at the North American Lithium (NAL) operation in Quebec. Sayona said the NAL operation has picked up speed, with about 30% of plant and equipment upgrades completed. The company having stated that its $190 million equity-funded North American NAL operation is on schedule for first production. SYA shares were up 5% in late Thursday trade. While up 100% in the past 12 months, the lithium stock is down nearly 50% from its 52-week high. Source: www.tradingview.com Sayonas NAL project is back This morning, Sayona reported that its North American Lithium (NAL) project in Quebec is on track to recommence production in Q1 2023. Sayona said the NAL operation has picked up speed, with about 30% of plant and equipment upgrades completed. SYA reported that construction work is on schedule, with 50 construction workers on site, that number is expected to double by September. Sayona has committed about $100 million to the restart. Having started the June quarter with $19.8 million in cash, Sayona ended the quarter with $195.7 million after issuing more than $190 million in new shares. SYA has now received important equipment for the project, billed to June commitments, including magnetic separators, crushers, derrick screeners, and ore sorting conveyors. SYA reported contingency plans are in place to work around supply-chain issues and delays in commissioning activities. Sayonas Managing Director Brett Lynch commented: It is extremely pleasing to see the rapid progress at NAL as we ramp up towards the recommencement of lithium production. With virtually all of the NAL operation powered by hydroelectricity, this is truly one of the worlds most sustainable lithium operations, an important ESG differentiator in an industry that aims to facilitate global decarbonisation. Ways to play the EV revolution: lithium is just one The electric vehicle (EV) market is rapidly expanding, boosted further by government initiatives and funding programs supporting production across the globe. But our energy expert, Selva Freigedo, thinks the global transition to EVs means the industry faces a supply crunch, which can send prices for battery materials soaring even higher in 2022 and beyond. If youd like to know more, I suggest checking out Selvas battery tech metals report for free here. Regards, Kiryll Prakapenka August 04, 2022 How Pelosi's Visit Hurts Taiwan When Nancy Pelosi made her 'woke' flight to Taiwan the U.S. seemed to hope for a Chinese military reaction to it. It positioned an aircraft carrier and two amphibious landing ships in the region. It also shipped additional fighter planes to Japan and South Korea. Chinese and international commentators drew up potential scenarios for a clash like a forced diversion of Pelosi's plane. However, the Chinese government kept its calm. The reintegration of Taiwan into China is not an urgent matter. It had planned for longer term measures designed to press the pro-independence government in Taiwan into obedience. Chinese military exercises will now be held around the island without regard for what Taipei claims as its borders. These missile launches, sea and air maneuvers will not be threatening enough to cause a dangerous military confrontation. But they will be repeated over the next years and will steadily move closer and closer to Taiwan's coast. The median line between China and Taiwan, never officially recognized but adhered to, will now be ignored. China essentially decided to boil the proverbial frog of Taiwanese independence by slowly, slowly increasing the pressure: Chinas Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) is closing off six areas around Taiwan from Thursday to Sunday and is expected to hold drills, including live-fire exercises, in some areas within 12 miles of the island. The drills are expected to be bigger than the missile tests China launched during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis that was sparked in 1995 by the US granting a visa to former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui. Both Chinese and American analysts believe that the unprecedented military exercises could become routine, a consequence of Pelosis provocative visit. Taiwan depends on sea trade. The Chinese military maneuvers will essentially block it for the next few days. It is demonstration of what might come should China get really serious. This military posturing will be aided by selected economic sanctions designed to remove the support for Taiwan's current pro-independence government: China also imposed sanctions on Taiwan because of Pelosi, including a ban on the export of natural sand, and a halt on imports of fish and fruit products from the island. A ban on the export of natural sand, 90% of which Taiwan imports from China, may sound harmless. But if you live on a rock in an area prone to earthquakes you may want to build your high rises with concrete. No sand no concrete. Building costs in Taiwan will rise and the government will be blamed for it. Taiwan's soft power will also be curbed: The authorities will take punitive measures against the "Taiwan Foundation for Democracy" (TFD) and the "International Cooperation and Development Fund" (ICDF), two organizations that have close ties with diehard secessionists, said Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesperson of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council. Enterprises that have donated to the two funds, such as Speedtech Energy, Hyweb Technology, Skyla Corporation, Skyeyes GPS Technology, are to be prohibited from conducting any transactions or cooperation with mainland organizations, enterprises and individuals. The persons responsible for these enterprises are banned from entering the mainland. The people of Taiwan did not support Pelosi's grand standing: News sites ran polls, with almost two-thirds of UDNs respondents saying the visit was destabilising. Talk radio discussed preparation and escape plans, and walked listeners through their growing anxieties. That wasn't helped by Pelosi's tone deafness: At a news conference with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday, Pelosi was asked what she could offer Taiwan to offset the possible costs the island would incur including economic retaliation from China as a consequence of her visit. She answered that her visit was part of a broader U.S. effort to have better economic exchanges with Taiwan, and she said significant Taiwanese businesses are already planning to invest in manufacturing in the United States. "You will get sanctioned while we will steal your prime advantage in chip manufacturing," is not exactly an uplifting message. Other countries which Pelosi also visited felt sidelined by her anti-China antics: Ms. Pelosis visit may also damage a push by the White House to shore up support against China from key allies in the region who analysts say have felt sidelined by the trip, and frustrated by the spiraling tensions. With much recent attention eaten up by Chinas fulminations over the visit, allies suggested that they wish they had been better consulted ahead of Ms. Pelosis journey. South Korea, where a recent economic imbalance and trade deficit has raised concerns, snubbed Pelosi: President Yoon Suk-yeol plans to speak by phone with visiting U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi later Thursday, his office said, after officials said earlier that a meeting between the two is not planned as Yoon is on summer vacation. Pelosi wasn't amused: Korea Pro @southkoreapro - 2:00 UTC Aug 4, 2022 Yoon administration and the ROK National Assembly did not send any delegation to welcome Pelosis arrival last night. Pelosi was not pleased about the situation, multiple reports said. All together Pelosi's trip was not the success she may have thought it would be. It was a trap she had set for herself when it first 'leaked' that she would visit Taiwan. If she had not gone the Republicans would have blasted her as a coward. Now she will carry the responsibility for further deteriorating U.S. relations with China. Taiwan, which all the brouhaha is allegedly about, will further lose in its economic relations with China and will wither away as an economic power. Eventually the people of Taiwan will vote for another party and unification will again come into sight. Posted by b on August 4, 2022 at 9:14 UTC | Permalink Comments next page August 04, 2022 Ukraine Open Thread 2022-122 Only for news & views related to the Ukraine conflict. Off topic comments will be deleted and repeated offenders WILL get banned. The current open thread for other issues is here. Posted by b on August 4, 2022 at 9:30 UTC | Permalink Comments next page The Hollywood heavyweight's surprise appearance on the plane has gone viral after a TikTokker shared footage of the moment captured by her aunty. "When Jason Momoa is your flight attendant," the caption read. In the clip, Jason wears a Kukui nut lei around his neck and a pink hibiscus flower behind his left ear as he hands out bottles of his drinking water Mananalu. The 'Game of Thrones' star founded the company in 2019 and has recently partnered with Hawaiian Airlines. The TikTok has racked up over 5 million views, with hundreds of commenters losing their minds over the thought of Jason serving them drinks. Notification from the Environmental Protection Agency that it is considering redesignating the Permian Basin as being in non-attainment of National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone has sent shockwaves from the Permian Basin throughout the state. An area is considered to be in non-attainment when it exceeds standards in this case 70 parts per billion under current regulations over a certain period of time. The Permian Basin Coalition hosted a luncheon Wednesday, sponsored by the Midland-Odessa Transportation Alliance and Permian Basin Petroleum Association to discuss the issue. James Beauchamp, president of MOTRAN, said after the notification was received, MOTRAN decided to gather some data to better understand the EPAs concerns. He told his audience they began with Midland County, setting up monitors at Midland International Airport, near Midland Memorials west campus and at Farm-to-Market Road 1788 and County Road 60. The monitors tested the air for 15 minutes, taking samples at 10-second intervals. The highest score was 41 at the airport, he said, well below the 70 PPB standard. Bobby Janecka, one of the Texas Commission on Environmental Qualitys three commissioners, said his agency is not aware of any data showing that any of the Permian Basin airshed exceeds target levels and requires additional monitoring. His concern, Janecka told the audience, is that the agency could gather new, strong data showing the area is in compliance but it would be rejected by the EPA, which would only consider data before a certain time. That means, he explained, is that while Texas and the TCEQ can argue that the EPA is basing its actions on data primarily from New Mexico and that its data shows the Permian in compliance, those arguments would still be rejected. Donna Huff, TCEQs deputy director, air quality division, said ozone monitors have been set up in Hobbs and Carlsbad in New Mexico and several in the El Paso area, but none in the West Texas portion of the region and they arent required due to a lack of high density population. Ozone monitors in Hobbs had a reading of 70 PPB, Carlsbad a reading of 69 PPB and Carlsbad Caverns a reading of 73 PPB through the first two quarters of 2022. She echoed Janeckas concerns over how discretionary the decision to redesignate the Permian Basin as in non-attainment by citing communications between Gov. Greg Abbott and EPA Administrator Michael Regan. The governor had written Regan in June expressing concern the designation would jeopardize Permian Basin oil and gas production, which constitutes about 40 percent of US oil production and about 15 percent of US gas production. Regan responded in July that the EPA is still considering redesignation. Redesignating the Permian Basin as being in non-attainment is purely at the discretion of Regan, which raised concerns among the elected officials attending the luncheon. There is a strong legal basis for challenging this EPA action, State Rep. Brooks Landgraf of Odessa told the Reporter-Telegram. This is not based on science, theres no air monitoring on the Texas side of the Permian. This is a house of cards that werent built on a strong foundation. State Rep. Tom Craddick of Midland said legislators can monitor what is being done and do all they can to push back on actions they feel are unnecessary or detrimental. We can support litigation filed in court and help coordinate meetings like this and groups like this so were all united, Craddick said. Unity is more productive than various groups going in different directions. Kevin Sparks, state senator-elect, said its important to maintain the integrity of state agencies like the TCEQ and Railroad Commission and the quality people who work at those agencies. I believe in using good data and science to push back against federal action, Sparks said. To me, from what Ive heard, its clear Texas has to push back against the federal government again. Huff said the added cost to industries and cities to meet attainment standards if the area is redesignated as non-attainment could force cities to either find more resources for development projects or forgo projects. That is why Midland City Council member Lori Blong said its important to pay attention to this issue so the city doesnt find itself in the position of having to choose between developing road infrastructure or oil and gas development. Non-attainment could restrict our ability to grow, she said. And the potential consequences are not short-lived. Theres 20-plus years of potential impact. Blong continued, If we can use whatever influence we have to stop EPA overreach, the time is now. We want to get ahead of this and not be in the position of fighting it after the fact. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate BANGKOK (AP) A Japanese video journalist detained in Myanmar while covering a brief pro-democracy march has been charged with violating a law against spreading false or alarming news, the Southeast Asian countrys military government announced Thursday. Toru Kubota, a Tokyo-based documentary filmmaker, was arrested Saturday by plainclothes police after taking images of the protest. He is the latest of about 140 journalists arrested since the military seized power last year from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. More than half have been released, but the media remains under tight restrictions. A military information office, the Tatmadaw True News Information Team, said in a statement that Kubota was charged with incitement, specifically causing fear, spreading false news, or agitating against a government employee. It carries a penalty of up to three years in prison. Most of Myanmars imprisoned journalists were charged under the same law. Kubota is also charged with violating visa regulations The statement said Kubota arrived in Yangon from Thailand on July 1 with a tourist visa. Kubota is the fifth foreign journalist detained in Myanmar, after U.S. citizens Nathan Maung and Danny Fenster, who worked for local publications, and freelancers Robert Bociaga of Poland and Yuki Kitazumi of Japan. They were all eventually deported. The armys takeover was opposed by widespread peaceful protests that were suppressed with lethal force. Opposition continues with peaceful flash protests in cities and towns, and armed resistance in the countryside. According to a detailed tally by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, at least 2,148 civilians have been killed by the security forces and 14,970 arrested since the military took power. The military statement said Kubota was detained in Yangons South Dagon township while taking pictures and videos of 10-15 protesters. It said he confessed to police that he had contacted participants in the protest a day earlier to arrange to film it. The statement didnt mention where he is being held. Two protesters in Saturdays march were also arrested, according to the protest organizers, but there was no comment about them from the military. Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiji Kihara said on Monday that a Japanese male citizen in his 20s was arrested Saturday while filming a demonstration in Yangon and that Japanese Embassy officials have requested his early release. Friends of Kubota in Japan on Wednesday called for his immediate release, and an online petition has collected more than 41,000 signatures demanding his freedom. A graduate of Tokyos Keio University with a masters degree from the University of the Arts London, Kubota, 26, has done assignments for Yahoo! News Japan, Vice Japan and Al Jazeera English. His work has focused on ethnic conflicts, immigrants and refugee issues, including the plight of Myanmars persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) Former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez was arrested Thursday on bribery charges linked to the financing of her 2020 campaign, the latest hit to an island with a long history of corruption that brought fresh political upheaval to the U.S. territory. Vazquez is accused of engaging in a bribery scheme from December 2019 through June 2020 while she was governor with several people, including a Venezuelan-Italian bank owner, a former FBI agent, a bank president and a political consultant. I am innocent. I have not committed any crime, she told reporters. I assure you that they have committed a great injustice against me. The arrest embarrassed and angered many in Puerto Rico who believe the island's already shaky image has been further tarnished, leaving a growing number of people who have lost faith in their local officials to wonder whether federal authorities are their only hope to root out entrenched government corruption. Concern over previous corruption cases led to a delay in federal aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria as the U.S. government implemented more safeguards. Thursday's arrest also was a blow to Vazquez's pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which is pushing to hold a referendum next year in a bid to become the 51st U.S. state. Vazquez, 62, was the second woman to serve as Puerto Ricos governor and the first former governor to face federal charges. Former Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila of the opposing Popular Democratic Party was charged with campaign finance violations while in office and was found not guilty in 2009. He had been the first Puerto Rico governor to be charged with a crime in recent history. For the second time in our history, political power and public office are used to finance an electoral campaign, said Jose Luis Dalmau, president of Acevedo's party. Using the power of the government to advance political agendas is unacceptable and an affront to democracy in Puerto Rico." Vazquez's consultant, identified as John Blakeman, and the bank president, identified as Frances Diaz, have pleaded guilty to participating in the bribery scheme, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In early 2019, the international bank owned by Julio Martin Herrera Velutini was being scrutinized by Puerto Ricos Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions because of transactions authorities believed were suspicious and had not been reported by the bank. Authorities said Herrera and Mark Rossini, the former FBI agent who provided consulting services to Herrera, allegedly promised to financially support Vazquezs 2020 campaign for governor in exchange for Vazquez dismissing the commissioner and appointing a new one of Herreras choosing. Authorities said Vazquez accepted the bribery offer and in February 2020 demanded the commissioners resignation. She then was accused of appointing a former consultant for Herreras bank as the new commissioner in May 2020. After the move, officials said Herrera and Rossini paid more than $300,000 to political consultants to support Vazquezs campaign. A flurry of messages exchanged during that time between people involved in the case included a heart emoji attached to the commissioner's resignation letter and three sealed lips emojis when someone provided Rossi's name to Vazquez, who requested the name of the guy from the FBI. In addition, Herrera texted Rossini about the need for a campaign manager and said he didn't want a monkey from Puerto Rico. After Vazquez lost the primary to current Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, authorities said Herrera then allegedly sought to bribe Pierluisi to end an audit into his bank with favorable terms. Herrera is accused of using intermediaries from April 2021 to August 2021 to offer a bribe to Pierluisis representative, who was actually acting under FBI orders, according to the indictment. Officials said Herrera then ordered a $25,000 payment to a political action committee in hopes of trying to bribe Pierluisi. Stephen Muldrow, U.S. Attorney for Puerto Rico, said Pierluisi is not involved in the case. Vazquez, Herrera and Rossini are each charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and honest services wire fraud. If they are found guilty on all counts, they could face up to 20 years in prison, officials said. Meanwhile, Diaz and Blakeman could face up to five years in prison, officials said. Muldrow said officials believe Herrera is in the United Kingdom and Rossini in Spain. It wasnt clear if the U.S. would seek to extradite them. Rossini resigned from the FBI in November 2008 as part of a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to criminally accessing a sensitive FBI database for personal purposes. Many of the searches were related to Anthony Pellicano, an infamous private eye for celebrities who was charged in 2006 with wiretapping certain stars and bribing a police officer. Attorneys for the other suspects charged in the case could not be immediately reached for comment. In mid-May, Vazquez's attorney told reporters that he and his client were preparing for possible charges as the former governor at the time denied any wrongdoing. Vazquez was sworn in as governor in August 2019 after former Gov. Ricardo Rossello stepped down following massive protests. She served until 2021, after losing the primaries of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party to Pierluisi. In a statement Thursday, Pierluisi said his administration will work with federal authorities to help fight corruption. No one is above the law in Puerto Rico, he said. Faced with this news that certainly affects and lacerates the confidence of our people, I reiterate that in my administration, we will continue to have a common front with federal authorities against anyone who commits an improper act, no matter where it comes from or who it may implicate. Vazquez previously served as the islands justice secretary and a district attorney for more than 30 years. She became governor after Puerto Ricos Supreme Court ruled that the swearing in of Pierluisi who had only been nominated as secretary of state as governor was unconstitutional. Vazquez at the time said she was not interested in running for office and would only finish the nearly two years left in Rossellos term. Rossello had resigned in late July 2019 after tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the street, angry over corruption, mismanagement of public funds and an obscenity-laced chat in which he and 11 other men including public officials made fun of women, gay people and victims of Hurricane Maria, among others. Shortly after she was sworn in, Vazquez told the AP that her priorities were to fight corruption, secure federal hurricane recovery funds and help lift Puerto Rico out of a deep economic crisis as the government struggled to emerge from bankruptcy. During the interview, she told the AP that she had long wanted to be in public service: as a girl, she would stand on her balcony and hold imaginary trials, always finding the supposed defendants guilty. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate ROME (AP) Pope Francis has promoted a Vatican nurse whom he credited with saving his life to be his personal health care assistant. The Vatican announced the appointment of Massimiliano Strappetti in a one-line statement issued Thursday. Strappetti, the nursing coordinator of the Vaticans health department, accompanied Francis on a difficult trip to Canada last month. Francis, 85, last year credited Strappetti with having accurately ascertained an intestinal problem that led to the pope's 10-day hospital stay in July 2021 to remove 33 centimeters (13 inches) of his colon that had narrowed. A nurse, a man with a lot of experience, saved my life, Francis told the COPE radio of the Spanish bishops' conference in the months after his surgery. Francis noted that Strappetti's intervention was the second time a nurse had saved his life. A nurse in his native Argentina decided in 1957 to double the amount of drugs the future pope, then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was prescribed after part of his lung was removed due to a respiratory infection, he recalled. Francis has a personal physician, Dr. Roberto Bernabei, who was appointed last year. Bernabei is an internist and geriatric specialist at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome. The pontiff has had a series of health problems in the past year, most significantly strained ligaments in his right knee that sharply reduced his mobility. After months of magnetic and laser treatments, Francis can walk short distances with a cane or walker, though he also uses a wheelchair. Strappetti was on hand to help with the wheelchair during Francis' general audience Wednesday. He coordinates the nurses of the Vatican's small health care system, which provides basic care for Vatican employees and their families. Strappettis appointment was announced days after he and a doctor accompanied Francis on his weeklong penitential pilgrimage to Canada to atone for the Catholic Churchs role in the countrys residential schools for Indigenous children. Francis always travels with a doctor and nurse who are on call in case he has health problems. Strappetti, for example, was on hand when Francis issued his main apology and received a feathered headdress from Indigenous leaders. On the flight home from the trip, Francis said he would have to slow down his future travels and maybe resign one day. This trip was a bit of a test. Its true you cant do trips in this state, maybe we have to change a bit the style, reduce, pay the debts of the trips that I still have to do and reorganize, he said. But he added that the door is open to also resign if he cant carry on. Community Events Join fellow Midlanders and local vendors at Lo. Street Markets August showing on Saturday. Walk the Micro Market strip as you shop through the art, bites, apparel and more. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., 201 W. Wall St. Join SisterDough and more tha 40 other vendors in their first night market Friday at The Tailgate. Admission is free for all ages, and participants can expect bumpin beats from DJ Joel all night long. 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., 4401 N. Big Spring St. What better way to support little Midlanders than with the annual Back-to-School supplies drive, hosted by Members Financial FCU. The donation event will run through Aug. 31 and takes contributions of all sorts: pens, notepads, Crayons, you name it. Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturdays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., 3100 Sunburst Drive Thursday will be the last day City of Midland pools are open. Doug Russell Aquatic Center, 900 N. Midland Drive, will be open from noon to 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Admission is $3 per person, children 2 and under free Things to Do, See, Hear Centennial Park Music in the Park, Brother Z, Friday Music in the Park, The Croakin Toads, Aug 19 Midland Community Theater Summer Mummers, Yucca Theatre, Friday and Saturday, Aug 12-13, 19-20, 26-27 Museum of the Southwest Works of Art! in the Historic Turner Mansion! Loc Huynh, Aug 11 Note: session 1: ages 4-7; session 2: ages 8-12; session 3: ages 13+; RSVP www.museumsw.org/events Midland Downtown Farmers Market, Every Saturday, 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Wagner Noel Performing Arts Center Food is Medicine seminar, Aug 6 Robert Earl Keen World Tour of Texas, Aug 26 Jay Owenhouse, Aug 27 Charley Crockett, Aug 28 Windwalker Farms Rick Smith Memorial Shoot, Friday Blazin Targets Registered Shoot, Aug. 14 YMCA Clay Shoot, Aug. 19 Martin Co. Convent Clay Shoot, Aug. 20 Boy Scouts Clay Shoot, Aug. 26 Archway Outreach Clay Shoot, Aug. 27 Horseshoe Cody Johnson, Amphitheater, Thursday West Texas Heat Jackpot, Main Arena, Saturday Aaron Watson and Friends Birthday Bash, Amphitheater, Aug. 20 Midland County Fair, Aug. 25-28 Movies in the Park Luca, Aug. 12, Centennial Park, 200 W. Wall St., starts at dusk -- To put your event on the Community Calendar, send the information to morgan-taylor.thomas@hearstnp.com U.S. Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan presents Rabeya Akter and Steven Chen with congressional commendations for being the first individuals from the Northern Marianas to achieve the Congressional Award. Editor Zaldy Dandan is the recipient of the Best Editorial Writer Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the CNMI Humanities Award for Outstanding Contributions to Journalism. His four books are available on amazon.com Duncan_Andison/Getty Images/iStockphoto The South Jacksonville Board of Trustees is scheduled to meet in regular session at 7 p.m. today in Village Hall, 301 Dewey Drive. Among the items on the agenda are: This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate MADISON, Wis. (AP) As Wisconsin's longest-serving Assembly speaker, Republican Robin Vos has presided over efforts to restrict abortions, weaken unions, expand gun rights and push back against COVID-19 mandates. Despite that, he's facing a primary challenger who claims he's not conservative enough. The challenger's argument: Vos should do more to respond to former President Donald Trump's unfounded allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. Primary challengers like the one facing Vos next Tuesday have been successfully targeting incumbent state lawmakers across the country, and Republicans are taking the brunt of it. With more than half the state legislative primaries concluded, Republican incumbents this year have been losing at nearly twice the average rate of the past decade, according to data compiled for The Associated Press by the election tracking organization Ballotpedia. The primary loss rate for Democratic state lawmakers is similar to previous elections. The Republican losses continued to mount Tuesday, as Trump-endorsed candidates ousted incumbent state senators in Arizona and Michigan and a conservative challenger beat the assistant majority leader of the Missouri Senate. Though not technically an incumbent, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers also lost a bid for state Senate after being criticized for refusing to help Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In many cases, Republican lawmakers are being defeated by challengers portraying themselves as more conservative on election integrity, transgender policies, school instruction and other hot-button issues. We have a far-right faction that is very dissatisfied with whats happening on the left. So if you are not rabidly a fanatic that just punches every button, then youre going to have an issue, said Arkansas state Rep. Craig Christiansen, who lost in a Republican primary earlier this year. Though Christiansen considers himself very conservative, he drew multiple challengers and failed to advance to a runoff. That came after he voted against overriding Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson's veto of legislation making Arkansas the first state banning gender-confirming treatments for those younger than 18. Christiansen said he considered the legislation unconstitutional, because it lacked an exception for youths already undergoing such treatments. Vos, who has served as Wisconsin Assembly speaker since 2013, has taken sharp criticism for not pursuing a resolution decertifying Democrat Joe Bidens victory in the state. Trump endorsed his Republican challenger, Adam Steen, saying that Vos refused to do anything to right the wrongs that were done in the 2020 election. Under pressure from Trump, Vos hired former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman last year to investigate the election. Gableman said decertifying the election was a practical impossibility. Steen said he decided to challenge Vos because he failed to pass legislation outlawing absentee ballot drop boxes ahead of the 2020 election and hasnt pushed for tougher consequences for voter fraud, among other things. Conservatism as a whole has been lethargic, Steen said. We lack vision, and I think that vision is coming back. Vos said Steen is running on hyperbole. He said Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, poses the real obstacle to conservatives. Evers, for example, vetoed Republican bills that would have made it harder to vote absentee. "If we dont get a Republican governor, (Steen) would have less success than I had, Vos said. Vos is one of nine GOP Wisconsin lawmakers facing primaries. Though the challengers face an uphill fight, they could push the already conservative Legislature even further right if they notch a few victories. That would mark a significant shift in a state that plays a crucial role in national elections. Twenty-seven states had held legislative primaries or conventions before Tuesday. In those, at least 110 Republican incumbents and 33 Democrats had been defeated. The Republican loss rate of 7.1% far exceeds the Democratic rate of 2.8%. It also significantly exceeds the 3.6% average Republican incumbent loss rate over the previous decade in those states, as well as the 4.4% Republican loss rate in those states during the last redistricting election cycle in 2012. Idaho voters have led the way in ousting Republican incumbents, defeating 18 GOP lawmakers or 30% of those who sought reelection even while choosing GOP Gov. Brad Little over a Trump-backed challenger who claimed he wasn't conservative enough. The losers included three lawmakers representing Kootenai County in northern Idaho, where a local Republican committee recommended conservative challengers against some incumbents after a lengthy vetting process. People have kind of had it, and theyre willing to get up and vote," said Brent Regan, chair of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds endorsed primary opponents to four GOP state House members who hadn't supported her plan to provide taxpayer-funded scholarships for students to attend private schools. All four incumbents lost, including House Education Committee Chairman Dustin Hite. Even in some Democratic-dominated states, Republican primary voters have ousted incumbents deemed not conservative enough. Illinois state Rep. David Welter, one of nine Republican lawmakers booted from the chamber in February for ignoring COVID-19 protocols to wear masks, lost his primary in June to a challenger who claimed Welter wasn't Republican enough. Challenger Jed Davis criticized Welter's votes for the Equal Rights Amendment and a construction bill containing a gas tax hike, among other things. Davis also derided Welter's connections to U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who became a GOP outcast after voting to impeach Trump and participating in the Democratic-led House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Welter once worked for Kinzinger's campaign and received $32,500 in contributions since 2021 from committees associated with Kinzinger. People pegged me as more of a moderate," Welter said. "Im now going to be replaced by somebody who is really, really far to the extreme on the right. Welter believes redistricting after the 2020 census also played a role in his defeat by shifting the voters he represented. In states where partisan officials controlled redistricting, such as Illinois, the maps enacted for the 2022 elections often contained "more and more extreme partisan gerrymanders, according to a recent analysis by political scientists and data experts. When legislative districts tilt further right or left, incumbents are more likely to face challengers, and candidates who take more extreme positions are more likely to win, according to an analysis in a forthcoming book by Saint Louis University political scientist Steven Rogers. Wisconsin's state legislative districts had some of the largest pro-Republican tilts among all states during the past decade and underwent only minor changes before this year's election. Most of the challengers there are likely to lose, said University of Wisconsin-La Crosse political scientist Anthony Chergosky. But they still could leave their mark by forcing incumbents further right to please the GOP base that votes in primaries. We are just experiencing a real scramble for power within the Republican Party right now, he said. President Trump is really flexing his muscles in directing activists in the party against people like Robin Vos. Anyone in a position of authority in the Republican Party is a target. ___ Lieb reported from Jefferson City, Mo. ___ Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics. Ben Singson/Journal-Courier A Jacksonville auto repair shop is making repairs of its own after a semi-trailer truck and a pickup truck hit the building Tuesday. Jacksonville police said a semi-trailer truck being driven by Tyler D. Darush, 25, of Franklin was going east on Washington Street when it failed to come to a complete stop at North Clay Avenue. That truck and a pickup truck being driven by Bruce Williams of Jacksonville, who was going south on North Clay Avenue, collided. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Russian forces shelled a Ukrainian city close to Europe's biggest nuclear power plant Thursday, reinforcing warnings from the U.N. nuclear chief that the fighting around the site could lead to a disastrous accident. Dnipropetrovsk's regional governor said Russia fired 60 rockets at Nikopol, across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been under Russian supervision since Moscow's troops seized it early in the war. Some 50 residential buildings were damaged in the city of 107,000, and residents were left without electricity, Valentyn Reznichenko wrote on Telegram. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had warned on Tuesday that the situation was becoming more perilous daily at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the city of Enerhodar. Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated at the plant, he said. What is at stake is extremely serious and extremely grave and dangerous. He expressed concern about the way the plant is being operated and the danger posed by the fighting going on around it. He cited shelling at the beginning of the war when it was taken over and continuing instances of Ukraine and Russia accusing each other of attacks there. Experts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said they believe Russia is shelling the area intentionally, putting Ukraine in a difficult position. Either Ukraine returns fire, risking international condemnation and a nuclear incident which Ukrainian forces are unlikely to do or Ukrainian forces allow Russian forces to continue firing on Ukrainian positions from an effective safe zone, the think tank said. The Russian capture of Zaporizhzhia renewed fears that the largest of Ukraines four nuclear power plants could be damaged, setting off an emergency like the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the worlds worst nuclear disaster, which happened about 110 kilometers (65 miles) north of the capital, Kyiv. Also in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the Russian military struck two Ukrainian munitions depots near the village of Novoivanivka and a fuel depot near the Zaporizhzhia railway station. In northern Ukraine, the country's second-largest city, Kharkiv, was shelled by the Russians, Ukraine's presidential office said. Several industrial sites were hit in the city, which has been a frequent target. In the nearby city of Chuhuiv, a rocket hit a five-story residential building. Fighting continued in the fiercely contested Donetsk region in the east, with Ukrainian authorities saying a school was destroyed in the village of Ocheretyne. The attacks have disrupted supplies of gas, water and power, and the region's residents are being evacuated. In the town of Toretsk, artillery shells hit a bus stop, a church and apartment buildings, killing at least eight people, regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said. In the city of Donetsk, Russian-backed separatist authorities accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the central part of the city Thursday. The area hit was near a theater where a farewell ceremony for a prominent separatist officer killed a few days ago was being held. Donetsk Mayor Alexei Kulemzin said six people were killed. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied Ukrainian involvement. He alleged, without offering evidence, that Russian or separatist forces were responsible for the shelling. Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of firing on territories under their own control. Russian forces have already seized the Luhansk region that neighbors Donetsk. Its Ukrainian governor, Serhiy Haidai, said on social media that local residents are being mobilized by the Russian side to fight against Kyiv's forces and that even indispensable mine workers are being taken. Ukrainian authorities reported another abduction of a mayor who reportedly refused to collaborate with the Russians in the southern Kherson region, which is also almost entirely occupied. The reported kidnapping of Serhiy Lyakhno, mayor of the village of Hornostaivka, comes as Russia amasses more troops in the area in anticipation of a counteroffensive by Kyiv and ahead of a planned referendum on the region becoming part of Russia. ___ Follow APs coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine Farmers Market: 7 a.m.-noon, Pathway Plaza, 1905 W. Morton Ave. Prices vary. | Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday through Oct. 31. Link cards accepted. Produce and Bakery Giveaway: 9 a.m.-noon, Jacksonville Food Center, 316 E. State St. Free | For Morgan County residents. Free Noon Meal: 11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m., The Salvation Army, 331 W. Douglas Ave. | Meals in to-go containers can be picked up at side door. Walking for Wellness: 12:30-3 p.m., First Christian Church, 2106 S. Main St. Free | Indoor walking program offered year-round Monday-Thursday. For more information, call 217-243-6445. Spirit of Faith Soup Kitchen: 3:30-4 p.m., Spirit of Faith Soup Kitchen, 105 E. Dunlap St. Free | Serving meals to go for anyone in need. Central Park Market: 4-8 p.m., Downtown Jacksonville. Prices vary. | Extended business hours for local bars, shops and restaurants, local vendors, food trucks, and more. The first Thursday of every month through September. Drive-Through Colorectal Cancer Screening: 4-6 p.m., Jacksonville Memorial Hospital, 1600 W. Walnut St. Free | Pick up colorectal screening packet at circle drive. Ice Cream Social: 5:30-7:30 p.m., Governor Duncan Mansion lawn, 4 Duncan Place. Suggested donation of $7.50 for adults and $5 for children under 10. | Cupcakes, ice cream, drinks and music. Proceeds benefit the Duncan Mansion. Poetry Open Mic: 7 p.m., Soap Co. Coffee House, 207 S. Sandy St. Free | Read or listen to poetry. Masks preferred. For more information call 217-742-5777 or email robertseufert@frontier.com. First Thursday of each month. Friday Drive-Through Colorectal Cancer Screening: 9-11 a.m., Jacksonville Memorial Hospital, 1600 W. Walnut St. Free | Pick up colorectal screening packet at circle drive. Donuts and Coffee for Veterans: 9-11 a.m., Pike County All Wars Museum, 320 N. Illinois St., Pittsfield. Produce and Bakery Giveaway: 9 a.m.-noon, Jacksonville Food Center, 316 E. State St. Free | For Morgan County residents. Summer Bookmobile for Kids: 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., various locations, Jacksonville. | The library is coming to various locations in Jacksonville every Friday. Anyone from age 2 to seniors in high school can check out two books a week. Library card not required, no late fees and no registration. For more information, call 217-243-5435 or email bspradlin@jaxpl.org. Baby Storytime: 10 a.m., Jacksonville Public Library, 201 W. College Ave. | For caregivers and babies to 24 months. For more information, call 217-243-5435 or email clangdon@jaxpl.org. Archaeology Fridays: 10-11:30 a.m., Old Kampsville Grade School. Free | For children Kindergarten through third grades. Sessions held each Friday through Aug. 8. Make-and-take craft activity and game. Registration suggested by emailing education@caa-archeology.org or calling 618-653-4316. Free Noon Meal: 11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m., The Salvation Army, 331 W. Douglas Ave. | Meals in to-go containers can be picked up at side door. Downtown Shop Crawl: Noon-7 p.m., downtown Beardstown. | Food, drinks, shopping, and live music by Jobe Shores 5-7 p.m. Tales From the Vault: Bookish Artists Books from the ISM Collection: Noon-1 p.m., Illinois State Museum, Research and Collections Center 1011 E. Ash St., Springfield. Free | In-person, streamed online with advanced registration. For more information contact events@illinoisstatemuseum.org or 217-782-6044. Produce and Bakery Giveaway: 12:30-1 p.m., The Salvation Army, 331 W. Douglas Ave. Free. Scott and Karl: 6-10 p.m., The Loading Dock, 401 E. Front St., Grafton. | Live music. City Heat: 7-11 p.m., Grafton Pub, 225 W. Main St. | Live music. Jacksonville Main Street Downtown Concert Series: 7-9 p.m., Central Park, downtown Jacksonville. | The Harmans perform. Refreshments on sale 6 p.m. Bring lawn chairs or blankets. Grafton Family Fun Day: 7-11 p.m., Red Hawk Park, 1200 Grafton Hills Drive. Free admission | Free hot dogs, chips, popcorn and water, activities and helicopter rides (weather permitting). Family movie at dusk. Dave Caputo: 8 p.m., The Bloody Bucket, 201 E. Main St. | Live music. To submit items to the calendar, go to myjournalcourier.com and select calendar, or email jjcsocial@myjournalcourier.com. Items must be submitted at least 48 hours in advance. Review: Youth and anarchy in Bodies Bodies Bodies View Photo Bodies Bodies Bodies might just be the first great Gen Z thriller. In director Halina Reijns film is a razor-sharp satire of a very specific kind of modern privilege set inside an escalating murder mystery in a remote mansion as a hurricane rages outside. Dripping in neon, platitudes, sweat and fear, Bodies Bodies Bodies, opening in New York and Los Angeles Friday, is playful, cutting and never dull. The events are limited to one long night, but the toxic tensions were boiling over long before an actual corpse is introduced to the party. Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) has decided to take her new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), to meet her oldest friend, David (Pete Davidson), who is hosting a kind of end of the world rager in his parents mansion to ride out a hurricane. Sophie reassures Bee that her friends arent as nihilistic as they seem online and Bee looks on like anyone in a new relationship would: With nervous hope. It is not immediately evident that this film is about the young adult children of obscene wealth until Sophie drives up to a mansion that Daisy Buchanan might find impressive. This is no 1980s-greed-is-good portrait of young affluence, with cashmere cable knits and Lacoste polos, nor is it a 90s version bedecked in designer logos. These are the kids who only other wealthy kids would recognize as wealthy, who know enough to apologize for their privilege but also enough to be wary of outsiders. Not that those friendships borne out of the same boarding schools and tax brackets are somehow intrinsically safer, theyre just the devil they happen to know. In the back of the house David, his girlfriend, Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), and their friends Jordan (Myhala Herrold) and Alice (Rachel Sennott), all excellent in their roles, are in the pool partying with an exhibitionists abandonment, like they want everyone they hope is watching to think they think no one is watching. It soon becomes wildly clear that Bee is one of those outsiders and that Sophie was not, exactly, expected. They are anything-goes youths, except when it comes to the sin of not having responded yes in a text chain. The title of the film is derived from a game they play that involves slapping, shots and a fake killing. When the lights come back on, they have to find the body and figure out the murderer. But this tense game only brings out the festering wounds in the group and several quit in protest, including Alices boyfriend Greg (Lee Pace), who is trying to fit in with a crowd that is probably two decades younger then him. And then the real murders start. Bee becomes our innocent eyes and ears to whole confusing, debaucherously bloody endeavor in which the social contract expires along with everyones cell phone service. The film, written by Sarah DeLappe and based on a story by Kristen Roupenian (who wrote the viral New Yorker story Cat Person) acutely exposes how quickly social dramas and slights can seem like cause for murder. And yet even as things devolve and more friends are murdered, the dwindling surviving characters try their best to avoid microaggressions and triggering words as though navigating a fight on Twitter. I wont deprive anyone of the pleasure of the surprises to come. But the reveal just makes you want to watch the whole thing again. Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, an A24 release playing in New York and Los Angeles Friday and nationwide on Aug. 12, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for for violence, bloody images, drug use, sexual references, and pervasive language. Running time: 95 minutes. Three stars out of four. - MPA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian. - Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr By LINDSEY BAHR AP Film Writer Jo Koys Easter Sunday puts Filipinos front and center View Photo LOS ANGELES (AP) For a comedy, Jo Koys new movie Easter Sunday had a lot of waterworks. The film was no ordinary job for the comedian and the rest of the cast. The magnitude of being on a mostly Filipino set led to happy cry-fests, Koy said. Emotions really hit when co-star Tia Carrere pointed out this was her first time playing a Filipino character in her 40-year career. To be able to be right there in a scene with five other Filipino actors and just doing a scene about a family She never saw that before, Koy, 51, told The Associated Press. We all just kind of like teared up and just celebrated together because its like OK, this is going to be one of many moments up here. Koy, who is half Filipino and half white, is making his feature film debut in a movie largely inspired by the material from his Netflix stand-up specials. DreamWorks/Universal is touting Easter Sunday, which opens in theaters Friday, as the first big studio movie with an all-Filipino ensemble. Koy plays Joe Valencia, a comic and aspiring actor who goes home to the San Francisco Bay Area for the titular holiday. He attempts to bond with his teenage son while dealing with well-meaning but overbearing relatives. The production comes at a time when Filipino American food, history and advocacy are increasingly emerging into the zeitgeist. Finally our stories, our faces are front and center on the big screen, said Carrere, 55, and known for movies like Waynes World, True Lies and Lilo & Stitch. I have to pinch myself that Im still here, still in the business and invited to the party. Jimmy O. Yang (Crazy Rich Asians, Love Hard), who has a cameo in Easter Sunday, also served as a producer. That meant watching many, many audition tapes of actors of Filipino or Asian descent. Yang was blown away by the talent. It made casting 10 roles that much tougher. He thinks Hollywood claims that capable Asian actors are hard to find are just lazy excuses. As an actor, Im like all of these guys are so good. How did I ever get a job? Yang said. Some of them I wanted to call them and be like Hey, man! Please keep going OK? We just couldnt hire you for this job but please keep going.' Easter Sunday, directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, is set in the heavily Filipino suburb of Daly City where screenwriter Ken Cheng immigrated to as a kid. He envisioned a mix of Ice Cubes Friday and the holiday flick Its a Wonderful Life. A producer, too, Cheng wrote it in 2020 during lockdown. He then turned to Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Partners is co-producing. Within a few hours the legendary director read it and gave his approval, according to Cheng. From that day to the first day we started shooting was something like five and a half months. And thats like insanely fast, Cheng said. A lot of that is how enthusiastic everyone was about building a movie around Jo. Hollywood is populated with notable half-Filipino actors like Vanessa Hudgens and Darren Criss. But Koy is the one leaning into his heritage in his work. For example, he wanted a scene in Easter Sunday showing the family packing customary balikbayan boxes. Filipinos, usually first-generation immigrants, typically send boxes with American goods to relatives in the Philippines. Mailing balikbayan boxes is practically its own industry. Theres this responsibility that they put on their shoulders when they make it to this country, Koy said. I see that with a lot of Filipino families and I wanted to show the world thats how important this is to us. Today, Filipinos make up over 4 million of the countrys 23 million-plus Asian population, according to the U.S. Census. Only Chinese and Indians number more. Filipino culture and history have been gaining more mainstream visibility in recent years mostly because of decades-long activism by Filipinos. This year, a 30-foot (9-meter) tall gateway arch was unveiled in Los Angeles Historic Filipinotown and a street in New York Citys Queens was co-named Little Manila Avenue. A newly built Bay Area park was named for striking Filipino American farmworkers. For years, Filipino food has been hailed off and on as the next culinary trend. It seems to be having a moment again in the fine dining world. Chicagos Kasama became the only Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant in the country. Easter Sunday is coming during this really amazing moment in Asian American history and Filipino American history, where political, social, and economic capital has all come together, said Eric Pido, an Asian American Studies professor at San Francisco State University with a background in Filipina/o American Studies. He predicts younger generations will raise Filipinos profiles in the next few years. I think Filipino Americans are no longer shying away from sort of taking a representational role in American politics, which will bring up all sorts of interesting things about Filipino American culture that lots of folks just dont think about, Pido said. Last month, Koy and Cheng attended a screening of Easter Sunday in Daly City. Among the people there was the director of Pixars Turning Red, Domee Shi. Turning Red, about a Chinese-Canadian teenage girl and her family, was a hit after its March release on Disney+. But a white film reviewer called the animated feature exhausting and only relatable for Shis Chinese family and friends. The review was later pulled over accusations of racism. The idea that stories that focus on Asian ethnicities and cultures are too specific to be appealing is just outdated, Koy said. The relationship between a mother and son is the same no matter what ethnicity, Koy said. I hate ignorant people that dont move forward Theres a lot of people that live in this country that need to be heard and its time to hear it. ___ Terry Tang is a member of The Associated Press Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP By TERRY TANG The Associated Press KINSHASA, Congo (AP) Congos government has requested that the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Congo leave the country, saying he has made inappropriate statements amid demonstrations against the presence of the U.N. peacekeepers. Foreign Minister Christophe Lutundula wrote to the U.N. mission, known as MONUSCO, saying he considers that the current tensions between the U.N. and the population are due to the indelicate and inopportune statements by U.N. Congo spokesman Mathias Gillman. The Congolese government considers that the presence of this official on the national territory is not likely to promote a climate of mutual trust and serenity so essential between the Congolese institutions and MONUSCO, the statement said. The Congolese government would greatly appreciate if arrangements are made for Mr. Gillman to leave the territory as soon as possible. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric expressed regret at the governments decision requesting Gillman to leave the country, In line with the status of the U.N. under the Charter of the organization, any concerns that the government may have regarding the actions of a member of MONUSCO should be raised directly with the mission leadership, Dujarric said. The mission and U.N. headquarters are accordingly engaging with the government to address this matter. The U.N. Security Council was briefed behind closed doors Thursday by U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre, who just returned from Congo, on the latest developments there. The government did not point to specific statements made by Gillman, but in July during a press conference, he mentioned that MONUSCO and the Congolese army have limited means to deal with several fronts of attacks, in particular those by the M23 rebel group which has gained more weapons and is staging heavy attacks on civilians. Dujarric said Gillman is currently not in Congo. Congos government held a crisis meeting earlier this week to reassess the presence of United Nations peacekeepers after protests against the force in the countrys east killed at least 36 people and injured more than 170 others. The government will also meet with the U.N. mission to discuss the possibilities for its withdrawal. The U.N. force has already withdrawn from two provinces of Congo, Kasai and Tanganyika. The statement from the foreign minister mentioned 2024 as the goal, saying that they wanted the spokesman removed to help complete the transition plan for the end of its final withdrawal from Congo, by the horizon 2024, as agreed. The U.N. force in Congo, known as MONUSCO, has about 16,000 uniformed personnel but has not succeeded in stabilizing the countrys volatile east. Congos mineral-rich east is home to myriad rebel groups. Security has worsened there despite a year of emergency operations by the armies of Congo and Uganda. Civilians in the east have also faced violence from jihadi rebels linked to the Islamic State group. Fighting has also escalated between Congolese troops and the M23 rebels, forcing nearly 200,000 people to flee their homes. By JEAN-YVES KAMALE Associated Press US envoy: Africa trip isnt to compete with Russia, China View Photo UNITED NATIONS (AP) The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations headed to Africa on Wednesday, saying she was going to focus on how the United States can help Uganda, Ghana and Cape Verde deal with the food crisis that has hit the continent particularly hard not to compete with China and Russia. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the long-planned trip is not part of global competition with either of Americas rivals, but it is part of a series of high-level U.S. engagements that aim to affirm and strengthen our partnerships and relationships with African leaders and peoples. Her trip from Aug. 4-7 will be followed immediately by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkens visits to South Africa, Congo and Rwanda from Aug. 7-11. It also comes on the heels of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs visit last week to Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Republic of Congo where he accused the U.S. and European countries of driving up food prices. Chinas Foreign Minister Wang Yi began 2022 with a four-day visit to Eritrea, Kenya and the Comoros, keeping a 32-year tradition that the countrys top diplomat make his first trip of the year to Africa. Were not catching up. They are catching up, Thomas-Greenfield said. We have been engaging with this continent for decades, and even my own career is very much evidence of that. Thomas-Greenfield first went to Africa as a student in the 1970s, and in her career as a U.S. diplomat she rose to be assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2013 to 2017. She said high energy prices, climate change, COVID-19 and increasing conflict have pushed millions of Africans to the brink, and that Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 has added to the crisis, especially since some countries in Africa once got up to 75% of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. The U.S. ambassador said the three countries she is visiting Uganda first followed by Ghana and Cape Verde all face serious food security situations because of the significant rise in the cost of food and energy. But she said Ghana has been a leader in dealing with it and she will be visiting a market, meeting farmers and going to a grain factory in the country to see how we can help them improve on their production. In an interview and at a news conference ahead of her three-nation visit, Thomas-Greenfield said her trip happens to come on the heels of Lavrovs visit. Refusing to call Russias invasion of Ukraine a war, Lavrov said: The situation in Ukraine did additionally negatively affect food markets, but not due to the Russian special operation, rather due to the absolutely inadequate reaction of the West, which announced sanctions. Thomas-Greenfield countered: Russia is there to defend what they know they have to defend that they took actions that are hurting Africans, and theyre trying to somehow defend their actions and blame somebody else for the impact that their actions are having on the African continent. They can try to do that. But my question to them is, how are you helping Africans to address the food insecurity issue, not whom youre blaming for the food insecurity issues, she said. Were there to help Africans address those issues. Russia can deal with its own problems. As for China, while its trade with Africa last year was dramatically higher than U.S. trade, Thomas-Greenfield said if you look at our figures, and how far back our engagement has been with the Africans, then we really are far above those numbers. As you look at what Chinas doing in Africa, you need to look at the debt trap that African countries, many of them, have faced because of those relationships with China, she said. China has become one of the biggest lenders to developing countries through its Belt and Road initiative to expand trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Wang, Chinas foreign minister, insisted during his visit to Kenya in January that there is no debt trap. The so-called `debt trap in Africa is not a fact, but a malicious hype-up, he said. It is an utterance trap created by those external forces that do not want to see Africa accelerate development. If there is any `trap in Africa, it is the `poverty trap. Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. is not telling African countries they cant engage with China. What we are engaged in is vision for economic development that promotes democracy and that promotes respect for human rights and transparency and strengthening the capacity for Africans to create jobs for their own citizens, she said. We respect the ability of countries to decide for themselves whether they want to partner with China or not. By EDITH M. LEDERER Associated Press WHO Africa sees 10-year growth in healthy life expectancy View Photo ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) Africa recorded a ten-year growth in its healthy life expectancy from 2000 to 2019, the World Health Organization Africa office said Thursday, exceeding the global average and progress seen in any other region over the same period. The healthy life expectancy in the region rose by almost ten years to stand at 56 years in 2019 compared with 46 years in the year 2000, Dr. Lindiwe Makubalo, assistant regional Director for WHO Africa, said at an online briefing, citing the new WHOs State of Health in Africa report. The gain exceeds that of the average global healthy life expectancy that increased by five years over the same period, Dr. Makubalo said, attributing it to better essential health services, improvement in health service coverage, in productive and maternal health and in health services to tackle infectious diseases. Despite the progress made, we certainly have a lot to do and we seem to be ready to move together, the WHO Africa official said, warning that life expectancy in the African region is still below the global average of 64 years. Unless countries strengthen and make greater investments in the development of health systems as well as implementing effective catch-up plans, these life expectancy gains could easily be lost, she said, warning also that the COVID-19 pandemic which had greater disruptions to essential health services in Africa compared to other regions may also affect the continents healthy life expectancy estimates. Health systems across the continent have been overstretched mostly by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by other disease outbreaks such as monkeypox, cholera and Lassa fever. Countries such as Nigeria, the continents most populous nation, are battling as many as five of these outbreaks. To improve the health systems beyond the pre-pandemic levels and achieve quality, equitable and accessible services for all, a major step would be in boosting public health financing, Dr. Makubalo said, noting that only seven countries in the region fund more than half of their annual national health expenditure. Over the past 20 years, out-of-pocket expenditure has increased in about 15 countries, the official further said of the health situation in Africa, urging nations to do more to improve access to essential health services. A case in point for countries recording massive gains is Botswana where universal health coverage is the cornerstone of our development and our response or approach to health care delivery in the country, according to Moses Kitele with Botswanas Ministry of Health. We have made some strides in attaining UHC (universal health coverage) particularly with regards to minimizing the financial hardship, Dr Kitele told the briefing, citing a recent WHO-funded study which shows that less than 1% of the households in Botswana face catastrophic health spending associated with health care. A similar feat could be replicated in other parts of the continent, said Makubalo, the assistant regional Director for WHO Africa. The WHOs State of Health in Africa report, she said, provides us with an opportunity to reflect on where we are and the progress that has been made. We cannot be complacent; there is so much that needs to be done especially the post-COVID-19 period, Makubalo said. We do need to sustain investments, to sustain efforts, to continue to build and to continue to work together. By CHINEDU ASADU Associated Press In S. Korea, Pelosi avoids public comments on Taiwan, China View Photo SEOUL, South Korea (AP) After infuriating China over her trip to Taiwan, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met South Korean political leaders in Seoul on Thursday but avoided making direct public comments on relations with Beijing and Taipei that could further increase regional tensions. Pelosi, the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years, said Wednesday in Taipei that the American commitment to democracy in the self-governing island and elsewhere remains ironclad. In response, China on Thursday began military exercises, including missile strike training, in six zones surrounding Taiwan, in what could be the biggest of their kind since the mid-1990s. After visiting Taiwan, Pelosi and other members of her congressional delegation flew to South Korea a key U.S. ally where about 28,500 American troops are deployed on Wednesday evening, as part of an Asian tour that included earlier stops in Singapore and Malaysia. She met South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of Parliament on Thursday. After that hour-long meeting, Pelosi spoke about the bilateral alliance, forged in blood during the 1950-53 Korean War, and legislative efforts to boost ties, but didnt directly mention her Taiwan visit or the Chinese protests. We also come to say to you that a friendship, (the) relationship that began from urgency and security, many years ago, has become the warmest of friendships, Pelosi said in a joint news conference with Kim. We want to advance security, economy and governance in an inter-parliamentary way. Neither Pelosi nor Kim took questions from journalists. Kim said he and Pelosi shared concerns about North Koreas increasing nuclear threat. He said the two agreed to support their governments push for denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula based on both strong deterrence against North Korea and diplomacy. Pelosi and her delegation later spoke by phone with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on the alliance, foreign policy and other issues. Yoon is on vacation this week, but critics accuse him of intentionally shunning a face-to-face meeting with Pelosi in consideration of ties with China, South Koreas biggest trading partner. Yoons office said it had reviewed national interests and that Yoons vacation plan had already been set up when, about two weeks ago, Pelosis side contacted his office about a possible meeting. During the phone conversation, Pelosi and other members of her congressional delegation didnt bring up the Taiwan issue, and Yoon also didnt raise the matter, Yoons office said. In recent years, South Korea has been struggling to strike a balance between the United States and China as their rivalry has deepened. Yoon, a conservative, took office in May with a vow to boost South Koreas military alliance with the United States and take a tougher line on North Korean provocations. Later Thursday, Pelosi visited a border area with North Korea that is jointly controlled by the American-led United Nations Command and North Korea. She became the highest-level American to go to the Joint Security Area since then-President Donald Trump visited in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sitting inside the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) -wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer created at the end of the Korean War, the JSA is the site of past bloodshed and a venue for numerous talks. U.S. presidents and other top officials have often traveled to the JSA and other border areas to reaffirm their security commitment to South Korea. Pelosi posted several photos at the JSA on Twitter and wrote: We conveyed the gratitude of the Congress and the Country for the patriotic service of our servicemembers, who stand as sentinels of Democracy on the Korean Peninsula. Yoon earlier said Pelosis visit to the JSA would demonstrate a strong deterrence against North Korea by the allies, said Kim Tae-hyo, a deputy presidential national security adviser. North Korea didnt immediately comment on her JSA visit. On Wednesday, the Norths Foreign Ministry slammed the United States over her Taiwan trip, saying the current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the U.S. in internal affairs of other countries (is) the root cause of harassed peace and security in the region. On Thursday evening, Pelosi flew to Japan, the final leg of her Asian tour. The Chinese military exercises launched Thursday and planned to last until Sunday involve its navy, air force and other departments. They include missile strikes on targets in the seas north and south of the island in an echo of the last major Chinese military drills aimed at intimidating Taiwans leaders and voters in 1995 and 1996. Chinas official Xinhua News Agency said the exercises are joint operations focused on blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control. Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defense drills, while the U.S. has numerous naval assets in the area. Taiwans Defense Ministry called the Chinese drills unreasonable actions in an attempt to change the status quo, destroy the peace and stability of the region. China views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be annexed by force if necessary. It considers visits to Taiwan by foreign officials as recognizing its sovereignty. Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy, Pelosi said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday. Americas determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad. The Biden administration and Pelosi have said the United States remains committed to the one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing as the sole, legitimate government of China but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. The administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting. Pelosi noted in Taiwan that congressional support for Taiwan is bipartisan, and she praised the islands democracy. She stopped short of saying that the U.S would defend Taiwan militarily and emphasized that Congress is committed to the security of Taiwan, in order to have Taiwan be able to most effectively defend themselves. Tsai said at her meeting with Pelosi that facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told ABCs Good Morning America on Wednesday that U.S. officials dont believe were at the brink now, and theres certainly no reason for anybody to be talking about being at the brink going forward. On Thursday, the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations called for calm in the Taiwan Strait, which separates mainland China and Taiwan, and urged the avoidance of any provocative action. ASEAN foreign ministers, who are meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a regional forum, said they were concerned the situation could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers. Pelosis focus has always been the same, she said, going back to her 1991 visit to Beijings Tiananmen Square, when she and other lawmakers unfurled a small banner supporting democracy two years after a bloody military crackdown on protesters at the square. That visit was also about human rights and what she called dangerous technology transfers to rogue countries. China and Taiwan, which split in 1949 after a civil war, have no official relations but multibillion-dollar business ties. ___ Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan. Associated Press writer David Rising in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, contributed to this report. By HYUNG-JIN KIM and HUIZHONG WU Associated Press Alibaba revenue beats expectations despite contraction View Photo HONG KONG (AP) Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding on Thursday beat market expectations for revenue in its quarter ended June, even as revenue was nearly flat and its net income plunged 50%. The company has been grappling with increased regulatory scrutiny and fines and a slowing economy. Alibaba reported revenues of 205.6 billion ($30.4 billion) for its quarter ended June, down 0.1% from the same period last year but still better than the average analyst estimate of $30.09 billion, according to FactSet. It was the first time the company has reported a contraction in sales. Net income tumbled 50% to 22.7 billion yuan ($3.4 billion). Excluding one-time charges, adjusted earnings per ADS totaled $1.75, topping the average analyst estimate of $1.60 per share. The companys U.S.-listed shares rose 5% in early trading Thursday. Its shares traded in Hong Kong slipped 2.2% early Friday. Alibaba was hit hard in the last quarter as China locked down various cities around the country to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Online shopping tends to flourish during such times, but the company said in a statement that revenue fell mainly due to impacts from COVID-19 resurgence and restrictions that resulted in supply chain and logistics disruptions in April and most of May. Customers in the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, for example, were unable to shop online or even order food delivery during its two-month lockdown. Alibaba, headquartered in the eastern city of Hangzhou, has also in recent years been scrutinized heavily by regulators and been ordered to pay anti-monopoly fines. Its cloud business has been linked to Chinas largest cybersecurity breach, when a hacker online attempted to sell over a billion personal records purportedly from a Shanghai police database. Alibaba faces fierce competition from rivals such as JD.com and Pinduoduo, which has reported an increase in user numbers. Last week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission added Alibaba to a growing list of companies that could face delisting from U.S. stock exchanges unless they give U.S. regulators unfettered access to their auditing processes and financial books. Meanwhile, Alibaba is seeking a primary listing in Hong Kong by the end of the year that would allow mainland Chinese investors direct access to its stock as it seeks a more diversified investor base. This story has been corrected to reflect that the decline in revenue was 0.1% in the second paragraph. By ZEN SOO AP Technology Writer Canada to send trainers to UK to teach Ukrainian forces OTTAWA, Ontario (AP) Canada is sending military trainers to the United Kingdom to teach Ukrainians how to fight invading Russian forces, Defense Minister Anita Anand said Wednesday. Up to 225 members of the Canadian Armed Forces will eventually be based in the U.K. for an initial period of four months, said Anand. They will work alongside counterparts from Britain, the Netherlands and New Zealand in training Ukrainian troops on the basics of soldiering. This is an all hands on deck moment for allies and partners that support Ukraine, Anand said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. An earlier Canadian military training mission based in Ukraine was suspended only weeks before the invasion began. That mission, which also included 225 Canadian military trainers, was launched in 2014 after Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula and started supporting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The federal government says the mission, known as Operation Unifier, helped train more than 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers before all Canadian troops were withdrawn ahead of Russias attack. About 90 Canadian soldiers will head to the U.K. on August 12. Ukraine desires more troops and weapons, Anand said. This will assist with their training of new recruits. Canada has contributed more than $600 million Canadian (US466 million) in equipment and weapons. ___ AP writer Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report. Report: Ukrainian bases in communities endangering civilians View Photo POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) Ukrainian forces have exposed civilians to Russian attacks at times by basing themselves in schools, residential buildings and other places in populated areas, according to a report Amnesty International published Thursday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy angrily denounced the report, saying Amnesty International tries to amnesty the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim. If you provide manipulative reports, Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, then you share the responsibility for the death of people with them. AP journalists observed several scenes in recent weeks that mirrored the findings of Amnestys researchers, including the aftermath of weapon strikes in eastern Ukraine where Ukrainian fighters, their vehicles or items such as ammunition were at attack sites. At two locations, the AP was told a soldier or soldiers had been killed. At a third, emergency workers blocked reporters from filming victims of a Russian strike on a residential building, which was unusual; locals said military personnel had been staying there. In a report released Thursday, Amnesty International said its researchers, between April and July, found evidence of Ukrainian forces launching strikes from within populated residential areas, as well as basing themselves in civilian buildings in 19 towns and villages in three regions. Amnesty also said it found Ukrainian forces using hospitals as military bases in five places, in a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The report noted that parties to a conflict must avoid locating, to the maximum extent feasible, military objectives within or near densely populated areas. Combatants also must remove civilians from the vicinity of military objectives and warn of possible attacks, the report said, adding that viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians, such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas. At the same time, its authors stressed that the Ukrainian militarys practice of locating military objectives within populated areas does not in any way justify indiscriminate Russian attacks. Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly asked the remaining residents of the Donetsk region to evacuate, but starting anew elsewhere is not that easy. Tens of thousands of people who left their homes since Russias invasion have returned after running out of support or feeling unwelcome. The AP reported last week that one evacuee was killed in a missile strike two days after returning home to the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk. Neighbors expressed anger that Ukrainian fighters had set up base in their residential area on the citys outskirts. As AP journalists looked at the missile crater, a uniformed fighter walked over from the adjacent plot of land and questioned their presence. In the city of Kramatorsk, closer to the front line, residents told the AP after a strike in a residential area that soldiers had been staying there. The AP saw soldiers entering and leaving a Kramatorsk apartment building hit by a separate strike. And in Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, the AP saw soldiers and military vehicles at a teaching university that was hit. Soldiers and supplies also were present at a school for the disabled where a Russian strike left two craters in the schoolyard. Aside from witness accounts, Amnesty International relied on satellite imagery and remote sensing. Its researchers heard outgoing fire from nearby Ukrainian positions while examining damaged residential areas in the regions of Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Donbas. The Donbas region, which consists of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, is where the wars most intense fighting has taken place since April. The mother of a man killed in a rocket attack in a village near Mykolaiv told researchers that Ukrainian forces had stayed in a house next to theirs. The researchers found military uniforms and equipment there, according to the report. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba released a video statement denouncing the report as unfair and expressing his outrage about it. Such behavior by AI is not about seeking the truth and bringing it to the world, it is about creating a false balance between a criminal and a victim, between a country that is annihilating civilian populations by the hundreds and the thousands, (is destroying) cities and entire areas, and a country that is desperately defending itself, saving its people and the continent from this invasion, Kuleba said. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov also weighed in with a Facebook post. Any attempts to even in passing equate the unprovoked Russian aggression and Ukraines self-defense, like it is done in the Amnesty International report, is evidence of losing adequacy and a way to destroy ones authority, Reznikov wrote. Presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, in turn, accused the group on Twitter of participating in a disinformation and propaganda campaign by Moscow to discredit Ukraines armed forces. Russian state and pro-Kremlin media have extensively quoted the report, whose findings somewhat align with Moscows official narrative. Russia has justified attacks on civilian areas by alleging that Ukrainian fighters are setting up firing positions there. Were talking about it all the time, calling the actions of Ukraines armed forces the tactics of using the civilian population as a human shield, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram of the report. Ukrainian soldiers also have routinely based themselves in schools, Amnesty said. Even though Ukraines schools have been closed since Russias invasion, most are near residential neighborhoods. The rights groups researchers found soldiers or evidence of military activity at 22 out of 29 schools visited. In at least three towns, after Russian bombardment of the schools, Ukrainian soldiers moved to other schools nearby, putting the surrounding neighborhoods at risk of similar attacks, the report said. The full scope of the issue is unknown. A Human Rights Watch report last month identified three occasions when Ukrainian forces were based among residential homes and four occasions when Russian forces set up military bases in populated areas of Ukraine. ___ Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine By CARA ANNA Associated Press Poland sees rise of African migrants coming through Russia View Photo WARSAW, Poland (AP) Polish officials on Thursday reported a change in migration patterns across the countrys border with Belarus, with Africans who first traveled to Russia making up most of those seeking to enter Poland illegally by that route instead of people from the Mideast. The government said the African migrants include individuals passing through Russia, a close ally and another neighbor of Belarus, as well as people who were in Russia for a longer period. In an emailed statement to The Associated Press, the Polish government described the migration as part of a hybrid operation aimed at destabilizing the NATO eastern flank. Migrants and asylum-seekers have tried to cross from Belarus into Poland and Lithuania, and to a lesser extent Latvia, since last summer. The three nations are in the east of both European Union and NATO territory. The countries have sought to discourage the attempted crossings, detaining migrants and pushing them back into Belarus. Poland recently completed a tall steel wall along 186 kilometers (115 miles) of its land frontier with Belarus. Human rights organizations have criticized Poland and Lithuania, saying the migrants include people fleeing persecution who have the right under international law to request asylum. European leaders accuse Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of creating a new and artificial migration route in order to destabilize the EU. The government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said it believes Russia bears some responsibility too, given its alliance with Lukashenko. Early on, most of the people who tried to enter the EU from Belarus were Afghans, Syrians, Kurds from Iraq and others from the Middle East. After the arrival of large numbers last summer, the EU intervened, including by getting Iraq to stop the flights, and the migration flow slowed. It never stopped altogether, but the situation became overshadowed by the far larger numbers of Ukrainian refugees who were welcomed in Poland after Russias invasion of Ukraine in February. The National Security Department within the prime ministers office told the AP that current Border Guard statistics show that the vast majority of migrants who seek to illegally cross at the Poland-Belarus border now come from Sub-Saharan Africa. They possess Russian visas and it is via Russia that they reach Belarus, it said. (They) have visas issued for studies or work, but according to testimonies acquired by the Border Guard, they have never had such plans and they used visas only to get through the migratory route. Simultaneously, the Russian administration facilitates the procedure of obtaining the visas, the government said. Among migrants, there are also people who have been in Russia for a longer period of time. The actions undertaken by Russia and Belarus confirm that the artificially created migratory route is controlled and coordinated by these two regimes and in future we should expect that the hybrid operation aimed at destabilizing NATOs eastern flank will only intensify, it added. Border Guard data shows that there were 914 attempts to cross illegally from Belarus into Poland in July. ___ Follow APs global migration coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration By VANESSA GERA Associated Press Italys Salvini pledges to move migrant centers to N. Africa View Photo MILAN (AP) Italys firebrand former interior minister, Matteo Salvini, put migration at the center of his electoral campaign during a visit Thursday to Italys southernmost island of Lampedusa, a gateway for tens of thousands of people crossing the perilous central Mediterranean Sea to Italian territory each year. Salvini pledged to move screening centers for people seeking political asylum to northern Africa, in a bid to prevent economic migrants from pouring into Italy. He said just 15% of current arrivals qualify as refugees. He also voiced concern that the migrant center on Lampedusa, Italys largest, was nearing collapse due to overcrowding, calling it unworthy of a civilized country. Salvini distinguished between those who qualify for asylum, saying they cannot be massed on the ground on mattresses in 40-degree heat, and those who do not: We cannot throw open the doors of Italy to thousands of clandestine migrants who are not fleeing war, he said. Salvini is pledging a return to his tough-on-immigration policies should the right-wing coalition win the Sept. 25 parliamentary vote. The early elections were forced after his right-wing anti-migrant League party, along with two other parties, yanked their support for outgoing Premier Mario Draghis 17-month-old pandemic unity government. During Salvinis short but dramatic tenure as interior minister in 2018-19, migrant arrivals in Italy dropped sharply as he pursued policies of deterrence, including long government delays in assigning safe ports to rescue ships. He is currently on trial in Sicily, charged with kidnapping in one such case, while the charges were thrown out in another. I think in 2018-2019 Italy was a safer country, more protected, more normal, more European, Salvini said. Lampedusa is the gateway of Europe. It cannot be the refugee camp of Europe. While his League led the right-wing coalition in Italys 2018 election, it sank in popularity after joining Draghis consensus government. It is now lagging badly in the polls behind another right-wing coalition partner, the far-right Brothers of Italy led by Giorgia Meloni. That leaves Salvini fighting for political relevance. If the right-wing coalition wins the Sept. 25 vote, the leader of the party with the most votes would be tapped as premier to form a new government. Meloni is seeking to become Italys first female premier, but Salvini is not counting himself out. And he insists that in either case, the interior minister should come from his League. Not everyone on the island of Lampedusa was keen to be part of Salvinis electoral rhetoric. The islands mayor is worried about the impact on tourism, and insists the current system of transferring migrants to Sicily and beyond was averting the emergency situations experienced during the peak arrival years from 2014 to 2016. With new arrivals daily from Libya and Tunisia, migrants typically spend less than 24 hours on the island. The crucial element is not to slow down or jam the transfer to the mainland, Mayor Filippo Mannino told The Associated Press on Thursday. A handful of aid workers and activists held a sit-in in Lampedusa ahead of Salvinis arrival, displaying banners disputing his depiction of an island swamped by migrants. Whoever comes to Lampedusa, doesnt see migrants. There is no emergency. The only emergency is for the migrants who are at the (migrant center), said Luca Casarini, an activist and chief of mission on Mare Jonio Italian rescue ship. He accused Salvini of propaganda to gain votes on the skin of people who die at sea, who are much worse off than us. Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman with the Italian offices of the International Organization for Migration, said while migrant arrivals are up this year by about one-third over 2021, they are still well below the 120,000 to 180,000 registered annually from 2014-2016. These are not emergency numbers. We are not facing a numerical emergency. But we are facing a humanitarian emergency, Di Giacomo said, citing 905 people who have died or gone missing at sea this year. ____ David Lohmueller in Lampedusa, and Paolo Santalucia in Rome contributed. ___ Follow all AP stories on global migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration. By COLLEEN BARRY Associated Press Vegetation Fire along J-59 and Highway 108 in the Keystone area of Tuolumne County View Photo View Video Update at 5:05 p.m.: The CHP reports that all the closed roadways listed below have reopened. Update at 4:15 p.m.: CAL Fire reports that firefighters have contained the Springs Fire burning along J-59/La Grange Road near the Highway 108 intersection just south of Green Springs Road in the Keystone area of Tuolumne County. They said that the estimated size of the blaze is 35 acres. The flames spread to a home and a resident was evacuated before it was fully engulfed. These roadways remain closed: J-59 at the Highway 108 intersection, Green Springs Road at the Highway 108 and J-59 intersections; and J-59 at Red Hills Road. The CHP hopes to have these roadways open in this hour. Highway 108 is not impacted and traffic is moving freely. Crews will be on the scene for the next hour, mopping up. Update at 3:55 p.m.: CAL Fire has dubbed this blaze the Springs Fire. It is burning along J-59/La Grange Road near the Highway 108 intersection just south of Green Springs Road in the Keystone area of Tuolumne County. The fire has grown to an estimated 30 acres and is still moving at a moderate rate of spread. CAL Fire reports one home is fully engulfed in flames and the resident has been evacuated. There are no other evacuations or homes threatened. The CHP has shut down these roadways: J-59 at the Highway 108 intersection, Green Springs Road at Highway 108 and J-59 intersections, and J-59 at Red Hills Road. Highway 108 is not impacted. Original post at 3:25 p.m.: Keystone, CA Firefighters are battling a vegetation fire along J-59/La Grange Road in Tuolumne County. A large plume of smoke can be seen rising into the sky near Keystone. CAL Fire reports the flames broke out in grass near the Highway 108 intersection just south of Green Springs Road. One house is threatened and is being evacuated. There is no word on any other evacuations. The fire is estimated at an acre in size, and the flames are moving at a moderate rate of spread. An update will be provided as soon as new information comes into the newsroom. Board recommends clemency for Oklahoma death row inmate View Photo OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) The Oklahoma Board of Pardon and Parole on Wednesday voted to recommend clemency for a death row inmate who has admitted to beating to death a friend and co-worker who refused to loan him $50 to buy cocaine. The board voted 3-2 to recommend Gov. Kevin Stitt grant clemency to James Coddington, 50, who was convicted and sentenced to die for killing 73-year-old Albert Hale inside Hales home in Choctaw in 1997. Coddington beat Hale on the head at least three times with a hammer. Stitt said Wednesday that he hasnt been formally briefed on Coddingtons case, but that with any clemency recommendation, he meets with prosecutors, defense attorneys and the victims family before making a decision. Sometimes theres not even a question of guilt theyre admitting it, but do they deserve mercy? Stitt told The Associated Press. Those are all tough questions. What does mercy look like? What does justice look like? And I really take that very seriously and get by myself once I get all the facts and make that decision. State Attorney General John OConnor said in a statement that he will oppose the recommendation. An emotional Coddington, who spoke by video and appeared on the verge of tears, apologized to the Hale family and told the board that he is a different man today. Im clean, I know God, Im not Im not a vicious murderer, Coddington said. If this ends today with my death sentence, OK, Coddington said before the vote. Coddington said Hale tried to get him to stop using drugs and had been a friend and for that he lost his life. Hales son, Mitch Hale, read statements from himself and sister, Patricia Carey, urging the board to reject the clemency request. Please give my dad justice and my family closure. Give James Coddington the same sentence he gave my dad, according to the statement from Carey. Hale told the board that he initially hated Coddington, but let go of the hatred. I forgive James Coddington, but my forgiveness does not release him from the consequences of his actions, Hale said in urging the board to reject the clemency request. Assistant Oklahoma Attorney General Caroline Hunt told the board that Coddington killed Hale to rob him and to avoid going to prison. There will be no justice if Mr. Coddington receives clemency from his death sentence, Hunt said. Defense Attorney Emma Rolls told the panel that Coddington, who was 24 at the time, was impaired by years of alcohol and drug abuse that began when he was an infant and his father put beer and whiskey into his baby bottles. The Board has acknowledged that his case exemplifies the circumstances for which clemency exists, Rolls said in a statement following the hearing. We urge Governor Stitt to adopt the Boards recommendation. Coddington was twice sentenced to death in the case, the second time in 2008 after his initial sentence was overturned on appeal. The clemency recommendation now goes to Stitt, a Republican in his first term who is up for reelection this year. He has approved one clemency request, that of Julius Jones, and rejected one, that of Bigler Stouffer, who was put to death in December. Coddington is set to be put to death Aug. 25, the first of six inmates scheduled for execution after a federal judge rejected a challenge by them and 19 other death row inmates to the states lethal injection method. The chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Rev. Don Heath, said he is surprised but pleased by the boards recommendation. We ask Gov. Stitt to read the clemency packet, to watch the clemency hearing and we hope that he will allow James Coddington to spend the rest of his natural life behind bars, Heath said in a statement. Oklahoma had one of the nations busiest death chambers until problems in 2014 and 2015 led to a de facto moratorium. Richard Glossip was just hours from being executed in September 2015 when prison officials realized they received the wrong lethal drug. It was later learned the same wrong drug had been used to execute another man in January 2015. The drug mix-ups followed a botched execution in April 2014 in which inmate Clayton Lockett struggled on a gurney before dying 43 minutes into his lethal injection and after the states prisons chief ordered executioners to stop. _____ Associated Press reporter Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City contributed to this report. By KEN MILLER Associated Press China renews yellow alert for high temperatures Xinhua) 13:22, August 04, 2022 BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- China's national observatory on Thursday continued to issue a yellow alert for high temperatures as a scorching heatwave lingers in a vast area of the country. During daylight hours on Thursday, parts of Shaanxi, Hebei, Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Fujian, Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou, and Guangxi are expected to experience temperatures of over 35 degrees Celsius, the National Meteorological Center said. Temperatures in parts of Chongqing may surpass 40 degrees Celsius, according to the forecast. The center has advised the public to avoid outdoor activities during high-temperature periods in the afternoon and suggested workers exposed to high temperatures, or who work outdoors for a long time, take necessary protective measures. China has a four-tier color-coded weather warning system, with red representing the most severe warning, followed by orange, yellow, and blue. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Feds charge 4 police officers in fatal Breonna Taylor raid View Photo LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) The federal government filed civil rights charges Thursday against four Louisville police officers over the drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose fatal shooting helped fuel the racial justice protests that rocked the nation in 2020. The charges most of which stem from the faulty drug warrant used to search Taylors home are an effort to hold law enforcement accountable for the killing of the 26-year-old medical worker. One of the officers was acquitted of state charges earlier this year. Breonna Taylor should be alive today, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the charges, which include unlawful conspiracy, use of force and obstruction of justice. The charges named former officers Joshua Jaynes and Brett Hankison, along with current officers Kelly Goodlett and Sgt. Kyle Meany. Louisville police said they are seeking to fire Goodlett and Meany. Hankison was the only officer charged Thursday who was on the scene the night of the killing. Taylor was shot to death by officers who knocked down her door while executing a search warrant. Taylors boyfriend fired a shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the door, and they returned fire, striking Taylor multiple times. Hankison, Jaynes and Meany had initial appearances Thursday in federal court before Magistrate Judge Regina Edwards, who set their bonds at $50,000 each, according to a court clerk official. The three men face a maximum sentence of life in prison for the civil rights charges. Calls to attorneys for Jaynes and Meany were not returned Thursday. It wasnt immediately known if Hankison had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. Goodlett has pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy, Taylor family attorney Ben Crump said Thursday, though records on her court proceedings were sealed. Goodlett faces up to five years in prison. Local activists and members of Taylors family celebrated the charges and thanked federal officials. Supporters gathered in a downtown park and chanted: Say her name, Breonna Taylor! This is a day when Black women saw equal justice in America, Crump said. Taylors mother, Tamika Palmer, said she has waited nearly 2 1/2 years for police to be held accountable. Todays overdue, but it still hurts, she said. The Justice Department is also conducting a non-criminal investigation of the Louisville Police Department, announced last year, that is probing whether the department has a pattern of using excessive force and conducting unreasonable search and seizures. In the protests of 2020, Taylors name was often shouted along with George Floyd, who was killed less than three months after Taylor by a Minneapolis police officer in a videotaped encounter that shocked the nation. Protesters who took to the streets over months in Louisville were especially critical of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who presented only wanton endangerment charges against Hankison for a grand jury to consider in 2020. Members of the grand jury later came forward to complain that Camerons office had steered them away from charges for the other officers involved in the raid. Thank God that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not get the last word in regard to justice for Breonna Taylor, Crump said Thursday. We have always said this was a conspiracy to cover up the death of Breonna Taylor. Today the Justice Department put forth the charging documents to show we werent crazy. Cameron, a Republican running for governor next year, said in announcing the indictment against Hankison in September 2020 that he would leave issues regarding potential civil rights violations to federal officials to investigate. Cameron said in a release Thursday evening that his offices primary task was to investigate whether the officers who executed the search warrant were criminally responsible for Ms. Taylors death under state law. It is important that people not conflate what happened today with the state law investigation undertaken by our office, Cameron said. Im proud of the work of our investigators and prosecutors. Garland said the officers who were at Taylors home just after midnight on March 13, 2020, were not involved in the drafting of the warrant, and were unaware of the false and misleading statements. Hankison was indicted on two deprivation-of-rights charges alleging he used excessive force when he retreated from Taylors door, turned a corner and fired 10 shots into the side of her two-bedroom apartment. Bullets flew into a neighbors apartment, nearly striking one man. He was acquitted by a jury of state charges earlier this year. A separate indictment said Jaynes and Meany both knew the warrant used to search Taylors home had information that was false, misleading and out of date. Both are charged with conspiracy and deprivation of rights. Meany ran a police unit that focused on aggressive drug investigations. Police served five warrants simultaneously the night of the Taylor raid, four of them in a concentrated area where drug activity was suspected, and the fifth at Taylors apartment nearly 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. The warrant for Taylors house alleged that she was receiving packages for a suspected drug dealer who was a former boyfriend. The warrant, signed by Jaynes and approved by Meany, said Jaynes had confirmed with the postal service that packages for the ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, were going to Taylors apartment. Investigators later learned that Jaynes had not confirmed that with the postal inspector. Jaynes was fired in January 2021 for violating department standards in the preparation of a search warrant execution and for being untruthful in the Taylor warrant. Jaynes and Goodlett allegedly conspired to falsify an investigative document that was written after Taylors death, Garland said. Federal investigators also allege that Meany, who testified at Hankisons trial, lied to the FBI during its investigation. Federal officials filed a separate charge against Goodlett, alleging she conspired with Jaynes to falsify Taylors warrant affidavit. Garland alleged that Jaynes and Goodlett met in a garage in May 2020 where they agreed to tell investigators a false story. Former Louisville Police Sgt. John Mattingly, who was shot at Taylors door, retired last year. Another officer, Myles Cosgrove, who investigators said fired the shot that killed Taylor, was dismissed from the department in January 2021. Taylors boyfriend, Kenny Walker, who was in her apartment that night and fired the shot at Mattingly, was initially charged with attempted murder of a police officer but that charge was dropped after Walker told investigators he thought an intruder was breaking into the apartment. The Taylor case also prompted a review of the citys no-knock warrant policy. Officers at Taylors door said they knocked and announced they were police even though the warrant didnt require that. Those types of warrants, used in drug investigations to attempt to prevent the destruction of evidence, were later banned in the city of Louisville. By DYLAN LOVAN Associated Press Alyssa Farah Griffin, Ana Navarro join The View as cohosts View Photo NEW YORK (AP) ABCs The View has named two Republicans Alyssa Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro as regular panelists on the daytime talk show, and neither are fans of former President Donald Trump. Farah Griffin fills the chair left empty when Meghan McCain quit last summer after four years on the show. Farah Griffin is a communications strategist who worked as a spokesperson at the Pentagon and for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence during the last administration. Navarro, a familiar face as a frequent guest host at The View since 2015, was also officially named as an addition to the shows group of five hosts on Thursday. McCain was a magnet for controversy and attention during her time at The View, where she often fought onscreen with her more liberal co-hosts, and complained after she left of a toxic work environment. The View took its time replacing her, spending a year with conservative guest hosts in informal on-air tryouts. Farah Griffin appeared 29 times. If theres one thing that I believe, its that theres more that unites this country than divides it, Farah Griffin said. I think we can demonstrate at this table what our elected leaders often cant, which is disagreeing but doing so respectfully and doing so in a fact-based manner. We dont need any of these conspiracies and lies that have taken up so much of news. Farah Griffin, who is also a CNN contributor, quit the Trump administration in December 2020. She publicly turned against her old boss following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and spoke to the House committee investigating the event. She said the last two years have been turbulent for her, including dealing with death threats. I worked for an administration that I ended up speaking out against fervently and continue to do so daily, she said. It changes a lot in your life. I lost a lot of friends. Im estranged from family members, but I have to say this: I am so proud to have found my voice. Not everyone has been quick to turn the page, and theres a social media campaign to boycott The View because of her hiring, with some fans unwilling to forgive the new hosts service to Trump. Many in the media are still trying to normalize these folks, MSNBC host Tiffany Cross said on her weekend show. And why? The View discusses the days hot topics on its show and is seen by many politicians as an important conduit to women voters during national campaigns. Yet its also a target: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis office recently turned down an invitation to appear on the show, and publicly pointed to hostile comments made by the shows hosts about him. Led by veterans Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, the show is generally dominated by its liberal hosts. Goldberg refuses to even say Trumps name. Farah Griffin told her co-hosts, who also include Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines, that she knew it was going to get sporting sometimes. Its going to get more than sporting, Hostin replied. Navarro has worked for GOP figures John McCain and Jeb Bush. She had a Twitter tiff with the former presidents son last September; after Donald Trump Jr. made an online comment about Navarros weight, she called him a dimwit. She said she was pleased to be joining the show officially, even if it means a commute from her home in Miami. Were finally putting a ring on it, she said. - This story corrects the spelling of Sara Haines first name. By DAVID BAUDER AP Media Writer Autocratic Hungarian leader Orban hailed by US conservatives View Photo DALLAS (AP) Hungarys autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban urged cheering American conservatives on Thursday to take back the institutions, stick to hardline stances on gay rights and immigration and fight for the next U.S. presidential election as a pivotal moment for their beliefs. The exuberant cheers and standing ovations at the Conservative Political Action Conference for the far-right prime minister, who has been criticized for undermining his own countrys democratic institutions, demonstrated the growing embrace between Orban and Republicans in the U.S. He mocked the media in this country and in Europe. And in a speech he titled How We Fight, Orban told the crowd gathered in a Dallas convention ballroom to focus now on the 2024 election, saying they had two years to get ready, though he endorsed no candidate or party. Victory will never be found by taking the path of least resistance, he said during one of the keynote slots of the three-day CPAC event. We must take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. Referring to liberals, he said: They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you for the America you stand for. His entrance drew a bigger welcome than the governor of Texas, Republican Greg Abbott, received moments earlier on the same stage. From there, the cheers continued as Orban weaved through attacks on LGBTQ rights, boasted about reducing abortions in Hungary and celebrated hardline immigration measures back home. Other speakers will include former President Donald Trump who met with Orban earlier this week and will address the gathering on Saturday Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Republican candidates fresh off GOP primary election victories Tuesday. Orbans visit to the U.S. came amid backlash back home and in Europe over anti-migrant remarks in which he railed against Europe becoming a mixed race society. One of his closest associates compared his comments to Nazi rhetoric and resigned in protest. Orban told the crowd in Texas the media would portray him as a racist strongman and dismissed those who would call his government racist as idiots. His invitation to CPAC reflects conservatives growing embrace of the Hungarian leader whose country has a single-party government. Orban also is considered the closest ally in the European Union to Russian President Vladimir Putin. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday that President Joe Biden had no plans to speak with Orban while hes in the U.S. Asked if the administration had any concerns about CPAC inviting such a leader to speak at the high-profile conference, Kirby demurred. Hes coming at a private invitation, Kirby said. Mr. Orban and the CPAC, they can talk about his visit. Trump praised Orban, who has been prime minister for 12 years, after their meeting this week in Florida. Few people know as much about what is going on in the world today, the former president said in a statement after the meeting. To some attending the three-day conference, Orban is a model leader who makes an impression beyond Hungary because of his policies and personality. They praised him for his border security measures and for providing financial subsidies to Hungarian women, which Orban has called an effort to counter Hungarys population decline. Lilla Vessey, who moved to Dallas from Hungary with her husband, Ede, in the 1980s, said what she hears back in Hungary is that Orban is not anti-democratic. I dont know how it happened that the conservatives kind of discovered him, said Ede Vessey, 73. He supports the traditional values. He supports the family. Scott Huber, who met Orban along with other CPAC attendees at a private event hours before the speech, said the prime minister expressed hope the U.S. would moderate a little bit from the far-left influences in Novembers midterm elections. The 67-year-old Pennsylvanian said he would not disagree with descriptions of Orban as autocratic and that he has upset democratic norms, but said he thought it would change in time. As to why Orban is winning over so many conservatives, Huber noted Orbans attacks on George Soros, the American-Hungarian billionaire and philanthropist who is a staunch critic of Hungarys government and a supporter of liberal causes. Thats why I was so interested in seeing him, Huber said. Through his communications office, Orban declined an interview request by The Associated Press prior to his speech in Dallas. The AP and other international news organizations also were prohibited from covering a CPAC conference held in Budapest in May, the groups first conference in Europe. During that gathering, Orban called Hungary the bastion of conservative Christian values in Europe and urged conservatives in the U.S. to defeat the dominance of progressive liberals in public life. He has styled himself as a champion of what he calls illiberal democracy. Orban served as prime minister of Hungary between 1998 and 2002, but its his record since taking office again in 2010 that has drawn controversy and raised concerns about Hungary sliding into authoritarian rule. He has depicted himself as a defender of European Christendom against Muslim migrants, progressives and the LGBTQ lobby. Last year, his right-wing Fidesz party banned the depiction of homosexuality or sex reassignment in media targeting people under 18. Information on homosexuality also was forbidden in school sex education programs, or in films and advertisements accessible to minors. Some of the biggest applauses during Orbans speech came when he described Hungarys family framework. To sum up, the mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone, full stop, he said. Orban has consolidated power over the the countrys judiciary and media, and his party has drawn legislative districts in a way that makes it very difficult for opposition parties to win seats somewhat similar to partisan gerrymandering efforts for state legislative and congressional seats in the U.S. That process currently favors Republicans because they control more of the state legislatures that create those boundaries. Orbans moves have led international political observers to label him as the face of a new wave of authoritarianism. The European Union has launched numerous legal proceedings against Hungary for breaking EU rules and is withholding billions in recovery funds and credit over violations of rule-of-law standards and insufficient anti-corruption safeguards. ___ Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report. By PAUL J. WEBER Associated Press Michels goes after Kleefisch in Wisconsin governors race View Photo MADISON, Wis. (AP) Tim Michels is on the attack in the waning days of Wisconsins tight GOP governors primary, with an ad this week faulting his rival for not initially backing Donald Trump in 2016 even as it emerged Thursday that Michels himself did not vote in that primary. Michels launched the attack ad against Rebecca Kleefisch days after he said that running negative ads is just bad policy and that politicians who do it are losing. The ad faults Kleefisch for not endorsing Trump in the 2016 primary and brands her the ultimate Madison insider. Kleefisch, who is backed by former Vice President Mike Pence, is a former two-term lieutenant governor. Michels co-owns the states largest construction company, Michels Corp. And while Michels attacked Kleefisch for not backing Trump in 2016, records show Michels did not vote in that primary. I missed the Primary, but I didnt miss the movement, Michels said in a statement to The Associated Press. Michels said he missed the primary because of a sudden, unforeseen major issue on the big Michels Corporation construction project in New York. Michels said Trump was always his top choice and he never campaigned for or supported anyone else, unlike Kleefisch. The winner of Tuesdays primary will advance to face Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in what is expected to be one of the hardest-fought elections in the country this year, with implications for the 2024 presidential race in this swing state. Evers has blocked the Republican-controlled Legislatures attempts to change election laws and enact a host of other conservative policy items. The Michels ad, circulated Thursday by the Democratic Governors Association, began airing earlier this week, after Michels said in a televised town hall that Ive never had a negative ad run by my campaign in this race. And the reason is weve never had a single piece of business by talking bad about the competition, said Michels, who co-owns energy and pipeline construction company Michels Corp. And the reason is, its just bad policy, and if you get a reputation of doing that in my industry people immediately disrespect you. That wasnt the first time Michels took a stand against negative ads. Back in July, after Kleefisch launched the first in a series of attack ads against Michels, he came out strongly against it. When politicians are shocked to find themselves losing, they go negative out of desperation, Michels said on July 6. So it is sad that the former Lieutenant Governor has decided to go negative by falling in line with politics as usual. Michels spokesperson Chris Walker defended the attack ad, saying Thursday it came in response to spots run by Kleefisch and her supporters. The tone of the campaign has been set by her after weeks and millions spent lying about and attacking Tim, Walker said. When your opponent does that for weeks on end, it cant go unanswered forever. Kleefischs spokesperson Alec Zimmerman said Michels going negative was a sign that Kleefisch has all the momentum. The attack ad comes amid a blitz toward the election, with Pence campaigning Wednesday for Kleefisch, calling her a proven conservative. Kleefisch served as lieutenant governor under then-Gov. Scott Walker and has amassed endorsements from Walker, legislative leaders, dozens of Republican lawmakers and others. Michels is running as the outsider candidate, and Trump has scheduled a Friday rally in Waukesha County, just 3 miles from where Pence appeared for Kleefisch, as part of a final push. Michels notes in his ad that Kleefisch did not back Trump in 2016. She, along with Walker, supported Cruz who won Wisconsins primary that year. Cruz has endorsed Kleefisch this year. After Trump became the nominee, Kleefisch supported him in 2016 and 2020. Michels position on Trump also shifted this week. On Monday, at the town hall, he refused to commit to backing Trump if he ran for president in 2024. But less than 24 hours later, Michels reversed himself. By SCOTT BAUER Associated Press Surprise Senate vote would overturn Biden environmental rule View Photo WASHINGTON (AP) In a surprise victory for Republicans, the Senate on Thursday voted to overturn a Biden administration rule requiring rigorous environmental review of major infrastructure projects such as highways, pipelines and oil wells an outcome aided by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin, a key player on energy and climate issues and a swing vote in the closely divided Senate, joined Republicans to support the measure, which was approved 50-47. The vote comes as Manchin has proposed a separate list of legislative measures to speed up federal permitting for major projects in return for his support of a Democratic bill to address climate change. Republicans voted unanimously to overturn the Biden permitting rule, while Manchin was the only Democrat to do so. Three senators were absent: Republican John Cornyn of Texas and Democrats Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. The vote sends the measure to the Democratic-controlled House, where it is unlikely to move forward. Still, the vote signaled strong Senate support for action to reform the often onerous federal permitting process, which can take up to eight to 10 years for highways and other major projects. Streamlining federal review is a top Manchin and GOP priority that is not shared by most Democrats. Sen. Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, sponsored the measure to overturn the Biden rule, saying new regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, will further bog down the permitting process and delay critical infrastructure projects the country needs. The Biden rule which overturns an action by the Trump administration loosening environmental reviews requires regulators to consider the likely impacts on climate change and nearby communities before approving major projects. The new requirement is going to add to the red tape that prevents major infrastructure projects from being approved in a timely manner, Sullivan said. While President Joe Biden has called infrastructure a priority and pushed for a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year the new NEPA rule actually makes it harder to build infrastructure projects in the United States, Sullivan said. The only people, in my view, who really like this new system are radical far-left environmental groups that dont want to build anything and probably the Chinese Communist Party, he said on the Senate floor. China and other competitors likely love the fact that it takes 9 to 10 years to permit a bridge in the U.S.A., Sullivan said. The White House threatened a veto if the measure reaches the presidents desk. This action would slow the construction of American infrastructure, lead to the waste of taxpayer resources on poorly designed projects and result in unnecessary and costly litigation and conflict that will delay permitting, the White House said in a statement Thursday. Manchin countered that, for years Ive worked to fix our broken permitting system, and I know the (Biden) administrations approach to permitting is dead wrong. Manchin called Thursdays vote a step in the right direction but said the measure likely is dead on arrival in the House. Thats why I fought so hard to secure a commitment (from Democratic leaders) on bipartisan permitting reform, which is the only way were going to actually fix this problem. The new rule, finalized this spring, restores key provisions of NEPA, a bedrock environmental law that is designed to ensure community safeguards during reviews for a wide range of federal projects, including roads, bridges and energy development such as pipelines and oil wells. The longstanding reviews were scaled back under former President Donald Trump in a bid to fast-track projects and create jobs. The White House Council on Environmental Quality said in implementing the new rule that it should restore public confidence during environmental reviews. The change could speed development by helping to ensure that projects get built right the first time, said CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory. Projects approved by the Trump administration were frequently delayed or defeated by lengthy court battles from groups challenging environmental reviews as inadequate. Manchin, who brokered a surprise deal last week on climate legislation with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, said hes won promises from Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress to pursue permitting reforms in the Senate to speed approval of projects in his energy-producing state and across the country. Manchins wish list includes swift approval of the controversial Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline in his home state and Virginia. The pipeline is nearly complete but has been delayed for years by court battles and other issues. Manchins list includes a number of proposals supported by Republicans, including a two-year deadline on environmental reviews; changes to the Clean Water Act; limitations on judicial review; and prompt action on projects determined by the Energy secretary to be in the national interest. Environmental groups have decried Manchins proposals as counter-productive to the climate legislation and a threat to the environment and communities where projects would be built. Madeleine Foote, deputy legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters, dismissed the Senate vote Thursday as nothing more than a Republican-led stunt to appease their fossil fuel-industry allies. Foote and other environmentalists said strong NEPA review is needed to ensure that those most affected by an energy project have a say in the projects built in their communities. Thorough, community-based environmental reviews are critical to helping eliminate environmental racism and making sure low-income communities and communities of color are protected from polluters who want to build dirty, toxic projects in their backyards, Foote said. She called on Congress to approve the Manchin-Schumer climate bill as soon as possible. Schumer said votes on the bill are likely this weekend. Kabir Green, director of federal affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, another environmental group, said Americans are seeing the effects of climate change in catastrophic detail, from the heat waves in Texas to wildfires in New Mexico to the devastating flooding in Kentucky. But the Senate is voting to prevent the federal government from considering climate change when making decisions. This makes no sense. By MATTHEW DALY Associated Press Jill Biden carries out new mission in 2nd year as first lady View Photo WASHINGTON (AP) Jill Biden barnstormed the country during her debut year as first lady as if on a one-woman mission to help her husbands administration tackle the problem of the moment: getting people vaccinated and boosted against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. New headwinds blowing in year two President Joe Bidens low standing with the public and November elections that could put Republicans back in control of Congress have set her on a fresh mission: working to help elect Democrats who can help her husband. Shes making no secret of her frustration with Washington. Joe truly believes in working with Congress and getting things done, but obviously the Republicans are pulling together and theyre not budging. They are not budging, the first lady said at one of four fundraisers she headlined in the past month. Who would think that AR-15s make any sense for anything? Who doesnt believe in the need to deal with climate change? she said at a July fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts, referencing Republican opposition to the presidents call for an assault weapons ban and more spending on climate change. With school out for the summer, the teacher-first lady was free to travel again in her role as the presidents chief surrogate, highlighting administration accomplishments and showing a more political side while testing possible fall campaign messages before audiences big and small. She put a voice to the urgency she and the president feel over unfinished aspects of his agenda. After accompanying him to the scene of deadly mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the first lady a community college professor urged audiences to demand tougher gun laws from Congress. We need to fight, now, for the lives of our children and for the safety of our schools, she told the National PTA Convention in June, shortly after they visited Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 pupils and two teachers were killed by a man firing an AR-15. Congress represents the will of the people, she said, and thats why we need the people to speak up. Parents and teachers. All of us. She raised the gun issue later at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Boston in July, saying that we believe that AR-15s, the weapon that tore apart 19 children and two teachers in their classroom, have no place on our streets. And she turned the Supreme Courts decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion into an argument for sending more Democrats to Congress come November. President Biden has promised to sign a bill enshrining the right to an abortion in federal law, but there isnt enough support for it in Congress, where Democrats have slim majorities. All of us have a teacher voice for when things go off the rails and now is the time to use it, she said in Boston. In Nantucket, the first lady defended her spouse of 45 years, saying hes just had so many things thrown his way that werent expected, including the abortion ruling and Russias war against Ukraine. He had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment, she told a group of about two dozen donors. She said she also had become first lady of the moment, reacting to problems and not pushing her separate agenda. Tammy Vigil, a Boston University communications professor, said it is typical for a first lady to defend the president and, for that reason, complaints about Republican opposition sound better coming from her than from President Biden. He would risk undermining his authority and appear whiny if he were to sound off about GOP roadblocks more often than he has, she said. If its going to be said, shes the better person to say it, said Vigil, who wrote a book about former first ladies Michelle Obama and Melania Trump. Jill Bidens summer has been busy and uncharacteristically bumpy at times. She went on a pair of solo foreign trips in May, traveling to Romania and Slovakia in eastern Europe to meet Ukrainian refugees. The trip included an unannounced detour into western Ukraine to meet first lady Olena Zelenska. She also traveled through Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica. But by June, she had upset AIDS activists by hosting a White House event to unveil a postage stamp honoring first lady Nancy Reagan. Activists noted the Reagans indifference toward gays and lesbians at the start of the AIDS crisis, which exploded during Ronald Reagans presidency. Last month, she was forced to apologize, through a spokesperson, for offending Latinos by describing their diversity as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists tweeted in response: We are not tacos. The first lady was also heckled last month on her way into a Connecticut ice cream parlor. A man in the sidewalk crowd shouted, Your husband is the worst president we ever had and You owe us gas money. A new CNN poll recorded her favorability rating at a low 34%, though only 29% have an unfavorable opinion of her. An additional 28% said they have no opinion of the first lady and 9% said they hadnt heard enough of her. The presidents positive COVID-19 tests have forced the couple to remain apart for about two weeks while he isolates at the White House and she stays at their home in Wilmington, Delaware. She had welcomed Zelenska to the White House just before the presidents diagnosis. Jill Biden, 71, is the first first lady to work outside of the White House. She is expected to resume teaching in September and juggle those demands with campaigning. She signed a new contract with Northern Virginia Community College on the morning of her speech to the AFT, she said. So far this year, shes done seven fundraisers for the Democratic National Committee, and the party is happy to have her. Jill Biden is one of the Democratic Partys most important surrogates because she drives excitement from grassroots supporters across the country, Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison said in a statement to The Associated Press. Were grateful for the first ladys commitment to electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Robert Watson, a history professor at Lynn University, said modern first ladies have become effective fundraisers in their own right, popular with the party faithful, especially women. He said it would be surprising not to see more of Jill Biden in the runup to the Nov. 8 elections. She is a strong defender, said Watson, who studies the presidency. Nobodys interested in asking about her holiday cookie recipe. Whatever the outcome, the Bidens still have a happy occasion to look forward to after the election: the first White House wedding in nearly a decade. Granddaughter Naomi Biden is set to marry Peter Neal on the South Lawn on Nov. 19. By DARLENE SUPERVILLE Associated Press Ex Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez charged with bribery View Photo SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) Former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez was arrested Thursday on bribery charges linked to the financing of her 2020 campaign, the latest hit to an island with a long history of corruption that brought fresh political upheaval to the U.S. territory. Vazquez is accused of engaging in a bribery scheme from December 2019 through June 2020 while she was governor with several people, including a Venezuelan-Italian bank owner, a former FBI agent, a bank president and a political consultant. I am innocent. I have not committed any crime, she told reporters. I assure you that they have committed a great injustice against me. The arrest embarrassed and angered many in Puerto Rico who believe the islands already shaky image has been further tarnished, leaving a growing number of people who have lost faith in their local officials to wonder whether federal authorities are their only hope to root out entrenched government corruption. Concern over previous corruption cases led to a delay in federal aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria as the U.S. government implemented more safeguards. Thursdays arrest also was a blow to Vazquezs pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which is pushing to hold a referendum next year in a bid to become the 51st U.S. state. Vazquez, 62, was the second woman to serve as Puerto Ricos governor and the first former governor to face federal charges. Former Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila of the opposing Popular Democratic Party was charged with campaign finance violations while in office and was found not guilty in 2009. He had been the first Puerto Rico governor to be charged with a crime in recent history. For the second time in our history, political power and public office are used to finance an electoral campaign, said Jose Luis Dalmau, president of Acevedos party. Using the power of the government to advance political agendas is unacceptable and an affront to democracy in Puerto Rico. Vazquezs consultant, identified as John Blakeman, and the bank president, identified as Frances Diaz, have pleaded guilty to participating in the bribery scheme, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In early 2019, the international bank owned by Julio Martin Herrera Velutini was being scrutinized by Puerto Ricos Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions because of transactions authorities believed were suspicious and had not been reported by the bank. Authorities said Herrera and Mark Rossini, the former FBI agent who provided consulting services to Herrera, allegedly promised to financially support Vazquezs 2020 campaign for governor in exchange for Vazquez dismissing the commissioner and appointing a new one of Herreras choosing. Authorities said Vazquez accepted the bribery offer and in February 2020 demanded the commissioners resignation. She then was accused of appointing a former consultant for Herreras bank as the new commissioner in May 2020. After the move, officials said Herrera and Rossini paid more than $300,000 to political consultants to support Vazquezs campaign. A flurry of messages exchanged during that time between people involved in the case included a heart emoji attached to the commissioners resignation letter and three sealed lips emojis when someone provided Rossis name to Vazquez, who requested the name of the guy from the FBI. In addition, Herrera texted Rossini about the need for a campaign manager and said he didnt want a monkey from Puerto Rico. After Vazquez lost the primary to current Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, authorities said Herrera then allegedly sought to bribe Pierluisi to end an audit into his bank with favorable terms. Herrera is accused of using intermediaries from April 2021 to August 2021 to offer a bribe to Pierluisis representative, who was actually acting under FBI orders, according to the indictment. Officials said Herrera then ordered a $25,000 payment to a political action committee in hopes of trying to bribe Pierluisi. Stephen Muldrow, U.S. Attorney for Puerto Rico, said Pierluisi is not involved in the case. Vazquez, Herrera and Rossini are each charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and honest services wire fraud. If they are found guilty on all counts, they could face up to 20 years in prison, officials said. Meanwhile, Diaz and Blakeman could face up to five years in prison, officials said. Muldrow said officials believe Herrera is in the United Kingdom and Rossini in Spain. It wasnt clear if the U.S. would seek to extradite them. Rossini resigned from the FBI in November 2008 as part of a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to criminally accessing a sensitive FBI database for personal purposes. Many of the searches were related to Anthony Pellicano, an infamous private eye for celebrities who was charged in 2006 with wiretapping certain stars and bribing a police officer. Attorneys for the other suspects charged in the case could not be immediately reached for comment. In mid-May, Vazquezs attorney told reporters that he and his client were preparing for possible charges as the former governor at the time denied any wrongdoing. Vazquez was sworn in as governor in August 2019 after former Gov. Ricardo Rossello stepped down following massive protests. She served until 2021, after losing the primaries of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party to Pierluisi. In a statement Thursday, Pierluisi said his administration will work with federal authorities to help fight corruption. No one is above the law in Puerto Rico, he said. Faced with this news that certainly affects and lacerates the confidence of our people, I reiterate that in my administration, we will continue to have a common front with federal authorities against anyone who commits an improper act, no matter where it comes from or who it may implicate. Vazquez previously served as the islands justice secretary and a district attorney for more than 30 years. She became governor after Puerto Ricos Supreme Court ruled that the swearing in of Pierluisi who had only been nominated as secretary of state as governor was unconstitutional. Vazquez at the time said she was not interested in running for office and would only finish the nearly two years left in Rossellos term. Rossello had resigned in late July 2019 after tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the street, angry over corruption, mismanagement of public funds and an obscenity-laced chat in which he and 11 other men including public officials made fun of women, gay people and victims of Hurricane Maria, among others. Shortly after she was sworn in, Vazquez told the AP that her priorities were to fight corruption, secure federal hurricane recovery funds and help lift Puerto Rico out of a deep economic crisis as the government struggled to emerge from bankruptcy. During the interview, she told the AP that she had long wanted to be in public service: as a girl, she would stand on her balcony and hold imaginary trials, always finding the supposed defendants guilty. By DANICA COTO Associated Press SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) A former Southern California police officer has been acquitted of filing a false report about a traffic stop that said a driver had consented to a vehicle search that allegedly turned up drugs. A jury deliberated for about four hours before finding Dillon Avila not guilty, the Orange County Register reported Wednesday. Prosecutors said Avila and his then-partner with the Anaheim Police Department stopped a driver in April 2018 and searched his vehicle, even though the driver didnt consent. Drugs were found and the driver was charged, but body-worn camera footage later showed the driver didnt agree to the search, the district attorneys office said. Prosecutors dismissed the charges against the driver in 2020. Defense attorneys argued that it was unclear who wrote the police report, Avila or his partner, Samuel Silva. The defense said any errors in the report were unintentional. Michael Schwartz, Avilas attorney, told the Register his client was thankful and happy for the verdict. My client is a very honest person. To have such an attack on his integrity was a major blow to him, Schwartz said. Silva did not testify during Avilas trial. Avilas attorney in court filings said Silva was disciplined in connection to the allegedly false police report. Anaheim police confirmed that Silva is still with the department, but couldnt comment on any possible discipline. KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Russian forces shelled a Ukrainian city close to Europe's biggest nuclear power plant Thursday, reinforcing warnings from the U.N. nuclear chief that the fighting around the site could lead to a disastrous accident. Dnipropetrovsk's regional governor said Russia fired 60 rockets at Nikopol, across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been under Russian supervision since Moscow's troops seized it early in the war. Some 50 residential buildings were damaged in the city of 107,000, and residents were left without electricity, Valentyn Reznichenko wrote on Telegram. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had warned on Tuesday that the situation was becoming more perilous daily at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the city of Enerhodar. Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated at the plant, he said. What is at stake is extremely serious and extremely grave and dangerous. He expressed concern about the way the plant is being operated and the danger posed by the fighting going on around it. He cited shelling at the beginning of the war when it was taken over and continuing instances of Ukraine and Russia accusing each other of attacks there. Experts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said they believe Russia is shelling the area intentionally, putting Ukraine in a difficult position. Either Ukraine returns fire, risking international condemnation and a nuclear incident which Ukrainian forces are unlikely to do or Ukrainian forces allow Russian forces to continue firing on Ukrainian positions from an effective safe zone, the think tank said. The Russian capture of Zaporizhzhia renewed fears that the largest of Ukraines four nuclear power plants could be damaged, setting off an emergency like the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the worlds worst nuclear disaster, which happened about 110 kilometers (65 miles) north of the capital, Kyiv. Also in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the Russian military struck two Ukrainian munitions depots near the village of Novoivanivka and a fuel depot near the Zaporizhzhia railway station. In northern Ukraine, the country's second-largest city, Kharkiv, was shelled by the Russians, Ukraine's presidential office said. Several industrial sites were hit in the city, which has been a frequent target. In the nearby city of Chuhuiv, a rocket hit a five-story residential building. Fighting continued in the fiercely contested Donetsk region in the east, with Ukrainian authorities saying a school was destroyed in the village of Ocheretyne. The attacks have disrupted supplies of gas, water and power, and the region's residents are being evacuated. In the town of Toretsk, artillery shells hit a bus stop, a church and apartment buildings, killing at least eight people, regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said. In the city of Donetsk, Russian-backed separatist authorities accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the central part of the city Thursday. The area hit was near a theater where a farewell ceremony for a prominent separatist officer killed a few days ago was being held. Donetsk Mayor Alexei Kulemzin said six people were killed. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied Ukrainian involvement. He alleged, without offering evidence, that Russian or separatist forces were responsible for the shelling. Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of firing on territories under their own control. Russian forces have already seized the Luhansk region that neighbors Donetsk. Its Ukrainian governor, Serhiy Haidai, said on social media that local residents are being mobilized by the Russian side to fight against Kyiv's forces and that even indispensable mine workers are being taken. Ukrainian authorities reported another abduction of a mayor who reportedly refused to collaborate with the Russians in the southern Kherson region, which is also almost entirely occupied. The reported kidnapping of Serhiy Lyakhno, mayor of the village of Hornostaivka, comes as Russia amasses more troops in the area in anticipation of a counteroffensive by Kyiv and ahead of a planned referendum on the region becoming part of Russia. ___ Follow APs coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine Click here to read the full article. The View is adding two new co-hosts: former Trump staffer, Alyssa Farah Griffin, as well as longtime contributor to the show, Ana Navarro, who Variety has learned has signed a multi-year deal as a permanent co-host, though she wont appear every day on the show. Both women are Republicans and will add conservative commentary to the daytime talk show, though their political brands are vastly different, despite their same party affiliation. Navarro and Farah Griffin will join moderator Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines, resulting in six co-hosts for Season 26. Navarro a fan-favorite on The View who identifies as a Republican, but is a staunch critic of former President Donald Trump has appeared as a weekly guest host on the show, but never officially had a permanent spot at the Hot Topics table until now. Over the years, Variety has reported that she had been in discussions to join The View, but a full-time deal never materialized. Insiders tell Variety that while Navarro has inked a deal to be named a permanent co-host, she will continue in her role as a political commentator on CNN and Telemundo, so she wont be on The View every single day, and will be traveling from Miami to New York City to film the show. A person familiar with Navarros negotiations says she has inked a long-term deal with ABC. The View is an institution and incomparable platform for women of different backgrounds to share their opinions and insights, said Navarro in a statement. Its been a long courtship, but were finally making it official. I love being on the show, and I love living in Miami. Im happy I will be able to do both. Thank you to ABC News, The View family and our loyal viewers for their continued support. Farah Griffin will also be continuing in her role as a political commentator on CNN, while joining The View full time. Variety previously reported that Farah Griffin was expected to join The View, as she had been auditioning as a guest host on the show in recent months. When we reported she was in final negotiations to join as the conservative co-host, several sources said Navarro was disappointed that she hadnt been selected for the permanent gig. Now, it appears deals were reached to include both women for the upcoming season. Farah Griffins addition to The View could prove to be controversial on both sides. She worked for Trump, but only disavowed him after the Jan. 6 insurrection when she began her television career. Farah Griffin served as former vice president Mike Pences press secretary from 2017 to 2019 and then became press secretary for the United States Department of Defense, before joining the Trump White House in April 2020 where she was the presidents top spokesperson and helped engineer his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She also was the youngest person in history to serve as the top spokesperson for the Pentagon. She spent roughly eight months in her role working for President Trump, resigning one month after he lost to President Joe Biden. Ever since she left the White House, she has condemned the former president, publicly disagreeing with his failure to accept the election results and blaming him for the insurrection. In late 2021, Farah Griffin joined CNN as a contributor where she has frequently spoken about her time in the Trump White House. Farah Griffins father is the conservative editor and author Joseph Farah, who founded the far-right website, WorldNetDaily, and rose to prominence with his Clinton conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of Vince Foster, and then became known for promoting birtherism during Barack Obamas presidency. During one of her appearances on The View, Farah Griffin said that her father refused to attend her wedding because of political differences after she spoke out against Trump. In a statement, Farah Griffin said: I couldnt be more honored and thrilled to join the ladies of The View. The show paved the way for women speaking up and speaking out on TV. At a time when our country is so divided, often on partisan lines, Im honored to represent the conservative perspective. I hope to model what is too often lost by our elected leaders: learning from others, disagreeing respectfully, and focusing on finding real solutions for our country. Navarro is well known to The View audience, having appeared as a contributor on the show since 2015, before being named a weekly guest host in 2018. The Republican strategist has served in numerous Republican administrations, including as the national co-chair of the Hispanic Advisory Council for John McCain in 2008 and Jon Hunstman Jr. in 2012. (Navarro shared the screen on The View with McCain and Hunstmans daughters, Meghan McCain and Abby Hunstman, who previously served as co-hosts on the ABC talk show.) While both Navarro and Farah Griffin are Republicans, ABC in their press release, billed Farah Griffin as filling the conservative seat, which has been vacant since McCain left the show in 2021. Before McCain, Elisabeth Hasselbeck changed TV in 2003 as the first Republican arguing about the headlines of the day in daytime TV. The announcement of the two new co-hosts comes after Variety reported that Hostin inked a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal that will keep her on The View for the next three years. ABC had also previously secured long-term deals with Goldberg and Behar, taking them both through Season 28, indicating that The View plans to keep many of its core co-hosts at the panel for the foreseeable future particularly, through the 2024 election when ratings will likely surge. Editors note: This story has been updated with official statements from The View producers and co-hosts. Sign up for Varietys Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Jim Bennett/Getty Images Mark and Mike Black grew up in Lockhart, but they're working their way backwards to the once-and-former hotbed of Texas barbecue. After opening Terry Black's barbecue joints in Austin in 2014 and expanding northward to Dallas, they'll soon be competing with their uncle, Kent Black, proprietor of longtime Lockhart barbecue restaurant Black's. Lockharts long been known as the barbecue capital of Texas, so we want to plant our flag there," Mike Black told ABJ. "We're excited to go back and compete with some of those guys. Paleontologists from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas recently unearthed the fossils of a mosasaur, a 30-foot marine lizard that existed around 80 million years ago, according to a report from the Dallas Morning News. Starting in mid-July, scientists excavated parts of the mosasaur's skull, lower jawbones and several vertebrae from its spine near the fossil-rich North Sulphur River in North Texas. Stephen Kruse, an amateur enthusiast, told the Dallas Morning News that he first came across a piece of the creature's spine as he hiked near the river. "When I turned this corner, he was just sitting there, coming right out of the wall," Kruse said. Perot Museum of Nature and Science It's not the first time mosasaur bones have been discovered near the North Sulphur River. Ron Tykoski, the Perot Museum's director of paleontology and curator of vertebrae paleontology, told the Morning News that during the mosasaur's time, most of Central Texas was underwater. The mosasaur, which Tykoski described as the great white shark or killer whale of prehistoric times, was a top marine predator that fed on turtles, sharks and even other mosasaurs. "Imagine a 30-foot swimming point-nosed Komodo dragon with flippers and a forked tail," Tykoski told the Morning News. ROGER HARRIS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRA/Getty Images/Science Photo Libra Perot Museum of Nature and Science In order to remove the fossilized bones from the creek bed's claylike rock, Tykoski and his team used picks and shovels, as well as finer tools like probes and paintbrushes to remove remaining pieces of rock. They also shot glue made of plastic and acetone into the bone cracks to prevent the fossils from breaking apart. The entire process took about six days, the Morning News reported. "It's like a puzzle: The whole time you're working, you never know where it's going to lead," Dory Contreras, a curator of paleobotany at the Perot Museum, told the Morning News. "And so, as you dig further back, you discover more, you find more." Perot Museum of Nature and Science The fossils are currently housed at the Perot Museum's collection facility as scientists continue to work on removing remaining rock from the fossils and prepare to study and compare them to other previously found mosasaur skeletons. The team plans to return to the creek bed site in the fall to finish excavating the rest of the lizard, per the Morning News. Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network Officials continue to search for the young dolphin wrapped in a fishing line in Galveston as of Thursday, August 4, according to the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network. The nonprofit organization alerted the public about the dolphin in need on Facebook on Wednesday, August 3. In the post, officials stated the fishing line was wrapped around its tail flukes. The network was able to remove part of the entanglement that initially wrapped around its dorsal fin, allowing it to swim more freely. belekekin/Getty Images/iStockphoto A man is making claims that he sold "dozens" of 3D printed guns at a city-run gun buyback program in Texas over the weekend. The City of Houston hosted the buyback event over the weekend. Fox 26 reported that a man, who has remained anonymous, said the homemade guns cost about $3 to make and that he sold 62 firearms at $50 per gun. The program paid $50 for non-functioning guns, with bigger paydays up to $200 depending on the type of functioning firearm turned in. City officials said they purchased nearly 850 firearms at the four-hour long event on Saturday, July 30, with almost $100,000 in gift cards given in exchange. Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee, hearing from her for the first time since Texas Rangers opened an investigation into the Uvalde mass shooting, appears to have investigated whether or not victims in the classroom were shot by police. "We needed to just make sure that none of the officers that went into that room none of their bullets killed the children," Busbee testified. It was not clear from her statement to Judge Catherine A. Mauzy if officers shot students and Busbee's office was not immediately available to comment. Busbee's testimony came as hearings opened for Texas State Sen. Roland Gutierrez's lawsuit against the Department of Public Safety over the release of public records regarding the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary. Busbee argues that any release of information amid the investigation would compromise witnesses or possible defendants. Busbee testified that if witnesses dont know that they are the subject of an investigation then they will not be able to lawyer up and change their story. She said witnesses could say that they cant remember certain details that might have been published by the media. Gutierrez has requested 911 transcripts, police procedures, body camera footage, ballistics reports, and any reports on DPS presence. Busbee argued that the release of the hallway video by Austin news outlets was only a small piece of larger investigation. She said that released information could compromise any possible criminal charges. "I would ask for time to do my job. Time and patience," Busbee said. Other takeaways Busbee said that she does not conduct investigations, denying any claims that she told officials that she was conducting an investigation. She said her office reviews investigations. Busbee denied telling Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin that she would hold him in contempt if he released information. She says that the information released has only sensationalized the shooting and was done for "political attacks." Busbee testified that she called families on Wednesday, August 3, and said Gutierrez requested information that would be sent to the press and would only compromise the investigation. She denied Gutierrez's claim that she also told families that he would release images of their children in the classroom. Arredondo's termination delayed Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo's possible termination has been delayed again as hearings open for a Texas state senator's lawsuit against the Department of Public Safety over the release of public records regarding the Uvalde mass shooting. The Uvalde CISD school board delayed a Thursday, August 4, hearing over the embattled school police chief's termination due to "a scheduling conflict," CNN reported. Arredondo will remain on unpaid administrative leave. Dan Reynolds Photography/Getty Images With the Hill Country continuing to grow, over 300 luxury apartment homes are headed to San Marcos. Alta Center Point will begin construction on 330 apartment homes, which are expected to open for leasing in fall 2023, according to a news release. "Wood Partners is thrilled to be joining the thriving San Marcos community as we officially break ground on our first development in the area," said Bart Barrett, Managing Director at Wood Partners in the release. "As we continue forward with Alta Center Point, we are focused providing our residents with unparalleled community and a great place to call home." J Kupers uncle and grandfather, both named Charles, founded the real estate firm in 1972 that would become Kuper Sothebys International Realty. But it was his grandmother, Kathleen, who steered the firm toward its specialty on luxury homes. She dominated the whole deal, Kuper said. Our firm is still driven by how she worked with clients. She still says it to this day: You have to treat people properly both our competitors, our clients, the person on the other end of the transaction. With 350 real estate agents, Kuper Sothebys works with clients buying and selling homes in San Antonio, Austin, and Hill Country towns such as Boerne and Wimberley. It also lists ranches across the state, which are often purchased as luxury properties, Kuper said. The firm has been affiliated with Sothebys, the brokerage of fine arts and collectibles, since the late 70s; the two are now linked through a franchise agreement. The firm is currently selling the 53-acre estate of former Spurs player Tony Parker and his ex-wife Eva Longoria in the Anaqua Springs neighborhood near Boerne. It is listed for $19.5 million. Despite his pedigree, Kuper didnt set out to have a career in real estate. Before joining Kuper Sothebys, he worked as a project manager for a construction firm and at a tech company. He now serves as principal broker at the firm, a position hes held since 2011. Real estate is the only thing I said Id never do. But, you know, I grew up in the business. I cant get around it. Its 100 percent in my blood, he said. Its a 24-hour-a-day world. Theres never been a day off that I can think of, family-wide, in my whole life from real estate. Kuper recently met for an interview to discuss recent swings in the housing market, growth of the local luxury sector and demand from Mexican nationals eager to live in San Antonio. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity. Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer Q: Selling luxury homes, have you had any noteworthy clients over the years? A: We work with, I would almost say, every noteworthy client. If you named somebody that you could just name off the top of your head whos an important San Antonio person, I bet weve worked with 90 percent of them. I think the reason people use us is because we dont ever mention (who) they are. You know, were listing Tony Parkers house right now. I say that because I think its now been public, its his house and weve had some promotion on that. But normally, that stuff does not come out. Q: What do your clients expect that other buyers and sellers might not? A: The highest level of service and communication. Because typically those people are busy, or traveling, or both. And truthfully we do go above and beyond when duty calls. Weve got several stories of agents in our firm flying to the Midwest, or flying to New York City, in the morning to get documents hand-signed and flying back at night. Q: Has the local luxury market grown over the years? A: Significantly, Id say. It used to be that most all the luxury was in tri-cities (e.g., Alamo Heights, Olmos Park and Terrell Hills), but now weve got several amazing neighborhoods on the North Side. Dominion continues to grow, Cordillera Ranch. Austin has seen even bigger growth over time, and people recognize that from a national standpoint, but San Antonio is finally starting to catch up. I see good and bad parts of that. You know, affordability is what San Antonio has been always about. Q: What is driving the luxury markets growth? Are wealthy people more willing to live in San Antonio? A: Im always a one-trick pony on what drives real estate market, and its always job growth. What jobs are coming to San Antonio will drive price points and overall demand. If you have new jobs, lets say Texas (Biomedical Research Institute), and theyre hiring a lot more executives, higher-paid physicians and researchers, that drives the luxury market. Q: In the local housing market, we recently saw demand go off the charts, extremely tight, but now its loosening a little bit, right? A: I would say it is. I think a lot of the issues surrounding really low inventory that weve seen in the last few years have been very psychological. You had a pandemic that sort of kept people in their homes and not making any moves, not knowing what was going on. That sort of dissipated, right? That wasnt the reason not to buy or sell. Then it just became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because there werent homes on the market, because people had held off on doing that, there was nothing to buy. Then, people didnt want to list their house because they had nothing to buy. But I think what people have recognized now, just in the last three months, is the psychological feeling that weve hit the top of the market. Theyve got equity built up in their home, they want to realize some of that equity, so theyre willing to take it to the market to see if they can get something out. My prediction for the next 90 days and this what we talk about internally a lot is we should see a very large increase in inventory in the San Antonio market compared to what its been over the last few years. Because weve never had more calls, probably, for people wanting to list. Q: Does the luxury market typically mirror what the market as a whole is doing? A: It does mirror it. Ill give you my fun fact, another thing that I try to pay attention to that is not necessarily written down in a book. I watch heavily what our farm and ranch sales are doing. Theyre almost always the harbinger for whats going to happen for residential luxury or otherwise. Because if you think about whos buying our farm and ranch property, its more of a luxury property at the end of the day. Probably uber-luxury. A lot of what we sell is to some titan of industry; somebody thats got a pretty good view into the global economy. So if I start to see that slow down, typically within six months, I start to see that change on the residential side too. Q: How is it different operating in luxury? Upscale homes stay on the market longer, right? A: Yeah, 100 percent. (Years ago, the expectation was that) if youve got a luxury property, lets say over a million dollars, it would be on the market six months to a year. In the last few years, theyve sold almost instantaneously. I do think well get back to the days of them being on the market longer. Again, I dont see that being a problem at all. I think thats why weve done well as a company, because weve been through lots of market shifts in 50 years. Some of our best years have been when the market has been the worst. My grandmother, Kathleen, will say, J, we sold a lot of houses when there was 12 percent interest. Weve always done really well in even poor markets. I think that typically comes around to the fact that we do spend more and take more time and effort on our marketing and advertising effort, and client satisfaction. Q: When the market is crazy, as its been lately, is that generally good for business for Realtors? A: I would say the answer in general is yes. Its hard to deny that when things are moving this fast, Realtors benefit. At the same time, I would say our degree of additional benefit really isnt there. People revert back to, I need a really high-quality broker or agent to help represent me when I think the market might be a little bit more difficult. When the market is off the chart and everybodys doing well, you dont maybe need the same level of representation. Q: Do you see a lot of Mexican nationals buying homes in San Antonio? A: We always have. I would say the reason for that, especially for our firm, is that Mexican nationals recognize our brand. Weve always been a great, safe place for Mexican nationals wanting to buy primary, secondary, etc. Weve sold incredible ranches and incredible luxury property. Weve taken trips down to Mexico to help evangelize on the benefits of San Antonio for people wanting to move. Weve hosted groups here, in an almost bus tour fashion, to drive our market and talk about its benefits. So we very much cater to that market. One of the comments I made before is that were very discreet about who our clients are. So weve had very notable clients from Mexico want to buy here, and no one would ever know it except us and maybe the agent on the other side. Q: Is the Hill Country a big growth market for you? Whats going on out there? A: Oh, yeah. Weve been in the Boerne market for quite some time, and in New Braunfels. You know, Ive lived in Houston, Ive lived in San Antonio and now I live in Boerne, so I-10 has been my frenemy for 42 years. Under construction perpetually, but when you drive up now it is smooth sailing all the way out to Boerne. I think thats proof positive of the growth that weve seen in Boerne, Comfort, and now extending further past that. The growth is almost unbelievable to see because it happened so fast. Theres just a lot of demand for being in the Hill County these days. Q: Why is there more demand there now? A: I think its all a proximity thing. I remember driving to SeaWorld as a kid it seemed like it was forever away. I remember going to Boerne and that was like a vacation, like you were going out of the country. Now its pretty much wall-to-wall, right? Theres no break between San Antonio and Boerne, really, and I think people want proximity to services. Marco Bottigelli via Getty In one of the cheapest cross-country flights you'll ever see, you can fly from Austin to New York for as little as $54 roundtrip so if you have friends youve been promising to go see or just fancy a week soaking up a different city, nows the time, people. Low-cost carrier Spirit is offering these crazy prices, and you can search for your preferred flight configurations Kayak, with the cheapest prices starting in mid-September and extending all the way into January. Yves here. A close contact who has high level contacts in Germany and reads its press religiously said as soon as the EU stated its to cut itself off from Russian energy that the only way it could happen in 2022 to the degree that Germany wanted in 2022 would be to reboot nuclear energy. Mind you, he expressed that view months ago. Only now do we hear this bleat from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which is far less than an initiative, that it might be a good idea to get more nuclear power in service. As this article makes clear, this Scholz comment is at best a trial balloon. I welcome informed reader comment as to how much if at all nuclear energy output could be increased in Germany by winter. A separate issue is the diehard opposition of the Greens, both to nuclear power and presumably also to getting uranium from Russia. By Julianne Geiger, a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com. Originaly published at OilPrice Germanys government has held firmly onto the belief that its nuclear power industry must be retired, even in the midst of an energy crisis. But today, it appears that could change, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saying for the first time that the country could put off the retirement of its nuclear power fleet, according to the Wall Street Journal. It could make sense to keep its nuclear power plants operating, Scholz said on Wednesday, despite the current plans to retire the final three plants come December, and despite Germanys economy and environment ministries in March recommending against extending the life of the reactors. At the time, the German ministries concluded that extending the life of the nuclear reactors would have a very limited impact on alleviating Germanys power crunch, and that it would come at a very high economic cost. If someone decides to do so now, Scholz said about the potential for building new nuclear power plants as recenly as in June, they would have to spend 12-18 billion euros on each nuclear power plants and it wouldnt open until 2037 or 2038. And besides, the fuel rods are generally imported from Russia. As such one should think about what one does. Germany has also restarted two power plans that run on oil as the country tries to conserve natural gas as Russian gas flows to Europe continue to be restricted amid an ongoing gas turbine repair situation. Coal-fired plants in Germany have also been resurrected. Austerity measures have been implemented, with Stadtwerke Munchen reducing swimming pool temperatures and shutting saunas until further notice. Germanys plan to phase out nuclear power generation spans decades and was hurried along by the Fukushima disaster. For now, the German government has commissioned a stress test for nuclear plants, according to the WSJ, to determine if the life of the plants can be extended safely, and whether it will truly aid Germany with its tight energy situation. Yves here. Please welcome John McGregor, who has lived in London, Rome, and is currently in Australia. He has a background in classics, international relations, and counter-terrorism. In addition to the work he mentions below, he has also done know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering due diligence for major international firms. So his international background and regulatory-related experience should provide for a new perspective. By John McGregor, a translator and political violence researcher Much has been made of the famed instability of post-War Italian governments, to the point that it has become a near constant of foreign political commentary. However, attempts to change the political system reveal that the much-critiqued instability is the crucial to the design of Italian politics, not a glitch. Italy has been hit hard by the long-term economic effects of Euro integration and the acute effects of the 21st century financial crises. In recent elections, Italian voters have sought change by turning to anti-establishment parties. But the reward has been unelected technocratic leaders and a worsening economic situation. The Right wing has capitalized on this unresolved voter discontent by promising greater democratic involvement. As long as Italy remains a managed democracy, halting the rise of the Right will be a particularly difficult challenge. The tenacity of the European establishment, euphemistically called a technocratic government of national unity when it feels the need to intervene openly in the political system, in refusing to relinquish its management of Italys democracy. has allowed the Right to flourish and exploit a desire for greater democratic involvement to promote its own agenda. For instance, in an interview from 21 July, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right wing party Fratelli dItalia, said, for me, presidentialism is the mother all reforms, adding that revamping the political system was the starting point for the other reforms needed in Italy. This is not the first time that Meloni has raised the theme of constitutional reform; its been a long-standing element of her political platform. She has also called almost continuously for elections throughout the life of the last parliament. FdI was the only national party not to join the technocratic Draghi government. By positioning her party in this way throughout the most recent parliament, Meloni has been able to weaponize calls for greater democracy to promote her right-wing political platform. Its prodigious gains in popularity since the 2018 election reflect not only the longstanding discontent of Italian voters with the political establishment but also the more recent discontent with the politicians chosen for their promises to enact change, such as the Right-wing Lega and the ostensibly anti-establishment 5 Star Movement. The 5 Star Movement itself, first brought to power alongside the Lega, has throughout its short history made direct democracy central to its platform, even as it has deluded much of its voter base in successive governments. In the most recent legislature, Meloni was the first signatory on a bill to introduce a semi-presidential system similar to the French model in Italy. The proposed reform would have reduced the minimum age for the Presidency to 40, introduced direct elections using a run-off, and substituted a constructive vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister for the current system. This would have required the parliament to pre-emptively establish a successor as Prime Minister before one could be removed. The Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies effectively rejected this plan using amendments in March 2022, and in May 2022 the Chamber of Deputies voted down the proposal. On both occasions, the Partito democratico (Pd), 5 Star, and Liberi e uguali (as well as former 5 Star deputies) voted against the proposal, while the Lega, FdI, and Berlusconis Forza Italia voted in favour, albeit with some key deputies on the Right inexplicably absent. In the larger vote in the Chamber, 19 deputies from Italia Viva (IV), the party formed by Matteo Renzi after his split with the Pd, abstained. The rest of the political spectrum and the press have had mixed reactions to Melonis constitutional reform efforts. On 27 July, La Repubblica published an interview with Rino Formica, a Socialist former Minister, in which he warned that Melonis presidentialism is a hidden card designed to replace parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian presidential democracy. This type of response seeks to stoke fear, as does a recent New York Times opinion piece by David Broder, The Future is Italy, and Its Bleak, which warned: Perhaps we will not all burn together in the fire. But if the far right takes over the government, in Italy or elsewhere, some of us surely will. In another recent NYT opinion piece, Mario Draghis Fall Is a Triumph of Democracy, Not a Threat to It, Christopher Caldwell argued: But there is an odd thing about Mr. Draghis role as a symbol of democracy: No voter anywhere has ever cast a ballot for him. He was installed to break a political impasse in early 2021 at the request of President Sergio Mattarella, who is himself not directly elected. Honorable and capable though Mr. Draghi may be, his resignation is a triumph of democracy, at least as the word democracy has traditionally been understood. The difficulty that the pro-EU establishment, in Italy and abroad, now faces with the Italian electorate is that Draghis fall will demonstrably lead to a more democratic outcome. It has resulted in elections on 25 September, but the further rise of Melonis FdI is also a bleak prospect. In May, when the Chamber voted down Melonis bill, representatives from both the Pd and IV explained that the reason for doing so was that the remaining lifespan of the parliament, predicted to be 11 months at the time, was too short for such a reform. Marco Di Maio, speaking on behalf of IV, nonetheless added that his party was also in favor of a directly elected Prime Minister or President. This theoretical support but practical opposition is not surprising given the recent history of attempts to change the political system. In the last parliament, Melonis bill was one of three proposing a directly elected president: the other two emerged from the Pd. Before founding Italia Viva and splitting with the Pd, Matteo Renzi called a referendum in 2016 on proposed changes to the electoral system. Renzis plan was, amongst other things, to weaken the senate and increase the lower house representation of the party that won a plurality, thus creating, in theory, more stable governments for elected Prime Ministers. The referendum, which was presented by Renzi as a referendum on his government as well, was resolutely defeated as Renzi crashed in the polls. Portrayed as a young disruptor during his initial rise to power, Renzi had demonstrated his dedication to the pro-business austerity economics of the EU. Nonetheless, prior to this referendum, an editorial piece in the New York Times put forward the case in no uncertain terms against the referendum: A victory for Mr. Renzis reforms, however, would also pose a serious risk in the long term. There is no question that the equal powers of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies have sometimes contributed to legislative deadlock, but there is little evidence that this is the chief reason for the dearth of reform, or for the revolving-door governments. The main explanation lies in the nature of Italys fragmented politics and resistance to change, and the constitutional amendment wouldnt alter that. It would, however, enhance the governments authority to a degree unseen in Italian politics since World War II. Italys unique bicameral system was designed to put an extra check on executive powers in a country once led by Benito Mussolini and more recently by Silvio Berlusconi. Lifting it might make it easier for Mr. Renzi to enact reforms, but also for a different leader to achieve far less savory goals. The Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, a former comedian who wants to hold a referendum on dropping the euro, is not far behind Mr. Renzis Democratic Party in the polls. The disturbing truth of the establishment position is laid out clearly here: Italians cant be trusted to choose their government; they have chosen poorly in the past and might be tempted by some of the less savory political propositions. To fend off the risk of these poor choices, and prevent a rise of populism and the Right, Italian democracy must be kept on a short leash, according to this viewpoint. Yet the economic, Covid, and Ukraine crises have increased stress, resulting in already alienated voters being disenfranchised by the very anti-establishment parties that they turned to for change. European technocrats and other status-quo forces have neutered these factions, so they are incorporated into government without enacting systemic change. They have succeeded in shutting down more and more avenues for democratic reform. To Melonis FdI, each one of these failures is a success that gives it a boost as the next anti-establishment party in line. It will continue to exploit an Italian democratic urge opposed by the EU and American establishment. Unless these self-appointed minders can find room for more democracy in Italy, the Right will continue to win new voters attracted by the idea of voting itself. (Natural News) Small business truckers who rely on CoreFund Capital for factoring their accounts receivable are now struggling to stay in business following the abrupt closure of the company. Factoring companies purchase outstanding invoices from companies with slower-paying customers to provide them with immediate cash flow. CoreFund offers same-day factoring to trucking companies throughout the nation to help clients who need access to funds to make their payroll, purchase fuel or inventory, or fulfill orders. Hundreds of small business truckers depend on their services to stay afloat. CoreFund Capital, which is based in Texas, suddenly closed its doors late last month and fired all of its staff amid a legal dispute between two brothers involved in the companys ownership. This has left their clients scrambling to cover costs. Rival factoring companies have reported receiving countless calls from CoreFunds trucking clients, many of whom are concerned they will have to stop doing business because they cannot pay their drivers or buy fuel. Complicating matters is a lack of communication from CoreFund executives and a failure to follow procedures that would enable other brokerages and factoring companies to help the affected truckers. John J. Jerue Truck Brokers Director of Operations, Tony Ginevra, explained to Freight Waves that he cannot pay carriers who factor receivables through CoreFund. I had a carrier trying to get us to pay him directly hes called me a dozen times today but theres nothing we can do until we have a notice of assignment from CoreFund that this trucking company has gone to them for funding and CoreFund sends us an invoice, which we will pay the same day, he said. I feel for these guys because many are living load to load right now, but we legally cant pay the carriers directly because we have to pay CoreFund first. Until CoreFund releases Uniform Commercial Code liens that were filed by the factoring company against the assets of carriers, truckers will be unable to get relief. In addition, a revocation is required of the notice of assignment that was sent to these truckers clients telling them to make their payments to CoreFund, who then pays the truckers. Court makes a move that could help truckers access funds Last week, a District Judge in Parker County, Texas, Graham Quisenberry, appointed a receiver acting on behalf of CoreFund in the hopes of helping truckers to access their funds faster. This is viewed as a positive step as the receiver could act on behalf of CoreFund to make the necessary payout arrangements, but it will still take some time for funds to be paid. At the heart of the CoreFund Capital shutdown is a feud between CoreFund Capital founder Meir Sacks and his brother, Yaakov, and is related to a family trust. Although the companys executives have not released any statements about its future, some former employees who have access to the CoreFund Facebook account have been updating it in response to comments from panicked trucking customers. They maintain that they are legally and physically unable to release funds or send release letters, however. CoreFund Capitals former business development officer Todd Waller, who was among the staff members fired, released a statement on LinkedIn about the lawsuit and its effects on small business truckers. Our staff is hurting and struggling with this as we were completely blindsided, he wrote. Additionally, we are saddened and sickened by how this is impacting our clients who we consider family and we are legally unable to do anything to help as they struggle to stay in business. Sources for this article include: FreightWaves.com CoreFundCapital.com (Natural News) As recently as June 30th, proudly injected physician and former Canadian Liberal Member of Parliament Dr. Doug Eyolfson made it clear he has no pity for those who lost their livelihoods for refusing the COVID-19 injections. (Article by Yudi Sherman republished from AmericasFrontlineNews.com) Eyolfson tweeted a story about non-injected Canadian health care workers suing the Manitoba government over its vaccine mandate. The workers say they lost their primary source of income as a result, and were also ineligible for unemployment benefits, causing significant mental anguish, Eyolfson quoted in the tweet. Then he added, If only there was a way to have prevented all this anguish. Maybe a vaccine? The workers say they lost their primary source of income as a result, and were also ineligible for unemployment benefits, causing significant mental anguish. If only there was a way to have prevented all this anguish. Maybe a vaccine? https://t.co/jewKdhX83G Dr. Doug Eyolfson (@DougEyolfson) June 29, 2022 The doctor was also livid last month when Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre introduced legislation to abolish all current vaccine mandates and ban any future vaccine mandates in support of medical freedom. More dangerous pandering to an increasingly unhinged right-wing base, Eyolfson spat on Twitter. This is beyond irresponsible. Our COVID death rate per capita is 1/3 that of the U.S., thanks to science-based public policy. [The Conservative Party of Canada] apparently does not care if you live or die. More dangerous pandering to an increasingly unhinged right-wing base. This is beyond irresponsible. Our COVID death rate per capita is 1/3 that of the U.S., thanks to science-based public policy. CPC apparently does not care if you live or die. https://t.co/eB2Rs19YVf Dr. Doug Eyolfson (@DougEyolfson) June 2, 2022 Last week, Eyolfson, who has been injected four times for COVID-19, suffered a sudden heart attack during a jog in Vancouvers Stanley Park. His life was saved by an off-duty firefighter who happened to be nearby. Ive always known never to ignore symptoms. Im assuming this happened very suddenly, Eyolfson told CBC News. Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wished Eyolfson a speedy recovery. Glad to hear youre okay, my friend. Take care of yourself were all wishing you a fast and full recovery! tweeted Trudeau. Glad to hear youre okay, my friend. Take care of yourself were all wishing you a fast and full recovery! Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) July 21, 2022 The emergency physician spent six days in the hospital, during which he received bypass surgery, and was discharged on Wednesday. But Eyolfson did not appreciate social media users pointing out that cardiac events are hallmarks of the COVID-19 injections. Im doing very well, he tweeted last Wednesday from the hospital. Thank you so much for all of your good wishes. And to those who replied to my news with anti-vax rhetoric, look in the mirror and ask yourself if this is the really kind of person you want to be. Please seek help. Peace. Im doing very well. Thank you so much for all of your good wishes. And to those who replied to my news with anti-vax rhetoric, look in the mirror and ask yourself if this is the really kind of person you want to be. Please seek help. Peace ? pic.twitter.com/0JJvyFuKer Dr. Doug Eyolfson (@DougEyolfson) July 22, 2022 But the backlash didnt let up. I ask the same of those who ridiculed, shamed, forced, coerced, wished death upon and looked down on those who choose not to ?. Its a 2 way street that I am happy to walk down. Question though, why would people link a heart attack with the ?, curious. Actions have consequences Doc. You made you conscious decision and as a result, this is where youre at. Hope you bounce back from your mild and rare minor heart attack. Awful lot of you doctors dropping with cardiac issues. Wonder whats going on. Earlier this month, another Canadian physician suffered a cardiac arrest while on a run. Dr. Paul Hannam, Emergency Department director at North York General Hospital, was an accomplished Olympic athlete. He died on July 17th from cardiac arrest. For his part, Eyolfson is also not happy that mask mandates have been phased out. I was the only one at the gym today wearing a mask. COVID is far from over, he tweeted last month. I was the only one at the gym today wearing a mask. COVID is far from over https://t.co/gdcpAgn99B Dr. Doug Eyolfson (@DougEyolfson) June 29, 2022 Read more at: AmericasFrontlineNews.com (Natural News) Early treatment protocols for Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) infection are more effective when paired with nicotine, according to chiropractor and Brighteon.TV host Dr. Bryan Ardis. He shared this finding with CLO2TV host Bob Sisson when the two met last month at the Red Pill Expo in Indianapolis. According to The Dr. Ardis Show host, people around the world had been reaching out to him just so they could share their experiences with pairing nicotine with their COVID-19 treatments. The Texas-based chiropractor and CEO of ArdisLabs shared that individuals who had COVID-19 were able to recover their sense of hearing after chewing two milligrams of nicotine gum in the morning and evening. He then advised people to follow the same protocol with nicotine gum, or wear a nicotine patch daily, until the symptoms go away. Ardis went on to attest the effectiveness of the nicotine protocol, saying that most of the long-haul symptoms will be gone in 48 hours. He explained to Sisson also known as Bob The Plumber that the body has an affinity to the brains nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAchRs). Ardis explained that neurons bind to nicotine over anything else. If the nAchRs detect the presence of nicotine, ivermectin, venoms or poisons that attach to them, they bind to the nicotine and let go of the toxic chemicals causing symptoms to disappear. People who fear the long-haul symptoms of COVID-19 need to get nicotine in either gum or patch form, said the chiropractor. He added that God put these nAchRs in the human brain for a purpose, and that every cell in the body has cannabinoid receptors. Ardis noted that if people can recognize the weaponized venom aspect of COVID-19, then they can include both nicotine and the hormone melatonin in their treatments and completely eliminate all the long-haul COVID symptoms. Ardis talks about his revelations tying COVID-19 to snake venom Ardis told Sisson that since the release of the documentary Watch the Water, he has done at least 500 interviews around the globe. The 48-minute documentary saw successful releases in different countries despite attempts to ban it outright. It was just massively successful in getting around the world, the chiropractor remarked. I was really grateful that the world was so excited about it. [I] wanted to share it, and the rest of the world wanted to censor it. What I spent the most time [on], I think, during the first several weeks was trying to make sure the medical profession and the scientists that have been very great and outspoken over the last two and a half years about the corruption behind COVID-19 all understood it. According to InfoWars, Ardiss documentary based on his five-hour interview with Stew Peters posited that COVID-19 may have originated from snakes instead of bats. The chiropractor cited the suppression of monoclonal antibodies, which were used as antivenins, to treat SARS-CoV-2 infection. He also referenced genetic sequence testing on sick Chinese patients that revealed matches with two snake species the Chinese krait and king cobra. There was never any intent to try to draw attention to myself. It was [what] you were all doing with your early treatment protocols exactly what you need to do, and in your suggested hospital protocols like corticosteroids, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and budesonide. Those were all correct, said Ardis. You need to add in these other things on top of that and it will help save even more lives. Follow Cures.news for more news about alternative COVID treatments. Watch Bob The Plumbers interview with Dr. Bryan Ardis at the Red Pill Expo below. This video is from the BrighteonTV channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Dr. Bryan Ardis exposes the truth behind COVID-19 protocols Brighteon.TV. Dr. Bryan Ardis tells Stew Peters: COVID-19 is not a respiratory virus, it is SNAKE VENOM poisoning. Dr. Bryan Ardis: Ivermectin didnt fail people on COVID, the researchers and media did Brighteon.TV. Drs. Bryan Ardis and Lee Merritt talk about the coronavirus as a depopulation tool Brighteon.TV. America Unhinged: Dr. Bryan Ardis warns about the medical establishments COVID lies Brighteon.TV. Sources include: Brighteon.com InfoWars.com (Natural News) The United States saw the largest wildfire in New Mexicos history but it didnt start out as an accident. These fires were actually set by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) supposedly to reduce wildfire risk, but had the opposite effect. Due to a combination of incompetence, neglect and ignorance, the controlled burn morphed into a catastrophic blaze that engulfed over 530 square miles of mostly privately-owned forests and meadows while destroying 432 homes as well. After burning down the homes and land, the state is demanding that the victims pay for the damage themselves despite previously telling them that they would be given full support. When he visited the state in June, President Joe Biden said the federal government will be covering 100 percent of the cost, but this is no longer the case. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has so far granted $4.2 million to the 1,164 fire survivors, making the average payout to be $3,600. To those who lost their homes, this does not amount to anything. A recent report from Reuters said that cost-sharing statutes on federal relief programs are preventing the victims from receiving the help they need. Instead of the promised 100 percent of the costs, the victims, some of whom see the governments actions as arson, were told that they are on the hook for 25 percent of the total cost, as per the USDAs Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) guidelines. The victims cant simply shell out thousands or millions of dollars that it will take to repair the damages caused by the government-initiated fires. Many cant afford to share at least 25 percent of costs on the USDAs Emergency Forest Restoration Program (EFRP), which should offer relief, such as stabilization of burn areas prone to flash flooding, said New Mexico State Forester Laura McCarthy. Residents may own large areas of land that had been passed down to them from 1800s Spanish-Mexican land grants while still working blue-collar jobs. They were putting their hopes on a congressional bill that will fix the cost-sharing nonsense. However, given the extremely slow turning wheels, this could be months or years out. It happened before and it will happen again A victim, Leger Fernandez, told Reuters that he is going straight to the USDA to negotiate a waiver with the NRCS to drop the cost-sharing provision. The federal government burns your house down so they are responsible in my mind to pay 100 percent of the cost of rebuilding, Fernandez said. Support cannot get to the 45-mile-long disaster area fast enough, as the blaze burned around acres of forests. (Related: Massive fracking fire breaks out in New Mexico oilfield, forcing families to evacuate homes.) Hundreds of families are currently living in tents and campers next to the ashes of their homes, hoping that something changes. However, if history is any indicator, they would likely be waiting a long time. There had been similar scenarios in the past years within the police state when SWAT teams destroyed homes of innocent people, then told them they were on the hook for the bill. In 2020, Vicki Baker, a 75-year-old woman, was told she had to cover the $50,000 in damages to her home after the police blew it up when they were looking for a suspect. It took her two years to get her money back. Harry Edson Browne, a libertarian writer, public speaker and the Libertarian Partys nominee for president in 1996 and 2000, made a statement that perfectly summed up the situation before he died. The government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs and then hand you a crutch and say, See, if it werent for the government, you wouldnt be able to walk.' Visit BigGovernment.news for more news related to the federal government. Watch the video below for more information on the largest wildfire in New Mexico. This video is from The Resistance 1776 channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Government approves weather control cloud seeding operation in New Mexico in desperate bid to create rainfall. Devastating long-term drought haunts U.S. Southwest: Water wars underway between Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. Angry leftists triggered after militia group arrived in Sierra foothills to provide wildfire relief. Sources include: SHTFPlan.com Reuters.com Brighteon.com (Natural News) Steve Kirsch attempted to create a Google Surveys questionnaire about Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccines, only to have Google censor it. It turns out that Google does not allow any Google Surveys to mention anything about covid, the jabs or associated adverse events. An email Kirsch received from Google explained that information related to certain medical topics, in this case the Fauci Flu, are a non-starter. In this scenario, the email adds, we must reserve the right to allow or not allow surveys with these topics at our sole discretion. Please remove this question to make it compliant. Kirschs first question he only created two and the one that Google is referring to, here, asks whether anyone in the household, including oneself, has ever had covid, is now unable to work because of a covid infection, or has died from covid. This would seem to be a generally innocuous question, which makes Googles objection to it somewhat dubious. (Related: Google has been on a censorship spree for many years.) In his second question, Kirsch asked if anyone in the household, including oneself, has taken the covid injection, had a diagnosis of myocarditis following injection, or died from a covid injection. Here is what Google had to say about this one: Surveys with questions including offensive, obscene, gruesome, shocking or distasteful content are not allowed to run. Is Google the governments Ministry of Truth? Google pretty much sent the same response to both of Kirschs questions, mainly suggesting that they are inappropriate and not something that Google wants to allow on its platform. In order to publish the survey, the tech giant explained, both of Kirschs questions need to be removed which means there is no survey left to publish. Kirsch says that he and his team were floored by the response, as all they are attempting to do is take the pulse of public health post-plandemic. Clearly, they dont want anyone to know the truth, Kirsch says about Google. The only truth they want you to know is what the government tells you. Other platforms have published these same questions without issue, but not Google. In essence, Google is working on behalf of the government to silence all truth about covid and the injections. In short, Google Surveys will not allow us to question the government narrative, Kirsch further writes. Clearly, Google doesnt want anyone in America to know how safe the vaccines are. You simply are not allowed to question the government narrative. Based on the results of his many other surveys, Kirsch is convinced as we are that Chinese Virus shots are in no way safe, left alone effective. Google apparently knows this, too, which is why Kirschs surveys are not allowed there. What this means, of course, is that Google is complicit in the mass genocide of humanity via covid injections, which are still being pumped into peoples bodies on a daily basis with young children as the latest victims. Googles latest code of conduct reads: And remember dont be evil, and if you see something that you think isnt right speak up! Kirsch is trying to do just that. I think this isnt right, Kirsch writes. Will anyone at Google speak up? Wouldnt it be great if Google acknowledged the error and ran the survey and published the results? Dont hold your breath on that ever happening! Kirsch also attempted to post his survey to the Nextdoor app, which also removed it within 24 hours. According to Kirsch, almost everyone on the Nextdoor app is pro-vaccine, and he is considered to be an evil person there. The latest news about Fauci Flu shots can be found at ChemicalViolence.com. Sources for this article include: SteveKirsch.substack.com NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Are you or a loved one suffering from ABV Anything Besides Vaccines disease? Mainstream media, most doctors, and most nurses across the US are suffering from ABV disease, where no matter what, they can never blame vaccines for any health damage, disease, disorder or even death. Some are just brainwashed. Others fear for their jobs. Even when the injury is sustained immediately after getting a toxic jab, like the mRNA or J&J Covid stab, they still wont admit the damage is from the vaccine. Cold showers and referee whistles now to blame for young men having sudden heart attacks, pay no attention to COVID-19 jabs that clot blood and cause myocarditis Have you heard of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS)? Thats when you die from blood clots induced by the COVID-19 spike protein vaccines and the CDC and fake-news-mass-media call it death by surprise sounds or cold water. Thats right, young, healthy athletes, especially men, are suddenly dropping dead like flies when they hear that darned referee or umpire whistle during sporting events. Its so abrupt and acute, it gives them a heart attack. Dont mention their severe myocarditis and/or pericarditis conditions caused directly by the Fauci Flu clot shots. Other young, healthy adult men, like in the college and professional sports, or the military, are going into immediate cardiac arrest when they take those cold showers and the water hits them like a frozen Mack truck. Well, not really. Its the fact that their entire vascular system is clogged with sticky spiked prions that put intense strain on the heart, but thats never mentioned by anyone who is afraid of Big Pharma wrath. Remembering SIDS Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Could it be that SADS (Sudden Adult Death Syndrome) is caused by the exact same culprit as SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome)? Suddenly, after getting vaccinated repeatedly with neurotoxins and deadly adjuvants, babies and adults DIE, without any doctors ever even looking in the direction of the vaccines the victims recently received. Its not just infants anymore, and nobody is shaking adults to death, so lets not blame that. You see, theres an elephant in the room, standing there, right in the middle, and nobody is talking about it. Why? Thats when its time to understand VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and how it was established mainly to support the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. Most medical professionals and vaccine manufacturers could not care less about VAERS, even though its sponsored by the FDA and CDC. VAERS is a no fault federally-backed program to protect vaccine manufacturers from libel and to keep doctors and hospitals out of the loop. There are vaccine-induced injury and death lawsuits at hand, yet nobody says a word. Gag orders come with vaccine-induced injury settlements. No talking to the press or complaining on social media about it anymore. Parents of children and adults who suffer SADS might get some under-the-table money, but if they do, they are gagged from ever speaking about it again. Over $5 billion has been paid out for vaccine-induced injuries and deaths over the years, and never a word is uttered. Revealed: 9 out of 10 doctors NEVER report their patients adverse vaccine reactions Yes, the FDA outright admits that 90 percent of doctors never report vaccine adverse reactions their patients suffer, yet still, somehow, over 20,000 are reported every year. That means nearly a quarter of a million events take place, some of which bring life-long medical carnage, and some result in sudden unexplainable deaths. All in all, its always the patient the victim whos to blame. In many cases, infants, children, teens and adults alike receive multiple vaccinations within a short period of time, and then suffer from heart attacks, strokes, brain damage and/or severe allergic reactions, like anaphylactic shock. Bookmark Vaccines.news to your favorite independent websites for updates on experimental vaccines that cause blood clots, myocarditis and severe, chronic inflammation. Sources for this article include: Pandemic.news GatewayPundit.com NaturalNews.com NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Earlier this year, Italys fascist government dictated that all residents over the age of 50, in addition to health care workers, must get vaccinated for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) in order to live and work in the country. Now, however, the Italian government is reversing that mandate, at least for medical workers. Following the removal of Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi from office, the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists (FNOMCeO), Italys official government medical agency, has decided to allow all unvaccinated physicians and medical staff who were denied the ability to work to return un-jabbed if they so choose. The decision marks a major about-face for the agency, which turned Italy into a medically fascist police state under Draghi, replete with harassment, intimidation, coercion and abuse. Unfortunately for the Italian people, no apology has been issued by FNOMCeO for its earlier treatment of citizens under Draghi. Until recently, the government medical associations had been at the forefront of the push for mandatory vaccinations, requiring physicians and medical workers to get the jab, reported the RAIR Foundation. However, they have now reversed themselves without taking any personal responsibility for their dangerous and unjust mandate. Unvaccinated medical staff is supposed to put the past behind them and go back to work. Italian government plays victim, says mass resistance against jab mandates was wrong Instead of admitting it was wrong and just plain evil, and issuing a sincere apology, FNOMCeO is now playing the victim. Its president, Filippo Anelli, had this to say about the so-called anti-vax movement: I would like to staunchly and firmly condemn all the acts of violence, intimidation, name-calling, and vandalism against the Medical Associations and their own chairmen. Several chairmen have received personal threats, including death threats from people who will be prosecuted under the law. My colleagues have the sympathy and support of the Federation. In other words, the Italian government did nothing wrong by tyrannizing the public in trying to force everyone to get injected for the Fauci Flu against their will. And by resisting that tyranny, the unvaccinated made life harder for the tyrants, which upsets Anelli. As you may recall, some 1,900 doctors and dentists across Italy were suspended by their countrys professional association for refusing to permanently alter their DNA with the mRNA (messenger RNA) mystery injections being pushed under Operation Warp Speed. A new law that was passed said all medical professionals needed to be fully vaccinated against Chinese Germs in order to continue working. This included a so-called booster shot or two, or three, depending on what Tony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky decide is necessary. Not only were health care workers across Italy told they needed to get jabbed but so were teachers, police officers, members of the armed forces and anyone who works at a nursing home as well as residents at the nursing home. That so-called law was essentially decreed by the Italian government under Draghi back in December 2021 when Donald Trump launched Operation Warp Speed. When will the genocidal criminals behind all this be thrown in jail or worse? asked a commenter at the RAIR Foundation. Start with this list: Klaus Schwab, Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Mark Zuckerberg, Ursula von der Leyen, Justin Trudeau, Sanna Marin, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Joe Biden, Peter Daszak, all Big Pharma CEOs, and every doctor and nurse who embraced and perpetuated medical tyranny. Another commenter pointed out that Italys sudden shift in policy proves all the more that the so-called vaccines are medically useless at best. The latest news about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine push can be found at ChemicalViolence.com. Sources for this article include: NaturalNews.com RAIRFoundation.com (Natural News) Approximately 8,000 digital wallets connected to the blockchain platform Solana have been targeted by hackers, who have drained them of over $5.2 million worth of digital assets including the platforms own sol coin, USD Coin (USDC) and a small number of non-fungible tokens. According to Twitter account Solana Status, which provides status updates for the Solana network, approximately 7,767 digital wallets have been compromised by hackers who targeted an exploit that allowed them to drain the wallets. According to blockchain analytics and security firm Elliptic, the estimated number of compromised wallets is actually 7,936. OtterSec, an independent group of security researchers that audits blockchain platforms, believes that at least 8,510 wallets were compromised. (Related: Founder of fraudulent crypto CONVICTED for stealing over $6 million from investors.) Solanas sol token is one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world, next to bitcoin and ether. The hack of the token was discovered on the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 2, after multiple users began reporting that assets held in hot wallets wallets that are always connected to the internet, notably Phantom, Slope and Trust Wallet were drained of their assets. Two hours after the hack was initially detected, sols value fell by eight percent. Since then, its value has dropped by another percent, while trading volume has surged to about 105 percent of its average in 24 hours following the hacks detection. Engineers continue to investigate the root cause of an incident that resulted in approximately 8,000 wallets being drained, said Solana Foundation Head of Communications Austin Federa. This does not appear to be a bug with Solana core code, but in software used by several wallets popular among users of the network. How the hack happened is still unclear While it is still unclear how the hack occurred, analysts think the attackers were able to approve transactions on behalf of the owners of the compromised hot wallets, allowing them to transfer funds without the consent of the victims. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko believes the exploit is the result of a supply chain attack, or a type of cyber attack that occurs when an attacker accesses a victims account by targeting a third-party vendor. Seems like an iOS supply chain attack. Multiple plausible wallets that only received sol and had no interactions beyond receiving have been affected, wrote Yakovenko on his personal Twitter account. Android seems to be affected as well. All the confirmed stories so far have had the key imported or generated on mobile. Most of the reports are Slope, but a few Phantom users as well. Elliptic noted that it believes there is nothing wrong with the Solana blockchain platform itself. The root cause is still not clear, but it appears to be due to a flaw in certain wallet software, the firm wrote. The extent and precise nature of the hack are still unclear, but for now security analysts have noted that the exploit has only affected those who have Solana products in their hot wallets. Solana Status advised hot wallet users to move their funds to a hardware wallet as soon as possible. Theres no evidence hardware wallets have been impacted and users are strongly encouraged to use hardware wallets, it wrote. Do not reuse your seed phrase on a hardware wallet create a new seed phrase. Wallets drained should be treated as compromised and abandoned. Learn more about cryptocurrencies at CryptoCult.news. Watch this episode of the Health Ranger Report as Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, discusses how the media is prepping a narrative to justify crushing cryptocurrencies. This video is from the Health Ranger Report channel on Brighteon.com. More related articles: SEC ignores Paul Pelosi but charges 11 in alleged $300 million crypto Ponzi scheme. US Treasury probes crypto platform Kraken over alleged sanctions violations. Cryptoqueen becomes first crypto criminal on FBIs top 10 most wanted. Collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital now revealed to be a massive international fraud hidden behind complex legal structures. Hackers steal over $104 million worth of crypto assets from blockchain bridge. Sources include: ZeroHedge.com CNBC.com Fortune.com Twitter.com Brighteon.com (Natural News) The Transportation Workers Union of America (TWU), which represents employees of Southwest Airlines, just lost a case involving its own harassment of a pro-life employee who was fired for her religious beliefs. Charlene Carter, a 20-year veteran flight attendant at Southwest and pro-life advocate, was awarded $5.1 million by a jury after it was determined that both TWU and Southwest unfairly discriminated against her for not wanting her union dues to fund pro-abortion causes. TWU Local 556 president Audrey Stone attended the Womens March in Washington, D.C., back in 2017 after Donald Trump was elected president. That event receives direct funding from Planned Parenthood, Americas largest abortion provider. Carter reportedly started filing complaints back in 2013 about deductions from her paycheck that were going towards the unions far-left political action committee (PAC). These complaints were then circulated among TWU and Southwest higher-ups who openly mocked Carter for her objections. Ha! She has been supporting the thing she despises this entire time, wrote union treasurer John Parrot. I wish I could give her a list of all the campaigns she has donated to in the last 17 years! Her head would explode, added Todd Gage, a vice president at the union. Carter quickly became the butt of everyones jokes in private email chains that were revealed during the trial, exposing TWU and Southwest as being controlled by left-wing politics. (Related: Southwest was also among the many airlines that tried to force its employees to get vaccinated for the Wuhan coronavirus [Covid-19].) Unions need to be barred from using member funds for political candidates and campaigns Carter is not alone, either. It turns out that TWU and Southwest higher-ups maintained a culture of social media assassination against right-wing members whom they targeted. I am all about targeted assassinations, reads an email from union activist Brian Talburt, discussing dissidents on social media. That email was sent to Southwests then-senior director of inflight services Sonya Lacor, who then forwarded it to others. It IS maddening trying to reason with these sheeple, Talburt mocked in his correspondence, likening dissidents within the union ranks to cancer. When a black woman named Corliss King was made an executive board member at Local 556, Talburt chided her appointment as incredibly dangerous. I am sure with her dreadful work history, there could be opportunity, Talburt wrote about King. She will play VERY well to the heavy inner city, minority crowd coming on board soon. She will be their voice. She will be a huge threat in our upcoming election as well. Union critic Mike Casper was also dubbed a cancer who needed to be eradicated from the ranks for bucking the unions political leanings. Both Southwest and TWU have indicated plans to appeal the ruling, which forces Southwest to pay $4.15 million and TWU Local 556 to pay $950,000 to Carter. National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix, however, has promised to keep fighting for Carter, as well as others like her who have experienced similar hostility. Ms. Carter demonstrated that, even in an overwhelmingly toxic environment, independent-minded workers can stand up, push back against union boss attacks on individual rights and free speech, and win, Mix said in a statement. The evidence presented at Carters trial reveals an ingrained union culture of intimidation and prejudice against dissident workers. While we will keep fighting to defend Ms. Carters victory for her rights, flight attendants or other employees who have experienced similar hostility should not hesitate to contact the National Right to Work Foundation for help in defending their rights. More related news about left-wing intimidation and discrimination against conservatives can be found at Libtards.news. Sources for this article include: DailyWire.com NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Austin, Texas radio host Alex Jones is currently on the hook for $150 million, which would bankrupt all but the top 1% of the top 1% elite. (Article by Ben Bartee republished from TheDailyBell.com) The theory of the current batch of civil lawsuits against Alex Jones and InfoWars goes like this: he claimed on multiple occasions that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting didnt happen. He also posited the alternative theory that it did happen, but was a false flag. To be sure, there were lots of strange goings-on surrounding the case and the shooter. Here are just a handful: There are many more anomalies not included here for the sake of brevity. While none of the above curiosities, alone or in combination, proves government collusion, they certainly warrant further scrutiny. And theyre fair game to examine with a skeptical eye. Which Jones did. Per the prosecutions theory in the ongoing civil lawsuit, the parents of the Sandy Hook kids got harassed allegedly due to Jones skepticism, which caused them unquantifiable emotional distress. Now their lawyers want $150 million in compensation, and the corporate media is practically orgasming on air. Nothing excites them more than shutting down their populist, more popular competition. Trust in legacy media among the public has plummeted to 36% (a record low, likely an overestimate). CNN+, the platform intended to rival online media, failed just three weeks into its launch even after CNNs parent company dumped $300 million into the project. The only way they can survive is to use the states legal fiat to muzzle their competition. Jones never once said the purported Sandy Hook victims names on the air which, using common sense, would seem to be a baseline element of any defamation case (although US law doesnt always follow that standard). Furthermore, lots of web-based media figures claimed Sandy Hook didnt happen in the way it was portrayed. Lots of members of the general public are unhinged, independent of media influences. Lots of people get harassed online every day. The idea that Jones denial/questioning of Sandy Hook, through a labyrinth of cause and effect, through proxies, ultimately resulted in emotional trauma for parents is, to put it mildly, a stretch. Some might call it implausible. The evidence presented is an extremely loose casual chain of events, one which a jury likely wouldnt buy if the decision were left to them. Hence the default judgment and straight to damages. In a break from the Constitution, Alex Jones never got a jury trial to decide his guilt in this matter. Judges instead unilaterally issued a default judgment of guilt. The 7th Amendment: In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved . The right to jury trial, as indicated, extends even further back in time than the founding of the nation to British common law. Thats how far fundamental rights have been eroded. Legally, were getting dragged back into the feudal era. To emphasize, the current jury proceedings are not to determine guilt; the state already decided that for them. The jurys only job now is to decide how much Jones owes based on his pre-determined guilt. Guilty until proven bankrupt. The public, brazen display of extraconstitutional power is the point of the exercise . The state wants to demonstrate that it is no longer remotely constrained by the Constitution when it persecutes its enemies. To the social engineers bent on mass censorship, Alex Jones is the juiciest target possible. Hes bombastic; hes flamboyant; he often comes off, frankly, as an unhinged lunatic. Thats his brand. Free Alex Jones pic.twitter.com/53gvfYXrnl Jackson Hinkle ?? (@jacksonhinklle) July 30, 2022 Jones demeanor assists the corporate state in demonizing and framing him as a unique danger. But, for all his theatrics, Jones has been prescient about a hell of a lot from blowing the whistle back in the day on warrant-free mass-scale NSA spying way before the Snowden leaks to toxic water causing chemical castration to the mRNA vaccine fraud back in 2020 when they were still in development. On many of the foremost issues of interest to libertarians and dissidents more broadly, Jones has been the quintessential canary in the coal mine. The insight he offers from his independent platform, which cant be co-opted or controlled, is why the state (and the media it controls) hates him. His current legal persecution is retribution for not toeing the line. The Empire strikes back. Alex Jones is the bellwether: whatever happens to him will subsequently befall a broader swathe of the anti-establishment press. In 2018, Alex Jones was the first target of mass social media censorship when he was deplatformed from every major social media network overnight. In justification, he was framed as the exception to free speech so beyond the pale as to warrant extraordinary measures to silence his dangerous voice. The mere idea of a national debate in corporate media regarding the censorship of far-right media figures in 2022 is inconceivable its now just accepted as standard operating procedure. Of course, Jones banning was merely a taste of things to come. In the aftermath, scores of other, less notorious subversive figures got the boot. The precedent is set. Watch default judgments for independent media outlets that do the wrong kind of reporting become the new normal. Read more at: TheDailyBell.com (Natural News) Every child born in the U.S. is said to be contaminated with industrial chemicals, including endocrine disruptors that affect brain development. Brain function is often evaluated by intelligence tests, and these IQ scores have been declining since the mid-1990s. This ongoing decline is well documented in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. While IQ measurements are not perfect, scientific studies have shown that chemical exposure negatively affects brain function among children. This is why many professionals, including numerous medical and scientific organizations, are focusing on the soup of chemicals children are being exposed to at an early age. Dangers of endocrine-disrupting chemicals Endocrine-disrupting chemicals interfere with hormones. Newborn babies end up being pre-exposed to mixtures of over 200 of these chemicals, which include phthalates, perchlorate, fluoride, bisphenol-A (BPA ) and its substitutes, parabens, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and even heavy metals like lead and mercury. These chemicals can be found in the amniotic fluid that surrounds the baby in the womb when the brain is forming at an incredible rate with thousands of nerve cells being born per second. Contamination does not end there. Children absorb more of these chemicals through the mothers milk or formula; through the air that the baby breathes; and in products like creams, lotions and baby wipes. Phthalates are chemicals included in many consumer products, such as those for personal care, processed food, food packaging materials and even medical supplies. Other studies also showed that exposure to these chemicals causes reductions in IQ. (Related: Societys declining IQ linked to early chemical exposure in children, new research finds.) Perchlorate is a thyroid disruptor that is usually found in rocket fuel. However, it also turns up in food packaging and even in groundwater, which can affect food products. It acts by reducing the ability of the body to use iodine, which is essential in the formation of the thyroid hormone. It affects IQ by upsetting thyroid function and producing a state of insufficiency. Fluoride used to be added to drinking water until one of the most clear-cut demonstrations of the chemical lowering IQ was reported in Canada. A study measured the IQ of Canadian children living in different cities and found that those with fluoride in their drinking water have lower IQ scores. Legacy chemicals like PCBs and DDTs have been banned in production but still remain in the environment. By interfering with the thyroid system, they also decrease IQ in children and adults who have been exposed as children. Mercury is also known to disrupt brain development. There had been studies that showed at least 2.5 IQ points were lost in a cohort of exposed children in South Korea. Each of these chemicals is dangerous on its own, but a mixture of them can contaminate children from conception and cause irreversible damage to their brains. Watch the video below about another significant factor that makes children dumber. This video is from the Objective: Health channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Study finds lockdowns lower childrens IQ and cause mental health issues. An entire class of agricultural pesticides found to damage the brains of children IQ scores falling nationwide. Why cities make people stupid: Air pollution significantly reduces childrens IQ, study finds. Study finds lockdowns lower childrens IQ and cause mental health issues. Sources include: ChildrensHealthDefense.org 1 ChildrensHealthDefense.org 2 Brighteon.com (Natural News) Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), said the world is facing a nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War. Were just one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation, he warned. Gutteres added that people had been extraordinarily lucky so far, but luck is not a strategy. Nor is it a shield from geopolitical tensions boiling over into nuclear conflict. Guterres was addressing world leaders belonging to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at a conference when he called on nations to put humanity on a new path toward a world free of nuclear weapons. He also outlined five areas for action, beginning with reinforcing and reaffirming the norm against the use of nuclear weapons, which requires commitment from all parties to the treaty. We need to strengthen all avenues of dialogue and transparency.?Peace cannot take hold in an absence of trust and mutual respect, Guterres said. The meeting, which was held at the UNs headquarters in New York, has been postponed several times since 2020 due to the pandemic. It has since resumed and will run until August 26. Guterres said the conference was a chance to strengthen the treaty and make it fit for the worrying world around us, citing the Russia-Ukraine war as well as the tensions on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle East. He also said eliminating nuclear weapons is the only guarantee that they will never be used, adding that he would visit Hiroshima for the anniversary of its August 6, 1945 bombing by the United States. (Related: A primer on the different types of nuclear weapons and how they affect humans and the environment.) Threat of nuclear proliferation growing Currently, almost 13,000 nuclear weapons are being held in arsenals around the world at a time when the risks of proliferation are growing and guardrails to prevent escalation are weakening. The United States, China, Russia, Britain and France, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, pledged in January that they will prevent further dissemination of nuclear weapons. However, during the last review conference in 2015, the parties were unable to reach an agreement on substantive issues. And the threat of nuclear proliferation is only growing. Iran has already reported having enough uranium to build one, if not two bombs, as ex-U.S. diplomat and nuclear weapons expert Robert Joseph warned. The U.S. and its nuclear allies also rebuked Russia for its irresponsible and dangerous talk about the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons as a review of the keystone nuclear treaty opened. Following Russias unprovoked and unlawful war of aggression against Ukraine, we call on Russia to cease its irresponsible and dangerous nuclear rhetoric and behavior, to uphold its international commitments, the U.S., France and Britain said in a statement Nuclear weapons, for as long as they exist, should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression and prevent war. We condemn those who would use or threaten to use nuclear weapons for military coercion, intimidation and blackmail. This call was issued as there had been concerns about the spread of nuclear technology, especially in Iran and North Korea, and Chinas rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal. While five leading nuclear powers are among the 191 states that are included in the pact, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are not, which is why the NPT stated that further reduction of the risk of nuclear war must be a priority for them. (Related: North Korea vows to test more nuclear weapons, aims threats at US.) NPT said Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon. It also called on North Korea to stop its nuclear-related tests and launches. In a separate statement, U.S. President Joe Biden called on Russia and China to demonstrate their own commitment to limiting nuclear arms. Watch the video below for more information about the possibility of nations using nuclear weapons. This video is from the Chinese taking down EVIL CCP channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: India recently put Beijing in range of its nuclear weapons, report says. Kim Jong-un: North Korea fully ready to deploy nuclear weapons against US and its allies. Over 100 workers sue top US nuclear weapons lab over coercive vaccine mandates. Biden unfreezes $29 billion for Iran, handing huge gift to nation that promises to build nuclear weapons and bomb Israel. Bombshell Twitter thread reveals deep ties between Nazi Germanys V-2 rockets, US nuclear weapons and missile tech. Sources include: DailyMail.co.uk News.UN.org Brighteon.com According to the findings of a 10-year study from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, rewilding or nature-friendly farming can increase crop yields and biodiversity. At Hillesden, scientists spent a decade carefully observing the effects of a sizable government-funded experiment. Hillesden is a commercial arable farm located in Buckinghamshire, that spans an area of 1000 hectares. Beginning in 2005, this involved establishing several wildlife habitats, including tussocky grass margins to support a variety of birds, insects, and small mammals, wildflowers for pollinators, and seed-bearing plants for birds. 10-Year Study In the longest-running study of this kind, scientists were able to increase the populations of wildlife needed for agricultural production, including pollinators and crop pest predators. Some butterfly species, like the gatekeeper and green-veined white, saw their populations double, and birds that typically eat insects, like the great tit and blue tit, benefitted greatly from the shelter provided by the grass margins and hedges. They also discovered that even after the loss of agricultural land for habitat creation, overall yields at Hillesden were preserved, and even improved for some crops. The areas that were removed from production were hard to farm and unproductive, while the other areas benefited from an increase in pollinators and pest-eating insects and birds. Read also: Study Defines the Impacts of Organic Farming on the Environment An Expected Result Jake Fiennes, the author of the book on nature-friendly farming, Land Healer, said that he was not at all surprised by the report's findings. He outlined how historical English policies sought to increase food production worldwide. However, it is now understood that it is possible to improve average yield by ceasing to grow food in nonproductive areas of land and converting these areas into natural habitats. More natural elements on the farm have advantages. Farm biodiversity can be increased without lowering yields. Fiennes continued by saying that if there is woodland on a field's southern edge, for instance, the first 15 to 20 meters from that edge will almost always yield less than the average yield-up to 50% of the average. It is obvious to give it to nature by including all the species that might profit from that woodland edge. The land here is the least productive for growing food, so when farmers don't concentrate there, their average yield increases throughout the rest of the field. A biodiversity crisis and a climate crisis are both present, he continued. Since the two are related, there is a chance to both improve yields and support the environment. Dr. John Redhead of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology said that agri-environment options can help bird as well as butterfly populations in the long run by examining population changes over a long period and comparing these to other sites. Redhead is the lead author of the published study. Redhead explained that Hillesden is a typical, sizable arable farm using traditional agricultural methods, in a typical setting devoid of sizable areas of natural habitat. As a result, the long-term study's findings likely show what can be accomplished on all other commercial farms with good agri-environment planning, implementation, and management, The Guardian reported. Related article: Rise of Free-Range Farming May Increase Chances More Animal-Born Pandemics Following days of increasing seismic activity in the region, a volcano has erupted on a mountain close to Iceland's capital Reykjavik, the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) said on Wednesday. Local news organizations MBL and RUV captured images and live streams of lava and smoke erupting from a crack in the earth on the slope of the Fagradalsfjall mountain, which last year saw a six-month-long eruption. Although there was no imminent risk of harm to vital infrastructure, tourists and locals should stay away from the region because of hazardous vapors, the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management advised in a statement. Volcano eruption in Iceland Despite helicopters being brought in to assess the situation, a "code red" was issued to prevent airplanes from flying over the scene, the IMO told Reuters. According to a representative for the agency, the aviation warning would likely be dropped to orange, signaling less hazard, if the breakout was found to be comparable to the fissures reported last year. The country's foreign ministry issued a statement saying that "at this time, there have been no delays to flights to or from Iceland and international flight routes remain available." An earthquake and volcanic eruption occurred on the Reykjanes Peninsula, which is about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Reykjavik and 15 kilometers from the country's international airport. This eruption is not anticipated to release as much ash or smoke into the atmosphere as the one that occurred in 2010 on the ice-covered Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which grounded almost 100,000 flights and drove hundreds of Icelanders from their homes. Iceland is positioned between two of the planet's main tectonic plates, the Eurasian and the North American, and as the two move in opposition to one another, Iceland regularly suffers earthquakes and has significant volcanic activity. Also Read: White Island Disaster: Story Behind the Horrifying Volcanic Eruption That Killed 20 Tourists Volcanic super-eruptions are millions of years in the making Super-eruptions happen when enormous magma accumulations deep in the Earth's crust, created over millions of years, travel quickly to the surface shattering pre-existing rock, according to research from the University of Bristol and Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, as per ScienceDaily. An international team of scientists was able to demonstrate, using a model for crustal flow, that pre-existing plutons-a body of intrusive rock made from solidified magma or lava-were formed over a few million years before four known enormous super-eruptions and that the disruption of these plutons by newly emplaced magmas occurred extremely quickly. The magma disturbs the crust and subsequently erupts in just a few decades, as opposed to the magma supplying super-eruptions, which occur over a lengthy period. The results, which were published today in Nature, explaining these dramatic disparities in time spans for magma creation and eruption by the flow of hot but solid crust in reaction to the magma's ascent, which accounts for the rarity of these eruptions and their enormous volumes. Crystals created by earlier magma pulses, entrained within erupting magmas, are stored at temperatures near or below the solidus for long periods before the eruption and commonly have a very short residence in host magmas for just decadal timescales, according to Professor Steve Sparks of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences. This study questions the theory that ancient crystals were stored for a long time at temperatures high enough to have some molten rocks present and shows that the crystals were from plutons that had already been emplaced and had fully hardened (granites). Crystals from earlier rocks are ejected during volcanic super-eruptions, as scientists have long known. Before the discovery, however, it was commonly believed that they had their beginnings in warm regions above the rock melting temperatures. There is no logical explanation for the previous research findings that the magma chambers for super-eruptions form quickly. Modeling showed that extremely prolonged periods of granite pluton emplacement in the upper crust would be required to precede super-volcanic eruptions, but there was no evidence to support this hypothesis. Related article: Philippines' Taal Volcano Erupts, Sends Thousands to Flee According to information published by The Diplomat on August 3, 2022, a Chinese Yuan Wang class tracking ship that is heading to Hambantota Port in southern Sri Lanka could roil India-Sri Lanka relations again. Follow Navy Recognition on Google News at this link Chinese Yuan Wang 5 class tracking ship (Picture source: Chinese MoD) China has been a continuing source of military equipment to Sri Lanka, and is helping to modernize and expand the Sri Lanka Armed Forces. Chinese nuclear submarines have made several visits to Sri Lanka in September and November 2014, despite strong displeasure from the Indian government. The Yuan Wang class is used for tracking and support of satellite and intercontinental ballistic missiles by the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is important to note that Yuanwang class is not a single class of identical design, but instead, a group of different designs grouped under the same series that share the one name. The detailed specifications for every ship are not released by the PLASSF. Yuanwang 1 and Yuanwang 2 are thought to have a displacement tonnage of around 21,000 tons when fully loaded, with a crew of about 470 and a length of about 190 meters (620 ft). Their propulsion is from one Sulzer Ltd. diesel engine, with a top speed of 20 knots (37 km/h). Yuan Wang 5 is the third generation tracking ship of Yuan Wang series, and entered service on 29 September 2007. Built by Jiangnan Shipyard, Yuan Wang 5 has a displacement of 25,000 tones and withstands wind scale up to 12, and perform duties in sea state 6. The general designer of both Yuan Wang 5 & 6 is Mr. Huang Wei, the general engineer of the 701st Institute of China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC). Our County Editor Dave Hinton is editor of The News-Gazette's Our County section and former editor of the Rantoul Press. He can be reached at dhinton@news-gazette.com. AP EPA announces flights to look for methane in Permian Basin The Environmental Protection Agency says it will conduct helicopter overflights to look for methane super emitters in the nations largest oil and gas producing region AP An attorney for two parents suing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his false claims about the Sandy Hook massacre says the U.S. House Jan. 6 committee has requested two years worth of records from Jones phone A new study published on the preprint server bioRxiv* reports the identification of a cluster of monkeypox virus A.2 lineage genomes from three countries that are distinct from the much larger B.1 lineage responsible for the current outbreak. These observations suggest that A.2 monkeypox cases are not part of the current global 2022 outbreak of the monkeypox virus and instead occurred through a different chain of transmission. Study: A Distinct Phylogenetic Cluster of Monkeypox Genomes Suggests an Early and Cryptic Spread of the Virus. Image Credit: joshimerbin / Shutterstock.com Introduction Until recently, the monkeypox virus was endemic to several central African countries and typically caused single or multiple vesicular lesions that often resolve spontaneously. Infection with the monkeypox virus was previously associated with contact with wild game animals or with infected symptomatic individuals. Since early May 2022, the monkeypox virus has been identified in multiple non-endemic regions of the world. These patients have rarely reported a history of travel to endemic countries, with about 75% reporting recent travel to another European country. Those infected in the current outbreak are almost exclusively men who have sex with men (MSM), with the virus appearing to be primarily spread through sexual contact. The symptom profile of the monkeypox infection during the current outbreak has also shifted from previous phenotypes, thus indicating significant changes in virus biology. The first monkeypox infection of the current outbreak was traced back to a European event where the virus could have been transmitted to many people. Thereafter, the virus spread to 75 countries, with over 20,000 new cases reported by the end of July. Currently, the monkeypox virus outbreak has been designated as a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO). As a result, increased genomic surveillance and molecular testing have been conducted, with multiple sequenced genomes uploaded to the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) database. The monkeypox genome has about 200 kilobase pairs comprising its deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) double strand. Recently, nine genomes were uploaded onto GISAID from the United States, Thailand, and India from six clinical isolates that map to a different lineage, A.2. This lineage consists of 16 unique mutations, nine of which are non-synonymous. Following the phylogenetic model, the researchers at the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) attempted to estimate the time from the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) of this lineage. Study findings The tMRCA of the A.2 lineage was on June 25, 2021. The average rate of nucleotide substitutions was much lower than that of the B.1 lineage at 5.53 x 10-5 as compared to 1.13x10-4, respectively, with the B.1 substitution rate increasing. Thus, the A.2 lineage might have started to spread even years before the early 2022 outbreak, especially since the earliest genome was from a sample collected in July 2021. The genomes analyzed in the current study were obtained from men who had traveled to the United Arab Emirates or Nigeria. This indicates a separate chain of transmission between humans without direct zoonotic transmission across international boundaries. Importantly, this spread remained unrecognized until the current study. This transmission chain may not be linked to the large outbreak of monkeypox which occurred in 2022 and has been potentially uncovered due to heightened awareness, surveillance and the wider availability of diagnostics. The study findings emphasize the importance of genomic surveillance of all newly emerging pathogens for public health policies and epidemiologic insights. *Important notice bioRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. Since the start of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, scientists have extensively studied various aspects of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). For example, several studies have indicated that SARS-CoV-2 thrives at low temperatures and low sunlight, especially in the climatic conditions of the northern hemisphere. Study: Has SARS-CoV-2 evolved and adapted to circulate at high temperatures? Image Credit: Jo Panuwat D / Shutterstock.com Background Previous studies have reported an inverse correlation between air temperature and the prevalence of COVID-19. However, the emergence of several SARS-CoV-2 variants has significantly altered its characteristic features, including vulnerability and/or resistance to high air temperatures. In a recent study published on the preprint server Research Square*, researchers describe changes in the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 in Verona, Italy, in 2020, 2021, and 2022. About the study In the current study, researchers obtained the daily numbers of new COVID-19 diagnoses in Verona from the Regional Healthcare Service database. The mean daily air temperatures of the same region during the study period were also obtained from an official Italian meteorological website. The mean temperatures of July in Verona in 2020, 2021, and 2022 were about 24C, 25C, and 28C, respectively. An increased rate of daily COVID-19 cases was observed between 2020 and 2022, with 2.5 reported in 2020, 106 in 2021, and 1,287 in 2022. Thus, the number of COVID-19 cases in Verona significantly increased each subsequent year since the start of the pandemic, despite an increase in the mean air temperature. Mean daily air temperature and new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases recorded in the province of Verona in July of the years 2022, 2021 and 2022. Implications The study findings indicate that strong evolution pressure placed on SARS-CoV-2 over time has led to its adaptation to circulate at high temperatures. An alternative explanation is that the impact of temperature on SARS-CoV-2 might have remained constant, whereas the rate of transmission increased due to novel variants. Two potential factors could be responsible for these findings. For example, higher daily average temperatures might have increased indoor activities, which contributed to the rise in the daily COVID-19 cases. Another reason for Verona's increased daily infection rate could be non-adherence to SARS-CoV-2 preventive measures. The authors strongly recommend practicing preventive measures, such as wearing face masks, frequent use of hand sanitizers, and social distancing during the warmest periods of the year. Furthermore, healthcare administrators and policymakers must be aware that the number of severely infected COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization might not decrease during the hot season. *Important notice Research Square publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. Thought Leaders Dr. Jordan Green Director of the Speech and Feeding Disorders Lab MGH Institute of Health Professions In this interview, we speak to Dr. Jordan Green from the MGH Institute about his latest research partnership with Modality.AI which investigated whether an app could be used to effectively diagnose speech decline due to ALS. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what inspired your research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)? I am a Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences, and Director of the Speech and Feeding Disorders Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston, Massachusetts. I am a certified speech-language pathologist and avid researcher, studying speech and swallowing disorders throughout the lifespan. As I was studying motor control development for speech in children and developing computer-based technologies to quantify that speech, I began interacting with physicians who run ALS clinics. They expressed a need for a technology similar to that which I was using to better measure speech and swallowing in adults with ALS. They had the right technologies and techniques to measure limb movements and walking but struggled to measure and assess the speech system because the muscles are so small and relatively inaccessible, and speech movements are so fast and minute. This kind of measurement traditionally required significant expertise, and they needed more objective measures. From there, I began working on developing computer-based assessment tools for ALS specifically. Image Credit: Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock.com Currently, it can take up to 18 months to be diagnosed with ALS, and by the time this arrives, drug therapies are no longer as effective due to the loss of motor neurons. Why is it, therefore, vital to be able to identify ALS earlier in patients? Early diagnosis is essential for a disease like ALS. Only 15 percent of people who get ALS have a genetic marker that we can identify, so it's crucial to have objective ways for clinicians to assess the condition as early and accurately as possible. Since one-quarter of ALS patients have speech impairment as the first symptom, monitoring for subtle changes could serve as an early warning system. As ALS progresses, motor neurons responsible for speech, swallowing, breathing, and walking can rapidly deteriorate, but if the disease can be spotted in its early stages, while the motor neurons are still intact, the benefits of interventions are likely to be maximized. The right technologies, such as this one, can also detect changes in patients with greater precision, ultimately facilitating better monitoring of the disease's progression. You are currently involved in a study to test the effectiveness of a digital health app for ALS. Can you tell us more about this study and what its aims are? The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded my team, in conjunction with the app developer Modality.AI, a grant to determine if data collected on speech from an app is as effective or more effective than the observations of clinical experts who assess and treat speech and swallowing problems due to ALS. The data collected from the app will be compared to results obtained from state-of-the-art laboratory techniques used to measure speech that are expensive and complicated to use. If the results match the results from clinicians and their state-of-the-art equipment, we will know they have a valid approach. Image Credit: Modality.AI The app itself features a virtual agent, Tina. How is this virtual agent able to obtain speech data information? Using the application is as simple as clicking a link. The patient receives an email or text message indicating it is time to create a recording. Clicking a link activates the camera and microphone, and Tina, the AI virtual agent, begins giving instructions. The patient then is asked to count numbers, repeat sentences, and read a paragraph, for example. All the while, the app is collecting data to measure variables from the video and audio signals, such as speed of lip and jaw movements, speaking rate, pitch variation, and pausing patterns. Tina decodes information from speech acoustics and speech movements, extracted automatically from full-face video recordings obtained during the assessment. Computer vision technologies such as face tracking provide a non-invasive way to accurately record and compute features from large amounts of data from facial movements during speech. What information will this health app be able to provide patients? What are the advantages for patients of having all of this information available to them? Changes in speech are common with ALS, but the rate of progression of ALS varies from person to person. Patients report declining ability to speak to be among the worst effects of the disease. The app will allow patients to document their speech progression remotely. Service providers will use this information to help patients and their families make informed decisions throughout the course of the disease. As speech-language pathologists, we want to optimize communication for as long as possible. And teaching patients to use alternative modes of communication early is more effective than waiting until they have lost the ability to speak. In addition, confirming a diagnosis early will provide patients ample time to begin message and voice banking so that their own voice can be used in a text-to-speech (TTS) or speech-generating device (SGD). There are additional advantages for patients, including decreased costs and eliminating the need for patients to travel to clinics for a speech assessment. Lastly, the app generally requires patient engagement for only a few minutes per week, thus saving time, and expense, requiring less energy than a clinical exam and the time and delays involved in coordinating an appointment and traveling to a healthcare facility. Lack of early diagnosis and objective measures are two issues that have hindered treatment progress. Early diagnosis is critical in a rapidly progressing disease. As well as the advantages it offers to patients, what advantages could it offer for healthcare providers? The app will allow clinicians to access their patient's data remotely and, in and of itself, will keep track of the progression of speech, allowing the provider to manage and monitor speech without requiring frequent in-person visits. This level of accessibility will allow clinicians to monitor patients more regularly, draw more accurate conclusions about treatment, and determine the best possible care plan. This makes the entire process simpler and removes the burden from the patient and provider while reducing resource use for clinical services. The app's increased precision and efficiency will also be particularly appealing to clinical scientists and companies using speech patterns as outcome measures in ALS drug trials. In this study, you have joined up with technology firm Modality.AI. How important are these types of collaborations in bringing new scientific ideas and technologies into the world? I jumped at the opportunity to work with Modality.AI. The team members have unique and extensive histories of developing AI speech applications and commercial interest in implementing this technology into mainstream health care and clinical trials. New technologies are particularly at risk of failing when a commercial entity does not support them, so this relationship was critical to our overall goals for the study. I predict these types of collaborations will grow in popularity in the health tech space and will have an increasingly significant impact on studies like this one. Image Credit: elenabsl/Shutterstock.com Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a huge increase in its adoption in recent years. Why is this, and do you believe we will continue to see AI becoming an integral aspect of healthcare? AI plays a very important role in identifying conditions that are difficult for our human minds to comprehend because most health problems are multi-dimensional and very complicated, often impacting multiple body parts and a variety of symptoms that change over time. Machine learning is a perfect solution for diagnosing and monitoring certain health conditions because there is so much data to take in. These machines can process this data and define patterns in ways that human eyes and ears aren't capable of detecting to the same degree of accuracy. Utilizing AI and machine learning in this way will also present a challenge. For these models to be accurate and work properly in the way we'd want, they must be trained. Acquiring the training data required to make these models accurate will be a tall task. For example, to train a machine to make assessments accurately, hundreds or thousands of examples of a specific condition may be required for the algorithm to be trained on it and "learn" it. For this purpose, this data needs to be collected and then very carefully selected. This lack of data proves to be a bottleneck. While AI has been proven invaluable in the medical field, it will not replace clinicians. Human practitioners offer unparalleled personalized care, decision-making, and overarching patient support and cannot be replaced. Whats next for you and your study? Currently, a few patient advocacy groups are piloting the app and giving it to patients. Based on the structure of the grant we received from the NIH, we will continue to work on the app to meet set benchmarks over the next three years to continue in the grant cycle. Phase I will take one year and Phase II, two years. About Dr. Jordan Green Dr. Green, who has been at the MGH Institute since 2013, is a speech-language pathologist who studies biological aspects of speech production. He teaches graduate courses on speech physiology, and the neural basis of speech, language, and hearing. As Chief Scientific Advisor in the IHP Research Department, he works with the Associate Provost for Research in the areas of recruitment, strategic planning, and a variety of special projects. He also serves as Director of the Speech and Feeding Disorders Lab (SFDL) at the Institute. He has been appointed the inaugural Matina Souretis Horner Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences. His research focuses on disorders of speech production, oromotor skill development for early speech and feeding, and quantification of speech motor performance. His research has been published in national and international journals including Child Development, Journal of Neurophysiology, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. He has served on multiple grant review panels at the National Institutes of Health. In 2012, he was appointed as a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and in 2015, Dr. Green received the Willard R. Zemlin award in Speech Science. His work has been funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) since 2000. He is a prolific contributor to important journals, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He has presented his work internationally and nationally. He is an advisor for several IHP doctoral students, has directed ten Ph.D. dissertations, and has supervised eleven post-doctoral fellows. He also is an editorial consultant for numerous journals and has served on multiple NIH grant review panels. In a recent study posted to the arXiv* preprint server, researchers analyzed the first human monkeypox cases in Italy. The first large outbreak of human monkeypox outside Africa appears somewhat unique. Viral genome analyses indicated that the current epidemic is driven by the West African clade of the monkeypox virus. The presence of lesions near genitalia suggests a sexual mode of transmission. In Italy, suspected cases of monkeypox based on the criteria of case definition by the World Health Organization (WHO) are reported to the Ministry of Healths surveillance system. Only cases that test positive on a monkeypox-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test are deemed confirmed. About the study In the present study, researchers evaluated the first monkeypox cases in Italy. Data on patient characteristics such as age, sex, date of onset of symptoms, exposure modality, foreign travel, rash, and other signs, were collected. There were 255 PCR-confirmed monkeypox cases in Italy by July 8, 2022. The median age of patients was 37 years, and only two were females. 190 out of 200 individuals, who disclosed the information, reported having sex with males. Information on rash was available for 184 cases, and for 139 of them, the rash was localized at the perianal or genital area. Of the 228 patients with available travel data, 86 individuals traveled overseas, and 25 had been to the Canary Islands for vacation. One person who traveled to West Africa showed symptoms at arrival. The authors determined the incubation period for patients with known symptom onset dates. There were 30 patients with a known date of symptom onset. They assumed that the incubation period was distributed as a gamma function. The shape and scale parameters were estimated using a Bayesian approach based on Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) procedure and Metropolis-Hastings sampling. The team computed generation time, namely, the duration between the date of exposure of a confirmed case and that of the secondary cases. They assumed a gamma-distributed generation time similar to that of the incubation period. No pre-symptomatic transmission was considered. Sixteen pairs of infector-infectee with known dates of symptom onset were identified. The net reproduction number (R t ), the mean number of cases generated by one index case for the outbreak, was computed using the epidemic curve and the generation time distribution. Three assumptions were considered for imported cases. First, only the case with the earliest symptom onset was defined as an imported case. Second, all cases with a travel history to the Canary Islands were considered imported. Third, all cases with foreign travel were deemed imported. The first and third assumptions were deemed unrealistic hypotheses that could be considered upper and lower bounds of monkeypox transmission. The second assumption was used as the baseline for estimating R t . The mean incubation period was 9.1 days, and the mean generation time was 12.5 days. The mean R t in the first week of June was 2.43, following which R t declined progressively. Conclusions In summary, the authors estimated the mean incubation period and mean generation time using a limited number of monkeypox cases. The R t for the outbreak was approximately 2.4. Minor variations appeared when R t was computed using different distributions of generation time or with alternative assumptions of imported cases. The team indicated that the estimated R t should be considered for the community of men who have sex with men (MSM), not the general population. Further, R t could likely be below the threshold for the general public, given the overwhelming majority of cases spread via sexual contact. Overall, it is essential to maintain a high level of public attention and provide non-stigmatizing information to those at risk to curb the spread of the monkeypox virus. *Important notice arXiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information. To address the global burden of tuberculosis (TB), one of humankind's oldest scourges, an international collaboration led by Johns Hopkins Medicine has today been awarded up to $200 million in research funding over five years by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Supporting, Mobilizing and Accelerating Research for Tuberculosis Elimination (SMART4TB) project. The cooperative agreement will support studies to improve TB detection methods, treatments, containment and control strategies, and prevention. Additionally, it will strengthen research efforts in countries with high TB burdens and will transfer knowledge and capacity to local, regional and national governments, health institutions and support organizations. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), TB has been the leading cause of death worldwide from a single infectious agent (the microbe Mycobacterium tuberculosis) for most of the past decade (COVID-19 surpassed it in 2020). TB is responsible for some 1.5 million fatalities annually and greater than 30 million since 2000. The WHO also reports that last year, TB case detection was down 20% and mortality rates rose for the first time since 2012 -; a disturbing trend directly attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to mitigate it. Because of TB's tremendous impact on global health, the WHO has repeatedly stressed the critical importance of research -; like that which will be funded by the cooperative agreement announced today -; toward permanent elimination of the disease. This extraordinary investment from USAID will enable us to have a transformational impact on global efforts to end TB and will provide unparalleled research, strategic development and policy support opportunities for Johns Hopkins Medicine and our collaborators around the world over the next five years. Additionally, we'll be able to strengthen and empower the people, organizations and communities directly fighting TB in the areas most affected by the disease." Richard Chaisson, M.D., SMART4TB consortium chief of party, director of the Center for Tuberculosis Research and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Partnering with Johns Hopkins Medicine in the SMART4TB consortium are the University of California, San Francisco, Center for Tuberculosis; the KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation; the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation; the Treatment Action Group; and the following five regional hubs: Kyrgyz State Medical Academy (Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan) Walimu (Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania) PHRU/Wits Health Consortium (South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe) YRG Care (India and Bangladesh) VICTORY Network (Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines) "With the help of the regional hubs, we'll be able to mentor and support investigators and communities in countries with high-TB burdens as full partners, and commit the majority of our funding to key organizations in those areas in order to catalyze a transition of TB research to local leadership," says Chaisson. "In that way, the SMART4TB consortium and these partners can identify person-centered methods for finding, treating and preventing TB; strengthen local capacity to conduct high-quality research; and engage communities to build demand for new interventions, drive policy change and improve implementation of anti-TB efforts." Chaisson adds that the consortium can look to another Johns Hopkins Medicine-led international program, the Zero TB in Tibetan Kids project, for a successful model to emulate. "That effort -; incorporating Johns Hopkins Medicine expertise and done in close partnership with Tibetan refugee health, education and community groups -; conducted school-based screenings and implemented novel drug regimens for Tibetan refugee children living in India who were suffering from TB at a rate five times higher than that of Indian children," explains Chaisson. "As a result, TB incidence in these children was reduced 80% in just three years." "Johns Hopkins Medicine has been on the forefront of discovery and developing new tools to prevent and treat TB," says Amita Gupta, M.D., M.H.S., director of the Division of Infectious Diseases and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "With this incredible award, we can work with partners around the world to make a big impact on the global goal of TB elimination." USAID administers the U.S. foreign assistance program that provides economic and humanitarian assistance in more than 80 countries worldwide. More about the agency's efforts to eliminate TB globally is available at https://www.usaid.gov/global-health/health-areas/tuberculosis. Investigators at Cedars-Sinai and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have identified a component in the intestine that plays a critical role in repairing damaged tissue. Scientists found that endothelial cells in the lymphatic vessels produce molecules that are essential for the maintenance and regulation of stem cells and tissues in the intestine. These lymphatic endothelial cells reside near specialized stem cell niches, which are microenvironments that support stem cell regeneration. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Stem Cell. It's important for us to understand niches and how lymphatics communicate with stem cells as part of the niche. Deciphering the mechanisms that explain how the ecosystem that supports stem cells works will help to lay the foundation for future discoveries that could one day lead to therapeutic strategies to repair damaged tissue." Ophir Klein, MD, PhD, senior author of the study and executive director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children's The intestine undergoes continuous renewal to withstand the wear and tear that result from breakdown of foods, and from the presence of waste that can injure and kill cells. The intestine needs to replenish itself constantly with healthy cells, and fortunately, it has an exceptional capacity to regenerate cells. The division of intestinal stem cells to make more cells is regulated by their surrounding niche, which is comprised of several cell types and is an essential source of signals. However, it is unclear which niche cells produce signals during different states of injury. To better understand stem cell activity, the team wanted to learn which cells help the intestinal epithelial cells repair themselves-;particularly lymphatic endothelial cells. "Lymphatics are in very close proximity to the stem cells, and almost all the stem cell compartments are near lymphatics," said Brisa Palikuqi, PhD, co-first author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Klein Laboratory at UCSF. "Because the two cell types are in such proximity, this made us believe that these lymphatics may play an important role." Lymphatics express several factors, including a gene, Rspo3, that is known to be important for stem cells to function. To determine whether the gene played an important role in intestinal stem cell regulation, the investigators deleted the gene in mice and then used single-cell sequencing to see how stem cells in the intestine would react without Rspo3. Initially, the stem cells did not have any response to the change in the environment. The researchers then decided to injure the system by delivering a chemotherapy drug that kills any proliferating cells wherever the drug travels through the body. "When we did this, all of a sudden the stem cells and the intestine had to proliferate a lot more and replace a lot more cells on a daily basis," said Jeremie Rispal, PhD, also a postdoctoral researcher in the Klein Laboratory at UCSF and the other co-first author of the study. The loss of the Rspo3 gene led to a lower number of stem and progenitor cells, hindering recovery after the injury. "This discovery showed us that lymphatic endothelial cells are a key component of the intestinal niche and essential for intestinal repair after cases of damage, like chemotherapy," said Klein, who also holds the David & Meredith Kaplan Distinguished Chair in Children's Health at Cedars-Sinai. Klein noted that the study demonstrates how lymphatic endothelial cells play a much larger role than previously thought in stem cell regeneration and may play a role in disease, perhaps even influencing the promotion of cancer. "We are just beginning to understand the functions of the lymphatic vasculature," Klein said. Klein previously directed the Institute for Human Genetics and served as chief of the Divisions of Medical Genetics and Craniofacial Anomalies at UCSF, where he remains an adjunct professor. Klein conducted the study at both USCF and Cedars-Sinai. Commonly used in medicine as an anesthetic, ketamine is also increasingly prescribed to relieve depressive symptoms. This very fast-acting psychotropic drug is particularly indicated for the treatment of patients resistant to conventional antidepressants. However, its prescription has been the subject of debate: some believe that it presents a strong addictive risk. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has investigated this by administering the drug to mice. While it triggers an increase in dopamine in their brains - like all drugs - it also inhibits a specific receptor that precludes the progression to addiction. These results can be found in the journal Nature. Discovered in 1962 by the American chemist Calvin Lee Stevens, ketamine is a synthetic drug derived from phencyclidine with powerful anesthetic properties. It is commonly used in human and veterinary medicine, particularly for pain relief and brief sedation. It is also used illicitly for recreational purposes, its dissociative effect inducing an altered perception of reality. For the past ten years or so, ketamine has also been prescribed to treat the depressive symptoms of people who are resistant to conventional treatments. Its action has the advantage of being very rapid: its effect is felt a few hours after the first dose, whereas traditional antidepressants take several weeks to act. Although its prescription is increasing for this type of treatment, this substance is still widely debated within the scientific community. ''Some people believe that ketamine presents a strong addictive risk if taken for a long time, others do not. The whole point of our research was to try to provide some answers,'' explains Christian Luscher, a Full Professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and a specialist in the mechanisms underlying addiction. Addiction vs. dependence Addiction is defined as the compulsive use of a substance despite its negative consequences (behavioral disorder). Dependence, on the other hand, is characterized by the appearance of one or more withdrawal symptoms on abrupt cessation of use (physiological disorder). Dependence - the physical manifestations of which vary greatly depending on the drug - affects everyone. Addiction, on the other hand, affects only a minority of people and is not caused by all drugs. In the case of cocaine, for example, only 20% of users become addicted, even after prolonged exposure. For opiates, the rate is 30%. In its recent work, Christian Luscher's team sought to assess the risk of addiction to ketamine. Short stimulation of the reward system The UNIGE researchers used a device that allowed mice to self-administer doses of ketamine. The drugs intensely stimulate the reward system in the brain, which leads to an increase in dopamine levels. The first step was to observe whether this mechanism was also at work when taking ketamine.'' Yue Li, Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Basic Neuroscience, UNIGE Faculty of Medicine The scientists found that the level of dopamine - also known as the ''pleasure molecule'' - increased with each dose and induced a positive reinforcement in the mice, which motivated them to repeat the self-administration. ''However, unlike cocaine, for example, we found that the dopamine level fell very quickly after taking the drug,'' says Yue Li. A drug that does not leave its "mark" The research team wanted to understand this phenomenon. They discovered that ketamine triggered an increase in dopamine by inhibiting a molecule called NMDA receptor in the reward center of the rodent brain. Dopamine then binds to another receptor (called the D2 receptor), which acts as a rapid brake on the increase in dopamine. The researchers also confirmed that the action of the NMDA receptor is necessary to modify the communication between the nerve cells that underlie the behavioral change leading to addiction. Ketamine's inhibition of the NMDA receptor makes this modification impossible. ''The consequence of this dual action of ketamine is that it does not induce the synaptic plasticity that addictive drugs do and that persists in the brain after the substance has worn off. It is this memorization of the product in the reward system - absent in the case of ketamine - that drives the repetition of consumption, explains Christian Luscher. Therefore, the addictive risk of ketamine appears to be zero in rodents. Is this also the case in humans? Could this risk vary according to the individual? Our study provides a solid framework for debating access to its therapeutic use,'' concludes Christian Luscher. New York, US (PANA) - A powerful new sculpture unveiled at UN Headquarters on Wednesday honours the memory and mission of two human rights experts who were murdered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) five years ago In a recent study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers analyzed the effectiveness of the fourth dose of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) BNT162b2 vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron infection in medical professionals in Israel. Background The fifth wave of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, primarily driven by the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant and impacting both the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, began in Israel in December 2021. Starting in August 2021, Israel became the first nation to give a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine to the whole adult population. In Israel, 90% of adults received the three doses of the SARS-CoV-2 BNT162b2 vaccine, including above 95% of health care workers (HCWs), till September 2021. In the Delta variant surge, the frequency of serious illness, breakthrough infections, and death were decreased significantly by this third dose or booster vaccination. Despite the significant vaccination coverage, the highly contagious Omicron variant led to considerable breakthrough infections across the group that had received three vaccine doses. The Israeli Ministry of Health advised a voluntarily fourth dose of BNT162b2 vaccine to adults over the age of 60, people with compromised immune systems, and HCWs due to the safety and effectiveness of the third dose in averting infection and severe illness and probable diminishing immunity of the third vaccine dose. About the study The current multicenter cohort research assessed whether delivering a fourth dose of the COVID-19 BNT162b2 vaccination to HCWs during the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant outbreak was beneficial in Israel. The study aimed to determine the advantage of the fourth BNT162b2 vaccine dose on the breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infection rate across HCWs. The study was conducted during the peak of the Omicron variant wave in January 2022 in Israel, the first month of the fourth-dose vaccination program. The study included all HCWs from 11 Israelian general hospitals vaccinated with three BNT162b2 vaccine doses until 30 September 2021 and who had not acquired SARS-CoV-2 infection before the vaccination program, i.e., 2 January 2022. Besides, a fourth BNT162b2 vaccine dose was administered as part of the research protocol in January 2022. Until 31 January 2022, the researchers gathered information on all participants' vaccination and breakthrough infection dates and anonymized demographic information on the personnel, including age, gender, and profession. They restricted the study and comparison of three-dose and four-dose recipients to the HCWs who were only vaccinated with the third shot between August and September 2021 since 99% of four-dose recipients received their third dose in these months. The breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infections in four-dose recipients compared to three-dose recipients, as determined by a COVID-19-positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test result, were the research's primary outcomes. HCWs were screened according to exposure to SARS-CoV-2 cases or symptoms. Additionally, the reporting guidelines the team followed was the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE). Results According to the study results, 29611 Israeli HCWs, comprising 19381, i.e., 65%, women with an average age of 44 years, received three doses of the BNT162b2 vaccine between August and September 2021. Of these, 5331, i.e., 18%, received the fourth dose in January 2022, and none contracted the infection within the initial week of vaccination. In the four-dose group, the overall breakthrough infection rate was 7%, i.e., 368 of 5331, while in the three-dose group, it was 20%, i.e., 4802 of 24280. The fourth vaccination showed a substantial benefit at most enrolled hospitals and in subgroup assessments by age group, sex, and profession. A time-reliant Cox proportional hazards regression model and a matched evaluation by the specific day of getting the third vaccination revealed comparable decreases. There were no severe illnesses or fatalities in any group. In addition, elder HCWs in the current cohort showed a greater vaccination rate. Furthermore, physicians had higher vaccination rates versus nurses and other occupations. On the whole, the breakthrough COVID-19 rate among 29611 HCWs in Israel who received four doses of the BNT162b2 vaccination was 6.9%, compared to 19.8% among those who received three doses. These results imply that a fourth dose of the vaccine was valuable in avoiding SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections in HCWs, supporting the continued operation of the healthcare system throughout the pandemic. Conclusions Collectively, the study findings demonstrated that the fourth COVID-19 BNT162b2 vaccine dose caused a lower rate of breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infection among hospital workers. This reduction was less pronounced than the one found following the third dose. However, the authors noted that the fourth dose of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine should be considered to reduce the infection rate among HCWs in the upcoming COVID-19 waves to maintain the functionality of the healthcare system, given the high infectivity of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant, which caused substantial medical staff shortages. For seven years, Timothy Jay Fowler rotated between jail, forced psychiatric hospitalization, and freedom. In 2014, the Great Falls, Montana, man was charged with assaulting two detention officers while he was in jail, accused of theft. A mental health evaluation concluded that Fowler, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was unfit to stand trial, according to court documents. After Fowler received psychiatric treatment for several months, a judge ruled that he was unlikely to become competent anytime soon. His case was dismissed, and after a stay in the state-run psychiatric hospital, he was released. Roughly eight months after the dismissal, Fowler was arrested again, accused of beating a stranger with a metal pipe. As before, he was found unfit for trial, the charges were dropped, and he was eventually released. At least five times from 2014 through 2021, Fowler went through the same cycle: He was picked up on serious charges, mental health professionals declared him incompetent, and his case was dismissed. Fowler declined to be interviewed for this article. As of July, he hadn't faced felony charges for more than a year. In the U.S., criminal proceedings are halted if a defendant is determined to be incompetent. What happens after that varies from state to state. No one is tracking how often criminal charges are dismissed because defendants' mental illness prevents them from understanding the court process to help in their defense. Some states have policies to transition hospitalized patients to independence after their criminal charges have been dropped. But in others, such as Montana, there are few landing spots for such patients outside of jail or a hospital to aid in that transition. Health professionals, county attorneys, and criminal defendants have said people declared unfit for trial may have a short stay in a psychiatric hospital before being released without additional oversight. The vast majority of people with a chronic mental illness aren't violent, and they are far more likely to be victims of crime than the general population. Plus, health professionals say most defendants who are determined to be incompetent become stable enough through treatment for their case to continue. Some never do. The criminal justice system has long been a revolving door for defendants with a mental illness. The national nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, which advocates to make treatment for a severe mental illness more accessible, found that as of 2017, 21 states made little-to-no effort to create programs that treat those defendants. That failure leaves individuals without stability, and some go on to hurt themselves or others. "They're receiving only emergency care, followed by no care," said Lisa Dailey, the center's executive director. She added that people go untreated until they face new charges: "Youre creating a system that requires a victim." Dr. Karen B. Rosenbaum, a forensic psychiatrist and a vice president of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, said experiences like Fowler's show a system that fails people who have been released from psychiatric care. "There should be a lot of steps before you go back to the community," Rosenbaum said. Some states have created such steps. Colorado has a team of navigators to help coordinate care for people deemed incompetent to stand trial and a restoration program to deliver treatment for patients close to home. In Oregon, a psychiatric review board works with the state hospital to supervise people found incompetent to reduce the risk of future dangerous behavior. But even in states with programs to stabilize people with a serious mental illness, that treatment isn't guaranteed, often because of the limited availability of psychiatric services. Minnesota has a process to identify, treat, and manage risk for people determined to be "mentally ill and dangerous." However, maintaining appropriate staffing levels at treatment facilities has been a problem, as has finding enough community-based options for people who need a higher level of care than typical group homes can offer. Last year, a KARE 11 statewide investigation found dozens of cases in which people charged with serious crimes including assaults, rapes, and murders were deemed mentally incompetent and released without steady treatment or supervision. As a result, more people were hurt, according to the investigation. Forcing someone into psychiatric care is controversial, creating a tension between autonomy and public safety. For decades, mental health advocates have pushed for local services, such as intensive outpatient treatment programs and transitional placements. But as psychiatric hospitals have been whittled down, local options often don't have the resources to meet the need. In Montana, when cases are dropped because defendants are found to be incompetent, local officials must file a petition seeking a judge's order to have them admitted into psychiatric care. People can be required to attend outpatient treatment options, although attorneys and state officials have said those services often don't exist or are stretched too thin. More often, people are admitted to the short-staffed state-run psychiatric hospital, which earlier this year lost federal funding because of unsafe conditions and patient deaths. Montana court and state officials have said cases that are dismissed because a defendant is incompetent are outliers. However, the state doesn't have a way to track when that happens or how many people in that situation get additional treatment. Lewis and Clark County Attorney Leo Gallagher said people are sometimes released as soon as their case is dismissed. An involuntary commitment for a mental illness requires people to be an imminent threat to themselves or others. Gallagher said that's a high bar to meet. By the time a motion for commitment goes before a judge after someone is found unlikely to become fit to stand trial, the defendant could have been jailed or hospitalized for months. That time frame makes it hard to prove an imminent threat remains, Gallagher said, and a judge is likely to deny the commitment. "There's a hole in the system," he said, adding that he has filed motions knowing they will be dismissed because he can't meet the burden of proof. Daylon Martin, a Great Falls defense attorney, said that if clients whose charges were dropped because of an illness are hospitalized, their discharge is often the end of their care. "People just get released back into the community with the expectation they'll take their medication," Martin said. "There needs to be a better transition." The state-run hospital has long had a waitlist. Dr. Virginia Hill, a recently retired psychiatrist who worked at the Montana State Hospital for more than 35 years, told lawmakers this spring that a typical stay is two to four weeks, "a short commitment in the big scheme of things when youve been charged with a very serious felony." She said that a patient typically leaves the hospital with medicine in hand and local appointments booked but that the patient then exits the system. "That is the revolving-door population that we have," Hill said. "The charges are dismissed, and out they go. And theyre usually pretty ill." She asked lawmakers to consider defining in state law a way to manage people determined unlikely to become competent. To understand what problems exist, Hill said she'd like to see more data on who the state hospital treats, whether they receive care elsewhere, and the outcome. Montana lawmakers drafted a proposal for next year's legislative session aimed at boosting treatment coordination for people discharged from psychiatric care after they were sentenced for a crime. Matt Kuntz, executive director of the Montana chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is glad to see the proposal but said it doesn't include people whose charges were dismissed over a competency issue. "Sometimes people would rather just let the status quo keep going," Kuntz said, "even if there's something that's clearly not working." News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism. (Newser) Alex Jones said in a sworn deposition that there's nothing on his cellphone about the Sandy Hook school massacre. That position became uncomfortable Wednesday when the Infowars host was on the stand in his defamation trial in Texas and learned that his lawyers "messed up." Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the 2012 shooting, showed the witness a copy of a text message sent to Jones that was critical of his claim that the killings were faked, the Guardian reports. After accusing Bankston of a "nice trick," Jones was told how the lawyer had gotten the text. "Your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of your entire cellphone," Bankston said, "with every text message you've sent for the past two years." Bankston added, "That is how I know you lied when you said you didn't have text messages about Sandy Hook." Jones answered that if he was trying to hide something, he wouldn't have given his phone to his attorneys. "If I was mistaken, I was mistaken," Jones said about the phone's contents, sarcastically telling Bankston he just had a "Perry Mason moment." Bankston delivered sarcasm of his own, asking Jones, "You know what perjury is, right?" The plaintiffs' attorney said he informed Jones' lawyers about their mistake, but they didn't try to keep the texts out of the courtroom by designating them as privileged. Jones, who's being sued for at least $150 million, said on the stand Wednesday that he now understands the Sandy Hook mass shooting was "100% real," per NPR. He said meeting the parents helped him to that realization. The surfacing of his texts led to another complication for Jones on Wednesday. The House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol quickly decided it would like to see those texts, per Rolling Stone, and is preparing its request for the data. It's not clear what specific information the panel is looking for, but the committee has been looking into Jones' part in advocating the insurrection, as well as his ties to Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers. (Read more Alex Jones stories.) (Newser) Voters in western Michigan have made their decision, but GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger said the Democratic Party owns it. Rep. Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump after the attack on the Capitol, will be leaving Congress after losing his GOP primary Tuesday to a challenger who says the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had spent moneyalmost $500,000to promote John Gibbs, who was endorsed by Trump. The Democrats' thinking: Gibbs would be the more beatable opponent to face on the November ballot. That strategy brought criticism as soon as Meijer lost, the Hill reports, including Kinzinger's scathing assessment. "Here's the thing," Kinzinger said Wednesday on CNN. "Don't keep coming to me asking where are all the good Republicans that defend democracy and then take your donors' money and spend half-a-million dollars promoting one of the worst election deniers that's out there." The DCCC should be ashamed, he said. Democrats have done something similar elsewhere, including Illinois and Maryland, for the governor's race. The DCCC celebrated its success on Wednesday, with a spokesperson saying Gibbs' primary victory "seals the fate of Republicans hoping to keep this now Democratic-leaning district." A few Democratic strategists defended the party and its motivation. One said, "Meijer would have helped" Rep. Kevin McCarthy become House speaker, and another: "The job here is to win the seat. The job here is to deny Kevin McCarthy the speakership." Meijer discussed his disappointment in an online essay, writing, "You would think that the Democrats would look at John Gibbs and see the embodiment of what they say they most fear." A Democratic colleague lamented the incumbent's loss. "What we need in our public officials is courage, a commitment to service over politics, and loyalty to country over party bosses," said Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton. "Peter Meijer lives those values." (Read more GOP primaries stories.) (Newser) A 23-year-old McDonald's employee is in critical condition after he was shot in what witnesses say was a dispute stemming from an order of fries. Sources tell CBS2 a female customer approached the victim, Matthew Webb, to complain about the fries being cold, and that the dispute somehow moved outside the Brooklyn fast food restaurant. The woman was apparently on a video call with her son, 20-year-old Michael Morgan, who either overheard the dispute and decided to come intervene, or was called by his mother to the scene. (Reports vary.) When he arrived, Morgan allegedly shot Webb in the neck. The New York Daily News reports Webb is "fighting for his life" in a hospital, and Morgan has been arrested, with charges pending. No charges were immediately filed against his mother, with whom he lives at a residence about four blocks from the McDonald's. This is just the latest in a series of attacks on food workersa delivery person was killed in April in a dispute involving duck sauceand some fast food employees who spoke to CBS2 say they are apprehensive about working in this environment, especially at night. (A woman upset about the wait time shot into a Burger King drive-thru window.) (Newser) Russian aggression helped bring Republicans and Democrats together on Wednesday, as the Senate voted 95-1 to endorse letting Finland and Sweden join NATO. A two-thirds vote would have been sufficient, but Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had been lobbying his members, the New York Times reports. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, McConnell has argued for alliances and a substantial military footprint abroad. His trips this year to Ukraine, Sweden, and Finland, he said, were intended to demonstrate that former President Donald Trump's opposition to such alliances no longer rules. "If any senator finds a defensible excuse to vote no," McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor, "I wish them good luck." Majority Leader Chuck Schumer invited the ambassadors from Finland and Sweden to sit in the gallery during the Senate debate and vote, per CNN. The next step is President Biden signing a treaty ratification document. All 30 NATO member nations have to approve the nations' admittance for it to take place; 22 have so far. The invasion is what led to the applications by Finland and Sweden, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to retaliate against the two nations if they go through with joining the alliance. "Their accession will make NATO stronger and America more secure," McConnell said. The only senators to not support membership were Republicans Josh Hawley, who voted no, and Rand Paul, who voted present. (Read more NATO stories.) (Newser) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has departed Taiwanand China has launched what are believed to be its biggest-ever military drills around the island, which it has long vowed to reunify with the mainland, by force if necessary. For the first time since 1996, China has fired missiles into waters around Taiwan, reports Reuters. The drills, which China says will last from Thursday to Sunday, are taking place in six zones around the island, some of them stretching into Taiwan's territorial waters, encircling the island and disrupting shipping in what experts describe as a temporary blockade, the Wall Street Journal reports. More: Taiwan says China "imitated North Korea." Taiwan's foreign ministry strongly condemned China's actions, accusing the country of imitating North Korea with its missile launches, the Guardian reports. The ministry urged the international community to join the condemnation and support Taiwan's democratic government. Taiwan's foreign ministry strongly condemned China's actions, accusing the country of imitating North Korea with its missile launches, the Guardian reports. The ministry urged the international community to join the condemnation and support Taiwan's democratic government. "Precision strikes." China, which had warned of "serious consequences" if Pelosi went to Taiwan, said it carried out precision strikes in exercises involving its air force, navy, and other service branches, the AP reports. "Long-range armed live fire precision missile strikes were carried out on selected targets in the eastern area of the Taiwan Strait," the People's Liberation Army said in a statement. "The expected outcome was achieved." A trial run for invasion? Analystsincluding Major Gen. Meng Xiangqing, a professor of strategy at the PLA's National Defense University in Beijing who was interviewed on state TVsee the exercises as a trial run for a longer blockade and possible invasion, the New York Times reports. "Under the guise of signaling, theyre trying to basically test their ability to conduct complex maneuvers that are necessary for an amphibious assault on Taiwan," says Oriona Skylar Mastro at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Meng said the encirclement "creates very good conditions for reshaping the strategic situation in a way that benefits unification." Analystsincluding Major Gen. Meng Xiangqing, a professor of strategy at the PLA's National Defense University in Beijing who was interviewed on state TVsee the exercises as a trial run for a longer blockade and possible invasion, the New York Times reports. "Under the guise of signaling, theyre trying to basically test their ability to conduct complex maneuvers that are necessary for an amphibious assault on Taiwan," says Oriona Skylar Mastro at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Meng said the encirclement "creates very good conditions for reshaping the strategic situation in a way that benefits unification." China says it's an internal affair. China rejected accusations of violating international law, saying its dealings with Taiwan are an internal affair. "Our punishment of pro-Taiwan independence diehards, external forces is reasonable, lawful," China's Beijing-based Taiwan Affairs Office said, per Reuters. No comment from US military . The US military hasn't publicly commented on the drills, and CNN says it received no answers to its questions Thursday. The Navy has said the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier is operating as part of "normal scheduled operations" east of Taiwan, per the AP. . The US military hasn't publicly commented on the drills, and CNN says it received no answers to its questions Thursday. The Navy has said the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier is operating as part of "normal scheduled operations" east of Taiwan, per the AP. Shipping disrupted . The drills have forced ships using the Taiwan Strait, one of the world's busiest waterways, to reroute, which will add to the global disruption of supply chains, the BBC reports. More than 50 international flights to and from Taiwan were canceled Thursday because of the drills. . The drills have forced ships using the Taiwan Strait, one of the world's busiest waterways, to reroute, which will add to the global disruption of supply chains, the BBC reports. More than 50 international flights to and from Taiwan were canceled Thursday because of the drills. In China, some wanted more. Social media users in China who applauded Beijing's tough rhetoric ahead of Pelosi's visit said they were disappointed her plane hadn't been shot down or blocked from landing, reports the New York Times. Before censors shut down the comments section on a WeChat video of a military exercise, commenters accused Beijing of being "cowardly in foreign affairs," and a few people said they wanted to quit the Communist Party out of shame. (Read more Taiwan stories.) (Newser) When news reports showed the Kabul villa where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was killed in a US drone strike Sunday, American aid worker Dan Smock was startled. He recognized the distinctive home he shared with several colleagues while working on a US government-funded project. "Reports said the CIA had intelligence that he liked to stand on the balcony, and I thought, Of course he would, it was a nice balcony,'" Smock tells the Guardian. American officials reportedly built a scale model of the home and designed a strike that would destroy only the balcony. "When the Kabul smog lifts you can see the mountains in the morning, and its next to an open field," Smock says. "It felt like you could hang out there without anyone noticing who it is, unless someone was really paying attention. And clearly someone was." The quiet neighborhood was long "mocked by Kabul residents as the stronghold of corrupt warlords and officials," per the BBC, and the Taliban took over some of the empty villas after taking control of the capital last year. Residents say there has been an increase in mysterious "non-Afghan residents," including Arabs, in recent months. Smock, an Iraq veteran who was working in Kabul as a civilian, says it's "incredibly surreal" that the situation in Afghanistan changed so drastically that there was "public enemy number one, with a $25 million bounty on his head, literally living in the same space you lived in previously." He says he's saddened by the fact the Western mission in the country "failed so spectacularly that the people who took over in Kabul could do an Airbnb for the al-Qaeda CEO in a house that had been run by USAid contracting dollars for a decade plus." (The killing revealed a "worrisome alliance.") (Newser) It seemed an innocuous enough ad for Cracker Barrel. "Discover new meat frontiers," the restaurant chain announced in a Monday social media post. "Experience the out of this world flavor of Impossible Sausage Made From Plants next time you Build Your Own Breakfast." The accompanying photo shows two freshly cooked patties plated alongside scrambled eggs and hash browns, with a tiny "Impossible" flag planted squarely in one of the faux-sausage rounds. That succinct ad, however, has plunged Cracker Barrel into what NBC News calls a "culture war," with critics accusing the eatery of entering overly politically correct territory and others rolling their eyes at the backlash. The Washington Post pulls out some of "the more conservative" ideological takes, including one commenter who wrote, "Oh Noes ... the Cracker Barrel has gone WOKE!!!" Said another, "I just lost respect for a once great Tennessee company." Another chimed in with, "Bad choice. Do your research." Others didn't get political but simply didn't want meat alternatives over their favorite breakfast sausage. "If I wanted a salad ... I would in fact order a salad ... stop with the plant based 'meat' crap," another complained. Those remarks received their own pushback, with one commenter thanking the chain for "[understanding] the direction the world is going." Another person noted, "Imagine getting upset because a menu option exists at a restaurant." Still others commented on all the comments generated by this menu addition. "This comment section is further proof we need to ... get more people into therapy for anger issues," one observer noted, per NBC. Cracker Barrel has responded to the commotion, with a spokesperson pointing out that of course customers can still have regular sausage and bacon on their plates. "We appreciate the love our fans have for our all-day breakfast menu," the rep notes in a statement. "At Cracker Barrel, we're always exploring opportunities to expand how our guests experience breakfast and provide choices to satisfy every taste bud." (Read more Cracker Barrel stories.) (Newser) The Taliban broke its silence Thursday, days after a US drone strike killed al-Qaeda's top leader in Afghanistan's capital, acknowledging his slaying and pledging to launch an investigation. The killing of Ayman al-Zawahri on the balcony of a Kabul safehouse Sunday has further strained relations between the Taliban and the West, particularly as the Taliban seeks an urgent infusion of cash to handle an economic catastrophe there following the US withdrawal from the country a year ago. "The government and the leadership weren't aware of what is being claimed, nor any trace there," Suhail Shaheen, the head of the group's political office in Doha, Qatar, told the AP in a text message. That claim, however, directly conflicts with what US officials have said about the strike. They say al-Zawahri was staying at the home of a top aide to senior Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, the subject of a $10 million bounty from the US government. Haqqani is the deputy head of the Taliban, serves as interior minister in its government, and heads the Haqqani network, a powerful faction within the movement that battled US-led NATO troops and the former Afghanistan government over the past 20 years, though he also has rivals within the Taliban leadership. The Taliban had promised in the 2020 Doha Agreement with the US that they would not harbor al-Qaeda members or those seeking to attack the US. An "investigation is underway now to find out about veracity of the claim. The leadership is in constant meeting in this regard. Findings will be shared with all," Shaheen said. (Read more Taliban stories.) (Newser) Most analysts expected a narrow victory at best for abortion rights supporters in a vote in Kansas on Tuesday. Instead, they had an overwhelming win in the conservative state, which has energized the movement and upended predictions about this year's midterm elections. A ballot measure that would have removed the right to abortion from the state constitution was rejected 59% to 41%, and the New York Times reports that the vote suggests support for abortion rights is a lot higher than 59% nationwide. According to a Times analysis, 65% of voters nationwide would reject similar ballot initiatives. The Times says the initiative to further restrict abortion likely would have passed in only seven states, all of them in the South or Mountain West, and out of those, the margin would be very close everywhere except Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia, abortion rights would be backed by 65% or more of the vote, according to the Times analysis. Kansas voted for Donald Trump by a 15-point margin in 2020, and ahead of Tuesday's vote, polls showed voters were around evenly split on the abortion amendment. The result came after much higher Democratic turnout than usual, demonstrating that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has "shifted the political landscape," per the Times. Abortion rights groups are now looking ahead to similar votes in states including Kentucky and Michigan this fall, per Politico. Ahead of the Kansas vote, both sides spent millions on ads, and volunteers flew in from around the country. Neal Allen, a political science professor at Wichita State University, tells the media outlet that the "no" side succeeded with messaging about individual rights that appealed to conservatives. "The 'no' campaign's rhetoric about government overreach and intrusion into personal lives was very successful," he says. "Meanwhile, a big failure of the 'yes' side is that they weren't able to look credible to the electorate when they said that the amendment wouldn't lead to a ban on abortion." (Read more abortion stories.) (Newser) A teen security guard for the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago last week has been arrested after allegedly making a phony mass-shooting threat so she could try to clock out early. Per the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, Cook County prosecutors say Janya Williams, 18, was working the fest on Friday in Grant Park when she sent a message via the TextNow app to a staffer on the event's security team. The message read: "Mass shooting at 4pm location Lollapalooza. We have 150 targets." That worker then alerted her supervisors, who in turn informed Chicago police and the FBI. The security employee is said to have returned to her post around 4pm, which is when Williams allegedly mentioned that she, too, had heard about a mass shooting threat from her sister, who'd supposedly seen one circulating on social media. Prosecutors say when the staffer asked to see the threat, Williams worked up a fake Facebook page under the name "Ben Scott" and created a post that said "Massive shooting at Lollapalooza Grant Park 6pm." She then allegedly took a screenshot of it and sent it to the staffer. Investigators say they quickly tracked the TextNow message's IP address and Apple iCloud account back to Williams and brought her to the police command center for questioning. There she admitted she'd sent the message "because she wanted to leave work early," per prosecutors. She's been hit with a felony charge of making a false terror threat and is being held on $50,000 bail. WGN notes that she also has a pending case for a retail theft. Her next court appearance is Monday. (Read more Lollapalooza stories.) Macao loosens border restrictions with mainland as pandemic under control Xinhua) 13:52, August 04, 2022 People walk through automated gateways in the hall of Macao Immigration Inspection in Macao, south China, Aug. 3, 2022. (Xinhua/Cheong Kam Ka) MACAO, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) on Wednesday loosened land border restrictions with the mainland's Zhuhai city, Guangdong Province, as the latest wave of COVID-19 outbreak is under control. Starting 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, those leaving Macao to enter Zhuhai via the land borders need to present negative nucleic acid test results effective within 24 hours. No quarantine is required anymore, according to the Zhuhai-Macao joint work group overseeing the pandemic control. After entering Zhuhai, visitors from Macao need to go through nucleic acid test twice within three days, said the work group. They are advised to avoid taking public transport, dining or getting together. As of Tuesday, Macao has reported no new community COVID-19 cases for 11 consecutive days. People walk in the hall of Macao Immigration Inspection in Macao, south China, Aug. 3, 2022. (Xinhua/Cheong Kam Ka) (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here (Newser) Brittney Griner is expected to learn her fate in her drug smuggling case within hours, and Russian prosecutors have made clear they want it to be a harsh one. Prosecutors on Thursday asked a judge to sentence Griner to 9.5 years in prison, just shy of the 10-year maximum, and to impose a $16,590 fine, reports the Washington Post. They said the case against the 31-year-old Texan, who pleaded guilty to drug smuggling after she was caught bringing vape cartridges containing cannabis oil into the country, was "fully proven," per the Guardian. Prosecutors described the 0.702 grams of cannabis as a "significant amount," per the Post. But defense lawyers disputed that and claimed there were defects in the machines used to test the substance in the cartridges, per CNN. In closing arguments, lawyer Maria Blagovolina called for an acquittal, saying Griner only used marijuana for medical reasons at home in Arizona, where the drug is legal. Griner previously testified that she didn't know the items were in her luggage. Urged to intervene, the Biden administration is pushing Russia to accept a deal that would see Griner freed alongside Paul Whelan, an American serving a 16-year prison term in Russia following a 2020 spying conviction. The US has reportedly offered up imprisoned Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in exchange for the pair, though the government has not confirmed that. Bloomberg reports Moscow might also be seeking the release of Vladislav Klyushin, a businessman with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who's held in the US on accusations tied to an $82 million insider trading scheme. "We've made a serious proposal, made a serious offer," John Kirby, spokesman for the US National Security Council, said Tuesday, per the Post. "And we urge the Russians to take that offer because it was done with sincerity, and we know we can back it up." (Read more Brittney Griner stories.) (Newser) The office of South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol says he didn't meet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she arrived in Seoul Wednesday night because he was on vacationin Seoul. Photos of the leader at a theater performance in the capital Wednesday evening went viral Thursday as Pelosi met South Korean lawmakers, the Washington Post reports. He took pictures with actors after the performance. Critics accused Yoon of snubbing Pelosi to placate China, which is furious about her visit to Taiwan, but the president's office said his summer staycation was planned long in advance of Pelosi's decision to visit Asia, reports the Guardian. Yoon's critics included the conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper, which warned that avoiding a Pelosi meeting sent the "wrong signals" to the US and China, per the Post. Pelosi and Yoon spoke over the phone Thursday, officials say. Pelosi met in person with other senior lawmakers and held a joint press conference with her South Korean counterpart, National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo, the AP reports. "A relationship that began from urgency and security many years ago has become the warmest of friendships," Pelosi said, per the Wall Street Journal. Yoon's office says Taiwan wasn't discussed during his 40-minute phone call with Pelosi. The president took office in May following a hard-fought campaign in which he spoke of strengthening ties with the US and having a "reset" of relations with China. Later Thursday, Pelosi visited the Joint Security Area in the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea, according to South Korean media. She departed for Japan, the last stop on her Asia trip, Thursday evening local time. (Read more Nancy Pelosi stories.) (Newser) The overwhelming support for abortion rights in Kansas is giving Democrats new wind in their sails ahead of the November midterms, which have looked bad for the party for a while, particularly given President Biden's approval ratings. The Kansas vote suggests strong national support for abortion rightsa focus of many Democratic candidates' campaignsin the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, including in suburban and rural areas. As the New York Times puts it, "if abortion rights wins 59% support in Kansas, it's doing even better than that nationwide." More: The vote "highlighted the increasingly stark divide" between voters and Republican state lawmakers, writes Gregory Krieg in an analysis at CNN. A recent CNN poll found 63% of respondents disapproved of the Supreme Courts decision to overturn abortion protections at the federal level, while a Times estimate suggests 65% of voters nationwide would reject measures to restrict abortion rights, "including in more than 40 of the 50 states." If the Kansas vote is any indication, "political winds are now at the backs of abortion rights supporters," per the Times. But "the high turnout, especially among Democrats, confirms that abortion is not just some wedge issue of importance to political activists." Indeed, "the stakes of abortion policy have become high enough that it can drive a high midterm-like turnout on its own." John Harris at Politico points out that in drafting the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito noted the states should decide the morality and legality of abortion. Given what the results in Kansas suggest, "Alito's long-term legacy may well be as the justice who facilitated a national consensus on behalf of abortion rights," writes Harris. "Quite unintentionally, today's hero of the 'pro-life' movement could end up being a giant of the 'pro-choice' movement." California, Vermont, Kentucky, Montana, and likely Michigan will vote on abortion measures in November, per the Washington Post, which goes into specifics on each measure. But Democrats are putting the issue at the forefront outside of these states. That could help them appeal to young voters, write Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent at the Post, who argue abortion and climate change are key issues for this group. "It's at least possible that young people will provide Democrats with the lift they need to stave off a midterm defeat, or at least to avert a catastrophe in which youth turnout falls off a cliff." One GOP strategist tells the Post that the Kansas vote will "send a cold chill up the spines" of many Republicans. However, Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, claims the "economic mess," rather than abortion, will be the "number one issue in every competitive House race." The control of Congress could also push more Republicans to the polls, per the Times. (Read more abortion stories.) (Newser) The botched police raid that resulted in the death of Breonna Taylor has led to federal charges against four current and former Louisville officers. "Breonna Taylor should still be alive," Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday in announcing the charges, per the AP. Three of those chargedformer detective Joshua Jaynes, current Sgt. Kyle Meany, and current officer Kelly Goodlettare accused of falsifying information to obtain the search warrant that led to the 2020 raid, reports the Louisville Courier Journal. Jaynes was fired in January 2021 for lying on the search warrant; the Louisville Metro Police Department said Chief Erika Shields is initiating termination proceedings against Meany and Goodlett in the wake of the DOJ's indictments. More: Garland said the three were aware there was not probable cause for a search warrant and that the information they submitted in the affidavit to obtain it "contained false and misleading information and that it omitted material information." Garland repeated details that emerged at the time of Jaynes' firing: that Jaynes said he had verified through a US Postal Inspector that packages were being delivered to Taylor's apartment in the name of her ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, a suspected drug trafficker. The info had actually come from Shively Police, not the postal inspector, and the Shively police said postal inspectors had said the opposite: that no packages were delivered. In new allegations, Garland said Jaynes and Goodlett met in a garage on May 17, 2020, about two months after Taylor was killed, to discuss how to cover up their actions, per the Washington Post and CBS News. CBS reports the meeting was allegedly spurred by news reports that mentioned the postal inspector wasn't confirming details in the search warrant application. Per charging documents, the pair allegedly agreed to falsely tell investigators that a postal inspector had casually referenced Glover getting packages at Taylor's address. They "took steps to cover up their unlawful conduct after Ms. Taylor's death" and "conspired to mislead federal, state and local authorities" investigating the raid, said the attorney general. The fourth person facing federal charges is former officer Brett Hankison, who fired shots during the raid and is accused of "deprivation of rights under color of law," per CNN. He is charged with using "unconstitutionally excessive force during the raid on Ms. Taylor's home" in his firing of 10 shots that entered a neighboring apartment "without a lawful objective justifying the use of deadly force," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke for the Civil Rights Division said Thursday. Hankison was acquitted of state charges earlier this year. As for the other officers involved in the raid, Garland noted that "the officers who ultimately carried out the search at this Taylor's department were not involved in the drafting of the warrant, and were unaware of the false and misleading statements they contained." (Read more Breonna Taylor stories.) (Newser) Ryan Kent has spent some money in the past few years. The Missourian had his backyard remodeled, paid off old bills, went to Las Vegas to gamble, and bought a couple of vehicles, including a Cadillac Escalade. But federal prosecutors said the money wasn't his to spend. After being accused of embezzling $854,544 from his employer, Kent pleaded guilty to wire fraud on Wednesday. He now faces a prison sentence of as long as 20 years, the Raleigh News & Observer reports. Kent was a maintenance supervisor at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Missouri, which assigned him in July 2017 to have the location's equipment repaired or replaced. Until October 2021, Kent put supplies and equipment on his personal debit or credit cards, then altered the receipts to inflate the amount he was owed, he admitted. Kent also turned in fake invoices and asked to be reimbursed for trips to pick up equipment that he didn't make, prosecutors said. His lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. At sentencing on Nov. 9 by US District Judge John Ross, prosecutors said, Kent will be ordered to pay back the money to the company. (Read more embezzlement stories.) (Newser) After Wednesday's surprise development in the Alex Jones trialthe revelation that his attorneys accidentally turned over two years' worth of Jones' texts to prosecutorsthe defense asked for a mistrial on Thursday. But the judge, sounding a little exasperated, wasn't having it. Thats like the 17th time or something, said judge Maya Guerra Gamble, referring to mistrial requests on behalf of Jones, reports the Wall Street Journal. As a result, the jury is continuing with deliberations to determine how much Jones must pay the parents of a Sandy Hook victim over his since-disavowed claims that the massacre was a hoax. This is the first of three such trials to determine damages owed to Sandy Hook parents. We have a situation here thats akin to me mistakenly giving him the key to a room and he opens the door to the room and instead of finding what he expected to find he sees other doors, Jones attorney Andino Reynal argued Thursday in his push for a mistrial. Meanwhile, prosecutor Mark Bankston said he intends to comply with a request from the Jan. 6 House panel to turn over the texts, reports the New York Times. Among other things, the panel is investigating Jones' role in organizing a rally before the Capitol riot. "I certainly intend to do that, unless you tell me not to," Bankston told the judge on Thursday. (Read more Alex Jones stories.) Heather McFarland is communications lead for the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Contact her at hrmcfarland@alaska.edu or 907-474-6286. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune www.newsofbahrain.com The Municipalities Affairs and Agriculture Ministry is keen to strengthen partnership with United Nations (UN) organisations in supporting national programs in the areas of agricultural and fisheries development that support food security in Bahrain. Minister Wael bin Nasser Al Mubarak said raising the Kingdoms classification in relevant global indicators represented in the abundance of food, food supply stability, and food safety and quality, and pointed out that the ministry attaches the file of food security to the utmost importance and is working on implementing strategic initiatives that will achieve its desired goals. He was speaking at a virtual meeting with the UN and GCC the sub-regional coordinator of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Dr Dino Francescotti Mutis. The Minister explained that the implementation of the first project concerned with the development of Bahrains food security strategy has been completed that focused on three objectives in promoting innovative systems that increase the quality and quantity of production, ensure the sustainability of locally produced food, and take the necessary measures for the continuation of food imports. The meeting reviewed a report on the four joint projects between the ministry and the FAO implemented within the framework of the strategic partnership between Bahrain and the UN agencies for the years 2018-2022. The strategy also includes raising the efficiency of use by reducing food loss and waste and ensuring food security, he added, noting that the strategy included about 76 recommendations that were analysed in the strategy with the aim of ensuring effective planning. TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune www.newsofbahrain.com The vision of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, is to invest in Bahrains workforce to create a generation of leaders capable of furthering the sustainable development and keeping pace with the rapid global technological advancements. This was emphasised by Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, Chief Executive of the Information and eGovernment Authority (iGA). He was speaking as he met yesterday with the fellows of the Prime Ministers Fellowship Program. The fellowship program plays an important role in developing the skillset of Bahraini youth to further enhance creativity, competitiveness and excellence across various government workstreams, Al Qaed noted. The CEO said that it is in line with the Kingdoms comprehensive development goals, led by His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. He presented iGAs digital transformation initiatives and policies, its work to bring about a knowledge-based economy, and the advantages of migrating government systems to the cloud. The meeting covered the benefits of deploying advanced technologies, including time, effort, and cost savings, while maintaining efficiency and quality. iGAs projects carried out in collaboration with other government entities, provide the public with digital services and improved customer experience. Al Qaed answered inquiries by the fellows about the iGAs scope of work and welcomed their suggestions for enhancing government performance, in line with the vision of Bahrains senior leadership. The Fellowship is a competitive, challenging, year-long training program that develops the skills of Bahrainis working in the public sector. TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune www.newsofbahrain.com Education Minister Dr Majid bin Ali Al Nuaimi praised the continued interest of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, in developing technical and vocational education. The Minister noted the approval of the Cabinet headed by His Royal Highness the Crown Prince and Prime Minister to transfer the Bahrain Training Institute (BTI) to the affiliation of Bahrain Polytechnic. This approval came within the framework to develop students in technical and vocational education. Dr Al Nuaimi indicated that initiatives to advance technical and vocational education would contribute to enhancing graduate employment opportunities in the labour market by offering training programs that meet the needs of various institutions. TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune www.newsofbahrain.com An Indian School Bahrain (ISB) student has donated her hair to the Bahrain Cancer Society. Grade 10 student Eldha Ebi has been growing her hair out for the past two years with the intention of donating it for a noble cause. Now, she has donated her 45cm-long hair to the Society so real hair wigs can be made for children who have lost their own through cancer treatment or other reasons. Living through a pandemic for more than two years, the 15-year-old girl is thrilled that she finally could do so to help others. Eldha has been studying in the Indian School since LKG. Eldha Ebi says: My small act of kindness can give self-confidence, strength and hope to someone struggling with emotional challenges of hair loss and who suffers physically and mentally. It can boost self-esteem and a persons outlook. Human hairs are so costly and cannot be fabricated on demand. Hence, donation can help the needy ones. I did my hair donation wholeheartedly and feel proud with this new transformation exchange. I thank God for giving me this chance to support the needy ones and consider it as a gift of gratitude towards life. Eldha is the daughter of Indian expatriates Ebimon Yohannan, who works in Al Moayyed, and Jeena Ebimon. Her brother, Edwin Ebi John, is a student in Grade 11. The family, who is interested in charitable initiatives, belongs to the Sacred Heart Church, Manama. ISB Hon. Chairman Prince S Natarajan, Hon. Secretary Saji Antony and Principal VR Palaniswamy appreciated the students noble initiative for the society. TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune www.newsofbahrain.com The General Directorate of Anti-Corruption and Economic and Electronic Security announced that the Anti-Economic Crimes Directorate had arrested an African who used to cheat his victims by pretending that he could change papers to currency notes. An investigation into received information led to identifying and arresting the suspect. Devices, tools and chemicals were found at his residence. Legal proceedings are being taken to refer the case to the Public Prosecution. The General Directorate calls upon the public to avoid believing fraud claims and report such cases to the hotline 992. TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune www.newsofbahrain.com A Bahraini man in his forties was handed over a three-year prison term for selling his ex-wifes car without her knowledge. He offered to take the ex-wife's car to a workshop to be fixed. However, he later told her later that she had to pay BD2,000 in order to get it back before she discovered that the car was sold after faking her signature. I was trying to get help from anybody when my car stopped. And he called me, and I told him about my situation. He came to me and took the car to a repair shop in Isa Town. I went on the second day to the shop to check it and the worker there told me that he came and took the car to another workshop, the woman told prosecutors. I called him, and he told me that I had to pay BD2,000 if I wanted it back. And I later discovered that he sold it to someone after counterfeiting my signature, she added. According to court files, the defendant gave the car to the buyer, from whom he bought another vehicle and didnt settle its amount. He offered to give me the car in exchange for the vehicle he bought from me and I accepted, the buyer said. The defendant admitted to his wrongdoing during questioning. He was charged with fraud and forgery as well as stealing the car. "We are blessed to be part of this thriving region. I am proud of our talented teams and thankful for our client's trust during this time. This is a milestone for ITJ and our binational ecosystem," said Maritza Diaz, ITJ's CEO. For this milestone, the company gathered representatives of government and binational leaders. Mexico's Consulate in San Diego, the U.S. Consulate General in Tijuana, and Baja California State's Secretariat of Economic Development and Innovation were among the guests. In addition, the World Trade Center San Diego, Tijuana EDC, San Diego EDC, U.S., and companies leading software development and biotech innovation in the region also attended the event. After achieving a company growth of 200%, folding its client base, and developing an efficient trainee program, ITJ is ready to boost efforts and continue empowering partners to deliver digital innovation that improves people's lives. "We are blessed to be part of this thriving region. I am proud of our talented teams and thankful for our client's trust during this time. This is a milestone for ITJ and our binational ecosystem," said Maritza Diaz, ITJ's CEO. The symbiosis between San Diego and Tijuana has been crucial to building a prominent mega-region and tech hub in the Life Sciences industry. To enable companies to become more competitive in mind, the new center integrates spaces for collaborative environments, scrum rooms, and more. The flexible workspaces, which occupy an entire floor, support a capacity of our employee target growth of 62% per year. The offices are fixed to encourage the creativity and efficiency of the team and support real-time collaboration with clients who leverage the location advantages of being 30 minutes driving distance from San Diego. About ITJ ITJ is devoted to serving fast-growing and high-value market sectors, particularly the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), working with innovative medical device companies looking to improve people's lives. With a unique BOT (build, operate, and transfer) model that sources only the best digital talent available, ITJ enables companies in the U.S. to create technology centers of excellence in Mexico. For more information, visit http://www.itj.com. The highly anticipated return of Japanese travelers to Hawaii was expected to dramatically increase with foreign border restrictions loosening back in June 2022. But with the summer months coming to a close, Hawaii has seen far fewer Japanese tourists than once projected just months ago. "We were expecting an influx, increased numbers. And the numbers are increasing but we had several things happen," explained Hawaii Tourism Japan Managing Director, Eric Takahata. Local Japanese travel correspondents equate the delay to the country still in mourning over the shocking assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, as well as the sudden onset of it's seventh coronavirus wave. "For us to reach pre-pandemic numbers again it's going to be later in the year," Takahata added. "Again, because of all these setbacks that no one really has control over." According to numbers released by the the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA), the state welcomed back just under 12,000 Japanese tourists in the month of June. Those travelers spending about $24.3 million. That's compared to just three years ago, June 2019, when Hawaii saw more than 126,000 visitors spending upwards of about $182 million. It's the reason many local hotels, restaurants, and attractions continue to market push for the Japanese market in anticipation that those numbers begin to rise within the coming weeks and months. ...continue reading Despite imposing various sanctions against Russia, Japan is still exporting a huge number of used cars to the country. Export figures show that the number of used cars sent to Russia have tripled since May and about 40,000 more cars are waiting to be sent over to Russia. The Asahi Shimbun reports that in late June, the Vladivostok Port in Russia's Far East was packed with new and used cars transported from Japan and South Korea. Many of them are SUVs, minivans and large luxury models. According to the report, Russian companies said they were flooded with orders from across the country and were often forced to stop taking orders as they were unable to meet the demand. The Asahi Shimbun report said between 40,000 and 45,000 vehicles have been purchased and were waiting for loading in Japan. Further compounding the issue is that Japanese shipping companies have stopped their services from Yokohama and Kobe to Russia's Far East due to the economic sanctions against the country. A Russian cargo ship loaded with used cars had also caught fire while it was en route to Vladivostok from Fushiki Port in Toyama Prefecture in late June, resulting in its temporary suspension. The report also said that Japanese used cars have become cheaper mainly due to the strong Russian ruble. Before the conflict started, one ruble was around 1.5 yen and it dropped to less than 0.9 yen shortly after that. ...continue reading A Japanese journalist detained in Myanmar has been charged with breaching immigration law and encouraging dissent against the military, the junta said Thursday. Toru Kubota, who was held while covering a protest in Yangon last week "has been charged under section 505 (a) and under immigration law 13-1", the junta said in a statement. The two charges carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison. ... ... continue reading Japanese PM shakes up cabinet amid anger over Unification church links theguardian.com - Aug 10 Japans prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has removed ministers associated with the Unification church in a cabinet reshuffle aimed at reviving his fortunes amid a public outcry over his partys ties to the religious movement. Japans prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has removed ministers associated with the Unification church in a cabinet reshuffle aimed at reviving his fortunes amid a public outcry over his partys ties to the religious movement. Nagasaki calls for peace on 77th anniversary of atomic bombing NHK - Aug 09 People in Japan are remembering the victims of one of history's most catastrophic wartime attacks. Tuesday marks 77 years since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War Two. People in Japan are remembering the victims of one of history's most catastrophic wartime attacks. Tuesday marks 77 years since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War Two. Support for Japan PMs cabinet lowest since it was formed: NHK reports brecorder.com - Aug 09 Public support for Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida slid to the lowest level since he took office last October, with voters questioning his decision to hold a state funeral for former premier Shinzo Abe, public broadcaster NHK said on Monday. Public support for Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida slid to the lowest level since he took office last October, with voters questioning his decision to hold a state funeral for former premier Shinzo Abe, public broadcaster NHK said on Monday. On Japan's Yonaguni island, fears of being on the front line of a Taiwan conflict NPR - Aug 06 YONAGUNI ISLAND, Japan For years it was known as the "Two Gun" island one gun for each of the two policemen stationed here. YONAGUNI ISLAND, Japan For years it was known as the "Two Gun" island one gun for each of the two policemen stationed here. Minister denies politics played role in ex-Unification Church's name change NHK - Aug 06 A Japanese Cabinet minister has denied that politics played any role in a decision by the government to certify the then-Unification Church's name change in 2015. A Japanese Cabinet minister has denied that politics played any role in a decision by the government to certify the then-Unification Church's name change in 2015. Japan to roll out Omicron-targeted COVID vaccine as early as Oct. Kyodo - Aug 06 The Japanese government plans to roll out a new type of COVID-19 vaccine considered effective for the Omicron variant as early as October, sources familiar with the matter said Friday. The Japanese government plans to roll out a new type of COVID-19 vaccine considered effective for the Omicron variant as early as October, sources familiar with the matter said Friday. Japan's prime minister calls for 'immediate cancellation' of Chinese military drills FRANCE 24 English - Aug 06 Japan's prime minister on Friday condemned China's firing of ballistic missiles during military drills around Taiwan, calling them a "serious problem that impacts our national security and the safety of our citizens." Japan's prime minister on Friday condemned China's firing of ballistic missiles during military drills around Taiwan, calling them a "serious problem that impacts our national security and the safety of our citizens." Japans population crisis fuelled by indifference and ignorance of male lawmakers South China Morning Post - Aug 05 Japans minister for gender equality and childrens issues, Seiko Noda, said that the countrys male-dominated parliament has treated its dramatic population decline with indifference and ignorance. Japans minister for gender equality and childrens issues, Seiko Noda, said that the countrys male-dominated parliament has treated its dramatic population decline with indifference and ignorance. Japan: 5 Chinese ballistic missiles landed within Japan's EEZ NHK - Aug 04 Tokyo has lodged a protest with Beijing, after multiple Chinese ballistic missiles landed within Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone, amid large-scale military drills. Tokyo has lodged a protest with Beijing, after multiple Chinese ballistic missiles landed within Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone, amid large-scale military drills. Myanmar charges Japanese journalist with encouraging dissent indiatimes.com - Aug 04 A Japanese journalist detained in Myanmar has been charged with breaching immigration law and encouraging dissent against the military, the junta said Thursday. A Japanese journalist detained in Myanmar has been charged with breaching immigration law and encouraging dissent against the military, the junta said Thursday. Japan's Diet bans new member from staying overseas during session NHK - Aug 03 Japan's Upper House has dismissed a plan by a newly-elected opposition lawmaker to stay overseas during the extraordinary session that will open on Wednesday. Japan's Upper House has dismissed a plan by a newly-elected opposition lawmaker to stay overseas during the extraordinary session that will open on Wednesday. Welcome Guest! You Are Here: File Photo\Dave Harple / File Photo\David Harple DANBURY The citys public schools announced five administrative appointments this week, filling assistant principal and principal positions at Broadview Middle School, Danbury High School and Shelter Rock Elementary School. School district Superintendent Kevin Walston announced the new school administrators in a statement sent Wednesday. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate An Oklahoma judge said six descendants of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre cannot sue for reparations, while allowing three known survivors of the attack in which a white mob descended on a predominantly Black neighborhood to move forward with the lawsuit. The order, signed Tuesday by Tulsa County District Judge Caroline Wall, allows Lessie Benningfield Mother Randle, 106, Viola Mother Fletcher, 107, and Hughes Van Ellis, Sr., 101, to continue seeking reparations under state nuisance laws. Wall in May allowed the case to go forward while partially granting a motion to dismiss it without saying at the time what was being dismissed. In addition to the six descendants, Wall dismissed as plaintiffs the Historic Vernon AME Church Inc., which did not exist in 1921, and The Tulsa African Ancestral Society, which represents other descendants. And she dismissed as defendants the Tulsa Development Authority and the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission because they did not exist in 1921. Wall also dismissed an ongoing public nuisance claim by the plaintiffs. The city of Tulsa, Tulsa Regional Chamber, Tulsa County commissioners, the Tulsa County sheriff and the Oklahoma Military Department remain as defendants. The massacre occurred when a white mob descended on a 35-block area in Tulsas then-prosperous Greenwood District, killing up to an estimated 300 people, most of whom were Black, and looting and burning businesses and homes. Thousands were left homeless and living in a hastily constructed internment camp. Walls order calls for attorneys on both sides to amend the claim for reparations, which sought unspecified punitive damages and called for the creation of a hospital in north Tulsa, in addition to mental health and education programs and a Tulsa Massacre Victims Compensation Fund. Bottom line is that survivors are in, we have the opportunity to prove the massacre itself ... constitutes a nuisance, said Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for the survivors who filed the lawsuit in 2020. Solomon-Simmons said the massacre deprived Black people in Tulsa of security, economic power and vibrant community. We look forward to proving our case around the massacres ongoing catastrophic effects and demonstrating the actions that defendants must take to repair and rebuild the Greenwood community during our clients lifetimes, Solomon-Simmons said. Solomon-Simmons said during a news conference that he has spoken with those who were dismissed from the lawsuit. They were saddened they were dismissed out, but they are still very excited, heartened by the fact that we are moving forward and that these survivors can represent the entire community of Greenwood, Solomon-Simmons said. Michael Swartz, another attorney for the survivors, said the case provides an opportunity for a better understanding of the massacre. For the first time in over 100 years, the last three living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre will finally have an opportunity to hold accountable the institutions that instigated and facilitated one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in this countrys history, Swartz said. The city and insurance companies never compensated victims for their losses, and the massacre ultimately resulted in racial and economic disparities that still exist today, the lawsuit claims. In the years following the massacre, according to the lawsuit, city and county officials actively thwarted the communitys effort to rebuild and neglected the Greenwood and predominantly Black north Tulsa community in favor of overwhelmingly white parts of Tulsa. The massacre received renewed attention in recent years after then-President Donald Trump selected Tulsa as the location for a 2020 campaign rally amid a reckoning over racism. Trump moved the date of his June rally to avoid coinciding with a Juneteenth celebration in the citys Greenwood District commemorating the end of slavery. _____ Associated Press reporter Jake Bleiberg in Dallas contributed to this report. ______ For more AP coverage of the Tulsa Race Massacre anniversary, go to https://apnews.com/hub/tulsa-race-massacre This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate AUSTIN, Texas After a full day of deliberations, a jury awarded two Sandy Hook parents $4.11 million in the first verdict in the Alex Jones defamation trial. Punitive damages must still be decided. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis won their defamation lawsuit against Jones, who promoted the Sandy Hook shootings that killed their son Jesse as a hoax staged with crisis actors. The trial that concluded Wednesday focused on how much the jury will award the parents, who are claiming Jones lies are causing fear, anxiety and post-traumatic stress, on top of the grief that comes with losing a child. Heslin and Lewis were in the courtroom when the judge read the jurys verdict and had no discernible reaction. Thats a darn good start and we now have the punishment phase, said their attorney Mark Bankston. Jones attorney Andino Reynal said his client was satisfied with the amount the jury decided to give the parents. I think on behalf of the entire legal team today was an absolute vindication for the American legal system," Reynal said. "Were very pleased with the verdict thus far and we look forward to presenting the rest of the case. The jury will return on Friday to hear from more witnesses to decide punitive damages. The parents asked for $150 million $1 in compensation and $1 in punishment for the estimated 75 million Americans who experts claim dont believe or doubt the shooting occurred. Their goal, they said, is to punish Jones for his lies in the hope that hell think twice about promoting conspiracy theories on his Infowars platform. But Bankston said thats not the point of this first verdict. Were going to go back and talk to the jury tomorrow about how much they're (Infowars) worth and how much it will take to deter them, he said. But this verdict, this is merely about Scarlett and Neils mental stress. It has nothing to do with Mr. Jones and how much his business is worth. Jones was already ordered to pay about $1.5 million in sanctions toward the parents, Bankston said. After tomorrow, hes going to owe a lot more, Bankston said. Lewis and Heslin already have plans to use the money to further the aims of the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement, Bankston said, referring to the nonprofit started by Lewis following her sons death. What a way to honor Jesse, Bankston said. To know that with this money thats being disgorged from Alex Jones, school children across this country are going to be taught social emotional learning. The jury was to decide damages for Heslin for the loss of his reputation for Infowars coverage that occurred in 2017 including a report questioning whether he held his son in the hours after he died. The 12-member jury also decided how much Heslin and Lewis should receive for the intentional infliction of mental anguish that spanned from 2013 to 2018, the judge said during her instructions. The jury began deliberating for a brief period late Wednesday afternoon following closing arguments and came back with a verdict around 5 p.m. Thursday. The six-day trial included several twists and turns with Lewis and Heslin providing heart-wrenching testimony about the loss of their son who was called a hero for telling his classmates to run when the shooter went to reload his gun. Lewis and Heslin spoke of being tormented by Jones followers who would send emails questioning their sons death. In one case, someone shot at Heslins home, he said. Minutes after Lewis left the stand, Jones started his testimony after being chided by the judge for chewing on a wad of gauze in his mouth from a pulled tooth. Jones was often bombastic on the stand, staying that he tried in the last few years to show he knew that children died in the shooting but the media wouldnt let him walk back his original claims that the killings were a hoax. He apologized to Lewis and Heslin, saying that we never intentionally meant to hurt you. Jones also admitted on the stand that it was irresponsible of him to portray the deaths as a hoax. I really could believe it was fabricated, Jones said Wednesday when he was asked about his Sandy Hook coverage. You do understand that was irresponsible? Reynal said. Yes, Jones said, especially after I met the parents, now I believe its 100 percent real. Jones faces a similar but separate trial in Connecticut and will face another in Texas. Jury selection was halted in that Connecticut case on Tuesday, however, when Jones attorney asked that the case be moved to federal bankruptcy court in Connecticut due to the bankruptcy filing. Staff writers John Moritz and Jordan Fenster contributed to this story. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON (AP) At a dinner with the president of Finland shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell assured his host that the U.S. Senate would swiftly ratify NATO membership if the north European country chose to apply to the military alliance. It was a bold assumption for the Republican leader to make in the aftermath of the Trump era, when Donald Trump roused a neo-isolationist streak in the GOP, railing against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and threatening at times to upend the decades-old alliance. But over several courses of fresh fish and schnapps, McConnell, long a proponent of NATO's expansion as a bulwark against Russian aggression, sought to leave the impression that the U.S. would most certainly welcome the new NATO members with open arms. Late Wednesday, the Senate did exactly that, as most Republicans joined Democrats in ratifying the accession of Finland and Sweden to the alliance, an overwhelming 95-1 vote. Other NATO countries also must approve the new members. What a big day," McConnell said during an interview with The Associated Press in his office ahead of the vote. McConnell said he had just finished a phone call with the Finnish president, Sauli Niinisto, whom he now considers something of a friend. The two were just talking about what we've sort of been through since we had dinner together," he said, noting "this new and strengthened NATO and the way its pulled together sort of the, shall I say, the democratic world." The Republican is not the leader of the Senate's majority, but its minority, yet he has played a pivotal role in joining forces with President Joe Biden and the Democrats to nudge GOP senators off the Trump-era foreign policy approach and ensure NATO ratification. It's a milestone for McConnell, who has championed the NATO alliance almost since he joined the Senate more than 35 years ago. That position put him at odds with Trump during his tenure in the White House. At the time, McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously invited NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to deliver a speech to Congress on its 70th anniversary in direct response to Trumps criticisms of NATO. Thats the role Sen. McConnell is trying to play, said Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey. "It's an ongoing struggle," Edelman said. "The whole fight over Ukraine has become a little bit of a microcosm, a microcosmic case, of the larger fight in the party over its future stand on foreign policy. And, you see, unfortunately, a lot of people who dont see this as an important stake for the United States." Speedy action in the typically slow moving Senate was no guarantee, particularly as Republicans are still sorting out their policies and politics after Trumps presidency. The former president had awakened in the party, and many American voters, a newfound skepticism of the overseas alliance that lingers in the GOP at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine has drawn the U.S. and its European allies closer together. Privately, McConnell counseled his GOP senators ahead of the vote with the same arguments he makes in public including the idea that part of being a leader is explaining complex choices to constituents, even if Americans may say they dont like spending money or focusing attention abroad. The one thing I was concerned about, particularly at that point, was this sort of growing isolationist sentiment in the party, to some extent, given voice by President Trump," McConnell said in his office, steps off the Senate floor. He had reason to be worried: Just a few months earlier McConnell believed as many as 25 GOP senators, half his caucus, would oppose $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as it battled Russia. In the end, 11 voted against the Ukraine aid package, which Trump criticized. Ahead of the NATO vote, McConnell said he sought to convey to senators that the U.S. leadership role in the world "is not just important militarily, but commercially, as well, all of which is good for this country. This is not a charity were involved in here. This is for the benefit of America. He added: The world is better served if somebody stands up to dictatorships like we have in Russia and China. In the end, only one Republican, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a potential 2024 presidential hopeful, voted against ratifying the NATO expansion, saying the U.S.'s attention would be better focused on China. Even longtime non-interventionist Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did not oppose the vote, choosing instead to abstain. Paul said in a floor speech that after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the world changed. McConnell shrugged off Paul's vote, saying he and his fellow Kentuckian often have different foreign policy views. As for Hawley, the GOP leader said he couldn't disagree more but didn't try to change his colleague's vote. In the months after that March dinner with the Finnish president, McConnell led a delegation to visit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. The senators then stopped in Sweden and Finland in a show of support for the alliance. At a news conference in Stockholm, McConnell vowed that the Senate, which he did not control, would vote to ratify NATO membership by summer. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., another potential presidential hopeful who joined the March dinner, said of the GOP leader: Sen. McConnell has been a strong proponent all summer long of not waiting around to get this done. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON (AP) In a surprise victory for Republicans, the Senate on Thursday voted to overturn a Biden administration rule requiring rigorous environmental review of major infrastructure projects such as highways, pipelines and oil wells an outcome aided by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin, a key player on energy and climate issues and a swing vote in the closely divided Senate, joined Republicans to support the measure, which was approved 50-47. The vote comes as Manchin has proposed a separate list of legislative measures to speed up federal permitting for major projects in return for his support of a Democratic bill to address climate change. Republicans voted unanimously to overturn the Biden permitting rule, while Manchin was the only Democrat to do so. Three senators were absent: Republican John Cornyn of Texas and Democrats Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. The vote sends the measure to the Democratic-controlled House, where it is unlikely to move forward. Still, the vote signaled strong Senate support for action to reform the often onerous federal permitting process, which can take up to eight to 10 years for highways and other major projects. Streamlining federal review is a top Manchin and GOP priority that is not shared by most Democrats. Sen. Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, sponsored the measure to overturn the Biden rule, saying new regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, will further bog down the permitting process and delay critical infrastructure projects the country needs. The Biden rule which overturns an action by the Trump administration loosening environmental reviews requires regulators to consider the likely impacts on climate change and nearby communities before approving major projects. The new requirement is going to add to the red tape" that prevents major infrastructure projects from being approved in a timely manner, Sullivan said. While President Joe Biden has called infrastructure a priority and pushed for a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year the new NEPA rule actually makes it harder to build infrastructure projects in the United States, Sullivan said. The only people, in my view, who really like this new system are radical far-left environmental groups that dont want to build anything ... and probably the Chinese Communist Party,'' he said on the Senate floor. China and other competitors likely love the fact that it takes 9 to 10 years to permit a bridge in the U.S.A.,'' Sullivan said. The White House threatened a veto if the measure reaches the president's desk. This action would slow the construction of American infrastructure, lead to the waste of taxpayer resources on poorly designed projects and result in unnecessary and costly litigation and conflict that will delay permitting,'' the White House said in a statement Thursday. Manchin countered that, "for years Ive worked to fix our broken permitting system, and I know the (Biden) administrations approach to permitting is dead wrong.'' Manchin called Thursday's vote a step in the right direction" but said the measure likely "is dead on arrival in the House. Thats why I fought so hard to secure a commitment (from Democratic leaders) on bipartisan permitting reform, which is the only way were going to actually fix this problem.'' The new rule, finalized this spring, restores key provisions of NEPA, a bedrock environmental law that is designed to ensure community safeguards during reviews for a wide range of federal projects, including roads, bridges and energy development such as pipelines and oil wells. The longstanding reviews were scaled back under former President Donald Trump in a bid to fast-track projects and create jobs. The White House Council on Environmental Quality said in implementing the new rule that it should restore public confidence during environmental reviews. The change could speed development by helping to "ensure that projects get built right the first time, said CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory. Projects approved by the Trump administration were frequently delayed or defeated by lengthy court battles from groups challenging environmental reviews as inadequate. Manchin, who brokered a surprise deal last week on climate legislation with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, said he's won promises from Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress to pursue permitting reforms in the Senate to speed approval of projects in his energy-producing state and across the country. Manchin's wish list includes swift approval of the controversial Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline in his home state and Virginia. The pipeline is nearly complete but has been delayed for years by court battles and other issues. Manchins list includes a number of proposals supported by Republicans, including a two-year deadline on environmental reviews; changes to the Clean Water Act; limitations on judicial review; and prompt action on projects determined by the Energy secretary to be in the national interest. Environmental groups have decried Manchin's proposals as counter-productive to the climate legislation and a threat to the environment and communities where projects would be built. Madeleine Foote, deputy legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters, dismissed the Senate vote Thursday as "nothing more than a Republican-led stunt to appease their fossil fuel-industry allies.'' Foote and other environmentalists said strong NEPA review is needed to ensure that those most affected by an energy project have a say in the projects built in their communities. Thorough, community-based environmental reviews are critical to helping eliminate environmental racism and making sure low-income communities and communities of color are protected from polluters who want to build dirty, toxic projects in their backyards,'' Foote said. She called on Congress to approve the Manchin-Schumer climate bill as soon as possible. Schumer said votes on the bill are likely this weekend. Kabir Green, director of federal affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, another environmental group, said Americans are seeing the effects of climate change in catastrophic detail, from the heat waves in Texas to wildfires in New Mexico to the devastating flooding in Kentucky. But the Senate is voting to prevent the federal government from considering climate change when making decisions. This makes no sense.'' Foreign Policy, July 26, 2022 The Talibans failure to make the leap from insurgency to governance is coming under scrutiny this week as they meet with representatives of countries that are growing increasingly concerned that after almost year in power, the extremists have again transformed Afghanistan into a global terrorist haven. The July 25-27 conference in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, follows the latest report on Afghanistan by the United Nations Security Council, which contains alarming details on the activities of terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, now enjoying the Talibans protection in Afghanistan. The report indicated that Afghanistan has essentially reverted to the state it was in before Sept. 11, 2001, when it hosted Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, while the group planned the big terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Officially, the theme of the conference is security and economic development, though sources among participants say the real focus will be on counterterrorism. More than 20 countries and international organizations will attend, including Iran, Pakistan, China, and the Central Asian states. The United States, Russia, and India are also set to attend, as are U.N. delegates. This weeks gathering to discuss Afghanistans descent into rising lawlessness and corruption and sinking human rights will be the first for the Taliban as participants. They shouldnt expect diplomatic recognition, as they are still widely seen as illegitimate. The European Unions ambassador to Afghanistan, Andreas Von Brandt, says there is a general consensus on nonrecognition and an emphasis on helping the people, not the regime. The main goal of the event is to develop a set of measures and proposals for the approaches of the world community to promote stability, security, post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan and its integration into regional cooperation processes in the interests of the multinational Afghan people and the whole world, Uzbekistans foreign ministry said. Russia, Iran, China, Pakistan, and the Central Asian states were united in support of the Talibans victory over the former government last August, as they were happy to see the United States leave the region. Now that theyve got the Taliban on their hands, few appear to know how to halt their brutality and transform them from murderous drug-dealing thieves into politicians. The resurgence of terrorism in Afghanistan is also giving its neighbors fits. Uzbekistan, host of this weeks conference, has seen its southern border region hit repeatedly this year by rockets fired from Afghanistan. While the local Islamic State franchise has mostly claimed responsibility, observers doubt that the so-called Islamic State-Khorasan is anything more than a Taliban cover, deftly serving as a lightning rod so that the Taliban can pretend to cooperate on counterterrorism. The Uzbeks are furious that rockets have been landing in the center of [the border town] Termez, a delegate to the conference said anonymously, as he was not authorized to speak publicly. The military are furious and want to react with force; the civilian authorities are having to try to calm them down. Tajikistan is also concerned about anti-state groups operating just over its border with Afghanistan. China, another neighbor, has been unable to cajole the Taliban into handing over members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which supports a Uyghur homeland in Xinjiang. Pakistan, which enabled the Taliban by providing safe haven, funding, and arms throughout their insurgency, has lost control of the group and finds itself negotiating with them for peace with their affiliate Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Despite the proliferation of regional terrorist threats, the biggest problem with the old-new Afghanistan is the return of al Qaeda, the U.N. report concluded. The U.N. Security Council says al Qaeda poses the worlds major long-term terrorism threat, but with its protege in power, its keeping a low profile so as not to cause the Taliban international difficulty or embarrassment. But the capability appears to be there. Huge amounts of military hardware, like night-vision goggles, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, steel-penetrating bullets, and frequency-jamming equipment left behind by the U.S. and coalition militaries last year are now in the hands of terrorists, including al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the report said. Specifically, al Qaeda is developing methods for delivering large bombs. The U.N. report says al Qaeda leaders have an advisory role with the Taliban. Since taking control of Afghanistan last August, the Taliban have presided over the countrys slide into even deeper poverty and corruption than what prevailed under the corrupt Western-supported governments. The Taliban offer no security and no answer to rising food and fuel prices, while oppressing women and minorities and cracking down on the once-vibrant free media. Its like a boiling pot with the lid about to explode, but it is what we were expecting, said a Western diplomat, who was not authorized to speak to media. We will see it get worse, but right now this is a stable, peaceful period, he said, despite pockets of armed resistance and vicious Taliban retribution across large parts of the countrys north. The Taliban appear to believe the conference is an opportunity for the international community to offer further support to Afghanistan to solve problems, including instability and the humanitarian crisis, domestic media quoted regime spokesman Bilal Karimi as saying. The United States has offered almost $1 billion in assistance since August, though a lot of humanitarian aid is filtered through Taliban-affiliated organizations, enabling them to pilfer it for distribution to their own supporters and soldiers. The Uzbeks are hoping the Talibanrepresented by U.N.-sanctioned terrorist and de facto foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqiwill make a commitment to curtail terrorist activity and stick to the deal they struck with former U.S. President Donald Trump, who pulled out U.S. troops in exchange for a would-be Taliban break with terrorists. But few participants or observers expect anything meaningful to result, as the Taliban have yet to be held accountable for the violence, repression, and incompetence that mark their second turn at trying to run the country. Enayat Najafizada, the now-exiled founder of the Kabul-based think tank the Institute of War and Peace Studies, said the Taliban have displayed a pretty fair image of themselves as bound by religious ideology that is not compatible with the values and principles of Afghan society. Contrary to their claims, and those by their domestic and international sympathizers, the Taliban did not change and I believe they will not change. The international community must exert pressure to make them accountable, he said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON (AP) U.S.-China relations are teetering on a precipice after House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan. Pelosi received a rapturous welcome in Taipei and was applauded with strong bipartisan support in Washington, despite the Biden administrations misgivings. But her trip has enraged Beijing and Chinese nationalists and will complicate already strained ties even after her departure. Already, China is preparing new shows of force in the Taiwan Strait to make clear that its claims are non-negotiable on the island it regards as a renegade province. And, as the U.S. presses ahead with demonstrations of support for Taiwan, arms sales and diplomatic lobbying, the escalating tensions have raised the risks of military confrontation, intentional or not. And the trip could further muddle Washington's already complicated relationship with Beijing as the two sides wrest with differences over trade, the war in Ukraine, human rights and more. Wary of the reaction from China, the Biden administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting Taiwan. It has taken pains to stress to Beijing that the House speaker is not a member of the executive branch and her visit represents no change in the U.S. one-China policy. That was little comfort for Beijing. Pelosi, who is second in line to the U.S. presidency, was no ordinary visitor and was greeted almost like a head of state. Taiwan's skyline lit up with a message of welcome, and she met with the biggest names on the island, including its president, senior legislators and prominent rights activists. Chinese officials were enraged. What Pelosi has done is definitely not a defense and maintenance of democracy, but a provocation and violation of Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said after her departure. Pelosis dangerous provocation is purely for personal political capital, which is an absolute ugly political farce, Hua said. China-US relations and regional peace and stability is suffering. The timing of the visit may have added to the tensions. It came ahead of this year's Chinese Communist Partys Congress at which President Xi Jinping will try to further cement his power, using a hard line on Taiwan to blunt domestic criticism on COVID-19, the economy and other issues. Summoned to the Foreign Ministry to hear China's complaints, U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns insisted that the visit was nothing but routine. The United States will not escalate and stands ready to work with China to prevent escalation altogether, Burns said, according to the State Department. The White House also said that Pelosis visit doesnt change anything about the U.S. posture toward China and Taiwan. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the U.S. had expected the harsh reaction from China, even as she called it unwarranted. We are going to monitor, and we will manage what Beijing chooses to do, she added. Alarmed by the possibility of a new geo-strategic conflict at the same time the West sides with Ukraine in its resistance to Russia's invasion, the U.S. has rallied allies to its side. The foreign ministers of the Group of 7 industrialized democracies released a statement Wednesday essentially telling China by the initials of its formal name, the People's Republic of China to calm down. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally, the G-7 ministers said. The PRCs escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region. We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means. Still, that status quo long identified as strategic ambiguity for the U.S. and quiet but determined Chinese opposition to any figment of Taiwanese independence appears to be no longer tenable for either side. Its getting harder and harder to agree on Taiwan for both Beijing and Washington, said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, an emeritus professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. In Taipei and the U.S. Congress, moves are afoot to clarify the ambiguity that has defined U.S. relations with Taiwan since the 1970s. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will soon consider a bill that would strengthen relations, require the executive branch to do more to bring Taiwan into the international system and take more determined steps to help the island defend itself. Writing in The New York Times, committee Chairman Robert Menendez, D-N.J., lambasted China's response to Pelosi's visit. The result of Beijings bluster should be to stiffen resolve in Taipei, in Washington and across the region, he said. There are many strategies to continue standing up to Chinese aggression. There is clear bipartisan congressional agreement on the importance of acting now to provide the people of Taiwan with the type of support they desperately need. But China appears to be pressing ahead with steps that could prove to be escalatory, including live-fire military exercises planned for this week and a steady uptick in flights of fighter jets in and near Taiwan's self-declared air defense zone. They are going to test the Taiwanese and the Americans, said Cabestan, the professor in Hong Kong. He said the actions of the U.S. military in the area, including a naval force led by the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, will be critical. China had ratcheted up potential confrontation weeks ago by declaring that the Taiwan Strait that separates the island from the mainland is not international waters. The U.S. rejected this and responded to by sending more vessels through it. Cabestan said that showed that something had to be done on the U.S. side to draw red lines to prevent the Chinese from going too far." Meanwhile, Taiwan is on edge, air raid shelters have been prepared and the government is increasing training for recruits serving their four months of required military service - generally considered inadequate along with annual two-week annual refresher courses for reservists. The Chinese feel that if they dont act, that the United States is going to continue to slice the salami to take incremental actions toward supporting Taiwan independence, said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund. She said that domestic U.S. support for Taiwan actually gives China added incentive to take a strong stance: China does feel under pressure to do more to signal that this is an issue in which China cannot compromise." Despite the immediate concerns about escalation and potential miscalculation, there are others who don't believe the damage to U.S.-China ties will be more long-lasting than that caused by other, non-Taiwan-related issues. China is going to raise a huge fuss and there will be military exercises and there will be embargoes on importing Taiwan goods. And after the shouting is over, you will see a gradual easing, said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami. The situation never goes back to completely normal, whatever normal is, but it will definitely die down, she said. ___ AP writers Zeke Miller in Washington, Joe McDonald in Beijing and David Rising in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, contributed to this report. Announcement made by the Honourable Harjit S. Sajjan in address to attendees of the 2022 Aerospace, Defence & Security Expo VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 3, 2022 /CNW/ - British Columbia is one of the largest aerospace clusters in Canada with over 200 companies operating in the sector. Each year, the Aerospace, Defence and Security Expo (ADSE) brings together industry stakeholders to network and capitalize on opportunities in domestic and international markets. Government of Canada announces support for British Columbias aerospace sector (CNW Group/Pacific Economic Development Canada) That is why the Honourable Harjit S. Sajjan, Minister of International Development and Minister responsible for the Pacific Economic Development Agency of Canada (PacifiCan) addressed ADSE attendees at a lunchtime session today where he announced over $7.5 million under the Aerospace Regional Recovery Initiative (ARRI) for three B.C. organizations: Avcorp Industries, Inc., the University of Victoria, and Chinook Helicopters, Inc. The funding announced today will help the three organizations to innovate, commercialize technologies, and improve global competitiveness while creating 110 jobs in B.C.'s aerospace sector. During his remarks, Minister Sajjan reaffirmed his support for ADSE and underscored the importance of Canada's aerospace and defense sectors to the B.C. economy. PacifiCan provides funding to the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC) to deliver ADSE and support western Canada's aerospace and defense industries at home and abroad. PacifiCan is the dedicated federal regional economic development agency for British Columbia and plays a key role in supporting the aerospace industry. This includes working with local stakeholders to leverage economic opportunities associated with federal defence procurements under the Government of Canada's Industrial and Technological Benefits (ITBs) policy. Projects being funded: Organization: Chinook Helicopters (1982), Inc. Project description: Develop and commercialize a Virtual Reality Training and Simulation system Funding: $1,171,800 Organization: Avcorp Industries Inc. Project description: Adopt digital technologies to create efficiencies and enhance productivity Funding: $4,862,250 Organization: University of Victoria Project description: Develop Hybrid Electric Propulsion Systems Funding: $1,500,000 Total funding: $7,534,050 Quotes "PacifiCan is committed to building an inclusive and dynamic economy that ensures that all areas receive the support they need to prosper. My agency has long been a committed advocate of a thriving B.C. aerospace sector and we will continue to work with this industry to promote growth, innovation and an increased presence on the competitive global stage." - The Honourable Harjit S. Sajjan, Minister of International Development and Minister responsible for the Pacific Economic Development Agency of Canada "Canada's aerospace sector remains the most innovative industry and a key driver of our nation's economy providing nearly 200,000 jobs in every region of Canada. These projects, and the support of the Government of Canada, will ensure our aerospace industry continues to contribute to the economic recovery from the COVID19 pandemic. We look forward to continued collaboration as we set a course for a long-term vision and plan for decades to come." - Mike Mueller, President and CEO, Aerospace Industries Association of Canada Quick Facts The Aerospace Regional Recovery Initiative (ARRI) will help the Canadian aerospace sector emerge from the pandemic with the capacity to compete on the global stage. With a total budget of $250 million over three years (until March 31, 2024 ), this initiative is being delivered by Canada's regional development agencies (RDAs). over three years (until ), this initiative is being delivered by regional development agencies (RDAs). ARRI was developed to help Canadian companies emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic with the capacity to compete on the global stage. In British Columbia , ARRI is delivered by PacifiCan. , ARRI is delivered by PacifiCan. Pacific Economic Development Canada (PacifiCan) is the regional development agency focused on British Columbia's evolving economy. PacifiCan leads in building a strong, competitive Canadian economy by supporting business, innovation and community economic development unique to British Columbia . evolving economy. PacifiCan leads in building a strong, competitive Canadian economy by supporting business, innovation and community economic development unique to . For over 50 years, the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada has worked with its members to develop what is today the fifth-largest national aerospace industry in the world. Associated Links: Stay connected Follow PacifiCan on Twitter and LinkedIn Toll-Free Number: 1-888-338-9378 TTY (telecommunications device for the hearing impaired): 1-877-303-3388 SOURCE Pacific Economic Development Canada For further information: Haley Hodgson, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Economic Development, [email protected]; Ben Letts, Senior Communications Advisor, Pacific Economic Development Canada, [email protected] A Superior Court judge has rejected a constitutional challenge of Connecticuts election laws and denied an effort by Muad Hrezi to qualify for a Democratic primary against U.S. Rep. John B. Larson in the 1st District of Hartford and its suburbs. In a decision filed Tuesday, Judge Cesar A. Noble rejected Hrezis request for an order that likely would have forced a special primary, given that ballots already are printed for the Aug. 9 primary. Hrezi claimed his failure to secure sufficient signatures to qualify was a consequence of mistakes by state and local election officials, and he also challenged the constitutionality of the qualification rules. After an expedited hearing in June, the judge found no evidence of wrongdoing by the secretary of the states office or local officials. In a 50-page decision released Tuesday, Noble also rejected Hrezis constitutional claims. The challenge was the latest in a series of political and legal efforts over decades to reform what was one of the nations most challenging systems for office seekers who did not have the support of the party establishment. U.S. District Judge Peter C. Dorsey declared in January 2003 that the sole path to a primary for statewide office or multi-town legislative districts winning 15% of party convention vote was unconstitutionally burdensome. Nobles ruling Tuesday affirmed the constitutionality of the two-track system adopted in response to Dorsey: Either winning 15% at a convention, or petitioning for a place on a primary ballot. To qualify after getting little support at the convention in May, Hrezi needed the signatures of 3,833 registered Democrats 2% of the partys enrollment in the district. He fell short. Hrezi, a 27-year-old progressive Muslim and former Capitol Hill staffer who was trying to emulate the successes of liberal outsiders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said Wednesday the system may be constitutional, but it is still in need of revision. There should only be one track for everyone. It should be the signatures, Hrezi said. The court overruled the convention process back in 2003, and now weve created two tracks one where incumbents and party insiders get the really easy way out. The system is challenging but hardly impossible for an outsider. With no political background, Bob Stefanowski skipped the Republican nominating convention in 2018 and won the primary for governor as a petitioning candidate. But no one has qualified for a primary in Connecticut against a member of the U.S. House, and primaries are rarer than in other states. So I think having only one method, that being a petition process, would make sure that its a fair process if incumbents, challengers, everyone has to achieve the same level of support before they get on the ballot, Hrezi said. In 2002, Dorsey ordered Connecticut to open its primary, concluding that a legal challenge to the states election laws was likely to prevail. He was overruled by an appeals court on technical grounds. His ruling the following January was not appealed. Earlier, Connecticut had required 20% of a convention vote to qualify a standard that protected Gov. William A. ONeill from challenges for the Democratic nomination from two liberals, state House Speaker Ernest Abate in 1982 and former Congressman Toby Moffett in 1986. Hrezi raised more than $500,000 this year, seemingly more than enough to hire sufficient staff to collect the required signatures. But Hrezis collection effort was delayed by the two days it took to obtain the petition forms after he filed the papers to get them on April 26, the first day they were available. The judge noted that he could have got the forms on the same day had he simply waited for them at the secretary of the states office. Instead, Hrezi asked the office on April 28 to email them. Hrezi also complained that signatures were rejected because they filed in two towns after the deadline of 4 p.m. June 7. The judge noted Hrezi acknowledged missing the deadline and cited no statute giving officials the discretion to accept them. The tight labor market blunted the usefulness of his fundraising, Hrezi said Wednesday. We were willing to spend the money, he said. I mean, we told the judge heres the job postings. We put it up on Indeed. We put it up on all these websites. And people just dont want to do this job. I mean, people would come and do it for a day, kind of get trained and then not show up again. The campaign offered $20 an hour, then $30. Maybe if I paid them $100, now they would have done it, Hrezi said. But at some point it becomes absurd when you have to pay for signatures, so we just really went after trying to get volunteers and just trying to get it done with the team we had. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate HARTFORD Opportunity zones were born out of Former President Donald Trumps 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to help low-income census tracts in cities and towns across America. In the almost five years since the bill was signed into law, investors have expressed limited interest in taking advantage of the program in Hartford, which is considered the fourth-poorest city in the country by the World Population Review. I'm going to think it mirrors the trends of general investment, said Alexandra Daum, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development. If something is an attractive investment without opportunity zone treatment, it will be attractive with opportunity zone treatment. If something is unattractive without opportunity zone treatment, and probably will not magically become attractive. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created 8,764 tax havens across the country. Within these tax havens, investors get a capital gains break if they invest there. Each state was given a certain number of tracts to designate as opportunity zones based on certain criteria. What little information, we have suggested not surprisingly the money flow to those census tracts that were already attractive to private investors there are no requirements that projects actually help the people that live in a given community, said David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. Missed opportunity? Hartford is one city that opportunity zones were supposed to be targeting, according to Wessel, who wrote a book about opportunity zones. It turns out there are not a lot of social impact investors, Wessel said. Most are looking for the highest return at the lowest risk and that tends to be places that are already prospering, not places like Hartford. Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said the opportunity zone program seems to help add to an investors bottom line on a project that would have been completed anyway. He highlighted development in the capital city thats happened even without opportunity zone funds. We've got a lot of economic development underway, from Albany Avenue to Parkville to downtown, Bronin said in a statement. We work hard to build the public-private partnerships that make those projects possible, and we remain hopeful that opportunity zone funds will be a part of the mix in some of the projects that are in the planning and development phase right now." Wessels research shows many states took advantage of the loose restrictions around what areas could be designated as opportunity zones and designated tracts on the brink of prospering areas. In some of those tracts, we are seeing luxury student housing or self-storage facilities or boutique hotels for which federal tax payers are essentially subsidizing the construction even though they wont do much for the people who live in the census tract, Wessel said. Connecticut, however, distributed opportunity zones among census tracts desperately in need of private capital. Seventy-two urban and suburban areas across Connecticut are opportunity zones. Of Connecticuts 169 municipalities in the state, 27 have at least one opportunity zone. Hartford has 10, the most of any municipality. Seventy-one of the tracts chosen in Connecticut are low-income. Connecticut didnt try to stack the deck to allow a gentrifying neighborhood, say on the edge of downtown Stamford to get more gentrified, said Jim Horan, executive director of Local Initiatives Support Corporation in Connecticut. Other states may have done this. Those lower-income adjacent census tracts have attracted most of the development across the country. The goal of the program is for a large investor, one with capital gains, to take advantage of an existing project a vacant building, an outdated apartment complex or an open lot and create something that would result in new housing or jobs for the area. There are no stipulations about what the project has to be or if it has to benefit the area. Its based on reduction of capital gains taxes and only wealthy people and corporations have capital gains taxes, Horan said. Youd be trying to get people who are typically not involved in investing in low-income communities to do so. Its an interesting concept, but its been very underwhelming in Connecticut. East Hartford Mayor Michael Walsh reported zero opportunity zone investments in the town despite a large portion of the land having the designation. Successful investments touted by the state have been in New London and New Britain. Advertising Connecticuts opportunity zones Connecticut has a map containing all of the states opportunity zones and available projects. Aside from the map, which is a resource for potential investors, there is no database or tracking resource for opportunity zone funds. However, Horan and investors interviewed by Hearst Connecticut Media Group are not aware of any active Hartford opportunity zone investments. Hartford property records show that of the list of available projects none have been bought or sold since 2017 with the exception of Westbrook Village apartments, which Tinker Building LLC purchased in December 2021. Tinker Building LLC did not respond to a request for comment about whether it used opportunity zone funds for the project. Daum and the state were unable to confirm whether it was an opportunity zone project. On the Connecticut opportunity zone map with the list of available projects, some list investors. But that doesnt mean they are opportunity zone investors. Forrest Berwick was listed as the investor for an available property in West Hartford. While Berwick said he has invested in the property, its not with opportunity zone funding. There wasn't a lot of interest in Connecticut small, small Connecticut development, Berwick said. A lot of the funds were looking at hundreds and hundreds of units, development size building skyscrapers in major metropolitan areas, particularly in the southwest, in the southeast. That's where we were seeing the money going. David Levitz is listed as the contact for the available property on 151 Walnut St. within an opportunity zone in Hartford. He and two others owned the property prior to the 2017 opportunity zone provision. Unless they complete a new development on the existing property, they cannot take advantage of the opportunity zone tax break. Levitz said that if he put a new business on the property, he could take advantage of the tax break. I tried to build a new business on there to take advantage of the opportunity zone, but it didnt work out, Levitz said. Along with his two co-owners, Levitz planned to use the vacant parcel on the property, which has six parcels. He wanted to build a self-storage facility, but said the city did not approve it. The city of Hartford changed the zoning regs and the zoning is extremely limited, Levitz said. The only things I can do on there are multi-family and civic buildings. In Wessels book, he refers to self-storage facilities as a non-intended use for opportunity zones since they do not employ anyone. It would be a money-making business, taking advantage of a tax break, but not providing any jobs to the community. Levitz said the facility would have increased property taxes and helped provide more units for storage in the area. Its a new development that would have supported all the new apartment developments coming into the area, Levtiz said. The only potential opportunity zone in Hartford that Horan is aware of is an exploratory mission by Stanley Black and Decker. The company hopes to create an opportunity zone fund to benefit the Parkville neighborhood, but the project is not confirmed or started. Stanley Black and Decker did not respond to requests for comment. Horan said the project would be a mixed-use development along Bartholomew Avenue. Thats a really interesting project and I hope it goes forward, Horan said. I dont know how essential the opportunity zone is to the development, but it was a big part of it initially. The underwhelming response to opportunity zones in Hartford and statewide does not mean there has been a shortage of new investments. Several new projects in Hartford valued at over $150 million have moved forward over the last year. The opportunity zone funds have not played a role. Its hard to tell exactly how successful the opportunity zone program has been nationwide. While there have been some well-intended and executed projects in places like rural Alabama, there have also been some luxury apartments and hotels resulting from the program. You'll read this all over the national press, Daum said. Being in opportunity zones does not magically make a bad project good. It maybe helps a little bit with something just to get something over the finish line. But I think investors are not viewing it as a huge leap, a huge benefit to their performance. So it's slow and steady. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate PANAMA CITY (AP) Three weeks of continuous demonstrations and road blockades to protest high fuel and food costs in Panama have begun to cause shortages of some food products, fuel and medicine. The closures, including of the Pan-American Highway, have forced the national electric company to ration electricity in Darien province, which borders Colombia. Tankers carrying gas to run the power generation plant cannot arrive. Some 7,000 families have been affected by the reduction of electricity to 11 hours daily. In Panamas main wholesale market that supplies both supermarkets and individual consumers, there was little foot traffic Wednesday. Display tables usually stacked high with produce had far less on offer. Some vegetables like lettuce and tomatos, in particular, were in short supply. This stand was always full. Now I dont have many products, said Victor Palacios. Yesterday (Tuesday) there wasnt much merchandise. He said his produce comes from the highlands in the western province of Chirique. What little has arrived from there is expensive and damaged, Palacios said. Chiriqui province is Panamas primary supplier of produce. The Indigenous Ngobe-Bugle who live there have blocked important stretches of the Pan-American Highway, holding up trucks trying to get produce to the capital. The blockades are also affecting shipments coming from elsewhere in Central America. Groups representing agricultural producers have said the protests have caused losses of more than $130 million so far. Kevin Vigil, director of the wholesale market known as Merca Panama, said the situation had improved somewhat. Protesters had cleared some roadblocks on the Pan-American Highway and he was awaiting a convoy of 30 trucks loaded with food from Chiriqui. He said what food came in was selling rapidly, leaving some stands with sparse offerings. As the cargo enters, the stands restock, that is what were trying to do today, to get 80% stocked, he said. Oxygen had also grown scarce in hospitals in Chiriqui, but the Health Ministry said the company responsible for supplying it had inventory in its warehouse in the provincial capital and was able to resupply the hospitals. A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind. NEW HAVEN A city man was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday after being caught with a firearm while on probation, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for Connecticut. Tyrone Brown, 27, pleaded guilty in April to unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon, prosecutors said. Prosecutors said Brown was arrested Aug. 9, 2021 after a search of his Stevens Street home in New Haven turned up a loaded 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. Brown was previously convicted of a series of offenses in Connecticut, including firearm and robbery-related charges, prosecutors said. Attorney Jessica Walker, representing Brown, asked for a reduction in the recommended sentence of 51 to 63 months. Brown, also known as Malik, had been carrying the weapon for self-defense, she said. Raised in the Hill neighborhood, Walker said her client had known violence and tragedy since a young age. Among other incidents, she said he witnessed the slaying of his best friend, Devante Jackson, been grazed by bullets twice and dealt with the killing of several of his friends from the neighborhood, including Richard Whitaker Jr. and Ciera Jones. Any single one of these traumatic events has the capacity to devastate a confidante of the victim. Malik, however, has suffered through all of them, Walker said. When he was still on the streets, he tried to portray himself as a tough guy, but that was out of survival; he could not show weakness in his neighborhood. In reality, he was scared. He was scared for himself, for his family, and for his three-year old daughter. He was so scared that he was willing to risk possessing the implement responsible for all of the above-mentioned murders. He did not want to die but was certain that is his fate. With the clarity of hindsight, Mr. Brown now understands that possessing a firearm is not, in fact, the answer to all of his problems and that real change needs to occur in order for him to break his patterns of behavior. william.lambert@hearstmediact.com SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled from his post in June, said Thursday that he will not campaign for his old seat in the November election. The progressive criminal justice reformer tweeted that nonstop campaigning has taken a toll on his family, which includes his son born last September and his elderly father, a former Weather Underground radical who was released from prison after serving more than four decades for his role in a fatal robbery. My son is on the verge of taking his first step and speaking his first word, Boudin said. My wife's research on multiple sclerosis at (University of California, San Francisco) deserves the same support she has offered my work. Boudin said that sitting out the November election does not preclude him for running for district attorney in 2023 for a full four-year term. Boudin, 41, was recalled from office in June barely three years after he won office in November 2019 amid frustration and anxiety over the pandemic and viral footage of Asian seniors being assaulted in San Francisco. His platform of seeking alternatives to incarceration, offering restorative justice and giving defendants second chances did not resonate with some voters who became convinced that the city was sinking into petty lawlessness. San Francisco Mayor London Breed appointed Boudin recall campaign leader Brooke Jenkins as interim district attorney until the November election. Jenkins on Wednesday announced she has revoked 30 open plea offers to accused fentanyl dealers presented by Boudin's administration, saying the deals' terms were too lenient. Jenkins plans to run in November in an attempt to serve the rest of Boudin's term through 2023. Also in the race is Joe Alioto Veronese, a civil rights attorney and grandson of former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto. Boudin said in his announcement that he was gravely concerned that the progessive policies implemented by his administration are being rolled back by Jenkins. Boudin, whose mother died in May, said the demands of his job had prevented him from has cleaning out her apartment and planning her memorial. His mother was Kathy Boudin, also a former Weather Underground radical. She served more than two decades in prison for her role in the 1981 armored truck robbery and died of cancer. Her husband, David Gilbert, was granted parole last October. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate DAKAR, Senegal (AP) Senegals ruling coalition party has lost an absolute majority in the national assembly, according to official provisional results released Thursday by the electoral commission. President Macky Salls Benno Bokk Yaakar party, won 82 of the 165 deputy positions to be filled, a major blow to the leader who many feared would seek a third term in 2024 presidential elections if his party held the absolute majority. They held 125 seats before Sundays legislative election. Aly Ba, the president of the Court of Appeals of Dakar and President of the National Vote Counting Commission read the results Thursday. Parties can appeal to the Constitutional Council which will release final results by the end of next week. The two main opposition forces, Yewwi Askan Wi (Liberate the People) and Wallu Senegal (Save Senegal) obtained 56 seats and 24 seats respectively, according to the results. The other three seats are shared between the three other coalitions. This is the first time that the opposition has won so many seats in the National Assembly. Election officials said the participation rate for more than 7 million registered voters was about 47%. Voting Sunday in the West African nation known for its stability remained calm and peaceful. A prime minister will now be appointed and a new government formed after the president on Wednesday chaired a last Council of Ministers meeting on Wednesday during which he asked the ministers to evacuate current affairs. The results come hours after the Senegalese opposition demanded the suspension of the publication of the results of the legislative elections of July 31. On Sunday, the ruling party had said they were going to hold a majority. The national vote counting commission has until Friday at midnight to publish the results, declared Dethie Fall, representative of the Coalition Yewwi Askan wi (Liberate the People) during a press briefing in front of the court which houses the vote counting commission. On Wednesday, Ousmane Sonko, the leader of the opposition who was disqualified from running warned against any treachery aimed at confiscating the votes of the Senegalese. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate NEW YORK (AP) Former President Donald Trump is expected to be questioned under oath in the coming days in the New York attorney general's long-running investigation into his dealings as a real estate mogul. The deposition could be a critical moment in the investigation of allegations that the Republican billionaire's company, the Trump Organization, misled banks and tax authorities about the value of prized assets like golf courses and skyscrapers. New York Attorney General Letitia James office said in May that it was nearing the end of its probe and that investigators have amassed substantial evidence that could support legal action against Trump, his company or both. Trump's deposition a legal term for sworn testimony thats not given in court is one of the few remaining missing pieces, the attorney general's office said. Two of the former president's adult children Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump sat for questioning in the investigation in recent days, two people familiar with the matter said. The people were not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation and did so on condition of anonymity. The Trumps testimony had initially been planned for last month but was delayed after the July 14 death of the former presidents ex-wife, Ivana Trump, the mother of Ivanka, Donald Jr. and another son, Eric Trump. Eric Trump sat for a deposition in 2020. Donald Trump Jr.'s testimony last week was first reported by The New York Times. Messages seeking comment were left with James' office and with lawyers for the Trumps. They either declined comment or did not respond. James, a Democrat, has said in court filings that her office has uncovered significant evidence that Trumps company used fraudulent or misleading asset valuations to obtain a host of economic benefits, including loans, insurance coverage, and tax deductions. James alleges the Trump Organization exaggerated the value of its holdings to impress lenders or misstated what land was worth to slash its tax burden, pointing to annual financial statements given to banks to secure favorable loan terms and to financial magazines to justify Trumps place among the worlds billionaires. The company even exaggerated the size of Trumps Manhattan penthouse, saying it was nearly three times its actual size a difference in value of about $200 million, James office said. Trump has denied the allegations, explaining that seeking the best valuations is a common practice in the real estate industry. He says James investigation is part of a politically motivated witch hunt and that her office is doing everything within their corrupt discretion to interfere with my business relationships, and with the political process. THERE IS NO CASE! Trump said in a February statement, after Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron ruled that James office had the clear right to question Trump and other principals in his company. While James has explored suing Trump or his company, the Manhattan district attorney's office has long pursued a parallel criminal investigation. That probe had appeared to be progressing toward a possible criminal indictment, but slowed after a new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, took office in January. A grand jury that had been hearing evidence disbanded. The top prosecutor who had been handling the probe resigned after Bragg raised questions internally about the viability of the case. Bragg has said his investigation is continuing, which means that Trump could invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions from James' investigators. According to the subpoenas, Trump was to appear in person at the attorney generals office, located in a Manhattan office tower that has doubled as the fictional conglomerate Waystar Royco's headquarters on HBOs Succession. As vociferous as Trump has been in defending himself in written statements and on the rally stage, legal experts say the same strategy could backfire in a deposition setting because anything he says could potentially be used against him or his company in the criminal investigation. No former president has even been charged with a crime. In fighting to block the subpoenas, lawyers for the Trumps argued New York authorities were using the civil investigation to get information for the criminal probe and that the depositions were a ploy to avoid calling them before a criminal grand jury, where state law requires they be given immunity. Last summer, spurred by evidence uncovered by James office, Manhattan prosecutors charged the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, with tax fraud. Prosecutors said Weisselberg collected more than $1.7 million in off-the-books compensation. Weisselberg and the company have pleaded not guilty. Weisselberg and Eric Trump each invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 500 times when questioned by James lawyers during separate depositions in 2020, according to court papers. The former president could choose to do the same, but it's likely hell claim lack of knowledge on many questions, New York University law professor Stephen Gillers said. That strategy actually may be quite credible because we know hes not a green eyeshade guy, but a big picture guy, Gillers said. So hell answer the big picture questions and those answers will be general enough to keep him out of trouble, or so his lawyers will hope. On the other hand, his impetuosity makes him a lawyers nightmare and his overconfidence may lead him astray. Whoever questions him will encourage that, the professor added. Once her investigation wraps up, James could decide to bring a lawsuit and seek financial penalties against Trump or his company, or even a ban on them being involved in certain types of businesses. ___ Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report. ___ Follow Michael Sisak on Twitter at twitter.com/mikesisak CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) West Virginia's Republican-dominated House of Delegates passed a sweeping abortion ban Wednesday that makes providing the procedure a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The measure, which now heads to the Senate for consideration, includes exceptions for victims of rape and incest, as well as for medical emergencies. During hours of debate leading up to the 69 to 23 vote, the sound of screams and chants from protesters standing outside the chamber rang through the room. Face us! the crowd yelled. Whats ringing in my ears is not the noise of the people here, said one of the bill's supporters, Republican Del. Brandon Steele of Raleigh County. Its the cries of the unborn, tens of thousands of unborn children that are dead today. ... Their blood screams from the ground today that you end this scar on our state, that you remove this curse from this land that was put upon us by a court so long ago. Abortion had been banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy in West Virginia until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion last month. After that ruling, the state's Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said abortion was banned in the state because of an 1800s-era law that had been unenforceable while abortion was federally protected. But last week a Charleston judge barred the state from enforcing the ban, ruling it had been superseded by a slew of conflicting modern laws like the 20-week ban. In response, Republican Gov. Jim Justice on Monday called lawmakers to clarify and modernize the state abortion laws in a special session. During their lengthy floor debate Wednesday, lawmakers narrowly voted 46 to 43 to add an exemption for victims of rape and incest until 14 weeks of pregnancy. Eleven members did not vote. The exemption also requires victims to report their assault to law enforcement. The bill provides other exceptions for an a nonmedically viable fetus, a medical emergency or an ectopic pregnancy when an embryo grows outside the uterus and cant be saved. Republican Del. John Kelly of Wood County said he is against abortion, but said he had to listen to his conscience when it came to supporting the exemption for rape and incest. Kelly said he would want his granddaughter to be able to access abortion if she were assaulted. Im the guy thats going to have to lay my head down on a pillow tonight after I make that vote. Im either going to go to sleep, or I'm gonna have to worry, Did I make the right decision?" he said. "In this case, my little granddaughter is one that Im going to make a decision for. I am not going to put her through the hell that she would have to go through. Hundreds of people descended on the state Capitol to speak on the bill in a hearing or watch lawmakers vote. They stood outside the House chamber and Speaker Roger Hanshaw's office chanting and holding signs reading, We will not go quietly and Stop stealing our health care. During the morning public hearing, multiple people were escorted out from the House chambers by security, including staff from the state's only abortion clinic. Around 70 of the 90 people spoke against the bill. All speakers were each given 45 seconds before they were cut off and asked to step down from the podium. Some people cried, including a woman who said getting an abortion saved her life and a mother whose teenage daughter was raped last year at a sleepover. Women's Health Center of West Virginia Executive Director Katie Quinonez was cut off and asked to step down as she started to talk about the abortion she got when she was 17, months away from graduating high school. I chose life," she said, raising her voice to speak over the interruption. I chose my life, because my life is sacred." As security approached to escort her away from the podium, Quinonez walked past them, down the chamber aisle and out the doors. People sitting in the gallery stood up to clap and cheer. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) Abortion opponents were shocked and abortion rights advocates energized by a decisive statewide vote in heavily Republican Kansas this week in favor of protecting abortion access, yet it's not likely to translate into new abortion votes across the U.S. in the November election. Four other states California, Kentucky, Michigan and Vermont could have votes in November on abortion access, and a fifth, Montana, is voting on a measure that would require abortion providers to give lifesaving treatment to a fetus that is born alive after a botched abortion. Opponents argue federal law already offers those protections. No other abortion initiatives are likely to make a state's November ballot. The Kansas vote was the first test of public feeling about abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June, and it upended political assumptions. Voters rejected a proposed amendment to the Kansas Constitution declaring that it grants no right to abortion. That would have opened the door for the GOP-controlled Legislature to further restrict or ban abortion and nullify a 2019 decision by the Kansas Supreme Court that access is a fundamental right under the state's Bill of Rights. HOW WAS THE OUTCOME OF THE KANSAS VOTE A SURPRISE? Abortion rights supporters prevailed by nearly 18 percentage points in the Republican state with deep ties to the anti-abortion movement. They took the outcome as confirmation that preserving access to abortion is popular. Officials with several national abortion rights groups argued that the vote shows its a mistake for Democrats in red states like Kansas to avoid talking about abortion and that support for abortion rights can drive voters to the polls. In Kentucky, donations to the abortion rights cause poured in immediately, said Tamarra Wieder, state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates. The election in Kansas coincided with the states primary. Over the previous 10 years, turnout for a mid-term primary has averaged less than 26%, with Republicans casting twice as many ballots as Democrats. But turnout for this election topped 45% almost 915,000 voters approaching levels normally seen during a fall election for governor. More than half of registered Democrats and Republicans cast ballots. At least 28% of registered unaffiliated voters, who couldnt vote on anything else on ballots on Tuesday, voted on the proposed amendment. The outcome also suggested that a sizeable number of Republicans voted against the proposed amendment. Three things in Kansas are really important to note: One, the depth of the victory; two, the amount of increased voter turnout, and three, that it happened in an off-year midterm election, said Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner, CEO of MomsRising, an advocacy group that supports abortion rights. Abortion opponents argued that the vote was a temporary setback and vowed to keep electing anti-abortion candidates. CAN EITHER SIDE RUSH TO PUT A QUESTION TO VOTERS IN MY STATE IN NOVEMBER? Likely not. For one thing, deadlines to do it have passed in the half of U.S. states that allow voters to put questions on the ballot without going through the Legislature. In Ohio, the Democratic nominee for governor, Nan Whaley, has called for putting an abortion rights measure on the ballot as early as next year, and efforts have started in Colorado and South Dakota for 2024. In Iowa, GOP lawmakers have taken the first step toward putting an anti-abortion measure on the ballot in 2024. In Kansas, anti-abortion lawmakers anticipated voters approving their measure. BUT THERE ARE VOTES IN SOME STATES IN NOVEMBER? Yes, but those efforts were all underway before the Kansas vote. Legislators in California and Vermont put measures to protect abortion rights on the ballot, and Kentucky lawmakers have a measure on the ballot similar to the one that failed in Kansas. In Michigan, abortion rights advocates believe they have turned in enough signatures to put an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution on the November ballot, but the signatures must still be counted. The Montana referendum also was initiated by legislators. IN STATES ALLOWING IT, WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR VOTERS TO GET A QUESTION ON THE BALLOT? They have to circulate petitions and collect tens of thousands of signatures from registered voters; the number is often a percentage of the vote in a previous election. Some states set requirements to get signatures from across the state, not just in one or two metropolitan areas. In Nebraska, abortion opponents are focused on gaining one more seat in its one-house Legislature for the two-thirds majority necessary to overcome filibusters and pass an abortion ban. A voter initiative there must gather nearly 88,000 signatures from at least 5% of the registered voters in 38 of its 93 counties, something known as the two-fifths rule. In Missouri, initiatives can take a year to get to the ballot, and in Oklahoma, the average length has been more than a year 64 weeks over the past 10 years, according to the secretary of state's office. From start to finish, if you could get it done in nine months, youd really be moving fast," said Amber England, a political strategist in Oklahoma who has worked to get questions on the ballot in recent years. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which advises progressive groups on campaigning for ballot questions, advises that the work should take three years, including building community relationships before even circulating signatures. SO IT'S A MATTER OF GETTING ENOUGH VALID SIGNATURES IN THE RIGHT PLACES? Not necessarily. There can be other hurdles, particularly if public officials who are players in the process oppose an initiative. In Missouri in 2019, opponents of a law banning most abortions after eight weeks of pregnancy sought to get a proposed repeal on the ballot, but Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican who opposes abortion, took enough time in vetting the language that supporters had only two weeks to gather signatures. While the initiative's backers sued and won the final ruling from the state Supreme Court didn't come until early this year. It was a significant victory, said Mallory Schwarz, executive director of Pro-Choice Missouri. But we didnt get a do-over. ____ Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas. Also contributing were Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City, Scott McFetridge in Des Moines, Iowa, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio. ___ Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna The Central Criminal Court in the UK has adjourned the alleged organ harvesting case involving Ike Ekweremadu, former deputy president of ... The Central Criminal Court in the UK has adjourned the alleged organ harvesting case involving Ike Ekweremadu, former deputy president of the senate. The judge handling the case is going to hear pretrial applications on October 31, but the trial will commence fully on May 2, 2023. The former deputy senate president and Beatrice, his wife, are facing charges bordering on conspiracy to arrange/facilitate the travel of another person with a view to exploitation, namely organ harvesting. The couple were arrested by London Metropolitan Police in June and appeared before a magistrate court in July. Ekweremadus wife was granted bail on July 22. At the court on Thursday, the senator representing Enugu west asked that a new lawyer represent him. The police had alleged that David Ukpo, the reported victim at the centre of the organ harvesting allegation, is a 15-year-old but the court ruled that he is 21. NigerianEye had reported that the former senator wrote to the UK high commission in December 2021 to support a visa application for Ukpo. In the letter, Ekweremadu said Ukpo was undergoing medical investigations for a kidney donation to Sonia Ekweremadu, his daughter, who is in need of a kidney transplant. He said both Ukpo and Sonia will be at the Royal Free Hospital London. Ekweremadus appearance in the UK court is the third time since his arrest. The politician is a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). He served three terms as Nigerias deputy senate president from 2007 to 2019 and has been a senator since 2003. The United States (US) Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve the accession of Finland and Sweden to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisatio... The United States (US) Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve the accession of Finland and Sweden to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) on Wednesday, with the resolution gaining the support of ninety-five senators. The single dissenting vote came from Republican Senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, who argued that there should be less focus on security in Europe and much more on the threat from China. US President, Joe Biden has strongly supported the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO and referred the matter to the Senate for consideration back in July. The vote in Washington followed a vote in Frances National Assembly earlier on Wednesday, in which two hundred and nine (209) deputies voted in favour of Finnish and Swedish membership, while forty-six (46) voted against. The Senate, the second chamber of the French parliament, voted to approve the accession a fortnight ago. Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Until now, Finland and Sweden have been close partners, but not members, of the Western defence alliance. Before the accession rules can enter into force, Finland and Sweden must be ratified by all thirty NATO member States, two-thirds of which have already given their approval for the new members, NAN reports. Former federal lawmaker, Shehu Sani, has criticised the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government for donating vehicles worth N1.14 billion ... Former federal lawmaker, Shehu Sani, has criticised the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government for donating vehicles worth N1.14 billion to the neighbouring Niger Republic. In a tweet via his Twitter handle on Thursday, Sani insisted that the donation was not in line with Nigerias obligation to support her neighbouring countries for national security reasons. Sani tweeted, Nigeria has an obligation to support her neighbours namely Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon for regional security and our own national security interest. The Federal Governments Purchase and donations of luxury Toyota SUVs to Niger Republic doesnt fall in line with the above. The Nigerian government, through the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, had on Wednesday evening, confirmed that President Muhammadu Buhari approved the purchase and donation of vehicles, worth N1.14 billion, to the neighbouring Niger Republic, to address its security challenges According to Ahmed, it is to aid Niger in the acquisition of some operational vehicles. Ahmed said though Nigerians have the right to question the rationale for such donation, Buhari, who approved the purchase, also has the right to make his own assessment of situations and act accordingly. Uche Onyeagocha, the immediate past Secretary to the Imo State Government on Thursday asked the state governor, Hope Uzodinma, to resign sin... Uche Onyeagocha, the immediate past Secretary to the Imo State Government on Thursday asked the state governor, Hope Uzodinma, to resign since he has shown himself incapable of protecting the lives and property of Imolites and foreigners living in the state. The former Reps member now the PDP Candidate for Imo East Senatorial District, stated this in a press release signed by the Special Assistant on Media, MacDonald Enwere made available to newsmen. Recall that it was earlier reported how residents on Tuesday night deserted Orogwe community in Owerri Local Government Area of Imo State after seven people were shot dead by gunmen who invaded the community on Monday night. Onyeagocha while condemning the recent murder of seven refuse scavengers from Niger Republic in Orogwe, Owerri west LGA, said, Governor Uzodimma should resign since he has shown himself incapable of protecting the lives and property of Imolites and foreigners living in the state. The former lawmaker described the sad incident in his local government, Owerri West, as disheartening and called on the Imo State Governor, Senator Hope Uzodimma to take urgent steps to restore peace and normalcy in the state. He said, This is the irreducible minimum responsibility of any responsible government. The continued shedding of innocent blood in the state under the present administration is condemnable and unacceptable. I most heartily commiserates with the people and government of Niger Republic over the gruesome murder of her citizens in the state and prays to God for the peaceful repose of their souls. A former Senate Minority Leader, Enyinnaya Abaribe, has faulted those linking the Labour Party, LP, presidential candidate, Peter Obi to Igb... A former Senate Minority Leader, Enyinnaya Abaribe, has faulted those linking the Labour Party, LP, presidential candidate, Peter Obi to Igbo presidency and Biafra agitation. Abaribe said such move was a smear campaign aimed at de-marketing Obi. The Abia South Senator wondered why the All Progressives Congress, APC, presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu has not been referred to as Yoruba presidency and that of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, as Fulani presidency. Abaribe spoke during a virtual town hall meeting organized by Ikengaonline. He stressed that the former Anambra State governor should be seen as an individual pursuing his constitutionally-guaranteed rights. According to Abaribe, critics should stop linking Obi to his tribe and religion. He said: Its unfortunate that Peter Obis emergence which is now a silver lining has come with complications. Tinubu has a presidential ticket, nobody is saying its a Yoruba ticket. Atiku has a ticket, nobody is saying its a Fulani ticket. But Peter Obi got a ticket and everybody is shouting: Its Igbo presidency. Some even try to link him with the Biafra agitation. Have they tried to associate Tinubu with the Oduduwa self determination agitation? Or Atiku within the Fulani herdsmen menace or the banditry in the North? Watertown, NY (13601) Today Considerable cloudiness. Occasional rain showers this afternoon. Thunder possible. High near 80F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.. Tonight Cloudy skies this evening. A few showers developing late. Low around 60F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 30%. Where can you spot Spanish architecture in the French Quarter? A new THNOC video does it for you. An enormous crane appeared at Harmony Circle Thursday morning to remove the striking black sculpture thats stood at the site of the former Robert E. Lee monument since Jan. 22. The process of elevating the 1500-pound artwork caused traffic on St. Charles Avenue to detour for more than three hours. The installation of the 16-foot-tall bronze by renowned New York-based artist Simone Leigh was the climax of the Prospect.5 international art exhibit that took place in New Orleans last fall. Many onlookers took pride in the appearance of an artwork by a Black, female artist at the site of a former landmark that had long been called racist. Times had certainly changed since the giant statue of the failed Confederate general had been evicted from atop its column in 2017. But the stark, modernist sculpture was also a lightning rod for critics. Some found the abstraction too jarring, some blanched at the nudity, others still wanted Lee atop the column, and a few even feared that the figure, which was wrapped in an enormous snake, somehow implied Satan worship. It didnt. The sculpture, titled "Sentinel," was inspired by Mami Wata, a water deity, long venerated in parts of Africa. Leigh never explained the precise allegorical meaning of the sculpture, but New Orleans intimate connections to African culture and equally intimate relationship with water are both obvious. The giant snake that entwines the sculpture is a traditional symbol for a winding river and, according to one scholar, the figures cupped head may be an allusion to Zulu ceremonial spoons the southern African indigenous nation, not the Carnival club. The Sentinel was a temporary gift from Prospect.5 to the city. It was always meant to be removed after a few months. According to Prospect.5 Director Nick Stillman, the artwork will now be returned to the artist. +8 Sculpture by renowned Black female artist unveiled at former Lee Circle Simone Leigh piece seen as homage to history, continued presence of African diaspora traditions +11 Some call it ugly, Satanic, obscene: Understanding the statue at the former Lee Circle Predictably, when a 12-foot, jet black, abstract sculpture of a woman wrapped in an enormous snake appeared at the site of the former Lee Circ +7 Black Power Afro pick sculpture is about as good as public art gets: Doug MacCash's review The gigantic steel sculpture of an Afro hair pick that appeared on St. Charles Avenue in the CBD last weekend is everything a public artwork o Taiwan residents protest Pelosi's meddling Chinadaily.com.cn) 15:16, August 04, 2022 Politicians and people in Taiwan aired their anger and concern after United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island, which has resulted in an escalation of tensions across the Taiwan Straits. Protesters gathered outside the Grand Hyatt on Tuesday, the hotel Pelosi chose to stay in after landing in Taipei. They shouted "Yankee go home" and carried signs calling the speaker a "warmonger". Wu Cherng-dean, chairman of the New Party, said it is firmly opposed to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, saying she should not have been welcomed because it was "harmful to Taiwan without bringing any benefits". "Pelosi's visit would push Taiwan over the cliff and turn the island into a war zone," said Wu, who was among the protesters outside the hotel. "She is only here to light the blasting fuse." Chung Chin, former director-general of Taiwan's information office, said that although Pelosi clearly understands cross-Straits tensions, she insisted on visiting Taiwan. "She is an ugly American with ill intentions of using Taiwan as a pawn. The island's leader Tsai Ing-wen is a traitor. The people of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan are capable of solving the Taiwan question in a peaceful manner," Chung said. Members of the public also expressed concern after Pelosi left Taiwan on Wednesday afternoon. Lin Yen-chen, a young person from Taiwan, said by receiving Pelosi, the island administration has totally ignored the development interests of the people. Some members of Taiwan's post-2000 generation fear that continuous US interference in Taiwan may lead to war, said another young person, Shen Hung-jui. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said on Wednesday that many politicians, civil groups and people in Taiwan have condemned Pelosi's visit and said her intention was to stir up cross-Straits tensions and that she fooled with Taiwan people to help her political career. They all opposed the secessionist actions of "Taiwan independence" carried out by Tsai Ing-wen and the Democratic Progressive Party. "Taiwan people are not afraid of standing against manipulation by external forces and refuse to be kidnapped by the DPP. What they want is peaceful development and to live a good life," Ma said. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Union Minister for Home and Co-operation Amit Shah arrived in Bengaluru in the early hours of Thursday. Though he is attending a slew of programmes throughout the day, he is likely to have lunch with state leaders to discuss hostility of party workers and Hindu activists. Cabinet aspirants are hopeful that Amit Shah would consider their long pending demand of cabinet expansion during his visit as the Assembly elections are fast approaching. State Party President Nalin Kumar Kateel and cabinet ministers Govind M. Karajol, Dr C. N. Ashwathnarayan and others welcomed Amit Shah at 1.20 a.m. at HAL Airport in Bengaluru. Sources in the party stated that Amit Shah has come to Karnataka to give a strong message in the backdrop of backlash the party is facing following the murder of BJP Yuva Morcha activist Praveen Kumar Nettare. Shah is likely to discuss the issue during the lunch and give the strong message to state leaders and strategise to deal with the situation and assuage party workers. The party workers have been demanding the Yogi Adityanath model to deal with the communal forces and elements involved in violence. CM Bommai has also stated that if need arises the Yogi Model would be considered for Karnataka. Social media campaigning against ruling BJP by Hindu activists is still continuing and the state government's assurance of "initiating strict action" against culprits is being ridiculed. Karnataka BJP has never faced such a backlash from party workers and Hindu activists. The party workers and Hindu organisations are looking forward to the message Amit Shah gives for CM Bommai during the informal lunch meet. Amit Shah will take part in "Sankalp Siddhi" convention organised at Hotel Taj West End and later in the noon he will visit Mother Diary of Yelahanka and afterwards he will visit the headquarter of Karnataka Milk Federation (KMF) in Bengaluru. He will leave for New Delhi on Thursday evening. Ahead of the Independence Day, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) has issued an alert of a possible terror strike in the national capital and in Jammu and Kashmir by IS affiliated new terror outfit 'Lashkar-e-Khalsa'. According to information, Lashkar-e-Khalsa has been specially formed by the IS to carry out terror activities in India. Afghan fighters are part of the new outfit, which has been recently created. A ten-page note has been issued as a terror advisory by the IB. Violent incidents in Rajasthan's Udaipur and Maharashtra's Amravati have been described in the report to show how the radical groups are active who can create riot-like situations. Apart from this, the IB has also mentioned about the assassination of former Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was attacked by an armed assailant. The IB has warned that such incidents can take place and hence during the Red Fort Tricolour hoisting programme of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, extra arrangements should be made. This time there will be more security arrangements in and around the areas of Red Fort and limited people will be allowed to visit the venue of the Flag Hoisting programme. A day after the ED sealed Herald House, the Congress on Wednesday stepped up attack against the government and gave multiple adjournment motion notices in the Lok Sabha and suspension of business notice in the Rajya Sabha. Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi gave a notice in the Lok Sabha to discuss the India-China border dispute issue. "The Union Government should clarify its stance on the restoration of status quo ante prevailing on the LAC prior to May 5, 2020 and progress made pursuant thereto." Manickam Tagore has given notice on unemployment in the Lok Sabha while in the Rajya Sabha the Congress has moved multiple notices under rule 267. Rajiv Shukla has moved a notice on the medical students who returned from Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion there. Shakti Singh Gohil gave a notice on the deaths in cows due to the lumpy disease. The government is scheduled to pass 'The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill, 2022' in the Lok Sabha on Thursday. Power Minister R.K. Singh will move the Bill on energy conservation. Amid the growing energy needs and changing global climate landscape, the Centre has identified new areas to achieve higher levels of penetration of renewable energy by proposing certain amendments to the Energy Conservation Act, 2001. The objective will be to enhance demand for renewable energy at the end- use sectors such as industry, buildings, transport, etc. The Ministry of Power has prepared amendments, after consultations with stakeholders. The proposal includes defining a minimum share of renewable energy in the overall consumption by the industrial units or any establishment. Regional Health System welcomed the inaugural class of psychiatric physicians to its new accredited psychiatry residency program with the IU School of Medicine. More than 100 people, including community leaders, elected officials and health care providers, gathered at the Merrillville location of Regional Health Systems to welcome the new doctors. Sotirios Travlos, Dasia McClain, Manisha Byreddy and Cory Mahler started the resident training program last month month. It is here and with your support and warm welcoming that we will not only train the next generation of psychiatrists to better care for our underserved communities, but we will also work, collectively, to encourage Northwest Indianas newest physicians to continue their careers here and help us close the disparities in access to psychiatric care in Northwest Indiana, Regional Care Group CEO Bill Trowbridge said. It's the first residency program of its kind in Northern Indiana and the third run by the IU School of Medicine. The residents learn how to provide psychiatric services while on the job, doing rotations in inpatient psychiatry, addictions, child and adolescent mental health care, primary care and other areas of psychiatry. The hope is to prepare the next generation of psychiatric physicians to "develop integrated models of care while increasing access to psychiatric services within underserved communities." Its super exciting for everybody, said Brittany Miller, residency education coordinator at the IU School of Medicine and director of psychiatric education at Regional Health Systems. A lot of the local hospitals and health organizations are on board theyre excited to interact with the residents and teach a couple of didactic courses." The South Shore Line will bus passengers between its Michigan City Carroll Avenue Station and Gary Metro Center starting Saturday and lasting through the spring of 2023 as work on the Double Track project continues. The $650 million project will add a second set of rails to single-track areas between Gary and Michigan City, upgrade stations, expand parking and replace bridges. Train service between Gary Metro and Millennium Station in Chicago, and between Carroll Avenue and South Bend International Airport, will continue to operate as normal, the railroad said. Buses will make all intermediate station stops, operating on the regular South Shore train time schedule for Carroll Avenue, Dune Park, Portage/Ogden Dunes and Miller, the railroad said. Westbound passengers boarding at Gary Metro should plan to board trains on the platform throughout the duration of busing. Loop bus service will continue to be provided to the Michigan City 11th Street station area, using a bus stop at 920 Franklin St., and to Beverly Shores Station. Those passengers will be bused to either Dune Park or Carroll Avenue, where they may board the next scheduled South Shore train or bus. Westbound passengers at Carroll Avenue, Dune Park, Portage/Ogden Dunes and Miller should be prepared to board buses in front of the station and reboard trains at Gary Metro. Eastbound passengers will detrain at Gary Metro to board buses for their destination station, or to board eastbound trains again at Carroll Avenue. The bus loading zone at Gary Metro will be located on the northwest side of the station. The railroad said passengers should expect delays of 15-30 minutes due to busing. With busing in effect, bikes cannot be brought onboard between South Bend International Airport and East Chicago. Bikes are permitted as scheduled from East Chicago Station west. Busing between Carroll Avenue and Dune Park stations has been in effect since the end of February, and this week the railroad is busing between Carroll Avenue and the Gary/Chicago International Airport station on Clark Road. More than 20,000 passengers have used the bus service each month since it started in February, according to the South Shore. CHICAGO A 33-year-old man has been charged in the wake of a shooting Tuesday on a southbound bus on Interstate 94 at 130th Street, according to Illinois State Police. Anthony Bland, of Chicago, was arrested and faces felony counts of unlawful use of a weapon by a felon and reckless discharge of a firearm, and misdemeanor criminal damage to property, police said. State police said they responded at 3:42 p.m. Tuesday to the report of the shooting. "A physical altercation aboard the bus resulted in a firearm being discharged and Bland was identified and arrested as the suspect in the shooting," ISP said. "There were no reports of any persons struck by gunfire and the bus was safely relocated off the expressway for further investigation." Bland was charged Wednesday and is being held at the Cook County Jail with no bond. The Indiana House will vote Friday on legislation that would make it nearly impossible for pregnant women and girls to choose to terminate their pregnancies in the Hoosier State. Senate Bill 1 bans abortion from the moment of conception, except in the case of pregnancies caused by rape or incest, when a doctor determines continuing a pregnancy would cause a serious health risk or death to the pregnant woman, or following the diagnosis of a lethal fetal anomaly. If approved by the House's 71 Republicans and 29 Democrats, the near-total abortion ban will return to the Republican-controlled Senate for lawmakers there to either consent to the changes made by the House, or to send the legislation to a conference committee where a few representatives and senators will attempt to work out a compromise version that must again win majority support in both chambers. The House agreed Thursday to adopt minor tweaks to the abortion exceptions, including clarifying the definition of serious health risk, which was not a part of the Senate-approved proposal, and limiting abortion because of a lethal fetal anomaly to 20 weeks post-fertilization. The measure also requires abortion due to rape or incest be completed no later than 10 weeks post-fertilization, but no longer includes a Senate component obligating the pregnant woman to submit a non-confidential, notarized affidavit attesting to the criminal circumstances that led to her pregnancy. "I really believe this bill is where it needs to be. It's in a good place," said state Rep. Wendy McNamara, R-Evansville, a LaPorte native and sponsor of the legislation. An attempt by a few anti-abortion lawmakers to delete the exceptions, reclassify abortion as murder and subject women who obtain abortions to prosecution for a level 1 felony, punishable by 20 to 40 years in prison, was overwhelmingly defeated 93-6 by House members, who were called in response "evil" and "wicked" by state Rep. John Jacob, R-Indianapolis. "Abortion is always murder because it always takes the life of an innocent human being," Jacob said. "If human life begins at conception then these pre-born human beings deserve the same rights you and I have." An effort by state Rep. Karen Engleman, R-Georgetown, to delete only the rape and incest exceptions also was rejected, 61-39, with every member of the Northwest Indiana legislative delegation, Republican and Democrat, voting to preserve the exceptions. At the same time, some three dozen revisions proposed by Democratic representatives failed to win sufficient support to be inserted in the legislation. They included a 20-week period to obtain an abortion following a rape or incest pregnancy, delaying the start of the measure to Nov. 1 from Sept. 15, a requirement that Indiana businesses provide accommodations for their pregnant employees, and a 68-32 decision against putting a non-binding question on the Nov. 8 general election ballot asking Hoosier voters if abortion should remain legal. State Rep. Sue Errington, D-Muncie, said she believes Indiana, similar to Kansas, has a "silent majority" of citizens who want to preserve abortion access, even though the U.S. Supreme Court gave states the go-ahead to further restrict or ban abortion in its June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. "I think the people of Indiana would like that same opportunity to express their view on whether abortion should remain legal," Errington said. "You would be able to see what the people in your counties want." In response, McNamara noted Indiana is "not a referendum state." She said the Indiana Constitution directs the representatives of the people serving in the General Assembly to make these decisions, not Hoosier voters. A separate proposal by state Rep. John Bartlett, D-Indianapolis, to prohibit the sale of drugs in Indiana to treat erectile dysfunction and sexual impotence was defeated on an unrecorded voice vote. "If an unwanted pregnancy is an act of God, then impotency must also be an act of God," Bartlett said. "It takes two people for a pregnancy to come about and to put all the onus on the woman, I think, is unfair." CROWN POINT Over the next two years, the vacant field that sits near I-65 and 109th Avenue in Crown Point will be transformed into UChicago Medicine's largest off-site facility. First announced almost a year ago, the micro-hospital will be UChicago's first freestanding medical facility in Indiana. On Wednesday morning city leaders and representatives from UChicago gathered to break ground on the $121 million project. "Our citizens, who now may travel away from Crown Point for their needed specialized medical treatments, will be able to stay local while receiving the same top-level patient care," Mayor Pete Land told the crowd. Analyses conducted by UChicago found about 15% of Northwest Indiana residents leave the area for health care, and 20% of those are for cancer. The two-story facility, located at 10855 Virginia St., will feature an emergency department, a short-stay inpatient unit, a comprehensive cancer center, an imaging center, an outpatient surgery center and lab services. Patients will also have access to medical specialists with expertise in cancer care, cardiology, digestive diseases, orthopedics, neurosciences, pediatrics, primary care, surgical specialties, transplant care and women's health. UChicago already works with multiple local healthcare providers to offer services in Northwest Indiana, explained Audre Bagnall, chief strategy officer and executive vice president of business for UChicago Medicine. The goal is to "establish even stronger and mutually beneficial relationships with other health care providers," Bagnall said. "Instead of driving long distances for advanced care, patients will benefit by having convenient access to clinical trials and to the latest diagnostic and treatment options." When the project went before the Crown Point City Council in November 2021, the micro-hospital was 115,000 square feet. After input from the council, a second floor was added, expanding the facility to 130,000 square feet. UChicago received a special use variance from the council in the fall, allowing the operation of a hospital in a B-3 business district. Slated to be completed in spring 2024, the micro-hospital will create over 150 news jobs. About 110,000 patients are expected to visit every year. The micro-hospital will have a positive economic impact on Crown Point as local businesses will be able to serve employees and visitors, Land said. "As mayor, it is exciting for me to know that our citizens will have close access to top-level physician care." The number of NIPSCO customers still without power a day after power thunderstorms tore through the Region was at just under 2,000 early Thursday afternoon, the company reported. The figure is down from a high of 23,000 and the company said most of its customers should have power back by the end of the day Thursday. "Due to the extensive damage caused by many downed trees and wires, we estimate that a small number of customers, including those in portions of Gary, Hobart, Merrillville and Portage may not be restored until tomorrow (Friday) evening," according to NIPSCO. "We are tracking weather patterns and there is a potential for additional storm activity especially in the eastern portion of our service area which could contribute to new outages today if severe." Merrillville remained the hardest hit at 900 outages as of early Thursday afternoon, followed by Portage at 640, Hobart at 482 and Gary at 446, according to NIPSCO. Wednesday's heavy winds and rain resulted in widespread damage, including downed trees, poles and power lines, the company said. "As crews continue to work on restoration, customers are encouraged to make the plans necessary to keep themselves and their families safe during an extended outage," NIPSCO said. "It can be frustrating to see power restored in other parts of your town or city or even across the street from home," according to the company. "You may be on a different circuit than your neighbor." "An outage affecting your home/business may call for a more extensive repair needed down the street or in another part of your neighborhood before what's affecting your service can be restored. Rest assured, even if you don't see our trucks, our crews are focused on finding and fixing your outage as quickly and safely as possible." The company warns the public to avoid downed power lines, damaged poles or other hazardous situations. "Every downed wire should be treated as though it is a live wire," NIPSCO said. "Following an assessment of the damage, NIPSCOs restoration process begins with repairing large transmission and distribution lines that supply electricity to large numbers of customers in large geographic areas including critical customers such as hospitals and emergency response," according to the company. "Repairs to other lines that serve smaller groups of customers can't be made until the larger lines feeding electricity to those areas are repaired." NIPSCO customers experiencing a power outage should report it by texting "out" to 444111, visiting nipsco.com/outages or by using the NIPSCO app, available on the Apple App Store or on Google Play. Editor's note: This story was updated Aug. 5 with details from the Elkhart Sheriff's Police that revise the account of the accident the office offered Wednesday. ELKHART COUNTY U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana's 2nd district was killed Wednesday in a car crash in Elkhart County. The 58-year-old South Bend native, a Republican, represented much of LaPorte County as well as all or parts of St. Joseph, Elkhart, Starke, Marshall, Kosciusko, Pulaski, Fulton, Cass, Miami and Wabash counties. The Elkhart County Sheriffs Office said officers were called to the scene of a two-vehicle crash shortly after noon Eastern time. Investigators have determined that an SUV driven by Zachery Potts, 27, of Mishawaka, crossed the center line for unknown reasons in a rural area near the town of Wakarusa. Potts was Walorski's district director and the Republican chairman for northern Indiana's St. Joseph County. Also killed in the crash was Emma Thomson, 28, of Washington, D.C., who was Walorski's communications director. Edith Schmucker, 56, of Nappanee, was driving the other car and was also killed in the crash, police said. The crash is still under investigation. Walorski was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012. Before that, she served three terms in the Indiana House of Representatives. Walorski was seeking reelection this year to a sixth term in the solidly Republican district. Elected officials from across the state and country issued statements mourning her loss, along with that of Thomson and Potts. President Joe Biden pointed to Walorski's work with the House Hunger Caucus in a statement crediting Walorski for years of public service. We may have represented different parties and disagreed on many issues, but she was respected by members of both parties for her work, Biden said. My team and I appreciated her partnership as we plan for a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health this fall that will be marked by her deep care for the needs of rural America. I am deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of my Indiana colleague and Congressional-district neighbor Rep. Jackie Walorski," U.S. Rep. Frank J. Mrvan, D-Highland, said. "I am grateful for our all too brief shared time together in the U.S. House of Representatives and appreciate her consistent friendship, example of public service, and openness to conversation. My thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends during this difficult time, as well as with the loved ones of her staff member Emma Thomson and St. Joseph County Republican Chair Zachery Potts. "Janet and I are devastated by the tragic loss of our friend Congresswoman Jackie Walorski and her two staffers Emma Thomson and Zach Potts earlier today," Gov. Eric Holcomb said. "Our broken hearts go out to her husband Dean and the entire family during this time of unimaginable mourning. At every level of public service Jackie was known to be a positive force of nature, a patriot and a relentless policy maker with an unwavering loyalty to her constituents. Jackies record of achievement is impossible to quantify. She will be remembered as a fighter with a huge heart that always went the extra mile and Ill treasure the times we walked a few of those together. Every waking moment for her was energetically devoted to improving the lives of all Hoosiers, the epitome of a good and faithful servant. She, and the example she set, will be missed every day forward. Holcomb is directing flags in Indiana to be flown at half-staff in honor of Walorski immediately until the date of her burial. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, ordered the flags at the U.S. Capitol to be flown at half-staff in Walorskis honor. The White House said its flags would be lowered Wednesday and Thursday. Pelosi said Walorski lived a life of service. She passionately brought the voices of her north Indiana constituents to the Congress, and she was admired by colleagues on both sides of the aisle for her personal kindness, Pelosi said. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, said he was "shocked and saddened to hear of the tragic death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski. My thoughts and prayers are with her family and the other victims of this terrible crash. Though we came from very different places politically, she was always prepared to work together where there was common ground, always decent and straightforward, and she cared deeply about her work and her constituents." "I'm truly devastated," said U.S. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind. "Jackie loved Hoosiers and devoted her life to fighting for them. I'll never forget her spirit, her positive attitude and most importantly, her friendship. All of Indiana mourns her passing, along with the tragic deaths of her staff Emma Thomson and Zach Potts. Please join me in praying for their families in this difficult time. U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., called Walorski "a tireless advocate for the Hoosiers she represented and a kind friend to everyone she met. She faithfully served her constituents and her Lord and Savior, and I trust she is now wrapped in the arms of Christ. This is a devastating loss, and we grieve for her two staff members Zach and Emma who had their whole lives ahead of them. Please join me and Maureen in praying for the families and friends of those lost on this tragic day for Indiana. "Jackie and I served together in the Indiana House of Representatives," Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch said, "and she was a fighter for her constituents and conservative Hoosier values. My heart goes out to her husband, Dean, and the rest of her family and friends. She will be deeply missed." "Jackie Walorski was a woman who stood strong in her values, cared for her family, and served Hoosiers well," said Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita. "I have many great memories and stories of our time together in Congress and on the campaign trail. In addition to everything else, she had a great sense of humor. She will be missed. Our sympathies also go out to the families of Zach Potts and Emma Thomson, who died in the same tragic accident. Hoosiers across the state mourn the loss of these public servants." State Rep. Phil GiaQuinta, the Indiana House Democratic Leader, served with Walorski in the General Assembly. My heart goes out to the families of Congresswoman Walorski, Emma Thomson and Zach Potts, GiaQuinta said. Working in politics, you develop a tight bond with the people you work with, and the loss of three dedicated Hoosiers is insurmountable. Congresswoman Walorski and I served in the Indiana House of Representatives with the shared values of creating a better state. May the memories of their legacies and work be a blessing to those who loved them and the people they served. "Northwest Indiana, our state and our country was blessed to have such a strong woman diligently care for our communities," said state Sen. Mike Bohacek, R-Michiana Shores. "I am praying for the families of those who passed this afternoon, and will grieve alongside our shared constituents and the state." Ambassador Joe Donnelly, who preceded Walorski in the U.S. House and now serves as ambassador to the Vatican, called it "a terrible tragedy." "Jill and I offer our heartfelt sympathies and prayers to Dean, Jackie's husband, and to all the families who have suffered such an awful loss," he said. Walorski and her husband, Dean Swihart, were previously missionaries in Romania, where they established a foundation that provided food and medical supplies to impoverished children. She worked as a television news reporter in South Bend before her turn to politics. Since Walorski's election to Congress in 2012, the second district has included the city of LaPorte and all or part of 14 townships in central and eastern LaPorte County. Beginning next year, it will contain all of LaPorte County except the western half of the city of LaPorte and the six townships in the northwest corner of the county. Walorski is just the third sitting member of Congress from Indiana to die in office during the past half-century. Northwest Indiana U.S. Rep. Adam Benjamin, D-Gary, suffered a fatal heart attack Sept. 7, 1982, in his Washington, D.C., apartment. Benjamin, 42, represented the Region in the U.S. House for six years prior to his death. U.S. Rep. Julia Carson, D-Indianapolis, succumbed to lung cancer Dec. 15, 2007. She was 69 and had represented Indianas 7th District since 1997. Eruption proved continuing importance of shortwave When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai submarine volcano exploded earlier this year, bringing down communications to and from Tonga, RNZ Pacific reverted to shortwave to reach the isolated island nation Public Media Alliance carry an article by Richard Sutherland, Head of News at Radio New Zealand: In January this year, Tongas Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai submarine volcano exploded. It was the most powerful eruption of its type that the world has seen since Krakatoa in 1883. In addition to sending atmospheric shockwaves around the world, the eruption badly damaged the international high-speed subsea cable connecting Tonga to the rest of the world. The island kingdom was cut off it was several days before jury-rigged comms were restored. Getting information out of Tonga was next to impossible. But thanks to shortwave, RNZ Pacific was able to broadcast vital information into the country. It may seem strange to be talking about shortwave this far into the 21st century. Shortwave conjures up images of 1930s-style wood-panelled radios jammed with vacuum tubes, receiving programmes broadcast from colonial capitals. But what many dismiss as a legacy distribution platform continues to show its worth even in the age of the internet. The New Zealand government signed off on a multi-million-dollar investment in a new shortwave transmitter for RNZ Pacific, the international service of New Zealands public broadcaster, Radio New Zealand. This will allow us to continue and build on a service that began in 1948, using transmitters left behind by the US military after the Second World War. Read the full story at https://www.publicmediaalliance.org/a-vital-tool-how-the-tongan-earthquake-proved-the-continuing-importance-of-shortwave/ Are you looking for engaging ways to teach your students about how to share their stories? Are you thinking about bringing a real-world approach to your writing curriculum for the next school year? Have you thought about incorporating multimedia projects, such as podcasts or photography, into your classroom but dont know where to start? In the eight videos below all edited versions of previously recorded live webinars we walk teachers through how to use The New York Times to teach writing using our lesson plans, writing prompts, mentor texts and student contests. Each video focuses on a different genre: argumentative writing, narrative writing, informational/science writing, review writing, profile writing, podcast writing, multimedia creation and reader responses. The videos feature a mix of Learning Network staff, Times journalists, classroom educators and student creators who share their advice for producing writing that is meaningful, engaging and impactful. Please note: Each year we adjust our lineup of student contests. Please stay tuned for our 2022-23 contest calendar. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is the fitting name of the restaurant at the heart of the acclaimed FX series The Bear, which stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, a world-class chef who returns home to run his familys sandwich shop after his older brothers suicide. Of all American cities, Chicago is the one whose mythos is most closely associated with a particular kind of work: honest, meaty, broad-shouldered labor that forges you into something bigger, nobler. Like the city its set in, the restaurant in The Bear is an unpretentious place, humbly catering to the working man. But the working man, we soon learn as a young, Black, female sous-chef mocks an older, white, male managers use of the label is a contested term, especially in an environment where nobody does anything but work, and pretty much nobody has anything to show for it. Its unclear, at first, why Carmy, once named one of Food & Wines Best New Chefs, has come back to the sandwich shop, but were gradually made to understand that he is returning, compulsively, to a traumatic site. Food was the thread that connected him to his brother, but his brother wouldnt let him in the kitchen, and so off to Sonoma and New York he went, to make something of himself. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is also Carmys original beef the core wound that ignited his ambition, the site of his connection to his family as well as his estrangement from it. In the popular imagination, Kansas is synonymous with modern American conservatism, and not without reason. It has voted Republican in every presidential election for more than 50 years and hasnt elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. While the state governors office has a history of swinging between the parties a Democrat, Laura Kelly, is the current occupant not long ago it was held by one of the most dogmatic Republicans in the nation, Sam Brownback, who tested the limits of supply-side economics. PRAIRIE VILLAGE, Kan. DeAnn Hupe Seib is a fiscally conservative, churchgoing Republican from rural Kansas. When faced with a ballot question about whether abortion rights ought to be removed from her states constitution, she voted no. So did her home, Jefferson County, which favored Donald J. Trump by a 32-point margin in 2020. I was old enough that I remember stories of women who could not get abortions or had to defy their church in order to get in and get an abortion in order to save their lives, said Ms. Hupe Seib, 63, a lawyer. So its a very real issue to me, and I know it can be again. The sweeping victory for abortion rights in Kansas on Tuesday the countrys first post-Roe vote on the issue relied on a broad coalition of voters who turned out in huge numbers and crashed through party and geographic lines to maintain abortion access in the state. The result was an election with a stunning 18-point margin that is shaking up national politics ahead of the midterm elections. WASHINGTON The No. 2 Senate Democrat on Wednesday called for an inspector general investigation into missing text messages from top Defense Department officials in the Trump administration related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he was sending a letter to Sean ODonnell, the Defense Departments inspector general, seeking an investigation into the disappearance of text messages from the phones of at least five former Trump administration officials, including Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; Kash Patel, the Pentagons chief of staff; and Ryan D. McCarthy, the Army secretary. The officials were involved in discussions about sending the National Guard to the Capitol during the mob violence. In June, federal agents armed with a search warrant seized Mr. Eastmans phone, stopping him as he was leaving a restaurant in New Mexico. In testimony to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, another White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, said that on Jan. 7, 2021, Mr. Eastman brought up with him the idea of pursuing litigation in Georgia. Mr. Herschmann said he responded that Mr. Eastman was out of his mind, adding that he told Mr. Eastman: I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: orderly transition. Mr. Herschmann, by his account, went on to tell Mr. Eastman that he should get a great criminal defense lawyer because he was going to need one. The newly disclosed email shows that Mr. Eastman did not let up even after Mr. Biden had been sworn in. It was sent after the Trump campaign had raised tens of millions of dollars from solicitations to Mr. Trumps supporters suggesting the money would be used to fight voting fraud, even as the claims made by Mr. Trump and his allies were rejected by the courts and broadly debunked even by Mr. Trumps own Justice Department. What we consider before using anonymous sources. How do the sources know the information? Whats their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source. Learn more about our process. In proposing to use the Georgia runoff elections as a route to finding fraud in the general election held months earlier, Mr. Eastman was implicitly conceding that other, more direct accusations of fraud had failed to find any traction. The email suggests that Mr. Eastman saw the courts in Georgia as an investigative tool, using the discovery process, for continuing to try to bolster claims that had already been dismissed. The vote margin also reflected a striking repudiation by Republicans of the America First philosophy espoused by President Donald J. Trump, who was openly contemptuous of NATO and of American commitments to international organizations. Some Republicans in the Senate have watched with alarm as a growing number of their colleagues, seeking to emulate Mr. Trump and appeal to his supporters, have taken up anti-interventionist positions at odds with their partys traditional hawkish stance. Even while Mr. Trump occupied the White House, foreign policy was one of the few areas where Republicans dared challenge him. The overwhelming tally on Wednesday with just one defection was one of the most forceful rejections yet of that isolationist worldview. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, voted present. Few Republicans expressed qualms with the notion of entering a mutual defense pact with a country that shares an 800-mile border with Russia, instead arguing that doing so would strengthen the alliance. The vote came a day after Republicans in the House rallied around Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California one of their most bitter political adversaries for defying the Chinese governments warnings and traveling to Taiwan. That support, and the resounding vote on Wednesday, were a stark contrast to the pitched battles Republicans have engaged in with Democrats on domestic policy. At least 11 Chinese missiles struck seas north, south and east of Taiwan on Thursday, less than 24 hours after Speaker Nancy Pelosi celebrated the island as a bulwark of democracy next to autocratic China. The Peoples Liberation Army declared its missiles all precisely hit their targets, even as Japan said five landed in its waters. The Chinese military called the exercises a prelude to a bigger show of force intended to punish the island for a visit by Ms. Pelosi that challenged Beijings claims to Taiwan. The drills, pushing ever closer to Taiwan and expected to run 72 hours, will also give Chinese forces valuable practice should they one day be ordered to encircle and attack the island. Chinas top leader, Xi Jinping, has said that he hopes to eventually unify Taiwan and China through peaceful steps, as part of his vision for a rejuvenated and powerful nation. But like his predecessors, he has not ruled out force, and Chinas military buildup has reached a point where some commanders and analysts think an invasion is an increasingly plausible, though still highly risky, scenario. Amid heightened tensions surrounding Taiwan, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Wednesday stressed the importance of Chinese neutrality over the war in his country as Russia finds itself increasingly isolated by the West. I would like China to join the unified world position on the tyranny of Russia against Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky said during a meeting with thousands of students organized by the Australian National University. As for now, China is balancing and indeed has neutrality. I will be honest: This neutrality is better than if China would join Russia. Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, that he would like to speak with Chinas leader, Xi Jinping. I had one conversation with Xi Jinping that was a year ago, he said in the interview, published Thursday. Since the beginning of the large-scale aggression on Feb. 24, we have asked officially for a conversation. DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine The Russian Army appears to be massing forces for an attack along the same southern battlefront where Kyivs troops are planning one, the Ukrainian military warned on Wednesday. The warning, by the Operational Southern Command, raised the prospect of a more pitched, seesaw battle in southern Ukraine than had been expected in the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which has been pushing toward the Russian-occupied city of Kherson. The enemy continues to wage hostilities along the occupied defense line, the command said in a statement. The Russians are assembling troops for an assault, it said. ISS astronaut's favourite ham radio contact NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren KO5MOS, who is on the International Space Station, describes his amateur radio contact with 8-year-old Isabella from Kent, UK, as his favourite so far He tweeted: I've had a lot of fun using the #ARISS amateur radio station #NA1SS on the @Space_Station to talk with ham radio operators all over the world. I've even (unofficially) worked stations on all continents! But this may be my favourite contact so far. Thanks Isabella and @m0lmk ! https://twitter.com/astro_kjell/status/1554592817024040960 Matt M0LMK had tweeted: April 23, 2016. A 2 year old sat on my knee and watched the students of Wellesley House school chat with @astro_timpeake, an event I helped organise. Today she got her chance. Thank you so much @astro_kjell, you have changed her world. #iss #NASA #ARISS https://twitter.com/m0lmk/status/1554561621640585224 A recording of the contact is at https://www.m0lmk.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Isabella_ISS_Contact_02-08-22.mp3 Amateur Radio on the International Space Station https://www.ariss.org/contact-the-iss.html Elizabeth L. Hillman, the president of Mills College, has been appointed president and chief executive of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan. The board made the position official on Thursday, announcing Hillman, 54, who served as a U.S. Air Force space operations officer in the 1990s before becoming a law professor in the 2000s, would be the third person to lead the organization and would start in October. She replaces one of the museums founders, Alice M. Greenwald, who said in December that she was stepping down after 16 years there. Former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who serves as the institutions chairman, said in a statement that Hillman brings a rare set of skills from her experience as college president managing large institutions through challenging times, as a veteran who is still relied upon by our armed services, as a historian whose deep sense of service is grounded in a lifelong commitment to learning, and as a trailblazer who has fought for justice and equality her entire career. Shes sure to be a welcome presence in a city that is for anyone with an interest in this countrys history and a stake in Black culture, a bounteous resource. A truth-telling Civil Rights Museum opened here five years ago. The Mississippi Museum of Art has compelling holdings in Southern-made work, some of it on view in galleries adjoining the Great Migration show, which has been organized by Ryan N. Dennis, chief curator and artistic director of the museums Center for Art and Public Exchange, and Jessica Bell Brown, chief curator for contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum. Work by local Jackson artists enlivens public walls. And the Mississippi Freedom Trail, marked by signs commemorating era-shaping events and personalities runs through the downtown. Indeed, almost all the people I saw on the street in blazing midsummer were tourists seeking out exactly such signs, the one at the site of the 1963 Jackson Woolworths sit-in, and the one that identifies the old Greyhound depot from which countless Great Migrators departed and at which others arrived. A Movement in Every Direction catches the pulse of that coming and going, which has not stopped. The beat, and the feet, go on. A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration Through Sept. 11, Mississippi Museum of Art, 380 South Lamar Street, Jackson, Miss., (601) 960-1515; msmuseumart.org. It travels to the Baltimore Museum of Art, Oct. 30-Jan. 29. Its understandable that people like me need to create our own world to occupy and control, when in the world outside your control is limited, Locke, 62, said in a recent phone interview. He grew up in Guyana in the years immediately after the country was freed from colonial rule, when a past that is dark, bloody and involves slavery and indentureship was only just out of reach, he said. As a result, we were aware of other worlds, he said. The idea of a parallel world was sort of an ever-present, normal thing. Elsewhere in the show, much of Lina Iris Viktors work explores the world made possible by Liberia, a nation founded in 1847 by formerly enslaved Africans from the United States. Her commanding mixed media works often focus on female figures pertaining to Liberian mythologies and histories, and question the dangerous allure of utopian representations of dominance and power. For Viktor, one of the younger artists in the exhibition at 35, responding to the idea of a Black Fantastic was sensorial it didnt need further explanation. LONDON It feels like a religious object, said Joseph Galliano-Doig, the director of Queer Britain, a new museum here, gesturing toward a heavy oak door in the main exhibition room. Painted a sickly shade of mustard and studded with steel rivets, the door also had a tiny peephole for prison guards to look through. This is what Oscar Wilde was martyred behind, Galliano-Doig said, its just horrendous. From 1895 to 1897, Wilde was incarcerated for the crime of gross indecency, destroying his reputation. He died in exile and poverty three years later at the age of 46. The object loomed over Queer Britains inaugural exhibition, a stark reminder of the danger and taboo being gay represented a century ago. But Galliano-Doig also saw it as representative of the door that was kicked down and led to all of the joy you can see here, he said, gesturing to the nearby artifacts narrating L.G.B.T.Q. Britons slow journey toward equality over the past century. PHILADELPHIA The artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden hit the gun range on a sweltering Monday in July. The air was sticky inside the facility, but her routine would not be denied. She shoots every week and avoids weekends, when the range gets crowded and loud with men firing off assault-type rifles, inviting sensory overload. It might be a familiar activity for some Americans. Less so for an artist. But McClodden, 41, a star of the 2019 Whitney Biennial who has three major presentations of work now up in New York City at 52 Walker, the Shed, and the Museum of Modern Art didnt purchase guns and get her carry license two years ago with art in mind. At least at first. She did it like many other Black Philadelphians, she recalls after the pandemic drained the streets, and then the George Floyd protests and counter-protests filled them with interlopers and a sense of swirling violence. Safety and self-defense were her concerns. Good Grief When to watch: Now, on Sundance Now. In Season 1 of this New Zealand comedy, the sisters Ellie (Eve Palmer) and Gwen (Grace Palmer) inherited a funeral home and its quirky employees, which the more uptight Ellie started to embrace but the more free spirited Gwen bristled at. In Season 2, Gwen has attempted to sow her wild oats as a D.J. in Bali, and she returns home with a fresh, if not always welcome, perspective. Grief obviously has the makings of a sad show, but it is much more look at all these lovable goofballs; life is short, but we have fun than behold the endless chasm of sadness, a darkness so dense no light can escape; death is coming. Season 2 is streaming now and also airs weekly on IFC starting on Aug. 17. If youre the sort of television viewer like me who watches true-crime documentaries and spends the whole time wondering exactly how youre being manipulated, this week brings an opportunity to peek behind the curtain. It comes in the form of two pretty good series, one released last year and one that premiered in America on Thursday, about a harrowing and seemingly endless case, the 1996 murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier at her vacation home on the southern coast of Ireland. The case has so many of the ingredients of true-crime fascination that it hardly seems real. The victim was beautiful, demi-famous (her husband, Daniel, was a leading French film producer) and far from home in a haunting, dramatic landscape. The killing, two days before Christmas, was brutal and without eyewitnesses. The Sandman, Neil Gaimans best-selling DC Comics series that lasted for 75 issues in its original run, from 1989 to 1996, follows Morpheus, a cosmic being who wields power over dreams. When he is captured and imprisoned in the first issue, the repercussions of the event extend beyond the dreamscape into the waking world, where Morpheus must eventually travel to set things right. For decades, fans have eagerly awaited an adaptation of The Sandman, though there were several clear obstacles to a successful screen version, including its expansive story and the sure-to-be intense scrutiny of those same fans. Several TV and movie adaptations were started and paused over the years, including a highly publicized film project that was going to be directed by and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Morpheus, until it fizzled over creative differences. Finally, on Friday, fans will get to meet the dream-king (now played by the willowy British actor Tom Sturridge) and his six supernatural siblings in Netflixs take on the story. Gaiman himself has overseen the adaptation as a writer and executive producer. Though not all viewers will be familiar with The Sandman, the original series remains a seminal work in the world of comics and beyond. For those new to Morpheus and friends, here are some reasons the original issues are still so revered. Some options are fairly radical, like changing the size of the court or passing a law declaring any subject to be off limits from Supreme Court review (both of which, to be fair, have happened in previous centuries). Other options are more straightforward. They involve the basic tools of democratic politics: winning over public opinion and winning elections. Larry Kramer, a former dean of Stanford Law School, argues that many progressives have made the mistake of paying relatively little attention to this strategy in recent decades. They have instead relied on courts to deliver victories for civil rights and other policies. That tactic worked under the liberal Supreme Court of the 1950s and 1960s and even sometimes under the more conservative court of recent decades. But under the current court, it will no longer work. The founders did not design the court to be the final arbiter of American politics, anyway. At the state level, progressives still have the ability to protect abortion rights, so long as they can persuade enough voters as happened in Kansas this week. At the federal level, Congress has more authority to defy court decisions than many people realize. If you want a better government, you have to actively get yourself engaged in creating it. And that you do through democratic politics if you want it to be a democracy, Kramer recently said on Ezra Kleins podcast. You try and persuade, and if you do, the country follows you. The Indian government on Wednesday unexpectedly withdrew a proposed bill on data protection that a panel of lawmakers had been laboring over for more than two years, saying it was working on a new law. The abandoned legislation, Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, would have required internet companies like Meta and Google to get specific permission for most uses of a persons data, and would have eased the process of asking for such personal data to be erased. Countries worldwide have been adopting such steps, including in Europe with the General Data Protection Regulation. But privacy advocates and some lawmakers complained that the bill would have given the government excessively broad powers over personal data, while exempting law enforcement agencies and public entities from the laws provisions, ostensibly for national security reasons. Poldhu ARC Open Day This weekend, travellers to Britain may consider a stop-over at Poldhu. The RSGB reports that the Poldhu Amateur Radio Club is holding an Open Day on Saturday, the 6 August from 10am. They welcome anyone who has an interest in amateur radio, or those that are already licensed, to join them for the day. There will be an opportunity to operate the club station, have a chat and learn more. The club has a superb site on the cliffs overlooking Poldhu Cove and Mounts Bay, with a triband HF beam and multiple dipoles. The location is close to the Poldhu Cove beach with its cafe, an ideal location for the family while you indulge your radio passion. Go to Poldhu Cove and follow the signs to the Marconi Centre, where there is a large free car park. For more information, please call Terry, G4CDY on 0044 776 468 1843. IRTS For both Japan, once the worlds largest chip maker, and the United States, the birthplace of the semiconductor, a decades-long erosion of their chip-making capacities has left them playing catch-up. Last week, Congress passed a huge industrial policy bill that included $52 billion in subsidies and incentives to revitalize the U.S. chip industry. The new efforts are seen in both countries as critical to economic and national security as China expands its share of the chip market and takes an increasingly aggressive stance toward Taiwan that raises the risk of disruptions to the flow of chips made there. The question is whether the initiatives will be enough. Japan once manufactured over half the worlds supply of semiconductors, powering Toshiba calculators and Nintendo consoles, but its market share fell to around 10 percent as globalization pushed companies in wealthy countries to contract out their chip production abroad. Firms like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, that specialized in made-to-order chip manufacturing and that received ample government support accumulated enough customers to achieve economies of scale that made it senseless for companies in Japan and elsewhere to continue making most chips in-house. Japan still leads the market in some products that are essential to semiconductor manufacturing, including specialty chemicals and silicon wafers. The country also has nearly a monopoly on some of the highly specialized tools used in the production process. The New York State Common Retirement Fund, which manages the pension plan for state employees, filed a resolution asking management to file an annual report on its efforts to prevent racial discrimination and sexual harassment. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Tesla in February after receiving what it said were hundreds of complaints from employees who said they were subject to racial slurs, assigned physically arduous work and denied transfers and promotions. In a response to the resolution, Tesla said it did not tolerate discrimination, harassment, retaliation or any mistreatment of employees in the workplace or work-related situations. Mr. Musk did not directly address the shareholder criticism when he spoke after the official part of the meeting had ended. Instead, he announced that Tesla had recently produced its three millionth vehicle and had become solidly profitable. Just 10 years ago, he said, Tesla produced only a few thousand cars and was given little chance of survival. I think its going to go up from here, he said. Tesla maintains that its mission is to accelerate the worlds transition to sustainable energy. But shareholders have become increasingly critical of other aspects of the companys and Mr. Musks behavior. Several shareholder proposals were endorsed by Institutional Shareholder Services, which advises large investors on how to vote at annual meetings. That included the proposal allowing shareholders to nominate alternate candidates to the board. Tesla has often faced criticism that its board, whose members include Kimbal Musk, Elon Musks brother, has been unable to restrain the chief executive from doing or saying things that damage the automaker. Prosecutors said the plot had begun when Mr. Abouammo met Bader Binasaker, a top adviser for Saudi Arabias crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. At the time, Mr. Binasaker was operating as a foreign government official, and Mr. Abouammo knew it, prosecutors said. They continued communicating with each other and later met in London, where Mr. Binasaker gave Mr. Abouammo a luxury watch. The kingdom had now secured its Twitter insider, Mr. Cheng said. Over subsequent months, prosecutors said, Mr. Abouammo used Twitters tools to access the personal information of users such as the pseudonymous Mujtahidd, a critic of the Saudi government whose Twitter account Mr. Binasaker wanted suspended. In return for accessing that information, Mr. Abouammo received wire transfers from Mr. Binasaker, prosecutors said. In effect, Saudi Arabia had paid for a mole, Mr. Cheng said. But lawyers for Mr. Abouammo argued that he had been just a Twitter employee doing his job, not a spy for Saudi Arabia. Prosecutors used bits and pieces that they have specifically plucked out of context and tried to assemble to create the picture they want you see, said Angela Chuang, a federal public defender who represents Mr. Abouammo and a lead attorney in the case. Mr. Abouammos lawyers said his duties at Twitter had included developing relationships with prominent individuals from the Middle East and looking into accounts that received persistent complaints, such as Mujtahidds. His lawyers said that Mr. Abouammo had executed those duties but that the government did not have evidence that he had then shared user information with Mr. Binasaker. Dr. Califf said the agency was optimistic about the idea and expected to make a final decision within the next few days, adding, Its important to note that overall safety and efficacy profile will not be sacrificed for this approach. Under current regulations, doctors have to navigate byzantine rules to request tecovirimat, the drug recommended for treating the disease, for their patients. The declaration does not change those rules, and federal officials have said they believe the regulations are necessary to ensure that the drug is safe and effective in patients. Monkeypox, a virus similar to smallpox but with symptoms that are less severe, has in the past primarily been found in parts of Central and West Africa. But in the current outbreak, the United States has the worlds largest number of monkeypox cases, and the virus is spreading fast. Less than a month ago, there were about 700 cases; now there are nearly 10 times that many. More than 99 percent of people infected with monkeypox in this country are men who have sex with men, which has posed a delicate task for public health officials communicating with the public about the threat. They do not want to stigmatize gay people, as happened in the early days of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, but neither do they want to downplay their particular risk. This week, Mr. Biden named a veteran emergency response official, Robert Fenton, and an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, to coordinate the response from the White House a sign that the administration was stepping up its attention to the outbreak. Dr. Daskalakis, who is gay, has built deep credibility in the L.G.B.T.Q. community over his career. Both he and Mr. Fenton were on Thursdays call. Monkeypox is transmitted mostly during close physical contact. The infection is rarely fatal no deaths have been reported in the United States but it can be very painful. The number of cases is expected to rise as the virus continues to spread and as surveillance and testing improve, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Thursday. Whistlers genial facade does eventually slip, and They/Them ramps up the familiar slasher violence, as a masked, ax-wielding maniac begins butchering various people around camp. But Logan, who also wrote the screenplay, feels so averse to engaging with the thorny political implications inherent in this material of having to negotiate a cast of gay, transgender and nonbinary characters in a horror context that the whole thing winds up seeming rather tame. Slasher movies demand a certain willingness to be provocative, or even tasteless: a little incendiary zeal is essential to the effect. They/Them wants badly to avoid offending anyone, and takes pains to avoid any action that might be considered problematic. Well, the result is probably inoffensive a horror movie without blood pumping in its veins. They/Them Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Peacock. The uproar over the budget cuts has been pronounced and focused in large part on Mr. Adams. Last month the mayor said that people who showed up to one of his public appearances to protest the cuts were clowns. Inside Justice Franks courtroom on Thursday two people in the gallery wore black T-shirts with white letters that spelled out, Eric Adams Defunded My School. In the face of criticism, the mayor has defended his decision on the budget, repeating the argument that drops in enrollment made them necessary, although he has said he would comply with whatever order may be issued by the court. Although Mr. Adams has remained steadfast in his defense of the budget, other city officials have had second thoughts. The budget was passed by the City Council in June by a vote of 41 to 6, but since then some members have apologized for the vote. Adrienne Adams, the Council speaker, has called the school budget reductions a charade. Leadership is about making tough decisions, Mayor Adams said on Thursday during a briefing before he learned of Justice Franks decision. Sometimes we disagree, but we shouldnt be disagreeable. In their lawsuit, filed last month, the parents and teachers said that delaying deliberation and a vote on the budget by the Panel for Education Policy, a governing body largely appointed by the mayor, had deprived the City Council of crucial information before its own vote. The plaintiffs in the suit noted that in at least 12 of the last 13 years, other chancellors have invoked similar emergencies to adopt a budget before the vote of the education panel. Much of the discussion during the hearing on Thursday addressed whether the emergency declaration had been proper. Quarantining should end. We shouldnt have kids miss school because they are close contacts of someone who had Covid. This practice is disruptive, has forced entire classrooms to miss two weeks of school unnecessarily and led to increased rates of chronic absenteeism. That leaves one hard question: What to do about a child who has Covid? The first part is obvious. Kids with symptoms should stay home. But the trickier part, of course, is determining when they can return. People can remain infectious past five days, and some for 10 days and even beyond. The C.D.C.s recommendation is to isolate for five days, and then mask for five more. Thats smart. It relies on masks because they work. Ideally, we would have kids test to return, as a colleague and I recommended last year, where kids must have two negative rapid tests before returning to school. But I think the strict science here is running up against the reality of the moment that the longer kids who test positive are required to be out of school, and the longer parents miss work, the stronger the incentive for parents not to test their children if they show symptoms. Next best is the current C.D.C. 5 and 5 approach, where students who test positive must stay home for the first five days and then return to school masked for the next five. But that still means that the default is for kids who test positive to miss up to a week of school. If masks work on day five, they also work on day three, right? So its reasonable to have kids stay home while they have symptoms, return once their symptoms have passed and wear a mask until 10 days after symptoms began. Most school districts dropped their mask mandates by the end of the 2021-22 school year. This is a good policy choice that should continue into the fall because the value of mandates drops over time, as people become less likely to comply. Still, anyone who wants to should be allowed to wear an N95 mask. One-way masking works, and those arguing that N95s work only if everyone is wearing one have brought their messaging dangerously close to that of anti-maskers. To the Editor: Re Theres More Than One Way to Ban a Book, by Pamela Paul (column, July 25): Thank you, Ms. Paul, for calling out the pernicious strain of moral absolutism that has hijacked the message of the center-left in the U.S. in recent years. Ban Dr. Seuss? Defund the police? Do these culture warriors want to pass progressive legislation or just tick people off? Worse, the backlash they create makes it even harder to move the ball forward toward laudable goals like universal health care, the Green New Deal and policies that strip millionaires and billionaires of their precious tax breaks. Instead of harassing publishers and chasing conservative speakers off campuses, lets get busy electing the lawmakers who can actually enact a progressive agenda. The key for success would be a slow, but ultimately forceful normalization of joining up with Mega AmeriCorps after high school, which would have the added effect of lessening the pressure that many kids feel to compete and excel in their academic pursuits. Access to higher education plays far too large a role in nearly every facet of American life, from what salary you earn to what side of the political divide you fall. This would be a conscious effort to reduce the importance of a postsecondary education by creating a bridge between high school and a career that could allow you to circumvent the need to go to college at all. Much of the money that goes to Mega AmeriCorps would be spent on training and apprenticeship programs to get young people credentialed and prepared for a career. Even middle-class kids who might ultimately find their way to a four-year college could be encouraged to join up with AmeriCorps with the proper incentives. For what feels like years, the White House has been debating student loan forgiveness. While Im not entirely sure about tying existing loan forgiveness to Mega AmeriCorps, I do think the White House could partner with states and, much like the G.I. Bill, offer to supplement or fully cover the state or community college tuition of anyone who had completed two years of service. The service time would also count as class credits and could even help with admission into more exclusive state schools. This would also reduce tuition costs by cutting down on the time a Mega AmeriCorps graduate needed to be on campus. Heres a specific example of how it could work Ive written quite a bit about how one of the enduring and less-discussed problems with homelessness in California is that there simply are not enough workers to carry out the grand plans of politicians or even maintain the current raft of services. This is understandable even in times when civic agencies are fully staffed, for the very simply reason that working with the homeless isnt easy. Currently, much of the homelessness work in California gets contracted out to third-party nonprofits like Urban Alchemy, an organization that helps formerly incarcerated people find work. But the intensity of the homelessness crisis and the labor shortage have placed a great deal of strain on these organizations to keep up with demand. An energized and well-funded Mega AmeriCorps could produce a new work force to engage with the homeless at every level: Outreach on the streets, support to get people into shelters or into permanent housing, and then follow-ups once people have stabilized. Because its a federal program, it would be easier for the public to monitor than third-party nonprofits. And while it might be true that many of the young people who go into these jobs will not work in homelessness services for their whole career, there will at least be enough bodies around to run everything from shelters to permanent supportive housing services to harm reduction centers to so-called Safe Sleep sites. An admittedly too-broad and unpopular opinion I, myself, am an AmeriCorps alumnus. I did an environmental restoration program in Seattle when I was 19 years old. I was not an ideal employee by any means, but I did plant some trees and learn quite a bit about forestry, climate change and park maintenance. I also learned that there is a value to service, which was an invaluable lesson during a dark time in my life when the thought of going to college and pursuing some sort of career seemed like an impossibility. In order to spread, viruses exploit the connections between humans. The more connections there are, the more likely a virus is to find a new host to infect. Monkeypox is not terribly efficient at transmitting from human to human. The virus has been causing illness and deaths in some African countries, where animals carry the virus, for decades, but has gone largely ignored in the West. When the virus made it to places like Singapore, Israel and Britain in the past, it rarely led to any further cases. Most people do not have enough close skin-to-skin contacts for the virus to transmit. But those men who do have a lot of male sexual partners are more vulnerable. We have seen this with some other pathogens, like MRSA and drug-resistant shigella. Now we are seeing it with monkeypox. The world needs to take the threat of monkeypox seriously. Around 7 percent of cases so far have resulted in hospitalization, usually for pain treatment, and several countries have reported deaths from the disease. Even in many patients who are never hospitalized, the virus causes immense suffering. On top of this, poxviruses have adapted to numerous species over time, and as the monkeypox virus continues to circulate it may evolve in unpredictable ways. Researchers have already reported signs of the viruss genome changing. In the worst-case scenario, monkeypox could become more transmissible and more deadly. And even without any changes, the virus may yet make its way into other densely connected networks where it can spread. To control the outbreak, those most vulnerable to infection need to have information that allows them to make decisions to stay healthy until there are enough vaccine doses available. That includes talking about reducing the number of sexual partners, creating pods of sex partners (where people keep sexual activity within a group) and other strategies to reduce the risk. It means communicating that scientists do not yet know how well one dose of the vaccine or indeed two will protect people, a crucial knowledge gap that needs to be addressed quickly. And it also means combating misinformation about the virus that is circulating widely on social media. Public health responders need to make sure that the production of vaccines and drugs is ramped up, and that they are distributed quickly to those who need them most especially in the countries that have long been affected by this disease. And we need to talk clearly and honestly about all this. Keeping the focus on gay men and our sexual networks carries a risk, especially in those countries and communities where gay men are discriminated against and persecuted. Part of the public health response needs to be watching out for attempts to use this health crisis as a pretext for stigmatization and discrimination. Today, in countries not previously affected, this virus is spreading predominantly in my community, and we need to focus efforts there. Talking about thousands of children being infected or millions of cases is not where the disease is right now. But, however unlikely, it is one possible future. The way to prevent it is by fighting this disease, not one another. What do we make of it all, though? Well, Sri Lanka, today, is not in the happiest of places, politically or economically. Sri Lankan leaders have appealed to the world for assistance. India and China, in particular, have pledged support. Thats the problem. by Malinda Seneviratne India is reported to have raised concerns at the highest levels over Sri Lankas decision to allow the Chinese research vessel Yuan Wang 5 to dock at the Hambantota Port. Yuan Wang 5 is said to be a ship engaged in marine scientific research, but benign though that sounds, it is also one of Chinas latest generation space-tracking vessels, capable of monitoring satellite, rocket and intercontinental ballistic missile launches. Intelligence for the military, then, and as such certainly part of Chinas defence hardware complement. It is legitimate for India to be concerned. However, even if one were to call it a warship, its not the first Chinese vessel of its kind to dock in a Sri Lankan port. In December 2010 the Chinese missile destroyer, Lanzhou, was locked at the Colombo Port for five days. On that occasion also, India expressed concerns. In 2017, a hydrographic survey ship belonging to the Chinese Navy, Gi Jiguang (Hull 83) was in Colombo for a four-day goodwill visit. This too may have upset India. Another Chinese Naval vessel, Qian Weichang, also dedicated to hydrographic surveys, spent a few days in the Port a year later. In November 2014, a Chinese submarine (Changzheng-2) and a warship (Chang Xing Dao) docked at the Colombo Port, seven weeks after another Chinese submarine, described as a long-range deployment patrol, had also called at the same port ahead of a visit to South Asia by Chinese President Xi Jinping. India probably raised concerns on that occasion too. However, the then Navy Spokesman Kosala Warnakulasuriya dismissed all concerns thus: This is nothing unusual. Since 2010, 230 warships have called at Colombo port from various countries on goodwill visits and for refuelling and crew refreshment. Yes, its not just China thats leaving footprints in Sri Lankan waters and ports. This is routine stuff for the US Navy, for example. In October 2017, no less than six ships of the USAs Carrier Strike Group (the USS Nimitz, the cruiser USS Princeton, and destroyers USS Howard, USS Shoup, USS Pinckney, and USS Kidd) docked in Sri Lanka. In December 2018, USS Rushmore of the US Navy arrived and in the following year we had USS Spruance and USNS Millinocket arriving at the Hambantota Port to take part in annual naval exercises. A few months ago, i.e. in March 2022, theUSS Fitzgerald, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer of the United States Navy, docked at the Trincomalee Port. We dont know if India was aware or was concerned and if concerned showed this much anxiety. Still, theres nothing wrong in India being concerned. China, after all, isnt Indias best friend. The US is certainly a better buddy, although relations have somewhat frayed after India didnt bow down to pressure from Washington to side with NATO over the Ukraine situation following the Russian invasion. Perhaps in time to come, as the centre of global political and economic gravity shifts to Asia, India would find an objecting tongue if US destroyers, submarines and whatnot docked in any of Sri Lankas ports. For now, nothing. For now, China is Indias pet bugbear. Well, the pet bugbear of the USA too or rather a close second to Russia US House Speaker Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan is an in-your-face giving of the finger to Beijing, nothing less. Thats another story for another day. For now, its all about India and China as far as Sri Lanka is concerned the shameless politicking of US Ambassador Julie Chung, a Ms Busybody if ever there was one, notwithstanding. What do we make of it all, though? Well, Sri Lanka, today, is not in the happiest of places, politically or economically. Sri Lankan leaders have appealed to the world for assistance. India and China, in particular, have pledged support. Thats the problem. Sri Lanka, given the current policy regime (which is one that for decades has pooh-poohed the country's resources and in particular the strength of the people), needs India as well as China. Sri Lanka cannot afford to rub either country the wrong way. Now, if one were to be clinical about it and assume that a) the world is flat, b) all countries have equal say and sway, c) friendship rhetoric is not frill that covers self-interest and insidious design, and d) the powerful, although eminently able, arent willing to twist arms, the we can just brush off concerns as being irrelevant, irresponsible and quite out of order. We could go with Sri Lanka is a sovereign country, we are friends to one and all blah, blah and many more blahs, but thats not the happy world we live in. So we need to be cute. Or rather, the government needs to have diplomatic finesse. Simply, its not a China or India kind of proposition. Its imperative that relevant authorities are open, frank and transparent with all parties. There will be sabre-rattling. There will be assurances. India knows that a Chinese warship or whatever vessel it may be docking in Sri Lanka is hardly a defensible reason to invade the island. India can of course withdraw support to Sri Lanka as it navigates an unprecedented economic crisis. Sri Lanka cannot say thats not fair. Of course that would fly in the face of Prime Minister Narendra Modis Neighbourhood First foreign policy. The frills would come off and the truth would emerge: India first and foremost, neighbourhood first only in a predatory sense. Not that it would bother India. Thugs arent really worried about being perceived as such when they have a free hand. India is worried about the Chinese footprint in the island, especially the Hambantota Port which has been leased to China for 99 years (in a dodgy, ill-advised and carelessly worded document) for commercial activity. Well, Sri Lanka should worry about the Chinese footprint too, one could argue. On the other hand, weve known that the Indian footprint was made among other ways by the jackboot of the Indian army. We know that Rajiv Gandhi, when the Indo-Lanka Accord was signed, bragged that it was the beginning of the Bhutanization of Sri Lanka. We know that top military persons considered it a victory that Sri Lanka had agreed to name Trincomalee as the capital of the merged Northern and Eastern Province. And we know other things about China. Chinas friendship is long and staunch on many counts, going back to the Rubber-Rice Pact and even before that. China did not fund, arm and train terrorists, create a problem and offer to sort it out and fail miserably. China did not undertake to disarm terrorists and fail to do so or despite not keeping to its side of the bargain insist that Sri Lanka implement to the last letter a constitutional amendment thrust down Sri Lankas throat at gun-point, almost. China has consistently and solidly defended Sri Lanka at the UN, especially the UNHRC and the UN Security Council. India, on the other hand, never stood up for her neighbour, choosing at best to abstain during key votes, sponsored by the USA or her allies. China has been a veritable guarantor of Sri Lankas security; India has actively subverted Sri Lankas security. Ideally, geopolitics would evolve into an Asian Compact (as opposed to the QUAD) where India and China stand together against the worlds biggest bully, the US-led bloc which includes NATO members. Ideally, those who talk of friendship would not impose conditions on support. Ideally, Sri Lanka would excavate herself from the current predicament by placing greater faith on her resources and people, living within means, setting up development banks, banking on cooperatives and cooperation, and thereby fixing the balance of payment crisis, weaning herself from dollar dependency, and stumping the import mafia that has brought Sri Lanka to where it is now. We do not live in such a world. Yet. And so, its time for the diplomats. Time for diplospeak. However, at no point should even those who have to dialogue harbour illusions about whats what and who is who. Goes for India, China and anyone else, including Sri Lankans who in collusion with any such powers or on their own steam sow the seeds of misery on the citizenry. [Malinda Seneviratne is the Director/CEO of the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute. These are his personal views.] Still, the industry has been growing quickly, and it had a record year in 2021. According to McKinsey, private equitys total assets under management reached almost $6.3 trillion last year. The American Investment Council, a trade group representing the industry, says that companies backed by private equity firms employ nearly 12 million Americans. With the help of lax regulation and indefensible tax loopholes, private equitys apparent destructiveness can be enormously profitable for its partners. Private equity firms make money by extracting hefty fees from their investors and from the companies they purchase, meaning they can succeed even if their investments go kaput. Phalippou found that between 2005 and 2020, the industry produced 19 multibillionaires. Its a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose model, said Jim Baker, the executive director of a watchdog group called the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. But it gets worse: Not only do private equity partners make money even if their companies blow up; they also get a pretty good deal from the government on what they earn. Private equity funds generally charge their investors two different fees: a management fee of 2 percent of invested assets per year (funds are held for an average of about six years), and a carried interest fee that is 20 percent of any investment gains realized in the fund. In most other industries, the Internal Revenue Service would categorize a fee like carried interest as ordinary income (like how your salary is taxed) rather than a capital gain (like how your stock market winnings are taxed). After all, the partners are receiving the fee as compensation for performing a service (managing investors money), not collecting a gain on their own invested capital (because its the investors money, not theirs). But thats not how it works for partnerships like private equity, hedge funds and venture capital firms. Under I.R.S. guidelines, carried interest is taxed as a capital gain, which has a top rate of 20 percent, rather than as income, which has a top rate of nearly 40 percent. The upshot: Millionaire and billionaire partners in private equity firms pay a far lower tax rate on much of their income than many of the rest of us. Terry Castro, a New York-based jewelry designer whose knack for blending the fantastical with the elegant propelled him from selling on the sidewalks of New York to adorning celebrities like Rihanna and Steven Tyler, died on July 18 at his home in Istanbul. He was 50. The cause was a heart attack, his son, Sir King Castro, said. Mr. Castro, who worked under the single name Castro, considered himself a creator of dreams. He scoured antique shops and thrift stores for inspiration for his cheeky yet sumptuous pieces, which mixed animal and human forms and invoked African influences with medieval and galactic imagery. He produced only about 35 pieces a year, by hand, but he saw his work featured on the covers of Vogue Latin America, Forbes and Hamptons magazines, and in the 2013 feature film Out of the Furnace. Access Now has also called out other sweeping online censorship laws in Asia, including those in Vietnam, Bangladesh and India. (My colleagues reported today that the Indian government withdrew a proposed bill on data protection that privacy advocates and some lawmakers said would have given authorities excessively broad powers over personal data, while exempting law enforcement agencies and public entities from the laws provisions.) It gets more complicated trying to decide what to do about these laws. Companies in technology and other industries tend to say they are required to comply with the laws of the countries in which they operate, but they do push back sometimes, or even pull out of countries such as Russia, arguing that the laws or governments interpretations of them violate peoples fundamental freedoms. Access Now and other rights groups have said that companies should not bow to what they say are violations of international human rights and other norms in Indonesia. Executives of American internet companies have said privately that the U.S. government should do more to stand up to overly strict government controls over online expression, rather than leave it up to Google, Apple, Meta and Twitter alone. They say American companies should not be put in a position of trying to independently defend citizens of other countries from abuses by their own governments. There are, of course, much less clear-cut questions of when and whether governments should have a say over what people post. Countries such as Germany and Turkey have state controls over online information, employed in the name of stamping out hateful ideologies or keeping society healthy. Not everyone in those countries agrees that those are reasonable restrictions of the internet, or agrees with how the limits are interpreted or enforced. Twitter has accused Elon Musk, in a lawsuit, of abandoning his planned acquisition of the company because stock market turbulence made the deal more difficult for him. But firing back in a legal filing, Mr. Musk says it was Twitter that torpedoed the $44 billion acquisition. Mr. Musk argues that Twitter concealed the true number of inauthentic accounts on its platform, accusing the company of fraud. Such accounts made up at least 10 percent of Twitters daily active users who see ads, Mr. Musks legal team asserted, reiterating worries that he expressed shortly after signing the deal in April. Twitter has maintained that the figure is less than 5 percent. Twitter also hid the number of its users who see ads, lawyers for Mr. Musk said in the filing, which was made public on Thursday. During the first quarter of the year, 65 million of the companys 229 million daily active users did not see ads, according to the filing. SALZBURG, Austria The 1920 premiere of Arthur Schnitzlers Reigen provoked a riot in a Berlin theater. A year later, in Vienna, the work was shut down by the police. Shortly afterward, the playwright, who was prosecuted for indecency, banned further performances in Germany and Austria. The play, a merry-go-round of love affairs with a cast of characters drawn from all echelons of society, was not performed again in German until 1982, over half a century after Schnitzlers death. Instead, its fame spread in translation, including French film adaptations by Max Ophuls and Roger Vadim. Last week, a new play inspired by Schnitzlers succes de scandale premiered at the Salzburg Festival, where it was one of two reworked classics during the events opening days. The Salzburg Festival is, of course, better known for its musical offerings, including the high-profile opera premieres it rolls out each summer, but drama is Salzburgs oldest tradition, dating back to the production of Hugo von Hofmannsthals Jedermann that opened the first festival, in 1920. Nowadays, the plays at the festival draw a more diverse crowd than the exorbitantly priced operas, but Salzburg remains a blue-chip event, and the audience is swankier (and generally older) than your typical theatergoers in Berlin or Hamburg. For her Salzburg debut, the Latvian American director Yana Ross asked European writers under 50 to devise new scenes using Reigen, a cycle of 10 pre- and postcoital dialogues, as a rough guide. The result is a 21st-century homage that bears little resemblance to the original. As an anthology of short dramatic texts by a diverse group of established and emerging writers, it is both varied and, perhaps inevitably, uneven. But actually, shes not very interested in steps, as Fosse so distinctively was. (His style is much the same no matter the material.) Rather, she builds on social dance of the period, the late 1920s, to tell the story shes chosen to highlight. That story is less about the cynicism of the American justice system how two merry murderesses (Jennifer Rider-Shaw and Chelsea Preston) get off the hook by turning their crimes into showbiz than about women negotiating the tricky new landscape of independence and prohibition. So when six incarcerated women perform the Cell Block Tango, we see their men getting bumped off and they look as if they deserved it. And when Hunyak, the immigrant who maintains her innocence to the end, is nevertheless executed, Feore stages the scene as an aerial act, having the doomed woman (Bonnie Jordan) descend from the top of the theater on a satiny ribbon that becomes her noose. I wont reveal how Billy Flynn, the self-serving lawyer played by Dan Chameroy, departs. Still, this Chicago is a mostly joyful take, as is nearly inevitable with full sets and costumes instead of the bleak aesthetic of the long-running Broadway revival. (With everyone wearing black in that production, it can sometimes seem like a super-chic sorority wake.) Feore has apparently drawn inspiration instead from the great Kander and Ebb song All That Jazz, which starts the show on a note of liberation: Oh, Im no ones wife/but, oh, I love my life. That sentiment is nothing youd expect to find in Gaslight, the 1938 Patrick Hamilton thriller about a woman driven nearly insane by her husband. In earlier versions of the story, including the 1944 George Cukor film, the wife, Bella, is a bewildered victim of psychological torture and a mostly passive participant in the escape from her husband, Jack. Shes rescued by a police detective, whom we understand she may marry next. Its a pattern that suggests abortion rights would have much greater support than Joe Biden did as a candidate in a relatively white state like Kansas perhaps even enough to make abortion rights favored to survive. It may seem surprising that abortion supporters would even have a chance in Kansas, given the states long tradition of voting for Republicans. But Kansas is more reliably Republican than it is conservative. The state has an above-average number of college graduates, a group that has swung toward Democrats in recent years. Kansas voted for Donald J. Trump by around 15 percentage points in 2020, enough to make it pretty safely Republican. Yet its not quite off the board for Democrats. Republicans have learned this the hard way; look no further than the 2018 Democratic victory in the governors race. Even so, a landslide victory for abortion rights in Kansas did not appear to be a probable outcome, whether based on the polls or the recent initiatives. The likeliest explanations for the surprise: Voters may be more supportive of abortion rights in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe (as national polls imply); they may be more cautious about eliminating abortion rights now that there are real policy consequences to these initiatives; abortion rights supporters may be more energized to go to the polls. Abortion rights supporters may not always find it so easy to advance their cause. They were defending the status quo in Kansas; elsewhere, they will be trying to overturn abortion bans. Whatever the explanation, if abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much more conservative than the nation as a whole and the result was not close. There are only seven states in the Deep South and the Mountain West where abortion rights supporters would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative. A heat wave that has blanketed much of the country this week will peak in the Northeast on Thursday, with potentially record-breaking temperatures described as oppressive in National Weather Service forecasts. Temperatures will reach the mid-to-high 90s across the region, with heat indexes over 100. Parts of upstate New York, eastern New Jersey, southern New Hampshire and Pennsylvania could break records set in 1944, during a sweltering August heat wave that The New York Times later described as A Month Too Hot for Satan Satan being an overheated vulture at the Bronx Zoo. The heat spike comes less than two weeks after another sizzling heat wave across the Northeast, in which records were broken throughout the region. Walking into the radio air room and seeing the situation will about bring you to your knees, he said. There was about five feet of water in that space, Im sure it looked like an aquarium at one point. Mr. Ruth said the Whitesburg community was in shock but was rising to the challenge. He and Appalshop hope to have the radio station back up and running at a temporary location in town soon. Its been a place where folks interested in mountain history and the regions history have gathered, he said. Its been a place thats just not one little thing for one little group, folks from all walks of life can come in and feel good and safe. While a full recovery of Appalshop may take months and the fate of many of the buildings contents remains unknown, a sign of hope brought Mr. Gibson, the centers director, some joy: despite floodwaters of more than 20 feet, a young apple tree remained standing with some 30 apples attached. This tree was clearly totally submerged in the rapids, and it still has so many apples and leaves on it, he said. I didnt know an apple was that hard to pluck. More people will probably be making this decision when they realize how long and arduous the recovery will be, Mr. Weinberg said. And when they go, they will take tax revenue with them, leaving cash-strapped local governments with even less. Itll be a partial government that does what they can, which wont be much, Mr. Weinberg said. There are people and groups throughout the mountains like Appalshop, the arts and cultural organization in Whitesburg that was badly damaged in the floods that have been working for years to remake eastern Kentucky into a flourishing region that is no longer dependent on coal mines. The Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, is already talking with lawmakers about a substantial flood relief package, and the FEMA administrator has pledged to assist in the recovery as long as you need us. But unless Congress provides additional money for people to rebuild or replace their homes a process that can take years, if it happens at all many flood victims will have to rely on savings, charity or whatever other help they can find. And many are asking how much there is left to preserve. On Tuesday, Bill Rose, 64, was slowly shoveling away the mounds of mud outside the mechanic shop in Fleming-Neon where he and his brother like to tinker on old cars. Like so many others, he talked about the resilience people must have to live here. He said he was committed to staying. You build back, he said. But he made clear he was talking about himself. Not his children. He was grateful when his daughter left for work as a nurse closer to Louisville, Ky. She loved it here but there was nothing for her no jobs, no opportunities, nothing to do. After the cataclysm of last week, there was even less. My generation, Mr. Rose said, will probably be the last generation. Wickremasinghe sits in the Presidents House with a failing agenda. He is a fervent believer in Washingtons project, eager to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the US to build a military, and was ready for Sri Lanka to join Washingtons Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with a $480 million grant. by Vijay Prashad On 9 July 2022, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lankas capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore. In early May, Gotabayas brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from his post as prime minister and fled with his family to the Trincomalee naval base. The publics raw anger toward the Rajapaksa family could no longer be contained, and the tentacles of Rajapaksas, which had ensnared the state for years, were withdrawn. Now, almost a month later, residual feelings from the protests remain but have not made any significant impact. Sri Lankas new caretaker, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, extended the state of emergency and ordered security forces to dismantle the Galle Face Green Park protest site (known as Gotagogama). Wickremesinghes ascension to the presidency reveals a great deal about both the weakness of the protest movement in this nation of 22 million people and the strength of the Sri Lankan ruling class. In parliament, Wickremesinghes United National Party has only one seat his own which he lost in 2020. Yet, he has been the prime minister of six governments on and off from 1993 to the present day, never completing a full term in office but successfully holding the reins on behalf of the ruling class nonetheless. This time around, Wickremesinghe came to power through the Rajapaksas Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (Sri Lanka Peoples Front), which used its 114 parliamentarians (in a 225-person parliament) to back his installation in the countrys highest office. In other words, while the Rajapaksa family has formally resigned, their power on behalf of the countrys owners is intact. The people who gathered at Galle Face Green Park and other areas in Sri Lanka rioted because the economic situation on the island had become intolerable. The situation was so bad that, in March 2022, the government had to cancel school examinations owing to the lack of paper. Prices surged, with rice, a major staple, skyrocketing from 80 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR) to 500 LKR, a result of production difficulties due to electricity, fuel, and fertiliser shortages. Most of the country (except the free trade zones) experienced blackouts for at least half of each day. Since Sri Lanka won its independence from Britain in 1948, its ruling class has faced crisis upon crisis defined by economic reliance on agricultural exports, mainly of rubber, tea, and, to a lesser extent, garments. These crises particularly in 1953 and 1971 led to the fall of governments. In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations. They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory. A low growth rate alongside a habit of issuing international sovereign bonds to repay old loans has undermined any possibility of economic stabilisation. In December 2020, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Sri Lankas long-term sovereign credit rating from B-/B to CCC+/C, the lowest grade prior to D or in default status. Sri Lankas ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidise its debt. In addition, over the past few decades at least since the ugly 1983 Colombo riot Sri Lankas elite class has expanded military expenditure, using these forces to enact a terrible slaughter of the Tamil minority. The countrys 2022 budget allocates a substantial 12.3% to the military. If you look at the number of military personnel relative to the population, Sri Lanka (1.46%) follows Israel, the worlds highest (2%), and there is one soldier for every six civilians in the islands northern and eastern provinces, where a sizeable Tamil community resides. This kind of spending, an enormous drag on public expenditure and social life, enables the militarisation of Sri Lankan society. Authors of the sizeable national debt are many, but the bulk of responsibility must surely lie with the ruling class and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since 1965, Sri Lanka has sought assistance from the IMF sixteen times. During the depth of the current crisis, in March 2022, the IMFs executive board proposed that Sri Lanka raise the income tax, sell off public enterprises, and cut energy subsidies. Three months later, after the resulting economic convulsions had created a serious political crisis, the IMF staff visit to Colombo concluded with calls for more reforms, mainly along the same grain of privatisation. US Ambassador Julie Chang met with both President Wickremesinghe and Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena to assist with negotiations with the IMF. There was not even a whiff of concern for the state of emergency and political crackdown. These meetings show the extent to which Sri Lanka has been dragged into the US-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the countrys debt crisis away from Sri Lankas leaders and the IMF. Official data indicates that only 10% of Sri Lankas external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47% is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland). Despite this, the IMF and USAID, using similar language, continually insist that renegotiating Sri Lankas debt with China is key. However, malicious allegations that China is carrying out debt trap diplomacy do not stand up to scrutiny, as shown by an investigation published in The Atlantic. Wickremasinghe sits in the Presidents House with a failing agenda. He is a fervent believer in Washingtons project, eager to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the US to build a military, and was ready for Sri Lanka to join Washingtons Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with a $480 million grant. However, one reason that Wickremasinghes party was wiped out in the last election was the electorates deep resistance to both policies. They are designed to draw Sri Lanka into an anti-China alliance which would dry up necessary Chinese investment. Many Sri Lankans understand that they should not be drawn into the escalating conflict between the US and China, just as the old but raw vicious ethnic wounds in their country must be healed. A decade ago, my friend Malathi De Alwis (19632021), a professor at the University of Colombo, collected poetry written by Sri Lankan women. While reading the collection, I was struck by the words of Seetha Ranjani in 1987. In memory of Malathi, and in joining Ranjanis hopes, here is an excerpt of the poem The Dream of Peace: Perhaps our fields ravaged by fire are still valuable Perhaps our houses now in ruins can be rebuilt As good as new or better Perhaps peace too can be imported as a package deal But can anything erase the pain wrought by war? Look amidst the ruins: brick by brick Human hands toiled to build that home Sift the rubble with your curious eyes Our childrens future went up in flames there Can one place a value on labour lost? Can one breathe life into lives destroyed? Can mangled limbs be rebuilt? Can born and unborn childrens minds be reshaped? We died and dying, We were born again We cried and crying, We learned to smile again And now We no longer seek the company of friends who weep when we do. Instead, we seek a world in which we may find laughter together. He said Mr. Jones was found in a bedroom with serious burns over a large portion of his body and was flown to a hospital, where he was believed to be in serious condition. We believe this community is safe with this person in custody, Colonel Bolduc said. The authorities identified the victim in the first house as Michele Ebeling, 53. The victims whose bodies were found in the second house were identified as Gene Twiford, 86; Janet Twiford, 85; and their daughter Dana Twiford, 55. Law enforcement officials did not provide information about a possible motive or say whether Mr. Jones knew the victims. No charges were announced during the news conference on Friday. The State Patrol said in a statement late Thursday that investigators believed gunfire played a part at both crime scenes. They also said that the fires were suspected to have started at around the same time, but that the second fire was not visible outside the home for hours. About 15 faith and community-based groups in Washington have opened their doors to the migrants, offering them meals, showers and hygiene items during daylight hours. But the increase in the frequency of buses, from two to four a day to now sometimes eight, has depleted donations and exceeded capacity, and many volunteers have contracted Covid-19, said Ms. Scherff. The mayors have been playing into the Republican governors hands, said Adam Isacson, a scholar at the Washington Office on Latin America who studies the border. Of course theyre making noise about the migrant arrivals because those who need shelter are a strain on their cities social services, he said. But the tenor of their comments, he said, is giving the governors ammunition to push for a clampdown on immigration, including such measures as erecting border walls and eliminating asylum. On a recent night, migrants climbing down from three buses were greeted by volunteers and staff from SAMU First Response, an international aid organization that has received some funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and began operating in Washington in late June. They were given water, pizza and granola bars, and some were provided tickets for onward travel. By 1 a.m., most had settled for the night on the marble floor of the East Hall of Union Station. Others, from earlier buses, were forced to sleep on the streets. It created an unusual tableau: unhoused Americans on one side of the plaza; on the other, migrants with their meager belongings splayed on the ground all within sight of the Capitol. Tatiana Laborde, SAMUs managing director, said her organization had enough funds to buy tickets to other destinations for about a third of the migrants for whom they were providing services. The groups shelter in Montgomery County, Md., could not provide long-term housing, she said. WASHINGTON The lawyer for plaintiffs who are suing the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said Thursday that he plans to turn over two years of text messages from Mr. Joness phone to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The lawyer, Mark Bankston, who represents Sandy Hook parents suing Mr. Jones in defamation lawsuits for lies he had spread about the 2012 school shooting, said in court in Austin, Texas, that he planned to turn over the texts unless a judge instructed him not to do so. I certainly intend to do that, unless you tell me not to, Mr. Bankston told the judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, who appeared unsympathetic to requests from Mr. Joness lawyers that Mr. Bankston return the materials to them. Democrats are pressing to enact the legislation in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the nearly 50-year-old right to an abortion, amid concern that precedents on same-sex marriages and protecting the rights of such couples could be the next to fall. In a concurring opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the court also should reconsider past rulings that established marriage equality and access to contraception. The House moved quickly to pass the same-sex marriage bill, as Democrats rushed to put themselves on the record on the issue and Republicans on the spot ahead of the elections. But 47 Republicans voted in favor less than a quarter of the conference yet a larger proportion than expected and Mr. Schumer said he would work to find the necessary votes to move it past a filibuster and to a vote. In a matter of hours, a bill that many thought would be dead on arrival in the Senate became the subject of an intensive legislative push. Ms. Baldwin, the epitome of Midwestern nice who enjoys sewing and cooking hobbies she describes as boring is in some ways an unlikely arm-twister for the effort. Never one to seek attention, she played down the historic nature of her victory when she won her Senate seat 10 years ago, getting halfway through her speech before she mentioned that she was well aware that her election was a milestone for gay rights. (She also made history in 1999 with her election to the House, the first openly gay woman to serve there.) U.S. and European officials say few powers have conquered a country and destroyed an opposing army with a mostly volunteer force, as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is attempting to do. But Mr. Putin has shown no indications that he wants any sort of full-scale draft, which would amount to an admission to his country that the fight in Ukraine will be a long war, not a short operation. Russia has announced, and the West has predicted, various pauses in the war. After the fall of the city of Lysychansk last month, for example, Russian commanders said their forces would pause and reset, but artillery attacks continued. This time, NATO and other officials say the reality on the ground should force the Russian military to slow its operations to reinforce depleted units, better protect its supply lines and move in new equipment. These officials concede it is possible that Mr. Putin could override the advice of his officers and order the drive in the east to continue through the summer. For all of Russias equipment and manpower issues, high energy prices mean Moscow is making enough money to fund its military. The expected Russian pause comes after the bloodiest phase of the war for both sides. Ukraine and Russia have lost thousands of soldiers, including some of their best and most experienced frontline troops, during the last weeks of a grinding artillery battle that destroyed cities and towns in the path of Moscows army. Tennessee is the only state hosting a primary contest on Thursday. All polling places in the state close simultaneously: 8 p.m. in the Eastern time zone and 7 p.m. in the Central time zone. Look up polling locations and sample ballots here. Two of the notable races on the ballot: Governor Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, is seeking re-election and more than half of all voters approve of the job hes doing, according to recent polling. Democrats, however, are trying to make the case that he can be toppled in a general election. The Democratic primary features three candidates: Jason Martin, a Nashville physician; J.B. Smiley, a Memphis lawyer and city councilman; and Carnita Atwater, a Memphis community activist. Fifth Congressional District Redistricting diluted Democrats power in this Nashville-area district, making it more favorable for Republicans and prompting Jim Cooper, the 16-term Democratic congressman representing it, to retire. The Republican primary is crowded with 10 candidates, including Kurt Winstead, a businessman who has raised hefty sums for his campaign, and the former Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell. State Senator Heidi Campbell is unopposed on the Democratic side. I reiterate to the people and to all of you: I am innocent, Ms. Vazquez said. I have not committed any crime or any irregularity. Now its up to me to defend myself. I assure you they have committed a great injustice against me. A lawyer for Ms. Vazquez, Ignacio Fernandez, noted that she was not accused of personally receiving any bribe money. Not even the indictment alleges that she was enriched one cent, Mr. Fernandez said. The arrest of the former governor coincides with a wave of unrelated public corruption cases on the island, including the arrests of nine mayors so far this year. Ms. Vazquez was the commonwealths top prosecutor in 2019 when mass protests swept Gov. Ricardo A. Rossello out of office. The island has no lieutenant governor, and the first office in the line of succession, secretary of state, was vacant at the time, so Mr. Rossellos resignation unexpectedly catapulted Ms. Vazquez into the governorship. A Republican and member of the islands pro-statehood party, she served for less than two years, completing Mr. Rossellos term but losing her bid for another term when she was defeated in a primary in 2020. Federal prosecutors said that when Ms. Vazquez lost the primary, Mr. Herrera tried offering a bribe to the winner the current governor, Pedro R. Pierluisi. But the person representing Mr. Pierluisi in the scheme was actually working undercover for the F.B.I. In May, Ms. Vazquez assembled reporters at the office of one of her lawyers, Luis Plaza, to announce that she was under investigation. He described the investigation then as a technical issue that they would fight in court. PHNOM PENH, Cambodia The United States will give $25 million in agriculture development aid over five years to projects in Cambodia to help alleviate food insecurity, an issue made more urgent by Russias war in Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Thursday. The new aid is part of a 12-year-old American food security project in Cambodia and will fund an initiative called Harvest Three, in which the U.S. Agency for International Development will work with Cambodian farmers and others in the food industry to get products to more markets. The focus will include grains and fish, Mr. Blinken said. The needs are urgent, he added. Far too many Cambodians still live in food insecurity. Far too many Cambodian children are malnourished. TOKYO North Korea has for years lobbed missiles into Japans waters without great incident. But for an increasingly powerful and aggressive China to do the same as it did Thursday as a part of military exercises has sharply raised concerns in political and security circles from Tokyo to Washington. Beijings firing of five missiles into waters that are part of Japans exclusive economic zone, to the east of Taiwan, has sent a warning to both the United States and Japan about coming to the aid of Taiwan in the event of a conflict there, analysts said. Beijing wants to remind Washington that it can strike not only Taiwan, but also American bases in the region, such as Kadena air base on Okinawa, as well as any marine invasion forces, said Thomas G. Mahnken, a former Pentagon official who is now president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. In Parliament, the climate minister, Chris Bowen, said simply: This is a good day for our country. But the commitment which Mr. Albanese campaigned on as Labor challenged the long-governing conservative coalition in the federal election in May is widely seen as long overdue, and just the start of a vital economic transition in a country that is the worlds third-largest fossil fuel exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia. Amanda McKenzie, who runs the Climate Council, an association of scientists and community leaders who have called for years for Australia to do more on climate change, called the climate change bill a springboard that will require the government to hold itself accountable while creating a framework for investment in renewable energy. Richie Merzian, the climate and energy program director at the Australia Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, described the bill as a huge leap forward, while pointing out that there was still a long road ahead. State Council working harder to shore up nation's job market (China Daily) 15:28, August 04, 2022 The central government has scaled up measures to create jobs and stabilize the job market, pledging to continue to issue loans to eligible startups and self-employed individuals and help college graduates and migrant workers find jobs. In its executive meeting on July 13, the State Council, China's Cabinet, adopted a host of measures to shore up employment, including a policy stipulating that guarantee loans of up to 200,000 yuan ($29,700) will be provided to eligible startups and self-employed households, with interest subsidies to be offered from government funds. The meeting called for local governments to earmark funds to help business incubation bases lower rents and other fees for startups. The meeting came as China's urban unemployment rate reached 5.7 percent for the first half of this year, with the surveyed urban unemployment rate dropping from 6.1 percent in April to 5.5 percent in June, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The Government Work Report this year set the target of creating 11 million urban jobs and maintaining the urban unemployment rate at or below 5.5 percent. Meanwhile, the jobless rate for people age 25 to 59 was 4.5 percent in June, down by 0.6 percentage points from May and close to the average level last year. Fu Linghui, a spokesman with the NBS, told a news conference on July 15 that the nation has turned the tide for the rise in urban employment rate as the economy is gradually recovering. Youth unemployment remains a major challenge in the nation's labor market as the unemployment rate for people age 16 to 24 reached 19.3 percent in June. Fu attributed the rise in youth unemployment to frictional unemploymentthe fallow period between successive jobsas most young people were entering the job market for the first time. He highlighted the need to continue giving priority to helping key groups, including the young people, find work in a bid to stabilize the job market. The State Council meeting on July 13 called for intensified efforts to help with the employment of college graduates, which totaled a record high of 10.76 million this year, saying that policies will be rolled out to support the hiring of graduates in outsourcing industries. It pledged to offer tailored employment services to graduates who have yet to find jobs and carry out public works programs effectively. The meeting also decided to allow workers on flexible payrolls to join basic pension and medical insurance programs where they work and extend social insurance subsidies to graduates and those having difficulty finding jobs when they engage in flexible employment. Zhang Ying, head of the job promotion department at the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, told a news conference on July 22 that helping unemployed graduates find jobs will continue to be a priority going forward. She said the government will provide tailored services for unemployed graduates, including boosting recruitment at the grassroots level and providing more internships. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Mick Miners was herding sheep on a four-wheeler last week when he stumbled upon a pointy black object that looked more than nine feet tall. It reminded him of either a burned tree or a piece of farm machinery. Pretty frightening, actually, Mr. Miners, 48, said by phone on Thursday from his roughly 5,000-acre property in a remote corner of southeastern Australia. I was quite surprised, he added. Its not something you see every day on a sheep farm. Mr. Miners took a picture and sent it to a neighboring farmer, Jock Wallace, who happened to have discovered a similarly mysterious object on his farm a few days earlier. Three tourists were injured in Iceland Wednesday night as they trekked across rough terrain to a volcanic eruption that is drawing awe-struck onlookers to its sputtering fountains of red-hot lava, a spokeswoman for Icelands civil protection agency said. The injuries, including a broken ankle, were not serious, but they underscored the risks that tourists face if they try to hike to the lava flowing from the Fagradalsfjall volcano in southwest Iceland, the spokeswoman, Hjordis Gudmundsdottir, said in an interview on Thursday. We tell people that, even though we know its spectacular and theres nothing like it, we have to be careful, and we have to be prepared before we go, Ms. Gudmundsdottir said. BERLIN Germanys leading conservative politicians will visit one of the countrys last remaining nuclear plants on Thursday as part of a push to urge the government to abandon its planned exit from nuclear power amid growing concerns of a looming energy crisis due to Russias war in Ukraine. Germany is bracing to be one of the worst hit by Europes efforts to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels to punish Moscow for the invasion. That has led some parties particularly the center-right Christian Democrats, who are in the opposition, and the pro-business Free Democrats, one of the governments coalition parties to push for Germany to keep its last three nuclear power plants online. Chancellor Angela Merkel moved in 2011 to wind down the countrys nuclear power after an earthquake and tsunami in Japan led to overheating and explosions at its Fukushima nuclear plant. Thursdays visit by Martin Soder, the leader of the southern state of Bavaria, and Friedrich Merz, the head of the Christian Democrats, to the Bavarian Isar 2 plant comes after Ms. Merkels successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, suggested that he may be willing to reverse her decision. BELMULLET, Ireland The call of the corncrake a small, shy bird related to the coot is harsh and monotonous, yet for older generations it was a beloved sound of summer in Ireland, evoking wistful memories of warm weather, hay making and romantic nights. These days, though, its call is seldom heard outside a few scattered enclaves along the western coast, like Belmullet, a remote peninsula of County Mayo. Once numerous, the birds became threatened in much of their Western European range in the late 20th century, mainly because of changes in agricultural practices that deprived them of places to breed. Older people still talk about coming home from dances in summer nights and hearing the corncrakes calling from the fields all around them, said Anita Donaghy, assistant head of conservation at Birdwatch Ireland. You hear about them making special trips to places in the west where they are going to hear the corncrake again. Its sad that many young people have never heard it. Some prisoners are tortured, or beaten by fellow inmates. Some have to work 16-hour days. A few are forced to watch Russian propaganda on repeat. This is the world of the Russian penal colony, into which Brittney Griner is about to be inducted for a nine-year term. Penal colonies are the descendants of gulags, the notorious Stalin-era labor camps where millions of Russians lost their lives. The treatment of prisoners has improved markedly since then, according to rights groups. PHNOM PENH, Cambodia The U.S. government is giving $25 million in agriculture development aid over five years to projects in Cambodia to help alleviate global food insecurity, an issue made more urgent by Russias war in Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Thursday. The new aid is part of a 12-year-old American food security project in Cambodia and will fund an initiative called Harvest Three, in which the United States Agency for International Development will work with Cambodian farmers and others in the food industry to get products to more markets. The focus will be on grains, among other products, Mr. Blinken said. There has been a shortage of grains in parts of the world because of Russias war in Ukraine, a critical grain exporter. Iran has denied the agency access to cameras and other monitoring equipment intended to track the progress of its nuclear program, making it very difficult to know precisely how much uranium has been enriched to high levels. When it comes to nuclear, good words are not enough, Mr. Grossi said, adding that Iran must grant inspectors access commensurate to the size of its uranium enrichment program if the agency is to credibly assure that it is peaceful. Given the steady advance in Irans technical knowledge and stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the country is now considered by many to be a threshold state, capable of making a bomb if it wishes, though Tehran denies any intention of ever doing so. That provides Iran with significant clout and could encourage other countries to pursue nuclear weapons, effectively shredding the 52-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In July, Kamal Kharrazi, a senior adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, said that the country now had the technical capability to produce an atomic bomb. His comments were repeated on Monday by Mohammad Eslami, head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, according to the semiofficial news agency Fars. Three weeks ago, Richard Moore, the head of Britains foreign intelligence service, MI6, said that he doubted Iran would accept the renewal of the nuclear deal. Im skeptical that the supreme leader will go for the deal, he said, referring to Ayatollah Khamenei. He added that while an agreement was on the table, and despite his belief that China and Russia would not block a deal, I dont think the Iranians want it. Still, neither Tehran nor Washington is considered likely to declare the negotiations over, because that would present complicated choices about what to do next, given the repeated vows by the United States and Israel that they will do whatever is necessary to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon. In mid-July, President Biden and Israels prime minister, Yair Lapid, signed a joint declaration saying that the United States would use all elements of national power to deny Iran the ability to arm itself with nuclear weapons. The Biden administration has recently imposed further sanctions on Iran, targeting companies used by the countrys Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industry Commercial Company. Iran then announced that it was activating hundreds of new and advanced centrifuges that had previously been installed at an underground nuclear site in Natanz. What happened in Louisville? Shortly after midnight on March 13, Louisville police officers executing a search warrant used a battering ram to enter the apartment of Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician. The police had been investigating two men who they believed were selling drugs out of a house that was far from Ms. Taylors home. But a judge had also signed a warrant allowing the police to search Ms. Taylors residence because the police said they believed that one of the men had used her apartment to receive packages. Ms. Taylor had been dating that man on and off for several years but had recently severed ties with him, according to her familys lawyer. Ms. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, had been in bed but got up when they heard a loud banging at the door. Mr. Walker said he and Ms. Taylor both called out, asking who was at the door. Mr. Walker later told the police he feared it was Ms. Taylors ex-boyfriend trying to break in. After the police broke the door off its hinges, Mr. Walker fired his gun once, striking Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in a thigh. The police responded by firing several shots, striking Ms. Taylor five times. Mr. Hankison shot 10 rounds blindly into the apartment. Mr. Walker told investigators that Ms. Taylor coughed and struggled to breathe for at least five minutes after she was shot, according to The Louisville Courier Journal. An ambulance on standby outside the apartment had been told to leave about an hour before the raid, counter to standard practice. As officers called an ambulance back to the scene and struggled to render aid to their colleague, Ms. Taylor was not given any medical attention. It was not until 12:47 a.m., about five minutes after the shooting, that emergency personnel realized she was seriously wounded, after her boyfriend called 911. Shortly after their marriage almost six years ago, Ayan Chatterjee and David Krause bought their first home together: a two-story brick townhouse from 1920 in Ridgewood, Queens, which they fully renovated. As time went on, the two had the itch to get out of the city, Mr. Chatterjee said, and began traveling to the Catskills. At some point, when you hit your 30s, every weekend in the city isnt so fun anymore. The couple, both now 35, had enjoyed renovating the Queens house, so they bought a fixer-upper farmhouse in Greene County, three hours north, for around $250,000. They added a chicken coop and a pool. It is a beautiful house, but it is primitive and needs a lot of work, Mr. Chatterjee said. The minute you open up walls, you discover problems. They call their contractor their upstate dad he comes to the rescue when anything goes wrong. [Did you recently buy or rent a home in the New York metro area? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com] Back in the city during the pandemic, the couple felt trapped in their townhouse, with its small concrete patio. That was our only breath of fresh air, Mr. Chatterjee said. His job as a producer at MSNBC was fully remote, and Mr. Krause, a founder of a vegan skin-care company, Alder New York, had always worked from home. So they sold the Ridgewood house and moved up to the Catskills with Levi the dog, getting a hotel room whenever they visited the city or when Mr. Chatterjee went to his office. They found it interesting to try hotels in different neighborhoods but exhausting to live out of suitcases. So last winter, the couple checked out the Manhattan rental market, even as they heard horror stories about soaring rents. One day, surfing online, Mr. Krause mistakenly clicked on the for sale listings and found some surprisingly low prices. For a small pied-a-terre, buying seemed a better deal than renting. It didnt need to be more than a place to sleep and shower, he said. The couple could afford up to $400,000 for the equivalent of a hotel room of their own. They sought a West Side location an easy walk to Mr. Chatterjees office in Rockefeller Center and to Penn Station, for the train upstate. They knew they would get no more than a studio in a co-op building. The so-called one-bedrooms in their price range were typically studios with some kind of makeshift sleeping area. For help, they contacted a friend, Sumi Vatsa, an associate broker at Compass, who had sold their Ridgewood townhouse. It was about making it the nicest hotel room possible, Ms. Vatsa said. Among their options: Wang Zhenxi, a young woman from Luoyang, Henan Province, is known as one of Chinas premier mistress persuading teachers, professionals who convince mistresses to end their affairs with married men. Extramarital affairs are frowned upon in virtually all cultures around the world, but China is perhaps the only country in the world to have not one, but at least two professions that deal specifically with this type of relationship. One is the mistress killer, a type of detective/vigilante that helps scorned wives reveal their husbands infidelities and also exact revenge on the mistresses. The other is the mistress persuading teacher who relies on more diplomatic techniques to convince mistresses to end their affairs and allow their partners to return to their families. One such persuasion master was recently profiled by a major Chinese newspaper, after it became known that she had once managed to persuade over 800 mistresses in a single year. Photo: The Paper Like Zhang Yufen, the mistress killer we featured a few years back, Wang Zhenxi, one of Chinas most successful mistress persuaders, was inspired to take on her affair-ending mission by personal experiences. Her father cheated on her mother when she was growing up, so she learned first-hand the negative effects extramarital relationships have on a family. Later in life, after getting married, she also had to deal with her own husbands infidelity. Wang recently told The Paper that her now-ex-husband married her only to please his own parents. He was actually still in love with his ex-girlfriend, and soon after their wedding, the two resumed their romantic relationship When she became aware of his cheating, Wang filed for divorce and, relying on her personal experience in dealing with mistresses, she became one of Chinas premier mistress persuading teachers. Photo: The Paper Love makes us all blind, and mistresses are no different. This is the key concept that persuasion teachers keeping mind when performing their mission. Unlike mistress killers, who dont shy away from humiliating and even beating mistresses in public, professional persuaders focus on getting close to their targets and making them see the error of their ways through peaceful means. Wang herself said that after being contacted by a client usually a cheated wife, whose identity is never revealed to third parties the first step is identifying the mistress and trying to get close to her. That usually involves a period of surveillance followed by shadowing (following her around in the places she frequents) and eventually befriending her. Photo: The Paper It is Wangs belief that being the proverbial third wheel is an uncomfortable situation for mistresses, and they almost always open up about it to the right person. When this happens, they use a variety of arguments to convince them to end the affair and move on with their lives. The argument invoked depends on the situation of the mistress, whether they have children with their partner, or how long they have been seeing them for. Convincing a mistress to end their affair is not easy, and many times persuasion experts like Wang Zhenxi have to go the extra mile. This involves getting to close to their families and friends, revealing the affair to them and having them assist in convincing the mistress to end her relationship. Photo: The Paper Other times, she employs psychological methods and tactics inspired by the legendary Sun Tzu to sow division between the mistress and her lover, which, when successful, end in a breakup. In some cases, the solution lies in helping the mistress socialize more, helping her interact with other men and realizing that she has other options than being someones side piece. However, there are certain cases when the probability of success is too little. Wang said that if, after analyzing a case, she concludes that she has less than a 60 percent chance of success, she will abandon the mission and return her fee to the client. Photo: The Paper The Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns were a particularly busy time for mistress persuasion masters in general, and Wang Zhenxi in particular. She constantly shuttled between major cities, helping women deal with their husbands infidelities. Such affairs were fueled by the frequent quarrels caused by couples being cooped up together for long periods of time, with no ways to vent. Wang told The Paper that she managed to persuade around 800 mistresses in one year, a feat that won her a sort of superhero status among her peers, as well as record commissions. One person was so impressed with her results that she offered Wang 300,000 yuan ($44,500) to study under her. Photo: The Paper In addition to earning money, I can help more people return to happy families, Wang Zhenxi said. That is the most fulfilling part of this job. TWO local residents have initiated High Court proceedings in an attempt to reverse the go-ahead by An Bord Pleanala for a 40 million Chinese-backed meat factory a short distance from Banagher. The residents lodging the appeal are Desmond Kampff and Gwen Wordingham. They have separate addresses in the Banagher area. Speaking to The Midland Tribune, Mr Kampff said he is critically concerned about the potential environmental impacts of the proposed processing plant at the site three kilometres southeast of Banagher. They say the facility will discharge its domestic and wastewater into the nearby Feeghroe stream (which runs along the western boundary of the 19.5 hectare site). They say this stream does not have the capacity to accommodate such discharges. Mr Kampff, who describes himself as being active in local environmental protection, told the Tribune that the stream regularly floods during the winter. He showed us two photographs of this flooding, one in December 2019, the other in February 2020. He said he and Ms Wordingham (and other local residents) are concerned that during these flooding incidents the water table will become contaminated by run-off from the abattoir. Last month, An Bord Pleanala granted permission for Banagher Chilling Limited to build a large expansion to a pre-existing, disused plant. This plant was built in the 1990s and was also an abattoir. It's been non-operational for several years. The proposed site is located beside Five Roads Cross which is the junction of the R438 Borrisokane to Cloghan road and a local road (the L3010 which connects Banagher with Kinnitty). The location is about three kilometres south-east of Banagher. Eliza Lodge nursing home is 120 metres to the west and the closest house is 400 metres away. The new facility will have the capacity to slaughter 36,000 animals a year. Its inspector found the proposed development would not be likely to have a significant negative environmental impact in terms of climate. Mr Kampff said he often walks beside the Feeghroe Stream and as he's walking he's often worrying about the possible pollution when the new plant opens. He said he has the support of people living in the vicinity for the High Court appeal. He argues that during this era of Climate Change, opening a major abattoir which could possibly pollute the environment, is going against a lot of contemporary thinking about the kind of industries we should be operating. He said he is not against the beef industry, but I think they made a mistake not creating a co-operative structure. The dairy industry set up a co-operative structure but the beef industry failed to follow suit. The granting of permission by An Bord Pleanala came almost two years after Mr Kampff and Ms Wordingham lodged an appeal against Offaly County Councils grant of permission. Their High Court action against An Bord Pleanala, with the developer on notice, is grounded on a number of domestic and European legal points. Mr Kampff and Ms Wordingham are claiming the grant of permission breaches a section of the Water Framework Directive and surface water regulations because the board allegedly did not ensure the development would not cause a deterioration in the status of a body of surface water or jeopardise the attainment of good status or potential. And, or in the alternative, they say the board could not have arrived at its conclusion that there would be no significant environmental effect in circumstances where the adjacent Feeghroe stream has not been assigned a quality status by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The applicants say the board is precluded from granting consent for a development that may jeopardise the attainment of good water status and/or where no assessment was possible. They further claim it was not open to the board to conclude there would be no significant environmental effects where the evidence demonstrates that the additional biochemical oxygen demand levels would be sufficient to render the Feeghroe stream incapable of attaining good status. The discharge would also lead to significantly elevated nitrogen levels, they say. The matter was briefly mentioned before Mr Justice Charles Meenan two weeks ago by John Kenny BL, instructed by Eoin Brady of FP Logue solicitors. The case will return before the court in November. Met Eireann is forecasting a rise in temperatures in the coming days for Ireland as high pressure is set to dominate the weather in Ireland. Temperatures are set to increase steadily in the coming days reaching into the 20s over the weekend before increasing further early next week. The full weather forecast for Ireland for the coming days from Met Eireann is as follows. Weather forecast for Thursday Thursday will be mostly dry with sunny spells, although there will be a few passing showers, mainly in Ulster and Connacht. Feeling fresher than recent days with a light to moderate, occasionally fresh, northwesterly breeze. Highest temperatures of 14 to 19 degrees, warmest in the southeast. Scattered showers will continue in Ulster tonight but will be isolated in other areas. Lowest temperatures of 7 to 12 degrees in a light westerly breeze. Weather forecast for Friday Friday morning and afternoon there will be sunny spells and isolated showers, becoming more widespread during the evening. Highest temperatures of 14 to 19 degrees, warmest in the southeast, with a light to moderate northwesterly breeze. On Friday night it will be cloudy with patchy light rain or drizzle in the west and northwest but it will be generally dry with clear spells in other areas. Lowest temperatures of 7 to 12 degrees in a light west to southwest breeze. Weather forecast for Saturday On Saturday morning it will be dry and sunny in the south and east but cloudier with patchy light rain or drizzle across much of Connacht and Ulster. It will become cloudier everywhere during the afternoon with scattered light rain or drizzle but it will become drier again by evening with some hazy sunny spells. Highest temperatures 15 to 20 degrees in a light west to northwest wind. Mostly dry with clear spells on Saturday night, but cloudier with patchy drizzle near west and northwest coasts. Lowest temperatures of 9 to 13 degrees in a light and variable breeze. Weather forecast for Sunday Dry with sunny spells on Sunday morning but it will become cloudier in the afternoon with patches of drizzle possible near Atlantic coasts. Highest temperatures of 16 to 21 degrees with light and variable breezes. Dry with clear spells on Sunday night. Patches of mist and fog may develop in near calm conditions. Lowest temperatures of 10 to 14 degrees. Weather forecast for Monday Monday morning will be dry with sunny spells but it will likely become cloudier as the day goes on, with rain possibly affecting the northwest later. Highest temperatures of 16 to 22 degrees with a light west to southwest wind. Further weather outlook High pressure will likely continue to dominate, bringing generally dry weather and an increase in temperatures. Two Offaly-based charities and community groups have become the latest beneficiaries of ALDIs Community Grants programme, with each charity receiving a 500 grant from the ALDI store teams in County Offaly. Receiving the grants are Offaly Hospice Foundation and Laois Offaly Families for Autism. ALDIs Community Grants programme helps fund local charities and community organisations that contribute vital work and services in their local communities. Each local charity supported is chosen by ALDI employees, enabling them to help the local good causes they are passionate about. By the end of 2022, the programme will have donated 537,000 to over 1,000 local charity branches and community groups across Ireland since its inception in 2016. Receiving charities and organisations range from rescue teams to animal sanctuaries, cancer support to mental health support, or any charitable organisation that resonates with ALDI colleagues. Commenting, John Curtin, Group Buying Director, ALDI Ireland said: We are very proud to continue to support local charities across the country through the ALDI Community Grants programme and were pleased to see the impact of our donation in the local communities of County Offaly. The Community Grants programme is one example of how ALDI is committed to investing and partnering with local communities and charities across Ireland and we look forward to continuing this engagement in the years ahead. Operating two stores in County Offaly, ALDI is deeply involved in the local community. To date, the stores have donated over 33,000 meals to local charities through ALDIs partnership with FoodCloud, saving the charities more than 41,000. ALDI partners with six innovative Offaly food and drink producers, spending over 23.3 million with them in 2021. Lorrha is a hive of activity this past few weeks as the local community prepare for the visit on August 13th of the Martin OMeara Victoria Cross. Born at Lissernane, Lorrha, Martin OMeara emigrated as a young man to Australia. He enlisted in the army and served as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery he displayed during the horrific Battle of the Somme in 1916. The young Lorrha man braved intense gun fire and shelling to rescue injured comrades. It was reported that he rescued 25 men over a four day period at Pozieres, France. He was awarded the VC for bravery and this visit will be the first time the medal has visited Lorrha in 106 years. Martin was a proud Lorrha man and he never forgot his roots, his family, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins and his uncles. He returned once to visit them but soon made the long journey back to life in Australia. Like so many of his comrades, the war played havoc on him and OMeara spent his final years in military hospitals, suffering from what official military records recorded as chronic mania. In his will, he left 1,300, which amounts to about 100,000 in today's money, to the Lorrha community. The money was to go towards the re-roofing of the Dominican Abbey. However, as it wasnt practicable, the money was used to help build Redwood NS instead. The VC is presently on display in the National Museum of Ireland, where it has been on loan from the Australian Government since its arrival in Ireland in July 2019. It was to visit Lorrha in 2020 but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the visit had to be postponed. It will be returned to the Army Museum in Western Australia later this August after its visit to Lorrha. However, Saturday August 13th will see the Victoria Cross on display for one day only in St Ruadhans Church, Lorrha after an Ecumenical Service earlier, where it will be fittingly honoured Proceedings are expected to get under way at 10am with a wreath laying ceremony. The committee have worked very hard over the last two years, to get the VC to visit Lorrha before it is returned. Meetings were held with the Australian Ambassador to Ireland Gary Gray and zoom meetings with representatives from the Army Museum of Western Australia. The zoom meetings will continue to take place until the VC has gone back. Ahead of the display date, which coincides with the beginning of National Heritage Week, a lot of work is taking place in the village such as erecting bunting and flags, erecting plaques, sweeping, cleaning and much more besides. The organising committee is asking people to support this momentous occasion by making donations which can be done on a go fund me page under Homecoming of Martin OMearas VC on www.gofundme.com. You can follow progress on www.lorrhadorrha.ie or on facebook. More importantly, the committee urge everyone to come along on the day and enjoy all the village of Lorrha has to offer. Almost 30% of Irelands total deaths caused by Covid-19 occurred in nursing homes, according to figures released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Between March 2020 and February 2022, there were 3,176 deaths from Covid-19 in general and orthopaedic hospitals (59% of the total), with a further 1,564 dying from Covid-19 in nursing homes. No-one died from Covid-19 in maternity hospitals or paediatric hospitals, the figures show. The CSO said that its analysis focused on deaths where Covid was found to have been the underlying cause of death. A death due to Covid-19 differs from a death with Covid-19 in that Covid is identified as the underlying cause of death in the former but not in the latter, the CSO said. In deaths between March 2020 and February 2022, Covid-19 was identified as the underlying cause of death in 5,384 cases. People aged 85 and over accounted for 42% of Covid deaths, people aged 75 and over accounted for 75% of deaths, while those aged 65 and over accounted for 91% of Covid deaths, according to the figures. The fewest number of Covid deaths occurred in Leitrim, which had 26 deaths due to Covid, which is 0.5% of the total Covid death toll. Leitrims population is 0.7% of the countrys total, according to the 2016 census. Dublin City accounted for 17% of all Covid deaths in the period between March 2020 and February 2022. Taking the areas of Dublin City, South Dublin, Fingal, and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown together, 35% of all Covid-19 deaths were from Co Dublin, with a total of 1,883 lives lost. According to data from the last two censuses, Dublin accounted for around 28% of Irelands population, with Dublin City accounting for around 11.5%. The largest increases in people aged 65 and over between the 2011 and the 2016 censuses were in Fingal (36.1%) and South Dublin (34.1%). Imagine Broadband are delighted to announce they have extended their high-speed broadband to an additional 31,124 homes & businesses across Offaly. Of the over 31,000 homes & businesses in Offaly now covered, 90% reside in the NBP intervention area meaning they were in urgent need of better broadband. Imagines latest news comes as the company continues to receive strong demand showcased by the 60% of new customers being referred by existing customers! Sandra Dinan, who heads up the Connecting Communities Team commented: Our exclusive Advanced Hybrid Fixed Wireless Network along with our extensive coverage is a game changer, not only for the people of Offaly but for all of regional and rural Ireland. Now more than ever, people need consistent and reliable broadband. Irelands rural communities need better broadband now which is why we are seeing such demand for our service and why we will continue to invest our Community Engagement teams time and focus in the areas our Advanced Hybrid Fixed Broadband Network is needed the most. Our network can be deployed in these poor broadband areas within a matter of weeks ensuring we continue to meet this demand. Local TDS, Broadband Officers and community action groups who are being contacted by families and business owners who need better broadband are urged to contact Sandra and her team on 1800938414 or via email at betterbroadband@imagine.ie. Imagines commitment to providing better broadband for Irelands worst affected broadband areas continues with its exclusive Advanced Hybrid Fixed Broadband Network already connecting 284 live broadband Fibre Hub transmission sites, which has provided over 60,000 square kilometres of high-capacity, high-speed Broadband connectivity to over 1.2 million homes and businesses across 32,000 regional and rural townlands and communities. Homes and businesses that need better broadband can simply check their Eircode for coverage at imagine.ie *Sponsored Content Jacqueline R. Walorski was an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Indiana's 2nd congressional district from 2013 until her death in 2022. She was a member of the Republican Party. Walorski served in the Indiana House of Representatives, representing Indiana's 21st district, from 2005 to 2010. In 2010, she won the Republican nomination for Indiana's 2nd congressional district, but narrowly lost the general election to Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly. Walorski won the seat in 2012 after Donnelly vacated it to run for the U.S. Senate, and was reelected four times. An Queensland couple detail why it took them six years to get their dog Munchkin to Australia from Indonesia. There are reports that four people have been injured in Queensland in an alleged mass shooting.The incident allegedly happened on.. New Zealand Herald 04 Aug 2022 As police examine new evidence in connection to the assassination of Turkish Consul-General Sarik Ariyak, we revisit the day he and his bodyguard were brutally slain outside his Dover Heights home. The last two agreements the world made to battle climate change came only after the United States and China, by far the two biggest.. SeattlePI.com 06 Aug 2022 Beijings armed forces on Thursday launched long-range artillery live-fire shooting drills in the Taiwan Strait and sent dozens of warplanes over the median line. Berlin has realized that energy imports from Russia will never again reach the levels from before the Ukraine war. So, the challenge is to wean Germany off its dependence on Russian energy sources. And to do so quickly. The US became the latest NATO member to support Helsinki and Stockholm joining the alliance. President Joe Biden hailed the 95-1 bipartisan vote as "historic." Russia and Ukraine say the suburbs of Donetsk are besieged by heavy clashes. The International Atomic Energy Agency head also said there was no daily contact with Europe's largest nuclear plant. Follow DW for the latest. The war in Ukraine is having an impact on a long-running territorial dispute. Turkey is adopting a more aggressive stance towards Greece and has lashed out at pious diplomatic interventions from Germany. The document now heads to President Joe Biden's desk. Finland and Sweden's bid to join NATO still needs approval from all countries in the alliance. China has begun another series of military exercises around Taiwan as tensions continue to rise following a 24-hour visit to the island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. China says it conducted "precision missile strikes" in the Taiwan Strait on Thursday as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades. From Zelenskyy reaching out to China's Xi Jinping to questions over whether more grain will be shipped from Odesa, here is what you need to know about the Ukraine war this Thursday. Rumble 09 Aug 2022 China warned that there could be serious consequences, including a military response, if U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi follows.. After Nancy Pelosi's visit, China conducts its largest military drill in decades around the island. Some Taiwanese are worried; others have grown numb to Beijing's threats. Coral cover on two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef has reached its highest level since records began 36 years ago, according to marine scientists monitoring the ecosystem. MANZINI The joblessness out there is so severe that we need to declare a state of emergency on jobs, says Business Eswatini (BE). The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BE, Nathi Dlamini, said this when sought for comment regarding the introduction of the National Labor Migration Policy (NLMP). The CEO said the frustration of young professionals had now reached an untenable crescendo. Dlamini said the country needed investors badly and its policies must be seen to reflect that desperation. It is time to lower the artificial barriers we have unwittingly erected because they are slowing down our job creation effort. As it is, we have enough social problems without having to create new ones, Dlamini said. He said the NLMP sought to provide the legal framework for the unhindered movement of persons into and out of the country for employment purposes. He said this was necessary as business competitiveness at shop floor-level and at national level, was driven by skills, some of which may not be easily available locally. Framework In light of this, Dlamini said there was a need for a legal framework to allow for the hassle-free movement of critical skills across sovereign territories, more especially with the advent of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTA) or commerce without borders. He said the labour migration was a topical issue worldwide and BE has had the privilege to weigh in on the matter through the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Private Sector Forum. Dlamini said: Its possible that the policy under consideration here in Eswatini may affect certain business sectors. The extent of its effects will very much depend on the analysis of our skills benchmarks and skills mismatch reports. The CEO went on to say there was a necessity to appreciate that the aim of any business was to be competitive in order to thrive or even at worse, survive. To achieve this, he said, businesses needed skilled personnel regardless of where the skills may come from, but better sourced locally if available though. Robotics For example, Dlamini said, if a company needed a robotics or artificial intelligence engineer, it would not matter where that skill came from, as long as it could be found - somewhere. He said the NLMP therefore sought to address matters like that. The CEO said if there were sectors where Eswatini, as a country, had enough requisite skills to achieve business goals, then there would be no need to import any skill at all. That being said though, we desperately need a critical skills list in the country because we have seen the pandemonium being wreaked by its absence. The manner in which we handle work permits in the country is a clear signal to foreign investors that they are not welcomed here. He said it was as if there was full employment in the country and it needed no one. Dlamini said the approach was weird because there was a dire need for foreign direct investment (FDI) but without foreigners. The CEO said it was a self-defeating approach that would worsen the unemployment situation. Dlamini said companies were hesitant of coming down to invest largely because they knew that to get a work permit in this country was like pulling out teeth. While localisation is critical and we take it very seriously here at BE, we are, however, not so foolhardy as to be unmindful that we must first have these foreign direct investors well established in the country first; let them create the jobs we desperately need here, before we can talk about localising anything. He said businesses generally employed as per labour market needs, if they or anyone else for that matter possessed the requisite skills they should be able to penetrate the local market. Migration Dlamini said the NLMP provided for migration for employment purposes. He said the citizenship issue was a completely different matter and not provided for in the policy. Countries with NLMP ( which have been influenced by regional and international instruments), make it easier for that country to negotiate in terms of what is termed Bilateral Labour Agreements with other countries and agree on migration and its terms and conditions for purposes of employment. On Tuesday, this publication reported that there was a new policy set to control the movement of people seeking to work outside Eswatini, while ensuring their reintegration into local labour markets upon return. This follows that Eswatini has adopted the National Labour Migration Policy (NLMP) as supplemented by an action (implementation) plan. This policy will ensure that migrant workers and their dependants shall have their social security benefits easily carried out. The policy, which is due to be submitted to Cabinet for approval, has since been discussed and adopted by the tripartite Labour Advisory Board (LAB). The policy, once approved, will ensure the reintegration of emaSwati who have been working outside the country as it shall assist them in rejoining the local labour markets. The U.S. Justice Department has charged four Kentucky police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor with violating her civil rights. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker, was shot to death in March 2020 during a police raid of her apartment to execute a search warrant. US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was in Seoul to meet with political leaders. She also paid a visit to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the border with North Korea. 2008-2022 One News Page Ltd. All rights reserved. One News is a registered trademark of One News Page Ltd. euronews (in English) 21 Jul 2022 From Russian troops' continued bombardment of Kharkiv to rumours about Putin and Zelenskyy's ill health dismissed, here are some of.. Foreign minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday discussed regional and global issues, including the Sri Lanka crisis and what the US described as Russias brutal aggression against Ukraine and its implications for global food security. The meeting took place in Cambodia on the sidelines of the Asean Regional Forum and against the backdrop of a spike in US-China tensions over the visit to Taiwan by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Senate has overwhelmingly endorsed the NATO Accession Protocols for Sweden and Finland. The Upper chamber of the U.S. Congress voted 95 to 1 in favor of the accession Wednesday. This marks the United States' first step in giving its approval to Finland and Sweden's NATO membership bid. The North Atlantic Council's approval of the applications for NATO membership requires ratification by the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Japan on Thursday for the final stop on her Asian tour, following a visit to Taiwan that incensed China. AFP reporters The northern and central Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest amount of coral cover since the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) began monitoring 36 years ago. However, average coral cover in the southern region decreased due to ongoing crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks. While the Reef experienced its fourth major bleaching event in the past seven years this year, it didn't reach the intensity of earlier events and was not expected to lead to mass coral mortality. CANBERRA, Australia (AP) The Australian government said Wednesday it is confident its greenhouse gas reduction target will be enshrined in law after negotiating amendments with senators from outside the new administrations ranks. A bill to enshrine the center-left Labor Partys election pledge to reduce Australias greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below 2005 levels by 2030 was the first piece of legislation introduced to the Parliament when it sat last week for the first time since the May 21 elections. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his government had negotiated sufficient support for the bill to pass the Senate without changing the 43% commitment. I am very confident that it will be passed through the House of Representatives and through the Senate, Albanese told reporters. All 12 senators of the minor Greens party, which wants a 75% emissions reduction by the end of the decade, had agreed to support the amended bill, Greens leader Adam Bandt said. The Greens have improved a weak climate bill and we will pass it," Bandt told the National Press Club. "But the fight to stop Labors new coal and gas mines continues and, in this Parliament, the only obstacle to stronger climate action is Labor, Bandt added. With the Greens backing, the bill only needs the support of one of the six remaining unaligned senators to achieve a majority in the 76-seat chamber. Albanese did not say which senator or senators had promised support or what his government had conceded. But he said senators outside government did not get a whole lot of things that they want. We made our position very clear. There will be some amendments passed in the House of Representatives that are sensible, that are consistent with our position,... Voting booths at P.S. 138 in Crown Heights, which serves as a poll site. Due to a legal loophole, August's primary currently would allow registered voters to change parties up through the day of the election. [ more ] MBABANE Government is not taking its Spokesperson, Alpheous Nxumalos statement about South Africa, lightly. The matter, according to government, is now being dealt with at diplomatic level. This comes after the intervention of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Thuli Dladla, who said government was working on the issue diplomatically. Dladla was responding to this publications questions, regarding the matter whereby the South African Deputy Director-General responsible for Public Diplomacy in the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, Clayson Monyela, said the statement made by the Eswatini Government spokesperson to the effect that South Africa is infested with a cancer of criminality from head to toe, was very unfortunate. Diplomatically Dladla, in her brief response, said: We are working on the issue diplomatically. Monyela said the South African Government would be taking this matter up, using the proper diplomatic channels, to seek an explanation from the kingdom as to whether those views represented the country or an individual. He stated that they wanted to believe that the views expressed by Nxumalo were his own and not those of the Kingdom of Eswatini. He said it was a very unfortunate statement that was made by Nxumalo, but as South Africa, they would resist the temptation to return insults with insults. What we will not allow for South Africa and the people of this country is to be insulted by an individual hoping to be speaking on behalf of a neighbouring country. By the way, we have excellent relations with the Kingdom of Eswatini, he said. On Tuesday, SAfm journalist Sakina Kamwendo had a heated interview with Nxumalo. Kamwendo asked for Nxumalos comment on the allegations made by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) former Secretary General Godrich Gardee, who accused Eswatini authorities of being involved in his daughters murder case. When sought for comment, Nxumalo said he did not manage diplomatic relations between countries but he was a public speaker. He said diplomats would do what they had to do and he would continue to do what he had to do while in office. IT WAS RESPONSE TO SPECIFIC QUESTION - NXUMALO MBABANE Government Spokesperson Alpheous Nxumalo says he was not speaking to the Government of South Africa, but responding to a specific question. Nxumalo said the context was that; South Africa, like the rest of many other countries in the region, was infested with criminality from head to toe. He said hence they did not need some secret agencies from the Kingdom of Eswatini to inflict criminal activities among themselves, such as the murder of Godrich Gardees daughter. They dont need to be assisted by anyone outside their borders to commit such crimes, said Nxumalo. He said South Africans should solve their crime challenges without attempting to blackmail or export their criminality challenges to other countries in the region. He said as for the deputy generals overzealous reaction to the point of taking this matter out of its proper context and singularly carrying out a gun and running with one statement of such a lengthy interview, remained unfortunate indeed. In his previous response to the allegations made by the South African politician, Nxumalo said the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) blockade had not been the first time that Eswatinis border posts were closed by a political party, adding that a small demonstration at the border by the EFF did not warrant a government response. The blockades at the Ngwenya and Golela border posts, which lasted for six hours, were held in solidarity with the Eswatini wing of the EFF, as part of the partys call for democracy and human rights in the country. Director of Communications in the Kings Office Percy Simelane, described the accusations made by South African politician Gardee as weird witch-hunt. When contacted by this publication on Tuesday, Simelane, said: We refuse to grace, this weird witch-hunt with a comment, save to point out that the murder in question was investigated by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and suspects were charged after intelligence had exhausted leads. NO MEDIA TALKS - GODRICH MBABANE Former Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) Secretary General Godrich Gardee says he is currently not making any media talks regarding the matter. Gardee was responding to this publications questions regarding his accusations against the countrys authorities. In his response to the questions sent by this publication to his Twitter inbox or DM, Gardee simply said: I am fine and making no media talks. On Monday, Gardee took to his Twitter page to accuse the countrys authorities of orchestrating the kidnapping, rape and brutal murder of his daughter Hillary. Gardee alleged that this was prompted by the border blockades held by the party back in April, which saw four borders of Eswatini being closed for more than six hours. Coincidence In his posts or tweets, Gardee said it was no coincidence that Hillary was kidnapped 17 days after the protest and that a member of the Peoples United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) was arrested and linked to the murder. The PUDEMO member who was arrested was Philemon Lukhele, who was arrested along with other two men, being Sipho Mkhatshwa and Albert Mduduzi Gama. When they made their first appearance in court, it was revealed that they were facing six counts, which were conspiracy to murder, kidnapping, rape, murder, illegal possession of a firearm and defeating the ends of justice. The trio has been making their appearances in court since then. As of yesterday, one of the accused persons, Mkhatshwa, appeared in Nelspruit Magistrates Court for his bail hearing but was denied. The EFF members who were picketing outside the court described Mkhatshwas denied bail as a first win in the legal battle in the kidnapping and murder of Hillary. Lukhele was transferred to a maximum security prison in South African after he was allegedly found in possession of a cellphone inside a prison cell. Rumble 07 Aug 2022 Finland and Sweden are putting themselves at risk by joining NATO, which the US Senate has now approved by an overwhelming vote,.. As Russian shelling and bombardments have continued in the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian servicemen have been firing the powerful MSLR BM-21 "Grad" missile system and waiting for the command to push forward. (August 2) On the day of President Bidens inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia and asked for help being paid the $270,000 he billed the Trump campaign. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian reiterated the countrys support for the one-China policy, denouncing the US for its breach of Chinas territorial integrity. Respect for countries territorial integrity is among the recognized fundamentals of the international law, the top diplomat wrote.... U.S.-China relations are tense enough to spark concerns of military confrontation after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. The island which China insists is part of its territory has had a relationship with the U.S. since 1950. Prime Minister, James Marape says three months before his government went to the polls, they approved a K610 million intervention tax relief on essential food items. Article by Elias Nanau: NBC News Mr Marape says this was to help ordinary citizens to save and pay fewer costs on essential foods and fuel. He says if prices of basic goods have yet been inflated, once he returns as Prime Minister possibly in the coming week, his government will ensure the policies are implemented. He says if prices of basic goods have yet been inflated, once he returns as Prime Minister possibly in the coming week, his government will ensure the policies are implemented, Mr Marape says heads of key government agencies may have thought his PANGU government would not return. He has warned, that heads of government agencies who were supposed to implement the policies but did not will pack up and leave. Mr Marape has also promised when his government returns, there will also be additional savings passed to ordinary citizens helping people live through a tough economic situation. The PANGU Party leader made these statements after the signing of a Memorandum of Agreement between his PANGU Party and 15 other coalition parties who have thrown support behind him at Loloata camp this week. Source: NBC News/One PNG News Next: Police officers sentenced to 10 years imprisonment Two police officers have been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment each for unlawfully killing a betel-nut seller on September 16th, 2019 at Rainbow in the National Capital District. Article by Eric Tamaan: NBC News They are Andrew Kupuso from Chambri Village, East Sepik Province and John Selan Lavona from Rambutso Village, Manus Province. Chief Justice Sir Gibbs Saika in handing down the sentence stated that the lack of obedience to the rule of law must be a serious concern for governments now and in the future. Sir Gibbs was of the view that the incident happened because of people's no care attitude to obeying and living by the laws and regulations imposed by the relevant authority. The deceased was selling betel nuts at the Rainbow bus stop at that time when he was chased by police into the Jubilee Univesity grounds. He was trying to jump over the spiked fence into the Port Moresby National High School grounds when his trousers got caught on one side of the spikes. Both men caught him and pulled his leg downwards, causing him to fall onto the spikes of the fence which pierced his groin area. He fell to the ground and was left lying unconscious. He was assisted and rushed to the Gerehu hospital by a bystander, however, succumbed to his injuries and died later that day. The Court found that when the two police officers pulled his leg, it caused him to fall onto the spike fence which pierced his groin area and ultimately caused his death. For Kupuso, 2 years and 7 months have been deducted for time spent in custody and he will serve the balance of 7 years and 5 months. For Lavona, 6 months have been deducted for time spent in custody as well and he will serve the balance of 9 years and 6 months. Source: NBC News/One PNG News Next: Agena Gamai First ever MP election for Delta Fly Open Haitham Al Ghais takes office as OPEC Secretary General His Excellency Haitham Al Ghais of Kuwait today took office as Secretary General of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at the Organizations Secretariat in Vienna, Austria. HE Al Ghais was appointed by acclamation for a three-year term at the Special Meeting of the OPEC Conference held on 3 January 2022. He succeeds the late Secretary General of OPEC, HE Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo. HE Al Ghais said: It is a great honour for me to be at the helm of an Organization that has been instrumental in supporting a stable and sustainable supply of oil to the world for more than 61 years. Throughout its history, OPEC has been at the forefront of promoting dialogue, cooperation and partnerships to achieve its mission. Today, I look forward to working with all our Member Countries and our many partners around the world to ensure a sustainable and inclusive energy future which leaves no one behind, the Secretary General added. HE Al Ghais a respected oil technocrat and well-known OPEC figure brings a great wealth of experience from both his diplomatic background, as well as his extensive experience in the energy and oil sectors in both OPEC Founder Member Kuwait and internationally. The Secretary Generals career in the global oil industry spans 30 years. He advised six Kuwaiti Oil Ministers on the global oil market and its developments over the past years. HE Al Ghais is also a veteran of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC). He served at KPCs offices in Kuwait; Beijing, China; and London. Before taking the position of OPEC Secretary General, he was the Deputy Managing Director for International Marketing at KPC. HE Al Ghais was a leading member of Kuwaits Delegation to the meetings of OPEC and the Declaration of Cooperation (DoC) between OPEC Member Countries and non-OPEC oil-producing countries. The Secretary General served as Kuwaits Governor for OPEC from 2017 to 2021. He was also a Member of the Organizations Internal Audit Committee, which he later skilfully chaired. HE Al Ghais was the first Chairman of the DoCs Joint Technical Committee (JTC) following the inception of the historic framework in December 2016. He led the Committee with great distinction in its first year, and subsequently served as a Member of the JTC until June 2021. The Secretary General also played a key role in drafting and developing the landmark Charter of Cooperation (CoC). The CoC was endorsed by OPEC Member Countries and several non-OPEC producing countries in July 2019 at the Sixth OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting. Qatar Aviation Services (QAS), a subsidiary of Qatar Airways Group, has partnered with International Air Transport Association (Iata) to become the first ground handler globally to join the new expansion of the Iata Environmental Assessment Programme (IEnvA) for ground service providers. The IEnvA programme for ground service provides a framework for achieving environmental sustainability across all ground operations. Taking advantage of the knowledge and experience garnered from the airline programme, ground service providers can rely on its definitive guidance to reduce their impact on the environment, and improving health and safety for both employees and the community, while maintaining operational efficiency. Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive Akbar Al Baker, said: I am proud to lead the efforts to create a sustainable aviation industry. Environmental sustainability awareness across the entire organisation is critical to the success of Qatar Airways Group. Through IEnvA, Qatar Aviation Services will be able to demonstrate the value of environmental compliance and ensure sustainability in its operations. Iatas Director General Willie Walsh, said: Were delighted to count Qatar Aviation Services as the first ground handler to join the newly extended Iatas IEnvA programme. Sustainability is a critical challenge for our industry. By taking proactive steps to measure their impacts and address them throughout their operations with IEnvA, QAS and Qatar Airways Group will back their sustainability achievements with the most comprehensive global standard environmental certification available in the industry. Qatar Aviation Services, led by the Senior Vice President, is committed to minimising the environmental impact of its operations, playing an instrumental role in helping Hamad International Airport gain its world-class standing as environmental leader amongst airports globally. Through its participation, it aims to meet and exceed the highest environmental standards while preparing for future expansion strategies. The IEnvA programme is an Environmental Management System initially offered to airlines, which demonstrates equivalency to the ISO 14001: 2015 environmental management systems standard. It provides a structured approach to managing the environment, as well as reporting and mitigating environmental impacts. As a result, organisations are able to more formally incorporate sustainability and environmental compliance strategies into their operations. Qatar Airways, under the Qatar Airways Group, first achieved the highest level of IEnvA accreditation in 2017, becoming the first airline in the Middle East to do so. The airline has since played a key role in contributing to the successful development of the IEnvA programme. The programme covers all aspects of Qatar Airways global operations, including flight and ground operations and corporate activities. TradeArabia News Service MEXICO CITY (AP) A cave-in at a coal mine in northern Mexico trapped nine miners Wednesday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said. The president tweeted that the accident happened in the town of Sabinas in the border state of Coahuila. He said 92 soldiers, specialists and four dogs were at the scene assisting rescue efforts. The Coahuila state government said in a statement that the collapse occurred after the miners breached a neighboring area filled with water. The mine began operations this year, and the local government said it had not received any complaints or reports of previous incidents. Sabinas is about 70 miles southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas. Local media outlets reported that a miner managed to escape the collapse and alerted authorities. Milenio television said relatives of the trapped miners gathered outside the mine awaiting information. In June and July of 2021, cave-ins at two Coahuila mines claimed the lives of nine miners. Mexicos worst mining accident also occurred in Coahuila on Feb. 19, 2006, when an explosion ripped through the Pasta de Conchos mine while 73 miners were inside. Eight were rescued with injuries including serious burns. The rest died and only two of their bodies were recovered. Lopez Obradors administration promised two years ago to recover the remaining 63 bodies, a highly technical endeavor that has still not begun. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate REED CITY Demolition of the former North End Grocery in Reed City took place July 26 to make room for a new Biggby Coffee franchise set to open up this winter. "Sad to see it go, but excited to bring Biggby to Reed City!" read a Facebook post from Sonya Bielecki, who is starting the Biggby Coffee store with her partner, Kelly Prielipp. who was born and raised in Reed City. Her first job was at North End Grocery, which is one reason why the couple chose that location. "With the cross-section of (highways) 10 and 131, we feel we will have a lot of business and a lot of customers who we will make happy every day. Kelly is originally from Reed City, born and raised, so to be able to help build the community, to put a known brand within the community, to bring those kinds of names into Reed City is a big deal to help the community thrive," Bielecki said. Bielecki and Prielipp are both "obsessed" with Biggby Coffee, and have been since it was originally called Beaner's Coffee. "I think one of the most exciting things for both of us, and why we are so committed to Biggby, is that we talked about opening a franchise 11 years ago. We have been Biggby connoisseurs since it opened," Bielecki said. Bielecki appreciates the fact that it is a Michigan brand, having been started in East Lansing. Despite supply chain issues potentially making the build more difficult, Bielecki has high hopes. "Were really committed to the smile that Biggby brings to our community. Were proud to serve people, no matter the way things have gone, we are dedicated to excellent customer service," she said. Bielecki said making a profit is just a bonus for doing the kind of work she hopes will teach high schoolers life skills and what it's like to be in on the ground floor of a business, as well as putting smiles on the faces of people who will end up there every morning for their daily cup of joe. "We are really committed to doing whatever we can to help people get employment that makes them happy and gives them more than just a job, or a paycheck, and really helps them grow professionally and personally," Bielecki said. The Biggby location will have a lobby/seating area, as well as a drive-thru, as Bielecki made it a point to create an area for people in the community to mingle, relax and enjoy themselves while sipping their drink of choice. The announcement of the franchise has already seen a good response from people on Facebook. "Were really grateful for the overwhelming response from the community, its amazing to be that welcomed. Were both humbled by it," Bielecki said. Were gonna have so much fun. Its all about having fun. PHOENIX The Trump-endorsed state lawmaker who won the GOP nomination for Arizona secretary of state is the latest candidate to advance to the November ballot for a post overseeing state elections while denying the results of the last one. The early success of such candidates is raising concerns about what happens if those who lack faith in elections are put in charge of running them. State Rep. Mark Finchem easily cleared a crowded field in Tuesdays Arizona primary. He has embraced former President Donald Trumps false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and has promised to upend election administration in the politically pivotal state if elected. The focus of the election is going to be on restoring the rule of law. Its that simple, Finchem said in an interview Wednesday. Right now, we have lawlessness. Finchem, who earned an early endorsement from Trump, was among those seeking to have the Legislature overturn Democrat Joe Bidens win in Arizona. He joins Republican nominees for secretary of state in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico and the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania in supporting Trumps false claims. In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state. Election experts say candidates who dispute the results of a valid election in which there has been no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting systems pose a danger of interfering in future elections. They warn it could trigger chaos if they refuse to accept results they dont like. They only have faith in elections when their side wins. Their definition of a secure election is only when they or their party wins, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who now leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. That is not a democracy. Not all such candidates this year have been successful. Most notably, Rep. Jody Hice lost his bid to oust Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the states primary. Raffensperger had drawn the ire of Trump after refusing the former presidents demand in a phone call to find enough votes to overturn Bidens win in the state. Most of the seven incumbent Republican secretaries facing primary challengers this year have advanced to the November election. That includes Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, who on Tuesday defeated a challenger who promoted election conspiracy theories. Only Indianas Holli Sullivan and South Dakotas Steve Barnett have lost their bids to stay in office. A handful of primaries remain over the next several weeks. Historically, races for secretary of state have been low-key contests overshadowed by campaigns for governor and state attorney general. But they have drawn enormous interest since the 2020 election, when voting systems and processes came under attack by Trump and his supporters. Secretaries of state dont make laws, but they work closely with local election officials in their states. Responsibilities vary, but they typically issue guidance on voting procedures to ensure uniformity, dole out funding to local election officials and coordinate with federal officials on election security. Experts say a secretary of state who believes the 2020 election was stolen could seek changes to how elections are run. For instance, those who think mail voting is vulnerable to fraud could add new requirements for mail ballot requests, reduce access to drop boxes or eliminate lists of permanent absentee voters. In Arizona, the secretary of state writes a manual with the force of law that lays out election rules. The manual must be based on state law and approved by the attorney general and governor, but has been the subject of controversy this year after the Republican attorney general sought to block a new version written by the Democratic secretary of state. The 2019 version with some changes was allowed to remain in force instead of the new one, and Finchem vows to completely scrap that version. If they have the keys to the castle, so to speak, will they properly set rules, count votes and defend the will of the people? said David Levine, a former election official who is now a fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Besides noting election administration, Levine said there are questions about what a secretary of state who embraces conspiracy theories might do if their partys candidate lost an election and claimed fraud. We need to make sure that we are putting people in these positions who put free and fair elections above partisan interest, he said. Although secretaries of state are important positions, they do not have unlimited power, said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for expanded voter access. Even in states where the secretary of state has an enormous amount of power, a secretary of state cannot by themselves overturn a democratic election, Albert said. Even where these individuals may want to take actions to undermine the ability for voters to vote and have a ballot count, they are still limited by the law and checks and balances in place. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) The federal government filed civil rights charges Thursday against four Louisville police officers over the drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose fatal shooting helped fuel the racial justice protests that rocked the nation in 2020. The charges most of which stem from the faulty drug warrant used to search Taylors home are an effort to hold law enforcement accountable for the killing of the 26-year-old medical worker. One of the officers was acquitted of state charges earlier this year. Breonna Taylor should be alive today, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the charges, which include unlawful conspiracy, use of force and obstruction of justice. The charges named former officers Joshua Jaynes and Brett Hankison, along with current officers Kelly Goodlett and Sgt. Kyle Meany. Louisville police said they are seeking to fire Goodlett and Meany. Hankison was the only officer charged Thursday who was on the scene the night of the killing. Taylor was shot to death by officers who knocked down her door while executing a search warrant. Taylors boyfriend fired a shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the door, and they returned fire, striking Taylor multiple times. Hankison, Jaynes and Meany had initial appearances Thursday in federal court before Magistrate Judge Regina Edwards, who set their bonds at $50,000 each, according to a court clerk official. The three men face a maximum sentence of life in prison for the civil rights charges. Calls to attorneys for Jaynes and Meany were not returned Thursday. It wasn't immediately known if Hankison had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. Goodlett has pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy, Taylor family attorney Ben Crump said Thursday, though records on her court proceedings were sealed. Goodlett faces up to five years in prison. Local activists and members of Taylor's family celebrated the charges and thanked federal officials. Supporters gathered in a downtown park and chanted: Say her name, Breonna Taylor! This is a day when Black women saw equal justice in America, Crump said. Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, said she has waited nearly 2 1/2 years for police to be held accountable. Todays overdue, but it still hurts, she said. The Justice Department is also conducting a non-criminal investigation of the Louisville Police Department, announced last year, that is probing whether the department has a pattern of using excessive force and conducting unreasonable search and seizures. In the protests of 2020, Taylor's name was often shouted along with George Floyd, who was killed less than three months after Taylor by a Minneapolis police officer in a videotaped encounter that shocked the nation. Protesters who took to the streets over months in Louisville were especially critical of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who presented only wanton endangerment charges against Hankison for a grand jury to consider in 2020. Members of the grand jury later came forward to complain that Cameron's office had steered them away from charges for the other officers involved in the raid. Thank God that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not get the last word in regard to justice for Breonna Taylor," Crump said Thursday. We have always said this was a conspiracy to cover up the death of Breonna Taylor. Today the Justice Department put forth the charging documents to show we werent crazy. Cameron, a Republican running for governor next year, said in announcing the indictment against Hankison in September 2020 that he would leave issues regarding potential civil rights violations to federal officials to investigate. Cameron said in a release Thursday evening that his office's primary task was to investigate whether the officers who executed the search warrant were criminally responsible for Ms. Taylors death under state law. It is important that people not conflate what happened today with the state law investigation undertaken by our office, Cameron said. Im proud of the work of our investigators and prosecutors. Garland said the officers who were at Taylors home just after midnight on March 13, 2020, were not involved in the drafting of the warrant, and were unaware of the false and misleading statements. Hankison was indicted on two deprivation-of-rights charges alleging he used excessive force when he retreated from Taylors door, turned a corner and fired 10 shots into the side of her two-bedroom apartment. Bullets flew into a neighbors apartment, nearly striking one man. He was acquitted by a jury of state charges earlier this year. A separate indictment said Jaynes and Meany both knew the warrant used to search Taylors home had information that was false, misleading and out of date. Both are charged with conspiracy and deprivation of rights. Meany ran a police unit that focused on aggressive drug investigations. Police served five warrants simultaneously the night of the Taylor raid, four of them in a concentrated area where drug activity was suspected, and the fifth at Taylor's apartment nearly 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. The warrant for Taylor's house alleged that she was receiving packages for a suspected drug dealer who was a former boyfriend. The warrant, signed by Jaynes and approved by Meany, said Jaynes had confirmed with the postal service that packages for the ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, were going to Taylor's apartment. Investigators later learned that Jaynes had not confirmed that with the postal inspector. Jaynes was fired in January 2021 for violating department standards in the preparation of a search warrant execution and for being untruthful in the Taylor warrant. Jaynes and Goodlett allegedly conspired to falsify an investigative document that was written after Taylors death, Garland said. Federal investigators also allege that Meany, who testified at Hankisons trial, lied to the FBI during its investigation. Federal officials filed a separate charge against Goodlett, alleging she conspired with Jaynes to falsify Taylors warrant affidavit. Garland alleged that Jaynes and Goodlett met in a garage in May 2020 where they agreed to tell investigators a false story. Former Louisville Police Sgt. John Mattingly, who was shot at Taylors door, retired last year. Another officer, Myles Cosgrove, who investigators said fired the shot that killed Taylor, was dismissed from the department in January 2021. Taylor's boyfriend, Kenny Walker, who was in her apartment that night and fired the shot at Mattingly, was initially charged with attempted murder of a police officer but that charge was dropped after Walker told investigators he thought an intruder was breaking into the apartment. The Taylor case also prompted a review of the city's no-knock warrant policy. Officers at Taylor's door said they knocked and announced they were police even though the warrant didn't require that. Those types of warrants, used in drug investigations to attempt to prevent the destruction of evidence, were later banned in the city of Louisville. UN envoy meets Myanmar Military chief 17 Aug 2022 | 10:20 PM Naypyidaw, August 17 (UNI) UN Special Envoy for Myanmar Noeleen Heyzer met with the nation's military chief Min Aung Hlaing here on Wednesday and requested a meeting with jailed politician Aung San Suu Kyi. see more.. Cosmonaut Artemyev returns to ISS from Spacewalk 17 Aug 2022 | 10:13 PM Moscow, August 17 (UNI) Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev is returning from the spacewalk to the ISS due to issues with the battery, he may lose connection, according to the broadcast on the Roscosmos website. see more.. UK, Pakistan sign extradition agreement 17 Aug 2022 | 9:50 PM London, August 17 (UNI) London and Islamabad have signed an agreement on extradition of criminals and illegal migrants from the UK to Pakistan, British Home Secretary Priti Patel said on Wednesday. see more.. US airstrike kills 13 Al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia 17 Aug 2022 | 8:34 PM Washington, Aug 17 (UNI) The United States killed 13 al-Shabaab terrorists in an airstrike in Somalia last week, the Africa Command (AFRICOM) said on Wednesday. see more.. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate BLOOMINGTON, Minn. (AP) Someone fired shots Thursday at the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis, sending shoppers running for cover, but police said it did not appear anyone was injured. Bloomington police also said they were still searching for a suspect after securing the scene shortly before 6 p.m. They said a lockdown that had forced some shoppers to shelter in place, while others fled, was in the process of being lifted, but that the mall would not reopen Thursday. Video posted to social media showed what appeared to be a man shouting as he walked near the complexs Nike store, with at least three apparent gunshots. Bloomington Police Chief Booker T. Hodges during a news conference Thursday night at the mall said two groups got into an altercation at a store, one group left, but someone in that group decided to fire three rounds into a store with people around. Fortunately, at this time it doesnt appear that anyone was injured," Hodges said. Police are looking for two people but only one had a weapon, Hodges said. He said a Bloomington police officer was on the scene within 30 seconds. Hodges said if someone decides they have no regard for human life, I dont know what we can do about that. Mall spokesman Dan Jasper said the mall will reopen Friday with more mall security and police on site. Guns are not allowed on Mall of America property, Jasper said. Gov. Tim Walz tweeted: Tonights violence at the Mall of America is unacceptable. These brazen incidents will not be tolerated. The mall, which opened in 1992, is the largest in the U.S. and is a tourist destination and community gathering spot. Video posted online showed shoppers fleeing from the amusement park at the interior on the giant malls ground level, holding their childrens hands and clutching their bags. Still other video showed a pair of police officers, including one with a rifle, moving through the mall, and people walking quickly away from the mall's large interior atrium area. Trent Turner, a salesman at a DSW shoe store one level below the Nike store, said he was near the back when he heard gunshots. Then I saw everyone stampeding toward the back, he said. One woman tweeted that she was shopping for clothes for high school senior pictures with her 17-year-old daughter when the store manager told them to move as far back as possible. The woman said she was in a fitting room with her daughter. Another person posted video of dozens of people said to be gathered in the basement as warnings to please shelter immediately repeated over mall speakers. A woman who gave her name only as Tara told The Associated Press that she and a friend were among dozens of people who ran down a hallway to get out of the mall. We were in the Lululemon store and I just saw people running and he was in the dressing room and I started banging on the door to get him to come out and he didnt have a shirt on so we just ran out of there," she said. The Mall of America bans guns on its premises, according to its website. The mall does not have metal detectors and shoppers are not searched upon entry. It was the scene of a shooting on New Years Eve, when two people were wounded during an apparent altercation. ___ Associated Press writers Todd Richmond and Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis., Ken Kusmer in Indianapolis, Dave Kolpack in Fargo, N.D., and Scott McFetridge in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed. Trisha Ahmed is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. WASHINGTON Tremendous progress is being made to restore and protect the Great Lakes from the impacts of toxic chemicals and the introduction of non-native invasive species. Thats according to the authors of a joint report issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Climate Change Canada on July 29. The State of the Great Lakes report provides a summary of the health of the Great Lakes using indicators of ecosystem health, such as drinking water, fish contamination and frequency of beach closures. Protecting the Great Lakes can only be achieved by working together, stated Stephen Guilbeault, Canadas Minister of Environment and Climate Change in a press release. With our American friends and (neighbors), we have had incredible success in cleaning up the Great Lakes from pollutants, while reducing farm run-off and protecting species at risk. The overall condition of the Great Lakes is fair and largely unchanging according to the report. Over 120 scientists and other experts assessed the lakes on several different aspects of water quality and ecosystem health. These indicator assessments help governments identify current and emerging challenges to the Great Lakes. The report found the following aspects of the Great Lakes are currently in good condition: Drinking water Researchers found the Great Lakes remain a source of high-quality drinking water when treated. Beach quality Beaches along the Great Lakes are in good condition, according to the report. However, some beaches are occasionally unsafe for swimming due to bacterial contamination. Groundwater contamination The report finds that groundwater typically provides good quality water to tributaries in the Great Lakes basin. However, groundwater in some areas has elevated levels of pollutants like nitrate and chloride. Invasive species prevention The rate by which new nonnative species have been introduced to the Great Lakes basin has greatly declined, according to the report. Overall, the majority of the 2022 indicators are in fair and unchanging condition: Fish consumption Great Lakes fish can be safely eaten by following relevant guidelines and advisories. However, unrestricted fish consumption is not yet possible, which the report finds has had an impact on communities that heavily rely on fish for food and cultural, spiritual or economic purposes. Toxic chemicals Levels of toxic chemicals, including PCBs and mercury, have declined significantly in the Great Lakes. However, concentrations of other toxic chemicals still pose threats to human health and the environment. Habitat and species Ecosystems vary in quality along the coast of the Great Lakes, with the healthiest being located in northern areas where human populations are at their lowest. The Great Lakes food web continues to be impacted to varying degrees by environmental stressors such as invasive species and climate change. However, some native fish species including lake trout and sturgeon are responding well to restoration efforts in several areas, according to the report. Nutrients and algae Nutrients in the lakes are not at acceptable levels. High nutrient levels in parts of the Great Lakes, particularly on Lake Erie, are contributing to blooms of toxic cyanobacteria and nuisance algae. In offshore areas of lakes Michigan, Huron and Ontario, lower nutrient amounts have resulted in algae and microorganism growth rates below their desired levels. The report finds that only Lake Superior has acceptable nutrient conditions that are necessary to maintain a healthy food web. Watershed impacts Watershed stressors including population growth, habitat loss and degradation as well as land-use activities are impacting water quality and ecosystem health in the Great Lakes, the report finds. Some indicators however show that there are still significant threats to the Great Lakes ecosystem that could worsen due to climate change. The report assessed one indicator as being in poor condition: Invasive species impacts File photo While the study finds that efforts to block new potentially invasive nonnatives from the Great Lakes watershed have been largely successful, the impacts of those established invasive species persist. The report states that invasive species continue to spread within and between the lakes. An overall assessment could not be determined on the impacts of climate trends. The report also looked at the status of each of the Great Lakes. Lakes Superior and Huron have the best assessment, with both rated as good and unchanging. Lake Superior Lake Superiors forested watershed and coastal wetlands help maintain water quality and a healthy aquatic ecosystem, the report states. Lake Huron Lake Huron also remains healthy despite some algal blooms and a reduction in offshore nutrients due to invasive filter feeding mussels. Lake Michigan Lake Michigan was assessed as fair and unchanging, according to the report. Lake Michigan's habitats support a diverse array of plant and animal species and its waters continue to provide opportunities for swimming and recreational use, the report states. However, invasive species and other stressors continue to affect both water quality and the lakes food web. Lake Ontario Lake Ontario has shown improvements with fewer beach closing and declines in toxin concentrations in fish. The report lists Ontario as fair and improving. Lake Erie Lake Erie was given the worst assessment of poor and unchanging. Lake Erie supports a productive walleye fishery, but elevated nutrient concentrations and algal blooms are persistent problems, the report states. Visit binational.net to read the report or learn more about efforts to preserve the Great Lakes. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON (AP) The White House on Thursday said new intelligence suggests Russia is working to fabricate evidence concerning last week's deadly strike on a prison housing prisoners of war in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia is looking to plant false evidence to make it appear that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the July 29 attack on Olenivka Prison that left 53 dead and wounded dozens more, according to White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby Separately, a Western government official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, said explosive experts who have reviewed photos of the prison released by the Russians following the incident have determined that the destruction wasnt likely caused by a high-explosive strike from the outside and that it was much more likely to be incendiary and from inside the location. We anticipate that Russian officials will try to frame the Ukrainian Armed Forces in anticipation of journalists and potential investigators visiting the site of the attack," Kirby said. Russia has claimed that Ukraines military used U.S.-supplied rocket launchers to strike the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk Peoples Republic. The Ukrainian military denied making any rocket or artillery strikes in Olenivka. The intelligence arm of the Ukrainian defense ministry claimed in a statement Wednesday to have evidence that local Kremlin-backed separatists colluded with the Russian FSB, the KGBs main successor agency, and mercenary group Wagner to mine the barrack before using a flammable substance, which led to the rapid spread of fire in the room. Kirby said the classified intelligence determination which was recently downgraded shows that Russian officials might even plant ammunition from medium-ranged High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, as evidence that the systems provided by the U.S. to Ukraine were used in the attack. Ukraine has effectively used HIMARS launchers, which fire medium-range rockets and can be quickly moved before Russia can target them with return fire, and have been seeking more launchers from the United States. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday angrily dismissed the U.S. officials claims about Russia fabricating the evidence. It has been absolutely proven and its absolutely obvious what happened in Olenivka, Peskov said Thursday in a conference call with reporters. Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed by the Ukrainian military. Ukraine killed its soldiers who were in captivity, and many others were wounded. There is an evidence and there is nothing to hide. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Wednesday he is appointing a fact-finding mission in response to requests from Russia and Ukraine to investigate the killings at the prison. Guterres told reporters he doesnt have authority to conduct criminal investigations but does have authority to conduct fact-finding missions. He added that the terms of reference for a mission to Ukraine are currently being prepared and will be sent to the governments of Ukraine and Russia for approval. Peskov said that Russia has invited the U.N. and the Red Cross to visit the site and conduct a probe. The Ukrainian POWs at the Donetsk prison included troops captured during the fall of Mariupol. They spent months holed up with civilians at the giant Azovstal steel mill in the southern port city. Their resistance during a relentless Russian bombardment became a symbol of Ukrainian defiance against Russias aggression. More than 2,400 soldiers from the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian national guard and other military units gave up their fight and surrendered under orders from Ukraines military in May. Scores of Ukrainian soldiers have been taken to prisons in Russian-controlled areas. Some have returned to Ukraine as part of prisoner exchanges with Russia, but other families have no idea whether their loved ones are still alive, or if they will ever come home. U.S. and U.K. officials, before the war and in its early stages, repeatedly went public with what they said were Russian plans to stage fake videos and events that the Kremlin would blame on Ukraine but in fact were perpetrated by Russia. Lederer reported from the United Nations. Associated Press writers Jill Lawless in London and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report. SALT LAKE CITY (AP) A Utah man has been arrested on accusations he started a wildfire while trying to burn a spider with his lighter. Cory Allan Martin, 26, told deputies that he spotted the spider Monday while he was in a hiking area in the foothills south of Salt Lake City near the city of Springville, shows a probable cause statement. He acknowledged starting the fire, but didn't explain why he was trying to burn the spider. Photo: (Photo : Marc Piscotty/Getty Images) A cash boost in the amount of $750 for single taxpayers and $1,500 for joint taxpayers have been disbursed in the mail for families in Colorado. The money due is underscored in the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) refund. Dubbed the Colorado Cash Back, the stimulus payment was expedited for release this year instead of spring 2023. According to the Colorado Department of Revenue, taxpayers who completed their 2021 income tax filing as of June 30, 2022, should expect the refund check in the mail on or before Sept. 30, 2022. Colorado State Treasurer Dave Young said that they have started transmitting as of Monday, Aug. 1, 2022. However, residents should expect the distribution to last several weeks as an estimated 3.1 million locals filed their taxes for the year. Taxpayers who have yet to complete their income tax returns before the extended deadline in October will still be eligible for the Colorado Cash Back. However, they will get their TABOR refund by January 2023 due to late filing. On the other hand, families who just moved to Colorado for 2022 will not be eligible for the stimulus payment. Read Also: New Stimulus Checks Approved: Up to $1,050 to Go to Eligible Californians What exactly is a TABOR refund? The state disburses the TABOR refund, spun as the Colorado Cash Back, when the tax collection for the year is beyond the constitutional cap. The state is obligated to return the excess money to the people if the numbers indicate good growth in the Colorado economy. Legislators, however, still need to specify the details of the rollout as this is not outlined in the state constitution. For the current rollout, the lawmakers have agreed that a one-time $750 to $1,500 cash boost would be the way to go. They have also decided to release the money over the summer to help with the school expenses. Young told The Denver Channel that what differs from this year's Colorado Cash Back to the previous years is its early release and higher value for low-income families. In the past, the amount of the cash boost was based on a percentage so high-income earners get more of the TABOR refund. This year, every Colorado taxpayer will receive the same amount. However, the state's Department of Revenue may deduct back taxes or any debt the taxpayer owes to the government. "Those people that are in most need, I believe, are getting the best benefit out of this," Young said. The countdown is on. Your CO Cashback check is coming in August. Global forces & continued disruptions from the pandemic have caused economic uncertainty. We fought to ease the burden for CO families - keep an eye out for your check in the coming weeks. #copolitics #coleg pic.twitter.com/GdJC67Z5pl DafnaMichaelsonJenet (@dafna_m) July 29, 2022 Preventing fraud for the cashback The state will use the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for the distribution and not through direct deposits. Taxpayers are advised to update their postal address if they have moved residence, or they must set up a forwarding address to ensure that the check arrives in their new home. Meanwhile, locals who pay property or sales taxes, instead of income taxes, may also claim their TABOR payments. Aside from the checks, they may be eligible for property tax reductions if they are senior citizens or veterans. A call center will soon be set up to help the locals with their TABOR refund questions, per KDVR. Related Article: Stimulus Payments: Residents in These 4 States May Get Another Cash Boost Photo: (Photo : JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) T.J. Maxx has agreed to pay a whopping $13 million fine for selling a number of recalled products, including Fisher-Price's Rock 'n Play Sleepers, an item that has been linked to at least 30 infant deaths since 2009. The agreement settles charges that T.J. Maxx knowingly sold, offered and distributed products that were part of 21 different recalls from March 2014 to October 2019, according to Fox 59. While the U.S. government says the Rock 'n Play Sleepers were linked to 30 child deaths, a congressional report last year found that more than 50 infants died using the dangerous product before it was recalled back in 2019. The report accused Fisher-Price of keeping the infant sleepers on the market for a decade as it earned $200 million in revenue from it, despite the company's knowledge of infant deaths and safety concerns linked to the product. T.J. Maxx is also accused of selling a since-recalled Kids II Rocking Sleeper, a product that has been linked to at least five infant deaths. TJX deeply regrets selling recalled products TJX Companies issued a statement to NBC News, saying that they deeply regret that in some instances between 2014 and 2019, recalled products were not properly removed from their sales floors despite the recall processes that they had in place. The statement added that they have made a significant investment in people, processes, and technology to strengthen their processes, and have cooperated fully with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). TJX Companies owns T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods and Marshalls, among several other discount retail brands. The settlement that was announced on Tuesday does not constitute an admission by the company that it knowingly violated the federal Consumer Product Safety Act. T.J. Maxx still has agreed to maintain a compliance program as well as a system of internal controls to ensure it complies with the act. Read Also: Banana Boat Recalls Sunscreen Products After Benzene Detected in Several Batches CPSC said sales of recalled products were illegal According to the U.S. CPSC, TJX offered for sale and distributed dangerous recalled products through its website and its retail stores. The federal agency said these sales were illegal and put hazardous products into the hands and homes of unsuspecting consumers. CPSC added that hundreds of inclined sleepers that pose a suffocation risk to infants as well as a wide range of other products that present laceration hazards, choking hazards, and fire risks were sold after their recall date, which is in violation of federal law. Majority of the products were recalled due to the risk of death and infant suffocation. Other products included hoverboards with 16 reports of burn injuries, a portable speaker that has multiple reports of it exploding, and knives that broke that caused multiple lacerations requiring stitches. The company filed a joint news release with the CPSC back in November 2019 about the issue, saying they sold 19 different products. The CPSC said the company reported to staff that it found three additional products after the announcement. Related Article: Family of NC Pilot, Who Died After Exiting Plane During Mid-flight Emergency, Left Reeling Dhaka, Aug 4 (UNI) Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will be on a two-day Bangladesh tour starting from Saturday. The Chinese Foreign Minister will land in Dhaka on Saturday morning. He will leave the city on Sunday. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Foreign Minister have bilateral meetings and courtesy calls with him. Besides, several other documents including a memorandum of understanding regarding disaster management may be signed during the visit, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shahriar Alam told reporters on Thursday. He said that Bangladesh's relationship with China is very deep. Several MoUs and old agreements are likely to be renewed during this visit. Photo: (Photo : JAMES ARTHUR GEKIERE/Belga/AFP via Getty Images) The back-to-school season used to be such an exciting time for students but health threats like COVID-19 and its variants, monkeypox, respiratory syncytial virus, superflu and super colds, are expectedly drawing concerns for parents and kids. As the children prepare to enter the school halls and interact with their peers and teachers face-to-face again, safeguarding their health is a priority for many parents. Medical experts are also imparting some valuable back-to-school health precautions that families can adapt to ensure the avoidance of infection or illnesses. To wear or ditch the facemask? Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN analyst, said that the question most often asked by parents as the kids return to school is if they should put their face masks back on. The expert said that it's a decision other parents must respect if they feel that a mask will protect their kids. Read Also: Back-to-School Shopping to Average $661 Per Child for Fall 2022 However, Wen said that masking should be a top priority for everyone if there is a high level of infection in the community. As previous pandemic waves have shown, this safety protocol can reduce the risks of transmissions, especially among school children. Wen said that for her family, personally, their priority is not to avoid the infection anymore so they are OK with not wearing a face mask. Instead, they are focusing on getting every family member vaccinated and boosted. Getting vaccinated and observing basic protocols Dr. Tricia Pearce of the Department of Health in Bay County in Florida said in an interview with WJHG that vaccine requirements in some schools have been established long before COVID-19. She advised parents to look into their child's school list and comply with the requirements. Pearce also wants children not to forget about the basic health protocols that stop the spread of germs, such as washing hands frequently with soap and water or using hand sanitizer if there are no soaps. These are very effective ways against the spread of flu, cough or colds, and other infectious illnesses. The state Department of Health also advised families to stay at home if they do get sick and deal with getting better first than attending to their tasks, duties and obligations at school or work. Wen added that some schools and after-school programs may still impose regular COVID-19 tests as with the 2021 school year, depending on the community transmissions. Other schools, however, may only ask for testing results if the child is showing symptoms. At any rate, it's still good to stock up on testing kits in case it is needed at home. What about monkeypox? Public Health District Director Lou Kreidler said via Texoma's that there is a great concern for monkeypox spread in school, especially as there are still no reported cases in their area in Witchita, Kansas. He believes that infection of this disease is applicable to close contact. Kreidler also said that health concerns are always at an all-time high during back-to-school season, pre-COVID, because it's also the start of flu season. As with Pearce, he expects the children to wash their hands and use hand sanitizers, as guided and reminded by the parents. Related Article: Back-to-School Necklace: Why Parents Need to Probe the Dark Meaning Behind this Trend Photo: (Photo : Getty images ) Experts have warned of Monkeypox's "high risk" spread to kids under eight as the school season starts. Four children in the country have tested positive for Monkeypox after federal officials confirmed two other cases last month. There are 22,000 cases reported globally, 5,200 cases of these cases are from the U.S. Since May, health officials have confirmed that 5,811 Americans have been infected with the virus. The first two Monkeypox cases on children in the US were a toddler in California and a non-resident from the UK who was tested in the Washington DC area. The children are now receiving treatment and are in good health, The Sun reports. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pushed a health alert over the weekend, citing preliminary evidence that has suggested that children below the age of eight could develop a more severe reaction to the virus. Monkeypox on children Dr. Aniruddha Hazra cited that out of the 15,000 cases reported to the World Health Organization (WHO), less than 75 have occurred in children. As per The Sun, the number of cases in children globally is small, but many global data are merged, making it difficult to know the exact number of children cases. Per Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital, the four cases of children getting Monkeypox are low, but household transmission is possible. Hence, more kids getting infected with the virus is likely. Read Also: Mom Appeals for Help in Finding Husband's Killer Who Shot Him Infront of Their Toddler Symptoms of monkeypox in kids to watch out for According to Kids Health, Monkeypox is caused by the monkeypox virus. It was discovered in laboratory monkeys in 1958. It is similar to smallpox, but it is less contagious and usually exhibits milder cases. Common signs and symptoms include rash, headache, fever, body aches, and swollen lymph nodes. The rash initially looks like flat spots, eventually becoming bumps. The bumps become filled with fluids. In some cases, the sites would look like pimples or blisters. As the infected person heals, the bump crust falls off. The rash can be painful or itchy, making it more challenging to manage for kids. Usually, symptoms disappear within two to four weeks. Its transmission mode is if a person contacts infected blood, body fluids (especially during sexual contact), or fluid from blisters. Unlike COVID-19, Monkeypox is not spread through respiratory droplets. However, it can be transmitted through close skin-to-skin contact or a secondary surface like clothing, bedding, or towels. Experts recommend washing hands, masking, and avoiding contact with sick people and animals can protect people from getting sick. Smallpox vaccines are also effective against monkeypox infection. Last week, New York became the first state to declare Monkeypox a "disaster emergency," with officials calling the city the "epicenter of the outbreak." San Francisco also declared an emergency local declaration for the disease. This week, ABC News reports that Illinois declared Monkeypox a public health emergency, making the state a "disaster area" for the virus. Related Article: Charlotte Woman Whose Baby Died Sues Abbott Alleging its Milk is Dangerous to Premature Babies Photo: (Photo : Pexels) Being a single parent is tough but having a better understanding of the challenges solo parents face can help many people to offer better support to those who find themselves taking on such roles. While the majority of solo parents are mothers, there are about 2.6 million families in the United States are headed by single dads. However, the study on single fathers is limited, with many studies focused on comparing partnered parents to single mothers. Single dads may have several advantages working in their favor. According to a Pew Research Report, from 2013, single fathers are more likely to be living with a cohabiting partner (41% versus 16%) which means they're not always entirely on their own. In terms of education, income, and poverty, single fathers tend to be better off than single mothers. Hence, that doesn't mean that there are no challenges single dads usually face. After all, the majority of society views men as not someone capable of such tasks as women are assumed to be caregivers and nurturers, and keepers of the family. The truth, according to Healthline, fathers are not only capable and competent as they are also loving, caring, and more than qualified. Why fathers play an important role? According to Dr. Gregory Gordon, one of the pediatricians at the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children in Florida, fathers who are involved help keep children on the right path. His statement is backed up by a study released by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the study is about the nonprofit organization on fatherhood since 2004 and was released in connection with Father's Day. Gordon says that parenting roles are a lot more blended and dads have realized they can do possible things they think they couldn't do before or looks impossible to them. The term single father entails men in a variety of family circumstances. About 52% are separated, divorced, widowed, or never married and are living without a cohabiting partner, 41% are living with a non-marital partner, and a small share, 7%, are married but living apart from their spouse. The role of fathers has evolved and the public now acknowledges their importance not only as a breadwinner of the family but also as a caregiver. The analysis of long-term time use data determines that fathers are narrowing the still sizable gap with moms in the amount of time they spend with their children. The Pew Research survey that many believe that a father's greatest role is to provide values to the children which will be followed by emotional support, discipline, and income support. Read Also: Does Living Together Before Marriage Makes the Relationship Stronger? Fathers as the pillar in the development of a child Daniel Ortega, a 34-year-old in Boston and founder of Solo Parents Society has sole custody of his kids and says his biggest insecurity as a father is that, he has to explain himself all of the time to his children, and when they learn that he was a single dad, that's when all the praise comes. Men are assumed to be buffoons who don't even know to dress a kid while women are supposed to be the ones who can do everything for the kid. That's likely why dads are praised when things go right, per Parents. Related Article: Father-Daughter Bond: How Fathers Affect Relationships with Daughters Photo: (Photo : Brandon Bell/Getty Images) Vicki Hankins and her husband were putting serious miles on their vehicle while looking for baby formula about a month ago. Fortunately for the couple, a lot has changed about the formula crisis since then. Instead of having long drives every few days with uncertain results, they now have been able to cut down to one long trip only once or twice a month to search for formula. The couple told CNN they don't worry any more about being able to find the much-needed formula for their kid. Vicki and her hubby just know they will have to travel to get it. Experts who are closely tracking the baby formula shortage in the country say stories like the Hankinses' are par for the course right now in the United States. Formula availability is not back to normal just yet, but for many American families, the situation is better than it was even a month or two ago. Stock rates for powdered formula slower to recover in U.S. Market research firm Information Resources Inc. (IRI) said that before a nationwide infant formula recall by Abbott back in February and the subsequent shutdown of one of the company's major manufacturing facilities, about 10 percent of infant formula items were typically out of stock in stores. The latest report of IRI says that about 20 percent of all types of baby formula products were out of stock during the week ending July 24, according to CNBC. That is the lowest out-of-stock rate since early June. Stock rates for powdered formula have been slower to recover, though, with IRI data showing that about 30 percent of powdered formula products were out of stock the week ending July 24. Dr. Steve Abrams, who is a neonatologist at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, said there is no question that the situation where American families are finding absolutely no formula in stores has gotten much better. Abrams pointed out, however, that there are still significant problems in the system. Read Also: Desperate Moms in the US Cross Borders to Find Baby Formula for Their Kids Abbott's Michigan plant resumes production The US Food and Drug Administration commissioner issued a statement last week, saying that formula production needs to continue at high levels for six to eight more weeks for supply to keep up with demand in the country. Programs designed to help American families affected by the formula shortage are being extended too. Abbott announced back in May, that it would cover the cost of switching babies to different brands in states where it held WIC (Women, infants and children) contracts through August 30, a signal that it expected the baby formula shortage could impact consumers for months. Flooding from a storm halted operations at Abbott's Michigan facility back in June, delaying its production ramp up once again. Abbott has resumed production of its specialty Elecare formula and shipping could begin imminently, according to NPR. The company has extended its rebates to states, though, for another month. Related Article: Long Beach to Distribute 950 Cans of Baby Formula Amid Ongoing Nationwide Shortage Photo: (Photo : photosforyou/Pixabay) A 12-year-old girl's escape from her kidnapper by chewing off her restraints has led to the discovery of two corpses in a nearby house in rural Alabama Monday, Aug. 1, 2022. According to CNN, the Tallapoosa County police received a call about a girl wandering by herself on County Road 34 at around 8:30 a.m. A passing motorist stayed with her until the authorities arrived. She was taken to the hospital for medical attention and told the police of her ordeal. The 12-year-old girl said she was kidnapped about a week ago and was tied to a bedpost. Her wrist showed marks of restraint. The victim said her kidnapper gave her alcohol, and she was constantly in a "drugged state." She recalled getting hit in the head and breaking her braces while chewing the rope. There were no reports of a missing child fitting her description. Police then arrested her kidnapper, Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, while he was at work at a construction site. He was subsequently charged with murder, abuse of corpses, and kidnapping, after the discovery of two bodies at his mobile home. He is currently at a Tallapoosa County jail, awaiting his bond hearing. Read Also: Daughter Kidnapped at Birth Wants Fake Father, Her Kidnapper's Husband, to Walk Her Down the Aisle Identities of dismembered bodies of woman and child released According to NBC News, the bodies found at the kidnapper's property belonged to Sandra Vazquez Ceja, Reyes' girlfriend, and her 14-year-old son. The police believe Pascual-Reyes smothered Ceja with a pillow while her son was struck hard. To hide the evidence, Reyes allegedly cut up their bodies. Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett described the crime as "horrendous." The police did not confirm if the kidnapped child knew Pascual-Reyes or the two deceased, but reports have cited that she is Ceja's daughter. This explained why there were no missing reports on her. Abbett hailed the child as a hero and said she is now safe with child welfare officials. Other people were living on the Alabama property, but the police did not say if they would also be charged. Investigations are ongoing alongside the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. A forensics team is still trying to determine how long the bodies had been hidden. A 12-yr-old girl escaped from her kidnapper who tied her to a bedpost and drugged her with alcohol, by chewing through her restraints. Her escape led police to find two decomposed bodies in his home. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes 37, has been charged with first-degree kidnapping, pic.twitter.com/Jtn9PJK5nD Sumner (@renmusb1) August 3, 2022 The motive for Baby Brandon's kidnapping discovered Meanwhile, across the state, officials of Santa Clara County have uncovered the motive behind the kidnapping of three-month-old baby Brandon Cuellar, who was taken inside the house while his grandmother, Victoria Mejia, was unloading items from her car. According to SFist, the kidnapping mastermind was Yesenia Guadalupe Ramirez, 44, who knew the grandmother and the baby's mom, Jessica Ayala. Ramirez allegedly came up with a complicated scheme to entrap one of her many boyfriends, Francisco Marquez, by claiming the baby was his child. One of the men who took the baby, Roman Portillo, was also a boyfriend and had tried to kidnap Brandon four times before. He succeeded on the fifth try, but the baby was rescued the next day, following a tip from his neighbors. Ramirez and Portillo will be sentenced in October as they didn't contest the charges laid before them. Related Article: Baby Brandon Cuellar Rescued, Suspects Arrested in San Jose 3-Month-Old Kidnapping This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact the Parsons Sun office at (620) 421-2000 if you have any questions Its being reported today that Foxconn's Zhengzhou iPEBG and iDPBG business group factories under Hon Hai Group have offered preferential bonuses to recruit employees. The units cover assembly, testing, manufacturing, Mother Level Board and other departments. Industry analysts have analyzed that this is in response to the volume of new Apple iPhone 14 series. production demand. According to the WeChat official account on the 3rd, Foxconn Zhengzhou Science and Technology Park has launched a new recruitment policy, covering the Zhengzhou Comprehensive Bonded Zone of the iPEBG Innovative Product Mechanism Business Group, the iDPBG Digital Product Business Group (Integrated Digital Product Business Group) Zhengzhou Plant, the Glass Group Zhengzhou Plant, iPEBG Zhengzhou Processing Zone, etc. According to information, the iPEBG business group is one of the core units of the industrial Fii under the Hon Hai Group, engaged in the research and development of high-end Apple iPhone manufacturing technology, as well as automation, robotics and intelligent solutions; the iPEBG business group in Zhengzhou Comprehensive Bonded Zone also designs, manufactures and manufactures iPhone precision machine components, and layout solutions related to smart manufacturing, automation equipment, and industrial artificial intelligence. As for Foxconn's iDPBG business group, it is mainly located in Zhengzhou Free Trade Zone and South District in Henan, Guanlan and Longhua factories in Shenzhen, Guangdong, Taiyuan, etc. The iDPBG business group mainly manufactures iPhone mobile phones for Apple. Industry insiders said that Foxconn Zhengzhou Airport Plant and Economic and Technological Development Zone mainly manufacture Apple iPhone and other smart phone products and components, and the high-end iPhone 13 is also produced in the airport plant. The mass production demand of the launched iPhone 14 series. The WeChat public account information was announced, iPEBG Zhengzhou Comprehensive Bonded Zone emphasized in the recruitment content that the air conditioning of the production line workshop is "cold to burst", the peak season bonus will not end before October 1, the monthly peak season bonus can reach RMB 9,500, and the monthly comprehensive income can be To RMB 6,750, in addition to recruiting ex-employees who have resigned and returning to work, they also target unemployed young people aged 18 to 24 to join. As for the iDPBG Zhengzhou plant, the annual "rebate fee" (return to the employee's agency referral bonus) can be stimulated up to RMB 10,000. To attract more qualified employees to work, the need for talents is urgent. FATP (final assembly, testing and packaging) manufacturing headquarters, and MLB manufacturing department, industry analysts, MLB department may be the production unit for Apple's motherboard (MotherLevel Board). Japanese journalist detained in Myanmar Tokyo, Aug 4 (UNI) A Japanese journalist Toru Kubota detained in Myanmar has been charged with sedition and violation of the country's immigration control law, the Jiji Press news agency reported on Thursday, citing Myanmar's military. On July 31, the Myanmar police detained a Japanese citizen, documentary filmmaker Toru Kubota, for filming protests against the military government. According to the Myanmar media, he was taken to a police station in Yangon, where his personal belongings, including equipment, were seized. The Japanese journalist, according to the military, entered Myanmar on a tourist visa and contacted demonstrators prior to the protest, the report said. The dog days of summer may be upon us, but back to school season is right around the corner as well. Weve found a sizzling sale on a near-ideal laptop for students, or anyone else who needs a solid notebook that wont empty your wallet. Dells website is selling a Dell Inspiron 15 3000 laptop for just $352. Thats $77 off its usual price tag, and it comes with far better specs than you usually find in laptops costing $350 or less. In this price range, your best options are usually Chromebooks, or heavily hobbled Windows laptops with lackluster power, meh memory, or a skimpy screen. Not the Dell Inspiron 15 3000. This notebook comes with an Intel Core i3 processor, an ample 8GB of RAM, and a small, but manageable 128GB SSD. That configuration offers plenty of punch for basic tasks, from basic productivity to email to web browsing. You know, the sort of stuff most folks do every day. (Dont try triple-A gaming or rendering video on this laptop though.) Better yet, Dells deal comes with a spacious 15.6-inch display at full 1080p resolution. Many low-cost laptops either offer smaller screens or cut the resolution down to unacceptable levels. You wont run into that issue here, and since the big screen gives the laptop a bigger footprint, the keyboard wont feel cramped either. It still weighs in under 4 pounds, though. Get the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 for $323 from Dell The notebook ships with Windows 11 Home in S Mode, which restricts you to apps found in Microsofts app store. But if you need to install standard desktop software for work, play, or school, switching from S Mode to full-fledged Windows 11 is fast and free. Bottom line? The Dell Inspiron 15 3000 should be a reliable, yet very budget-friendly workhorse for everyday productivity. Thats exactly what you want for a back to school laptop, and youd be hard-pressed to find more compelling options in this price range. Editors note: This article was updated to reflect current (still awesome) pricing. Telecel Group, headed by French tycoon Hugues Mulliez, said its in talks with Ghanaian authorities to get approvals for a deal to buy Vodafone Group Plcs operations in the West African country in an all-cash deal. The company said in a statement on Wednesday its signed a sales agreement with Vodafone for its operations in Ghana, as the British telecommunications giant looks to refocus on key markets. It hasnt received approvals for the deal yet. The tycoon, whos a shareholder in the Association Familiale Mulliez -- owner of French retailers including Decathlon and Leroy Merlin -- will fund the acquisition with Telecels partners. The potential sale of Vodafone Ghanas towers arent being considered as part of the the deal funding. Telecel plans to spend about $500 million in the first three years to expand and refinance Vodafones network across the country. Vodafone entered Ghana in 2008, when it paid the government $900 million for 70% of Ghana Telecommunications Co. The state retains a 30% holding in the business. Source: Bloomberg Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Police have foiled a robbery attack on a gold buying shop at Konongo in the Ashanti region. The Police received a distress call that there was a robbery attack on the Adom Gold buying shop around 7:30pm and Police moved quickly to the scene. While the robbers were fleeing the scene upon seeing the Police, they started shooting indiscriminately injuring an officer in the process. Police returned fire but the robbers managed to escape. The officer is currently on admission at the Konongo Odumase Government Hospital and in stable condition. The Inspector-General of Police has spoken to him and the commanders on the ground. There is currently an ongoing anti-robbery operation in the area to get the suspects arrested to face justice. We, therefore, urge members of the community to remain calm and be on the lookout for any suspicious character among them and inform the Police accordingly. We also urge hospitals and other health facilities in the area to report to the Police any persons who report to them for treatment of gunshots wounds or any other wounds. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is recommending Novavax's COVID-19 vaccine carry a warning of two inflammatory conditions of the heart, based on a small number of reported cases. The conditions - myocarditis and pericarditis - should be listed as new side effects in the product information for the vaccine, Nuvaxovid, the EMA said on Wednesday. The agency has also requested that the U.S. drugmaker provide additional data on the risk of these side effects occurring. Last month, the EMA identified severe allergic reactions as potential side effects of the vaccine. read more Novavax was hoping that people who have opted not to take Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines - which are based on the groundbreaking messenger RNA (mRNA) technology - would favour its shot because it relies on technology that has been used for decades to combat diseases including hepatitis B and influenza. However, only around 250,000 doses of Nuvaxovid have been administered in Europe so far since its launch in December, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Source: Reuters Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF) in line with its mineral investment diversification strategy is positioning to invest in the industrial salt sector. According to the Chief Executive Officer of MIIF, Mr Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng, salt is set to become one of Ghanas major foreign exchange earners by 2026 and a top industrial earner by 2030 if the resuscitation plan of the Ada Songhor Salt project follows through as planned. This follows the plan of the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF) to strategically focus on the sector. The plan to boost salt production and the development of its allied value chain should yield about $2billion to the Ghanaian economy beginning 2027, with the potential to create more than 10,000 direct and indirect jobs in the next five years from just the Songhor Salt pans alone Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng said after a one day working visit to the Ada. Classification of Salt as High Priority Mineral by MIIF The Chief Executive Officer of MIIF, Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng is optimistic that the planned focus on the mineral will generate new economy vibrancy for the areas known for salt production such as Ada, Sege, Keta, Ningo and Winneba. Mr Koranteng intimated that, MIIF is developing a classification strategy for high priority minerals such as lithium, limestone, granite, diamond and salt. Classifying Salt as a high priority mineral means we will invest in the mineral value chain development, we will de-risk its funding methods and help with the acquisition of relevant technology that revitalises the industry. Mr Koranteng said, Ghana and Senegal are the only countries in West Africa with the potential for large-scale industrial production of salt. He decried the fact that Nigeria with a demand in excess of 1.5 million metric tons (MT) per annum, imports 80% of its industrial salt needs from Brazil while the Songhor salt pans alone has the capacity to produce over one million tons at just 60% capacity. The Global Salt Market Salt has at least 14,000 uses with the chemical industry most reliant on the mineral to produce various chemicals. It is frequently used as a raw material in the production of chlorine, caustic soda, and soda ash. Aside from these, industrial salt is used to make sodium sulphate, sodium carbonate, hydrochloric acid, sodium bicarbonate, liquid sodium, metallic sodium, chlorine, and sodium nitrate. Salt is also used for detergents, de-icing, textiles, fertilizers and is used heavily in oil and gas processing. The worldwide market for salt was valued at circa $28.5 Billion in 2020 with 270 million metric tons (MT) of salt produced that year. The market is projected to grow to $36 Billion in 2026 with China controlling 22.48% of the worlds production. Africas leading salt producing countries are Egypt, Tunisia, Namibia, Morocco and South Africa. Egypt produced 1.75 million MT of salt while Tunisia produced 1.6 million MT of salt. The total amount of salt produced in Ghana has remained relatively flat since 2013 at about 250,000 MT. The Ada Songhor Salt Resuscitation Project The Ada Songhor Pans, a 41,000-acre salt project is currently being resuscitated by Electrochem, a fully owned Ghanaian company. The Ada Songhor Project in terms of acreage is the largest in Africa. It has been lying dormant as an industrial salt producing area since 1982 but has the potential to produce more than 1.75 million MT and to be the largest salt producing area in Africa. The resuscitation project by Electrochem which started in late 2016 with initial production starting in early 2021 has led to the full restoration of the Songhor lagoon which had dried out for eight years. The resuscitation project which includes construction of evaporating and crystallisation ponds, extensive civil works, restoration of the lagoon, desilting and development of new pans has seen an initial investment of $58 Million dollars through a combination of debt and equity from a local bank and Electrochem. The current state has created employment for 2,800 people directly and indirectly, Electrochem has developed a community salt mining scheme for the local community with Electrochem itself as the offtaker. Although current production is just about 12% capacity now, the redevelopment has garnered interest from the sub-region region and led to the first ever sea export of salt from Ghana through the Tema ports. The MIIF Initiative with Ada Songhor Salt MIIF intends to partner and support the full restoration of the Ada Salt project to its full capacity with an equity investment. The place was completely dead. The lagoon had dried up, the ponds were heavily silted and the project previously looked like a high risk or a death knell for any investor to engage especially with factions among the chiefs and people of the various communities. It was considered in financial circles as a poisoned chalice for anybody to take on, Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng said of the state of the project before the new investors arrived. Electrochem seem to have succeeded in reducing the daunting task into manageable pieces. Its chairman, Daniel McKorley told the MIIF team; We realised the problem of factionalism the moment we conceived the project. We worked on uniting the community and seeking their support and that of the chiefs for more than two years before moving to site. We needed to get it right with the community. Among other things, we created a beneficial financial scheme especially for the women and assured the leaders that there would be several hundreds of jobs for the youth in the area over the sixteen-year lease. It was when we started the process of trying to prepare the ponds for production through desilting that we realised we had taken on an unbelievably huge project. We are creating a wealthy ecosystem that feeds the community first and then business. Remember, Salt production is primarily from the sea and as long as the sea never dries, the community and the business will both progress, Daniel McKorley said. For us at MIIF, the fact that this project is wholly owned by Ghanaians and could integrate several parts of our development agenda such as the 1D1F where salt is used in virtually every industry excites us greatly. The focus for MIIF is to create value and derive even greater value to the community and to Ghana as a whole. We do this by building local participation into our mining model at the ownership level as well as developing the value chain to the benefit of Ghanaians. The Africa Continental Free Trade Area provides immense possibilities not only to Songhor but to a well-developed salt mining sector in Ghana. The Songhor salt project and the sponsors, Electrochem, tick the boxes for long term viability, environmental, social and governance, export potential, high salt density, infrastructure plans and the fact that all the engineers on site are Ghanaians. The corporate management suite is all Ghanaian and the project is supported by one of the best salt design and project managers in the world, Serra of Spain which is also responsible for the technical construction. This nexus of global experience and Ghanaian knowledge is what will make this project thrive and we believe with MIIFs proposed investment, Ghana should be Africas largest salt producer by 2027, said Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng. Mr Koranteng further emphasised that, in line with ongoing discussions with the Ghana Stock Exchange, there is a plan of development to list most of MIIFs investments on the Stock Exchange. This has been included in the proposed Electrochem investment plan. This would allow a greater number of Ghanaians to own a part of the company. Mr Koranteng concluded. The Electrochem concession spreads through several communities including Sege, Ada Foah and Big Ada. About the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF) MIIF is a sovereign minerals fund mandated by the Minerals Income Investment Fund Act 2018, (Act 978) as amended, to maximise the value of dividend and royalties income accruing to the Republic of Ghana in a beneficial, accountable and sustainable manner and to monetize Ghanas mineral wealth in a manner which would bring long term value to Ghana. MIIF also has 100% ownership of Agyapa Royalties Company, the only state-owned gold royalties company in Africa. MIIF has plans to list Agyapa on the London Stock Exchange and the Ghana Stock Exchange. MIIF has invested in the Toronto, Frankfurt and now Ghana listed Asante Gold Corporation which has just opened the lucrative Bibiani gold mine and is on the verge of acquiring the Kinross Chirano gold mine in Ghana. The acquisition will create one of the largest gold mining companies in West Africa. MIIF is also planning to invest in lithium and other upcoming gold projects. Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is expected to commission a new water treatment plant at Tono in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality of the Upper East Region. The two-phase project started in 2018 with funding from Ghana and Dutch Governments at a contract sum of more than 33.2 million Euros for the first phase while the second phase, which commenced on January 12, 2021, is expected to be completed within 12 months. The treatment plant has a pump station and raw water transmission pipeline with a capacity to produce about 20.500 cubic metres of water per day. President Akufo-Addo, who is expected to arrive in Bolgatanga, the Regional capital, on Thursday, August 4, 2022, to begin a days working visit to the Region on Friday, August 5, would first commission the water treatment plant. In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Peter Ayinbisa Ayamga, the Regional Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), said the visit was part of the Presidents scheduled visits to all Regions in the country for first-hand information on development projects. Every year, he takes time to visit the various Regions to acquaint himself with happenings in the Regions, listen to the people, inspect ongoing projects and interact with the Chiefs and people, Mr Ayamga said. Per the Presidents itinerary, Mr Ayinbisa said he would address a durbar of Chiefs and people of Navrongo, after commissioning the water treatment plant. While in Navrongo, President Akufo-Addo would commiserate with the family of the late Mrs Grace Abatey, a former Regional Womens Organizer of the NPP. Mr Ayamga said the President would later proceed to the Bolgatanga East District to inspect ongoing construction work on a major bridge, which links the District to the Bolgatanga Municipality. President Akufo-Addo would also inspect the Agenda 111 project located at Kantaga, a community in the district, he added. In the Upper East Region, we have seven of them currently under construction, Contractors are on site working seriously, the Communications Director, who is the immediate past District Chief Executive for Bongo, said. Source: BBC 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 Mr Ambrose Dery, Minister for the Interior, says timely information and intelligence sharing are critical to successful seizures of contrabands and arrest of perpetrators of illicit drug trafficking and organised crime. The fight against such unlawful acts can further be strengthened through partnerships and collaborations. The ultimate goal of arrest is to secure successful prosecution leading to a conviction. We can only achieve that when we collaborate and work together, he added. Mr Dery made the comments on Wednesday during the official launch of Technical and Logistical Assistance for Ghanaian Authorities to Counter Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime. The event was organized by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in partnership with Narcotics Control Commission (NACOC). Participants include criminal justice actors from NACOC, Judicial Service of Ghana, Office of the Attorney General, Ghana Police Criminal Investigations Department, other security and intelligence agencies, Office of the Attorney General, amongst others. He said the launch of the project was a testament to the international communitys commitment to collaborate, strengthen and help to dismantle international drug syndicates and organized crime organizations in Ghana and Africa. Mr Dery said illicit drug trafficking and related organised criminal activities enabled transnational criminal organisations to infiltrate, pollute and corrupt the social, political, and economic structures of states. He said in most cases, money gotten from illicit drug trade was used to finance other illegal activities across the world, including extremism. The Minister said Government, therefore, passed a law in 2020 giving NACOC greater powers to fight illicit drug trade in Ghana. He said it was necessary to protect the youth from being involved in the unlawful act, adding that, if we lose them to the use of drugs, it will cause a problem. Dr Amado Philip De Andres, Regional Director, West and Central Africa, UNODC, said West Africa was a region vulnerable to, and affected by, acute threats in terms of transnational organised crime, including the use of the region as a transit area for cocaine, heroin, cannabis. He added that we are working together to provide effective and balanced drug control solutions to protect health and livelihood, as highlighted in the Investment Area 1 of the UNODC Strategic Vision for Africa 2030. As part of this initiative, we are also improving data collection and analysis in West and Central Africa and launched the World Drug Report 2022 with representatives of 16 countries, including Ghana, and Diplomatic missions. Mr Amado said the partnership between UNODC and NACOC with guidance from the US Department of States Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (US INL), was to support the National Integrated Programme (NIP) to fight transnational organised crime and to strengthen the criminal justice system in Ghana. He said the launch would pave way for the establishment of a minimum of five border posts among others for NACOC to expand its coverage in the fight against drugs. The first batch of 30 senior officers from Oti region, Ashanti region and Greater Accra, have been selected for an intensive Train of Trainers course at the end of August 2022 to ensure sustainability of the project, he added. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The chiefs and the people of Yilo Krobo in the Eastern Region have appealed to the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to restore power supply to the area to save businesses and economic activities from collapse. Since July 27, 2022, the area has been without electricity due to the decision of the ECG to cut power to the area following actions by a section of the people not to allow the company to replace their postpaid meters with prepaid ones. Event Addressing a press conference in Somanya last Monday, the Divisional Chief of Okper, Nene Anyeenorgu Teye Agor IX, said the people had no problem with the ECG and would, therefore, continue to support the company in its prepaid meter installation activities. "We want to state categorically and emphatically that no citizen of Yilo Krobo has, on record, ever resisted or confronted or obstructed the ECG in its line of duty since the company started the prepaid meter installation exercise some few weeks ago, he said. According to him, there had not been any reported incident of attack or threat or difficulty encountered by staff of the ECG by residents of Yilo Krobo because "Yilo Krobo citizens are law-abiding and will never do anything untoward to disturb the peace". "The ECG has always been working hand in hand with the Yilo Krobo paramountcy in the execution and administration of its statutory mandate and responsibility. The company has, at no time, complained to the paramountcy or chiefs of having difficulty with residents of Yilo Krobo during the ongoing installation of the prepaid meters," the chief added. He further pleaded with the ECG to temper justice with mercy and restore power to the area, saying: "The power outage is affecting every facet of our lives in the Yilo Krobo Traditional Area, especially Somanya, the traditional and municipal capital, where schools are suffering and every economic activity has come a halt." Disappointment Nene Agor said the people of Yilo Krobo felt disappointed, deceived and saddened by the decision of the ECG to indefinitely shut down power, not only in communities where some people had disrupted ECG activities but also extended it to Yilo Krobo, where the people were always cooperating with the company in the deployment of prepaid meters, adding: "The effect of this general disconnection is more harmful and costly to the country than one can imagine. "National Security and the Public Utilities Regulation Commission (PURC) are aware of the way Yilo Krobo is helping to resolve ECG challenges in the area, he said. Source: graphic.com.gh Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Police at Abuakwa in the Ashanti Region are looking into the circumstances that led a man to keep his wifes dead body in their flat for some months. The mans body was also discovered by the police in the familys bathroom, sitting on the toilet. Two children of the couple, aged 11 and 13, were also rescued in an unconscious state. They were in a locked room in the flat. The family has been identified as the Jacksons, and they lived in a rented apartment at Abuakwa Maakro, in the Atwima Nwabiagya District of Ashanti. The family is said to have relocated from the Netherlands about seven years ago to live in Ghana. It took the intervention of curious neighbours who alerted the police to break into the flat. The neighbours had not seen the couple outside for some time and therefore alerted the police on their suspicion. Source: graphic.com.gh 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 Dr Enoch Havorh, the Medical Officer at the Obstetrics and Gynecology unit of the Tamale Teaching Hospital, has advised husbands to encourage their wives to breastfeed their babies frequently to keep them healthy. He said breastmilk had all the necessary nutrients in the proper proportions, which protected against allergies, sickness, and obesity. Dr Havorh gave the advice in an interview with Ghana News Agency in Tamale as part of the World Breastfeeding Week celebrations. He said breastfeeding protected babies against infections and improved their weight. Dr Havorh said breastmilk changed in volume and composition according to the time of day and it was also the perfect food for babies. He called on nursing mothers to always ensure the breastmilk was available and at the right temperature, clean and free from infection. The World Breastfeeding Week was instituted in 1991 by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action and is observed each year to promote the campaign on the importance of breastfeeding. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video China refutes German FM's wrong remarks over Taiwan question (Global Times) 15:36, August 04, 2022 China urges Germany to have an objective and accurate understanding of the Taiwan question, abide by the one-China principle with concrete actions, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said at Wednesday's press briefing in response to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock's remarks claiming that German will support the island of Taiwan if the Chinese mainland conducts military actions. Hua said that Baerbock's remarks on the Taiwan Straits situation and the claims of "in violation of international law" made during the review conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons lack "common sense," and are also "inconsistent with the facts." In fact, for some time now, some German politicians have made irresponsible remarks on China-related issues, and China has also promptly refuted them and has made it clear that we oppose them, Hua said. The historical and legal facts which prove that the island of Taiwan is part of China and that both sides of the Taiwan Straits belong to one and the same China shall never be altered by anyone or any force, Hua noted. Some people are deliberately distorting the concept and confusing the public by comparing the Ukraine crisis with the Taiwan question. This is a serious interference in China's internal affairs, Hua said. "Violation of the one-China principle would undermine the overall development of bilateral relations.'' In December 1943, the Cairo Declaration was issued by the Chinese, US and British governments, stipulating that Japan should return to China all the territories it had stolen, including Northeast China, Taiwan and the Penghu Archipelago. The Potsdam Proclamation signed by China, the US and Britain in July 1945 (subsequently joined by the Soviet Union) stipulated that "The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out." There is one China in the world, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory, and the Government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. This has been clearly recognized by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. Many countries including Russia, Cuba and Pakistan have reaffirmed their positions of upholding the one-China principlefollowing the Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. The United Nations also reaffirmed its position of upholding the one-China principle. (Web editor: Wu Chaolan, Liang Jun) Two killed, 7 injured in gang shootout in Thailand Bangkok, Aug 4 (UNI) Two people were killed and seven others wounded in a ten-minute shootout between rival gang members in the northeastern Thai city of Mueang Ubon Ratchathani, the Thai Rath newspaper reported on Thursday, citing local police. The gang members met to settle a personal dispute but failed to reach any agreement and a deadly quarrel erupted at a parking lot of a local market, the police told the newspaper. All the wounded were taken to hospitals by police and rescuers, and two of them were pronounced dead during medical examination, according to the newspaper. The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has called on the Judicial Council to institute an inquiry into developments at the Supreme Court where judgments are made without assigning full reasons to the rulings. It said the inquiry must also address some administrative lapses and abuse of office by the Chief Justice, Justice Kwasi Anin Yeboah. Addressing a press conference in Accra, the General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, stated that the findings and recommendations would salvage the countrys democracy. He stated that the judiciary was key to maintaining democracy in the country. He said the NDC would also petition Parliament for the Judiciary Committee of the House to conduct a public inquiry into the reasons for the blunders committed by the Supreme Court in the 2020 Presidential Election Petition and other cases with the view to proposing appropriate remedial legislation. The NDC is saddened by and gravely concerned about the phenomenon of unreasoned judgments, lack of fidelity to the record of cases, unpardonable factual errors that have become commonplace in judgments of the apex court, as well as glaring administrative abuses by the Chief Justice, he stated. Commitment He said the NDC remained committed to Ghana's democracy and the promotion of the rule of law. Accordingly, we shall endeavour at all times, in line with our social democratic ethos, to ensure that the justice system performs the role assigned to it by the 1992 Constitution by serving the interest of all Ghanaians devoid of any political or partisan considerations, he stated. He, however, said recent happenings in the judiciary threatened the credibility and public confidence in the institution which, when left unchecked, could lead to a major democratic disaster in the country. He cited two instances to prove his point: the cases of Abdul Malik Kweku Baako vs Attorney General on the impeachment proceedings of Charlotte Osei, the then Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, and the Republic vs High Court (Criminal Division) Accra, Ex parte Stephen Kwabena Opuni & Anor. "In recent times, our Supreme Court has handed down some judgments and rulings that do not make any legal or factual sense because the court has failed to assign any reason for these judgements," he said. "The NDC has observed that our democracy cannot operate efficiently and deliver the values of freedom, justice, development and equality of opportunity for all citizens regardless of political affiliation if our judiciary, particularly elements within the Supreme Court, become or are perceived to be rented agents or the political wing of a political party," he added. Negative developments Mr Asiedu Nketiah alleged that the Chief Justice was abusing his power through his empanelling of the Courts. Recently, the case involving Dr Cassiel Ato Forson was originally assigned to Justice Solomon Oppong Twumasi only for the judge to announce in open court that the Chief Justice had reassigned the case to another judge in another division of the High Court. This development is quite mind-boggling and we wonder why for us in Ghana, we start everything with so much aplomb and funfair only for us to ruin it along the way, he added. He also expressed concern about what he termed the unholy haste of the apex court in trespassing into domains reserved for the legislature by the 1992 Constitution. We note that one entrenched principle of our legal governance since 1993 has been the recognition by our courts that it is not their business to get into certain matters that by law have been assigned to other branches of government. Contrary to this principle, we have observed a creeping tendency of the apex court to trespass into domains reserved for Parliament. In the process, the court has demonstrated legal or institutional hubris and thrown overboard the restraints the court has exercised in the past over matters that fall within the domain of Parliament, he said. Source: graphic.com.gh Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Former Member of Parliament (MP) for Kumbungu constituency, Ras Mubarak, has taken a swipe at the Minister for Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful for her style of communication. He says her lack of respect for Ghanaians is very annoying and that she should treat Ghanaians with some form of respect when ever she is communicating. Speaking on Okay FM's 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, he explained that the Communications Minister owe it a duty to Ghanaians to explain issues of national interest, but must be very decorous when doing so. "You are in that office because Ghanaians voted for your party and you will surely be out when your party is out of government again, so why do you arrogantly express your self when ever you are talking to Ghanaians?" he said. He maintained that it is no fault of those who are unable to re-register their SIM cards to default the deadline, as it is due to the poor measures put in place by the ministry to ensure that the registration exercise goes on without any hitch. According to him the confusion and the chaos that has characterized the 'illegal' SIM card re-registration exercise should be blamed at Ursula Owusu-Ekuful's door step. He said it is very disappointing to illegally impose further burden on the already struggling Ghanaian public. "We will call on her to abandon this insensitive illegal charge of Ghc 5 on Ghanaians," he added. Ghanaians will from Tuesday, August 2 optionally pay a GHc 5 self service fee to re-register their sim cards on their mobile phones through a downloaded application, according the Minister for Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful. Watch video below Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline/[email protected] 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 Actors Guild of Nigeria has announced the release of its members, Cynthia Okereke and Clemson Agbogidi, released by their abductors. According to a statement by the Actors Guild of Nigeria on its official Instagram page on Wednesday, August 3, the movie stars were released unhurt. It read: This is to gladly inform the public that the kidnapped actors, Cynthia Okereke and Clemson Cornel Agbogidi, have been released unhurt. The elated National President of the Actors Guild of Nigeria, Ejezie Emeka Rollas, announced their release by the abductors who were touched by the spirit of God to set them free and unharmed. The Guild has arranged for medical checks and psychological support for the victims. On behalf of their families, the National President expressed our heartfelt appreciation to Nollywood industry and Nigerians at large for the support and prayers during the trying period. He urged members to be security conscious on and off film sets and always take precautionary measures on their personal security at all times. Source: Vanguardngr 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 Aydin Coban's lawyer Joe Saulnier pauses while responding to questions outside B.C. Supreme Court, in New Westminster, B.C., on Monday, June 6, 2022. The defence lawyer for the Dutch man accused of harassment and extortion of B.C. teenager Amanda Todd says sharing a link is "not child pornography." THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck UFC Star Colby Covington Wins Poker Tournament at Seminole Hard Rock August 04, 2022 Jon Sofen Senior Editor U.S. Colby Covington, one of the top welterweights in the UFC, is having quite a week at the poker tables during the 2022 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open. On Thursday, he won his third-ever Hendon Mob recorded live poker tournament, this one at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, a $25,875 score in a $1,100 buy-in pot-limit Omaha/8 event. Plenty of Knockouts for UFC Fighter The tournament attracted 84 entrants, none of whom were able to knockout a skilled mixed martial artist. This wasn't the first large score of the week for the South Florida local. Covington took seventh place for $48,295 for finishing in seventh place in the largest field poker tournament in the Sunshine State's history $400 Deep Stack No-Limit Hold'em (7,703 entries). I wanted to come back and prove that wasnt just a fluke, said Covington, And show that I could play with the best players in the world. He certainly did prove he can compete at a high level in more than just mixed martial arts. The new poker champ was ecstatic to have won the tournament so close to home. Its a surreal feeling, Covington said of his win. Its been a long journey to finally get a trophy here at Seminole Hard Rock. This is my home casino, and I love playing here. The second ranked UFC welterweight was one of 11 players who cashed. He defeated David Shmuel, who received $15,890 for second place, heads up to win the title outright. Covington said following his victory that part of his strategy was to avoid entering pots against three-time WSOP bracelet winner Phil Hui, who ended up in fourth place for $6,680. The strategy worked like a charm as the athlete won his first recorded poker tournament since 2018 when he shipped a $150 daily in Pompano Beach, Florida for $2,702. 2022 SHRPO Event #22 Final Table Results Place Player Prize 1 Colby Covington $25,875 2 David Shmuel $15,890 3 Salvatore Pipitone $9,985 4 Phil Hui $6,680 5 Tony Cousineau $5,095 6 Aaron Schaff $4,075 7 Errol Massey $3,380 8 Damjan Radanov $2,850 Learn More About the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood Here! Covington in the Octagon As a UFC fighter, Covington has been almost unbeatable, so long as he isn't facing Kamaru Usman, whom he's lost to twice. Outside of those defeats, he's 17-1 in the octagon. The 34-year-old is one of the toughest and also most controversial fighters around. His open support of former US president Donald Trump has made Covington a love-him-or-hate-him fighter. Whichever side you site on (love or hate), you can't deny his talents. Covington also has a highly publicized feud with his former close friend and fellow MMA fighter, Jorge Masvidal, whom Covington defeated via unanimous decision at UFC 272 back in March, his most recent fight. The two UFC stars had an infamous fallout over Masvidal disrespecting the poker player by saying he was "being a b***h.[" Over the past year, the feud has become perhaps the nastiest spat in UFC history. "I'll f*****g kill you, bro," Masvidal told ESPN that Covington shouted. "Don't ever talk to me like that." A decade ago, Masvidal had taken Covington under his wings and helped the young fighter grow. They held a strong bond for quite some time, but those days are long gone. 2022 SHRPO Winners Thus Far *Date Tournament Entries Prize Pool Winner Prize* July 27-August 1 Event #1: $400 NLH Re-Entry 7,703 $2,541,990 Andrew Pecina $225,906 27-Jul Event #2: $400 Seniors NLH 50+ 272 $91,120 Robert Garcia $15,364 27-Jul Event #3: $400 Big Stack Big O 129 $43,215 Hal Rotholz $11,860 27-Jul Event #4: $200 Quad Stack Double Green Chip Bounty 212 $23,320 Eric Halpern $5,495 28-Jul Event #5: $600 Limit Omaha 8 109 $57,225 Aaron Kupin $17,015 28-Jul Event #6: $400 8-Handed PLO 144 $48,240 Kahlil Francis $13,220 28-Jul Event #7: $150 Big Stack NLH 297 $35,046 Darrell Carril $7,196 29-Jul Event #8: $400 Omaha 8/Stud 8 81 $27,135 Chris Labrie $5,328 29-Jul Event #9: $600 Double Black Chip Bounty NLH 188 $61,100 Steve Olivier $12,478 29-Jul Event #10: $600 Black Chip Bounty 5-Card PLO 149 $63,325 Vincent Fiorenza $17,240 30-Jul Event #11: $400 Pot-Limit Omaha 8 124 $41,540 Sheila O'Connor $10,000 30-Jul Event #12: $300 Ladies NLH 66 $17,160 Mica Lamar $5,000 31-Jul Event #13: $400 Deep Stack NLH 505 $169,175 Donna Stutts $19,197 July 31-August 1 Event #14: $1,100 Six-Max NLH 262 $254,140 Vincent Chauve $58,030 July 31-August 2 Event #15: $600 Deep Stack PLO 500 $260,000 Duff Charette $48,075 31-Jul Event #16: $600 NLH Turbo 100 $53,000 Jennifer Borsini $12,500 August 1-2 Event #17: $1,100 Seniors 50+ 137 $132,890 Neil Blumenfield $31,670 August 1-3 Event #18: $200 Big Stack NLH 2,532 $405,120 Carlos Pino $54,720 August 1-2 Event #19: $600 HORSE 86 $45,150 Phil Hui $14,460 1-Aug Event #20: $400 NLH Turbo 86 $29,240 Rob Brown $9,320 2-Aug Event #21: $600 Deep Stack 6-Max NLH 257 $134,925 Nick Yunis $31,415 August 2-3 Event #22: $1,100 Pot-Limit Omaha 8 84 $81,480 Colby Covington $25,875 3-Aug Event #25: $600 Double Black Chip Bounty PLO 158 $52,930 Brandon Duvdivani $13,660 3-Aug Event #26: $200 Double Green Chip Bounty NLH 395 $43,500 Jarett Minkoff $8,460 3-Aug Event #27: $1,100 Deep Stack Turbo NLH 97 $97,000 James Rodriguez $29,185 *Images courtesy of SHRPO. Sharelines Find out how UFC star @ColbyCovMMA fared in the latest @SHRPO poker tournament. EPT Returns to Barcelona; PokerNews to Report on 14 Events August 04, 2022 Matthew Pitt Editor The European Poker Tour (EPT) returns to Casino Barcelona for the first time since 2019 and PokerNews' Live Reporting team will be with you every step of the way, bringing you unrivaled coverage from 14 of the schedule's biggest events. EPT Barcelona is one of the most popular stops on the live poker circuit, and there is no reason that the 2022 edition of the EPT Barcelona Main Event cannot break its attendance record, which was set in 2019 when 1,988 players bought in and created a 9,641,800 prize pool. The 2020 and 2021 editions of EPT Barcelona fell victim to the global COVID-19 pandemic, so PokerStars is determined to make the return of the tour a memorable one. EPT Barcelona runs from August 8 through August 21, combining the EPT and Estrellas Poker Tour in one mega schedule. PokerNews' Live Reporting team are on the ground throughout the festival, bring you live and exclusive coverage from 14 of the tour's most popular events. Warm Up For the 2022 EPT Barcelona Festival With the CEP in Barcelona EPT Barcelona Events Covered by PokerNews' Live Reporting Team Hometown Hero Adam Maxwell Wins the PokerStars UKIPT Nottingham Main Event You do not have long to wait to feast your eyes on the first updates of EPT Barcelona because we are covering the 10,200 Mystery Bounty tournament from August 8. Mystery Bounty tournaments are all the rage right now and this one should be huge. The 3,000 Mystery Bounty event between August 17-19 has a $30,000 PSPC Platinum Pass waiting to be won. PokerNews cannot wait to see which looking bounty winner pulls out that potentially life-changing prize. Also on the agenda are the ever-popular 25,000 and 50,000 Single Day High Rollers, in addition to the eagerly anticipated 10,300 EPT Barcelona High Roller and 100,000 Super High Roller. Chris Hunichen triumphed in the 10,300 High Roller in 2019, outlasting 539 opponents on his way to banking 841,345 and the famous Spadie trophy. Spain's Sergi Reixach won the 100,000 Super High Roller, denying Sam Grafton the title. Reixach banked 1,816,210, leaving Grafton to pad his bankroll with 1,303,950. Of course, PokerNews is also bringing all the action from the 5,300 EPT Barcelona Main Event. Running from August 15-21, the EPT Barcelona Main Event has every chance of breaking its attendance record set in 2019 when 1,988 players turned out in force. Sweden's Simon Brandstrom emerged victoriously that day and got his hands on 1,290,166, ending a run of two straight victories for Polish player; Sebastian Malec won in 2017 with Piotr Nurzynski becoming the champion in 2018. PokerStars Launches The Value-Packed PSPC Ticket Machine Promotion PokerStars EPT Barcelona Main Event Champions More Off The Felt Activities Than You Can Shake a Stick At Although those of you jetting off to sunny Barcelona will have poker front and center in your mind, PokerStars is running plenty of off the felt activities to help you have fun and relax between grinding. The PokerStars Summer Fiesta welcome party is scheduled for August 11th, with an exclusive Player's Party at the awesome CDLC beach club on August 14th. Fancy something a little more relaxing? Then enjoy daily paddle board sessions every morning through EPT Barcelona, or head off on a catamaran brunch excursion on August 12, 14, and 19. Here's to seeing you in Barcelona! A familiar face is returning to the Aiken County Public School District as the director of communications and community partnerships. Merry Glenne Piccolino, who previously served in the role with the Aiken County school district, will return to the after two years at the Orangeburg County School District. She previously spent six years with the Aiken County school district where she worked under several district leaders, including Dr. Elizabeth Everitt, Dr. Sean Alford and King Laurence. She left Aiken after accepting a position with Orangeburg County School District as the assistant superintendent for communications, business and community partnerships in 2020. While holding the Orangeburg position, she developed new websites for the schools and district, restructured the communications department, created weekly newsletters and established partnerships with community groups and businesses that have helped propel the school system forward. New principal for Aiken High School announced A new principal for Aiken High School has been named. Im proud of the work accomplished during the last two years Ive spent in Orangeburg, Piccolino said in a news release from the school district, and leave with confidence in a team that will continue moving the district, schools and community along a trajectory defined by purpose and poised for collective achievement. Piccolino said returning to Aiken County feels like coming home. We are thrilled to welcome Merry Glenne back to Aiken County public schools, Laurence said. Her immense talent as an award-winning communications professional paired with her knowledge of our district will suit us well. Piccolino has worked in K-12 communications since 2014, and entered public education following a career in the private sector. Before working in public relations for a school, her experience included working in philanthropy as a development officer for University Health Care Foundation and as the regional editor of Skirt!. Its been a unique journey, Piccolino said. The experiences I gained in every previous position, from fundraising and event planning, to magazines, medical sales and waitressing, created a career path which prepared me uniquely well for school PR. Im excited about continuing my journey in Aiken County and for the opportunity to serve alongside former colleagues in strengthening public education in the community thats remained home for me. +2 Former principal of Aiken High School takes on new role in Edgefield County The former principal of Aiken High School is taking on a new role with the Edgefield County School District. Piccolino is a graduate of the University of Georgias Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. She has a leadership certification from the Darla Moore School of Business at USC, is trained in diversity leadership through Juan Johnsons work affiliated with the Riley Institute, and has achieved certification from the Society for Human Resources Management. The Aiken County Board of Education approved her appointment during its July 26 meeting. Piccolino will begin her position with the Aiken County school district Aug. 29. Dozens of children were the center of attention Tuesday evening in Perry Memorial Park, with the Aiken Department of Public Safety helping present the local version of the National Night Out event, billed as "an annual community-building campaign that promotes police-community partnerships and neighborhood camaraderie." This year's event included a chance for kids to test their skills with hula hoops, a relay event with water-filled paper cups and a "color war," with the designated "blue team" and "green team" getting the chance to put plenty of colored powder into the air and on each other. The grand finale, facilitated by a fire truck, was a few minutes under a shower from a fire hose. Attorney Everett Chandler, with Chandler Law Firm, helped run the show, with a variety of public safety officers on hand for the 90-minute gathering. Also on the administrative end were Capt. Aaron Dobbs, with Aiken Public Safety; and Cynthia Mitchell, the community services coordinator with Aiken Public Safety. "Everybody had fun," in the words of Sgt. Joe O'Conor, also with public safety. "I was truly impressed with the kids. They all helped clean up. They were all very respectful. Everybody had a good attitude. I was blown away." Shepeard Community Blood Center had representatives on hand, with a bloodmobile at the park to receive donations, and the Aiken Volunteer Mounted Unit visited as well, offering kids the chance for a face-to-face meeting with friendly horses. Among other boosters were the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, HopeHealth and Life Choices Pregnancy Care Center. Aiken County normally has a variety of National Night Out events. Among upcoming ones is a gathering set for Friday in Wagener. Scheduled to be from 6 to 9 p.m., the event is for residents of Perry, Salley and Wagener, and will be held in Ponder Park, next to the fire department. It is being promoted as featuring free food, music, "activities for the kiddos" and "resources for the community." The national event is "an annual community-building campaign that promotes police-community partnerships and neighborhood camaraderie to make our neighborhoods safer, more caring places to live," as described on its website. The summary notes, "National Night Out enhances the relationship between neighbors and law enforcement while bringing back a true sense of community. Furthermore, it provides a great opportunity to bring police and neighbors together under positive circumstances." COLUMBIA South Carolina election officials must decide quickly whether Labor Party candidates for governor and the 1st Congressional District can appear on November ballots amid an unprecedented intra-party squabble. According to the state political party's co-chairwoman, Gary Votour of Columbia and Lucus Faulk of Bonneau are its convention-approved candidates for governor and the coastal 1st District, respectively. But according to the co-chairman, the convention was a sham, and the party has no candidates. The state Election Commission isn't sure what to do. The agency's unaware of ever before getting dueling certification letters from co-equal leaders of a political party. "It's important for us to resolve it soon. We're in a position where we have to make a decision: Do we put the candidates on the ballot or not?" agency spokesman Chris Whitmire told The Post and Courier on Aug. 3. By state law, all political parties must certify their candidates to the Election Commission by Aug. 15, so the agency can create the November database in time for military personnel and other South Carolinians overseas to vote absentee. To help resolve the question, the agency has asked Attorney General Alan Wilson for a legal opinion. While the party leaders dispute whether the convention was legal, Whitmire said it's not up to his agency to decide whether conventions are held correctly. For the agency, the question is whose instructions it follows. "The SEC has been put in the position of either placing the candidates named by (co-chairwoman Donna) Dewitt on the ballot or refusing to do so as instructed by (co-chairman Willie) Legette," agency Director Howard Knapp wrote in his Aug. 3 request to Wilson. They "are, in essence, asking the SEC to resolve an internal party dispute that it has no authority to resolve." Meanwhile, Votour's chosen running mate, Harold Geddings of St. Matthews, filed at Election Commission headquarters Aug. 3 to join his ticket, though his candidacy is in limbo too. Both Faulk and Votour, a self-described social justice activist who initially intended to run as a Democrat, filed to run under the Labor Party banner back in March. But no candidate can be put on the ballot until they're certified by their party. The elections agency first became aware of the dispute on July 26, when it received a letter from Legette warning that Dewitt planned to hold a nominating convention days later in Orangeburg in opposition of party leaders' decision not to run any candidates in 2022. "Therefore, if this convention proceeds, it is fraudulent," wrote Legette, of Orangeburg. "I am asking the Election Commission not to certify any nominees of the SC Labor Party." Whitmire said he hoped the party leaders would work out the disagreement on their own. But then Dewitt, also of Orangeburg, sent letters Aug. 1 approving the candidates and contending it's Legette who's in the wrong, and the convention was legitimate. Votour said Legette's letter shocked him, six months after he said he received verbal backing from the party leaders, including Legette, who did not immediately return a message from The Post and Courier. "As far as I know, Donna did everything correctly," Votour told the newspaper. "Willie's just going to have to get over it." Dewitt, former South Carolina president for the AFL-CIO, said she's confident the candidates will ultimately be approved for the ballot. "I have complete faith, if we're looking at the law," she said. While only about a dozen people attended the convention, that's actually a pretty good turnout, she said. The underground music scene of Charleston has long thrived in house-show territory, popping up from place to place over the years, organized by either the artists themselves, college students or local original music fans with backyards or large living rooms or sometimes neither, but a go-getter DIY spirit. For a short stint this year, it arose in glorious splendor in a downtown dive bar that serves picklebacks, Jell-O shots and $1 mystery beers. Cutty's at 227 St. Philip St. took on local and touring punk rock, hip-hop, hardcore, synth, shoegaze and more bands with the hopes of growing and supporting the original music scene. Unfortunately, that came to an end with one final farewell performance on June 25 that featured Chicago post-punk noise pop outfit Dendrons and Charleston's own chillwave dream techno project Infinitefreefall. Let's look back at how the whirlwind journey all began and what it meant to the people involved. Cocktail contest cash The rise of Cutty's shows arrived at the same time the establishment was gifted $10,000 last year by a local rapper and bartender, Clayton James Sears, who won a cocktail contest through Chasing Sage. Plans for the money included widening the bar's side door to allow artists to directly carry in their gear and getting rid of seats in the back to build a stage. Both of those projects commenced, and since December the show schedule really took off. It all came reeling off the quarantine era that forced many bands to screech to a touring halt in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. By the end of 2021, it finally felt like things were back, in a sense, a much-needed reprieve after almost two full years of uncertainty and pivoting. Cutty's outdoor picnic tables on the Bogard Street sidewalk at the time remained a visible reminder of how things had changed. "I struggled to avoid the inevitable insidious thoughts; everything felt hopeless," Cutty's general manager Sarah Griffith recalled of the extended pandemic era. "Every day I wondered whether I was ever going to be able to bartend again, if I was ever again going to be able to experience the soul-cleansing catharsis of seeing my favorite bands perform live. During the arduous process of reopening post-quarantine, I refocused my energy on programs that would grow the Cuttys space beyond its established identity as a neighborhood watering hole." She, along with some help from longtime Cutty's patrons and music scene notables like mutli-project collaborator Evan Tilson, had the idea to really make the dive bar a show destination. Feb. 16 marked the first concert on the bar's new stage, one that featured sludge metal band Yashira, hardcore outfit Slow Fire Pistol and local screamo group To Forget. The stage was built by a longtime friend of Griffith's and Cutty's regular Mackie Bones at Pink Hawk Metalworks. He was the perfect fit for the project. Then there was Rylee Miller, a lighting tech with audio engineering knowledge to boot who lit up house shows on occasion. For such a small space, it was impressive that a full lights show was in effect for each show and added a certain liveliness. "I happened to enjoy going to house shows to see live music, and I wanted to get involved in a similar behind-the-scenes way," said Miller, who has a background in theater lighting. "At one point, I wired a few wall outlets to radial dimmer switches and plugged in some clip lights. I was able to buy all of it at the hardware store." Cutty's gave Miller the chance to test out some upgraded equipment. With Bones' stage, Miller's lighting and audio work, and Griffith's booking, concerts were ready for action. Small but mighty There was something special about an organized house show project of sorts being held not in a living room, but at a neighborhood bar. More people rallied behind it, and it was quickly a hot ticket item for those who sought to be moved by an immersive music experience in the center of a sweaty crowd. It was simply the thing to do for the DIY scene on show nights. And the bands loved it; unlike most venues that take a cut from door money, Cutty's gave it all to the musicians. "Having never operated a dedicated venue before, I was beginning this program from a place that was admittedly a bit naive, but ultimately I think that naivete lent itself to the creation of a show space that was purely about the shared experience of music and support of the incredibly talented people in the underground scene rather than profit," said Griffith. Though I had heard live music at Cutty's before, the first show I saw on the new stage featured two of my favorite Charleston bands: Art Star and Dawning, along with Asheville, N.C.'s Secret Shame. The line was out the door; with such a limited capacity, the small space filled up quickly, but the interior, while packed, felt intimate. The pool table became the merch table, and the back by the stage a mosh pit. For smaller bands who have played to almost empty rooms, Cutty's was a refreshing energy burst. "Since the space is tiny, it fills quickly, and a very excited and supportive energy spreads over the small crowd," Miller said. "Many artists have taken note of this unique experience, and a few have shared with us that this has been their favorite venue on tour so far." Nate McKinley, guitarist of To Forget and drummer of Art Star, compares Cutty's in a way to a DIY venue he remembers from a decade ago in Charleston: the Communications Museum at the College of Charleston. "A shaky old upstairs room, always filled to the brim with people losing their minds," McKinley recalled. "I was amazed right from the beginning. Whether it was in living rooms, skateparks, garages, you name it, someone was always being creative and finding a place to make cool stuff happen. Some really great bands, venues and people have come and gone over the years, but I think we've always had something special here. Charleston shows up, and people care." McKinley said Cutty's is his favorite space since the Communications Museum. "I just feel like everyone there gets it," he said. "People feel like they could really be themselves. They felt welcomed and appreciated for being there, and that goes a long way. Shows were intimate, loud, sweaty and a whole lot of fun. Just what the doctor ordered." A safe space For Elizabeth Southwell, the guitarist in Art Star, Cutty's was a fresh haven for the music scene she's been a part of in Charleston since 2012. It felt like a safe space. "There are a lot of places I dont feel awfully safe at as a trans woman, and Im sure a lot of people who arent straight or White would say the same," said Southwell. "Also, a lot of spaces down here have a pretty high bar for entry, whether it comes to what they need out of the door money or the kind of turnout they need guaranteed. We need people willing to make things happen and willing to take risks." Cutty's was that place. "I wanted to encourage a safe, supportive environment where everyone was accepted and felt free to be themselves unapologetically," said Griffith. "I wanted every band that played a show here to leave feeling like a legend. We were here to support them, not the other way around." Griffith has booked a large number of bands with queer and trans members. To Southwell and Miller, the venue's trans lighting designer, that was meaningful. "More than just in reference to me, many in the local queer community have taken notice to this," said Miller. "I have met more trans people, local or otherwise, at Cuttys shows than I have at any other bar in Charleston collectively. This is especially important because so often queer and trans individuals can have a harder time being successful in the music industry. This not only gives these artists a fighting chance, but it gives queer patrons the opportunity to see themselves represented on stage, as well." It's not just about the music or the people behind the music. It's much bigger than that. Music has and will always be one of the greatest, most accessible tools to bring diverse crowds together and form a collective, inclusive sense of identity, Griffith said. The hopes are for that collective identity to foster a stronger community at large, serving as a catalyst for positive changes socially, politically, locally and beyond. It was always the goal at Cutty's to do such. Where to next? But it's hard to see any lasting change when such venues come and go so quickly. "A lot of things that happen and are talked about here are just whats palatable to tourists," said Southwell. "The reality is there are a lot of artists that live in Charleston. Theres a lot of marginalized communities that live in Charleston and have for many, many, many years." "What are we doing for them?" Southwell queried. DIY spaces, both private and public, have certainly and clearly served as refuges to the artists and fans who have been a part of them and remain nostalgic homes away from home to the community that cherished them, from the Communications Museum to Cory's Grilled Cheese. There's Dan Dickey's Purple Buffalo, a branch off his former King Street DIY venue King Dusko, that instantly became a haven for the "underground" music and art scene and continues to host EDM, hip-hop and experimental concerts consistently. The Instagram page lists an updated series of upcoming shows. Big Gun on Calhoun Street and Burns Alley Tavern off King Street are two other notable venues that host occasional hardcore, screamo, emo and otherwise heavy bands. Recently, Monster Music & Movies has taken on more of a role in hosting artists in the record store, like with a lineup featuring instrumental rock band Shy, Low along with local bands Catholics and Gods, on Aug. 6. A funky little place called Tua Lingua exists in North Charleston that also caters to the DIY scene. No alcohol is allowed, as it serves the under-21 community as a safe space to gather, listen to live and often thought-provoking experimental shows. An upcoming concert there will star Georgia math rock band Things Amazing; Brooklyn, N.Y., art-rock outfit Big Scary Indian; along with projects Elders and Phantom on Aug. 28. And Cutty's does still host DJ acts, like an evening that will star Southwell's personal DJ project DJ Normal Girl, along with Fake Fever and Leopard Lee's Prime Time on Aug. 12. Griffith, who has spearheaded Cutty's music efforts, is moving to Philadelphia at the end of the summer. The future of the St. Philip Street bar in relation to the music scene is uncertain. "Unfortunately our live music program came to an end this summer," said Griffith. "For reasons beyond our control it became unsustainable for us. Though it was short-lived, I think a precedent was set, and I hope one day to utilize the knowledge Ive gained at the helm of a DIY spot of my own in Philadelphia." Griffith said that she felt like the community rallied around the good thing she had going. Community support is vital in keeping any underground or DIY scene alive, she said. Support is one thing, but money and resources are certainly another. That's why these efforts are often not long-lasting, but little heavenly blips in a cover band-dominated tourist destination. "It made me realize that the fight for, I guess well call it underground music, in Charleston is a lot more of an upward battle than Id previously thought," Southwell said of Cutty's show days fizzling out almost as quickly as they began. "The people who want to make these things happen are here, we just need the money and the places to do it." Where to next, Charleston? Many students will have to pay for school meals this year now that some pandemic assistance programs have ended. School breakfast and lunch rules were suspended nationwide in 2020 to make it easier for schools to ensure children were fed despite the pandemic's disruptions. Besides making meals free for students, waivers allowed schools to implement grab-and-go programs and increased the federal reimbursement schools get for each meal served. Those waivers expired in June. Congress extended some, like the reimbursement rates, but didn't extend the free meals program. To qualify for assistance, most families will need to apply for free or reduced lunch aid unless students attend a school that participates in the Community Eligibility Provision. Meals at CEP schools will remain free. The process may be new for some parents. In Charleston County, administrators held a lunch application open house last month to help families register, said Walter Campbell, the district's executive director of nutrition services. Schools will also offer help during back-to-school open houses. Families can apply online at www.lunchapplication.com. Qualifying will depend on income and the number of children in the family. Students from households with incomes between 130 percent to 185 percent of the federal poverty level qualify for reduced aid. Those from families with incomes below 130 percent qualify for free lunch. In Charleston, meal prices are the same as they were pre-pandemic: Full-price student lunches are $2.25; reduced-price lunches are $0.40. Full-price student breakfasts are $1.40; reduced-price breakfasts are $0.30. Sign up for our Education Lab newsletter. Email Sign Up! Students can apply for assistance at any time if a family's financial situation changes. Advocates had wanted to extend waivers to provide free meals for all students for another year to help families still dealing with financial hardships from the pandemic or from rising food prices. "Many of the hardships that have been experienced will continue this year, as well," said Erica Olmstead, who works with No Kid Hungry, a Washington, D.C.-based group working to end child hunger. Olmstead said the waiver extensions are still helpful, particularly the increased reimbursement rates. It will help districts that are having to pay more for food due to supply chain issues. Campbell said the district is doing its best to deal with supply issues. He is on the phone daily with manufacturers to make sure food arrives on time. The district develops menus based on what it can order three weeks out, and that has forced the district to be much more creative with its menu options. Donate to our Investigative Fund to support journalism like this Our public service and investigative reporting is among the most important work we do. Its also the most expensive reporting we do. We cant do it without your support. Donate Now Charleston is not as fast-paced as some of the countrys larger cities, where fast casual brands, many of which are chains, serve as go-to lunch and dinner options for those in a hurry. But Charlestons appetite for quick meals that arent lacking in quality is growing, just like the handful of independently owned counter-service restaurants with roots in the Holy City. As this type of service becomes increasingly popular, the line between fast casual and full service is beginning to blur, and owners with restaurants where guests order at a counter say customer service remains a top priority. For local fast casual brands with multiple locations, maintaining consistent operations at each is top-of-mind, especially as expansion opportunities arise. Betting on salads Charleston didnt have many locally owned restaurants that offered fast service and health-conscious cuisine when Jennifer Ferrebee opened Verde with her husband on King Street in 2011. Thus, the eatery serving build-your-own salads topped with house-made dressing and an assortment of 40-plus toppings quickly gained a following. We had seen fast casual restaurants in other cities, but at the time in 2011 Charleston did not have what I would classify as a lot of fast casual restaurants, Ferrebee said. We knew that was a type of restaurant and for us that was definitely appealing and a place that we would want to eat. When the first Verde opened, the couple believed the concept could work, given its proximity to the College of Charleston. They didnt expect to be serving South Carolina at five locations 11 years later. We definitely felt like the college students would be on board and it would be something they would like, she said. By the first year it was working and we were thrilled. After opening two Verdes in Mount Pleasant, one in West Ashley and another in Columbia, Ferrebee has grown the company to just under 100 employees. The menu changes seasonally, but some salads have stood the test of time. Amazingly, some of our signature salads have been on the menu since day one, she said. The base of what we do has not evolved a ton. One recent change was the addition of canned beer and wine, a service Verde launched earlier this year. Online orders now account for 40 percent of Verdes business that's up from 15 percent pre-pandemic. The pandemic has certainly shifted the amount of people who ordered online and a lot of people have not migrated back, Ferrebee said. As they continue to adjust to the pandemic-caused changes to the business, Ferrebee has her eye on more growth opportunities. She said North Charleston, Summerville and other neighborhoods in Columbia could be the next home for a Verde outpost in the near future. Beyond state lines Verde isnt the only Charleston-born casual restaurant brand thats expanding to other parts of South Carolina and beyond. Saveurs du Monde will soon add a fourth French cafe on Seabrook Island, which will be followed soon after by Summerville. Owner Thierry Chateau, who opened the first Saveurs du Monde nearly 10 years ago, said that operating one location was never the end goal. There were early-on plans to expand the business that have been recently spurred on by a partnership with Mr. Wonderful (Kevin O Leary) from Shark Tank, the popular show in which investors hear pitches from business owners in search of funding. In 2021, Chateau began fundraising with OLearys company Startengine, a capital market enterprise that allows businesses and investors to find their match. In June, Saveurs du Monde became permitted for franchising with hopes to expand nationwide. The owners of Mediterranean eatery Kairos, first opened in Mount Pleasant in 2017, are considering the franchising route after they took their business beyond South Carolina state lines. Cary Chastain and Will Oriani own and operate seven Kairos locations: Three in the Charleston area, two near Greenville, one in Columbia and one in Tallahassee, Fla. The vision was to serve delicious healthy food and to give people an option that is as well as all that affordable, Oriani said. As you have growth, its very tempting to start outsourcing things. It does take a great commitment to make sure that you're serving fresh food that you make in house everyday. Kairos was chef-driven from the start, when Chastain and Oriani hired current South Carolina chef ambassador John Ondo as a consultant after he closed his Cannonborough-Elliotborough restaurant Lana in 2017. (Ondo later joined the ownership team but is no longer affiliated with the business.) From spreads to marinades and a 17-step falafel, Kairos boasts a menu filled with house-made bowls, salads, platters and pitas. Thats the heart of what I consider will be our strong point moving forward, Oriani said. 'Fast fine dining' Bon Banh Mi owners Jason Sakran and James Romano arent big fans of the fast casual moniker. With two Charleston area locations and another on the way, Bon Banh Mi has many of the features found at restaurants serving fast casual fare, including counter service and online ordering. While structured to accommodate heavy volume, Bon Banh Mis menu features scratch-made ingredients that figure into Southeast Asian inspired bowls, tacos, salads and banh mi sandwiches. That combined with their staffs commitment to customer service sets Bon Banh Mi apart, the owners said. The experience were aiming to offer I call it fast fine dining, meaning its a higher level of service, Romano said. So to be in the same category as a place that maybe doesnt quite put that much emphasis on those things, that would maybe be my only gripe with defining the segment as fast casual. The food, described as healthy, vibrant and fresh, is inspired by recipes Sakran and Romano would cook for friends and family. They dont make any illusions that the eateries were built around spending large amounts of time in Southeast Asia, but that doesnt mean their food cant be delicious and something people crave, they said. According to Sakran, the concept was built around the idea of replication, meaning there could be more Bon Banh Mis in the Carolinas and beyond in the future. The owners have had plenty of opportunities to grow to beyond the Lowcountry in the past, but they opted for the grassroots approach. Patrons often dont leave tips after ordering at the Bon Banh Mi counter. Some leave it at that, while others feel inclined to leave cash on the table after engaging with Bon Banh Mis staff throughout their meal, Romano said. An influx of online orders in a post-pandemic world has cut down on these opportunities to engage with customers, but that part of the business remains a top priority, especially as the business grows. Sakran calls it a hybrid model. GEORGETOWN The city of Georgetown will uphold a June decision by the city Board of Zoning Appeals that allowed Liberty Steel's mill to stay open, Mayor Carol Jayroe confirmed on Aug. 3. A 30-day period in which the city could appeal the decision to circuit court began in early July, after the Board of Zoning Appeals voted to finalize adoption of Liberty Steels appeal of a February determination by a former Georgetown zoning administrator that could have shut down the mill. City Attorney Elise Crosby said that whether the decision is appealed would be a policy determination by the Georgetown City Council. United Steelworkers Local 7898 president James Sanderson told Georgetown Times that he and his fellow union members appreciate the city's decision not to go forward with an appeal. "We feel its time for the city, Liberty Steel and United Steelworkers Local 7898 to return back to working together as a partnership like before," Sanderson stated in a text message. "The city and Liberty Steel along with the United Steelworkers by working together as a team has a bright future ahead of us." A spokesperson for Liberty Steel USA was equally grateful for the city's decision. "LIBERTY Steel welcomes the news that the City will support the Board of Zoning Appeals decision and looks forward to the continued success of the mills restart," the spokesperson told Georgetown Times. "LIBERTY will work with all relevant parties to remain good stewards of the mill for the benefit of the Georgetown community." The fight between Georgetown and the mill centered around whether Libertys prolonged closure during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a zoning change that would shut down the plant for good. If the plant was closed for a year, that would trigger a zoning change from industrial to commercial that would stop the plant from producing steel wire used in tires and bridge cables, as it has for decades. Liberty, once one of the citys largest employers, reopened in mid-January with 65 workers just before what the companys owners believed was the end of the one-year deadline. Georgetown interim Zoning Administrator Chris Inglese ruled soon after the plant reopened that the clock started months sooner, triggering the zoning change, and that decision led to Liberty asking for a hearing before the citys seven-member Zoning Board of Appeals. At its July 21 meeting, the Georgetown City Council voted 3-4 against the reappointment of Donald Gilliard to the Board of Zoning Appeals. The decision was met with stiff opposition by members of USWA Local 7898 who attended. Gilliard, who voted for the motion allowing the plant to stay open, told Georgetown Times that he believed the June 1 ruling in favor of Liberty Steel factored into the vote. Jayroe, who voted against Gilliard's reappointment and for the appointment of Jerry Miller to the board, denied this and said the decision came down to qualifications. Brandon Alter covers the town of Kingstree and Williamsburg County for The Kingstree News. He is from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He graduated from the University of South Carolina's school of Journalism and Mass Communications in May 2021. MYRTLE BEACH The Galen College of Nursing opened its new Myrtle Beach campus Aug. 3, and officials hope it will aid in addressing the statewide nursing shortage. Galen College of Nursing, one of the country's largest private nursing colleges, collaborated with Grand Strand Health to build its new Myrtle Beach campus. Grand Strand Health is a multi-facility health system located along the Grand Strand coast. A ribbon cutting and grand opening ceremony for the new campus took place Aug. 3. This is the first campus the college has opened in South Carolina, with others being located in Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Tiffany Keys, Grand Strand Regional Medical Center's Chief Nursing Officer, said that the new location has been in the works for over three years, since March 2019. At least 90 students have already enrolled, and about 150 students are planning to graduate at the end of the first year. "We are very excited, for lack of a better word, because it's truly a game changer for our community," Keys said. "I'm already getting the calls that we need to expand. We're gonna need more space, or maybe a bit bigger, and we will do that. We're committed to that growth." Mayor Brenda Bethune said that she was excited to hear that 150 students are planning to graduate by the end of the year from the new campus. She said there was a great need for new nurses in the Myrtle Beach area, which is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Horry County, in particular, is the fastest growing county in the state. "It's great for our community, it's great for economic development, and it's great for our entire state," Bethune said during the ceremony. "Thank you for bringing new nurses into the fastest growing area in the nation. It's so desperately needed, and it's such an honor to have you here in Myrtle Beach." The recent opening of Galen's Myrtle Beach campus comes as South Carolina is seeing a statewide nursing shortage. In 2020, the state had 40,600 employed registered nurses, or about 7.9 RNs per 1,000 people. By 2030, the state is projected to see about 10,400 vacant nursing positions, which is the fourth most severe nursing shortage in the country, according to a 2021 study by the University of St. Augustine. Keys said this new campus will help in addressing that shortage by graduating nursing students every quarter, so that new graduate nurses will be able to enter the workforce at a faster rate. Also, she said that Galen encourages and recruits students who may be seeking a second degree or a second career. Because of this, she said it will help tap into a new pool of potential nurses. "They really cater to a different kind of learner that maybe wouldn't be in the market," Keys said. "It's a whole untapped resource full of people that may not think they can be a nurse. Galen encourages that and then provides them with the resources and support to achieve their goals." One of those students is Ronetta Grate, 40, of Myrtle Beach. Grate said she decided to go back to nursing school, after working in various medical departments for over 20 years. Grate has three children, including a 21-year-old daughter who also plans to attend Galen. "I think you really have to situate your life so that you can be able to do this," Grate said about attending nursing school. "But if you do that, Galen has all the tools that you're going to need to succeed and to be a great nurse." GOOSE CREEK Two former school resource officers were arrested Aug. 3 following an investigation into inappropriate sexual conduct at Stratford High School. Conrad Sands Stayton, 40, was arrested on charges of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor and misconduct in office on allegations he kept "pornographic" photos of a 17-year-old student on his phone. Shelly Love Ollic, Stayton's former supervisor at the Goose Creek Police Department, was arrested on one count of misconduct in office. The 52-year-old lieutenant is accused of failing to report Stayton's inappropriate behavior to authorities. Both defendants are booked in the Berkeley County jail. Stayton allegedly possessed on his personal cell phone more than 15 images of a 17-year-old student "engaging in sexual activity or appearing in a state of sexually explicit nudity," according to arrest warrant affidavits. The former school resource officer knew the student's age from working at the school but if he took any actions to stop the minor from taking the photos, it is not documented, the affidavits states. Meanwhile, Ollic knew the officer maintained an inappropriate relationship with the student but did nothing to stop it, according to the affidavits. Ollic failed to report to her superiors that the student spent "extended time" with Stayton in a hotel room during an event in January sponsored by the police department. The student later reported being sexually assaulted by Stayton, according to the affidavits. It's unclear whether Stayton possessed pornographic images of the same student who made the sexual assault claim. The student's name and pronouns were also redacted in the affidavits. Goose Creek Police Chief LJ Roscoe said the department became aware of the allegations against Stayton in early March. She terminated the officer later that month following an internal investigation. As a result of information discovered during the internal investigation, Roscoe said she requested SLED investigate to determine whether criminal charges were warranted. Ollic is also no longer employed by the department, Roscoe confirmed. Goose Creek Mayor Greg Habib said the city does not tolerate dishonest behavior. Integrity, trust and accountability underscore our commitment to the community we serve," he said. The cases will be prosecuted by the 9th Circuit Solicitors Office. A May 2021 article on the Berkeley County School District's website, which has since been deleted, said Stayton had been a school resource officer for Stratford High School for four years. The article noted the officer served as a karate instructor and volunteered with the Boy Scouts outside his policing duties. A spokeswoman for the Berkeley County School District did not respond to questions about the case. Charleston has a new plan to crack down on college party houses, but some are unsure whether it will have unintended ripple effects for both landlords and renters. The goal of the policy headed to City Council is for Charleston to be able to respond more easily when neighbors have concerns about nearby renters who repeatedly throw parties, leave bulk trash out and otherwise contribute to quality-of-life issues in the surrounding community. The proposal is a welcome effort for those who live near the College of Charleston and feel students' unruly behavior is a recurring issue. But for others, the policy feels like a burden to landlords and a missed opportunity to strengthen renters' rights. How it works The proposed policy, a rental registry program, will require all landlords to receive a permit before renting out a property. To apply for the permit, they will have to pay an annual $25 fee per unit and sign a statement that the property meets building code standards. After that, the property will be subject to code inspections every five years. The policy will only apply to landlords who rent out houses and own at least two or more units. That means it applies to landlords who own homes that are subdivided into multiple units or own multiple single-family rental homes. It does not apply to multiunit apartment complexes. To receive a permit, a landlord who lives in another city or state must also be able to list the contact information of one person who can be reached on their behalf who lives within 30 miles of Charleston. This, city officials hope, will help code enforcement officers resolve quality-of-life issues more quickly. Some landlords create an LLC to purchase rental properties, leaving out their personal contact information on county tax records. This makes them harder to reach when problems arise, Charleston Livability Director Dan Riccio said. The policy is modeled after a similar program in Columbia that aims to hold students and landlords accountable around the University of South Carolina. Radcliffeborough Neighborhood Association President Henry Golabek is no stranger to the headaches of living near hordes of college students. The neighborhood is wedged between Upper King Street and the Medical University of South Carolina. The College of Charleston campus forms Radcliffeborough's southern border. The largest parties, he said, happen during the daytime. But when they grow out of hand, he said he's never seen the police have much trouble shutting them down. "Right now we deal with police, (the Charleston Office of) Livability and the college to deal with issues," he said. "It's always harder to get to the owner." Having a revolving door of college students as tenants means that every year or two, new students need an education on how to avoid fines or school punishments for nuisance issues. "Unless a violation is seriously egregious ... we are going to work on educational pieces," said Alicia Caudill, executive vice president for Student Affairs. The college also hosts meetings and orientations to prepare both students and community members ahead of the school year. Caudill said she thinks the rental registry program will help with these efforts. Scott Anthony, president of the Harleston Village Neighborhood Association, said he hopes the new policy can put more responsibility on the landlords to set expectations for their renters. His neighborhood sits between Colonial Lake and the College of Charleston. "If the prior two tenants were nightmares ... the landlord still gets a fresh start when a new tenant moves in," he said. He said he hopes that the landlords who repeatedly allow tenants to create neighborhood disturbances will face more punishment than the students themselves. "These are kids," he added. "Nobody needs to be going to jail for making too much noise." If the registry program is approved by City Council, the permits will come with a point system similar to a driver's license. The more violations a landlord racks up, the more points they lose. If they lose all 15 points associated with their permit, they will have their permit suspended or permanently revoked. Concerns for tenants Some Charlestonians and housing advocates are wary about the proposed ordinance's gray area around renters' rights and whether a landlord can use the permit points as an excuse to threaten eviction. Landlords can set up a remediation process with the city to regain points before losing the permit altogether. For more severe cases, that could include evicting the tenant, the ordinance reads. Any remediation plan will need prior approval from the city. And Riccio said he doesn't anticipate the city readily signing off on evictions as a means to regain points. "(The policy) is not to go after tenants. It's not to go after landlords. It's to keep everyone accountable in as timely a manner as possible," he said. The eviction process, however, takes place separately from the city's rental permit program. Evictions are handled by Charleston County's magistrate court. So a landlord can pursue one at any time. Even though he welcomes the idea in Harleston Village, Anthony said that as an attorney, he thinks the ordinance should offer clearer explanations of tenants' rights. "I would like to see some language from the legal department that would articulate that if you think you are being ousted ... you have legal rights through the magistrate court," he added. The ordinance does require the landlord to post a notice within the rental unit that states the landlord's contact information, lists local regulations about pets, trash and noise levels and states that the renter has rights under the South Carolina Residential Landlord and Tenant Act. Better code enforcement is also a missed opportunity in the policy, said Sue Berkowitz, director of South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. "When people are struggling because their conditions are bad and their utilities are high because of a repair that's not getting done, that should be equally as important as people next door who are annoyed," she said. As written, a landlord will only get docked points if they fail the building code inspection that they will be subject to once every five years. Any tenant wishing to report building code violations would still need to do so through other city departments or the magistrate court. And not all maintenance issues qualify as building code violations. The finer details of the building code will go through the building inspection department and the fire marshal, Riccio said. We are just going to be addressing the issues created by the tenants that continue to misbehave. Berkowitz said the permit program could have been an opportunity to hold absentee landlords accountable for these types of issues. "If there are bad conditions and the landlord is not fixing it, you could get the court to order it," Berkowtiz said. "But isn't it more likely that the relationship between the landlord and the tenant will be destroyed? Wouldn't it be better to avoid getting to that point?" One Charleston couple ended up moving to Columbia after dealing with similar issues. The air conditioning at the West Ashley apartment of Will Close and his girlfriend went out on multiple occasions, sometimes for over a week at a time. At one point, the maintenance persons response was to keep a closet door open to improve airflow. After dealing with multiple, hourslong water outages and poor communication about their cause and timing, Close said he and his girlfriend started to consider moving. The last straw was potentially facing a $400-per- month rent hike at the end of their most recent lease. They chose his hometown of Columbia because it was a more affordable city for them to purchase a home. Its bittersweet, he said of the move. Im only 30 but the better part of my adult life has been in Charleston. A phased rollout The policy has been proposed in various forms over the years but never gained approval from the city's influential real estate community. In a 2013 Post and Courier commentary, CEO of the Trident Association of Realtors, Wil Riley, opposed a previous iteration of the registry program. "As always, there are bad apples in the bunch, but it is ridiculous to subject all city residents to onerous laws in response to issues created by a few," Riley wrote. Now the association is supportive of the newly proposed policy. Between the appeals process and the fact that the policy will be rolled out gradually through a pilot program, the association's leadership feel the ordinance includes enough protections for property owners. "I don't believe this will be a huge shakeup for our industry," said Josh Dix, government affairs director for the association. Representatives of the Charleston Apartment Association disagree. "Placing responsibility on housing providers, and subsequently handing out extreme consequences that threaten their livelihood, will drive people away from the industry and harm small businesses," Apartment Association President Susan Burke said in an e-mail. "Instead of addressing the issue at hand, the proposed landlord registry and complaint system will ultimately lead to less housing, higher rents, and fewer options for renters all of which hurts Charleston." The pilot area process is a point of contention for City Councilman Robert Mitchell. As currently proposed, the pilot program will only apply to the East Side. Then, if it's successful, it will expand to Harleston Village, Cannonborough-Elliottborough, Radcliffeborough and the West Side. After another trial run in those areas, it will be expanded to cover the entire city. Mitchell represents both Cannonborough-Elliottborough and the East Side. He said many of his constituents in Cannonborough-Elliottborough have been asking for this type of ordinance for years. But many of his constituents in the rapidly gentrifying East Side feel targeted by new city programs. "Why is it that all the time when things happen, we are jumping on this community," Mitchell said. "Every time, (constituents) look to me and say 'you're hitting the East Side again?'" He said he's worried that the increased cost to landlords will be passed on to tenants in the form of rent hikes in a neighborhood that is already struggling with affordability. The East Side was chosen because it has received the highest number of livability complaints in the past year out of the proposed pilot areas on the peninsula, Planning Director Robert Summerfield said in a presentation to the City Council Community Development Committee. It is also ideal for a pilot program because it is a small, concentrated area, he added. Charleston City Council will vote on the proposed ordinance Aug. 16. If approved, it will take about two months before it is up and running on the East Side. The length of the pilot period is not specified in the ordinance. It will expand to other areas of the city depending on its success in the pilot area. COLUMBIA A South Carolina judge is expected to weigh in soon on whether death row inmates can be executed by firing squad or the electric chair, after attorneys delivered final arguments in a case challenging the state's only available options as unconstitutional. Attorneys for Justice 360, who represent condemned inmates, argued the two methods are cruel and unusual forms of punishment that few states even allow. They also argued there's no scientific guarantee the options are the most painless and efficient forms of execution. The state Supreme Court has asked Judge Jocelyn Newman to rule within the next 30 days. However, whatever conclusion she reaches is only a step in a lengthy process. Her ruling will be appealed to the state's highest court and beyond. The inmates' attorneys asked Newman to recognize that forms of execution used at the turn of the 20th century have no place in modern society. We want you to have the compassion the South Carolina Constitution requires and to kill these people in the most compassionate manner possible, Joshua Snow Kendrick, a Justice 360 attorney, said Aug. 4 in his closing argument. Inmates are forced to choose between two more brutal and unusual forms of punishment after being sentenced to die when lethal injection was the default method of execution, said the inmates' attorneys. The state's supply of the drugs expired in 2013, and S.C. Department of Corrections officials have repeatedly said they've been unable to secure more despite multiple attempts. A law passed by the Legislature last year made electrocution the default method, as it was before 1995, and added the firing squad an alternative. The inmates' attorneys said legislators gave the prison agency too much leeway in writing the rules for how executions would be carried out and Corrections officials failed to offer evidence during hours of testimony that what they came up with is as pain-free as possible. Attorneys for the state defended the legality of the state's execution methods while accusing attorneys for the condemned of asking Newman to grant clemency to death row inmates only Gov. Henry McMaster has authority to give. While South Carolina's constitution does grant prison inmates protections from cruel and unusual punishment, they said, it also allows for individuals to be sentenced to death, and for the Legislature to outline how death sentences will be carried out. Legislators were operating in good faith when they decided the electric chair or firing squad were the most humane alternatives to lethal injections possible, said attorneys for Corrections. While still uncommon, the rates of botched executions for lethal injections are higher than by electrocution or firing squad, they said. They argued inmates' attorneys offered little proof to confirm whether the injuries seen on executed inmate's corpses occurred before they died or whether they could feel pain. Not only did Justice 360 fail to argue either punishment was inhumane, they argued, their arguments do nothing to prove that the two forms of execution approved by lawmakers last year violated the law in any way. "What the plaintiffs seemed to be doing, your honor, is asking the court to assume that lethal injection is less painful than the two methods described here," Corrections attorney William Grayson Lambert said in his closing arguments. "The court cannot make that assumption. The court bases its decisions on facts." Meanwhile, attorneys for Justice 360 are still questioning whether South Carolina prison officials truly did all they could to obtain the drugs necessary to perform lethal injections after Corrections Director Bryan Stirling stated in court documents that no companies were willing to provide them. "We've said from the beginning that we believe lethal injection should be available," Lindsey Vann, a Justice 360 attorney, told reporters after the hearing. "Other jurisdictions around the country have been carrying out lethal injection executions. There's been no opportunity to delve into that based on the rulings in this court. And so, we would ask for further review of whether lethal injection is available or not." Sargassum seaweed lie piled on the shore at Sapphire Beach, St. Thomas, in 2021. This year, the influx of sargassum has had a greater impact territorywide, hampering water production on St. Croix. Maddy Quon covers the Berkeley and Dorchester counties for The Post and Courier. Most recently from Tokyo, Japan, Maddy graduated from the University of Mississippi where she studied journalism. When it comes to open government, we dont get a lot of wins in South Carolina, so we need to celebrate them when they do come. As The Post and Couriers Avery Wilks reports, a high-profile one came on Monday, when S.C. Circuit Judge Clifton Newman denied a joint request from the defense and the prosecution to issue a breathtaking gag order in the double-murder case against the now-infamous Lowcountry attorney Alex Murdaugh. In the first hearing in what is sure to be one of South Carolinas most closely watched trials ever, the two sides had asked the judge not only to gag all parties but also to issue an extraordinary order that would have given the attorneys the power without the judges involvement to decide which if any court filings the public would be able to see. Judge Newmans order wasnt precisely a surprise, since he had responded skeptically to the request during Mr. Murdaughs bond hearing last month. But its significant that when it came time to actually issue a ruling, he held firm and didnt give in to the split-the-baby formulation where the lawyers get a little bit of what they want and the public gets a little bit of what we are promised by the state constitution. Its significant too that neither the news media nor any public interest groups had to get involved and argue for openness that Judge Newman recognized his duties under our state constitution and under clear and constant S.C. Supreme Court precedents and rules. Those precedents and rules make it clear, he wrote, that the public is entitled to know how justice is being administered. The court has ruled, for instance, that judges can only restrict public access to court proceedings if they demonstrate that access would damage the defendants right to a fair trial and that there are no reasonable alternatives to closure that would adequately protect the Defendants fair trial rights. But as Judge Newman noted, court rules already restrict what prosecutors, police and defense attorneys can say outside the courtroom. Combine that with the fact that prosecutor Creighton Waters concurred in defense attorney Dick Harpootlians request to muzzle the two sides, and it seems clear that it is completely within the power of those two sides to muzzle themselves. Indeed, the main thing that would have been accomplished by the joint request was to seal virtually all pre-trial filings absent court scrutiny, which the judge correctly noted would threaten access rights of the public and press which are constitutionally protected and likely constitute the improper closure of the courtroom. Clearly, the publics open court guarantees are sometimes in conflict with defendants fair-trial guarantees, and when that happens, judges have to find the right balance. In this case, for instance, there likely will be some documents that Judge Newman agrees to hide temporarily from the public. But thats a decision the judge needs to make on a case-by-case basis. His ruling means that he will. How do you hire a new jail director without realizing he had been fired the month before from the same job in the adjacent county? The answer doesnt have anything to do with those secret gag orders that S.C. governments are always including when they fire employees and pretend there was an amicable departure although there was either an error or a fraud that made it look that way for a while. Instead, its the latest example of a local government hiring someone for a particularly sensitive position without engaging in the most basic level of vetting. As The Post and Couriers Skyler Laird reports, Richland County had to acknowledge last week that it learned only after the fact that its new jail director had been fired from his previous job as jail director in Kershaw County after being accused of making suggestive comments about female employees clothes and asking them for sex. So now, just a month after hiring Tyrell Cato, county administrator Leonardo Brown is conducting the investigation he should have done to start with on Mr. Catos work history, which one presumes will lead to the departure of yet another jail director. Mr. Cato was fired from his Kershaw County job on May 23, weeks after Richland County began considering him for the job but more than a month before he started the new job. So its possible that a call to Kershaw County wouldnt have warned Richland County away. Of course, it might have resulted in a follow-up call after the firing. But well never know, because as Kershaw County administrator Danny Templar told Ms. Laird, Richland officials never called for a job reference. Mr. Templar said he assumed that was because Mr. Cato had a good reputation in the law-enforcement community, and we wouldnt be surprised if that were true. Thats precisely the sort of informal hiring process that often gets employers into trouble. Theres supposed to be a backstop for hiring law enforcement officials although not as strong a backstop as some employers might assume: State law requires police agencies to report to the S.C. Criminal Justice Academy when and why certified law enforcement officers leave their departments, and agencies are supposed to check with the academy before they hire new employees. This case was complicated by what we hope was a rare mistake, or fraud: The academys records show that a Kershaw County jail employee filed paperwork in June that said Mr. Cato voluntarily resigned to take a job elsewhere. Academy director Jackie Swindler tells us no one realized there was a problem until Ms. Laird talked to the Kershaw County administrator last week, and the administrator called to correct the record. SLED has begun a criminal investigation to figure out how the incorrect information was filed to begin with, and if it turns out to have been intentional, we hope that will result in charges. Police need to be able to trust that the academy's records are accurate, which means police agencies have to provide accurate information. Of course, even when the records are accurate, they go only so far. The records don't verify that a particular candidate would make a good hire particularly for a supervisory position; they merely provide a candidates job history and say whether his law enforcement certification is in good standing. So its a little like running a criminal background check on a prospective non-police employee: It can provide useful information, but its not sufficient, particularly for a sensitive or high-level position. Which takes us back to the need for the Legislature to require thorough background checks on candidates for sensitive positions. We became aware of this problem earlier this year, when The Post and Couriers Avery Wilks reported on the success Travis Braddy has had landing government jobs. Mr. Braddy was hired as procurement manager for Richland School District 1 even though he had a bad-conduct discharge from the Army and a 30-month sentence in military prison for financial fraud. The school district compounded the error of failing to vet the job candidate by allowing him to resign rather than be fired after he was accused of swindling $40,000 from the district that is, by depriving future employers of the type of information it failed to seek out. And then, even though the district eventually reported the alleged crime to police, Mr. Braddy became the subject of a SLED investigation and Mr. Wilks wrote multiple news articles about the situation, Greenville Technical College hired him. The school fired him shortly thereafter because of numerous discrepancies and material omissions in his application records, indicating that it hadnt done so much as a simple Google search before offering him a job. This isnt a government-specific problem. A lot of private employers also let problem employees leave rather than fire them for cause, because they dont want to have to deal with the red tape, or theyre worried about lawsuits. But government has obligations that private employers dont have. In addition to making sure we have sufficient punishments in place to deter misreporting to the Criminal Justice Academy, lawmakers should provide the same sort of protection from lawsuits for honest reporting of all employee departures as they already do for law-enforcement departures. And they should require government agencies to do thorough background checks on all employees in particularly sensitive positions such as, say, procurement officer, or jail director. Editorials represent the institutional view of the newspaper. They are written and edited by the editorial staff, which operates separately from the news department. Editorial writers are not involved in newsroom operations. Scott wrote a little while ago about the debate between Minnesota governor candidates that took place earlier today, at FarmFest in southern Minnesota. FarmFest is like a State Fair for farmers and the ag industries. My wife and I spent the day at FarmFest helping to man the American Experiment booth there, and we attended the debate. This is our booth. We had a wheel you could spin to win prizes and merchandise, and a steady stream of rural Minnesotans passed through all day: The debate between far-left Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Republican challenger Dr. Scott Jensen was interesting on many levels. Here are some observations: * Tim Walz is unpopular in rural Minnesota, as Democrats are generally throughout the country. He infamously told a gathering of Democrats that there is no reason to worry about Greater Minnesotaeverything other than the Twin Cities metro areabecause there is nothing there but rocks and cows. So todays crowd was a good one for the Republican candidate. * The crowd was huge, bigger than a vast building could hold. Interest in this years election is sky-high. * If Phil Spector perfected the wall of sound in popular music, Tim Walz is the wall of sound politician. If he were getting paid by the word, he would be the richest man in town. He doesnt try to persuade an audience, he tries to yammer his audience into submission. What was striking today was how angry Walz seemed. He is the incumbent governor, so why is he so mad? I think Walz is one of many Democratic politicians who think they have bought the voters ballots fair and square, with government programs. If voters hesitate, they are being ungrateful, so Walz is frustrated when he meets opposition. But anger is not a good look. A farmer from Sauk Centre who is not political watched the debate and came away asking, Why is Walz so angry? That was a common reaction. * Republican candidate Scott Jensen is not a politician but a practicing doctor. Walz looked slovenly because he was trying to impersonate a Minnesotan, while Jensen dressed respectably: * Maybe the details of todays debate are unique to Minnesota, but in reality the main issues are the same almost everywhere. Our experience manning the American Experiment booth was that the price of energy is easily issue number one. Rural Americans understand the Lefts war on fossil fuels, which is in effect a war on rural and small town life. My organization has done perhaps the most sophisticated work of any group in the country on energy issues, but it is remarkable how little explanation the people who stop by our booth need to hear. They get it. And, for what it is worth, I didnt encounter a single green energy advocate at FarmFest. The energy issue is death for Democrats at the polls. * So who won todays debate between a professional politician who is an incumbent governor, and a superficially less-polished challenger who is a doctor, not a politician? I think it did not go well for Governor Walz, for several reasons. * One, a politician who comes across as angry is generally not winning. * Two, Dr. Scott Jensens closing remarks were greeted with cheers and a standing ovation. Walzs, to put it mildly, were not. * Three, when the debate was over, a journalist immediately started peppering Dr. Jensen with questions about Donald Trump: Has Jensen been endorsed by Trump? Has he sought Trumps endorsement? Has he been to Mar-A-Lago? This is an obvious attempt to change the subject. The two gubernatorial nominees have just gone at it for an hour and a half in a truly substantive debate, and the Democratic Party journalist wants to deep-six all of that and talk about Donald Trump. She obviously thought Walz lost the debate. I am not sure whether there will be any more debates between Tim Walz and Scott Jensen. Walz seems to view any challenge as an act of Lese-majeste, and given how poorly he fared today he might not agree to any similar events in the future. In the end, though, it doesnt matter, at least as it relates to rural and small town voters. The Democratic Party has nothing to offer to the overwhelming majority of such voters. So politicians like Tim Walz, who came from rural origins and pretend to understand rural issues, are fighting a rear-guard battle. They are slaves to the forces that control their party, and have nothing to offer residents of rural communities. The same is true, no doubt, in many other states. I would be remiss if I didnt add that you can contribute to Dr. Jensens campaign here. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and GOP gubernatorial nominee Dr. Scott Jensen faced off in a debate at FarmFest in Redfern, Minnesota today. Walz is running for reelection this November. Anthony Gockowski has posted a story on todays debate for Alpha News along with complete video here. The fun took place following the debate. Walz has an abysmal record, a thin skin, and a staff that keeps him surrounded by a rarely breached circle of love. Recall that I was bounced from the Minnesota Department of Health press briefings on Covid shortly after Walz declared a semi-permanent emergency and MDH staff consulted with Walzs staff about me. You see, I had asked a critical question of MDH staff by email following a press briefing. It took a section 1983 lawsuit against Team Walz to reinstate me to the press briefings and obligate MDH staff to answer my questions for the duration of the emergency. Faithful readers may recall how forthcoming they were with me. They were about as forthcoming with me as Walz was with the voters seeking him out after the debate. Take this in as one victim of the Walz emergency tries to engage the governor with his story. A farmer / retired sheriff tells Governor Walz: You wiped out my 30 year old farm. Walz eventually gets uncomfortable with the conversation and walks away. #FarmFest pic.twitter.com/8ptxsxHi0x Rebecca Brannon (@RebsBrannon) August 3, 2022 And note the quick work by staff to protect him from a question about the torching of the Minneapolis Police Department Third Precinct headquarters in the riots following the death of Saint George Floyd on Memorial Day 2020. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. The Biden administration has tried to redefine recession to avoid responsibility for two consecutive quarters of GDP decline. Has that rather pitiful effort worked? No, according to Rasmussen Reports: Despite denials from the White House, most voters think the American economy is in a recession and agree that Democrats are to blame for it. A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 62% of Likely U.S. voters believe the U.S. economy is currently in a recession, while 23% think its not. Another 15% are not sure. So much for White House spin. The real question, though, is: regardless of whether you call it a recession, who is to blame for the current economic decline? Rasmussens polling is eye-opening: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said: Democrats inherited an economy that was primed for an historic comeback, and promptly ran it straight into the ground. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of voters agree with McConnells statement, including 45% who Strongly Agree with the Kentucky Republican. Thirty-five percent (35%) disagree, including 27% who Strongly Disagree with the quote from McConnell. If those numbers are anywhere near correct, it is hard to see how the Democrats can avoid a blowout in November. The Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED) has rejected the federal governments decision to restructure electricity distribution companies in the country. It added that the government failed to fulfil its N100 billion subsidy and other privatisation promises made since 2013. The executive director, research and advocacy, Sunday Oduntan, disclosed in a statement. At least five companies, including Abuja DisCo, Benin DisCo, Ibadan DisCo, Kaduna and Kano DisCos, have been taken over by the banks they borrowed money from after failing to break even. A few days after NERC announced a contract-based power market, stakeholders claimed the current situation might make the industrys problems worse, citing an alleged breach by BPE and NERC. Both NERC and BPE stated that the bulk of the equity in the companies will be sold to competent private sector investors who will re-capitalise and efficiently run the businesses. The government claimed to have confirmations that Fidelity Bank would actively participate in all market initiatives now underway that aim to develop the sector, including the National Mass Metering Programme. But the group claimed that by failing to meet existent standards and regulations, the governmentvia the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) and Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC)has a hand in the failure of the electricity industry. The restructuring of the five electricity distribution firms, according to Mr Oduntan, gives the utility companies serious concern because the action is inconsistent with all the guidelines and processes necessary to comply with the framework of privatisation agreements and the rule of law. The statement said that as a result of the action, the Federal Government has appropriated or indirectly renationalised the DisCos. Not only were the investors short-changed because of insufficient and unreliable data that was provided by BPE to them during the privatisation process, but the government also committed to and failed to deliver on DisCos debt-free financial books, payment of Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDA) electricity debts and N100 billion subsidy, he said. For a correct understanding of the performance issues, the DisCos have encountered since privatization, such renationalisation or expropriation must be seen in the historical context that it requires. Fundamentally, the basis of privatisation was flawed from the beginning, due to conditions that were not met by the Federal Government, while expecting the DisCos to meet their performance obligations, he said. Nigerian governors have advised the federal government to offer federal civil servants who are older than 50 years a one-off retirement package to exit the service, as part of coordinated efforts to instill fiscal discipline and prevent the nation from imminent economic collapse. The governors made the proposal at a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari in July, PREMIUM TIMES gathered from sources privy to details of the meeting. The proposal also urged the government to begin implementation of the updated Stephen Oronsaye Report, which suggested merger and shutdown of agencies and parastatals with duplicated or contested functions as a way to address bureaucratic inefficiency and reduce the cost of governance. Officials familiar with details of the meeting, who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES, explained that the governors were concerned about the deteriorating state of the economy and a proposal to restore fiscal discipline was presented to the federal government. The federal civil service employs just about 89,000 people but will spend about N4.1 trillion on personnel costs this year, from its N17 trillion budget for the entire country. It is not clear how many workers are above 50 years of age, or how much goes to them. The suggestion comes as indications emerge that the nation may be teetering towards the cliff of economic collapse. PREMIUM TIMES reported Wednesday that Nigerias external reserves amount to only $15 billion, well below the $36 billion balance on the gross external reserves claimed by the bank. With the nation spending N5.9 trillion on imports in the first quarter of the year, reserves of $15 billion would barely cover four months of import. Last week, details emerged that the balance in Nigerias Excess Crude Account had depleted significantly from $35.37m to $376,655, leaving the nation with no buffers to stabilize the economy and its currency. Yet another indication emerged recently that the nation was broke as debt service surpassed revenue. According to details of the 2022 fiscal performance report for January through April, Nigerias total revenue stood at N1.63 trillion while debt servicing stood at N1.94 trillion, showing a variance of over N300 billion. Fiscal Discipline As part of measures to restore fiscal discipline, the governors advised the federal government to reduce expenditure immediately by eliminating petrol subsidy and NNPC-funded projects, cap the Social Investment Programme (SIP) and National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy (NPRGS) budgets to N200 billion, eliminate extra-constitutional deductions from FAAC, and reduce SWV items for SDG and NASS Constituency projects. The governors also asked the government to reduce duplications (e.g. empowerment programmes) and waste, reduce 1% granted to NASENI to 0.2%, amend the Act in 2022 Finance Bill, reduce personnel costs of federal government MDAs, and expedite privatization of non-performing assets like the NDPHC power plants. Similarly, the governors urged that the 2023 2025 MTEF should reflect the suggestions and governments commitment to restore fiscal discipline while the planned 22% increase in salaries in 2023 be reconsidered. They added that the fiscal deficit should be reduced to no more than 2% of GDP in 2023 2025. Foreign Exchange and Reserves To conserve foreign exchange and grow the reserves, the governors suggested that foreign trips by MDAs, including budgetary-independent agencies such as FIRS, NPA, NIMASA and NCC, be put on hold for at least one year. They also urged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to issue requests for Visas to foreign embassies for federal government officials and their families, unless express approval is granted by the presidency. They also suggested the movement from State Income Taxation to Consumption Taxation, adding that with the introduction of 3% Federal Income Tax, state-level PIT should be abolished. Similarly, they suggested that state Sales Taxes (flat rate of 10%) should be enacted for the 36 States and FCT, VAT levels increased to 10% with a timeline to raise it to between 15% and 20%, as well as re-introduction and passage of VAT into the Exclusive List. It was not clear whether all governors agreed with the position on VAT being moved to the exclusive list. To improve tax revenues, they suggested that the federal government should introduce a flat 3% Federal Personal Income Tax on all Nigerians earning more than N30,000 per month, adding that persons earning less than N30,000 per month whether employed or not, including farmers and traders, should pay a monthly FPIT of N100. Similarly, telecoms firms and NIMC should collaborate to ensure deduction of this from phone credit of individuals and linking to NIN and BVN. The governors also suggested centralization of the collection of all federal oil and non-oil taxes in one agency, the FIRS, while Customs, NPA, and others assess and issue demands. They suggested that the Federal Government improve crude oil and gas production, resolve lingering issues of ownership of gas in PSCs (eg Nnwa-Doro, OML 129) to help position Nigeria to take advantage of the gas needs in Europe, and provide incentives to expedite development of vandalism-resistant deep offshore fields like Bonga SW (Shell), Preweoi (Total), Zabazaba (ENI) and Owowo (Exxon). The governors equally advised the government to encourage (and pre-finance, if necessary) Dangote Refinery to early completion to reduce massive future outflows of foreign exchange. The embattled Nigerian Instagram celebrity and Bureau de Change operator, Ismaila Mustapha, better known as Mompha, has accused the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) of extortion, among other things. In a tweet on Wednesday evening, the anti-graft agency declared him wanted and urged members of the public with information on his whereabouts to speak up. Responding to the development, Mompha said the agency is bitter about a 10 December 2021 judgement delivered at the Federal High Court, Lagos. He said that dissatisfied with the judgement ordering the EFCC to release his wristwatches and other valuables in their custody, the agency came up with trumped-up charges against him. Allegations In a lengthy post on his Instagram page on Thursday, the first in months, Mompha explained that on 10 January while at the EFCCs office to retrieve his valuables in compliance with the judgement, they detained and charged him to court the following day on frivolous charges. I was arraigned before a familiar Judge to the EFCC, and in effect, I was given a challenging bail condition to meet, as a result of which I ended up spending over two months in prison custody while making efforts to meet the problematic bail. After several attempts to meet the bail conditions failed, I successfully applied for the bail conditions to be reduced, which eventually led to my release, he wrote. Alleged blackmail He recalled that upon his release, he embarked on a short trip outside the country to check on his family and return. The EFCCs lawyer, Rotimi Oyedepo, whom he described as allegedly corrupt, along with the EFCC operative Kaina Garba, chose to capitalise on the fact that he travelled to blackmail him into entering a plea bargain with the agency. I initially refused, but after so much blackmail and intimidation by Rotimi Oyedepo, I succumbed and was told to pay N142 million naira to EFCC and sign a one-year imprisonment sentence, he added. He said that after negotiations, the deal was commuted to N40 million naira and one-year imprisonment. When it became obvious to EFCC that I wasnt going to sign the plea bargain and play to their game, they informed the judge I travelled and the judge, without any concrete evidence, disregarded the fact that I was never absent in court, revoked my bail, but fortunately, the Judge again released me temporarily and I was asked to appear in court a week after, Mompha noted. Seeking justice Due to what he termed blackmail and intimidation, Mompha said that he has concluded that he cannot get justice within this corrupt laden system as the EFCC. He wrote: More importantly, to show the EFCC is a charade, the so-called Nappy I was alleged to have engaged in fraudulent activities with was never declared wanted, the EFCC extorted money, cars and landed properties from Nappy but instead declared me wanted to generate cheap publicity. I was never involved in any illegal activity or crime; I only paid money to Nappy in the usual cause of my BDC business. I never knew whether he was involved in any form of illegal activities. Finally, it was obvious entering the plea bargain with the EFCC, which they wanted to force me into at all cost, means I would be convicted for a crime I did not commit and therefore become an ex-convict, and this is what EFCC set out to achieve with me to enable them to generate more social media publicity hence the desperation in falsely declaring me wanted and misleading the public. EFCCs response Responding to the issue, the EFCC spokesperson, Wilson Uwujaren, said there was no merit to Momphas claims. In a telephone interview with PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday, Mr Uwujaren said: The matter is in court. The EFCC declaring him wanted is a process arising from the matter in court. Background The EFCC is accusing Mompha of, among other offences, laundering funds obtained through unlawful activities, false asset declaration and retention of alleged proceeds of crime. Mompha has had several run-ins with the EFCC in the last two years. He was re-arrested in January after he announced his trip to Nigeria with an Instagram photo captioned, About to make some billions in Lagos. Mompha is alleged to have used his registered companies to receive illicit funds on behalf of yahoo yahoo boys from across the world in return for a commission. The account of one of his companies, Ismalob Global Investment Limited Bank, a Bureau de Change company domiciled in Zenith Bank Plc, was allegedly used to launder funds derived from unlawful activities. Mompha and his company Ismalob Global Investment Ltd, were prosecuted by the commission over alleged N6 billion fraud on January 12. A fresh eight-count charge was brought against him early in the year. A former senator, Shehu Sani, has urged opposition lawmakers to focus on the 2023 general elections instead of wasting energy on trying to impeach President Muhammadu Buhari. Mr Sani said that though he is disposed to impeach the president over the worsening security situation, the complex nature of impeachment as provided in the 1999 Constitution makes it technically impossible to achieve before the 2023 elections. The former lawmaker stated this on Wednesday during a PREMIUM TIMES forum on Twitter Space. The session, titled Insecurity: Should President Muhammadu Buhari be impeached, also had in attendance, the founder of Enough is Enough (EiE), Yemi Adamolekun, the Director of Publicity of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chinwe Nnorom, and about 3,327 participants. Impeachment threat Last week, the minority caucus of the National Assembly resolved to give Mr Buhari six weeks to address the general insecurity in the country or risk impeachment. The agitation started in the Red Chamber when some opposition senators staged a walkout of plenary after Senate President Ahmad Lawan blocked a motion on insecurity and a call for an impeachment notice to the president. The PDP caucus in the House also joined in the six-week ultimatum after a meeting of the National Assembly PDP caucus. The PDP is the largest opposition in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Although the presidency described the impeachment threat as babyish antics of the opposition, some senators of the ruling APC have backed the impeachment move. Elisha Abbo (APC, Adamawa) and Adamu Bulkachuwa (APC, Bauchi) have publicly endorsed the impeachment move. Impeachment move is comical Mr Sani, who was in the 8th Senate, said the main opposition party should focus on winning the general election rather than dissipating energy on the impeachment that has the potential to drag on till February 2023 when elections will be ongoing. At a time like this, what should be most important is how to dislodge the present political party. Any other thing can be a serious distraction, Mr Sani, a former PDP governorship aspirant in Kaduna said. The Chairman (Iyorcha Ayu) of the PDP was also a former Senate President. He knows the details and the issues in the National Assembly. I think the party should preoccupy itself with the strategy on how to win the election. Dissipating energy on the issue of impeachment can even affect the next election. If it is easier, I believe the president should be impeached today, and if there would be no consequences. If you go to the details, it would take months and with leadership like Senate President Ahmad Lawan and Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila, who are already in sync with the government, it is going to be energy wasted. The Kaduna politician said his stance is based on his experience as a senator. At a period like this in the National Assembly, when the whole tenure of the administration is coming to an end and they already proceeded on annual recess, by the time they are back, there would never be a full quorum in the National Assembly, he said. Many seats will be empty until the end of the year because the senators and Reps will have to retrieve back to their constituencies, struggling for their political lives. Mr Sani said he believes the impeachment threat is more symbolic to send a message to the president that he has failed and the National Assembly is taking him on. What is important is for them to summon the service chiefs continuously and to call for their removal. That is within the purview of the president. But it could have been good for the president to be impeached. As someone who has been within the system, I know that it is technically impossible, he said. Opposition lawmakers make up less than half of the population of each of the two chambers of the National Assembly. At least two-thirds of lawmakers must support any impeachment of the president, which means the opposition lawmakers will need to convince about half the APC lawmakers to impeach the president. This, many analysts have said, makes it almost impossible to impeach the president. When Mr Sani was asked about the impact of insecurity on elections, he said INEC will still have to develop means for people to vote even in troubled parts of the country like Kaduna, Katsina and Zamfara. Once you initiate the process of evicting the president, all other issues come second and this can drag to December, January, and even during the election. The question is, can we do with the heat, the crisis, the turbulence and the storm for the next 4-5 months? Or do we manage the situation like this until we can take the government and the party out during the election for a new government to come in? I have lost the hope and the confidence that this government can address insecurity in Nigeria. Ms Adamolekun, the founder of EiE, opposed the position of Mr Sani on managing the situation until after the general elections in 2023. Although she stated that the lawmakers have shown a lack of seriousness in the impeachment process, she stated that in an ideal society, impeachment is the best means to threaten a lame-duck president that is not facing re-election. She noted that citizens must lead peaceful protests to demand their lawmakers do the needful. I dont agree that we manage until we get to the election. You cannot continue to manage people being killed and the state of the economy. It is not something you will manage, she said. She said she does not believe that opposition lawmakers who issued the impeachment threat are serious about it. You are still going on holiday for seven weeks, and you gave the president six weeks. That is if you dont solve it within six weeks while we are on holiday, we will decide to serve you notice that will take five months in an election year. It does not make any sense. The fact that they framed it that way shows the degree of seriousness. There is no political will. Also speaking on the planned impeachment, Ms Nnorom, the PDP official, said there are several reasons the lawmakers should impeach the president. She said although the PDP is not driving the impeachment threat, she believes opposition lawmakers should go ahead with their threat. It is better late than never, she said when asked if the impeachment threat is not coming too late in the administration. Governors of Nigerian states under the umbrella of Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) have again resisted attempts to commence the deduction of $418 million Paris Club refund allegedly owed four contractors from the federation account. The governors in a letter to the federal government through the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha, argued that an attempt to restart the deduction process, which is being challenged in the courts and for which the Supreme Court has made pronouncement, would be unconstitutional. The letter, signed by the Chairman of the NGF and outgoing governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi, described the new move as an attempt by the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and the Minister of Finance (HMF) to circumvent the law and the recent judgement of the Supreme Court by surreptitiously securing the approval of the FEC to effect payment of the sum of $418 million to four contractors who allegedly executed contracts in respect of the Paris Club refunds to the states and local governments. An approval of President Muhammadu Buhari under the instrumentality of the AGF, Abubakar Malami, and Finance Minister, Zainab Ahmed, to pay the said sum to the contractors through the issuance of promissory notes, had met stiff resistance from the 36 state governors who approached the court for redress through their Attorneys-General. Pending Matter The governors argued that the matter is currently pending on appeal at the Court of Appeal in Abuja for hearing, adding that the Nigerian government should exercise restraint in its handling of the matter. Significantly, while that appeal is pending, one of the contractors, who is a beneficiary of the Promissory Notes in the sum of $USD 142,028,941.95, Riok Nigeria Limited and who had lost at the Court of Appeal, further appealed to the SC in SUIT NO: SC 337/2018 BETWEEN: RIOK NIGERIA LIMITED V INCORPORATED TRUSTEES OF NIGERIA GOVERNORS FORUM &7 ORS. The Supreme Court on 3rd June, 2022 also dismissed Rioks appeal as lacking in merit, the NGF said. The governors argued that the Supreme Court had on the occasion made clear that neither the NGF nor ALGON had power to award contracts and charge the same directly to the Federation Account as done in this case. The dismissal of RIOKS case by the SC also affected the payment of $1,219,440.45 and $215,195.36 to two private lawyers to RIOK, NWAFOR ORIZU and OLAITAN BELLO who are also beneficiaries of Promissory Notes by the DMO, the letter said. Besides RIOK and the two lawyers, the States have also challenged either on appeal or other courts the claims by the other contractors including: DR. TED ISIGHOHI EDWARDS ($159,000,000), NED NWOKO ($68,658,192.83) and PANIC ALERT SECURITY SYSTEMS LTD ($47,831,920). These cases are pending and no steps ought to be taken to enforce the Judgment and alter the status quo until the matters are fully determined. A Caveat issued to restrain all parties concerned and the public from dealing or honoring Promissory Notes issued had earlier been published. The governors said that the purport and essence of the definitive pronouncement by the Supreme Court is that none of the contractors recommended for payment of the sum of $418 Million by the AGF and finance minister can be so paid because the contracts and payments relied upon were not processed as prescribed by the Constitution and the law. The funds certainly cannot be accessed through the Federation Account as vigorously pursued by the AGF and HMF. Those contracts as they stand are unconstitutional and unlawful and cannot vest any legal right on any of the contractors. It is immaterial that part of the contract sums has been paid. Those payments did not validate the unlawful nature of the contracts. The SC has spoken. It is final and must be obeyed. The excerpt of the decision of the SC is attached for ease of reference, the governors argued. Long-running battle The NGF said it had consistently posited that neither the States nor ALGON can appropriate or deduct monies directly from the Federation Account which funds are meant to be paid into the States/Local Government Joint Account for which the Houses of Assembly of the states are yet to appropriate and arising from judgments to which the states that are custodians of the joint account were not a party. The position, it argued, has been reinforced by the recent supreme court decision in the RIOKs Case. The NGF therefore urges that the AGF and the HMF should not under any guise whatsoever stampede the FEC to take a decision which will not only be patently unconstitutional and illegal but also an affront to the highest court of the land. The rule of law is not only supreme; it is a cardinal principle canvassed by the present administration and should in this particular occasion be strictly obeyed, the letter said. In the face of the crushing economic realities and security challenges facing the nation and competing allocation of scarce resources, the payment of contractors of the humongous sum of $418 Million from public treasury is not and should not be the priority of FEC. FEC may also wish to note that the undue haste in which the payment of the contractors in the Paris Club refund has been pursued and processed by the AGF and HMF has already created the impression in the discerning minds of the public that it would appear that the interest of contractors takes precedence over and above the welfare and interest of the general public whom the senior officials of government had sworn to defend and protect. The NGF therefore admonishes FEC to prevail on the AGF and HMF to toe the line of constitutionality and allow the due process of the law to prevail. An investigation by the Intercept, an online newspaper, has accused the United States of playing an unacknowledged role in the 2017 bombing of Rann Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Borno State. At least 160 civilians, many of them children, were killed in the attack. The report published on 28 July said the attack was referred to as an instance of U.S.-Nigerian operations. Evidence suggests that the U.S. launched a near unprecedented internal investigation of the attack because it secretly provided intelligence or other support to the Nigerian armed forces, the American non-profit news organisation reports, citing a secret U.S, military document it obtained. The U.S. inquiry, the existence of which has not been previously reported, was ordered by the top American general overseeing troops in Africa and was specifically designed to avoid questions of wrongdoing or recommendations for disciplinary action. PREMIUM TIMES reported how the air raid by the military occurred in January 2017 to target Boko Haram members. The Nigerian military and the federal government had said the jet was meant to target suspected Boko Haram members when it accidentally bombed the camp. The Nigerian Air Force expressed regrets for carrying out the airstrike, which also killed nine aid workers and seriously wounded more than 120 people. John Eneche, the then defence spokesperson, had said the attack was carried in that location because it was not reflected in the operational map as a humanitarian base. Hence, it appeared as a place that could equally be used for enemy activities. Thus, when the mass movement was noticed through aerial satellite observation, it was taken for Boko Haram terrorists activity, which needed to be neutralised with speed, Mr Eneche said. U.S. role According to the report, U.S. surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations have often been employed in Nigeria, including a Predator drone flown from neighboring Chad, in addition to a longer-range Global Hawk and a manned, turbo prop plane, deployed over Nigeria beginning in 2014, ostensibly to search for children kidnapped by Boko Haram, the Intercept said. The paper reported that just days after the attack, U.S. Africa Command secretly commissioned Brig. Gen. Frank J. Stokes to undertake an investigation to determine the facts and circumstances of a kinetic air strike (strike) conducted by Nigerian military forces in the vicinity of Rann, Nigeria. Its findings were never made public, the paper reported, noting AFRICOM did not answer its questions about the results of Stokess investigation or the extent of U.S. involvement in the attack. Relying on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Intercept said it is impossible to ascertain the full extent of U.S. involvement in the 2017 airstrike, but Stokess official instructions suggest that the U.S. provided intelligence or other support to the Nigerian military. You will gather and preserve any background information that is relevant to a complete understanding of U.S.-Nigerian operations such as this strike, reads the document cited by the intercept. Stokess mandate included an inquiry into how the U.S. shares information with Nigerias military, protocols concerning its use, and after action reporting procedures when shared information is used in a strike (e.g., battle damage assessment reports). The formal investigation of an African partners airstrike was rare, if not unprecedented, and indicates this was no ordinary Nigerian bombing gone wrong. A former Pentagon official with expertise in investigations of civilian casualty incidents, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said that he had never encountered a U.S. investigation of an allys airstrike. U.S. denies involvement Meanwhile, the United States has said it was not involved in the 2017 airstrike on the IDP in Rann, a remote village in Borno State. Jeanne Clark, the spokesperson for the U.S. Mission Nigeria, told PREMIUM TIMES that America, through its embassy in Nigeria, actively engaged the Nigerian military to ensure safeguards were implemented that could help prevent similar incidents. Regarding the airstrike on the IDP camp, she said it was the Nigerian Air Force that consequently made changes in order to minimise the threat of civilian harm. These changes include a U.S.-supported Air to Ground Integration programme and human rights and law of armed conflict training that have enhanced the Nigerian Air Forces procedural controls, she said in an email response to PREMIUM TIMES. Ms Clark noted that the U.S. Embassy Nigeria routinely engages with the Armed Forces of Nigeria to reinforce civilian protection and human rights practices through our security force professionalisation efforts that seek to create a modern and effective force. A deputy spokesperson at the State Departments Bureau of African Affairs, Ryan Essman, had issued a similar statement to The Intercept. The State High Court in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, has sentenced Uduak Akpan to death for raping and murdering a female job seeker, Iniubong Umoren, in the state last year. The judge, Bassey Nkanang, in his judgement on Thursday, said the convicted man will be put to death by hanging. Mr Nkanang also found Mr Akpan guilty of rape and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The judge said the prosecution has proved beyond doubt the case of rape and murder against Mr Akpan. He, however, discharged and acquitted the father and sister of Mr Akpan, who were the 2nd and the 3rd defendants in the case. After the judge read out the judgment, the convicted rapist attempted to escape from the courtroom but was overpowered by security officials. Mr Nkanang took over two hours to finish reading the judgement. Background Ms Umoren went missing on 29 April 2021 after she was lured out of her home in Uyo with a fake job interview by Uduak Akpan. The victims friend, Uduak Umoh, said she heard her scream for help when she established contact with her on the phone. She sent me a 1sec audio record on WhatsApp and I had to call her back to know if she wanted to say something to me but immediately I called her, I heard her screaming, Ms Umoh had tweeted during the search for the slain woman. Several Nigerians deployed the Twitter hashtag #FingHinyUmoren to see how they could track the missing womans location or uncover the identity and location of the person she went to meet. The police later exhumed Ms Umoren in a shallow grave on 30 April, 2021, a day after she was raped and killed at Mr Akpans family compound. Her gruesome murder ignited international and nationwide outrage over increasing rape cases in Nigeria. Ms Umoren, before her death, was a fresh Philosophy graduate of the University of Uyo. She was waiting for her deployment for the mandatory National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) Programme. Ms Umoren did not live to see her mobilisation letter for the programme or even her final-year result she graduated as one of the top students in her department. Trial, testimonies The convict, Mr Akpan, first appeared in court on 26 July 2021 and pleaded guilty to murder, and not guilty to rape. The court, however, entered a not-guilty plea for the murder of Ms Umoren. The Attorney-General of Akwa Ibom State, Uko Udom, who led the prosecution team, told reporters, For a capital offence, an accused person pleading guilty is neither here nor there. As far as the law is concerned, he is not guilty until we (prosecution) prove our case. So if an accused person pleads guilty in a capital offence like this, the court normally would enter a plea of not guilty for him, Mr Sam had said. Mr Akpan later made a U-turn during his trial and denied raping and killing Ms Umoren. He told the court that he had a fever the day he pleaded guilty and that it was the influence of his IPO in the court that made him plead guilty. He also denied the confessional statements he made to the police and added that a similar statement he made to the State Security Services (SSS) was done under duress. But Ama Okeke, a call data analyst with the SSS, who testified before the court, presented a video recording of Mr Akpans interview session which countered his claims. The court admitted the video as evidence. Mr Okeke also told the court that from the agencys call record analysis, Mr Akpan and Ms Umoren were at the same cell record and coordinate (location) in Nung Ikono Obio in Uruan Local Government Area. He further told the court that SSS investigations led to the arrest of Mr Akpans sister, who is the 3rd accused person, Bassey-awan, in Calabar, Cross River State. Besides his confessional statements to the police and the SSS, Mr Akpan, while he was paraded at the police headquarters in Uyo, told reporters how he lured and killed the victim. In his testimony before the court to justify his sons innocence, Frank Akpan, the father of the convict, told the court his son had a mental disorder and was an outpatient at the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital. Bassey-awan, in her testimonies, admitted her brother visited her but she said as of the time of the visit, her brother was accused of kidnapping Ms Umoren, from what she had learnt on Facebook. She told the court she had asked the brother to go back to Uyo and clear his name. Defence counsels final submission Sampson Adulla, a lawyer from the Legal Aid Counsel, provided free legal services to Mr Akpan. Mr Adulla, while adopting his final written address, prayed the court to rely on weak facts presented by the prosecution to discharge and acquit his client. He asked the court to discountenance Mr Akpans confessional statement because there was no witness to testify that his client committed the murder. On Mr Frank and Ms Bassey-awan, Mr Adulla had urged the court to discharge and acquit them because there was no evidence before the court that the duo knew that Mr Akpan was being accused of murder. He had argued that at the time Mr Akpan visited her sister in Calabar, his alleged offence was kidnapping and not murder. Prosecutions submission The prosecution counsel, Friday Itim, a deputy director of public prosecution in the Ministry of Justice, Akwa Ibom State, had reminded the judge how Mr Akpan pleaded guilty to the charge of murder, but not rape, on his first court appearance in July last year. Mr Itim had also drawn the courts attention to the fact that they (prosecution) had proven that there was communication between Mr Frank and her daughter (Bassey-awan) via text message on the day of the incident. The court had admitted the phone and text message as evidence. The murderer of the female Akwa Ibom job seeker has said that nobody is doing anything about many assassinations in Nigeria. A State High Court convicted the murderer, Uduak Akpan, Thursday, in Uyo for killing Iniubong Umoren last year, whom he lured out of her home with a fake job interview. The judge, Bassey Nkanang, said Mr Akpan will be put to death by hanging. Mr Nkanang also found Mr Akpan guilty of rape and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The judge said the prosecution had proved beyond doubt the case of rape and murder against Mr Akpan. He, however, discharged and acquitted the father and sister of Mr Akpan, who were the 2nd and the 3rd defendants, respectively, in the case. Mr Akpan attempted to escape from the courtroom after Mr Nkanang finished reading the judgement, but was overpowered by security officials. After his conviction by the court, the judge asked Mr Akpan if he would like to say something to the court. My Lord, I am not guilty, Mr Akpan responded. But the judge told him that the court had passed that stage. He told him he should say something related to the case. My Lord, in our country, therere many assassinations, but nobody is doing something about it, the convicted man said. It is not exactly clear what the convicted man wanted to achieve with his remarks in court. Nigeria is currently facing serious security challenges, including several unresolved killings in different parts of the country. Good news. Justice served, a Twitter user (@chika_oseki), said of the conviction and sentencing of Mr Akpan. A lawyer has narrated how the Akwa Ibom Chief Judge, Ekaette Obot, once described in a derogatory manner the incarcerated human rights lawyer, Inibehe Effiong, as a lousy boy. The lawyer, Augustine Asuquo, who is the head of Inibehe Effiong Chambers in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, disclosed this in a press statement he issued on 28 July, shortly after Mrs Obot committed Mr Effiong to prison for alleged contempt. Several people and groups, including the Nigerian Bar Association, have condemned the judges action as being arbitrary and unconstitutional. Mr Effiong, who is based in Lagos State, Nigerias South-west, is a counsel to another lawyer, Leo Ekpenyong, in a defamation suit in which the Akwa Ibom State Governor, Udom Emmanuel, is the claimant. Mr Asuquo said he had a shocking experience on 21 June when he appeared on behalf of Mr Effiong before Mrs Obot in the defamation matter. The lawyer said Mrs Obot took on him when he reminded her of a letter from their chambers that she should transfer the case to another judge. I saw the letter, and I did order that you should make a formal application so that the other party can respond, but you evaded service of that process, Mr Asuquo quoted the judge to have said. Mrs Obot, according to the lawyer, veered off the case to talk about Mr Effiong. What about that lousy boy? Whats his name again? The judge said derogatorily. The claimants counsel, Samuel Ikpo, responded, Inibehe Effiong! My Lord said, Yes, that rude boy was found running in the street of Uyo, evading service and was chased after by the bailiff. You people want to frustrate this case with this your application, you will not, the judge said. Mr Asuquo said Mrs Obot accused his chambers of bringing a herbalist (a journalist who was covering the proceedings) into the court. With utmost dismay, I couldnt believe myself, the lawyer said of the judges remarks. I then pleaded with my Lord that we never evaded any service of the process and that my colleague is not based in Uyo, but Lagos. Contempt of court? Mr Asuquo said his argument angered the judge who wanted to commit him to prison for contempt. In anger for daring to argue with my Lord, Her lordship quickly ordered the clerk of court to seize my phone, check if I was recording. When it was discovered that I wasnt recording, my Lord asked that my phone be switched off and seized from me. As I stammered to utter another word, my Lord yelled at me to step out of the court and de-robe myself that shes sending me to prison for contempt. I was shocked to my marrow. While I stepped out, my Lord continued to denigrate my colleague Inibehe for his unruly behaviour, that he has influenced me with it. That I had better find a senior lawyer and attach myself and learn the proper principles of law and conduct. Regarding my committal, I was helplessly miserable because I had done nothing to warrant such an unthinkable attack. So I managed to utter some words of apologies to the court if my comment had ever offended the court. Another learned senior from the bar, equally stood up and appealed for my pardon. That was how I escaped the sentencing hammer. President Muhammadu Buhari has urged businessman and philanthropist, Abdulsamad Rabiu, to carry forward his momentum of investment and charitable deeds as he marks yet another birthday. In a message to the President of BUA Group, one of Nigerias largest conglomerates, the President lauded Abdulsamad Rabius and other leading citizens for giving the country a good name at home and abroad. Through your life and career, you have persevered with determination and dignity, the family traditions of business, scholarship and charitable work, the president said of Mr Rabiu in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu. President Buhari said he cherished the businessmans compassion and concern for the weakest citizen. You are a steadfast champion of the poor and the marginalized and your charitable efforts will continue to inspire fellow citizens. Mr Rabiu, one of Nigerias richest businesspersons, was born on August 4, 1960 in Kano, Northwest, Nigeria. is a Nigerian billionaire businessman and philanthropist. His conglomerate, BUA group is into manufacturing, infrastructural development, agriculture. The group is estimated to generate annual revenue in excess of $2.5 billion. On July 7, 2020, Forbes estimated Mr Rabius wealth at $3.2 billion The businessmans late father, Isyaku Rabiu, was also one of Nigerias foremost industrialists in the 1970s and 1980s. The publisher of the Desert Herald newspaper, a Kaduna-based newspaper, has given reasons he will withdraw from negotiating the release of kidnap victims in the Abuja-Kaduna train attack. Tukur Mamu spoke during a chat on Arise TVs The Morning show on Thursday. Mr Mamu had helped in negotiating the release of 11 hostages who were abducted from the Kaduna-bound train that was attacked by gunmen in March. He also helped to secure the release of additional seven hostages in July. Reasons Mr Mamu said he declared his withdrawal from the hostage negotiations nearly two weeks ago. First, when doing something as an army of one, if you succeed, the success will be very limited, and in a situation whereby theres virtually no support from the government, he said. Mr Mamu said that he has received threats and the federal government has failed to appreciate his efforts. He added that negotiating with kidnappers without government support is very dangerous and could cost his life. Give and take Mr Tukur said that during the negotiation for the release of the first hostages no ransom was paid except a give and take. The first batch of the 11 when the government participated actively, I can guarantee you, I can assure you that we did not pay a single Kobo to anybody, he said. We achieve that through dialogue, through negotiation and through the spirit of give and take. When he was asked to clarify what he meant by give and take, he said that he cant comment on it because it involved the federal government and the security agencies. So I think the right people to answer this question should be the federal government or the military, he said. They know exactly what happened. And they know how we succeeded in securing the release of the first 11. Already, you know, Im under serious pressure frommost of them because they think that the little we are doing, incapacity of the military, which is not so. Were not criticizing the military. Were only advising them that this is the right step to take, especially in this very difficult and unpredictable situation. President Muhammadu Buhari Thursday in Abuja declared that the rapid integration of solar power into the countrys energy mix will lead to an increase in electricity access to underserved and unserved communities. Receiving a delegation of SUN Africa LLC, USA, the president said this administration has embarked on several reforms aimed at revitalizing Nigerias energy sector aimed at improving energy access to communities across the country. He commended the interest of the US developer to invest in Nigerias power sector, pledging that the federal government would remain committed to collaborating with the private sector in improving energy access, creating jobs and industrial development. Highlighting some of the reforms embarked upon by this administration to address Nigerias energy needs, the president listed the recent signing of the Nigeria Climate Change Bill in November 2021, the implementation of the Power Sector Recovery Programme with the World Bank and the Nigeria Electrification Programme aimed at enhancing energy access to remote communities. He also added that the Presidential Power Initiative with Siemens was aimed at achieving end-to-end alignment across the electricity value chain. Initiatives like these will go a long way in developing local capacity through technology transfer and relieving transmission constraints through the generation and distribution of electricity in the local Distribution Companies Franchise Area, making off-take easier. The ministers of finance and power, as well as other agencies of government, will remain available at all times, to ensure the achievement of this significant project as part of our efforts towards achieving Net Zero Emission by 2050. I am pleased to note the technology transfer content embedded in this initiative as well as the employment generation potentials. I thank you all for coming and look forward to receiving regular updates as you achieve significant milestones in developing your projects in Nigeria, he told the delegation from the solar project company. In his remarks, Goran Rajsic, founder, Sun Africa LLC, USA, said the renewable and infrastructure company hopes to deliver solar power in multiple locations across the country, just as it has done in Angola, with financing done through the US EXIM Bank. He submitted that his organization, working with other leading energy companies, has the capacity to do what Nigeria requires in the area of power. We will create something that will be of immediate need for Nigeria, and last for years to come, he said. He described what Sun Africa LLC, USA has in mind as a partnership for energy and infrastructure, which will revolutionize both the industrial and agricultural sectors. Femi Adesina Special Adviser to the President (Media & Publicity) The timely intervention of the police in Lagos saved four persons from being lynched by a mob on the Eko bridge. The spokesperson of the police in the state, Benjamin Hundeyin, made this known on his verified Twitter handle monitored by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). The timely intervention of Police from Ebute-Ero Division and Rapid Response Squad (RRS) rescued the four persons from being killed by a Mob. He said the four adults (including one grandmother) were severely beaten on Wednesday in Eko bridge. They were suspected of being kidnappers because they had with them in their vehicle twelve children (ranging from seven-month-old to 12 years old). Police officers from Ebute-Ero Division and the RRS were on time to rescue the adults from lynching. Their vehicle was totally burnt down by the mob. He said that preliminary investigation showed that they were all coming from the beach where they allegedly went to do some sacrifices. Mr Hundeyin said the adults also explained that the children were their children and grandchildren. According to him, the case has been transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) for further investigations. He warned Lagos residents against jungle justice. (NAN) The Registrar-General of the Corporate Affairs Commission, Garba Abubakar, has said the National Identity Number (NIN) will replace signatures in business registration. Mr Abubakar said this at the just concluded 2022 management retreat held in Kano, according to a statement signed Thursday by the spokesperson of the CAC, Rasheed Mahe. The CAC boss said the new plan is part of the integration with the National Identity Management Commission, adding that when implemented, the CAC may only require NIN enrollment numbers and not signatures to process registration applications as obtained in other jurisdictions. The statement said the CAC at the retreat re-trained staff in all sectors of its operations and will continue to receive priority attention. Mr Abubakar revealed that this year the Commission would surpass the 583 staff trained in 2021 and train 700 by the end of 2022. He added that more staff of the Commission would also be empowered with working tools some of which were to be provided courtesy of the World Bank to enable them to grant registration approvals even outside of working hours. Other government agencies have previously mandated the use of NIN for Nigerians after the number became mandatory for SIM cards in December 2020. In April 2022, the Nigerian government mandated telecoms companies to bar SIMs not linked to NINs. In the second quarter of 2021, Nigerians began using NIN to register their automobiles. The Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) spokesperson, Bisi Kazeem, said the choice was made by a presidential directive. The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has directed all potential candidates for the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) to obtain their NIN in advance of the exercise. The All Progressives Congress (APC) says it plans to challenge the results of the 16 July Osun governorship election at the election petition tribunal. Gboyega Famodun, the state APC Chairman said this at a news conference on Thursday at the party secretariat, in Osogbo. Mr Famodun said the decision followed assurances by the party lawyers who said that there were good grounds to challenge the results after they had studied them. We are going to the tribunal. Our lawyers had informed us that we have good reasons to challenge the results of the election at the tribunal, he said. He decried the suspected anti-party activities of an APC faction in the stateThe Osun Progressive (TOP). The members of TOP, the faction of the party in the state loyal to former governor Rauf Aregbesola, staged a protest in the capital, Osogbo, on Wednesday calling for a restructure of the party. The Chairman said the TOP members worked for the opposition, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to deny the APC victory at the election. The recent protest by the group, calling for his removal as the partys chairman and the restructuring of the party, after they openly supported the PDP candidate, Sen. Ademola Adeleke, during the governorship election was shameful and wicked. Our position is that the protest was shameful, callous, primitive, selfish, wicked, misplaced and inconsiderate for the Aregbesola supporters, who glaringly worked against the success of Gov. Oyetola at the polls, to now be canvassing restructuring of the party through a sponsored protest. Assuming without conceding that there are challenges within the party, the protesters and their patron should know that they lack moral right to either suggest or effect any likely solution for the restructuring of our party, as it is on record that they massively and collectively worked against Oyetola. Since members of the factional group (TOP) people, had done their worst by working assiduously and conscientiously by teaming up with the PDP for the success of Adeleke, which is the highest level of an anti-party activity that can be committed by any politician, it will be a needless venture to enter into any pact with the group that is bereft of honour, he said. Highlights of the briefing included the passing of a Vote of Confidence on Governor Gboyega Oyetola and Famodun by the state executive of the party. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on July 17 declared Ademola Adeleke of the PDP as the winner of the Osun governorship election with 403,371 votes. While Governor Oyetola of APC placed second with 375,027 votes. (NAN) The federal government has obtained $134 million loan from the Africa Development Bank to boost wheat production. The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Muhammad Mahmoud, said this in Abuja, while briefing State House correspondents on the implementation of the presidential mandate given to the ministry. He explained that the aim was to save the country from acute scarcity of wheat, whose demand and price had gone high because of the Russia-Ukraine war. The minister noted that with 250,000 farmers cultivating 250,000 hectares in the 2022 dry season, the initiative would raise wheat production to 750,000 metric tonnes. The wheat, he said, would be cultivated in Jigawa, Kebbi, Kano, Bauchi, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Zamfara, Gombe, Plateau, Borno, and Yobe, Adamawa, and Taraba states. The minister said the federal government had deployed 5,000 agro rangers drawn from the Nigeria Civil Defence Corps to protect farmers facing security challenges. He said about 3.6 million indirect jobs had been created from the $2.4 billion worth of externally-funded projects being implemented by the Buhari administration. He said $538 million was approved for special agricultural processing zones to support inclusive and sustainable agricultural development in Nigeria. According to him, another project worth $575 million is being implemented to improve rural access and agricultural marketing in participating states. He added that government was also strengthening the financing institutional base for effective development, maintenance and management of rural roads network. He gave the participating states as Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Kano, Katsina, Kogi, Kwara, Kebbi, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo, Plateau and Sokoto. He said government was implementing the Value Chain Development Programme Additional Financing (VCDP) 2020-2024. This is to enhance incomes and food security of poor rural households engaged in the production, processing and marketing of rice and cassava. Mr Mahmoud said the project is currently being implemented in nine states including Niger, Benue, Ogun, Ebonyi, Taraba and Anambra, Nasarawa, Kogi and Enugu to scale up the achievement recorded in the original VCDP states. He said Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes Project, a $700 million project, is being implemented by three ministries; Environment, Agriculture, and Water Resources. The 19 states in the northern part of the country and the FCT are the beneficiaries. The projects objective is to mitigate and build the resilience of Nigerian farmers to climate change. The project duration is six years 2022 to 2028. More than one million degraded land will be restored within the six years project cycle, the minister said. Mr Mahmoud said governments foresight in introducing measures to ward off the effects of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict had paid off. He stressed that in spite of the challenges, which had slowed down global economy, Nigeria is significantly not experiencing food crisis. (NAN) The Actors Guild of Nigeria, AGN, has announced the release of kidnapped actors Cynthia Okereke and Clemson Cornel Agbogidi. It is unclear whether a ransom was paid, but a statement from the Guild, signed by its Director of Communications, Monalisa Chinda Coker, states that the actors were released unhurt. The elated National President of the Actors Guild of Nigeria, Ejezie Emeka Rollas announced their release by the abductors who were touched by the spirit of God to set them free and unharmed, the statement reads. Ms Coker also notes that the Guild has arranged for medical checks and psychological support for the victims. On behalf of their families, the National President expressed our heartfelt appreciation to the Nollywood industry and Nigerians at large for the support and prayers during the trying period/ He urged members to be security conscious on and off film sets and always take precautionary measures on their security at all times, she adds. Search efforts, petition Following the unfortunate incident, Ms Coker had called on Nigerians to intensify their search for the actors by reposting valuable information. On her Instagram page, the actress noted that the demand being made by the kidnappers is outrageous, given that actors dont earn much in Nigeria. Meanwhile, famous actress Kate Henshaw started a change.org petition. The petition challenged the Federal Government of Nigeria not just to secure the release of the abducted actors but put an end to insecurity across the nation. Background The actors were reported missing on Thursday. This was after their family members confirmed they didnt return home from a film location at Ozalla Town, Enugu State. By Saturday, their abductors contacted their families, demanding $100,000 as ransom. In a video clip on social media, Mr Rollas said that though both actors are still being held captive by their abductors, the Guild is doing its best to secure their release. Mr Rollas announced that the Guild was working closely with the victims families and the security forces to ensure their safe release. A court in London on Thursday adjourned the pre-trial hearing of the criminal charges filed against Nigerias former Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, and his wife, Beatrice. The couple is charged with human trafficking and attempted organ harvesting. The Old Bailey, as it is fondly called, adjourned the pre-trial hearing to 31 October. Mrs Ekweremadu, who is on bail, appeared at the Old Bailey for a plea and directions hearing, with Messrs Ekweremadu and Obeta also attending by video link from Wandsworth and Belmarsh prisons, Daily Mail said. The newspaper said the judge, Richard Marks, said the case would be heard by a High Court judge, adding that a provisional trial will begin by 2 May, 2023 with an estimated length of three to four weeks. Mr Ekweremadu and his wife, Beatrice Ekweremadu, were on 23 June arrested in the UK by London Met Police and charged with conspiracy to traffic a child to the United Kingdom in order to harvest organs. According to the prosecutors, the couple has a daughter who has a kidney-related disease and has been on dialysis for some time. They added that they believe the plan was to use an organ from the boy on their daughter who needs a kidney transplant. In a turn of events, David Nwamini (alleged victim of trafficking) told doctors he was 15 and was coerced by the Ekweremadus into donating his kidney. However, the Nigerian government said all its records show that Mr Nwamini was not a minor and was 21 years old. The Westminster Magistrate Court in the United Kingdom later ruled that he is not a minor. The Ekweremadus are facing charges of conspiring to traffick a person for organ harvesting in violation of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. The case was transferred to Central Criminal Court in London popularly known as Old Bailey where Mrs Ekweremadu was granted bail on stringent conditions. But the senator was denied bail because he was said to be a flight risk. Obinna Obeta, a Nigerian doctor practising in the UK, has been charged with plotting with the Ekweremadus to traffic a man into the UK to harvest a kidney for their daughter. Mr Obeta appeared before Bexley Magistrates court on 13 July and is charged under the Modern Slavery Act with arranging the travel of a 21-year-old man between August 2021 and May 2022 to exploit him. Chiamaka Okafor is a reporter at Premium Times in partnership with Report for the World A former presidential aspirant of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), Olufemi Oguntoyinbo, has emerged as the governorship candidate of the party in Ogun State. Mr Oguntoyinbo emerged following the disqualification of two factional governorship candidates, Ezekiel Fayoyin and Kassim Jackie-Adunni by the national leadership of the NNPP. The state chairperson of the party, Olaposi Oginni, confirmed the disqualification of Messrs Fayoyin and Jackie-Adunni to PREMIUM TIMES. Mr Oguntoyinbo had earlier pulled out of the partys presidential primary, with the hope of becoming the running mate of the former Kano State Governor, Musa Kwankwaso, the flag bearer of the party. He emerged as the winner of the rerun governorship primary held at the NNPP secretariat in Abeokuta on Wednesday evening. Announcing Mr Oguntoyinbo, the Chairman, Electoral Committee and Returning Officer of the party, Abdullahi Dogonnama, said the party acted in line with the INECs substitution provision of candidates. The candidate thanked party members and delegates for their support and the opportunity to serve them. Addressing journalists shortly after the primary exercise, Mr Oginni described the development as an administrative error, saying the rerun would allow the party to substitute its governorship candidate. Mr Oginni said: the people of the state are not happy with the situation of things in the state, thats why our party is introducing a very young, dynamic, and enthusiastic governor. Youth development is going to be our priority, and one of our core priorities is education, we are going to make sure that our children are well educated. We are the best and we are bringing the best to Ogun State. The Lagos State Environmental and Special Offences (Enforcement) Unit has impounded more than 322 commercial motorcycles in the state for allegedly contravening traffic laws. The agencys spokesperson, Gbadeyan Abdulraheem, who confirmed the seizure in a statement issued in Lagos on Thursday, said the operation was carried out in a week-long raid. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the 250 motorcycles earlier seized by the task force for traffic offences were crushed by the state government in June. Mr Abdulraheem said the motorcycles were seized while plying the major highways across the state, six local government areas and nine local council development areas, where commercial motorcycles had been prohibited. While describing the activities of those he called recalcitrant commercial motorcyclists as rebellious, he maintained that the motorcycles would continue to be confiscated and crushed by the state government. The Lagos State Task Force has carried out numerous raids which spanned a week in various parts of the state, in order to enforce and maintain the ban on the activities of commercial motorcycles. The enforcement exercise, spearheaded by the Chairman of the agency, CSP Shola Jejeloye, took place at Agege/Fagba, Apapa and Ajah, where pockets of their activities were seen. More raids will be carried out in the coming days, and we will ensure that we hit them in their strongholds and cripple their activities. No commercial bike operator violating the states traffic laws will be spared until total compliance is attained, he said. Mr Abdulraheem reminded Lagos residents, still in the habit of patronising okada operators, to desist forthwith, in order not to be arrested and prosecuted. According to him, both passengers and riders are culpable, if found operating on routes that have been banned by the government. Both the passengers and riders face a penalty of either three months jail term or N50,000 fine by the court or both if found guilty, he said. The agencys spokesperson enjoined motorcycle operators to embrace alternative means of transportation, which, he said, were safer, more presentable and in line with the state governments vision of having a top metropolitan city in the world. (NAN) Kano State government said its committed to ensuring justice is done to the condemned teacher, Abdulmalik Tanko, who was sentenced to death by hanging over the killing of his five-year-old pupil. The Kano State High Court sentenced Mr Tanko, and his accomplice, Hashimu Isyaku, to death on 28 July 2022, for killing Hanifa Abubakar, a five-year-old pupil, last December. Mr Tanko, alongside his accomplices, Mr Isyaku and Fatima Musa, were found guilty of criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, confinement, and culpable homicide contrary to sections 97, 274, 277, and 221 of the penal code. The convicts were also sentenced to five years each for conspiracy. Ms Musa, was sentenced to one-year imprisonment for conspiracy and another one year for an attempt to commit a felony. On Thursday, the states Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Musa Lawan, allayed fears that the condemned criminals may end up not being punished for their crimes. Mr Lawan told reporters that though the Nigerian Correctional Service is responsible for the issuance of the certificate, such provision would only be provided after the expiration of 90 days for the appeal. The official said despite the conviction, the two convicts have the right to appeal the judgement of the lower court The court has passed judgement sentence two of the accused to death by hanging and the Governor has promised to sign the death warrant, so we are waiting for the 90 days window period for appeal before we do the needful. The constitution allows and gives the convicts rights of appeal (in) about three months window period. Remember when this trial started we promised Nigeria the commitment to prosecute the case to the logical conclusion and as speedy as possible and by the will of God that happened, he said. The trial judge concluded the case within six months. This is commendable. So if there is an appeal, we would remind the public that government is ready for the appeal at any given time. Not only that, we will make sure the trial and judgement are given equal commitment and speedy completion. I can assure the public that we are matching the trial with all sense of responsibility and seriousness, Mr Lawan said. For the people raising questions on whether the judgement would be executed or not, all I can say is the law. We would wait for after the 90 days grace of appeal. If they appeal then fine, we would equally swing to action if they did not, as soon as the waiting period expires the governor will do the needful, the Attorney General said. A total of 30 students of the Moshood Abiola Polytechnic (MAPOLY), Abeokuta, Ogun State, have been summarily expelled while 60 others were suspended for examination misconduct and other offences. The polytechnics acting Rector, Adeoye Odedeji, said this on Thursday, during the Matriculation and Oath-Taking Ceremony held at the school. Mr Odedeji said the management of the polytechnic frowns at any anti-social behaviours, examination misconduct, indecent dressing, secret associations and others, which he noted the students had sworn against. The rector said; Your primary aim on this campus is to obtain certificates which will help you achieve in life; be informed that the management frowns at some anti-social behaviours. The Polytechnic recently expelled 30 students and suspended 60 students for examination misconduct. The acting rector reminded the students that tinted glasses are not allowed on campus for security reasons during ceremonies. He also warned the students on their use of commercial motorcycles, noting that security of their lives must be taken seriously. Some people have a penchant for tinted vehicles, but for the security of our staff and students, they are not allowed to gain access into our campus. We have also made efforts to register the motorcycle operations at the gate to ensure that those that carry our students are known to us. He admonished that, as fresh students, know those who you associate with, refuse any unsolicited assistance from any quarters, run away from anything that is capable of dragging the name of the institution and your families to the mud. Rather, invest your energy in positive and productive works that will write your name in gold. Mr Odedeji, who boasted that MAPOLY remains the first Ogun States polytechnic with over 100 PhD holders as lecturers, charged the matriculating students to take advantage of the quality lecturers in their academic sojourn. On a final note, I wish you every success in your academic pursuits. I encourage you to take on leadership positions in various fields that you have chosen and remember the sons and daughters of whom you are, the acting rector said. Condemnations have trailed the imposition of a N10 million fine on Trust TV as well MultiChoice Nigeria limited for broadcasting documentaries about the insecurity in the countrys North-west region. Trust TV ran a documentary titled Banditry: The inside story in March while the BBC Africa Eye produced another one titled The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara (https://youtu.be/g-fPEHUqhyA) that ran on the YouTube, DStv, Telcom Satellite Limited (TSTV), NTA Startimes owned by MultiChoice Nigeria Limited. Trust TV and MultiChoice would now pay a fine of N5 million, according to the National Broadcasting Commission, NBC. Its baseless, authoritarian IPC, CWPPF While condemning the fine, the Coalition of Whistleblowers Protection and Press Freedom, (CWPPF), said the fine on the television stations was a move to stifle the press. In a statement signed by its Programme Officer, Stephanie O. Adams-Douglas, Media Freedom, described the ban as baseless and authoritarian. The CWPPF regards the fine slammed on these broadcast services as a baseless and authoritarian move to stifle the press. In many cases, threats of violence and attacks against journalists are not properly investigated, yet the NBC thinks this fine is the best way to constrain the Nigerian media from carrying out its mandate, the statement said. The CWPPF said the decision to impose a fine on the media houses could discourage journalists and embolden criminals. This continuous impunity emboldens the perpetrators of the crimes and at the same time has an undesirable discouraging effect and obstructs journalists and their work. However, Nigerian journalists have remained dogged in exposing corruption, irregularity and security that has affected millions of Nigerians. This kind of unwarranted sanctions against journalists impedes the free flow of information. CWPPF, therefore, condemns this sanction in its entirety and calls on the National Broadcasting Commission to withdraw it without delay. We shall continue to oppose all forms of attacks on human rights and press freedom in Nigeria and across the world and hold the government, individuals and organizations accountable, the statement added. On its part, the International Press Centre (IPC), said it was surprised by the fine. The IPC said despite warning the Nigerian government not to impose the fine after the threat by the Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, the government went ahead to take the decision. The centre said by taking the decision, the Nigerian government has now constituted itself to the accuser, the prosecutor and the judge in its own case. In the statement, signed by Melody Lawal, the centres Press Freedom Officer, the IPC said: the Federal Government through the NBC has shamefully done that, forgetting that in a democracy the basic tenets of the rule of law cannot be trampled upon as it suits the whims and caprices of those in the corridors of power. In the above context, it is worth pointing out that Trust TV was neither notified of the alleged infringement of sections 3.1.1, 3.12.2 and 3.11. 2 of the Nigeria Broadcasting Code nor requested to defend itself against the allegations before the fine was handed down. In other words, there was no fair hearing for Tust TV, but one-sided hearing of the accusation by the Information Minister upon which the NBC acted. It is unacceptable that NBC, funded by taxpayers money and expected to act in the public interest, would continuously exhibit the symptoms of an attack dog of the government once the Information Minister blows the whistle, Ms Lawal said. The statement quoted the Executive Director of the IPC, Lanre Arogundade, saying banditry was not created by the media. In the circumstance, the IPC considers the fine imposed on Trust TV an act of injustice, an assault on media freedom and a violation of the right of the people to know the truth about the dynamics of banditry in the country and the decision should therefore be reversed, Mr Arogundade said. The IPC said the press must be allowed to continue carrying its function of holding the government to account. The Federal Government, the Information Minister and the NBC must be made to understand that the banditry ravaging the country and daily putting the lives and property of the citizens in jeopardy is not a creation of the media, which has through editorial opinions, investigations and broadcast programmes offered suggestions and support to the government on the way out of the general insecurity. At the same time, in line with its constitutional obligation to monitor governance and hold the government accountable to the people, the media has also been critical of the inability of the government to fulfil its own part of the constitutional bargain by guaranteeing the lives and security of the people. The police officers caught on camera assaulting a young Nigerian have been identified and will face disciplinary action, an official has said. Benjamin Hundeyin, the spokesperson of the police in Lagos State, on Thursday gave the update via his Twitter handle. The officers reported today. They have been handed over to the Provost for disciplinary action, pending their transfer to FHQ Abuja for further disciplinary measures, he wrote. The video clearly shows assault on the part of the officer. A testimony/statement from the victim would have helped a lot in establishing the phone search beyond reasonable doubt, like it did in previous cases where victims showed up or explained further on phone. One Chinedu had posted on Twitter that his friend was harassedby the police. Is there anything new under the sun? My friend was harassed by the police today while he was on his way for a photo shoot, he had posted alongside a video. Responding to the video of the harassment via Twitter on Wednesday, Mr Hundeyin said that officers have been identified and will report to the headquarters Thursday. Video According to the male voice in the video, the police officer with the name tag, Opeyemi Kadiri, and his colleague had asked him to pull over and attempted to search his phone. But he resisted saying that it was against the law. So, I was going for a job, this policeman stopped me, collected my phone and was searching me. But the Inspector-General of police said on Twitter that you should not search my phone. Why are you searching my phone? he said. The Force spokesperson had tweeted in July that no policeman has the right to check ones phone anywhere except the phone is an exhibit in a case under investigation. Any policeman who does that is not a policeman, but rather a scavenger. While he was filming, Mr Kadiri attempted to stop him saying I will break this thing (phone). Enugu State Government, Thursday, demolished Kenyatta Building Materials Market in Uwani-Enugu, Enugu South Local Government Area of the state. The demolition was carried out by the Enugu Capital Territory Development Authority (ECTDA) early in the morning when most of the traders had not opened their shops for the day. The traders were said to have rebuffed directives by the government to relocate to their permanent site at Ugwuaji area of the state, even when some of their colleagues complied with the directive. When a PREMIUM TIMES reporter visited the area, excavators and manual labourers were seen demolishing shops in the market. Several traders struggled to remove their goods from the shops, while others were busy loading their goods into waiting trucks. But those who could not immediately hire trucks, resorted to putting down their goods temporarily along minor roads and streets around the market. The ECTDA chairman, Joseph Onoh, told reporters that the demolition was a development control measure with the aim of decongesting the capital city. He said the growing population at the demolished market was affecting the development plan of the area. The traders were given adequate time to move to their permanent site, he said. Mr Onoh said the area was originally allocated to the National Youth Council of Nigeria but was converted into a market by the traders. As far back as 2003, a site was obtained and designated as Enugu South International Market and the successive state administrations failed to relocate the traders to that site at Ugwuaji, he said. On 6 January 2020, we came for enforcement and we moved a portion of the traders, but some said they didnt have shops. Not aware Some traders in the market, who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES, said the government took them unawares. They expressed surprise that the demolition was carried out despite a court injunction against it. Mike Okonkwo, a shop owner at the market, told this newspaper that although they were notified that the market would be demolished, they were not told of the date of the demolition. They told us that they were coming, since last two years, and we were waiting for them to give us (exact) time, and suddenly they came today and started demolishing our shops, said Mr Okonkwo, whose two shops were demolished. One shop is worth N15 million, he added. Another shop owner, who accused the leadership of the market of sabotage, lamented that they have lost millions of naira due to the demolition. Some traders sued the state government over their plan to demolish the market. A notice of the lawsuit and a court injunction was seen pasted on one of the buildings in the market. In the notice, dated 4 August 2022, and signed by Justice P. C. Ugwueze of Enugu State High Court, the parties (traders and ECTDA) were ordered to maintain the status quo and preserve the Res in the matter pending the hearing of the substantive application. It also indicated that the suit has been adjourned to 21 September. Notice duly served The Chairman of Kenyatta Market Traders Association, Chinweuba Igwesi, told reporters that the state government duly notified the traders of the demolition . The market leader said the traders had been asked several times to move to the permanent site, but that they were reluctant to do so, before the market was demolished. Anybody who said they were not notified is trying to lie to the public, he said, adding that the only complaint was that some traders were yet to get shops in the permanent site. So, notice was given to them and not up to three weeks or one month ago, another people came and gave them (traders) seven days ago (to vacate the place), Mr Igwesi added. Although the market leader confirmed the existence of a lawsuit, he declined to comment on it. Two gunmen were killed on Thursday when they attacked a residence of a police inspector in Orogwe, a community in Owerri West Local Government Area of Imo State, Nigerias South-east. The police spokesperson in the state, Michael Abattam, disclosed this in a statement on Thursday, but did not give the name of the police inspector. He said the gunmen jumped the perimeter fence into the inspectors compound and destroyed his burglary-proof and front door, but the police inspector engaged them in a shootout. Mr Abattam said the hoodlums fled the scene when they were overpowered by the inspector, but were given a hot chase. In the process, one of them was neutralised at the spot and others escaped into the surrounding bushes fatally injured, he said. The police spokesperson said the inspector quickly alerted the divisional police officer of Ogbaku Division, who deployed more operatives in the area. On arrival, they positioned themselves strategically and professionally, combed the surrounding bushes where a corpse, two locally made pistols and an identity card were recovered, Mr Abattam said. He said the recovered identity card belonged to one of the slain gunmen identified as Chukwuemezie Chukwu, an electrician, who hailed from Atta in Ikeduru Local Government Area of the state. The incident comes barely three days after gunmen invaded the community and killed seven security guards. Mr Abattam said the gunmen who attacked the inspector were the hoodlums that invaded and killed the seven security guards in the community on Monday. Coincidentally, the police inspector lives just a pole away from where the previous attack took place, he said. He said the bodies of the gunmen have been evacuated and deposited at the Federal Medical Center, Owerri. He said the police were making concerted efforts to track down the fleeing suspects who escaped with bullet wounds. The police spokesperson urged residents of the state to report to the police any person seen treating bullet wounds or hiding within their communities. Worsening insecurity Security in Nigerias South-east has deteriorated in recent times with frequent attacks by armed persons across the region. Anambra and Imo states have witnessed some of the worst attacks in the region. The attacks often target security agencies, government officials and facilities. The Nigerian government has accused the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra of being responsible for the deadly attacks in the region. But the group has repeatedly denied their involvement in the attacks. The separatist group is leading agitation for an independent state of Biafra to be carved out from the South-east and some parts of the South-south Nigeria. Leader of the secessionist group, Nnamdi Kanu, is detained in Abuja where he is facing trial for terrorism. The presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, on Thursday, said Nigeria would continue to grapple with its current challenges unless it was restructured. Atiku stated this at the 64th Annual Bible Study Conference of the National Council of Anglican Youth Fellowship (AYF) of Nigeria held at the Ekiti Diocesan Camp Ground, Iyin-Ekiti, Ekiti State. Represented by his running mate and Governor of Delta, Ifeanyi Okowa, Atiku who was Special Guest at the occasion, said Nigeria was in dire need of knowledgeable, capable, and experienced leaders who would break the cycle of failed leadership and take the country to the level of growth and prosperity. He said that devolution of powers and resources to the sub-national governments, and the guaranteeing of a constitution that allowed equity, justice for all and inclusiveness in governance such that none was left out or oppressed, was what was needed for a proper federal structure. According to him, Nigeria should continue as a federation but not in its present form. He said I advocate a proper federal structure that recognises the federating units and the federal government as mutually coordinate and not subordinate one to the other, yet cooperative among themselves, distinct from the current structure where states exist as mere appendages of the centre. I am particularly thrilled by the theme of this conference Be Strong and Courageous because the times we live in call for men and women of courage who will stand up to be counted in the battle to rescue and rebuild Nigeria. There is no gainsaying the fact that Nigerias unity is under serious threat today. The mutual suspicion, distrust, and sometimes hostility among the various ethnic groups have reached levels never experienced before, fueling separatist agitations across the country. This is largely due to the general discontent occasioned by the broken promises, dashed aspirations, and the lopsidedness in power-sharing under the current federal government. As I said sometime ago, a situation where the top guns in the nations security architecture are dominated by persons from a particular ethnic/religious group does not augur well for the unity and progress of the country. Nigeria can only grow if ethnic, religious and tribal divides dissolve, and a pan-Nigeria goal is truly desired and embraced by all. We must act swiftly and decisively to calm the raging storm, regain confidence in the Nigerian project, and halt the drift toward chaos and anarchy. The forthcoming 2023 elections offer us the opportunity to do the needful and move Nigeria in the right direction. It calls for sober reflection and strategic thinking as against the mindless euphoria, sensationalism, and herd mentality that brought us to where we are today. Going forward, we need mature, wise, and experienced leaders who will inspire hope in our country and foster a sense of belonging among all Nigerians. I am an ardent believer in the restructuring of Nigeria, especially as it relates to fiscal federalism and devolution of powers. Restructuring does not mean we jettison the federal system of government. In fact, I believe that it is more functional and realistic for our ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversities. I guarantee you that the states and Nigeria will develop faster when the proper federal structure is put in place. The former vice president assured that if voted as president in 2023, he would prioritize education in the country as no nation could develop beyond the knowledge-base of its citizens. He recalled that the late Nelson Mandela had said that education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world, and said you can, therefore, imagine my pain and grief to see students of our tertiary institutions idling away at home when they should be in school. It not only distorts the academic calendar, it also robs the parents and the students of their hope for a better future. I wish to use this opportunity to respectfully call on the federal government to urgently reach a compromise with striking university lecturers and reopen our universities. No nation can afford to have its students to be idle or roaming the streets and expect to achieve peace, security, and inclusive economic growth. He called for the harnessing of the creative energies of the youth to accelerate national development by providing them with a solid educational system that equipped them with the right skills-set and leadership credentials. As a corollary to the above, Nigeria needs a well thought-out policy to tackle youth unemployment through skills training and entrepreneurship development programmes. The army of the unemployed in our country is a recipe for disaster. To get out of the current quagmire, we must as a matter of urgency begin to think more in terms of equipping them with the technical know-how, vocational skills, values and resources to become job and wealth creators, as well as giving them employability skills. We must be intentional, determined, and resolute about this to avoid a situation where graduates from our educational system roam the streets in search of non-existent jobs, Atiku stated. Welcoming guests earlier, National President of Anglican Youth Fellowship (AYF) Nigeria, Alex Akpata, said Nigerians were faced with serious security and economic challenges, but urged the youths to be strong and courageous as the nation would soon overcome its challenges. He urged the young persons to join politics and stand firm in voting for candidates that would protect the interest of the people. How to solve a problem like Wike? Its to admit that Atiku, not Wike, is the problem. Its hypocritical for those who praised Wike when he was the caretaker, picking the partys bills, sticking his head out for distressed governors and even sponsoring their presidential ambition to suddenly discover the downside of his brashness. Seven weeks after the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar announced Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa as his running mate, the man not chosen remains the talk of the town. Im not sure Abubakar (fondly called Atiku) expected this amount of pushback when he chose Okowa over Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike. But just as it is with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) too, the choice of running mate has become a national obsession, exposing Nigerias deepest religious and ethnic fault lines. On the eve of Atikus announcement of his running mate, when the media was awash with news that it might go Wikes way, a party insider described the Rivers State governor as a caretaker. He said, privately, that, You people will be surprised. After Wike lost the party presidential primary, this is the final rite of passage. The caretaker (Wike) will hand the party over to its owners. That didnt make sense. Atiku who has the prerogative to choose his running mate delegated that responsibility to two different committees of the PDP. Both overwhelmingly favoured Wike and recommended him. It also emerged after the closely contested presidential primary of the PDP that Atiku reportedly told Wike that he would be pleased to offer him the position of running mate. It was not a favour as such. Or a caretakers token, as the party insider framed it. After seven years of being out of power at the centre, losing state elections and losing governors to defection, the PDP was broken and on the verge of bankruptcy. Without Wike picking up the pieces and rallying the party, Atiku, the new landlord who was on sabbatical to other parties, would not have had a property to return to. But thats not the only reason why many thought that Wikes choice as running mate was a no-brainer. While the South-South remains the fourth largest vote bank, Rivers, more than any other state in the entire South, delivered the largest votes to the PDP in two of the last three presidential elections (1.8 million, 2011; and 1.5 million, 2015) followed by Delta (594,000 against Rivers 474,000 in 2019). Not even Oyo State, the South-Wests largest PDP voter base, has matched Rivers in the last three election cycles. At the presidential primary in May also, Wike gave Atiku a scare from which the former vice president was saved only by Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwals last-minute manoeuvre. Wike had earned his place. To treat him like a mere caretaker or the thought that he should have been offered the running mate ticket as a favour is quite frankly, ridiculous. Much more than any governor in the South-South, Wike had something extra to bring to the ticket. That was why Atiku approached him. But whatever the qualities of any potential running mate, the prerogative was always Atikus. The PDP has found itself in the current mess not because anyone thought that the running mate tail should wag the dog, but because of the candidates disastrous handling of his prerogative. He started as a democrat but ended as a tyrant. Its a big irony that the man who wants to unify Nigeria cant seem to gather his wits when he needs them most to unify his own party. Is Wike overplaying his hand? Why doesnt he just take Lamidos advice and emulate former governors Peter Odili, Rotimi Amaechi, and more recently, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who took their own defeats in their strides and simply moved on? Apart from the settled fact that Wike can no longer be running mate and also the waiting game for him to show exactly how Atiku lied against him, no one is exactly sure what hand he is playing. Tambuwal has been heavily criticised deservedly for turning his back on Wike. The party Chairman, Iyorchia Ayu, has been hammered for his triumphalism after the PDP presidential primary, and Okowa has also been criticised for breaking ranks with the Southern governors demand that the president must come from that region. The harshest criticism must, however, be reserved for the presidential candidate whose arrogance has complicated the partys problems and damaged its momentum. Its been said that it was not Atiku, but the real landlords and owners of the party that swayed him. Specifically, the redoubtable General Aliyu Gusau, Bamangar Tukur, associates of former military President Ibrahim Babangida, some traditional rulers and the old PDP network, including Sule Lamido and the Chairman of DAAR Communications, Engineer Raymond Dokpesi, have been mentioned as the anti-Wike ringleaders. A number of these people were said to have expressed the view that Wikes brashness, his micromanaging style and combustible temper could harm the partys chances, especially in the North. Whoever may have been opposed and whatever their reasons, the last word was with the candidate. He made the call when, after choosing Okowa, he read a statement that sounded more like Wikes crime charge sheet than it was Okowas pre-nuptial affirmation. He must face up to the mess and deal with it, himself. Is Wike overplaying his hand? Why doesnt he just take Lamidos advice and emulate former governors Peter Odili, Rotimi Amaechi, and more recently, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who took their own defeats in their strides and simply moved on? Apart from the settled fact that Wike can no longer be running mate and also the waiting game for him to show exactly how Atiku lied against him, no one is exactly sure what hand he is playing. The visitors parade to the Government House, Port Harcourt, since June which has recorded at least 13 high profile politicians across party lines, is a show of force that is difficult to ignore. But the fact that Wikes allies have fielded themselves for the next general elections under the flag of the PDP and the BOT is meeting with both sides in attendance is a good place to start. How to solve a problem like Wike? Its to admit that Atiku, not Wike, is the problem. Its hypocritical for those who praised Wike when he was the caretaker, picking the partys bills, sticking his head out for distressed governors and even sponsoring their presidential ambition to suddenly discover the downside of his brashness. Abubakar and Wike must realise that this is a dangerous moment to misjudge or mismanage. The ruling party never looked more vulnerable than at a time when not just the adversaries but President Muhammadu Buhari himself is saying that he is tired and cannot wait to leave office. We are not only tired of him, were tired for him, too. For the first time his adversaries and friends agree with one another and with him that he must go and go quickly. He mismanaged the exit of former Chairman Uche Secondus and overreacted in his face-off with Governor Godwin Obaseki. At a point, he behaved as if the party was his farm and wouldnt be appeased until he ate every first fruit. But who can deny that he filled a vacuum? His demand for balance in the partys top positions is not unreasonable; its consistent with Section 7(3)(c) of the partys constitution. Atiku cannot justify it by citing the Jonathan-Nwodo example, a breach at the time, which in todays PDP is a monstrous travesty with the partys candidate, chairman, deputy national chairman, BOT chairman and national treasurer, all from the North. Atiku and his party cannot continue to kick this lopsided can down the road. All other demands credited to Wike by the press, from control of the National Assembly to a single-term Presidency by Atiku and which of the former vice presidents wifes turn it should be every other night, are at worst speculations and at best matters for negotiation. Was the Osun State governorship result a bellwether of Wikes limited political value? That insinuation has been made in some circles that Osun proved the PDP does not need Wike to do well in 2023. Those who wish may agree on this convenient lie, but the facts are nuanced. More than any single factor, the internal divisions in the APC and the insatiable demands by party godfathers on Governor Gboyega Oyetola wrecked the party. The lessons from Osun and Ekiti States are parables of how a divided party can damage itself. Abubakar and Wike must realise that this is a dangerous moment to misjudge or mismanage. The ruling party never looked more vulnerable than at a time when not just the adversaries but President Muhammadu Buhari himself is saying that he is tired and cannot wait to leave office. We are not only tired of him, were tired for him, too. For the first time his adversaries and friends agree with one another and with him that he must go and go quickly. If the PDP misjudges this moment, as some of us desperately wish they would, the party faces the risk of a repeat of the crisis that led to a mass defection by PDP governors to APC in 2014. That was the final nail in the partys coffin. If it mismanages it, the party faces the risk of extinction. PDP, as it is now, cannot survive another potential eight years out of power. And should that happen, Atiku would be a far bigger loser than many of his seducers or adversaries. Azu Ishiekwene is Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP. Now Abuja is facing a significant terrorist threat and the impact is going to be widely felt for a long time outside of the immediate security threat. Abuja and other Nigerian cities were already struggling in the fight to become commercial hubs for the African ecosystem and were losing major ground to cities in Ghana and Kenya. A countrys capital is the city where its national government is located. This location is usually carefully chosen and designed to offer the best impression and position for a nations government and people to connect optimally with citizens and visitors. Sometimes nations change their choice of capitals to get new ones that adequately serve these purposes and this was the idea behind the Nigerian governments moving the Federal Capital from Lagos to Abuja in 1991. 31 years later though, what we have is a situation where Abuja is dealing with a significant terrorist threat that began as a spate of armed robbery attacks on the outskirts of the FCT and recently manifested as prison breaks that had arrested terrorists and criminals being freed. The situation should be shocking but it really isnt. It has sadly been rather predictable and began with the Buhari administrations response to attacks on Northern minorities with a disdainful lack of concern that had many onlookers believing it was complicit in some way. Benue and Kaduna States had been dealing with violent attacks that were said to be clashes and the Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom, was even attacked on his farm a couple of years ago. He has recently asked the American government to hold the Buhari administration responsible for the violence and deaths arising from the actions of the terrorists, who were described as ordinary herders by the Federal Government for years. The so-called herders had also been involved in a spate of attacks in the largely Christian Southern Kaduna portion of Kaduna State, and the complaints and casualties of the Southern Kaduna people were contemptuously waved aside by state and federal officials. The communities under attack insisted that the violence was being deliberately fostered to enable the seizure of lands. The lack of backlash encouraged the terrorists and criminals, who eventually started looking for more lucrative opportunities and set about kidnapping commuters on the Abuja-Kaduna Road, and got bolder and started attacking the Kaduna-Abuja train service. Now they have become bold enough to target the countrys capital. Rather than respond responsibly, the government through one its spokesmen, Femi Adesina, asked the people under siege to surrender their lands to stop the violence. Adesinas words on national television were: Ancestral attachment? You can only have ancestral attachment when you are alive. If you are talking about ancestral attachment if you are dead, how does the attachment matter? Governor Ortom went to see President Buhari and was told: I ask you in the name of God to accommodate your countrymen. The ethnic and religious identities of the victims of the attacks were clearly a factor and this was made even clearer when the Federal Government tried to placate the terrorists, who were masquerading as herders, by creating government-sponsored ranches for them in all states of the country. Fierce resistance from the Southern and Middle-Belt regions led to the abandonment of the idea. The lack of backlash encouraged the terrorists and criminals, who eventually started looking for more lucrative opportunities and set about kidnapping commuters on the Abuja-Kaduna Road, and got bolder and started attacking the Kaduna-Abuja train service. Now they have become bold enough to target the countrys capital. All this could have been avoided if the government had not let ethnic and religious differences mute its response to a situation that had dangerous implications for national security. For those of us who dared to voice out in those heady days, how dangerous the slope were on was, we were assaulted by troll farms and called choice names, bigot being the favourite. People tend to forget that when you feed a baby monster with your enemies, it grows to become a teenager, and if youve run out of enemies by that point, it will eat your children. Abuja being seen as unsafe at a time when Nigeria needs an annual FDI inflow of $90 billion but got only $698.7 million of FDI in 2021 is not helpful. Hopefully, this teaches us the economic value of abiding by the principle of justice and equity, regardless of the ethnic or religious affiliations of the victims or the aggressors. Best practice tends to make for the best outcomes. Now Abuja is facing a significant terrorist threat and the impact is going to be widely felt for a long time outside of the immediate security threat. Abuja and other Nigerian cities were already struggling in the fight to become commercial hubs for the African ecosystem and were losing major ground to cities in Ghana and Kenya. The city of Nairobi scored a major coup when Google launched its first African product development centre there, after having set up an Aritificial Intelligence (AI) and research centre in Ghana in 2019. Financial giant, Visa has also set up an innovation centre in Nairobi. It gets more interesting when you realise that even non-African cities are in the competition to be the major African hub, with Dubai being a major competitor. More than 21,000 African companies are registered in Dubai. 45 multinationals that group their Middle East and African operations jointly have also placed their regional headquarters for these zones in Dubai. Dubai becoming the hub of African business for decision-makers is not that strange an idea when you consider that its really about a location having the proper mix of proximity, infrastructure, political connections, comfort, safety, capital, structure, and accessibility. Miami, Florida is in the USA but it serves this same purpose for Latin America for pretty much the same reasons that Nigerian cities are losing out insecurity and infrastructure. Miami is a three-hour flight away from Colombia, a six-hour flight away from Brazil, and a two-hour flight away from Puerto Rico. It has become a key hub for Latin America, with more than 1,200 multinational corporations setting up the headquarters of their Latin American operations in Florida. Dubais excellent flight connections, ICT infrastructure, and tourist-friendly structure have made it appealing to a lot of African and non-African power-brokers looking for a hub to connect and do business. Abuja being seen as unsafe at a time when Nigeria needs an annual FDI inflow of $90 billion but got only $698.7 million of FDI in 2021 is not helpful. Hopefully, this teaches us the economic value of abiding by the principle of justice and equity, regardless of the ethnic or religious affiliations of the victims or the aggressors. Best practice tends to make for the best outcomes. Cheta Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence. On Wednesday, cement manufacturer, BUA, donated projects worth more than N275 million naira to communities in its host local government area of Wamakko in Sokoto State. The projects included a furnished clinic, a school, a mosque, and 170 tonnes of BUA cement, which were donated to 68 communities in the local government as part of the companys yearly corporate social responsibility. Speaking before handing over the projects to the host communities, the Managing Director of BUA Cement, Yusuf Binji, said the new facilities were donated to communities relocated as a result of the companys operations. Mr Binji, who was represented by BUAs Director of Human Resources, Altine Wali, said the company compensated families whose lands were used for its operations in Gidan Boka, of the communities in the area. BUA Cements Head of Administration and Corporate Services, Sada Suleiman, said in addition to what the company handed over to the communities, it had also constructed roads, provided cemeteries, and supplied water and electricity to its host communities. According to Mr Sada, BUA Cement has continued to ensure routine distribution of cement to host communities to repair mosques and other infrastructures in addition to supplying drugs and granting scholarships, and educational materials. While stressing that the company enjoys a cordial relationship with the Sokoto State government and all the host communities, Mr Sada added that their projects were geared toward complementing the governments efforts towards improving the living condition of residents of the state. Responding on behalf of the beneficiaries, the Vice Chairman of Wamakko Local Government, Garba Muhammad, thanked the company for their various interventions. A total of 187 candidates from 12 political parties are contesting for the 25 available seats in the Cross River House of Assembly in the 2023 general elections. This was disclosed by the Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) of the state, Cyril Omorogbe, at a news conference on Wednesday in Calabar. Mrs Omorogbe said 11 political parties fielded 69 and 28 candidates for the eight House of Representatives seats and the three Senatorial seats, respectively. He said 11 political parties would contest for the governorship position, adding that Cross River had 322,351 new registrants in the just concluded voter registration. The total completed registration recorded in the State at the close of Continuous Voters Registration (CVR) is 322,351 as well as 58,305 voter transfers and 20,822 PVC replacements. A total of 73 Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Voter Enrolment Device (VED) were deployed to the 19 Registration Centres in Cross River State (i.e. the 18 LGA offices and the State office) during the exercise, he stated. On Permanent Voters Card (PVCs) collection, Mr Omorogbe said collection would continue in all the Local Government Area (LGAs) offices of the state, while 69,016 PVCs remained uncollected from 2011 to date. He expressed regret that the collection rate of the PVCs was low, considering that it was just six months to the general elections. According to him, PVCs collection will continue in all the LGA offices. PVCs collection by owners was one of the services carried out by our staff alongside the CVR. A total of 27,158 new PVCs were received by the State Commission in April for distribution to their owners but at the close of registration, only 3,897 were so far collected by voters, leaving an outstanding balance of 23,261. This set of PVCs is for people that registered from June to December 2021. From the old PVCs that are left over from 2011 to 2018; we have on record 57,310 PVCs but only 11,555 have been collected by their owners during this period under review with an outstanding 45,755 which is still not collected. While appealing for support from the political parties and their candidates ahead of elections, he urged the people to collect their PVCs. I pledge that we will continue to work hard to deliver free, fair and credible elections come 2023, he stated. INEC had fixed 25 February, 2023 for the Presidential and National Assembly Elections and 11 March, 2023 for Governorship and State Assembly elections. According to the schedule of activities for the general elections released by the commission, campaign is expected to commence on 28 September and 12 October for the Presidential/NASS and Governorship/ State Assembly elections respectively. (NAN) The Anambra State Primary Healthcare Development Agency (ASPHCDA) says the rate of exclusive breastfeeding in the state increased from 17 per cent in 2018 to 27 per cent in 2022. Chioma Ezenyimulu, the executive secretary of the agency, made the disclosure at the opening of the 2022 World Breastfeeding Week (WBW) at the Maternal and Child Health Centre, Amawbia in Awka, on Thursday. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that WBW is celebrated on 1 August to 7 August every year, to raise awareness and galvanise actions to promote exclusive breastfeeding. The theme for this years commemoration is Step Up for Breastfeeding: Educate and Support. Ms Ezenyimulu, a medical doctor, said that Anambra recorded an increase in the rate of exclusive breastfeeding due to intensified awareness and counselling programmes at health facilities. The figure of 27 per cent is still low and below the national target of 50 per cent by 2025. We are calling on residents to become advocates of exclusive breastfeeding and support mothers to practice optimal breastfeeding. The practice of exclusive breastfeeding will ensure the provision of vital and adequate nutrients required for healthy and maximal growth and development as well as eradication of childhood malnutrition in the state, she said. Also speaking, Afam Obidike, the states commissioner for health, said the efforts of the current administration were geared towards the promotion of maternal and child survival strategies. READ ALSO: Niger govt decries 39 per cent rate of breastfeeding practice in state Mr Obidike, a medical doctor, urged fathers to support their breastfeeding wives as exclusive breastfeeding could be exhausting for mothers. A mother needs to be psychologically, physically and emotionally balanced to breastfeed optimally. Therefore, fathers should be there to provide all that the woman needs, he said. In his remarks, Moses Ohamaeme, Cluster Coordinator, representing the World Health Organisation and United Nations agencies, said that exclusively breastfed children become healthy and productive adults. According to him, such children are protected from severe complications arising from childhood killer diseases. (NAN) The chairperson of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NiDCOM), Abike Dabiri-Erewa, has said the autopsy of the Nigerian killed in Italy shows that he died of suffocation. She spoke during an interview on Arise TVs The Morning Show on Thursday. A 39-year-old Nigerian man, Alika Ogorchukwu, was on Friday beaten to death by an Italian man in Civitanova Marche city, Italy, while passersby watched and filmed, making no attempt to help him. According to NiDCOM, he was a physically challenged street vendor and his murderer used his clutches to beat him to death. The incident happened in the same week two Nigerian residents in Canada were shot dead. Well, I wont say Nigerians are being attacked all over the world. The world is becoming a more dangerous place, she said. It tells you that you know, theres crime all over the world, and things happen all over the world. Just as in Nigeria, in the case of Alika. Like I give an update, number one, the autopsy is out and he died of suffocation. She said the murder suspect has been arrested and the next step is to be charged to court. The deceased was his familys breadwinner despite his disability she said She said the death was a needless one while adding that the Nigerian ambassador is on top of the situation and would ensure that the case will not be swept under the carpet. Speaking further, the commissions chairperson said the deceaseds lawyer is handling the matter. Theres a very good lawyer handling this case. The lawyer is actually Alikas because he had been his lawyer handling even his case, how he became disabled so its a very good lawyer, and the lawyer is on the matter, she said. I cannot preempt what he will be charged with what the lawyers will say. But definitely, the mission is working with a very, very good lawyer that will handle this case. But one thing is for sure. Justice must be served. She explained that the deceased had had an accident, and got a lawyer to get his compensation from an insurance company. She also said that his lawyer was retained because the ambassador realized that he is a very good lawyer, so its like, rather than get another lawyer, a lawyer who knows the family, knows him will continue the case. He was a very healthy, hardworking man before the accident. Canada shooting Speaking on the Nigerians killed in Canada, she said the murder suspect has not been arrested but has been profiled. Mrs Dabiri-Erewa said the commission has made contact with one of the deceaseds family who lives in Lagos. We will be paying them a condolence visit and you know, share the pain and grief with them, she said. Again, these are just two young men that were working legally. They didnt commit any crime. So well ensure that were still on this case till the very end. But the Canadian authorities again are very cooperative. Theyre looking for the chap, the chap apparently has committed murder. So, I dont want to jump the gun but I think that they have some criminal offence against him, he really shouldnt be somebody walking the streets free. Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State and Adeniyi Adebayo, the Minister of Industry, Trades and Investment, on Thursday launched a new taxi hailing service codenamed: AFRICAR in Ibadan. The taxi hailing service was launched at a well-attended ceremony with 150 of the taxis. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the new taxi hailing service had already begun operations in Ibadan with residents hailing its introduction. Mr Makinde said the introduction of the taxi hailing service in Ibadan was in line with his administrations goal of bringing investors into the state. The governor, represented by his Chief of Staff, Segun Ogunwuyi, said that the launching of AFRICAR in Ibadan had attested to the business-friendly atmosphere provided by his administration for investors. Mr Makinde expressed delight at witnessing another demonstration of his administrations commitment to make life comfortable for residents of the state. I am very delighted to be at the event of today, which is a further demonstration of our administrations commitment to making life comfortable for our people. This will improve the socioeconomic activities of the citizenry and the state at large, he said. The governor said that transportation was evidently important for economic activity and social life in a state. According to him, the current economic status of Oyo State is due to many factors, chief among which is the development and continuous improvement of our public transport system. The state has witnessed and still witnessing tremendous growth in the transport sector since the inception of this administration in the areas of transport infrastructure and procurement of vehicles for mass transit, he said. The governor said that his administration had purchased 109 buses for mass transit tagged: Omituntun Bus Mass Transit and constructed four Bus Terminals at Iwo Road, Challenge, as well as Ojoo. He congratulated Stallion Group, owners of AFRICAR, expressing hope that the launch would bear more interesting fruits as they collaborate with his government for the wellbeing of the people. In his remarks, the minister appreciated Stallion Group, a home-grown conglomerate that has been adding value for the past 52 years. The minister thanked Mr Makinde for the welcoming environment provided to AFRICAR, adding AFRICARs platform would transform the transportation industry in the state, providing both employment opportunities and low-cost rides. Commenting, Sahil Vaswani, AFRICAR Chief Executive Officer, said all the cars used for the project were assembled in Lagos at Stallion Groups Von Plant. Mr Vaswani said AFRICAR, in Partnership with the National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC), had developed the Bajaj Qute cars used for the new ride hailing taxi. This car is assembled in Nigeria by Nigerians and is environmentally friendly, with 50 per cent lower carbon emissions than the average car, he said. (NAN) RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Digital Cooperation Organization (DCO) welcomed the Republic of Cyprus as the latest member state as it becomes the first European Union country to join the DCO, an international organization that aims to accelerate the inclusive growth of the digital economy to drive sustainable growth and empower nations. The Republic of Cyprus, represented by the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy (DMRID), will become the 11th nation to join DCO. The accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the DCO was marked in a ceremony at the Presidential Palace of the Republic of Cyprus The accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the DCO was marked in a ceremony at the Presidential Palace of the Republic of Cyprus, attended by government officials, Ambassadors, industry representatives and business organizations, and local media. H.E. Kyriacos Kokkinos, the Deputy Minister to the President for Research, Innovation, and Digital Policy said: "The Republic of Cyprus is very pleased to be joining the DCO and becoming a part of this great effort to accelerate the growth of the digital economy and build a sustainable, inclusive and prosperous future for all, adding that "In the face of many challenges, and while socioeconomic global developments and technological evolutions continue to take place and evolve, international cooperation in the digital sphere is a powerful investment in our shared future." According to the Deputy Minister, Cyprus' national ambitions and strategic objectives fully align with the DCO's mission and expressed the government's great pride in being part of this exciting journey, sharing knowledge and experience with the global community. "As the first EU member state to join the DCO, and a natural crossroads between Europe, Asia, and Africa", said Mr. Kokkinos, "Cyprus aspires to act as a bridge between nations, people, and ideas, facilitating communication, collaboration, and knowledge transfer." Deemah AlYahya, Secretary-General of the DCO welcomed Cyprus as a new member state: "We are very pleased that the Republic of Cyprus has chosen to become the eleventh member state of the DCO, today with the leadership of Cyprus, marks a major milestone for DCO, where the 1st European nation has joined the DCO. We are focused on fostering an international ecosystem for knowledge sharing and cooperation to promote digital prosperity for all, and the accession of Cyprus is an important milestone as we grow the DCO's reach into a global organization with member states that reflect a diversity of experience and strategic approaches. "Many of the strategic initiatives that have been undertaken by Cyprus are in alignment with the DCO's own objectives, such as programs to reduce barriers for digital startups and to foster entrepreneurship; and initiatives to advance inclusion for women, youth, and other underrepresented populations in the digital economy. Cyprus is also a good example of how nations can use smart policies and strategies to create a solid foundation for an equitable digital economy, and we look forward to engaging Cypriot expertise with the rest of the DCO to share knowledge, experience, and best practice on driving digital prosperity." Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1871982/Cyprus_to_DCO.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1867632/DCO_Logo.jpg SOURCE The Digital Cooperation Organization (DCO) Actasys and Webasto Group to combine expertise as 'sensorification' in the automotive industry drives OEM demand for sensor platforms and sensor cleaning. BROOKLYN, N.Y., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Actasys , a leader in the development of sensor cleaning systems, today announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with global tier one supplier to branded automotive companies, Webasto Group . This is the first step in a partnership to ensure the functionality of Webasto's roof sensor module (RSM) under all weather and environmental conditions through the integration of Actasys' cleaning system. The result will provide original equipment manufacturers (OEM) with a comprehensive solution to their sensor needs. Webasto is one of the 100 largest automotive suppliers and is a leader in developing and producing roof systems, with 2021 sales over 3.7B Euros and over 15,000 employees worldwide. Webasto is advancing innovation of roof systems with its Roof Sensor Module (RSM), utilizing the roof as an ideal location for sensors such as Lidars, cameras and radars for highly automated and autonomous driving vehicles. These sensors are the foundation for increased vehicle safety and improved driving support and functionality. Actasys is a leader in the field of sensor cleaning with its unique ActaJet sensor cleaning system. The collaboration between Actasys and Webasto will further enhance their respective innovations by enabling full sensor functionality for OEM's. "Maintaining the visual clarity of sensors when they are exposed to adverse weather conditions is essential to enabling safe and optimal operation of every vehicle with an assisted driving system," said Actasys Chief Executive Officer, Miles Flamenbaum. "Sensor cleaning is a relatively new field with rapidly growing demand due to 'sensorfication' - increasing reliance on sensors. Actasys has developed a deep understanding of sensor cleaning, with tools and data to develop industry standards, and provides ActaJet as a unique solution. As a result of this exciting partnership, we will implement our vision for sensor cleaning with Webasto's RSM to solve critical problems faced by automotive OEM's." The ActaJet cleans and maintains the visual clarity of optical sensors with an electronically controlled array of small actuator cartridges that provide strong jets of air to clean the surface of sensors during vehicle operation. ActaJet is unique as it is not a centralized system, but distributed and scalable, integrating actuators with each sensor. The system is controlled by software developed by Actasys and embedded into a vehicle ECU. As opposed to other solutions, ActaJet uses air-based cleaning. This approach significantly reduces power and liquid consumption in the cleaning process. Actasys also leads the industry with its weather-adaptive software and proprietary blockage detection, further enhancing the ActaJet system. "Webasto is a market leader in automotive roof systems and is part of the automotive sector's future by providing OEMs with advanced roof systems for implementation of sensors for highly automated and autonomous driving. To make this successful in all weather conditions requires an advanced sensor cleaning system to offer a comprehensive solution," said Magnus Sviberg (Director Special Products & SE Methods), "Actasys is an ideal partner for us as they offer innovative functional new approaches and capabilities that we would like to investigate and integrate into our RSM solutions." The partnership with Webasto is a next accomplishment for Actasys, following its evaluation earlier this year with Hyundai Cradle , its ongoing commercialization efforts, and its participation with automotive accelerators such as Quantum Hub and DriveTLV . About Actasys, Inc. The future of mobility depends on vision sensors to keep us safe. Actasys' mission is to enable vision sensors to function optimally under all weather, environmental, and operating conditions. To maintain high fidelity data and reduce maintenance costs, Actasys provides innovative hardware for sensor cooling and cleaning combined with proprietary software to solve three critical sensor needs enable visibility in all weather conditions, maintain thermal stability at all times, and monitor and support sensor health. This wholistic approach to sensor optimization results in real-time and lifecycle performance improvements and increases lifetime value for our customers. Actasys has multiple product development partnerships with leading automotive and transportation companies and is backed by prominent automotive and mobility investors the Volvo Cars Tech Fund and Next Gear Ventures. For more information, please visit www.actasysinc.com . About Webasto Group The Webasto Group is a global innovative systems partner to the mobility industry and one of the 100 largest suppliers to the automotive sector worldwide. The company's offering includes in-house developed roof, heating and cooling systems for various types of vehicles, batteries and charging solutions for hybrid and electric vehicles, and additional services related to thermal management and electromobility. Among the customers of Webasto are manufacturers of passenger cars, commercial vehicles and boats, as well as dealers and end customers. In 2021, the Group generated sales of 3.7 billion euros and employed around 15,700 people at over 50 locations. The headquarters of the company, which was founded in 1901, is located in Stockdorf near Munich (Germany). For more information, please visit www.webasto-group.com Contact: Marely Arias 954-249-5413 [email protected] SOURCE Actasys NFC-enabled sticker to verify origin and authenticity of Johnnie Walker, Hennessy, Terrazas and Moet & Chandon bottles with a simple scan of a smartphone SAN MARINO and LAS VEGAS, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic slowly fading, many economies are witnessing a sharp rebound in consumer demand, especially for high-quality, luxury goods. During this resurgence, the inefficiencies of traditional logistics models have become starker than ever, with cases of fraud skyrocketing, especially in developing economies. NFC-enabled sticker to verify origin and authenticity of Johnnie Walker, Hennessy, Terrazas and Moet & Chandon bottles with a simple scan of a smartphone. VeChainThor, the world's leading Enterprise-grade public blockchain, was conceived specifically to resolve trust gaps in data. Blockchain creates a level playing field where any party can review the claim of another independently, removing the need for intermediaries. For producers and importers of luxury products, digital technologies that can guarantee origin, logistics trails and legitimacy of a product present a significant opportunity. Unsurprisingly, the adoption rate of digital tools such as blockchain is rapidly picking up pace. A Digital Future Attwood Import Export, recognized as the largest premium alcoholic beverage importer and distributor in Cambodia, recently announced the implementation of an entirely new kind of security sticker built using the VeChainThor blockchain, the NFC-enabled 'Attwood Blockchain Sticker' (ABS). Mr. David Wang, General Manager of VeChain Tech SEA, attended the launching ceremony on July 27, 2022, an event attended by various major Cambodian news outlets and televised on the CTV8 Cambodia news channel. Attwood Import Export is a leading company that has exclusively imported and distributed luxury brands for almost 30 years, notably, Johnnie Walker, Hennessy, Moet & Chandon, Terrazas, Chandon Sparkling, Budweiser beer, Corona beer, and Coronita beer. By applying ABS to each bottle of product, Attwood enhances its liquor distribution capabilities, drastically improves transparency, and guarantees product authenticity to partners and consumers. With key data hashed on the blockchain, salient product information becomes immutable and trustworthy, allowing clients and customers to verify the origin and authenticity of products with a simple scan of a smartphone, preventing fraud and protecting consumers. Attwood is known for going to great lengths to take care of its customers. Mr. Tan Se Chhay, CEO of Attwood commented: "As a leading import export trading company, Attwood has always played an important role in bridging the gap between brands and consumers. Through the partnership with VeChain Tech, we strengthen the ability to take responsibility for our customers and products." As a mature, scalable, and commercially proven blockchain, VeChainThor's versatility continues to garner industrial interest. With an array of advanced tools and solutions already on the market, the VeChainThor blockchain is cementing its position as the de facto blockchain for industrial, commercial, and other kinds of application. VeChain Tech will continue its mission of developing and deploying digital solutions for Attwood and other visionary businesses, push the fore of digital transformation and unlock new value while solving complex industrial problems. With blockchain mass adoption unfolding globally, VeChainThor stands ready to deliver its powerful blockchain technology to enterprises and businesses of all sizes. About VeChain Launched in 2015 as a private consortium network, the VeChain Foundation went on to launch the VeChainThor public blockchain in 2018, a fully programmable, EVM-compatible layer one smart contract platform. Its unique two-token model ensures stable, low transaction costs while an advanced Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism guarantees high throughput, scalability, and security with minimal energy consumption. VeChainThor's robust architecture has seen zero downtime for the network after almost 4 years of continuous operation. Strong independent capabilities combined with the professional compliance guidance of strategic partners PwC and DNV has seen VeChain to establish partnerships with leading enterprises including Walmart China, Bayer China, BMW Group, BYD Auto, PICC, H&M Group, Shanghai Gas, LVMH, D.I.G, ASI Group and more. VeChain continues to pioneer real-world blockchain applications across the globe with offices in Luxembourg, China, Singapore, San Marino, Milan, Ireland, Japan, France and the United States, working on wide-ranging applications from supply chain & logistics, sustainability & SDGs, carbon emissions, energy, medicine, De-Fi, NFTs and much more. SOURCE VeChain JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Bank Rakyat Indonesia (IDX: BBRI), one of the largest financial groups in Indonesia, announced a net profit of USD 1.66 billion or grew almost double 98.38% year-on-year (YoY) with total assets also increased 6.37% to USD 110.19 billion in the first half of 2022, at the Press Conference on Financial Performance for Q2 2022 on July 27, 2022. Sunarso, BRI President Director BRI President Director Sunarso said, "We focus on liquidity, especially the growth of low-cost funds; manage the loan quality, especially the restructured loan, while maintaining adequate provision to mitigate the credit risk; and furthermore accelerate business process reengineering to increase productivity and improve operational efficiency." BRI disbursed USD 73.65 billion worth of loans, a growth of 8.75% YoY, to the micro segment (15.07% growth), consumers (5.27% growth), corporate segment (3.76% growth), and SMEs (2.71% growth). BRI's MSME loan portfolio grew 9.81% or USD 55.85 billion in Q2 2021 to IDR 61.33 billion in Q2 2022, reaching a proportion of 83.27%. BRI's selective growth strategy focused on MSME, especially the utterly potential Ultra Micro and Micro segment, as the primary source of growth. This aligns with BRI's core competence, leveraging on BRI's vast experience and advanced infrastructure in terms of the physical and digital network, human capital, and progressive digital initiatives. In conjunction, BRI applied the soft-landing strategy to anticipate the deterioration of the loan quality ahead of the end of Indonesia's FSA restructuring relaxation period by March 2023. BRI's ability to distribute loans with prudent risk management was reflected in the controlled NPL ratio of 3.26%, with strong coverage of 266.6% in Q2 2022, compared to 252.59% in Q2 2021. Furthermore, Third Party Funds (DPK) grew 3.70% to USD 75.80 billion in Q2 2022, driven by a 13.38% YoY increase in Low-cost funds (CASA), with Current Accounts and Saving Accounts growing 25.63% and 8.32%, respectively. The current proportion of BRI's CASA of 65.12% is a significant increase compared to 59.56% in Q2 2021. BRI's loan disbursements are supported by ample liquidity, seen from the consolidated LDR of banks maintained at 88.45% as well as a robust 25.06% Capital Adequacy Ratio. BRI's exceptional performance has also received global recognitions, most notably: a) Forbes Global 2000 World's Largest Public Companies: named BRI as the largest public company in Indonesia in 2022, ranked 349th globally. b) The Banker: The Best Bank in Indonesia and ranked 104th globally. c) The Asset Triple A: The Best SME Banker of The Year for Sunarso, and The Best Treasury and Working Capital SME for BRI. "These achievements encourage BRI to continue delivering the best performance and maintaining its position as a prominent financial institution in Indonesia," said Sunarso. Furthermore, there are 45 million ultra-micro entrepreneurs in need of new or additional funding, of which only 15 million have already received financial assistance. Of the 30 million unreached individuals, 5 million rely on money lenders with 100-500% interest per year, 7 million borrow from relatives, and 18 million are still excluded from any financial assistance. "BRI will secure its sustainability with a strong engine of growth to provide financial support to the ultra-micro segments that have not been reached yet," concluded Sunarso. Visit www.bri.co.id for more information. SOURCE PT Bank Rakyat Indonesia Tbk (BRI) Wednesday, September 21 at the Beverly Wilshire SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Scleroderma Research Foundation (SRF)the country's first and leading nonprofit investor in medical research into sclerodermaannounced today that Cool Comedy Hot Cuisine will return for a special tribute to Bob Saget, who spearheaded the signature event for 30 years, on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, at 6:30 p.m. at the Beverly Wilshire. Hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, John Mayer, and Jeff Ross, Cool Comedy Hot Cuisine is co-chaired by John Mayer, Kelly Rizzo, Jeff Ross, and SRF Board Member, Susan Feniger. Honoring the laughter that Saget inspired, as well as his work as a relentless champion for those affected by scleroderma, some of the world's most talented comedians and musicians are generously donating their time and will perform on stage to raise funds for the Scleroderma Research Foundation and to find a cure. Tickets, starting at $500, are now available. For more information, visit www.srfcure.org/cchc . Bob Saget and Susan Feniger "Bob worked tirelessly to support the Scleroderma Research Foundation, in honor of his sister," says Kelly Rizzo. "This drive led him to bring together talent from across comedy and music in order to raise awareness and funds for the SRF. It was through laughter that he was able to touch many lives. I am honored to continue the legacy he built, through working with Bob's closest friends to create an unforgettable night with the same goal that Bob had - to find a cure." "I'm honored to be stepping into Bob's John Varvatos Converse sneakers to host the next Cool Comedy Hot Cuisine," adds Jeff Ross. "These events meant so much to him and have always been a great bonding experience for us. Bob will be missed, but the show must go on until a cure for this awful ailment is found." "The SRF is honored to have partnered with Bob for three decades in our work to fund research while also raising awareness so that no one suffering needs to explain what this disease is or does," says Joanne Gold, Executive Director of the Scleroderma Research Foundation. "We are grateful to the co-chairs and hosts who will continue his legacy as we work to eradicate scleroderma." Since 1987, the SRF has hosted Cool Comedy Hot Cuisine, featuring the biggest names in comedy, to raise critical funds for research and awareness. The SRF is the United States' leading nonprofit investor in scleroderma research. Cool Comedy Hot Cuisine has been a cornerstone of the SRF's fundraising efforts, raising over $27 million to fund vital research, so that one day, no one will have to suffer from scleroderma. About Scleroderma Research Foundation (SRF) The Scleroderma Research Foundation is focused on bringing the best minds in science together to find a cure for scleroderma. The SRF was established in 1987 by patient-turned-activist Sharon Monsky, when research on this potentially life-threatening illness was nearly nonexistent. Sharon lost her battle to the disease in 2002, but her vision lives on today, as the SRF remains committed to funding the most promising research aimed at improved therapies and finding a cure. Through the generosity of donors and support from events like Cool Comedy Hot Cuisine, the SRF has raised more than $37 million dollars to fund and facilitate research at top universities such as Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Stanford University, and University of California, San Francisco, so thatone dayno one will suffer from scleroderma. Stay engaged with SRF at srfcure.org and via social media: Twitter , Facebook , and Instagram . Media Contact: Julie Richter 480.818.8022 [email protected] SOURCE Scleroderma Research Foundation Corporate Leadership Training Market 2022-2026: Increased Spending on Corporate Leadership Training to Drive Growth Organizations are increasingly spending on leadership training year-over-year, as it is more cost-effective for a company to fill senior positions from within its hierarchy than hire an external resource. Organizations have started to invest in leadership training for their own employees to groom them as leaders. To increase the agility of the company to cope with the rapidly changing business environment, organizations are required to train their employees. Companies with strategic leadership development programs can respond rapidly when faced with an unpredictable business environment. Sophisticated leadership training programs also help in the development of a rich pipeline of talent, which accounts for increased spending on corporate leadership training among organizations. Corporate Leadership Training Market 2022-2026: Intense Competition Among Vendors to Challenge the Growth The market witness's intense competition, with relatively easy entry of new vendors. The vendors regularly introduce new programs and services to have a competitive edge in the market and render the existing programs and services obsolete. The entry barriers to the market are not very strict, therefore, there is a possibility for many small and regional players to enter the market. But these small vendors face the challenge of effective implementation of training programs. With e-learning being an emerging trend, infrastructure and technical expertise are mandatory for the effective implementation of online training programs. The intense competition may hamper the revenue and market growth in the coming years. For more insights on the latest drivers, trends, and challenges that will help companies evaluate and develop growth strategies. REQUEST FREE SAMPLE REPORT (INCLUDING GRAPHS & TABLES) OF THIS MARKET Corporate Leadership Training Market 2022-2026: Segmentation Application Online Training ILT Blended Training The corporate leadership training market share growth in the online training segment will be significant during the forecast period. The multiple benefits of online training will be fueling the growth of the global corporate leadership market in the forecast years. Some of them are flexibility in training services, low-cost training, and training with increased access to experts. Geography North America Europe APAC South America Middle East and Africa 41% of the market's growth will originate from North America during the forecast period. US and Canada are the key markets for corporate leadership training in North America. Market growth in this region will be faster than the growth of the market in South America, Europe, and MEA. The significant increase in spending by MNCs on leadership training programs will facilitate the corporate leadership training market growth in North America over the forecast period. DOWNLOAD FREE SAMPLE COPY OF THIS REPORT using business Email ID to gain further insights on the market contribution & share of various segments & regions on higher priority Corporate Leadership Training Market 2022-2026: Scope Technavio presents a detailed picture of the market by the way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. Our report covers the following areas: Corporate Leadership Training Market 2022-2026: Key Highlights CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2022-2026 Detailed information on factors that will assist corporate leadership training market growth during the next five years Estimation of the corporate leadership training market size and its contribution to the parent market Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior The growth of the corporate leadership training market Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of corporate leadership training market vendors Corporate Leadership Training Market 2022-2026: Related Reports Browse Summary of the CORPORATE TRAINING MARKET Growth, Size, Trends, Analysis Report by Type, Application, Region and Segment Forecast 2022-2026: The market value is set to grow by USD 46.22 billion, progressing at a CAGR of 8.77% from 2021 to 2026, as per the latest report by Technavio. Furthermore, this report extensively covers corporate training market segmentation by product (technical training and non-technical training) and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa). Browse Summary of the CORPORATE COMPLIANCE TRAINING MARKET Growth, Size, Trends, Analysis Report by Type, Application, Region and Segment Forecast 2021-2025: The market value is set to grow by USD 2.42 billion, progressing at a CAGR of 7.24% from 2020 to 2025, as per the latest report by Technavio. The corporate compliance training market report also offers information on several market vendors, including Blackboard Inc., City & Guilds Group, CrossKnowledge, and more. Corporate Leadership Training Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 9.51% Market growth 2022-2026 $ 18.59 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 7.87 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa Performing market contribution North America at 41% Key consumer countries US, Canada, India, UK, and Germany Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled D2L Corp., Articulate Global Inc., Bauer Media Group Inc., BTS Group AB, City and Guilds Group, Computer Generated Solutions Inc., Development Dimensions International Inc., Allen Communication Learning Services, Franklin Covey Co., Future London Accademy Ltd., GBS Corporate Training Ltd., Global Training Solutions Inc., Interaction Associates Inc., Korn Ferry, Learning Technologies Group Plc, MPS Ltd., New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Inc., NIIT Ltd., Skillsoft Ltd., and Wilson Learning Worldwide Inc. Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, and market condition analysis for the forecast period. Customization preview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized. Browse for Technavio "CONSUMER DISCRETIONARY MARKET" Research Reports Table of Contents: 1 Executive Summary 1.1 Market overview Exhibit 01: Executive Summary Chart on Market Overview Exhibit 02: Executive Summary Data Table on Market Overview Exhibit 03: Executive Summary Chart on Global Market Characteristics Exhibit 04: Executive Summary Chart on Market by Geography Exhibit 05: Executive Summary Chart on Market Segmentation by Application Exhibit 06: Executive Summary Chart on Incremental Growth Exhibit 07: Executive Summary Data Table on Incremental Growth Exhibit 08: Executive Summary Chart on Vendor Market Positioning 2 Market Landscape 2.1 Market ecosystem Exhibit 09: Parent market Exhibit 10: Market Characteristics 3 Market Sizing 3.1 Market definition Exhibit 11: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition 3.2 Market segment analysis Exhibit 12: Market segments 3.3 Market size 2021 3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021-2026 Exhibit 13: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 14: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 15: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 16: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 4 Five Forces Analysis 4.1 Five forces summary Exhibit 17: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2021 and 2026 4.2 Bargaining power of buyers Exhibit 18: Chart on Bargaining power of buyers Impact of key factors 2021 and 2026 4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers Exhibit 19: Bargaining power of suppliers Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.4 Threat of new entrants Exhibit 20: Threat of new entrants Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.5 Threat of substitutes Exhibit 21: Threat of substitutes Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.6 Threat of rivalry Exhibit 22: Threat of rivalry Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.7 Market condition Exhibit 23: Chart on Market condition - Five forces 2021 and 2026 5 Market Segmentation by Application 5.1 Market segments Exhibit 24: Chart on Application - Market share 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 25: Data Table on Application - Market share 2021-2026 (%) 5.2 Comparison by Application Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by Application Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by Application 5.3 Online training - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 28: Chart on Online training - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 29: Data Table on Online training - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 30: Chart on Online training - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 31: Data Table on Online training - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.4 ILT - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 32: Chart on ILT - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 33: Data Table on ILT - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 34: Chart on ILT - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 35: Data Table on ILT - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.5 Blended training - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 36: Chart on Blended training - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 37: Data Table on Blended training - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 38: Chart on Blended training - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 39: Data Table on Blended training - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.6 Market opportunity by Application Exhibit 40: Market opportunity by Application ($ million) 6 Customer Landscape 6.1 Customer landscape overview Exhibit 41: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria 7 Geographic Landscape 7.1 Geographic segmentation Exhibit 42: Chart on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 43: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) 7.2 Geographic comparison Exhibit 44: Chart on Geographic comparison Exhibit 45: Data Table on Geographic comparison 7.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 46: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 47: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 48: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 49: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 50: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 51: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 52: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 53: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 54: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 55: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 56: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 57: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 58: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 59: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 60: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 61: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.7 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 62: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 63: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 64: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) and - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 65: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.8 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 66: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 67: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 68: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 69: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.9 UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 70: Chart on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 71: Data Table on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 72: Chart on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 73: Data Table on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.10 India - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 74: Chart on India - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 75: Data Table on India - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 76: Chart on India - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 77: Data Table on India - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.11 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 78: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 79: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 80: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 81: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.12 Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 82: Chart on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 83: Data Table on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 84: Chart on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 85: Data Table on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.13 Market opportunity by geography Exhibit 86: Market opportunity by geography ($ million) 8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 8.1 Market drivers 8.2 Market challenges 8.3 Impact of drivers and challenges Exhibit 87: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026 8.4 Market trends 9 Vendor Landscape 9.1 Overview 9.2 Vendor landscape Exhibit 88: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation 9.3 Landscape disruption Exhibit 89: Overview on factors of disruption 9.4 Industry risks Exhibit 90: Impact of key risks on business 10 Vendor Analysis 10.1 Vendors covered Exhibit 91: Vendors covered 10.2 Market positioning of vendors Exhibit 92: Matrix on vendor position and classification 10.3 Allen Communication Learning Services Exhibit 93: Allen Communication Learning Services - Overview Exhibit 94: Allen Communication Learning Services - Product / Service Exhibit 95: Allen Communication Learning Services - Key offerings 10.4 Articulate Global Inc. Exhibit 96: Articulate Global Inc. - Overview Exhibit 97: Articulate Global Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 98: Articulate Global Inc. - Key offerings 10.5 City and Guilds Group Exhibit 99: City and Guilds Group - Overview Exhibit 100: City and Guilds Group - Product / Service Exhibit 101: City and Guilds Group - Key offerings 10.6 D2L Corp. Exhibit 102: D2L Corp. - Overview Exhibit 103: D2L Corp. - Product / Service Exhibit 104: D2L Corp. - Key news Exhibit 105: D2L Corp. - Key offerings 10.7 Franklin Covey Co. Exhibit 106: Franklin Covey Co. - Overview Exhibit 107: Franklin Covey Co. - Business segments Exhibit 108: Franklin Covey Co. - Key offerings Exhibit 109: Franklin Covey Co. - Segment focus 10.8 Interaction Associates Inc. Exhibit 110: Interaction Associates Inc. - Overview Exhibit 111: Interaction Associates Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 112: Interaction Associates Inc. - Key offerings 10.9 Korn Ferry Exhibit 113: Korn Ferry - Overview - Overview Exhibit 114: Korn Ferry - Business segments - Business segments Exhibit 115: Korn Ferry - Key offerings - Key offerings Exhibit 116: Korn Ferry - Segment focus 10.10 Learning Technologies Group Plc Exhibit 117: Learning Technologies Group Plc - Overview Exhibit 118: Learning Technologies Group Plc - Business segments Exhibit 119: Learning Technologies Group Plc - Key news Exhibit 120: Learning Technologies Group Plc - Key offerings Exhibit 121: Learning Technologies Group Plc - Segment focus 10.11 Skillsoft Ltd. Exhibit 122: Skillsoft Ltd. - Overview Exhibit 123: Skillsoft Ltd. - Product / Service Exhibit 124: Skillsoft Ltd. - Key offerings 10.12 Wilson Learning Worldwide Inc. Exhibit 125: Wilson Learning Worldwide Inc. - Overview Exhibit 126: Wilson Learning Worldwide Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 127: Wilson Learning Worldwide Inc. - Key offerings 11 Appendix 11.1 Scope of the report 11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist Exhibit 128: Inclusions checklist Exhibit 129: Exclusions checklist 11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$ Exhibit 130: Currency conversion rates for US$ 11.4 Research methodology Exhibit 131: Research methodology Exhibit 132: Validation techniques employed for market sizing Exhibit 133: Information sources 11.5 List of abbreviations Exhibit 134: List of abbreviations The global education services market is at a crossroads with the positive impact of technological advances such as online education, the implementation of AR and VR in teaching methods, and the use of interactive whiteboards. On the other hand, data and security issues and low digital literacy rates are having a negative impact on the growth of the market. The combined impact of these factors will lead to high growth in the global education services market. Education: Includes technical education, language learning, test preparation services, tutoring services, makerspaces, vocational training, and distance learning courses and certifications Emphasis on mobile learning: The increasing use of smartphones is encouraging education service providers to introduce mobile learning modules. Mobile learning has several advantages, such as flexibility and convenience. Therefore, users can schedule and complete the course/training according to their convenience. Mobile learning is also an experience of personalized learning as users can take training as per their requirements. Digital literacy rates: Educational hardware and software have not been realized in tandem with the availability of trained staff in educational institutions. Institutions find it difficult to integrate technology into business processes. This is because of the inability of the faculty and administrators to understand applications and optimal use. The deployment of these applications alone by colleges and universities is not enough. About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio Round Led by Panoramic Ventures to Fund Growth Capital for Sales and Marketing Initiatives MIAMI, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lumu , creators of the Continuous Compromise Assessment cybersecurity model that empowers organizations to measure compromise in real time, today announced it has closed an $8 million investment round, bringing total funding to $15.5 million. Led by Panoramic Ventures, the investment will serve as growth capital for sales and marketing initiatives to further Lumu's mission of helping organizations operate cybersecurity proficiently. Other investors include KnowBe4 Ventures, Lane Bess, former Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks executive, and Tom Noonan, former CEO at Internet Security Systems and the SoftBank Group's SB Opportunity Fund. "We are excited to continue to support Lumu through this phase of hypergrowth, as organizations across all verticals are realizing the value of measuring compromise within their networks and acting on this factual data immediately," said Paul Judge, Managing Partner of Panoramic Ventures. "The innovation Lumu is bringing to the market is evident and a true game-changer for cybersecurity operations." Lumu's Continuous Compromise Assessment model enables any organization to measure and understand compromise to close the breach detection gap from months to minutes continuously and intentionally. Teams receive actionable information about who was impacted, when the incident took place and how best to respond before it escalates to a bigger problem. The company has experienced hyper-growth in 2021 and 2022 and now has more than 3,100 organizations using its technology. The Lumu platform has analyzed more than 1 trillion metadata and detected more than 345 million adversarial contacts. "With today's economy, hiring constraints and the non-stop cyber threats, companies need tools that enable an accurate understanding of, and swift response to, potential attacks," said Ricardo Villadiego, Founder and CEO of Lumu. "Our platform provides context at the granular level to understand each and every incident and the specific techniques used by attackers so that cybersecurity operators can mitigate malicious incidents and overall improve their cybersecurity stack. With cybercriminals quick to take advantage of economic downturns, this funding round emphasizes just how critical of a time it is for enterprises to prioritize protection and defense mechanisms." The capital will also be used to scale the company's initiative to consistently attract exceptional talent to amplify the reach of Lumu's cyber industry-leading resilience message and to build credibility with target audiences to help companies of all sizes and verticals proficiently operate cybersecurity functions. KnowBe4 is one of the key investors joining Lumu's funding round. The companies will join forces to further their missions of enabling employees and security teams to make smarter security decisions every day. Miami-based Lumu is founded and led by Ricardo Villadiego, a successful second-time founder who is part of the SB Opportunity Fund's community of visionary Black, Latinx, and Native American entrepreneurs. About Lumu Headquartered in Miami, Florida, Lumu is a cybersecurity company focused on helping enterprise organizations illuminate threats and isolate confirmed instances of compromise. Applying principles of Continuous Compromise Assessment, Lumu has built a powerful closed-loop, self-learning solution that helps security teams accelerate compromise detection, gain real-time visibility across their infrastructure, and close the breach detection gap from months to minutes. Learn more about how Lumu illuminates network blind spots at www.lumu.io . SOURCE Lumu TORONTO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Denison Mines Corp. ('Denison' or the 'Company') (TSX: DML) (NYSE American: DNN) today filed its Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements and Management's Discussion & Analysis ('MD&A') for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. Both documents will be available on the Company's website at www.denisonmines.com, SEDAR (at www.sedar.com) and EDGAR (at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml). The highlights provided below are derived from these documents and should be read in conjunction with them. All amounts in this release are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. PDF Version David Cates, President and CEO of Denison commented, "During the second quarter, Denison capitalized on rising uranium prices with the sale of the Company's share of Canadian-origin production received from the successful SABRE mining test completed by the McClean Lake Joint Venture ('MLJV') in 2021. The SABRE test resulted in the production of over 175,000 lbs U 3 O 8 . By comparison, this test production represents over eight times the total mine production of uranium reported in the United States for 2021 highlighting the importance of new sources of low-cost Canadian uranium supply as the global uranium market grapples with sanctions and self-sanctioning against Russian uranium supplies and progresses towards a geopolitical bifurcation where product origin could be crucial. The Company's flagship Wheeler River development project is well positioned to respond to global demand for Canadian-origin uranium, and our efforts through the second quarter have produced several key developments that have advanced the project namely, the receipt of regulatory approval from the Province of Saskatchewan to carry out the Feasibility Field Test ('FFT') planned for the Phoenix deposit and the achievement of key metallurgical milestones to define the components necessary for the Phoenix processing plant and confirm our ability to produce a saleable yellowcake. We were also pleased to report the execution of two important agreements with Kineepik Metis Local #9 ('KML') for (i) Denison's exploration and evaluation activities within KML's land and occupancy area, and (ii) the co-development of an agreement related to the advancement of the proposed Phoenix In-Situ Recovery ('ISR') uranium mining operation. During the second half of the year, we are anticipating the completion of ISR field testing initiated at Wheeler River during the first quarter of the year and the transition of our efforts to focus on the preparation, construction, and operation of the Phoenix FFT. From a regulatory standpoint, we are approaching the submission of our draft Environmental Impact Statement for Wheeler River, which is expected to represent a key accomplishment in the environmental assessment and permitting process. On the exploration side, we will be participating in partner-operated programs and are planning to complete regional exploration drilling programs at Wheeler River and Waterbury Lake." Highlights Completed the sale of 40,000 pounds of U 3 O 8 from MLJV production at a sales price of $74.65 (US$59.25) per pound U 3 O 8 . In April 2022 , Denison completed the sale of 40,000 pounds of U 3 O 8, representing the Company's share of production from the SABRE test mining program completed at the MLJV in 2021. The uranium was sold at a price of $74.65 (US$59.25) per pound U 3 O 8 . In , Denison completed the sale of 40,000 pounds of U O representing the Company's share of production from the SABRE test mining program completed at the MLJV in 2021. The uranium was sold at a price of per pound U O . Received approval to construct and operate the Phoenix FFT In July 2022 , Denison announced that it had received approval from the Province of Saskatchewan to prepare, construct, and operate the facilities required to carry out the ISR FFT planned for the Phoenix deposit (' Phoenix ') at the Company's 95% owned Wheeler River Uranium Project ('Wheeler River' or 'the Project'). The approval was granted by the Saskatchewan Minister of Environment and authorizes Denison to operate "pollutant control facilities" which is typical for mining operations and allows for the management of material recovered from mineral extraction through to waste water treatment, discharge, and storage (as applicable). The approval followed the completion of a process involving the review of and consultation on the Company's permit application and supporting materials related to the FFT. In , Denison announced that it had received approval from the Province of to prepare, construct, and operate the facilities required to carry out the ISR FFT planned for the deposit (' ') at the Company's 95% owned Wheeler River Uranium Project ('Wheeler River' or 'the Project'). The approval was granted by the Minister of Environment and authorizes Denison to operate "pollutant control facilities" which is typical for mining operations and allows for the management of material recovered from mineral extraction through to waste water treatment, discharge, and storage (as applicable). The approval followed the completion of a process involving the review of and consultation on the Company's permit application and supporting materials related to the FFT. Achieved key milestone for Phoenix with completion of metallurgical test work to define Phoenix process plant components and confirmation of ability to produce Yellowcake In August 2022 , Denison announced the substantial completion of extensive metallurgical test work to define the mechanical components for the planned Phoenix processing plant as part of the Feasibility Study underway for Wheeler River. In addition, the metallurgical program has confirmed the ability to produce a yellowcake product that meets industry standard ASTM C967-13 specifications. In , Denison announced the substantial completion of extensive metallurgical test work to define the mechanical components for the planned processing plant as part of the Feasibility Study underway for Wheeler River. In addition, the metallurgical program has confirmed the ability to produce a yellowcake product that meets industry standard ASTM C967-13 specifications. Executed agreements with KML In June 2022 , Denison announced that it has entered into a Participation and Funding Agreement with KML which expresses Denison's and KML's mutual commitment to the co-development of an agreement supporting the advancement of the ISR uranium mining operation proposed at Wheeler River. The Company also entered into an Exploration Agreement in respect of all of Denison's exploration and evaluation activities within KML's land and occupancy area. These agreements reflect Denison's commitment to the principles set out in the Company's Indigenous People's Policy and advancing reconciliation through taking action. About Denison Denison Mines Corp. was formed under the laws of Ontario and is a reporting issuer in all Canadian provinces and territories. Denison's common shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol 'DML' and on the NYSE American exchange under the symbol 'DNN'. Denison is a uranium exploration and development company with interests focused in the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan, Canada. The Company has an effective 95% interest in its flagship Wheeler River Uranium Project, which is the largest undeveloped uranium project in the infrastructure rich eastern portion of the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan. A Pre-Feasibility Study ('PFS') was completed for Wheeler River in late 2018, considering the potential economic merit of developing Phoenix as an ISR operation and the Gryphon deposit as a conventional underground mining operation. Denison's interests in Saskatchewan also include a 22.5% ownership interest in the MLJV, which includes several uranium deposits and the McClean Lake uranium mill, which is contracted to process the ore from the Cigar Lake mine under a toll milling agreement, plus a 25.17% interest in the Midwest Main and Midwest A deposits and a 67.01% interest in the Tthe Heldeth Tue ('THT', formerly J Zone) and Huskie deposits on the Waterbury Lake property. The Midwest Main, Midwest A, THT and Huskie deposits are located within 20 kilometres of the McClean Lake mill. Through its 50% ownership of JCU (Canada) Exploration Company Limited ('JCU'), Denison holds additional interests in various uranium project joint ventures in Canada, including the Millennium project (JCU, 30.099%), the Kiggavik project (JCU, 33.8118%) and Christie Lake (JCU, 34.4508%). Denison's exploration portfolio includes further interests in properties covering approximately 300,000 hectares in the Athabasca Basin region. Denison is also engaged in post-closure mine care and maintenance services through its Closed Mines group (formerly Denison Environmental Services), which manages Denison's reclaimed mine sites in the Elliot Lake region and provides related services to certain third-party projects. Technical Disclosure and Qualified Person The technical information contained in this press release has been reviewed and approved by David Bronkhorst, P.Eng, Denison's Vice President, Operations who is a Qualified Person in accordance with the requirements of NI 43-101. CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Certain information contained in this press release constitutes 'forward-looking information', within the meaning of the applicable United States and Canadian legislation concerning the business, operations and financial performance and condition of Denison. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as 'plans', 'expects', 'budget', 'scheduled', 'estimates', 'forecasts', 'intends', 'anticipates', or 'believes', or the negatives and/or variations of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results 'may', 'could', 'would', 'might' or 'will be taken', 'occur', 'be achieved' or 'has the potential to'. In particular, this press release contains forward-looking information pertaining to the following: projections with respect to exploration, development and expansion plans and objectives, including the scope, objectives and interpretations of the Feasibility Study process for the proposed ISR operation for the Phoenix deposit, including the FFT and metallurgical testing programs described herein and the interpretation of the results therefrom; expectations regarding regulatory applications and approvals and the elements thereof, including the submission of the Environmental Impact Statement; expectations regarding Denison's joint venture ownership interests; expectations regarding the continuity of its agreements with third parties; and its interpretations of, and expectations for, nuclear energy and uranium demand. Statements relating to 'mineral reserves' or 'mineral resources' are deemed to be forward-looking information, as they involve the implied assessment, based on certain estimates and assumptions that the mineral reserves and mineral resources described can be profitably produced in the future. Forward looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made, and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Denison to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For example, the results and underlying assumptions and interpretations of the PFS as well as de-risking efforts such as the ISR field programs discussed herein may not be maintained after further testing or be representative of actual conditions within the applicable deposits. In addition, Denison may decide or otherwise be required to extend its evaluation activities and/or the FS and/or otherwise discontinue testing, evaluation and development work if it is unable to maintain or otherwise secure the necessary approvals or resources (such as testing facilities, capital funding, etc.). Denison believes that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be accurate and results may differ materially from those anticipated in this forward-looking information. For a discussion in respect of risks and other factors that could influence forward-looking events, please refer to the factors discussed in Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 25, 2022 under the heading 'Risk Factors'. These factors are not, and should not be, construed as being exhaustive. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Any forward-looking information and the assumptions made with respect thereto speaks only as of the date of this press release. Denison does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information after the date of this press release to conform such information to actual results or to changes in Denison's expectations except as otherwise required by applicable legislation. SOURCE Denison Mines Corp. VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - DESERT MOUNTAIN ENERGY CORP. (the "Company") (TSXV: DME) (OTC: DMEHF) (Frankfurt: QM01) From the President of the Company. The Company is pleased to announce that it has encountered the largest number of helium and hydrogen showings from all wells drilled thus far, on its Gunnar Dome prospect in Arizona. Mass spectrometer readings during drilling operations clearly delineated multiple zones which had either helium, hydrogen or argon present. The Company is in the process of setting & cementing the production casing on the well. As is the Company's previously stated practices, it has set and cemented multiple strings of casing, (which exceed all state regulatory requirements,) to isolate and protect all water zones, irrespective of their individual mineral content. The Company further anticipates it will have a completion rig for the well available, at the end of August. "Our geologic and drilling teams continue to successfully drill our targets, cement and set production casing," says Robert Rohlfing, CEO of Desert Mountain Energy Corp. "We look froward to bringing in the completion rig, sample and release the results of this well." Consistent mass spectrometer readings and the corresponding flow results visible at the surface are extremely encouraging and await final definitive testing for specific perforated formation results. The geologic data from this well confirms the hypothesis on the possible trapping mechanisms of both helium &, hydrogen within this specific geologic setting. This information will be applied by our team to other specific settings. It further expands upon the previously held theoretical understanding of helium and hydrogen generation. It is the opinion of the Company, (based on confidential and proprietary geologic drilling data,) that the acreage controlled by the Company on the corresponding structures will ultimately confine the water-free commercial production areas for this geologic setting to the leases currently held. With this press release, the Company will be in communications with its partner in hydrogen processing to explore where and how they can meld this discovery into other long-term ESG developmental plays. It is the Company's position to monetize its newly discovered hydrogen assets, whilst developing the long-term opportunities which management feels may be the most advantageous to shareholders. ABOUT DESERT MOUNTAIN ENERGY Desert Mountain Energy Corp. is a publicly traded resource company primarily focused on exploration, development and production of helium, hydrogen and noble gases. The Company is primarily looking for elements deemed critical to the renewable energy and high technology industries. We seek safe harbor "Robert Rohlfing" Robert Rohlfing Exec Chairman & CEO Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in polices of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The statements made in this press release may contain certain forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual events or results may differ from the Company's expectations. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Such forward looking statements and information herein include but are not limited to statements regarding the Company's anticipated performance in the future the planned exploration activities, receipt of positive results from drilling, the completion of further drilling and exploration work, and the timing and results of various activities. Forward-looking statements or information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company and its operations to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Such factors include, among others, changes in national and local governments, legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments in Canada and the United States; financial risks due to helium prices, operating or technical difficulties in exploration and development activities; risks and hazards and the speculative nature of resource exploration and related development; risks in obtaining necessary licenses and permits, and challenges to the Company's title to properties. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable, including but not limited to the continued operation of the Company's exploration operations, no material adverse change in the market price of commodities, and such other assumptions and factors as set out herein. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or information, there may be other factors that cause results to be materially different from those anticipated, described, estimated, assessed or intended. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements or information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. The Company does not intend to, and nor does not assume any obligation to update such forward-looking statements or information, other than as required by applicable law. SOURCE Desert Mountain Energy Corp. Scholastic Launches "Dav Pilkey's Epic Comic Club," A Virtual Platform Where Kids Around the Globe Can Create Their Own Comics NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Readers and retailers rejoice! Scholastic, the world's largest publisher and distributor of children's books, announced today that 2023 will be a big and exciting year for kids and families everywhere with the publication of a new Dog Man graphic novel. DOG MAN: TWENTY THOUSAND FLEAS UNDER THE SEA, the newest book in the #1 global bestselling and critically-acclaimed series will release on March 28, 2023, simultaneously in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Asia. This eleventh installment in the series follows Dog Man: Mothering Heights which dominated both children's and adult bestseller lists, and was the #1 bestselling book overall in 2021, selling more than 2 million copies to date in the U.S. alone. In just over five years since Dog Man launched to multiple starred reviews, there are more than 50 million copies of the Dog Man books in print with translations in 42 languages. DreamWorks Animation is currently developing a movie adaptation of Dog Man. DOG MAN: TWENTY THOUSAND FLEAS UNDER THE SEA by #1 worldwide bestselling author and illustrator Dav Pilkey will be published by Scholastic worldwide on March 28, 2023. Scholastic launches DAV PILKEYS EPIC COMIC CLUB, a new global virtual platform where kids around the world can create their own comics. The safe and moderated site on www.epiccomicclub.com features free monthly downloadable activities including comic starters, customizable official membership cards, collectible character badges, special sneak peeks, exclusive book news, and more! The phenomenal success of Dog Man has also helped to drive the comic book industry , and Dav Pilkey's global domination continues on November 29, 2022 with the release of Cat Kid Comic Club: Collaborations, the newest book in his #1 worldwide bestselling Cat Kid Comic Club graphic novel series, a spin-off of Dog Man. With more than 90 million copies in print to date, the Captain Underpants series will soon mark its 25th anniversary. To celebrate the milestone of Pilkey's popular series widely-credited for helping to create the illustrated children's chapter book category, Scholastic will publish on March 7, 2023 a special anniversary edition of the first Captain Underpants book, The Adventures of Captain Underpants, featuring a bonus 32-page all-new comic mash-up starring Dog Man and Captain Underpants, bringing together two iconic characters in a never-before-told story. In a statement, Caldecott Honoree Dav Pilkey said: "I am humbled and grateful to do what I love for a living. Since the pandemic began, I have been inspired to create even more stories and to learn and grow as an artistfrom experimenting with various mediums to make comics using photography, poetry, and calligraphy, to building character models and sets by hand, as well as exploring different themes and storylines. My hope is that my books foster creativity and imagination, and instill a lifelong love of reading." To engage and bring together its millions of fans worldwide, Scholastic also announced the official launch of Dav Pilkey's Epic Comic Club, a new global online platform where kids can create their own comics. The COPPA-compliant site, www.EpicComicClub.com , opens up with a special message from Dav Pilkey encouraging kids to have fun making comics, and features a place where kids can upload their stories in a safe and moderated environment, along with an "Epic Comic Club Wall" to showcase their comic creations. The online hub includes free monthly downloadable activities including comic starters, customizable official membership cards, collectible character badges, special sneak peeks, exclusive book news, and more. The Epic Comic Club site also will serve as a destination for educators, booksellers, parents, and caregivers around the globe to access free resources including tips on how to start their own Epic Comic Clubs at home, in bookstores, classrooms, or libraries. Additionally, Scholastic has created a special section on its existing HomeBase platform ( www.scholastic.com/homebase ) as another portal where kids can submit their comics and access more games inspired by Dav Pilkey's beloved characters. Ellie Berger, President of Scholastic Trade, said: "Dav is one of the most inspiring and creative storytellers of this generation and the anticipation and strong demand for his books has been extraordinary. With the launch of 'Dav Pilkey's Epic Comic Club,' we can't wait to see kids' creativity and imagination come to life in their own comics." About Dog Man The Dog Man series follows the hilarious and heartwarming adventures of the "Supa Buddies": Dog Man, a lovable canine superhero, and his friends Li'l Petey, a curious kitten who embodies love, optimism, and hope, and 80-HD, a robot who expresses himself best through his art. With each Dog Man book, readers see the growth and development of the main narrators George and Harold through their comics. Their artwork, grammar, as well as their spelling improve as the series progresses. The series explores universally positive messages including empathy, kindness, and striving to become a better version of one's self, while it also tackles more complex themes including loss, forgiveness, and self-acceptance. All ten books in the Dog Man series published to date have clinched the #1 spot on renowned bestseller lists. A live stage adaptation inspired by the books, Dog Man: The Musical from TheaterWorksUSA , will resume its tour across North America starting in August 2022. About Dav Pilkey The publication of Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea marks Dav Pilkey's 35 years of writing and illustrating award-winning and bestselling books for children. His first-ever graphic novel, The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, was published in 2002, fourteen years before the release of the first Dog Man book. When Dav Pilkey was a kid, he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Dav was so disruptive in class that his teachers made him sit out in the hallway every day. He spent his time in the hallway creating his own original comic books -- the very first adventures of Dog Man and Captain Underpants. In college, Dav met a teacher who encouraged him to write and illustrate for kids. He took her advice and created his first book, World War Won, which won a national competition in 1986. Dav made many other books before being awarded the California Young Reader Medal for Dog Breath (1994) and the Caldecott Honor for The Paperboy (1996). Dav's stories are semi-autobiographical and explore universal themes that celebrate friendship, empathy, and the triumph of the good-hearted. When he is not making books for kids, Dav loves to kayak with his wife in the Pacific Northwest. For more information about Dav Pilkey and his books visit http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/davpilkey . About Scholastic For more information about Scholastic, visit our media room at http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/ SOURCE Scholastic Benefit added in response to employee Great Place To Work survey feedback CHICAGO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Enlivant, one of the largest senior living providers in the U.S., announced today all full-time employees are now eligible to receive New Child Leave benefits. As part of Enlivant's commitment to providing employees comprehensive health care, this new benefit supports employees following the birth, adoption or fostering of a child and supports their overall health, safety and well-being. Enlivant added the benefit in response to employee feedback from the Great Place to Work survey. "Enlivant strives to create a compassionate and inclusive workplace that supports every employee having the opportunity to live their best life," says CEO Dan Guill. "We are thrilled to be able to expand our benefits package to support our employees and their families across the organization." Enlivant's nationwide workforce consists of 84 percent women, and the company is committed to increasing women in leadership positions. Liezl Tolentino was recently promoted to serve as Chief Human Resources Officer in April, the first woman in Enlivant's history at the C-Suite level. "We are committed to listening to employees, responding and providing benefits that support all employees and their families," says Liezl Tolentino, Chief Human Resource Officer. "Our New Child Leave benefit is an important commitment to the ongoing health and well-being of our employees." As part of the New Child Leave policy, Enlivant will provide qualified full-time employees with up to six weeks of time off for New Child Leave, of which four weeks will be paid at the employee's normal pay level. The company's new benefit will enable employees to deliver, care for and bond with a newborn or a newly placed child and help balance the demands of a career and family. Enlivant was recently certified as a "Great Places to Work" for the fourth year in a row. In the survey, 91 percent of employees said they feel treated fairly regardless of gender, 92% feel treated fairly regardless of sexual orientation, 89% of employees say people are treated fairly regardless of their race, and 90% of employees say their work has special meaning: This is not "just a job." About Enlivant Since 1981, Enlivant has delivered a pioneering approach to senior living designed to give residents a supportive, stimulating environment where they thrive in mind, body, and soul. With more than 200 communities across the United States and more than 7,000 residents, the company strives to be the nation's most trusted senior living provider. Enlivant is a certified "Great Places to Work" for four years in a row and is the first senior living portfolio to earn the WELL Health-Safety Rating, recognizing their ongoing commitment to support the health and safety of everyone who walks through their doors. Enlivant has 117 communities that are recognized by U.S. News & World Report as a 2022-23 Best Senior Living Community in the categories of Best Assisted Living and Best Memory Care, the highest number of recognitions in the Best Assisted Living category. Learn more at enlivant.com. Media Contact Amanda Pollard [email protected] 312-914-4417 SOURCE Enlivant VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Equinox Gold Corp. (TSX: EQX) (NYSE American: EQX) ("Equinox Gold" or the "Company") announces that Christian Milau will be leaving Equinox Gold to pursue a new opportunity in the global carbon finance industry. Equinox Gold's Board of Directors has unanimously appointed Greg Smith to succeed Christian as Chief Executive Officer and a Director of Equinox Gold. Ross Beaty, Chair of Equinox Gold, commented: "Greg Smith has been President of Equinox Gold since we founded the Company in 2017 and has always been considered the designated successor when Christian retired. Greg brings the right corporate knowledge, industry experience and skill set to effectively manage current operations and advance our long-term strategy. He has the full support of the Board and the executive team, and I look forward to working with him as we focus on achieving our vision of being the premier Americas million-ounce gold producer. "On behalf of the Board, I thank Christian for his leadership over the last six years. Christian has led the team through two mergers and three acquisitions, growing the company from a single-asset developer to a diversified, multi-mine gold producer with one of the industry's strongest growth profiles. His commitment to responsible mining, collaborative relationships and providing meaningful benefits to both our workforce and our community partners leaves an enduring legacy that we will continue to uphold. We wish him the best of success in his new endeavour." Greg Smith commented: "I am excited to take on a bigger role at Equinox Gold. With Greenstone construction progressing exceptionally well, seven gold mines and three promising expansion projects, Equinox Gold is well positioned to deliver continued growth. Christian has also built an excellent team of industry experts with a strong work ethic and a respectful, positive corporate culture. I look forward to building on that foundation and continuing Equinox Gold's growth into a large, sustainable gold-mining company." Christian Milau commented: "It has been my privilege to serve as Equinox Gold's CEO for the last six years. I am incredibly proud of what Equinox Gold has achieved so far, thanks to the dedication of a talented, hard-working team and the vision and support from Ross and our Board. Together we have created a solid company that operates with integrity. I remain a supportive shareholder and am confident that Equinox Gold will achieve its long-term goals." Greg Smith will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer and Director of Equinox Gold on September 1, 2022. Greg is a founding shareholder and executive of Equinox Gold and previously held executive roles at Goldcorp, Minefinders and Esperanza Resources. He is a Canadian Chartered Professional Accountant. Equinox Gold Contacts Christian Milau, Chief Executive Officer Greg Smith, President Rhylin Bailie, Vice President, Investor Relations Tel: +1 604-558-0560 Email: [email protected] About Equinox Gold Equinox Gold is a Canadian mining company operating entirely in the Americas, with six operating gold mines, a mine in commissioning, and a clear path to achieve more than one million ounces of annual gold production from a pipeline of development and expansion projects. Equinox Gold's common shares are listed on the TSX and the NYSE American under the trading symbol EQX. Further information about Equinox Gold's portfolio of assets and long-term growth strategy is available at www.equinoxgold.com or by email at [email protected]. Cautionary Notes This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information in this news release relate to, among other things: the successful transition of the CEO role, the strategic vision for the Company and expectations regarding production capabilities and future financial or operational performance; and the Company's ability to successfully advance its growth and development projects, including the construction of Greenstone and the expansions at Los Filos, Castle Mountain and Aurizona. Forward-looking statements or information generally identified by words such as "will", "continue", "advance", "achieve", "deliver", "promising" and similar expressions and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "will", "may", "could", or "should", or the negative connotation of such terms, are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. Although Equinox Gold believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements and information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements since Equinox Gold can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Equinox Gold has based these forward-looking statements and information on Equinox Gold's current expectations and projections about future events and these assumptions include: the Company's ability to achieve the exploration, production, cost and development expectations for its respective operations and projects; prices for gold remaining as estimated; currency exchange rates remaining as estimated; availability of funds for the Company's projects and future cash requirements; prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services; construction of Greenstone being completed and performed in accordance with current expectations; and expansion projects at Los Filos, Castle Mountain and Aurizona being completed and performed in accordance with current expectations. While Equinox Gold considers these assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available, they may prove to be incorrect. Accordingly, readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on the forward-looking statements or information contained in this news release. Equinox Gold cautions that forward-looking statements and information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release and Equinox Gold has made assumptions and estimates based on or related to many of these factors. Such factors include, without limitation: fluctuations in gold prices; fluctuations in prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services; fluctuations in currency markets; operational risks and hazards inherent with the business of mining (including environmental accidents and hazards, industrial accidents, equipment breakdown, unusual or unexpected geological or structural formations, cave-ins, flooding and severe weather); inadequate insurance, or inability to obtain insurance to cover these risks and hazards; employee relations; relationships with, and claims by, local communities and indigenous populations; the Company's ability to obtain all necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in a timely manner or at all; changes in laws, regulations and government practices, including environmental and export and import laws and regulations; legal restrictions relating to mining; risks relating to expropriation; increased competition in the mining industry;; the ability of Equinox Gold to work productively with its joint venture partner and Indigenous partners at Greenstone; and those factors identified in the section titled "Risks and Uncertainties" in Equinox Gold's MD&A dated March 23, 2022 for the year ended December 31, 2021, and in the section titled "Risks Related to the Business" in Equinox Gold's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2022 for the year ended December 31, 2021, both of which are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov/edgar. Forward-looking statements and information are designed to help readers understand management's views as of that time with respect to future events and speak only as of the date they are made. Except as required by applicable law, Equinox Gold assumes no obligation to update or to publicly announce the results of any change to any forward-looking statement or information contained or incorporated by reference to reflect actual results, future events or developments, changes in assumptions or changes in other factors affecting the forward-looking statements and information. If Equinox Gold updates any one or more forward-looking statements, no inference should be drawn that Equinox Gold will make additional updates with respect to those or other forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. SOURCE Equinox Gold Corp. WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Scholarships for Military Children program once again came through for 500 students from military families who were each awarded a $2,000 scholarship grant for the upcoming 2022-23 school year. "This scholarship, honestly, it means a lot to me, not in just the aspect of lifting a financial burden, but also it keeps me motivated and reminds me of what my parents and so many other Americans choose to do," said scholarship recipient Amber Bishop. Fisher House Foundation Scholarships for Military Children recipients gather together to celebrate their awards. The program, created in 2001, recognizes the contributions of military families to the readiness of the fighting force and celebrates the commissaries' role in enhancing the military's quality of life. Fisher House Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps service members and their families, partners with the Defense Commissary Agency to administer the scholarship. "We are grateful for our partnership with the Defense Commissary Agency and all of our generous sponsors who help make this program a success every year," said Marshall Banks, Fisher House Foundation's director of community relations. No government funds are used to support the Scholarships for Military Children program. Commissary vendors, manufacturers, brokers, suppliers, and the general public donate to fund the program. Sponsors for the 2022-23 scholarship program are: At the four-star level, donating $50,000 to $199,999: 522 Foundation, Inc.; Major General Harry Greene AUSA Aberdeen Chapter; Procter & Gamble Company; PwC Charitable Foundation; and Synchrony Foundation. At the two-star level, donating $10,000 to $24,999: Dollar Shave Club, a Unilever brand; Simon and Merrilee Engel; The Hershey Company; Elissa Koff; Stephanie Larson; Padres Foundation; William and Helen Sherman. At the one-star level, donating $2,000 to $9,999: Anonymous; Maj. Gen. Susan Y. Desjardins, USAF (Ret.) and Peter D. Lennon; Elite Brands; Estate of Edwin H. Erland; General Mills; Robert and Tara Indresano; In memory of Roy V. Kinion, Jr.; Lt. Col. Ronald Mattana, USAF (Ret.); Capt. Victor and Mrs. Carol Palmucci, USN (Ret.); Patricia Stenzel Overseas Service Corp. and Webco Services Co. also supported the Scholarships for Military Children program. Businesses, organizations, and individuals interested in sponsoring the 2023-24 scholarships can contact [email protected] To read the full wrap up of the 2022-23 scholarship program go to https://bit.ly/3b9r92d. More info about Fisher House Foundation's scholarship programs including the Scholarships for Military Children, Heroes' Legacy Scholarship, and an interactive scholarship search engine, can be found at https://fisherhouse.org/programs/scholarship-programs/ . About Fisher House Fisher House Foundation is best known for its network of 92 comfort homes where military and veteran families can stay at no cost while a loved one is receiving treatment. These homes are located at major military and VA medical centers nationwide, and in Europe, close to the medical center or hospital they serve. Fisher Houses have up to 21 suites, with private bedrooms and baths. Families share a common kitchen, laundry facilities, a warm dining room and an inviting living room. Fisher House Foundation ensures that there is never a lodging fee. Since inception, the program has saved military and veteran families an estimated $547 million in out-of-pocket costs for lodging and transportation. Fisher House Foundation also operates the Hero Miles Program, using donated frequent flyer miles to bring family members to the bedside of injured service members as well as the Hotels for Heroes program using donated hotel points to allow family members to stay at hotels near medical centers without charge. The Foundation also manages an awards program recognizing programs that support military and veteran communities and scholarship funds for military children, spouses, and children of fallen and disabled veterans. www.fisherhouse.org SOURCE Fisher House Foundation NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As per Zion Market Research study, The global B2B payments platform market size was worth around USD 942.67 billion in 2021 and is predicted to grow to around USD 1564 billion by 2028 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 8.35% between 2022 and 2028. B2B Payments Platform Market: Overview Business to business (B2B) payments refers to the monetary transactions or payments between two organizations for sales of goods or services. For example, the money-related transactions that would take place between an office and another organization that supplied them with the office equipment. Whenever there is an invoice generated for one company by another, B2B payment systems come into play. Some of the industries that are the largest consumers of business-to-business payments platforms are; manufacturing covering over 28.8% of the global market share, professional & business service with 21.2% of the share, finance, insurance, leasing, retail, and real estate with 17.8%, mining comprises 5.6% of the market, and wholesale trade covers 5.2% of the global market cap. There are a few key pointers that separate B2B from customer-to-business (C2B) payment models. Some of them include; volume where payments in the B2B model comprise the larger volume of payments as compared to C2B, and frequency of the payment since the frequency is higher in B2B models. However, deciding on the correct payment model between two organizations for a particular business is not obstacle-free. There are a few questions that organizations struggle to find answers to. Since there are so many payment methods available and each organization has its own requirements, the availability of multiple options like online payments, cryptocurrency, cheques, cash, etc. leads to more confusion. Get a Free Sample Report with All Related Graphs & Charts (with COVID 19 Impact Analysis): https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/sample/global-b2b-payments-platform-market Our Free Sample Report Includes: 2022 Updated Report Introduction, Overview, and In-depth industry analysis COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak Impact Analysis Included 255 + Pages Research Report (Inclusion of Updated Research) Provide Chapter-wise guidance on Request 2022 Updated Regional Analysis with Graphical Representation of Size, Share & Trends Includes an Updated List of tables & figures Updated Report Includes Top Market Players with their Business Strategy, Sales Volume, and Revenue Analysis Zion Market Research methodology Key Industry Insights & Findings of the B2B Payments Platform Market Reports: As per the analysis shared by our research analyst, the B2B Payments Platform Market is expected to grow annually at a CAGR of around 8.35 % (2022-2028). (2022-2028). Through the primary research, it was established that the B2B Payments Platform Market was valued at approximately USD 942.67 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach roughly USD 1564 billion by 2028. billion in 2021 and is projected to reach roughly billion by 2028. The growth in adoption rate is the increasing international export and import between economies since international trade occurs between organizations that deal with heavy funds. In the case of online B2B platforms, repetitive tasks can be avoided thus saving the organization's time and cost since tasks like depositing and reconciling cheques can be completely eliminated. The global B2B payments platform market is expected to be dominated by North America in the coming years because of increased investment in the field of transaction network security in countries like the USA and Canada . in the coming years because of increased investment in the field of transaction network security in countries like the and . Asia-Pacific may also register significant growth because of the rise in the number of organizations that deal in B2B trade thus aiding the demand for B2B payments and propelling the global market growth. Zion Market Research published the latest report titled "Global B2B Payments Platform Market By Payment Mode (Digital and Traditional), By Industry (IT & Telecom, Manufacturing, Metals & Mining, BFSI, and Energy & Utilities), By Enterprise Size (Large-Scale Business and SMEs), By Payment Type (Cross-Border Payments and Domestic Payments), and By Region - Global and Regional Industry Overview, Market Intelligence, Comprehensive Analysis, Historical Data, and Forecasts 2022 2028." into their research database. Industry Dynamics: B2B Payments Platform Market: Growth Drivers Growth in import and export or trade exchange to propel market growth. The global B2B payments platform market growth may be attributed to the rising transactions taking place between various business models. One of the key aspects that have aided the growth in adoption rate is the increasing international export and import between economies since international trade occurs between organizations that deal with heavy funds. As per the May 2022 report of the US International Trade in Good & Services, the USA export value was over USD 256 billion. These numbers are rising owing to the higher demand for goods in the global market assisted by the increasing disposable income of the general population. Some of the other factors that influence the change in export-import value are favorable government policies, the income of the economy, subsidiaries for exporters, import restrictions, etc. There is a growing need for global footprint expansion amongst organizations. This can be achieved with the help of strategic decisions and an increase in trade thus boosting cross-border payments between businesses. Another factor assisting the rise in B2B payments trends is the exhaustive measures undertaken by small and mid-size firms to increase their profitability index. Multiple tie-ups like outsourcing of information technology (IT) services, HR systems, internet services, and others are a few of the examples that take place between two organizations resulting in global market growth. B2B Payments Platform Market: Restraints Security concerns related to digital payments may impede the market growth. Data security is the major concern of any organization. Business institutes deal with large sums of money, and they are always under the radar of hackers or security breaches. As per a recent Deloitte study, more than 20% of mid-size companies have faced security breaches at least once. Any transactional platform not only holds data related to money transfers but personal and security details as well. In 2021, payment processors at Amazon and Swiggy faced data breaches where details related to more than 3.5 crore users were compromised. Such concerns are expected to have negative implications on the global market cap unless security systems upgrade so that they can never be compromised. Directly Purchase a Copy of the Report @ https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/buynow/su/global-b2b-payments-platform-market B2B Payments Platform Market: Opportunities Time and cost saver benefits of online platforms to provide growth opportunities during the forecast period. In the case of online B2B platforms, repetitive tasks can be avoided thus saving the organization's time and cost since tasks like depositing and reconciling cheques can be completely eliminated. In the case of online transactions, almost all platforms provide timely automated deductions which reduce the risk of faulty payments or missing out deadlines thus saving the company from extra expenses. This provides the employees more time to deal with other critical aspects. In fact, in the case of online payments, data is recorded and kept for safekeeping, unlike offline modes where transaction-related details may get misplaced. These benefits may attract more tech-savvy users to the B2B payments platform during the forecast period. B2B Payments Platform Market: Challenges Transaction-related fees to challenge global market growth. Many offline and online payment platforms charge companies or account holders for maintenance and transactions completed with the aid of the platform. These extra charges sometimes may not be suitable for small-scale companies who may see this as an extra cost. In case the account maintenance rate is higher, organizations may choose other options to make their payments. There are also certain restrictions related to payment dates like payments raised on bank holidays may take more days for completion which might sometimes not be in the company's favor. These aspects are expected to create challenges for the expansion of the global market size. Global B2B Payments Platform Market: Segmentation The global B2B payments platform market is segmented based on payment mode, industry, enterprise size, payment type, and region. Based on payment mode, the global market segments are digital and traditional. The global market is expected to be dominated by digital payment modes since they offer faster transactions, less scope for error, well-organized data, and accurate transaction history. As per official reports, over 71% of businesses prefer digital payments with an increasing number of organizations accepting online transactions. By industry, the global market is segmented into IT & telecom, manufacturing, metals & mining, BFSI, energy & utilities. Almost all sectors entail at least some form of B2B payments but BFSI leads the global market owing to the heavy transactions conducted under this category. By enterprise size, large-scale business and SMEs are the two main segments, and the global market is dominated by the large-scale business segment. This can be attributed to the higher adoption rate of B2B trading amongst large-scale organizations especially in international trade in order to expand their global presence. In June 2022, India's overall export value was around USD 65 billion which is projected to grow further in the coming years. By payment type, the global market is divided into cross-border payments and domestic payments. Cross-border payments may generate higher revenues since a large sum of money is involved in such payments. Get More Insight before [email protected]: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/inquiry/global-b2b-payments-platform-market List of Key Players in B2B Payments Platform Market: Mastercard Square Inc. Bank of America Corporation American Express PayPal Holdings Inc. Visa Inc. TransferWise Ltd. Stripe Key questions answered in this report: What are the growth rate forecast and market size for B2B Payments Platform Market? What are the key driving factors propelling the B2B Payments Platform Market forward? What are the most important companies in the B2B Payments Platform Market Industry? What segments does the B2B Payments Platform Market cover? How can I receive a free copy of the B2B Payments Platform Market sample report and company profiles? Report Scope: Report Attribute Details Market size value in 2021 USD 942.67 Billion Revenue forecast in 2028 USD 1564 Billion Growth Rate CAGR of almost 8.35 % 2022-2028 Base Year 2020 Historic Years 2016 2021 Forecast Years 2022 2028 Segments Covered By Product Type, By Application, And By End Use Forecast Units Value (USD Billion), and Volume (Units) Quantitative Units Revenue in USD million/billion and CAGR from 2022 to 2028 Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa, and Rest of World Countries Covered U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, GCC Countries, and South Africa, among others Companies Covered Mastercard, Square Inc., Bank of America Corporation, American Express, PayPal Holdings Inc., Visa Inc., TransferWise Ltd., and Stripe Report Coverage Market growth drivers, restraints, opportunities, Porter's five forces analysis, PEST analysis, value chain analysis, regulatory landscape, market attractiveness analysis by segments and region, company market share analysis, and COVID-19 impact analysis. Customization Scope Avail of customized purchase options to meet your exact research needs. https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/custom/7030 Free Brochure: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/requestbrochure/global-b2b-payments-platform-market Recent Developments In July 2022 , French Fintech Hero, an upcoming B2B payments platform, managed to raise USD 12.49 million within 7 months of its launch. The payment solutions provided are more inclined towards mid-size firms and SMEs. The company aims to create a platform where users can take care of order-to-cash for suppliers and procure-to-pay for clients , French Fintech Hero, an upcoming B2B payments platform, managed to raise within 7 months of its launch. The payment solutions provided are more inclined towards mid-size firms and SMEs. The company aims to create a platform where users can take care of order-to-cash for suppliers and procure-to-pay for clients In May 2022 , Visa announced that it will explore more opportunities to collaborate with fintech companies in India in order to enhance payment solutions for B2-B suppliers and the entire value-chain of corporates. This is being regarded as one of the big bets in terms of B2B payments in the corporate and commercial world. Regional Dominance: North America to lead the global market during the projection period. The global B2B payments platform market is expected to be dominated by North America in the coming years because of increased investment in the field of transaction network security in countries like the USA and Canada. Government spending in the telecom and network industry is expected to boost regional market cap since more companies are being encouraged to adopt technology in as many processes as possible along with advancements towards higher security for online activities like payments. Asia-Pacific may also register significant growth because of the rise in the number of organizations that deal in B2B trade thus aiding the demand for B2B payments and propelling the global market growth. Global B2B Payments Platform Market is segmented as follows: B2B Payments Platform Market: By Payment Mode Outlook (2022-2028) Digital Traditional B2B Payments Platform Market: By Industry Outlook (2022-2028) IT & Telecom Manufacturing Metals & Mining BFSI Energy Utilities B2B Payments Platform Market: By Enterprise Size Outlook (2022-2028) Large-Scale Business SMEs B2B Payments Platform Market: By Payment Type Outlook (2022-2028) Cross-Border Payments Domestic Payments B2B Payments Platform Market: By Region Outlook (2022-2028) North America The U.S. Canada Europe France The UK Spain Germany Italy Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan India South Korea Southeast Asia Rest of Asia Pacific Latin America Brazil Mexico Rest of Latin America Middle East & Africa GCC South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa Press Release For B2B Payments Platform Market: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/news/global-b2b-payments-platform-market Browse Other Related Research Reports from Zion Market Research Metaverse Market - Global Industry Analysis : The global Metaverse Market accrued earnings worth approximately 47.49 (USD Billion) in 2021 and is predicted to gain revenue of about 400.5(USD Billion) by 2028, is set to record a CAGR of nearly 39.5% over the period from 2022 to 2028. 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Our database is been updated constantly to fulfill our clients with prompt and direct online access to our database. Keeping in mind the client's needs, we have included expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends in this database. Last but not the least, we make it our duty to ensure the success of clients connected to usafter allif you do well, a little of the light shines on us. Contact Us: Zion Market Research 244 Fifth Avenue, Suite N202 New York, 10001, United States Tel: +49-322 210 92714 USA/Canada Toll-Free No.1-855-465-4651 Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/ Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1605489/Zion_Market_Research_Logo.jpg SOURCE Zion Market Research ATLANTA , Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Grady Health System has been named a Level I Emergency Cardiac Care Center (ECCC) by the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH). This designation is Georgia's highest level of emergency cardiac care and recognizes Grady's commitment to excellence. Grady Memorial Hospital "We are honored to receive this distinct recognition from the Georgia Department of Public Health," said Annie Cheek, Vice President of Heart and Vascular Services at Grady. "Our designation as a Level I Emergency Cardiac Care Center is a true testament to the collaboration among our heart and vascular team and highlights Grady's ongoing commitment to providing high-quality cardiac care to help improve patient outcomes." Georgia DPH conducts a thorough evaluation process for all healthcare organizations seeking ECCC accreditation, which includes a site inspection and an assessment of emergency cardiac care procedures and equipment. The Level I designation means a hospital can perform open heart surgery and interventional cardiac catheterizations. In 2017, legislation was signed into Georgia law to establish the Office of Cardiac Care at the Georgia DPH. Its mission is to improve survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and heart attacks through quality improvement, benchmarking, and evidence-based guidelines. A three-level designation system was implemented to help identify a hospital's capability of providing emergency cardiac care services. In a letter sent to Grady, Georgia DPH Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey applauded the health system for its contributions to the health and well-being of Georgians. "We believe that improving emergency cardiac care throughout Georgia can best be achieved by adopting a 'systems approach' to care," said Toomey. "As a Georgia designated Emergency Cardiac Care Center, you have become an integral part of a growing emergency cardiac care system throughout the state." To learn more about Grady's Heart and Vascular Center, visit https://www.gradyhealth.org/care-treatment/heart-vascular-center/. About Grady Health System: Grady Health System is one of the largest safety net health systems in the United States. Grady consists of the 953-bed Grady Memorial Hospital, six neighborhood health centers, Crestview Health & Rehabilitation Center, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Hughes Spalding, which is operated as a Children's affiliate. With its nationally acclaimed emergency medical services, Grady has the premier Level I trauma center in the Metro Atlanta region and serves as the 911 ambulance provider for the city of Atlanta. Grady's American Burn Association/American College of Surgeons verified Burn Center is one of only two in the state. And the Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center is a Joint Commission designated Advanced Comprehensive Stroke Center. Other key services/distinctions include Grady's Regional Perinatal Center with its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Georgia's first Cancer Center for Excellence, The Avon Comprehensive Breast Center, the Georgia Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center, and the Ponce de Leon Center - one of the top HIV/AIDS outpatient clinics in the country. Grady is one of an elite group of hospitals to earn the Baby-Friendly USA international recognition as a Baby-Friendly Designated birth facility. For more information visit http://www.gradyhealth.org/. SOURCE Grady Health System WALNUT CREEK, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Heffernan Insurance Brokers, one of the largest full-service, independent insurance brokerage firms in the United States, acquired Beals Insurance Agency located in Ventura, Calif. Charley Beals, president of Beals, joined Heffernan Insurance Brokers effective August 1, 2022. Charley Beals has over 19 years of experience in the insurance industry and founded Beals Insurance Agency in 2014. He will be joining Heffernan's HeffDirect division, combining the two firms' specialty in residential long-term care facilities for the elderly. "We are very excited to be partnering with Heffernan and feel that the substantial resources available to us through this partnership will allow an unparalleled customer experience and position us to bring a level of service that the industry has never seen," said Charley Beals, now Vice President at Heffernan Insurance Brokers. "We're looking forward to partnering with Charley Beals to provide an excellent customer experience and expanded resources to his loyal clients," said F. Michael Heffernan, President and CEO of Heffernan Insurance Brokers. "With a focus on residential long term care facilities, Beals is a welcome compliment to Heffernan's existing expertise, and we're confident we will deliver great products and services to existing clients while also seeking new opportunities." As part of the next phase of Heffernan's growth strategy, we are interested in collaborating with privately held independent brokers across the United States. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Matt McKenna, Director of Corporate Development, at 925-746-7962 or [email protected]. About Heffernan Insurance Brokers Heffernan Insurance Brokers, formed in 1988, is one of the largest independent insurance brokerage firms in the United States. Heffernan provides insurance and financial services products to a range of businesses and individuals. Headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., Heffernan has offices in San Francisco, Petaluma, Menlo Park, Truckee, Bakersfield, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles and Irvine, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Portland, OR; Seattle and Olympia, WA; St. Louis, MO; Philadelphia, PA; and London UK. Employee-owned, Heffernan Insurance Brokers was named the Top Mid-Sized Broker in the United States to work for in 2009 by Business Insurance Magazine. The firm has been among the Top Greater Bay Area Philanthropists since 2003. For more information, visit www.heffins.com. License #0564249 SOURCE Heffernan Insurance Brokers Data-driven report analyzes emerging cyber threats and trends that will dominate into 2023 WILMINGTON, Del., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Intel 471 , the premier provider of cyber threat intelligence for leading intelligence, security, and fraud teams across the globe, today released The 471 Cyber Threat Report; 2022-2023 Trends & Predictions. This research analyzes recent and commonly used tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that have been adopted by prominent threat actors, how these threats have affected enterprises, along with predictive intelligence assessments on threats that organizations should be prepared to thwart over the next year. 3 Key Steps to Protect Your Organization from Threats Emanating from the Cyber Underground The report details the most impactful threats that fueled the cybercrime ecosystem over the past year and the TTPs employed by the actors behind them. It provides recommended steps organizations should take to protect themselves against existing and emerging threats on the horizon. "It is important to not only draw attention to the TTPs commonly used by the most capable threat actors but also to provide rich context for how these TTPs can impact organizations at every stage of the cyberattack chain, and how they can be countered by tactical defenders and senior decision makers," said Intel 471 Chief Intelligence Officer, Michael DeBolt. "The findings of our latest research will help arm organizations with the adversary, credential, malware and vulnerability intelligence they need to refine their cyber defense strategy, adjust their security practices and prepare for 2023." Other key takeaways from the report include: Prominent cyber threats observed over the past year include compromised access and data, ransomware, return of Emotet malware and exploitation of vulnerabilities. Many of these can be mitigated with a comprehensive identity access password program and a patching and update policy, as well as continuous monitoring for compromised credential breaches across third parties. Many of these can be mitigated with a comprehensive identity access password program and a patching and update policy, as well as continuous monitoring for compromised credential breaches across third parties. Evolving threats included hacktivism, one-time password (OTP) bypass services, supply chain attacks and information-stealer malware. It is crucial to foster a culture of cybersecurity awareness to combat employee negligence synonymous with both OTP and information stealer malware. It is crucial to foster a culture of cybersecurity awareness to combat employee negligence synonymous with both OTP and information stealer malware. The threat landscape will continue to be shaped by an increase in ransomware attacks and a demand for network access, threat actors will persist in capitalizing on security vulnerabilities and hacktivism will likely remain a threat. Intel 471 also identified a number of cyber threat trends that will likely dominate the landscape in 2023 and beyond: As prominent ransomware groups such as LockBit continue to offer evolving products with targeted services , vulnerabilities have reduced in quantity whilst increasing in severity. In fact, last year several vulnerabilities accounted for some of the biggest threats faced by organizations. , vulnerabilities have reduced in quantity whilst increasing in severity. In fact, last year several vulnerabilities accounted for some of the biggest threats faced by organizations. World events have further complicated the threat landscape, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine acting as a catalyst for further polarization of the underground . The most prolific threat to date has been KillNet, a pro-Russian group who gained notoriety through orchestrating distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against pro-NATO countries and organizations. . The most prolific threat to date has been KillNet, a pro-Russian group who gained notoriety through orchestrating distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against pro-NATO countries and organizations. Threat actors monetized criminal services to great success in 2022. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) is a common security practice, and threat actors are turning to OTP bypass services to circumvent this layer of security. This area of the underground ecosystem will likely grow as demand increases for these services in the future. to circumvent this layer of security. This area of the underground ecosystem will likely grow as demand increases for these services in the future. The use of information-stealers will continue into 2023; since the beginning of 2022, there has been a substantial uptick in offering when compared to the same period of 2021. "With the constant evolution throughout the cyber threat landscape and resilience that threat actors continue to display, organizations need insights based on research and intelligence surrounding the most prominent threat actors to understand their activities and to stay ahead of the next attack," DeBolt added. "Just as threat actors and groups are adjusting their methods to remain resilient against new and emerging security measures, organizations should be staying abreast of key TTPs employed by adversaries and adjusting their security systems based on that intelligence to tackle new and refined ways of being compromised." The report also includes case studies on LockBit 2.0, the most impactful ransomware strain observed by Intel 471 from November 2021 through May 2022, and the release of version 3.0, which is shaping up to be just as impactful as 2.0, as well as on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent appearance of pro-Russian hacktivist groups. To help organizations protect themselves from threat actors and their continuously evolving TTPs, The 471 Cyber Threat Report includes a series of mitigation recommendations to help organizations and their security teams harden their security practices, detect potential threats, and isolate their sensitive information to avoid falling victim to new ransomware strains and malware. You can download the full report here . About Intel 471 Intel 471 empowers enterprises, government agencies, and other organizations to win the cybersecurity war using near-real-time insights into the latest malicious actors, relationships, threat patterns, and imminent attacks relevant to their businesses. The company's TITAN platform collects, interprets, structures, and validates human-led, automation-enhanced results. Clients across the globe leverage this threat intelligence with our proprietary framework to map the criminal underground, zero in on key activity, and align their resources and reporting to business requirements. Intel 471 serves as a trusted advisor to security teams, offering ongoing trend analysis and supporting your use of the platform. Learn more at https://intel471.com/ . Media Contact: John Kreuzer / Maxime Olshan-Cantin Lumina Communications for Intel 471 [email protected] SOURCE Intel 471 Get a comprehensive report summary describing the market size and forecast along with research methodology. The FREE sample report is available in PDF format Micro-segmentation Solutions Market 2022-2026: Scope The micro-segmentation solutions market report covers the following areas: Micro-segmentation Solutions Market 2022-2026: Vendor Analysis AlgoSec Inc., Arista Networks Inc., August Schell, Cisco Systems Inc., Cloudvisory LLC, ColorTokens Inc., Dell International Services India Pvt. Ltd., ExtraHop Networks Inc., Extreme Networks Inc., FireEye Inc., Fortinet Inc., Guardicore Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Illumioa Inc., Juniper Networks Inc., Nutanix Inc., Unisys Corp., Varmour Networks Inc., and VMware Inc. are among some of the major market participants. The key of a few of these vendors are listed below: AlgoSec Inc. - The company offers micro segmentation solutions that include Firewall Analyzer, AlgoSec Fireflow, AlgoSec Cloud, CloudFlow, ObjectFlow, AppViz, AlgoBot. The company offers micro segmentation solutions that include Firewall Analyzer, AlgoSec Fireflow, AlgoSec Cloud, CloudFlow, ObjectFlow, AppViz, AlgoBot. Arista Networks Inc. - The company offers micro segmentation solutions that provides arista macro segmentation service firewall capability for cloud vision allowing next-generation firewalls to be deployed automatically for specific workloads and workflows across modern overlay network virtualization fabrics. The company offers micro segmentation solutions that provides arista macro segmentation service firewall capability for cloud vision allowing next-generation firewalls to be deployed automatically for specific workloads and workflows across modern overlay network virtualization fabrics. August Schell - The company offers micro segmentation solutions that enable smarter monitoring, enhance analytics capabilities, identify anomalies, and optimize IT operations. The company offers micro segmentation solutions that enable smarter monitoring, enhance analytics capabilities, identify anomalies, and optimize IT operations. Cisco Systems Inc. - The company offers micro segmentation solutions that help to reduce attack surfaces, prevent the lateral movement of threats to contain breaches, strengthen regulatory compliance and secure zones across cloud and data center environments to isolate application workloads from one another and secure them individually. The company offers micro segmentation solutions that help to reduce attack surfaces, prevent the lateral movement of threats to contain breaches, strengthen regulatory compliance and secure zones across cloud and data center environments to isolate application workloads from one another and secure them individually. Dell International Services India Pvt. Ltd. - The company offers micro segmentation solutions that include network firewalls, next-generation firewalls, database firewalls, cloud firewalls, web application firewalls, and container firewalls, which help in creating zones in data centers and cloud environments to isolate workloads from one another and secure them. This report provides a full list of key vendors, their strategies, and latest developments. Request a FREE PDF Sample Now Micro-segmentation Solutions Market 2022-2026: Segmentation Product Services: The services segment will contribute the highest market share growth during the forecast period. Factors such as growing investments of enterprises in managed and professional services to enhance their security controls will drive the growth of the market. Software Geography North America : North America will account for 43% of the market's growth during the forecast period. This growth is attributed to factors such as significant increase in the investment in IT security owing to rising security concerns of enterprises across industries in the US and Canada . Moreover, market growth in this region will be faster than the growth of the market in other regions. The US is a key country in the micro-segmentation solutions market in North America . : will account for 43% of the market's growth during the forecast period. This growth is attributed to factors such as significant increase in the investment in IT security owing to rising security concerns of enterprises across industries in the US and . Moreover, market growth in this region will be faster than the growth of the market in other regions. The US is a key country in the micro-segmentation solutions market in . Europe APAC South America Middle East And Africa Micro-segmentation Solutions Market 2022-2026: Key Highlights CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2022-2026 Detailed information on factors that will assist micro-segmentation solutions market growth during the next five years Estimation of the micro-segmentation solutions market size and its contribution to the parent market Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior The growth of the micro-segmentation solutions market Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of micro-segmentation solutions market vendors Related Reports Domain Name System Tools Market by Product and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026 Custom Application Development Service Market by Deployment and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026 Micro-segmentation Solutions Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 28.04% Market growth 2022-2026 USD 3.61 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 27.22 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa Performing market contribution North America at 43% Key consumer countries US, China, Japan, UK, and Germany Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled AlgoSec Inc., Arista Networks Inc., August Schell, Cisco Systems Inc., Cloudvisory LLC, ColorTokens Inc., Dell International Services India Pvt. Ltd., ExtraHop Networks Inc., Extreme Networks Inc., FireEye Inc., Fortinet Inc., Guardicore Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Huawei technologies Co. Ltd., Illumioa Inc., Juniper Networks Inc., Nutanix Inc., Unisys Corp., Varmour Networks Inc., and VMware Inc. Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for the forecast period, Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized. Browse Information Technology Market Research Reports Table of Contents: 1 Executive Summary 1.1 Market overview Exhibit 01: Executive Summary Chart on Market Overview Exhibit 02: Executive Summary Data Table on Market Overview Exhibit 03: Executive Summary Chart on Global Market Characteristics Exhibit 04: Executive Summary Chart on Market by Geography Exhibit 05: Executive Summary Chart on Market Segmentation by Product Exhibit 06: Executive Summary Chart on Incremental Growth Exhibit 07: Executive Summary Data Table on Incremental Growth Exhibit 08: Executive Summary Chart on Vendor Market Positioning 2 Market Landscape 2.1 Market ecosystem Exhibit 09: Parent market Exhibit 10: Market Characteristics 3 Market Sizing 3.1 Market definition Exhibit 11: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition 3.2 Market segment analysis Exhibit 12: Market segments 3.3 Market size 2021 3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021-2026 Exhibit 13: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 14: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 15: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 16: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 4 Five Forces Analysis 4.1 Five forces summary Exhibit 17: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2021 and 2026 4.2 Bargaining power of buyers Exhibit 18: Chart on Bargaining power of buyers Impact of key factors 2021 and 2026 4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers Exhibit 19: Bargaining power of suppliers Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.4 Threat of new entrants Exhibit 20: Threat of new entrants Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.5 Threat of substitutes Exhibit 21: Threat of substitutes Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.6 Threat of rivalry Exhibit 22: Threat of rivalry Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.7 Market condition Exhibit 23: Chart on Market condition - Five forces 2021 and 2026 5 Market Segmentation by Product 5.1 Market segments Exhibit 24: Chart on Product - Market share 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 25: Data Table on Product - Market share 2021-2026 (%) 5.2 Comparison by Product Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by Product Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by Product 5.3 Services - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 28: Chart on Services - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 29: Data Table on Services - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 30: Chart on Services - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 31: Data Table on Services - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.4 Software - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 32: Chart on Software - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 33: Data Table on Software - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 34: Chart on Software - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 35: Data Table on Software - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.5 Market opportunity by Product Exhibit 36: Market opportunity by Product ($ million) 6 Customer Landscape 6.1 Customer landscape overview Exhibit 37: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria 7 Geographic Landscape 7.1 Geographic segmentation Exhibit 38: Chart on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 39: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) 7.2 Geographic comparison Exhibit 40: Chart on Geographic comparison Exhibit 41: Data Table on Geographic comparison 7.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 42: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 43: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 44: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 45: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 46: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 47: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 48: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 49: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 50: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 51: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 52: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 53: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 54: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 55: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 56: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 57: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.7 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 58: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 59: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 60: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) and - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 61: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.8 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 62: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 63: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 64: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 65: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.9 UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 66: Chart on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 67: Data Table on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 68: Chart on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 69: Data Table on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.10 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 70: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 71: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 72: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 73: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.11 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 74: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 75: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 76: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 77: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.12 Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 78: Chart on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 79: Data Table on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 80: Chart on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 81: Data Table on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.13 Market opportunity by geography Exhibit 82: Market opportunity by geography ($ million) 8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 8.1 Market drivers 8.2 Market challenges 8.3 Impact of drivers and challenges Exhibit 83: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026 8.4 Market trends 9 Vendor Landscape 9.1 Overview 9.2 Vendor landscape Exhibit 84: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation 9.3 Landscape disruption Exhibit 85: Overview on factors of disruption 9.4 Industry risks Exhibit 86: Impact of key risks on business 10 Vendor Analysis 10.1 Vendors covered Exhibit 87: Vendors covered 10.2 Market positioning of vendors Exhibit 88: Matrix on vendor position and classification 10.3 AlgoSec Inc. Exhibit 89: AlgoSec Inc. - Overview Exhibit 90: AlgoSec Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 91: AlgoSec Inc. - Key offerings 10.4 Arista Networks Inc. Exhibit 92: Arista Networks Inc. - Overview Exhibit 93: Arista Networks Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 94: Arista Networks Inc. - Key offerings 10.5 August Schell Exhibit 95: August Schell - Overview - Overview Exhibit 96: August Schell - Product / Service - Product / Service Exhibit 97: August Schell - Key offerings 10.6 Cisco Systems Inc. Exhibit 98: Cisco Systems Inc. - Overview Exhibit 99: Cisco Systems Inc. - Business segments Exhibit 100: Cisco Systems Inc. - Key news Exhibit 101: Cisco Systems Inc. - Key offerings Exhibit 102: Cisco Systems Inc. - Segment focus 10.7 ColorTokens Inc. Exhibit 103: ColorTokens Inc. - Overview Exhibit 104: ColorTokens Inc. - Key offerings 10.8 Dell International Services India Pvt. Ltd. Exhibit 105: Dell International Services India Pvt. Ltd. - Overview Exhibit 106: Dell International Services India Pvt. Ltd. - Product / Service Exhibit 107: Dell International Services India Pvt. Ltd. - Key offerings 10.9 ExtraHop Networks Inc. Exhibit 108: ExtraHop Networks Inc. - Overview Exhibit 109: ExtraHop Networks Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 110: ExtraHop Networks Inc. - Key news Exhibit 111: ExtraHop Networks Inc. - Key offerings 10.10 Extreme Networks Inc. Exhibit 112: Extreme Networks Inc. - Overview Exhibit 113: Extreme Networks Inc. - Business segments Exhibit 114: Extreme Networks Inc. - Key offerings Exhibit 115: Extreme Networks Inc. - Segment focus 10.11 FireEye Inc. Exhibit 116: FireEye Inc. - Overview Exhibit 117: FireEye Inc. - Business segments Exhibit 118: FireEye Inc. - Key offerings Exhibit 119: FireEye Inc. - Segment focus 10.12 Fortinet Inc. Exhibit 120: Fortinet Inc. - Overview Exhibit 121: Fortinet Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 122: Fortinet Inc. - Key offerings 11 Appendix 11.1 Scope of the report 11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist Exhibit 123: Inclusions checklist 11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$ Exhibit 124: Currency conversion rates for US$ 11.4 Research methodology Exhibit 125: Research methodology Exhibit 126: Validation techniques employed for market sizing Exhibit 127: Information sources 11.5 List of abbreviations Exhibit 128: List of abbreviations About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio BMNT Inc., NC State partner for Innovation Project Leaders course PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- BMNT Inc. and North Carolina State University will offer a series of training courses that teach members of the military community to apply lean innovation and entrepreneurship techniques to address national security and defense problems. Command Sgt. Maj. Veronica Knapp, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) senior enlisted adviser, serves on the senior leaders evaluation panel during the soldier presentations of those who graduated from the H4X: Lean Acquisition Innovation Course at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Photo by Spc. Jacob Wachob, 40th Public Affairs Detachment The series will offer both self-paced and instructor-led courses of varying lengths. Participants in the Innovation Project Leaders class will learn skills such as value proposition mapping and minimum viable product experiments. The class is one in BMNT's series of Hacking for X (H4X) courses and is based on the curriculum for the national Hacking for Defense program, which teaches students at 50+ universities to solve critical national security challenges. "This partnership brings us the ability to scale from training individual innovators to creating a lasting culture across the armed services," says Bull Holland, who taught a version of the course at NC State, as well as for the U.S. Army's 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions; and directs BMNT's H4X training series. "Students in this first course will learn how to apply rapid experimentation techniques perfected over time by numerous innovative startups to the daily defense challenges they face in the field." Sponsored by NC State's Office of Research and Innovation (ORI) National Security Initiatives and BMNT, the course will focus on filling a critical missing skill in the capabilities development process defining evidence-based product features. BMNT and ORI will also partner with NC State Entrepreneurship to identify additional opportunities for education, research and development. The National Guard Bureau is providing funding for guardsmen to take the course. "Military leaders have been asking service members to learn 'how industry does it,'" Holland says. "The Innovation Project Leaders class is a giant leap toward that goal." In the class, experts from the Army Research Laboratory, tech companies, universities and the capabilities development community will work with soldiers to develop solutions to challenges ranging from modernizing infantry mortar systems to improving Special Operations recruiting. "NC State proudly offers market-driven continuing education programs for individuals and groups in North Carolina and beyond, so this agreement with BMNT is a great way to support the specific training interests of our military community," says Alyson Wilson, NC State's associate vice chancellor for national security and special research initiatives. For information on the class, contact Bull Holland, [email protected]. Contact: Terri S. Vanech, BMNT Communications Manager, 203-918-1270, [email protected] SOURCE BMNT Inc TAIPEI, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ProLogium Technology (ProLogium), a global leader in innovative solid-state battery technology, announced today that it has joined NAATBatt International (NAATBatt), the premiere trade association of developers, manufacturers, suppliers and users of battery technology in North America, as a platinum member, and will also join upcoming meetings of its Board of Directors. "We are pleased to be a member of NAATBatt, to learn and participate in the development of innovative solutions for the advancement of battery technologies," said Vincent Yang, CEO and Founder of ProLogium. "The United States plays a crucial role in the global automotive industry value chain. Automakers are accelerating their plans to extend their EV product range. With manufacturing bases in the region, we will be able to better meet the market's needs and benefit from local policy support. The proximity allows for local production and local supplies, manufacturing closer to customers to reduce carbon footprint a win-win solution for the benefit of both our customers and ProLogium." Jim Greenberger, Executive Director of NAATBatt International, said: "I'm delighted that ProLogium has joined NAATBatt and is planning to become an important part of the North American advanced battery supply chain. Scaling the manufacture of electrochemical energy storage technology is a challenge facing countries worldwide. NAATBatt will do its best to provide the resources required by ProLogium and fully support ProLogium's efforts to promote innovative battery technology in North America and help it enter the commercial field more quickly." ProLogium is actively seeking to establish its first overseas battery plant. The company is in the process of selecting the location for its gigafactory in anticipation of the surging global demand for electric vehicles over the next decade. The estimated total investment in three phases is over USD 8 billion, and a feasibility study for potential sites has been initiated. "With the recommendation and assistance from the US Department of Commerce, we were invited to the 2022 SelectUSA Investment Summit. We met with US officials and governors during the SelectUSA Summit. The US government expressed its full support for ProLogium to set up plants locally, an indication of the increasing strategic importance of the next-generation battery," Vincent Yang commented. ProLogium has a three-phase construction plan for its first-ever overseas gigafactory. The total capacity is expected to reach 120 GWh when the plant is complete. The firm's final decision on plant location is set to be made by the first half of 2023 at the soonest. A due diligence process will be performed before the construction project kicks off. ProLogium also estimates that by 2031, the project will create over 6,500 jobs, and the company is poised to begin its global talent recruitment efforts in the areas of engineering, product research and development, business management, and more. ProLogium's manufacturing competence has been well established in the past nine years. Its first production line for consumer applications began operating back in 2013, and its roll-to-roll EV battery pilot line began production in October 2017. The battery maker owns proprietary technologies covering over 500 (applied or awarded) patents worldwide and has established more than 4,000 quality control items in its production processes, achieving 99.9% yield for its single-layer cell manufacturing and 94% yield for multi-layer cells. The company has already shipped more than one million cells for consumer electronic applications (from 15mAh to 1Ah) with a very high level of customer satisfaction. It has already begun the long testing and certification process with key global car OEMs by delivering nearly 8,000 EV battery cells (50-60Ah). These results laid a solid foundation for its global mass production gigafactory. SOURCE ProLogium Technology DENVER, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Two years ago, PeerSource decided to launch a summer internship program geared towards college students going into their senior year. A few successful internships later, PeerSource now wants to grow the program. PeerSource recruits information technology talent for clients nationwide, while its sister company, Nextaff, provides healthcare talent to facilities in several markets. Together, PeerSource and several Nextaff franchises are supported by shared services entity PSN Staffing. PSN interns are given the opportunity to work with multiple Nextaff franchises and Managing Partners around the country. It is a great opportunity to learn from many different entrepreneurs and business drivers that are veterans in the industry. It is also a great way to see how multiple offices and managers can work together to help each other succeed. John Snellings, Co-Founder of PeerSource and multiple Nextaff franchises, shared his perspective about how the internship was designed for his companies. "Our goal is not only to identify future talent for our firms and clients, but to also impart knowledge and share our entrepreneurial experience with aspiring young leaders," said Snellings. An internship with PSN is not your typical internship; these young adults get to learn and practice all different sides of the business. After a brief training period, they get to recruit, interview, hire, and onboard talent. Additionally, an intern at PSN will quickly learn that business development is just as important as recruiting quality talent. They reach out to potential clients by making calls, sending emails, and support various marketing strategies. They also contribute to the growth of the different Nextaff franchise's social media presence by utilizing their own creativity and expertise to craft content. "Being in the recruiting industry, we know the importance of getting real-world experience on a resume to stand out from the other college graduates," said Trevor Richards, a Director at PeerSource. "Our action-packed internship program gets them solid business experience in a fun, relaxed environment." This internship has created some great opportunities for college students, who get a chance to come back to the team as full-time employees after graduation. Snellings hopes that in the future, PSN can support a year-round internship program to give even more young adults the opportunity to be a part of it. For more information on the internship program, contact PeerSource at [email protected]. SOURCE PeerSource OSLO, Norway, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Photocure ASA (Photocure, PHO: OSE) will announce the second quarter and first half year 2022 financial results on Wednesday 10 August 2022 at 08:00 CEST and invites investors, analysts and the media to a presentation at Hotel Continental, Oslo, Norway at 14:00 CEST the same day. The investor presentation will also be streamed live and be hosted by Daniel Schneider, CEO and Erik Dahl, CFO. The presentation will be held in English and questions can be submitted throughout the event. The presentation is scheduled to conclude at 14:45 CEST. The quarterly report and presentation will be published at 08:00 CEST and will be publicly available at www.photocure.com. The streaming event is available through https://channel.royalcast.com/landingpage/hegnarmedia/20220810_2/ For further information, please contact: Photocure Erik Dahl CFO Tel: +47 45055000 Email: [email protected] Media and IR enquiries: Geir Bjrlo Corporate Communications (Norway) Tel: +47 91540000 Email: [email protected] About Photocure Photocure: The Bladder Cancer Company delivers transformative solutions to improve the lives of bladder cancer patients. Our unique technology, making cancer cells glow bright pink, has led to better health outcomes for patients worldwide. Photocure is headquartered in Oslo, Norway and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE: PHO). For more information, please visit us at www.photocure.com, www.hexvix.com, www.cysview.com This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/photocure/r/photocure-asa--invitation-to-presentation-of-second-quarter-and-first-half-year-2022-financial-resul,c3610350 The following files are available for download: SOURCE Photocure Pinner's suit alleges fraud and corruption surrounding the construction of Los Angeles Valley College's performing and media arts center by project director Mark Strauss, architect Kevin Tyrell, and others, costing taxpayers over $20 million. Arbitrator selected by Pinner and the School District found "bad faith" and wrongdoing after a six-week binding arbitration. Pinner attorney Newt Kellam demands that Board President Gabriel Buelna, who misled taxpayers to the Los Angeles Times saying this was just a "lawsuit" to "correct the record." Pinner attorney Lanny J. Davis, former special counsel President Bill Clinton, calls on the state legislature, the governor, and the attorney general to open an immediate investigation "A state audit is needed after the findings of bad faith and wrongdoing by the arbitrator," said Davis. "The young people who rely on community colleges are the real victims." LOS ANGELES, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pinner Construction ("Pinner"), a century-old Southern California construction firm, today filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District (the "School District") and its construction project consultants, alleging fraud, corruption, and racketeering conduct surrounding the construction of the School District's performing and media arts center, following the findings of a prestigious arbitrator that the District "consultants" were guilty of bad faith and wrong doing. Along with the School District, Pinner filed suit against DACM Project Management, QDG, Inc., ARCADIS U.S., Inc., Jacobs Engineering Group, Kevin Tyrell, Mark W. Strauss, and Gig Pukprayura (the "Racketeers") in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The law suit was reported in a major front page story in California news section by the Los Angeles Times this morning. The Times headlined the story: "Corruption and fraud besets long-delayed L.A. Valley college theater, project lawsuit alleges." The Times also reported the factual findings of an arbitrator, Deborah S. Ballet from JAMS, one of the most prestigious arbitration organizations in the nation comprised of many senior retired judges, selected by both Pinner and the School District, "found multiple management failures by college consultants." The arbitrator's finding includes the statement that this conduct violated California's "implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing" i.e., bad faith. Pinner Attorney calls out Board President Buelna for misleading comment Pinner attorney, Newt Kellam, cited the misinformation in his comment to the Los Angeles Times by the Board President Gabriela Buelna, who stated "people file lawsuits." Said Kellam: "The Board president is either willfully ignorant or has intentionally ignored the facts, which he must know, that the arbitrator selected by Pinner and the District, after an extensive 6-week binding arbitration or, in effect, a trial, found definitively that the District's consultants had "violated their covenant of good faith and fair dealing"i.e., acted in bad faith. "Now we at Pinner are suing the wrongdoers/consultant and the companies they work for, to be sure they pay out of their own pockets for their wrongdoing, not the "taxpayers." "Instead of ignoring this finding by the arbitrator, the entire Board, not just the Board President, should be actively conducting an investigation of this wrongdoing by its own consultants costing taxpayers, we now know from the arbitrator's decision, millions of dollars." Pinner attorney Lanny J. Davis, former special counsel to President Bill Clinton, called on the state legislature, the governor, and the attorney general to open an immediate investigation "A state audit is needed after the definitive findings of wrongdoing by the arbitrator," said Davis. "The young people who rely on community colleges are the real victims." According to the complaint, in September 2016, Pinner contracted with the School District, a state agency created by state legislation, to build a multi-building performing and media arts center on the campus of the Los Angeles Valley College campus ("the Project"). The center is to include three theatres, a lecture hall, a radio station, and several classrooms and studios. Pinner agreed to build the complex for a guaranteed maximum price of just over $78 million in 851 days. To incentivize a timely completion of the Project, the contract provided limited additional compensation to Pinner if the Project was delayed by the School District and actually charged Pinner with financial penalties if Pinner was responsible for the delay. According to the complaint, that was not the case for the Racketeers: "Unlike [Pinner], RACKETEERS essentially work hourly and are: (A) guaranteed to receive unlimited additional compensation if the Project is delayed by [Pinner]; (B) guaranteed to receive even more unlimited additional compensation if claims filed by [Pinner] are arbitrated; and (C) are not charged liquidated damages if Project delays are determined to have been caused by themselves or [the School District]." The lawsuit then asserts that because of this payment structure, the Racketeers, beginning in March 2017, "maliciously conspired to delay the Project, blame it on [Pinner] and earn themselves millions of additional dollars in the process." They did this, in part, by allegedly "interfering with needed approvals from the Department of State Architect ("DSA"), delaying needed design direction and/ or robbing the contractor and its subcontractors of the capital needed for manpower by cutting monthly payment applications, increasing the cost of performance and/ or refusing to pay change orders." This ultimately resulted in the breach of contract between the School District and Pinner. Pinner also alleges that from March 2017 onwards, there was a conspiracy among the Racketeers, combined with various actions that are crimes under federal law, and thus, violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations ("RICO") Act. California allows its citizens to file a civil case for damages under federal RICO Act. Pinner gives several examples of the Racketeers' allegedly illegal conduct: "RACKETEERS commenced engaging in a wide-ranging and fraudulent scheme to concoct a false narrative that [Construction Change Directive 19] should not be resubmitted, that building the Project without splices in vertical reinforcing steel above 30' would not delay the Project, that the plans clearly precluded splicing above 30' and that Pinner and its subcontractors were not entitled to extra compensation. These statements were proven false and fraudulent at an arbitration which spanned the summer of 2021. Undaunted, [Pinner is] informed and believe[s] that RACKETEERS continue to willfully and maliciously delay the Project through misrepresentations and concealments made to [School District's] board and Chief Facilities Executive related to harvested wood, audio visual design and door hardware design and Trespa culminating with witness tampering related to executed DSA documents." As a result of the allegedly corrupt overcharges by the Racketeers, Pinner alleges damages of nearly $25 million in extra construction costs, unnecessary consultant fees, attorney fees and loss of existing and future business opportunities. Pinner also alleges this scheme to delay the project for increased consulting fees has defrauded the people of California. According to the lawsuit's estimates, taxpayers have already footed more than $20 million in wrongful payments to the consultants, extra construction fees, legal fees, and lost resources for students at Los Angeles Valley College and Pinner says the number is only increasing as this matter goes unresolved. "Community college students are among the most vulnerable, often learning part-time and coming from first-generation, low-income backgrounds," said Dirk Griffin, CEO of Pinner, who attended Riverside City College. "Resources are scarce at these institutions as they rarely have large endowments, sizeable state funding, or consistent alumni donations. That's what makes this alleged fraudulent scheme so devastating. We believe these consultants are taking advantage of an already vulnerable population just to earn more in fees for themselves. It has to stop." "We allege this corrupt scheme among the named consultants ended up not just costing the taxpayers who, in the final analysis, fund these corrupt overpayments, but really, it's the students who pay tuition and in other ways are the victims of this corruption," attorney Davis said about the filed complaint. "That's why we are asking to meet with senior leaders of the California state legislature who are responsible for leading a state audit to consider initiating one. Davis went on to point out that it was the state legislature that created the School District and authorized the bonds to be sold to finance the LACCD. Davis concluded that he hopes leaders of the state legislature, supported by the governor and the attorney general, would start by initiating a state audit of this contract that the arbitrator found was riddled with over-billing and bad faith conduct." About Pinner Construction The people of Southern California have entrusted Pinner Construction with their building needs since 1919. Throughout the last century, the sustained growth of the firm, coupled with an unwavering commitment to excellence, has allowed it to provide top-tier customer service and truly one-of-a-kind project delivery to a variety of clients. Pinner is proud to celebrate 102 years of Pinner trust and looks forward to the next century and beyond. To learn more, please visit www.pinnerconstruction.com/ Media Contact: Taylor C. Pearson [email protected] 202-235-3482 SOURCE Newt Kellam, Kellam Law South Africa: Capetonians urged to use water sparingly The City of Cape Towns Water and Sanitation Directorate has advised residents to use water sparingly as the current rainfall is noticeably lower than the previous hydrological year. This comes after the citys Bulk Water Branch reported that, at this stage, the current seasons rainfall and its projections indicate that it is likely that the hydrological years rainfall will be below average. The city said it is carefully monitoring the situation and engaging with stakeholders to ensure water resources are optimised. Citys Mayoral Committee Member for Water and Sanitation, Zahid Badroodien commended the residents, as well as the agriculture and urban sectors, which continue to be mindful of their water usage and still implement water saving efforts. Badroodien said the lower water demand has benefited the system, but the city warned that the data from the hydrological year mirrors what has previously been experienced in drier years, hence the potential of having a sequence of drier periods cannot be excluded. We have learnt in the drought to follow a cautious risk-averse approach to water resource management and therefore would like to remind everyone to continue with water conservation measures. The city will continue to monitor the Western Cape Water Supply System status and keep residents informed, Badroodien said. According to the city, Cape Towns latest dam levels stand at 75.5%. This time last year, dam levels were at 97.5%. Reduced availability of surface and groundwater sources Following a comprehensive study of potential long-term climate change impacts, the city said it is assuming a reduction of 25% in water availability from both surface and groundwater sources over a 30-year planning horizon. The city said this is marginally more than initially assumed in the Water Strategy (2019) and is based on an innovative calculation methodology. The modelling also indicates that due to climate change, rainfall is expected to be experienced later in the typical rainfall season. The City of Cape Towns Water Strategy sets the course toward a future in which Cape Town has sufficient, reliable water from diverse sources so that it can be more resilient to the impact of climate change. The citys New Water Programme aims to bring more water online to ensure a safe, reliable supply for years to come through groundwater abstraction, desalination and water reuse, as well as optimising surface supply through clearing thirsty invasive alien vegetation. This programme forms part of the City of Cape Town Water Strategy: Our Shared Water Future, which aims to build resilience to the effects of climate change, and future drought that is expected to be more frequent and severe, and to ensure a safe, reliable water supply for generations to come, the city said. The programme aims to produce approximately 300 million litres (Ml) per day through groundwater abstraction, desalination and water reuse by 2030, the city added. Cape Flats aquifer recharge project Meanwhile, the city said the construction phase of the civil part of the Cape Flats Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) project, which will support the citys vision to create a water sensitive city, is expected to be completed in 2024. The MAR project includes the construction of a pre-treatment facility that will treat treated effluent to a high standard and then pump high quality water into the Cape Flats Aquifer. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2022-08-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Chinese agricultural products with geographical indications win favor with consumers People's Daily Online) 16:19, August 04, 2022 Agricultural products with geographical indications (GIs), which boast high quality and a good reputation, have become popular among Chinese consumers. Photo shows mudflats along a section of the Yellow River in Ruicheng county, Yuncheng city, north Chinas Shanxi Province. The county produces six kinds of agricultural products with geographical indications. (Photo/Xue Jun) A resident surnamed Wu in Beijing bought two boxes of Pinggu peaches, a GI product of Pinggu district situated in the countrys capital, and sent them to his friends living elsewhere via an e-commerce platform. A 200-gram peach is worth about 4 yuan ($0.59). The unit price is higher than that of an ordinary peach, but Pinggu peaches are very delicious and the taste serves as a memory from my childhood, Wu said. Wu added that he has always preferred GI agricultural products, such as Pinggu peaches, Yantai apples, and Korla pears, since he came to realize the unique advantages of such products. The name of a GI agricultural product is the combination of the name of the region where the product is produced and the common name of the product, according to Zhou Qingjie, executive director of a research institute at the Beijing Technology and Business University, who introduced that the names of GI agricultural products indicate their places of origin and superior quality. The development of GI agricultural products has not only brought quality agricultural products to consumers, but also helped improve the reputation of such products, increase farmers incomes and promote rural vitalization, Zhou said. China has continuously enhanced the protection of GI agricultural products in recent years. According to an official from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA), since the country implemented programs to protect GI agricultural products three years ago, it has supported the protection and development of 634 kinds of GI agricultural products and realized a sales volume of more than 270 billion yuan, which has helped 11.3 million rural households increase their incomes. So far, 62,000 different kinds of green, organic and GI agricultural products have been registered across the country. Workers in Wangheng village, Xinghua city, east Chinas Jiangsu Province, are busy producing Xinghua chives, a kind of geographical indication agricultural product, which will be exported to buyers overseas. (Photo/Tang Dehong) GI agricultural products have been recognized by more and more consumers. Zhou introduced that the high quality of GI agricultural products is the key to attracting consumers. Chinese e-commerce platforms have expanded the sales channels for GI agricultural products and have since delivered an eye-catching performance. Fresh food e-commerce platforms, including Hema Fresh and Dingdong Maicai, have actively promoted GI agricultural products. We launch a campaign to market GI agricultural products every fiscal year, said Li Tianyu, head of public relations of Hema Fresh, adding that GI agricultural products on the platform are widely recognized by customers. In addition, Chinas convenient system of logistics services has contributed to brisk sales of GI agricultural products. Thanks to unimpeded logistics, those GI agricultural products with strong seasonality, which were often sold locally in the past, can now be bought and delivered to peoples dining tables faster. China has rolled out a series of policies to promote the development of GI agricultural products. On May 30, the MARA issued a circular on further implementing programs to protect GI agricultural products, aiming to boost the development of 200 new GI agricultural products. These policies serve as references for the development of GI agricultural products, said Zhou, who suggested establishing a mechanism for tracing the origin of GI agricultural products using digital methods. Chinas GI agricultural products have also gained popularity among overseas customers. Since the China-European Union (EU) Geographical Indications Agreement came into effect in March 2021, 244 China-EU GIs have been mutually recognized and protected, which has boosted exports of Chinese GI agricultural products. For instance, in east Chinas Shandong Province, over 550,000 tonnes of Jinxiang garlic, a kind of GI product, have been exported so far this year, up more than 80 percent year-on-year. Zhou also suggested fostering a development pattern that focuses on the production of GI products and integrates storage, processing, transportation, sales and cultural tourism to promote the coordinated development of GI, tourism, cultural and creative industries, as well as other related industries. (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) Two-week "Ready, Set, Robotics!" challenge further integrates STEM learning while helping children learn to work collaboratively and give without expectation ATLANTA, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Children at Primrose schools across the country recently put their robotics skills to the test by solving problems through coding, design thinking and engineering during its first-ever "Ready, Set, Robotics!" challenge. As part of the two-week summer curriculum, adventurers worked in teams to design and engineer an original invention and created a video featuring their project to be entered into the contest. Nearly 85 schools participated and to conclude the friendly challenge, the three winning teams' schools received funds to donate to local charities of their choice. During the Primrose Schools Summer Adventure Club, children learned to code an interactive robot named Dash and nurtured their design thinking and engineering skills as part of the STEM-based Ready, Set, Robotics! challenge. Children nurtured their problem-solving skills through coding a programmable robot at the Primrose Schools Summer Adventure Club. Children learn how to think creatively and solve problems through designing an original invention during a junior robotics challenge at the Primrose Schools Summer Adventure Club. As part of the Primrose Schools junior robotics challenge, students interacted with a programmable robot named Dash through coding, mazes and special missions. Coming in first place, the winning team at Primrose School of Mill Creek in Mill Creek, Washington, donated $2,500 to Progress Animal Welfare Society. A team from Primrose School of Fleming Island in Fleming Island, Florida, achieved runner-up and donated $1,500 to Safe Animal Shelter. With a third-place win, Primrose School of West Allen in Allen, Texas, donated $1,000 to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Entries for the robotics competition were judged against a pre-defined rubric that emphasizes collaboration, creativity and social-emotional and robotics skills. "At Primrose, we believe who children become is as important as what they know. Encouraging the winning teams to donate their earnings to local charities exemplifies the principles in our Balanced Learning approach for children to learn about the importance of giving without expectation," said Jo Kirchner, CEO of Primrose Schools. "We are so proud of all the winners and participants for their creativity during this year's robotics challenge!" Recent research shows that robotics and STEM learning can be leveraged to build children's social and emotional competencies, including problem-solving and collaboration. STEM concepts are integrated in the Primrose Balanced Learning approach to focus on helping children develop character and life skills in addition to intellectual skills to nurture balance among mind, body and heart. During the Ready, Set, Robotics! program, students engaged with an interactive robot named Dash through coding, mazes and special missions. "Engaging in this challenge encourages children to think creatively and solve problems both individually and collaboratively at a young age, which helps foster their development at this stage," said Dr. Maria Shaheen, senior director of early childhood education at Primrose Schools. The Ready, Set, Robotics! program was a part of Summer Adventure Club at Primrose Schools, which provides a fun, full-day experience for children in kindergarten through fifth grade. About Primrose Schools Primrose Schools is the leader in providing premier early education and care to children and families in the United States. Founded in 1982, there are nearly 475 Primrose schools in 33 states and Washington D.C. today. Each school is independently owned and operated by Franchise Owners who partner with parents to help children build the right foundation for future learning and life. Primrose believes who children become is as important as what they know. The Primrose-exclusive Balanced Learning approach is created from the best early education wisdom and balances purposeful play with nurturing guidance from teachers to encourage curiosity, creativity, confidence and compassion. For more information, visit www.PrimroseSchools.com, connect with us on Facebook and Twitter, explore our blog, sign up for our Pointers for Parents emails and find a Primrose School near you. SOURCE Primrose Schools Zendesk (a world-leading customer support platform) recognizes Qtrac's consistently exceptional customer experiences VALENCIA, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Qtrac by Lavi Industries, a world-leading provider of virtual queue management and appointment scheduling systems , today announced it has received a Zendesk Customer Satisfaction Badge, a milestone that highlights how Qtrac customers can depend on reliable and knowledgeable support personnel for exceptional customer service during every engagement. "Achieving this recognition of exceptional support is a testament to our people, process, and flexible, user-friendly software," said Yoni Lavi, president of Qtrac. "This designation is fully controlled and managed by Zendesk, which ensures credibility and transparency for the recognition. The badge is a form of assurance that our customers are receiving the best-in-class support they deserve." "The badge is a form of assurance that our customers are receiving the best-in-class support they deserve." Tweet this World-class support is essential with SaaS platforms, and receiving customer feedback, even when service is exceptional, can be a challenge for any organization. Qtrac awards badges to its most engaged customers, which provides positive reinforcement for interacting with the company and incentivizes them to do more. To determine eligibility for a Customer Satisfaction Badge, Zendesk reviews a partner company's customer ratings. If a partner company has 120 satisfactory ratings overall, and the most recent 100 ratings are satisfactory and above, the partner is awarded the badge. "Delivering world-class service is critical to our organization's success, and, more importantly, to our customers' success," added Alek Nikolovski, Qtrac's helpdesk manager. Qtrac customer service is fully accessible for all customers via telephone, email, and live chat. Customers can also find an extensive self-help library through an online help center. ABOUT ZENDESK Zendesk is a cloud-based CRM company that builds software designed to improve customer relationships. Tools are fully customizable and can be integrated with a variety of other apps like Google Analytics. The company was founded in 2007 by three friends sitting around a kitchen table and now has more than 5,400 employees located in 160 countries. More information is available at zendesk.com . ABOUT QTRAC Qtrac provides virtual queue management systems to companies of all sizes and across many different industries around the world. Its virtual queuing technology enhances the customer experience by focusing on the way people interact with businesses in order to eliminate lines, increase sales and improve service. Qtrac was founded by Lavi Industries, the premier provider of public guidance and crowd control solutions. Building on Lavi's 40+ years of experience and success in helping the world's leading companies effectively guide people in, through and out of their facilities, Qtrac helps organizations improve their operations by improving the customer journey. More information is available at lavi.com and qtrac.com . SOURCE Qtrac by Lavi Industries COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Responding to an urgent radio appeal for stuffed animals to lift the spirits of young patients at Children's Hospital Colorado, Colorado Springs, local nonprofit organization Save the Storks quickly sprang into action this week, partnering with Beverly Hills Teddy Bear to deliver 500 plush toys. Save the Storks CEO Diane Ferraro, Board Chairman Herb McCarthy, and additional staff members presented the stuffed animals to Children's Hospital Colorado on Wednesday, August 3. "At Save the Storks, it is our desire to see children of all ages thrive," said Ferraro. Tweet this Save the Storks delivers hundreds of plush toys to Children's Hospital Colorado on Wednesday, Aug. 3. (Photo: Save the Storks) Based in Colorado Springs, Save the Storks provides compassion, education and holistic care to women facing unplanned pregnancies. Believing that choosing life doesn't end at birth, Save the Storks supports women and their children through all stages of life, providing practical and emotional support. "At Save the Storks, it's our desire to see children of all ages thrive," said Ferraro. "It's a privilege to serve, even in a small way, the Colorado Springs community in support of the phenomenal work being carried out by Children's Hospital Colorado." MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES AND VISUALS: Diane Ferraro , CEO of Colorado Springs -based nonprofit organization Save the Storks, is available for interviews , CEO of -based nonprofit organization Save the Storks, is available for interviews Photos and video are available of the stuffed animal delivery that took place on Wednesday, August 3 , at Children's Hospital Colorado, Colorado Springs About Save the Storks Save the Storks' mission is to create a story of hope and empowerment for every woman in an unplanned pregnancy. A nonprofit that began in 2012, with headquarters in Colorado and staff across America, Save the Storks is 100% funded through the support of donors. It equips, educates and trains pregnancy resource centers and churches across the United States to help them empower women to choose life. Save the Storks has captured the imagination of millions with its innovative mobile medical units, known as the Stork Bus. Today there are more than 76 Stork Buses on the road in 28 states. SOURCE Save the Storks VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Revolve Renewable Power Corp., ("Revolve or the Company") (TSXV: REVV), is pleased to announce that of the United States Bureau of Land Management (the "BLM") has notified the Company that its right of way / variance land application for the 250 megawatt (or "MW") Parker Solar and Storage Project (the "Parker Project"), located in La Paz County, Arizona has been approved for further processing. Highlights The Parker Project is a 250MW solar and battery storage project, located on approximately 1,530 acres of land wholly managed by the BLM in La Paz County , 9 miles southeast of Parker, Arizona . The entire project site is located in a solar variance area as identified in BLM's Solar PEIS and Record of Decision (ROD) (BLM/DOE 2012, BLM 2012a). It has the capacity to provide electricity to an equivalent of approximately 300,000 homes. The Company will now continue through the BLM approval process, which will consist of completion of an environmental review of the Parker Project in accordance with National Environmental Policy Act ("NEPA") of 1969 and all other applicable laws, regulations and policies. Development activities for the Parker Project over the remainder of 2022 are expected to consist of the following: Completion of field studies including biological, aquatic and cultural resource assessments; Continuation of the interconnection study process for the Parker Project by the Western Area Power Administration (" WAPA "); and "); and Review and amendment of the plan of development for the project. Revolve Parker Solar LLC., a 90% owned subsidiary of the Company, submitted a right of way (SF299) application to the BLM in September 2021 which included a Plan of Development and Variance Factor Analysis for the Parker Project. Following the submission of the SF299 application, the Company has worked with the BLM in accordance with the BLM's right of way regulations (43 CFR 2800) to advance approval of the Parker Project. This process included various preliminary meetings with relevant federal and state agencies, tribal consultation and a public consultation meeting held on February 2nd, 2022. Following completion of this process the Company has been officially notified of the BLM decision to approve the Parker Project for further processing. The Company also confirms that it has appointed Wood Group Inc. ("Wood"), a global engineering consultancy firm with extensive experience across the energy sector in the United States, to lead the field studies required as part of the NEPA process. The biological field studies have already commenced and will be completed in the coming months. The aquatic and cultural resource assessments will be completed during Q1 2023. Steve Dalton, CEO of Revolve, commented: "Completion of the variance approval process is a major milestone for the development of the Parker Project and is the result of some excellent work by the Revolve development team working closely with the BLM over the last 10 months. We now look forward to continuing this work with the BLM and our external consultants as the project moves into the NEPA process." About Revolve Revolve was formed in 2012 to capitalize on the growing global demand for renewable power. Revolve develops utility-scale wind, solar and battery storage projects in the US and Mexico with a portfolio of 3.7 gigawatts (or "GW") under development. The Company has a second division, Revolve Business Solutions Ltd., which installs and operates sub 20MW "behind the meter" distributed power generation (or "DG") assets, which has an operating portfolio of 3MW with an additional 3MW in the construction phase. Revolve has an accomplished management team with a demonstrated track record of taking projects from "greenfield" through to "ready to build" (or "RTB") status and successfully concluding project sales to large operators of utility-scale renewable energy projects. To-date, Revolve has developed and sold over 300MW of projects which are currently in commercial construction. Going forward, Revolve is targeting 5GW of utility-scale projects under development in the US and Mexico, and in parallel is rapidly growing its portfolio of revenue-generating distributed power generation assets Forward Looking Information Although Revolve believes, in light of the experience of its officers and directors, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors that have been considered appropriate that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because Revolve can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. When used in this press release, the words "estimate", "project", "belief", "anticipate", "intend", "expect", "plan", "predict", "may" or "should" and the negative of these words or such variations thereon or comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. The forward-looking statements and information in this press release include information relating to the business plans of Revolve and Revolves' management's expectation on the future development of the Parker Project, including the completion of the BLM approval process, publication by the BLM of the notice of intent to commence the NEPA process, completion of field studies including biological, aquatic and cultural resource assessments, completion of the Phase One interconnection study by WAPA, the review and amendment of the plan of development for the project, the Parker Project becoming one of the largest solar & storage projects in Arizona, the growth and performance of the Company's business in the United States and Mexico, including the planned MW capacity of its projects and its expansion into the distributed generation market. Such statements and information reflect the current view of Revolve and/or Revolve, respectively. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based on current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions, having regard to the Company's experience and its perception of historical trends, and includes, but is not limited to, expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions relating to the extent of regulations pertaining to the Company's projects and Revolves' ability to continue as going concern. Risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in those forward-looking statements and information, including but not limited to: the effects of weather, catastrophes and public health crises, including COVID-19; labour availability; disruptions to the Company's supply chains; changes to regulatory environment, including interpretation of production tax credits; armed hostilities and geopolitical conflicts; failure to obtain necessary regulatory approvals in a timely fashion, or at all; risks related to the development and potential development of the Company's projects; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; the availability of tax incentives in connection with the development of renewable energy projects and the sale of electrical energy; as well as those factors discussed in the sections relating to risk factors discussed in the Company's continuous disclosure filings on SEDAR. Such statements and information reflect the current view of Revolve. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking information contained in this press release represents the expectations of Revolve as of the date of this press release and, accordingly, is subject to change after such date. Readers should not place undue importance on forward-looking information and should not rely upon this information as of any other date. Revolve does not undertake to update this information at any particular time except as required in accordance with applicable laws. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE ReVolve Renewable Power Corp NEW BRITAIN, Conn., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Stanley Black & Decker (NYSE: SWK) today announced that Robert J. Manning, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MFS Investment Management, has been elected to the company's Board of Directors. With more than three decades of financial services experience and leadership, Manning brings a deep understanding of the investor community. Manning also has expertise in building corporate value and evaluating corporate capital allocation, operating systems and environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies. "Rob is a highly respected leader in the investment management industry, and his extensive knowledge of financial markets, investor perspectives and sustainable investing will enhance the expertise on our Board," said Andrea J. Ayers, Stanley Black & Decker Chair. "We look forward to working with Rob as we build on our efforts to maximize long-term value for all of our stakeholders." In accordance with its ongoing Board succession process, the Company has added five new non-management directors in the last three years. Robert Manning said, "I am thrilled and honored to join the Stanley Black & Decker Board. Stanley Black & Decker is an iconic American company, and I will work every day to help it succeed in the future." Manning retired as Non-Executive Chairman of MFS Investment Management earlier this year after a 37-year career with the company. Under his leadership, MFS evolved into a global investment manager capable of adding value for individual and institutional investors worldwide. He is credited for implementing initiatives which helped the firm weather the global financial crisis of 2008 and positioned MFS for continued success as the firm navigated through the global pandemic. Manning joined MFS in 1984 as a Fixed Income Research Analyst and held several positions with increasing responsibility within the firm's Investment division, including Fixed Income Portfolio Manager, Fixed Income Strategist and Director of Fixed Income Research. In 2004, he was named Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer. Manning added the chair role in 2010 and was named co-CEO in 2015. He had been Executive Chairman since 2017 and Non-Executive Chairman since 2021. Manning is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and earned an M.S. in Finance from Boston College. He is currently the Chair of the board of trustees for the UMass system. About Stanley Black & Decker Headquartered in the USA, Stanley Black & Decker (NYSE: SWK) is the world's largest tool company operating nearly 50 manufacturing facilities across America and more than 100 worldwide. Guided by its purpose for those who make the world the company's more than 60,000 diverse and high-performing employees produce innovative, award-winning power tools, hand tools, storage, digital tool solutions, lifestyle products, outdoor products, engineered fasteners and other industrial equipment to support the world's makers, creators, tradespeople and builders. The company's iconic brands include DEWALT, BLACK+DECKER, CRAFTSMAN, STANLEY, CUB CADET, HUSTLER and TROY-BILT. Recognized for its leadership in environmental, social and governance (ESG), Stanley Black & Decker strives to be a force for good in support of its communities, employees, customers and other stakeholders. To learn more visit: www.stanleyblackanddecker.com Media Contact: Debora Raymond Vice President, Public Relations [email protected] 203-640-8054 Investor Contact: Dennis Lange Vice President, Investor Relations [email protected] 860-827-3833 SOURCE Stanley Black & Decker Robotics System Integration Market - Vendor Analysis The robotics system integration market is fragmented and the vendors are deploying growth strategies such as focusing more on innovation and technological advancements to compete in the market. The robotics system integration market report provides complete insights on key vendors including Amtec Solutions Group Inc., Burke Porter Group, CNC Robotics Ltd., Concept Systems Inc., FH Automation, Geku Automation, Hitachi Ltd., IPG Photonics Corp., JH Robotics Inc., MESH Automation Inc., Midwest Engineered Systems Inc., Mitsui and Co. Ltd., Motion Controls Robotics Inc., Peak Analysis and Automation Ltd., Phoenix Control Systems Ltd., R U Robotics Ltd., RNA Automation Ltd., RobotWorx, TASI Group, and TW Automation. Burke Porter Group - The company offers robotic system integration solutions under its brand Van Hoecke Automation The company offers robotic system integration solutions under its brand Van Hoecke Automation Concept Systems Inc. - The company offers robotic system integration solutions such as OnGuard Collision Avoidance, OnRobotics, and LengthScan Pro. The company offers robotic system integration solutions such as OnGuard Collision Avoidance, OnRobotics, and LengthScan Pro. FH Automation - The company offers robotic system integration solutions for vision inspection and traceability. The company offers robotic system integration solutions for vision inspection and traceability. Geku Automation - The company offers robotic system integration namely the Robot Automation system for material handling, molding process, and assembly process. The company offers robotic system integration namely the Robot Automation system for material handling, molding process, and assembly process. Hitachi Ltd. - The company offers robotic system integration solutions through its subsidiary JR Automation. The company offers robotic system integration solutions through its subsidiary JR Automation. IPG Photonics Corp. - The company offers robotic system integration solutions through its subsidiary Genesis System Corp. The company offers robotic system integration solutions through its subsidiary Genesis System Corp. To know about the offerings of each vendor - Click Now! Robotics System Integration Market - Market Dynamics Drivers - The market is driven by factors such as the increase in demand for cobots, a surge in the industrial robotics industry, and technological innovations in robot system integration. The market is driven by factors such as the increase in demand for cobots, a surge in the industrial robotics industry, and technological innovations in robot system integration. Challenges - The high cost of services is hindering market growth. The high cost of services is hindering market growth. Trends - The increase in demand for application-specific industrial robots is a major trend that will open multiple growth opportunities for players in the market. For elaborated information on the market dynamics - Request a FREE sample now! Segmentation Analysis By Application, the market is classified into material handling, welding and soldering, assembly line, and others. the market is classified into material handling, welding and soldering, assembly line, and others. By Geography, the market is classified as Europe , North America , APAC, South America , and the Middle East and Africa. To know about the market contribution of each segment - Request a FREE sample! The competitive scenario provided in the Robotics System Integration Market report analyzes, evaluates, and positions companies based on various performance indicators. Some of the factors considered for this analysis include the financial performance of companies over the past few years, growth strategies, product innovations, new product launches, investments, growth in market share, etc.Don't wait, Make a strategic approach & boost your business goals with our Robotics System Integration Market Forecast Report - Buy Now! Related Reports - The elevator and escalator market share is expected to increase to 275.28 thousand units from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 4.37%. share is expected to increase to 275.28 thousand units from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 4.37%. The laser cutting machine market share is expected to increase to USD 1.25 billion from 2021 to 2026, at a CAGR of 4.91%. Robotics System Integration Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 9.8% Market growth 2022-2026 USD 4.38 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 9.4 Regional analysis Europe, North America, APAC, South America, the Middle East, and Africa Performing market contribution APAC at 46% Key consumer countries US, China, Japan, South Korea, and Germany Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled Amtec Solutions Group Inc., Burke Porter Group, CNC Robotics Ltd., Concept Systems Inc., FH Automation, Geku Automation, Hitachi Ltd., IPG Photonics Corp., JH Robotics Inc., MESH Automation Inc., Midwest Engineered Systems Inc., Mitsui and Co. Ltd., Motion Controls Robotics Inc., Peak Analysis and Automation Ltd., Phoenix Control Systems Ltd., R U Robotics Ltd., RNA Automation Ltd., RobotWorx, TASI Group, and TW Automation Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, and market condition analysis for the forecast period. Customization purview If our report has not included the data you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get customized segments. Browse for Technavio " Industrials Market " Research Reports Table of Content 1 Executive Summary 1.1 Market Overview Exhibit 01: Executive Summary Chart on Market Overview Exhibit 02: Executive Summary Data Table on Market Overview Exhibit 03: Executive Summary Chart of Global Market Characteristics Exhibit 04: Executive Summary Chart of Market by Geography Exhibit 05: Executive Summary Chart on Market Segmentation by Application Exhibit 06: Executive Summary Chart on Incremental Growth Exhibit 07: Executive Summary Data Table on Incremental Growth Exhibit 08: Executive Summary Chart on Vendor Market Positioning 2 Market Landscape 2.1 Market ecosystem Exhibit 09: Parent market Exhibit 10: Market Characteristics 3 Market Sizing 3.1 Market Definition Exhibit 11: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition 3.2 Market segment analysis Exhibit 12: Market segments 3.3 Market size 2021 3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021-2026 Exhibit 13: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 14: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 15: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 16: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 4 Five Forces Analysis 4.1 Five forces summary Exhibit 17: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2021 and 2026 4.2 Bargaining power of buyers Exhibit 18: Chart on the Bargaining power of buyers Impact of key factors 2021 and 2026 4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers Exhibit 19: Bargaining power of suppliers Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.4 Threat of new entrants Exhibit 20: Threat of new entrants Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.5 Threat of substitutes Exhibit 21: Threat of substitutes Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.6 Threat of rivalry Exhibit 22: Threat of rivalry Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.7 Market condition Exhibit 23: Chart of Market condition - Five forces 2021 and 2026 5 Market Segmentation by Application 5.1 Market segments Exhibit 24: Chart on Application - Market share 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 25: Data Table on Application - Market share 2021-2026 (%) 5.2 Comparison by Application Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by Application Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by Application 5.3 Material handling - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 28: Chart on Material handling - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 29: Data Table on Material handling - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 30: Chart on Material handling - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 31: Data Table on Material handling - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.4 Welding and soldering - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 32: Chart on Welding and soldering - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 33: Data Table on Welding and soldering - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 34: Chart on Welding and soldering - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 35: Data Table on Welding and soldering - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.5 Assembly line - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 36: Chart on Assembly line - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 37: Data Table on Assembly line - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 38: Chart on Assembly line - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 39: Data Table on Assembly line - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.6 Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 40: Chart on Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 41: Data Table on Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 42: Chart on Others - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 43: Data Table on Others - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.7 Market opportunity by Application Exhibit 44: Market opportunity by Application ($ million) 6 Customer Landscape 6.1 Customer landscape overview Exhibit 45: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria 7 Geographic Landscape 7.1 Geographic segmentation Exhibit 46: Chart on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 47: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) 7.2 Geographic comparison Exhibit 48: Chart on Geographic comparison Exhibit 49: Data Table on Geographic comparison 7.3 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 50: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 51: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 52: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 53: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 54: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 55: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 56: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 57: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.5 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 58: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 59: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 60: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 61: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 62: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 63: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 64: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 65: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.7 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 66: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 67: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 68: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) and - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 69: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.8 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 70: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 71: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 72: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 73: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.9 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 74: Chart on the US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 75: Data Table on the US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 76: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 77: Data Table on the US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.10 Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 78: Chart on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 79: Data Table on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 80: Chart on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 81: Data Table on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.11 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 82: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 83: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 84: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 85: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.12 South Korea - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 86: Chart on South Korea - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 87: Data Table on South Korea - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 88: Chart on South Korea - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 89: Data Table on South Korea - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.13 Market opportunity by geography Exhibit 90: Market opportunity by geography ($ million) 8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 8.1 Market drivers 8.2 Market challenges 8.3 Impact of drivers and challenges Exhibit 91: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026 8.4 Market trends 9 Vendor Landscape 9.1 Overview 9.2 Vendor landscape Exhibit 92: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation 9.3 Landscape disruption Exhibit 93: Overview on factors of disruption 9.4 Industry risks Exhibit 94: Impact of key risks on business 10 Vendor Analysis 10.1 Vendors covered Exhibit 95: Vendors covered 10.2 Market positioning of vendors Exhibit 96: Matrix on vendor position and classification 10.3 Burke Porter Group Exhibit 97: Burke Porter Group - Overview Exhibit 98: Burke Porter Group - Product / Service Exhibit 99: Burke Porter Group - Key offerings 10.4 Concept Systems Inc. Exhibit 100: Concept Systems Inc. - Overview Exhibit 101: Concept Systems Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 102: Concept Systems Inc. - Key offerings 10.5 FH Automation Exhibit 103: FH Automation - Overview Exhibit 104: FH Automation - Product / Service Exhibit 105: FH Automation - Key offerings 10.6 Geku Automation Exhibit 106: Geku Automation - Overview Exhibit 107: Geku Automation - Product / Service Exhibit 108: Geku Automation - Key offerings 10.7 Hitachi Ltd. Exhibit 109: Hitachi Ltd. - Overview Exhibit 110: Hitachi Ltd. - Business segments Exhibit 111: Hitachi Ltd. - Key news Exhibit 112: Hitachi Ltd. - Key offerings Exhibit 113: Hitachi Ltd. - Segment focus 10.8 IPG Photonics Corp. Exhibit 114: IPG Photonics Corp. - Overview Exhibit 115: IPG Photonics Corp. - Product / Service Exhibit 116: IPG Photonics Corp. - Key offerings 10.9 Midwest Engineered Systems Inc. Exhibit 117: Midwest Engineered Systems Inc. - Overview Exhibit 118: Midwest Engineered Systems Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 119: Midwest Engineered Systems Inc. - Key offerings 10.10 Phoenix Control Systems Ltd. Exhibit 120: Phoenix Control Systems Ltd. - Overview Exhibit 121: Phoenix Control Systems Ltd. - Product / Service Exhibit 122: Phoenix Control Systems Ltd. - Key offerings 10.11 RobotWorx Exhibit 123: RobotWorx - Overview Exhibit 124: RobotWorx - Product / Service Exhibit 125: RobotWorx - Key offerings 10.12 TASI Group Exhibit 126: TASI Group - Overview Exhibit 127: TASI Group - Product / Service Exhibit 128: TASI Group - Key offerings 11 Appendix 11.1 Scope of the report 11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist Exhibit 129: Inclusions checklist Exhibit 130: Exclusions checklist 11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$ Exhibit 131: Currency conversion rates for US$ 11.4 Research methodology Exhibit 132: Research methodology Exhibit 133: Validation techniques employed for market sizing Exhibit 134: Information sources 11.5 List of abbreviations Exhibit 135: List of abbreviations About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio MECHANICSBURG, Pa., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Select Medical Holdings Corporation ("Select Medical," "we," "us," or "our") (NYSE: SEM) today announced results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2022, and the declaration of a cash dividend. For the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, revenue increased 1.3% to $1,584.7 million, compared to $1,564.0 million for the same quarter, prior year. Income from operations was $121.0 million for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $284.0 million for the same quarter, prior year. For the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, income from operations included $15.1 million of other operating income related to the recognition of payments received under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act ("CARES Act") Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund, also referred to as the Provider Relief Fund, compared to $98.0 million for the same quarter, prior year. Net income was $66.3 million for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $196.2 million for the same quarter, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA was $181.0 million for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $342.0 million for the same quarter, prior year. Earnings per common share was $0.43 for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $1.22 for the same quarter, prior year. The definition of Adjusted EBITDA and a reconciliation of net income to Adjusted EBITDA are presented in table IX of this release. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, revenue increased 2.4% to $3,184.3 million, compared to $3,110.5 million for the same period, prior year. Income from operations was $225.0 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $486.0 million for the same period, prior year. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, income from operations included $15.1 million of other operating income related to the recognition of payments received under the Provider Relief Fund, compared to $114.1 million for the same period, prior year. Net income was $122.2 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $333.4 million for the same period, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA was $344.8 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $600.4 million for the same period, prior year. Earnings per common share was $0.79 for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $2.04 for the same period, prior year. The definition of Adjusted EBITDA and a reconciliation of net income to Adjusted EBITDA are presented in table IX of this release. In addition to providing key statistics in tables VII and VIII of this release for both the second quarters and six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021, Select Medical also provided statistics for the comparable period in 2019. Select Medical believes this additional data provides insight into how it has performed in comparison to the year prior to the widespread emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 ("COVID-19") in the United States. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the duration and extent of disruption on our operations, continues to create uncertainties about Select Medical's future operating results and financial condition. Please refer to the risk factors in Item 1A and the section titled "Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on our Results of Operations" in Item 7 of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, for further discussion. Company Overview Select Medical is one of the largest operators of critical illness recovery hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, outpatient rehabilitation clinics, and occupational health centers in the United States based on number of facilities. Select Medical's reportable segments include the critical illness recovery hospital segment, the rehabilitation hospital segment, the outpatient rehabilitation segment, and the Concentra segment. As of June 30, 2022, Select Medical operated 105 critical illness recovery hospitals in 28 states, 31 rehabilitation hospitals in 12 states, and 1,920 outpatient rehabilitation clinics in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Concentra operated 518 occupational health centers in 41 states. At June 30, 2022, Select Medical had operations in 46 states and the District of Columbia. Information about Select Medical is available at www.selectmedical.com . Critical Illness Recovery Hospital Segment For the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the critical illness recovery hospital segment increased to $545.9 million, compared to $544.1 million for the same quarter, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the critical illness recovery hospital segment was $20.0 million for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $72.9 million for the same quarter, prior year. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the critical illness recovery hospital segment was 3.7% for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to 13.4% for the same quarter, prior year. Certain critical illness recovery hospital key statistics are presented in table VII of this release for the second quarters ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the critical illness recovery hospital segment increased to $1,147.7 million, compared to $1,138.9 million for the same period, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the critical illness recovery hospital segment was $56.0 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $186.2 million for the same period, prior year. For the six months ended June 30, 2021, Adjusted EBITDA included $17.9 million of other operating income related to the outcome of litigation with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the critical illness recovery hospital segment was 4.9% for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to 16.3% for the same period, prior year. Certain critical illness recovery hospital key statistics are presented in table VIII of this release for the six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. Rehabilitation Hospital Segment For the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the rehabilitation hospital segment increased 7.6% to $228.9 million, compared to $212.7 million for the same quarter, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the rehabilitation hospital segment was $49.8 million for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $50.8 million for the same quarter, prior year. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the rehabilitation hospital segment was 21.8% for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to 23.9% for the same quarter, prior year. Certain rehabilitation hospital key statistics are presented in table VII of this release for the second quarters ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the rehabilitation hospital segment increased 6.9% to $449.5 million, compared to $420.5 million for the same period, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the rehabilitation hospital segment was $92.2 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $101.3 million for the same period, prior year. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the rehabilitation hospital segment was 20.5% for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to 24.1% for the same period, prior year. Certain rehabilitation hospital key statistics are presented in table VIII of this release for the six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. Outpatient Rehabilitation Segment For the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the outpatient rehabilitation segment increased 2.4% to $287.3 million, compared to $280.4 million for the same quarter, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the outpatient rehabilitation segment was $33.6 million for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $45.6 million for the same quarter, prior year. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the outpatient rehabilitation segment was 11.7% for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to 16.3% for the same quarter, prior year. Certain outpatient rehabilitation key statistics are presented in table VII of this release for the second quarters ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the outpatient rehabilitation segment increased 5.0% to $559.2 million, compared to $532.4 million for the same period, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the outpatient rehabilitation segment was $60.2 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $72.0 million for the same period, prior year. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the outpatient rehabilitation segment was 10.8% for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to 13.5% for the same period, prior year. Certain outpatient rehabilitation key statistics are presented in table VIII of this release for the six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. Concentra Segment For the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the Concentra segment was $441.4 million, compared to $456.4 million for the same quarter, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the Concentra segment was $92.6 million for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to $137.1 million for the same quarter, prior year. For the second quarter ended June 30, 2021, Adjusted EBITDA included $32.3 million of other operating income related to the recognition of payments received under the Provider Relief Fund. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the Concentra segment was 21.0% for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, compared to 30.0% for the same quarter, prior year. Certain Concentra key statistics are presented in table VII of this release for the second quarters ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, revenue for the Concentra segment was $864.8 million, compared to $879.2 million for the same period, prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the Concentra segment was $182.1 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $219.1 million for the same period, prior year. For the six months ended June 30, 2021, Adjusted EBITDA included $32.3 million of other operating income related to the recognition of payments received under the Provider Relief Fund. The Adjusted EBITDA margin for the Concentra segment was 21.1% for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to 24.9% for the same period, prior year. Certain Concentra key statistics are presented in table VIII of this release for the six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021. Dividend On August 2, 2022, Select Medical's board of directors declared a cash dividend of $0.125 per share. The dividend will be payable on or about September 2, 2022, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on August 16, 2022. There is no assurance that future dividends will be declared. The declaration and payment of dividends in the future are at the discretion of Select Medical's board of directors after taking into account various factors, including, but not limited to, Select Medical's financial condition, operating results, available cash and current and anticipated cash needs, the terms of Select Medical's indebtedness, and other factors Select Medical's board of directors may deem to be relevant. Stock Repurchase Program The board of directors of Select Medical has authorized a common stock repurchase program to repurchase up to $1.0 billion worth of shares of its common stock. The common stock repurchase program will remain in effect until December 31, 2023, unless further extended or earlier terminated by the board of directors. Stock repurchases under this program may be made in the open market or through privately negotiated transactions, and at times and in such amounts as Select Medical deems appropriate. Select Medical funds this program with cash on hand and borrowings under its revolving credit facility. During the six months ended June 30, 2022, Select Medical repurchased 7,567,433 shares at a cost of approximately $177.6 million, or $23.47 per share, which includes transaction costs. Since the inception of the common stock repurchase program through June 30, 2022, Select Medical has repurchased 47,919,061 shares at a cost of approximately $592.8 million, or $12.37 per share, which includes transaction costs. Business Outlook for Revenue Select Medical reaffirms its 2022 business outlook for revenue, which was provided most recently in its May 5, 2022, press release. Select Medical continues to expect consolidated revenue to be in the range of $6.25 billion to $6.40 billion for the full year of 2022. Select Medical is also reaffirming its previously issued three-year compound annual growth rate target for revenue only, which is expected to be in the range of 4% to 6% for 2021 through 2023. Select Medical intends to address its business outlook and target compound annual growth rates for Adjusted EBITDA and earnings per common share when the labor climate stabilizes. Conference Call Select Medical will host a conference call regarding its second quarter results, as well as its business outlook for revenue and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on each of its reportable segments, on Friday, August 5, 2022, at 9:00am ET. The conference call will be a live webcast and can be accessed at Select Medical Holding Corporation's website at www.selectmedicalholdings.com . A replay of the webcast will be available shortly after the call through the same link. For listeners wishing to dial-in via telephone, or participate in the question and answer session, you may pre-register for the call at Select Medical Earnings Call Registration to obtain your dial-in number and unique passcode. Certain statements contained herein that are not descriptions of historical facts are "forward-looking" statements (as such term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995), including statements related to Select Medical's 2022 and long-term business outlook. Because such statements include risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements due to factors including the following: developments related to the COVID-19 pandemic including, but not limited to, the duration and severity of the pandemic, additional measures taken by government authorities and the private sector to limit the spread of COVID-19, and further legislative and regulatory actions which impact healthcare providers, including actions that may impact the Medicare program; changes in government reimbursement for our services and/or new payment policies may result in a reduction in revenue, an increase in costs, and a reduction in profitability; the failure of our Medicare-certified long term care hospitals or inpatient rehabilitation facilities to maintain their Medicare certifications may cause our revenue and profitability to decline; the failure of our Medicare-certified long term care hospitals and inpatient rehabilitation facilities operated as "hospitals within hospitals" to qualify as hospitals separate from their host hospitals may cause our revenue and profitability to decline; a government investigation or assertion that we have violated applicable regulations may result in sanctions or reputational harm and increased costs; acquisitions or joint ventures may prove difficult or unsuccessful, use significant resources or expose us to unforeseen liabilities; our plans and expectations related to our acquisitions and our ability to realize anticipated synergies; private third-party payors for our services may adopt payment policies that could limit our future revenue and profitability; the failure to maintain established relationships with the physicians in the areas we serve could reduce our revenue and profitability; shortages in qualified nurses, therapists, physicians, or other licensed providers, or the inability to attract or retain healthcare professionals due to the heightened risk of infection related to the COVID-19 pandemic, could increase our operating costs significantly or limit our ability to staff our facilities; competition may limit our ability to grow and result in a decrease in our revenue and profitability; the loss of key members of our management team could significantly disrupt our operations; the effect of claims asserted against us could subject us to substantial uninsured liabilities; a security breach of our or our third-party vendors' information technology systems may subject us to potential legal and reputational harm and may result in a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 or the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act; and other factors discussed from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), including factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" of the quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and of the annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 . Except as required by applicable law, including the securities laws of the United States and the rules and regulations of the SEC, we are under no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of any new information, future events, or otherwise. You should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results or performance. Investor inquiries: Joel T. Veit Senior Vice President and Treasurer 717-972-1100 [email protected] I. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations For the Three Months Ended June 30, 2021 and 2022 (In thousands, except per share amounts, unaudited) 2021 2022 % Change Revenue $ 1,564,020 $ 1,584,741 1.3 % Costs and expenses: Cost of services, exclusive of depreciation and amortization 1,291,448 1,390,550 7.7 General and administrative 35,737 37,268 4.3 Depreciation and amortization 50,954 51,081 0.2 Total costs and expenses 1,378,139 1,478,899 7.3 Other operating income 98,087 15,125 N/M Income from operations 283,968 120,967 (57.4) Other income and expense: Equity in earnings of unconsolidated subsidiaries 11,809 6,167 (47.8) Interest expense (33,888) (41,052) 21.1 Income before income taxes 261,889 86,082 (67.1) Income tax expense 65,681 19,820 (69.8) Net income 196,208 66,262 (66.2) Less: Net income attributable to non-controlling interests 31,314 11,055 (64.7) Net income attributable to Select Medical $ 164,894 $ 55,207 (66.5) % Basic and diluted earnings per common share:(1) $ 1.22 $ 0.43 _____________________________________________ (1) Refer to table III for calculation of earnings per common share. N/M Not meaningful. II. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations For the Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 and 2022 (In thousands, except per share amounts, unaudited) 2021 2022 % Change Revenue $ 3,110,483 $ 3,184,288 2.4 % Costs and expenses: Cost of services, exclusive of depreciation and amortization 2,584,897 2,797,560 8.2 General and administrative 71,140 74,781 5.1 Depreciation and amortization 100,574 102,120 1.5 Total costs and expenses 2,756,611 2,974,461 7.9 Other operating income 132,108 15,125 N/M Income from operations 485,980 224,952 (53.7) Other income and expense: Equity in earnings of unconsolidated subsidiaries 21,728 11,564 (46.8) Interest income 4,749 N/M Interest expense (68,290) (76,566) 12.1 Income before income taxes 444,167 159,950 (64.0) Income tax expense 110,745 37,762 (65.9) Net income 333,422 122,188 (63.4) Less: Net income attributable to non-controlling interests 57,982 17,864 (69.2) Net income attributable to Select Medical $ 275,440 $ 104,324 (62.1) % Basic and diluted earnings per common share:(1) $ 2.04 $ 0.79 ______________________________________________ (1) Refer to table III for calculation of earnings per common share. N/M Not meaningful. III. Earnings per Share For the Three and Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 and 2022 (In thousands, except per share amounts, unaudited) Select Medical's capital structure includes common stock and unvested restricted stock awards. To compute earnings per share ("EPS"), Select Medical applies the two-class method because its unvested restricted stock awards are participating securities which are entitled to participate equally with its common stock in undistributed earnings. The following table sets forth the net income attributable to Select Medical, its common shares outstanding, and its participating securities outstanding for the three and six months ended June 30, 2021 and 2022: Basic and Diluted EPS Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 2022 2021 2022 Net income $ 196,208 $ 66,262 $ 333,422 $ 122,188 Less: net income attributable to non-controlling interests 31,314 11,055 57,982 17,864 Net income attributable to Select Medical 164,894 55,207 275,440 104,324 Less: net income attributable to participating securities 5,560 1,920 9,250 3,558 Net income attributable to common shares $ 159,334 $ 53,287 $ 266,190 $ 100,766 The following tables set forth the computation of EPS under the two-class method for the three and six months ended June 30, 2021 and 2022: Three Months Ended June 30, 2021 2022 Net Income Allocation Shares(1) Basic and Diluted EPS Net Income Allocation Shares(1) Basic and Diluted EPS Common shares $ 159,334 130,396 $ 1.22 $ 53,287 124,897 $ 0.43 Participating securities 5,560 4,550 $ 1.22 1,920 4,500 $ 0.43 Total $ 164,894 $ 55,207 Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 2022 Net Income Allocation Shares(1) Basic and Diluted EPS Net Income Allocation Shares(1) Basic and Diluted EPS Common shares $ 266,190 130,362 $ 2.04 $ 100,766 126,942 $ 0.79 Participating securities 9,250 4,530 $ 2.04 3,558 4,482 $ 0.79 Total $ 275,440 $ 104,324 ________________________________ (1) Represents the weighted average share count outstanding during the period. IV. Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets (In thousands, unaudited) December 31, 2021 June 30, 2022 Assets Current Assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 74,310 $ 94,669 Accounts receivable 889,303 921,623 Other current assets 175,826 204,756 Total Current Assets 1,139,439 1,221,048 Operating lease right-of-use assets 1,078,754 1,136,678 Property and equipment, net 961,467 955,752 Goodwill 3,448,912 3,476,213 Identifiable intangible assets, net 374,879 366,222 Other assets 356,720 395,745 Total Assets $ 7,360,171 $ 7,551,658 Liabilities and Equity Current Liabilities: Payables and accruals $ 942,288 $ 956,756 Government advances 83,790 6,471 Unearned government assistance 93 586 Current operating lease liabilities 229,334 233,917 Current portion of long-term debt and notes payable 17,572 44,009 Total Current Liabilities 1,273,077 1,241,739 Non-current operating lease liabilities 916,540 974,657 Long-term debt, net of current portion 3,556,385 3,723,734 Non-current deferred tax liability 142,792 157,892 Other non-current liabilities 106,442 107,738 Total Liabilities 5,995,236 6,205,760 Redeemable non-controlling interests 39,033 42,197 Total equity 1,325,902 1,303,701 Total Liabilities and Equity $ 7,360,171 $ 7,551,658 V. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows For the Three Months Ended June 30, 2021 and 2022 (In thousands, unaudited) 2021 2022 Operating activities Net income $ 196,208 $ 66,262 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities: Distributions from unconsolidated subsidiaries 7,751 3,654 Depreciation and amortization 50,954 51,081 Provision for expected credit losses 145 17 Equity in earnings of unconsolidated subsidiaries (11,809) (6,167) Loss (gain) on sale or disposal of assets 422 (1,453) Stock compensation expense 7,099 8,946 Amortization of debt discount, premium and issuance costs 552 565 Deferred income taxes (7,426) (2,385) Changes in operating assets and liabilities, net of effects of business combinations: Accounts receivable 28,391 19,794 Other current assets (8,431) (309) Other assets (12,945) (1,411) Accounts payable and accrued expenses 45,288 40,369 Government advances (73,703) (14,391) Unearned government assistance (97,716) 392 Income taxes (1,642) 6,717 Net cash provided by operating activities 123,138 171,681 Investing activities Business combinations, net of cash acquired (3,767) (14,055) Purchases of property and equipment (36,723) (46,332) Investment in businesses (4,614) (3,653) Proceeds from sale of assets 9,444 5,277 Net cash used in investing activities (35,660) (58,763) Financing activities Borrowings on revolving facilities 285,000 Payments on revolving facilities (275,000) Borrowings of other debt 1,700 Principal payments on other debt (5,972) (7,686) Dividends paid to common stockholders (16,876) (16,108) Repurchase of common stock (1,610) (126,947) Decrease in overdrafts (3,447) Proceeds from issuance of non-controlling interests 5,688 1,726 Distributions to and purchases of non-controlling interests (15,489) (8,368) Net cash used in financing activities (34,259) (149,130) Net increase (decrease) in cash and cash equivalents 53,219 (36,212) Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of period 750,274 130,881 Cash and cash equivalents at end of period $ 803,493 $ 94,669 Supplemental information Cash paid for interest $ 14,485 $ 20,700 Cash paid for taxes 74,751 15,500 VI. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows For the Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 and 2022 (In thousands, unaudited) 2021 2022 Operating activities Net income $ 333,422 $ 122,188 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities: Distributions from unconsolidated subsidiaries 19,384 11,140 Depreciation and amortization 100,574 102,120 Provision for expected credit losses 212 111 Equity in earnings of unconsolidated subsidiaries (21,728) (11,564) Loss (gain) on sale or disposal of assets 494 (1,476) Stock compensation expense 13,808 17,769 Amortization of debt discount, premium and issuance costs 1,095 1,123 Deferred income taxes (8,323) (1,965) Changes in operating assets and liabilities, net of effects of business combinations: Accounts receivable (31,751) (32,431) Other current assets (12,856) (2,128) Other assets (11,984) 1,275 Accounts payable and accrued expenses 89,915 25,367 Government advances (73,703) (77,319) Unearned government assistance (78,509) 493 Income taxes 42,976 23,315 Net cash provided by operating activities 363,026 178,018 Investing activities Business combinations, net of cash acquired (10,081) (19,241) Purchases of property and equipment (76,442) (93,177) Investment in businesses (11,185) (6,990) Proceeds from sale of assets 9,463 5,314 Net cash used in investing activities (88,245) (114,094) Financing activities Borrowings on revolving facilities 565,000 Payments on revolving facilities (375,000) Borrowings of other debt 8,915 17,494 Principal payments on other debt (15,314) (16,874) Dividends paid to common stockholders (16,876) (32,799) Repurchase of common stock (1,610) (178,623) Decrease in overdrafts (11,055) Proceeds from issuance of non-controlling interests 5,688 6,955 Distributions to and purchases of non-controlling interests (29,152) (18,663) Net cash used in financing activities (48,349) (43,565) Net increase in cash and cash equivalents 226,432 20,359 Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of period 577,061 74,310 Cash and cash equivalents at end of period $ 803,493 $ 94,669 Supplemental information Cash paid for interest $ 66,955 $ 74,217 Cash paid for taxes 76,094 16,423 VII. Key Statistics For the Three Months Ended June 30, 2019, 2021, and 2022 (unaudited) 2019 2021 2022 % Change Critical Illness Recovery Hospital Number of hospitals operated end of period(a) 100 99 105 Revenue (,000) $ 461,143 $ 544,059 $ 545,908 0.3 % Number of patient days(b)(c) 262,860 272,981 273,133 0.1 % Number of admissions(b)(d) 9,172 9,026 8,806 (2.4) % Revenue per patient day(b)(e) $ 1,739 $ 1,986 $ 1,987 0.1 % Occupancy rate(b)(f) 69 % 69 % 67 % (2.9) % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 64,138 $ 72,904 $ 20,019 (72.5) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 13.9 % 13.4 % 3.7 % Rehabilitation Hospital Number of hospitals operated end of period(a) 28 30 31 Revenue (,000) $ 160,374 $ 212,666 $ 228,887 7.6 % Number of patient days(b)(c) 86,525 104,948 108,812 3.7 % Number of admissions(b)(d) 6,017 7,360 7,450 1.2 % Revenue per patient day(b)(e) $ 1,635 $ 1,849 $ 1,928 4.3 % Occupancy rate(b)(f) 75 % 85 % 86 % 1.2 % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 29,968 $ 50,768 $ 49,845 (1.8) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 18.7 % 23.9 % 21.8 % Outpatient Rehabilitation Number of clinics operated end of period(a) 1,695 1,833 1,920 Working days(g) 64 64 64 Revenue (,000) $ 261,891 $ 280,409 $ 287,258 2.4 % Number of visits(b)(h) 2,203,505 2,404,861 2,450,912 1.9 % Revenue per visit(b)(i) $ 102 $ 102 $ 103 1.0 % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 42,584 $ 45,633 $ 33,601 (26.4) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 16.3 % 16.3 % 11.7 % Concentra Number of centers operated end of period(b) 526 518 518 Working days(g) 64 64 64 Revenue (,000) $ 413,451 $ 456,372 $ 441,357 (3.3) % Number of visits(b)(h) 3,103,089 3,030,078 3,214,512 6.1 % Revenue per visit(b)(i) $ 121 $ 125 $ 127 1.6 % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 76,087 $ 137,060 $ 92,607 (32.4) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 18.4 % 30.0 % 21.0 % _____________________________________________________ (a) Includes managed locations. (b) Excludes managed locations. For purposes of the Concentra segment, onsite clinics and community-based outpatient clinics are excluded. (c) Each patient day represents one patient occupying one bed for one day during the periods presented. (d) Represents the number of patients admitted to Select Medical's hospitals during the periods presented. (e) Represents the average amount of revenue recognized for each patient day. Revenue per patient day is calculated by dividing patient service revenues, excluding revenues from certain other ancillary and outpatient services provided at Select Medical's hospitals, by the total number of patient days. (f) Represents the portion of our hospitals being utilized for patient care during the periods presented. Occupancy rate is calculated using the number of patient days, as presented above, divided by the total number of bed days available during the period. Bed days available is derived by adding the daily number of available licensed beds for each of the periods presented. (g) Represents the number of days in which normal business operations were conducted during the periods presented. (h) Represents the number of visits in which patients were treated at Select Medical's outpatient rehabilitation clinics and Concentra centers during the periods presented. (i) Represents the average amount of revenue recognized for each patient visit. Revenue per visit is calculated by dividing patient service revenue, excluding revenues from certain other ancillary services, by the total number of visits. For purposes of this computation for the Concentra segment, patient service revenue does not include onsite clinics. VIII. Key Statistics For the Six Months Ended June 30, 2019, 2021, and 2022 (unaudited) 2019 2021 2022 % Change Critical Illness Recovery Hospital Number of hospitals operated end of period(a) 100 99 105 Revenue (,000) $ 918,677 $ 1,138,931 $ 1,147,663 0.8 % Number of patient days(b)(c) 520,989 566,099 562,350 (0.7) % Number of admissions(b)(d) 18,628 18,885 18,263 (3.3) % Revenue per patient day(b)(e) $ 1,749 $ 2,006 $ 2,032 1.3 % Occupancy rate(b)(f) 70 % 72 % 69 % (4.2) % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 137,136 $ 186,176 $ 55,986 (69.9) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 14.9 % 16.3 % 4.9 % Rehabilitation Hospital Number of hospitals operated end of period(a) 28 30 31 Revenue (,000) $ 314,932 $ 420,470 $ 449,521 6.9 % Number of patient days(b)(c) 169,341 207,387 212,614 2.5 % Number of admissions(b)(d) 11,853 14,491 14,632 1.0 % Revenue per patient day(b)(e) $ 1,634 $ 1,851 $ 1,935 4.5 % Occupancy rate(b)(f) 76 % 84 % 85 % 1.2 % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 55,765 $ 101,302 $ 92,224 (9.0) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 17.7 % 24.1 % 20.5 % Outpatient Rehabilitation Number of clinics operated end of period(a) 1,695 1,833 1,920 Working days(g) 127 127 128 Revenue (,000) $ 508,796 $ 532,370 $ 559,198 5.0 % Number of visits(b)(h) 4,257,988 4,505,015 4,760,998 5.7 % Revenue per visit(b)(i) $ 103 $ 103 $ 103 0.0 % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 71,575 $ 71,962 $ 60,197 (16.3) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 14.1 % 13.5 % 10.8 % Concentra Number of centers operated end of period(b) 526 518 518 Working days(g) 127 127 128 Revenue (,000) $ 809,772 $ 879,212 $ 864,780 (1.6) % Number of visits(b)(h) 6,014,696 5,825,652 6,331,410 8.7 % Revenue per visit(b)(i) $ 122 $ 125 $ 126 0.8 % Adjusted EBITDA (,000) $ 142,345 $ 219,075 $ 182,076 (16.9) % Adjusted EBITDA margin 17.6 % 24.9 % 21.1 % __________________________________________________ (a) Includes managed locations. (b) Excludes managed locations. For purposes of the Concentra segment, onsite clinics and community-based outpatient clinics are excluded. (c) Each patient day represents one patient occupying one bed for one day during the periods presented. (d) Represents the number of patients admitted to Select Medical's hospitals during the periods presented. (e) Represents the average amount of revenue recognized for each patient day. Revenue per patient day is calculated by dividing patient service revenues, excluding revenues from certain other ancillary and outpatient services provided at Select Medical's hospitals, by the total number of patient days. (f) Represents the portion of our hospitals being utilized for patient care during the periods presented. Occupancy rate is calculated using the number of patient days, as presented above, divided by the total number of bed days available during the period. Bed days available is derived by adding the daily number of available licensed beds for each of the periods presented. (g) Represents the number of days in which normal business operations were conducted during the periods presented. (h) Represents the number of visits in which patients were treated at Select Medical's outpatient rehabilitation clinics and Concentra centers during the periods presented. (i) Represents the average amount of revenue recognized for each patient visit. Revenue per visit is calculated by dividing patient service revenue, excluding revenues from certain other ancillary services, by the total number of visits. For purposes of this computation for the Concentra segment, patient service revenue does not include onsite clinics. IX. Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA Reconciliation For the Three and Six Months Ended June 30, 2019, 2021 and 2022 (In thousands, unaudited) The presentation of Adjusted EBITDA is important to investors because Adjusted EBITDA is commonly used as an analytical indicator of performance by investors within the healthcare industry. Adjusted EBITDA is used by management to evaluate financial performance and determine resource allocation for each of Select Medical's segments. Adjusted EBITDA is not a measure of financial performance under accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America ("GAAP"). Items excluded from Adjusted EBITDA are significant components in understanding and assessing financial performance. Adjusted EBITDA should not be considered in isolation or as an alternative to, or substitute for, net income, income from operations, cash flows generated by operations, investing or financing activities, or other financial statement data presented in the consolidated financial statements as indicators of financial performance or liquidity. Because Adjusted EBITDA is not a measurement determined in accordance with GAAP and is thus susceptible to varying definitions, Adjusted EBITDA as presented may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures of other companies. The following table reconciles net income to Adjusted EBITDA for Select Medical. Adjusted EBITDA is used by Select Medical to report its segment performance. Adjusted EBITDA is defined as earnings excluding interest, income taxes, depreciation and amortization, gain (loss) on early retirement of debt, stock compensation expense, gain (loss) on sale of businesses, and equity in earnings (losses) of unconsolidated subsidiaries. Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2019 2021 2022 2019 2021 2022 Net income $ 59,986 $ 196,208 $ 66,262 $ 113,330 $ 333,422 $ 122,188 Income tax expense 20,826 65,681 19,820 39,293 110,745 37,762 Interest expense 51,464 33,888 41,052 102,275 68,290 76,566 Interest income (4,749) Gain on sale of businesses (6,532) Equity in earnings of unconsolidated subsidiaries (7,394) (11,809) (6,167) (11,760) (21,728) (11,564) Income from operations 124,882 283,968 120,967 236,606 485,980 224,952 Stock compensation expense: Included in general and administrative 4,796 5,620 7,046 9,544 11,080 13,995 Included in cost of services 1,562 1,479 1,900 3,069 2,728 3,774 Depreciation and amortization 54,993 50,954 51,081 107,131 100,574 102,120 Adjusted EBITDA $ 186,233 $ 342,021 $ 180,994 $ 356,350 $ 600,362 $ 344,841 Critical illness recovery hospital(a) $ 64,138 $ 72,904 $ 20,019 $ 137,136 $ 186,176 $ 55,986 Rehabilitation hospital 29,968 50,768 49,845 55,765 101,302 92,224 Outpatient rehabilitation 42,584 45,633 33,601 71,575 71,962 60,197 Concentra(b) 76,087 137,060 92,607 142,345 219,075 182,076 Other(c)(d) (26,544) 35,656 (15,078) (50,471) 21,847 (45,642) Adjusted EBITDA $ 186,233 $ 342,021 $ 180,994 $ 356,350 $ 600,362 $ 344,841 ______________________________________________________________________ (a) For the six months ended June 30, 2021, Adjusted EBITDA included other operating income of $17.9 million. The other operating income is related to the outcome of litigation with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (b) For both the three and six months ended June 30, 2021, Adjusted EBITDA included other operating income of $32.3 million. The other operating income is related to the recognition of payments received under the Provider Relief Fund. (c) For both the three and six months ended June 30, 2022, Adjusted EBITDA included other operating income of $15.1 million related to the recognition of payments received under the Provider Relief Fund. For the three and six months ended June 30, 2021, Adjusted EBITDA included other operating income of $65.8 million and $81.9 million, respectively. The other operating income is related to the recognition of payments received under the Provider Relief Fund. (d) Other primarily includes general and administrative costs and other operating income, as discussed further above. SOURCE Select Medical Holdings Corporation SMITHFIELD, Va., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Smithfield Foods, Inc. this week donated more than 20,000 pounds of protein to help the victims of recent floods in Eastern Kentucky. Partnering with Mercy Chefs, a non-profit disaster relief organization, the donated products will be professionally prepared as restaurant-quality meals for victims, volunteers and first responders impacted by the historic floods. "At Smithfield Foods, we are passionate about leading the fight against hunger and making sure the communities where our employees live and work are supported," said Jonathan Toms, community development manager for Smithfield Foods. "With operations in Kentucky, thousands of our neighbors have been devastated by these unprecedented floods and do not know where their next meal is coming from or how they will feed their families. We are proud to partner with Mercy Chefs to aid their recovery and provide this much-needed nourishment." The donation is part of Helping Hungry Homes, Smithfield's initiative focused on alleviating hunger across the country and helping Americans become more food secure. By joining forces with Mercy Chefs, Smithfield is placing nearly 100,000 servings of high-quality, nutrient-rich protein in the hands of flood victims, volunteers and first responders. "The need here in Eastern Kentucky is so widespread and overwhelming," says Chef Gary LeBlanc, founder and chief executive officer of Mercy Chefs. "We are so grateful for Smithfield Foods' partnership to provide hope in the form of a meal and help hungry homes across Eastern Kentucky. We couldn't do what we do without their support!" This year, Helping Hungry Homes will help fight hunger by donating food to food banks, school nutrition programs, disaster relief and community outreach programs. To learn more about Helping Hungry Homes, visit https://www.smithfieldfoods.com/helping-communities. About Smithfield Foods, Inc. Headquartered in Smithfield, Va. since 1936, Smithfield Foods, Inc. is an American food company with agricultural roots and a global reach. With more than 60,000 jobs globally, we are dedicated to producing "Good food. Responsibly." and serve as one of the world's leading vertically integrated protein companies. We have pioneered sustainability standards for more than two decades, including our industry-leading commitments to become carbon negative in our U.S. company-owned operations and reduce GHG emissions 30 percent across our entire U.S. value chain by 2030. We believe in the power of protein to end food insecurity and have donated hundreds of millions of food servings to our communities. Smithfield boasts a portfolio of high-quality iconic brands, such as Smithfield, Eckrich and Nathan's Famous, among many others. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. SOURCE Smithfield Foods, Inc. WARRENTON, Va., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SPARC Research, based in Warrenton, VA, recently celebrated the grand opening of their new 20,000 sq. ft. office and manufacturing facility during a ribbon cutting ceremony held on July 08, 2022. SPARC Research ribbon cutting ceremony at new engineering and manufacturing facility in Vint Hill, VA. (Photo: SPARC Research) SPARC Research founder and CEO Dr. Patrick Hewitt and SPARC President Matt Cornwell welcomed distinguished guests from the Commonwealth, to include the Honorable Governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin, Deputy Secretary of Commerce and Trade for the Commonwealth of Virginia Nicole Riley, and Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman. The Honorable District Supervisor Holder Trumbo represented Fauquier County and welcomed local business owners and guests. Governor Youngkin expressed his enthusiasm for SPARC's decision to expand in Fauquier County by saying "I am so excited today as the vision of SPARC Research is about making rockets go. How exciting is that? When you in fact see entrepreneurs thriving and ideas becoming great businesses, that's an ecosystem that will win. It's amazing". Deputy Secretary Riley stated, "It was with the help of the Virginia Department of Economic Development and the county of Fauquier working together that we were able to secure this project". Dr. Hewitt said "I couldn't have asked for better support along the way from the various state and local organizations. They've been instrumental in making this happen and contributing to the success of SPARC Research". Mr. Cornwell followed by saying "Today is a day of celebration and recognition for what a small aerospace business has accomplished in four short years". Following opening remarks and speeches, Governor Youngkin presented SPARC with a Virginia flag which will be proudly on display to commemorate the event. The guests then participated in the official ribbon cutting ceremony at the entry, and later were given a tour of the new facility. The SPARC Research team will now begin Phase II of their planned expansion and transition to manufacturing of inert rocket motor components in the new facility. About SPARC Research SPARC Research was founded in 2018 to advance the state-of-the-art in rocket and airbreathing technology development, preliminary design, and prototype demonstration using modern multiphysics modeling tools. For more information, visit www.sparcresearch.com or contact: SPARC Research, 1 (540) 351-5121, [email protected] SOURCE SPARC Research ASU students who participated in the Cambridge International program in high school had higher average SAT and ACT scores compared to both state and national averages. WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambridge International, the world's largest provider of international education programs and part of the University of Cambridge, and Arizona State University, have released new findings about the impact of Cambridge Pre-Advanced (IGCSE) on college preparation and first year performance at Arizona State University (ASU). New findings from a study by Cambridge International and Arizona State University, "Cambridge IGCSE Performance and First Year Performance at Arizona State University," show that students who took the Cambridge Pre-Advanced IGCSE high school program demonstrated higher average SAT and ACT scores compared to both the state and national average, with the average SAT and ACT score being 1255 and 24.0 respectively for Cambridge students. This research highlights findings on 924 high school students who participated in Cambridge International programs between 2011 and 2018 and enrolled at ASU. Of the 924 high school students, 50% of students identified as Hispanic/Latino. The Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) is the world's most popular international qualification for 14- to 16-year-olds, offering over 70 course subjects for schools to choose from. Cambridge IGCSE is popular among schools in Arizona because it provides the preparation all students need for advanced coursework in high school, first-year college coursework, or dual enrollment. Further, in Arizona, students can earn the Grand Canyon High School Diploma by taking Cambridge IGCSE courses. "ASU is steadfast in our commitment to improving the college-readiness of Arizona high school students. We are encouraged by the results to date from Arizona students who have participated in Cambridge International's college preparation curriculum," said Kent Hopkins, Vice President of Academic Enterprise Enrollment at ASU. "Developing research fundamentals and critical thinking, as well as exposure to interdisciplinary learning, helps students gain skills that prepare them to succeed at a major research university like ASU. The development of these skills is core to the Cambridge curriculum." Other key findings included: The combination of high school GPA and performance on Grand Canyon Diploma subjects (American History, History, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and First Language English) was a good predictor of credit hours completed, first semester GPA, and first year GPA at ASU. IGCSE Mathematics was a good predictor of first year college math performance. Students who have higher IGCSE Mathematics grades tend to perform stronger in their college math courses. "Too many students who graduate from high school are unprepared for college, so we are very pleased to see that our Cambridge programs demonstrate college readiness for Arizona students," said Mark Cavone, Regional Director of Cambridge International in North America. "Our program produces well-rounded students who are prepared for Arizona higher education institutions, and challenges students to meet their full potential." The Cambridge IGCSE Performance and First Year Performance at Arizona State University study was a joint effort by the two organizations: Cambridge International and Arizona State University. Since Cambridge International launched its first partnership with Arizona schools in 2010, nearly 19,000 Arizona high school students have taken assessments for Cambridge Advanced (AS Level and A Level) and Pre-Advanced (IGCSE). By mastering Cambridge IGCSE courses, a student can earn the Grand Canyon High School Diploma, meaning that a student has mastered the material and is academically prepared to take college level courses without remediation. The Grand Canyon High School Diploma is available to any Arizona student who demonstrates college and career readiness in all core subject areas of English, mathematics, science, history and the arts before they leave high school. Cambridge International offers a fully integrated and flexible K-12 educational system, known as the Cambridge Pathway, that brings together globally recognized teaching and learning with meaningful assessments that measure student mastery. Further, over 850 universities in the U.S., including many state systems and all Ivy League institutions, recognize the Cambridge Advanced program. Cambridge Advanced (AS and A Level) exams offer students across the country the opportunity to earn college credit at many higher education institutions while in high school. About Cambridge Assessment International Education As a global organization with a 160-year history as part of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Assessment International Education partners with schools and districts around the world with a shared goal of making education transformation a reality. Schools in the U.S. now utilize the Cambridge Advanced program, an internationally benchmarked program that allows students to earn college-level credit in high school. Cambridge uniquely provides an instructional system across four stages (Primary through Advanced) aligning rigorous curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment for all students in grades K-12. Cambridge International is the short name for Cambridge Assessment International Education. Learn more! Visit www.cambridgeinternational.org/usa/ SOURCE Cambridge International Sun Life also establishes long-term strategic partnership with UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business TORONTO and LONDON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Sun Life Financial Inc. (TSX: SLF) (NYSE: SLF) announced today it has entered into an agreement to sell SLF of Canada UK Limited ("Sun Life UK") to Phoenix Group Holdings plc ("Phoenix Group") (LSE: PHNX). Headquartered in London, Phoenix Group is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business with more than 13 million customers and 310 billion of assets under administration. Sun Life UK manages life and pension policies and annuity blocks for UK Clients. The company is closed to new sales and has been operating as a run-off business in the life and pension policies segment since 2001. Sun Life will sell Sun Life UK to Phoenix Group for a closing price of 248 million (approximately C$385 million) and will retain its economic interest in UK's payout annuities business. This transaction will also provide further growth opportunities for Sun Life's asset management businesses. As part of the sale, Sun Life will form a long-term partnership to become a strategic asset management partner to Phoenix Group. Sun Life's asset management companies, MFS and SLC Management, will continue to manage approximately C$9 billion of Sun Life UK's general account upon the close of the sale. Phoenix Group has set a goal to invest approximately US$25 billion in North American public and private fixed income and alternative investments over the next five years. MFS and SLC Management will be material partners to Phoenix Group in achieving this goal. "We're excited to partner with Phoenix Group. A great deal of consideration was taken to find the right buyer and partner for our UK business. Phoenix Group is a purpose-led company with similar values to Sun Life and a strong focus on delivering outcomes for their customers. We're also pleased about our asset management partnership, which will bring the strength of MFS and SLC Management to Phoenix Group customers," said Kevin Strain, President and CEO of Sun Life. "Thank you to our UK team for all of their efforts in delivering solid results year-after-year in our life, pension and annuities businesses. We believe Phoenix Group will be a great organization for our UK employees and Clients." "This acquisition is highly attractive for Phoenix Group. As the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business with a strong track record of UK closed book integrations, we look forward to offering a safe home for Sun Life UK Clients over the long term and enabling them to benefit from our broad range of Standard Life products in our Open division," said Andy Briggs, Phoenix Group, CEO. "I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the colleagues who will join us from Sun Life UK. We are also pleased to enter into a new, long-term strategic asset management partnership with MFS and SLC Management, Sun Life's Asset Management businesses. This partnership will complement our existing relationships and further enhance our liquid and illiquid credit capabilities in North America by building on their strong presence in the region." Since 2016, Phoenix Group has successfully completed four acquisitions totaling approximately 7.5 billion. This has supported increasing their assets under administration by more than 300% over the past five years through organic and inorganic growth. Strain added, "The sale of the Sun Life UK business is consistent with our strategy to grow fee-based and capital light businesses. It also frees up capital to continue on our journey of creating long-term value for our shareholders. This transaction also aligns with our objective to continue building our Sun Life asset management pillar by creating an attractive long-term partnership with the UK's leading long-term savings and retirement business." This transaction is expected to close during the first half of 2023, subject to receipt of regulatory approvals and satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Fenchurch Advisory Partners acted as a financial advisor to Sun Life for this transaction and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP served as legal counsel. Slides related to this announcement are available at www.sunlife.com. About Sun Life Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance and health solutions to individual and institutional Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of June 30, 2022, Sun Life had total assets under management of C$1.26 trillion. For more information, please visit www.sunlife.com. Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF. About Phoenix Group Phoenix Group is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business. With 0.3 trillion of assets under administration, we offer our c.13 million customers a broad range of products across our market-leading pensions, savings and life insurance brands which include Standard Life and Sun Life. We support people throughout their savings cycle, and our vision is to help even more people on their journey to and through retirement, providing the right support at the right time. A member of the FTSE 100, we're a sustainably growing business united by a common purpose to help people secure a life of possibilities. This drives everything we do and means taking responsible and sustainable investment decisions and using our presence and voice to drive forward change for the better for our customers, our colleagues, and our wider community. We have been recognised as a leading employer for many years. We are accredited as a Living Wage Employer and as a Carer Positive Exemplary Employer for offering the best support to colleagues who are carers. Linkedin: PhoenixGroup-UK Twitter: @PhoenixGroupUK Forward-looking Statements From time to time, Sun Life makes written or oral forward-looking statements within the meaning of certain securities laws, including the "safe harbour" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements contained in this release include, without limitation, statements (i) relating to our strategies, (ii) relating to our anticipated divestiture of Sun Life UK, (iii) relating to our growth initiatives and other business objectives, (iv) relating to the expected timing of the closing of the transaction, (v) relating to the expected impact of the transaction on our business and financial results, (vi) that are predictive in nature or that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, and (vii) that include words such as "intends", "expect", "will", and similar expressions. These statements represent our current expectations, estimates, and projections regarding future events and are not historical facts, and remain subject to change, particularly in light of the ongoing and developing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the global economy and its uncertain impact on our business. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. The forward-looking statements in this news release do not reflect the potential impact of any non-recurring or other special items or of any dispositions, mergers, acquisitions, other business combinations or other transactions that may be announced or that may occur after the date of this news release. If any non-recurring or other special item or any transaction should occur, the financial impact could be complex and the effect on our operations or results would depend on the facts particular to such item and we cannot describe the expected impact in a meaningful way or in the same way we could present known risks affecting our business. Forward-looking statements are presented for the purpose of assisting investors and others in understanding our expected financial position and results of operations as at the date of this news release, as well as our objectives for the transaction, strategic priorities and business outlook following the transaction, and in obtaining a better understanding of our anticipated operating environment following the transaction. Readers are cautioned that such forward-looking statements may not be appropriate for other purposes and undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements. The following risk factors are related to our intention to divest Sun Life UK that could have a material adverse effect on our forward-looking statements: (i) the ability of the parties to complete the transaction; (ii) failure of the parties to obtain necessary consents and approvals or to otherwise satisfy the conditions to the completion of the transaction in a timely manner, or at all; (iii) our ability to realize the financial and strategic benefits of the transaction; and (iv) the impact of the announcement of the transaction and the dedication of our resources to completing the transaction. These risks all could have an impact on our business relationships (including with future and prospective employees, Clients, distributors and partners) and could have a material adverse effect on our current and future operations, financial conditions and prospects. Other important risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking statements in this presentation are set out in our MD&A for the period ended June 30, 2022 and in SLF Inc.'s other annual and interim regulatory filings filed with Canadian securities regulators or furnished to U.S. securities regulators, which are available for review at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov, respectively. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this document or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. Sun Life Media Relations Contact: Sun Life Investor Relations Contact: Rajani Kamath Yaniv Bitton Associate Vice-President Vice-President, Head of Investor Corporate Communications Relations & Capital Markets T: 647-515-7514 T: 416-979-6496 [email protected] [email protected] SOURCE Sun Life Financial Inc. ISSAQUAH, Wash., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The King County Library System (KCLS) offers a unique new service called Peers in Libraries to help meet community members' needs. Peers in Libraries is administered in partnership with Peer Kent, a nonprofit organization that aims to cultivate powerful, healthy lives by providing emotional support and development services to those impacted by addiction, mental health and/or HIV/AIDS. Peers in Libraries is one of only a few such programs in the nation, and the only one in Washington state. KCLS' Peer Services Specialists, or "Peers," work through a trauma-informed lens to connect people to the community resources and services they need, including shelter and housing, education, food and mental health referrals. Peers are individuals with lived experiences of mental or medical illness, substance abuse, homelessness and/or involvement with the criminal justice system. Now on a path to recovery, Peers draw on their experience to help patrons identify and achieve wellness goals. They provide support in a compassionate space, while sharing stories without judgment to help people rebuild their lives. Peers collaborate with day centers, shelters, food banks, safe parking sites, encampments and substance abuse treatment clinics to conduct community outreach. From January through June, Peers engaged with 1,115 patrons and referred 839 people to library and community resources. Peers also attended 190 community meetings to keep abreast of local needs. Peers have helped patrons find shelter, complete employment training, enroll in mental health treatment programs and sign up for benefits. "Peers in Libraries reflects KCLS' commitment to create communities of inclusion and belonging, and reduce barriers to access," stated KCLS Executive Director Lisa Rosenblum. "We are fortunate to have Peers at KCLS, and appreciate the impactful services they provide." The Peers in Libraries partnership provides three full-time Peer Services Specialists who work at the Kent, Renton, Federal Way and Bellevue Libraries. The King County Library System Foundation and King County Health Care for the Homeless Network provide grant funding for these positions. Learn more about Peers in Libraries at kcls.org/ask. About the King County Library System: Founded in 1942, the King County Library System (KCLS) is one of the busiest public library systems in the country. Serving the communities of King County (outside the city of Seattle), KCLS has 50 libraries and 1.3 million cardholders. In 2021, residents checked out over 7.8 million digital eBooks and audiobooks through OverDrive, making KCLS the fourth-highest digital circulating library system in the world and the highest per capita in the U.S. In 2011, KCLS was named Library of the Year by Gale/Library Journal. King County Library System Media Contact: Sarah Thomas, [email protected] SOURCE King County Library System BEIJING, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The 5G+AI Work Group of IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group has officially launched The third Wireless Communication AI Competition on July 25, 2022(Beijing time) on DataFountain (a leading Big Data & AI competition platform). The competition is open to all the people around the world, regardless of age or nationality. All colleges and universities, scientific research institutions, enterprises, maker teams, individuals, etc. can log on to the official website to register for the competition. COMPETITION BACKGROUND 5G+AI has become the most popular research area for the development of wireless communications. Competition becomes an unprecedented way to promote the integration of 5G and AI by involving academic and industrial R&D to solve typical wireless problems with AI/ML tools. The 5G+AI Work Group of IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group is committed to conducting research on the requirements, theories and technologies of deep integration of 5G and AI, and promoting the international standardization and industrialization process of 5G and AI integration. Wireless Communication AI Competition (WAIC) is hosted by The 5G+AI Work Group of IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group for researchers to contribute to the integration of wireless communications and AI, with the theme of "AI Enlightens Wireless Communication". A continue influence is expected for the WAIC to attract academic and industry contribution to the integration of 5G and AI. COMPETITION TRACK IN THE 3rd WAIC Track 1: AI-based Joint Channel Estimation and Channel State Information Feedback Track 2: AI-based High-Precision Positioning COMPETITION TASK Track 1: AI-based Joint Channel Estimation and Channel State Information Feedback Organizer: CAICT OPPO Task: In this competition, we consider to make use of the information compression, nonlinear recovery and end-to-end optimization capability of AI, to take the received pilot signal (CSI-RS) on small number of time-frequency resources at user equipment (UE) side as the input, and strive to realize the recovery of channel state information as accurately as possible at base station (BS) side, so that enabling the construction of high-quality wireless communication link. Specifically, the characteristics of this competition are as follows: a. Following the practical requirements of wireless communication system, the competition focuses on the improvement of CSI feedback performance based on received pilot signal with limited number. b. The solution design with two different pilot densities (sufficient and insufficient pilot) are required, and the performance will be evaluated separately. c. In the traditional communication module partitioning, channel estimation and CSI feedback are independently designed and optimized. With the empowerment of AI, there are actually a variety of potential implementation methods to improve the overall performance, such as based on integrated design or modular design. Participants can freely select the most appropriate implementation method to achieve the best performance. Track 2: AI-based High-Precision Positioning Organizer: CAICT, Huawei and vivo Task: This competition includes three cases, which examine the contestants' capabilities of using AI to obtain high-precision positioning accuracy. In general, several AI models need to be designed and trained by considering the channel knowledge, i.e., channel impulse response, as the network input. The output is indeed the user coordinate. Contestants need to optimize the network architecture as well as the training procedure, so as to get a more accurate inferencing result which will be compared with the ground-truth label to indicate the score. Specifically, the characteristics of this competition are listed as follows: a. The provided AI model(s) needs to have good scalability and generalization capabilities to handle different testing scenarios, i.e., spatial consistency differences b. The provided AI model(s) needs to work well when the distribution of the input data is shifting, i.e., the number of available BSs might differ c. The provided AI model(s) needs to have the capabilities to work well when the percentage of labeled data samples is relatively small. In this case, unlabeled data needs to be well utilized to improve the positioning performance. COMPETITION SCHEDULE The competition will be held online, and technology sharing and awarding will be carried out offline. Contestants should register, team up, and submit the model for evaluation on the official platform DataFountain. After the online competition, the top ten teams or individuals whose submitted models have been reviewed need to participate in the seminar and attend the award ceremony. The schedule is as follows: - July 25, 2022: The competition tasks are released, contestants can log in to the official website for registeringhttps://sourl.cn/qfsGMJ - August 1, 2022: The dataset is released. Contestants can log in to the official website to download the dataset. At the same time, the competition officially enters the evaluation stage. Players can submit the model files online to the competition platform. Each team can submit up to 5 times a day. The evaluation system will automatically evaluate the score. - September 25, 2022 12:00 (Beijing time): Deadline for registration and team formation. - September 28, 2022 12:00 (Beijing time): The evaluation platform is closed, and the score list is locked. - September 29-October 31, 2022: After reviewing the models of the top ten teams, the teams will be awarded the Golden, Silver, Bronze and the Winning prize in descending order of the evaluation results. The winning teams must participate in the seminar and the award ceremony. Teams that do not participate will abandon the competition by default. - November 2022 [to be confirmed]: Seminar and award ceremony. Bonus (for Both Track) Golden Prize: 300,000 RMB for 1 team Silver Prize: 50,000 RMB (per team) for 2 teams Bronze Prize: 20,000 RMB (per team) for 3 teams Winning Prize: 10,000 RMB (per team) for 4 teams Official Competition websitehttps://sourl.cn/qfsGMJ Click here to learn more and sign up. Contact email: [email protected] SOURCE IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group; DataFountain PARSIPPANY, N.J., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As America ushers in the new era of hybrid and flexible working following the pandemic, Reckitt's Lysol Pro Solutions, a science-led business-to-business offering, reveals the top 10 germiest surfaces in the workplace including elevator buttons, refrigerator doors, and keyboards. Vending Machine Coffee Machine Keyboard & Mouse Door Handles Elevator Button Telephones Kitchen Sink Tap/Handles Refrigerator Door Shared Printers TV Remote Control The researchi, conducted by a team of scientists, uncovers higher-risk hotspots a typical office worker can unknowingly encounter throughout the working day, potentially exposing them to germs such as rhinovirus, rotavirus, and norovirus. These encounters can lead to catching a cold or result in stomach problems such as nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Over 50% of American workers are currently working from home more than four days each week, and a third of workers indicate a preference to be fully remote.ii If companies are to be successful in encouraging employees to come back to the office, whether hybrid or full-time, giving them the confidence that important hygiene protocols are in place to help protect from germs at work is critical. The move to hybrid working also means that when employees come into the office, they often do so specifically to meet with their co-workers in communal spaces. Coupled with the rise in "hot desking" or "hotel desking," where almost a fifth (19%) of all American office workers now have no assigned desk,iii this combination can lead to shared surfaces being touched more regularly by different people than in a pre-pandemic office. As a result, illness-causing germs travel around the workplace differently than before. Against this backdrop, the following surfaces were identified by the Lysol Pro Solutions team as the top 10 germiest hotspots in a typical U.S. office: Entrance areas Communal kitchen Restroom Workspace Conference room Elevator buttons Coffee machine handles/buttons Door handles Keyboard & mouse TV remote control Refrigerator door Telephones Kitchen sink taps/handles Shared printers Vending machines By focusing cleaning and disinfection measures on the germiest hotspots, employers and facilities managers can develop a targeted hygiene program that helps provide protection for workers. Lysol Pro Solutions' science-led approach considers the composition of what materials different office surfaces are made of, where and when employees interact with each other in different areas, and the applicable disinfection products. The Lysol Pro Solutions approach also empowers workers to better understand how they can control the spread of germs and engage in the hygiene experience by equipping them with the products and education to help protect themselves and those around them. Hotspots such as keyboards and elevator buttons present a unique challenge when it comes to cleaning and disinfecting. These uneven surfaces with multiple crevices provide a host of hiding spots for germs and must be given extra attention by cleaning teams and employees when being cleaned and disinfected. In addition, timing and frequency of cleaning must be given special consideration for common area hotspots for example after a meeting has taken place in the conference room. If cleaning staff can't clean before and after every meeting, disinfecting products can be placed in the conference room for employees to use to help protect themselves and their co-workers. It is also unrealistic to expect elevator buttons to be disinfected by cleaning staff after every use. So, empowering office workers to engage in the hygiene experience, for example by practicing good hand hygiene before and after touching these surfaces or office workers using a disinfecting wipe on the buttons before touching them, can help break the chain of infection of germs. Dr. Lisa Ackerley, Director, Medical and Scientific Engagement, Hygiene, at Reckitt's Lysol Pro Solutions, comments: "The sheer number of shared surfaces in today's evolving workplaces makes it easy for germs to be spread and harder for cleaning teams and employees to understand where, when, and how to clean and disinfect potential hotspots. To help protect offices, additional germ-protection must be implemented by both employers and by employees themselves. Knowing exactly which areas to focus disinfection on and when provides the framework for a more intelligent approach to hygiene, helping inspire confidence amongst America's workforce to return to the office." Learn more about how to implement targeted hygiene for your business at www.lysolprosolutions.com ABOUT LYSOL PRO SOLUTIONS Reckitt's Lysol Pro Solutions harnesses the power of Lysol to help protect businesses and public spaces from the spread of germs. In today's world, consumers have increased hygiene expectations which makes germ-protection more critical than ever. The comprehensive approach from Lysol Pro Solutions incorporates science-backed protocols and training, EPA-approved Lysol products and Lysol branded marketing materials and signage. Lysol Pro Solutions empowers businesses to demonstrate to their staff and customers a commitment to providing a trusted standard for protection. ABOUT RECKITT Reckitt* is driven by its purpose to protect, heal and nurture in the relentless pursuit of a cleaner, healthier world. We fight to make access to the highest-quality hygiene, wellness and nourishment a right, not a privilege, for everyone. Reckitt is proud to have a stable of trusted household brands found in households in more than 190 countries. These include Enfamil, Nutramigen, Nurofen, Strepsils, Gaviscon, Mucinex, Durex, Scholl, Clearasil, Lysol, Dettol, Veet, Harpic, Cillit Bang, Mortein, Finish, Vanish, Calgon, Woolite, Air Wick and more. 20 million Reckitt products a day are bought by consumers globally. Reckitt's passion to put consumers and people first, to seek out new opportunities, to strive for excellence in all that we do, and to build shared success with all our partners, while doing the right thing, always is what guides the work of our 40,000+ diverse and talented colleagues worldwide. For more information visit www.reckitt.com/us. *Reckitt is the trading name of the Reckitt Benckiser group of companies i Research involved measuring surface contamination via ATP (adenosine triphosphate) analysis, analyzing people flow through public spaces, and reviewing published literature studies ii Streetbees, July 2022. Streetbees delivers in-the-moment consumer intelligence for consumer brands. Our 4.5 million global bees use a WhatsApp style app to capture their consumption moments, enriched with emotion and context. In their own words, photos and videos, consumers help Streetbees and its customers including Unilever, Pepsico and Mars uncover where to play and how to win. Streetbees proprietary machine learning and AI make it possible to turn these billions of data points into easy to access and easy to action growth opportunities. Launched this year, Streetbees GO is an always on category specific dashboard that delivers qualitative quality at quantitative scale. iii Survey conducted by Suzy between December 2021-January 2022 and commissioned by Lysol Pro Solutions. It received 918 responses from office workers across the US with an equal male/female split SOURCE Reckitt Twelve Designer-Inspired Colors to Freshen Up Any Space CLEVELAND, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, paint and coatings brand Valspar announces its 2023 Colors of the Year with 12 trend-worthy, forward-thinking, beautiful and livable colors. This year's colors are composed of comfort, acceptance and joy not a temporary solution but a lasting change. Valspar 2023 Colors of the Year Everglade Deck Restored A deep midnight blue, used as an elegant calming shade to restore our mind, body and home. Flora Thoughtful A deep blackened olive, a new neutral being introduced into the home embodies charm and sophistication. Desert Carnation Inspired Faded natural terracotta, leaves us inspired to craft a home with individuality and warmth. Valspar color experts have thoughtfully matched each color to a specific facet or emotion of life, all relating to what people may find helpful to complement their space. Homeowners are prioritizing areas of the home with paint to update their well-used spaces. By turning to nature-inspired design, this year's collection is all about finding new comfort, embracing a flexible lifestyle, rediscovering joy and leaning into the growing DIY movement. "Valspar's 2023 Colors of the Year are usable shades that encourage self-expression and anyone can envision in their space," said Sue Kim, Valspar Color Marketing Manager. "With our 12 colors to choose from, you are guaranteed to find a color that is picture-perfect for you!" The 2023 Colors of the Year All 12 colors are available at Lowe's stores, Lowes.com and Independent Retailers nationwide. Please note that color names vary at each retailer. See below for the full list of colors and how they add inspiration in a space. Cozy White Comfort A comfortable white with a yellow undertone that makes a space cozy like a soft blanket. A comfortable white with a yellow undertone that makes a space cozy like a soft blanket. Lowe's: 3008 10C Cozy White Independent Retailer: V168 Nice and Easy Villa Grey Mindful A cool grey that is balanced by the warmth of the yellow undertone, a natural hue like a cotton muslin cloth. A cool grey that is balanced by the warmth of the yellow undertone, a natural hue like a cotton muslin cloth. Lowe's: 6005- 1B Villa Grey Villa Grey Independent Retailer: V135-2 Soft Pelican Rising Tide Health A light blue that has a dose of softness, used as a fresh neutral with uplifting qualities of a modern pastel. A light blue that has a dose of softness, used as a fresh neutral with uplifting qualities of a modern pastel. Lowe's: 4008-3A Rising Tide Independent Retailer: V139-1 Sunday Sky Gentle Violet Connection A white softened by a violet undertone, a harmonious shade promoted by digital connectivity. A white softened by a violet undertone, a harmonious shade promoted by digital connectivity. Lowe's: 4002-3A Gentle Violet Independent Retailer: V126-1 Orchid Blush Holmes Cream Joy A classic tan that is dependable, with a yellow undertone that gives it new life with uplifting qualities. A classic tan that is dependable, with a yellow undertone that gives it new life with uplifting qualities. Lowe's: 3004- 10B Holmes Cream Holmes Cream Independent Retailer: V088-2 Silken Stockings Ivory Brown Natural A washed brown tone inspired by the shades found in nature, a new warm neutral being incorporated inside and out the home. A washed brown tone inspired by the shades found in nature, a new warm neutral being incorporated inside and out the home. Lowe's: 6006-1C Ivory Brown Independent Retailer: V135-4 Oyster Shoal Blue Arrow Balance A cooled down blue with a slight yellow undertone, a beautiful shade to find balance between cool and warm shades in the home. A cooled down blue with a slight yellow undertone, a beautiful shade to find balance between cool and warm shades in the home. Lowe's: 5001-3C Blue Arrow Independent Retailer: V139-3 Lagoon Reflection Green Trellis Calm Tapping into the calming tones of nature, this hazy green has duality bringing in the calm and liveliness we seek from outdoors. Tapping into the calming tones of nature, this hazy green has duality bringing in the calm and liveliness we seek from outdoors. Lowe's: 5006-3C Green Trellis Independent Retailer: V097-3 Stormy Day Desert Carnation Inspired Faded natural terracotta that leaves us inspired to craft a home with individuality and warmth. Faded natural terracotta that leaves us inspired to craft a home with individuality and warmth. Lowe's: 2005-7C Desert Carnation Independent Retailer: V085-3 Maple Tan Southern Road Contentment A muted clay with a brown undertone, embracing the life of contentment we seek in living with what we have. A muted clay with a brown undertone, embracing the life of contentment we seek in living with what we have. Lowe's: 1006-9C Southern Road Independent Retailer: V081-5 Aged Bourbon Flora Thoughtful A deep blackened olive, a new neutral being introduced into the home that embodies charm and sophistication. A deep blackened olive, a new neutral being introduced into the home that embodies charm and sophistication. Lowe's: 5004-2C Flora Independent Retailer: V143-6 Japanese Seaweed Everglade Deck Restored A deep midnight blue, used as an elegant calming shade to restore our mind, body and home. A deep midnight blue, used as an elegant calming shade to restore our mind, body and home. Lowe's: 5011-3 Everglade Deck Independent Retailer: V138-6 Cadet Song Free color tools available from Valspar For small changes to your home that can make a big impact, Valspar offers color tools to help you feel confident in your paint buying decisions. Free Color Consultations from our Color Experts offer personalized advice allowing you to find your perfect color! DIYers can also save a trip to the store by having paint chips sent directly to their home for free directly from valspar.com For more information on Valspar color trends and tools, please visit: valspar.com About Sherwin-Williams Consumer Brands Group Sherwin-Williams Consumer Brands Group offers innovative products to meet customers' paint and coating needs. The company manufactures products under well-known brands such as Valspar, HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams, Purdy, Krylon, Minwax, Thompson's Water Seal, Cabot and many more. Founded in 1866, The Sherwin-Williams Company is a global leader in the manufacture, development, distribution and sale of paints, coatings and related products to professional, industrial, commercial and retail customers. For more information, visit Sherwin.com. Media Contact Weber Shandwick Brittany Sell, 952-346-6293 [email protected] SOURCE Valspar https://spendedge.com/sample-report/zirconium-sourcing-and-procurement-intelligence-report Major Price Models in the Zirconium Sourcing and Procurement Market The report discusses in detail each pricing model and the pros and cons attached to every pricing model prevalent in the market. Also, the report provides insights with respect to the category supply chain and the margins of various suppliers within the supply chain. The most widely adopted pricing models in the Zirconium Sourcing and Procurement Market Index-based pricing model Spot pricing model Spend Growth and Demand by Region The Zirconium Sourcing and Procurement market will register an incremental spend of about USD 0.83 Billion during the forecast period. However, only a few regions will drive the majority of this growth. Moreover, on the supply side, North America, Europe, and APAC will have the maximum influence owing to the supplier base. The growth is expected to be primarily driven by increasing demand and adoption of the category across those few regions. Subscribe to our "Free Limited Period Starter Procurement Plan" to get the following: View 6 full reports View 800+ report samples Pre-order upcoming reports Dedicated account manager Subscribe Now for FREE! Most Adopted Procurement Strategies by Buyers Across the Zirconium Sourcing and Procurement Market The report provides a detailed insight of the most adopted procurement strategies by buyers across industries and analysis of these strategies with respect to innovation, regulatory compliance, quality, supply, and cost. Adoption of these procurement strategies will enable the buyers to reduce category TCO and achieve cost savings, while sourcing for thermal equipment requirements. To get the exact information on various procurement strategies: https://spendedge.com/sample-report/zirconium-sourcing-and-procurement-intelligence-report This Zirconium Sourcing and Procurement Market report answers help buyers identify and shortlist the most suitable suppliers, for instance: Am I engaging with the right suppliers? Which KPIs should I use to evaluate my incumbent suppliers? Which supplier selection criteria are relevant for? What are the workplace computing devices category essentials in terms of SLAs and RFx? Our Top Selling Procurement Reports: Asset Recovery Services - Forecast and Analysis: The asset recovery services will grow at a CAGR of 9.49% during 2021-2025. Asia Asset Recovery Pte Ltd., TES-Amm Singapore Pte Ltd., and Iron Mountain Inc. are among the prominent suppliers in asset recovery services market. Click the above link to download the free sample of this report. Vulnerability Management Sourcing and Procurement Report: Vulnerability Management Procurement Market, prices will increase by 4%-6% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a Moderate bargaining power in this market. Click the above link to download the free sample of this report. Celebrity Talent Management Services - Sourcing and Procurement Intelligence Report: This report offers key advisory and intelligence to help buyers identify and shortlist the most suitable suppliers for their celebrity talent management services requirements. Click the above link to download the free sample of this report. About SpendEdge: SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are the preferred procurement market intelligence partner for 120+ Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across numerous industries. Our strength lies in delivering robust, real-time procurement market intelligence reports and solutions. Contact SpendEdge Anirban Choudhury Marketing Manager Ph No: +1 (872) 206-9340 https://www.spendedge.com/contact-us SOURCE SpendEdge Market Overview One of the key factors driving the IT training market growth is the g rowth in the number of strategic partnerships among vendors. Growth in popularity of MOOCs is one of the key challenges hindering the IT training market growth. North America will register the highest growth rate of 35% among all regions. Therefore, the IT training market in North America is expected to garner significant business opportunities for the vendors during the forecast period. The IT training market vendors should focus on grabbing business opportunities from the infrastructure segment as it accounted for the largest market share growth in the base year. Scope of the Report IT Training Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2020 Forecast period 2021-2025 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 8.43% Market growth 2021-2025 USD 10.59 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 3.23 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA Performing market contribution North America at 35% Key consumer countries US, Canada, UK, Germany, and India Competitive landscape Leading companies, Competitive strategies, Consumer engagement scope Key companies profiled GP Strategies Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Learning Tree International Inc., LearnQuest Inc., Microsoft Corp., NIIT Ltd., Oracle Corp., Pluralsight Inc., QA group of companies, and SAP SE Market dynamics Parent market analysis, market growth inducers and obstacles, fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID-19 impact and recovery analysis and future consumer dynamics, and Market condition analysis for the forecast period. Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized. Browse for Information Technology Market Research Reports Didn't Find What You Were Looking For? Customize Report- Don't miss out on the opportunity to speak to our analyst and know more insights about this market report. Technavio can also help you customize this report according to your needs. Our analysts and industry experts will work directly with you to understand your requirements and provide you with customized data in a short amount of time. Speak to an analyst now to take full advantage of every opportunity using competitive analysis created just for you The Infrastructure Segment Held the Largest Market Share The IT training market share growth by the infrastructure segment will be significant during the forecast period. The growth of this segment is driven by the growing demand for skilled individuals in networking and cloud computing technology. Networking and cloud computing technologies have become crucial for enterprises, with growing digitization and the need for storage solutions North America is Expected to Hold a Significant Share of the Market 35% of the market's growth will originate from North America during the forecast period. The US and Canada are the key markets for IT training in the region. Market growth in this region will be faster than the growth of the market in other regions. The presence of major technology companies will drive the IT training market growth in North America during the forecast period. Learn about the contribution of each segment summarized in concise infographics and thorough descriptions. View a Sample Report Vendor Insights- GP Strategies Corp. International Business Machines Corp. Learning Tree International Inc. LearnQuest Inc. Microsoft Corp. NIIT Ltd. Oracle Corp. Pluralsight Inc. QA group of companies SAP SE The IT training market is fragmented and the vendors are deploying organic and inorganic strategies to compete in the market. Key Offerings GP Strategies Corp. - The company offers digital learning solutions by integrating across all learning areas and domains for learning transformation consulting, innovation and emerging learning strategy, content design and development, content curation, and learning analytics, measurement, and evaluation. Learning Tree International Inc.- The company offers over 360 IT courses covering 22 curricula and 120 IT certification paths. These courses are offered for professional development and continuing education and largely include curricula associated with Azure, Apple programming, Agile and Scrum, Windows Systems, etc. Microsoft Corp. - The company offers various training courses (through its subsidiary LinkedIn) such as business courses, technology courses, and creative courses on a single platform, taught by real-world practitioners located across the globe. To learn more about recent Developments in IT Training Market, Download our Sample Report Here are Some Similar Topics- Learning Management Systems Market for Higher Education by Deployment and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026: The learning management systems market share for higher education is expected to increase by USD 5.42 billion from 2021 to 2026 Recruitment Software Market by Deployment and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026: The recruitment software market share is expected to increase by USD 704.26 million from 2021 to 2026. Table of Contents 1 Executive Summary 2 Market Landscape 2.1 Market ecosystem Exhibit 01: Parent market Exhibit 02: Market characteristics 2.2 Value chain analysis Exhibit 03: Value chain analysis : IT Consulting and Other Services 3 Market Sizing 3.1 Market definition Exhibit 04: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition 3.2 Market segment analysis Exhibit 05: Market segments 3.3 Market size 2020 3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2020 - 2025 Exhibit 06: Global - Market size and forecast 2020 - 2025 ($ million) Exhibit 07: Global market: Year-over-year growth 2020 - 2025 (%) 4 Five Forces Analysis 4.1 Five forces summary Exhibit 08: Five forces analysis 2020 & 2025 4.2 Bargaining power of buyers Exhibit 09: Bargaining power of buyers 4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers Exhibit 10: Bargaining power of suppliers 4.4 Threat of new entrants Exhibit 11: Threat of new entrants 4.5 Threat of substitutes Exhibit 12: Threat of substitutes 4.6 Threat of rivalry Exhibit 13: Threat of rivalry 4.7 Market condition Exhibit 14: Market condition - Five forces 2020 5 Market Segmentation by Service 5.1 Market segments Exhibit 15: Service - Market share 2020-2025 (%) 5.2 Comparison by Service Exhibit 16: Comparison by Service 5.3 Infrastructure - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 17: Infrastructure - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 18: Infrastructure - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 5.4 Development - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 19: Development - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 20: Development - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 5.5 Database - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 21: Database - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 22: Database - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 5.6 Security - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 23: Security - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 24: Security - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) Exhibit 25:List of cybersecurity certification in the market 5.7 Others - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 26: Others - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 27: Others - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 5.8 Market opportunity by Service Exhibit 28: Market opportunity by Service 6 Customer landscape 7 Geographic Landscape 7.1 Geographic segmentation Exhibit 30: Market share by geography 2020-2025 (%) 7.2 Geographic comparison Exhibit 31: Geographic comparison 7.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 32: North America - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 33: North America - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 7.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 34: Europe - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 35: Europe - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 7.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 36: APAC - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 37: APAC - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 7.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 38: South America - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 39: South America - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 7.7 MEA - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Exhibit 40: MEA - Market size and forecast 2020-2025 ($ million) Exhibit 41: MEA - Year-over-year growth 2020-2025 (%) 7.8 Key leading countries Exhibit 42: Key leading countries 7.9 Market opportunity by geography Exhibit 43: Market opportunity by geography ($ million) 8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 8.1 Market drivers 8.2 Market challenges 8.3 Market trends 9 Vendor Landscape 9.1 Overview Exhibit 46: Vendor landscape 9.2 Landscape disruption Exhibit 47: Landscape disruption Exhibit 48: Industry risks 9.3 Competitive scenario 10 Vendor Analysis 10.1 Vendors covered Exhibit 49: Vendors covered 10.2 Market positioning of vendors Exhibit 50: Market positioning of vendors 10.3 GP Strategies Corp. Exhibit 51: GP Strategies Corp. - Overview Exhibit 52: GP Strategies Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 53: GP Strategies Corp. - Key news Exhibit 54: GP Strategies Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 55: GP Strategies Corp. - Segment focus 10.4 International Business Machines Corp. Exhibit 56: International Business Machines Corp. - Overview Exhibit 57: International Business Machines Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 58: International Business Machines Corp. - Key news Exhibit 59: International Business Machines Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 60: International Business Machines Corp. - Segment focus 10.5 Learning Tree International Inc. Exhibit 61: Learning Tree International Inc. - Overview Exhibit 62: Learning Tree International Inc. - Product and service Exhibit 63: Learning Tree International Inc. - Key offerings 10.6 LearnQuest Inc. Exhibit 64: LearnQuest Inc. - Overview Exhibit 65: LearnQuest Inc. - Product and service Exhibit 66: LearnQuest Inc. - Key offerings 10.7 Microsoft Corp. Exhibit 67: Microsoft Corp. - Overview Exhibit 68: Microsoft Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 69: Microsoft Corp. - Key news Exhibit 70: Microsoft Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 71: Microsoft Corp. - Segment focus 10.8 NIIT Ltd. Exhibit 72: NIIT Ltd. - Overview Exhibit 73: NIIT Ltd. - Business segments Exhibit 74: NIIT Ltd. - Key news Exhibit 75: NIIT Ltd. - Key offerings Exhibit 76: NIIT Ltd. - Segment focus 10.9 Oracle Corp. Exhibit 77: Oracle Corp. - Overview Exhibit 78: Oracle Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 79: Oracle Corp. - Key news Exhibit 80: Oracle Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 81: Oracle Corp. - Segment focus 10.10 Pluralsight Inc. Exhibit 82: Pluralsight Inc. - Overview Exhibit 83: Pluralsight Inc. - Business segments Exhibit 84: Pluralsight Inc. - Key offerings 10.11 QA group of companies Exhibit 85: QA group of companies - Overview Exhibit 86: QA group of companies - Business segments Exhibit 87: QA group of companies - Key offerings 10.12 SAP SE Exhibit 88: SAP SE - Overview Exhibit 89: SAP SE - Business segments Exhibit 90: SAP SE - Key news Exhibit 91: SAP SE - Key offerings Exhibit 92: SAP SE - Segment focus 11 Appendix 11.1 Scope of the report 11.2 Currency conversion rates for US$ Exhibit 93: Currency conversion rates for US$ 11.3 Research methodology Exhibit 94: Research Methodology Exhibit 95: Validation techniques employed for market sizing Exhibit 96: Information sources 11.4 List of abbreviations Exhibit 97: List of abbreviations About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio www.adaptfa.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-niemann-clu-chfc-aep-26b816a5/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/avery-niemann-6a3a59141/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashton-niemann-993a891a1/ OKLAHOMA CITY, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Adaptation Financial Advisors welcomes CEO and Founder, Alan Niemann's, youngest daughter onto the team as an Insurance Professional. Alan Niemann, CEO and Founder of Adaptation Financial Advisors (AFA) has been helping clients build their legacies for 38 years with one goal in mind taking care of his clients, employees, and their families. Especially over the last 5 years, Niemann has been working towards ensuring his clients and employees will continue to be taken care of after his departure. Most advisors have this same concern on whether it is better to find a successor from within the firm or sell to a third party. Niemann has decided a third option is the best course of action to truly ensure his clients and employees are taken care of AFA becoming a legacy firm. At this year's family retreat, it was visible to see the next generation emerging with over 40 children in attendance, ranging in age from newborn to early twenties. Adaptation's goal is to provide each of these children an opportunity to join AFA in the future. To facilitate this, AFA helps our advisors put a buy-sell agreement in place. The buy-sell agreement gives family members the right to pass the relationships that the current advisor has built with their clients onto the next generation. If a family member is not ready, AFA will purchase the practice until they are ready, so that the advisor will not have to worry about how their legacy will be passed down. This is our overarching goal - for the AFA grandchildren to be serving our clients' grandchildren in the future. Kicking off the legacy program is the founders' 2 daughters, Avery and Ashton Niemann. AVERY NIEMANN : March 2021, | Avery Niemann began with Adaptation Financial to act as a liaison for the family and the firm after Alan was in a motorcycle accident and unable to be in office for a period of time. Avery is currently based in Denver, Colorado and has worked her way to becoming Adaptation Financial's Chief Administrative Officer. "I found my way into the family business out of necessity and during a crisis," says Avery. "I would not wish for a repeat of last year, but I am endlessly grateful for the in depth look into the family business and what my dad has built over the last 38 years. I am so excited to be a part of a legacy business where I can contribute my own strengths and ideas while working with such a talented team to ensure that the next generation after me can one day have same of privilege of working at Adaptation." ASHTON NIEMANN August 2022, | Ashton Niemann is welcomed into the firm as an Insurance Professional on track to become a Financial Advisor. Ashton is a recent graduate from TCU where she received a bachelor's degree in Finance and was actively involved on campus through holding leadership positions in her sorority, Alpha Delta Pi. Beyond her academic involvement activities, Ashton worked for the Outdoor Program as a Trip Leader. "While the name of the business has changed, I have very early memories of Adaptation," says Ashton. "I grew up meeting many of my dad's clients, quite a few who are now like family to me. My dad also taught my sister and me the importance of money management and life insurance from an early age. I'm now looking forward to pursuing a career as a future financial advisor in a business that has been a part of my whole life and will be around for many years to come." ABOUT ADAPTATION FINANCIAL: Adaptation Financial, Inc is a Hybrid Independent Registered Investment Advisory firm with over $750MM of client assets under management. The firm currently has 6 office locations across 3 states and caters to individual investors through a variety of financial services tax and estate planning, property and casualty, stock options with a phantom stock plan, etc. Securities are offered through Registered Representatives of Cambridge Investment Research Inc., a broker-dealer, member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services are through Cambridge Investment Research Advisors, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor. Financial planning services are through Adaptation Financial Advisors, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor. Cambridge and Adaptation Financial Advisors are not affiliated. Visit www.adaptfa.com or call 800-522-8727 to connect with an advisor in your area. SOURCE Adaptation Financial Advisors ISLE OF SKYE, Scotland, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Iconic Scotch whisky, Talisker, is today opening the doors to its newly renovated visitor experience. To mark the opening, and to celebrate Talisker's special connection to the rugged sea and coastline of Skye, the distillery welcomed multi-record-breaking wild swimmer Ross Edgley, and Skye based artist, adventurer and conservationist Katie Tunn. Katie Tunn & Ross Edgley arrive at the launch of the new Talisker visitor experience (PRNewsfoto/Diageo) Talisker makes a splash with launch of world class visitor experience on the Isle of Skye (PRNewsfoto/Diageo) Fittingly, they arrived at the distillery by sea in Loch Harport, and after drying off they were greeted by Barbara Smith, Managing Director of Diageo's Scotland Brand Homes, before visiting the reimagined visitor experience. Having stood on the rugged coast of the Isle of Skye for more than a century and a half, the new visitor attraction has been completely transformed as part of Diageo's 185 million investment in Scotch tourism. Boasting a new interactive experience and revamped distillery tours, the new space demonstrates how Talisker is made by the sea. Showcased within the new visitor experience on Skye is a snapshot of Talisker's ground-breaking partnership with ocean conservation organisation, Parley for the Oceans. Previously embarking on long-distance swims in support of this work is adventurer and long-distance swimmer Ross Edgley, and one of the first through the doors at the distillery. Ambassador Ross Edgley commented: "It's impossible to visit Skye and not feel like you're on an adventure, it just oozes out of the place. The experience at Talisker embodies this adventurous spirit and is truly worth a visit. What you've got here is a truly unique whisky experience in a stunning setting, with its opportunity to get out into the wild and come back here to one of the many tastings and tours, there are so many reasons to keep returning to this beautiful island." When visiting Talisker, guests will have the opportunity to embark on three newly created tours: The Distillery Tour: Visitors will discover how the island influences the flavour of the whisky whilst exploring the making Talisker room and mash house before enjoying three tastings of the beloved single-malt. Visitors will discover how the island influences the flavour of the whisky whilst exploring the making Talisker room and mash house before enjoying three tastings of the beloved single-malt. Made by the Sea Tasting Experience: Whisky lovers will have the chance to immerse themselves in a multi-sensory tasting session that explores the story of Talisker followed by a tasting. Whisky lovers will have the chance to immerse themselves in a multi-sensory tasting session that explores the story of Talisker followed by a tasting. Talisker Cask Draw and Tasting Experience: Designed with the whisky connoisseur in mind, this experience will see guests visit Talisker's maturation warehouse where they'll get the rare opportunity to draw and taste five unique cask-strength distillery exclusive whiskies - set to open at a later date. Barbara Smith, Managing Director of Diageo's Scotland Brand Homes, added: "Talisker is inseparable from the unique Isle of Skye landscape and its whisky is inherently shaped by the sea and landscape that surrounds it. Our new brand home celebrates that deep connection with the sea and Talisker's commitment to preserving the wonderful marine environment in Scotland and around the world. "From the tours to the bars and retail space, there's so much to experience at Talisker whether you've travelled two miles or two hundred miles to be there and whether you're already familiar with this wonderful whisky, or discovering it for the first time." Two bars, a self-guided exhibition and retail space packed with local products complete the new Talisker experience, creating a place where both tourists and Skye residents can gather. Local artists, crafts and tradespeople have been employed wherever possible during the renovation. Katie Tunn is one such local artist who has collaborated with the team, she said: Theres no arguing that Talisker is one of our countrys most iconic whiskies, and its been a joy to watch the space come alive as weve worked through the project. Its sure to quickly become a popular destination for tourists and locals alike. As both a whisky lover and someone who's passionate about the ocean environment, it's been an honour to be involved with Talisker and there is more to come so watch this space. Talisker is the sixth site to undergo a transformation as part of Diageo's investment. The Singleton, Glenkinchie, Clynelish and Cardhu distilleries have recently opened as part of the ambitious project which re-imagines the traditional whisky tour experience. The centrepiece of the investment programme, the Johnnie Walker Princes Street global visitor attraction, opened in Edinburgh in September last year. Along with Diageo's other 13 visitor experiences in Scotland, Talisker holds a Green Tourism Gold Award the highest sustainability accolade for a visitor attraction. To book your tour, please visit: taliskerdistillery.com Talisker encourages everyone to drink responsibly when enjoying our whisky, and remember not to mix swimming and consuming alcohol. About Diageo Diageo is a global leader in beverage alcohol with an outstanding collection of brands across spirits, beer and wine categories. These brands include Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, J&B, Buchanan's, Smirnoff, Ciroc and Ketel One vodkas, Captain Morgan, Baileys, Don Julio, Tanqueray and Guinness. Diageo is a global company, and our products are sold in more than 180 countries around the world. The company is listed on both the London Stock Exchange (DGE) and the New York Stock Exchange (DEO). For more information about Diageo, our people, our brands, and performance, visit us at www.diageo.com. Visit Diageo's global responsible drinking resource, www.DRINKiQ.com, for information, initiatives, and ways to share best practice. Celebrating life, every day, everywhere. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1872591/Diageo_New_Experience.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1872592/Diageo_Talisker_Experience.jpg SOURCE Diageo AgriCapture aiming to sign up another 50,000 acres in August with extra financial incentives for farmers. NASHVILLE, Tenn., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AgriCapture is expanding its rapidly growing Soil Enrichment Project to enable more farmers to receive premium payments for their climate-friendly practices. Since its launch, the project has more than doubled in size, with over 110,000 acres of regenerative farmland enrolled and 31 farmers participating. The acres registered with the Climate Action Reserve's (CAR) Soil Enrichment Protocol cover farmland across eight states in the Mid-South producing rice, corn, cotton, and soybeans. The AgriCapture team is attending field days and meeting with farmers across the Mid-South throughout this month to enroll row crop farmers in the expanding Soil Enrichment Project. The Soil Enrichment Project is expanding for more farmers to receive payments for their climate-friendly practices. Tweet this "Word is spreading quickly across the Mid-South and farmers are approaching us to join our project," says Founder and CEO of AgriCapture, John Farris. "We are spending time with farmers explaining that they must enroll before September to receive maximum direct financial incentives from AgriCapture." Across the project, farmers are implementing climate-friendly farming practices including cover crop rotations, reduced/no-till, efficient fertilizer application, avoided burning and irrigation changes to reduce GHG emissions and sequester carbon. Due to the environmental impact of these practice changes, AgriCapture is generating high-quality and high-value carbon credits. Missouri farmer, Jarrett Lawfield says, "AgriCapture's direct financial incentives help make it possible for us to consider certain practices. They understand farmers, they know what questions to ask and, most importantly, they are not full of empty promises." AgriCapture manages the full project development and carbon credit generation process to reward farmers for their regenerative farming efforts. A team of agronomists and sustainable farming experts determine an optimal combination of climate-friendly farming practices and collect practice data from farm records, remote sensing, and satellite imagery to submit for validation and verification of emission reductions with CAR. The AgriCapture team manages the sale of carbon credits and facilitates payments to farmers for their climate-friendly farming practices. About AgriCapture AgriCapture is technology and data-enabled to provide best in class agricultural solutions to climate change. The AgriCapture team works closely with farmers to develop tailored growing plans and collect on-farm data while managing the soil sampling and carbon credit verification process with best-in-class service providers. The Soil Enrichment Project is the second-ever greenhouse gas reduction project registered with the Climate Action Reserve. AgriCapture is quantifying, monitoring, reporting, and verifying climate friendly agricultural practices on over 110,000 row crop acres across eight states to generate carbon credits and climate-friendly crop premiums. AgriCapture is committed to expanding climate-friendly agriculture programs as a solution to climate change. More information is available at www.agricapture.com. Contact: Megan Garvey, [email protected] SOURCE AgriCapture In the US, the Algorand Centres of Excellence (ACE) Program will fund multi-year projects at UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, University of Florida, Yale and Purdue SINGAPORE, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Algorand Foundation , whose mission is to grow the ecosystem of Algorand , the carbon-negative Layer 1 blockchain invented by Turing Award winner and MIT professor Silvio Micali, today announced the 10 winners of its Algorand Centres of Excellence (ACEs) Program with awards totalling $50M over five years. The program received 77 proposals with over 550 participants representing 46 countries; winners were selected by an international panel of 27 experts from a diverse set of disciplines. The 10 winners of the ACE Program lead 46 organizations across six continents. The 10 winners lead 36 sub-organizations and are represented by the following primary investigators (PIs): US Australia Italy Germany South Africa Singapore "The selection process was incredibly difficult, given how many excellent applications we received," said Dr. Hugo Krawczyk, Algorand Foundation's principal researcher and head of the ACE Program . "But we're delighted to see how many bright, talented people around the globe recognize the ability of blockchain technology to fundamentally change and better the world we live in, and we're very much looking forward to seeing the amazing work the grant recipients do in the coming months and years." These grants will fund research and education hubs (each one is an Algorand Centre of Excellence) on university campuses worldwide for multiple years to enable: Multi-disciplinary research in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space College courses, hackathons, accelerators and student-led organizations and activities Development of real-world solutions, applications and use cases Social impact and sustainability projects based on blockchain technology Algorand education and community expansion "It was the cryptographic, distributed and security community that created the technology on which blockchains are based. I applaud the Algorand Foundation for going back to the roots and supporting this kind of research. The academic grants are going to stellar teams that will help grow the diverse and inclusive global community of blockchain researchers and educators," said Dr. Shafi Goldwasser, a scientific advisor for Algorand and winner of the Turing Award (alongside Micali), Godel Prize and Franklin Medal. Goldwasser, who received her Ph.D from UC Berkeley and is currently the director of the university's Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing , added, "And of course, I am proud to see my Bears among the winners!" ALGORAND FOUNDATION The Algorand blockchain designed by MIT professor and Turing Award winning cryptographer Silvio Micali is capable of delivering on the promise of a borderless global economy. It achieves transaction throughputs at the speed of traditional finance, with immediate finality and near zero transaction costs, and without a second of downtime since it went live in June 2019.Its carbon-neutral platform and unique pure proof-of-stake consensus mechanism solves for the "blockchain trilemma" by achieving both security and scalability on a decentralized protocol. The Algorand Foundation is dedicated to helping fulfill the global promise of the Algorand blockchain by taking responsibility for its sound monetary supply economics, decentralized governance, and healthy and prosperous open-source ecosystem. For more information, visit https://algorand.foundation MEDIA CONTACTS Prosek Partners, on behalf of Algorand Foundation [email protected] SOURCE Algorand Foundation Leading provider of automated geospatial intelligence solutions to the commercial and government sectors Concurrent with transaction, Antarctica operating partners Richard Davis and Graeme Shaw Named CEO and COO, respectively of Descartes Labs NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Affiliates of Antarctica Capital ("Antarctica"), an international private equity firm, today announced the acquisition of a controlling interest in Descartes Labs, a solutions provider of geospatial intelligence to leading commercial and government clients. The acquisition complements Antarctica's existing portfolio of companies spanning New Space, Data Analytics and Digital Infrastructure. Descartes Labs is a geospatial intelligence company that performs scientific analysis of geospatial, remote sensing, and diverse complementary data sets to enable sustainable sourcing best practices, commodity price forecasting, and efficient mineral exploration for leading CPG, Agriculture, and Mining companies. The company's SaaS platform automates the analysis of geospatial imagery for users, enabling planetary scale analysis through artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company also supports a diverse set of federal government customers to curate, normalize, and fuse multi-source data at the speed of mission, to provide geospatial-aware actionable insights and autonomous tipping and cueing solutions through Descartes Labs Government. Concurrent with the transaction, Antarctica operating partners Richard Davis will serve as Chief Executive Officer and Graeme Shaw will serve as Chief Operating Officer of Descartes Labs. Mr. Davis and Mr. Shaw are both highly regarded executives with decades of experience in satellite technology, data analytics and corporate finance. Chandra Patel, Managing Director of Antarctica Capital, said, "Antarctica Capital has a strong institutional commitment to the geospatial and data analytics sectors and Descartes Labs will be very complementary to our other portfolio companies in these sectors. We are committed to maintaining Descartes' current business, while also providing the necessary capital and expertise to ensure the company's growth. We are confident that Antarctica can build upon Descartes legacy of innovation and insights to enable the company to realize its immense potential." Mr. Davis, commented, "Antarctica Capital's investment approach emphasizes active ownership and providing more than capital to develop companies. We are extremely excited about Descartes' business prospects and with Antarctica's involvement the Company is poised to accelerate innovation quicker than before to offer customers more value and best in class geospatial intelligence to both the commercial and government sectors." About Descartes Labs Established in 2014 by a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Descartes Labs was founded on the belief that planetary knowledge has the power to radically alter how companies, governments, and nonprofits understand their relationship to the world's physical systems. The Company possesses decades of experience working on some of our nation's most difficult problems, with expertise in large-scale computing, artificial intelligence, and satellite imagery. As a geospatial intelligence company, Descartes Labs helps organizations benefit from the scientific analysis of observable, physical world events. Descartes' SaaS platform enables custom signal development and our packaged analytics solutions create new sources of operational advantage and sustainability for customers across Agriculture, Consumer Goods, Mining, and Government. The Company also supports US federal government efforts to curate, analyze and provide unique actionable insights from geospatial data. For more information visit https://descarteslabs.com/. About Antarctica Capital Antarctica Capital is an international private equity firm headquartered in New York. Antarctica Capital is a registered investment advisor and is dedicated to investments in private markets and real assets and the establishment of long-term capital vehicles to leverage this investment focus. Antarctica Capital's investment approach is active ownership with an inherent focus on sustainability and to provide more than capital to develop companies. The firm has an absolute return focus, which leads the firm to rigorously evaluate and build conviction around idiosyncratic investment opportunities and build value through the implementation of its investment strategies, such as SIGA, SARO and SEREY. For more information visit https://antarcticacapital.com/. Contact: Chris Tofalli Chris Tofalli Public Relations, LLC 914-834-4334 SOURCE Antarctica Capital The leadership transitions will enhance the company's products, sales and data operations NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- automotiveMastermind (aM), part of S&P Global Mobility and a provider of predictive analytics and marketing automation solutions for dealerships, has announced a new, broader role for a senior data executive, as well as two other senior-level promotions. Charity Taylor is moving into a new role overseeing the creation of the Enterprise Business Analytics Team within the S&P Global Mobility division. In this capacity, she will be tasked with developing analytical solutions to key industry challenges and reducing time-to-value for newly acquired sources by combining deep automotive expertise with world-class data assets from across the S&P Global Mobility organization. Taylor spent over 12 years at JD Power (PIN) prior to joining aM in April 2020, most recently serving as managing director responsible for new product development and ongoing data operations. She also has nearly a decade of additional automotive experience in a variety of financial roles spanning manufacturing, product development, sales and marketing and supply chain for General Motors. Taylor has long supported improved business outcomes for a broad array of automotive clients through the development of unique analytical solutions in the realm of real-time market performance, pricing and incentive optimization, along with her ability to derive from them valuable insights to guide high-impact decisions. Aaron Baldwin has been promoted to chief product officer. In this role, he will oversee the product roadmap and strategy, supporting a team of directors specializing in product, product marketing, integrations and analytics. Before joining aM, Baldwin served as senior vice president of product and business development at CarNow. He was a member of the founding management team and oversaw development of OEM, large client and partner relationships, as well as product development and product lifecycle management. Baldwin also previously served as director of digital marketing at eLEAD and worked in various positions at Asbury Automotive Group, including director of dealership marketing, giving him insight into dealership operations that currently help him support aM's dealer partners. Michael Eager has been promoted to the newly created role of chief revenue officer. In this role, Eager will oversee aM's go-to-market teams and strategy. Prior to joining the aM team, Eager worked at CARFAX (also part of S&P Global Mobility) as the director of field sales and was instrumental in the launch of many products and growth of the sales business. In his 17 years of experience at CARFAX, he led the growth of the national field sales teams through both management and strategic sales leadership positions. Eager also previously held sales positions at tech start-ups and consulting companies, giving him a passion and expertise in launching new businesses and leading high-performing automotive sales teams. "As we look ahead to continue growing and scaling automotiveMastermind, I'm confident these new roles for Charity, Aaron and Michael will significantly strengthen our data leadership position, drive even greater levels of product innovation and continue to enhance product and service offerings for our dealer partners," said automotiveMastermind Chief Executive Officer Matt Leone. "I could not have asked for more qualified and seasoned industry executives to fill these roles, and I look forward to ongoing success from these dedicated professionals and their teams." About automotiveMastermind Founded in 2012, automotiveMastermind, part of S&P Global Mobility, empowers dealers to close more deals by predicting future buyers and consistently marketing to them. Its proprietary automated sales and marketing platform, Mastermind, helps dealerships generate success in loyalty, service and conquest portfolios through a combination of turnkey predictive analytics, proactive marketing and dedicated consultative services. automotiveMastermind is headquartered in New York City. For more information, visit automotiveMastermind.com. About S&P Global Mobility S&P Global Mobility is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI). S&P Global is the world's foremost provider of credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and workflow solutions in the global capital, commodity and automotive markets. SOURCE automotiveMastermind Big-T will produce and store renewable energy and support the transition from coal SYDNEY, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- BE Power and GE Renewable Energy have selected Bechtel to support the planning for a new pumped storage hydro energy facility named Big-T at Lake Cressbrook in southeast Queensland, Australia. The project will support the transition of Australia's baseload of electricity away from its aging coal generation power plants and it will contribute to the Queensland Government's target of 50% renewable energy generation by 2030. Artist impression of Lake Cressbrook, Queensland, Australia Big-T will act as an extension to the national electrical grid by both producing and storing electricity. It will consist of a pumped hydro energy storage facility (400MW, 10 hours) and a battery energy storage facility (200MW, 1 hour), enough to power 288,000 homes with renewable energy. Once operational, the plant is expected to deliver significant savings in electricity costs and improve the reliability of supply to consumers. "We are pleased to secure the services of the global construction infrastructure leader Bechtel," said Scott Walkem, BE Power managing director. "Bechtel has significant expertise in the delivery of power infrastructure including hydropower. Further, Bechtel and GE have a long history of working collaboratively to deliver energy projects." Bechtel will provide support to the project development under a service agreement that will include advancing the design; facilitating early contractor cost savings and buildability; advising how to best structure core contracts; and kick-starting supply chain engagement with a view to maximizing local content and indigenous participation. Bechtel's work will help inform Big-T's feasibility study, with the final investment decision scheduled for late 2023. If achieved, Bechtel would then go on to engineer, procure, and construct the project. "A sustainable energy future is today's global goal and energy storage facilities have a significant role in us achieving it," said Scott Osborne, Bechtel's general manager for Infrastructure in Asia Pacific. "Big-T will help create renewable energy opportunities for Queenslanders in terms of a more cost effective and reliable energy system, and local job and business opportunities not just in long duration storage but in the broader system it supports." Bechtel has partnered with customers to build 50 hydroelectric plants around the world. Most recently, the company built the Keeyask Generating Station in Manitoba, Canada, which began generating clean renewable energy to power 400,000 homes earlier this year. The company has had established programs for over 60-years to provide opportunities for local community and First Nations participation on Australian projects. Early this year the company formalized its commitments in a reconciliation action plan to continue to support a diverse and inclusive workforce, and supply chain. About Bechtel Bechtel is a trusted engineering, construction and project management partner to industry and government. Differentiated by the quality of our people and our relentless drive to deliver the most successful outcomes, we align our capabilities to our customers' objectives to create a lasting positive impact. Since 1898, we have helped customers complete more than 25,000 projects in 160 countries on all seven continents that have created jobs, grown economies, improved the resiliency of the world's infrastructure, increased access to energy, resources, and vital services, and made the world a safer, cleaner place. Bechtel serves the Energy; Infrastructure; Manufacturing&Technology; Mining & Metals; and Nuclear, Security & Environmental markets. Our services span from initial planning and investment, through start-up and operations. www.bechtel.com About BE Power BE Power Group is a multi-faceted energy company that develops, constructs, and operates power plants, with more than $4.5bn of projects under development. BE Power also undertakes electricity trading and retailing activities. About GE Renewable Energy GE Renewable Energy is a $15bn business which combines one of the broadest portfolios in the renewable energy industry including onshore and offshore wind, blades, hydro, storage, utility-scale solar, and grid solutions as well as hybrid renewables and digital services offerings. Media contact: Juliet Whitcombe C : +44 (0)7917 722304 Email: [email protected] SOURCE Bechtel SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- To celebrate seven years of providing young families around the world with high-quality baby products, German-based Besrey is launching a celebration event with special offers on products across the range, as well as a number of prizes and gifts to give away to lucky winners. The anniversary celebration event will run for one week, beginning on August 2nd and finishing on the 8th. With an emphasis on high-quality design and R&D over the past seven years, Besrey has rapidly grown to become one of the premier global baby product brands. Driven to benefit both the infant and the parents by offering highly evolved baby products, the brand is committed to making thoughtfully designed products that incorporate improvements and ensure safety and comfort for the baby while making parenting easier. As part of the celebration event, starting from August 2nd, Besrey will be giving 10% cash back when customers spend $50, $100, or $200 on marked products such as Baby Bedside Sleeper Crib Bassinet, Lightweight Gravity Easy to Fold Baby Stroller, Child Carrier Hiking Backpack, 5-in-1 Toddler Bike and more. Besrey will also be giving away 10 Hip Seat Baby Carriers to lucky winners who accumulate discount codes throughout the week, with an opportunity to snatch up the free prizes at 00:00 on August 7th (GMT-08:00). Also, from August 2-8, Besrey will be running a lottery competition with every user getting one chance per day to be in the draw to win coupons and gifts valued up to $299. The Besrey product line focuses on three main areas: outdoor, sleeping, and travel. To meet the needs of any child, the company developed strollers, tricycles, carriers, car seats, bassinets, and many more innovative products within this range. Alongside the core value of 'born with love,' each product released adheres to strict industry standards, including EU, Swiss SGS, and more. The Besrey team follows six product principles: exquisite craftsmanship, practical and comfy experience, safe and eco-friendly material, minimalist appearance, scientific and professional design, as well as novel and unique style. About Besrey Founded in 2015, Besrey(born with love) is a German brand specializing in the production and sale of high-end products for infants and children. Since its inception, the company has focused on fostering its R&D team, which now consists of over 150 experts and has been granted 79 patents. As specialists in baby products, Besrey has also been recommended by many professional media outlets, such as verywellfamily and tripsavvy. Currently, Besrey operates three modern industrial parks and has sold over 30 million products to families scattered across more than 130 countries and regions. For more information, please visit: https://bit.ly/Besrey7thevent Or follow us on: Instagram: https://bit.ly/BesreyIG Facebook: https://bit.ly/BesreyFacebook Twitter: https://bit.ly/Besreytwitter YouTube: https://bit.ly/BesreyYoutube PR Contact: [email protected] SOURCE Besrey GmbH JERUSALEM, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- C2A Security, a leading provider of Electric Vehicle focused cybersecurity solutions, and ThunderSoft, the world leading operating system products and technologies provider, announced today a collaboration to provide cybersecurity solutions for the automotive industry in China. The partnership will provide powerful cybersecurity products and solutions for OEMs and suppliers in China to enable the development of intelligent connected and electric vehicles. The collaboration between C2A Security and ThunderSoft will provide necessary tools for OEMs and suppliers to effectively identify and respond to cyberattacks and provide full lifecycle security protection for the automotive industry. As the Chinese automotive industry continues to develop it is inevitable that cybersecurity issues will become prevalent. In 2019 it was reported by the Chinese Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Agency (EVCIPA) that there were 808,000 EV chargers in the country, a number expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. According to a recent report , in 2020 there were 2.8M malicious attacks on automotive related companies. The report also included cybersecurity breaches with companies like Toyota, where the privacy of 3.1 million people was compromised, Daimler's Car2Go had 100 vehicles stolen due to a malicious actor hacking a mobile app, and a breach to the BMW network system. To combat these automotive cybersecurity issues, new standards were passed including the ISO 21434 standard and UNECE WP. 29 regulations, which require automotive companies to update their cybersecurity measures. Due to recent cybersecurity incidents and the new regulations, OEMs and Tier-1s are racing to catch up and revamp their cybersecurity processes. "The Chinese automotive industry is one of the fastest growing markets in the world and will need to catch up quickly to the rising need to protect connected vehicles from cybersecurity vulnerabilities," says Roy Fridman, CEO of C2A Security. "To meet the needs of the industry and fill the current gap in the market, C2A Security partnered with ThunderSoft to provide an advanced cybersecurity management system to local OEMs and Tier-1s." C2A Security provides OEMs and Tier-1s with a new cybersecurity management system that automates cybersecurity for the electric vehicle ecosystem, which includes the vehicle, charging station, grid, and their communications protocol. The company's newest product EVSec breaks down communication silos and enables sharing and collaboration of the entire cybersecurity process in one of the most complex known ecosystems - Electric Vehicles. ThunderSoft, one of the world's leading intelligent operating system products and technology providers, has been deeply involved in the automotive market since 2013. Based on the technological advantages in intelligent networked vehicle operating systems and artificial intelligence, it has gradually built three major product line-ups: smart cockpit, smart driving, and a central computing-based vehicle operating system. ThunderSoft provides customers with full product lifecycle solutions from the operating system development, core technology authorization to application customization, automated testing, etc. To date, more than 40 million vehicles around the world have adopted Thundersoft's smart vehicle products and solutions. "We have deeply felt the growth of the intelligent connected vehicle business and cybersecurity is an indispensable part of the intelligent connected vehicle," says Wenguang Wu, Executive President of ThunderSoft. "The cooperation with C2A Security will provide cybersecurity solutions for the whole lifecycle of connected vehicles in China. We look forward to expanding the cooperation globally and bringing the vehicle industry to a safer future." About C2A Security C2A Security is a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions that addresses the specific needs of modern vehicles with a focus on the unique security challenges of electric vehicles. C2A Security's new flagship product EVSec is a cybersecurity management system that automates cybersecurity for the electric vehicle ecosystem, which includes the vehicle, charging station, grid, and their communications protocol. Using EVSec, C2A's customers save time and money on managing cybersecurity activities and increase protection with a centralized risk management system. C2A Security breaks down communication silos to create a true cybersecurity single pane of glass that delivers transparency, communication, and collaboration with one automated and centralized solution. For more information, visit https://www.c2a-sec.com . About ThunderSoft: ThunderSoft, the world leading intelligent operating system products and technologies provider, has been continuously accumulating and innovating in the operating system field, with its business expanding gradually from smart terminals to AIoT, smart vehicle and smart industries. It has been successfully listed in 2015, which leads it to be China's first listed technical company specialized in the intelligent operating system. Till now, the branches, subsidiaries and R&D centers of ThunderSoft have covered 37 cities around the world, with a total of nearly 10,000 employees. Contact: DeeDee Rudenstein [email protected] SOURCE C2A Security Get a comprehensive report summary describing the market size and forecast along with research methodology. Request a FREE sample report Cardiac Monitoring and Cardiac Rhythm Management Devices Market 2022-2026: Scope The cardiac monitoring and cardiac rhythm management devices market report covers the following areas: Cardiac Monitoring and Cardiac Rhythm Management Devices Market 2022-2026: Vendor Analysis We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the cardiac monitoring and cardiac rhythm management devices market, including Abbott Laboratories, Abiomed Inc., ACS Diagnostics Inc., Asahi Kasei Corp., BioTelemetry Inc., BIOTRONIK SE and Co KG, Boston Scientific Corp., Fukuda Denshi Co. Ltd., GE Healthcare Inc., HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc., InfoBionic Inc., Integrated Sensing Systems Inc., iRhythm Technologies Inc., Koninklijke Philips NV, Medtronic Plc, MicroPort Scientific Corp., Nihon Kohden Corp., OSI Systems Inc., Preventice Solutions Inc., and SCHILLER AG. The key offerings of some of these vendors are listed below: Abbott Laboratories - The company offers Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) devices, catheters, connectivity and remote care Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICD) and others under cardiac rhythm management devices. The company offers Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) devices, catheters, connectivity and remote care Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICD) and others under cardiac rhythm management devices. Abiomed Inc. - The company offers heart pumps such as Impella 2.5, Impella CP, and Impella 5.0. It provides SmartAssist technology, which gives medical providers insights to help them improve patient outcomes. The company offers heart pumps such as Impella 2.5, Impella CP, and Impella 5.0. It provides SmartAssist technology, which gives medical providers insights to help them improve patient outcomes. Asahi Kasei Corp. - The company offers defibrillation and cardiac monitoring devices and software for observation of heart activity to determine the health of the heart. The company offers defibrillation and cardiac monitoring devices and software for observation of heart activity to determine the health of the heart. BIOTRONIK SE and Co KG - The company offers a wide range of devices under cardiac rhythm management, such as Arrhythmia Monitoring, Bradycardia, and Tachycardia. The company offers a wide range of devices under cardiac rhythm management, such as Arrhythmia Monitoring, Bradycardia, and Tachycardia. Boston Scientific Corp. - The company offers HeartLogic Heart, LUX-DX ICM, and EMBLEM MRI S-ICD under cardiac rhythm management. Cardiac Monitoring and Cardiac Rhythm Management Devices Market 2022-2026: Segmentation Product Cardiac Rhythm Management Devices: The cardiac rhythm management devices segment will contribute the highest market share growth. Cardiac rhythm management devices include defibrillators, which restore the normal heartbeat by delivering a shock or an electric pulse to the patient's heart. Cardiac Monitoring Devices Geography North America : The region will contribute the highest market share growth during the forecast period. This growth is attributed to factors such as high healthcare expenditure on CVDs. : The region will contribute the highest market share growth during the forecast period. This growth is attributed to factors such as high healthcare expenditure on CVDs. Europe Asia Rest Of World (ROW) Learn more about the contribution of each segment of the market. Download a FREE Sample Report Cardiac Monitoring and Cardiac Rhythm Management Devices Market 2022-2026: Key Highlights CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2022-2026 Detailed information on factors that will assist cardiac monitoring and cardiac rhythm management devices market growth during the next five years Estimation of the cardiac monitoring and cardiac rhythm management devices market size and its contribution to the parent market Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior The growth of the cardiac monitoring and cardiac rhythm management devices market Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of cardiac monitoring and cardiac rhythm management devices market vendors Related Reports Cardiac Restoration Systems Market by Product, End-user, and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026 3D Cardiac Mapping Systems Market Growth, Size, Trends, Analysis Report by Type, Application, Region and Segment Forecast 2022-2026 Cardiac Monitoring And Cardiac Rhythm Management Devices Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 4.5% Market growth 2022-2026 USD 5.52 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 4.1 Regional analysis North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of World (ROW) Performing market contribution North America at 42% Key consumer countries US, Canada, Germany, France, and China Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled Abbott Laboratories, Abiomed Inc., ACS Diagnostics Inc., Asahi Kasei Corp., BioTelemetry Inc., BIOTRONIK SE and Co KG, Boston Scientific Corp., Fukuda Denshi Co. Ltd., GE Healthcare Inc., HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc., InfoBionic Inc., Integrated Sensing Systems Inc., iRhythm Technologies Inc., Koninklijke Philips NV, Medtronic Plc, MicroPort Scientific Corp., Nihon Kohden Corp., OSI Systems Inc., Preventice Solutions Inc., and SCHILLER AG Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for the forecast period, Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized. Browse Health Care Market Research Reports Table Of Contents 1 Executive Summary 1.1 Market overview Exhibit 01: Executive Summary Chart on Market Overview Exhibit 02: Executive Summary Data Table on Market Overview Exhibit 03: Executive Summary Chart on Global Market Characteristics Exhibit 04: Executive Summary Chart on Market by Geography Exhibit 05: Executive Summary Chart on Market Segmentation by Product Exhibit 06: Executive Summary Chart on Incremental Growth Exhibit 07: Executive Summary Data Table on Incremental Growth Exhibit 08: Executive Summary Chart on Vendor Market Positioning 2 Market Landscape 2.1 Market ecosystem Exhibit 09: Parent market Exhibit 10: Market Characteristics 3 Market Sizing 3.1 Market definition Exhibit 11: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition 3.2 Market segment analysis Exhibit 12: Market segments 3.3 Market size 2021 3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021-2026 Exhibit 13: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 14: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 15: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 16: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 4 Five Forces Analysis 4.1 Five forces summary Exhibit 17: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2021 and 2026 4.2 Bargaining power of buyers Exhibit 18: Chart on Bargaining power of buyers Impact of key factors 2021 and 2026 4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers Exhibit 19: Bargaining power of suppliers Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.4 Threat of new entrants Exhibit 20: Threat of new entrants Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.5 Threat of substitutes Exhibit 21: Threat of substitutes Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.6 Threat of rivalry Exhibit 22: Threat of rivalry Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.7 Market condition Exhibit 23: Chart on Market condition - Five forces 2021 and 2026 5 Market Segmentation by Product 5.1 Market segments Exhibit 24: Chart on Product - Market share 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 25: Data Table on Product - Market share 2021-2026 (%) 5.2 Comparison by Product Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by Product Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by Product 5.3 Cardiac rhythm management devices - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 28: Chart on Cardiac rhythm management devices - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 29: Data Table on Cardiac rhythm management devices - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 30: Chart on Cardiac rhythm management devices - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 31: Data Table on Cardiac rhythm management devices - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.4 Cardiac monitoring devices - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 32: Chart on Cardiac monitoring devices - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 33: Data Table on Cardiac monitoring devices - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 34: Chart on Cardiac monitoring devices - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 35: Data Table on Cardiac monitoring devices - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.5 Market opportunity by Product Exhibit 36: Market opportunity by Product ($ million) 6 Customer Landscape 6.1 Customer landscape overview Exhibit 37: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria 7 Geographic Landscape 7.1 Geographic segmentation Exhibit 38: Chart on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 39: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) 7.2 Geographic comparison Exhibit 40: Chart on Geographic comparison Exhibit 41: Data Table on Geographic comparison 7.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 42: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 43: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 44: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 45: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 46: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 47: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 48: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 49: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.5 Asia - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 50: Chart on Asia - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 51: Data Table on Asia - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 52: Chart on Asia - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 53: Data Table on Asia - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.6 Rest of World (ROW) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 54: Chart on Rest of World (ROW) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 55: Data Table on Rest of World (ROW) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 56: Chart on Rest of World (ROW) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 57: Data Table on Rest of World (ROW) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.7 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 58: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 59: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 60: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 61: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.8 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 62: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 63: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 64: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 65: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.9 France - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 66: Chart on France - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 67: Data Table on France - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 68: Chart on France - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 69: Data Table on France - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.10 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 70: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 71: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 72: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 73: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.11 Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 74: Chart on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 75: Data Table on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 76: Chart on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 77: Data Table on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.12 Market opportunity by geography Exhibit 78: Market opportunity by geography ($ million) 8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 8.1 Market drivers 8.2 Market challenges 8.3 Impact of drivers and challenges Exhibit 79: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026 8.4 Market trends 9 Vendor Landscape 9.1 Overview 9.2 Vendor landscape Exhibit 80: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation 9.3 Landscape disruption Exhibit 81: Overview on factors of disruption 9.4 Industry risks Exhibit 82: Impact of key risks on business 10 Vendor Analysis 10.1 Vendors covered Exhibit 83: Vendors covered 10.2 Market positioning of vendors Exhibit 84: Matrix on vendor position and classification 10.3 Abbott Laboratories Exhibit 85: Abbott Laboratories - Overview Exhibit 86: Abbott Laboratories - Business segments Exhibit 87: Abbott Laboratories - Key news Exhibit 88: Abbott Laboratories - Key offerings Exhibit 89: Abbott Laboratories - Segment focus 10.4 Abiomed Inc. Exhibit 90: Abiomed Inc. - Overview Exhibit 91: Abiomed Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 92: Abiomed Inc. - Key news Exhibit 93: Abiomed Inc. - Key offerings 10.5 Asahi Kasei Corp. Exhibit 94: Asahi Kasei Corp. - Overview Exhibit 95: Asahi Kasei Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 96: Asahi Kasei Corp. - Key news Exhibit 97: Asahi Kasei Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 98: Asahi Kasei Corp. - Segment focus 10.6 BIOTRONIK SE and Co KG Exhibit 99: BIOTRONIK SE and Co KG - Overview Exhibit 100: BIOTRONIK SE and Co KG - Product / Service Exhibit 101: BIOTRONIK SE and Co KG - Key offerings 10.7 Boston Scientific Corp. Exhibit 102: Boston Scientific Corp. - Overview Exhibit 103: Boston Scientific Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 104: Boston Scientific Corp. - Key news Exhibit 105: Boston Scientific Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 106: Boston Scientific Corp. - Segment focus 10.8 GE Healthcare Inc. Exhibit 107: GE Healthcare Inc. - Overview Exhibit 108: GE Healthcare Inc. - Product / Service Exhibit 109: GE Healthcare Inc. - Key offerings 10.9 HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc. Exhibit 110: HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc. - Overview Exhibit 111: HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc. - Business segments Exhibit 112: HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc. - Key news Exhibit 113: HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc. - Key offerings Exhibit 114: HILL ROM HOLDINGS Inc. - Segment focus 10.10 Koninklijke Philips NV Exhibit 115: Koninklijke Philips NV - Overview Exhibit 116: Koninklijke Philips NV - Business segments Exhibit 117: Koninklijke Philips NV - Key news Exhibit 118: Koninklijke Philips NV - Key offerings Exhibit 119: Koninklijke Philips NV - Segment focus 10.11 Medtronic Plc Exhibit 120: Medtronic Plc - Overview Exhibit 121: Medtronic Plc - Business segments Exhibit 122: Medtronic Plc - Key news Exhibit 123: Medtronic Plc - Key offerings Exhibit 124: Medtronic Plc - Segment focus 10.12 SCHILLER AG Exhibit 125: SCHILLER AG - Overview Exhibit 126: SCHILLER AG - Product / Service Exhibit 127: SCHILLER AG - Key offerings 11 Appendix 11.1 Scope of the report 11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist Exhibit 128: Inclusions checklist Exhibit 129: Exclusions checklist 11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$ Exhibit 130: Currency conversion rates for US$ 11.4 Research methodology Exhibit 131: Research methodology Exhibit 132: Validation techniques employed for market sizing Exhibit 133: Information sources 11.5 List of abbreviations Exhibit 134: List of abbreviations About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio World's largest cruise company is rolling out Service Power Packages to improve energy efficiency and support overall sustainability goals To significantly reduce energy and fuel consumption, upgrades include investments in on-demand automation and controls, cooling enhancements, LED lighting and efficient HVAC systems, with indoor air quality continuously monitored and maintained to the highest standards at sea MIAMI, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE/LSE: CCL;NYSE: CUK), the world's largest cruise company, today announced the rollout of comprehensive technology upgrades called Service Power Packages across its global fleet to further improve energy savings and reduce fuel consumption. The upgrades include ongoing installations through 2023 on ships from the company's nine cruise line brands Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn, P&O Cruises (Australia), Costa Cruises, AIDA Cruises, P&O Cruises (UK) and Cunard. Carnival Corporation's Service Power upgrade program delivers an average of 5-10% fuel savings per ship and is expected to reduce fleetwide greenhouse gas emissions by more than 500,000 metric tons each year. In addition to the environmental benefits, the program upon completion is expected to generate over $150 million in annual fuel cost savings. Developed over the past six years, the company's Service Power program delivers significant efficiency upgrades across the fleet, including air conditioning upgrades to cabin and public areas, and major enhancements to cooling, lighting and automation systems. Adjusting for variations in ship design, size and equipment, the company customizes the Service Power Package for each ship, which combines the synergies from multiple upgrades with new operational efficiencies, all effectively supporting Carnival Corporation's energy savings and decarbonization strategies. The Carnival Corporation Service Power Packages include the following elements designed to work together to reduce each ship's overall service load the energy required to support all onboard hotel systems and as a result, significantly reduce both fuel usage and emissions: Comprehensive upgrades to each ship's hotel HVAC systems , accounting for 25% of a ship's energy consumption, to improve hotel ventilation efficiency using sophisticated variable speed drives and on-demand systems throughout public areas, cabins and galleys. Additionally, indoor air quality is continuously monitored and maintained to the highest standards at sea, using an industry-leading air filtration and ultraviolet-C treatment throughout the ship. , accounting for 25% of a ship's energy consumption, to improve hotel ventilation efficiency using sophisticated variable speed drives and on-demand systems throughout public areas, cabins and galleys. Additionally, indoor air quality is continuously monitored and maintained to the highest standards at sea, using an industry-leading air filtration and ultraviolet-C treatment throughout the ship. Technical systems upgrades on each ship using variable speed drives and on-demand automated control systems for engine room ventilation, main air conditioning chillers and cooling pumps, which together dramatically lower the energy needed to deliver cooling around the ship. using variable speed drives and on-demand automated control systems for engine room ventilation, main air conditioning chillers and cooling pumps, which together dramatically lower the energy needed to deliver cooling around the ship. State-of-the-art LED lighting systems installed throughout each ship to reduce both power consumption and heat load generation creating a dual benefit from lower air conditioning demand. installed throughout each ship to reduce both power consumption and heat load generation creating a dual benefit from lower air conditioning demand. Remote monitoring and maintenance improvements that maximize benefits from the upgrade packages, including improved instrumentation and automated management systems, with nonstop ship-to-shore connectivity. Expanded remote monitoring and analysis of each ship's energy performance and technical status ensure peak efficiency and minimal down times. "The Service Power program closely aligns with our long-term sustainability and decarbonization goals and our highest responsibility and top priority, which is compliance, environmental protection and the health, safety and well-being of our guests, the people in the communities we visit, and our shipboard and shoreside personnel," said Bill Burke, chief maritime officer for Carnival Corporation. "Based on our improved fleet composition, including adding six industry-leading LNG-powered ships, and our previous investments to increase efficiency and reduce emissions, our absolute carbon emissions peaked in 2011 despite significant capacity growth over the past decade. These tailored Service Power Packages further build on those efforts as part of our comprehensive approach to sustainability." The fleetwide enhancements are part of Carnival Corporation's ongoing energy efficiency investment program and efforts to reduce fuel consumption, including over $350 million invested in energy efficiency improvements since 2016, along with the company's fleet optimization strategy and design of more efficient itineraries. Together, these ongoing efforts are expected to drive a 10% reduction in fuel consumption per available lower berth day (ALBD) in the company's first full year of guest cruise operations compared to 2019, along with a 9% reduction in carbon emissions per lower berth distance traveled. As part of its longer-term sustainability plan and vision, Carnival Corporation has committed to significant investments to achieve its 2030 sustainability goals and 2050 aspirations, which incorporate six critical sustainability focus areas overall. These areas include climate action; circular economy; sustainable tourism; good health and well-being; diversity, equity and inclusion; and biodiversity and conservation. Among these priorities, the company has committed to reducing carbon emission intensity by 20% from its 2019 baseline by 2030, supporting its efforts and aspirations to achieve net carbon-neutral ship operations by 2050. More information on the company's sustainability efforts is available at www.CarnivalSustainability.com. About Carnival Corporation & plc Carnival Corporation & plc is one of the world's largest leisure travel companies with a portfolio of nine of the world's leading cruise lines sailing to all seven continents. With operations in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia, its portfolio features Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn, P&O Cruises (Australia), Costa Cruises, AIDA Cruises, P&O Cruises (UK) and Cunard. Additional information can be found on www.carnivalcorp.com, www.carnival.com, www.princess.com, www.hollandamerica.com, www.seabourn.com, www.pocruises.com.au, www.costacruise.com, www.aida.de, www.pocruises.com and www.cunard.com. SOURCE Carnival Corporation & plc BEIJING , Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On July 29th, one industry leader in carrier-neutral hyperscale data center solutions, Chindata Group, and technical research partner, Vertiv Technology jointly released details of a waterless cooling technology during the 2022 China Computing Conference. Coined "X-Cooling", the solution enables data centers to achieve zero WUE cooling, setting a new benchmark for the industry. Leveraging this technology will promote sustainability across the entire industry and lead to further innovation in the development of more efficient data centers. Speaking at the 2022 China Computing Conference, Zhang Binghua, CTO of Chindata Group, said, "Carbon emissions, water and energy use are three areas which present a fundamental challenge for data centers. Together with the technical research and supply chain integration expertise of our partner Vertiv Technology, Chindata Group is very pleased to release details of 'X-Cooling,' the world's first waterless cooling technology. We believe this major innovation in the reduction of power usage effectiveness (PUE) and water use efficiency (WUE) for cooling will bring about a new paradigm for the development of green and other low-carbon technologies, enabling better use of land, energy, and water. At Chindata Group, we are passionate about promoting sustainability and efficient energy use." As the world becomes more and more digitized, there is an increasing reliance on data centers and computing power to operate the growing digital economy. In storing massive amounts of data, data centers generate a large amount of heat, which has traditionally been dispersed by using water. As a result, data centers are commonly located in areas where both power and water supply are plentiful and cheap. This greatly narrows the range of suitable locations and puts more strain on existing centers to grow larger. "X-Cooling" realizes waterless cooling through a complex coordination of software controllers and hardware induction technology which matches ambient temperatures to generate a natural cooling process that reduces energy consumption. The technology can also be fully adjusted to accommodate changing outdoor environments, indoor load changes, and features different operating modes to ensure better efficiency. The cooperation between software and hardware allows for real-time mapping of air volumes and cooling volumes. The technology can also ensure consistent operation with a one-click on/off switch in case of emergencies. Compared with commonly used indirect evaporative air handling unit (AHU) technology, in rigorous testing scenarios, "X-Cooling" was able to achieve a pPUE <1.1 and WUE of 0. Per 100MW data center in Hebei, switching to 'X-Cooling' waterless cooling has the potential to save 1.2 million tons of water per year, which is equivalent to annual average water consumption of 10,000 four-person households. With energy and water use a growing concern for many industries and governments, 'X-Cooling' offers a solution for supporting sustainable growth of the digital economy. About Chindata Group Chindata Group is a leading carrier-neutral hyperscale data center solution provider in Asia-Pacific emerging markets and a first mover in building next-generation hyperscale data centers in China, India and Southeast Asia markets, focusing on the whole life cycle of facility planning, investment, design, construction and operation of ecosystem infrastructure in the IT industry. Chindata Group provides its clients with business solutions in major countries and regions in Asia-Pacific emerging markets, including asset-heavy ecosystem chain services such as industrial bases, data centers, network and IT value-added services. SOURCE Chindata Group GURUGRAM, India, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cielo, the world's leading Talent Acquisition Partner, has launched its first office in India. The new workspace in Gurugram, just southwest of New Delhi, is a critical milestone in Cielo's expansion across the Asia Pacific region. Cielo's India team delivers fresh and proven talent acquisition solutions to diverse organizations across the IT, engineering, life sciences, automotive and consulting sectors. Beyond Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), Cielo provides the India market with world-class consulting services, including employer brand, all backed by its proprietary technology platform, Cielo TalentCloud. "Establishing a solid presence in India is vital to Cielo's vision to lead the market with better talent experiences for all," Shailesh Singh, Director India at Cielo said. "We're excited to start this new chapter of operations in India as Cielo cements itself as the leader in global talent acquisition." Cielo is committed to pairing market-leading talent acquisition solutions with expertise across multiple sectors, including technology and life sciences both major industries in India. The country's tech industry experienced record-breaking growth in 2022 and its pharmaceutical industry is the third-largest in the world. With unmatched experience and knowledge in these areas, Cielo is well-positioned to provide impactful recruiting and talent solutions to the market in India. "Cielo's expansion into India is underpinned by our commitment to strengthening Cielo's footprint in key regions, forging closer ties and lasting partnerships with every client to better meet their talent acquisition needs and overall business goals," said Marissa Geist, CEO of Cielo. Established in 2005, Cielo's 4,000 employees now serve 215 clients across 113 countries in 39 languages. Cielo's global reach and local focus, combined with its expertise, allows companies to get ahead in the race for talent. About Cielo Cielo is the world's leading Talent Acquisition Partner. We deliver a better talent experience for everyone through Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Executive Search, Contingent Workforce Solutions, and Consulting services. With our fresh approach we design and build comprehensive, proven solutions inspired by technology to find and keep the unique talent that elevates our clients above the competition. Learn more at cielotalent.com . SOURCE Cielo Conner Homes' newest community, Altamura, offers 107 homes that give buyers the ultimate combination of style and function BELLEVUE, Wash., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Conner Homes, a homebuilder based in Bellevue that serves communities throughout Washington, today announced the upcoming grand opening of its newest community, Altamura. This 107-home neighborhood is settled in the Greenbridge master-planned community. Commuters can conveniently access public transportation to downtown Seattle, West Seattle, Capitol Hill and Bellevue. The vibrant Greenbridge community features an elementary school, community center and library, and open space. Outdoor lovers can explore the nearby Westcrest Park, which features a pet-friendly, off leash dog park. The walkable community also showcases more than 80 pieces of public art. This community is served by the Highline School District, which includes White Center Heights, Cascade Middle School and Evergreen High School. There are additional opportunities for residents here to enroll at Raisbeck Aviation High School or to select from a large variety of private schools. Altamura homes will range between 2,145 and 2,701 square feet and are priced from the high $700,000s, with first homes available in the $800,000's. Homebuyers can choose one of 10 floorplans, which include up to five bedrooms, 2.75 baths, two car garages, bonus rooms and fully fenced and landscaped yards. Each home is custom-designed with a classic "Seattle Style" architecture and features clean interiors and finishes, all hand-selected by professional interior designers to maintain each home's individuality. Depending on the model, the Altamura homes include either a spacious covered decks, patios or wrap-around porches. "Altamura offers fresh floorplans and unique exterior designs that are emblematic of classic Seattle style architecture." said Michael Lorenz, President of Conner Homes. Homes styles include Modern Farmhouse, Craftsman, Foursquare, Tudor and Dutch Colonial. "Homeowners will enjoy the welcoming and diverse community of Greenbridge, all within a short drive of Downtown Seattle." Prospective homebuyers can enjoy snacks and refreshments and tour the furnished model home and community at the Altamura Grand Opening, which will take place on Saturday, August 6th from 11 am to 4 pm. Model home and sales information is located 10058 4th Land SW in Seattle. Google Conner Homes at Altamura for directions. Conner Homes has been building a variety of homes in the Pacific Northwest for over 60 years, making it the longest-standing local homebuilder in the region. Its designs prioritize natural light to create brighter, more welcoming spaces and incorporate eco-friendly technologies to minimize environmental impact. For more information on new homes in Altamura or to make an appointment to tour the model home, call 1-888-302-1252 or visit https://www.connerhomes.com/communities/altamura. About Conner Homes At Conner Homes, homebuyers find something different. It's called strength of character. It's reflected in the homes Conner Homes builds, the communities they create, and the way they do business. As a local, multi-generational, family-owned business for over 60 years, Conner Homes shares the interests of their community in building homes responsibly, with an attention to design, a devotion to quality, and a level of integrity not found in the typical mass manufacturers. Their goal is to treat every customer with the kind of service that will make them a customer for life. That translates to a customer experience that's truly worth talking about. Learn more by visiting www.connerhomes.com For media inquiries, please contact: Alex Thompson or Drew Howland, Fearey for Conner Homes (202) 793-0019, [email protected] SOURCE Conner Homes This Monterey-based company manufactures premium extracts for their own brand and several of the more prominent, better-known brands in California. Their extensive expertise in producing high-quality, standardized extracts should prove invaluable as we refine standard operating procedures (SOP) to guide product development for future customers. Together we are establishing a toll processing station at their sophisticated Monterey facility, where we expect to process cannabis on behalf of some of California's leading cannabis cultivators, many of which are already close business relationships. The Company is confident this partnership will begin generating revenues in the 4th quarter of 2022 and anticipate a steep ramp-up in revenues throughout 2023. The CryoMass system enables cannabis and hemp cultivators and processors to optimize and streamline their processes, thus dramatically reducing costs while simultaneously capturing approximately 97% of the active elements and increasing the purity and quality of the products sold to consumers. CryoMass Director and CEO Christian Noel stated, "Finally, after seven years of engineering, product development, and testing, we are ready to commercialize this exciting new technology. And the demand is incredible. Every week we receive inquiries from cannabis and hemp cultivators and processors from all around the United States and the rest of the world as well. It's an exciting time for us." Noel added, "Our initial target market is North America, especially the United States. We think our first deployment in Monterey will serve to attract cultivators from within a four-hour radius seeking to avail themselves of this "must-have" new cryogenic trichome separation technology. Between Santa Barbara and Monterey, we will be positioned to toll-process for approximately 5,000 cultivation licenses representing 60% of the entire California market. We view this first installation as the perfect venue to showcase the CryoMass system to future customers from all around the globe." Testing Phase Highlights When comparing the results of the patented CryoMass system to traditional trichome separation systems, there is no comparison. Based on the processing of 25,000 lbs. of biomass, here are the results of our trichome separation system versus nine leading traditional systems that do not and cannot utilize our patented cryogenic, solventless separation process: CryoMass Versus Traditional Trichome Separation Systems CryoMass Traditional Systems Average Biomass processed per hour (lbs.) 1320 60 Separation time in days (based on 12-hour days) 1.6 66 Expected average trichome yield (lbs.) 8,000 1,750 Operating expenses ($) $ 2,816 $ 33,533 * Traditional systems data was gathered from company websites and from conversations with company representatives It is important to note that one of the key reasons the CryoMass system is so much more efficient from a process and cost-saving perspective is that it is, to the best of our knowledge, the only continuous-feed separation system while all others are batch-feed systems. Although the Company's initial focus is on the cannabis and hemp sector, there is tremendous potential to generate important revenue streams from processing other high-value, trichrome-rich plants where similar cost savings and end-product improvements can be realized. Here is the video of the continuous-feed CryoMass trichrome separation system in operation that was initially published in May: CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO The common stock of CryoMass Technologies Inc. trades on the OTC QX market under the symbol CRYM. For further information, please contact the Company by email at [email protected] or by telephone at +1 833 256 2382. This press release is not an offer of securities, or a solicitation for purchase, subscription or sale of securities in the United States of America or in any other jurisdiction in which it would be unlawful to do so. Forward-looking Statements This press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, including risk factors identified in the Company's SEC filings, and which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, changes in the regulatory environment affecting the sale and use of cannabis or hemp products and of other, potential lines of businesses that the Company will consider entering at a given time, demand for the Company's products, internal funding and the financial condition of the Company, product roll-out, competition, our dependence upon our commercial partners, variations in the global commodities markets and other commercial matters involving the Company, its products and the markets in which the Company operates or seeks to enter, as well as general economic conditions. The forward-looking statements in this press release are made only as of the date hereof, and unless otherwise required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Caution Regarding Cannabis Operations in the United States Investors should note that there are significant legal restrictions and regulations that govern the cannabis industry in the United States. Marijuana, as defined in the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, remains a Schedule I drug under the respective act, making it illegal under federal law in the U.S. to, among other things, cultivate, distribute or possess cannabis. Financial transactions involving proceeds generated by, or intended to promote, cannabis-related business activities in the U.S. may form the basis for prosecution under applicable U.S. federal money laundering legislation. Please carefully review the Company's SEC filings with respect to related risk factor. SOURCE CryoMass Technologies Inc SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hagens Berman urges Carvana Co. (NYSE: CVNA) investors who suffered significant losses to submit your losses now. Class Period: May 6, 2020 June 24, 2022 Lead Plaintiff Deadline: Oct. 3, 2022 Visit: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/CVNA Contact An Attorney Now: [email protected] 844-916-0895 Carvana Co. (NYSE: CVNA) Securities Fraud Class Action: The action challenges Defendants' statements touting Carvana's growth in retail units sold purportedly driven by the Company's increased penetration in existing markets. The complaint alleges Defendants' statements were misleading by omitting to disclose that Carvana: (1) faced serious ongoing issues with documentation, registration, and title with many of its vehicles; (2) was issuing unusually frequent temporary license plates; (3) was violating laws and regulations in many of its existing markets; (4) risked its ability to continue business and/or expand its business in existing markets; (5) was at increased risk of governmental investigation and action; (6) was in discussion with state and local authorities regarding the above-stated business tactics and issues; and, (7) was facing imminent and ongoing regulatory actions including license suspensions, business cessation, and probation in several states. On June 24, 2022, Barron's published an article revealing that "[i]n its haste to seize market share from competitors, Carvana was selling cars faster than it could get them registered to their new owners," Carvana has sold cars before it had title and, at one point, Carvana scrambled to respond to these problems by forming the "undriveable-car task force" unit. Barron's also observed that Carvana is facing scrutiny from several state motor vehicle agencies over its failure to meet vehicle registration deadlines, the use of out-of-state permits by customers, and other compliance issues. This news sent the price of Carvana shares sharply lower. "We're focused on investor losses and proving Carvana concealed its rampant violation of documentation regulations," said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation. If you invested in Carvana and have significant losses, or have knowledge that may assist the firm's investigation, click here to discuss your legal rights with Hagens Berman. Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding Carvana should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 844-916-0895 or email [email protected]. Hagens Berman is a global plaintiffs' rights complex litigation law firm focusing on corporate accountability through class-action law. The firm is home to a robust securities litigation practice and represents investors as well as whistleblowers, workers, consumers and others in cases achieving real results for those harmed by corporate negligence and fraud. More about the firm and its successes can be found at hbsslaw.com. Follow the firm for updates and news at @ClassActionLaw. Contact: Reed Kathrein, 844-916-0895 SOURCE Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP - Introduces Pepticate and Pepticate Syneo, specialized medical formulas, to the U.S. - Company's total supply of baby formula nears 1.9 million cans of product WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. and BROOMFIELD, Colo., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Danone North America, the purpose-driven food and beverage leader, today announced alongside its Specialized Nutrition business, Nutricia, it will introduce a new specialty medical baby formula, to the U.S. market this Fall. Continuing its efforts to help families navigate the baby formula shortage, Danone has also launched an online website, https://operationformulaforfamilies.com, that will serve to connect parents with helpful resources. Danone Introduces Pepticate to the U.S. Market Danone and Nutricia have coordinated with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to bring Pepticate and Pepticate Syneo to the United States. The company plans to import 50,000 cans of Pepticate and 24,000 cans of Pepticate Syneo, equivalent to more than 930,000 full-size, 8-ounce bottles, from its facility in the Netherlands. Pepticate is an extensively hydrolyzed, whey-based medical formula for children with cow's milk allergies. Pepticate is nutritionally complete for infants from 0 to 1. For babies with food allergies, hypoallergenic formulas such as Pepticate are oftentimes their main source of nutrition and can play a critical role in their development. Over the course of the next several months, Pepticate and Pepticate Syneo will be available through medical and retail channels including national and regional home healthcare state and government programs such as USDA's Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), MMCAP (state GPO), Medi-Cal and Tri-Care as well as several wholesale outlets and pharmacies. Shane Grant, CEO at Danone North America, said: "Danone teams around the world have come together, harnessing our global capabilities to support babies and families at a critical time. Together, we have been able to not only increase the supply of formula in the U.S. and provide families with important resources, but also introduce two new products to market, Aptamil and now Pepticate, to help meet this urgent need. This continues to be a powerful example of our mission in action to bring health through food to as many people as possible." New Online Resource for Parents and Families Based on Danone's expertise of more than 50 years in breastmilk research, the company believes breastfeeding offers babies the best nutritional start in life. However, if parents choose not to or cannot breastfeed, baby formulas like Aptamil, Neocate and Pepticate are high-quality, safe alternatives. To further help parents and families navigate the formula shortage, Danone North America developed a new online resource, https://operationformulaforfamilies.com. The website contains educational resources, product information on its portfolio of baby formula, as well as product locators and access to healthcare and nutrition professionals. Dr. Jon Vanderhoof, Chief of Pediatric G.I. at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, NE said: "Danone North America's new Formula for Families hub will serve a critical role by helping to connect parents and caregivers with formula products, raise awareness for available options and provide educational resources from credible experts. This website coupled with Danone's efforts to increase the availability of formula in the U.S. is truly essential in a time filled with uncertainty for so many families." To date Danone has committed to bringing nearly 1.9 million additional cans of formula to the market, including: Introduced more than 750,000 cans of Aptamil, Europe's number one formula brand, into the U.S., available on shelves now, with another 550,000 cans on the way (facilitated in part by the Biden Administration's Operation Fly Formula), for a total commitment of more than 1.3 million cans of Aptamil; number one formula brand, into the U.S., available on shelves now, with another 550,000 cans on the way (facilitated in part by the Biden Administration's Operation Fly Formula), for a total commitment of more than 1.3 million cans of Aptamil; In coordination with the FDA and the Biden Administration's Operation Fly Formula, imported more than 500,000 cans of Neocate, a specialized medical baby formula, to the U.S.; More than doubled its imports of Neocate prior to the FDA's enforcement discretion. About Danone North America Danone North America is a purpose-driven company and an industry leader in the food and beverage category. As a Certified B Corporation, Danone North America is committed to the creation of both economic and social value, while nurturing natural ecosystems through sustainable agriculture. Our strong portfolio of brands includes: Activia, DanActive, Danimals, Dannon, evian, Happy Family Organics, Honest to Goodness, Horizon Organic, International Delight, Light + Fit, Oikos, Silk, So Delicious Dairy Free, SToK, Two Good, Wallaby Organic and YoCrunch. With more than 6,000 employees and 16 production locations across the U.S. and Canada, Danone North America's mission is to bring health through food to as many people as possible. For more information on Danone North America's B Corp status, visit: https://bcorporation.net/directory/danone-north-america. About Nutricia Since 1896, Nutricia has pioneered nutritional solutions that help people live longer, more joyful and healthier lives. Building on more than a century of research and innovation, Nutricia has harnessed the power of life-changing nutrition to create a leading specialized nutrition portfolio that can change a health trajectory for life. With its nutritional solutions, Nutricia supports healthy growth and development during a baby's first 1,000 days and helps to address some of the world's biggest health challenges, including in North America: faltering growth, food allergy, rare metabolic diseases, epilepsy and wound healing. As part of Danone North America, Nutricia embraces the company's "One Planet. One Health" vision reflecting that the health of people and the health of the planet are interconnected and therefore seeks to protect and nourish both. Media Contact: Karissa Seltz [email protected] SOURCE Danone North America SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DoorDash Inc. (NYSE: DASH) announced financial results today for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. Please visit the DoorDash investor relations website at http://ir.doordash.com to view our financial results and letter to shareholders. A live audio webcast of our earnings release call will be available at http://ir.doordash.com . The call begins Thursday, August 4 at 3:00 PM (PT) / 6:00 PM (ET). Announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, as well as press and earnings releases are also available at http://ir.doordash.com . Following the call, a replay will be available at the same website. About DoorDash DoorDash (NYSE: DASH) is a technology company that connects consumers with their favorite local businesses in 27 countries across the globe. Founded in 2013, DoorDash builds products and services to help businesses innovate, grow, and reach more customers. DoorDash is building infrastructure for local commerce, enabling merchants to thrive in the convenience economy, giving consumers access to more of their communities, and providing work that empowers. With DoorDash, there is a neighborhood of good in every order. Investor Relations Contact [email protected] Press Contact [email protected] SOURCE DoorDash CHARLOTTE, N.C., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) has posted its second-quarter 2022 financial results in a news release available on the company's website at the following link: duke-energy.com/investors. Lynn Good, chair, president and chief executive officer, and Steve Young, executive vice president and chief financial officer, will discuss the company's financial results and other business and financial updates during an investor presentation at 10 a.m. ET today. The call can be accessed via the investors' section ( duke-energy.com/investors ) of Duke Energy's website or by dialing 888-510-2359 in the U.S. or 646-960-0215 outside the U.S. The confirmation code is 2999899. Please call in 10 to 15 minutes prior to the scheduled start time. A recording of the webcast with transcript will be available on the investors' section of the company's website by Aug. 5. Duke Energy Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of America's largest energy holding companies. Its electric utilities serve 8.2 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, and collectively own 50,000 megawatts of energy capacity. Its natural gas unit serves 1.6 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky. The company employs 28,000 people. Duke Energy is executing an aggressive clean energy transition to achieve its goals of net-zero methane emissions from its natural gas business and at least a 50% carbon reduction from electric generation by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The 2050 net-zero goals also include Scope 2 and certain Scope 3 emissions. In addition, the company is investing in major electric grid enhancements and energy storage, and exploring zero-emission power generation technologies such as hydrogen and advanced nuclear. Duke Energy was named to Fortune's 2022 "World's Most Admired Companies" list and Forbes' "America's Best Employers" list. More information is available at duke-energy.com . The Duke Energy News Center contains news releases, fact sheets, photos, and videos. Duke Energy's illumination features stories about people, innovations, community topics and environmental issues. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter , LinkedIn , Instagram and Facebook. Media contact: Jennifer Garber 800.559.3853 Analysts contact: Jack Sullivan 980.373.3564 SOURCE Duke Energy SAO PAULO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- EMBRAER S.A. (NYSE: ERJ; B3: EMBR3) releases its Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Results. HIGHLIGHTS Firm order backlog ended 2Q22 at US$ 17.8 billion (+US$0.5 billion versus 1Q22). This is the highest quarter backlog post pandemic, driven by solid order activity. Recent announcement of 20 E195-E2 firm order of Porter will be included in 3Q22 backlog. ended 2Q22 at versus 1Q22). This is the post pandemic, driven by solid order activity. Recent announcement of 20 E195-E2 firm order of Porter will be included in 3Q22 backlog. Reported 2Q22 consolidated gross margin of 22.9% higher than 18.2% reported in 2Q21 , with y-o-y improvement in most segments due to product mix, pricing increase and overall operational performance, including tax efficiencies. , with y-o-y improvement in most segments due to product mix, pricing increase and overall operational performance, including tax efficiencies. Adjusted EBIT and EBITDA were US$ 81.2 million and US$ 124.6 million , respectively, yielding Adjusted EBIT margin of 8.0% and Adjusted EBITDA margin of 12.2% . and were and , respectively, yielding of and of . In 2Q22, Embraer reported Adjusted Net Income (excluding deferred taxes and special items) of US$ 39.4 million and Earnings per Share of US$ 0.40 . (excluding deferred taxes and special items) million and Earnings per Share of . Free cash flow (FCF) in 2Q22 was a surplus of US$ 91.2 million , representing a significant improvement compared to the US$ 45.1 million in FCF in 2Q21, supported by divestment of Evora's facilities and EVE's IPO offset by working capital needs and liability management strategy. in 2Q22 was a surplus of , representing a significant improvement compared to the in FCF in 2Q21, supported by divestment of Evora's facilities and EVE's IPO offset by working capital needs and liability management strategy. The Company finished the quarter with net debt of US$ 1.198 billion , or US$ 0.255 billion less than 1Q22 in line with the strategy to improve our capital structure and liability management. We reaffirm all aspects of our 2022 financial and deliveries guidance, with no material variation. For additional information, please check the full document on our website ri.embraer.com.br INVESTOR RELATIONS Leonardo Shinohara, Jose Triques, Caio Moriani and Viviane Pinheiro. (+55 11) 3040-6874 [email protected] ri.embraer.com.br CONFERENCE CALL INFORMATION Embraer will host a conference call to present its 2Q22 Results on: ENGLISH : Thursday, August 4, 2022 at 10:00 AM (SP Time) / 09:00 AM (NY Time) . Access Link: https://mzgroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EsExGKIZTpOBUAtAggVJ9w To participate by Phone: From Brazil: 55 21 3958 7888 or +55 11 4632 2236 or +55 11 4632 2237 or +55 11 4680 6788 or +55 11 4700 9668. From U.S.: +1 386 347 5053 or +1 564 217 2000 or +1 646 558 8656 or +1 646 931 3860 or +1 669 444 9171 or +1 720 707 2699 or +1 253 215 8782 or +1 301 715 8592 or +1 312 626 6799 or +1 346 248 7799. International Phone Numbers available at https://mzgroup.zoom.us/u/kdl6WjpjTv ID: 829 8270 9256 Password: 979255 We recommend you call 20 minutes in advance. THE CONFERENCE CALL WILL ALSO BE BROADCASTED LIVE OVER THE WEB, AT THE ADDRESS: ri.embraer.com.br SOURCE Embraer S.A. NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Women and girls who seek to advance their STEM education have long faced incredible challenges in a field traditionally dominated by men. At the same time, recent events have highlighted the soaring population of 89.3 million refugees, displaced and stateless people around the world - almost 27% of whom are women and girls under 18. International education, and especially virtual exchange, is rarely used to address such issues, even though it can be a powerful way to broaden opportunities for marginalized groups. Helping Young Women Enter the World of STEM & Sustainability AFS Intercultural Programs, a global non-profit renowned for its intercultural exchanges has run programs funded by bp since 2011 for young people in STEM. In 2021, the two organizations launched an ambitious 5-year initiative aimed at giving 5,000 young people scholarships, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, and a particular focus on supporting young women. The AFS Global STEM Accelerator program, which launched in June 2022, is a full-scholarship, virtual exchange program designed to provide 180 young women worldwide with access to education in sustainability, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), and positive social impact. Giving Refugees Equal Access to Education The refugee crisis affects more than 89.3 million people globally, including the millions of displaced people from Syria, Venezuela, Sudan, and Myanmar. Since February 2022, the world has seen millions of Ukrainians being forced to flee their homes. The immediate public response to refugee crises is often focused on meeting urgent humanitarian needs. However, education is a basic human right that is often denied to refugee youth. This is especially true of young refugee women. It's also, according to the UNHCR , a critical part of any international refugee response. With this in mind, AFS, with support from bp, increased the number of scholarships to ensure that young refugee women were included in the AFS Global STEM Accelerator Program . Recognizing the need to execute outreach thoughtfully, AFS partnered with SPARK, an international non-governmental development organization active in 14 regions throughout the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa. For over 28 years, SPARK has created pathways for young people to rebuild their futures, and provide opportunities for youth, particularly women and refugees, to study, work and grow their own businesses in fragile communities. "Global citizenship education has to be accessible to everyone. We are so excited that we could work with bp and SPARK to make this program accessible to young people that are often excluded from these opportunities, but in reality need them the most," says Daniel Obst, AFS President and CEO. Over 1,000 applicants from 71 Countries The AFS Global STEM Accelerators program received 1,083 applications from 71 countries worldwide, including applicants from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Nigeria, and Syrian refugees in Turkey. Applications were open to young women (ages 15-17.5) globally, with a keen interest in becoming changemakers in their communities. AFS allocated 20% of scholarships specifically for refugees and girls from displaced populations, whether from war, violence, or natural disaster. The 180 scholarships awarded to young women from 61 countries reflect the diversity and inclusion the program seeks to achieve: 20% of recipients identify as refugees or from displaced communities 82% of recipients identify as People of Color 51% of recipients come from low-income households 10% will be the first in their families on track to graduate from high school AFS and bp recognize that access to technology and internet connectivity is inequitable globally and are prepared to support these needs. "It is exciting to see such strong interest from these brilliant young women," says Kerry Dryburgh, EVP people & culture, bp. "With their passion to make a difference and the skills they will learn, they are future changemakers, leaders and innovators we wish them the very best for their journey." The words of the scholarship recipients further support the claim that virtual exchange is a powerful tool for expanding access to educational opportunities. "I am from a traditional Pashtun society, where in my province girls don't even have the right to go to school. In each corner of my country, gender inequality is vivid. All these challenges give me the strength to create my own identity and to be different from my surroundings. Participating in this program will be my first step toward achieving my goal to explore the world and become someone influential in improving sustainable societies." - Harira, from Afghanistan What's Next for These Young Women The AFS Global STEM Accelerators program culminates with scholars developing social impact capstone projects and presentations that offer potential solutions to real-world challenges, with an emphasis on sustainability. Participants receive the Advanced Certificate on Global Competence for Social Impact, awarded by AFS and the University of Pennsylvania, along with official validation on their capstone projects from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Social Impact Strategy. Students' learning and capstone development is guided by a diverse facilitation team representing twelve qualified facilitators (all women) from nine countries. Upon program completion, scholars will be invited to join the alumni community offering diverse mentoring opportunities, skills development sessions, panel discussions and further development opportunities. Scholars will also be invited to participate in the AFS Youth Assembly , a global gathering of young people actively tackling the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. SOURCE AFS Intercultural Programs ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Falcon Capital Advisors , a leading business advisory firm that provides strategic advice, technical expertise and engagement execution to financial institutions and government agencies, today announced that it has hired industry veteran Walter Allen as its Managing Director; Natisha Dawson as its new Director of Finance and promoted Ken Yoo to Chief Operating Officer. "We are pleased to welcome Natisha and Walter to the team and to elevate Ken in an expanded role," said Armando Falcon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Falcon Capital Advisors. "This latest infusion of talent, as well as our recent announcement that Phil Bracken has joined us as Vice Chairman, reinforces our position as the premier, full-service consulting firm dedicated to serving the needs of the mortgage and capital markets. The timing couldn't be more advantageous, given turmoil in the mortgage market and the digital transformation that is taking place. Clients are looking for strategic counsel as they readjust their business models and for direction and implementation assistance as they digitize their lending and secondary marketing operations." Allen will be responsible for business development across Falcon's major practice areas: financial institutions and government advisory services and its eMortgage consulting practice. Allen is a recognized industry veteran and digital business strategy leader with more than 20 years of experience utilizing technology solutions to drive transformational business initiatives in both the government and private sector. Prior to joining Falcon, Allen was the President of HouseAmp, a fintech company where he managed and oversaw all aspects of the operation. Prior to HouseAmp, Allen spent nearly 13 years with data and technology leader CoreLogic, most recently as Vice President of Government Solutions working directly with federal government clients and agencies. Earlier, he was the Vice President of Global Capital Markets where he oversaw a team of product specialists and subject matter experts focused on key financial services customers and the Rating Agencies. Dawson brings more than 20 years of finance and leadership expertise to Falcon. As Director of Finance, Dawson will be responsible for leading all finance and accounting matters in the firm. Prior to joining Falcon, she was the Founder & Chief Financial Officer of The Griffin Way, a firm designed to provide outsourced finance and accounting services to small- and mid-sized businesses. Previously, she held executive financial roles at large, global marketing, public relations and communications firms. As Chief Operating Officer, Yoo oversees Falcon's daily operational and administrative functions. Yoo's areas of oversight at Falcon include daily operational supervision, strategic planning, M&A planning and integration, IT and physical infrastructure management, and governance/risk/compliance activities. Yoo has more than 25 years of senior leadership experience in banking, housing finance, consulting risk management and regulatory oversight. During his tenure at Falcon Yoo has been responsible for managing teams, relationships and projects for both commercial and government agency clients. Yoo's involvement in those engagements have included initiatives related to program management, asset management, risk management and quality control, data analytics, grant and loan administration and financial analysis for the housing, financial services and healthcare industries. About Falcon Capital Advisors Falcon Capital Advisors (FCA) is a Washington, D.C.-based business and technology advisory firm that provides strategic advice, technical expertise and engagement execution to financial institutions and government agencies. The FCA team is comprised of industry experts who have developed deep financial services expertise by serving as regulators at federal financial regulatory agencies and as top business and technology executives at leading financial institutions. FCA's capabilities span the entire mortgage landscape, from origination and servicing to government agency consulting. The firm's technology consulting practice is known for its expertise in digital transformation, its ability to implement as well as design solutions, and its vendor agnostic approach. For more information, go to falconcapitaladvisors.com. SOURCE Falcon Capital Advisors BUFFALO, N.Y., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Fidelis Care is proud to join with community partners to host a special summer block party called Unity in Buffalo on Saturday, August 6 from 1-3 PM at the Cold Spring Church at 107 Verplanck Street in Buffalo. The public is invited to attend the free event, which will feature music, fun activities for kids, refreshments, giveaways, and more. Information on local support and resources from community partners will also be available, and Cold Spring Church Outreach Program will be giving away free school supplies, while supplies last. "As a local health plan, Fidelis Care is proud to serve the Buffalo community and to join with our members, providers, friends, and neighbors to promote unity and healing in the wake of the tragic shooting on May 14," said Senior Vice President Scott Averill. "Fidelis Care has deep roots in the Buffalo community and we will continue to be here in the weeks, months, and years to come. We look forward to seeing community members on Saturday and encourage everyone to stop by the Fidelis Care table to say hello." Added Jackquell Baker, Assistant Secretary of Cold Spring Church where the event will be held: "For over 75 years, Cold Spring Church of God in Christ Jesus has served our community, providing hope and strength to many. Under the leadership of our Bishop Joseph L. Wallace Sr., we are proud to partner with Fidelis Care and truly believe in the power of unity, and will continue to support our community each and every day. The Unity in Buffalo event is a great opportunity to bring our friends and neighbors together, especially as our community continues to heal." About Fidelis Care Fidelis Care is a mission-driven health plan offering quality, affordable coverage for children and adults of all ages and at all stages of life. With more than 2.5 million members statewide, Fidelis Care believes that all New Yorkers should have access to affordable, quality health insurance. Follow us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/fidelis-care , on Twitter at @fideliscare, Instagram at @fideliscare, and on Facebook at facebook.com/fideliscare. For more information, call Fidelis Care at 1-888-FIDELIS (1-888-343-3547) or visit fideliscare.org. Contact: [email protected] SOURCE Fidelis Care Award Recognizes Young Leaders on Personal and Professional Accomplishments ROCHESTER, N.Y., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Foundry Digital LLC ("Foundry"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Digital Currency Group ("DCG") focused on empowering a decentralized infrastructure and progressing the digital asset mining and staking industry, announced that the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce selected Foundry's Director of Economic and Community Development Adrian Hale as an IGNITE Award finalist. The award recognizes outstanding contributions in the areas of personal and professional accomplishments, leadership, and community service. With Adrian Hale's community-focused mindset, Foundry's ROC The Block fellowship program is empowering recent RCSD graduates to become contributing members of the blockchain community through education, exposure, expertise, and employment. The pathway program encourages recent RCSD graduates to join a two-year industry-based curriculum within Foundry, providing hands-on training, competitive salaries, and benefits. Before entering the crypto industry, Adrian worked to improve educational outcomes for the community's youth and enhance the quality of the Rochester regional workforce. He was the youngest Greater Rochester Chamber executive in the organization's history, creating its talent, workforce development, and education initiatives office. Hale was also nominated for and awarded various leadership and community-focused awards throughout his professional career, including the Center for Teen Empowerment Award, Champion for Youth Leadership Award, two ROC Black Men Achieve Awards, and 40 Under 40 recognitions. Hale said, "I am grateful for this recognition from the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce. My goal will always be to give back to the Rochester community and contribute to the region's economic progress by doing what I can today until I can do more tomorrow. I also congratulate my fellow finalists for their personal and professional achievements across the Rochester and Finger Lakes region." Foundry's VP of Operations Andrea Childs stated, "I've had the pleasure of witnessing Adrian's dedication to the Rochester community both inside and outside of Foundry. I'm excited to see how he will continue to prioritize and bring community to the forefront of Foundry's mission to empower a decentralized infrastructure." Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Bob Duffy said, "Greater Rochester's future is bright because of young leaders like our Greater Rochester Chamber IGNITE Award finalists. They exemplify the community-driven nature that is characteristic of so many young leaders and make us proud with the efforts that they are putting into our region. Each of these individuals has impacted the lives of so many through their professional success, community service, and leadership. We look forward to celebrating them in August and seeing what comes next for these exemplary young leaders." About Foundry Digital LLC A subsidiary of DCG, Foundry Digital LLC was created to meet the institutional demand for better capital access, efficiency, and transparency in the digital asset mining and staking industry. Headquartered in Rochester, NY, Foundry leverages its institutional expertise, capital, and market intelligence to empower participants within the crypto ecosystem by providing the tools they need to build tomorrow's decentralized infrastructure. For more information, please visit foundrydigital.com. About Digital Currency Group, Inc. Founded in 2015, Digital Currency Group is a global enterprise that builds, buys, and invests in blockchain companies all over the world. Today, DCG sits at the epicenter of the industry, backing more than 200 companies in 30+ countries. In addition to its investment portfolio, DCG is the parent company of some of the leading companies in the industry, including Grayscale Investments, Genesis Trading, CoinDesk, Foundry Digital, Luno, and TradeBlock. SOURCE Foundry Dedication to sustainable practices and ongoing goals led to the top 1% rank of more than 95,000 companies worldwide NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Genpact (NYSE: G), a global professional services firm focused on delivering meaningful business outcomes through end-to-end transformation, announced that it was awarded its first ever Platinum rating from EcoVadis, the world's most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings. The assessment includes an in-depth review of Genpact's policies and practices across 21-point review criteria covering four core themes: Environment, Labor and Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement. Rising from last year's Gold ranking, Genpact's ongoing focus on sustainability and its commitment to its employees, clients and partners, shareholders, and communities, influenced this year's recognition, the highest possible by EcoVadis. Genpact's sustainability program focuses on the following areas: Environment and climate action, including a commitment to energy and water management as well as the reduction of emissions and waste Corporate governance to create economic value for stakeholders supported by strong corporate governance practices Delivering excellence for clients by innovating and collaborating to drive tangible outcomes beyond cost and productivity Supporting people and communities through a relentless focus on the wellbeing of Genpact's employees and the communities in which it operates "We are excited to receive the highest possible rating from EcoVadis for our commitment to sustainability," said Tiger Tyagarajan, chief executive officer, Genpact. "Not only is prioritizing our global commitment to sustainability the right thing to do, but it is also an important part of what we bring to our clients to help them transform their businesses and meet their own sustainability commitments." As a purpose-driven business, sustainability is embedded in Genpact's business strategy and is at the core of its ongoing commitment to create a world that works better for people across its employees, clients and partners, shareholders, and the communities in which it operates. For more information, please read Genpact's latest sustainability report here. About Genpact Genpact (NYSE: G) is a global professional services firm that makes business transformation real. Led by our purpose -- the relentless pursuit of a world that works better for people -- we drive digital-led innovation and digitally enabled intelligent operations for our clients. Guided by our experience reinventing and running thousands of processes for hundreds of clients, many of them Global Fortune 500 companies, we drive real-world transformation at scale. We think with design, dream in digital, and solve problems with data and analytics. Combining our expertise in end-to-end operations and our AI-based platform, Genpact Cora, we focus on the details all 100,000+ of us. From New York to New Delhi, and more than 30 countries in between, we connect every dot, reimagine every process, and reinvent the ways companies work. We know that reimagining each step from start to finish creates better business outcomes. Whatever it is, we'll be there with you accelerating digital transformation to create bold, lasting results because transformation happens here. Get to know us at Genpact.com and on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Media Contact: Sarah Joyce Genpact Media Relations [email protected] +1 (626) 379-9829 SOURCE Genpact DUBLIN, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Air Traffic Management Market by Application (Communication, Navigation, Surveillance, Automation), End Use (Commercial, Military), Airspace, Investment Type, Offering, Service, Airport Size and Region - Forecast to 2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Based on Application, Communication segment is estimated to be the largest growing market An automatic terminal information system (ATIS) is a mission-critical ATC system that helps air traffic controllers to transfer meteorological and operational information to pilots when an aircraft approaches an airport for landing. The ATIS also helps broadcast airport-related information, including weather conditions and active runways, to the pilot and flight crew. The ATIS system is connected to a server, which communicates with outside systems and devices, such as meteorological data sources, telephone lines, radio transmitters, and client workstations, where the ATIS message is created. ATIS users, such as air traffic control officers, use client software interfaces to initiate, compose, review, and publish ATIS messages. In November 2020, ACAMS Airport Tower Solutions (Norway) was chosen to supply ATIS systems to Saudi Air Navigation Service (SANS). The ACMS delivery involves new hardware and software for 13 systems, supplied with the latest ACAMS ATIS technology and functionality. The systems run on ACAMS i6 software and include an upgraded speech engine and database. Rising use of amplifiers in surveillance systems to drive offering segment demand Amplifiers are used in communication and navigation systems. The systems and modules offer competitive output powers from 5-5,000 watts, spanning frequencies from 0.0-6,000 MHz. Teseo SpA (Italy) delivers military and air traffic control amplifiers, which are recognized worldwide as the leading amplifiers for RF systems. Empower RF (US) is a major supplier of amplifiers in L-band for long-range air traffic control and surveillance (IFF) as well as S-band for moderate-range surveillance and long-range weather. The air traffic management market is projected to grow from USD 8.0 billion in 2022 to USD 11.8 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 8.1%. In February 2022, Taiwan Air Navigation and Weather Service (ANWS) selected Thales Group (France) to replace 3 airport surveillance systems in Taitung, Hualien, and Songshan (Taiwan) with the STAR NG primary surveillance radars, combined with the RSM NG secondary radars. The upgrade would expand the air traffic control capacity of ANWS by offering a wider range of capabilities and functions and bolster confidence in the safety and reliability of air travel. Market Dynamics Drivers Launch of Sesar 3 Joint Undertaking to Modernize European Air Traffic Management Global Focus on Improving Air Safety Modernization of Air Traffic Management Infrastructure Restraints Stringent Regulatory Norms Associated with Aircraft Operation High Costs of Air Traffic Management Equipment Opportunities Advancements in Unmanned Traffic Management Growing Role of Digitalization in Aviation Challenges Risk of Cyber Threat due to Ads-B in Air Traffic Management Limited Availability of Skilled Personnel Upgrading Existing Aircraft with Advanced Air Traffic Management Systems Premium Insights Modernization of Existing Airports and Construction of New Airports to Drive Market Communication Segment to Lead Air Traffic Management Market During Forecast Period Modernization & Upgradation to Command Highest Growth Rate During Forecast Period Class C Commercial Airports to Grow Fastest During Forecast Period India and Australia Projected to Witness Highest CAGR (2022-2027) Key Topics Covered: 1 Introduction 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Premium Insights 5 Market Overview 6 Industry Trends 7 Air Traffic Management, by Airspace 8 Air Traffic Management Market, by Application 9 Air Traffic Management, by Offering 10 Air Traffic Management Market, by Airport Size 11 Air Traffic Management Market, by Investment Type 12 Air Traffic Management, by End Use 13 Air Traffic Management Market, by Service 14 Regional Analysis 15 Competitive Landscape 16 Company Profiles 17 Appendix Companies Mentioned Acams Airport Tower Solutions Adacel Technologies, Ltd. Advanced Navigation and Positioning Corporation Altys Technologies Amadeus It Group, S.A. Aquila Air Traffic Management Services Limited Bae Systems plc Cyrrus Limited Frequentis Ag Honeywell International, Inc. Ids Airnav Indra Sistemas, S.A. Intelcan Technosystems Inc. L3Harris Technologies, Inc. Leidos Holdings, Inc. Leonardo Spa Lockheed Martin Corporation Nav Canada Northrop Grumman Corporation Raytheon Technologies Corporation Saab Ab Saipher Atc Sita Group Skysoft-Atm Thales Group For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/2yrbo5 Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/539438/Research_and_Markets_Logo.jpg SOURCE Research and Markets DUBLIN, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Pet Insurance Market - Forecasts from 2022 to 2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The pet insurance market has a CAGR of 5.66% during the forecast period to reach US$84.996 billion by 2027, from US$57.811 billion in 2020. Introduction Pet Insurance is a protection policy that mostly covers veterinary healthcare for a person's sick or wounded pet. Insurance companies may compensate for a part or whole of the healthcare treatment cost of the pet, depending on the policy. Some policies also cover costs if the pet gets stolen or lost, or even in case of death. Market Trend: The global pet insurance market is likely to increase in the following years, owing to the increasing veterinary healthcare prices. The increasing trend of pet adoptions and pet purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic would also play a vital role in the pet insurance market. Europe is currently holding the largest market share in the pet insurance industry. Sweden currently holds the largest market share in Europe, with almost 90% of pets having reported pet insurance covers. However, North America has been regarded as the fastest growing market in recent years, rapid advancements in the pet insurance market. NAPHIA recently revealed many industry achievements in North America, including a remarkable US$2.174 billion in total pet health insurance premiums sold in 2020 (up to over 26% from $1.717 billion in 2019) and over 3.45 million pets covered across the region (up by 22.5% from over 2.81 million pets insured in 2019). Growth Factors Increase in veterinary healthcare costs With the increasing adoption and purchase of pet animals, the veterinary healthcare industry has also become substantially expensive. Knee replacements, sophisticated allergy testing, cancer treatments, and chiropractic therapy, which were previously exclusively available to humans, are now available to dogs and cats. According to the American Pet Products Association's (APPA) annual state of the industry report, pet expenditure in the United States hit US$103.6 billion in 2020, up by 6.7% from the previous year. Of that amount, US$ 31.4 billion was used for veterinary healthcare, which accounted for an increase of about 7.2% from the previous year. With the increasing costs of veterinary healthcare, people have started to understand the significance of pet insurance. This is consequently expected to drive up the demand for pet insurance. Moreover, pet owners have seen a significant increase in instances of dog thefts. According to information released under the Freedom of Information Act by Direct Line Pet Insurance, thefts have increased by 13%, totaling 2,670 instances in 2021 in the UK. This has been recorded as the highest number of thefts in the last seven years. Government agencies have tried releasing guidelines to safeguard the pets, but have been unsuccessful. The best option that pet owners have to safeguard their pets is to get a theft or straying insurance cover that would cover the costs for the loss of a pet. Such increases in the instances of pet thefts are also expected to drive up the pet insurance market. Restrain Increasing policy prices Pet insurance prices have been increasing rapidly over the past few years. Veterinary treatments have advanced to the point that veterinarians can now diagnose and treat pet ailments with much more accuracy than ever before. However, these treatments come at a price, and they will unavoidably affect pet insurance premiums. Moreover, some insurance providers are a lot more careful about their financial decisions and want to generate as much revenue as they can. Some of them are more active in raising their rates than others, and they are willing to risk losing clients as a result. Furthermore, even if a pet is currently in perfect condition and has never filed a claim, the pet insurance premiums may rise. As animals grow older, the likelihood of their being ill increases, raising the cost of insurance. Since pets live for a shorter amount of time on average than humans, it may seem that they are afflicted with more ailments and succumb to them sooner. Market Segmentation: By Animal Type Dog Cat By Policy type Lifetime Cover Illness Cover Accident Cover Non-Lifetime Cover Illness Cover Accident Cover By Geography Key Topics Covered: 1. INTRODUCTION 2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4. MARKET DYNAMICS 5. PET INSURANCE MARKET, BY ANIMAL TYPE 6. PET INSURANCE MARKET, BY APPLICATION 7. PET INSURANCE MARKET, BY COUNTRY 8. COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT AND ANALYSIS 9. COMPANY PROFILES Companies Mentioned Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company Metlife Inc. Healthy Paws Pet Insurance, LLC. Crum & Foster Trupanion Petplan Limited Embrace Pet Insurance Agency, LLC Animal Friends Insurance Petsecure Pet Health Insurance 24PetWatch For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/3fquze Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/539438/Research_and_Markets_Logo.jpg SOURCE Research and Markets MELBOURNE, Fla., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sierra Supply Chain Services, a full-service Cold Chain provider, celebrated a ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday, August 3, 2022 in honour of their new state-of-the-art facility, Sierra Cold. The 65-million-dollar complex is located in Hamilton, ON, strategically situated within the Red Hill Business Park. The 65-foot-tall expansion boasts nearly 164,000 sq. ft. of storage space and over 36,000 pallet positions bringing the facility's grand total to 250,000 sq. ft. and 30,000 sq. ft. of food processing space. New state-of-the-art facility, Sierra Cold Sierra Cold Facility in Hamilton, Ontario Sierra Cold is a jewel of efficiency due to its implementation of energy saving systems such as Evapcold LCR and a Budzar Modular Engine Room. Expertly designed narrow aisles and raised ceiling heights maximize density, decreasing the facility's footprint and increasing storage capacity. "We are excited to bring this state-of-the-art facility to market," said Rob Vanden Broek, CEO of Sierra Supply Chain Services. "High density and high efficiency are the future in 3PL supply chain and Sierra Cold will lead the way." Ti Cold, an internationally recognized leader in the cold chain industry, has worked with long-term partners Sierra Supply Chain Services and Penta Properties to create a temperature-controlled facility developed with innovation in mind, resulting in an efficient and effective solution that meets the demands of cold chain users. "We are very excited to have this opportunity to continue our valued partnership with Sierra Supply Chain Services in support of this important project," said Sam Tippmann, President and CEO of Ti Cold. "This project continues the growth and expansion of our development footprint and is yet another exceptional example of market demand advancing cold chain infrastructure investment across North America. At Ti Cold, we feel privileged to be a part of an essential industry that brings value to so many, and is valued by so many," said Tippmann. Sierra Cold is deeply valued in the area. "The fast-growing food processing sector reinforces the need for a multi-purpose facility like this. The time is now for Hamilton," Vanden Broek stated. Sam Tippmann affirmed, "When it's the right time to build, you need the right partner. Ti Cold brings depth of experience to every aspect of the cold industry and we proudly use our expertise to help our clients through every step of the process." "Ti Cold provides design and cold storage construction expertise that is best in class," said Vanden Broek. "Decades of pioneering experience and numerous cold chain patents positioned Ti Cold to be our partner of choice." About Sierra Supply Chain: Sierra Supply Chain is a North American leader in comprehensive 3rd party supply chain services. Sierra Supply Chain Services sources, imports, and exports protein products; provides value add processing, as well as cold storage logistics, distribution, and warehousing. Penta Properties, part of Alinea Group Holdings Inc., is a landowner, developer, and owner of multiple buildings in the retail and employment sector throughout the GTA and the Hamilton-Niagara Regions. About Ti Cold: Known as an award-winning, specialty industrial cold storage builder and developer with decades of experience in designing and building state-of-the-art facilities across the United States and Canada. Ti Cold utilizes time-honed expertise and advanced technology solutions to create efficient buildings that scale with a business and that are designed to maximize profitability through fully integrating operations and supply chain. Ti Cold provides a full suite of cold storage construction and development services, including master site planning, and operations guidance. Ti's consulting services help companies navigate the unique challenges associated with a rapidly changing industry. Ti Cold has offices in Florida and Indiana. Learn more online @ www.ticold.com. FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Rob Adams, 260-424-2222, [email protected] SOURCE Ti Cold SACRAMENTO, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SkySlope, the leader in real estate transaction and brokerage software, is partnering with the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS (GLAR) to offer its premier transaction management solution SkySlope Suite including SkySlope Forms and DigiSign as a benefit to GLAR members. SkySlope's suite of products enables real estate professionals to centralize their workflow while remaining compliant. As the transaction management platform that serves over half of the top 20 largest brokerages in the nation, SkySlope is known for its 24/7 award-winning technical support and customized onboarding and training both benefits that are now available to GLAR agents. "We are ecstatic to offer SkySlope to our members," says Aaron Fox, 2022 Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS President. "SkySlope provides a valuable resource for REALTORS to get the most out of their form libraries and elevate the transaction process across the state. Seeing as SkySlope is dedicated to building innovative, easy-to-adopt solutions, we know our members will thrive using SkySlope." SkySlope launched in 2011 with a mission to create technology that makes life better for real estate professionals. In October 2017, after several years of impressive growth, SkySlope became a part of the Fidelity National Financial (NYSE: FNF) family. This partnership reinforces SkySlope's commitment to its vision, providing them with greater resources to innovate. Since then, SkySlope has continued to create groundbreaking products for its growing community of over 450,000 real estate professionals. Located in Lansing, Michigan, the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS was founded with a mission to promote the American dream of homeownership through a free enterprise system. They provide support for their REALTORS, allowing them the ability to take on industry challenges, protect homeowner and private property rights, and build communities. GLAR's partnership with SkySlope will empower its agents with top-tier tools designed to help them succeed. SkySlope Suite for GLAR members will include: SkySlope Suite - Flagship transaction management solution (includes DigiSign and Forms). DigiSign - Send documents for signature quickly and easily with intuitive (and free) features. Forms - Association and MLS forms that are always up-to-date and synced with data from the MLS. "The way REALTORS work today is changing as they take on more clients, adjust to market swings, and adopt more tech," says Tyler Smith, CEO of SkySlope. "At SkySlope, we are driven to provide tools that make an immediate impact in our customers' lives which is why we designed SkySlope Suite to be simple, flexible, and user-friendly. We are excited to work with GLAR to provide this benefit to all of its members." For more information about SkySlope Suite, visit our website . About SkySlope Established in 2011, SkySlope is the customer experience platform managing real estate transactions from contract to close. Serving over 450,000 real estate professionals across the U.S. and Canada, SkySlope manages nearly 3 million transactions annually. SkySlope is on a mission to build solutions that reshape the real estate industry by creating the most powerful autonomous transaction platform. For more information, visit SkySlope . About Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS Founded in Michigan in 1907, the purpose of the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS is to promote the American dream of homeownership through a free enterprise system by preserving the right to own, use, and sell real property. GLAR members work together to take on industry challenges, maintain the most accurate housing data, protect homeowners and private property rights, and help build communities. To learn more about the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS, visit www.glaronline.com . Contact SkySlope [email protected] 1-800-507-4117 SOURCE SkySlope TULSA, Okla. and NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP, Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons and a team of civil rights lawyers today announced that Tulsa County Judge Caroline Wall released her 13-page order late on August 3 denying the defendants' efforts to entirely dismiss plaintiffs' claim that the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was a public nuisance under Oklahoma law and finding that plaintiffs 106-year-old Lessie Benningfield "Mother" Randle, 107-year-old Viola "Mother" Fletcher, and 101-year-old Hughes Van Ellis are entitled to proceed to discovery and prove that the Tulsa Race Massacre was a public nuisance that continues to impact Black Tulsans today. From May 31 through June 1, 1921, a large white mob completely decimated Tulsa's thriving, all-Black community of Greenwood. The mob, which included members of the Tulsa Police Department, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, the Tulsa County Sheriff's Department and the Oklahoma National Guard, as well as other city and county leaders, overwhelmed the approximately 40-square-block community, killing hundreds of Black residents, injuring thousands more, burning down over one thousand homes and businesses and stealing residents' personal property. The damage caused during the Massacre is estimated to be approximately $200 million in today's dollars. "The Court's ruling is historic," said Sara Solfanelli, special counsel for pro bono initiatives at Schulte Roth & Zabel. "This victory not only recognizes that the Massacre was a devastating attack on the Black community 100 years ago, but clears the path for our clients to prove that it was also a public nuisance that continues to harm the community today." "The Massacre deprived Black Tulsans of our sense of security, hard-won economic power and vibrant community," says Solomon-Simmons, a Tulsa native, "and created a nuisance that continues to this day. The nuisance has led to the continued destruction of life and property in Greenwood in every quality of life metriclife expectancy, health, unemployment, education level, and financial security." "For the first time in over 100 years, the last three living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre will finally have an opportunity to hold accountable the institutions that instigated and facilitated one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in this country's history. While we are excited about the Court's historic ruling, this case is by no means over," commented Michael Swartz, co-head of Schulte Roth & Zabel's litigation group. "We believe that discovery will unearth more facts of what truly happened at the Massacre; the plaintiffs and the public deserve a deeper understanding of the events and their aftermath, and a more accurate historical record." "We look forward to proving our case around the Massacre's ongoing catastrophic effects and demonstrating the actions that defendants must take to repair and rebuild the Greenwood community during our clients' lifetimes," added Solomon-Simmons. The Court dismissed certain plaintiffs and defendants, as well as the unjust enrichment claims, and further allowed plaintiffs to amend the petition to cure potential deficiencies that would strengthen their claims. In addition to Solomon-Simmons, Swartz, and Solfanelli, the Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys J. Spencer Bryan and Steven Terrill of Bryan & Terrill Law, PLLC, Professor Eric Miller of Loyola Marymount College of Law, Maynard M. Henry, Sr., Lashandra Peoples-Johnson and Cordal Cephas of Johnson Cephas Law PLLC, Kymberli J. M. Heckenkemper of SolomonSimmonsLaw, and Randall T. Adams, McKenzie Haynes, Ekenedilichukwu (Keni) E. Ukabiala, Angela Garcia, Alex Wharton, Erika L. Simonson, Vincent W. Moccio, and Melanie S. Collins of SRZ. Media Contact: Sneha Satish [email protected] 646-502-3556 PRESS CONFERENCE TODAY Event: Hosted by The Justice For Greenwood Foundation, Inc. Why: Tulsa County Courts Judge Caroline Wall officially ruled the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was a "Public Nuisance" allowing the three last known survivors their day in court for the first time in 101 years! Who: Attorneys, survivors, and descendants will participate. When: Thursday, August 4, 2022 Time: 1pm CST Where: JusticeForGreenwood.org/Stream SOURCE Schulte Roth & Zabel HOUSTON, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Inprint, Houston's premier literary arts nonprofit organization, today shared that it has reached its 40th anniversary as a resource for creatives across the city. The milestone reflects the organization's commitment to the community, serving more than 15,000 readers and writers across literary pursuits. Inprint prides itself on fostering a community of creatives with workshops, readings, literary events, and other programs that attract authors and patrons from across the globe. Founded in 1983, Inprint was conceived as a resource for readers and writers helping Houston continue to rise in prominence as a city known for its rich literary history. Collaborating directly with the University of Houston's PhD in Spanish with a concentration in creative writing program, Inprint supports emerging authors in their pursuits by providing them with not just a community within which to thrive, but also fellowships, awards, and employment assistance, totaling more than $4 million to date. Run strictly by volunteers until 1991 when funding made it possible to retain a full-time staff, Inprint has relied heavily on donations and volunteers within the community. Anonymous gifts and a variety of fundraising activities have helped the organization succeed in nurturing an inclusive and deeply involved literary community in the greater Houston area. Inprint's Writers Workshops have been named by the Houston Press as the best place for aspiring writers, offering an in-depth and intimate creative experience for participants looking to hone their skills. Inprint has flourished in its 40-year history under the guidance of a number of pivotal leaders, including past president Franci Neely and current board chair Marcia West. The torch will be passed to another community leader during the anniversary festivities, with Mary S. Dawson serving as Inprint's new board president. Each of these three women has served more than 15 years in support of the organization. "Through its 40 years of promoting, praising and prizing the diversity of literature, Inprint has become an internationally renowned literary light," said former president and philanthropist Franci Neely. "Serving as Inprint's board president was my singular honor, working with Rich [Levy, the executive director] and Krupa [Parikh, an associate director] and Marilyn [Jones, an associate director] in the atmosphere of grace and wit and warmth they created. My life is richer for it. Congratulations, Inprint, on your 40 years of extraordinary excellence." The board of directors and advisory board work with the staff to oversee a wide array of programs in support of furthering creative endeavors for aspiring writers. This also includes coordinating and ensuring the success of the Inprint Poets & Writers Ball, which brings together philanthropists like Neely alongside creatives to celebrate Inprint's work in the literary arts. About Inprint Inprint is a nationally recognized nonprofit literary arts organization connecting and nurturing readers and writers in Houston. Inprint House is located in the heart of Houston's Museum District, where it continues to serve the city's creative arts communities with accessible, equitable arts education, workshops, and programming. Its programs support and engage readers and writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Learn more at www.inprinthouston.org . Press Contact Inprint Houston [email protected] SOURCE Inprint MAUI, Hawaii, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- HulaHu is proud to announce that their one-of-a-kind educational card games for kids are available in French, English, Spanish, and Hawaiian. HulaHu offers three educational games: VirtHU, Karma Buster, and KaHUna. Parents looking for an educational, virtuous, and entertaining activity for their kids can trust that HulaHu will provide games that teach wisdom (KaHUna), show the importance of kindness (Karma Buster), and help children and families rediscover their noble virtues (VirtHU). HulaHu Not only do HulaHu's games teach your family about virtues in a fun way, but they also encourage learning a new language. Through simple texts, your children learn new vocabulary that they can understand and use daily. Gameplay encourages comprehension of these newly used languages. In addition to their card games, HulaHu offers Gaston Ouellet's book "Listening Contemplating Loving" in French and English. This story follows Gaston on his spiritual journey, and provides children with the deep messages of spiritual heritage, discovering one's true self, and cultivating the courage to accept love. Additionally, you can shop HulaHu's ambassador products to help spread the virtues to others. Sharing your virtues with the HulaHu cap is a unique way to reach the hearts of others with your message. HulaHu's 3 vocations motivated the creation of their games. To discover the vocabulary of the virtues with simple texts, so the child can understand and integrate them well Introduce the learning of a new language by playing Draw one card per day and pay particular attention to the manifestation of its message Shop HulaHu's products to accompany your children on their journey to discover the noble virtues of life at https://www.hulahu.net About HulaHu HulaHu's founder, Gaston, has studied universal virtues that have helped him overcome many experiences. Through gathering these resources, he has created a fulfilling and noble life. The goal of HulaHu products is to provide these foundational virtues for children as well, so that they may experience a happy life while improving their language skills. Contact Information Name: Gaston Ouellet Email: [email protected] Phone Number: (808 )867-0061 SOURCE HulaHu THE WOODLANDS, Texas, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Huntsman Corporation (NYSE: HUN) today announced that its board of directors has declared a $0.2125 per share cash dividend on its common stock. The dividend is payable on September 30, 2022, to stockholders of record as of September 15, 2022. About Huntsman: Huntsman Corporation is a publicly traded global manufacturer and marketer of differentiated and specialty chemicals with 2021 revenues of approximately $8 billion. Our chemical products number in the thousands and are sold worldwide to manufacturers serving a broad and diverse range of consumer and industrial end markets. We operate more than 70 manufacturing, R&D and operations facilities in approximately 30 countries and employ approximately 9,000 associates within our four distinct business divisions. For more information about Huntsman, please visit the company's website at www.huntsman.com. Social Media: Twitter: www.twitter.com/Huntsman_Corp Facebook: www.facebook.com/huntsmancorp LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/huntsman Forward-Looking Statements: Certain information in this release constitutes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements are based on management's current beliefs and expectations. The forward-looking statements in this release are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances and involve risks and uncertainties that may affect the company's operations, markets, products, services, prices and other factors as discussed under the caption "Risk Factors" in the Huntsman companies' filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Significant risks and uncertainties may relate to, but are not limited to, volatile global economic conditions, cyclical and volatile product markets, disruptions in production at manufacturing facilities, reorganization or restructuring of Huntsman's operations, including any delay of, or other negative developments affecting the ability to implement cost reductions, timing of proposed transactions, and manufacturing optimization improvements in Huntsman businesses and realize anticipated cost savings, and other financial, economic, competitive, environmental, political, legal, regulatory and technological factors. The company assumes no obligation to provide revisions to any forward-looking statements should circumstances change, except as otherwise required by applicable laws. SOURCE Huntsman Corporation Federal agency enters new multi-year partnership with Avel eCare with additional telemedicine services to improve the health of tribal communities and ensure access to care in rural areas. SIOUX FALLS, S.D., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Avel eCare today announced it has entered into a new strategic partnership with the Indian Health Services (IHS), a department within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). This partnership enables Avel eCare to deliver telemedicine services to more than 145,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives in the rural Midwest health network for the next five years and expands the existing program to include sexual assault medical forensic exams (eSANE) and psychiatric support for emergency departments in the Great Plains Area. "Telemedicine is one of the best ways to ensure vital access to quality healthcare in these remote, hard-to-reach tribal communities. Before this, many tribal members would either travel hundreds of miles to see a doctor or forgo care altogether. We look forward to furthering our impact on the lives of patients and providers and continuing our work addressing health disparities for this vulnerable population," said Brian Erickson, Vice President and GM of Behavioral Health and Specialty Clinic at Avel eCare. More than half of the American Indian population live in rural areas, and statistics show American Indians have a life expectancy that is 5.5 years less than the average. Avel eCare began its relationship with IHS in 2017 when the telemedicine provider was awarded a contract to deliver Specialty Clinic services to reservations in the Great Plains Area, which includes Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. In 2019, the partnership expanded into the Billings Area across Montana and Wyoming. In the past five years, Avel eCare's providers have scheduled more than 50,000 appointments, transforming care delivery to American Indian patients and helping restore health equity in the process. For more information on Avel eCare's telemedicine services, visit: www.avelecare.com/services About Avel eCare Avel eCare offers the largest and most comprehensive virtual health networks in the world, partnering with more than 650 health care systems, rural hospitals, outpatient clinics, long-term care facilities, schools, and correctional facilities across the country. Media Contact: Andrea LePain [email protected] 617-894-1153 SOURCE Avel eCARE/eMedia Junction Get a comprehensive report summary describing the market size and forecast along with research methodology. The FREE sample report is available in PDF format Infrared Search and Track (IRST) System Market 2022-2026: Scope The infrared search and track (IRST) system market report covers the following areas: Infrared Search and Track (IRST) System Market 2022-2026: Vendor Analysis ASELSAN AS, Excelitas Technologies Corp., HGH Systemes Infrarouges SAS, Leonardo Spa, Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Rheinmetall AG, Safran SA, Thales Group, and Tonbo Imaging India Pvt Ltd. are among some of the major market participants. The key offerings of some of these vendors are listed below: ASELSAN AS - The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that is designed for maritime platforms in order to passively detect and track multiple air and surface vehicles and missiles with its staring sensors. The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that is designed for maritime platforms in order to passively detect and track multiple air and surface vehicles and missiles with its staring sensors. Thales Group - The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that provides a permanent 360-degree panoramic day and night air and surface surveillance without any blind sector. The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that provides a permanent 360-degree panoramic day and night air and surface surveillance without any blind sector. Leonardo Spa - The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that is designed and developed to satisfy the more demanding requirements of 5th generation fighter aircraft with an embedded solution where it comprises two Line Replaceable Units, a Sensor Head Unit, and a Processor Unit. The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that is designed and developed to satisfy the more demanding requirements of 5th generation fighter aircraft with an embedded solution where it comprises two Line Replaceable Units, a Sensor Head Unit, and a Processor Unit. Lockheed Martin Corp. - The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that is used to detect and track airborne threats with weapon-quality accuracy, increasing pilot reaction time and improving survivability. The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that is used to detect and track airborne threats with weapon-quality accuracy, increasing pilot reaction time and improving survivability. Northrop Grumman Corp. - The company offers an infrared search and track (IRST) system that provides a 360-degree, protective sphere of situational awareness and warns of incoming aircraft and missile threats, as well as provides day and night vision. This report provides a full list of key vendors, their strategies, and the latest developments. Request a FREE PDF Sample Now Infrared Search and Track (IRST) System Market 2022-2026: Segmentation End-user Aerospace and Defense: This segment will contribute the highest market share growth during the forecast period. Aerospace and defense organizations are adopting infrared search and track IRST systems. Thus, the rise in the adoption of infrared search and track IRST systems will drive the growth of the segment during the forecast period. Civil Geography North America : This region will account for 38% of the market's growth during the forecast period. This growth is attributed to factors such as a significant increase in R&D spending in countries such as the US. : This region will account for 38% of the market's growth during the forecast period. This growth is attributed to factors such as a significant increase in R&D spending in countries such as the US. Europe APAC South America Middle East And Africa Infrared Search and Track (IRST) System Market 2022-2026: Key Highlights CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2022-2026 Detailed information on factors that will assist infrared search and track (IRST) system market growth during the next five years Estimation of the infrared search and track (IRST) system market size and its contribution to the parent market Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior The growth of the infrared search and track (IRST) system market Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of infrared search and track (IRST) system market vendors Related Reports Infrared Aerial Camera Market by Application and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2021-2025 Shortwave Infrared Market by Product and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026 Infrared Search And Track (IRST) System Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 3.15% Market growth 2022-2026 USD 879.44 million Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 2.33 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa Performing market contribution North America at 38% Key consumer countries US, China, France, Germany, and UK Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled ASELSAN AS, Excelitas Technologies Corp., HGH Systemes Infrarouges SAS, Leonardo Spa, Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Rheinmetall AG, Safran SA, Thales Group, and Tonbo Imaging India Pvt Ltd. Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, market growth inducers and obstacles, fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID-19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for the forecast period Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized. Browse Information Technology Market Research Reports Table of Contents: 1 Executive Summary 1.1 Market overview Exhibit 01: Executive Summary Chart on Market Overview Exhibit 02: Executive Summary Data Table on Market Overview Exhibit 03: Executive Summary Chart on Global Market Characteristics Exhibit 04: Executive Summary Chart on Market by Geography Exhibit 05: Executive Summary Chart on Market Segmentation by End-user Exhibit 06: Executive Summary Chart on Incremental Growth Exhibit 07: Executive Summary Data Table on Incremental Growth Exhibit 08: Executive Summary Chart on Vendor Market Positioning 2 Market Landscape 2.1 Market ecosystem Exhibit 09: Parent market Exhibit 10: Market Characteristics 3 Market Sizing 3.1 Market definition Exhibit 11: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition 3.2 Market segment analysis Exhibit 12: Market segments 3.3 Market size 2021 3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021-2026 Exhibit 13: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 14: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 15: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 16: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 4 Five Forces Analysis 4.1 Five forces summary Exhibit 17: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2021 and 2026 4.2 Bargaining power of buyers Exhibit 18: Chart on Bargaining power of buyers Impact of key factors 2021 and 2026 4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers Exhibit 19: Bargaining power of suppliers Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.4 Threat of new entrants Exhibit 20: Threat of new entrants Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.5 Threat of substitutes Exhibit 21: Threat of substitutes Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.6 Threat of rivalry Exhibit 22: Threat of rivalry Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026 4.7 Market condition Exhibit 23: Chart on Market condition - Five forces 2021 and 2026 5 Market Segmentation by End-user 5.1 Market segments Exhibit 24: Chart on End-user - Market share 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 25: Data Table on End-user - Market share 2021-2026 (%) 5.2 Comparison by End-user Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by End-user Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by End-user 5.3 Aerospace and defense - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 28: Chart on Aerospace and defense - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 29: Data Table on Aerospace and defense - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 30: Chart on Aerospace and defense - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 31: Data Table on Aerospace and defense - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.4 Civil - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 32: Chart on Civil - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 33: Data Table on Civil - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 34: Chart on Civil - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 35: Data Table on Civil - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.5 Market opportunity by End-user Exhibit 36: Market opportunity by End-user ($ million) 6 Customer Landscape 6.1 Customer landscape overview Exhibit 37: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria 7 Geographic Landscape 7.1 Geographic segmentation Exhibit 38: Chart on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 39: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) 7.2 Geographic comparison Exhibit 40: Chart on Geographic comparison Exhibit 41: Data Table on Geographic comparison 7.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 42: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 43: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 44: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 45: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 46: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 47: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 48: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 49: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 50: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 51: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 52: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 53: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 54: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 55: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 56: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 57: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.7 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 58: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 59: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 60: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) and - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 61: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.8 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 62: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 63: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 64: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 65: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.9 France - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 66: Chart on France - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 67: Data Table on France - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 68: Chart on France - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 69: Data Table on France - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.10 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 70: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 71: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 72: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 73: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.11 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 74: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 75: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 76: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 77: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.12 UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 78: Chart on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 79: Data Table on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 80: Chart on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 81: Data Table on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 7.13 Market opportunity by geography Exhibit 82: Market opportunity by geography ($ million) 8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 8.1 Market drivers 8.2 Market challenges 8.3 Impact of drivers and challenges Exhibit 83: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026 8.4 Market trends 9 Vendor Landscape 9.1 Overview 9.2 Vendor landscape Exhibit 84: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation 9.3 Landscape disruption Exhibit 85: Overview on factors of disruption 9.4 Industry risks Exhibit 86: Impact of key risks on business 10 Vendor Analysis 10.1 Vendors covered Exhibit 87: Vendors covered 10.2 Market positioning of vendors Exhibit 88: Matrix on vendor position and classification 10.3 ASELSAN AS Exhibit 89: ASELSAN AS - Overview Exhibit 90: ASELSAN AS - Business segments Exhibit 91: ASELSAN AS - Key offerings Exhibit 92: ASELSAN AS - Segment focus 10.4 HGH Systemes Infrarouges SAS Exhibit 93: HGH Systemes Infrarouges SAS - Overview Exhibit 94: HGH Systemes Infrarouges SAS - Product / Service Exhibit 95: HGH Systemes Infrarouges SAS - Key offerings 10.5 Leonardo Spa Exhibit 96: Leonardo Spa - Overview Exhibit 97: Leonardo Spa - Business segments Exhibit 98: Leonardo Spa - Key news Exhibit 99: Leonardo Spa - Key offerings Exhibit 100: Leonardo Spa - Segment focus 10.6 Lockheed Martin Corp. Exhibit 101: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Overview Exhibit 102: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 103: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Key news Exhibit 104: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 105: Lockheed Martin Corp. - Segment focus 10.7 Northrop Grumman Corp. Exhibit 106: Northrop Grumman Corp. - Overview Exhibit 107: Northrop Grumman Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 108: Northrop Grumman Corp. - Key news Exhibit 109: Northrop Grumman Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 110: Northrop Grumman Corp. - Segment focus 10.8 Raytheon Technologies Corp. Exhibit 111: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Overview Exhibit 112: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Business segments Exhibit 113: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Key news Exhibit 114: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Key offerings Exhibit 115: Raytheon Technologies Corp. - Segment focus 10.9 Rheinmetall AG Exhibit 116: Rheinmetall AG - Overview Exhibit 117: Rheinmetall AG - Business segments Exhibit 118: Rheinmetall AG - Key news Exhibit 119: Rheinmetall AG - Key offerings Exhibit 120: Rheinmetall AG - Segment focus 10.10 Safran SA Exhibit 121: Safran SA - Overview Exhibit 122: Safran SA - Business segments Exhibit 123: Safran SA - Key news Exhibit 124: Safran SA - Key offerings Exhibit 125: Safran SA - Segment focus 10.11 Thales Group Exhibit 126: Thales Group - Overview Exhibit 127: Thales Group - Business segments Exhibit 128: Thales Group - Key offerings Exhibit 129: Thales Group - Segment focus 10.12 Tonbo Imaging India Pvt Ltd. Exhibit 130: Tonbo Imaging India Pvt Ltd. - Overview Exhibit 131: Tonbo Imaging India Pvt Ltd. - Product / Service Exhibit 132: Tonbo Imaging India Pvt Ltd. - Key offerings 11 Appendix 11.1 Scope of the report 11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist Exhibit 133: Inclusions checklist Exhibit 134: Exclusions checklist 11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$ Exhibit 135: Currency conversion rates for US$ 11.4 Research methodology Exhibit 136: Research methodology Exhibit 137: Validation techniques employed for market sizing Exhibit 138: Information sources 11.5 List of abbreviations Exhibit 139: List of abbreviations About Us Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio Instacart integrates FoodStorm technology into the Instacart App, making it easier for grocers to offer online ordering and delivery of catering items Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace is the first to launch online catering in the Instacart App, now available to customers across New York and New Jersey SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, today announced that grocers can use FoodStorm's order management system (OMS) with the Instacart App, making it easier to offer online ordering and delivery of catering items. Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace is the first retailer to connect their FoodStorm OMS directly with their Instacart App storefront, allowing customers across New York and New Jersey to easily place catering orders online, while streamlining the process for store associates to manage orders. Uncle Giuseppes Marketplace is the first to launch online catering in the Instacart App, now available to customers across New York and New Jersey FoodStorm can now be integrated with the Instacart App further extending Carrot Order Ahead, an Instacart Platform solution. Carrot Order Ahead enables a variety of fulfillment options, including next-day or scheduled in advance delivery and pickup, so grocers can offer their customers a more convenient way to order catering and prepared foods on their Instacart App storefront or white-label e-commerce storefront. The integration between FoodStorm and the Instacart App now means customers can order grocery items such as beverages, paperware or side dishes directly alongside their catering order for delivery all at once. "Catering represents one of the highest margin categories for grocers, driving meaningful incremental growth for their business as consumer demand increases. In the first half of 2022, we've seen nearly a 20% increase in customers searching for 'catering' on Instacart* compared to the same period last year," said Jeanette Barlow, Vice President of Product at Instacart. "Historically, ordering ahead from the grocery store is labor intensive often using paper tickets or other manual systems and inefficient for both retailers and customers. By connecting FoodStorm OMS with the Instacart App, we're able to help grocers meet catering demand by offering a comprehensive, omnichannel experience for customers using Carrot Order Ahead and scale the reach of a highly profitable part of their business." "Instacart Platform technology has helped more customers discover our catering selection, resulting in incremental sales for this important part of our business," said Russell McVeigh, Catering Director at Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace. "The Instacart App and FoodStorm OMS have both been important to supporting our e-commerce business. During the busy holiday season when catering and prepared foods are in peak demand, we've been able to grow our online sales by nearly 62% by having the right infrastructure in place to handle that volume without crippling our in-store operations or without having to scale our staff. Now, with Carrot Order Ahead, we have a more connected and simplified experience that allows us to be more innovative and go above and beyond for our in-store associates and customers." For more information about the Instacart Platform, visit www.instacart.com/company/platform . To learn more about FoodStorm by Instacart, visit www.foodstorm.com . *Includes searches on the Instacart App and retailer-operated sites powered by Instacart About Instacart Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop. The company partners with more than 800 national, regional, and local retail brands to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 70,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America on the Instacart Marketplace. Instacart makes it possible for millions of busy people and families to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love, and for more than 600,000 Instacart shoppers to earn by picking, packing and delivering orders for customers on their own flexible schedule. The Instacart Platform offers retailers a suite of enterprise-grade technology products and services to power their e-commerce experiences, fulfill orders, digitize brick-and-mortar stores, provide advertising services, and glean insights. With Instacart Ads, thousands of CPG brands from category leaders to emerging brands partner with the company to connect directly with consumers online, right at the point of purchase. For more information, visit www.instacart.com/company , and to start shopping, visit www.instacart.com . For anyone interested in becoming an Instacart shopper, visit https://shoppers.instacart.com/ . About Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace is a full-service specialty grocery market that is committed to selling the tastiest food made with traditional Italian recipes and using the highest quality ingredients. Founded in 1998, Uncle Giuseppe's has established itself as Long Island's leading Italian food retail destination, with stores that emphasize an extensive selection of fresh products, prepared foods, and hard-to-find specialty and gourmet offerings, along with a full assortment of conventional groceries. Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace is headquartered in Farmingdale, NY with ten stores; eight located in New York (East Meadow, Smithtown, Port Washington, Port Jefferson Station, Massapequa, Melville, North Babylon and Yorktown Heights), and two in New Jersey (Ramsey and Morris Plains). To learn more about Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace, please visit http://www.uncleg.com or follow them on Facebook or Instagram. SOURCE Instacart Show airing weekly on WNYC, Saturday evenings after All Things Considered Joining WNYC carrying the program are WLRN and WGCU (Miami), KVPR (Central California), WBHM (Birmingham), WYSO (Southern Ohio), and Wyoming Public Radio. NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Intelligence Squared U.S., the nation's leader in provocative nonpartisan debates, has kicked off a weekly show on public radio stations across the country. The hour-long program is now airing on WNYC Radio every Saturday at 6:00 PM ET following All Things Considered, as the veteran media brand transitions to a weekly release schedule across its public radio, podcast, and video platforms. The weekly show will feature new debates and conversations furthering Intelligence Squared U.S.'s mission of combating extreme polarization by exposing audiences to smart arguments across a range of timely issues. Episodes will come out every Friday in podcast apps and air soon after every week on a range of public radio stations across the country, with more being announced regularly. The programming schedule for the next two months is as follows: August 5 : Should We Eat More Processed Foods? : Should We Eat More Processed Foods? August 12 : Should We Indict Trump? : Should We Indict Trump? August 19 : Is Cancel Culture Toxic? : Is Cancel Culture Toxic? August 26 : Should We Do Away With the SAT? : Should We Do Away With the SAT? September 2 : Will AI Do More Harm than Good? : Will AI Do More Harm than Good? September 9 : Activism in Healthcare : Activism in Healthcare September 16 : Can We Separate Art from the Artist? : Can We Separate Art from the Artist? September 23 : Is Amazon Good for Small Business? : Is Amazon Good for Small Business? September 30 : Will Dollar Dominance Last? To mark the launch of the new weekly show for public radio, Intelligence Squared U.S. will take the stage live on August 31st at PRPD Public Radio Content Conference in New Orleans to debate a timely question: "Is public radio still relevant in a digital world?" "In our increasingly divided world, Americans deserve a contempt-free zone for hearing both sides of the issues," said Clea Conner, CEO of Intelligence Squared U.S. "We are thrilled to offer our program on a weekly basis to help expose public radio listeners to a range of ideas on some of the most important questions of our time." The program was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Laura and Gary Lauder Family Venture Philanthropy Fund, contributing up to $1.25 million over four years to initiate the Debate for Understanding program. "The ability to consider and learn from each other's perspectives is crucial for our democracy to function," said Laura Lauder. "We are thrilled to support Intelligence Squared U.S.'s new program, Debate for Understanding, to enable all Americans to explore the most pressing issues of our time through debates conducted with civility and respect." The new show builds on a remarkable recent run for the veteran media platform. Just last month, Intelligence Squared U.S. won six Telly Awards for excellence in digital programming. The nonprofit media organization has also produced recent debates in partnership with Bloomberg, IBM, the German Marshall Fund, the Richmond Forum, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and more. The program will continue to air on other public radio stations across the country and via the Intelligence Squared U.S. podcast and YouTube channel. ABOUT INTELLIGENCE SQUARED U.S. Intelligence Squared U.S. was founded to address a fundamental problem in America: the extreme polarization of our nation and our politics. Through its award-winning live debates and associated programming, the nonprofit organization serves as a model for responsible media in a new age - fair, intelligent, nonpartisan - while restoring critical thinking, facts, reason, and civility to public discourse. Recognized as "Best Podcast Event of 2020" by Adweek, Intelligence Squared U.S. reaches millions through multi-platform distribution, including public radio, podcasts, video live streaming, newsletters, interactive digital content, and on-demand apps. With over 220 debates and counting, plus additional podcast and video content, the organization has encouraged the public to "think twice" on a wide range of provocative topics for over a decade. Intelligence Squared U.S. was initiated by The Rosenkranz Foundation, which continues to provide major support. For more information on Intelligence Squared U.S., please contact Ray Padgett ([email protected]) or Mark Satlof ([email protected]) at Shore Fire Media. SOURCE Intelligence Squared U.S Total judgment to exceed $183 million CHICAGO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A jury has ordered Eli Lilly and Company to pay over $61 million in damages eight years after whistleblower Ronald J. Streck filed a False Claims Act lawsuit alleging that the pharmaceutical company underpaid the rebates required of drug manufacturers under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program. Under the False Claims Act, damages are trebled and the final judgment will be over $183 million. Dan Miller of Walden Macht & Haran, lead counsel to Streck, said, "The jury has spoken. Eli Lilly knowingly violated the False Claims Act and defrauded the Medicaid Program of $61 million in taxpayer money. We took on one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, and one of the largest law firms in the world, and we won. We are very proud to represent Mr. Streck in this quest, which began more than eight years ago." The $61 million award is the latest in Streck's series of successful False Claims Act lawsuits against drug manufacturers for alleged misconduct involving the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, including a $75 million settlement with Bristol Myers Squibb and an $18 million settlement with Astellas Pharma U.S. last year. Collectively, Streck's lawsuits have recovered more than $350 million for the Medicaid program. Miller has represented Mr. Streck across all of his whistleblowing cases. The Department of Justice announced the settlement agreements regarding Streck's previous claims with Bristol Myers Squibb in 2021, Astellas Pharma and Amgen in 2019 and with AstraZeneca and Cephalon in 2015. In 2018, when the government declined to intervene, Streck and his attorneys proceeded to litigation against Eli Lilly. These efforts include successfully defeating two motions to dismiss in 2018 by defendants Eli Lilly and Astellas Pharma U.S. Today's decision marks the thirteenth previously-declined False Claims Act case that Walden Macht & Haran partner Miller has successfully prosecuted on behalf of the federal and state governments. The case is captioned U.S. ex rel. Ronald Streck et al. v. Takeda Pharmaceuticals America, Inc. No. 1:14-cv-09412 and proceeded in the Northern District of Illinois. Home - Walden Macht & Haran LLP SOURCE Walden Macht & Haran The new partners come with a strong international operational background, highly experienced in building management teams, and scaling companies to sales of hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the current challenges facing the tech sector, it is all the more salient to have such an experienced team of partners to strengthen JVP's tech companies in Israel and New York. In 2021-2022, JVP led funding rounds totaling more than $1.5 billion for its portfolio companies to propel them to become category leaders JERUSALEM and NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- JVP, one of the top ten venture capital firms in the world, as ranked by Preqin, is expanding its activities in New York. Along with new investments in FinTech, Blockchain, Cyber, ClimaTech, FoodTech, and Digital Health, the fund has focused on growth and providing robust support to its companies over the past two years. In 2021-2022, JVP led funding rounds totaling more than $1.5 billion for its portfolio companies to propel them to become category leaders. JVP investment team meets in their New York offices (Shahar Azran / Courtesy) As part of the fund investment strategy, JVP has expanded its international activities, strengthened its management team, and most recently, welcomes new partners and executives to its ranks. The new partners will join JVP's current roster of partners that lead investments in the most important high-tech companies in Israel and internationally in tandem with working closely with the Fund's portfolio companies, with the goal of significantly expanding and advancing their business operations. Each new partner joins JVP with a strong international operations background, along with experience in building management teams and implementing growth strategies that have translated into hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. In the backdrop of tightening markets, each partners' expertise and experience will support and further strengthen each of JVP's portfolio companies in Israel and internationally. JVP is renowned for its Centers of Innovation including Media and AI in Jerusalem, FoodTech in the Galilee, FinTech in Tel Aviv, Digital Health in Haifa, Cyber Security in Beer Sheva, and the International Cyber Center in New York. "We welcome our new partners to JVP" says Erel Margalit, JVP Founder, and Executive Chairman. "It is precisely in these challenging times that category leaders are made. We must support our companies to reach these heights, enabling them to scale and reach sales of $100-300 million. Along with our existing roster of partners, our new partners bring robust business and strategic experience to further our companies in Israel, North America, and penetration into the Asian and European markets." Marge Breya joins as a JVP partner in New York. Marge brings over 20 years of experience as CMO and COO in global companies including SAP, HP, Informatica Business Objects, and others. Marge will leverage her robust experience to propel JVP's portfolio companies to become international market leaders. Today, among other roles, she is the CMO of LeadSpace, in which JVP is a leading shareholder. Sara Thomas was appointed as a JVP partner in London and New York. Founder and one of the owners of Aspen Group, she has led strategic processes in leading global technological companies including Salesforce, Orcal, FIS, and Finastra. In recent years, she has worked with JVP to build the management team at Qlik ($2.5 billion market cap) and, CyberArk ($5.6 billion market cap), among others. Ilan Ron was promoted to JVP AgTech and FoodTech partner. Ilan is an international expert in the world of food. In recent years, he served as the CEO of Kayco Kosher, which control the kosher food market in North America. He serves as a board member on the boards of JVP's portfolio companies InnovoPro, Kinoko, and Next Probiotics. Riki Mozes was promoted to JVP Chief People Officer. In her previous role, Riki was the Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Amdocs, where she was responsible for a team of 140 HR professionals across 12 countries. Riki also held senior positions at Teva and Ormat. In addition, Alexandre Dahan was promoted from JVP Analyst to Director of Investments at JVP. Oren Schor joins JVP as a Senior Associate. Karen Kay joins JVP as Head of Strategic Partnerships in New York. Oded Pinero has been appointed CEO of Margalit Startup Cities. Sagi Kedem was promoted to COO, and Gali Timor joined the group as the Head of Margalit Start Up City Haifa - Digital Health. About JVP JVP, founded in 1993 by Dr. Erel Margalit, is an internationally renowned VC fund. It is among the pioneering firms of the Israeli VC industry and has raised over $1.6bn. Over the years, JVP has built over 160 companies and has been listed numerous times by Preqin, as one of the top-ten consistently performing VC firms worldwide. JVP has been instrumental in building some of the world's largest companies to emerge, facilitating 12 IPOs on NASDAQ, including CyberArk Software (NASDAQ: CYBR, $4.7 billion mkt. cap.), QLIK Technologies (NASDAQ: QLIK, then $4 billion mkt. cap.) as well as many large industry sales. Over the past decade, JVP has spearheaded the creation of international Centers of Excellence, including the AI and Media center in Jerusalem, the Cyber center in Beer Sheva, the FoodTech center in the Galilee, and the International Cyber and FinTech center in NYC, in partnership with NYC/EDC and the leading universities of the city. https://www.jvpvc.com. SOURCE JVP WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, K2 Integrity, the preeminent risk, compliance, investigations, and monitoring firm, announced its partnership with the Cyprus Bar Association (CBA). Through this partnership, CBA members will gain access to K2 Integrity's Certified Risk Management Specialist Russia Sanctions (CRMS-RS) certification program. Those who register for the program will also have access to the current suite of anti-money laundering (AML), countering the financing of terrorism (CFT), global sanctions, anti-bribery and corruption (ABC), and fraud resources available on K2 Integrity's e-learning platformthe Dedicated Online Financial Integrity Network (DOLFIN). CBA and K2 Integrity have agreed to collaborate through 2022 and beyond on continuing education content to support CBA members who achieve the CRMS-RS accreditation in maintaining the knowledge, technical skills, and judgment needed to assess and respond to evolving sanctions and financial crimes risks. "K2 Integrity's partnership with the CBA will bring unparalleled sanctions risk management training, subject-matter expertise, and resources to assist the lawyers in Cyprus and CBA members, in meeting the growing demands of protecting the integrity of the Cypriot financial system," said Andrew Rabinowitz, Co-CEO and Member of the Board of Directors at K2 Integrity. "Senior Managing Directors Danny McGlynn and Michele Malvesti have applied their outstanding expertise in government and the private sector to design and deliver a program that uniquely meets the financial crimes risk management challenges of our time. They combined an expert-driven commitment to maintaining evergreen content in a dynamic risk and compliance environment with an analytic framework for assessing and managing sanctions-related risk. The result is a new approach to training and certifying public and private sector practitioners in a field of growing importance to our collective security," Mr. Rabinowitz concluded. K2 Integrity's DOLFIN platform offers training, testing, certification, and continuing education, as well as premium tools and resources, for financial integrity professionals. The DOLFIN platform and its content were developed and are continuously maintained by financial crimes risk and compliance professionals, including experts who spearheaded the post-9/11 counter-illicit finance regime adopted across the globe. "CBA is always working to expand and enhance the value of its continuous training offerings for members," said Georgia Constantinou-Panayiotou, CBA's Spokesperson and member of the Council. "By partnering with K2 Integrity, the CBA is ensuring that its members have access to the best sanctions training program in the global market, while safeguarding the quality expertise and reliability of the legal community in Cyprus amid unprecedented challenges." For more information on the CBA/K2 Integrity partnership, please visit CBA's website. Click here to learn more about K2 Integrity's CRMS-RS certification program. About K2 Integrity K2 Integrity is the leading risk and financial crimes advisory firm helping clients understand and manage their risk so they can lead with confidence. With some of the most knowledgeable practitioners in the industry, K2 brings together deep subject matter expertise with proprietary technology and digital offerings to help clients creatively solve today's issues while also planning for the future. With offices in New York and London and more than 400 employees globally, K2 has deep knowledge and experience working in every region and numerous jurisdictions around the world. To learn more about how K2 Integrity is revolutionizing the management of risk, visit www.k2integrity.com, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn. Media Contacts Prosek Partners [email protected] SOURCE K2 Integrity Run-Rate Production of 14,948 Boe/d up 4% to Record Level (All Organic Growth) Net DUCs and Permits up 7% to Record Level Record Oil, Natural Gas and Natural Gas Liquids Revenue Record Net Income and Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA Record Cash Available for Distribution per Common Unit Record Cash Distribution of $0.55 Declared FORT WORTH, Texas, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP (NYSE: KRP) ("Kimbell"), a leading owner of oil and natural gas mineral and royalty interests in more than 122,000 gross wells across 28 states, today announced financial and operating results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. Second Quarter 2022 Highlights Record Q2 2022 run-rate daily production of 14,948 barrels of oil equivalent ("Boe") per day (6:1), an increase of 4% from Q1 2022 (all organic growth) Record Q2 2022 oil, natural gas and NGL revenues of $78.6 million , an increase of 21% from Q1 2022, reflecting improved realized commodity prices , an increase of 21% from Q1 2022, reflecting improved realized commodity prices Record Q2 2022 net income of approximately $43.3 million and net income attributable to common units of approximately $37.9 million and net income attributable to common units of approximately Record Q2 2022 consolidated Adjusted EBITDA of $53.5 million , an increase of 22% from Q1 2022 , an increase of 22% from Q1 2022 Record cash available for distribution of $0.74 per common unit, an increase of 16% from Q1 2022 per common unit, an increase of 16% from Q1 2022 Announces a Q2 2022 cash distribution of $0.55 per common unit, an increase of 17% from Q1 2022 and a new record, reflecting a payout ratio of 75% of cash available for distribution; implies a 12.7% annualized yield based on the August 3, 2022 closing price of $17.34 per common unit; Kimbell intends to utilize the remaining 25% of its cash available for distribution to repay a portion of the outstanding borrowings under Kimbell's secured revolving credit facility per common unit, an increase of 17% from Q1 2022 and a new record, reflecting a payout ratio of 75% of cash available for distribution; implies a 12.7% annualized yield based on the closing price of per common unit; Kimbell intends to utilize the remaining 25% of its cash available for distribution to repay a portion of the outstanding borrowings under Kimbell's secured revolving credit facility As of June 30, 2022 , Kimbell's major properties 1 had 5.36 net drilled but uncompleted wells ("DUCs") and net permitted locations on its acreage (2.38 net DUCs and 2.98 net permitted locations), up from 5.03 net DUCs and net permitted locations as of March 31, 2022 and a new record , Kimbell's major properties had 5.36 net drilled but uncompleted wells ("DUCs") and net permitted locations on its acreage (2.38 net DUCs and 2.98 net permitted locations), up from 5.03 net DUCs and net permitted locations as of and a new record As of June 30, 2022 , Kimbell had 74 rigs actively drilling on its acreage, up 1% from Q1 2022 and representing 10.1% 2 market share of all rigs drilling in the continental United States as of such time , Kimbell had 74 rigs actively drilling on its acreage, up 1% from Q1 2022 and representing 10.1% market share of all rigs drilling in the continental as of such time Kimbell affirms its financial and operational guidance ranges for 2022 previously disclosed in its Q4 2021 earnings release 1 These figures pertain only to Kimbell's major properties and do not include possible additional DUCs and permits from Kimbell's minor properties, which generally have a net revenue interest of 0.1% or below and are time consuming to quantify but, in the estimation of Kimbell's management, could add an additional 20% to Kimbell's net inventory. 2 Based on Kimbell rig count of 74 and Baker Hughes U.S. land rig count of 730 as of July 1, 2022. Robert Ravnaas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Kimbell Royalty GP, LLC, Kimbell's general partner (the "General Partner"), commented, "Continuing the momentum from Q1 2022, strong commodity prices coupled with organic production growth resulted in several new records for Kimbell. In addition, net DUCs and permits reached record levels at the end of Q2 2022, reflecting increased activity and line-of-site on our acreage. I am particularly pleased with the 4% organic production growth in Q2 2022, driven mainly by significant new production from multiple high interest wells in the Haynesville. Reflecting these strong quarterly results, I am pleased to announce today that our Q2 2022 distribution was a new record at $0.55 cents per common unit. "Recessionary fears have now permeated the economy and U.S. gasoline demand has decreased, resulting in a steep drop in oil prices from the March 2022 highs. However, upstream operators across the United States have generally kept production growth constrained, which should provide a backstop to the magnitude of potential downside in oil prices from current levels. In fact, overall U.S. oil production has grown only approximately 2% this year even with multi-year highs in commodity prices. After a significant correction in natural gas prices from June highs, natural gas prices are again trending higher, reflecting record power demand and tepid production growth. This price increase is happening notwithstanding approximately 2 bcf/d of demand temporarily lost due to a major LNG export facility being offline. These higher oil and natural gas prices are supporting activity increases across all major basins, which we are seeing in increased lease bonus activity as well as record net DUCs and permits. We continue to see operators maintaining discipline even in the face of these higher prices and expect only modest production growth as we finish out 2022. "As we look forward in 2022 and beyond, we remain very bullish about the industry overall, are extremely excited about our role as a leading consolidator in the oil and natural gas royalty sector and the prospects for Kimbell to generate long-term unitholder value for years to come." Second Quarter 2022 Distribution and Debt Repayment Today, the Board of Directors of the General Partner (the "Board of Directors") declared a cash distribution payment to common unitholders of 75% of cash available for distribution for the second quarter of 2022, or $0.55 per common unit. The distribution will be payable on August 22, 2022 to common unitholders of record at the close of business on August 15, 2022. Kimbell plans to utilize the remaining 25% of cash available for distribution for the second quarter of 2022 to pay down a portion of the outstanding borrowings under its secured revolving credit facility. Since May 2020 (excluding the expected upcoming pay down from the remaining 25% of Q2 2022 projected cash available for distribution), Kimbell has paid down approximately $63.0 million of outstanding borrowings under its secured revolving credit facility by allocating a portion of its cash available for distribution for debt pay down. On May 9, 2022, Kimbell made a cash distribution to its common unitholders and subsequently has reasonably estimated that a portion of that distribution, as well as a portion of the distribution payable on August 22, 2022, should not constitute dividends for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Approximately 58% of the distribution that was paid on May 9, 2022 and approximately 50% of the distribution payable on August 22, 2022 are estimated to constitute non-taxable reductions to the tax basis of each distribution recipient's ownership interest in Kimbell. The reduced tax basis will increase unitholders' capital gain (or decrease unitholders' capital loss) when unitholders sell their common units. The Form 8937 containing additional information may be found at www.kimbellrp.com under "Investor Relations" section of the site. Kimbell currently believes that the portion that constitute dividends for U.S. federal income tax purposes will be considered qualified dividends, subject to holding period and certain other conditions, which are subject to a tax rate of 0%, 15% or 20% depending on the income level and tax filing status of a unitholder for 2022. Kimbell believes these estimates are reasonable based on currently available information, but they are subject to change. Financial Highlights Kimbell's second quarter 2022 average realized price per Bbl of oil was $107.96, per Mcf of natural gas was $6.93, per Bbl of NGLs was $46.10 and per Boe combined was $57.78. During the second quarter of 2022, Kimbell's total revenues were $72.7 million, net income was approximately $43.3 million and net income attributable to common units was approximately $37.9 million, or $0.66 per common unit. Total second quarter 2022 consolidated Adjusted EBITDA was $53.5 million (consolidated Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP financial measure. Please see a reconciliation to the nearest GAAP financial measures at the end of this news release). In the second quarter of 2022, Kimbell's G&A expense was $7.9 million, $4.9 million of which was Cash G&A expense, or $3.61 per Boe (Cash G&A and Cash G&A per Boe are non-GAAP financial measures. Please see definition under Non-GAAP Financial Measures in the Supplemental Schedules included in this news release). As of June 30, 2022, Kimbell had approximately $216.1 million in debt outstanding under its secured revolving credit facility, had net debt to second quarter 2022 trailing twelve month consolidated Adjusted EBITDA of approximately 1.2x and remained in compliance with all financial covenants under its secured revolving credit facility. Kimbell had approximately $83.9 million in undrawn capacity under its secured revolving credit facility as of June 30, 2022. As of June 30, 2022 and August 4, 2022, Kimbell had outstanding 57,331,833 common units and 8,211,579 Class B units. Production Second quarter 2022 average daily production was 14,948 Boe per day (6:1), which was composed of approximately 63% from natural gas (6:1) and approximately 37% from liquids (24% from oil and 13% from NGLs). Operational Update As of June 30, 2022, Kimbell's major properties had 693 gross (2.38 net) DUCs and 708 gross (2.98 net) permitted locations on its acreage. In addition, as of June 30, 2022, Kimbell had 74 rigs actively drilling on its acreage, which represents an approximate 10.1% market share of all land rigs drilling in the continental United States as of such time. Basin Gross DUCs as of June 30, 2022(1) Gross Permits as of June 30, 2022(1) Net DUCs as of June 30, 2022(1) Net Permits as of June 30, 2022(1) Permian 253 331 0.67 1.04 Eagle Ford 73 76 0.69 0.44 Haynesville 91 37 0.54 0.37 Mid-Continent 123 80 0.23 0.18 Bakken 139 134 0.20 0.74 Appalachia 9 29 0.04 0.08 Rockies 5 21 0.01 0.13 Total 693 708 2.38 2.98 (1) These figures pertain only to Kimbell's major properties and do not include possible additional DUCs and permits from Kimbell's minor properties, which generally have a net revenue interest of 0.1% or below and are time consuming to quantify but, in the estimation of Kimbell's management, could add an additional 20% to Kimbell's net inventory. Hedging Update Kimbell maintains a consistent hedging methodology, and hedges out two years on a rolling quarterly basis. The Company's commodity derivative contracts consist of fixed price swaps, under which Kimbell receives a fixed price for the contract and pays a floating market price to the counterparty over a specified period for a contracted volume. Kimbell hedges expected daily production based on the amount of debt as a percent of total enterprise value. The following provides information concerning Kimbell's hedge book as of June 30, 2022: Fixed Price Swaps as of June 30, 2022 Weighted Average Volumes Fixed Price Oil Nat Gas Oil Nat Gas BBL MMBTU $/BBL $/MMBTU 3Q 2022 139,196 1,759,316 $ 43.52 $ 2.44 4Q 2022 109,388 1,383,496 $ 46.00 $ 2.58 1Q 2023 91,854 1,204,308 $ 53.38 $ 2.73 2Q 2023 70,889 998,179 $ 61.16 $ 2.52 3Q 2023 72,680 1,047,880 $ 61.70 $ 3.09 4Q 2023 67,988 995,532 $ 63.00 $ 3.28 1Q 2024 54,509 823,186 $ 76.32 $ 4.15 2Q 2024 56,511 809,354 $ 82.40 $ 4.31 Conference Call Kimbell Royalty Partners will host a conference call and webcast today at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. Central Time) to discuss second quarter 2022 results. To access the call live by phone, dial 201-389-0869 and ask for the Kimbell Royalty Partners call at least 10 minutes prior to the start time. A telephonic replay will be available through August 11, 2022 by dialing 201-612-7415 and using the conference ID 13730699#. A webcast of the call will also be available live and for later replay on Kimbell's website at http://kimbellrp.investorroom.com under the Events and Presentations tab. Presentation On August 4, 2022, Kimbell posted an updated investor presentation on its website. The presentation may be found at http://kimbellrp.investorroom.com under the Events and Presentations tab. Information on Kimbell's website does not constitute a portion of this news release. About Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Kimbell (NYSE: KRP) is a leading oil and gas mineral and royalty company based in Fort Worth, Texas. Kimbell owns mineral and royalty interests in approximately 16 million gross acres in 28 states and in every major onshore basin in the continental United States, including ownership in more than 122,000 gross wells with over 46,000 wells in the Permian Basin. To learn more, visit kimbellrp.com. Forward-Looking Statements This news release includes forward-looking statements, in particular statements relating to Kimbell's financial, operating and production results and prospects for growth, drilling inventory, growth potential, identified locations, the tax treatment of Kimbell's distributions, future natural gas and other commodity prices, changes to supply and demand for oil, natural gas and NGLs and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on Kimbell and on the oil and gas industry. These and other forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including risks that the anticipated benefits of acquisitions are not realized, risks relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, and uncertainties relating to Kimbell's business, prospects for growth and acquisitions and the securities markets generally, as well as risks inherent in oil and natural gas drilling and production activities, including risks with respect to potential declines in prices for oil and natural gas that could result in downward revisions to the value of proved reserves or otherwise cause operators to delay or suspend planned drilling and completion operations or reduce production levels, which would adversely impact cash flow, risks relating to the impairment of oil and natural gas properties, risks relating to the availability of capital to fund drilling operations that can be adversely affected by adverse drilling results, production declines and declines in oil and natural gas prices, risks relating to Kimbell's ability to meet financial covenants under its credit agreement or its ability to obtain amendments or waivers to effect such compliance, risks relating to Kimbell's hedging activities, risks of fire, explosion, blowouts, pipe failure, casing collapse, unusual or unexpected formation pressures, environmental hazards, and other operating and production risks, which may temporarily or permanently reduce production or cause initial production or test results to not be indicative of future well performance or delay the timing of sales or completion of drilling operations, risks relating to delays in receipt of drilling permits, risks relating to unexpected adverse developments in the status of properties, risks relating to borrowing base redeterminations by Kimbell's lenders, risks relating to the absence or delay in receipt of government approvals or third-party consents, risks relating to acquisitions, dispositions and drop downs of assets, risks relating to Kimbell's ability to realize the anticipated benefits from and to integrate acquired assets, risks relating to tax matters, and other risks described in Kimbell's Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), available at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law, Kimbell undertakes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after this news release. When considering these forward-looking statements, you should keep in mind the risk factors and other cautionary statements in Kimbell's filings with the SEC. Contact: Rick Black Dennard Lascar Investor Relations [email protected] (713) 529-6600 Financial statements follow Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheet (Unaudited, in thousands) June 30, 2022 Assets: Current assets Cash and cash equivalents $ 13,318 Oil, natural gas and NGL receivables 53,595 Derivative assets 2,041 Accounts receivable and other current assets 2,145 Total current assets 71,099 Property and equipment, net 1,234 Investment in affiliate (equity method) 1,137 Oil and natural gas properties Oil and natural gas properties (full cost method) 1,204,840 Less: accumulated depreciation, depletion and impairment (684,969) Total oil and natural gas properties, net 519,871 Right-of-use assets, net 2,688 Derivative assets 1,300 Loan origination costs, net 3,748 Assets of consolidated variable interest entities: Cash 787 Investments held in trust 237,224 Prepaid expenses 337 Total assets $ 839,425 Liabilities and unitholders' equity: Current liabilities Accounts payable $ 1,553 Other current liabilities 5,179 Derivative liabilities 36,191 Total current liabilities 42,923 Operating lease liabilities, excluding current portion 2,402 Derivative liabilities 5,891 Long-term debt 216,116 Other liabilities 385 Liabilities of consolidated variable interest entities: Accounts payable Other current liabilities 436 Deferred underwriting commissions 8,050 Total liabilities 276,203 Commitments and contingencies Mezzanine equity: Redeemable noncontrolling interest in Kimbell Tiger Acquisition Corporation 236,900 Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP unitholders' equity: Common units 475,270 Class B units 410 Total Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP unitholders' equity 475,680 Noncontrolling deficit interest in OpCo (149,358) Total equity 326,322 Total liabilities, mezzanine equity and unitholders' equity $ 839,425 Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations (Unaudited, in thousands, except per-unit data and unit counts) Three Months Ended Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 June 30, 2021 Revenue Oil, natural gas and NGL revenues $ 78,592 $ 38,838 Lease bonus and other income 1,213 1,104 Loss on commodity derivative instruments, net (7,094) (14,217) Total revenues 72,711 25,725 Costs and expenses Production and ad valorem taxes 5,003 2,564 Depreciation and depletion expense 11,274 8,337 Marketing and other deductions 4,063 2,551 General and administrative expenses 7,866 6,685 Consolidated variable interest entities related: General and administrative expenses 591 Total costs and expenses 28,797 20,137 Operating income 43,914 5,588 Other income (expense) Equity income in affiliate 3,385 274 Interest expense (3,323) (2,102) Other income (expense) 898 (49) Consolidated variable interest entities related: Interest earned on marketable securities in Trust Account 223 Net income before income taxes 45,097 3,711 Income tax expense 1,803 Net income 43,294 3,711 Distribution and accretion on Series A preferred units (1,578) Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests (5,424) (621) Distributions on Class B units (8) (21) Net income attributable to common units of Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP $ 37,862 $ 1,491 Basic $ 0.66 $ 0.04 Diluted $ 0.55 $ 0.04 Weighted average number of common units outstanding Basic 55,424,930 39,312,388 Diluted 65,543,669 41,124,489 Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Supplemental Schedules NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES Adjusted EBITDA, Cash G&A and Cash G&A per Boe are used as a supplemental non-GAAP financial measures by management and external users of Kimbell's financial statements, such as industry analysts, investors, lenders and rating agencies. Kimbell believes Adjusted EBITDA is useful because it allows us to more effectively evaluate Kimbell's operating performance and compare the results of Kimbell's operations period to period without regard to its financing methods or capital structure. In addition, management uses Adjusted EBITDA to evaluate cash flow available to pay distributions to Kimbell's unitholders. Kimbell defines Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), net of depreciation and depletion expense, interest expense, income taxes, impairment of oil and natural gas properties, non cash unit based compensation, unrealized gains and losses on derivative instruments, cash distribution from affiliate, equity income (loss) in affiliate, gains and losses on sales of assets and operational impacts of variable interest entities, which include general and administrative expense and interest income. Adjusted EBITDA is not a measure of net income (loss) or net cash provided by operating activities as determined by GAAP. Kimbell excludes the items listed above from net income (loss) in arriving at Adjusted EBITDA because these amounts can vary substantially from company to company within Kimbell's industry depending upon accounting methods and book values of assets, capital structures and the method by which the assets were acquired. Certain items excluded from Adjusted EBITDA are significant components in understanding and assessing a company's financial performance, such as a company's cost of capital and tax structure, as well as historic costs of depreciable assets, none of which are components of Adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA should not be considered an alternative to net income, oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids revenues, net cash provided by operating activities or any other measure of financial performance or liquidity presented in accordance with GAAP. Kimbell's computations of Adjusted EBITDA may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures of other companies. Kimbell expects that cash available for distribution for each quarter will generally equal its Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter, less cash needed for debt service and other contractual obligations, tax obligations, and fixed charges and reserves for future operating or capital needs that the Board of Directors may determine is appropriate. Kimbell believes Cash G&A and Cash G&A per Boe are useful metrics because they isolate cash costs within overall G&A expense and measure cash costs relative to overall production, which is a widely utilized metric to evaluate operational performance within the energy sector. Cash G&A is defined as Kimbell's general and administrative expenses less unit-based compensation expense. Cash G&A per Boe is defined as Cash G&A divided by total production for a period. Cash G&A should not be considered an alternative to G&A expense presented in accordance with GAAP. Kimbell's computations of Cash G&A and Cash G&A per Boe may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures of other companies. Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Supplemental Schedules (Unaudited, in thousands) Three Months Ended Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 June 30, 2021 Reconciliation of net cash provided by operating activities to Adjusted EBITDA and cash available for distribution Net cash provided by operating activities $ 40,423 $ 28,479 Interest expense 3,323 2,102 Income tax expense 1,803 Amortization of right-of-use assets (79) (74) Amortization of loan origination costs (459) (382) Equity income in affiliate, net 274 Forfeiture of restricted units 20 Unit-based compensation (2,949) (2,744) Gain (loss) on derivative instruments, net of settlements 6,564 (11,043) Changes in operating assets and liabilities: Oil, natural gas and NGL revenues receivable 12,039 (1,050) Accounts receivable and other current assets (176) (8) Accounts payable 341 14 Other current liabilities (1,396) (1,227) Operating lease liabilities 80 82 Consolidated variable interest entities related: Interest earned on marketable securities in Trust Account 223 Other assets and liabilities (63) Consolidated EBITDA $ 59,694 $ 14,423 Add: Unit-based compensation 2,949 2,744 (Gain) loss on derivative instruments, net of settlements (6,564) 11,043 Cash distribution from affiliate 432 131 Equity income in affiliate (3,385) (274) Consolidated variable interest entities related: Interest earned on marketable securities in Trust Account (223) General and administrative expenses 591 Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA $ 53,494 $ 28,067 Adjusted EBITDA attributable to noncontrolling interest (6,702) (8,167) Adjusted EBITDA attributable to Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP $ 46,792 $ 19,900 Adjustments to reconcile Adjusted EBITDA to cash available for distribution Less: Cash interest expense 2,442 1,249 Cash income tax expense 2,043 Cash distributions on Series A preferred units 682 Restricted units repurchased for tax withholding 156 Distributions on Class B units 8 21 Cash available for distribution on common units $ 42,299 $ 17,792 Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Supplemental Schedules (Unaudited, in thousands, except for per-unit data and unit counts) Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 Net income $ 43,294 Depreciation and depletion expense 11,274 Interest expense 3,323 Income tax expense 1,803 Consolidated EBITDA $ 59,694 Unit-based compensation 2,949 Gain on derivative instruments, net of settlements (6,564) Cash distribution from affiliate 432 Equity income in affiliate (3,385) Consolidated variable interest entities related: Interest earned on marketable securities in Trust Account (223) General and administrative expenses 591 Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA $ 53,494 Adjusted EBITDA attributable to noncontrolling interest (6,702) Adjusted EBITDA attributable to Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP $ 46,792 Adjustments to reconcile Adjusted EBITDA to cash available for distribution Less: Cash interest expense 2,442 Cash income tax expense 2,043 Distributions on Class B units 8 Cash available for distribution on common units $ 42,299 Common units outstanding on June 30, 2022 57,331,833 Cash available for distribution per common unit outstanding $ 0.74 Common units outstanding on August 15, 2022 Record Date 57,331,833 Second quarter 2022 distribution declared (1) $ 0.55 (1) The difference between the declared distribution and the cash available for distribution is primarily attributable to Kimbell allocating 25% of cash available for distribution to pay outstanding borrowings under its secured revolving credit facility. Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Supplemental Schedules (Unaudited, in thousands, except for per-unit data and unit counts) Three Months Ended June 30, 2021 Net income $ 3,711 Depreciation and depletion expense 8,337 Interest expense 2,102 Cash distribution from affiliate 273 Income tax expense Consolidated EBITDA $ 14,423 Unit-based compensation 2,744 Loss on commodity derivative instruments, net of settlements 11,043 Cash distribution from affiliate 131 Equity income in affiliate (274) Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA $ 28,067 Adjusted EBITDA attributable to noncontrolling interest (8,167) Adjusted EBITDA attributable to Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP $ 19,900 Adjustments to reconcile Adjusted EBITDA to cash available for distribution Less: Cash interest expense 1,249 Cash distributions on Series A preferred units 682 Restricted units repurchased for tax withholding 156 Distributions on Class B units 21 Cash available for distribution on common units $ 17,792 Common units outstanding on June 30, 2021 42,916,472 Cash available for distribution per common unit outstanding $ 0.41 Common units outstanding on August 2, 2021 Record Date 42,916,472 Second quarter 2021 distribution declared (1) $ 0.31 (1) The difference between the declared distribution and the cash available for distribution is primarily attributable to Kimbell allocating 25% of cash available for distribution to pay outstanding borrowings under its secured revolving credit facility. Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP Supplemental Schedules (Unaudited, in thousands) Three Months Ended June 30, 2022 Net income $ 43,294 Depreciation and depletion expense 11,274 Interest expense 3,323 Income tax expense 1,803 Consolidated EBITDA $ 59,694 Unit-based compensation 2,949 Gain on derivative instruments, net of settlements (6,564) Cash distribution from affiliate 432 Equity income in affiliate (3,385) Consolidated variable interest entities related: Interest earned on marketable securities in Trust Account (223) General and administrative expenses 591 Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA $ 53,494 Q3 2021 - Q1 2022 Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA (1) 113,459 Trailing Twelve Month Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA $ 166,953 Long-term debt (as of 6/30/22) 216,116 Cash and cash equivalents (as of 6/30/22) (14,105) Net debt (as of 6/30/22) $ 202,011 Net Debt to Trailing Twelve Month Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA 1.2x (1) Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA for each of the quarters ended September 30, 2021, December 31, 2021 and March 31, 2022 was previously reported in a news release relating to the applicable quarter, and the reconciliation of net income to consolidated Adjusted EBITDA for each quarter is included in the applicable news release. This also includes the trailing twelve months pro forma results from the Q4 2021 acquisition that closed in December 2021 in accordance with Kimbell's secured revolving credit facility. SOURCE Kimbell Royalty Partners, LP SOMERVILLE, Mass., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Laronde, the company pioneering Endless RNA (eRNA) a novel, engineered form of RNA that can be programmed to express proteins inside the body for breakthrough treatments today announced that John Mendlein, Ph. D., the company's Chairman, will become its interim Chief Executive Officer, effective this month. Mendlein succeeds Diego Miralles, M.D., who joined Laronde as CEO in December 2020 from Vividion Therapeutics, Inc. and Johnson & Johnson in San Diego. Mendlein, a Flagship Pioneering Executive Partner, has been involved with numerous Flagship bioplatform companies in board or senior leadership roles, including Adnexus, Axcella, Editas, FL55, Laronde, Moderna, Omega and Senda, and is a seasoned biotech entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience in building bioplatform companies from small molecules to programmable medicines. As he assumes the role of interim CEO, the company will initiate a CEO search. Diego Miralles will continue to work with Flagship ecosystem companies as an Advisor. "On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to thank Diego for his efforts to advance Laronde through its emergence from stealth and its next company building steps, and for his deep commitment to our mission," said Mendlein, Laronde Chairman and incoming CEO. "Our multi-product eRNA platform holds the promise to change medicine and I look forward to partnering with the entire Laronde team to write the next exciting chapter of Laronde as we bring forward breakthrough eRNA treatments into the clinic in 2023." "Flagship founded Laronde in 2017 to industrialize our invention of endless RNA and scale the development of our new class of medicines based on eRNA," said Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., Laronde Founding CEO, Co-founder, Board member, and Flagship General Partner. "Since that time, we have remained actively involved in developing the eRNA platform and company strategy. John's entrepreneurial experience with first-in-category programmable bioplatforms positions him well to lead the company during this important next phase of growth." "Laronde has an exceptional team leading the development of its eRNA platform, with the potential to create a new class of programmable medicines," said Diego Miralles. "I look forward to my continuing role engaging with Flagship as an Advisor and am grateful for my time at Laronde and wish John all the best in his new role." About John Mendlein John Mendlein is an executive partner at Flagship Pioneering, contributing to Flagship's strategic and operational objectives, including the origination of new Flagship Labs companies. A longtime member of Flagship's broader ecosystem of companies, John is an experienced biotech entrepreneur. Prior to joining Flagship, John served as president of corporate and product strategy at Moderna and was a member of Moderna's board of directors from 2012 to 2018. He has also held leadership roles at multiple additional biotech enterprises including Aurora Biosciences (acquired by Vertex Pharmaceuticals), Adnexus Therapeutics, Fate Therapeutics and Affinium Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Debiopharm Group). John currently serves on the boards of Flagship companies FL55, Harbinger Health, Laronde, and Senda Biosciences. John is also a co-author or co-inventor of over 210 publications and published patents. For more about John Mendlein, see here. About Endless RNA Ribonucleic Acids, or RNAs, play a significant role in biology. Among their functions, they provide the "code" that instructs cells to produce or regulate proteins, the building blocks of life and important regulators of disease processes. Because RNAs provide coded instructions to cells, they can be programmed to produce specific effects. This approach has been validated by the successful development of several important RNA-based medicines, but RNA's potential as a drug development modality has just begun. Endless RNA, or eRNA, was invented at Flagship Labs and is a new class of synthetic, closed-loop RNA. Because eRNA has no free ends, it is not recognized by the immune system and is very stable, enabling a long duration of protein expression. In addition, eRNA can serve protein-coding and non-protein-coding functions, and its protein translation capabilities are completely modular switching an eRNA "protein sequence cassette" enables the expression of a different protein or multiple proteins that can be tuned as needed on an application-by-application basis. About Laronde Laronde is pioneering a platform that offers a completely novel way of modulating human biology. Endless RNA (eRNA), invented at Flagship Labs, is a uniquely engineered RNA that can be programmed to express diverse proteins inside the body. It is persistent, non-immunogenic, allows for repeat dosing, and offers flexibility in formulation and delivery. Laronde was founded in 2017 by Flagship Labs, the innovation foundry of Flagship Pioneering. The company is rapidly scaling to support the parallel development of multiple programs across many disease areas. To learn more, please visit the company's website at https://www.laronde.bio/ or Twitter and LinkedIn. Media Contact [email protected] SOURCE Laronde LOS ANGELES, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading luxury tequila company, Casa Del Sol, today announced the hiring of beverage industry veteran, Scott Blazek, as their new Chief Growth Officer. Blazek served as Executive Vice President of Breakthru Beverage for Nevada for seven years where he oversaw the entire NV operation, including the Las Vegas and Reno markets. Prior to his time at Breakthru, Scott worked for Heineken USA where he served as Senior Vice President of Sales as well as with Diageo, serving in several capacities across the organization. "I am excited to be joining Casa Del Sol at such a pivotal moment in time," Blazek comments. "The time is now for a company like Casa Del Sol who is garnering significant consumer and trade excitement to catapult the tequila industry into uncharted territory, and I look forward to being part of the thrilling journey ahead." Scott will be leading the company's commercial organization; including all sales and distribution, strategy and analytics as well as working as a critical partner on the executive team reporting to CEO Steph Sebbag and Colbi Corbett, President & COO. "Scott's extensive experience across the wider beverage alcohol industry as well as his deep understanding of the space makes him a true value add for Casa Del Sol," states Colbi Corbett, President & COO of Casa Del Sol. Corbett continues, "We are building a world-class team rooted in values, quality and authenticity and look forward to Scott helping us build on the national momentum and high revenue velocity we are experiencing as a brand and company." Casa Del Sol is available nationwide through Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits in partnership with Shaw-Ross International Importers. About Casa Del Sol: Casa Del Sol is a luxurious, award-winning ultra premium tequila unlike any other. Casa Del Sol tequila is uniquely aged in heritage Cognac barrels made of French Limousin Oak in partnership with the Martell family and using only the finest 100% Blue Weber agave. With a vision to redefine the tequila category, Casa Del Sol tastefully brings together aesthetic design, sustainability, social change and quality. 100% Mexican owned distillery proudly awarded the ESR distinction for sustainability and social responsibility. Each bottle of Casa Del Sol is inspired by the golden hour of the setting sun and the legend of Mayahuel, the Goddess of Tequila. For more information visit: www.casadelsoltequila.com and @casadelsoltequila on Instagram. Communications Contact: Taylor Foxman The Industry Collective [email protected] SOURCE Casa Del Sol Leap Partners Acquires Drain Werks in Birmingham, Alabama NASHVILLE, Tenn., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In record speed, Leap Partners, a Nashville-based home services company, has completed four acquisitions in just four months. Most recently, the company acquired Drain Werks, a leading plumbing company serving central and northern Alabama. Through their acquisitions, John Cerasuolo, CEO, and Patrick Ritter, CFO of Leap Partners have built a reputation for being friendly and fair buyers of companies in the Southeast. This is exactly what attracted Marcus and Duston Williams, of Drain Werks. Marcus Williams, Owner of Drain Werks said, "I am proud of what we have built in Drain Werks. However, I knew we needed some help to take the company into our next phase of expansion. John and Patrick's approach fit perfectly with what I was looking for. I am excited about the new growth opportunities for all of our employees and customers now that we have Leap Partners' support." Duston Williams, CEO of Drain Werks said, "With the Leap Partners team, we are going to be able to better serve our employees and our customers. I am excited about the opportunity to continue to lead Drain Werks, but now with a broader support team of business owners that can help us navigate our growth." "We are excited to have Marcus, Duston, and all of the Drain Werks family join our growing team," said John Cerasuolo, Leap Partners CEO. "They will be great additions to our all-star team of business owners who are helping each other run and grow their businesses. We feel fortunate at Leap Partners to continue to meet and work with caring, driven, and inspiring people like Marcus and Duston." Marcus and Duston will continue to lead the Drain Werks team, as leading plumbing and drain specialists in the Alabama area. About Leap Partners Leap Partners is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The company is working to connect the best small and medium-sized HVAC, plumbing, and electrical service businesses in the Southeast to build a world-class service provider with industry-leading customer satisfaction and employee engagement. For more information, visit theleappartners.com and to read testimonials from past acquisitions please click here . SOURCE Leap Partners Nomination Deadline is August 19, 2022. Applications now available at www.lidma.org ATLANTA, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Life Insurance Direct Marketing Association (LIDMA) is now accepting nominations for their prestigious "Innovation Award" of life insurance industry companies, individuals, or vendors, who are blazing a trail of technology and process innovations that are creating positive outcomes within the life insurance direct marketing channel, all with the goal of protecting more families. The deadline for nominations is August 19. Once nominations are received, the selected finalists will then be required to submit a brief two-minute video on their industry innovation no later than September 30. The Innovation Award winner will be announced through a "People's Choice" voting selection by member attendees of LIDMA's Fall Meeting & Business Showcase scheduled for October 16-19, 2022, at the Westdrift Manhattan Beach in Manhattan Beach, California. Our 2022 Innovation Award promises to promote the best-of-the-best! Tweet this "Exciting InsurTech innovations, focused on making the process of buying life insurance easier and more accessible, are the catalysts driving the historic change we are now seeing in Life insurance distribution," said LIDMA President, Nicole Buckenmeyer. "Our LIDMA members are at the forefront of making the life insurance purchase process faster and simpler, and our 2022 Innovation Award promises to promote the best-of-the-best and declare a winner at our Fall conference." The "Innovation Award" was originally inspired by LIDMA's eProcess improvement initiatives which continually evolve to meet the demand of our consumers in partnership with our LIDMA-affiliated insurers, service vendors, attorneys, and marketers. LIDMA's eProcess reduces costs for carriers and providers and improves the buying and fulfilment experience for customers. Last year's winner, Human API's Health Intelligence Platform, was chosen by the LIDMA community from an outstanding group of finalists including Insurance Technologies, Insureio Technologies, Inc., Techficient Holdings and InsurAware. LIDMA Innovation Award Criteria and Process Successful applicants or nominees must show a measurable effect on how they're expanding the market, reducing cycle times, digitizing previously awkward and manual processes, while strengthening the consumer relationship with our industry and its noble purpose of financial protection. To determine Innovation Award finalists, LIDMA will conduct a thorough review to ensure each applicant's technological or procedural improvement initiative is active in-market or in an advanced stage of development. Finalists will be notified after application submission with a further requirement that they submit a brief video on their industry innovation no later than September 30. Finalists will be showcased during the LIDMA Fall Meeting & Business Showcase slated for October 16-19, 2022. A presentation of finalists and "People's Choice" voting will be conducted on the LIDMA mobile app during the conference. The ultimate winner of the Innovation Award will be announced on-site at the conclusion of the LIDMA Fall Meeting & Business Showcase. Applications for the LIDMA Innovation Award are available now at www.lidma.org and will be accepted through August 19, 2022. About LIDMA LIDMA is the premiere association dedicated to supporting businesses and professionals active in direct sales of life insurance products to consumers the fastest growing sales segment in the life insurance industry. The not-for-profit organization is committed to helping members protect more families while boosting their revenues and reducing costs. For more information, or if you would like to become a member, please visit www.lidma.org. SOURCE Life Insurance Direct Marketing Association INDIANAPOLIS, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) will now conduct its second-quarter 2022 financial results investor conference call today at 10 a.m. Eastern time due to third-party technical difficulties. Investors, media and the general public can access a live webcast of the conference call through a link that will be posted on Lilly's website at https://investor.lilly.com/webcasts-and-presentations. A replay will also be available on the website following the conference call. About Lilly Lilly unites caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world. We've been pioneering life-changing discoveries for nearly 150 years, and today our medicines help more than 47 million people across the globe. Harnessing the power of biotechnology, chemistry and genetic medicine, our scientists are urgently advancing new discoveries to solve some of the world's most significant health challenges, redefining diabetes care, treating obesity and curtailing its most devastating long-term effects, advancing the fight against Alzheimer's disease, providing solutions to some of the most debilitating immune system disorders, and transforming the most difficult-to-treat cancers into manageable diseases. With each step toward a healthier world, we're motivated by one thing: making life better for millions more people. That includes delivering innovative clinical trials that reflect the diversity of our world and working to ensure our medicines are accessible and affordable. To learn more, visit Lilly.com and Lilly.com/newsroom or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. F-LLY SOURCE Eli Lilly and Company CHICAGO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lithium silicon battery market size is projected to grow from USD 10 million in 2022 to USD 247 million by 2030 at CAGR of 48.4% during the forecast period from 2022 to 2030, according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. The increasing use of lithium-ion battery-based electric grid storage systems is expected to open new market avenues for lithium silicon battery technologies. Next-generation li-ion batteries will likely use silicon anodes that utilize silicon nanotubes or a coating of silicon material. This will result in significantly higher energy storage and longer battery life. Silicon is a preferred anode material for lithium batteries, as it has a low discharge potential and the highest known theoretical charge capacity of 4,200 mAh per gram. Some major companies have undertaken R&D to develop and commercialize lithium silicon batteries. Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=78526836 Browse in-depth TOC on "Lithium Silicon Battery Market" 129 Tables 51 Figures 170 Pages The market for < 3,000 mAh is expected to grow at a significant CAGR during the forecast period Consumer electronics is the only market that has successfully tested the application of lithium silicon batteries commercially. Consumer electronics have smaller energy needs that can be fulfilled with <3,000 mAh batteries. These batteries are lightweight, compact, and have an excellent charge and discharge cycle rate. However, they have a shorter shelf life than higher-capacity variants. They are designed for applications that require a nominal amount of power. The batteries provide a good cycle performance due to nano geometry and superior electrical conductivity. They also have low first-cycle irreversible capacity losses. Various companies are researching and developing >3,000 mAh batteries for future applications in consumer electronics such as hearing aids, smartwatches, headphones, and remote controls. The market for consumer electronics application is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period Li-ion batteries are used widely as a portable power source for consumer electronics such as wearables, smartphones, tablets and laptops, consumer & delivery drones, home devices, and AR/VR devices. Technological changes and development in the consumer electronics industry have resulted in compact, lighter, and higher-performance products; however, li-ion batteries showed several drawbacks such as size, energy capacity, and weight. Hence, several companies are developing lithium silicon batteries as an alternative. Furthermore, wearables, designed and required to be thin, small, and lightweight, also need high-capacity batteries. This has driven attention toward lithium silicon batteries in wearables. Some companies have tested their wearables with lithium silicon battery power. Request Sample Pages: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestsampleNew.asp?id=78526836 North America to hold substantial market share during the forecast period The North American lithium silicon battery market is segmented into the US, Canada, and Mexico. The region is home to most key market players; many products have been commercialized in the US and used in small consumer electronics. North American companies are developing lithium silicon batteries for EVs, consumer electronics, and energy applications. North America is a highly competitive market due to the presence of several players in the US. The major players include Amprius Technologies (US), Enovix Corporation (US), NanoGraf Corporation (US), Enevate Corporation (US), Sila Nanotechnologies, Inc. (US), and Group14 Technologies, Inc. (US). Get 10% Free Customization on this Report: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestCustomizationNew.asp?id=78526836 Browse Adjacent Market: Semiconductor and Electronics Market Research Reports &Consulting Related Reports: Solid State Battery Market by Type, Rechargeability, Capacity, Application (Consumer Electronics, Electric Vehicles, Energy Harvesting, Medical Devices, Packaging, Wireless Sensors) & Region (2022-2028) Lithium-Ion Battery Market by Type (Li-NMC, LFP, LCO, LTO, LMO, NCA), Capacity, Voltage, Industry (Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Power, Industrial), & Region (North America, Europe, APAC & RoW) (2021-2030) About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Aashish Mehra MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/lithium-silicon-battery-market.asp Visit Our Web Site: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ Content Source: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/lithium-silicon-battery.asp Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg SOURCE MarketsandMarkets SBIRS GEO-6 Sets Stage for Upcoming Next Generation Resilient Missile Warning Architecture BUCKLEY SPACE FORCE BASE, Colo., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Following a successful launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today, the U.S. Space Force is now communicating with the sixth Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (SBIRS GEO) -6 satellite, built by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT). The final satellite in the SBIRS program series, GEO-6 joins the U.S. Space Force's constellation of missile warning satellites equipped with powerful scanning and staring infrared surveillance sensors. "The need for Overhead Persistent Infrared systems has never been more critical," said Michael Corriea, vice president of Lockheed Martin Space's Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) Mission Area. "At Lockheed Martin, we are making advancements to keep pace with evolving needs based on emerging threats in our military customers' environment, helping pave the way for the future." The GEO-6 satellite is a stepping stone toward the resilient missile warning to be provided by SBIRS' successor, the Next Generation OPIR GEO System (NGG). Like SBIRS GEO-5 and GEO-6, NGG will be based on Lockheed Martin's modernized LM 2100 Combat Bus, which provides additional capabilities such as cyber hardening, resiliency features, enhanced spacecraft power, and improved propulsion and electronics. The SBIRS GEO-6 satellite is responding to the U.S. Space Force's commands as planned. Signal acquisition was confirmed 3 hours and 43 minutes after the satellite's 6:29 a.m. EDT lift off aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. The satellite is now orbiting under its own propulsion following separation from the rocket. The onboard sensors collect data that allow the U.S. military to detect missile launches, support ballistic missile defense, expand technical intelligence gathering and bolstering situational awareness on the battlefield. A Step Toward More Resiliency The OPIR mission has become more critical as ballistic missile technology has proliferated around the world with over 1,000 missile launches tracked annually. Lockheed Martin recognizes that modernized technology is needed to augment the current missile warning architecture and improve resiliency against attacks. "SBIRS GEO-6 fortifies the current missile warning architecture, and it also signifies that we are on our way to achieving even greater technological capacity and expanded coverage with NGG," Corriea said. Lockheed Martin is proud to be part of the SBIRS team led by Space Systems Command's Space Sensing Directorate at Los Angeles Air Force Base. Lockheed Martin Space, Sunnyvale, California, is the SBIRS prime contractor, with Northrop Grumman of Azusa, California, as the payload supplier. About Lockheed Martin Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin Corporation is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 114,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. Please follow @LMNews on Twitter for the latest announcements and news across the corporation, and follow @LMSpace to learn more about the latest technologies, missions and people driving the future of space. SOURCE Lockheed Martin Lowe's distributed more than 400 buckets of flood cleanup supplies at each store in Paintsville, Pikeville and Hazard, Kentucky on July 31. Supplies included batteries, sponges, bottled water, trash bags, goggles and hand sanitizer to help with recovery and cleanup. Lowe's will deploy its Tool Rental Disaster Response Trailer to the Hazard store to give impacted residents affordable rental options for one-time use equipment such as generators and chainsaws. Lowe's Command Center has deployed a 26-person emergency response team to the Hazard store to help with recovery efforts over the next two weeks. These specially trained associates are voluntarily leaving their home stores to give associates in eastern Kentucky a chance to focus on their families. Lowe's is providing additional assistance for its associates, including shower and laundry trailers to help those without power or water, as well as pallets of clothing. The company will also double its match commitment for contributions to the Lowe's Employee Relief Fund, which provides financial assistance in times of crisis. Lowe's will match $2 for every dollar an employee donates. Visit Lowe's Newsroom for updates on Lowe's relief efforts and continued support. About Lowe's Lowe's Companies, Inc. (NYSE: LOW) is a FORTUNE 50 home improvement company serving approximately 19 million customer transactions a week in the United States and Canada. With fiscal year 2021 sales of over $96 billion, Lowe's and its related businesses operate or service nearly 2,200 home improvement and hardware stores and employ over 300,000 associates. Based in Mooresville, N.C., Lowe's supports the communities it serves through programs focused on creating safe, affordable housing and helping to develop the next generation of skilled trade experts. For more information, visit Lowes.com. Contact: Candace Gordon Lowe's Companies Inc. [email protected] SOURCE Lowe's Companies, Inc. SHANGHAI, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lufax Holding Ltd ("Lufax" or the "Company") (NYSE: LU), a leading technology-empowered personal financial services platform in China, today announced its unaudited financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022. Second Quarter 2022 & First Half 2022 Financial Highlights Total income increased by 3.1% to RMB15,288 million ( US$2,282 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB14,828 million in the same period of 2021. ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021. Net profit decreased by 37.9% to RMB2,936 million ( US$438 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB4,729 million in the same period of 2021. (In millions except percentages, unaudited) Three Months Ended June 30, 2021 2022 YoY RMB RMB USD Total income 14,828 15,288 2,282 3.1 % Total expenses (8,477) (10,935) (1,633) 29.0 % Total expenses excluding credit and asset impairment losses, financial costs and other losses (7,107) (6,322) (944) (11.0 %) Credit and asset impairment losses, financial costs and other losses (1,370) (4,613) (689) 236.7 % Net profit 4,729 2,936 438 (37.9 %) (In millions except percentages, unaudited) Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 2022 YoY RMB RMB USD Total income 30,079 32,604 4,868 8.4 % Total expenses (17,007) (21,099) (3,150) 24.1 % Total expenses excluding credit and asset impairment losses, financial costs and other losses (14,162) (13,569) (2,026) (4.2 %) Credit and asset impairment losses, financial costs and other losses (2,845) (7,529) (1,124) 164.6 % Net profit 9,697 8,226 1,228 (15.2 %) Second Quarter 2022 & First Half 2022 Operational Highlights Retail credit facilitation business: Outstanding balance of loans facilitated increased by 9.0% to RMB661.4 billion as of June 30, 2022 from RMB606.8 billion as of June 30, 2021 . as of from as of . Cumulative number of borrowers increased by 17.3% to approximately 18.2 million as of June 30, 2022 from approximately 15.5 million as of June 30, 2021 . from approximately 15.5 million as of . During the second quarter of 2022, excluding the consumer finance subsidiary, 86.1% of new loans facilitated were disbursed to small business owners, up from 77.6% in the same period of 2021. New loans facilitated decreased by 15.2% to RMB129.5 billion in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB152.7 billion in the same period of 2021. in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021. During the second quarter of 2022, excluding the consumer finance subsidiary, the Company bore risk on 21.7% of its new loans facilitated, up from 16.0% in the same period of 2021. As of June 30, 2022 , including the consumer finance subsidiary, the Company bore risk on 21.2% of its outstanding balance, up from 11.3% as of June 30, 2021 . , including the consumer finance subsidiary, the Company bore risk on 21.2% of its outstanding balance, up from 11.3% as of . For the second quarter of 2022, the Company's retail credit facilitation revenue take rate [1] based on loan balance was 8.6%, as compared to 9.7% for the second quarter of 2021. based on loan balance was 8.6%, as compared to 9.7% for the second quarter of 2021. C-M3 flow rate [2] for the total loans the Company had facilitated was 0.7% in the second quarter of 2022, as compared to 0.6% in the first quarter of 2022. Flow rates for the general unsecured loans and secured loans the Company had facilitated were 0.8% and 0.3%, respectively, in the second quarter of 2022, as compared to 0.7% and 0.2%, respectively, in the first quarter of 2022. for the total loans the Company had facilitated was 0.7% in the second quarter of 2022, as compared to 0.6% in the first quarter of 2022. Flow rates for the general unsecured loans and secured loans the Company had facilitated were 0.8% and 0.3%, respectively, in the second quarter of 2022, as compared to 0.7% and 0.2%, respectively, in the first quarter of 2022. Days past due ("DPD") 30+ delinquency rate [3] for the total loans the Company had facilitated was 3.1% as of June 30, 2022 , as compared to 2.6% as of March 31, 2022 . DPD 30+ delinquency rate for general unsecured loans was 3.6% as of June 30, 2022 , as compared to 3.0% as of March 31, 2022 . DPD 30+ delinquency rate for secured loans was 1.4% as of June 30, 2022 , as compared to 1.0% as of March 31, 2022 . for the total loans the Company had facilitated was 3.1% as of , as compared to 2.6% as of . DPD 30+ delinquency rate for general unsecured loans was 3.6% as of , as compared to 3.0% as of . DPD 30+ delinquency rate for secured loans was 1.4% as of , as compared to 1.0% as of . DPD 90+ delinquency rate[4] for the total loans facilitated was 1.7% as of June 30, 2022 , as compared to 1.4% as of March 31, 2022 . DPD 90+ delinquency rate for general unsecured loans was 2.0% as of June 30, 2022 , as compared to 1.6% as of March 31, 2022 . DPD 90+ delinquency rate for secured loans was 0.7% as of June 30, 2022 , as compared to 0.5% as of March 31, 2022 . Wealth management business: Total number of registered users grew to 52.3 million as of June 30, 2022 from 47.1 million as of June 30, 2021 . from 47.1 million as of . Total number of active investors grew to 15.2 million as of June 30, 2022 from 14.8 million as of June 30, 2021 . from 14.8 million as of . Total client assets grew by 2.6% to RMB431.9 billion as of June 30, 2022 from RMB421.1 billion as of June 30, 2021 . as of from as of . The 12-month investor retention rate was 94.7% as of June 30, 2022 , as compared to 96.0% as of June 30, 2021 . , as compared to 96.0% as of . Contribution to total client assets from customers with investments of more than RMB300,000 on the Company's platform increased to 81.6% as of June 30, 2022 from 80.2% as of June 30, 2021 . on the Company's platform increased to 81.6% as of from 80.2% as of . During the second quarter of 2022, the annualized take rate[5] for current products and services on the Company's wealth management platform was 43.1 bps, down from 53.9 bps during the first quarter of 2022. Mr. YongSuk Cho, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Lufax, commented, "In the face of COVID-19 resurgence severely impacting our core client base of small business owners, we remain prudent in our operations and prioritize asset quality over volume growth. At the same time, we are witnessing an improvement in the regulatory environment, as the recently released policy statements seek to balance incentivizing and regulating the platform economy. With our key initiatives launched last year starting to bear fruit, we believe that the most challenging time is now behind us. Our C-M3 monthly flow rate, which is a leading risk indicator, peaked in April at 0.83% from 0.53% in December and decreased to 0.61% in June. Going forward, we remain committed to serving the financial needs of small business owners in our retail credit facilitation business and helping our customers in the online fund distribution space to achieve their financial planning objectives in our wealth management business. With a re-aligned seasoned executive team and a long proven track record of making preemptive adjustments to adapt to the changing environment, we are confident that the strategic initiatives we have implemented will generate sustainable value for our shareholders and the real economy at large." Mr. Gregory Gibb, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Lufax, commented, "As recent policy announcements indicate increased recognition of the constructive role that credit insurance can play in funding availability for small business owners, we attained positive regulatory feedback on our guarantee company and its position in data transmission to our funding partners. In the second quarter, the average APR for outstanding loan balance wide reached 21.4%, down from 21.8% in the previous quarter. Credit insurance provided by our seven insurance partners to customers covered 76% of our new loans. Meanwhile, our sales channel transformation made additional progress with increased direct sales contribution and improved sourcing quality. New business sourced from Ping An channels in the second quarter declined to 22% from 31% a year ago. Our direct sales made up 53.6% of new loan sales in the second quarter, up from 49.0% a year ago. As of June 30, the percentage of high quality talents[6] in our direct sales force had increased from the first quarter, as we continue to execute our channel transformation. In fact, in the second quarter, we witnessed a 17% year-over-year increase in number of loan applications per direct sales. In addition, we further improved our funding costs across our partner network. In the second quarter overall bank and institutional funding costs decreased by about 10 basis points, while our number of funding partners in the quarter reached 78. While we are confident that our robust balance sheet and low leverage ratio should lead to a speedy resumption in our business growth once the macro environment stabilizes, we are taking a prudent approach in our financial forecast and full year guidance. Should we experience more aggressive economic policy support in 2023 and beyond, we may deliver positive surprises to the upside." Mr. David Choy, Chief Financial Officer of Lufax, commented, "Despite a very challenging macro environment during the second quarter, we achieved positive top-line growth of 3.1% quarter over quarter, or 8.4% growth for the first half of the year. Our total expenses in the second quarter, excluding credit impairment losses, asset impairment losses, finance costs and other losses, actually decreased by 11.0%, with sales and marketing expenses decreasing by 19%. With the balance of our cash at bank increasing to RMB42.9 billion and liquid assets maturing in 90 days or less amount to RMB42.37 billion, as of June 30, 2022. The leverage ratio of our guarantee company remaining as low as 2.03x versus the regulatory allowance of 10x, we are well equipped with operating flexibility and abundant capital and cash to weather the economic downturn, whilst maintaining our dividend payout. While market volatility brought on by COVID resurgence and the uncertain macroeconomic conditions on the horizon may keep our new business growth stalled for the short term, we believe that our profit growth will likely re-accelerate once the channel optimization impact starts to materialize and credit costs become normalized on an annual basis." Second Quarter 2022 & First Half Financial Results TOTAL INCOME Total income increased by 3.1% to RMB15,288 million (US$2,282 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB14,828 million in the same period of 2021. The Company's revenue mix changed with the evolution of its business model, as it gradually bore more credit risk and increased funding from consolidated trust plans that provided lower funding costs. Three Months Ended June 30, (In millions except percentages, unaudited) 2021 2022 YoY RMB % of total income RMB % of total income Technology platform-based income 9,601 64.7 % 7,380 48.3 % (23.1 %) Retail credit facilitation service fees 9,194 62.0 % 6,912 45.2 % (24.8 %) Wealth management transaction and service fees 407 2.7 % 467 3.1 % 14.7 % Net interest income 3,227 21.8 % 5,010 32.8 % 55.3 % Guarantee income 891 6.0 % 1,936 12.7 % 117.3 % Other income 1,071 7.2 % 532 3.5 % (50.3 %) Investment income 37 0.2 % 428 2.8 % 1056.8 % Share of net profits of investments accounted for using the equity method 2 0.0 % 2 0.0 % 0.0 % Total income 14,828 100 % 15,288 100 % 3.1 % Six Months Ended June 30, (In millions except percentages, unaudited) 2021 2022 YoY RMB % of total income RMB % of total income Technology platform-based income 19,891 66.1 % 16,672 51.1 % (16.2 %) Retail credit facilitation service fees 18,859 62.7 % 15,612 47.9 % (17.2 %) Wealth management transaction and service fees 1,032 3.4 % 1,060 3.3 % 2.7 % Net interest income 6,138 20.4 % 9,994 30.7 % 62.8 % Guarantee income 1,442 4.8 % 3,838 11.8 % 166.2 % Other income 2,109 7.0 % 1,236 3.8 % (41.4 %) Investment income 526 1.7 % 863 2.6 % 64.1 % Share of net profits of investments accounted for using the equity method (28) (0.1 %) 1 0.0 % (103.6 %) Total income 30,079 100 % 32,604 100 % 8.4 % Technology platform-based income decreased by 23.1% to RMB7,380 million ( US$1,102 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB9,601 million in the same period of 2021 due to a decrease in retail credit facilitation service fees. - Retail credit facilitation service fees decreased by 24.8% to RMB6,912 million (US$1,032 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB9,194 million in the same period of 2021, mainly due to a decrease in new loan sales, and changes in the Company's business model that resulted in more income being recognized in net interest income and guarantee income. - Wealth management transaction and service fees increased by 14.7% to RMB467 million (US$70 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB407 million in the same period of 2021. The increase was mainly driven by the increase in fees generated from the Company's current products and services, partially offset by the run-off of legacy products. Net interest income increased by 55.3% to RMB5,010 million ( US$748 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB3,227 million in the same period of 2021, mainly as a result of 1) the Company's increased usage of trust funding channels that were consolidated by the Company (as of June 30, 2022 , the Company's on-balance sheet loans accounted for 36.0% of its total loan balance under management, as compared to 27.8% as of June 30, 2021 ), and 2) increase in the consumer finance loans. increased by 55.3% to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, mainly as a result of 1) the Company's increased usage of trust funding channels that were consolidated by the Company (as of , the Company's on-balance sheet loans accounted for 36.0% of its total loan balance under management, as compared to 27.8% as of ), and 2) increase in the consumer finance loans. Guarantee income increased by 117% to RMB1,936 million ( US$289 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB891 million in the same period of 2021, primarily due to the increase in the loans for which the Company bore credit risk. increased by 117% to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, primarily due to the increase in the loans for which the Company bore credit risk. Other income decreased to RMB532 million ( US$79 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB1,071 million in the same period of 2021, mainly due to the change of service scope and fee structure that the Company provided and charged to its financial institution partners. decreased to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, mainly due to the change of service scope and fee structure that the Company provided and charged to its financial institution partners. Investment income increased to RMB428 million ( US$64 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB37 million in the same period of 2021, mainly due to the lower base in the second quarter of 2021 as a result of fair value losses from investments. TOTAL EXPENSES Total expenses increased by 29.0% to RMB10,935 million (US$1,633 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB8,477 million in the same period of 2021. This increase was mainly driven by credit impairment losses, since credit impairment losses increased by 152% to RMB3,513 million (US$524 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB1,394 million in the same period of 2021. Total expenses excluding credit impairment losses, asset impairment losses, finance costs and other losses decreased by 11.0% to RMB6,322 million (US$944 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB7,107 million in the same period of 2021. Three Months Ended June 30, (In millions except percentages, unaudited) 2021 2022 YoY RMB % of total income RMB % of total income Sales and marketing expenses 4,316 29.1 % 3,496 22.9 % (19.0 %) General and administrative expenses 798 5.4 % 762 5.0 % (4.5 %) Operation and servicing expenses 1,476 10.0 % 1,581 10.3 % 7.1 % Technology and analytics expenses 517 3.5 % 483 3.2 % (6.6 %) Credit impairment losses 1,394 9.4 % 3,513 23.0 % 152.0 % Asset impairment losses 2 0.0 % 352 2.3 % NA Finance costs 276 1.9 % 221 1.4 % (19.9 %) Other (gains)/losses - net (301) (2.0 %) 527 3.4 % (275.1 %) Total expenses 8,477 57.2 % 10,935 71.5 % 29.0 % Six Months Ended June 30, (In millions except percentages, unaudited) 2021 2022 YoY RMB % of total income RMB % of total income Sales and marketing expenses 8,549 28.4 % 7,980 24.5 % (6.7 %) General and administrative expenses 1,651 5.5 % 1,487 4.6 % (9.9 %) Operation and servicing expenses 2,998 10.0 % 3,171 9.7 % 5.8 % Technology and analytics expenses 963 3.2 % 931 2.9 % (3.3 %) Credit impairment losses 2,447 8.1 % 6,336 19.4 % 158.9 % Asset impairment losses 2 0.0 % 352 1.1 % NA Finance costs 560 1.9 % 432 1.3 % (22.9 %) Other (gains)/losses - net (163) (0.5 %) 409 1.3 % (350.9 %) Total expenses 17,007 56.5 % 21,099 64.7 % 24.1 % Sales and marketing expenses decreased by 19.0% to RMB3,496 million ( US$522 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB4,316 million in the same period of 2021. - Borrower acquisition expenses decreased by 37.6% to RMB1,648 million (US$246 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB2,643 million in the same period of 2021. The decrease was mainly due to decreased new loan sales, increased sales productivity and continual optimization of commissions. - Investor acquisition and retention expenses decreased by 36.7% to RMB107 million (US$16 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB169 million in the same period of 2021, mostly due to the improvement in the Company's investor acquisition efficiency. - General sales and marketing expenses increased by 15.8% to RMB1,741 million (US$260 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB1,503 million in the same period of 2021. This increase was primarily due to the increase in sales cost related to platform services[7] and the increase in the staff costs for sales and marketing personnel. General and administrative expenses decreased by 4.5% to RMB762 million ( US$114 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB798 million in the same period of 2021 as a result of the Company's expense control measures. decreased by 4.5% to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021 as a result of the Company's expense control measures. Operation and servicing expenses increased by 7.1% to RMB1,581 million ( US$236 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB1,476 million in the same period of 2021, primarily due to the increase of trust plan management expenses, which resulted from the increase in consolidated trust plans. increased by 7.1% to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, primarily due to the increase of trust plan management expenses, which resulted from the increase in consolidated trust plans. Technology and analytics expenses decreased by 6.6% to RMB483 million ( US$72 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB517 million in the same period of 2021, as a result of the Company's improved efficiency. decreased by 6.6% to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, as a result of the Company's improved efficiency. Credit impairment losses increased by 152% to RMB3,513 million ( US$524 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB1,394 million in the same period of 2021, mainly driven by 1) the increase of provision and indemnity loss driven by increased risk exposure, and 2) the change in credit performance due to impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. increased by 152% to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, mainly driven by 1) the increase of provision and indemnity loss driven by increased risk exposure, and 2) the change in credit performance due to impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. Asset impairment losses increased to RMB352 million ( US$53 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB2 million in the same period of 2021, mainly due to an impairment loss of long-term investment. increased to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, mainly due to an impairment loss of long-term investment. Finance costs decreased by 19.9% to RMB221 million ( US$33 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB276 million in the same period of 2021, mainly due to the increase in interest income resulting from the increase in deposits. decreased by 19.9% to ( ) in the second quarter of 2022 from in the same period of 2021, mainly due to the increase in interest income resulting from the increase in deposits. Other losses were RMB527 million ( US$79 million ) in the second quarter of 2022 compared to other gains of RMB301 million in the same period of 2021, mainly due to the foreign exchange loss in the second quarter of 2022. [1] The take rate of retail credit facilitation business is calculated by dividing the aggregated amount of retail credit facilitation service fee, net interest income, guarantee income and the penalty fees and account management fees by the average outstanding balance of loans facilitated for each period. [2] Flow rate estimates the percentage of current loans that will become non-performing at the end of three months, and is defined as the product of (i) the loan balance that is overdue from 1 to 29 days as a percentage of the total current loan balance of the previous month, (ii) the loan balance that is overdue from 30 to 59 days as a percentage of the loan balance that was overdue from 1 to 29 days in the previous month, and (iii) the loan balance that is overdue from 60 to 89 days as a percentage of the loan balance that was overdue from 30 days to 59 days in the previous month. Loans from legacy products and consumer finance subsidiary are excluded from the flow rate calculation. [3] DPD 30+ delinquency rate refers to the outstanding balance of loans for which any payment is 30 to 179 calendar days past due divided by the outstanding balance of loans. Loans from legacy products and consumer finance subsidiary are excluded from the calculation. [4] DPD 90+ delinquency rate refers to the outstanding balance of loans for which any payment is 90 to 179 calendar days past due divided by the outstanding balance of loans. Loans from legacy products and consumer finance subsidiary are excluded from the calculation. [5] The take rate for the wealth management business is calculated by dividing total wealth management transaction and service fees for current products by average client assets in the Company's current products. Part of the wealth management transaction and service fees do not generate client assets. [6] High quality talent refers to talent who have (i) bachelor degree; (ii) sales experience; and, (iii) obtained A scoring in interview [7] The liquid assets consist of Cash at bank, Financial assets at amortized cost, Financial Assets purchased under reverse repurchase agreements and Financial assets at fair value through profit or loss with a maturity of 90 days or less as of June 30, 2022. NET PROFIT Net profit decreased by 37.9% to RMB2,936 million (US$438 million) in the second quarter of 2022 from RMB4,729 million in the same period of 2021, driven by the aforementioned factors. EARNINGS PER ADS Basic and diluted earnings per American Depositary Share ("ADS") were RMB1.27 (US$0.19) and RMB1.23 (US$0.18), respectively, in the second quarter of 2022. BALANCE SHEET The Company had RMB42,863 million (US$6,399 million) in cash at bank as of June 30, 2022, as compared to RMB34,743 million as of December 31, 2021. Net assets of the Company is amounted to RMB97,238 million (US$14,517 million) as of June 30, 2022, as compared to RMB94,559 million as of December 31, 2021. Recent Developments Change of Annual Dividend Policy to Semi-Annual Dividend Policy The Company's board of directors (the "Board") has approved a semi-annual cash dividend policy to replace its existing annual dividend policy. Under the semi-annual dividend policy, starting from the second half of 2022, the Company will declare and distribute a recurring cash dividend semi-annually, at an amount equivalent to approximately 20%-40% of the Company's net profit in the previous six-month period, or as otherwise authorized by the Board. The determination to make dividend distributions and the exact amount of such distributions in any particular semi-annual period will be based upon the Company's operations and earnings, cash flow, financial condition, and other relevant factors, and subject to adjustment and determination by the Board. Semi-Annual Dividend The Board has approved a cash dividend of US$0.34 per ordinary share for the six-month period ended June 30, 2022, on the Company's outstanding shares to shareholders of record as of the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on October 13, 2022. Holders of ADSs, each two ADSs representing one ordinary share, will accordingly be entitled to a cash dividend of US$0.17 per ADS, subject to the payment of applicable depositary fees. The depositary, Citibank, N.A., will distribute the dividend to holders of ADSs on or about October 28, 2022. Changes in Board Composition and Management Team Mr. Guangheng Ji has tendered his resignation as the Chairman of the Board and will no longer serve as a member of the Board. Mr. YongSuk Cho, currently a director and Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Company, has been appointed as the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Company. Mr. Gregory Dean Gibb will remain as Co-Chief Executive Officer and a director of the Company. In addition, Mr. Hanjie Ou has been appointed as a director of the Company. Mr. Hanjie Ou currently serves as Senior Manager of the Corporate Planning Center at Ping An Group, where he is mainly responsible for the planning and management of core financial institutions of Ping An Group and key strategic projects within Ping An Group. Mr. Ou has rich experience in the financial industry. Prior to joining Ping An Group in 2018, Mr. Ou has served as Senior Project Manager at Roland Berger Strategy Consulting in Shanghai from 2015 to 2018. Mr. Ou received a Master's Degree in Operations Research from London School of Economics and Political Science in 2008. Mr. David Siu Kam Choy, currently the Controller of the Company and the Chief Financial Officer of Puhui, has been appointed as the Chief Financial Officer of the Company. Mr. Jian Yang has tendered his resignation as the Chief Risk Officer of the Company and Ms. Younjeong Lim has been appointed as the Chief Risk Officer of the Company. Mr. Dongqi Chen has been appointed as the General Manager of the Company. Mr. David Siu Kam Choy has been the Controller of the Company from August 2020 to August 2022. He has also been the Chief Financial Officer of Puhui since October 2018. Mr. Choy served in various positions at KPMG Hong Kong and Ernst & Young Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong from September 1997 to September 2005, and served as the Financial Controller of Shenzhen Development Bank Company Limited (now known as Ping An Bank Co., Ltd.) from October 2005 to March 2007. Mr. Choy subsequently joined Ping An Insurance Group where he served as the Deputy General Manager of Group Finance Department from March 2007 to January 2009, Deputy General Manager of Group Planning Department from January 2009 to March 2014, and General Manager of Group Treasury Department from March 2014 to September 2018. Representing Ping An Insurance during his service at the group, Mr. Choy also served in various directorship roles within the Ping An Group, namely, Chairman of China Ping An Insurance Overseas (Holdings) Limited, non-executive director of each of Shenzhen Ping An Fintech Company, Ping An Asset Management (HK) Limited, Ping An Real Estate Company and Ping An Yiqianbao e-commerce Company. Mr. Choy obtained his Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration major in finance from the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in 1997 and his Master's Degree in Corporate Governance and Directorship from the Hong Kong Baptist University in 2014. He also completed the senior executives program in corporate governance at Stanford University in 2016. Ms. Younjeong Lim currently serves as Vice President and Chief Risk Officer of Puhui, where she is responsible for the comprehensive risk management of retail lending business of the Company. Ms. Lim has led the transformation of Puhui's risk management system from a traditional model into a technology-supported, data-driven online model. Prior to joining Puhui in 2008, Ms. Lim has served as the Head of Consumer Finance Risk Management Department of Standard Chartered Bank in Korea from 2006 to 2008 and the Head of Credit Card Business Planning Department of Citibank in Korea from 1999 to 2005. Ms. Lim received her Master's Degree in Economics from Ohio State University in 1996. Mr. Dongqi Chen currently serves as Chairman of Ping An Consumer Finance Co., Ltd. and General Manager of Puhui. Mr. Chen has over 25 years of experience in sales management and the financial industry. Prior to his current positions, Mr. Chen has served as Executive Deputy General Manager of Puhui from 2017 to 2020, Deputy General Manager of Puhui from 2016 to 2017, and Assistant to the General Manager of Puhui from 2015 to 2016. Mr. Chen has served as Chairman and General Manager of Ping An Insurance Agency Co., Ltd. from 2014 to 2018 and held a number of positions in Ping An Property & Casualty Insurance Company of China Ltd. from 1996 to 2014, including as Assistant to General Manager of the Credit Guarantee Insurance Business Unit from 2013 to 2014. Mr. Chen received his Bachelor's Degree in Insurance from Nankai University in 1991. Business Outlook For the second half of 2022, the Company expects its new loans facilitated to decrease by 8% to 17% year over year to the range of RMB270 billion to RMB296 billion, client assets to decrease by 1% to 10% year over year to the range of RMB390 billion to RMB430 billion, total income to decrease by 8% to 13% year over year to the range of RMB27.7 billion to RMB29.1 billion, and net profit to decrease by 26% to 33% year over year to the range of RMB4.7 billion to RMB5.2 billion. For the full year of 2022, the Company expects its new loans facilitated to decrease by 9% to 13% year over year to the range of RMB563 billion to RMB590 billion, client assets to decrease by 1% to 10% year over year to the range of RMB390 billion to RMB430 billion, total income to decrease by 0% to 3% year over year to the range of RMB60.3 billion to RMB61.7 billion, and net profit to decrease by 20% to 22% year over year to the range of RMB13.0 billion to RMB13.4 billion. If non-cash foreign exchange losses were excluded from the calculation of net profit, then the Company's expectation would be for a decrease in net profit for the full year of 2022 of between 14% and 17%. These forecasts reflect the Company's current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. Conference Call Information The Company's management will hold an earnings conference call at 9:00 P.M. U.S. Eastern Time on Thursday, August 4, 2022 (9:00 A.M. Beijing Time on Friday, August 5, 2022) to discuss the financial results. For participants who wish to join the call, please complete online registration using the link provided below in advance of the conference call. Upon registering, each participant will receive a participant dial-in number, the Direct Event passcode, and a unique access PIN, which can be used to join the conference call. Registration Link: https://ige.netroadshow.com/registration/q4inc/11391/lufax-holding-ltd-second-quarter-2022-earnings-conference-call/ A replay of the conference call will be accessible through August 11, 2022 (dial-in numbers: +1 (866) 813-9403 or +1 (226) 828-7578; replay access code: 311080). A live and archived webcast of the conference call will also be available at the Company's investor relations website at https://ir.lufaxholding.com. About Lufax Lufax Holding Ltd is a leading technology-empowered personal financial services platform in China. Lufax Holding Ltd primarily utilizes its customer-centric product offerings and offline to-online channels to provide retail credit facilitation services to small business owners and salaried workers in China as well as tailor-made wealth management solutions to China's rapidly growing middle class. The Company has implemented a unique, capital-light, hub-and-spoke business model combining purpose-built technology applications, extensive data, and financial services expertise to effectively facilitate the right products to the right customers. Exchange Rate Information This announcement contains translations of certain RMB amounts into U.S. dollars at a specified rate solely for the convenience of the reader. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from RMB to U.S. dollars are made at a rate of RMB6.6981 to US$1.00, the rate in effect as of June 30, 2022, as certified for customs purposes by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Safe Harbor Statement This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates" and similar statements. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Lufax's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Lufax has based these forward-looking statements largely on its current expectations and projections about future events and financial trends, which involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the Company's control. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements about Lufax's goals and strategies; Lufax's future business development, financial condition and results of operations; expected changes in Lufax's income, expenses or expenditures; expected growth of the retail credit facility and wealth management markets; Lufax's expectations regarding demand for, and market acceptance of, its services; Lufax's expectations regarding its relationship with borrowers, platform investors, funding sources, product providers and other business partners; general economic and business conditions; and government policies and regulations relating to the industry Lufax operates in. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in Lufax's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release, and Lufax does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law. Investor Relations Contact Lufax Holding Ltd Email: [email protected] ICR, LLC Robin Yang Tel: +1 (646) 308-0546 Email: [email protected] LUFAX HOLDING LTD UNAUDITED INTERIM CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED INCOME STATEMENTS (All amounts in thousands, except share data, or otherwise noted) Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 2022 2021 2022 RMB RMB USD RMB RMB USD Technology platform-based income 9,601,195 7,379,637 1,101,751 19,891,314 16,671,652 2,489,012 Retail credit facilitation service fees 9,193,711 6,912,248 1,031,971 18,858,856 15,612,092 2,330,824 Wealth management transaction and service fees 407,484 467,389 69,779 1,032,458 1,059,560 158,188 Net interest income 3,226,887 5,010,245 748,010 6,137,811 9,993,806 1,492,036 Guarantee income 890,589 1,936,139 289,058 1,441,964 3,838,473 573,069 Other income 1,070,812 532,002 79,426 2,109,368 1,235,577 184,467 Investment income 36,756 428,234 63,934 526,462 863,222 128,876 Share of net profits of investments accounted for using the equity method 2,037 1,754 262 (27,846) 1,377 206 Total income 14,828,276 15,288,011 2,282,440 30,079,073 32,604,107 4,867,665 Sales and marketing expenses (4,315,895) (3,495,839) (521,915) (8,549,164) (7,979,735) (1,191,343) General and administrative expenses (797,573) (761,940) (113,755) (1,651,278) (1,487,481) (222,075) Operation and servicing expenses (1,476,499) (1,581,171) (236,063) (2,997,686) (3,170,998) (473,418) Technology and analytics expenses (516,828) (483,385) (72,167) (963,421) (931,268) (139,035) Credit impairment losses (1,393,534) (3,512,913) (524,464) (2,446,784) (6,336,429) (946,004) Asset impairment losses (2,049) (351,956) (52,546) (2,049) (351,956) (52,546) Finance costs (275,974) (221,279) (33,036) (560,066) (432,071) (64,507) Other gains/(losses) - net 301,417 (526,718) (78,637) 163,451 (408,691) (61,016) Total expenses (8,476,935) (10,935,201) (1,632,583) (17,006,997) (21,098,629) (3,149,942) Profit before income tax expenses 6,351,341 4,352,810 649,857 13,072,076 11,505,478 1,717,723 Income tax expenses (1,622,650) (1,416,356) (211,456) (3,374,756) (3,279,143) (489,563) Net profit for the period 4,728,691 2,936,454 438,401 9,697,320 8,226,335 1,228,159 Net profit/(loss) attributable to: Owners of the Group 4,773,635 2,908,962 434,297 9,768,993 8,187,904 1,222,422 Non-controlling interests (44,944) 27,492 4,104 (71,673) 38,431 5,738 Net profit for the period 4,728,691 2,936,454 438,401 9,697,320 8,226,335 1,228,159 Earnings per share -Basic earnings per share 4.00 2.54 0.38 8.17 7.16 1.07 -Diluted earnings per share 3.72 2.46 0.37 7.59 6.73 1.00 -Basic earnings per ADS 2.00 1.27 0.19 4.09 3.58 0.53 -Diluted earnings per ADS 1.86 1.23 0.18 3.80 3.37 0.50 LUFAX HOLDING LTD UNAUDITED INTERIM CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (All amounts in thousands, except share data, or otherwise noted) As of December 31, As of June 30, 2021 2022 RMB RMB USD Assets Cash at bank 34,743,188 42,862,660 6,399,227 Restricted cash 30,453,539 25,333,802 3,782,237 Financial assets at fair value through profit or loss 31,023,211 21,433,047 3,199,870 Financial assets at amortized cost 3,784,613 5,485,415 818,951 Financial assets purchased under reverse repurchase agreements 5,527,177 1,509,259 225,326 Accounts and other receivables and contract assets 22,344,773 19,706,801 2,942,148 Loans to customers 214,972,110 236,591,969 35,322,251 Deferred tax assets 4,873,370 4,335,306 647,244 Property and equipment 380,081 332,665 49,666 Investments accounted for using the equity method 459,496 108,918 16,261 Intangible assets 899,406 894,951 133,613 Right-of-use assets 804,990 798,421 119,201 Goodwill 8,918,108 8,918,108 1,331,438 Other assets 1,249,424 2,348,549 350,629 Total assets 360,433,486 370,659,871 55,338,062 Liabilities Payable to platform users 2,747,891 2,440,464 364,352 Borrowings 25,927,417 32,033,601 4,782,491 Current income tax liabilities 8,222,684 1,984,602 296,293 Accounts and other payables and contract liabilities 8,814,255 9,098,003 1,358,296 Payable to investors of consolidated structured entities 195,446,140 199,974,869 29,855,462 Financial guarantee liabilities 2,697,109 3,964,959 591,953 Deferred tax liabilities 833,694 1,013,871 151,367 Lease liabilities 794,544 809,298 120,825 Convertible promissory note payable 10,669,498 11,688,577 1,745,059 Optionally convertible promissory notes 7,405,103 8,051,587 1,202,070 Other liabilities 2,315,948 2,361,683 352,590 Total liabilities 265,874,283 273,421,514 40,820,757 Equity Share capital 75 75 11 Share premium 33,365,786 28,533,060 4,259,874 Treasury shares (5,560,104) (5,642,769) (842,443) Other reserves 9,304,995 8,657,715 1,292,563 Retained earnings 55,942,943 64,130,847 9,574,483 Total equity attributable to owners of the Company 93,053,695 95,678,928 14,284,488 Non-controlling interests 1,505,508 1,559,429 232,817 Total equity 94,559,203 97,238,357 14,517,304 Total liabilities and equity 360,433,486 370,659,871 55,338,062 LUFAX HOLDING LTD UNAUDITED INTERIM CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS (All amounts in thousands, except share data, or otherwise noted) Three Months Ended June 30, Six Months Ended June 30, 2021 2022 2021 2022 RMB RMB USD RMB RMB USD Net cash generated from/(used in) operating activities 2,119,461 (1,034,772) (154,487) 3,903,849 (2,736,994) (408,622) Net cash generated from/(used in) investing activities (1,358,421) 6,048,599 903,032 (5,198,665) 12,943,660 1,932,438 Net cash generated from/(used in) financing activities 363,769 (6,577,441) (981,986) 2,286,217 (7,302,588) (1,090,248) Effects of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents (85,377) 24,535 3,663 (61,670) 2,358 352 Net increase/(decrease) in cash and cash equivalents 1,039,432 (1,539,079) (229,778) 929,731 2,906,436 433,919 Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning of the period 23,675,950 30,941,825 4,619,493 23,785,651 26,496,310 3,955,795 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 24,715,382 29,402,746 4,389,714 24,715,382 29,402,746 4,389,714 SOURCE Lufax Holding Ltd Spinoff of Knife River expected to unlock significant shareholder value. expected to unlock significant shareholder value. Creates financial and strategic flexibility for each company to focus on core business opportunities. Establishes Knife River as a stand-alone, aggregates-based, vertically integrated construction materials and contracting provider. Enhances MDU Resources' strategic focus on regulated utilities, natural gas pipelines and related infrastructure services. MDU Resources to discuss separation and second quarter 2022 financial results at 8:30 a.m. EDT today. BISMARCK, N.D., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- MDU Resources Group, Inc. (NYSE: MDU) today announced that its board of directors has unanimously approved a plan to separate its wholly owned construction materials business, Knife River Corporation, from the company. The separation will result in two independent, publicly traded and well-capitalized companies, which the MDU Resources board believes will leave each positioned well for durable growth and shareholder value creation. The separation is expected to be effected as a tax-free spinoff to MDU Resources shareholders and to be completed in 2023. "We are taking an important step to significantly enhance the value inherent in our businesses by creating two focused, independent publicly traded companies," said David L. Goodin, president and CEO of MDU Resources. "We are proud of the strong businesses we have built and are confident now is the right time to take this step to best serve our customers, employees, communities and shareholders." MDU Resources' and Knife River's proven management teams will be able to more directly focus resources and capital to achieve their respective strategic goals, Goodin said. "We expect this transaction to create significant value for our shareholders and believe it will enable us to achieve attractive shareholder returns at both companies," Goodin said. Dennis W. Johnson, chair of MDU Resources board, said, "The board regularly assesses MDU Resources' business, operations and value creation opportunities. Our most recent assessment determined that a separation of Knife River could unlock significant value. Since its first aggregate company acquisition in 1992, MDU Resources has built Knife River into a leading aggregates-based construction materials business. The MDU Resources board believes Knife River is ready to continue its success as a stand-alone public company and take full advantage of anticipated work resulting from federal infrastructure funding. We will diligently work through the separation process to ensure each company is optimized to deliver value for shareholders." Compelling Benefits of the Separation The MDU Resources board believes the proposed separation will unlock the inherent value within the two companies, which have unique growth prospects and investment opportunities. The separation is expected to have a number of benefits for MDU Resources and Knife River stakeholders, including: Enhanced strategic focus: Each company will be able to pursue individualized strategies specific to the industries in which they operate, and use equity tailored to its own business to enhance acquisition programs and retention and hiring. Each company will be able to pursue individualized strategies specific to the industries in which they operate, and use equity tailored to its own business to enhance acquisition programs and retention and hiring. Optimized capital structures: Each company will benefit from a distinct capital structure and financial policies tailored to its separate business profile and needs. Each company will benefit from a distinct capital structure and financial policies tailored to its separate business profile and needs. Tailored capital allocation strategies: Each company will have enhanced flexibility to deploy capital toward its specific growth opportunities. Each company will have enhanced flexibility to deploy capital toward its specific growth opportunities. Distinct investment opportunities: Investors will have two compelling investment opportunities and will be able to better assess the value of the two companies based on their respective operational and financial characteristics. MDU Resources: Regulated Utility and Infrastructure Business Focused on Building a Strong America Following the planned separation, MDU Resources will remain headquartered in Bismarck, North Dakota, and continue to be the parent company for MDU Resources' existing regulated electric and natural gas utilities (Cascade Natural Gas Corp., Intermountain Gas Co., Montana-Dakota Utilities Co.), natural gas pipeline business (WBI Energy, Inc.) and construction services company (MDU Construction Services Group, Inc.). MDU Resources expects approximately 70% of its pro forma EBITDA to be generated from its regulated businesses, providing low-risk, stable returns to shareholders. The company's utilities provide affordable and reliable electric and natural gas service to 1.2 million customers across eight states. The combined utility business has a rate base of $2.8 billion and is expected to make $1.6 billion in capital investments over the next five years. It generated $321 million of EBITDA in 2021. WBI Energy provides natural gas transportation and underground storage services through regulated pipeline systems primarily in the Rocky Mountain and northern Great Plains regions of the U.S. and provides non-regulated cathodic protection and other energy-related services. It generated $78 million of EBITDA in 2021. With approximately 98% of WBI Energy's EBITDA coming from regulated business, it is focused on growing this business through pipeline expansion projects. MDU Construction Services Group provides market-leading specialty contracting services across the U.S., primarily electrical and mechanical, and transmission and distribution services. MDU Construction Services Group is comprised of 16 local operating companies employing more than 8,500 skilled workers during peak season and has been ranked the fourth largest U.S. electrical contractor. It generated $169 million of EBITDA in 2021. Knife River: Leading Vertically Integrated Aggregates Producer and Provider of Construction Materials and Contracting Services Focused on Organic and M&A Growth Knife River, which provides construction materials and contracting services throughout the western, central and southern United States, also will remain headquartered in Bismarck. Knife River produces and delivers aggregates and markets crushed stone, sand, gravel and related construction materials, including ready-mix concrete, asphalt and other value-added products. It also distributes cement and asphalt oil. Knife River has more than 1 billion tons of aggregate reserves, 110 ready-mix plants, 50 asphalt plants and a combined 410,000 tons of liquid asphalt and cement storage. It also performs integrated contracting services for most types of aggregate-related construction, including roads, freeways, bridges, residential properties, schools, shopping centers, office buildings and industrial parks. Knife River has a successful track record of growth. In just the past four years, it has completed 12 acquisitions and increased revenues 23%. Knife River generated $293 million of EBITDA in 2021. MDU Resources' board believes Knife River is poised to benefit from significant investments at the federal and local levels in infrastructure development and upgrades. Details of Separation Transaction With the spinoff, it is expected that MDU Resources shareholders will retain their current shares of MDU Resources stock and receive a pro rata distribution of shares of Knife River stock in a transaction that is expected to be tax free to MDU Resources and its shareholders for U.S. federal income tax purposes. The actual number of shares to be distributed to MDU Resources shareholders will be determined prior to closing, as will the specific transaction structure. The separation is expected to be completed in 2023. The proposed separation is subject to customary conditions, including final approval by the MDU Resources board of directors, receipt of a tax opinion and, if determined advisable, a private letter ruling from the Internal Revenue Service, and the filing and effectiveness of a Form 10 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. No assurance can be given regarding the form that a spinoff transaction may take or the specific terms or timing thereof, or that a spinoff will in fact occur. MDU Resources is committed to establishing strong capital allocation strategies for each business that align with each business's long-term goals. Post-separation, MDU Resources intends to maintain a dividend policy consistent with its historic practice. Knife River's dividend policy will be determined in the future in a manner consistent with its stated capital allocation strategies. Further details related to capital structure, governance and other elements of the transaction will be announced at a later date. Second Quarter 2022 Financial Results MDU Resources also announced today its second quarter financial results, which can be found on the company's website at www.mdu.com. Conference Call MDU Resources will discuss today's separation announcement as well as its second quarter results during a webcast at 8:30 a.m. EDT Aug. 4, 2022. The event can be accessed at www.mdu.com. Audio and webcast replays will be available through Aug. 18, 2022, at 888-203-1112, or 719-457-0820 for international callers, passcode ID 3010359. Advisors J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and PJT Partners are serving as financial advisors for the transaction; Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is serving as legal advisor. About MDU Resources MDU Resources Group, Inc., a member of the S&P MidCap 400 and the S&P High-Yield Dividend Aristocrats indices, is Building a Strong America by providing essential products and services through its regulated energy delivery and construction materials and services businesses. For more information about MDU Resources, visit www.mdu.com or contact the Investor Relations Department at [email protected]. About Knife River Knife River Corporation mines aggregates and markets crushed stone, sand, gravel and related construction materials, including ready-mix concrete, asphalt and other value-added products. It also distributes cement and asphalt oil. It performs integrated contracting services. For more information, visit www.kniferiver.com. Media Contact: Laura Lueder, MDU Resources manager of communications and public relations, 701-530-1095 Mahmoud Siddig, Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher, 212-355-4449 Financial Contact: Jason Vollmer, MDU Resources vice president and chief financial officer, 701-530-1755 Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding MDU Resources and the proposed spinoff of Knife River that are subject to risks and uncertainties and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1993, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The words "believe," "continue," "could," "expect," "anticipate," "intends," "estimate," "forecast," "project," "should," "may," "will," "would" or the negative thereof and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, including key growth strategies, projections, certain assumptions and strategies of MDU Resources and the independent companies following the proposed spinoff, the anticipated benefits of the spinoff, and the expected timing of completion of the spinoff, are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond MDU Resources' control, and could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in such forward-looking statements. Although MDU Resources believes that its expectations are based on reasonable assumptions, current expectations involve a number of risks and uncertainties. With respect to forward-looking statements contained herein, a number of factors could cause actual outcomes to vary materially. These factors include, but are not limited to, risks relating to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the business (including impacts on employees and contractors and disruptions to operations and the supply chain); new or changing laws and regulations impacting the business (including changes in pipeline safety regulations and environmental law); supply chain disruptions (including price fluctuations and supply of materials necessary for operations); the adverse impact of cyberattacks on operations; competitive factors including technological advances and customer demands; pricing and market pressures; ability to successfully integrate any businesses acquired; issuance of new or revised accounting standards; risks associated with the impact, timing or terms of the spinoff; risks associated with the expected benefits and costs of the spinoff, including the risk that the expected benefits of the spinoff will not be realized within the expected timeframe, in full or at all, and the risk that conditions to the spinoff will not be satisfied and/or that the spinoff will not be completed within the expected timeframe, on the expected terms or at all; the expected qualification of the spinoff as a tax-free transaction for U.S. federal income tax purposes, including whether or not an IRS ruling will be sought or obtained; the risk that any consents or approvals required in connection with the spinoff will not be received or obtained within the expected timeframe, on the expected terms or at all; risks associated with expected financing transactions undertaken in connection with the spinoff and risks associated with indebtedness incurred in connection with the spinoff; the risk that dis-synergy costs, costs of restructuring transactions and other costs incurred in connection with the spinoff will exceed estimates; and the impact of the spinoff on the businesses and the risk that the spinoff may be more difficult, time consuming or costly than expected, including the impact on resources, systems, procedures and controls, diversion of management's attention and the impact on relationships with customers, suppliers, employees and other business counterparties, as well as the various important factors listed in Part I, Item 1A - Risk Factors in MDU Resources' Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2021, which was filed with the SEC on Feb. 23, 2022, and subsequent filings with the SEC. Changes in such assumptions and factors could cause actual future results to differ materially. All forward-looking statements in this news release are expressly qualified by such cautionary statements and by reference to the underlying assumptions. Undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. Except as required by law, the company does not undertake to update forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Non-GAAP Financial Measures Throughout this news release, MDU Resources presents financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP, as well as "Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization" (EBITDA), which is considered a non-GAAP financial measure. The company believes these non-GAAP financial measures are useful to investors by providing meaningful information about operational efficiency compared to the company's peers by excluding the impacts of differences in tax jurisdictions and structures, debt levels and capital investment. The company's management uses the non-GAAP financial measures in conjunction with GAAP results when evaluating the company's operating results internally and calculating compensation packages. Non-GAAP financial measures are not standardized; therefore, it may not be possible to compare such financial measures with other companies' non-GAAP financial measures having the same or similar names. The presentation of this additional information is not meant to be considered a substitution for financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. The company strongly encourages investors to review the consolidated financial statements in their entirety and to not rely on any single financial measure. EBITDA Reconciliations The following table provides a reconciliation of consolidated GAAP net income to EBITDA for 2021. Utility Companies WBI Energy MDU Construction Services Group Knife River (In millions) Net income $103 $41 $110 $130 Adjustments: Interest expense 64 7 4 19 Income taxes 1 10 35 43 Depreciation, depletion and amortization 153 20 20 101 EBITDA $321 $78 $169 $293 SOURCE MDU Resources Group, Inc. Before next school year, public schools report the need to hire three teachers, on average, with special education vacancies among the most prevalent for all school levels WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Public school leaders estimated that half of their students (50 percent) began the 2021-22 school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject, according to data released today by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the statistical center of the U.S. Department of Education. Of schools that reported having students behind grade level in at least one academic subject, 64 percent believed that the COVID-19 pandemic played a major role in students beginning this school year behind grade level. "Over the course of the 2021-22 school year, public schools reported a 14-point reduction in the percentage of students behind grade level in at least one subject," said NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr. "We will learn more about student achievement and learning experiences in schools with our next release of results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) later this year." More than 98 percent of public schools employed strategies to support pandemic-related learning recovery during the 2021-22 school year. The most common types of additional instruction enacted to support learning recovery were remedial instruction (72 percent) and high-dosage tutoring (56 percent). More than three-quarters of public K-12 schools (79 percent) used diagnostic assessments, followed by formative assessments (76 percent). Of the peripheral supports offered by schools, the most common addressed students' mental health and trauma (72 percent). Public schools continue to support learning recovery this summer, with 75 percent offering learning and enrichment programs run by the school or district and 70 percent offering summer school, among other traditional summer program offerings. Around one-third of public schools offering these programs reported increasing the amount of summer programming they offered specifically to support pandemic-related learning recovery. As of June, the average public school has three teaching positions to fill for the upcoming 2022-23 school year. In elementary schools, general elementary openings are the most prevalent, with 51 percent of schools reporting a vacancy in this area. For middle and high schools, special education openings were the most prevalent, with 54 and 51 percent of schools reporting a vacancy in this area, respectively. "In January 2022, public schools identified special education as the teaching position with the most vacancies," said Mark Schneider, IES Director. "The data released today suggest that filling special education openings will continue to be an area of concern at the start of the 2022-23 school year." The findings released today are part of the seventh monthly experimental data product from the School Pulse Panel. The June data were collected from 859 participating schools between June 14 and June 28, 2022. The School Pulse Panel is part of NCES's innovative approach to delivering timely information regarding the pandemic's impact on public K-12 schools in the U.S. The June survey provides data focused on learning recovery, summer learning, staff vacancies, learning modes offered by schools, and student and staff quarantine prevalence, as reported by school staff in U.S. public schools. Experimental data products are innovative statistical products created using new data sources or methodologies. Experimental data may not meet all NCES quality standards but are of sufficient benefit to data users in the absence of other relevant products to justify release. NCES clearly identifies experimental data products upon their release. The August data collection will focus on a review of the hiring process that occurred this summer, after-school program offerings for the 2022-23 school year, and services provided in community school/wraparound service models. The data released today can be found at the COVID-19 dashboard at https://ies.ed.gov/schoolsurvey/ . Key Findings Learning Loss and Recovery Efforts Public school leaders estimated that nearly half of their students (50 percent) began the 2021-22 school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject, which is 14 points higher than the percentage of students they estimated to be behind grade level in at least one academic subject at the beginning of a typical school year before the pandemic began (36 percent). Of those schools that reported having students starting the 2021-22 school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject, 64 percent believed that the COVID-19 pandemic played a major role as to why students were behind grade level at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year. Public school leaders estimated that just over one-third of their students (36 percent) ended the 2021-22 school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject. Public schools enacted a variety of strategies to support pandemic-related learning recovery for their students this year, including additional instruction, assessments, and peripheral supports. The most common types of additional instruction used by public schools were remedial instruction (72 percent) and high-dosage tutoring (56 percent). More than three-quarters of public schools used diagnostic (79 percent) and formative (76 percent) assessments. The most common types of peripheral supports addressed student mental health and trauma (72 percent) and provided teacher professional development specifically focused on learning recovery (51 percent). Summer Programs This summer, the most prevalent types of summer programming in public schools are learning and enrichment programs run by the school or district (75 percent) and summer school (70 percent). Additionally, public schools are offering learning and enrichment programs run by a partner organization (49 percent) and bridge programs (34 percent). Of those schools offering these programs, 33 percent increased learning enrichment programs run by the school or district, 32 percent increased summer school, 28 percent increased learning and enrichment programs run by a partner organization, and 30 percent increased bridge programs they are offering this summer, compared to summers prior to the start of the pandemic, primarily to support pandemic-related learning recovery. Staffing On average, public schools reported having three teacher vacancies for the upcoming 2022-23 school year. In elementary schools, the most prevalent positions that need to be filled are general elementary (51 percent) and special education teachers (44 percent). For elementary schools, school leaders anticipate that special education and ESL/bilingual education teachers will be the most difficult positions to fill, with 49 percent of schools and 42 percent of schools reporting it will be 'very difficult' to hire fully certified teachers in these areas, respectively. In middle schools, the most prevalent positions that need to be filled are special education (54 percent), English/language arts (34 percent), and math teachers (30 percent). For middle schools, school leaders also anticipate that biology or life sciences and special education teachers will be the most difficult positions to fill, with 57 percent reporting it will be 'very difficult' to hire fully certified teachers in both areas, respectively. In high schools, the most prevalent positions that need to be filled are special education (51 percent), math (37 percent), and career/technical education teachers (32 percent). For high schools, school leaders anticipate that physical sciences and math teachers will be the most difficult positions to fill, with 60 percent and 58 percent reporting it will be 'very difficult' to hire fully certified teachers in these areas, respectively. Across all school levels, the most prevalent non-teaching staff positions that need to be filled are custodial staff (32 percent), transportation staff (29 percent) and mental health professionals (19 percent). In line with the prevalence of these openings, public school leaders anticipate it will be the most difficult to hire transportation staff and custodial staff, with 61 percent and 46 percent reporting it will be very difficult to hire staff in these areas, respectively. Learning Modes, Mitigation Strategies and Quarantine Prevalence At the end of the 2021-22 school year, 15 percent of public schools required students and staff to wear masks while inside the school. This is down from March 2022 , when 22 percent of public schools required students and 23 percent required staff to wear masks. This is also a large decline from January 2022 , when 73 percent of public schools required students and 77 percent required staff to wear masks. , when 22 percent of public schools required students and 23 percent required staff to wear masks. This is also a large decline from , when 73 percent of public schools required students and 77 percent required staff to wear masks. Schools continued to provide on-site COVID-19 testing for students (43 percent) and staff (51 percent) at the end of the 2021-22 school year. Sixteen percent of schools required daily symptom screening for students and 20 percent for staff at the end of the school year, compared to 22 percent of schools requiring daily symptom screening for students and 25 percent requiring daily symptom screening for staff in February 2022 . . Thirty-four percent of public schools reported using Test to Stay (TTS) at the end of the 2021-22 school year, up from the 26 percent of public schools that reported using TTS in February 2022 . . Comparing learning mode offerings at the end of the 2020-21 school year and the end of the 2021-22 school year: In-person learning offerings were more prevalent (62 percent at the end of 2020-21 versus 98 percent at the end of 2021-22) Remote learning offerings were less prevalent (40 percent at the end of 2020-21 versus 33 percent at the end of 2021-22) Hybrid learning offerings were less prevalent (44 percent at the end of 2020-21 versus 10 percent at the end of 2021-22) The percentage of public schools that reported having to quarantine students in June was 34 percent, a decline from the 47 percent that reporting having to quarantine students in May. Similarly, 24 percent of public schools required staff to quarantine in June, down from 35 percent in May. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, is the statistical center of the U.S. Department of Education and the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations. NCES, located within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), fulfills a congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report complete statistics on the condition of American education; conduct and publish reports; and review and report on education activities internationally. Follow NCES on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube and subscribe to the NCES News Flash to receive email notifications when new data is released. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the independent and nonpartisan statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Its mission is to provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and to share this information in formats that are useful and accessible to educators, parents, policymakers, researchers, and the public. CONTACT: Josh Delarosa, National Center for Education Statistics, [email protected] James Elias, Hager Sharp, [email protected] SOURCE National Center for Education Statistics Leonard, previously Motif's CTO, brings strong experience in driving R&D and commercialization. Will focus on accelerating Motif's go-to-market initiatives for its breakthrough plant-based products BOSTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Motif FoodWorks, the Boston-based food technology company making plant-based foods better tasting and more nutritious, today announced that Michael Leonard has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Michael Leonard, CEO of Motif FoodWorks Leonard has served as Chief Technology Officer at Motif since 2019, and brings extensive experience in driving commercialization, transformational R&D and innovation across global markets. He will lead the company's focus on the acceleration of its go-to-market initiatives, including its recently launched meat alternative finished formats. Jonathan McIntyre, Motif's previous CEO, will transition to an advisory role with the company. "Motif has developed unique approaches to analyzing, discovering, and designing both plant-based ingredients and foods to better address unmet customer needs and tastes," said Dr. Leonard. "I look forward to leading this business as we strengthen our position in the market and deepen our organizational focus on commercialization, technology development, and growth. The entire team at Motif thanks Jon for his outstanding leadership and contributions over the past three and a half years, and for his continued support of the company as we enter this new phase." Under McIntyre's leadership, Motif has achieved several major milestones, from the development of the startup's breakthrough food-tech, HEMAMI and APPETEX, to its finished meat alternative formats and Motif's successful series A and B fundraising rounds that raised a total of $345 million. Leonard brings nearly two decades of experience in senior industrial science and technology roles in the specialty food ingredient and fast-moving consumer goods industries, with an emphasis on combining innovation, commercial execution, and organization-wide collaboration to deliver business results across developed and emerging markets. Prior to joining Motif, Leonard served as vice president for White Space Innovation and Springboard R&D at Kraft Heinz, where he led product, packaging and process development strategy and execution for emerging growth platforms across all categories of the business. Previously, Leonard was vice president of Process Technology for Global Snacks R&D at PepsiCo, in addition to leadership roles at DuPont Nutrition & Health and International Flavors & Fragrances in process and protein ingredient research, business development and strategy. He holds a PhD in Polymer Science & Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a BS in Chemistry from Roanoke College. "It has been a privilege to lead Motif since its founding as we have pushed the boundaries of breakthrough food-technology development and pioneered new approaches to plant-based foods," said Dr. McIntyre. "I am immensely proud of the work we have accomplished to advance Motif's mission and propel the broader industry, and I look forward to my continued involvement with the team in an advisory capacity." About Motif FoodWorks Motif FoodWorks makes plant-based foods so desirable that people actually crave them. Motif provides companies with a range of food-technologies and finished food forms, from solutions for meat and dairy alternatives to experiences that inspire new categories. By pioneering breakthrough approaches to food science and the culinary arts, Motif is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in plant-based foods delivering innovations for taste, texture and nutrition that benefit people and the planet. For more information, visit www.madewithmotif.com. Media Contact Matt Roszell [email protected] SOURCE Motif FoodWorks BATTLE CREEK, Mich., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- MyLifeWell, an all-in-one employee wellness startup based in Battle Creek, MI, announced today that it has been awarded "The Top Emerging Employee Wellness Company 2022" by HR Tech Outlook. "Being awarded the Top Emerging Employee Wellness Company is an honor, especially because the need for holistic health and wellness solutions has never been greater thanks to the pandemic," said Gaurav Goomer, Founder & CEO, MyLifeWell. HR Tech Outlook Award and Magazine Cover HR Tech Outlook is an enterprise technology magazine that is the go-to resource for senior-level HR leaders and decision-makers to learn and share their experiences with products/services, technologies and HR technology trends. Each year, the magazine publishes an annual list of 10 Emerging companies that are at the forefront of providing Employee Wellness solutions and impacting businesses. MyLifeWell was included on the list, and named #1 this year. "The healthtech space is full of choices, and as the first all-in-one and fully customizable employee wellness program out there, we are pleased that more companies are looking for a solution that integrates all dimensions of wellness instead of simply siloing them," Gaurav stated. Read the feature article on HR Tech Outlook here: https://www.hrtechoutlook.com/mylifewell . About MyLifeWell MyLifeWell is a holistic digital wellness solution that uses technology with human interaction to build relationships and influence behavioral change. MyLifeWell makes it easy for companies to help their employees lead and maintain a healthy lifestyle by combining all their health and wellness needs into an all-in-one platform. For more information about MyLifeWell, visit business.mylifewell.com . Media Contact: MyLifeWell Liana Buenaventura Head of Marketing [email protected] (989) 657-6583 Business.mylifewell.com SOURCE MyLifeWell GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Grand Rapids-based cannabis company Fluresh announced a new leadership team as a part of the organization's community-focused direction. Fluresh is a leading, vertically integrated cannabis company that cultivates, processes and sells across Michigan. On Oct. 23, 2020, it became the first dispensary in Grand Rapids to sell recreational marijuana. Shoran Williams, General Council and Chief Regulatory Officer Nic Hernandez, Director of Retail New leadership appointments include: Brandon Kanitz - Chief Executive Officer Scott Asiala President Shoran Williams - General Counsel and Chief Regulatory Officer Jacob Fein - Chief Financial Officer Bob Schwartz - Chief Operating Officer Sarah LaFleur - Vice President of Marketing Kevin Cleary - Vice President of Sales Matthew Eastman - Director of Human Resources Nic Hernandez - Director of Retail Nathan VanderVen - General Manager of Grand Rapids Operations The new, West Michigan-based team comes together with varied and robust backgrounds, from those promoted within Fluresh, those outside the company with extensive experience in cannabis and those new to the industry. Kanitz, who co-founded Fluresh in 2020, assumed the role of CEO in March 2022. Kanitz founded Thornapple River Capital LLC in October 2015 and was instrumental in raising $125 million in capital to finance Fluresh. He is also the founder and director of Desert Evolution, a vertically integrated Nevada-based cannabis company. Hernandez, Fluresh Director of Retail, began working in cannabis 12 years ago when the sale of recreational marijuana first became legal in the United States by way of Colorado and Washington. Hernandez oversees all Fluresh's retail operations, including hiring and training staff. He says that the nature of the industry calls for quick adaptation and thoughtful investment. "Working one year in cannabis is like working five years in any other industry," he expressed. "Things happen very fast, and we are all learning." The fast-paced, ever-evolving nature of the cannabis industry required startups to focus on driving revenue while community investment fell to the wayside. As Fluresh expands across the state, the company's new leadership will focus on building relationships and investing resources into the neighborhoods their facilities operate in to drive property value and intentional community development. "One word to sum it up is an investment," Hernandez said. "Community engagement is going to be a huge focus of ours moving forward. We are trying to dig deep and find ways to improve the lives of all the folks on our team and in our communities. It is really important that we build these relationships and find solutions that work for everyone." Williams came to Fluresh in March 2022. She believes the new leadership direction allows Fluresh to create standards for how cannabis companies can operate with responsibility and intention to the communities in which they operate. "The cannabis industry has an opportunity to be a leader in what can happen when private industry cares about the community in which people live, employ and operate, and when companies exercise their power and resources to do the right thing," Williams said. Hernandez echoes William's sentiments. "I am very excited about the new leadership and really focusing on getting out into the community and creating these relationships and making a good name for cannabis," Hernandez said. "We are trying to exemplify what could and should be done within this space." Contact: Sarah LaFleur, [email protected] SOURCE Fluresh TORONTO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Nuula, a fintech company focused on providing small businesses the tools and the capital they need to succeed, today announced a new Term Life Insurance feature from an A-rated (Excellent) carrier, powered by Walnut. The term life insurance provides Canadian small business owners and entrepreneurs with coverage up to $1MM starting at just $10/month. Nuula announced its launch in Canada in June, where it set out to revolutionize how Canadian small business owners monitor their business performance and access a range of financial products, including Wealth Management services from OneVest and a Corporate Credit Card from Caary Capital. Today's news expands Nuula's portfolio of small business financial tools as it builds the first super app for small business. "Peace of mind for a small business owner not only includes the health of their business but of the long-term wellbeing of their family," said Mark Ruddock, CEO at Nuula. "To be the app that every small business owner wants to use, Nuula needs to serve the widest range of small business needs as possible. Providing world-class life insurance represents another step along that path." "We are proud to again provide Nuula with a new integrated feature, adding to its growing list of products and services it provides to small business owners," said Derek Szeto, co-founder and CEO of Walnut. "With its new Term Life Insurance feature, small business owners can gain access to a reliable, A-rated carrier within minutes." Starting today, Nuula users will be able to sign up for Term Life Insurance from RBC Life Insurance Company through Walnut in all provinces in Canada except Quebec, and New Brunswick. About Nuula Nuula is building the future of small business performance. Launched in 2021, Nuula is a financial services and technology company focused on serving the small to medium-sized business community. Nuula provides real-time data and analytics, allowing businesses to manage their finances, monitor their credit ratings and user reviews, and more. Nuula is an advocate of financial inclusivity and a proud partner to Kiva to create economic and social good. To learn more about Nuula, visit www.nuula.com. About Walnut Founded in 2020, Walnut is a Canadian and US insurtech that has built infrastructure to enable multiple lines of embedded insurance for brokers, employers, and financial services coupled with value added benefits from international brands. Walnut's platform makes insurance simple and convenient creating greater accessibility for underserved audiences. Learn more about Walnut at www.gowalnut.com/businesses. SOURCE Nuula LONDON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Global employment partner Omnipresent today launches the OmniAcademy, a free online learning platform dedicated to helping HR professionals and senior leaders to grow successful, international businesses with ease. Developed by Omnipresent's team of HR experts, the OmniAcademy's first course - 'Everything you need to know about international hiring' - comprises 13 step-by-step videos with downloadable guides for time-strapped teams. This is the first in a series of courses, and those who complete them will receive certification for the skills developed in each course. The launch of the OmniAcademy comes at a time when 96% of HR professionals are facing challenges with 'future of work initiatives', but 47% 'don't know the best tactics or tools to overcome these issues'. All this in a post-pandemic world where they are tasked with delivering hybrid and remote set-ups, while maintaining a positive employee experience. CEO and Co-founder of Omnipresent, Matthew Wilson says, 'We founded Omnipresent on the belief that borderless hiring is a key component in the future of work. And with organisations looking increasingly further afield to hire the best talent in a competitive market, HR leaders need to be equipped with the right information to guarantee a positive employee experience, wherever their employees are based. However, we know first hand that this can be extremely complex - our team of over 400 is currently based in 53 countries, so we've had to navigate these very challenges ourselves. This is why we've created the OmniAcademy: to help HR teams make the most of global work and create a seamless experience for their employees.' For more information on the OmniAcademy, enroll for free at: https://www.omnipresent.com/academy Notes to editors Source:. Data was sourced from PR in HR's 'HR Strategies and Buying Decisions survey' of 200 HR managers from October- November 2021 . About Omnipresent Founded in 2019, Global employment partner Omnipresent provides client-focused, tech-enabled business solutions combined with personalized expertise to support hiring people globally. Businesses looking to go global can hire and manage employees compliantly in more than 160 countries through the OmniPlatform, Omnipresent's proprietary digital platform and SaaS product. Companies can easily integrate HR administrative duties, including payroll, expenses, taxes, and benefits, to let them focus on growing their business. As a fully remote company with no corporate headquarters, Omnipresent has grown from a team of two to more than 400 people in 50+ countries worldwide. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1872468/Omnipresent_Logo.jpg SOURCE Omnipresent Program Resettles Over 180 Refugees and 50 Families in the United States TYSONS, Va., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The PenFed Foundation, a national 501(c)3 founded by PenFed Credit Union, is proud to announce its Afghan Rescue and Resettlement Program (ARRP) has helped 50 families and over 180 refugees resettle in the United States as the nation enters the one-year anniversary of the dramatic fall of Kabul, Afghanistan. The program was founded in November 2021 to assist refugees who are proven to have supported our country's values in exemplary ways, with a particular focus on resettling Afghan women soldiers and their families who worked alongside U.S. Army women soldiers through the Army's Cultural Support Team (CST). U.S. and Afghan soldiers serving together in Afghanistan. These Afghan women soldiers were crucial to supporting the U.S. as they worked to hunt the Taliban during night raids and to gather valuable intelligence from other women in remote villages. "The war in Afghanistan may officially be over, but the sisterhood developed between the American and Afghan women soldiers who served together certainly is not," said Rebekah Edmondson, program manager for the PenFed Foundation's ARRP and a U.S. Army CST veteran. "The group of women I served alongside during my four deployments to Afghanistan were remarkable and they deserve our support." A video of Rebekah telling her story can be found here. The ARRP raises funds to provide food, clothing, housing, transportation, childcare, English classes, job training and other services to the Afghan refugees as they resettle in communities across America. Those interested in making a difference for these Afghan allies as they make their long and arduous resettlement, are encouraged to visit the ARRP website to learn more. About PenFed Foundation Founded in 2001, the PenFed Foundation is a national nonprofit organization committed to empowering military service members, veterans and their communities with the skills and resources to realize financial stability and opportunity. It provides service members, veterans, their families and support networks with the skills and resources they need to improve their lives through programs on financial education, homeownership, veteran entrepreneurship, and short-term assistance. Affiliated with PenFed Credit Union, the Foundation has the resources to effectively reach military communities across the nation, build strong partnerships, and engage a dedicated corps of volunteers in its mission. The credit union funds the Foundation's personnel and most operational costs, demonstrating its strong commitment to the programs the Foundation provides. Equal Housing Opportunity. To learn more, visit www.penfedfoundation.org . SOURCE PenFed Foundation Organizations are in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island CANTON, Mass., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Point32Health Foundation today announced grants totaling $1 million to advance social and racial equity. The funds will support nonprofit organizations that include diverse voices and perspectives, eliminate systemic barriers, and advocate for stronger communities. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation and Tufts Health Plan Foundation, which combined to become Point32Health Foundation, have committed more than $5.5 million to support racial equity since 2020. "We are honored to support the important work these non-profits are doing in promoting equity and making transformative societal changes," said Cain Hayes, president and CEO of Point32Health and a member of the Point32Health Foundation board of directors. "They are addressing persistent inequities that affect almost every issue in society and we know these grants will have a positive impact in communities throughout the region." The grants will support 16 nonprofit organizations, two in Connecticut, three each in Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and four in Massachusetts. Organizations will have flexibility in how the resources are used and are not tied to a specific project or initiative. About the organizations: Connecticut ($125,000) Black Infinity Collective (formerly known as CT Core-Organize Now!), a freedom fighting, movement-building organization dedicated to healing and liberation for all Black people. $50,000 Health Equity Solutions, promotes policies and practices for equitable health care access, delivery and outcomes for all people in Connecticut . $75,000 Maine ($125,000) Maine Equal Justice, civil legal aid and economic justice organization increasing economic security, opportunity, and equity for people in Maine . $25,000 . Maine Initiatives, connects and engages people around racial, social, economic, and environmental justice in Maine . $75,000 . Resources for Organizing & Social Change (ROSC), builds and supports a movement for nonviolent social change that will educate, activate, and empower people in Maine through grassroots community organizing. $25,000 Massachusetts ($500,000) New Hampshire ($125,000) New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, to help seed newly established Racial Justice Fund, a community-advised fund to advance racial justice in New Hampshire . $75,000 . YWCA New Hampshire, eliminates racism, empowers women, and promotes peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all. $25,000 Victory Women of Vision, encourages, empowers, and nurtures immigrant and refugee families to thrive by embracing their cultural heritage as they build their new lives. $25,000 . Rhode Island ($125,000) AMOR Coalition, an alliance of community-based grassroots organizations mobilizing at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status to prevent, respond to and end state violence against our community. $25,000 Center for Southeast Asians, promotes the prosperity, heritage and leadership of Southeast Asians in Rhode Island . $25,000 . SISTA Fire, co-creates a network of women and non-binary people of color to build our collective power for social, economic, and political transformation. $75,000 To engage its own community of colleagues, the Foundation also has expanded Point32Health's employee match program. A new two-for-one match aims to incentivize colleagues to support nonprofits that advance social and racial justice as well as eliminate systemic barriers. This new double match is available year-round. "This moment in time requires a stronger commitment, one that acknowledges shared wisdom and lived experience, one that supports organizations with demonstrated community leadership," said Nora Moreno Cargie, president of Point32Health Foundation and vice president of Corporate Citizenship." These are steps in the right direction, and still we must do more." About Point32Health Foundation Point32Health Foundation builds on values of giving and service that were central to both Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation and Tufts Health Plan Foundation. We work with communities to support, advocate and advance healthier lives for everyone. The Foundation advances equity-focused solutions in healthy aging, access to healthy food and behavioral health in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. SOURCE Point32Health Foundation PARK CITY, Utah, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, globally recognized aesthetics device company Powered by MRP announced the launch of the MRP Movement. This nationwide philanthropic program, in partnership with local nonprofit organizations, will help human trafficking survivors by providing complimentary skin treatments to remove scars related to abuse or trauma. Launching its first chapter in Chicago in August, the MRP Movement will join forces with the Salt & Light Coalition a local grassroots initiative mobilizing individuals and organizations to empower survivors of trafficking to live meaningful and purposeful lives and board-certified dermatologist Dr. Emily Rubenstein. As part of their efforts, Powered by MRP will provide its devices and offer training to key clinics that will be administering the treatments free of charge to human trafficking survivors. In conjunction with the treatments, Powered by MRP will launch a social media fundraiser to benefit the partnering nonprofit that strives to help survivors find the resources necessary to reclaim their lives. "We know the pandemic has impacted charitable giving in many respects especially considering human trafficking," said Founder and CEO Scott Carson. "At Powered by MRP, we want to leverage our expertise in energy-based devices and extensive network of cosmetic surgery partners to shed light and help those programs in need through education, training, and equipment donations. We're looking to our partners to expand on this and uphold this value." Since its founding in 2015, MRP's mission has been to create a fair market for physicians to access biomedical energy-based devices at GPO-level pricing to lower the physician's overhead cost and generate more access to care for patients as a result. The MRP Movement will further establish and expand MRP's mission to grant patients higher accessibility to medical treatments. "The women in our program have scars and tattoos that are constant reminders of the trauma and pain they've been through," said Corinne Kopsky, Operations Manager at the Salt & Light Coalition. "Removing these will help the healing process, help increase their self-esteem and prepare them for a world that sees them for who they have become." "I am so proud to be part of helping human trafficking survivors and supporting the Salt & Light Coalition," said Dr. Emily Rubenstein, director of the Swedish Skin Institute. "Since last year, the Swedish Hospital, part of Northshore University Hospital, has been integral in allowing us to start Vanish the Ink, a program that services survivors of trafficking with board-certified dermatologists to aid in laser tattoo removal free of charge. My team and I are eager to support the MRP Movement and help change lives." For more information about the MRP Movement and to donate to the Salt & Light Coalition, please visit here. About Powered by MRP Powered by MRP is a globally recognized aesthetics device company founded by Scott Carson in 2015. MRP's technology-driven platform provides a vertically-integrated community marketplace that helps Aesthetic Providers lower equipment and supply costs through consultative customer service and GPO-level pricing. Overstock, pre-owned, parts and deals, drive markets, and MRP is the largest reseller of new and pre-owned energy-based aesthetic and surgical devices in the world. MRP-supplied equipment can be seen featured in TLC's first season of their hit television series, DR. MERCY. Visit mrp.io and follow us on LinkedIn , Facebook , Instagram , or YouTube for more information. About Salt & Light Coalition Founded in 2017, the Salt and Light Coalition is a Chicago-based grassroots movement mobilizing individuals and organizations to empower survivors of trafficking to live meaningful and purposeful lives. Starting with a six-month structured healing curriculum focusing on questioning the survivors' relationship to the bio, psycho, social, and spiritual self, the one-year program guides and equips survivors with the knowledge needed to be successful in the workplace. The second phase of the program focuses on workforce development and creating a growth mindset. So far, the Salt and Light Coalition has graduated 50 thrivers and is currently in the process of taking our eleventh cohort. Visit saltandlightcoalition.com and follow us on LinkedIn , Facebook , Instagram , or YouTube for more information. About Dr. Emily Rubenstein Dr. Emily Rubenstein is a board-certified dermatologist who treats both medical and cosmetic skin conditions in adults and children. She attended Midwestern University for medical school and completed her residency at Nova Southeastern University/Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She is pleased to be the director of the Swedish Skin Institute on the hospital campus. SOURCE Powered by MRP Combination adds cutting-edge technology that transforms the way assessment and learning content is created, classified, and delivered BALTIMORE, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Prometric announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Finetune, a leading innovator in AI-assisted assessment and learning technology across the credentialing, licensure, workforce readiness and education sectors. Finetune, based in Boston with a pre-pandemic globally distributed team, has been developing innovative solutions in learning, instruction, and assessment for more than a decade. They expanded in recent years into proprietary AI-assisted technology targeting the growing demand among organizations and companies for the ability to create high-quality assessment and other learning content with greater time- and cost-efficiency than traditional approaches. Finetune's flagship products, Generate and Catalog, are the world's first commercially available products to use state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) transformer models to power AI-driven content generation and classification, increasing the productivity and creativity of item-authoring and classification, in tandem with subject matter experts, while greatly improving quality. Roy Simrell, President and CEO of Prometric LLC, said, "The addition of Finetune to Prometric's portfolio represents a significant opportunity to not only bring cutting-edge AI content and assessment technology to our suite of solutions but to transform the way organizations address the challenges they face in a rapidly changing learning landscape. I am excited by the opportunity that these advanced capabilities represent for the way we support our customers and test takers." Steve Shapiro, CEO of Finetune, said, "We are energized by the synergy that a partnership with Prometric represents. Joining Prometric allows us to further build on our success, taking these solutions to market at scale and continuing to invest in emerging technologies that serve the wide cross section of markets we serve." About Prometric LLC Prometric is a leading provider of technology-enabled testing and assessment solutions. Our integrated, end-to-end solutions provide exam development, management, and distribution that set the industry standard in quality, security, and service excellence. Today, we are paving the industry's path forward with new solutions and innovation to ensure reliable access to secure assessments anytime, anywhere. For more information, visit Prometric or follow us on Twitter at @PrometricGlobal and www.linkedin.com/company/prometric/. About Finetune Finetune is a leading innovator in the education sector, specializing in the development of hybrid AI-human-solutions that address some of the most challenging problems including automated content generation and AI-powered learning-resource classification. For more information, please visit Finetune - Creating AI-Human hybrid solutions for learning (finetunelearning.com). Tyton Partners served as the exclusive financial adviser to Finetune. Media Contact Brooke Smith, SVP and CMO Prometric 335.971.9190 [email protected] SOURCE Prometric ATLANTA, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pye-Barker Fire & Safety adds one of the largest full-service security providers in New Jersey, Complete Security Systems, Inc., to its alarm division and family of companies. The merger makes Pye-Barker Fire & Safety the leading security and alarm provider in the state. "I'm thrilled to be able to forge this partnership with Pye-Barker." Tweet this Eric Garner, CEO of Pye-Barker's alarm division, meets with Complete Security Systems' President Chris Mosley and his wife Lillian Murphy Mosley Complete Security Systems (CSS), headquartered in Marlboro, New Jersey, specializes in customized security solutions including intrusion alarms, fire alarms, CCTV and access control for commercial and residential customers. It was founded in 1983 by Chris Mosley who built CSS with a vision to listen, provide quality and take care of customers like family, thus propelling its success. Complete Security Systems is the only security company to receive the prestigious New Jersey Electronic Life Safety Association (NJELSA) Dealer Award for three years. "I'm thrilled to be able to forge this partnership with Pye-Barker," said Chris Mosley, Complete Security Systems President. "Their culture, people and way of doing business align perfectly with who we are at CSS." Mosley is an impactful leader in his community and throughout the security industry. He was instrumental in the fight to get new licensure approved in the state of New Jersey that would strengthen the quality of security service and alarm installation in the state. He served as the national President of ESA, as well as President of the New Jersey Electronic Life Safety Association and is an active board member of the Monmouth County Friends of the Parks and the local YMCA. "It's an honor to be able to work with Chris Mosley and the Complete Security Systems team. They're a pillar in the industry with a high bar for quality and taking care of customers," said Bart Proctor, CEO of Pye-Barker. Mosley will continue to lead CSS along with his leadership team, and his well-trained security professionals will service new and existing customers. About Pye-Barker Fire & Safety Pye-Barker Fire & Safety, founded in 1946, is a leader in fire protection and life safety, with over 130 locations and 3,100 team members. It is a full-service company offering all the necessary specialties including portable extinguishers, restaurant fire suppression, special hazard systems, fire sprinklers, fire alarms, and security. Pye-Barker invests heavily in providing the best-in-class training for its team while offering industry competitive benefits and is rapidly expanding its national footprint. Contact: Eric Garner CEO, Pye-Barker Alarm Division (801) 395-8738 [email protected] SOURCE Pye-Barker Fire & Safety SEATTLE, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Quark Expeditions, the global Leader in Polar Adventures, is proud to report the successful inaugural voyage of Ultramarine in the Canadian Arctic. On August 1, 2022, Quark Expeditions' newest vessel embarked on the 17-day Northwest Passage: In the Footsteps of Franklin voyage, which is one of the operator's five expeditions that explore the Canadian High Arctic. Credit: Michelle Sole & Quark Expeditions This captivating adventure offers a wide range of opportunities that immerse Quark Expeditions' guests in the haunting beauty of the Canadian Arctic, where they'll experience rich Inuit culture, learn about polar history, witness abundant wildlife, and take advantage of the industry's most extensive portfolio of off-ship adventure options, which include Zodiac cruises, kayaking and hiking. "We're so excited to have kicked off our Canadian Arctic season with the 17-day Northwest Passage: In the Footsteps of Franklin itinerary," said Thomas Lennartz, Vice-President of Sales and Customer Service for Quark Expeditions. "Not only does it herald our return to the much-beloved Canadian Arctic, but this voyage also marks Ultramarine's inaugural voyage in the Canadian Northwhich includes the fabled Northwest Passage. Guests get to enjoy the amenities of this technologically-advanced ship while steeped in polar history and wilderness." True to its name, the Northwest Passage: In the Footsteps of Franklin expedition takes guests on a journey that retraces the footsteps of polar explorer Sir John Franklin and his ill-fated expedition to map out the Northwest Passage. Franklin departed the shores of England in May 1845 with a crew of 24 officers and 100 men and never returned. The doomed expedition remains one of the most enduring mysteries of Arctic exploration and is an integral part of this itinerary. This unique voyage also includes stops in Greenland before traversing the Davis Strait to the northern tip of Baffin Island, near the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage, where guests can often spot humpback and bowhead whales and an abundance of seabirds to the delight of birders and photographers alike. Guests also have the opportunity to visit the picturesque Inuit hamlet of Pond Inlet where they can meet Inuit guides and community members to learn more about the traditional Inuit way of life and rich culture. Learn more about the Northwest Passage: in the Footsteps of Franklin itinerary and the other four Canadian High Arctic voyages offered in August and September. About Quark Expeditions: Specializing exclusively in expeditions to Antarctica and the Arctic, Quark Expeditions has been the leading innovator of polar adventure since the company took the first group of consumer travelers to the North Pole in 1991. Quark Expeditions has been innovating ever since. With a diverse fleet of specially-equipped small expedition vessels and icebreakerssome of them equipped with helicoptersQuark Expeditions delivers deeply immersive polar experiencesand is able to take guests deeper into the Polar Regions than anyone else. Led by passionate and seasoned expedition teams, including scientists, wildlife experts and researchers, Quark Expeditions offers an onboard program that enriches the passenger experience. About Ultramarine: The technologically-advanced Ultramarine, the newest addition to the Quark Expeditions fleet, is a game-changer in polar exploration. Equipped with two twin-engine Airbus 145 helicopters, 20 quick-launching Zodiacs and the largest portfolio of off-ship adventure options in the industry, Ultramarine changes the way guests explore the Polar Regions. Other features include a spa, sauna with floor-to-ceiling windows, fitness centre, yoga space, spacious rooms and two restaurants plus a lounge and presentation theatre. Ultramarine has been designed with advanced sustainability systems that help preserve the pristine Polar Regions for the next generation of explorers. Ultramarine has an Ice Class rating of 1A+ and Polar Class rating of PC6, which contribute to the vessel's superior standards of safety standard. The ship's innovative sustainability features, which help reduce its environmental footprint, include a micro auto gasification system (MAGS), which is capable of converting onboard waste into energy, eliminating the need for the transportation of waste. About Travelopia: Travelopia is one of the world's leading specialist travel groups. A pioneer in the experiential travel sector with a portfolio consisting of more than 50 independently operated brands, most of which are leaders in their sector. From sailing adventures, safaris and sports tours, to Arctic expeditions, each brand is diverse and focused on creating unforgettable experiences for customers across the world SOURCE Quark Expeditions New mortgage arm further integrates offerings for Radius agents and clients across California, with plans to enter additional markets as brokerage expands. SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Radius , the tech-enabled brokerage, today announced it has launched a mortgage brokerage in California. The mortgage launch comes on the heels of the company's $14 million Series A fundraise and recent expansion to Texas, Florida and Washington. Radius is a full service, modern brokerage that provides real estate professionals and their teams with the support and tools needed to grow their business with a simplified and modest flat fee commission structure. The brokerage empowers entrepreneurial real estate professionals with integrated technology, mentorship, recruiting, financial services and marketing resources to build and amplify their own brand. Radius Mortgage is now available to real estate agents and clients in CA with low rates and elevated service. Tweet this With the addition of a mortgage brokerage, Radius agents and their clients in California will have access to a more seamless and transparent lending experience. With access to real-time status updates and critical documents in their client dashboards, Radius agents will be able to provide quality information about the lending process to their clients while being supported by a dedicated team. Radius' mortgage arm will be led by Director of Mortgage Michael Bardales, a 20-year veteran of California lending and Senior Lending Manager Grace Davis, a 17-year real estate veteran and top lending officer in the state. "We're building Radius Mortgage from the ground up to be a premier lender in California," said Sam Kasle, Radius' Chief Revenue Officer. "For far too long, the lending process has been frustrating and burdensome for agents and their clients alike. By keeping cost structures low and bringing transparency to the entire lending process, we hope to help real estate professionals deliver a better client experience and grow their businesses." Dedicated to developing the whole agent, Radius helped real estate professionals and their teams close more than $400 million in sales in the first quarter of 2022, while the referral network has generated $25 billion in referral commissions in the last three years. The company has doubled revenue in the last five months, and seen 300 percent revenue growth year-over-year. Radius now operates in California, Colorado, Georgia, Oregon, Texas, Florida, and Washington. Building on its real estate social network of more than 85,000 agents nationwide, Radius plans to further expand across the U.S. by the end of the year. About Radius Radius is the premier tech-driven brokerage firm for real estate professionals eager to grow their brands and profits. From networking opportunities, branding/marketing resources, to white-glove services for buyers and sellers, Radius is poised to help real estate professionals grow their businesses while saving them time and money. Founded in 2015, Radius is backed by the founders of Trulia, Zillow and Roofstock. Visit https://www.radiusagent.com/ to learn more. Contact: Joanna Umali [email protected] SOURCE Radius CHERRY HILL, N.J., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- BorgerMatez, P.A. is pleased to announce that Harold U. Johnson, recently retired from the Family Part of the Chancery Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey has joined the firm. The Hon. Harold Johnson will mediate, arbitrate, sit as a Blue Ribbon Panelist, and be available for consultation, in all divorce and family law matters. Watch Judge Johnson discuss why he joined BorgerMatez here. Hon. Harold U. Johnson (Ret.) joins BorgerMatez, P.A. Watch Judge Johnson discuss why he joined the firm: https://youtu.be/A5Hz08DIbNs Through June 2022, Judge Johnson served the Family Part of the Chancery Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey handling all Family Law case types. Starting in 2015, he also served as Presiding Family Judge, Vicinage 15 overseeing and directing management of the judges and court staff in Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem counties. He was also Vice-Chairperson of the New Jersey Supreme Court Judicial Education Committee and the New Jersey Supreme Court Family Practice Committee. "We're fortunate to be joined by such an esteemed judge and mediator as Judge Johnson," BorgerMatez partner, Gary L. Borger, partner, said. "As one of the most experienced and leading judicial minds in New Jersey Family Law, Judge Johnson brings with him a career's depth of knowledge in dispute resolution that further enhances BorgerMatez's abilities to settle family law matters in the most efficient, fairest way possible," added partner, Bruce Matez. ABOUT BORGERMATEZ Based in Cherry Hill, NJ, BorgerMatez is one of New Jersey's most respected and accomplished family law and divorce law rms. Primarily serving clients in South Jersey, the firm's attorneys are dedicated to protecting the rights and interests of its clients, taking great pride in helping them through emotionally difficult family law issues, whether they involve the joy of adopting a child, or the agonizing difficulties associated with separation and divorce or domestic violence. 100% of what the firm does is divorce, family law, and matrimonial law. BorgerMatez attorneys utilized whatever approach is best for each individual client to work efficiently and effectively toward settlement. Visit the firm at https://njfamilylaw.net Media Contact: Larry Siegel +1-856-638-8965 [email protected] SOURCE BorgerMatez, P.A. MIAMI, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Flip Phone Events presents Moira's Party Boat, Ew Cruising!: A Schitt's Creek Fan Celebration. The four-day Caribbean cruise departs from Miami on the newly refurbished Celebrity Summit. This is the first ever vacation geared towards fans of the hit show, Schitt's Creek. The four-day cruise departs on March 30 and visits Key West, Florida and Nassau, Bahamas. Nina DiAngelo as Moira Rose on Moira's Party Cruise Moira's Party Boat is on Celebrity Summit Featured onboard events include a Schitt's Creek costume party, A Night of 1000 Moiras, A Little Bit Alexis Pool Party, Jocelyn's Bingo Jamboree, and even a performance from a Jazzagirls drag troupe. Guests on the cruise will also participate in Schitt's Creek themed trivia, a Key West bar crawl, a wig party featuring Fruit Wine, and a soiree celebrating Moira's film, The Crowening. Featured performers on board include Shuga Cain from RuPaul's Drag Race, Michael Judson Berry, actor and Moira Rose impersonator and drag performers Nina DiAngelo (Minneapolis) and Tenderoni (Chicago). Guests will be instructed to dress as their favorite Schitt's Creek characters throughout the cruise. Moira's Party Boat is produced by Flip Phone Events, which has produced the wildly successful, Golden Fans at Sea, a Golden Girls themed cruise and Cindy Levine of Dream Vacations. The cruise will provide an exciting opportunity for diehard fans of Schitt's Creek to come together and celebrate this groundbreaking show. Interested guest must book their vacation through www.moiraspartyboat.com to participate in all Schitt's Creek related events. If you have any questions, need photos or other promotional material please email Cindy Levine at [email protected] or give her a call at 480-861-6427. Moira's Party Boat is not an official Schitt's Creek event. The cruise is a fan celebration of the television series. It is not associated with, authorized by, or sponsored by the owners of the Schitt's Creek trademarks. None of the cast or crew members of the Schitt's Creek television show will be in attendance. However, the cruise will be filled with hundreds of Schitt's Creek fans to celebrate the iconic show. Media Contact: Cindy Levine 480-861-6427 [email protected] SOURCE Flip Phone Events NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Purcell & Lefkowitz LLP, a class action law firm dedicated to representing shareholders nationwide, is investigating a potential breach of fiduciary duty claim involving the board of directors of Ralph Lauren Corporation (NYSE: RL). If you are a shareholder of Ralph Lauren Corporation and are interested in obtaining additional information regarding this investigation, free of charge, please visit us at: http://pjlfirm.com/ralph-lauren-corporation/ You may also contact Robert H. Lefkowitz, Esq. either via email at [email protected] or by telephone at 212-725-1000. One of our attorneys will personally speak with you about the case at no cost or obligation. Purcell & Lefkowitz LLP is a law firm exclusively committed to representing shareholders nationwide who are victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty and other types of corporate misconduct. For more information about the firm and its attorneys, please visit http://pjlfirm.com. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. SOURCE Purcell & Lefkowitz LLP New Series B funding of $33 million will advance Sibel's FDA-cleared ANNE One platform for home and hospital monitoring through global partnerships. will advance Sibel's FDA-cleared ANNE One platform for home and hospital monitoring through global partnerships. Jon P. Otterstatter , ex-CEO and co-founder of Preventice, joins Sibel as its chairman of the board, and Matt Banet , PhD, cofounder of Sotera Wireless and toSense, joins Sibel as president. , ex-CEO and co-founder of Preventice, joins Sibel as its chairman of the board, and , PhD, cofounder of Sotera Wireless and toSense, joins Sibel as president. Drager's previous convertible note changes to equity in Sibel, along with a renewed and deeper strategic partnership. NILES, Ill., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sibel Health, an award-winning medical technology company spun out of the world-renowned John Rogers Research Group and the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at Northwestern University, has recently closed a $33 million Series B financing round, bringing Sibel's total funding to date to more than $50 million. Sibel Health has developed an advanced wearable monitoring solution that enables care in the hospital and the home. In addition, Sibel has announced two new executive appointments. Jon Otterstatter, the former CEO and co-founder of Preventice (acquired by Boston Scientific in 2021), will join as chairman of the board. Matthew Banet, PhD, a world expert in advanced body-worn sensors and previously the CTO and cofounder of toSense and Sotera, joins as president from Baxter International. The funding round was led by the Steele Foundation for Hopea private foundation seeking to fund solutions for humanity's hardest challenges with an emphasis on technology and innovation. Joe Exner, CEO of Steele Foundation for Hope, said, "Sibel was founded by the world's leading engineers and scientists. We invested in their ingenuity to advance bio-integrated sensors and wireless data collection to promote better care, especially for mothers and newborns in developing countries." Drager, a leading medical and safety technology company, previous convertible note changes to equity. With the funding, Sibel will scale up its FDA-cleared ANNE One platform for global deployments across the entire continuum of care from the home to the hospital. "What makes us unique as a digital health company is that our product is vertically integratedwe believe that everything matters, from the adhesive we place on the skin to how the sensor fits on the body to the final alert a clinician sees for medical decision-making," said Steve Xu, MD, CEO and co-founder. "We're proud that our technology can be potentially deployed in both the neonatal intensive care unit and in the home for remote patient monitoring." Steffen Protsch, president of monitoring at Drager and Sibel board member, said, "As an early investor in Sibel, we have been impressed by the company's growth and technology over such a short period of time. We look forward to integrating and scaling their technology as part of Drager's offerings to our hospital customers." Since 2020, Sibel has seen a significant increase in revenue driven by partnerships with leading Fortune 500 companies and funding support from the U.S. military, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The appointment of new executives will accelerate Sibel's transition to scaled commercialization. "I look forward to joining Sibel as chairman of the board in this time of rapid acceleration and growth," Otterstatter said. "The company's advanced wearable monitoring platform is industry-changingthe comprehensive suite of on-body sensors, best-in-class analytics, robust machine-learning algorithms and extensible software capabilities make the ANNE One platform a very unique offering. I look forward to supporting Sibel's transition towards commercial scale." He continued, "Having led a team and a company that successfully developed and achieved commercial success with a breakthrough remote cardiac monitoring solutions, I am convinced that the ANNE sensors are raising the bar for the market." John Rogers, PhD, the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University and Sibel co-founder, said, "It is exciting to see the research from my research group translate into a successful product with the potential to impact millions of lives worldwide, particularly in the area of neonatal and women's health." About Sibel Health: Sibel Health is an award-winning digital health company with a mission to deliver Better Health Data for All. Based in the greater Chicago area with offices in Seoul (South Korea) and San Diego, the company's FDA-cleared ANNE platform includes advanced wearable sensors, AI-enabled data analytics, and an integrated mobile software and cloud platform. Sibel's partnerships include some of the most respected healthcare organizations worldwide. For more information, please visit www.sibelhealth.com and follow us on LinkedIn. About Drager: Drager is an international leader in the fields of medical and safety technology. Its products protect, support, and save lives. Founded in 1889, Drager generated revenues of around EUR 3.1 billion in 2021. The Drager Group is currently present in over 190 countries and has more than 16,000 employees worldwide. Visit www.draeger.com for more information. About Steele Foundation for Hope: Founded in 2021, the Steele Foundation for Hope strives to find and fund lasting solutions for some of humanity's hardest challenges, with a strong belief that advances found through technology and innovation are key to improving quality of life. SOURCE Sibel Health NEW YORK, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The smart home appliances market estimates a market value of USD 34.31 Million from 2021 to 2026 as per the latest market forecast report by Technavio. The report projects the market to progress at a CAGR of 15%. 32% of the market's growth will originate from North America during the forecast period. US and Canada are the key markets for smart home appliances in North America. However, market growth in this region will be slower than the growth of the market in other regions. An increase in the popularity and adoption of smart home technology, owing to the implementation of stringent government regulations and standards related to energy usage will facilitate the smart home appliances market growth in North America over the forecast period. Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Smart Home Appliances Market Growth, Size, Trends, Analysis Report by Type, Application, Region and Segment Forecast 2022-2026 For more highlights on the regional segment - Request an Exclusive FREE Sample Now! Smart Home Appliances Market: Segmentation Analysis The market research report segments the smart home appliances market by Distribution Channel (Offline and Online), Product (Smart washing machines and dryers, Smart air conditioners, Smart refrigerators, Smart microwave ovens, and Smart dishwashers), and Geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and the Middle East and Africa). Revenue Generating Segment - The smart home appliances market share growth by the offline segment will be significant for revenue generation. The growth is attributed to the increase in preference by consumers for the purchase of smart home appliances owing to growing urbanization, increasing middle-class income population, and the rapid growth of developing countries. To know about the market contribution of each segment - Grab a FREE sample report! Smart Home Appliances Market: Major Driver The key factor driving the global smart home appliances market growth is product innovation in terms of technology, performance, features, and design . . Smart home appliances are equipped with cameras, sensors, and connectivity features to enable remote monitoring and control. For instance, Samsung Electronics offers a Counter Depth 4-Door French Door Refrigerator with Family Hub Recessed Handles. Many smart home appliances can shop online without any intervention from the end-users. For instance, a smart refrigerator can automatically replenish the supply. Samsung Electronics smart refrigerators can order food through their grocery shopping partner Instacart. Similarly, a smart washing machine can place an order for fabric softeners and washing powder. Such factors are expected to positively impact the market growth during the forecast period. To know about the other drivers along with market challenges- Request a FREE Sample The competitive scenario provided in the Smart Home Appliances Market report analyzes, evaluates, and positions companies based on various performance indicators. Some of the factors considered for this analysis include the financial performance of companies over the past few years, growth strategies, product innovations, new product launches, investments, growth in market share, etc.Don't wait, Make a strategic approach & boost your business goals with our Smart Home Appliances Market Forecast Report - Buy Now! Related Reports: The house wraps market share is expected to increase to USD 2.12 billion from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 6.18%. share is expected to increase to USD 2.12 billion from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 6.18%. The smart air purifier market share is expected to reach an estimated USD 3.97 billion by 2026 at an accelerating CAGR of 9.28%. Smart Home Appliances Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 15% Market growth 2022-2026 USD 34.31 Million Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 14.0 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, South America, the Middle East, and Africa Performing market contribution North America at 32% Key consumer countries US, Canada, China, Germany, and the UK Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled AB Electrolux, Crestron Electronics Inc., General Electric Co., Haier Smart Home Co. Ltd., Koninklijke Philips NV, Legrand SA, LG Electronics Inc., MIDEA Group Co. Ltd., Miele and Cie. KG, MIRC Electronics Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Panasonic Corp., Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Schneider Electric SE, Sharp Corp., Videocon Industries Ltd., Vivint Smart Home Inc., Whirlpool Corp., and Xiaomi Corp. Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for the forecast period, Customization purview If our report has not included the data you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get customized segments. Browse for Technavio "Consumer Discretionary Market" Research Reports Table of Content 1. Executive Summary 2. Market Landscape 2.1 Market ecosystem Exhibit 01: Parent market 2.2: Market Characteristics Exhibit 02: Market Characteristics 3. Market Sizing 3.1 Market Definition Exhibit 03: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition 3.2 Market segment analysis Exhibit 04: Market segments 3.3 Market size 2020 3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2020 - 2025 Exhibit 05: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 06: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 07: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 08: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 4. Five Forces Analysis 4.1 Five Forces Summary Exhibit 09: Five forces analysis 2021 & 2026 4.2 Bargaining power of buyers Exhibit 10: Bargaining power of buyers 4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers Exhibit 11: Bargaining power of suppliers 4.4 Threat of new entrants Exhibit 12: Threat of new entrants 4.5 Threat of substitutes Exhibit 13: Threat of substitutes 4.6 Threat of rivalry Exhibit 14: Threat of rivalry 4.7 Market condition Exhibit 15: Market condition - Five forces 2021 5 Market Segmentation by Distribution Channel 5.1 Market segments The segments covered in this chapter are Offline and Online. Exhibit 16: Chart on Distribution Channel - Market share 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 17: Data Table on Distribution Channel - Market share 2021-2026 (%) 5.2 Comparison by Distribution Channel Exhibit 18: Chart on Comparison by Distribution Channel Exhibit 19: Data Table on Comparison by Distribution Channel 5.3 Offline - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 20: Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 29: Chart on Offline - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 21: Data Table on Offline - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 22: Chart on Offline - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 23: Data Table on Offline - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.4 Online - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 24: Chart on Online - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 25: Data Table on Online - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 26: Chart on Online - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 27: Data Table on Online - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 5.5 Market opportunity by Distribution Channel Exhibit 28: Market opportunity by Distribution Channel ($ million) 6 Market Segmentation by Product 6.1 Market segments The segments covered in this chapter are Smart washing machines and dryers, Smart air conditioners, Smart refrigerators, Smart microwave ovens, and Smart dishwashers. Exhibit 29: Chart on Product - Market share 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 30: Data Table on Product - Market share 2021-2026 (%) 6.2 Comparison by Product Exhibit 31: Chart on Comparison by Product Exhibit 32: Data Table on Comparison by Product 6.3 Smart washing machines and dryers - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 33: Chart on Smart washing machines and dryers - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 34: Data Table on Smart washing machines and dryers - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 35: Chart on Smart washing machines and dryers - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 36: Data Table on Smart washing machines and dryers - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 6.4 Smart air conditioners - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 37: Chart on Smart air conditioners - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 38: Data Table on Smart air conditioners - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 39: Chart on Smart air conditioners - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 40: Data Table on Smart air conditioners - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 6.5 Smart refrigerators - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 41: Chart on Smart refrigerators - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 42: Data Table on Smart refrigerators - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 43: Chart on Smart refrigerators - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 44: Data Table on Smart refrigerators - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 6.6 Smart microwave ovens - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 45: Chart on Smart microwave ovens - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 46: Data Table on Smart microwave ovens - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 47: Chart on Smart microwave ovens - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 48: Data Table on Smart microwave ovens - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 6.7 Smart dishwashers - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 49: Chart on Smart dishwashers - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 50: Data Table on Smart dishwashers - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 51: Chart on Smart dishwashers - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 52: Data Table on Smart dishwashers - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 6.8 Market opportunity by Product Exhibit 53: Market opportunity by Product ($ million) 7 Customer Landscape 7.1 Customer landscape overview Exhibit 54: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates & purchase criteria. 8 Geographic Landscape 8.1 Geographic segmentation Exhibit 55: Chart of Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 56: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%) 8.2 Geographic comparison Exhibit 57: Chart on Geographic comparison Exhibit 58: Data Table on Geographic comparison 8.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 59: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 60: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 61: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 62: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 63: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 64: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 65: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 66: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 67: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 68: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 69: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 70: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 71: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 72: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 73: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 74: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.7 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 75: Chart on the Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 76: Data Table on the Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 77: Chart on the Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 78: Data Table on the Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.8 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 79: Chart on the US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 80: Data Table on the US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 81: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 82: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.9 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 83: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 84: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 85: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 86: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.10 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 87: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 88: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 89: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 90: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.11 Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 91: Chart on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 92: Data Table on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 93: Chart on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 94: Data Table on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.12 UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 95: Chart on the UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 96: Data Table on the UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million) Exhibit 97: Chart on the UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) Exhibit 98: Data Table on the UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%) 8.13 Market opportunity by geography Exhibit 99: Market opportunity by geography ($ million) 9 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 9.1 Market drivers 9.1.1 Product innovation in terms of technology, performance, features, and design 9.1.2 Periodic revisions in energy efficiency standards 9.1.3 Growing adoption of wireless connecting devices and IoT 9.2 Market challenges 9.2.1 High cost of smart home appliances 9.2.2 Privacy issues with respect to data 9.2.3 Lack of awareness in developing and underdeveloped countries 9.3 Impact of drivers and challenges Exhibit 100: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026 9.4 Market trends 9.4.1 Introduction of additional features in smart home appliances 9.4.2 Partnerships with other companies 9.4.3 Increasing M and A activities 10. Vendor Landscape 10.1 Competitive scenario 10.2 Vendor landscape Exhibit 101: Vendor Landscape 10.3 Landscape disruption Exhibit 102: Landscape disruption 10.4 Industry risks Exhibit 103: Industry risks 11. Vendor Analysis 11.1 Vendors covered Exhibit 104: Vendors covered 10.2 Market positioning of vendors Exhibit 105: Matrix on vendor position and classification 11.3 AB Electrolux Exhibit 106: AB Electrolux - Overview Exhibit 107: AB Electrolux - Business segments Exhibit 108: AB Electrolux - Key news Exhibit 109: AB Electrolux - Key offerings Exhibit 110: AB Electrolux - Segment focus 11.4 General Electric Co. Exhibit 111: General Electric Co. - Overview Exhibit 112: General Electric Co. - Business segments Exhibit 113: General Electric Co. - Key news Exhibit 114: General Electric Co. - Key offerings List of Abbreviations About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contacts Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio Large enterprises are expected to bolster demand of connected worker solutions due to large disposable funds to implement advanced technologies within their ecosystem NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The global connected worker solutions market witnessed a CAGR of 19.9% during the historical period, 2015-2019. Digitalization, emergence of IoT and industry 4.0 have been the growth drivers during the forecast period. For instance, supply chain digitalization with the integration of connected worker solutions is expected to offer opportunities for the market. Global connected worker solutions market is projected to expand at a CAGR of around 23% during 2020-2030. Smart manufacturing practice involves deployment of computer-integrated manufacturing with upgraded features. Connected worker solutions assist industrial activities with the cohesive experience of proficiency in real team. Besides this, IT/OT convergence offers immense opportunities for manufacturing processes by utilizing IT with OT components. The convergence has offered opportunity for real-time visibility and thorough understanding of manufacturing processes. Thereby supporting the overall market. For more insights into the Market, Get A Sample of this Report! https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=2956 Moreover, Industrial IoT is spreading across various manufacturing sectors and this is ultimately reshaping modern manufacturing process. In addition to this, majority of companies such as Honeywell, Oracle and Intel in the US, incorporation of connected worker solutions across wide variety of industrial use to provide immense opportunity. Key Takeaways: During the historical period, 2015-2019, the US connected worker solutions market witnessed a CAGR of 16.4%. Technological adoption and mobilization of high-end technologies such as 5G and electric vehicles infrastructure. The connected worker solutions market in China is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29% through 2030. Due to widespread manufacturing establishments within the country, China is expected to dominate the market over the next 10 years. is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29% through 2030. Due to widespread manufacturing establishments within the country, is expected to dominate the market over the next 10 years. Surge in deployment of advanced digital technologies in India is expected to boost the growth of the market by CAGR of 28% during the forecast period. Growth Drivers: Connected worker market is expected to be driven by large enterprises. The market is substantial for large enterprises due to high disposable funds to implement advanced technologies Rapid surge of manufacturing clusters such as healthcare and electronics across the globe are further expected to provide ample opportunity for connected worker solutions to grow. Increasing penetration of smart manufacturing practices in various developing economies across the globe is expected to boost the growth of the market. Wide usage of connected workers solutions in diverse range of industries such as oil & gas, automobile is expected to drive the growth of the market. Restraints: With uncertainty related to production output and backlash from environmentalists, the market is expected to witness a challenge during the forecast period. Connected worker solution is not cost-effective and this factor is expected to restrict the widespread usage of the solutions. Requirement of highly skilled labor for management of connected worker solutions leads to extra cost on manufacturers to hire a skilled labor Competitive Landscape: Key market players in the market are focusing on launch of products with enhanced asset connectivity. Moreover, company also plans to launch improved product offerings and targeted acquisitions. For instance, Wood, a leader proficient in consulting and operation solutions has adopted Honeywell Forge workforce productivity solutions. Through this initiative, the company would equip its frontline workers to streamline uptime operations. In addition to this, Fujitsu has incorporated Industrial IoT and enterprise wearable. This approach helps companies in providing solutions with hardware and software combined. Moreover, Telus offers a solution, which offers journey management, contact tracing, smart building, etc. Get Customization on this Report for Specific Research Solutions https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=2956 More Valuable Insights on Connected Worker Solutions Market By Component: Hardware Headgear Glasses Mobile Devices / Tabs VR Headsets Sensors / RFID Network devices Tools & Software Services By Size of Enterprise: Small and Medium Enterprise Large Enterprise By Industry Vertical: Manufacturing Automotive Oil & Gas Chemicals and materials Food & Beverages Industrial Goods Machinery Pharmaceutical Mining and Metal Others Services By Region: North America Latin America Europe East Asia South Asia & Oceania & Oceania Middle East & Africa Explore Fact.MR's Coverage on the Technology Domain IoT in Education Market: IoT in Education Market Share, Size, Trends Report By Component (Hardware, Software, Services), By Application (Learning management solutions, Big Data analytics, Academic devices, Lecture capturing solutions) - Regional Forecast 2018-2028 Connected Building Solutions Market: The growth of the global connected building solutions market is expected to be driven by the need for lower operating costs and lower CO2 emissions, and the scarcity of energy resources Connected Bottles Market: Connected Bottles Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Functionality (Communication, Convenience), By Technology (Bar Code, 2d Matrix Code, Quick Response Code) & By Region Outlook - Global Market Insights 2019 To 2029 Connected Distribution Center Market: The shift from voice picking to vision picking operations using augmented reality and intelligent sensors in distribution centers is the primary factor boosting the growth of the connected distribution center market. Connected Stadium Solution Market: On the basis of geography, the Connected Stadium Solution market is segmented across North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China, SEA and other APAC, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. About Fact.MR Fact.MR is a market research and consulting agency with deep expertise in emerging market intelligence. Spanning a wide range from automotive & industry 4.0 to healthcare, technology, chemical and materials, to even the most niche categories. 80% of Fortune 1000's trusts us in critical decision making. We provide both qualitative and quantitative research, spanning market forecast, market segmentation, competitor analysis, and consumer sentiment analysis. Contact: Mahendra Singh US Sales Office 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United States Tel: +1 (628) 251-1583 E: [email protected] Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/713666/FactMR_Logo.jpg SOURCE Fact.MR Opening in Lake Carolina Neighborhood FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Stoner's Pizza Joint, a quick-service pizza franchise, announced today that it will be opening its third location in the Columbia, SC market located in the Lake Carolina neighborhood at 5 Lake Carolina Way, Suite 130, Columbia, South Carolina 29229. The new location is expected to open in October 2022. Hunter Morris, AHMorris Holdings "We are thrilled to be opening our 3rd location in the Columbia market," said owner and operator Hunter Morris of AHMorris Holdings, a multi-unit franchisee. "The reception to our Harbison/Irmo location that was opened last year has been great and we can't wait to bring our delicious products to Lake Carolina and Northeast Columbia. We look forward to continuing to serve the greater Columbia area and build more locations in the coming years." Stoner's Pizza Joint is a delivery and takeout focused concept featuring fresh, high-quality food prepared in-house daily with minimal production time, including proprietary recipes for the pizza dough, sauce, and cheese blend. Menu items include a variety of specialty pizzas, calzones, strombolis, sandwiches, hickory-smoked chicken wings made daily in-house, freshly prepared salads, and freshly baked desserts. About Stoner's Pizza Joint Founded in 2013, Stoner's Pizza Joint launched its franchising program in late 2018 along with fresh new branding and a business model that has proven resilient to massive changes sweeping the food industry. Stoner's Pizza has locations throughout Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado. For more information, visit https://www.stonerspizzajoint.com. Stoner's Pizza Joint is currently seeking qualified franchisees to help the brand grow nationwide in college town markets, with a focus on the Southeast region. Prospective franchisees should have a minimum net worth of $250,000. The ideal candidate is a proven, multi-unit operator in the restaurant industry and has a strong knowledge of their market. Stoner's Pizza Joint's Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD) reveals an estimated initial investment range of $90,000 to $206,000 for the first location, including a franchise fee of $25,000. To learn more about ownership opportunities with Stoner's Pizza Joint, contact the Stoner's Pizza Joint Franchise Development team, at [email protected] . MEDIA CONTACT: Scott Mobley // Stoner's Pizza Joint [email protected] 706-410-0667 SOURCE Stoner's Pizza Joint Enables customers to achieve successful business outcomes using healthy data in Amazon Redshift Serverless SAN MATEO, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Talend , a global leader in data integration and governance, announced its support for Amazon Redshift Serverless. Talend's integration with Amazon Redshift Serverless reinforces our commitment and leadership in supporting businesses to enable analytics with a foundation of healthy data they can access, trust, and act on to achieve successful outcomes. "Support for Amazon Redshift Serverless gives customers further validation and assurance of our commitment to provide high-quality integrations and governance solutions with Amazon Redshift," said Rolf Heimes, global head of business development, Talend. "Our continued close collaboration with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team is focused on bringing innovative solutions to market that help companies use reliable, healthy data to make critical decisions and drive desired business outcomes." Amazon Redshift Serverless is a new serverless option for Amazon Redshift that makes it easy to run and scale high-performance analytics workloads on petabytes of data in seconds without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure. By supporting Amazon Redshift Serverless, Talend also provides complementary features, including Talend Trust Score, which automatically crawls and provides a health assessment of data in Amazon Redshift. "Using Talend and AWS Redshift means our business teams can now execute reports in minutes rather than hours or even days," says David Clifton, Head of Data and Architecture, Affinity Water, a water supplier to 3.6 million customers daily in the UK. "Without this underlying technology we'd struggle to operate and meet our business commitments, and also risk financial penalties from regulators and other areas, including requirements such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We're certainly achieving benefits by using AWS and Talend." Prezzee, a leading global eGift card platform, found a way to simplify and integrate its operational tracking. "Using Talend Stitch and Amazon Redshift, we have automated reporting, monitoring, and alerting across all platforms, our production database (AWS), and our customer data platform," said Anthony Wakulicz, Head of Data, Prezzee. "Now it saves team members countless hours of work and helps us confidently scale and manage our business. With Stitch and AWS, anyone in the company can have visibility over all of our business processes, whether built in-house or not." Integration with Amazon Redshift Serverless is Talend's latest advancement in supporting Amazon Redshift customers. Talend also supports native integration of Stitch with the Amazon Redshift Console, a user interface that simplifies management and improves insights into Amazon Redshift clusters and workloads. With this integration, Amazon Redshift customers can rapidly integrate multiple data sources into a fully managed secure platform and immediately enable analytics across a business. Customers can begin to use Talend or Talend Stitch with Amazon Redshift Serverless immediately. About Talend Talend, a global leader in data integration and data management, is taking the work out of working with data. Talend offers the only end-to-end platform that combines enterprise-grade data integration, integrity, and governance capabilities to unify data across any cloud, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment. With Talend's no-code and low-code modules, data experts and business users actively collaborate to make data more discoverable, usable, and valuable organization-wide. Over 7,250 customers around the world rely on Talend for healthy data and a healthy business. Top analyst firms and industry media recognize Talend as a leader in data management software. For more information, please visit www.talend.com and follow us on LinkedIn.com and Twitter @Talend. SOURCE Talend Inc. Joining of three hospital systems created healthcare organization that cares for more patients in North Texas than any other ARLINGTON, Texas, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas Health Resources celebrates its 25th anniversary on this month, commemorating the coming together of three hospital systems Presbyterian Healthcare Resources, Harris Methodist Health System and Arlington Memorial Hospital. As market share leader, more North Texans choose Texas Health for their acute care needs than any other health system in the area. That translates into more than 600,000 babies delivered, over 2 million surgeries performed, more than 16 million emergency department visits and, more recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 314,000 vaccinations given. Texas Health 25th Anniversary Tweet this "When we came together 25 years ago, our goal was to join the strength of our hospitals to form a sustainable regional healthcare system for generations to come," said Barclay Berdan, FACHE, CEO, Texas Health Resources. "Texas Health could not have achieved this impact without the dedication of the organization's employees and volunteers, and physicians on the medical staffs." With nearly 400 locations and a dedication to offering new and innovative care models, including virtual and in-home care, the system offers access to care when and where patients need it. Texas Health has received numerous recognitions for its workplace culture. The health system has been ranked on Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For list since 2014 and was ranked for seven years on Fortune's #1 Best Workplaces in Healthcare list. "While we know the past two years have been challenging in healthcare, the industry is on the brink of an exciting, consumer-centric evolution," said Winjie Miao, senior executive vice president and COO of Texas Health Resources. "I'm excited to see what the next 25 years hold for the health and well-being of the North Texans we serve." About Texas Health Resources: Texas Health Resources is a faith-based, nonprofit health system that cares for more patients in North Texas than any other provider. With a service area that consists of 16 counties and more than 7 million people, the system is committed to providing quality, coordinated care through its Texas Health Physicians Group and 29 hospital locations. The system has more than 4,100 licensed hospital beds, 6,400 physicians with active staff privileges and more than 26,000 employees. SOURCE Texas Health Resources SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Alliance upholds its competitive edge in the L&D landscape with the launch of a brand-new community - and the complete rebranding of another. Following a very busy and exciting first half of 2022 with the launch of three new communities ( Go-to-Market Academy , Finance Alliance , and Customer Marketing Alliance ), The Alliance continues to scale with the release of its latest community, Competitive Intelligence Alliance . The competitive intelligence space is evolving. CI is becoming a role of its own, and those responsible for CI must cascade that intel to and throughout the organization. As the central source of intelligence for CI, Competitive Intelligence Alliance assists those responsible for CI with the necessary insights, resources, and foresight needed to thrive in their role. It's the ultimate hub for anyone who wants to accelerate their career and contribute to an organization's competitive advantage. The Alliance has also breathed new life into one of its existing communities and unveiled the complete rebranding of B2B Marketing Alliance to Revenue Marketing Alliance . So, why the rebrand? In today's world, marketing and sales must support the customer in a holistic, contextual, and helpful way. Revenue marketing roles and practices advocate for this. However, there's a genuine lack of specific resources for revenue marketing. And, with over 471,000 people with the term 'revenue marketing' in their job title on LinkedIn, there's a clear gap in L&D for roles focused on revenue marketing and everything it entails. We wanted to change that. Revenue Marketing Alliance exists to unite, inform, and shape the revenue marketing space by equipping those in revenue marketing roles with the people, information, and platform to succeed in their role. Revenue Marketing Alliance is the first brand dedicated to elevating and uniting the revenue marketing role, and ensuring that we (and our community members) are always one step ahead of the curve. Richard King, Founder & CEO of The Alliance, said: "Competitive intelligence is something we've spoken about a lot across all The Alliance brands, but we're really excited to finally give those involved with competitive intelligence the standalone resource it needs - and deserves. "Revenue Marketing Alliance is another one we're really pumped for. We all know how crucial sales and marketing are to any organization's success, and this community's there to shine a spotlight on that and ensure companies all over the world are nurturing next-generation marketers with a laser-focus on revenue. "This year's been a crazy for one growth in terms of headcount, products, and communities, and we can't wait to see what's next." Contact: Richard King [email protected] www.allianceled.io SOURCE The Alliance Global visionaries headline the premier open source event in Europe to share on OSS adoption in Europe, driving the circular economy, finding inspiration through the pandemic, supply chain security and more. SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation , the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the keynote speakers for Open Source Summit Europe , taking place September 13-16 in Dublin, Ireland. The event is being produced in a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual participation available, and is co-located with the Hyperledger Global Forum, OpenSSF Day, Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit, KVM Forum, and Linux Security Summit, among others. Open Source Summit Europe is the leading conference for developers, sys admins and community leaders to gather to collaborate, share information, gain insights, solve technical problems and further innovation. It is a conference umbrella, composed of 13 events covering the most important technologies and issues in open source including LinuxCon, Embedded Linux Conference, OSPOCon, SupplyChainSecurityCon, CloudOpen, Open AI + Data Forum, and more. Over 2,000 are expected to attend. 2022 Keynote Speakers Include: Hilary Carter , Vice President of Research, The Linux Foundation , Vice President of Research, Bryan Che , Chief Strategy Officer, Huawei ; Cloud Native Computing Foundation Governing Board Member & Open 3D Foundation Governing Board Member , Chief Strategy Officer, ; Governing Board Member & Governing Board Member Demetris Cheatham , Senior Director, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Strategy, GitHub , Senior Director, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Strategy, Gabriele Columbro , Executive Director, Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) , Executive Director, Dirk Hohndel , Chief Open Source Officer, Cardano Foundation , Chief Open Source Officer, Ross Mauri , General Manager, IBM LinuxONE , General Manager, Dusan Milovanovic , Health Intelligence Architect, World Health Organization , Health Intelligence Architect, Mark Pollock , Explorer, Founder & Collaborator Explorer, Founder & Collaborator Christopher "CRob" Robinson , Director of Security Communications, Product Assurance and Security, Intel Corporation , Director of Security Communications, Product Assurance and Security, Emilio Salvador , Head of Standards, Open Source Program Office , Google Head of Standards, Open Source Program Office Robin Teigland , Professor of Strategy, Management of Digitalization, in the Entrepreneurship and Strategy Division, Chalmers University of Technology ; Director, Ocean Data Factory Sweden and Founder, Peniche Ocean Watch Initiative (POW) Professor of Strategy, Management of Digitalization, in the Entrepreneurship and Strategy Division, ; Director, and Founder, Linus Torvalds , Creator of Linux and Git , Creator of Jim Zemlin , Executive Director, The Linux Foundation Additional keynote speakers will be announced soon. Registration (in-person) is offered at the price of US$1,000 through August 23. Registration to attend virtually is $25. Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount off registration and can contact [email protected] to request a member discount code. Health and Safety In-person attendees will be required to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination or provide a negative COVID-19 test to attend, and will need to comply with all on-site health measures, in accordance with The Linux Foundation Code of Conduct . To learn more, visit the Health & Safety webpage. Event Sponsors Open Source Summit Europe 2022 is made possible thanks to our sponsors , including Diamond Sponsors: AWS, Google and IBM, Platinum Sponsors: Huawei, Intel and OpenEuler, and Gold Sponsors: Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Codethink, Docker, Mend, NGINX, Red Hat, and Styra. For information on becoming an event sponsor, click here or email us . Press Members of the press who would like to request a press pass to attend should contact Kristin O'Connell . ABOUT THE LINUX FOUNDATION Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 2,950 members. The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, Hyperledger, RISC-V, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at https://linuxfoundation.org/ . The Linux Foundation Events are where the world's leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world's largest shared technologies. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter , LinkedIn , and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements. The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage . Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Media Contact Kristin O'Connell The Linux Foundation [email protected] SOURCE The Linux Foundation Renowned Houston trial lawyer selects Emily Smith, John MacVane, and Leah Graham to help lead Houston firm HOUSTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Rusty Hardin & Associates, LLP is pleased to announce it has named Emily Smith, John MacVane, and Leah Graham as new partners at the Houston-based civil and criminal litigation firm. "I would comfortably go anywhere in the country to try a case with these three attorneys," said Rusty Hardin. "Their constant loyalty to their clients, their impeccable ability to anticipate what a client or case needs, and just sheer talent all make me confident that I can rely on them in every respect." Rusty Hardin & Associates, LLP has named Emily Smith, John MacVane, and Leah Graham as new partners at the Houston-based civil and criminal litigation firm. Ms. Smith, who joined Rusty Hardin & Associates in 2019, handles complex commercial litigation and business disputes involving a variety of issues, including contract, fiduciary duty, negligence, trade secrets, oil and gas, and bankruptcy. Her previous experience includes an internship with Judge Lisabeth Tabor Hughes of the Kentucky Supreme Court, as well as one with Judge Jennifer Elrod of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She also served as a judicial clerk for Chief Bankruptcy Judge Jeff Bohm of the Southern District of Texas. Ms. Smith has been named to the list of Ones to Watch by Best Lawyers in America in both 2021 and 2022. Mr. MacVane's extensive experience in both criminal and civil matters allows him to focus his practice on civil cases with possible criminal implications. His practice also includes criminal defense, catastrophic personal injury, and commercial litigation. Before joining Rusty Hardin & Associates in 2019, Mr. MacVane served as an assistant federal public defender in the Southern District of Texas. He also clerked for Texas Supreme Court Justice Brett Busby when Judge Busby was on the 14TH Court of Appeals and also for New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice Linda S. Dalianis. Ms. Graham joined Rusty Hardin & Associates in 2019 and focuses her practice on high-stakes business disputes both at trial and in arbitration. Her experience includes matters involving construction, sports, employment, oil and gas, real estate, environmental, product liability, intellectual property, partnership, trustee and fiduciary matters, and personal injury claims. Ms. Graham has been recognized as a Texas Rising Star by Thomson Reuters every year since 2018 and was named to the 2019 and 2020 list of Top 40 Under 40 Civil Plaintiff Trial Lawyers by National Trial Lawyers. "The beauty of these promotions is that our clients will not see a difference at all Leah, John, and Emily have been operating on a partner level for some time now," said Mr. Hardin. "This is confirmation of just how much we value them and their work. They are just great lawyers." Rusty Hardin & Associates, LLP has built a solid reputation for taking on the causes of its clients and obtaining favorable results in commercial litigation, white-collar criminal defense, plaintiffs' personal injury, appellate matters, and general civil and criminal litigation. To learn more about the firm's representative matters, visit https://www.rustyhardin.com/. Media Contact: April Arias [email protected] 800-559-4534 SOURCE Rusty Hardin & Associates, LLP Team of cold chain industry leaders eyes the Northeast as they break ground on their third location this year. HAZLETON, Pa., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Arcadia Cold joined local Hazleton and Pennsylvania state officials, as well as Saxum Real Estate, to celebrate the groundbreaking for their Hazleton Cold Storage Facility. The site is located west of Hazleton off US Interstate 81 in the heart of the Northeast distribution market. The event was hosted by the CAN DO of Greater Hazleton. Team of cold chain industry leaders eyes the Northeast as they break ground on their third location this year. Tweet this Arcadia Cold joined local Hazleton and Pennsylvania state officials, as well as Saxum Real Estate, to celebrate the groundbreaking for their Hazleton Cold Storage Facility. The Arcadia Cold Team Shovels Dirt on Hazleton Project From Left to Right: JD Schwefler, Jimmy Widjaja, Andy Janson, Chris LaFaire, Chris Hughes, Chris Koenigshof, Burnie Taylor, PJ Chipman This event marks Arcadia's third groundbreaking of their national cold storage platform to be developed in strategic markets across the United States. Hazleton's location will be a frozen and refrigerated distribution center facility with 30,000 pallet positions designed to support high-volume throughput handling services. The site will serve as a hub for the Northeast states with access to large metropolitan markets of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC and the New England region. Hazleton is a growing market in Pennsylvania and a natural consolidation distribution location. This facility will play an important role in allowing Arcadia to serve food manufacturing and end user demand more quickly and efficiently. "The Arcadia Team is very excited to announce our third cold storage location in Hazleton, PA as part of our larger national greenfield platform strategy. We anticipate leveraging this strategic site to support our customers' need for a quality Northeastern U.S. regional distribution hub that offers a variety of value-added service offerings in this 30,000 pallet facility. We are grateful to CAN DO for their support in helping to bring this project to fruition and most importantly, for helping to bring new, quality jobs to Hazleton and the surrounding area." said Arcadia Cold CEO Chris Hughes. Speakers at this event included Chris Hughes , CEO & President of Arcadia Cold , Anthony Rinaldi, Founder & Managing Principal of Saxum Real Estate, Senator David Argall, Pennsylvania State Senate, 29th District, Robert Schnee, Pennsylvania House of Representatives, 116th District, Steve Kettelberger, Owner of Blue Rock Construction, Jim Montone, Chairman of the Hazle Township Board of Supervisors, and Mary Malone President of the Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce. "CAN DO is excited to welcome Arcadia Cold Storage and Logistics to the Humboldt Industrial Park," said CAN DO President, Joe Lettiere, "Food manufacturing and food related industry has been a strategic focus for our organization for many years, making this locate mutually beneficial. Most importantly, Arcadia's plan to hire between 80-90 employees at family sustaining wages will positively impact the Greater Hazleton community as a whole." "One of our top priorities is new, family-sustaining jobs for our region," said State Senator David Argall, "Thanks to the advocacy efforts of CAN DO, this new facility will create 80 to 90 new jobs just the latest of thousands of new jobs brought to the area in recent years. Thank you to Saxum Real Estate, Blue Rock Construction, and Arcadia Cold Storage and Logistics for this great investment in Luzerne County." About Arcadia Cold: Established in 2021, Arcadia specializes in providing third-party handling, storage, distribution, and value-added services to the food industry. Arcadia Cold bridges the innovation and supply gaps within the cold industrial industry in the United States through modern cold storage warehouse development expertise and proven operational "know-how". Its strategic development partnership with Saxum Real Estate offers a collaborative approach to the design-build and operation model that provides for efficient construction of fully temperature convertible buildings, coupled with modern supply chain technology innovations for its valued customers in the "New Age of Cold Chain". www.arcadiacold.com SOURCE Arcadia Cold LEAWOOD, Kan., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Torch.AI, pioneers of data infrastructure AI, announced today the U.S. Navy has awarded a new 5-year agreement to provide next generation AI and data infrastructure software capabilities for the U.S. Navy's Digital Warfare Office (DWO). U.S. Navy The new artificial intelligence ecosystem will provide AI and machine learning capabilities for Warfighting Naval Forces. The ecosystem is designed to equip the Navy to better operate and maintain their operational fleet across a complex, siloed IT environment including cloud compute, storage, hardware, and cloud edge devices used for data lakes at unclassified, secret, and top-secret levels. Torch.AI will provide acquisition, transformation, and enrichment of proprietary sensor, vessel, and other complex maritime data sources from multiple U.S. Navy platforms into commercially consistent data payloads for ubiquitous data access. The systems also support the delivery of data pipelines for the Navy's AI/Machine Learning (ML) personnel responsible for conducting AI/ML algorithm and model development. "We've made tremendous strides in advancing the Navy's maritime capabilities with data and AI," says Brad Kolarov, Torch.AI's VP of Mission Systems and former Navy SEAL. "It's exciting to see the impact we can have on the organization and military personnel, and we're thrilled to be able to support this mission." The Navy established the Digital Warfare Office in December 2016 to lead efforts to better utilize the vast amounts of data produced each day and to further advance its competitive advantage across all mission areas. The U.S. Navy is the largest and most powerful navy in the world with nearly 350,000 active-duty personnel, 300 deployable combat vessels and 3,000 operational aircraft. "The speed of data dictates the demands of today's multi-domain battlefield. Machine speed and machine scale are critical advantages needed today," added Brian Weaver, Founder and CEO of Torch.AI. "We are extremely excited to continue to expand our support of the national security mission with Torch.AI's proven expertise in data infrastructure and mission-ready AI solutions. We are all in." About Torch.AI Torch.AI is the data infrastructure AI company with headquarters in Kansas City and offices in Washington, DC. The company is pioneering the use of AI to process data in-flight, radically evolving analytic and operational capabilities in any IT environment. Torch.AI's products and people are currently actively supporting operations in industries including financial services, construction and engineering, healthcare, and the US Department of Defense, US Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies. To learn more about the company, visit Torch.AI. Media contact: [email protected] SOURCE Torch.AI PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Berger Montague is investigating securities fraud allegations on behalf of investors who purchased the securities Unity Software Inc. ("Unity" or the "Company") (NYSE: U) between March 5, 2021 and May 10, 2022 (the "Class Period"). If you purchased the securities of Unity during the Class Period, would like to discuss Berger Montague's investigation, or have questions concerning your rights or interests, please contact attorneys Andrew Abramowitz at [email protected] or (215) 875-3015, or Michael Dell'Angelo at [email protected] or (215) 875-3080 or visit: https://investigations.bergermontague.com/unity-software-inc/ Whistleblowers: Anyone with non-public information regarding Unity is encouraged to confidentially assist Berger Montague's investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under this program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to thirty percent (30%) of recoveries obtained by the SEC. For more information, contact us. On May 10, 2022, after the market closed, Unity announced its first quarter 2022 financial results. The Company reduced its fiscal 2022 guidance due to challenges with monetization products. Specifically, "a fault in [the Company's] platform . . . resulted in reduced accuracy for [its] Audience Pinpointer tool, a revenue expensive issue given that [the] Pinpointer tool experienced significant growth post the IDFA changes." On this news, Unity's stock fell $17.83 per share 37% to close at $30.30 per share on May 11, 2022. The complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants failed to disclose to investors that: (1) deficiencies in Unity's product platform reduced the accuracy of the Company's machine learning technology; (2) the foregoing was likely to have a material negative impact on the Company's revenues; and (3) accordingly, Unity had overstated its commercial and financial prospects for 2022. Berger Montague, with offices in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and San Diego, has been a pioneer in securities class action litigation since its founding in 1970. Berger Montague has represented individual and institutional investors for over five decades and serves as lead counsel in courts throughout the United States. Contacts Andrew Abramowitz, Senior Counsel Berger Montague (215) 875-3015 [email protected] Michael Dell'Angelo, Executive Shareholder Berger Montague (215) 875-3080 [email protected] SOURCE Berger Montague WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Department of Commerce today issued its final determination in the third annual review of softwood lumber imports from Canada. The total duty rate of 8.59% confirms yet again that Canadian lumber imports are unfairly traded into the U.S. market. "The trade laws duties announced today by the Commerce Department will help offset Canada's unfair trade practices," said Andrew Miller, Chairman of the U.S. Lumber Coalition and CEO of Stimson Lumber. "The benefit of the trade cases against Canada are clear," added Miller. "Trade law enforcement boosts American manufacturing and results in more U.S. lumber being produced by U.S. workers to build U.S. homes." U.S. sawmills have invested heavily to expand capacity since the trade cases were filed in 2016. The domestic industry has produced an additional 15 billion board feet of lumber through 2021, averaging 3 billion a year of additional output. This is enough lumber to build over 1 million single-family homes. The U.S. Lumber Coalition supports the continued enforcement of the U.S. trade laws to strengthen domestic supply chains by allowing American companies to invest and increase the overall supply of made-in-America lumber and will continue to aggressively pursue the enforcement of the trade laws. The U.S. industry remains open to a new U.S.Canada softwood lumber trade agreement if and when Canada can demonstrate that it is serious about negotiations for an agreement that addresses Canada's unfair trade practices which are harming U.S. producers, workers, and timberland holders. Until then, the U.S. Lumber Coalition fully supports the continued strong enforcement of the U.S. trade laws to address Canada's unfair softwood lumber trade practices. About the U.S. Lumber Coalition The U.S. Lumber Coalition is an alliance of large and small softwood lumber producers from around the country, joined by their employees, and woodland owners, working to address Canada's unfair lumber trade practices. Our goal is to serve as the voice of the American lumber community, and effectively address Canada's unfair softwood lumber trade practices, including its gross underpricing of timber. For more information, please visit the Coalition's website at www.uslumbercoalition.org. CONTACT: Zoltan van Heyningen [email protected] | 202-805-9133 SOURCE The U.S. Lumber Coalition NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- After signing a conditional acquisition agreement in July 2022, Wavestone announces the acquisition of PEN Partnership, a UK-based consulting firm. PEN Partnership: an independent business consulting firm specializing in Financial Services and Life Sciences The project fits perfectly with Wavestone's strategic plan 'Impact': to accelerate the firm's external growth. Tweet this Wavestone and Pen Partnership have joined forces. Another boost in global development, Pen Partnerships management consulting skills combined with Wavestones technological expertise will offer a first-class proposition to tackle clients transformation challenges. Founded in 2012, PEN Partnership has established itself as a trusted partner for its clients operating across the Financial Services and Life Sciences sectors. PEN Partnership serves some of the most reputable organizations within these industries across four core areas of expertise: Customer Experience & Digital, Operations & Automation, Data & Technology and Change Delivery & Capability. Another boost in global development, aligned to Wavestone's Impact strategic plan The project fits perfectly with Wavestone's strategic plan 'Impact': to accelerate the firm's external growth in its target geographies of the US and the UK. The acquisition is a great opportunity to enrich Wavestone's overall value proposition for its clients across geographical markets. The addition of PEN Partnership's expertise in Financial Services and Life Sciences to Wavestone's technological capabilities will offer a first-class proposition to help tackle clients' transformation challenges across the two industries. Chris Gibson, PEN Partnership's CEO, comments: "Wavestone and PEN Partnership together make a powerful combination, and this is really great news for our clients and staff. The two companies provide complementary services and share very similar corporate culture and values. Wavestone has an ambitious growth plan, and I am very excited for the PEN team to play a key role in building a world-class consultancy." Reza Maghsoudnia, Strategic Development Director of Wavestone, says "This merger enhances Wavestone's ability to deliver global transformation programs. With PEN Partnership, we can accelerate our growth and deepen our value proposition in Financial Services and Life Sciences globally. It's clear from our discussions with PEN Partnership that there are synergies not only in the services provided, but the company culture. There is strong alignment on topics such as CSR, Diversity & Inclusion, as well as Great Place to Work, and this is a key success factor for our project." About Wavestone In a world where knowing how to drive transformation is the key to success, Wavestone's mission is to inform and guide large companies and organizations in their most critical transformations, with the ambition of a positive outcome for all stakeholders. It's an ambition anchored in the firm's DNA and embodied in the signature "The Positive Way." Wavestone draws on about 4,000 employees across Europe where it is a leading independent player in consulting, the United States and Asia. Wavestone is listed on Euronext Paris and recognized as a Great Place to Work. Wavestone US Reza MAGHSOUDNIA Strategic Development Director | US Lead Tel.: +1 610-341-9753 PEN Partnership Chris GIBSON CEO Tel.: +44 20 3515 8920 SOURCE Wavestone MINNETONKA, Minn., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Waymore Casino of Panama has contracted with Table Trac, Inc. (OTCQX: TBTC) to be their casino management system. The Waymore Casino joins the growing number of South American casinos that have chosen Table Trac's casino management system. "We are excited about the array of new options we will have with the CasinoTrac systems; additionally, we are pleased to be partnering with TableTrac on this project and our future projects as we grow our operations." Waymore Casino Executive Team. Chad Hoehne, President of Table Trac, Inc. said, "I am very pleased to be serving the Waymore Casino and helping a new casino reach its full potential. They will soon see that the CasinoTrac system is easy to use and easy to own." About Table Trac, Inc. Founded in 1995, Table Trac, Inc. designs, develops and sells casino information and management systems. The company has over 145 systems installed in North, South, and Central America, as well as the Caribbean. More information is available at http://www.tabletrac.com/ . Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve numerous risks and uncertainties. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors, including those set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For more information: Robert Siqveland Table Trac, Inc. 952-548-8877 SOURCE Table Trac, Inc. LONDON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- WeGift, the industry leader in digital rewards and incentives, announced a number of significant achievements in the first half of 2022. In the first six months of the year, the WeGift team added more than 120 major, beloved brands to its catalog, signed more new clients than in the entire previous year and passed 100 full-time employees. "After closing our best year ever in 2021, we've taken things to a whole new level in 2022," said Aron Alexander, CEO and founder. "Payouts from organizations to individuals have long been slow, cumbersome and expensive. We're on a mission to fix that. The customers, partners and team members we've added in the first half of this year will help us accelerate our growth and bring more innovation to an industry that sorely needs it." The WeGift team added more than 120 major brands, signed more new clients than in all of 2021 and passed 100 employees. Tweet this In the last six months, WeGift has added some of the world's most-beloved brands to its catalog, including AirBnB, Nike, Instacart, Dunkin', Dick's Sporting Goods, Aldi and many more. In many cases, WeGift is the first and only gift-card platform to integrate with these brands, adding to an industry-leading catalog that offers rewards and incentives that will delight any recipient. "WeGift continues to be a major partner," said Joel Tobias, director of Strategic Alliances at Perkbox. "The integration was simple, and we saw an impact almost immediately. We've increased our available brands, continue to improve customer satisfaction, and cut our administrative time significantly. Working with WeGift has been nothing short of a huge win." Customers are taking notice, as WeGift's client roster has exploded. In the first half of the year, notable new customers included WishList, ThanksBen, Xoxoday and Wonde, among many others. The company has signed more new customers in the first six months of the year than were added in all of 2021, while existing customers are extending their engagements and renewing agreements. Organizations of all types are tapping WeGift's network to underpin rewards through their platforms, as a solution for their own reward and incentive needs or both. WeGift clients report significant time savings, cost reductions and improved results upon adding WeGift functionality via API integration. Whether they're using WeGift to reward high performers, power marketing campaigns, drive customer loyalty or disburse funds, powerful reporting tools and an intuitive UX lead to happy users and happier recipients. WeGift solutions support rewards of all types, including retail gift cards, prepaid cards, subscriptions, charitable donations and more, available in 30 countries and 18 currencies. They are aggressively hiring across the organization. To join WeGift - whether as a customer, prospective employee or to be added to the reward catalog - please visit https://www.wegift.io . About WeGift Sending disbursements, incentives, and non-cash payouts is manual, expensive, time-consuming, and error prone. WeGift changes this by removing friction from the payouts process, so businesses can instantly transfer value to build relationships with the people they care about. Operating in more than 30 countries, and dozens of languages and currencies, WeGift's digital payouts platform and open API solution is directly integrated into every brand on its platform, offering corporate buyers the only true global network with direct access to more than 1,300 brands. Habito, Perkbox, Seated, Sodexo, Vodafone, and Vouchercodes all rely on WeGift to digitally engage their audiences. About Perkbox Perkbox is the global benefits and rewards platform that allows companies to care for, connect with and celebrate their employees, no matter where they are and what they want. With over 10 years' experience, Perkbox is trusted by more than 4,500 companies across 51 countries and counting. Its location agnostic platform helps companies with diverse and dispersed workforces harmonise their Employee Value Proposition (EVP) keeping each employee happy, healthy, and motivated. Media Contact: [email protected] SOURCE WeGift Pelosis visit to Taiwan provocative, unjustified 16:32, August 04, 2022 By Zamir Ahmed Awan ( People's Daily Online Following the visit of the U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to China's Taiwan region, the emerging situation there has become quite tense. Despite advanced warnings, the U.S. politician went ahead with her visit and offended 1.4 billion Chinese. The fervent anger and anxiety of the Chinese public are now well understood. All peace-loving nations and individuals stand with China and condemn U.S. House Speaker Pelosi's actions. On August 2, in disregard of China's solemn representations and firm opposition, U.S. House Speaker Pelosi went ahead with her visit to China's Taiwan region. The move has gravely violated the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-U.S. joint communiques, gravely undermined China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, gravely impacted the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and sent a seriously wrong signal to "Taiwan independence" separatist forces. China firmly opposes and strongly condemns the move. There is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory. The Government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. The one-China principle is the premise for the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the U.S., and is also the political foundation of China-U.S. relations. The U.S. has made a solemn commitment to China on the Taiwan question, but in its actual actions, it has constantly upgraded substantive relations and official exchanges with Taiwan, emboldened and supported "Taiwan independence" separatist forces, attempted to use Taiwan to contain China, and severely undermined the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese government and the Chinese people have taken and will continue to take resolute and forceful measures to firmly safeguard China's sovereignty, security and development interests. The Taiwan question bears on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. For China, there is zero room for compromise and not an inch to give. The Anti-Secession Law has made clear stipulations on major issues including upholding the one-China principle, deterring separatist moves toward "Taiwan independence" and opposing interference in the Taiwan question by external forces. The stance of the Chinese government and the Chinese people on the Taiwan question has been consistent. It is the firm will of over 1.4 billion Chinese people to resolutely safeguard China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Any attempt to obstruct China's complete reunification and great national rejuvenation is doomed to fail. Being the Iron Clad and closest friend of China, Pakistan always stood with China at all times. At this moment, Pakistan reaffirms its strong commitment to the one-China principle and firmly supports Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. Pakistan is deeply concerned about the evolving situation across the Taiwan Strait, which has serious implications for regional peace and stability. The world is already reeling from a critical security situation due to the Ukraine conflict, with destabilizing implications for international food and energy security. The world cannot afford another crisis that has negative consequences for global peace, security, and the economy. Pakistan strongly believes that inter-state relations should be based on mutual respect, non-interference in internal affairs, and the peaceful resolution of issues by upholding the principles of the UN Charter, international law, and bilateral agreements. The people of Pakistan share the Chinese peoples feelings and sentiments and support Chinese sovereignty. It is hoped that the U.S. will understand Chinese feelings and public sentiments and avoid any further confrontation. The Chinese people are by their nature peace-loving and have demonstrated restraint and patience during the last four decades, with China having not fought a single war throughout this period. China believes in the peaceful resolution of all disputes and differences through diplomatic and political means and has exercised the same in the past. China has been a net contributor to global stability and security throughout its history. However, if war is imposed on the country, China has the right to respond appropriately. China has already attained a certain level of development in all dimensions and has now reached a stage where it cannot be coerced so easily. World opinion supports China, believing that U.S. House Speaker Pelosis actions are provocative and unjustified. Zamir Ahmed Awan is a non-resident fellow with the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) and a sinologist at the National University of Sciences and Technology in Pakistan. E-mail: [email protected] The opinions expressed in this article reflect those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of People's Daily Online. (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League released a report which shows that hazardous air quality during the Weaver Fertilizer Plant fire was downplayed. The report Winston-Salem Weaver Fertilizer Plant Fire - Analysis of Publicly Disseminated Air Quality Information During Facility Fire Incident highlights instances when local officials told the public that the air quality was okay and pollutants were just "irritants" when, in fact, levels of Particulate Matter 2.5 were in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's hazardous and very unhealthy categories. It has been six months since the Weaver fertilizer plant fire which began on the evening of January 31. BREDL has recently received EPA air quality data through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which show that hazardous air quality conditions were downplayed during this industrial incident. We are still waiting for information from a March 22, 2022 open records request with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. The report compares official statements to the then current air quality data, specifically PM 2.5. This air quality data was available to the fire command center in real time but was not available to the general public. Once EPA set up temporary air monitors around the perimeter of the fire, 29 hours into the incident, the PM 2.5 readings were well into the hazardous category. These air monitors became operational around midnight on Wednesday, February 2. Five hours later during a press conference officials stated that "all levels have been in the acceptable range". While, in fact, PM 2.5 concentrations were as high as 9200 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m3) at the temporary air monitor located at the Wake Forest University police station. EPA community action hazardous conditions start at a concentration of 500 ug/m3. Mark Barker, author of the BREDL Report, said, "On the afternoon of February 2 a Wake Forest University alert stated that the EPA indicated air quality readings on and near campus posed no threat to individual health and was safe to breathe. However, the on campus EPA air quality data indicated hazardous and very unhealthy PM 2.5 levels." PM 2.5 has long been associated with significant health effects especially impacting respiratory and heart conditions. The community within a one-mile radius of the Weaver facility has a high prevalence of asthma and heart disease according to EPA's EJScreen tool. Barker said, "Our analysis leads us to make several recommendations for local, state and federal officials during industrial incidents: be transparent in reporting air quality and associated health impacts, make air quality data available to the public, include an air quality expert in incident press briefings and statements, utilize EJScreen to identify vulnerable communities, and incorporate temporary air monitors into existing EPA current air quality maps." The BREDL report is available online at www.bredl.org/reports.htm . Contact: Mark Barker (540) 342-5580 (landline) (540) 525-5241 (mobile) [email protected] SOURCE Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League Inc The global women intimate care market is projected to be valued at US$ 45.84 Bn by 2031 Rise in the working women population globally is expected to drive the sales growth in the market Players are focusing on fulfilling rising demand for women intimate care products manufactured using natural ingredients WILMINGTON, Del., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The global women intimate care market is estimated to register growth at a CAGR of 5% during the forecast period of 2022 to 2031, according to a research report by Transparency Market Research (TMR). The global female population with child/children is being seen inclining toward the use of different types of hygiene products in order to maintain their health. Moreover, there has been increase in understanding among this population pool pertaining to the importance of hygiene. These factors are resulting into the expansion of the global women intimate care market, note analysts at TMR. In the recent years, there has been rise in the demand for different types of women intimate care products across the globe. Hence, manufacturers in the global women intimate care market are focused on strengthening their production capabilities in order to cater to the rising demand for their products. This factor is boosting the growth in the women intimate care market, states the TMR assessment. The women intimate care market in Asia Pacific is projected to expand rapidly during the forecast period owing to many factors including the presence of many emerging economies such as India and China in the region. Furthermore, the Asia Pacific market for women intimate care is foreseen to expand due to an increase in the working women population in the region and rise in understanding about the importance of hygiene among women population of the region. Request Sample Report at - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=61041 Women Intimate Care Market: Key Findings Different types of intimate feminine hygiene products including intimate wash and cleansers are gaining immense popularity across the globe. Considering the rising demand for such products, companies operating in the market are focusing on the production of women's intimate care products including best intimate wash for women using natural ingredients. Moreover, manufacturers are concentrating on the incorporation of no or less harmful chemical ingredients in their products. Such efforts are likely to play a key role in the rapid expansion of the global women intimate care market during the forecast period. Major women's intimate care product companies are increasing R&Ds in order to develop best products for intimate hygiene including the pH-balancing intimate cleansers, sprays, and creams using natural components including natural oils. This aside, leading companies in the market are focusing on the use of acquisition strategies in order to maintain their prominent positions. Such initiatives are expected to help in the rapid growth of the global women intimate care market, which is estimated to gain a valuation of US$ 45.84 Bn by 2031. Ask for References - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=ARF&rep_id=61041 Women Intimate Care Market: Growth Boosters Surge in the use of intimate care products by working female population across the globe is boosting the demand opportunities in the women intimate care market Rising efforts of women intimate care manufacturers in order to spread awareness pertaining to significance of intimate care hygiene is propelling the market Increase in the use of organic intimate care products globally is fueling the growth in the women intimate care market Make an Enquiry before Buying - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=EB&rep_id=61041 Women Intimate Care Market: Key Players Some of the key players profiled in the report are: Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc. Procter & Gamble Co. Kimberly-Clark Corporation Unicharm Corporation Elif Cosmetics Ltd. Edgewell Personal Care Zeta Farmaceutici S.p.A. Nolken Hygiene Products Gmbh Ciaga Emilia Personal Care The Himalaya Drug Company Nua Woman Kao Corporation TZMO SA (Torunskie Zaklady Materialow Opatrunkowych S.A.) BODYWISEUK Women Intimate Care Market Segmentation Product Type Intimate Wash Liners Oils Masks Moisturizers & Creams Hair Removal Razors Wax Depilatories Powder Wipes Gels Foams Exfoliants Mousse Mists Sprays Others (E-products , etc.) Age Group 12-19 Years 20-25 Years 26-40 Years 41-50 Years 51 and Above Price Low Medium High User Type Women with Child Women with no Child Distribution Channel Online Company-owned websites E-commerce websites Offline Hypermarket /Supermarkets Pharmacy Beauty Salon Others Regions Covered North America Europe Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa & South America Consumer Goods Industry Research Reports Period Panties Market- Period Panties Market is expected to reach US$ 275.6 Mn by the end of 2031 Feminine Hygiene Products Market- Feminine Hygiene Products Market is expected to surpass the value of US$ 127.6 Bn by the end of 2031 Hair Removal Products Market- Hair Removal Products Market is expected to surpass the value of US$ 1.8 Bn by the end of 2031 Tampons Market- Tampons Market is expected to surpass the value of US$ 8.3 Bn by the end of 2031 Hair Care Products Market - The global hair care products market is expected to cross the value of US$ 72 Bn by the end of 2031, expand at a CAGR of 5.1% from 2021 to 2031 Baby Diaper Market - The global baby diaper market is projected to reach value of US$ 84.1 Bn by 2027, at an average annual growth rate of 6.4% during the forecast period Organic Personal Care Market - Organic Personal Care Market to expand at a CAGR of 9.2 percent during the assessment period of 2019-2027 Ceramic Sanitary Ware Market- Ceramic Sanitary Ware Market to Exceed Valuation of US$ 42.91 Bn by 2031 About Transparency Market Research Transparency Market Research registered at Wilmington, Delaware, United States, is a global market intelligence company provides syndicated research reports and business consulting services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insights for thousands of decision makers. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools & techniques to gather and analyze information. Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports. For More Research Insights on Leading Industries, Visit our YouTube channel-https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8e-z-g23-TdDMuODiL8BKQ Contact Us: Rohit Bhisey Transparency Market Research Inc. CORPORATE HEADQUARTER DOWNTOWN, 1000 N. West Street, Suite 1200, Wilmington, Delaware 19801 USA Tel: +1-518-618-1030 USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Website: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Blog: https://tmrblog.com Email: [email protected] Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1682871/TMR_Logo_Logo.jpg SOURCE Transparency Market Research Acclaimed digital marketing, publishing and design agency Azam Marketing is celebrating its milestone silver anniversary in August with twenty-five philanthropic donations. LONDON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Since its founding in the embryonic days of the world wide web in August 1997, Azam has grown into one of the most renowned internet marketing agencies in the world. Azam Marketing has served 1,088 clients over the quarter of a century, including Coca-Cola, Disney, Nike, Swatch, Google, Dell, IBM, and Hilton, and won numerous prestigious industry awards for producing exceptional results. Azam Marketing has released this new design to celebrate its milestone 25th anniversary New design by Azam Marketing's creative team to commemorate the company's extraordinary 25th anniversary The company has expanded its services from specialising in the 1990s in affiliate marketing, search engine optimisation and web design to, in the 2000s, email marketing and CRM, and, in the 2010s, social media marketing, mobile app development and business consultancy. To mark the anniversary, Nadeem Azam, the Founder and CEO of Azam Marketing, has announced the company is donating USD $30,650 (GBP 25,000 / EUR 29,870) to twenty-five charities selected by its current and former staff, consultants and clients. The registered charities are in the following sectors: social welfare, education, medical research, international development, animal welfare and the environment. The company has received congratulatory messages from dozens of sources on its landmark birthday. "We would like to offer Azam Marketing our sincerest congratulations on their seminal 25th anniversary," states Azim Suleman, Principal Solicitor at Bromptons Solicitors. "We have fortunately had the continuous benefit of Azam Marketing's professional services for over 10 years. Azam Marketing has become an indispensable and integral part of our growth and success by reason of the sheer hard work and dedication of their team, enabling us to enjoy a highly effective online presence." In honor of its silver anniversary, the agency has released a revelatory showreel video and articles exposing titbits from its experiences over the years. Find them at: https://www.azam.info . About Azam Marketing Azam Marketing is the world's oldest existing internet marketing, design and publishing agency. The agency has generated over $1.4 billion in sales for clients and has specialist divisions dedicated to social media, search, email and performance marketing, as well as web design and development, mobile app development and business consultancy. Visit Azam Marketing at https://www.azam.net for further details. For more information contact: Rob Miller, Communications Director. Email: [email protected], telephone: +44 (0) 20 33 55 4334. SOURCE Azam Marketing MONTREAL, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday evening, WowWee, a family-owned toymaker responsible for the award-winning Fingerlings line, was made aware that Roblox Corporation filed a lawsuit against our company. WowWee believes that Roblox's allegations are completely meritless and looks forward to vigorously defending its position, product, and brand. WowWee created My Avastars dolls to bring kids offline in a hybrid model that uses the digital attributes of the increasingly popular metaverse and avatar customization into physical play. WowWee specifically designed the dolls to appeal to 712-year-old girls, a demographic that is far too often overlooked and excluded from the metaverse. Since Roblox began as a platform that encouraged collaboration with its users (to Roblox's benefit), WowWee believed My Avastars would be a welcome addition to the Roblox platform. However, in June 2022, a week after WowWee publicly announced the creation of its My Avastars dolls, Roblox changed its terms of use to the detriment of the creative community. A week later, Roblox sent a cease-and-desist letter to WowWee threatening legal action if the company continued with the launch of My Avastars dolls. WowWee has spent several weeks trying to resolve this disagreement amicably and in good faith and without needing to resort to contentious litigation. Following the cease-and-desist letter, WowWee voluntarily disassociated My Avastars from Roblox. WowWee is a company that is focused on designing and developing toys to astonish our costumers' imaginations, whereas Roblox's actions today show that it is an organization driven by profit and power. Roblox's lawsuit stands in stark contrast to the values of creativity, community, and companionship that our My Avastars dolls are designed to promote. WowWee's focus remains on kids rather than courts. Unfortunately, Roblox's actions are another example of a company using litigation as a growth strategy. Despite being a publicly traded corporate giant with a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream, it is targeting a family business whose goal is to provide children with another way to express their individuality through play. Yet, as parents have been teaching their children for generations, giving into a bully encourages them to bully again. Today, WowWee intends to take a stand for the creative community. WowWee hopes you join us. SOURCE WowWee NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Xeal, a leading provider of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations and smarter technology for the multifamily industry, and Harrison Street, one of the leading investment management firms exclusively focused on alternative real assets, today announced a partnership under which Xeal will install more than 300 EV charging stations at select Harrison Street senior housing, student housing, life science, and medical office properties located in California, Massachusetts, Texas, and Virginia. Harrison Street selected Xeal's vanguard all-in-one EV solution as part of its broader strategy to meet resident and tenant demand for top-tier amenities, including charging stations, and to provide them with the most seamless, reliable and intelligent charging technology. "We are thrilled to assist Harrison Street as they strive to accelerate the deployment of EV chargers at their properties in order to support the explosive growth of electric vehicles. We believe that our EV charging technology and self-reliant communication architecture is the most accessible and dependable choice for their residents and visitors now and in the future," said Alexander (Zander) Isaacson, Co-Founder and CEO at Xeal. "From our vantage point, Harrison Street is not only offering sufficient charging for today's EV drivers, but they're also demonstrating the leadership that if you build it, they will come. This is the type of leadership that will accelerate the trajectory to 100% clean energy." Xeal's charging platform relies on its patent-pending Apollo protocol, which uses encrypted tokens and distributed ledger technology for communication, eliminating the need for costly IT/network infrastructure and upgrades entirely, reducing capex and maximizing ROI. With Xeal's holistic software, drivers gain on-demand charging access and owners can install up to 3x as many charging stations without electrical upgrades. "As a first mover in alternative real asset investing, Harrison Street has long sought to develop and execute on environmental and social best practices that make a positive impact for our employees, tenants, and communities," said Jill Brosig, Managing Director and Chief Impact Officer at Harrison Street. "One of these practices is to significantly reduce carbon emissions. Partnering with Xeal on the initial rollout of more than 300 technologically advanced, highly reliable EV charging stations will allow us to both support and measure avoided emissions from vehicles. As we move toward a net zero carbon economy these types of initiatives help propel our communities into the future." Xeal visually showcases some of its recent deployments with Harrison Street here . ABOUT XEAL Founded in 2019, Xeal is a technology-first electric vehicle (EV) charging company operating at the intersection of mobility, real estate, IoT, and energy. Xeal is building the next generation of EV charging solutions to take the market from 1% to 100% mass adoption. Its core technology, Apollo, is built on a distributed ledger and token technology that is molding the next wave of connected devices beyond EV charging. Xeal is backed by leading climate tech and proptech investors and has been adopted by the nation's largest real estate companies to electrify thousands of parking spaces. The company is on a mission to "stop climate change without bothering people." Since its inception, Xeal has moved at lightning speed working with world class real estate leaders including Lincoln Property Company, Greystar, Related, Toll Brothers, and Bozzuto to accelerate EV infrastructure in the built environment. Xeal plans to release Apollo for other applications in the future to evolve and expand the world of IoT. For more information, please visit www.xealenergy.com . About Harrison St. Harrison Street is one of the leading investment management firms exclusively focused on alternative real assets. Since inception in 2005, the firm has created a series of differentiated investment solutions focused on demographic-driven, needs-based assets. The firm has invested across senior housing, student housing, healthcare delivery, life sciences and storage real estate as well as social and utility infrastructure. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in London, Toronto, San Francisco and Washington D.C., the firm has more than 220-employees and approximately $50 billion in assets under management. Clients of the firm include a global institutional investor base domiciled in North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Harrison Street was awarded Best Places to Work by Pensions & Investments for seven consecutive years (2014-2020) and was recognized by PERE as the 2021 Alternatives Investor of the Year, North America and 2020 Global Alternatives Investor of the Year. For more information, please visit www.harrisonst.com . SOURCE Xeal Evraz PLC (LSE:EVR) reported a 99.5% drop in net profits and saw its cash flow halved in the first half as the Russian steelmaker was hit by falling demand and prices. The company, which was sanctioned by the UK government after the invasion of Ukraine due to its "strategic significance" to Moscow, said the Russian steel industry has been hit "a combination of negative effects from deteriorating market conditions in China and other foreign markets, as well as additional pressure from export restrictions, sanctions, the rouble appreciation and tighter competition". Domestic producers are also experiencing problems with payments from foreign customers, logistics constraints and falling margins. Evraz reported revenues of US$8.1bn in the six months to end-June, an increase of 31% on a year ago, and underlying earnings (EBITDA) rose 19% to US$2.5bn. "This was achieved thanks to higher coal sales prices and better performance of our North American operations, as well as our cost-cutting and productivity improvement initiatives and customer focus efforts," said chief executive Aleksey Ivanov. He acknowledged that "recent geopolitical tensions have given rise to significant corporate governance and operating challenges" for the company, which was also facing headwinds of a strong rouble, declining demand for steel due to the global downturn, and increased competition. Ivanov pointed to "growing worries over the health of the global economy and persistent supply chain challenges" for falling steel demand, while China lockdowns, low margins and rising steel inventory led to a pullback in steel prices. Evraz said it has pushed back the schedules of investment in development projects, but improved its total debt position by US$136mln to just under US$4bn, with net debt at US$3.2bn. In May, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office froze certain assets so no UK citizen or company could do business with the company, saying its Russia-based steel manufacturing and mining operations are "sectors of strategic significance to the government of Russia". Evraz produces 28% of all Russian railway wheels and 97% of rail-tracks in Russia. But the former FTSE 100 company's shares proved very popular among retail investors after they, and other Russia-linked stocks, fell over 90% following the Ukraine invasion. Looking forward, Evraz said a "slight recovery might arrive in the short term if China eases the COVID-19 restrictions and implements its previously announced economic support measures". However, it noted that Chinas intention to keep crude steel output below the 2021 level was a continuing weight on the market, with the country's real estate sector also a headwind, suggesting prices are likely to stay under pressure. Power Metal Resources PLC said a team has been mobilised to the companys Molopo Farms Complex in Botswana to carry out two geophysics surveys of the area, which has the potential to be a large-scale nickel-platinum group element project. The idea is the work carried out by consultants Spectral Geophysics will allow its diamond drilling programme to be precision-targeted when it gets underway in the autumn. The companys own technical experts have compiled all project information into a data room to "underpin forward project development". In a wide-ranging update, PM said final negotiations are underway with Botswana drill contractors for the aforementioned exploration drilling programme. The main next step is planned diamond drilling focused on discovering economic nickel sulphides and following up on the highly positive results from the drill programme completed in early 2021, said chief executive Paul Johnson. To ensure we are optimising drill hole targeting, Spectral Geophysics have been engaged to conduct a geophysics programme, and whilst that continues we are making arrangements for the engagement of drill contractors. Molopo is a priority exploration Project for Power Metal and I look forward to providing further updates to the market on our operational progress and drill plans." Drilling last year intersected nickel-sulphides with individual at grades of up to 1.69% nickel, including 0.55g/t platinum. Artrya Ltd (ASX:AYA) CEO John Barrington and his team are harnessing exponential growth in technological capability to address the largest cause of death in the world coronary artery disease with an AI-powered rapid diagnostic tool. The medtech boss has encountered his fair share of life-changing solutions in his time, with a background in surf-lifesaving and a strong presence in the arts, including as chair of the John Curtin Gallery, past chair of the Perth International Arts Festival, member of the Creative Economy Taskforce and deputy chair of the National Portrait Gallery. He draws a direct line from his ongoing interest in the arts to his current interest in the technology sector: Creativity and human innovation are linked theyre products of the human mind. That creative process of conceiving of the idea, extrapolating, testing and refining whether it be a novel or a poem or a new technology thats human ingenuity at its finest," he says. That ingenuity and ability to conceive of something that adds value to society that wasnt in existence before is almost magical and its endlessly inspiring. Barrington has come full circle from surf-lifesaving to potentially life-saving diagnostic technology. Ive always been a person to follow my passion, he says. We all take a lot out of society and Artrya is a way of giving back. John Barrington has a background in both technology and the arts. Harnessing technology for good Artrya, a medtech start-up deploying artificial intelligence (AI) for the early detection of coronary artery disease, was born when Barrington and co-founder John Konstantopoulos put their heads together to come up with a healthcare idea that would harness the exponential power of technology. Barrington had spent more than a decade in the technology space and written about it extensively. AI is at the core of a wide range of the technologies of the future, he says. The question then is where do you best deploy this to benefit people? In the early 1990s, the late business philosopher Peter Drucker said that technology would benefit two industries above all education and health, Barrington says. We havent seen that uptake thus far, and now is the opportunity for us to exploit tech to the benefit of humanity. We met a clinician, Professor Girish Dwivedi, whose area of research was vulnerable heart plaque and he was able to lend his expertise it came together very well. We saw an opportunity to make a difference in the world, to exploit technology to address a problem that has been around for generations and hasnt been solved. Combating a very common problem Coronary artery disease is the largest cause of death in the world accounting for a staggering one in every three deaths annually and outcomes havent significantly improved in decades. Within coronary arteries there is a soft plaque that is vulnerable to rupture. Its difficult to see with the naked eye and yet highly susceptible, and can kill within minutes. Diagnosis has thus far been tricky and often comes too late to save lives. Enter Artryas flagship asset, Salix a non-invasive, cloud-based software diagnostic for early detection of coronary artery disease. The AI used by Salix can examine imaging at a pixel level and rapidly detect and report the plaque. The technology draws on thousands of computed tomography coronary angiography (CTCA) scans within minutes to detect stenosis (a narrowing or restriction of a blood vessel or valve) and other biomarkers in a patients cardiovascular system, all within minutes. Salix has received Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approval in Australia and Artrya is now in the process of trialling software at sites around Australia. A clinical partnership in the US was recently signed and the company is exploring avenues to move the technology into commercial use. Over in the UK, Salix is the only such product to have been appointed to a more than two-year agreement with the NHS, making the cost-efficient technology available to 1,250 NHS trust hospitals across the UK. The company needs the final chips to fall into place FDA (US) and UKCA (UK) approval but it is working on securing these with its wholly-owned subsidiary in the US, and a clinical advisory board consisting of prominent cardiologists. Addressing the anti-AI bias There has always been a certain scepticism holding society back from embracing AI wholeheartedly. People are reticent to yield to the machines, particularly in an area as sensitive as healthcare. Barrington sees this pushback in his work not only with Artrya but previously as chairman of Anglicare working to provide solutions for disadvantaged people but he believes that a certain willingness to accept the risk is necessary if we are to move towards genuine gains in the health sector at scale. He points to a disability leader who told him it was important to allow people with disability the dignity of risk, saying there was so much potential for technology to improve lives. I hold in my mind that AI develops exponentially, so we need to harness it to the benefit of humans, Barrington says. We cant afford to let it get away from us. Theres a massive shortage of clinicians, increasing expectations of an ageing and educated population, and rising costs of healthcare, he says. This is not sustainable in the long term we need to use AI to address some of these issues. Cost is a huge factor in diagnostics: We are able to assess coronary blood flows off a single CT scan, which would otherwise require an invasive hospital visit, 58% of which are not necessary. Of course, in the US, this means exponential costs. Human endeavour is inspiring Barrington says that the innovative people and the exhilarating pace of change in his line of work inspire him each day. Creating something that hasnt been created before, using technology, is an aspirational endeavour. These same things make the work high stakes and high risk, and require leaders to be fleet of foot because there is a constant balance between taking appropriate risks with shareholder capital while deploying new technology its all about managing that risk appropriately. The space is rapidly changing its important for leaders to move with high velocity while having appropriate risk management in place. With every decision you make youre weighing up upside potential and downside risks in what is a risky environment. Barrington believes there are several key ingredients to a successful small-cap company. The first is delivery: Do what you say you will. Make sure you are addressing a real problem with a differentiated solution, and always continue to innovate. With a start-up environment youre creating as you proceed its a complex system with a lot of interdependencies. Its important to have a strategy, but the other part of it is prioritising and reprioritising accordingly because it is such a dynamic world. Lindian Resources Ltd (ASX:LIN) has a new CEO with Alistair Stephens to step into the role from Monday, August 8, 2022, and his first task will be to oversee the acquisition of Malawi company Rift Valley Resource Developments Limited and its globally significant Kangankunde Rare Earths Project Read more: Lindian Resources snaps up coveted rare earths project in Malawi; shares up 44.5% Stephens, a qualified geologist, has more than 20 years of experience specialising in the critical and strategic commodities sector with emphasis on rare earths and rare metals. However, he brings in excess of 35 years of experience to Lindian, with roles in mine geology, mine planning, metallurgy, advanced processing, marketing and logistics. He also has extensive hands-on experience in the planning and development of project feasibility studies. Arafura role bodes well for Lindian Stephens played an instrumental role in Arafura Resources Ltd (ASX:ARU)s development of the Nolans Bore Rare Earth Project that took ARU from an early-stage exploration group with a market capitalisation of around $4 million to a near $400 million company. He was the managing director of Arufura until 2010. Following his time at Arufura, he delivered the outcomes of a feasibility study for the Kanyika Niobium Project in Malawi, where he managed the project for nine years. Other roles he has held include senior operational and executive roles at companies including Newmont Mining Ltd and Western Mining Resources Ltd and he was part of the establishment of global commodity trading house Enegra Group. Lindian hopes his extensive understanding that is unique in the specialty commodity sector and an advanced strategic tactical perspective to project development and operational implementation can help it take the next step in its operations. I believe that the Kangankunde Project is the best undeveloped rare earth project in the world, with such global significance that it may redefine supply independence in the rare earth market, Stephens said. Having passively studied the Kangankunde project for more than a decade, I am genuinely excited by the opportunity to lead the project development program which we will immediately commence after shareholder approval is secured. "I am honoured to be part of the Lindian team and will work diligently and loyally to deliver shareholder value, and of equal importance, value to our stakeholders in Malawi. Stephens will be tasked, among other things, with: Lindian publicly declaring a JORC-compliant mineral resource for the Kangankunde project by no later than December 31, 2023, with at least 50% of that estimate being in the 'indicated' classification; Lindian publicly releasing the results of a definitive feasibility study and a JORC-compliant ore reserve in respect of the Kangankunde project by no later than December 31, 2024; and Lindian successfully completing the project finance required to commence commercial production at the Kangankunde Project by no later than December 31, 2025. Role transition Lindian has also noted that non-executive chairman Asimwe Kabunga will transition to the role of executive chairman, having been a director of Lindian for five years and having played a pivotal role in securing the acquisition of 100% of the Kangankunde Rare Earths Project, which is subject to shareholder approval. He has an extensive network and a proven track record in the African resources sector identifying quality projects and unlocking their value. Of Stephens appointment, Kabunga said: Im delighted to confirm Alistairs appointment given that he brings almost unrivalled knowledge of the Kangankunde rare earths project to Lindian. "The decision to acquire Kangankunde, which is subject to shareholder approval, was made in part with the understanding that it would require a skilled operations team to develop the asset to its full potential. "In that context, the company is privileged to welcome an executive of Mr Stephens calibre, both in terms of his broader industry experience and specialist knowledge in the rare earths field, and his track record working in Malawi. "The board looks forward to working with Alistair to unlock the value of Kangankunde which we believe is one of the worlds most exciting, rare earths assets. Cookie Policy Overview This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping us understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful. See our Cookie Policy for more information. Moho Resources Ltd (ASX:MOH) is making strong progress with nickel sulphide exploration programs at the Silver Swan North Project in Western Australia. At the Black Swan South Prospect, passive seismic survey and geochemical assays are underway to investigate potential structure or channel development. Meanwhile, at the tenements that are part of an option agreement with Yandal Resources Ltd (ASX:YRL), portable XRF analysis of drill samples is underway to assess potential metal content for nickel-copper-PGE mineralisation. Looking ahead, Moho is planning a diamond drill program to drill below previous RC drilling to follow the southeast plunge of the potential structure or channel development as well as to test potential EM targets. Critical information Moho managing director Ralph Winter said: This next phase of geophysical work at Black Swan South will assist Moho in defining the potential structure or channel development and give the company critical information on vectoring in on the historic Norilsk EM signature. The ultimate aim would be to use this data to plan some strategic diamond holes to target the EM anomaly and also drill deeper to follow the dip of the Komatiite flow towards the southeast. Yandal tenements Moho entered into a binding heads agreement with Yandal Resources on November 11, 2021, giving Moho the exclusive right to access, explore for, own, mine, recover, process and sell all nickel, copper, cobalt and PGEs extracted from 15 granted mining tenements held by Yandal. Moho has identified +-650 geochemical sample pulps to be re-analysed for nickel and PGEs to be integrated into the geochemical model for Silver Swan North. Forward plan Moho will conduct a downhole electromagnetic (DHEM) survey at select recent RC holes and historic diamond holes at the Black Swan South and Wise prospects. Review and interpretation of seismic, DHEM surveys and RC drill data will be used to generate a geological model which will aid the preparation of a diamond drill program. The aim of the drill program is to drill below previous RC drilling and follow the southeast plunge of the potential structure or channel development as well as to test potential EM targets. Emyria Ltd (ASX:EMD) has kicked off a series of human cell-line pre-clinical studies to advance its MDMA-inspired drug discovery partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA). The healthcare stock has engaged the Institute of Respiratory Health (IRH) to conduct the studies as Emyria and UWA continue expanding one of the worlds largest libraries of novel MDMA-inspired analogues. Essentially, IRHs pre-clinical program will evaluate a set of unique analogues suggested to have anti-fibrosis effects but limited neuropsychiatric action, based on early screening results. Emyria has also received the green light from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to transport five high-priority MDMA analogues to the US, paving the way for engagement with leading US-based research bodies and potential partners. Analogues may have potent antifibrotic activity Emyria managing director Dr Michael Winlo said: We are delighted to commence this pre-clinical program with the IRH, a leading translational research group, to examine the anti-fibrosis potential of some of our unique MDMA analogues. Fibrotic diseases represent a major group of unmet medical needs and our early screening results indicate some analogues may have potent antifibrotic activity. Emyrias new drug discovery program, inspired by MDMA, continues to grow via our partnership with the University of Western Australia. We now have three clear therapeutic focus areas fibrotic diseases, next-generation MDMA for drug-assisted therapy and treatments for other neurological conditions and I look forward to updating the market on each preclinical program as it advances. MDMA-inspired analogues Emyria has created and screened more than 125 MDMA-inspired analogues, led by Professor Matt Piggott in partnership with the University of Western Australia. Professor Piggott is an expert in medicinal chemistry and an international leader in modifying MDMA to create novel analogues with therapeutic potential. Based on initial screening, Emyria has identified three potential therapeutic areas for its MDMA-inspired drug discovery program: Treatments for major mental health disorders where more potent and shorter-acting MDMA-like treatments, when given alongside psychological therapy, may offer advantages over standard MDMA in drug-assisted therapy. Treatments for neurological disorders where selective neurological receptor effects are desired. Treatments for nonneurological disorders where selective activity at peripheral (non-brain) targets are of interest. Preclinical studies are now commencing for leading drug candidates in each therapeutic area and the first preclinical program will explore the antifibrotic potential of a priority set of novel MDMA analogues. DEA approval Emyria also received notice from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that a set of five high-priority compounds can be imported into the US. DEA approval is the first key step to initiating work with US-based research institutions and partners, which are exploring the use of psychedelic-assisted therapies as innovative medical treatments. Subsequent to the DEA approval, the team at UWA have begun scaling up the synthesis of the five selected compounds to support further studies. Canada was a digital asset fund hotspot in the past week Crypto asset funds saw total inflows of US$81.1mln in the last week, according to data published by CoinShares, making for a 170% uptick from the previous week. Bitcoin saw US$84.8mln of inflows, bringing the month-to-date (MTD) total up to US$306.3mln. For the first time in five weeks, ProShares Short Bitcoin fund a vehicle betting against the price of Bitcoin saw net outflows of US$2.6mln. This is a good sign that bearish investor sentiment for Bitcoin has definitely reversed. Ethereum funds, however, saw a substantial 86% decline to US$1.1mln from US$8.1mln the week prior; its MTD total currently stands at US$137.9mln. Multi-asset funds continued to witness outflows, this week for a total of US3.7mln, while also Cardano saw outflows of US$700,000. According to CoinShares, the lack of interest in multi-asset funds suggests that investors are becoming more targeted in their investments. Total assets under management across all digital asset funds currently stands at US$32.5bn. The majority of inflows in the last weekly period came from Canada, followed by the US and Germany. Bye Pricewaterhouse, hello Dubai PricewaterhouseCoopers former global head of crypto Henri Arslanian has left his role at the Big Four in search of riches in the middle east. Speaking with the Financial Times, Arslanian explained that he intends to establish digital asset fund Nine Blocks Capital Management in the Gulf city-state following a provisional regulatory approval. The fund will receive US$75mln from its chief backer and main shareholder Nine Masts Capital, a Hong Kong-based hedge fund. Dubai has been pushing to make the city a global crypto leader, having recently announced plans to create 40,000 metaverse-related jobs in the next five years. American Rare Earths Ltd (ASX:ARR) has grown the Halleck Creek Rare Earth project in Wyoming, US, to more than 6,000 acres or 24.5 square kilometres with the addition of the newly staked Bluegrass area, which has demonstrated its potential with surface samples up to 5,065 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxide (TREO). The company collected 71 new surface samples from Bluegrass prospect, returning average assays of 3,051 ppm TREO, 812 ppm magnet rare earth oxides (MREO) and 2,738 ppm light rare earth elements (LREE). On average, the area returned a high-value MREO average of 27% in observed TREO, with very low thorium and uranium penalty elements. Very exciting results Halleck Creek continues to exceed our expectations, American Rare Earth managing director and CEO Chris Gibbs said. These are very exciting results for the company coming soon after the highly encouraging drill results from the maiden drill program completed at Halleck Creek earlier this year. The project continues to grow, and these results demonstrate the potential of Halleck Creek to become one of the major, large scale, rare-earth mines in North America. Read: American Rare Earths returns high-grade rare earth assays from Halleck Creek in Wyoming ARR has interpreted these latest results to be consistent with those from the Red Mountain and Overton Mountain area and believes they demonstrate that the current exploration target has been significantly underestimated. American Rare Earths will now work to expand the existing exploration target and begin drilling for a maiden JORC-compliant resource. Investors have welcomed the news with shares up as much as 9.81% this morning to A$0.28. MicroStrategy shares surge on stepping down of Chief executive Michael Saylor The crypto markets opened fairly flat across the board today, adding 1.3% to bring total market capitalisation up to US$1.08tn. Bitcoin edged slightly over the US$23,000 line, while Ethereum stayed close to US$1,650. Ethereum scaling solution Optimism continued its strong rally with a 25% rise, while Binances US$49bn BNB coin was also among the biggest risers, adding 6.7%. Following Bored Ape Yacht Clubs partnership announcement with Gucci, the NFT project's native token ApeCoin enjoyed a 10% rally to bring its market capitalisation up to US$2.3bn. Crypto.coms US$3.7bn CRO token fell nearly 4% while privacy coin Monero and the Qtum network token were also among the biggest losers on Thursday morning. Among the biggest gainers in the decentralised finance (DeFi) space were 1inch Network with 7.7%, Uniswap with 6.2% and staking platform Lido DAO with 11.5%. However, total value locked across the wider DeFi space did suffer a 2% drop to US$88.4bn. In the news Another day, another crypto hack, this time directed at the China-based ZB centralised exchange, which labels itself the worlds most secure digital asset exchange. Approximately US$4.8mln was purportedly stolen, according to blockchain security company Peckshied. ZB has temporarily paused deposits and withdrawal while we resolve the issue. MicroStrategy shares surged nearly 13% following former Chief executive Michael Saylors decision to step down from the position to focus on the companys Bitcoin strategy as executive chairman. Under Bitcoin evangelist Saylor, MicroStrategy became the largest corporate Bitcoin holder in the world, a decision which has proved polarising in the current bear market. The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act bill introduced into the US House of Representatives on Wednesday by senators Debbie Stabenow and John Boozman has been met with approval within the crypto community. If passed, the bill would enlarge the role of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in regulating crypto while limiting the influence of the hawkish Securities Exchange Commission. Trees is a cannabis company at the intersection of community, content, and commerce Trees Corporation (NEO:TREE.AQN) has said it recorded another system-wide sales record in July with sales totalling $1.3 million, a 7% increase over the prior month. The company said it expects to report 2Q system-wide sales of approximately $3.1 million, a 13% increase over the previous quarter, when it releases its results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, after the closing of the markets on August 15. Trees president Jeff Holmgren noted that the company continues to be encouraged by its robust growth in sales, now setting records in both June and July, and for its soon-to-be-released 2Q results. We look forward to continued growth in the months ahead as we remain focused on operational execution and M&A-based growth opportunities, Holmgren said. Trees CEO Michael Klein added: "Our performance is a testament to the entire team, and we are grateful for the support from the communities we serve in Ontario and British Columbia." Trees is a cannabis company at the intersection of community, content, and commerce. Contact the author at emily.jarvie@proactiveinvestors.com Follow her on Twitter @emilyjjarvie Cypress Development said Global Resource Engineering will now update the resource model with the new data and work on the mine plan and production schedule for the feasibility study Cypress Development Corp (TSX-V:CYP, OTCQX:CYDVF) has reported impressive results from its recently completed drill program at its Clayton Valley Lithium project in the US mining-friendly state of Nevada. A sonic drill program was conducted in May 2022 to obtain sample material for lithium extraction testing at the companys pilot lithium extraction plant in Nevadas Amargosa Valley, and to supplement the projects resource model for the feasibility study that is currently underway. The drill program was highly successful in generating material for our pilot plant and providing distinct data to strengthen the projects resource model, Cypress CEO Bill Willoughby said in a statement. These are significant steps as we continue to work to de-risk the project and provide information for the Feasibility Study. READ: Cypress Development unveils positive lithium recovery rates at DLE portion of Nevada pilot plant Cypress said it has received all assays from its May 2022 drilling program, which was conducted to collect claystone with large diameter core for use in metallurgical testing at its pilot plant. A total of 580 meters (m) were drilled in eight holes. Hole depths were limited to intersect lithium-bearing claystone to a depth of 61 to 76m and to obtain 15 tonnes of material for testing. The Vancouver, Canada-based advanced stage lithium company highlighted the following: Best intersection of 70.1m of 1,336 parts per million (ppm) lithium Successful use of sonic drilling to obtain six- and four-inch diameter cores Completed 580m in eight drill holes ranging from 61 to 76m in depth Acquired 15 tonnes of claystone for testing at the companys pilot plant Confirmed resource model built by Global Resource Engineering (GRE) All eight holes ended in lithium-bearing claystone and their lithium values are tabulated in table format here. Four holes, CSV1 through CVS4, were drilled in the central portion of the project near the planned starter-pit. CVS2 is nearest to the anticipated plant site for the feasibility study. Meanwhile, CVS3 lies adjacent to a reclaimed test pit where 500-tonnes of claystone were collected in April. The company noted that the assay results are in line with lithium grades predicted at all eight locations by the resource block model developed by Global Resource Engineering (GRE). The overall estimated lithium grade for all eight locations from GREs model is 1,060 ppm. This compares to the compiled average lithium grade from all eight holes drilled of 1,080 ppm, for a variance of +2%. The assay results also support the continuation of a higher-grade northeast trend of lithium-bearing claystone on Cypress project as interpreted by GRE in developing the resource model, said the company. GRE will now update the resource model with the new data and work on the mine plan and production schedule for the feasibility study which is likely to be completed by year-end, said Cypress. Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at uttara@proactiveinvestors.com Follow her on Twitter: @UttaraProactive Kontrol said the project began in the third quarter of this year and will be completed over the next 12 months Kontrol Technologies Corp (OTCQB:KNRLF, NEO:KNR) announced that it has entered into a binding letter of intent (LOI) for a C$10 million heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and automation project through its wholly-owned Global HVAC and Automation Inc subsidiary. The Canadian technology company said the project, which began in the third quarter of this year, relates to a new high rise building in the Greater Toronto Area and will be completed over the next 12 months. This is a new order from an existing customer and demonstrates our ability to generate repeat business in our solutions and offerings, Kontrol Technologies CEO Paul Ghezzi said in a statement. As we work diligently to consolidate our technology platform, we can offer our customers a unified platform which includes building automation, ongoing software and service as well as large project integration, Ghezzi added. Kontrol noted that the customer, which will not be named for industry competitive purposes, is a leading Canadian developer in the multi-family high rise sector with a significant number of projects in various stages of development. It added that a final contract is anticipated to be completed in the third quarter of 2022. Toronto-based Kontrol Technologies is a leader in smart buildings and cities through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology. Contact Sean at sean@proactiveinvestors.com Dhaka, Aug 4 : Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said that conspiracy to oust her from power has been intensified. The premier made the remark while the newly elected board members of Bangladesh Red Crescent Society paid a courtesy call on her at Hasina's official residence Gono Bhaban in the capital. Adding that she knows the conspirators who are plotting against the Awami League (AL) government, she said, "I know who are involved in this conspiracy and what they are doing. I know them very well." The Prime Minister further said that the people of Bangladesh would have to suffer if the evil forces grab the power, which has been proven 21 years ago. "It was a big struggle for a daughter, who had lost most of the family members all of a sudden, on the night of 15 August, 1975. And it was a big defeat of the evil forces, that Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Bangabondhu Sheikh Mujibar Rahman would take the helm of the party when it was in disarray after the murder of its supreme leader," the Prime Minister added. Hasina also said, the evil forces, behind the assassination of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of her family members, are against the progress and peaceful Bangladesh led by a member of Bangabandhu's family. "Conspiracies were hatched before the national elections in 2014 and 2018. Plotters are becoming active again to oust me." "The killers were indemnified by BNP founder, the military dictator Ziaur Rahman. They were rehabilitated through awarding jobs at foreign missions. Even the post-75 governments paved ways for the killers to run politics and rehabilitated them socially," she asserted. Paris, Aug 4 : An explosion in a factory in the city of Bergerac in southwest France left eight people injured, one in critical condition, a French daily has reported. As many as 35 people were overcome with fumes from the explosion, which happened on Wednesday afternoon, local authorities were quoted as saying by Le Figaro newspaper, Xinhua news agency reported. French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on his social media that those injured in the explosion were being treated. The factory owned by the Eurenco company is specialised in the fabrication of explosives. However, the origin of the explosion remains unknown. A total of 60 firefighters and 20 police officers attended the scene of the explosion. Two helicopters from intensive care units at Bergerac hospital were also present, with the hospital on high alert. The Manuco factory, present in Bergerac since 2013, is listed as a "high threshold Seveso" establishment, with an activity linked to handling, manufacturing, using or storing dangerous substances. In France, 705 industrial sites are on high threshold Seveso, while 607 are on low threshold. In 2019, a fire broke out at the Lubrizol factory, which was on high threshold Seveso, in the city of Rouen. Several people were injured, including eight requiring hospitalisation. Washington/Paris, Aug 4 : The US Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, with the resolution gaining the support of 95 senators. The single dissenting vote came from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who argued that there should be less focus on security in Europe and much more on the threat from China, dpa news agency reported. US President Joe Biden has strongly backed the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, and referred the matter to the Senate for consideration in July. The vote in Washington followed a vote in France's National Assembly earlier on Wednesday, in which 209 deputies voted in favour of Swedish and Finnish membership, while 46 voted against. The Senate, the second chamber of the French parliament, voted to approve the accession a fortnight ago. Sweden and Finland applied to join the Western defence alliance in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Until now, the two countries have been close partners, but not members, of NATO. Before the accession protocols can enter into force, they must be ratified by all 30 NATO member states, two-thirds of which have already given their approval for the new members. Baghdad, Aug 4 : Iraqi prominent Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for dissolving the parliament and holding early elections, urging his followers to continue their open sit-in in the Parliament building until their demands are met. "Most of the Iraqi people are tired of the ruling class, including some faces of the Sadrist Movement," al-Sadr said in a televised speech. "The revolution (protests for comprehensive reform) began by the Sadrist, and it will not exclude the corrupters from the Sadrist Movement," al-Sadr was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency. "I am not asking for power, but I am seeking reform," the Shiite cleric concluded. On Saturday, thousands of al-Sadr's followers began an open sit-in in the parliament, rejecting the nomination of Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani as the country's Prime Minister on July 25 by al-Sadr's opponents in the Coordination Framework (CF), an umbrella group of Shiite parliamentary parties. The CF became the largest alliance in the Iraqi parliament after al-Sadr ordered his followers in the Sadrist Movement, the biggest winner in the elections held on October 10, 2021 that secured 73 seats, to withdraw from the parliament. During the past months, the continued disputes among the Shiite parties have hampered the formation of a new Iraqi government, making it unable to elect a new president by a two-thirds majority of the 329-seat parliament under the constitution. If elected, the president will appoint the prime minister nominated by the largest alliance in the parliament, now the CF, to form a new government that would rule the country for the coming four years. Istanbul, Aug 4 : The first ship carrying Ukrainian grain for export since the Russian invasion of Kiev began in February has successfully passed an international inspection on Istanbul's Bosporus Strait, and is now continuing its journey to the Lebanese port of Tripoli. Representatives of Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the UN inspected the ship for approximately an hour on Wednesday, checking the cargo and documents, dpa news agency quoted the Turkish Defence Ministry as saying. Escorted by three Turkish vessels, the ship passed through the Bosporus into the Marmara Sea, state news agency Anadolu said. It is later scheduled to sail through the Gallipoli strait to the Mediterranean. The ship, the Razoni, had left the Ukrainian port of Odessa on Monday carrying 26,000 tonnes of corn. More than 20 million tonnes of grain from last year's harvest is still awaiting export, according to the Ukrainian authorities. The food is urgently needed on the world market, especially in Asia, Africa and the Middle East,where the UN recently warned of the biggest famine in decades. Also on Wednesday, Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Mykola Solsky said his country raised its outlook for this year's harvest despite the continued war, forecasting it would harvest 65 to 67 million tonnes of grain and oilseeds, up from an initial estimate of 60 million tonnes. Under a deal agreed on July 22 to lift Russia's months-long blockade of the ports, Ukraine pledged to guide the ships through waters that have been mined and Russia promised to not target the ships and certain port infrastructure. The deal's brokers, the UN and Turkey, said they would help safely coordinate the exports and monitor the shipments to ensure the vessels were only being used to export grain. A joint coordination centre has been opened in Istanbul and is staffed by the four parties, prompting some observers to suggest that the deal could be a first step towards an eventual peace deal. However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took a less than conciliatory stance in his daily video address on Wednesday evening, when he sharply criticized the world's security architecture as wholly inadequate, pointing not only to the war in his own country, but also to conflicts in the Balkans, Taiwan and the Caucasus. "All these situations seem different, although they are united by one factor, namely: the global security architecture did not work," Zelensky said, before once again accusing Russia of violating international law in its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The war in Ukraine had demonstrated just how fragile freedom was, Zelensky said, adding that the world needed "an effective global security architecture that ensures that no state can ever again use terror against another state". He also accused Russia of only pretending to be open to peace negotiations, adding that if Moscow really wanted a peaceful solution to the conflict, it wouldn't currently be regrouping in southern Ukraine. On the ground in Ukraine, a Wednesday intelligence update published by Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) noted that Ukrainian counter-attacks in the south-eastern Kherson region were increasingly causing problems for occupying Russian forces, whose ground offensive against the Ukrainian military on Wednesday failed, according to the Ukrainian General Staff. The Ukrainian counter-offensive in the region has recently gained momentum, according to Western security circles, and Britain's MoD said it expected more and more civilians to flee the region in the near future if the fierce fighting continued. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War Reykjavik, Aug 4 : Emergency plans were activated in Iceland after a volcano erupted, with glowing lava flows bubbling up in an event that was widely expected after a flurry of seismic activity. The eruption on Wednesday started near the mountain Fagradalsfjall on the Reykjanes peninsula south-west of Reykjavik, dpa news agency quoted the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) as saying. White smoke initially rose from the earth before glowing magma emerged, live images from the Icelandic broadcaster RUV showed, with lava spraying out of an extended crack in the Geldingadalur valley. A leading vulcanologist said the fissure was several hundred metres long, in comments to RUV. It was not initially possible to estimate the scale the eruption will reach. Local officials have implemented emergency plans, they said. Police advised people to avoid the area. Several roads in the region were closed to traffic while emergency teams and scientists made their way to the site to assess the situation. The Foreign Ministry tweeted that the risk to populated areas and critical infrastructure was considered very low. There has been no disruption to air traffic yet. The area is relatively sparsely populated, but is home to the country's most important airport, which handles practically almost all air traffic to and from the island. The Blue Lagoon, a thermal spa popular with tourists, is also located on the Reykjanes peninsula, which is 30 kilometres from the capital. The peninsula saw a similar eruption last year, when lava from the Krysuvik underground volcano system kept gushing out for about five months. As then, the renewed eruption has been heralded in recent days by a series of earthquakes, some of them powerful, prompting scientists to warn that an eruption was likely. New Delhi, Aug 4 : Alongside the next generation of OnePlus operating system (OS) -- OxygenOS 13, the global smartphone brand has made its newest flagship smartphone -- OnePlus 10T 5G -- official globally as well as for Indian consumers. The OnePlus 10T 5G with 8GB+128GB storage variant is priced at Rs 49,999, the 12GB+256GB model comes at Rs 54,999. Meanwhile, the 16GB+256GB variant is priced at Rs 55,999. "The OnePlus 10T 5G takes our signature fast and smooth performance to the next level at an extremely competitive price point and OxygenOS 13 advances our operating system with a burdenless design and expanded features requested by our users --a-like an improved selection of always-on displays," Pete Lau, Founder of OnePlus, said in a statement. The smartphone will go on sale on August 3 and be available on OnePlus.in, OnePlusa-Store App, Amazon.in, OnePlus Exclusive Stores and partner outlets. The OnePlus 10T 5G,Alaunched at an in-person event in New York City, features a 6.7-inch display with an adaptive 120Hz refresh rate. Its display is HDR10+ certified and has native support for 10-bit colour for a richer and more realistic viewing experience.A The smartphone is powered by Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 Mobile Platform offering faster CPU and GPU speeds with improved efficiency. It houses a 4,800 mAh battery with support for 150W fast charging support. The company claimed that the 150W SUPERVOOC Endurance Edition delivers up to a day's power after just 10 minutes of charging, with a full charge -- from 1-100 per cent -- taking only 19 minutes. The OnePlus 10T 5G comes with a triple camera system on its rear headlined by the 50MP Sony IMX766 sensor with optical image stabilisation (OIS), Nightscape 2.0, and improved HDR performance Meanwhile, the company also mentioned that the OxygenOS 13 will launch first on the OnePlus 10 Pro 5G, with the Open Beta available for download soon. The update will be rolled out to the newest OnePlus 10T 5G later this year. Lucknow, Aug 4 : Uttar Pradesh's first tabletop airport is ready for inauguration in Chitrakoot. Constructed at the cost of Rs 146 crore , this will be the first operational airport of Bundelkhand and will be managed by the Airport Authority of India (AAI). After acquiring the licence from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), a 20-seater aircraft will also start flying from here under the UDAN scheme. A tabletop runway is a runway that is located on the top of a plateau or hill with one or both ends adjacent to a steep precipice which drops into a deep gorge. According to the government spokesman, the ropeway at Chitrakoot has been the centre of attraction for tourists visiting the place since September 2019. People can now visit Chitrakoot both by air and by road via the Bundelkhand Expressway. Chitrakoot, the holy land where Lord Shri Ram spent most of his exile (about 11 years) and which is situated on the Vindhya hills, has started attracting tourists from all over the globe for its history and beauty. Chitrakoot has several tourist spots, such as Gupt Godavari, Kamadgiri Parvat, Bharatkup, Ganeshbagh, Sati Anusuiya Ashram, Rajapur, Dharkudi, Jankikund, Ramghat and Bharat Milap Temple and Chitrakoot waterfall, Hanuman stream and Sphatik Shila, which are reminiscent of Lord Ram's visit along with his brother Lakshman and wife, Sita. The Shri Chitrakoot Dham Teerth Development Council, which is looking after the maintenance of Chitrakoot, has been entrusted with the responsibility to ensure holistic development, including enriching the natural surroundings further, while conserving the rich heritage of the pilgrimage destination. The Council has completed work on the laser show on the water screen and the digital Ramayana gallery at the cost of Rs 5.29 crore. Ramlila theatres, painting competitions and other programmes are organised under the Ramayana Conclave in Chitrakoot. On International Tiger Day-2022, held on July 29, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced that Ranipur will soon be developed as the fourth tiger reserve of the state. Ranipur is located in an area where once the guns of dacoits used to be heard. New York, Aug 4 : Indian-American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi visited Taiwan as a member of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosis delegation that drew Beijings ire. Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat who is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, met Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-Wen along with Pelosi and other members of the Congressional delegation on Wednesday in Taipei. Sending a pointed message to Beijing, Krishnamoorthi and the members of the delegation also met with Tiananmen Square protest leader Wu'er Kaixi, exiled Hong Kong dissident Lam Wing-kei and Kelsang Gyaltsen Bawa, chairman of the Taipei-based foundation of the Dalai Lama during a visit to the National Human Rights Museum, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported. Krishnamoorthi now faces threats from China of action against him personally. China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi had warned that "those who offend China will be punished". Responding to reporters' questions about it, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Wednesday: "What I can say is that what needs to be done will be done and these measures will be resolute, strong and effective." Beijing officials have denounced the delegation's visit as a provocation and an infringement of China's territorial integrity because it considers Taiwan an integral part of the nation. Although President Joe Biden's administration has come around to backing the Congressional delegation's right to visit Taiwan, it did not endorse the idea of the trip when it was floated because of fears of China's retaliation and introducing more complications to relations with it. Biden had said that the Pentagon did not think such a visit was advisable now. In a rare show of solidarity with Pelosi, many Republicans who are usually opposed to her came out in support of her. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party leader in the Senate, and 25 other Senators including Senate Foreign Relations Committee's top Republican Jim Risch issued a statement supporting the Pelosi trip. Krishnamoorthi, who represents a constituency comprising Chicago suburbs, is a hawk on China. A bill authored by him to assess "grey zone activities" of China and others against the US through actions like disinformation campaigns and terrorism financing and another to monitor risks to US technology from China-United Arab Emirates cooperation were adopted by the House earlier this year. The defence budget adopted by Congress in 2020 incorporated wording pushed by him urging China to end aggression against India against the Line of Actual Control in the Himalayas. The Congressional delegation's Taiwan trip has provided an opportunity for Chinese President Xi Jinping to arouse nationalist fervour before the Communist Party Congress later this year that must endorse him for a third term as its leader while the country is facing an economic slowdown and risks from Covid spread. China has announced live ammunition drills around Taiwan on Thursday and has already sent aircraft and naval vessels close to or into its air and sea spaces. The Congressional delegation began its Asian tour with a stop in Hawaii for consultations with the US Indo-Pacific Command. It went to Singapore and Malaysia before going to Taiwan and is visiting South Korea and Japan (Arul Louis can be contacted at aru.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis) Seoul, Aug 4 : Speaker of South Korea's National Assembly Kim Jin-pyo met visiting US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing in the wake of her high-profile visit to Taiwan. Pelosi is the first US House speaker to visit South Korea since former Speaker Dennis Hastert in 2002, reports Yonhap News Agency. Pelosi arrived in Seoul on Wednesday night from Taiwan where she reaffirmed unwavering US commitment to supporting the island's democracy. China denounced her trip to Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province, and announced live-fire military drills around the island. On Thursday, she met Kim for talks about regional security, economic cooperation and other pending issues. Also attending the meeting were the floor leaders of the ruling People Power Party and the main opposition Democratic Party. Her two-day trip also includes a visit to the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom later on Thursday. Pelosi's delegation includes House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chair Mark Takano, as well as other lawmakers, such as Suzan DelBene, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Andy Kim. South Korea is one of the legs on Pelosi's Asian tour that already has taken her to Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. After South Korea, she plans to visit Japan. Washington, Aug 4 : US authorities have said investigations were underway into reports that turbans of Sikh asylum seekers were confiscated after they were detained at the country's border with Mexico, the media reported. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), nearly 50 Sikh migrants have had their turbans taken away, the BBC reported. It said that the turban confiscations "blatantly violate federal law" and are inconsistent with the US Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) own non-discrimination policies. In a letter sent to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus on August 1, the ACLU called the seizures "ongoing, serious religious-freedom violations". Meanwhile, Vanessa Pineda, a lawyer of the ACLU of Arizona, told the BBC that no proper explanation has been given about what, if any, security concerns a turban could raise. "It's just not acceptable. They need to find another alternative and to stop this. It's dehumanising," she added. In response, Magnus said the border agency expects its staff to "treat all migrants we encounter with respect", the BBC reported citing A Washington Post report. "An internal investigation has been opened to address this matter," the CBP Commissioner was quoted as saying. According to CBP statistics, nearly 13,000 Indian citizens, including many from Punjab, have been detained by Border Patrol officers at the US-Mexico border in the fiscal year that began in October 2021. Of these, about three-quarters, or nearly 10,000, have been detained in the Border Patrol's Yuma sector, a 202 km expanse of desert and rocky mountains that stretches from California's Imperial Sand Dunes to the border between Arizona's Yuma and Pima counties. New Delhi, Aug 4 : Delhi Police on Thursday claimed to have held two members of "Namastey Gang" following a brief encounter in the Shahdara area. A senior police official said that one of the accused suffered a gun wound in the encounter and was removed to a nearby government hospital. "Afzal and Shahid were held following the encounter. Both were wanted criminals. They used to greet their targets before and after looting them," police said. Both the criminals used to carry out robberies on a bike and had a created terror in the area. On getting a tip-off, the Special staff of Shahdara police laid a trap to nab them before Vivekanand College in the area. This morning, when they were coming from Ghaziabad area, the police signalled them to pull over but they tried to escape by opening fire at the police. The police also opened fire in retaliation. One of the policemen had a narrow escape as a bullet hit on his bulletproof vest. "Both the accused were involved in a robbery case that took place around three days back," the official said. An FIR was being lodged in this respect. Further details are awaited. Koppal : , Aug 4 (IANS) An incident of a man abandoning his 80-year-old mother in the premises of a temple after giving her a mobile phone without SIM card has come to light from Koppal district of Karnataka on Thursday. The abandoned aged woman gives her name as Khasim Bi, and is claiming that she is from Ujjayani village. The authorities are, however, not able to track her family as she is unable to provide any information other than this. According to police, her son had brought her to the famous Huligemma temple in Huligi village in Koppal two days ago. He had given her a basic mobile set and asked her to wait for his call. He had also given her a sheet of paper where he had claimed to have written his mobile phone number. Devotees noticed the elderly woman sitting all alone without being taken care of on Wednesday night. They gave her food and a blanket. When they checked her mobile, it was found that her son had given handset without a SIM card. It also came to light that he had given an empty sheet of paper telling her that it contained his mobile number. The devotees then contacted the Senior Citizens Helpline with the help of police. National Senior Citizens Helpline Zonal officer Muttanna Gudneppanavar and his staff arrived at the spot and took the elderly woman to an old age home. The Munirabad police facilitated her shifting to the shelter. Further investigation is on. Baku/Yerevan, Aug 4 : Azerbaijan and Armenia have blamed each other of violating their ceasefire agreement and launching provocation in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. "The illegal Armenian detachments in the territory of Azerbaijan, where the peacekeeping contingent of the Russian Federation is temporarily deployed, fired intensively on the positions of the Azerbaijani Army in the direction of the Lachin region," Xinhua news agency quoted the Foreign Ministry in Baku as saying on Wednesday. It added that one Azerbaijani serviceman was killed. Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry in Yerevan said in a statement that Azerbaijani forces "once again violating the November 9, 2020, Trilateral Statement of the leaders of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan on the cessation of hostilities in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, launched aggression in the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, resulting in casualties and wounded ones". Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at loggerheads over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh since 1988. Peace talks have been held since 1994, when a ceasefire was agreed, but there have been sporadic minor clashes since then. A new round of armed conflict broke out along the contact line on September 27, 2020, before Russia brokered a ceasefire on November 9 of that year. On November 26, 2021, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, where they agreed on creating mechanisms for demarcation and delimitation of the border between the two nations. During their previous meeting last April, Aliyev and Pashinyan launched a peace treaty process mediated by the European Union, and they agreed to establish border commissions to work on the border delimitation issue. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War Chennai, Aug 4 : A 41-year-old man, working as a welder in an industrial unit in Tamil Nadu's Vellore, was arrested for raping and impregnating his 13-year-old daughter, police said on Thursday. The man and his wife had separated eight years ago and his children -- a boy and a daughter -- had been living with him and his parents in Adukkambarai, Vellore. Police said that the 13-year-old Class VIII student was admitted to Government Vellore Medical College Hospital where she delivered a baby boy. When hospital authorities questioned the girl, she told that she had been abused by her father since November 2021. The hospital authorities immediately intimated the police who took the man into custody and on questioning he admitted to the crime. A case was registered under Section 376 (rape) of the IPC and Section 5 (aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Abuses (Pocso) Act. He was arrested on Wednesday and produced before a Pocso court that remanded him to judicial custody. Psychologist and retired Professor of Psychology, from a Government Medical College in Tamil Nadu, Dr Sulekha Beagum told IANS: "This is a high-end crime. Protector turning predator cannot be allowed and police should ensure that maximum punishment is meted out to him. He may be having some ill-conceived concepts on sex and that is the reason for such a behaviour." Brussels, Aug 4 : Despite the resumption of grain exports from Ukraine's Black Sea ports under a UN and Turkish-brokered deal between Moscow and Kiev, the European Union (EU) intends to continue its efforts to create alternative freight routes for Ukrainian grain exports. Despite the re-opening of maritime routes, an immediate return to pre-war levels of Ukrainian exports remains challenging and alternative export routes are still crucial, an EU Commission official told dpa news agency. European Commissioner for Transport Adina Valean stressed that there was "room for improvement", in the alternative routes being worked on, citing a lack of freight wagons, barge operators and storage facilities for Ukrainian produce. According to the European Commission, Ukraine was the world's largest exporter of sunflower oil, the third largest exporter of rapeseed and barley, the fourth largest exporter of maize, and the fifth largest exporter of wheat before the beginning of Ukraine's invasion by Russia in February. However, hopes are currently pinned on the agreement with Russia enabling a resumption of regular Ukrainian agricultural exports via the Black Sea. According to EU figures, before the war, up to 5 million tonnes of grain passed through Ukraine's Black Sea ports each month. Reaching that level again in the near future is considered highly unlikely, however, with the first ship to leave the port of Odessa under the UN deal carrying just 26,000 tonnes of maize. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War London, Aug 4 : England's former world champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson defended her title in heptathlon at the Commonwealth Games on Wednesday. Katarina, who has been struggling with injuries in the past three years, triumphed in Birmingham with 6,377 points, claiming her first victory since winning the world title in 2019. Katarina overcame a ruptured achilles tendon to compete at the Tokyo Olympic Games, but had to withdraw midway as she suffered a calf injury in the 200m race, reports Xinhua. The 29-year-old failed to defend her world title last month, only managing an eighth finish in the tournament in Eugene, the United States. "It has been hard," said Katarina. "I had moments where I didn't know if I wanted to carry on. But to come out here and get the gold, I prove to myself that pushing through was worth it." Eilish McColgan from Scotland won her first major title in her career as the 31-year-old finished first in the women's 10,000m race in a new Games record of 30 minutes and 48.60 seconds. McColgan's mother won the same title twice in 1986 and 1990. In the 100m finals, double Olympic 100m champion Elaine Thompson-Herah from Jamaica won the women's race in 10.95 seconds while Kenyan Ferdinand Omanyala took the men's gold in 10.02 seconds. In the pool, Duncan Scott of Scotland set a new Games record of one minute 56.88 seconds to clinch the title of the men's 200m individual medley. England's Ben Proud took the victory in the men's 50m freestyle final in 21.36 seconds. In weightlifting, Olympic silver medalist Emily Campbell of England triumphed in the women's +87kg category with a total of 286kg, beating Samoa's defending champion Feagaiga Stowers to second place. "I hope people see how beautiful our sport is. Throughout the week you have seen it, doesn't matter what you look like, what shape you are, what size you are, you can pick up a bar and do it," said the 28-year-old Campbell. Latest updates on Commonwealth Games 2022 New Delhi, Aug 4 : Digital engineering services provider GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group company, on Thursday said its Chief Operating Officer (COO) Nitesh Banga will take over as new President and CEO, effective from October 1. Banga replaced current President and CEO Shashank Samant, who will assume a new role as Chairman of the GlobalLogic Board, in addition to being the Executive Advisor to Toshiaki Tokunaga, Head of Hitachi Digital Systems and Services (DSS) Sector. "I believe that for organizations to continue to lead and succeed, their executive leadership must also evolve. Banga has proven throughout his career that he is a strong leader across both vision and execution," said Samant. Japan's Hitachi last month completed the acquisition of US-headquartered GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion, that will help the company expand digital operations in a number of businesses, including IT, energy, industry and mobility. For more than a decade as CEO, Samant led GlobalLogic through strong growth phases during which he oversaw several strategic acquisitions and digital capability expansion efforts. Banga, on the other hand, spent more than two decades at Infosys before joining GlobalLogic. "As we enter our third decade, we have a unique opportunity to accelerate enterprise digital transformation backed by Hitachi's incredible heritage, global reach, and trusted brand," said Banga. With more than 21,000 professionals working in engineering centres, and design studios around the globe, GlobalLogic specialises in advanced digital engineering, experience design, and data services to help clients accelerate innovation and the development of new digital products and experiences. Patna, Aug 4 : Around 40 kanwariyas sustained injuries after a bus in which they were travelling in rammed into a parked truck in Bihar's Gopalganj district on Thursday morning. The victims are residents of Sugauli, located on the Indo-Nepal border in West Champaran district. They were on the way to Deoghar in Jharkhand to offer Ganga Jal on the 'Shiva Ling'. According to police, the incident took place at 4 a.m., when the bus reached Bhoktapur village under Kuchaikot police station, and crashed into the truck parked along the roadside from the rear. "Preliminary investigation reveals that the driver of the bus may have dozed off while driving leading to the accident. Since the driver is critically injured, he is unable to give a statement. Things would clear only after he gives a statement to the police," said SHO of Kuchaikot police station. There were 56 passengers in the bus besides the driver and two helpers. Six of the injured admitted to Gopalganj Sadar hospital are stated to be critical. The others are undergoing treatment in Kuchaikot referral hospital. Beijing, Aug 4 : Major air and sea drills by the Chinese military in the waters encircling Taiwan resumed on Thursday, shortly after the end of a visit to the island by Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi that has drawn Beijing's ire. China's eastern military command said that at about 1 p.m. (local Beijing time) units of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) "implemented long-range fire live firing training in the Taiwan Strait and conducted precise strikes on specific areas in the eastern part of the Taiwan Strait," which separates mainland China from the island, reports dpa news agency. The exercises, which began on Tuesday, started in full at six locations surrounding Taiwan, coming as close as 9 nautical miles (16.7 km) from its two major sea ports in Keelung and Kaohsiung. For the first time, the declared areas where the exercises are being held partly cross into Taiwan's territorial waters. They were set to end on Sunday. State media cited China's military and various experts as saying that the manoeuvers were practice for imposing an aerial and maritime blockade of the self-governing island, and even for a potential invasion. Chinese military representatives have not ruled out that the PLA could fire missiles over Taiwan for the first time. The drills, which were to include missile tests and shooting drills, are apparent retaliation for the visit by Pelosi, the third-highest ranking official in Washington. Pelosi's visit fuelled tensions between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, which Beijing's ruling Communist Party views as part of its territory, claiming reunification is inevitable. Meanwhile, Taiwan has said it scrambled jets to warn off Chinese warplanes on Wednesday and its military fired flares to drive away unidentified aircraft over the Kinmen islands, located close to the mainland, reports the BBC. Several ministries have suffered cyberattacks in recent days, the Taiwanese government said. Taiwan has also asked ships to take different routes and is negotiating with Japan and the Philippines to find alternative aviation routes. New Delhi, Aug 4 : In a relief to Uddhav Thackeray, the Supreme Court on Thursday orally asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) not to decide a plea by Eknath Shinde group to recognise them as the real Shiv Sena. A bench headed by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana and comprising Justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli asked the Election Commission not to take any precipitative action on the claim raised by Shinde group for recognising them as the real Shiv Sena party in the meanwhile. The top court told the ECI that if the Thackeray faction seeks time to file response to its notices on the Shinde-faction petition, then it should consider their request keeping in mind the views expressed by the apex court. The bench told senior advocate Arvind Datar, representing ECI, "Let them file affidavits. But can't you hold...let no precipitative action be taken... We are not passing any order. But at the same time don't take any precipitative action..." Datar submitted that the disqualification proceedings under the tenth schedule operate in a different territory and it does not affect the ECI's power to decide the claim of rival factions for official recognition. The top court said it will decide by Monday whether to refer to a larger bench regarding the constitutional questions involved in the disqualification of MLAs arising from Maharashtra political scenario. Shinde faction moved the Election Commission seeking their recognition as the real Shiv Sena ahead of the BMC polls. However, the Thackeray faction has contested it saying that a few MLAs can't decide about the entire political party. Top court was hearing petitions filed by the Shiv Sena and its rebel MLAs on the constitutional issues of splits, merger, defection and disqualification. Hanoi, Aug 4 : National flag carrier Vietnam Airlines has started altering its flight routes to avoid airspace near the Taiwan Strait while China conducts military drills, the company said in a statement on Thursday. "Since August 4, in order to ensure operation and flight safety, Vietnam Airlines will adjust flight routes between Vietnam and north-east Asia, including: Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, between Vietnam and the US to avoid flying over some areas near the island of Taiwan," dpa news agency quoted the statement as saying. It is anticipated that at least 36 flight routes operated by Vietnam Airlines will be affected. China is currently carrying out live-fire military drills in six coastal areas around Taiwan following Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. On Wednesday, Vietnam's Aviation Authority asked Vietnam Airlines to avoid flying in areas near Taiwan while China conducts military exercises. Chinese authorities sent an official notice asking airlines operating in Asia to avoid flying near Taiwan. Chennai, Aug 4 : Director V J Gopinath's eagerly-awaited entertainer, 'Jiivi 2' is to have a direct release on the OTT platform Aha. The film has huge expectations riding on it as it is a sequel to 'Jiivi', a critically acclaimed superhit film featuring actors Vetri and Karunakaran in the lead. The premise of 'Jiivi's' story is based on the Triangle theory which is about a series of events happening in a person's life repeating itself in another person's life in a different place. In 'Jiivi', the protagonist realises this situation and attempts to stop the chain of events. "In the fag end of part one, the protagonist's friend asks him whether the Triangle theory has ended or whether it will continue to exist. This is where the story of 'Jiivi-2' commences," director V J Gopinath had disclosed during an earlier interview. Interestingly, the director completed the script of the sequel in a matter of just two days. Vetri, Karunakaran, Aswini Chandrashekar, Rama, Rohini, Mime Gopi, aAruvi' fame Thirunavukarasu, who played the titular roles in the first part, are all reprising their characters in the sequel. While Babu Tamizh had written the story and dialogues for 'Jiivi-1', director VJ Gopinath himself has penned the story for 'Jiivi-2'. The same technical crew that made 'Jiivi' has been retained for 'Jiivi 2'. Praveen Kumar is the director of photography for the film, which has music by K.S. Sundaramoorthy and editing by Praveen K.L. New Delhi, Aug 4 : Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who is facing ED investigation in the National Herald case, on Thursday said that he was not scared of the Modi government. "We will not flee, neither are we scared of Narendra Modi. Let him do what he wants to," Gandhi said while talking to mediapersons outside his house here. "They think they can silence our voice by pressurising us. But it is not going to happen. Whatever Modiji and Amit Shahji are doing is against democracy," he said. Rahul Gandhi skipped the meeting of the Congress MPs in Parliament on Thursday. Congress had called a meeting after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) sealed the Herald House here. The Congress has also accused the ruling dispensation of treating the opposition leaders as "terrorists". "The entire country is watching as an investigating agency has been deployed mindlessly against the leadership of India's oldest political party. You (the BJP) are treating this party, its leaders and institutions as terrorists," Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said during a media briefing on Wednesday. The briefing came soon after the ED sealed the office of Young Indian Pvt Ltd located in the Herald House here days after the party's interim President Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi were grilled in connection with the National Herald case. "The word - 'fear' is not there in the dictionary of the Congress party," Singhvi said, adding that the voice of the party's leadership will not be silenced with such "cheap tactics". Porbandar, Aug 4 : In the last three days the local police have found 180 to 200 opium packets near Porbandar, Mangrol and Veraval areas on the western coast of Gujarat. This is the first time that the packets have been detected along the coast in Porbandar or Veraval. "The moment it came to our notice, the police started search operations along the coast for more packets that might have landed, even patrolling along the coast has been increased," said Manoharsinh Jadeja, Gir Somnath District Superintendent of Police. A senior police officer with Coastal Security wishing anonymity told IANS, "In the past such packets were found in the Sir Creek, or near Jakhau in the Kutch and Devbhumi Dwarka coast in Saurashtra. The Packaging is the same, each cloth bag has 20 small packets packed inside. But it is the first time that it has reached up to Porbandar, Mangrol and Veraval." According to the officer's information, "Indian, Pakistan and Iranian agencies have been patrolling and vigil has increased in the high seas since the last few years, so whenever the carrier fears that they may be caught with drugs, they throw packets in the sea. The packets float towards the coast." "The packets found seem to be two years old. In monsoon, water current in the sea is from West to East, that could be the reason that packets have reached up to Porbandar or Veraval," the officer added. Brisbane, Aug 4 : Police in the Australian state of Queensland said on Thursday that three people had died following a gun shooting on a rural property. At 9 a.m., police were called to the scene in Bogie, a small town about 1,200 km north of state capital Brisbane and home to around 200 people, responding to reports of multiple people being shot, reports Xinhua news agency. "We are actively searching the area and commencing our investigations into what the circumstances were and how it came to be that these people had been shot," acting superintendent of Queensland police Tom Armitt told reporters. "At this stage, we are at very, very early stages of this investigation. We do not know who is responsible." Three people were found dead and a fourth was flown to the hospital in critical condition. Upon surveying the surrounding area police deemed the area safe. Investigations into the circumstances surrounding the incident are ongoing. Supt Armitt described Thursday's shooting as an "extremely rare event". Australia has some of the toughest gun laws in the world, introduced after a lone gunman murdered 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996. Since then, there have been only three mass shootings, defined in Australia as those resulting in at least four deaths, excluding the perpetrator. Bengaluru, Aug 4 : The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has warned of extremely heavy rain across Karnataka especially over the South Interior region for the next three days. Bengaluru, the capital of the state has also been issued a yellow alert for two more days. Meanwhile, Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary in Mandya district of Karnataka which was declared as a Ramsar site underlining its status as wetland of international importance, has come under threat due to flood situation following incessant rains. Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary near historical Srirangapatna town supports more than 1 per cent of the world's population of spot-billed pelicans. It is the first and the only water body so far in the state to have Ramsar recognition. Due to heavy rainfall in Cauvery catchment area, the water levels in Krishna Raja Sagar (KRS) dam have risen drastically and a large amount of water released from the dam. Due to this, many regions of Srirangapatna town have been inundated. The tourists have been denied entry to the world-famous bird Ranganathittu bird sanctuary. Authorities have clamped prohibitory orders in the 1 kilometer radius in the Cauvery River bank area. Sources said that Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary located close to KRS dam is inundated and slowly coming under water endangering the rare species of birds. Many temples in historical Srirangapatna town have come under water. The flood water has reached till the doorsteps of the famous Nimishamba temple in Ganjam area. The Cauvery river is overflowing creating an alarming situation. The authorities have warned the people not to go near River banks and to not let the livestock out to graze. Till Wednesday, Bengaluru had recorded 63.3 mm of rainfall, which is highest in the last five years in the month of August, according to IMD. The Badami town in Bagalkot district which houses UNESCO World Heritage Site is also witnessing heavy rainfall. Karnataka has been witnessing heavy rains for the last three days. Incessant rains have created havoc in the coastal region. Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai had visited Bhatkal region in Uttara Kannada to take stock of the havoc created by heavy rainfall. Bengaluru has been witnessing heavy rainfall throughout this week and is likely to experience heavy rainfall for another two days. The city is witnessing heavier rainfall than usual this month. Gaza, Aug 4 : Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that the threats of Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz against the Gaza Strip were unacceptable, amid rising tensions after Israeli soldiers arrested an Islamic Jihad leader. Haniyeh made the remarks during a phone conversation with Tor Wennesland, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, according to a statement issued by the Hamas leader's office in Gaza. "The threats of the Israeli leaders, especially Benny Gantz, are unacceptable," Xinhua news agency quoted Haniyeh as saying. Bassam al-Saadi, a prominent leader of Islamic Jihad movement, another faction in the Gaza Strip committed to violently resisting Israel, was arrested by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank early this week. Since then Israeli forces have been on high alert near the Gaza Strip for fear of retaliation. After al-Saadi was detained, Gantz threatened to use force against the Gaza Strip to bring life back to normal in the Israeli towns in the vicinity of the coastal enclave. The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007 and is currently ruled by Hamas. "If it is not possible to return to the routine of normal life in the Gaza Strip's vicinity, there will be no normal life inside the Gaza Strip either," the Defence Minister told Israel Radio. Haniyeh called on the United Nations to "constrain the Israeli occupation and prevent it from harming the Palestinian people," adding that the UN "has a major role in this context". Kolkata, Aug 4 : As the probe in the multi-crore West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) recruitment scam intensifies, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will travel to New Delhi on Thursday afternoon where she will hold a meeting with her party's MPs this evening only. Party sources said after she reaches the national capital, she will first go to the residence of the party's Rajya Sabha member, Sukhendu Sekhar Ray at 7, Mahadev Road and hold a meeting with all the party Parliamentarians. Party's national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee will also be attending the meeting. The expected time of the meeting is 6 p.m. Thursday. "The meeting is expected to concentrate on the party's strategy in both the Houses of Parliament in the coming days and is also expected to discuss on how to counter the criticism from other MPs relating to the WBSSC scam both within and outside Parliament," said a senior leader of the party, who did not wish to be named. On Friday, she is expected to visit the Central Hall of Parliament. Trinamool Congress's chief whip in the Lok Sabha, Sudip Bandyopadhyay has reportedly informed the Lok Sabha Speaker about the chief minister's probable visit to the Central Hall on Friday. However, despite speculations, the party leadership is not sure as yet about the probable time when the chief minister might have a meeting with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "However, the chief minister is especially keen to have an exclusive meeting with former Congress president Sonia Gandhi keeping in mind the long association between them," the party leader said. Recently, the relationship between the Congress and Trinamool Congress at the national level after the latter decided to abstain from polling in the elections for the post of Vice- President of India. Congress leader Margaret Alva is pitted against the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidate and former West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar. When asked about the possibility of the change of the party decision on the Vice- President polls if the meeting between Sonia Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee happens, the Trinamool leader said, "It is up to only the chief minister to decide." The polling for the Vice- President election is scheduled on August 6. Seoul, Aug 4 : North Korea's permanent mission to the UN has issued a rare press statement in response to US condemnation of its nuclear programme, according to state media on Thursday. It slammed Washington over its "anti-DPRK confrontational clamour" during the 10th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the UN headquarters in New York, reports Yonhap News Agency. DPRK is the acronym for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "Today, the mastermind that undermines the foundation of the non-proliferation regime is none other than the US," read the English-language statement issued Wednesday and carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. "It is the peak of busy blaming that the US alleges somebody's 'nuclear threats' given the fact that it is the kingpin of nuclear proliferation." "We will never tolerate any attempt by the US and its servile forces to groundlessly accuse our state and encroach upon our sovereign rights and national interests," it added. Addressing the NPT conference on Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Pyongyang continues to expand its "unlawful nuclear programme" and continues its "ongoing provocations against the region". New Delhi, Aug 4 : The Supreme Court on Thursday queried Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde's counsel, that 'if completely ignoring political parties after being elected, is it not a danger to democracy?' Shinde's counsel submitted that his client is not disqualified, and he has also not left the party, and emphasized on the aspect of dissent within a political party. Senior advocate Harish Salve, representing Shinde, submitted that disqualification under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution takes place, only if the Speaker reaches a conclusion that a member has voted against the stand of a party. Salve added that if the Speaker of an Assembly takes one or two months to decide on disqualification pleas against MLAs, then what does this mean? That they should stop attending the proceedings of the House? He further added, "There is no per se illegality principle, until and unless there is a finding of disqualification..." A bench headed by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana and comprising Justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli said, "What is the use of whip then? Does anti-defection apply to only those things?" Salve replied that the anti-defection law cannot be an anti-dissent law. The Chief Justice queried, if completely ignoring political parties after being elected, is it not a danger to democracy? Justice Ramana further queried "You say this court and high court should not hear this and this is after you had approached us first." Salve said that in facts of this case, there is nothing to show that these people left the party. The Chief Justice told Salve, "Today you say the court can't go into the issue...because the Speaker has the power". Salve said, "I am not disqualified, I have not left the party..." Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing the Uddhav Thackeray faction, submitted that there was no need to refer the issue to a constitution bench. The Chief Justice posed a query, suppose there are two groups saying we are the real political party, and general members of the political party cannot claim to recognise who is the original political party. Sibal contended that a group may say that they have the support of 40 out of 50 MLAs, so they are the real political party. He added, if the 40 are disqualified? If the Election Commission decides one way or the other, what happens to this defection? Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, also representing the Thackeray group, said that till this court decides, how can Election Commission decide this issue, and later they would say that these proceedings are infructuous? Senior advocate Arvind Datar, representing the Election Commission, submitted that disqualification of rebel MLA means their disqualification from the House, not from the political party. Datar added that this is not a political issue and the Tenth Schedule cannot interdict this. "I can only decide who can have the symbol after the evidence is adduced," said Datar. After hearing arguments, the top court orally asked the Election Commission of India to not take any precipitative action on the claim raised by the Shinde group for recognising them as the real Shiv Sena party in the meanwhile, and allow Thackeray faction to submit their response. The top court said it will decide by Monday whether to refer to a larger bench regarding the constitutional questions involved in the disqualification of MLAs arising from the Maharashtra political scenario. Mumbai, Aug 4 : Ahead of the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) monetary policy, most companies are rushing to short-term debt market to raise funds through commercial papers to lock-in lower rates because after policy announcement they expect rates on these instruments to rise further. According to the data compiled from market sources, companies raised Rs 37,920 crore through commercial papers (CP) since July 25, with highest being raised on July 27 worth Rs 13,425 crore. Small Industries Development Bank of India raised Rs 9,450 crore, the highest among all the companies who raised funds in last few days, which was followed by Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd raising Rs 6,450 crore, Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd raising Rs 5,400 crore, and Larsen and Toubro Ltd raising Rs 5,000 crore. These four companies raised nearly 70 per cent of the total amount raised by the companies through CPs since July 25. "In general demand for credit has picked up due to pick in economic activities and higher working capital requirements due to increased prices. This could be a reason for the increase in CP issuances," said Pankaj Pathak, Fund Manager-Fixed Income at Quantum Asset Management Company. In the last few weeks, rates on CPs rose around 30-40 basis points due to falling surplus liquidity from the banking system and in expectation of further rate hike by the RBI. Rates on CPs issued by non-banking finance companies were in the range of 6.05-6.20 per cent, as against 5.80-6.00 per cent two weeks back. While, rates on papers issued by manufacturing companies were in the range of 5.85-6.05 per cent, as compared to 5.60-5.80 per cent earlier. "The pricing of all short-term instruments including CP, CD and T-Bills have gone up due to withdrawal of liquidity from the system last week. System liquidity, supply side constraints besides future rate hike expectations are the key drivers for immediate pricing/yield volatility of short-term instruments," said Venkatakrishnan Srinivasan, founder and managing partner at Rockfort Fincorp, a Mumbai-based debt advisory firm. Going forward, market participants expects issuers to raise more funds in the coming days due to increase in credit off-take and robust economic growth. Further, investors may become selective when system liquidity drains or they may demand higher yield. "We expect credit demand to remain robust in coming quarters as economic growth is getting broad-based," Pathak added. New Delhi, Aug 4 : Four different space companies -- Rocket Lab, ULA, Blue Origin and SpaceX -- are all set to launch their rocket missions on Thursday. After facing a delay on its second satellite launch due to software updates, American firm Rocket Lab on Thursday successfully launched the NROL-199 spy satellite for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which operates the nation's fleet of spy satellites. "Successful launch!" the NRO wrote on Twitter. The NROL-199 called "Antipodean Adventure" mission launched on the Electron rocket from Pad B at Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 at 1 a.m. EDT (10.30 a.m. IST) on Thursday from New Zealand. It carries a payload designed, built, and operated by the NRO in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence. This mission follows the successful delivery to orbit of its predecessor NROL-162 on July 13. The satellites will support the NRO to provide critical information to government agencies and decision makers monitoring international issues. Following five successful tourist flights to space, Jeff Bezos' space venture Blue Origin is aiming to launch its sixth mission on Thursday. The sixth flight to space will lift off at 8:30 a.m. CDT (7:00 pm IST) from Launch Site One in West Texas, US. The NS-22 mission crew will include Dude Perfect cofounder Coby Cotton, Portuguese entrepreneur Mario Ferreira, British-American mountaineer Vanessa O'Brien, technology leader Clint Kelly III, Egyptian engineer Sara Sabry, and telecommunications executive Steve Young. Sara will become the first person from Egypt to fly to space; Mario will become the first from Portugal. Vanessa will become the first woman to reach extremes on land, sea, and air, completing the Explorers' Extreme Trifecta, a Guinness World Record. Next is United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V 421 rocket that will launch the sixth and final Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (SBIRS GEO 6) spacecraft for the US Space Force. It is expected to launch at 6.29 a.m. EDT (3.59 p.m. IST) on Thursday from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The SBIRS GEO 6 is equipped with powerful scanning and staring infrared surveillance sensors. These infrared sensors will help the US military to detect missile launches and support ballistic missile defence. SpaceX is also targeting Thursday to launch South Korea's first lunar orbiter mission. The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) -- also known as Danuri -- was initially set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, US, on Tuesday. It was postponed due to additional maintenance of the SpaceX rocket. The new launch of the 678-kg Danuri will now take place at 7.08 p.m. ET (4.38 a.m. IST Friday). The Korea Aerospace Research Institute plans for the orbiter to reach and start circling the moon in December for a yearlong observation mission. Jaipur, Aug 4 : Rajasthan government has gone on an alert mode in view of the rising number of cattle stock falling prey to the lumpy skin disease and has directed the officers to work on a mission mode for the prevention of the disease. As per officials, over 4,000 cows in the state have died due to the disease and thousands have been infected. Animal Husbandry Minister Lalchand Kataria said that funds worth Rs 8-12 lakh have been disbursed at the division level offices in Ajmer, Bikaner and Jodhpur to buy emergency essential medicines. An amount of Rs 2 to 8 lakh has also been disbursed for other affected districts. In view of the emergency situation, the medicines available in the drug stores of other districts have been sent to the affected districts. Permission has been given to buy essential medicines under the brand name if the generic name is not available. The minister said that the state medical teams and teams from neighbouring districts have been sent to the more affected districts. For the affected districts, 29 veterinary doctors and 93 livestock assistants have been deployed from other districts. Approval of 30 additional vehicles has been issued for effective monitoring and treatment of sick animals. Nodal officers sent from the directorate are visiting the affected areas and monitoring them continuously. More staff will be sent from other districts if required. A control room has been set up in the affected districts as well as at the Jaipur Headquarters for continuous monitoring of the disease spreading among livestock. Giving instructions to control the lumpy skin disease completely in 15 days, secretary P.C. Kishan said that close monitoring is being done in Barmer, Jalore, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Sirohi districts due to high infection. He said that vigilance is also being done in other districts, including Dungarpur, Banswara, Udaipur, Rajsamand adjoining Gujarat. He said that teams from Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi and National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases, Bhopal have collected samples of sick animals from Jodhpur and Nagaur districts. Kishan informed that the districts have been given full powers to deal with this disaster of disease outbreak. He instructed the officers to keep the sick animals separate from the healthy animals. Along with this, instructions were given to dispose of the dead animals through scientific methods. "The outbreak of this disease is high in Jodhpur division, although the death rate is not high. One to 1.5 per cent of the animals that get sick are dying, which are very weak and have low immunity. Veterinarians are doing symptomatic treatment to prevent the disease. In order to protect healthy animals from the disease, animal owners have been advised to keep the infected animal completely separated, if symptoms like fever and lump, etc., are detected," said the officials. Kataria was reviewing measures being taken for the prevention of the disease with the officials of the affected districts through video conferencing at Pant Shi Bhawan here on Wednesday. He directed the officers to immediately reach the spot on getting information about the infection and make the people aware of the preventive measures. Chief Secretary Usha Sharma also had a meeting with ten district collectors and district level officers of the Animal Husbandry Department through video conferencing to review the status of lumpy skin disease spreading in the state and the efforts being made to prevent it. She informed that the state government was taking all the necessary steps with alertness and sensitivity regarding the spreading of lumpy skin disease in cattle in the state. Berlin, Aug 4 : After an explosion at a police blasting site in Berlin's Grunewald forest, a fire has broken out in the adjacent forest and is spreading, the fire brigade said on Thursday. An area of roughly 1.5 hectares was affected and further explosions have occurred, reports dpa news agency. Residential areas are not in danger, however, according to firefighters. "We will prevent that," a spokesman said. Though there have been no casualties, Berliners are being told to avoid the area as far as possible. It is assumed that the extreme dryness in the area will influence the further course of the fire. The extreme heat expected on Thursday will be especially hard on the emergency services. Due to further explosions and flying debris, the fire brigade said it had not yet started extinguishing the fire, and the emergency services had initially withdrawn to about 1,000 metres away. There are 100 firefighters and police at the scene. Additional firefighters and special forces from the Bundeswehr have been requested. Water cannon and evacuation tanks have also arrived. According to a police spokesperson, it is still completely unclear how the explosion could have occurred. The site is used to dispose of ammunition in a controlled manner. New Delhi, Aug 4 : A total of 18 emergency landings were reported by various airlines in India during the last two years, the Civil Aviation ministry told the Lok Sabha on Thursday. Recently on July 2, a plane operating from Delhi to Jabalpur was forced to return after the crew noticed smoke in the cabin while passing at 5000 ft. No untoward incident was reported and the passengers disembarked safely after emergency landing. Similarly, a Calicut-Dubai flight was diverted to Muscat and made an emergency landing on July 16 after a burning smell was observed in the cabin mid-air. Aviation regulator the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued the Air Operator Permit (AOP) to the airline on compliance with laid down Civil Aviation Requirements (CARs) which require the airline to have their own maintenance organisation approved or have arrangement with an approved maintenance organisation for maintaining their aircraft in a continuous state of airworthiness. The responsibility for the maintenance of the aircraft lies with the airline which is required to ensure that aircraft is maintained as per the maintenance programme prepared based on instruction of the manufacturer and approved by DGCA. Airline/operators are also responsible for ensuring that the required qualified and experienced manpower, equipment and spares including maintenance data is available for maintaining the aircraft, said the Aviation ministry in a reply in the Lower House. DGCA ensures that the airline and the maintenance organisation continue to comply with the regulatory requirements against which they have been initially approved through a system of surveillance, audits, spot checks, night surveillance etc. and in case of the non-compliances, DGCA ensures that rectification is taken by the airlines/ maintenance organisation. DGCA initiates enforcement actions against organisation, personnel in case violations are found which may include warning, suspension, or cancellation of approval, authorisation, permit or license including imposition of financial penalty. Lucknow, Aug 4 : The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) is of the view that social media platforms are posing new challenges to child safety. "Children are being manipulated on social media platforms, technically known as grooming and these agencies are not ready to cooperate. The government wants these companies to give parents the right to access to accounts of children on social media," said Priyank Kanoongo, chairperson of NCPCR while talking to reporters. Claiming that the social media platforms chose to remain ignorant to concerns like phishing, grooming, cyber bullying and so on, he said: "We are not asking them to give the rights to strangers and therefore their dilly-dallying over engaging parents to monitor the social media use of their children is shocking and unacceptable." He asked parents to be extra cautious about their child's activity online. "The world of the deep web and dark web is filthier than they can even comprehend. They must educate themselves to save their children from risks. We have had scores of examples, linking allurement of young girls and boys on social media with trafficking networks," he pointed out. Citing an example, he said, "Recently, a young girl from Kolkata, who posted her songs on Instagram, was lured by someone posing as a music director. The girl was rescued from near Indore." Kanoongo further said that sexting and exchange of self-shared pornographic material is emerging as the commonest crime. Talking about the achievements of the NCPCR in the past few years, Kanoongo, said: "Some of the few things which make my work extremely satisfying include being able to undertake a social audit of all child homes in the country. Then, the commission has been able to reunite over 1.45 lakh children with their own homes. We have been able to formulate a policy for street children and push for admission of children from economically weaker sections into schools." The NCPCR chief lauded Uttar Pradesh government for its strategy on Covid-19 orphans. "What UP did to safeguard the Covid-19 orphans' interests was remarkable and other states should follow it," he said. Tokyo, Aug 4 : Torrential rain lashed regions in northeast and central Japan overnight through Thursday, with local authorities in Yamagata and Niigata prefectures urging residents to seek shelter. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) had issued a level 5 alert, the highest on the country's disaster warning scale, for six municipalities in Yamagata, but has since downgraded the warning, reports Xinhua news agency. The emergency warning for Niigata Prefecture, however, is still in effect, the JMA said. Local authorities in Yamagata have also said that extensive flooding had occurred due to the Mogami River bursting its banks. Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency said around 30,000 people in Yamagata were urged to evacuate their homes by Wednesday night. Houses were flooded, cars submerged, roads inundated and water supplies were cut off in some of the affected towns and cities, Yamagata and Niigata-based authorities said, as reported by local media. In Yamagata, a bridge reportedly collapsed and a car was swept away in the deluge, according to media accounts in the area. Fukushima prefecture also experienced extensive flooding, media reports said, with local authorities saying homes and roads had also been flooded. East Japan Railway Co. said it will suspend its Shinkansen bullet train service throughout Thursday between Fukushima and Yamagata's Shinjo due to the torrential rain. The weather agency said more heavy rain is expected in the southern Tohoku region and Niigata prefecture through Thursday noon. It has also issued a notice of record hourly rainfall for the central prefectures of Ishikawa and Fukui prefectures. The Ishikawa prefectural government has warned of landslides in four cities in the region, local media reported. Weather officials have urged people to remain vigilant for landslides, swelling rivers and flooding in the affected regions. Bengaluru, Aug 4 : Union Minister for Home and Co-Operation Amit Shah on Thursday took the Karnataka BJP leadership to task and directed them to assuage the angry party workers and focus on the upcoming Assembly elections. Sources said that Shah stated that the party leaders should consider seriously the anguish and backlash of the BJP workers following the murders of Hindu activist. He also gave them directions to come up with brave decisions to assuage the workers' anger and prepare them to work for the party as elections are fast approaching, sources added. Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai, state President Nalin Kumar Kateel, state BJP Organising General Secretary Rajesh Kunturu, National General Secretary and BJP MLA C.T. Ravi were present during the confidential meeting. Sources said that Amit Shah expressed his displeasure over the statements of state BJP leaders undermining the party workers, which has provoked them further. The en masse resignation move by the BJP Yuva Morcha members following the murder of Praveen Kumar Nettare was also discussed during the meet. Sources added that Amit Shah gave clear instructions to maintain the law and order system in the state and consider the political killings of minority communities also seriously. CM Bommai was also asked to maintain peace and harmony as that will play an important role in the upcoming Assembly elections. CM Bommai was asked to take harsh measures against the forces behind the murder of Hindu activists. The Congress party's decision to go to elections under collective leadership which ended the infighting in the state unit was also discussed, sources said. New Delhi, Aug 4 : A Go First flight operating from Ahmedabad to Chandigarh was diverted to Ahmedabad after an incident of bird hit. As per the aviation regulator, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), engine number 1 of the flight G8-911 is suspected to be hit by a bird and investigation has been initiated. Multiple incidents of technical snags and diversion of flights have been witnessed in the last few weeks. As per government data, a total of 478 technical snags related occurrences were reported in the planes in the last one year between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022. "During operations, an aircraft may experience technical snags due to malfunctioning of components fitted on the aircraft which require rectification action by the airlines for continued safe, efficient and reliable air transport service. These technical snags are reported by the flight crew on receiving an aural/visual warning in the cockpit or an indication of an faulty system or while experiencing difficulty in operating the aircraft," said the ministry of Civil Aviation recently in a Parliament reply. Jaipur, Aug 4 : Rajasthan is all set to make a big leap towards the new era of Industrialisation with proposals of over Rs 10 trillion lined up ahead of 'Invest Rajasthan 2022 summit', said the officials, adding that "the proposals have arrived across sectors following the advantages of land, resources, infrastructure and state government policies". State Minister of Industries Shakuntala Rawat said, "On 7 and 8 October, 2022, Rajasthan government will host the 'Invest Rajasthan Summit' in Jaipur. It will host approximately 3,000 delegates from various industries/sectors to have deliberations on varied sectors during conclaves/ sessions on Startups, Agri and Agri Processing, Future Ready Sectors, Tourism, MSME. The Summit will commemorate the fructification of investment proposals received in Rajasthan". Ahead of the summit, investment proposals from Reliance, Renew Power Solar Module Manufacturing, Renew Power Green Hydrogen, Lenskart Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Okaya EV Pvt Ltd., Saint Gobain Glass India Pvt. Ltd., Adani Group, Asahi Glass., RSWM Limited, Sudiva Spinners, Borosil Limited, Wipro Hydraulics Pvt. Ltd. E-Pack Durable Pvt. Ltd., Anand Shree Trust, Sahasra Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd. have been provided clearances. Along with several multinational and Indian investors, the summit has also attracted proposals from the local entrepreneurs, assuring development of a conducive ecosystem for industries in the state. In advance towards Invest Rajasthan, various roadshows and investor connect programmes have been held across India and abroad. Recently, Startup Conclave was organised where 4,192 memorandums of understanding and letters of intent were received. The MoUs signed are majorly in Mines and Minerals, Agri and Agro Processing, Tourism, Textile, Engineering, Chemicals and Petrochemicals, Health and Medical, Logistics, Energy and Handicraft. Out of the 4,192 MoUs/LoIs, already 39 per cent have been implemented or in the advanced stage of setting up their ventures in the state. The aim of the state government is to have most of the MoUs/LoIs on ground before the Summit. Veenu Gupta, Additional Chief Secretary, Government of Rajasthan said, "The Summit will see breakaway sessions on topics addressing new age agendas pertaining to Tourism, Renewable energy, MSMEs, Agri, Startups. For the MoUs and LoIs signed the government is putting in a lot of effort to provide clearances and permissions so that these can be started timely." Chhotaudepur : , Aug 4 (IANS) A teacher hanged himself from the ceiling of his house in Vachlibhit village of Chhotaudepur on Wednesday night after a rape complaint was lodged against him a week ago. Since then he was absconding, said an officer with Zoz police station. The officer said last week Anita (name changed) had lodged a complaint alleging that Babubhai Ruplabhai Rathva had raped her 14 year old mute and mentally challenged daughter, when she was alone at home on July 26. In the complaint she stated that Babubhai had come to her house and told the victim's family that he is waiting for labourers, and till they arrive he will rest at the victim's house. The family members trusted him and the adults went to their farm to work there. When the girl was alone at home, the teacher raped the minor girl. On returning from the farm, the complainant learned about the incident from her daughter. By that time the teacher had fled frm the spot. The victim's mother informed her husband and lodged a complaint with the police. The police officer said the accused was booked under various sections of POCSO and for rape while the victim was sent to a government hospital for medical examination. The case was investigated by Inspector K A Dabhi. On Wednesday night the village sarpanch called the police to inform them that the accused teacher Babubhai had committed suicide after returning home. His body was sent for postmortem. Lucknow, Aug 4 : For the first time, about 21 foreign students of Lucknow University have been given Indian alumni cards under the initiative taken by ICCR so that the graduating students carry a sense of belonging and bond with the country wherever they go. "The alumni card was awarded to the 2022 batch of foreign students, who studied at the LU under ICCR fellowships. This is a unique initiative of the ICCR to establish a cultural bond with the scholars, getting dispersed across the globe. The initiative shall add to the global connection and strengthen the mission of universal peace and amity," said LU spokesman. The cards were given at the farewell function held at the regional office of Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) on Wednesday evening. Regional director Arvind Kumar said: "From this year, ICCR has decided to organise a farewell function for ICCR scholars who would be finishing their studies. The aim of organising this event is not only to bid farewell to students but also to strengthen the bond. It is a significant step towards our cultural diplomacy." Mumbai, Aug 4 : In a major haul, the Mumbai Police' Anti Narcotics Cell (ANC) has made drug seizures worth a stupendous Rs 1,403-crore from Nala Sopara town in Palghar district, which borders Gujarat state, officials said here on Thursday. The ANC nabbed a person with the 702 kgs of Mephedrone from Sitaram Building in Chakradhar Nagar area of Nala Sopara on Wednesday night worth a total of Rs 1,403.5 crore, and arrested two suppliers. The latest drugs haul became possible after the interrogation of two other drug peddlers plus a woman, who were nabbed by the ANC on March 29 from Govandi in north-east Mumbai. Of the arrested trio, one was caught with 250 gms Mephedrone valued at Rs 37.50 lakh and the other with 2.70 kgs of Mephedrone worth Rs 4.14 crore in the market. After sustained interrogation, the woman accused revealed details on their two associates of whom one was picked up late on Tuesday (August 2) and the fifth was caught with the narcotics consignment on Wednesday (August 3). The ANC said that among the accused are a couple of qualified chemists with knowledge of organic chemistry required to produce the Mephedrone drugs which are much in demand. The woman accused along with the others kept their identity secret and sought clients on social media and supplied the drugs to their clientele in different parts of Mumbai and surroundings. The teams which cracked one of the biggest narcotics supply racket comprised police officials like Inspector Sandeep Kale, guided by ACP Savlaram Agavale, DCP Datta Nalawade, Additional Police Commissioner Viresh Prabhu, Joint Police Commissioner Suhas Warke and Police Commissioner Vivek Phansalkar along with the field teams of ANC Worli Unit. While three accused arrested in March are in judicial custody, the two others nabbed on Wednesday have been sent to police custody, said Kale. Further investigations are on in the sensational case to trace the source of the drugs, other hidden players and their links with the narcotics mafia after the seizure of the drugs totally valued at Rs 1,408-crore in two inter-connected operations carried out in four months. New Delhi, Aug 4 : Industry stakeholders on Thursday said the new framework for Personal Data Protection Bill should emphasise on cross-border data flow and data localisation requirements, bringing ransomware, Blockchain-based crypto/NFT scams and even the huge tax evasion by Chinese tech companies into its ambit. IT industry's apex body Nasscom said that data is the bedrock for 'Digital India' and the new framework can build on the learnings from global implementation of data privacy laws and stakeholder feedback on the earlier bill. "The key imperatives will be to operationalise the fundamental right of privacy and enable data protection in a manner that grows trust in data driven businesses and allows data led services to grow in a safe and trusted manner," Nasscom said in a statement. The government withdrew the contentious Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill 2019 that saw 81 amendments to date, saying that it will soon introduce a new, sharper bill that fits into the comprehensive legal framework to protect the data of billions of citizens. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the draft of the new PDP Bill is almost ready that will protect the digital privacy of individuals. According to Sajai Singh, Partner at law firm J Sagar Associates (JSA the key issue is the practicality of a Bill becoming the law of the land. "The drafting of the PDP Bill needed to be made current with the ground realities, with ethics and AI, ransomware becoming more sophisticated, crypto and NFTs adding a commercial dimension to Blockchain technology and the like," said Singh. On the parallel ground is the drafting of the Digital India Act, which will update and replace the Information Technology Act, 2000. "Various multinationals are interested in seeing how Indian law will address issues like cross-border data flow, data localisation requirements and restrictions placed on certain services like VPN (virtual private network)," Singh added. Aparajita Bharti, Founding Partner at TQH Consulting, said that given the number of outstanding questions around issues like non-personal data, data localisation, cross border data flows and exemptions to central government, "the government's intent to bring a fresh Bill that incorporates all the feedback could be a positive stepa. The earlier PDP Bill drew intense scrutiny from privacy advocates, industry stakeholders and tech companies. The Bill was first brought in 2019 and was then referred to the Joint Committee. The JCP report had identified many issues that were relevant but beyond the scope of a modern digital privacy law. New Delhi-based cyberlaw expert Virag Gupta said that several cases of data breach and tax evasion by Chinese companies have been detected by the Indian agencies. "Industry and the government have, many times, suggested that India needs a comprehensive Information Technology Act. On many important issues, the government has come with ordinance. Early enactment of data protection and data localisation will bring massive tax revenue and create huge employment opportunities in the country", Gupta told IANS. Amit Jaju, senior MD at Ankura Consulting, said that Indian companies have witnessed large-scale data breaches this year and in absence of a data protection law, individuals have little to no protection. New Delhi, Aug 4 : In a latest development in connection with the National Herald case, sources in Enforcement Directorate (ED) said that they had written two emails to Young Indian officials, (Congress' Mallikarjuna Kharge and Pawan Bansal) to assist them in the search operation, but none helped them. "We were forced to seal the Young India (YI) office," sources claimed. The sources said that both Bansal and Kharge were present at the office of YI when they reached there. The ED officials said that they requested them to join the search operations. "But both of them immediately left the office... it shows they didn't want to help us. We then decided to take action," said the source. The ED had sealed the office of Young India situated at the fourth floor of the National Herald building. The ED had asked Kharge to designate an official of YI so that they could initiate search proceedings. But after hearing this, Kharge left the National Herald office and didn't provide them with any person, sources detailed. "We wanted to make a seizure memo in front of that official of YI. As we weren't provided with anyone we had to seal it to keep the proof intact," the source said. The ED has said that if Kharge provides them with an official of YI, who will assist them in the search, they will open the sealed office. On Wednesday, the ED sealed the office of YI in the building of Herald House at Bahadurshah Zafar Marg. The ED pasted an order on the building of the Herald House. "This is hereby declared that this premises will not be opened without prior permission from the Directorate of Enforcement," read the order copy. The sources had said that they did this so that the evidence was not tampered with. "We had called Herald officials to assist us but senior persons were not cooperating and were not coming forward to assist in the search. We were left with no other options but to seal the office," the official said. Recently, the ED questioned Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi for several days. As of now the ED has not released any official statement in this respect. Further details are awaited. Hyderabad, Aug 4 : Hyderabad on Thursday added another landmark with the inauguration of the state-of-the-art world class Integrated Command and Control Centre of Telangana State Police. Built at a cost of Rs 600 crore, the iconic building has come up in upscale Banjara Hills in the heart of this technology hub whose landscape is already dotted with gleaming towers of several global IT giants. With the networking the functioning of various units of the police under a single roof, the facility serves as the nerve centre to tackle crisis like law and order problems, natural calamity or other disasters. The centre also has a helipad on the roof-top for emergency operations. This is claimed to be the first-of-kind facility in India and is modelled on the lines of command and control centres in New York and Chicago. Equipped with the latest technology, the Police Towers, as the centre is also called, will help police to further improve the monitoring mechanism and cut down the response time across the state. The footage from about 10 lakh CCTV cameras installed across the state can be monitored from this facility. With a built up space of 6.42 lakh square feet, the twin towers stand 272 feet tall and will also help in multi-agency operations for disaster management. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao inaugurated the centre and offices of Hyderabad Police Commissioner, various wings of the police and a museum, showcasing the history of Telangana police. Accompanied by Home minister Mohammed Mehmood Ali, Director General of Police M. Mahender Reddy, Hyderabad Police Commissioner C. V. Anand, Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar and other top officials, the chief minister went around the building and witnessed technology demonstration. The centre comprises twin towers. Tower A, which is a 20-storeyed building has the Hyderabad City Police Commissionerate. Tower B has 15 storeys and it served as the 'Technology Fusion Tower' with all backups relating to Dial-100. Tower B will also have SHE safety, cyber and narcotics, crimes branches and incubation centre. The building, comprising five blocks, has chambers for the chief minister, home minister and DGP. When required, they can monitor the crisis situation from the war room and give necessary instructions to law enforcement agencies and other departments. The building also has a data centre equipped with the new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for analytics in tackling the crimes. The centre has a 480-seater auditorium, a media and training centre. Officials of not just police but also other government departments can monitor the situation for disaster management. The building has parking space that can accommodate 600 four wheelers and 350 two-wheelers. No wooden furniture has been used in the centre. Officials said the furniture has been designed out of recycled material. About 35 per cent of the land has been allotted for plantation. The Police Command and Control Centre is a green building. With the glass facade, natural light allows the building to cut down on 50 per cent of energy consumption. Additionally, solar panels will generate up to 0.5 megawatts of electricity. Ahmedabad / Tel Aviv, Aug 4 : Adani Enterprises Ltd (AEL), the business incubation arm of the Adani Group, has signed an MoU with the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), the premier public-funded agency overseeing Israel's innovation policy, for cooperation in technological innovation between Israeli entities and the Adani Group. This cooperation will deepen the existing partnerships that Adani has already established over the past six years in Israel. The MoU will lead to the creation of a cutting-edge innovation platform that will allow Adani businesses to access tech solutions provided by Israeli start-ups whereby selected innovation projects will be supported by the partnership. The collaboration will span climate change, cyber, AI, IoT, 5G, agriculture, all of which are core businesses for Adani. Karan Adani, CEO and Whole-time Director, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Ltd said, "The Haifa Port acquisition demonstrates the Adani Group's commitment to Israel. The partnership with the Israel Innovation Authority is yet another large step in deepening our relations within Israel and provides us a platform to access the hundreds of cutting-edge technologies that Israel continues to produce. What we offer in return is the broadest sandbox of multiple B2B and B2C industries from Adani to multiple tech companies in Israel. It is a classic supply demand match between two nations that have always shared very strong bonds. The Adani-IIA collaboration will also help to open various channels for the latest technologies from Israel to enter India and accelerate the digitization of several other organisations." Dror Bin, CEO, Israel Innovation Authority said, "The Israel Innovation Authority is pleased to partner with the Adani Group in cementing Adani's and India's strategic collaboration with Israel, following the group's historic acquisition of Haifa Port last month. The Adani Group, one of India's largest conglomerates, is a partner of choice for any Israeli startup looking to tap into the world's fastest growing economy - India. "With this MoU, the Israel Innovation Authority will provide Israeli companies a unique opportunity to codevelop, pilot and scale-up innovative technologies in collaboration with Adani's diverse businesses in the fields of renewable energy, AI, logistics and more. As we celebrate this year the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between India and Israel, we are proud to further expand our collaboration with India in the field of innovation, and together with the Adani Group, lead the sustainable and digital transformation that will create ripple effects worldwide." The Adani Group's broader strategy is to digitally integrate its current and future businesses by linking its data centres through a network of submarine and terrestrial cables, industrial level 5G connectivity, building the largest industrial operations cloud in the world, developing the super app to offer a suite of services across its consumer base of 400 million, and establishing a world-class AI centre of excellence. T his tie-up between Adani Enterprises and IIA is expected to further each other's capabilities, technology leadership, resources and worldwide presence. Under the provisions of Israeli industrial laws and policies that encourage research, development and technological innovation, the Adani Group will screen and select Israeli startups and other innovation companies developing new and exciting solutions in the tech space. Approved projects will then be assisted by the Adani Group and supported by the Israel Innovation Authority. London, Aug 4 : After MPs raised concerns about the risk of data being passed to the Chinese government, the UK Parliament suspended and deleted content of its TikTok account, days after its launch. Senior MPs and peers had called for the account to be removed until TikTok gave "credible assurances" no data could be handed to China, reports the BBC. "Based on member feedback, we are closing the pilot UK Parliament TikTok account earlier than we had planned," a UK Parliament spokesman was quoted as saying. "The account was a pilot initiative while we tested the platform as a way of reaching younger audiences with relevant content about Parliament," it added. Meanwhile, TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has denied it was controlled by the Chinese government. TikTok spokeswoman said it was "disappointing" that Parliament would not be able to connect with users of the app in the UK. Offering to reassure the MPs who raised concerns, the spokeswoman said TikTok would be willing to "clarify any inaccuracies about our platform". Peers and MPs, including former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and recent party leadership contender Tom Tugendhat, flagged those concerns in a letter to the speakers of both Houses of Parliament. In the letter, the peers and MPs, who have been sanctioned by the Chinese government for speaking out about human rights abuses in the country, said they were "surprised and disappointed" by Parliament's decision to set up the account. The letter said the data security risks associated with the app were "considerable". TikTok executives were "unable to reassure MPs that the company could prevent data transfer to ByteDance, should the parent company make a request for it", the letter said. "The prospect of Xi Jinping's government having access to personal data on our children's phones ought to be a cause for major concern," it added. Mumbai, Aug 4 : Bollywood star Alia Bhatt, who is currently expecting her first bundle of joy with husband Ranbir Kapoor, is currently going through a very busy phase in her life. While she is expecting her first child post a dreamy wedding with the actor, on the professional front she has two big projects lined up for release -- first is the OTT movie 'Darlings and second is 'Brahmastra: Part One - Shiva. Both projects are very special to her. The Netflix movie 'Darlings' where she co-stars with powerhouse performers like Shefali Shah and Vijay Varma, is her maiden production under Eternal Sunshine Productions banner. 'Brahmastra: Part One - Shiva', which is set to debut on September 9 in cinemas, is her first film opposite her hubby Ranbir. In a recent conversation with IANS, Alia spoke about the spotlight on her personal life more than professional, her experience as a debutante producer and working with the cast of 'Darlings'. The overwhelming coverage around her personal life in the media may give an impression that her work is not in the media focus but, Alia gracefully disagrees, "I feel there is a lot of focus on my work. Unfortunately, the nature of showbiz is such that people are interested to know about your personal life and as an actor you sign up for that." But, there's one thing that irks her and rightly so - the fake news. Alia says, "The only thing that I get annoyed with is people making up fake news. But, again that's something that's difficult to control in the digital sphere." She claims that venturing into production has had no effect on the actor in her. For a generous amount of time on the 'Darlings' sets, she walked around like an actor hired to do a job and not the producer of the film. She says in a matter of fact manner: "The actor in me hasn't changed much because of the producer in me. In fact, when we were shooting the film I was majorly on the sets as an actor and not as a producer. Having said that, the producer in me majorly came into play after the film was finished." "As an actor, once the film is wrapped up, you're done. You get back into the action during the promotions or closer to the release of the project. But as a producer, you have to be with the film at every step - planning and strategising, monitoring the post-production, checking the edit and the cut till it's out for the audience." "I have always been involved in all my films as an actor but this project took me a step further." The film features an interesting line-up of actors, in addition to Shefali and Vijay, it has another Vijay - Vijay Maurya and Rajesh Sharma. Casting for Alia is of prime importance, something that can make or break a film, "When I watch a movie, I get impressed when the casting of the film is very detailed. You can see the hard work of the casting directors, their assistants and that of the entire team put together." Finally, she talks about her camaraderie with fellow actress Shefali Shah, who plays her mother in the film, "Shefali and I are not at all on the same page before a scene. Off the camera, there's something else going on in her mind and I am in my own zone." "It's only when the camera rolls, we spontaneously switch into our characters and that's how we build up the scene", she concludes. -- Syndicated from IANS New Delhi, Aug 4 : In a latest development in the National Herald case, senior Congress leader Mallikarjuna Kharge reached the office of Young Indian to assist the Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials in search operations. On Thursday, a team of top officials of the ED reached the office of Young Indian (YI) to conduct the search operation. The ED has also opened the office, which was temporarily sealed. Kharge was present at the YI office after he decided to assist the ED officials in search operations. On Wednesday, the ED officials had seized the YI office saying no one was assisting them. The ED also said that they wrote two emails to Pawan Bansal and Mallikarjuna Kharge and requested them to be present at the time of search operations. Kharge, on Thursday reached the YI office and was assisting the ED officials in the search operation. The search operations can go on for hours, said sources Meanwhile, the Congress called it vendetta and said the search was being done at the instruction of the Centre. Barcelona, Aug 4 : As Europeans battle sweltering temperatures and rising energy prices, Spain adopted a rule mandating that air conditioning be set at or above 27 degrees Celsius in public areas, including offices, shops, bars, theaters, airports, and train stations. The decree was published in the official state gazette and is scheduled to go into effect next week. The rules include maintaining heating at or below 19 degrees Celsius in the winter and will remain in place at least through November 2023, The Verge reported. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has stated publicly that the country urgently needs to save energy, even encouraging office workers to remove their ties to help stay cool without artificial assistance. "I have asked the ministers and public and private sector bosses not to wear ties unless it is necessary," he was quoted as saying at a press conference last week. As per the report, the European countries are scrambling to untangle twin problems; scorching heat that is driving up energy demand and political conflict that's complicating energy supplies. Nations, including Spain, are facing increasing pressure not to rely on gas supplied by Russia amid the ongoing conflict with Ukraine. According to the media reports, Greece and Italy announced measures last month to similarly restrict energy use when cooling public buildings, requiring air conditioning to be set to 27 degrees Celsius or higher. France has ordered public premises to set thermostats higher in the summer and lower in the winter and will fine air-conditioned businesses 750 euros ($764 approx) if they leave their doors open. The city of Hanover, Germany, has banned the use of mobile air conditioning units and fan heaters everywhere other than in hospitals and schools. However, the Madrid region president Isabel Diaz Ayuso tweeted, "Madrid isn't going to switch off. This generates insecurity and scares away tourism and consumption". Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War New Delhi, Aug 4 : HMD Global, the home of Nokia phones, on Thursday launched two new upgraded feature phones -- Nokia 8210 4G and Nokia 110 -- in India. The Nokia 8210 4G will be available at Rs 3,999 in blue and red colour variants and the Nokia 110 will be available at Rs 1,699 for cyan and charcoal and Rs 1,799 for rose gold colour. "Nokia 8210 4G -- a new addition to the 'Originals' family -- celebrates the iconic Nokia 8210 4G launched in 1999 at Paris Fashion Week, which was quite the sensation in India at the time," Sanmeet Singh Kochhar, Vice President, HMD Global-India and MENA said in a statement. "We have also added the new Nokia 110 (2022) to our robust feature phone line-up. The latest portfolio additions reaffirm HMD Global's commitment to ensuring everyone has access to affordable and long-lasting technology," he added. The new Nokia 8210 4G is claimed to offer a big battery life with 27 days of standby time, and dual SIM VoLTE for crystal clear calls with elegant colour choices. Meanwhile, the new Nokia 110 (2022) offers a built-in rear camera, wireless FM Radio, Auto Call Recording feature and larger storage. Sabarkantha : Aug 4 (IANS) Sabarkantha Police have launched a probe after a baby was found buried alive at a farm in Gambhoi village of the district on Thursday morning. The infant was noticed by a farmer when he reached his field in the morning. On seeing a tiny arm outside the mud, he dug the area with the help of others only to find an alive infant. They then rushed the baby to Himatnagar civil hospital, where it is being treated. Gambhoi Police Sub-Inspector C.F. Thakor told the local media that: "We received information that a infant was buried alive in the farm owned by Hitendrasinh. The infant was rescued and taken to a hospital. Police have recorded the statement of Hitendrasinh and other locals and started an investigation." Officer said once the parents or the mother is identified, an official complaint will be lodged and action taken various sections of Indian Penal Code. Farmer Hitendrasinh told the media: "Thursday morning while I was inspecting the farm, I saw a baby's arm, so I sought the help from the employees of a power distribution company's office which is right next to my farm. They all rushed and one of them rescued the baby. The pit was not deep and as the baby is alive means someone must have buried it early this morning only." Washington, Aug 4 : Ishan Wahi, 32, a former product manager at cryptocurrency platform Coinbase Global, along with his brother Nikhil Wahi, 26, have pleaded not guilty to federal charges of insider trading, the media reported. The lawyer representing Ishan Wahi said that the charges against him should be "dismissed" as insider trading needs to involve securities or commodities and this case did not, according to reports. Last month, the US authorities charged the brothers and their Indian-American friend Sameer Ramani, 33, of Houston with wire fraud conspiracy by using confidential information from crypto exchange Coinbase and made $1.5 million in illicit money. The Wahi brothers were arrested in Seattle, Washington State, where they were living, and presented in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington. Ramani remains at large. Ishan, Nikhil and Ramani stare at a maximum sentence of 20 years each. Ishan worked at Coinbase as a product manager assigned to a Coinbase asset listing team starting in October 2020. He was involved in the highly confidential process of listing crypto assets on Coinbase's exchanges and had detailed and advanced knowledge of which crypto assets Coinbase was planning to list and the timing of public announcements about those crypto asset listings. According to the US authorities, on at least 14 occasions, Ishan knew in advance both that Coinbase planned to list particular crypto assets and the timing of its public announcements of those asset listings. He misappropriated that Coinbase confidential information by tipping either his brother, Nikhil, or Ramani, "so that they could place profitable trades in those crypto assets in advance of Coinbase's public listing announcements". The defendants made illegal trades in at least 25 different crypto assets and realised ill-gotten gains totalling approximately $1.5 million. To conceal their purchases of crypto assets in advance of Coinbase listing announcements, Nikhil and Ramani used accounts at centralised exchanges held in the names of others, and transferred funds, crypto assets, and proceeds of their scheme through multiple anonymous Ethereum blockchain wallets. "Nikhil and Ramani also regularly created and used new Ethereum blockchain wallets without any prior transaction history in order to further conceal their involvement in the scheme," said the Justice Department. Coinbase publicly replied on Twitter, saying that any Coinbase employee who leaked confidential company information would be "immediately terminated and referred to relevant authorities (potentially for criminal prosecution)." --IANS na/vd A Mumbai, Aug 4 : Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, who is fondly called as Mr. Perfectionist, has praised his 'Laal Singh Chaddha' co-star Kareena Kapoor Khan and called the diva "perfect" on the chat show 'Koffee With Karan' Season 7. In an all-new segment, actor trolling actors, the latest episode of the show saw Aamir and Kareena ask each other candid questions exploring their unknown side. Aamir made Kareena share a slice of her experience working with the actor. "He has a thing for perfection. It is not bad, but if he feels it has to be a certain way, it has to be just that. Unless that perfection is achieved, we are not done. That extra focus on reaching that perfection can sometimes be a bit annoying," she said. Aamir revealed that he has never stopped himself from appreciating things that are already perfect, like Kareena. "I am a perfectionist, but she is perfect," shared the star with a big smile. 'Koffee with Karan' Season 7 streams on Disney+ Hotstar. Latest updates on Koffee With Karan Season 7 Los Angeles, Aug 4 : Hollywood star Jason Momoa made a very special trip this week from Los Angeles to Hawaii. He also made it a never-to-forget trip for the passengers on the flight. The actor was travelling to Hawaiian Airlines to celebrate the airline's partnership with his water company Mananalu. The 42-year-old actor surprised unsuspecting passengers by personally handing out aluminum bottles filled with the purified water, reports people.com. TikTok user @livinglikekylee posted a video their aunt sent of Momoa handing out the bottles. The video had the caption, "When Jason Momoa is your flight attendant." The 'Aquaman' actor also documented the special occasion on his Instagram page with his own video footage. "Bright and early. It should be a good day. I'm going home to Hawaii with the babies, and we're doing something really cool, very cool, something like how it all started," he said. The "babies" Momoa was referring to are his daughter Lola Iolani, 14, and son Nakoa-Wolf, 13. Of his inspiration for the activation, he explained that he questioned why he would always see plastic single-use water bottles on flights. "It's a dream come true...why can't we have aluminum? There's sparkling water, there's sparkling beer, there's soda, soft drinks. Why do I have to have this little single tiny water? So this is my first time being able to do this. So I'm going to make the announcement on Hawaiian Airlines...I'm excited I'm going home." In his caption, Momoa described his ultimate goal, and wrote: "My idea to create @Mananalu.water came to me while on a flight. I'm grateful for your support and it's an honor to have Hawaiian Airlines be the first airline to partner with Mananalu. We're on a mission to end single-use plastic." "Drink one, remove one - For every bottle of Mananalu sold, we remove one plastic bottle from the ocean. We have removed 3 MILLION plastic bottles from the ocean this year. Don't stop making waves to save our beautiful planet. aloha j." -- Syndicated from IANS Dakshina Kannada, Aug 4 : The Karnataka police department will impose a ban on male young pillion riders in Dakshina Kannada district during night time, announced ADGP (Law and Order) Alok Kumar on Thursday. Alok Kumar stated that this rule would come into effect after lifting of night curfew in Dakshina Kannada district that was imposed after serial murders triggered outrage in the state. The ADGP said elderly persons have been given exemption in the rule and they can ride pillion. "This measure was taken up in Wayanad district of Kerala. All male persons were banned from riding two wheelers. Here, the restrictions will only be on pillion riders," he said. The move is suspected to have come as the modus operandi of political killings in the district usually involve a pillion rider. According to police sources, the decision had been taken as the investigations have proved that the youngsters are brainwashed and used to carry out 'supari' (contract) killings in the district. He further stated that 18 check posts are being opened across the bordering district of Dakshina Kannada as per the directions of the Home Minister and DGP. The CCTV will be installed on check posts and Karnataka State Reserve Police (KSRP) staff will be deputed. This tight security arrangement will be there for a year, he added. Speaking about the progress of investigation of BJP activist Praveen Kumar Nettare murder case, he said, the police have successfully detected who is behind his murder. Information is already gathered on who carried out murder, who conspired and planned and they will be arrested soon, he said. A decision will be taken on when to hand over the case to the National Investigation Agency (NIA). However, before handing over the case, Karnataka police will arrest all accused persons, he said. Mumbai, Aug 4 : The makers of 'Holy Cow' starring Sanjay Mishra have released the poster that raises many questions at first glance with the depiction of a cow and the actor behind it. At one point it makes you laugh and on the other side it makes you think about the storyline. The movie is a social satire which stars Sanjay Mishra, Tigmanshu Dhulia and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Nawazuddin briefs about his role and says: "I have a guest appearance in the film and it's the job of an actor to adapt to the value system of the character. The whole cast of this film belonged to theatres hence it was all the more fun. This film is a satirical comedy with lots of fun elements." Producer Aaliya Siddiqui says that the movie holds a strong message for society. "I find art to be highly pointless if it doesn't reflect the day to day happenings. Filmmakers and artists have the voice and strength to effect long term changes and I am delighted to produce 'Holy Cow'." "We had a theme in mind and wanted to have fun with an idea that we have all pondered. I am grateful to my eclectic cast for telling the story with such honesty and sincerity," concludes Aaliya. The film is produced by Aaliya Siddiqui and Baljinder Khanna in association with Reltic Pictures, presented by K Sera Sera, written and directed by Sai Kabeer and will be released on August 26. Taipei, Aug 4 : China fired multiple missiles toward water near northeastern and southwestern Taiwan on Thursday, the island's Defence Ministry said, as Beijing makes good on its promise that Taipei will pay a price for hosting US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, media reports said. The Chinese military's Eastern Theater Command said in a statement that multiple missiles have been fired into the sea off the eastern part of Taiwan, adding that all the missiles hit their target accurately, CNN reported. "The entire live-fire training mission has been successfully completed and the relevant air and sea area control is now lifted," the statement said, as per the report. Earlier, the Eastern Theater Command said that it had conducted long-range, live-fire training in the Taiwan Strait, state broadcaster CCTV reported, as part of planned military exercises around the island. Taiwan also reported that Chinese long-range rockets had fallen near its islands of Matsu, Wuqiu and Dongyin, which are in the Taiwan Strait, but located closer to the Chinese mainland than the main island of Taiwan. Chinese state media said that exercises to simulate an air and sea "blockade" around Taiwan had started on Wednesday, but offered little solid evidence to back up the claim. Later on Thursday, images showed military helicopters flying past Pingtan island, one of Taiwan's closest points to mainland China. The military posturing was a deliberate show of force after Pelosi left the island on Wednesday evening, bound for South Korea, one of the final stops of her Asia tour that ends in Japan this weekend, CNN reported. Within hours of her departure from Taipei on Wednesday, the island's Defence Ministry said China sent more than 20 fighter jets across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, the midway point between mainland China and Taiwan which Beijing says it does not recognise but usually respects. Chennai, Aug 4 : It is going to be a no holds barred fight between two Indian teams on Friday at the ongoing 44th Chess Olympiad being held at Mamallapuram near here, said the Indian officials. There is no question of agreed draws/wins and each player will fight tooth and nail as the medal prospects are open, they added. On Friday, the top board will see the fight between the second seeded India 1 and the 16th seeded India 3. India has fielded six teams - three each in the Open and Women's sections - at the Olympiad. Both India 1 and India 3 have scored 10 points each at the end of sixth round. Agreed draws/wins in chess competitions is nothing new and has happened in the past. One view is that given the strength of its players, the chances of second seeded India 1 team staying at the top and contending for an Olympiad medal are more than the chances of India 3 going up and staying there after drawing/winning against the former. "India 1 has to win the match tomorrow as splitting the point with India 3 will work against it in the case of a tie-break to decide the medal winners with more than one team scoring identical points," Ganesh Kumar Rajaram, a chess tournament organiser, told IANS. Losing to a higher rated player will not majorly affect an India 3 player as the loss can be made up soon. All the members of India 3 team are rated above 2,600 ELO points and can beat any strong player in the world. The team also has players who have played in the Olympiad. So, is there a possibility of India 3 team being requested by the officials to allow its opponent to win or sign the peace treaty by splitting the point, is the question. "None of the All India Chess Federation (AICF) officials will do that now. It might have happened 30 years back when a player would have been asked to split or give away a point to his opponent. But it has not happened during the last 30 years," chess Grandmaster (GM) Pravin Thipsay, Head of the Indian Delegation at the Olympiad, told IANS. He also added that the current generation players are not for match fixing and they would fight it out. Is it possible to do a post mortem of a game and see whether a player - given his ratings and earlier games - actually gave away or split a point? While anti-cheating laws are there, it is also true it is not possible to prove that beyond a point, chess players said. A player can be a piece up at one particular point of time. But that doesn't mean he will win as there are possibilities of him blundering his queen, Thipsay said recalling an incident that happened in a tournament several decades back. He said an arbiter also cannot decide who will win at a given point of time. Wondering at the germination of agreed draw/win idea, India 3 team Captain GM Tejas Bakre told IANS: "It will be an all out fight against India 1 team. Our team members will fight for a win." "India 1 team can easily win the round on Friday 2.5 points out of 4. Mostly the two teams will play out their games," a chess official told IANS. Responding to the strategy to be adopted by his team on Friday, GM Srinath Narayanan, Captain of India 1, told IANS: "The team will play a normal game till the end. There is no pre-agreed result." According to him, in the past, teams with 10 points midway have figured in the medal list. The field is open as there are many teams with 10 points now. India 1 player GM P. Harikrishna, responding to a question from IANS on the strategy that would be employed while playing against another Indian team, said: "Meeting the other Indian team depends on the pairing. Our focus is on playing the matches and not the teams." The pairing has happened now and the match will happen on Friday. India 1 team GM Pentala Harikrishna 2720 GM Vidit Santosh Gujrathi 2714 GM Arjun Erigaisi 2689 GM S.L. Narayanan S.L. 2659 GM Krishnan Sasikiran 2638 India 3 team GM Surya Shekhar Ganguly 2608 GM S.P. Sethuraman 2623 GM Abhijeet Gupta 2627 GM Murali Karthikeyan 2613 GM Abhimanyu Puranik 2612 (Venkatachari Jagannathan can be reached at v.jagannathan@ians.in) New Delhi, Aug 4 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday issued summons to Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut's wife Varsha Raut in connection with the Prevention of Money Laundering case pertaining to the Patra Chawl land case. The ED said that the summons were issued after transactions done on Varsha Raut's account came to light. Sanjay Raut was on Sunday arrested by the ED after he skipped several summons. He was sent to the ED's custody till Thursday. Now his custodial remand has been extended till Monday by the Mumbai court. The ED had earlier questioned Pune businessman Avinash Bhosale in custody in the DHFL Yes Bank case, and sources claimed that they wanted to grill Raut in this matter too. The sources claimed that the Patra Chawl case of the ED is also linked to the DHFL case. In April, the ED had attached Raut's property in connection with the land scam. A property worth Rs 9 crore of Raut's associate Pravin Raut and assets worth Rs 2 crore belonging to Varsha Raut, the wife of Sanjay Raut, were attached by the ED. Pravin had eight parcels of land in Alibaug and a flat registered in the name of Varsha Raut which were attached. The ED had arrested Pravin in connection with the matter. "We had filed a chargesheet in the matter against Pravin, Sarang Wadhawan and Rakesh Wadhawan of HDIL and Guru Ashish Construction and others were named as an accused in the chargesheet," said an ED official. The ED came to know during the probe that Pravin allegedly paid Rs 55 lakh to Varsha. This was paid from the bank account of Pravin's wife. The money was termed as proceeds of crime by the ED. It was also alleged that the travel expenses of Sanjay Raut were borne by Pravin which included his hotel stay and air tickets. Kolkata, Aug 4 : The three Congress MLAs from Jharkhand, nabbed with a huge amount of cash from West Bengal last week, received a jolt on Thursday as the Calcutta High Court rejected their plea that their case be handed over to Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). A single judge bench of Justice Moushumi Bhattacharya has maintained the matter will continue to be probed by the state police's CID. However, the bench observed that if the petitioners desire, they can approach a division bench or higher court against her decision. On June 20 evening, three Congress MLAs from Jharkhand, namely Irfan Ansari, Rajesh Kacchap and Naman Bixal Kongari, were nabbed by the police from Howrah with a cash to the tune of Rs 49 lakh in their vehicles. The CID took over the investigation and the three MLAs approached the high court. West Bengal government's counsel, Anirban Roy argued that the accused persons cannot have the choice on which agency will probe the charges framed against them. "The accused persons cannot have the choice of CBI or any other agency. A separate FIR in the matter has been filed at Ranchi. But since the incidence of cash seizure happened in West Bengal, the FIR at Ranchi is not admissible," Roy added. Siddharth Luthra, the counsel for the petitioners, argued that they want the transfer of the investigation process since the state police do not have the right to arrest them. He also alleged that the ruling party in West Bengal is trying to gain political mileage from the entire incident. In his counter argument, the West Bengal government's counsel said that since the cash seizure was in an area under the jurisdiction of the state police, the latter have every right to probe that matter. After hearing both sides, Justice Bhattacharya observed that on the basis of assumptions, it is not possible to order for a transfer of probe process from one agency to the other. She also said that the statements given by the three MLAs that they brought the cash to purchase sarees from Kolkata is not admissible and hence the court does not find any reason to interfere in the interrogation process. New Delhi, Aug 4 : In a bid to build a strong ecosystem for 5G in the country after a successful 5G spectrum auction, the government on Thursday extended the last date for submission of applications under the design-led manufacturing scheme till August 25. The Department of Telecommunication had notified the design-led production-linked scheme (PLI) scheme on February 24, 2021, with a financial outlay of Rs 12,195 crore. The guidelines for the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for telecom and networking Products have been amended with effect from April 1, to introduce design-led manufacturing with additional one percent incentive rates. The registration process for design-led manufacturing under the PLI scheme started from June 21. Earlier, the last date for submission of the application was extended till August 5. The Department of Telecom (DoT) in June announced an incentive scheme for design-led manufacturing, along with extending the duration of production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme by a year. DoT also approved addition of 11 new telecom and networking products to the existing list, based on suggestions from the stakeholders. The design-Led manufacturing is primarily aimed to support efforts for designing telecom products in India. The government has also approved addition of 11 new telecom and networking products to the existing list, and announced to give an additional incentive rate of 1% over and above existing incentive rates. Patna, Aug 4 : Criticising the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), former Bihar deputy chief minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday said the ruling party is using central agencies only against the Opposition parties' leaders. "The central agencies are working like the wings of the BJP in the country. They are acting only against leaders in the Opposition parties. The officials in those agencies are working under tremendous pressure and they are forced to do one-sided investigations to frame Opposition leaders," he said. "I am not afraid of central agencies but why they are targeting only the leaders of opposition parties? Why are they not reaching Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi? Where is Lalit Modi? Actress Sushmita Sen has met Lalit Modi but central agencies are unable to trace him and other fugitives," Tejashwi said. Ahead of the "Pratirodh March", the RJD is trying to formulate a plan and make it successful. Yadav on Thursday met leaders of Left parties and Congress to make the rally successful. Tejashwi Yadav also slammed the Narendra Modi-led Central government, saying: "The people of the country are miffed over issues such as price rise, corruption, unemployment etc. The Narendra Modi-led government cannot discuss the issues which are affecting the common people. They are just misleading it. The people of the country and Bihar know their ploy and will give answers at the right time." Hectic activities have been underway in the political circles of Bihar since the visit of Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president JP Nadda to the state on July 31. Both had conducted road shows in Patna to showcase the "saffron might". That event has been considered as preparation for the Lok Sabha election 2024. The Opposition leaders of Bihar have plans to counter that event, and decided to come out with "Pratirodh March" led by the RJD, here on August 7. The Congress which parted ways with the 'Mahagathbandhan' after the 2020 assembly election also joined hands with the RJD and the Left to challenge the BJP in Bihar. Ahmedabad, Aug 4 : The Gaekwad rule in Vadodara was celebrated for providing education, employment, equality and security to people from all the communities - something that may not be spotted easily in the present times. During the rule of Sir Sayajirao Gaekwad in the 20th century, 'kinnars' were allowed education and freedom like other common people. They also had special rights that kept them from having to beg for alms. History is repeating itself as the former royal family of Vadodara is introducing a special cafe which will serve to connect people of the LGBTQA community with mainstream society. This cafe will be the first in Gujarat to be run by and for the LGBTQA community under the patronage of the ex-royals. This cafe will be opened in Maharani Chimnabai Stree Udyogalaya that has been operating since 1914, providing various kinds of training and support for women and transgender empowerment. The cafe will hire chefs and service staff from the LGBTQA community. Additionally, women engaged in entrepreneurial pursuits from home will also be employed in this cafe. Preparations for this initiative include training 20 people from the LGBTQA community. The cafe is named 'Gajra Cafe' after the progressive Gajrabai Devi, who went on to become Maharani Chimnabai of Baroda. An Urja event will be held in August 26 and 27, during which this cafe will be inaugurated. The event will have numerous food stalls with a wide variety of cuisines to choose from. Members of the Gandhinagar queer pride foundation told IANS that as an organisation that works for providing safe space, empowerment and upliftment to the sexual minorities and LGBTQA+ community, "It makes us immensely happy when we see other organisations, individuals and cities taking such progressive initiatives. Visibility of the marginalised communities through bringing them into the mainstream, providing equal work and earning opportunities to them and putting them in front of the society is extremely important today." New Delhi, Aug 4 : The traffic wing of the Delhi Police has issued a challan to BJP's Member of Parliament Manoj Tiwari of Rs 1,000 for not wearing a helmet, driving a bike without any license and other papers during the Tiranga Bike Rally on Wednesday. The Tiranga Bike Rally was organised by the BJP across the country. In Delhi it was held in Central Delhi's Red Fort area. The police said that Tiwari was challaned for riding the bike without a helmet, not having a license and pollution and registration certificates. Manoj Tiwari has said that he will pay the fine as he violated the law. "Very sorry for not wearing helmet today. I will pay the challan @dtptraffic.. clear number plate of vehicle is shown in this photo and location was Red Fort. All of you are requested not to ride two-wheelers without helmet. #DriveSafe family and friends need you," read his tweet. Tiwari was driving someone else's bike. The police has also issued a challan to the real owner of the bike. Beijing, Aug 4 : A Tibetan community festival, banned for 20 years after the arrest of a popular religious leader, has been allowed by Chinese authorities to resume with no explanation given for the sudden lifting of control, Tibetan sources say, a report mentioned. The annual event held in Nyagchuka county in Sichuan's Kardze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, formerly a part of historic Tibet, features horse races and picnics, a Tibetan living exile told RFA, citing local sources. "But since 2002, the year when Tulku Tenzin Delek was arrested on a charge of bombing a public square, the Chinese authorities had barred Tibetans in the region from celebrating the annual event," RFA's source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We don't know why the authorities have suddenly allowed the festival to be held again," the source said. Authorities had hoisted Chinese flags around the festival grounds before allowing the event to be held, though, he added. "In earlier years, when Tulku Tenzin Delek was there, people were forbidden to indulge in alcohol, smoking or taking drugs at the picnic, but this year everything was allowed," the source said. The annual festival was a major gathering in the region even before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, the source said. "But it became even grander after Tulku Tenzin Delek lived there. During the picnic, religious teachings were given and plays were performed on the life of the Tibetan yogi and poet Milarepa." "There was so much respect for Tulku Tenzin Delek." Tulku Tenzin Delek, 65, died under mysterious circumstances on July 12, 2015, 13 years into a 22-year sentence following what rights groups and supporters called a wrongful conviction on a charge of bombing a public square in Sichuan's provincial capital Chengdu in April 2002, RFA reported. Widely respected among Tibetans for his efforts to protect Tibetan culture and the environment, he was initially sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. An assistant, Lobsang Dondrub, was executed almost immediately, prompting an outcry from rights activists who questioned the fairness of the trial. New Delhi, Aug 4 : With tourism making a marked recovery post the pandemic, the German National Tourist Office, India, on Thursday announced a rise of 214 per cent in Indian tourists in 2022 so far. In its annual conference, GNTO, India shared the travel trend analysis globally and for the Indian market and showcased India as an important market for inbound travel to Germany with genuine hospitality to inspire potential Indian visitors. "As per the Nation Brands Index, Anholt Ipsos Nation Brands Index SM 2021, Germany ranks No. 1 on the Nation Brands Index for fifth time in a row. From cultural centres to architecture, innovative gastronomy to insider's tips and new favourite places in such close proximity, Germany offers the best travel experience," GNTO, India, Director Romit Theophilus, said. Specific to Indian travellers, Germany accounted for 9 per cent of European trips of Indians. As per GNTO, a total of 55 per cent of Indian tourists visit Germany for leisure while 38 per cent travel for business. About Germany as a preffered travel destionation for Indian travellers, Theophilus said: "Eight hours gate-to-gate and with multiple daily flight routes from India to cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart, Germany has long been favoured by the Indian traveller. An increase in travellers is expected this festive period in light of the relaxation of Covid-19 requirements." On the question of impact of Russian-Ukraine conflict, he said that there has not been any impact in the context of Indian travellers. Recognising an increased demand for experiences this season among visitors from the Indian market, the German National Tourist Board (GNTB) is debuting the brand-new campaign showcasing nature and cultural tourism in all its facets that focuses on highlighting sustainable tourism attractions and open-air activities. The campaign also aims to promote Germany as a destination for culturally interested travelers, families, and active vacationers in the Indian market. The campaigns for Indian market are a part of the global campaign to promote "Culturally Rich, Naturally Beautiful Germany". --IANS avr/vd A Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War New Delhi, Aug 4 : Amid continuous sloganeering by the opposition members, the Rajya Sabha on Thursday passed the 'Family Courts (Amendment) Bill, 2022' by a voice vote. Lok Sabha had passed this bill last week. Opposition members led by Congress were protesting alleging misuse of investigating agencies by the government against the political opponents. In response to the discussion on the bill, Union Minister of Law and Justice Kiren Rijiju talked about the need to have the legislation passed considering the long list of pending cases. He said that there are at present 715 family courts in the country with over 11 lakh pending cases and the government is emphasising to have at least one family court in each district for speedy disposal of cases. According to the Family Court Act of 1984, it is mandatory for a state government to set up a family court for every city or a town whose population exceeds one million. The Minister informed the House that the Union government has already asked judicial officers to give importance to family matters. Rijiju further mentioned that in India, marriage is not only a union of two individuals but that of families and communities, and that when a marriage breaks down, a structure crumbles. Hitting out at the opposition members, Rijiju said that he wanted to have a detailed discussion on the important bill but the way the Opposition, specially Congress members, behaved, it won't be possible. As soon as the bill was passed, Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman Harivansh Narayan Singh adjourned the House for the day. Bengaluru, Aug 4 : The Popular Front of India's (PFI) state executive committee on Thursday demanded an impartial investigation into the serial murders that took place in the coastal districts of Karnataka recently. A PFI statement said that recently, within a span of 10 days, 3 young men were murdered in coastal Karnataka. The BJP government, which should have taken all three murder cases seriously by giving them equal importance has failed in this regard. The BJP has instead been giving excessive attention to the murder of their party worker while blatantly trivializing the Sangh Parivar orchestrated murders of two innocent Muslim men, the statement said. Although it is incumbent for the police department to investigate murder cases in the state, out of the three murders, it has been announced that the investigation into Praveen's murder will be handed over to the NIA, due to the sole reason that he was a BJP worker, the PFI statement alleged. The malicious intent of the state government to prey on the innocent youth of the Muslim community under stringent laws is evident through this. Therefore, the Popular Front's state executive committee has demanded that the state government should abandon its discriminatory attitude and facilitate equal and impartial investigations into all three cases, the PFI demanded. The statement noted that the outrageous news being broadcast by a section of the media about the murders is provoking the people emotionally. Furthermore, this type of media narrative is creating a mentality of vindictive retaliation among the youth. Even as the police investigation into the murder cases is progressing, the media has been actively engaging in smear campaigns against the Muslim community and people's organizations like the PFI, it said. Such behaviour on the part of the media is not just harmful to a healthy society but is also against the ethics of journalism. On this account, the executive committee demands that the media must stop such slanderous campaigns and take steps to ensure peace and harmony in the district, the statement said. All the three victims belonged to poor families. In this regard, it was the state government's responsibility to provide equal compensation to all the affected families. But Chief Minister Bommai, who visited Praveen's house and gave Rs 25 lakh as compensation, did not visit Masood's residence in the same village and nor did he announce any compensation for his family, the statement said. The PFI noted that similarly, neither government representatives nor the representatives of the people have visited Fazil's family and no compensation has been given to them. The murders of a migrant worker from Kerala, Masood, BJP Yuva Morcha president Praveen Kumar Nettare and daily wage labourer Mohammad Fazil from Mangalpet in Dakshina Kannada district have ignited a debate on the communal divide and targeted killings by communal forces. The investigation has revealed that Masood was killed in a road rage case and police arrested all the 8 accused within 24 hours. Praveen was killed for campaigning for a ban on halal meat and Fazil was killed in retaliation for Praveen's murder. The police have arrested all the main accused in Fazil's case. The ruling BJP is pointing fingers at the PFI and the SDPI for creating a communal divide and inciting communal violence. Both the organisations have denied their involvement in the murders and challenged the BJP to prove its charges. New Delhi, Aug 4: Defying a string of stark warnings and threats from China that have sent tensions between the world's two superpowers soaring, Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, second in line to the presidency and the highest-profile elected US official landed in Taiwan on Tuesday evening. She greeted at Taipei's Songshan Airport by Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu. "Our delegation's visit to Taiwan honors America's unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan's vibrant democracy," she said in a statement upon her arrival, adding that her visit "in no way contradicts" the US policy towards Taipei and Beijing -- maintaining the ambiguity that Washington follows in regard to Taiwan. While the US follows a 'One China Policy' (OCP), its laws bind it to defend the island. Beijing was furious and called the visit a sure provocation and a threat to China's sovereignty, peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. It had earlier given a stern warning of taking resolute steps if the visit materialised. In a long telephone conversation on 28th July, Xi Jinping told President Biden that the US was playing with fire and those who play with fire will perish. President Biden himself was not happy with the visit as he wanted to avoid major tension with China when Washington was preoccupied with the Ukraine War, but had to respect the separation of power with the executive having no control over legislature in the US system. He, thus allowed her visit. Even while the US did not fear military measures from China, as precaution several US warships were cruising in waters near Taiwan on Tuesday, and Pelosi herself travelled in a military aircraft. The Pentagon had on Tuesday deployed four US warships, including an aircraft carrier, in waters east of Taiwan on what the US Navy said were routine deployments. The carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, is positioned far from Taiwan, according to one US official. So far, Beijing has not taken any major steps other than suspending trade with Taipei on certain products. China's defence ministry announced on Tuesday that its military would conduct targeted drills around Taiwan, designed to "safeguard national sovereignty," vowing to "resolutely thwart external interference and Taiwan's independence and separatist attempts. There were reports that 21 Chinese aircraft entered Taiwan's air defence zone. There will be more such threatening moves in the coming weeks to intimidate Taiwan so that the latter does not dare to do anything that goes against Beijing's interests. China considers Taiwan as a renegade province and a part of China and it has often threatened to take over by force, if necessary. Its strategy towards Taiwan is basically to intimidate the country through military exercises and by firing occasional missiles towards Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait. Other measures are isolating the country diplomatically and luring towards Beijing the countries who have recognized it. Its main objective is to prevent Taiwan from declaring independence. And it strongly believes that visits like Pelosi's encourage the Taiwanese towards that goal. Taiwan, however, tries to strike a balance between the two superpowers mainly by keeping quiet even when tension rises. Taiwan's President Tsai Ingo-wen has done everything possible to avoid unnecessary provocations while maintaining the integrity of Taiwan's democracy. Some experts feel this is not an unnecessary provocation keeping with the precedent that has been established with the US and Taiwan. For Taiwan's diplomatically isolated government, any exchange with a foreign political leader is seen as positive. "We are very grateful to Speaker Pelosi who has been very supportive and friendly to Taiwan for many years and we would welcome any friendly foreign guest to visit," said Taiwan's premier, Su Tseng-chang. Other than grandstanding, Pelosi's daring visit has not brought any tangible benefit either to the United States or to Taiwan. It may have reaffirmed US commitment to Taiwanese democracy, but it has also brought huge risk of a military conflict and spiralling of tension in an already frayed relationship between the US and China. "Pelosi's position and the new conditions created by the nationalistic rule of Xi, as well as Beijing's new assertiveness and military and strategic power make this the most risky brinkmanship over decades," comments Stephen Collinson of CNN. Most of the expected actions China will undertake like sending its jets to Taiwan's air defence identification zone may not threaten US naval forces in the area, but they can add to the potential for miscalculations and also raise the prospect how Taiwan would respond to serious provocations. If Taiwan responds militarily under threatening conditions, the situation will automatically escalate into a major conflict. But there are other analysts who believe the tension between the US and China may not spiral out of control, as neither wants a military conflict or the tension to fester for longer term. As for China, just months ahead of its all-important 20th Party Congress in which Xi is expected to assume a third term as leader of the Party and country, China is unlikely to make any destabilizing moves. The US is also fully involved in the Ukraine war and would not like to get involved in unnecessary conflict with China. As the two super powers are engaged in competition and rivalry, they also need the cooperation of each other in dealing with many challenges confronting the world and they have learnt to manage their differences. As Arthur Zin-Sheng Wang, a perceptive analyst from Taiwan's Central Police University says: "The main point is not in Pelosi coming to Taiwan, but it is to look at how the US and China effectively control the risks that may arise." Wang gives the example of the phone conversation between Biden and Xi. The immediate fall out of the Pelosi visit would be some aggressive actions by China vis-a-vis Taiwan and some verbal rhetoric aimed towards the US, but it may not last long, as all the parties involved in the conflict have a large stake in maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. (The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War New Delhi, Aug 4: The Speaker of the US House of Representatives has left Taiwan, but by taking the trip, she may have triggered a strategic decision by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the head of the Communist Party of China (CPC), to take over the island by force. The question may not no longer be "whether" but "when" to launch a massive military operation to annex the Taiwan islands. While Pelosi was still in Taiwan, the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Eastern Theatre command began an exercise to blockade Taiwan, deploying warships, aircraft, amphibious forces and conventional land attack missiles, feeding off from an elaborate surveillance system that included military satellites. Chinese state media is reporting that the Chinese have also deployed DF-17 hypersonic missile in the exercise, adding a sharper message of intent. The exercise aims to substantially blockade Taiwan by exercising control over the territory's key ports. These include the Keelung Port and Taipei Port in the north, the Taichung port, Kaohsiung port in the south and Hualien Port in the east. "If the PLA exercises take a long time, it will constitute a substantial blockage of Taiwan," Global Times, the garrulous mouthpiece of the CPC, quoted a Chinese military expert as saying. The PLA' s drills this time are "comprehensive and highly targeted," showing the determination of resolving the Taiwan question once and for all, another Chinese military commentator Song Zhongping told the daily. The drill should be viewed as a war plan rehearsal, Song said, "In the event of a future military conflict, it is likely that the operational plans currently being rehearsed will be directly translated into combat operations." The comment corroborates an explosive audio leak of a top-secret meeting of the Guangdong Military Region that surfaced on Lude media's YouTube channel on May 14. The audio reveals a detailed plan of invading Taiwan. Participants advocate the centrality of safeguarding the Pearl River Delta area in the province. A densely populated area, it is the heartbeat of the Chinese industry. The province is majorly responsible for turning China into the workshop of the world. It includes Guangzhou, a world class trading hub, Shenzhen, the hi-tech capital, where giants of the digital age, such as Huawei and Tencent Industries are headquartered. Other major cities of huge importance include Foshan, the furniture capital, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Hong Kong and Macau. Regarding mobilization, it reveals that Guangdong military region tasks slated by the eastern and southern theatre commands include "1,358 detachments of various types with a total of 140,000 personnel, 953 ships of various types, and 1,653 units/sets of various unmanned equipment. Other resources include 20 airports and docks, 6 repair and shipbuilding yards, 14 emergency transfer centres, and resources such as grain depots, hospitals, blood stations, oil depots, gas stations, etc." Besides, "the national defence mobilization recruitment office will recruit new military service personnel, retired military personnel, and special talents totalling 15,500 people from our province. The National Defence Commission clearly stated that our province shall coordinate the implementation of the seven types of national level warfare resources, including, mainly, 64 10,000-ton roll-on/roll-off ships, 38 aircraft, 588 train cars and 19 civil facilities including airports and docks." The leak further reveals that the task flow from the "the Party Central Committee, General Secretary Xi Jinping's major strategic decision in view of the big picture of international and domestic affairs, as well as the overall strategic situation of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It was made after carefully reviewing the timing and the situations". In the manoeuvres to blockade Taiwan, the PLA is deploying the J-20 stealth fighter jets, H-6K bombers, J-11 fighter jets, Type 052D destroyer, Type 056A corvette and DF-11 short-range ballistic missiles. There are four major reasons as to why President Xi may have made up his mind to annex Taiwan. First, there is widespread support in China for such a move where nationalist fervour is running high. A show of strength at this time will bind people as well as well as disparate factions within the CPC ahead of the 20th Party Congress this autumn that will decide on a new leadership line-up for the next five years. Second, from a strategic perspective China's top leadership appears to have made up its mind to break its naval containment imposed by the US and its allies under the First island chain -- a string of mostly militarised islands that run from the Kamchatka in the north pass though Taiwan and end up in Borneo, with Okinawa in Japan as the fulcrum. Occupation of Taiwan by China would be central to breaking the stranglehold of the First island chain. Once Chinese submarines are based in the deep waters of Taiwan, the First island chain would be broken as there is no way that the Americans can monitor the movement of these platforms which can then roam with impunity in the Pacific. Third, the Chinese would like to make their move in Taiwan before the Australia- UK-US (AUKUS) grouping dedicated to China's containment matures. Fourth, unlike 1996 when they were found wanting in their fracas with Taiwan, the Chinese war machine has been significantly upgraded. "In 1996, we didn't have aircraft carriers, the Type 055 large destroyer, nor hypersonic missiles... Since then, our ability to strike, capture and kill has greatly improved and our military options and confidence have increased," Song, the military expert was quoted as saying. (The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative Guwahati, Aug 4 : The Assam government has requested all state governments to include a chapter in the academic curriculum on Bir Lachit Barphukan, the 17th century war hero from Assam. Officials on Thursday said that Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has written letters to his counterparts of other states, requesting them to include a chapter on Lachit Barphukan in the syllabus of the schools and colleges. The letter is among the government of Assam's series of initiatives related to the year-long celebration of the 400th birth anniversary of the 17th-century great Ahom army general. The Chief Minister in his letter mentioned that the saga of the valour of Lachit Barphukan should spread far and wide, instilling in every Indian a sense of pride over the exploits of this great Ahom general. "It is worth mentioning that in the battle of Saraighat in 1671, Lachit Borphukan led his army from the front to a resounding victory, despite being terribly ill. His unflagging valour and determination ensured the culture, identity and uniqueness of the northeastern region remained intact," Sarma said in his letter. The Chief Minister, in his letter, stated that despite being a shining example of patriotism and love for one's motherland, Barphukan's accomplishments remain comparatively unknown in the many parts of the country. Requesting his counterparts for inclusion of Lachit Barphukan's history and valour in curriculum, the Chief Minister added that this would contribute to spread of patriotic ideals among the youths and inspire them to dedicate themselves to the service of the nation. Barphukan was a celebrated General of the Ahom dynasty who defeated Aurangzeb's army in the historic Saraighat battle and that defeat proved to be the final nail in the coffin of the expansionist policies of Mughals in northeast India. In memory of Barphukan, the state government is setting the Alaboi battle war memorial in Kamrup district and constructing Lachit Barphukan Maidan in Jorhat. Former President Ram Nath Kovind in February at a function in Guwahati inaugurated the year-long celebrations of the 400th birth anniversary of Lachit Barphukan. Panaji, Aug 4 : Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Thursday questioned the teaching fraternity why education standards in Goa were ranked below the national average in several subjects, including mathematics and science, when they are paid well and all the infrastructure is provided. "We are less than the national average in mathematics and science. When this news got published, whom did the people criticise? The blame is on the government and on me as education minister. Do I go to teach students? Do I go to school (to teach)? Do I take their studies? Who teaches them? You compare our state to others. Is there any dearth (in facilities)? Infrastructure is lacking? Salary is less? Have we hesitated giving you (whatever demanded)? Everything we have given. Then why the lower average? I have concern for our students," Sawant said while addressing the Goa Headmasters Association programme. "We are concerned about 100 percent results, but are we concerned about dropouts? Who will see to them? Who will skill them? Are we working for a 100 per cent result only? We need to give quality education and skilled manpower, and for that we have to work. We need to give 100 percent dedication," Sawant said. He said that the teaching fraternity should use innovation and research to impart quality education and skills to students. "We are only producing graduates," he said. "Hospitality and logistic sectors are venturing into Goa. There are hardly any courses in logistics. We need to think about such innovations. Start with new things, start with innovation. Innovation is coming to the education sector, I am expecting the same from you," he said. Sawant said the government is held responsible for the unemployment rate, and sought support from the teachers in skilling students. "PM has started a Skill India Mission while implementing the New Education Policy. Give suggestions to the government for quality education," he said. He said the NEP will be implemented step by step. Khedroob Thondup is a Tibetan writer and author based in Taiwan. He is also the Dalai Lama's nephew-the son of His Holiness' elder brother. Born in Kolkata in 1952, he is well known for publishing the book 'Dalai Lama, My Son', the autobiography by the Dalai Lama's mother-Diki Tsering. India Narrative speaks with Thondup about the fallout from US Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit that raised a storm in the seas around the Taiwan Strait. In an exclusive interview, Thondup, who is an independent lobbyist for the Tibetan cause, says that very few in Taiwan believe that China will hold good on its policy of 'one nation two systems' after they saw the forceful annexation of Hong Kong. Living in Taiwan for over 20 years, Thondup is creating awareness on Tibetan issues among the local people. He has published a book in Chinese so that locals are acquainted better with Tibetan history. "I came to Taiwan in 1997 when His Holiness made his first visit to Taiwan," Thondup adds. Being the Dalai Lama's nephew makes him a political person. He says that he wanted to meet Pelosi but the appointment did not materialise. Talking about the volatile situation created by China in the wake of Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, Thondup says that China is physically blockading the island from five different areas. "I do not think China will attack us immediately as this would create conflict with the US. America is treaty-bound to protect us and this could lead to bigger problems. China could get into trouble with other countries if it attacks Taiwan." Analysing Pelosi's visit carefully, he says that there are good and bad effects of the visit. "Among the positive effects are that the US has assured Taiwan of support. Pelosi has said that Taiwan is one of the best democracies in south-east Asia. The visit also shows that there is bi-partisan support for Taiwan in the US Congress. "Among the bad effects is that China is not happy with Taiwan and looked at Pelosi's visit as 'interfering in our internal affairs'. But Xi Jinping may do something in retaliation as he has to deal with internal politics and face the 20th national congress of the communist party later this year. So, he has to show the public that he is strong." About Pelosi, Thondup says that she is known as a strong supporter of democracy and has been with the minorities like the Uighurs, people in Hong Kong, the Tibetans and Taiwan. He says that though China has promised 'one country two systems' to Taiwan also, but "we refused that". "After we saw what happened in Hong Kong, we know that this policy of the communist party may let us down. People in Taiwan will not accept the 'one country two systems' type of governance," stresses Thondup. Talking about the Dalai Lama, he says that as His Holiness has visited Taiwan many times his popularity grows with each visit. "Because of this there is a lot of interest in Tibet Buddhism. There are over 200 Tibetan Buddhism centres in Taiwan. There are lots of lamas also. Of the practicing Buddhists in Taiwan, almost 50 per cent follow Tibetan Buddhism." Talking about the growing popularity of Tibetan Buddhism, he adds that nearly 3,000 to 6,000 Taiwanese visit Dharamsala every year to see the Dalai Lama. "Because of this more and more people in Taiwan are getting to know about the political situation in Tibet as well. The Taiwanese have also become very wary of Chinese communism because of our situation," says Thondup. (The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative Bhubaneswar, Aug 4 : The Odisha government has approved 11 investment proposals worth Rs 2,253.15 crore which will create employment opportunities for 3,817 people, officials said on Thursday. The state level single window clearance authority (SLSWCA) headed by Chief Secretary S.C. Mahapatra has approved the industrial projects from various sectors like aluminium downstream, steel, food processing, infrastructure, oil and gas, information technology, electronic system designing and manufacturing. As most of the proposals are from downstream and manufacturing, the units will boost economic activities in their respective areas through generation of many indirect employment opportunities, said Hemant Sharma, principal secretary, industries. The government has approved a proposal of Fedders Electric and Engineering Limited to set up an iron ore beneficiation plant in Sundargarh district at a cost of Rs 533.25 crore. The proposal of Envirocare Infrasolution Pvt Ltd for establishment of a pellet beneficiation and ferro alloy plant in Sundergarh with an investment Rs 520 crore was also approved by the panel. Similarly, Adani Enterprises Limited has proposed to set up a datacentre facility offering cloud hosting services at a cost of Rs 500 crore in Khurda district. This proposal was also approved by the SLSWCA of Odisha. Among others, the government has approved an investment proposal of Rs 175.75 crore by Arya Iron and Steel Company Pvt Ltd during the meeting. The chief secretary has asked concerned departments to provide proactive facilitation to the approved units for their early execution. Agartala, Aug 4 : The Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) has signed an MoU with the Bangladesh Roads and Highways Department in Dhaka for emergency ferrying of petroleum products to the northeastern states of India through Bangladesh's territory, an official said on Thursday. An IOCL official said here that the MoU was signed following the Indian government's request to ferry transport fuel and other petroleum products through Bangladesh's territory when rail and road transportation gets disrupted during monsoon. "The MoU was signed in Dhaka on Wednesday as an interim arrangement to facilitate urgent ferrying of petroleum products after damage to railway lines and highways due to rains or any other natural calamity," the official told IANS. According to the proposed arrangement, petroleum tankers from Assam would go to Meghalaya and then to Tripura crossing through Bangladesh's territory. As per the MoU, the IOCL would bear all the administrative fees, charges and local taxes, including road usage fee, for the use of Bangladeshi territory and highways. Few years ago also, transport fuel and other petroleum products were ferried to the northeastern states via Bangladesh when railway tracks and roads were badly damaged by heavy rains, floods and landslides. Essentials and transport fuel can be ferried using the Dawki (Meghalaya)-Bangladesh-Kailashahar (Tripura) route. Tripura and Mizoram had earlier approached the External Affairs Ministry to bring essential supplies and transport fuel via Bangladesh as the rail links had been cut off for over two months while the vital highways in Assam and Meghalaya were also damaged. After over two months, the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR), following the restoration of the damaged railway tracks, resumed passenger train services in the Lumding-Badarpur section in Assam on July 22, reconnecting Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur and the southern part of Assam with the rest of the country. The freight train services were started on July 12 in the Lumding-Badarpur section via the Dima Hasao district. In the hill section under Lumding division, both passenger and freight train services were cancelled due to heavy rains and landslides on May 14. The director of Tripura Food and Civil Supplies Department, Tapan Kumar Das, said on Thursday that currently there are sufficient stocks of fuel and essentials in the state. "Rail service and road transportation are now normal between Tripura and other parts of the country," he told IANS. The four-month long Southwest monsoon season is expected to come to an end in September. Kolkata, Aug 4 : A single-judge bench of Calcutta High Court, on Thursday, stayed a decision of the West Bengal correctional services department for deportation of four Rohingya convicts to Myanmar with immediate effect. The single-judge bench of Justice Moushumi Bhattacharya also directed the state correctional services department to arrange for all the basic amenities to the four Rohingya inmates. These four Rohingya individuals are currently inmates of the Dum Dum Central Correctional Home in the northern outskirts of Kolkata. Recently, the correctional home authorities also informed them that they will have to go back to Myanmar. The four Rohinghya inmates drew the attention of Justice Bhattacharya's bench in this connection. Justice Bhattacharya asked the counsels for both the Union government and the state government whether there was any specific instruction on this count. Both Dhiraj Trivedi, the counsel for the Union government and Anirban Roy, the counsel for the state government, informed that the bench denied knowledge of any such order. Thereafter, Justice Bhattacharya directed that in the current situation the four petitioners cannot be pushed back to Myanmar. She also ordered that till the time the matter of their repatriation is finally settled the Dum Dum Central Correctional Home authorities will have to arrange for their basic amenities of living. The matter will be heard again on August 10, 2022. Justice Bhattacharya asked the counsel of the petitioners to present all the documents related to the matter in the form of an affidavit by that date. New Delhi, Aug 4 : The Supreme Court has set aside a Himachal Pradesh High Court judgment, noting that it was "utterly incomprehensible." A bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Sudhanshu Dhulia said: "The judgment of the high court is utterly incomprehensible. The reasons on the basis of which the High Court has proceeded to allow the petitions and set aside the reassessment cannot be discerned from the judgments." The top court order, passed on August 1, came on an appeal by Himachal Pradesh government challenging the Himachal Pradesh High Court judgment, which allowed the writ petitions instituted by the respondent under Article 226 of the Constitution. The top court, in its order, said: "A Division Bench of the High Court of Himachal Pradesh has by its judgments dated 27 November 2020 allowed the writ petitions instituted by the respondents under Article 226 of the Constitution. The respondents sought to challenge the validity of orders of reassessment passed by the appellant. The High Court by its impugned judgments has set aside the reassessment." It noted that notice was issued by the top court on January 12, April 18, and April 29 in the special leave petitions. "The appeals are accordingly allowed. The impugned judgments of the High Court are set aside," said the bench, directing the high court to hear the matter afresh. The matter was Himachal Pradesh and another vs Himachal Aluminium Conductors. Chennai, Aug 4 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has commenced probing the case of two men arrested for possessing a pistol, live rounds, and walkie-talkies during a routine vehicle check in Tamil Nadu. The agency has taken over the case as the men had revealed during interrogation by the Q' branch police that they were planning to carry out guerilla attacks on stone quarries inspired by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). M. Naveen Chakravarthy (25) of Kichipalayalam and J. Sanjay Prakash (24) of Sevapet in Salem district had formed an outfit World Tamil Justice Court (WTJC), and were reportedly in touch with a man through Clubhouse who claimed to be a former intelligence operative of the LTTE. While Naveen is a school dropout Sanjay is a BE graduate in Computer Science and had worked with an IT firm. The duo were classmates in school. They had taken the code names 'Freedom' and 'Oast' to communicate and to mislead the police, the police said. The youths, according to officers of the 'Q' branch, had confessed that they were inspired by books and other literature on the LTTE and wanted to attack stone quarries that destroy mountains and nature, bring water from Kerala, fight drug trafficking and stop sexual harassment of women. The police found that they had taken a house on rent at Chettichavadi in Salem and were in the process of making pistols using YouTube and other videos. The 'Q' branch sleuths said that they converted a portion of the house into a workshop, bought scrap steel, and used local lathes claiming that they were working on a college project. The police said that they bought the ingredients needed to make live rounds online and also bought walkie-talkies online to communicate with each other. The Omalur police which had arrested them, on questioning learnt that they were on their way to attack a stone quarry at Theevatipatti. The youths were arrested around 50 days ago with their two-wheeler and a pistol with live rounds. The NIA took over the investigation following the confessions of the youths and their claim that they were in touch with a former LTTE operative. The agency will also probe whether they had received some funding from any external sources for making pistols and live bullets. The NIA had arrested a former LTTE intelligence operative Satkunam alias Sabesan in October 2021 after he and some accomplices had confessed to their involvement in smuggling of drugs and arms from Pakistan to Sri Lanka. They had revealed their close links with Sri Lankan don Angoda Lokka who had died in Coimbatore while staying there in disguise. A woman who was a Canadian national with Tamil origins was arrested while trying to board a flight to Mumbai from Chennai while on her way to withdraw money from a dormant nationalized bank account that belonged to associations linked to the LTTE. The NIA has taken over the investigation in this case as there were intelligence reports of the defunct LTTE trying to use Tamil Nadu to regroup. Bengaluru, Aug 4 : Former Karnataka Chief Minister and veteran BJP leader B.S. Yediyurappa met Union Home Minister Amit Shah here on Thursday. According to sources, during the meeting, Yediyurappa told the Home Minister that the new-found unity in Karnataka Congress unit could prove costly for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming assembly elections. Yediyurappa also stressed on the "support" extended by the people toward the celebration of Opposition leader Siddaramaiah's 75th birthday held on August 3 in Davanagere, stating "the message of unity given out by the Congress" should be an alarm bell to the ruling BJP. He also underlined the "solidarity shown by former Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Karnataka Congress president D.K. Shivakumar before the 4-5 lakh people that gathered for the birthday bash, which was well received by the people", sources said. According to sources, Yediyurappa told Shah "if counter-strategy is not formulated and put forth before the people, it could be an uphill task for the BJP to attain power in Karnataka". He also suggested the leaders take up state-wide tours and organise functions ahead of the elections. Sources said that Amit Shah gave a patient hearing to Yediyurappa. Jamnagar : , Aug 4 (IANS) A 29-year-old man from rural Jamnagar has been admitted to the Guru Govindsingh Hospital (G G hospital). The patient's blood samples have been sent to the Ahmedabad B J Medical college laboratory for testing, said Manoj Aggarwal, Additional Chief Secretary in the health department. The patient was admitted on Thursday afternoon with skin rashes, swollen lymph nodes on the body, said Dr. Dipak Tiwari, Superintendent at the G G hospital. As the case is from the rural area, the district health department will be carrying out tracing and tracking of the patient's travel history and the people he came in contact with. Latest updates on Monkeypox Virus Outbreak Kabul, Aug 4 : The caretaker Taliban administration in Afghanistan has said that the group was uninformed of Ayman al-Zawahiris "arrival and stay" in Kabul, although it is uncertain whether the Taliban have explicitly acknowledged or denied the American assertion that the al-Qaeda chief has been killed, media reports said. In a statement released on Thursday, senior Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group has instructed its intelligence agencies to conduct thorough and comprehensive probe into the various aspects of this case, Khaama Press reported. According to the Taliban spokesman, no country, including the United States, is under threat from Afghanistan. He said the Taliban intend to put the Doha Agreement into effect and that its violations has to stop. The Taliban once again denounced the US attack on Kabul as a violation of Afghan airspace and against international norms and warned that the US will be held responsible for the consequences of such attacks, if repeated. On the other hand, several top American officials, including Zalmay Khalilzad, claimed that some Taliban leaders were aware of Zawahiri's presence in Kabul. The death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the eyes of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has strengthened global security. By "hosting and sheltering" the al-Qaeda chief in Kabul, the Taliban administration in Afghanistan violated its commitments to the international community, according to Blinken. According to Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to US President Joe Biden, they are in contact with the Taliban to find out whether the Taliban sheltered al-Zawahiri, Khaama Press reported. The Taliban have officially pledged to renounce ties with terrorist organisations and prohibit the use of Afghan soil against other countries in the pact it signed with the United States in Doha in February 2020. New Delhi, Aug 4 : Both the Houses of Parliament on Thursday witnessed protests by opposition members against the alleged misuse of investigating agencies by the government against political opponents. Opposition members led by the Congress in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha protested against the Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids and summons against Opposition leaders. The Lok Sabha proceedings were first adjourned until 2 p.m. and then adjourned for the day after opposition members continued loud sloganeering over the misuse of the ED against political rivals. Congress members tried to raise the issue of the alleged misuse of the ED but Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu said that he will listen to them after papers are laid on the table. After the papers were laid, Naidu said he has received five notices under Rule 267 but none has been admitted and he was not admitting them as the issues can be raised in any other form. The Rajya Sabha first adjourned till 12 noon as the opposition benches protested against the misuse of the ED. As the chairman gave permission, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said that the investigating agencies were being misused against the opposition parties to suppress them. Members from the treasury benches opposed Kharge's remark and heated exchanges took place between the two sides. As the disruption continued, the Chairman adjourned the Rajya Sabha till 12 noon. When the House resumed proceedings at 12 noon, Question Hour was held amid loud sloganeering and disruption from the Opposition, who were demanding a response from the Prime Minister. Kharge said that while the House was in session he had received a summons from the ED to appear before the agency at 12.30 pm. "I respect the law and will appear before the law enforcement agency," Kharge said. Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha Piyush Goyal said that the law enforcing agencies were doing their work and the present government is not interfering in their functioning. After Question Hour amid sloganeering, the Rajya Sabha was adjourned till 2 p.m. for the lunch break. Post lunch, the Rajya Sabha passed the 'Family Courts (Amendment) Bill, 2022' by a voice vote amid continuous sloganeering by the opposition members. As soon as the bill was passed, Rajya Sabha deputy chairman Harivansh adjourned the House for the day. New Delhi, Aug 4 : The Supreme Court on Thursday said that it is the court's duty to "extract the truth from the mass of evidence", as it set aside the conviction and sentence of an accused convicted for attempt to murder and various sections of Arms Act in a 2003 case. A bench, headed by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana and comprising justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli said: "It is the duty of the court to separate the grain from the chaff and to extract the truth from the mass of evidence. In our opinion, the case of the prosecution is based on mere conjectures and surmises. The high court and the trial court failed to consider the above mentioned circumstances while rendering the judgment convicting the accused." Chief Justice Ramana, who authored the judgment on behalf of the bench, said it is the solemn duty of the courts below to consider the defence of the accused, and the court may accept or reject the same, however it cannot be done cursorily. "If all the circumstances are bundled together and a single opportunity is provided to the accused to explain himself, he may not be able to put forth a rational and intelligible explanation. Such exercises which defeat fair opportunity are nothing but empty formality," the bench said. The top court noted that non fulfillment of the true spirit of Section 313 of the CrPC may ultimately cause grave prejudice to the accused and the court may not have the benefit of all the necessary facts and circumstances to arrive at a fair conclusion. The purpose of Section 313 is to provide the accused a reasonable opportunity to explain the adverse circumstances which have emerged against him during the course of trial, it said. According to the prosecution, in February 2003, Jay Prakash Tiwari and another person had gone to the house of the complainant and called him outside, and later fired at him with a country-made pistol. The complainant ran into the house and escaped injury. Tiwari claimed that owing to the animosity pertaining to the elections, he was falsely implicated in the matter, and also produced two witnesses to prove his alibi, who said Tiwari was in his village as his mother was unwell. Tiwari also pointed out that the father, sister and brother of the complainant were all part of the Police Department. In May 2017, the Madhya Pradesh High Court dismissed his appeal against sessions court judgment confirming his conviction under Section 307 of IPC (attempt to murder) and various sections of Arms Act. Tiwari challenged the high court judgment in the apex court. "It is clear that the courts below have failed to undertake this solemn duty. Rather, the evidence of the accused has been dealt by the Court in a casual manner," said the top court. New Delhi, Aug 4 : In the latest development in connection with the National Herald issue, Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials quizzed senior Congress leader Mallikarjuna Kharge during the search operation at the office of Young Indian (YI) Pvt Ltd. Kharge, being the principal official of YI, was assisting the ED officials when he was quizzed. He was quizzed over a few documents of YI. On Thursday a team of ED officials reached the YI office for the search operation. They also opened the office of YI which had been sealed. The ED had earlier accused Mallikarjuna Kharge and Pawan Bansal of not cooperating despite sending two emails to them. On Wednesday, the ED officials had sealed the YI office saying nobody was assisting them and they were forced to do so. On Thursday Kharge reached the YI office and assisted the ED officials in the search operation. During the search proceedings Kharge was quizzed regarding a few documents. The search operation was still going on at the time of filing this report. Srinagar, Aug 4 : The signing of a ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan in February 2020 has once again led to increase in tourist interest in the scenically beautified and serene Kashmiri locations situated in the bordering villages which were prone earlier to arbitrary shelling. A group of 40 people, including women and children, became the first outsiders to visit the border village of Machil in Kupwara district in north Kashmir from July 16-17. Machil was earlier known to be shelling prone and therefore, despite its beautiful and eye dropping meadows and ethereal pastures, tourists dithered. Farah Zaidi Ali, co-founder of the Kashmir off Road (KoR), organised the trip to Machil as per a report by a leading media outlet. This is a very positive and welcome development. For locals, tourists visiting the Kashmiri offbeat locations closer to the India-Pakistan border is like a dream come true. People want peace and resuming their business and economic activities without any fear and insecurity. Such areas, notwithstanding lots of tourism potential, did not attract tourists due to frequent and arbitrary shelling. These areas, which were earlier out-of-bounds for tourists and home to only armed infiltrators or soldiers, are now expecting restoration of usual tourism activities which would spur business opportunities for the locals. The India-Pakistan border villages have immense potential for eco-tourism. As peace returns, sustainable tourism can not only open the natural beauty of Kashmir to the tourists but also better livelihood opportunities for the locals. The people in such areas are now just getting mentally prepared how to make the best of this new found opportunity. For instance, people in Teetwal, another such location, believe that the Sharda temple made by Kashmiri pandits and gurdwara in the region could attract tourists given assurance of safe travel and security during the sojourn. Buoyed by increasing footfalls of tourists in Kashmir, the Jammu and Kashmir government has identified 35 new destinations in the valley, including Gurez and Tulali villages in Bandipora besides Teetwal and Keran. The Jammu and Kashmir tourism department also aims at adding 50,000 new rooms in Kashmir through the home-stay initiative at 75 new locations across the Union Territory. According to Sarmad Hafeez, Secretary, J&K Tourism, the J&K Tourism Department has eased the registration process of homestays. This has been done in view of shortage of homestays with anticipated rise in tourist footfalls as peace is being restored in the UT due to pro-active efforts of the government. As part of building additional accommodation capacity for tourists, the J&K government is promoting both, homestays and tented accommodation, in the valley. As revealed by officials, the J&K government would make tented colonies functional at 30 new locations. Besides, 75 offbeat destinations are being developed with proper infrastructure and requisite facilities. The top offbeat tourist locations include Chatpal, Bangus, Reshwari, Daksum, Karnah, Warwan Valley, Watlab, Gurez and Lolab valley. Kashmir, the "paradise on earth", as the Indians like to call it, is a home of lovely glades and forests. Its offbeat locations in particular have sights of vast mists rising from rivers curling in thin spirals around the opposite mountains; lovely glades and forests; trees of chinar, pineapple, cedar and somber; and soft air ruffling the water causing pleasant motion among the trees. In the offbeat locations, the visuals of tiny hamlets are enchanting. Jammu and Kashmir is looking forward to resuscitate its tourism industry as peace and normalcy is being restored in the state. The present government is living no stone unturned. In December 2020, government announced a package of Rs 1,350 crore ($182.83 million) to boost tourism and other sectors. There are many things in pipeline to boost tourism in the state and the people of Kashmir are now filled with hope. Chennai, Aug 4 : Relief centres were opened in Erode district of Tamil Nadu as Cauvery river is in spate, officials said on Thursday, adding 2 lakh cusecs of water was released from the Stanley reservoir in Mettur. Around 200 houses located on the banks of the river at Bhavani and Kodumudi in Erode district were inundated by the water flow. At least 143 families comprising 490 people were shifted to relief camps in Erode district on Thursday. Water entered the houses in Kandhan Nagar, Cauvery Nagar, Pasuveswarar Street and Cauvery Street -- all in Bhavani municipality and in Elupullai Thoppu in Kodumudi municipality, and people from these houses were immediately shifted to relief centres. With the water level increasing since Wednesday night, the district administration had opened relief centres and had made precautions to shift people if homes were inundated and on Thursday, families were shifted and household items were shifted to safe locations. The Tangedco officials cut off power in the region after a transformer was inundated in water in the Bhavani market area. Meanwhile, a flood warning was issued along the banks of Aliyar river after copious rainfall continued in the Western Ghats. The inflow in the Aliyar reservoir was steadily increasing and reached 118 ft with the full reservoir level (FRL) at 120 feet, and the outflow to the river has increased. In the Nilgiris district also, red alert has been issued with the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) units being deployed in the district which is expected to receive heavy rains on Friday. Four units of NDRF have been deployed in The Nilgiris district and Kanniyakumari district following heavy rains. New Delhi, Aug 4 : The BJP on Thursday urged Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to appoint a full-time Health Minister in view of rising cases of monkeypox. In a letter to the Chief Minister, Delhi BJP spokesperson Pravin Shankar Kapoor said that it is shocking to note that at a time when there is a health emergency situation, Delhi does not have a full-time health minister. "After a few months of relief, Delhi is again passing through a state of health emergency with two major infections - Covid-19 and monkeypox - threatening citizens. Four cases of monkeypox, a dreaded infection, have been reported during the last one week and Covid19 cases are multiplying with every passing day. Yesterday on August 3, Delhi recorded five deaths due to Covid-19 and 2,073 new cases at a positivity rate of 11.64 per cent," he said. Kapoor said Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia is looking after the Health Department along with 18 others and "one can very well imagine how little time he must be giving to the Health Department as he is facing inquiries in the working of his main two portfolios of excise and education". He said that for last 10 days, both monkeypox and Covid-19 cases have been rising in Delhi, "due to your callousness of not taking the working of the Health Department seriously" and urged him take the situation seriously and appoint a full-time Health Minister. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Hyderabad, Aug 4 : In a surge in Covid-19 cases, Telangana on Thursday reported over 1,000 new infections. According to health officials, 1,061 new cases were reported during the 24-hour period, ending 5.30 p.m. This is the second time in the last three days that the state has crossed the 1,000 mark. For the first time after the third wave, the state's daily count of Covid cases had crossed the 1,000 mark on August 2. The third wave had lasted between November 2021 and January 2022. As per the daily Covid bulletin released by the Health Department, 43,318 samples were tested during the 24-hour period. A total of 836 people recovered during the same period. The recovery rate now stands at 98.75 per cent. The total number of active cases also jumped to 6,357. They include 236 people admitted in hospitals. According to officials, 40 of them are in ICU and 92 in oxygen beds. The daily Covid count in Hyderabad surged past 400 mark. Rangareddy and Medchal Malkajgiri districts adjoining Hyderabad reported 63 and 56 cases, respectively. Nalgonda district reported 51 cases. As many as 16 students of a Kasturba Gandhi residential school in the district have tested positive for Covid-19. A teacher of the school located in Neredugomma has also been found infected. This came to light on Thursday after health authorities conducted Covid tests. After some students were found with suspected symptoms like fever, cold, and cough, the school authorities sought the help of local health officials, who conducted the tests. School authorities have informed the parents of the infected children and they all have been sent home. Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Srinagar, Aug 4 : Three terrorists were arrested from Jammu and Kashmir's Handwara on Thursday and arms and ammunition recovered from their possession, police said. "Police, along with army and CRPF, at a checkpoint established at Fruit Mandi Crossing, Handwara intercepted three persons who on seeing the checking, tried to flee from the spot but were apprehended," police said. They have been identified as Manzoor Ahmed Kumar, resident of Sagipora, and Showkat Ahmed Bhat, resident of Khanu Babagund. "However, the identification of the third arrested terrorist has been withheld as his age is being verified," police said. On their personal search, arms and ammunition including a pistol, a pistol magazine, seven pistol rounds, and two grenades were recovered from their possession. "Preliminary investigation revealed that the arrested trio was tasked to carry out terror attacks in Handwara and cause loss of life and injuries to the public and disrupt peace in the area. The timely and swift action by the joint team has prevented the terrorists from carrying out the mischievous activities," police said. Kolkata, Aug 4 : Veteran Trinamool Congress leader and four-time MLA Tapas Roy claimed on Monday that Partha Chatterjee, who's presently in ED custody as the prime accused in the WBSSC teacher recruitment scam, might have past records of being involved in conspiracies against others. Roy was referring to a comment Chatterjee made just a day after being stripped off his ministerial and party portfolios that he was victim of conspiracies. "If Partha feels that he is a victim of conspiracy, he should speak out and say who conspired against him. But without any details, his conspiracy theory does not hold any ground. I feel that in the past, Partha had been involved in conspiracies against others and hence he is harping so much on the conspiracy theory," said Roy, who is currently the Deputy Chief Whip of Trinamool Congress in the West Bengal Assembly. Although there were rumours that Roy might get a ministerial berth during Wednesday's cabinet reshuffle because of his clean image and vast experience as a legislator, his name did not figure among the new faces who were inducted as ministers. Meanwhile, senior state BJP leader Rahul Sinha said that this comment about Chatterjee came from such a Trinamool leader who despite his long experience has remained a non-entity in his own party. "He is nowhere near the conspiracies that are going on within the Trinamool Congress," Sinha said. Senior CPI(M) leader and four-time former Lok Sabha MP Samik Lahiri said the actual conspiracy is the one which the Trinamool government has hatched against the people of West Bengal, especially the youth who have been deprived of teaching jobs. "Partha Chatterjee is not the only one involved in this conspiracy. The party might now try to distance itself from Chatterjee, but the reality is that the crime proceeds had been circulated at higher levels," Lahiri said. Hyderabad, Aug 4 : Telugu film shoots remained suspended for the fourth day on Thursday even as leading producer Dil Raju made it clear that they don't intend to stop shootings for months. After a meeting of the Telugu Film Chambers, Dail Raju said that he has no personal agenda and that he is working only for the good of the industry. Dil Raju, who is heading a committee of producers formed by Film Chamber, said he had no intention of keeping the film shoots on hold for months together. The producer said the Film Chamber has constituted four committees to address the problems faced by Tollywood. The committees are working on issues relating to OTT, VPF charges, revenue percentage, wages of the film artists and cost of production. "All producers have placed a responsibility on my shoulders. I have no personal agenda. I am working for the sake of the cinema," he said. Another leading producer C. Kalyan said film shoots were stopped indefinitely to resolve the issues. He denied that there were any differences among producers. Kalyan said both the Producers' Council and the Active Telugu Film Producers' Guild (ATPG) were working with the same aim. ATPG was the first to announce its decision to halt the film shoots. The Film Chamber of Commerce on Sunday backed its decision. The Film Chamber said they will sit down and discuss the problems and the shoots will not resume till they find a solution. The apex body felt that the Telugu film industry is passing through a situation wherein producers, distributors, exhibitors and all others are not happy. It is currently discussing various issues faced by them to decide measures to be taken to bring the film industry back on track. The consultations will involve all 24 crafts of the film industry. The producers are worried over issues like drop in patronage in cinema theaters, cinema ticket prices, new releases on OTT and increasing production cost. The action of the producers' bodies has brought production of many films to a halt. These include Allu Arjun's "Pushpa 2", Balakrishna-Gopichand Malineni's yet to be titled film, Ravi Teja's "Tiger Nageshwara Rao" and "Ravanasura", Vijay Deverakonda's "Khushi" and Nagarjuna's "The Ghost". New Delhi, Aug 4 : The police in Canada have issued a public warning identifying 11 men, including nine of Indian origin, linked to extreme levels of gang violence. The Indian origin criminals named in the list are -- Shakiel Basra (28), Amarpreet Samra (28), Jagdeep Cheema (30), Ravinder Sarma (35), Barinder Dhaliwal (39) Andy St. Pierre (40) Gurpreet Dhaliwal (35) Richard Joseph Whitlock (40), Amroop Gill (29), Sukhdeep Pansal (33) and Sumdish Gill (28). The police in Canada have urged people to maintain distance with them. The warning was issued by the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit of British Columbia (CFSEU-BC), along with Vancouver Police and BC Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "A public safety warning has been issued in partnership with @VancouverPD @BCRCMP identifying 11 individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety due to their ongoing involvement in gang conflicts and connection to extreme levels of violence #endganglife," the Canadian authority tweeted along with a poster featuring the 11 'most-violent gangsters'. The police said these 11 criminals pose danger to everyone as their rivals can taget them at any time. Meninder Dhaliwal, a dreaded gangster with roots in Punjab, was recently gunned down by his rivals in Canada, which prompted the authorities to release the poster of criminals whom the general public should avoid at all times. Srinagar, Aug 4 : A labourer was killed and two others were injured in a grenade attack by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on Thursday night, police said. "Terrorists hurled grenade on outside labourers at Gadoora area of Pulwama. In this terror incident, one labourer died and two others were injured. Area cordoned off," a police official said. Additional police parties have reached the spot and an operation has been started to nab the attackers. Panaji, Aug 4 : The Goa government has decided to take up the issue of 'e-Visa' to the UK with the Central government to help the tourism industry of the state. Goa tourism Minister Rohan Khaunte on Thursday said that providing e-Visa is also important for the state to get the same flow of people, which the government is looking forward. He was speaking during a meeting of the World Travel and Tourism Council-India, here. "Chief Minister Pramod Sawant in his forthcoming meeting with Home Minister (Amit Shah) will sort out the issue of e-Visa as far as the UK is concerned. We will try our level best. e-Visa which is important for you, same is for the government, as the same flow of people we are looking forward," Khaunte said. Rohan Khaunte had earlier said that the coastal state's tourism is predominantly dependent on the UK and Russia, and some parts of Europe. "Government is taking all steps to get a good footfall with good spending," he had said. In 2019, about 71,27,000 were domestic tourists who arrived in Goa, while 9,31,000 were foreign tourists. But this number dropped in 2020 and 2021 as Covid pandemic had struck the coastal state. Congress MLA Aleixo Sequeira, in recently concluded assembly session, had demanded that the central government should make the UK eligible for e-visa and also bring fees of visa on par to other countries. Travel and Tourism Association of Goa (TTAG), in June, had urged Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to convince the central government to include UK, Canada, Kyrgyzstan and other nations for issuance of e-visas. TTAG had stated that Goa's tourism sector has suffered due to withdrawal of e-visa for travellers from the UK, Canada, Kyrgyzstan and other countries. According to TTAG, mostly senior citizens from the UK visit Goa and hence they find it difficult to apply for a regular paper visa at the Indian embassy, which involves additional cost of travelling and other expenses. Bharuch : , Aug 4 (IANS) Four armed robbers looted around Rs 44 lakh from Union Bank's Ankleshwar branch in Bharuch, Gujarat, on Thursday afternoon. After a brief exchnage of fire that took place when they were escaping from the spot, the police managed to injure and arrest one of the robbers, who is presently undergoing treatment at a hospital in Vadodara. Vadodara range DIG M.S. Bharada told IANS, "At around 4 p.m. on Thursday, I was informed by the Bharuch Superintendent of Police that a bank was being robbed. At that time, it was not clear how many robbers were there or how much cash was looted." According to local sources, four persons reached the Union Bank branch in Ankleshwar, armed with country-made pistols. They held the bank officials at gun point before decamping with the large stash of cash. Sources said when the police tried to chase them, the four-member gang splitted into groups of two and took two different escape routes. After a brief exchange of fire, the police managed to injure one of the robbers and take him into custody. Bharuch SP Leena Patel said the police have managed to recover Rs 22 lakh in cash and three weapons from the robbers. A hunt is on to nab the three remaining miscreants. Mamallapuram, Aug 4 : Country's two teams, India A and India C, will lock horns in a crucial seventh-round match in the open section at the 44th Chess Olympiad here on Friday. Though the dice is loaded heavily in Team A's favour, India C is capable of any upsets. The team strategy would be a major aspect as it remains to be seen which players would be rested in one of the most important rounds. Team A have exhibited a solidity, not losing a single game, but the top guns like Vidit Gujrathi and Arjun Erigaisi have not been in firing form. India B will take on Cuba which has been on a roll, surprising many in the previous rounds. D Gukesh has been in formidable form for India B with a 6/6 on the top board. The last half promises intense and exciting battles and it is largely a question of which teams can rise to the occasion. Permutations and combinations have often gone awry in the last few rounds of the Olympiad but one thing is crystal-clear, performances above average ratings, only can enhance medal prospects. After the halfway stage of the 44th Chess Olympiad with six rounds completed, India A and Armenia have emerged as sole leaders in the women's and open section respectively. India A, in the women's section have justified their top seeding with six successive victories to tally 12 points. Sixth-seeded Azerbaijan and 20th seed Romania follow behind with 11 points each. The open section has been a roller coaster ride with 12th seed Armenia shooting into sole lead with a 12/12 score. The star-studded US team is in second place with 11 points while India A and India B along with nine others have totalled 10 points. India A women's team have been a cohesive unit with each player rising to the occasion whenever needing a victory. They will now face tougher teams like Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Poland and Armenia in the remaining five games. All that India A team need to do is to stick to their game plan and deliver as they have done so far. India B and India C have drifted down but can take solace in the fact that the last few rounds can bring about dramatic reversal if they focus on winning. Washington, Aug 4 : The US Department of Justice, which has taken up the findings of the January 6 (2021) panel on Capitol Hill insurrection, has sued former President Donald Trump's legal counsel Peter Navarro over using personal email for presidential records. The lawsuit claimed that Navarro used a personal email account to conduct business that involved presidential records and, as such, he should hand over those emails as they are the rightful property of the National Archives. "Mr. Navarro is wrongfully retaining Presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration," the lawsuit stated, adding, "Mr. Navarro's wrongful retention of Presidential records violates District of Columbia law, federal common law, and the Presidential Records Act." Navarro's attorneys, John Irving and John Rowley, however, denied withholding documents from the government. "As detailed in our recent letter to the Archives, Mr. Navarro instructed his lawyers to preserve all such records, and he expects the government to follow standard processes in good faith to allow him to produce records. Instead, the government chose to file its lawsuit today," they said in a statement sent to Politico. The lawsuit, filed in the federal court in Washington, is the latest in a slew of public battles between the former Trump adviser and US government, said the Washington Examiner in a report. In June, Navarro was arrested and charged with contempt of Congress after refusing to provide documents or appear to testify in front of the Jan 6 committee. A judge set a trial date for November 17 after he pleaded not guilty to the charges. Jaipur, Aug 4 : An order issued by the Sawai Madhopur Statistics Department to appoint Yuva Mitras to promote the public welfare schemes of the state government by creating 10 dummy accounts each has gone viral on social media, forcing the state government to take immediate action on Thursday. Soon after the order went viral, the Director of Statistics Directorate, Omprakash Bairwa, issued directive to suspend Assistant Director Satish Kumar Saharia, who had issued the order. While Sahariya denied issuing the order, Bairwa said, "An FIR has been lodged in this case on behalf of the Directorate, and an investigation will make the picture clear." "The Directorate did not issue instructions to create dummy accounts. The Assistant Director of Sawai Madhopur Statistics Department has been suspended and the police will investigate the whole matter," he added. In the order issued by the Department of Statistics, Sawai Madhopur, instructions were given to the block statistics officers to appoint Yuva Mitras to promote the public welfare schemes of the state government by creating 10 dummy accounts for each Yuva Mitra on Twitter and five on Facebook. Meanwhile, BJP MLA Jitendra Gothwal, who has lodged a complaint in this matter, said that creating a fake account is an offence under Section 419 of the IPC and a violation of the IT Act. Gothwal alleged that the state government is cheating the youth of the state by egging them to create dummy accounts to promote its schemes to garner publicity. The BJP MLA also met Director General of Police M.L. Lather in Jaipur and demanded appropriate action in the matter. New Delhi, Aug 4 : A Delhi court has sent three arrested Tihar Jail officials to judicial custody till August 17, in a case pertaining to the alleged murder of gangster Ankit Gujjar inside the jail last year. Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Anjani Mahajan, in the order passed on Wednesday, noted the gravity of the offences as the court heard the application of the Investigating Officer seeking an extension of remand of the accused -- former Deputy Superintendent Narender Meena, suspended Assistant Superintendent Dinesh Dabas, and suspended Head Warder Deepak Chikara, who were arrested by the Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI). The IO also said that further investigation is going on in relation to Dabas and Chhikara, who were arrested few days ago, and supplementary report shall be filed expeditiously. Meena was arrested two months before by the probe agency. The court was also told that adequate measures have been taken up considering the apprehensions of jail officials, who alleged security threats from inmates. "One personnel of Tamil Nadu Special Police has been deployed outside their cell round the clock and will accompany them when they are required to move outside their cell within the jail premises. Further, it is mentioned that special instructions have been given to jail officials concerned to provide adequate security to them," the court was told. For their request for providing facility of separate van, a letter has been sent to DCP, it was apprised. On August 4 last year, Gujjar was found dead with multiple injuries on his body inside the premises of Central Jail No 3. As per the court's directions, the investigation of the case was being conducted by the CBI. Patna, Aug 4 : The Patna High Court on Thursday pulled up the Bihar Police, saying its approach against judicial officers was dangerous and it was not even respecting the rulings of the Supreme Court. A division bench of Justices Rajan Gupta and Mohit Shah made the remarks in presence of Bihar DGP S.K. Singhal who appeared before the bench in connection with the hearing of ADJ Avinash Kumar assault case in Madhubani, after being summoned by the court on Wednesday. ADJ, Jhanjharpur, Avinash Kumar was assaulted by then Ghoghardeh SHO Gopal Krishna and Sub-Inspector Abhimanyu Kumar Sharma in his court chamber on November 18, 2021. The two policemen also threatened him with dire consequences by pointing a pistol on him. He was subsequently rescued by the lawyers of the Jhanjharpur court. Following the incident, ADJ Avinash Kumar registered an FIR against the two policemen in the Jhanjharpur police station. Since then, the high court was monitoring the case. However, on Wednesday, the court was shocked to know that an FIR was filed against the ADJ. Government lawyer Mrigang Mauli, appearing for the police, said that an FIR was registered against the ADJ on the statement of then SHO and the SI in June this year. At this, Chief Justice Sanjay Karol asked him to inform the court under which law was the FIR was registered against the ADJ. "The state police have violated the ruling of the Supreme Court which clearly said that the FIR would be registered against any judge only after the direction of the Chief Justice of the high court. As I have not given the permission to register an FIR against ADJ, how could Bihar Police register an FIR against him," he said. He had summoned the DGP on Thursday. On Thursday, the bench also asked the DGP that if any case is registered against leaders, police will withdraw it immediately. "Then, why have you delayed in withdrawing the FIR against a judge?" At this, Advocate General Lalit Kishore told the court that the police had made the mistake by registering the FIR against the ADJ. As the police cannot withdraw it on its own, it has started the process and moved an application in the respective court for the cancellation of the FIR. The FIR will be cancelled soon. Following the assurance, the bench directed the police to rectify the error by the next hearing. Itanagar, Aug 4 : The Arunachal Pradesh government on Thursday named the under-construction greenfield airport -- the state's third here in the state capital Itanagar as "Donyi Polo Airport", officials said. An official at the Chief Minister's Office said that the state cabinet in its meeting on Thursday approved the name of the airport as "Donyi Polo Airport". Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu chaired the meeting. The official said that the name of the lone airport in the capital city would symbolise the age-old tradition and rich cultural heritage of the tribal dominated state and also would reflect the people's age-old indigenous reverence on the Sun (Donyi) and the Moon (Polo). The Central government had earlier accorded its approval for setting up of the "greenfield airport" under the 'Capital Connectivity Scheme' to build up fixed wing air connectivity facility to the state capital which was a long cherished dream of the people of the bordering state, the official added. The "Donyi Polo Airport" airport in Itanagar would be Arunachal Pradesh's third airport after Pasighat and Tezu airports, and northeast India's 16th airport. The Chief Minister had earlier said that work on the airport is on war-footing and shall be made operational soon. The Airport Authority of India has undertaken a Rs 650 crore project to develop the airport to boost air connectivity in the mountainous areas. Currently, there are 15 operational airports in the northeastern region -- Guwahati, Silchar, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Tezpur, Lilalabari and Rupsi (Assam), Tezu and Pasighat (Arunachal Pradesh), Agartala (Tripura), Imphal (Manipur), Shillong (Meghalaya), Dimapur (Nagaland), Lengpui (Mizoram) and Pakyong (Sikkim). New Delhi, Aug 4 : Acting on the advice of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reach out to Pasmanda Muslims, the BJP is planning to start a felicitation programme from Friday of the community leaders from Uttar Pradesh. A programme 'Pasmanda Muslim Sneh Milan and Samman Samaroh' will be organised in the national capital in which Uttar Pradesh minister Danish Azad Ansari, chairman of Uttar Pradesh Minorities Commission Ashfaq Saifi and Chairman of Uttar Pradesh Board of Madarsa Education Dr. Iftikhar Ahmed Javed will be felicitated in the presence of BJP OBC Morcha president and MP K. Laxman. During the party's national executive committee meeting in Hyderabad earlier this month, the Prime Minister asked party leaders to start exploring new social equations by reaching out to marginalised sections among other religious groups including Pasmanda Muslims, who have benefitted from various government welfare schemes. Former vice chairman of National Minority Commission and in-charge of Delhi BJP Minority wing, Atif Rasheed told IANS that the programme is organised in recognition of the leadership role given to the Pasmanda community in Uttar Pradesh under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Rasheed also said that leaders and representatives of the Pasmanda community from 10 states and Delhi will attend the programme. Pasmanda leaders from Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Assam, Rajasthan, Maharashtra Bihar Jharkhand and Delhi will attend the programme. "Similar programmes will be held in Uttar Pradesh and other states across the country to recognise the Pasmanda leadership by the Rashtrawadi Muslim Pasmanda Mahaz that is also organising the event in Delhi," Rasheed added. The BJP is planning to identify individuals among the backward Muslim community for leadership role in the party. According to the party estimates, there is around 85 per cent backward or Pasmanda Muslim population across the country. In a major organisational restructuring, the BJP is getting ready to include Pasmanda Muslims in its OBC (other Backward Classes) Morcha as office bearers. The presence of Laxman in the function is a step towards including the Pasmanda community in leadership roles as BJP OBC Morcha national president. Bhopal, Aug 4 : A minister in the BJP-led Madhya Pradesh government hinted on Thursday that a National Herald building in Bhopal can come under the scanner of the state government. The remark came a day after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) sealed the office of Young Indian Pvt Ltd located in the Herald House in the national capital in connection with its probe into a money laundering case. Minister of Housing and Urban Development in the Madhya Pradesh government, Bhupendra Singh, told mediapersons here that the building, which used to be the office of National Herald newspaper, has been converted into a business complex. A case in this issue is pending in the Bhopal district court, which is being closely monitored by the state government, he said. "We have given direction for a probe, and if needed we will seal the complex," Singh said. As per reports, around 1.14 acre of land was allotted to National Herald on lease for a period of 30 years for building its office. However, the newspaper stopped its operations in 1992. After the expiry of the said lease in 2011, the administration moved to take over the possession of the building, only to find that it has been converted into a commercial complex. When the procedures to get the plot vacated got underway, many buyers came forward and the issue reached the court, as per reports. New Delhi, Aug 4 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Thursday arrested Mohammed Salim Mohd. Iqbal Qureshi alias Salim Fruit in the case relating to activities of fugitive mafia don Dawood Ibrahim's D Company. "Salim Fruit is a close associate of D Company and has played an active role in extorting huge amount of money in the name of Chhota Shakeel through property dealings and dispute settlements for raising terror funds in furtherance of terrorist activities of D company," an official said. On February 3, the NIA had received an information that Dawood Ibrahim was raising terror funds and was working with Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Al Qaeda, and was controlling criminal activities in India through close aides. The case was registered suo moto on February 3 this year pertaining to terrorists and criminal activities viz. smuggling, narco-terrorism, money-laundering, circulation of FICN, unauthorised possession/acquisition of key assets for raising terror funds and working in active collaboration with international terrorist organisation including LeT, JeM and Al Qaeda. New Delhi, Aug 4 : The indigenously developed laser-guided Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) were successfully test-fired from Main Battle Tank (MBT) Arjun by Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Army at KK Ranges with support of Armoured Corps Centre and School, Ahmednagar in Maharashtra, on Thursday. The missiles hit with precision and successfully destroyed the targets at two different ranges, officials said, adding the telemetry systems have recorded the satisfactory flight performance of the missiles. The all-indigenous laser-guided ATGM employs a tandem High Explosive Anti-Tank warhead to defeat Explosive Reactive Armour protected armoured vehicles. The ATGM has been developed with multi-platform launch capability and is currently undergoing technical evaluation trials from 120 mm rifled gun of MBT Arjun. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has congratulated the DRDO and Indian Army for the successful trial of the laser-guided ATGM and said that development of this system is an important step towards realising Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat', a release said. Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and Chairman, DRDO G. Satheesh Reddy congratulated the teams associated with the test-firing of laser-guided ATGMs. New Delhi, Aug 5 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday arrested a local gangster from Bihar Bachchoo Yadav, who is said to have links with Pankaj Mishra, a close aide of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren, in connection with an alleged illegal mining and extortion scam in Jharkhand. Bachchoo is also an aide of Dahu Yadav, another accused in the case. He will be produced before the court on Friday. The ED had arrested Mishra July 19. He was sent to ED's custody till August 1. The agency had even recently seized one inland vessel worth Rs 30 crore namely M.V. Infralink- III which was allegedly being used Mishra. "The vessel was being operated illegally without having any permit from Sukargarh Ghat, Sahebganj. "The vessel was being operated at the behest of Rajesh Yadav alias Dahu Yadav in collusion with Pankaj Mishra and others for transporting illegally mined stone chips, stone boulders," it had said. An official had said that an FIR has been lodged with Muffasil police station against the owner of the vessel under Section 25, 30 of Bengal Ferries Act, and sections 188, 282, 420 of IPC. According to the ED, this was preceded by the freezing of two illegally operated stone crushers of Maa Amba Stone Works operated by Bishnu Yadav and Pavitra Yadav along with the freezing of three HYVA trucks found at Mauza Majhikola, Sahebganj carrying illegally quarried stone chips and boulders without having any mining challans during a search conducted on July 25 by the agency. In a similar manner, an FIR dated July 26 in this regard has also been lodged under Sections 379 and 414 of IPC at Girwabadi, Sahebganj. "Besides, one illegal mine situated at Mauza Simaria, Sahebganj operated by Bishnu Yadav and others has been identified. Another mine has been identified at Mauza Demba, Sahebganj where mining has exceeded far beyond the leased area. The quantification of the excess illegal mining done at the above site has been estimated around 37.5 million cubic feet which has remained undeclared and concealed. The processed value of the mined stone chips estimated to be around Rs 45 crore," said the official. An ED team is visiting Sahebganj district to conduct a joint survey in conjunction with Jharkhand State Pollution Control Board, District Mining Office, Sahibganj, District forest office, Sahebganj and other officials of the district to identify the beneficiaries of such illegal mining activities and to investigate the proceeds acquired through illegal mining activities. The ED had seized cash amounting to Rs 13.32 crore lying in 50 bank accounts, Rs 5.34 crore unaccounted cash, illegally operated stone crushers and seizure of various incriminating documents belonging to Mishra, Yadav and their associates. Further investigation in the case is in progress. Helsinki, Aug 5 : The Finnish government wants to tighten visa regulations for people from Russia, Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said Thursday, according to a media report. Russian citizens should no longer be granted tourist visas in the way they are at present, dpa news agency reported, citing Finnish radio station Yle. The Foreign Ministry in Helsinki is preparing measures to be discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the end of the month, Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told the broadcaster. It is not enough for Finland to make such a decision on its own, there must be the same guidelines throughout the Schengen area, he said. Lawmakers across the political spectrum backed the move, according to Yle, in sentiments sparked by Russia's war neighbouring Ukraine, which began in February. Finland shares a 1340-km border with Russia, the longest of all the EU states. According to Yle, Russian tourists have so far been able to enter the Schengen area by bus or car across the Finnish border despite Moscow's attacks. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War Tehran, Aug 5 : A new round of talks on the revival of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers has began in Vienna after a 150-day hiatus, according to Iran's official news agency. The Iranian negotiating team, headed by Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani, held a meeting with the Russian delegation led by Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia's permanent representative to international organisations in Vienna and chief negotiator to the Vienna talks, Xinhua news agency reported, citing IRNA. "The two sides had a frank, pragmatic and constructive exchange of views on ways and means of overcoming the last outstanding issues," Ulyanov tweeted after the meeting. Bagheri Kani also met with Enrique Mora, the European Union chief coordinator for the Iran nuclear talks, and Secretary General of the Austrian Foreign Ministry Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal respectively. Iran signed the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with world powers in July 2015, agreeing to curb its nuclear program in return for the removal of sanctions on the country. However, former US President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the agreement. The talks on reviving the JCPOA began in April 2021 in the Austrian capital of Vienna but were suspended in March this year because of political differences between Tehran and Washington. Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War KanAm Grund Group has acquired the last-mile logistics property Cross Dock Upper Austria for its open-ended real estate fund Leading Cities Invest. The building is situated in the Austrian municipality of Enns, near the city of Linz, and offers almost 13,000 square meters of space. Seller is the Meir real Photos: Backbone [] Screenshot of Who Are the People App Envisions AR technology immerses users in an interactive experience that tells the stories of diverse American heroes featured at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, said Envision President and CEO, Alexander Cortez, Jr. Envision Innovative Solutions, an extended reality technology developer, announced the release of Who Are the People, a free augmented reality (AR) app the company developed for the U.S. Architect of the Capitol. Users can interact with statues displayed in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center by using their camera phone to virtually place statues in any location and experience interactive content paired with audio from museum curators. Inside the app, users can resize, rotate, and walk around each statue to explore the sculpture up close. After completing special activities, users will engage with app rewards such as haptic technology that makes mobile phones vibrate or unique multimedia experiences. For example, the activity featuring NASA astronaut John Jack Swigert, Jr., includes the actual recording of Swigerts historic radio message to the control room during the Apollo 13 mission. Users can also learn information about the artists who sculpted each historical figure from the Curator for the Architect of the Capitol. Envisions AR technology immerses users in an interactive experience that tells the stories of diverse American heroes featured at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, said Envision President and CEO, Alexander Cortez, Jr. We see a lot of potential for AR in the tourism industry, particularly for museums where visitors want to learn more about exhibits before, during, and after their trip. Who Are the People is available to the public for free, and can be downloaded from the App Store for iOS devices, or from Google Play for Android devices. Statues that are featured within the app include: Statue of Freedom by Thomas Crawford Sarah Winnemucca by Benjamin Victor, given by Nevada in 2005 John Jack Swigert, Jr., by George and Mark Lundeen, given by Colorado in 1997 Kamehameha I by Thomas Ridgeway Gould, given by Hawaii in 1969 Helen Keller by Edward Hlavka, given by Alabama in 2009 Sojourner Truth bust by Artis Lane, donated by the National Congress of Black Women in 2009 About Envision Innovative Solutions Established in 2006, Envision Innovative Solutions is a leading technology developer in the field of eXtended Reality (XR)the umbrella technology branding that includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. Other Envision extended reality clients include Fortune-100 energy corporations and educational institutions, including K-12 and higher education. Envision XR is highly focused on immersive training and education, simulation, and real-time learning. For nearly two decades, Envision has been an industry leader in software development, systems engineering and integration, and managed IT services for the U.S. Departments of Defense and Interior. Additionally, Envision offers remote virtual education and tutoring services, including XR, to help combat the educational sector loss of in-person learning and hands-on lab exercises due to COVID-19 circumstances and closures. Learn more about Envisions extended reality technology at envision-is.com/xr. "Were very thankful to Oxford Road and their support, which will allow us to expand CHLA's long standing Cuddler Program to more families throughout the hospital," said Rosby Lamm, Manager of Volunteer Resources at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Oxford Road, the leading independent audio agency, today announced that its Koala Corps program has raised the funds needed to afford a full-time professional to oversee the cuddler program at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) for the next three years. The agencys Koala Corps initiative was designed to support critical newborn infants to be held through this service. With this milestone under its belt, Oxford Road is now pursuing ways to establish Koala Corps as an endowment. Koala Corps mission to provide arms to hold every child in need was inspired by the experience the programs co-founders, Oxford Road founder and CEO Dan Granger and his wife Ciera had when their second daughter Shae was born with cognitive delays and complex medical issues. Shae ultimately spent six months in Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, where she underwent a dozen surgeries and procedures. During Shaes fight for her life, one of the most important things the Grangers recognized was the benefits of holding her whenever possible. Shae underwent back-to-back surgeries. One of her only sources of comfort was to be held, said Ciera Granger. She was a fragile little newborn who needed constant affection and attention, but not all babies in the hospital have someone available to cuddle them. Because of our experience with our daughter, we were compelled to launch the Koala Corps fund. We learned it was important for newborns and we were determined to find a way to help. It is a need in our community that most people dont know exists. This will bless babies and their families tremendously. The funds Koala Corps raises for Childrens Hospital Los Angeles come primarily from its chief contributor, Oxford Road. For years, the agency has donated a percentage of company revenue from audio advertising services to the fund. Oxford Roads partners have also been generous. For instance, iHeartMedia Los Angeles recently donated a generous bank of ad inventory to support the fund. Hitting this years funding milestone has brought supporters of the program even closer. Contributing to Koala Corps is directly aligned with iHearts own ethos and values of connecting local LA families in need with available resources, said Jeff Thomas, Senior Vice President of Sales for iHeartMedia Los Angeles. Through our media support we aim to expand the program benefits to even more families and children in the Los Angeles area. Rosby Lamm, Manager of Volunteer Resources at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, oversees the Hospitals Cuddler Program. For many families, the birth of a baby who needs intensive medical care is unexpected and obligations at home and work mean families are unable to visit the hospital every day to be with their newborn, says Lamm. "Were very thankful to Oxford Road and their support, which will allow us to expand CHLA's long standing Cuddler Program to more families throughout the hospital." To learn more about Oxford Roads Koala Corps program and/or donate to the fund, please visit: Koala Corps https://koalacorps.com About Oxford Road Oxford Road is the leading independent ad agency specializing in audio advertising, reaching millions of people each day through Podcasts, Radio, Streaming, and Smart Speakers. Through industry innovation and proprietary data management practices, they have helped more than a dozen direct-to-consumer brands scale their customer acquisition efforts and grow from Startup to $1 Billion+ valuations. Every organ donation story is different, and that is reflected in our cast." Chicago residents Laurie Lee, Bethany and Hannah Goralski and Hammond, Indiana resident Helaynia Walker have been cast in Maitri River Productions documentary film CrowdSource for Life. The Dallas-based film and television production company announced the casting of seventeen living kidney donors for a narrative non-fiction documentary. Lee and the Goralski sisters donated their kidneys to strangers at Northwestern Medicines Comprehensive Transplant Center (NMTAC). They made the decision to donate after their dads received successful organ transplants at NMTAC just days apart. The Goralski sisters and Lee met on the transplant floor of the hospital while their fathers were walking laps post-surgery. Walker donated her kidney to a stranger in a kidney swap at Ascension St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. We get amazing and unique content from non-directed kidney donors, stated Donald Griswold, CrowdSource for Lifes director and executive producer. Science considers them to be our societys most extreme altruists. Because of the rare nature of their giving, these living kidney donors like Laurie take us on a deep unexpected dive into what it really means to give. CrowdSource for Life isnt a documentary about living kidney donation; its about the human experiences that come with giving. The films cast of living kidney donors will work with Chicagos 2nd Story theatre company and producers from Maitri River Productions to develop their experiences with living kidney donation into monologues. The storytelling monologues will be performed before a live theatre audience in Dallas, Texas, where the production will be recorded live for the feature film, CrowdSource for Life. Every organ donation story is different, and that is reflected in our cast, said Lee, who is also a CrowdSource for Life producer. We have seventeen completely different takes on the process, the effects, and the experience of giving. There is something in this show for everyone. Lee also points out the importance of diversity on the cast. There is an unfortunate racial disparity in the world of kidney transplant and donation. White people are four times more likely to receive a kidney transplant than Black people, despite the equity assured once youre listed on the kidney transplant list. CrowdSource for Lifes cast is diverse both culturally and racially, which industry experts expect will expand the conversation about living kidney donation into many communities. CrowdSource for Life will be released directly to numerous streaming services. Ned Brooks, founder of The National Kidney Donation Organization described CrowdSource for Life as, an extraordinary opportunity to increase the awareness of kidney disease and the benefits of living kidney donation. Numerous kidney transplant and donation organizations have joined the effort to raise the films $300,000 production budget. Transplant Village, Organ Transplant Support, Kidney Donor Conversations and PKD Outreach Foundation have all contributed, together with private individual donors, to raise more than $190,000 for the films production in just a few months. Tax deductible donations to CrowdSource for Life can be made at https://crowdsourceforlife.com. Left to right- Consent Advocates Andrea Constand, Susan Prout and Joyce Short Every state and jurisdiction should adopt the UCMJ wording to address the issues raised by #MeToo, secure justice for victims, and hold sexual predators accountable for their actions, says CAN founder, Joyce Short Representative Annie Kuster (NY-02) led the House of Representatives in passing a critical amendment to conquer sexual assault and sexual harassment through the National Defense Authorization Act. Now the bill is being considered by the Senate. Representative Kuster says: Military sexual assault and harassment are at an all-time high with the militarys own internal surveys indicating a staggering 38% increase in unwanted sexual contact in recent years. We owe the brave men and women who protect our nation the highest concern for their personal safety. As founder and co-chair of the Bipartisan Task Force to End Sexual Violence, I was proud to introduce and pass this amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act to direct the Department of Defense to define consent and conduct fair, thorough investigations in cases of sexual assault, Kuster adds. Advocates from the Consent Awareness Network (CAN), led by its founder Joyce Short, the author of Your Consent The Key to Conquering Sexual Assault, launched this transformational fix for the flaw in military law (UCMJ). Short says, Correctly defining consent as 'freely given, knowledgeable and informed agreement by a person with the capacity to reason' enables our justice system to improve case handling for sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, sex trafficking, and sexual harassment. This definition will provide the blue-print to prevent the horrific victim-blaming currently embedded in the militarys statutes, and in laws across the US and around the world. Every state and jurisdiction should adopt the UCMJ wording to address the issues raised by #MeToo, secure justice for victims, and hold sexual predators accountable for their actions. CANs efforts were supported by several advocates from high profile cases such as Andrea Constand and Stacey Pinkerton, Cosby survivors, and Susan and Alex Prout, whose 15 year old daughter was the victim of a Senior Salute at St. Pauls School in New Hampshire. Ms. Prout is a co-founder of the non-profit, I Have the Right To.https://www.ihavetherightto.org/ Andrea Constand says, "Bill Cosby's case would have had a very different outcome if this law was in effect when he engaged in his criminal behavior. We need our laws to enlighten and protect society from sexual predators." Susan Prout says, "Our current laws are failing us. Our children and young adults need the guidance that our laws should provide. This bill is a monumental step forward!" Stacey Pinkerton, also a Cosby Survivor, states, "The use of coercive control by the military hierarchy is a far too common and an unacceptable abuse. This bill will prevent such conduct." Weve seen firsthand how the power of a brand can elevate a business from a company to an industry leader; how it can bring overwhelming attention to those hidden rockstar companies and help them attract their ideal audience CMDS has reached an exciting milestone, as the award-winning brand building, digital marketing, and web design agency celebrates 20 years of success collaborating with clients and delivering exceptional results. In 2002, founder Chris Mulvaney set out with a vision to create the best customer-centric web experience possible across the internet by 2030. Despite launching immediately after one of the most significant market crashes in web history, while the dot-com bubble burst, CMDS flourished by truly understanding the audience of their clients and showing how remarkable their businesses really are. Over the last two decades, Mulvaney and his team of brand strategists continued to refine their approach and expand their offerings to include web development, social media strategy, mobile app development, and video advertising. The agency became known for its deep commitment to excellence and the personal one-to-one relationships its employees formed with clients and partners. As CMDS has grown over the years, Mulvaneys vision of building a premiere digital marketing agency for brands of all sizes has become a reality. Mulvaney reflects on the companys 20th anniversary by saying, Over the last 20 years, we always prided ourselves on being trendsetters in branding, design, websites, and marketing. With the evolution of the digital landscape, we have embraced new strategies and tools to deliver many of our clients, as well as ourselves, exponential business growth. He added, Thank you to all of our loyal employees and partners who have made this journey as exciting as it has been. Since the beginning, CMDS has viewed its clients as partners, and not just customers. The agency is known throughout the industry for its commitment to its clients and personal relationships, working hand-in-hand to determine the smartest, most impactful ways to achieve stated objectives through the power of creative marketing. Weve seen firsthand how the power of a brand can elevate a business from a company to an industry leader; how it can bring overwhelming attention to those hidden rockstar companies and help them attract their ideal audience, said Mulvaney. Looking forward, CMDS plans to continue supporting clients in the Pharma and Healthcare industry as well as B2B businesses, leveraging insights and data collected over the last 20 years to fully execute what drives business success. ABOUT CMDS CMDS combines business acumen, marketing, communications, and design-thinking to develop meaningful, differentiated, and authentic brands for companies big and small. The agency is a full-service digital marketing firm, offering holistic solutions like digital marketing, website development, brand strategy, video, and social media strategy. To learn more, visit https://www.cmdsonline.com. Benchmark Senior Living Family Group Text Campaign "This campaign is designed to showcase the fun and freedom our residents enjoy daily because of what we make possible. -Tom Grape, founder, chairman and CEO of Benchmark Benchmark Senior Living, the largest senior housing provider in New England, has launched a new advertising and marketing campaign in print and digital. The campaign encourages consumers to better understand the world of senior living by unlearning everything they think they know about independent living, assisted living, memory care and respite care. The Family Group Text campaign showcases whats possible when assumptions about older loved ones are put aside. It tells Benchmarks story using images depicting the typical modern-day family conversation text messaging. When seniors move into a Benchmark community, most of them go from being isolated at home to rediscovering what they enjoy. Independent and assisted living community residents are featured dancing, enjoying social hour and off-site trips with their friends, participating in group exercise classes and relaxing because someone else is taking care of the cleaning. Often, people have misconceptions about senior living that are dispelled immediately when they walk through our doors, said Tom Grape, founder, chairman and CEO of Benchmark. Our communities are truly a special place for our residents and their loved ones because of the great skill, love and intention our associates put into providing our industry-leading care and experiences. This campaign is designed to showcase the fun and freedom our residents enjoy daily because of what we make possible. Facilitated by Benchmark associates who are hired for heart and trained for skill, at its 64 communities throughout the Northeast, residents benefit from interest-oriented programs, experiential, restaurant-style dining, hotel-like amenities, personalized, comprehensive care and access to onsite healthcare services. This year marks Benchmarks 25th providing senior housing. Throughout its history, Benchmark and its communities have won hundreds of local, regional and national awards for being a top workplace, providing outstanding programs and dining and overall quality. Most recently, Benchmark communities won 53 awards in U.S. News & World Reports first Best Senior Living 2022-2023 excellence program for Best Assisted Living, Best Memory Care and Best Independent Living. The company was among the top five of senior living providers nationwide to receive the most awards. The Family Group Text campaign launched today in major newspapers, online and social media. To learn more about Benchmark senior assisted living, memory care assisted living, assisted living with memory care and independent assisted living at its communities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Maine and Vermont, click here. # # # About Benchmark Senior Living Benchmark is New Englands largest senior living provider with 64 independent living, assisted living, memory care and continuing care communities and over 5,000 dedicated associates providing compassionate care and outstanding experiences throughout the Northeast. The Waltham, Mass.-based company was founded over 25 years ago by Tom Grape with the purpose of Transforming Lives Through Human Connection. Since then, Benchmark has continued to set the industry standard, having won over a hundred local, regional and national awards for its care, programs and as a top workplace. Benchmark has been named one of the Top Places to Work for 14 straight years in The Boston Globes annual employee-based survey and received repeated recognition in FORTUNEs Best Workplaces for Aging Services list. For more information, visit BenchmarkSeniorLiving.com. H. Butch Browning, Jr. (center) receives the 2022 Fire Safety Advocate Award from Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association president, Guy Jones (right), and code consultant, Dwayne Garriss (left). Butch Browning has devoted his entire life to public safety and service in a pursuit to protect the lives and property of others, said Guy Jones, president of the Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association. The Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association has selected H. Butch Browning for its 2022 Fire Safety Advocate Award. Browning is the executive director of the National Association of State Fire Marshals (NASFM) and recent past Louisiana State Fire Marshal. The annual Fire Safety Advocate Award is given to an individual who has demonstrated a commitment to enhancing the safety of the public through innovative efforts, including legislative, educational, enforcement or other effective means. After personally witnessing the destructive power of fire as a young child and becoming a burn victim, Browning decided to dedicate his life to fire safety. Today, more than 34 years later, he has served in all levels of the fire service. Butch Browning has devoted his entire life to public safety and service in a pursuit to protect the lives and property of others, said Guy Jones, president of the Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association. The Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association thanks Butch for his dedication, and we congratulate him on this award. Browning entered public service as a sheriffs deputy for East Baton Rouge Parish and later taught firefighting techniques as an adjunct professor at LSU. Prior to his appointment as Louisiana State Fire Marshal, he served as Fire Chief for the District 6 Fire Department in Baton Rouge and as the City of Gonzales Fire Chief. A proud Eagle Scout, Browning is also Past President of the Louisiana State Firemen's Association, Past President of the National Association of State Fire Marshals, and Past President of the Louisiana Arson and Fire Prevention Association. Browning was presented with the 2022 Fire Safety Advocate Award during the annual NASFM conference on August 1, 2022, in New Orleans, La. About the Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association The Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association is a more than 80-year-old non-profit trade association dedicated to saving lives and protecting property by providing education on a layered fire protection design. For additional information, including videos, interactive questionnaires, and training websites about fire safety and protection, visit femalifesafety.org or call 216-241-7333. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/FireEquipmentManufacturersAssociation. For a complete listing of member companies, visit the Member Profiles page of the associations website at femalifesafety.org/members. GroGurus irrigation monitoring and management solutions help smart farms utilize water and other scarce resource more strategically and efficiently, enabling the the tools to increase crop yields in a more sustainable way. Brian Henrichs, Actiontec president, joins GroGuru as a member of its business advisory board. Brian is a communication and wireless systems industry veteran, and will advise GroGuru on scaling its revolutionary wireless underground system into large scale production. Brian has over 40 years of high-tech communication systems experience having held senior roles in engineering, marketing, business development and executive management. Most recently Brian has applied AI and ML cloud data techniques to optimize wifi performance for home networks. Brian grew up on a dairy farm in northeastern Wisconsin and developed an appreciation for the volume of water consumed by lactating dairy cattle and an understanding of the impact of soil moisture during crop growth on crop yields. He enjoys applying technology to solve problems particularly using communications and the power of cloud computing to help drive business profitability and better resource utilization. Brian holds a BSEET degree from DeVry University and an MBA from Illinois Institute of Technology. In his spare time, he enjoys aviation and has been a licensed private pilot for 37 years having flown over 35 different aircraft including ownership of 4 experimental aircraft. He is also a licensed remote pilot for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS). By 2050 the world will need to feed 2 billion more people than it does today requiring 70-100% more of the crops we grow," said Brian Henrichs. "GroGurus irrigation monitoring and management solutions help smart farms utilize water and other scarce resource more strategically and efficiently, enabling the the tools to increase crop yields in a more sustainable way. I am delighted and excited to help contribute to their solutions that address this real world problem in a meaningful and sustainable manner. "Brian's operations, engineering, farming and executive management expertise make him uniquely suited to advise GroGuru as we enter the next phase of our growth," said Patrick Henry, president and CEO at GroGuru. "There has never been a more urgent need for new technology to address water conservation, food security, sustainability and regenerative agriculture, and GroGuru is right at the center of all of these. We are excited to have Brian's support and council as we continue on the journey of building GroGuru as a premier agriculture technology company." ### About GroGuru GroGuru, Inc. is a privately held company based in San Diego, CA, founded in 2014. GroGuru supplies precision soil and irrigation monitoring and management systems to the commercial agriculture industry. GroGuru is all about strategic irrigation management, helping farmers make more money by increasing crop yield and more efficiently using water in a sustainable way. GroGuru has a patented wireless underground system (WUGS) for soil monitoring, an AI-based recommendation engine in the Cloud, and an intuitive farmer-friendly user interface that farmers can access on their tablet, computer or mobile device. GroGuru sells an innovative hardware-enabled subscription-based solution to farmers that enables optimal irrigation, as well as a software as a service (SaaS) marketed as GroGuru InSites. GroGurus patented WUGS technology enables a permanent installation of soil sensors, even in annual field crops. GroGuru has been a part of the OCTANE LaunchPad, EvoNexus, AgLaunch, the Yield Lab, SVG-Thrive and Plug & Play AgTech accelerator programs. Paul DeAngelo, a Resident at The Village at Willow Crossings & Mass-ALA 2022-23 Resident Spirit Award Winner Our community is a much better place because of Paul. He never stops giving to all of us. He makes everyones day brighter, and we are so happy to have him as a member of our family." -Anne DeMinico, executive director of The Village at Willow Crossings The Village at Willow Crossings is known for its culture of caring thats been built over the past 23 years, and its this culture that has earned them yet another recognition. The Benchmark independent living, assisted living and Mind & Memory Care community has been awarded the Massachusetts Assisted Living Associations (Mass-ALA) 2022 Excellence Award for Resident Spirit. Resident Paul DeAngelo was honored for embodying the heart and soul of the community, leading and interacting with other residents in a way that makes The Village home for everyone. The award nomination noted that, since moving to The Village a year and a half ago, theres not been a single person who hasnt been touched by DeAngelos passion for life and people. DeAngelos own life is one that has inspired his fellow residents, having survived The Vietnam War and the unimaginable loss of family members. As a member of The Villages welcoming committee, he makes each new resident immediately feel like they belong and focuses on helping them find what they love and their purpose. Hes extended his decades-long excitement for beadmaking to all residentspatiently helping those who cannot use their dexterity to create earrings, bracelets and other pieces of jewelry. Kindly supporting one another in a way that only friends and neighbors can is what has continued to make The Village great, said Anne DeMinico, executive director of The Village. Our community is a much better place because of Paul. He never stops giving to all of us. He makes everyones day brighter, and we are so happy to have him as a member of our family. Im thrilled that Mass-ALA has seen what we see daily in Paul and our community. In addition to the Mass-ALA 2022 Excellence Award for Resident Spirit, The Village was recently the only senior living community in all of Bristol County to receive U.S. News & World Reports Best Assisted Living 2022-2023 Excellence Award. In addition to independent living, The Village at Willow Crossings offers traditional senior assisted living and independent assisted living for those who would benefit from a safer, engaging environment, chef-prepared meals, supportive living services, transportation and assistance with daily activities, such as getting dressed and medication management. Residents enjoy connecting over programs and amenities offered in many common spaces, including an indoor pool, English Pub, tearoom, recreation room, fitness and wellness centers, library, hair salon, private dining room and outdoor courtyards with walking paths. The community also offers an award-winning Mind & Memory Care program featuring carefully created living environments and unique opportunities for those with Alzheimers and dementia to find joy in each new day. Memory care assisted living residents are supported by 24/7 care providers who have been hired for heart and educated in memory loss, communication and empathy. Neighborhoods provide the comforts of home and have unique features that help those with memory impairment stay connected to who and what matters most to them. Thoughtful touches, visual cues and purposeful amenities further promote familiarity and wellness. For more information about The Village at Willow Crossings, click here. # # # About Benchmark Senior Living Benchmark is New Englands largest senior living provider with 64 independent living, assisted living, memory care and continuing care communities and over 5,000 dedicated associates providing compassionate care and outstanding experiences throughout the Northeast. The Waltham, Mass.-based company was founded over 25 years ago by Tom Grape with the purpose of Transforming Lives Through Human Connection. Since then, Benchmark has continued to set the industry standard, having won over a hundred local, regional and national awards for its care, programs and as a top workplace. Benchmark has been named one of the Top Places to Work for 14 straight years in The Boston Globes annual employee-based survey and received repeated recognition in FORTUNEs Best Workplaces for Aging Services list. For more information, visit BenchmarkSeniorLiving.com. "The knowledge we can glean as it relates to orthobiologics will play a pivotal role in guiding the highest quality of musculoskeletal care for our patients." The Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation (OREF) announced today that Kyle R. Duchman, MD, of the University of Iowa, has been awarded the second OREF/AAOS Injectable Orthobiologics of Knee Osteoarthritis Grant. Dr. Duchman, who is an orthopedic surgeon and an Assistant Professor of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics, will serve as principal investigator (PI) for the study, Platelet Rich Plasma for Osteoarthritis: Role of Exosomes in Effectiveness. Joseph A. Buckwalter IV, MD, FAAOS, will serve as co-PI. Funding for this grant was made possible through the OREF/AAOS Clinical Research Gaps Fund with contributions from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) and individual donors. The $50,000 grant is the second to be awarded through a strategic partnership between OREF and AAOS, which aims to help narrow the gap between clinical research funding and prioritized clinical research needs in musculoskeletal care, including orthobiologics. The partnership identifies areas of clinical research for which there is a need for increased, targeted funding to evaluate the effectiveness of various orthopaedic interventions and improve the quality of care for patients. A request for applications (RFA) is expected to be published in November 2022 for the third grant to be funded through this partnership. The use of orthobiologics is of great interest to patients. It is imperative that we continue to prioritize research in this area so that orthopaedic surgeons are equipped to guide their patients in making safe and effective healthcare choices. We are excited to award this grant to Dr. Duchman and the University of Iowa, said Thomas P. Sculco, MD, FAAOS, OREF president. We look forward to the research that Dr. Duchman and his team will conduct through this grant, said Felix H. Buddy Savoie III, MD, FAAOS, AAOS president. Together with our partners at OREF, we are pleased with the momentum behind the OREF/AAOS Clinical Research Gaps Fund. The knowledge we can glean as it relates to orthobiologics will play a pivotal role in guiding the highest quality of musculoskeletal care for our patients. Future funding will be key as we continue to close the gap in evidence-based orthobiologics research. For more information about the AAOS investment in evidence-based educational content and symposia for orthobiologics, visit AAOS.org/quality. Donors interested in earmarking funds to further enable AAOS-prioritized clinical research needs within musculoskeletal healthcare may contribute to the OREF/AAOS Clinical Research Gaps Fund. Go to oref.org/aaoscpg to make a secure online donation. ABOUT THE ORTHOPAEDIC RESEARCH AND EDUCATION FOUNDATION An independent 501(c)3 nonprofit, OREF strives to improve clinical care and patient outcomes by advancing innovative research, developing new investigators, and uniting the orthopaedic community in promoting musculoskeletal health. The Foundation raises funds to support research on diseases and injuries of bones, nerves, joints, and muscles and to enhance clinical care leading to improved health, increased activity, and a better quality of life for patients. To further its mission, OREF is committed to exploring ways to partner with others to move the field of musculoskeletal research forward. Visit oref.org or follow OREF on Twitter. ABOUT THE AAOS With more than 38,000 members, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons is the worlds largest medical association of musculoskeletal specialists. The AAOS is the trusted leader in advancing musculoskeletal health. It provides the highest quality, most comprehensive education to help orthopaedic surgeons and allied health professionals at every career level best treat patients in their daily practices. The AAOS is the source for information on bone and joint conditions, treatments and related musculoskeletal health care issues and it leads the health care discussion on advancing quality. Follow the AAOS on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Arika Horner announces her entry into the publishing scene with the release of Homestead Ranch (published by AuthorHouse), the story of a dreamer, who finds herself through encouragement from others. She decides to write with the support of family and friends while facing challenges and discovering love. Veronica, an accelerated business student, lives on her family farm, Homestead Ranch, in Salyersville, Kentucky. Growing up, she took an interest in writing fiction and poetry when she was not helping on the ranch. Her father pushes her to become a business student, but Veronica has other dreams along with her sister. Her world is catapulted into a new trajectory when she applies for a scholarship at New Haven, a school for young authors, and meets Dustin in the red F-250. An excerpt from the book reads: Bent and winding, twisting and turning, my framework of fibers provides a home. I was a sapling, but no more will I sprout. No, I am tall, reaching towards the heavens as if I had no endpoint. Shivers run down my spine, Im always a jungle gym or a playground for the little muskrats. Wait! Im so much more than a mat. Im a scenic view. Im the source of your warmth. Im the base and foundation of your residence. Im the filter to your air. Im everything while being nothing at all. Maybe, youll notice me, standing tall or not at all. For now, Im the jungle gym, but one day, Ill have it all. I think this book will appeal to readers because it's a story for anyone, no matter the age. I think it is entertaining and creates a message of inspiration. I want to continue this series and grow the storyline with Veronica's character. I want people to see change and bettering ones self is possible, Horner says. When asked what she wants readers to take away from the book, she answers, I want readers to take away the message of hope and encouragement to take the risk of changing your life even when it seems impossible. For more details about the book, please visit https://www.authorhouse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/839440-homestead-ranch Homestead Ranch By Arika Horner Softcover | 6 x 9in | 80 pages | ISBN 9781665560092 E-Book | 80 pages | ISBN 9781665560085 Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble About the Author Arika Horner spent her free time writing as a child. However, she did not think much of it. When she entered college, she realized her passion for writing after a professor thoroughly enjoyed her work. In April of 2022, Horner graduated from Western Michigan University with a bachelors degree in English focusing on Creative Writing and Journalism, and lives with her fiance. She hopes her stories will inspire others to follow their dreams. AuthorHouse, an Author Solutions, Inc. self-publishing imprint, is a leading provider of book publishing, marketing, and bookselling services for authors around the globe and offers the industrys only suite of Hollywood book-to-film services. Committed to providing the highest level of customer service, AuthorHouse assigns each author personal publishing and marketing consultants who provide guidance throughout the process. Headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana, AuthorHouse celebrates over 23 years of service to authors. For more information or to publish a book visit authorhouse.com or call 833-262-8899. Law Office of Blumenthal Nordrehaug Bhowmik De Blouw LLP For more information about the lawsuit against Eureka Rehabilitation & Wellness, LP, call (800) 568-8020 to speak to an experienced California employment attorney today. The San Francisco employment law attorneys, at Blumenthal Nordrehaug Bhowmik De Blouw LLP, filed a lawsuit against Eureka Rehabilitation & Wellness, LP alleging the company violated Labor Code 2699, et seq. seeking penalties for DEFENDANTs alleged violation of California Labor Code 201-204 et seq., 210, 221, 226(a), 226.7, 227.3, 510, 512, 558(a)(1)(2), 1194, 1197, 1197.1, 1198, and 2802. The lawsuit against Eureka Rehabilitation & Wellness, LP is currently pending in the Humboldt County Superior Court, Case No. CV2201080. To read a copy of the Complaint, please click here. According to the lawsuit filed, Eureka Rehabilitation & Wellness, LP allegedly failed to fully relieve Plaintiff and other Aggrieved Employees for their legally required thirty (30) minute meals breaks. Employees were also allegedly required, from time to time, to work in excess of four (4) hours without being provided the legally required ten (10) minute rest periods. The California Supreme Court defines off-duty rest periods as the time during which an employee is relieved from all work-related duties and free from employer control. PAGA is a mechanism by which the State of California itself can enforce state labor laws through the employee suing under the PAGA who do so as the proxy or agent of the state's labor law enforcement agencies. An action to recover civil penalties under PAGA is fundamentally a law enforcement action designed to protect the public and not to benefit private parties. The purpose of PAGA is not to recover damages or restitution, but to create a means of "deputizing" citizens as private attorneys general to enforce the Labor Code. For more information about the lawsuit against Eureka Rehabilitation & Wellness, LP, call (800) 568-8020 to speak to an experienced California employment attorney today. Blumenthal Nordrehaug Bhowmik De Blouw LLP is a labor law firm with law offices located in San Diego County, Riverside County, Los Angeles County, Sacramento County, Santa Clara County, Orange County, and San Francisco County. The firm has a statewide practice of representing employees on a contingency basis for violations involving unpaid wages, overtime pay, discrimination, harassment, wrongful termination, and other types of illegal workplace conduct. ***THIS IS AN ATTORNEY ADVERTISEMENT*** Centric Announces Online Marketing Platform DigitalFlyer Has Adopted Centric Payments Centric offers a global reach, and we believe that will serve us and our customers well as we expand here in South Africa and across the globe. Centrics COO Tommy Butcher announced a new partnership with DigitalFlyer, an online marketing platform based in South Africa. Described as a business directory on steroids, DigitalFlyer makes it easy for customers to find services they are looking for, and for businesses to be found effortlessly. DigitalFlyer calls itself the business directory 3.0. The platform allows customers to find and purchase products, services, and tickets to events. Users can also contact vendors directly through the platform, book appointments, and contact companies through social media channels like Twitter, WhatsApp, and Telegram. DigitalFlyer offers a web-based version and an app available on both Google Play and Apples App Store. The company operates in South Africa and has plans to expand soon into other markets around the globe. Dewald Rosema, CEO of DigitalFlyer, explained the value of the platform to small business owners. The typical plumber, for example, doesnt have the time, technical skills, or budget to build, maintain, and host a custom website, said Rosema. We provide all of that, plus a back office for the business owner. We do it all for only R1,199, which is the equivalent of about 75 USD. Now businesses can choose to pay the subscription fee with Centric Swap, he said. The back office Rosema referenced allows business owners to track views, customer inquiries / messages, booked appointments, and reviews. Businesses can also post new products for sale, FAQs, links to social media, and more. DigitalFlyer now accepts Centric Swap (CNS) payments from businesses for their annual subscription fees. CNS payments are also available for opt-in by each of the 600+ and growing vendors on the platform. We were excited to first learn about Centric, and even more excited to partner with the Centric Foundation, said Dewald. Centric offers a global reach, and we believe that will serve us and our customers well as we expand here in South Africa and across the globe. Centrics COO, Tommy Butcher, said, On behalf of the Centric community, we offer a warm welcome to DigitalFlyer, along with all of their vendors and customers. We look forward to a long and beneficial partnership. Learn more about DigitalFlyer https://www.digitalflyer.co.za Learn more about Centric https://www.centric.com To stay in the loop on all the latest developments with Centric, readers may follow Centric on Twitter and join the announcement channel on Telegram. About DigitalFlyer DigitalFlyer is the fastest growing online marketing platform in South Africa. We are a business directoryand so much more. We offer the most cost-effective online marketing solutions for business members to sell their products and services, and easy access for your customers. DigitalFlyer uplifts communities with an affordable business listing, allowing any size business to be found easily, resulting in buying from more local businesses within the community, and ultimately impacting their communities with the resulting economic benefits. Uniquely, Digital Flyer has its own rewards token, CBT (Community Business Token). Learn more about CBT here: https://linktr.ee/CBTCommunity About Centric Centric was conceived with the vision of one day replacing traditional fiat currencies. Blockchain technology will enable a more transparent world and we believe our innovative approach to achieving widespread adoption long-term sets Centric apart from other cryptocurrencies today. While the rest of the industry focuses on transaction throughput and smart contracts, we focus on solving price stability to realize the economic capabilities that the blockchain enables. CSG is excited to partner with DETR on this important initiative to modernize Nevadas UI systems and operations, says Tim Lenning, Executive Vice President and Director of CSGs Program Modernization practice. CSG Government Solutions, a national leader in government program modernization, today announced that it has been selected by the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) to provide Project Management Office (PMO) services for its Unemployment Insurance System Modernization Project. CSG is supporting DETR with its proven PMO methodology, processes, and tools to provide management and oversight for all phases of the project. CSG brings its expertise and experience helping states replace their legacy systems with modernized unemployment insurance systems and processes to better serve the states workers and employers. CSG is excited to partner with DETR on this important initiative to modernize Nevadas UI systems and operations, says Tim Lenning, Executive Vice President and Director of CSGs Program Modernization practice. Our team will apply our many years of experience with state government labor and employment agencies to help DETR achieve its objectives. Contact: Tim Lenning Executive Vice President and Program Modernization Practice Director CSG Government Solutions 180 N. Stetson Ave Suite 3200 Chicago, IL 60601 312.444.2760 Fax: 312.938.2191 tlenning@csgdelivers.com About CSG Government Solutions: CSG Government Solutions is a leading government operations consulting firm helping states modernize critical program enterprises. We help governments leverage innovative technology and processes to meet the challenges of administering complex programs. Founded in 1997, CSG clients include 47 state and territory governments, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Labor, and large municipal governments. For more information, visit http://www.csgdelivers.com and connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter Deerfield Township joins the MITN Purchasing Group by Bidnet Direct "Registered vendors can access bids, related documents, addendum and award information." Deerfield Township announced today that it has joined the MITN Purchasing Group, a regional purchasing group that helps local governments post, distribute and manage RFPs, quotes, addendums and awards online. Bidnet Directs MITN Purchasing Group provides notification to registered vendors of new relevant solicitations, any addenda and award information from over 270 participating agencies from across Michigan. All potential Deerfield Township vendors are encouraged to register online with http://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn/deerfieldtownship to access upcoming solicitations. Deerfield Township joined the purchasing group in August 2022. In joining, Deerfield Township has become the 271st participating local government agency utilizing the system to streamline the purchasing process. The MITN Purchasing Group is a single, online location for managing sourcing information and activities and provides local Michigan government agencies a method to minimize costs and time delays associated with the procurement process. Deerfield Township was distributing bids and managing the procurement process manually before joining the system. In joining, Deerfield Township looks to save time, increase competition, and achieve cost savings over the traditional paper-based bid process. Deerfield Township now has access to an extensive vendor pool, thereby enhancing competition without increasing distribution costs. In addition to the existing vendors on the MITN Purchasing Group, all vendors looking to respond to bids with local government agencies can register online: http://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn/deerfieldtownship. Deerfield Township invites all current vendors not already registered on the purchasing group to do so today. Vendor registration is easy and takes only a few minutes online. Registered vendors can access bids, related documents, addendum, and award information. In addition, the MITN Purchasing Group offers a value-added service to notify vendors of new bids targeted to their industry, all addenda associated with those bids and advance notice of term contract expiration. A robust NIGP code category list allows vendors registering to find the correct codes and receive matched bids. By using the MITN Purchasing Group, our valued vendors can now access not only our open bids, but those from other municipalities, counties, and school districts throughout the state. In addition to the time savings we anticipate, our vendors will also benefit from registering in one location for all local bid opportunities. Vendors may register on the MITN Purchasing Group: http://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn. Bidnet Directs vendor support team is available to answer any questions regarding the registration process or the bid system at 800-835-4603 option 2. Other local Michigan government agencies looking to switch from a manual bid process, please contact the MITN Purchasing Group for a demonstration of the no-cost sourcing solution. About Deerfield Township: Deerfield Township is in the north central portion of Livingston County. Rolling countryside, dairy farms, woods, and fields are some of the images of Deerfield Township. The area is also noted for the Oak Grove State Game Area managed by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and is home to a variety of wildlife. About Bidnet Direct: Bidnet Direct, powered by mdf commerce, is a sourcing solution of regional purchasing groups available at no cost to local government agencies throughout the country. Bidnet Direct runs regional purchasing groups, including the Rocky Mountain E-Purchasing System, across all 50 states that are used by over 1,600 local governments. To learn more and have your government agency gain better transparency and efficiency in purchasing, please visit https://www.bidnetdirect.com/buyers Engage3 Cements Position As Competitive Pricing Leader with Acquisition of Dexi.io. In our search for a data partner, we vetted more than 20 companies; Dexi outperformed the rest of the eld by 282 percent. - Edris Bemanian, Engage3 CEO. Engage3, which helps retailers and brands protably grow revenue and drive store trips by tracking and optimizing their Price Image, today announced the acquisition of Dexi.io, the leading provider of AI-enabled web data collection. Dexi is the global leader in enterprise-grade online data collection. Dexis SaaS cloud-based data extraction platform further enhances the volume, eciency, and uptime of Engage3s competitive price collection, allowing brands and retailers to access additional data points and expand product linking. The acquisition pairs Dexis best-in-class data collection with Engage3s revolutionary Price Image Management suite to offer unmatched value for organizations seeking to improve competitive pricing strategies and optimize their Price Image. Dexi in 60 Seconds: Stop Wondering. Start Winning. Price Image Explained: Using Price Image to FormulatePricing Strategy Thanks to ination and market volatility, the need for complete and reliable market data is more urgent than ever, said Edris Bemanian, Engage3 CEO. In our search for a data partner, we vetted more than 20 companies; Dexi outperformed the rest of the eld by 282 percent. We're speaking objectively when we say Engage3 powered by Dexi is the worlds best competitive intelligence solution for brands and retailers and brings us many steps closer to transforming the way products are bought and sold through personalized pricing. More from Engage3: Engage3 Raises $35M Series D Engage3 Launches Comprehensive Price Tracking for Convenience Retailers IDC & Retail Today recognize Engage3 as a Price Optimization Leader Dexi is the leader in enterprise web data thanks to our commitment to innovation and our proven ability to win the web scraping arms race, said Jacob Laurvigen, Dexi CEO and Co-Founder. Were using AI and machine learning to push the limits of whats possible. Brands and retailers will be amazed at the reliability, accuracy, and diversity of insights Engage3 Powered by Dexi will deliver. Engage3 Powered by Dexi serves more than 300 customers in 182 countries, supporting the retailers and brands that represent $2 trillion in annual revenue. The combined team numbers over 250, with headquarters in Davis, California, and 6 additional oces around the world, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Albania. Engage3 supports 6 of the top 10 retailers in the world and many of the worlds fastest-growing companies including of the INC. 5000. Click here to schedule a free assessment of your competitive strategy and take the next steps on your pricing journey. About Engage3 Powered By Dexi Price optimization pioneers Ken and Tim Ouimet created Engage3 to revolutionize the way brands and retailers engage with shoppers. Engage3 provides the industrys most comprehensive omnichannel intelligence solution, combining best-in-class AI-enabled web crawls, professional in-store audits, and self-serve in-store and online data collection into a single source of truth. Leveraging advanced algorithms and the Nobel Prize-winning Ecient Frontier theory, Engage3 helps retailers and brands track and optimize their Price Image to accelerate revenue growth, drive incremental store trips, and increase margins. Engage3 serves more than 300 customers in 182 countries, supporting $2 trillion in global retail revenue. Engage3s leadership team is composed of former executives from KhiMetrics, Mozenda, SAP, Revionics, dunnhumby, KSS Retail, IBM/DemandTec, and Nielsen. Engage3 is headquartered in Davis, California with 6 additional oces around the world. Our goal continues to be to mix in the same values and workmanship of John while incorporating the latest technology to help us grow. South Jerseys top roofing company, Gasper Roofing, is celebrating fifty years in business. Gasper Roofing was founded by John Gasper in 1972. The company would like to thank their amazing customers who have entrusted Gasper Roofing with their roofing needs since 1972. Current Owner, Jason Jimenez, bought Gasper Roofing from John Gasper in 2015. After 43 years John was ready to sell to someone who would continue his commitment to quality and customer service. Jimenez speaks to the companys success saying, I created a family within our community and have since served many customers. Our goal continues to be to mix in the same values and workmanship of John while incorporating the latest technology to help us grow. Jimenez continued, We will continue to stop at nothing to provide our commercial and residential roofing customers with unmatched service. Gasper Roofing provides both commercial and residential roofing services including: Roofing Siding Gutters Skylights And More To see what Gasper Roofing can do for your home or business, visit https://www.gasperroofing.com/ About Gasper Roofing: Gasper Roofing is the premier choice for an easy and headache-free roofing experience for your home or business. With a simple process for your installation or repair needs, Gasper Roofing shows you exactly what needs to be done and what your options are. Gasper Roofing is your highly trained, family and locally owned roofing professionals in South Jersey! Dr. Natan N. Krohn Natan N. Krohn, MD of Gastroenterology Associates Of New Jersey in Clifton, New Jersey is a double board certified gastroenterologist and has been approved by NJ Top Docs for 2022. Prior to his position at the Gastroenterology Associates Of New Jersey, Dr. Krohn conducted research for Marion Bessin Liver Research Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY on various topics relevant to the medical community. He completed a fellowship in gastroenterology and hepatology at the Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, NY and a residency in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, NY. Dr. Krohn also received his medical degree with special distinction for research in hepatology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a Bachelor of Arts in history with summa cum laude honors from Yeshiva University in New York, NY. In addition to his extensive research during his medical training, Dr. Krohn has multiple publications and has received academic awards including the Samuel Belkin Scholarship and the Ira Marienhoff Scholarship. To learn more about NJ Top Doc, Dr. Natan Krohn, please visit: https://njtopdocs.com/nj-doctors/drnatankrohn/ --- About Us NJ Top Docs is a comprehensive, trusted and exclusive healthcare resource featuring reviewed and approved Top Doctors and Dentists in New Jersey online in an easy to use format. NJ Top Docs only reviews and approves providers based on merit after they have been extensively vetted. NJ Top Docs is a division of USA Top Docs which allows patients to meet providers online before making their appointment. For more information, please click here to contact us or visit http://www.NJTopDocs.com. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram. Basic Prep: an important discussion for those in committed relationships. Basic Prep is the creation of published author Helen July, a dedicated wife and mother who works with students with special needs. July shares, The Lord gave me Basic Prep the morning of August 13, 2021, while I was out on a walk. Basic Prep is about getting back to the basics of what the word of God says who we are and what our purpose is in our marriages. The world has taken Gods covenant of marriage and made a mess of it, and God is ready to take it back. As daughters of Christ, we have taken on the worlds view of marriage, and our marriages are failing. Its time for us to stop conforming to this world and allow God to transform us by giving us a new mind and seeing marriage through His eyes the way He designed it to be from the beginning. Basic Prep will help you discover who you really are and help you to renew your relationship with the Father. It will help you find your proper place in your marriage. You will find out what God is saying to you about your marriage and how to be naked and unashamed in His presence. This book will help you search your heart and heal your hearts and give you a new outlook on your marriage. Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Helen Julys new book will encourage reflection and growth on a personal and spiritual level. July shares in hopes of empowering others in their marriage commitments to help nurture long-term, successful unions. Consumers can purchase Basic Prep at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or inquiries about Basic Prep, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919. The Simple Truth of God: a potent reminder of Gods promise of salvation. The Simple Truth of God is the creation of published author John E. Ditzel, Jr. Ditzel shares, You were uniquely created in the IMAGE of the God and Creator of the universe far above all other created life for the distinct privilege of living forever with God. Why dont our children know this wonderful, good news message of hope from the Bible? Sadly, its because public schools and colleges teach students there is no God. Why do our educational institutions teach students there is no God when Intelligent design is so plainly evident in all creation; and the consequences of not knowing the truth is so devastating to students and to this nation and world? In America, every student should have the opportunity to hear, question, debate, and freely make their own conclusion about the existence of God thus the purpose of this book. This book presents the simple truth about the existence of God to students and adults who have never heard the Biblical Creation account of life during their public school and college education so they can intelligently make their own decision about the ORIGIN OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE. Published by Christian Faith Publishing, John E. Ditzel, Jr.s new book will encourage and challenge readers who seek to learn more about the evidence for God. Ditzel empowers others to seek and nurture a strong connection with their faith in hopes of finding a better understanding of their role in creation. Consumers can purchase The Simple Truth of God at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or inquiries about The Simple Truth of God, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919. Charlie Byrge, chief commercial officer, MDsave MDsave, the nations leading online medical service marketplace connecting providers, employers and consumers to affordable and accessible healthcare, announced today three promotions and a new hire supporting an expansion of sales and marketing efforts. In addition to providing patients with the ability to shop for affordable and transparently priced procedures, MDsave offers a direct contracting engine for health system partners seeking to connect with local and national employers. Adding to our team is a direct result of the employer demand we are experiencing for shoppable healthcare services to reduce healthcare costs and improve retention in a competitive market, says Paul Ketchel, chief executive officer of MDsave. This is also driving rapid growth for our provider partners who desire to establish direct contract relationships with local employers to build consistent volume. Charlie Byrge has been promoted to chief commercial officer, formerly serving as chief revenue officer. In this new role, he is now responsible for sales, account management, sales operations, product, finance, and technology. More information about Charlie Byrge is available here. Kate Rogow has been promoted to senior vice president, account management and strategic growth. In this role, she will provide leadership to company-wide activities and strategies focused on generating, maintaining, and increasing revenue. Kate Rogow will report to Charlie Byrge, chief commercial officer. More information about Kate Rogow is available here. Branson Lankster has been promoted to vice president, operations and strategy. He will continue to lead operations and business intelligence teams and will assist in setting and executing on organizational strategy. Branson Lankster will also report to Charlie Byrge, chief commercial officer. More information about Lankster is available here. Christy Friedman joins MDsave as a new director of marketing. She leads brand strategy, account management engagement, and strategic marketing for employers, providers, and consumer marketing. Prior to MDsave, she was the marketing communications manager at Ascension leading national marketing efforts for Employer Solutions, and formerly a communications program manager at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. More information about Friedman is available here. About MDSave Headquartered in Nashville, TN, MDsave is the nations leading online medical service marketplace connecting providers, employers and consumers connecting to affordable, reliable high-quality healthcare at fair, transparent prices. Through innovative technology, MDsave simplifies the healthcare billing process for patients and providers through bundled pricing and upfront payment. MDsaves patented technology also supports employers and payers to deliver more value to employees and policyholders minimizing out-of-pocket deductible costs. For more information, visit http://www.mdsave.com. Morrison Foerster, a leading global law firm, is pleased to announce that it has elected corporate lawyer Kelley Howes to the firms partnership, effective July 31, 2022. Howes brings to the partnership almost 30 years of experience in investment management-related matters, both in private practice and in-house. She will co-chair the firms Investment Management Group together with New York partner Derek Steingarten, who joined Morrison Foerster last month. Howes has extensive experience representing U.S. registered and unregistered investment companies, registered investment advisers, transfer agents, and broker-dealers on a wide range of legal, regulatory, compliance, corporate governance, and insurance matters. She advises clients, including private funds and REITs, on issues under the Investment Company Act and the Investment Advisers Act. She counsels independent fund directors on governance issues, and registered funds on mergers, reorganizations, compliance, and regulatory matters, including examinations and enforcement matters. Howes also advises blockchain and crypto companies on their obligations under U.S. federal securities laws. Howes joined Morrison Foerster 10 years ago, having previously served as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Janus Capital Group, now Janus Henderson Group (NYSE/ASX: JHG), a global asset management holding company. She also previously served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Janus Capital Management LLC, a U.S. registered investment advisory subsidiary of Janus Capital Group, and as President of the Janus funds and President of Janus Distributors LLC. Kelley is a distinguished lawyer whose substantive investment management experience has earned her loyalty from many firm clients over the years. She has demonstrated her commitment to the firm in many ways, including as a member of our Allies Network and by spearheading training initiatives. We are delighted to welcome her to the partnership, said Eric McCrath, co-chair of Morrison Foersters Global Corporate Department. Further, Kelleys promotion highlights the continued momentum of the firms Corporate Group, following the addition of nine partners since the start of the year and the election of nine corporate lawyers to the partnership in January and April. "Were continuing to see increasing demand from funds clients for experience at the intersection of managing money and the law, added Managing Partner Eric Piesner. Kelleys election to the partnership, combined with Dereks recent addition, further invigorates our investment management practice and is a critical step in the expansion of our capabilities in this important area. Their more than 40 years of combined experience, and Kelleys focus on crypto, together with her invaluable commercial perspective gained in-house, position us well to serve the industrys rapidly changing needs, including those driven by blockchain and digital securities. Howes earned her J.D. from Suffolk University School of Law and her B.A. from St. Lawrence University, and holds an M.B.A. from Northwestern University. She is ranked by leading legal directory Chambers USA for Registered Funds. Howes has served on the boards of directors of Young Americans Bank/Young Americans Center for Financial Education, ICI Mutual Insurance Company, and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. She is admitted to practice in New York, Massachusetts, and Colorado. About Morrison Foerster Morrison Foerster is a leading global law firm that transforms complexity into advantage for its clients. Our clients include some of the largest financial institutions, banks, consulting and accounting firms, and Fortune 100, technology, and life sciences companies. Highlighting the firms commitment to client service, leadership in market-changing deals and impact litigation, and values-based culture, Morrison Foerster was recognized as one of the top 10 firms on The American Lawyers 2022 A-List. Year after year, the firm receives significant recognition from Chambers and The Legal 500 across their various guides, including Global, USA, Asia-Pacific, Europe, UK, Latin America, and FinTech Legal. Our lawyers passionately care about delivering legal excellence while living our values. Morrison Foerster has a long-standing commitment to creating a culture that respects and celebrates differences, while providing an inclusive environment. The firm has achieved Mansfield Certification Plus since 2018 as a result of successfully reaching at least 30 percent women, communities of color, and LGBTQ+ lawyer representation in a notable number of current leadership roles and committees. The firm also has a long history of commitment to the community and society through providing pro bono legal services, including litigating for civil rights and civil liberties, improving public education and fostering the wellbeing of children, advocating for veterans, promoting international human rights, enforcing the right to asylum, and safeguarding the environment. It is estimated that 29% of medicines are lost due to shipping errors or theft in Malawi. This contributes to poor health outcomes. Gaining insight into the problem using OnAsset devices -- is a critical step toward resolution. OnAsset Intelligence recently supplied technology to a public-private research partnership to audit and combat drug shipment diversion in Malawi. Alongside the Malawi Ministry of Health, OnAsset worked with the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and University of California San Diego to audit medicine distribution in real time using OnAssets suite of technologies. OnAssets solution helped the government better understand how to improve upon the delivery of health services. With support from the World Bank and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the primary goal of the research was to evaluate how electronic tracking technology can improve insight into supply chain breakdowns and the ability to pinpoint and correct medicine diversion, particularly in environments where capacity and investment are low. In Malawi, researchers estimate that 29% of medicines are diverted and 75% of communities have experienced drug theft, said Adam Crossno, CEO of OnAsset. By placing OnAsset tracking devices and a monitoring warning label on medicine being shipped from Malawi Central Medical Stores Trust to healthcare facilities in Southern Malawi, researchers were able to gain visibility into the breakdown in medicine delivery. The Sentinel tracking devices used in the study gave researchers a real-time snapshot of the entire distribution network, allowing them to quantify medicines delivered and diverted. The research concluded that digital audits and targeted messaging can be effective tools in the anti-corruption arsenal. While diversion of medications and supplies is still rampant (at 40%), the study learned that not all diversion is due to theft. Researchers estimated that one-third of medications diverted during delivery were simply delivered to the wrong facility. This collaborative effort highlighted how digital tracking and auditing is an important first step to empowering all parties engaged in healthcare and medicine delivery, said Ryan Jablonsky, Associate Professor at London School of Economics. With this data, government entities are able to better shape future health policies and ensure more people have access to the medicines they need. About OnAsset OnAsset has been providing cargo edge technology for detailed insight on shipments of valuable goods since 2005. OnAssets products deliver piece-level tracking across all modes of transportation in an environmentally sustainable way. OnAssets dedication to innovation has led to 17 patents, approval by 95 percent of worldwide airlines, coverage in over 160 countries, and millions of shipments annually. Learn more at http://www.onasset.com and follow OnAsset on LinkedIn. Tardiff understands that its not always easy for someone to take the time off work, or find a caregiver for an elderly parent, or even a babysitter. The law office of Mary Ann Tardiff, a Paso Robles estate attorney, has made a commitment to provide down-to-earth, practical, and affordable solutions for her clients and one unique thing she does along those lines makes house calls. An attorney for over 30 years, Tardiff believes that making legal services as accessible as possible goes a long way toward solving a lot of problems for ordinary daily lifestyles. Im a person like everyone else, says Tardiff. I just happen to be an attorney. Clients are always welcome in her law office, but Tardiff also understands that its not always easy for someone to take the time off work, or find a caregiver for an elderly parent, or even a babysitter. All it takes is a phone call to the Law Offices of Mary Ann Tardiff to arrange for a house call either during the day, after hours, or even on weekends under certain circumstances. The broad legal experience of the Paso Robles estate attorney means that Mary Ann Tardiff can serve a variety of legal needs, especially matters of estate planning, wills, and trusts, elder law and family law. Sometimes timing is very important when decisions are needed about a trust, will, advanced health care directive (AHCD), or power of attorney. Meeting a client in need at a convenient location can help speed up the legal processes and avoid critical delays. Whether a young person starting out, a family, or a senior citizen, a trust that is appropriate to the circumstances can be a source of peace of mind. Mary Ann Tardiff can help set up a new trust or make changes to an existing trust. A properly established trust is one legal way to make sure wishes about end-of-life care or how an estate is preserved and distributed are carried out. A trust legally avoids probate court and spares the surviving family the concerns and decisions about distributing an estates assets. Estate planning isnt the only matter where a house call is convenient. Meeting at convenient locations to have documents signed so they can be filed and processed quickly serves the best interest of any client in any matter. House calls can be of benefit for a wide variety of matters, including: Initial consultation Signing documents Drafting a will, completing an AHCD and powers of attorney Advice about legal matters Reviewing contracts and other legal documents Setting up a business and business entity And more The Paso Robles estate planning attorney is available for consultations in her office during regular business hours or other flexible times as needed, including house calls. After completing a B.A. at the University of California, Mary Ann attended the Santa Barbara College of Law, graduating with her J.D. degree in 1984. She was admitted to the California Bar Association in 1986. She has served as a commissioner on the Board of Parole Hearings for the California Department of Corrections, as a Judge Pro Tem, and practiced law in Santa Barbara before moving to Atascadero. She serves and supports the local communities and all of San Luis Obispo County and Monterey County. Law Office of Mary Ann Tardiff 3540 El Camino Real Atascadero, CA 93422 (805) 451-6683 MAFI electric yard tractor (pictured) and electric semis are available at Ports of Indiana-Burns Harbor for all interested port tenants and trucking companies to demo Connecting best available technology with port users is key to gaining their confidence in implementing electric-power into trucking operations, said Andrea Hermer, Ports of Indianas chief operating officer. Having port businesses participate is essential for a successful program. The Ports of Indiana-Burns Harbor launched an exciting electric vehicle demonstration program. This pilot program is unique in its focus. Heavy-duty trucks, yard jockeys and forklifts are now available to port operators, businesses and trucking companies to use as part of real-world port trucking operations. Featured at the port during the launch were leading Class 8 electric semis from Peterbilt, Nikola and electric yard tractor manufacturer MAFI. New equipment, including a forklift and a variety of heavy-duty electric-powered trucks, will be made available throughout the program for all interested port tenants and trucking companies to demo. This program is part of the Ports of Indianas broader initiatives to achieve a greener, energy-resilient and sustainable port. Ports are all about transportation and logistical connections, said Andrea Hermer, Ports of Indianas chief operating officer. We are looking at electricity and other sources of energy in the same way critical connections to port operations and the future. The Ports of Indiana is collaborating with Current Trucking, who along with Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO), has provided the vehicles, chargers and operational support during the pilot. NIPSCO is supplying power to support industrial-grade DC fast chargers at the port. We are showcasing the best available heavy-haul electrification technology from the industrys leading manufacturers, said Pip Decker, Current Trucking founder and project team member. We hope to demonstrate to operators how emobility adoption reduces total operating costs. Hermer agrees. Connecting best available technology with port users is key to gaining their confidence in implementing electric-power into their trucking operations, said Hermer. Having port businesses participate in the program, including Bulk Equipment Corp., is essential for a successful program and ultimate adoption at the port. For more information about the program or to sign up a business to demo a heavy-duty electric vehicle, contact port director Ryan McCoy at rmccoy@portsofindiana.com. About the Ports of Indiana-Burns Harbor: The Ports of Indiana-Burns Harbor opened in 1970 and is operated by Ports of Indiana, a statewide port authority managing three ports on the Ohio River and Lake Michigan. Established in 1961, the Ports of Indiana is a self-funded enterprise dedicated to growing Indianas economy by developing and maintaining a world-class port system. Information: http://www.portsofindiana.com. Follow us on Twitter: @PortsofIndiana. Media Contact: Jen Hanson, jhanson@portsofindiana.com About Current Trucking: Current Trucking focuses on deploying the best available electric vehicles in the Class 37 segment, while maintaining a first mover advantage in the Class 8 eTractor space. Current Trucking provides a full solution offering to encourage electrical adoption, inclusive of EV truck procurement, construction, charging and O&M for any tire tread under a Trucks as a Service (TaaS) model. More information can be found at http://www.TrucksAsAService.com Reallusion and 3Dconnexion leverage synergies to accelerate 3D animation production 3Dconnexions SpaceMouse brings joy and sensitivity to 3D creation with iClone 8, allowing for unprecedented agility for animating, directing, timeline editing and live recording. - Charles Chen, Founder & CEO of Reallusion Reallusion, a platform for digital human character creativity and animation, joined forces with 3Dconnexion, a German manufacturer of human interface devices, to accelerate 3D real-time workflows on camera directing, character animation, and sequence editing. All iClone features can be accessed using the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse. iClone is a fast real-time 3D animation software for professional use in films, previz, animation, apps, and games; as its user-friendly environment blends facial performance, humanoid body animation, mocap production, scene design, and cinematic storytelling. Voted as the top device request in iClone users wishlist, iClones latest version 8 has refreshed its software architecture, opening it up to freedom of customization with SpaceMouse through hotkey and device mapping to more than 700 iClone features. 3Dconnexions SpaceMouse brings joy and sensitivity to 3D creation with iClone 8, allowing for unprecedented agility for animating, directing, timeline editing, and live recording. - Charles Chen, Founder & CEO of Reallusion It has been a great pleasure for us to collaborate with the Reallusion team on this integration. We believe this will let our joint users experience 3D like never before, while adding more speed and enjoyment to their workflow. - Antonio Pascucci, CEO of 3Dconnexion Powerful Real-time Production Workflows Three specially designed SpaceMouse presets have been optimised for Animation Editing, Object Transformation, and Light Arrangement. In addition to camera navigation, SpaceMouse has been highly optimised for Animation Editing that requires quick collaboration between view angles, joint traversal, posing, and lots of manipulation through left hand control. The handy timeline scrubbing function simulates jog dialling by using the 6DoF sensor so that users can easily search target frames by manipulating scroll, zoom speed, break clips, and copy/paste keyframes. The context-sensitive design will control cameras and objects while in the 3D viewport, but will also work as an animation sequencer when focused in the Timeline. Freely Download Presets To make the most of the SpaceMouse with iClones real-time production, users can freely download three SpaceMouse hotkey presets to work with different design purposes. iClone 8 users just need to easily switch to a desired profile via 3Dconnexions driver, 3DxWare 10. The latest iClone 8 Profiles can be downloaded here. The partnership with Unitech will allow us to bring additional technology services to Vicksburg, MS area and beyond. RJ Young, an industry-leading business technology solutions provider, announces today its acquisition of Unitech, a Mississippi-based dealer of digital imaging systems, including multifunctional devices that have the capability to copy, print, fax & scan. Unitechs seven employees will join the 650 plus RJ Young team members. All operations, area offices, and team members will remain local. The acquisition marks RJ Youngs fourth transaction in 2022 and twelfth in the past five years. The latter is part of the companys aim to expand its technology services into the Vicksburg, MS area. When we started Unitech 38 years ago, we made it our priority to value our customer and employee relationships and provide our customers with the highest quality customer service, said Unitechs vice president Amy Stone. We are excited about teaming with RJ Young to continue providing exceptional service and technology solutions that power businesses in Mississippi and the Southeast. Unitechs success is directly tied to the success and satisfaction of their customers. They are a true business partner by customizing solutions to support your business requirements. Unitech's goal is to be the only source businesses will need to align imaging technology solutions with their unique business needs. At RJ Young, we have always admired the way Unitech has been able to deliver the same superior quality of service that we also strive for, said RJ Youngs president and CEO Chip Crunk. The partnership with Unitech will allow us to bring additional technology services to Vicksburg, MS area and beyond. Since the launch of RJ Youngs technology vertical in 2019, the company has grown that side of the business by 360%. Last year, RJ Young introduced the Modern Office the companys concept of being a one-stop for technology solutions in response to the markets evolving needs amid workplace shifts initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, RJ Young has gone through a rebrand that speaks to the Modern Office, complete with a new website and logo. If you would like to learn more about the partnership and how it can benefit your organization, reach out to info@rjyoung.com today. ### ABOUT RJ YOUNG RJ Young is an industry leader that provides technology solutions that power businesses. RJ Young helps small to enterprise-level organizations transition into modern workplaces and increase productivity with comprehensive managed IT solutions, office equipment and technology, business process outsourcing and digital communications. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, RJ Young has been partnering with businesses since 1955 and has more than 650 team members in more than 30 sales and service locations across nine states. To learn more about how RJ Young can help power your organization with technology solutions, visit RJYoung.com or reach out to info@rjyoung.com. South Bay Credit Union (SBCU) celebrates another year of teaching teenagers about how to make lemonade out of lemons as a presenting sponsor of Lemonade Day, a strategic lesson-based program that walks youth from a dream to a business plan while teaching them principles required to start a business. South Bay Credit Union conducted micro loan interviews from May 16th to the 27th at their Lomita branch. During the event, the credit union worked with 30 young leaders and gave more than $1,200 in micro loans. The credit union also hosted two lemonade stands at their Redondo Beach branch on July 9, 2022. South Bay Credit Union was recognized by the County of Los Angeles for its integral role in making Lemonade Day possible. When speaking about the event, SBCU President and CEO Paris Chevalier said, Were honored to continue to make Lemonade Day a successful event for the communitys youth as theyre the future of who we support and why we exist. Lemonade Day sparks the spirit of entrepreneurship and empowers youth to set goals, work hard, and achieve their dreams and South Bay Credit Union will be there to help along the way. South Bay Credit Union inspired kids to work hard to make a profit, and taught them to spend smartly, save and share by giving back to their community. Since its launch in 2007, Lemonade Day has grown from serving 2,700 kids in a single city, to one million children in more than 80 licensed markets in the United States, Canada and Bermuda. Lemonade Day is committed to delivering youth entrepreneurship programming that is accessible to all children regardless of age, color, race, handicap, economic status, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identification. For more information, please visit lemonadeday.org. About South Bay Credit Union An integral part of the South Bay community of Southern California since 1953, South Bay Credit Union (SBCU) delivers affordable financial services with a heart, uplifting communities by empowering members to live better and do better. Offering a full line of checking and savings options, as well as home, auto, credit card, business, student and personal loans, SBCU operates three branches in Redondo Beach and Lomita, and serves members throughout Los Angeles County with 24/7 online and mobile banking, as well as a nationwide network of 28,000 surcharge-free ATMs. A strong advocate for financial inclusion, SBCU actively works to cultivate financial literacy by offering a broad range of free online financial education resources for adults and teens. Learn more at http://www.southbaycu.com ODU MINI-SNAP IEC 60601-1 ODU-USA launches the expansion of the push-pull circular connector portfolio, ODU MINI-SNAP, a robust connector with metal housing, a wide range of configuration options and integrated cable assembly solutions. The portfolio now includes additional inserts designed to fulfill the user and patient protection levels required by IEC 60601-1 (2 MOOP/ 2 MOPP). These connectors now become the solution of choice when searching for a circular connector with a metal housing for medical applications. The approval procedures for medical electrical equipment and systems have become even more complex than before with the latest version of the IEC 60601-1. Using ODU connectors in the design process simplifies the risk management and reduces the cost of product development. If components from suppliers are already fully compliant with the IEC 60601-1, which is the case with this portfolio extension, approval times can be shortened. The main advantages of choosing a connector with a metal housing to fulfill the requirements defined under IEC 60601-1 (2 MOOP/ 2 MOPP) are the advanced electromagnetic shielding capabilities and the mechanical strength of the connector. These features ensure safe operation and the best possible signal quality in the most demanding of medical environments. The new inserts are available in 3 sizes and offer a choice of contacts as follows (additional contact variations are available upon request): Size 1: 7 crimp contacts, 0,7 mm, Nominal Voltage 36V AC or DC Size 2: 12 crimp contacts, 0,7 mm, Nominal Voltage 48V AC or DC Size 3: 16 crimp contacts, 0,7 mm, Nominal Voltage 48V AC or DC The inserts are available in the ODU MINI-SNAP L& K connector series. Reverse gender options are also available. The voltage ratings are valid for pollution grade 2 (IEC 60601-1). The nominal current rating is 7A and this connector can withstand up to 500 autoclave cycles. Customer-specific cable assemblies with silicone overmolding options are also available upon request. The expansion of ODU MINI-SNAP portfolio with an IEC 60601-1 compliant design offers a solution for various medical applications such as heart-lung machines, electric bone saws, electric blankets, and electric wheelchairs. Find out more at: odu-usa.com ODU Group: Global Representation with Perfect Connections The ODU Group is one of the worlds leading suppliers of connector systems, employing 2,500 people around the world. In addition to its company headquarters in Muhldorf a. Inn (Germany), ODU also has an international distribution network, production and product development sites in Sibiu/Romania, Shanghai/China, Tijuana/Mexico and Camarillo/USA. ODU combines all relevant areas of expertise and key technologies including design and development, machine tooling and special machine construction, injection, stamping, turning, surface technology, assembly and cable assembly. The ODU Group sells its products globally through its sales offices in China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Romania, Sweden, UK and the US, as well as through numerous international sales partners. ODU connectors ensure a reliable transmission of power, signals, data and media for a variety of demanding applications including medical technology, military and security, automotive, industrial electronics, and test and measurement. Unitek College is one of California and Nevadas reputable healthcare colleges. As a School of Distinction, Unitek College will be formally recognized throughout the 2022 ACCSC Professional Development Conference. Unitek College is thrilled to announce that on September 21, 2022, they will be presented with a 2021 2022 ACCSC School of Distinction Award for their Reno campus. Marilyn Lim-Carreon, the Campus Director, will accept the award on behalf of the entire Reno campus. This prestigious ceremony will be held at the ACCSCs Professional Development Conference in Reston, Virginia. The ACCSC School of Distinction Award commends institutions that have overcome the rigors of accreditation and produced educational programs of the highest quality. As a School of Distinction, Unitek College will be formally recognized throughout the 2022 ACCSC Professional Development Conference. The theme of the conference, A Community of Partners in Education, highlights a shared goal between ACCSC and Unitek: building partnerships within higher education to promote student excellence. We are thrilled to celebrate our accomplishments at the Reno Campus, said Dr. Navneet Bhasin, Chief Operations Officer at Unitek College. It has been a year of growth and opportunity at Unitek, and we look forward to celebrating our success throughout the 2022 ACCSC Professional Development Conference. The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC) designed this conference to provide various opportunities for accredited institutions. At the event, participants will have the chance to promote student excellence, strengthen support for workforce development, and help fill the skills gap in the United States. Join Unitek College and other school representatives for a celebration of educational achievements at the Professional Development Conference. We have created a welcoming culture of inclusiveness where everything we do in Reno is centered around our students, said Marilyn Lim-Carreon, Campus Director of Unitek College Reno. We are committed to excellence because it is what our students, our staff, and our community deserve! Unitek College is one of California and Nevadas reputable healthcare colleges. Every Unitek program teaches the clinical technique and theory used in the field today. Equipped with a multitude of sought-after skills, Unitek graduates are prepared to excel in many of the fastest-growing careers in healthcare and nursing. SPEs Vinyltec conference gives students the ability to learn more about the vinyl industrys technological advancements and provides excellent networking opportunities with industry leaders. The Vinyl Institute (VI) announced today it now accepting grant applications to cover student registration fees for up to four university students to attend the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) Vinyltec in September. The vinyl industry has great career opportunities for students interested in manufacturing, chemistry, and engineering, said Ned Monroe, president, and CEO of the Vinyl Institute. SPEs Vinyltec conference gives students the ability to learn more about the vinyl industrys technological advancements as well as provides excellent networking opportunities with leaders in the industry. SPE is the leading technical society for the global plastics industry. It is a community of individuals involved in the technical and commercial aspects of the plastics and polymer industry. Vinyltec is the largest vinyl-focused technical conference in the United States. There, new developments in the vinyl industry are unveiled and participants receive training in niche areas of the industry. This year, the event, Charting the Course for a Sustainable Future focuses on technologies and topics of importance to the vinyl plastics industry. This years event will be a hybrid event, held at the Crown Plaza Philadelphia, in King of Prussia, PA. The event takes place from September 27-29, 2022. The VIs grant covers the cost of student registration. Students can attend virtually or in person. Grant recipients who choose to attend in person are responsible for any costs associated with travel. To be eligible to apply for the 2022 Vinyltec Grant, a prospective grantee must: 1. Be enrolled at an accredited U.S. university. 2. Have not received a previous VI Vinyltec grant. 3. Be pursuing a degree in polymer science, material science, chemistry, or chemical engineering. 4. Be able to attend Vinyltec, either virtually or in person from Sep. 27-29, 2022. Applications must be received by Sept. 9, 2022. To apply for a VI Vinyltec grant, click here. ### About the Vinyl Institute The Vinyl Institute (VI), founded in 1982, is a U.S. trade association representing the leading manufacturers of vinyl, vinyl chloride monomer, vinyl additives, and modifiers. The VI works on behalf of its members to promote the benefits of the worlds most versatile plastic, used to make everything from PVC piping to flooring, roofing, and vinyl siding. The vinyl industry in the United States employs over 350,000 highly skilled employees at nearly 3,000 facilities and generates an economic value of $54 billion. For more information, visit vinylinfo.org. Scholastic has announced a new Dog Man book, the 11th in Dav Pilkeys bestselling series, and the first in two years: Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea will be released on March 28, 2023, simultaneously in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and Asia. In addition, Scholastic announced the launch of Dav Pilkeys Epic Comic Club, an online platform where children can upload their own comics. The COPPA-compliant site is designed to be a safe space for children to showcase their own comics and download activities such as comics prompts, badges and membership cards, and previews and book news. The third item in Scholastics trio of announcements is the news that it will mark the 25th anniversary of the launch of Pilkeys Captain Underpants series with a special edition of the first book, The Adventures of Captain Underpants, which will include a new 32-page comic featuring both Dog Man and Captain Underpantsin comics terms, their first crossover. The anniversary edition is slated for release on March 7, 2023. The new Dog Man book comes two years after the previous one, Dog Man: Mothering Heights, which was the top-selling book in the U.S. in 2021 and has sold more than two million copies to date. Currently, there are 50 million Dog Man books in print worldwide. Scholastic has also published three volumes of Pilkeys Dog Man spinoff Cat Kid Comic Club, with a fourth book scheduled for November. The two series are very different: while the Dog Man books are goofy superhero stories, the Cat Kid Comic Club books are set in a comics class where the students experiment with different ways to tell stories. The Cat Kid Comic Club books are more time-consuming, according to said Ellie Berger, president of Scholastic Trade. Since the pandemic began, Dav has been working solely in his studio on Cat Kid Comic Club. Dav creates all the character models and scenes for the mini-comics that you see in these booksall by hand, and that takes extra time. For example, Dav uses Claymation, photography, poetry, calligraphy, and watercolor to create different types of comics and to show kids that there are many ways to be creative. The Epic Comic Club will serve a similar purpose. The goal of Dav Pilkeys Epic Comic Club is to encourage kids around the world to be creative and have fun making their own comics and sharing their storiesall in a safe and moderated environment, Berger said. Pilkey, who had dyslexia as a child, thought he hated reading until he found comics, she noted. The panels in comics helped him to learn to read, and comics made him fall in love with reading. Berger added, We hope kids fall in love with comics and reading, as Dav Pilkey did. And by bringing together his fans from around the world, we hope to create the biggest comic club for kids. Like Pilkeys books, which have been translated into 42 languages, the club will have a global reach. For the initial launch of the Epic Comic Club, we are excited to be able to reach kids in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and through Scholastics English language subsidiaries in Asia including China, Malaysia, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, said Berger. For the next phase after launch, we plan to collaborate with Davs foreign publishers to make the Epic Comic Club available in their respective markets and languages. The club will feature themes and activities based on all three Pilkey series, Dog Man, Cat Kid Comic Club, and Captain Underpants, Berger said. And she has good news for fans of Pilkeys graphic novels: Dav plans to continue writing and illustrating more books in the Dog Man and Cat Kid series in the near future. Earlier this year, when describing Simon & Schusters first quarter results in which the publisher reported a 17% increase in sales and a 85% jump in profits, CEO Jonathan Karp said the company was defying gravity. Karp, after two days of testifying at the trial in which the Department of Justice is trying to block Penguin Random Houses purchase of S&S, wasnt available for an interview this morning, but the company posted another stellar quarter in which revenue rose 34% over last years second quarter, to $293 million. Operating income also jumped again, this time up 54%, to $80 million. In a memo to employees, Karp said all of S&Ss divisions had double digit revenue growth led by two key driversTikTok and Colleen Hoover. The biggest [sales] lift has come from the ongoing trend of backlist titles that have become increasingly popular on TikTok and other social media channels, Karp wrote. Colleen Hoover is a cultural phenomenon, with multiple books on bestseller lists worldwide. The S&S-published It Ends with Us has sold over one million copies this and and the company will publish the sequel, It Starts with Us later this year and pre-orders, Karp said, are on a record-setting pace. Backlist titles by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Jack Carr also had a big sales quarter aided by TikTok and a movie release, respectively. Karp told employees it is also the best of times for the companys childrens division largely due to the summer of Jenny Han as three titles written by Han have sold extraordinarily well benefitting from the release of the movie based on her The Summer I Turned Pretty. On the international front, sales were up in all major markets, including Canada, the U.K., and Australia. In addition to the strong sales, Karp noted that Ada Ferrers Cuba: An American History, published by Scribner won a Pulitzer Prize. Karp was optimistic about the fall citing, among a number of titles, new by books by Stephen King (who testified on Tuesday against the PRH merger with S&S), Nina Totenberg, John Irving, and by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. Novelist Elaine Castillos brilliant and passionate new essay collection, How to Read Now, argues that the publishing industry is designed to suit white readers and that changing the way one reads can change the way one sees the world. Among other insights, Castillo warns against seeing stories by writers of color as a kind of ethical protein shake to teach white readers how to be better people and critiques white authors appropriation of narratives about oppression, including Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale, which was partly inspired by dissidents in the Philippines during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Castillos knowledge, along with her firebrand style and generous humor, result in a dynamic and necessary look at the state of storytelling. Overlooked is a category as imprecise as invisible, in the spirit of Toni Morrisons deft analysis of the Ralph Ellisons novel Invisible Man: Invisible to whom? Overlooked by whom? Most of these writers arent overlooked at all, not to the readers who love them or the contexts they both spring from and resist. So, for the purposes of this piece, when I say overlooked, I mean it in the narrowest, and most American sense: books that are perhaps less glimpsed here on our mainstream syllabi and reading lists, yet whose force reverberates across all sorts of borders, in ways indelible, unforgettable, and yes, essential. 1. L'homme qui rit/The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo Victor Hugo? Overlooked? Surely not. And youre right. Hes not remotely overlooked, except in the way that sometimes monuments loom so large that you forget what they actually look like. Most of us know of Hugo via the adaptions of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but my personal fave is Lhomme qui rit, or The Man Who Laughs, which I went on a long digression about in the Works Cited of How to Read Now. Its about cruelty, aristocracy (it contains one of my all-time favorite excoriating takes on the English aristocracy), childhood, poverty, inequity, torture, chance, desire, lust, bad choices, and long consequences. And as a helicopter dog mom, Im constitutionally required to say that it features one of my favorite dog characters, a wolf dog hybrid named Homo. 2. Windward Heights by Maryse Conde In How to Read Now, I talk about some of my experiences in a pretty terrible writing program I attended while living in London. But I regretted that I wasnt able to fit in a section about one of the few true joys of my time at that institution, which was the Caribbean Womens Writing class I audited, along with two other women of color. Taught by Prof. Joan Anim-Addo, its where I first read and loved the work of writers like Maryse Conde, Velma Pollard, Olive Senior, and Beryl Gilroy. Of course, writers like Cesaire, Senghor, Glissant, and Walcott are some of the best-known luminaries of Caribbean literature. Conde, a writer from Guadeloupe, is perhaps lesser known in the States than her male peers, a point she doesnt shy away from discussing in her interviews. Windward Heights is a bravura reimagining of Wuthering Heights, written in a blend of French and Guadeloup creole; in an interview, Conde said: "There is no French. There is the French of Proust, of Chateaubriand, of Maryse Conde I write neither in French nor in Creole, I write in Maryse Conde. 3. Morenga by Uwe Timm I first read an excerpt of this in Terrestrial Intelligence, a New Directions anthology of writing in translation that I bought in San Franciscos City Lights when I was still in college. I remember being utterly struck by the translation of Timms prose, the terse clarity and historicity of it, yet also its material aliveness, how its attention to the concrete felt so intense as to be transformative. Its also one of the few German novels I know of (also of note to me because my partner is French German and grew up mainly in Germany, so Ive spent a lot of time in France and Germany, and read a lot of literature in French and German, which comes up in How to Read Now) that speaks about the German colonial project in South West Africa, now Namibia, and particularly the Herero and Namaqua genocide. Timms book soberly draws parallels between the German colonial enterprise in South West Africa and the dehumanizing ideologies around racial superiority and ethnic cleansingits concentration camps, its forms of torturethat anticipated the rise of Nazism. 4. Sisters of No Mercy by Vincent Silk I first met the brilliant trans Australian writer Vincent Silk at the Sydney Writers Festival, for what I think was the festivals Queer NightI still remember how struck and moved I was by the luminous, devastating piece he shared that evening, which I wont do him the disservice of clumsily summarizing. Not long after the festival ended I read his gorgeous novel Sisters of No Mercy, and it remains one of my favorite books on the joys and discontents of organizing (anyone who has been in any type of leftist or anarchist household/squat/organizing project will recognize so much in this book; there were moments I had to put it down for a minute, either because I was laughing too hard, or because it was getting Too Real, or both), on gentrification, on the dystopian urban residues of settler colonialism, on grief and family, and most of all on the tenuous tenderness of solidarity and community. 5. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig Manuel Puig, like Victor Hugo, obviously isnt an overlooked writer, either, what with being a titan of Latin American literature (though still, probably, overshadowed by his Argentinian compatriot Borges). Puigs best known novel is Kiss of the Spider Woman (another fave)but I have a soft spot for this one, his first novel, which treads much of the same ground as Kiss (queerness, femininity, the utopian dream presented by the cinema, the reality of heteropatriarchal machismo, leftist militancy and resistance and its fraught relationship to the queer), but sets it all in a small town in the Pampas of Argentina, a place the young protagonist Toto both grows up in and tries to escape, through the magic portal of cinema. Puigs work is often described as camp; I also love his nimble skewering of class norms (as well as gender norms), aspiration, and self-delusion. The book veers from the comic to the harrowing on the same page, sometimes the same breath. 6. An Arab Melancholia by Abdellah Taia I think I read Abdellah Taiawho has been described as the first openly gay Moroccan writerfirst in French, but some of his books have been translated into English and are available in the States: namely Une melancholie arabe (An Arab Melancholia) and Larmee du salut (Salvation Army). An Arab Melancholia is a short, devastating work, partially an epistolary novel about a passionate and doomed romance (in my personal canon, it rivals one of my favorite films and another essay subject in How to Read Now, Wong Kar Wais Happy Together)while also being a rumination on the narrators childhood in Sale, Morocco and his adulthood in France, with paeans to the actress Isabelle Adjani and descriptions of perfume so evocative they made me start collecting Serge Lutens fragrances. The way Taia writes in Frenchthe way he writes himself into French, both invites and invents himself into Frenchnever ceases to thrill and inspire me. And for some reason, his writing also started to make me reflect on the way Samuel Beckett chose to write in French: In French, its easier to write with no style, Beckett once said, and thereafter it seemed like most critics framed his adoption of French as a kind of aesthetic purificationa stripping-away of things. Taias writing in French is full of style (so, in truth, is Becketts), not at all a stripping-away; his prose is by turns breathless, romantic, effusive, dramatic, harsh, melodramatic, recriminating, self-recriminating, honest, evasivea writing that shuns some of the more boring Academie Francaise-esque elitism around what constitutes good bourgeois French literature. Its also a writing that confronts head-on the inevitable colonial echoes of a North African writer choosing to write in French. Its in this oblique way, in the end, that Taias writing illuminated Beckett for me; it made me realize that for Beckett, as an Irish writer, the refusal of English would have been both a fraught aesthetic choice and a fraught, colonially inflected onenot unlike Taias. 7. Unexplained Presence by Tisa Bryant This isnt a novel, exactly, but its one of my longtime favorite books of experimental literary and cultural criticism, and much of it is written in prose so lively, characterful, and embodied it often feels novelistic. Bryants project is extending and expanding on the work of Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark, by locating the unexpected presences of Blackness in works of art, film, and literature. It prowls the background of classic films, rustles at the margins of novels, peers into the storage room of museums, cataloguing the ways blackness persists in culture: as curio, as enabler, as counter-example, as temptation, as nightmare. The virtuosic final essay on Regency House Party, a British Regency-themed reality show, has been one of my favorite essays for years, and Ive thought about it often since the rise of Bridgerton (we wont even talk about the most recent Persuasion adaptation except to say it is Earth sign erasure.) 8. The Drone Outside by Kristine Ong Muslim Id been a fan of Kristines science fiction and fantasy short stories for a long time before I met her at the Philippine International Literary Festival in 2018; I remember her joking/not joking about Manila being an imperial city (shes from Mindanao, in the South; my family is from the provinces in the North, Ilocos Sur and Pangasinan). She is a prolific writer, and The Drone Outside is just one of her many masterpieces, a collection of spare dystopian stories that terrify, clarify, and renew all at once. Her prose is crisp and lucid yet shot through with wonder and dread in equal measure, and like the best science fiction and fantasy, the politics of her fiction feels inextricable from its ethics and aesthetics; she has a gift for showing us unreal worlds and alien situations that nevertheless begin to ring intimately, hauntingly, familiar. 9. Hawaiis Story by Hawaiis Queen by Queen Liliuokalani One of the essays in How to Read Now is called Main Character Syndrome, a critique of the cult of Joan Didion, and in particular the settler colonial politics of her writing, especially about the West. One of the Didion pieces I talk about is an essay she wrote about her wealthy family connections to Hawaii, and in the course of writing and researching that essay, I came across this book, Queen Liliuokalanis memoir/record of history that preceded the U.S. overthrow of the sovereign kingdom of Hawaii. In school, I dont think we read any novels by Hawaiian or Pacific Islander authors (Ive recently been reading Kiana Davenports 1994 novel Shark Dialogues and Craig Santos Perezs Navigating CHamoru Poetry, and am excited to start Kristiana Kahakauwilas This is Paradise); at least in my education there was no substantial reckoning with the colonial annexing of Hawaii and how it came to be part of America (its also been an ongoing frustration of mine that often lists dedicated to AAPI Authors You Should Read Now often seem to feature only Asian American authors, no Pacific Islander authors). This book in particular feels like a time capsule, containing an essential American origin storythe one not told by its victors. Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. Research has shown that the Southeastern U.S. will face far more economic damage than other regions as climate change continues to worsen, mainly stemming from rising sea levels and deadly heat waves. The Brattleboro Reformer and Fulflex rubber products supplier sponsored the 6th annual Backpack Giveaway at the Brattleboro Auto Mall on Tuesday. The event gave away around 200 backpacks filled with back-to-school supplies. Children also were able to get a free haircut by Shear Designs Hair Andrew and Elizabeth Christo are proposing the construction of a kitchen to produce coffee and doughnuts to be sold via carry-out only at 24 West Main St. Photographer / Multimedia Editor Has been working as a photojournalist since 2007, before moving into newspapers, he worked with an NGO called Project HOPE. He then went to work for the Press and Sun-Bulletin in New York, and then in New England working for the Brattleboro Reformer. Brattleboro, VT (05301) Today Rain. Thunder possible. High 77F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%.. Tonight Cloudy with showers. Low near 60F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%. Don't miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook. Kevin Chu is executive director of the Vermont Futures Project. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media. Charley Tiernan (left) and Drew Angus will perform at this year's Sound on Sound music festival. Charley Tiernan (left) and Drew Angus will perform at this year's Sound on Sound music festival. Taking a glance at the lineup of Sound on Sound, the brand new music festival taking place in Bridgeports Seaside Park on Sept. 24 and 25, it would be easy to get distracted by names like Stevie Nicks, Dave Matthews and The Lumineers. However, the next headliner may be hidden within the undercard of this years lineup. Though musicians like Black Pumas and Zach Bryan are often lauded as the next generation of musical festival headliners, there are local musicians playing this years festival that are creating their own buzz. Charley Tiernan, a New Haven native and student at Berklee College of Music in Boston, is slated to perform first on Sunday under the moniker of Charley. Tiernan describes her sound as soulful rock blending elements of pop, rock and soul music. Sound on Sound will be her second-ever music festival performance following her debut festival appearance at Faster Horses in Brooklyn, Michigan last month. Its unbelievable sometimes, Tiernan said about being on the same lineup as Nicks and Matthews. Its really crazy when my friend will send me pictures of the poster on a train going into New York, or something like that. Tiernan is participating in the festival as part of the Berklee Popular Music Institute, which pairs Berklee-affiliated musicians with major music festivals such as Governors Ball in New York and Lollapalooza in Chicago. The three-semester course develops these musicians with students in the program, and gives them the ability to work with other students on marketing, budgeting and booking among other elements of the music industry. The result is these artists having both a band and brand to bolster them up. Im really focused on my music and I enjoy writing, and I try to say a message through my music every time I write a song, Tiernan said on why she believes she was among the chosen artists, adding that performing is her absolute favorite thing to do. You can sing the worst song ever but if you put on a show, people might love you, Tiernan added. The budding musician, who counts Donna Summers, Led Zeppelin and Marcus King as some of her influences, raved about her first festival performance last month, explaining that it was an honor to share the bill with country stars like Eric Church and Tim McGraw. It was really cool to meet some fans. I had no idea that people actually listened to my music. It was really fun to go into that realm and have people hear some country in me, Tiernan said. Tiernan recalls attending a performance by Alliance Childrens Theatre in New Haven when she was 6 and thinking, I have to do this, this looks amazing. This passion for music led her to audition and perform in numerous local musicals as well as at Hamden Hall Country Day School, where she went to school. Being in the community, I think its really artistic. Like there is always a show on the [New Haven] Green and theres always music out there to go see so Im really fortunate to grow up in such an artistic area, Tiernan said. Tiernan said that before her Sound on Sound debut, she will release a few singles so that attendees can get a glimpse at the style and sounds of Charley. Also playing at the Sound on Sound music festival is Black Rock-based musician Drew Angus, who has been cutting his teeth in the local music community for the past couple of years. Angus released his latest EP, You and Me, back in May, with the song, Home Is When Youre Here With Me, immediately becoming one of his most-listened-to songs on Spotify. Angus has shared the stage with the likes of Harry Styles, Andrea Boccelli and Nile Rodgers, and considers Dwayne The Rock Johnson among his biggest supporters. Now, Angus is bringing his celebrity-winning melodies to Sound on Sound. "This is my first big festival and I think its super exciting to see my name among some of my heroes like Dave Matthews, The Lumineers and Stevie Nicks," Angus told Hearst Connecticut in a February interview. "This is a killer lineup. I think this is a really exciting way to bring some action back to Seaside Park. I think itll be great for the community." "I hope to do my community justice here," Angus added. The Sound on Sound performance will cap off Angus three-show run of Connecticut, which will also double as the end of his summer tour. Angus also explained that after Gathering of the Vibes left Seaside Park in 2015 after a number of issues including unpaid overtime for police officers, there was a hole left in the local community. "I didnt spend a lot of time at Gathering of the Vibes growing up but I know many of my friends were regulars and a lot of people that I work with were integral to the team that was working on Gathering of the Vibes," Angus said. "Gathering of the Vibes brought together a huge group of people. As a musician, when Vibes ended, I think we lost a great deal of musicians to bigger cities and other pastures if you will." With that said, Angus believes that Sound On Sound is a much-needed resurgence for live music in Bridgeport that will only complement the musical DNA of the Park City. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) The driver in a hit-and-run crash that killed the father of rapper Nicki Minaj last year was sentenced Wednesday to a year in jail, in keeping with a promise the judge made when the man pleaded guilty in May. Charles Polevich, who pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and tampering with evidence in the crash on New Yorks Long Island that killed Robert Maraj, was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and had his drivers license suspended for six months. Polevichs lawyer, Marc Gann, suggested his client may have had a medical issue at the time of the crash and that he wasnt fully aware of what had happened when he fled. Polevich, 72, said in court that hes been heartsick since realizing the extent of the tragedy and that there was no excuse for his behavior. Marajs widow, Carol Maraj, said in court that Polevich had left her husband like a dog on the street and that sparing him a longer jail sentence was a slap in the face for the family, Newsday reported. Polevich struck Maraj, 64, while Maraj was walking along Roslyn Road in Mineola in February 2021. Polevich stopped briefly to ask Maraj if he was OK, but didnt call for help, prosecutors said. Instead, Polevich went home, parked the car a white, 1992 Volvo station wagon in his garage and covered it with a tarp, prosecutors said. Maraj was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead the next day. Prosecutors sought a sentence of one to three years behind bars, but Nassau County Judge Howard Sturim said in May, when Polevich pleaded guilty, that he would get no more than one year in jail. Brendan Brosh, a spokesperson for the Nassau County district attorneys office, said that given the severity of the defendants conduct, prosecutors felt a stiffer sentence was warranted. We continue to express our condolences to the family of Robert Maraj, Brosh said. Gann asked for a 90-day jail sentence, arguing that other factors outside of Polevichs control were partially to blame for the crash, including road construction, street lights that werent working and Marajs physical condition. Marajs widow, Carol Maraj, is suing Polevich over the crash. Polevich, who had been splitting time between Long Island and Guam, where he runs a drilling and water purification business, surrendered to police a few days after the crash. Detectives said they used pieces of surveillance video to track the Volvo involved in the crash to Polevichs Mineola home. Nicki Minaj, the platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated rapper of Anaconda, Super Bass and other hits, was born Onika Tanya Maraj in Trinidad and was raised in Queens. In a post on her website, Minaj, 39, called her fathers death the most devastating loss of my life. TEHRAN, Iran (AP) Iran, the United States and the European Union said Wednesday they would send senior representatives to Vienna amid what appears to be a last-ditch effort at reviving talks over Tehran's tattered 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. It wasn't immediately clear if all other parties to the landmark accord would attend the surprise summit, nor if there had been any progress after a monthslong stalemate and recent fruitless round of indirect talks between Iran and the U.S. in Doha. The European Union official who chairs the talks, Enrique Mora, said the negotiations would focus on the most recent draft to restore the agreement, while Irans chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, said he was heading to the Austrian capital to advance the negotiations. U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley wrote on Twitter that he was preparing to travel to Vienna for talks. He cautioned that American expectations are in check" ahead of the negotiations. The United States welcomes EU efforts and is prepared for a good faith attempt to reach a deal. It will shortly be clear if Iran is prepared for the same," Malley added. Iran's U.N. Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi said Wednesday that Iran has negotiated in good-will"" since April 2021 to resume full implementation of the 2015 deal and blamed the U.S. for failing to reach agreement. Achieving this objective has been delayed because the United States is yet to decide to give assurances that Iran will enjoy the promised economic benefits in the agreement," he told a high-level conference reviewing the landmark Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty at U.N. headquarters in New York. When the U.S. makes the right decision," Ravanchi said, Iran, in turn, will cease its remedial actions and resume the full implementation of its nuclear-related measures in accordance with the 2015 agreement." The German Foreign Ministry said Berlin would be represented at an expert level at the talks in Vienna, adding it supported efforts to fully revive the deal even if hopes are very small. It again pushed Iran to conclude the deal and said that would mean giving up maximalist positions in areas beyond the nuclear agreement. Russias chief representative at the talks, Mikhail Ulyanov, also wrote on Twitter that negotiators from Russia, a key signatory of the nuclear deal, stand ready for constructive talks in order to finalize the agreement. The prospects for the deal's restoration have darkened in the past few months with major sticking points remaining, including Tehran's demand that Washington provide guarantees that it wont again quit the pact and that it lift terrorism sanctions on Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. The abruptly called meeting in Vienna comes after EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has repeatedly pushed to break the deadlock and salvage the deal in past weeks. He recently wrote in The Financial Times that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted. Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, which lifted most international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for tight restrictions on Irans nuclear program. Since then, Iran has massively expanded its nuclear work and now has enough highly enriched uranium to fuel one nuclear weapon, according to nonproliferation experts. However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, likely a monthslong project. Iran insists its program is for peaceful purposes, though U.N. experts and Western intelligence agencies say Iran had an organized military nuclear program through 2003. ___ Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Geir Moulson in Berlin, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report. BRIDGEPORT A homeless man, on probation less than a week for stealing a car, is accused of carjacking a Seymour woman at knifepoint after she stopped to talk to a friend in Bridgeport. Julio Maldonado-Rivera, 47, was arrested after a chase with police through Trumbull and Bridgeport. He was charged with carjacking, first-degree robbery, carrying a dangerous weapon, threatening, fourth-degree larceny and reckless driving. During Maldonado-Riveras arraignment Wednesday afternoon, Assistant States Attorney Justine Moore urged Superior Court Judge Ididi Moses to set a high bond for the defendant citing his prior criminal record and the seriousness of the crime. He pointed a knife at a woman. She was terrified, the prosecutor said. The judge ordered Maldonado-Rivera held in lieu of $250,000 bond and continued the case to Sept. 27. Shortly after 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, police said officers were dispatched to the intersection of Noble and Edna avenues. When officers got there police said they found the woman sobbing on the sidewalk. Police said the woman told them she had pulled her Volkswagen sedan to the side of the road and gotten out to talk to a friend, leaving the car running so the air conditioner would remain on in the car. But while the victim was talking to her friend, police said Maldonado-Rivera jumped into the drivers seat of the car. Police said the victim got into the passenger seat in an attempt to stop Maldonado-Rivera from stealing the car but the defendant pointed a knife at her and demanded she get out. He then drove off with the car. Police said a short time later officers spotted the Volkswagen on Main Street in Trumbull and gave chase. Police said they pursued the car into Bridgeport where it hit a police car before coming to a stop. Officers pulled Maldonado-Rivera from the drivers seat and arrested him. Police said they found a knife in the car. On May 18, Newtown police said they arrested Maldonado-Rivera after he drove from the scene after causing a two-car collision there. He was subsequently found to be driving a car reported stolen in Danbury, police said. On July 28, Maldonado-Rivera pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of fifth-degree larceny for the Newtown incident and was given a suspended sentence and two years of probation, according to court records. Jacquelyn Martin/AP GREENBELT, Md. (AP) A West Virginia man was sentenced Thursday to three years in federal prison after he sent emails threatening Dr. Anthony Fauci and another federal health official for talking about the coronavirus and efforts to prevent its spread. Using an anonymous email account based in Switzerland, Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr. threatened to kill Fauci or members of his family, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release. One of his messages said they would be dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire." TORRINGTON Theyre appearing more and more. Lawn signs and flags declaring support for former President Donald Trump, and F Joe Biden. There are variations on the theme, such as Trump Won, referring to the 2020 election, and Trump 2024. But its the f-word that really gets to some people, and some have written letters to city officials, complaining and wondering whether anything can be done. Freedom of speech laws allow them, according to City Counsel Vic Muschell but that doesnt make it any easier for those who are offended by them. Muschell gave his legal opinion to the City Council this week about the signs using profanity. He said he looked at Torringtons blight ordinance, likely the citys only defense against such displays of political opinion. Our blight ordinance is based on a statute of whats considered blight, Muschell said. Obscenity is not considered blight, so it cant be in the ordinance. I am personally offended by these signs, he said. We have criminal statutes for obscenity, but if they are enforced, you have to commit a crime. The crime being determined has a definition of what obscenity is, and unfortunately, the signs were considering dont fall into that definition. Obscenity can be defined as something that incites violence, Muschell said, but a sign that says F Biden or F Trump is the same as saying impeach Biden or Trump. So the problem of enforcement involves the Constitution. We all have the rights of free speech, Muschell said. The bottom line is, theres not much we can do about it. We dont have to like it or encourage it, but we cant stop it. We dont have the luxury of being able to regulate the signs. According to a story published by reason.com, a judge in New Jersey in 2021 ruled that such signage was illegal, and that the person responsible for them a woman who put them up in her front yard should be fined $250 a day until they were removed. Roselle Park Municipal Court Judge Gary Bundy said the signs violated the areas ordinance against obscenity and seems oblivious to the fact that the law runs afoul of the First Amendment if its applied in this way, according to the report. Roselle Parks ordinance defines obscenity as anything that appeals to the prurient interest; depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct as hereinafter specifically defined, or depicts or exhibits offensive nakedness as hereinafter specifically defined; and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The judges 2021 ruling, according to the report, all ran contrary to what the U.S. Supreme Court previously has said on the matter: in Cohen v. California, the court held that a jacket emblazoned with F the Draft was OK, even when worn inside a courthouse, and its wearer could not be convicted of disturbing the peace, according to the report. The woman in New Jersey, Andrea Dick, appealed the judges decision and won, according to the report. On Memorial Day of 2021, Dick put up signs outside her home that read, Dont Blame Me, I Voted for Trump, Joe Biden Sucks, Yes, Im a Trump Girl, Get Over It and, most notably, F Biden. In Torrington, council members this week wondered about the location of anti-Biden signage in town. Some of them are near schools, said council member Keri Hoehne. There have been court cases on that .... the f-word is gaining more acceptance, Muschell said. Its used by everyone. Council member Paul Cavagnero said he wanted to protect parents and children from such crudity. It frustrates me, he said. There should be some way to protect kids from this coarsening of our society. I cant remember walking around my neighborhood and seeing this stuff before. Mayor Elinor Carbone has received letters regarding profanity on political signs for several years now, she said. Every test we gave these (to see if the city could do some sort of enforcement), they didnt pass the test, she said. Thats why we got a legal opinion provided by Vic. The thing is, the more we talk about them, the more (those who put the signs on their laws) they win, she said. They want us talking about it, and thats what were doing. Analysts say the angry response to Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei is 'The Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis.' In this image taken from video footage run by China's CCTV, a rocket is launched from an unspecified location in China, Aug. 4, 2022. UPDATED at 5:30 p.m. EDT on 2022-08-04 Unprecedented Chinese live-fire maritime drills got underway on Thursday with the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) launching ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan, the Taiwanese defense ministry said. The Chinese military launched 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles into the northern, southern and eastern surrounding waters of Taiwan this afternoon from 13:56 hours to 16:00 hours, the ministry said without specifying the range. Matsu, Wuqiu, Dongyin and some other outlying islands have been put on heightened alert after the PLA fired long-range rockets in the surrounding areas, the ministry added. Before the launch, the PLA threatened to fire missiles over Taiwan and enter the islands territorial waters for the first time, in a scenario that analysts describe as "The Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis." Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, on August 4, 2022, ahead of massive military drills off Taiwan. Credit: AFP China has been conducting military drills in the seas around Taiwan since early this week in an angry response to a stopover by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who arrived in Taiwan late on Tuesday and met top Taiwanese officials and rights groups on Wednesday. She is the most senior U.S. official to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Beijing considers the self-ruling, democratic island a breakaway province, to be united with the mainland by force if necessary, and objects strongly to high-level U.S. visits. The United States does not recognize Taiwan diplomatically as part of a One China Policy demanded by Beijing, but retains close unofficial ties with Taipei and is obligated by law to provide it with defense capabilities. U.S. assurances that Pelosi's visit does not represent any change in Taiwan policy have failed to assuage Beijing, which has accompanied the naval drills and missile barrages with harsh denunciations of Washington. Chinas irrational action Chinese international state broadcaster CGTN said military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills around Taiwan island have begun and would run for 72 hours. The PLA conducted long-range live-fire shooting training in the Taiwan Straits on Thursday at around 1:00 p.m. and carried out precision strikes on specific areas in the eastern part of the Taiwan Straits, CGTN added. The state-supported Global Times said the Chinese military conducted long-range artillery live-fire shooting drills in the Taiwan Straits, striking targets on the eastern side of the Straits and achieving the expected outcome. Taiwans defense ministry said it has activated relevant defense systems, and strengthened combat readiness. The Ministry of National Defense condemned this irrational action that undermines regional peace, it said in a statement. The maritime drills at six locations around Taiwan, that started on Thursday and last until Sunday, are set to be larger in scale than those in 1996 during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, and also unprecedented in many ways. For the first time, Chinese troops are expected to enter the 12-nautical-mile (22 kilometers) waters around Taiwan which, according to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, serve as the islands sovereign territorial waters. Conventional missiles are expected to be test-launched from naval vessels that are sailing to the east of Taiwan and from the mainland, according to the PLA Eastern Theater Command. Chinese analysts, quoted by state media, said the missiles would fly over the island. We need to recognize that we are in a major militarized crisis, and start calling it by its name: the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, said Christopher Twomey, a China military expert at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School who spoke to RFA in a personal capacity. What will get the most attention are missile tests, particularly if they land close to Taiwanese claimed waters or fly over Taiwanese territory, he said. Newspapers in Beijing on Wednesday, reporting Pelosis visit to Taiwan and showing maps of locations where the PLA will conduct military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills. Credit: Reuters High level of attention Japan said it lodged a diplomatic protest after five ballistic missiles fired by China appear to have landed inside Japan's exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which stretches 200 nautical miles from the outer limits of Japan's territorial seas. "To have five Chinese missiles fall within Japan's EEZ like this is a first," Japanese defense minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters, according to Reuters. In the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995-1996), a series of missile tests was conducted by the PLA in the waters surrounding Taiwan and the PLA live ammunition exercises led to intervention by the U.S., which staged the biggest display of American military might in Asia since the Vietnam War. The six areas in which the PLA will execute its live-fire drills until Sunday clearly delineate a military encirclement of Taiwan. To me, it looks like a prelude or preparations for a future scenario that is not primarily focused on amphibious assault, but on blockade, said Nadege Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), a U.S. private think-tank. If this is the case, it will not only choke Taiwan, but also directly impact Japans security, and the regions civilian transit as several Asian airlines have already canceled their flights over the broader area, said Rolland, who previously served as a senior advisor on Asian and Chinese strategic issues at the French Ministry of Defense. The exercises will generate a high level of attention from both Taiwans military and that of the United States. Both will want to ensure that the exercises are not a cover for an even more offensive action, but also will want to learn about Chinese capabilities and operational practices, Twomey said. The maritime drills that see PLA troops entering an area within 12 nautical miles of Taiwan were announced on Tuesday evening when Pelosi landed in Taipei for a brief but highly symbolic visit. Beijing has repeatedly condemned the visit as a grave violation of Chinas sovereignty and integrity, and threatened the strongest countermeasures. "I think this is the strong and resolute response that that Chinese spokespersons and the military are have talked about. But, these missions that they're conducting have been conducted against Taiwan for 20 years," said Drew Thompson, a former U.S. defense official and senior visiting fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Massive joint war games from May to September focusing on Taiwan "is what happens every summer in the PLA training cycle," he told RFA. "This year is different because there's a great deal more messaging and signaling and propaganda that is accompanying it," added Thompson. Irresponsible drills Taiwans defense ministry said in a statement that by announcing air-naval live-fire drills around the island, Chinese leaders made it self-evidently apparent that they seek a cross-strait resolution by force instead of peaceful means. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in a media interview on Wednesday called the drills irresponsible and they would make the chance of an incident real. The actors involved are certainly the same as for the three crises in 1954, 1958 and 1995-96, but the geostrategic context is very different, said NBRs Rolland. In each of the three previous crises, the U.S. intervened militarily and the military tensions between the PRC [Peoples Republic of China] and the ROC [Republic of China] were prolonged but diffused after a rapid initial escalation, said Rolland, referring to China and Taiwan by their official names. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. will get involved this time, she said, noting that if the survival of Taiwan and Japan is at stake, it will be impossible for the U.S. not to intervene at a minimum to safeguard the freedom of the sea lanes on which transit the majority of international commerce. On Thursday morning, the U.S. Air Force dispatched an RC-135S reconnaissance aircraft to observe the drills but the USS Ronald Reagan, the U.S. Navys only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, seems to have moved north towards Japan, according to a Beijing-based think-tank that has been tracking regional military movements. "USS Ronald Reagan and her strike group are underway in the Philippine Sea continuing normal, scheduled operations as part of her routine patrol in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific," a U.S. Navy 7th Fleet spokesperson was quoted by Reuters as saying. The U.S. should monitor to ensure there isnt greater escalation and to learn about the PLAs practices and capabilities. Beyond that, it is important to coordinate with other regional allies, said Christopher Twomey. It will be important to also signal to allies and partners that the U.S. would be a reliable ally if military aggression is undertaken by Beijing, the analyst said. In his opinion, the latest developments will have a legacy effect of deepening the militarization of the cross-strait relationship and Sino-American competition. Meanwhile, Rolland warned that in previous crises that involved the U.S. and China, tensions eventually abated thanks to a combination of factors including the U.S.s military superiority over the PLA and Beijings overarching strategic priorities such as joining the World Trade Organization). Today, both have drastically changed, she said. Reunification by force The blockage-style operation seen in current military drills could be one of the action plans taken in the future for achieving the reunification by force, Herman Shuai, a retired Taiwan general, was quoted by Chinas Global Times as saying on Wednesday. China considers self-ruled Taiwan a Chinese province that must be reunited with the mainland at all costs. The PLAs Eastern Theater Command has already conducted a number of military exercises around Taiwan upon the U.S. House Speakers arrival. The joint naval-air exercises which started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday were carried out in the north, southwest and southeast waters and airspace off Taiwan, according to the PLA Daily. Maj. Gen. Gu Zhong, deputy chief of staff of the PLA Eastern Theater Command was quoted by the newspaper as saying that Chinese troops conducted targeted training exercises of joint blockade, strikes on land and maritime targets, airspace control operations as well as the live firing of precision-guided munitions. This round of joint military operations is a necessary response to the dangerous move made by the U.S. and Taiwan authorities on the Taiwan question, Gu was quoted as saying. UPDATED with military expert comments on PLA war game practices. The PLA may also enter Taiwan waters in what has been called the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, on August 4, 2022, ahead of massive military drills off Taiwan. Updated at 03:31 ET on 8-4-22 Unprecedented Chinese live-fire maritime drills got underway on Thursday with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) launching ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said. The Chinese military "launched a number of Dongfeng ballistic missiles into the waters surrounding northeastern and southwestern Taiwan at about 13:56 p.m." the ministry said without specifying the range of the missiles. Before the launch the PLA threatened to fire missiles over Taiwan and enter the island's terrirtorial waters for the first time, in a scenario that analysts described as "The Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis." Chinese international state broadcaster CGTN said military exercises and training activities, including live-fire drills around Taiwan island have begun. Taiwans Ministry of National Defense said it is closely monitoring the situation, strengthening military alerts, and will respond appropriately. The ministry said that unidentified aircraft, probably drones, were spotted over Taiwans Kinmen islands on Wednesday night. During the day, 22 Chinese military aircraft also crossed the median line dividing the Taiwan Strait, it said. On Thursday morning, the U.S. Air Force dispatched a RC-135S reconnaissance aircraft to observe the drills but the USS Ronald Reagan, the U.S. Navys only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, seems to have moved north towards Japan, according to a Beijing-based think-tank that has been tracking regional military movements. "USS Ronald Reagan and her strike group are underway in the Philippine Sea continuing normal, scheduled operations as part of her routine patrol in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific," a U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet spokesperson was quoted by Reuters as saying. The maritime drills that see PLA troops entering an area within 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) of Taiwan were announced on Tuesday evening when Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi landed in Taipei for a brief but highly symbolic visit. Beijiing has repeatedly condemned the visit as a grave violation of Chinas sovereignty and integrity, and threatened strongest countermeasures. Pelosi is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the democratic island in 25 years. Taiwans defense ministry said in a statement that by announcing air-naval live-fire drills around the island, Chinese leaders made it self-evidently apparent that they seek a cross-strait resolution by force instead of peaceful means. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, in a media interview on Wednesday, called the drills irresponsible and said they would make the chance of an incident real. Newspapers in Beijing on Wednesday, reporting Pelosis visit to Taiwan and showing maps of locations where the PLA will conduct military exercises and training activities including live-fire drills. CREDIT: Reuters Joint military exercises The PLAs Eastern Theater Command already conducted a number of military exercises around Taiwan after the U.S. House Speakers arrival. The joint naval-air exercises, which started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday, were carried out in the north, southwest and southeast waters and airspace off Taiwan, according to the PLA Daily. Maj. Gen. Gu Zhong, deputy chief of staff of the PLA Eastern Theater Command was quoted by the newspaper as saying the Chinese troops conducted targeted training exercises of joint blockade, strikes on land and maritime targets, airspace control operations as well as the live firing of precision-guided munitions. This round of joint military operations is a necessary response to the dangerous move made by the U.S. and Taiwan authorities on the Taiwan question, Gu was quoted as saying. The maritime drills, that started on Thursday and last until Sunday, have attracted the most attention, not least because they are set to be larger in scale than those in 1996 during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis but also unprecedented in many ways. For the first time, Chinese troops are expected to enter the 12-nautical-mile waters around Taiwan which, according to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, serve as the islands sovereign territorial waters. We need to recognize that we are in a major militarized crisis, and start calling it by its name: the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, said Christopher Twomey, a China military expert. What will get the most attention are missile tests, particularly if they land close to Taiwanese claimed waters or fly over Taiwanese territory, he told RFA. In the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995-1996), a series of missile tests were conducted by the PLA in the waters surrounding Taiwan. The PLA live ammunition exercises led to the U.S. intervening by staging the biggest display of American military might in Asia since the Vietnam War. This story has been updated in the first paragraph to add details of ballistic missile launches. China's wolf warrior diplomats are out in force after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island. Hong Kong's Chief Executive John Lee, shown in a July 2022 file photo, released a statement saying, "The Hong Kong ... government has unwavering determination in and a clear stance against any advocacy of 'Taiwan independence.' Senior officials in Hong Kong's new administration have been lining up to show their loyalty to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by condemning U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, as U.K. lawmakers were reportedly planning their own Taiwan trip. "The Hong Kong ... government has unwavering determination in and a clear stance against any advocacy of 'Taiwan independence', and fully supports the central government's resolute determination in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity," Hong Kong chief executive John Lee said in a statement on the government's website. He said Pelosi's visit had gambled with the well-being of Taiwan's 23 million nationals, calling it "extremely selfish." A government spokesman echoed the phrasing used by Chinese officials all over the world. "Pelosi's visit to Taiwan constitutes gross interference in China's internal affairs, seriously undermines China's sovereignty and territorial integrity [and] greatly threatens the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait," the spokesman said. The statements were rapidly followed by similar statements from the city's justice secretary Paul Lam, who said it was the "sacred duty" of all Chinese nationals to ensure Taiwan -- which has never been ruled by the CCP nor formed part of the People's Republic of China -- to "unify" with China. Lee's second-in-command Chan Kwok-ki called Pelosi's visit "wanton," and vowed to lead the administration "to fully support and facilitate the country in safeguarding its national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and resolutely handle Taiwan-related matters." Chiang Min-yen, a Taiwanese citizen who was a student in Hong Kong during the 2014 Umbrella movement, said the statements from the government marked a new low in relations between Hong Kong and Taiwan, which has been a vocal critic on an ongoing crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong under the national security law. "The Hong Kong government has to go a step further and make a positive effort [through these statements] to show loyalty to Beijing," Chiang told RFA. "This is actually a very dangerous sign, because it shows that Xi Jinping's wolf warrior diplomacy directly affects and extends to Hong Kong's handling of foreign relations, including those with Taiwan." "[This] will actually damage Hong Kong's reputation as an international financial center ... something that Beijing is very afraid of." Former Uyghur student leader Wuer Kaixi, shown in this May 2019 photos, said "China today is not only not worried about going against the values shared by the rest of the world, but is proud of it and normalizes bullying, which is incredible." Credit: AP Global offensive Chinese officials and pro-CCP commentators have launched a global media offensive around Pelosi's Taiwan visit, claiming that the island is an "inseparable" part of Chinese territory. The Chinese ambassador to France, Liu Shaye, warned that the CCP may need to impose "re-education" on the island following "unification," suggesting that China is already planning to export its repressive form of ideological brainwashing beyond its borders. In an interview with France's BFM TV, Lu blamed the lack of receptiveness to China's insistence on "unification" among Taiwan's 23 million people on "extreme propaganda" by its ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Kazakh citizen journalist Mirbek Serambek, who is currently in exile in France, told RFA that "re-education" likely refers to the mass internment camps used to "re-educate" Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. That policy is part of a CCP assimilation program in Xinjiang that has been branded genocide by some Western governments and legal experts. "It shows that the Chinese government's re-education policy is unlikely to change for the time being, and that it was likely on strict orders from [CCP leader] Xi Jinping," he said. "Xi Jinping will take a more radical approach following the Pelosi incident, both internally and externally." "The Chinese government may set up re-education centers in or near Hong Kong over the next few years," Serambek said. "It will keep on oppressing other groups if Western countries don't step up sanctions." Wuer Kaixi, the Uyghur former student leader of the 1989 pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square, said Liu is in the mold of a "wolf warrior" diplomat, and is reacting against Washington's new-found determination not to appease China over Taiwan. "China today is not only not worried about going against the values shared by the rest of the world, but is proud of it and normalizes bullying, which is incredible," Wuer told RFA. "It's gotten to the point where ... one of its ambassadors has spoken with pride of this domineering approach." Zheng Zeguang, the Chinese ambassador to the UK, warned Britain not to "play with fire" with the U.S. amid reports British MPs plan to visit Taiwan, adding that "those who play with fire will set themselves on fire," in file photo. Credit: Screengrab from the official website of the Chinese Embassy in the UK UK MPs to visit Taiwan An employee who answered the phone at the Chinese embassy in France declined to comment on Thursday. "I can't answer you because I can't get a hold of my superiors; you need to go through the proper channels," the employee said. The embassy press office asked for questions to be emailed, but no reply had been received by the time of writing. Meanwhile, the Chinese ambassador to the U.K. warned members of parliament not to visit Taiwan, following a media report that there are plans in the pipeline for such a trip. "We call on the U.K. side to abide by its own commitments and not to underestimate the extreme sensitivity of the Taiwan issue or follow in the U.S.' footsteps and play with fire," Zheng Zeguang told reporters. "Remember: those who play with fire get burnt," he said. The Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee had originally planned to visit Taiwan in February this year, but the trip was postponed because a member of the delegation tested positive for COVID-19. In a report published on Aug. 3, Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) quoted sources as saying that the delegation is expected to travel this fall Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. The U.S. House speaker heard Hong Kong, Tibetan and Uyghur rights concerns at a forum in Taipei. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wound up her visit to Taiwan in a symbolic meeting with rights activists, from former political prisoners from Taiwan's authoritarian past to Chinese pro-democracy leaders and members of the beleaguered Uyghur and Tibetan ethnic minorities. In her meetings at Taiwan's National Human Rights Museum, built at the site of a notorious jail and military court from Taiwan's dark era of martial law, she contrasted the now-democratic island's willingness to address its past with the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) extensive suppression of historical debate. Participants told RFA she also stressed the need to bolster Taiwan that was a theme of her public remarks and published statements during the 20-hour visit, which China harshly condemned and launched war games and threatened a missile barrage and blockade of the island. We cannot stand by as the CCP proceeds to threaten Taiwan and democracy itself, she wrote in an op-ed published in the Washington Post as she arrived in Taipei during a Congressional tour of Asia. She was given a tour of the museum's Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park, commemorating Taiwan's 38-year period of brutal martial law under the Nationalist Party, by Chen Chu, chairwoman of Taiwans Human Rights Council who was once a political prisoner held and tried in that facility. "Our delegation visited the National Human Rights Museum with ex-political prisoners: a tribute to the heroes who suffered and fought for Taiwan's democracy," Pelosi tweeted. Another tweet showed her in tears after hearing stories from former prisoners. She also met Wuer Kaixi, an ethnic Uyghur and prominent student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Lam Wing-kee, a Hong Kong bookseller forced out of business and into exile in Taiwan, for books critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Lee Ming-che, a Taiwanese activist who was jailed for five years in China. The rights forum also included Kelsang Gyaltsen, the Dalai Lama's representative in Taiwan, and Yang Xianhong, director of the Taiwan Coalition for Human Rights in China. Participants in the meeting said she highlighted the differences between Taiwan's democracy and the dictatorship in China and the threat authoritarianism posed to free societies. "She said that she came to Taiwan and came to this forum to express her support for Taiwan's freedom and democracy. She hopes that we can talk to young people about human rights in China," said Lee. Lee was released in April after serving five years in jail for "subverting state power" for his NGO work assisting the families of Chinese political prisoners. Noting that Pelosi has been a critic of Chinese human rights practices for most ofher 35 years in Congress, he said "she believes that China's human rights and rule of law have moved increasingly backward in recent years." Lee Ming-che, a Taiwanese activist who was jailed for five years in China, speaks to reporters after meeting Nancy Pelosi in Taipei, Aug. 3, 2022. Credit: RFA Lee said he told Pelosi of his concerns about abusive Chinese practices including "residential surveillance in a designated location" under which political prisoners are detained in secret for a long time, and heavy surveillance of inmaes after they serve their terms. Lam, the former manager of Hong Kong's Causeway Bay Bookstore who was secretly kidnapped by the CCP, told RFA that Pelosi spent a lot of time focusing on the understanding of young people in Taiwan on the issues of mainland China, Hong Kong and Tibet. He said he told Pelosi that many young people in Hong Kong cannot leave the city, move abroad or obtain residency status overseas and called for help in allowing imperiled Hong Kong democracy protesters emigrate. The Taiwan representative of the Dalai Lama as well as Tibet's government-in-exile, Kelsang Gyaltsen, told RFA that he informed Pelosi that the human rights situation in Tibet is getting worse and that the CCP's totalitarian dictatorship is getting more and more extreme. He said he highlighted Chinese assimilation policies in which boarding schools provide meals, housing and free tuition to draw Tibetan children to schools, away from their parents, culture and religion. Kelsang Gyaltsen, the Dalai Lama's representative in Taiwan, meets with Nancy Lama in Taipei, Aug. 3, 2022. Credit Kelsang Gyaltsen For former Tiananmen pro-democracy leader Wuer Kaixi, secretary-general of the Taiwan Legislative Yuan Human Rights Promotion Association, her trip itself is one very, very loud message" that repudiates years of U.S. policies aimed at bringing China into the world system through trade and engagement. "It didnt bring China into the world arena as a responsible stakeholder. It didnt bring China into capitalism and give birth to a middle-class civil society, and eventually to democracy. It didnt make China more reasonable," he told RFA Uyghur in an interview Wednesday. "On the other hand, it made China more greedy. And then, they [China] feel they are invincible and that the whole world will give in to whatever they do," added Wuer Kaixi. I think the sacrifices of the Uyghur people and the resilience fighting from Hongkongers, Uyghurs, Tibetans and the Chinese democracy movements have also made the United States realize that the previous China policy is not working for them. he added. Written in English by Paul Eckert. The travel advisory comes after pro-democracy activist Yang Chih-yuan is arrested for 'separatism' in Zhejiang. UPDATED at 6:10 p.m. EDT on 2022-08-04 Authorities in Taiwan on Thursday warned the democratic island's 23 million citizens not to travel to China unless absolutely necessary, after police in China's Zhejiang announced the arrest of a Taiwanese national for "separatism." Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), which handles ties with China "urged Taiwanese citizens to assess the risks of visiting China," following the arrest of Taiwanese activist Yang Chih-yuan on charges of "separatism," the Central News Agency (CNA) reported. Yang, a 32-year-old pro-democracy campaigner and vice chairman of the independence-leaning Taiwanese National Party, was taken into custody by state security police in Zhejiang's Wenzhou city on Aug. 3 on charges relating to his activities in support of Taiwanese independence, state broadcaster CCTV reported. "Taiwanese nationals should exercise caution when traveling to China given the potential risks to their personal freedom and security," CNA quoted the MAC as saying. The MAC has called on China to stick to a cross-straits anti-crime agreement, but has yet to receive notification of his arrest through official channels, CNA said. "Yang's arrest has been viewed in some quarters as retaliation for U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recently concluded trip to Taiwan," the agency reported. Seeing Pelosi's visit to Taiwan as a threat to China's sovereignty claims, Beijing has taken a number of countermeasures, including banning the import of certain food from Taiwan and scheduling live-fire drills in six maritime areas in the vicinity of the island from Aug. 4-7, it said. Tourists look on as a Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest points to Taiwan, in Fujian province on August 4, 2022. Credit: AFP 'Irrational actions' by the PRC It said at least two Taiwanese nationals, retired National Taiwan Normal University academic Shih Cheng-ping and independent scholar Cheng Yu-chin are currently also imprisoned in China on national security and espionage charges. Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) condemned Yang's arrest as "a serious human rights violation." "China, which claims to be a great power, has repeatedly abused its judicial system to detain Taiwanese people on the grounds of national security," the party said in a statement widely reported in local media. "The CCP has resorted to a series of irrational actions in the past couple of days to exert extreme pressure on Taiwan via malicious bullying behavior, in a bid to sow fear among the Taiwanese people and force Taiwan to submit," the DDP said. "Today they have stooped to using the personal freedom of a Taiwanese national for political blackmail ... meaning that Taiwanese people in China could be arrested at any time as part of this red terror campaign," it said. The Taiwan National Party was set up in July 2011 by former national policy adviser to the president Huang Hua, independence activist Kao Kin-lang, scholars Liu Chong-yee, Yang Chih-yuan and others. Exiled Chinese dissident Guo Baosheng, who is acquainted with Yang, said he was shocked by the news of his arrest. "I was shocked because he hated the CCP and swore that he would never go back to China unless it was China free," Guo told RFA. Taiwanese activist Yang Chih-yuen, who was arrested by state security police in Zhejiang's Wenzhou city on Aug 3, 2022. Credit: Yang Chih-yuen Ammunition in dispute over Pelosi Gao said the last contact he had with Yang was in May this year, adding that Yang had been less politically active since losing his bid for a New Taipei legislature seat in 2020. "He probably thought there was no risk and just went on over there," Guo said. "Also, I am guessing some spy agents tricked him [to go there] by pretending to be [fellow activists] persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)." "He likes to befriend these dissidents," he added. Guo said Yang could have been arrested a while ago, but Beijing is now using his case as ammunition in the row over Pelosi's Taiwan visit, which has also prompted live-fire military exercises by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and the firing of missiles across the island. Another friend of Yang's, Wang Yikai, said on his personal Facebook page that he knew that Yang had recently signed up for a Go tournament in Wenzhou. Aside from the military response, several government websites in Taiwan were attacked during Pelosi's visit, with cybersecurity research institutes saying the attacks were likely launched by Chinese hackers. Beijing has slapped import bans on thousands of Taiwanese food products, while its Taiwan Affairs Office has sanctioned four Taiwanese companies labeled by Beijing as "pro-independence diehards." Chen Kuide, executive chairman of the Princeton China Society, said all of these reactions were predictable. "For Pelosi to make this visit in such a formal and high-profile way has angered the CCP and caused a great loss of face," Chen told RFA. "All of these things are being done to save face for the country and to restore the [Chinese] public's good impression of their country," he said. "They'll do it for a while, and do it like they mean it, but really starting something with the U.S. military wouldn't be a good idea, although possible." There have been few signs of panic in Taiwan so far, reflecting the citizens' experience with years of Chinese threats. "Many observers have questioned why Taiwan seems to show little concern about China's military threats over Speaker Pelosis visit," said Wenchi Yu, a former U.S. State Department official and a non-resident senior fellow at the Ash Centers Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia. "The answer is because Taiwan has been living under Chinas threats for over seven decades," she said in an interview published by the Harvard University institute. Little Pinks a diversion A Shanghai resident surnamed Liu said that Pelosi's visit had mobilized strong nationalistic sentiment among CCP supporters online, known as Little Pinks, with many calling for Pelosi's plane to be shot down. But he said much of the online hype was a distraction technique designed to whip up populist support ahead of the 20th party congress later in the year. "Without such hot topics to divert public attention from domestic social conflicts, how can [CCP leader Xi Jinping] smoothly achieve another term at the 20th National Congress?" Liu said. Another Shanghai resident surnamed Wang agreed. "Most people know they wouldn't start a war, but they were enjoying the excitement," Wang said. "In the end, [China] softened its stance, and got a lot of online ridicule for that." "Now, the topic has been banned from the internet." MAC spokesman Chiu Chui-cheng said: "The people of Taiwan will never submit to Beijing's civil and military attacks ... [and] will resolutely take countermeasures." "We warn the CCP authorities not to take this opportunity to provoke trouble, and immediately abandon its attempts at intimidation and retaliation," Chiu said. UPDATED with analyst comments. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. ASEAN chair Hun Sen says the situation in Myanmar is worse than ever since the coup. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ratcheted up its criticism of member state Myanmars junta on Wednesday, as Russias top diplomat visited Naypyidaw despite international outrage of the regimes execution of four prominent democracy activists. In a speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the 55th ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose nation holds the rotating chair of the bloc, acknowledged that no progress has been made on Myanmars political crisis, despite junta chief Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaings pledge to end violence in April last year. Hun Sen said that if the junta continues to execute its political opponents he would be forced to reconsider ASEANs role in mediating Myanmars conflict. The situation is now very volatile with the execution of the four opposition activists, and can be said to be worse than before the Five-Point Consensus (5PC), he said, referring to the agreement Min Aung Hlaing made with ASEAN in April 2021 during an emergency meeting on the situation in Myanmar. ASEAN is deeply shocked and horrified by the execution of these opposition activists. ASEANs 5PC called for an end to violence, constructive dialogue among all parties, the mediation of such talks by a special ASEAN envoy, the provision of ASEAN-coordinated humanitarian assistance and a visit to Myanmar by an ASEAN delegation to meet with all parties. Even Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged that the junta had failed to hold up its end of the bargain on the consensus in a televised speech on Monday in which he announced that the junta was extending by six months the state of emergency it declared following its Feb. 1, 2021 coup. He blamed the coronavirus pandemic and political instability for the failure and said he will implement what we can from the 5PC this year, provided it does not jeopardize the countrys sovereignty. Frustration with the junta boiled over last week after it put to death veteran democracy activist Ko Jimmy and former opposition lawmaker Phyo Zeya Thaw, as well as activists Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, despite a direct appeal from Hun Sen to Min Aung Hlaing. The executions prompted protests in Myanmar and condemnation abroad, including from outspoken ASEAN member-state Malaysia, which said no Myanmar military regime representative should be allowed at any meeting of the bloc, including this weeks gathering of foreign ministers from ASEAN countries and nearly 40 ASEAN partner nations. Wednesdays comments sounded a different tune for Hun Sen who, on assuming the ASEAN chair earlier this year, predicted that he would use his skill as a negotiator to resolve the situation in Myanmar. Hun Sens decision in January to become the first foreign leader to visit Myanmar following the coup was widely panned by the international community as conferring legitimacy on the junta and he has since remained relatively quiet while the crisis has worsened. Call for stronger measures Speaking to RFA Khmer, observers said ASEAN stakeholders should not remain silent on the junta and suggested that the bloc call on the United Nations to intervene in Myanmar if it is unable to resolve the crisis on its own. Cambodian political analyst Em Sovannara said that refusing the junta a seat at the table for ASEAN gatherings doesnt go far enough. For example, the ASEAN Chair should start talking to Myanmars [shadow] National Unity Government (NUG), not the military government, he said. Similarly, Soeung Senkaruna, spokesman for the Cambodian rights group Adhoc, said ASEAN should review its 5PC and, if unable to resolve the crisis, seek assistance from the U.N. There should be strong measures in place to punish the abuse and killing of innocent people, he said. We think that with no such measures, Myanmars dictatorial leaders will continue to persecute their opponents in any way they see fit. Attempts by RFA to reach Cambodian Foreign Ministry spokesman Chum Sontory for comment on the situation in Myanmar went unanswered on Wednesday. Long lines of vehicles wait at a filling station in Yangon, April 19, 2022. Credit: AP Photo Russian visit While many Western governments have sought to punish Myanmars junta for killing what rights groups say is at least 2,148 civilians over the past 18 months, Russia has continued to support the regime both diplomatically and militarily. Moscow reiterated that support on Wednesday when, ahead of attending the ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in Phnom Penh, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Naypyidaw and met with Min Aung Hlaing and junta Minister of Foreign Affairs Wunna Maung Lwin. Details of the meetings remain unknown, but in a post on Twitter Russias foreign ministry cited Lavrov as saying that Moscow appreciate[s] the traditionally friendly nature of our partnership, which is not affected by any opportunistic processes, apparently in reference to efforts by the international community to sanction the junta. The juntas foreign ministry said Lavrov and Wunna Maung Lwin cordially exchanged views on promotion of bilateral relations and cooperation and reaffirmed their commitment to enhance cooperation between the two countries in the multilateral arena based on mutual trust and understanding. RFA Burmese was unable to reach junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for further comment on the meetings Wednesday. Lavrovs visit comes two weeks after Min Aung Hlaing traveled to Russia on an unofficial trip, which political analyst Ye Tun described as part of the juntas bid to secure weapons from Moscow. The frequent back-and-forth visits between the leaders and the Russian foreign ministers current visit all point to expanded economic ties between Russia and Myanmar and the effort to obtain military assistance especially military equipment from Russia, he said. Lavrov said in a press release on Tuesday that his trip sought not only to promote bilateral relations, but also strengthen economic cooperation and defense and security ties. Amid the uptick in cooperation between Russia and Myanmar since the coup, the two countries relationship has become increasingly complex. Complex relationship Myanmar-based political analyst Than Soe Naing said the junta is relying more than ever on Russia to uplift the countrys economy, which is in shambles due to Western sanctions. Myanmar's economic situation is already in a serious state as international oil companies, like Total, are withdrawing from the country, he said. I believe that the junta is embracing Russia so that Russia can help the country in the face of an economic crisis especially a fuel shortage. Thein Tun Oo, executive director of the Thaningha Strategic Studies Group, a think tank of former military officers, said the junta has become closer to Russia as a strategic partner in order to reduce its dependence on neighboring China for economic and military assistance. It may be a disadvantage to be dependent on a single country, so its not uncommon to find another strategic partner with whom you can have a really close relationship, he said. Its mainly for this reason that [Myanmar is] now looking at Russia as a strategic partner. Observers also suggested that junta leaders are more impressed with Russia than China when it comes to military technology. Four months after last years coup, during his June 2021 visit to Russia, Min Aung Hlaing told Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that he was grateful to Moscow for making Myanmars army one of the strongest in the region. That same month, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution to prevent the flow of military equipment to Myanmar, but Russia abstained. Observers said Russia might see Myanmar as an important country if it hopes to expand its economic influence in East Asia. The website Global Firepower, which tracks the development of military forces from around the world, said last month that Myanmar maintains a fleet of 280 aircraft, including fighter jets and attack helicopters, 664 tanks, and 155 warships, including one submarine. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. The juntas hanging of 4 democracy activists last week suggests more executions to come. The families of 77 political activists sentenced to death by Myanmars military junta say they live in fear that their loved ones will be executed without warning after the military regime hanged four prominent prisoners of conscience. Frustration with the junta boiled over last week after it put to death veteran democracy activist Ko Jimmy and former opposition lawmaker Phyo Zeya Thaw, as well as activists Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, despite a direct appeal from Hun Sen to Min Aung Hlaing. The executions prompted protests in Myanmar and condemnation abroad. On Thursday, the daughter of a 56-year-old former junta soldier sentenced to death for allegedly helping pro-democracy Peoples Defense Force (PDF) paramilitaries told RFA Burmese that she cant bear to think that her father might be executed at any point without her knowing. "As a family member, there is no way I could accept that my father might die all of a sudden, she said, speaking on condition of anonymity. They gave him the death sentence, but did he deserve it? He had no involvement [in the anti-junta protests]. I think it is completely unfair that he was given the death penalty just for planning to get involved. She claimed that her father was arrested by the military without having committed any crime and was sentenced to death by a military court without having the opportunity to defend himself legally. She urged the junta to let her father serve out a life sentence in prison, noting that he is a veteran soldier who spent many years in the military. Prior to last week, only three people had been executed in Myanmar in the past 50 years: student leader Salai Tin Maung Oo, who helped organize protests over the governments refusal to grant a state funeral to former U.N. Secretary-General U Thant in 1974; Capt. Ohn Kyaw Myint, who was found guilty of an assassination plot on the life of dictator Gen. Ne Win; and Zimbo, a North Korean agent who bombed the Martyrs Mausoleum in Yangon in an attempted assassination of the visiting South Korean President Chin Doo-hwan in 1983. In the more than 30 years between Myanmars 1988 democratic uprising and the military coup of Feb. 1, 2021, death sentences have been ordered, but no judicial executions were carried out. Thailands Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) has said at least 77 people are currently sentenced to death in Myanmar. From left: Activists Ko Jimmy, Phyo Zeya Thaw, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw were executed by the Myanmar junta in late July. Credit: RFA Legality of execution Legal experts have noted that only the countrys democratically elected head of state has the right to order an execution under existing laws. Aung Thein, a High Court lawyer from Yangon, said coup leader Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing considers himself Myanmars head of state and that carrying out the death penalty is his right. [The junta hasnt] disposed of the 2008 [military-drafted] Constitution. It has only been suspended, he said. Since they have said they are operating according to the 2008 Constitution, [Min Aung Hlaing] believes the responsibility of head of state falls to him. That's why he might be under the impression that he can order executions. A lawyer from Yangon, who asked not to be named for security reasons, said that the hanging of a person considered a political challenger to the military appears more like revenge than anything legally justifiable. Things have gone from political repression to military repression, the lawyer said. When a rivalry becomes intense, the execution of the opposition by a rival organization can be seen more as revenge than legal action. Junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun said the four activists executed last week were perpetrators of terrorism and were judged according to the law. He told a press conference in the capital Naypyidaw a few days after the executions that ideally the junta would have killed the four more than once. Aung Myo Min, human rights minister for Myanmars shadow National Unity Government (NUG), said the unlawful arrest and execution of the opposition under unjust laws is the same thing as murder in prison. He expressed concern that last weeks executions would lead to more official killings in the countrys prisons. For a military regime which sees the people as the enemy and kills them wherever they like, executing people in prison is not very unusual. In fact, this is not the death penalty. This is murder in prison, as it is based on unjust laws and unsubstantiated cases and verdicts. After these executions, we worry that the junta may continue, using it as a precedent. A mother whose son was recently sentenced to death in Yangons Insein prison told RFA she can only pray that no other family members of those on death row be forced to experience such a tragedy. It's not good in my heart. I don't know how to describe it, she said. There is anxiety because I'm afraid [another execution] will happen. Nobody wants that to happen. Im praying that it won't. ... I pray for the speedy release of these young kids." ASEAN criticism The current rotating chairman of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, told a meeting of the blocs foreign ministers in Phnom Penh on Wednesday that if political prisoners continue to be executed in Myanmar, he would be forced to reconsider ASEANs role in mediating the countrys political crisis. Under an agreement Min Aung Hlaing made with ASEAN in April 2021 during an emergency meeting on the situation in Myanmar, known as the Five-Point Consensus (5PC), the blocs member nations called for an end to violence, constructive dialogue among all parties, and the mediation of such talks by a special ASEAN envoy. The 5PC also calls for the provision of ASEAN-coordinated humanitarian assistance and a visit to Myanmar by an ASEAN delegation to meet with all parties. Even Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged that the junta had failed to hold up its end of the bargain on the consensus in a televised speech on Monday in which he announced that the junta was extending by six months the state of emergency it declared following last years coup. He blamed the coronavirus pandemic and political instability for the failure and said he will implement what we can from the 5PC this year, provided it does not jeopardize the countrys sovereignty. Foreign Minister of Singapore Vivian Balakrishnan, who is attending the ASEAN meeting in Cambodia, publicly stated on Thursday that further discussion between the bloc and the junta would not be beneficial if there is no progress made in the implementation of the 5PC. Myanmars junta has killed at least 2,148 civilians over the past 18 months and arrested nearly 15,000 some 12,000 of whom remain in detention, according to the AAPP. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. Vietnams heavy reliance on cotton imports from China could lead it to fall foul of a U.S. ban on cotton produced by forced labor in Xinjiang province. Vietnamese manufacturers say it is hard to prove where the fabric in their garments comes from. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) came into force on June 21, after being signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden last December. The move has reportedly led fashion chains such as Japans United Arrows to stop selling clothes made from Xinjiang cotton. According to the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC) countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, the worlds second and third largest garment exporters, still depend heavily on imports of Chinese fabric and yarn, particularly high-end materials. As a result, campaign groups and some Western politicians have accused manufacturers of cotton laundering in places such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, for serving as intermediaries in cotton garment production, the center said. Last month the Bangladesh Garment Buying House Association asked its members to be careful where they sourced their raw materials to avoid falling foul of the new U.S. regulations. Last year Bangladeshs garment exports to the U.S. earned it $7.18 billion. Vietnams garment exports to America brought in more than double that, at $15.4 billion, according to the U.S. Office of Textiles and Apparel. The BHRRC said that one Chinese garment manufacturer who owns a factory in Vietnam said proving the origin of fabrics and threads involved a lengthy due-diligence process. It is hard to distinguish the cotton products entering Vietnam from different sources because they may have been mixed together while being transported at sea. Suppliers may do this so they can deceptively label Xinjiang cotton as coming from elsewhere, to circumvent the US law, the manufacturer told the center. RFA spoke with the director of an apparel firm in Vietnams northern Nam Dinh province. My company is producing apparel products for a China-based company which uses materials from its country and exports to the U.S., he said. Due to the UFLPA it has ordered less from us. It seems that our Chinese partner cannot sell its products so it has stopped ordering [so much] from us. The Vietnam Cotton and Spinning Association referred RFA to comments given by Vice President Do Pham Ngoc Tu to Chinas Global Times. He told the newspaper that Vietnamese garment manufacturers will have to wean themselves off raw materials produced in Xinjiang if they want to continue exporting to the U.S. One fifth of the worlds cotton comes from Xinjiang, making it hard for manufacturers to find adequate supplies from countries that do not use forced labor. Ignoring the ban would mean falling foul of the worlds biggest garment importer. The U.S. ships all but 5% of its apparel from overseas. The first thing to know: Long convoys of Russian military trucks, tanks, towed artillery, and other weapons are moving away from Ukraines Donbas region, headed southwest -- and in at least one case, headed northwest from the Russian-occupied port of Mariupol. The second thing to know: Bridges, ammunition depots, and rail links are being targeted with growing frequency in Ukraines southern regions, hit by Ukrainian forces with powerful Western-supplied weapons. The most important thing to know: Russias war on Ukraine is about to enter a new phase, if it hasnt already, with the heaviest fighting shifting to a roughly 350-kilometer front line stretching southwest from near Zaporizhzhya to Kherson, paralleling the Dnieper River. The fight for the city of Kherson alone could prove decisive in determining the ultimate outcome of the war, according to at least one account. The south is key, said Peter Zwack, a retired U.S. Army general who served as defense attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Its more than just a test, from Kyivs perspective, he told RFE/RL. The fight in the south is existential. Certainly [the Ukrainians] are refining their forces, bringing in new men, equipment, but first and foremost, its existential. Theyve got to get the Russians out of the south now -- before everything hardens, coalesces, theyve got to push them out. Already, Ukrainian officials are pointing to a growing number of villages and towns in the Kherson region that have been recaptured. The regions head, Dmytro Butriy, said on national TV on August 2 that 53 settlements there had been recaptured since the start of the invasion nine of them over the previous 24 hours. Ukrainian commanders said that Russian forces were massing in the south in preparation for an assault -- possibly in response to, or anticipation of, Ukraines counteroffensive. Ukrainian artillery and long-range rockets have also hit a growing number of targets of strategic importance to Russia in the Kherson region, including bridges, and more recently, a railroad spur that links it to Russian-occupied Crimea. You all have been reporting on the advances that the Ukrainians are making around Kherson -- and we have seen [them], a senior U.S. Pentagon official said last week, and they're not large, giant advances but they are certainly advances against the Russians. I don't know if it's a part of a counteroffensive, the official said at a briefing for journalists. I know they're making offensive gains. And they are doing so, you know, against a Russian force thatlooks like they are ill-prepared for it. First To Fall In the first weeks after Russia invaded on February 24, much of the fighting was concentrated in the north, near Kyiv, and in the south along the Sea of Azov coast, around Mariupol. Ukraine won in the north, driving Russian forces back across the border. Russia made substantial gains in the south, including seizing Kherson, which had a pre-invasion population of around 300,000 and was the first major Ukrainian city to be taken. Mariupol was captured after a brutal siege. The focus then shifted east, to the Donbas, where Russia regrouped and then pummeled Ukrainian troops with withering artillery and rocket fire and brutal urban warfare. Ukrainian forces were forced to retreat. Russia seized major Luhansk region cities, before taking an operational pause. In the south, however, for weeks, Ukrainian forces have made small, incremental gains in the Kherson region, which straddles the Dnieper. The river has been a natural defensive barrier, and the advances Ukrainian forces have made have been on the northern side, or right bank. Now, according to military experts, eyewitness reports, social media accounts, and Western intelligence, both Ukraine and Russia are girding for a new concentration of fighting along the Dnieper. In the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions, Russias southern grouping is built around the 49th Combined Arms Army, along with mechanized and paratroopers brigades as well as some units that have been mobilized from the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Ukraines military intelligence agency said on August 2 that a new battalion tactical group, which comprises between 800 and 1,000 troops, had deployed to Crimea and would be sent into the Kherson region in the coming days. Russian positions on the northern bank of the Dnieper were untenable and vulnerable, according to Mykola Byelyeskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Ukrainian government think tank. Thats due in large part to Ukraines use of U.S.-supplied M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS. Russian troop movements are to be expected, Byelyeskov told RFE/RL, given all the signals pointing to a Ukrainian counteroffensive. It would be strange for them not to respond to the declared -- in broad terms -- possible [Ukrainian] counteroffensive, with some measures to strengthen their grouping, he said in a text message. But movement as such doesnt solve this [Russian] predicament when their grouping of forces on the right bank of [the] Dnieper depends on bridges threatened by Ukraines artillery. Last week, three key Dnieper bridges, including the Antonivskiy Bridge, were heavily damaged and rendered impassable by Ukrainian fire. Russia has rushed to repair the bridges, and has installed a temporary pontoon ferry, to allow for men and equipment -- and civilians -- to cross the river. 'A Major Test' The importance of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions comes from their geography, first and foremost. The largely flat expanse has vast farm fields and power plants. And, as it stands now, Ukrainian lands occupied by Russian forces include the entire Sea of Azov coast, the Crimean Peninsula, and the Black Sea coast up to the mouth of the Dnieper, west of the isthmus that links mainland Ukraine with Crimea. That puts Russia dangerously close to blocking the entirety of Ukraines coastline. The uptick in the tempo in fighting, and troop movements, may also stem from the Kremlins intentions. Russian officials have signaled plans to hold referendums in the two regions, possibly with an eye toward annexing them, similar to what happened in Crimea in 2014. Already, Russia has installed puppet administrations, started handing out Russian passports, and imposed the ruble as the local currency in place of the hryvnya. To that end, Ukraine may be pressing forward to thwart Russian referendums that Moscow would use to cement its control, experts said. While Ukrainian forces have gone toe-to-toe with Russian adversaries in the Donbas for months now, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya will showcase how much Ukrainian troops have learned since February. Russian troops as well. Yes, it will be a major test of Ukraine's military capability, said Nick Reynolds, a land warfare analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. So far they haven't been able to successfully counterattack in depth except where the Russian military have conducted discretionary withdrawals to consolidate their forces. Ukrainian commanders are also likely to try and seize the initiative when Russian troops are still replenishing and reshuffling forces, Richard Moore, the head of the British foreign intelligence agency MI6, said last month. The Russians are "about to run out of steam," he told the Aspen Security Forum. Its important to the Ukrainians themselves that they demonstrate their ability to strike back and that will be very important for their continuing high morale, Moore said. I also think it will be an important reminder to the rest of Europe that this will be a winnable campaign for the Ukrainians. Ukraine Tested, Russia Tested A new counteroffensive will also test how well Ukraine can use the sophisticated weapons systems provided by Western countries: the U.S. HIMARS, the French-made Caesar howitzers, and the German-made Panzerhaubitze self-propelled artillery. It will be interesting to see if enablement by systems such as HIMARS results in significantly better performance by Ukrainian armored and mechanized forces, Reynolds told RFE/RL by e-mail. This is why the battle for Kherson is important, Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London, wrote in a blog post on July 27. Ukraine is anxious to recover its territory and justify the confidence of its people that this war can be won. In the process it seeks to encourage its Western partners to keep the faith. The new counteroffensive will also test the stamina of both sides, which by all accounts face problems of exhaustion, depleted numbers, and in Russias case, reports of increasing problems with discipline, morale, and insubordination. The problem with preparing for an assault -- and I think this is a concern for NATO and U.S. planners -- is that theyre not sure that the Ukrainians have enough mass of men, materiel, and munitions to actually carry through an assault that can break through the Russian lines, Chris Dougherty, a former U.S. defense official and analyst at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank, said in an interview with RFE/RL. The Russians have been bled out, theyve been bringing in a lot of subpar replacement units, Zwack said. It seems in the south that they, if theyre reading like we are, theyre anticipating the Ukrainian counteroffensive. People are talking about it, youre going to get Russian lines hardening. When youre at war, just to survive, youre going to adjust, he said. Then theres the question of the will to fight. The Russians are better than they were, and so are the Ukrainians. Thats just war -- but we dont how much better. A contingent of around two dozen German troops arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina on August 16 as part of the European Union's nearly two-decade peacekeeping and security mission in the troubled Balkan state, in a move quickly disparaged by Russia's embassy. The return of German troops to the EUFOR mission for the first time in a decade reflects Western concern at centrifugal ethnic and political forces and potential geopolitical spillover from the Ukraine war. EUFOR last week announced the deployment of up to 50 Bundeswehr troops to the former Yugoslav republic, which remains divided into a Bosniak and Croat federation and a mostly Serb entity known as Republika Srpska under the terms of a 1995 cease-fire known as the Dayton Agreement. On August 16, it called the arrival of around 30 troops "a further demonstration of the EU's commitment to a stable, prosperous, and European future for all the citizens" of Bosnia. EUFOR's Althea mission in Bosnia comprises around 1,100 soldiers from 20 countries. EUFOR said after the German troops' arrival at Camp Butmir that "the advance party of German personnel arriving this week are expected to be followed by further troops deployed on a phased basis." The Serb member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, Milorad Dodik, who has openly sought secession for Republika Srpska and hastened instability with rival institutions, has criticized the arrival of German troops with references to World War II. EUFOR is in part tasked with ensuring civilian order and compliance with Dayton alongside an international high representative, currently German Christian Schmidt. Dodik ally Russia last year accelerated its push to phase out Schmidt's post. EUFOR's current mandate expires in November and there is speculation that Moscow could use its UN Security Council veto to scupper an extension. Russia's embassy in Sarajevo alleged on August 16 that the United States and Britain are "preparing the ground for the creeping NATOization" of Bosnia. Given European forces' most recent report to the UN Security Council suggesting Bosnia is calm and stable, the embassy said, "the reasons for the need to expand military personnel in EUFOR, including at the expense of Bundeswehr soldiers, are groundless." It said that it "especially" considers suggestions that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is affecting the situation in Bosnia as "unacceptable." Bosnia has EU aspirations but has struggled to implement reforms and even maintain unified policies in the face of governmental and administrative divisions based on ethnicity and geography. Elections scheduled for later this year are in jeopardy as Serbs continue to press for independence and ethnic Croats insist on major electoral changes or they will boycott the vote. More than 100,000 people died in the 1992-95 Bosnian War that ended with the signing by Serb, Croat, and Bosniak leaders of a U.S.-mediated peace in Dayton, Ohio. EUFOR replaced NATO peacekeeping troops in Bosnia in 2004. With reporting by Reuters The families of victims of mass executions in Iran in 1988 have expressed outrage over construction and other changes made at the Khavaran cemetery, which they believe holds the remains of their loved ones. A letter signed by nearly 800 members of the victims families and sent to Javid Rahman, the UN's special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran, demands that the Islamic republic stop harassing and threatening the grieving families. Videos and images published on social media in May show that a high concrete wall and security camera fixtures have been installed around the perimeter of the cemetery, known by many Iranians as the "place of the damned." According to eyewitnesses, in addition to the surveillance cameras, a new door has been installed at the entrance to the cemetery and the layers of security around the cemetery are being intensified. Families and activists see the new constructions as a brazen attempt by authorities to further restrict access to the Khavaran cemetery in their efforts to erase the memory of the dead. Through his fatwa in 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini paved the way for the immediate execution of Iranian prisoners deemed loyal to the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), a political-militant organization that advocated the overthrow of Iran's clerical regime. Many of the prisoners had been rounded up for even the slightest perceived affiliation to the MKO. The fatwa eventually encompassed all left-wing opponents of the regime, including communists, Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, and others. The cemetery in the east of the capital was traditionally a final resting place for members of religious minorities, who were interred there to keep them separate from the graves of Muslims. But following the mass executions, Khavaran became best known as a secret burial ground for some of the thousands killed. The graves at Khavaran are unmarked, and Tehran has for decades barred families of the dead from mourning there and punished those who left flowers and mementos. The strict official stance has contributed to accusations that Tehran has attempted to cover up the killings of dissidents and religious minorities by death squads and has even desecrated the burial sites of victims. The Iranian government has never acknowledged the mass executions nor provided any information about the number of prisoners killed. With writing and reporting by Ardeshir Tayebi Negotiators have begun a new round of talks in Vienna on August 4 on salvaging a landmark 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and world powers. The talks opened in the Austrian capital with a meeting between Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, and the EU's Enrique Mora, coordinator of the negotiations. Mora will again shuttle between Kani and the U.S. negotiator, Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, because Iran refuses to hold direct talks with the United States. The talks are the first since March, when negotiations that began last year to reintegrate the United States into the agreement stalled. Comments made by Malley and Kani ahead of the talks indicated that neither side was overly optimistic about the prospect of a breakthrough. Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran, said on August 3 that he was headed to Vienna to resume the negotiations "with expectations in check." He said that the United States "is prepared for a good faith attempt to reach a deal," adding, "It will shortly be clear if Iran is prepared for the same." Kani put the onus on Washington to compromise, saying in a tweet that the United States should "show maturity & act responsibly." Under the deal with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China, Iran pledged to curb its nuclear program in return for relief from economic sanctions. But since Washington's unilateral pullout from the deal in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump, Tehran has gradually broken from compliance with the accord. In a last-ditch effort last month, the EU's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, submitted a compromise proposal and called on the parties to accept it to avoid a "dangerous nuclear crisis." Mora previously said the two sides were close to a deal before talks broke down in March. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House on August 4 that time is getting "very short" for Iran to accept a return to the deal. There is "a deal on the table" and the Iranians "ought to take it," he said. "You've heard the president say we're not going to wait forever for Iran to take this deal." Months of inaction and increased international isolation of Iranian ally Russia since the Kremlin attacked Ukraine in February have lowered hopes for a new deal that slowly emerged after another lull accompanying the election last year of hard-line Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. U.S. President Joe Biden's administration says it favors a return to the deal, including lifting key sanctions, but has rejected an Iranian demand to reverse the blacklisting of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. Russia's envoy to the talks, Mikhail Ulyanov, also tweeted about the return to negotiations. Borrell said the draft text includes "hard-won compromises by all sides" and "addresses, in precise detail, the sanctions lifting as well as the nuclear steps needed to restore" the 2015 pact. Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on August 2 warned Iran's program was "moving ahead very, very fast" and "growing in ambition and capacity." On July 25, Iran said monitoring cameras belonging to the IAEA will not be turned back on until an agreement is reached. With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and AP 6 A male kulan occasionally jumps the fence of the corral and wanders alone on the steppe. Salemgareev says kulans use strength in numbers to guard against predators. "What we have seen is that when a wolf comes close to the corral, kulans bunch together and stare the predator down. The risk for the predator is too high when there's one wolf facing four kulans," the scientist says. The Polish Foreign Ministry has summoned Belarusia's charge d'affaires after a journalist for Polish broadcaster Belsat TV was sentenced in Belarus to five years in jail. Ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina said on August 4 that the Belarusian diplomat was summoned because journalist Iryna Slaunikava "is not only an employee of Polish Television, but one of those journalists who fight for peace and the rule of law in Belarus." A court in Belarus sentenced Slaunikava a day earlier as the Belarusian government continues to crack down on independent media following mass protests sparked by a disputed presidential election two years ago that handed victory to authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Slaunikava, who is being held in custody, was found guilty of leading an extremist group and organizing activities that disrupt social order. She has denied the charges. A former correspondent for Belsat TV who went on trial in June, Slaunikava was first arrested along with her husband, Alyaksandr Loyka, in late October. The couple was sentenced to 30 days in jail on charges of "distribution of extremist materials" and "minor hooliganism." After serving their jail terms, Slaunikava was charged again, this time with "leading an extremist group" and the "organization and preparation of events disrupting social order." Loyka was not arrested a second time. Lukashenka, 67, and in power since 1994, has tightened his grip on the country since the 2020 election by arresting -- sometimes violently -- tens of thousands of people. Fearing for their safety, most opposition members have fled the country. Most of the country's independent media have also been either arrested or left the country due to the crackdown. The West has refused to recognize the results of the election and does not consider Lukashenka to be the country's legitimate leader. Many countries have imposed several rounds of sanctions against his regime in response to the suppression of dissent in the country. With reporting by Polska Times and Wiadomosci When senior managers at Kremlin-controlled natural gas producer Gazprom arrived in New York in February 2020 to present a business update to U.S. investors, the company had just wrapped up the best three-year stretch in its export history. Gazprom had delivered an average of nearly 200 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas a year via pipeline to Europe, including Turkey -- one-third more than the average over the previous decade and generated more than $120 billion in revenue over that period. The management team told the U.S. investors that it expected Gazproms exports to Europe to remain around that record level for the next decade, extending the financial windfall for the company -- a key pillar of the Russian economy -- far into the future. Two years later, the prognosis is starkly different. Russian President Vladimir Putins decision to launch a large-scale assault on Ukraine and his moves to cut gas exports to the European Union over its support for Kyiv following the February 24 invasion -- have cost Gazprom that lucrative future on the continent, experts say. The company -- considered a Kremlin slush fund because of its business ties to friends and close associates of Putin -- stands to lose hundreds of billions of dollars in European revenue over the long term. And that bleak outlook will have ripple effects on Gazproms efforts to compensate with a pivot to Asia by undermining its negotiating position with China, experts said. In the short term, though, Gazprom can expect to enjoy a bonanza. Even as its volumes to Europe tumble, the company will generate record export revenue this year -- and strong earnings over the next two to three years -- because prices for the fuel have surged amid a shortage triggered by what Brussels has called Kremlin blackmail. But by mid-decade, as new supplies of natural gas flood the market and the EU further cuts Russian gas imports, Gazprom will face a sharp drop in revenue and profits at a time when the rest of the economy will be struggling under Western sanctions, analysts say. Gazproms rising exports to Asia will not offset the lost income. The impact on Russia will be meaningful as Gazprom is one of the nations largest companies by revenue, employees, and capital expenditures, and is a major contributor to the federal budget. 'Off The Boil' Gazprom is not just losing a commercial opportunity -- and taxes for the state -- but also actively destroying its own market, Nadia Kazakova, an analyst at the U.K.-based Renaissance Energy Advisors, told RFE/RL. Gas prices in Europe will eventually come off the boil but Gazprom will never recover its market share, she said. In Russias long-term planning for Gazprom, it was never supposed to be Europe or Asia -- it was supposed to be both, with eastward exports serving as a growth driver for the company and the country. Gazprom possesses the world's largest reserves of natural gas, enough to supply both continents with large quantities of the fuel for decades. Before the February invasion of Ukraine, Gazprom had been Europes biggest gas supplier, accounting for about one-third of the continents needs. Putin apparently did not expect that to change. He was clearly confident of a quick and decisive victory in Ukraine -- one that would subordinate Kyiv to the Kremlin -- and analysts say he apparently believed the West would grudgingly accept that outcome, with the United States and the EU imposing limited sanctions as they did after Moscows seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. Instead, the European Union has vowed to sharply cut imports of Russian energy, including gas, to deprive Moscow of revenue for its military campaign -- albeit gradually, at a pace aimed to ease the pain for EU countries and their citizens. Putin has tried to turn the tables on the EU by reducing gas flows to the bloc at a faster pace, helping drive prices to record highs and sparking fears that Russia might completely halt exports this winter. Natural gas is largely used for heating homes and buildings in winter, in industrial processes, and for generating power. Right now, Russia [is] calling the shots, said Karolina Siemieniuk, a gas analyst at the Norway-based research firm Rystad Energy, in a July 26 note. 'Russias Game Plan' Kazakova said she does not expect Putin to completely cut off gas exports to Europe. Russias game plan is to keep exports to Europe flowing at a level which allows the government to collect sufficient revenues and taxes but potentially keeps Germanys gas market short, she said. Germany had been the largest importer of Russian gas in Europe. Based on current prices and volumes, Kazakova expects Gazprom to earn $79 billion in European export revenue this year and $67 billion next year, far surpassing the record $51 billion it received in 2021. Sergei Vakulenko, a Bonn-based independent energy analyst, said in a post that some Russian officials may be betting that a peace deal on Ukraine will include an agreement with the West on long-term Russian gas supplies and forgiveness of legal claims stemming from cutoffs. Such a wager on the Kremlins part would be a colossal miscalculation, Ed Chow, an energy analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told RFE/RL. Even if the war in Ukraine were to end immediately, irreparable damage has been done to the decades-old symbiotic gas relationship between Europe and Russia, he said. After building a reputation as a reliable gas supplier for more than 50 years, Russia has thrown it out the window in five months, Chow said. Moscow never cut off its gas supply to Western Europe for political gain during the Cold War. Rather, it served as a bridge between the two camps, analysts said. Bread And Butter European sales have been Gazproms bread and butter over the decades, accounting for around 70 percent of the companys gas revenue and 40 percent of total revenue. Gazprom, which sells more gas by volume domestically than it sells to Europe, also generates revenue from oil and power production. European sales enabled Gazprom to overcome the turbulent 1990s, when Russia was transitioning to a market economy and many households and companies could not -- or would not -- pay for gas. Grasping the potential power of Gazproms influence at home and abroad, Putin quickly took steps to consolidate his control over the company after first taking office in 2000. In May 2001, a year after his inauguration, Putin ousted the companys long-serving chief, Rem Vyakhirev, and installed Aleksei Miller, a loyalist from his hometown of St. Petersburg. Miller runs the company to this day. Putin early on defeated bids by powerful business interests to break up Gazprom and end its monopoly on pipeline exports. He also began using it as a foreign policy tool -- mainly, at first, in scraps with other former Soviet republics. 'Last Hurrah' Looking to the future, Europes gradual shift toward alternative sources of energy to combat climate change meant that Russias revenue from fossil fuels sales to the continent would eventually decline. But the Kremlin could have still expected two more decades of abundant last hurrah oil and gas revenue, Thane Gustafson, a professor at Georgetown University who has written several books on Russias energy industry, said in a recent post. The invasion will likely shorten that period of respite, he said. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that Gazproms pipeline exports to Europe will fall to about 80 bcm by 2025 -- about 40 percent of the peak reached in 2018. The EU, which accounts for the lions share of Europes gas demand, has said it will aim to end Russian gas imports by 2027 though some analysts say that could be hard to achieve. James Henderson, chairman of the gas research program at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said that Europe does not need to completely halt Russian gas to end Kremlin influence over the sector. He said that reducing Russias share of the European gas market to less than 10 percent, or less than 50 bcm annually, would essentially end Moscows sway if those exports were spread around many nations. 'Second-Best' As Gazprom loses its dominant position in Europe, it is seeking to widen its footprint in Asia, especially in the fast-growing gas market of China -- a shift that coincides with Moscows sharpening geopolitical turn toward Beijing amid increasing isolation from the West due to anger and dismay over its unprovoked war on Ukraine. Russia could begin exporting additional volumes of natural gas to China through a new pipeline by as early as 2027 -- just when the EU aims to end imports -- if the two sides can reach a deal, said Henderson. Moscow and Beijing have been in talks for years over Power of Siberia 2, which would carry up to 50 bcm of natural gas to China from fields on Yamal, the peninsula in northwestern Siberia that supplies Europe with fuel. Russia is currently exporting gas to China through Power of Siberia 1 from fields in Eastern Siberia. That pipeline is expected to reach its maximum capacity of 38 bcm in 2024. Russias loss of the European market makes a deal with China more urgent and thus weakens the Kremlins negotiating position, Chow said. It is a case of deja vu. The Kremlin was desperate to sign a deal with Beijing for Power of Siberia 1 after the West first slapped sanctions on Russia in 2014 following the occupation and takeover of Crimea. China was able to clinch an agreement at a very attractive price, Chow said. Kazakova, the U.K.-based analyst, estimated that China in July paid about a quarter of what Europeans paid for Gazproms pipeline gas. Russia is simply late to the Asian energy market and will never achieve the dominant position it had in Europe, Nikos Tsafos, the chief energy adviser to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and a former analyst at CSIS said in a May note. In volume terms, Asia could maybe match Europe one day as a market for Russian gas, but as a source of income and geopolitical heft, Asia will be a second-best alternative. Tax police in Italy have seized assets worth more than 141 million euros ($144 million) said to belong to an architect who designed a luxury estate dubbed "Putin's Palace" by opponents of the Russian president. Tax authorities in Brescia in northern Italy said in a statement on August 3 that they had seized the assets from a "well-known professional," saying he failed to pay taxes from 2013 to 2019. Italian media and Reuters said the assets belonged to Lanfranco Cirillo. The assets include a helicopter, luxury properties, cash, jewels, and important works of art, according to the tax police. The artworks include paintings by Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Cezanne, according to the Italian newspaper la Reppublica. WATCH: A video alleging that a secret palace used by Russian President Vladimir Putin comes stuffed with over-the-top amenities like a strip club and an $800 toilet brush has gained tens of millions of views on YouTube. The video was made by opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and posted by his supporters after his detention. A lawyer for Cirillo confirmed that his client's assets had been seized but said he was not guilty of any wrongdoing regarding Italian taxes. "The architect, who is in Moscow, is very disappointed by the fact that having bought some prestigious properties and works of art in Italy and having provided for his wife and daughter are used to argue that he faked his move abroad," lawyer Stefano Lojacono said in a statement quoted by Reuters. Lojacono said Cirillo had been based in Russia for many years and had been granted Russian citizenship in 2014. He has been the architect for palaces and villas for dozens of Russian oligarchs. But he is best known as the architect who designed a grand estate that was the subject of an investigation by opposition politician Aleksei Navalnys Anti-Corruption Campaign (FBK). An online video expose released by the FBK in 2021 claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was its ultimate owner. Putin has denied any link to the luxury property, which overlooks the exclusive Gelendzhik Bay region of the Black Sea from Cape Idokopas. It was built between 2005 and 2010, and the FBK investigation alleges the luxurious estate cost more than $1 billion to build. The palace is 17,691 square meters and is said to include a home theater, a lobby with a bar, a hookah bar, a casino, and a swimming pool. Arkady Rotenberg, a childhood friend of Putin and one of Russia's wealthiest oligarchs, said in an interview in January 2021 that he owns the mansion. Rotenberg said he acquired it "several years ago" without offering specifics and said he planned to turn it into an apartment-hotel facility. With reporting by Reuters and la Reppublica MOSCOW -- A new charge has been brought against jailed Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza stemming from his role in organizing an event to support political prisoners in Russia. Kara-Murza's lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, said on August 4 that his client had been charged with carrying out activities of an undesirable organization. The noted Kremlin-critic was already in jail after he was arrested in April for allegedly spreading false information about the Russian Army's activities in Ukraine. According to Prokhorov, Kara-Murza is accused of holding a conference in Moscow in October to support political prisoners in Russia that was sponsored by the foreign-based Free Russia Foundation. That group has been deemed "undesirable" in the country. The "undesirable organization" law, adopted in 2015, was part of a series of regulations pushed by the Kremlin that squeezed many nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations which received funding from foreign sources -- mainly from Europe and the United States. Russian lawmakers have since dramatically widened the scope of the law, including barring Russian nationals and organizations anywhere in the world from taking part in activities of such "undesirable" groups. Russia's Investigative Committee has been conducting an initial probe into allegations that Kara-Murza distributed false information about the army while speaking to lawmakers in the U.S. state of Arizona. Kara-Murza has rejected the charge, calling it politically motivated. His arrest came amid a mounting crackdown by Russian authorities on opposition figures and any dissent to the ongoing war in Ukraine, which Moscow launched against its neighbor on February 24. In early March, President Vladimir Putin signed a law that calls for lengthy prison terms for distributing "deliberately false information" about Russian military operations. The law envisages sentences of up to 10 years in prison for individuals convicted of an offense, while the penalty for the distribution of "deliberately false information" about the Russian Army that leads to "serious consequences" is 15 years in prison. It also makes it illegal "to make calls against the use of Russian troops to protect the interests of Russia" or "for discrediting such use" with a possible penalty of up to three years in prison. The same provision applies to calls for sanctions against Russia. A close associate of slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza is best known for falling deathly ill on two separate occasions in Moscow -- in 2015 and 2017-- with symptoms consistent with poisoning. Tissue samples smuggled out of Russia by his relatives were turned over to the FBI, which investigated his case as one of "intentional poisoning." U.S. government laboratories also conducted extensive tests on the samples, but documents released by the Justice Department suggest they were unable to reach a conclusive finding. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Russia must not be permitted to win in the war it launched against Ukraine, which has given rise to the most dangerous moment for Europe since World War II. Speaking in Norway on August 4, Stoltenberg said the alliance and its member countries may have to continue to support Ukraine with arms and other assistance for a long time in order to keep Russia from succeeding after it launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's ongoing invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here. "It's in our interest that this type of aggressive policy does not succeed," Stoltenberg said. "This is the most dangerous situation in Europe since World War II," he said, adding, "what happens in Ukraine is terrible but it would be much worse if there was a war between Russia and NATO." Stoltenberg then reaffirmed the alliance's resolve to defend all its 30 member countries. "If (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin even thinks of doing something similar to a NATO country as he has done to Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine, then all of NATO will be involved immediately," Stoltenberg said. The war has led previously nonaligned Finland and Sweden to seek NATO membership, with the request so far ratified by 23 of the 30 member states, including the United States. "This is not just an attack on Ukraine, an independent democratic nation with more than 40 million people, it's also an attack on our values and the world order we want," the NATO chief said of the war. Following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, the two traditionally neutral Nordic countries, Finland, which shares a border of more than 1,000 kilometers with Russia, and Sweden applied to join NATO as soon as possible. Under the fast-track admission process, the U.S. Senate voted 95-1 in favor of the two countries' membership on August 3, making the United States the 23rd of the 30 NATO countries to formally endorse the move so far, after Italy approved it earlier this week. According to a NATO list, seven member countries have yet to formally agree: the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, and Turkey. Only Turkey has raised a challenge, demanding the intensification of work on extraditing dozens of government opponents it labels "terrorists" from both countries in exchange for its support. Turkey has said that a special committee would meet Finnish and Swedish officials this month to assess whether the two nations are complying with its conditions. With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and AP Another native of Tajikistan's restive Gorno-Badakhshan Region (GBAO) has reportedly gone missing in Moscow and may have forcibly been taken to Tajikistan where he could face illegal incarceration and an arbitrary trial. Relatives of Ruslan Pulodbekov told RFE/RL on August 3 that he went incommunicado after he was briefly detained by immigration police in the Russian capital on July 29, the same day two other GBAO natives -- who are now Russian citizens -- went missing from a Moscow airport before emerging later in a video on a YouTube channel saying that they had "decided to return to Tajikistan" by their "own will." Pulodbekov's relatives told RFE/RL that he was most likely taken into Tajik custody over his close ties with Amriddin Alovatshoev, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison in Dushanbe in April, four months after he was arrested in Russia and later showed up in custody in Tajikistan. Alovatshoev, known as an informal leader of GBAO youth in Russia, was found guilty of hostage-taking, illegally depriving others of their freedom, and "other crimes," charges his relatives call trumped-up. Deep tensions between the Tajik government and residents of the volatile GBAO have simmered since a five-year civil war broke out shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Protests are rare in the tightly controlled nation of 9.5 million where President Emomali Rahmon has ruled with an iron fist for nearly three decades. The latest crackdown on activists in GBAO followed protests initially sparked in mid-May by anger over the lack of an investigation into the 2021 death of an activist while in police custody and the refusal by regional authorities to consider the resignation of regional Governor Alisher Mirzonabot and Khorugh Mayor Rizo Nazarzoda. The rallies intensified after one of the protesters, 29-year-old Zamir Nazrishoev, was killed by police on May 16, prompting the authorities to launch what they called a "counterterrorist operation." The escalating violence in the region has sparked a call for restraint from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Western diplomatic missions in Tajikistan, and human rights groups. Gordo-Badakhshan, a linguistically and ethnically distinct region, has been home to rebels who opposed government forces during the conflict in the 1990s. While it occupies almost half of the country's territory, its population is a mere 250,000. The region's mountainous terrain makes travel difficult, while its economy suffers from unemployment, difficult living conditions, and high food prices. Ukraine said Moscow was putting together an attack force aimed at President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's hometown of Kryvyi Rih, as Russia bombarded several parts of Ukraine, causing casualties and damage. Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the eastern Donetsk region, said on Telegram that three civilians had been killed in Bakhmut, Maryinka, and Shevchenko and five wounded in the past 24 hours. Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's ongoing invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here. The governor of the Sumy region on the border with Russia, Dmytro Zhyvytsky, said three towns had been shelled by Russian forces on August 3, with a total of 55 missiles fired. There were no injuries, but homes and commercial premises were damaged. Zhyvytsky said eight artillery shells hit residential parts of the Krasnopylska community. The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in its update on August 4 that Russia had begun creating a strike group in the Kryvyi Rih direction and that it could be preparing new offensive operations in southern Ukraine. The steel-producing city of Kryvyi Rih, where Zelenskiy grew up, lies around 50 kilometers from the southern front line. Mayor Yevhen Yevtushenko of Nikopol, to the west of Zaporizhzhya in central Ukraine, said on his Telegram channel that his city had been shelled overnight and that a woman was wounded. The Russian military also shelled the Kryvorizky district of the Dnipropetrovsk region, the head of the regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko, reported, adding that the Russians used Hrad rockets. Britain's Ministry of Defense said in its daily intelligence bulletin that Ukraine continued to hit Russian military targets with missile and artillery strikes targeted at strongholds, personnel clusters, logistical support bases, and ammunition depots throughout the front line. British intelligence said that Ukraine's tactic is "highly likely" to damage the Russian military's logistical resupply and put pressure on combat support elements. The bulletin said that Russian forces have "almost certainly" installed radar reflectors in the water near the Antonivskiy Bridge across the Dnieper that was damaged by Ukrainian rockets fired from U.S.-supplied HIMARS rocket launchers. The reflectors are meant to hide the bridge from possible future strikes, British intelligence suggested. "This highlights the threat Russia feels from the increased range and precision of Western-supplied systems," the bulletin said. Presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said the whole point of the Russian offensive in the east was to force Ukraine to divert troops from the area that is truly a danger -- Zaporizhzhya. Russia in March was accused of firing shells dangerously close to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, as its forces took it over in the first weeks of the invasion. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has accused Moscow of using Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant as a "nuclear shield" in attacks on Ukrainian forces. Russia denies it targets civilians, but many towns and cities have been destroyed and thousands killed since the start of the invasion in late February. Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russian forces of war crimes. With reporting by Reuters, AP, AFP, dpa, CNN, and BBC By Jun Sheng Shortly after US President Joe Biden reiterated his administrations commitment to the one-China policy on Taiwan has not and will not change, and the US does not support Taiwan independence separatist forces, some American politicians have once again played the Taiwan card, fully exposing their sinister intentions of keeping the China-US relations tense, the situation across the Taiwan Strait turbulent, and the global situation chaotic. On August 2, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Chinas Taiwan region. The extremely vicious act with hidden evil intentions is a serious violation of the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-US joint communiques, seriously undermined the China-US mutual trust and bilateral relations, and severely threatened peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese government and military have voiced firm opposition to the act, and the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) has engaged in organizing relevant forces to launch a series of targeted military operations to counter it. The history of the Taiwan question has been transparently clear, that is, the fact and current situation that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China is absolutely clear. The three China-US joint communiques are political commitments made by both China and the US, and the one-China principle serves as the political foundation of China-US relations. Some US officials have stated on multiple occasions that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; it does not aim to change Chinas system; the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; the US does not support Taiwan independence; and it has no intention to seek a conflict with China. However, what the world has seen is that some US politicians are inconsistent in their words and deeds, keeping concocting wrong remarks and doing despicable deeds, which have repeatedly affected the relationship between the two countries and the two militaries. Pelosis Taiwan visit this time is another example to show some American politicians have stubbornly clung to the policy of containing China with Taiwan. China firmly opposes any official contacts and military ties between the US and China's Taiwan region, firmly opposes the US using the Taiwan question to implement the policy of containing China with Taiwan, and firmly opposes Taiwan relying on the US and rejecting reunification by force. This time, the US and Taiwan region colluded and provoked first, and Chinas legitimate defense came after. The root cause of the current tension across the Taiwan Strait lies in the US, for which the US should and must take full responsibility. If the US is bent on going down the wrong path, China will not to sit idly by and will take strong measures to counterattack, and any targeted military operation taken will be justified and necessary. For a long time, playing the Taiwan card has been a usual tactic used by some American politicians. This is especially true in recent years. The US has staged various farces by stepping up its political and military provocations against China by means of arms sales to Taiwan, congressmens visits to Taiwan, military aircraft landing in Taiwan, and passage of the US warships through the Taiwan Strait. In this regard, Taiwans Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities have been delighted and cant help but be eager to try, dreaming of seek independence by relying on the US, and willing to be a pawn of the US in attacking or containing China. The Taiwan question concerns Chinas core interests and the national sentiments of all Chinese people, including Taiwan compatriots. No one cares more about the safety and well-being of Taiwan compatriots than the Chinese central government. As for those US anti-China politicians full of crap during the COVID-19 epidemic, they can even ignore the life and death of their own people. It is hard to imagine that they will really care about the safety of Taiwanese people who have always been played as cards. All their tricks will only push Taiwan compatriots into a more dangerous situation. In this regard, we would like to warn the anti-China politicians in the US and Taiwans DPP authorities that the basic fact that both sides of the strait belong to one China and that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory has never changed and will not change. China firmly opposes Taiwan independence separatist forces and external forces' interference, and will never leave any space for Taiwan independence separatist forces in any form. The stance of the Chinese government and Chinese people on the Taiwan question has been consistent, and it is the firm will of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people to resolutely safeguard Chinas national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Public opinion cannot be violated. Those who play with fire are bound to get burned. The PLA will not tolerate any Taiwan independence separatist activity or interference of external forces, for which they are sure to resolutely take countermeasures. Action is the most powerful language. No matter how the situation changes, no matter what storms it encounters, the Chinese military has a firm will, full confidence, and sufficient ability to thwart any form of external interference and Taiwan independence separatist activities, and will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity. Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt. Because Ceres is small, there was not enough gravitational energy when it formed to heat the interior. Virginia Tech Professor Scott King and colleagues investigated whether heat generated by the decay of radiogenic elements can power the tectonism, ice-volcanism, and evidence for past hydrothermal activity that have been documented by NASAs Dawn mission. Using computer modeling, they found a planet-scale asymmetric instability (one hemisphere up, one hemisphere down) forms as a small spherical body heats due to the decay of radiogenic elements within the interior. They showed that this planet-scale instability can explain many puzzling features on Ceres, including the high topographic plateau, fracture zones, and the absence of large craters. NASAs Dawn mission was the first spacecraft to visit Ceres, the largest asteroid-belt object with a radius of approximately 470 km (292 miles). Ceres has many features commonly associated with active, icy bodies including: hydrothermal, cryovolcanic, and tectonic features. The dwarf planet likely formed between 3 and 5 million years after the formation of calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions the oldest solids that formed in the Solar System and partially differentiated into a body with a rocky interior and crust composed of rock, salts, clathrates, water ice, and possibly organic rich material. The detection of material rich in sodium carbonate and ammonium salts at multiple sites on Ceres surface suggests that an ocean may have been present in the uppermost 10s of kilometers. For a long time, our view of Ceres was fuzzy, said lead author Professor Scott King, a geoscientist in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. Professor King and his colleagues wanted to know how a body as small as Ceres could generate the heat needed to power that kind of geological activity and account for the surface features picked up by Dawn. Through modeling, they found that the decay of radioactive elements within Ceres interior could keep it active. The collision between objects that form a planet creates that initial heat. Ceres, by contrast, never got big enough to become a planet and generate heat the same way, Professor King said. To learn how it could still generate enough heat to power geologic activity, the researchers used theories and computational tools previously applied to bigger planets to study Ceres interior, and they looked for evidence that could support their models in the Dawn data. Their model of the dwarf planets interior showed a unique sequence: Ceres started out cold and heated up because of the decay of radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium which was alone enough to power its activity until the interior became unstable. What I would see in the model is, all of a sudden, one part of the interior would start heating up and would be moving upward and then the other part would be moving downward, Professor King said. That instability could explain some of the surface features that had formed on Ceres, as revealed by the Dawn mission. The large plateau had formed on only one side of Ceres with nothing on the other side, and the fractures were clustered in a single location around it. The concentration of features in one hemisphere signaled to the team that instability had occurred and had left a visible impact. It turned out that you could show in the model that where one hemisphere had this instability that was rising up, it would cause extension at the surface, and it was consistent with these patterns of fractures, Professor King said. Based on the teams model, Ceres didnt follow a planets typical pattern of hot first and cool second, with its own pattern of cool, hot, and cool again. What weve shown in this paper is that radiogenic heating all on its own is enough to create interesting geology, Professor King said. The authors see similarities to Ceres in Uranus moons Ariel, Miranda, and Titania and Saturns moons Rhea, Dione, and Tethys. With additional improvements to the model, they look forward to exploring their interiors as well. Some of these moons are not too different in size from Ceres. I think applying the model would be really exciting, Professor King said. The teams work was published in the journal AGU Advances. _____ Scott D. King et al. Ceres Broad-Scale Surface Geomorphology Largely Due To Asymmetric Internal Convection. AGU Advances, published online May 17, 2022; doi: 10.1029/2021AV000571 UPDATE: Chesa Boudin is sending out fundraising emails, fueling speculation over whether hell run again. Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin will not run for his former job this year, saying he will instead take time with his family after more than three years of nearly non-stop campaigning in a Twitter thread posted Thursday. Boudin previously said he had not ruled out running for his former job, after his recall from office in June. The announcement comes less than a month after the swearing-in of Boudins replacement, Brooke Jenkins, who was appointed to the role by Mayor London Breed. Jenkins, who worked under Boudin until she quit to help lead the recall effort against him, has announced her intent to run in the November special election. Though Boudin had never committed to running in November, his presence loomed large for both supporters and critics who braced for a heated battle between him and Jenkins. His decision to bow out will reshape the next D.A.s race and raises the question of who Boudins supporters will back. In a 14-tweet thread, Boudin said over the past few weeks he had taken stock of the burden that campaigning has had on his family, adding that while he was committed to criminal justice reform, Im also committed to my family. My son is on the verge of taking his first step and speaking his first word. My wifes research on multiple sclerosis at UCSF deserves the same support she has offered my work. My elderly father just came home from prison after more than 40 years, Boudin said. My mother died in May and I have not had time to clean out her apartment or plan her memorial or even mourn her death. Boudin went on to list his proudest accomplishments his team achieved during his two and a half years in office, including an expansion of victims services, resentencing work, a worker protection unit and their historic strides in police accountability. Boudin could go after the D.A. post again in the next regular election, in November 2023. He has already filed paperwork with the city if he chooses to run next year. Boudins tweets made no mention of whether he would run again in 2023. Both Boudin and Jenkins declined to be interviewed Thursday. Boudins absence clears the path for other contenders to challenge Jenkins in the fast-paced run-up to this falls election. He leaves up for grabs a large and impassioned swath of supporters, upset about both the recall and the current direction of the office and ready to throw their weight against Jenkins. Joe Alioto Veronese, a civil rights attorney and son of former San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto, announced his candidacy months before Boudins recall election. In previous interviews, Alioto Veronese has touted his experience in law enforcement and billed himself as a criminal justice reform advocate who can work well with the citys Police Department. Alioto Veronese said Boudins supporters will find similarities in his reform goals. When it comes down to it, 45% of the people voted to keep him, Alioto Veronese said in a Thursday interview, referring to the outcome of the Boudin recall. Thats because theres a large population ... of people that believe in criminal justice reform. I have been doing criminal justice reform since 2004, when I was a police commissioner here in San Francisco. Aside from Jenkins and Alioto Veronese, only one other candidate, Maurice Chenier, has declared their intention to run in November, according to the San Francisco Elections website. Chenier could not be reached for comment. Other moderates who were on Breeds short list for the district attorney appointment last month, including veteran prosecutor Nancy Tung and San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani, are not expected to run. Jenkins recently named Tung chief of special prosecutions, a top leadership position in her administration. Rachel Marshall, who served as communications director and policy adviser for Boudin until she was fired by Jenkins last month, said Boudins decision came as a disappointment to his supporters. I know that so many of us who are committed to this movement still believe in him and our mission and want to continue, Marshall said. 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. This week, in her first major policy announcement since taking office, Jenkins said she would be revoking the plea offers extended to at least 30 defendants accused of selling drugs and would seek harsher penalties against certain offenders. The announcements were swiftly cheered by many of the citys moderates who believed Boudin was too soft on drug offenders but blasted by progressives as reminiscent of the nations failed policies in the war on drugs. The only thing that has changed since Jenkins took over, when it comes to crime, is that the D.A. is no longer blamed for what happens, Marshall said Thursday. Alioto Veronese said many of his proposed policies will appeal to the citys progressives, including the elimination of civil assessments and no-knock warrants and doing away with cash bail in a way that doesnt pull the system apart. I think the D.A.s office needs to have one focus, and thats fighting crime in San Francisco, he said. The D.A. shouldnt be focused on ribbon-cutting ceremonies, protecting the mayor or conducting social experiments. Alioto Veronese said he voted in support of Boudins recall but was not a part of the Yes on H campaign. He said that while agrees with many of Boudins reform philosophies, Alioto Veronese said he took issue with how the former D.A. went about executing them. Potential candidates have until Aug. 12 to file their nomination petitions. Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 2 1 of 2 Jessica Christian/The Chronicle Show More Show Less 2 of 2 DNY59/Getty Image Show More Show Less A former Richmond police officer is being charged with felony assault in connection with an on-duty incident, the Contra Costa District Attorneys Office said Wednesday. Eric Smith Jr., 28, faces one count of felony assault with a deadly weapon, with enhancements for inflicting great bodily injury and for the use of a deadly and dangerous weapon. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Anyone seeking a quick resolution to the two-person encampment in Fairfaxs Peri Park was forced to confront the complex realities of homelessness in Marin County at a city council meeting Wednesday night. The impetus for the meeting was a widely circulated petition that urged city officials to address concerns regarding a small homeless encampment located near a creek that separates a childrens playground from other open space. More than 500 people signed the petition, which stated that residents want their quiet place back. Residents made claims about erratic behavior by encampment members, alleged drug use, and the potential for contamination issues in the nearby Fairfax Creek if the individuals were using the creek as a toilet. Perhaps to the chagrin of some residents who wanted quick answers to the specifics at Peri Park, Fairfax and Marin County officials took the opportunity instead to urge residents to be more compassionate. It is disturbing to me to be talking about two individuals behind their backs, said Fairfax City Council Member Renee Goddard. For a community that prides (itself) on being inclusive, I dont feel like many of our underserved residents feel welcome. Throughout the meeting, officials made a concerted effort to shift the discussion away from Peri Park and toward the hurdles the county is facing when it comes to homelessness overall in Marin County. Ethan Swope/The Chronicle Homelessness across the county increased by 8.4% from 2019 to 2022, said Ashley Hart McIntyre, the countys homelessness policy analyst. There are still about 500 unhoused people across the county waiting for permanent supportive housing all of whom are vulnerable, have disabilities and have long histories of homelessness. But it can take years for a single unhoused person to qualify for housing, because of that housings short supply, McIntyre said. Other factors have had an impact on homelessness, she said, but in particular to its visibility, such as changes in federal law that limit authorities from clearing encampments, fewer beds in shelters and fears people may have about staying indoors because of the pandemic. Regarding concerns about contamination in the nearby Fairfax Creek, residents also heard from Howard Bunce, an engineering assistant with the countys stormwater pollution prevention program. Its almost without exception that the water quality in urban creeks deteriorates the further down through the watersheds it runs, said Bunce. It is not just going to be the unhoused who ... cause pathogens in the creeks. Public comment was largely even-tempered. Most of us are just a paycheck or two away from the streets ourselves, said Mimi Newton, adding that as a young person, she spent time in San Francisco living on the streets. 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. Other residents said that while they had less than favorable interactions with the residents at Peri Park, they were pleased to see that city and county officials were aware of the issue, even if immediate changes werent going to be made. Earlier in the week at Peri Park, families at the playground seemed to echo in part what city council officials would say the following day. They truly just keep to themselves and dont bother anybody, said Fairfax resident Janelle Loiselle, who was at the playground with husband and their two toddlers and appeared astonished that a petition had even been issued, let alone that hundreds of people had signed it. Watching her granddaughter at the playground, Wendy Arthurs that she had personally never had a problem with the encampment but that she would like to see Fairfax put up a portable toilet and handwashing station nearby as a solution for the interim. Its not illegal to be homeless, and in this county a lot of people cant afford a place, said Arthurs, who has lived in the county since 1986. Annie Vainshtein (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avainshtein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annievain Two months after taking office in 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on executions in California, a bold action in a state whose voters have approved the death penalty four times since 1972. But because Newsom has yet to seek clemency for any of the states condemned inmates currently 687 they could again face execution once he leaves office. Some states allow governors to commute sentences on their own, such as the 167 death sentences that Illinois Gov. George Ryan reduced to life in prison, or to 40 years in some cases, as he was leaving office in 2003. But since 1879, Californias Constitution has required the governor to gain approval from a majority of the state Supreme Courts justices before granting clemency to anyone with felony convictions in two or more cases, a category that includes most, perhaps all, of the states Death Row inmates. The court set no public criteria for considering clemency until 2018, when the seven justices announced that they would deny a governors request only if it represented an abuse of (clemency) power, a seemingly permissive standard. But shortly afterward, without explanation, the court denied 10 clemency applications by Gov. Jerry Brown, whose previous requests had all been approved. The court has not rejected any such requests from Newsom, but his, like Browns, have all been in non-capital cases. So why hasnt the Democratic governor, an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, asked the court for permission to commute any death sentences? Newsom wont say. An inquiry to his office produced a statement saying the governor believes the death penalty has discriminated against people who are mentally ill, Black, brown, and low-income, and has wasted billions in taxpayer dollars while providing no public safety benefit, but not addressing clemency. Death penalty advocate Kent Scheidegger says its just politics. Scheidegger is legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and co-author of Proposition 66, an initiative aimed at speeding up executions that state voters narrowly approved in 2016. The state Supreme Court upheld much of Prop. 66, including restrictions on inmate appeals, but overturned a provision that would have required it to decide all death penalty appeals within five years, more than twice as fast as its current pace. I fully expect Newsom to clear-cut justice in the capital cases to the maximum extent he can before he leaves office, Scheidegger said. I suspect his timing is purely political, for maximum advantage and minimum disadvantage. Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender who teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, was less critical but gave a similar assessment. I think Newsom believes he has struck the perfect balance: He doesnt have to execute anybody, but he also doesnt have to take responsibility for removing any condemned from Death Row, Kennedy said. He noted that President Biden has likewise declared a moratorium on federal executions, while his Justice Department continues to defend death sentences in court. But Newsom has already taken, and survived, political heat on the issue, which Republican opponents raised in their unsuccessful campaign to recall him last year. Earlier, he was among the few prominent political figures to support state ballot initiatives to repeal the death penalty, which fell short by 2 percentage points in 2012 and by 3 percentage points in 2016. And he has regularly noted racial disparities in a state where 35% of Death Row inmates are Black, compared with 12.4% of the overall population, and nearly 26% are Latino, compared with 18.7% of the population. I dont think theres any political rationale, said John Donohue, a Stanford law professor. He said Newsom is not generally shy about doing what he thinks is right, with maybe a political blowback. Michael Romano directs Stanford Law Schools Three Strikes Project, which represents defendants with past felony convictions, and was appointed by Newsom as chair of the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, which has called for repeal of the states death penalty. Romano said he has not spoken with Newsom about clemency but sees no political motive. He already owns the mantle of wanting to eliminate the death penalty. ... I dont think going the extra step of seeking clemency loses any votes, Romano said. But he said the courts review process, which considers the circumstances of each case and recommendations from the state parole board, may not be well-suited for commutation of large numbers of death sentences. Unlike Illinois, whose law allowed its governor to grant blanket commutations, California requires a case-by-case analysis, Romano said. Most likely, he said, the court would approve some and not others. It wouldnt achieve the goal of ending the death penalty or stop county prosecutors from seeking new death sentences. The states high court, with a 5-2 majority of Democratic appointees, still upholds most of the death sentences it considers. California has not executed anyone since 2006, when a federal judge ruled that deficiencies in the states prison staff training, equipment and procedures for lethal injections had created an undue risk of botched and agonizing executions. But the states Death Row population, which was 737 when Newsom declared his moratorium in 2019, is gradually declining, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. The main reason is deaths of aging prisoners, worsened by a bungled inmate transfer that led to an outbreak of COVID-19 in San Quentin. But a few prosecutors have also exercised their authority to reduce some death sentences in their counties to life in prison, including 10 by Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, who now probably faces a recall election. Further reductions could result from pending legislation, such as AB2657 by Assembly Member Mark Stone, D-Santa Cruz, which would rescind the death sentence of any inmate who is found to be incurably mentally incompetent. Because of those factors, and Newsoms moratorium on executions, the need to seek clemency in capital cases is less immediate, Dunham said. But he said such requests would also be more difficult than ordinary clemency petitions, which typically highlight a defendants rehabilitation in prison or questions about their original conviction and sentence in capital cases, the governor would essentially be arguing that the death penalty itself is unfair. And as Romano observed, the court can take months to act on a clemency request in a non-capital case. Can you imagine if they had to evaluate 600 to 700 death penalty cases? he said. As a practical matter we cannot end the death penalty through clemency in California. The only other way is at the ballot box, since voters amended the state Constitution in 1972 to expressly authorize capital punishment. Assembly Member Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, whose district includes San Quentin and its execution chamber, introduced a proposed constitutional amendment, ACA2, to abolish the death penalty in December 2020. Since then, it has sat in its first committee without a hearing. Advocates are very fearful of its being on the ballot, and the governor I believe (is) as well, Levine said in an interview. It would be a real rejection of Newsoms moratorium if the electorate were to vote against a repeal. But although the measure will not be on the November ballot, Levine said, he hopes to win two-thirds approval from fellow lawmakers to qualify it for November 2024. With a presidential election and a strong turnout, and I believe with a governor and a president opposed to the death penalty, he said, that is strong leadership to help bring them out to end the death penalty once and for all. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko California businesses that discriminate against a customer can be sued for penalties of at least $4,000 and damages of as much as three times the harm they inflicted. But the same penalties do not apply to public schools that violate their students rights, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday in the case of a disabled student from Contra Costa County. The 1959 California law, the Unruh Act, applies to civil rights violations by business establishments. And public schools, as governmental entities engaged in the provision of a free and public education, are not business establishments within the meaning of the act, Justice Joshua Groban wrote in the 7-0 decision. Students can still sue schools under other discrimination laws. But those laws, unlike the Unruh Act, provide only actual damages for economic loss and emotional distress, with no punitive damages for extreme violations, and do not require schools to pay attorneys fees of students whose rights they violated. The court said the Legislature could amend the Unruh Act to cover schools and other government agencies. But for now, the ruling is a demolition of civil rights, said Micha Star Liberty, a lawyer for the disabled student and his family. Its not just students. The opinion applies to all governmental entities unless they are expressly covered by laws allowing suits for additional damages, Liberty said. Trans children, religion, race, political affiliation, pregnancy rights ... all categories that we in California hold dear and want to protect against bias. Particularly for the disabled, these cases are difficult to litigate and expensive, meaning victims will find their access to justice limited without the enhanced remedies and attorney fees provided for by the Unruh Act, said Charles DellArio, another attorney for the student and his family. According to a court filing, about 750,000 public school students in California, one-eighth of the states total, have one or more disabilities. Cody Lee Saal, a lawyer for the school district, said the ruling benefits all public schools and their students. While discrimination is abhorrent, she said in a statement, public schools are severely underfunded and this decision helps preserve desperately needed funding for the benefit of all students. The ruling will not directly affect the student, identified as Brennon B., who settled his case against the West Contra Costa Unified School District for $3.725 million, according to his lawyers. Both sides agreed to present arguments to higher courts after the settlement in order to resolve the issue for future cases. According to his lawsuit, Brennon had been diagnosed as severely autistic and was a 14-year-old special education student at De Anza High School in Richmond in 2012 when he was sexually assaulted by another mentally disabled student in a restroom. Over the next three years, the suit said, Brennon was assaulted numerous times, including four times by a school district employee who was later criminally prosecuted. After Brennons initial complaints, the suit said, the school agreed to assign a supervisor to accompany him to the restroom and on the school bus but failed to do so, and he was assaulted again. The Unruh Act, written by future Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, said the disabled and other protected groups were entitled to equal treatment and services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever. The law applies to private schools, and most federal courts have ruled that its broad wording also covers public schools. 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. But the state Supreme Court, the final authority on the meaning of California law, disagreed. The everyday meaning of business establishments, even with the expansive definition of every kind whatsoever, is commercial entities, those whose principal mission is the transactional sale of goods or services, Groban said. A school district provides services to the public, he said, but not in a commercial, transactional manner. He noted that the first draft of the law had expressly allowed suits against public schools, but that provision was removed before final passage. Lawmakers amended the Unruh Act in 1992 to specify that it also covered any violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. That federal law applies to violations by government agencies as well as businesses, but the court said Thursday a more plausible interpretation of the 1992 amendment was that it extended the Unruh Act to cover any violation of the ADA by a business establishment, not a school or other government entity. Any other interpretation, Groban said, would amount to a monumental change in the state law without any evidence that the Legislature had discussed or intended such an expansion. The case is Brennon B. v. Superior Court, S266254. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko As Californias wildfire season ramps up, the number of federal firefighters in the state is down way down plummeting to its lowest level in years, despite pledges by fire officials to have boosted the ranks before a potentially busy summer. The U.S. Forest Service, which operates the nations largest wildland fire force, entered the summer months with about 25% fewer firefighters in California than it had planned for, according to federal records obtained by The Chronicle. This translates into nearly 1,300 unfilled jobs. The lack of staffing means less capacity to put out fires and protect people and property. It comes as the state has seen record burning over the past two years and, with the continuing drought, remains poised for another difficult year. Recently, crews have been tested by the still-out-of-control McKinney Fire, which exploded in the Klamath National Forest near the Oregon border and has killed at least four people, as well as by a pair of big blazes in and around Yosemite National Park. While Forest Service administrators say they sought to do more hiring during the off-season to deal with the onslaught of fire, they acknowledge their efforts fell short, citing factors largely beyond their control. We have struggled to fill positions in some areas of the country, especially in the Pacific Northwest and California, where the labor pool is low and pay isnt as competitive as we would like it to be, Michelle Burnett, spokesperson for the Forest Service, said in a statement to The Chronicle. Staffing, which has never been easy for the agency, began to be a problem two years ago. Many employees decided to move on from the manually difficult and often time-intensive work of firefighting during the coronavirus pandemic and after fatigue set in from Californias increasingly long fire seasons. The states high cost of living is part of the reason. Entry-level wages for Forest Service firefighters is $15 an hour, barely in keeping with Californias minimum wage and much less than the more than $20 an hour that new employees can make at the states Cal Fire agency. Currently, the Forest Service has about 3,700 permanent and temporary employees who at least partially work on fire suppression in the Pacific Southwest Region, which is almost entirely California it also includes Hawaii. The numbers were obtained by The Chronicle from the Forest Service through an information request. The agencys target for the region this year was 5,000 total employees, which was how many people were on the job three years earlier, records show. Last year, just under 4,000 worked at peak season. Ethan Swope/The Chronicle The shortage, say current and former firefighters, has left holes on hand crews, engine teams, hotshot units, smoke jumper squads and dispatch rosters at many of Californias 18 national forests. These sites make up the bulk of Californias forested lands. The Forest Service oversees firefighting on its lands, and it helps the states Cal Fire battle flames on state and private property. The agency gets help from Cal Fire, too, which has seen its staffing rise with recent budget surpluses to close to 8,000 employees, but the Forest Service cant count on its partner to patch its gaps. The lack of bandwidth extends beyond firefighting to the forest management work done in the off-season that helps keep fires from burning in the first place. The big question is: Do we have the competency and trained federal response that weve had in the past? Absolutely not, said Kelly Martin, a former fire manager who worked for the Forest Service and National Park Service, including 14 years in Yosemite, and now advocates for firefighters as president of the group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. Most firefighters agree that pay is at the heart of the staffing problem. At the urging of California lawmakers, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, President Biden boosted entry-level pay of Forest Service firefighters from $13.45 per hour to $15 last year. The $1 trillion infrastructure law has since provided money to raise wages further, up 50% more or a maximum increase of $20,000 for both new and veteran employees, for two years. A sweeping package of drought and wildfire bills approved last week by the House, but less certain to be acted on by the Senate, would make at least a portion of these pay increases permanent. The iffy legislation also includes first-ever mental health leave for federal firefighters, expanded eligibility for hazard pay and the elimination of overtime pay caps. Fire Tracker Follow wildfires across the state Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California Bronte Wittpenn/The Chronicle Forest Service officials have said better compensation, if it becomes permanent, would go a long way toward hiring and retaining employees. Many of the agencys former firefighters, if they havent left the field entirely, have gone to work for Cal Fire, city fire departments or Pacific Gas and Electric Co., all of which have historically paid more for similar jobs. Until enough people can be recruited by the Forest Service, the agency plans to continue trying to fill holes by bringing in firefighters from other parts of the country the federal workforce is slim nationwide, too, but not as much as in California. The Forest Service is also contracting with local fire departments and private fire companies for help. Mariposa County Supervisor Rosemarie Smallcombe, who represents a part of the state that burned in the Washburn and Oak fires in and around Yosemite, says firefighters have been very effective at containing the blazes. She worries, however, this will change if the fire season escalates in late summer and fall, as it has the two previous years. The increase in wildfire, experts say, is due to the buildup of vegetation in forests after decades of fire suppression combined with the warming and drying climate. Given the number and scale of the fires weve been looking at over the past two or three years, Im afraid that we will have a fire like (the Oak and Washburn fires) but where the resources are elsewhere in the state and the response is slow, Smallcombe said. It scares the heck out of me, she added. And its not just me. Its my colleagues in other Sierra counties. We all worry about this. Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Firefighters battling the McKinney Fire in Klamath National Forest gained some ground on the nearly 92-square-mile blaze overnight, with Cal Fire maintaining 10% containment of the wildfire Thursday. The wildfire, burning in Siskiyou County, torched 58,668 acres by Thursday evening, making it Californias largest fire of the year so far. Firefighters were forced to contend with high temperatures for most of the week, in addition to thunderstorms that led to flash floods in areas scarred by the McKinney Fire and older blazes. Four people were found dead inside the fires perimeter: two were found in a car and two others were found in separate residences. Their identities were not publicly released as of Thursday morning. Some residents were able to return home after evacuation orders were downgraded to warnings in areas of Yreka and Hawkinsville. Just over 3,600 residents remain evacuated, a reduction from 5,822, according to Mike Lindbery, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service. A shelter was set up at the Weed Community Center for evacuated residents. Crews continued to fight the fire as it approached Highway 96, near Walker Bridge, Horse Creek and Scott Bar. The fire has spread slowly along the Klamath River Corridor, officials said. Highway 96 remains closed from Scott River Road in Hamburg to State Route 63 in Siskiyou County. In a related development, Pacific Power, the utility company serving areas of California north of Mount Shasta, filed an electric incident report with the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday alerting state regulators to the incident out of an abundance of caution. The company said it was notified about the fire at about an hour after it was first detected Friday and said its employees havent been granted access to the area where the fire started. Drew Hanson, a spokesman for Pacific Power, declined to say whether the companys electric equipment is under investigation for starting the fire when asked Wednesday. We are not aware of any equipment being collected for an investigation related to the McKinney Fire, Hanson said. Hanson said the utility filed the report due to the potential damage to Pacific Power assets. A 911 caller reported the first flames of the McKinney Fire just before 2:15 p.m. Friday in a rural area by McKinney Creek south of Klamath River, an unincorporated community in northern Siskiyou County on Route 96, U.S. Forest Service officials said. Emergency dispatch audio from some of the first fire units on scene describe the early flames. About a quarter acre.right now putting water on it.it is underneath the power line right-of-way, a firefighter reported over the radio at about 2:30 p.m. The McKinney Fires cause is being investigated by the U.S. Forest Services regional law enforcement team with help from the Siskiyou County Sheriffs Office. U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Adrienne Freeman said they are still in the early stages of the investigation, which includes pinpointing exactly where the fire started. Fire Tracker Follow wildfires across the state Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California They are boots-on-the-ground determining the exact point of origin, Freeman said. The investigation is expected to take two-to-four weeks, she said. She declined to provide information about a suspected cause. The Yeti Complex, to the west of the McKinney Fire, had burned 4,626 acres and was uncontained as of Thursday morning. The cause of the fire was lightning, according to U.S. Forest Service officials. The fire threatened 336 structures but none have been destroyed. The fight is projected to get more intense with the arrival of hot and dry weather over the weekend. Temperatures are forecasted to reach up to 105 degrees with winds of up to 20 mph conditions that could fan the flames. Jordan Parker (he/him) and Julie Johnson (she/her) are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jordan.parker@sfchronicle.com, julie.johnson@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @jparkerwrites @juliejohnson. Northern California welcomed 11 new wolf pups this year, state wildlife officials said, news hailed as a conservation milestone by wolf advocates. Two of the states three wolf packs have produced new pups this year, according to a wolf management report published Tuesday by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The Lassen pack, located in western Lassen and northern Plumas counties, had five pups. The Whaleback pack in eastern Siskiyou County added six, officials said. These furry little tykes are really something to celebrate, said Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a news release. Two wolf packs producing pups back-to-back is considered a conservation milestone, Weiss said. The gray wolf, regarded as a symbol of wildlife conservation, temporarily lost its endangered species protections in 2020, a controversial move made by the Trump administration. Federal officials at the time said the rising numbers of the storied canine did not warrant such protections. That decision was reversed in February by a federal judge in Oakland. California, like some states, has enacted state-level protections for the canines, However, wildlife experts say the wider federal umbrella is needed, since wolves migrate hundreds even thousands of miles, which can put individual animals from California and other places in danger when they cross state lines. Continued state and federal protections offer the safety net these wondrous animals need to survive, Weiss said in the statement, adding that wolf recovery is still in its early stages in California. Gray wolves roamed the state freely before they were hunted into near-extinction a century ago. They began reappearing in California about 10 years ago, a long-term result of the federal endangered species status granted in 1973. An Oregon-born lobo known as OR-7 made headlines in 2011 for becoming the first wolf in nearly a century to roam through Californias wilderness. GPS tracking showed he wandered thousands of miles through Siskiyou, Lassen, Shasta, Modoc, Butte and Plumas counties before eventually returning to Oregon and finding a mate, fathering litters of pups each year from 2014 to 2018. Officials announced that OR-7 was presumed dead in 2020 at an estimated age of 11 considered old for a wolf in the wild after he went missing from the annual count. Three of OR-7s pups were detected in California, where one became a breeding male to the Lassen pack. This is the fifth consecutive year that the Lassen pack has had pups since it was first identified in 2017, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. For the Whaleback pack, which was identified in late 2020, its the second year of producing pups. The Beckwourth pack, Californias third, which was discovered in Plumas County in 2021, does not appear to have produced pups this year, officials said. Wolf pups are usually born in the spring, according to the National Park Service. Turnover of pack members is common at about 1 or 2 years of age, a young wolf often will leave its birth area unless an older wolf dies and leaves a space. Both the Lassen and Whaleback wolf families consist of two adult breeding animals and five yearlings born to each pack in 2021, which are still present, according to Weiss. With the addition of the pups, the Lassen pack now has at least 12 members, and the Whaleback pack has at least 13. Jessica Flores (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores Berkeley city officials called for and then apparently canceled a meeting Thursday to consider lifting the citys ban on police using tear gas, tear-inducing smoke and pepper spray during the City Councils recess. An agenda for the special meeting was posted Thursday morning. But Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin tweeted that he was canceling the meeting and that the ban on pepper spray and similar chemicals would remain in place. Arreguin also blamed the Alameda County Sheriffs Office for threatening to not provide emergency support to Berkeley, but he did not elaborate in a tweet. He could not be immediately reached for comment. Sgt. Ray Kelly, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriffs Office, said that deputies were in attendance at Peoples Park, though not at the city of Berkeleys request. Kelly said he was not aware of what was driving Arreguins allegation that the office threatened to hold off responding to the at times violent incident. We would never refuse to respond if there was an emergency and lives depended on it, Kelly said. Referring to the citys ban on pepper spray and tear gas, Kelly added that if deputies cant use equipment theyre trained with, then it puts the officers and public at risk. The discussion was scheduled to take place the day after protesters clashed with police in an effort to block construction of a planned student housing development at Peoples Park. Read more: The standoff over Peoples Park could be a defining moment for Berkeley Seven people were arrested and booked on a range of charges, according to Kyle Gibson, a spokeperson for UC Berkeley, including battery of a peace officer, trespassing and resisting and obstructing or delaying an officer. One of the people arrested was released from custody and taken to a local hospital for minor injuries. Two of the officers involved in an altercation were injured. 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. On Wednesday, as construction crews began cutting down trees inside the park, protesters ripped down security fencing, planted themselves in the street and damaged earthmovers and other construction equipment. Police and construction crews were dispersed from the area, and construction was halted. Documents provided by Berkeley about the scuttled meeting did not make an explicit link between Wednesdays demonstrations and the measure to temporarily lift the ban on pepper spray and similar chemicals. Dominic Fracassa and Jordan Parker (he/him) are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com, jordan.parker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa, @jparkerwrites Perhaps, while dining out recently, you've noticed restaurant staff pouring a stream of wine into customers' mouths from a large glass vessel with a sharp-pointed spout. The recipient tilts back their head and opens their mouth wide as a thin cascade of liquid arcs through the air into the back of their throat. There's a name for this strangely shaped pitcher: a porron. You might assume, if you're not familiar with the porron, that it's simply the latest Bay Area restaurant gimmick, an heir to the same lineage as the caviar bump and the chambong. After all, it's become all the rage within a certain subset of very hip natural wine spots, like Shuggie's Trash Pie and Habibi in San Francisco, and Snail Bar in Oakland. Depending on the scene, it can come across as a pretty bro-y activity the adult equivalent of a beer bong. But before it became an obsession in the natural wine community, the porron was an everyday fixture in many Spanish bars and restaurants, including Bay Area spots like El Lopo, Coqueta and Teleferic. Far from a newfangled fad, it's actually a very old tradition: The earliest porrones in Catalonia may date back as far as the 14th century, and even earlier prototypes may have been found in ancient Egypt. The ancient Romans used something similar called a rhyton, essentially a horn-shaped vessel that allowed a beverage to be delivered directly to the mouth, rather than a cup. In modern times, the porron has been a popular delivery vehicle for low-alcohol wines from northern Spain, most notably Txakoli, a lightly effervescent Basque white wine. Cava, Basque cider and other easy-drinking Spanish delicacies are also common porron fillers. I've seen tapas joints in the U.S. throwing streams of Txakoli into people's mouths for a long time while at the now-closed Barvale on Divisadero St. several years ago, the staff delivered a surprise porron shot to a friend who was celebrating her birthday in lieu of dessert. As it proliferates locally now, it seems to be generating some controversy. The idea of having liquid forced down your throat in public, it turns out, is not universally appealing. "It brings back PTSD from being iced," one coworker of mine remarked on Slack, referring to the truly terrible frat-party game involving Smirnoff Ice. "It's luxurious waterboarding," wrote another. Personally, I've always loved the vibe of the porron. It's celebratory showmanship, the sort of thing that unites a room of people, like cheers-ing after a toast. It's a safe form of communal drinking (the spigot never touches a mouth), something that can feel hard to find these days. It really brings the party. I have one at home it remains the best gift I've ever snagged in a white elephant exchange. They're inexpensive if you want to buy one yourself; the Spanish Table, which has locations in Berkeley and San Francisco, sells 500ml versions for $19.99 and 1-liter versions for $24.99. (Pick up some Txakoli there while you're at it.) But, yes, it certainly can be messy. Many times while taking a porron I've accidentally lifted my head before the pourer had finished pouring, resulting in a stream of spritzy white wine streaming down my chin and onto my shirt. This can be unpleasant, though I still think it's better than the experience of getting sake squirted into your mouth at a hibachi grill. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. So, now that porrones are everywhere, allow me to offer a few recommendations for use. First: Feel free to decline! Just because a bar is offering you a complimentary stream of skin-fermented Riesling doesn't mean you have to accept. Second: If you do accept, do not do what I do and tilt your head up when you've had enough. Instead, try to signal with your hands that it's time for the pourer to stop (though any courteous porron practitioner will keep it brief anyway). Finally, follow the Spaniards' lead and keep the contents to something that's dry, low in alcohol and high in acid, to maximize the potential for refreshment. And please, whatever you do, resist the temptation to fill a porron with red wine. I promise you, it will end up staining somebody's clothing. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) After a trip that drew Chinas wrath, a defiant Nancy Pelosi concluded her visit to Taiwan on Wednesday with a pledge that the American commitment to democracy on the self-governing island and elsewhere remains ironclad. Pelosi received a euphoric welcome as the first U.S. House speaker to visit in more than 25 years, and China swiftly responded by announcing multiple military exercises nearby. The speaker's departure for South Korea came just a day before China was scheduled to launch its largest maneuvers aimed at Taiwan in more than a quarter of a century. Before leaving, a calm but resolute Pelosi repeated previous remarks about the world facing a choice between democracy and autocracy. Americas determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad, she said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. The trip enraged China, which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments. The Biden administration, and Pelosi, have said that the United States remains committed to the so-called one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. The administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting. Nevertheless, China issued a series of harsh statements after the American delegation touched down in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. Taiwanese President Tsai pushed back firmly against Beijings military exercises, parts of which will enter Taiwanese waters. Facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down, Tsai said at her meeting with Pelosi. We will firmly uphold our nations sovereignty and continue to hold the line of defense for democracy. The exercises, including those involving live fire, are to start Thursday and will be the biggest aimed at Taiwan since 1995, when China fired missiles in a large-scale exercise to show its displeasure over a visit by then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to the U.S. In other activities, Pelosi visited a human rights museum in Taipei that details the history of the islands martial-law era. She also met with some of Taiwans most prominent rights activists, including an exiled former Hong Kong bookseller who was detained by Chinese authorities, Lam Wing-kee. Thanking Pelosi for her decades of support for Taiwan, the president presented her with a civilian honor, the Order of the Propitious Clouds. A day earlier, China's official Xinhua News Agency announced the military operations and showed a map outlining six different areas around Taiwan. Arthur Zhin-Sheng Wang, a defense studies expert at Taiwans Central Police University, said three of the areas infringe on Taiwanese waters, meaning they are within 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) of shore. Using live fire in a country's territorial airspace or waters is risky, Wang said, because under international rules of engagement, it can be seen as an act of war. In Washington, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby sought to tamp down fears. He told ABCs Good Morning America on Wednesday that U.S. officials dont believe were at the brink now, and theres certainly no reason for anybody to be talking about being at the brink going forward. Pelosi's trip heightened U.S.-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her position as leader of the House of Representatives. The last House speaker to visit Taiwan was Newt Gingrich in 1997. China's response came on multiple fronts military, diplomatic and economic. Shortly after Pelosi landed Tuesday night, China announced live-fire drills that reportedly started that night, as well as the four-day exercises starting Thursday. The People's Liberation Army Air Force also flew a contingent of 21 warplanes toward Taiwan. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing to convey the country's protests the same night. On Wednesday, China banned some imports from Taiwan, including citrus and fish. That night, China flew an additional 27 fighter jets toward Taiwan. 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. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said a Taiwanese citizen was detained on suspicion of inciting separatism. Yang Chih-yuan, originally from the city of Taichung, was shown surrounded by police in a CCTV video. Yang had been a candidate for a legislative position in New Taipei City, according to local media. Addressing Beijings threats, Pelosi said she hopes its clear that while China has prevented Taiwan from attending certain international meetings, that they understand they will not stand in the way of people coming to Taiwan as a show of friendship and of support. Pelosi noted that congressional support for Taiwan is bipartisan, and she praised the islands democracy. She stopped short of saying that the U.S would defend Taiwan militarily and emphasized that Congress is committed to the security of Taiwan, in order to have Taiwan be able to most effectively defend themselves. Her focus has always been the same, she said, going back to her 1991 visit to Beijing's Tiananmen Square, when she and other lawmakers unfurled a small banner supporting democracy two years after a bloody military crackdown on protesters at the square. That visit was also about human rights and what she called dangerous technology transfers to rogue countries. On this trip, Pelosi met with representatives from Taiwans legislature. The speaker's visit is the strongest defense of human rights, democratic values and freedom, Tsai Chi-chang, vice president of Taiwans legislature, said in welcome. Pelosi's five-member delegation included Rep. Gregory Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi from the House Intelligence Committee, as well as Reps. Andy Kim and Mark Takano. Also traveling with the speaker was Rep. Suzan DelBene, whom Pelosi said was instrumental in the passage of a $280 billion bill aimed at boosting American manufacturing and research in semiconductor chips an industry that Taiwan dominates and is vital for modern electronics. Hours after leaving Taipei, Pelosi arrived Wednesday evening at a South Korea military base ahead of meetings with political leaders in Seoul, after which she will visit Japan. Both countries are U.S. alliance partners, together hosting about 80,000 American personnel as a bulwark against North Koreas nuclear ambitions and Chinas increased assertiveness in the South China and East China seas. Regarding Breed, Walton clash over use of slur (Front Page, Aug. 3): What amazes me is the arrogance of Shamann Walton and a few other San Francisco supervisors. They seem to believe that the rules dont apply to them. City Hall security is there for a good reason; there are dangerous people in the city and they sometimes aim their anger at city leaders. Perhaps Walton has forgotten that it was a recently resigned city supervisor who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. Dan White climbed in a City Hall window to avoid security. For Walton, trying to bluster his way into City Hall sets a dangerous precedent and puts more stress on the security guards. City supervisors should set an example for courtesy when dealing with other city employees. Mary Gardner, San Francisco Dont let racists win Regarding Story on supervisors use of racial slur buried (Letters to the Editor, Aug. 3): The comments of San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton and school board member Ann Hsu were both out of line. To what degree is open to discussion. Yet the letter writer, in defending Hsu and lamenting Walton, is unwittingly playing into the hands of white supremacists who want to stoke tension among minorities. The author clearly suggests that the Black man got a pass for his comments, whilst Hsu is paying the price. The Oath Keepers would take one look at that letter and declare mission accomplished. Lets agree that both politicians erred shamefully, but be mindful of the harm done by playing the race card. Mark Allendorf, San Mateo Kudos for killing Today, the world is a slightly better place due to the Biden administrations killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Ironically, in 2020 NBC News reported that then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the accused 9/11 mastermind and had a chance to kill him, but did not because he did not recognize al-Zawahiris name. When your commander-in-chief is ignorant and doesnt listen, your intelligence activities are hamstrung. Good that we now have a thinking, listening individual in the White House. Bob Benson, Lafayette Drone attack is murder Murder is the American way. No trial, no evidence, no jury but a drone killing. Ayman al-Zawahiri is executed by a U.S. presidential order. He is accused of being a co-conspirator of the 9/11 attacks. Our country again demonstrates its hypocrisy and brutality. Robert Cromey, San Francisco Cut the excess packaging Regarding State bill seeks to reduce plastic used in shipping (Bay Area & Business, Aug. 1): State Sen. Scott Weiner is right: With AB2026, we now have a chance to really start moving the dial on packaging. Californians shouldnt have to worry that the plastic packaging added to ship online purchases will pollute our oceans, communities and climate every time they place an order. Most plastic packaging ends up in landfills, incinerators, or polluting the environment and harming wildlife. The e-commerce industry can and should do more to address its plastics problem. We know e-commerce shippers are well-positioned to significantly reduce their impact on our planet because we are seeing action in other countries. This legislation will give Californians the plastic-free shipping options that they are asking for. Ashley Blacow-Draeger, Monterey The writer is Pacific policy and communications manager for Oceana. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate San Franciscos current and former city attorneys have filed a pair of lawsuits that they hope will bring the federal governments effort to shutter Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center next month to a screeching halt. City Attorney David Chiu is asking a U.S. District Court judge to stop the federal government from cutting off funds to Laguna Honda as of Sept. 13, a deadline the city calls arbitrary and which would force the nursing home to shut down and displace more than 600 vulnerable residents. He filed the suit Wednesday night. At the same time, former City Attorney Louise Renne filed a separate class-action lawsuit against state and federal officials on behalf of those residents. Most patients at the skilled nursing facility, one of the largest in the U.S., are medically fragile and often very poor. Some have lived there for decades. The pending closure has caused an uproar among supporters of the city-run nursing home, especially after the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services forced Laguna Honda to start transferring its frail patients in May in preparation for the closure. Of the 57 patients transferred or discharged, nine died within days or weeks of their moves, city officials confirmed Thursday. Bronte Wittpenn/The Chronicle San Francisco Mayor London Breed, whose grandmother lived at Laguna Honda for 14 years, joined Chiu and Renne at City Hall to announce the lawsuits Thursday. She noted that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, just six people died at the 156-year-old care facility. The people who worked there they saved lives! the mayor said. That should count for something. By contrast, nine people died after being sent away from the hospital, or 16% of the people relocated, she said. Federal and state officials declined to comment Thursday on the lawsuits. Because of the high death rate, possibly as a result of the phenomenon known as transfer trauma, federal officials paused the transfers in late July. Pausing is not enough, Renne told The Chronicle. Were asking them to end the discharge. Period. Families are worried sick. The mere threat of a discharge is wrong. In the citys lawsuit, Chiu argues that the federal agency, known as CMS, chose a random date Sept. 13 to halt funding of more than $200 million a year in Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements. The suit says shutting down the nursing home so quickly is illegal because San Francisco is appealing the agencys decision to decertify Laguna Honda in the first place and that appeal wont be heard until at least October. Were asking the federal government to exert compassion and common sense, Chiu said. Between the huge shortage of skilled nursing facility beds, we see potentially very negative consequences if the facility is forced to shut down next month. Individuals will become homeless. These people have nowhere to go. Referring to the nine deaths, Renne put it more bluntly: Who knows if there would be more? (CMS) knows that as well as we do. How do they live with themselves? On Thursday, Renne called the closure process required by CMS a diabolical plan. Chius lawsuit notes that three patients discharged from Laguna Honda wound up in homeless shelters. And last month, when Laguna Honda officials called 1,400 nursing homes in a single week to try to comply with the transfer order, not one of them had a vacant bed eligible for Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement and with appropriate services for Laguna Hondas patients, according to the suit. CMSs unreasonable requirements are not only harmful to patients and impossible to achieve, they are also unlawful, the citys lawsuit says. Chiu argues that the agency shouldnt be allowed to shut down Laguna Honda before the city can make its case that CMS was wrong to crack down so hard on the facility and that closing it before the appeal is heard denies San Francisco due process. In an interview on July 26, a CMS official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Chronicle that the agency could extend its deadline for closure. Constanza Hevia H./Special to The Chronicle The timing is something we can revisit, he said. CMS decertified Laguna Honda in April, six months after state inspectors declared it to be in a state of substandard care. CMS set Sept. 13 as the date it would stop paying to care for the facilitys hundreds of residents. Laguna Honda depends on Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements of nearly $18 million a month, or more than two-thirds of its $26 million monthly budget. On Thursday, CMS officials abruptly canceled a planned question-and-answer session with the press, saying the new lawsuits limit what they are able to say. Instead, they pointed to a July 28 statement from CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure saying the agency was required by statute to terminate the facility from the Medicare and Medicaid programs after six months of substantial non-compliance. Among the deficiencies were failing to train staff on appropriately disposing of illegal drugs and failing to investigate staff-to-resident abuse allegations, the statement said. On Thursday, a CMS official also cited a serious safety issue in which a patient had been smoking while hooked up to oxygen. The citys lawsuit acknowledges that Laguna Honda must fix deficiencies and prevent them from recurring. But it also says the California Public Health Department which recommended that CMS withdraw the Medicare and Medicaid funding overstated the severity of the deficiencies its inspectors found at Laguna Honda from October to March and that it never should have made that recommendation. Rennes class-action suit, which seeks a trial by jury, makes the same argument. Its also the basis of Chius appeal. Laguna Hondas current troubles began in July 2021, after the facility reported that two patients had overdosed on illegal drugs and recovered. That report triggered the state visit in October, after which inspectors found the facility out of compliance. The citys lawsuit says the states finding was based on a failure to eliminate all illicit drugs and contraband (such as cigarette lighters), which in turn led to the recommendation that CMS terminate its contract with Laguna Honda on April 14 if the nursing home was still out of compliance. Chiu argues that instead of allowing CMS to hastily shut down a vital institution, especially when there are virtually no adequate alternatives for most residents, the courts should give San Francisco time to make its case that decertifying Laguna Honda was done in error. Laguna Honda is also correcting its deficiencies and should be allowed to complete that process, the lawsuit says. The nursing home is confident that it will submit an application allowing it to be recertified as a Medicare and Medicaid provider by the end of the year. But if it has to shut down, Laguna Honda will need until November 2023 to do so safely, the suit says. In all, Chius lawsuit paints a picture of a catch-22 an impossible situation that CMS has forced on Laguna Honda, the city and the patients who depend on it. Laguna Honda cannot stay open and it cannot close, the suit says. The city attorney said that the federal government has left us with no choice but to sue. Were hoping that CMS will come to the table and work with us to preserve this critical safety net. Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov KLAMATH RIVER, Siskiyou County The scenic hamlet of Klamath River was home to about 200 people, a community center where they gathered, a corner store and a post office. But the wildfire raging through the forested region near the Oregon state line jumped the river last weekend, killing four residents and turning most homes and businesses to ash. Some Klamath River residents are now picking through the burned out shells of their modest houses. Eighty-year-old Roger Derry said he and his son are among the few families whose homes were spared by the inferno. Its very sad. Its very disheartening, said Derry, who has lived in the unincorporated town for more than four decades. Some of our oldest homes, 100-year-old homes, are gone. Its a small community. Good people, good folks, for the most part, live here and in time will rebuild. But its going to take some time now. The McKinney Fire was still out of control on Wednesday despite some progress by firefighters who took advantage of thunderstorms that dumped rain and temporarily lowered heat that can help fan flames in the parched region. Amid storms Tuesday that dumped heavy rain and swelled rivers in the area, a private contractor aiding the firefighting effort was hurt when a bridge gave out and washed the contractors pickup truck away, said Courtney Kreider, a spokesperson with the Siskiyou County Sheriffs Office. The contractor was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, she said. Several thousand people remained under evacuation orders, 100 buildings ranging from homes to greenhouses have burned and at least four bodies have been found near Klamath River within the burned area of the wildfire. Identifying the people who were killed, including two found inside a burned vehicle in a driveway, could take several days, Kreider said. The fire has charred nearly 90 square miles since it erupted last Friday and is the largest of several wildfires burning in the Klamath National Forest. The blaze grew very little Tuesday, and fire officials said crews managed to use bulldozers to carve firebreaks along a ridge to protect homes and buildings in and around the small city of Yreka. When it began, the McKinney Fire burned just several hundred acres and firefighters thought they would quickly bring it under control. But thunderstorms came in with ferocious wind gusts that within hours had pushed it into an unstoppable conflagration. Klamath River was virtually wiped off the map, with the fire destroying most of its homes, including those in a trailer park, along with the post office, community hall and scattered businesses. The cause has not been determined. The City of San Francisco is suing the federal government, demanding that it halt the transfer of patients from Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center and resume payments to the facility, money necessary in order to keep it in operation. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, comes after at least nine patients have died in the transfer process. The lawsuit seeks to remove a September 13 deadline to transfer patients and to extend federal funding to Laguna Honda at least until appeals filed by the city attorney can be decided. Because of Defendants arbitrary and capricious conduct, San Francisco now has no choice but to seek declaratory and injunctive relief to stop the harm Defendants have caused to the City and County of San Francisco, Laguna Honda, and its patients, The Citys complaint reads. The Citys lawsuit is directed at the U.S. Department of health and Human Services and its Secretary Xavier Becerra, which oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS). CMS terminated federal funding for the hospital in April after it failed to meet compliance in multiple inspections from October 2021-22. Issues cited included finding illicit drugs and improper storage of protective equipment. As a result of that termination, federal regulators required Laguna Honda to implement a closure plan that involved moving as many of its nearly 700 patients as possible before a September deadline. At least nine people have died after their relocation since the transfer process started in May, City Attorney David Chiu said during a press briefing on Thursday. Earlier, federal regulators announced they would pause the requirement to relocate patients, but it is unclear how long that may last. The federal government has put Laguna Honda and our city in an impossible situation, said Chiu, who filed one of the lawsuits. As the final safety net for many of our most vulnerable San Franciscans, Laguna Honda serves too critical a need to be closed due to an arbitrary, bureaucratic decision. The City has been forced into an unworkable closure and transfer plan that has done far more harm than good. Hundreds of patients lives are stake. Louise Renne, founding partner of Renne Public Law Group and a former San Francisco city attorney, also filed a class action lawsuit against the state and federal governments on behalf of patients and families caught in the middle of the bureaucratic nightmare. The class-action suit alleges that the rushed closure of Laguna Honda violates the Americans with Disabilities Act and due process for patients. The lawsuit is seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to continue federal funding at Laguna Honda and stop patient transfers. For over 150 years, San Franciscans have relied on Laguna Honda to provide critical care to our most vulnerable, said Renne. We simply cannot allow Laguna Honda to close. The actions of CMS and the California Department of Health are illegal, unnecessary, and cruel. The class-action lawsuit reads: Relocation strikes terror in the hearts of the residents and their families as they face the prospect of eviction. Where will they go? Will their new facility be equipped to treat them? Will families be able to continue to visit? As it is, Laguna Honda represents the bulk of the available skilled nursing beds in San Francisco. There are few, if any, other alternatives in the Bay Area or even the State of California. To add to the urgency, most private facilities limit available beds for the poor, preferring a wealthier clientele. Nearly 98% of residents at Laguna Honda rely on government-subsidized health care plans. It is the largest and oldest skilled nursing home in the state. It is one of very few facilities remaining that offer services for extremely low income and medically fragile individuals who need care for dementia, physical rehabilitation and therapy, mental illness, substance abuse and much more. Following Laguna Hondas termination from Medicare and Medi-Cal in April, the San Francisco Department of Public Health submitted a patient transfers and closure plan that would give the facility 18 months to find alternative care options for residents. San Francisco has a massive deficit in skilled nursing beds, especially those for patients who rely on government health care plans. Federal regulators rejected that plan and instead gave Laguna Honda until September 13 to move patients out. Federal regulators at CMS did not respond to questions about why that plan was rejected. Out of the 57 patients who were transferred before federal regulators paused discharges, the majority were referred to alternate nursing facilities in San Mateo County. But three individuals were sent to homeless shelters, according to a data dashboard tracking the transfers and discharges. We are working hard to address issues that have been raised at Laguna Honda, and that important work will continue, said Mayor London Breed. But closing this facility and forcing residents and families to go through the trauma of transfers should not be part of that process. This facility provides care and support for some of the most vulnerable people in our city, and that support must continue to keep them healthy and safe. In addition to the two lawsuits announced Thursday, San Francisco also recently filed three administrative appeals contesting state and federal regulators decision to terminate funding for Laguna Honda. But those appeals will not be decided before the closure plan deadline in September, according to the City Attorneys Office. If CMS were to terminate funding or require Laguna Honda to complete closure of the facility before the appeals process is complete, Laguna Hondas due process rights would be violated, a letter from the city attorney to CSM on July 15 reads. At a bare minimum, we ask CMS to continue funding at least through completion of the appeal process. After being banned in Hong Kong, a new documentary about protest movements in that city will be playing to largely sold-out audiences this weekend in San Francisco. It didnt start out that way. When Hong Kong film director Chan Tze-woon and producer Peter Yam embarked on their documentary Blue Island, about social movements in Hong Kong back in 2016, they never imagined packed screenings in The City or a solely international distribution. Contrary forces brought them to that point. Qualifying for next years Academy Awards and an earlier win at the Bay Areas CAAMfest brought them welcome attention. But it also gave them unwelcome notice from the pro-Beijing government in Hong Kong, which banned the film, preventing them from screening it in the very city it was about. Since the passing of the controversial Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020, the Film Censorship Ordinance was amended to give authorities the power to ban films deemed to harm Chinas national security interests. Violators face a hefty fine and up to three years of imprisonment. And Blue Island was a prime candidate for censoring. The film cast current pro-democracy activists to re-enact scenes from past social movements as a way to explore Hong Kongs tumultuous history. It weaved together storylines of protesters in the citys 1967 riots, a couple fleeing Chinas Cultural Revolution in 1973, and an activist who traveled to Beijing in 1989 to support the Tiananmen Square students. Director Chan believes that despite featuring three storylines across generations, what lies in the center is a struggle for autonomy. Its a tale of what happens when a people with distinctive culture have never been allowed to decide their own fate. Like many other Hong Kong films, the films creators must now strategically seek out a market away from Chinese territories. Our story has changed since 2019, not just the storyline of our film, but the story of our city, said producer Yam, referring to Hong Kongs pro-democracy uprising in 2019. Previously, metropolitan people like Hongkongers were more concerned about their work, about making ends meet and about climbing the corporate ladder. That has changed. Hong Kong has been creating commercial and arthouse cinema with a global reach since the 1970s. Action films featuring kung fu and high-stakes gunplay have inspired the likes of Quentin Tarantino. More introspective productions like Chungking Express (1994), Happy Together (1997) and In the Mood for Love (2000) have captivated audiences across the world with universal themes of love and loneliness. A decade ago, the tiny island of Hong Kong still made more films each year than countries like Australia and the Netherlands. But even before the former British colonys recent censorship laws, reliance on mainland Chinese investment since the mid-1990s made it more difficult to produce films that were innovative or risky. To avoid rousing Chinas ire, many filmmakers produced different two versions of their films, one for the mainland and another for Hong Kong and overseas audiences. But by 2004, even that appeasement was no longer viable when China ceased to screen films that used multiple versions. Purely Hong Kong films are seeing meager profits compared with the past. Film theorist David Bordwell described the decline as a submission to Chinas experiment in state-sponsored crony capitalism without democracy in his book Planet Hong Kong. Once Hong Kong cinema had simply to be profitable, wrote Bordwell, Now it must also be politically correct. With films banned by law, tapping into the U.S. market is new and daunting territory for many young Hong Kong filmmakers. The protest documentary Revolution of Our Times (2021), directed by Kiwi Chow, made a surprise debut at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and scored major wins at the International Documentary Festival (FIPADOC). It later saw a full house at the San Francisco Roxie Theater under the sponsorship of the San Francisco-based Northern California Hong Kong Club, and eventually screened in more than 20 countries. Last month, May You Stay Forever Young, a dramatic production distributed by the U.S. Hongkongers Club, also saw sold out tickets in theaters across the Bay Area. Blue Island now expects similar high turnouts in the Roxie Theater this coming weekend. Chan, the director, attributed this success partially to the rising number of people in the Hong Kong diaspora. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, more than 140,000 people have left Hong Kong, according to the citys government. Local Hongkonger organizations have sprouted across the U.S. and have hosted screening of Hong Kong films. Ken Chan of the NorCal Hong Kong Club in San Francisco described the support as overwhelming, with members of the community often willing to commute from nearby cities for a screening. Tickets for the first two screenings of Revolution of Our Times sold out within minutes, which compelled Chan to add more shows later on. However, Icarus Films, the Brooklyn-based distributor of Blue Island, explained that international theatrical release is not where the profit is in terms of distribution. Moreover, it is still too early to tell whether these films will be profitable in the American market in the long run. The tightening censorship is what prompted us to expand and include Hong Kong films in our catalog of independent Chinese films, said Karin Chien, founder of dGenerate Films collection that is a part of Icarus. We are working on including more Hong Kong films and helping them reach as wide of an audience as possible, but right now the ends wont meet for the filmmakers yet. A few weeks ago, a Declaration of Hong Kong Film Freedom was drafted by recently formed independent film studio Phone Made Good Film, and co-signed by both Kiwi Chow and Chan Tze-woon. The difficulties and risks that must be faced by filmmakers are unprecedented in the history of Hong Kong. But paradoxically, now is the best time to make movies, because we need them the most, the declaration reads. We must take a page from other filmmakers in highly censored countries like Iran, said Chan, We must learn to keep going even if we have budget shortage and all we have left are our phones. San Franciscos shelter-in-place hotel program helped cut down emergency room visits among people who are homeless, according to a recent study by researchers at UCSF and UC Berkeley. Shelter-in-place hotels provide residents with a room plus on-site access to health services, including nursing support, routine wellness checks and health screenings, as well as harm-reduction services aimed at reducing drug overdoses. After issuing one of the earliest shelter-in-place orders in the country to slow the spread of COVID-19, San Francisco began opening temporary shelters in April 2020 in private hotel rooms for people who were homeless and highly vulnerable to COVID-19. The program grew to include 25 hotels and 2,288 rooms at its highest capacity, and provided shelter to nearly 3,700 people, according to data from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Those who received a hotel placement and previously had high use in acute medical care saw a 55% decrease in visits. This was in contrast to a control group of people who did not receive a placement and who had a smaller decrease (24.8%) in acute service use. Visits among the the high-use group who received placement decreased from an average of 1.84 visits in the 90 days before the SIP hotel program to 0.82 visits in the 90 days after their hotel placement. Types of acute care examined in the study included emergency room visits, psychiatric emergency stays and inpatient stays. It does make a difference when there are on-site medical services and people who are cued in to whats happening in the building, said Dr. Maria Raven, an author of the study. The findings come as San Francisco and California are both examining the impacts of using hotels during the pandemic to provide emergency housing for people who are homeless, and what to do next as homelessness continues to grow across the state. In April 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Project Roomkey, a statewide initiative to acquire hotels in order to house the homeless across the state during the pandemic. San Francisco received federal funding for its hotel program through the Roomkey initiative. Using city dollars, San Francisco went beyond providing hotel shelter to including medical services on-site. We worked with the Department of Public Health to include a lot of wraparound services to make sure people could actually shelter in place, said Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. We had on-site doctors and nurses going into the SIP hotels. If someone did get COVID, they could get isolation and quarantine, and medical care was brought to them. After implementing its SIP hotel program, San Francisco saw a 3.5% decrease in overall homelessness since the start of the pandemic, and a 15% drop in unsheltered homelessness, which refers to people who sleep outside rather than in a shelter or other temporary housing. Its hard for people to be healthy if they dont have a stable place to live, Raven said. The quality of the building and fact that people had their own bathrooms is also hugely important. The study on the emergency intervention supports the idea that providing non-congregate shelter, meaning individual rooms, with on-site health services can alleviate overwhelmed medical systems while meeting the housing and health needs of residents, said Raven. Now, San Francisco is in the process of winding down its hotel program and moving residents into other forms of housing. As of Tuesday, about 669 people remained in the shelter-in-place hotels, according to The Citys online data dashboard for the program. Of those who have exited the hotels, about 57% have moved into a permanent housing situation and about 43% left for a variety of alternative settings, including 9% who went to a temporary shelter and 5% who were discharged for inappropriate behavior. Three existing shelter-in-place hotels will be converted to long-term shelters, according to Cohen, and The City also acquired two shelter hotels to keep as permanent housing. The UCSF study looked at 686 people who frequently use county health services including emergency department visits, hospital admissions, psychiatric emergency visits and inpatient days between April 2020 and April 2021. Participants in the study were among the top 10% of users of these services and had three or more ER visits in the nine months prior to the implementation of the hotel programs. Although emergency room visits decreased nationally by nearly 42% during the early months of the pandemic, visits among the homelessness population stayed relatively steady, the study points out. But in San Francisco, the hotel program proved to decrease ER visits among participants who were previously homeless as well. The fact that we saw this among the homeless population is significant, Raven said. San Francisco decided to do this, and it is not a cheap intervention. Despite the cost, we can see there was a benefit to people beyond just housing. San Francisco is now exploring ways to continue providing on-site medical services in addition to existing social services and case work in other city-run housing programs. That includes a roaming behavioral health unit to visit housing sites, for example, and decreasing case worker ratios. We learned a lot more from the SIP hotels, and we have begun implementing this more widely, Cohen said. We have roving health care in the shelter program and wed really love to see an increase in those services as well. California's Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office has threatened criminal action against a TV news crew for bringing a civilian into the McKinney Fire evacuation zone in their news van and stepping onto private property within the burn area where a deceased individual was found. The agency also accused the news crew of televising the information prior to law enforcement properly processing the scene and notifying the family. This is unacceptable and disrespectful to fire victims and their families and will NOT be tolerated," the sheriff's office wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. On Tuesday, ABC News aired a news clip showing chief national correspondent Matt Gutman in the back of a news van with a Siskiyou County resident and walking around the charred remains of a home that she says was her uncles property. "My uncle was sitting right there in that chair, I think, that is no longer there," she says. "Have you heard from your uncle?" Gutman asks. "No, he died, he had to have died. He lived right there," she says, pointing to the rubble. Although the broadcast clip does not show it, both the sheriff's office and an ABC News spokesperson confirmed that a body was found at the site. DAVID MCNEW/AFP via Getty Images While the sheriffs office didnt name the news agency being criticized in its Facebook post, sources told SFGATE it was the ABC News crew. In addition, several professional wildfire photographers called out the news agency on social media. Kent Porter, a photographer for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat who regularly covers wildfires, posted the video taken by ABC News on Twitter and accused the news crew of creating their own news. In a separate Tweet, he wrote, @ABC news, you should question the crew you sent in to the fire zone. In a statement to SFGATE, an ABC News spokesperson said that the crew had permission to visit the areas. Officials gave ABC News permission to cross the fire line, he said. A resident gave us permission to be on the property where the house had burned down. As soon as the residents discovered the body, our team notified law enforcement. The McKinney Fire ignited near the California-Oregon border on July 29, quickly exploding into a raging monster that has killed four people and destroyed more than 100 homes as its torn through 58,668 acres, according to the U.S. Forest Service. In the Facebook post, the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office wrote that the impacted area is being treated as a crime scene, because the fires cause and origin are still under investigation. While California law allows press access to disaster scenes, active crime scenes are excluded. The sheriff's office also said that the home had not yet been processed by investigators and search teams when the media crew visited; when officials did access the area, according to the post, they found a deceased person on the property that "media had disturbed." "Since we are actively checking structures and properties for deceased individuals, and conducting various law enforcement investigations, it is imperative media respect the necessary restrictions on private property and stay on public property that has been cleared for media access," the sheriff's office said. Amy Travis, a spokesperson for the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office and the Office of Emergency Services, told SFGATE that the incident is still under investigation and the agency isn't naming the media crew involved. Travis said media crews can receive permission to access roadways through burn areas, but they're not allowed to walk into crime scenes or bring civilians into these areas. "We haven't determined whether we're going to press charges," Travis said. A custom, functional replica of a 1966 Batmobile, complete with a working flamethrower, is at the core of a legal spat between a Bay Area real estate agent and an Indiana minister a spat that may have illicitly involved Bay Area sheriff's investigators flying halfway across the country to conduct a raid. In 2017, according to court documents, Atherton real estate agent Sam Anagnostou signed a contract with Mark Racop, who would build the replica for a cool $210,000 by June 2018. Racop is a minister and the owner of Fiberglass Freaks, a 19-year-old Indiana company that manufactures the only custom-made Batmobile replicas licensed by DC Comics. Racop told the Pharos-Tribune in Logansport, Indiana, where Fiberglass Freaks' garage are located, that Anagnostou decided for nine months not to make a payment. He kept demanding to know when his car was going to be completed during that time but would not make a payment, Racop told the newspaper. I was forced to reorder the cars and bumped his car to the end of the lineup because he hadnt paid. Anagnostou was seemingly furious. He filed a police report with Atherton police and a suit in California state court in San Mateo County against Racop. In the August 2021 lawsuit, Anagnostou alleged that the carmaker sold his car to fulfill a later car order ahead of [Anagnostous] order to generate additional cash by selling the same Car twice. (The contract, which was provided in Anagnostous complaint, indeed states that, in the event that Buyer fails to pay a payment as agreed, and upon 30 days notice, the Builder shall be entitled to sell the Car.) Judge Nancy Fineman threw out the lawsuit on the grounds that Indiana is the proper forum for this action. Anagnostou persisted. KGO reported last Friday that he requested a favor from a friend in a high place, San Mateo County Sheriff Carlos Bolanos. (Anagnostous public Facebook page shows that he is, in fact, Facebook friends with Bolanos.) Bolanos, according to the news station, allegedly sent a sheriffs office lieutenant, sergeant and two deputies 2,200 miles away. On July 19, the sheriffs officers allegedly raided the Fiberglass Freaks offices and harassed Racop for hours. They were there to intimidate me from minute one," Racop told the station. The officers allegedly took him to the local jail, only to let him go and were able to somehow freeze his bank account, according to the San Mateo Daily Journal. They also obtained a warrant to take the Batmobile. The San Mateo County District Attorneys Office is also now involved, charging Racop for felony charges of fraud and misuse of funds. (Racop will have to go to San Mateo County on Aug. 19 for his arraignment, the San Mateo Daily Journal reported.) One legal expert seemed baffled by the extent the sheriff's office went to allegedly harass Racop. Sheriff Bolanos is definitely not the first law enforcement leader to utilize their officers and their police powers for highly inappropriate and personal grievances, Berkeley criminal law professor Jonathan Simon told SFGATE in an emailed statement, citing the 2012 incident with then-Berkeley police Chief Michael Meehan harassing a reporter, but for how far the officers went (literally and legally) and how trivial and cartoonish the cause, its got to be an outlier. It appears that public outcry could change the tides of the case. During a San Mateo County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, KGO reported, constituents shamed Bolanos and the San Mateo County District Attorneys Office pushing the county executive to reach out to the sheriff's office and the DA. This is just completely unacceptable, it's embarrassing, it's humiliating, one resident said during a call. But since Bolanos was already voted out of office in Junes primary election and plans to retire next year it seems like not much can be done by constituents to oust him from office. The larger problem is that sheriffs, who are elected at the county level and answer only to the voters, generally operate without oversight or even transparency while spending one of the larger budgets in the county," Simon told SFGATE. The San Mateo County District Attorneys Office and San Mateo County Sheriffs Office declined to comment. NOAM GALAI/Getty Images StubHub announced on LinkedIn last week it will be closing its San Francisco office by the end of the year. The tech company occupies space at 199 Fremont Street in SoMa, according to its corporate website. CEO Eric Baker wrote a letter to employees that he posted on LinkedIn, saying that the Shanghai office will close as well and that "the majority of our employees in both locations" will be laid off. Baker attributed the decision to the need to streamline and optimize operations following the merger of StubHub and Viagogo and claimed that the business is performing strongly. The grand opening of Brew Detroits new kitchen is on August 13, 2022, and their secret ingredient is Chef Tara Abdusshakur her excitement about pairing beer with food. Chef Tara talked about her vision for Brew Detroits menu during an interview on Brew Detroits Facebook page. Watch the Brew Detroit interview When I was building the menu, I wanted it to be extremely Detroit area, city focused," she said. "I wanted to pull in as many people as I could out of the Metro Detroit Area. Utilizing urban farmers and small batch companies. That is my whole mind of how I went into this. So, why open a kitchen? Why now and why here? More Information Visit the brewery: Brew Detroit 1401 Abbott Street, Detroit, MI 48216 Phone: (313) 344-7185 https://www.brewdetroit.com/ See More Collapse Brew Detroit General Manager Xena Shaban-Schelter was the right person to ask. The Brew Detroits owner had been interested for years in adding a kitchen," Shaban-Schelter said. "Certain foods go nicely with beer. The Idea was always brewing. Days and years passed, and finally, the right heads merged together. The menu was very carefully picked for you," she continued. "Every item on the menu is unique in its kind and has its own taste. And that's why the Reuben Fritters are exceptional. They're very popular too. Especially when you take that first bite, they're crispy on the outside and warm on the inside. They just melt in your mouth like when you eat a taco or a nacho or like a Ruben sandwich." When I finished eating my Reuben fritta, I wanted to lick the plate; it was that good. I dont like chicken, so I tried to say no thanks to the Detroit Honey Bites. When I saw Chucks face after he took his first bite, I knew I better get a bite - the crunch, OMG. The honey is from T.M. Kline & Sons in Saint Charles, Michigan. Oh boy, this could be bad news, I thought when they set the Chronic Fries on our table. I was right. The SarVecchio Parmesan cheese is an interesting pairing with the balsamic, bacon and rosemary. As the name suggests, it is hard to stop eating them. We had potato pierogies. They were good, but the caramelized onions in Cerveza Delray Oscura beer stole the show. Chuck Marshall/For Hearst Midwest The Smokey Haystack sandwichs description makes my mouth water - Smoked BBQ beef brisket, coleslaw, BD Signature BBQ sauce on a brioche bun. What is in the BD Signature BBQ sauce? It is delicious, I asked. Chef Tara had no problems sharing, It's the 313 Polish Lager. Even the pizza dough is made with beer, the Cerveza Delray, which won the 2018 Bronze International Style Pilsener at the American Beer Festival. It is described as Clean. Crisp. & Easy Drinking. Pilsner, Vienna, & Munich malt were used in the brewing process. Munich malt adds a touch of sweetness and complexity while complimenting the cascade hops. Chuck Marshall/For Hearst Midwest The pizza crust was thin with just a touch of sweetness. Chucks favorite pizza was The Joe. Hot. Hot. Hot. I wrote in my notes. The arrabbiata sauce paired with pepperoni and hot Italian sausage makes for one spicy dish. My favorite was the Red Wing. It has crispy fried chicken, garlic cream sauce, cheese, and tangy buffalo sauce. We didnt sample the Dearborn pizza, but Shaban-Schelter shared her thoughts: "all the ingredients are from Dearborn, and they're like Mediterranean; different. Put them all together. You have this explosion of flavor in your mouth. We asked Chef Tara if shed watched The Bear, the new series on Hulu. The question nearly brought her to her knees. OMG! Yes! was her reply, laughing. She assured us Brew Detroits kitchen was nothing like that kitchen, but they do address each other as Chef out of respect. She has nicknames for everyone on her team. Shes nicknamed their pizza chef, Lenny, Chef Kravitz. HONG KONG (AP) Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding on Thursday beat market expectations for revenue in its quarter ended June, even as revenue was nearly flat and its net income plunged 50%. The company has been grappling with increased regulatory scrutiny and fines and a slowing economy. Alibaba reported revenues of 205.6 billion ($30.4 billion) for its quarter ended June, down 0.1% from the same period last year but still better than the average analyst estimate of $30.09 billion, according to FactSet. It was the first time the company has reported a contraction in sales. Net income tumbled 50% to 22.7 billion yuan ($3.4 billion). Excluding one-time charges, adjusted earnings per ADS totaled $1.75, topping the average analyst estimate of $1.60 per share. The company's U.S.-listed shares rose 5% in early trading Thursday. Its shares traded in Hong Kong slipped 2.2% early Friday. Alibaba was hit hard in the last quarter as China locked down various cities around the country to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Online shopping tends to flourish during such times, but the company said in a statement that revenue fell mainly due to impacts from COVID-19 resurgence and restrictions that resulted in supply chain and logistics disruptions in April and most of May. Customers in the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, for example, were unable to shop online or even order food delivery during its two-month lockdown. Alibaba, headquartered in the eastern city of Hangzhou, has also in recent years been scrutinized heavily by regulators and been ordered to pay anti-monopoly fines. Its cloud business has been linked to Chinas largest cybersecurity breach, when a hacker online attempted to sell over a billion personal records purportedly from a Shanghai police database. Alibaba faces fierce competition from rivals such as JD.com and Pinduoduo, which has reported an increase in user numbers. Last week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission added Alibaba to a growing list of companies that could face delisting from U.S. stock exchanges unless they give U.S. regulators unfettered access to their auditing processes and financial books. Meanwhile, Alibaba is seeking a primary listing in Hong Kong by the end of the year that would allow mainland Chinese investors direct access to its stock as it seeks a more diversified investor base. This story has been corrected to reflect that the decline in revenue was 0.1% in the second paragraph. GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. (AP) _ CSG Systems International Inc. (CSGS) on Wednesday reported second-quarter net income of $5.3 million. The Greenwood Village, Colorado-based company said it had net income of 17 cents per share. Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, were 84 cents per share. The provider of support services for the communications industry posted revenue of $262.2 million in the period. Its adjusted revenue was $243.5 million. CSG Systems expects full-year earnings in the range of $3.44 to $3.68 per share, with revenue in the range of $1 billion to $1.03 billion. _____ This story was generated by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on CSGS at https://www.zacks.com/ap/CSGS VERNON, Calif. Teresa Robles begins her shift around dawn most days at a pork processing plant in an industrial corridor 4 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. She spends eight hours on her feet cutting tripe, a repetitive motion that has given her constant joint pain, but also a $17.85-an-hour income that supports her family. So in early June, when whispers began among the 1,800 workers that the facility would soon shut down, Robles, 57, hoped they were only rumors. But it was true, she said somberly at the end of a recent shift, and now each day inches a little closer to my last day. The 436,000-square-foot factory, with roots dating back nearly a century, is scheduled to close early next year. Its Virginia-based owner, Smithfield Foods, says it will be cheaper to supply the region from factories in the Midwest than to continue operations here. Unfortunately, the escalating costs of doing business in California required this decision, said Shane Smith, the chief executive of Smithfield, citing utility rates and a voter-approved law regulating how pigs can be housed. MARK ABRAMSON/NYT Workers and company officials see a larger economic lesson in the impending shutdown. They just differ on what it is. To Robles, it is evidence that despite years of often perilous work, we are just disposable to them. For the meatpacker, it is a case of politics and regulation trumping commerce. The cost of doing business in California is a longtime point of contention. It was cited last year when Tesla, the electric-vehicle maker that has been a Silicon Valley success story, announced that it was moving its headquarters to Texas. Theres a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area, said Elon Musk, Teslas chief executive, mentioning housing prices and long commutes. As with many economic arguments, this one can take on a partisan hue. Around the time of Teslas exit, a report by the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford University found that California-based companies were leaving at an accelerating rate. In the first six months of last year, 74 headquarters relocated from California, according to the report. In 2020, the report found, 62 companies were known to have relocated. Dee Dee Myers, a senior adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, counters by pointing to Californias continued economic growth. MARK ABRAMSON/NYT Every time this narrative comes up, its consistently disproven by the facts, said Myers, director of the Governors Office of Business and Economic Development. The nations gross domestic product grew at an annual pace of 2% over a five-year period through 2021, according to Myers office, while Californias grew by 3.7%. The state is still the countrys tech capital. Still, manufacturing has declined more rapidly in California than in the nation as a whole. Since 1990, the state has lost a third of its factory jobs it now has roughly 1.3 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics compared with a 28% decline nationwide. The Smithfield plant is an icon of Californias industrial heyday. In 1931, Barney and Francis Clougherty, brothers who grew up in Los Angeles and the sons of Irish immigrants, started a meatpacking business that soon settled in Vernon. Their company, later branded as Farmer John, became a household name in Southern California, recognized for producing the beloved Dodger Dog and al pastor that sizzled at backyard cookouts. During World War II, the company supplied rations to U.S. troops in the Pacific. Almost 20 years later, Les Grimes, a Hollywood set painter, was commissioned to create a mural at the plant, transforming a bland industrial structure into a pastoral landscape where young children chased cherubic-looking pigs. It became a sightseeing destination. More recently, it has also been a symbol of the states social and political turbulence. MARK ABRAMSON/NYT In explaining Smithfields decision to close the plant, Smith, the chief executive, and other company officials have pointed to a 2018 statewide ballot measure, Proposition 12, which requires that pork sold in the state come from breeding pigs housed in spaces that allow them to move more freely. The measure is not yet being enforced and faces a challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court this fall. If it is not overturned, the law will apply even to meat packed outside the state the way Smithfield now plans to supply the local market but company officials say that in any case, its passage reflects a climate inhospitable to pork production in California. Passions have sometimes run high outside the plant as animal welfare activists have condemned the confinement and treatment of the pigs being slaughtered inside. Protesters have serenaded and provided water to pigs whose snouts stuck out of slats in arriving trucks. In addition to its objections to Proposition 12, Smithfield maintains that the cost of utilities is nearly four times as high per head to produce pork in California than at the companys 45 other plants around the country, though it declined to say how it arrived at that estimate. John Grant, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, which represents Robles and other workers at the plant, said Smithfield announced the closing just as the sides were to begin negotiating a new contract. A total gut punch and, frankly, a shock, said Grant, who worked at the plant in the 1970s. MARK ABRAMSON/NYT He said wage increases were a priority for the union going into negotiations. The company has offered a $7,500 bonus to employees who stay through the closing and has raised the hourly wage, previously $19.10 at the top of the scale, to $23.10. (The rate at the companys unionized Midwest plants is still a bit higher.) But Grant said the factory shutdown was an affront to his members, who toiled through the pandemic as essential workers. Smithfield was fined nearly $60,000 by California regulators in 2020 for failing to take adequate measures to protect workers from contracting coronavirus. After all that the employees have done throughout the pandemic, theyre now all of a sudden going to flee? Theyre destroying lives, said Grant, adding that the union is working to find new jobs for workers and hopes to help find a buyer for the plant. Karen Chapple, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, said the closing was an example of the larger trend of deindustrialization in areas like Los Angeles. It probably doesnt make sense to be here from an efficiency perspective, she said. Its the tail end of a long exodus. Indeed, the number of food manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles County has declined 6% since 2017, according to state data. And as those jobs are shed, workers like Robles wonder what will come next. More than 80% of the employees at the Smithfield plant are Latino a mix of immigrants and first-generation native-born. Most are older than 50. The security and benefits have kept people in their jobs, union leaders say, but the nature of the labor has made it hard to recruit younger workers who have better alternatives. On a recent overcast morning, the air in Vernon was thick with the smell of ammonia. Workers wearing surgical masks and carrying goggles and helmets walked into the plant. The sound of forklifts hummed beyond a high fence. Massive warehouses line the streets in the area. Some sit vacant; others produce wholesale local baked goods and candies. Robles started at the Smithfield plant four years ago. For more than two decades she owned a small business selling produce in downtown Los Angeles. She loved her work, but when her brother died in 2018, she needed money to honor his wish to have his body sent from Southern California to Colima, Mexico, their hometown. She sold the business for a couple of thousand dollars, then started at the factory, making $14 an hour. I was proud, she said, recalling the early months at her new job. Robles is the sole provider for her family. Her husband has several health complications, including surviving a heart attack in recent months, so she now shoulders the $2,000 mortgage payment for their home in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Sometimes her 20-year-old son, who recently started working at the plant, helps with expenses. But this is my responsibility it is on me to provide, she said. Robles has long recited the Lords Prayer every night before bed, and now she often finds herself repeating it throughout the day for strength. Theyre kicking us out with no answers, she said. Other workers, like Mario Melendez, 67, who has worked at the plant for a decade, shares that unmoored feeling. Its an honor to know his labor helps feed people across Southern California, he said especially around the holidays, when the factorys ribs, ham and hot dogs will be part of peoples celebrations. But the factory is also a place where he contracted coronavirus, which he passed along to his brother, who died of the virus, as did his mother. He was devastated. A terrible shock, said Melendez, who says he feels betrayed by the company. So does Leo Velasquez. He started on the night shift in 1990, making $7 an hour to package and seal bacon. A few years later, he moved to days, working 10-hour shifts. Ive given my life to this place, said Velasquez, 62. Over the years, his body began to wear down. In 2014, he had shoulder replacement surgery. Still, he had hoped to continue at the factory until he was ready to retire. Thats not going to happen, he said. Where I go from here, I do not know. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate NEW YORK (AP) Pose star Angelica Ross is set to make her Broadway debut in Chicago this fall, becoming the first openly transgender actor to play the murderous vixen Roxie Hart in the long-running musical. Ross, whose credits also include American Horror Story: 1984, will start an eight-week run beginning Sept. 12 at the Ambassador Theatre. She will join a Broadway starting to open its arms to transgender actors. In 2018, Ru Pauls Drag Race star Peppermint became the first openly trans woman to originate a principal role on Broadway, starring in the Go-Gos jukebox musical Head Over Heels. This spring, L Morgan Lee made history as the first openly transgender person to be nominated and go on to win a Tony Award for her work as a featured actress in the musical A Strange Loop. Set in the 1920s, Chicago is a scathing satire of how show business and the media make celebrities out of criminals. It has Bob Fosse-inspired choreography, skimpy outfits and killer songs such as All That Jazz and Cell Block Tango. It tells the story of Hart, a housewife and dancer who murders her on-the-side lover after he threatens to leave her. To avoid conviction, she hires Chicagos slickest criminal lawyer to help her dupe the public, media and her rival cellmate, Velma Kelly, by creating shocking headlines. Other principal and featured Broadway actors who have identified as trans include Alexandra Billings in The Nap, Becca Blackwell in the play Is This a Room, and Kate Bornstein and Ty Defoe in Straight White Men. The celebrity-craving heroine at the heart of "Chicago'' has been played by dozens of women since the show opened in 1996, including Melanie Griffith, Christie Brinkley, Marilu Henner, Brooke Shields, Lisa Rinna, Gretchen Mol, Ashlee Simpson, Brandy Norwood, Jennifer Nettles and Robin Givens. Pamela Anderson made headlines earlier this year when she played Roxie. ___ Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits A boisterous extended clan gathers for a family holiday, launching the requisite arguments, hurt feelings, grudges, inside jokes, laughter, love, reconciliation and lots of eating, plus maybe a car chase. So far, so familiar. Whats different about Easter Sunday, a joyful if overly broad family dramedy starring comedian Jo Koy, is that this extended clan is a Filipino American family and the cast is almost all Filipino, with a few familiar actors finally getting cast as Filipino characters And that in itself is a welcome achievement, especially for Koy, whose life is clearly echoed here and who anchors the enterprise with a winning charm. The writing could surely be sharper and the ending is more than a little sappy. But this is an undeniable step forward for representation on the big screen. Koy clearly channels much of his own story in this, his feature film debut, drawing from his hugely popular standup comedy (Jay Chandrasekhar directs from a script by Kate Angelo and Ken Cheng.). He plays Joe Valencia, a Los Angeles comedian seeking his big acting break in Hollywood just as hes navigating family issues on multiple fronts, all coming to a head on, well, Easter Sunday. We meet Joe, a divorced dad, on a day of competing obligations. His son, Junior (a sweetly goofy Brandon Wardell) needs his presence at a school meeting to discuss mediocre grades. His own demanding mom, Susan (Lydia Gaston, blending imperious, demanding, loving and needy) is constantly calling, making sure hes on track for Easter celebrations. And hes auditioning for a sitcom something that'll take him beyond that beer commercial where hes famous for the line, Lets get this party started, baby! Joe (unsurprisingly) misses the school meeting but makes the audition, only to be told that they love him but want a half-Filipino accent even though its an accent he doesnt have. This show just wants a funny-sounding Filipino, he complains to his agent, who tells him to just suck it up and do the accent. (The agent is played, winkingly, by director Chandrasekhar as a guy whos always suspiciously driving through tunnels and losing his cell signal.) Easter Sunday comes, and Joe heads up the California coast to Daly City and the Filipino American neighborhood where his mom and her sister, Teresa (Tia Carrere, who has said this is her first Filipino role in a 40-year career), are each planning holiday meals. Theyre feuding, too, over something or other. It doesnt help that the two women happen to wear the exact same exact dress to church (yes, that old joke.) Much funnier is their fierce competition over the balikbayan boxes filled with gifts to be sent to family back home. As the holiday festivities proceed apace and Joe tries to keep his sitcom prospects alive, several subplots come into play. One involves Joes lovable but less-than-sensible cousin Eugene (Eugene Cordero) and his ill-conceived entrepreneurial efforts, which land him and Joe into potentially deadly conflict with gun-toting bully Dev Deluxe (Asif Ali) and bring them together, improbably, with Filipino American star Lou Diamond Phillips, playing himself. Theres also a brief run-in with the law during a car chase, the law being none other than Tiffany Haddish, in a cameo as Vanessa, an ex of Joes with an axe to grind and, now, a cop's badge. Haddish is, not surprisingly, quite funny. Less welcome is the whole splapsticky criminal-gang subplot that detracts from the more human themes. Speaking of humanity, the lovely Eva Noblezada projects it beautifully as Tala, a romantic interest for Junior a confident young woman who shows the LA-raised boy some of the values around family that shes learned in Daly City. If youre a Broadway fan, you may know Noblezada from Hadestown, in which her terrific singing talent, teased here for a few seconds, is on full display. (Couldn't they have given her more bars?) Noblezadas unforced delivery makes her scenes a highlight in a film that overall relies too heavily on broad comedy. A church service turned standup routine seems especially forced. And yet, one cant help leaving with a smile. Food, family, a big karaoke scene and a spotlight on an immigrant community underrepresented in Hollywood. There are worse ways to spend 96 minutes. Easter Sunday, a Universal Studios release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for some strong language, and suggestive references. Running time: 96 minutes. Two stars out of four. ___ MPAA definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. ___ For more AP film reviews, go to https://apnews.com/hub/film-reviews. John L. via Yelp Thai Noodle II, a restaurant right in the heart of UC Berkeley's bustling Telegraph Avenue, has closed after 15 years, according to Berkeleyside. On July 1, a notice posted at the restaurant announced that it had closed "due to circumstance[s] beyond our control" and that "we have loved being here on Telegraph Avenue and would like to thank you." SFGATE could not reach the owner for comment at time of publication. Cowgirl Creamery is closing its remaining retail presence at Point Reyes Station after 25 years. The Bay Area institution, best known for its selection of artisan soft cheeses like its famous Mt. Tam, made the announcement on Thursday in an Instagram post that said the store at 80 4th St. in Point Reyes Station would permanently close Sept. 5. Pamela Dressler, managing director at Cowgirl Creamery, told SFGATE in a statement that the decision to shutter the cheese shop at Point Reyes Station was a difficult one but also necessary for the sake of the overall business. Point Reyes Station was the home of Cowgirl for many years, and it will always be a cornerstone of our story and who we are, but there have long been challenges with maintaining a retail shop and cheesemaking facility in this location, Dressler said. For instance we are unable to build bathroom facilities and unable to scale Red Hawk production and meet the demands of existing and new consumers. Both of these considerations were evaluated, and thought was given to long-term water usage and other needs. There were no easy solutions. Cynthia W. on Yelp Cowgirl Creamery founders Sue Conley and Peggy Smith debuted their small cheese shop within an old barn at Point Reyes Station in 1997. Over time, the partners worked on crafting a series of artisan cheeses that include its top sellers Mt. Tam, Devil's Gulch and the accidental creation of Red Hawk. Guests who visited the Point Reyes Station outpost could peek at the makings of the pungent Red Hawk through a series of glass windows inside that showed the cheese in its various phases of production. In 2016, Conley and Smith sold their artisan cheese business to Swiss dairy company Emmi. The following year, Cowgirl Creamery opened a larger production facility in Petaluma. Conley and Smith continued to work at Cowgirl Creamery until their retirement in 2021. Alix Martichoux / SFGATE Alix Martichoux / SFGATE Michelle P. on Yelp Alix Martichoux / SFGATE Bay Area-based Cowgirl Creamery announced its plans to shutter its Point Reyes Station retail location. (Photos top to bottom right: Alix Martichoux. Bottom left: Michelle P. on Yelp Bay Area-based Cowgirl Creamery announced its plans to shutter its Point Reyes Station retail location. (Photos top to bottom right: Alix Martichoux. Bottom left: Michelle P. on Yelp Last year, Cowgirl Creamery closed its shop inside San Franciscos Ferry Building because of operational challenges amid the pandemic. The forthcoming Point Reyes Station store closure means that Cowgirl Creamery will no longer have a retail presence in the Bay Area at least for now. Its unclear whether the company plans to open a retail shop sometime in the future. For now, Dressler said that Cowgirl Creamery will continue to focus its efforts at the Petaluma plant and eventually move Red Hawk cheese production to that location early next year when the cheesemaking process for that item is perfected. San Franciscos Mission District, through Victor Escobedos eyes, is a sight to behold. As he walks down 24th toward the corner of Mission Street, the man synonymous with Papalote taquerias and its growing salsa empire seems to know just about everyone who crosses his path. He fist bumps one older man as he asks about his day in Spanish. He waves at one of his employees whizzing by on a scooter on his way to finish a shift. Across from his latest venture, a sweet shop called La Snackeria, he points to the Dance Mission Theater, a performance venue and studio where both of his sons have thrived as hip-hop dancers. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE As he weaves his way through crowds of folks selling food, clothes and other goods next to a bus stop he pauses. I walked in front of here when I was 12. My dad, my mom and my frightened self, he said. I looked at that wall where La Snackeria is right now, but I never knew that I was going to own that place, eventually. So do I owe anything to the Mission? At one point, you realize, are there coincidences? Do they exist? Was this meant to be? Was this my destiny? Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE He ponders these existential questions standing under one of San Franciscos most storied taquerias, El Farolito on 24th Street. Although the next generation may see Papalote as El Farolitos competition, Escobedo said the beloved neighborhood restaurant is a bookmark of memories tied to his childhood. A time when a 12-year-old Escobedo moved from Mexico City to the United States. Now, Escobedo is the owner of two Papalote taqueria locations, with one in the Mission and the other on Fulton Street. Hes also the man behind the Papalote Salsa brand made from trusted family recipes and stocked on the shelves of Whole Foods, Bi-Rite and Rainbow Grocery. His newest venture, La Snackeria, is a sweet shop thats located right next to the 24th Street BART station, and its filled with all his favorite Mexican candies and treats from his childhood, including homemade ice cream. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Escobedos pulse seems to beat in rhythm with the heart of the Mission. I stand here like, look at the Mission, he said, with open arms. This is an amazing place that saw me grow up. Tengo un carnita Whenever Escobedo visited with his grandma on his mothers side, whether in San Mateo or in Mexico City, she would always make a little carne asada on the stove. Food is a direct link to his culture, his family. Its a tangible way to relive those fond memories by simply tasting the dishes he grew up eating, and now he shares those recipes with his customers across all of his businesses. There was always a carne asada, he said. Tengo un carnita, she would say. Thats very common in Mexico. You visit someone out of the blue and everybody has a little steak. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Customers line up, outside of Papalote on 24th Street.(Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE) Customers line up, outside of Papalote on 24th Street.(Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE) Papalote means kite in Spanish, and reminds Escobedo of big family barbecues back in Mexico. When the weather was just right, the Escobedos would visit a beautiful park in Mexico City called Chapultepec and grill carne asada while other family members brought cases of beer and side dishes like potato salad. Escobedo recalls flying kites with his cousins and running around the lush park filled with balloons tied to trees as markers so you could locate your party. I just remember, its not just the flavor, but its also the smells of the smoke from the grill, and the way they would take the tortilla and tear the thin steak, he said. I can see it, just the fibers coming apart, and then, giving it to me. It almost sounds cliche, but it is the flavor of the charcoal, and I remember that very well. Thats what he loves about Papalote. Everything on the menu is made fresh to order in an effort to recreate those flavors from those family barbecues back at Chapultepec. Courtesy Papalote The carne asada has that same taste. We cut it nice and big, he said. Those chunks of meat, thats my burrito: the carne asada with pinto beans, super, with avocado instead of guacamole. Its part of my essence of my memory of Mexico. Escobedo said when he first moved to the states from Mexico, he ached for his birth country. He missed being surrounded by the Spanish language. He longed for the little stores that sold his favorite candies. But most of all, he missed all the familiar spaces that brought him comfort. After all, he was a kid with an accent, and it was apparent that he was different from his new school peers. But as he grew older, Escobedo said he started to really enjoy his Spanish-speaking talents. As a kid, Escobedo lived in Marin, but remembers feeling a sense of belonging when walking alongside his father on trips to the Mission. It was a place where Escobedo saw businesses with Spanish names, a neighborhood where Spanish music poured out into the street from open windows. He remembers visiting Libreria Mexico, where he could find his favorite magazines and comic books, while also eating familiar dishes made with care from surrounding restaurants. It was in those moments that Escobedo said he felt relevant. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE But food was also an important part of that change in my life, he said. In my life, in my experience, its always been El Farolito and La Taqueria. Escobedos wife and business partner, Jodi Hernandez, said the Mission evokes memories of when she and Escobedo were dating. Before we got married, we went to Cal, we would always go out to eat in the Mission and we liked to go salsa dancing. And then, we would end up at one of the restaurants in the Mission District and have our late-night burrito, Hernandez said. Victors been tied to the Mission longer than I have. I discovered it when I went to Cal. Its a special place and I love how Victor is so connected to the community. The salsa is the secret weapon Escobedo isnt the first in his family to go into the restaurant business. In fact, he worked at Celias Mexican Restaurant (his aunts place) in San Rafael for about 20 years before opening Papalote. Tia Celia moved to the Bay Area in the 1960s and began feeding her new community with her familys staple dishes. His fathers mole recipe, tasted in chicken burritos at Papalote, is one also served at Celias in San Rafael. When it came time to open his own restaurant, Escobedo said he reflected on his experiences with food, starting with the art of salsa-making. We took Tia Celias salsa and we made it our own, he said. So, same ingredients, but a different process. That was the one salsa that we had. As customers would ask for more and more sides of salsa at Papalote, he knew the taqueria had something special. But it was an appearance on Throwdown with Bobby Flay in February 2010 that changed everything. Bobby Flay goes, Yeah, you beat me. The salsa is the secret weapon, Escobedo said. But man, this whole Bobby Flay thing is so much overkill for two little restaurants. With Flay giving Papalotes salsa such high compliments and lines pouring out of both taqueria locations with hungry customers seeking a taste, Escobedo saw an opportunity to sell his familys salsa in grocery stores. Not knowing how labels are created, or what a co-packer does for a budding business, Escobedo slowly learned the ins and outs of the retail side of things and would often visit fancy food shows to gain more perspective. Less than a year after his appearance on Throwdown with Bobby Flay, Papalote Salsa was carried in grocery stores. Courtesy Papalote In August, Papalote Salsa started selling jars in Southern California Whole Foods locations as well as stores in Southern Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii. Although Escobedo said his company still distributes to about 150 stores on their own, there are 600 stores whose orders are fulfilled by big-time wholesale food distributors such as KeHE and UNFI. I was just making burritos, and the next thing you know, Im distributing salsa to 600 stores, Escobedo said. Next year with the salsa company, Im going to be going to different stores such as Nugget and Mollie Stones, and maybe grow the company that way. He estimated that Papalote Salsa sells tens of thousands of units, or jars, a month. Its a recipe that takes three hours to make every day, starting with roasting off tomatoes before blending them with onions, garlic and other well-kept spices. Hernandez, whos a field reporter for NBC Bay Area, still gets giddy when she sees her familys salsa when shes out and about. Its always exciting to see the product on the shelves, wherever we are, she said. Wherever I am in the Bay Area, I cover primarily the East Bay, but wherever I am, I snap a picture and send it to Victor. Sometimes, I buy a jar and give it to my photographer. Sharing culture through food Standing in front of La Snackeria in the Mission, Escobedo points to the Carlos Santana mural that hugs the side of his store. There was a point in time where Escobedo taught eighth grade Spanish at a private school in Larkspur. One of his students was Salvador Santana, the famed guitarists son. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Its a gift to the community, he said of the mural. If you go to the Mission and get off on BART and you turn around. Its like, Ta-da! Welcome to the Latino community! La Snackeria opened in February in a former liquor store location. Once Escobedo heard through the grapevine that the storefront was empty, he quickly made moves to fill it with the Mexican sweet shop of his childhood dreams. After all, he didnt want to see a Starbucks take its place. Opening La Snackeria meant customers could enjoy everything from individual scoops of fruity ice cream to sweet-and-spicy fruit cups with mangos and watermelon. I want the Latinx community to feel represented by Papalote and La Snackeria, he said. Its like, Oh! They still have this? This is not lost! Its why I opened Snackeria. As you go in, I have all the candy that I can get from as far back as I can remember. So Lunetas and Mamut and Duvalin, in addition to whats happening now like mangonadas and tostilocos and stuff like that. As he entered his prized candy haven, Escobedo struck up a conversation with Maria Marin, a customer waiting for her mangonada who is originally from Mexico and sought out La Snackeria for a little taste of home. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Im benefiting from it from my memories when I was in Mexico, grabbing a little candy from la tiendita and just having the taste, Marin said, showing off the lollipops she bought at La Snackeria. Im happy with my goodies and Im waiting for my fruta. Escobedos eyes lit up with every word Marin described of her experience at La Snackeria. So much so that he asked, jokingly, if I planted her in the store. Thats the intention of La Snackeria is to bring community together, he said. Im going to be introducing churros pretty soon, in addition to all of the Mexican treats that kids who are new immigrants who still miss Mexico enjoy, and even immigrants who have aged here, the people who came in during the 80s and 90s. As he makes his way back toward Papalote, he comments that his taqueria is the last business on the block before the neighborhood becomes super gentrified. He said someone once told him that Mission Street is the border, if you travel further south, its reminiscent of Tijuana. But, if you travel north past Papalotes location, its comparable to San Diego, with nice apartment buildings with pristine views of the city. His taqueria, and all his businesses, are not only points of pride for Escobedo, but for wife, Jodi, and his sons Jose and Mateo, as well. The Mission has watched Escobedo grow up, and he sees it as his duty to continue to stay connected to a neighborhood that made him feel at home all those years ago. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE We really believed in what we were doing, and when Victor and the staff developed the menu, it was just so amazing. The food, I still crave it, Hernandez said. It's been 23 years and now we are one of the staples in the Mission District. So its mind-blowing to think about it. We actually did it. Papalote Mission, 3409 24th St., San Francisco. Open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Papalote Nopa, 1777 Fulton St., San Francisco. Open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.- 9 p.m. Sauls Deli in Berkeley has new future owners, reports J Weekly. Longtime owners Peter Levitt and Karen Adelman have handed the torch to Jesus Chuy Mendoza, a manager at Sauls, and Sam Tobis, who owns Oaklands Grand Bakery. The pair will join Sauls as partners while Levitt and Adelman will take smaller roles at the restaurant and eventually transfer ownership completely, J Weekly reports. Peter and Karen and wonderful people and I feel grateful and excited to continue to work and learn from them, Tobis told SFGATE. Nothing [at Sauls] is going to change. Tobis told SFGATE that he came on board about eight months ago when he began to have more availability. He added that he first met Levitt and Adelman around 2017, first as a vendor, but his introduction to Sauls came earlier while a student at Cal. When asked how the partnership came about, Tobis was tight-lipped about the details and simply offered, sometimes the timing is right. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Mendoza, who has been an employee at Sauls for the last decade, told J Weekly that he was thrilled to be part of the restaurants future and that we are a really strong team. Owners Levitt and Adelman have been on the hunt for new owners since 2016 when they first announced their plans to sell the Berkeley institution so that they could seek retirement. Four years later, Levitt and Adelman had an interested buyer in 2020 and expected to finalize the sale that April, but the deal fell apart in March due to COVID reasons, Berkeleyside reported. Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE The main goal in finding new ownership has remained the same for Levitt and Adelman: to keep Sauls the same as its always been. The couple told J Weekly that they feel confident that theyve found the right fit with Tobis and Mendoza on board. Moreover, Levitt and Adelman will continue to train and guide the new partners until they eventually retire in a few years. Sam made it clear that he wanted to come in and learn from us and meet our regular customers through us, Adelman told J Weekly. Both deeply care about the philosophy and spirit of the place ... Its a passion project for them and not just a job. Cassandra Day / Hearst Connecticut Media / NEW BRITAIN A city man was arrested Wednesday and faces federal charges after being caught with 140 grams of fentanyl and a loaded pistol, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for Connecticut. Thomas Rivera, 29, was charged with possession with intent to distribute 40 grams or more of fentanyl, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, prosecutors said. Last nights city council meeting saw a subdued replay of its July 20 meeting when a standing-room only crowd of irate Maxwelltown residents complained about flooding in their basements and general slowness of sewer construction and street paving in their low-lying section of town next to Manistee Lake. Funds to 'sell the area' In an effort to promote economic growth in Manistee, the Manistee County Board of Commissioners pledged $3,000 for additional personnel to be employed to sell the area during Tuesday mornings session. Last month, the board supported the concept of forming an economic development center as an adjunct to the Manistee County Chamber of Commerce. Presently, efforts to attract more industries are being made through the Industrial Development Committee and the Economic Development Committee. 60 YEARS AGO More TV courses Schoolroom television is returning to northern Michigan this fall on an expanded basis. Televised instruction for students in the areas schools will be available each weekday morning during the 1962-63 school year over stations, WWTV, Channel 9, Cadillac-Traverse City, and WWUP-TV, channel 10, Sault Ste. Marie. The instruction sessions will be telecast over Channels 9 and 10 each weekday morning from 9 to 10 starting Sept. 11. 80 YEARS AGO Scouts master It was announced today that Rev. Raymond Boadway has been appointed master of the Cub Boy Scouts locally. All boys between the ages of 9 and 11 who are interested in becoming cubs will meet at First Congregational Church tomorrow afternoon at 2 p.m. Starting tomorrow The adventures of Maisie continue fast and furious in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers Maisie Gets Her Man, latest in the series of which Ann Sothern is the star and which opens tomorrow at the Vogue Theatre. Showtimes are 3:35 p.m. , 7:10 p.m. and 10 p.m. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate President Joe Biden made an impromptu address to the nation Monday announcing that the United States had taken down al-Qaidas No. 1 leader: Ayman al-Zawahiri. The impact of the news swept the country, specifically resonating in the veteran community. And that was no exception to Laredoans who were a part of the War in Afghanistan as they voiced their opinions on the matter this week. As the No. 1 wanted terrorist, being killed can bring relief as his actions against others nations and groups of people can bring a sense of peace for some time until another one takes his place, said Ricky Quijano, a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars as a Post Adjutant and past Commander. Quijano served in Afghanistan as ongoing battles with al-Qaida elements and the Taliban were rampant during his time of service. Another Afghanistan veteran who has been vocal about the current administrations handling of the War in Afghanistan after it saw the U.S. presence retreat in August last year said the killing of al-Zawahiri was definitely a positive personally. On a personal level, this is incredibly gratifying, former Army SPC Joshua Alvarez said. May the judge of the world judge him accordingly. Alvarez, however, said for him politically, this is bittersweet. He said the fact the Taliban quickly retook control upon the U.S. pulling out of the area was not a good look, as it demonstrated failure from the whole 22-year conflict. Seeing Afghanistan fall and the Taliban resurgent to the point it has is so painful, Alvarez said. Yes, we did kill Zaw. But it's primarily a moot point with us having abandoned Afghanistan, and this is a relatively minor change. According to Alvarez, things would have been different had the United States still had control of Afghanistan or had a government in place that represented democratic values and opened ties with the U.S. Had this happened while we held Afghanistan, this would have had far greater meaning and impact, Alvarez said. This is more of a discount value kill. Glad he's out. The deck got one card shorter. Others who are not themselves veterans but had family or friends lost during the attacks in New York and Washington also expressed relief at al-Zawahiri's demise. Robert Ortiz, who had a family member involved in the attacks on Sept. 11 as he was injured while in New York City, said he found the news welcoming. The shock that this man and Osama (bin Laden) did can never be forgotten, and knowing that years later they are still being sought and paid for what they did to us is always comforting to hear, Ortiz said. More will follow like him in his footsteps, but they can rest assured that they will face the same fate as them if they continue attacking innocent people for political goals. Quijano said he is happy the mission was conducted with only one drone strike being used to take down the terrorist rather than using military personnel. He said by not putting any soldiers on the battlefield, countless lives were saved and the target was still reached. What makes me feel at-ease is that no boots on the ground servicemembers were used to carry out the mission, Quijano said. (Ad) After two years of being stuck at home, most Americans are anxious to get out and take a vacation. Post-pandemic travel is exploding as more people drive, fly, or cruise to their next getaway. Plus, companies that rely on business travel to run are now anxious to get their previously homebound employees and leaders back on the road to start taking advantage of post-pandemic work. How can you capitalize on this trend to make the most of your marketing budget? Read on to see what you need to know about the future of the travel industry as we enter a new phase of the pandemic and what marketing trends are most effective in the new travel boom. Travel Marketing Overview Travel is at an unprecedented high. Even as Americans are holding back on certain purchases, they are more than willing to spend big on their trips, especially higher-income travelers. In fact, Expedia announced that 2022 was the year of the GOAT, which stands for "greatest of all trips." Their survey of 12,000 travelers found that 65% of them planned to spend more money on their next trip and that extravagant trips are one of the year's biggest travel trends. While Americans are a significant part of this trend, they are not the only ones to get the travel itch. A survey of over 9,000 travelers that include France, Germany, Singapore, the UAE, and India found that 77% planned to travel in 2022. Businesses are also planning on ramping up their travel plans. In one survey of business travelers, 86% said they expect to make at least one business trip over the next six months. This environment provides travel marketers with an impressive opportunity. Travel companies may see massive gains and recover from the pandemic slump with the right marketing strategy that meets customers where they are, addresses their potential concerns, and appeals to their aspirations. How Travel Brands Can Market to Travelers in a Post-Pandemic World Now is the right time to start strategizing tourism marketing post-COVID. By creating an effective strategy, companies can start to come back from two long years with minimal travel and tourism. Prioritize Health And Safety Measures Public health and safety continue to be significant concerns for travelers. After two years of pandemic-related anxiety, most are still concerned that companies are keeping health and safety a priority. Many companies have one issue: the true preventative COVID measures, such as improving air ventilation in buildings and modes of transportation, are not visible to customers. Marketing is the perfect space to inform customers about the upgraded safety protocols and policies that help keep them safe. Brand trust is one of the most critical factors in purchasing decisions and has taken on even more significant importance since the pandemic. Providing more options and letting customers know what steps you are doing to keep them safe is critical to maintaining this trust and ensuring customers feel comfortable traveling again. Target Customers With Post-COVID Marketing Messages Customers' feelings, expectations, and thoughts have changed since 2020. With the changes in feelings towards travel, you must reassess your customers and target audiences. You may need to reconsider who is receptive to traveling and is considering an upcoming trip. This is the time to reconsider your customer journey and ensure that you know what they want and need from your company at each stage. It is critical that you give the right message at the right time to the right audience. Look Out For Competitors No matter what aspect of travel you are involved in, from airlines to hotels to local tourism, you are far from the only company looking to take advantage of post-pandemic travel. Stay ahead of the competition by keeping up with changing regulations, trends, and customer attitudes. Get every insight to ensure you don't fall behind other travel brands and maintain your market share. Post-pandemic travel is an uncharted category for companies. From shifting audience attitudes to restrictions to rising demand, it's challenging to predict exactly where the market is going and how to create an effective strategy to reach audiences. However, by keeping an eye on changes and analyzing consumer behavior, you start to make the most effective strategy and offer the right services and products. Optimize How Customers Can Contact You Consumers expect the brands they use and promote are reliable and trustworthy. However, travel issues are more likely as everyone adjusts to post-pandemic travel. The best way that travel businesses can maintain trust and reliability in uncertain times is by improving communication. Optimizing your contact center and offering multiple mediums for customers to contact you will enable you to encourage customer loyalty. Use mediums such as 24/7 help centers, chatbots, email support, and a strong social media presence to make interacting with you and solving issues easier. It gives travelers the reassurance they need by being accessible and demonstrating empathy. Identify Social Media Platforms Young and ready to put the pandemic behind them, Millennials and Gen Z-ers are an ideal audience for travel marketing, and social media is one of the best ways to market to them. To reach this key demographic, Snapchat created new Dynamic Travel Ads. Snapchat is especially effective for travel marketing. One survey found that Snapchat users were more likely to travel than other platforms and were 37% more likely to book a trip after seeing an ad. With Dynamic Travel Ads, marketers can benefit from advanced audience targeting, locally relevant campaign delivery, and a customized catalog setup. Snapchat is far from the only platform to reach travelers. Instagram continues to be a popular platform for Millennials, Facebook can be effective for a wider population, and TikTok is most widely used among Gen Z travelers. Identify your target audience's platforms to ensure your marketing budget is used most effectively. Source: California Travel Tips Find Target Audiences With A Visitor Profile A visitor profile is one of the most effective ways that you can start to identify changing attitudes to help you create the most effective marketing strategy. It gives you better insights into travel post-COVID. The research from before the pandemic and the early days of travel restrictions are most likely outdated and no longer represents today's travelers. You will need new research to create a strategy that reflects the modern tourists. Ask questions about your guests to put together a visitor profile. Some questions to include: What kind of guests stay in the hotel? Where do they come from? Is there a mix of leisure and business visitors, families, and high-end guests? Business Meets Leisure Employees are more willing than ever to turn their business trip into a vacation by extending their trip with added days. As a result, hospitality companies should capitalize by offering leisure with work for these laptop luggers. Since many offices are remote, a new form of business travel is starting to emerge. According to a Deloitte report, these so-called laptop luggers have above-average buying power, greater flexibility on travel dates, and a unique set of needs. Considerations for remote working include a solitude and comfortable workspace, fast Wi-Fi, and wellness-related amenities. Another travel trend taking shape is off-site corporate meetings and events where business leaders organize off-site get-togethers in hotels to enable employees to mingle and meet in person. Its the perfect opportunity for employers to encourage face-to-face interactions with remote employees in different locations. Post-COVID travel is no longer a business or pleasure choice. Many travelers are mixing the two, and marketers should tap into this desire when promoting their business. Leverage Video Marketing Visualization is some of the most effective forms of marketing to the newest generations. It creates a better impact and ensures effective messaging and engagement. For example, talking about the beauty of Kauai will have a limited impact. Showing the jungles, flowers, waterfalls, trails, and stunning coral reefs will significantly affect the viewers' desire to travel. Video helps remind viewers why they love to travel: new experiences and memories that lastleverage videos to show them how these potential experiences will enhance their lives. Source: Sky Travel Native Advertising And Interactive Content Before COVID, most travel marketing focused on TV commercials and billboards. However, this form of marketing has fallen by the wayside as travelers are more often seen online. Consumers expect messages crafted specifically for them in the places they visit online. They also want a feel for the experience they will receive traveling with you. Targeted, interactive content combined with a data-driven promotional strategy is critical post-COVID. With the right native advertising and interactive content, potential travelers can get a sense of the adventures that await them. Source: Hearst StoryStudio Click here to see more examples of Hearst StoryStudios native advertising and interactive content in the travel industry. Other Marketing Ideas Beyond these effective marketing techniques, there are some points that you may want to keep in mind advertising travel post-COVID. Mindful Messaging Consumers are interested in the politics of the companies they buy from. Corporate social responsibility weighs heavily into whether they purchase from you or your competitor. Stories of how you help local communities, communicating with empathy and understanding, and increasing cleaning standards are all critical to your messaging today. Geo-Targeting While flights are up, some travelers are looking for a local adventure. Geo-targeting could help you reach consumers planning to drive for vacation or insist upon finding a locale in a particular area of a city. Travel Guides Travel guides are a critical way to get in front of prospects while they are still early in their customer journey. They will likely reach for a travel guide during their initial planning phase. A travel guide will set you apart from competitors as helpful and as an authority in the space. Dynamic Segmentation Most companies have more than one target audience. Dynamic segmentation helps streamline marketing technology so that you target the right customers with the right messages. You can be more effective in your reach by giving the right offers and promotions at ideal times. Marketing to Travelers in a Post-Pandemic World: Key Takeaways Trust is first and foremost in your post-COVID strategy. Promote the ways that you make everyone's health and safety a priority. Ensure your customers have multiple ways to contact you to help maintain reassurance. Traveler needs, challenges, and goals have changed from two years ago. Create a visitor profile to get insights into what your customers want to see post-COVID and how you can most effectively market to them. A nice picture is no longer enough. Customers want to get an immersive experience before committing to a trip. Videos and interactive content are most effective in giving customers a sense of why traveling with your brand is best for their next vacation. How Hearst Bay Area Can Help Now that people are easing into a post-pandemic recovery, they are setting their sights on new adventures, leisure business travel, and other experiences. If you are a travel or hospitality brand and want to lure travelers, contact Hearst Bay Area to discuss marketing and advertising strategies. CYNTHIANA, Ky. (AP) A small plane crash in Kentucky has killed one person and injured another, police said. The crash happened around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Cynthiana-Harrison County Airport, WKYT-TV reported. A woman aboard the plane died and a man was hospitalized with serious injuries, police said LOS ANGELES (AP) A driver who was fleeing police crashed into a homeless encampment in South Los Angeles, killing a man and a woman, authorities said. A man suspected of domestic violence drove off at around 12:30 p.m. Tuesday. Police didn't chase the man but found his car a short time later. SDI Productions/Getty Images On Wednesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety announced that three of the top 10 most wanted Texas figures were captured, this includes individuals from Greenville, Abilene and Fort Worth. On July 14, Cameron Bishop (Greenville) was arrested in Commerce, Texas, the release said, adding that John Havener (Abilene) was arrested on July 24 in Durant, Okla. and Texas 10 Most Wanted Sex Offender Arthur Stevenson (Fort Worth) was arrested on July 27 in Fort Worth, with a Crime Stoppers reward set to be paid in Bishops arrest. COLUMBUS, Ind. (AP) A southern Indiana prosecutor charged with harassment, intimidation and other counts threatened to kill a neighbor in a dispute over a dog, an affidavit unsealed Thursday said. Bartholomew County Prosecutor William Nash also is charged with obstruction of justice, disorderly conduct and interfering with the reporting of a crime in the May 8 confrontation. He faces four counts of harassment and two counts of intimidation. Currently Reading Alert: Air Force charges airman in April attack that injured troops at US base in Syria PEORIA An Alton born author is working to honor the first feed slave. Carl Adams has been a lifelong Abraham Lincoln scholar, dedicating the last 25 years to research into Nance Legins-Costley, born Nance Legins Cox, who was freed as a slave by Lincoln in 1841 20 years before the start Civil War. Next week historical markers will be placed at her gravesite in Moffatt Cemetery in Peoria. According to Adams, funds are also being collected to erect a permanent memorial in her honor. Adams grew up near the Alton monument to abolitionist publisher Elijah Parish Lovejoy who was killed by a mob during an anti-abolition riot in his hometown. "I sat there and wondered about that monument and what it meant," he said. He earned a bachelors degree in broadcast journalism from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 1979 and worked more than 20 years on public radio documentaries and network television news. In the 1970s and 1980s, Adams provided communications and military history lessons as a training officer for both the Marines and the Army. For his project,Trials of Nance, Adams had to dig deep into Lincoln and Illinois history to recover the story of Legins-Costley, a story that for more than a hundred years was lost to history. In 2014 the project was compiled into a book titled "Trials of the First Slave Freed by Abraham Lincoln: A True Story of Nance Legins-Costley." This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Ameren Illinois has agreed to pay $587,000 to repair parts of Anna and West streets that were damaged as the utility remediated the soil at a former coke gas plant which is immediately west of the Taco Gringo restaurant. The latest phase of the cleanup started May 3, 2021, and all contractors and equipment were off-site May 12, Dave Palmer, manager for remediation projects for Ameren Illinois, said. The last portion of the project is street repair now that remediation is complete. New asphalt is planned for Anna and South West streets. An alley that goes north from Anna Street will be repaired. New sidewalks on the north side of Anna Street from West to South Main streets as well as some minor sewer and water line repair are also in the plan. "We're glad that now it's just getting the roads put back together. Realistically, we hope it gets done this year," Jacksonville Mayor Andy Ezard said. "But we know contractors are extremely busy as well." The $587,000 figure was arrived at by understanding the change in the original condition of the roads the trucks used to access the remediation site, Palmer said. Ezard said the city council was happy with the settlement. "It took some time, and we had some back and forth, and there was some compromise. But Ameren realizes we made good arguments," Ezard said. "We feel the settlement was appropriate. Ameren has been a good partner and we felt it was a reasonable amount." Hutchison Engineering and Benton & Associates were involved in the negotiations with Ameren. Ezard said Hutchison handles road and bridge construction matters for the city, and Benton takes care of water and sewer issues. Ezard said the city is taking responsibility for soliciting and awarding construction bids since it already has the check in hand. The agreement was for $587,000, so that amount is set, Palmer said. If the amount of the bids is higher, the city will have to pay for the overage. The two engineering firms came up with the estimates, Ezard said, so he is confident the bids will be in line with the settlement amount. "Early on, Ameren upgraded some of the sewer and water lines," Ezard said. "They realized they were disruptive to some of our sewer lines. So, some of those are already done." The remediation project was the final phase of a voluntary cleanup program administered by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Ameren has worked with the EPA to restore the property. The Jacksonville Gas Light and Coke Co. started manufacturing gas shortly after its construction along South Main Street near Sandy and Anna streets in 1855 and stored gas in cylindrical holders until about 1892. Illinois Power bought the facility in 1923 and continued gas production until 1934. The site housed a natural gas storage facility in the 1950s, which was demolished to make way for an electrical substation at 101 Anna St. That facility was torn down in 2014 in favor of a new substation nearby, which eventually cleared the way for the testing that led to the last round of soil remediation. Ameren used a process called in-situ soil stabilization, Palmer said. With this process, the spread of contaminants in soil and groundwater is limited by stabilizing and solidifying the contaminated soil. It is intended to contain the soil and contaminated material, not remove it. "Imagine 10-foot augers with teeth with holes in them," Palmer said. "As they stand in soil, it injects cement and chemicals into the soil in the zone. It makes a homogeneous material in columns and the machine will make more columns that overlap throughout the area. It is all soil that is there; but it's mixed with other components." According to the EPA, this method keeps contaminants from leaching into the surrounding environment. Leaching occurs when water from rain or other sources dissolves contaminants and carries them down into groundwater or over land into lakes and streams. Using in-situ soil stabilization eliminated the need to drive on city roads repeatedly with trucks loaded with dirt. Palmer said they bored down about 40 feet with the top 10 feet being clean soil that was brought in and topped with gravel. Rural school districts in Texas are switching to four-day weeks this fall due to lack of staff. Florida is asking veterans with no teaching background to enter classrooms. Arizona is allowing college students to step in and instruct children. The teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels - and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure that, as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them. "I have never seen it this bad," Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said of the teacher shortage. "Right now it's number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts . . . necessity is the mother of invention, and hard-pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions." It is hard to know exactly how many U.S. classrooms are short of teachers for the 2022-2023 school year; no national database precisely tracks the issue. But state- and district-level reports have emerged across the country detailing staffing gaps that stretch from the hundreds to the thousands - and remain wide open as summer winds rapidly to a close. The Nevada State Education Association estimated that roughly 3,000 teaching jobs remained unfilled across the state's 17 school districts as of early August. In a January report, the Illinois Association of Regional School Superintendents found that 88% of school districts statewide were having "problems with teacher shortages" - while 2,040 teacher openings were either empty or filled with a "less than qualified" hire. And in the Houston area, the largest five school districts are all reporting that between 200 and 1,000 teaching positions remain open. Carlton Jenkins, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin, said teachers are so scarce that superintendents across the country have developed a whisper network to alert each other when educators move between states. "We're at a point right now, where if I have people who want to move to California, I call up and give a reference very quick," he said. "And if someone is coming from another place - say, Minnesota - I have superintendent colleagues in Minnesota, they call and say, 'Hey, I have teachers coming your way.' " Why are America's schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators' sense that politicians and parents - and sometimes their own school board members - have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues. "The political situation in the United States, combined with legitimate aftereffects of covid, has created this shortage," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "This shortage is contrived." The stopgap solutions for lack of staff run the gamut, from offering teachers better pay to increasing the pool of people who qualify as educators to bumping up class sizes. But many of these temporary fixes are likely to harm students by diminishing their ability to learn, predicted Dawn Etcheverry, president of the Nevada State Education Association. "When you start to double classes, teachers don't have that one-on-one with the students, that personal ability to understand what the student needs" - both academically and socially, Etcheverry said. Danika Mills, a former school-based therapist and state director of Unite Us, a technology company that connects health and social services providers, said this diminishment in the quality of education is coming at the worst possible moment. America's schoolchildren are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, she said, and the havoc months of online learning wreaked on students' academic progress, social skills and mental health. "We know students of all ages suffered steep declines in academic achievement during the pandemic and now is the time to course-correct those changes," Mills said. "Instead, I think and fear we may be facing an even bigger decline." Nevada's Clark County School District, which serves 320,000 students, is one of many school systems taking a scattershot approach to staff shortages by trying several solutions at once. In hopes of shrinking its roughly 1,300 teaching vacancies, the district has raised the starting teacher salary by $7,000 and is offering a $4,000 "relocation bonus" to new teachers who move from out of state or more than 100 miles. In an interview, Superintendent Jesus F. Jara said the district is also granting employees a "retention bonus" of up to $5,000 for staying in their jobs. But, with school slated to start in a week, the district is still only 92% staffed, Jara said. And - despite "around-the-clock" efforts from his human resources team - he does not believe the district will close the gap in time. "I'm still worried, I am still losing sleep at night, and I'm not going to fill the rest of the 8% of our classrooms by Monday," Jara said. Come Aug. 8, the district will be forced to deploy patching measures, Jara said - including pulling administrators from the central office to work as substitutes and combining multiple classes together in large spaces such as auditoriums or gymnasiums. "Band-aid-wise, I think they're doing whatever they can," said Jeff Horn, executive director of the Clark County Association of School Administrators. "It's a mess." Other districts and states are attempting more unorthodox fixes. A new state law in Arizona, signed by Gov. Doug Ducey (R) last month, allows college students to take teaching jobs. A similar law, which took effect in Florida on July 1, offers K-12 teaching jobs to military veterans who served for at least four years. The veterans do not need bachelor's degrees but must have earned at least 60 college credits while maintaining a grade-point average of at least 2.5. Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said the need for teachers in his state is dire: His association estimates there are at least 8,000 teacher vacancies this year, up from 5,000 the year before. But Spar does not believe the veterans program is "really a solution," as it may lead to unqualified individuals entering classrooms. "I think we all appreciate what our military veterans have done for our country in terms of protecting our freedoms both here and abroad," he said. "But just because you were in the military does not mean you will be a great teacher." Meanwhile, the school board and superintendent in Arizona's Tucson Independent School District are considering making up for a dearth of math teachers - the system is missing 24 of them, along with 102 other teachers - by sending a small number of students into online learning for part of the day. The district may hire virtual math teachers from a Chicago-based online education company, the Tucson Sentinel reported. The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment. And in Texas's Mineral Wells Independent School District and Chico Independent School District, officials have switched to a four-day school week for the upcoming academic year. In both districts, which are small and rural, school leaders said the change is meant to attract and retain teachers amid significant staff shortages, the Texas Tribune reported. Neither district responded to a request for comment. In Wisconsin's Madison school district, superintendent Jenkins said that, a month away from the start of school on Sept. 1, officials are still working to fill 199 teacher vacancies and 124 non-teaching positions. But no children will lack an adult in the classroom come fall, he said, because the district has managed to recruit 269 qualified substitute teachers - primarily by raising substitute pay rates this spring. Jenkins said he hopes that, over the course of the year, the district can convince at least some of these substitutes to convert to full-time teachers. "We're just going to go after them," Jenkins said. Initial enticements will include "some immediate supplies. Every teacher likes their calendar, right? So we're providing calendars, little things for them - and we have some other things planned that I don't want to reveal, because I don't want to ruin the surprise." In Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia's largest district, Superintendent Michelle Reid said 97% of teaching positions are filled about three weeks before the semester begins. Reid said the district of nearly 179,000 students is now making an "all-hands-on-deck" effort to fill those jobs. "We are recruiting and processing applications and hiring educators around-the-clock, really," she said. "It's our intent to continue to recruit and hire teachers daily as we approach the start of the school year." Nonetheless, the district has begun developing backup plans, Reid said. Although the details vary campus to campus, one possible strategy is to send administrators with teaching licenses back into classrooms - but "we hope we will not have to utilize that." Leslie Houston, president of the Fairfax Education Association, said she has never in her career seen so many teachers leaving the job because they feel disrespected, primarily by politicians and some parents. "When people were beating up on teachers and just being real nasty about what we're doing and what we're not doing," Houston said, "I don't think they were really thinking, 'Who will teach my children?' " AURORA, Colo. (AP) Police in suburban Denver say theyre looking for a man who doused two customers with gasoline at a fueling station after confronting them because they were speaking Spanish and dont belong here, according to a department statement. The man allegedly looked for something to ignite the gasoline before smashing the rear window of the victims vehicle, taking the keys to their car and leaving, Aurora police said this week. CANBERRA, Australia (AP) Australias new government announced on Thursday it plans to prevent development of a coal mine due to the potential impact on the nearby Great Barrier Reef. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said she intends to deny approval for the Central Queensland Coal Project to be excavated northwest of the Queensland state town of Rockhampton. The minority Greens party has been pressing the center-left Labor Party government, which was elected in May, to refuse approvals of coal or gas projects, to help reduce Australias greenhouse gas emissions. Based on the information available to me at this stage, I believe that the project would be likely to have unacceptable impacts to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and the values of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and National Heritage Place, Plibersek said in a statement. The marine park manages the network of more than 2,500 reefs that cover 348,000 square kilometers (134,000 square miles) of seabed off the northeast Australian coast. The World Heritage Area, designated by the United Nations and Australia's National Heritage List, includes natural, historic and Indigenous places of outstanding significance to the nation. UNESCO, the U.N. cultural organization, is considering downgrading the Great Barrier Reefs World Heritage status mainly because rising ocean temperatures are killing coral. The mines proponents have 10 business days to respond to the proposed refusal before the minister makes her final decision. The Greens welcomed the news and urged the minister to reject another 26 planned coal mines. Now we need an across-the-board moratorium on all new coal and gas projects, Greens leader Adam Bandt said in a statement. The proposed decision was announced after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would enshrine in law the governments ambition to reduce Australias greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. The bill was passed 89 votes to 55. The previous governments target had been a reduction of between 26%-28%, set at the Paris climate conference in 2015. A proposed Greens amendment that would have acknowledged no new coal, oil or gas projects could be started if Australia were to achieve its net-zero emissions target by 2050 was defeated on Thursday. The government is confident that the bill will be passed by the Senate next month with support from all 12 Greens senators, who would prefer a 2030 target of a 75% reduction. The apparently doomed mine would have been an open-cut operation that extracted up to 10 million metric tons (11 million U.S. tons) of coal a year. Start your art tour of Benzie County at the end of the road. Go any further than Elizabeth Lane Oliver Center for the Arts and youre in Betsie Bay. But thats just geography. The real reason to start there is because its a combo platter: gallery, arts education center, nonprofit, after-school program. Elizabeth Lane Oliver Center for the Arts When it was founded 75 years ago, its main purpose was arts education, said Executive Director Mercedes Michalowski. Today its goal is promoting and developing the visual, performing, culinary and literary arts in Benzie County and the surrounding area. And display it as well. Its become a premier space to showcase artwork, said Michalowski. The exhibits explore various styles by regional artists, emerging artists, and/or those well known to the public. She also isnt afraid to challenge patrons and give rise to conversations about what exactly is art. I joke I want to make people a little uncomfortable, said Michalowski. Ellie Harold Gallery Ellie Harold Gallery is always comfortable, since its her home. The Atlanta, Georgia resident was smitten by the imagery of the area when visiting, and ended up buying a home next to the cottage she was renting. After totally renovating the 1895 Victorian at 402 Forest Ave. in Frankfort, she and her husband turned it into their home, her studio and a gallery. She now paints and offers classes there. Harold got a late start, beginning to paint at 52. Its been a remarkable thing. My art just took off, Harold said. Her show Birds Fly In: A Human Refuge Exhibition was on exhibit at Oliver Art Center and Dennos Museum. The author of two books, the studio/home showcases her regional landscapes, still lifes and abstract oil paintings, as well as note cards, calendars and books. They are celebrating its 10th anniversary with an open house Aug. 11. Focus Gallery Photographer Drew Smith says his Focus Gallery is in a dangerous location for him: next to Crescent Bakery and across the street from Kilwins in downtown Frankfort. Its home to his photographs and the wildlife photos, drawings and paintings of his business partner Carl Freeman. Smith and his wife spent several years in Washington, D.C. but always wanted to return to their home state. When his wife was able to land a job in Kalamazoo, they moved back to Michigan, and summer in the Benzie County cottage her parents bought to retire to before moving into a condo. We feel we find ways to capture the beauty of the area, said Smith of the gallerys art, whether its the beaches, the skies, the wildlife or the landscapes. So many people love the feeling evoked by what we show here. Bechler Pottery Those who can, do. And they teach. Exhibit A is ceramic artist Corey Bechler, who teaches art at Benzie Central, and with his wife Stacey owns and runs Bechler Pottery. They make a number of different objects, many of which are whimsical animal or robotic creations. While both took art classes, neither has ever taken a pottery class. He said one of the best things about their life is that hes met so many artists that when his students show an interest in a particular style or medium, he can direct them to a professional in that field. When they come across content they think is cool, Ive met or know someone who does (something) similar, Bechler said. Their studio gallery at 5342 Birch Trail in Honor is open by appointment. Other galleries Is that all? Not really. Theres Gallery 31 and Peggy Hawley Studio and well, who know what might pop up tomorrow, as more artists and art enthusiasts discover the visual feasts in Michigans smallest county. BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) A Black resident of Buffalo, New York, told investigators he anonymously tweeted out a fake threat to commit mass killings against Black people in his community, days after a real mass shooting, because he wanted to see if racists would cheer him on, according to federal prosecutors. The U.S. Attorney's office said Thursday that the suspect, 24, said in a May 16 post that he and associates would target Black people at area grocery stores two days after a white gunman from Conklin, New York, opened fire at a Tops Friendly Market and killed 10 people. SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) Voters in Southern California's San Bernardino County will have the chance to decide in November whether they want the county to potentially secede from the state. The county's Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 on Wednesday to put the secession measure on the 2022 ballot, the Southern California News Group reported. One supervisor was absent. The measure will go before the board again next Tuesday for final adoption. The initial draft would put this question to voters on Nov. 8: Do the citizens of San Bernardino County want the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors to study all options to obtain its fair share of state and federal resources, up to and including secession? While supervisors voted for the measure, they aren't all enthusiastic supporters of secession, the news group reported. Supervisor Joe Baca Jr. said he's against splitting from the state but interested in studying whether the county and its residents are owed more state and federal funds than they currently receive. I do think we have to look at anything we can do to enhance services for our residents, Baca said. Im not in favor of seceding. Im proud to be from California. I love California. The secession idea was initially floated by real estate developer Jeff Burum at the boards July 26 meeting. Secession would require approvals by the California Legislature and U.S. Congress. According to county spokesman David Wert, a finance team conducted a per-capita comparison of federal and state revenue received by California counties based on data from the state controller. The data show San Bernardino County ranks 36th out of 56 counties for per-capita revenue received from the state and federal governments, Wert said. If the worst thing that comes out of this is a study that will be ammunition for our state representatives to fight for more money for us that would be acceptable, said board Chairman Curt Hagman. Home to 2.1 million people east of Los Angeles, San Bernardino is the fifth-most populous county in California and the largest in the nation by area. It's physically larger than Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Rhode Island combined. A CarPro Show listener from California called in recently, perplexed over the fact that his truck had been in a dealership service department for eight weeks with no end in sight. I see this with every brand vehicle made. Parts shortages have been a way of life since the earliest days of COVID-19 and remain today. I suggested he contact the manufacturer directly and if not resolved, to try to invoke the Lemon Law, which every state has. I get a lot of questions from listeners and website visitors about their vehicle warranty. Not just the initial warranty, but the powertrain coverage and extended warranties. I get enough that it is pretty clear that the majority of people do not really understand how the process works from the dealership side. So, here's a look at how the factory warranty process works Factory Vehicle Warranties It is your dealer with whom you interact when your vehicle needs a repair that is covered by any manufacturer's warranty. Not all automakers handle warranty repairs exactly the same, but generally here is the way things work. Although it is a complicated process, I will do my best to make it simple. Let's call the car manufacturer Acme Automaker just for simplicity sake. Acme Automaker builds a vehicle and sells it to Roadrunner Auto Sales (your dealer). Roadrunner Auto Sales then sells the vehicle to a consumer. At the time of purchase, it is explained what your warranty coverage is for the vehicle you purchased. One of the main things you need to understand is that it is Acme Automaker, the manufacturer of your vehicle, that is responsible for, administers your warranty coverage, and pays for your repairs, not the dealership. Given that, what is the responsibility of the dealer, Roadrunner Auto Sales? It is simply to make the repairs as prescribed by the manufacturer of the vehicle. This is one of the biggest challenges dealers face today - how do they make you (their customer) happy, while at the same time get the manufacturer (Acme Automaker) to pay the bill? You can see the problem here for the dealers. So, you have a problem pop up with your car, either major or minor and you return to the service department of a dealership. You just want your car fixed, but the dealer also wants to be reimbursed by the factory for making the repairs, so there are complex procedures that have to be followed with every repair order that is written on your car. If the dealer does not do everything exactly right, it doesn't get paid for performing the repair. Most people think it is the dealership that decides what is a covered repair and what is not, but that is not true. It is all laid out by the manufacturer. On the other side of the coin, the manufacturer opens itself up to abuse by some dealers who would cheat the system if not for the rules set forth by the warranty policy manual. The dealers are always stuck in the middle on warranty repairs, they have to please you so you will come back and continue to do business with them AND they have to satisfy the entity paying the bill, which is the manufacturer that built the car. Luckily, for most dealership customers, the process of getting your vehicle fixed and all the "behind the scenes" paperwork and computer entries are transparent, but sometimes the dealership has to call the factory for approval before the work can be done, especially with extended warranties. If the factory declines, the customer will generally get mad at the dealership. It is also noteworthy to mention that the factory pays the dealership very well for work performed, but only once. If you take your car back for the same problem, the dealer generally eats the second and subsequent repair costs. This can be why cars sometimes have to be taken back multiple times for the same repair. If the technician is not very good, or inexperienced, it can be a real issue for the customer. Since dealers are paid well to perform warranty work, the dealers welcome you with open arms no matter where you bought your vehicle. That is a little different than it was some years ago. I hope this gives you a little insight into what dealers go through to repair your car under the factory warranty. It is not easy, but the goal is to keep both the consumer and the factory happy. This article originally appeared on CarProUSA This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed his country's efforts to strengthen ties with Southeast Asian countries at a meeting Thursday with their foreign ministers, which came as Beijing seeks to expand its influence in the region. Wang's talks with top diplomats from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations were held amid high tensions in the region, following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, which has infuriated Beijing. The group issued a strong statement earlier in the day, urging both the U.S. and China to show maximum restraint in the wake of the visit and refrain from provocative action. China claims the self-governing island of Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments. In his opening remarks, Wang did not mention the situation but instead stressed how China and ASEAN countries have strengthened cooperation in recent years. We have safeguarded the oasis of peace in the face of the turbulence in the international security situation, he said. ASEAN is made up of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. China has become one of the biggest lenders to developing countries through its Belt and Road Initiative to expand trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across Asia, Africa and the Middle East to Europe. This has prompted accusations that Beijing is using debt to gain political leverage, but Chinese officials deny that. In the Phnom Penh meetings, Wang pledged that China will continue to "strive to promote high-quality development, build a new development pattern, provide greater momentum for regional and world economic recovery and development, and provide more development opportunities for ASEAN countries. Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, one of the groups most pro-China countries and this year's host of the ASEAN meetings, met individually with Wang on Wednesday. During the meeting with Hun Sen, Wang reiterated that China is willing to work with Cambodia to safeguard their respective sovereignty, security and development interests, Chinas state-run Xinhua news agency reported. The report did not provide more detail, but China and Cambodia in June broke ground on a naval port expansion project which has raised concerns from the U.S. and others that it could give Beijing a strategically important military outpost on the Gulf of Thailand. Hun Sen in 2019 reportedly granted China the right to set up a military base at the Ream Naval Base, but has long denied that, saying Cambodias Constitution prohibits foreign military facilities. The U.S. in November sanctioned two senior Cambodian defense officials over allegations of graft connected to construction financing at the Ream base, and China has accused Washington of conducting a smear campaign. In his meeting with Wang, Hun Sen said an iron-clad friendship had developed which was enjoying fruitful results from joint construction of the Belt and Road, which have brought huge benefits to their peoples, Xinhua reported. The U.S. has also been pushing strongly to increase its presence and involvement in the Asia-Pacific, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said ahead of his meetings with the ASEAN ministers that Washington hoped to increase cooperation with the group across the region. We strongly support the ASEAN outlook on the Indo-Pacific and we wholeheartedly endorse the values upon which the outlook is based," Blinken said. "Openness, exclusivity, a commitment to the rule of law, good governance. In a separate meeting with the ASEAN ministers that brought together Wang with South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa, Yoshimasa emphasized that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had far-reaching effects beyond Europe, which he said has made it even more difficult for economies to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Russia's aggression against Ukraine has given rise to many challenges, including soaring prices of energy, food and other commodities, as well as supply chain disruptions," he said. I think now is the time to address these challenges in a coordinated manner, and it is even more important to maintain and strengthen the free and open international order based on the rule of law. Addressing the ASEAN ministers ahead of a different meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made no specific mention of the Ukraine invasion or the resulting economic issues, saying only that there were currently challenges related to some of our colleagues imposing bloc approaches in the spirit of the Cold War. In a one-on-one meeting with European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, however, Cambodia's Hun Sen said he had urged that sanctions against Russia be reconsidered because they were having serious economic effects on other nations around the world. He added in a post on his Facebook page that he had met with Lavrov and that they talked about the war in Ukraine, but did not provide further details. In a later post, he said he had also urged Blinken to reconsider the Russia sanctions. ___ Associated Press writer Sopheng Cheang contributed to this story. PLAQUEMINE, La. (AP) The Coast Guard was monitoring an oil spill cleanup on Thursday, four days after it poured into a Louisiana swamp southwest of Baton Rouge. An estimated 4,000 gallons (15,141 liters) of oil spilled Sunday while WCC Energy Group LLC was piping oil from wellheads into a barge tank used for storage, Coast Guard spokesman Riley Perkofski said in emails. MEXICO CITY (AP) Nicaragua President Daniel Ortegas government has closed seven radio stations owned by the Roman Catholic church this week, as well as two other outlets serving the largely rural northern area with a history of opposition to his Sandinista National Liberation Front party. Experts say the latest crackdown aims to silence any remaining voices of dissent before Nicaragua holds local elections in November, much like Ortegas arrest of the leading potential opposition candidates before last years presidential election. But observers elsewhere in Central America worry that Ortegas unchecked repression has emboldened other leaders who have shown little tolerance for dissenting voices. Last Friday, Guatemala arrested a prominent journalist whose newspaper specializes in corruption investigations, including against current President Alejandro Giammattei. After his first appearance before a judge Wednesday on money laundering and extortion charges, Jose Ruben Zamora said it was a set-up carried out by the president and attorney general. Zamoras arrest followed persecution of Guatemalan judges and prosecutors specially in corruption cases, a number of whom have been driven into exile. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele regularly attacks nongovernmental organizations that criticize his governments measures, most recently a more than four-month state of exception that suspended fundamental rights during which authorities have arrested more than 40,000 people for alleged gang connections. The arrests have been popular in El Salvador, but criticized by civil rights organizations because many have occurred without investigation and due process. Ana Maria Mendez Dardon, Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, said they were concerned by how the region has suffered a widespread backlash from powerful pro-impunity sectors and authoritarian leaders, and how Nicaragua has become, lets say, a model. She said Giammattei and Bukele both from other parts of the ideological spectrum had taken pages from Ortegas playbook in order to concentrate power. In Matagalpa on Thursday, blue-uniformed police surrounded the diocese offices and bishop's residence. Bishop Rolando Alvarez, an outspoken government critic, stood in the street ringed by priests praying as police cordoned off the area in the background. That followed the seizure of the churchs radio stations in the area on Monday. Police cut the power and occupied the residence of a parish priest in Sebaco. Rev. Uriel Vallejos and several others remained holed up inside Thursday. Neither the Nicaraguan government nor the Vatican have commented publicly on the situation. Matagalpa is a coffee and cattle producing province about 80 miles north of Managua. In the 1980s, it was also a center of the right-wing Contra fighters against Ortegas first Sandinista government after the revolution. Among the other outlets closed this week there were feminist communitarian radio station Radio Vos and television station RB3, both serving largely rural populations. They suspended our license with technical arguments, but we know that it is retaliation for our critical position and our work in defense of women and the formation of community leaders, said Argentina Olivas, director of Radio Vos. Founded in 2004, the station reaches 13 municipalities in Matagalpa, including places no other outlet does. It transmits programs supporting womens development and training for young journalists. The station on Monday had aired a statement in support of the priest surrounded in Sebaco. Television station RB3 transmits from Rio Blanco. Station founder and director David Mendoza cried after announcing to viewers that the station was being shut down after 18 years in operation. This is really hard. We do independent journalism with a social profile, Mendoza said later. This was the channel of help and hope for the people. After the massive street protests in April 2018 that were violently put down by the government, Mendoza said the government pulled their advertising. He received threats and was harassed by police, but the station continued. While much of the population in the area is anti-Sandinista, Ortegas party won local elections in Rio Blanco in 2017 in what the opposition called a fraud. They are going for total control, Mendoza said. Oscar Rene Vargas, a political analyst forced to flee Nicaragua, said the government seeks to silence all media outlets possible. Dozens of journalists have been forced into exile. Last month, Nicaraguas main daily La Prensa announced that its staff had all left the country, but they would continue to publish online. Police had occupied the newspapers offices last August. Nicaraguas government has also shut down some 1,000 non-governmental organizations this year. Ortega has maintained that the April 2018 protests were an attempt to oust him that received foreign support. The government clamped down on organizations receiving any international support. Last month, the government expelled nuns from Mother Teresas charity. Wednesday night, U.S. Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols criticized Ortega and first lady and Vice President Rosario Murillo via Twitter: Ortega-Murillos brutal assault on Catholic clergy, radio facilities and community members in Sebaco is another blow to religious freedom in Nicaragua as well as to the freedom of expression. How can men and women in uniform many of them people of faith - carry out such orders? The U.S. government has sanctioned a number of officials in Ortegas inner circle and last month targeted prosecutors and judges involved in the trials against opposition members this year, but Ortegas behavior has not changed. The Biden administration has sanctioned officials in Guatemala and El Salvador too, alleging corruption or that they're undermining democracy, but also without effect. Vargas said it is part of Ortegas ongoing campaign. Ortega continues his strategy of power or death, Vargas said. He will do anything to hold onto power through repression at all levels: religious, political, the press, the NGOs, the business people. The Roman Catholic church had been under increasing pressure in Nicaragua. The government expelled the Vaticans top diplomat in March. Some bishops have criticized the governments actions since the 2018 protests and had to leave. After the church initially tried to mediate peace between protesters and the government, Ortega accused them supporting those who wanted to remove him, calling them terrorists and demons in robes. On Thursday, Bishop Alvarez knelt on the sidewalk outside his residence in front of armed police. As officers tried to clear onlookers and parishioners, including some who had also knelt, Alvarez walked at them determinedly with a large crucifix held out in front him. At one point he said, kneeling only before God. __ AP writer Christopher Sherman contributed to this report. BOISE, Idaho (AP) Research at an eastern Idaho nuclear facility is key to boosting nuclear energy to meet President Joe Bidens goals of 100% clean electricity by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2050, Energy Department Secretary Jennifer Granholm said. Granholm on Wednesday toured facilities at the 890-square-mile (2,300-square-kilometer) site that includes the Idaho National Laboratory, the nations leading nuclear energy research lab. She said increasing nuclear power could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming and extreme weather events such as floods and wildfires. About 100 nuclear power plants provide about 20% of the nations power and 50% of the nation's zero carbon-emitting energy. The whole world has to lean into getting to net zero and addressing climate change, said Granholm, the former Democratic governor of Michigan, in a phone interview with The Associated Press. Nuclear is such a clear part of that. I meet with my counterparts from all over the world, and everywhere people are looking to us to help them reach their goals with nuclear. The Idaho National Laboratory, or INL, is one of 17 national labs. Wednesday was Granholm's first visit to the lab. Not just the facilities, but the people who are working there are amazing, she said after the tour. We're lucky to have such incredible talent. The lab is leading multiple efforts to advance various nuclear energy technologies. Those include small modular reactors that could be built more economically than existing commercial reactors, micro-reactors that could be quickly brought in for energy generation, and experiments to develop new types of nuclear fuels and components for a new generation of reactors. Having (Granholm) out here was obviously of great importance to the INL and to me personally, said Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, who accompanied Granholm on the tour and has been a key figure in bringing federal research money to the lab that's a significant economic driver with about 5,400 workers. I'm very pleased that she's very supportive of nuclear energy. If you're actually going to get to zero emissions and reduce climate change, then nuclear energy has got to be a part of it. Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by developing new technologies with nuclear power began during the Obama administration and have continued under both the Trump and Biden administrations. The Energy Department last month selected the INL as the site for a sodium-cooled fast test reactor that would be the first fast spectrum test reactor to operate in the United States in nearly three decades. Officials said it would dramatically reduce the time needed to develop new nuclear fuels and components. However, Congress hasn't approved funding for the Versatile Test Reactor, or VTR. Simpson, the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies, said the VTR hadn't been funded because money is limited and has gone to other nuclear research projects. We're going to fight to try to get the funding restored in that so we can move forward with that at the INL, Simpson said. Granholm said she's aware that many people have safety concerns about nuclear power. Nuclear waste from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident is stored at the INL site. That incident was followed by the Chernobyl disaster in what is now Ukraine in 1986 and then the tidal wave-caused Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. Everyone understands it when you have historic events that have created major problems, Granholm said. But the testing regime that has been demonstrated at INL and the regulatory regime that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has set up is the gold standard. People need to know how much time and effort has gone into making these technologies safe. She also said the department was working on what to do with nuclear waste, as the nation has no long-term storage for spent nuclear fuel. Granholm said a component of that effort is consent-based siting for a repository. Idaho in the 1990s appeared to be on its way to becoming the nation's nuclear waste dump until a series of federal lawsuits led to a 1995 settlement agreement between Idaho and the Energy Department limiting nuclear waste coming into the state. Idaho is currently preventing the Energy Department from bringing in research quantities of spent nuclear fuel because the department has failed, due to technical challenges, to meet a component of the 1995 settlement agreement requiring the department treat 900,000 gallons (3.4 million liters) of radioactive liquid waste that sits above a giant aquifer that supplies water to cities and farms in the region. Granholm on Wednesday said the department is committed to meeting its obligations under the agreement. Besides nuclear research, the lab also researches other energy sources such as geothermal and hydrogen. The lab also has a significant cybersecurity component in its Cybercore Integration Center that Granholm also toured. Cybersecurity is important for a whole variety of technologies, but in my column I'm really interested in cybersecurity of the (power) grid and obviously any system connected to the grid, Granholm said. Simpson said cybersecurity is the fastest growing budget item at the INL because it does work with the U.S. Department of Defense, Homeland Security and other agencies. Cyberattacks on this country are numerous, and the better we can protect ourselves beforehand and anticipate them, the better off we are, he said. ___ This story has been updated to correct the number of workers at the Idaho. It has 5,400 workers, not 4,500. ATU Images/Getty Images DALLAS (AP) A former Dallas-area mayor and a developer were sentenced Thursday to six years each in federal prison for bribery and tax fraud in a public corruption case that could have formed the plot of a movie. From May 2013 to April 2015, developer Mark Jordan plied then-Richardson Mayor Laura Maczka with money, home renovations, luxury hotel stays, airfares and even a job at one of his companies while she helped him with zoning requests for his apartment projects, according to prosecutors. Eventually, in 2017, the pair married, after Maczka had an affair with Jordan and divorced her husband. RENO, Nev. (AP) People who lost their homes and property in last summers Tamarack Fire in northern Nevada and California have filed a claim against the U.S. Forest Service seeking more than $85 million. The filing by attorney William Jeanney of Reno on behalf of 27 claimants is the first step before filing a lawsuit. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the U.S. Forest Service has six months to either pay the claim or opt out, and face a potential lawsuit. There's no chance the U.S. Forest Service will pay the claim outright, Jeanney said, not unless you believe in the yellow brick road. The day after the six months, well be prepared to file the lawsuit, he added. The U.S. Forest Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday evening. Twelve of the claimants are from Douglas County, while the rest were Alpine County residents, according to The Nevada Appeal, which first reported the filing. The Tamarack Fire started on July 4, 2021 when lightning hit a tree in the Mokelumne Wilderness in Alpine County, California. The U.S. Forest Service initially decided to hold off on providing assistance on the Tamarack Fire as it struggled with limited resources and officials perceived the fire as contained to a small area. But soon, the fire spread rapidly, eventually scorching nearly 109 square miles (282 square kilometers) along the Nevada-California border. The governors of both states said the U.S. Forest Service was hampered by insufficient staffing, forcing officials to make difficult decisions about where to direct resources. The fire damage was concentrated in Douglas County, Nevada and Alpine County. Authorities from both counties evacuated nearly 2,000 people in 15 communities. Each of the 27 claimants have varying amounts of damage ranging from less than $500,000 to more than $15 million, Jeanney said. Some lost trees and acreage; others lost their homes, clothes and most of their personal belongings. Some of the claimants were retirees who are now back in the workforce, and others are attempting to rebuild their homes but have trouble getting home insurance, Jeanney said. One of his clients is now living in a tent on her property. Jeanney added that the process for compensation may not come for three to five years if the lawsuit drags on. Until then, getting temporary help may be hard for those recovering from the fire. Were turning over a lot of rocks to see whatever help we can get for them, he said. But its just a tough time. Theres a lot of people in the United States who are having a tough time right now. ___ Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Stern on Twitter @gabestern326. A Granite City man indicted for armed violence along with drug and weapons charges was one of several issued last week by a Madison County grand jury. George H. Narup, 26 of Granite City, was indicted July 28 on July 5 with armed violence, unlawful possession of methamphetamine with intent to deliver and being an armed habitual criminal, all Class X felonies, and unlawful possession of weapons by a felon, a Class 2 felony. The case was originally presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department and charges were filed July 5. According to court documents, on July 1, Narup allegedly had 15-100 grams of methamphetamine with the intent to deliver as well as a Taurus 9 mm handgun. The armed violence count stems from possession of a weapon during a drug-related offense. The armed habitual criminal charge stems from his possession of a weapon after multiple felony convictions, including burglary and offenses relating to motor vehicles in 2013, aggravated battery in 2016, and possession of weapons by a felon in 2018, all out of Madison County. Other indictments issued July 28 include: Derek D. Brooks, 52, of Pontoon Beach, was indicted for aggravated discharge of a firearm, a Class 1 felony, and two counts of domestic battery, a Class A misdemeanor. The domestic battery charges were added after the original charge was filed. The case was originally presented by the Pontoon Beach Police Department. According to court documents, on July 4, Brooks allegedly discharged a firearm in the direction of two people, one being a 15-year-old boy. Both were household or family members who were also pushed to the ground by Brooks. Reginald D. Curry, 32, of Granite City, was indicted for aggravated battery, a Class 2 felony; electronic harassment, a Class 4 felony, and resisting a peace officer, a Class A misdemeanor. The case was originally presented by the Granite City Police Department. According to court documents, on July 5, Curry allegedly struck an officer of the Granite City Police Department in the chest and scratched their face. Curry also allegedly threatened injury to another through electronic communications. Colyn K. Cantrell, 25, of Quincy, was indicted for domestic battery (second subsequent offense), a Class 4 felony. The case was originally presented by the Granite City Police Department. On May 14 Cantrell allegedly hit a household or family member in the face with his hand. It was noted he has a prior conviction for domestic battery out of Adams County, Illinois. QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) Suspected separatists threw a grenade at a roadside store selling Pakistani national flags in southwestern Baluchistan province on Thursday night, killing a man and wounding 14 people, police said. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Quetta, the provincial capital. A senior police officer, Fida Hussain, said the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital. Wasim Baig, a spokesman for the provincial health department, said one of the wounded was in critical condition. For nearly two decades, Baluchistan has been the scene of a low-level insurgency by separatist groups demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad. The government says it has quelled the insurgency, but violence in the province has persisted. Pakistan will celebrate Independence Day on Aug, 14, the date in 1947 when the country became independence from British colonial rule when India was divided. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate GUATEMALA CITY (AP) A prominent Guatemalan journalists initial hearing before a judge was suspended Wednesday when the judge announced that the defendants lawyers were also targets of the governments investigation. Following the hearing, Jose Ruben Zamora, president of the newspaper El Periodico, said that the case is a set-up effectively designed and mounted by the president, attorney general and other people. Attorney General Consuelo Porras office arrested Zamora on a charge of money laundering, but during Wednesdays hearing Zamora and his lawyers were also accused of extortion. The new allegation meant Zamoras lawyers could no longer defend their client from something they themselves were accused of. Ethically it is not appropriate, said Romeo Montoya, one of Zamoras lawyers. The extortion accusation came from businessman Ronald Navarijo Garcia, who himself had previously been arrested on corruption charges for allegedly colluding with directors of Banco de los Trabajadores, or the Workers Bank, to embezzle its funds. Navarijo is under house arrest and his trial has not been scheduled. Navarijo alleges Zamora extorted him for about $25,000 to influence the case against him. Zamora said he recently met with Navarijo. In that meeting, he said, Navarijo told him that prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, who is prosecuting Zamora, asked Navarijo for 15% of the more than $4.2 million that the Attorney Generals Office has frozen in the businessman's case. Zamora added that Navarijo told him that Curruchiche asked for something else, too: that Navarijo report people who were bothersome for the Attorney Generals Office and the regime. The journalist was arrested at his home Friday by agents and police armed with assault rifles. Authorities also raided the printing presses for El Periodico. Press freedom groups have complained about the arrest of the award-winning Zamora. Critics of President Alejandro Giammatteis administration say his arrest is an attempt to silence a prominent critic whose newspaper was known for investigations uncovering corruption and a powerful message to other voices of dissent in Guatemala. The U.S. government has sanctioned Guatemala's attorney general as well as Curruchiche, who Porras put in charge of corruption investigations, for allegedly being involved in corruption themselves. As most of west-central Illinois bakes in the summer heat today, weather forecasters also are cautioning strong to severe storms are possible this afternoon into the evening. The National Weather Service said Morgan, Cass, Sangamon, Scott and Schuyler counties could experience damaging winds and hail after about 3 p.m. Lightning and flooding from heavy rain also will be a concern, according to the weather service. SPRINGFIELD A statewide cannabis commission, similar to Illinois' liquor and gaming commissions, is being proposed to simplify the states regulation of the legal cannabis industry while working to reduce litigation and the specter of politics. Currently entrepreneurs in the adult-use and medical cannabis industry in Illinois have multiple state agencies they must work through to get licensed and regulated. State Rep. Marcus Evans, D-Chicago, wants to reduce the touch points by creating a cannabis commission. Its about centralizing things and time management, Evans said. Business folks dont need the confusion. Even some of us are confused because I dont know which agency is which. Ive got to try to answer folks and bring out a flowchart. Why make government difficult when it can be easy? Pam Althoff, Cannabis Business Association of Illinois Executive Director, said things need to be streamlined for the state to really achieve policy goals for the industry. You just have too many agencies with small responsibilities that just confuse stakeholders on who theyre supposed to talk to, Althoff said. Last week, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR) issued 28 additional cannabis dispensing licenses selected from three lotteries. The total number of dispensaries issued licenses to date since adult-use sales became legal in January 2020 is 177. Depending on the cannabis business be it craft growers, manufacturers, distributors, transporters or even medicinal cannabis users and their caregivers state agencies involved include the IDFPR, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Revenue, the Department of Public Health and the Illinois State Police. Evans plans to file a standalone bill to bring about a state cannabis commission consisting of seven members including gubernatorial appointees and equal representation from General Assembly leaders as well as a dedicated executive director. Politics shouldnt play a role in this, he said. We havent seen it now, but if we ever get a new administration, we dont want new department heads with new ideas. "A commission is more stable for the long term," he said. "Thats why we use it for the liquor commission and we use it for gaming. Because you just dont want the sways of politics really to impact certain industries. Evans also said a more streamlined approach can cut down on confusion which sometimes litigants capitalize on. His commission idea is supported by the Cannabis Business Association of Illinois. Total adult use cannabis sales in fiscal year 2022 were $1.5 billion. Of that, the state captured $445 million in tax revenue thats split several ways. More than a third of the revenue goes to the states general revenue fund. Ten percent goes to the states backlog of unpaid bills. Eight percent goes to law enforcement and two percent goes to cannabis public safety campaigns. A quarter of every cannabis tax dollar collected goes to the grants for community groups in areas negatively impacted by past drug enforcement policies. Local governments can also tack on up to 3% additional sales tax. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON (AP) Jill Biden barnstormed the country during her debut year as first lady as if on a one-woman mission to help her husband's administration tackle the problem of the moment: getting people vaccinated and boosted against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. New headwinds blowing in year two President Joe Biden's low standing with the public and November elections that could put Republicans back in control of Congress have set her on a fresh mission: working to help elect Democrats who can help her husband. She's making no secret of her frustration with Washington. Joe truly believes in working with Congress and getting things done, but obviously the Republicans are pulling together and they're not budging. They are not budging, the first lady said at one of four fundraisers she headlined in the past month. Who would think that AR-15s make any sense for anything? Who doesn't believe in the need to deal with climate change? she said at a July fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts, referencing Republican opposition to the president's call for an assault weapons ban and more spending on climate change. With school out for the summer, the teacher-first lady was free to travel again in her role as the president's chief surrogate, highlighting administration accomplishments and showing a more political side while testing possible fall campaign messages before audiences big and small. She put a voice to the urgency she and the president feel over unfinished aspects of his agenda. After accompanying him to the scene of deadly mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the first lady a community college professor urged audiences to demand tougher gun laws from Congress. We need to fight, now, for the lives of our children and for the safety of our schools, she told the National PTA Convention in June, shortly after they visited Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 pupils and two teachers were killed by a man firing an AR-15. Congress represents the will of the people," she said, "and thats why we need the people to speak up. Parents and teachers. All of us. She raised the gun issue later at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Boston in July, saying that we believe that AR-15s, the weapon that tore apart 19 children and two teachers in their classroom, have no place on our streets. And she turned the Supreme Courts decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion into an argument for sending more Democrats to Congress come November. President Biden has promised to sign a bill enshrining the right to an abortion in federal law, but there isnt enough support for it in Congress, where Democrats have slim majorities. All of us have a teacher voice for when things go off the rails and now is the time to use it, she said in Boston. In Nantucket, the first lady defended her spouse of 45 years, saying he's just had so many things thrown his way" that weren't expected, including the abortion ruling and Russia's war against Ukraine. He had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment," she told a group of about two dozen donors. She said she also had become first lady of the moment," reacting to problems and not pushing her separate agenda. Tammy Vigil, a Boston University communications professor, said it is typical for a first lady to defend the president and, for that reason, complaints about Republican opposition sound better coming from her than from President Biden. He would risk undermining his authority and appear whiny if he were to sound off about GOP roadblocks more often than he has, she said. If its going to be said, shes the better person to say it, said Vigil, who wrote a book about former first ladies Michelle Obama and Melania Trump. Jill Biden's summer has been busy and uncharacteristically bumpy at times. She went on a pair of solo foreign trips in May, traveling to Romania and Slovakia in eastern Europe to meet Ukrainian refugees. The trip included an unannounced detour into western Ukraine to meet first lady Olena Zelenska. She also traveled through Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica. But by June, she had upset AIDS activists by hosting a White House event to unveil a postage stamp honoring first lady Nancy Reagan. Activists noted the Reagans indifference toward gays and lesbians at the start of the AIDS crisis, which exploded during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Last month, she was forced to apologize, through a spokesperson, for offending Latinos by describing their diversity as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists tweeted in response: We are not tacos. The first lady was also heckled last month on her way into a Connecticut ice cream parlor. A man in the sidewalk crowd shouted, Your husband is the worst president we ever had and You owe us gas money. A new CNN poll recorded her favorability rating at a low 34%, though only 29% have an unfavorable opinion of her. An additional 28% said they have no opinion of the first lady and 9% said they hadnt heard enough of her. The president's positive COVID-19 tests have forced the couple to remain apart for about two weeks while he isolates at the White House and she stays at their home in Wilmington, Delaware. She had welcomed Zelenska to the White House just before the president's diagnosis. Jill Biden, 71, is the first first lady to work outside of the White House. She is expected to resume teaching in September and juggle those demands with campaigning. She signed a new contract with Northern Virginia Community College on the morning of her speech to the AFT, she said. So far this year, she's done seven fundraisers for the Democratic National Committee, and the party is happy to have her. Jill Biden is one of the Democratic Partys most important surrogates because she drives excitement from grassroots supporters across the country," Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison said in a statement to The Associated Press. "Were grateful for the first ladys commitment to electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Robert Watson, a history professor at Lynn University, said modern first ladies have become effective fundraisers in their own right, popular with the party faithful, especially women. He said it would be surprising not to see more of Jill Biden in the runup to the Nov. 8 elections. She is a strong defender, said Watson, who studies the presidency. Nobody's interested in asking about her holiday cookie recipe." Whatever the outcome, the Bidens still have a happy occasion to look forward to after the election: the first White House wedding in nearly a decade. Granddaughter Naomi Biden is set to marry Peter Neal on the South Lawn on Nov. 19. ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) A county prosecutor on Thursday urged a judge to question a Maryland woman before deciding if she is mentally fit to stand trial on murder charges stemming from the disappearance of her two young children nearly eight years ago. Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Judge Richard Jordan said he needs more time to prepare before questioning Catherine Hoggle or issuing any rulings related to her mental competence. Jordan, who recently inherited the case, scheduled a hearing in early October to revisit the matter. Authorities say Hoggles 3-year-old daughter, Sarah, and 2-year-old son, Jacob, were last seen in their mothers care on Sept. 7, 2014. Hoggle was arrested three days after their disappearance. Hoggle, now 35, initially was charged with misdemeanor offenses. Three years after her arrest, prosecutors secured an indictment charging her with two counts of first-degree murder. Other county judges have repeatedly found that Hoggle was incompetent to stand trial on the murder charges. Under state law, authorities have five years to restore Hoggle to competence before the charges must be dismissed. Last September, a state appeals court ruled that the county judge must determine whether Hoggle is unlikely to become competent in the foreseeable future and must be civilly committed to a medical facility. Montgomery County States Attorney John McCarthy said he wants the judge to exercise his independent judgment in determining whether Hoggle is competent to be tried or can have her competence restored. Its not a medical decision. Its a legal determination. The person who has the legal authority to make this decision is the judge. It is not the doctors, McCarthy told reporters after Thursdays hearing. McCarthy said the lawyers will provide the judge with a list of possible questions for him to ask Hoggle in October. Defense attorney David Felsen suggested that Hoggle has a right not to answer the judge's questions to avoid the possibility of incriminating herself. McCarthy disagreed, saying he doesn't think she has a 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer the judge's questions under the circumstances. The limitation is that whatever she says cannot be used against her if there ever was a trial, he added. Hoggle had a history of schizophrenia and was treated with antipsychotic medications after her arrest. A county judge initially ruled in December 2017 that she was incompetent to stand trial. That judge concluded that she was a danger to herself or to others. In 2019, a court order allowed prosecutors to select a psychiatrist, Dr. Christiana Tellefsen, to evaluate Hoggle. Tellefsen concluded that Hoggle remained dangerous and incompetent to stand trial. Tellefsen also noted that Hoggle was taking an antipsychotic medication that is generally considered to be a last resort because of its potentially severe side effects, the appeals court said. In January 2020, Hoggle's lawyer asked the circuit court to dismiss her murder charges. A judge rejected the request several weeks later. A three-judge panel from the appeals court upheld the circuit court judge's refusal to dismiss Hoggle's murder charges. The panel said a judge correctly concluded that the five-year period for dismissal of the murder charges began with the initial December 2017 ruling that she was incompetent to stand trial. Troy Turner, the children's father, and other relatives attended Thursday's hearing wearing T-shirts bearing photos of the missing children. We have two kids that we have not seen in almost eight years, he said. We are hoping to get some justice for them." This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A Michigan judge on Wednesday extended an order that bars county prosecutors from enforcing a 1931 state law that bans abortion. Leadership Team member Allison Wilcox of the Women of Michigan Action Network said members are relieved that there is temporary assurance until the next hearing on Aug. 17. "As the overwhelming support for the Reproductive Freedom for All ballot initiative shows, huge numbers of Michiganders feel that abortion should be legal and that we should trust pregnant people and their doctors to make private decisions about pregnancy, miscarriage treatment, and contraception," she said on Thursday. "Being able to control your own body is a bedrock freedom that all Americans should support, even those who are personally opposed to abortion." Oakland County Judge Jacob Cunningham agreed after lawyers for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer argued that pulling the plug on his Monday order would cause chaos around the state. The restraining order will hold at least until the next hearing. Michigan's 91-year-old abortion ban makes it a crime to perform abortions unless the life of the mother is in danger. If you need one, you need one today or very, very soon, Assistant Solicitor General Linus Banghart-Linn said of abortion services. We dont want more confusion. Wilcox agreed. She said the 1931 Michigan law preventing abortion is extreme and places women at risk, also causing doctors to question whether they can provide care needed to a patient without risking legal action against themselves. A Court of Claims judge in May suspended the law in a different lawsuit, saying it's probably unconstitutional. That step had kept abortion legal in Michigan even after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June. But the status became clouded this week when the state Court of Appeals said the decision in May applied only to the attorney general's office, not to prosecutors in counties where abortion services are provided. Photo provided/AP Governor Gretchen Whitmer filed an amicus brief with the Michigan Supreme Court in support of preserving the statewide injunction issued in mid-May that prevents enforcement of Michigans 1931 law. "Recent fire drills and a legal patchwork that changes day to day, county to county, prove that our current situation is unsustainable," Whitmer said in a press release on Thursday. "We need clarity. Every day we delay, women will suffer and health care providers will wonder if their work will lead to prosecution. I will continue fighting like hell to keep abortion legal in Michigan and protect nurses and doctors from prosecution. Separately, voters in November will likely get an opportunity to decide whether to add abortion rights to the state constitution and override the old law. "We are confident that when Michigan voters are given the opportunity to amend our state constitution to explicitly protect reproductive freedom, that we will see a result similar to what happened recently in Kansas - overwhelming support for the right to a legal abortion," Wilcox said. "We would also expect that at that (upcoming August) hearing, a reasonable court would affirm that the 1931 anti-abortion law should not be enforced until Michigan voters have had their say in the November general election." More from Midland Midland prosecutor awaits state guidance on 1931 abortion law More on order stretch from Wednesday's Oakland County ruling Lawyers for Whitmer, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, rushed to Cunningham's court for a restraining order, which was granted Monday. Democratic prosecutors in some of the state's largest counties, especially in the Detroit area, have pledged to not enforce the 1931 abortion ban. But Republican prosecutors in Kent and Jackson counties have expressed a different position. David Kallman, an attorney for the two GOP prosecutors, argued against maintaining the restraining order. Since when does a governor have the right to go after a law he or she doesnt like? Kallman said. Just come to court and just say, Hey, I might be harmed by this so I want this law overturned or I want it changed.' Thats ridiculous. Cunningham declined to allow attorney John Bursch to argue on behalf of Right to Life of Michigan and the Michigan Catholic Conference. The judge said these two anti-abortion groups aren't formal parties in the litigation. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate ST. LOUIS (AP) Nearly 2,500 workers at three Boeing defense plants in the Midwest voted Wednesday to ratify a contract that their union said will raise pay by an average of 14% over three years and add inflation adjustments. The vote by members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers came less than two weeks after union members rejected an earlier offer and authorized a strike. A spokesman for Boeing, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, said the company was pleased with the outcome and looked forward to its future in the St. Louis area. The three-year contract will take effect Thursday and cover employees at Boeing plants in St. Louis and St. Charles, Missouri, and Mascoutah, Illinois. The workers build several types of military planes. The union said the new contract includes a provision from the rejected deal that calls for company contributions of up to 10% to employees' 401(k) retirement plans, and it added a $8,000 lump-sum payment that can go into the employees account. It also has improvements for sick leave and parental leave, and makes no changes to the workers health insurance plans, according to the union. Workers voted down a company offer on July 24, saying that the retirement benefits were not an adequate replacement for pension plans that had been taken away. Boeing made an improved offer over the weekend. Boeing is best known to the public for its airline jets, but through the first six months of this year it received more revenue from its defense and space business about 38% of total revenue. With labor shortages in many parts of the economy, unions have scored organizing wins this year including at Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe's. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate MADISON, Wis. (AP) Tim Michels is on the attack in the waning days of Wisconsins tight GOP governors primary, with an ad this week faulting his rival for not initially backing Donald Trump in 2016 even as it emerged Thursday that Michels himself did not vote in that primary. Michels launched the attack ad against Rebecca Kleefisch days after he said that running negative ads is just bad policy and that politicians who do it are losing. The ad faults Kleefisch for not endorsing Trump in the 2016 primary and brands her the ultimate Madison insider. Kleefisch, who is backed by former Vice President Mike Pence, is a former two-term lieutenant governor. Michels co-owns the state's largest construction company, Michels Corp. And while Michels attacked Kleefisch for not backing Trump in 2016, records show Michels did not vote in that primary. I missed the Primary, but I didnt miss the movement, Michels said in a statement to The Associated Press. Michels said he missed the primary because of a sudden, unforeseen major issue on the big Michels Corporation construction project in New York. Michels said Trump was always his top choice and he never campaigned for or supported anyone else, unlike Kleefisch. The winner of Tuesday's primary will advance to face Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in what is expected to be one of the hardest-fought elections in the country this year, with implications for the 2024 presidential race in this swing state. Evers has blocked the Republican-controlled Legislature's attempts to change election laws and enact a host of other conservative policy items. The Michels ad, circulated Thursday by the Democratic Governors Association, began airing earlier this week, after Michels said in a televised town hall that Ive never had a negative ad run by my campaign in this race. And the reason is weve never had a single piece of business by talking bad about the competition, said Michels, who co-owns energy and pipeline construction company Michels Corp. "And the reason is, its just bad policy, and if you get a reputation of doing that in my industry people immediately disrespect you. That wasn't the first time Michels took a stand against negative ads. Back in July, after Kleefisch launched the first in a series of attack ads against Michels, he came out strongly against it. When politicians are shocked to find themselves losing, they go negative out of desperation," Michels said on July 6. So it is sad that the former Lieutenant Governor has decided to go negative by falling in line with politics as usual. Michels spokesperson Chris Walker defended the attack ad, saying Thursday it came in response to spots run by Kleefisch and her supporters. The tone of the campaign has been set by her after weeks and millions spent lying about and attacking Tim, Walker said. When your opponent does that for weeks on end, it can't go unanswered forever. Kleefisch's spokesperson Alec Zimmerman said Michels going negative was a sign that Kleefisch has all the momentum. The attack ad comes amid a blitz toward the election, with Pence campaigning Wednesday for Kleefisch, calling her a proven conservative. Kleefisch served as lieutenant governor under then-Gov. Scott Walker and has amassed endorsements from Walker, legislative leaders, dozens of Republican lawmakers and others. Michels is running as the outsider candidate, and Trump has scheduled a Friday rally in Waukesha County, just 3 miles from where Pence appeared for Kleefisch, as part of a final push. Michels notes in his ad that Kleefisch did not back Trump in 2016. She, along with Walker, supported Cruz who won Wisconsin's primary that year. Cruz has endorsed Kleefisch this year. After Trump became the nominee, Kleefisch supported him in 2016 and 2020. Michels' position on Trump also shifted this week. On Monday, at the town hall, he refused to commit to backing Trump if he ran for president in 2024. But less than 24 hours later, Michels reversed himself. JACKSON, Miss (AP) Mississippi will soon stop accepting applications to a federal rental assistance program created during the COVID-19 pandemic to help people stave off evictions, Gov. Tate Reeves announced Wednesday. The Rental Assistance for Mississippians Program will not accept any applications past Aug. 15, and the state will return as much as $130 million for the program back to the federal government. The total amount that will be returned to the Treasury Department will decrease with each new application that is approved or recertified, according to the governors office. Its time our state returns to pre-pandemic policies, Reeves said at a press conference. We will continue to say no to these types of projects and handouts that encourage people to stay out of the workforce. While Reeves praised a booming Mississippi economy, he said there are still too many people in the state being paid not to work. Labor shortages across the country have led to staffing woes for some employers and increased job opportunities for some workers. Mississippi has spent $200 million in federal emergency rental assistance. The Rental Assistance for Mississippians Program is administered by the Mississippi Home Corporation. The money can pay for up to 15 months of rental and utility assistance. The governor said the program has received 86,146 applications since it launched. Of that total, 36,889 applications have been approved, and 32,442 have been denied. The remaining applications are still being processed. Applicants who have already applied for the program will not be affected by the decision. Reeves said the program made sense at the beginning of the pandemic because people lost unemployment through no fault of their own. Mississippis COVID-19 state of emergency ended over eight months ago. Vangela Wade, president of the Mississippi Center for Justice, called Reeves decision outrageous, heartless and utterly devoid of any reason. Nearly one in three renter households in Mississippi is extremely low-income, and our state is short more than 48,000 affordable rental homes for extremely low-income renters, Wade said. But the Governor has decided to make housing even more precarious. The data referenced by Wade comes from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The organization estimates that 46% of low-income Mississippi households are spending more than 30% of their income on rent. To qualify for the program, renters must make no more than 80% of their areas median income. But Reeves said the programs requirements for determining whether a person needs aid are too lax, opening it up to fraudulent claims. In August 2021, the Treasury Department issued guidance encouraging state and local governments to allow tenants to self-assess their income and their risk of becoming homeless. John Jopling, housing law director for the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the program is designed to ensure funds are for their intended purpose. The Governor claims that the program pays people to stop working, but fails to mention that RAMP payments are made directly to the landlords, Jopling said. American Family Association Action, a conservative Christian nonprofit group, praised Reeves' decision to end the program amid an ongoing labor shortage. The federal rental assistance program is another COVID-era welfare program that helps explain why people are not getting back to work, even when employers are offering massive hiring bonuses, higher hourly wages and new flexibility for workers, said Jameson Taylor, director of government affairs for AFA Action. Reeves said the move will encourage recipients of the aid who dont have jobs to reenter the workforce. He said the state is doing everything in its power to recruit companies that offer higher wages. Mississippi has not enacted a state minimum wage, and the federal standard is still $7.25. Reeves said at the Wednesday press conference that he was open to the idea of increasing the state's minimum wage. ___ Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/mikergoldberg. ___ This story has corrected the name of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate DALLAS (AP) The mother of two teens fatally shot in 2008 in the Dallas area told jurors Thursday that her ex-husband, who is on trial for the killings after evading arrest for over 12 years, was abusive and controlling during their marriage. When Patricia Owens was asked to identify her ex-husband in court, she pointed at Yaser Said, saying: That devil there. Said, 65, is charged with capital murder, accused of killing 18-year-old Amina Said and 17-year-old Sarah Said on New Years Day in 2008. Yaser Said has entered a not guilty plea. Said, who had worked as a taxi driver, faces an automatic life sentence if convicted. The sisters were found shot to death in a taxi parked near a hotel in the Dallas suburb of Irving. On Wednesday, jurors heard a 911 call Sarah Said made from a cell phone, telling the operator that her father shot her and she was dying. A former police detective testified Thursday that the taxi the girls were found in had been lent to Yaser Said. A week before the sisters were killed, they and their mother left their home in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville and went to Oklahoma to get away from Said. Both sisters' boyfriends also joined the three. Prosecutor Lauren Black said in opening statements that the sisters had become very scared for their lives, and the decision to leave was made after Said put a gun to Aminas head and threatened to kill her, the prosecutor said. Owens, who spoke softly and often hesitantly on the stand, testified that Said eventually convinced her to return to Texas. I didn't think anything would happen," she testified. Black said during opening statements that Said was obsessed with possession and control. Owens testified that when she married Said, she was 15 and he was 29. The evening the girls' were killed, Said wanted to take just the two sisters to a restaurant. In a letter written to the judge overseeing the case, Said said he was not happy with his kids dating activity but denied killing his daughters. Defense attorney Joseph Patton said in opening statements that the evidence would not support a conviction and that police were too quick to focus on Said. Black said Sarah Said was shot nine times and Amina Said was shot twice. In a Dec. 21, 2007, email that was brought into evidence, Amina Said told one of her teachers that she and her sister planned to run away. She wrote that she and her sister didnt want to live by the culture of their father, who was born in Egypt, nor did they want arranged marriages, as he planned. Her father, she wrote, had made our lives a nightmare. He will, without any drama nor doubt, kill us, the email read. Yaser Said, who had been sought on a capital murder warrant since the slayings, was placed on the FBI's most-wanted list. He was finally arrested in August 2020 in Justin, about 35 miles (60 kilometers) northwest of Dallas. His son, Islam Said, and his brother, Yassim Said, were subsequently convicted of helping him evade arrest. WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. (AP) Navajo Nation officials declared a state of emergency Thursday due to increased flooding from recent monsoon rains. The declaration by the tribes Commission on Emergency Management will allow local chapters to access additional resources to help mitigate the impacts of heavy rainfall. Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said the tribes emergency response personnel have been out in the communities every day helping people recover from recent flooding. Yes there are many challenges and not enough personnel to get to every site immediately, but they are making progress, Nez said. The Navajo Division of Transportation also continues to work on repairs to roads that were damaged. We recommend all Navajo households, communities and organizations be prepared as we continue to see scattered thunderstorms throughout the Navajo Nation this week, Nez added. As we move forward into the fall and winter seasons, we need everyone to be proactive and plan ahead for more severe weather. Nez said tribal health workers have been going to various communities providing support and assistance for elderly residents and those with health conditions. A flood watch remains in effect throughout this week on the tribes vast reservation that covers parts of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico and southeastern Utah. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate NEW ORLEANS (AP) New Orleans officials will ask a federal judge to end a decade of court-ordered oversight of the city's police department, Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced Thursday, saying a 2013 reform pact is now an unnecessary bureaucratic burden on the understaffed force. The reform agreement, embodied in a court document called a consent decree, was welcomed by department critics when it was negotiated during former Mayor Mitch Landrieus administration. Recurring scandals involving corruption or questionable use of force had plagued the department for decades and were exposed anew amid shootings of civilians in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. But the agreement reached with the U.S. Justice Department had its critics as well, including police officer representatives who said it hampered police work. Over the years, police organizations have cited restrictions on car chases and searches of suspects, along with officers fears of stepped up discipline if they breach even minor regulations. Cantrell and Superintendent of Police Shaun Ferguson have been under increasing pressure to deal with violent crime even as the city police force shrinks. Depletion of the ranks began under Landrieu as he cut city spending after inheriting a large deficit from his predecessor. That decline has continued to the point that the department, which had 1,300 officers, now has fewer than 1,000 in Cantrells second term. Ferguson and Cantrell announced plans to seek the consent decree's end at a news conference where they also touched on other plans to boost morale as well as retain and recruit officers, including an initiative to speed up promotions and relax some uniform and dress code restrictions. Rafael Goyeneche, head of local police watchdog organization the Metropolitan Crime Commission, said the announcements appear to mark a belated recognition by city officials of the need to not only recruit with higher pay but also retain officers with pay increases. He said the city had been too slow to promote officers to senior status which carries an increase in pay. Goyeneche was skeptical that ending the consent decree would solve the paperwork problem cited by Cantrell. Statistics and reports on police activities will still be needed to ensure the policy and practice reforms imposed by the agreement stick. My position is, if you want to lessen the load on the officers, you don't allow the police force to drop from 1,300 officers to 900 officers, Goyeneche said. We allowed the department to shrink to the level that the workload became unmanageable. In April, U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan and court-appointed police monitors praised the department's progress and said the city could be declared in full compliance with the consent decree this year, which would lead to a two-year wind-down of oversight. Morgan tempered her praise with acknowledgment of continuing problems, including the short-handed departments slowdown in recruiting and allegations of wrongdoing by officers who work private duty details arranged through the department. But the department has shown transparency in dealing with such setbacks, Morgan said. Cantrell said the decree is no longer needed. They know how to police constitutionally, she said of the current force. Theyre models throughout the United States of America." In an interview earlier this year with The Associated Press, University of Nebraska-Omaha Professor Emeritus Sam Walker, an expert in police accountability, cited New Orleans as an example of a federal consent decree that worked. Back in 2012, it was one of the worst departments in the country, but theyve made enormous progress, Walker said. James Carbone/AP CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) A 74-year-old retired schoolteacher from a New York City suburb was sentenced to 30 months in prison Wednesday for mailing dozens of violent threats to LGBTQ affiliated individuals, groups and businesses over several years. According to prosecutors, Robert Fehring threatened to blow up the Stonewall Inn, a historic bar in Manhattan considered the birthplace of the gay rights movement. He also threatened to place explosives at 2021 New York City Pride march that would make the 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting look like a cakewalk, referring to the 2016 attack in which 49 people were killed and dozens wounded at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) An Oklahoma court on Thursday reinstated the conviction and sentence of a Tulsa man whose case led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision on criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reinstated the child-abuse conviction and 35-year-prison sentence of Victor Castro-Huerta, 37. The court had vacated his conviction and sentence after a U.S. Supreme Court 2020 decision that the state lacked criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country in cases involving tribal citizens. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate AL-FAKHEET, West Bank (AP) After repeatedly rebuilding his home only to have it demolished by Israeli soldiers, Mohammed Abu Sabaha has a new plan to remain on the land he is moving into a cave. Abu Sabaha is among some 1,000 Palestinians at risk of expulsion from an arid region of the occupied West Bank that the Israeli military has designated as a live-fire training zone. Israel's Supreme Court upheld their expulsion in May after a two-decade legal battle. Most residents of the area, known as Masafer Yatta, have remained in place since the ruling, even as Israeli security forces periodically roll in to demolish structures. But they could be forced out at any time, and rights groups fear Israel will do it gradually to evade international scrutiny. The entrance to Abu Sabaha's cave is surrounded by the ruins of homes and animal pens that the soldiers demolished in earlier raids. The coo and cackle of chickens can be heard from inside a wrecked coop. A set of stone steps leads down into the cave, where he has strung up electrical lights, but it will take time to turn it into a home for his wife, parents and six children. We have suffered a lot because of this ruling. Especially the kids, who were born here, he said, standing in the dimly lit cave. They fled demolitions, then went back when we rebuilt, so many times. When the army isn't demolishing homes it is staging training exercises nearby. Tanks throw up dust clouds and heavy machine-gun fire and explosions echo across the desert hills. Abu Sabaha says his 3-year-old daughter Zeynab tenses up every time she sees them. She's always afraid they will come to destroy once again," he said. The military declared this part of Masafer Yatta a firing and training zone in the early 1980s. Israeli authorities said the residents Arab Bedouin who practice a traditional form of agriculture and animal herding only used the area part of the year and had no permanent structures there at the time. In November 1999, security forces expelled some 700 villagers and destroyed homes and cisterns. The legal battle began the following year. The families say they have been there for decades from long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war and have nowhere else to live. Some residents have traditionally resided in caves part of the year, as they graze sheep and goats in different areas. Israels Supreme Court sided with the state in May, after the villagers rejected a compromise that would have allowed them to enter at certain times and practice agriculture for part of the year. Since then, the army has demolished several structures and seized vehicles, setting up roadblocks and checkpoints to limit movement, according to Nidal Younes, head of the local council. All of this is within the framework of occupation, to frighten, to scare, to make peoples lives extremely difficult to force them to leave, he said. Masafer Yatta is in the 60% of the occupied West Bank known as Area C, where the Israeli military exercises full control under interim peace agreements reached with the Palestinians in the 1990s. Palestinian structures built without military permits which residents say are nearly impossible to obtain are at risk of demolition. Area C is also home to several Jewish settlement outposts that are protected by the army despite being built without Israeli authorization. Nearly 500,000 settlers live in communities across the West Bank, most of which were planned and approved by the government. Many resemble small towns or suburbs, with apartment blocks, shopping malls and factories. The Palestinians and the international community view the settlements as a major obstacle to resolving the century-old conflict because they absorb and divide up the land on which a future Palestinian state would be established alongside Israel. Israel officially considers the West Bank disputed territory subject to negotiations, but every government since 1967 has expanded settlements, and the country's dominant right-wing parties are opposed to Palestinian statehood. One of the Supreme Court justices who issued the ruling on Masafer Yatta is a settler. Eugene Kontorovich, a legal scholar at Israel's Kohelet Policy Forum, a right-wing think tank, said Israel could not allow private squatters to determine the uses of state land" and was justified in barring people from entering a military firing range. The technical, legal justification is that its not their land," he added. Rights groups say several other Palestinian communities across the West Bank could face similar threats of expulsion if the international community does not pressure Israel over Masafer Yatta. Israel has declared firing zones in 20% of the West Bank, affecting some 5,000 Palestinians from 38 communities, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for the Israeli rights group B'Tselem, said Israel would likely implement a quiet transfer in which it gradually makes life so difficult that families trickle out on their own. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which has been waging a legal battle on behalf of the residents of Masafer Yatta for more than two decades, has filed another petition against the Supreme Court ruling. Roni Pelli, an attorney with the group, said the terrible ruling goes against international law, which prohibits the transfer of civilians out of occupied territory. The legal consequence is that international humanitarian law is no longer relevant in the West Bank because the military commander can issue any order he wants, she said. You dont have to put people on trucks to force them from the land," she added. "I am really, really worried that it might become a humanitarian disaster. ___ Associated Press reporters Emily Rose in Jerusalem and Nasser Nasser in al-Fakheet, West Bank contributed to this report. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate BEIRUT (AP) A large block of Beiruts giant port grain silos, shredded by a massive explosion two years ago, collapsed on Thursday as hundreds marched in the Lebanese capital to mark the second anniversary of the blast that killed scores. The northern block of the silos, consisting of four towers, had been slowly tilting for days before it collapsed, causing a huge cloud of dust. The silos had shielded Beiruts western neighborhoods in the Aug. 4, 2020 explosion that killed nearly 220 people, injured over 6,000 and caused damage worth billions of dollars. Thursday's collapse of roughly a fourth of the structure occurred an hour before hundreds of people were to gather outside the facility to mark the 2nd anniversary of the disaster. Authorities had evacuated parts of the port earlier this week after an initial section of the silos collapsed on Sunday as a precautionary measure and there was no indication that anyone was hurt. The 50 year-old, 48 meter (157 feet) tall silos had withstood the force of the 2020 explosion that destroyed much of the port. Many in Lebanon, including families of the victims, have been demanding that the silos be kept for future generations as a testament to a blast they say was caused by widespread corruption and mismanagement in the small Mediterranean nation. Sundays initial collapse was triggered by a weekslong fire, caused by remnants of grains left over from the 2020 explosion that started fermenting and ignited in the summer heat last month. Firefighters and Lebanese Army soldiers were unable to put it out and it smoldered, a nasty smell spreading around. The environment and health ministries in late July issued instructions to residents living near the port to stay indoors in well-ventilated spaces. Experts warned of more collapses in the days to come and said the entire structure of the silos was in danger of coming down. Following Thursday's collapse, fire engines and an army helicopter sprayed the silos with water in an attempt to put out the fire. Emmanuel Durand, a French civil engineer who volunteered for the government-commissioned team of experts, said eight silos are still left in the northern block. He added that this part has a tilt of 3.3 degrees and is picking up the same trend as before almost 0.5 degrees "per day, which is huge. The south block is still not moving, said Durand who monitors the silos from thousands of miles away using data produced by sensors he installed over a year ago, and updating a team of Lebanese officials on the developments in a WhatsApp group. The anniversary came amid calls for an international investigation into the blast, one of the most destructive single incidents in Lebanon's troubled modern history. The domestic investigation has been stalled since December following legal challenges by charged and accused officials against the judge leading the investigation. Hundreds of people, including families of the victims, marched from three locations in Beirut toward the main road outside the port Thursday. Some carried white coffins with names of some of the victims, others carried mock gallows, demanding punishment for those responsible. The pain is still the same, said a man who had lost his brother. Two years on, none of the top politicians have apologized to the Lebanese. The government called for a day of mourning, leading many businesses to close. Tarek Bitar, the judge leading the Lebanese investigation, had charged four former senior government officials with intentional killing and negligence that led to the deaths of scores of people. He also charged several top security officials in the case. But none of them have been detained and two of those charged were re-elected to parliament in May. There is no justice under the rule of militia and mafia, read one banner carried during the march an apparent reference to the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group, which has been calling for the removal of Bitar, describing him as biased. Many have blamed the Lebanese governments longtime corruption and mismanagement, saying it paved way for the tragedy, when hundreds of tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, a material used in fertilizers, detonated at the port. The state has no right to abstain from the Lebanese investigation and also prevent an international investigation, said Cardinal Bechara Rai, the head of the Maronite Catholic church, Lebanons largest, during a special prayers Thursday for the victims. Some of those marching made a brief stop outside the French Embassy to urge France, Lebanons former colonial power, to call on the U.N. Human Rights Council to send a fact-finding mission to investigate the blast. They later gathered outside the port where they called for justice and vowed never to give up on the case, before dispersing peacefully. Official correspondence between political, security and judicial officials has revealed that many were aware about the hazardous substances stored in the port, without taking meaningful action to remove it. After the blast, port customs and legal documents revealed that the ammonium nitrate had been shipped to Lebanon in 2013 on a worn-out Russian ship and stored improperly at a port warehouse ever since. BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The meeting between Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and so-called human rights activists is just another farce, said a Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the remarks in response to a media inquiry on Pelosi's visit to a human rights-themed venue in China's Taiwan region and her meeting with so-called "human rights and democracy activists." These arrangements are just another farce staged by Pelosi based on her consistent anti-China, anti-Communist stance and ideological bias, with the cooperation of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities, said Ma, noting that the activists she met and bolstered on Wednesday are long-known tools and puppets of U.S. anti-China forces. Highlighting the guise of so-called "human rights" and "democracy" on the Taiwan question, Pelosi is simply seeking her own personal gain, said Ma, adding that the U.S. mid-term elections are approaching and there have been scandals around the Pelosi family. Ma also warned the DPP authorities that the agenda of roping in anti-China forces, inciting cross-Strait confrontation and engaging in secessionist acts under the guise of democracy and human rights will never succeed. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WARSAW, Poland (AP) Polish officials on Thursday reported a change in migration patterns across the countrys border with Belarus, with Africans who first traveled to Russia making up most of those seeking to enter Poland illegally by that route instead of people from the Mideast. The government said the African migrants include individuals passing through Russia, a close ally and another neighbor of Belarus, as well as people who were in Russia for a longer period. In an emailed statement to The Associated Press, the Polish government described the migration as part of a hybrid operation aimed at destabilizing the NATO eastern flank. Migrants and asylum-seekers have tried to cross from Belarus into Poland and Lithuania, and to a lesser extent Latvia, since last summer. The three nations are in the east of both European Union and NATO territory. The countries have sought to discourage the attempted crossings, detaining migrants and pushing them back into Belarus. Poland recently completed a tall steel wall along 186 kilometers (115 miles) of its land frontier with Belarus. Human rights organizations have criticized Poland and Lithuania, saying the migrants include people fleeing persecution who have the right under international law to request asylum. European leaders accuse Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of creating a new and artificial migration route in order to destabilize the EU. The government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said it believes Russia bears some responsibility too, given its alliance with Lukashenko. Early on, most of the people who tried to enter the EU from Belarus were Afghans, Syrians, Kurds from Iraq and others from the Middle East. After the arrival of large numbers last summer, the EU intervened, including by getting Iraq to stop the flights, and the migration flow slowed. It never stopped altogether, but the situation became overshadowed by the far larger numbers of Ukrainian refugees who were welcomed in Poland after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February. The National Security Department within the prime minister's office told the AP that current Border Guard statistics show that the vast majority of migrants who seek to illegally cross at the Poland-Belarus border now come from Sub-Saharan Africa. They possess Russian visas and it is via Russia that they reach Belarus, it said. (They) have visas issued for studies or work, but according to testimonies acquired by the Border Guard, they have never had such plans and they used visas only to get through the migratory route. Simultaneously, the Russian administration facilitates the procedure of obtaining the visas, the government said. Among migrants, there are also people who have been in Russia for a longer period of time. The actions undertaken by Russia and Belarus confirm that the artificially created migratory route is controlled and coordinated by these two regimes and in future we should expect that the hybrid operation aimed at destabilizing NATOs eastern flank will only intensify, it added. Border Guard data shows that there were 914 attempts to cross illegally from Belarus into Poland in July. ___ Follow APs global migration coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration TOWSON, Md. (AP) Authorities in Maryland charged a juvenile Thursday in the fatal shooting of an 8-year-old girl. Baltimore County police officers were called to a home on Sherwood Road in the Towson area around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday for a report of a shooting, officials said in a news release. At the home, officers found the 8-year-old shooting victim critically wounded in the basement. Medics took the girl to a hospital, where police said she was pronounced dead. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Relatives of prisoners of war captured by the Russians following the fall of Mariupol gathered in central Kyiv Thursday demanding information about their husbands, fathers and sons following a strike on a prison housing POWs in a separatist region of eastern Ukraine last week that reportedly killed and wounded dozens. One of those gathered was Eugenia Vasylieva who last saw her husband Valeriy Vasyliev in Mariupol on the night of Feb. 24, the day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That night he went to defend his city. Her 7-year-old daughter Zlata Vasylieva, holding a placard calling for her father's return, said: I want my dad to be alive and that he never die." Russia has claimed that Ukraines military used U.S.-supplied rocket launchers to strike the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk Peoples Republic. The Ukrainian military denied making any rocket or artillery strikes in Olenivka. The intelligence arm of the Ukrainian defense ministry claimed in a statement Wednesday to have evidence that local Kremlin-backed separatists colluded with the Russian FSB, the KGBs main successor agency, and mercenary group Wagner to mine the barrack before using a flammable substance, which led to the rapid spread of fire in the room. The ex-commander of the Ukrainian national guard's Azov Regiment, Maksym Zhorin, told the AP there were around 1,500 defenders of Mariupol in Olenivka before the explosion. They were part of 2,400 soldiers from the Azov Regiment and other military units defending Mariupol who surrendered under orders from Ukraines military in May. But there were 100-150 people in the facility that was blown up, said Zhorin. He said the conditions in the block where the prisoners of war were being held were not suitable for living. The facility was not located next to the other barracks but on the outskirts of the prison near the warehouses. U.S. officials believe Russia is working to fabricate evidence concerning the strike. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia is looking to plant false evidence to make it appear that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the July 29 attack on the prison, which left 53 dead and wounded dozens more, a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence finding told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Zhorin says Ukraine has extremely little time to get to the crime site and to the witnesses who can give accounts of what really happened. We cannot be sure they will be alive tomorrow, that the Russians will not kill them. So far, nothing prevents them from doing it, Zhorin said. Relatives of prisoners of war are increasingly frustrated at the lack of information they are getting about the fate of their loved ones. They are looking to the International Committee of the Red Cross for answers because of the role the humanitarian organization played when Ukrainian fighters came out of the Azovstal steel mill and surrendered to Russian forces. Our goal is to reach the Red Cross, to say that they are not fulfilling their duties. We entrusted them with the lives of our boys. And it shouldnt be like this that the Red Cross is now saying they are not responsible for anything, Iryna Yermoshyna, the wife of a POW, said. The scope of ICRC's responsibility remains a source of confusion. Following the prison attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on the Red Cross and the United Nations to react. When the defenders of Azovstal left the plant, the U.N. and the International Committee of the Red Cross acted as guarantors of the life and health of our soldiers, Zelenskyy said. However, Oleksandr Vlasenko, a spokesperson for the ICRCs delegation in Ukraine, said the organization's guarantor role was a limited one. We guaranteed safety only during the capture of Azovstal combatants. That is, until the moment when they boarded the buses, he said. Kateryna Chyzykova saw the name of her husband on the list of wounded soldiers that Russia's Ministry of Defense published after the prison explosion. She says she's tried to contact the ICRC to try and find out about her husband's condition but has so far been unsuccessful. My husband left Azovstal, trusting the Red Cross, said Chyzykova. Zhorin says the list of casualties published by the Russian side is incorrect. He said among those listed as dead were names of people who died even before the explosion in Olenivka. Unfortunately, we already know that there are more dead POWs. There are victims who died in the hospital or on the way to the hospital, Zhorin said. So far the ICRC has not been able to access Olenivka and the wounded, so they have been unable to verify the list of names. Earlier this week, Russias Supreme Court declared Ukraines Azov Regiment a terrorist organization, a move that some fear could lead to terror charges against some of the captured fighters who made their last stand inside Mariupols shattered steel plant and make it more difficult to verify who was at the blast site. The Azov regiment that was stationed in Mariupol is part of the National Guard. Other units of Azov, which exist throughout the country, are part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They are under the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the commander-in-chief during the war. All of these are official units that certainly cannot be separately recognized as terrorist organizations. This is part of the entire defense of Ukraine, Zhorin said. Zhorin believes that Russia made the ruling so they could put members of the Azov regiment on trial. Before the ruling, they could not hold a trial against fighters as their status as prisoners of war gave them protection under the Geneva Conventions. Moscow has repeatedly portrayed the Azov Regiment as a Nazi group and accused it of atrocities but has publicly produced little evidence. The regiment, a unit within Ukraines National Guard, has a checkered past. It grew out of a group called the Azov Battalion, formed in 2014 as one of many volunteer brigades created to fight Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The battalion drew its initial fighters from far-right circles. While its current members reject accusations of extremism, the Kremlin has seized on the regiments right-wing origins to cast Russias invasion as a battle against Nazi influence in Ukraine. Meanwhile, covered in artificial blood, Olha stood in the Kyiv square with a message for her boyfriend who is in captivity. I want to give him all my love, to tell him that everything will be fine, that I will fight for him until the end." ___ This story was first published on August 5, 2022. It was updated on August 5, 2022 to include the International Committee of the Red Crosss description of its guarantor role in Mariupol. ___ Follow all of AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) An international human rights group says Sri Lanka's government is using emergency laws to harass and arbitrarily detain protesters who are seeking political reform and accountability amid the island country's economic crisis. New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement Wednesday that Sri Lanka's military sought to curtail protests through intimidation, surveillance, and arbitrary arrests of demonstrators, activists, lawyers and journalists since President Ranil Wickremesinghe took office last month. Sri Lanka's Parliament approved a state of emergency July 27. The decree gives the president the power to make regulations in the interest of public security and order. Wickremesinghe, who had ordered arrests of protesters, has said that although the protests started peacefully, groups with political interests took over later and became violent, citing the burning of dozens of ruling party politicians' homes in May. Sri Lankans had been protesting for months over the country's economic crisis that has led to a severe shortage of many essential imported items like medicines, fuel and cooking gas. Wickremesinghe's predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country after protesters stormed his official residence and occupied many key state buildings including the president's office and prime minister's office and official residence. Wickremesinghe was elected by Parliament to complete Rajapaksa's term, which ends in 2024. In a speech Wednesday to Parliament, Wickremesinghe promised leniency for those who took to violence unknowingly or at the instigation of others. He also promised to punish those who broke laws willfully. Some of those arrested are accused of clashing with security forces and encouraging people to break into Parliament. Officials have also seized the passport of a British woman who posted about the protests on social media. The Sri Lankan governments crackdown on peaceful dissent appears to be a misguided and unlawful attempt to divert attention from the need to address the countrys urgent economic crisis, said Meenakshi Ganguly, Human Rights Watch's South Asia director. Sri Lanka is bankrupt, having announced that it is suspending repayment of its foreign loans pending the outcome of talks with the International Monetary Fund for a rescue package. Sri Lankas international partners should be clear that they need to be working with a rights-respecting administration to address Sri Lankas deeply rooted economic problems," Ganguly said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate When an Arizona bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, learned that a member of his ward was sexually assaulting his 5-year-old daughter, he followed church policy and called the Mormon Abuse Help Line. The bishop later told law enforcement that church attorneys in Salt Lake City who staff the help line around the clock said that because he learned of the abuse during a counseling session the church considers a spiritual confession, he was legally bound to keep the abuse secret. Paul Douglas Adams, a U.S. Border Patrol employee living with his wife and six children in Bisbee, Arizona, continued abusing his daughter for as many as seven more years, and went on to abuse a second daughter. He finally stopped in 2017 with no help from the church only because he was arrested. The Associated Press obtained thousands of pages of sealed court documents that show in detail exactly how the churchs help line can divert abuse complaints away from law enforcement, leaving children in danger. Takeaways from the APs investigation: THE CLERGY-PENITENT PRIVILEGE The seven years of secrecy in the Adams case began when church attorneys in Salt Lake City advised Bishop John Herrod and later Bishop Robert Kim Mauzy they were exempt from reporting requirements under the states child abuse reporting law because of the laws so-called clergy-penitent privilege. You absolutely can do nothing, Herrod said he was told during an interview with federal investigators. Arizonas child sex abuse reporting law, and similar laws in more than 20 states, says clergy, physicians, nurses, or anyone caring for a child who reasonably believes the child has been abused or neglected has a legal obligation to report the information to police or the state Department of Child Safety. But it also says that clergy who receive information about child neglect or sexual abuse during spiritual confessions may withhold that information from authorities if the clergy determine it is reasonable and necessary under church doctrine. An Arizona attorney who is defending the bishops and the church in a lawsuit filed by three of the Adams children, told the AP that Herrod and Mauzy and by extension the church were acting within the law and in accordance with their religious principles. These bishops did nothing wrong. They didnt violate the law, and therefore they cant be held liable, said William Maledon. He also called the Adams childrens lawsuit a money grab. THE HELP LINE The Associated Press obtained nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records from an unrelated child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon church in West Virginia, which show that the help line is part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations against church members away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys, who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harms way. It was established in 1995 when legal claims of sex abuse against churches were on the rise. Officials of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said in sworn statements included in the sealed records that the help line is staffed by social workers who destroy records of all calls at the close of each day. When the social workers receive calls about abuse that may present a risk to the church such as abuse committed by prominent church members, abuse perpetrated during church activities, or especially egregious instances of abuse the calls are referred to attorneys with the Salt Lake City law firm Kirton McConkie. The church maintains that all calls referred to the attorneys are protected by attorney-client privilege, leaving no record of the accusations accessible to prosecutors or victims attorneys. The lawsuit filed by the Adams children alleges: The Mormon Church implements the Helpline not for the protection and spiritual counseling of sexual abuse victims...but for (church) attorneys to snuff out complaints and protect the Mormon Church from potentially costly lawsuits. THE SURVIVORS Miranda and Matthew Whitworth adopted the Adams younger daughter when she was just 2 years old. Miranda said when they met, the toddler wrapped her arms and legs around her head, buried her face in her neck, and refused to look up to say good-bye to her mothers family. It was the craziest thing, Miranda Whitworth said. It was like when you see a baby monkey or baby gorilla cling to their mother, and they just wont let go. The couple said they joined the lawsuit to push the church to change its policy so that any instance of child sexual abuse is immediately reported to civil authorities. We just dont understand why theyre paying all these lawyers to fight this, Matthew Whitworth said. Just change the policy. Nancy Salminen, a special needs teacher in public schools, adopted the older Adams daughter, MJ, after providing her with foster care when she was 12 years old. Today, MJ is a bubbly 16-year-old who plays in her high school band and proudly dons a crisp new uniform for her job as a fast-food restaurant. She had every excuse to fail and to just fold into herself and run away, Salminen said. But instead, she came back stronger than anyone Ive ever known. THE UPSHOT Paul Adams died by suicide in jail before he could stand trial on federal child pornography charges and state child sex abuse charges. Leizza Adams pleaded no contest to two counts of child abuse and served two-and-a-half years in state prison. Judge Wallace Hoggatt called the abuse endured by MJ and her younger sister one of the most horrendous cases of child molestation he had ever encountered. Today, the lawsuit filed by the Adams children in Cochise County Superior Court, as well as a criminal investigation by the Cochise County attorney, continue to unfold. I just think that the Mormon church really sucks. Seriously sucks, MJ told the AP. They are just the worst type of people, from what Ive experienced and what other people have experienced. ___ Associated Press editor Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and news researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report. To contact the APs investigations team, email investigative@ap.org. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. BALDWIN The Shrine of the Pines Rustic Furniture Museum in Baldwin was one of 32 Michigan museums to receive an award for cultural programing from Michigan Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are very excited to provide grants to 32 Michigan-based museums, 15 of those who are new grant partners to Michigan Humanities. This grant round is a great reminder to take time to visit the abundance of museums that our state has to offer, Jennifer Rupp, Michigan Humanities President & CEO said in a news release. According to the news release, the Michigan Museum Recovery Grants, part of the American Rescue Plan Act funding to assist organizations with recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, awarded up to $10,000 for general operating support, programing support or a combination of both. The Shrine of the Pines was awarded $2,500, board president Brenda Nelson told the Star. The funding will be used to fund operations of the museum, including rent, utilities and supplementing the salary of the one paid manager on staff, she said. The storm that came through the area recently caused a significant amount of damage, which cost us thousands of dollars for clean up, Nelson said. We were behind on some things, so this funding will be a great help to us. Since they are a nonprofit, every little bit helps, she added. Nelson said she would like to thank the state for the funding, and especially thank Shelly Kasprzycki, president and CEO with the Fremont Area Community Foundation, for making them aware of the grant. The Shrine of the Pines Rustic Furniture Museum is founder Raymond Overholzer's ode to the white pines that were cut down during the era of lumbering companies in Lake County about 100 years ago. The Shrine of The Pines houses over 200 pieces of art and furniture carved by Overholzer from pine roots and stumps over the course of 30 years. Overholzer held a very high regard for natural root formations which he showcased through his creations. Some of the pieces you can view include a dining table produced from a 700 pound root with over 60 inlays in its surface, a revolving gun rack that holds twelve shot guns, a game table with five chairs, and a rocking chair made especially for Mrs. Overholzer. The grounds include a nature trail that runs along the edge of the Pere Marquette River. About one mile in length, the trail offers an opportunity to enjoy the surroundings. Along the trail are signs with information about plant life found in the area and benches to stop and take in the beauty of the area. The museum offers live tours, as well as audio tours, which allow visitors to listen at their ouw pace and review specific portions of the tour. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. For more information, or to schedule a tour, call 231-745-7892. STAMFORD Police arrested a 17-year-old man wanted for attempted murder in New York during an unrelated vandalism investigation on Stamfords West Side on Wednesday. The 17-year-old is facing extradition back to Peekskill, N.Y., in connection to a July 29 double shooting that left two women injured. Lt. Jack Galusha of the Peekskill Police Department said the teen allegedly fired multiple rounds at the women as they sat in a car. One of the women was shot in the abdomen; the other was struck in both legs. The teenager will be charged with two counts of attempted murder and single counts of attempted assault with intent to cause serious injury with a weapon, second-degree assault, criminal possession of a loaded firearm and criminal possession of a weapon once released to Peekskill police. Stamford police Capt. Richard Conklin said patrol officers responded to an apartment complex on Havemeyer Lane around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday on reports of vandalism. When officers arrived on scene, they found two men nearby, Conklin said. When an officer asked the two for their names, Conklin said they both ran off. After a short search aided by a K9 unit, police found the 17-year-old in a shed just over the Greenwich town line. At first, the teen gave police a fake name, Conklin said. However, Conklin said they learned his identity and found there was a warrant for his arrest. Conklin said the teen was also apparently connected to a stolen car that police found in the area where the arrest was made. The car was reported stolen by an Uber driver who was beaten and robbed on Selleck Street on Aug. 1, Conklin said. The teenage was charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer in connection to the Havemeyer Lane encounter. WASHINGTON Tremendous progress is being made to restore and protect the Great Lakes from the impacts of toxic chemicals and the introduction of non-native invasive species. Thats according to the authors of a joint report issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Climate Change Canada on July 29. The State of the Great Lakes report provides a summary of the health of the Great Lakes using indicators of ecosystem health, such as drinking water, fish contamination and frequency of beach closures. Protecting the Great Lakes can only be achieved by working together, stated Stephen Guilbeault, Canadas Minister of Environment and Climate Change in a press release. With our American friends and (neighbors), we have had incredible success in cleaning up the Great Lakes from pollutants, while reducing farm run-off and protecting species at risk. The overall condition of the Great Lakes is fair and largely unchanging according to the report. Over 120 scientists and other experts assessed the lakes on several different aspects of water quality and ecosystem health. These indicator assessments help governments identify current and emerging challenges to the Great Lakes. The report found the following aspects of the Great Lakes are currently in good condition: Drinking water Researchers found the Great Lakes remain a source of high-quality drinking water when treated. Beach quality Beaches along the Great Lakes are in good condition, according to the report. However, some beaches are occasionally unsafe for swimming due to bacterial contamination. Groundwater contamination The report finds that groundwater typically provides good quality water to tributaries in the Great Lakes basin. However, groundwater in some areas has elevated levels of pollutants like nitrate and chloride. Invasive species prevention The rate by which new nonnative species have been introduced to the Great Lakes basin has greatly declined, according to the report. Overall, the majority of the 2022 indicators are in fair and unchanging condition: Fish consumption Great Lakes fish can be safely eaten by following relevant guidelines and advisories. However, unrestricted fish consumption is not yet possible, which the report finds has had an impact on communities that heavily rely on fish for food and cultural, spiritual or economic purposes. Toxic chemicals Levels of toxic chemicals, including PCBs and mercury, have declined significantly in the Great Lakes. However, concentrations of other toxic chemicals still pose threats to human health and the environment. Habitat and species Ecosystems vary in quality along the coast of the Great Lakes, with the healthiest being located in northern areas where human populations are at their lowest. The Great Lakes food web continues to be impacted to varying degrees by environmental stressors such as invasive species and climate change. However, some native fish species including lake trout and sturgeon are responding well to restoration efforts in several areas, according to the report. Nutrients and algae Nutrients in the lakes are not at acceptable levels. High nutrient levels in parts of the Great Lakes, particularly on Lake Erie, are contributing to blooms of toxic cyanobacteria and nuisance algae. In offshore areas of lakes Michigan, Huron and Ontario, lower nutrient amounts have resulted in algae and microorganism growth rates below their desired levels. The report finds that only Lake Superior has acceptable nutrient conditions that are necessary to maintain a healthy food web. Watershed impacts Watershed stressors including population growth, habitat loss and degradation as well as land-use activities are impacting water quality and ecosystem health in the Great Lakes, the report finds. Some indicators however show that there are still significant threats to the Great Lakes ecosystem that could worsen due to climate change. The report assessed one indicator as being in poor condition: Invasive species impacts While the study finds that efforts to block new potentially invasive nonnatives from the Great Lakes watershed have been largely successful, the impacts of those established invasive species persist. The report states that invasive species continue to spread within and between the lakes. An overall assessment could not be determined on the impacts of climate trends. The report also looked at the status of each of the Great Lakes. Lakes Superior and Huron have the best assessment, with both rated as good and unchanging. Lake Superior Lake Superiors forested watershed and coastal wetlands help maintain water quality and a healthy aquatic ecosystem, the report states. Lake Huron Lake Huron also remains healthy despite some algal blooms and a reduction in offshore nutrients due to invasive filter feeding mussels. Lake Michigan Lake Michigan was assessed as fair and unchanging, according to the report. Lake Michigan's habitats support a diverse array of plant and animal species and its waters continue to provide opportunities for swimming and recreational use, the report states. However, invasive species and other stressors continue to affect both water quality and the lakes food web. Lake Ontario Lake Ontario has shown improvements with fewer beach closing and declines in toxin concentrations in fish. The report lists Ontario as fair and improving. Lake Erie Lake Erie was given the worst assessment of poor and unchanging. Lake Erie supports a productive walleye fishery, but elevated nutrient concentrations and algal blooms are persistent problems, the report states. Visit binational.net to read the report or learn more about efforts to preserve the Great Lakes. BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) North Dakotas Supreme Court on Thursday struck down key portions of a state law that a landowners group argued amounts to the unconstitutional taking of private property rights. The so-called pore space law passed the 2019 Legislature after supporters sought clarification on the use of voids or cavities in underground rock formations. Pore spaces are used when the petroleum industry injects saltwater from oil and gas production underground for permanent storage or for enhanced oil recovery. The Northwest Landowners Association sued the state arguing the law deprives them of their right to be compensated for the use of their pore space. A state district judge last year ruled the law unconstitutional because it gives the landowners value from pore space to the oil and gas industry for free. Justices, in their unanimous opinion made public Thursday, largely agreed. In summary, we conclude that several parts of (the law) have been shown to be unconstitutional on their face, the opinion said. This is a big win I mean, there is nothing in this opinion that we are not absolutely thrilled about and dont agree with 100%, said Derrick Braaten, a Bismarck attorney who represents the landowner group. Under the law, landowners couldn't be compensated for pore space when it is used for saltwater disposal or enhanced oil recovery, unless they had an existing contract. Landowners adjacent to a disposal well also could not make a claim that saltwater, a byproduct of oil production, had migrated into their pore space, nor could they sue for trespassing. The Supreme Court struck down those provisions. North Dakota law has long established that surface owners have a property interest in pore space, justices said. "Surface owners have a right to compensation for the use of their pore space for disposal and storage operations. Government-authorized physical invasions of property constitute the clearest sort of taking." the opinion said. North Dakotas oil industry pushed for the law and Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed it, despite strong objections from landowners. It was one of the most controversial measures of the 2019 Legislative session. Some of the bill was salvaged. The Supreme Court did not find problems with the legislations new definition of pore space and surface owner, which the state had pushed for to provide clarity. North Dakota's Industrial Commission, headed by Burgum, said in a statement that it is "committed to ensuring that underground saltwater injection wells are managed for the benefit of landowners as well as the oil and gas industry. FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) A former state child welfare worker and a substance abuse consultant pleaded guilty Wednesday to participating in a bribery scheme in South Florida. Alexandra Alia Cadet, 31, of West Palm Beach, and Shannel Simone Escoffery, 34, of Coral Springs, pleaded guilty to extortion conspiracy in Fort Lauderdale federal court, according to court records. Sentencing is set for Oct. 18. According to court documents, Cadet was a licensing specialist in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health office for the Florida Department of Children and Families. She was responsible for reviewing license applications submitted by substance abuse treatment facilities. Escoffery was a consultant for those facilities and helped prepare licensing applications and submit them to DCF. As part of the bribery scheme, Escoffery would solicit payments from facilities and then turn over all or some of the money to Cadet in exchange for Cadets expedited review and recommendation of approval of licenses. BEIJING (AP) Police in southern China have arrested a 47-year-old man suspected of an attack that killed three people and injured six others at a kindergarten in Jiangxi province. Liu Xiaohui was arrested at 10:50 p.m. on Wednesday, about 12 hours after the morning attack, the Anfu county police said in a statement. He had fled and gone into hiding, the statement said. TOLAR, Texas (AP) One firefighter was injured and two others were treated for heat exhaustion while fighting a wildfire in North Texas that burned almost half a square mile Wednesday, officials said. The fire near Tolar, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Fort Worth, was completely uncontained as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. SOUTH HAVEN, Mich. (AP) Two men died after the plane they were in crashed near a southwestern Michigan airport shortly after takeoff, police said Wednesday. The plane crashed around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, South Haven Police Chief Natalie Thompson said, but the wreckage wasn't discovered until nearly 24 hours later. It was found about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) from South Haven Regional Airport. The bodies of the two men were found in the wreckage of the Aerospace 600 around 7 a.m. Wednesday, Thompson said. Police found no indications of an explosion, she said. South Haven police were told by the Federal Aviation Administration around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday that the plane was missing. Both men were believed to be about 70 years old, she said. One man was from the Lawton area, southwest of Kalamazoo, while the other was from the Wayland area, south of Grand Rapids. Their names have not been released. The Lawton-area man was the planes owner and the other man was his flight instructor, police said. Family members who had not heard from either of the two men reached out to air traffic controllers who then called the FAA, she said. The investigation into the cause of the crash has been turned over to the National Transportation Safety Board, Thompson said. UNITED NATIONS (AP) U.N. experts say they have solid evidence that members of Rwandas armed forces are conducting operations in volatile eastern Congo in support of the M23 rebel group, which is waging a major offensive in the mineral-rich region that has caused deaths and massive displacement of civilians. In a new report to the U.N. Security Council, obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, the experts accused Rwandas forces of violating a U.N. arms embargo against Congo by their direct intervention into the country, either to support the M23 group or to conduct military operations against another armed rebel group, the FDLR. Rwandan military members also violated sanctions by providing weapons, ammunition and uniforms to M23 rebels, the group of experts said. Relations between Congo and its smaller neighbor Rwanda have been fraught for decades. Rwanda alleges that Congo gave refuge to the ethnic Hutus who carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed at least 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Rwandas President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, is widely credited with stopping the genocide. Congo has accused Rwanda of supporting the M23, mainly comprising Congolese Tutsis, which Rwanda has long denied. And Rwanda has accused Congo of supporting the FDLR, a Hutu rebel group opposed to Tutsi influence, which Kinshasa denies. The experts report comes at a time of worsening security in eastern Congo that led to a meeting between Rwandas Kagame and Congos President Felix Tshisekedi in Angolas capital, Luanda, on July 6 and agreement to revive a Congo-Rwanda commission. A statement issued afterwards called for a return to normal diplomatic relations between Kinshasa and Kigali, a cessation of hostilities, and the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the M23 rebel group from its positions in eastern Congo. The U.N. special envoy for Congo, Bintou Keita, warned the Security Council in late June that during recent hostilities M23 conducted itself increasingly as a conventional army rather than an armed group, saying it possesses increasingly sophisticated firepower. She said this has put civilians, and U.N. peacekeepers charged with protecting them, under greater threat. The U.N. experts said that despite almost 15 months of continuous state of siege in North Kivu and Ituri provinces in eastern Congo and military operations by Congos armed forces, Ugandan forces, and troops from the U.N. peacekeeping force known as MONUSCO, the security and humanitarian situation in the two provinces has remained of great concern. They singled out the deteriorating situation in the Rutshuru and Nyiragongo areas of North Kivu. Attacks by M23 fighters have become more frequent, longer and stronger, and the territory under the groups control significantly increased, causing massive displacement of civilians and indiscriminate shelling, the experts said. M23 combatants also deliberately killed civilians and adopted the tactic of attacking MONUSCO troops. The experts said some Congolese army troops forged ad hoc alliances with local armed groups to fight against the M23 unilaterally or jointly with other Congolese troops. These armed groups were provided with weapons, ammunition and uniforms by some members of the Congolese army, they said. The experts said the support to several Congolese armed groups, and cooperation with them, by members of the countrys armed forces in Rutshuru also violated the U.N. arms embargo. Violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including deliberate killings of children and civilians and indiscriminate shelling that killed civilians and damaged houses and schools, notably by M23, are also acts that can lead to sanctions, the expert group said. Since M23 intensified its operations, the experts said it also documented with great concern a sharp multiplication of hate speech and discourses inciting discrimination, hostility and violence targeting Rwandan-speaking people, at times leading to violence against them. The experts also reported on Uganda-based ADF rebels, who have been active in eastern Congo for decades and have killed thousands in the region since they resurfaced in 2013. The ADF continues to expand its area of operations and continues to conduct attacks against civilians in the Beni region of North Kivu and southern Ituri, the expert group said It said an explosion on April 7 in a bar in the Congolese armys Katindo camp in Goma, which killed at least eight people, was most likely planned and committed by ADF. UNITED NATIONS (AP) The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations headed to Africa on Wednesday, saying she was going to focus on how the United States can help Uganda, Ghana and Cape Verde deal with the food crisis that has hit the continent particularly hard not to compete with China and Russia. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the long-planned trip is not part of global competition with either of Americas rivals, but it is part of a series of high-level U.S. engagements that aim to affirm and strengthen our partnerships and relationships with African leaders and peoples. Her trip from Aug. 4-7 will be followed immediately by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkens visits to South Africa, Congo and Rwanda from Aug. 7-11. It also comes on the heels of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs visit last week to Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Republic of Congo where he accused the U.S. and European countries of driving up food prices. Chinas Foreign Minister Wang Yi began 2022 with a four-day visit to Eritrea, Kenya and the Comoros, keeping a 32-year tradition that the countrys top diplomat make his first trip of the year to Africa. Were not catching up. They are catching up, Thomas-Greenfield said. We have been engaging with this continent for decades, and even my own career is very much evidence of that. Thomas-Greenfield first went to Africa as a student in the 1970s, and in her career as a U.S. diplomat she rose to be assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2013 to 2017. She said high energy prices, climate change, COVID-19 and increasing conflict have pushed millions of Africans to the brink, and that Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 has added to the crisis, especially since some countries in Africa once got up to 75% of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. The U.S. ambassador said the three countries she is visiting Uganda first followed by Ghana and Cape Verde all face serious food security situations because of the significant rise in the cost of food and energy. But she said Ghana has been a leader in dealing with it and she will be visiting a market, meeting farmers and going to a grain factory in the country to see how we can help them improve on their production. In an interview and at a news conference ahead of her three-nation visit, Thomas-Greenfield said her trip happens to come on the heels of Lavrovs visit. Refusing to call Russias invasion of Ukraine a war, Lavrov said: The situation in Ukraine did additionally negatively affect food markets, but not due to the Russian special operation, rather due to the absolutely inadequate reaction of the West, which announced sanctions. Thomas-Greenfield countered: Russia is there to defend what they know they have to defend that they took actions that are hurting Africans, and theyre trying to somehow defend their actions and blame somebody else for the impact that their actions are having on the African continent. They can try to do that. But my question to them is, how are you helping Africans to address the food insecurity issue, not whom youre blaming for the food insecurity issues, she said. Were there to help Africans address those issues. Russia can deal with its own problems. As for China, while its trade with Africa last year was dramatically higher than U.S. trade, Thomas-Greenfield said if you look at our figures, and how far back our engagement has been with the Africans, then we really are far above those numbers. As you look at what Chinas doing in Africa, you need to look at the debt trap that African countries, many of them, have faced because of those relationships with China, she said. China has become one of the biggest lenders to developing countries through its Belt and Road initiative to expand trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Wang, Chinas foreign minister, insisted during his visit to Kenya in January that there is no debt trap. The so-called `debt trap in Africa is not a fact, but a malicious hype-up, he said. It is an 'utterance trap created by those external forces that do not want to see Africa accelerate development. If there is any `trap in Africa, it is the `poverty trap. Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. is not telling African countries they cant engage with China. What we are engaged in is vision for economic development that promotes democracy and that promotes respect for human rights and transparency and strengthening the capacity for Africans to create jobs for their own citizens, she said. We respect the ability of countries to decide for themselves whether they want to partner with China or not. TIRANA, Albania (AP) A cyberattack that temporarily shut down numerous Albanian government digital services and websites in mid-July was likely the work of pro-Iranian hackers seeking to disrupt an Iranian opposition group's conference in Albania, a leading U.S. cybersecurity firm said Thursday. In a report, Mandiant expressed moderate confidence the attackers were acting in support of Tehran's anti-dissident efforts based on several factors: The timing, the content of a social media channel used to claim responsibility, and similarities in software code used with malware long used to target Farsi and Arabic speakers. The July 23-24 conference by the Iranian dissident group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq was in fact canceled following warnings from local authorities of a possible terrorist threat. Some 3,000 Iranian dissidents from the group, best known as MEK, live at Ashraf 3 camp in Manez, 30 kilometers (19 miles) west of Albanias capital, Tirana. The Free Iran World Summit was to have been held at the camp with U.S. lawmakers among the invitees. A group calling itself HomeLand Justice claimed credit for the cyberattack, which used ransomware to scramble data. Ransomware is best known for its use in for-profit criminal extortion but is being increasingly wielded for political ends, particularly by Iran. The claim by HomeLand Justice" came on a Telegram channel in which documents purported to be Albanian residence permits of MEK members were posted, along with video of the ransomware being activated. The channel alleged corruption in the Albanian government and used hashtags including #Manez. This activity poses an active threat to public and private organizations in other NATO member states, Mandiant said. As negotiations surrounding the Iran nuclear deal continue to stall, this activity indicates Iran may feel less restraint in conducting cyber network attack operations going forward. At the time, the Tirana government said the hackers method was identical with attacks last year in other NATO states including Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Belgium. Irans mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. The MEK began as a Marxist group opposing the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. It supported the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but soon had a falling out with Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and turned against his clerical government, carrying out a series of assassinations and bombings in the Islamic Republic. The MEK later fled into neighboring Iraq, leading many in Iran to oppose the group. Although now largely based in Albania, the group claims to operate a network inside Iran. - Follow Llazar Semini at https://twitter.com/lsemini This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON (AP) The federal Bureau of Prisons is keeping its former director on the payroll as an adviser to his successor, rewarding him with an influential new role after concerns about his leadership including from staff, inmates, Congress and the Biden administration hastened his exit from the top job. Michael Carvajal, who submitted his resignation in January but was not replaced until Tuesday, will stay on through the end of the month as a senior adviser to the new director, Colette Peters, agency spokesperson Kristie Breshears told The Associated Press. Peters, who was the state prisons chief in Oregon, has pledged to overhaul the federal agency, which was plagued by myriad problems during Carvajals two years in charge. Critics say that retaining Carvajal, even for a few weeks, could slow that progress. Some people involved in the federal prison system say Carvajal lacks credibility and that the decision to let him stay on sends mixed signals about the direction of the agency at a pivotal time. Staffing shortages have hampered operations at some of the agencys 122 facilities and there is continued fallout from staff misconduct, including the sexual abuse of inmates at a womens prison in California. That is unbelievable. Why would we keep an individual that has left this agency in ruins, and who refuses to take ownership of failures of his administration, from staffing to COVID?" said Jose Rojas, a leader in the federal correctional officers union. "What a sad state of affairs." Peters has pledged greater transparency and accountability for the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Departments largest component with a budget of more than $8 billion. At the same time, with Carvajal as a senior adviser, she is being counseled by an official roundly criticized on Capitol Hill for falling short in those regards. Carvajal submitted his resignation on Jan. 5 amid increasing scrutiny over his leadership in the wake of Associated Press reporting that uncovered widespread problems at the Bureau of Prisons, including rampant staff criminal conduct, dozens of escapes, deaths and staffing woes hampering responses to emergencies. Carvajals departure wasnt immediate. He and the Justice Department agreed for him to stay on until a successor was in place a search process that carried on into the summer as the Biden administration struggled to find a candidate qualified and willing to take on the agencys challenges. Among the pressure Carvajal faced before resigning: The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., demanded his firing last November after the AP revealed that more than 100 Bureau of Prisons workers have been arrested, convicted or sentenced for crimes since the start of 2019. Administration officials also had discussions about whether to remove Carvajal in the spring of 2021, after the AP reported that widespread correctional officer vacancies were forcing prisons to expand the use of cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates. In one of his final acts as director, Carvajal clashed with senators at a hearing last week as he refused to accept responsibility for a culture of corruption and misconduct that has plagued his agency for years. Carvajal, testifying before the Senates Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, insisted he had been shielded from problems by his underlings. But he had been copied on emails, and some of the troubles were detailed in reports generated by the agencys headquarters. Carvajal blamed the size and structure of the Bureau of Prisons for his ignorance on issues such as inmate suicides, sexual abuse, and the free flow of drugs, weapons and other contraband. This is a very large and complex organization, Carvajal told the panel, led by Sens. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga. and Ron Johnson, R-Wis. Peters, sworn in Tuesday by Attorney General Merrick Garland, said she was humbled, honored and proud to serve in the position. She also welcomed congressional oversight, adding that she believes in good government and transparency. Peters is only the second director in the agencys history with no prior experience in the federal prisons system. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco led the search for the new director and had been looking for someone who was focused on reforming an agency that has had cultural issues for decades. In an interview with the AP last month, Peters stressed the importance of working to create an environment where people can feel comfortable coming forward and talking about misconduct. ___ On Twitter, follow Michael Balsamo at twitter.com/mikebalsamo1 and Michael Sisak at twitter.com/mikesisak. Send confidential tips by visiting https://www.ap.org/tips/ A massive volcano erupting close to a global travel hub, Iceland's Keflavik Airport, led to close monitoring by officials and sparked fascination from people who ventured near the bright orange lava flows despite warnings. The Fagradalsfjall volcano in southwest Iceland erupted Wednesday at 1:18 p.m. local time, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office, which urged people to stay away from the sparsely populated area on the Reykjanes peninsula - though some still went up close to snap photographs with their children and fly drones. "I just made it to the volcano . . . my mind is completely blown, it's crazy," one onlooker told the Associated Press. "The last thing that I would have imagined this morning when I woke up would be to be standing and looking at this . . . it is so beautiful." Another man who had flocked to see the same volcano erupt last year said it was "absolutely incredible," describing the lava as a mesmerizing "dancing fire." The eruption, classified as a volcanic fissure, is occurring about 10 miles from Keflavik International Airport and about 20 miles from the country's capital, Reykjavik. As of Thursday morning, the airport - which has flights from Seattle, London and Frankfurt - remained open and operational. Brynjar Gunnarsson/Associated Press "Currently, there have been no disruptions to flights to and from Iceland and international flight corridors remain open," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. International travelers will recall the 2010 eruption of the country's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge ash clouds into the atmosphere, grounding air traffic and leaving millions stranded. "What we know so far is that the eruption does not pose any risk to populated areas or critical infrastructure," Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir said in a statement. "We will of course continue to monitor the situation closely." A volcanic fissure does not usually result in large explosions or significant dispersal of ash into the stratosphere. But people were warned to stay away because of the risk from noxious fumes and hot magma. "The eruption follows intense seismic activity over the past few days," the Foreign Ministry said. "It is considered to be relatively small and due to its location, there is low threat to populated areas or critical infrastructure" The exact location of the eruption is in Meradalir, about one mile north of Mt. Stori-Hrutur, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. The area has experienced "strong earthquakes" in recent days, it added, warning of tremors, falling rocks and gas pollution. The same volcano also erupted last year, it said, and lasted about six months. Volcanoes are a fact of life in Iceland, a country that sits atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, caused by the separation of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. On average, the country experiences a volcanic event about every four years. However, the same geological activity is also responsible for some of the country's most dramatic natural features, such as black sand beaches and geothermal lagoons, which draw millions of foreign tourists. The current volcanic response is being led by Iceland's department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management alongside the Meteorological Office and University of Iceland. Scientists are also in the area with Coast Guard helicopters to assess the situation, the government said. A Stockton Unified School District school board committee will hold a town hall meeting Thursday evening for people to voice their concerns regarding a recent San Joaquin County Civil Grand Jury report. The meeting of the school board's Ad Hoc Board Committee will be held from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the district's Administration Complex building located at 56 S. Lincoln St. The 2021-22 grand jury in its report alleges finding various examples of poor business practices, inadequate duty of care by the board and administration and a lack of transparency by the district to the public and board. The grand jury said in the report that they received reports alleging that the school district's management and Board of Trustees were not adhering to state and local policies and procedures involving financial transactions and funds. A former Richmond police officer faces a felony charge for allegedly assaulting a man with a taser, the Contra Costa District Attorney's Office announced Wednesday. On April 9 at 1 a.m., former officer Eric Smith Jr. was attempting to arrest a man in Richmond for a previous car chase incident, according to the filing. After failed attempts to stun the man with a taser, Smith physically hit him with the device enough times to cause "great bodily injury to the victim," according to the district attorney. The Richmond Police Department terminated Smith from the force on Aug. 3, and filed the case to the district attorney. Smith also faces enhancements for causing great bodily harm and for the use of a dangerous weapon. Sonoma County supervisors approved updates Tuesday to the county's regulations on vacation rental units, capping them in some areas of the county and prohibiting them altogether in others. The regulations will prevent the approval of new vacation rentals in areas that are considered to have an insufficient density of residential housing, including parts of the unincorporated communities of Geyserville, Glen Ellen, Graton and Guerneville. The board will have latitude going forward to establish limits on vacation rentals in certain areas that have the highest concentration of them, such as along the county's coastline and the lower Russian River area. The ordinance also restricts who can hold a vacation rental permit countywide. Only individual people of trusts can hold only one permit at a time, while corporate entities are barred from holding new rental permits, according to the county. After seven businesses in Oakland's Little Saigon sustained serious losses in burglaries early Monday morning, police are asking for the public's help identifying the burglars through photos of their vehicles, police said Wednesday. The businesses were hit at about 4 a.m., according to police. The neighborhood is located between Second Avenue and 14th Avenue along International Boulevard and East 12th Street. Officers went to the 800 block of International Boulevard at about 7:30 a.m. to investigate one burglary and found seven businesses had been broken into in International Plaza, according to police. Police believe five people got out of three vehicles before breaking into the businesses and leaving with cash and a gun. To address the burglaries and other crime in the area, police recently appointed a liaison officer to Little Saigon. Police arrested a man suspected of a series of shootings from a pellet gun at seemingly random victims, which are being classified as assaults with a deadly weapon and assaults causing great bodily injury, San Jose police said Wednesday. Nicholas Montoya, 38, of Campbell, is accused of shooting lead pellets from a high-powered rifle at three victims in three separate San Jose locations in a 45 minute period on June 10. Another victim was identified the following day. Police said they immediately put together a task force to identify and apprehend a suspect in the crimes. Montoya was arrested at his residence in the 200 block of Beverly Court in Campbell, police said, and he has been charged by the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office with seven counts of assault with a deadly weapon and assault causing great bodily injury, police said. A cooling tower at the Embassy Suites Napa Valley has been identified to hold an unsafe amount of Legionella bacteria, which has infected a dozen residents and killed one over the last month, Napa County health officials said Wednesday. The tower at the hotel, located on California Boulevard in Napa, was determined to hold high levels of the bacteria an investigation by county health officials, the California Department of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. County officials said the cooling tower has been taken offline, preventing further risk to the general public. The bacteria cause a type of pneumonia called Legionnaires' disease and typically grows in warm water. Contaminated water can then be aerosolized via air conditioning units, hot tubs, cooling misters and decorative fountains. One person died and another was injured in a Wednesday afternoon shooting on a Muni bus in San Francisco's Visitacion Valley neighborhood, police said. Officers responded to 3:20 p.m. report of a shooting on a bus at Velasco Avenue and Santos Street. Upon arrival, officers discovered two victims suffering from apparent gunshot wounds. Police rendered first aid until paramedics arrived and took the victims to a hospital, where one later died. Officers identified and arrested a suspect said to be involved in a car fire in San Jose that killed a man over the weekend, police said Wednesday. Police responded to reports of a car fire at 6:15 a.m. Sunday near Pomona and Barnard avenues. After extinguishing the fire, firefighters discovered the body of a man inside the car, police said. In collaboration with a San Jose Fire Department arson investigator, detectives allege that 50-year-old Martin Cabrera was the prime suspect. He was arrested at a San Jose homeless encampment and booked into county jail on suspicion of homicide. The identity of the man who died will be released after the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner's Office notifies next of kin and confirms his identity, according to police. Police in Union City have released more information about a shooting on Wednesday. Officers were dispatched to the area of 8th and H streets at approximately 12:36 p.m. for a shooting that had just occurred, the department said. Upon arrival, officers learned that a 44-year-old male was shot once in the leg. He was transported to the hospital and is expected to survive. Three suspects were later taken into custody in Oakland, Union City police said. COVID-19 transmission remains high in San Mateo County, one of the county's top health officials said this week, as the ongoing surge continues to last longer than most previous surges. According to San Mateo County Health Chief Louise Rogers, the county's census of COVID-related hospitalizations has hovered between 30 and 60 over most of the last three months and was at at 58 as of Monday. That figure is lower than the peak of 160 hospitalized patients the county reached during the winter surge of the omicron variant, but is comparable to the peak of last fall's delta variant surge. Like much of the Bay Area and the state in general, San Mateo County remains in the "high transmission" tier, as outlined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The westbound lanes of Interstate Highway 80 were closed for about an hour early Thursday in Fairfield near the on-ramp at West Texas Street, according to the California Highway Patrol. Initial reports came in just before 2 a.m. of a pedestrian crossing westbound lanes of the highway and who was later struck by at least one vehicle. The CHP closed the westbound lanes at 2:21 a.m. and diverted westbound traffic off the highway at the off-ramp to West Texas Street. The coroner was contact minutes later to come to the scene. The CHP reopened the far right westbound lane at 3:27 a.m. and estimated that all westbound lanes would reopen about 4 a.m. The National Weather Service forecast for the greater San Francisco Bay Area calls for sunny skies Thursday, with daytime highs expected in the mid 60s along the coast, in the mid 70s to low 80s around the bay and reaching the mid 80s to low 90s in the interior areas of the North and East Bay. Overnight lows are expected in the upper 50s to low 60s. Daytime highs could cool by a few degrees Friday and through the weekend. Copyright 2022 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area. Copyright 2022 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. The saga of Emmett Till has once again returned to the public sphere. Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955. He was kidnapped under cover at night, mercilessly beaten, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River for having the supposed audacity to flirt with a white woman. Carolyn Bryant asserted Till grabbed her while making lewd, crude and profane comments, which included whistling toward her. She testified to this before an all-white jury during the trial of her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam. She later recanted that part of her story. So why are we discussing Tills legacy again? Because last month, a team reportedly found an unserved warrant charging Bryant in Tills 1955 kidnapping, and his relatives want authorities to arrest her. Unfortunately, the Justice Department officially closed its investigation into Tills murder back in December, denying his family the justice they have long sought. There is much written history that highlights the grim and terrorizing reality for Black people in the South during this largely oppressive era. An all-white, all-male Southern jury in mid-20th century Mississippi had absolutely no intention of convicting two white men for killing a young teenage Black boy, despite absolute evidence of their guilt. In fact, in closing arguments, the defense made the case that, as white, Anglo-Saxon men, they had a conscientious duty to render a not-guilty verdict. Tills murder was a prime example of how Black men have long been targets of pathological paranoia, hatred and malice. Black men (in the case of Till, a child), have been seen as particularly dangerous to the safety of white women. Truth be told, we have seen this sort of adultifying of Black children time and time again. Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old pre-teen from Cleveland who was shot by police within seconds of the officers arriving on the scene, was thought by cops to be maybe 20. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was killed by unhinged vigilante criminal George Zimmerman, was referred to as a 20-something guy. More than a few bodies of Black men (often innocent) were strung up on trees and burned alive, with body parts chopped off and sold as souvenirs to mentally unhinged spectators who took sadistic delight in such a horrid spectacle. Oftentimes, it was based on the claims of a white woman, whose words (regardless of their truth) took precedence over the rights and dignity of a Black person. Its impossible to know how many Black people lost their lives due to false accusations. Recently, the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting obtained a copy of an unpublished memoir by Bryant, who now goes by Carolyn Donham, in which she reportedly wrote that she sees herself as much as a victim as Emmett Till. Talk about adding insult to injury, or rather murder. Today, Bryant is 89 years old. Despite the fact that she is an octogenarian, Bryant and anyone else still alive who contributed to this horrid event should face some sort of justice. Tills decades-old blood remains on her hands, and possibly those of others. The case is a sad reflection of what all too often actually occurred during this most dark and sordid era of American history. To the editor, The federal government seems to be slipping away for the average citizen of America and Connecticut. Democrats from Joe Biden to Jim Himes are embracing a far-left agenda which has resulted in runaway inflation, soaring gas and electricity prices, an economy in recession and a frightful collapse of Americas regard in the world. We in Connecticut must do whatever we can to return normalcy to our nation and it starts with defeating Jim Himes as our congressman. But we just cant say the words. Republicans must nominate a strong candidate, a proven leader, someone who knows America is heading in the wrong direction. And most importantly that candidate must be able to defeat Jim Himes. That is why I will be voting for Jayme Stevenson in the Republican primary on Aug. 9. As a five-term Darien first selectman, Jayme is a proven vote-getter. But she is also a proven leader and not just in Darien. She has developed trusted relationships with cities and towns in Southwest Connecticut. They know her and know she will bring common sense and pragmatic leadership to Washington as our congresswoman. And that is why she can really win against Jim Himes. Its time to get America moving in the right direction. Join me in voting for Jayme Stevenson for Congress in the Republican primary on Aug. 9. Edward Dadakis is the former chairman of the Greenwich Republican Party. He represented Greenwich, Stamford and New Canaan for eight years on the Republican State Central Committee. StackCommerce When you've got a life, or much worse, a business to run, the last thing you need to be worrying about is your personal or business correspondence. But believe it or not, great emails are the sneaky key to watching your audience grow exponentially. If you have no idea where you're supposed to start, that's totally ok. Though email sending is an exact skill, it's not rocket science. You might just need to outsource this one job. Luckily, you don't have to pay an expensive consultant to do it. Look no further than the EmailWritr Premium Plan: Lifetime Subscription. This amazing tool takes the guesswork out of sending out emails everyone will love, regardless of what you are trying to convey. It also happens to be on sale for a limited time, so get it while it's hot. WFO LAS VEGAS Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, August 3, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Las Vegas has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... Central Inyo County in south central California... * Until 945 PM PDT. * At 642 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Life-threatening flash flooding. Thunderstorms producing flash flooding. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Life-threatening flash flooding of low-water crossings, creeks, normally dry washes and roads. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Keeler. Highway 190 between mile markers 14 and 30 and Highway 136. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Be aware of your surroundings and do not drive on flooded roads. In hilly terrain there are hundreds of low water crossings which are potentially dangerous in heavy rain. Do not attempt to cross flooded roads. Find an alternate route. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO RENO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, August 3, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING ...FLASH FLOOD EMERGENCY FOR TAMARACK BURN SCAR INCLUDING MARKLEEVILLE AREA... The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... The Tamarack burn scar in... Alpine County in northern California... Northern Mono County in northern California... * Until 730 PM PDT. * At 443 PM PDT, emergency management reported cars being swept away from flood waters and dangerous debris flows. Up to 2.5 inches of rain have fallen. Flash flooding is already occurring. This is a FLASH FLOOD EMERGENCY for Tamarack Burn Scar including Markleeville Area. This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW! HAZARD...Life threatening flash flooding. Thunderstorms producing flash flooding in and around the Tamarack Burn Scar. SOURCE...Emergency management reported. IMPACT...This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW! IMMEDIATE EVACUATION for areas in and around the Tamarack Burn Scar. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Grover Hot Springs, Alpine Village, Woodfords, Mesa Vista, Junction CA 89 And CA 4, Alpine County Airport, Indian Creek Reservoir, Turtle Rock Campground, Indian Creek Campground, Markleeville, Monitor Pass and Paynesville. Avoid all roads leading into Woodfords and Markleeville including CA- 89, CA-88, and CA-4. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Move to higher ground now! This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order. Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO RENO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, August 3, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... The Slink burn scar in... Alpine County in northern California... Northern Mono County in northern California... * Until 845 PM PDT. * At 556 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain over the Slink burn scar. Between 0.25 and 0.50 inches of rain have fallen. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. Excessive rainfall over the burn scar will result in debris flow moving through the Slink burn scar. The debris flow can consist of rock, mud, vegetation and other loose materials. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms in and around the Slink burn scar. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flooding of areas in and around the Slink burn scar. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... mainly rural areas of Alpine and Northern Mono Counties including Golden Gate and Mill Canyon Road. Impacts to irrigation canals and CADFW resources expected. Prolonged heavy rain could cause flooding issues along the lower section of Slinkard Creek. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... This is a life threatening situation. Heavy rainfall will cause extensive and severe flash flooding of creeks...streams...and ditches in the Slink burn scar. Severe debris flows can also be anticipated across roads. Roads and driveways may be washed away in places. If you encounter flood waters...climb to safety. Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... Northeastern Tulare County in central California... * Until 245 PM PDT. * At 1239 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 2 inches of rain have fallen. The expected rainfall rate is 1 inch in 1 hour. Additional rainfall amounts of 2 to 3 inches are possible in the warned area. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Life threatening flash flooding. Thunderstorms producing flash flooding. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Life threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Farewell Gap, Cold Springs Campground, Mineral King Ranger Station, Hockett Meadow Ranger Station, Wet Meadows, Atwell Mill Campground and Quinn Patrol Cabin. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... In hilly terrain there are hundreds of low water crossings which are potentially dangerous in heavy rain. Do not attempt to cross flooded roads. Find an alternate route. Flooding is occurring or is imminent. It is important to know where you are relative to streams, rivers, or creeks which can become killers in heavy rains. Campers and hikers should avoid streams or creeks. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... Eastern Fresno County in central California... Northern Tulare County in central California... * Until 315 PM PDT. * At 123 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 2 inches of rain have fallen. The expected rainfall rate is 1 to 2 inches in 1 hour. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Moraine Campground, Canyon View Campground, Mitchell Meadow, Sentinel Campground, Cedar Grove, Sheep Creek Campground and Roaring River Ranger Station. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Flooding is occurring or is imminent. It is important to know where you are relative to streams, rivers, or creeks which can become killers in heavy rains. Campers and hikers should avoid streams or creeks. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... North Central Kern County in central California... * Until 315 PM PDT. * At 144 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. The expected rainfall rate is 1 to 2 inches in 1 hour. Additional rainfall amounts of 1 to 2 inches are possible in the warned area. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Squirrel Mountain Valley, Bodfish, South Lake Cdp, Weldon, Lake Isabella, Mountain Mesa, Wofford Heights and Kernville. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Be aware of your surroundings and do not drive on flooded roads. The National Weather Service in Las Vegas has issued a San Bernardino County in southern California... * Until 445 PM PDT. * At 146 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain south of Twentynine Palms. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly and May impact highway 62 between Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms. HAZARD...Life-threatening flash flooding. Thunderstorms producing flash flooding. IMPACT...Life-threatening flash flooding of low-water crossings, creeks, normally dry washes and roads. Twentynine Palms. In hilly terrain there are hundreds of low water crossings which are potentially dangerous in heavy rain. Do not attempt to cross flooded roads. Find an alternate route. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... South Central Kern County in central California... * Until 400 PM PDT. * At 208 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 2 inches of rain have fallen. The expected rainfall rate is 1 to 2 inches in 1 hour. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Pine Mountain Club and Lake Of The Woods. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Be aware of your surroundings and do not drive on flooded roads. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... South Central Tulare County in central California... * Until 415 PM PDT. * At 217 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 2 inches of rain have fallen. The expected rainfall rate is 1 to 2 inches in 1 hour. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Johnsondale, Peppermint and Ponderosa. This includes the following streams and drainages... Nobe Young Creek, Kessing Creek, Durrwood Creek, South Creek, Alder Creek, White River, Cedar Creek, Cold Springs Creek, Dry Meadow Creek, Spear Creek, South Fork Tule River, Deer Creek, Starvation Creek, Bone Creek, Peppermint Creek, Kern River, Tyler Creek, North Fork Gordon Creek, South Fork Gordon Creek, Brush Creek, Salmon Creek, Trout Creek, Tobias Creek, Bond Creek and Bull Run Creek. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Be aware of your surroundings and do not drive on flooded roads. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... Northern Mariposa County in central California... West Central Tuolumne County in northern California... * Until 345 PM PDT. * At 222 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 2 inches of rain have fallen. The expected rainfall rate is 1 to 1.5 inches in 1 hour. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, as well as poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... White Wolf Campground, Rancheria Falls Wilderness Campground, Hetch Hetchy Ranger Station and Hetch Hetchy. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... In hilly terrain there are hundreds of areas which are potentially dangerous in heavy rain. Do not attempt to cross flooded locations. Flooding is occurring or is imminent. It is important to know where you are relative to streams, rivers, or creeks which can become killers in heavy rains. Campers and hikers should avoid streams or creeks. ...FLASH FLOOD WARNING IS CANCELLED FOR EASTERN FRESNO AND NORTHERN TULARE COUNTIES... The heavy rain has ended. Flooding is no longer expected to pose a threat. Please continue to heed remaining road closures. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... South Central Kern County in central California... * Until 345 PM PDT. * At 240 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 2 inches of rain have fallen. The expected rainfall rate is 1 to 2 inches in 1 hour. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Tehachapi, Stallion Springs, Golden Hills, Bear Valley Springs, Water Canyon and Keene. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Flooding is occurring or is imminent. It is important to know where you are relative to streams, rivers, or creeks which can become killers in heavy rains. Campers and hikers should avoid streams or creeks. ...FLOOD ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL 530 PM PDT THIS AFTERNOON... * WHAT...Flooding caused by excessive rainfall is expected. * WHERE...A portion of southwest California, including far northern Ventura County. * WHEN...Until 530 PM PDT. * IMPACTS...Dangerous flows over low-water crossings. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS... - At 237 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated heavy rain due to thunderstorms. Minor flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly in the advisory area. - Some locations that will experience flooding include... Lockwood Valley. - http://www.weather.gov/safety/flood The rain will likely trigger minor rock falls and flooding capable of localized damage, especially in steep terrain. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Hanford has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... Northeastern Fresno County in central California... * Until 600 PM PDT. * At 414 PM PDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 2 inches of rain have fallen. The expected rainfall rate is 0.5 to 1 inch in 1 hour. Additional rainfall amounts of 1 to 2 inches are possible in the warned area. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Upper Burnt Corral, Florence Lake, High Sierra, West Woodchuck Meadow, Lake Thomas Edison, Kaiser Point and Blackcap Basin. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Flooding is occurring or is imminent. It is important to know where you are relative to streams, rivers, or creeks which can become killers in heavy rains. Campers and hikers should avoid streams or creeks. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO ALBANY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Albany NY 332 PM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 8 PM EDT THIS EVENING... ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TO 8 PM EDT FRIDAY... * WHAT...Heat index values in the mid 90s to lower 100s expected both today and Friday afternoon. * WHERE...In Connecticut, Litchfield County. In New York, Dutchess and eastern Ulster counties. In Massachusetts, southern Berkshire County. * WHEN...11 AM to 8 PM EDT Thursday and noon to 8 PM EDT Friday. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO BOSTON Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Friday, August 5, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Boston/Norton MA 254 AM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 8 PM EDT FRIDAY... * WHAT...Heat index values up to 101 expected. * WHERE...Portions of northern Connecticut, central, eastern, northeastern, southeastern and western Massachusetts and northern and southern Rhode Island. * WHEN...From 11 AM this morning to 8 PM EDT Friday. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO ALBANY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Albany NY 448 AM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 8 PM EDT THIS EVENING... ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TO 8 PM EDT FRIDAY... * WHAT...Heat index values in the mid 90s to lower 100s expected both Thursday and Friday afternoon. * WHERE...In Connecticut, Litchfield County. In New York, Dutchess and eastern Ulster counties. * WHEN...11 AM to 8 PM EDT Thursday and noon to 8 PM EDT Friday. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. * WHAT...Heat index values in the upper 90s to lower 100s expected. * WHERE...The Mohawk and Hudson River Valleys and central Taconics in eastern New York and the Connecticut River Valley in southern Vermont. * WHEN...From 11 AM to 8 PM EDT Thursday. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO ALBANY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT Special Weather Statement National Weather Service Albany NY 448 PM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...A strong thunderstorm will impact portions of southern Herkimer and northwestern Montgomery Counties through 515 PM EDT... At 448 PM EDT, Doppler radar was tracking a strong thunderstorm over Cedarville, or 7 miles southwest of Ilion, moving northeast at 25 mph. HAZARD...Wind gusts up to 50 mph and half inch hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Gusty winds could knock down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. Minor damage to outdoor objects is possible. Locations impacted include... Ilion, Herkimer, Little Falls, Mohawk, Dolgeville, West Winfield, Jordanville, Cedarville, Elizabethtown, Warren, Ingham Mills, Jersalem Hill, Spinnerville, Cedar Lake, North Ilion, South Columbia, Rasbach Corner, South Ilion, Kelhi Corners and Davys Corners. This includes Interstate 90 between exits 29A and 30. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... If outdoors, consider seeking shelter inside a building. LAT...LON 4299 7521 4313 7474 4285 7471 4290 7488 4284 7489 4283 7490 4283 7492 4291 7510 4286 7514 4286 7520 TIME...MOT...LOC 2048Z 246DEG 23KT 4291 7511 MAX HAIL SIZE...0.50 IN MAX WIND GUST...50 MPH The National Weather Service in Albany has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... East Central Albany County in east central New York... * Until 800 PM EDT. * At 449 PM EDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 3 inches of rain have fallen with additional heavy rain continuing for at least the next hour. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Albany, Delmar, Slingerlands, Elsmere and Normansville. Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Be aware of your surroundings and do not drive on flooded roads. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO ALBANY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ FLASH FLOOD WARNING The National Weather Service in Albany has issued a * Flash Flood Warning for... East Central Albany County in east central New York... * Until 845 PM EDT. * At 538 PM EDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 1 and 3 inches of rain have fallen. Flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly with additional heavy rain expected. HAZARD...Flash flooding caused by thunderstorms. SOURCE...Radar. IMPACT...Flash flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other poor drainage and low-lying areas. * Some locations that will experience flash flooding include... Albany, Rensselaer, Menands, Bleecker Stadium and Kenwood. This includes the following streams and drainages... Normans Kill and Hudson River. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Be aware of your surroundings and do not drive on flooded roads. Stay away or be swept away. River banks and culverts can become unstable and unsafe. ...THE SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR SOUTHERN WASHINGTON COUNTY IS CANCELLED... The severe thunderstorm which prompted the warning has moved out of the warned area. Therefore, the warning has been cancelled. Northeastern Rensselaer County in east central New York... * Until 745 PM EDT. * At 539 PM EDT, Doppler radar indicated thunderstorms producing heavy rain across the warned area. Between 2 and 3 inches of rain shortly. Hoosick Falls, Hoosick, Walloomsac, East Hoosick, North Hoosick and Hoosick Junction. ...THE SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR EASTERN SCHOHARIE AND SOUTHEASTERN MONTGOMERY COUNTIES IS CANCELLED... ...A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 600 PM EDT FOR CENTRAL SCHENECTADY AND CENTRAL ALBANY COUNTIES... At 539 PM EDT, a severe thunderstorm was located over Altamont, or near Rotterdam, moving northeast at 25 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and penny size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Expect damage to roofs, siding, and trees. Locations impacted include... Schenectady, Rotterdam, Scotia, Guilderland, Duanesburg, Voorheesville, Altamont, Rotterdam Junction, Pattersonville-Rotterdam Junction, New Scotland, Knox, Princetown, Clarksville, Duane, East Berne, Harding Crossing, Gifford, Schonowe, Bramans Corners and Helderberg. For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO BUFFALO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Buffalo NY 420 AM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 8 PM EDT THIS EVENING... * WHAT...Heat index values in the mid to upper 90s expected. * WHERE...Wayne and Northern Cayuga counties. * WHEN...From 11 AM this morning to 8 PM EDT this evening. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 8 PM EDT FRIDAY... * WHAT...Heat index 95 to 104 expected. * WHERE...New York (Manhattan), Bronx, Southern Queens, Richmond (Staten Island), Kings (Brooklyn) and Northern Queens Counties. * WHEN...From 11 AM this morning to 8 PM EDT Friday. New York City residents should call 3 1 1 to obtain 'Beat the Heat' safety tips. A Heat Advisory is issued when the combination of heat and humidity is expected to make it feel like it is 95 to 99 degrees for two or more consecutive days, or 100 to 104 degrees for any length of time. Seniors and those with chronic health problems or mental health conditions are at an increased risk. Homes without air conditioning can be much hotter than outdoor temperatures. Use air conditioning to stay cool at home or go to a place that has air conditioning. Check on vulnerable friends, family members and neighbors. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! In cases of heat stroke call 9 1 1. * WHAT...Heat index values 95 to 104 expected. * WHERE...Portions of northeast New Jersey, southern Connecticut and southeast New York. * WHAT...Heat index values 95 to 100 expected. * WHERE...In Connecticut, Southern Middlesex, Southern Fairfield, Southern New London and Southern New Haven Counties. In New York, Southeast Suffolk, Southwest Suffolk, Southern Nassau, Northeast Suffolk, Northern Nassau and Northwest Suffolk Counties. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO BUFFALO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Buffalo NY 402 PM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY IS CANCELLED... Clouds and showers have allowed temperatures to drop this afternoon, ending the risk of high heat index. The National Weather Service in Albany has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Schoharie County in east central New York... South central Montgomery County in eastern New York... * Until 500 PM EDT. * At 405 PM EDT, a severe thunderstorm was located near Jefferson, or 14 miles southwest of Cobleskill, moving east at 30 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and penny size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Expect damage to roofs, siding, and trees. * Locations impacted include... Cobleskill, Jefferson, Middleburgh, Summit, Schoharie, Richmondville, Sharon Springs, Livingstonville, North Blenheim, Breakabeen, Central Bridge, Carlisle, Sharon, Seward, Zeh Corners, Beekman Corners, West Richmondville, Baird Corners, Rockwell Corners and Warnerville. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Please report hail size...damaging winds and reports of trees down to the National Weather Service by email at Alb.Stormreport@noaa.gov... On Facebook at www.facebook.com/nwsalbany or twitter @nwsalbany _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO BURLINGTON Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Burlington VT 317 AM EDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TODAY TO 7 PM EDT THIS EVENING... * WHAT...Heat index values up to 100 expected. * WHERE...In New York, Eastern Clinton and Eastern Essex Counties. In Vermont, Grand Isle, Western Franklin, Western Chittenden, Western Addison, Western Rutland and Eastern Windsor Counties. * WHEN...From noon to 7 PM EDT today. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 8 PM EDT THIS EVENING... * WHAT...Heat index values between 95 to 100 degrees expected. * WHERE...Seneca, Southern Cayuga, Onondaga, Schuyler, Chemung, Tompkins, Madison, Southern Oneida, Tioga, Broome and Sullivan counties. * WHEN...From 11 AM this morning to 8 PM EDT this evening. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS...The highest heat index values will be in the lower elevations and urban areas. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO AMARILLO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING The National Weather Service in Amarillo has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Northwestern Armstrong County in the Panhandle of Texas... Carson County in the Panhandle of Texas... Southeastern Potter County in the Panhandle of Texas... * Until 500 PM CDT. * At 355 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 9 miles west of Panhandle, moving east at 15 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and half dollar size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Minor damage to roofs, siding, and trees is possible. Hail damage to vehicles is expected. * Locations impacted include... Amarillo, Panhandle, Claude, White Deer, Washburn and Pantex. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO AMARILLO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING Severe Weather Statement National Weather Service Amarillo TX 419 PM CDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 500 PM CDT FOR NORTHWESTERN ARMSTRONG...CARSON AND SOUTHEASTERN POTTER COUNTIES... At 418 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 7 miles northwest of Panhandle, moving east at 10 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and penny size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Minor damage to roofs, siding, and trees is possible. Locations impacted include... Amarillo, Panhandle, Claude, White Deer, Washburn and Pantex. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Torrential rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. The National Weather Service in Lubbock Texas has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Northwestern Swisher County in the Panhandle of Texas... * Until 500 PM CDT. * At 419 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 5 miles northwest of Tulia, and is nearly stationary. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Hail damage to vehicles is expected. Expect wind damage to roofs, siding, and trees. * Locations impacted include... Tulia. Very heavy rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to ...HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL 8 PM CDT THIS EVENING... * WHAT...Heat index values up to 113. * WHERE...Jim Wells, Inland Kleberg, Inland Nueces, Coastal Kleberg and Coastal Nueces Counties. * WHEN...Until 8 PM CDT this evening. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO AUSTIN/SAN ANTONIO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio TX 217 AM CDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 8 PM CDT THIS EVENING... * WHAT...Air temperature 102 to 105 and heat index values up to 111 expected. * WHERE...Portions of south central Texas. * WHEN...Until 8 PM CDT today. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high heat index values may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. ...HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM NOON TODAY TO 8 PM CDT THIS EVENING... * WHAT...Maximum temperatures of around 103 degrees. * WHERE...Houston, Trinity, Madison, Walker, Burleson, Brazos, Washington and Grimes Counties. * WHEN...From noon today to 8 PM CDT this evening. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO DALLAS / FT. WORTH Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Fort Worth TX 616 PM CDT Wed Aug 3 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 8 PM CDT THURSDAY... * WHAT...Temperatures between 103 and 106 and heat index values up to 108 expected. * WHERE...All of North & Central Texas. * WHEN...From noon Wednesday to 8 PM CDT Thursday. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity will increase the risk for heat-related illnesses to occur, particularly for those working or participating in outdoor activities. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO EL PASO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING The National Weather Service in El Paso has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Central Hudspeth County in western Texas... * Until 530 PM MDT. * At 450 PM MDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 4 miles southwest of Sierra Blanca, moving west at 10 mph. HAZARD...Quarter size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Damage to vehicles is expected. * Locations impacted include... Sierra Blanca and Quitman Canyon. This includes Interstate 10 in Texas near mile marker 107. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. ...A thunderstorm along I-45 inside the South Loop is producing short periods of heavy rain and may be able to produce briefly gusty outflow winds spreading across the Houston core... At 548 PM CDT, Doppler radar was tracking a thunderstorm over Greater Eastwood, moving west at 10 mph. HAZARD...Winds to around 30 mph. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Gusty winds could knock down tree limbs and blow around unsecured objects. Locations impacted include... Western Pasadena, South Houston, West University Place, Galena Park, Midtown Houston, Downtown Houston, Greenway / Upper Kirby Area, Second Ward, Greater Heights, Neartown / Montrose, Greater Eastwood, Near Northside Houston, Greater Fifth Ward, Memorial Park, Greater Third Ward, Fourth Ward, University Place, Astrodome Area, Macgregor and Afton Oaks / River Oaks Area. If outdoors, consider seeking shelter inside a building. LAT...LON 2985 9530 2965 9521 2961 9539 2982 9547 TIME...MOT...LOC 2248Z 072DEG 11KT 2973 9534 MAX HAIL SIZE...0.00 IN MAX WIND GUST...30 MPH _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO LUBBOCK Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING Severe Weather Statement National Weather Service Lubbock TX 438 PM CDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 500 PM CDT FOR NORTHWESTERN SWISHER COUNTY... At 437 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 5 miles northwest of Tulia, and is nearly stationary. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Expect damage to roofs, siding, and trees. Locations impacted include... Tulia. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Very heavy rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. The National Weather Service in Amarillo has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Western Armstrong County in the Panhandle of Texas... Eastern Randall County in the Panhandle of Texas... * Until 515 PM CDT. * At 438 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 9 miles southwest of Claude, moving south at 20 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and nickel size hail. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Minor damage to roofs, siding, and trees is possible. * Locations impacted include... Claude, Wayside and Palo Duro Canyon. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO LUBBOCK Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING The National Weather Service in Lubbock Texas has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Warning for... Northeastern Castro County in the Panhandle of Texas... Northwestern Hall County in the Panhandle of Texas... Northern Swisher County in the Panhandle of Texas... Briscoe County in the Panhandle of Texas... * Until 545 PM CDT. * At 458 PM CDT, severe thunderstorms were located along a line extending from 8 miles north of Caprock Canyon State Park to 5 miles west of Vigo Park to 11 miles southwest of Happy, moving north at 15 mph. HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts. SOURCE...Radar indicated. IMPACT...Expect damage to roofs, siding, and trees. * Locations impacted include... Tulia, Silverton, Caprock Canyon State Park, Happy, Vigo Park, Mackenzie Reservoir and Nazareth. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building. Heavy rainfall is occurring with these storms, and may lead to flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather WFO PORTLAND Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Monday, August 8, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Portland OR 219 PM PDT Thu Aug 4 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM NOON SUNDAY TO 8 PM PDT MONDAY... * WHAT...High temperatures 97F to 102. Low temperatures 60F to 70F * WHERE...In Oregon, Greater Portland Metro Area, Upper Hood River Valley, Western Columbia River Gorge and Central Columbia River Gorge. In Washington, Greater Vancouver Area, Western Columbia River Gorge and Central Columbia River Gorge. * WHEN...From noon Sunday to 8 PM PDT Monday. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE "Typical summer weather" is in the forecast for San Francisco Friday through Sunday, when the annual Outside Lands festival will take over Golden Gate Park with musical acts, ranging from Green Day to Post Malone, performing on outdoor stages. This means morning and evening fog with afternoon clearing is likely all three days, the National Weather Service said. Yes, you can count on some afternoon sun breaking through the trees and allowing you to take off your jacket and show off your cute outfit. Page Content The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a shift in workplace culture, forcing organizations to embrace digital transformation and adapt to new ways of working, in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Such advancements necessitate changes to the skill sets required from the workforce and the way in which firms provide their products and services to clients. Several companies identified that the younger minds in organizations continually faced and embraced the challenges of the digital era with zeal and, in an effort to harness this resilient and innovative thinking, they introduced the concept of a "shadow board." What Is a Shadow Board? A shadow board is an association of younger nonexecutive employees who engage with senior executives and management on strategic initiatives. The purpose of a shadow board is to engage with and leverage the acumen of the younger minds to modify and diversify the insights and the panorama of the senior executives in the workplace. The Success of Shadow Boards The positive impact of shadow boards had been evident prior to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent Harvard Business Review study revealed that organizations that adopted a shadow board prior to the COVID-19 pandemic were able to respond to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their operations and the acceleration of digital transformation within the workplace. Gucci, a fashion conglomerate, established its shadow board in 2015 that consisted primarily of younger employees who were devoted to address strategic oversights and provide a fresh perspective on sales strategies and products. By virtue of the shadow board's insight, Gucci embraced Internet and digital strategies, with the result that sales at Gucci skyrocketed by 136 percent in 2018 from 2014. Also in 2018, professional services firm, KPMG, implemented a shadow board consisting of millennial employees, known as their Millennial Board, which evolved to the Next Generation Council. KPMG reported that the creation of the council resulted in a robust decision-making process, where traditional norms and views were challenged. KPMG adopted an active approach in that the council was a dynamic party in contributing strategic initiatives, providing recommendations and solutions to the executive board in actual matters relating to the organization. Members of the council also benefited personally through the increased visibility, which boosted their career opportunities within the organization. Implementation of a Shadow Board In South Africa, there is no prescribed manner that organizations are required to follow for the establishment of a shadow board. Organizations can adapt the models used in other jurisdictions and organizations, with reference to the organizational dynamics and the culture of the organization. It is recommended that organizations that wish to establish a shadow board should seek the sponsorship of the CEO or executive committee, in order for the shadow board to be impactful and provide meaningful input. A terms of reference should be drawn up to govern the structure, purpose, mandate and the role of the shadow board within the operations of the company. To the extent that a company sets up a shadow board, the directors of the company should pass appropriate resolutions to establish the requisite shadow board, and to the extent that such members of the shadow board are delegated certain power and authorities, the resolution or power of authority should delegate the authority to the shadow board. Additionally, the scope of power and authority delegated to the shadow board, if any, by the executive management should be governed in the terms of reference. Nonetheless, this delegation of power does not absolve the board of directors from ultimate responsibility. To ensure that the shadow board is able to fulfill its purpose effectively, members should be selected from a diverse group of professionals from different demographics, organizational levels, functions, cultures and skill sets. This can be included in a company's transformation policy or nomination policy. An open application process is recommended as this will result in increased worker engagement. The process to be followed for the incorporation of a shadow board will depend on the culture within the organization. Nonetheless, nominations can be invited from the executive management for members of the shadow board, to ensure that the executive management is involved in the election and nomination of certain members of the shadow board. The experience and skills required should be stated on the invitation for nominations or the open application process. Companies wishing to establish a shadow board may seek guidance from the provisions of the Companies Act in relation to the structure, eligibility, procedure of nominations or open applications, and governance of the shadow board. Members should contribute during the decision-making process but submit proposals or recommendations on matters to the executives and management for review and ultimate approval. The membership of the shadow board can be on a rotational basis as this seeks to provide as many workers as possible with an opportunity to serve on a shadow board. The overarching sentiment that resulted in the uptake of shadow boards is that a fresh perspective and a more enthused workforce engagement appears to be the elixir for corporates to keep up to date with market changes and competition. Ultimately, the decision to establish a shadow board and the manner of establishment is dependent on the cultural dynamics of a company and the existing management structure in place. Savanna Stephens is an attorney and Pooja Pundit is a candidate attorney with CMS South Africa in Johannesburg. 2022 CMS South Africa. All rights reserved. Reposted with permission of Lexology. A threat of CAATSA sanctions against India has been unproductive and detrimental to American interests. If the U.S. Senate votes on the amendment, it is expected to pass with massive support The US House of Representatives paved the path for the Biden administration to give an India-specific waiver under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), removing a possible obstacle in India-US relations. According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, India can now be exempted from CAATSA sanctions Supporters of the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2023 that requested the waiver for India argued that the goal of CAATSA was to penalize the adversaries of the United States, not its allies. As India confronts "immediate and significant" threats from neighbouring countries, according to Indian-American Democratic congressman from California Ro Khanna, India must preserve its Russian weapons. Threatening India with CAATSA sanctions would have been self-defeating and unhelpful for American interests. The amendment is anticipated to receive resounding approval if it is put to a vote in the U.S. Senate. However, it seems probable that the Biden administration will follow the House of Representatives' example and reestablish ties with India without the need to wait for a Senate vote. Congress didn't consider the possibility of harming India, a crucial partner of the United States in the Indo-Pacific strategy. India and Russia agreed on a USD 5 billion deal in 2018 to buy S-400 surface-to-air missile systems, which are now on their way to India. New Delhi has stated that it is incomprehensible for the United States to prevent India from purchasing a vital weaponry system that is required for India's security, especially given the fact that the United States was slow to extend an offer to India for a comparable missile system. Despite concerns about India's slower than anticipated military modernization and economic progress, India continues to be a key component of U.S. policy. In a poll conducted in 2022 by Gallup, it was found that 77 percent of Americans still have a good opinion of India. In 2021, a similar percentage of 79 percent of Indians viewed the United States favorably. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, sometimes known as the Quad, is a partnership between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. Former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo had anticipated that the Quad would bring together four democracies with comparable interests and values. The four nations' cooperation on key and developing technologies; telecommunications; environmentally friendly shipping methods and corridors; green hydrogen; joint initiatives on sustainable infrastructure and open connectivity; and marine domain awareness have enlarged the Quad's agenda. A Middle East quad, often known as I2U2, is made up of the United States, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and India, in addition to the Quad. A Clean Energy Initiative was unveiled by the four nations, focusing on cooperation in the field of renewable energy. Over the past 15 years, India-US security relations have dramatically expanded. Over the past ten years, India has imported USD 21 billion worth of military hardware from the United States, but in 2008, these purchases were essentially nonexistent. Four fundamental agreements that link close American military friends and partners have been signed by India. India was classified as a "major defense partner" in 2016 and holds the majority of its military drills with the US. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! The world, apparently, has a new financial giant. AMTD Digital, a Hong Kong-based company that listed in New York less than three weeks ago, has surged so much that the combined market value of its Class A and Class B shares hit more than $US310 billion ($446 billion) this week. That means the firm which develops digital businesses, including financial services is worth more than Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, despite reporting just $US25 million in revenue for the year ended April 2021. At least on paper, that makes it the third-biggest financial company in the world, trailing just investment banking giant JPMorgan and billionaire Warren Buffetts company Berkshire Hathaway. The world, apparently, has a new financial giant, surpassing Wall Street giants in market value. But it may be short-lived. Credit:AP Photo/Mark Lennihan While those firms have a long list of shareholders, AMTD Digital has a convoluted ownership structure that ultimately leads to one key name: Calvin Choi, an ex-UBS banker, whos currently fighting an industry ban in Hong Kong for failing to disclose conflicts of interest. How does what you do at Chainalysis differ from your previous role in intelligence? Its very different. Theres the reactionary side, but then theres also the proactive work that we enabled through having increased visibility of the crypto space. Because the blockchain is public, its live, and we do real-time monitoring of it thats a game changer for organisations. If you look at the ANZ stablecoin transfer, for instance, people were really excited by the fact that they could move $30 million in 30 minutes. But if you flip it on its head and say, well, someone stole money and moved $30 million in 30 minutes thats just crazy. Its those sorts of situations where you need to have that active investigation. Bitcoin and other digital assets are often viewed as a haven for criminals. Credit:Bloomberg Considering how close you are to the criminal side of crypto, do you think the broader concerns about scams and crime in the space are justified? Or is it a bit overblown? Its definitely overblown. The key piece of crypto is transparency the fact that we can show you, on-chain, the crime and illicit activity we see, no one can do that with fiat currency, its not possible. We dont know how much cash Pablo Escobar had hidden and how much the rats have eaten. In crypto, the rats are like Tornado Cash or CryptoMixer. They take that little piece out of it, but we can still see where those funds are. This confidence in the security and transparency of crypto is shown through the increase in institutional organisations coming to play in this space, theyre not investing for no reason. Theyve been looking at this for a long time because the fundamental technology can be a huge enabler for them. With something like TornadoCash or Monero, how hard to track are they really? Do they make it much harder for law enforcement? While privacy coins have been used by some illicit actors including ransomware groups in an attempt to obfuscate their transactions, they havent been adopted to the extent that one may expect. One reason is that privacy coins arent as liquid as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Especially now that many exchanges have delisted privacy coins given regulatory guidance, theyre becoming increasingly impractical. Cryptocurrency is only useful if you can buy and sell goods and services or cash out into fiat, and that is much more difficult with privacy coins. Whats your view personally on all the broader aspects of Web3, like NFTs, DeFi etc? I think the underlying technology is extremely important, and I think people are having amazing ideas on how theyre trying to solve real-world problems. Traditional cryptocurrencies there are thousands of them and they dont all serve a purpose, they dont solve a problem. But if you look at things like NFTs, theyre a fantastic concept. The smart contract components and what they can be applied to is remarkable technology, things like proving where your wine came from, and mitigating counterfeiting. Provenance is a way NFTs can be utilised across the globe. DeFi is just a new way to do markets. People are not always happy with the standard offering that theyve got from the banking sector, so why not build something else? Obviously, it isnt for everyone and doing your due diligence is key for anyone investing in any market. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Four months after Februarys record-breaking floods, the crisis is far from over for artists, performers and musicians of the inundated river settlements in northern NSW. Yes, there are signs of rebuilding and recovery. Lismore put on its annual lantern parade, its first major festival since the natural disaster: a smaller, simpler event with lanterns shaped like tinnies, to honour those who took to the raging floodwaters and saved so many. At Byron School of Art in Mullumbimby classes have resumed; at M-Art, Murwillumbahs art precinct, rebuilding got underway as soon as the metre-high sludge tide receded; and Lismores artist collective, Elevator ARI, has opened with a restricted exhibition program. Eavesdropping in the Dragonfly Cafe in Lismore, the epicentre of the natural disaster where tradesmens utes outnumber local vehicles, the creator of ABCs dirtgirlworld, Cate McQuillen, has been heartened to hear fresh talk of art-making. Its been so wonderful to hear, she says. But parts of the Lismore area are still without power. People have been scattered to lounges, spare rooms, tents, and caravans. Affordable accommodation and cheap studio space, already in short supply before the floods, are diabolical to find. Anxiety remains high among those rebuilding artistic practices that the floods will come again. And funding support is not reaching everyone. Now comes news that only 60 percent of the submerged 1400 works in the permanent collection of the Lismore Regional Art Gallery are recoverable. These include editions of fine art photographs - comprising almost one fifth of the collection - that were lost but can be reprinted. The gallerys most valuable object, the Hannah Cabinet, is undergoing treatment before being returned to its maker for restoration to exhibition standards. It will be at least until early 2024 before the council-owned gallery reopens. Last week 200 representatives from visual arts, screen, musicians and performers came together for the Creative Industries Recovery Forum to map the sectors recovery and discuss ways to future-proof themselves from repeat calamities. Advertisement Its a place creatives have never been in before, says organiser Jane Fuller, executive director of the peak representative body, Art Northern Rivers. Weve gone from thriving arts and culture industries operating from bricks and mortar buildings to galleries without walls and venues without stages. At that forum, NSW arts minister Ben Franklin announced $12 million would be directed to flood impacted regions in coming days to fund the urgent repairs to theatres, music venues, museums, art centres and other cultural organisations. Im proud to call this region my home and many of the artists and creative practitioners are my friends. Ill walk with them on the recovery journey for as long as it takes, Franklin said. Manager of Silver Cloud Studios, Robyn Staines in her studio after floodwaters receded. Credit:Natalie Grono The biblical deluge that drowned Lismore hit an area boasting the highest concentration of musicians, artists, dancers and filmmakers outside of Sydney. The arrival of creatives to these bucolic parts first gathered pace in the 1980s and drew like-minded creatives to a self-sustaining and vibrant circuit of homegrown festivals, art, and music-making that spread beyond the artist bolt-holes of Byron and Mullumbimby. In Lismore, emerging artists and students from Southern Cross University settled on its south side: flood plain country vulnerable to flooding but cheap enough to sustain a precarious living in the arts. When stained-glass artist Simon Falomir arrived from Sydney 20 years ago he discovered a tight-knit artistic community well-practiced in staged retreats from the Wilsons River. Not this time. Weve been through many, many floods but this was something else, he says. Advertisement Falomir in the rubble of what was his space at Silver Cloud Studios. Credit:Natalie Grono Falomir rented a studio in the old chocolate factory and as rain bucketed down over three days he and fellow resident artists moved art supplies, tools, and works to the buildings second floor. Upstairs, Silver Cloud Studios manager Robyn Staines thought her kiln, press, ceramic ware, etchings, inks and paintings, some framed for forthcoming exhibition at the Lismore Regional Art Gallery, would be safe from inundation. After midnight, with water lapping the table on which Staines stood, she and her 10-year-old son followed Falomir onto a precarious ladder propped between the factorys upper verandah and the roof of a neighbouring home. From their rooftop position, Falomir watched helplessly as his brick studio was partially swept away, along with his personal belongings and thousands and thousands of dollars of antique glass and porcelain mold-making equipment. Falomir, whose clear thinking Staines credits for helping to save her life, now sleeps in a half-made caravan under a teepee on a bush block outside Nimbin. Like many solo artists, Falomir did not have a traditional business set up and was knocked back on a Create NSW grant to help build a studio on his own land. Staines has received some support but has not been able to find herself a replacement studio. McQuillen is likewise grateful for the $18,000 grant she received from the governments arts agency, Create NSW, which has directed $700,000 in money and in-kind support to institutions and creatives in the region. The grant money doesnt touch the sides, but it keeps us moving, McQuillen says. She lost valuable live recording equipment, props, and merchandise when her rehearsal and recording studio in the Richmond Valley flooded to shoulder height on that fateful night. Advertisement Weve gone from thriving arts and culture industries operating from bricks and mortar buildings to galleries without walls and venues without stages. Jane Fuller, Art Northern Rivers Members of her production team were trapped by the rising waters for 18 days and had to be helicoptered out. McQuillen has decided not to rebuild. Production will resume at her home on higher land after September, but as the muck of Splendour in the Grass highlighted, the ground is still too waterlogged to bring in vehicles and heavy equipment. With bushfires and COVID, I feel like we have been in recovery mode for three years now, McQuillen says. The good news - which is also the bad news when you are an artist - is that you have a driving urge to tell stories, and how sad would it be if the northern rivers was not the beautiful place for arts to happen? The story Im driven to tell is our relationship to nature and, yet, here I am, sitting in a part of the world hardest hit by the climate shift. Loading Art Northern Rivers estimates flood damage to cultural organisations including the Lismore Regional Art Gallery and Byron School of Art to be around $5 million. Independent artists lost more than $4.5 million in equipment, studios, and artworks. The breadth of the loss is very layered, Fuller says. Its embryonic work right up to work ready to be sold, or ready to be played or ready to be exhibited. Abstract artist Michael Cusack runs the Byron School of Art with a small group of artists in a rented industrial workspace in downtown Mullumbimby that at peak flood was knee-deep in fast-flowing water. Cusack has resumed student classes and started over on his September show for the Olsen Gallery, Paddington, one-third complete before the floods struck. Cusacks new work is weightier. Without being too grandiose about it, you cant go through something like this without feeling something, obviously. Advertisement Artist Michael Cusack at The Byron School of Art in Mullumbimby. Credit:Natalie Grono Seven of Cusacks paintings were in the permanent collection of the Lismore Regional Art Gallery and showed his maturation as an artist. To put it in perspective, while my work is important, it is insignificant when one thinks of all that have lost their homes and somewhere to live. The community comes first, Cusack says. Visual artist Claudie Frock relinquished her lease on the Arch Studio Gallery after the flood destroyed hanging racks and lighting and has joined Outpost Studio on higher ground. She counts herself lucky to be able to fall back on a permanent position as a community engagement officer with the Lismore Regional Gallery, running collage workshops at the Thursday produce markets. Artist Claudie Frock surrendered her art gallery lease. Credit:Natalie Grono It still feels very overwhelming when you go into town and lots of things are broken and theres still piles of rubbish, she says. Even if your homes are not gone, venues are gone to show work, the regional gallery is not functioning as an exhibition space, the art supply shops are not functioning. At the Northern Rivers Conservatorium, 250 students have returned to refurbished teaching studios, the remaining 350 students to stay at Southern Cross University until ground-floor classrooms can be reopened. The 1902 heritage building took in almost 4.5 metres of water causing $1.4 million in damage, of which the conservatorium still needs to find $400,000, likely to be met by the arts ministers new funding commitment. Its a really important part of the communitys identity - not just the parents, teachers, and students - that we are back in, and you can hear music coming from the building in the afternoon, says executive director, Anita Bellman. Advertisement Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Journalism 101: dont become the news. Dont let your personal life bleed into your reporting, and god forbid you ever find yourself in the crosshairs of an angry online mob. But staying out of the picture is harder when youre a TV journalist, and exponentially more so when youre a woman. Add social media trolls to the mix and you have a toxic cocktail that can and has driven journalists to the brink. Anna K is the latest play by Suzie Miller, and like her international hit Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Comer on the West End, its an unflinching portrait of a tough woman under outrageous pressure. Anna is a household name: a top-rating TV journalist known for her hard-hitting interviews. When her love life becomes the subject of a news scandal, she finds the world turning on her from all sides. Playwright Suzie Miller, left, and Caroline Craig deplore the toxic culture of public shaming. Credit:Eddie Jim Miller is one of Australias most successful and prolific playwrights, so its perhaps not surprising that shes been on the receiving end of public criticism. One of her earlier plays focused on a character who had killed a child when they were young and explored the potential for such a persons rehabilitation as an adult. Then the shock jocks came at her. I was probably too new to the world of talkback radio to know how dreadful it was, she says. I was constantly told that this was an appalling suggestion, that anyone could possibly be rehabilitated after theyd done something so evil. It was harrowing. I really stayed off social media and I kept to myself. Caroline Craig and Callan Colley during rehearsals for Anna K. Credit:Tamarah Scott Caroline Craig, who plays Anna K, has had her own run-ins with the media. I naively took a few photos when I was pregnant, bad photos in a mirror thinking Id share it with Mum and my friends. After posting these to Facebook, she received a message from her brother: Theres photos of you pregnant in a mirror, you look really bad, on the Daily Mail website. I was like, oh my god I dont want them to own photos of me and my kids. Thats off. Advertisement Like Anna, Craig has also seen first-hand the way that the immediacy of TV can create an illusion of intimacy and personal connection among fans. When she took over from Lisa McCune as a lead in Blue Heelers, people hated my character. They hated me. I was at the supermarket and this old lady hit me with a bag of frozen peas and said: You killed Maggie Doyle! Caroline Craig in Blue Heelers: an elderly fan of the show hit her with frozen peas, accusing her of killing Maggie Doyle. Craig says that compared to her latest role, her experience of celebrity has been relatively minor. But I didnt enjoy it at all. My uni friends were always like you love it, but Id be having a fight with my boyfriend, being dumped by the side of the road, Ill have had a car crash, and people would be like: Can you do a photo with my sister? Suzie Millers Anna K was partly inspired by the experiences of her friends Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales . Credit:Louie Douvis Miller is friends with several journalists, including Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb. She was partly inspired to write Anna K having watched people go through Twitter storms and the level of hate they get. Its terrifying to me. She began to think about public shaming: how it serves to silence and punish individuals who refuse to conform, and acts as a warning to others. Her research took her from Jon Ronsons bestseller So Youve Been Publicly Shamed all the way back to Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter. It struck her that not all shaming is the same. The shaming of women takes on different accents to the shaming of men; so too does the belittlement or humiliation of people of colour, of different classes or sexualities. Eventually her reading led her back to Anna Karenina, how she was shamed out of her mind. Advertisement In Tolstoys classic, the titular young woman leaves her husband and son to take up a new life with her young lover, but the rebuke she faces from all corners of society escalates to a fatal level. Anna K isnt an adaptation of Tolstoy. Theres a family resemblance, but Millers play is both a riff on and a riposte to the novel. [Tolstoys] Anna was very much the warning that if you have a passionate nature and you act outside the conformed values youre dead, basically. You cant exist. But I wanted to find a way that my Anna could exist, says Miller. Loading To prepare for the role, Craig has explored the experiences of other women whove had to weather online maelstroms. Its really damaging. Its been fascinating doing research about what has happened to people like Leigh Sales or someone like Clementine Ford. Its horrific. The way that such hatred takes on gendered aspects cant be ignored, says Miller. Ive spoken to some journalists who had really never had mental health crises in their life, who really went under when they had this hate mail and very sexually violent messages sent their way It had an effect where they started to take seriously the sort of options that were put to them by the trolls and the haters online. The thing about the internet, says Craig, is that you think its wonderful, its a great opportunity for diversity, for everyone to have an opinion, and all these voices to be equally heard. But really its just amplifying a lot of the really patriarchal, oppressive shit that we have to live with. Advertisement Anna K isnt a morality play, but its a deeply ethical one. It doesnt ask us to judge its central figure but of course we do, because weve been raised in the same culture as the people who find her so objectionable. Its hard not to become self-conscious in that moment, however, and wonder how different we are to the trolls and haters ourselves. Millers script is also much more sophisticated than a tale of right and wrong Anna is too real to be angelic, and there are moments when you might wonder if her detractors sort of have a point. She might just want to live according to her own terms, but does power bring with it a certain level of responsibility to others? Loading I know women who would go, well, once youve got a platform its not just about you any more, says Miller. Its about maintaining an authenticity to the people youre speaking to, and you make sure you dont get cancelled, because that platform shows women they can be up there. However, the play never falls back on easy solutions. Its relationship to moral arguments it presents is as slippery as its relationship to the story from which it takes its name respectful, but wary. Maybe Tolstoy was making a comment about the social system, says Miller, but the comment still meant that Anna Karenina went crazy and put herself under a train. Its almost like a warning to women. I didnt want my play to be a warning, I wanted it to be a call to action. Anna K is at the Malthouse Theatre, August 12 - September 4. The NT Live film version of Prima Facie, starring Jodie Comer, is screening at Cinema Nova. Another essential addition would surely be the Sound of Music classic So Long, Farewell. David Boyd, Bondi Beach Weathering a perfect storm of financial pressures Labor is facing a perfect storm when it comes to implementing all its economic promises (Bandt is a bounder: Keating fires up in climate wars as Greens back Albanese bill, August 4). Many OECD countries are now facing staggering debt in the aftermath of the pandemic. The war in Ukraine has compounded the problem, resulting in record price rises for food, oil and gas. Australias financial situation is no exception. To make matters worse, we have been left severely handicapped by nine years of little or no investment in the infrastructure that is badly needed to modernise Australias crumbling power network and transmit renewable power from the areas where it is generated. This adds an extra burden to the enormous amount that our federal government needs to invest in cheap renewable power. At a time of unprecedented financial constraints, how do the Greens think we can realistically budget for a 75 per cent reduction in emissions? Bruce Spence, Balmain Paul Keatings attack on the Greens makes no mention of one awkward fact. Labors emissions policy would have more credibility if the ALP did not receive substantial donations from the fossil fuel industries. Until we have bans on political donations from oil, gas and coal companies (or better still, all companies) it is hard to believe that any political party really acts in the national interest, especially when they approve new fossil fuel projects. The Greens have banned all such donations for years. George Rosier, Carlingford It seems incongruous that on the same day as the Australian Defence Force review is announced, the Labor government has snubbed the Greens request to halt new coal and gas developments. Given that recent diplomacy has brought Pacific Islands on side, it can only be viewed by them as inconsistent, while new mines continue to be approved. Strategically, the future challenges of the ADF may well be exacerbated, as the differentiation between Australias and other countries perceived carbon emissions reductions are blurred, and nations are tempted by funding bounteousness. Roger Epps, Armidale Watching the conduct of the Coalition and the Greens on passing Labors very modest 43 per cent carbon reduction target legislation, its a strange state of affairs when the Greens are the voice of reason. Carlo Ursida, Kensington (VIC) Despite Keatings claim to the contrary, his government was indeed an active advocate of privatisation. Under the former PM, business units of the Department of Administrative Services were either sold off or primed for sale, with thousands of public servants rendered jobless. I was one of them. Peter Mahoney, Oatley Focus needed on teacher supply as children struggle Despite the many challenges facing the premier, I hope he will turn his mind to the ongoing emergency in the supply of teachers in this state (Majority of teachers plan to leave profession, August 4). Two years of COVID restrictions saw many children falling behind. Homeschooling simply wasnt possible in families without the resources. There has been a significant rise in the number of children school refusing or struggling with being back at school. There is a higher proportion of children diagnosed with anxiety disorders and neurodiverse conditions. We need a full complement of dedicated teachers to encourage, educate and guide our children. Teachers need better pay, permanent positions, less administration tasks and to be clearly heard by the Department of Education. If 60 per cent of teachers leave the profession in the coming years, our schools will be in an untenable position. Sue Adams, Dulwich Hill Instead of consistently blaming teachers for all of educations ills and attempting to redefine teaching itself, where are the brilliant plans for providing support for teachers so that they can do the best for students? Where has there been a streamlining of admin tasks and record-keeping? Why are teachers not given adequate time for professional development? Why does the minister insist that teachers deserve an effective cut in their salaries? Unless the minister finds a way to understand her own job shell continue to prevent our teachers from doing theirs. Her task is a straightforward one to maximise student learning by giving teachers the support and respect they need. Allow teachers to teach, in other words. Peter Outhwaite, Hawks Nest Planning woes are rife Most would give a sigh of relief on reading your article (Landmark exhibition uncovers the Sydney well never see, August 4). However, it would be foolish to imagine that planning abominations are not still taking place throughout Sydney. The nexus between the state government and developers is alive and well. Its let it rip for developers (equals lucrative profits) and infrastructure money for the state (equals a chance to forever proclaim new initiatives). The state has worked assiduously to amalgamate councils and to set up developer-friendly rules in the form of Local Environment Plans, all for developers and their own gain. The result has been a proliferation of soulless enclaves and mediocrity. Sydney has become a city determined not by how its people want to live in respect of their environment and heritage, but by a hungry horde of developers. David Catchlove, Newport Powerhouse debacle I share the objections of the majority of submissions, and your correspondent, that the current planning DA is the destruction of Ultimos Powerhouse Museum (Letters, August 4). I spent almost two years with others in a now apparent faux consultation process, laughably misnamed a masterplanning dialogue, attempting to advise the government to simply renew the Powerhouse Museum, as then treasurer Dominic Perrottet and arts minister Don Harwin promised the people of NSW on July 4, 2020. After all, it was the peoples love and respect for one of Australias leading museums which saved it from the governments wrecking ball. Instead, a secret DA is revealed to be an abomination costing an eye-watering $500m to smash any semblance of the extraordinary, internationally recognised Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo for 142 years. The Powerhouse Museum can be renewed as promised for half that amount but the government is not listening. Lionel Glendenning, design architect, Powerhouse Museum Silencing the Voice We are now witnessing the tactic which the conservative side of politics is planning as it outlines its opposition to the passing of the Voice referendum (Letters, August 4). George Brandis opened the batting for the Conservatives by outlining the plan: dont oppose the Voice, dont oppose Indigenous Australians, rather claim that the lack of detail from the government will force the opposition to vote against the referendum; and for the conservative press to campaign against the referendum from here on. Rather than be honest and admit this opposition to the referendum is racially motivated and specifically biased against Australian Indigenous communities, the opposing forces are hiding behind this pathetic lack of detail excuse. This approach is at odds with the aspects which the Voice from the Heart is based on: respect, trust and walking together. Warren Marks, Hill Top Pelosi wrong move Nancy Pelosi is big on gestures. She won the hearts of millions of Americans when she expressed her contempt for Donald Trump (Speakers Strait talk adds to mixed signals, August 4). However, her unnecessary visit to Taiwan in defiance of the president smacks of an ego trip and has unnecessarily inflamed our already fragile relations with China. It served no purpose other than to give her a last moment in the spotlight on the world stage before, as she suspects, her role as speaker will most likely end with the midterms in November. Richard Keyes, Enfield No to war at any cost Thank you for your correspondents call to declare Australia neutral in any future conflicts (Letters, August 4). War is never the answer to conflict and leads to immense human suffering that continues through generations. We are still not dealing with the devastating effects of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The billions spent on armaments to destroy life could be used to enhance life in so many ways. Anne Shay, Ballina Sexism reigns I cannot believe the Herald would publish such a sexist letter. It was infuriating that the assumption by banks in the 1970s was that, as I was a young female who would get pregnant and stop work, my generous teaching salary could not be counted in its loan consideration (Letters, August 4). My husband and I had to save for several years longer and settle for a more modest house even though we never intended to have children and were using foolproof contraceptive measures. Cherylle Stone, Soldiers Point Old school ties Greens member for Griffith Max Chandler-Mather was criticised for not wearing a tie in question time. Credit:James Brickwood Some parliamentarians accept the definition of ethical behaviour as the wearing of a tie (No shirt, no service: Question time tied up to their necks over fashion choices, August 4). Apparently misogyny, insults and deceit can all be pulled off by a man who puts a tie around his neck. It is 2022 time for genuine mutual respect, regardless of anachronistic dress conventions. Lorraine Hickey, Green Point Manners maketh the man, not dress. If only the same energy applied to attire was employed to ensure a degree of decorum in the house. Elizabeth Maher, Bangor Will the mind that worries about what male MPs wrap around their necks in question time ever manage to wrap its brain around the big issues of the day? Judith Fleming, Sawtell Sydneys two lowest-income council areas each racked up more than half a billion dollars in losses to poker machines last year, according to research by the Wesley Mission, triggering fresh calls for gambling reforms in NSW. The analysis by the charity also reveals cumulative losses by people who use poker machines in NSW over the past 30 years hit $135 billion. In Victoria, poker machine losses are estimated to be $66 billion since they were introduced there in 1992, less than half the total in NSW over the same period. Last year gross poker machine losses in the Canterbury Bankstown council area were $562 million, more than any other local government in NSW. Next highest was neighbouring Fairfield council with losses of $527 million. Census data released in June shows Fairfield and Canterbury Bankstown had the lowest median household incomes of the 32 local government areas across the Sydney basin. There are almost 5000 poker machines within the Canterbury Bankstown council area and more than 3800 in Fairfield council. Cumberland City Council, which had the third-lowest median household income in Sydney, had the third-highest gross poker machine losses in 2021 at $356 million. Vision of a man and woman buying fast food at a McDonalds drive-through could be the key in solving the investigation into the killing of a western Sydney man, police believe. Granville man Shady Kanj, 22, was shot in Guildford near Parramatta on August 6 last year and died at the scene. No one has been arrested over his death. Shady Kanj was killed in the shooting. Shortly after, the states top homicide squad detective Superintendent Danny Doherty said he could not discount the shooting was the result of gang violence involving the Alameddine organised crime network. Continuing to search for answers, detectives this week canvassed several homes on Miller Street in South Granville, which has been identified as a place of interest. An Australian man charged with terrorism offences allegedly cut off the tracking device he had been ordered to wear and booked a one-way ticket to Saudi Arabia to fly out that night. Omar Saghir, 40, was arrested in July 2021 by Australian Federal Police officers when he landed at Sydney Airport from Saudi Arabia, where he had been since 2019. Omar Saghir could not have got through Brisbane Airports international terminal because he does not have a passport. Credit:Glenn Hunt The AFP alleges Saghir played a senior role in a Brisbane group that held a religiously motivated violent extremist ideology and a desire to travel to Syria to fight. Saghir has also been accused of co-founding an organisation that provided funds to people who later fled Australia to join Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group fighting against Syrian government forces. US ambassador Caroline Kennedys arrival was always going to wow Canberra. The daughter of assassinated president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the inspiration behind Neil Diamonds hit Sweet Caroline, shes the kind of American royalty far too illustrious to be living in the cold capital. But Kennedy by far the highest profile American ambassador weve ever had is a big enough deal that people come to her, and at a meet and greet on Wednesday, business, political and cultural leaders flocked to the embassy for a chance to kiss the ring. All hail the queen. Credit:Shakespeare There was a bipartisan smorgasbord of domestic pollies from the government there was Energy Minister Chris Bowen and assistant foreign affairs minister Tim Watts, and from the Coalition, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, shadow foreign affairs minister Simon Birmingham, and shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie. A few formers too notably ex-foreign minister Julie Bishop (now chancellor of the Australian National University) and recently retired speaker Tony Smith. Lawyers acting for the Catholic Church have argued that legislation passed to close a legal loophole that helped the church avoid liability for sex abuse victims does not apply to the father of a former choirboy whom prosecutors had alleged was sexually abused by George Pell. But Julian Burnside, QC, acting for the father, told Supreme Court Justice Michael McDonald on Thursday that if the court found the legislation did not apply to family members, it would undermine the purpose of the law. Cardinal George Pell was found guilty in 2018 of abusing two teenage choirboys in 1996. Credit:Just McManus. Pell was found guilty in 2018 by a County Court jury of abusing two teenage choirboys in Melbournes St Patricks Cathedral after a Sunday Mass in December 1996. Those convictions were quashed by the High Court in 2020 and Pell was released from prison after more than a year in custody. One of the choirboys died in his 30s in 2014 from an accidental heroin overdose, having never made a complaint against Pell. The deceased mans father, referred to in court under the pseudonym RWQ, lodged a civil case in the Supreme Court last month. Finally, there looks like an end in sight to a long and destructive cycle in the politics of climate change over at least five terms of federal parliament. In its second week, the new House of Representatives has approved a 43 per cent target to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as promised by Labor when it went to the election. The Greens will back the bill when it goes to the Senate. The anxious observers of parliament from environmental groups to business lobbies seem to be airing a sigh of relief. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has delivered on one of his election promises. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen This is not the end of the climate wars. There cannot be an end to the political conflict on climate when the issue remains a source of debate and division in the community. Politics, after all, is about the resolution of conflict, which means conflict is part of the process. But the thunder in the argument has eased. The achievement this week was the decision by a significant majority to ensure their divisions in parliament would not prevent a vote to get something done. For the first time, the national target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is being written into the law. Yes, this was only a limited agreement between Labor, the Greens and most of the crossbench. Yes, the Liberals and Nationals sidelined themselves by voting against a target that is only slightly higher than the 35 per cent cut they claimed they could deliver. Businesses and consumers are bearing the brunt of obsolete tariffs that will cost more to collect than they raise as Australia strikes new free trade deals, a review of the system has found. Productivity Commission research that puts pressure on the federal government to consider axing all remaining tariffs found the broad economic cost of collecting $1 in tariffs is likely to climb from between 57 and $1.59 today to almost $5. The federal government collects about $1.5 billion in tariff revenue a year, or less than 0.3 per cent of its total tax take. Credit:Bloomberg The federal government collects about $1.5 billion in tariff revenue a year, or less than 0.3 per cent of its total tax take. The commission, as part of special research into the assistance provided to businesses released on Friday, found there were growing costs from both policing the tariff system and its impact on the overall economy. Washington/Singapore: The US has accused China of using Nancy Pelosis Taiwan trip as a pretext to create a manufactured crisis in the region, and will continue to station American ships nearby as tensions escalate. Hours after China deployed scores of planes and fired live missiles in the Taiwan Strait in response to the US House Speakers visit, the White House condemned the actions as irresponsible and warned that the US was prepared to respond to what Beijing chooses to do in coming days. A projectile is launched from an unspecified location in China in response to US Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan. Credit:AP We have a robust military capability in the region. We have strong alliances and partnerships in the region. We also have economic throw-weight, we have diplomatic throw-weight. Theres a lot of things that the United States can bring to bear if we feel like we need to, said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. But heres the thing: we shouldnt need to do it, the former Navy admiral added. It shouldnt come to blows. Theres no reason for this manufactured crisis to exist there, but the Chinese have used Speaker Pelosis trip as a pretext to try to up the ante intentionally and actually try to set a new status quo. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The sun starts to fade over the suburban Melbourne skyline as Paween Pongsirin gathers the documents of the case that changed his life forever. Over several hours, the decorated former Thai policeman has explained how he came to live in exile, chased from family and friends for daring to prosecute powerful men. As a police major general, Paween spearheaded Thailands largest human-trafficking prosecution in 2015, arresting nearly 100 suspects and gathering evidence that put the ringleaders away for decades. But five months in, he was transferred off the case, subject to pressure from figures in the military government, police force and the royal palace. Paween Pongsirin has made a new life for himself in Melbourne. Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui He fled in November that year, and six years after being granted asylum in Australia he has overcome fears for his familys safety and is speaking out. His claims have shocked a country reeling from two years of anti-government protests, made for uncomfortable debates in the Thai parliament and come as the military-controlled government faces an election early next year. Those he accuses deny everything, and Paween is disappointed many of those involved remain in positions of power, but he is adamant. He lays out his case with the methodical detail of a 33-year police veteran, and it is only when he is asked how hard it is to be an honest policeman in Thailand that his expression slips. I could look after other people, but I couldnt look after my family, he says, wiping tears. I feel that my family has sacrificed a lot. They let me follow my dream. I wanted to help people. I wanted to be a good policeman. But its been very hard, its been very tough. Nobody understands why I do what Im doing. The more I try, the more enemies I make. Advertisement Trafficking members of Myanmars persecuted Rohingya minority has been lucrative for decades. For the Thai network which profited from their suffering, business flourished between 2004 and 2015, particularly after the 2012 riots in Myanmars Rakhine state displaced hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Rohingya Muslims. The Myanmar military persecuted the Rohingya and also profited by luring them into a multinational trafficking network that offered them refuge elsewhere in South-East Asia and demanded payment at each step. An unknown number of people were smuggled across the Andaman Sea from Myanmar to Malaysia, via camps in Thailand where they would be tortured, deprived of food and extorted for money before being sent south. Many died along the way. The military ran the Thai part of the operation: if the police accidentally intercepted the refugees en route, soldiers would spring them from custody and send them to the camps. One journalist investigating the network estimates the number of victims trafficked through Thailand swelled to about 80,000 in 2014. Phil Robertson from Human Rights Watch believes the true toll of death and deprivation is lost to history. For much of that time, the soldier tasked with overseeing Thailands response to the Rohingya refugee crisis was being paid by human traffickers. Lieutenant General Manas Kongpan, left, in custody in 2016. Credit:AP Manas Kongpan, an imposing figure whose career included leading a massacre on a mosque that left 32 dead, was appointed in 2008 and oversaw the trafficking network. After a coup in 2014, the lieutenant general was appointed an adviser to the military government. Advertisement The network began to unravel on May 1, 2015, when mass graves were found in Songkhla province near the Malaysian border. In all, 36 bodies were discovered but the mountains were never thoroughly searched. Paween, whose rank was equivalent to an assistant commissioner in Australia, was called in a few days later from a different region to help lead the investigation. I wasnt part of the investigation from the beginning when they went up on the mountain, but from what I heard from people going up, the Rohingya camp where they were held was like a pigsty, like for animals, Paween said. There was room for hundreds of people to stay, and there were so many graves there, they dug up dozens of corpses. But I also heard that its the same story on the other side in Malaysia, so there could be a lot more. He spoke to a senior officer overseeing the recovery effort who admitted they were not going to search properly. I dont see whats the point of digging them up, Paween was told. We cant prove who they are. This is enough for the case file. The early chaos of the operation soon gave way to obstruction. Evidence Paween asked for took weeks to arrive, and he later discovered other officers had been ordered to withhold information from him. A forensic police officer inspects a camp used by human traffickers near the Thai-Malaysian border, where mass graves were found in May 2015. Credit:AP A whistleblower from the trafficking network was a vital source of intelligence and helped identify more than 100 suspects. However, the most crucial documents, transfer slips showing payments from traffickers into Manas bank account, only became known to Paween after reporters tipped him off about a leak on social media. Employing some subterfuge, Paween obtained the evidence from his colleagues and used it to secure an arrest warrant. Advertisement The arrest on June 3, 2015, was a sensation. When Manas turned himself in, he did so in Bangkok in full uniform in front of the media, and top-level police received him in a reception room. The police also arranged a special flight, using a plane belonging to the Royal Thai Police, flying him down south, Paween said. There was very nice food, according to others on the flight. It looked like a first-class flight. When Paween arrived at Hat Yai Police Station in the morning to see his suspect, he was surprised to see armoured personnel carriers outside and soldiers everywhere. It didnt look like a police station any more, it looked like a barracks. Migrants on a boat tethered to a Thai navy vessel in waters near Koh Lipe island in May 2015. Credit:Reuters For a time, Manas had friends in high places. The deputy prime minister, Prawit Wongsuwan, was among those who vouched publicly for him. As a former army chief and one of Manas superior officers, Prawit has also been accused of lobbying behind the scenes on the human traffickers behalf. Paween said he received a call from a well-connected policeman, phoning at Prawits behest, urging him to free Manas on bail. Paween said he was shocked but replied that it was impossible as it would undermine the case. Advertisement It also goes to the credibility of the investigative team, if we allow one suspect to get bail and not the others, what does it say about us? Paween said. Asked about the claims this year, Prawit denied interfering in the case. He said he would welcome any evidence Paween had, but dismissed accusations of wanting Manas to be freed as false. Its the courts business, not my business, he told Thai reporters. I had nothing to do with it. Even among Paweens allies, arresting Manas was not universally welcomed. Why are you making my life difficult? his immediate superior complained at the time. In five months on the case, Paween and his team identified 153 suspects (two of whom died) and made 91 arrests. It became Thailands largest and highest-profile human trafficking case, and hefty jail sentences were handed down. Manas was jailed for 82 years; he died in prison in June 2021 of a heart attack. Paween was only allowed to go so far. In November 2015, he was taken off the case. Robertson said, as a result, the big fish got away, with the exception of Manas Kongpan. Its very clear and very important to understand that the presiding theme to this has been impunity, he said. Impunity writ large is the real story of this whole saga. Senior people were making a lot of money from the monstrous abuse of people. When the Move Forward Party raised the case in the Thai parliament earlier this year, top government leaders including Prawit were absent. Paweens case was raised again during a censure debate in July, to no avail. Advertisement Ternopil: A typical working day begins for Khrystyna Fetsitsa when she climbs behind the wheel of a large four-wheel drive and heads towards the front line in eastern Ukraine. Fetsitsa spends at least two days travelling up to 1200 kilometres from her home in Ternopil to the war zones near Luhansk and Donetsk. Then she catches a train home. Her job is done when she has delivered a vehicle to a soldier in what Ukrainians call zero position the line closest to Russian fire. Khrystyna Fetsitsa in Ternopil at the workshop where volunteers refit 4WDs for the front line. Her shirt says warrior in Ukrainian. Credit:David Crowe Fetsitsa went to university thinking she might become a lawyer but is now part of a war economy that puts a premium on any task that helps the Ukrainian armed forces fight against Russias invasion. Learning from the old gold must be New technologies, modern thinking, but often also know-it-all attitude determine the world of today. However, anyone who looks closely knows that gold is part of the hedge. The elderly often get bogged down in old stories and like to reminisce about the good old days. But experience is a commodity that can only be acquired with difficulty. So why not learn from the old? And it\-s not just about grandma or grandpa; research should go much further into the past. Scientists in Australia, for example, did this at the request of the Ministry of the Environment there. There is evidence that Aboriginal burning techniques help manage forests, protect biodiversity and prevent catastrophic bushfires. The scientists also demonstrated how implementing Aboriginal knowledge about fire can reduce environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions. To demonstrate this, the scientists implemented the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement in the Northern Territories as a project. Another example is in Tasmania. Aborigines there are contributing their knowledge to advance today\-s agriculture in the areas of grassland management and drought resistance, especially to improve soil sustainability through regenerative management. It is not only in land management that ancient knowledge is in demand. In today\-s world, it is also increasingly important to accumulate as much knowledge as possible when making investments. Here gold jumps into the eye. For more than 2000 years, the precious metal is considered money and store of value. It outlasts every crisis and every currency. If that alone is not reason enough to acquire a small gold treasure as a nest egg. Those who are willing to take risks can also look at the shares of companies with gold projects. Examples would be Karora Resources and Maple Gold Mines. Karora Resources https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvnfOE-2hXU is drilling at its Beta Hunt property in Western Australia (up to nearly 30 grams of gold per ton of rock). Recently, the company also has a ready gold processing plant. Maple Gold Mines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDYx1XbEphA is developing the Douay and Joutel gold projects in Quebec with partner Agnico Eagle Mines. Current corporate information and press releases from Karora Resources (- https://www.resource-capital.ch/en/companies/karora-resources-inc/ -) and Maple Gold Mines (- https://www.resource-capital.ch/en/companies/maple-gold-mines-ltd/ -). In accordance with A34 WpHG I would like to point out that partners, authors and employees may hold shares in the respective companies addressed and thus a possible conflict of interest exists. No guarantee for the translation into English. Only the German version of this news is valid. Disclaimer: The information provided does not represent any form of recommendation or advice. Express reference is made to the risks in securities trading. No liability can be accepted for any damage arising from the use of this blog. I would like to point out that shares and especially warrant investments are always associated with risk. The total loss of the invested capital cannot be excluded. All information and sources are carefully researched. However, no guarantee is given for the correctness of all contents. Despite the greatest care, I expressly reserve the right to make errors, especially with regard to figures and prices. The information contained herein is taken from sources believed to be reliable, but in no way claims to be accurate or complete. Due to court decisions, the contents of linked external sites are also co-responsible (e.g. Landgericht Hamburg, in the decision of 12.05.1998 312 O 85/98), as long as there is no explicit dissociation from them. Despite careful control of the content, I do not assume liability for the content of linked external pages. The respective operators are exclusively responsible for their content. The disclaimer of Swiss Resource Capital AG also applies: https://www.resource-capital.ch/en/disclaimer/ A Family Matter Following the cliffhanger Season 19 finale, with Parker (Gary Cole) still on the run with his ex-wife Vivian (Terri Polo), the team investigates who from his past might have a personal vendetta against him in hopes of clearing Parkers name. Enlisting the help of NCIS: Hawaiis Special Agent Jane Tennant (Vanessa Lachey) and Computer Specialist Ernie Malick (Jason Antoon), who are in town meeting with Director Leon Vance (Rocky Carroll) in preparation for a global military exercise, the group tracks down their prime suspect, The Raven, on the CBS Original Series NCIS, Monday, Sept. 19 (9:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network, and available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+. Tolpuddle (UK) 03 August 2022 (SPS)- The annual British Trade Union festival of the six Tolpuddle Martyrs expressed support and solidarity with the Struggle of Saharawi people, Western Sahara campaign said in a letter to Saharawi Workers Union (UGTSARIO), urging the British government to stand for the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination. "Today the Saharawi people who live under a brutal Moroccan colonial regime in occupied Western Sahara are also standing up for their rights," the letter says. Participants to the Festival stressed the need for UK, as a country committed to justice and international law, to "finally make a real stand in the name of Saharawi self-determination." For that to happen, concerted efforts have to be taken to liberate the last colony in Africa For the British Trade Unionists, the sacrifice and determination of the Six Tolpuddle Martyrs would not have been successful without the solidarity and mass support they received across the UK, forcing the then government to allow them to return back from exile to their country. Living up to the principles and spirit of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the British Trade Unionists pledge their commitment to international justice and to defend the Sahrawi people's struggle to free their country. Tollpuddle Martyrs Festival was held from July 15 to 17 in the village of Tollpuddle, in the presence of thousands of Trade Unions members. This yearly event commemorates the struggle of six men who were exiled to Australia in 1834 for standing up for their right to join a trade union. That sentence against the 6 men triggered a large solidarity and protest in UK, forcing the government to reverse its decision in 1836 for them to return back between 1837 and 1839. Their struggle was instrumental in the formation of the British Trade Union Movement. (SPS) 090/500/60 (SPS) Rabat University Campus (Morocco), 04, August 2022 (SPS) The Saharawi student and researcher, Jarbuch Brahim, was subjected to beatings and verbal and physical humiliation on July 31, 2022 by a group of ten people who are part of the security apparatus of the Moroccan occupation authorities, inside the university campus of the Moroccan capital, Rabat. According to sources from the Executive Bureau of the Collective of Human Rights Defenders in Western Sahara (CODESA), "he was attacked by Moroccan paramilitaries when he tried to access the university campus, in order to prevent him from entering, after which he was taken to hospital, according to eyewitnesses, and is in critical condition.SPS 125/090/TRA The United Nations on Wednesday reiterated its support for the one-China principle, noting that it follows the UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 2758 of 1971. "Our position is very clear. We abide by General Assembly resolutions, by the one-China policy, and that is the orientation that we have in everything we do," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a briefing. On Oct 25, 1971, the UNGA passed the resolution recognizing the representatives of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as the only lawful representatives of China to the UN. The resolution also recognizes the PRC is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) The Flagstaff police chief has been placed on administrative leave pending an independent investigation into how the department conducted an undercover operation in 2019 that targeted massage parlors, city officials confirmed Thursday. Dan Musselman has been the city's police chief since late 2020 and first joined the department in 1995. The city said placing him on leave is not a disciplinary action. Phoenix TV station ABC15 first reporting on the action, citing an email Musselman sent to staff saying he would be on leave starting Aug. 1. The city did not immediately respond to a request Thursday for a copy of the email. The outside investigation is expected to take a few weeks, the TV station reported. Deputy Chief Scott Mansfield is serving as acting police chief in the meantime. City spokeswoman Sarah Langley said Thursday that the review will not target individuals officers involved in the 2019 undercover operation. The purpose of the review is to determine what policies and methodologies could be used, as best practices, in future operations should they occur," she said in an email. ABC15 reported last month that two Flagstaff police officers went undercover to massage parlors, took off their pants and allowed themselves to be touched sexually as part of an investigation into suspected human trafficking, sex trafficking and prostitution. Flagstaff city officials have said there was nothing illegal about the officers' conduct, and Musselman has defended their actions. A call to Musselman's office at the police department went unanswered Thursday, and he doesn't have a publicly listed personal phone number. Defense attorneys, law enforcement experts and others have criticized the operation, saying that officers violated state law and that the investigation raises ethical issues. Other police agencies have conducted similar undercover operations. An investigation published in 2020 by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University found that federal undercover agents repeatedly paid for and engaged in sex acts with suspected victims in western Arizona. In 2004, the Maricopa County prosecutor's office rejected about 60 prostitution cases from the sheriff's department because a half dozen deputies and posse members engaged in nudity and sexual contact during a prostitution sting. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Associated Press (AP) Republican leaders got their wish with the defeat of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens in the U.S. Senate primary. Now, they face another complication: A well-funded, right-leaning political newcomer who could splinter some of the Republican and independent vote in November. Attorney General Eric Schmitt pulled off a stunningly dominant win in the GOP primary on Tuesday. Greitens, forced by sex and campaign finance scandals to resign in 2018 and accused by his ex-wife of abuse in a March court document, didn't even finish second, bested also by U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler. Schmitt will face Democrat Trudy Busch Valentine in November. The X factor is John Wood, a Republican running as an independent. He served as U.S. attorney in Missouri from 2007 to 2009 and before that held key roles in President George W. Bush's administration. He was most recently a senior investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee. Backed by a political action committee led by retired Republican Sen. John Danforth, Wood reiterated Wednesday that hes in it to win it. He accused Schmitt of extremism, noting his court challenge to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Hes very divisive and extreme and playing to the extreme parts of the Republican Party, Wood said of Schmitt. "I think there is still room for a mainstream candidate who is going to appeal to a large segment of Missouri voters. Schmitt, 47, is a former state senator from suburban St. Louis who was elected state treasurer in 2016. He was appointed attorney general after Josh Hawley vacated the seat following his election to the U.S. Senate in 2019. Schmitt won another term as attorney general in 2020. He was among many who entered the Senate race soon after two-term incumbent Republican Roy Blunt announced last year that he would retire. Missouri was considered a swing state as recently as a decade ago. Now, its solidly Republican, making Schmitt the odds-on favorite. Still, he'll face two well-funded opponents. Valentine, 65, is an heiress to the Anheuser-Busch fortune. Her campaign was late-starting and largely self-funded, but her onslaught of TV ads overcame a strong grassroots effort by Marine veteran Lucas Kunce, who outraised everyone Republican or Democrat during the primary. Wood, 52, has the powerful support of Danforth, who believes Wood is part of the answer to the vitriol permeating politics. Danforth said in a statement that his Missouri Stands United PAC has already spent $5 million on Wood's campaign and will spend more, including $700,000 over the next three weeks alone on TV and digital ads. Missouri GOP operative John Hancock said Wood has zero chance of winning, and he doesn't believe he can take enough votes away from Schmitt to push Valentine to victory. Theyre not positioning (Wood) as an independent, middle of the road, theyre positioning him as a conservative, and the Republicans just nominated a conservative," Hancock said. "So theres no real lane for him to run in here. And given the state of the electorate in Missouri and how substantially right of center it is, if he ends up in the single digits or even the low double digits, Eric Schmitt still wins. Still, Wood is showing some signs of support. To get on the November ballot as an independent, he needed to submit petitions signed by 10,000 registered voters by Aug. 1. He turned in more than 20,000. Valentine's campaign manager, Alex Witt, said the presence of Wood definitely disrupts the partisan trend we've been seeing in Missouri for the past few cycles, and I do think it makes this race very competitive for a Democrat. Missourians are going to find Trudy's experience as a nurse and her commonsense and compassionate approach really appealing, Witt said. Actor Marcel Iures says that this job does not exist, but it's rather an obsession, "a journey where luck is essential," which requires a lot of work and has no meaning without an audience. "You can't talk too much about happiness. There's no point in talking about the importance that is given to us actors. It's obvious that we are given enormous importance. This means that we deserve it and we must continue thus to do our job, because otherwise we don't exist. We don't make sense if we don't have an audience to tell us if they like our work or not," said Marcel Iures, in his speech delivered on the occasion of the opening of the 13th edition of the Romanian Film Evenings Festiva, Agerpres. Iures said acting is not a job, but rather "an obsession," which requires "an enormous amount of work." "This job doesn't exist, it's not a job. It's madness, an obsession, a stubbornness, it's a journey where luck is essential. Meetings with colleagues, with other actors, again they are essential, are extremely important. A lot of luck, a lot of work, an enormous amount of work, dreaming, living with the characters and with the others day and night. All these are important," added Marcel Iures, in front of the audience that came to see him on the stage that was placed in the Unirii Square. The great actor added that acting gave him the chance to travel a lot and to be "in a way" a cultural ambassador of the language and country in which he was born. "I had, let's say, the chance to travel a lot and represent the culture that gave birth to me, the language in which I grew up and in which I exist, in a way acting as an ambassador. After a few years I met [Liviu - editor's note] Ciulei, who told me: "Know that even the dust from the seams of your shoes goes with you. Don't think you're someone else. Don't hide it. That dust is from here and you'll take it with you anywhere." It is one of the things that Ciulei confirmed to me. That's how I felt, too," said Marcel Iures, before receiving the Romanian Film Evenings Festival Trophy. The trophy was handed over by SFR organizer Andrei Giurgia, film critic Irina Margareta Nistor and journalist Marina Constantinescu. "This year's edition is dedicated to him. The trophy of the Romanian Film Evenings Festival for his entire career up to this moment, for all the roles, for all the experiences and all the joys he has given us, goes this year to Marcel Iures," said Andrei Giurgia, SFR director. Many actors, directors, theatre and film critics, including Irina Margareta Nistor, Laurentiu Damian, Ioana Dichiseanu, Ileana Popovici, Carmen Tanase, as well as local authorities and personalities, were present at the event that took place in the Unirii Square in Iasi, Agerpres. They all watched, together with the citizens of Iasi who came to the Unirii Square, the movie "Hart's War - Razboiul lui Tom Hart," directed by Gregory Hobit, in which Marcel Iures played German Colonel Werner Visser 20 years ago, and actor Bruce Willis played Colonel William McNamara. The Gala was opened with a traditional music concert performed by Bogdan Simion&Lautarii de Matase. This year's edition of the SFR takes place between August 3-7, during which more than 40 events will be organized in eight locations, and more than 65 guests will participate, including actors, directors, film critics, cultural representatives and also representatives of the art and cinema worlds. Minister of European Investment and Projects Marcel Bolos told a news conference on Thursday that the incumbent ruling coalition ensures political and decision-making stability and that Romania cannot afford to face instability. When asked about the possibility of the current ruling coalition breaking up, Bolos answered that he does not believe that the Social Democratic Party (PSD) will pull out of ruling, Agerpres. "Let's not forget that if political instability is added in times of crisis, I don't see how Romania could have a natural course of things. Moreover, having such a huge investment budget of 80 billion euros, all that Romania is missing is facing political instability, being unable to take the necessary decisions so that investment can be implemented. Romania in 2026 or 2029, after this money and the investment made with the money are implemented, should look completely different," said Bolos. He added that "Romania's political and decision-making stability is a well-earned asset today." "I don't think that Romania can afford the luxury of facing political instability given that there are crises upon crises that have to be solved and decisions to be made. Look at the energy crisis, then the pandemic crisis, then the war crisis. Every day you have to be very careful so that you, as a government, adjust your decisions for the type of crisis you are facing. I don't see an alternative today to Romania's incumbent government," said Bolos. German citizen Zeno Pop, accused of possessing and selling treasure items stolen from the Sarmizegetusa Regia archaeological site in Orastiei Mountains (center-west), including an almost 1-kilo gold bangle, Dacian ornaments, Geto-Dacian and Roman coins, ceramic and stone artefacts, was handed down a 3-year suspended term on Thursday, in a final ruling by the Bucharest Court of Appeal. He will have to perform unpaid work for the benefit of the community for a period of 80 days within the Sector 1 Bucharest Public Domain Administration or the Sector 1 Local Police. The Court upheld the civil rulings of the Bucharest Tribunal (first instance court), according to which the defendant must pay the Culture Ministry 72,654 euros in damages. It still has to be determined how this amount will be recovered, as the Romanian court found that the precautionary seizure instated on Zeno Pop's real estate assets (by Order No. 733/P/2014 of 14.04.2016 of the Prosecutor's Office attached to the Alba Iulia Court of Appeal), specifically on two land plots of 819 sqm and 431 sqm (for the purpose of covering the legal expenses and the material damage), was overturned on 04.08.2021 by the final ruling of the Linz Court of Appeal. The Bucharest Tribunal also ordered the confiscation of several items from the German national: 473 Roman Republican and Dacian silver coins, 7 silver bracelets, a necklace and 23 Geto-Dacian coins. All these items were handed over to Romania, based on a 2017 ruling of the Salzburg Court. On the other hand, the judges rejected the prosecutors' request to confiscate other items, specifically 10 ceramic or stone archaeological artifacts which will be returned to the German citizen. The request for the confiscation of 72,150 euros, representing the money obtained by coin trading, was also rejected. Also, the magistrates didn't agree with the confiscation of a multi-spiral gold bangle weighing 933.4 grams, which in the custody of the National Museum of Romanian History. According to the General Prosecutor's Office, between 2005 and 2015, Zeno Pop got possession of and sold numerous assets belonging to the national cultural heritage, which were stolen from Romanian archaeological sites; he did so by hiding or concealing the true source and ownership of the items. In 2006 the defendant sold to a Bulgarian collector a gold multi-spiral bangle (weighing 933.4 g, looted from the Archaeological Reserve in Orastiei Mountains - the Sarmizegetusa Regia archaeological site) acquired in 2005, presenting it to the buyer as coming from a private collection. Zeno Pop also got possession of 18 Dacian silver items of jewelry, 23 Geto-Dacian coins (which come from at least four dispersed monetary hoards), a batch of 473 Roman Republican and Dacian silver coins, as well as 10 archaeological ceramic or stone artifacts, knowing that they were sourced by crimes committed on the territory of Romania. According to invoices dated between 2007 and 2013, Zeno Pop traded to various individuals or companies (from Europe and the U.S.) over one thousand coins (Lysimachos, Iustinian solidi, Lysimachos-type gold staters, Roman Republic denarii, and an Eastern Celtic drachma). According to the General Prosecutor's Office, various persons acted as money and artifact launderers to broker these items; some of them were sent to court and convicted in other cases built by the Public Prosecution Office. The coins identified in the aforementioned invoices were recovered by the judicial authorities in other criminal cases, some settled definitively, and others in the process of being settled, following expert's assessments that determined that they come from monetary hoards looted from Romanian archaeological sites. The Prosecutor's Office specifies that the multi-spiral gold bangle was returned to the Romanian judicial authorities on May 9, 2011, based on the compensation granted under the terms of the UNIDROIT Convention to the bona fide collector who cooperated with the judicial authorities. The respective jewel item is currently in the custody of the National Museum of Romanian History in Bucharest and belongs to the national cultural heritage, Treasure category. This is the 13th bangle recovered by the Romanian authorities (out of a total of 15 bangles stolen from archaeological sites between 2000 and 2001); it was found that, similar to the previously examined 12 multi-spiral gold bangles, its place of origin is the Sarmizegetusa Regia archaeological site (the capital of Dacia) - the Caprareata archaeological point, and was part of a royal treasure hidden in the center of the Dacian kingdom. Other recovered items - specifically 473 coins and 18 Dacian silver ornaments - were repatriated and are in the custody of the National Museum of Romanian History. AGERPRES The economic map of Romania, a useful tool for Romanian and foreign investors who want to develop businesses in our country, was launched on Thursday, and the data to be found on this economic map of Romania will be used, among other things, to devise a development strategy, Minister of Economy Florin Spataru told the closing conference of the Project "Institutional capacity development of the Ministry of Economy - SIPOCA 7. "More precisely, it is about a platform where relevant economic and social information will be uploaded in order to configure the clearest possible picture of investment opportunities in one region or another on the territory of Romania. The data that will be found on this economic map of Romania will be used, among other things, to devise a development strategy, depending on the competitiveness poles identified by this new electronic system," said Florin Spataru. He emphasized that the launch of the Economic Map and the industrial policy document does not represent an end, but "a new beginning". "This industrial policy document must be updated because what was happening four years ago is no longer necessarily up-to-date. With the help of this Economic Map we will be able to obtain data in real time. With the help of this Economic Map and with all analysis backing it, we will be able to give the right answers for what is happening in Romania. Very often, in the public environment, the question was asked whether Romania still has industry. The question was asked very often: Where are Romania's competitiveness poles? Whether we are only a country that is focused on the manufacturing side or we also have the research-development component or we have industrial parks or we have universities or we have young people who are attracted to certain directions," said Florin Spataru. In his opinion, the Ministry of Economy must assume the role of catalyst, given that it is the ministry responsible for the supervision and implementation of the single European market. "It is an extremely important role. For this we need updated, coherent industrial policies that respond to the needs of the single European economy," said the minister, Agerpres. The "Institutional capacity development of the Ministry of Economy - SIPOCA 7" project is co-financed from the European Social Fund through the Operational Capacity Administrative Program - SIPOCA 7 and has a budget of 9,816,257.52 RON, to be implemented between August 10, 2016 and August 9, 2022. Health Minister Alexandru Rafila said on Thursday that starting this autumn, if there is interest, Covid-19 vaccination centers will open in medical units as well. "I am convinced that this fall, especially if the new formula vaccine arrives and there is interest in getting the jab, this inconvenience will be overcome, we are organizing to be able to offer vaccination in medical institutions other than family doctors' practices. We will promote regulatory acts to the effect that all medical units can organize Covid vaccination centers so that there is no hindrance to the people's access to vaccination and they are spared the effort to travel long distances to get vaccinated. (...) We are doctors, we have patients on the list and at least these patients on the list should be vaccinated if they want this. That's what I think. (...) In order to be able to properly run this vaccination rollout, not in the sense of control, but in that of providing access to vaccination for patients, we will open vaccination centers in medical units. But I remind you that the family doctor's office is also a medical unit," the Health Minister told a press conference. AGERPRES As many as 8,617 new cases of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 were recorded in the last 24 hours in Romania, down 489 from the previous day, with over 27,000 RT-PCR and rapid antigenic tests performed, the Health Ministry informed on Thursday. Of the new cases, 1,624 were in re-infected patients, who tested positive more than 90 days after the first time they recovered from the disease. Most of the newly confirmed COVID-19 cases in Romania since the previous reporting were recorded in Bucharest City - 1,655, and in the counties of Cluj - 436, Brasov - 431, Constanta - 418, Timis - 379, Iasi - 322, and Prahova - 312, Agerpres. The 14-day notification rate nationwide is 3.82 cases per 1,000 population. The highest rate is in Bucharest City - 9.76, followed by the counties of Cluj - 9, Ilfov - 7, Sibiu - 6.84, Constanta - 6.42, Brasov 6.2, and Timis - 6.04. As of Thursday, 3,098,268 cases of people infected with the novel coronavirus were confirmed in Romania. - Hospitalisations - As many as 4,007 people with COVID-19, up 12 from the previous reporting, including 539 minors, are hospitalised in Romania at specialist care facilities. Out of the total number of hospitalised patients, 283 patients, down one, including five minors, are in intensive care. Of the 283 patients admitted to ICU, 241 are unvaccinated against COVID-19. - Deaths - According to the ministry, 27 Romanians, 11 men and 16 women, infected with SARS-CoV-2 are reported dead in the last 24 hours. Of the 27 deaths, three were recorded in the age group 50-59 years, three in the age group 60-69 years, eight in the age group 70-79 years, and 13 in the age group over 80 years. As many as 25 deaths were in patients with comorbidities, and 11 deaths were in unvaccinated patients. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 66,117 people diagnosed with the SARS-CoV-2 infection have died in Romania. Acting President of the Senate Alina Gorghiu received on Wednesday the Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to Romania, Sergey Minasyan, on a courtesy visit, with the two officials addressing the consolidated collaboration between the two peoples and states, based both on long relations of understanding and friendship, as well as on the special contribution of the Armenian community to Romania's culture, history and traditions, informs a Senate press release. The high-ranking Romanian official reiterated the increased attention that Romania pays to the South Caucasus region and the promotion, on the European agenda, of particularly relevant themes such as connectivity, the digital transition, people-to-people contacts and the consolidation of regional stability, reads the press release. Gorghiu highlighted the need to expand the dialogue on a bilateral level, in multilateral forums and within the framework of the Republic of Armenia's relations with the European Union, and expressed full openness with a view to the intensification of collaboration between the two legislative fora, especially at the level of parliamentary friendship groups. The two officials emphasized the importance of organizing the next session of the Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation between the Republic of Armenia and Romania in Bucharest, expressing regret that the pandemic situation prevented the two states from exploiting the full potential of existing cooperation, the cited source further mentions.AGERPRES The acting president of the Senate, Alina Gorghiu, received on Thursday the Charge d'Affaires ad-interim of the United States of America in Romania, David Muniz, during a courtesy visit, the Romanian dignitary showing the special meanings of the 25th anniversary of the strategic partnership between the two countries, emphasizing the openness and determination of the Romanian side to undertake all the necessary efforts to strengthen and deepen the Romanian-American relationship in all spheres of activity and fields of cooperation. On this occasion, the acting president of the Senate welcomed the nomination of a new U.S. Ambassador to Romania, Kathleen Kavalec, according to a statement from the Senate. Alina Gorghiu thanked the U.S. side for the announcement of the US President, Joe Biden, to supplement the troops in Romania by deploying a Brigade-level Combat Command, thus ensuring the consolidation of Romania's security and the security of the entire Eastern Flank of the Alliance. During the dialogue, the Romanian official stressed that Romania's inclusion in the Visa Waiver Programme remains a priority on the bilateral agenda, with a special importance for Romanian citizens, while reconfirming Romania's status as a strategic partner of the U.S. In this regard, she advocated the need to continue and intensify the cooperation of the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest with the Government of Romania in joint efforts to reduce the visa refusal rate, allowing for concrete progress in the inclusion of our country in the Visa Waiver Programme. The U.S. official expressed his appreciation for the support provided by the Romanian authorities to Ukrainian refugees, as well as for the measures regarding their free access to the health and education system, and their integration into the Romanian labour market. Another topic concerned the legislative priorities of the Romanian Senate in the soon-to-begin session, among them being the laws of justice, education, national security, as well as the law on whistleblowers according to the EU Directive provisions. The dialogue also highlighted the importance of gender equality at the political decision-making level, as well as the need to adopt measures to increase women's participation in the political exercise. In this respect, the discussions focused on the state of the legislative initiative on the introduction of a minimum quota for the representation of women and men in Parliament. In closing, they agreed that strong cooperation between Romania and the U.S. will bring tangible benefits to the two economies and will play a crucial role in strengthening transatlantic strategic resilience in order to combat the Russian Federation's attempts to instrument the energy and food crisis in order to support its "own aggressive and expansionist policies".AGERPRES Swimmer Avram Iancu had to give up, on Thursday morning, while attempting to cross the Balaton Lake (Hungary), for health reasons, the librarian from Petrosani being pulled out of the water by the support team after 21 hours and 21 minutes of continuous swimming in which he traveled 28.8 kilometres, according to the data from the tracking device used by the athlete. According to an announcement made by Iancu, the abandonment was caused by health problems in the stomach, after his last three hours - out of the 21 hours - in the lake were "agonizing." Due to the imminent risk of drowning, Avram Iancu was lifted into the boat by the support team and he stopped the race. "It is with a heavy heart that I inform you my stomach has betrayed me. I tried my best to reach at least the intermediate goals of the swim. It was impossible. After 21 hours of swimming, the last 3 of which were agonizing, I had to be lifted onto the boat. Drowning was imminent. Without fuel, no car can go, even more so a man who was no longer receiving any kind of food. I thank the Hungarian team (real professionals), Cosmin and Andrei who were with me," Avram Iancu said on his official Facebook page. Swimmer Avram Iancu started, on Wednesday morning, to swim in Lake Balaton in Hungary, which he intended to cross from one end to the other, over a length of 75 kilometres, and set a new European record for endurance swimming. Iancu estimated that he will cross the lake in approximately 48 hours, which would be almost five hours more than the current European record of 43 hours and 15 minutes. Agerpres. The crossing of Lake Balaton was organized by the Balaton Lifeguard Service, who monitored compliance with the conditions imposed for the approval of swimming. Avram Iancu also tried to set a record on Lake Balaton in July 2021, but he had to stop because of a storm and big waves that could have put his life in danger. The last record set by the sportsman from Petrosani took place this year, on July 21, when Iancu managed to swim across the Bristol Channel, being the first Romanian to set such a performance and the 14th swimmer in the world to do so. This year, Avram Iancu received the title of "Performance of the Year" from the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), because in 2021 he managed to swim 26 kilometres against the current on the Danube, in 18 hours and 30 minutes, a world premiere. Among the accomplishments of the librarian from Petrosani is also his crossing of the English Channel, in August 2016, and in the summer of 2017, Avram Iancu swam the entire course of the Danube, without a wetsuit, over a distance of 2,860 kilometres. Two men from Bangladesh who were travelling in a bus identified themselves as Romanians at the border by using the identity cards of Romanian citizens, in order to enter the Schengen Area; they were caught in the Nadlac II Border Crossing area. "Two men showed up for the border formalities, travelling as passengers in a bus going the Romania-France route, who identified themselves with Romanian identity cards. As the id documents were checked, the border police found that between the persons at the checkpoint and the photos in the documents there are differences in physiognomy, which is why they were apprehended for investigation," the Arad Border Police informed on Thursday. The two men from Bangladesh are 22 and 27 years old and are being investigated for false identity and attempted fraudulent crossing of the state border. The government takes money from you for Social Security throughout your working life, and that doesn't always end when you receive your first benefit check. You'll keep most of it, but if any of the scenarios below apply, you'll have to give a share back to Uncle Sam. 1. Federal taxes on Social Security benefits The federal government taxes any Social Security recipient if their provisional income exceeds $25,000 for a single adult or $32,000 for a married couple. Your provisional income is your adjusted gross income (AGI) plus any nontaxable interest you have and half your annual Social Security benefits. How much tax you'll owe depends on what your provisional income is. Single adults with a provisional income between $25,000 and $34,000 pay taxes on up to 50% of their Social Security benefits, as do married couples with provisional incomes between $32,000 and $44,000. Single adults and married couples with provisional incomes exceeding $34,000 and $44,000, respectively, owe taxes on up to 85% of their benefits. It's sometimes possible to avoid these taxes with careful planning. For example, if you're approaching the income thresholds listed above, you may be able to reduce your spending for the rest of the year to stay under it. Or you can rely more upon your Roth retirement savings. Withdrawals from these accounts don't affect your provisional income. 2. State taxes on Social Security benefits There are currently only 12 states that tax Social Security benefits. They are: Colorado Connecticut Kansas Minnesota Missouri Montana Nebraska New Mexico Rhode Island Utah Vermont West Virginia If you live elsewhere, you won't have to worry about owing state taxes on your benefits. And if you live in one of these states, you still might not owe anything. Each has its own rules for determining which Social Security recipients owe benefits. It's usually related to your income or the size of your annual Social Security benefit. Check with your state's department of taxation to learn how it handles Social Security benefit taxes. Depending on how it's structured, you may be able to avoid these taxes using the same methods described above. 3. Medicare Part B premiums withheld Social Security recipients who are also on Medicare will automatically have their Part B premiums withheld from their benefit checks. This is $170.10 for most people in 2022, though some high earners may have to pay as much as $578.30. However, you could almost see this as a bonus. If the government didn't take this money out of your Social Security check, you'd get a bill for it each month instead. This is the case for those who are claiming Medicare but not Social Security. So with the automatic deduction, that gives you one less bill you have to pay manually. At the same time, it means you need to adjust your expectations accordingly. When calculating your retirement budget, remember that your monthly Social Security checks will be reduced by the year's Medicare Part B premium cost unless you're not signed up for Medicare yet. 4. Garnishment for unpaid debts The federal government is one of the worst creditors to have because it can take things most other creditors can't touch, including your Social Security benefit. If you owe back taxes, child support, or alimony, the government can take that money from your benefit checks if you're not keeping up with your payments. But it may not take your entire check. If you owe back taxes, for example, the government will take up to 15% of each check until your debt is paid off. It's not possible to appeal this decision with the Social Security Administration, so it's best to keep up with your debt obligations if you're able. Talk to the IRS about setting up a repayment plan if you're not able to pay all your taxes at once. It can work with you to find a solution that enables you to pay your debt over time without any Social Security garnishment. As for garnishment due to unpaid child support or alimony, you'll have to talk to a lawyer to discuss your options if you don't agree with the decision. You can't always avoid giving some of your Social Security checks back to the government. But you'll have a better chance at doing so if you're aware of what it can take from you and why. Keep the above tips in mind and, whenever possible, take steps to reduce your risk of forking over your benefits. The $18,984 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 $18,984 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. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. CLAYTON Biotech giant Bayer and its subsidiary Monsanto have been trying for years to get out from under thousands of court cases alleging its weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. This week, the fight came to St. Louis County. Opening arguments started Wednesday for three people who say the herbicide's active ingredient caused them to develop non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma after using Roundup for years. Attorneys for Creve Coeur-based Monsanto, which was purchased by Bayer in 2018, maintained that the product did not cause cancer. It's the first case to go to trial since the U.S. Supreme Court last month rejected a bid by Bayer to end thousands of lawsuits, potentially paving the way for billions more in settlements. The trial is expected to last several weeks and will contain reviews of studies and testimony from experts hired for each side. Bayer has been dogged by similar lawsuits for years. The company has won at least four trials and has also lost multiple cases in which juries awarded millions of dollars in damages. In a 2019 case that Bayer hoped to appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court, a California jury awarded roughly $80 million to a Sonoma County couple that regularly used Roundup for 26 years and contracted non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The award was later cut to $25 million. WASHINGTON (AP) The federal government declared a public health emergency Thursday to bolster the response to the monkeypoxoutbreak that has infected more than 7,100 Americans. The announcement will free up money and other resources to fight the virus, which may cause fever, body aches, chills, fatigue and pimple-like bumps on many parts of the body. We are prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus, and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously, said Xavier Becerra, head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The declaration by HHS comes as the Biden administration has faced criticism over monkeypox vaccine availability. Clinics in major cities such as New York and San Francisco say they havent received enough of the two-shot vaccine to meet demand, and some have had to stop offering the second dose to ensure supply of first doses. The White House said it has made more than 1.1 million doses available and has helped to boost domestic diagnostic capacity to 80,000 tests per week. The monkeypox virus spreads through prolonged skin-to-skin contact, including hugging, cuddling and kissing, as well as sharing bedding, towels and clothing. The people who have gotten sick so far have been primarily men who have sex with men. But health officials emphasize that the virus can infect anyone. No one in the United States has died. A few deaths have been reported in other countries. Earlier this week, the Biden administration named top officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to serve as the White House coordinators to combat monkeypox. Thursday's declaration is an important and overdue step, said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University. It signals the U.S. governments seriousness and purpose, and sounds a global alarm, he said. Under the declaration, HHS can draw from emergency funds, hire or reassign staff to deal with the outbreak and take other steps to control the virus. For example, the announcement should help the federal government to seek more information from state and local health officials about who is becoming infected and who is being vaccinated. That information can be used to better understand how the outbreak is unfolding and how well the vaccine works. Gostin said the U.S. government has been too cautious and should have declared a nationwide emergency earlier. Public health measures to control outbreaks have increasingly faced legal challenges in recent years, but Gostin didnt expect that to happen with monkeypox. It is a textbook case of a public health emergency, Gostin said. Its not a red or a blue state issue. There is no political opposition to fighting monkeypox. A public health emergency can be extended, similar to what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, he noted. The urgency in the current response stems from the rapid spread of the virus coupled with the limited availability of the two-dose vaccine called Jynneos, which is considered the main medical weapon against the disease. The doses, given 28 days apart, are currently being given to people soon after they think they were exposed, as a measure to prevent symptoms. Becerra announced the emergency declaration during a call with reporters. During the call, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf said regulators are reviewing an approach that would stretch supplies by allowing health professionals to vaccinate up to five people instead of one with each vial of Jynneos. Under this so-called dose-sparing approach, physicians and others would use a shallower injection under the skin, instead of the subcutaneous injection currently recommended in the vaccines labeling. Califf said a decision authorizing that approach could come within days. That would require another declaration, to allow the government to alter its guidelines on how to administer the vaccine, officials said. Health officials pointed to a study published in 2015 that found that Jynneos vaccine administered that way was as effective at stimulating the immune system as when the needle plunger deeper into other tissue. But experts also have acknowledged they are still gathering information on how well the conventional administration of one or two full doses works against the outbreak. Others health organizations have made declarations similar to the one issued by HHS. Last week, the World Health Organization called monkeypox a public health emergency, with cases in more than 70 countries. A global emergency is WHOs highest level of alert, but the designation does not necessarily mean a disease is particularly transmissible or lethal. California, Illinois and New York have all made declarations in the last week, as have New York City, San Francisco and San Diego County. The declaration of a national public health emergency and the naming of a monkeypox czar are symbolic actions, said Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University infectious diseases expert. Whats important is that the government is taking the necessary steps to control the outbreak and if it comes to that to have a plan for how to deal with monkeypox if it becomes endemic, he said. Monkeypox is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals. It does not usually spread easily among people. But in May, a wave of unexpected cases began emerging in Europe and the United States. Now more than 26,000 cases have been reported in countries that traditionally have not seen monkeypox. UPDATED at 11:20 a.m. Thursday ST. LOUIS Storms that socked the region overnight Wednesday left about 6,900 Ameren customers without power Thursday morning. As of 11 a.m., the outages were primarily in Missouri and concentrated in St. Louis County. Some 700 crew members for Ameren were working Thursday to try to restore power. At the peak, there were some 15,000 customers without power about midnight Wednesday. Police made several water rescues along Saline Creek near Fredericktown, and other rescues from flash flooding near Fenton and Romaine Creek Road. No injuries were reported. The National Weather Service said several rounds of storms had moved through the St. Louis area since about 2 or 3 p.m. Wednesday. By 7 a.m. Thursday, the rain measured at Lambert airport was 4.6 inches for the two-day total. The rain on Wednesday alone 4.32 inches set a record for that date, Aug. 3. The previous record for Aug. 3 was 1.45 inches set in 1946, said Matt Beitscher, meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Weldon Spring. Other spots reported higher rain totals, including more than 5.5 inches in Sunset Hills, 5 inches in Glendale, 3.8 inches in Hazelwood, and 3.96 inches in Mehlville. There are two river flood warnings, one for the Dardenne Creek in the St. Peters area and one for the Kaskaskia River in Illinois. Thursday's lingering rain was moving east, out of the St. Louis region, and should stop by around noon. But it could leave an additional half-inch of rain, or up to an inch in areas along Interstate 70, Beitscher said. The storm Wednesday came as parts of the region were still wringing themselves out from historic rainfall and flooding last week. In addition to torrential rain, a late afternoon thunderstorm downed trees and powerlines in Alton. Residents in the area were among hundreds of people who have spent the past week attempting to recover from a storm that brought a record 9 inches of rain to the St. Louis area and almost 13 inches in some places. The area took another hit two days later, when another 2 to 4 inches of rain fell, causing repeat flooding in some neighborhoods. A lot of people caught in those floods were seeking aid at John F. Kennedy Community Center in Florissant when rain began to fall Wednesday afternoon. They found help from nonprofit and government entities, including the American Red Cross of Missouri and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The community center opened around 2 p.m. Wednesday, and within an hour 600 people had signed up for help with everything from getting a drivers license replaced to finding food. More waited in a line that stretched outside into the elements, which prompted organizers to end the event early. Teaira Wilhite, 24, and Rechard Williams II, 24, were among those seeking help Wednesday. They were there with their 15-month-old son, Rechard Williams III, for more than three hours. They said the flooding ruined supplies for the baby theyre expecting in December as well as furniture like their bed, forcing them to camp out in their living room. Their apartment carpet is still wet from last week, they said. Were doing the best we can, Williams said. Several more events for people in need of aid are scheduled later this week, officials said. Thursday: Centennial Commons, 7210 Olive Boulevard, University City, 3-8 p.m. Friday: Friendly Temple Church, 5515 Martin Luther King Drive, St. Louis, 3-8 p.m. and Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Annika Merrilees, Austin Huguelet and Kelsey Landis of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this article. CLAYTON A Calverton Park man admitted Thursday that prosecutors had sufficient evidence to convict him in two of the three homicides with which hes charged. Jeffrey E. Tod, 56, of the first block of Williams Boulevard, entered Alford pleas in the murders of Kenneth Alvern Linzie, 68, of Berkeley, in January 2019 and Deandre Moore Jr., 41, in December 2018. Tods Alford pleas mean he doesnt admit guilt but agrees prosecutors have sufficient evidence to secure convictions. Prosecutors recommended a sentence of 23 years in prison as part of the deal. He is set to be sentenced Aug. 22 by Circuit Judge Dean Waldemer. Tod is also charged in the December 2018 shooting death of Melvin Whitted Jr., 55. That case is still pending. Police said the killings were tied to drugs. All three men were shot in the head while sitting in their own vehicles after exchanging text messages with Tod, police said in charging documents. Whitted and Moores bodies were found in their vehicles, abandoned a few miles from Tods home. Police said they also found Tods DNA in Whitteds car. A prosecutor said in court Thursday that police found blood-stained items belonging to Linzie and a pistol inside Tods home, that one of the bullets from Moores body was the same kind as a bullet recovered from Linzies body, and that all of the bullets came from the same gun. Prosecutors said the bullet found in Whitted Jr.s body was similar to the caliber of a gun found in Tods house that police say was used to kill Linzie the following month. Linzies body, as well as the car he drove the day he was killed, were found in Tods detached garage. A nephew of Linzie told police Linzie may have gone to Tods home to settle a debt that Tod owed him, charges said. Linzies nephew found Linzies body in the garage in the backyard, along with the car Linzie was last seen driving. Before Whitted was found, Tod told an acquaintance that Whitted aint coming back, charges say. Tod also told the same person Moore and Whitted had what was coming to them. ST. LOUIS One man died and another was seriously injured in a shooting Wednesday evening in the city's Baden neighborhood, police said. Officers said they were called to North Broadway and Halls Ferry Road around 8:40 p.m. for a report of a shooting, and they found two men suffering from gunshot wounds. Both were taken to the hospital where one of them, believed to be in his 20s, was pronounced dead. The other man, who police said is 30, is in critical condition. Five children from the St. Louis area were recovered as part of a nationwide operation led by the FBI that recovered 84 victims of child sex trafficking and sexual exploitation offenses, and found 37 missing children. JEFFERSON CITY The Missouri Lottery is scheduling interviews for its top position following the surprise departure of its longtime executive director last month. Applications for the post, which pays an estimated $127,000 annually, closed on July 21. Lottery spokeswoman Wendy Baker said applications were received from across the country. Lottery Commission Chairman Lance Mayfield said there is no timeline for when the panel will select a replacement for May Scheve Reardon, who left after 13 years amid a fight over the agencys advertising budget with budget writers in the Missouri House and Senate. The Lottery Commission is looking for a vibrant person who can resume our role in branding the Missouri Lottery as our residents and players have become accustomed to, Mayfield said. Judy Martin is currently serving as interim executive director. Reardon announced in June that she was stepping down after lawmakers and Gov. Mike Parson approved a budget with just $400,000 for advertising and marketing. That meant the cancellation of the Lotterys participation in a number of events, including ticket booths at the Missouri State Fair and activities at St. Louis Cardinals games, the Forest Park Balloon Festival, St. Louis Blues games and other events. Those events helped generate more than $782,000 for the lottery last year. Earlier this month, top state budget writers called on the Missouri Lottery to halt any major decisions until a new executive director is hired. Reardon announced last month that she took a job with Canada-based Pollard Banknote, a lottery contractor, to head up government relations and legislative affairs. Pollard Banknote has received about $10 million in state payments for work it has done for the lottery during Reardons tenure. Reardon called them a minor contractor in the Missouri Lotterys operation, assisting with scratch-off ticket supplies. The Lottery is overseen by a commission appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. The commission is charged with hiring the executive director. Parson earlier said he would not interfere in the commissions search and appointment of a new chief. Baker said it is not clear when a replacement will be made. We are not projecting an announcement or hire date just yet, as so much depends on the interview process. Well know more once the commission has had the opportunity to meet with candidates, Baker said. Updated Aug. 5, 2022 to clarify the Lottery received $400,000 in this year's budget for advertising ST. LOUIS The Loop Trolley will crank up operations once again on Thursday morning, two and a half years after shutting down amid low ridership, mechanical mishaps and financial problems. Wednesday, the board overseeing the special sales tax that helps subsidize the controversial line gave the final go-ahead for a three-month pilot program. The lines new operator, the Bi-State Development Agency, said the trolley will ply its 2.2-mile route along Delmar Boulevard and DeBaliviere Avenue from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays through Oct. 30. And rides will be free this time. After the three-month period, plans call for the trolley to start up again next spring. If we can get through its next six months, itll be able to operate in perpetuity, in my opinion, said Joe Edwards, the Delmar Loop businessman who has been the main promoter of the project for decades. We need to give it a chance and fine-tune it. But trolley critics continue to argue that there just hasnt been any public demand and likely never will be for an old-fashioned rail line that runs only from the western end of the Loop in University City to the Missouri History Museum on the north side of Forest Park. Theres been no clamoring from anyone for bringing it back, said Tom Sullivan, a University City resident who has fought the trolley for years. And lets not forget ... no air conditioning. Indeed, the trolleys cars arent outfitted with AC, a fact that Edwards shrugs off. He said when the trolley operation was in the planning stages, that was left out for cost reasons. The board of the transportation development district overseeing trolley tax revenue signed off on the Thursday reopening by approving a required safety plan. That followed a week of testing and operator training involving Bi-State, its Metro Transit agency and the Missouri Department of Transportation. We are ready to go, all systems running, Metro Transit Executive Director Charles Stewart told the board at its videoconference meeting. St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, who chairs the district board, thanked Bi-State for stepping in and said she plans to ride the trolley Sunday. Jones has pushed to restart the trolley, citing a warning last December from a regional Federal Transit Administration official that, if the trolley cars and tracks remain unused, the agency might demand repayment of some of the $37 million in federal money used to help build the $51 million project. Jones, who had opposed reopening the trolley during her campaign for mayor last year, also has expressed concern that defaulting could hurt the metro areas chances to get other federal transit funding in the future. Bi-States CEO, Taulby Roach, who also is on the tax district board, has made the same point. Other members are Edwards, University City Mayor Terry Crow and St. Louis County Executive Sam Page, who was represented at Wednesdays meeting by an aide. The federal official who issued the warning, Mokhtee Ahmad, could not be reached for comment Wednesday on the trolleys planned restart. Bi-States board earlier this year agreed to take over the operation on a contract basis from the nonprofit Loop Trolley Co., which is going out of business. People interviewed in the Delmar Loop on Wednesday had a mix of opinions on the trolleys rebirth. Im looking forward to it, Wendy Harris, 68, said outside her art gallery, Artisans in the Loop. People love to see it going by and its already here. So lets just embrace it and be more positive about it. But David Gonzalez, 43, who was interviewed on Delmar as he was walking to his office at the nearby Center of Creative Arts, called the trolley a disaster. It wasnt well-used, said Gonzalez, the director of development at the center, also known as COCA. I feel like people have resoundingly said, We dont want this. Andrea Williams, 26, who manages the Vintage Vinyl record store, said shes neutral on the trolley. When it was running, I think tourists liked it, she said. I dont know if itll be able to sustain itself just on tourist appeal. Bi-State in a news release says it plans to use only one of the trolley operations three cars in the pilot period; a second car will serve as a backup if needed. A third car has yet to be put into service and had been under renovation. A round trip, Bi-State said, will take about an hour, including a 10-minute operator break at each end of the route. The trolley can be boarded at any of six stops along Delmar, three on DeBaliviere and one at the history museum. Earlier this year Jones said the district estimated it will collect more than $775,000 in sales tax this year. Previously collected tax revenue also will be used. The district also has applied to the regional East-West Gateway Council of Governments for a new $1.26 million federal grant; a decision on that is expected later this month. Roach has said thats essential to the lines long-term financial viability. Gateways board turned down a similar request last fall. The trolley shut down at the end of 2019 after about only a year of service; it reappeared briefly for one month in July 2020 for free weekend rides. Loop Trolley to resume service Aug. 4, but not year-round The trolley, which hasnt run regularly since the end of 2019 due to financial and operational problems, will operate Thursdays through Sundays until Oct. 15. Plans call for it to start up again next spring. WASHINGTON U.S. Senators delivered overwhelming bipartisan approval to NATO membership for Finland and Sweden Wednesday, calling expansion of the Western defensive bloc a slam-dunk for U.S. national security and a day of reckoning for Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine. Wednesdays 95-1 vote for the candidacy of two Western European nations that, until Russias war against Ukraine, had long avoided military alliances took a crucial step toward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its 73-year-old pact of mutual defense among the United States and democratic allies in Europe. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer invited ambassadors of the two nations to the chamber gallery to witness the vote. President Joe Biden, who has been the principal player rallying global economic and material support for Ukraine, has sought quick entry for the two previously non-militarily aligned northern European nations. Approval from all member nations currently, 30 is required. The candidacies of the two prosperous Northern European nations have won ratification from more than half of the NATO member nations in the roughly three months since the two applied. Its a purposely rapid pace meant to send a message to Russia over its six-month-old war against Ukraines West-looking government. It sends a warning shot to tyrants around the world who believe free democracies are just up for grabs, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in the Senate debate ahead of the vote. Russias unprovoked invasion has changed the way we think about world security, she added. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who visited Kyiv earlier this year, urged unanimous approval. Speaking to the Senate, McConnell cited Finlands and Swedens well-funded, modernizing militaries and their experience working with U.S. forces and weapons systems, calling it a slam-dunk for national security of the United States. Their accession will make NATO stronger and America more secure. If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote no, I wish them good luck, McConnell said. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who often aligns his positions with those of the most ardent supporters of former President Donald Trump, cast the only no vote. Hawley took the Senate floor to call European security alliances a distraction from what he called the United States chief rival China, not Russia. We can do more in Europe ... devote more resources, more firepower ... or do what we need to do to deter Asia and China. We cannot do both, Hawley said, calling his a classic nationalist approach to foreign policy. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, like Hawley a potential 2024 presidential contender, rebutted his points without naming his potential Republican rival. That included arguing against Hawleys contention a bigger NATO would mean more obligations for the U.S. military, the worlds largest. Cotton was one of many citing the two nations military strengths including Finlands experience securing its hundreds of miles of border with Russia and its well-trained ground forces, and Swedens well-equipped navy and air force. Theyre two of the strongest members of the alliance the minute they join, Cotton said. U.S. State and Defense officials consider the two countries net security providers, strengthening NATOs defense posture in the Baltics in particular. Finland is expected to exceed NATOs 2% GDP defense spending target in 2022, and Sweden has committed to meet the 2% goal. Thats in contrast to many of NATOs newcomers formerly from the orbit of the Soviet Union, many with smaller militaries and economies. North Macedonia, NATOs most recent newcomer nation, brought an active military of just 8,000 personnel when it joined in 2020. Senators' votes approving NATO candidacies often are lopsided the one for North Macedonia was 91-2. But Wednesday's approval from nearly all senators present carried added foreign policy weight in light of Russia's war. Schumer, D-N.Y., said he and McConnell had committed to the countrys leaders that the Senate would approve the ratification resolution as fast as we could to bolster the alliance in light of recent Russian aggression. Sweden and Finland applied in May, setting aside their longstanding stance of military nonalignment. It was a major shift of security arrangements for the two countries after neighboring Russia launched its war on Ukraine in late February. Biden encouraged their joining and welcomed the two countries government heads to the White House in May, standing side by side with them in a display of U.S. backing. The U.S. and its European allies have rallied with newfound partnership in the face of Putin's military invasion, as well as the Russian leader's sweeping statements this year condemning NATO, issuing veiled reminders of Russia's nuclear arsenal and asserting Russia's historical claims to territory of many of its neighbors. Enlarging NATO is exactly the opposite of what Putin envisioned when he ordered his tanks to invade Ukraine, Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday, adding that the West could not allow Russia to launch invasions of countries. Wednesday's vote by Republicans and Democrats stood out for the normally slow-moving and divided chamber. Senators voted down a proposed amendment by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., intended to ensure that NATOs guarantee to defend its members does not replace a formal role for Congress in authorizing the use of military force. Paul, a longtime advocate of keeping the U.S. out of most military action abroad, voted present" on the ratification of Sweden and Finland's membership bid. Senators approved another amendment from Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, declaring that all NATO members should spend a minimum of 2% of their gross domestic product on defense and 20% of their defense budgets on major equipment, including research and development. Each member government in NATO must give its approval for any new member to join. The process ran into unexpected trouble when Turkey raised concerns over adding Sweden and Finland, accusing the two of being soft on banned Turkish Kurdish exile groups. Turkeys objections still threaten the two countries membership. SOUTH ST. LOUIS COUNTY Katherine Pinners neighbors had no idea that she was running for the highest public office in St. Louis County government. There were no signs anywhere in the county with Pinners name on them. Pinner, a self-described business consultant and author, didnt fundraise or run any advertisements. She didnt knock on their door to ask for their vote. As far as Marian Thomas could tell, her quiet, friendly neighbor was going about her usual daily life walking her dog, going to work and mowing the lawn. We never talked about it, said Thomas, 74, on Wednesday. It kind of surprised me. I didnt know that she had any interest in doing that at all. That changed Tuesday night when Pinner won a shocking upset against Republican state Rep. Shamed Dogan to secure the GOP nomination to face Democratic incumbent St. Louis County Executive Sam Page. Pinner, a political newcomer, handily defeated Dogan by a 12-point margin, capturing 56% of the vote, or 33,261 votes. Dogan received 26,029 votes. Pinner won without mounting much of a campaign at all. Her victory over Dogan baffled Republican officials and most political observers who expected him to coast to victory. Dogan, a state representative since 2015, launched his campaign last year and raised more than $200,000 for his bid to try to become the first Republican executive in the heavily Democratic county in three decades. Page is heavily favored to win in November. Dogan did not return phone calls requesting comment Wednesday. In a tweet thanking supporters, he said he was a bit in shock. He wasnt alone. Everyone that Im talking to is shocked, said Rene Artman, chair of the St. Louis County Republican Central Committee. The first thing you say is how does this happen? Whatever the reasons for Dogans loss, Artman said, she was eager to get her party to rally around Pinner. But there was just one problem. Theyd never spoken. Neither had Pinner and 3rd District Councilman Tim Fitch, one of three Republicans on the County Council. Fitch and 7th District Republican Mark Harder, who both represent the partys base in west St. Louis County, had both endorsed Dogan. I did not know her name until she appeared on the ballot, Fitch said. But having a conversation with her is certainly something on my short list of things to do. Pinner, reached by email Wednesday, asked for questions in writing but did not respond to requests for a phone interview. Phone calls to a number listed for Pinner instead reached a employee of a major aircraft manufacturer in St. Louis who said he had no connection to her. Artman said shed encountered the same problem trying to call Pinner. A reporter couldnt reach Pinner at her home Wednesday afternoon. Pinner appeared to have had no social media presence, or much public presence at all apart from an internet blog that she had set up previously to advertise her four self-published books. Pinner, according to her website, is a native of St. Louis with a masters degree in English. She has a consulting business, Greatest Moment LLC. A daughter of Croatian immigrants, Pinner said her father fled a communist regime in his native country to seek refuge and freedom in the United States. That journey inspired two works of fiction Pinner has published. On her website, Pinner described a traditional Republican platform of lower taxes, support for law enforcement and economic freedom. She disavowed campaign donations to ensure that her allegiance is to the people of St. Louis County, not political action groups, special interest groups, and global agendas funded by out of state contributions. The flyer said Pinner wanted to return to our countrys core principles, from the U.S. Constitution. But elsewhere on her website, Pinner repeated false conspiracy theories that COVID-19 vaccines were part of a global scheme to control people by covertly inserting microchip into peoples bodies. Thomas, one of Pinners neighbors, said she is a Democrat and on totally different sides of the political spectrum as Pinner. The two met more than 20 years ago when Pinner first moved to the neighborhood, while they were both out walking their dogs, and while they werent close, they were friendly, Thomas said. Shes very nice, very quiet, very soft-spoken, Thomas said. Shes a very good neighbor. Thomas said she had no idea who Dogan was. Neither did Matt Mikitin, another neighbor and a Republican. Mikitin, 52, said he only learned Pinner was running for office when he voted in the primary. Its pretty cool, Im excited for her, he said. Mikitin said he and Pinner would often greet one another while out walking dogs or mowing the lawn. Told about her website Mikitin said he was excited to learn they had something in common. His grandfather also escaped communism from Penza, Russia, he said. Mikitin said he wants to know Pinners stance on public education. While he supports scaling back taxes, he said, he doesnt want to see any cuts to school funding. But he otherwise felt good about voting down ticket. I know that if shes a Republican she leans the way I lean. Negotiators from Iran, the United States and the European Union resumed monthslong, indirect talks over Tehrans tattered nuclear deal Thursday, even as international inspectors acknowledged the Islamic Republic began a new expansion of its uranium enrichment. The resumption of the Vienna talks, suddenly called Wednesday, appears not to include high-level representation from all the countries part of Iran's 2015 deal with word powers. That comes as Western officials express growing skepticism over a deal to restore the accord and the EU's top diplomat has warned the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted. Iran's top negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, met with EU mediator Enrique Mora, Iranian media reported. As in other talks, the U.S. wont directly negotiate with Iran. Instead, the two sides will speak through Mora. U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley also was on hand, tweeting Wednesday that our expectations are in check. Mora also met Thursday with Russian Ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov, who has represented Moscow's interests in the talks. Ulyanov also separately met with Bagheri Kani. As always we had a frank, pragmatic and constructive exchange of views on ways and means of overcoming the last outstanding issues, Ulyanov wrote on Twitter. But going into the negotiations, Iran laid out a maximalist stance. Through its state-run IRNA news agency, Tehran denied that it had abandoned its effort to get America to delist its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization as a precondition to a deal. That has been a main sticking point. Meanwhile, IRNA also quoted its civilian nuclear chief as saying turned-off surveillance cameras of the International Atomic Energy Agency only would be switched back on once the West abandons an effort to investigate manmade traces of uranium found at previously undisclosed sites at the country. Those positions could doom the talks. Iranian officials had been trying to offer optimistic assessments of the negotiations while alternating blaming the U.S. for the deadlock, likely worried a collapse of the talks could see its rial currency plunge to new historic lows. Iran struck the nuclear deal in 2015 with the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia and China. The deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium under the watch of U.N. inspectors in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. As of the last public IAEA count, Iran has a stockpile of some 3,800 kilograms (8,370 pounds) of enriched uranium. More worrying for nonprofileration experts, Iran now enriches uranium up to 60% purity a level it never reached before that is a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Those experts warn Iran has enough 60%-enriched uranium to reprocess into fuel for at least one nuclear bomb. However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, likely a monthslong project. Iran maintains its program is for peaceful purposes, though its officials increasingly are discussing the country's ability to build a nuclear bomb if it chose previously a taboo topic there. Meanwhile Thursday, those U.N. inspectors at the IAEA said that they had verified Iran had begun feeding uranium gas into two IR-1 cascades previously unused at its underground Natanz facility. Those cascades will enrich uranium up to 5%. The IAEA inspectors also verified that Iran had completed installation of three advanced IR-6 cascades at the plant, each comprised of up to 176 centrifuges. The IAEA said those cascades had yet to be fed uranium. Iran also told the IAEA it planned to installed another six IR-2M cascades in a new operating unit at Natanz as well, inspectors said. Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP. How angry are some Republicans at what they see as betrayal by a centrist Democrat? Angry enough to betray sick military veterans, apparently. Thats the only rational explanation for last weeks sudden about-face by two-dozen Senate Republicans, including Missouris Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley, who opposed legislation they previously supported to make it easier for cancer-stricken veterans to get help from the government. Facing ferocious public pushback, Blunt, Hawley and the other GOP senators who about-faced last week quickly about-faced again this week, resuming their previous support for the measure and passing it Tuesday. But this shouldnt be mistaken for an alls-well-that-ends-well story. What the episode reveals about the partisan insolence and general dysfunction infecting one of Americas two major political parties is beyond disturbing. At issue was the Pact Act, a long-sought measure to streamline the process of getting federal health care benefits to millions of veterans sickened by toxins released by burn pits for chemical and biological refuse and other sources. It relieves vets of the burden of proving the cause-and-effect of their illnesses in order to obtain coverage. The cost of less than $30 billion a year is the least America can do for those who have served and fallen ill while militarily deployed abroad. Most of the Senate thought so when the measure passed overwhelmingly with strong bipartisan support in June. When the bill returned to the Senate for a procedural revote last week, it appeared headed for easy reapproval. Instead, 25 Republican senators who had previously supported it voted against overcoming a filibuster, effectively stalling the measure. Republicans claimed it was because the bill was written in a way that could usher in hundreds of millions of dollars in unrelated spending a claim the bills supporters deny. If that really was the sticking point, why did those 25 Republicans support it in the first place? As it happens, their reversal last week came just hours after top Democrats announced a deal with centrist Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, to approve a health care, climate and tax package that Manchin had previously opposed. Republicans were livid at what they considered a double-cross by their favorite Democrat. Republicans sudden reversal of their previous support for the veterans bill had an icy sheen of vengeance. Theres something amusing about the notion that the fact-averse, norm-breaking, democracy-threatening GOP of the Trump era is feeling aggrieved that a key Democrat decided (for once) to support a Democratic priority of helping veterans. But theres nothing funny about a party thats so all-consumed with digging ideological trenches and meting out partisan payback that it would betray sickened veterans to do it. Subsequently scurrying to pass the bill only because of a well-deserved backlash doesnt hide, but spotlights, how indefensible this game was. Probably no one is more surprised by Katherine Pinners victory in Tuesdays Republican primary victory for St. Louis County executive than her opponent, state Rep. Shamed Dogan. Dogan was hardly a household name, but at least he was well known and well liked across party lines. Pinner was hardly known beyond her own household. How she managed more than 33,000 votes 7,000 more than Dogan is for the political scientists to explain. For now, the challenge is figuring out who, exactly, Pinner is and what she stands for. As if St. Louis County politics hadnt already pushed the envelope of the bizarre, a whole new era of wackiness is about to begin, especially if Pinner defeats incumbent Democrat Sam Page in the general election. Recall those raucous County Council meetings of the past two years as public speakers expounded on Critical Race Theory or their most wild vaccination and coronavirus theories. Pinners blog posts suggest she counts those people among her base perhaps along with QAnon Nation. Pinner embraces a theory that President Bidens Build Back Better plan has satanic roots. All you have to do is replace the Bs with the number 6 to get the mark of the devil. As voters started catching onto this plan of 6uild 6ack 6etter, the democrats quickly changed their slogan, she blogged. When Democrats characterized the 2020 presidential election as a battle for the soul of the nation, she suggests, it was actually a bid by Satan with United Nations collusion to take over the soul of the nation. And dont get Pinner started on the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the rich and powerful in Davos, Switzerland. She questions whether coronavirus vaccines are part of a plot to inject humans with nanotechnology to program people against their will. In other words, in the words Q: WAKE UP! she blogged. It is all connected. To implement this plan and to inventory every item on the planet, including people, you need a bar code. How do you bar code nine billion people? Well, its quite simple. You vaccinate them. Pinner declined to submit answers for the Post-Dispatchs pre-election voters guide. She shuns reporters queries if theyre not submitted in writing. There are no state campaign finance reports for her. The group Freedom Principle claims her as a member who worked with our group to ban Critical Race Theory. This is the person Republicans chose over Dogan. If Dogan took his primary election victory for granted, he has only himself to blame. If tens of thousands of Republicans rallied behind Pinner because they preferred a secretive white woman with dangerous conspiratorial beliefs over a centrist Black man, thats on the GOP to explain. Either way, the St. Louis County political locomotive appears to have veered back onto the track to Wackoville. South Korea has developed its first jet fighter, the KF-21. Also called Borame (Fighting Hawk ''), the fighter made its first flight on July 19th and expects to enter service by 2026. Developing the KF-21 cost at least $8 billion. The South Korean air force wants to buy 120 of them. The first 40 will be Block 1 while the other 80 will be Block 2. There is also an export customer, Indonesia, which is contributing 20 percent of the development funds. The South Korea government is supplying 60 percent of development costs and the KF-21 manufacturer the remaining 20 percent. Indonesia and the South Korea aircraft manufacturer expect to receive contracts for production of KF-21 components and future upgrades. Indonesia will eventually assemble KF-21s in Indonesia from components supplied by South Korea and Indonesia. The initial (Block 1) KF-21 is a twin-engine 24.5-ton air superiority fighter. F414 engines are supplied by U.S. firm GE. This engine is used by the U.S. Navy F-18E fighter and the South Korean TA-50 trained aircraft, which can also be used as an attack aircraft. A new model of the Swedish Gripen fighter also uses F414. These engines are also built in South Korea as a joint venture with GE. The South Korea partner helped design the version of the F414 needed for the TA-50 and KF-21. The block 2 KF-21 will be equipped as a fighter-bomber, with sensors and electronics similar to what the F-35 uses to enable the pilot to handle ground attack operations without a second crew member who is the weapons officer. The two seat F-15E fighter bomber is the nest example of this type of attack aircraft and South Korea already had 40 F-15K aircraft which are F-15Es customized for South Korea needs. These will be complemented by and eventually replaced (after 2040) by the block 2 KF-21. South Korea has already developed world-class armored vehicles, warships and support aircraft, including helicopters. Neighboring countries, like Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Australia are also developing manufacturing capabilities for combat vehicles, ships and aircraft. Japan was the first country in the region to develop the capability to build modern weapons but until recently the Japanese post-World War II constitution banned export of weapons. That was recently changed and now Japan can build for export. Japan has to catch-up with South Korea which always produced these new weapons with the intention of competing in export markets. NATO and non-NATO nation contributing weapons, ammunition and equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces realized early in the war that they had to create an efficient organization to coordinate the delivery of material to the Ukrainian border as well as arrange to have Ukrainian troops trained in their use, By March, NATO (mainly the U.S. and Britain) set up the ECCU/IDCC (EUCOM Control Center-Ukraine/International Donor Coordination Center) at a NATO base in southwest Germany (Stuttgart). EUCOM is United States European Command, which was originally created to coordinate operations, including logistics, for all U.S. forces in Europe during and after World War II, European Command or EUCOM, coordinated most of the imported supplies and equipment provided to allied forces in Europe. In the 1950s, with the creation of NATO, EUCOM expanded its logistics capabilities. This continued after the Cold War ended and the Russian threat evaporated. That meant most American forces in Europe were withdrawn to the United States or other parts of the world. EUCOM had less work to do but was still needed, especially since bases in Germany handled air movement of troops to or from Iraq, Afghanistan and other distant war zones. After the Russian limited attack on Ukraine in 2014, EUCOM was there to handle shipment of weapons and military trainers to Ukraine. When the Russians invaded in February EUCOM was where military aid was sent for Ukraine. As more NATO and non-NATO countries made contributions, ECCU/IDCC established their own base at a German facility which soon included representatives from 26 NATO and non-NATO nations responding to Ukraine requests for weapons and equipment. There is also a Ukraine representative to coordinate deliveries to the Ukrainian border and arrange to have trained Ukrainian operators ready. Most training takes place in Germany but some is done in Poland, Britain and the United States. The EUCOM center makes sure Ukraine has trained personnel ready when new types of weapons arrive at the Ukrainian border. Many of the donated weapons are Cold War era Russian type items that new NATO nations are replacing with new Western equipment. The Ukrainians already have personnel that know how to operate this but new items require some trained operators. The weapons supplied are becoming more complex, to include guided missiles, warplanes and even small warships that can be moved to Ukrainian via a network of rivers and canals. The Ukrainian have a lot of qualified personnel, some of them recent volunteers for military service, who learn operation of the new items fast, often faster than their trainers expected. The EUCOM center keeps track of this and schedules the arrival of new weapons and trained Ukrainian operators to arrive at the border transfer locations at the same time. Britain is also setting a training program for new Ukrainian combat troops in Britain that can turn out 10,000 trained troops every 120 days. Ukraine is supplying untrained personnel for this program, which is in addition to the numerous technical training operations in Poland, Germany, Britain and the United States. Ukraine does not expect to expel the Russians quickly and is training and equipping troops for a long war to expel all Russian forces from Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian troops are doing all the fighting but with superior logistical support they are much better prepared for this fight than the Russians. NATO and non-NATO nations send logistic personnel to the EUCOM center to track the progress of items from their country to Germany where it is moved by rail or aircraft to locations on the Ukrainian border, where Ukrainian vehicles move the material into Ukraine and distribute it to the Ukrainian troops. The main transfer point is in Poland. The Ukrainians have to be careful how they move the new equipment through Ukraine to storage sites or direct to combat zones. The Russians have tried to attack these shipments with missiles but have not been very successful at it. For the Ukrainians moving these shipments safely is more urgent and important than it is for the Russian invaders. The result of this effort is that it provided Ukraine with much more effective logistic support than Russian forces in Ukraine receive. Russia does not have access to a worldwide network of suppliers. Nearly all Russian logistical support comes from Russian sources. This often includes older and often defective weapons. NATO always had more effective logistical support than the Russians. This was also the case during World War I and II when Russia had problems handling local logistics as well as aid from Western allies. In Ukraine this disparity in logistical support has proved to be a key advantage for the Ukrainians, who have, since the 1990s, sought to adopt a Western style of logistical support. Russian invasion plans depended on a quick victory because Russia did not have the logistical capabilities to handle a longer war. That turned out to be a major flaw in the Russian war plans and now they are feeling the impact of superior Ukrainian logistics more and more. This has long been expressed another way; amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. There is a separate NATO coordination center for services, mainly information collected by NATO nation electronic collection and surveillance aircraft operating in NATO air space but are able to cover much of Ukraine. Similar services are provided by NATO nation space satellites. Ukraine, like anyone else, has access to commercial space satellite images but can also get warning from NATO if some of those commercial satellite images are misleading. This doesnt happen as much now because commercial satellites have improved to supply many those verification systems. NATO nations also collect useful information via embassy staff and separate intelligence agency information collection efforts. All this information is available to NATO members in wartime and Ukrainian access to this is one reason why Ukraine is often referred to as nearly a NATO member. Ukraine plans to complete the joining NATO process after the war is over. The outcome is still in doubt, at least in terms of how long it will last. The intel advantage provided by NATO, including the more accurate and reliable weapons and munitions provided by NATO nations appears to be providing a decisive advantage. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / August 4, 2022 / Perk Labs Inc. (CSE:PERK)(OTCQB: PKLBF)(FKT:PKLB) ("Perk" or the "Company") the parent company of Perk Hero, the digital franchise company helping businesses transition to the digital economy, announced today that it received certification from Deliverect for Point-of-Sale ("POS") integration. Founded in 2018, Deliverect is a SaaS company that simplifies online food delivery management. Deliverect seamlessly integrates online orders from food ordering channels, allowing 25,000 establishments to improve operational service and increase customer satisfaction. Deliverect automatically sends incoming orders from ordering platforms to a restaurant's POS system, saving time and eliminating mistakes. Deliverect supports hundreds of different POS systems, including over 30 different POS systems in the Canadian market, such as Square, Clover, TouchBistro, Lightspeed, Micros, and many more. "Today's announcement is an important milestone in our product roadmap and the culmination of months of dedicated work by our development team," says Gary Zhang, Perk Labs' CTO. "As we build on a strong ordering, payment and loyalty technology stack, integration with POS systems was a logical next step. We're excited to work with a partner like Deliverect to provide our customers with powerful, integrated solutions." "We are excited to partner with Deliverect to enable restaurants to streamline their operations and accept orders from table, for pickup and delivery directly from their POS," says Jonathan Hoyles, Perk Labs' CEO. "With our integration with Deliverect, we are removing a critical barrier in the ordering process, by reducing the friction for restaurants when they receive an order through our platform. We know POS integration is a mandatory requirement to support enterprise customers, and with this integration, we are well positioned to demonstrate our value to larger restaurant chains." The next steps for Perk to be fully integrated with Deliverect are to register live restaurant partners for beta testing. As part of Perk's partnership with Deliverect, Perk signed a referral agreement with Deliverect providing that Perk will receive a referral fee for each new restaurant that Perk signs up to Deliverect. About Deliverect Deliverect is a SaaS company that simplifies online food delivery management. It seamlessly integrates online orders from food delivery channels (Uber Eats, Doordash, Just Eat Takeaway.com, etc.), allowing 25,000 establishments to improve operational service and increase customer satisfaction. Operating in over 40 markets around the world, Deliverect is trusted by restaurants and FMCGs companies such as Taco Bell, Burger King, and Unilever, as well as small and midsize restaurants and dark kitchens around the world. To find out more information, visit www.deliverect.com. About Perk Labs Inc. Perk Labs Inc. is the owner of Perk Hero, the digital franchise company helping businesses transition to the digital economy. Perk Hero provides restaurateurs with friendly and reliable digital ordering, payment and loyalty tools to help them survive and thrive in a difficult economic environment. Perk Hero is growing through a unique community-driven digital franchise business that is available to entrepreneurs at an attractive start-up price. For more information about Perk Labs, please visit www.perklabs.io. Visit Perk Hero at www.perkhero.com. For more information on a Perk Franchise, visit www.perkfranchise.com. For more information contact: Jonathan Hoyles, CEO Perk Labs Inc. (833) 338-0299 [email protected] Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking information or forward-looking statements (collectively "forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information is typically identified by words such as: "may", "believe", "thinks", "expect", "exploring", "expand", "could", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "plan", "pursue", "potentially", "projected", "should", "will" and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. These forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, relate to, among other things, the discussion of the Company's business strategies and its expectations concerning future operations, that we are well positioned to demonstrate our value to larger restaurant chains, and expectations concerning registering beta merchants and receiving referral fees. Although the Company considers these forward-looking statements to be reasonable based on information currently available to it, they may prove to be incorrect, and the forward-looking statements in this release are subject to numerous risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause future results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking information provided by the Company is not a guarantee of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Undue reliance should not be placed on such forward-looking information, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are based will occur. SOURCE: Perk Labs Inc. View source version on accesswire.com: $404 million aggregate principal amount of existing notes due 2024 exchanged for $202 million aggregate principal amount of new notes due 2028 and cash $60 million share repurchase reduces shares issued and outstanding by estimated 10.7 million shares Proceeds of new $250 million Term Loan Credit Facility led by Francisco Partners funds cash portion of convertible note exchange and share repurchase CAMPBELL, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- 8x8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT) ("8x8" or the "Company"), a leading integrated cloud communications platform provider, announced today that it has entered into privately negotiated agreements with certain of the holders of its existing 0.50% Convertible Senior Notes due 2024 (the 2024 Notes) to exchange an aggregate of approximately $404 million principal amount of the 2024 Notes for approximately $202 million aggregate principal amount of a newly issued series of 4.00% Convertible Senior Notes due 2028 (the New Notes) and approximately $182 million in cash (the Exchange). The Exchange is expected to close on or about August 11, 2022, subject to customary closing conditions. 8x8 intends to use the proceeds of a new term loan described below to fund the cash portion of the Exchange and repurchase $60 million of the Company's common stock in privately negotiated transactions at an average price per share of approximately $5.61 (equal to the closing price of the Companys common stock on August 3, 2022) to facilitate the Exchange (the Buyback). These repurchases could increase, or prevent a decrease in, the market price of the Companys common stock. Interest on the New Notes will be payable semi-annually in arrears at a rate of 4% per annum on February 1 and August 1 of each year, beginning on February 1, 2023. The New Notes will mature on February 1, 2028, unless earlier converted, redeemed or repurchased. Following the Exchange, Buyback and funding of the new term loan, the Company anticipates changes to its debt and share count profiles as reflected below: Approximately $404 million, or 81%, of the 2024 Notes exchanged for approximately $202 million of the New Notes and approximately $182 million in cash. Total debt outstanding after the exchange and including the term loan facility will be approximately $548 million. Shares issued and outstanding reduced by 10.695 million (8.9%), from approximately 120 million shares to approximately 109 million shares. Reconciliation of Shares Issued and Outstanding: Shares issued and outstanding as of 7/25/221 119,964,673 Cash for share buybacks $60,000,000 Closing share price on 08/3/22 $5.61 Shares repurchased and retired 10,695,000 Pro forma shares outstanding after buybacks 109,269,673 % decrease in shares issued and outstanding 8.9% ____________________________________ 1 Shares issued and outstanding reported in the Companys fiscal first quarter Form 10-Q filed on July 25, 2022. Summary of Changes to 8x8 Debt Profile: New Note Issuance and New Term Loan Post Exchange and Issuance ($MM) Pre- Exchange Exchanged Notes New Notes/Loan Post Exchange Outstanding % Change % of Debt Obligations 2024 Notes $500 ($404) $96 (81)% 18% New 2028 Notes $202 $202 37% New Term Loan due August 2027 $250 $250 46% Total Debt Obligations $500 ($404) $452 $548 10% 100% The initial conversion rate of the New Notes will be 139.8064 shares of the Company's common stock per $1,000 principal amount of New Notes, which is equivalent to an initial conversion price of approximately $7.15 per share, and is subject to adjustment upon the occurrence of certain events. The initial conversion price of the New Notes represents a premium of approximately 27.5% over the last reported sale price of $5.61 per share of the Company's common stock on the New York Stock Exchange on August 3, 2022. The Company will settle conversions of the New Notes by paying or delivering cash, shares of the Companys common stock or a combination of cash and shares of the Companys common stock, at its election, subject to any covenants in the term loan facility. The Company may redeem all or any portion of the New Notes, at its option, on or after August 3, 2025 if the last reported sale price of the Company's common stock has been at least 130% of the conversion price then in effect for at least 20 trading days (whether or not consecutive) during any 30 consecutive trading day period (including the last trading day of such period) ending on, and including, the trading day immediately preceding the date on which 8x8 provides notice of redemption at a redemption price equal to 100% of the principal amount of the New Notes to be redeemed, plus accrued and unpaid interest to, but excluding, the redemption date. Holders of New Notes may require the Company to repurchase their New Notes upon the occurrence of a fundamental change (as defined in the indenture governing the New Notes) at a purchase price equal to the principal amount thereof plus accrued and unpaid interest to, but excluding, the repurchase date. In addition, in connection with certain corporate events or if the Company issues a notice of redemption, it will, under certain circumstances, increase the conversion rate for holders who elect to convert their New Notes in connection with such corporate event or during the relevant redemption period. In connection with the Exchange, 8x8 intends to enter into an indenture establishing the terms of the New Notes. Neither the New Notes, nor any shares of the Company's common stock issuable upon conversion of the New Notes, have been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act), or any state securities laws, and unless so registered, may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act and other applicable securities laws. J. Wood Capital Advisors LLC acted as financial advisor and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP served as legal advisor to the Company on the transaction. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the New Notes, the Company's common stock potentially issuable upon conversion of the New Notes or any other securities, and will not constitute an offer, solicitation or sale in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. 8x8 Announces $250 Million Term Loan Credit Facility in Transaction Led by Francisco Partners Separately, the Company announced a new $250 million senior secured term loan facility in a tailored capital solution led by Francisco Partners. The Company intends to use the facility to fund the cash portion of the exchange of approximately $404 million principal amount of the Companys 0.50% convertible notes due 2024 and the concurrent repurchase of approximately $60 million of the Companys common stock. In connection with the term loan, the Company also issued detachable warrants exercisable for an aggregate of 3.1 million shares of the Companys common stock to Francisco Partners and its affiliates. The warrants carry a five-year term and an exercise price equal to $7.15, representing a 27.5% premium over the closing price of the Companys common stock on August 3, 2022. About 8x8 Inc. 8x8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT) is transforming the future of business communications as a leading Software as a Service provider of 8x8 XCaaS (eXperience Communications as a Service), an integrated contact center, voice communications, video, chat, and API built on one global cloud communications platform. 8x8 uniquely eliminates the silos between Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) to power the communications requirements of all employees globally as they work together to deliver differentiated customer experiences. For additional information, visit www.8x8.com, or follow 8x8 on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. 8x8, 8x8 XCaaS, eXperience Communications as a Service, eXperience Communications Platform are trademarks of 8x8, Inc. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Any statements that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. For example, words such as "may," "will," "should," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," "continue," "strategy," "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "expects," "intends" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include but are not limited to the Company's ability to close the foregoing transactions on the timeline described, with the terms anticipated, or at all. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements depending on a variety of factors. These include that the closing of the transactions is subject to closing conditions. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see "Risk Factors" in the Company's reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, as well as other reports that 8x8 files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and 8x8 undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement for any reason, except as required by law, even as new information becomes available or other events occur in the future. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220803006076/en/ 8x8, Inc. Contacts: Investor Relations: Kate Patterson, 1-408-763-8175 [email protected] Media: John Sun, 1-408-692-7054 [email protected] Source: 8x8, Inc. HONG KONG--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE: BABA and HKEX: 9988, the Company) announces that Irene Yun-Lien Lee, Chairman of Hysan Development Company Limited, and Albert Kong Ping Ng, former Chairman of Ernst & Young China, were appointed as independent directors to the Companys board, effective August 4, 2022. The new appointments demonstrate the Companys commitment to corporate governance excellence and diversity at the board level. Following these appointments, the Companys board currently consists of twelve directors, including seven independent directors. The number of female board members increases to three. I am delighted to welcome Ms. Lee and Mr. Ng to the Alibaba board. The new independent board member appointments are part of Alibabas ongoing enhancement of our corporate governance. Irene and Albert are both respected leaders with invaluable understanding and experience in global markets including mainland China and Hong Kong. I believe Alibaba will greatly benefit from their insight, especially in light of our plans for dual-primary listing in Hong Kong to further broaden and diversify our investor base, said Daniel Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group. Alibaba is one of the most exciting and innovative companies of this generation and I am honored to become its board member, said Irene Yun-Lien Lee. The focus of my career has been to create a deep connection with consumers by curating top of mind physical destinations, where people come to work, shop and play. I am delighted to join Alibaba, with its mission to make it easier to do business with anyone, anywhere. I am thrilled to join the board of a company with such a distinguished combination of Chinese origin and a global vision, said Albert Ng. as Alibaba applies to add Hong Kong as another primary listing venue, I hope my experiences in the capital market of Hong Kong and Greater China can be applied to the company's pursuit of excellence. Mr. Chee Hwa Tung, an independent director of the Company, will not seek re-election after his current term, which will end at the Companys annual shareholding meeting to be held later this year. Mr. Tung has served as an independent director on the Companys board since September 2014. We would like to express our most sincere gratitude to Mr. Tung for his invaluable contributions and full support to Alibaba, which exemplified the highest standards of service and commitment, said Zhang. About Irene Lee Irene Lee has been executive chairman of Hysan Development Company Limited, a company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, since March 2012. Before that she was Hysans non-executive chairman from May 2011 to March 2012, and non-executive director from March 2011 to May 2011. Ms. Lee currently serves as the independent non-executive chairman of Hang Seng Bank Limited, a company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. She also serves as a director of various private and unlisted companies. Previously, Ms. Lee was an executive director of Citicorp Investment Bank Limited in New York, London and Sydney, and head of corporate finance at Commonwealth Bank of Australia and chief executive officer of Sealcorp Holdings Limited, both based in Sydney. In addition, she was until April 2022 an independent director of HSBC Holdings plc, and also previously served as director of a number of public companies. Ms. Lee received a bachelor of arts degree from Smith College, and is barrister-at-law in England and Wales and a member of the Honourable Society of Grays Inn, United Kingdom. About Albert Ng Albert Ng currently serves as an independent non-executive director and chairman of the audit committee of a number of public companies, including Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd., a company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Beijing Airdoc Technology Co., Ltd., a company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and China International Capital Corporation Limited, a company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Mr. Ng worked at Ernst & Young China from April 2007 to June 2020, where he was the chairman of Ernst & Young China and a member of Ernst & Youngs Global Executive Board. Prior to joining Ernst & Young, he was Greater China Managing Partner of Arthur Andersen, Managing Partner China Operation of PricewaterhouseCoopers and Managing Director of Citigroup China Investment Banking. Mr. Ng is the president of the Hong Kong China Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Ng is also a member of the audit committee of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and a council member of the Education Foundation of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Mr. Ng is a member of the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants (HKICPA), Chartered Accountants of Australia and New Zealand (CAANZ), CPA Australia (CPAA) and Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA). He received a bachelors degree in business administration and a masters degree in business administration from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. About Alibaba Group Alibaba Groups mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. The company aims to build the future infrastructure of commerce. It envisions that its customers will meet, work and live at Alibaba, and that it will be a good company that lasts for 102 years. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220803006055/en/ Media Contacts Cathy Yan Alibaba Group +852 9012 5806 [email protected] Ivy Ke Alibaba Group +852 5590 9949 [email protected] Source: Alibaba Group Holding Limited Additional Independent, Assisted and Memory Care Services Coming Soon to the East Side of Indianapolis GREENFIELD, Ind.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Senior Living developer, Avenue Development, in partnership with Randall Residence, announces the groundbreaking of Randall Residence at Gateway Park just outside Indianapolis, Indiana. This senior living campus will consist of independent living cottages and apartments as well as licensed assisted living and memory care apartments and services. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005618/en/ Randall Residence at Gateway Park will consist of independent living cottages and apartments as well as licensed assisted living and memory care apartments and services. Residents will have access to onsite amenities such as multiple dining venues, theater, meeting and activity space, fitness equipment, a beauty salon and more. Strategic outdoor amenity spaces with an emphasis on keeping aging adults healthy will also be a focus of the community. (Photo: Business Wire) "This has been a project three years in the making, and all of our partners showed up {for the groundbreaking}, says Laurie Schultz, Principal and Co-founder, Avenue. Its a true testament to how we truly work with our partners day in and day out and put in all the work together to make this happen, and without everyone working together it wouldnt be such a success. Onsite amenities such as multiple dining venues, theater, meeting and activity space, fitness equipment, a beauty salon and more. Strategic outdoor amenity spaces with an emphasis on keeping aging adults healthy will also be a focus of the community. In addition, the proximity of Hancock Health at Gateway Park provides an opportunity for additional programming to be developed in collaboration with the wellness experts at Hancock Health. Additional housing for seniors is needed in this market, and together with a strong operating partner like Randall Residence, the seniors who choose to live at Gateway Park will experience family-oriented care focused on meeting their individual needs. Thats unique in senior housing, says Michael Mattingly, Principal and Co-founder, Avenue. Avenue and Randall Residence are committed to being an integral part of the community and are excited about future wellness and fitness programming offerings in partnership with Hancock Health and the Hancock Wellness Center. The community is expected to open in Fall 2023. ABOUT AVENUE DEVELOPMENT Avenue Development is a full-service real estate development and advisory company focused on innovative solutions for wellness centered healthcare and senior living properties. Avenue services go beyond the walls of a building to provide developments that positively impact the communities in when they serve. For more information about Avenue, visit avenuedev.com or call 317-800-0480. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005618/en/ Sara Mitchell, Solinity Marketing Phone: 731-695-0243 [email protected] Source: Avenue Development CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Chamberlain University, the number one educator of nursing students in the U.S., celebrated its post-licensure and graduate students at the spring 2022 commencement ceremony. More than 14,000 students graduated between July 2021 and June 2022 and will join a network of nearly 115,000 Chamberlain alumni around the world who are helping to address the projected shortage of half a million nurses by 2030. As the largest school of nursing in the country, Chamberlain has the scale and reach to make a meaningful impact on our nations healthcare needs. Chamberlain is the leading grantor of Bachelor of Science in Nursing degrees to underrepresented minority students in the U.S. and is committed to addressing workforce needs in the healthcare sector. Chamberlain's mission is to provide students of diverse backgrounds access to a quality education and its nursing students are helping serve in underrepresented areas most impacted by nursing healthcare shortage.ii Chamberlains student body is made up of nearly 60% underrepresented minority students, in comparison to the 34% of students from underrepresented minority groups enrolled across all BSN-granting schools.iii Full-time students in fall 2021 identified as 25% Black or African American, 17% Hispanic, 10% Asian, and 2% two or more races. We are dedicated to preparing extraordinary healthcare professionals with the knowledge, skills, values and beliefs required to not only succeed, but to make a difference in todays ever-changing healthcare environment, said Karen Cox PhD, RN, FACHE, FAAN, president, Chamberlain University. We are immensely proud of our graduates and alumni who are filling critical gaps in the healthcare workforce while advancing health equity for their communities and beyond. Chamberlain prepares students for success through the Chamberlain Care Student Success Model, which is a customized program of tools, resources and support to help students complete their degree program and succeed as a nurse or healthcare professional. With 23 campuses in 15 states, BSN Online and six online degree programs, Chamberlain offers a broad spectrum of programs and learning modalities to meet students where they are and offer the flexibility that so many need. About Chamberlain University Chamberlain University is a part of Adtalem Global Education (NYSE: ATGE). Chamberlain Universitys mission is to educate, empower and embolden diverse healthcare professionals who advance the health of people, families, communities, and nations. With 23 campuses in 15 states, BSN Online and six online degree programs, Chamberlain is comprised of the College of Nursing, which offers a three-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree program and flexible post-licensure programs such as the RN to BSN option, Master of Science in Nursing degree program, Doctor of Nursing Practice degree program and graduate certificates, and the College of Health Professions, which offers Master of Public Health, Master of Social Work and Master of Physician Assistant Studies degree programs. Chamberlain University is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, an institutional accreditation agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. For the most updated accreditation information, visit Chamberlain.edu/accreditation. To learn more, visit Chamberlain.edu. About Adtalem Global Education Adtalem Global Education (NYSE: ATGE) is a leading healthcare educator and provider of professional talent to the healthcare industry. With a dedicated focus on driving strong outcomes that increase workforce preparedness, Adtalem empowers a diverse learner population to achieve their goals and make inspiring contributions to their communities. Adtalem is the parent organization of American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Chamberlain University, Ross University School of Medicine, Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, and Walden University. Adtalem and its institutions have more than 10,000 employees and a network of more than 275,000 alumni. Adtalem was named one of Americas Most Responsible Companies 2021 by Newsweek, and one of Americas Best Employers for Diversity in 2021 and 2022 by Forbes. Follow Adtalem on Twitter @adtalemglobal, LinkedIn or visit Adtalem.com for more information. ___________________________ i14,290 is the number of students with a degree or certificate as stated by the Registrars office conferred between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022. iiAnalysis is based on FY2020 IPEDS data downloaded on 10/18/2021. Under-represented minority includes students who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, or two or more races. iiiAccording to AACN's report on 2018-2019 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing, nursing students from minority backgrounds represented 34.2% of students in entry-level baccalaureate programs. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005860/en/ Investor Contact: [email protected] Media Contact: [email protected] Source: Chamberlain University SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- CloudBees, the leading software delivery platform for enterprises, today announced Anuj Kapur as President and Chief Executive Officer. Previously a C-level executive at Cisco and SAP, Kapur brings extensive experience in corporate strategy, product management, go-to-market strategy, and alliances in the enterprise technology sector to CloudBees. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220803005117/en/ Anuj Kapur (Photo: Business Wire) Kapur joins CloudBees at a pivotal time as all enterprises face the reality that software and the speed, quality, and security with which such innovation gets into their customers hands defines their competitiveness and dictates their success. Kapur will focus on accelerating product innovation, strengthening the go-to-market approach, furthering geographic expansion, and scaling the companys global operations. Enterprises know that the software they build and deliver will make or break their future, said Kapur. They also know that speed is table stakes, and that quality, security, and compliance are the next frontier in creating exceptional customer experiences. CloudBees is at the center of enabling some of the worlds largest and most influential brands to make software their most significant differentiator. The opportunity to join CloudBees to shape this next chapter of growth for our customers and employees is an absolute honor. CloudBees Co-Founder Sacha Labourey, who was serving as interim CEO, will remain as Chief Strategy Officer. Labourey will continue as a member of the board and CloudBees executive team, reporting directly to Kapur. Prior to CloudBees, Kapur was President, Corporate Development and Strategy at SAP and was responsible for the companys growth strategy and execution across the entire product and customer life cycle. From 2018 to 2020, he served as Chief Strategy Officer at Cisco where he led a team that worked closely with Ciscos CEO and other top executives on product and go-to-market strategy, as well as startup investments. Kapur also led Cisco's partnerships with AWS, Google, and Apple. Previously at Cisco, Kapur held various executive roles, including within product management in Ciscos security group. Kapur also serves as an advisor to the CEOs of several technology startups in the U.S. and Israel. Kapur holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo and a masters degree in business administration from The Wharton School. The appointment of Kapur comes during a time of significant growth for CloudBees. Since its founding in 2010, CloudBees has raised $246 million in venture capital, including $150 million in a Series F funding round announced in December 2021. CloudBees has grown to more than 600 employees spanning 27 countries. CloudBees is the go-to software delivery provider for enterprises, including market powerhouses such as Capital One, Fidelity Investments, HSBC, Morningstar, Pegasystems, Salesforce, and a number of U.S. federal government agencies. CloudBees is consistently ranked as a category leader by major publications, influencers, and industry analysts in the continuous integration, continuous delivery, release orchestration, and value stream management categories. Additional Resources About CloudBees CloudBees provides the leading software delivery platform for enterprises, enabling them to continuously innovate, compete, and win in a world powered by the digital experience. Designed for the world's largest organizations with the most complex requirements, CloudBees enables software development organizations to deliver scalable, compliant, governed, and secure software from the code a developer writes to the people who use it. The platform connects with other best-of-breed tools, improves the developer experience, and enables organizations to bring digital innovation to life continuously, adapt quickly, and unlock business outcomes that create market leaders and disruptors. CloudBees was founded in 2010 and is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bridgepoint Capital, HSBC, Golub Capital, Delta-v Capital, Matrix Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Visit www.cloudbees.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220803005117/en/ Media Brianna Taylor Manager, Public Relations CloudBees [email protected] Source: CloudBees Company Achieves Record Revenues in the First Half of 2022 Second Quarter 2022 Highlights: Delivered the second-highest quarterly revenue total in history in the second quarter of 2022, despite a challenging macroeconomic environment Consolidated revenues of $364.4 million, a decline of 7.0% or $27.6 million compared to the prior year period For the second quarter of 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment achieved gross transaction value of approximately $13.6 billion, compared to approximately $15.1 billion for the second quarter of 2021. For the second quarter of 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment reported an average price per transaction of $1.7 million. Consolidated operating income of $14.6 million and real estate brokerage segment operating income of $21.6 million compared to $43.2 million and $43.2 million, respectively, in the prior year period Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman of $10.2 million, or $0.13 per diluted common share, compared to net income of $39.5 million, or $0.51 per diluted common share, in the prior year period Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman of $19.2 million compared to $45.3 million in the prior year period, reflecting stand-alone public company expenses Adjusted EBITDA attributed to real estate brokerage segment of $24.4 million compared to $45.3 million in the prior year period Year-to-Date 2022 Highlights: Reported record revenues for the first half of 2022 Consolidated revenues of $673.3 million, an increase of 1.3% or $8.5 million compared to the prior year period For the six months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment achieved gross transaction value of approximately $25.3 billion, compared to approximately $25.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2021. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment reported an average price per transaction of $1.7 million. Consolidated operating income of $22.5 million and real estate brokerage segment operating income of $36.1 million compared to $57.4 million and $57.4 million, respectively, in the prior year period Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman of $16.8 million, or $0.21 per diluted common share, compared to net income of $53.4 million, or $0.69 per diluted common share, in the prior year period Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman of $31.9 million compared to $61.6 million in the prior year period, reflecting stand-alone public company expenses Adjusted EBITDA attributed to real estate brokerage segment of $42.1 million compared to $61.6 million in the prior year period Last Twelve Months Ended June 30, 2022 Highlights: Consolidated revenues of $1.4 billion For the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022 and the year ended December 31, 2021, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment achieved gross transaction value of approximately $51.2 billion and $51.2 billion, respectively. For the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment reported an average price per transaction of $1.6 million. Consolidated operating income of $67.2 million and real estate brokerage segment operating income of $80.8 million Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman of $62.2 million Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman of $81.0 million Adjusted EBITDA attributed to real estate brokerage segment of $91.2 million MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Douglas Elliman Inc. (NYSE: DOUG) today announced financial results for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022. Douglas Elliman delivered the second highest quarterly revenue total in our companys history this past quarterand achieved a record-setting revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2022, said Howard M. Lorber, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Douglas Elliman. We are extremely proud of our team for delivering another successful quarter and we look forward to accelerating our momentum as we capitalize on significant opportunities in the U.S. residential real estate market. GAAP Financial Results Three months ended June 30, 2022. Second quarter 2022 revenues were $364.4 million, compared to revenues of $392.0 million in the second quarter of 2021. The Company recorded operating income of $14.6 million in the second quarter of 2022, compared to operating income of $43.2 million in the second quarter of 2021. Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman for the second quarter of 2022 was $10.2 million, or $0.13 per diluted common share, compared to net income of $39.5 million, or $0.51 per diluted common share, in the second quarter of 2021. Six months ended June 30, 2022. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, revenues were $673.3 million, compared to revenues of $664.8 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021. The Company recorded operating income of $22.5 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to operating income of $57.4 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman for the six months ended June 30, 2022 was $16.8 million, or $0.21 per diluted common share, compared to a net income of $53.4 million, or $0.69 per diluted common share, for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Non-GAAP Financial Measures Non-GAAP financial measures include an adjustment for change in fair value of contingent liability (for purposes of Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted Net Income) and income related to Tax Disaffiliation indemnification (for purposes of Adjusted Net Income, which is included in other, net for Adjusted EBITDA). For purposes of Adjusted EBITDA only, adjustments also include stock-based compensation, equity in earnings (losses) from equity method investments and other, net. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the comparable GAAP financial results for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021 and the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022 are included in Tables 2, 3 and 4. Three months ended June 30, 2022 compared to the three months ended June 30, 2021 Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman (as described in Table 2 attached hereto) were $19.2 million for the second quarter of 2022, compared to $45.3 million for the second quarter of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment (as described in Table 2 attached hereto) were $24.4 million for the second quarter of 2022, compared to $45.3 million for the second quarter of 2021. Adjusted Net Income attributed to Douglas Elliman (as described in Table 3 attached hereto) was $9.7 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2022, and $43.1 million, or $0.55 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2021. Six months ended June 30, 2022 compared to the six months ended June 30, 2021 Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman (as described in Table 2 attached hereto) were $31.9 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $61.6 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment (as described in Table 2 attached hereto) were $42.1 million for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $61.6 million for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Adjusted Net Income attributed to Douglas Elliman (as described in Table 3 attached hereto) was $16.2 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, for the six months ended June 30, 2022, and $57.0 million, or $0.73 per diluted share, for the six months ended June 30, 2021. Last twelve months ended June 30, 2022 For the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022, revenues were $1.4 billion. The Company recorded operating income of $67.2 million for the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022. Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman for the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022 was $62.2 million. For the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022, Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman (as described in Table 2 attached hereto) were $81.0 million. Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment (as described in Table 2 attached hereto) were $91.2 million for the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022. Gross Transaction Value For the three months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans subsidiary, Douglas Elliman Realty, LLC, achieved gross transaction value of approximately $13.6 billion, compared to approximately $15.1 billion for the three months ended June 30, 2021. For the three months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment reported an average price per transaction of $1.7 million. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans subsidiary, Douglas Elliman Realty, LLC, achieved gross transaction value of approximately $25.3 billion compared to approximately $25.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2021. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment reported an average price per transaction of $1.7 million. For the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022 and the year ended December 31, 2021, Douglas Ellimans subsidiary, Douglas Elliman Realty, LLC, achieved gross transaction value of approximately $51.2 billion and $51.2 billion, respectively. For the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022, Douglas Ellimans real estate brokerage segment reported an average price per transaction of $1.6 million. Consolidated Balance Sheet Douglas Elliman maintained a strong balance sheet with cash and cash equivalents of $202.1 million at June 30, 2022. This significant liquidity places the Company in a position of strength in the market. Conference Call to Discuss Second Quarter 2022 Results As previously announced, the Company will host a conference call and webcast on Friday August 5, 2022 at 7:30 AM (ET) to discuss its second quarter 2022 results. Investors can access the call by dialing 888-330-2506 and entering 46689 as the conference ID number. The call will also be available via live webcast at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/484294423. Webcast participants should allot extra time to register before the webcast begins. A replay of the call will be available shortly after the call ends on August 5, 2022 through August 19, 2022. To access the replay, dial 800-770-2030 and enter 466898 as the conference ID number. The archived webcast will also be available at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/484294423 for one year. Non-GAAP Financial Measures Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted Net Income, and financial measures for the last twelve months (LTM) ended June 30, 2022 (referred to as the Non-GAAP Financial Measures) are financial measures not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The Company believes that the Non-GAAP Financial Measures are important measures that supplement discussion and analysis of its results of operations and enhance an understanding of its operating performance. The Company believes the Non-GAAP Financial Measures provide investors and analysts with a useful measure of operating results unaffected by differences in capital structures and ages of related assets among otherwise comparable companies. Management uses the Non-GAAP Financial Measures as measures to review and assess operating performance of the Companys business, and management does and investors should review both the overall performance (GAAP net income) and the operating performance (the Non-GAAP Financial Measures) of the Companys business. While management considers the Non-GAAP Financial Measures to be important, they should be considered in addition to, but not as substitutes for or superior to, other measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP, such as operating income, net income and cash flows from operations. In addition, the Non-GAAP Financial Measures are susceptible to varying calculations and the Companys measurement of the Non-GAAP Financial Measures may not be comparable to those of other companies. Attached hereto as Tables 2, 3 and 4 is information relating to the Companys Non-GAAP Financial Measures for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022 and 2021 and the last twelve months ended June 30, 2022. About Douglas Elliman Inc. Douglas Elliman Inc. (NYSE: DOUG, Douglas Elliman) owns Douglas Elliman Realty, LLC, which is one of the largest residential brokerage companies in the United States with operations in New York City, Long Island, Westchester, Connecticut, New Jersey, the Hamptons, Massachusetts, Florida, California, Colorado, Texas and Nevada. In addition, Douglas Elliman sources, uses and invests in early-stage, disruptive property technology (PropTech) solutions and companies and provides other real estate services, including development marketing, property management and settlement and escrow services in select markets. Additional information concerning Douglas Elliman is available on its website, www.elliman.com. Investors and others should note that we may post information about Douglas Elliman on our website at www.elliman.com or, if applicable, on our accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube or other social media platforms. It is possible that the postings or releases could include information deemed to be material information. Therefore, we encourage investors, the media and others interested in Douglas Elliman to review the information we post on our website at www.elliman.com and on our social media accounts. Forward-Looking and Cautionary Statements This press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities law. All statements other than statements of historical or current facts made in this document are forward-looking. We identify forward-looking statements in this document by using words or phrases such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, intend, may be, continue could, potential, objective, plan, seek, predict, project and will be and similar words or phrases or their negatives. Forward-looking statements reflect our current expectations and are inherently uncertain. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons. Risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ significantly from our current expectations are described in our 2021 Annual Report on Form 10-K and in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. We undertake no responsibility to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement except as required by applicable law. [Financial Tables Follow] TABLE 1 DOUGLAS ELLIMAN INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED COMBINED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS (Dollars in Thousands, Except Per Share Amounts) For comparability purposes, Douglas Elliman Inc. (NYSE: DOUG) began operating as a standalone public company on December 30, 2021 and did not incur any material public company expenses until the first quarter of 2022. Douglas Elliman Inc. also became a full taxpayer after it became a standalone public company on December 30, 2021. Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 (Unaudited) (Unaudited) Revenues: Commissions and other brokerage income $ 348,831 $ 376,033 $ 643,940 $ 635,133 Property management 10,046 9,901 19,245 19,169 Other ancillary services 5,482 6,041 10,074 10,449 Total revenues 364,359 391,975 673,259 664,751 Expenses: Real estate agent commissions 267,182 283,651 490,604 480,668 Sales and marketing 22,136 19,741 41,442 39,095 Operations and support 19,563 16,999 37,654 34,249 General and administrative 32,875 22,887 65,705 42,194 Technology 5,989 3,417 11,282 6,914 Depreciation and amortization 1,986 2,097 4,065 4,220 Operating income 14,628 43,183 22,507 57,411 Other income (expenses): Interest income 32 25 71 72 Equity in (losses) earnings from equity-method investments (114 ) 75 418 75 Change in fair value of contingent liability (3,596 ) (3,523 ) Investment and other income 1,219 493 1,971 391 Income before provision for income taxes 15,765 40,180 24,967 54,426 Income tax expense 5,546 708 8,463 989 Net income 10,219 39,472 16,504 53,437 Net loss attributed to non-controlling interest 27 252 Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman Inc. $ 10,246 $ 39,472 $ 16,756 $ 53,437 Per basic common share: Net income applicable to common shares attributed to Douglas Elliman Inc. $ 0.13 $ 0.51 $ 0.21 $ 0.69 Per diluted common share: Net income applicable to common shares attributed to Douglas Elliman Inc. $ 0.13 $ 0.51 $ 0.21 $ 0.69 TABLE 2 DOUGLAS ELLIMAN INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF ADJUSTED EBITDA (Unaudited) (Dollars in Thousands) Table 2 provides a reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP financial measures. For comparability purposes, Douglas Elliman Inc. (NYSE: DOUG) began operating as a standalone public company on December 30, 2021 and did not incur any material public company expenses until the first quarter of 2022. Its expenses incurred in its public company operations are reported in the Corporate and Other Segment and the operations of its brokerage businesses are reported in the Real Estate Brokerage Segment. LTM Year Ended Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, December 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 2022 2021 Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman Inc. $ 62,157 $ 98,838 $ 10,246 $ 39,472 $ 16,756 $ 53,437 Interest income (82 ) (83 ) (32 ) (25 ) (71 ) (72 ) Income tax expense 9,607 2,133 5,546 708 8,463 989 Net loss attributed to non-controlling interest (438 ) (186 ) (27 ) (252 ) Depreciation and amortization 8,406 8,561 1,986 2,097 4,065 4,220 EBITDA $ 79,650 $ 109,263 $ 17,719 $ 42,252 $ 28,961 $ 58,574 Equity in (earnings) losses from equity-method investments (a) (65 ) 278 114 (75 ) (418 ) (75 ) Change in fair value of contingent liability (1,876 ) 1,647 3,596 3,523 Stock-based compensation expense (b) 5,311 2,659 5,311 Other, net (2,109 ) (529 ) (1,219 ) (493 ) (1,971 ) (391 ) Adjusted EBITDA 80,911 110,659 19,273 45,280 31,883 61,631 Adjusted EBITDA attributed to non-controlling interest 86 40 (71 ) 46 Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman $ 80,997 $ 110,699 $ 19,202 $ 45,280 $ 31,929 $ 61,631 Operating income by Segment: Real estate brokerage $ 80,803 $ 102,098 $ 21,575 $ 43,183 $ 36,116 $ 57,411 Corporate and other (13,609 ) (6,947 ) (13,609 ) Total $ 67,194 $ 102,098 $ 14,628 $ 43,183 $ 22,507 $ 57,411 Real estate brokerage segment Operating income $ 80,803 $ 102,098 $ 21,575 $ 43,183 $ 36,116 $ 57,411 Depreciation and amortization 8,406 8,561 1,986 2,097 4,065 4,220 Stock-based compensation 1,859 934 1,859 Adjusted EBITDA 91,068 110,659 24,495 45,280 42,040 61,631 Adjusted EBITDA attributed to non-controlling interest 86 40 (71 ) 46 Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman $ 91,154 $ 110,699 $ 24,424 $ 45,280 $ 42,086 $ 61,631 Corporate and other segment Operating loss $ (13,609 ) $ $ (6,947 ) $ $ (13,609 ) $ Stock-based compensation 3,452 1,725 3,452 Adjusted EBITDA attributed to Douglas Elliman $ (10,157 ) $ $ (5,222 ) $ $ (10,157 ) $ _____________ a. Represents equity in earnings recognized from the Companys investment in certain real estate businesses that are accounted for under the equity method and are not consolidated in the Companys financial results. b. Represents amortization of stock-based compensation. $934 and $1,859 is attributable to the Real estate brokerage segment for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022, and $1,725 and $3,452 is attributable to the Corporate and other segment for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022. TABLE 3 DOUGLAS ELLIMAN INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF ADJUSTED NET INCOME (Unaudited) (Dollars in Thousands, Except Per Share Amounts) Table 3 provides a reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP financial measures. For comparability purposes, Douglas Elliman Inc. (NYSE: DOUG) began operating as a standalone public company on December 30, 2021 and did not incur any material public company expenses until the first quarter of 2022. Douglas Elliman Inc. also became a full taxpayer after it became a standalone public company on December 30, 2021. Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 Net income attributed to Douglas Elliman Inc. $ 10,246 $ 39,472 $ 16,756 $ 53,437 Change in fair value of contingent liability 3,596 3,523 Income related to Tax Disaffiliation indemnification (553 ) (553 ) Total adjustments (553 ) 3,596 (553 ) 3,523 Adjusted Net Income attributed to Douglas Elliman Inc. $ 9,693 $ 43,068 $ 16,203 $ 56,960 Per diluted common share: Adjusted Net Income applicable to common shares attributed to Douglas Elliman Inc. $ 0.12 $ 0.55 $ 0.20 $ 0.73 TABLE 4 DOUGLAS ELLIMAN INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF REVENUES (Unaudited) (Dollars in Thousands) LTM Year Ended Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, December 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2021 2022 2021 2022 2021 Revenues: Commissions and other brokerage income $ 1,301,223 $ 1,292,416 $ 348,831 $ 376,033 $ 643,940 $ 635,133 Property management 37,421 37,345 10,046 9,901 19,245 19,169 Other ancillary services 23,002 23,377 5,482 6,041 10,074 10,449 Total revenues $ 1,361,646 $ 1,353,138 $ 364,359 $ 391,975 $ 673,259 $ 664,751 Gross transaction value (in billions) $ 51.2 $ 51.2 $ 13.6 $ 15.1 $ 25.3 $ 25.3 Total transactions (absolute) 31,843 32,400 7,789 8,464 15,001 15,558 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005942/en/ Stephen Larkin, Douglas Elliman Inc. 917-902-2503 Emily Claffey/Benjamin Spicehandler/Columbia Clancy FGS Global 212-687-8080 Abi Genis FGS Global - Europe +44 (0)20 3178 8914 J. Bryant Kirkland III, Douglas Elliman Inc. 305-579-8000 Source: Douglas Elliman Inc. OTTAWA, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Edgewater Wireless Systems Inc. (Edgewater or the Company) (YFI: TSX.V) (OTC: KPIFF) is pleased to announce a proposed non-brokered private placement of unsecured convertible debentures (the Debentures) for aggregate gross proceeds of up to $1,000,000 (the Offering). The Debentures will mature on the date that is three years from the date of issuance (the Maturity Date). The principal amount of the Debenture is convertible at the election of the holders at any time after the date, which is four months following the date of closing of the Offering (the Closing Date) and before the Maturity Date, and redeemable at the election of the Company at any time after the date which is 12 months following the Closing Date and before the Maturity Date, into units (each a Unit) of the Company at a price of $0.12 per Unit. Each Unit will be comprised of one common share (each, a Share) and one common share purchase warrant (each, a Warrant). Each Warrant entitles the holder to purchase one additional common share of the Company at an exercise price of $0.23 per share for a period of three years after the Closing Date, subject to an acceleration provision that is triggered at the Companys election if daily volume weighted average price of the Companys Shares is over $0.30 for ten consecutive trading days. Each Debenture will bear interest from the date of issue until the Maturity Date or date of redemption or conversion at a rate of 10% per annum (non-compounded) payable quarterly in arrears in cash or, at the election of the Company, in Shares. Subject to TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) acceptance, any interest that has accrued on the principal amount outstanding under the Debenture will be payable in Shares at a price per share which equals the higher of the Market Price (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) on the date the accrued interest becomes payable or the volume weighted average trading price of the Shares on the TSXV for the 10 consecutive trading days preceding the date the accrued interest becomes payable. The Offering is subject to a 15% over-allotment pursuant to which the Company may sell additional Debentures for aggregate gross proceeds of up to an additional $150,000 over the $1,000,000 Offering amount described herein. The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Offering for general working capital purposes. In connection with the Offering, the Corporation may pay finders fees in cash or securities or a combination of both, as permitted by the policies of the TSXV. Closing of the Offering may occur in one or more tranches. The Debentures and any securities issuable upon conversion will be subject to a statutory hold period of four months from the date of issuance of the Debentures. The Offering is subject to final approval by the TSXV. About Edgewater Wireless We make Wi-Fi. Better. Edgewater Wireless (www.edgewaterwireless.com) is the industry leader in innovative Spectrum Slicing technology for residential and commercial markets. We develop advanced Wi-Fi silicon solutions, Access Points, and IP licensing designed to meet the high-density and high quality-of-service needs of service providers and their customers. With over 26 granted patents, Edgewaters Multi-Channel, Single Radio (MCSR) technology revolutionizes Wi-Fi, delivering next-generation Wi-Fi today. Edgewaters physical layer Spectrum Slicing allows a frequency band to be divided, or sliced, to enable more radios to operate in a given area. Think of Spectrum Slicing like moving from a single-lane road to a multi-lane highway regardless of Wi-Fi technology. The recently completed Proof of Concept (PoC) with a major Tier 1 Service Provider showed 7 to 18 times performance gains in 75% of homes surveyed. Interestingly, homes with the most devices saw the greatest improvements. For more information, visit www.edgewaterwireless.com. NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804006035/en/ Edgewater Wireless: Andrew Skafel, President and CEO E: [email protected] Bill Mitoulas, Investor Relations E: [email protected] T: +1.416.479.9547 www.edgewaterwireless.com Source: Edgewater Wireless Systems Inc. HARTLAND, Wis.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Fathom Digital Manufacturing Corp. (NYSE: FATH), an industry leader in on-demand digital manufacturing services, today announced that it plans to issue financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022 on Monday, August 15, 2022 before the open of market trading. Fathom will also hold a conference call the same day at 8:30 am Eastern Time. To participate on the conference call, please dial +1-844-200-6205 (US) or +1-929-526-1599 (international) and use the access code: 489270. The conference call will also be broadcast live over the Internet and include a slide presentation. To access the webcast and supporting materials, please visit the investor relations section of Fathoms website at https://investors.fathommfg.com. A replay of the conference call will be available through August 22, 2022 by dialing +1-866-813-9403 (US) or +1-226-828-7578 (international) and entering the access code: 896018. The event will also be archived on Fathoms website. About Fathom Digital Manufacturing Fathom is one of the largest on-demand digital manufacturing platforms in North America, serving the comprehensive product development and low- to mid-volume manufacturing needs of some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world. With more than 25 unique manufacturing processes and a national footprint with nearly 450,000 square feet of manufacturing capacity across 12 facilities, Fathom seamlessly blends in-house capabilities across plastic and metal additive technologies, CNC machining, injection molding & tooling, sheet metal fabrication, and design and engineering. With more than 35 years of industry experience, Fathom is at the forefront of the Industry 4.0 digital manufacturing revolution, serving clients in the technology, defense, aerospace, medical, automotive and IOT sectors. To learn more, visit https://fathommfg.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005678/en/ Michael Cimini Director, Investor Relations Fathom Digital Manufacturing (262) 563-5575 [email protected] Source: Fathom Digital Manufacturing Corporation Szechenyi Funds, a Hungarian fund manager, to invest $20 million in Flashpoint VC III fund. The close allows VC III to reach its target fund size of US$100 million. LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Flashpoint Venture Capital, an international technology investment firm that manages equity and debt funds that are focused on global Series A tech startups originating in Emerging Europe and Israel, announces that Szechenyi Funds signed up for a commitment of US$20 million in Flashpoints VC III fund becoming Flashpoints first institutional limited partner. While Szechenyi Funds focus is on financial institutions, large corporates, and more mature SMEs, it provides start-ups with "smart money" through domestic incubators and accelerators and especially through fund of funds investments. Michael Szalontay, co-founder and General Partner at Flashpoint commented: We are delighted to reach our initial goal of over US$100m in commitments for our VC III fund despite the extremely challenging backdrop for fundraising. Being a Hungarian, I am especially proud that our first institutional investor is from Hungary as we are pursuing a shared mission in developing the venture capital ecosystem in Hungary and the Carpathian basin. Alexander Konoplyasty, co-founder, General Partner at Flashpoint, and the Managing Partner for Flashpoint VC III said: We have a tailored strategy to invest in b2b software companies in Western markets where we are particularly focussing on founders who originate from Emerging Europe and Israel. 1/5th of Western unicorns were founded by expats from Eastern Europe and Israel they are much more cost-efficient than an average U.S. start-up and there is tremendous pent-up demand for capital among them. We, therefore, bring a strong cultural fit, a wide business network and we look forward to equipping our founders for the next phases in their development. Denes Jobbagy, CEO and president of Szechenyi Funds added: We know from experience that Emerging Europe talent and professional investment is a highly efficient combination. Especially so in the following years when increasing cost efficiencies through technology will be more important than ever before. About Flashpoint Flashpoint is an international investment group with over . US$450m AuM and a focus on Western Tech Companies founded by expats from Emerging Europe & Israel. Flashpoint manages six venture funds: four VC funds, a Venture Debt Fund, and a Secondary Fund. Investors in Flashpoints funds include more than 130 major family offices and HNWIs. The company has offices in London, Tel-Aviv, Budapest, Warsaw, Riga, and Nicosia. The funds have made investments in over 55 companies including names such as Guesty, Chili Piper, and Office RnD. Flashpoint has completed eleven exits, including the sale of its stakes in Shazam (to Apple) and Chess.com (to PokerStars founders and General Atlantic). About Szechenyi Funds Szechenyi Funds is one of the largest and most active investors in the domestic capital market. It manages assets of over USD 400 million, including 80+ portfolio companies. It works closely with its owner, the Rudolf Kalman Foundation for the Obuda University, which allows for a high degree of synergy between technical and economic disciplines and practical business. The aim of the Szechenyi Funds is to contribute to the long-term growth and stability of the Hungarian economy by investing capital in high value-added enterprises. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220802005674/en/ For More information please contact: Eddie Waller, Instinctif Partners [email protected] Source: Flashpoint Venture Capital TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The Ontario Nurses Association (ONA), the Canadian Union of Public Employees and SEIU Healthcare will hold a media conference (virtual ZOOM link below) on Friday, August 5, 2022, at 11 a.m. to urge the province to immediately implement five priority measures to deal with what is a now a dire staffing crisis. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that there are 45,000 vacant health-care positions in Ontario. The three unions have repeatedly offered the government dialogue and provided solutions (so far unheeded) to avoid a complete collapse of our hospital care. They say that for those working on the front lines of Ontarios hospitals it is incomprehensible why the Doug Ford government has no comprehensive plan to deal with the staffing crisis thats intensified to the point where hospital units and emergency rooms are closing. This is an untenable situation, leaving thousands of Ontario patients without needed care in their community. Collectively, CUPE, ONA, SEIU Healthcare represent over 120,000 registered nurses, registered practical nurses, personal support workers, porters, cleaners, administrative and other hospital staff a workforce who are more than 85% female. WHO: Cathryn Hoy, President Ontario Nurses Association Michael Hurley, President CUPEs Ontario Council of Hospital Unions Sharleen Stewart, President SEIU Healthcare WHAT: Media conference Health unions outline five priority measures to turn around Ontarios staff crisis WHERE: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtdeGvqDsiE9G1WM41llXbf1wCtVD7sahs WHEN: Friday, August 5, 2022 11 a.m. SY:lf/cope491 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005826/en/ Stella Yeadon, CUPE Communications, 416-559-9300, [email protected] Sheree Bond, ONA Media Relations Officer, 416-986-8240, [email protected] Corey Johnson, SEIU Healthcare Communications, 416-529-8909, [email protected] Source: Canadian Union of Public Employees Former Apple and Meta executives join Juno, bringing consumer product and housing expertise to Junos sustainable proptech platform SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Juno, a leading venture-funded sustainable proptech company, announced two additions to its growing leadership team. The company has appointed Tim Twerdahl to serve as its first Chief Product Officer and Menka Sethi to serve as its first Chief Business Officer. Tim has over 20 years of experience creating products and services that customers love at leading technology companies including Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. Most recently, he served as Apples Vice President of Home & Audio Products, overseeing AirPods, Apple TV, HomePod, HomeKit, and AirPlay. At Apple, Tim created the companys first product team focused on the home by bringing together products and technologies from across the company to deliver new and innovative experiences to Apples customers at home. At Amazon, Tim led the Fire TV business, expanding the product line and launching Fire TV Stick, which became the best-selling product on Amazon during his tenure. Im thrilled to be joining the Juno team, says Tim. Junos mission-driven work to simultaneously address both the housing crisis and the climate crisis couldnt be more important. Their thoughtful, design-centric, scalable approach to housing will allow people in cities across the country to live healthier, happier, more eco-conscious lives. Menka has over 20 years of experience as an architect and business strategist in the housing delivery space across a variety of roles, at companies including Meta and the American Battery Technology Company. At Meta, Menka drove the companys global location strategies and led Metas decision to deploy $1B in housing investments to advance policy reform addressing California's housing crisis. As part of this investment, Menka created and launched innovative partnerships and pilot programs to address gaps in housing policy and delivery systems. She also brought about cross-sector partnerships within academia, employers, and civil society to advance California State housing reform bills, and envisioned and operationalized Facebooks $75MM Catalyst Housing Fund in partnership with local community groups, cities, LISC, the Housing Trust of Silicon Valley, and the San Francisco Foundation to finance affordable housing preservation and development projects in Silicon Valley. Following Meta, Menka served as the COO of the American Battery Technology company, where she led the operational and business strategies that scaled the company from $50MM to $1B in market value. Juno is a natural extension of my work designing, developing, and piloting innovative housing projects, says Menka. Junos approach to building housing with low capital intensity, high scalability, and a commitment to sustainability has the potential to drive significant improvements to the way housing is created and made available. Im excited to work with the team to bring our vision of quality housing for more people to life. We are delighted to welcome Tim and Menka to the Juno team at this important period of growth for the company, says Jonathan Scherr, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Juno. Their record of leadership and impact, paired with their shared vision for increasing the supply of more consumer-centric housing, make Tim and Menka the ideal partners as we scale Juno to bring more beautiful, sustainable, and affordable homes to cities across the country. At Juno, Tims first priority will be to build out the product, program management, and marketing teams to help deliver on Junos vision of delivering beautifully designed, sustainable buildings created using a system of mass timber components that are both highly efficient and earth-friendly. As Chief Business Officer, Menka will be focused on Junos go-to-market strategies, leading the policy and partnerships work that will drive Junos business as it scales across the country. Co-founded by Scherr and BJ Siegel, Chief Design Officer at Juno and former Senior Design Director of Real Estate and Development at Apple responsible for the Apple Store, Juno was launched in 2020 and is building the worlds first network of mass timber apartment buildings. The company is combining software and a proprietary building system to bring more sustainable, healthy, and efficient buildings to cities around the world. ABOUT JUNO: Juno is an integrated design and development company that creates extraordinary buildings with partner architects and engineers. The company uses software and scripts to accelerate the design process and connect building design to an increasing network of partner suppliers across the country and around the world. Juno partners with visionary developers and landowners to make better housing a reality for the next generation of city dwellers. Learn more at https://juno.co/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220801005634/en/ Alex Hollander Juno Communications [email protected] 650.862.7917 Source: Juno NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- KBRA releases the July 2022 issue of CMBS Trend Watch. This months Spotlight features a review of the impact of servicer advancing (or lack thereof) for end-of-life conduit transactions. Servicer advancing requires the master servicer to advance principal and interest on delinquent loans to the extent deemed recoverable. For end-of-life conduits, non-recoverable advance determinations (NRAD) would cause interest shortfalls to impact most or all of the outstanding classes, including those with relatively high levels of credit enhancement. A look at the 2012 conduit universe shows a few transactions where the remaining loans are mostly nonperforming, and where the servicer determined that all advances of principal and interest on the loans are NRAD. This led to interest shortfalls that impacted most or all of the outstanding classes, including those with relatively high levels of credit enhancement. The Spotlight provides examples of affected transactions, as well as a more detailed discussion of NRADs. The publication also provides highlights on new issuance in the sector, as well as surveillance activity. In July, KBRA published pre-sales for four deals ($3.4 billion) including two SB transactions ($1.7 billion), one Freddie Mac K-Series ($1.2 billion), and one single-family rental ($464.8 million). Julys surveillance activity included rating actions on 362 classes consisting of 348 affirmations, 10 downgrades, and four upgrades. The activity was effectuated across 34 transactions including 19 conduits, nine single-borrower transactions, three Freddie Mac K-Series, one commercial real estate collateralized loan obligation (CRE CLO), one large loan, and one re-remic transaction. Click here to view the report. About KBRA KBRA is a full-service credit rating agency registered in the U.S., the EU, and the UK, and is designated to provide structured finance ratings in Canada. KBRAs ratings can be used by investors for regulatory capital purposes in multiple jurisdictions. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005705/en/ Cammy Wan, Analyst, CMBS Ratings Surveillance +1 (646) 731-3327 [email protected] Larry Kay, Senior Director, CMBS Ratings Surveillance +1 (646) 731-2452 [email protected] Roy Chun, Senior Managing Director, CMBS Ratings Surveillance +1 (646) 731-2376 [email protected] Eric Thompson, Senior Managing Director, Head of Global Structured Finance Ratings +1 (646) 731-2355 [email protected] Business Development Michele Patterson, Managing Director +1 (646) 731-2397 [email protected] Source: KBRA Let everything inside you out. The power to be yourself is what makes you brilliant. ~Alicia Keys OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The good vibes lifestyle beauty brand created by artist, producer, entrepreneur and New York Times best-selling author Alicia Keys with leading dermatologist Dr. Renee Snyder wants you to protect your inner and outer light with its first SPF skincare offering. The new Protect Your Light Daily Moisturizer with SPF 30 protects, moisturizes and hydrates skin. This dermatologist-developed, clean, non-comedogenic, vegan and cruelty free formula both protects and hydrates without leaving a white cast. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005679/en/ Keys Soulcare launches its first skincare offering, Protect Your Light Daily Moisturizer SPF 30. (Photo: Business Wire) Everybody has been asking for this Keys Soulcare SPF offering, and Im so happy its here! I love it! Its lightweight, theres no white residue, it WORKS AND it reminds us to us to protect our light and keep paying attention to you, said Alicia Keys. Its our first offering with broad spectrum SPF. This is so important. Everyone needs this sunscreen! With Keys Soulcare, Alicia invites all of us to walk in our own strength and nurture an empowered state of mind, explains Kory Marchisotto, President, Keys Soulcare. Protect Your Light is another chapter in this journey, protecting you from the suns rays while helping you feel more powerful in your own skin. INTRODUCING PROTECT YOUR LIGHT DAILY MOISTURIZER WITH SPF 30 (50ML, $32) Powerful hydration meets invisible broad spectrum sun protection for all skin tones in this lightweight daily moisturizer. Skin-loving Ingredients Infused with squalane and niacinamide to create a highly efficacious formula that is gentle enough for all skin types, Protect Your Light is a non-greasy moisturizer and sunscreen with broad spectrum UVA / UVB protection. Soul-nourishing Ritual For me, applying sunscreen every morning is an opportunity to reflect on protecting myself, said Alicia. When you follow this SPF moisturizer with our Let Me Glow Illuminating Serum, its a little reminder to not just protect yourself, but to also let yourself shine. These two truly are soulmates. Honoring the connection between skin and soul, try the Daily Glow Ritual. Prime, protect and hydrate with this glow-boosting ritual that shields your skin from harmful rays in three easy steps. Step 1: Use the Keys Soulcare Be Luminous Exfoliator to gently buff away dullness for a smooth, radiant complexion. State the affirmation aloud, I am layered, complex and divine. Step 2: Protect skin with Keys Soulcare Protect Your Light Daily Moisturizer SPF 30. Massage a generous amount evenly onto the face and neck. State the affirmation aloud, I protect my inner light. Step 3: Finish with Keys Soulcare Let Me Glow Illuminating Serum for a radiant glow or as a primer for makeup. State the affirmation aloud, I give myself permission to glow. Protect Your Light Daily Moisturizer SPF 30 is available at keyssoulcare.com and will be available at ulta.com on August 14. Go on and share your radiance with the world! Yall are so bright and beautiful. ~Alicia Keys About Keys Soulcare: Keys Soulcare is a lifestyle beauty brand created by artist, producer, entrepreneur, and New York Times best-selling author Alicia Keys. Born of Alicias personal skincare journey and her passion for bringing light into the world, the brand vision is more than skin deep. With an inclusive point of view, an authentic voice, and a line of skin-loving, dermatologist-developed, clean, and cruelty free product offerings, Keys Soulcare aims to bring new meaning to beauty by honoring ritual in our daily life and practicing intention in every action. The brand is available online and through exclusive retail partnerships. Learn more by visiting www.keyssoulcare.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005679/en/ Media: Keys Soulcare Corporate Communications Melinda Fried [email protected] Business Media Inquiries: SuJin Oh [email protected] Consumer Media Inquiries: Danielle Marmel [email protected] Alicia Keys Inquiries: Kristen Foster [email protected] Erica Gerard [email protected] Source: Keys Soulcare AHF Zoom Press Telecon: Thurs., August 4 @ 11:00 am PT Now that both the State of California and Los Angeles County have declared states of emergency on monkeypox, AHF is urging L.A. County health officials to swiftly ramp up and improve its uneven response to the virus outbreak that is primarily affecting gay men or men who have sex with men (MSM) AHF will revisit its 6-point Monkeypox Plan that it proposed to County officials in early July that includes public briefings, safety warnings and ads in bathhouses and on hookup apps, lobbying the federal government for vaccines and supplies, engaging with community partners like AHF and engaging in research with universities on the changed characteristics of the virus in this pandemic LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- AHF, the largest global AIDS organization with treatment clinics or operations in 45 countries, will host a Zoom Press Teleconference THURSDAY, August 4 at 11:00 am PT (2:00 pm ET) to discuss actions that it believes Los Angeles County health officials should take on monkeypox now that both L.A. County and the State of California have declared states of emergency on the virus. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220803006079/en/ AHF will also run a full-page, full-color ad in this Sundays Los Angeles Times (8/7/22), the second Sunday it has run an ad targeting L.A. County over its monkeypox response. (Photo: Business Wire) AHF will revisit its six-point monkeypox response plan which it first proposed to county officials in July. The formal declaration of a state of emergency in Los Angeles County now allows government and public health officials to mobilize additional resources and request recovery assistance under the California Disaster Assistance Act to increase and deploy funding and emergency planning to combat the monkeypox outbreak more effectively. WHAT: MONKEYPOX ZOOM PRESS TELECONFERENCE: Global outbreak affects U.S. -- AHF to urge L.A. County Dept. of Public Health to step up education, prevention and surveillance. WHEN: Thursday, August 4th, 2022 11:00 am PT (2:00 pm ET) WHO: Michael Weinstein, AHF President Carl Millner, MD, AHF Internal Medicine Regional Medical Director, West (pending confirmation) Adam Sukhija-Cohen, PhD, MPH, AHF Director of Advocacy and Policy Research, Public Health Division Research Whitney Engeran Cordova, Vice President, Public Health Division, AHF (pending confirmation) HOW: Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83033590418 PRESS CONTACT: Ged Kenslea, AHF Dir. of Communications, (323) 791-5526 cell, [email protected] B ROLL: AHFs 6-point Monkeypox Response Plan, also, a Monkeypox: L.A. County Alert full-page newspaper ad by AHF which will run Sunday, August 7 in the Los Angeles Times and which urges L.A. County to Put the Public Back in Public Health. Monkeypox: AHFs 6-Point Plan for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health should conduct twice weekly public briefings outlining the number of new cases and where they are occurring. Warnings to the gay and bisexual male population should be launched online, in newspapers and in outdoor advertising advising men to watch for symptoms; avoid group sexual situations; consult a doctor if you have symptoms indicative of monkeypox, and isolate if you are diagnosed. Require signs to be posted in commercial sex venues and via banner or other ads on hookup applications. Lobby the federal government to supply vaccine on an emergency basis. Regularly engage community partners to assist the Department of Public Health in prevention, testing, vaccination and treatment of monkeypox. Engage universities to initiate studies to determine the changed characteristics of monkeypox in the current pandemic. Now that a formal state of emergency on monkeypox has been declared in Los Angeles, we are calling on the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to swiftly scale up and improve its response to the virusincluding securing $10 million in funding for monkeypox and STDsafter an uneven, disjointed start with monkeypox, said Michael Weinstein, President of AHF. County health officials can use AHFs six-point plan as a roadmap to quickly and efficiently get on track with monkeypox and also rely on community partners like AHF to assist. Now is the time to put the public back in public health. AHF LA Times Advocacy Ad: Monkeypox: L.A. County Alert AHF will also run a full-page, full color ad in this Sundays Los Angeles Times (8/7/22), the second Sunday it has run an ad targeting L.A. County over its monkeypox response. This ad is titled Monkeypox: L.A. County Alert. The first ad, titled L.A. County Fails Gay Men AGAIN ran Sunday, July 31, 2022. As part of efforts to educate its own AHF Healthcare Center patients and clients as well as the general public who may seek free HIV or STD testing at one of AHF Public Health Divisions 35 AHF Wellness Centers in the U.S., AHF created the following AHF Monkeypox Information Sheet. Monkeypox has become a worldwide public health crisis, with more than 25,000 confirmed or presumptive positive cases reported as of today across more than 75 countries where it is not considered endemic, according to Reuters Monkeypox Factbox. AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.6 million individuals in 45 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/aidshealth, follow us @aidshealthcare or subscribe to our AHF podcast AHFter Hours. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220803006079/en/ MEDIA CONTACT: Ged Kenslea, Senior Director, Communications for AHF, +1.323.791.5526, [email protected] Source: AIDS Healthcare Foundation Krishna has brought financial growth and successful innovative strategies to propel the 40-year-old national retailer BURNSVILLE, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Suresh Krishna, President and CEO of family-owned Northern Tool + Equipment, is adding more power to the retailer-and-manufacturing companys 40-plus year history through bold moves and innovation. Now two years into his role as CEO, Krishna is driving forward a focus of more retail spaces and embracing the brands innovative roots to develop battery-powered professional-grade equipment. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005254/en/ Suresh Krishna has brought financial growth and successful innovative strategies to propel the 40-year-old national retailer. (Photo: Business Wire) Krishna took helm of the company in April 2020 and has successfully navigated a pandemic and other challenges to capture successful results, including a 40 percent increase in revenue and the addition of 1.5 million new customers over the last two years. In recent years, Northern Tool has also beefed-up its product inventory, from 40,000 items pre-Covid to more than 100,000 spanning 60 categories that support the pros and serious DIYers who work in construction, landscaping, auto, electrical, welding and more. Krishna sees this deeper assortment as a key to keeping customers returning to Northern Tool. Northern Tool is proud to be a partner to our great customers, especially as our customers are the people who are at the frontlines building America, said Krishna. Our customers see success and pride in the work they do and the things they make with their own hands, and we are excited to be a part of that success. Boldly Leaning into More Brick-and-Mortar, While Surging Online Success Northern Tool currently has 125 stores across nearly 25 states primarily in the Midwest and Southeast. Looking forward, Krishna is aiming to expand Northern Tools brick-and-mortar locations, with a goal of 300-plus stores in the next decade. In a June interview with HBS Dealer, Krishna said, Northern Tool sees tremendous value in growing our retail footprint and is excited to add new stores in many new communities over the next decade. While other companies have pulled back from opening new stores, we have doubled down by demonstrating that we are a big believer in brick-and-mortar, with plans to have over 300 stores by the next decade. In parallel with its brick-and-mortar vision, Krishna remains focused on continuing the companys online sales success noting that 35 percent of the Northern Tools sales are via ecommerce. We have a saying that we were omnichannel before the term omnichannel existed, and that is demonstrated through our unique mix of retail spaces, catalog, online e-commerce and innovative distribution practices, said Krishna. Bringing Solutions to Supply Chain Challenges During his time as CEO, Krishna has spearheaded solutions to address supply chain issues. Krishna told Authority Magazine that a key to Northern Tools success was to pull out of the port of LA in early 2020, and explore other ports like Charleston and Houston, which opened up other options, including implementing on-shoring or near-shoring approach to sourcing. And to further support its customers, Krishna has created storefronts to not only serve as excellent customer-centric hubs for pros and serious DIYers to seek out product solutions to their jobs, but also mini-warehouses. Via ship-to and ship-from strategies, Northern Tool retail spaces now provide more convenience and speed to customers, while lessening the burden on the companys distribution centers. Innovating, Back to the Future Northern Tools founder Don Kotula started the company by creating an innovative log splitter a desired piece of equipment in the time of the countrys energy crisis in the early 1980s. Now, under Krishnas leadership, Northern Tool will soon launch a battery-powered log splitter. The company is also working on more battery powered equipment, including agricultural sprayers. Northern is proud to manufacture its exclusive lines of pro-grade equipment here in the US, and with this, the company is embracing and innovating emerging technology with battery-powered electric equipment, said Krishna. Importantly, these innovative tools have come to life from our deep understanding and listening to our customers and their insights. Its that understanding that has kept us moving forward. Building Up Support for the Trades Another key focus of Krishnas is adding more resources to support the future of the skilled trades workforce. Through the companys Tools for the Trades program, Northern Tool has donated thousands of dollars to career and technical education programs across high schools in its retail footprint to give students hands-on experience with pro-grade tools. We believe its our duty to make sure we can help build the next generation of tradespeople, Krishna told Retail TouchPoints. We are creating an awareness that there are other career paths. These are good jobs, jobs where people can be their own masters as entrepreneurs. The ones who are building the future of our country are people who work with their hands building the countrys highways, roads, bridges and buildings. Skilled tradespeople are putting their heart and mind and soul into doing something and creating something. About Northern Tool + Equipment Family-owned Northern Tool + Equipment, based in Burnsville, Minnesota, has been a leading supplier of high-quality tools and equipment for 40 years, providing the right product solutions through direct channels, online and through 125 retail locations across 23 states. Along with a deep selection of hand, power and air tools, Northern Tool + Equipment carries a wide variety of products to match every job from DIYers to commercial customers with more than 100,000 tools ready to ship. In addition to its retail and online experience, Northern Tool is also a manufacturer of products through its private label brands of NorthStar, Powerhorse, Ironton, Klutch and more. Learn more about Northern Tool + Equipment at www.NorthernTool.com and stay connected to Northern Tool through social media: View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005254/en/ Nathan Bowie [email protected] (612) 767-2403 Source: Northern Tool + Equipment TURIN, Italy--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Reply, thanks to its proprietary WMS solution suites LEA Reply and Click Reply has been recognized as a Visionary in the annual Gartner Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems among 17 vendors worldwide. As per Gartner, Visionaries must have a coherent, compelling and innovative strategy that seeks to deliver a differentiated, robust and vibrant offering to the market. Reply has been named a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WMS for the third consecutive year. We believe, in the 2022 report, Reply has consolidated its position, moving further in Completeness of Vision, confirming its innovative DNA and thought leadership mindset. Reply leverages a microservices-based cloud digital platform to offer its customers the extensibility, flexibility and adaptability necessary to unlock new business opportunities. Through off-the-shelf building blocks, Reply can also support the composition of tailor-made solutions to quickly react to market challenges. Alongside its strong support to core WMS processes and warehouse automation capabilities, Reply has a clear vision to evolve towards supply chain convergence and increasingly data-driven approach, with new partnerships and continuous scouting of the latest cutting-edge technologies. This had led to be trusted by new, global customers across a variety of industries, from retail, fashion and FMCG with a focus on omnichannel logistics, to automotive and manufacturing. Reply continues to innovate and focus on extending its capabilities within the LEA Reply and Click Reply solutions to improve its customers time-to-value and long-term quality and to support customers evolving supply chain execution needs. We are very proud to have been recognized by Gartner, for the third consecutive time, as a Visionary in the Magic Quadrant for WMS, said Enrico Nebuloni, Executive Partner at Reply. We think this recognition truly reflects our mission to be thought leaders to drive innovation in the supply chain and support our customers in their transformation journey, to keep pace with an increasingly complex and demanding market landscape. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems, Dwight Klappich, Simon Tunstall, Rishabh Narang [1 June 2022] GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartners research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Reply Reply [EXM, STAR: REY] specialises in the design and implementation of solutions based on new communication channels and digital media. As a network of highly specialised companies, Reply defines and develops business models enabled by the new models of AI, big data, cloud computing, digital media and the internet of things. Reply delivers consulting, system integration and digital services to organisations across the telecom and media; industry and services; banking and insurance; and public sectors. www.reply.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005280/en/ Media Reply Fabio Zappelli [email protected] +390117711594 Aaron Miani [email protected] +44 (0) 207 730 6000 Source: Reply ALLENTOWN, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR), a global leader in commerce technology, has posted its second quarter 2022 financial results as part of its 2Q 2022 Shareholder Letter under the Financials section of its Investor Relations website which can be found at https://investors.shift4.com/overview/default.aspx. The Companys Shareholder Letter can also be viewed here. 2Q22 Earnings Conference Call Management will host a conference call today, August 4, 2022 at 8:30 a.m. ET to discuss the results. To pre-register for the live teleconference of the second quarter earnings call, please use this link. After registering, a confirmation will be sent through email, including dial in details and unique conference call codes for entry. Registration is open through the live call, but to ensure you are connected for the full call we suggest registering a minimum 10 minutes before the start of the call. The earnings conference call will also be webcast live. Due to high call volumes, we urge interested parties to join the live webcast of the event through Shift4s website at https://investors.shift4.com/events-and-presentations/default.aspx. Upcoming Investor Conference Participation Taylor Lauber, President and CSO, and Thomas McCrohan, EVP, Strategy and Investor Relations, will attend the 2022 Piper Sandler Growth Frontiers Conference in Nashville, Tennessee on Tuesday, September 13, 2022. Management will be available for one-on-one and small group meetings. About Shift4 Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) is boldly redefining commerce by simplifying complex payments ecosystems across the world. As the leader in commerce-enabling technology, Shift4 powers billions of transactions annually for hundreds of thousands of businesses in virtually every industry. For more information, visit www.shift4.com. Source: Shift4 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005269/en/ Investor Relations Thomas McCrohan EVP, Strategy and Investor Relations Shift4 (484) 735-0779 [email protected] Sloan Bohlen Managing Director Solebury Trout [email protected] Media Nate Hirshberg Vice President, Marketing Shift4 [email protected] Source: Shift4 Following the successful launch of Hancoms payload on a Spire satellite in May 2022, Spire will launch another payload for the company VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Spire Global, Inc. (NYSE: SPIR) (Spire or the Company), a leading global provider of space-based data, analytics and space services, announced an agreement with HANCOM inSPACE (Hancom), initially a spin-off by Korea Aerospace Research Institute and now a part of HANCOM Group, for a second mission with Spire Space Services. Hancom will host an optical payload on a second Spire 6U satellite, named HANCOM-2, and Spire will manage the payload integration, satellite launch and mission operations. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005253/en/ HANCOM-1, a Spire 6U satellite carrying an optical payload for Hancom, launched in May 2022 on the SpaceX Transporter-5 Mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It was the first commercial satellite deployed for a private South Korean company. Hancom specializes in commercial and government applications of image analysis, including detection of vehicles, aircraft and ships, changes in roads and buildings, and pine tree death detection. The HANCOM-1 and HANCOM-2 missions are focused on collecting optical imagery for applications in the agriculture sector, including landscaping applications and the expansion of its existing image analysis portfolio offerings. Hancom plans to launch and operate a constellation of up to 50 satellites. Hancom is a pioneer in the South Korean space industry as the first private company to deploy satellites, and were thrilled to work with them to further build out their constellation, said Joel Spark, Co-Founder and General Manager, Space Services, Spire. Im extremely proud of the dedication and ingenuity of our Space Services team for delivering an unparalleled experience to our customers that allows us to continue earning their business. "The satellite data business has been mainly used in areas such as defense, military, disaster and disaster control due to its characteristics, but now it is expanding to the civilian market," said Choi Myungjin, CEO of HANCOM inSPACE. HANCOM inSPACE plans to provide solutions that observe crops and predict output through satellite observations; initial target countries are in Asia and the Middle East, where demand for satellite image data is high. The companys ultimate goal is to build an image data service belt that covers all space, aviation, and ground. HANCOM inSPACE plans to continue its cooperative relationship with Spire. Spire Space Services offers fast and scalable access to space through a subscription model that eliminates the high upfront cost of building and maintaining infrastructure in space. Commercial and government organizations can deploy and operate a constellation of satellites, a hosted payload, or a software application in space with Spires established space, ground, and web infrastructure. Spire handles the end-to-end management, from manufacturing to launch to satellite operations, and the customer operates the system through a web API. About Spire Global, Inc. Spire (NYSE: SPIR) is a leading global provider of space-based data, analytics and space services, offering access to unique datasets and powerful insights about Earth from the ultimate vantage point so that organizations can make decisions with confidence, accuracy, and speed. Spire uses one of the worlds largest multipurpose satellite constellations to source hard to acquire, valuable data and enriches it with predictive solutions. Spire then provides this data as a subscription to organizations around the world so they can improve business operations, decrease their environmental footprint, deploy resources for growth and competitive advantage, and mitigate risk. Spire gives commercial and government organizations the competitive advantage they seek to innovate and solve some of the worlds toughest problems with insights from space. Spire has offices in San Francisco, Boulder, Washington DC, Ontario, Glasgow, Oxfordshire, Luxembourg, and Singapore. To learn more, visit www.spire.com. About HANCOM inSPACE HANCOM inSPACE carries out its business in the satellite ground station sub-system development, image analysis service, and drone utilization service. HANCOM inSPACE provides customers with services that allow them to receive, analyze, process, and distribute images of various satellites through its integrated satellite ground station system platform, InStation Platform. HANCOM inSPACE also offers downtown, forest, and marine monitoring service using in-house developed drones and drone stations. HANCOM inSPACE aims to become a leading data analysis company by collecting all space, aviation, and ground data through its satellites and cameras. To learn more, visit https://www.inspace.co.kr/home. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005253/en/ For Spire Global, Inc. Kristina Spychalski Senior Manager, Communications [email protected] For HANCOM inSPACE Choi Hye Min Senior Researcher, Strategy&Innovation Division [email protected] Source: Spire Global, Inc. KEARNEY, Neb.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The Buckle, Inc. (NYSE: BKE) announced today that comparable store net sales, for stores open at least one year, for the 4-week period ended July 30, 2022 increased 1.8 percent from comparable store net sales for the 4-week period ended July 31, 2021. Net sales for the 4-week fiscal month ended July 30, 2022 increased 4.2 percent to $97.7 million from net sales of $93.7 million for the prior year 4-week fiscal month ended July 31, 2021. Comparable store net sales for the 13-week second quarter ended July 30, 2022 increased 1.6 percent from comparable store net sales for the 13-week period ended July 31, 2021. Net sales for the 13-week fiscal second quarter ended July 30, 2022 increased 2.3 percent to $302.0 million compared to net sales of $295.1 million for the prior year 13-week fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2021. Comparable store net sales year-to-date for the 26-week period ended July 30, 2022 increased 2.6 percent from comparable store net sales for the 26-week period ended July 31, 2021. Net sales for the 26-week fiscal period ended July 30, 2022 increased 2.8 percent to $611.0 million compared to net sales of $594.2 million for the prior year 26-week fiscal period ended July 31, 2021. The Company will announce second quarter earnings the morning of Friday, August 19, 2022. Management will hold a conference call at 10:00 a.m. EDT on August 19, 2022 to discuss results for the quarter. To participate in the call, please call (844) 867-6169 for domestic calls or (409) 207-6975 for international calls and reference the conference code 2084271. A replay of the call will be available for a two-week period beginning August 19, 2022 at 1:00 p.m. EDT by calling (866) 207-1041 for domestic calls or (402) 970-0847 for international calls and entering the conference code 9468609. About Buckle Offering a unique mix of high-quality, on-trend apparel, accessories, and footwear, Buckle caters to fashion-conscious young men and women. Known as a denim destination, each store carries a wide selection of fits, styles, and finishes from leading denim brands, including the Companys exclusive brand, BKE. Headquartered in Kearney, Nebraska, Buckle currently operates 442 retail stores in 42 states, which includes the opening of one new store this week in Stephenville, Texas. The Company operated 442 stores in 42 states as of August 4, 2021. To listen to the Companys recorded monthly sales commentary, please call (308) 238-2500. SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT UNDER THE PRIVATE SECURITIES LITIGATION REFORM ACT OF 1995: All forward-looking statements made by the Company involve material risks and uncertainties and are subject to change based on factors which may be beyond the Company's control. Accordingly, the Companys future performance and financial results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in any such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to, those described in the Companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company does not undertake to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements even if experience or future changes make it clear that any projected results expressed or implied therein will not be realized. News releases and other information about The Buckle, Inc., can be found on the Internet at www.buckle.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005132/en/ Thomas B. Heacock, Chief Financial Officer The Buckle, Inc. (308) 236-8491 Source: The Buckle, Inc. Aviation veteran to lead the expansion of Technical Operations capabilities in preparation for high frequency flights in commercial service TUSTIN, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SPCE) (the Company or Virgin Galactic), a vertically integrated aerospace and space travel company, announced today that former Delta Air Lines executive Mike Moore has been appointed Executive Vice President, Spaceline Technical Operations, effective August 22. Moore will lead Virgin Galactics technical operations and maintenance team in charge of ensuring the Companys vehicles are ready for flight. As part of this new position, he will help design and implement the operational model and technical infrastructure needed to support high cadence spaceflights during commercial service. Moore will report to CEO Michael Colglazier. A major part of delivering the Astronaut experience at Virgin Galactic sits with our technical operations team, which ensures our Spaceflight system is fit and ready to fly, said Colglazier. I am thrilled that Mike is joining us to lead the expansion of our talented technical operations team at Spaceport America as we develop our capabilities in preparation for commercial service. Mike has more than 28 years of experience overseeing daily aerospace operations, and his expertise and steadfast dedication to safety, quality, and process improvement will be indispensable as we enter this chapter. Moore joins the Company following a thirty-seven-year long career within aviation, and a decade-long career at Delta Air Lines, where he led Deltas TechOps Services Group as Senior Vice President, Maintenance Operations & MRO Services Group. While at Delta, Moore supported the introduction of two major next-generation engine maintenance partnerships with Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney. After beginning his aviation career as an aviation mechanic in the U.S. Air Force, Moore also worked at Northwest Airlines and ran StandardAero completions between TIMCO and TeamSAI. Joining the worlds first commercial spaceline during this pivotal period of expansion is an honor, said Moore. Virgin Galactic is an industry pioneer with a distinctive product and an exceptionally talented team. Entering high frequency commercial service will see a step-change in their day-to-day technical needs, and I look forward to working with the team to expand, build on their cutting-edge operations and exceed their goals. About Virgin Galactic Holdings Virgin Galactic is an aerospace and space travel company, pioneering human spaceflight for private individuals and researchers with its advanced air and space vehicles. It is developing a spaceflight system designed to connect the world to the wonder and awe created by space travel and to offer customers a transformative experience. You can find more information at https://www.virgingalactic.com/ Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws with respect to Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. (the "Company"), including statements regarding the Companys spaceflight systems, markets and expected flight schedule. These forward-looking statements generally are identified by words such as believe, project, expect, anticipate, estimate, intend, strategy, future, opportunity, plan, may, should, will, would, and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, including but not limited to the factors, risks and uncertainties included in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, as such factors may be updated from time to time in our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), accessible on the SECs website at www.sec.gov and the Investor Relations section of our website at www.virgingalactic.com. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause the Companys actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and, except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220804005452/en/ For media inquiries: Aleanna Crane Vice President Communications [email protected] 575.800.4422 Jeff Michael Communications Specialist 661.754.4300 For Investor Relations inquiries: Eric Cerny Vice President Investor Relations [email protected] Source: Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. FILE PHOTO - A PetroChina worker inspects a pump jack at an oil field in Tacheng, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China June 27, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer AT By Noah Browning LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Global oil prices dropped on Thursday to their lowest levels since before Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, as traders fretted over the possibility of an economic recession later this year that could torpedo energy demand. Benchmark Brent crude futures settled down $2.66, or 2.75%, at $94.12, the lowest close since Feb. 18. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures settled down $2.34, or 2.12%, at $88.54, the lowest close since Feb. 2. The fall in oil prices could come as a relief to large consumer nations including the United States and countries in Europe, which have been urging producers to ramp up output to offset tight supplies and combat raging inflation. Oil had surged to well over $120 a barrel earlier in the year. A sudden rebound in demand from the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with supply disruptions stemming from sanctions on major producer Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Thursday's selling followed an unexpected surge in U.S. crude inventories last week. Gasoline stocks, the proxy for demand, also showed a surprise increase as demand slowed under the weight of gasoline prices near $5 a gallon, the Energy Information Administration said. "Seems the weakness from Wednesday following weaker than expected U.S. implied gasoline demand, together with the break of technical support levels on Thursday, has dragged oil lower," said Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS. The demand outlook remains clouded by increasing worries about an economic slump in the United States and Europe, debt distress in emerging market economies, and a strict zero COVID-19 policy in China, the world's largest oil importer. "A break below $90 is now a very real possibility, which is quite remarkable given how tight the market remains and how little scope there is to relieve that," said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda in London. "But recession talk is getting louder and should it become reality, it will likely address some of the imbalance." The Bank of England (BoE) raised interest rates on Thursday and warned about recession risks. An OPEC+ agreement on Wednesday to raise its output target by 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) in September, equivalent to 0.1% of global demand, was viewed by some analysts as bearish for the market. OPEC heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the UAE are also ready to deliver a "significant increase" in oil output should the world face a severe supply crisis this winter, sources familiar with the thinking of the top Gulf exporters said. (Additional reporting by Laura Sanicola, Richard Valdmanis and Emily Chow; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Kirsten Donovan) Aflac Incorporated today announced the introduction of two new consumer-directed products: Aflac Final Expense Whole Life Insurance and Aflac Medicare Supplement Insurance. These products underwritten by Tier One Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Aflac Incorporated are part of a robust portfolio of supplemental coverage options for those unable to access Aflac products through the workplace. "This product expansion represents not only new offerings, but a bold new senior strategy that leverages Aflac's strong brand recognition and affinity, particularly with retiring Americans who are seeking to continue their trusted relationship with Aflac by supplementing their Medicare benefits," said Aflac U.S. Deputy President Virgil Miller. "In providing this competitive product lineup to seniors, we have partnered to support product development, risk transfer and administration." Aflac Final Expense Whole Life Insurance With Aflac Final Expense Whole Life Insurance, policyholders can help protect their loved ones' financial security by helping to pay for end-of-life expenses not covered under Medicare and other programs, while also encouraging families to address uncomfortable discussions about final expenses. "Processing the loss of a loved one takes an emotional toll on families and many often face financial stress while grieving. It is important for families and individuals to be prepared in order to help alleviate the financial burdens placed on loved ones during intensely sensitive times," said Jeramy Tipton, SVP Distribution Expansion and Consumer Markets. "End-of-life medical, legal and funeral costs can be substantial. Aflac Final Expense is designed to help take that weight off grieving families' shoulders so they can focus on what matters." The average out-of-pocket medical expenses during one's last year of life can total nearly $10,000.1 In addition to these expenses, there are often significant costs involved when settling a loved one's estate, and the median funeral expenses are almost $8,000.2 Considering that nearly 50% of American workers say they would not be able to pay more than $1,000 in out-of-pocket medical costs in the event of an accident or injury,3 Aflac's Final Expense Whole Life Insurance can help protect loved ones from inherited expenses. Aflac's Final Expense Whole Life Insurance is available in two options: the Level Plan and the Modified Plan. Both plans include a guaranteed level premium meaning premiums will never increase and a guaranteed death benefit paid to the beneficiary while the policy is active. Plans are available for individuals age 45 to 80. Benefit amounts range from $2,000 to $50,000, depending on the plan selected. The level plan also offers the option to elect accelerated and accidental death benefit riders, as well as a children's term insurance rider. Aflac Medicare Supplement Insurance While Medicare provides coverage for health-related expenses, it doesn't cover all costs such as copayments, coinsurance and deductibles. Because consumers need a way to help manage expenses during retirement, Aflac introduced its Medicare Supplement Insurance policies to help fill some of these coverage gaps. "Seniors have worked their entire lives toward this milestone: retirement," said Tipton. "With the addition of Medicare Supplement Insurance, we are able to help reduce the burden of financial stress so that policyholders can focus on enjoying their retirement years as much as possible." With Aflac's Medicare Supplement plans A, F, G, and N, consumers will have the freedom to choose any provider that accepts Medicare at a convenient location that best meets their needs, without precertification or pre-authorization. Plan benefits remain the same year after year and are portable, so if policyholders move or travel, their coverage goes with them. To better serve the non-workplace individual market, Aflac's Final Expense Whole Life Insurance and Medicare Supplement Insurance join other offerings, including Accident, Cancer and Critical Illness products that launched last year. Aflac's consumer markets portfolio of individual insurance products is available through Aflac Tier One distribution partners and direct to consumers by visiting Aflac.com. Aflac Final Expense Insurance: Coverage may not be available in all states including but not limited to NM or NY. Benefits/premium rates may vary based on coverage selected. Optional riders may be available at an additional cost. Policies have limitations and exclusions that may affect benefits payable. Refer to the specific policy and rider form(s) for complete details, definitions, limitations and exclusions. In AR, ID, OK, OR, PA, TX and VA: Policies ICC21-AFLLBL21 and ICC21-AFLRPL21; and Riders ICC21-AFLABR22, ICC21-AFLADB22, and ICC21-AFLCDR22. Aflac Final Expense insurance coverage is underwritten by Tier One Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Aflac Incorporated and is administered by Aetna Life Insurance Company. Aflac Medicare Supplement Insurance policy series AFLMS. Coverage not available in all states, including but not limited to NM or NY. Some plans may be available to qualified consumers under age 65. Plans not available in all states. Benefits/premium rates will vary based on coverage selected. For complete details of benefits, definitions, and exclusions, please carefully read the outline of coverage and policy forms, and refer to the "Guide to Health Insurance for People with Medicare." Aflac Medicare supplement insurance is not connected with or endorsed by the U.S. government or the federal Medicare program. All benefits payable under the policy are based upon Medicare-eligible expenses (as applicable). In Idaho, policies AFLMSP22A-ID, AFLMSP22F-ID, AFLMSP22G-ID, AFLMSP22N-ID. In Oklahoma, policies AFLMSP22A-OK, AFLMSP22F-OK, AFLMSP22G-OK, AFLMSP22N-OK. In Virginia, policies AFLMSP22A-VA, AFLMSP22F-VA, AFLMSP22G-VA, AFLMSP22N-VA. Aflac Medicare Supplement insurance coverage is underwritten by Tier One Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Aflac Incorporated, and is administered by Aetna Life Insurance Company. 1021 Reams Blvd, Franklin, TN, 37064; Telephone Number: 833-504-0336. Ecovyst Inc. (NYSE: ECVT) today announced the upsize and pricing of the previously announced underwritten public offering (the Offering) by funds affiliated with CCMP Capital Advisors, LP (the Selling Stockholders). The size of the Offering increased from the previously announced 12,000,000 shares to an aggregate of 13,000,000 shares of the Company's common stock at a price to the public of $8.75 per share. The Offering is expected to close on August 8, 2022, subject to customary closing conditions. The Selling Stockholders have granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,950,000 additional shares at the public offering price less underwriting discounts and commissions. The Selling Stockholders will receive all of the net proceeds from the Offering. No shares are being sold by the Company. Subject to the completion of the Offering, the Company intends to repurchase from the underwriters 6,500,000 shares of the common stock being sold in the Offering at a price per share equal to the price per share paid by the underwriters to the Selling Stockholders in the Offering. The Company intends to fund the share repurchase with cash on hand and cash from operations. The closing of the share repurchase is conditioned on, and expected to occur simultaneously with, the closing of the Offering. The Offering is expected to close on August 8, 2022, subject to customary closing conditions. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Deutsche Bank Securities and Credit Suisse are serving as the joint lead book-running managers of the Offering. Citigroup, BMO Capital Markets, Morgan Stanley, Jefferies and KeyBanc Capital Markets are also serving as book-running managers of the Offering. C.L. King & Associates are serving as a co-manager of the Offering. An automatic shelf registration statement (including a prospectus) relating to the Offering was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 26, 2021 and became effective upon filing. Before you invest, you should read the prospectus included in that registration statement and the documents incorporated by reference in that registration statement as well as the prospectus supplement related to the Offering. You may obtain these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC website at www.sec.gov. When available, copies of the prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus related to the Offering may also be obtained from Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282 Attention: Prospectus Department, by telephone: (866) 471-2526 or by email at [email protected]; Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Attention: Prospectus Department, 1 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019, by telephone at 1-800-503-4611 or by email at [email protected]; or Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Attn: Prospectus Department, 6933 Louis Stephens Drive, Morrisville, North Carolina 27560, United States or by telephone at (800) 221-1037 or by email at [email protected]. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or other jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or other jurisdiction. Any offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time prior to notice of its acceptance given after the effective date. Following a successful launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today, the U.S. Space Force is now communicating with the sixth Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (SBIRS GEO) -6 satellite, built by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT). The final satellite in the SBIRS program series, GEO-6 joins the U.S. Space Force's constellation of missile warning satellites equipped with powerful scanning and staring infrared surveillance sensors. "The need for Overhead Persistent Infrared systems has never been more critical," said Michael Corriea, vice president of Lockheed Martin Space's Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) Mission Area. "At Lockheed Martin, we are making advancements to keep pace with evolving needs based on emerging threats in our military customers' environment, helping pave the way for the future." The GEO-6 satellite is a stepping stone toward the resilient missile warning to be provided by SBIRS' successor, the Next Generation OPIR GEO System (NGG). Like SBIRS GEO-5 and GEO-6, NGG will be based on Lockheed Martin's modernized LM 2100 Combat Bus, which provides additional capabilities such as cyber hardening, resiliency features, enhanced spacecraft power, and improved propulsion and electronics. The SBIRS GEO-6 satellite is responding to the U.S. Space Force's commands as planned. Signal acquisition was confirmed 3 hours and 43 minutes after the satellite's 6:29 a.m. EDT lift off aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. The satellite is now orbiting under its own propulsion following separation from the rocket. The onboard sensors collect data that allow the U.S. military to detect missile launches, support ballistic missile defense, expand technical intelligence gathering and bolstering situational awareness on the battlefield. A Step Toward More ResiliencyThe OPIR mission has become more critical as ballistic missile technology has proliferated around the world with over 1,000 missile launches tracked annually. Lockheed Martin recognizes that modernized technology is needed to augment the current missile warning architecture and improve resiliency against attacks. "SBIRS GEO-6 fortifies the current missile warning architecture, and it also signifies that we are on our way to achieving even greater technological capacity and expanded coverage with NGG," Corriea said. Lockheed Martin is proud to be part of the SBIRS team led by Space Systems Command's Space Sensing Directorate at Los Angeles Air Force Base. Lockheed Martin Space, Sunnyvale, California, is the SBIRS prime contractor, with Northrop Grumman of Azusa, California, as the payload supplier. Sun Life Financial Inc. (NYSE: SLF) announced today it has entered into an agreement to sell SLF of Canada UK Limited to Phoenix Group Holdings plc. Headquartered in London, Phoenix Group is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business with more than 13 million customers and 310 billion of assets under administration. Sun Life UK manages life and pension policies and annuity blocks for UK Clients. The company is closed to new sales and has been operating as a run-off business in the life and pension policies segment since 2001. Sun Life will sell Sun Life UK to Phoenix Group for a closing price of 248 million (approximately C$385 million) and will retain its economic interest in UK's payout annuities business. This transaction will also provide further growth opportunities for Sun Life's asset management businesses. As part of the sale, Sun Life will form a long-term partnership to become a strategic asset management partner to Phoenix Group. Sun Life's asset management companies, MFS and SLC Management, will continue to manage approximately C$9 billion of Sun Life UK's general account upon the close of the sale. Phoenix Group has set a goal to invest approximately US$25 billion in North American public and private fixed income and alternative investments over the next five years. MFS and SLC Management will be material partners to Phoenix Group in achieving this goal. "We're excited to partner with Phoenix Group. A great deal of consideration was taken to find the right buyer and partner for our UK business. Phoenix Group is a purpose-led company with similar values to Sun Life and a strong focus on delivering outcomes for their customers. We're also pleased about our asset management partnership, which will bring the strength of MFS and SLC Management to Phoenix Group customers," said Kevin Strain, President and CEO of Sun Life. "Thank you to our UK team for all of their efforts in delivering solid results year-after-year in our life, pension and annuities businesses. We believe Phoenix Group will be a great organization for our UK employees and Clients." "This acquisition is highly attractive for Phoenix Group. As the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business with a strong track record of UK closed book integrations, we look forward to offering a safe home for Sun Life UK Clients over the long term and enabling them to benefit from our broad range of Standard Life products in our Open division," said Andy Briggs, Phoenix Group, CEO. "I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the colleagues who will join us from Sun Life UK. We are also pleased to enter into a new, long-term strategic asset management partnership with MFS and SLC Management, Sun Life's Asset Management businesses. This partnership will complement our existing relationships and further enhance our liquid and illiquid credit capabilities in North America by building on their strong presence in the region." Since 2016, Phoenix Group has successfully completed four acquisitions totaling approximately 7.5 billion. This has supported increasing their assets under administration by more than 300% over the past five years through organic and inorganic growth. Strain added, "The sale of the Sun Life UK business is consistent with our strategy to grow fee-based and capital light businesses. It also frees up capital to continue on our journey of creating long-term value for our shareholders. This transaction also aligns with our objective to continue building our Sun Life asset management pillar by creating an attractive long-term partnership with the UK's leading long-term savings and retirement business." This transaction is expected to close during the first half of 2023, subject to receipt of regulatory approvals and satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Fenchurch Advisory Partners acted as a financial advisor to Sun Life for this transaction and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP served as legal counsel. Slides related to this announcement are available at www.sunlife.com. About Sun Life Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance and health solutions to individual and institutional Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of June 30, 2022, Sun Life had total assets under management of C$1.26 trillion. For more information, please visit www.sunlife.com. Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF. About Phoenix Group Phoenix Group is the UK's largest long-term savings and retirement business. With 0.3 trillion of assets under administration, we offer our c.13 million customers a broad range of products across our market-leading pensions, savings and life insurance brands which include Standard Life and Sun Life. We support people throughout their savings cycle, and our vision is to help even more people on their journey to and through retirement, providing the right support at the right time. A member of the FTSE 100, we're a sustainably growing business united by a common purpose to help people secure a life of possibilities. This drives everything we do and means taking responsible and sustainable investment decisions and using our presence and voice to drive forward change for the better for our customers, our colleagues, and our wider community. We have been recognised as a leading employer for many years. We are accredited as a Living Wage Employer and as a Carer Positive Exemplary Employer for offering the best support to colleagues who are carers. Linkedin: PhoenixGroup-UK Twitter: @PhoenixGroupUK Forward-looking Statements From time to time, Sun Life makes written or oral forward-looking statements within the meaning of certain securities laws, including the "safe harbour" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements contained in this release include, without limitation, statements (i) relating to our strategies, (ii) relating to our anticipated divestiture of Sun Life UK, (iii) relating to our growth initiatives and other business objectives, (iv) relating to the expected timing of the closing of the transaction, (v) relating to the expected impact of the transaction on our business and financial results, (vi) that are predictive in nature or that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, and (vii) that include words such as "intends", "expect", "will", and similar expressions. These statements represent our current expectations, estimates, and projections regarding future events and are not historical facts, and remain subject to change, particularly in light of the ongoing and developing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the global economy and its uncertain impact on our business. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. The forward-looking statements in this news release do not reflect the potential impact of any non-recurring or other special items or of any dispositions, mergers, acquisitions, other business combinations or other transactions that may be announced or that may occur after the date of this news release. If any non-recurring or other special item or any transaction should occur, the financial impact could be complex and the effect on our operations or results would depend on the facts particular to such item and we cannot describe the expected impact in a meaningful way or in the same way we could present known risks affecting our business. Forward-looking statements are presented for the purpose of assisting investors and others in understanding our expected financial position and results of operations as at the date of this news release, as well as our objectives for the transaction, strategic priorities and business outlook following the transaction, and in obtaining a better understanding of our anticipated operating environment following the transaction. Readers are cautioned that such forward-looking statements may not be appropriate for other purposes and undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements. The following risk factors are related to our intention to divest Sun Life UK that could have a material adverse effect on our forward-looking statements: (i) the ability of the parties to complete the transaction; (ii) failure of the parties to obtain necessary consents and approvals or to otherwise satisfy the conditions to the completion of the transaction in a timely manner, or at all; (iii) our ability to realize the financial and strategic benefits of the transaction; and (iv) the impact of the announcement of the transaction and the dedication of our resources to completing the transaction. These risks all could have an impact on our business relationships (including with future and prospective employees, Clients, distributors and partners) and could have a material adverse effect on our current and future operations, financial conditions and prospects. Other important risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking statements in this presentation are set out in our MD&A for the period ended June 30, 2022 and in SLF Inc.'s other annual and interim regulatory filings filed with Canadian securities regulators or furnished to U.S. securities regulators, which are available for review at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov, respectively. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this document or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. Sun Life Media Relations Contact: Sun Life Investor Relations Contact: Rajani Kamath Yaniv Bitton Associate Vice-President Vice-President, Head of Investor Corporate Communications Relations & Capital Markets T: 647-515-7514 T: 416-979-6496 [email protected] [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sun-life-announces-intention-to-sell-its-uk-business-301599704.html SOURCE Sun Life Financial Inc. PRESS RELEASE Paris La Defense, 4 August 2022 Changes to Albiomas Board of Directors Following the friendly Tender Offer by KKR, whose results were published on 1 August 2022, Albioma announces several appointments by co-optation to its Board of Directors in order to reflect the change to its shareholder base. The Board of Directors, chaired by Frederic Moyne, has taken note of the resignations from their office as directors of Frank Lacroix, Jean-Carlos Angulo and Bpifrance Investissement, represented by Sebastien Moynot, and has co-opted three new members, namely, Vincent Policard, Ryan Miller and Shreya Malik. In compliance with the investment agreement1 concluded on 13 May 2022, Bpifrance will be appointed to the Kyoto TopCo supervisory committee, an entity that exercises control over Kyoto BidCo, the offeror that will control Albioma after the settlement-delivery of the Offer on 11 August 2022. Following the change in the composition of the Board of Directors, which will take effect on 11 August 2022, Albiomas Board of Directors will comprise the following seven members: Frederic Moyne, Chairman of the Board* Pierre Bouchut* Florence Lambert* Shreya Malik Ryan Miller Vincent Policard Ulrike Steinhorst* Frederic Moyne, Albioma Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, offers his sincere thanks to Jean-Carlos Angulo, Frank Lacroix and Sebastien Moynot for their commitment and for the quality of their work throughout their mandates. Vincent Policard Vincent Policard, 48, is a Partner and Co-Head of European Infrastructure. He joined KKR in 2012 and has been actively involved in a number of infrastructure investments including Renvico, Coriance, ELL, Deutsche Glasfaser, Q Park, Hivory and Hyperoptic. Prior to joining KKR, he spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley, most recently as an executive director of the infrastructure fund team. A French national, Vincent Policard graduated from HEC Paris and IEP Paris, and holds a Masters of Law from the Universite Paris II Assas. He is a board member of Q Park, Hivory, Hyperoptic, X-Elio and Telxius. Ryan Miller Ryan Miller, 37, joined KKR in 2016 and is a member of the Energy & Infrastructure team. He has been actively involved in KKRs investments in Viridor, Q-Park, South Staffordshire plc, FlowStream Commodities, iGas and the Acteon Group. Prior to joining KKR, he was the commercial manager at Genel Energy and spent five years at First Reserve in London and Metalmark Capital in New York. Ryan Miller began his career in investment banking at Merrill Lynch and holds a B.S. in Finance and French from Schreyer Honors College of the Pennsylvania State University. A dual British-American national, he serves as a board member of Q-Park and Acteon Group. Shreya Malik Shreya Malik, 36, is a Director on the Infrastructure team. She joined KKR in 2021 and spent over a decade at Partners Group, most recently as Senior Vice-President of its infrastructure funds team. Shreya Malik holds a masters degree in Finance from the University of Oxford and a B.A. Hons. in Statistics and Economics from the University of Mumbai. A British national, she previously served as a board member for Partners Group portfolio companies Gren, Telepass and Greenlink. Warning: This press release does not constitute an offer to acquire shares. This release was prepared for informative purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to the public. The circulation of this release, the offer and its acceptance can be the subject of specific regulations or restrictions in some countries. The offer is not intended for those who are subject to such restrictions, neither directly nor indirectly, and is not likely to be the subject of any acceptance in a country where the offer would be the object of such restrictions. This release is not intended to be circulated in these countries. Consequently, those in possession of this release are advised to inform themselves about local restrictions that may be applicable and to conform to these. The initiator and Albioma accept no responsibility for any potential violation of these restrictions. It is anticipated that the bid will be open to the United States of America in compliance with Section 14(e) and Regulation 14E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as it was modified (the U.S. Exchange Act), and in compliance with the exceptions set by Rule 14d-1(d) of the U.S. Exchange Act. Forward-looking statements: This release contains forward-looking statements. These can be identified through the use of terms such as prospects, believe, think, expect, potential, continue, can, should, seek, around, predict, intend, will be, plan, estimate, anticipate, the negative use of these terms, other comparable terms or statements that do not strictly relate to real proven facts, including but not limited to, statements related to: the proposed transaction; the operation of the acquired company after effecting the transaction; the growth opportunities and other synergies resulting from the transaction; and the expected time of effecting the proposed transaction. Forward-looking statements are based on KKRs beliefs, hypotheses, and expectations, considering all the information currently at its disposal. These beliefs, hypotheses and expectations can evolve following numerous events or factors, which are not all known to KKR, nor under its control. If a change occurs, KKRs activities, financial situation, liquidities, and operational results can vary markedly from those expressed in projected statements. The following factors, amongst others, could have an impact on real results compared to forward-looking statements: the inability to reap expected benefits of the proposed transaction in the expected period; unforeseen liabilities, integration costs and other supplementary costs related to the proposed transaction and to the calendar; the availability and the cost of financing the proposed transaction; changes in Albiomas activities; any delays or difficulties in obtaining the required authorisation; the inability to effect the transaction; the ability of the acquired company to maintain commercial relationships after the proposed transaction; the inability to reap the benefits or effect the changes in the commercial strategies of KKR or of the acquired company, including the capacity to execute the anticipated synergies, strategic partnerships or other transactions; the availability, methods and distribution of capital; the availability of qualified personnel and the recruitment and retention fees of such personnel; and the increased competition. All forward-looking statements are only valid at the date of this press release. KRR expressly accepts no obligation nor commitment to update forward-looking statements to reflect circumstances or events arising after the date at which these statements were made, unless demanded by law or regulations in force. Past performance does not anticipate future results. This press release does not constitute an offer of sales nor the invitation of an offer to purchase shares in any jurisdiction. About Albioma Contacts An independent renewable energy producer, Albioma is committed to the energy transition thanks to biomass, photovoltaics and geothermal energy. The Group operates in Overseas France, mainland France, Mauritius, Brazil and Turkey. For 30 years, it has developed a unique partnership with the sugar industry to produce renewable energy from bagasse, the fibrous residue of sugar cane. Albioma is also the leading producer of photovoltaic energy in Overseas France where it builds and operates innovative projects with storage, as well as in mainland France. In 2021, the Group acquired its first geothermal energy power plant in Turkey. This activity will develop in 2022 with the acquisition of a second GEPP in the same region. Investors Julien Gauthier +33 (0)1 47 76 67 00 Media Charlotte Neuvy +33 (0)1 47 76 66 65 [email protected] Brunswick Group Guillaume Maujean +33 (0)6 67 74 36 89 [email protected] Aurelia de Lapeyrouse +33 (0)6 21 06 40 33 [email protected] Albioma is listed on Euronext Paris compartment B, and eligible for SRD, PEA and PEAPME. It is a part of the SBF 120 and the CAC Mid 60. The Group is also included in the Gaia-Index, an index for socially responsible midcaps. www.albioma.com About KKR Contacts KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management as well as capital markets and insurance solutions. KKR aims to generate attractive investment returns by following a patient and disciplined investment approach, employing world-class people, and supporting growth in its portfolio companies and communities. KKR sponsors investment funds that invest in private equity, credit and real assets and has strategic partners that manage hedge funds. KKRs insurance subsidiaries offer retirement, life and reinsurance products under the management of Global Atlantic Financial Group. References to KKRs investments may include the activities of its sponsored funds and insurance subsidiaries. For additional information about KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE: KKR), please visit KKRs website at www.kkr.com and on Twitter @KKR_Co. Media FGS Global Nathalie Falco +33 (0)6 30 64 90 15 [email protected] Xavier Mas +33 (0)7 71 95 69 60 [email protected] www.kkr.com 1 The main terms and conditions of the investment agreement are described in paragraph 1.3.2 of the offerors Offer Document published on Albiomas website. Attachment PRESS RELEASE Paris La Defense, 4 August 2022 Reopening of the friendly Tender Offer for Albioma shares KKR will hold 83.44 % of A lbiomas capital following the co mpletion of the first offer period The Offer will be reopened from 8 August to 9 September on the same terms, namely a price of 50 euros per share and 29.10 shares per Albioma BSAAR, in order to allow shareholders who have not yet tendered their securities to do so. Results of the Offer closed on 27 July Albioma and KKR announced on 1 August 2022 the provisional results of the friendly tender offer for all Albioma securities (the Offer) published by the Autorite des marches financiers (AMF), after the completion of the first period of the Offer on 27 July 2022. Following the completion of the first offer period, KKR will hold 27,049,985 shares representing 83.44% of Albiomas capital and 83.44% of voting rights, and 551,205 warrants (BSAAR) amounting to 99.95% of all outstanding BSAARs1. The settlement-delivery of the first offer period will take place on 11 August 2022. Reopening of the Offer In compliance with the AMFs general regulations, the Tender Offer will be reopened from 8 August to 9 September on the same terms as the first offer period, namely a price of 50 euros per Albioma share and 29.10 euros per BSAAR. This price reflects in particular: a premium of 51.6% compared to the last undisturbed closing price of Albioma shares on 7 March 2022, before market rumours; a premium of 46.6% compared to the volume-weighted three-month average share price. Shareholders and Albioma BSAAR bearers who would like to tender their securities to the reopened Offer must choose to transfer their shares and/or BSAAR: Either on the market, in which case related transaction costs (including brokerage fees and VAT) will remain their responsibility, and the settlement-delivery will be made progressively as the orders are executed, two (2) trading days after each execution; Or via the centralised procedure overseen by Euronext Paris, in which case the transaction fees (brokerage fees and applicable VAT) incurred by shareholders and bearers of BSAARs will be covered by the offeror to a maximum of 0.2% (excluding tax) of the order value, within the further limit of 75 euros per application (inclusive of all taxes). The settlement-delivery will then take place following completion of the centralised procedure. If KKR comes to hold at least 90% of Albiomas share capital and voting rights at the completion of the Offer, it intends to request the implementation of a mandatory squeeze-out procedure. A toll-free number has also been put in place to answer any questions that individual Albioma shareholders may have about the Offer during the opening period: 0805 08 15 87 (when dialling from within France). D.F. King Ltd is acting as information agent for individual Albioma shareholders (contact: Mr. David Chase Lopes, Managing Director, EMEA). The Offer Document, the Response Document and the results of the Offer, published on 1 August 2022, by the AMF are available on the websites of Albioma (www.albioma.com) and of the AMF (https://www.amf-france.org/en). Warning: This press release does not constitute an offer to acquire shares. This release was prepared for informative purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to the public. The circulation of this release, the offer and its acceptance can be the subject of specific regulations or restrictions in some countries. The offer is not intended for those who are subject to such restrictions, neither directly nor indirectly, and is not likely to be the subject of any acceptance in a country where the offer would be the object of such restrictions. This release is not intended to be circulated in these countries. Consequently, those in possession of this release are advised to inform themselves about local restrictions that may be applicable and to conform to these. The initiator and Albioma accept no responsibility for any potential violation of these restrictions. It is anticipated that the bid will be open to the United States of America in compliance with Section 14(e) and Regulation 14E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as it was modified (the U.S. Exchange Act), and in compliance with the exceptions set by Rule 14d-1(d) of the U.S. Exchange Act. Forward-looking statements: This release contains forward-looking statements. These can be identified through the use of terms such as prospects, believe, think, expect, potential, continue, can, should, seek, around, predict, intend, will be, plan, estimate, anticipate, the negative use of these terms, other comparable terms or statements that do not strictly relate to real proven facts, including but not limited to, statements related to: the proposed transaction; the operation of the acquired company after effecting the transaction; the growth opportunities and other synergies resulting from the transaction; and the expected time of effecting the proposed transaction. Forward-looking statements are based on KKRs beliefs, hypotheses, and expectations, considering all the information currently at its disposal. These beliefs, hypotheses and expectations can evolve following numerous events or factors, which are not all known to KKR, nor under its control. If a change occurs, KKRs activities, financial situation, liquidities, and operational results can vary markedly from those expressed in projected statements. The following factors, amongst others, could have an impact on real results compared to forward-looking statements: the inability to reap expected benefits of the proposed transaction in the expected period; unforeseen liabilities, integration costs and other supplementary costs related to the proposed transaction and to the calendar; the availability and the cost of financing the proposed transaction; changes in Albiomas activities; any delays or difficulties in obtaining the required authorisation; the inability to effect the transaction; the ability of the acquired company to maintain commercial relationships after the proposed transaction; the inability to reap the benefits or effect the changes in the commercial strategies of KKR or of the acquired company, including the capacity to execute the anticipated synergies, strategic partnerships or other transactions; the availability, methods and distribution of capital; the availability of qualified personnel and the recruitment and retention fees of such personnel; and the increased competition. All forward-looking statements are only valid at the date of this press release. KRR expressly accepts no obligation nor commitment to update forward-looking statements to reflect circumstances or events arising after the date at which these statements were made, unless demanded by law or regulations in force. Past performance does not anticipate future results. This press release does not constitute an offer of sales nor the invitation of an offer to purchase shares in any jurisdiction. About Albioma Contacts An independent renewable energy producer, Albioma is committed to the energy transition thanks to biomass, photovoltaics and geothermal energy. The Group operates in Overseas France, mainland France, Mauritius, Brazil and Turkey. For 30 years, it has developed a unique partnership with the sugar industry to produce renewable energy from bagasse, the fibrous residue of sugar cane. Albioma is also the leading producer of photovoltaic energy in Overseas France where it builds and operates innovative projects with storage, as well as in mainland France. In 2021, the Group acquired its first geothermal energy power plant in Turkey. This activity will develop in 2022 with the acquisition of a second GEPP in the same region. Investors Julien Gauthier +33 (0)1 47 76 67 00 Media Charlotte Neuvy +33 (0)1 47 76 66 65 [email protected] Brunswick Group Guillaume Maujean +33 (0)6 67 74 36 89 [email protected] Aurelia de Lapeyrouse +33 (0)6 21 06 40 33 [email protected] Albioma is listed on Euronext Paris compartment B, and eligible for SRD, PEA and PEAPME. It is a part of the SBF 120 and the CAC Mid 60. The Group is also included in the Gaia-Index, an index for socially responsible midcaps. www.albioma.com About KKR Contacts KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management as well as capital markets and insurance solutions. KKR aims to generate attractive investment returns by following a patient and disciplined investment approach, employing world-class people, and supporting growth in its portfolio companies and communities. KKR sponsors investment funds that invest in private equity, credit and real assets and has strategic partners that manage hedge funds. KKRs insurance subsidiaries offer retirement, life and reinsurance products under the management of Global Atlantic Financial Group. References to KKRs investments may include the activities of its sponsored funds and insurance subsidiaries. For additional information about KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE: KKR), please visit KKRs website at www.kkr.com and on Twitter @KKR_Co. Media FGS Global Nathalie Falco +33 (0)6 30 64 90 15 [email protected] Xavier Mas +33 (0)7 71 95 69 60 [email protected] www.kkr.com 1 Taking into account the 25,868,599 shares and 431,771 BSAARs tendered to the Offer, as well as the securities contributed in kind to Kyoto Topco by Bpifrance and some of Albiomas employees and company representatives. These figures exclude Albioma's treasury shares (0.45% of the capital) and performance shares subject to a retention period which may be covered by liquidity agreements (0.63% of the capital). Attachment Resorbable implants to treat pectus excavatum and silicone breast implant revision / congenital defect correction First patients treated in Australia Leipzig, Germany, August 4, 2022 BellaSeno GmbH, an ISO 13485-certified medtech company developing resorbable scaffolds using additive manufacturing technologies, today announced the start of two clinical trials of its products in Australia, which are sponsored by its Australian subsidiary BellaSeno Pty. Already, recruiting has started in Brisbane, Australia. The first trial is expected to enroll 10 patients with pectus excavatum, a common congenital chest wall deformity in which the breastbone is sunken into the chest. Principal investigator of this trial is Dr. Michael Wagels, Director of the Herston Biofabrication Institute (HBI), Specialist Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Director of the Australian Centre for Complex Integrated Surgical Solutions (ACCISS) and Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. BellaSeno already published first-in-human data in 2021, demonstrating that its implant was able to camouflage a pectus excavatum defect not reconstructable by conventional techniques. The second trial aims to enroll 20 patients who either need breast implant revision or surgery to correct congenital breast defects. Principal investigator of the second trial is Prof. Owen Ung, Director of the Comprehensive Breast Cancer Institute (CBCI), consultant breast surgeon at the Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital and Professor of Surgery, University of Queensland, Australia. In both trials, patients will receive porous polycaprolactone implants produced in Bellasenos AI-driven additive manufacturing facilities by a no-touch approach. Polycaprolactone has been used in healthcare for decades as absorbable suture material. Once the implants are inserted in compressed form by minimal invasive surgery, the structure unfolds and is subsequently grafted with the patient's own fat tissue obtained by liposuction. Within up to 5 years, the polycaprolactone scaffold is fully absorbed and replaced by fat cells, leaving no permanent remnants of foreign material in the body. This scaffold-guided tissue reconstruction (SGTR) provides a promising alternative to silicone or other permanent implants. The Companys novel implants are designed to ultimately result in natural tissue. Primary outcome of the trials will be intra- and post-operative device safety; secondary endpoints are adverse event rate and frequency of complication. Secondary endpoints comprise, among others, change in (fat) volume and soft tissue retention as well as pain and quality of life. This trial is a very important step for us to demonstrate that our approach is not only safe, but leads to substantial improvements in terms of long-term safety, health and quality of life, said Dr. med. Tobias Grossner, CMO of BellaSeno. "We very much hope the trials once more confirm our scaffold-guided tissue reconstruction concept." "We are delighted to spearhead the administration of novel, fully absorbable implants for soft tissue reconstruction applications. There is a clear need for a safe alternative to contemporary alloplastic materials and operative techniques in pectus excavatum and breast surgery. Having customizable implants that resorb, leaving behind the patient's own tissues, is a big step forward," said Dr. Michael Wagels, Principal investigator of the pectus excavatum trial. "It is important to us that patients have access to healthier alternatives to permanent implants. There is a strong demand for restoring fully natural breast tissue without potentially risky remnants in the body. We believe that BellaSenos solutions can play an important role in addressing these needs," added Prof. Owen Ung, Principal investigator of the breast trial. ### About BellaSenoBellaSeno GmbH was founded in 2015 and is headquartered on the BioCity campus in Leipzig, Germany, with a subsidiary in Brisbane, Australia. The Company is developing novel resorbable soft tissue and bone reconstruction implants made by additive manufacturing (3D-printing) under ISO 13485 certification. The Company has received substantial financial support from private investors as well as from the Saxony Development Bank (SAB), the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRE), Germanys Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Australian government. The Company is thereby co-funded from tax resources based on the budget adopted by the members of Saxon State Parliament. About SenellaSenella is a patented porous scaffold made of resorbable Polycaprolactone (PCL) containing highly-specialized topological and design features, which act as recipients for injected fat tissue isolated with a standard liposuction procedure. The implant is designed to get absorbed over a span of up to 5 years and to provide a stable platform for the injected fat tissue to mature, adapt to its environment and stabilize. The clinical end result is a natural soft tissue without remnants of foreign material. Senella therefore has the potential to alleviate the complications found in current breast reconstruction and augmentation approaches. Contact BellaSenoBellaSeno GmbHDr. Mohit [email protected] comTel.: +49 176 2283 9583 Media InquiriesakampionDr. Ludger Wess / Ines-Regina Buth Managing Partners[email protected]Tel. +49 40 88 16 59 64Tel. +49 30 23 63 27 68 Source: AKAMPION St. Petersburg, FL, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Service and protection powerhouse Centricity announced today that Vice President of Client Services Chris Penn has been named as a Dealerscope Magazine 40 Under 40 honoree. Based on nominations from industry peers and consideration by the magazines editorial staff, Penn was chosen as one of this years winners featured in the August 2022 issue. The annual issue recognizes 40 of the most prominent young professionals under the age of 40 for their outstanding industry contributions. Each executive is profiled in this months issue of the magazine. Penn has been in the warranty industry for more than 17 years, spending the majority of his career working with hundreds of retailers in the appliance and CE space to launch and grow their extended service plan business. For the last three years, he has led the Client Services department at Centricity. While at Centricity, Penn has spearheaded the development of a number of innovative extended service plan programs designed specifically for independent retailers. Im very honored to receive this recognition from my industry peers, Penn said. I hold the other winners in the highest regard and am truly flattered to be recognized for doing a job that I love. About Centricity Centricity partners with retailers and manufacturers to provide customized product protection solutions that drive revenue resulting in happy, loyal customers. At Centricity, we put customers at the center of everything we do by creating differentiated products to meet the needs of todays demanding customers. Headquartered in St. Petersburg, FL, Centricity is a privately held and wholly owned subsidiary of Bankers Financial Corp., a 47-year-old company with a rich history of service and protection. We are committed to evolving with the changing needs of the industries we serve, and being a simple, one-stop service provider for our current and future customers. Attachment Karen Blanchard Centricity 727.542.3942 [email protected] Source: Centricity MIAMI and RESTON, Va., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CornerstoneAI, Provider of Ethical and Responsible AI Services and Solutions, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, today announced a partnership. Under this agreement, Carahsoft will serve as CornerstoneAIs Master Government Aggregator, making their artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions available to the Public Sector through Carahsofts reseller partners and NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, OMNIA Partners and National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA) contracts. CornerstoneAIs mission is to ensure the development and ongoing maintenance of responsible AI usage by agencies within the Federal and State Government space. AI plays a critical role in nearly every aspect of business and accelerates the creation of high-impact digital and automated solutions. CornerstoneAI provides AI audit, remediation and development services, including cybersecurity to maximize these benefits while maintaining necessary boundaries and implementing precautions against misuse. Partnering with a company as reputable as Carahsoft, provides a clear path to further our mission to eliminate data bias in AI/ML and bring responsible AI techniques to the top of AI development agendas, said Eric Barberio, Executive Advisor and COO of CornerstoneAI. I am confident that our partnership with Carahsoft and its resellers will provide Government agencies a competitive edge and advantage in the continuous modernization effort. Preserving ethical operations is crucial to any technology field and CornerstoneAI makes this task simple. Through CornerstoneAIs efficient auditing and detailed reports, agencies can improve their data ecosystems and build trust by identifying challenge areas and implementing effective solutions to eliminate machine learning bias and AI discrimination. With the addition of CornerstoneAI to Carahsofts AI solutions portfolio, Government agencies have access to solutions that can ensure their AI systems function at maximum quality and accuracy, said Michael Adams, Director of AI Solutions at Carahsoft. We look forward to working with CornerstoneAI and our resellers to help agencies take ownership of their AI diversity and create an equal opportunity, inclusive society. CornerstoneAIs AI solutions and machine learning technologies are available through Carahsofts SEWP V contracts NNG15SC03B and NNG15SC27B, OMNIA Partners Contract #R191902 and NCPA Contract NCPA01-86. For more information, contact the CornerstoneAI team at Carahsoft at (571) 662-3750 or [email protected]. Carahsoft is helping Government agencies connect technology and industry partners with best-of-breed artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high performance computing capabilities to meet mission needs. To learn more about Carahsofts AI and Machine Learning solutions visit Carahsofts AI and Machine Learning Solutions. About Carahsoft Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, supporting Public Sector organizations across Federal, State and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator for our vendor partners, we deliver solutions for Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, MultiCloud, DevSecOps, Big Data, Open Source, Customer Experience and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators and consultants, our sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services and training through hundreds of contract vehicles. Visit us at www.carahsoft.com. About CornerstoneAI Inc. CornerstoneAI Audits, Inc is the creator of the BiasFinder AI technology designed to assess bias within machine learning AI systems of any size and provides data-engineering and social ethics consulting assessments of AI eco-systems having established an audit program to attest to Fairness, Accuracy, Transparency and ensure AI systems are Explainable to all stakeholders. Contact: Eric Barberio, Chief Operating OfficerCornerstoneAI[email protected] Mary LangeCarahsoft703-230-7434[email protected] Source: Carahsoft Technology Corp. Miami, FL, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Endeavor Miami, in partnership with Dell for Startups, announced that 10 companies will be taking part in the EndeavorLAB Cohort for Black Founders. The group of successful minority entrepreneurs, lead a variety of innovative companies, from changemakers in the collectable sneaker space to a new tech-forward way to get beer and wine delivered. We are thrilled to work with this latest batch of entrepreneurs, and we are confident that our program will provide an incredible boost to their growth and development,said Claudia Duran, Managing Director of Endeavors Miami office. Over half of the companies that have gone through EndeavorLAB have at least doubled their revenue and raised a successful round of capital in the year since their participation in the program. EndeavorLAB is a two-month, audience-specific, accelerated growth program designed to support local early-stage companies in establishing their business foundations post-revenue generation. All entrepreneurs selected for this cohort will receive a scholarship provided by Dell for Startups to participate in the program. We love our partnership with Endeavor Miami, it's great to be a part of Miami's entrepreneurial ecosystem momentum. I am particularly excited about this EndeavorLAB cohort, as it aligns with Dell's 2030 moonshot goals, and it reflects our vast commitment to diversity and inclusion in everything we do. I look forward to engaging with this high-impact cohort of founders and supporting them with Dell for Startups resources for entrepreneurs, said Lucas Chaya del Pino, Dell Technologies, Expert Network Lead. Since its inception in 2019, Endeavor Miamis Programs have gone on to accelerate 98 companies, which have generated over $118 million in annual revenues, employed 1,273 people and raised $166 million. In addition, the Programs hold an NPS score of 97%, consistently deliver over 60 hours of curated content to each company (program dependent) and leverage the expertise of 30+ Endeavor network members for the benefit of participating entrepreneurs. The EndeavorLAB Cohort for Black Founders powered by Dell for Startups, includes: Airyvl, Inc.: Airyvl Founder & CEO Mark Thayer previously presented his company to Endeavor Miami during last years Dell for Startups Pitch Competition. Airyvl is a predictive and recommendation platform for commercial airlines and private jet charter companies and has seen dramatic growth since last year. Beach Box Safe, Inc.: Beach Box is revolutionizing the portable storage space by giving customers the ability to securely store personal belongings within reach. The company is led by Co-Founder & CEO Austin Igein, Co-Founder & CIO Darius Swain, and Marketing & Sales Lead Austin Helm. BeachBox employs a business model that has been validated in various industries, thus Endeavor believes that with the right mentorship, it can accelerate the timeline of the companys 2022 milestones. JRZY: A decentralized playground for athletes to connect, engage, and monetize the opportunities they create, JRZY is led by Founder & CEO Issa Hall and Co-Founder & COO Madison Savarese. As JRZY expands into the world of NFTs, Endeavor plans to provide them with the right mentorship and guidance to take the company to the next level. Lien Library: Co-Founded by Mac Alabre (CEO), Rohansen Joseph (COO), Eduardo Mejia (CIO), and Sondley Northecide (CTO), Lien Library gives users the ability to discover liens that may be unknown on their property. Endeavor Miami saw great potential in the niche market and hopes to assist in achieving rapid growth for the company. Loan My Sole: Endeavor Miami chose Loan My Sole in part due to the immense dedication of Founder & CEO Brandon Chance. With a large inventory already, Loan My Sole is a web rental society for sneakerheads that bridges the gap between physical & digital assets. Nailstry: Nailstry is revolutionizing the press-on nail industry by providing press-on nail brands with a solution to offer truly customized shopping experiences with a virtual fingernail sizing tool. This company is led by Founder & CEO Aurelia Edwards and her drive for success is rooted in past experiences that led her to create a superior product. QuikLiq: QuikLiq is an online tech-forward digital marketplace for wine, beer, and spirits where customers can order from their computer or mobile device and receive their delivery in 45 minutes or less. This company is led by CEO Navarr Grevious and CSO Mikael Pyles and found a real niche in a competitive market by targeting mom and pop liquor stores and expanding locally. Endeavor plans to help the early stage company through its growth stage. Rav.ai: With a degree in robotics and years of experience working in tech, Founder & CEO of Rav.ai, Jonas Cleveland has built a solution that will revolutionize the film editing market by removing the inefficiencies that plague the space and let artists do what they do best; create content. The company is also led by Co-Founders Elnura Amati and Jason Keeton. Show Agents: Show Agents is a platform that connects overbooked realtors to local showing assistants that can show properties on their behalf. The company is led by Founder & CEO Nadia Davis, an impressive entrepreneur with an abundance of motivation and passion. With a need to scale, Endeavors ecosystem is perfect for the company. Vero Learning: Chrissybil Boulin, Founder of Vero Leaning, has serious grit and a proven track record with her previous business, JumpStart Tutors. Although Vero Learning is still in its infancy, Endeavor feels confident in the scalability of the business. About Endeavor Endeavor is the leading global community of, by, and for High-Impact Entrepreneurs those who dream bigger, scale faster, and pay it forward. Driven by our belief that High-Impact Entrepreneurs transform economies, Endeavor is on a mission to build thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging and underserved markets around the world. Endeavor creates a Multiplier Effect by inspiring high-growth founders to dream bigger, supporting and investing in them to scale faster, and providing a platform to pay it forward thereby compounding their individual impact. To sustain Endeavors long-term operations in a mission-aligned way, Endeavor created Endeavor Catalyst a rules-based, co-investment fund, set up to invest in the same High-Impact Entrepreneurs that Endeavor supports. Today. Endeavor Catalyst is among the worlds top early-stage founders of startups-turned $1B+ companies (Unicorns) outside of the U.S. and China. Learn more about Endeavor at https://endeavor.org/. About Endeavor Miami The Endeavor Miami affiliate was established in 2013, with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as the first U.S. affiliate of Endeavor Global. Endeavor Miamis entrepreneurs generated close to $340M in revenues and over 3,000 jobs in South Florida in 2020. With the addition of its newest companies, the affiliate currently supports 32 companies and 51 entrepreneurs, such as EveryMundo, EcoSystems, NovoPayment and SellersFunding. Learn more about Endeavor Miami at https://endeavormiami.org/. About Dell Technologies Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. The company provides customers with the industrys broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the data era. Dell for Startups provides technology expertise from dedicated IT advisors and scalable solutions to ensure your business is always ready to grow. Regardless of where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, planning for technology that meets your needs now and can scale with your startup in the future is as challenging as it is important. Dell for Startups will pair you with a dedicated startup tech advisor to walk with you on your startup journey, helping you launch efficiently and scale rapidly. Entrepreneurs selected for EndeavorLAB Cohort for Black Founders Daniel BenjaminSenior Account Executive, BoardroomPROffice: 954-370-8999Cell: 954-618-82871776 N Pine Island Road, Suite 320, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33322 Source: Endeavor Miami In Q2 2022, Enefit Green group total revenues increased by 30% y-o-y to 47.3m and EBITDA was up by 51% y-o-y at 30.7m. During the quarter, the group earned net profit of 16.9m (0.06 per share), which is 80% more than in Q2 2021. Aavo Karmas, Chairman of the management Board of Enefit Green comments: Energy prices in the region continued to break new records in the second quarter, keeping consumers and industry under intense pressure across Europe. European countries are abandoning Russian gas and oil and are searching for new and alternative solutions. The only viable long-term solution for the energy crisis is electrification through renewable sources replacing fossil energy sources such as motor fuels in transport or natural gas in heat production. The more we can produce green electricity, the less we will depend on uncertain and expensive fossil fuel supplies. Enefit Green is currently constructing four new wind farms in Estonia, Lithuania and Finland and three solar farms in Estonia and Poland. Investments in new assets amounted to about 40 million euros during the second quarter. In order to accelerate the deployment of renewable electricity and reduce the carbon footprint in the region, we will quadruple the current production capacity (457 megawatts) to about 1900 megawatts by 2026. For this purpose, we are investing ca 1.5 billion euros in new development projects. The most recent step in the implementation of the growth plan is the acquisition of the Tootsi wind farm. We plan to simultaneously build the Tootsi (74 MW) and Sopi (161 MW) wind farms and double the current production of Estonian wind power by doing so. The implementation of the growth strategy is also supported by the construction of the new 32MW Purtse solar farm. Together with the wind farm to be built nearby (21 MW), it will become Estonia's first hybrid farm for large-scale electricity production. In May, the general meeting of shareholders of Enefit Green decided to pay investors a dividend of 0.151 euros per share for financial year 2021. In total, we distributed investors nearly 40 million euros in dividends, or 50% of the net profit in 2021. Just as prescribed by our dividend policy. To grow production of renewable energy, and together with it our financial results and dividends in the future, we plan to make investment decisions for the construction of new wind and solar parks in the amount of 358 MW before the end of this year. Webinar to present the results of Q2 2022 Today, August 4, 2022 at 13.00 EEST Enefit Green will host a Webinar in English to present and discuss its Q2 2022 results. To participate, please follow this link . Significant events Approval of the updated strategy Final investment decision on 32MW Purtse solar farm (Estonia) Sale of minority stake in Wind Controller Annual general meeting of shareholders and dividend distribution 74MW Tootsi wind farm project acquisition (July 2022) Change in the management board composition (July 2022) Key figures Q2 2022 Q2 2021 Change Change % PRODUCTION VOLUMES Electricity, GWh 270 256 15 6% Heat, GWh 152 146 6 4% Pellets, th t 36 26 9 35% TOTAL REVENUES, m 47.3 36.2 11.0 30% Sales revenue, m 41.5 29.4 12.1 41% Renewable energy support and other income, m 5.8 6.8 -1.1 -16% EBITDA, m 30.7 20.3 10.4 51% NET PROFIT, m 16.9 9.4 7.5 80% EPS, (post-IPO number of shares) 0.06 0.04 0.03 80% Sales revenues and other operating income Groups electricity production in 2Q 2022 was 270 GWh, increasing 6% year-on-year. The implied captured electricity price (including various subsidies) received by the group across markets was 127/MWh in Q2 2022, compared with 87 /MWh in Q2 2021. The most important revenue driver was the surge in the electricity price in the Estonia price area of the Nord Pool (NP) power exchange, which increased the groups revenue by around 11.5m. The average market price in the NP Estonia price area in Q2 2022 was 142.0 /MWh compared with 54.6 /MWh in Q2 2021. The implied captured electricity prices of the groups Estonian production entities in the two periods were 115.9 /MWh and 45.0 /MWh. The implied captured electricity price differs from the average NP price because wind farms do not produce the same amount of electricity in each hour and the figure also includes the effects of long-term fixed-price power purchase agreements (PPAs). Wind conditions in Q2 2022 were comparable to Q2 2021 and their influence on the production results was relatively neutral. Heat energy production increased by 4% and sales price increased by 8% compared with a year earlier. Other income for Q2 2022 was strongly affected by a decrease in the renewable energy support received by the groups Estonian wind farms, which dropped by 0.9m year on year. The eligibility period of the Tooma 1 wind farm expired in April 2022 and that of the earliest completed part of the Aulepa wind farm (39 MW) expired in July 2021. EBITDA and segmental breakdown Groups EBITDA increased by 51% y-o-y to 30.7m in Q2 2022 driven mostly by the elevated Estonian electricity prices and somewhat by higher wind energy production volume in Estonia. Variable costs have increased by 7.0m, which is largely due to the increase in the price of balancing energy transactions due to the increased price of electricity and the change in the financial accounting of intraday Nord Pool transactions (2.9m), which has no effect on EBITDA. In addition, the cost of technological fuel (2.4m) and other direct production costs (1.8m) have also increased. Groups fixed expenses increased by 19% or 1.4m of which around half derived from payroll expenses, driven mainly by expanded development team and growth in compensation. Based on total revenues and EBITDA, the groups largest segment is Wind energy with 57% of total revenues and 67% of EBITDA for the reporting period. The Cogeneration segment contributed 34% to total revenues and 35% to EBITDA. The smallest reportable segment is Solar energy, which accounted for 8% of the groups total revenues and 4% of the groups EBITDA for Q2. Among reportable segments, Wind and the Cogeneration delivered the strongest EBITDA growth supported by high electricity prices. Net profit The groups net profit increased 80% compared to Q2 2021, amounting to 16.9m for the reporting period. The most significant positive contribution came from high market prices of electricity , but also from lower net financial expenses. At the same time 4.3m increase in corporate income tax expense (primarily related to the dividend distribution from Estonian profits) had considerable negative effect on net profit growth. Capital Expenditures The groups Q2 capital expenditures grew by 4.8m year on year, rising to 40.9m. Growth resulted from development investments, which extended to 39.9m. Out of the total, 37.8m was invested in the construction of three wind farms: 24.9m in the Akmene wind farm, 6.9m in the Silale 2 wind farm and 6.0m in the Tolpanvaara wind farm. The largest investment in solar power was 1.1m, which was invested in the execution phase of the Purtse solar farm. Baseline investments (expenditure on the improvement and maintenance of existing assets) amounted to 1m in Q2 2022 compared with 1.8m in the same period last year and were mainly related to operating turbines. Baseline investments may differ significantly quarter by quarter because they depend on the wind turbines repair and maintenance needs during the period. Condensed consolidated interim income statement thousand Q2 2022 Q2 2021 1H 2022 1H 2021 Revenue 41,505 29,408 99,646 63,522 Renewable energy support and other income 5,773 6,833 14,352 14,886 Change in inventories of finished goods and work-in-progress 4,646 (3,158) 2,579 (5,942) Raw materials, consumables and services used (16,365) (9,508) (30,499) (19,086) Payroll expenses (2,169) (1,477) (4,612) (3,307) Depreciation, amortisation and impairment (9,644) (9,547) (19,292) (19,126) Other operating expenses (2,645) (1,772) (5,150) (3,688) OPERATING PROFIT 21,101 10,778 57,025 27,259 Finance income 1,117 50 1,525 145 Finance costs (626) (1,022) (1,188) (1,576) Net finance costs 491 (972) 337 (1,431) Profit (loss) from associates under the equity method (76) (58) (72) (36) PROFIT BEFORE TAX 21,516 9,748 57,290 25,792 Corporate income tax expense (4,592) (328) (5,441) (760) PROFIT FOR THE PERIOD 16,924 9,420 51,849 25,032 Basic and diluted earnings per share Weighted average number of shares, thousand 264,276 4,793 264,276 4,793 Basic earnings per share, 0.06 1.97 0.20 5.22 Diluted earnings per share, 0.06 1.97 0.20 5.22 Basic earnings per share based on post-IPO number of shares Post-IPO number of shares, thousand 264,276 264,276 264,276 264,276 Basic earnings per share, 0.06 0.04 0.20 0.09 Condensed consolidated interim statement of financial position thousand 30 June 2022 31 Dec 2021 ASSETS Non-current assets Property, plant and equipment 647,634 612,503 Intangible assets 68,578 68,239 Right-of-use assets 4,298 2,750 Prepayments 20,030 20,710 Deferred tax assets 734 442 Investments in associates 427 578 Derivative financial instruments 6,703 - Long-term receivables 40 78 Total non-current assets 748,444 705,300 Current assets Inventories 16,267 9,529 Trade and other receivables and prepayments 23,479 22,373 Cash and cash equivalents 90,845 80,454 Derivative financial instruments 12 - Total current assets 130,603 112,356 Total assets 879,047 817,656 thousand 30 June 2022 31 Dec 2021 EQUITY Equity and reserves attributable to equity holder of the parent Share capital 264,276 264,276 Share premium 60,351 60,351 Statutory reserve capital 3,259 479 Other reserves 158,317 151,793 Foreign currency translation reserve (1,209) (965) Retained earnings 166,836 157,673 Total equity 651,830 633,607 LIABILITIES Non-current liabilities Borrowings 132,297 93,884 Goverment grants 7,344 7,458 Non-derivative contract liability 23,207 23,207 Deferred tax liabilities 12,384 12,568 Other long-term liabilities 3,000 3,000 Provisions 12 13 Total non-current liabilities 178,244 140,130 Current liabilities Borrowings 22,936 29,572 Trade and other payables 25,791 14,291 Provisions 55 56 Derivative financial instruments 191 - Total current liabilities 48,973 43,919 Total liabilities 227,217 184,049 Total equity and liabilities 879,047 817,656 Further information: Sven Kunsing Head of Finance Communications [email protected] https://enefitgreen.ee/en/investorile/ Enefit Green is one of the leading diversified renewable energy producers in the Baltic sea area. The Company wind farms in Estonia and Lithuania, cogeneration plants in Estonia and Latvia, solar farms in Estonia and Poland, a pellet plant in Latvia and a hydroelectric plant in Estonia. In addition the Company is developing several wind and solar farms in the mentioned countries and Finland. As of the end of 2021, the Group had a total installed electricity production capacity of 457 MW and a total installed heat production capacity of 81 MW. During 2021, the Company produced 1,193 GWh of electricity and 618 GWh of heat. Attachments Austin, Texas, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ePac Flexible Packaging, the industry leader in quick turn, short and medium run-length flexible packaging, has announced it will accelerate its growth and transition to a global enterprise over the next 18 months. Eleven new sales and manufacturing locations will be established across Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East/North Africa, and North America bringing ePacs global footprint to 36 locations. In Europe, a second plant will be added in each of the UK, France, and Poland. In Austria, ePac Innsbruck will open in Q4 2022, along with a new site(s) to serve the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. In the Asia Pacific region, second plants will be added in Indonesia and Australia, and a new operation will start up in Malaysia. The company also plans to establish an Asia-based Global Services group to manage operations in the region. In the Middle East/North Africa region, ePac West Africa in Ghana will open in Q4 of this year, while evaluations of new sites in Kenya and Turkey are underway. Finally, in North America, previously announced ePac Montreal is planned to open in early 2023, along with 3 additional plants in the US. Established in 2016, ePac is based on a disruptive business model that includes: 1) an all-digital and highly automated technology platform, 2) a commitment to the communities our plants reside in, and 3) a focus on helping small and medium size brands compete and grow. As the company has expanded its broad network of facilities and geographic coverage, it has enabled the rapid start-up of new plants and created the ability to split long run jobs among multiple plants. ePacs platform is capable of serving all but the longest of run-lengths. According to Jack Knott, ePac CEO: To manage our growth and operations our company is transitioning from ePac Holdings, to ePac Global with an infrastructure to optimize market knowledge and growth in each country we are in. About ePac Flexible Packaging Founded in 2016 with a mission to help small and medium sized companies grow and compete with larger brands, ePac has 25 locations across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and the Asia Pacific region. ePac is 100% digital and built on the latest in digital printing and workflow technologies, providing fast time to market and low minimum orders. ePac offers a full complement of sustainable film options, while its print technology platform is carbon-neutral and inherently eco-friendly. Further, the company offers true order to demand capability, helping brands reduce inventory and obsolescence. For more information, please visit ePacFlexibles. Attachment Carl Joachim ePac Flexible Packaging 561-573-7992 [email protected] Source: ePac Flexible Packaging HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Erdene Resource Development Corp. (TSX:ERD; MSE:ERDN) ("Erdene" or the "Company") is pleased to announce operating and financial results for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022 and to provide an update on its Khundii Gold District (KGD), including its Bayan Khundii Gold Project (Bayan Khundii or BK). This release should be read in conjunction with the Companys Q2-2022 Financial Statements and MD&A, available on the Companys website and SEDAR. Quotes from the Company: During the second quarter, we made further progress on our objectives of growing resources in the Khundii Gold District, while progressing the Bayan Khundii Gold Project towards development, said Peter Akerley, Erdenes President and CEO. Results from recent drilling at the Ulaan Southeast discovery, just west of Bayan Khundii, expanded mineralization, which remains open to the west and at depth. We are seeing further evidence to support Erdenes thesis that our Khundii Gold District hosts a multimillion-ounce gold deposit, which could support a significant increase in gold production from the Bayan Khundii Gold Project. We also moved Bayan Khundii closer towards construction over the past three months. Preparatory site works are underway and permits have been received for most facilities, with the balance expected in the coming months, continued Mr. Akerley. As we move into the latter part of 2022, we anticipate the issues at the China-Mongolia border will begin to abate, positioning us well for full construction. Q2-2022 Highlights and Significant Subsequent Events: Bayan Khundii Gold Project 100% Erdene Progressed construction readiness activities for the Bayan Khundii Gold Project: Preliminary Site Establishment works completed, including camp expansion, communications infrastructure installation and project controls software implementation Re-pricing and tendering for major equipment supply and construction works substantially complete Preferred and shortlist vendors selected for all major project works Obtained key permits and advanced regulatory approvals required for mine development: Regulatory review of detailed drawings well advanced, with nine facilities fully approved, including those planned during the site establishment and initial construction received construction permits for eight of these facilities in February 2022 Process plant regulatory review ongoing with approvals anticipated in Q3 2022 Continued local community programs in advance of full construction: Undertook several community-led programs to support public health and education in the sub-province, within the framework of the Local Cooperation Agreement Established over 10,000 endemic plants and trees at a 2 hectare nursery at the project site for future reclamation and environmental protection Employed over 30 local residents at site Exploration Completed first phase of the 2022 KGD exploration program, including 3,906 metres of diamond drilling and 2,145 metres of shallow, reverse circulation (RC) work: Drilled 2,464 metres at Ulaan SE, expanding this high-grade discovery west and at depth, intersecting an interpreted feeder zone Completed 1,442 metres of shallow scout drilling across the broader Ulaan license results are pending and expected to be announced in mid-August 2022 Executed a systematically spaced RC drill program focusing on zones of cover primarily within the Khundii license results are pending and expected to be announced in mid-August 2022 Traced mineralization at Ulaan SE over a 200 metre strike to a depth of 450 metres, that remains open to the west and at depth UDH-35 included the highest average grade intersection to date at Ulaan SE Intersected 23 metres of 13.7 g/t gold within 41 metres of 8.1 g/t gold, beginning 187 metres downhole UDH-21, including the hole extension, returned one of the thickest gold zones in the KGD Intersected 335 metres of 1.1 g/t gold, beginning 115 metres downhole, ending in mineralization Includes 27 metres of 8.7 g/t gold, within 77 metres of 3.2 g/t gold UDH-36 intersected 179 metres of 1.2 g/t gold, beginning 72 metres downhole Includes several one-metre, high-grade intervals, ranging from 10-33 g/t gold, and ending in mineralization UDH-53 returned high-grade mineralization within a projected feeder zone Includes 2 metres of 24.9 g/t gold within 27 metres of 3.5 g/t gold UDH-52, 60 metres SSE of UDH-53, intersected a wide zone of mineralization Returned 189 metres averaging 0.8 g/t gold Corporate Completed a $7.2 million financing led by $2.0 million investment from Eric Sprott on July 21 Proceeds will be used to fund exploration, including follow up drilling at the recent Ulaan and Dark Horse discoveries, site establishment work for the Companys Bayan Khundii Gold Project development, and for general working capital purposes Progressed due diligence for the Bayan Khundii Project Finance with EDC and other financiers EDC term sheet agreed and detailed drafting underway in advance of anticipated late-2022 financial close Discussions are proceeding in parallel with Mongolian and International financiers on subordinated debt and other non-equity instruments Recorded a net loss of $2,928,904 for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to a net loss of $1,895,606 for the six months ended June 30, 2021 Exploration and evaluation expenditures totaled $5,936,987, including capitalized expenditures of $3,943,279, for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $5,618,873, including capitalized expenditures of $4,735,968, for the comparative prior year period, as increased salaries, camp and stakeholder relations costs due to a ramp-up in activity prior to construction more than offset lower drilling and analysis costs due to less exploration in the period and lower share-based compensation expenditures due to the timing of employee performance grants Corporate and administration expenses totaled $921,045 for the six months ended June 30, 2022, compared to $1,029,131 for the six months ended June 30, 2021, as lower share-based compensation expenditures due to the timing of employee performance grants more than offset higher administrative salaries in support of pre-development and financing work for the Bayan Khundii Gold Project and increased regulatory fees driven by growth in the Companys market capitalization Qualified Person Peter Dalton, P.Geo. (Nova Scotia), Senior Geologist for Erdene, is the Qualified Person as that term is defined in National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release. About Erdene Erdene Resource Development Corp. is a Canada-based resource company focused on the acquisition, exploration, and development of precious and base metals in underexplored and highly prospective Mongolia. The Company has interests in three mining licenses and an exploration license in Southwest Mongolia, where exploration success has led to the discovery and definition of the Khundii Gold District. Erdene Resource Development Corp. is listed on the Toronto and the Mongolian stock exchanges. Further information is available at www.erdene.com. Important information may be disseminated exclusively via the website; investors should consult the site to access this information. Forward-Looking Statements Certain information regarding Erdene contained herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements may include estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, guidance, or other statements that are not statements of fact. Although Erdene believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Erdene cautions that actual performance will be affected by a number of factors, most of which are beyond its control, and that future events and results may vary substantially from what Erdene currently foresees. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include the ability to obtain required third party approvals, market prices, exploitation, and exploration results, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. The forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The information contained herein is stated as of the current date and is subject to change after that date. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. NO REGULATORY AUTHORITY HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS RELEASE Erdene Contact Information Peter C. Akerley, President and CEO, or Robert Jenkins, CFO Phone: (902) 423-6419 Email: [email protected] Twitter: https://twitter.com/ErdeneRes Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ErdeneResource LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/erdene-resource-development-corp-/ Source: Erdene Resource Development Corporation Atlanta, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Younger generations have begun to dominate and shape the homebuying market. In 2022, the National Association of REALTORS identified that 43% of homebuyers were Millennials and 2% of homebuyers were Gen Z. While many more consumers aspire to become homeowners, they often face challenges and obstacles along the way. Across all states and demographics, the top three reasons for a mortgage application being denied in 2021 were high debt-to-income ratio, low credit score, and insufficient savings to cover their down payment and closing costs. FinLocker believes that homeownership should be attainable and sustainable for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status. We are committed to working with mortgage lenders, banks, credit unions, and related financial institutions and businesses to understand the challenges often facing homebuyers. Together we can overcome the obstacles facing many future homeowners on their path to achieving the American Dream. Who are the future homebuyers? To better understand the financial habits of future homebuyers, FinLocker partnered with students in the American Marketing Associations group at the University of Southern California (USC). Over a four-week period from mid-March to mid-April 2022, the USC students interviewed Millennials, defined as those born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z, defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. However, the average age of Gen Z survey respondents was 20.3 years old, so that they could provide relevant responses to the survey questions. The survey was designed to determine: How the next generation of homebuyers manages their personal finances. How are they planning to achieve their financial goals? How is the next generation of homebuyers planning to buy a home in the future? Identifying the financial habits of future homebuyers When it comes to using budgeting tools to manage their finances, Millennials were evenly split using personal finance apps (45%) and spreadsheets (43.1%). In comparison, most Gen Z preferred personal finance apps (52%) over spreadsheets (12.3%). However, 33.3% of Millennials and 49.1% of Gen Z do not use any tool to manage their finances. With the oldest Gen Zers just graduating college and the youngest still in middle school, this admission identified an opportunity for financial institutions to connect with the 73% of smartphone users who said they used an app to manage their finances in the month prior to taking the survey. The prevalence of free credit monitoring tools has made it easier for future homebuyers to monitor their credit score. Most Millennials (82%) and Gen Z (54.5%) regularly monitor their credit score, and 88.8% of both groups prefer to use their banks app or website for credit score monitoring rather than a personal financial management app. To monitor their credit report, the top choice for both groups is FICO (46.9%), closely followed by going directly to one of the three credit bureaus (43.6%), with TransUnion (18.6%) being their preferred bureau. However, most respondents were unaware that FICO offered a paid service for credit report monitoring, so they were likely obtaining their FICO credit score from their banking app or website and obtaining their credit report directly from the credit bureaus. Both groups of future homebuyers strongly prefer using free tools provided by reputable financial institutions to monitor their credit score and credit report. Of the total finance app users who downloaded a paid app, 38% reported doing so because the app offered features or functionality unavailable on free alternatives. Providing future homebuyers with a feature-filled free private-label app will enable them to monitor their credit score and credit report in one place rather than juggle multiple apps and websites to accomplish the same tasks. Mortgage lenders using this tactic have two advantages: They can establish their reputation as a trustworthy source of financial information long before future homebuyers enter the home buying process, and They can begin to establish a relationship with the homebuyer before their competitors. Financial goals of future homebuyers A high proportion of both groups had identified financial goals to achieve in the next five years. Their financial goals reflected the differences in their stage of life. Millennials, who are more likely to have already bought a car and started to accumulate credit card debt, aimed to buy a home, pay off loans/debt, then buy a car. While the leading financial goals of Gen Z respondents were first to buy a car, buy a home, then pay off loans/debt. Interestingly, for two generations early in their financial life, both groups rated achieving financial freedom, which they defined as being debt-free and having savings to buy a house, as their top priority. Millennials Gen Z Financial freedom 61.5% 80.8% Buying a home 51.3% 30.8% Paying off loans / debt 46.2% 23.1% Buying a car 23.1% 50% Supporting a family 17.9% 28.8% How are future homebuyers saving to achieve their financial goals? According to the National Association of REALTORS2022 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, savings are the primary source of a down payment for homebuyers 23 to 31 (86%) and 32 to 41 (72%). It is, therefore, optimistic to see that future homebuyers are establishing saving habits early. Banks and credit unions have a head start on independent mortgage lenders capturing the business of future homebuyers because Millennials and Gen Z are either saving in a regular bank account or a separate savings account. Where do you put your savings? Millennials Gen Z Regular bank account 49% 78.9% Separate savings account 49% 66.7% Invest in stocks 47.1% 26.3% 401K, Roth IRA, other Retirement account 23.1% 10.5% Crypto Assets 17.9% 10.5% Health Savings Account 2% 1.8% Marketing to future homebuyers Lenders can become the trusted advisor that future homebuyers seek Like many first-time homebuyers, the Millennials and Gen Z survey respondents lack a solid understanding of how to improve their credit profile, the mortgage process, and the amount of time it takes to buy a home. The majority of Millennials conceded that they need to improve their knowledge of the homeownership process, including finding a real estate agent, home loans, down payments, etc. When Millennials were asked to rate their knowledge of the home buying process, 32.6% confidently rated their knowledge 8, 9, or 10 out of 10. However, 49.8% rated their knowledge only a 1, 2, or 3 rating out of 10. Both groups of future homebuyers primarily learn about personal finance topics, such as how to save and follow budgets, from family and friends. However, Millennials next preferred finance websites, personal finance blogs, and influencers before social media. Gen Z respondents overwhelming turned to social media before any other source. With both groups of future homebuyers using social media platforms between 1-5 hours each day and preferring YouTube to learn about personal finance, there is a tremendous opportunity for mortgage lenders, banks, and credit unions to drive exposure to their business through financial education. Where do you go to learn about personal finance topics? Millennials Gen Z Friends and family 33.3% 50.9% Websites (e.g. Motley Fool, The Balance) 25% 5.5% Personal finance blogs and influencers 18.8% 5.5% Social media 16.7% 34.5% Books and podcasts 4.2% 3.6% Both Millennials (80.4%) and Gen Z (93%) respondents would eventually like to buy a home. Knowing the motivating factors of future homebuyers can be used as additional topics for social media posts and blogs. Why would you like to buy a home? Millennials Gen Z Buying a home is a good investment 34.1% 49.1% I want the financial stability of having a payment, and not renting 29.3% 18.9% Buying a home will enable me to build wealth 12.2% 11.3% Want more space or to live on their own 12.2% 11.3% Buying a home will be good for my family 9.8% 5.7% Buying a home will provide financial security 2.4% 3.8% What drives future homebuyers to begin their homeownership journey? FinLocker has conducted extensive user research focused on leading indicators of a borrower entering their homeownership journey. The mortgage industry commonly uses high-cost lagging indicators, like credit and MLS listing triggers to identify new leads. However, as the survey validates, there is a more equitable opportunity to engage a consumer: connecting at the top of the marketing funnel during their point of thought. Our research informs us of four primary activities most consumers undertake (sequence may vary within each consumer segment) as a precursor to their homeownership journey. Consumers begin their homeownership journey by forming a mental picture of their new home. During the property exploration phase, consumers identify where they would like to live, the type of home, neighborhood, schools, etc., well before they connect with a real estate agent or mortgage originator. Consumers research how they will finance their home purchase. In this phase, consumers seek answers to understand their potential buying power, the mortgage products they may qualify for their purchase, and the companies and prices offered for those products. Consumers review their credit profile to understand their credit score and its impact on pricing, eligibility, and affordability. Consumers decide if their finances and cash flow can support a mortgage payment. In this phase, the consumer develops their financial picture of cash flow, housing expenses, and discretionary spending implications. To better understand how to reach future homebuyers at their point of thought, we need to know the factors that future home buyers use to determine when they are ready to start their homeownership journey. The study has already identified that future homebuyers know they need to be educated on ways to build credit and budget their income. However, they also need support during the initial stages of their homeownership journey when they are actively saving, paying off debt, and monitoring their credit. How will you determine when you are ready to buy a home? When I have sufficient savings: 73.9% When I have a good credit score: 11.9% When I have a family of my own: 11.9% Other: 2.4% The ability to save is also impacted by the number one factor that delays future homebuyers from considering homeownership debt. Nine out of ten Gen Z survey respondents had educational loans, and 26.8% had credit card debt. Debt is an obstacle that prevents or delays homeownership for many future homebuyers. Among the class of 2020, 55% of bachelors degree recipients took out student loans, graduating with an average of $28,400 in federal and private debt, according to Student Loan Hero. Student loans were the primary expenses that delayed 49% of young millennials and 44% of older millennial homebuyers, a median of 3-4 years from saving for a down payment or buying a home, according to the National Association of REALTORS2022 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends. Helping future homebuyers to achieve homeownership presents challenges to the mortgage industry. However, mortgage lenders have clear opportunities to reach them by understating their needs and responding to the drivers they use to determine when they are ready to proceed with their first home purchase. This study, which was conducted by future homeowners, was to understand the challenges facing these consumers so the industry can provide them with trusted resources and objective information to help them navigate their own path to homeownership. Summary of survey respondents Gender: Female: 51% Male: 49% Income: 22% > Up to $30,000 22% > $30,000 - $50,000 10% > $50,000 - $70,000 6% > $70,000 - $100,000 40% > Over $100,000 About FinLocker FinLocker provides mortgage lenders with a competitive advantage to attract future homebuyers to their business long before they begin taking actions that put them on the radar of other mortgage lenders. As the survey highlights, saving is the most significant factor for Millennials' homebuying decisions. The core financial fitness tools in FinLocker credit health, financial accounts management, trackable savings goals, and customizable budgets - were designed to engage consumers of all ages meaningfully. Future homebuyers can begin their financial life by establishing good financial habits and saving to achieve early financial goals while learning from the educational resources while interacting with your brand in your private-labeled FinLocker. When a future homebuyer determines they are ready to begin their homeownership journey and selects the goal of "first-time homebuyer" in their FinLocker, personalized journeys are triggered to introduce them to the Readiness tool. This proprietary tool, created by FinLocker, aggregates and analyzes their enrolled financial data and outputs their current status for mortgage eligibility. Consumers are also provided with the actions they need to take to get mortgage ready, including saving more for their down payment, raising their credit score, and reducing their debt-to-income ratio. Future homebuyers can research the current sales prices of homes in their desired neighborhoods using the Property widget powered by HomeScout. The home affordability calculator analyzes their income and recommends a home budget and monthly mortgage payment based on their income. The calculator also shows the amount they need to save for their down payment and closing costs. FinLocker makes it easy for future homebuyers to achieve their savings goals. Within a few clicks on their FinLocker app, consumers can create a trackable savings goal for their down payment and assign a bank account that perpetually updates each goal. To reduce their debt-to-income ratio, they can also create trackable goals to pay off credit cards and other high-interest personal loans. Future homebuyers can track their progress towards mortgage readiness using the perpetually updated Readiness tool. When they've achieved mortgage eligibility, they can verify their income and employment in the FinLocker app and share their financial data and documents with their mortgage originator to begin their mortgage application. FinLocker supports customers for their entire financial life Banks and credit unions can provide their consumers with a private-labeled FinLocker before they've graduated college to position their financial institution to retain and recapture multiple financial transactions. Most consumers conduct five to seven mortgage-related transactions during their lifetime. Mortgage lenders can distribute their private-label FinLocker to college students to financially prepare them for their first home loan and retain them for refinancing and additional purchase loans. Mortgage lenders and financial institutions who partner with businesses to offer auxiliary financial services, such as credit counseling, home insurance, and wealth management, are best positioned to be the center of their customer's entire financial life. FinLockers mission is to enable people to achieve the dream of homeownership and financial well-being. We are committed to providing the mortgage industry with trusted tools and resources that can help make this happen. Acknowledgements FinLocker would like to thank the students of the American Marketing Association group at the University of Southern California for conducting the survey and presenting their finding and recommendations to FinLocker. Atharva Bubna - Computer Science & Business Administration Ambar Dange - International Relations Global Business Mia Fong - Economics Ryan Jung - Product UX Design Rohan Nishtala - Industrial Engineering: Operations Management and Supervision Charlie Rez - Economics and Data Science Additional Contributors Yee Young (YY) Cher - Business Administration Isaac Wu - Industrial Systems Engineering & Business Administration Attachment Diana Mulhall FinLocker 415-786-2406 [email protected] Source: FinLocker CENTREVILLE, Va., Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Parsons Corporation (NYSE: PSN) joined Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) to celebrate the unveiling of the 1st of 44 Automated People Mover (APM) vehicles to be delivered to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The APM is a 2.25-mile electric train system that will enhance the traveler experience by making it easier to get into and out of the worlds fifth-busiest airport, reduce traffic congestion, and provide a more predictable and reliable commute to and from the airport. The APM incorporates best practices in vehicle sustainability, manufacturing, design, and construction. LAX is a gateway to the world, and the APM is a critical investment that will improve access to its terminals, the recently opened LAX Economy Parking Garage, and the soon to be completed Consolidated Rent-A-Car facility for millions of passengers every year, said Catherine Cronin, senior vice president, aviation and rail transit for Parsons. Our team of aviation experts has proudly supported capital projects at LAX for more than two decades, and we are honored to be part of the LAWA team for this true milestone in one of the largest ongoing infrastructure projects in the United States. Parsons has served as the Project Management/Construction Management (PM/CM) consultant and client representative for the APM since 2017. The company also developed the structure, budget, and staffing plan for the Landside Access Modernization Program; and currently supports construction management, engineering technical validation, and design document review. The APM includes an elevated, dual lane grade-separated guideway that will connect the Central Terminal Area to the new off-site LAX Economy Parking Garage, which opened in October 2021, in addition to regional light rail and the Consolidated Rent-A-Car facility, which are both in construction. The APM will operate 24 hours, seven days a week and will be free to the public. "Innovation, sustainability and state-of-the-art technology are integral to our ongoing modernization," said Justin Erbacci, Chief Executive Officer, LAWA. "These automated people mover train cars will set a high standard for environmentally sustainable transportation, having shells made of recyclable materials and achieving zero emissions. We look forward to seeing the cars in action when we begin testing them in 2023." Parsons is a global leader in critical infrastructure excellence, contributing to the planning, design, sustainability, and management of more than 450 airports around the world. The company is continuously working to enhance the air travel experience through smart infrastructure and advanced technology that helps passengers get to their destinations safer, faster, and more efficiently. To learn more about Parsons aviation expertise, visit www.parsons.com/aviation. About Parsons: Parsons (NYSE: PSN) is a leading disruptive technology provider in the national security and critical infrastructure markets, with capabilities across cybersecurity, missile defense, space, C5ISR, transportation, environmental remediation, and water/wastewater treatment. Please visit Parsons.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook to learn how were making an impact. Media Contact: Bernadette Miller+1 980.253.9781[email protected] Investor Relations Contact:Dave Spille+1 703.775.6191[email protected] Source: Parsons Services Company Sydney, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Proactive, provider of real-time news and video interviews on growth companies listed in Australia, has covered the following companies: Surefire Resources NL (ASX:SRN) discovered a new mineralised gold trend in a recent reverse circulation (RC) drilling campaign at the Yidby Gold Project in Western Australia. Click here Creso Pharma Ltd (ASX:CPH, OTCQB:COPHF) has secured firm commitments to raise approximately A$7 million from institutional, professional and sophisticated investors through the issue of 175 million fully paid ordinary shares at A$0.04 per share. Click here Emyria Ltd (ASX:EMD) has kicked off a series of human cell-line pre-clinical studies to advance its MDMA-inspired drug discovery partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA). Click here Moho Resources Ltd (ASX:MOH) is making strong progress with nickel sulphide exploration programs at the Silver Swan North Project in Western Australia. Click here West Wits Mining Ltd (ASX:WWI)'s revised definitive feasibility study (DFS) for the Phase 1 Qala Shallows operation at Witwatersrand Basin Project (WBP) in South Africa demonstrates robust financials and an opportunity to grow beyond the initial phase, the company says. Click here Cobre Ltd (ASX:CBE) has completed a share placement to raise $7 million (before costs) with commitments from sophisticated and both international and domestic institutional investors to support the acquisition of Kalahari Metals Ltd, which owns the Ngami Project in Botswana. Click here American Rare Earths Ltd (ASX:ARR) has grown the Halleck Creek Rare Earth project in Wyoming, US, to more than 6,000 acres or 24.5 square kilometres with the addition of the newly staked Bluegrass area, which has demonstrated its potential with surface samples up to 5,065 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxide (TREO). Click here Chase Mining Corporation Ltd (ASX:CML) welcomes the news that Red Fox Resources (ASX:FXR) Pty Ltd, in which Chase holds a 40% stake, has been granted exploration permits (EPMs) across all tenements at the Selwyn Project, south of Cloncurry in northwest Queensland. Click here Lindian Resources Ltd (ASX:LIN) has a new CEO with Alistair Stephens to step into the role from Monday, August 8, 2022, and his first task will be to oversee the acquisition of Malawi company Rift Valley Resource Developments Limited and its globally significant Kangankunde Rare Earths Project. Click here Blue Star Helium Ltd (ASX:BNL, OTC:BSNLF) has spudded the Sammons 315310C helium well the first asset to target the companys Serenity prospect in Las Animas County, Colorado. Click here Dart Mining NL (ASX:DTM) is pleased with the findings from a regional soil survey at its Granite Flat Copper-Gold Project in Victoria, where its one step closer to understanding the scale of a base and precious metals system. Click here Radiopharm Theranostics Ltd (ASX:RAD) has secured key agreements with leading diagnostics and biopharmaceuticals companies Lantheus and Nanomab a strategic collaboration to develop the NM-01 imaging agent and a licensing agreement for imaging rights in China and worldwide IP rights for NM-01, respectively. Click here Kingwest Resources Ltd (ASX:KWR) has upsized its share purchase plan to $2.5 million amid strong shareholder demand. Click here Anson Resources Ltd (ASX:ASN) has delivered a material increase of up to 70% in lithium brine assays with drilling in the Clastic Zones of the Long Canyon No.2 well at the Paradox Lithium Project, in Utah, USA. Click here Jindalee Resources Ltd (ASX:JRL) has welcomed highly experienced lithium industry executive Darren Wates to the board as an independent non-executive director. Click here Brookside Energy Ltd (ASX:BRK) had notched up another success in the SWISH Area of Interest (AOI) in Oklahomas world-class Anadarko Basin with commercial production of oil and rich gas underway at the high-impact Flames 3-10-1S-3W WXH1 Well. Click here Frontier Energy Ltd (ASX:FHE) has positively assessed the hydrogen potential of its WA-based Bristol Springs green energy project in Western Australia through a pre-feasibility study (PFS). Click here Galileo Mining Ltd (ASX:GAL) has underscored the considerable potential of the Callisto discovery within the Norseman Project in Western Australia with extensive continuity of rhodium mineralisation unearthed in the second reverse circulation (RC) drilling program on the tenure. Click here About Proactive Proactive is a unique tech-enabled platform providing companies globally with a comprehensive investor engagement solution across their business lifecycle. With six offices on three continents, Proactive works with innovative growth companies quoted on the worlds major stock exchanges, helping executives to engage intelligently with investors. In 2020, Proactive featured in 809 million search results, our content was viewed over 165 million times and our readers spent over 10 million hours on our websites. Proactive has produced over 300,000 articles and 20,000 executive interviews since it was established in 2006. For more information on how Proactive can help you make a difference, email us at [email protected] Source: Proactive THE WOODLANDS, Texas, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ring Energy, Inc. (NYSE American: REI) (Ring or the Company) today reported operational and financial results for the second quarter of 2022. In addition, Ring provided third quarter guidance and increased its full year 2022 sales volumes outlook. Second Quarter 2022 Highlights Recorded quarterly sales revenue of $85.0 million, which was the highest in the Companys history; Produced sales volumes of 9,341 barrels of oil equivalent per day (Boe/d) (86% oil) were 5% higher than the first quarter of 2022 and at the higher end of Rings guidance range of 9,000 to 9,400 Boe/d (86% oil); Increased Net Income nearly six-fold to $41.9 million, or $0.32 per diluted share, from $7.1 million, or $0.06 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2022; Reported Adjusted Net Income1 of $31.3 million, or $0.29 per share, which was a 40% increase from $22.3 million, or $0.22 per share, in the first quarter of 2022; Increased Adjusted EBITDA1 by 33% to $47.4 million from $35.6 million for the first quarter of 2022; Represents the highest level of quarterly Adjusted EBITDA in the Companys history: Adjusted EBITDA was $82.9 million in first half of 2022, which was nearly equal to the $83.3 million generated in full year 2021; Generated Cash Flow from Operations1 of $44.3 million and Free Cash Flow1 of $2.5 million; Paid down $10.0 million of debt on the Companys revolving credit facility; Reduced the debt to trailing 12-month Adjusted EBITDA (Leverage) ratio to 2.1x compared to 3.5x at year end 2021; Increased liquidity to $81.5 million, a 32% increase from year-end 2021; Drilled nine wells, placed on production seven wells (two of which were drilled in first quarter), and began the completion process on four wells all on the Companys Northwest Shelf (NWS) acreage; Converted four wells (three in the NWS and one in the Central Basin Platform (CBP)) from downhole electrical submersible pumps to rod pumps (CTRs), thereby reducing costly workovers and long-term operating costs; and Provided third quarter guidance and an improved outlook for full year sales volumes and operating costs, while leaving capital spending guidance unchanged. Subsequent Events On July 5, 2022, the Company announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire (the Transaction) the assets of privately-held Stronghold Energy II Operating, LLC and Stronghold Energy II Royalties, LP (collectively, Stronghold). Strongholds operations are focused on the development of approximately 37,000 net acres in the Permian Basins CBP, where Ring also conducts operations. The effective date of the Transaction is June 1, 2022 and closing is anticipated during the third quarter. As a result, the impact from the Transaction will not be included in Rings financial and operational results until following the closing of the transaction. Management Commentary Mr. Paul D. McKinney, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, commented, The continued strong performance of our drilling and completions program, bolstered by significantly higher commodity prices, enhanced our second quarter results and led to record quarterly revenue and Adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA increased 33% from this years first quarter and we have generated nearly as much Adjusted EBITDA in the first half of 2022 as we did in the entire prior year. We also generated Free Cash Flow for the 11th consecutive quarter, as well as reduced debt by $10 million. We have now paid down $20 million in debt in 2022 and lowered our leverage ratio to 2.1x, which was almost a full turn and a half lower than at year-end 2021. We believe our strong operational and financial results for this quarter clearly reflect the merits of our value-focused and proven strategy and is a direct reflection of the hard work of our workforce. I want to thank our entire team for their dedication and commitment to generating value for our stockholders. Mr. McKinney continued, During the second quarter, our development program was focused on our NWS acreage on which we drilled nine wells, completed and placed on production seven wells, and initiated the completion of four additional wells. I am pleased to report that our production results from the wells brought online in the second quarter have met or exceeded our expectations, and we will continue to leverage industry-leading drilling and completion technologies that best exploit the unique geologic opportunities afforded by our attractive acreage. We intend to drill seven to nine wells and complete eight to ten wells during the third quarter and have increased our full year sales volumes guidance to reflect the enhanced performance of our capital spending program. Mr. McKinney concluded, In the coming weeks, we look forward to completing the Stronghold acquisition and providing additional details regarding our combined outlook. The Transaction strategically enhances our size and scale, complements our existing operations, materially grows our long-term inventory of high rate-of-return projects, and is immediately accretive on all key metrics. The credit facility will provide new benefits to our stockholders, including the ability to pay dividends and buy back stock in the future under certain conditions. The Ring team has extensive experience operating these types of stacked-pay, multi-zone assets and consider this opportunity as going home to our roots. Through the acquisition, we expect to nearly double production, reserves and projected Free Cash Flow, lower our lifting costs, and optimize our future capital spending program. The result will be an enhanced financial position that accelerates our ability to pay down debt, which will benefit our stockholders and allow Ring to more effectively and profitably grow our business. Financial Overview: For the second quarter of 2022, the Company reported net income of $41.9 million, or $0.32 per diluted share, which included a $12.2 million before tax non-cash unrealized commodity derivative gain and $1.9 million in before tax share-based compensation. Excluding the estimated after-tax impact of the adjustments, the Companys Adjusted Net Income was $31.3 million, or $0.29 per share. In the first quarter of 2022, the Company reported net income of $7.1 million, or $0.06 per diluted share, which included a $13.5 million before tax non-cash unrealized commodity derivative loss and $1.5 million in before tax share-based compensation. Excluding the estimated after-tax impact of the adjustments, the Companys Adjusted Net Income was $22.3 million, or $0.22 per share. In the second quarter of 2021, Ring reported a net loss of $15.9 million, or $0.16 per diluted share, which included a $22.8 million before tax non-cash unrealized commodity derivative loss, and $0.4 million in before tax share-based compensation. Excluding the estimated after-tax impact of these adjustments, Adjusted Net Income in the second quarter of 2021 was $7.3 million, or $0.07 per share. Adjusted EBITDA grew by 33% to $47.4 million for the second quarter of 2022 from $35.6 million in the first quarter of 2022, with the increase primarily driven by higher realized pricing and sales volumes. Second quarter of 2021 Adjusted EBITDA was $20.6 million. Free Cash Flow was $2.5 million for the second quarter of 2022 versus $12.6 million in the first quarter of 2022 and $5.6 million for the second quarter of 2021. Impacting Free Cash Flow for the second quarter of 2022 was the timing of capital spending for the Companys 2022 drilling program. Adjusted Net Income, Adjusted EBITDA, Cash Flow from Operations, and Free Cash Flow are non-GAAP financial measures, which are described in more detail and reconciled to the most comparable GAAP measures, in the tables shown later in this release under Non-GAAP Information. Sales Volumes, Prices and Revenues: Sales volumes for the second quarter of 2022 were 9,341 Boe/d (86% oil), or 850,017 Boe, compared to 8,870 Boe/d (85% oil), or 798,262 Boe, for the first quarter of 2022, and 8,709 Boe/d (89% oil), or 792,551 Boe, in the second quarter of 2021 a 5% and 7% increase, respectively, on a Boe/d basis. Second quarter 2022 sales volumes were comprised of 729,484 barrels (Bbls) of oil and 723,196 thousand cubic feet (Mcf) of natural gas. For the second quarter of 2022, the Company realized an average sales price of $109.24 per barrel of crude oil (before the impact of hedging) and $7.29 per Mcf for natural gas. The combined average realized sales price for the period was $99.95 per Boe, up 17% from $85.41 per Boe for the first quarter of 2022, and 66% higher than $60.26 per Boe in the second quarter of 2021. The average oil price differential the Company experienced from WTI NYMEX futures pricing in the second quarter of 2022 was a positive $0.81 per barrel of crude oil, while the average natural gas price differential from NYMEX futures pricing was a negative $0.23 per Mcf. Revenues were $85.0 million for the second quarter of 2022 compared to $68.2 million for the first quarter of 2022 and $47.8 million for the second quarter of 2021. Primarily driving the comparative period increases of 25% and 78%, respectively, were higher realized oil and natural gas pricing as well as increased oil sales volumes. Lease Operating Expense (LOE): LOE, which includes expensed workovers and facilities maintenance, was $8.3 million, or $9.77 per Boe, in the second quarter of 2022 versus $9.0 million, or $11.22 per Boe, in first quarter of 2022 and $7.4 million, or $9.37 per Boe, for the second quarter of 2021. Primarily contributing to the sequential decrease in second quarter 2022 LOE was a lower level of workover expense. Gathering, Transportation and Processing (GTP) Costs: GTP costs, which are associated with natural gas sales, were $0.65 per Boe in the second quarter of 2022 versus $1.62 per Boe in the first quarter and $1.13 per Boe in the second quarter of 2021. Due to a contractual change effective May 1, 2022, the Company no longer maintains ownership and control of the natural gas through processing. As a result, GTP costs moving forward will be reflected as a reduction to the natural gas sales price and not as an expense line item. Ad Valorem Taxes: Ad valorem taxes were $1.12 per Boe for the second quarter of 2022 compared to $1.19 per Boe in the first quarter of 2022 and $0.89 per Boe for the second quarter of 2021. The year-over-year quarterly increase was primarily due to higher commodity prices. Production Taxes: Production taxes were $4.89 per Boe in the second quarter of 2022 compared to $4.03 per Boe in the first quarter of 2022 and $2.77 per Boe in first quarter of 2021. Production taxes remained steady at 4.5% to 5.0% of revenue for all three periods. Depreciation, Depletion and Amortization (DD&A) and Asset Retirement Obligation Accretion: DD&A was $12.65 per Boe in the second quarter of 2022 versus $12.25 per Boe for the first quarter of 2022 and $11.70 per Boe in the second quarter of 2021. Asset retirement obligation accretion was $0.22 per Boe in the second quarter of 2022 compared to $0.24 per Boe for the first quarter of 2022 and $0.23 per Boe in the second quarter of 2021. Operating Lease Expense: Operating lease expense was $83,590 for the second and first quarters of 2022, and $84,790 in the second quarter of 2021. Operating lease expenses are primarily associated with the Companys office leases. General and Administrative Expenses (G&A): G&A, excluding share-based compensation, was $3.9 million, or $4.63 per Boe, for the second quarter of 2022 versus $4.0 million, or $5.01 per Boe, for the first quarter of 2022 and $3.4 million, or $4.30 per Boe, in the second quarter of 2021. Interest Expense: Interest expense was $3.3 million in the second quarter of 2022 versus $3.4 million for the first quarter of 2022 and $3.7 million for the second quarter of 2021. Interest expense decreased for both comparative periods substantially due to a lower average daily balance of long-term debt. Derivative (Loss) Gain: In the second quarter of 2022, Ring recorded a net loss of $7.4 million on its commodity derivative contracts, including a realized $19.6 million cash commodity derivative loss and an unrealized $12.2 million non-cash commodity derivative gain. This compared to a net loss of $27.6 million in the first quarter of 2022, including a realized $14.1 million cash commodity derivative loss and an unrealized $13.5 million non-cash commodity derivative loss, and a net loss of $35.3 million in the second quarter of 2021, including a realized $12.5 million cash commodity derivative loss and an unrealized $22.8 million non-cash commodity derivative loss. The Company does not have any hedges in place on its natural gas production. To date in 2022, the Company added the following crude oil derivative positions (through August 4, 2022): Average Weighted Avg. Strike Deferred Put Call Date Entered Into Production Period Instrument Daily Volumes Swap Price Price Premium Price Price Crude Oil - WTI (Bbls) (per Bbl) 02/01/2022 02/01/2022 - 12/31/2022 Swaps 1,000 $81.53 06/28/2022 07/01/2022 - 09/30/2022 Put Options 1,000 $107.90 $6.95 06/28/2022 10/01/2022 - 12/31/2022 Put Options 1,000 $100.60 $11.71 06/28/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 1,000 $95.75 $13.96 06/28/2022 04/01/2023 - 06/30/2023 Put Options 1,000 $92.70 $15.20 06/28/2022 07/01/2023 - 09/30/2023 Put Options 1,000 $90.00 $16.00 06/28/2022 10/01/2023 - 12/31/2023 Put Options 1,000 $87.70 $16.53 06/29/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 500 $95.25 $14.25 06/29/2022 04/01/2023 - 06/30/2023 Put Options 500 $91.85 $15.58 06/29/2022 07/01/2023 - 09/30/2023 Put Options 500 $89.10 $16.45 06/29/2022 10/01/2023 - 12/31/2023 Put Options 500 $86.90 $16.93 06/29/2022 01/01/2024 - 03/31/2024 Put Options 500 $84.70 $17.15 06/29/2022 04/01/2024 - 06/30/2024 Put Options 500 $82.80 $17.49 07/01/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 1,000 $91.00 $13.79 07/01/2022 04/01/2023 - 06/30/2023 Put Options 1,000 $88.00 $15.32 07/08/2022 07/01/2022 - 09/30/2022 Put Options 500 $100.30 $6.69 07/08/2022 10/01/2022 - 12/31/2022 Put Options 500 $92.60 $12.02 07/08/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 500 $87.70 $14.35 07/25/2022 01/01/2024 - 03/31/2024 Collars 1,000 $70.00 $86.00 07/25/2022 04/01/2024 - 06/30/2024 Collars 1,000 $70.00 $83.40 07/25/2022 07/01/2024 - 09/30/2024 Collars 1,000 $70.00 $81.20 A full listing of the Companys current outstanding crude oil derivative positions is included in the tables shown later in this release. Income Tax: The Company recorded a non-cash income tax provision of $1,472,209 in the second quarter of 2022, compared to a provision of $78,752 in the first quarter of 2022 and $190,644 for the second quarter of 2021. Balance Sheet and Liquidity: Total liquidity at the end of the second quarter of 2022 was $81.5 million, a 32% increase from December 31, 2021 and up 58% from June 30, 2021. Liquidity at June 30, 2022 consisted of cash and cash equivalents of $2.2 million and $79.2 million of availability under Rings revolving bank credit facility, which includes a reduction of $0.8 million for letters of credit. On June 30, 2022, the Company had $270.0 million in borrowings outstanding on its revolving credit facility that has a current borrowing base of $350.0 million. Ring paid down $10.0 million of debt during the second quarter of 2022 and is targeting further debt reduction during the remainder of the year depending on market conditions, the timing of capital spending and other considerations. Ring is currently in compliance with all applicable covenants under its revolving credit facility agreement. In early April 2022, a total of 6.5 million of the Companys common warrants were exercised at a price of $0.80 per warrant. Accordingly, second quarter results reflect the issuance of 6.5 million shares of common stock and the receipt of $5.2 million of cash. There are currently approximately 23 million common warrants that remain unexercised. Capital Expenditures: During the second quarter of 2022, capital expenditures on an accrual basis were $41.8 million as the Company drilled nine wells, completed seven wells, and began the completion process on four wells all in the NWS. Two of the wells completed were 1.0-mile horizontal wells that were drilled in the first quarter with a working interest of 100%. In addition, the Company drilled and completed three 1-mile horizontal wells with a working interest of 100% and two 1.5-mile horizontal wells with a working interest of approximately 98.7%. Ring also drilled and accelerated the completion process of four 1.0-mile horizontal wells (previously anticipated for the third quarter) that were placed online in early July. Two of the wells have a working interest of 100%, one has a working interest of 87.5%, and the fourth has a working interest of 75%. During the second quarter of 2022, the Company also performed four CTR projects, including three in the NWS and one in the CBP. 2022 Capital Investment, Sales Volumes, and Operating Expense Guidance For full year 2022, excluding the impact of the pending Stronghold acquisition, Ring reiterates its previous standalone outlook of total capital spending in the range of $120 million to $140 million, which includes the estimated cost to drill 25 to 33 horizontal wells and complete 25 to 30 horizontal wells. Rings full year capital spending outlook includes targeted well reactivations, workovers, infrastructure upgrades, and continuing its CTR program. Also included in the full year estimate is anticipated spending for leasing, contractual drilling obligations and non-operated drilling, completion and capital workovers. Based on the $130 million mid-point of spending guidance, the Company expects the following estimated allocation of capital investment, including: 82% for drilling, completion, and related equipment and facilities; 13% for CTRs, recompletions and capital workovers; and 5% for land, non-operated capital and other investments. The Company remains focused on generating free cash flow in 2022, after all expenses, costs and capital expenditures. All 2022 planned capital expenditures will be fully funded by cash on hand and cash from operations, and excess free cash flow is currently targeted for further debt reduction. The combination of anticipated growth in Adjusted EBITDA resulting from higher prices and growth in sales volumes, along with planned further debt reduction, is expected to significantly reduce Rings leverage ratio by year-end 2022. Supported by the success of its targeted development program and continued focus on operational excellence, the Company has increased its full year 2022 sales volumes forecast to 9,300 to 9,700 Boe/d (86% oil), compared with its prior full year 2022 guidance of 9,000 to 9,600 Boe/d. Ring currently expects third quarter 2022 sales volumes to range between 9,500 and 9,900 Boe/d (86% oil). The guidance in the table below represents the Company's current good faith estimate of the range of likely future results for the full year and third quarter of 2022. Guidance could be affected by the factors discussed below in the "Safe Harbor Statement" section. Full Year Q3 2022 2022 Sales Volumes: Total (Boe/d) 9,300 - 9,700 9,500 - 9,900 Oil (Bo/d) 8,000 - 8,400 8,200 - 8,600 Capital Program: Capital spending(1) (millions) $120 - $140 $35 - $39 Number of new wells drilled 25 - 33 7 - 9 Number of new wells completed and online 25 - 30 8 - 10 Operating Expenses: LOE (per Boe) $10.25 - $11.25 $10.25 - $11.50 (1) In addition to Company-directed drilling and completion activities, the capital spending outlook includes funds for targeted well reactivations, workovers, infrastructure upgrades, and continuing the Company's successful CTR program in its NWS and CBP areas. Also included is anticipated spending for lease costs, contractural drilling obligations and non-operated drilling, completion and capital workovers. Investor Conference Participation The Company will be participating in EnerCom Denver in Denver, Colorado where Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Paul McKinney is scheduled to make a presentation on Monday, August 8, 2022 at 1:55 pm Mountain Time. Senior management will also host one-on-one meetings with investors. The presentation will be webcast live and archived on Rings website, www.ringenergy.com, in the Investors section. An updated investor slide deck will be posted in the Investors section of Rings website under Presentations by Monday, August 8, 2022. Conference Call Information Ring will hold a conference call on Friday, August 5, 2022 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time to discuss its second quarter 2022 operational and financial results. An updated investor presentation will be posted to the Companys website prior to the conference call. To participate in the conference call, interested parties should dial 833-953-2433 at least five minutes before the call is to begin. Please reference the Ring Energy Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. International callers may participate by dialing 412-317-5762. The call will also be webcast and available on Rings website at www.ringenergy.com under Investors on the News & Events page. An audio replay will also be available on the Companys website following the call. About Ring Energy, Inc. Ring Energy, Inc. is an oil and gas exploration, development, and production company with current operations focused on the conventional development of its Permian Basin assets in West Texas and New Mexico. For additional information, please visit www.ringenergy.com. Safe Harbor Statement This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements involve a wide variety of risks and uncertainties, and include, without limitations, statements with respect to the Companys strategy and prospects. Such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties which are disclosed in the Companys reports filed with the SEC, including its Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, and its other filings with the SEC. Readers and investors are cautioned that the Companys actual results may differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including, but not limited to, the Companys ability to acquire productive oil and/or gas properties or to successfully drill and complete oil and/or gas wells on such properties, general economic conditions both domestically and abroad, and the conduct of business by the Company, and other factors that may be more fully described in additional documents set forth by the Company. Contact Information Al Petrie AdvisorsAl Petrie, Senior PartnerPhone: 281-975-2146Email: [email protected] RING ENERGY, INC. Condensed Statements of Operations (Unaudited) Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, March 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2022 2021 2022 2021 Oil and Natural Gas Revenues $ 84,961,875 $ 68,181,032 $ 47,760,102 $ 153,142,907 $ 87,262,634 Costs and Operating Expenses Lease operating expenses 8,301,443 8,953,165 7,424,488 17,254,608 15,651,063 Gathering, transportation and processing costs 549,389 1,296,858 897,166 1,846,247 1,832,185 Ad valorem taxes 949,239 951,954 703,775 1,901,193 1,441,026 Oil and natural gas production taxes 4,157,457 3,218,362 2,198,339 7,375,819 4,051,101 Depreciation, depletion and amortization 10,749,204 9,781,287 9,275,126 20,530,491 17,383,284 Asset retirement obligation accretion 186,303 188,242 184,013 374,545 377,757 Operating lease expense 83,590 83,590 84,790 167,180 356,307 General and administrative expense (including share-based compensation) 5,832,302 5,522,277 3,757,152 11,354,579 6,670,143 Total Costs and Operating Expenses 30,808,927 29,995,735 24,524,849 60,804,662 47,762,866 Income from Operations 54,152,948 38,185,297 23,235,253 92,338,245 39,499,768 Other Income (Expense) Interest income - - 1 - 1 Interest expense (3,279,299 ) (3,398,361 ) (3,654,529 ) (6,677,660 ) (7,396,498 ) Loss on derivative contracts (7,457,018 ) (27,596,141 ) (35,277,240 ) (35,053,159 ) (66,865,879 ) Net Other Expense (10,736,317 ) (30,994,502 ) (38,931,768 ) (41,730,819 ) (74,262,376 ) Income (Loss) Before Provision for Income Taxes 43,416,631 7,190,795 (15,696,515 ) 50,607,426 (34,762,608 ) (Provision For) Benefit From Income Taxes (1,472,209 ) (78,752 ) (190,644 ) (1,550,961 ) (190,644 ) Net Income (Loss) $ 41,944,422 $ 7,112,043 $ (15,887,159 ) $ 49,056,465 $ (34,953,252 ) Basic Earnings (Loss) per Share $ 0.39 $ 0.07 $ (0.16 ) $ 0.47 $ (0.35 ) Diluted Earnings (Loss) per Share $ 0.32 $ 0.06 $ (0.16 ) $ 0.39 $ (0.35 ) Basic Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding 106,390,776 100,192,562 99,300,458 103,291,669 99,197,160 Diluted Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding 130,597,589 124,004,178 99,300,458 126,251,705 99,197,160 RING ENERGY, INC. Condensed Operating Data (Unaudited) Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, March 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2022 2021 2022 2021 Net sales volumes: Oil (Bbls) 729,484 676,215 702,408 1,405,699 1,312,529 (2) Natural gas (Mcf) 723,196 732,283 540,857 1,455,479 1,178,666 Total oil and natural gas (Boe) (1) 850,017 798,262 792,551 1,648,279 1,508,973 % Oil 86 % 85 % 89 % 85 % 87 % Average daily equivalent sales (Boe/d) 9,341 8,870 8,709 9,107 8,337 Average realized sales prices: Oil ($/Bbl) $ 109.24 $ 93.80 $ 65.00 $ 101.81 $ 61.74 Natural gas ($/Mcf) 7.29 6.49 3.90 6.89 5.28 Barrel of oil equivalent ($/Boe) $ 99.95 $ 85.41 $ 60.26 $ 92.91 $ 57.83 Average costs and expenses per Boe ($/Boe): Lease operating expenses $ 9.77 $ 11.22 $ 9.37 $ 10.47 $ 10.37 Gathering, transportation and processing costs 0.65 1.62 1.13 1.12 1.21 Ad valorem taxes 1.12 1.19 0.89 1.15 0.95 Oil and natural gas production taxes 4.89 4.03 2.77 4.47 2.68 Depreciation, depletion and amortization 12.65 12.25 11.70 12.46 11.52 Asset retirement obligation accretion 0.22 0.24 0.23 0.23 0.25 Operating lease expense 0.10 0.10 0.11 0.10 0.24 General and administrative expense (including share-based compensation) 6.86 6.92 4.74 6.89 4.42 General and administrative expense (excluding share-based compensation) 4.63 5.01 4.30 4.81 3.95 (1) Boe is determined using the ratio of six Mcf of natural gas to one Bbl of oil (totals may not compute due to rounding). The conversion ratio does not assume price equivalency and the price on an equivalent basis for oil and natural gas may differ significantly. (2) Includes 379 barrels of skim oil. RING ENERGY, INC. Balance Sheets (Unaudited) June 30, December 31, 2022 2021 ASSETS Current Assets Cash and cash equivalents $ 2,223,289 $ 2,408,316 Accounts receivable 39,496,928 24,026,807 Joint interest billing receivable 1,350,134 2,433,811 Derivative assets 1,353,196 - Prepaid expenses and other assets 3,205,746 938,029 Total Current Assets 47,629,293 29,806,963 Properties and Equipment Oil and natural gas properties subject to amortization 945,521,085 883,844,745 Financing lease asset subject to depreciation 2,067,375 1,422,487 Fixed assets subject to depreciation 2,044,709 2,089,722 Total Properties and Equipment 949,633,169 887,356,954 Accumulated depreciation, depletion and amortization (255,274,309 ) (235,997,307 ) Net Properties and Equipment 694,358,860 651,359,647 Operating lease asset 1,140,886 1,277,253 Derivative assets 785,389 - Deferred financing costs 1,324,918 1,713,466 TOTAL ASSETS $ 745,239,346 $ 684,157,329 LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY Current Liabilities Accounts payable $ 64,262,609 $ 46,233,452 Financing lease liability 407,031 316,514 Operating lease liability 301,339 290,766 Derivative liabilities 32,700,566 29,241,588 Notes payable 894,295 586,410 Total Current Liabilities 98,565,840 76,668,730 Non-Current Liabilities Deferred income taxes 1,641,253 90,292 Revolving line of credit 270,000,000 290,000,000 Financing lease liability, less current portion 667,456 343,727 Operating lease liability, less current portion 983,995 1,138,319 Asset retirement obligations 15,373,543 15,292,054 Total Non-Current Liabilities 288,666,247 306,864,392 Total Liabilities 387,232,087 383,533,122 Stockholders' Equity Preferred stock - $0.001 par value; 50,000,000 shares authorized; no shares issued or outstanding - - Common stock - $0.001 par value; 225,000,000 shares authorized; 107,236,111 shares and 100,192,562 shares issued and outstanding, respectively 107,236 100,193 Additional paid-in capital 561,791,836 553,472,292 Accumulated deficit (203,891,813 ) (252,948,278 ) Total Stockholders' Equity 358,007,259 300,624,207 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY $ 745,239,346 $ 684,157,329 RING ENERGY, INC. Statements of Cash Flows (Unaudited) Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, March 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2022 2021 2022 2021 Cash Flows From Operating Activities Net income (loss) $ 41,944,422 $ 7,112,043 $ (15,887,159 ) $ 49,056,465 $ (34,953,252 ) Adjustments to reconcile net income (loss) to net cash provided by operating activities: Depreciation, depletion and amortization 10,749,203 9,781,287 9,275,126 20,530,490 17,383,284 Asset retirement obligation accretion 186,303 188,242 184,013 374,545 377,757 Amortization of deferred financing costs 189,274 199,274 147,224 388,548 330,251 Share-based compensation 1,899,245 1,521,910 351,775 3,421,155 707,269 Deferred income tax (benefit) expense 1,485,022 65,939 47,967 1,550,961 (1,744,175 ) Excess tax (benefit) expense related to share-based compensation - - 142,677 - 1,934,819 Loss on derivative contracts 7,457,018 27,596,141 35,277,240 35,053,159 66,865,879 Cash paid for derivative settlements, net (19,617,265 ) (14,115,501 ) (12,436,333 ) (33,732,766 ) (18,357,124 ) Changes in assets and liabilities: Accounts receivable (4,315,730 ) (10,078,098 ) (704,568 ) (14,393,828 ) (6,673,307 ) Prepaid expenses and other assets (2,470,602 ) 202,885 (1,346,762 ) (2,267,717 ) (1,181,562 ) Accounts payable 4,328,968 2,519,011 2,365,612 6,847,979 8,659,118 Settlement of asset retirement obligation (1,113,208 ) (553,368 ) (1,093,816 ) (1,666,576 ) (1,338,277 ) Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities 40,722,650 24,439,765 16,322,996 65,162,415 32,010,680 Cash Flows From Investing Activities Payments to purchase oil and natural gas properties (383,003 ) (360,848 ) (178,718 ) (743,851 ) (437,688 ) Payments to develop oil and natural gas properties (35,793,923 ) (13,860,249 ) (10,824,079 ) (49,654,172 ) (22,723,018 ) Purchase of fixed assets subject to depreciation (81,646 ) (10,114 ) (41,442 ) (91,760 ) (60,903 ) Sale of fixed assets subject to depreciation 126,100 8,500 - 134,600 - Proceeds from divestiture of oil and natural gas properties 25,066 - - 25,066 2,000,000 Net Cash Used in Investing Activities (36,107,406 ) (14,222,711 ) (11,044,239 ) (50,330,117 ) (21,221,609 ) Cash Flows From Financing Activities Proceeds from revolving line of credit 40,500,000 10,000,000 6,900,000 50,500,000 19,900,000 Payments on revolving line of credit (50,500,000 ) (20,000,000 ) (11,900,000 ) (70,500,000 ) (32,400,000 ) Proceeds from issuance of common stock and warrants 5,163,126 - 80,000 5,163,126 241,269 Payments to cover tax withholdings (257,694 ) - - (257,694 ) - Proceeds from notes payable 928,626 - 909,467 928,626 909,467 Payments on notes payable (253,360 ) (367,381 ) (151,317 ) (620,741 ) (151,317 ) Payment of deferred financing costs - - (76,887 ) - (76,887 ) Reduction of financing lease liabilities (111,864 ) (118,778 ) (70,288 ) (230,642 ) (119,995 ) Net Cash Used in Investing Activities (4,531,166 ) (10,486,159 ) (4,309,025 ) (15,017,325 ) (11,697,463 ) Net (Decrease) Increase in Cash 84,078 (269,105 ) 969,732 (185,027 ) (908,392 ) Cash at Beginning of Period 2,139,211 2,408,316 1,700,510 2,408,316 3,578,634 Cash at End of Period $ 2,223,289 $ 2,139,211 $ 2,670,242 $ 2,223,289 $ 2,670,242 RING ENERGY, INC. Financial Commodity Derivative Positions As of August 4, 2022 Average Weighted Avg. Strike Deferred Put Call Date Entered Into Production Period Instrument Daily Volumes Swap Price Price Premium Price Price Crude Oil - WTI (Bbls) (per Bbl) 12/04/2020 Calendar year 2022 Swaps 500 $44.22 12/07/2020 Calendar year 2022 Swaps 500 $44.75 12/10/2020 Calendar year 2022 Swaps 500 $44.97 12/17/2020 Calendar year 2022 Swaps 250 $45.98 01/04/2021 Calendar year 2022 Swaps 250 $47.00 02/04/2021 Calendar year 2022 Swaps 250 $50.05 05/11/2021 Calendar year 2022 Swaps 879(1) $49.03 02/01/2022 02/01/2022 - 12/31/2022 Swaps 1,000 $81.53 06/28/2022 07/01/2022 - 09/30/2022 Put Options 1,000 $107.90 $6.95 06/28/2022 10/01/2022 - 12/31/2022 Put Options 1,000 $100.60 $11.71 06/28/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 1,000 $95.75 $13.96 06/28/2022 04/01/2023 - 06/30/2023 Put Options 1,000 $92.70 $15.20 06/28/2022 07/01/2023 - 09/30/2023 Put Options 1,000 $90.00 $16.00 06/28/2022 10/01/2023 - 12/31/2023 Put Options 1,000 $87.70 $16.53 06/29/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 500 $95.25 $14.25 06/29/2022 04/01/2023 - 06/30/2023 Put Options 500 $91.85 $15.58 06/29/2022 07/01/2023 - 09/30/2023 Put Options 500 $89.10 $16.45 06/29/2022 10/01/2023 - 12/31/2023 Put Options 500 $86.90 $16.93 06/29/2022 01/01/2024 - 03/31/2024 Put Options 500 $84.70 $17.15 06/29/2022 04/01/2024 - 06/30/2024 Put Options 500 $82.80 $17.49 07/01/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 1,000 $91.00 $13.79 07/01/2022 04/01/2023 - 06/30/2023 Put Options 1,000 $88.00 $15.32 07/08/2022 07/01/2022 - 09/30/2022 Put Options 500 $100.30 $6.69 07/08/2022 10/01/2022 - 12/31/2022 Put Options 500 $92.60 $12.02 07/08/2022 01/01/2023 - 03/31/2023 Put Options 500 $87.70 $14.35 07/25/2022 01/01/2024 - 03/31/2024 Collars 1,000 $70.00 $86.00 07/25/2022 04/01/2024 - 06/30/2024 Collars 1,000 $70.00 $83.40 07/25/2022 07/01/2024 - 09/30/2024 Collars 1,000 $70.00 $81.20 (1) The notional quantity per the swap contract entered into May 11, 2021 is for 26,750 barrels of oil per month. The 879 represents the daily amount on an annual basis. RING ENERGY, INC. Non-GAAP Information Certain financial information included in Rings financial results are not measures of financial performance recognized by accounting principles generally accepted in the United States, or GAAP. These non-GAAP financial measures are Adjusted Net Income, Adjusted EBITDA, Free Cash Flow and Cash Flow from Operations. Management uses these non-GAAP financial measures in its analysis of performance. In addition, Adjusted EBITDA is a key metric used to determine the Companys incentive compensation awards. These disclosures may not be viewed as a substitute for results determined in accordance with GAAP and are not necessarily comparable to non-GAAP performance measures which may be reported by other companies. Reconciliation of Net Income (Loss) to Adjusted Net Income Adjusted Net Income does not include the estimated after-tax impact of share-based compensation, ceiling test impairment, and unrealized loss (gain) on change in fair value of derivatives. Adjusted Net Income is presented because the timing and amount of these items cannot be reasonably estimated and affect the comparability of operating results from period to period, and current periods to prior periods. Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, March 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2022 2021 2022 2021 (Unaudited for All Periods) Net Income (Loss) $ 41,944,422 $ 7,112,043 $ (15,887,159 ) $ 49,056,465 $ (34,953,252 ) Share-based compensation 1,899,245 1,521,910 351,775 3,421,155 707,269 Unrealized loss (gain) on change in fair value of derivatives (12,160,246 ) 13,480,640 22,840,907 1,320,393 48,508,755 Tax impact of adjusted items (347,939 ) 164,305 - 145,314 - Adjusted Net Income $ 31,335,482 $ 22,278,898 $ 7,305,523 $ 53,943,327 $ 14,262,772 Basic Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding 106,390,776 100,192,562 99,300,458 103,291,669 99,197,160 Adjusted Net Income per Share $ 0.29 $ 0.22 $ 0.07 $ 0.52 $ 0.14 Reconciliations of Adjusted EBITDA, Free Cash Flow and Cash Flow from Operations The Company also presents the non-GAAP financial measures Adjusted EBITDA and Free Cash Flow. The Company defines Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss) plus net interest expense, unrealized loss (gain) on change in fair value of derivatives, ceiling test impairment, income tax (benefit) expense, depreciation, depletion and amortization, asset retirement obligation accretion and share-based compensation. Company management believes this presentation is relevant and useful because it helps investors understand Rings operating performance and makes it easier to compare its results with those of other companies that have different financing, capital and tax structures. Adjusted EBITDA should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for net income, as an indication of operating performance or cash flows from operating activities or as a measure of liquidity. Adjusted EBITDA, as Ring calculates it, may not be comparable to Adjusted EBITDA measures reported by other companies. In addition, Adjusted EBITDA does not represent funds available for discretionary use. The Company defines Free Cash Flow as Adjusted EBITDA (defined above) less net interest expense (excluding amortization of deferred financing cost), capital expenditures and proceeds from divestiture of oil and natural gas properties. For this purpose, the Companys definition of capital expenditures includes costs incurred related to oil and natural gas properties (such as drilling and infrastructure costs and the lease maintenance costs) and equipment, furniture and fixtures, but excludes acquisition costs of oil and gas properties from third parties that are not included in the Companys capital expenditures guidance provided to investors. Company management believes that Free Cash Flow is an important financial performance measure for use in evaluating the performance and efficiency of its current operating activities after the impact of accrued capital expenditures and net interest expense and without being impacted by items such as changes associated with working capital, which can vary substantially from one period to another. There is no commonly accepted definition Free Cash Flow within the industry. Accordingly, Free Cash Flow, as defined and calculated by the Company, may not be comparable to Free Cash Flow or other similarly named non-GAAP measures reported by other companies. While the Company includes net interest expense in the calculation of Free Cash Flow, other mandatory debt service requirements of future payments of principal at maturity (if such debt is not refinanced) are excluded from the calculation of Free Cash Flow. These and other non-discretionary expenditures that are not deducted from Free Cash Flow would reduce cash available for other uses. The following tables present (i) a reconciliation of the Companys net income (loss), a GAAP measure, to Adjusted EBITDA and (ii) a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, to Free Cash Flow, as both Adjusted EBITDA and Free Cash Flow are defined by the Company. In addition, a reconciliation of Cash Flow from Operations is presented. Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, March 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2022 2021 2022 2021 (Unaudited for All Periods) Net Income (Loss) $ 41,944,422 $ 7,112,043 $ (15,887,159 ) $ 49,056,465 $ (34,953,252 ) Interest expense, net 3,279,299 3,398,361 3,654,528 6,677,660 7,396,497 Unrealized loss (gain) on change in fair value of derivatives (12,160,246 ) 13,480,640 22,840,907 1,320,393 48,508,755 Income tax provision (benefit) 1,472,209 78,752 190,644 1,550,961 190,644 Depreciation, depletion and amortization 10,749,204 9,781,287 9,275,126 20,530,491 17,383,284 Asset retirement obligation accretion 186,303 188,242 184,013 374,545 377,757 Share-based compensation 1,899,245 1,521,910 351,775 3,421,155 707,269 Adjusted EBITDA $ 47,370,436 $ 35,561,235 $ 20,609,834 $ 82,931,670 $ 39,610,954 Adjusted EBITDA Margin 56 % 52 % 43 % 54 % 45 % Basic Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding 106,390,776 100,192,562 99,300,458 103,291,669 99,197,160 Adjusted EBITDA per Share $ 0.45 $ 0.35 $ 0.21 $ 0.80 $ 0.40 Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, March 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2022 2021 2022 2021 (Unaudited for All Periods) Adjusted EBITDA $ 47,370,436 $ 35,561,235 $ 20,609,834 $ 82,931,670 $ 39,610,954 Net interest expense (excluding amortization of deferred financing costs) (3,090,025 ) (3,199,087 ) (3,507,304 ) (6,289,112 ) (7,066,246 ) Capital expenditures (41,810,442 ) (19,743,693 ) (11,456,062 ) (61,554,135 ) (25,981,498 ) Proceeds from divestiture of oil and natural gas properties 25,066 - - 25,066 2,000,000 Free Cash Flow $ 2,495,035 $ 12,618,455 $ 5,646,468 $ 15,113,489 $ 8,563,210 Three Months Ended Six Months Ended June 30, March 31, June 30, June 30, 2022 2022 2021 2022 2021 (Unaudited for All Periods) Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities $ 40,722,650 $ 24,439,765 $ 16,322,996 $ 65,162,415 $ 32,010,680 Changes in operating assets and liabilities 3,570,572 7,909,570 779,534 11,480,142 534,028 Cash Flow from Operations $ 44,293,222 $ 32,349,335 $ 17,102,530 $ 76,642,557 $ 32,544,708 1 A non-GAAP financial measure; see Non-GAAP Information section in this release for more information including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures. Source: Ring Energy, Inc. TORONTO, Aug. 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Shawcor Ltd. (Shawcor or the Company) (TSX: SCL) today announced that its pipe coating division has been awarded a definitive contract by Saipem to provide thermal insulation and anticorrosion coating services for the Yellowtail development project, located in the Stabroek block offshore Guyana at a water depth of approximately 1,800 meters. The value of the award is in the range of C$40-$50 million and coating is scheduled to commence in the first quarter of 2023 from Shawcors Veracruz, Mexico facilities. Saipem previously awarded coating contracts to Shawcor for the first two phases of the Liza development projects and the Payara project in Guyana in 2017, 2018 and 2020 respectively. The award of work for the Yellowtail project follows deployment of our solution on the Liza Phases 1&2 development projects and the more recent Payara development project in Guyana, said Kevin Reizer, Pipeline Performance Group President. This new contract validates our ability to bid, contract, and execute multiple deepwater projects globally, demonstrating the strength of our coating performance and confirming our Customers confidence in Shawcor to deliver quality coating services. About Shawcor Shawcor Ltd. is a growth-oriented, global material sciences company serving the Infrastructure, Energy, and Transportation markets. The Company operates through a network of fixed and mobile manufacturing and service facilities. Its three business segments, Composite Systems, Automotive & Industrial and Pipeline & Pipe Services enable responsible renewal and enhancement of critical infrastructure while lowering risk and environmental impact. For further information, please contact: Meghan MacEachernExternal Communications & ESG, DirectorTelephone: 437.341.1848Email: [email protected] shawcor.com Forward Looking Information This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Words such as "may", "will", "should", "anticipate", "plan", "expect", "believe", "predict", "estimate" or similar terminology are used to identify forward-looking information. This forward-looking information is based on assumptions, estimates and analysis made in the light of the Company's experience and its perception of trends, current conditions and expected developments, as well as other factors that are believed by the Company to be reasonable and relevant in the circumstances. Forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those predicted, expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. The forward-looking information is provided as of the date of this news release and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. Source: Shawcor Ltd. Source: Shawcor Ltd. State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Thursday that China would resolutely respond to the United States' flagrant provocation and political gamble, and he called for countries to support China's legitimate position and measures on the Taiwan question. Wang made the remarks on the sidelines of ASEAN-plus foreign ministers' meetings in Phnom Penh, Cambodia while further expressing China's position on the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Noting the visit was plotted and instigated by Washington, Wang said the US has trampled on international law, violated its commitment to China, damaged peace across the Taiwan Straits, supported separatism and clamored for bloc confrontation. "Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is another bankruptcy of US politics, diplomacy and credibility as a country and a testament that the US is 'the biggest peace destroyer' across the Taiwan Straits and 'the biggest troublemaker' for regional stability," Wang said. "It also suggests that the US' Indo-Pacific Strategy is extremely confrontational and harmful, and demonstrates US hypocrisy and double standards on international rules," Wang added. Wang stressed that the US' acts amount to an open provocation against Chinese people and peace-loving people of countries in the region, which is a political gamble that is bound to bring about appalling effects. "If China does not resolutely counter the US' manic, irresponsible and extremely irrational deeds, the international principles of respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity would simply become a piece of blank paper," Wang said. "Separatist elements and extreme forces would intensify their actions and the hard-won peace and stability in the region would be severely damaged," he added. Wang said that China has made the utmost diplomatic efforts to try to avoid the crisis and, in the meantime, Beijing would never allow its core interests and the process of national reunification to be jeopardized. "China would not sit idle by and let the US play the 'Taiwan card' to serve its domestic politics and politicians' self-interests, neither will China tolerate acts of creating tension, provoking confrontation and instigating division," Wang added. Wang said that, "the comprehensive measures China has taken now and will take later, through prudent consideration and careful review, are a necessary and timely defense and are countermeasures to safeguard its national sovereignty and security." "They are also in line with the international law and China's domestic law, serving as a warning to provocateurs and helping safeguard regional stability and peace across the Taiwan Straits," he added. Wang called on parties to see clearly the causes and nature of the crisis to jointly oppose US provocations and to safeguard peace in the region and across the Taiwan Straits. Company invites individual and institutional investors, as well as advisors and analysts, to attend real-time, interactive presentations on VirtualInvestorConferences.com LONDON, Aug. 02, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Tekcapital Plc (AIM: TEK), (OTCQB: TEKCF) the UK intellectual property investment group focused on creating valuable products from investing in university technologies that can improve peoples lives, is pleased to announce that Dr. Clifford Gross, CEO will present live at VirtualInvestorConferences.com on August 4th,, 2022. DATE: August 4th, 2022 TIME: 12:00 PM EDT LINK: https://bit.ly/3u8UbFn Available for 1x1 meetings: August 5th, 2022 This will be a live, interactive online event where investors are invited to ask the company questions in real-time. If attendees are not able to join the event live on the day of the conference, an archived webcast will also be made available after the event. It is recommended that investors pre-register and run the online system check to expedite participation and receive event updates. Learn more about the event at www.virtualinvestorconferences.com. Company Information About Tekcapital plc Tekcapital creates value from investing in new, university-developed discoveries that can enhance peoples lives and provides a range of technology transfer services to help organisations evaluate and commercialise new technologies. Tekcapital is quoted on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange (AIM: symbol TEK) and is headquartered in the UK. For more information, please visit www.tekcapital.com. About Virtual Investor Conferences Virtual Investor Conferences (VIC) is the leading proprietary investor conference series that provides an interactive forum for publicly traded companies to seamlessly present directly to investors. Providing a real-time investor engagement solution, VIC is specifically designed to offer companies more efficient investor access. Replicating the components of an on-site investor conference, VIC offers companies enhanced capabilities to connect with investors, schedule targeted one-on-one meetings and enhance their presentations with dynamic video content. Accelerating the next level of investor engagement, Virtual Investor Conferences delivers leading investor communications to a global network of retail and institutional investors. CONTACTS: Tekcapital plc Tim Thompson Flagstaff Strategic and Investor Communications +44 (0)207 129 1474 Virtual Investor Conferences John M. Viglotti SVP Corporate Services, Investor Access OTC Markets Group (212) 220-2221 [email protected] TORONTO, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trisura Group Ltd. (Trisura or Trisura Group) (TSX: TSU), a leading specialty insurance provider, today announced financial results for the second quarter of 2022. David Clare, President and CEO of Trisura, stated, Our business performed well in the quarter, recording net income of $20.2 million. Strong growth and stable underwriting, supported by investment income, generated a 19.2% return on equity(1), despite continued investment in infrastructure. Continuation of established trends drove the result. Expansion of market share, and maturation of our platform resulted in premium growth of 76.7% in the quarter. In Canada, disciplined underwriting generated an 80.6% combined ratio(1) for the quarter. Our US business bound a quarterly record $447.6 million of gross premiums, and reported deferred fee income of $34.7 million. Subsequent to quarter-end we raised $144.0 million in equity capital, the proceeds of which are expected to support growth across the platform. Financial Highlights EPS of $0.48 in Q2 2022 compared to $0.40 in Q2 2021. Adjusted EPS(2) of $0.46 for the quarter compared to $0.35 in the prior period. Pro forma EPS(3), including the impact of the public offering, is $0.43 for the quarter and $0.88 YTD. Pro forma adjusted EPS(3) is 0.41 for the quarter and 0.82 YTD. Book value per share(1) of $8.62 increased 7.3% from June 30, 2021, driven by strong earnings but diluted by unrealized losses on investments in the quarter. Including the impact of the public offering, pro forma BVPS(3) is $10.92. Gross written premiums growth of 76.7% in Q2 2022 reflected a step change in scale with sustained growth in Canada and a significant expansion in US fronting. Net income of $20.2 million in the quarter grew 19.6% compared to Q2 2021, driven by growth and profitable underwriting in Canada and the US. ROE of 19.2% compared to 18.3% in Q2 2021, exceeding our mid-teens target despite significant growth. Consolidated combined ratio is 79.1%, and consolidated loss ratio(1) is 28.3% for Q2 2022. Amounts in C$ millions Q2 2022 Q2 2021 Variance Q2 2022 YTD Q2 2021 YTD Variance Gross premiums written 642.2 363.5 76.7% 1,123.6 673.8 66.8% Net income 20.2 16.9 19.6% 41.2 36.2 13.9% EPS diluted, $ 0.48 0.40 20.0% 0.98 0.86 14.0% Adjusted EPS diluted, $ 0.46 0.35 31.4% 0.91 0.75 21.3% Book value per share, $ 8.62 8.03 7.3% 8.62 8.03 7.3% Debt-to-Capital ratio(1) 22.7% 18.4% 4.3pts 22.7% 18.4% 4.3pts LTM ROE 19.2% 18.3% 0.9pts 19.2% 18.3% 0.9pts Adjusted LTM ROE(4) 19.6% 16.1% 3.5pts 19.6% 16.1% 3.5pts Combined ratio Canada 80.6% 83.3% (2.7pts) 80.1% 75.4% 4.7pts Fronting operational ratio US(1) 82.2% 69.8% 12.4pts 78.8% 68.6% 10.2pts Insurance Operations Disciplined underwriting in Canada contributed to a loss ratio of 14.2% for the quarter. Growth continued in the US, with GPW of $447.6 million in the quarter, compared to $220.6 million in Q2 2021, and fee income of $15.5 million in the quarter compared to $11.1 million in Q2 2021. Growth was the result of maturing and new programs. GPW in Canada increased by 36.2% in Q2 2022. Strong underwriting performance across all lines contributed to a combined ratio of 80.6% and a 31.6% ROE. New fronting arrangements in Canada contributed $86.7 million premiums in the quarter. US premium grew by 102.9% and fee income grew by 39.5% in the quarter compared to Q2 2021, reaching $447.6 million and $15.5 million, respectively. This contributed to improved net income of $8.0 million in the quarter and a 13.7% ROE. Capital The Minimum Capital Test ratio(5) of our regulated Canadian subsidiary was 232% as at June 30, 2022 (229% as at December 31, 2021), which comfortably exceeded regulatory requirements(6) of 150%. The Risk-Based Capital of the regulated insurance companies of Trisura US was in excess of the various Company Action Levels of the states in which it is licensed at June 30, 2022. Consolidated debt-to-capital ratio of 22.7% as at June 30, 2022 is above our long-term target of 20.0%, but is expected to fall below the target given the recent equity raise. Investments Interest and dividend income rose 37.5% in the quarter compared to Q2 2021. The Canadian and US portfolios benefited from improved diversification and increased capital generated from strong operational performance. Corporate Development Subsequent to quarter-end the Company raised $144.0 million in equity capital to support growth across the platform. Earnings Conference Call Trisura will host its Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call to review financial results at 9:00 a.m. ET on Friday August 5th, 2022. To listen to the call via live audio webcast, please follow the link below:https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/me2jn4xb A replay of the call will be available through the link above.About Trisura Group Trisura Group Ltd. is a specialty insurance provider operating in the surety, risk solutions, corporate insurance, fronting and reinsurance segments of the market. Trisura has investments in wholly owned subsidiaries through which it conducts insurance and reinsurance operations. Those operations are primarily in Canada (Trisura Canada) and the United States (Trisura US). Trisura Group Ltd. is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol TSU. Further information is available at http://www.trisura.com/group. Important information may be disseminated exclusively via the website; investors should consult the site to access this information. Details regarding the operations of Trisura Group Ltd. are also set forth in regulatory filings. A copy of the filings may be obtained on Trisura Groups SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. For more information, please contact: Name: Bryan SinclairTel: 416 607 2135 Email: [email protected] Trisura Group Ltd.Condensed Interim Consolidated Statements of Financial PositionAs at June 30, 2022 and December 31, 2021(in thousands of Canadian dollars, except as otherwise noted) As at June 30, 2022 December 31, 2021 Cash and cash equivalents 367,966 341,319 Investments 606,756 641,140 Premiums and accounts receivable, and other assets 397,259 311,629 Recoverable from reinsurers 1,706,310 1,375,354 Deferred acquisition costs 376,212 304,580 Capital assets and intangible assets 19,379 17,109 Deferred tax assets 15,253 9,223 Total assets 3,489,135 3,000,354 Accounts payable, accrued and other liabilities 87,827 216,633 Reinsurance premiums payable 451,233 335,673 Unearned premiums 1,229,602 965,245 Unearned reinsurance commissions 208,072 152,003 Unpaid claims and loss adjustment expenses 1,050,721 897,011 Debt outstanding 105,000 75,000 Total liabilities 3,132,455 2,641,565 Shareholders' equity 356,680 358,789 Total liabilities and shareholders' equity 3,489,135 3,000,354 Trisura Group Ltd.Condensed Interim Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive (Loss) IncomeFor the three and six months ended June 30(in thousands of Canadian dollars, except as otherwise noted) Q2 2022 Q2 2021 Q2 2022 YTD Q2 2021 YTD Gross premiums written 642,215 363,514 1,123,595 673,788 Net premiums written 145,933 100,200 254,103 177,565 Net premiums earned 102,671 67,028 191,020 119,652 Fee income 16,311 12,112 34,538 25,896 Net investment income (loss) 5,077 2,780 9,100 (2,537) Net gains 1,441 4,801 967 8,635 Total revenues 125,500 86,721 235,625 151,646 Net claims and loss adjustment expenses (29,055) (21,390) (52,660) (25,497) Net commissions (44,311) (26,330) (81,419) (44,889) Operating expenses (24,112) (19,737) (45,236) (36,751) Interest expenses (642) (281) (1,233) (468) Total claims and expenses (98,120) (67,738) (180,548) (107,605) Income before income taxes 27,380 18,983 55,077 44,041 Income tax expense (7,185) (2,094) (13,832) (7,834) Net income 20,195 16,889 41,245 36,207 Other comprehensive (loss) income (22,381) 3,835 (43,435) 4,597 Comprehensive (loss) income (2,186) 20,724 (2,190) 40,804 Trisura Group Ltd.Condensed Interim Consolidated Statements of Cash FlowsFor the three and six months ended June 30(in thousands of Canadian dollars, except as otherwise noted) Q2 2022 Q2 2021 Q2 2022 YTD Q2 2021 YTD Net income 20,195 16,889 41,245 36,207 Non-cash items 2,403 (1,150) 7,338 9,792 Change in working capital 50,372 69,950 53,670 72,403 Realized gains (3,593) (611) (5,485) (1,481) Income taxes paid (9,890) (5,996) (21,524) (7,187) Interest paid (997) (107) (1,496) (357) Net cash from operating activities 58,490 78,975 73,748 109,377 Proceeds on disposal of investments 44,266 23,436 97,855 60,280 Purchases of investments (75,684) (104,742) (176,667) (174,677) Net purchases of capital and intangible assets (116) (1,669) (406) (2,525) Net cash used in investing activities (31,534) (82,975) (79,218) (116,922) Shares issued 1,115 602 1,666 859 Shares purchased under Restricted Share Units plan - (116) (2,106) (1,930) Issuance of note payable - 74,700 - 74,700 Loans received 30,000 - 30,000 26,970 Loans repaid - (26,970) - (54,525) Lease payments (445) (354) (947) (688) Net cash from financing activities 30,670 47,862 28,613 45,386 Net increase in cash and cash equivalents 57,626 43,862 23,143 37,841 Cash and cash equivalents, beginning of period 304,464 129,649 341,319 136,519 Currency translation 5,876 (694) 3,504 (1,543) Cash and cash equivalents, end of period 367,966 172,817 367,966 172,817 Non-IFRS Financial Measures Table 1 Reconciliation of reported Net income to Adjusted net income(7): reflect Net income, adjusted for certain items to normalize earnings to core operations in order to better reflect our North American specialty operations. Q2 2022 Q2 2021 Q2 2022 YTD Q2 2021 YTD Net income 20,195 16,889 41,245 36,207 Adjustments: Impact of share based compensation 194 4,394 (2,948) 7,165 Net gains (1,441) (4,801) (967) (8,635) Net losses (gains) from life annuity - 56 77 (1,399) Tax impact of above items 393 (475) 938 (748) Adjustments relating to income tax benefits - (1,221) - (1,221) Adjusted net income 19,341 14,842 38,345 31,369 Table 2 ROE and Adjusted ROE: a measure of the Companys use of equity. Q2 2022 Q2 2021 LTM net income 67,597 53,691 LTM average equity 352,242 293,528 ROE 19.2% 18.3% LTM net income 67,597 53,691 Adjustments: Impact of share based compensation 111 11,641 Loss on sale of structured insurance assets 1,336 - Net gains (6,816) (15,635) Net losses (gains) from life annuity 2,035 (679) Impact of Catastrophe programs reinsurance 2,158 - Tax impact of above items 2,160 (639) Adjustments relating to non-recurring income tax benefits 285 (1,221) Adjusted LTM net income(4) 68,866 47,158 LTM average equity 352,242 293,528 Adjusted LTM ROE 19.6% 16.1% Table 3 Reconciliation of Average equity(8) to LTM average equity: LTM average equity is used in calculating adjusted ROE. Q2 2022 Q2 2021 Average equity 343,653 300,032 Adjustments: days in quarter proration 8,589 (6,504) LTM average equity 352,242 293,528 Table 4 Pro forma EPS and pro forma adjusted EPS: reflect pro forma EPS and adjusted EPS including the impact of equity raise on July 14, 2022. Q2 2022 Q2 2022 YTD Net income 20,195 41,245 Pro forma Weighted-average number of common shares outstanding diluted (in thousands of shares) 46,651 46,637 Pro forma Earnings per common share diluted (in dollars) 0.43 0.88 Adjusted net income, per table 1 19,341 38,345 Pro forma Weighted-average number of common shares outstanding diluted (in thousands of shares) 46,651 46,637 Pro forma Adjusted earnings per common share diluted (in dollars) 0.41 0.82 Table 5 Pro forma BVPS: reflects pro forma BVPS including the impact of equity raise on July 14, 2022. Q2 2022 Book value as of June 30, 2022 356,680 Net proceeds from equity raise on July 14, 2022 144,023 Pro forma book value 500,703 Total common shares outstanding as of June 30, 2022 (in thousands of shares) 41,359 Pro forma common shares outstanding (in thousands of shares) 45,871 Pro forma BVPS (in dollars) 10.92 Footnotes (1) This is a supplementary financial measure. Refer to Q2 2022 MD&A, Section 10, Operating Metrics table for its composition. To access MD&A, see Trisuras website or SEDAR at www.sedar.com. (2) This is a non-IFRS ratio, see table 10.2 in Q2 2022 MD&A for details on composition, as well as each non-IFRS financial measure used as a component of ratio, and an explanation of how it provides useful information to an investor. Non-IFRS ratios are not standardized under the financial reporting framework used to prepare the financial statements of the Company to which the ratio relates and might not be comparable to similar ratios disclosed by other companies. (3) This is a non-IFRS ratio. See Table 10.5 and 10.6 in Q2 2022 MD&A, Section 10, Non-IFRS Financial Measures and Other Financial Measures for details on composition, as well as each non-IFRS financial measure used as a component of this ratio, and an explanation of how it provides useful information to an investor. (4) This is a non-IFRS ratio. See table 10.4 in Q2 2022 MD&A for details on composition, as well as each non-IFRS financial measure used as a component of ratio, and an explanation of how it provides useful information to an investor. (5) This measure is calculated in accordance with the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions Canadas (OSFIs) Guideline A, Minimum Capital Test. (6) This target is in accordance with OSFIs Guideline A-4, Regulatory Capital and Internal Capital Targets. (7) See section on Non-IFRS financial measures, Reconciliation of reported Net income to Adjusted net income. Adjusted net income is a non-IFRS financial measure. Non-IFRS financial measures are not standardized financial measures under the financial reporting framework used to prepare the financial statements of the Company to which the measure relates and might not be comparable to similar financial measures disclosed by other companies. Details and an explanation of how it provides useful information to an investor can be found in the reconciliation table. (8) Average equity is calculated as the sum of opening equity and closing equity over the last twelve months, divided by two. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Information Note: This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian provincial securities laws and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities regulations. Forward-looking statements include statements that are predictive in nature, depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, include statements regarding the operations, business, financial condition, expected financial results, performance, prospects, opportunities, priorities, targets, goals, ongoing objectives, strategies and outlook of the Company and its subsidiaries, as well as the outlook for North American and international economies for the current fiscal year and subsequent periods, and include words such as expects, likely, anticipates, plans, believes, estimates, seeks, intends, targets, projects, forecasts or negative versions thereof and other similar expressions, or future or conditional verbs such as may, will, should, would and could. Although we believe that our anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements and information are based upon reasonable assumptions and expectations, the reader should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information because they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of our Company to differ materially from anticipated future results, performance or achievement expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and information. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated or implied by forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to: developments related to COVID-19, including the impact of COVID-19 on the economy and global financial markets; the impact or unanticipated impact of general economic, political and market factors in the countries in which we do business; the behaviour of financial markets, including fluctuations in interest and foreign exchange rates; global equity and capital markets and the availability of equity and debt financing and refinancing within these markets; strategic actions including dispositions; the ability to complete and effectively integrate acquisitions into existing operations and the ability to attain expected benefits; changes in accounting policies and methods used to report financial condition (including uncertainties associated with critical accounting assumptions and estimates); the ability to appropriately manage human capital; the effect of applying future accounting changes; business competition; operational and reputational risks; technological change; changes in government regulation and legislation within the countries in which we operate; governmental investigations; litigation; changes in tax laws; changes in capital requirements; changes in reinsurance arrangements; ability to collect amounts owed; catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes or pandemics; the possible impact of international conflicts and other developments including terrorist acts and cyberterrorism; and other risks and factors detailed from time to time in our documents filed with securities regulators in Canada. We caution that the foregoing list of important factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. When relying on our forward-looking statements, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Except as required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether written or oral, that may be as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Cautionary Non-IFRS and Other Financial Measures Reported results conform to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), in accordance with IFRS. In addition to reported results, the Company also presents certain financial measures, including non-IFRS financial measures that are historical, non-IFRS ratios, and supplementary financial measures, to assess results. Non-IFRS financial measures, such as adjusted net income, are utilized to assess the Companys overall performance. To arrive at adjusted results, the Company adjusts for certain items to normalize earnings to core operations, in order to better reflect our North American specialty operations. Non-IFRS ratios include a non-IFRS financial measure as one or more of its components. Examples of non-IFRS ratios include adjusted diluted earnings per share and adjusted ROE. The Company believes that non-IFRS financial measures and non-IFRS ratios provide the reader with an enhanced understanding of our results and related trends and increase transparency and clarity into the core results of the business. Non-IFRS financial measures and non-IFRS ratios are not standardized terms under IFRS and, therefore, may not be comparable to similar terms used by other companies. Supplementary financial measures depict the Companys financial performance and position, and are explained in this document where they first appear, and incorporates information by reference to the Companys current MD&A, for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022. To access MD&A, see Trisuras website or SEDAR at www.sedar.com. These measures are pursuant to National Instrument 52-112 Non-GAAP and Other Financial Measures Disclosure. Source: Trisura Group Ltd New Gold Discovery in Lower Zone Indicates Mineralization Potential Outside of Existing 2.47M Ounce Indicated Gold Resource Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Anacortes Mining Corp. (TSXV: XYZ) (OTCQB: XYZFF) ("Anacortes" or the "Company") is pleased to announce drill results for drill holes ATC-502 and ATC-504 from the Tres Cruces Phase 1 drill program. These represent the next two of 22 planned drill holes at its Tres Cruces gold project in the prolific Quiruvilca Mining District in northern Per. Hole ATC-502 was a definition hole drilled with the objective of defining limits of gold mineralization on the outskirts of the known oxide pit, confirming lithology, alteration, and metallurgical material type from the surrounding reverse circulation drill holes. ATC-502 was drilled to a final depth of 120.0 metres and intersected three separate gold intervals[1] tabulated in the Drill Results Table below. AC-502 successfully fulfilled the objective confirming the gold grade, mineralization limits, and geologic characteristics. Drill hole ATC-504 returned 142.90 meters of 1.43 g/t gold from 40.50 meters downhole and discovered a new zone outside the existing sulphide resource, returning 39.40 meters of 1.45 g/t gold from 194.20 meters downhole. ATC-504 (located approximately 400 m south of previously announced Hole ATC-501) was drilled to confirm gold grade, lithology, alteration, and metallurgical material type reported in diamond core drill hole DTC-267. Notably, the upper zone of ATC-504 (142.90m of 1.43 g/t gold from 40.50m downhole) significantly exceeded both the grade and intercept thickness previously reported in DTC-267 (98.2 meters grading 0.89 g/t). The lower intercept of ATC-504 (39.40m of 1.45 g/t gold from 194.20m downhole) is a newly discovered zone and indicates the potential for extensive mineralization outside of the existing resource estimate. Drill Results Table Hole Azimuth / dip (degrees) / Final depth (m) From (m) To (m) Interval (m) Lithology / Alteration Gold (g/t) ATC-502 165 / -60 / 120.0 m 0.90 m 9.90 m 9.00 m Dacite and Andesite / Massive Silica 0.44 ATC-502 15.85 m 19.30 m 3.45 m Dacite / Silica 0.55 ATC-502 44.10 m 46.85 m 2.75 m Andesite / Argillic 0.52 ATC-504 0/ -90/ 256.80 m 40.50 m 183.40 m 142.90 m Dacite and Andesite / Massive Silica and Argillic 1.43 ATC-504 190.0 m 192.35 m 2.35 m Andesite / Argillic 0.92 ATC-504 194.20 m 233.60 m 39.40 m Andesite / Argillic 1.45 Holes ATC503 and ATC-505 were drilled as PQ-size metallurgical holes and will not be assayed or included in any resource estimates. The core from these holes has been shipped to the Plenge Metallurgical Lab in Lima where they will be subject to testing to support the planned Feasibility Study on the oxide resource at Tres Cruces. Drilling is on hiatus at the moment, but will recommence in due course and will continue throughout the fall. The Company will remain well funded after the completion of the Phase 1 drill program. Quality Assurance All Anacortes sample assay results have been monitored through a rigorous quality control / quality assurance ("QA/QC") protocol which includes the random insertion of blind standards, coarse blanks, pulp blanks, pulp duplicate and reject duplicate samples. Samples will be randomly selected and sent for check assaying at a second laboratory as a further check as the drill program progresses. Logging and sampling are conducted at Anacortes's core handling facility located in Trujillo, Peru. Drill core is diamond sawn at the Trujillo facility. The half drill-core samples are securely transported to ALS Global's Peruvian subsidiary, ALS Peru S.A, in Lima, Peru, where the samples are crushed, pulverized, and analyzed. The gold content is determined by fire assay of a 50-gram charge, with Atomic Absorption finish. Silver and other elements are determined by ICP analysis. Samples reporting 5 g/t or more gold are assayed with a gravimetric finish. Samples with a reported gold value 0.2 g/t or more undergo a cyanide leach assay for gold, silver and copper. Anacortes is not aware of any drilling, sampling, recovery, or other factors that could materially affect the accuracy of reliability of the data referred to herein. ALS laboratories is independent of Anacortes. About Anacortes Anacortes is a new growth-oriented gold company in the Americas, which owns a 100-per-cent interest in the Tres Cruces gold project located in Peru. Tres Cruces is one of the highest-grade oxide deposits globally and hosts oxide plus sulphide indicated resources of 2,474,000 oz at 1.65 g/t gold, inclusive of 630,000 oz of high-grade leachable gold at 1.28 g/t gold and inferred resources of 104,000 oz at 1.26 g/t gold. The recently released PEA on the leachable resource at Tres Cruces indicates a robust open-pit, heap leach project. Anacortes is well capitalized and intends to aggressively advance the Tres Cruces Oxide Project through feasibility, permitting and to production as quickly as possible. Additionally, Anacortes will continue to seek further growth opportunities in the Americas, with the goal of creating the next mid-tier multi-asset gold producer. Qualified Person The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and validated by James ("Jim") Currie, P. Eng., a qualified person as that term is defined in National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Currie is the President and CEO of Anacortes Mining Corp. For more information visit: www.anacortesmining.com Twitter: @anacortesmining LinkedIn: Anacortes Mining On Behalf of the Board: James A. (Jim) Currie President & CEO Investor Relations Contact: Kin Communications Inc. 604-684-6730 [email protected] Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Information This news release contains forward-looking statements which constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation ("Forward-looking Statements"). All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, are Forward-looking Statements and are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those reflected in the Forward-looking Statements. The Forward-looking Statements in this news release may include, without limitation, statements about the Company's belief that Tres Cruces has exceptional exploration potential at depth, its intent to aggressively advance the development of the oxide resource, its expectation that its proposed drill program can test the extent of the deposit and increase confidence in the resource, the design of the project as contemplated in the PEA, the Company's plans to conduct an extensive metallurgical program during 2022 and its expectation that such a program would confirm recovery and, finally, the Company's intent to aggressively advance Tres Cruces through feasibility and to production under a heap leach open-pit scenario. Often, but not always, these Forward-looking Statements can be identified by the use of words such as "anticipated", "estimated", "potential", "open", "future", "assumed", "projected", "used", "detailed", "has been", "gain", "planned", "reflecting", "will", "containing", "remaining", "to be", or statements that events "could" or "should" occur or be achieved and similar expressions, including negative variations. Forward-looking Statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond the ability of the Company to control or predict and which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the Forward-looking Statements. These risks include changes in general economic conditions and financial markets; political risks; risks relating to the current and potential adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy, financial markets and the Company's operations; and risks inherent in mineral exploration and development. Although Forward-looking Statements contained in this news release are based upon what each of the parties believe are reasonable assumptions at the time they were made, such statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company disclaims any obligation to update any Forward-looking Statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by law. There can be no assurance that these Forward-looking Statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place undue reliance on Forward-looking Statements. The TSXV has in no way approved or disapproved of the contents of this press release. [1] Significant interval is calculated and reported using a 0.3 g/t gold cutoff value. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132849 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Cabral Gold Inc.(TSXV: CBR) (OTC: CBGZF)("Cabral" or the "Company")is pleased to provide assay results from eleven new trenches excavated along strike and immediately west of the previously drilled Machichie Main zone within the Cui Cuiu gold district. Highlights are as follows: Trench CT0049 returned 96.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold including; 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold, including 0.5m @ 77.3 g/t gold including 1.1m @ 5.4 g/t gold, including 0.5m @ 11.6 g/t gold Trench CT0045 returned 138m @ 0.5 g/t gold including three distinct higher-grade zones: 8m @ 1.5 g/t gold 15m @ 1.7 g/t gold 2m @ 8.9 g/t gold including three distinct higher-grade zones: Other notable intercepts include 0.7m @ 11.3 g/t gold in trench CT0040, 1.6m @ 6.6 g/t gold in trench CT0041 and 0.5m @ 10.9 g/t gold in trench CT0047 All of the Machichie West trenches encountered gold mineralization in weathered bedrock, and cut multiple mineralized structures within a 500m x 300m area indicating the presence of a large new mineralized area on the western side of the east-trending Machichie Main zone Alan Carter, Cabral's President and CEO commented, "These recent trench results are highly significant for three reasons. Firstly, they indicate that the east-trending Machichie Main zone can be traced for at least 350m west of previous drilling, significantly increasing the strike extent, and in particular extending the high-grade zone previously identified in recent trenching. The Machichie Main zone remains open to the west. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, these results suggest the presence of a large new mineralized body in intrusive rocks comprising a swarm or array of numerous gold-bearing quartz veins and veinlets. Trenching suggests that this new zone is northeast-trending parallel to the general trend of the veins. The array extends over an area of at least 500 x 300m, and includes the previously identified Machichie SW veins. This mineralized area remains open in every direction. Finally, the trenching program suggests a significant amount of oxide material has likely resulted from the weathering of this new mineralized zone which should add to the overall inventory of gold-in-oxide mineralization, which already includes three gold-in-oxide blankets discovered thus far at Cuiu Cuiu". Machichie West Trench Results The Machichie target is located 500m north-west of the MG gold deposit (Figure 1). Previous drilling at the Machichie Main zone identified a persistent mineralized zone which is east-trending and dips steeply to the north. This main zone consists of a high-grade core zone surrounded by a low-grade alteration envelope which is similar in style to the primary bedrock gold deposits at MG and Central, as well as the recently announced PDM basement discovery. Figure 1: Map showing the location of the Central and MG gold deposits, the recent discoveries at PDM and Machichie, the three oxide blankets and the new Machichie West area. Other key gold targets are shown as yellow circles To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/3900/132827_da6a1cb9c46a088f_002full.jpg The immediately adjacent Machichie SW target comprises an array of narrow steep-dipping, northeast-trending structures that have returned some very high-grade intercepts, which had been recognized to the southwest of the Machichie Main zone. These veins were initially only recognized south of the Machichie main zone, but trenching has now identified multiple parallel and north-east trending mineralized vein structures immediately north of the Machichie Main zone. This suggests the presence of a much more extensive sheeted vein array than previously envisaged covering an area of 300 x 500m and open in three directions. Table 1 summarizes the results from all eleven recent trenches excavated in the new Machichie West area. The following discusses some of the more significant results and observations. Trench CT0049 Trench CT0049, was excavated in a northwest direction on the extreme west of the main Machichie mineralized zone (Figure 2), approximately 50m west of the trench CT0035A which returned 5m @ 8.3 g/t gold including 1m @ 37.8 g/t gold (see press release dated February 2, 2022). Trench CT0049 was characterized by numerous veins and veinlets within broad zones of hydrothermal alteration. The trench averaged 96.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold and mineralization remains open across strike to the south. Several higher-grade zones are evident within this trench (Table 1, Figure 2) and are associated with zones of more intense veining. These returned: 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold (open to the south) including 0.5m @ 77.3 g/t gold 1.5m @ 1.2 g/t gold 1.1m @ 5.4 g/t gold 1.6m @ 0.6 g/t gold The 7.7m higher-grade intercept is 50m west of the high-grade mineralization that was cut in trench CT0035A which returned 5m @ 8.3 g/t gold. Based on vein orientations and structures evident in both trenches, it is almost certainly the same zone, and is now interpreted to represent the western extension to the east-trending Machichie Main zone. The intercept in CT0049 of 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold starts from the beginning of the trench and is open to the south indicting that the higher-grade zone may be wider than the mineralized interval suggests. Furthermore, CT0049 is the westernmost trench excavated to date in the Machichie West zone indicating that both the Machichie Main zone and the Machichie West vein array are open to the west. Trench CT0045 Trench CT0045, was excavated 50-100m east of trench CT49. It is oriented in a north-south, and occurs immediately north of CT0035A (Figure 2).This trench was designed to test for the presence of more northeast-trending veins. The trench returned 138m @ 0.5 g/t gold. Several of the more significant intervals of gold mineralization displayed northeast-trending foliations, fractures, and vein structures similar to veins in the Machichie SW area. Higher-grade intervals in Trench CT0045 include: 2m @ 8.9 g/t gold 0.5m @ 3.9 g/t gold 8m @ 1.5 g/t gold 15m @ 1.7 g/t gold Other Trenches Three other trenches were excavated along the surface projection of the interpreted western extension of the Machichie Main Zone. Trenches CT0040 and CT0041 returned 0.7m @ 11.3 g/t gold and 1.6m @ 6.6 g/t gold, respectively, and are located approximately 150m east of trench CT0035A. CT0042 was also excavated on the projection of the main Machichie structure immediately east of trench CT0041 and returned 4m @ 1.5 g/t gold with the mineralized intercept being open across strike, and of unknown width. Two short trenches CT0046 and CT0047 were developed to the north and each cut narrow high-grade structures. These trenches returned 1.1m @ 3.5 g/t gold and 0.5m @ 10.9 g/t gold respectively. All of the other trenches excavated on the western side of Machichie are mineralized along their entire length and include; CT0038A 112m @ 0.4 g/t gold CT0036 34.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold CT0045 138m @ 0.5 g/t gold CT0049 96.5m @ 0.6 g/t gold CT0044 90m @ 0.2g/t gold Figure 2: Detailed map showing the E-W trending Machichie Main and the NE-SW trending veins of the Machichie SW target. The Machichie West Vein array comprising an area of 300 x 500m is also shown and is coincident with a magnetic low (blue background). Current and recent trench results are shown, as is the outline of the main mineralized structures identified to date (yellow) To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/3900/132827_da6a1cb9c46a088f_003full.jpg Trench Weathering Length of Trench From to Width Grade # m m m m g/t gold CT0039 Oxide 12.5 13.0 0.5 2.3 42.0 CT0040 Oxide 3.0 3.7 0.7 11.3 6.7 CT0041 Oxide 3.0 4.6 1.6 6.6 6.6 CT0042 Oxide 3.0 7.0 4.0 1.5 7.0 CT0043 Oxide 14.0 15.4 1.4 0.4 24.0 34.0 10.0 0.4 34.0 CT0044 Oxide 0.0 90.0 90.0 0.2 incl. 7.0 12.0 5.0 0.7 and 44.5 45.2 0.7 1.6 and 67.5 68.5 1.0 1.7 90.0 CT0045 Oxide 0.0 138.0 138.0 0.5 incl. 18.0 20.0 2.0 8.9 incl. 18.7 19.2 0.5 35.0 and 43.2 43.7 0.5 3.9 and 74.0 82.0 8.0 1.5 and 90.7 93.0 2.3 0.4 and 102.5 117.5 15.0 1.7 incl. 116.5 117.0 0.5 41.8 138.0 CT0046 Oxide 2.5 3.6 1.1 3.5 12.0 CT0047 Oxide 9.0 9.5 0.5 10.9 12.0 CT0048 Oxide 26.0 32.0 6.0 1.3 86.0 CT0049 Oxide 0.0 96.5 96.5 0.6 incl. 0.0 7.7 7.7 5.8 incl. 6.5 7.0 0.5 77.3 and 12.5 14.0 1.5 1.2 and 32.4 33.5 1.1 5.4 incl. 32.4 32.9 0.5 11.6 and 93.2 94.8 1.6 0.6 96.5 Table 1: Gold values in trenches CT0039 to CT0049 from Machichie / Machichie West area Interpretation The trenching program immediately west of Machichie was initially designed to test the western extension of the main east-trending Machichie Main zone and has been very successful in that regard, with trench CT0035A returning 5m @ 8.3 g/t gold. That trench is located 300m along strike and due west of the most westerly drill hole. Trench CT0049 was excavated 50m further west and returned 7.7m @ 5.8 g/t gold (open) including 0.5m @ 77.3 g/t gold suggesting that the mineralized zone at Machichie extends at least 900m along strike. Whilst drilling will be required to confirm the down-dip extent of the western extension to the Machichie Main zone, previous and ongoing drilling in the central and eastern part of the Machichie Main zone, as well as geological considerations, suggest that gold mineralization should extend to depth. A number of northeast-trending individual veins are known to exist immediately south of the Machichie structure and comprise the Machichie SW target. Whilst drilling thus far has been limited, individual veins have returned high-grade intercepts, e.g. 3.4m @ 36.9 g/t gold, including 0.7m @ 162.7 g/t gold in DDH182 (see press release dated February 28, 2019). The recent trenching program identified numerous new northeast-trending veins in weathered intrusive rock to north of the Machichie Main zone. The density of these veins and veinlets within the weathered intrusive host rock appears to increase steadily to the west and to the north. The extensive low-grade values that were encountered in most trenches include zones of higher grade (Table 1). These are comparable with the gold values from the recently identified gold-in-oxide zones at MG, PDM and Central suggesting that the Machichie area could contain a significant amount of additional oxide material in weathered basement. Since this oxide material occurs in structures within weathered and oxidized intrusive rocks, the mineralization is expected to continue below the weathering profile into the hard underlying intrusive rocks, although drilling will be required to confirm. The northeast-trending vein swarm has now been traced over an area that is 500m northeast to southwest, and over 300m northwest to southeast, and is open along strike to the northeast, southwest, and across strike to the northwest and at depth. It is also coincident with a magnetic low. Magnetic lows are characteristic of all of the known gold deposits at Cuiu Cuiu. The size and intensity of the veining noted from the recent trenches at Machichie West suggests that it could be a major new mineralized body. Drilling / Resource Update Results are pending on 12 diamond-drill holes at MG. Results for 21 RC holes are also pending at PDM. Results are pending on 14 follow-up diamond-drill holes at Machichie. Results are also pending on 6 diamond-drill holes at the Indio target and additional drilling is planned. The preparation of an updated resource estimate for the Cuiu Cuiu project is in progress. The NI 43-101 estimate is being carried out by SLR Consulting (Canada) Ltd. and is expected to be completed during August. About Cabral Gold Inc. The Company is a junior resource company engaged in the identification, exploration and development of mineral properties, with a primary focus on gold properties located in Brazil. The Company has a 100% interest in the Cuiu Cuiu gold district located in the Tapajos Region, within the state of Para in northern Brazil. Two gold deposits have so far been defined at Cuiu Cuiu and contain 43-101 compliant Indicated resources of 5.9Mt @ 0.90g/t (200,000 oz) and Inferred resources of 19.5Mt @ 1.24g/t (800,000 oz). The Tapajos Gold Province is the site of the largest gold rush in Brazil's history producing an estimated 30 to 50 million ounces of placer gold between 1978 and 1995. Cuiu Cuiu was the largest area of placer workings in the Tapajos and produced an estimated 2Moz of placer gold historically. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: "Alan Carter" President and Chief Executive Officer Cabral Gold Inc. Tel: 604.676.5660 Guillermo Hughes, MAusIMM and FAIG., a consultant to the Company as well as a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, supervised the preparation of the technical information in this news release. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as such term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-looking Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively "forward-looking statements"). The use of the words "will", "expected" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. This news release contains forward-looking statements and assumptions pertaining to the following: strategic plans and future operations, and results of exploration. Actual results achieved may vary from the information provided herein as a result of numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors. The Company believes the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. Notes Gold analysis has been conducted by SGS method FAA505 (fire assay of 50g charge), with higher grade samples checked by FAA525. Analytical quality is monitored by certified references and blanks. Until dispatch, samples are stored under the supervision the Company's exploration office. The samples are couriered to the assay laboratory using a commercial contractor. Pulps are returned to the Company and archived. Drill holes results are quoted as down-hole length weighted intersections. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132827 Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Lendified Holdings Inc. (TSXV: LHI) (the "Company" or "Lendified") announces the resignation of Guy Charette as a director and chair of the board of directors of the Company (the "Board") and the appointment of Kevin Dane as a director of the Company, effective immediately. Chris Tambakis, a director of the Company, will succeed Mr. Charette as chair of the Board. The Board wishes to thank Mr. Charette for his service as chair and member of the Board. Mr. Dane brings a wealth of experience when it comes to supporting the growth of entrepreneurs. He spent many years at a large Canadian financial services business and has helped finance the growth and development of hundreds of Canadian companies. Kevin has extensive experience in debt, mezzanine and venture capital financing, as well as consulting services to support business growth. The Board of the Company is now comprised of Chris Tambakis (Chair), Perry Dellelce, Peter Ostapchuk, Kevin Dane and Eoghan Bergin. ABOUT LENDIFIED HOLDINGS INC. Lendified, a company located in Ontario, Canada, is a Canadian company operating a lending platform which provides working capital loans to small and medium-sized businesses across Canada. Further Information For further information regarding Lendified, please contact: Eoghan Bergin, Chief Executive Officer and Director 1-844-451-3594 [email protected] Neither the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release may contain forward-looking statements which reflect the Company's current expectations regarding future events. The forward-looking statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "seek", "anticipate", "plan, "estimate", "expect", "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions. These forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, which could cause results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from the results discussed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Many risks are inherent in the industries in which the Company participates; others are more specific to the Company. The Company's ongoing quarterly filings should be consulted for additional information on risks and uncertainties relating to these forward-looking statements. Investors should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Management assumes no obligation to update or alter any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, further events or otherwise. NOT FOR DISSEMINATION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132926 Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - Datametrex AI Limited (TSXV: DM) (FSE: D4G) (OTCQB: DTMXF) (the "Company" or "Datametrex'') is pleased to announce that it has been recognized as one of the Top Mental Health Companies Battling the Suicide Epidemic. "Mental health is on the decline all over the world. In fact, according to Morning Call, Given the challenges of the last two years, it's not surprising we find ourselves in a national mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cases of depression and anxiety were four times higher during the first year of the pandemic compared to previous years. Nationally, the proportion of mental health-related emergency department visits among adolescents aged 12-17 years increased 31% compared to pre-pandemic numbers. In the U.S., one person dies by suicide every 11 minutes. The good news is more companies are lining up to help, including Datametrex AI Limited (TSXV: DM) (OTCQB: DTMXF)." Read the feature here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/stocks/DM-X/pressreleases/9470671/these-top-mental-health-companies-are-battling-the-suicide-epidemic/ About Medi-Call Medi-call is a subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) mobile application that connects patients with doctors. It is an integrated grid system that connects patients with providers in real time. Medi-Call solves accessibility issues for patients living in rural or isolated communities and those also have limited mobility while improving coordination and communication of treatment among healthcare team members and their patients. Medi-Call facilitates mobile health care services, including prescriptions and is passionate about building doctor-patient relationships virtually. Visit Medicallmd.ca to learn more about the Company. Download the Medi-Call App for Android: https://bit.ly/MCGooglePlay Download the Medi-Call App for iOS: https://apple.co/3oos9m2 About Datametrex Datametrex AI Limited is a technology-focused company with exposure to artificial intelligence, machine learning, telehealth and has recently entered the electric vehicle (EV) market. Datametrex' mission is to provide tools and solutions that support companies in fulfilling their operational goals, including health and safety, with predictive and preventive technologies. By working with companies to set a new standard of protocols through artificial intelligence and health diagnostics, the Company provides progressive solutions to support the supply chain. For additional information on Datametrex and other corporate information, please visit the Company's website at www.datametrex.com. For further information: Investor Relations & Communications Priya Monique Atwal, Director of Communications Email: [email protected] Tel: 416-901-5611 x 204 Marshall Gunter, CEO Email: [email protected] Tel: 514-295-2300 Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements All statements included in this press release that address activities, events, or developments that the Company expects, believes, or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the Bid. These forward-looking statements involve numerous assumptions made by the Company based on its experience, perception of historical trends, current conditions, expected future developments and other factors it believes are appropriate in the circumstances. In addition, these statements involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties that contribute to the possibility that the predictions, forecasts, projections, and other forward-looking statements will prove inaccurate, certain of which are beyond the Company's control. Except as required by law, the Company does not undertake to revise or update these forward-looking statements after the date hereof or revise them to reflect the occurrence of future unanticipated events. ### To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132772 The Company had previously announced its first repeat order with existing customer Bard on the Beach. Partnership with Flair rapidly accelerates The Gummy Project's growth across Canada with GUMY products being featured for sale on all Flair flights. As the "Better for You" gummy company, The Gummy Project, through its Flair Airlines partnership, will extend the reach and effectiveness of its purpose driven mission to support endangered keystone species. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 4, 2022) - The Gummy Project (CSE: GUMY) (FSE: 0OS) (OTCQB: GUMYF) ("GUMY" or the "Company") is excited to announce that the Company has received a repeat order from its existing customer Flair Airlines ("Flair"). "We are very pleased to receive our second repeat order from an existing customer. We view this as another vote of confidence that our customers are very much enjoying our gummies and strongly embracing our mandate to support endangered keystone species," said Charlie Lamb, President & CEO of The Company. "We look forward to building upon the momentum that the Company has created as we continue to accelerate revenue generation and brand awareness." Flair Airlines is Canada's only independent ultra low-cost carrier with 14 Boeing jets currently in operation with a goal of reaching 50 aircraft by 2026. Flair currently serves 28 destinations in Canada, USA and internationally, highlighted by Calgary, Cancun, Charlottetown, Chicago, Denver, Edmonton, Fort Lauderdale, Halifax, Hollywood/Burbank, Kitchener, Las Vegas, Los Cabos, Montreal, Nashville, New York, Ottawa, Palm Springs, Phoenix, San Francisco and Vancouver. About The Gummy Project We are a growing community of individuals and organizations who believe small contributions can add up to something big. We sell low sugar, plant based gummy products while raising money (and awareness) to support endangered keystone species. We are the only "better for you" candy company that is built to support our planet's most precious species and ecosystems, while educating our future generations on the steps we must take today, to ensure a viable tomorrow. https://shopgummies.com/ Charlie Lamb, President & CEO, Director Telephone: 1(236) 317-2812 - Toll free (877) 806-2633 E-mail: [email protected] Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements Certain information set forth in this news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding future financial position, business strategy, use of proceeds, corporate vision, proposed acquisitions, partnerships, joint-ventures and strategic alliances and co-operations, budgets, cost and plans and objectives of or involving the Company. Such forward-looking information reflects management's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to management. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "predicts", "intends", "targets", "aims", "anticipates", "may" or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases or may be identified by statements to the effect that certain actions "may", "could", "should", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. A number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors may cause the actual results or performance to materially differ from any future results or performance expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company including, but not limited to, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions, risks relating to epidemics or pandemics such as COVID-19, including the impact of COVID-19 on the Company's business, financial condition, and results of operations. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. The Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by securities laws. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/132744 NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Acquco, the fastest growing e-commerce aggregator, announced today its Amazon Prime Day 2022 year-over-year sales surpassed competitors with an increase of over +107%. Acquco was founded by e-commerce experts Raunak Nirmal and Wiley Zhang, who are passionate about acquiring high-quality Amazon brands and growing them into household names. "Acquco's performance on Amazon Prime Day is largely due to our expert team of brand managers with years of experience coming from Amazon, Walmart, and Ebay," says Nirmal. "We also have proprietary playbooks that give our brand managers unique strategies to drive sales. As a result, we have consistently unlocked double-digit, year-over-year growth for the brands we have acquired." Sales data highlights Acquco's continuously strong performance in the Home, Office, Sports, and Beauty categories. Key brands and products that contributed to Acquco's record-breaking sales growth include: LuxClub Bedsheets - Luxury bedsheets continue to drive growth with a year-over-year increase of nearly 300%. On July 13th, sales for the brand's bedsheets exceeded 1.5 million, thanks in part to a viral post on TikTok that was viewed 1.3 million times. Liba Brand Products - A lineup of household and self care products, increased sales by 128% from Prime Day 2021. The #2 BSR Liba Back and Neck Massager became a best selling product during the week of Prime Day by tripling in daily units sold. Sigtuna Bike Locks - Sales for Sigtuna bike locks jumped 137% compared to Prime Day last year. These heavy-duty locks not only protect bikes from theft, but also feature a special coating to prevent scratches. The folding bike lock sprinted to the top ten sellers of its category by selling three times its daily average. Scala Foot Peel Mask - Demand for highly discounted beauty items was very high during Prime Day. The Scala Foot Peel Mask became a best-selling product over the Prime Day sales period and made the front page of the Beauty category deals page. This hypoallergenic foot peel sold 206 times its daily average and is currently standing tall as the seventh-best seller in its category. PowerLix Inflatable Sleeping Mat - Camping enthusiasts took advantage of the competitive discount offered on this #1 best-selling inflatable sleeping pad. Units sold increased by four times the daily average over the Prime Day period compared to last year. The unique design ensures campers not only get a good night's sleep, but also folds up to the size of a water bottle to easily fit in a backpack. When asked about her team's contribution to Acquco's Prime Day success, Vice President of Brand Management Christine Cui explained, "We've strived to improve our brands since Prime Day last year. From overhauling our content and branding, investing in social media marketing, improving our product quality with new QA processes, to launching hundreds of new products, we're reaching a broader audience this year and evolving our acquisitions from product source to brand source. With the goal of serving a broader audience across multiple countries and channels, we're excited to see triple-digit growth this year not only on Amazon US, but also across many other regions, from Canada, to the UK and the EU." Nirmal added, "Acquco is successfully navigating the unique challenges that 2022 has brought to the e-commerce industry because of our adaptability. Behind our lineup of successful brands is a dynamic team that approaches every hurdle with the future success of the company in mind. I am incredibly proud of what we accomplished on Prime Day, but the year is far from over. Wiley and I look forward to acquiring new Amazon storefronts, overcoming obstacles, and continuing growth in the months and years ahead." About Acquco Acquco takes a highly measured approach to identify, evaluate, and acquire leading Amazon brands. Acquco delivers long-term value to its clients by leveraging capital, resources, and opportunities for Amazon sellers to achieve their goals. Acquco's proprietary technology and global operating experience structures a distinct approach to acquisitions, resulting in sustained year-over-year impact for its clients and partners. Media contact: [email protected] View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/acquco-achieves-record-breaking-sales-on-amazon-prime-day-301599489.html SOURCE Acquco PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AirECMO, Inc., a division of Keystone Perfusion Services, P.C. announces a strategic partnership with industry leading air ambulance provider, REVA, to provide ECMO transportation capabilities globally. ECMO is an extracorporeal technique of providing prolonged cardiac and respiratory support to persons whose heart and lungs are unable to maintain hemodynamic stability. AirECMO announces a strategic partnership with REVA to provide ECMO transportation capabilities globally. Through the COVID pandemic, the need for patients to be safely transported on ECMO for escalation of care has increased significantly. The ECMO Transport Program not only offers global interfacility transports but also cannulation services to place the patient on ECMO prior to transport. "We are excited to partner with a top-notch organization like REVA to offer the travel and health insurance market and private patients a suitable transportation solution that has been lacking for quite some time", said Michael Hancock, co-founder of AirECMO, "we look forward to being available to provide patients with a reliable and safe way to get home for the treatment they need and deserve". About AirECMO, a division of Keystone Perfusion Services Keystone Perfusion is a Nationwide key supplier of Perfusion Services with a footprint spanning 38 states at 180 facilities and boasts a roster of 305 + Certified Perfusionists. Perfusionists are vital members of the cardiovascular surgical team because they are responsible for running the heart-lung (cardiopulmonary bypass) machine during open-heart surgery. Extra-corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) utilizes similar technology to provide long-term support to patients in cardiac or respiratory failure, with the Perfusionist being the specialized clinician that can both operate the machine and troubleshoot any issues with the circuit. The highly experienced Transport Team consists of 10 Perfusionists and 8 cannulating physicians (CT Surgeons, Cardiac Anesthesiologists, ICU Intensivists). www.airecmo.com About REVA REVA, Inc., owner-operators of a fleet of 16 medically configured aircraft, including small and mid-size jets, employs over 350 air-ambulance-service professionals who deliver caring, efficient, fully-accredited medical care from bases throughout North America, including the Caribbean. REVA, Inc., has completed more than 30,000 medical transports that include time-sensitive organ deliveries, trauma response, and intensive-care connections, in addition to private charters associated with medical tourism, cruise-line passenger emergencies, and philanthropic efforts. REVA, Inc. has earned over a dozen top industry honors and recognitions from the Department of Defense, NAAMTA, EURAMI, International Assistance Group, ARGUS Platinum as well as the AAMS Fixed Wing Award of Excellence, ACE Safety Award, ITIJ 2015 Air Ambulance Provider of the Year Award and ITIJ 2018 Air Ambulance Provider of the Year Award Finalist. Contact: Geoff NagleT: 1.856 506 2984T : 1.800.407.1198E : [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/airecmo-and-reva-launch-cooperation-301600240.html SOURCE Keystone Perfusion ZURICH, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Amcor plc (NYSE: AMCR; ASX: AMC) will announce its full year results for the twelve months ended 30 June 2022 after the US market closes on Wednesday 17 August 2022. A conference call and webcast to discuss the results will be held at 5.30pm US Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday 17 August 2022 / 7.30am Australian Eastern Standard Time on Thursday 18 August 2022. For those wishing to participate in the call please use the following dial-in numbers: US and Canada: 888 440 4149 (toll-free)Australia: 1800 953 093 (toll-free)United Kingdom: 0800 358 0970 (toll-free)Hong Kong: +852 3002 3410 (local number)Singapore: +65 3159 5133 (local number)All other countries: +1 646 960 0661 (this is not a toll-free number) Conference ID 8080870 Access to the webcast and supporting materials will be available via the Investors section of Amcor's website (www.amcor.com/investors). A webcast replay will be available at the conclusion of the call. For further information please contact: Investors: Tracey Whitehead Global Head of Investor Relations Amcor +61 3 9226 9028 / +1 224-478-5790 [email protected]com Damien BirdVice President Investor Relations Amcor +61 3 9226 9070[email protected] Damon WrightVice President Investor Relations Amcor + 1 224 313 7141 / +1 949 202 9682[email protected] Media Europe Ernesto DuranHead of Global Communications Amcor +41 78 698 69 40[email protected] Media Australia James Strong Citadel-MAGNUS +61 448 881 174[email protected] Media North America Daniel Yunger KekstCNC +1 212 521 4879 [email protected] About AmcorAmcor is a global leader in developing and producing responsible packaging for food, beverage, pharmaceutical, medical, home- and personal-care, and other products. Amcor works with leading companies around the world to protect their products and the people who rely on them, differentiate brands, and improve value chains through a range of flexible and rigid packaging, specialty cartons, closures, and services. The company is focused on making packaging that is increasingly light-weighted, recyclable and reusable, and made using a rising amount of recycled content. Around 46,000 Amcor people generate US$13 billion in sales from operations that span about 225 locations in 40-plus countries. NYSE: AMCR; ASX: AMC www.amcor.com I LinkedIn I Facebook I Twitter I YouTube View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amcor-to-report-full-year-2022-results-301599532.html SOURCE Amcor Innovating Marketing Group is excited to share, HBJ 40 under 40 class of 2022 nominee Ayesha Shelton is hosting this year's class party with a private event in River Oaks HOUSTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovating Marketing Group is excited to share, Park Street Homes announced the organization would be the host committee for this year's Houston Business Journal 40 under 40 class of 2022 celebration. The Houston Business Journal 40 under 40 nomination celebrates (40) young professionals under the age of (40) for their significant contribution to their companies, industries, and communities. Meet Ayesha Shelton one of the 40 under 40 nominees. Ayesha Shelton is the Co-founder of Park Street Development/Park Street Homes and a licensed realtor in the State of Texas. As a licensed realtor, Ayesha founded the Ayesha Shelton team powered by The Braden Real Estate Group. As the lead listing specialist Ayesha represents various types of clients annually including homeowners, real estate developers, builders, and business owners throughout Houston as well Ayesha has assembled a dynamic team of skilled agents. Ayesha has been able to develop herself as a premier real estate investor and developer within the Houston area and the company prides itself on "Affordable Luxury in the City." "Housing prices are astronomical. To be able to bring a product to the community that is affordable and convenient to all of the local amenities in the city of Houston, I think, is a game changer." Ayesha, through her tireless commitment, has consistently grown her businesses while also staying committed to empowering young entrepreneurs and investors to reach their maximum potential. Ayesha currently serves on several boards and has association memberships with organizations that serve the communities through economic growth. Ayesha along with her husband have been highlighted for their philanthropic initiatives as well as their work in the real estate sector both locally nationally. About the 40 under 40 class celebration The event will take place at a premiere location in the Houston River Oaks District on August 18th, 2022, by invite only. The event is a celebration for the 2022 class highlighting the achievements of the collective group. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor for the event or to inquire about Zoom/Skype interviews or media inquiries, please contact LaToya Hurley at [email protected] or call 346-980-9062. About The Ayesha Shelton Team The Ayesha Shelton Team specializes in new and existing homes throughout the city of Houston and surrounding communities. Whether you are building your first home or selling your latest investment property our team has you covered. Here at The Ayesha Shelton Team powered by The Braden Real Estate Group, we work together to ensure that every client receives the supreme experience when making their home buying, selling or investment dreams come true. Come experience what The Team has to offer. "Selling real estate is no longer a single agent game. I've joined forces with a few dynamic realtors to bring excellent service and VIP treatment to every client we touch. PRESS CONTACT LaToya Hurley13469809062https://www.innovatingmarketinggroup.com/ View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ayesha-shelton-was-honored-by-the-houston-business-journal-as-one-of-the-40-under-40-class-of-2022-301600191.html SOURCE The Ayesha Shelton Team Fintech Infrastructure Company Cited as a Small Company Stand Out for Fostering an Exceptionally Innovative and Welcoming Environment SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Fast Company today announced its fourth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list, honoring organizations and businesses that demonstrate a steadfast commitment to encouraging innovation at all levels. Bond Financial Technologies, Inc., the leading embedded finance platform, was selected as one of 11 companies globally in the small company category. These companies with fewer than 100 employees were selected because they foster exceptionally innovative environments. Though they may be small, their potential for impact and growth is just the opposite. Fast Company applauds Bond's culture of opportunity and innovation: 2022 Best Workplaces finalist Developed in collaboration with Accenture, the 2022 Best Workplaces for Innovators ranks winners from a variety of industries including computer science, biotech, consumer packaged goods, nonprofit, education, financial services, cybersecurity, engineering, diversity, sustainability, B2B, and consumer products and services. Fast Company editors and Accenture researchers worked together to score nearly 1,500 applications, and a panel of eight eminent judges reviewed and endorsed the top companies. The 2022 awards feature workplaces from around the world. "I am honored that Bond has been recognized by Fast Company as a standout small company for the culture of opportunity and innovation we've worked so hard to create," said Roy Ng, CEO and co-founder of Bond. "Yan Wu and I founded Bond in 2019 with a mission to build a best-in-class embedded finance platform for innovators to build apps that enable financial access and inclusion. We enable our customers to build incredibly personalized apps that integrate innovative software experiences with financial services. People have very personal and intimate relationships with their money; the only way to build a platform that enables our customers to build this is to build a diverse team with different backgrounds and points of views." "This year's list of the Best Workplaces for Innovators recognizes organizations that have demonstrated a deep commitment to cultivating creativity across the board," says Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. "In the face of powerful headwinds, these leaders and teams continue to spur innovation." To see the complete list, go to: https://www.fastcompany.com/best-workplaces-for-innovators/list Fast Company's Best Workplaces for Innovators issue (September 2022) is available online now, and the print issue will be on newsstands beginning August 16, 2022. Join the Best Workplaces for Innovators conversation using #FCBestWorkplaces. About Bond Bond enables any company to become a fintech. Through Bond's full-stack embedded finance platform, customers can offer personalized and compliant financial products to their end users, including high-value-add products such as consumer and commercial charge cards. Bond was founded in 2019 by industry veterans from Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, SAP, SoFi, and Twilio, with deep roots in financial services, technology and enterprise software. Bond is a remote-first company, with office locations in San Francisco, New York City and Salt Lake City. Visit www.bond.tech to learn more. About Fast Company Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with our sister publication Inc., and can be found online at www.fastcompany.com. About Accenture Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Technology and Operations services and Accenture Song all powered by the world's largest network of Advanced Technology and intelligent Operations centers. Our 710,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us www.accenture.com. Media ContactJill Reed, Sift Communications: [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bond-named-to-fast-companys-fourth-annual-list-of-best-workplaces-for-innovators-in-small-companies-301599587.html SOURCE Bond Financial Technologies, Inc. New technology is designed to reduce collection time and improve donor experience; Aurora, Colorado, location is first of 300-plus CSL Plasma U.S. centers to convert to Rika Plasma Donation System BOCA RATON, Fla., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CSL Plasma, the plasma collection business of global biotherapeutics leader CSL Behring, today began a new era in plasma donations, collecting its first plasma donations using leading-edge plasma collection technology that is expected to significantly reduce average collection time by approximately one-third and improve the donor experience. The Rika Plasma Donation System, only available at CSL Plasma and developed by Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies, is designed to reduce collection time, and improve the donor and operator experience. When considering prior average CSL Plasma donation procedure times, this could represent about a 30% reduction in average donation time for donors. The new plasmapheresis system first launched today in the Aurora, Colorado, CSL Plasma location, as part of a phased rollout to CSL Plasma U.S. collection centers. Plasma collected at CSL Plasma facilities is used in the manufacturing of lifesaving plasma-derived therapies. "Today marks a threshold moment for plasma donors following years of dedication, innovation and collaboration demonstrating how we are driven by our promise in delivering lifesaving and life-extending therapies to patients around the world," said CSL Chief Operating Officer Paul McKenzie. "We look forward to the positive impact this new technology brings and are thankful for plasma donors who continue to do the amazing every day when they donate at CSL Plasma." CSL Plasma believes features of the new Rika system can enable the collection of more plasma, in shorter periods of time, supporting quality and safety, and, ultimately, better serving patients who rely on plasma-based therapies. One of the first plasma donors to experience the Rika system, Kelly Geiser is a resident of the Denver area. She has donated plasma since 2017, and is a Platinum level donor as part of CSL Plasma's donor loyalty program, iGive Rewards. Geiser appreciated that she was able to complete the donation procedure with the new technology in under 35 minutes and in the fastest donation time she has experienced, while every plasma donor's experience will vary. Donating plasma is also personal for Geiser, who says that therapies made from plasma have helped her and her family, including a parent who recently underwent emergency surgery. "It feels good knowing I'm helping people and, who knows, I might've helped somebody I know," said Geiser. According to Terumo BCT, benefits of the Rika Plasma Donation System include: Rika completes one plasma collection in 35 minutes or less on average. The proprietary design of the system's centrifuge maximizes the plasma yield per cycle. The Rika Plasma Donation System was designed to allow no more than 200 milliliters of blood cells outside the donor's body, resulting in a low extracorporeal volume, which may contribute to a more comfortable donor experience. With less than 200 milliliters of blood cells outside the donor's body at any given time, should the initial procedure not be completed, the donor can return and donate without being deferred. The device is designed with an advanced user interface to guide CSL Plasma front-line employees. Operators can quickly and confidently resolve alarms, thanks to guidance provided on the Rika system's touchscreen, which also alerts operators about situations that require attention and provides suggested actions to resolve the situation. The system allows for real-time data analytics to drive device maintenance and repairs. CSL Plasma is implementing the new devices at Colorado centers and then expanding to other U.S. locations, providing donors more opportunities to "do the amazing" and be rewarded for their generosity. "As a long-time leader in our industry, CSL Plasma looks forward to this new plasmapheresis technology to delight our plasma donors and attract new donors while supporting a better operating experience for our employees," said Walter Charles, CSL Plasma Senior Vice President and General Manager. "As we complete the implementation of new technology at U.S. centers, we continue to address the critical and ongoing need for human plasma to produce life-saving medicines for people with serious and rare diseases." About CSL PlasmaCSL Plasma operates one of the world's largest and most sophisticated plasma collection networks, with more than 300 plasma collection centers in the U.S., Europe and China. Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, CSL Plasma is a subsidiary of CSL Behring, a global biotherapeutics company and a member of the CSL Group of companies. Plasma collected at CSL Plasma facilities is used by CSL Behring for the sole purpose of manufacturing lifesaving plasma-derived therapies for people in more than 100 countries. The parent company, CSL Limited (ASX:CSL; USOTC: CSLLY), headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, employs more than 25,000 people. For more information about CSL Plasma visit, www.cslplasma.com. About CSL Behring CSL Behring is a global biotherapeutics leader driven by our promise to save lives. Focused on serving patients' needs by using the latest technologies, we discover, develop and deliver innovative therapies for people living with conditions in the immunology, hematology, cardiovascular and metabolic, respiratory, and transplant therapeutic areas. We use three strategic scientific platforms of plasma fractionation, recombinant protein technology, and cell and gene therapy to support continued innovation and continually refine ways in which products can address unmet medical needs and help patients lead full lives. For inspiring stories about the promise of biotechnology, visit CSLBehring.com/Vita and follow us on Twitter.com/CSLBehring. Media Contact in U.S. Rhonda Sciarra Director, Communications, CSL Plasma Office: + 1 561 981 4207Mobile: +1 551 228 3244[email protected] Media Contact in Australia Jimmy Baker Senior Communications Business Partner, CSL+61 450 909 211 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/csl-plasma-reimagines-donor-experience-with-first-donations-completed-on-innovative-plasma-collection-technology-301600361.html SOURCE CSL Plasma VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - CycurID Technologies Ltd., ("CycurID" or the "Company"), is pleased to promote their KYC Pricing Packages to all businesses. CycurID (pronounced "Secure ID") is a cybersecurity company that has developed a proprietary, reusable Personal Identity Management System that allows for the deployment of innovative identity-based applications and solutions that address the extensive shortcomings which currently exist with KYC/AML measures, authentication, ID theft and privacy. CycurID's software incorporates Artificial Intelligence, Biometric Encryption and Zero-Knowledge Protocols with no sharing of personal information as third-party software is not used in the validation and verification process. Gord Jessop, CycurID Co-founder and COO said, "We believe that the KYC/AML screening process should be affordable for all companies and not be a cash flow killer. The KYC/AML market has evolved to a point where it is an industry unto itself, and the fees most companies are charging are exorbitant. Our KYC/AML solution is automated, secure, continuous and extremely cost effective. Our solution requires a simple API integration and is platform agnostic, meaning that businesses do not have to invest in extra hardware or cloud servers to deploy an effective 2FA or KYC/AML solution." Jessop's comments reference news and commentary from Binance, which has stated the high costs that Binance and other businesses can incur when trying to meet current KYC/AML compliance and regulatory requirements. Current KYC/AML providers are not stemming the tide of identity theft, or money laundering. It is estimated that money laundering costs the world economy between 2% to 5% of its GDP and identity theft has become one of the top money laundering trends. Anti-money laundering activities recover only 0.1% of criminal funds indicating that current KYC/AML procedures are ineffective. "We are aware that rigorous KYC/AML protocols are critical steps in both fiat-based and crypto-based transactions but current solution providers are not solving the problem. CycurID rethinks the entire approach to KYC/AML and is a critical first step in providing a better solution." CycurID pricing packages are low-cost, ensuring that KYC/AML is affordable for companies of all sizes: The Basic package includes: email verification, cell number verification, and liveness verification, along with biometric 2FA (which gives companies passwordless authentication and instant onboarding) all at no cost . package includes: email verification, cell number verification, and liveness verification, along with biometric 2FA (which gives companies passwordless authentication and instant onboarding) all at . The Standard package includes everything in Basic plus: Geolocation Fencing, Age Verification, Single Government Issued ID Verification, and Biometric ID verification for $49 USD per month for unlimited user checks. package includes everything in Basic plus: Geolocation Fencing, Age Verification, Single Government Issued ID Verification, and Biometric ID verification for for unlimited user checks. The Premium package includes everything in the Standard Package plus two Government-issued ID verifications, address verification, sanction list screening, and full audit trail capabilities (enabling businesses to access the CycurID dashboard and see who, when and what customers are accessing their platform and what checks have been run on them). The Premium Package is $99 USD per month for unlimited user checks. "Our identity verification and crypto monitoring solutions go well beyond just being KYC/AML tools," Jessop said. "Our technology is a secure, cost-effective step in the overall process and enables businesses to be more proactive." For more information about CycurID's complete suite of identity solutions, visit our corporate website https://cycurid.com or contact us through our contact page here. No Offer or Solicitation.This press release shall not constitute a solicitation of a proxy, consent, or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the proposed business combination. This press release shall also not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any provinces, states or jurisdictions in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. AboutCycurID Technologies Ltd is a privately held personal identity management and security software developer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. CycurIDTM has developed proprietary patent pending identity management and privacy software which is available via its consumer app immeTM (I'm me). CycurID is registered with the Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, WorkSafe BC and with Fintrac as Money Service Business (MSB). CycurIDTM and immeTM are Registered Trademarks of CycurID Technologies Ltd. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking InformationThis release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that the Company expects to occur, are forward-looking statements including without limitation, expected growth and success of the Company. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include regulatory actions, market prices, and continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Forward looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates, and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates, opinions or other factors should change. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cycurid-disrupts-the-high-cost-of-kyc-301599551.html SOURCE CycurID Technologies Ltd. VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Equinox Gold Corp. (TSX: EQX) (NYSE American: EQX) ("Equinox Gold" or the "Company") announces that Christian Milau will be leaving Equinox Gold to pursue a new opportunity in the global carbon finance industry. Equinox Gold's Board of Directors has unanimously appointed Greg Smith to succeed Christian as Chief Executive Officer and a Director of Equinox Gold. Ross Beaty, Chair of Equinox Gold, commented: "Greg Smith has been President of Equinox Gold since we founded the Company in 2017 and has always been considered the designated successor when Christian retired. Greg brings the right corporate knowledge, industry experience and skill set to effectively manage current operations and advance our long-term strategy. He has the full support of the Board and the executive team, and I look forward to working with him as we focus on achieving our vision of being the premier Americas million-ounce gold producer. "On behalf of the Board, I thank Christian for his leadership over the last six years. Christian has led the team through two mergers and three acquisitions, growing the company from a single-asset developer to a diversified, multi-mine gold producer with one of the industry's strongest growth profiles. His commitment to responsible mining, collaborative relationships and providing meaningful benefits to both our workforce and our community partners leaves an enduring legacy that we will continue to uphold. We wish him the best of success in his new endeavour." Greg Smith commented: "I am excited to take on a bigger role at Equinox Gold. With Greenstone construction progressing exceptionally well, seven gold mines and three promising expansion projects, Equinox Gold is well positioned to deliver continued growth. Christian has also built an excellent team of industry experts with a strong work ethic and a respectful, positive corporate culture. I look forward to building on that foundation and continuing Equinox Gold's growth into a large, sustainable gold-mining company." Christian Milau commented: "It has been my privilege to serve as Equinox Gold's CEO for the last six years. I am incredibly proud of what Equinox Gold has achieved so far, thanks to the dedication of a talented, hard-working team and the vision and support from Ross and our Board. Together we have created a solid company that operates with integrity. I remain a supportive shareholder and am confident that Equinox Gold will achieve its long-term goals." Greg Smith will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer and Director of Equinox Gold on September 1, 2022. Greg is a founding shareholder and executive of Equinox Gold and previously held executive roles at Goldcorp, Minefinders and Esperanza Resources. He is a Canadian Chartered Professional Accountant. Equinox Gold Contacts Christian Milau, Chief Executive OfficerGreg Smith, PresidentRhylin Bailie, Vice President, Investor RelationsTel: +1 604-558-0560Email: [email protected] About Equinox Gold Equinox Gold is a Canadian mining company operating entirely in the Americas, with six operating gold mines, a mine in commissioning, and a clear path to achieve more than one million ounces of annual gold production from a pipeline of development and expansion projects. Equinox Gold's common shares are listed on the TSX and the NYSE American under the trading symbol EQX. Further information about Equinox Gold's portfolio of assets and long-term growth strategy is available at www.equinoxgold.com or by email at [email protected]. Cautionary Notes This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information in this news release relate to, among other things: the successful transition of the CEO role, the strategic vision for the Company and expectations regarding production capabilities and future financial or operational performance; and the Company's ability to successfully advance its growth and development projects, including the construction of Greenstone and the expansions at Los Filos, Castle Mountain and Aurizona. Forward-looking statements or information generally identified by words such as "will", "continue", "advance", "achieve", "deliver", "promising" and similar expressions and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "will", "may", "could", or "should", or the negative connotation of such terms, are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. Although Equinox Gold believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements and information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements since Equinox Gold can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Equinox Gold has based these forward-looking statements and information on Equinox Gold's current expectations and projections about future events and these assumptions include: the Company's ability to achieve the exploration, production, cost and development expectations for its respective operations and projects; prices for gold remaining as estimated; currency exchange rates remaining as estimated; availability of funds for the Company's projects and future cash requirements; prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services; construction of Greenstone being completed and performed in accordance with current expectations; and expansion projects at Los Filos, Castle Mountain and Aurizona being completed and performed in accordance with current expectations. While Equinox Gold considers these assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available, they may prove to be incorrect. Accordingly, readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on the forward-looking statements or information contained in this news release. Equinox Gold cautions that forward-looking statements and information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release and Equinox Gold has made assumptions and estimates based on or related to many of these factors. Such factors include, without limitation: fluctuations in gold prices; fluctuations in prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services; fluctuations in currency markets; operational risks and hazards inherent with the business of mining (including environmental accidents and hazards, industrial accidents, equipment breakdown, unusual or unexpected geological or structural formations, cave-ins, flooding and severe weather); inadequate insurance, or inability to obtain insurance to cover these risks and hazards; employee relations; relationships with, and claims by, local communities and indigenous populations; the Company's ability to obtain all necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in a timely manner or at all; changes in laws, regulations and government practices, including environmental and export and import laws and regulations; legal restrictions relating to mining; risks relating to expropriation; increased competition in the mining industry;; the ability of Equinox Gold to work productively with its joint venture partner and Indigenous partners at Greenstone; and those factors identified in the section titled "Risks and Uncertainties" in Equinox Gold's MD&A dated March 23, 2022 for the year ended December 31, 2021, and in the section titled "Risks Related to the Business" in Equinox Gold's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2022 for the year ended December 31, 2021, both of which are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov/edgar. Forward-looking statements and information are designed to help readers understand management's views as of that time with respect to future events and speak only as of the date they are made. Except as required by applicable law, Equinox Gold assumes no obligation to update or to publicly announce the results of any change to any forward-looking statement or information contained or incorporated by reference to reflect actual results, future events or developments, changes in assumptions or changes in other factors affecting the forward-looking statements and information. If Equinox Gold updates any one or more forward-looking statements, no inference should be drawn that Equinox Gold will make additional updates with respect to those or other forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equinox-gold-announces-ceo-transition-301599523.html SOURCE Equinox Gold Corp. ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Falcon Capital Advisors, a leading business advisory firm that provides strategic advice, technical expertise and engagement execution to financial institutions and government agencies, today announced that it has hired industry veteran Walter Allen as its Managing Director; Natisha Dawson as its new Director of Finance and promoted Ken Yoo to Chief Operating Officer. "We are pleased to welcome Natisha and Walter to the team and to elevate Ken in an expanded role," said Armando Falcon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Falcon Capital Advisors. "This latest infusion of talent, as well as our recent announcement that Phil Bracken has joined us as Vice Chairman, reinforces our position as the premier, full-service consulting firm dedicated to serving the needs of the mortgage and capital markets. The timing couldn't be more advantageous, given turmoil in the mortgage market and the digital transformation that is taking place. Clients are looking for strategic counsel as they readjust their business models and for direction and implementation assistance as they digitize their lending and secondary marketing operations." Allen will be responsible for business development across Falcon's major practice areas: financial institutions and government advisory services and its eMortgage consulting practice. Allen is a recognized industry veteran and digital business strategy leader with more than 20 years of experience utilizing technology solutions to drive transformational business initiatives in both the government and private sector. Prior to joining Falcon, Allen was the President of HouseAmp, a fintech company where he managed and oversaw all aspects of the operation. Prior to HouseAmp, Allen spent nearly 13 years with data and technology leader CoreLogic, most recently as Vice President of Government Solutions working directly with federal government clients and agencies. Earlier, he was the Vice President of Global Capital Markets where he oversaw a team of product specialists and subject matter experts focused on key financial services customers and the Rating Agencies. Dawson brings more than 20 years of finance and leadership expertise to Falcon. As Director of Finance, Dawson will be responsible for leading all finance and accounting matters in the firm. Prior to joining Falcon, she was the Founder & Chief Financial Officer of The Griffin Way, a firm designed to provide outsourced finance and accounting services to small- and mid-sized businesses. Previously, she held executive financial roles at large, global marketing, public relations and communications firms. As Chief Operating Officer, Yoo oversees Falcon's daily operational and administrative functions. Yoo's areas of oversight at Falcon include daily operational supervision, strategic planning, M&A planning and integration, IT and physical infrastructure management, and governance/risk/compliance activities. Yoo has more than 25 years of senior leadership experience in banking, housing finance, consulting risk management and regulatory oversight. During his tenure at Falcon Yoo has been responsible for managing teams, relationships and projects for both commercial and government agency clients. Yoo's involvement in those engagements have included initiatives related to program management, asset management, risk management and quality control, data analytics, grant and loan administration and financial analysis for the housing, financial services and healthcare industries. About Falcon Capital Advisors Falcon Capital Advisors (FCA) is a Washington, D.C.-based business and technology advisory firm that provides strategic advice, technical expertise and engagement execution to financial institutions and government agencies. The FCA team is comprised of industry experts who have developed deep financial services expertise by serving as regulators at federal financial regulatory agencies and as top business and technology executives at leading financial institutions. FCA's capabilities span the entire mortgage landscape, from origination and servicing to government agency consulting. The firm's technology consulting practice is known for its expertise in digital transformation, its ability to implement as well as design solutions, and its vendor agnostic approach. For more information, go to falconcapitaladvisors.com. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/falcon-capital-advisors-expands-leadership-team-to-accelerate-growth-301600509.html SOURCE Falcon Capital Advisors Co-Founder, Chairman, & CEO Tim Hwang Joins FiscalNote's Senior Leaders, Company Employees, Board of Directors, & Customers to Open NYSE Hwang Becomes one of the Youngest Asian American CEO/Co-Founders to lead a NYSE Publicly Listed Company Company's Stock Began Trading on Monday, August 1 Under NYSE Ticker Symbol "NOTE" NEW YORK, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- FiscalNote (NYSE: NOTE), a leading AI-driven enterprise SaaS company that delivers legal and regulatory data and insights, celebrated its debut as a public company today when Chairman, CEO & Co-founder Tim Hwang joined senior leadership, company employees, members of its Board of Directors, and many of its customers and investors to ring the historic and iconic Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange in New York. FiscalNote commenced trading of its stock under the ticker symbol "NOTE" on Monday, August 1, 2022. With its public markets entry, Hwang became one of the youngest Asian American CEOs/Co-founders on the New York Stock Exchange. "It was truly an honor to ring the illustrious Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning with the other cofounders of FiscalNote - Gerald Yao and Jonathan Chen - as well as over a hundred FiscalNoters and guests," said Hwang. "It is the fulfillment of a lifetime dream to become a public company, and to take FiscalNote to even greater heights from here. For us, the process of going public is just the beginning of a new journey, as we accelerate our efforts to help companies and organizations around the world turn insights into action and leverage the resources of the public markets to enter our next phase of growth. I am so grateful to those who brought us to this moment - our people, our customers, our investors, and partners. Together, I'm confident FiscalNote will become one of the most consequential companies of our time." "The purpose of FiscalNote is to create a more transparent and informed global society," said Gerald Yao, Global Head of ESG, Chief Strategy Officer & Co-founder. "The ethos of FiscalNote has not changed since we started the company, and it continues to inspire and guide us today. Even before developing our strategy, we focused on creating cultural values and norms that would help us accomplish our purpose. Culture is still fundamental to the success of our company, and it's our people who make our culture. I'm grateful for everyone who has helped build FiscalNote's culture to where it is today." "This represents a significant step forward for all our team members and customers as we look ahead to our next phase of growth and investment," said Josh Resnik, President and Chief Operating Officer. "We are well-positioned to drive further investment in our products and services and to continue our aggressive acquisition strategy, enhancing our broad portfolio of solutions that enable us to support our customers' needs every day. Global corporations, governments, and associations face increasing challenges in managing a volatile political and economic environment, and FiscalNote is uniquely positioned to help them manage through these challenges." "As a pioneer in applying artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to the government information marketplace, FiscalNote quickly transformed the industry and emerged as the category leader early in its history. Nine years later, the role that FiscalNote plays in an increasingly complex and volatile world is even more important and relevant today and has never been more essential. FiscalNote is a truly unique company, powered by a purpose-driven culture and a deep commitment to operational excellence to drive growth, value, and results for its global customers. But what makes FiscalNote truly special is Tim, an extraordinary visionary and trailblazer before his time who, at the age of 22, revolutionized the legaltech space with unyielding passion, deft agility, and inspiring determination to achieve his dream. Today, Tim's dream has become a remarkable reality, as his rings in America's newest publicly-traded company on NYSE," said Keith Nilsson, Managing Partner of Xplorer Capital and an early investor and board member for Fiscal Note since 2014. A recorded, archived video of Hwang, Yao, Resnik, and other FiscalNoters ringing the Opening Bell at NYSE can be found here, and on NYSE's social media channels. About FiscalNote FiscalNote (NYSE: NOTE) is a leading technology provider of global policy and market intelligence. By uniquely combining AI technology, actionable data, and expert and peer insights, FiscalNote empowers customers to manage policy, address regulatory developments, and mitigate global risk. Since 2013, FiscalNote has pioneered technology that delivers mission-critical insights and the tools to turn them into action. Home to CQ, Equilibrium, FrontierView, Oxford Analytica, VoterVoice, and many other industry-leading brands, FiscalNote serves more than 5,000 customers worldwide with global offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. To learn more about FiscalNote and its family of brands, visit FiscalNote.com and follow @FiscalNote. Media Contact Nicholas GrahamFiscalNote[email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fiscalnote-celebrates-public-company-debut-with-opening-bell-ringing-ceremony-at-new-york-stock-exchange-301600362.html SOURCE FiscalNote TSX: GPR | NYSE American: GPL This news release constitutes a "designated news release" for the purposes of the Company's prospectus supplement dated October 15, 2021, to its short form base shelf prospectus dated September 10, 2021. VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Great Panther Mining Limited (TSX: GPR) (NYSE-A: GPL) ("Great Panther" or the "Company") reports that it has closed the previously announced sale of its Mexican subsidiary Minera Mexicana El Rosario S.A. de C.V. ("MMR"), which owns the Guanajuato Mine Complex (the "GMC"), the Topia mine, and the El Horcon and Santa Rosa projects, to Guanajuato Silver Company Ltd. ("GSilver"). The consideration payable to the Company comprised: US$8,000,000 of cash, plus additional cash of approximately US$1,350,000 pursuant to the working capital adjustment described below 25,787,200 common shares of GSilver, valued at approximately US$6,700,000 as of the announcement of the transaction on June 29, 2022, and US$8,921,172 as of the close of business on August 4, 2022 US$500,000, if at any time following the closing date the GMC and Topia produce an aggregate of 2.5 million ounces of silver US$750,000 if the price of silver closes at or above US$27.50 per ounce over a period of 30 consecutive trading days at any time within two years of closing US$750,000 if the price of silver closes at or above US$30.00 per ounce over a period of 30 consecutive trading days at any time within three years of closing Fifty percent of the shares are subject to the statutory hold period of four months, 25% are subject to an eight-month hold period and the remaining 25% are subject to a 12-month hold period. The US$1,350,000 working capital adjustment described above is based on estimate of the difference between MMR's working capital at closing and an agreed target level of working capital. The final adjustment will be determined post-closing. Approximately US$3,450,000 of the sale proceeds were used to repay all outstanding indebtedness pursuant to a lead concentrate prepayment agreement between MMR, the Company (as guarantor) and Samsung C&T U.K. Ltd. ("Samsung"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung C&T Corporation. Upon repayment of the Samsung indebtedness, Samsung released its security interest in the MMR shares and GSilver assumed all future obligations of the Company under the agreement. Upon completion of the transaction, the Company issued 171,153 common shares to its financial advisor at a deemed issue price of US$1.30. The shares are subject to a four month hold period under Canadian securities law that will expire on December 5, 2022. ABOUT GREAT PANTHER Great Panther Mining is a precious metals producer focused on the operation of the Tucano Gold Mine in Brazil where the Company controls a land package covering nearly 200,000 hectares in the prospective Vila Nova Greenstone belt. Great Panther's aim is to create long-term stakeholder value through safe, sustainable production and reinvest into exploration to tap into the potential of the Tucano Gold Mine to replace resources, extend mine life and make new discoveries. Great Panther trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange trading under the symbol GPR and on the NYSE American under the symbol GPL. CAUTIONARY STATEMENT ON FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities laws (together, "forward-looking statements"). Such forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, (i) additional amounts payable by GSilver to MMR based on future production or the price of silver and (ii) statements regarding the Company's growth orientation and focus on creating long-term stakeholder value through safe and sustainable production and reinvesting into exploration. These forward-looking statements and information reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant operational, business, economic and regulatory risks and uncertainties, including risks described in respect of Great Panther in its most recent annual information form and management's discussion and analysis filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators and available at www.sedar.com and its most recent annual report on Form 40-F and management's discussion and analysis on Form 6-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. There is no assurance that these forward-looking statements will prove accurate or that actual results will not vary materially from these forward-looking statements. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated, described, or intended. Accordingly, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements. Forward-looking statements and information are designed to help readers understand management's current views of our near- and longer-term prospects and may not be appropriate for other purposes. The Company does not intend, nor does it assume any obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, changes in assumptions, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable law. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/great-panther-completes-sale-of-the-guanajuato-mine-complex-and-topia-mine-in-mexico-301600502.html SOURCE Great Panther Mining Limited SACRAMENTO, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SkySlope, the leader in real estate transaction and brokerage software, is partnering with the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS (GLAR) to offer its premier transaction management solution SkySlope Suite including SkySlope Forms and DigiSign as a benefit to GLAR members. SkySlope's suite of products enables real estate professionals to centralize their workflow while remaining compliant. As the transaction management platform that serves over half of the top 20 largest brokerages in the nation, SkySlope is known for its 24/7 award-winning technical support and customized onboarding and training both benefits that are now available to GLAR agents. "We are ecstatic to offer SkySlope to our members," says Aaron Fox, 2022 Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS President. "SkySlope provides a valuable resource for REALTORS to get the most out of their form libraries and elevate the transaction process across the state. Seeing as SkySlope is dedicated to building innovative, easy-to-adopt solutions, we know our members will thrive using SkySlope." SkySlope launched in 2011 with a mission to create technology that makes life better for real estate professionals. In October 2017, after several years of impressive growth, SkySlope became a part of the Fidelity National Financial (NYSE: FNF) family. This partnership reinforces SkySlope's commitment to its vision, providing them with greater resources to innovate. Since then, SkySlope has continued to create groundbreaking products for its growing community of over 450,000 real estate professionals. Located in Lansing, Michigan, the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS was founded with a mission to promote the American dream of homeownership through a free enterprise system. They provide support for their REALTORS, allowing them the ability to take on industry challenges, protect homeowner and private property rights, and build communities. GLAR's partnership with SkySlope will empower its agents with top-tier tools designed to help them succeed. SkySlope Suite for GLAR members will include: SkySlope Suite - Flagship transaction management solution (includes DigiSign and Forms). DigiSign - Send documents for signature quickly and easily with intuitive (and free) features. Forms - Association and MLS forms that are always up-to-date and synced with data from the MLS. "The way REALTORS work today is changing as they take on more clients, adjust to market swings, and adopt more tech," says Tyler Smith, CEO of SkySlope. "At SkySlope, we are driven to provide tools that make an immediate impact in our customers' lives which is why we designed SkySlope Suite to be simple, flexible, and user-friendly. We are excited to work with GLAR to provide this benefit to all of its members." For more information about SkySlope Suite, visit our website. About SkySlope Established in 2011, SkySlope is the customer experience platform managing real estate transactions from contract to close. Serving over 450,000 real estate professionals across the U.S. and Canada, SkySlope manages nearly 3 million transactions annually. SkySlope is on a mission to build solutions that reshape the real estate industry by creating the most powerful autonomous transaction platform. For more information, visit SkySlope. About Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS Founded in Michigan in 1907, the purpose of the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS is to promote the American dream of homeownership through a free enterprise system by preserving the right to own, use, and sell real property. GLAR members work together to take on industry challenges, maintain the most accurate housing data, protect homeowners and private property rights, and help build communities. To learn more about the Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS, visit www.glaronline.com. ContactSkySlope[email protected]1-800-507-4117 View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greater-lansing-association-of-realtors-partners-with-skyslope-to-provide-members-access-to-breakthrough-transaction-tools-301600399.html SOURCE SkySlope Bongos from Florida to be repatriated to Mt. Kenya. Black Rhinos at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy returning to the Mt. Kenya ecosystem. MERU, Kenya, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Kenya Forest Service Board approved an application for a Special User License requested by the Meru County Government, Kenya, to establish a 250-acre parcel of forest land in the Mt. Kenya Forest Reserve as the first phase of a new Mountain Bongo and Black Rhino sanctuary. The National Environmental Management Authority approval process is underway. This is good news for the IUCN red-listed Critically Endangered Mountain Bongo antelope, whose large healthy population in Florida has been propagated for repatriation back to its native Kenyan home. Robust family groups of Bongos are being raised and managed by the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation (RSCF) in Florida, USA. Meru County Government is championing the new Bongo and Black rhino sanctuary through an ongoing Public Private People Partnership (PPPP) that helps propel Kenya's National Bongo Recovery and Action Plan (2019-2023) into tangible conservation action. Once distributed across Mt. Kenya, the Aberdares, Mau, Eburru Forest and elsewhere, the wild mountain bongo population has declined to fewer than 100 animals due to habitat degradation, forest fragmentation, poaching, and other human impacts. On Mt. Kenya, once the stronghold for this animal, the mountain bongo has disappeared in the wild. This project aims to restore the wild Mt. Kenya population, engage local communities in eco-tourism and eco-friendly sustainable agriculture, and leverage protection for biodiversity across the Mt. Kenya ecosystem. The Meru Bongo and Rhino Conservation Trust is entrusted with the implementation of the project guided by the following stakeholders: the Meru County Government, Kenya Forest Service, Kenya Wildlife Service, Meru Bongo and Rhino Conservation Trust, Ntimaka and Kamulu Community Forest Associations, Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, Rare Species Conservatory Foundation, and Florida International University's Tropical Conservation Institute. The Bongo Repatriation PPPP project was featured and shared as a model for the conservation of critically endangered wildlife species at the recent International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) held in Kigali, Rwanda in July 2022. It was the first meeting of leaders, citizens, and interest groups from all over Africa who gathered to talk about the role of protected areas in preserving nature, protecting Africa's vital wildlife, providing vital ecosystem services, promoting sustainable development, and keeping Africa's cultural heritage and traditions alive. The Meru Bongo and Rhino Conservation Trust, in partnership with the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation, will facilitate the successful transfer of the Mountain Bongo from Florida to Kenya and subsequent generations' sustained reintroduction into the Mt. Kenya Forest. A large healthy population of Black rhinos currently thrive at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya and will be connected to the new sanctuary and the greater Mt. Kenya ecosystem over time through a series of wildlife corridors enabling further recovery of the species. This initiative will be carried out in stages, with Bongos introduced into the sanctuary during the first phase and Black rhinos introduced in the second. The returned Bongos will be placed in spacious, specially built, fence-protected enclosures where they will be closely observed to ensure their acclimation. The new sanctuary enables Bongo groups to breed and thrive, providing future generations to be rewilded into Mt. Kenya's forest ecosystem. This project demonstrates the first effort in several decades of a public-private partnership of its kind in Kenya aimed to re-introduce a wildlife species that had gone extinct to the northern slope of the Mount Kenya Forest. It brings together key stakeholders with the highest level of experience and expertise in wildlife conservation to join hands with the local communities to bring back and protect rare species for benefit of conservation and economic development. The Bongo and Rhino initiative exemplifies the core of community-based conservation as a long-term, multi-stakeholder, public-private partnership. For more information, visit the County Government of Meru website at https://meru.go.ke/1051/conservation-endagered-mountain-bongo-through-public-private-people-partnership/ Media Inquiries: Karen Galanaugh, APR, MSM, (561) 632-4378, [email protected] Spokesperson:John KinotiChairmanMeru Bongo and Rhino Conservation TrustPhone +254721661072[email protected] Paul R. Reillo, Ph.D.President, Rare Species Conservatory FoundationDirector, Tropical Conservation Institute, Florida International Universitywww.rarespecies.org https://tci.fiu.edu David MudachiDirector of CommunicationsLEWA Wildlife Conservancy[email protected]www.lewa.org View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kenya-on-path-to-establish-new-mountain-bongo-and-black-rhino-sanctuary-on-mt-kenya-301599754.html SOURCE Meru Bongo & Rhino Conservation Trust Dr. Jeanne Zanca assumes IRB chair, following two decades of service by Dr. Richard Greene EAST HANOVER, N.J., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- After 20 years of service, Richard Greene, MD, PhD, announced his retirement last month from his position as chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Kessler Foundation. Dr. Greene's successor is Jeanne Zanca, MPT, PhD, senior research scientist in the Center for Spinal Cord Injury Research at Kessler Foundation. In addition to assuming the role of IRB chair, Dr. Zanca was promoted to assistant director of the Center. After 20 years of service, Richard Greene, MD, PhD, announced his retirement last month from his position as chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Kessler Foundation. Dr. Greene earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and his doctorate in molecular biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his career at Kessler Foundation in June 2002. He brought with him decades of experience including research positions with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and New York Presbyterian Hospital, and teaching positions at Columbia University, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and New Jersey Institute of Technology. "It is with great enthusiasm that I take on the role of IRB chair in addition to my new position as assistant director of SCI research, said Dr. Zanca. "I am looking forward to working with our well-established team to ensure that we protect the rights and welfare of our research participants and facilitate our organization's diverse portfolio of research. "I have experienced the IRB review process from both sides as a researcher and an IRB member. Institutional Review Boards play a key role in both regulatory compliance and enabling discoveries that can change the lives of people with disabilities. I will work with our team to maintain our IRB's highest level of standards while reflecting institutional policies, federal regulation, and guidance," she added. As IRB chair, Dr. Zanca's primary responsibility is to ensure that the Foundation's research protects the rights and safety of research participants. She oversees IRB activities, including reviews of research protocols; analysis and sharing of information about new or modified requirements for the conduct of clinical research; research protocol audits; reports on grant status to management and funding agencies; and maintenance of resource documents required for grant applications. Dr. Zanca also serves as Kessler Foundation's liaison with Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, Children's Specialized Hospital, and Rutgers - New Jersey Medical School in matters related to the IRB and Fellowship Training committees. As assistant director for the Center for Spinal Cord Injury Research, Dr. Zanca will continue her research in secondary complications of spinal cord injury (SCI). Her emphasis is on empowering interventions programs or services that enable people with SCI and their loved ones to take the actions needed in everyday life to prevent and manage complications of SCI. Her current research focuses on promoting self-management of chronic pain and its consequences and improving quality of personal care assistance services for people with SCI. Dr. Zanca contributed to the development of the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System, which provides a theoretical framework designed to improve research design and reporting, health professions education, and uptake of evidence-based interventions in clinical practice. Dr. Zanca is a research associate professor at Rutgers - New Jersey Medical School. She is also co-investigator for the Northern New Jersey Spinal Cord Injury System (NNJSCIS), a federally funded Spinal Cord Injury Model System (SCIMS), and co-chair of the national SCIMS Knowledge Translation Committee. Dr. Zanca serves on the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) Board of Governors and is chair of the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification Networking Group. Her service with ACRM includes past chair of the Spinal Cord Injury Interdisciplinary Special Interest Group (SCI-ISIG) and membership in the Program Committee and Training Institute Committee. Dr. Zanca reports to the Foundation's president and CEO Rodger DeRose in her role as IRB chair. As assistant director of the Center for Spinal Cord Injury Research, she will continue to report to the Center's director, Trevor Dyson-Hudson, MD. About Kessler Foundation Kessler Foundation, a major nonprofit organization in the field of disability, is a global leader in rehabilitation research that seeks to improve cognition, mobility, and long-term outcomes including employment for people with neurological disabilities caused by diseases and injuries of the brain and spinal cord. Kessler Foundation leads the nation in funding innovative programs that expand opportunities for employment for people with disabilities. For more information, visit KesslerFoundation.org Stay Connected with Kessler Foundation Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Instagram | iTunes & SoundCloud View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kessler-foundation-announces-change-in-leadership-for-institutional-review-board-301600206.html SOURCE Kessler Foundation Leap Partners Acquires Drain Werks in Birmingham, Alabama NASHVILLE, Tenn., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In record speed, Leap Partners, a Nashville-based home services company, has completed four acquisitions in just four months. Most recently, the company acquired Drain Werks, a leading plumbing company serving central and northern Alabama. Through their acquisitions, John Cerasuolo, CEO, and Patrick Ritter, CFO of Leap Partners have built a reputation for being friendly and fair buyers of companies in the Southeast. This is exactly what attracted Marcus and Duston Williams, of Drain Werks. Marcus Williams, Owner of Drain Werks said, "I am proud of what we have built in Drain Werks. However, I knew we needed some help to take the company into our next phase of expansion. John and Patrick's approach fit perfectly with what I was looking for. I am excited about the new growth opportunities for all of our employees and customers now that we have Leap Partners' support." Duston Williams, CEO of Drain Werks said, "With the Leap Partners team, we are going to be able to better serve our employees and our customers. I am excited about the opportunity to continue to lead Drain Werks, but now with a broader support team of business owners that can help us navigate our growth." "We are excited to have Marcus, Duston, and all of the Drain Werks family join our growing team," said John Cerasuolo, Leap Partners CEO. "They will be great additions to our all-star team of business owners who are helping each other run and grow their businesses. We feel fortunate at Leap Partners to continue to meet and work with caring, driven, and inspiring people like Marcus and Duston." Marcus and Duston will continue to lead the Drain Werks team, as leading plumbing and drain specialists in the Alabama area. About Leap Partners Leap Partners is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The company is working to connect the best small and medium-sized HVAC, plumbing, and electrical service businesses in the Southeast to build a world-class service provider with industry-leading customer satisfaction and employee engagement. For more information, visit theleappartners.com and to read testimonials from past acquisitions please click here. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leap-partners-completes-fourth-acquisition-in-four-months-301599495.html SOURCE Leap Partners DALLAS, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- NexPoint Diversified Real Estate Trust ("NXDT" or the "Company") (NYSE: NXDT) will host an update call on August 10, 2022 to discuss the Company's operations as a REIT. To register to attend the call, click on "events and presentations" under "resources" on the Company's website at nxdt.nexpoint.com. A replay will be available on NXDT's website after the call. Please note this call was originally scheduled for August 3, 2022, but has been rescheduled for August 10, 2022. About NexPoint Diversified Real Estate Trust NexPoint Diversified Real Estate Trust is an externally advised, publicly traded, diversified real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on the acquisition, development, and management, of opportunistic and value-add investments throughout the United States across multiple sectors where NexPoint and its affiliates have operational expertise. NXDT is externally advised by NexPoint Real Estate Advisors X, L.P. For more information, please visit nxdt.nexpoint.com. Contact: Jackie GrahamDirector, Investor Relations[email protected] Media InquiriesLucy Bannon[email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nexpoint-diversified-real-estate-trust-announces-update-call-301599562.html SOURCE NexPoint Diversified Real Estate Trust Joins the ranks of more than 1,100 corporations, companies, and public sector agencies who help connect Soldiers to post-military career opportunities BOSTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- This week, Public Consulting Group (PCG) announced that it is joining forces with the United States Army through the Partnership for Your Success (PaYS) Program. This strategic partnership between the U.S. Army and a cross section of corporations, companies, and public sector agencies, helps to connect enlisting Soldiers and Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) Cadets to post-military career opportunities. PaYS guarantees Soldiers and Cadets job interviews with up to five PaYS partner organizationsof more than 1,100 across the countryas they transition to civilian life. PCG Founder, President, and CEO Bill Mosakowski and Lieutenant Colonel Natasha Clarke, Commander of the New England Recruiting Battalion, jointly signed a memorandum of agreement solidifying the partnership during a small reception at the firm's Boston headquarters. Addressing the group, Lt. Col. Clarke said, "The PaYS Program allows military veterans to interview for positions similar to those in their own career field and provides a welcome home for our military service men and women. There is security in knowing that our veterans have opportunities waiting for them; opportunities for them to take their skills from 'Boots to Suits.'" Lt. Col. Clarke continued, "The United States Army invests time and resources to train our nation's service members, which enables our veterans to bring this training and those learned job skills with them into the civilian market." Echoing Clarke's enthusiasm for the burgeoning partnership, Mosakowski said, "It is an honor to be recognized as a PaYS partner organization and to have the opportunity to empower our veterans and service members in their civilian career pursuits. The PaYS Program is a win-win for soldiers, their families, and employers such as PCG. The program offers those from the U.S. Army a pipeline for guaranteed interviews and potential employment in a fast-growing company, which works in every state of our nation." Mosakowski continued, "With the execution of today's agreement, PCG gains access to a talent pipeline of skilled and passionate candidates who are dedicated to public service. Our firm is proud to be a member of the PaYS Program and to offer an employment platform where veterans and service members can leverage their leadership skills, training, and Army experience to continue their service to the communities in which they live." Also in attendance at the signing ceremony were Captain Collin Clark, Company Commander, Boston Recruiting Company; and Former U.S. Army National Guard Sergeant Guy Reynolds, PCG's Director of Talent Acquisition. Sgt. Reynolds said, "PCG is committed to creating and sustaining strong pipelines to recruit and retain military veterans and those who continue to serve, including active-duty service members, Reservists, members of the National Guard, and military spouses. In fact, members of our internal veteran mentor program, PCG's Military Networking Group (or 'MNG' as we often refer to it), helped put PaYS on the radar of our senior leaders. We're excited to continue growing our veteran employee base as a PaYS partner." Media and Resources About Public Consulting Group Public Consulting Group LLC (PCG) is a leading public sector solutions implementation and operations improvement firm that partners with health, education, and human services agencies to improve lives. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, PCG employs approximately 2,000 professionals across the United Statesall committed to delivering solutions that change lives for the better. The firm has extensive experience in all 50 states and belongs to a family of companies with a presence in Australia, Canada, and Europe. PCG offers clients a multidisciplinary approach to meet challenges, pursue opportunities, and serve constituents across the public sector. To learn more, visit www.publicconsultinggroup.com. About U.S. Army Partnership for Your Success The PaYS Program is a strategic partnership between the U.S. Army and a cross section of corporations, companies, and public sector agencies. PaYS Soldiers are guaranteed a job interview and possible employment after the Army with their five chosen PaYS partners. The PaYS Program aligns with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command's mission to reconnect America with its Army and assist in establishing the Army as the Service of choice. U.S. Army Partnership for Your Success (armypays.com) Media ContactsAlyssa Brown, Corporate Director of Communications and Public Relations(617) 488-9084[email protected] Alyssa Salmon, U.S. ArmyChief, Advertising and Public Affairs(207) 438-8530[email protected] View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pcg-joins-us-army-pays-program-to-support-soldiers-transition-to-the-civilian-workforce-after-the-army-301599930.html SOURCE Public Consulting Group From Artificial Intelligence to the Arts and Gaming, Industry Experts Touch on Some of the Most Prominent Topics in Computer Graphics CHICAGO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SIGGRAPH 2022 highlights the many voices that have facilitated the evolution of computer graphics and interactive techniques. The Frontiers and Retrospective programs feature pioneers and industry experts in panels and workshops for a passionate look at untold stories, influential voices, emerging topics, and new breakthroughs. The 49th annual conference runs 811 August in person, and virtually 25 July31 October 2022. The Frontiers and Retrospective Programs at SIGGRAPH 2022 Showcase How Legacy Drives Innovation. The Retrospective program brings together the pioneers and leaders who have enabled computer graphics to improve lives. Panel topics have pioneers and practitioners taking ideas into new directions, compelling the industry to rethink assumptions, take risks, and achieve greatness. Panel topics include foundational events in computer graphics, how computer graphics impacts lives, how interfaces to computer graphics have evolved, and the groundbreakers and the unheard voices that have expanded computer graphics and user interfaces. The Frontiers program aims to identify emerging fields and introduce new communities to SIGGRAPH, where we hope to form future partnerships and collaborations with sectors we may not have previously considered. The goal of the program is to make these conferences the place where new, exciting technologies in and adjacent to computer graphics and interactive techniques are being discovered and advanced. Through a series of talks and workshops, the Frontiers program aims to spark research and innovation in new areas such as AR/VR, AI, robotics, arts, visualization, gaming, responsible innovation, and more. "While many computer graphics advancements have been recorded in textbooks and archives, there are still many noteworthy yet untold stories and unheard voices," said Benjamin Lok, SIGGRAPH 2022 Retrospective program chair. "With our Retrospective panels, we go behind the images with a wide range of people and hear about their journeys to learn about critical moments, foundational events, and advancements that are impacting all of us today." Highlights of the Retrospective program include: Breaking New Ground: Establishing Graphics Worldwide Moderator: Mary Whitton, UNC Chapel Hill (Dept. of Computer Science, retired)Panelists: Jon Meads, NW Old Boys Rugby Club (retired); Maxine Brown, University of Illinois Chicago; Marcelo Knorich Zuffo, Universidade de Sao Paulo; Joaquim Jorge, Universidade de Lisboa (ULisboa), INESC-IDComputer graphics pioneers share how computer graphics expanded both throughout the United States and into different parts of the world. Their lessons learned along the way can be applied by today's professionals for continued groundbreaking work in today's new and fluid landscape. Pioneers in Computer Graphics Moderator: Masha Shugrina, NVIDIA CorporationPanelists: Carolina Cruz-Neira, University of Central Florida; Holly Rushmeier, Yale University; Joan Collins, ACM SIGGRAPH, West Coast Pictures, LLC; Theresa-Marie Rhyne, theresamarierhyne.com; Kristine Middlemiss, monstersaliensrobotszombies.comPowerful Women in Graphics panelists share industry and academic viewpoints and career journeys that have contributed to the historic advancements in computer graphics. Participants learn about opportunities on the horizon for the women in technology community and how the past can influence the future in this exciting time of growth. Computer Graphics Disruptions in Art, Science, Visualization, Engineering, and Modeling Moderator: Brian Wyvill, University of VictoriaPanelists: Yoichiro Kawaguchi, The University of Tokyo (Emeritus); Eugene Fiume, Simon Fraser University; David Kasik, ACM SIGGRAPH; Alyn Rockwood, ACM SIGGRAPHDiverse panelists, all of them innovators and disruptors, look at how computer graphics is used to change the worlds of art, science, engineering, and at the core of computer graphics itself modeling. Their pathways to success serve as an inspiration for young SIGGRAPHers looking to make disruptions in their own chosen fields. "Advancements in artificial intelligence, as well as augmented and virtual reality presents the need to talk about the latest in computer graphics to connect users to virtual environments and more," stated Vathsal Veena Shashidhar, SIGGRAPH 2022 Frontiers program chair. "The talks and workshops allow us, as innovators, to cover these topics and much more. We can inspire and influence creators to make their impact in the physical and virtual worlds." Highlights of the Frontiers program include: Metric Telepresence Using Codec Avatars Contributor: Yaser Sheikh, Meta ResearchYaser Sheikh of Meta Reality Labs discusses progress toward achieving metric telepresence. He describes Meta's approach using codec avatars neural networks to address computer vision and computer graphics problems in signal transmission and reception of photorealistic avatars. He also introduces the large-scale systems required to train codec avatars, visually and acoustically, and the research challenges ahead to achieve metric telepresence at scale. Art in the Age of AI: Can Computers Create Art? Contributor: Aaron Hertzmann, Adobe ResearchCan AI algorithms make art and be considered artists? Within the past decade, the growth of new neural network algorithms has enabled exciting new artforms with considerable public interest. Aaron Hertzmann discusses how these developments parallel the development of previous artistic technologies, like oil paint, photography, and traditional computer graphics. Access to the Retrospective and Frontiers programs at SIGGRAPH 2022 is available in person and online. Learn more and register for the conference at s2022.SIGGRAPH.org/register. About ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH 2022 ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field's challenges. ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM that serves as an interdisciplinary community for members in research, technology, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques. The SIGGRAPH conference is the world's leading annual interdisciplinary educational experience showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2022, the 49th annual conference hosted by ACM SIGGRAPH, will take place as a hybrid event, with live events 811 August at the Vancouver Contention Centre and virtual content available starting 25 July through 31 October. Click here for news from the conference and its partners. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/siggraph-2022-moves-forward-and-looks-back-the-frontiers-and-retrospective-programs-showcase-how-legacy-drives-innovation-301600515.html SOURCE SIGGRAPH Xochitl Gomez helps kick-off the celebration of self-expression, spotlighting and supporting creators with the chance to win $25,000 CHICAGO, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- You're invited to the most vibrant cinematic celebration since the premiere of color film... SweeTARTS, the iconic brand that has been encouraging fans to live their most colorful lives and "Be Both," understands the best storytellers aren't just traditional filmmakers. They're nurses who can sing acapella, students with a knack for thrift-store finds, or skateboarders who dabble in cooking, all with a shared passion for creating content from their everyday lives that sparks impactful emotions. To elevate the unique talents of these storytellers across the country, SweeTARTS is reimagining the typically exclusive award show concept by hosting the first branded film festival on TikTok. Submissions for the SweeTARTS Film Fest on TikTok begin Aug. 12, with the entry window continuing through Sept. 7. With more than 1 billion monthly active users globally and over 6.5B views on #FilmTok, TikTok is home to a new generation of filmmakers who are leading culture and promoting creativity, inclusivity and self-expressionno fancy equipment, big budgets or elite connections necessary. Everyone is invited to this festival, where fans can submit and engage with short TikTok films in four categories: "Best Expression of 'Be Both'", "Best Story Time", "Best Use of Video Tools" and "Best Colorful Creation." Four winners will be selected by a panel of judges, including Hollywood's newest star, Xochitl Gomez (6.9MM+ followers on TikTok @Xochitlgomez) a beloved actress known for her roles in recent popular superhero films and iconic TV series remakes. Each winner will receive a grand prize of $25,000 to help continue to fuel their love for content creation and storytelling. Check out the video Xochitl created here to help kick off the festival, and see below for more details on how to get in on the action. Xochitl will announce the winners on Oct. 6 during a live grand finale award show at 7pm ET, only on her TikTok channel. "Filmmaking is my passion; both in front of and now also behind the camera. Storytelling has held a special place in my heart for as far back as I can remember, and nothing goes together better than candy and movies," said Gomez. "TikTok has made it easier than ever for myself and other storytellers to share our video content with the world, and I'm thrilled to join forces with SweeTARTS in hosting a brand new celebration of modern-day creators. Can't wait to review the submissions from these multi-talented filmmakers!" The innovative and inclusive festival is the latest chapter in SweeTARTS legacy of empowering people to embrace their full selves and live colorfully. "Starting with our name and fully captured in our motto of 'Be Both,' SweeTARTS believes powerful results are unleashed when you combine things that are seemingly opposite, like our unique Sweet and Tart profile," said Jennifer Brownson, SweeTARTS Sr. Brand Manager at Ferrara. "The SweeTARTS Film Fest on TikTok celebrates the seemingly contradictory combination of the everyday and impactful content, the powerful result of which is certainly worthy of its own film festival." So, how can you get in on this original festival? Tune in live at 7pm ET on Oct. 6 to watch Xochitl announce all four winners, who will each receive $25,000 to continue to fuel their creativity! For the official rules, visit: sweetartscandy.com/sweetarts-film-fest-tiktok. Happy filming! About SweeTARTSFirst introduced in 1963, SweeTARTS has grown into a fan-favorite candy brand known for its electrifying flavor combination of delightfully sweet and delicately tart. Available in an array of colorful candy creations, the SweeTARTS product portfolio includes Original SweeTARTS, SweeTARTS Ropes, SweeTARTS Rope Bites, SweeTARTS Chewy and several seasonal favorites. SweeTARTS are available at mass, grocery, drug and convenience stores nationwide, as well as online through e-commerce partners. To find a retailer near you, and to learn more about the SweeTARTS product portfolio, visit sweetartscandy.com and follow @SweeTARTSCandy on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. About FerraraFerrara, a company related to The Ferrero Group, is a powerhouse in the North American and global sugar confections category. A passionate team of more than 6,000 employees work together to share delight in every bite through our beloved candy brands that have shaped the industry for more than 100 years. Our diverse portfolio of nearly 30 brands includes SweeTARTS, Trolli, BRACH'S, Black Forest and NERDS, along with iconic favorites like Lemonhead, Red Hots and Now and Later. Ferrara's superior innovation is rooted in diversity of thought, experience, and people, helping us introduce new candy products that make everyday moments a bit sweeter. Headquartered in Chicago, Ferrara has an operational network of 20 locations in North America that includes manufacturing, distribution, and R&D facilities. Learn more at www.ferrarausa.com. Media Contact:Shelby Roland[email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sweetarts-hosts-first-branded-film-festival-on-tiktok-championing-everyday-storytellers-301600320.html SOURCE SweeTARTS Joining of three hospital systems created healthcare organization that cares for more patients in North Texas than any other ARLINGTON, Texas, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas Health Resources celebrates its 25th anniversary on this month, commemorating the coming together of three hospital systems Presbyterian Healthcare Resources, Harris Methodist Health System and Arlington Memorial Hospital. Texas Health 25th Anniversary As market share leader, more North Texans choose Texas Health for their acute care needs than any other health system in the area. That translates into more than 600,000 babies delivered, over 2 million surgeries performed, more than 16 million emergency department visits and, more recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 314,000 vaccinations given. "When we came together 25 years ago, our goal was to join the strength of our hospitals to form a sustainable regional healthcare system for generations to come," said Barclay Berdan, FACHE, CEO, Texas Health Resources. "Texas Health could not have achieved this impact without the dedication of the organization's employees and volunteers, and physicians on the medical staffs." With nearly 400 locations and a dedication to offering new and innovative care models, including virtual and in-home care, the system offers access to care when and where patients need it. Texas Health has received numerous recognitions for its workplace culture. The health system has been ranked on Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For list since 2014 and was ranked for seven years on Fortune's #1 Best Workplaces in Healthcare list. "While we know the past two years have been challenging in healthcare, the industry is on the brink of an exciting, consumer-centric evolution," said Winjie Miao, senior executive vice president and COO of Texas Health Resources. "I'm excited to see what the next 25 years hold for the health and well-being of the North Texans we serve." About Texas Health Resources: Texas Health Resources is a faith-based, nonprofit health system that cares for more patients in North Texas than any other provider. With a service area that consists of 16 counties and more than 7 million people, the system is committed to providing quality, coordinated care through its Texas Health Physicians Group and 29 hospital locations. The system has more than 4,100 licensed hospital beds, 6,400 physicians with active staff privileges and more than 26,000 employees. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/texas-health-resources-celebrates-25th-anniversary-301599516.html SOURCE Texas Health Resources Atlas V precisely delivered the last of six SBIRS missions to orbit completing the constellation in support of the warfighter CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying the Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit-6 (SBIRS GEO 6) mission for the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command lifted off on Aug. 4 at 6:29 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. To date ULA has launched 152 times with 100 percent mission success. "Thank you to our U.S. Space Force and industry partners for their outstanding teamwork in successfully delivering the sixth and final SBIRS satellite to orbit," said Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of Government and Commercial Programs. "We are proud of our role in supporting the warfighter by launching the entire SBIRS satellite constellation, a critical constellation of missile warning satellites that expands the U.S. military's situational awareness on the battlefield and beyond." "This launch marked ULA's 95th U.S. National Space Security launch," added Wentz. "As the Air Force is gearing up to celebrate its 75th anniversary, we are honored to have been entrusted to deliver the vast majority of our nation's critical assets to orbit. Our customer's missions are vital to ensuring the safety of our women and men in harm's way serving our country." Leveraging a legacy of 100 percent mission success launching more than 150 missions to explore, protect and enhance our world, ULA is the nation's most experienced and reliable launch service provider with world-leading reliability, schedule confidence, and mission optimization. We deliver value unmatched by any launch services company in the industry, a tireless drive to improve, and commitment to the extraordinary. For more information on ULA, visit the ULA website at www.ulalaunch.com, or call the ULA Launch Hotline at 1-877-ULA-4321 (852-4321). Photos available on the ULA Flickr page. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/united-launch-alliance-successfully-launches-missile-warning-satellite-for-us-space-force-301600211.html SOURCE United Launch Alliance (ULA) Globally-inspired decor for a well-traveled look at home no passport required NORTH BERGEN, N.J., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- VCNY Home, a top-ten U.S.-based home goods manufacturer, announced a new addition to its brand portfolio today with the introduction of Indigo Ink. The eclectic, bohemian brand features laidback looks with a worldly flair for every room at home, from indoor to outdoor and bedroom to bathroom. The intricately designed brand collection is crafted with globally inspired motifs, pops of bold color, and richly crafted textures poised to quell any wanderlust. "Indigo Ink brings an adventurous and creative free-spirited style home effortlessly and affordably," said Toby Cohen, co-founder and CEO of VCNY Home. "We introduced Indigo Ink so that anyone could create a beautiful, modern boho space that feels worldly and like an everyday escape." Indigo Ink features on-trend globally-sourced and inspired decor at accessible prices. A warm and earthy palette with pops of jewel tones carries across the collection, woven with rich textures and eye-catching details. Reversible accents can easily be mixed and matched for versatility and creative self-expression. The brand's first collection, launching exclusively on Walmart.com, includes blackout curtain panels with intricate prints and embroidery and breezy sheer panels with knotted tie accents. Explore the complete Indigo Ink window collection on Walmart.com. Upcoming Indigo Ink collections will include artfully woven rugs, reversible comforters and quilts with mixed prints, textured decorative pillows and throws, and hard goods with macrame, rattan, tassels, and more signature boho accents. For more information on Indigo Ink, visit the brand passport here. You can learn more about all VCNY Home has to offer at vcnyhome.com. About VCNY Home VCNY Home is a home textile industry leader with more than 30 years of experience in home decor. Trusted by top retailers and consumers alike, VCNY Home draws inspiration from timeless designs and modern trends to create affordable, quality decor solutions for every room: bedding, bath, window, area rugs, home decor, and more. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vcny-home-introduces-new-boho-brand-indigo-ink-301600304.html SOURCE VCNY Home Fusing Technology and Art to Create an Immersive and Interactive Exhibition BREA, Calif., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ViewSonic Corp., a leading global provider of visual solutions, partners with the Taiwan Women's Art Association (TWAA) to create immersive art experiences at the "Love and Hope 2022 World Women's Art Festival". With continuous efforts to encourage creativity, ViewSonic provides cutting-edge projectors, touch displays, and large format interactive displays to enhance the exhibiting experience. Visitors can immerse and interact with a total of 98 artworks by 70 female artists that demonstrate the strength and resilience of women. "We are glad to be a part of this collaboration and provide artists with our visual solutions to create more diverse artworks. ViewSonic is committed to inspire the world to see the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary," said Steven Yu, Senior Global Marketing Director at ViewSonic. "Through this partnership, not only we were able to support art and the fight for gender equality, but we were also able to transcend barriers, spreading love and hope around the world." "Since TWAA's establishment in 2000, we have taken the concept of we/women as a collective entity to examine history more closely," said Jun T. Lai, Chairwoman of TWAA and Chief Convener of the festival. "The 2022 World Women's Art Festival reflects our beliefs. Through the power of contemporary female artwork in Taiwan and conversations between women's art groups around the world, we were able to create a momentum in the post-pandemic era for people to start a new chapter in their lives." In the exhibition, ViewSonic's projectors use interlaced light and shadows to immerse visitors into the artworks. For instance, "The Hot Zone" by Cynthia Lin is projected onto a wall to present the gradual decay of brain cells in a person with Alzheimer's disease, whereas "Forest of Enchantress" by Xiao-Hua Dou portrays a woman's inner self, expressing their love and awe for life. Additionally, ViewSonic's 65" ViewBoard interactive display and a 24" touch display were placed in the rest area. Visitors can interact with the displays to learn more about the art festival and concepts behind the exhibition. The exhibition also displayed the artworks of renowned female artists. Created by Mali Wu, Taiwan's first female winner of the National Award for Arts, "Awake in Your Skin: Bedsheets of Soul" is a red heart-shaped textile installation. Its behind-the-scenes documentary is projected alongside to articulate how the comfort of using a bedsheet contrasts the perseverance that goes into creating one, highlighting the tenacity of a woman's femininity. "Combined with the projection technology and the use of textiles, a familiar medium, the artwork reflects the complexity of a woman. Audiences can appreciate the effort that went into creating the bedsheet, challenging the preconceptions of traditional household activities." Ms. Wu stated. Dedicated to creating new media art, artist Chu-Yin Chen has won various digital art awards in Europe. Her work "Enactive Painting" utilizes ViewSonic's laser projectors to create an interactive wall. Through waving and moving their body, visitors can create images on the projection, creating a truly interactive experience. "By using sensing technology to detect human gestures, visitors are invited to collaborate with the artwork. The advanced sensing technology registers body movement and transforms them onto the projection," said Ms. Chen. "To create a more dynamic and immersive experience, traditional colors used for weaving by the indigenous people are also integrated to produce vibrant strokes." Another artwork,"Wang-Shih's Memories" by artist Chun Chen, uses projectors to deliver a large-sized blank backdrop, allowing viewers to immersive themselves in Wang-Shih's story and have a better chance to understand her life. To learn more about the exhibition, please visit: ViewSonic's Visual Solutions Ignite Love and Hope in 2022 World Women's Art Festival. About Taiwan Women's Art AssociationTaiwan Women's Art Association (TWAA) was founded in 2000. It has been committed to researching out Taiwan's art history materials and exhibition activities planning, as a platform to help female artists integrate various resources and actively improve the overall environment of gender differences in the art world. With the efforts of successive presidents of the Women's Art Association and the support of all parties, there are now more than 300 members from various professional fields such as artistic creation, curation, criticism, research, education, and galleries. The Women's Art Association has traces of the efforts of female artists from all over Taiwan to promote and seriously maintain the voice pipeline and exhibition platform condensed by female artists in the contemporary art world. About ViewSonicFounded in California, ViewSonic is a leading global provider of visual solutions and conducts business in over 100 countries worldwide. As an innovator and visionary, ViewSonic is committed to providing comprehensive hardware and software solutions that include monitors, projectors, pen displays, commercial displays, All-in-One LED displays, ViewBoard interactive displays, and myViewBoard software ecosystem. With over 35 years of expertise in visual displays, ViewSonic has established a strong position for delivering innovative and reliable solutions for education, enterprise, consumer, and professional markets and helping customers "See the Difference." To find out more about ViewSonic, please visit www.viewsonic.com. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/viewsonics-visual-solutions-ignite-love-and-hope-in-2022-world-womens-art-festival-301598089.html SOURCE ViewSonic ANN ARBOR, Mich., Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Xoran Technologies announces that last month it received FDA 510(k) clearance for TRON a truly mobile, full-body fluoroscopy, computed tomography (CT) X-ray system. " ... TRON scans take less than a minute, ... the system is easy-to-use, it can be further mobilized ..." CEO Misha Raki "When Xoran states that TRON is the 'One RING to rule them all,' we truly mean that this compact, mobile, open-bore device is poised to revolutionize global initiatives to democratize access to diagnostic imaging," says Xoran CEO Misha Rakic. "TRON is uniquely suited to provide safe, ultra-high-resolution, low dose imaging in traditional settings such as the operating room, surgery center, and critical care unit where space is limited, and hospital budgets are stretched thin." "Its compact size and weight make it truly nimble without any need for bulky motors and batteries," continues Rakic. "What's more, because TRON scans take less than a minute, and the system is easy-to-use, it can be further mobilized by placing it in small vans, lending TRON to low-dose screening brought to patients and not the other way around. This means that Xoran's Vehicle-Based Solutions can be used for community health initiatives and in ambulance and military front-line scenarios." Additionally, in July, Xoran announced it had begun work on Phase 2 of its mobile lung grantthe goal of which is to confirm the safety and utility of a future thoracic point-of-care CT system in support of an FDA submission. These research and development efforts for lung CT are supported by a recent grant award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). About Xoran TechnologiesSince 2001, Xoran is the pioneer and medical market leader in low-dose radiation, cone beam CT systems specifically designed for the patient's point-of-care. Providers around the world rely on our industry leading MiniCAT, xCAT, and veterinary CT systems: VetCAT and vTRON, to diagnose and treat patients. Xoran is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.For more information visit www.xorantech.com 2022 Xoran Technologies, LLC View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/xoran-announces-fda-510k-clearance-for-truly-mobile-fluoroscopy-ct-tron-301600366.html SOURCE Xoran Technologies, LLC (g) A parent holding company or control person in accordance with 240.13d-1(b)(1)(ii)(G); (h) A savings associations as defined in Section 3(b) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (12 U.S.C. 1813); (i) A church plan that is excluded from the definition of an investment company under section 3(c)(14) of the Investment Company Act of 1940 (15 U.S.C. 80a-3); (j) A non-U.S. institution in accordance with 240.13d-1(b)(1)(ii)(J); (k) Group, in accordance with 240.13d-1(b)(1)(ii)(K). Item 4. Ownership. (a) Amount beneficially owned: As of the close of business on January 31, 2022, Teacher Retirement System of Texas exercised its option to convert 1,500,000 units, resulting in 1,500,000 shares of Class A common stock, par value $0.0001 per share (the Class A Common Stock) and 250,000 redeemable warrants, where each whole warrant entitles the holder to purchase one share of Class A Common Stock (the Warrants). The Issuers warrants will become exercisable on the later of (a) 30 days after the completion of a Business Combination and (b) 12 months from the closing of the Initial Public Offering. (b) Percent of class: As of the close of business on January 31, 2022, Teacher Retirement System of Texas may be deemed to have beneficially owned 1,500,000 shares of the Issuers Class A Common Stock or 5.2% of the Issuers Class A Common Stock outstanding, which percentage was calculated based on 28,750,000 shares of the Issuers Class A Common Stock outstanding as of March 4, 2021, as reported in the Issuers Form 8-K filed on March 10, 2021. (c) Number of shares as to which the person has: (i) Sole power to vote or to direct the vote: 1,500,000 (ii) Shared power to vote or to direct the vote: 0 (iii) Sole power to dispose or to direct the disposition: 1,500,000 (iv) Shared power to dispose or to direct the disposition: 0 Item 5. Ownership of Five Percent or Less of a Class. Not applicable. Not applicable. 4 of 6 WASHINGTON An airman has been charged with six crimes in connection with an explosives attack in April that wounded four service members on a U.S. military base in Syria, the Air Force said Thursday. Tech. Sgt. David D. Dezwaan Jr. faces charges of aggravated assault, dereliction of duty, destroying military property, reckless endangerment, access of a government computer with an unauthorized purpose and obtaining classified information in the alleged insider attack, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said. The charges stem from an investigation into an April 7 bombing that took place at the base known as Green Village, which is east of the Euphrates River in Syria and adjacent to major oil fields. Four U.S. troops received minor injuries that included possible traumatic brain injuries, U.S. officials said at the time. Dezwaan was arrested June 16 when his commander made the decision to place him in pretrial confinement after reviewing the results of an investigation by the Army Criminal Investigation Division and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Stefanek said at the time. Though indirect fire was initially blamed for the incident, investigators later found evidence that suggested someone had deliberately placed explosive material in an ammunition storage room and a shower area, according to an April 15 statement by Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve. Dezwaans preliminary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 23 at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Stefanek said. Several hundred U.S. and coalition forces are stationed at Green Village as they train local forces to fight remnants of the Islamic State terrorist group, according to the Pentagon. Operation Inherent Resolve is a U.S.-led international coalition under U.S. Central Command that targets ISIS, primarily in Iraq and Syria. Dezwaan joined the Air Force in October 2007 and is attached to the 775th Civil Engineer Squadron at Hill AFB. He has been awarded the Joint Service Achievement Medal, the Navy Achievement Medal, the Air Force Achievement Medal and the Army Commendation Medal, according to Stefanek. A U.S. sailor who went overboard from the destroyer USS Arleigh Burke in the Baltic Sea earlier this week has died, the Navy announced Thursday. Seaman Recruit David Spearman was the subject of a search by U.S., Swedish and German military personnel after going overboard Monday, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet said in a statement. The Navy has not recovered the North Carolina natives body, said Cmdr. Richlyn Ivey, a spokeswoman for U.S. 6th Fleet. It wasnt clear how Spearman went into the sea, but on Monday afternoon a lookout saw a man in the water and the ship conducted man-overboard procedures, Ivey said. Weather and sea conditions as well as the details of the Arleigh Burkes operations are part of an investigation, she said. Spearman enlisted in November, completing basic training at the Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Ill., in February, according to his Navy biography. He reported to the Arleigh Burke April 21 following training at Surface Warfare Engineering School Command in Great Lakes, Ill., the statement said. WLOS, an Asheville, N.C.-based TV station, reported Wednesday that Spearman was 19 and had fallen overboard near Helsinki. He was from the Asheville area and came from a family that included several generations of Navy sailors, the station reported, citing family sources. This bright young man made an oversized positive impact on Arleigh Burke, Cmdr. Pete Flynn, the ships commanding officer, said in the statement. Spearman is at least the second sailor to die while on duty in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of responsibility in a little more than a year. On July 18, 2021, Petty Officer 1st Class Robin Nicole Collins, 26, also died while on duty. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service would not release details, such as the location or cause of Collins death, saying the investigation was classified. However, a Naval Safety Center mishap report said that Collins, a cryptologic technician, died after a shelter roof and chimney collapsed during heavy weather, according to a Navy Times story published almost two months afterward. The tension between China and Taiwan is in the news again as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leads a U.S. congressional delegation through Asia. The itinerary includes Taiwan along with Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. The brief Taiwan stop involved meetings with President Tsai Ing-wen and other top leaders. Beijing, which regards Taiwan as part of China, angrily denounced the visit. Chinas military is conducting live-fire exercises near Taiwan. Last week, President Joe Biden had a lengthy phone conversation with President Xi Jinping of China. Biden also noted publicly the U.S. military regards the congressional trip as unwise. These were low-key, sensible efforts to mitigate tensions. The Democratic Progressive Party, which has controlled Taiwan government for the past six years, is formally committed to independence from China. Tsai is also notable as the first woman elected to lead the island. The conservative opposition Kuomintang is carefully ambiguous on Beijing relations. China has become increasingly assertive in the region, including reconfirming commitment to absorbing Taiwan. Aggressiveness of China in maritime and military terms adds teeth to the continuing expansionist rhetoric. In February 2014, Taiwan and the mainland agreed to exchange representative offices. Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun of China and Taiwan Mainland Affairs Minister Wang Yu-chi led face-to-face negotiations. In hindsight, that was a high point of possible reconciliation. Since then, however, relations have deteriorated. The two sides share a bitter legacy of battle and blood. Following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, Japan occupied Taiwan for five decades, until the end of World War II. In 1949, nationalist forces of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek evacuated to Taiwan. Mao Zedongs armies consolidated control of the mainland. Except for the island territory, communist revolution was complete. The outbreak of the Korean War in late June 1950 resulted in the U.S. 7th Fleet moving to patrol the Taiwan Strait. China and the United States became direct combatants in that war; the Cold War become global. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in command of the United Nations forces defending the Korean Peninsula, became increasingly public and strident in criticizing the restraints placed on him by the U.S. government. Finally, President Harry Truman, out of patience, fired him. Truman reaffirmed civilian control of the military. This was the greatest test of that principle since Gen. George McClellan directly challenged President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. U.S. commitment to Taiwan security became explicit during the Korean War. The island became a controversial flashpoint in American domestic politics. Before North Korea invaded South Korea, bringing strategic shift, the Truman administration was resigned to victorious communist forces taking Taiwan along with the rest of China. Nonetheless, de facto economic cooperation between mainland China and Taiwan, built steadily if slowly over time, continues. Pragmatism characterizes Taiwans approach to mainland China. Following formal U.S. diplomatic recognition of Beijing in 1978, a consequence of President Richard Nixons 1972 visit, Taipei immediately launched a comprehensive essentially non-confrontational strategic response. In November 2008, agreement was achieved on far-reaching trade accords, including direct shipping, expansion of weekly passenger flights from 36 to 108, and introduction of up to 60 cargo flights per month. In 2010, the bilateral Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement was concluded. This has remained a major triumph for then-President Ma Ying-jeou. His election as Taiwan chief executive in 2008 and 2012 greatly furthered cooperation with Beijing. Taiwan is essential investor for the economic revolution on the mainland. Successful overseas Chinese provide vital capital for the mainland. Expatriate Chinese vote in Taiwan elections. Japan and the United States recently reconfirmed commitment to Taiwan. In 1969, Nixon and Prime Minister Eisaku Sato made a very similar public declaration. In March 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower visited Taiwan, the first and so far only sitting U.S. chief executive to do so. Earlier, he skillfully managed two serious Taiwan crises, in 1954-55 and 1958. Ike was always fully in charge. Arthur I. Cyr is author of After the Cold War. SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico Former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez was arrested Thursday on bribery charges linked to the financing of her 2020 campaign, the latest hit to an island with a long history of corruption that brought fresh political upheaval to the U.S. territory. Vazquez is accused of engaging in a bribery scheme from December 2019 through June 2020 while she was governor with several people, including a Venezuelan-Italian bank owner, a former FBI agent, a bank president and a political consultant. I am innocent. I have not committed any crime, she told reporters. I assure you that they have committed a great injustice against me. The arrest embarrassed and angered many in Puerto Rico who believe the island's already shaky image has been further tarnished, leaving a growing number of people who have lost faith in their local officials to wonder whether federal authorities are their only hope to root out entrenched government corruption. Concern over previous corruption cases led to a delay in federal aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria as the U.S. government implemented more safeguards. Thursday's arrest also was a blow to Vazquez's pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which is pushing to hold a referendum next year in a bid to become the 51st U.S. state. Vazquez, 62, was the second woman to serve as Puerto Ricos governor and the first former governor to face federal charges. Former Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila of the opposing Popular Democratic Party was charged with campaign finance violations while in office and was found not guilty in 2009. He had been the first Puerto Rico governor to be charged with a crime in recent history. For the second time in our history, political power and public office are used to finance an electoral campaign, said Jose Luis Dalmau, president of Acevedo's party. Using the power of the government to advance political agendas is unacceptable and an affront to democracy in Puerto Rico." Vazquez's consultant, identified as John Blakeman, and the bank president, identified as Frances Diaz, have pleaded guilty to participating in the bribery scheme, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In early 2019, the international bank owned by Julio Martin Herrera Velutini was being scrutinized by Puerto Ricos Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions because of transactions authorities believed were suspicious and had not been reported by the bank. Authorities said Herrera and Mark Rossini, the former FBI agent who provided consulting services to Herrera, allegedly promised to financially support Vazquezs 2020 campaign for governor in exchange for Vazquez dismissing the commissioner and appointing a new one of Herreras choosing. Authorities said Vazquez accepted the bribery offer and in February 2020 demanded the commissioners resignation. She then was accused of appointing a former consultant for Herreras bank as the new commissioner in May 2020. After the move, officials said Herrera and Rossini paid more than $300,000 to political consultants to support Vazquezs campaign. A flurry of messages exchanged during that time between people involved in the case included a heart emoji attached to the commissioner's resignation letter and three sealed lips emojis when someone provided Rossi's name to Vazquez, who requested the name of the guy from the FBI. In addition, Herrera texted Rossini about the need for a campaign manager and said he didn't want a monkey from Puerto Rico. After Vazquez lost the primary to current Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, authorities said Herrera then allegedly sought to bribe Pierluisi to end an audit into his bank with favorable terms. Herrera is accused of using intermediaries from April 2021 to August 2021 to offer a bribe to Pierluisis representative, who was actually acting under FBI orders, according to the indictment. Officials said Herrera then ordered a $25,000 payment to a political action committee in hopes of trying to bribe Pierluisi. Stephen Muldrow, U.S. Attorney for Puerto Rico, said Pierluisi is not involved in the case. Vazquez, Herrera and Rossini are each charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and honest services wire fraud. If they are found guilty on all counts, they could face up to 20 years in prison, officials said. Meanwhile, Diaz and Blakeman could face up to five years in prison, officials said. Muldrow said officials believe Herrera is in the United Kingdom and Rossini in Spain. It wasnt clear if the U.S. would seek to extradite them. Rossini resigned from the FBI in November 2008 as part of a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to criminally accessing a sensitive FBI database for personal purposes. Many of the searches were related to Anthony Pellicano, an infamous private eye for celebrities who was charged in 2006 with wiretapping certain stars and bribing a police officer. Attorneys for the other suspects charged in the case could not be immediately reached for comment. In mid-May, Vazquez's attorney told reporters that he and his client were preparing for possible charges as the former governor at the time denied any wrongdoing. Vazquez was sworn in as governor in August 2019 after former Gov. Ricardo Rossello stepped down following massive protests. She served until 2021, after losing the primaries of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party to Pierluisi. In a statement Thursday, Pierluisi said his administration will work with federal authorities to help fight corruption. No one is above the law in Puerto Rico, he said. Faced with this news that certainly affects and lacerates the confidence of our people, I reiterate that in my administration, we will continue to have a common front with federal authorities against anyone who commits an improper act, no matter where it comes from or who it may implicate. Vazquez previously served as the islands justice secretary and a district attorney for more than 30 years. She became governor after Puerto Ricos Supreme Court ruled that the swearing in of Pierluisi who had only been nominated as secretary of state as governor was unconstitutional. Vazquez at the time said she was not interested in running for office and would only finish the nearly two years left in Rossellos term. Rossello had resigned in late July 2019 after tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the street, angry over corruption, mismanagement of public funds and an obscenity-laced chat in which he and 11 other men including public officials made fun of women, gay people and victims of Hurricane Maria, among others. Shortly after she was sworn in, Vazquez told the AP that her priorities were to fight corruption, secure federal hurricane recovery funds and help lift Puerto Rico out of a deep economic crisis as the government struggled to emerge from bankruptcy. During the interview, she told the AP that she had long wanted to be in public service: as a girl, she would stand on her balcony and hold imaginary trials, always finding the supposed defendants guilty. PHNOM PENH, Cambodia The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is calling for calm in the Taiwan Strait, urging against any provocative action in the wake of a visit to Taipei by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that has infuriated Beijing. In a rare statement on such issues from the 10-nation group, some of whose members drift more toward China in allegiance and some toward the United States, ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia said Thursday that they were concerned the situation could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers. Both U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi were taking part in the ongoing ASEAN meetings in Phnom Penh on Thursday and Friday. Pelosi received a euphoric welcome as the first U.S. House speaker, and highest ranking U.S. official, to visit Taiwan in more than 25 years, and China swiftly responded by announcing multiple military exercises nearby. China claims the self-governing island of Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments. Beijing has accused the U.S. of breaking the status quo with the Pelosi visit, while the U.S. insists there has been no change to its one-China position of recognizing the government in Beijing, while allowing for informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. On the other side, with China's recent increase in military activities around Taiwan, Washington accuses Beijing of no longer accepting the status quo. Shortly after Pelosi landed Tuesday night, China announced live-fire drills that reportedly started that night, as well as the four-day exercises starting Thursday. The Peoples Liberation Army Air Force also flew a contingent of 21 warplanes toward Taiwan. Meantime, the U.S. has an aircraft carrier group and other naval assets in the region. In their statement, the ASEAN foreign ministers called for maximum restraint and for all sides to refrain from provocative action. The world is in dire need of wisdom and responsibility of all leaders to uphold multilateralism and partnership, cooperation, peaceful-coexistence and healthy competition for our shared goals of peace, stability, security and inclusive and sustainable development, they said. We should act together and ASEAN stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilizing ASEAN-led mechanisms to deescalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region. ASEAN is made up of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. A squadron of F-35B Lightning II stealth fighters practiced skills needed to strike distant targets during a six-week Pacific Ocean deployment aboard Americas newest amphibious assault ship. The USS Tripoli left its San Diego homeport for its maiden deployment on May 2, just under two years after its July 2020 commissioning, according to the Navy. The 855-foot America-class amphibious assault ship stopped at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan, and on May 22 loaded 200 members of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121, the Green Knights. Fourteen F-35Bs from the squadron flew aboard the next day, the units commander, Lt. Col. Timothy Farag, told Stars and Stripes by phone Monday. Over the next six weeks the Marines exercised skills theyd need to support advanced basing operations, he said. Advanced basing involves small contingents of Marines operating within range of an adversarys weapons. Members of the newly formed 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment practiced tactics needed for such operations during the annual Balikatan drills in the Philippines in April. The Green Knights used their Tripoli deployment to figure out how they could employ their aircraft in advanced basing operations, Farag said. We can put airplanes in those places, too, he added. The squadron used the Tripoli to move its aircraft forward and conduct long-range missions into advanced basing locations, he said. Its the ability to be expeditionary and rapidly deploy to these locations and operate, he said. Its significant to be able to get 14 airplanes wherever I need to get them at a range where I can launch. Ahead of the Tripoli deployment the squadron sent Marines to Okinawa to practice forward arming and refueling, he said. Now we are doing that from a ship to get to these expeditionary airfields, he said. The ship can be used as a lily pad for arming and refueling The Tripoli has an expanded hangar bay instead of a well deck, to accommodate the F-35Bs short takeoffs and vertical landings. Dubbed a Lightning carrier, the Tripoli in April loaded 16 F-35s, breaking a record for the number of fighters aboard an amphibious assault vessel, according to USNI News. The ship can also carry MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors and a variety of helicopters such as the MH-60S Seahawk. The Tripoli is the second America-class ship, preceded by the USS America, which is homeported at Sasebo Naval Base, Japan. Construction began on a third ship, the USS Bougainville, in 2018 that is expected to launch in 2023. Unlike the Tripoli and America, the Bougainville will reincorporate a well deck to increase operational flexibility without sacrificing aviation capability, according to Naval Sea Systems Command. The Tripolis large hangar provided plenty of space for the F-35Bs, which could be moved inside to free up the deck for MV-22 Ospreys at times during the deployment, Farag said. Six more F-35Bs are deployed with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the Tripoli, which continues its deployment, he said. The Tripoli and the America on Monday were steaming through the Philippine Sea, according to the U.S. Naval Institutes Fleet and Marine Tracker. The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan is also on patrol in the region this week with tensions rising between the U.S. and China over U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis planned trip to Taiwan. Later this month 12 F-35Bs from the 121st head to Australias Northern Territory to train alongside Royal Australian Air Force F-35A conventional takeoff and landing fighters during Exercise Pitch Black, Farag said. Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See more stories here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea Cases of COVID-19 continued to increase in South Korea over the past two weeks while the U.S. military infections remained around 300 for the same period. U.S. Forces Korea reported 316 new cases in the week ending Monday, according to an update on its website Tuesday. The command reported 294 cases between July 19 and 25, and 380 cases July 12 to 18. The command reported its record weekly high of 1,599 cases in January. USFKs health protection condition remains at Alpha, which signifies a limited alert and the beginning of community transmission. The command, which is responsible for about 28,500 troops, still allows its personnel to visit most off-base businesses. Most USFK pandemic mandates, including a mandatory seven-day quarantine for arriving personnel, were rescinded by June. Meanwhile, COVID-19 is surging again in South Korea, which reported 107,894 cases Wednesday and a three-month high of 119,922 cases on Tuesday, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. The countrys one-day record of 621,328 new infections was reported on March 17. South Korea has recorded over 20 million COVID-19 cases, roughly 39% of its population, since Jan. 20, 2020, according to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters. As of Wednesday, 25,144 people in South Korea have died of COVID-19 complications. Once again, the government calls upon the people to take special care of themselves if they are at performance halls and beaches, where many people are gathered, and be careful at geriatric hospitals, where people are vulnerable to infections, Lee Ki-il, a vice minister of health and welfare, said during a press briefing on Wednesday. The country was better prepared to deal with the surge and was preparing for an influx of cases, Lee said. In recent weeks, KDCA estimated the countrys daily caseload would reach 200,000; Lee said health officials were preparing for 300,000 cases and were trying to secure more hospital beds. South Korea has rescinded many of its social distancing restrictions, such as business curfews, but still requires people to wear masks when using public transportation or when out in groups of 50 or more people. Stars and Stripes reporter Yoo Kyong Chang contributed to this report. HIROSHIMA, Japan President Barack Obamas impromptu embrace of an atomic bombing survivor inspired a work of art that was unveiled near Hiroshima ahead of the events 77th anniversary. The emotional moment between Obama the first sitting U.S. president to lay a wreath at Peace Memorial Park and Shigeaki Mori was broadcast around the world on May 27, 2016, and roused artist Hofu Saida to pick up her brushes and paint A Hopeful Sign. I was touched, and I was moved to tears naturally, she recently told Stars and Stripes by phone. Obama, in the painting, symbolizes peace while Mori, who was 8 years old when the atomic blast threw him into a river on Aug. 6, 1945, represents war fire, said Saida, who lives and works out of Toyama prefecture. Obamas peace extinguishes Moris fire, she added. Saida gifted the painting to Mori, who kept it in his home for several years until deciding last month to donate it to the Ikachi Lonesome Lady Peace Memorial Museum in Yanai city. The small, private museum is dedicated to the memory of six U.S. aviators taken prisoner of war after their B-24 Lonesome Lady bomber crashed in Yanai on July 28, 1945. They were taken to Hiroshima and were among the 12 American troops who perished in the worlds first atomic bombing. I was surprised to learn that he had treasured it, but also that he thought it was the right thing to do to donate it to the museum so that many people could see it, Saida said. I was honored. The plan was to unveil A Hopeful Sign at the museum in time for the 77th anniversary of the Lonesome Lady crash. However, an uptick in COVID-19 cases caused museum owner Masanori Takenaga to hold off on inviting large crowds into his small space. Yanai city officials came to the rescue, offering to display the painting temporarily at their public library. Visitors can see A Hopeful Sign there until Aug. 31, library director Masaaki Ishioka said during the paintings unveiling on July 27. Its about a 40-minute drive from Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni. We will be displaying the painting as an opportunity for people to once again think about how horrifying the war is while the tragic situation continues in Ukraine, he said. We also hope it will be an opportunity for many local residents to learn about the B-24 crash. Mori, an amateur historian, spent nearly 50 years researching and identifying American prisoners of war who died in the Hiroshima bombing. We were able to learn through researching about U.S. service members, who were exposed to the atomic bomb, that race or nationality doesnt matter when there is a nuclear war and that war should never happen, Mori, appearing via video link from his home in Hiroshima, said during the library unveiling. The painting we are introducing to you today symbolizes the importance of peace, he said. Stars and Stripes reporter Jonathan Snyder contributed to this report. kusumoto.hana@stripes.com Twitter: @HanaKusumoto U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talked security and economic issues in Seoul, South Korea, on Thursday, a day after her high-profile stop in Taiwan. Pelosi arrived at Osan Air Base with her five-member congressional delegation Wednesday evening, leaving behind an effective blockade of self-governing Taiwan by Chinese military forces mounting an expansive exercise. Pelosi, whose Asia tour also includes Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, met Thursday with senior lawmakers, including South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo. A relationship that began from urgency and security many years ago has become the warmest of friendships, Pelosi said during a press conference with Kim. The speaker had no meeting planned with South Korean President Yoon Seok Youl, who is on vacation, said presidential office spokeswoman Kang In-sun. Instead, the U.S. delegation shared a 40-minute phone call with Yoon and discussed a variety of topics, including the war in Ukraine and regional security. Yoon called the lawmakers visit a sign of a strong U.S.-South Korean alliance and a deterrent against North Korea. Pelosi was expected to travel to the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas before departing for Japan, according to a statement from South Koreas presidential office. She and the delegation landed late Thursday at Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo, where they were greeted by a group that included U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and the commander of U.S. Forces Japan, Lt. Gen. Ricky Rupp. Earlier in the day, Chinas navy, air force and other forces began exercises in six zones surrounding Taiwan, The Associated Press reported. The drills are expected to conclude at noon Sunday and include missile strikes on targets in the seas north and south of the island. Twenty-seven Chinese warplanes entered Taiwans air defense identification zone on Wednesday evening, according to the Taiwan Ministry of National Defense. The ministry reported 22 planes breached the median line, the informal boundary between the island and the mainland that splits the Taiwan Strait. In response, Taiwan scrambled combat aircraft, issued radio warnings, and deployed air defense missile systems, according to the ministry. The U.S. had its own assets nearby, including the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in the Philippine Sea and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, carrying a complement of F-35B stealth fighters. Tension between the U.S. and China surrounding Taiwan, a democracy that China regards as a rebellious province, spiked during Pelosis visit. One U.S. response to Chinas aggression toward Taiwan should be joint military exercises of the type it carries out with other nations in the region, according to retired U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham, a senior researcher with the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo. The U.S.s unofficial military presence on the island last year grew from 20 to 39 personnel, government-run Voice of America reported Dec. 2. It was unclear whether the figures include a U.S. special-operations contingent and Marines training the Taiwan military, according to the report. Does sending small training teams to Taiwan have much effect on Chinese thinking? Not really, Newsham wrote in an email Wednesday to Stars and Stripes. Battalion-sized training by U.S. forces with Taiwan, either on the island or on U.S. territory, would be a good start, he said. Planning exercises would be good as well, he said. Keep in mind that the US military has done near zero joint training with Taiwan armed forces over last 40+ years. Near zero! And nobody else has. That lack of training has kept Taiwans military from improving, Newsham said. How are the Americans and Taiwan forces going to cooperate to defend Taiwan if they have nothing to do with each other? Chinas military exercises around Taiwan are the most concerning response to Pelosis visit so far, said Norah Huang, director for international relations at the Prospect Foundation, a security and foreign affairs think tank in Taipei. Medium- to long-term impact depends on whether Chinas military normalizes training in areas surrounding Taiwan, which would increase the chance of a miscalculation, she said in an email Wednesday. China has no need to make Pelosis Taiwan trip a crisis, said Brad Glosserman, deputy director and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University in Tokyo. However, Beijing has an internal audience to assuage and wants to make sure neighbors dont get the wrong idea about supporting Taiwan, Glosserman said in an email Wednesday. China is at the peak of its training period and has lots of [military] assets in the area, he said. The danger isnt a deliberate confrontation but an accident and escalation but that is always the danger. Authorities in Italy are examining the case of a former senior Russian official who was hospitalized in Sardinia this week after suffering neurological symptoms, Italian media reported Wednesday. Anatoly Chubais, who resigned as the Kremlins climate envoy soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, was in intensive care after suddenly falling ill at a resort on the island. According to Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian TV personality identified by the Associated Press as a family friend, Chubais was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy nerves. Symptoms include tingling in the feet or hands, muscle weakness and difficulty with vision, speaking or eating. Italian authorities, however, including Sardinias public prosecutor, are awaiting test results in order to definitively rule out poisoning, Italys ANSA news agency reported. Chubaiss symptoms include partial facial paralysis and a loss of feeling in his arms and legs, Sobchak wrote in a Telegram post Wednesday that featured a photo of the 67-year-old in a hospital bed. The prosecutors office and Mater Olbia Hospital where he is being treated did not immediately respond to requests for comment. There is no clear public evidence that Chubais was poisoned and Kobchak, the daughter of a former mentor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has dismissed the reports as speculation. But his sudden symptoms recalled several instances where former Russian spies or prominent dissidents abruptly fell ill and were later found to have ingested radioactive material or a military-grade nerve agent. U.N. experts last year blamed Russias government for the near-fatal poisoning of leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday called Chubaiss hospitalization sad news and said the Kremlin did not have details about what happened. In March, Chubais became the most senior official to cut ties with the Kremlin after the invasion of Ukraine. He quit his post and reports at the time indicated he fled the country. A member of former Russian president Boris Yeltsins Cabinet after the fall of the Soviet Union, Chubais is known as one of the few Russian reformers from the 1990s who remained in politics through Putins presidency, although he was not considered to be a part of Putins inner circle. He became unpopular among Russians for championing the loans-for-shares privatization deal in the mid-1990s that gave rise to Russias oligarchs. Chubais also reportedly supported the development of Putins career, and Putin gave him a position as an adviser on sustainable development after he was dismissed from a state nanotechnology firm in December 2020. In late February, Chubais turned to Facebook to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of pro-democracy politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot in 2015 after criticizing Putins annexation of Crimea. Avdotya Smirnova, Chubaiss wife, signed an open letter from philanthropists to Putin that month opposing the war in Ukraine. - - - The Washington Posts Robyn Dixon and Mary Ilyushina contributed to this report. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Chinese leader Xi Jinping to hold direct talks, noting Beijing hasn't replied to such requests since Russia invaded his country some five months ago. The last time the pair spoke was one year ago, Zelenskyy told the South China Morning Post in an interview published Thursday. Since Russia's invasion on Feb. 24, he said the Ukrainian side had "asked officially for a conversation" with Xi but hadn't received a response. Such a dialogue, he added, "would be helpful." The leader of the world's second largest economy has refused to condemn Russia's war in Ukraine and declared a "no limits" friendship with Putin weeks before the invasion, making any call with Zelenskyy potentially awkward. Xi and Putin spoke within days of the war's beginning, and the Russian leader called Xi on the latter's birthday in June. Dialogue between Ukraine and China has been limited to lower level diplomatic exchanges, such as those between Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Ukrainian counterpart. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China had maintained communication with "all relevant parties on the Ukraine crisis," at a briefing in Beijing on Thursday. When asked whether there had been direct talks between the two presidents, she said China and Ukraine communicate "through diplomatic channels." While Beijing has maintained it respects Ukraine's right to sovereignty, it voted against a United Nations court order in March for Moscow to immediately suspend its military operations, refused to join a US-led sanctions campaign to isolate Putin's regime and framed Washington as the "culprit" of the conflict for encouraging the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Zelensky, 44, said there was still room for China to play a positive role in ending the conflict. "China, as a big and powerful country, could come down and sort of put the Russian federation in a certain place," he told the Post, adding that his countrymen shared fundamental values with the Chinese. "Everyone loves their kids," he said. "Everyone wants to live in peace." Negotiators from Iran, the U.S. and the European Union resumed monthslong, indirect talks over Tehran's tattered nuclear deal Thursday, as international inspectors reported that the Islamic Republic is expanding its uranium enrichment. The resumption of the Vienna talks, suddenly called Wednesday, appeared not to include high-level representation from all the countries that were part of Iran's 2015 deal with world powers. The negotiations come as Western officials express growing skepticism over the prospects for a deal to restore the accord. The EU's top diplomat has warned that "the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted." Iran's top negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, met with EU mediator Enrique Mora, Iranian media reported. As in other talks, the U.S. won't directly negotiate with Iran. Instead, the two sides will speak through Mora. U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley also was on hand, tweeting Wednesday that "our expectations are in check." Mora also met Thursday with Russian Ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov, who has represented Moscow's interests in the talks. Ulyanov also separately met with Bagheri Kani. "As always we had a frank, pragmatic and constructive exchange of views on ways and means of overcoming the last outstanding issues," Ulyanov wrote on Twitter. But going into the negotiations, Iran laid out a maximalist stance. Through its state-run IRNA news agency, Tehran denied that it had abandoned its effort to get America to delist its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization as a precondition to a deal. That has been a main sticking point. IRNA also quoted Iran's civilian nuclear chief as saying turned-off surveillance cameras of the International Atomic Energy Agency would be switched back on only if the West abandons an effort to investigate manmade traces of uranium found at previously undisclosed sites in the country. Those positions could doom the talks. Iranian officials have been trying to offer optimistic assessments of the negotiations while blaming the U.S. for the deadlock. They may be worried that a collapse of the talks could send the country's rial currency plunging to new lows. Iran struck the nuclear deal in 2015 with the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China. The deal saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium under the watch of U.N. inspectors in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Then-President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the accord in 2018, saying he would negotiate a stronger deal, but that didn't happen. Iran began breaking the deal's terms a year later. As of the last public IAEA count, Iran has a stockpile of some 3,800 kilograms (8,370 pounds) of enriched uranium. More worrying for nonproliferation experts, Iran now enriches uranium up to 60% purity a level it had never reached before. That is a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Those experts warn Iran has enough 60% enriched uranium to reprocess into fuel for at least one bomb. However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, likely a monthslong project. Iran maintains its program is for peaceful purposes, though its officials increasingly are discussing the country's ability to build a nuclear bomb if it chose previously a taboo topic there. Meanwhile Thursday, U.N. inspectors at the IAEA said that they had verified that Iran had begun feeding uranium gas into two IR-1 cascades previously unused at its underground Natanz facility. Those cascades will enrich uranium up to 5%. The IAEA inspectors also verified that Iran had completed installation of three advanced IR-6 cascades at the plant, each comprising up to 176 centrifuges. The IAEA said those cascades had yet to be fed uranium. Iran also told the IAEA it planned to installed six more IR-2M cascades in a new operating unit at Natanz, inspectors said. ___ Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP. ISLAMABAD The Taliban said Thursday they are investigating what they described as "claims" that al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the Afghan capital. However, the group insisted in a statement that it "has no knowledge of the arrival and residence" of al-Zawahri in Afghanistan. The statement marked the first time the Taliban leadership addressed the U.S. announcement that al-Zawahri was the target of Sunday's strike. However, despite the Taliban denial of knowledge of al-Zawahri's presence, U.S. officials have said the al-Qaida head was staying at a Kabul safe house linked to the deputy leader of the Taliban. The strike killed al-Zawahri when he stepped out onto the safe house's balcony. His presence in Kabul and the killing have further strained relations between the Taliban and the West, particularly as Afghanistan's rulers seek an urgent infusion of cash to handle the catastrophic collapse of the economy that came after the U.S. withdrawal a year ago. The Taliban had promised in the Doha Agreement not to harbor al-Qaida members or those seeking to attack the U.S. In the accord, the U.S. committed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and not to attack the Taliban. On Tuesday, the Taliban's first statement on the strike only confirmed it had taken place, without mentioning al-Zawahri. In it, they condemned the strike as a "clear violation of ... the Doha Agreement." In the new statement Thursday, the Taliban appeared to be trying to avert escalated tensions, particularly at ta time when they and U.S. officials have been holding talks over $3.5 billion in Afghan assets frozen in the United States. The Taliban said they ordered "the investigative and intelligence agencies to conduct serious and comprehensive investigations on various aspects of the mentioned event." The statement also assured the West "there is no danger from the territory of Afghanistan to any country, including America." Pakistan, which has lobbied the world to improve ties with the Taliban, said Thursday that its airspace was not used for the strike that killed al-Zawahri. Although U.S. officials have not confirmed from where the drone with precision-guided Hellfire missiles was launched, there was speculation it used Pakistani territory. "There is no evidence of this action having been undertaken using Pakistan's airspace," Foreign Ministry spokesman Asim Iftikhar said. U.S. officials have said al-Zawahri had been staying for months at the Kabul home of a top aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani is the top deputy of the Taliban movement's supreme leader, Mullah Haibatallah Akhundzada. He also serves as interior minister in the Taliban-run government and heads the Haqqani network, a powerful faction within the movement. The Haqqani network is an Afghan Islamic insurgent group, built around the family of the same name. In the 1980s, it fought Soviet forces and over the past 20 years, it battled U.S.-led NATO troops and the former Afghanistan government. The U.S. government maintains a $10 million bounty on Sirajuddin Haqqani for attacks on American troops and Afghan civilians. However, the Haqqanis also have opponents within the Taliban leadership, some of whom feel Sirajuddin Haqqani is amassing too much power. Haqqani's apparent sheltering of al-Zawahri could exacerbate frictions within the movement, though his power in the leadership leaves him nearly untouchable. Regardless of who knew about al-Zawhari's presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban as a whole has never ended its longtime alliance with al-Qaida. The terror network has greatly diminished in manpower and strength the past decade, making it more reliant on allies like the Taliban. Al-Qaida has enjoyed greater freedom in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, according to a July report to the U.N. Security Council by monitors of militant groups. However, the monitors said it's unlikely al-Qaida will seek to mount direct attacks outside Afghanistan, "owing to a lack of capability and restraint on the part of the Taliban, as well as an unwillingness to jeopardize their recent gains" such as having a safe haven and improved resources. A Missouri man left a loaded 9mm semiautomatic pistol on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to prosecutors. Jerod Thomas Bargar, 36, of Centralia, Mo., was arrested Wednesday; he is one of a small group of people accused of illegally carrying guns during the riot that forced a delay in certifying the results of the 2020 election. Lawmakers investigating the attack revealed recently that President Donald Trump knew some members of the crowd were armed and said they should be let through security regardless. Only four other people have been charged with taking guns onto the Capitol grounds that day. But police have said they understood many more in the crowd to be armed. One defendant, Guy Reffitt, said in a video played at trial that from the front of the crowd, he could see eight firearms carried by five people. Reffitt, a Texas man who was the first Jan. 6 defendant to be convicted at trial, received a sentence of more than seven years for five felonies that included carrying a firearm to a riot the stiffest punishment in the Capitol attack investigation so far. In the Bargar case, Washington, D.C., police officers found the gun on the ground amid rioters about 2:30 p.m., according to an FBI agents affidavit, but did not know whose it was. The pistol was in a distinctive holster depicting the American flag and the words We the People. There was one cartridge in the chamber and 15 in the magazine. Bargar was first identified through an anonymous tip and interviewed by the FBI on Jan. 18, 2021, according to the court record. He said he came to Washington, D.C., with a friend but did not enter the Capitol or do anything illegal in the chaos because he knew where the line was, according to the affidavit. At the time, the agents did not know Bargar had brought a gun. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives subsequently found that the gun had been owned by an individual who pawned it in Missouri, where it was bought by Bargars stepfather. In a subsequent interview, according to the affidavit, Bargar said he lost the gun when trying to help a woman who had been knocked to the ground. Bargar added that he wanted to be armed when he went to the belly of the beast for his own self-protection. D.C. law bars concealed carrying of firearms without a permit and open carrying; no guns are allowed on the Capitol grounds. Bargar told the FBI he was unaware of those laws at the time of the riot. A public defender who represented Bargar at his initial appearance declined to comment. WASHINGTON Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski was killed Wednesday in a car crash in her northern Indiana district along with two members of her congressional staff and another person, police said. The crash happened about 12:30 p.m. when a car crossed the center line on a state highway and collided head-on with the SUV Walorski was riding in, the Elkhart County Sheriffs Office said. Three people in the SUV, including Walorski, 58, were killed, as was a woman driving the other car, authorities said. Walorski, who served on the House Ways and Means Committee, was first elected to represent Indianas 2nd Congressional District in 2012. She previously served six years in the states Legislature. She has returned home to be with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Please keep her family in your thoughts and prayers, Walorskis chief of staff Tim Cummings said in a statement. Walorski and her husband, Dean Swihart, were previously Christian missionaries in Romania, where they established a foundation that provided food and medical supplies to impoverished children. She worked as a television news reporter in South Bend before turning to politics. Also killed in the crash were Zachery Potts, 27, of Mishawaka, Indiana; Emma Thomson, 28, of Washington, D.C.; and Edith Schmucker, 56, of Nappanee, Indiana, according to the sheriffs office. Cummings confirmed that Potts and Thomson were members of Walorskis congressional staff. Thomson was Walorskis communications director, while Potts was her district director and the Republican chairman for northern Indianas St. Joseph County. Schmucker was driving the other car, according to the sheriffs office. The crash, which occurred in a rural area near the town of Wakarusa, is still under investigation. Walorski was seeking reelection this year to a sixth term in the solidly Republican district. She was active on agriculture and food policy in Congress, often working across the aisle on those issues. A co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, she introduced legislation with Democrats to bring back a Nixon-era White House event on food insecurity. President Joe Biden pointed to that work in a statement crediting Walorski for years of public service. We may have represented different parties and disagreed on many issues, but she was respected by members of both parties for her work, Biden said. My team and I appreciated her partnership as we plan for a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health this fall that will be marked by her deep care for the needs of rural America. Indiana Republican U.S. Sen. Todd Young said he was devastated by Walorskis death. Jackie loved Hoosiers and devoted her life to fighting for them, Young said in a statement. Ill never forget her spirit, her positive attitude, and most importantly her friendship. All of Indiana mourns her passing, along with the tragic deaths of her staff Emma Thomson and Zach Potts. Walorski was a reliable Republican vote in Congress, including against accepting the Arizona and Pennsylvania electoral votes for Biden following the Capitol insurrection. As a member of the Indiana House, Walorski pushed anti-abortion legislation opposed gambling expansion proposals. She became a favorite of the conservative tea party movement. Walorski lost a close 2010 congressional race to Democrat Joe Donnelly before narrowly winning the seat in 2012 as Donnelly made a successful run for the Senate. She had easily won her reelection campaigns since then. House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Walorski a no-nonsense, straight shooter. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Walorski lived a life of service. She passionately brought the voices of her north Indiana constituents to the Congress, and she was admired by colleagues on both sides of the aisle for her personal kindness, Pelosi said in a statement. Pelosi ordered the flags at the U.S. Capitol to be flown at half-staff in Walorskis honor. The White House said its flags would be lowered Wednesday and Thursday, and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb issued a similar flag directive for the state. At every level of public service Jackie was known to be a positive force of nature, a patriot, and a relentless policymaker with an unwavering loyalty to her constituents, Holcomb, a Republican, said. Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire said she and Walorski bonded as newly elected members of Congress in late 2012 over their husbands shared love of jazz music and became friends. I was proud to work with her on a variety of critical issues, including legislation to address the addiction crisis, end sexual violence, and help military sexual assault survivors access the care they need, Kuster said. Davies reported from Indianapolis. Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed from Washington. (Tribune News Service) A man who spent six years on the run after being questioned in the death of his estranged wife is back in Greenville County and was denied bond Thursday morning. John Blauvelt was arrested last month in Medford, Oregon. He is charged with murder and possession of a weapon in the death of Cati Blauvelt, who was found stabbed in the basement of an abandoned house in Simpsonville in October 2016. At a bond hearing Thursday, Blauvelt looked nothing like the man whose photo was circulated across the country over the last six years. He had his hair in a bun and had grown a full beard. He wore a red jail jumpsuit, wrists in handcuffs, ankles shackled. U.S. Marshals and Medford police found Blauvelt after an investigation by a cold case team from the Marshals headquarters, the Marshals office said in a news release. Blauvelt was an Army recruiter at the time of his wifes death and after he fled he was considered a deserter. Blauvelt was an immediate suspect in the death of his wife and was interviewed twice by Simpsonville Police. Before they could get a warrant, he was gone, on the run with a 17-year-old whose parents had reported him for holding parties with juveniles. The teen called her family in December 2016 from Eugene, Oregon, and said Blauvelt had abandoned her. The Blauvelts lived in a four-bedroom house in Fountain Inn, but Cati moved out when the parties started, her family told Unsolved Mysteries. Blauvelt was arrested for domestic violence relating to an incident with his wife in which he held a gun to her head and contributing the delinquency of a minor. Cati went to work at PetSmart in Simpsonville. That was the last place she was seen, Oct. 24, 2016. Two friends found her body shortly after midnight Oct. 26 hidden under lumber in a rundown house in the woods just off Main Street in Simpsonville. People in town knew it as the party house. The Marshals cold and complex case investigative team began investigating earlier this year. Blauvelt was known in Medford as Ben Klein. He was arrested without incident, the Marshals Office said in a news release. 2022 The State. Visit thestate.com . GLOUCESTER, Mass. (Tribune News Service) A Massachusetts Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopter Wednesday looped over Gloucester dumping 600-gallon buckets of water scooped from the Babson Reservoir onto the stubborn Poles Hill brush fire which, along with controlled burn outs, has charred almost 20 acres, the seaports fire chief said. The brush fire flared up again overnight Tuesday into Wednesday. Since Monday, firefighters have been battling a brush fire on half of Poles Hill, a 60-acre conservation area on Wheelers Point bisected by the fire road portion of Sunset Hill Road. Just after 3:15 p.m. Wednesday, onlookers, Gloucester Fire Department and Massachusetts Forest Fire Control firefighters were greeted with the sight of the massive helicopter touching down in a landing zone on the field at OMaley Innovation Middle School on Cherry Street. Within minutes the crew unloaded a red Bambi Bucket and took off for the reservoir about a half mile away. The helicopter then circled back flying over the middle schools parking lot heading to Poles Hill where it dumped its load and then circled back for another scoop. Firefighters who had been battling the brush fire had been pulled out of the woods and looked on from the middle schools parking lot. Part of today is to get up there and just make mud, Fire Chief Eric Smith said of the water drops. They were supposed to be training with this thing and the state fire warden is aware of what their operations are and when they are and his first thought was, No, no, no. Instead of spending that fuel just to train, lets actually have you train on a real target. Around the time the helicopter arrived, the city announced that the Fire Department and state Forestry Services would be conducting aerial water drops via helicopter in the area. The city asked people to avoid the area and not to fly drones under any circumstances as the water drops were scheduled to take place for three hours. There would be limited road closures and access in the area. These air drops will result in additional smoke in the surrounding neighborhood. Gloucester Fire Department will be monitoring the situation to ensure the safety of the area, the city announced. Around 6 p.m., the city posted an update that read the Fire Department was assessing the work of the aerial drop thus far. We expect an additional 2 hours of activity tonight. Thank you for your continued cooperation. Assistant Fire Chief Robert Rivas said before the Black Hawk arrived that he goal was to drop water to form a C-shaped curtain between the homes on Ferry Street, Washington Street and Riverview Road and the foliage. Smith said police assisted some residents to get out of their house when there were flare-ups Tuesday to Wednesday, but he said the Fire Department had not evacuated any homes. We havent seen the need to do that yet, Smith said. Our time is spent just putting fires out and they are not huge fires. They are impressive because they are outdoors and they are free burning and they get big and they get ugly quickly and sometimes they will move through whatever fuel that they were in and they hit kind of dry patch or a dead patch or a burnt-out area, and then they are done. Rivas also said the Fire Department did not evacuate any homes but he said police may have when residents got nervous with the fire coming down the hill. There was another today that came down the hill, Rivas said. Might be another one tomorrow. (c)2022 the Gloucester Daily Times (Gloucester, Mass.) Visit at www.gloucestertimes.com WASHINGTON Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the director of public affairs for the Air Force, will soon become the next chief Pentagon spokesman, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Thursday. He will spend the next few weeks closing out his Air Force and Space Force responsibilities before assuming his new role later this month, Austin said in a prepared statement. The Pentagon has gone more than two months without regular news briefings since its former chief spokesman, John Kirby, left the position in May for a senior communications job for the National Security Council. In Ryders current position, he leads nearly 4,500 active-duty, National Guard and Reserve airmen and civilians in their jobs producing Air Force and Space Force internal information as well as community and media relations, according to the Air Force. [Ryder] brings a wealth of experience, including joint and deployed assignments that will serve him well as he informs the media of our activities around the world, Austin said. Ryder joined the Air Force in 1992 after graduating from the University of Florida. He has previously served as special assistant for public affairs to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, public affairs director for U.S. Central Command in the Middle East and director of media operations for the Air Force secretarys office of public affairs, according to the Air Force. I am confident that I will benefit from his counsel and that the American people will benefit from his ability to clearly and consistently communicate our efforts to protect the United States and its interests around the world, take care of our people and strengthen our unrivaled alliances and partnerships, Austin said. (Tribune News Service) Though U.S. military forces left Afghanistan nearly a year ago, the United States has still spent nearly $800 million there since then, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (also known as SIGAR) said in an interview this week. I think its close to $800 million that weve spent in Afghanistan since the collapse of the government last August, said SIGAR John Sopko, an Ohio native who started his career in Dayton. Because we still have an interest there, and there are still a lot of Afghans our government wants to help. I guess people dont realize that, he added. And I think people should realize that. We still are giving money to the Afghan people. We are trying not to, as much as possible, give money to the Taliban. Thats one of SIGARs oversight roles to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars arent directed to the Taliban, the group that quickly took control of Afghanistan as the U.S. and its allies hastily withdrew by then end of August last year. Thats one of the issues we have right now with state aid, Sopko told the Dayton Daily News. The United States this week killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri with a drone missile while he stood on a balcony at his Kabul home near the former U.S. embassy, according to U.S. officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Taliban had sheltered the al-Qaida leader after repeated assurances that they would not. Sopko said much of the U.S. money that has been spent in the past year has been an effort to ease hunger and address health care needs in Afghanistan. And there yet remains $1.8 billion in authorized and appropriated money that has still not been spent, although Sopko assumes much of that will eventually be rescinded. Sopko will oversee what is spent of that amount. Once his office does that and issues final reports, then we will go out of existence, he said. The SIGAR office also released a report last year detailing how the U.S. Air Force spent $549 million on aircraft for the Afghan Air Force, most of which were junked a few years later at a scrap value of $40,257 a project that involved officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The Air Force and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base I think has been very cooperative in the past, he said this week. Weve had only great dealings with them. ( Air Force) Materiel Command (based at Wright-Patterson) was very supportive in the past. Sopko was sworn in as SIGAR in July 2012, having been appointed to the post by President Obama. Last month, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner asked President Joe Biden to cooperate with Sopkos examination of taxpayer funded operations in Afghanistan. The letter was prompted by what Turner called a failure by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development ( USAID) to provide any meaningful documentation related to Afghanistan in nearly a year. I am concerned that further delays will significantly obstruct SIGARs necessary oversight work, Turner wrote. I urge you to make all efforts to ensure that the historic cooperation between SIGAR and the Department of State and USAID recommence. Sopko this week said he is cautiously optimistic that Congress and administration agencies will support his work. (c)2022 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) Visit at www.daytondailynews.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Before daybreak on Aug. 17, 1952, six Marines were pinned down on a Korean hilltop after an ambush. Forces from the Chinese-backed government in the north opened up with gunfire. Then came grenades. One landed near Robert Simanek, a 22-year-old private first class in the Marine Corps. He managed to kick it away, but the blast injured his foot. A second grenade fell to his side. I couldnt move too well. So I just sort of rolled over on top of that grenade, he later recounted. Simaneks legs and hip took most of the blast and the grenade fragments, leaving the other Marines unharmed. The next year, he was presented with the Medal of Honor, the U.S. militarys highest decoration, citing his daring initiative and great personal valor in the face of almost certain death. Over the decades, Simanek, who died Aug. 1 in Novi, Mich., at age 92, attended gatherings of Medal of Honor recipients, presidential inaugurations and events honoring veterans of the 1950-53 Korean War and other conflicts. He visited South Korea and was a guest at dinners hosted by Seoul officials. There was one more honor awaiting. In December, construction began in San Diego on the future USS Robert E. Simanek, an expeditionary sea base vessel. I didnt think having a ship named after me would happen, he told the Detroit News. Robert Ernest Simanek was born April 26, 1930, in Detroit and worked in auto plants before he joined the Marine Corps in 1951. In summer 1952, U.S.-led forces clashed with Chinese troops along a series of fronts known as the Korean Wars Battle of Bunker Hill, a pivotal but costly fight that gave allied units under U.N. command control of key front-line defenses. Simanek was part of a predawn reconnaissance patrol about a week into the battle. The patrol was heading back to an outpost when the Marines were ambushed near Panmunjom, now in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. The Marine patrol splintered, Simanek recounted to the Lansing State Journal in 1954. He and five other Marines scrambled into a hilltop ditch to take cover. As radio operator for the patrol, Simanek was able to direct mortar and tank fire on the Chinese positions. But the attack on his group did not let up. It took five hours to drive back the Chinese and allow help to arrive, he said. Simaneks right side absorbed the brunt of the blast he smothered. It put a good-size hole in my hip, he later said. At the time, however, he didnt know the extent of his injuries. I was really more concerned while I was sliding down the hill about the scrapes and cuts I was getting from the barbed wire and shell fragments on the ground, he told the Lansing newspaper in 1954. The battles for control of the area continued for weeks, with territory and redoubts often changing hands. In late August, warplanes under the U.N. command conducted the largest air raids of the Korean War in attempts to drive back the Chinese-led forces. In the end, Marines took strategic positions including Bunker Hill, also known as Hill 122, and held them throughout the war, which ended with an armistice but no formal peace treaty. The U.S. military has kept a presence in South Korea ever since. Along the lines at Bunker Hill, the battlefield price was high with dozens of Marines killed or seriously wounded. Simanek spent months under medical treatment on a hospital ship and in Japan before returning for more care in the United States. He walked with a limp for decades. In October 1953, Simanek was presented with the Medal of Honor by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a White House ceremony with six other recipients of the decoration, a five-pointed star attached to a blue ribbon. Simaneks other military honors include the Purple Heart. In an Armistice Day parade in November 1953 in Detroit, Simanek walked alongside Michigans governor, G. Mennen Williams, as more than 50,000 people looked on. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society announced Simaneks death but did not cite a cause. There are 65 living Medal of Honor recipients, the society said. Simanek received a degree in business management from Wayne State University in Detroit and spent part his career in the auto industry and Small Business Administration. His wife of 64 years, the former Nancy Middleton, died in 2020. Survivors include a daughter, Ann Clark of Traverse City, Mich. On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, Simanek described the veterans of the Cold War conflict as a quiet cohort. We were the younger brothers and nephews of World War II, which was just over by five years, he told the Lansing State Journal in 2000. The Korean veteran was quite quiet because the nation and ourselves were in awe of the sacrifices of World War II veterans. Gavin Kelly allegedly altered documents that were found to contain forged signatures Gavin Kelly (33) allegedly altered documents that were found to contain forged signatures related to the investments potential loss, a court heard. The case was adjourned at Blanchardstown District Court for Mr Kelly to decide on a plea. The accused, with an address at Talavera House, Myrtle Road, Baldoyle, Dublin is charged with using a false instrument, under the Theft and Fraud Offences Act. The offence is alleged to have happened at KBC Bank, Blanchardstown on October 6, 2019. Garda Sergeant Maria Callaghan said the DPP directed that the case could be dealt with at district court level on a plea of guilty only. Judge Gerard Jones asked for an outline of the allegations. Sgt Callaghan said the alleged victim presented at KBC with the intention of investing 60,000 into the bank. She met the accused who was working as a financial advisor at KBC. He talked her through investment opportunities and she agreed to invest money into two guaranteed funds that would not lose money, Sgt Callaghan said. This was allegedly submitted by the accused and the following year, the woman received a statement saying her investment had lost 5,000. She questioned this and was sent the policy documents that she had signed. According to the prosecution, the policy had two forged signatures in relation to the potential loss of investment. When she queried this there was an investigation by KBC and Mr Kelly was allegedly found to have altered the documents. Judge Jones asked if there was any loss to the woman. Sgt Callaghan said the bank was liable so the 5,000 loss was to KBC. Judge Jones accepted jurisdiction, allowing the case to be dealt with in the district court in the event of a guilty plea. If the accused pleads not guilty, it will be sent forward for trial to Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. The judge ordered disclosure of prosecution evidence to the defence and adjourned the case to a date in October. The victim was treated for his injuries and the court heard he suffered a fractured nose. A prison inmate headbutted a guard in the face, breaking his nose in an unprovoked attack, a court heard. Christopher Grant (33) struck the prison officer after he was told to return to his cell because he had no shoes on. The case against him was adjourned for the production of a victim impact statement. Grant, with an address at Barrygarron, Kilmeaden, Co Waterford, pleaded guilty to assaulting the man, causing him harm at Cloverhill Prison in west Dublin. Blanchardstown District Court heard the incident happened on June 7 last year. A garda told Judge Gerard Jones that the Director of Public Prosecutions consented to the case being dealt with summarily in the district court subject to the issue of jurisdiction being considered. Outlining the prosecutions case, a garda said that Grant was in prison in Cloverhill when an officer opened the cell door and asked the accused to come out so he could clean the cell. When Grant came out, he had no runners on and his trousers were pulled up which was against policy, the garda said. When he was directed to return to his cell, the accused headbutted the officer, who stumbled back. Grant was restrained by other prison guards and returned to his cell. The victim was treated for his injuries and the court heard he suffered a fractured nose. He attended hospital and underwent one operation. The officer had to spend some time off work as a result. The injury had an effect on the officers breathing and he was now due to have a second operation on his nose. The victim still had issues with his breathing but he had gone back to work, the court heard. After enquiring about the victims progress, Judge Jones accepted jurisdiction, allowing the case to remain in the district court. Grants lawyer said he would be pleading guilty. The court heard that the prison officer was amenable to making a victim impact statement. This was required before sentencing and the judge noted the plea and adjourned the case to Cloverhill District Court. Grant did not apply for bail and he was remanded in custody. Frank ODonnell (22) is charged with threatening to cause criminal damage at the South Dublin Maktab site in Lucan earlier this year Frank ODonnell (22) is accused of being among a group of men who went into the building while it was under construction and made threats. A judge ruled that his case can be dealt with at district court level and adjourned it for Mr ODonnell to decide on a plea. The accused is charged with threatening to cause criminal damage at the South Dublin Maktab site in Lucan on January 20 this year. Mr ODonnell, of Tor An Ri Lane, Balgaddy Lucan, is also accused of trespassing in a manner likely to cause fear in the same incident. He first appeared before Blanchardstown District Court earlier this year and the case came back before Judge Gerard Jones for the directions of the DPP to be given. Garda Sergeant Maria Callaghan said the directions were for the case to be dealt with at district court level subject to jurisdiction being accepted by the judge. Outlining the allegations, she said gardai took a report that two men were carrying out repairs to the roof of a building that was being converted to be used as a mosque. Four men including the accused allegedly entered the building and threatened the pair, the court heard. The accused allegedly said: you are trying to build a mosque here - you build it and Im going to f**king burn it. According to the prosecution, he again shouted: you build a mosque here and Im going to burn it. We will deal with it here, Judge Jones said, accepting jurisdiction in the case. He ordered the prosecution to disclose evidence to defence solicitor Simon Fleming and adjourned the case to a date in November. Bail was previously granted with conditions that Mr ODonnell does not enter the site at South Dublin Maktab and does not loiter in the environs of the site. He must also not interfere with any witnesses involved in the prosecution. The accused also provided a contact phone number to gardai as part of his bail terms. Free legal aid was granted earlier after the court heard the accused was not working and was on social welfare. The charges are under the Criminal Damage and Public Order Acts. John Lonergan was speaking after Robert OConnor (34) died from catastrophic head injuries in the early hours of yesterday morning in the Mater Hospital The former governor of Mountjoy Prison has said that gangs and drug feuds are to blame for increasing levels of violence in prisons. John Lonergan was speaking after Robert OConnor (34) died from catastrophic head injuries in the early hours of yesterday morning in the Mater Hospital after being attacked in his cell last Friday. It has emerged that Mr OConnor had been moved to a new wing for his own protection after he had been beaten with a kettle just two days before he was attacked. However, Mr Lonergan told RTEs Morning Ireland that if someone was determined to attack another prisoner then they would get the opportunity. The fundamental purpose and the top priority of the prison service is the safe custody of those in prison and that includes the personal safety of prisoners, he said. Robert O'Connor Any individual person who is being committed to prison should expect and has a right to expect that his or her safety is guaranteed in the prison. But the reality is of course that there's always a risk factor and unfortunately on rare occasions people do suffer serious injury and on a very small number of occasions, lose their lives. He agreed that while killings are rare, attacks and beatings are pretty common. This is something that has happened over the last 25 years. During the previous hundred years very few serious assaults took place in prison. Certainly you had no organised crime in prison, you hadn't gangs or the drug feuds and the gangland feuds that you have nowadays. And they have been the biggest single contributory factor to the level of violence. There's been a massive increase in violence in prisons over the last 20 years. "This is despite a huge amount of resources being put into security and to preventative measures with highly trained staff and a huge amount of emphasis on reducing the opportunities that prisoners would have to arm themselves with weapons. We have over 400 prisoners in what's called protection at the moment and that's a tenth of the overall prison population. Protection means that they are taken out of the mainstream and they have a more reduced and confined regime and their safety is certainly enhanced. But it also means that there is an ongoing challenge even amongst that 400 to recreate them and to have any type of positive regime. We in Ireland operate on a free association basis which means that prisoners generally can mix and socialise within the prisons. But free association brings with it the risk that if an individual prisoner or a group of prisoners set out to damage another prisoner that opportunity will be there. You have to remember as well that on exercise for instance you can have 100 to 150 prisoners walking around a yard and you can imagine the opportunities that would be there for prisoners if they were so determined to carry out attacks like that. However, Mr Lonergan stressed that it was important to reassure the families of prisoners who might be anxious and worried about the well-being of their own particular individual family members in prison. For the vast numbers of people that are not involved in the drug culture our prisons are very safe, he added. This is very much a gangland drug feud environment and anybody who is involved in that type of activity on the outside it's almost inevitable that that particular activity will continue on the inside. Because the gangs our imprisoned eventually and they establish themselves back in prison, and in all prisons, not just in Mountjoy, and not just in Ireland either. Meanwhile, jail sources have revealed that a number of prisoners have been disciplined for the earlier attack on Mr OConnor and gardai are investigating if the assault on the prisons A-Wing is linked to his murder on the C2 landing. A prominent line in the inquiry is whether OConnor was targeted in a revenge attack after he ordered that another inmate be slashed in revenge for an alleged assault on one of the close associates of the murder victim on the outside. Senior sources said that this is one of just a number of motive theories being examined. Last Friday OConnor was rushed to the Mater Hospital where he was kept alive on a ventilator after being diagnosed with a severe brain injury which had been originally expected to be turned off on Monday. His life support was switched off in the early hours of yesterday morning but gardai have been treating the case as a murder investigation since Friday because of the injuries that the victim received. OConnor had been on remand in custody in Cloverhill Prison since last October but was moved to Mountjoy in February after picking up a six-month sentence for a separate offence. Last Wednesday, he pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of a semi-automatic pistol in Finglas on October 13, 2021. Only for the gardai, I might not be here today A woman who was subjected to a terrifying stalker ordeal has said new legislation will not only help protect victims of harassment but will save the State both money and critical resources. Una Ring has welcomed the introduction of regulations that will allow victims to obtain a civil restraining order against their stalker without the need for a criminal prosecution. The Cork woman said it was critical Ireland used every possible legislative reform to help nip such incidents in the bud. This wasnt available to me when I was being stalked and harassed, she said. Who knows that if it had been available, the incident I was subjected to might have been nipped in the bud and a lot of fear and heartache might have been avoided not just for me, but for everyone else involved. If these things are dealt with at a very early stage it will, in many cases, help prevent them from escalating into something far more serious and sinister. Ms Rings stalker, a former colleague, who said he had become obsessed with her, was arrested by gardai outside her home after threatening to break into her house and rape her. He was found with a rope and had a sex toy strapped to his body. Under the legislation, victims of stalkers will be able to apply for civil restraining orders against them without a criminal prosecution being taken. The move, which has been welcomed by campaign groups and stalking victims, will make it easier for victims to seek protection and at an earlier stage. It is one of a number of measures set to become law in the autumn. CCTV shows moment stalker is caught by gardai in Cork Others include making stalking and non-fatal strangulation standalone offences, increasing the maximum sentence for assault causing harm one of the most common charges in cases of domestic violence from five to 10 years and expanding the existing harassment offence. By using civil restraining orders, the Government hopes it will enable stalkers to be tackled at an earlier stage before the stalking worsens, as has been seen in some criminal cases. The new standlone offence of stalking covers any conduct that either puts the victim in fear of violence or causes them serious alarm and distress and has a substantial impact of their day-to-day life. It will cover a wide range of acts, from following a victim, communicating with them or impersonating them and interfering with their property or pets. Stalking can be committed by a single act and does not have to be persistent or repeated. It will also cover situations where the victim only finds out about the stalking acts afterwards. The maximum penalty on conviction will be 10 years. Announcing the new measures, Justice Minister Helen McEntee said the civil restraining orders will allow for earlier intervention to protect victims. Stalking is an extremely serious and intrusive crime that can cause devastating psychological distress, she said. The evidence from other countries is that when a specific stalking offence is introduced, it leads to a greater awareness of the crime and an increase in the number of crimes reported and ultimately prosecuted. So we are doing that. The new Criminal Justice Bill 2022 will be brought before the Oireachtas as a priority on the resumption of the Dail and is expected to become law in the autumn. Ms Ring said she believed the legislation will also help save the State money through fewer court appearances and a reduced demand for garda manpower. Since her ordeal, Ms Ring has become a vocal campaigner for greater protection for the victims of stalking and harassment. She said removing the criminal element of securing a civil restraining order was a vital step but she said other measures also need to be pursued by the Government. Ms Ring said that while she was delighted the new legislation was being introduced, she was heartbroken it was against the background of multiple tragic and disturbing attacks on women over recent years. She was subjected to a terrifying ordeal where a former work colleague suddenly became obsessed with her and threatened to break into her house and rape her. Her stalker, James Steele (54), was jailed for five years in February 2021 at Cork Circuit Criminal Court after he was caught outside her home in a special surveillance operation mounted by Youghal-based gardai. Only for the gardai, there is a very, very high probability that I would not be here today. I am convinced of that, Ms Ring said. The gardai were incredible they were outside my home waiting for my stalker for hours. If they werent there, God only knows what might have happened. It (stalking) is such an invasive crime it is absolutely terrifying. Unless you go through it, it is very hard to comprehend just how invasive, exhausting and frightening it can be. When Steele was confronted by gardai, he was found to be in possession of duct tape and rope and had a large plastic sex toy strapped to his body. Steele, of Reavilleen, Rosscarbery, Co Cork, told detectives the only explanation he could offer was that he had become totally obsessed with his former work colleague and he refused to heed her pleas to be left alone. Ms Ring was so terrified she considered getting her identification details tattooed on to her body so that if she was kidnapped and killed, gardai could identify her. Steele pleaded guilty to charges of harassment, attempted burglary with intent to rape, possession of articles to cause a crime and two counts of criminal damage. Steele, an Australian, had an indecent assault conviction in his native country. Revenge for face slash in jail probed as a possible motive A prisoner who was the victim of a fatal assault in Mountjoy Prison had been beaten with a kettle just two days before he was moved to a different section of the jail. Robert OConnor (34), who died from his catastrophic head injuries in the early hours of yesterday morning in the Mater Hospital after being attacked last Friday, had been moved to a new wing for his own protection. This decision was made following the kettle attack less than 48 hours earlier. Jail sources have revealed that a number of prisoners have been disciplined for the earlier attack and gardai are investigating if the assault on the prisons A-Wing is linked to OConnors murder on the C2 landing. A prominent line in the inquiry is whether OConnor was targeted in a revenge attack after he ordered that another inmate be slashed in revenge for an alleged assault on one of the close associates of the murder victim on the outside. Senior sources said that this is one of just a number of motive theories being examined. The Irish Independentcan reveal that there isCCTV evidence of OConnor seen going into his cell with another inmate shortly before 6pm last Friday. Shortly after this, two other prisoners followed them into the cell where the savage assault took place. It is not known if they took part in the assault or were merely keeping sketch. Mountjoy Prison. Photo: Gareth Chaney/Collins Photos A major line of enquiry is that OConnor was struck by an implement described as a blunt object as soon as he entered his cell and then kicked and beaten before prison officers arrived at the scene just seconds later. A lot of work needs to be done on this investigation but it may well be the case that only one individual is responsible for the fatal injuries that the victim suffered, a senior source said. Despite this, the three notorious criminals who were apprehended by prison officers in OConnors cell have been put in an isolation regime and are expected to be moved to other jails before being questioned by gardai. The investigation team is in no rush in this matter because none of those involved in this are going anywhere soon, apart from the prison system... and gardai have a lot of time to build up the evidence of what actually happened, a senior source said. Of the three inmates identified as being in the cell, one is linked to the Kinahan cartel while another is serving a lengthy sentence for an aggravated burglary. All are from the capitals north side and are considered extremely violent criminals. The Kinahan associate from the north inner city is serving a sentence in connection with an attempted murder of a Hutch associate. He was also arrested in connection with a gangland murder last year. The inmate who is serving a lengthy sentence for a notorious burglary that happened in Munster is originally from the Coolock area and considered extremely violent. A third suspect who is of major interest in the inquiry is a 38-year-old crack cocaine addict from the capitals north inner city and is serving a sentence for a string of violent robberies in Dublin over a three-month period. Was this personal or were these individuals paid to do it or did it happen because of a debt? That is what the garda investigation will now establish, a senior source said last night. There has been a lot of theories in this case but the most likely scenario is that he was attacked because of the earlier jail attack that he organised in which an inmate was cut in the face but an open mind needs to be kept. Last Friday OConnor was rushed to the Mater Hospital where he was kept alive on a ventilator after being diagnosed with a severe brain injury which had been originally expected to be turned off on Monday. His life support was switched off in the early hours of yesterday morning but gardai have been treating the case as a murder investigation since Friday because of the injuries that the victim received. OConnor had been on remand in custody in Cloverhill Prison since last October but was moved to Mountjoy in February after picking up a six-month sentence for a separate offence. Last Wednesday, he pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of a semi-automatic pistol in Finglas on October 13, 2021. OConnor had been followed by gardai after he and another man had abandoned a vehicle on the N2 heading towards Finglas. They were chased down the North Road in Finglas and were seen removing their tops before gardai managed to stop them. He was arrested and claimed he had the gun because he was in fear of my life. His previous convictions included drugs offences, stealing cars, criminal damage, theft and road traffic offences. Gardai are investigating the incident in the Tallaght area, Dublin 24 A number of shots were fired at a home in Tallaght early this morning. Gardai are investigating the incident in Dublin 24 in which shots were fired at a residence shortly after 3am. Gardai said a number of people were in the residence in the house at the time. However, there were no injuries reported. A garda spokesman confirmed the scene was preserved for technical examination and investigations are ongoing. critical condition | Man (30s) injured in early morning assault in Mulhuddart Village in west Dublin The casualty, in his mid-30s, received serious injuries in Mulhuddart and was rushed to Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown. The man remains in a critical condition in Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown Neil Fetherstonhaugh Sunday World Thu 4 Aug 2022 at 16:41 A man who was attacked in west Dublin in the early hours of Sunday morning remains in a critical condition in hospital. CRIME WORLD | Episode 136: The life and crimes of sex trafficker 'Mucky' Marty Heaney Patrick Caseys life was derailed through a drug habit and when he was jailed for his crimes he met up with some of Ireland's most-feared mobsters Martin Heaney 'Mucky' Martin Heaney has a history of sex trafficking Nicola Tallant Sunday World Thu 4 Aug 2022 at 17:42 The trip of a lifetime is a flight away, with luxurious accommodation, ancient artefacts and magnificent vistas, writes Eugene Masterson With direct flights from Dublin to Cairo recently starting, it is magical that the land of the pharaohs, which has been at the top of my bucket list for decades, is now easily accessible from Ireland. My journey began by taking Egypt Airs efficient and pleasant service, a flight of about five-and-a-half hours. There is no alcohol served on board, and you will also find there are no local bars in mainly-Muslim Egypt, though alcohol is served in tourist hotels or the ubiquitous English and Irish bars, which are few and far between. On arrival in Cairo, I checked into the modern Fairmont Nile City Hotel a towering structure boasting spectacular views over one of the worlds most famous rivers. Fairmont Nile City Hotel The Fairmont has a couple of upmarket international restaurants as well as its in-house Egyptian eatery. Upstairs there is a pool bar, where you can take a dip in the warm air. Be warned though, cocktails are very pricey at about 20 a pop, with bottles of lager around 6. The next morning, I left the hotel at 7am and was whisked through the bustling streets of this city of nearly 20 million people. After only a 20-minute ride, I spotted one of the most magnificent sights Ive ever seen the iconic pyramids of Giza. Its amazing to see how close these majestic structures are to the city, lying right on its periphery. There are three major pyramids, as well as the Great Sphinx of Giza. All were built during the fourth dynasty of ancient Egypt, between 2600 and 2500BC (the locals are bemused when I tell them Irelands Newgrange is 500 years older, but perhaps not as spectacular). The reason why tourists visit this site (and others in the country) so early in the morning during summer is the stifling afternoon heat, which can reach 40C or more. This is also why its usually best to plan your trip in the spring or autumn. Eugene at the Karnak temple arrival at the tallest pyramid which is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the only one still in existence its time to take in the sheer enormity of what was for nearly 4,000 years the planets highest man-made structure, standing at 147m (481ft). The pyramids were originally built to house the tombs of the pharaohs, but the insides are now empty theyre not for the claustrophobic, as you have to crouch down tunnels to reach the chambers (I passed on this one). To get totally into the vibe, I donned a headdress and mounted a camel for a jaunt of several minutes on the outskirts of the pyramids, feeling a bit like Lawrence of Arabia (its about 5). Next up was a photo opportunity with the iconic sphinx, which has the body of a lion and head of a human. Many tourists say the best place to get a snap of the whole vista is from the roof of the local Pizza Hut, though I didnt get time to try this out. Eugene sailing on a felucca After this breath-taking visit, we popped into a factory where the papyrus plant is made into the writing support which was used by the ancient Egyptians. Then it was off to the Museum of Civilisation and the Egyptian Museum. Both fascinating buildings house mummies of the pharaohs, the most famous being Ramesses II. The latter museum also has many of the artefacts taken from the tomb of Tutankhamun, including his death mask. The next morning was spent visiting the historic Citadel an Islamic fortress built in the 12th century, which housed Egypts rulers for over 700 years. The complex now boasts a huge mosque, while its former palace has been turned into a fascinating museum, with an exhibition of military paraphernalia outside. A walking trip through the citys Khan el-Khalili market and bazaar allowed me to pick up a couple of local handmade souvenirs, and get a glimpse of what life is like for the locals. Early the next day it was time to fly to Hurghada, a major port city located on the Red Sea. I checked into the beautiful Hilton Plaza Hotel, where I stayed in a fabulous two-story duplex overlooking swimming pools and a beautiful beach. Taking a hammock break during a snorkelling trip at Giftun Island Visits to a fascinating Coptic cathedral and a local mosque were followed by a pretty marina, where I took a boat trip which included snorkelling (wear a life vest as the water can be quite choppy). You can also see coral and fish from the boats submarine-like windows downstairs. The next day, I took a six-hour journey by car through mainly barren countryside to reach Luxor in the Nile Valley, where I checked into the splendid Steigenberger Nile Palace, which has lovely suites overlooking the Nile and delicious Italian and Lebanese restaurants in its airy courtyard. The Luxor area is known as the worlds largest open-air museum, where one of the greatest civilisations to have walked the earth once lived. That evening, I visited the enormous Karnak Temple with its mindboggling array of statues and pillars stretching back nearly 4,000 years. A relaxing sunset trip on a traditional felucca sailboat followed, during which I sampled Egyptian tea and saw kingfishers diving for food. The next day was one jaw-dropping moment after another. First up was a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Valley of the Kings, which has about 60 discovered tombs, four of which I visited; they are readily accessed with steps and lighting and boast wonderful artwork on their walls. Egypt Air flies direct to Cairo from Dublin The most famous, of course, is the tomb of Tutankhamun. It still has the mummy of the boy king who reigned Egypt from 1361-1352BC and will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its discovery by Howard Carter in November. The temple of Queen Hatshepsut and Luxor Temple are both treasure troves, where you can spend hours looking in awe at the detail of carvings and sculptures, while the twin Colossi of Memnon also have the wow factor. A few tips if you go youre likely to be targeted by hawkers at major tourist attractions, who usually ask three times the price you can barter them down to, but they are friendly enough. Be wary of tourist traps like alabaster pottery factories, where I was charged 200 for six onyx marble goblets. And at Cairo airport, the euro and dollar are the same rate in duty free, so you may prefer to pay in dollars. FACTBOX: See www.egypt.travel Egypt Air operates four times per week between Dublin and Cairo, and it is the first Irelands scheduled air service to and from Egypt. Prices average 500 return. Fairmont Nile City Hotel is at all.accor.com/fairmont/cairo; Hilton Plaza Hurghada on hilton.com/hurghada and the Steingenber on steigenbergerluxor.guestreservations.com Unconfirmed reports indicated that the two individuals are a man and a woman and are part of the same family group. A major air-sea rescue operation was launched after reports of two individuals in difficulty in the sea off Mens Beach, Ballybunion, in north Kerry on Thursday afternoon. Initial reports indicated that one person had died in the incident. A second casualty is reported to have been recovered from the water and was being worked on by paramedics while being transferred to hospital. However, it is now understood that the man and woman in their 50s have both died. Unconfirmed reports indicated that the two individuals are a man and a woman and are part of the same family group. Locals say it was a sunny day in Ballybunion but a strong breeze made the water choppy and hazardous. The emergency response included units of the Irish Coast Guard, Gardai, RNLI, Civil Defence and both the Shannon-based Rescue 115 helicopter and the north Cork-based air ambulance. The Ballybunion unit of the Irish Coast Guard, Ballybunion Rescue and the RNLI lifeboat based at Cappagh near Kilrush in Co Clare have been tasked to the scene. The alarm was raised at around 6.30pm. It is understood that the initial report to emergency services indicated that two people had gotten into difficulty while swimming off Ballybunion beach. Search and rescue crews were quickly dispatched to the area. While en route to the scene on the other side of the Shannon Estuary, the Kilrush lifeboat was stood down after it was reported that two people had been recovered. One is understood to be in a critical condition. Soon afterwards, the lifeboat was requested to turn around and continue to Ballybunion after the Irish Coast Guard received further information suggesting that a third person could be missing. The volunteer lifeboat crew immediately proceeded to the search area off Ballybunion. The Shannon-based Irish Coast Guard helicopter had been on a mission from the Aran Islands to University Hospital Galway when the crew was tasked to the search operation. Rescue 115 flew directly to Shannon Airport where fire crews were standing by so they could undertake a hot-refuel. A hot-refuel is when an aircraft is refuelled while the engines are still running. After the helicopter had been refuelled, the crew made their way directly to the scene to assist in the search. As the operation continued further information became available to rescue services that suggested there were only two casualties and not a third as feared. The Kilrush RNLI life about the Rescue 115 were requested to continue to the area and carry out searches as a precaution. The search and rescue operation was mounted and coordinated by watch officers at the Irish Coast Guards marine rescue sub centre on Valentia Island in Kerry. "Everybody in the community is shocked by what happened and I offer my condolences to the family," Sinn Fein councillor Robert Beasley said. Further extending hours of service would by definition, reduce the amount of time available for maintenance work Currently the Luas does not operate between 1am and 5am. Transport Minister Eamon Ryan had asked the authority in June to examine the prospect of running services on a 24-hour basis. But the NTA has said that a significant extension of the tram system is "not something that should be progressed at this point. In a statement to JOE.ie, an NTA spokesperson said the transport authority, along with Transport Infrastructure Ireland, had recently examined the prospect of the Luas operating past 1am. However, they determined that essential maintenance on the tram system - such as on its overhead cable systems, overhead line equipment and rail works - can only be carried out when all trams are out of service. "Even with the current schedule in place, the nightly window for that preventative maintenance work to take place is only somewhere between two and three hours," the NTA spokesperson said. "Further extending hours of service would by definition, reduce the amount of time available for maintenance work, which could result in a diminution of services at other times of the week. "The Friday-Saturday and Saturday-Sunday sets of engineering hours are particularly valuable on Luas, as the longer window due to the later start on Saturday and Sunday gives extra time for longer tasks, which again are required regularly. "Were we to regularly run later services on Luas at say weekends, an alternative time would be required to complete these activities." While the NTA has ruled out such a late night Luas service, the authority said that overnight bus services are being prioritised. It pointed out that late night bus services have been introduced on a number of routes such as the 15, 39a and 41 in recent years. A new 24-hour operation is in place between Sandymount and Adamstown via the city centre and South Lucan, and also between Ringsend depot and Maynooth/Celbridge via the city centre and Lucan Village. An orbital route along the N4 between Blanchardstown and the Point Village via DCU and Collins Avenue has also been rolled out. The NTA said further 24-hour services are expected to commence in late summer on routes G1/G2 to Liffey Valley/Red Cow via Ballyfermot, adding that future phases will include more expansion of overnight services. The NTA argued that the delivery of 24-hour bus services on a regular schedule across the network is more feasible. The NTA is committed to delivering more of these services as the BusConnects Dublin network is rolled out, they added. However, Fine Gael TD Neale Richmond told The Journal that late-night Luas services are badly needed as are more 24-hour Dublin Bus services, given the persisting issues with access to taxis in Dublin city centre. This is becoming a public safety issue with many people being forced to walk home, often alone, late at night as public transport is not operating and taxis are hard to come by, he said. unprovoked | Tributes paid after Irishman (87) stabbed to death in shocking act of violence in London Mr Doorhy, who was in his 60s, was out hillwalking near Irelands largest waterfall Anthony Doorhy from Loughrea, Co Galway, tragically died after being reported missing at around 7pm on Monday. Mr Doorhy, who was in his 60s, was walking at the Devils Chimney area of Glencar on Monday evening when he fell. A major search operation was launched after he was reported missing and gardai said he was located but was later pronounced dead at the scene. His family has thanked all those that were involved in the rescue attempt. The Devil's Chimney near Glencar, Co Sligo. Picture: Jon Sullivan A notice on RIP.ie reads: Anthony passed tragically from this life, after an accident on Monday 1st August. Predeceased by his parents Paddy and Bridget, brother Paddy and sister Peggy. Anthony will be deeply missed by his partner Marcela, daughters Carmel and Yvonne, and their mum Ann, sons-in-law Michael and Richie, grandchildren Richie and Ryan, brother Willie, sisters Nora, Delia and Mary, nieces, nephews, extended family, relatives, neighbours and many friends. The family would like to extend their deepest gratitude to all of the emergency services personnel who assisted Anthony at the scene of his accident and who were so kind to them. Mr Doorhy was holidaying in the area with his wife when the accident happened. Its believed he became disoriented, as he tried to make his way back down the mountain trail. Henry Doherty, from Sligo Leitrim Mountain Rescue (SLMR), told Independent.ie: Initially we got the call at 7pm to look for a man whod gone missing. He was on his way back down the mountain and he got disoriented. We found him approximately 500m from the track itself. Its quite easy to lose your way in the mountains, if youre not familiar or experienced in that environment. Some peoples perception may be different from the way they went up to the way down. Mr Doherty said it was possible the man couldnt find his way back but unfortunately he slipped and tragically fell about 20m. A local landowner helped the search and rescue team locate the man, and Mr Doherty said this local knowledge was key in locating the man. The information led to the team finding the man around 40 minutes after arriving at the scene. Sadly, the man had fallen into a stream, Mr Doherty said. He was found in the base of a gully and the stream had swollen due to bad weather. He was partially submerged in water. The team located him and after an initial assessment, he was found to have a head injury and having fallen into the stream, he was developing the symptoms of hypothermia. It can very much affect the vulnerable and elderly people, or people with any circulatory issues. We don't know how long he was in the water. The rescue operation involved 10 members of the Strandhill-based Irish Coastguard helicopter, the National Ambulance Service and the gardai. The Irish Coastguard helicopter, Rescue 118, also attended the scene and paramedics performed CPR on the casualty. The man was pronounced dead at the scene. His body was taken to Sligo University Hospital and a coroner will decide the cause of death. Mr Doherty said the rescue team had been upset by the loss of the man and they sent their condolences to his family and loved ones. He asked the general public to always be careful when setting off on a trek up a mountain, due to the uncertainty of the geographical and weather conditions. Make sure to prepare properly for the day out, he said. The mountains are there to be enjoyed but first check the weather and that you have suitable footwear, clothing and enough food and water for the day and for if any difficulty arises due to weather changes. Its possible you could be out a lot longer than expected, so prepare for that with food, water and clothing. Tell someone where you're going, what time you're expected to be back and make sure your mobile is fully charged to dial emergency services if you get into difficulty. The Devils Chimney is a popular mountain trail walk which is a 130m high ascent. The waterfall is named Sruth in Aghaidh An Aird, meaning stream against the height. This refers to the waterfalls appearance of blowing upwards in certain weather conditions. The walk is only meant to take around an hour and is classed as moderate according to SligoWalks.ie. A scene pic from the time of the pipe bomb Brian Dean was charged with. Ex-UDA boss Brian Dean has had his bomb charges dropped and he claims he was set up for speaking out against his former paramilitary pals in this paper. The former military commander of the notorious Shankill Roads B Company has revealed the Public Prosecution Service dramatically withdrew a charge connected to a pipe bomb left under a car in Broughshane in June 2020 during a loyalist feud. He was charged with making an explosive device with intent and faced several years in prison if hed been convicted. I wasnt surprised the charge was dropped because I knew I had nothing to do with that and the police knew that too, the 55-year-old told us from his bolthole across the Irish Sea. Im relieved its all over not least because I always knew I hadnt done it. Theres no doubt in my mind that I was set up with that charge as punishment for speaking out in the Sunday Worldagainst the UDA. They wanted to shut me up for speaking out about the truth of what the UDA had become. Im not going into that again, Im careful about what I say but someone wanted me out of the way as a punishment for criticising certain people within the UDA. Two years ago Brian Dean and other loyalists were forced to flee to Scotland told the Sunday World that the West Belfast UDA was effectively nothing more than a drug dealing crime gang and appealed to young people not to join as theyd end up working as slaves to that gang. Former UDA military commander Brian Dean, speaks exclusively to the Sunday World from his UK bolt hole. The criminal with more than 50 convictions is living in Scotland after being put out of Northern Ireland by the UDA and says he doubts hell ever return. Speaking to this paper from his home in Scotland, he reveals how the bogus pipe bomb charge wrecked his life, left him jail for weeks, forced him out of his home and left him to live in a freezing caravan in Scotland all last winter. I know I have a record; I know Ive done some bad things, but I know I was never involved in leaving that pipe under that car in Broughshane. jail. Ive been to jail for things I did do and I didnt like it then so I wasnt looking forward to going to jail for years for something I definitely didnt do. The charge was completely bogus, so I was fairly relaxed about it. I knew it would never stick. However, it cost me my home. I was living in temporary accommodation when I was arrested, charged and brought back to Northern Ireland by the police. I spent a few weeks in jail but when I got out and went back to my house they told me I had to leave because of the pipe bomb charge. They told me I wasnt welcome there anymore. Luckily a friend let me live in their static caravan but those things arent set up for the winter. I spent the winter in a freezing caravan and in total I was living in it for nearly a year. Dean says while hes angry at being charged with the bomb, hes relieved to have it withdrawn and says hes happy now in Scotland. Ive changed my life since coming to Scotland, he says. Im still a loyalist, I still have concerns for my country and about the Protocol but Ive turned my back on the all the other stuff. If this charge had stuck and Id gone to jail Id have been dragged back into all that UDA stuff. I feel when you are in Northern Ireland you can easily get dragged back in. Dont get me wrong, Ive been approached here in Scotland but Im not interested and theres no pressure like there would be back home. Im happy here in Scotland. Ive got a house and Im settled. Its different way of life and Im really happy. a scene pic from the time of the pipe bomb Brian Dean was charged with. Dean much like other UDA exiles like Sam Skelly McCrory who died recently week in Scotland cant return home as the UDA still want him dead. Its sad I cant go home, he says. There are people I miss, there are family members who are ill who Id like to see but I dont think Ill ever go home now because I wouldnt want to put my loved ones at risk. Ive lived with that threat for years but I wouldnt want to put that onto those close to me if they gave me comfort. Im content here. The irony of all of this is the fact the UDA boss, The Rat, the person who caused me all the grief has now turned state evidence against his own people. The UDA protected him but now hes turned on them thats something I would never do. The pipe bomb, described by police at the time as a viable device, was apparently planted under the car on June 15 in the Rocavan Meadow area of Broughshane. The victim left his home before receiving a call from a relative a short time later to say a pipe bomb had fallen off his car as he left. The PSNI said at the time of the incident the bomb could have had devastating consequences. It wasnt until May 2021 when detectives from the PSNIs Criminal Investigation Branch along with Scottish police swooped on Brian Dean. During his appearance at Ballymena Magistrates Court a police officer explained that Army Technical Officers removed the device for examination, on which Deans DNA was found. Police told the court they believe he is linked to West Belfast UDA and he had to leave Northern Ireland in September, 2020 due to a threat. His defence barrister made an issue of the fact police had been in possession of a forensic report which confirmed Brian Deans DNA was found on a fuse connected to the bomb six months before they arrested him. His lawyer told the court: If there was any real concern around a potential pipe-bomber builder, police sat on this for around six months. When I asked about the delay, police said it was because of Covid. I simply dont accept that. This man has been at liberty for a considerable period since police had that report. If they had concerns, they should have acted sooner. The judge agreed and described the polices decision not to arrest Dean as an unconscionable delay. Today Brian Dean says the fact its taken over a year for the PPS to drop the charge raises more questions. They dropped the charge after examining the evidence and deciding there was insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution, says the loyalist. Surely they examined the evidence before deciding to charge me? It was the same evidence. It wasnt insufficient evidence in my eyes, it was a complete lack of evidence somebody pointed the finger at me and they grabbed me off the streets. Brian Dean has a host of criminal convictions and was most recently convicted in 2020 of having articles and documents linked to the UDA. At Londonderry Crown Court in 2018 he pleaded guilty to robbery and illegal possession of ammunition following an armed robbery of a filing station in Maghera. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment for robbery with half of the sentence to be served on licence. He also received a further four months concurrent sentence for illegal possession of ammunition. Yesterday it emerged that the Dubliner has landed a role in the new movie alongside Jake Gyllenhaal News that UFC superstar Conor McGregor will be making his acting debut in a remake of the '80s classic movie Road House has not gone down well with fight fans. Or movie fans for that matter. Yesterday it emerged that the Dubliner has landed a role in the new movie alongside Jake Gyllenhaal who is set to play a former UFC fighter who takes a job as a bouncer at a rough-and-tumble roadhouse in the Florida Keys. It remains unknown who McGregor will be playing in the project, but sources have made it clear that he would be playing an original character and not himself. However, for some fight fans they believe that McGregors new departure marks the end of his fighting career. Well never see him in the octagon again, one tweeted while another added: This guy is not serious about fighting anymore, when will you Conor fans understand that?" Other movie fans objected to a remake of a classic that they appear to hold close to their hearts. One stormed: Cool beans, now thats TWO reasons not to watch it, while another added: This film looks suckier by the day. nobody asked for it. One irate fan stormed: A remake of Roadhouse with McGregor? Talk about adding insult to injury. One stated: You can't improve on perfection, let Roadhouse stay where it is. As for McGregor himself, he has remained uncharacteristically silent, retweeting a story on Deadline about his acting debut and just adding a wink emoji. McGregor has yet to make a return to the Octagon after breaking his leg in a crushing defeat by Dustin Poirier last July. The UFC star has documented his return to full-time training but has also been enjoying the high life with friends and family that included a raucous party to mark his 34th birthday in Ibiza last month. Hollywood has been wanting to see the Dubliner on the big screen for some time now, but McGregor reportedly wanted to make sure that he chose the right project to make his acting debut in. Insiders say when he heard there was interest for him to join the Road House cast, he watched the original film for the first time and enjoyed it so much he wanted to get in on the action. Sources add that after a meeting with producer Joel Silver, McGregor was sold on the project and loved the idea where the new story was headed compared to the original. The Amazon Original Movie is set to go into production in the Dominican Republic this month and will stream on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide when it is released. In March, Conor offered Jared Leto the opportunity to join him at a fight camp after the House of Gucci star said hed love to play the Dublin fighter in a biopic. The 50-year-old, who is a big fan of McGregors and has attended several of his fights, told Extra TV: If we do the UFC movie, if I was younger, Id play Conor McGregor. I got the beard. What Conor does and what these guys and gals do is just extraordinary. Im too old to do Conor probably, but you never know. We could maybe use some CGI. McGregor later tweeted: Jared Leto, I invite you to come and practice the part with me! alongside a link to an article about the actors remarks. Leto who appeared in 'Fight Club' in 1999, also suggested that he would be interested in playing the part of UFC president Dana White. The cast for the new version of Road House also includes Billy Magnussen, Daniela Melchior, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Lukas Gage, Hannah Love Lanier, Travis Van Winkle, B.K. Cannon, Arturo Castro, Dominique Columbus, Beau Knapp and Bob Menery. Doug Liman is directing from a script written by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry while Joel Silver will produce the film for his company, Silver Pictures. The 58-year-old is starring in a film based on real-life figure Fr Gabriele Amorth, a priest who acted as chief exorcist of the Vatican and who performed more than 100,000 exorcisms in his lifetime. Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe is pictured here filming in Ireland new movie The Popes Exorcist. The 58-year-old is starring in a film based on real-life figure Fr Gabriele Amorth, a priest who acted as chief exorcist of the Vatican and who performed more than 100,000 exorcisms in his lifetime. The Italian died in 2016 at the age of 91. Crowe plays Fr Amorth and is pictured here in the grounds of Trinity College in Dublin wearing black religious garments. Numerous extras dressed as priests and nuns, also gathered to take part in various scenes for the flick. Russell Crowe Crowes girlfriend Britney Theriot is also working on the film and was seen in conversation with Crowed during breaks yesterday evening. Britney is a 31-year-old American real estate agent and the couple confirmed their relationship last November, although they first met on the set of his 2013 film Broken City (she was then working as an actress before becoming an auctioneer). She is said to be the spitting image of his ex-wife Danielle Spencer. Two other actors so far confirmed for the film include Alex Essoe and Daniel Zovatto. The Popes Exorcist is being directed by Julius Avery and location work is ongoing in Dublin and Co Wicklow. New Zealand-born and Australian resident Crowe won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in the 2000 blockbuster Gladiator, and has also starred in the likes of A Beautiful Mind, The Insider, Cinderella Man and Les Miserables. The Popes Exorcist is the latest in a string of films and TV productions being made in Ireland in recent months. Antonia Banderas has visited here to team up with actresses Alice Eve and Shelley Hennig to star in Jon Keeves thriller The Last Girl. Eve plays a private investigator forced into a dangerous alliance with a killer (Hennig) in order to uncover a quiet towns grisly criminal underbelly and clear the name of her mentor (Banderas), who is implicated in the crimes. Jonathan Rhys Meyers has also been spotted in Wicklow town shooting The Last Girl. Colm Meaney is also currently filming in Co Wicklow. He is making The Problem With People, which also stars Paul Reiser, Jane Levy, Lucianne McEvoy and Des Keough. The film is a heart-warming comedy about two estranged cousins making amends for many generations of a family dispute. Adam Driver was also recently spotted filming in Ardmore studios in Co Wicklow. The American is believed to be here shooting 65, which is science fiction film with a budget of over E90 million. TV production crews are also currently busy in central Dublin and surrounding areas shooting back to back seasons two and three of TV crime series Kin. The motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene despite efforts from paramedics. Former Love Island winner Kem Cetinay has been involved in a fatal road accident. The reality star, who won the ITV dating show in 2017, is said to be devastated after his Mercedes G-Wagon collided with a motorbike in Romford, Essex on Thursday morning. The motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene despite efforts from paramedics. A source told MailOnline that Kem has been left traumatised by the incident and is cooperating with police. Kem is devastated about what's happened. He's a sensible driver; no one could have foreseen this tragic accident happening, the insider said. There has been no wrongdoing on Kem's side, he's not at fault, and is being treated by police as a witness. He's still dealing with the shock alongside close friends and his family. A statement from the Metropolitan Police confirmed: Police were called at 11:32hrs on Thursday, 4 August to reports of a collision at Shepherds Hill, Romford. Police and London Ambulance Service [LAS] attended. At the scene a car had been in collision with a motorcycle. Despite the efforts of medics, the male motorcyclist [no further details] was sadly pronounced dead at the scene at 12:04. Enquiries are underway to notify next of kin. The driver of the car stopped at the scene and is assisting police with their enquiries. He was not arrested. And in a statement, Kem's representative said: Kem was this morning (Thursday) involved in a road traffic accident close to his home in the Brentwood area at approximately 11.30am. Tragically, a motorcyclist died in the collision. Kem has been assisting the police and is being treated purely as a witness to the incident. Kem will be making no further comment on this matter aside to offer his deepest condolences, prayers and sympathies to the motorcyclist's family and friends. Kem won the third series of Love Island back in 2017 with former girlfriend Amber Davies. The pair called it quits four months after lifting the crown and scooping up the 50,000 cash prize but have remained friends since their split. Jan Tinetti Labour MP Youth Parliament was recently held in Wellington and I was extremely fortunate to have an outstanding young woman, Lily Pearce, from Tauranga Girls College as my Youth MP. For my column this week Ive handed it over to Lily to write about her experience at Youth Parliament to highlight the fantastic experience this offers our young people. From July 18-20, I had the privilege of representing Jan Tinetti as her Youth MP at the New Zealand Youth Parliament event in Wellington. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about parliamentary processes, exploring the Health Inquiry topic in my select committee, and sitting in Jans seat in the House. Im grateful to have met many fellow Youth MPs from around the country, spoken in the general debate, and voted on the Mock Bill. In the general debate, I spoke about the struggles the youth population face while navigating the world of social media. It was a privilege to speak about this because I believe that the realities of social media consumption is not talked about enough. Speaking in the house and being filmed on Parliament TV, made for an incredibly special experience. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Jan for selecting me as her Youth MP. I have really enjoyed accompanying her as we attended many different events around Tauranga, such as Tech Weeks Women in Tech event, the annual Battle of Gate Pa memorial, the Tauranga Civic ANZAC Memorial, and the Mount Maunganui Lifeguard Service Easter Appeal fundraiser, etc. Jan displayed incredible kindness by making time for me in her busy schedule. It is safe to say my passion for politics and youth leadership has further strengthened through the incredible Youth Parliament experience! The Electoral Commission is urging people to get a move on and enrol now to make voting easy in the October local body elections. "The local elections are held by a postal vote, and you need to be enrolled at the correct address by Friday, August 12, to receive your voting papers in the mail," says enrolment and community engagement acting national manager Ross McPherson. "If youve already checked your enrolment details are up to date, then youre all set to vote. If you havent checked, take a few minutes to do it now and itll make voting in the local elections much easier." At the start of July, enrolment update packs were sent to more than 3.5m enrolled voters. Since then, more than 165,000 people have taken the opportunity to apply to enrol or update their details. "Weve also had about 100,000 packs sent back to us marked return to sender. If youve moved recently, make sure you change your address on the electoral roll so you dont miss out on voting in the local elections." People can enrol, check, or update their details online at vote.nz using their New Zealand driver licence, New Zealand passport, or RealMe verified identity. They can also call 0800 36 76 56 and ask for an enrolment form to be sent to them. Anyone enrolling after 12 August will need to contact their local council to arrange a special vote. More information on the local elections Local councils will start sending out voting papers on September 16 and voting closes at midday on Saturday, October 8. More councils will have Maori wards and constituencies at this years elections. If a voter is on the Maori roll and their local council has Maori wards or constituencies, they will vote for candidates standing in the Maori wards or constituencies. Go to vote.nz for information on enrolling to vote. More information on the local elections is available on the Taituara and Local Government New Zealand website www.votelocal.co.nz or from your local council. Leading health advocates are pleading for bolder action on monkeypox, saying New Zealand could see the same failures as other countries if the government doesn't act now. A five-page letter has been sent to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, with a range of government ministers and health officials copied in, including Minister of Health Andrew Little, Associate Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall, and top staff from Health New Zealand and the Maori Health Authority. It calls for "urgent action to prepare for and prevent the escalation of MPX [monkeypox] cases in Aotearoa New Zealand", and is signed by Burnett Foundation (formerly the NZ Aids Foundation) chief executive Joe Rich, New Zealand Sexual Health Society president Anne Robertson, and top sexual health researcher Peter Saxton. "We must act now," they wrote. "The rapid spread of MPX indicates a failure of the public health strategies that were implemented early on overseas." They want a dedicated monkeypox response team; a vaccine plan prioritised; better, stigma-free, public health communication; and support for self-isolation. Rich told RNZ the organisation had been constructively working with the government on a response but was concerned how similar current plans were to those of Northern Hemisphere countries. "What we're seeing at the moment is that in the Northern Hemisphere, the approaches that they've been using to try and control monkeypox have not been working and the [case] numbers are increasing." Since early May, more than 18,000 cases have been confirmed or suspected in more than 70 countries outside of where the virus was usually endemic. In New Zealand, three cases have been confirmed - two of whom have recovered. The Ministry of Health considers the public health risk to be low-to-moderate, but with a high risk of more cases being imported. Rich says a post-exposure vaccine approach, known as ring vaccination, is "not going to be enough" and that it should instead be pre-emptive and used as a primary tool, instead of relying on contact tracing and testing. "This is not a criticism," he says. "This is just saying that we have the advantage ... of being able to learn about what is or isn't working in other countries." University of Auckland associate professor Peter Saxton says procuring pre-exposure vaccines is needed so New Zealand can "stay ahead of the virus, rather than chasing an infection that we see moving fast among most at-risk communities overseas". He's concerned that infections will soon start being missed and the virus will "start spreading locally". "We still have a short window of opportunity to act before monkeypox becomes established." The Ministry of Health says it's "working with Pharmac to secure access to third generation smallpox vaccines that can be considered for the targeted prevention of monkeypox". RNZ understands health officials and manufacturers are discussing a possible delivery schedule for a vaccine, as well as antiretroviral treatments. 'I'm quite worried to be honest with you' Gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) have been disproportionately affected in the current global outbreak, but anyone can be infected with monkeypox. The Ministry of Health says the risk of transmission is "considerably lower" than Covid-19 or measles, "given it requires very close contact". It could be transmitted person-to-person by close contact with skin lesions, body fluids, respiratory droplets and contaminated materials such as bedding, but was not likely to be a sexually transmitted infection. Photo: Supplied. Dr Massimo Giola, a member of the New Zealand Sexual Health Society executive, says the country needs to act "before we have a major problem in our hands". Dr Giola is gay and studied infectious disease in Italy, during the 1990s, "right at the top of the AIDs pandemic". The current monkeypox outbreak makes him feel like he's reliving that time but in "fast forward" and he wants to see a stronger outbreak response. He understands why some MSM "feel under threat". "I'm quite worried to be honest with you." There are challenges in creating a response without stigma, Giola says. Specifically, officials need to carefully juggle acknowledging the disproportionate rate at which the MSM community is being affected, without stoking the homophobia that the outbreak had stirred up online, including people calling monkeypox a "gay disease" or thinking it only affected the MSM community, he says. The struggle of this is already coming through in patients he saw. Giola has started talking to patients enquiring about HIV-prevention drug PrEP whether they knew of monkeypox and where to find information. "Always, always, always the question I get is: 'when are we getting the vaccine?' So people are very aware there is a vaccine and they definitely want to have access to that." 'Leadership, bold action' needed The Burnett Foundation's Rich says they are not trying to create panic but officials need to be "very careful" to get the response right. "We know from our experience with Covid we have unique opportunities in New Zealand to learn from the rest of the world." Similarities to the Covid-19 pandemic response were mentioned in the letter to Ardern. "As with Covid-19, an effective response to MPX requires leadership, bold action, and comprehensive resourcing at a level commensurate with the threat of this novel global public health emergency." RNZ asked the Ministry of Health a series of specific questions about the concerns raised in the letter. They went unanswered, but the acting public health director, Harriette Carr, says the ministry "acknowledge the concerns raised in this letter". Carr also says public health advice has been worked on since "the early stages of the current global outbreak" for the general public and health professionals. RNZ has also approached the offices of the prime minister, minister of health, and associate health minister for comment. -RNZ/Jake McKee. The recent collapse of State Highway 35 could have been prevented if action was taken sooner. This is according to a regular user who drives the route to deliver essential medical services to the East Coast. The collapse of SH35 was totally predictable and avoidable, says the man, who wishes to remain anonymous. The river has been heading towards the road for the last six months at least. He says the road is used by many Bay of Plenty transport operators along the East Coast, as well as people who are heading past Opotiki for leisure purposes. He believes if Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency spent time diverting the river, it would have cost significantly less than to rebuild the collapsed road. It is a flat low level river used as a shingle quarry with easy equipment access. A month ago, diverting the river would have taken four excavators one day with an estimated cost of around $4000. I first decided to look at a map when we were driving through for work one day. I couldnt believe how far in the river was. I thought something wasnt right, and as we came up the Maraenui Hill, I thought holy smokes, that is just ridiculous. He adds when he opened the map, it became clear that the river should have been on the NZTA radar. You can clearly see that the swirling bay has been forming in there for over a year. The Motu River has found its own course after time like any other river going out to sea. If any road inspector noticed a year ago and decided to divert it, it would have saved this whole saga from happening. It wasnt even out of vision, the water creeping in was in plain sight. A map showing where the river runs in. Image: Google Maps. The transport operator predicts that if the river is not diverted away from SH35, the next collapse will happen 1km further along the highway. This is not using hindsight to cast blame, but it is just highlighting NZTAs failure to be proactive and focus on their core responsibilities. NZTA national emergency response manager Mark Owen says the coastal surges and significant rainfall has put pressure on a roading network that is already susceptible to unstable geology. As much as we cant mitigate every potential situation, we also cannot fix everything all at once this comes down to resource constraints (materials, machinery, personnel, funding and consenting), says Mark. The Regional Council is responsible for all river works and Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency was not aware of any concerns council had regarding this particular location. Bay of Plenty Regional Council integrated catchments general manager Chris Ingle says that the Motu River is not a river that is actively managed by the Bay of Plenty Regional Council. It is not part of one of our river scheme areas. Consequently, Bay of Plenty Regional Council has no responsibility for redirecting the river flow, says Chris. When infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, is potentially affected by a river its up to the asset owner to determine whether intervention is required. If the decision is made that intervention is required, then Bay of Plenty Regional Council will provide assistance via river management and/or consenting advice. Bay of Plenty Regional Council continues to assist Waka Kotahi, via advice, on the temporary repair and with a more permanent solution. Repairs being carried out on SH35. Photo:NZTA. Unfortunately the unstable geology at this stretch of road is typical of the East Coast, and other locations across NZ where roads run alongside rivers, and can make it hard to prioritise risks based on likelihood of if and when they might occur, says Mark. Thats why we have an active risk assessment and monitoring programme for the state highway network, and why our crews noticed the cracking in the road and were able to do something about it early, ensuring we could keep both our contractors and people who use the road safe. Our focus is on stabilising the embankment. The high rainfall together with extremely high river level and high velocity of the water makes it a challenging situation. The S curve in the river is continuing to move north at a rate of around 10m a day. We are working hard to get rock protection along the river edge to prevent further deterioration of the road. We know how important these connections are to communities on the East Coast - to access necessary services, such as food and healthcare, to get kids to school, to run businesses and to stay in touch with friends and whanau. Current Print Subscribers will be prompted to either login to their current site user account or to create a new one. A confirmation email will be sent when a new user account is created, which must be confirmed within three days in order to provide uninterrupted online access through your Print Subscription. Once the email address is confirmed please provide your Account Number to activate your Print Subscription Service. On 02 August 2022, US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan, the most senior US official to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich in 1997. Taiwan is administered by the Republic of China (ROC) but claimed by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), who refer to Taiwan as Chinese Taipei. The US has not recognised the ROC as an independent state since 1979, but Washington and Taipei continue to have strong economic and military ties. Response Rumours of the Pelosi visit elicited a strong response from Beijing, who promised an escalation in the PRCs military presence in the Taiwan Strait. In response to Pelosis visit, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Navy of the PRC announced six days of live-fire military exercises in the waters surrounding Taiwan. It has designated six zones for the exercises, two of which overlap with the territorial sea and internal waters of the ROC. The PRC maintains that the ROC are separatists and that ROC sovereignty over those waters is not non-existent. These military exercises are an escalation from previous PRC responses to US support for the ROC. At this stage is assessed that China has limited avenues of recourse, a number of which have already been realised. In particular these have included incursions into Taiwanese domestic airspace with military aircraft, aggressive posturing of land-based armed forces including a heightening of readiness, and the enforcement of no-sail zones around Taiwan. Military exercises are a typical form of hard-power posturing that demonstrates the PRCs capacity to implement an effective blockade of Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait at short notice. It is important to note that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faces several ongoing internal crises in mainland China, particularly against the backdrop of a difficult macro-economic climate. Such domestic issues will likely feature heavily in any assessment of escalation. Whilst it is highly likely that, following the live-fire drills, normality will return to the region, it remains a realistic possibility that across the longer term, the Polosi visit may be seen as an impetus for Chinese escalation which may further provide suitable distraction from internal issues within China. Risks For commercial traffic transiting through or near the Taiwan Strait, this is a significant geopolitical development however, the threat remains predominantly an issue of safety resulting from traffic density and congestion rather than a compromise of security. The Taiwan Strait is the primary route for shipping transiting between Northeast Asia and the rest of Asia. The exercise zones established by the PLA Navy prohibit passage for commercial shipping, requiring complex rerouting within deeply congested waters. Rerouting introduces significant safety issues for commercial vessels, as it increases the density of traffic on other routes, increasing the risk of collision. PLA Navy vessels are understood to be converging on the Taiwan Strait however it remains highly unlikely that such vessels will interrupt lawful and legitimate commercial traffic. It is advised commercial vessels keep clear distance from military traffic and ensure that if hailed by military vessels, masters should respond with ships name, flag state and confirm that they are proceeding in accordance with International Law. Vessels should remain compliant with any instructions given. The likelihood of commercial traffic being affected by the ongoing naval exercises ad state of heightened geopolitical tension is assessed as low and avoiding the no-sail zones is deemed a sufficient mitigation of this risk. Whilst avoidance of the Taiwan Strait is not necessary at this time it is important to consider the potential impact on routing as a result of no sail zones and consider the potential safety implications resulting from this. Testing Times for Taiwan Traffic There is potential for substantial disruption for trade around Taiwan with China conducting significant military drills and missile tests in the region. With China conducting significant military drills and missile tests around Taiwan between Thursday and Sunday, there is potential for substantial disruption to trade in the region. VesselsValues data shows that there are currently 256 Containerships, Tankers, and Bulkers in Taiwanese territorial waters, with a further 60 estimated to arrive before the conclusion of the drills on Sunday. Of the Containerships, Tankers and Bulkers that have a predicted destination of Taiwan the current count is 308, of which 60 are estimated to arrive between Thursday and Sunday when the military drills will be performed. As the show of Chinas military force commences, VesselsValue will monitor what effect this has on trade to and from Taiwan, along with the impact that Nancy Pelosi, the US House speakers Taiwanese visit may have on US and Chinese trading relations. Commentary from Peter Williams, Trade Flow Analyst at VesselsValue. By Jun Sheng Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Chinas Taiwan region on August 2. It was a nasty move that seriously violated the one-China principle and maliciously infringed upon Chinas sovereignty. With the US midterm elections nearing, Pelosi decided to play the Taiwan card at such a moment partly to play the old trick of containing China with Taiwan, but mostly to add her chances in the election, cumulate political legacy, and seek personal gains. Such an ugly and dangerous provocation once again proved Pelosi and other American politicians like her are the worlds trouble makers. In the eyes of the people in many countries and regions, Pelosi is a self-willed, reckless politician. She bragged about the US being the beacon of democracy and the rule of law on the one hand, and, on the other, wantonly trampled upon the international law and the basic norms governing international relations and frequently interfered in other countries internal affairs. In the eyes of many Americans, Pelosi and her family are known as the Buffett on capitol hill who exercise public power and double standards for their private gains. They make every investment move precisely and timely just before the House of Representatives released good news about certain industries. The visit to Chinas Taiwan region is another political farce driven by Pelosis selfish purposes. Her provocation posed a serious threat to regional peace and stability and aroused widespread opposition and concern in the international community. Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating called the visit a gamble thats foolish, dangerous and unnecessary. Days ago, Singapores Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong urged Pelosi to strive for stable ties with Beijing as he met her during her visit to Singapore. But such criticism and advice of course fell on the deaf ears of this politician completely blinded by personal gains. She doesnt care if her willful and unscrupulous move will jeopardize China-US relations, disrupt international order, harm Americas credibility, and leave a nasty mess to her successor those are not her concerns. Pelosis hysteria, absurdity and selfishness make the perfect self-portrait of a heartless and heinous American politician. She is not alone. There are plenty of self-centered, unattractive inside politicians like her in Washington in recent years. Having lived in the dirty political house of cards for long years, they have completely forsaken their bottom line and morality. They are constantly meddling in the issues of Hong Kong and Xinjiang and blatantly interfering in Chinas internal affairs in order to contain Chinas development, and scoop up political capital for themselves by playing the anti-China vanguard. They are putting up such a high profile on the Taiwan question because they want to divert conflicts and gather more bargaining chips while paying no heed to the China-US relations and the long-term interests of their peoples. China must be and will be reunified. This is an unstoppable historical trend. Both the plot to contain China with Taiwan and the illusion to rely on the US to seek Taiwan independence are wishful thinking. For the Chinese people, nothing is more sacred than safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and nothing is more important than preserving and realizing national reunification. Pelosi and her likes cannot stop the historical trend of China becoming stronger and more prosperous, achieving rejuvenation, and reunifying the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. At the end of the day, they will find their names on the historical pole of shame. The Taos News delivered to your Taos County address every week for a full year! We offer our lowest mail rates to zip codes in the county. Click Here to See if you Qualify. Plan includes unlimited website access and e-edition print replica online. Your auto pay plan will be conveniently renewed at the end of the subscription period. You may cancel at anytime. What just happened? Pieces of space debris found in the mountains of southern New South Wales, Australia, have been confirmed as belonging to a SpaceX craft. The parts are believed to have broken off from the unpressurized trunk of a SpaceX capsule that was jettisoned prior to re-entering earth's atmosphere earlier this year. Last Thursday, Mick Miners and Jock Wallace, two sheep farmers in the town of Dalgety, reported finding the object. They spoke to Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, who noted that their description matched a SpaceX craft that re-entered the earth's atmosphere on July 9, twenty months after it launched in November 2020. Tucker's initial assessment of the object, which is about 3 meters (9.8 feet) tall and weighs about 20-30 kilograms (22 66 pounds), was that it "kind of just looks like a burnt tree [] and then you come up to it, it's like this alien obelisk almost." The heat-resistant materials, including woven carbon fibre, and signs of scorching from re-entry seemed to confirm suspicions. There was also what appeared to be a part number on the side. The Australian Space Agency has now confirmed the debris is from a SpaceX craft after technical experts from the agency visited the site on Saturday. "The agency has confirmed the debris is from a SpaceX mission and continues to engage with our counterparts in the US, as well as other parts of the commonwealth and local authorities as appropriate," said an agency spokesperson via The Guardian. Another piece of debris has been found since the first announcement was made, this one further to the west, and more are expected to be discovered over "the coming weeks to months to even years." G'day @elonmusk, I'm a reporter at @abcnews that's been covering the discovery of @SpaceX debris in Australia. Just wondering, is anyone from your team coming to collect it? Here's a pic of one of the pieces' pic.twitter.com/NcJeuigQzx Adriane Reardon (@adrianereardon) August 3, 2022 Discussions are now taking place over whether SpaceX will collect the junk. The actions of Elon Musk's company could affect any potential liability, though so far, it appears that the pieces landed without causing any injuries, damage, or even craters. It's been a busy week for falling space objects. Monday brought news that another out-of-control Chinese rocket had come falling to earth, the third time such an incident had occurred. The Long March 5B re-entered the atmosphere on Saturday over the Indian Ocean before crashing somewhere near the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Check out these videos of the pieces blazing a trail through the night sky. Rumor mill: It's a case of another day, another RTX 4000 rumor. Assuming it turns out to be accurate, the latest claim from a regular leaker is excellent news for those with one eye on the RTX 4070, a supposedly mid-range card that could potentially take on the RTX 3090 Ti. It was only earlier this week when prolific leaker Kopite7kimi claimed the upcoming RTX 4070 Ti with its full-fat AD104 GPU could "easily" match the RTX 3090 Ti. Now, Kopite has updated the specifications of the non-Ti version of the card, and it seems the RTX 4070 has replaced the RTX 4070 Ti, specs-wise, with the only difference being a much lower TDP. There is an update of RTX 4070. PG141-SKU331 7680FP32 12G 21Gbps GDDR6X 300W TSE >11000 kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) August 4, 2022 The RTX 4070 is said to use the PG141-SKU331 that was previously thought to be in the RTX 4070 Ti. It also packs 7,680 CUDA cores or 60 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), 30 billion transistors, and up to 160 ROPs. There's 48 MB of L2 cache, and 12GB of GDDR6X memory at 21 Gbps on a 192-bit bus, giving it a maximum 504 GB/s bandwidth. But a critical difference between the RTX 4070's new specs and the previous ones for the RTX 4070 Ti is the TDP. As with other Lovelace leaks, Kopite believes the Ti card will carry a fairly hefty TDP400W, which isn't far from the RTX 3090 Ti's 450W TDP. The RTX 4070, however, is a 100W lower at 300W, which could relate to custom designs rather than Founders Editions. That's pretty much the same as the RTX 3070 Ti that Nvidia says has a 290W TDP. The new rumored specs are a big improvement over the previously RTX 4070 claims. Those had the card featuring the PG141-SKU341 with 10GB of VRAM@18Gbps and a 160-bit memory bus for 360GB/s bandwidth. Another exciting part of the tweet is Kopite's alleged Time Spy Extreme score. They claim the RTX 4070 can now achieve more than 11,000, up from the previous 10,000, putting it close to a RTX 3090 Ti (Founders Edition) score. Like all rumors, take this one with plenty of salt. It also leaves the question of what Nvidia has planned for the RTX 4070 Tia cut-down version of the AD103 found in the RTX 4080 is one possibility. In context: Robocalls are a nuisance at best and a threat to personal information and financial security at worst. While telecoms have made efforts to reduce automated and scammy telemarketing calls, they are still a significant problem because of the lack of enforcement to entities outside United States jurisdiction. To address the situation, a consortium of US attorneys general has formed a task force to give current anti-robocalling and telemarketing laws and regulations more teeth. They propose going after what they call "gateway providers." These are telecoms that enable or allow this type of traffic onto their networks, usually because they stand to profit from it. North Carolina AG Josh Stein, Indiana's Todd Rokita, and Ohio AG Dave Yost head up the newly formed Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force. The group includes AGs from all 50 states. It aims to fight robocalls by suing US gateway providers, which in theory would be more effective than trying to litigate against fly-by-night foreign companies that are the source of the calls. "I've been leading the effort by state attorneys general to work with the federal government and phone companies to fight robocalls," said Stein in a press release announcing the task force. "But we're also going to take action against phone companies that violate state and federal laws." Stein points out that he has already filed one lawsuit against a gateway provider from outside his state of North Carolina called Articul8. This company allegedly routed over 65 million robocalls to phone numbers in his home state alone, resulting in some 50 to 200 calls per day for NC residents. The AG also cites studies showing that of all the automated calls made to US residents, over 33 million are scams, including Social Security cons targeting seniors, fake Amazon reps, and other fraudulent calls. Analysts estimate that scam operations stole almost $30 billion from US residents in 2021, most of it coming from offshore companies. As long as US providers can rake in profits from shady telemarketers and scammers outside the States, they will. So the task force aims to hit these providers in their pocketbooks to discourage them from enabling these annoying and threatening calls. Will their efforts be enough to stop all automated calls? Of course not. Some robocalls are legitimate. For instance, rings from your child's school or school district informing you of events, closures, and other school-related information are legal under all current legislation. Targets are only those that look to rip people off, which is still a gray area under the law. For example, are companies trying to sell you an extended warranty on your car scams or legit business calls? It could go either way. As long as the company does sell what it says and is not just phishing or taking your money while providing nothing, regulators consider it legal even though it can be just as annoying as scam calls. Anything that shoots to reduce the number of robocalls everyone receives daily should be welcome. Of course, time will tell exactly how effective the Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force is. Image credit: Karen Roach (Photo : Sango) The Central African Republic (CAR) is among the rising countries in the African continent in terms of digital transformation. One of the latest steps is a move to a secure and citizen-friendly system, thanks to the Sango Initiative. Digital Monetary System For over a decade, digital currencies have proven time and again that they have immense usability and potential than their traditional counterparts. Though it does come with its own set of issues, the benefits outweigh the shortcomings. The Sango ecosystem is the first government-backed blockchain and cryptocurrency that is already engaged in exploiting various characteristics to bring about a change in the country. With the ease of use and storage, instant payment, the inclusion of the unbanked, DeFi and much more, Sango is revolutionizing how capital and resources are managed. This has put the Central African Republic at the forefront as the country moves to transform its complete economy over the coming years to run on the blockchain. The Sango is a Bitcoin second-layer solution that taps into the security and power of the largest decentralized network, yet offers a lot more. With its innovative L2 solution, Sango offers smart contracts and is highly scalable. A modular design with governance built into it, Sango is the perfect monetary solution for the future, available today. Digital Ecosystem, Digital Citizenship The Central African Republic, with its vast resources ($3 trillion+) is one of the largest untapped potentials in Africa and has opened its arms to people from all over the world to become a part of its accelerated development and resource utilization. Anyone can apply for a CAR citizenship through an easy and paperless process of locking $60,000 (as SANGO Coins) for a period of 5 years. The citizenship is the first of its kind in the world, obtainable by investment through cryptocurrency. Citizens will also gain the ability to hold a Central African Republic passport, allowing them to travel internationally on that document. Sango also offers a Central African Republic e-residency system in which individuals and corporations can digitally exist as entities of the country, allowing them to benefit from all the resources for as little as $6,000 locked in SANGO for 3 years. Both citizenship and e-residency holders will have different opportunities and doors opened up, like healthcare, insurance and the rising fintech industry of the nation, all through the ease of the Sango App. The Government is also offering real estate in the Crypto City area in the capital, Bangui. Each 250 square meter plot is also accompanied by its metaverse alternative, allowing property owners to enjoy the physical and the digital realm for as little as $10,000 worth of SANGO locked for 10 years. All locked investments come with a standard 0% income tax and once the staked period is over, the SANGO Coins will be redeemable by the owners. SANGO Coin: Powering The Digital Monetary System At the heart of the innovative monetary system is the SANGO Coin. The Bitcoin-backed digital coin acts in multiple ways within the Central African Republic and Sango ecosystem: A means of payment as a digital coin that carries value, backed by Bitcoin. A governance system which gives every coin holder a voice in the largest digital democratic set up. Gives coin holders complete ownership of their assets and creates a digital identity. With more on the way, such as access to the huge natural resource, commerce and corporate setups, and partnerships, SANGO Coin is already available in its Genesis Cycle at a discounted rate of $0.10 on its website. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. BMW's Neue Klasse has been reaffirmed by BMW's CEO Oliver Zipse that it will underpin a compact electric sedan and will be followed by a compact SUV, according to Motor1. Zipae said in a press release that from 2025, their company would take the next huge leap with the Neue Klasse. (Photo : by CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP via Getty Images) Workers stick advertising pictures of German car producer BMW on the glass front of a terminal at the Franz-Josef-Strauss airport in Munich, southern Germany, on July 27, 2022. Neue Klasse The company is planning to release a compact sedan in the three-series segment, which an SUV will follow. They also expect that the Neue Klasse will account for more than half of their sales by the end of the decade. According to the blog, the vehicles may be called the i3 and iX3 and will be alongside new CLAR-based combustion models. However, the company isn't ready to reveal more details yet about the future of its electric vehicles. Still, reports state that the company will have a whole range of battery-powered models based on the Neue Klasse architecture. That said, these vehicles will range from the mainstream segment to exclusive high-performance models. Also, the new platform will be used for EVs, while other combustion-powered models will be underpinned by different platforms. Neue Klasse will also be supported by the company's push toward a circular economy. The automaker will use their new production technologies and processes from the middle of the decade. The first product that will be based on the Neue Klasse will come in 2025. Neue Klasse is the company's all-electric platform that will let the company produce better electric cars that are not beholden to the design constraints of a combustion engine. There is also a report that stated that the company is planning to switch to a new CATL cylindrical battery cell that can cut the battery costs by 30 percent. Also read: 2024 BMW 5 Series: New Renderings Shows a More Traditional Aesthetic The Neue Klasse Architecture The German luxury brand says that the Neue Klasse architecture will be geared toward sustainability and a circular economy through the use of new technologies and production processes. The Debrecen plant in Hungary will start off its production of a NE-based product in 2025, which will be followed by Munich a year later. The Rise of Electric Vehicles BMW is trying to catch up to its rivals as the German automaker continues to lag behind both Tesla and Audi when it comes to electrified cars. Therefore, BMW is trying to gain ground and is working on a series of new electric models. BMW is following the footsteps of other carmakers that are determined to switch to electric cars. The company is known to be a very influential carmaker in the automotive world, and it is a good indication that the company is planning to continue offering many of the premium features in its vehicles that it is known for. This means that the engines may be electrified, but it will not lose the luxurious driving experience that many BMW owners know and love. Related article: BMW Vehicles Without Android Auto, Apple CarPlay Support To Arrive-Will This Be Permanent or Temporary? This article is owned by TechTimes Written by April Fowell 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The U.K. TikTok account, @ukparliament, was taken down as ordered by the United Kingdom's Speakers of the House of Commons and Lords. (Photo : Olivier Bergeron on Unsplash) UK's TikTok Account Taken Down as Tory Group Claims ByteDance Send User Data To China This decision was made after Conservative Members of the Parliament successfully lobbied a campaign against the use of TikTok. For the past few years, the popular Chinese app has been criticized because of its alleged connection with China's government. Although ByteDance already denied this accusation multiple times, many nations still claim that there's a chance that it is providing user data to the Chinese government. UK's TikTok Account Taken Down According to The Guardian's latest report, the Speakers of the House of Commons, as well as the Lords who ordered the shut down of the TikTok account @ukparliament explained that they were not informed before it was created. (Photo : SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images) This illustration photo taken on June 29, 2020 shows a person using the video-sharing app TikTok on a smartphone in New Delhi. Also Read: A TikToker Uses 'Long-Range Remote Controlled Car' To Buy Groceries Without Leaving Home! Before the TikTok account was removed, it only published one video, which provides tips on how to take selfie pictures with the iconic Big Ben in London. Although this is the case, a group of Tory backbenchers explained that the U.K. government really needs to take down the account until it is assured that no user data is being sent to the Chinese officials. The group added that since ByteDance is a Chinese company, there's a chance that it is required to follow the Asian country's security law. If this is true, then TikTok is probably supplying personal data to Beijing. "In light of your feedback and concerns expressed to us, we have decided that the account should be closed with immediate effect," said the Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle and the Lord Speaker Lord McFall. Even US Government is Concerned Aside from the U.K. government, the United States federal communications regulators are also worried about the use of TikTok. Bloomberg recently reported that many U.S. military members are using the social media platform to share their daily activities. Although they have TikTok accounts for personal use, officials said that their user data can be provided to the Chinese government, allowing them to know the troops' next movements. If you want to see further details about the U.S. military members' TikTok usage, you can visit this link. On the other hand, rumors claimed that the so-called TikTok Music will soon arrive. Meanwhile, new reports stated that TikTok is now more watched by young users compared to YouTube. For more news updates about TikTok and other social media platforms, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes. Related Article: Leaked TikTok Documents Show How App Disassociates Itself From China! This article is owned by TechTimes Written by: Griffin Davis 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Twitter is now looking for new things to investigate in the lawsuit that it filed in the Delaware court. It recently issued a subpoena on Tesla documents that have information regarding its CEO's plans to purchase the company. It may be a highly unusual thing to do for Twitter, but it is looking into all the angles that it would use against Musk for the case on his purchase regarding the social media's purchase for $44 billion. Twitter Subpoenas Tesla Documents for Musk-TW Lawsuit (Photo : PHILIP PACHECO/AFP via Getty Images) There is a new development on the Twitter-Musk lawsuit that would ask for new documents from their company, Tesla, regarding the talks or any other information regarding the supposed purchase. According to The Verge, Twitter is asking for new documents and now raised a subpoena for the documents, including that of their talks with Larry Ellison from Oracle. Twitter's lawsuit that it filed in a Delaware court is one of the most significant issues that Musk is facing now, and this is for the CEO's retraction of its original plans to purchase the social media company. Tesla's involvement here is still unknown, especially if it has massive effects on Musk's party and fight against Twitter, but it is still what the social media company asks for using the subpoena it filed. Read Also: Twitter Claims Elon Musk's Buyout Deal Caused Second Quarter Earnings Dip Due to 'Uncertainty' What is Twitter Looking for in Tesla Documents? Twitter is looking for additional evidence regarding the information that Tesla supposedly owns or has that would help in the case's progression against the tech billionaire. There are 27 documents in question that Twitter asks for in its subpoena filed earlier this week, including Tesla's internal documents that contain information in the supposed deal. Twitter and Elon Musk's Dealings Earlier this year, there was a supposed purchase of Twitter, and the company took a while to decide on it, handing over the company to Elon Musk for $44 billion that would bring it on new ownership. There are many promises here, and it includes the privatization of Twitter, which would help it express a free platform for all users. Musk's promises on Twitter talk about many changes in the platform, and one of the very first is its supposed edit button for tweets that would change accessibility for users. However, this is not the most significant change for Twitter in the platform, rather focus on making the company private for several years to change many things before making it public again in three years. The dispute started with bots and several things that it did not disclose in the initial documents that Twitter handed over to Musk's camp, and it made the CEO steer away from the deal. Now, there is a lawsuit against Elon Musk and Tesla is the latest company to get involvement here, with Twitter fishing for new information to use against the other party. Related Article: Elon Musk vs Twitter: Judge Schedules Trial in October 17 This article is owned by TechTimes Written by Isaiah Richard 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The International Space Station is getting a new surgery assistant, and it is not another astronaut to join its future missions, but a surgery robot named "MIRA" that will fly to it in 2024. The new surgery robot will assist in future operations, and it is something that the ISS will test while orbiting the planet, focusing on a future use for space and health technology. International Space Station's Surgery Robot to Test Capabilities (Photo : Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images) Surgery robots are massive on the planet now, and there are significant ventures to focus on for the world to experience and expand on in health technology. The International Space Station will soon receive a robot assistant to help in surgeries called "MIRA," and it stands for "miniaturized in-vivo robotic assistant." The robot was developed by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and medical technology company, Virtual Incision. According to Virtual Incision's press release, the robot assistant aims to help in surgeries that the team of astronauts would test out while in space. And while there are no significant surgeries that researchers scheduled for the astronauts, they will look into the capabilities of the robot to assist in space ventures. Read Also: Scientists are Growing Stem Cells in Space as Part of Experiment for Treatment of Diseases MIRA is Flying to the ISS in 2024 for Testing and Operations Gizmodo's report says that it may be a preparation by NASA to use for long-term flights or journeys that would need more than a team of astronauts to deal with medical concerns in the future. MIRA is preparing for its arrival at the ISS by 2024 to test out its capabilities and look into operations that would help astronauts in their needs. It will provide more than a helping hand for their needs. ISS and the Many Space Ventures to Test There are many ventures that researchers and scientists bring to the International Space Station to test, and it aims to test its capabilities in different setups, including that of space operations. One of the ventures available there is the use of microgravity to understand cancer tumors and aging skin cells which would only be achievable there. Different tests in the ISS focus on understanding what space does to human anatomy and the body, especially those flying to orbit. Of course, the main test subjects and points of reference for the research sent to the ISS are its astronauts, cosmonauts, and other dwellers in the orbiting space laboratory. The researchers aboard it now focus on monitoring each other's health, looking into spinal scans and heart rate, among the few things they check on on a routine basis. Now, a new robot assistant is coming to the ISS, and it specializes in surgeries and operations to help researchers know more about the conditions there and supposedly help in different ventures done in space. It may bring data and information back to the planet once it's collected, but its main goal is to test its capabilities in a different environment from the planet. Related Article: Spectrolab Continues Innovation in Space with Advanced Solar Cell Technology This article is owned by TechTimes Written by Isaiah Richard 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has launched another US spy satellite. The NROL-199 spacecraft was launched on Thursday, Aug. 4, atop the Rocket Lab Electron booster from New Zealand. The said spacecraft is said to complete a mystery mission. NRO Launches NROL-199 According to The Guardian, the launch of NROL-199 happened two days later than planned after high winds delayed an attempted liftoff on Tuesday, Aug. 2. Rocket Lab had shut down its webcast right after the Electron reached orbit at the request of the NRO. The NRO is an agency that builds and operates a fleet of spy satellites in the US. The agency keeps details about the satellites' activities top secret, and NROL-199 is no exception to this rule. Publications have a vague idea of what the satellite will do in Earth's orbit. In a description of the mission, Rocket Lab stated that its payload would support the NRO in providing critical information to government agencies and decision-makers monitoring international issues. The Rocket Lab calls this "Antipodean Adventure." Related Article: ULA Launch Update: 90% Good Weather for NROL-44 Mission; How to Watch Live! What is the NROL-199 According to Space.com, NROL-199 is a joint effort of the NRO and the Australian Department of Defense or AUS DoD. The two agencies also joint forces to launch another spy satellite, the NROL-162, which Electron launched three weeks ago, on July 13. Rocket Lab added that both the NROL-199 and NROL-162 missions are a demonstration of responsive launch under the agency's Rapid Acquisition of a Small Rocket or RASR contract for launching small satellites through a commercial approach and are the third and fourth missions contracted to Rocket Lab by the agency under the contract. The two mystery missions launched under the RASR contract lifted off in early 2020 and mid-2020. The 58-foot-tall, two-stage Electron was created to give small satellites rides to the Earth's orbits. But it can do more than that. Electron also sent NASA's CAPSTONE CubeSat toward the moon, and Rocket Lab plans to launch another mission to Venus in 2023. Rocket Lab's communications manager Murielle Baker said in a commentary that the company's been very busy due to the scheduled launch of the spy satellites. The company's CAPSTONE moon mission for NASA launched on June 28 and was followed a couple of days later by the NROL-162 mission, marking the company's fastest turnaround between missions so far. What is Electron? Electron is an expendable vehicle for satellites, but Rocket Lab is working to make it its first-ever reusable stage. The plan calls for catching falling stages with a helicopter, then hauling them back to land for further inspection, refurbishment and relaunch. Rocket Lab has recovered Electron first stages on different missions, even getting one booster with a chopper. There were no such activities on Antipodean Adventure, as the Electron first stage ditched into the Pacific Ocean right after separating from the upper stage. Russia's Inspector Satellite Russia is also in on the mission as the US continues to launch spy satellites in the Earth's orbit. According to EurAsian Times, Russia launched an inspector satellite named Kosmos-2558 on Wednesday, Aug. 3, just a day before NRO launched the NROL-199. The satellite has sparked concerns among space experts as the Russian satellite is moving closer to a US spy satellite. Related Article: SpaceX Falcon 9 Sends US Spy Satellite Into Orbit! Starlink Launches To Follow This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Sophie Webster 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. An unusual Russian satellite that is alleged to be designed to stalk American military satellites in orbit has just been deployed, according to a report by The Drive. Russian satellite 14F150 Nivelir was launched into orbit as part of the Kosmos-2558 mission, and given its present orbit, it may soon be near what is thought to be the spy satellite USA-326. "Very Clear Indication" Following the launch, unverified claims about the asset's intended use as an "inspector" satellite to discreetly spy on adjacent spacecraft have started to spread online. Marco Langbroek, an astrodynamics professor at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, who tracked the two satellites' orbital planes, said that the Russian satellite was launched at a moment when the American satellite was passing above the Russian spaceport of Plesetsk. In his interview with Gizmodo, he stated that the two orbits appear to be fairly close, with the major variation "being a relatively small difference of a few tens of kilometers in orbital altitude. He claimed that this was a "very clear indication." The Russian launch today was indeed at 20:25 UTC, right at the moment the USA 326 orbital plane passed over Plesetsk (i.e. the launch was into the orbital plane of USA 326):https://t.co/UFeIuewfTq Dr Marco Langbroek (@Marco_Langbroek) August 1, 2022 He also noted that the Russian satellite is traveling in a 97.25-degree inclined orbit, whereas the American satellite is traveling in a 97.4-degree inclined Sun-synchronous orbit. In the coming days, the Russian satellite may also modify its orbit in order to approach the American satellite even more closely, Langbroek added. He also claimed that this kind of Russian satellite has previously been deployed to monitor satellites in orbit. Read also: Russia is Extending its Stay on the ISS until 2028-To Continue Missions Until Time Comes Sensor System Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also said that the satellite likely features a sensor system designed to view other spacecraft rather than the typical observing satellite designed to take photographs of the ground. The purpose of USA-326 may help to explain why Russia might wish to deploy Kosmos-2558 to spy on it, as per The Drive. Based on the initial TLEs, in its current orbit Kosmos-2558 wil pass within 80 km of NRO's USA 326 satellite at about 1450 UTC Aug 4 (Thursday). Of course, the satellite may manuever before then. pic.twitter.com/0l1dhY8cV8 Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) August 2, 2022 In February of this year, USA-326-a classified national security operation run by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in collaboration with SpaceX-was launched by the latter's Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base. This mission was known as NROL-87. According to a statement made by the NRO in a press release issued after the initial launch, NROL-87 was created, constructed, and is currently being operated by the NRO to support its "overhead reconnaissance mission," which is primarily focused on preserving national security. Interesting Engineering said that in the past, space stalking has occasionally involved the United States as both the perpetrator and the victim. A second Russian satellite, Kosmos 2542, was pursuing USA 245, an electro-optical espionage satellite in low Earth orbit, in 2020. Langbroek will monitor the two satellites' orbits over the coming days to see whether they approach Earth close. Related Article: Roscosmos Says It Will Use Its ISS Part in Any Way - A Reply To NASA's Criticism Over Russian-Backed Territory Flags This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. TSMC's 3nm chip production expansion might be delayed as Intel, one of its major clients, suddenly decided to cancel its orders. (Photo : Photo by SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images) A man walks past a company logo at the headquarters of the world's largest semiconductor maker TSMC in Hsinchu on January 29, 2021. (Photo by Sam Yeh / AFP) If this is true, then the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company needs to make schedule adjustments. As of writing, the 3nm tech or "N3" is a big deal in the tech industry. This chipset development method is expected to offer up to 15% speed improvement, 30% power consumption reduction, as well as 70% logic density gain. However, it seems like TSMC needs to reconsider its original 3nm chip mass production plan after the surprising order cancelation of Intel. TSMC 3nm Chip Delay Might Happen! According to MacRumors' latest report, TSMC's 3nm chipset mass production was first scheduled for the second half of 2022. (Photo : Photo by LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Images) An employee works on smartphones reconditioning, mainly Iphones, at the Largo company headquarters which is a Back Market refurbishing company subcontractor, in Sainte-Luce-sur-Loire, outside Nantes, on January 26, 2021. (Photo by LOIC VENANCE / AFP) Also Read: Apple Face Silicon Chip Price Hikes from TSMC-Cupertino Releases to be More Expensive? However, because of some verification and design issues, the giant SoC maker was forced to move the expansion plan to the first half of 2023. Now, TrendForce reported that another delay is expected to happen. People who are familiar with the work of Intel said that the chipmaker was supposed to outsource its tGPU chipset in Meteor Lake to TSMC. But, the sudden order cancelation is now affecting TSMC's 3nm chipset expansion goal. Because of the postponement, the SoC developer is left with no choice but to slow down progress. This is needed so that the production capacity will not idle too long. Will It Affect Apple's A17 Bionic Chip? The sudden Intel order cancelation now makes Apple among the first clients to receive TSMC's first wave of 3nm chipsets. The giant iPhone maker scheduled its ordered 3nm SoCs between the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023. Among the chipsets that Apple will receive from the Taiwanese tech, manufacturer are the advanced A17 bionic chip and the new M-series models. As of press time, it is still unclear if the expansion progress adjustments of TSMC will affect the launch of A17 chipsets. On the other hand, there's no confirmation yet if the sudden changes will lessen the volume of Apple's ordered 3nm SoCs. If you want to see more details about Intel's canceled TSMC 3nm SoC order, you can visit this link. Meanwhile, the Apple 3nm M2 Pro mass production by TSMC was recently confirmed. Previously, Samsung's 3nm chip was completed, allowing it to overtake TSMC. For more news updates about TSMC and other giant SoC makers, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes. Related Article: Apple Supplier TSMC's Arizona Plant Nears Completion, Expected to Mass Produce 5nm Chips This article is owned by TechTimes Written by: Griffin Davis 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Tencent Holdings, one of the biggest gaming companies in China, announced on Thursday, Aug. 4, that it would cancel free breakfast and dinner perks for its contract personnel. This is because the company is cutting costs and is trying to save money. Tencent Removes Food Perks According to SCMP, the contract personnel of Tencent is outsourced by third-party firms to work for them for a predetermined period and sum of money. Starting Aug. 15, contract personnel will have to pay for their own meals. Tencent, which runs the largest video gaming business in the world by revenue and China's biggest social media platform via WeChat, did not respond to a request for comment by SCMP. Technology companies in China normally outsource certain projects like testing software to contract personnel who are not entitled to get the same benefits as regular company employees on a payroll. Also Read: Chinese Gaming Company Tencent Terminates Booster That Allows Users to Play Overseas Games Since 2017, the gaming company has offered free breakfast to regular and contract employees at its office canteens. The free dinner perk was given to the employees from October 2021, with a total headcount of 116,200 at the end of March, according to Wingo. Tencent's Cost Cutting On the mainland, these types of perks have helped make massive tech firms more attractive as places of employment than other companies. Tencent's latest move shows how the gaming company is keen to slash expenses where it can, following its worrying first-quarter financial results that showed almost zero revenue growth because of regulatory uncertainty and economic problems. Shares of the gaming company in Hong Kong gained 3.11% to $312 on Thursday, Aug. 4, as most firms in the latest quarterly earnings season are expected to post strong results or a turnaround in outlook. Tencent, which has failed to get a license for a new video game for about 14 months, has already initiated job cuts across various business units. The firm's recent round of downsizing is expected to be reported in the company's second-quarter results, which will be released on Aug. 17. In June, Tencent adjusted its salary policy to slow the pace of pay rises for the employees. They are no longer entitled to an immediate salary increase after a promotion. In March, the gaming company's president Martin Lau Chi-Ping said that Tencent would exit or streamline some noncore businesses to control headcount, a strategy that founder, chairman, and chief executive Pony Ma Huateng reiterated during the company's earnings call in May. Tencent Drought SCMP also reported about the continued drought of Tencent as it has been 14 months since the company had a new game approved by China's regulators. The National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) approves new games every month. Still, for 2022, the regulators have been approving new games from small companies instead of the big corporations, according to Bloomberg. Tencent's shares had decreased to 37.4% in Hong Kong since July when the last list was released before the licensing freeze in the country. NetEase, Tencent's rival, also suffered from the licensing freeze as its shares dropped 10%. Related Article: Tencent Ordered by Chinese Government to Limit Minors' Time on 'Honor of Kings' to 1 Hour a Day This article is owned by Tech Times Written by Sophie Webster 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Both Russia and Ukraine said that there will be a "major breakthrough" in the war situation, and the "Battle of Donbass" is coming to an end? People protest outside if Civil District Court as arguments over whether the states trigger ban is too flawed to take effect in New Orleans, La. Friday, July 8, 2022. (Photo by Max Becherer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate) David Cronenberg understands if you walk out of his new movie, Crimes of the Future. In fact, ahead of the films world premiere at Cannes in May, he was expecting it. There are some very strong scenes, the famed body horror director told Deadline. Im sure that we will have walkouts within the first five minutes of the movie. As dramatic as that might sound, its not so unusual for a film at the Cannes Film Festival. And, though reports vary about how many chose to leave and when, there were certainly walkouts from Cronenbergs film throughout the course of the festival some during the opening minutes in which a young boy is killed, others after a scene where people orgasm from licking open wounds. Walkouts at Cannes are part of the fabric of the festival, says Kate Jinx, one of the programmers of the Melbourne International Film Festival, where Crimes of the Future film will have its Australian premiere this weekend. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Ben Harpers dad looks like a dude. Hes smiling and reclining in the sun with his Afro and Ray-Bans; denim shirt over seventies-brown T-shirt and cords. His first-born son, maybe three years old, scowls at the camera. It seems dad would rather kick back than play with the beach toys hes being offered. He was a dude, Ben confirms with an affectionate dip of his head. My dad was a master photographer. He was always shooting. And I remember he set up his timer for that shot which was a new phenomenon in the 70s. We were at Laguna Beach, which was where he loved. It was one of his happy places. My dad didnt have many of those. That last revelation is key. The kid in the faded Polaroid, which is now the cover of an album titled Bloodline Maintenance, wasnt much older when Leonard Harper walked out in brutal, drunken circumstances, leaving his mother, a young folk musician named Ellen, to raise Ben and two younger brothers. The best part of this process is revealing the mystery to oneself, Harper says when asked why the time was right to share this intimate moment with the world. Its the most exciting exploration, truly, of the conscious and subconscious Ive ever been a part of The cover of Ben Harpers new album, Bloodline Maintenance. I leaned on him, his cadence, memories of conversations, in a way that I had never written music before A lot of the lyrics are connected to my dad. Its kind of a conversation continuing. This record picks up [our] dialogue where we left off. That was a good place, many years after hed turn up drunk at the door, little Ben raged at mum for turning dad away. An accomplished musician too, Leonard joined his famous son on tour before he died in the late 90s. By then, the Bob Marley concert hed taken Ben to see back in 78 had become folk legend. Advertisement I spent my entire childhood needing his love, Harper says. And he kept that close. As the [new] song says, it was on a need-to-know basis. I think by and large because he was fatherless. His dad died on a boat during World War II. His dad never came home from the war. And I just dont think he could ever catch up with that loss in his life. Harper performs on stage at the Beacon Theatre in New York in March 2022. Credit:AP This all explains the micro meaning behind the new album title. Its in the second track that the macro implications of Bloodline Maintenance become clear. Slavery, the chorus announces. We need to talk about it. No doubt. But why so urgently? One, Americas current attempt to whitewash slavery entirely in the education system, Harper responds. Two, the blind eye people in America turn to the through-line between the transatlantic slave trade and the dysfunctionality of American democracy. And the third and final point, and what might be the most important, is that the scales of justice have never been more out of balance than they are now. Theyve tilted far enough in recent years that Harper is preparing to leave the country of his birth for a new home in France, which is where he and his band are currently breaking the COVID drought with an extensive tour. I wake up an optimist. I just dont always go to bed an optimist, he says. Harper says he spent his entire childhood needing his fathers love. Certainly, from its sombre, a cappella opening track, Below Sea Level, much of the new album seems to sail closer than usual to the brink of defeat. I was trying to find some way to reach through the troubling noise to a place of sonic safety, he says of that song, which hits doubly hard because much of his recent output has been instrumental. I had to write my way into being comfortable in my skin, even for the minute and 50 seconds that that song takes. Thats my attempt at finding serenity and sanity in a mad, mad world. Advertisement [Its] surrender as a tool, he says. Not as giving up, but as a tool to clarity; towards a calm in the storm. The deep choral harmony (probably even seven-part at times) was a conscious attempt to channel the steely resolve of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The southern gospel-blues connection of the Blind Boys of Alabama is another reference in the same spiritual ballpark. Harper has collaborated with both acts in a 30-year recording career littered with musical giants. Also, Harry Styles! I got the call! Harper says, brightening immediately. I mean, thats one of the most exciting parts about sitting in my chair is that I get some fun phone calls. Those phone calls have ranged from John Lee Hooker to Harry Styles. Harry Styles performs at a special one-night only performance in New York for the release of Harrys House. Credit:Courtesy of Apple Music Boyfriends is the penultimate track on the boy wonder du jours new album, Harrys House. Harpers finger-picked acoustic guitar is unusually understated, but evidently nobody else would do. Harry was like, Do you have that guitar that you used on your earlier records? Harper had given the mahogany Martin 0018 to his eldest daughter, Harris, who was luckily just visiting home from college. The date was booked. I was already a fan, Harper says. I mean, I have sung Harry Styles to and from my daughters boyfriends house at the top of my lungs for years. So to get that call was exciting for me and the whole family. Loading Better still, Harper is booked to open for Styles at the 17,500-seat Kia Forum in Inglewood for a staggering 15 shows in October-November. For all the delicately weighed darkness and fury of his new album, its enough to send him directly to his happy place. Whether youre an old dog like me or a young kid, its such a prime place to arrive at. Not only is [Styles] rarely talented, but its once in every 50 years where an artist resonates with the culture and times that hes from as clearly as he does. Advertisement The first time the sharp, debilitating pain struck me was in 2018. The attack on my back was so severe that it rendered me helpless on the Airbnb floor, on my first tourist night in Kuala Lumpur. My mind raced as I turned and twisted on the floor for hours, writhing in agony. I couldnt understand. What was this? What was happening to me? And most urgently, Why wouldnt the pain stop? Unbeknownst to me, I would be asking these same questions for the next four and a half years. This nightmare was just beginning. Its a kind of pain that knocks the wind out of you. When the pain strikes, its sudden, its sharp and it burns as it radiates from the upper, right side of the abdomen to the lower back to the entire right, vertical, side of the back, where it stays for never less than one hour. Its excruciating. And its torture. Meanwhile, finding sufficient medical attention for chronic back pain without evidence of injury has proven to be a special kind of torture in itself. For years, I went to different hospitals, doctors, and specialists in Kenya and none of them knew the cause of the pain. Nose jobs are idolised by those from cultural backgrounds blessed with a birds beak (and football players requiring corrective surgery). They typify the global beauty trend that promotes the need for symmetry in facial proportions. An objective, formulaic approach that creates a standard by which all shapes and colours should abide to fit in, find love, be happy and successful. Calculations for the face. My nickname in high school was big nose. As a mixed-race Italian and Iranian Australian, most of my lived experience has been consumed by not meeting this symmetrical beauty facial ideal. My nickname in high school was big nose. Ive dated girls whove held discussions with their mum (and me) about how Id look better with a new nose. These experiences significantly influence and shape our perception of self and internal narrative. Weve been allocated three branches and been told precisely how we should cut them and where on our biodegradable floral foam we should place them. Weve talked golden ratios and off-centre focal points. The allure of empty space has been thoroughly dissected. You would think, given how little room Dr Shoso Shimbo is leaving for error, our Japanese flower arrangements would be a sure-fire success. But if there is one thing that becomes abundantly clear in this introduction-to-ikebana workshop, it is that even when you follow all the rules, you dont necessarily come up with something thats spare and poetic. Shoso Shimbo with one of his ikebana arrangements made from camellias and flowering quince from his garden Credit:Simon Schluter Making an arrangement that feels right can take years of dedication. The triangular basic style that Shimbo has us fashion is something he has made hundreds of times. He says he has done it until the form of it has become embedded into his very being. Such an approach puts a whole different spin on the ikebana arrangements that are currently finding their way into some of Melbournes most fashionable restaurants and shops. Youre allowed out now, are you? Lucky you! Thats how the immigration officer greeted me upon arrival at Heathrow airport, after I escaped a world-record, 270-day lockdown in Victoria. Although said with light-hearted intentions, I didnt really know how to respond, so I just smiled and made my way to the airport tube station. Today, after almost a year living in the UK as a student of public policy, that moment has lingered with me and caused me to reconsider what the Australian identity really is, as well as the way culture shapes what is considered acceptable government policy. Victorian Premier Dan Andrews held a daily media conference during the states lockdowns. Credit:Penny Stephens With the benefit of an expats perspective, I see that what I once believed to be a tolerant and laid-back shell be right, mate country is a myth. Truth is, Australians are sticklers for rules. They enjoy being governed, enjoy telling others what to do, and attack those who dare deviate from the accepted norm. I worry our cultural fetishisation for rules made us susceptible to a creeping authoritarianism overreach during the pandemic, whether that was by a media who championed certain epidemiologists voices over others, or by premiers who played state one-upmanship with peoples livelihoods. US ambassador Caroline Kennedys arrival was always going to wow Canberra. Daughter of JFK and inspiration behind Neil Diamonds hit Sweet Caroline, Kennedy is the kind of American royalty far too illustrious to be living in the cold capital. But Kennedy by far the highest-profile American ambassador weve ever had is a big enough deal that people come to her, and at a meet and greet on Wednesday, business, political and cultural leaders flocked to the embassy for a chance to kiss the ring. Caroline Kennedy, Peter Dutton and Chris Bowen. Credit:Shakespeare There was a bipartisan smorgasbord of domestic pollies from the government, Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Assistant Foreign Affairs Minister Tim Watts; from the Coalition, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, shadow foreign affairs minister Simon Birmingham, and shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie. A few formers too notably ex-foreign minister Julie Bishop (now chancellor of the Australian National University) and recently retired speaker Tony Smith. The unprovoked stabbing of a much-loved teacher in Sydneys inner west was an extremely rare outburst of homicidal violence from a man receiving close treatment for a mental illness, a coroner has found. Brian Liston, 51, had attended a German lesson on the evening of December 10, 2015 and was waiting for a bus on Salisbury Road in Camperdown when he was confronted by William Cahill, 34, who lived in a unit across the road. Brian Liston was killed in a stabbing at a Camperdown bus stop in December 2015. Cahill, who had a history of chronic treatment-resistant schizophrenia including delusions, thought Mr Liston looked like the family member of a former housemate. He walked out to confront him and stabbed him without warning at about 8.30pm. Multiple passersby attempted to intervene, including a man who kicked Cahill in the back, but Mr Liston died from a stab wound to the heart. Cahill was later found not guilty of murder due to mental illness. The Kings School has been forced to explain planned spending on a plunge pool for the headmasters residence and business-class flights for senior staff to attend a prestigious British rowing regatta. The federal and state governments wrote to the private school following the Heralds reports that a board member quit over plans to fly the headmaster, his wife and deputy to watch students compete at the Henley Royal Regatta, and confirmation the school approved a request by its principal, Tony George, to have a private pool installed. The actions of the government are likely to provoke further scrutiny from parents, who the school previously acknowledged had expressed concern after reports of the UK trip. The Kings School in North Parramatta. Credit:Wolter Peeters A federal Department of Education spokesperson confirmed the government had written to the school reminding them of their obligations under the Australian Education Act regarding the use of recurrent government funding. The owners of the buildings and land of a failed private school in Kilmore have launched a last-ditch bid to try to save it, insisting they support the continuation of the Colmont School and have investors willing to commit funding to keep it alive. But the proposal, understood to involve investors from China, has been rejected by the schools administrators. Colmont School went into voluntary administration last week, leaving hundreds of families scrambling to find a new school. Credit:Justin McManus In their first public statement since the schools shock announcement last week that it would close, leaving hundreds of students just days to find a new school, the landlords said they had put forward an investment proposal that would provide sufficient funding to allow the school to resume full operations. The landlords said they would seek to force out the voluntary administrators, charged with shutting the school, at a scheduled creditors meeting on Friday and replace them with new administrators who would help them to revive it. Politics can make for strange bedfellows. In 1997, when the Catholic conservative federal Liberal MP Kevin Andrews was leading the fight with a private members bill to repeal the Northern Territorys law legalising voluntary euthanasia, Labor MPs were at the time being encouraged to support the bill by Labors leader of the house Tony Burke, who was then executive director of Euthanasia No! Two years earlier, the NT had become the first jurisdiction in the world to legally allow a terminally ill patient to end their life with medical assistance. In September 1996, Bob Dent, who had terminal prostate cancer, became the first person to use the law. Three more people ended their lives legally before the law was nullified by the Howard government, which passed the Euthanasia Laws Act under powers in the Australian Constitution which allow the national government to veto a territory law. Canberra MP Alicia Payne and Solomon MP Luke Gosling have introduced a private members bill to repeal the Andrews bill and allow territories to debate voluntary assisted dying laws. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Twenty-five years on, and Burke has found himself shepherding a new private members bill to a vote. That bill would restore the right of the NT and the ACT to pass laws relating to assisting dying. It passed this week in the House of Representatives 99 votes to 37, and is expected to be voted on in the Senate in September. Not surprisingly, the latest push to repeal the federal law an attempt in 2018 failed to pass the Senate by two votes is being led by Labor MPs Luke Gosling, who holds the Darwin seat of Solomon, and Canberra MP Alicia Payne. Western Australia is massively under-defended against foreign threats compared to the rest of the country, according to state Defence Industry Minister Paul Papalia. Papalias comments came after the Albanese government announced an urgent review of the nations defence amid fears $44.6 billion in annual spending is not doing enough to prepare the country for growing threats to its security. WA Defence Industry Minister Paul Papalia said more troops were needed in the states north-west to safeguard resources assets. Credit:Getty Images The review, to be led by former Labor defence minister Stephen Smith and former defence force chief Sir Angus Houston, will take place as the government considers pivotal decisions on nuclear submarines, a fleet of guided-missile destroyers and plans to build a bigger army. Papalia argued more army assets needed to be based in Perth and the states north-west to protect the nations mining assets. Labor and the Greens are on a collision course on the future of coal and gas, despite a historic agreement on laws to cut greenhouse gas emissions, setting up a new clash over urgent reforms to existing laws protecting the environment. At a press conference shortly after Labors historic Climate Change Bill passed the lower house 89 votes to 55, Greens leader Adam Bandt lashed the Albanese governments 43 per cent emissions reduction target as weak. Greens leader Adam Bandt speaks during the debate over amendments to the governments Climate Change Bill. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The Greens are demanding Labor insert a so-called climate trigger in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. This trigger would require all fossil fuel projects to be assessed on their contribution to global warming, likely blocking approvals for new coal and gas developments. You cant put the fire out if youre pouring petrol on it, you cant fix the problem if youre making the problem worse, Bandt said on Thursday. Genetic genealogy websites are being used by law enforcement agencies to help solve missing person cases as scientists tap into new technologies to help unmask some of Australias 750 unidentified remains. Scientists at the Australian Federal Police National Missing Persons Coordination Centre say online DNA collection databases have the potential to help solve cases here after successfully helping decode hundreds of remains in other countries including the US. Jodie Ward, associate professor at the National Missing Persons Coordination Centre. Many of these cases date back to the 50s and 60s ... so time is against us, Associate Professor Jodie Ward said. Opening up the field of possible comparison samples to the general public, using these genetic genealogy databases, gives us this global reach weve never had before. The federal government is considering strengthening privacy laws to tackle the social media service TikTok after the UK parliament closed its official account, decrying the Chinese-owned platform as a data harvester. A group of British MPs who had been sanctioned by Beijing had pushed to shut down the account, which had been set up in a bid to engage more young people in the countrys democratic process. A man opens social media app 'Tik Tok' on his cell phone. Credit:AP In Australia, the Department of Home Affairs is considering all options to address data use concerns about TikTok and other social media firms, with a spokesman saying current laws did not give Australians confidence their data was being protected. When it comes to ensuring the privacy, safety and security of Australians, every option is on the table, the spokesman said, noting the ongoing review of the Privacy Act and a national data security action plan. Others not associated with the work were similarly astonished. Its unbelievable, mind blowing, said Nita Farahany, a Duke law professor who studies ethical, legal and social implications of emerging technologies. And, Farahany added, the work raises questions about the definition of death. We presume death is a thing, it is a state of being, she said. Are there forms of death that are reversible, or not? The work began a few years ago when the group did a similar experiment with brains from dead pigs from a slaughterhouse. Four hours after the pigs died, the group infused a solution similar to OrganEx that they called BrainEx and saw that brain cells that should be dead could be revived. That led them to ask if they could revive an entire body, said Dr Zvonimir Vrselja, another member of the Yale team. The OrganEx solution contained nutrients, anti-inflammatory medications, drugs to prevent cell death, nerve blockers substances that dampen the activity of neurons and prevented any possibility of the pigs regaining consciousness and an artificial haemoglobin mixed with each animals own blood. Loading When they treated the dead pigs, the investigators took precautions to make sure the animals did not suffer. The pigs were anaesthetised before they were killed by stopping their hearts, and the deep anaesthesia continued throughout the experiment. In addition, the nerve blockers in the OrganEx solution stop nerves from firing to ensure the brain was not active. The researchers also chilled the animals to slow chemical reactions. Individual brain cells were alive, but there was no indication of any organised global nerve activity in the brain. There was one startling finding: the pigs treated with OrganEx jerked their heads when the researchers injected an iodine contrast solution for imaging. Latham emphasised that while the reason for the movement was not known, there was no indication of any involvement of the brain. Yale has filed for a patent on the technology. The next step, Sestan said, will be to see if the organs function properly and could be successfully transplanted. Sometime after that, the researchers hope to test whether the method can repair damaged hearts or brains. The journal Nature asked two independent experts to write commentaries about the study. In one, Dr Robert Porte, a transplant surgeon at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, discussed the possible use of the system to expand the pool of organs available for transplant. Loading In a telephone interview, he explained that OrganEx might in the future be used in situations in which patients are not brain-dead but brain-injured to the extent that life support is futile. In most countries, Porte said, there is a five-minute no touch policy after the respirator is turned off and before transplant surgeons remove organs. But, he said, before you rush to the [operating room], additional minutes will pass by, and by that time, organs can be so damaged as to be unusable. And sometimes patients do not die immediately when life support is ceased, but their hearts beat too feebly for their organs to stay healthy. In most countries, transplant teams wait two hours for patients to die, Porte said. Then, he added, if the patient is not yet dead, they do not try to retrieve organs. As a result, 50-60 per cent of patients who died after life support was ceased and whose families wanted to donate their organs could not be donors. If OrganEx could revive those organs, Porte said, the effect would be huge a vast increase in the number of organs available for transplant. The other comment was by Brendan Parent, a lawyer and ethicist who is director of transplant ethics and policy research at New York Universitys Grossman School of Medicine. In a telephone interview, he discussed what he said were tricky questions around life and death that OrganEx raises. By the accepted medical and legal definition of death, these pigs were dead, Parent said. But, he added, a critical question is: what function and what kind of function would change things? Would the pigs still be dead if the group did not use nerve blockers in its solution and their brains functioned again? That would create ethical problems if the goal was to preserve organs for transplant and the pigs regained some degree of consciousness during the process. But restoring brain functions could be the goal if the patient had had a severe stroke or was a drowning victim. If we are going to get this technology to a point where it can help people, we will have to see what happens in the brain without nerve blockers, Parent said. In his opinion, the method would eventually have to be tried on people who could benefit, like stroke or drowning victims. But that would require a lot of deliberation by ethicists, neurologists and neuroscientists. How we get there is going to be a critical question, Parent said. When does the data we have justify making this jump? Loading Another issue is the implication OrganEx might have for the definition of death. If OrganEx continues to show that the length of time after blood and oxygen deprivation before which cells cannot recover is much longer than previously thought, then there has to be a change in the time when it is determined that a person is dead. Angelica Ross (Pose, American Horror Story) will make her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago, performing for eight weeks only, September 12-November 6. Ross will be the first transgender woman to perform the role on Broadway. Ross is best known for her role as Candy from the Ryan Murphy series Pose, which followed New York City's Black and Latino LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming ballroom culture scene in the '80s and early '90s. She went on to appear in the ninth season of Murphy's FX hit American Horror Story: 1984 and the double feature 10th season as The Chemist in part 1 and Theta in part 2. Set amid the razzle-dazzle decadence of the 1920s, Chicago is the story of Roxie Hart, a housewife and nightclub dancer who murders her on-the-side lover after he threatens to walk out on her. Desperate to avoid conviction, she dupes the public, the media and her rival cellmate, Velma Kelly, by hiring Chicago's slickest criminal lawyer to transform her malicious crime into a barrage of sensational headlines, the likes of which might just as easily be ripped from today's tabloids. Chicago features a book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, music by John Kander, and lyrics by Fred Ebb. Directed Walter Bobbie and choreographed by Ann Reinking, this revival of has been playing on Broadway since 1996 and is one of the longest-running Broadway productions in history. The picture taken on August 1, 2022 shows the scene of launching ceremony of the special project themed Helping out Veterans in Difficulty held in Beijing. BEIJING, Aug. 4 -- China's Ministry of Veterans Affairs (MVA), the China Charity Federation, China Life Insurance Company Ltd., China Aging Development Foundation, and China Veterans Support Foundation, jointly held a ceremony in Beijing to mark the launching of the special project themed "Helping out Veterans in Difficulty" on August 1, the Army Day. The special project targets veterans who have special living difficulties, ever made outstanding contributions to national defense and the armed forces, and are active in spreading positive energy in ordinary positions, as well as their families. The total value of assistance funds and materials exceeds RMB 120 million, and it is expected that there will be a million veterans benefiting from the project. It is learned that in recent years, the veterans affairs departments at all levels across China have mobilized all parties to participate in the efforts of helping out the veterans in difficulty. A total of nearly 10 billion yuan has been raised through multiple channels with 32 million veterans becoming the beneficiaries. The veterans enjoy a growing sense of fulfillment, happiness and honor. On the same day, the Ministry of Veterans Affairs also held a ceremony to accept a donation of RMB 20 million from China Rongtong Asset Management Group to the China Veterans Support Foundation. It is learnt that the donation will be mainly used for assisting and supporting families of martyrs in need and repairing martyrs memorials. Federal court cites human health, climate costs in rejecting massive Wyoming, Montana coal mining plan A federal judge late yesterday struck down two U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) resource management plans that failed to address the public health consequences of allowing massive amounts of coal, oil, and gas production from public lands and minerals in the Powder River Basin, including approximately 6 billion tons of low-grade, highly polluting coal over 20 years. The Biden administration had defended the Trump-era resource management plans (RMPs) in the court proceedings. The court ordered the BLM to redo its analysis a second time. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris ruled that BLM failed to comply with a previous court order directing the agency to account for the environmental and human health impacts of burning publicly owned coal. The judge also held that BLM failed to consider alternatives that would limit or end new coal leasing in the Powder River Basinthe largest coal-producing region in the U.S.in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. The Bureau of Land Management is singularly focused on propping up the dying coal industry at the expense of its legal obligations to consider public health and the climate, said Melissa Hornbein, a senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. That a federal judge ordered the Bureau to consider a no-leasing alternative and disclose to the public how many people will be sickened and die as a result of the combustion of federal coal is groundbreaking. The courts recognize the seriousness of the climate crisis and the impacts of fossil-fuel pollution. The BLM must now do likewise. The Buffalo and Miles City RMPs designate how much federal coal can be mined and burned within the planning areas. Almost all coal mined in the region is used for electricity production, making the region the largest single-source of carbon dioxide pollution in the nation. More than 43% of all coal produced in the U.S., andmore than 85% of all federal coal produced in the U.S., comes from the Powder River Basin, which stretches more than 13 million acres across Montana and Wyoming. "Put simply, [the National Environmental Policy Act] requires BLM to bookend its analysis by considering a no-future-leasing alternative and at least one alternative that further reduce[s] leasing by reducing the potential for expansion," Judge Morris wrote. "Coal mining represents a potentially allowable use of public lands, but BLM is not required to lease public lands. The multiple use mandate does not bar BLM from considering a no-leasing alternative for public lands. In 2018, the U.S. District Court for the District of Montanaordered the Trump administrations BLM to revise its land management plans for the Miles City and Buffalo Field Offices. The judge ruled that the agency failed to consider an alternative that reduced the amount of coal available for strip-mining, failed to disclose potential harm from fossil fuel combustion and failed to disclose the short-term climate harm of methane emissions. In 2020, BLM responded to the courts order by revising its analysis but again failed to consider alternatives that would reduce or eliminate additional coal leasing, to account for climate change and to disclose or analyze the human health impacts of the harmful and toxic non-greenhouse gas pollutants that would result from burning more coal, oil, and gas. The tragedy is that this litigation didnt need to happen. Seven years ago BLM promised the American people an open and honest conversation about the federal coal program, said Lynne Huskinson, retired coal miner and board member of the Powder River Basin Resource Council and Western Organization of Resource Councils from Gillette, Wyoming. But were still waiting for them to do an honest analysis of the climate and public health consequences of their choices. Maybe now BLM will finally wake up. As Montana and Wyoming deal with the impacts of more frequent and more severe droughts, flooding, and heat waves due to climate change, this ruling is especially welcome, said Joanie Kresich, chair of Northern Plains Resource Council. We are pleased that the court has upheld the law. BLM will have to fully consider climate pollution when it makes decisions about our region's public lands and minerals. We have an obligation to provide a healthy climate to our children and grandchildren, and this ruling helps make that possible." This ruling is a forceful, welcome recognition of the dangers of fossil-fuel extraction to people and the planet, said Taylor McKinnon with the Center for Biological Diversity. Its horrifying that federal lawsuits are required to force the Biden administration to even consider ending fossil-fuel leasing or accounting for its massive climate damage. Climate pollution from federal fossil fuels is torching forests, drying the Colorado River, and pushing endangered species closer to extinction. It has to end. "What's great about this ruling is the court didn't just stop at requiring BLM to assess other uses of our public lands. It requires BLM to fully analyze and disclose all impacts from mining and burning fossil fuels taken from our public lands," saidConnie Wilbert, director of Sierra Club Wyoming. Its well past time for BLM to be honest with the American people about the climate impacts that bring devastating wildfires, heat waves, and flooding, as well as the tremendous toll on human health caused by burning fossil fuels from public lands. This ruling will shine a bright light into this dark corner of the fossil fuel industry. This ruling is a shameful confirmation that the Biden administration has no real interest in defending public lands or the climate, said Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians. Thankfully the courts are upholding law and science, but its sad that President Biden is allowing his administration to undermine his promises to protect our health and our climate. The Bureau of Land Managements blinkered allegiance to fossil fuels must end, said Shiloh Hernandez, senior attorney at Earthjustice. Air pollution from coal kills thousands of people in the U.S. every year and sickens many more. This ruling will require the Bureau to be honest with the public about the massive climate and human health toll from our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Once again, the Bureau of Land Management has failed to adequately analyze or consider the enormous consequences of continuing to permit fossil-fuel extraction on public lands and the resulting contribution to the climate crisis, stated Derf Johnson, deputy director of the Montana Environmental Information Center. Its well past time for the BLM to fully plan for an end to fossil fuel development on public lands, and thankfully this ruling moves us toward that reality. Once again, the plaintiffs were represented in the litigation by Melissa Hornbein at Western Environmental Law Center, Shiloh Hernandez at Earthjustice, and Nathaniel Shoaff at Sierra Club. Taliban fighters patrol on the back of a vehicle along a road in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on March 15, 2022. (Javed Tanveer/AFP via Getty Images) 2 Police Killed in Clash With ISIS Gunmen in Afghan Capital ISLAMABADA gunbattle in Afghanistans capital of Kabul left at least five people dead Wednesday, including two Taliban police and three ISIS terrorist group gunmen, a Taliban official said. Khalid Zadran, the Taliban spokesman for the Kabul police chief, said police had launched an operation against the gunmens hideout, killing at least three in the Karti Sakhi neighborhood in western Kabul. He said the gunmen were ISIS group fighters. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. One of the police officers killed was a woman, said Zardan. He said four Taliban police were wounded and one gunman was arrested. The regional affiliate of ISIS, known as the ISIS in Khorasan Province, has increased attacks on mosques and minorities across the country. It has been operating in the country since 2014. ISIS is seen as the greatest security challenge facing the countrys Taliban rulers. Since the Taliban seized power in Kabul and elsewhere in the country last August, the Taliban have launched a sweeping crackdown against the ISIS headquarters in eastern Afghanistan. Wednesdays gunbattle took place near the Sakhi shrine in the minority Shiite neighborhood where people were busy preparing for the upcoming Ashura holiday. Ashura is the 10th day of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic lunar calendar. By Rahim Faiez Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault hold a press conference at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 2, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick) Canadas Long March to Sustainable Development News Analysis Canadas pursuit of the United Nations sustainable development goals has made headlines in recent months, but the roots of its participation go back 50 years. Beyond the better-known aspects, such as reducing carbon emissions, are a wide range of social and economic goals lumped together with environmental ones. The United Nations first brought international attention to the environment and economy at its Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. Canadas National Task Force on Environment and Economy was launched in 1986, and its recommendations led to formation of Canadas Green Plan in 1990. The U.N.s Agenda 21, the first comprehensive global blueprint for sustainable development, was adopted by over 178 countries including Canada at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, in Brazil in 1992. The Federal Sustainable Development Act of 2008 requires the environment minister to report on Canadas progress in implementing the Federal Sustainable Development Strategy (FSDS) at least once every three years. In 2010, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, first signed by Canada in 1992, committed to setting aside 17 percent of the worlds land within protected areas by 2020. In 2013, the U.N. General Assembly established the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, which include Canada as a member, to do further work on Agenda 21. In September 2015, one month before the election of the Trudeau Liberals, Canada and all of the other 192 U.N. member states adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which has 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) at its core. The title of the federal webpage Explore our 17 goals suggests that the government has fully made the U.N.s goals its own. In December 2015, Canada sent a delegation of 383 people to the U.N. climate conference in Parismore than Australia, the UK, and the United States combined. It remains a federal goal for Canadas delegations to the U.N. High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development to include representatives from all levels of government, indigenous partners, civil society, academia, and youth. In 2020, the Federal Sustainable Development Act was amended to broaden the focus by adding social and economic factors and to promote greater federal collaboration. It increased the number of federal organizations that must contribute to advancing the 17 SDGs by developing and reporting on their own departmental sustainable development strategies. The current draft FSDS for 20222026 includes contributions from 99 federal organizations. In 2021, Canada and 50 other countries agreed to set aside 30 percent of their land and oceans within protected areas by 2030, a goal that convention signatories are expected to adopt at the upcoming CBD conference in Montreal in December. Billions Spent on UN Goals The Canada Child Benefit was introduced in 2016 as part of SDG 1, No Poverty. The CCB now pays eligible families up to $6,997 per child under 6 and $5,903 per child aged 6 to 17. In 2018, the feds published Canadas first national poverty reduction strategy, saying that it brings together new investments of $22 billion that the government has made since 2015. In 2018, through the SDGs Funding Program, the government committed up to $59.8 million over 13 years to support programs that aim to raise awareness and further the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Beneficiaries included not-for-profit groups, municipalities, provinces and territories, and universities and colleges, among others. The Canadian Gender Budgeting Act of 2018 mandated consideration of gender equality and diversity for all aspects of federal budgeting, fulfilling SDG 5, Gender Equality. A federal report on Climate Change and Gender in Canada highlighted activists and academics such as one specializing in Feminist geography in the North. In 2019, the Rainbow Refugee Assistance Partnership was launched to bring in LGBTQ2 refugees. Goal 10, Reduced Inequalities, was helped by the federally funded Black Entrepreneurship Program in 2021. That year, the Liberals also pledged $18 billion for indigenous communities and $40 billion to compensate First Nations children harmed by the underfunding of child and family services on reserves. A 2021 publication by Canadas SDG Unit on the countrys 2030 Agenda National Strategy, titled Moving Forward Together, says embedding indigenous rights must occur at a whole-of-society level. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, signed by Canada in 2018, fulfills Goal 10s Target 10.7. It lumps political refugees and economic immigrants together under the category of migrants, giving them the same rights as citizens in some respects. A study by MigrationPolicy.org estimated that nearly 50,000 asylum seekers entered Canada irregularly via land crossing from the United States, mostly via Roxham Road along the New York-Quebec border, over a two-year period beginning spring 2017. Goal 9 aims to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation, while Goal 11 aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. To advance these goals, Canada adopted the New Urban Agenda at the U.N. 2016 Habitat III Summit. In 2019, the federal, provincial, and territorial governments formed the Emergency Management Strategy for Canada: Toward a Resilient 2030, to tackle disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. In 2021, Canada joined the international Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure. A subset of Goal 11 is sustainable transport, which includes expanding public transport. Last year, a permanent public transit fund was launched to that end. Another new fund was formed the same year, under Canadas National Active Transportation Strategy, to build new and expanded networks of pathways, bike lanes, trails, and pedestrian bridges. Every Part of Civil Society Canadas 2021 Moving Forward Together strategy paper explained that the 17 SDGs at the heart of the 2030 Agenda have 169 targets measured by over 230 indicators. It says theres a place for every institution, every part of civil society, every level of government, every Indigenous community, and every individual to contribute to achieving the SDGs. Canadas Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) page estimates that for each additional child born to a woman between the ages of 25 and 39, labour participation decreases by 10 to 15 percent. In 2019, Canada committed $1.4 billion annually for 10 years, starting in 2023, to promote the health and rights of women and girls abroad. This includes making sure women and girls around the world have access to the quality health services they need, including safe and legal abortion. Half of the annual investment was designated for SRHR in partnership with organizations such as the UN Population Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Family Planning 2030. Moving Forward Together says Canadas Feminist Foreign Policy supports an enabling environment for the SDGs. The SRHR page adds that a comprehensive approach to SRHR also means looking beyond health services to address the gendered inequalities, discriminatory social norms and institutional structures that limit the promotion of SRHR. However, the feds also endeavour to change their own citizens values. In 2021, the Privy Council Offices Impact and Innovation Unit launched a multi-year Program of Applied Research on Climate Action in Canada that would use behavioural science insights and methods to promote climate action. The effort promises to research how Canadians think, feel and act in response to climate change and the risks it creates. We will then develop and test, online and in the real world, specific behaviourally-informed solutions with the potential to reduce GHG emissions and promote climate adaptation at the individual and community level, the programs overview says. In fulfillment of Goal 4, Quality Education, the draft FSDS 2022 to 2026 document states, Effective climate change education is fundamental to overcoming climate denial, increasing climate literacy and supporting climate action. The Canada Climate Change and Education report, released in 2019, showed that 43 percent of school divisions had already participated in a sustainability certification program and 25 percent had sustainability staff. Net Zero In May 2020, Canada joined Jamaica and the U.N. secretary-general to lead the Initiative on Financing for the Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond. In 2021, Canada made a $5.3 billion commitment over five years to help developing countries fight climate change, doubling its $2.65 billion 20152021 international climate finance commitment. At home, the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act of 2021 formalized Canadas target of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. The act says Canada must lower its emissions by 4045 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 as its contribution under the Paris Agreement. The draft FSDS 2022 to 2026 document, released by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault in March, sets various targets for 2024, 2025, and 2026 to establish electric charging stations, hydrogen fuel facilities, natural gas stations, biomass supply chains, and stricter building codes. By 2030, 90 percent of Canadas electricity is expected to come from renewable and non-emitting sources. The government will consult on the development of a Clean Electricity Standard that would help achieve a net-zero clean electricity grid by 2035. Clean electricity production must advance rapidly to meet demand, given that Canada signed the Global Memorandum of Understanding for Zero-Emission Medium- and Heavy-Duty Vehicles (ZE-MHDVs) in 2021. Parties committed to working together to enable such vehicles to reach 30 percent of sales of new MHDVs by 2030, and 100 percent by 2040. In July, the federal government announced another round of consultations on plans to lower GHG emissions from fertilizer use to 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. The idea was first proposed in the December 2020 document A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy. A 2021 report by Meyers Norris Penny commissioned by Fertilizer Canada found that reduced fertilizer use would result in lower yields and cost growers $48 billion in lost farm income over the next eight years. Ad Pleading for Doctor Results in Multiple Offers, Hundreds of Messages From Canadians With No Family Physician Janet Mort bought a newspaper ad in a desperate plea to get a doctor for her ailing husband Michael. A helpful doctor and hundreds of Canadians in the same plight respondedincluding some in Morts own family. The Brentwood Bay resident in the Victoria, B.C., area placed her ad on page A2 in the July 30 issue of the Times Colonist. Wanted: Licensed medical doctor for prescription renewal. Urgent! Please? read the ad. We need a doctors help to renew my 82-year-old husbands prescriptions. We will agree to any reasonable fee: Michael is worth it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Canada Proud (@wearecanadaproud) The Epoch Times interviewed Janet Mort to find out how her ad had worked out. Weve accepted one doctor gratefully. There were up to five doctors in the local area who were anonymously willing to take Michael on as a patient. And I say anonymously, because theyre afraid that their name will get out there and that therell be a horde of people standing in the hallway, Mort said. What Ive discovered through this process is, this is an endemic. This is a serious, serious issue. Mort said she knew her 59-year-old son and his wife have not had a family doctor for five years, but since placing her ad, other family members have confessed similar problems, including her 30-year-old granddaughter who also lives in the Victoria area. She said, Grandma, I heard you on the news last night. I went to see my doctor yesterday with the two kids. My doctor told me shes moving and she wont be here in two months. Im not going to have a doctor. And one of her kids is autistic, and needs ongoing medical support, Mort said. My brother called me this morning from Quebec. Hes 81. The first thing he said was, Janet Mort, can I just ask you to change what youre saying in all of these media interviews? Could you start saying Canada instead of B.C. because Ive been living in Quebec for 15 years and I dont know if you know it, I have not been able to get a family doctor in Quebec and I commute to Toronto, to my old family doctor, when I need help. I was stunned. I didnt know that. Another Project Mort is a former school principal who sought answers to why some students had such poor literacy. She was part of the Sullivan Royal Commission and became superintendent of educational innovation for the province of B.C. to implement the recommendations the commission made. Mission accomplished, she pursued a PhD in early learning at age 60. In 2020, Janet Mort, PhD, was awarded the Order of B.C. for her work, though reception of the award was delayed until this past March due to the pandemic. Im chuckling because I got a call from my 94-year-old godmother who Im named after. Im Janet Nadine Morton, shes Nadine. I just finished an app for literacy, and Ive written numerous books. And she keeps counselling me to slow down, as my mother would have, she said. Last night, she phoned [and said], Janet Nadine Mort, have you started another project? I just saw you on Windsor TV. I cant escape. So yes, I do have something I want to say and I hope I have another minute to say it. Family Physician The Morts have had no doctor since their physician of 15 years retired at the age of 75 last Christmas. Janet Mort says, he saved Michaels life many times. Michaels been in critical medical care since he had brain surgery in his late 50s. And they literally took his brain out of the skull. One neurosurgeon held it, while the other one repaired the damage inside. It wasnt actually his brain, it was around the skull that has become infected. So, Michael experiences many different [things] from seizures to heart issues related to that surgery, she said. I have been Michaels caregiver for 15 years in our home. I feel incredibly responsible for whether he lives or dies. And I want him. Were married for 51 years. I think this situation could cut his life shorter, much shorter than it might have been, unless somebody acts. And now Ive got a family doctor who will now take on these bigger issues. Ad in Paper Mort said her advertisements reach was magnified many times over by reposts on social media. The doctor she chose said that was what made the difference. [The doctor saw] six social media posts [about the ad], and she said, By the sixth one, I just felt moved that I had to take [Michael], Mort said. Mort posted her husbands email address on the ad, something that allowed many public responses. Im getting phone calls from people that I havent seen for 15 years saying, I dont have a doctor, either. I have hundreds of emails now. The stories are very sad and very frightening. And you know what? Were not talking about it. This is Canada, she said. New Cause Mort says her recent experience has given her a new cause. Im going to do something. We as citizens need to start demanding what we need, we wont do it the way some Americans have. [We have] to do it our way, she said. We need to start thinking about the service in a different way. We need to take it apart and start with some new thinking and build a new one that doesnt rely on the old one and make it work. A poll worker sorts ballots in a file photo taken in Arizona. (Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images) Arizona County Suffers Widespread Shortage of Ballots: Election Officials Officials in Pinal County, Arizona, said there was a shortage of ballots at more than 20 voting sites during the primary election this week, which left some voters without the ability to cast votes. On Tuesday evening, Pinal Countys election agency confirmed the shortage and suggested that people use an express vote device instead. Due to unprecedented demand for in-person ballots, Pinal County has experienced a ballot shortage in certain, limited precincts. Pinal County is continuing to print additional ballots and distributing them to each affected precinct polling place, county officials wrote in a Twitter post. It later added that you can choose to use the express vote device located at the polling place, or as long as you are physically in line at 7:00 pm today, you will be permitted to cast a ballot, noting that people who arrive after 7 p.m. are not permitted to vote. Pinal County is continuing to print additional ballots and distributing them to each affected precinct polling place, the election office said. Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer and Jeffrey McClure, chair of the Board of Supervisors, issued a joint statement to FOX10 saying it was a major screw-up but McClure claimed he has not seen evidence of a nefarious act. Instead, he termed the shortage as mistakes made on a grand scale. About two dozen sites in Pinal County experienced shortages in ballots, officials told the station. Were all human. Weve all screwed up. Theres nothing sinister. It wasnt as if we said, Hey, this is only going to impact a Republican, or this is only going to impact a Democrat. This was widespread, it was equal opportunity, it was just simply a mistake, Volkmer said during a news conference a day later, adding that about 750 out of 50,000 voters may have been affected. Quite frankly, we underestimated the number of people wanting to show up in person, Volkmer asserted. There were more people who showed up than we thought were going to show up. Elaborating on the ballot fracas, McClure said officials on Tuesday opened the boxes and there werent enough ballots. Were not really quite clear how that occurred, he said in a Wednesday news conference. Criticism But the incident is drawing the scrutiny of national Republican organizations, including the Republican National Committee and its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel. During Arizonas primary elections, the RNC and Republican Party of Arizonas poll observer program documented and reported multiple failures by Pinal Countys Elections Administrator, including 63,000 mail-in ballots delivered to the wrong voters and multiple Republican-heavy precinct locations running out of ballots, McDaniel said in a statement. This is a comprehensive failure that disenfranchises Arizonans and exemplifies why Republican-led efforts for transparency at the ballot box are so important. Pinal County Elections Director David Frisk should resign immediately. Republican state Rep. John Fillmore said that such errors will further imperil voters faith in the electoral system amid widespread allegations of fraud after the 2020 election. Why the hell was the county not prepared for people showing up at the polls, Fillmore said at a news conference this week, reported local media. There has to be a change in the administration, in the people running the elections. U.S. Army Maj. Samuel Sigoloff in an undated picture. (Courtesy of Samuel Sigoloff) Army Officer Deemed a Possible Threat After Refusing to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine A U.S. Army officer was deemed a possible threat, according to newly disclosed emails. Maj. Samuel Sigoloff, a doctor, was ordered to stop seeing patients earlier this year after granting exemptions to the militarys COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Sigoloff has attempted to leave the force but the Army has refused to process his resignation, according to his lawyer. On Aug. 1, Sigoloff was sent an email from David Prince, a plans officer at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Four other officers were also sent the message. ALCON, Here is some information on the subject of tomorrows Threat Working Group, Prince wrote. The subject was Sigoloff, according to the missive, which was reviewed by The Epoch Times. Why are they having a meeting about a doctor being a threat when hes not made any threats? That doesnt make any sense, Sean Timmons of Tully Rinckey, who is representing the major, told The Epoch Times. Timmons thinks the message was meant to signal to Sigoloff that the military is focusing on him for what hes done. Theyve been so frustrated by his exposure of the corruption that theyre now engaged in Hail Mary desperation and reprisal through intimidation, he said. A spokeswoman for Fort Huachuca told The Epoch Times in an email: In an abundance of concern, the U.S. Army frequently assesses situations in order to ensure the health and welfare of its Soldiers, families and team members. At this time Maj. Sigoloff has not been deemed a threat. Asked what situation arose in this instance, she said that Sigoloff is under a lot of stress. Prince did not respond to a request for comment. Additional Messages Sigoloff responded to Prince and the others, telling them that he needed more information about the meeting in order to attend. I will be standing by for the time and place. Thank you for the invite, he wrote. Frederick Ubungen, another officer, said that the meeting would be at a certain building but indicated it might not happen because a key participant in the threat group was traveling. I must not have been on the email that said the meeting was going to be rescheduled. Please let me know when the new meeting will take place so that I can help. In the meantime I would be happy to answer questions. I, like you, always want to help uphold our oath to protect the Constitution, Sigoloff later wrote to the group. Timmons said he spoke with a person at the base who said that when the meeting was being set up, Prince likely inserted Sigoloffs email to make sure he was spelling Sigoloffs name correctly, and forgot to remove it before he clicked send. That doesnt pass the smell test to me, Timmons said. He believes what has unfolded is illegal, since Sigoloff has served in a whistleblower capacity for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). The fort spokeswoman said it was unclear whether the meeting was ultimately held and whether Sigoloff was intentionally included in the message. Update: This story has been updated with comments from the fort spokeswoman. Australian Health Advisers Recommend Against COVID-19 Vaccination for Healthy Babies, Toddlers A group of experts that advises the Australian government on vaccination policy recommended on Aug. 3 against COVID-19 vaccination for all children under 5, except for those with serious underlying conditions. The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) issued its findings after analyzing clinical trial data and taking into account how healthy children who get COVID-19 face little risk of experiencing severe illness. The group is recommending COVID-19 vaccination for children aged 6 months to 4 years if the children have type 1 diabetes, chronic neurological conditions, Down Syndrome, or other serious conditions that increase the risk of severe COVID-19. But the panel said children without the conditions should not get a vaccine. These children have a very low likelihood of severe illness from COVID-19, they said in a position statement. The new guidance was based on data that show children are much less likely to experience severe COVID-19 symptoms than older populations, the substandard efficacy shown in Modernas clinical trial for young children, the high rate of fever recorded in trial participants following vaccination, and the lack of evidence that vaccination would have an effect on the transmission of COVID-19. Australias Therapeutic Goods Administration in July provisionally approved Modernas vaccine for the young age group. Children who do get a shot should be administered the primary series of two doses, spaced eight weeks apart, the advisory panel said. The new guidance runs counter to the ATAGIs previous recommendations. It has advised all Australians aged 5 years and older to get a vaccine. 500,000 Doses Half a million doses have been ordered by the Australian government, Health Minister Mark Butler told reporters in Canberra. He stressed that vaccinations would not begin for the babies and toddlers with serious conditions until September, and encouraged parents to consult with healthcare professionals. [delete] Given that theres quite a limited cohort here of children who are particularly vulnerable to severe illness, were confident that there will be a reasonable uptake but this obviously is a matter for parents to decide, Butler said. And I encourage them if they have any questions to consult with their treating medical practitioners, he added. Similar to other countries, Australia has seen lower uptake among youth than adults. Only 40 percent of children aged 5 to 11 have received a primary series. Data Modernas clinical trial for children under the age of 5 was based on the immune response triggered in children. Because the vaccine prompted a response similar to that recorded in adults in 2020, the company said the vaccine was effective. The companys vaccine, though, like other COVID-19 shots, has proven increasingly unable to prevent infection in the real world as new variants emerge, and the trial estimate of efficacy against infection was under 50 percent for children under 5 years old. U.S. regulators in 2020 set the efficacy threshold at 50 percent, a mark that has also been put forth by the World Health Organization. The trial was also unable to estimate the protection against severe disease, because none of the children, vaccinated or unvaccinated, experienced a severe case. The lower the risk to you, the more youve got to show benefit from any vaccines. And what I thought was a bit disconcerting about that data, Dr. Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician at Canberra Hospital, told The Epoch Times when the results were announced. My overall view generally, was that for any vaccine to get approved, it had to have a 50 percent efficacy. Well, that was for adults. So in my mind, the bar for children should be higher than that, because their risk is so much lower. The United States in June became one of the first countries in the world to grant clearance to vaccines for babies and toddlers, authorizing and recommending the Moderna and Pfizer shots for virtually all children aged 6 months to 4 years. U.S. authorities say the vaccine helps protect recipients against COVID-19. Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton MP reacts during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on July 28, 2022. (Martin Ollman/Getty Images) Australian Opposition Leader Gives Go Ahead for Party to Develop Nuclear Policy Australias opposition leader Peter Dutton has opened the door for the Liberal-National Coalition to put nuclear energy on the table as a policy going forwarda proposal previously panned by Energy Minister Chris Bowen as the most expensive form of energy. An internal process will be run to examine the potential for advanced and next-generation nuclear technologies and chaired by Ted OBrien, the shadow minister for climate change and energy, who will then submit the report to the Coalition policy committee. OBrien has long advocated for nuclear energy. It is high time that Australia had an honest and informed debate on the benefits and costs of nuclear energy, Dutton said in a statement. The current energy crisis has shown the importance of getting more dispatchable power into the grid. The average wholesale electricity price in the second quarter this year was three times higher than the same time a year agoa situation described by the Australian Energy Market Operator as unprecedented.' While Dutton said renewable energy sources had a role in Australias energy mix, it needed to be balanced with investment in dispatchable energy generators. He said that based on current trends around 60 percent of Australias coal-fired generators would be closed by 2030, which could leave households and businesses vulnerable to blackouts. Nuclear energy is a mature, proven technology. It can provide the reliable, emissions-free, base-load electricity Australia needs. Estimates show that it would cost the world US$1.6 trillion more to meet the Paris targets without nuclear energy. The opposition leader also pointed to existing nuclear research already being conducted at Lucas Heights in Sydney as something to build upon, further pointing to the United Kingdoms plans to increase nuclear generation. Climate Change Action in the Pipeline His position comes as the federal Labor government pushes to legislate a hard emissions reduction target into law with the support of the left-wing Australian Greens. The focus of the Climate Change Bill 2022 is to set a 43 percent emissions reduction target by 2030, up from the previous target under the Morrison government of 26-28 percent. The implications of the Bill will see the federal government look to overhaul the energy grid so that it is predominantly supported by renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, hydro, and potentially backed up by battery storage and gas. Currently, around 64.67 percent of Australias energy grid is powered by coal-fired generation. However, Energy Minister Bowen has been reticent to throw his support behind coal and nuclear power generation. Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy. We have a cost of living crisis, energy prices going through the roof, and whats [the oppositions] big bright idea? Lets have the most expensive form of energy we can possibly think of. Cheap Fares Are Out There If You Shop Wisely Along with the cost of everything else, airline prices have risen considerably in recent months. With airline ticket prices so high right now, it seems like the day of cheap air fares is gone, making it difficult for some people to travel. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index, flight prices rose 18.6 percent between March and April 2022 and then increased another 12.6 percent from April to May of 2022. Prices saw a slight drop going into June. The good news is that low-cost air fares are still available, if youre willing to search for them. Instead of buying tickets from the first travel agency ad you seeor directly from an airline websitehere are some tips on how to get a cheaper price. Fares To Remain High Through the Summer Summertime is generally the peak season for air travel. And this summer, after staying home for so long, it seems people are trying to make up for lost time. This rush to travel has enabled many planes to fly at near full capacity. People seem willing to pay the higher air ticket prices. And as long as people continue paying the current prices you can probably expect them to remain high. Once summer is over, though, and airlines start having a harder time finding travelers, you will likely find that prices have dropped againmaking air travel more affordable. Good News for Fall Travel This Year If you want to travel by air this fall, here is some good news. Even before the end of summer, you may find that airline ticket prices are lower than they have been. Readers Digest reports that the lowest prices for fall travel are available in September or October. This lets you take advantage of the off-season. Kids have gone back to school, and the holidays are in the relatively distant future. This means that there is less demand for tickets. This year, fall travel looks even better. Online travel agency Hopper reports that the difference in price between spring/summer airfares and fall airfares is even steeper than usual, with domestic flights roughly 26% cheaper compared to the cost of summer airfare. The average price for round-trip domestic flights this fall is $298, down from Mays average of over $400. Buy Tickets Three Weeks in Advance Traveling in the fallor any other time of year? ThePointsGuy says that you will find your tickets to be the lowest if you purchase them three weeks in advanceor more. Traditionally, tickets become about 25 percent higher two weeks in advance, and then increase by another 30 percent within one week of departure. Travel Mid-week, or During Off Hours Weekend travel is always crowdedespecially on Fridays and Sundays. Business people often choose Mondays to travel. Weekends and holidays such as Labor Day and Thanksgiving will always be peak traveling seasons. Stay away from holiday travel and plan on traveling on Tuesday or Wednesday if you want to find the lowest prices. Saturdays are also a good travel day. Another way to get a price break is to travel either early in the morning or late at night. Fewer people like to travel at those hours, so tickets will be cheaper. Check College Calendars On days when hordes of college students are heading home for fall, spring, or semester breakor heading back to school after breakfares tend to be higher. Airlines do the research to find out when most colleges schedule their breaks. It can pay to do your research too. When You Purchase Makes a Difference When you actually book your flights may save you money as well. Although opinions vary, for domestic flights, Tuesday may be your best day to book a ticket. Nerdwallet says economy tickets bought on Tuesdays are usually about 24 percent lower than prices on Sundays, but Hopper reports that you may save up to 30 percent on Mondays. For international flights, booking flights on Thursday may save you money. Use Fare-Price Calendars You may find a lower-priced flight by using Google Flights. Googles website lists about 300 different airlines and will show you airline prices a month at a time. Ticket prices change frequently. Sites like Google Flights will simplify your search by notifying you of airfare changes. Take a Different Route Flying directly to your end destination may not be the cheapest way to fly. If you can take some time to get to your end destination, consider stopping at other cities on the way. This method is not recommended if you have time constraints, but if you can afford at least one or two days in other cities, this could let you fly cheaper than taking direct routes. If you just want to traveland you dont care whereonce you log in to Google Flights, its map will show you current prices for various popular destinations. If you are budget conscious, Google Flights can quickly show you the cheapest destination cities in the area of your choice. Use Search Engines Wisely Online travel agencies (OTAs) can be a great way to find cheap fares. But if youve noticed that the same airlines show up over and over again on sites like Expedia, Hotwire or even smaller booking sites, youre not mistaken. For a variety of reasons, some airlines simply dont show up on OTAs. For fares with some budget airlines like Southwest, you may need to go directly to the airlines website. Although you are probably familiar with larger OTAs like Expedia and Kayak, dont neglect smaller OTAs like Skiplagged, Agoda, and Hopper. See Valuepenguins list of the best cheap flight search engines. Use Budget Airlines Although you will find some good deals on the major airlines, remember that you may find even better travel deals on budget airlines. You may need to put up with some inconveniences, but smaller airlines have big competitionand fewer costs. They can enable you to get low fare flights to your destination. Two smaller but growing low-cost carriers you might want to consider are Avelo Airlines and Breeze Airways. Take Advantage of Small Airports In some cases, you may save money on fares by flying to a smaller airport near your destination city. When buying tickets, factor in the hidden costs of using major airports, including the cost of your time. Small airports near large metro areas have the advantage of less traffic and are easier to get to. Taxis cost lessand so does parking. Overall, using a small airport could save you as much as 25 percent, according to aviation website AviationPros. Use an Airline Credit Card With an airline credit card or a travel card that gives you miles, you can reduce your flight cost. Better credit cards will give you enough points for a free flightonce you put a certain amount in purchases on the card. Two worth considering are the Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Cardwhich gives cardholders 75,000 bonus miles after spending $4,000 within three months, and the United Club Infinite Cardwhich rewards cardholders with 100,000 bonus miles after spending $5,000 within the first three months. Look for Last-Minute Flights Airlines will sometimes offer reduced airfare prices for last-minute flyers. Passenger cancellations, or empty seats, can trigger a low-cost opening, allowing you to grab a seat or two at a very low price. Skyscanner can help you find last-minute cheap flights. The booking site provides price details, the latest travel requirements to various countries, and some options for hotel and car rentals. The bottom line: You can find cheap airline tickets this fall, but you may need to shop around. The Epoch Times Copyright 2022 The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors. They are meant for general informational purposes only and should not be construed or interpreted as a recommendation or solicitation. The Epoch Times does not provide investment, tax, legal, financial planning, estate planning, or any other personal finance advice. The Epoch Times holds no liability for the accuracy or timeliness of the information provided. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands prior to a bilateral meeting at the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau, Germany, on June 27, 2022. (Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press) Business Councils Call on Ottawa to Secure Trade Agreement With India Two business councils are urging the Canadian government to reach a trade agreement with India, as Western countries seek stronger political and economic ties with allies in the Asia-Pacific region. The Business Council of Canada and the Canada India Business Council commissioned a report in which they recommend that the federal government forge stronger economic ties with India and develop a comprehensive India strategy. There is no path to achieving success in this massive and strategically important region without building strong and enduring economic ties with Indiaone of Canadas last large, untapped trade opportunities, said the report, published on Aug. 4. The report included analysis from Ciuriak Consulting, which found that exports to India grew by an average of nearly 12 percent per year between 2001 and 2019, rising to US$3.9 billion from US$517 million. Over that same period, Canadas imports from India rose at an annual pace of nearly 10 percent. While CanadaIndia trade appears quite robust, the report said the Indian market is actually shifting away from North America and Europe, and is increasing trade with China, the United Arab Emirates, and member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. The best path forward is a comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPA) with India, the report said. CEPA, which the report describes as an ambitious bilateral trade deal, would increase CanadaIndia two-way trade by an estimated $8.8 billion a year, and bring about an annual GDP boost of 0.25 percent by 2035. Trade negotiations between Canada and India began in 2010 under the Conservative government of former prime minister Stephen Harper, but the deal was later stalled and has been shelved for the past 12 years. In early 2022, the two governments announced plans to resume talks toward a comprehensive free-trade deal. This reanimation of the trade deal negotiation comes as Ottawa is looking to develop an Indo-Pacific strategy to strengthen its political and economic ties in the region. The term Indo-Pacific, previously referred to as Asia-Pacific, marks a shift to bolster Indias prominence in the region, according to Vivek Dehejia, an associate professor of economics at Carleton University. That shift, he says, is driven by the Wests perception of China as a threat. However, the report noted that it wont come easy for Canada to forge stronger ties with India, which has historically been closed off to trade negotiations. A free trade agreement alone wont miraculously open up opportunities for Canadian businesses, the report said. Canadian policymakers and businesses will need to get out of their comfort zone when it comes to India, and work hard to leverage the full benefits of closer economic ties and market-opening opportunities. That will mean putting capital at risk, investing in local talent, expanding trade facilitation support, and more. The elephant in the room is that the real driver of the relationship between Canada and India, I dont see anymore as the economy, it really is diaspora-driven, Dehejia told The Canadian Press. The Indian diaspora in Canada is 1.6 million people, or roughly 3 percent of the Canadian population. In 2017, India overtook China as Canadas largest source of landed immigrants. The Indian diaspora, which is concentrated in metropolitan regions like the Greater Toronto Area, is made up of swing voters, Dehejia said, adding a political incentive for the Liberal government to reach a deal. Dehejia also said there are some positive signs that India has recently become more open to trade negotiations, as it is expected to reach a free-trade agreement with the United Kingdom this fall. India is also reviving trade talks with the European Union. I think [India] realized that trade is just too important for them to put that on the back burner, he said. The Canadian Press contributed to this article. Test tubes labeled "Monkeypox virus positive and negative" are seen in this illustration taken on May 23, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters) California Announces Fifth Case of Pediatric Monkeypox in US A fifth child is presumed to have monkeypox in the United States since the countrys first two pediatric cases were reported in July. California health officials announced the latest presumptive pediatric monkeypox case in a Long Beach child on Tuesday, four days after Indiana health officials confirmed that two children in that state also tested positive. Last month, another California toddler tested positive for monkeypox as well as an infant resident of a foreign country who was passing through Washington D.C., bringing the total U.S. pediatric cases to five. The Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is carrying out a contact tracing investigation and told The Epoch Times it had no further information about those efforts since Tuesday. Preliminary test results indicate that the child has tested positive for orthopoxvirus, the Long Beach DHHS said in a statement. Additional testing will be performed at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to confirm monkeypox. The child was symptomatic and is now recovered, according to the Californian department, which said, in light of the pediatric diagnosis, that monkeypox can also be spread by holding and feeding. This is a reminder that everyone, regardless of age or sexual orientation, can get monkeypox if they come into contact with the virus, Long Beach DHHS said. Pediatric Cases in Indiana The new pediatric case in California comes days after the Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) reported two pediatric cases among its total of 45 new cases confirmed between June 18 and July 28. IDOH said it wont release additional information about the cases due to patient privacy. Like many other states, Indiana has seen an increase in monkeypox cases over the past month, State Health Commissioner Dr. Kris Box said in a statement. Monkeypox does not easily spread through brief casual contact, but its important to remember that anyone can be affected if they are a close contact of a positive case. She encouraged residents who think theyve been exposed or who develop symptoms to contact a healthcare provider. A section of skin tissue, harvested from a lesion on the skin of a monkey, that had been infected with monkeypox virus, is seen at 50X magnification on day four of rash development in 1968. (CDC/Handout via Reuters) In guidance, the CDC has said that children with exposure to people with monkeypox may be eligible for post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) with vaccination, immune globulin, or antiviral medication. PEP is commonly known for its use as an emergency antiviral medication to prevent HIV infection and is taken largely by gay and bisexual men. However, the first-line treatment for children is the antiviral Tecovirimat, commonly used for smallpox. Household Spread In the 2022 outbreak, monkeypox has primarily been spreading through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men but it is not typically considered by health officials to be a sexually transmitted disease. The CDC and World Health Organization (WHO) have said the virus can also spread through contaminated bedding and clothing. With the fifth child now contracting monkeypox, presumably within a household, Long Beach DHHS has named other household items that could spread the virus, such as cups, towels, and utensils. For this reason, the department has said that people with monkeypox should avoid contact with household members and follow the CDCs guidance for limiting transmission in the home. With children, people are advised to minimize the number of caregivers and limit interaction between siblings, including sharing toys, clothing, linens and bedding. It is also important for the infected person to limit interactions with pets in the home, Long Beach DHHS said. The CDC has provided extensive guidance on household infection control to inform people with monkeypox around how to isolate, including not engaging in sexual activity that involves direct physical contact. Much like with COVID-19, people with monkeypox should isolate away from other household members, and clean shared spaces appropriately until such as time when any rash has fully resolved, the scabs have fallen off, and a fresh layer of intact skin has formed. Spread Beyond LGBT Community The rise to five pediatric cases comes after a senior WHO official warned that monkeypox would likely spread beyond the LGBT population. Dr. Catherine Smallwood, a senior emergency officer at the WHO, told CNBC in July that we should not expect monkeypox to remain only within the demographic of men who have sex with men. Experts and health officials are still coming to grips with monkeypoxs evolution from an endemic disease limited mostly to Africa, where it is spread by animals, to the current vector of the 2022 outbreak, which is spread primarily via the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men, according to a major peer-reviewed study. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White Houses medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said health officials needed to come to a better scientific understanding of the current monkeypox outbreak. He also said swift interventions and outreach to the LGBT community, which is most at risk from the virus, was absolutely needed to combat the virus. Monkeypox case numbers in the United States are currently over 5,800 since the first case emerged in May. Last month, the WHO declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency. DeSantis Criticizes Emergency Declarations California, Illinois, and New York have declared states of emergency in response to the outbreak. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state has the fifth highest number of monkeypox cases as of Aug. 4, has said he will not follow suit. The Republican governor accused other elected officials of driving a scare campaign. Do not listen to their nonsense Im so sick of politicians, and we saw this with COVID, trying to sow fear into the population, he told reporters on Wednesday. Florida will not be dictating our health policies out of fear we are focused on the facts. pic.twitter.com/GATB0Op3Y5 Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) August 3, 2022 He added: Were not going to go back to like Fauci in the 80s where he was trying to tell families they were all going to catch AIDs watching TV together. DeSantis said that Floridas response to monkeypox wont include a fear campaign to rile people up and try to act like people cant live their lives as theyve been normally doing. You see some of these states declaring states of emergency. Theyre gong to abuse those emergency powers to try to restrict your freedom. I guarantee you thats what will happen. We saw it with COVID, he added. CORRECTION: The infection in California was incorrectly attributed to an infant and the infection in D.C. a toddler. The Epoch Times regrets the error. Caltech grad student Jeffrey Edlund remotely operates a rover on the grounds of the Jet Propulsion Mars Yard in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 14, 2009. (David McNew/Getty Images) Caltech Applicants Wont Need SAT, ACT Until 2025 The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced on July 27 that the school will not require first-year applicants to submit their SAT and ACT scores through 2025. The prestigious private research institution in Pasadena first announced a two-year moratorium on the requirements in June 2020, in a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jared Leadbetter, professor and chair of the schools first-year admissions committee, said in a statement that faculty and staff already agreed two years ago that numerous other key attributes of applications serve as stronger indicators of the potential for student success here. School officials said the decision to extend the moratorium was supported by internal analysis. A study was conducted by faculty to analyze the academic performance of the last seven undergraduate first-year cohorts, which included students whose testing scores were reviewed in the admission process and those who applied after the moratorium took effect. The study found that standardized test scores have little to no power in predicting students performance in the first-term mathematics and physics classes that are required for all freshmen by Caltech, according to the institute. According to school officials, the extension will also help faculty members collect more data from students admitted during the moratorium and study the relationship between academic performance and standardized test scores. Caltech has a well-established holistic admission process in which all aspects of an applicants life and experiences are considered when assessing their preparation and potential performance in Caltechs rigorous academic environment, said Jarrid Whitney, Caltechs assistant vice president for student affairs, enrollment, and career services. However, its peer school, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced in March that it will reinstate the SAT and ACT requirement for future admissions. The school has drawn an opposite conclusion as its research found that standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Students walk past the Great Dome atop Building 10 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Mass., on April 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File) In addition to waiving standardized tests, Caltech also announced it is replacing its current Early Action program with Restrictive Early Action, a non-binding program commonly used by other universities. The program allows some students who applied in a designated early period and were offered admission to have more time to consider other schools. The new model takes effect for students applying for the 202324 school year. Some early action programs are binding, meaning a student must attend that university if accepted. We believe moving to a restrictive early admissions process is responsive to our applicants desire to identify Caltech as their first choice while still giving them the flexibility to consider all financial aid packages, Ashley Pallie, director of undergraduate admissions, said in a statement. Vehicles wait to enter Canada at the Canada-U.S. Thousand Islands border crossing in Lansdowne, Ont., on Nov. 8, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg) Canadian Judge Denies Refugee Status to Three US Citizens, One Wanted for Alleged Child Abduction A federal judge has denied three U.S. citizens refugee status in Canada in a case that spent six years on appeal. There is a heavy burden on a party who is attempting to rebut the presumption the United States is capable of protecting them, Justice Ann Marie McDonald of the Federal Court wrote in documents obtained by Blacklocks Reporter. Protection offered by a state need only be adequate and does not have to be perfect. A federal appeal board had previously granted refugee status to a mother and two children, all U.S. citizens from Michigan, who arrived in Ontario in 2016. The woman claimed to be fleeing an ex-husband, though evidence showed that she was wanted on a U.S. warrant for alleged child abduction, according to Blacklocks Reporter. The Refugee Appeal Division said the United States could not provide them with adequate state protection and that the three were refugees and persons in need of protection. They were fleeing to safety from Michigan, the court was told. McDonald quashed that decision, sending the case back to immigration authorities for further review. Even with local police failures this does not amount to a lack of state protection, a court document reads. Canadas acceptance of refugee claims from U.S. residents have been repeatedly protested by opposition MPs. There is no such thing in peoples minds, mine included, as a refugee from the United States. Its just not there, then-Conservative MP Larry Miller said at a House of Commons immigration committee hearing in 2017. Under a 2004 Canada-U.S. treaty, the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), individuals entering Canada at official land border crossings are ineligible for making refugee claims. Such claimants are to be returned to the United States unless they meet one of the exceptions provided in the STCA, such as an exception involving family members or unaccompanied minors. A federal judge struck down that treaty as unconstitutional in a 2020 case, which is pending a final Supreme Court of Canada decision, according to Blacklocks Reporter. The legal challenge was brought on behalf of Syrians, Ethiopians, and El Salvadorians, including those who lived in the United States for years before trying to claim refugee status in Ontario and Quebec. Voters across five states have selected their nominees for the midterm elections. Several Trump-backed candidates won. And in one state, Americans got to vote directly on abortion access. A hearing sought to pin down the origin of the pandemic by focusing on gain-of-function research. As more vaccines and boosters are administered throughout the country, what are the side effects, and should mandates still be in place for Americans? Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson weighs in. The State Department issues warnings on traveling abroad after the killing of al-Qaedas leader. We spoke to former national security adviser Keith Kellogg about the greatest threat our country is facing. His answer might surprise you. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has wrapped up her unannounced trip to Taiwan. Her schedule included a visit to Taiwans legislature and a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. * Click the Save button below the video to access it later on My List. Follow CapitolReport on social media: Twitter https://twitter.com/capitolreport Facebook https://www.facebook.com/CapitolReport/ Gettr https://gettr.com/user/capitolreport Follow EpochTV on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpochTVus Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/EpochTV Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@EpochTV Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/epochtv Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpochTVus Gab: https://gab.com/EpochTV Telegram: https://t.me/EpochTV People eat as a television broadcasts news about U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 1, 2022. (Ann Wang/Rueters) CCP Announces the Arrest of Taiwan-Born Activist After Pelosi Departed From Taiwan China announced the detention of a Taiwanese activist after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) finished her visit to Taiwan. The state security from eastern Chinas Zhejiang placed Yang Zhi-yuan, a leader of the Taiwanese National Party, under criminal detention and investigation for allegedly endangering national security, according to state-run media CCTVs report on Aug. 3. The arrest seems to be part of what the regime promised as the consequence of escalated tension across the Taiwan Strait for Pelosis visit. Taiwan voiced its concern about the arbitrary arrest of its people. CCP Targets Taiwanese Activists The 32-year-old Yang was born in Taiwan, and the arrest was due to his activities in promoting Taiwan to become a sovereign and independent country and join the United Nations, reported the state mouthpiece Xinhua News. The regime often labels pro-democracy activists from outside China as separatists, with charges such as engaging in or undermining state security. Yang was not the only one detained under such an allegation. Lee Ming-che, a Taiwanese activist, was arrested in Guangdong province and convicted in 2017. He was the first Taiwanese sentenced with the charge of subversion of state power. Lee was released in April. He was one of the democratic activists Pelosi met during her visit to Taiwan. Taiwan lawmaker Chiu Hsien-chih (middle in the first row) attends a rally urging the Chinese authorities to release Lee Ming-che, a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist, on March 18, 2022. Lee was arrested during a visit to mainland China in 2017 and sentenced by the Chinese communist regime to five years in prison on alleged subversion charges. (Courtesy of Chiu Hsien-chih) Taiwan Warns of Travel to China In a press conference on Aug. 4 local time, Taiwan responded to the arrest of Yang. The spokesperson of the Mainland Affairs Council, Chui-Cheng Chiu, strongly opposed Chinas arbitrary detentions of Taiwanese on the grounds of national security. He indicated that it was a malicious political manipulation by the regime that undermined cross-strait relations and security. Chiu also advised people to seriously evaluate the risk of visiting China. Li Jing contributed to this report. Robert E. Crimo III walks in to the courtroom during a hearing in Lake County court in Waukegan, Ill., on Aug. 3, 2022. (Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo, Pool) Chicago-Area July 4 Parade Attack Suspect Pleads Not Guilty WAUKEGAN, Ill.The man accused of killing seven people and wounding dozens more in a shooting at an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago pleaded not guilty on Wednesday, a week after prosecutors announced he faces 117 felony counts in the attack. Robert E. Crimo III appeared for a brief hearing Wednesday in Lake Countys circuit court to enter a formal plea to the charges21 counts of first-degree murder, 48 counts of attempted murder, and 48 counts of aggravated battery representing those killed and wounded during the parade in Highland Park. Crimo wore a COVID-19 face mask throughout the 10-minute arraignment and repeatedly told Judge Victoria Rossetti that he understood the charges and potential penalties he faces, including life imprisonment. As Crimo shuffled into court, chains around his ankles jangling, several relatives and friends of at least one victim turned to look at him from across the room, some keeping their eyes fixed on him throughout hearing. Lake County prosecutors in late July announced that a grand jury had indicted Crimo on the charges. The prosecutors had previously filed seven murder charges against the 21-year-old in the days following the shooting. The multiple first-degree murder charges allege Crimo intended to kill, caused death or great bodily harm, and took action with a strong probability of causing death or great bodily harm on the seven people who died. A representative for the county public defenders office, which is representing Crimo, has said the office does not comment publicly on any cases. An attorney with the office entered Crimos not guilty plea during Wednesdays court appearance. Prosecutors have said Crimo admitted to the shooting once police arrested him following a hourslong search for the gunman who opened fire from the rooftop of a building along the parade route. Authorities have said the wounded range in age from 8 to their 80s, including an 8-year-old boy who was paralyzed from the waist down when the shooting severed his spine. In comments delivered after the hearing, Lake County States Attorney Eric Rinehart declined to say whether Crimo could face additional charges and said he would not comment on whether Crimos parents could be charged. Some in the community have questioned why Crimos parents apparently supported his interest in guns only months after he reportedly threatened suicide and violence. George Gomez, an attorney representing Crimos parents, said Wednesday that they are not concerned that criminal charges could be filed against them. Both attended Wednesdays hearing where they sat quietly behind their son. Speaking with reporters afterward, Gomez described his clients as devastated and heartbroken for Highland Park and he said they are cooperating with authorities. By Kathleen Foody and Michael Tarm Chicago-Bound Amtrak Train Crashes Into Tractor-Trailer in Maryland An Amtrak train from Washington crashed into a tractor-trailer in Maryland on Wednesday evening after a traffic jam left no room for the trucks driver to leave the tracks. There were no deaths, but the driver of a passenger pick-up truck who was caught in the collision was taken to the hospital for injuries considered not to be life threatening. There was nowhere for the tractor-trailer to go, a spokesperson for the Frederick County Fire Department told Fox News. Train struck rear passenger side of the trailer causing it to be pushed into a passenger truck. The passenger truck was then pushed into the building. The incident took place in Rockville, Maryland, at about 5:20 p.m. The Amtrak train was on its way to Chicago. The train was back in service after a delay of just over an hour. Amtrak said its working with officials to investigate the accident. Past Incidents There have been a number of serious incidents involving Amtrak trains in recent years. In June, an Amtrak train crashed into a car at a railroad crossing in California, killing three people and seriously injuring two others. The same month, another Amtrak train derailed in Missouri after hitting a dump truck that was on an uncontrolled public crossing. Four people died in the Missouri incident, and at least 150 people had to be treated at hospitals. In September 2021, an Amtrak train derailed in Montana and sent several cars toppling to the sides. The train was carrying 146 passengers and 16 crew members when the derailment took place. Three passengers were killed and over 50 others suffered injuries. Seven people later filed a lawsuit, claiming Amtrak and its operator were negligent. And in 2017, an Amtrak train derailed in DuPont, Washington, leaving three people dead and over 60 others injured. The company paid out $57 million in settlements for that incident. Amtrak instituted a policy in 2019 which insists that legal action against the firm must be resolved through a mandatory arbitration process. If a customer purchases a ticket, the policy does not allow them to sue Amtrak for any reason. The lawsuits stemming from the Montana incident also sought to challenge the arbitration policy. Since the second half of last year, the mainland real estate bubble has apparently burst, with property developer Evergrande bearing the brunt, followed by at least 58 real estate companies defaulting on their debts to varying degrees. Photo shows a residential complex built by Evergrande in Beijing. (Noel Celis/AFP) China Crisis: From Sharp Crash to Lost Decade(s) Commentary A decade ago, China was praised as a miracle. The twin crisis (real estate and debt) will be another miracle. The miracle is, as always, something in story books. In reality, there seems to be no miracle at all. Half to one-third of a century ago, when West Germany and Japan had been regarded as economic miracles to take over the United States, it turned out not to be so. Then the four little dragons in Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) were viewed as another miracle; the bubble popped in just a few years. Later, a quarter of a century ago, it was the BRICS turn (China, Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa). Now the leader is making another miracle. All these cases point to only an up-down or boom-bust phenomenon. All were cyclical and far from secular, exhibiting a longer cycle at most. In other words, none of these were sustainable over decades. These were not miracles, and there was no magic behind them. This kind of growth is often a garbage-in-garbage-out (GIGO) without much quality. Whether Japan in the 1980-1990s or China in the 2000-2010s, economic growth was fueled mainly by bricks and mortar; a sharp rise was as easy as a sharp fall. When encountering abnormal profits, financial returns, or growth, always recall the law of one price. Always ask yourself why others are making 1-3 percent growth, but you have 10-15 percent. Either you are spending your past (from savings), gaining from your neighbours (the so-called beggar-thy-neighbour), or spending your future (from borrowings). Fair to say, the exceptional low growth during Maos era saved China quite some potential after 1978. But the real estate boom since 2003 and especially after 2008 seemed to exhaust their future significantly. Borrowings result in debt, which has to be paid back ultimately. The experience in the 2010s seemed to suggest this would not happena miracle of no repay needed. Now it becomes another miracle insteadan unprecedented twin crisis. Maybe not. This is not new in history but has been repeated many times before. Without going too far back, Japan experienced it in the early 1990s, Asia ex-Japan experienced it in the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced it in the late 2000s, and Europe experienced it in the early 2010s. Cases were abundant every decade. An appropriate case should be Japan since the nature of the two countries as well as the scale of the bubble are highly similar. U.S. experience showed that eight years was needed to clear the leveragefrom mid-2006 when housing prices peaked to mid-2014 when its unemployment rate returned to below seven percent. Japan did not publish housing prices but land prices in the past. The accompanying chart shows China is now stepping on Japans footprint of 28-29 years ago. The similarity looks amazing should the second-tier housing price (house prices in second-tier cities) be used. Japan Land Price and China Housing Price Growth (Courtesy of Law Ka-chung) The worst time seems to have just passed, but without allowing a sharp price crash, correction is bound to take an extended time. A prolonged gloom will last another decade or two until the 2030s or even 2040s to fully repay. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. A missile is launched from an unspecified location in China on Aug. 4, 2022. The Chinese military fired missiles into waters near Taiwan as part of its planned exercises on Aug. 4. (CCTV via AP) China Fires 11 Missiles in Largest Ever Military Drills Near Taiwan After Pelosi Visit TAIPEI, TaiwanChina fired several Dongfeng ballistic missiles into waters near Taiwan on Thursday, drawing condemnation from the islands defense ministry. The missile launch was reported by Taiwans Ministry of National Defense at around 3:30 p.m. local time, and the missiles landed into water around Taiwans northeast and southwest. According to the ministry, China began firing the missiles at around 1:56 p.m. local time. However, the ministry did not say the range of the missiles. In response, the Taiwanese ministry said it activated its defense system and strengthened its combat readiness. We condemn such irrational action that has jeopardized regional peace, the ministry wrote on Twitter. Just before 6 p.m. local time, the ministry issued another statement, saying that China fired a total of 11 Dongfeng missiles as of 4 p.m. local time. China has reported firing missiles as part of its planned exercises on Aug. 4. According to Chinas state-run media, the Chinese militarys rocket force under the East Theater Command fired multiple types of conventional missiles, accurately hitting targets in water east of Taiwan. On Aug. 2, China announced that it would hold live-fire military drills in six zones around Taiwan from Aug. 4 to Aug. 7, in apparent retaliation against a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to the island. Some of the zones partially overlap with Taiwans territorial waters. The drills are the biggest the Chinese regime has ever held in the Taiwan Strait, according to Reuters. A map shows the locations of Chinas military drills in six zones around Taiwan set to run from Aug. 4 to Aug. 7. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times via Reuters) Pelosi left Taiwan on Aug. 3 after spending about 19 hours on the island, the third stop of her Asia trip following Singapore and Malaysia. While in Taiwan, she met with several Taiwanese government officials including President Tsai Ing-wen and Vice President William Lai. Today, our delegation, of which Im very proud, came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear, we will not abandon our commitment to Taiwan, and we are proud of our enduring friendship, Pelosi said in Taiwan, reaffirming the U.S. commitment to the self-ruled island. The Chinese regime claims Taiwan as a part of its territory and opposes governments and international organizations interacting or forming ties with Taiwanese officials, as such actions suggest that the island is a de facto nation-state. There has been international condemnation over Chinas military and economic coercion against Taiwan following Pelosis visit. Some U.S. lawmakers have taken to Twitter to denounce Chinas military drills encircling Taiwan. Communist China cannot dictate where we go or who we talk to, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) wrote. Chinas encircling exercises, sanctions, and other retaliatory measures need to be met with strong U.S. leadership to reinforce our rock solid partnership with Taiwan. Communist China is again violating its hollow promises to resolve its differences with #Taiwan peacefully, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) wrote. It is time to end the dishonest One China Policy and normalize US-Taiwan ties. This story has been updated with the latest information. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reacts during House of Representatives Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Aug. 4, 2022. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) Climate Bill for 43 Percent Emissions Reduction by 2030 Passes Australias Lower House The Australian federal government has passed its climate bill, legislating a 43 percent emissions reduction target, through the lower house. It was passed 89 votes to 55 with the support of Greens, teal independents, and Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer after a number of minor amendments. The legislation sets a target of 43 percent carbon emissions reduction on 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. This is a fulfilment of a core promise that we made at the election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters on Aug. 4. And it is pleasing that even though the crossbenchers did not get the demands met that were not consistent with the program that we put to the election, that it passed the parliament. Teal Independent MP Zali Steggall said the next step would be phasing out oil, coal, and gas. An amendment to cease all new oil, coal, and gas projects, proposed by Greens Party Leader Adam Bandt, had been rejected. It also voted against the amendment to further lift the emissions reduction target to 75 percent by 2030 and net-zero by 2035, proposed by the Greens and teal independent MP Andrew Wilkie. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the vote signalled the parliament stop arguing whether to reduce emissions and start working on how to reduce emissions. Renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, renewable energy is the key to reducing emissions and seizing the jobs opportunity that is the climate emergency, he told parliament. The prime minister noted that all Coalition members aside from Archer opposed the Bill, and implored Coalition Senators to change their mind when the Bill is presented in the upper house. Chris Bowen, Labor Partys minister for energy and climate change, speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on June 16, 2022. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) Opposition Supports Nuclear Meanwhile, Coalition Leader Peter Dutton has opened the door for the Liberal-National Coalition to put nuclear energy on the table as a policy going forward. He said renewable energy sources had a role in Australias energy mix, it needed to be balanced with investment in dispatchable energy generators. Based on current trends around 60 percent of Australias coal-fired generators would be closed by 2030, which could leave households and businesses vulnerable to blackouts, Dutton said. The current energy crisis has shown the importance of getting more dispatchable power into the grid, he said in a statement. Bowen said the opposition, in giving the go ahead for nuclear, was supporting most expensive form of energy. We have a cost of living crisis, energy prices going through the roof, and whats [the oppositions] big bright idea? Lets have the most expensive form of energy we can possibly think of, he said. Daniel Y. Teng contributed to this report. As children learned from home during the pandemic, parents saw what they were being taught. In some cases that's triggered pushback from parents opposed to how controversial topics were being handled. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Conservatives and Union Members Battle For Control of Towns Schools Conservatives and a teachers union have squared off over a small Colorado towns schools. After years with no contested school board election, a conservative slate last November took four of five seats on the Woodland Park School Board in Teller County outside Colorado Springs. They started delivering on campaign promises quickly but just as quickly faced a recall effort led by the local teachers union with help from its state and national allies. Having allegedly harassed one new board member into resigning this spring, they started a recall drive against the three others and by this weeks petition deadline had narrowly met the signature threshold for two of them. Whether theyve got enough valid signatures to trigger the recall election remains to be seen. The recall effort is one of many such fights across the country. Parents are struggling to regain control of schools many think have gone over the top in what they teach and how they teach itsubjects like Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, and gender fluidity, in many cases information directed at very young children. Jameson Dion, a Woodland Park resident who defends the school board members, said he and his wife, who have no children, got involved after moving to Woodland Park during the Covid pandemic. One reason theyd moved was disenchantment with health restrictions passed by local health officials where they lived in the Denver suburbs. We realized a bunch of people were dictating our destiny that we never voted for and didnt know. They moved to Woodland Parkwhere Dion, 37, had been bornpartly because the county sheriff there refused to enforce what he regarded as unconstitutional mandates during the pandemic. We vowed we would be involved in local politics and control our lives a little more, Dion said. He started attending school board meetings and got involved in the campaigns of the four conservative candidates, who all won by comfortable margins. He said Teller County is one of the more conservative in the state. Donald Trump carried the county with 66.4 percent of its vote in 2020. Dion said many veterans live there, retired from the Air Force Academy and other military bases in and around Colorado Springs. That the school system was in trouble was apparent, Dion said. It had lost 36 percent of its students in the previous decade, far more than the 8 percent decline in school-age children during that time. One group of disenchanted parents wanted to break away by forming a charter school. Dion said that the old school board turned them down based largely on plan shortcomings that likely would have been addressed further into the process, such as busing, and school lunch programs. The parents then formed a contract school, an independent one not requiring board approval, getting some state funds but needing to rely on donations and outside funding to meet its budget. That school, Merit Academy, launched last year with almost 200 students, around 10 percent of the public school systems enrolment, and with another 100 on its waiting list, he said. One issue triggering the reform election last year was something occurring nationally. During the lockdown children stayed home to attend class online and parents learned what they were being taught and how it was being done. Dion said that reform candidates opposed mask mandates and supported school choice, higher teacher pay, and greater transparency. After taking office, they quickly moved to deliver on those promises. Teachers got an 8.5 percent raise. The school board eliminated mask mandates the previous board had enforced for over a year. It created a sensitive subject policy, ensuring parents would be informed beforehand if their children were going to be exposed to something age-inappropriate. And the board approved making the Merit Academy a charter school, removing the financial burden for its operation from parentstwo of whom had mortgaged vacation homes to help fund it. And since declining enrolment had left school buildings using only half their capacity, they allowed the charter school to rent out part of the middle school. But efforts to resist the new school board began almost immediately, with protests and demonstrations at school board meetings. One new member was harassed into resigning, Dion alleged. Dion said that the opponents started peppering the school board with public records requests, so he figured hed do the same. Doing so he found the opponents were using a playbook established by the National Education Association, the teachers union the Woodland Park Education Association is affiliated with. The NEAs website contains an article on How To Oust A Right-Wing School Board detailing one such campaign a few years ago in Colorados Jefferson County near Denver. Dion said that most of those active in the Woodland Park recall attempt are in the union or have ties to it. He also discovered a high school English class had read only one book the previous year, and it was Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the son of a Black Panther and prominent writer backing critical race theory positions. This is not a neutral mainstream book, Dion said. Another thing he came across was an email from a union rep to a concerned school employee mentioning plans for continued disruption of school board meetings, after one session in which a group of teachers union membershad all worn red shirts and then staged a walkout. Dion decried the unions tactics. He also found a kindergarten teacher had penned an op-ed in the Colorado Sun headlined, The election, the Capitol attack and Black Lives Matter come to a kindergarten classroom in rural Colorado. I would argue BLM and Jan. 6 are above a kindergarten childs understanding and not age-appropriate, Dion said. There has been legal sniping by both sides. The recall leaders sued the school board for allegedly violating open meetings law. A judge denied their request for an injunction on that issue, but did instruct the school board to be more precise on its agenda items. Theyd approved beginning negotiations with Merit Academy over charter school status on Jan. 26 at a special board meeting under an agenda item labeled only Board housekeeping, according to a report on KRDO.com. Meanwhile, the recall leaders may find themselves under the gun for missing deadlines for legally required financial reporting of their effort, Dion said. He alleged one was recently arrested in connection with having filed a false police report against the wife of a school board member. A Woodland Park Police Department representative acknowledged that a case number had been established in connection with the recall leader, but would not disclose further details or provide a copy of the arrest report, saying he was not authorized to do so. The police chief did not respond to repeated calls from The Epoch Times about the case. Im stunned to see this happening in a public school, even in a conservative county, Dion said. Im offended the parents arent being informed. The attitude is, Its our job as educators to raise your child. Its none of your business what were teaching. Ive been taken aback that their job is not to teach STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] but to raise your child, to teach them what to think. Enjoying just two slices of Jarlsberg cheese every day may help stave off osteoporosis, a small Norwegian study suggests. The protective effect of cheese on bone-thinning appears to be an exclusive benefit of Jarlsberg, and a mere 2 ounces a day seems to be enough to protect bone health, the investigators reported. Jarlsberg cheese might have a prophylactic effect on osteopenia and metabolic diseases, said lead researcher Dr. Helge Einar Lundberg, from Skjetten Medical Center in Skjetten. This has to be further investigated in a long-term study on a larger population of elderly females and men at risk of developing osteoporosis. Jarlsberg is a mild, semi-soft cheese made from cows milk from Jarlsberg in eastern Norway. The TINE Group, the makers and distributors of Jarlsberg, didnt fund this study. Vitamin K2 and DHNA (1,4-Dihydroxy-2-naphthoic acid) in Jarlsberg cheese show promising results in preserving bone, Lundberg said, who added that no vitamin K supplement or other cheese contains the same healthful ingredients as Jarlsberg. As a doctor, I have to prescribe pills all the time, and many people use too much of supplements as well, Lundberg said. Healthy food could be amongst the best therapies. Several types of cheese on the market contain vitamin K2, including both Jarlsberg and Norvegia, he said. What differentiates Jarlsberg from the others is a special type of vitamin K2 [MK-9/4H], which is produced by a type of bacteria that is used in the production of Jarlsberg. In this process, the only enzyme [DHNA] that has so far been shown to increase a central protein in the bodys bone formation is also produced, Lundberg explained. This protein is called osteocalcin. With the help of vitamin K2, osteocalcin is activated. This activation process seems to go much faster than previously thought and means that calcium and magnesium from the blood are transported into the bone, he said. For the study, Lundberg and his colleagues randomly assigned 66 young women to eat either 2 ounces of Jarlsberg or about the same amount of Camembert each day for six weeks. After the first six weeks, the participants switched cheeses for another six weeks. Jarlsberg and Camembert contain about the same amount of fat and protein, but only Jarlsberg is rich in vitamin K2. After each stage, blood samples were taken to measure osteocalcin and a peptide (PINP) linked to bone turnover. Vitamin K2 and blood fat levels were also measured. Blood samples showed that markers of bone turnover, including osteocalcin and vitamin K2, increased after six weeks among those eating Jarlsberg. These levels among those eating Camembert remained unchanged, but increased after switching to Jarlsberg. PINP levels also increased. Although blood fats increased slightly in both groups, the levels of total cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol dropped with Jarlsberg. Also, blood sugar levels dropped 3% among those eating Jarlsberg, but it rose 2% among those eating Camembert. The report was published online Aug. 2 in the journal BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health. Dr. Stuart Weinerman, an endocrinologist at Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y., doesnt think this small study proves that Jarlsberg benefits bone health. Specifically, he said, the study doesnt show that eating this cheese prevents osteoporosis or strengthens bones or, most importantly, prevents fractures. Weinerman also said that other studies have shown no benefit from vitamin K on bone health. I dont believe it works, and I dont believe its dangerous, he said. But vitamin K is a clotting agent and so may not be safe for all patients, he noted. People shouldnt start eating Jarlsberg in the hopes of not developing osteoporosis or preventing bone fractures, he said. Jarlsberg certainly does not, and should not, replace drugs or interventions that have been studied in large populations to actually change the outcome, such as drugs for osteoporosis in high-risk patients, Weinerman said. Dont take calcium, vitamin D or vitamin K thinking that its going to be effective for reducing fractures, where the evidence is just not there, he said. The evidence is contrary it just plain doesnt work. Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at NYU Langone Health in New York City, agreed. We dont need an excuse to eat more cheese if anything, we would all likely benefit from eating less, she said. Americans eat over 39 pounds of cheese per person every year. That adds up to boatloads of saturated fat, sodium, and in the ballpark of more than 56,000 calories, Heller said. Overall, cheese should be used to enhance flavor and not bury the food with which it is being served, she said. We can help create and preserve bone health by engaging in regular weight-bearing exercise and consuming a variety of healthy foods to meet our nutrient needs, Heller said. Opting for less processed foods and more whole foods can help provide vitamins and minerals that are important for bone health. More information For more on osteoporosis, head to the U.S. National Institutes of Health SOURCES: Helge Einar Lundberg, MD, Skjetten Medical Center, Skjetten, Norway; Stuart Weinerman, MD, endocrinologist, Northwell Health, Great Neck, N.Y.; Samantha Heller, MS, RD, CDN, senior clinical nutritionist, NYU Langone Health, New York City; BMJ Nutrition Prevention & Health, Aug. 2, 2022, online Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) questions Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 6, 2018. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Democrats Introduce Bill to Cap Supreme Court Terms at 18 Years Led by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Senate Democrats introduced a bill on Aug. 2 to limit the tenure of Supreme Court justices, who currently serve for life, to 18 years. The proposed legislation comes as Democrats fume over recent decisions by the court that returned the regulation of abortion to the states, expanded gun rights, and curbed the governments environmental regulatory powers. The legislation has little chance of passing with a polarized 50-50 Senate and congressional elections just three months away, but its likely to resurface in the next Congress. The proposed Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization (TERM) Act is co-sponsored by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii). The Supreme Court is facing a crisis of legitimacy, Booker said in a press release. This crisis is the result of radical rulings that discard years of legal precedent and that are at odds with the views of the American people, ethical lapses, and the politicization of the Supreme Court confirmation process by Senate Republicans intent on using raw political power to transform the Court. The American people have lost confidence in our nations Highest Court and, in turn, our democracy. Fundamental changes are urgently needed to restore trust in the institution. Setting term limits would create predictability and lower the stakes of future confirmation proceedings, de-politicizing the Court. Although conservatives have welcomed the Supreme Courts rightward turn, a Gallup poll last month reported that Americans confidence in the Supreme Court has hit an all-time low of 25 percent, down 11 points since 2021. Term limits will help restore credibility and trust to our nations highest court, said Blumenthal. Detached from the public and more politicized than ever, the Supreme Court will continue to face a crisis of legitimacy without fundamental reform. The legislation would impose a complex mechanism for regulating who serves on the high court. According to a summary provided by Booker, a new justice would take the bench every two years and spend 18 years in active service. Appointments of new justices would only be allowed in the first and third years after a presidential election. Retired justices would temporarily fill in on the court if the number of justices falls below nine. But conservative legal commentator Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, said the billwhich he said applies to sitting justiceswas blatantly unconstitutional. Article 3, Section 1 of the Constitution, provides that judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour. The good behaviour provision has been interpreted to mean that federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, continue to serve unless they are impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted by the Senate of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Packing the court by changing the federal statute setting the number of justices at nine would not be unconstitutional, but this would be unconstitutional and clearly requires a constitutional amendment, Levey told The Epoch Times. The senators sponsoring the bill show a disregard, almost contempt, for the Constitution by introducing a bill they know is unconstitutional. Levey added that he doesnt oppose term limits but it would have to be done in a nonpartisan way, which pretty much means that it couldnt apply to sitting justices, and probably shouldnt apply to the rest of the presidential term. If you can apply it to sitting justices, or you can apply it to the current president, then you can see political motivations, he said. But if it only applies in the future, starting with the next presidential term, I wouldnt be against it. I dont think there is any reason why justices have to serve for life, Levey said. The knowledge that they would have to go back into the real world would probably make them better justices. Leveys nonprofit describes itself as devoted to restoring the Founders vision of a federal judiciary governed by the rule of law and anchored by the Constitution. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) introduced a companion bill known as H.R. 8550 last week in the House of Representatives. More than 300 depositors to a village Bank in Henan Province gathered in front of the Henan Supervisory Bureau to protest and demand that they be able to withdraw their money legally, on June 25, 2022. (Courtesy of the interviewee/The Epoch Times) Depositors Frustrated by Regimes Reparations For Frozen Accounts When banks in Henan Province refused to let people access their deposits, large-scale protests broke out in July. The local authorities responded with plans to repay those with frozen accounts in rural banks. The reimbursements reportedly entered a third stage on Aug. 1. However, one protester revealed that the first two rounds of repayments werent exactly fulfilled. In an interview with the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on July 29, a protester said that many smaller account holders have not received any payments from the previous two repayment plans, and the morale of the protesters has unraveled. She said, I am not optimistic for those larger accounts. Around 413,000 Depositors Victimized Officials claimed the rural banks incident involved collusion between the banks administrators and the major shareholder. The incident started when the accounts of 413,000 Chinese depositorsof an estimated total of $5.93 billionwere frozen in April. At one point, local officials even authorized a red QR-code to appear on the health cards of some depositors to prevent them from going to the banks. A red code meant they would be unable to travel under the strict Covid containment policy in force. Thus, hundreds of depositors gathered and protested in front of a branch of Chinas central bank in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. After the outraged public condemned the violent beating of protestors by a huge gang of thugs dressed in black and white on July 10, Henan officials started the repayment plan. On July 15, the so-called advanced payments were made to bank customers who had a combined deposit of less than 50,000 yuan (about $7,410) On July 25, the second repayment plan was made to those who have less than 100,000 yuan (about $14,816) in their account. The Aug. 1 payment plan is is for depositors with over 100,000 yuan but less than 150,000 yuan (about $22,196), according to the latest official release. People hold banners and chant slogans during a protest at the entrance to a branch of Chinas central bank in Zhengzhou in central Chinas Henan Province, on July 10, 2022. (Yang/AP Photo) The Plans Eliminate the Victims: Protestor Xiaoqing (alias), a depositor in Inner Mongolia, said that many depositors have not received their payments for various reasons, such as, incorrect phone numbers or reissued bank cards. She said, I believe only about half of those who passed the identity check received a payment, according to the head counts on the second payments made out to the depositors with less than 100,000 yuan in total. However, for those who did receive their money, the accumulated interest had been deducted. Her husband received his 100,000 yuan during the second repayment plan, but All interest after April 18 had been deducted, Xiaoqing said. She believes the tactics are to crush the protestors bit by bit. With an increment of 50,000 yuan at a time, the rights defenders were diluted out. Those big account holders will probably get sacrificed, she said. Its all planned, she believes. She said, The process is done at their pace, to wear out depositors confidence. The big account holders are only a few. Then the negotiations will begin. I figure they will compromise with some loss, maybe 20 percent or 30 percent of the total. They will have to accept it. A Sense of Frustration She explained that theres been some change in the protest group. Some of the victims have withdrawn from a group that was set up on social media. She said, Those small depositors felt its not worth the time and energy [to protest]. Many of them just took it as fate. The group was filled with an atmosphere of despair. Xiaoqing said that a woman in the group has been constantly harassed by local police, who tried to trump up a charge on her. She explained, Her deposit was more than two million yuan (about $381,000). Through the protest, Xiaoqing also realized that some depositors, even though they would lose one million yuan, had given up on defending their rights. She said, Under the current circumstances, people feel that the right to speak the truth is gone. Haizhong Ning and Gu Xiaohua contributed to this report. Then-White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro is seen outside the White House in Washington on Oct. 8, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) DOJ Sues Ex-Trump Adviser Peter Navarro Over White House Emails The Justice Department has sued former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro for allegedly violating a record-keeping law, asking the latter to turn over private emails for while he was working for former President Donald Trump. Mr. Navarro has refused to return any Presidential records that he retained absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents, the lawsuit (pdf) says, adding that the ex-Trump aide is wrongfully retaining Presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration. Filed on Aug. 3 in a federal court in Washington, the document alleged that Navarro used at least one non-official email account while working in the White House but failed to copy those emails or messages constituting Presidential records to his government email account within 20 days as required by the Presidential Records Act. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was also supposed to receive them before or shortly after Trump left office but is yet to, according to prosecutors, who said between 200 and 250 of the emails on Navarros private account should have been collected. The department further accused Navarro of declining to turn in the retained records without a grant of immunity. Navarros lawyers refuted such claims, arguing that their client has never refused to provide records to the government. As detailed in our recent letter to the Archives, Mr. Navarro instructed his lawyers to preserve all such records, and he expects the government to follow standard processes in good faith to allow him to produce records. Instead, the government chose to file its lawsuit today, his attorneys told The Hill in a statement. Reaching for Trump The latest case comes two months after a grand jury indicted Navarro on June 3 for refusing to give documents and testimony early this year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach in 2021. The former White House trade adviser had pleaded not guilty on June 17 to two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress, citing executive privilege due to his former position at the White House under the Trump administration, before rejecting a plea offer to a single count in July. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, rejected Navarros claims, claiming that privilege belongs to the president but not a White House official, despite the emails involving the former president. Navarros trial is set for Nov. 17. Trumps attorneys have previously argued that former White House officials shouldnt comply with congressional subpoenas because the requested information is protected by Trumps executive privilege. However since January, NARA has handed documents and records from the Trump administrations time in office to the Jan. 6 House Committee, despite Trumps attempts to ask the Supreme Court to block the release. SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles on June 13, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters) Elon Musk Updates Timeline for Successful Starship Orbital Launch SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday gave a timeline for the orbital launch of Starship, which is being developed and tested at the companys Boca Chica launch facility in Texas. What Happened When one of Musks Twitter followers shared a picture of the Starship and asked him when an orbital launch is likely, the worlds richest person said a successful orbital flight is likely between one and 12 months from now. A *successful* orbital flight is probably between 1 and 12 months from now Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 2, 2022 The question was triggered by Musks own tweet, in which he shared a CNBC video entitled Why Starship is the Holy Grail For SpaceX. Musk commended the video, calling it a good CNBC piece on SpaceX & Starship. Just came across this pretty good CNBC piece on SpaceX & Starship Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 2, 2022 Why Its Important The Starship spacecraft and super heavy rocket, collectively called Starship, is a fully reusable system to transport both crew and cargo to Earths orbit, the Moon, and Mars. Last month, the Starship experienced a mishap, as booster 7 made of Raptor engines exploded. The SpaceX CEOwho also heads Tesla, Inc.allayed concerns and said the damages were only minor and an orbital flight would start in August. Musks most recent update has now pushed forward the timeline by anywhere between one and 12 months. He, however, had laid emphasis on it being successful. Starship is key to realizing Musks vision of making human life multi-planetary. The tech entrepreneur expects Starship to do a loop around the Moon in 2023 and land on Mars by 2026. In April 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion fixed-price contract to transport the next two American astronauts to the lunar surface. By Shanthi Rexaline 2022 The Epoch Times. The Epoch Times does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Elections staff load ballots into machines as recounting begins at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office in Lauderhill, Florida on Nov. 11, 2018. (Joe Skipper/Getty Images) EXCLUSIVE: Florida Elections Supervisor Issues COVID-19 Voting Procedures That Appear to Challenge Florida Law DeSantis's office has expressed 'serious concerns' A supervisor of elections for a Florida county has repeatedly overstepped his authority to implement COVID-19 mandates and voting procedures that appear to challenge numerous state laws, according to documents obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times just days before the start of Floridas 2022 primary election cycle. Early voting in Florida runs from Aug. 13 to Aug. 20, and Each county s Supervisor of Elections may offer more days of early voting from one or more of the following days: Aug. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 21. Floridas primary Election Day is Aug. 23. In a letter dated Nov. 4, 2021, Paul Stamoulis, the supervisor of elections for Floridas Charlotte County, informed all applicants interested in serving as a Poll Worker that they were required to complete an enclosed Certification form, verifying that they had been inoculated for the COVID-19 virus. Applicants were told they had to identify the type of vaccine they received and the dates the vaccine was administered. By signing the form, applicants were also acknowledging that they understood they would be required to wear a mask or a face shield, covering their nose and mouth, at all times. Applicants who could not comply with this new policy for whatever reason, were told they were ineligible to work the 2022 Elections. Paul Stamoulis, supervisor of elections for Charlotte County, Florida. (Charlotte County Supervisor of elections website) Paul Stamoulis, supervisor of elections for Charlotte County, Florida. (Charlotte County Supervisor of elections website) On April 2, 2021, seven months before Stamoulis mailed his letters, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed executive order 21-81 (pdf), banning vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, saying such measures would create two classes of citizens based on vaccination. A month later, on May 3, DeSantis issued executive order 21-101 (pdf), which suspended all local COVID-19 restrictions and mandates on individuals and businesses, and further stated that no county or municipality may renew or enact an emergency order or ordinance, using a local state of emergency that imposes restrictions or mandates upon businesses or individuals due to the COVID-19 emergency. The order was effective immediately. The same day, DeSantis signed executive order 21-102 (pdf) suspending all remaining states of emergency as of July 1, four months before Stamoulis mailed his letters. Due to immediate backlash, Stamoulis rescinded this vaccine mandate policy. Pandemic Procedures But after his failure to force a vaccine mandate on local poll workers, Stamoulis has released a new set of polling room procedures that would prohibit voters from entering any one of their three early voting locations. According to Page 8 of Stamouliss Polling Location Pandemic Procedures 2022 manual, Stamoulis wanted poll deputies to take the temperature of every voterincluding accompanying children or any assistors they might bringwho wants to cast a ballot during Charlotte Countys 15-day early voting period. Deputies duties from Polling Location Pandemic Procedures 2022 issued by the Supervisor of Elections for Charlotte County, Fla., Paul Stamoulis as seen in July 2022. (Screenshot) Under the heading, Changes During COVID, the new manual says each location would be provided with a thermometer, and Deputies stationed at the entry to the polling location will be responsible for that thermometer throughout the day. Deputies will also instruct that Everyone wishing to enter a polling location is to have his or her temp checked (kids, assistors, poll watchers, etc.). If anyone registers a temperature of 100 degrees or more, claims to be uncomfortable entering the location, or claims to feel ill and does not want to enter the polling location or refuses to have their temp taken, that would trigger a costly and time-consuming procedure. Alternate Voting Procedures Any of those situations would activate alternate voting procedures. The deputy must stop attending to their other outside dutieswhich include ensuring that only voters and qualified individuals are admitted into the polling room, maintaining the peace outside, and ensuring enforcement of the 150-feet no solicitation zonein order to find the clerk, who also would need to step away from their assigned duties. Those tasks include assisting voters casting a provisional ballot, providing assistance to the EViD operator/inspector who operates the electronic poll book when they are unable to locate a voter in the registry, ensuring the maintenance of adequate supplies, filling in for poll workers who are on breaks, and managing the overall voting process within the polling site. Screenshot of mandatory procedures to be followed for deputy and clerk responsibilities if a voter registers a temperature of 100 degrees or more that are being imposed by the Supervisor of Elections for Charlotte County, Fla., for the 2022 primary election cycle. (Screenshot) Under the Deputy and Clerk Responsibilities heading, the clerk is directed to go outside and, while wearing a mask and single-use gloves, explain the new alternate process and request the voters photo/signature identification and inform the voter they will be right back. The clerk must then go back inside and interrupt the check-in procedure of a voterwho already went through the temperature screening processin order to have the EViD operator/inspector force the machine to issue a voting pass, since the voter hasnt yet provided a signature for verification purposes. One Voter, Three Poll Workers The clerk then returns outside with the voters ID, voting pass, signature slip, ballot, and secrecy sleeve. After the voter signs the signature slip, the clerk then compares the signature with the signature on the voters ID. If they match, the voter is directed to a voting booth outside in the Florida summer heat to mark their ballot. The deputy then juggles their normal duties with monitoring the voter to make sure they dont leave with the ballot and/or that they arent approached by a third person. Once the voter has completed their ballot, they are told they must take their ballot to the deputy, who is not permitted to touch the ballot, so the deputy can go inside to get the clerk, who must again stop what they were doing inside in order to go back outside to get the voters ballot. A clerks additional responsibilities listed in the Alternate Voting procedures created by Paul Stamoulis in the Polling Location Pandemic Procedures 2022 for Charlotte County, Fla. (Screenshot) The clerk then must tell the voter that they are going to take their ballot inside to the polling room, where the ballot will be added to the tabulator. In the meantime, a third poll worker, the assistant clerk, also must halt their inside duties, which includes covering for the clerk in their absence, in order to document the procedure for the voter with a recording device, leaving no one left to assist voters and other poll workers with ballot casting and check in issues. The Assistant Clerk records the ballot going from the voter to insertion into the DS200, the manual states. Then, the clerk returns to show the voter the video that their ballot was tabulated. Once the voter sees the video, it is deleted (in front of the voter). Florida Election Laws According to Fla. Stat. 102.031, No photography is permitted in the polling room or early voting area. Floridas Voters Bill of Rights states that an elector has the right to Vote free from coercion or intimidation by elections officers or any other person. According to Fla. Stat. 104.20, Any elector who, except as provided by law, allows his or her ballot to be seen by any person; takes or removes, or attempts to take or remove, any ballot from the polling place before the close of the polls; places any mark on his or her ballot by which it may be identified; endeavors to induce any elector to show how he or she voted; aids or attempts to aid any elector unlawfully; or prints or procures to be printed, or has in his or her possession, any copies of any ballot prepared to be voted is guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree. Forcing a voter to have possession of their ballot outside of the polling location, where anyone could walk up and see it, subjects the voter to committing a third-degree felony. Stamoulis Responds When asked by The Epoch Times about his policies and procedures that appear to violate at least three executive orders and several statutes in Floridas election laws, Stamoulis said in an email: Regarding the sanitizing and social distancing issues, please see Governor Ron DeSantis Executive Order cited, in part, below. He then pasted the following: STATE OF FLORIDA OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR EXECUTIVE ORDER NUMBER 20-149 Section 3. Election Administration Coordination A. Each Supervisor of Elections shall ensure proper social distancing and cleaning procedures are implemented for Early Voting and Election Day, insofar as is practicable. This may include, but is not limited to, spacing out voting stations, the use of physical barriers for poll workers interacting with voters, providing personal protective equipment to poll workers, and making hand sanitizer and other cleaning products readily available. DeSantis signed executive order 20-149 (pdf) on June 17, 2020, which was superseded by the three aforementioned Executive Orders. Masks are optional but not required of voters or poll workers in Florida, Stamoulis said. However, his manual clearly states on Page 6, under the heading, What We Expect Our Voters to Do for Our Community, that voters are expected to Arrive with sanitized hands and a face mask. Under the heading What We Will Do for You, it says poll workers will provide masks for those without. We are awaiting a ruling on the temperature issue, Stamoulis added. However, on the last page of his manual, Stamoulis states The Supervisor of Elections Is the Final Authority When It Comes to Decisions Surrounding COVID in Our Offices and Polling Locations. In response to me being the final authority on COVID issues, please be advised that I follow the law in all matters, including Executive Orders, no exceptions, he added. DeSantiss Office Responds The office of Gov. Ron DeSantis disagrees. Florida law is the final authority when it comes to elections in the state, DeSantiss press secretary Christina Pushaw told The Epoch Times. Supervisors of elections must follow state law. If a supervisor is found to be in violation of the law, the governor has the authority to suspend that person from office. Under state law, Pushaw asserted that Floridians cant be required to wear a mask by any government official or entity, which means that a mask mandate for voting wouldnt be permissible. Beyond the mask issue, this document as a whole is concerning because it could scare citizens into thinking they must comply or simply not show up, Pushaw said. In other words, this could be seen as voter suppression. It needs to be rectified to be clear to voters about their rights. We do not accept COVID protocols that could suppress legal votes or prevent anyone from voting in person. Florida Department of State Weighs In We were made aware of the document and reached out to Charlotte County Supervisor of Elections (SOE) Stamoulis to discuss, Mark R. Ard, a Florida Department of State spokesman, told The Epoch Times. After our conversation, Supervisor Stamoulis understands the concerns presented within the document in question and is revising his policy so that all voters in Charlotte County will [have] equal access to ballots and there are no restrictions on voting. We appreciate Supervisor Stamoulis for being very collaborative throughout the process as we continue to work together to ensure safe, transparent elections in Florida. As a result of reporting on Aug. 5 by The Epoch Times sister media outlet NTD News about Stamouliss efforts to implement polling procedures that violate Florida laws, the Florida Department of State has addressed the issue. Stamouliss office told NTD that the Polling Procedures Manual has been revised and all clerks and poll workers have been notified via email of the prohibition against temperature screening and the alternate voting procedure. Stamoulis or Ard didnt respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for an update on how the policy has been revised. Questionable Equipment Security During the course of the investigation, The Epoch Times also received another manual, which raises serious questions regarding election equipment security at polling locations that do not have a secured/locked room to store equipment. According to the 2022 Election Cycle training manual for Clerks and Assistant Clerks, the Charlotte County SOEs security procedure for storing EViDs and ballot tabulators at unsecured locations consists of laying a large tarp flat on the floor, placing the equipment on the tarp, pulling the tarp over the equipment and fitting the U-bar of a combination lock through grommeted holes. Equipment security procedures from the 2022 Election Cycle training manual for clerks and assistant clerks for the Supervisor of Elections in Charlotte County, Fla. (Screenshot) While the manual indicates there should be no holes to allow access to the equipment inside the tarp, theres nothing to prevent anyone with a pair of scissors from cutting through the tarp to access the equipment. Should any of the seals be found broken, the equipment would have to be replaced. This isnt a simple matter because of a complicated procedure involved in staging an EViD for an election. A meticulous and time-consuming Logic and Accuracy Testing procedure also must be performed with ballot tabulators, including the DS200 (pdf), used by Charlotte County, and the ritual must be witnessed and verified by a canvassing board. Considering the high cost of election equipment, odds are that there are limited spare ready-to-go ballot tabulators and EViDs sitting around in some other secure location ready for use when security measures at a polling location have failed. Serious Concerns Pushaw said that because the Pandemic Procedures manual is already in the hands of poll workers, some of them are still going to believe that they must enforce the outlined rules. Our position is that these policies need to be revised to make clear that voters cannot be required to participate in COVID protocols in order to exercise their right to vote, she said. More broadly, no official anywhere in the state is permitted to enact policies that violate Florida law. To summarize, we have serious concerns about this document and this Supervisors approach to elections administration. Correction: The headline of this article has been updated to more accurately describe the election concerns. A generic photo of the Washington building that houses the Export-Import Bank, the Veterans Affairs Office of Construction, Board of Veterans Appeals, and the Administrative Office of the US Courts. (Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images) Billions Meant for US Small Businesses Go to China, Russia: Watchdog Small businesses seeking to increase their overseas sales are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of loan guarantees by the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), although a new analysis by a nonprofit government watchdog finds most of the funds are going to corporate giants and corrupt foreign regimes. Small businesses, supposedly the intended beneficiary of the Export-Import Bank, received only $54.8 billion of the over $234 billion in total assistance since 2007, or about 23 percent of the banks total funding, according to the report by Open The Books (OTB), a Chicago-based nonprofit that monitors government spending. By filing more than 40,000 federal Freedom of Information Act requests and posting the checkbooks of 49 state governments, OTB has posted to the internet more than $6 trillion in public spending. The nonprofits goal is to post every dime in real-time. By far the biggest beneficiary of Ex-Im lending is Boeing Co., the largest U.S. aircraft manufacturer and one of the worlds most successful designers and builders of commercial airliners. While currently based in Chicago, the company is planning a move to Arlington, Virginia, in the near future. The Export-Import Bank has been nicknamed Boeings Bank by critics, and it is easy to see why. From 2007-2021, the aircraft giant received 33 percent of all of the Export-Import Banks assistance, totaling over $66.4 billion, while the second largest vendor received just over $5 billion. Thats more than all small businesses received combined, the OTB report said. Boeing subsidiary Boeing Satellite Systems International reaped another $1.4 billion in assistance. Major international airline companies like Ryanair, Emirates Airlines, and Air Canada have all received assistance for Boeing purchases. Boeing employs a small army of 18 lobbyists to advocate for the Export-Import Bank. The second-largest beneficiary of the funding is Reston, Virginia-based Bechtel Corp., which ranked behind Boeing despite getting assistance for only seven contracts since 2007. The engineering and construction company received just over $5 billion from the bank for petroleum engineering in wealthy countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and India, as well as with governments like Serbia and Kenya, according to the OTB report. General Electric Co. and its subsidiaries, through exports of industrial engines and machinery in more than 265 transactions, earned third place on the list of top vendors. The report said GEC got $4.7 billion in assistance between General Electric International Operations Co. and General Electric Energy Parts alone. The mandate of Ex-Im is filling the gaps to provide liquidityfacilitating the wheels of commerce, the report stated about the banks overseas funding activities. [A total of] 147 countries have received some amount of aid since 2007. While the United States sent billions of aid to some of the most corrupt countries and repressive regimes in the world, equally disturbing is the amount that went to wealthy countries that dont need our aid. The largest beneficiary among nations of U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed Ex-Im loans is Nigeria, which is ruled by a regime thats among the worlds most corrupt. Ranked 149th in the world on a scale from least to most corrupt by Transparency International in 2020, importers in Nigeria received over $570 million from the Export-Import Bank, the OTB report said. It would be a miracle if any of those dollars actually reached their intended recipient. China, with the worlds second-largest economy, also was a large beneficiary of Ex-Im resources. Second to only the United States in GDP [gross domestic product], businesses in China nonetheless received more than $6.4 billion in U.S. Export-Import Bank assistance. Even amidst Donald Trumps trade war with China, $128,062,638.20 flowed to China from 2017 to 2020, the report observed. Russia and Turkey are also big beneficiaries of Ex-Im funding. At least part of the over $1.9 billion that went to Russia likely went to line the pockets of [Russian President Vladimir] Putins oligarchs, who control most of that nations commerce. Sberbank, Russias largest financial institution, was recently sanctioned by the United States for Russias invasion of Ukraine, though they were approved for $29,103,807 of assistance from the Export-Import Bank, the OTB report said. Human Rights Watch warned in 2021 that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been dismantling human rights protections and democratic norms in Turkey on a scale unprecedented in the 18 years he has been in office. Still, the Export-Import Bank has sent over $6.2 billion to Turkey since 2007. The Ex-Im bank currently has 396 employees, with 321 of them, or 81 percent, being paid more than $100,000 annually. The highest-paid employee made $199,300. The bank has been the source of controversy for nearly a decade, with conservative Republicans demanding that it be abolished as a corrupt example of crony capitalism, and Democrats defending it as an essential tool of U.S. foreign policy. In 2015, the then-Republican-led Congress allowed Ex-Im to expire, but reversed itself five months later. FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during a hearing before Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 4, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) FBI Working on Developing Better Sources in Wake of Capitol Breach: Wray The FBI is examining how to improve its sourcing after failing to detect the potential for large-scale mayhem before the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, the bureaus director said on Aug. 4. While the FBI did put out various intelligence documents warning about the prospect of politically-motivated violence before the breach, it is also the reality that we did not, I think, have any specific credible intelligence that point to thousands of people breaching the capital, Director Christopher Wray said. And so one other things we are determined to do on our part, to make sure we can do our part to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again, is to see how we can go about developing better sources, he added. Anytime in the intelligence field where there is any kind of successful attack, we make a point in trying to figure out, are there better ways to develop sources, higher-quality sources, etc., so were doing that now. The bureau was tipped off about social media posts suggesting the potential for violence in Washington on Jan. 6 by companies like Parler and Facebook, while law enforcement partners also forwarded concerning messages before Congress convened to certify the electoral votes that day. But the FBI had no specific concerns during a Jan. 2 meeting regarding the events scheduled in Washington, according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has said he was assured on Jan. 4 that the FBI was on top of the chatter. The day before the breach, the FBIs Norfolk, Virginia office shared a bulletin about the potential for violence in connection with the Stop the Steal protest, with one thread discussing specific actions such as breaking glass and kicking in doors at the Capitol so members of Congress could hear. Get violent.stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war, the thread stated. Wray has said before that he was not informed of the bulletin until after the breach. That was a thread on a message board that was not attributable to an individual person, Steven DAntuono, the official in charge of the FBIs Washington Field Office, told reporters in 2021. The information was briefed within 40 minutes of receipt to law enforcement partners, he said. The U.S. Capitol Police were alerted, but a copy did not get in front of then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, the former chief told members of Congress a month after the breach. Michael Stenger and Paul Irving, the former sergeants-at-arms for Congress, also testified that they did not see it. Sund said the information was raw data, and that other intelligence didnt indicate that a breach would occur, while Irving described officials as ill-prepared. More Charges As of July 6, more than 855 people have been charged in relation to the breach in federal and District of Columbia courts. Approximately 350 others who were involved in the mayhem have not been charged yet, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said, wondering why that was the case. The FBI is still working on the matter, Wray said. In some instances, a lot of the initial people we were able to find and arrest and charge made themselves widely visibly and easily identifiable on social media or otherwise. but there were a certain number of people who concealed themselves more effectively, so part of it is a little more challenging to get those people identified. Thats part of it, he said, adding later, We are continuing to develop some of the more complicated parts of the investigation in terms of conspiracy charges. Confirmation of DAntuono Movement DAntuono was the FBI agent in charge of the Detroit, Michigan field office while agents there were investigating a group that was ultimately charged with plotting to assassinate Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. At least 12 FBI informants or agents were involved with the group, and defendants have said they were entrapped. Federal charges were brought against some of the men, but two were acquitted in April, while a mistrial was declared for two others. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked how many agents had been disciplined for taking part in the operation, which Wray declined to answer. Crus then pointed out that DAntuono was later promoted to head the Washington office, which Wray initially seemed to deny. The special agent in charge of that case has now been sent to D.C. and now leads the investigation regarding Jan. 6, is that correct? Cruz asked. That doesnt sound right to me, Wray said. When Cruz named DAntuono, Wray said he thought Cruz was talking about somebody else. I thought you were asking about the agent who was responsible for this, Wray said. Florida Governor Suspends State Prosecutor Who Vowed Not to Enforce the Law Floridas governor on Aug. 4 suspended a state prosecutor who has vowed not to enforce laws related to abortion. Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren of the 13th Judicial Circuit due to neglect of duty. In the order (pdf) outlining the move, DeSantis cites Warren recently declaring he wouldnt enforce laws that largely prohibit late-term abortions. Warren and other prosecutors signed a document in June that said enforcing abortion bans runs counter to the obligations and interests we are sworn to uphold. We decline to use our offices resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who provide, or support abortions, the prosecutors stated. No other state attorneys in Florida signed the document. One Florida law bars doctors from performing abortions during the third trimester, or after a fetus achieves viability. Another law bans abortions, with exceptions, after a fetus reaches 15 weeks of age. Warren has put himself publicly above the law, DeSantis, a Republican, told reporters during a press conference. Warrens office didnt immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment. Policies and Other Statements The governors order also cites how Warrens office has avoided prosecuting people who commit misdemeanors such as resisting arrest without violence, stating that the policies arent a proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion and also usurp the authority of the Florida Legislature by not enforcing the law. The order also notes that Warren in 2021 signed a separate statement with other prosecutors regarding biological males using female bathrooms and vice versa. The prosecutors pledged to not promote the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare or transgender people. Gender-affirming is a term used to describe sex change operations and other procedures meant to facilitate a persons change from male to female or female to male. The joint statement said that bills that criminalize such treatments do not promote public safety, community trust, or fiscal responsibility, and suggested that they wouldnt be enforced. DeSantis appointed Susan Lopez to replace Warren while the suspension is in place. Lopez was appointed by DeSantis in 2021 to be a judge on the Hillsborough County Court, and she previously served as an assistant prosecutor in the 13th Judicial Circuit. I have the utmost respect for our state laws and I understand the important role that the state attorney plays in ensuring the safety of our community and the enforcement of our laws, Lopez said in a statement. I want to thank the Governor for placing his trust in me, and I promise that I will faithfully execute the duties of this office. Firefighter vehicles at an entrance of the Manuco factory, which produces a compound used in gunpowder, after a blast occurred, injuring eight people, one of them seriously, in Bergerac, southern France, on Aug. 3, 2022. (Yohan Bonnet/AFP via Getty Images) France: Explosion at Gunpowder Chemical Plant Injures 8 PARISAn explosion Wednesday at a French plant that produces a component of gunpowder injured eight people, one of them seriously, local officials in southwest France said. The plant located in the town of Bergerac specializes in making nitrocellulose, a highly flammable chemical compound. Jean-Charles Jobart, the deputy prefect of Bergerac, said the cause of the explosion was obviously internal to the plant but that there would be an investigation to pinpoint it The explosion caused a fire, and about 60 firefighters were deployed to the site and extinguished the blaze by Wednesday afternoon, officials said. Bergerac Mayor Jonathan Prioleaud told French news channel BFM TV that the plant was fully secured and no more hazards were expected. Hong Kong activist dubbed "Captain America 2.0" Ma Chun-man attends a vigil for a protester Marco Leung Ling-kit who fell to his death during a demonstration outside the Pacific Place mall, in Hong Kong, on June 15, 2020. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters) Hong Kong Captain America Protester Gets Lighter Sentence After Appeal HONG KONGA Hong Kong activist dubbed Captain America 2.0 for wielding the superheros shield during pro-democracy protests in 2019 had his jail sentence reduced to five years on Wednesday after winning an appeal. High Court Chief Judge Jeremy Poon and Justices of Appeal Derek Pang and Anthea Pang, wrote in a summary that was posted on the courts website. The 6-year starting point adopted by the judge was manifestly excessive. The proper starting point should have been 5 years 3 months, and with a discretional discount of 3 months, the final sentence should be one of 5 years. Ma Chun-man, 31 and formerly a delivery man, was jailed for five years and nine months last November under a sweeping national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020. He was found guilty of what the communist regime in mainland China sees as inciting secession, due to the slogans he chanted, placards displayed, and statements he made to the media. According to Article 21 of the national security law: If the circumstances of the offence committed by a person are of a serious nature, the person shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years but not more than 10 years. The judges said the lower court judge, Stanley Chan, was wrong to use the applicants lack of remorse as a reason to assign this case to the serious category, though it did not affect the conclusion that this case was of a serious nature. What Ma did remained at the lower end of that classification, the judges added. Senior Counsel Edwin Choy, representing Ma, argued that his sentence should be closer to five years, as the impact of Ma chanting a slogan was small and he did not have detailed plans on pushing forward a pro-independence stance. The national security law punishes anything the Chinese regime sees as subversion, secession, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces with up to life in prison and has been widely criticized as a tool to purge political opponents and civil society groups. More than 200 people, including many of the citys most prominent opposition politicians and activists, have been arrested for endangering national security. Most have been denied bail. By Jessie Pang Civil servants on their way to the Hong Kong government offices. (Song Bi-long/The Epoch Times) Hong Kong Government Jobs Show Record High Number of Resignations, Double the Previous Year Record Low Applications for Top Government Roles Hong Kongs civil service resignations have reached a scale not seen since the citys handover to China in 1997. The citys Civil Service Bureau (CSB) recently disclosed that 10,487 civil servants left their jobs in the year 2021-2022, of which 3,743 resigneddouble last years number, according to the Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP). Other reasons for departure included retirement, not renewing their contract, dismissal, and death. Among those who resigned, 32 were administrative officers, which the report defines as a prestigious government role where some go on to fill leading positions in bureaux or departments. Since Beijing imposed the sweeping National Security Law, Hong Kong has faced an exodus of educated workers on a scale not seen since the early 1990s, impacting the citys many functions, especially its civil services. The number of applicants for top government roles has also fallen to record lows, the report added. Administrative officer positions saw about 9,700 applications in the year 2021-2022, compared to around 17,000 applications four years ago. Meanwhile, the number of applicants for executive officer roles also fell from 25,000 in the year 2017-2018 to about 15,000 in 2021-2022, a 40 percent drop in just four years. Pledge Allegiance or Be Dismissed The Hong Kong government now requires civil servants to take an oath or sign a declaration of allegiance to the Hong Kong authority under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This requirement was introduced last year and was extended to cover non-civil service employees. The citys Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs, Tsang Kwok-wai, revealed in a recent Legislative Council meeting that 129 civil servants and 535 non-civil servant government employees, who ignored or refused to sign and return the declaration, had left their government posts last year. The Information Service Department announced on April 19 that candidates for civil service positions, starting July 1 this year, must pass a test on Hong Kong Basic Law and the National Security Law, and this will be an entry requirement for all civil service positions. Leung Chau-ting, chief executive of the Federation of Civil Service Union, told local newspaper Ming Pao that the citys civil servants now face uncertainty amid increased political pressures such as taking oaths. He worries that the vacancies might not be filled with the falling number of applicants for civil service jobs in recent years. Shortage of Skilled Auditors Amid Emigration Wave According to the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), Hong Kongs audit regulator, the emigration of experienced staff has resulted in a shortage of qualified auditors in the city, seriously impacting its audit work. High staff turnover and loss of experienced staff create operational inconveniences, impact staff morale and productivity, and eventually affect the firms audit quality and services, according to FRCs 2021 annual inspection report (pdf) released on June 23. It is also the most commonly cited reason for audit work not being performed properly and supervision and review not being performed on a timely basis and sufficiently. The report said that Hong Kong is facing challenges maintaining audit staff at appropriate levels. In response to the situation, FRC recommends that firms decline engagements when they do not have the time and resources to conduct a high-quality audit. On top of the emigration wave, the city is also experiencing a significantly higher employee turnover rate. The citys accounting and legal staff turnover rate reached 11 percent in 2021, a nine percent jump from the previous year, said Kelvin Wong, the chairman of FRC, in a local press briefing on June 23. The FRC is an independent body with the statutory duty to regulate auditors of listed entities in Hong Kong. Its 2021 annual inspection report covers the financial year of Apil. 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022. China Evergrande is selling the devalued former "Mass Mutual Tower," which it bought in November 2015 for $1.6 billion, with a current market valuation of $1.17 billion. (Song Bilong /The Epoch Times) Hong Kongs Li Ka-Shing Makes Bid to Purchase Devalued China Evergrande Center Chinese developer Evergrande is selling its flagship China Evergrande Center in Hong Kong through tender that closed on July 28. The buildings market valuation had dropped to an estimated HK$9 billion (about $1.17 billion). Cheung Kong Asset Holdings Limited, founded by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-Shing, confirmed submission of the tender on the same day in a company statement. In November of 2015, China Evergrande purchased the Mass Mutual Tower from Chinese Estates Holdings for HK$12.5 billion (about $1.6 billion) and renamed it the China Evergrande Center. The landmark office building stands 26-stories tall and has 345,424 square feet of floorspace. It is situated on the northern shore of Hong Kong Island inside the Wan Chai District. The $1.6 billion Evergrande paid for the property in 2015 set two new records at the time. It was the highest price ever paid for a commercial building in Hong Kong and it was also the highest unit price paid per square foot of office space. The Evergrande Center was at full occupancy when purchased by Evergrande. According to Colliers, the global commercial real estate services firm, the propertys occupancy rate has fallen by nearly 30 percent. In 2021, with over $300 billion in liabilities, Evergrande was under pressure to sell the Evergrande Center at the asking price of HK$15.6 billion (about $2 billion). Reuters reported that state-owned Yuexiu Property in Guangzhou was close to buying the property for $1.7 billion one year ago. The deal was set to close but concerns over Evergrandes debt load caused the buyer to discontinue negotiations in October. Evergrande is one of many Chinese real estate companies that have become burdened by debt. From July 21 to 26 of this year, four of the top 100 real estate companies admitted they were defaulting on their US dollar bonds. Three of which are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. When speaking with the Epoch Times on July 29, Katherine Jiang, a Hong Kong financial analyst suggested Chinas real estate companies are in debt due to excessive borrowing. They wanted to continue building while property prices were on the rise. Their investments were achieved via the accumulation of enormous debt. When asked about the mounting debt of Chinas real estate companies, Chinese economist Dr. Li Songyun told The Epoch Times, Under the current situation, it is inevitable that Chinas real estate companies will continue to default. The reason is that the real estate companies have no money in their hands. The pre-sale money they received may have been used to buy new plots of land or squandered. Now they are constrained by the governments policies and unable to get loans from banks. They cant recoup funds from sluggish housing sales, so they are unable to repay their debts. Li Songyun said, The real estate market is being hit hard by the loan suspensions, set off by the home buyers of unfinished buildings. She was referring to construction work being abandoned or put on hold. According to the latest estimate by S&P Global Ratings, Chinas real estate sales are likely to fall by 30 percent this year, a drop that will exceed the level seen during the 2008 financial crisis. Recently, news researcher REDD Asia reported the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approved a plan to establish a real estate fund. According to Li Songyun, the CCP is worried that this loan suspension storm will get worse and even affect social stability. She said, the first batch of funds is only $12 billion, and it is hoped that the total amount will be raised to $30 to $45 billion. But even so, the fund is too low. The bailout is very limited, as it is said to target only a dozen major property developers, whose short-term debts amount to more than $105 billion and would total $600 billion if debts to home buyers and suppliers are included. Commenting further, Li Songyun said it is likely that the CCP is only using this news to appease the public, mainly to maintain social stability and ensure the smooth convening of the 20th National Congress. Only after the 20th National Congress is over in the next few months will we be able to see if it really has the determination to deal with the issues of unfinished buildings and give justice to the people. The 20th National Congress will determine the leadership of the country for the next 5 to 10 years. Hospital Patients Need an Advocate to Fight the White Coats in the Medical Establishment, Former Nurse Says The need for medical patients to have their own advocates has become critical in light of increasing reports from family members who believe their loved ones died in the hospital because of the COVID-19 treatment protocols prescribed by doctors. To assist in breaking up what Priscilla Romans called an unhealthy co-dependency between patients and the health care system, Romans launched Graith Care, a patient advocacy business that takes the ultimate authority out of the hands of the white coats and returns it back to the patient. People have believed the hospitals are going to take care of them, only to find that this isnt always the case, Romans told The Epoch Times. Many hospitals mechanically adhere to treatment protocols outlined in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), but with the help of patient advocates, patients and their families can override these one-size-fits-all treatment plans. Its a solution to a problem long overdue, Romans said. Romans is launching Graith Care at a time when many health care professionals are leaving a medical system that they say was broken long before COVID-19 brought its corruption to the surface. The tipping point has caused some doctors and nurses, including Romans, to find alternatives outside of the system. It Was Worse Than I Thought As a nurse who later worked in the health insurance industry, Romans said shes seen the many faces of the medical industrial complex, only to find that it was worse than I thought. Among the issues is the fact that hospitals are paid large incentives by health insurance companies to follow a pre-set treatment plan, she said, which has led to hospitals exchanging patient care for lucrative payoffs. For example, hospitals that receive federal funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act receive a 20 percent increase in reimbursement for inpatient stays resulting from COVID-19, she said. There are also incentives for treating COVID-19 patients with sedatives and the antiviral drug remdesivir, and then putting them on a ventilator, which often ends in death. Even before the pandemic began, Romans said, she had been feeling a spiritual calling to step out of the comfort zone of a steady paycheck after years of observing the mechanics of a machine fueled by money, not by compassion. I launched Graith Care from my own home not knowing what was around the corner with all the vaccine mandates, protocols, and the use of drugs like remdesivir that, in many cases, have been deadly, Romans said. Since then, shes expanded her business through word-of-mouth to help people throughout the United States and internationally, she said. I just felt like this was the right thing to do for people at the worst time in their lives, she said. Rescue Operations Patient advocacy requires quick, critical thinking skills and a good understanding of the health care system to properly advocate for the average person, who may not understand that starving patients while keeping them on drugs like remdesivir, fentanyl, and precedex only makes them sicker, Romans said. These hospitals will make it seem like they are giving an individual plan of care while the patient and the family have no clue what is happening, and they just go along with what the white coats tell them, Romans said. Patient advocacy is about helping families understand their rights, she said, and how to navigate through the bureaucracy of the system that tells them they only have one option, like remaining trapped in the hospital. Anne and Scott Quiner at Gooseberry Falls State Park in 2018. (Courtesy of Anne Quiner) In the case of the Anne and Scott Quiner in January 2022, Graith Care had Annes husband Scott flown out of a hospital in Minnesota to another hospital in Texas that allowed patients to choose a COVID-19 protocol recommended by Americas Frontline Doctors, which involved hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and vitamin C. Anne Quiner had to seek legal counsel to file a restraining order to prevent the Minnesota hospital from taking Scott off a ventilator. The hospital responded by objecting on the basis that Annes position wasnt supported by medical science before requesting that the court issue an order authorizing the hospital to take Scott off the ventilator, which would have killed him. The judge sided with the Quiners lawyer, and on Jan. 15, it was Graith Care that helped organize a team to transfer Scott. When Scott arrived in Texas, it was reported that he was malnourished, dehydrated, and 30 pounds underweight, and that his doctors there were horrified at his condition, but on Jan. 20, he reportedly became responsive and was making tremendous progress. Scott Quiner later died on Jan. 22. He had already been put through too much and had so much thrown at him without the proper nutrition, Romans said. After a period of time, all of his organs were just suffering. Nobody Ever Flies Out of This Hospital Graith Care had another patient flown out of a top-tier hospital in South Dakota where the doctor was refusing a patient alternative treatment, Romans said. The physician there said that a ventilator was the only option, so Graith Care worked to have the patient transferred, she said. The doctor told me, Nobody ever flies out of this hospitalthey fly to us, she said. I told him we were going to try because its what the family wants. Within about 24 hours of his stay at the new hospital, the patient was healthy enough to return home, she said. He probably would have died at the other hospital because the only option they gave him was to be put on a [ventilator], Romans said. But there are many people who didnt have the option to transfer their loved ones out of hospitals where they were receiving poor care. Katrin Crum, Aletha Chavez, and Ashley Wines said their husbands were each isolated and given a combination of sedatives and the antiviral drug remdesivir, a drug reported to cause acute kidney failure. The doctors said the kidney failure was a symptom of COVID-19. Though individual treatment had previously been left up to the physician and was an open discussion between the physician and the patient, Crum told The Epoch Times that all of that was thrown out the window when it came to her husbands care. My 58-year-old husband in Washington received the exact same treatment as a 40-year-old woman in Florida who had none of the same health issues that my husband had, Crum said. For Romans, the pandemic has exposed the frayed wires of a medical system that cant be fixed. The behavior of some physicians and nurses in the face of families who have had their lives turned upside down has revealed a disconnect in health care, she said. I think the system is going to implode on itself, she said. As a result, people are going to start shifting where they get their advice and medical care. As with all change, she said, it wont be comfortable. Its been painful, but its opened our eyes so that we can start looking for better solutions, she said. Dear Monty: We recently purchased a condo in a community with a homeowners association board and bylaws. This property was only a slab when we bought it with a July closing date. The builder did not complete the unit until the middle of October. The builder promised a closing date inspection for any blemishes or defects and would inspect it each quarter again until the end of one year. The builder also said that the unit would look like the other units (outside) in the community. At the end of April, the HOA requested a meeting because the triplex needed two-thirds approval to go forward. At this meeting, I expressed my concerns that I and others in our fourplex were not getting any satisfaction from the builder in resolving many issues. The HOA was only interested in the outside. I did write a letter to the board explaining all my concerns. They responded that it was our fault because we had taken a winter vacation in Arizona. The outside, which they claimed was their responsibility, does not match the other units. I wrote a second letter asking why we did not get the same treatment as the other units built 10-12 years ago. After a month, I did not get a response. The entire board is not very outgoing and is very standoffish. They told me they dont want to hear about any problems and will make any necessary decisions without outside input. My question is, is there a governing group in Wisconsin overseeing HOAs so I can voice my complaints, or will I have to contact a lawyer to get this board to answer my concerns? Montys Answer: Based on your shared information, consider investing in the cost of an initial meeting with an attorney. Should you proceed, here is a link to an article about how to identify a competent attorney if you do not have a relationship established. The direct answer to your question is that a governmental body does oversee homeowners associations in Wisconsin. It is called the State Legislature. There is no license requirement to organize an HOA. The Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services licenses many businesses. Still, there are statutes on the books to which condominiums must adhere. That said, there is much more state legislatures could do to minimize the problems you experienced. They could start by requiring a license. Several national organizations work toward quality improvement in the 350,000 HOA communities throughout the nation. I am linking you to two I found on an internet search for HOA organizations. HOA-USA.com directs you to Wisconsin Statutes here. A second organization named the Community Association Institute has a chapter in Wisconsin here. I want to be clear that I am not endorsing either organization listed here. Consider asking what they are doing to get legislatures to act. Researching organizations like the ones identified above may lead you to other resources that can offer guidance, short of seeking legal redress with your resources. Another option is mediation, which can occasionally turn a reluctant board from combatant to conciliatory. Your description of the HOAs current responses suggests that it may be unlikely. Here is a Dear Monty article about a recently published HOA issue that may offer more information. Illegal alien Jose Paulino Pasceul-Reyes, 37, was charged with first-degree kidnapping, three counts of capital murder, and two counts of abuse, in Tallapoosa County, Ala., on Aug. 2, 2022. (Tallapoosa County Sheriffs Office) Illegal Alien Charged After Captive 12-Year-Old Girl Escapes House, 2 Decomposing Bodies Found An illegal alien has been charged with first-degree kidnapping, three counts of capital murder, and two counts of abuse of a corpse, after a gruesome discovery in rural Alabama on Aug. 1. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, who had previously been deported, is accused of murdering Sandra Vazquez Ceja and her son, who was younger than age 14, as well as kidnapping Cejas 12-year-old daughter in Tallapoosa County, Alabama. The complaint alleges that Pascual-Reyes killed Ceja by smothering her with a pillow and her son by bludgeoning him with his hands or feet on or about July 24. He is also accused of cutting both bodies into small pieces at the joints in order to hide evidence. Pascual-Reyes then allegedly tied Cejas 12-year-old daughter to the bedposts for about a week, plying her with alcohol to keep her in a drugged state, and abusing her. The girl eventually chewed through her restraints and escaped from the house. A passerby called 911 after seeing the girl wandering down a road early on Aug. 1. The information she provided us was that she had been bound and held at the residence thats located near where she was at, Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett told The Epoch Times. As we proceeded through it, a warrant was issued for [Reyes] on that offensethe kidnapping in the first degreeand then as our investigation continued, we determined that there were two decomposed bodies in the residence. Abbett said the bodies are still with forensics for formal identification and cause of death determination. He said Pascual-Reyes and Ceja were a couple and had moved into the residence in February. Abbett said the young girl is now in state custody and being provided for. Hes calling her a hero. What she had to endure and also provide us enough information where we could actually arrest this individual, he said. Shes doing as well as can be expected, he said. No life-threatening injuries but, you know, you got the anguish and the mental part shes got to deal with. The sheriff said he hasnt had border-related issues in his county prior to this incident. Tallapoosa County has a population of about 41,000. This is really our first one. Weve had some minor stuff, traffic stuff, and things of this nature, but not to the magnitude of this, he said. Pascual-Reyes is being held in custody without bond and had his first court appearance on Aug. 3, when he was provided attorneys. He ended up with three capital murder charges due to Alabamas law that adds an extra charge for killing two or more persons. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didnt respond by press time to a request for more information on Pascual-Reyes. Jessica Korda of The United States on the first tee during the second round of the AIG Women's Open at Carnoustie Golf Links Muirfield in Gullane, Scotland, August 4, 2022. (Andrew Redington/Getty Images) In Borrowed Clothes, Korda Makes Strong Start at Muirfield MUIRFIELD, ScotlandPlaying in borrowed clothes doesnt seem to bother Jessica Korda at the Womens British Open. Still waiting for her suitcase to arrive in Muirfield, Korda recovered from an early bogey to shoot a 5-under 66 in the first round Thursday, putting her one shot behind leader Hinako Shibuno of Japan. Korda made four birdies and an eagle on the 17th despite missing her normal clothes after her luggage got stuck at an airport in Switzerland. If anyone knows anyone at the Zurich airport that would like to put my suitcase on the one flight a day that they have coming into Edinburgh, Id deeply appreciate it, Korda said. I know where it is, I have an air tag on it. I cant get anyone to actually go get it. Monday I wore Megan Khangs pants. Tuesday, I wore my sisters pants and Wednesday I wore Alison Lees pants. Today Im wearing FootJoy pants. Shibuno, the 2019 champion, made birdies on the first three holes and went on to card eight in total in her 65. Scotlands Louise Duncan and Mexicos Gabby Lopez were tied for third, two shots back. It has been a long time since Ive played this well, especially putting. Honestly it was a little frightening, Shibuno said through an interpreter. I havent changed much. My caddie told me that my body balance was off when I was missing putts. Once I focused on this, I could play much better. Hinako Shibuno of Japan tees off on the 15th hole during Day One of the AIG Womens Open at Muirfield in Gullane, Scotland, August 4, 2022. (Octavio Passos/Getty Images) Nelly Korda, Jessicas sister, was tied for 13th after shooting a 70. Catriona Matthew, also a former Womens British Open champion and two-time winning captain in the Solheim Cup, was selected to hit the opening tee shot Thursday after growing up close to Muirfield, which is hosting the event for the first time. It was only six years ago that Muirfield didnt allow women to even set foot in the clubhouse. Matthew struggled to a 5over 76, making double bogeys on the first and 10th and failing to make a single birdie. Being the first womens pro event to be played here, its great, and me being local it was a huge honor to hit the first tee shot, Matthew said. Apart from the two doubles I actually played quite well. Its a little frustrating. Independent federal member for Fowler Dai Le at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Aug. 3, 2022. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas) Independent MP Explains Why She Abstained From Voting on Climate Change Bill An Independent MP has revealed why she abstained from voting on the Climate Change Bill, saying it lacks details and doesnt explain the economic impact on low-income communities. It comes as the Climate Change Bill passed through parliament, 89 votes to 55, within one week after it was first introduced. Dai Le, who defeated high-profile Labor Senator Kristina Keneally to claim the Western Sydney seat of Fowler, tweeted on August 3 that she abstained from voting because she cant justify voting yes on a bill thats been rushed through parliament. Le said parliamentarians need to make informed and educated choices, which means understanding the consequences of the bill. As it stands, the legislation lacks detail which means there is no certainty on power prices, there is no certainty on how we will achieve it, she said in a media statement. Solar panels are seen on the rooftop at AGLs new Docklands office in Melbourne, Australia, on August 20, 2015. (Scott Barbour/Getty Images) The Vietnam-born MP added that while she supports a cleaner and greener environment, she considers economic relief, not the current Climate Change bill, to be an emergency. Right now, Australian families have a real emergency, and we need to focus on low-income families who are struggling with high food, fuel and energy prices, she said. In my electorate, the average household income is 20 percent less than the rest of Australia; we need solutions now. Will the Push for Net-Zero Benefit Low-Income Communities? The 14-page Climate Change Bill sets a 43 percent emission reduction target as a minimum standard by 2030 and net zero by 2050. It was mainly opposed by the Coalition but was supported by the left-wing Greens, who initially proposed to lift the emission target to 75 percent by 2030 and net zero by 2035. Were not doing this to try [to] stop pollution a little bit. We are doing this to try [to] stop climate change becoming a runaway chain reaction, Greens leader Adam Bandt said. The Bill seeks to fulfil Labors election pledge to rewire the energy grid so that it is predominantly supported by renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, as well as to grow the uptake of electric cars. A Tesla Model Y electric vehicle is displayed on a showroom floor at the Miami Design District in Florida on Oct. 21, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) However, a media spokesperson for Dai Le told The Epoch Times that while there are incentives for renewable energy in principle, in practice, it does take a lot of considering when implementing something like this. For example, the shift to renewables means low-income communities like Western Sydney will find it difficult to adapt, she said. With solar rebates, a lot of people in our community are renters. So theres no incentive for landlords to even put solar panels on houses for renters. How do we address that? the spokesperson said. In terms of electric vehicles, theres a supply issue. Even though theyre wanting to make it cheaper for people to buy electric vehicles, its still a really high price point for people in power as well. He said western Sydney was a huge manufacturing base that political leaders should nurture into a hub for electric vehicle makingrather than importing cars that will need two years to arrive in Australia. Those two things dont really trickle down to everyday Australians. Currently, 64 percent of Australias energy grid is powered by coal-fired generation, while the country has a 60 percent supply of the worlds lithium. Supporters of the Freedom Convoy protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions in front of Parliament in Ottawa on Jan. 28, 2022. (Dave Chan/AFP via Getty Images) Industry Complaints of Trucker Shortages Days Before Freedom Convoy Protest Canadas labour department complained about a significant labour shortage in the trucking industry days before the truckers Freedom Convoy protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandate broke out earlier this year. A department briefing note, titled Safety And Training In The Trucking Sector, said key sectors in the economy including the trucking sector continue to face significant workforce challenges, according to Blacklocks Reporter. Trucking companies were struggling to find workers, the briefing note reads. The note, dated Jan. 13, came days before a massive convoy of trucks and vehicles arrived in Ottawas downtown core on Jan. 28 to begin a three-weeks-long demonstration against the federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates and pandemic restrictions. The vacancy rate for this sector (eight percent) remained above national levels (five percent) indicating that trucking sector employers are in need of more skilled workers but are having a difficult time filling vacancies, the note reads, adding that employers need creative solutions to resolve the labour shortage. The briefing note made no mention of COVID-19 vaccination orders. The Freedom Convoy protest ended after the Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14 to give the police additional powers to clear the demonstrators at the national capital and several Canada-U.S. border crossings. Police engaged in escalated operations over the next few days, leading to the end of the protests. A week after the protests ended, a cabinet proposal for truckers to show proof of vaccination when crossing interprovincial borders was dropped. The Department of Transport first proposed a vaccine mandate for federally regulated private sector workers like cross-border truckers on Aug. 13, 2021. Then on Dec. 7, 2021, the labour department issued a Canada Labour Code notice stating that vaccine mandates would come into force in early 2022. Making vaccination mandatory across all federally regulated workplaces will protect workers, Labour Minister Seamus ORegan said in a statement at the time. He dropped the proposal after the Freedom Convoy protest ended. On March 2, ORegan told reporters that vaccine mandates are something we continue to listen to stakeholders very keenly with but things change. Public health changes, science changes. Lots of things are changing. Its very much in flux. In response to a reporter who asked whether the vaccination mandate for interprovincial truckers are still going ahead, ORegan replied, Interprovincial? No, no. Rick Bergmann, chair of the industry group Canadian Pork Council, testified on Feb. 14 at the House of Commons agriculture committee, saying that a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on interprovincial trucking would be very devastating to our country. The reality is were experiencing a significant shortage of trucks and trailers to haul hogs across Canada, and the situation is worse than publicly stated, Bergmann said. Weve talked with different drivers, different driving businesses, transport companies, and so on, and they are pulling their hair out. If this in fact happens, the problem has gotten much worse. Investigator Alleges Thousands of Irregularities on Wisconsin County Voter Rolls A citizen investigator says he has discovered thousands of inaccuracies in the Racine County, Wisconsin, municipal voter rolls. The latest allegations come on the heels of findings announced earlier this week by another investigator that security vulnerabilities exist in the statewide online process of applying for absentee ballotsfindings that prompted Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling to call for an immediate suspension of part of Wisconsins absentee voter process pending a statewide investigation. Just days before the Aug. 9 primary election, it was discovered that any individual can go online and, using only a date of birth, can order an absentee ballot for any registered voter in the state and direct the ballot to be sent to an address other than that of the person who requested it. Peter Bernegger of Wisconsin is working to clean up the states voter rolls. (Courtesy of Peter Bernegger) In a July 28 press release responding to the claim, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) stated, There is no indication of any vulnerability with the MyVote application. Yet, small tests of the system conducted by individuals revealed that at least half a dozen absentee ballots, including that of a prominent local official, were applied for by someone else and delivered to unrelated third parties. On July 31, 2022, Peter Bernegger, a cyber analyst, sent a package of data documenting the voter roll problems he found to 13 municipal clerks in Racine County, including a letter asking them what is being done about it. Bernegger told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 1 phone interview, It is the duty of local and state election officials to ensure voter registration lists are accurate and updated regularly. Our analysis shows this is not the case in the municipalities of Racine County. He said the numerous problems he discovered call for correction in order to prevent their potential exploitation by nefarious actors seeking to influence the outcome of an election. In his letter to the clerks, Bernegger wrote, I would be happy to help you and your staff with this critically important effort to protect our elections. There are local volunteers in Racine County willing to help also. As of press time, Bernegger said he had not heard from any of the clerks. Bernegger said he used data obtained from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the United States Postal Service (USPS) verified database and the postal services national change of address service in conducting his study. The Epoch Times has obtained a copy of his findings. Berneggers electronic cross-checking found 531 registered voters moved out of Racine County two or more months before the November 2020 election, according to the USPSyet voted using their old address. Some of these folks voted absentee and some voted in person, he said. In this image from video, Bob Spindell, a commissioner on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, speaks during a state hearing on elections in Madison, Wis., on Dec. 11, 2020. (NTD Television) Bernegger found that 636 people voted from registered addresses that were listed as vacant by the postal service. The addresses are not valid; hence the electors are illegally registered, he wrote. In 421 instances, the persons listed primary address is a number that falls beyond the range available for that street or road. His examination of the rolls showed 220 people have zip codes that do not match USPS zip codes. Street addresses listed on the rolls for 412 people had errors in the street name. Thirteen people are listed on the rolls without a first name. If there is no first name, the system should not accept the registration, Bernegger said. The Racine County clerks office and the office of the clerk of the city of Racine did not respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment as of press time. According to Bernegger, in Racine County, there are 111,665 voters currently listed on the rolls as active and 136,432 listed as inactive, including 24,890 deceased. The population of Racine County is just under 200,000. Bernegger said there are 632,599 inactive voters listed as deceased on the statewide voter roll. In his letter, Bernegger quoted Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, who opined on the perils of failing to continually purge the states voter rolls. Bradley wrote in a recent opinion, Indeed, retaining thousands of potentially illegitimate registrations on Wisconsins voter lists substantially harms the integrity of elections. Removing ineligible voters from this states registration list is paramount if Wisconsin takes seriously its obligation to ensure fair and honest elections. According to WECs website, there are 7.1 million names on the states voter list, with 3.6 million listed as inactive and 3.5 million listed as active. WEC explained on its website that the inactive voters are not deleted because the list is a historical public record, and it can be used to assist election workers as a historical reference in making determinations. Bernegger told The Epoch Times in a phone interview, Since 2016 Wisconsin has had a contract with the Electronic Registration Information Center known as ERIC. Both the registration information center and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are being paid by the taxpayers of Wisconsin to keep the rolls clean and accurate. It appears that in Racine County they have done very little to keep them in acceptable order. This ought to be a concern for every citizen regardless of political party, he said. I filed a public information request for any and all reports provided to WEC by ERIC from Jan. 1 through Nov. 3, 2020. I received notice of exactly one report which contained nothing but the names of many thousands of people who were eligible but not yet registered to vote in Wisconsin, said Bernegger. The irony of a private citizen being able to find the irregularities and inaccuracies on the voter rolls in Racine County, while well-funded authorities seem to be blind to them, is too much. The Electronic Registration Information Centers website explains that under the terms of its agreement with the states, member states contact potentially eligible but unregistered voters with instructions on how to register. ERIC members contact potential voters at least every two years, ahead of any federal general election, the website said. According to the centers website, Each member state receives reports that show voters who have moved within their state, voters who have moved out of state, voters who have died, duplicate registrations in the same state, and individuals who are potentially eligible to vote but are not yet registered. States may request a report identifying voters who appear to have voted twice within the state in the prior federal election, voted in more than one state in the prior federal election, or who voted on behalf of a deceased voter in the prior federal election. The website says that each member state must, at a minimum send to ERIC its voter registration and motor vehicle licensee data, including names, addresses, date-of-birth, and the last four digits of peoples social security number. Date of birth and social security numbers are encrypted. To join ERIC, each state must pay a one-time fee of $25,000 and pay annual membership dues ranging from $16,000 to about $74,000 depending on its population and other factors. It currently provides its services to 31 states. In 2019, 69,000 names of Wisconsin voters who likely moved were reported, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the state elections commission was not obligated to remove them, so they remained on the voter rolls through the 2020 presidential election. WEC said in a statement that it was the local clerks who were responsible for removing move-aways from the voter rolls. In a separate investigation, Bernegger filed suit asking for a court order to allow him access to election records from the city of Milwaukee, which he says has largely stonewalled him in his quest. The case is still pending. Irvine Offers $4.7 Million in Grants to Nonprofits Irvine officials announced Aug. 3 that the city is offering $4.7 million in grants to nonprofits supporting small businesses and disadvantaged communities. The city is allocating $2.2 million to nonprofits that assist small businesses, $2.2 million to those that help what city officials call vulnerable populationsor groups at a higher risk of illness, disability, and educational or economic disadvantagesand $300,000 for newly established nonprofits. The grants will be distributed incrementally over 2 years. The City of Irvine is committed to supporting the critical needs of our community, such as childcare, food insecurity, housing and mental health resources, Mayor Farrah Khan said in a statement. Khan said the funds come from the citys share of the federal American [Rescue] Plan Act, which was enacted to deliver economic relief for the pandemic. The deadline for applications is Aug. 24. No late applications will be accepted, and only nonprofits serving Irvine are eligible. The citys grant review subcommittee will meet twice in September to review the applications and submit them to the city council. A JetBlue airplane is shown at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, on March 16, 2017. (Seth Wenig/AP Photo) JetBlue Posts Q2 Loss as Fuel Costs Offset Rising Revenue NEW YORKJetBlue Airways lost $188 million in the second quarter, as fuel costs nearly tripled and wiped out a large increase in revenue during the early part of the peak vacation-travel season. The loss reported Tuesday was wider than Wall Street expected. JetBlue was unable to keep pace with bigger rivals, who posted profits for the quarter on full planes and higher fares. Shares of JetBlue fell 6 percent in late-morning trading Tuesday. JetBlue gave the financial update just days after reaching an agreement to buy Spirit Airlines for about $3.8 billion. CEO Robin Hayes said the deal, which JetBlue expects to close by early 2024, will increase his airlines earnings per share in the first year after closing. Antitrust regulators are already reviewing the deal, and it is unclear how long that process will take. Obviously were not in control of the timeline, Hayes said on a call with analysts. He said Spirit shareholderswho were poised to reject a merger with Frontier Airlineswill likely vote in the next three months. In the meantime, JetBlue is counting on the addition of flights to London and a partnership with American Airlines in New York and Boston to help it become profitable. The Justice Department is suing to block the deal with American, saying it will reduce competition and hurt consumers. JetBlue also announced it will speed up the retirement of some smaller planes to save money. In the second quarter, fuel was JetBlues largest expense, surging to $910 million from $336 million a year earlier. Labor costs rose 20 percent, to $695 million, as the New York-based airline hired more workers to avoid the high number of flight delays and cancellations it suffered in April. The quarterly loss compared with a profit of $64 million a year earlier, when JetBlue received federal pandemic aid that has since ended. The adjusted loss, excluding some non-recurring items, was 47 cents per share. Analysts expected a loss of 11 cents per share, according to a FactSet survey. Revenue soared 63 percent from a year ago, to $2.45 billion, about in line with expectations. Students and parents wearing face coverings wait in line for the first day of the school year at Grant Elementary School in Los Angeles, Calif., on Aug. 16, 2021. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images) LA Unified Scales Back Indoor Masking, Weekly COVID Testing for Upcoming School Year The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will scale back most of its COVID-19 measuresincluding the mask mandate and weekly testingfor the upcoming school year. The LAUSD announced these changes just two weeks before the start of the fall semester on Aug 15. As we have entered into a new phase of this virus where we have accessible at-home testing, vaccinations for COVID-19 and therapeutics available for treatment, Los Angeles Unified is able to nimbly adjust to changing conditions, the district stated in an Aug. 2 statement. Under the new guidelines, indoor masking is strongly recommended but not required, and the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students is on hold until at least 2023. Students and staff will no longer have to undergo weekly COVID-19 testingthough everyone must upload a negative test result to the districts DailyPass mobile application before returning to campus. Instead of weekly testing, the district is only requiring those who are experiencing COVID-19 symptomsor who have been in close contact with a person who has tested positiveto test for the coronavirus. Students or staff members who test positive will be required to isolate themselves at home for at least five days. They can leave isolation on day six if their symptoms are improving, they test negative for the virus, and they remain fever-free for 24 hours. Employees who leave isolation after the five-day period will be required to wear a mask on campus until 10 days after the initial positive test. As for students, this practice is strongly recommended. The new testing rules are aligned with Superintendent Alberto Carvalhos strategic plan for the district to cut its spending. He said in June that he was preparing the districtwhich received about $5 billion in federal pandemic aid last yearfor the time when such funding is no longer available. During the 202122 school year, the district administered between 1 and 2 million tests each month, which, along with contact tracing, was projected to cost nearly $600 million each year, according to a district analysis in February (pdf). The cost was four times the cost projections from June 2021. The majority of such COVID-19 expenses will likely be covered by federal funding, officials said. Some parents and educators are worried that the lack of masking can lead to a transmission surge in schools, while the changes are welcomed by those who argued that masks hindered students ability to learn and socialize. Sharon McKeeman, founder of Let Them Breathea parent advocacy group that advocates for ending school mask mandatessaid the district is doing the right thing. Parents and students standing up for their rights are returning common sense to the equation in education, she told The Epoch Times. However, we must remain vigilant so that overreaching restrictions do not return. Students cant be on a roller coaster this year as they need to heal and recoup from learning loss. The founder of parent advocacy group UTLA Uncensored, who declined to provide her name out of concerns for her childrens safety, said she hopes all COVID-19 measures will soon be laid to rest. This is a win for kids, the mother of two LAUSD students told The Epoch Times. Parents are hopeful that these changes will allow kids to heal from the trauma of the past two years. Legal Battle Over Floridas Big Tech Censorship Law May Impact Future of Free Speech on Social Media News Analysis Recent controversies stoked by alleged efforts of leading tech platforms to ban or de-platform content on political groundswhich some claim was behind Twitters temporary blocking last week of all links to articles running in The Epoch Timeshave prompted fresh debate over the legal rights of users of these platforms and what the First Amendment does, and does not, guarantee. In the view of some legal experts, while the spirit of the First Amendment unmistakably favors freedom of expression, its explicit language leaves those who have been banned or blocked with little legal recourse, calling for new approaches, including potentially an antitrust case against the tech companies whose dominance is so entrenched that they shape public discourse in a putatively free society. SB 7072s Uncertain Fate Some people have eagerly awaited the outcome of an ongoing case, NetChoice v. Moody, in which tech and social media companies represented by the trade association NetChoice have challenged a Florida law, SB 7072, which sought to bar the platforms from censoring content from any candidates running for statewide or national office. While the litigation pertains to the rights specifically of Florida users of social media platforms, it has gained national attention and support in other states, and is closely watched by tech companies around the country. Introduced partly in response to the decision of Facebook and Twitter in January 2021 to kick former President Donald Trump off their platforms, SB 7072 purports to move the decision to de-platform a candidate out of the hands of the big tech companies and place it in the hands of the end users, Florida citizens, who are free to delete or block any content they wish. The governors office promoted the statute not just as one benefiting candidates, but as a populist measure, declaring in a statement, All Floridians treated unfairly by big tech platforms will have the right to sue companies that violate this lawand win monetary damages. This reform safeguards the rights of every Floridian by requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content moderation practices and give users proper notice of changes to those policies, which prevents Big Tech bureaucrats from moving the goalposts to silence viewpoints they dont like. The statute calls for the Florida Election Commission to impose fines of $250,000 per day for the de-platforming of candidates for office in Florida, and $25,000 per day for censorship of candidates for offices outside the state. An Ongoing Court Battle As things stand now, SB 7072, and the legal challenges that it may inspire in other states, may offer the most explicit defense of candidates and publications seeking to avoid de-platforming, but questions remain as to its legality. A federal appellate court and a federal trial court have enjoined the statute for violating the First Amendment. When Florida made an appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the trade association NetChoice, which represents a broad array of leading tech firms and platforms including Google, Twitter, Amazon, Yahoo!, Etsy, and eBay, jumped into the fray with oral arguments in favor of the tech companies absolute freedom to ban or block content as they see fit. Chris Sprowls, speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, made the case that the tech firms platforms have morphed into the town square and that it is impossible to preserve free speech as long as a few technological oligarchs exercise arbitrary control over what people can say and share online. But from a First Amendment standpoint, the tech firms may have a point, at least as far as their own right to censor is concerned, Clay Calvert, director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida, told The Epoch Times. The First Amendment only protects against censorship by government entities and government officials, not censorship by private individuals and businesses. That has always been the case, regardless of the medium of speech. For example: If back in the day a record store didnt want to sell an album youd produced, that didnt violate your First Amendment right of free speech because the record store was not the government. It was a private business, Calvert said. Today, when a social media platform such as Twitter or Facebook kicks a person off their site or removes a post for violating the platforms terms of use or community standards about acceptable content, that doesnt violate the persons First Amendment right of free speech because Twitter and Facebook are private businesses. There is no First Amendment right to have a Twitter or Facebook account, he added. In an official statement on NetChoices oral arguments against Florida, counsel Chris Marchese called SB 7072 rotten top to bottom and said that the law violates the Constitution many times over. Means of Redress The essence of the companies defense is that the Florida law gets in the way of the firms editorial control of content that they bring to the world, Calvert argued, adding that it is quite possible that the case may end up before the Supreme Court. In the meantime, users who become the victims of de-platforming currently do not have many means of legal redress, Calvert observed. One route they could take is to argue that a platform entered into a legal contract with the user when it established certain terms of service at the time the user joined, and that deleting a post or kicking the user off the platform violates those terms of service, he said. This may be especially true where the terms of service did not explicitly prohibit the content in question or were vague about what content might be actionable under its guidelines. Even so, the outcome may not satisfy the de-platformed user. Theres likely not much money one could recover unless they could prove an actual monetary loss caused by the removal of a post or de-platforming, Calvert said. The Antitrust Option Given the dominance that a few companies hold over online speech and the uncertain fate of Floridas challenge to de-platforming, a more realistic option may be to pursue an antitrust case that might result in a less centralized and more ideologically diverse social media landscape. This would not even necessarily have to happen in the future under a Republican administration, experts say. The Biden administration certainly is willing to use antitrust law in the media space. The governments current case in the book publishing industry, targeting the merger of Penguin Random House with Simon & Schuster, is a good example, Calvert said. But it is important not to underestimate the legal resources at the disposal of the tech firms or the lengths to which they will go to ensure their continued oversight of what speech gets out into the world, he cautioned. It definitely is possible that we might see some trust-busting moves against social media companies, but their lobbying efforts to push back against the government will be immense. It would be a long and expensive battle by the government, Calvert added. Maintaining Perspective For all the problems afflicting political discourse in the U.S. social media realm, the severity of censorship is still not on par with what exists in other parts of the world, namely China, said Jennifer Pan, a professor of communications at Stanford University. We can take the very example of you writing this article. In the United States, you can write the article and an audience will see it. In China, you would not be able to call attention to censorship, or any topics the government wants censored, no matter how hard you tried. Youd be monitored, arrested, intimidated, your outlet banned and fined, your editors arrested, and any and all online presence you have erased, Pan said. Pan dismisses arguments that democratization and liberalization have improved the climate for freedom of expression in recent years. In China today, there is no longer any press independence. During the 2000s, there was a degree of independence, but that has gone away in the past 10 years, Pan said. Though the United States may not yet have descended to the level of full-blown censorship and repression, Pan pointed to a recent experiment conducted by researchers Yuyu Chen and David Y. Yang over 18 months, and summarized in a January 2018 paper, as an illustration of the dangers facing people who live and work in an environment where access to information about the world is constricted on one pretext or another. In the experiment, college students in China received access to censorship circumvention technology that would permit them to access whatever online content they wished, anywhere in the world. But the outcome was disappointing, Pan said, and suggested that the lack of free access to online content had fostered an assumption that what users were allowed to see and read was a fair representation of what they needed to see and read. Few students used the technology, likely because they did not think they would find any additional information in an uncensored environment. That shows the success of government censorshipwhen people living inside a censored information environment believe that they have access to full information, when they no longer know what it is that they do not know, Pan said. The Epoch Times has reached out to NetChoice for comment. Los Angeles Councilman To Increase Police Patrols, Citing Crime Bump LOS ANGELESHollywood could soon see an increase in police presence after a motion introduced Aug. 3 by Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch OFarrell that intends to address a recent increase in crime in the area. OFarrell, who represents Hollywood, is seeking to transfer $216,000 from his office to the Los Angeles Police Departments Hollywood division to add additional officer shifts. According to OFarrells office, there has been a 75 percent increase in homicides and a 36 percent increase in shots fired so far this year compared to last yearwhile robbery has gone up by 19 percent and theft has jumped by 25 percent. If you plan to come to Hollywood to commit crime, you are not welcome, OFarrell said. All Angelenos should feel safe where they live and work. The demand for public safety has exceeded the available resources in Hollywood, according to the motion. The motion is expected to come before the Public Safety Committee. Hollywood is as diverse, if not more than any other part of the city itself, and having more resources concentrated in this area would be beneficial to ensuring public safety, particularly to the most vulnerable of society, the motion says. Blake Chow, deputy chief for the Los Angeles Police Department, said in a statement that people need to feel safe when theyre in Hollywood. Were thankful to Councilmember OFarrell for these additional resources and look forward to quickly putting them to use to prevent, deter, and address crime, Chow said. McConnell Confident Hell Be Reelected as GOP Leader, Issues Notice to Would-Be Challenger Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) predicted on Wednesday night that hell be reelected as Senate GOP leader regardless of whether Republicans take back the upper congressional chamber in Novembers elections. During an appearance on Fox News, McConnell was asked by host Bret Baier about whether he would be able to lead a GOP caucus that may include a growing number of senators backed by former President Donald Trump, who has frequently criticized McConnells leadership. You could be looking, as I mentioned, J.D. Vance, Mehmet Oz, Ted Budd. You have Trump-loyal Republicans like Eric Schmitt, who just won in Missouri, Blake Masters in Arizona, and some of those candidates have refused to say on the trail that they back you as leader, Baier said, referring to several Senate candidates backed by Trump. Is that the new face of a Trumpified Republican Party? And are you the guy to lead that in the Senate? McConnell said hes still very confident in being reelected GOP leader. Well, look at it this way: I have been elected eight times without opposition. If I have an opponentI dont own this job, and theres always an election every two years for leaderif anybody wants to challenge me, have at it, the Kentucky Republican said. Baier followed up by asking: If you dont win the majority, are you still going to be leader? to which McConnell replied, I am. Trump Versus McConnell While Trump and McConnell rarely butted heads while the former president was in office, hes frequently targeted the longtime Senate leader since the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. At one point, Trump suggested McConnell be ousted from his leadership position. The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm, Trump said in a statement in early 2021. McConnells dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from Majority Leader to Minority Leader, and it will only get worse, he added. Several weeks ago, the former commander-in-chief pilloried McConnells support of a gun control bill that provides more funding to so-called red flag laws, ends straw purchases of firearms, and adds more restrictions on federally licensed firearms dealers. The senate GOP leaders decision to not only vote for the bill but to push for Republican senators to vote for gun control will be the final straw, said Trump in late June. For his part, McConnell has issued few statementscritical or otherwisein response to Trumps criticisms. Last month, McConnell suggested that if Trump were to become the 2024 Republican nominee for president, he would absolutely support his bid. A Planned Parenthood clinic is seen in this file photo. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images) Michigan Judge Says Local Prosecutors Cant Enforce Abortion Ban A county judge in Michigan issued an extended order on Aug. 3 stopping the enforcement of a 1931 abortion ban just days after the state Court of Appeals upheld the law. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer filed a restraining order on Aug. 1 after the Court of Appeals ruled that county prosecutors could go ahead and enforce the states abortion ban. Hours later, Oakland County Judge Jacob Cunningham granted the restraining order, prohibiting prosecutors in counties with abortion providers from enforcing the 1931 law. On Wednesday, Cunningham extended that order until the next hearing on Aug. 17. Michigans decades-old abortion ban makes it a crime to perform abortions unless the life of the mother is in danger. In May, the Michigan Court of Claims suspended the 1931 abortion ban. Judge Elizabeth Gleicher ruled that the law was likely unconstitutional. She also signed an injunction, which kept abortion legal in the state even after the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned Roe v. Wade in June. On Monday, the Michigan Court of Appeals overturned the May ruling. At the court on Wednesday, Whitmers lawyers argued that revoking the restraining order issued the previous Monday would cause chaos in the state. Cunningham declined to allow attorney John Bursch to argue on behalf of the Michigan Catholic Conference and Right to Life of Michigan, stating that the pro-life groups were not formal parties in the case. David Kallman, an attorney for two Republican county prosecutors in the state, criticized the decision to extend the restraining order. Since when does a governor have the right to go after a law he or she doesnt like? Kallman said. Just come to court and just say, Hey, I might be harmed by this so I want this law overturned or I want it changed. Thats ridiculous. The 1931 law bans abortions in nearly all circumstances, including pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. Under the law, unless a pregnant womans life is in danger, performing an abortion is a felony, and if the woman dies during the procedure, the doctor performing the abortion would be charged with manslaughter. Abortion in Michigan In the decision overturning Gleichers May ruling, the Michigan Court of Appeals had said that her injunction only applied to the state attorney generals office and not to county prosecutors, who handle most of the crimes. In Kent and Jackson counties, Republican prosecutors have indicated that they plan on enforcing the 1931 abortion ban, while seven Democratic prosecutors have made it clear that they will not enforce the law. Speaking to FOX2 Detroit, Denis Harle from Alliance Defending Freedom said that it was the duty of the state to uphold laws that protect the health, safety, and welfare of people. So its really sad to see the governor and the attorney general of Michigan refusing to enforce the laws they have sworn to uphold, Harle said. Planned Parenthood of Michigan has stated that it will continue offering abortions. The Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia, on March 7, 2022. (Glenn Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images) Most of Australias Great Barrier Reef Seeing Record High Coral Coverage Despite Bleaching Events Two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest levels of coral cover since monitoring of the worlds largest coral reef system began 36 years ago, according to a report by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). Between August 2021 and May, the 87 representative reefs surveyed revealed average hard coral cover in the northern region increased to 36 percent from 27 percent in 2021, while the central region increased to 33 percent from 26 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, average coral cover in the southern region remains comparably high, but decreased to 34 percent from 38 percent in 2021. The recovery comes after increasingly frequent coral bleaching events, with the most recent occurring in March. In our 36 years of monitoring the condition of the Great Barrier Reef, we have not seen bleaching events so close together, AIMS CEO Paul Hardisty said. Every summer, the reef is at risk of temperature stress, bleaching, and potential mortality and our understanding of how the ecosystem responds to that is still developing. Bleaching occurs when the coral is under stress, causing it to expel the colourful microscopic algae that live in its tissue and turn completely white. In this state, the coral is not dead but extremely vulnerable to mortality and disease. AIMS monitoring program team leader Mike Emslie said the results are primarily because of the fast-growing but also very vulnerable Acropora corals. Marine geophysicist Peter Ridd, who has been long outspoken on misinformation regarding the state of the reef, noted that other media still manage to find bad news in these wonderful statistics. Just ignore them, he wrote in a post on Facebook. We must celebrate that our Great Barrier Reef is brilliant. This photo taken on Nov. 20, 2014, shows an aerial view of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of the Whitsunday Islands, along the central coast of Queensland. (Sarah Lai/AFP via Getty Images) The Greens Party spokesperson for healthy oceans, Sen. Peter Whish-Wilson, welcomed the report of record coral recovery. However, we cant overlook that the fast-growing corals responsible for an increase in coral cover are also those most at risk from marine heatwaves and pest species, he said. He argued that the Labor governments current climate targets are a political choice and a death sentence to the reef. Poorly Understood AIMS noted in the report that coral reef recovery still isnt completely understood, making it a continued focus of its research and monitoring. This recovery has occurred despite the latest two mass coral bleaching events in 2020 and 2022, which underlines that widespread coral bleaching does not necessarily lead to coral mortality, it said. Sub-lethal effects such as reduced growth and larval settlement are understood to have long-lasting effects on the recovery dynamics of coral reefs. However, the full extent of these impacts is poorly understood and will only become evident in the future, the report said. The AIMS report comes before a UNESCO report that is expected to indicate that the reef system is in a deteriorating state. In June 2021, a China-chaired United Nations committee recommended that the Great Barrier Reef should be added to a list of in danger World Heritage sites. This was heavily disputed by the government at the time, with former Environment Minister Sussan Ley arguing it was a politically motivated move on the best-managed reef anywhere in the world. A delegation from the United Nations visited the reef during the peak of the 2022 bleaching event in March to assess whether it should be added to the list. A recent Australian government report also argued that Australias ecosystem was at risk of collapse, while omitting important data that contradicted the claims. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Ron DeSantis for Governor) Florida Sets Program to Help State Fight Mounting Fentanyl Overdoses PUNTA GORDA, Fla.Florida officials have announced an effort to focus on addressing the states rising death toll associated with fentanyl overdoses. Gov. Ron DeSantis said the synthetic opioid ruins lives and has infiltrated other substances that have led to a number of deaths, as he announced the statewide initiative at an Aug. 3 news conference in Brevard County. Fentanyl overdoses make up 70 percent of all overdoses in Florida, the governor said. The addiction programCoordinated Opioid Recovery (CORE) Networkis based on a model from Palm Beach County that has been successful in curbing addiction, will be expanded to 12 additional counties. It uses a three-prong approach to recovery that focuses on long-term treatment, the governor said. The program will begin in Brevard, Clay, Duval, Escambia, Gulf, Manatee, Marion, Pasco, and Volusia counties, and will be expanded to Citrus, Pinellas, and Flagler counties. DeSantis named Dr. Courtney Phillips, the director of behavioral health for the Health Care District of Palm Beach County, the statewide director of opioid recovery. Phillips said recognizing that substance addiction is an illness and understanding the effect on the brain is important in treating the disease. She said her goal is to provide people who suffer from substance addiction with 24/7 access to assistance, readily available evidence-based treatment, medical and psychiatric care, and social support. No other chronic condition has been treated without access to emergency services the way addiction has been for many years in the past, she said. In Florida, that stops today, thanks to this initiative. During the press event, DeSantis said fentanyl overdose deaths have increased by 800 percent since 2015; in 2022, there have been almost 2,000 fentanyl overdoses across the state. The governor, who has butted heads over policy with the Biden administration, blamed Floridas growing fentanyl problem on an open southern border. They are letting it come in with these disastrous policies, DeSantis said. Now, in the United States, the leading cause of death for Americans [between] 18 to 25 is fentanyl overdose. Deputy Secretary for Health Dr. Kenneth Scheppke said first responders have been instructed to take overdose victims to specialty hospitals that are trained in addiction medicine and eventually move them into long-term care facilities that will help them break the overdose cycle. He said, Substance use disorder is a chronic, life-threatening, and relapsing disease that needs to be treated like all other chronic diseases with medical and subspecialty expertise. U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) (L) and South Korean National Assembly speaker Kim Jin-pyo (R) attend the Joint Press Announcement after their meeting at the National Assembly on Aug. 4, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea. (Kim Min-Hee - Pool/Getty Images) No Comment on Taiwan During Pelosi Meetings With South Korea Leadership U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with political leadership in South Korea Thursday as part of her ongoing tour of Asia. Neither Pelosis delegation nor Korean leadership commented on current heightened tensions with communist China over the issue of Taiwan. Pelosi met in person with South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of the South Korean Parliament, after which she held a phone conference with President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was on vacation. The two sides discussed the U.S.-Korea alliance, foreign policy, and other issues, but did not broach the issue of Taiwan. The United States and South Korea have maintained a firm alliance since the Korean War in the 1950s, which was the last time U.S. forces fought communist China. Yoon took office in May with a vow to boost South Koreas military alliance with the United States against North Korea. The issue of China is now a touchy subject for South Korea, however, as the nations are key trading partners. South Korea has struggled to strike a balance between its relations with the United States and China as the Sino-American rivalry has deepened over the past several years. Taiwan Resolute Against CCP Aggression South Koreans have questioned Yoons failure to meet Pelosi in person, as Pelosi is touring Asia and meeting leaders from Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan. The speakers stop in South Korea, however, follows her highly-publicized visit to Taiwan earlier in the week, which Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders used as a pretext to launch an aggressive and retaliatory series of economic, cyber, and military operations. In the days since, the CCP has launched several cyber attacks against Taiwan, announced hundreds of import bans, and effectively blockaded the island with unprecedented military drills. The most escalatory action thus far, however, was the CCPs decision to launch several missiles over Taiwan and into Japans exclusive economic zone (EEZ), an area 200 nautical miles (230 miles) from the countrys coast. To have five Chinese missiles fall within Japans EEZ like this is a first, said Japanese defense minister Nobuo Kishi. We have protested strongly through diplomatic channels. The CCP maintains a so-called One China principle, which states that Taiwan is a breakaway province that must be reunited with the mainland. The regime hasnt ruled out the use of force to achieve this goal. Taiwan has been self-governing since 1949 and has never been controlled by the CCP, however. And Taiwans democratic government and thriving market economy ensure that it maintains healthy trade relations with many global powers. U.S. relations with Taiwan and China are governed by a series of treaties and diplomatic cables stretching back to the 1970s. Notably, the United States adheres to a One China policy, which provides an acknowledgment, but not endorsement, of the CCPs One China principle. The policy also mandates extensive unofficial ties with Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 further mandates that the United States will provide the arms to Taiwan necessary for its self-defense. At the heart of the ongoing tensions between the CCP and the United States is their long-standing agreement that neither side will attempt to unilaterally change this status quo through force or coercion. CCP authorities maintain that Pelosis visit was intended to unilaterally change that status quo, while U.S. officials say the same of Chinas increased military and economic aggression in the region. Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy, Pelosi said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday. Americas determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad. Our visit reiterates that America stands with Taiwan: a robust, vibrant democracy and our important partner in the Indo-Pacific, Pelosi added in a tweet following the trip. Taiwans Defense Ministry called the Chinese drills unreasonable actions in an attempt to change the status quo, destroy the peace and stability of the region. NYC Mayor, NYPD Commissioner Call for Changes to Bail Reform Policies Amid Increase in Repeat Offenders Governor says issue has been dealt with New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York Police Department Commissioner Keechant Sewell are calling for targeted changes to the states bail reform policies, citing an increase in crime as well as recidivism. New York passed a bail law in 2019, implemented in 2020, that blocked judges from requiring cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, which include most drug trafficking offenses. As such, many alleged offenders have been released without paying any money pending trial, and return to the streets quickly after an arrest. Judges were only able to set bail for a limited range of crimes, most of which are violent felonies. New York is the only U.S. state with a law that blocks judges from considering the danger an offender poses when deciding whether or not to set bail, a release from Adamss office on Aug. 3 noted. Both Adams and Sewell believe that judges must be allowed to remand defendants at arraignment when they are deemed a risk to public safety based on the severity of their alleged crimes or their history of recidivism, according to the release. At a press conference at NYPD headquarters on Aug. 3, Adams called for more to be done to fix the states criminal justice system. They say the definition of insanity is to do the same thing repeatedly but expect different results. Our criminal justice system is insane. It is dangerous, it is harmful, it is destroying the fabric of our city, he said. Time and time again the police are making arrests and then the person who is arrested for assault, felonious assault, robberies, and gun possession is finding themselves back on the street within daysif not hoursafter the arrest. And they go on to commit more crimes within weeks, if not days. This is about a small number of people that are taking advantage of the existing laws to endanger our city, the mayor noted, adding that the recidivism rate in New York City has skyrocketed. Bail Reforms Adjusted in April In April, the New York Legislature and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul reached an agreement to adjust the 2019 bail reform as part of the state budget. The changes gave judges the ability to set bail for a slightly wider range of crimes, including gun-related crimes, hate crimes, and repeat offenses in theft of property. When setting bail, judges may also consider the alleged criminals history of gun possession, as well as prior violations of an order of protection, and whether the alleged crime had caused serious harm. At a press conference on Aug. 3, Hochul, a Democrat, said that judges now have tools at their disposal to tackle the matter. Her comments came in response to a question about Adamss call on July 26 for her and the state legislature to convene a special legislative session over the bail reforms. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at a news conference in New York City on Aug. 3, 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) What we gave judges was the ability to consider the severity of the offenseis this a repeat offense? Is there a history involved here? So we now have spelled out for judges factors to consider in weighing whether or not this person should be out in the street or not, she said. She urged judges to follow the updated bail laws. The April changes didnt have the provision for judges to consider whether the defendant poses a danger to the public if they were to be released from custody pending trial. Some criminal justice advocates say such a standard could be subject to racial bias. When asked about Hochuls comments, Adams referred back to the provision he is urging for, saying: The judges have tools that they are not using, but they do need more tools such as public safety. If public safety is in jeopardy based on the actions of someone, judges need the tools that 49 other states currently have to make sure that person is not dangerous to our community. Increase in Crime, Recidivism Sewell and Adams on Aug. 3 cited figures that show significant increases in recidivism in some categories of crime. In 2022, 25 percent, or 393 of 1,494 people arrested for burglary, committed another felony within 60 days, Adams said. In 2017, however, just 7.7 percent went on to commit another crime, he added. Meanwhile, the 60-day recidivism rate for grand larceny in 2022 was 16.8 percent, or 310 people. In 2017, the rate was 6.5 percent, Adams noted. The rate for grand larceny auto in 2022 is 20 percent, or 125 people, compared to the rate in 2017 of 10.3 percent, he said. The number of individuals arrested three or more times in a calendar year for crimes including robbery, burglary, and grand larceny, among others, has increased through the first six months of 2022, compared with crime in the years prior to the onset of the global pandemic, the release states. For example, 211 individuals logged at least three arrests for burglary through June 2022, a 142.5 percent increase compared with the 87 individuals arrested at least three times for burglary in the first six months of 2017. For shoplifting, 899 people have been arrested three times for that crime through June 2022, an 88.9 percent increase over the 476 individuals arrested three times for shoplifting through June of 2017. Ten of the worst-of-the-worst alleged repeat offenders have been arrested for nearly 500 crimes since the 2019 bail reforms were passed. The release from Adamss office also noted that overall arrests increased by 24 percent in 2022, compared with the same period in 2021. Arrests for the seven major felony crimes increased by about 29 percent compared with the same period last year. Meanwhile, firearms arrests are at a 27-year high. Sewell clarified in a statement that she believes nonviolent, first-time offenders deserve a second chance, as the spirit of the states 2020 criminal justice reforms envisioned. However, judges should be given the ability to hold career and violent criminals in custody pending trial, she said. We need to maintain the reforms we all agree on, yet at the same time pull together to keep New Yorkers from being harmed. Our collective focus must be on the victims of crime. Orange County Night Court Judge Improperly Approves Search Warrants While in Canada SANTA ANA, Calif.An Orange County Superior Court judge has signed off on at least 19 search warrants while working remotely in Canada, a violation of a rule requiring that such documents be approved while a judge is in the county, authorities revealed Aug. 3. Prosecutors and defense attorneys were alerted Wednesday morning of the rule violation in May by Orange County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Thompson, who was working an overnight shift for the countys night court operations, said Jeff Wertheimer, the general counsel for the Orange County Superior Court system. Thompson has been reassigned to a courtroom in the North Justice Center in Fullerton. Someone in the information technology department noticed roaming charges from Canada on the judges work-issued tablet and brought it to the attention of court officials, Wertheimer said. An outside law firm was hired to provide guidance on the issue, and the attorneys recommended alerting prosecutors and defense attorneys to the policy violation. Based on what we received back from the Jones Day law firm, we decided the prudent thing to do is to tell the DA [district attorney] and PD [police department] what we learned so earlier this morning we have them a notebook with 19 warrants [in question] to them, Wertheimer told City News Service. These are the ones we believe he issued while outside the country. In some of the cases, charges have not yet been filed, Wertheimer said. It will be up to the attorneys to decide what to do with the cases now, he added. The court has a policy that judges with night court duty considering search warrant requests cannot leave the state, Wertheimer said. Since the coronavirus pandemic, judges have been encouraged to rely on technology to work remotely, but whether that covers what Thompson did is an open question, Wertheimer said. Court officials are combing through the warrants to see if there have been any others issued improperly. We are going to continue to do our investigation and it could take some time, Wertheimer said. Thompsons attorney, Paul Meyer, said, Judge Thompson is fully cooperative with the courts current investigation and legal research underway in this matter. Chapman University law professor Mario Mainero said the issue could jeopardize many cases. He said judges must strive to avoid even the appearance of impropriety or unfairness, So it strikes me that, if anything, this is a potential violation of those canons. He also noted, A reasonable person might say, Gee, if the judge is in Canada, and theyre there for personal reasons of one kind or another the focus will be on why theyre in Canada, and a reasonable person might think they are just whipping through these because its part of the job and that as well contributes to the concern.' Mainero said its unknown why Thompson was working outside the country. But he said Thompsons hiring of Paul Meyer to represent him indicates some level of concern because Meyer is a well-known attorney for judges who find themselves in some sort of trouble. Its believed that this has not happened before and Mainero said he struggled to find much case law on the issue. The law professor said he has no problem with the use of modern technology, but a judge cannot seriously examine an affidavit establishing probable cause for a search through emailed communications. Defense attorney Brian Gurwitz told City News Service that it is an interesting issue, but he doubted the revelation could end up affecting many cases. It would not be enough for a defendant to show that Judge Thompson violated a state law by approving a warrant when he was outside of California, Gurwitz said. Instead, the defense would need to establish that this also violated the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. And Im not familiar with any case saying that the Fourth Amendment requires judges to be sitting in their home state when they approve search warrants. Sylvia Jones, Ontario Deputy Premier and Minister of Health, takes her oath at a swearing-in ceremony at Queens Park in Toronto on June 24, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette) Ontario Directs Regulator to Register Internationally Trained Nurses More Quickly Ontarios health minister is giving the regulatory colleges for nurses and doctors two weeks to develop plans to more quickly register internationally educated professionals. Sylvia Jones sent directives today to the College of Nurses of Ontario and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario directing them to make every effort to register those nurses and doctors as expeditiously as possible. The minister also directed the nursing college to develop supports for the internationally trained nurses for example to bring their skills to Ontario standards to allow them to practice in a timely way. Jones has asked for reports from the colleges in two weeks on how they will accomplish that. Hospitals have been under strain in the province, with some emergency rooms forced to close for hours or days at a time due to staff shortages. Nursing groups, hospital executives, other health-care professionals and advocates have said that burnout after being on the COVID-19 front lines for more than two years and not being properly compensated have caused people to leave the profession in droves. A 2020 report from Ontarios fairness commissioner showed that 14,633 internationally educated nurses were actively pursuing a licence through the College of Nurses of Ontario. That same year, just over 2,000 international applicants became fully registered members. The registered nurses association says the past decade has seen a growing backlog of internationally educated applicants and estimates the queue is near 26,000. The nurses college has recently taken steps to speed up the process, including changes to language proficiency requirements and a partnership with the province to create more supervised practice opportunities, a spokeswoman has said. It has registered a record number of nurses this year, including more international nurses than in previous years, with 4,728 registrations by the beginning of August. The college also says its looking at ways to streamline the process. Ontario Teacher Responds to School Boards Defence in Defamation Case Over Accusation Her Comments Were Transphobic Carolyn Burjoski, a former elementary school teacher who has launched a defamation lawsuit against the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) and its chair after her comments about age-appropriateness of sexual content in childrens books were called transphobic, has released a video responding to the boards defence. The school board submitted a statement of defence on July 11, denying the allegations claimed in the lawsuit. Burjoski, who filed her statement of claim against the school board on April 22, says while she expected the board to deny any and all wrongdoing, she didnt foresee the approach they would take in their counterargument. What I did not expect is that, in their defence, this boardwho cut off my presentation and ejected me from the trustees meeting, forbade me from speaking to my students and colleagues, and publicly maligned my reasonable comments as transphobic hate speechis now pleading before the court that I am trying to suppress their free expression by suing them, Burjoski said in a video shared on Twitter on Aug. 3. The irony is thick. My response to WRDSB's Statement of Defence in my defamation lawsuit. You can find the court documents and ways to fund this legal action on my website. #wrdsb pic.twitter.com/1gRdcZTsYI Carolyn Burjoski (@carolynburjoski) August 3, 2022 Age-Appropriateness Burjoski, who retired on Jan. 31, was registered as a delegation to the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 17 and was allotted 10 minutes to speak. During her presentation, she read excerpts from two childrens books available in her elementary school libraries and criticized the age-appropriateness of their sexual content. One of the books was Rick by Alex Gina, in which the main character, a young boy named Rick, questions his sexuality because he doesnt think about naked girls like his friends do. He later declares an asexual identity after joining the schools rainbow club. The second book was The Other Boy by M.G. Hennessy, in which the female character identifies as a boy and takes puberty blockers and testosterone as part of her medical sex transition. Less than four minutes into my presentation, the board chair claimed that I had violated the Human Rights Code, and he ejected me from the meeting, said Burjoski in a June 20 video, referring to Scott Piatkowski, who took the helm as school board chair in 2021. While the WRDSB usually publishes video recordings of its meetings on YouTube, it didnt post the recording of the Jan. 17 meeting. In a statement issued on Jan. 20, the board reiterated Piatkowskis claims that there are concerns about potential violations of the Human Rights Code. Claims In her statement of claim filed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Burjoski said the interviews Piatkowski gave on CTV News and 570 Newson Jan. 18 and Jan. 19 respectivelyabout the meeting were false and defamatory that maliciously damaged her professional reputation. There were comments [from Burjoski] that were, frankly, transphobic that were questioning the right to exist of trans people, Piatkowski said on CTV News at the time. Among several comments he made on 570 News, Piatkowski said Burjoski was not respectful or courteous towards transgender people. And this delegate was speaking about transgender people in a way that would cause them to be attacked, he said. The retired teacher also said in her claim that Piatkowski shared a tweet on Jan. 17 that likened her presentation to hate or derogatory speech, followed by another one the next day, referring to her speech as a Bat Signal directed to every transphobe on Twitter. Both tweets have since been removed. In addition, her claim noted that the WRDSB published a statement to all staff on Jan. 20 to express our deep regret for any harm caused to the transgender community, and a second one on Jan. 25 that they have taken the necessary steps to reduce harm to WRDSB students, staff, and community and reduce its legal exposure by stopping Burjoskis presentation and not sharing the video with the public. These statements have been widely disseminated in local media reports, radio, television, social media, Twitter, and other online forums, as well as the WRDSB website and to all WRDSB staff, the statement of claim said. They have been highly visible to the community at large, as well as Burjoskis teaching colleagues, students and past students, and their families. The full extent of this dissemination is not known and cannot be known. Defence In the statement of defence filed on July 11, the WRDSB and Piatkowski argued that due to significant public interest in Burjoskis case at the time, Piatkowski agreed to do the media interviews and participated in the discussion on Twitter in his capacity as chair. The defendants pleaded that none of their comments on Burjoski bore or was capable of bearing any defamatory meaning. The conduct of the media was not within the control and/or responsibility of the defendants, they said. They added that their remarks were made in good faith and no malice and they had no intention to inflict mental or emotional harm on Burjoski, which she claimed in her statement. On the contrary, they alleged the former elementary teacher was attempting to silence them and suppress freedom of expression. The defendants plead that this action is brought by the plaintiff for the purposes of silencing the defendants and chilling the expression of others in relation to matters of public interestnamely, the support of the LGBTQ2S+ + communityrather than for the bona fide purpose of recovery damages for loss of reputation, which is denied. Gaslight Burjoski, who worked as a WRDSB teacher for over 20 years, says the boards attempts to deny her claims wont work. This Board seems to think they can gaslight an entire community and even the Court into believing the exact opposite of what is actually true, she said in her latest video. She said while she fully supports the rights of the LGBT community, she is opposed to inappropriate books in school libraries. What I do not support is the Boards silencing, shaming, and punishment of anyone who criticizes the age-appropriateness of Board policies based on Gender Theory, she said. If the School Board has policies and practices with the potential to harm children, then parents and teachers have an obligation to speak up and a right to be heard. The Epoch Times reached out to the WRDSB for comment. In response, spokesperson Eusis Dougan-McKenzie said, We do not comment on ongoing legal issues. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wraps up her historic visit to Taiwanafter a series of threats from Beijing. A Chinese company is eyeing a deep water port and airstrip in the Solomon Islands amid mounting concerns in the West about a potential Chinese military base just a thousand miles from Australia. India is on high alert. A Chinese military ship plans to visit one of its neighborsthough the country says the ship is only there to refuel. In a dangerous dance between three Pacific powers, New Zealand is looking to improve its relations with Beijing, while the United States seeks to boost military ties with the island country. Topics in this episode: Pelosi Visit: We Salute the Successes of Taiwan Countries React to Pelosis Taiwan Visit Pelosi Visit Activates Memories of a Past Crisis U.S., Indonesia Hold Drills Amid China Concerns China to Buy a Strategic Solomon Islands Port Chinese Military Survey Ship Heads to Sri Lanka Port New Zealand: We Still Have Shared Interests W/ China U.S. to Deepen Military Ties with New Zealand Industry Group: UK Companies Turning Away from China GPS Tracker Open to Life-Threatening Hacks: Report Have other topics you want us to cover? Drop us a line: chinainfocus@ntdtv.org And if youd like to buy us a coffee: https://donorbox.org/china-in-focus Subscribe to our newsletterfor more first-hand news from China. Follow China in Focuson social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChinaInFocusNTD Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@chinainfocus Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/chinainfocus Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NTDChinainFocus Gab: https://gab.com/ChinaInFocus Telegram: https://t.me/ChinainFocusNTD Click the Save button below the video to access it later on My List U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) attends the Joint Press Announcement after meeting with South Korean National Assembly speaker Kim Jin-pyo at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, on Aug. 4, 2022. (Kim Min-Hee-Pool/Getty Images) Pelosi Visits Korean DMZ Amid Escalating Tensions With China Over Taiwan Visit Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited the South Korean side of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on Aug 4. as part of her controversial Asia trip. Pelosis visit to Taiwan set off alarm bells about a potential conflict with China, which threatened a military response if Pelosi followed through on the trip. After Pelosis arrival, China ratcheted up military activity in the region. Tensions have escalated as China has commenced live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait, including the launch of 11 active missiles near the island. The regime in Beijing was so displeased with Pelosis Taiwan visit that Chinas Vice Foreign Minister, Xie Feng, summoned U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns late on Aug. 2. According to Chinas state-run media outlets, Xie said the United States will pay the price for its mistakes of allowing the speaker to visit the island. Chinas Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang accused the United States of playing with fire in a statement. He said he has lodged a strong protest with the White House National Security Council and the U.S. State Department. After visiting Taiwan, Pelosi traveled to South Korea, another U.S. ally, where she met with top South Korean legislators before moving on to visit the DMZ. Currently, around 29,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed in the southern half of the peninsula. It was a privilege to engage with American heroes in uniform on the ground in Korea, led by Gen. Paul LaCamera, Commander, U.S. Forces Korea. During visits to the Demilitarized Zone/Joint Security Area (DMZ/JSA) and Osan Air Base, we conveyed the gratitude of the Congress and the Country for the patriotic service of our Servicemembers, who stand as sentinels of Democracy on the Korean peninsula, Pelosi said in an Aug. 4 statement. The United States and South Korea share a strong bond formed for security and forged by decades of warm friendship. Our Congressional delegation traveled to Seoul to reaffirm our treasured ties and our shared commitment to advancing security and stability, economic growth, and democratic governance, Pelosi added. Support for Taiwan Pelosi received an outpouring of support for her Taiwan visit from 26 Republican senators, who signed a letter on Aug. 2 expressing support for the visit. During her visit to Taiwan, Pelosi suggested that the visit fits into a larger conflict between democracy and autocracy, likely a reference to Russias ongoing military invasion of Ukraine. Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy. Americas determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and around the world remains ironclad, Pelosi said. She said the bedrock of the bilateral relationship remains with the Taiwan Relations Act, which authorizes the United States to provide the island with military equipment for self-defense. The act of U.S. Congress was signed after Washington ended its diplomatic ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing in 1979. Today, our delegation, of which Im very proud, came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clearwe will not abandon our commitment to Taiwan, and we are proud of our enduring friendship, Pelosi said. Now more than ever, Americas solidarity with Taiwan is crucial. While in South Korea, she met in the capital Seoul with South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo and other prominent members of the South Korean legislature. We also come to say to you that a friendship, a relationship that began from urgency and security, many years ago, has become the warmest of friendships, Pelosi said during a press conference, recalling the beginning of the United States relationship with the nation during the Korean War. However, in order to avoid escalating already-rising tensions, Pelosi did not comment on her visit to Taipei or on Chinas ongoing live-fire exercises. Instead, Pelosi discussed concerns over nuclear threats from North Korea and expressed support for the efforts of both of their nations to denuclearize the peninsula through deterrence and diplomatic outreach. China has not responded to Pelosis Aug. 4 visit to the Korean DMZ. The Chinese Communist Party has long taken on a protective role toward the communist north, which they generally consider an important buffer zone to avoid having U.S. troops directly along their border. Frank Fang contributed to this report. CEO, and chief engineer at SpaceX, Elon Musk, arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on May 2, 2022. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images) Public Version of Musks Response to Twitter Lawsuit to Be Issued by Aug. 5, Judge Rules The public version of Elon Musks response to Twitters lawsuit over his bid to walk away from their $44 billion purchase deal will be issued before the end of this weekAug. 5, a judge has ruled. Musks team initially wanted it to be disclosed to the public by Aug. 3, but the decision faced opposition from Twitters attorneys, who argued they needed more time to review and potentially redact Musks sealed filing. The attorneys deemed redaction necessary to avoid internal Twitter information and data given to Musk from being revealed. Few cases attract as much public interest as this one, and Twitter is mindful of this courts commitment to ensuring maximum public access to its proceedings, Twitter attorney Kevin Shannon wrote. Twitter has no interest in proposing any more redactions to defendants responsive pleading than are necessary. According to Shannon, court rules require that five business days lapse before a public version of Musks filing is docketed. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, on Aug 3, gave assent to Twitters proposal and ordered the public filing to be docketed by 5 p.m. on Aug. 5 at the latest. The Delaware court also decided that the document could be filed earlier, depending on when Twitter attorneys complete their review. Meanwhile, Musk attorney Edward Micheletti claimed that no part of his clients submission should be withheld. Twitter should not be permitted to continue burying the side of the story it does not want publicly disclosed, Micheletti wrote. Tesla CEO Elon Musk filed a counterclaim against Twitter after the social media company sued the billionaire for backing out from their $44 billion purchase deal. Musks counterclaims are an abrupt escalation in the legal battle between the big tech company and the richest man in the world, where Twitter is suing Musk to complete the acquisition deal he entered into with Twitter on April 25. Lawyers acting on behalf of Musk had argued that the number of bots on Twitter is far greater than the 5 percent the company had disclosed, representing a material adverse effect that justified backing out of the deal on July 8. Consequently, Twitter sued days later, rejecting Musks assertion and seeking to complete the deal. If the other party is held responsible for the contract collapsing, either Musk or Twitter would be entitled to a $1 billion breakup fee. Twitter shares on Aug. 3 closed at $41, much below their 52-week high of $69.81. Gary Bai contributed to this report. Richmond, Virginia Police Drop Charges Against Men Tied to July 4 Mass Shooting Plot New federal charges filed Police in Richmond, Virginia, have dropped charges against two men who were arrested for allegedly plotting a mass shooting for the Fourth of July holiday. The Richmond Commonwealth Attorneys Office filed a motion on Aug. 3 to drop state charges against the two suspects in the case. Richmond Commonwealths Attorney Colette McEachin said that her office on the same day asked federal authorities to take over the case. These are two illegal aliens with guns so we wanted them prosecuted at the highest level possible, she said. Guatemalan illegal immigrants Julio Alvarado-Dubon, 52, and Rolman Balcarcel-Bavagas, 38, were arrested on July 1 and July 5 respectively and were charged with being non-U.S. citizens in possession of firearms. The men lived at the same address and were described as roommates. The arrests came after an anonymous person overheard a discussion about carrying out a shooting at an Independence Day celebration in Richmond, Gerald Smith, the citys police chief, said in early July. A search warrant affidavit filed in state court said that after police received the tip, they contacted Homeland Security, then went to a home in Richmond, where police said both men lived. Officers seized two rifles, a handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Officials said the shooting was allegedly planned for the Dogwood Dell amphitheater, which seats 2,400 and is located outdoors. We know what their intent is. But we dont have that motive, Smith noted at the time. Neither Alvarado-Dubon nor Balacarcel were charged specifically with planning a mass shooting. New Federal Charges On Aug. 2, Alvarado-Dubon was charged in federal court with possession of a firearm by a non-U.S. citizen. An affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint against Alvarado-Dubon said he last entered the United States in 2014 and had overstayed his visa by more than seven years. His attorney, Jose Aponte, said he is scheduled to be arraigned Friday in U.S. District Court. Aponte declined to comment on the case. Balcarcel-Bavagas was charged in a federal criminal complaint with entering the U.S. illegally. His attorney, Samuel Simpson V, did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment. An affidavit written by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent said Balcarcel-Bavagas was deported twice previouslyin 2013 and 2014and reentered the United States illegally. During a hearing on Aug. 3 in Richmond General District Court, presiding Judge David Hicks asked a state prosecutor for any evidence that the mass shooting was planned for Dogwood Dell. The Commonwealth has no information that either of these individuals were involved in a potential shooting or planned shooting at Dogwood Dell on the Fourth of July here in the City of Richmond? Hicks asked Clinton Seal, the assistant commonwealths attorney. Seal said there was evidence of a planned shooting, but not at a specific location. I think that there is evidence to support the potential for a shooting, Seal responded, according to WRIC. McEachin told WRIC that her offices evidence came from an anonymous person who never mentioned a time or place for the alleged mass shooting plot. The Commonwealths evidence was that a tipster communicated to the police that he knew someone who has said that he was going to shoot up a large event on the Fourth of July. No specific time was mentioned by the tipster. Neither Dogwood Dell, nor any other specific location, was ever mentioned by the tipster, she told the outlet. My office asked the U. S. Attorneys Office to adopt the case so that federal resources could be directed at the case, given the seriousness of the allegations, McEachin also said. No details about the alleged shooting plot have been included in documents filed in state or federal court. Police also have not officially announced any motive. In a statement issued on Aug. 3, the Richmond Police Department said that there is evidence that RPD stopped a mass shooting from happening in the city on July 4. Our investigation led us to conclude that Dogwood Dell was the intended target, it said. The result of good investigative work led to removing two men with guns and rounds of ammunition from harming our residents and visitors. The case is now in the hands of the federal justice system and we will continue to follow the case as it unfolds. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A Russian court sentenced American basketball star Brittney Griner to nine years in prison on drugs charges, after finding her guilty of narcotics possession and smuggling for bringing cannabis-infused vape cartridges into Russia. China conducted live-fire missile drills in the waters near Taiwan, just one day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island. Taiwan and the White House have responded. A Boston subway line is closing for a month for track maintenance and repair. The line has been plagued with problems, including with some of its new subway cars that were made in China. It took a Christian charity five years and a lengthy legal battle to be able to fly a Christian flag at Boston City Hall. They finally did on Wednesday, after the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. * Click the Save button below the video to access it later on My List. Follow EpochTV on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpochTVus Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/EpochTV Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@EpochTV Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/epochtv Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpochTVus Gab: https://gab.com/EpochTV Telegram: https://t.me/EpochTV Hong Kong: Early vaccination for toddlers urged Secretary for the Civil Service Ingrid Yeung urged parents to arrange COVID-19 vaccination for their children as soon as possible given that those aged from six months to three years may receive the Sinovac vaccine from today. Mrs Yeung visited a kindergarten and child care centre in To Kwa Wan this morning to view the outreach vaccination service for pupils. It is the first premises having children vaccinated through the outreach service after the minimum age for receiving the vaccine was lowered to six months old. She then inspected a community vaccination centre (CVC) in Kwun Tong, where about 15 toddlers aged under three received their jab. Meeting the media after her To Kwa Wan visit, Mrs Yeung said that 150 parents made appointments for their children aged from six months to three years to get the Sinovac jab in the first half hour after the online booking system started to accept vaccination bookings for this age group. Parents or guardians must accompany the children to receive the vaccination at CVCs or the Hospital Authority's designated general outpatient clinics. Five CVCs providing the Sinovac vaccine retrofitted some vaccination booths specifically for children by decorating them with cartoon stickers so as to provide a more relaxing environment for children to take their jab, Mrs Yeung noted. She added that areas for breastfeeding and changing diapers were also set up in those CVCs for parents in need. Moreover, maternal and child health centres under the Department of Health will provide the Sinovac vaccination service to children aged from six months to three years when they receive regular services from mid-August. Parents can also make reservations for free Sinovac vaccination for their children through more than 1,000 private doctors or clinics participating in the COVID-19 Vaccination Programme. This story has been published on: 2022-08-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Senate Committee Investigation Finds US Organ Transplant Network Failing, Endangering Lives Dozens of deaths and illnesses in the United States among individuals who either received or were in need of organ transplants were caused by a lack of oversight from the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), according to a Senate Finance Committee investigation report released on Aug. 3. The Senate report (pdf) examined 1,118 complaints filed from 2010 to 2020 against organ procurement organizations (OPOs) by families, transplant centers, and anonymous individuals, among others. Those complaints detailed a string of allegations, such as OPOs failing to complete critical, mandatory tests on patients for things like blood types, disease, and infection, and some patients having to have organs removed after the transplant. The committee found that between January 2008 and September 2015, organs and tissues from 211 donors transmitted diseases, and 249 recipients developed donor-derived diseases. Of the 249 people who developed diseases from the donated organs they received, 70 died. Organs Left at Airports, Never Delivered Elsewhere, the investigation found that 53 complaints had been submitted alleging transportation failures when life-saving organs were being delivered, including incidents in which the courier service requested by the OPO did not arrive in time to get the organs to their flight or transplant center. In other cases, the organs were simply never picked up or abandoned at airports, the committee said. According to the committee, the U.S. transplant network is failing and jeopardizing the lives of Americans. The committees investigation found that the OPTN is failing to provide adequate oversight of the nations 57 OPOs, resulting in fewer available organs for transplant. It also found that the lack of oversight by UNOS causes avoidable failures in organ procurement and transplantation resulting in risks to patient safety, including testing procedure errors and transportation issues that resulted in life-saving organs being lost or destroyed in transit. The committee also said that UNOS lacks [the] technical expertise to modernize the OPTN IT system, resulting in [the] risk of system interruption or technical failure. The network that UNOS oversees is made up of nearly 400 members, including 252 transplant centers and 57 OPOs. This data illustrates the lethality of diseases contracted during a transplantation and the need for exacting scrutiny of such transmissions, the committee wrote in a 60-page report. The Committees investigation shows that despite the efforts of UNOS and its internal committees, OPOs continue to experience recurring and systemic patient safety issues, including packaging and labeling errors, transportation failures, failure to identify transmissible diseases in donors, and even allegations of fraud, the report added. Not a Partisan Issue In a statement on Aug. 3, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said the investigation had uncovered failures that had cost lives. Thousands of organs donated each year wind up discarded, including one in four kidneys, Wyden said. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently issued new standards for OPO performance, and more than a third of OPOs are failing to meet them. Fixing whats broken could substantially increase the supply of lifesaving organs available for transplant. The lawmaker noted that the Senates investigation remains ongoing. This is not a partisan subject, Wyden said. Everybody wants this system to work with as few errors as possible. As of July 29, there had been 24,532 transplants performed in the United States in 2022, according to official UNOS data. More than 60,000 people are listed as active waiting list candidates for an organ transplant. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), about 17 people die each day waiting for an organ transplant. A UNOS spokesperson told The Epoch Times: We were disappointed by the Senate Committee on Finances misunderstanding of the role UNOS has been assigned by the government within the nations organ donation and transplant system. We remain dedicated to addressing these misperceptions and are looking forward to working with Congress to further improve. The U.S. organ donation and transplantation system is the most successful in the world and will soon exceed one million transplants in its history. Each represents a patient whose life was transformed. UNOS is proud of the community we have helped build and look forward to continuing working together to serve all patients who rely on us. The Epoch Times has contacted the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network for comment. The Senate committee began investigating alleged failures in the organ transplant system in February 2020 after four members of the committeeGrassley, Wyden, and Sens. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.)sent a letter to UNOS detailing their concerns about the adequacy of patient safety standards. Inspector general audits and news reports at the time had suggested that thousands of organs that were available to patients who needed them were not being used. The reports and numerous audits also highlighted questionable financial practices of some organ procurement organizations (OPOs), lawmakers wrote at the time. (L-R) US Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), and Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) listen during a meeting between President Donald Trump and congressional members in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington on Feb. 13, 2018. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) Shocked: Biden Responds After Republican Congresswoman Jackie Walorski Dies in Crash President Joe Biden issued a statement following the deaths of Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) and two staffers who were involved in a head-on crash in Indiana on Wednesday afternoon. Walorski was killed in an auto accident on state Route 19 near South Bend, Indiana. Her communications director, Emma Thomson, and her district office director, Zachary Potts, also died in the accident, officials said. Jill and I are shocked and saddened by the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana along with two members of her staff in a car accident today in Indiana, Biden said in a White House statement. Born in her beloved South Bend as the daughter of a meat-cutter and firefighter, she spent a lifetime serving the community that she grew up inas a journalist, a nonprofit director, a state legislator, and eventually as a Member of Congress for the past nine and half years. Biden said that Walorski came from opposite sides of the political spectrum and disagreed on many issues but said she was respected by members of both parties for her work on the House Ways and Means Committee on which she served. We send our deepest condolences to her husband, Dean, to the families of her staff members, Zachery Potts and Emma Thomson, who lost their lives in public service, and to the people of Indianas Second District who lost a representative who was one of their own, Biden said in conclusion. The White House said it would order flags at federal properties to fly at half-staff after her death. More Details Prior to her election in 2012 to the House, Walorski served three terms in the Indiana legislature, spent four years as a missionary in Romania along with her husband, and worked as a television news reporter in South Bend, according to a biography posted on her congressional website. Walorski was a lifelong resident of Indiana, according to her official biography. She served on the House Ways and Means Committee and was the top Republican on the subcommittee on worker and family support. Confirming her death in a statement shared on Twitter by House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Walorskis office said: Dean Swihart, Jackies husband, was just informed by the Elkhart County Sheriffs office that Jackie was killed in a car accident this afternoon. His statement added: Please keep her family in your thoughts and prayers. We will have no further comment at this time. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement that Walorski passionately brought the voices of her north Indiana constituents to the Congress, and she was admired by colleagues on both sides of the aisle for her personal kindness. The Elkhart County Sheriffs office said Wednesday that an investigation into the crash is underway. Reuters contributed to this report. A healthcare worker administers the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to a woman outside a polling station at the Kopanong Hall in Soweto, South Africa, on Nov. 1, 2021. (Michele Spatari/AFP via Getty Images) South Africa Confirms Causal Link Between Death and COVID-19 Vaccine The South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) on Thursday confirmed that a person died as a result of the COVID-19 vaccine. SAHPRAs chief executive officer, Dr. Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela, said this was the countrys first death causally linked to an individual and Johnson & Johnsons (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine. To date, the health regulator assessed around 160 people who possibly died after getting the jab, but it had not seen a positive link to vaccination until now, Semete-Makokotlela said. Soon after being given the J&J shot, the patient developed Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a rare neurological disorder that has been identified as a possible side-effect of the jab. It is a very rare event, said Hannelie Meyer, a professor of the national immunization safety committee, South African newspaper Daily Maverick reported. The person presented with the symptoms shortly after vaccination and this had led to prolonged hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and further infections. At the time of illness no other cause for the Guillain-Barre syndrome could be identified, she further declared. GBS occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks its own nerves, typically resulting in numbness, weakness, pain in the limbs, and sometimes even paralysis of breathing. Meyer noted that the patients age and other personal details, including the province where the death occurred, will not be disclosed for confidentiality reasons. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a warning label to J&Js COVID-19 vaccine, revising its fact sheets to include information pertaining to an observed increased risk of GBS following vaccination, a spokesperson for the agency told The Epoch Times on July 12, 2021. That determination was made based on an analysis of Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting (VAERS) data which found there have been 100 preliminary reports following vaccination with the Janssen vaccine after approximately 12.5 million doses administered, the spokesperson said. At the time, 95 serious cases and one death were noted in the report of GBS cases in vaccine recipients. According to the FDA, although available data suggest there is an association between the J&J vaccine and an increased risk of GBS, this is insufficient to establish a causal relationship. A spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told The Epoch Times that an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 people develop GBS every year in the United States, adding that the federal health agency is monitoring reports of GBS. It is typically triggered by a respiratory or gastrointestinal infection, according to the spokesperson, who noted that most people fully recover from GBS. Joe Phaahla, South Africas minister of health, said during a news conference on Thursday that as of mid-July, there had been more than 6,200 adverse events reported to SAHPRA out of the more than 37 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the country, equivalent to 0.017 percent. The benefit of vaccination still far outweighs the risk, said Semete-Makokotlela, after announcing a death had been positively linked to the shot. Meanwhile, 217 deaths were reported to South Africas health regulator between May 2021 and July 2022 with claims that it was linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, Daily Maverick reported, citing SAHPRA statistics. Of these cases, 33 remain under investigation, while about 150 others were reported as coincidental deaths. Two other people were found to have died due to complications of breakthrough infection after vaccination. In 30 other cases, the deaths could not be investigated properly due to a lack of information. South Africa has been primarily using shots from J&J and Pfizer in its COVID-19 vaccination campaign, according to the federal governments website. Around 32 percent of its population is now fully vaccinated. Reuters contributed to this report. From NTD News A technician in a lab at Sinovac Biotech where the company is producing their COVID-19 vaccine CoronaVac during a media tour in Beijing, China on Sept. 24, 2020. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) Sudden Deaths Occurring Among Senior Experts in Chinas COVID Vaccine Industry A few prominent researchers associated with the development of COVID-19 vaccines in China have died unexpectedly at an age much younger than Chinas average. In light of their causes of death being largely unknown, heated discussions on Chinese social media have bloomed. Zeng Bing, a notable researcher and vice president of Chinas state-owned COVID-19 vaccine developer China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), passed away at the age of 52. According to local media, Zeng, who was also the vice mayor of the city of Dalian since June 24, died from sudden illness on July 23. Zhao Zhendong, Director of Science and Technology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, passed away on Sept. 17, 2020, at the age of 53. According to a death announcement by Chinese media The Paper on Nov. 30nearly three months laterZhao had suffered from excessive fatigue and collapsed at the Beijing Capital International Airport on the night of Sept. 16 and passed away the following morning. Zhao was a well-known figure for his contributions as a leader of the vaccine development task force of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council (JPCMSC). The JPCMSC is a platform of experts created on Jan. 21, 2020, by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In another instance, Zhou Yusen, one of the most prominent CCP military scientists in microbial epidemiology, passed away in May 2020. However, little to no information can be found about Zhous death, as the CCP did not announce his death other than quietly changing his profile to deceased. According to the New York Post, Zhou filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2020 on behalf of the CCPs Academy of Military Sciences before passing away under mysterious circumstances three months later, citing a report obtained by The Australian. The Epoch Times was not able to independently verify the report by The Australian. Multibillion-Dollar Vaccine Industry The COVID-19 vaccine industry is currently one of the biggest and most profitable industries in China. However, under the ideologies of communism, the political systems are largely intertwined with the economic sectors. One example of this would be the CCPs mass lockdowns under its draconian zero-COVID policy and the massive expansion of pharmaceutical companies in China. According to a press release by the National Health Commission on June 28, over 3.4 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in China. Sinovac Biotech, Chinas largest COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer, generated approximately $19.4 billion in revenue in 2021, a 37-fold increase over the previous year, according to the companys 2021 annual report. Some Chinese commentators have speculated that the unusual deaths among Chinese medical experts might be a reflection of the political power struggle among high-level CCP leaders behind the multibillion-dollar COVID-19 vaccine industry in China. Xia Yifan, a China current affairs expert based in Japan, told The Epoch Times its possible that these medical researchers in the vaccine industry, given the massive growth in profits and the fierce power struggles in Beijing, were silenced by the CCP. Epoch Times reporter Ellen Wan contributed to this report. David and Collet Stephan leave for a break during their appeals trial in Calgary, on March 9, 2017. (The Canadian Press/Todd Korol) Supreme Court Wont Hear Appeal by Parents Who Have Faced Two Trials in Sons Death The Supreme Court of Canada wont hear an appeal in a high-profile Alberta case that saw a couple tried twice in the death of their sick toddler. David and Collet Stephan were accused of not seeking medical attention sooner for their 18-month-old son before he died in 2012. They testified that they were treating the boy with natural remedies for what they thought was croup. A jury convicted them in 2016 of failing to provide the necessaries of life, but the Supreme Court of Canada overturned that verdict and ordered a second trial. A judge hearing the second trial without a jury found them not guilty in 2019. In March 2021, the Alberta Court of Appeal granted a request by the Crown to overturn that acquittal and ordered another trial. Crown prosecutors then stayed charges against the Stephans in June 2021, but the application seeking leave to appeal the decision on a third trial was already submitted to the Supreme Court. As usual, the Supreme Court gave no reasons for its decision. Shawn Buckley, a lawyer for David and Collet Stephan, said Thursday he would comment on the decision after speaking to his clients. He had said in an earlier interview that the Stephans wanted to go ahead with the application because they think its very important for the law to be clarified so that other parents dont face the type of uncertainty that they have been facing. Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, in Fujian province, ahead of military drills off Taiwan, on Aug. 4, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images) Taiwan Cancels 51 Flights Amid CCP Military Live-Fire Drills Taiwans Taoyuan International Airport (TPE) canceled 51 international flights on Wednesday, a day before the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) military began live-fire drills in the waters on all sides of the island. Taiwan News reported that 51 international flights due to arrive and depart TPE on Thursday were canceled, according to the airports official website. TPEs website appeared to be down as of Thursday. The canceled flights that were due to arrive in Taipei on Thursday include five Eva Air flights from Shanghai, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Osaka, and Fukuoka, as well as a China Airlines flight from Hong Kong. At least 25 outbound international flights were also disrupted, including more Eva Air flights scheduled to depart to Japan and Vietnam, Taiwan News reported. The local outlet reported that TPE cited the COVID-19 pandemic and not the so-called live-fire drills as the reason for the flight cancellations, citing a statement published on the TPE website. The CCP mouthpiece Xinhua announced the Peoples Liberation Armys (PLA) live-fire drills only minutes after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan for her historic visit. Pelosis visit has angered the CCP, which views the visit as affirming Taiwans de-facto independent status. Chinas foreign minister, Wang Yi, released a statement on Wednesday accusing Pelosi of making a politically provocative trip and accused the United States of undermining peace and regional stability in the Taiwan Strait. PLA Drills The communist regime announced on Tuesday that the drills would be conducted in six separate exclusion zones on all sides of the island over four days from Thursday to Sunday, Aug. 7. Aircraft and maritime vessels are prohibited from entering the six regions during that time, a move that may be designed to interfere with international shipping lanes. According to reports, the CCP began its live-fire military drills on Thursday local time, including launching long-range rockets into the eastern part of the Taiwan Straits, CCP state media purported. Taiwans Ministry of National Defense took to social media on Wednesday to clear up rumors online that the Chinese military had struck Taipeis international airport with a missile. In response to rumors online, there is no missile attack from PLA against Taoyuan International Airport of R.O.C., and #TPE is working as usual. We strongly condemn this malicious act and urge netizens not to spread this disinformation, the agency said on Twitter. The CCP has never ruled Taiwan but claims the democratic island nation as a part of its territory under its so-called one China policy. Beijing has previously threatened to use military force to bring Taiwan under CCP control. The Rocket Force under the Eastern Theatre Command of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) fires live missiles into the waters near Taiwan, from an undisclosed location in China on Aug. 4, 2022. (Eastern Theatre Command/Handout via Reuters) Taiwan Lawmaker Warns Beijing Could Invade as Chinese Missiles Land in Nearby Japans Waters Five ballistic missiles launched by China landed in the waters of Japans exclusive economic zone on Aug. 4, prompting an international outcry against the communist regime. The missiles were launched as part of the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) retaliatory military exercises against Taiwan, which have cut off several international air and sea paths to the island in a sort of blockade. To have five Chinese missiles fall within Japans EEZ like this is a first, Japanese defense minister Nobuo Kishi said. We have protested strongly through diplomatic channels. Shortly before the launches, CCP authorities canceled a previously planned meeting between China and Japans foreign ministers, citing displeasure with Japans signing of a joint statement by the G-7 that called on China to resolve its tensions with Taiwan peacefully. We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means, the document said. Taiwan Warns CCP Could Invade Local Waters The military exercises are the largest ever conducted by the CCP across the Taiwan Strait. They include joint naval, air, and missile forces, operating in six areas surrounding Taiwan. Notably, some of the exercise areas, which the CCP has declared prohibited to international travel, occur within 10 miles of Taiwans coastline. A nations sovereign waters end 12 miles from the coastline, according to international law. Such maneuvers would constitute an invasion of Taiwans territorial waters if Chinese forces were to travel the full breadth of the exercise areas, Taiwan lawmaker Wang Ting-yu told Axios. If they send in their fighters or their warships to enter our territorial sea, that means China invaded our territory and we will have our standard operation procedure to respond to that, Wang said. We dont want to provoke any conflict here, but whoever dares to invade our country, our home, we have our obligation to defend our home. CCP authorities claim that Taiwan is a rogue province of China that must be united with the mainland at any cost. As such, Chinas state-owned propaganda organs have issued articles claiming that Taiwans territorial waters are actually Chinas territorial waters. Despite Chinas claims, Taiwan has been self-governed since 1949, has never been controlled by the CCP, and boasts a democratic government and thriving market economy. The White House said that China was positioning itself to take further aggressive actions against Taiwan following the announcement of the exercises, which have effectively blockaded many important international trade routes to the island. China has positioned itself to take further steps, and we expect that they will continue to react over a longer-term horizon, said White House National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby during an Aug. 2 press briefing. The United States will not seek and does not want a crisis. [But] we are prepared to manage what Beijing chooses to do. What weve seen thus far is consistent with the playbook that we expected them to run. US, China at Loggerheads Over Status Quo The CCPs escalations in the region follow a highly publicized visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which the CCP leadership loudly protested. Both China and the United States have used the ensuing tensions to accuse one another of unilaterally attempting to change the status quo regarding Taiwan. The United States maintains a One China policy, which acknowledges but doesnt endorse the CCPs principle that there is one inalienable China of which Taiwan is a part. Its also bound by treaty to supply Taiwan with the arms necessary for Taiwan to defend its de facto independence. Further, the documents that form the basis of China and the United States agreement on the Taiwan issue demand that neither side seek to unilaterally change the current status quo through force or coercion. To that end, the CCP has said it would start a war no matter the cost in order to prevent Taiwans independence from being recognized on the international stage. Likewise, however, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that the language of the United States agreements with China indicated that the nation would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from a CCP invasion. Going back 50 years, our views on this issue [have] been clear in that regard, that this would be a matter of grave concern, which is often diplomatic language that we would be willing to go to war over this, Esper said during a speech last month. Its China that is undermining the One China policy as all sides have understood it now for 50 years, and its China changing the status quo through force. Those are just the facts of the matter. Despite the CCPs claims that Pelosis visit constituted a secessionist push away from the status quo, the White House was quick to note that congressional delegations visit Taiwan with some frequency, including multiple times this year which received relatively little or no attention from the CCP. Taiwans political and military leadership have also defended the visit, and have vowed to defend Taiwans territory and democratic way of life from CCP aggression. We are not eager for a fight, nor will we shy away from one, Taiwans defense ministry stated in a video released on social media. We have the capacity and the will to uphold our valued liberty and democracy, and maintain our regions stability. A Taliban fighter stands guard along a street near the Zanbaq Square in Kabul on Sept. 23, 2021. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images) Taliban Responds to US Strike That Killed Al-Qaeda Leader The Taliban on Aug. 4 said it wasnt aware Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was in Kabul days after the Biden administration confirmed it killed him in the Afghan capital. A chief spokesman for the Taliban said the group ordered its investigative and intelligence agencies to conduct serious and comprehensive investigations on various aspects of the mentioned event. There is no threat to any country, including America, from the soil of Afghanistan, the Islamic Emirate wants to implement the Doha pact and the violation of the pact must end, the Taliban claimed. The fact that America invaded our territory and violated all international principles, we strongly condemn the action once again. If such action is repeated, the responsibility of any consequences will be on the United States of America. The comment was the first time the Taliban spoke about the July 31 CIA drone strike that killed Zawahri, the former top deputy to Osama Bin Laden, on the balcony of a safe house that officials claimed was linked to a Taliban leader. In 2020, the Talibans leaders promised in an agreement in Doha, Qatar, that the group wouldnt harbor Al-Qaeda members or terrorist groups who seek to attack the United States. But U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that the Taliban had grossly violated the 2020 agreement by allegedly hosting and sheltering Zawahri in Kabul. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CBS News that the administration is speaking with the Taliban about the incident. We do believe that senior members of the Haqqani network, which is associated with the Taliban, knew that Zawahiri was in Kabul, Sullivan said. There may have been other members who didnt. And we are communicating directly with the Taliban about their obligations not to allow Al Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base for plotting. Other Details Revealed Authorities in Pakistan, which shares a lengthy border with Afghanistan, said on Aug. 4 that its airspace wasnt used for the drone strike that killed Zawahri. Top U.S. officials havent commented on where the drone, which fired Hellfire missiles, had originated. There is no evidence of this action having been undertaken using Pakistans airspace, Foreign Ministry spokesman Asim Iftikhar told news outlets. Ayman al-Zawahri poses for a photograph in Khost, Afghanistan, in this 1998 file photo made available on March 19, 2004. (Mazhar Ali Khan/AP Photo) While Biden and other administrations have hailed the killing of Zawahri as a positive development, some analysts say its a worrying sign that Al-Qaeda or other Islamic terrorist groups have returned to Afghanistan. The United States initially launched its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan to dismantle Al-Qaeda for its alleged role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The killing of Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success. But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe haven for Al Qaeda, Bill Roggio, a terrorism analyst at the Long War Journal, wrote on Twitter on Aug. 1. Zawahiri could not operate in Afghanistanparticularly in Kabulwithout the consent of the Taliban. He wasnt in the remote mountains of Kunar, Nuristan, or Nangarhar, or distant provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, or Kandahar, Roggio wrote. He was in the Talibans capital. As for Al-Qaeda, the group hasnt named a successor to Zawahri, who was a top target of the U.S. government over the past decade after Bin Ladens death in 2011. Firefighters encourage voters to vote on a proposition that would raise their pay outside the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center polling place on Nov. 6, 2018 in Houston. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images) Texas County Democrats Approve Lawsuit Against State to Stop Election Audit County officials are criticizing a random drawing that puts them in line for a second audit Officials in Harris County, Texas, approved a potential lawsuit against the states Secretary of States Office over a random drawing that will mean a second election audit for the states most populous county. The county, which includes Houston and has more than 4.8 million residents, is currently undergoing a state-run forensic audit of the 2020 election. The Democratic-controlled county allowed drive-thru and 24-hour voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted the scrutiny. State auditors are in phase two of the audit, after about 3,000 potential noncitizens were found on the voter rolls. The county is now attempting to verify the citizenship of those flagged by the state. The most recent election problem in Harris County occurred during the 2022 primaries, when 10,000 votes were found after the election. Democrats see the additional audit as pointless, saying that the states elections are secure and that Republicans have bought into former President Donald Trumps calls for investigating claims of potential election fraud. Dozens of people calling for stopping the vote count in Pennsylvania because of alleged fraud against President Donald Trump gather on the steps of the State Capital in Harrisburg, Pa., on Nov. 5, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, a Democrat, told the Harris County Commissioners Court during their Aug. 2 meeting that the secretary of states drawing names from a bucket was akin to a sketch comedy show. Menefee questioned the validity of the drawing, saying that the video of the selection didnt show the entire process. He complained that Harris County wasnt given notice of the drawingwhich the secretary of states office denied. The camera doesnt show the paper that was pulled from the bucket, he said during the meeting. All these things taken together make this highly suspicious. Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis suggested during the meeting that Bidens Justice Department get involved so that somebody can audit the auditors. The commissioners voted during the meeting in favor of pursuing legal action against the secretary of states office. Biyearly Audits Harris County is one of four counties up for a new audit. Cameron County was selected as the second large county to be audited. Guadalupe and Eastland counties were chosen in the small county category. Acting Harris County Elections Administrator Beth Stevens told The Epoch Times in an email last week that the office would cooperate with all audits. The Texas State Capitol is seen on the first day of the 87th Legislatures third special session in Austin, Texas, on Sept. 20, 2021. (Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images) The secretary of states office drew the counties out of a bucket live on Facebook on July 28, Sam Taylor, secretary of state spokesman, told The Epoch Times. That means local and state elections will be audited through the 2022 midterm elections in the four counties. The audits are part of an election integrity law passed by the states Republican-led legislature last year. The election integrity law requires the secretary of states office to select four counties to be randomly audited every two yearstwo with a population of more than 300,000 and two counties with lesser populations. Eighteen of Texass 254 counties have populations greater than 300,000, meaning the states large urban counties will be audited more frequently. Harris County Shying From Spotlight The secretary of states office defended the drawing in an Aug. 3 statement, saying that nothing untoward occurred and noting that the drawing was done on camera, even though that wasnt a requirement. The suggestion that Harris Countyor any other countywas deliberately chosen for a randomized election audit is completely false. Unfortunately, this is a counterfactual, delusional conspiracy theory that some officials in Harris County have chosen to perpetuate, Taylor wrote. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston, told The Epoch Times in a text that filing a lawsuit over the drawing would be the most frivolous act yet by the Democrats. There were documented election irregularities across Texas in 2020, Bettencourt said. He pointed out that irregularities occurred during the March primary elections in Harris County, which prompted election administrator Isabel Longoria to quit. While Longoria served as election administrator, Harris County missed the mandatory 24-hour state deadline to have all ballots counted. During the weekend following election day, officials announced that about 10,000 mail-in ballots from 6,000 Democratic voters and 4,000 Republican voters were discovered missing from the original election night count. In December, the secretary of states office announced the results of the first phase of the 2020 election audit that focused on four of the states largest countiesHarris, Collin, Dallas, and Tarrant. The preliminary findings included more than 11,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote statewide. Of these, 327 records were identified in Collin County, 1,385 in Dallas County, 3,063 in Harris County, and 708 in Tarrant County. At the time of the announcement, Dallas County had canceled 1,193 of these records, with Tarrant County canceling one. Neither Collin nor Harris had canceled any potential nonvoting records at the time. The Attack on Orban Commentary The Left cant stand that a successful, popular, strong conservative government is leading a country at the heart of central Europe. When that country cheerfully maintains its sovereignty and distinct national identity while still belonging to the European Union (EU) and NATO, the elites bristle. Making things worse, the country self-identifies as having a Christian heritage and being pro-family. It also accepted and aided more than 700,000 people fleeing war-torn Ukraine. Hungary and its just reelected prime minister, Viktor Orban, now find themselves in the crosshairs of attack for daring to be Hungarian. How dare they? chuff the anointed arbiters of all European cultural structures, moral norms, legal debate, and wealth redistribution. Journalists and media opinion-leaders are quick to join the attack slinging accusations of various -isms, phobias, mind-reading analyses, dog whistles, and coded messages. Adding to the indignation of the postmodern, post-Western, globalists-in-charge is the fact that Orban is featured as a keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting in Dallas this week. Whether in the corridors of Brussels or any number of leftist editorial Zoom meetings, the same objective is made clear: Orban and his message must be stopped! The well-worn go to technique to silence anyone making the Left nervous is the smear. Its straight out of the Saul Alinsky playbook, Rules for Radicals, and it often works. In this case, the Left has chosen comments made by Orban during an annual address to members of the Hungarian minority in Romania on July 23. The Washington Post and others of their ilk will not give you Orbans full quote with context. Theyre too busy saving their keystrokes in order to be able to write Nazi and authoritarian repeatedly while advocating for the EU to withhold funding from Hungary. Heres what Orban actually said: The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claimtheir claimthat Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. This is a historical and semantic sleight of hand, because it conflates two different things. There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. And, given a favorable alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture. This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. This is why we fought at Nandorfehervar/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, andif I am not mistakenthis is why, in still older times, the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers. The real problem with this quote is, of course, that its factually correct. For the historians reading this, the Battle of Poitiers that Orban references is also known as the Battle of Tours (A.D. 732). The second problem with the quote is that it begins with Orban pointing out the false claim of the internationalist Left. He begins his quote explaining that his critics are liars. That portion of Orbans quote must be omitted, of course. Heres the essence of Orbans statement: Europeans are from Europe; Turks and Arabs from their own homelands. Fundamentally, thats it. Various peoples are indigenous to their own regions. They have their own distinct identity, culture, history, language, religion, etc. Orban was simply and directly advocating for the Magyar people. They are allowed to have a home and an identity. They are allowed to hand down their heritage through generations. France and Germany are free to make their own decisions, or not. They can value their own identity, culture, history, language, religion, etc.or not. Self-determination is the freedom to choose ones own acts without external compulsion. The term is generally associated with the freedom of the people of a given territory to determine their own political status. Its the power of a nation to decide how it will be governed without the influence of any other country. Chapter 1, Article 1, part 2 of the United Nations Charter guarantees the right of self-determination into the framework of international law and diplomacy. Now is a good time to consider how a country like Hungary and a leader like Orban can make their own choices as a nation and advance their own interestsbased on faith, family, history, culture, and traditionwithout threat of violence, compulsion, or intimidationand not be subjected to false claims of racism and bigotry as a sleazy political trick. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. statements "Because we're in a revolutionary cycle, or the left has now said, under the pretext that Donald Trump is so extraordinarily threatening to the Republic, that it requires any means necessary to end him." Victor Davis Hanson Classicist and Military Historian "Half the country believes that when it comes to President Trump there are no rules. They have lost faith in the system." Lindsey Graham Chairman, US. Senate Judiciary Committee "DOJ must immediately explain the reason for its raid ... or it will be viewed as a political tactic and undermine any future credible investigation." Andrew Cuomo Former New York Governor "These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents." Donald Trump Former President "[Russia hoaxers] have now been promoted into the Biden administration. ... Theyre definitely targeting [former] president Trump because they dont want him to run for president." Devin Nunes Former U.S. Representative "Theyre using the full powerillegally, I think, unconstitutionallyof the law to harass, intimidate, and try to push Trump out of the picture." Louie Gohmert U.S. Representative "[The raid] was the latest link a long series of operations starting six years ago with absurd claims that Donald Trump was the asset of a foreign country. That operation was called Russia gate." Lee Smith Author, The Plot Against the President "Beginning in 2016, Americans began to have doubts when we began to unravel the Russia collusion reporting. ... Those doubts kept growing and you started to hear people say we have a dual justice system in America." John Solomon Editor-in-Chief, Just the News "This is the modern day version of Watergate. Except the only difference is it wasn't political operatives breaking in to their opponents headquarters. It was the FBI and DOJ." Kash Patel Former Chief of Staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense "It seems like this was ... without buy-in or notification of higher levels of government. But literally no one will believe that." Andrew Yang Former Democratic presidential candidate "When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of [the DOJ]." Kevin McCarthy U.S. House Minority Leader "Lets be clear: This is a brazen weaponization of the FBI by Bidens DOJ against his political opponentwhile giving their political allies free passes." Steve Scalise U.S. House Minority Whip "Its all a coordinated attack with the FBI. Do you think that the FBI director is going to raid the former presidents house without getting the approval of President [Biden]?" Eric Trump Son of former President Donald Trump "AG must explain why 250 yrs of practice was upended with this raid." Mike Pompeo Former Secretary of State "[The raid represents] another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regimes political opponent." Ron DeSantis Florida Governor "No person is above the law. Not even the president of the United States. Not even a former president of the United States." Nancy Pelosi U.S. House Speaker "[The] raid on the home of a former U.S. president without explanation will only further erode confidence in the FBI and the Justice Department." Chuck Grassley Ranking Member, U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee "The country deserves a thorough and immediate explanation of what led to the events." Mitch McConnell U.S. Senate Minority Leader "Three FBI agents visited me and seized my cell phone. Im outraged ... [that the FBI] would seize the phone of a sitting Member of Congress." Scott Perry U.S. Representative "I didnt actually get to oversee the search, they wouldnt let anybody see what they were doing." Christina Bobb Attorney to Trump "If theres anything negative about Trump or his allies, that gets accelerated, leaked, and used for political purposes." Matt Gaetz Member, U.S. House Judiciary Committee "They see the support that he has all over the country. His rallies terrify them." Marjorie Taylor Greene U.S. Representative "[Democrat Party attorney] Marc Elias is saying that the criminal statute could result in President Trump being barred from future office. And I think its clearly part of his plan." Jeff Clark Former lawyer, Justice Department "I think for anyone who doubted that there was a swamp when Donald Trump was saying drain the swamp now I think theres true believers." Warren Davidson U.S. Representative "The security state complex and the complexity of the security state ... is now overtaking our system of government and our rule of law." Michael Flynn Retired lieutenant general One of the worlds greatest grapes, sauvignon blanc, has suffered enough indignities over the years to qualify as a survivorthough the accolades it has received recently make it seem as if its always been a star. In fact, the history of this variety is so checkered that most of todays younger wine buyers would never guess what crises it faced. Today its widely seen as a go-to grape, a patio sipper best on hot days to cool the brow, and great with lighter food. In its most classic form, in Frances eastern Loire Valley, its one of the more challenging varieties to understand. At its best, it requires lots of bottle aging! Since most white wines are best consumed young, some people might suspect that older versions of sauvignon blancs are strange. But when theyre from Frances Pouilly-Fume or its neighbor, Sancerre, this wine can be startlingly complex. Thats not the way most Americans think of it. Some see sauvignon blanc as a simple quaff, probably best exemplified by the $8 to $15 versions we see from New Zealand. Theyre often slightly sweet to offset high acidity. Decades ago, in Northern California, winemakers considered it to be a simple chardonnay alternative. It didnt sell that well, partially because the word sauvignon wasnt easy to pronounce. The word Fume came from the fanciful Blanc Fume that had been used in France. The name Fume Blanc here, widely used first in the late 1960s by Robert Mondavi, initially was met with confusion. Some thought it represented a different style of wine than sauvignon blanc. But theyre the same thing, which led the federal government to require that all wines designated Fume Blanc also carry sauvignon blanc on the label. After Mondavi adopted Fume, David Stare, the founder of Dry Creek Vineyards in Sonoma County, began using the name as well in 1972 and it soon was widely accepted. But sauvignon blanc remained a clear second-tier wine. Most wineries chardonnays clearly were No. 1, and everyone made one. And for a time in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was much disparagement of sauvignon blanc. Cool to cold regions such as Monterey County often produced sauvignon blancs with curious if not odd aromatics, such as cilantro, green pepper, and even canned asparagus. This was related to a natural compound called pyrazine. When the grape is farmed in the wrong way or in the wrong climates, its natural herbaceous qualities can become so strange that Americans dislike it. However, when the wine comes from vines that are extremely carefully tended to deal with the strong herbal scent, the wine can be fascinating. Even some of the Loire Valleys most impressive wines have traces of the pyrazine component, and purists simply adore it. But in Monterey County 35 years ago, grape growers had yet to discover the best ways of growing the variety, and some of those wines were widely disparaged for being green or leafy. It wasnt until the mid-1990s when New Zealands first sauvignon blancs began appearing here, which took the country by storm. Their aromas were so exotic that the wines began to sell well, partially as a result of how the acid and sugar worked in harmony to produce a fine sipping wine. Today sauvignon blanc is produced in widely different regions. With better understanding of viticultural practices, the wines are more harmonious and balanced than ever before. Today, several wineries still use Fume Blanc on their primary labels. Now, a few use both names. Dry Creek also makes a wine called sauvignon blanc, as does Napa Valleys Grgich Hills (a new companion to its Fume Blanc). Wine of the Week 2021 J. Lohr Sauvignon Blanc, Arroyo Seco, Monterey County, Flume Crossing ($18): Delicate mint/lime aromas replace the herbal notes of the past with excellent grapefruit and passionfruit elements and a complex, dry finish. Try with sole poached with tarragon. How Scott Hardy honors and protects America's Western arts tradition Canadian silversmith and cowboy Scott Hardy wants the world to see the beauty and elegance of Western craftsmanship. He feels blessed to honor his culture in this way. Hardys maternal grandparents raised him in Saskatchewan, after his parents divorced when he was 3 years old. Hes the fifth generation in his family of ranchers and homesteaders. Silversmith Scott Hardy loves to show the beauty and elegance of fine Western craftsmanship. (Nadine Levin) Growing up in a small, rural town, Hardy learned about self-reliance and community. You grew up understanding what it meant to build something, what it meant to be independent, [and] to rely on yourself and your neighbors rather than the government, he said by telephone. Hardy believes that the West has always been a place of innovation and forward thinking, as people have had to adapt to survive. Odd Jobs and a Silver Lining Hardy met his wife, Leslie, during his time as a guide in Banff, Alberta. The couple set up a ranch in Alberta, and the only way they could afford to do so was if Hardy worked odd jobs. He worked on oil rigs, shoed horses full time, and worked in a welding shop, to name a fewwhatever it took to make their dream possible. Hardy came home one night and found a newspaper cutting for a silver jewelry-making course that Leslie had saved for him. He signed up for the class to supplement their ranching income. But it didnt go as planned. He fell in love with silversmithing, so much so that the couple sold most of their herd (and they now have a small herd of about a dozen cows). Instead of making jewelry, Hardy wanted to make horse ornaments (for instance, silver works for saddles and bridles) and objects like buckles that had meaning to the North American West. Pair of bridle conchos (round silver ornaments), 2020, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver filigree (soldered sterling silver beadwork) with 14-karat gold flower centers. (Leslie Hardy) Pair of bridle conchos (round silver ornaments), 2019, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver engraved and sculpted, with sterling silver scroll and monogram overlays. (Leslie Hardy) Custom flask (13 oz.), 2016, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver with sterling silver overlays and 14-karat gold brands, monogram, and flower centers. (Leslie Hardy) Most people dont wear jewelry in the West, but they do wear buckles, he explained. Its part of the Western identity: Rodeo cowboys wear buckles for the competitions theyve won, and ranch cowboys wear buckles that signify ranching. (They may wear a three-piece set called a ranger set, similar to what Roy Rogers wore.) Three-piece buckle set, 2017, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver filigree (soldered sterling silver beadwork), with 14-karat gold monogram. (Leslie Hardy) The rodeo gave birth to the Western buckle in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Hardy explained. Rodeo cowboys wore big, wide belts (kidney belts) to protect their backs when their horses bucked. As the rodeos became more competitive, the cowboys began to wear their competition prize plaques on the back of their belts to show what theyd won. Over time, they moved these plaques to the front of their belts and they became the buckles we know today. Three-piece buckle set, 2016, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver with red sterling silver, 14-karat gold scrolls, and green-gold flower centers. (Leslie Hardy) Three-piece buckle set, 2018, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver fully overlaid with sterling silver and three colors of 14-karat gold. (Leslie Hardy) The Mountain of Craftsmanship Hardy searched for four years to find a teacher, while teaching himself more silversmith skills. Most of the silversmiths he met were unwilling to pass on their trade, and they were secretive and protective of their work. But Hardy did find the help he sought. He was creating horse jewelry and also spurs in the 1980s when he met two master silversmiths. Over a drink, they shared their work and advice. Each concentrated on one area of Western works. One of them said to Hardy: Pick a profession and become the best you can be at it. You owe that to the materials. From that day on, Hardy chose to make silver and gold work his profession, and he made it his mission to read and learn all he could about the methods and materials of his trade. Hardy sees each of his accomplishments as a tool in a toolbox. The more he learns, the more tools he has. He likens learning to climbing one part of a mountain and then reaching a lush meadow, where one can choose to rest after conquering a skill or choose to keep improving ones skills to reach higher levels. Hardy always chooses to climb. Now, after 41 years of working at perfecting his trade, he takes smaller steps but theyre no less significant. An Epiphany and Tiffanys Hardy had been silversmithing for around 15 years when he had an epiphany at the worlds largest horse show: Equitana, in Germany. Horse people from around 42 countries go to the show to demonstrate their talents. He and his cousin (a saddlemaker) were invited to represent Alberta and Saskatchewan, respectively. On the opening night, Hardy remembers thinking how charming the attendees looked in their national costumes. Thats when he realized that he, too, must wear a charming outfit! Only when he took himself out of the West did he realize that he was part of a culture, whereas before it was just a way of life and who they were: men wearing boots and hats, working and living off the land. From then on, instead of thinking that he was part of the silversmith trade, he thought: This is how I can honor the people behind me and take it forward. Hardy told his grandma about his realization and also how it annoyed him that Hollywoods idea of the cowboy seemed cemented in peoples minds. I was frustrated, because the world looked at the Western culture like it was rough, crude, and rude, and I wasnt raised that way and neither were the people around me, he said. Not long after their talk, his grandma sent him the book Tiffanys 150 Years, by John Loring. Hardy learned about Tiffanys humble beginnings selling pens and paper, and how the company grew after introducing fine craftsmanship from around the world. What struck Hardy about Tiffanys was the lack of Western craftsmanship. He also wondered why Western crafted objects werent held in the same high esteem as Tiffanys glass or leadlight lamps. From then on, Hardy made it his mission to show people the beauty and elegance of Western craftsmanship. Creating Heirlooms Hardy hopes his creations become revered family heirlooms, rather than remembered as Scott Hardy pieces. For instance, a man might wear one of Hardys buckles his entire life, it becomes part of his identity, and when he dies his son might inherit the buckle. As its passed down the generations, its then known as dads buckle or grandpas buckle, and the artist is forgotten. Hardy believes thats the way his craft should be; its about the material and the creation itself, not the artist and his or her ego. Hardy looks to the past and also to other crafts for inspiration. For example, he loves how gun engravers make fine scrolls and flowers in the gun metal. He had to tweak the process for silver because due to the nature of the silver, the design would easily rub off. The cowboy way of thinking is, you bring all these elements together to make something work for you, he said. Set of six shot glasses, 2019, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver, lined with 18-karat gold; decorated with sterling silver scroll and flower overlays, with 14-karat gold flower centers. (Leslie Hardy) Decanter (28 oz.), 2015, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver decanter with sterling silver scroll overlays and 14-karat gold flower centers. Sterling silver funnel and stand. (Leslie Hardy) Hardy carves by hand, although he started using a pneumatic graver to engrave with after he got injured five years ago. He prefers to sculpt directly into the gold or silver, and rarely casts metal. Silversmith Scott Hardy hand-sculpting a sterling silver buckle. (Leslie Hardy) Calgary Stampede In 2012, Hardy handmade 100 buckles to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Calgary Stampede, an annual rodeo. To make the design, he studied buckles from 1912 and also Calgary Stampede art from Western artists such as Charles Marion Russell (known as the cowboy artist) and Edward Borein, who were at the first show. For the center of his buckle design, Hardy chose Boreins famous drawing I See You of a rider on a bucking horse. Calgary Stampede 100th anniversary buckle, 2012, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver, hand-engraved with hand-sculpted figure, and 10-karat gold. (Leslie Hardy) Hardy explained that the horse Borein depicted had been owned by the U.S. Cavalry, but it kept bucking the riders and so was branded ICU, meaning that it was condemned to death. The founder of the Calgary Stampede saved the horse and put it in his Wild West show that toured the world. Every time the horse bucked, it had a habit of looking back at the rider, hence the name I See You. Hardy took two and a half years to finish all 100 buckles, and each one was engraved by hand, with each figure sculpted by hand. A Canadian postage stamp even features his buckle, the first buckle to be so honored. Traditional Cowboy Arts Association In 1998, Hardy, along with other master craftsmen, formed the Traditional Cowboy Arts Association (TCAA) to uphold and protect their cowboy trades (of rawhide braiding, silversmithing, saddlemaking, and bit and spur making). Only masters can enter the TCAA, as its not as simple as a craftsperson creating fine work. Becoming a master is more than technique; its developing the head and heart, and that takes time. Hardy explained that theyre looking for ambassadors: Your ego has to stand aside from your profession. A big part of the TCAA mission is to show the brilliance of Western craftsmanship and for bona fide masters to teach the trades. For the past 23 years, TCAA members have exhibited in the Traditional Cowboy Arts Exhibition & Sale at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Hardy said that the show aims to stretch members skills and to introduce collectors and young aspiring craftspeople alike to the beauty and elegance of Western craftsmanship. Silversmith Scott Hardy and saddlemaker John Willemsma created this saddle with sterling silver filigree (soldered silver sterling beadwork) embellishments for the 2009 Traditional Cowboy Arts Exhibition & Sale at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. (National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum) Hardy finds it satisfying, looking back over his past exhibits, to see his progress. For this years TCAA show, it took him around 700 hours to create his five entries. The time he took to make each piece varied. For instance, he took around 500 hours to make a decanter, while he took around 90 hours to create a buckle in sterling silver with three types of colored gold. Hes quick to stress that its not about getting the piece done or the time it takes to complete it. He believes that its about creating it properly and being mentally present at every stage. Silversmith Scott Hardys entry for the 2022 Traditional Cowboy Arts Exhibition & Sale at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Buckle, 2022, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver buckle with sterling silver flower and scroll overlays, 14-karat green-gold flower centers, 14-karat red-gold trim, and 14-karat gold twist rope. (Leslie Hardy) One of Hardys mentors continued to make great works when he was 78 years old. Hardy hopes to do similarly. But essentially, he and his peers at TCAA are building a Western craftsmanship legacy. Were trying to build something that lasts way past any of us, he said. Hardy works in his shop every dayhe has been for the past 41 years. But hes quick to add that hes still a cowboy, and theres never a day without a horse. In the beginning, I thought I could pay homage to the West by being a cowboy. [In the end,] I felt I could do more for the West through silver and gold than I could on the back of a horse, he said. Hardys a constant ambassador for his trade, and his Western works are admired nationally and internationally. Among his many commissions are those from well-known figures. For instance, in 2005 he was commissioned to make monogrammed buckles for the 13 Canadian premiers. Among the many Western roles hes taken, he was the president of the TCAA for three years, and in 2011 he was inducted into the Stetson Craftsmans Alliance. Hes taught hand-engraving and silver fabrication across North America, and he has frequently lectured on the history of American West craftsmanship at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Palm flask (8 oz. ), 2019, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver with sterling silver scroll and flower overlays, and 14-karat gold flower centers. (Leslie Hardy) Western childs table set, 2013, by Scott Hardy. Sterling silver with sterling silver decorative overlays. (Leslie Hardy) Every piece that Hardy makes is important to him, whether its a chalice for the Catholic church, a table set for a child, or a flask for a cowboy. Its about people understanding the culture of the North American cowboy. Its about honoring my family, and honoring the materials, he said. To find out more about silversmith Scott Hardy, visit ScottHardy.com The Reactionary Politics of Silicon Valley Commentary For a while, the internet was an unambiguously revolutionary phenomenon. Everyone could broadcast truth to the world. But as the internet became ubiquitous, and with the more recent impact of social media and broadband, what had been a revolution is becoming a coopted new manifestation of establishment power. The modern internet is a propagandists dream. Perpetual internet access to an infinite audience and infinite content has altered the human psyche, making it easier than ever to manipulate the beliefs and passions of entire populations. Control of this interaction by a small handful of mega corporations in Silicon Valley has given those companies almost indescribable power. The ironic surprise in all this is how Silicon Valleys tech companies have used their power. They have embraced a reactionary politics, reflected in who they promote and who they erase, as well as what online behaviors they reward and where they direct the herd. To understand why Silicon Valleys big tech companies have become reactionaries, one must understand how the American Leftwhich includes the overwhelming majority of big tech company employees and foundershas over the past 10-20 years moved from opposing corporate globalization to fully endorsing it. This shift, gradual but steady, came into the open with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The Populist Uprising Against Globalism Donald Trumps heresy was to focus on the negative impact globalism was having on Americans. He catalyzed a revolution by challenging what had become truisms for the establishment: trade deficits dont matter or can actually be beneficial, free trade is always good, and mass immigration always helps more than it harms. Trump clarified the debate over globalization by forcing the progressive Left to reveal its true colors. It became clear that the Lefts primary concern was how corporate globalization affected nations in the developing world, and it exposed their indifference, even hostility, toward the workers in their own nations. You can make a moral case that globalization should harm workers in developed nations by characterizing their standard of living as ecologically unsustainable and built on the legacy of colonial exploitation. You can therefore rationalize the harm globalization inflicts on developed nations as an altruistic necessity. You can also embrace globalization on those terms because it does the biddingand attracts the generosityof wealthy elites and multinational corporations who are most enriched by free trade and open borders. Americas progressive Left did both. Theyve disguised the agenda that disenfranchises American citizens within their own nation by attacking white privilege and by accusing their opponents of being racists and deniers of climate change. Theyve come to accept the premises of the free-trade economists theyd once despised, with the transformative caveat that climate activism and all that it entailsnamely, the mass redistribution of wealthwill mitigate the impacts of globalism on developing nations. Its all ridiculous. Climate activism may redistribute wealth, but climate activism also requires the abolition of cheap conventional energy which remains the primary means by which individuals and nations escape poverty. But this paradox, if anything, leaves intact and strengthens the core agenda of globalists: eliminate nations and empower multinational corporations and transnational bureaucracies. The Silicon Valley, a progressive stronghold which by 2019 had a tech workforce reaching an incredible 75 percent foreign-born, epitomizes a culture where globalism is perceived not just as inevitable, but already here. In lockstep with the tech monopolies, fully embracing globalism in all its woke and green ramifications, is every other major corporation in America, every elite academic institution, every influential entertainer, every so-called mainstream media property. Globalism Is Not the Revolution. It Is the Establishment. Globalism, with its epicenter shifted into the heart of the Silicon Valley, is the governing ideology of what is now a sprawling empire, wielding economic and cultural power rarely seen in the history of the world. And in the face of a growing populist insurgency from Colombo to Amsterdam to Ottawa, they are the reactionaries. Everyone in the world who questions the flawed diktats of globalism, whether they are right-of-center or left-of-center, are the true revolutionaries of this era. If you examine the list of online voices that have been silenced, regardless of anything else, the common thread are ideas that question the globalist agenda. The narratives of globalism skeptics are dangerous to the reactionary empire. Skeptics are the revolutionaries. But what if the majority of ordinary people just want to hear the other side for a change, on the issues surrounding environmentalism, energy, land use, infrastructure, multiculturalism, immigration, race, feminism, gender equity, and social justice? What if they sometimes find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if they believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or globalisms enabling siblingthe so-called climate emergency? What if it isnt even globalism itself that should be most questioned, but merely some of its misanthropic and counterproductive premises? It is reasonableor it should be reasonableto expect a nation to defend its culture, its language, and its borders, to care for its citizens, to respect its traditions. To accept someone as an American citizen, what constitutes an acceptable range of behaviors and beliefs? What are reasonable terms for inclusion in the American family? This is one of the most important questions of our time: If globalism, pushed by every major institution in America, is determined to erase national identities, then what sort of pushback can preserve nations and cultures in a way where the solution isnt worse than the problem? What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation? Can nationalism be inclusive without becoming meaningless? Can nationalism be compassionate, offering a better model for the evolution of global civilization, and still be authentic nationalism? Is there a version of economic nationalism that nonetheless nurtures global prosperity? One thing ought to be certain: Denying skeptics of globalism the ability to voice their observations and opinions online is a dangerous mistake, because the concerns voiced by globalism skeptics can often rely on hard facts and sound logic, no matter whether they are expressed with grace or with fury. For the reactionaries of Silicon Valley to silence them defers a much-needed debate about globalism and its consequences, at a time when current globalist policies are becoming increasingly unsustainable. You cant demand a 50 percent reduction in the use of fossil fuel, oppose nuclear power, and expect renewables to provide sufficient energy to power civilization, when worldwide energy production will have to double merely to provide every person living on earth half the energy that Americans currently consume. You cant have mass immigration into the United States at the same time as environmentalist laws make it impossible to build adequate housing and infrastructure to accommodate them. You cant have mass immigration while at the same time expanding a welfare state. And you certainly cant have mass immigration at the same time as the unionized public education system, dominated by leftists, teaches immigrant children that they have arrived in a hostile, racist nation. Unless youre prepared to throw away all pretense of a meritocracy in American society, you cant demand perfectly proportional representation of all ethnic groups in every facet of American life, from wealth and income to geographic distribution to hiring, promoting, college admissions, and contract awards. All of these things are socially and economically unsustainable; all of them weaken America and every other nation where they are enforced. To implement them requires the soft tyranny of Pavlovian conditioning, backed up by an authoritarian state. Small wonder that dissident glitches in the online matrix become barely remembered rumors and vague caricatures once some reactionary zealot, working for a California tech giant, erases their lifes work with a click. Such are the shortsighted reactionary politics of Silicon Valley, the citadel of globalism. Their progressive dreams have merged into the broader agenda of a multinational corporate establishment that progressives once opposed with all their strength. Their revolutionary posturing is a comforting illusion, but they are only fooling themselves as they drive us into an untenable future. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks after receiving the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon, Taiwans highest civilian honor, from Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen at the president's office, in Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 3, 2022. (Chien Chih-Hung/Office of The President via Getty Images) The Transcendent Hypocrisy of the Pelosis Commentary Ever wonder why the Chinese Communist regime huffed and puffed, exploded some cannons, and sent a couple of dozen jets revolving around Taiwan during and after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to the island theyve long claimed as their own, but in reality, did little more than institute a few small trade sanctions that might have barely made the back pages of the Financial Times? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may be evil, but theyre not dumb. They know where their bread is buttered, and they know a propaganda show when they see one. In fact, theyre experts at it. For the answer, look no further than Nancys husband Paul Pelosi, who got into a bit of trouble just a week or two before, after driving his black 2021 Porsche 911 into another mans Jeep in the late evening. Both cars were totaled, but both drivers, weve been told, are okay. Unfortunately, Paul was allegedly determined to be legally drunk0.08 percent alcohol from a test delayed a full 2 1/2 hours after he was apprehended, the first sign of the favoritism our so-called elites normally get. Despite pronouncements to the contrary from the Napa Valley police, no doubt everything possible is being done to keep him from getting the strong DUI punishment most of us would certainly receive. But thats pro forma. Whats more interesting here is the car he was drivinga 911 that goes for more than $200k when fully loaded. Nice wheels, but a combustion engine, dude?! Shouldnt Paul Pelosi, of all people, have been driving electric? This is especially true since it was just announced by Porsche that their classic 911 wouldnt be going electric until at least 2030. Thats pretty far off, far enough for a lot to change. (Maybe Porsche knows something we dontthat the electric car fad has peakedand theyre hedging their bets.) Its not a great lookbad optics, as they saysince all his wife talks about in Congress is green, green, green. But thats just talk, as everyone paying the slightest attention knows. Its for the little peopleyou know, the idiots who had to wear masks at their hairdressers or keep them on at exclusive Napa Valley fundraisers. Who of the bon type bon genre, as the French say, does that? What does this have to do with a trip to Taiwan? A recent article in Business Insider details the substantial investments that Paul Pelosi made just for 2021 and 2022. They include Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Micron, and Nvidia, all of which do large percentages of their business in Chinawith the permission of the CCP, of course. If I can see this in three minutes on the internet, you can bet the CCP knows it and then some. Why would they see Nancy Pelosi as their enemy? They have to know that her trip, much as I hate to say it because I have visited Taiwan with a delegation and loved it, is basically a charade. Nothing of significance happened. No one, certainly not Nancy, is considering abandoning the one China policy. This is hypocrisy taken to the nth power. Marie Antoinette had nothing on these folks. When Nancy went to Taiwan, she was accompanied by a good portion of the U.S. Navy, including the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, an item they couldnt have dreamed of in the French Revolution. What do you think the junket cost? I couldnt even give you an over-under. But I do know that the media doesnt even ask, just as they dont ask about the massive hypocrisy enveloping virtually all Democratic Party politicians and a fair percentage of the Republicans. They also know were headed for an election that has long looked bad for the Democrats. Right now, they have to look tough, after appearing like marshmallows in Afghanistan. That in itself would constitute a good motivation for the trip. (Youve heard about a show trial. This was a show trip.) The Chinese communists know this, too. They know the real truth, the more important truth, that these men and women, our political operativesmost of them anywayare lined up like desperate pigs at the proverbial trough trying to get their money. As long as they have the Pelosis of the world out there yammering for electric cars (when they dont drive them) and clean energy even as their state is plagued with brownouts, the Chinese know its full speed ahead for their often defective but always cheap solar collectors and anything else they can sell us idiots for a price by exploiting slave labor. Does Nancy Pelosi have anything to say about that? Maybe for propaganda purposes. Would she actually do something about what she says? Not a chance. Everyone knows that. Ask her husband. He should be easy enough to reach. No way is he going to jail. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Trans Sanctuary State Legislation Heads to Assembly Floor Despite Resistance Legislation that would make California a sanctuary state for transgender youth and their parents fleeing states where laws prohibit gender-affirming health care for minors continues to move through the Legislature despite strong criticism from opponents. Senate Bill 107 passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Aug. 3 with an 114 vote along party lines. It now moves to the State Assembly floor. A San Francisco Bay-area mother, whose daughter once believed she was transgender but changed her mind, told the committee that shell never forgive herself for allowing the girl to take puberty blockers. At the insistence of the medical community, we regrettably placed our 12-year-old gender-confused daughter on puberty blockers. We were not told of long-term effects, said the mom, who used the pseudonym Kiley Chang for fear of retaliation. In written testimony read during the committee meeting, Chang said she left the Democratic Party because of gender ideology. Transgender rights group members protest against an Our Bodies, Our Sports rally at the Freedom Plaza in Washington on June 23, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times) Medical providers used the threat of suicide to pressure us to accept our daughter as our son instead of the promised relief and stability. With both social and medical transition, our daughters mental health grew worse, the letter reads. Chang said her daughter became more suicidal. She was cutting herself, and her sleep and eating habits were abnormal to the point where every day was crisis management until she took the girl out of public school, which she said was pushing this gender identity. Her daughter began to detransition after she sought the help of an out-of-state psychiatrist who with family, love and compassion brought our daughter back, according to the letter. Authorities from child protective services (CPS) investigated her after her daughter changed her mind, Chang said. While she retained custody of her daughter, at least one other California mother lost custody of her child for not supporting medical transition. Imagine losing your child because you believe in biological facts, Chang said. My daughter is now happy in her female body, but I will never forgive myself for subjecting my child to what may result in long-term health problems. Only time will tell what puberty blockers did. Other parents of children with gender dysphoria have told The Epoch Times that CPS has investigated them for opposing transgender ideology or refusing to use transgender pronouns. State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who authored SB 107, described it as a trans state of refuge measure to protect the parents of trans youth who are facing criminalization and prosecution for allowing their kids to receive gender-affirming health care in other states. State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, speaks at a California Assembly Appropriations Committee hearing in Sacramento, Calif., on Aug. 3, 2022. (Screenshot via California State Assembly) If the legislation is passed and signed into law, Wiener said that California will do whatever it can to keep them safe from despicable laws, such as those passed in Texas and Alabama. In Alabama, parents of trans youth and the doctors who provide them with gender-affirming care can be charged with child abuse and face up to 10 years in prison, while the children can be placed in foster care. Support and Opposition Molly Robson, legislative director at Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California urged support for the legislation and criticized other states for enacting hostile legislation and criminalizing health care from abortion to gender-affirming care. California has, of course, taken the lead and is taking necessary steps to protect access, Robson said during the meeting. Our health centers are committed to providing accessible, inclusive gender-affirming care to those who seek it. SB 107 ensures that we can continue to do so without our providers being in fear of another states law interfering with their duty as a medical professional. Tami Martin of Equality California said the LGBT rights group supports the goal of the measure to protect people who come to California from the laws of other states. The legislation indicates to trans youth and their families that California welcomes them and that Californians continue to have the right to control their bodies and to live their lives authentically, Martin said at the meeting. State finance authorities say the measure would have a minor impact on the states budget if it becomes law. Erin Friday, the mother of a teen who once suffered from gender dysphoria, speaks at a California Assembly Appropriations Committee hearing in Sacramento, Calif., on Aug. 3, 2022. (Screenshot via California State Assembly) Erin Friday, of Our Duty, an international group that opposes transgender ideology and mother of a formerly trans-identified child, said the monetary and human costs of the legislation will be much greater than proponents claim. The financial analysis of this bill completely misses the mark. Wheres the cost of foster care? Wheres the cost for the runaways, homeless services, and MediCal? Every A.G. [Attorney General] in this country should be lining up to file a lawsuit against California, said Friday, an attorney. Aside from those expenses, the cost to minor children is sterility, missing body parts [and] loss of sexual function, she said. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration warned of the risk of blindness and brain tumors from the use of puberty blockers. According to the Mayo Clinic, puberty blockers may also have long-term effects on future fertility, and St. Louis Childrens Hospital has stated that puberty blockers may cause less development of genital tissue, which may limit options for gender-affirming surgery (bottom surgery) later in life. Friday said SB 107 is unconstitutional, violates parental rights, and obviates every custody agreement in the nation, not just those in states that ban gender interventions for minors. This law codifies kidnapping and offers protections to a noncustodial parent who absconds with the child to California in order to get gender interventions in contravention of an out-of-state order or the custodial parents wishes, she said. Even more terrifying, this law encourages minors to run away if their parents wont consent. Friday pointed out that the UKs only pediatric transgender clinic, Tavistock Centre, announced recently that it will close in the spring. She said the impending shutdown is because the science does not support transitioning minors. The Tavistock Centre in London in an undated file photo. (Aaron Chown/PA) During the hearing, many of the more than 45 people who called in to oppose the legislation were parents of teens who formerly identified as transgender. Questions Raised When asked by Assemblyman Bill Quirk, a Democrat, to address concerns about puberty blockers and parental custody, Wiener dismissed the notion of adults without custody kidnapping children because of the legislation as a wild exaggeration and said gender-affirming treatments fall within accepted medical standards. The legislation clearly prohibits extradition unless it violates the U.S. Constitution, such as in the case of kidnapping, Wiener said. The proposed legislation would prohibit law enforcement in California from arresting or extraditing parents charged in other states or nations for child abuse or other crimes related to allowing minor children to receive gender-affirming care, including medical interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone therapy, and surgery. The measure would prohibit health care providers and contractors from releasing medical information related to a person or entity allowing a child to receive gender-affirming health care. These are families that are literally fleeing the possibility of being put in prison for 10 yearsparents being put in prison for 10 years because they allow their child to have health care. So for anyone saying this takes away parental rights, that is a completely frivolous, made-up argument, Wiener said. Assemblywoman Laurie Davies, a Republican, questioned the rationale of protecting parental rights to make medical decisions for their children on gender-affirming care, but not when it comes to vaccines. What about protecting the parents right not to have their kid vaccinated? she asked. Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, a Democrat, praised Wiener for bringing the legislation forward. As a mother of trans identified youth, this is extremely important to the families. And there are horror stories across our nation of families whove gone through this process and at the same time had different outcomes. But, I think at this point, we have to find a way to protect people and make for the most successful outcome, Wilson said. Undated photo showing some cash in sterling with a mobile photo displaying the words "your latest energy bill." (Jacob King/PA Media) UK Energy Regulator to Revise Price Cap More Often, With Another Rise to Be Announced This Month British homes will see their energy bills swell further this winter as the UKs energy regulator Ofgem said on Thursday that it will announce another increase in the price cap later this month. Ofgem also said it will revise the price capthe maximum price suppliers can charge for a unit of energyevery three months instead of every six months to adapt to the volatile global energy market. The notice period between the announcement and implementation of the new cap, which was eight weeks last time, is also expected to be shortened. Announcing the change on Thursday, Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley said the cost of supplying electricity and gas had increased considerably following Russias invasion of Ukraine. Although the UK only imported a small portion of its gas from Russia, suppliers have still been hit by rising global energy prices. Ofgem said more frequent adjustments will go some way to provide the stability needed in the energy market, reducing the risk of further large-scale supplier failures which cause huge disruption and push up costs for consumers. The regulator also said the change means should wholesale energy prices fall in the future, the price reduction will be passed on to the customers sooner, but Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy Committee Chairman Darren Jones said he doesnt expect to see this happening until the end of 2024 or 2025. Last year, an array of smaller British energy companies went bust amid higher wholesale prices driven by demand following the COVID-19 pandemic and a long and cold winter across Eurasia. The supply shortage has been compounded by Russias invasion of Ukraine, after which Western countries began turning away from Russian oil and gas in a bid to cut off the countrys ability to fund the war. In April, the price cap saw a historic hike of 54 percent, from 1,277 ($1,550) to 1,971 ($2,400) per year for customers on default tariffs paid by direct debit. Its now predicted to soar by another 70 percent. In May, Ofgem predicted that the price cap would reach 2,800 ($3,400) in October, but Brearley told BBC Radio 4s Today programme on Thursday that the regulator now expects significant increases again in prices, even over and above the estimate that we made in May. Cornwall Insight, one of the countrys most respected energy consultancies, said bills will hit a staggering 3,359 ($4,080) per year from October for the average household, and not fall below that level until at least the end of next year. PA Media contributed to this report. UK Minister Scraps Civil Service Diversity Training Riddled With Left-Wing Views UK Attorney General Suella Braverman said she has scrapped the diversity training programme in her department, as it is riddled with left-wing views. Writing in the Daily Mail, Braverman compared the diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) sector to the witch-finders of the Middle Ages. She said she was horrified to discover that hundreds of government lawyers spent nearly 2,000 hours of their taxpayer-funded time last year attending lectures given by LGBT charity Stonewall on micro-incivilities, different lived experiences, and how to be a straight ally. Downright Dangerous During the training sessions, Braverman said, government lawyers are told that if a black person says something is offensive, then it is offensive, and they dont have a right to question it. How does that fit with the rule of law, or due process? she asked. She added: This kind of thinking is harmful in other departments, but in legal cases its downright dangerous. It does nothing to create solidarity and encourage support but rather keeps emphasising difference, creates a sense of otherness and pits different groups against each other. Woke Commissars Braverman said she has told her officials to scrap the training programme, adding, We really must get serious about taking on this divisive mindset and call it out for what it is: a new religion with a new priestly caste. She compared zealots who believe in this new religion to witch-finders of the Middle Ages who never tire of rooting out unbelievers. She also criticised those who nod along and recite the creed because they are too scared to dissent, adding, None of these approaches are acceptable in modern Britain. Britain needs a lot of things but it certainly doesnt need woke commissars policing our thoughts, she said. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss arrives to attend a Tory Leadership hustings event in London on July 21, 2022. (Getty Images/Dan Kitwood) Braverman, who joined the Conservative Party leadership race last month but has since been knocked out, backed Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who is one of the final two contenders, to continue her work to fight pernicious identity politics. The attorney general said she is especially glad that Truss is committed to scrapping diversity jobs across the UK government. Trusss campaign said there are at least 326 of these roles in government departments, and scrapping them will save taxpayers around 12 million ($14.5 million) a year. Waste of Money Braverman told Sky News that the training materials used are riddled with left-wing views on race and gender, things like white privilege. She said the thousands of hours of training within government departments come at a huge cost to the taxpayer. Its been divisive, not inclusive, she said. Its been patronising, not empowering. Its based on an assumption that me as an ethnic Asian woman from working-class roots must be a victim, necessarily oppressed. Thats a misassumption. And I think it creates division. Its tearing up society, breaking down the fabric of our country. She called it a waste of money, as she said she does not think ultimately thats what taxpayers want their civil servants or their government lawyers to be spending their time on. A pro-life activist holds a model fetus during a demonstration in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2020. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) Understanding the Constitution: Why It Doesnt Protect the Unborn Commentary When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade (pdf), most of the outrage came from those who believe the U.S. Constitution protects abortion rights. However, a few argued that the Constitution mandates a national standard forbidding abortion. This essay explains why those who claim the Constitution forbids abortion are as much in error as those who think it legalizes abortion. I have a long history of advocating for pro-life causes. But theres a difference between my political preferences and what the Constitution actually says. Respecting what the Constitution actually says is key to the rule of lawnecessary, in turn, for a free society. If we disagree with the Constitution, we should work to amend it. We should not fall into the lefts corrupt practice of pretending the Constitution says what it doesnt. The Case for the Unconstitutionality of Abortion The arguments for the view that the Constitution bans abortion have been set forth as follows: First: Its a scientific fact that humanity begins at the moment of conception. Second: A human being is therefore a person as the Constitution uses the term. Third: The Constitutions Fifth and the 14th Amendments each contains a Due Process Clause stating that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law. Fourth: Just as slavery was a national moral issue rather than a states-rights issue, abortion also is an issue of national morality. Lets examine each of these arguments. Argument #1: Humanity begins at the moment of conception The essence of the Roe decision was that it was unconstitutional for a state to protect an unborn child, against the wishes of the mother, before the child could survive outside the womb. Although the court purported not to decide when human life begins, its ruling assumed that a fetus necessarily dependent on the mother is only potentially human. This ruling was absurd: Ones humanity isnt solely a function of dependence or independence. If it were, then Americas large dependent population would be deemed non-human. Roes absurdity illustrates that judges are unequipped to make decisions of this kind. But the fact that humanity isnt solely the result of independence doesnt prove that its solely the result of conception either. Exactly when life becomes human is a subject on which reasonable and informed people disagree. Some would place the critical moment at the time of conception; others at the time when cells differentiate from each other, or at the time of implantation, or when (and if!) the brain begins to function, or when the fetus has a heart, or when the soul enters the body. Science offers plausible answers and rules out implausible ones, but it doesnt give us the answer. In this respect, the question of when humanity begins resembles the question of when it endsthat is, when death occurs. Theres a point in time when we can say a person is definitely alive and a point when we can say a person is definitely dead, but theres often a twilight zone between the two. To a lesser extent, the question of when humanity begins resembles the issues of when a person ceases to be a child and becomes an adult, or is mentally competent or incompetent. In a democratic society, the answers to such questions are provided by the peoples freely elected representatives, acting under spiritual, scientific, and popular guidance. When legislatures delegate discretion to physicians and other providers (as they often do), they still impose legal guidelines. Admittedly, decisions of this kind can be difficult. However, their difficulty argues for their being products of an open, democratic, and deliberative process. Not the results of abstract reasoning or judicial decree. Argument #2: The Unborn are Persons Under the Fifth Amendment The Fifth Amendment forbids the federal government from depriving any person of life without due process of law. What does person mean? In daily discourse, we often use person interchangeably with human being. This is not necessarily true in legal language, however. Some traditional legal systems have denied personhood to certain classes of human beings, such as slaves or foreigners. Our own legal system grants personhood to corporations, which arent human beings at all, but rather formally organized collections of human beings. In 1791, when the state legislatures ratified the Fifth Amendment, the American legal system recognized all born human beings, even slaves, as persons. But it didnt recognize the unborn as fully human. And it certainly didnt recognize the unborn as legal persons. Applying the Fifth Amendment to include the unborn within its word person would require changing the meaning of the amendment as its ratifiers understood it. More on that below. Argument #3: The Unborn are Persons Under the 14th Amendment When the state legislatures ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868, knowledge of fetal development was far more advanced than in 1791. Accordingly, most states had instituted some legal protection for the unborn. But granting some legal protection didnt mean that lawmakers believed the unborn were fully human, much less persons. (Lawmakers also grant legal protection to animals and forests, for example.) Although the legislative and public debates over the amendment discussed the personhood of ethnic minorities and women, no one seems to have added fetuses or embryos to the list. And in the years after 1868, laws were passed and lawsuits filed to protect the 14th Amendment rights of ethnic minorities and womenbut not the unborn. This and other evidence forces the conclusion that the 14th Amendments term person doesnt include those yet unborn. Other Problems with the Fifth and 14th Amendments You might respond by saying, Whatever the opinion was in 1791 and 1868, we now know that the unborn are human and, therefore, ought to be legal persons. So lets extend the two Due Process Clauses to them. Of course, this line of argument reeks of the unprincipled living constitutionalism most conscientious Americans reject. But theres an even bigger problem with it: Even if we interpret person in the Fifth and 14th Amendments to include embryos and fetuses, most abortions would remain unaffected. The Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause prevents the federal government from taking life, liberty, or property without following pre-set procedures. The 14th Amendment extends the same restriction to state governments. But the two amendments apply solely to governmentsnot to transactions by private parties, such as the typical abortion procedure. In this respect, the Fifth and 14th Amendments are unlike the 13th (abolishing slavery): The 13th applies both to governments and to private individuals; the Fifth and 14th apply only to governments. In constitutional law, the rule excluding private conduct from the Fifth and 14th amendments is called the state action doctrine. The state action doctrine protects federalism and prevents officials and judges from using the amendments to restrict individual freedom. In sum, as Justice Samuel Alito pointed out in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health (pdf)and as the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia said repeatedlythe Fifth and 14th Amendment Due Process Clauses really have nothing to do with abortion. Argument #4: Abortion is a National Moral Issue, not a States Rights Issue I have seen one writer argue that Abortion is no more a states rights issue than slavery was in the mid-19th century. However, the writer got the history wrong. Slavery was a moral issue, but it also was very much a matter of states rights. Even most anti-slavery activists acknowledged this. Abraham Lincoln, for example, agreed that states could maintain slavery within their own borders indefinitely. What Lincoln contended was that Congress should adopt a law abolishing slavery within federal territories. Slavery ceased to be a states-rights issue only when Americans passed a constitutional amendment abolishing it. Similarly, those seeking to end abortion in our country will have to obtain a constitutional amendment to do so. The present Constitution will not do it for them. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Breonna Taylor's mother Tamika Palmer, center, addresses the media over the speed of the investigation of her daughter's death as attorney Benjamin Crump, left, and co-counsel Lonita Baker look on outside Louisville City Hall in Louisville, Ky., on Aug. 13, 2020. (John Sommers II/Getty Images) 4 People Linked to Breonna Taylors Death Hit With Federal Charges Four former and current police officers were indicted on Aug. 4 in connection with the death of Breonna Taylor. Former Louisville Metro Police Department detective Joshua Jaynes, current Louisville officers Kyle Meany and Kelly Goodlett, and former detective Brett Hankison were charged by a federal grand jury. Jaynes and Meant are accused of violating Taylors Fourth Amendment rights when they sought a warrant to search her apartment in 2020 because they allegedly knew an affidavit in support of the warrant contained false and misleading details and omitted material information. The pair also knew executing the search warrant could create a dangerous situation for anyone else who was in her home at the time, according to charging documents. Taylor was shot dead in her home on March 18, 2020. Officers serving the warrant were fired upon by Taylors boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. They fired back, and some of the bullets struck Taylor. A judge approved the warrant request because officers said they conclusively linked Taylors ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, a known criminal, to Taylors residence, including finding mail addressed to Glover at Taylors apartment. We were told that the target, their main target, the male, had packages sent to this location in her name, Jonathan Mattingly, one of the officers, told investigators. She heldshe possibly held dope for him. Received the packages and held his money. That has since been questioned by Tony Gooden, a U.S. postal inspector in the area, who told WDRB-TV that an investigation concluded there were no packages of interest going to the address. Investigators said the wording on the affidavit was misleading and recommended the affidavit be reviewed for possible criminal action. On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor should have awakened in her home as usual, but tragically she did not, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement. Since the founding of our nation, the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution has guaranteed that all people have a right to be secure in their homes, free from false warrants, unreasonable searches and the use of unjustifiable and excessive force by the police. These indictments reflect the Justice Departments commitment to preserving the integrity of the criminal justice system and to protecting the constitutional rights of every American. Former Louisville police detective Brett Hankison poses for a booking photograph at Shelby County Detention Center in Shelbyville, Kentucky, on Sept. 23, 2020. (Shelby County Detention Center via Reuters) Charges After the warrant was executed, Jaynes worked to cover up the false warrant affidavit with Goodlett while Meany made a false statement to federal investigators, according to the charging documents. Jaynes, Meany, Goodlett, and Hankison were charged with deprivation of rights. Jaynes was also charged with conspiracy and falsification of records, while Meany was charged with lying to investigators. Lawyers for Janes and Hankison did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It wasnt clear whether Goodlett and Meany had legal representatives. Hankison, the only person charged in relation to the situation by prosecutors inside Kentucky, was acquitted by a jury in March. Ben Crump and other attorneys representing Taylors family said in a statement that the new charges are a huge step toward justice. US Condemns China Missile Launches, Orders Aircraft Carrier Group Toward Taiwan The White House condemned the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) launch of 11 ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan Thursday. The administration also said that it would move an aircraft carrier strike group into the region to defend its partners and allies. The Peoples Republic of China launched an estimated 11 ballistic missiles towards Taiwan which impacted toward the northeast, the east, and southeast of the island, said White House National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby. We condemn these actions, which are irresponsible and at odds with our longstanding goal of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the region. Several of the missiles launched by China traveled over Taiwan and landed in the waters of Japans exclusive economic zone, which is an area 200 nautical miles (230 miles) from the countrys coast. The aggressive move followed a highly-publicized visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei earlier in the week. CCP leadership falsely claimed that the Speakers visit was a change to the status quo between China, Taiwan, and the United States, though members of the U.S. Congress from both parties have previously visited the self-governed island. As such, Chinas retaliatory measures against Taiwan have been met with international condemnation and calls for the CCP to abandon its threatening actions and pursue peace. Both the G7 and ASEAN issued statements following the announcement of Chinas military exercises, urging the CCP to seek a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Kirby said that Chinas actions represented a drastic escalation in a long line of attempts by the CCP to forcibly unite Taiwan with the mainland. China has chosen to overreact and use the Speakers visit as a pretext to increase provocative military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait, Kirby said. We anticipated that China might take steps like this. Beijings provocative actions are a significant escalation in its long-standing attempt to change the status quo, he added. In response to the CCPs attempt to coerce and intimidate Taiwan, Kirby said, the United States would station the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and its strike group in the region, and would have the group transit the Taiwan strait several times in the coming weeks. Such was necessary, he said, to defend the nations allies, including Japan. The United States is prepared for what China chooses to do, Kirby said. We will not seek, nor do we want, a crisis. At the same time, we will not be deterred from operating in the seas and the skies of the western Pacific, consistent with international law as we have for decades supporting Taiwan and defending a free and open Pacific. Kirby added that the United States was prepared to respond to any CCP threat across all the tools of government. For the sake of transparency and clarity, he said, and to help to deescalate the situation, the United States would reschedule an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test that was to take place this week, and conduct it instead in the coming weeks. As China engages in destabilizing military exercises around Taiwan, the United States is demonstrating instead the behavior of a responsible nuclear power by reducing the risks of miscalculation and misperception, Kirby said. This is how were going to defend Americas national security interests and our values. Despite the hopeful rhetoric, Kirby added that he fully expected the CCPs hostile actions to continue in the near and medium term, as the regime sought to establish a new normal regarding the international communitys relationship with Taiwan. Were not going to accept a new status quo, Kirby said. And its not just the United States, but the world as well. Theres no reason for this manufactured crisis to exist. A view of the flags of Finland, NATO and Sweden during a ceremony to mark Sweden's and Finland's application for membership in Brussels, Belgium, on May 18, 2022. (Johanna Geron/Pool/Reuters) US Senate Votes in Favor of Finland, Sweden Joining NATO The U.S. Senate on Aug. 3 overwhelmingly approved Finland and Swedens candidacy to NATO, expanding the Western military bloc in a response to the RussiaUkraine war. The Senate voted 951 to support ratification of the two countries accession documents. The ratification required approval by at least two-thirds of the chamber. President Joe Biden had sought quick entry for the two countries, sending the protocols for ratification to the Senate for review on July 11. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) voted against the measure. Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) voted present, meaning he didnt support or oppose the resolution. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) invited the ambassadors of Finland and Sweden to the Senate gallery to witness the vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) poses for a photo with an official delegation from Finland and Sweden in his office at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington on Aug. 3, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) This is important substantively and is a signal to Russia. They cannot intimidate America or Europe, he said on the Senate floor. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) noted that both Finland and Sweden already participate in NATO and U.S.-led missions. Finland already meets NATOs spending target, and Sweden is making significant investments in modernizing its military, he said. Even with the capabilities these militaries already have, they will bring meaningful, interoperable military capabilities into the alliance on day one, and improve burden sharing across the alliance. Theres also no question that their entry is specifically in our interest. These are long-standing defense partners of the United States. Even closer cooperation with these partners will help us counter Russia and China, he added. Their accession will make note of stronger and America more secure. Hawley, who opposed the ratification and had previously stated his reasoning, wrote in a statement on Twitter on Aug. 3: Todays vote to expand NATO presents a simple choice: either we do more in Europemore troops, more resources, more spendingor we focus on our #1 adversary, China. We cant prioritize both. Russia Has No Problem: Putin Finland and Sweden were formally invited to join NATO on June 29 after Turkey, a NATO member, lifted its opposition to the move. The same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow has no problem with Helsinki and Stockholm joining NATO, and that Moscow doesnt have territorial differences. But he noted that Russia would respond to any kind of action if it feels threatened. If NATO troops and infrastructure are deployed, we will be compelled to respond in kind and create the same threats for the territories from which threats towards us are created, the Russian president said at the time. Everything was going fine between us, but now there will be tensions, there certainly will, he added. This is obvious and inevitable, I repeat, if there is a threat to us. NATOs 30 allies signed the accession protocol for Finland and Sweden on July 5, which allows the two countries to join the U.S.-led nuclear-armed alliance. At that point, the two countries were able to participate in NATO meetings and have greater access to intelligence, but werent protected by Article 5, the NATO clause stating that an attack on one ally is an attack against all. For Finland and Sweden to be protected by the defense clause, the parliaments of all the NATO members must ratify their accession to the bloc. Ratification could take up to a year, although it has already been approved by a few countries, including Canada, Germany, and Italy. Reuters contributed to this report. Pete Arredondo, chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, speaks at a press conference, following a mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) Uvalde School District Police Chiefs Termination Hearing Postponed Again Over Scheduling Conflict A school board meeting that will determine whether Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondos employment will be terminated was delayed for the second time on Wednesday over a scheduling conflict, officials confirmed. The hearing was set to be held Thursday having already been rescheduled from the original date of July 23. According to Anne Marie Espinoza, executive director of communications and marketing for the district, Arredondos attorney requested the hearing be postponed because of the scheduling conflict, and the district agreed to do so. During the delay, Pete Arredondo will continue to remain on unpaid leave until a new date and time can be scheduled for the proposed termination hearing, Espinoza noted. The postponed hearing comes over two months after 19 children and two adults were killed during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Arredondo, who was one of the first responders on the scene, was placed on administrative leave in June following growing criticism over his handling of the shooting and his decision not to immediately breach the classroom where gunman Salvador Ramos was fatally shooting students. During state Senate hearings in June, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steven McCraw said officers waited for 77 minutes before killing Ramos. Systemic Failures Meanwhile, the Texas state House of Representatives on July 17 published a 77-page report noting that there were systemic failures across the board by law enforcement who responded to the incident on May 24. There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregious poor decision making, the report said. However, the committee also determined that Arredondo had failed to perform or to transfer to another person the role of incident commander on the day of the shooting. This was an essential duty he had assigned to himself in the plan mentioned above, yet it was not effectively performed by anyone, the report states. The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon. McCraw has blamed Arredondo for police waiting over an hour before killing Ramos despite there being a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject. Arredondo defended his actions on the day of the shooting in an interview with The Texas Tribune, stating that a missing key to a locked classroom door was the reason why law enforcement took over an hour to take down Ramos. Lt. Mariano Pargas, who was the acting lieutenant on duty on the day of the mass shooting at the school was also placed on administrative leave in July. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin confirmed the leave in a statement published on July 17 in which he noted that the city has a responsibility to evaluate how the Uvalde Police Department responded to the shooting, including Pargass role as acting chief. In late July, the principal of Robb Elementary School, Mandy Gutierrez, was placed on paid administrative leave before being reinstated three days later. Australian Army soldiers run during Exercise Chong Ju at the Puckapunyal Military Area on May 9, 2019 in Seymour, Australia. (Scott Barbour/Getty Images) Veteran Homelessness, Suicide Ongoing Problems in Australia: Commission Hears Australia is examining its handling of veteran affairs and questioning senior public servants over issues such as suicide and support. Currently, the Royal Commission on Defence and Veteran Suicide is holding hearings for seven days in Tasmaniahome to the most veterans per capita of any jurisdiction in Australia, with more than 17,500 veterans. Kate Pope, the Repatriation Commission deputy president, along with a senior official, will give evidence. The body is in charge of providing benefits and treatment to veterans and their families. The inquiry had already heard that veterans had difficulty connecting with appropriate services and support organisationswith some bodies stating that they had no information on when soldiers retired. Peter Williams, Tasmanias northern director for the Returned and Services League (RSL), said homelessness was an increasing problem. What we have seen is a spread of veterans through from Vietnam to modern service, and weve seen a number of females with children as well, Williams told the Royal Commission. John Hardy, CEO of RSL Tasmania, said organisations should be able to make direct contact with retired personnel but noted privacy issues. This really isnt about the RSL; this isnt about membership, he said. We dont care that youre not a member; we care that you dont commit suicide. The Royal Commission also heard that veterans with acute mental health issues were forced to travel interstate for treatment because Tasmania lacked adequate services. The body will hand down its interim report on Aug. 11, after receiving more than 1,900 submissions and hearing evidence from hundreds of witnesses. Veteran affairs advocate Heston Russell has previously told The Epoch Times that retired military personnel often struggle to adjust to modern society. The military is fantastic at grabbing someone off the street and issuing them with a collective identity and an overwhelmingly inspiring purpose that hits them at the intrinsic and extrinsic level, he said. From the way they march you around to the way you wear a uniform and even being called by your last name. Russell said the military was a for purpose and values-based organisation where each individual was held accountable to values such as courage, initiative, teamwork, and respect. But as many of us transition to [living] primarily in larger cities in Australia, we find that society no longer really values responsibility; its replaced with entitlement: Whats in it for me? What do I deserve? It replaces selflessness with selfishness; its dog-eat-dog. Everything is for profit, as opposed to for purpose. And its a really difficult place to espouse these values, where you are literally the minority as people are too busy focusing on profit, enjoyment, and all these things. A Visa credit card is seen on a computer keyboard in this picture illustration taken on Sept. 6, 2017. (Philippe Wojazer/Illustration/Reuters) Visa Stops Processing Credit Card Payments for Ads on Pornhub in Wake of Lawsuit Visa has suspended payments for ads on Pornhub and parent company MindGeek after a woman accused the credit card company of knowingly helping monetize child pornography. In a statement on Thursday, Visa CEO Alfred Kelly said TrafficJunky, the advertising arm for MindGeek, will be suspended from the credit card transaction network. During the suspension, Visa card cant be used to purchase ads on any MindGeek-affiliated websites, including Pornhub. Let me be clear: Visa condemns sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, and child sexual abuse, Kelly said. It is illegal, and Visa does not permit the use of our network for illegal activity. Our rules explicitly and unequivocally prohibit the use of our products to pay for content that depicts nonconsensual sexual behavior or child sexual abuse. The statement comes a week after a federal judge in California allowed a lawsuit against MindGeek and Visa to proceed. The suit was filed last year by Serena Fleites, who alleges a former boyfriend pressured her into making a sexually explicit video and uploaded it to Pornhub without her knowledge or consent when she was 13 years old. The video amassed 400,000 views on Pornhub by the time she discovered it, according to the lawsuit. As a result, the girl became intermittently homeless, developed depression and heroin addiction, and attempted suicide several times in the ensuing years, all while having no support from her family. In her complaint, Fleites not only accused MindGeek of illegally profiting from child pornography but also argued that Visa should be held accountable for processing payments to MindGeeks pornography websites with the knowledge that these sites have problems with hosting non-consensual content, including content that features minors. U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney found the womans claim against Visa plausible. In his July 29 opinion (pdf), Carney rejected Visas request to dismiss the accusation, saying that the credit card giant knew that MindGeeks websites were teeming with monetized child porn. When MindGeek decides to monetize child porn, and Visa decides to continue to allow its payment network to be used for that goal despite knowledge of MindGeeks monetization of child porn, it is entirely foreseeable that victims of child porn like plaintiff will suffer the harms that plaintiff alleges, Carney wrote. The judge did note, however, that Fleites simply has no basis for claiming Visa directly participated in the sex trafficking ventures that harmed her, and that she must file a more definitive statement for her common law civil conspiracy cause of action against Visa. Visa called the ruling disappointing, saying in a statement that the judge mischaracterizes Visas role and its policies and practices. MindGeek, the Luxembourg-based internet company best known for owning and operating Pornhub, said a statement that the judge has not yet ruled on the veracity of the allegations and is required to assume all of the womans claims are true and accurate. When the court can actually consider the facts, we are confident the plaintiffs claims will be dismissed for lack of merit, a spokesperson from MindGeek told Motherboard. MindGeek has zero tolerance for the posting of illegal content on its platforms, and has instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history. Maury County mayor Andy Ogles is one of 10 candidates in the Aug. 4 GOP primary for Tennessee's 5th Congressional District. (Courtesy of Mayor Andy Ogles for Congress) Voters to Decide GOP Nominee in Potentially Historic Tennessee Congressional Race Voters are heading to the polls in Tennessee on Aug. 4 for the primary election. In the states 5th Congressional District, 10 Republicans are vying for the nomination. The race has generated national interest since the GOP is striving to regain control of the U.S. House and the party believes that one of the seats it can flip is Tennessees 5th District. The seat is currently occupied by Rep. Jim Cooper (D), who has represented the district since 2003 but announced in February that he would not seek reelection. Democrats have held the 5th District congressional seat since 1875, but redistricting announced in February split Davidson County through downtown Nashville, shifting portions of the former 5th District to the mostly rural and historically Republican 6th District and 7th District. When the new congressional maps were approved in February, Cooper announced he would not seek another term. The historic implications could lead to a Republican winning the 5th District seat for the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president. Tres Wittum (L), Andy Ogles (C), and Jeff Beierlein (R) are questioned by economist Jeffrey Tucker at Tennessee 5th Congressional District debate on July 12. (Screenshot/EpochTV) The district is rated as solid Republican by the Cook Political Report, safe Republican by Sabatos Crystal Ball, and likely Republican by Inside Elections. The winner of the GOP primary will face state Sen. Heidi Campbell, who is unopposed in the Democratic primary; and independent candidates Derrick Brantley, Daniel Cooper, and Rick Shannon, in the Nov. 8 general election. Frontrunners, according to polling are Maury County mayor Andy Ogles, former Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell, former Tennessee National Guard joint staff director Brig. Gen. Kurt Winstead. The field also includes retired small business owner Geni Batchelor, West Point graduate and U.S. Army combat veteran Jeff Beierlein, homeschool academy operator Natisha Brooks, former legislative senior policy and research adviser Tres Wittum, real estate professional Stewart Parks, and medical professional Timothy Lee. Ogles, who is endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus and Sen. Ted Cruz, joined Beierlein and Wittum at an innovative debate coordinated by The Epoch Times and hosted by the Nashville Republican Women, the Nashville Young Republicans, and the Williamson County Young Republicans on July 22. Instead of a traditional debate format where a media personality serves as a moderator and dictates the content, the forum featured questions asked by a panel of experts covering election integrity, economics, health care, education, foreign policy, and immigration. Winstead committed to appear before canceling. Harwell declined and attended a Washington Chamber of Commerce fundraiser for her campaign. Ogles said at the July 12 forum that the U.S. Department of Education should be eliminated and budgets for agencies like the EPA, OSHA, and the CDC should be cut. They are not empowered to run our country, yet they are acting like Congress, Ogles said. Its time for Congress to reign in their authority. Ogles also promised to address Tennessees education system. I want Washington D.C. out of Tennessee, Ogles said. Reading and math scores are low in Tennessee. Weve been doing what the Department of Education has said, and its not working. I will do whatever I can to protect children from the decay occurring in curriculum pushed to schools with CRT and social-emotional learning, he added. Lets teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Winstead touts himself as a political outsider who is pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, a member of the National Rifle Association, and a Trump supporter. Former Tennessee Speaker of the House Beth Harwell is one of 10 candidates vying for the GOP nomination in the states 5th Congressional District primary on Aug. 4. (Courtesy of Beth Harwell) Harwell promotes what she did as Speaker of the House, including advocating for school choice and being appointed by Trump to serve on the Tennessee Valley Authority board. She has focused a large portion of her campaign publicizing herself as a pro-Trump candidate, claiming that she will finish building a wall at the Mexican border. Negative ads have flooded the districts airwaves in recent weeks. One attack ad against Harwell pointed out her 2001 vote to give drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. Another claimed that Harwell and Winstead are too liberal for Tennessee. Ogles has owned restaurants and a real estate investment firm. He served as COO of Abolition International, for which he says I oversaw operations and investments in 12 countries to fight human trafficking. Ogles was also state director of Americans for Prosperity Tennessee and executive director of the Laffer Center, which advises politicians on tax policy. He is currently mayor of Maury County. Harwell has frequently labeled Ogles as a lobbyist tied to a Washington special interest group that smeared former Trump and linked to another group that supports amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. One attack ad from Harwells campaign says, Whos behind lobbyist Andy Ogles campaign? A D.C. special interest group that smeared Donald Trump and another shady special interest group that supports amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. Theyre spending big bucks on Ogles, because Ogles will vote for their pro-amnesty agenda. Bought and paid for by never Trumpers and amnesty-loving RINOS who sell out America. Lobbyist Andy Ogles would make the D.C. swamp even worse. The spot shows an image of a smiling Ogles next to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming). Outside super PACs have poured around $1.6 million into the 5th District race in recent weeks elevating Ogles and attacking his rivals. FEC filings show that figure is almost as much as Harwell and Winstead combined. Ogles has faced scrutiny for admitting that he has directed donors to super PACs working with his campaign, which is a violation of federal campaign finance law. Lea Beaman, a Nashville auto magnate, is treasurer and chairman of Ogles campaign. He is also the only donor for a super PAC that funded an ad buy bolstering Ogles, according to federal campaign finance disclosures. Freedom PAC, which was created on June 1 of this year, is supported by a single $50,000 donation that Beaman contributed a week after the PAC was established. Weeks after Beamans donation, the Freedom PAC coordinated a $24,000 ad buy in support of Ogles, a federal disclosure illustrates. Super PACs are permitted by federal campaign finance law to accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and organizations. Super PACs are not allowed to coordinate public communication, including ad buys, with candidates or their representatives. Harwell recently told reporters that Ogles will be controlled by the D.C. swamp if he is elected. He owes everything to them, and I dont think thats right for the people of middle Tennessee, Harwell said. In an interview with Nashvilles Super Talk 99.7 last week, Ogles said that his campaign has implemented a strategy to direct donors who would have contributed directly to his campaign to instead donate the money to PACs funding positive ads related to the campaign. Ogles has also received criticism for filing campaign finance disclosures late, and Conservative Americans PAC funded an ad that said. You fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Andy Ogles already fooled us. He campaigned against tax hikes. I dont like tax hikes, all taxes are evil. Then he got elected and backed a tax hike. The same Andy Ogles businesses didnt pay their own taxes, and the state had to file liens to collect. Now, Andy Ogles is trying to fool us again. Dont get burned again. Conservative Americans PAC is responsible for the content of this advertisement. In the radio station interview, Ogles said that the ad is inaccurate. Look, if I havent paid taxes in nine years, Id be holding a seminar that would be packed, Ogles said in the interview. He added, So you know, I dont owe the county, I dont owe the city, I dont owe the IRS. My wife doesnt. We have no business that does. We had multiple properties, we had interests in multiple businesses, and OK, something was late. But that being said, we paid. And any interest that may have been due, which I dont know if there was, was paid. Ogles and Harwell are the top contenders for the Republican nomination, according to recent polls, while Winstead is also still a serious contender. Ogles believes that his track record as an America First candidate makes him a target. During COVID, I refused to comply with mandates. I did not shut down my community. I kept it open because, from my perspective, every job is essential and every small business is essential, Ogles said in an Aug. 3 interview with John Fredericks on Real Americas Voice. I had to fight for my community. We are the fastest growing county in Tennessee and the No. 1 county for job growth in Tennessee, so when OSHA targeted our county, I told them they would have to arrest me before forcing a vaccine, and they backed off. Im polite in my opinions, and Im for freedom and liberty, and for we the people having the choice, not government and big business, Ogles added. That is a threat to the status quo. Robby Starbuck on the set of Candace in Nashville, Tenn., on March 31, 2021. (Jason Kempin/Getty Images) Donald Trump initially endorsed Morgan Ortagus, who was running for the 5th District seat. In April, the Tennessee Republican Party voted to remove Ortagus, Baxter Lee, and Robby Starbuck from the primary ballot. The Tennessee General Assembly passed a law in March that established residency requirements in congressional primaries in an effort to target transplant candidates who recently moved to the state. Ortagus and Lee did not fight the decision, but Starbuck appealed, citing that the Tennessee Republican Party violated the states Open Meeting Act, which gives citizens the right to attend public meetings. The GOPs executive committee removed the candidates from the ballot in a private meeting, Starbuck alleged. Federal judge Waverly Crenshaw ruled that the state GOP might have violated their bylaws but refused to restore Starbuck to the primary ballot. Starbuck appealed, and Davidson County Chancellor Russell Perkins restored Starbuck to the ballot on June 3. Tennessee GOP leaders appealed that decision to the state supreme court, which overturned Perkins ruling on June 10, leaving Starbuck off the ballot. Starbuck does not appear on the Aug. 4 Republican primary ballot, but he is running for the 5th District congressional seat as a write-in candidate. It is a universal fact that prescriptions, by suppressing or enhancing certain biological pathways, induce unnatural effects in the body. Every single drug added to our regimen, increases the risk of an adverse effect by 7 to 10 percent. However, this thought rarely crosses our minds when we take a painkiller to numb a headache or an antacid for heartburn. Most of the time we do not need to be concerned about it, especially when taking a generic drug for short-term use. The problems come when we start taking many medications, for a long time. Emerging research on prescriptions has found that prescriptions could be leading causes of deaths in the United States. A study released in 2014 suggested that prescriptions were the third leading causes of deaths in the United States and Europe. Other studies found that prescriptions were causing more deaths than strokes, making them the fourth leading cause of deaths in the United States. The primary causes of morbidity and mortality from prescriptions are polypharmacymedication overloadand medical errors, such as errors in prescription and administration of medication. A study described a case where a 71-year-old woman was wrongfully prescribed an antipsychotic medication (Navane) rather than her usual antihypertensives (Norvasc) for three months. The pharmacist mixed the two names up and she experienced severe adverse changes to her mental health after she unknowingly made the switch. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that it receives up to 100,000 reports of suspected drug errors every year. Other studies suggest that annual medication errors are behind 7,000 to 9,000 mortalities and $40 billion in healthcare costs every year. Despite such alarming numbers, errors from dispensaries remain a rare occurrence, taking up 2.1 percent of all prescriptions. The rate of adverse effects from errors in administration is even lower. Though few studies have compiled the prevalence and far-reaching effects of various pharmaceutical errors, polypharmacy (using five or more medications), on the other hand, is one of the most well-researched areas in prescription-involved adverse effects. Hospitalizations from polypharmacy have been increasing across Europe and in the United States. However, pharmaceutical adverse effects have received little media coverage with no study yet to examine the full scope of prescription-involved adverse effects. Polypharmacy: The Interactions Between Drugs and Their Effects on the Body A single drug can easily come with 20 to 40 side effects and when prescribed with other drugs, may interact with them in unpredictable ways. However, most physicians prescribing these drugs will not know all of the side effects, nor will they have a full understanding of possible adverse effects from drug interactions. Dr. Peter C. Gtzsche likened the problem of drug-to-drug interactions with a pilot faced with various buttons in a cockpit in his study. Imagine that airline pilots had thousands of little buttons in the cockpit at their disposal and, furthermore, that those buttons interacted in unpredictable ways if several were switched on simultaneously, analogous to a patient who is on several drugs. Prescriptions work by blocking or enhancing certain proteins and receptors. These proteins and receptors perform specific tasks and are often involved in major biological pathways. Some pathways are well-studied, some are not, which is why side effects of different drugs vary. Different drugs can induce additive or opposing effects by interfering with each other. Two drugs may both share an affinity for the same receptor, but induce different effects and inhibit each others activity. Likewise, some drugs may induce the same effect by binding to the receptor, therefore creating a larger response than expected. Some drugs may create a synergistic effect, where the drugs produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. Not just drugs, supplements, food, and a patients own conditions can also interfere with the entire process of the drug. Aging is a major factor that affects drug performance and often slows down drug clearance. Older patients are therefore at a greater risk of drug toxicity and adverse effects. Polypharmacy and Adverse Drug Effects Prescriptions are commonplace and more people are overloading themselves with medication. Studies show that between 1999 and 2000, 6.3 percent of the U.S. population used 5 or more prescriptions but by 2007 to 2008, this number had reached 10.7 percent. Older people are especially at risk of polypharmacy. Studies show that in 2005 to 2006, 53 percent of older adults had polypharmacy (taking 5 or more prescriptions), this number increased to 67 percent from 2010 to 2011. However, experts believe these numbers are underestimations of the real polypharmacy rates. Many older patients also take supplements and other drugs themselves. They may not tell their doctors about it and many doctors also do not ask. With age comes increased complaints of chronic and acute conditions as well as visits to the doctor. Each appointment visit alsomore often than notresults in prescriptions. In fact, the modern healthcare system is geared towards prescriptions and polypharmacy. A 1971 study estimated that 75 percent of all doctor visits result in a prescription. This is because most patients expect a prescription at the end of appointments; they believe that modern medicine should provide an antidote for every symptom, according to authors. The prescription is a tangible end to the office visit, and may be perceived by the patient as having greater value than education or reassurance, the authors of a study wrote. Over 50 years later, with a bigger and growing pharmaceutical market, and marketing campaigns that target both patients and doctors, it is likely that this mentality has only been strengthened. Polypharmacy also gives rise to many adverse drug effects and drug induced injuries. A study found that with every addition to the regimen, the risk of adverse effects increases. When taking two medications, the risk of an adverse event is 13 percent, this number increases to 58 percent when taking five drugs. In patients taking seven or more medication, this risk surpasses 80 percent. Another 2019 report estimated that polypharmacy would result in 150,000 premature American deaths and more than 4.6 million hospitalizations over the next decade. [Medication overload] will reduce the quality of life for millions more. Strong, coordinated, and immediate action is needed to stem the tide of this epidemic, which harms people of all ages, but especially older generations, the authors of the report wrote. Polypharmacy in the older demographic has been associated with increased falls which can often result in a broken hip. Broken hips increase the risks of death due to the the various complications that come after a broken hip, including stroke, pneumonia, dementia, and so on. Drugs that affect the central nervous system (the brain and the spinal cord) may also induce overdoses and death. Though the exact healthcare burden from polypharmacy has not been calculated, research suggests that health care expenditures may be doubled due to polypharmacy. A study on patients with cardiovascular diseases found that polypharmacy almost doubled health care expenditure. The Challenge of Deprescription The healthcare system is geared towards polypharmacy, but sufficient interventions to deprescribe is not put in place to counter medication overload. Physicians are more educated about prescribing than stopping medications. Textbooks on pharmacotherapy tell doctors when to start drugs, but unless adverse drug reactions arise, doctors are not taught when and if they should stop. Therefore patients may use the same prescription for years, even when it is no longer necessary. Medical books on reducing polypharmacy also often place discontinuation of medications as the last recommendation. Another confounding factor in polypharmacy, especially in older patients, is that doctors and patients may mistake adverse drug effects from the prescription as signs of diseases instead. Therefore, rather than stopping the medication, another prescription is added to the regimen, leading to a polypharmacy cascade. Signs of polypharmacy include loss of appetite, diarrhea, tiredness, confusion and hallucinations, weakness and dizziness, skin rashes, depression, anxiety, and excitability. How to Avoid Prescription-Induced Harm To reduce harm from prescriptions, Gtzsche recommended that prior to purchase, patients should search the package insert for drug side effects. Most drugs come with 20 to 40 side effects, and patients cannot expect their doctors to know all of them. Some websites also offer drug interaction checkers where patients can submit the prescriptions they are taking. Though the majority of drug interactions have low morbidity, in rare cases it can cause severe debilitating effects and even death. Emerging studies also warn patients not to use newly released medications. Most physicians will recommend that newly released medicationsunless they are breakthrough medications, meaning that they are better than drugs already on the marketshould be avoided in the first 5 to 7 years after release. However, the vast majority of new drugs (80 percent or more) released every year are me too drugs rather than breakthroughs. Me too drugs are new modifications to generic drugs and generally do not work much better than drugs already on the market. Dr. Donald W. Light wrote that newly released medications are generally some of the most unreliable, and unsafe medications. With accelerated approval and increased drug applications, drug approvals are becoming less reliable. Regulators, including the FDA, have also transitioned to regulate drugs through post-market surveillance rather than performing rigorous investigations prior to approval. Studies found that most drugs that are withdrawn for safety reasons are often withdrawn in the first 7 years after market approval. Another study on 222 drugs released from 2001 to 2010, found that one third of these new drugs were alerted, warned, or recalled by the FDA a few years after release. Depending on what you and your healthcare practitioner discuss, some herbal remedies might be more helpful than certain medications. (Shutterstock) Increased Interest in Homeopathic Medicines In the light of drug adverse effects, the use of alternative medicines including homeopathic medicines has steadily increased. The root of polypharmacy and many prescription-induced problems stem from allopathic medicine, the basis of conventional western medicine. Western medicine is not curative, rather it operates to resolve the symptoms of the disease by providing a quick fix, often leaving the root of the ailment festering in numbed silence. Though patients may see an immediate effect on their symptoms, the unnatural effects of prescriptions can easily lead to side effects which can then call for more prescriptions. Homeopathy, on the other hand, provides an alternative direction in medical practice. Practitioners of homeopathy examine the whole body in treating the patient, aiming to use as few prescriptions as possible by making the body better able to respond to disease. Homeopathic doctors tend to advise patients on changes in lifestyles and habits to restore homeostasis to the body. This reduces risks of drug toxicity from pharmaceuticals, offering natural interventions as compared to unnatural ones. Nonetheless, neither concept of medicine is perfect. Homeopathy has been discouraged by many western doctors due to lacking in solid evidence of having prominent benefits to a patient. The effects of homeopathy can be slower than allopathy, and in the case of severe chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer, patients practicing homeopathy may take a long time to see any benefits if at all. The argument between homeopathy or allopathy among different medical ideologies is a long standing debate but both have their own benefits in treating patients. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here. Workers are seen next to a cage with mice (R) inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images) Wuhan Lab Was Genetically Manipulating Deadly Nipah Virus, Expert Testifies at Senate Hearing A forensic analysis shows that the Wuhan Insitute of Virology (WIV) was genetically manipulating the Nipah virus, a highly lethal pathogen, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention, according to an expert who testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing on Aug. 3. The finding was another piece of evidence showing that the controversial Wuhan lab was conducting gain-of-function researchexperiments that ultimately resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic via a leak from the facility, according to Dr. Steven Quay, CEO of Atossa Therapeutics. Gain-of-function research involves enhancing the potency or transmissibility of a virus. Quay said he and other scientists conducted an examination of COVID-19 patient specimens from December 2019 sequenced and published by the WIV. Through that analysis, published in a preprint paper that hasnt been peer-reviewed, they found 20 unexpected contaminants that they believe are evidence of other research conducted at the lab. For 19 of the 20 unexpected contaminants, we then found published research from the previous two years, confirming that the lab had indeed been working on these unexpected genes, he said in written testimony (pdf) before a hearing on gain-of-function research held by the Senate subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight. The hearing was only attended by the subcommittees Republican members. But the one contaminant not accounted for in papers published by WIV was cloning vectors of the Nipah virus, according to Quay. This is the most dangerous research I have ever encountered, he said in the written testimony. The Nipah virus has a lethality of more than 60 percent, more than that of Ebola, although its less transmissible than the latter virus since it isnt airborne, the expert said at the hearing. The Nipah virus is also about 60 times deadlier than COVID-19. [A] laboratory-acquired infection with a modified Nipah virus would make the COVID-19 pandemic look like a walk in the park, he said. This kind of synthetic biology is a breach of international law, according to the expert. Its actually against the biological weapons treaty to take the Nipah virus apart and then put it back together again, Quay told The Epoch Times in an interview before the hearing. Wuhan Lab In the hearing, Quay listed a series of evidence that he said pointed to COVID-19 originating from a lab leak from WIV. Among these is the fact that the WIVs public database of 22,000 samples and viral sequences was taken offline on Sept. 12, 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the facility stated that this was because of cyber hacks, Quay called this act suspicious, and he believes that the database was taken offline to remove evidence of close precursors to COVID-19, which would have been a smoking gun showing that the virus leaked from the lab. He also highlighted that the WIV was the worlds leading center for the study of coronaviruses, noting that before 2019, the facility was responsible for 65 percent of all published research in the area. For almost a decade, they were going into bat caves throughout China and back into Africa as well, 20 visits a year in bringing these samples back to the laboratory, Quay said at the hearing. They had the largest collection of raw material backbones from nature to then do gain function research on. I believe its the confluence of those two activities bringing things back from bat caves and gain-of-function research that led to the pandemic. The WIV has repeatedly denied that it was the source of the pandemic, but the Chinese regime has persistently refused to open the lab and its records to outside authorities, making an independent investigation of the hypothesis nearly impossible. A 2021 U.S. State Department fact sheet stated that WIV researchers had begun conducting experiments involving RaTG13, identified to have the closest genetic similarity to the COVID-19 virus, from as early as 2016. Besides engaging in gain of function research to engineer chimeric viruses, the WIV has engaged in laboratory animal experiments on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017, according to the fact sheet. Eva Fu contributed to this report. Yorba Linda Housing Proposals Face Fierce Opposition From Residents YORBA LINDA, Calif.City Hall was filled to its maximum capacity Aug. 2 as many residents arrived on horseback just thirty minutes before city officials would meet to discuss state-mandated rezoning plans. The city council approved a measure for over 20 sites Tuesday night that would be rezoned for housing to go before voters in November; but it postponed taking action on three sites, which included the site the citys equestrian residents took issue with. The problem is the locations that theyve chosen. We wouldnt be here tonight if they chose, in our opinion, better locations, 40-year resident and horse owner Dee Dee Friedrich told The Epoch Times. Someones half-acre to an acre backyard with horses in with future apartments or condos looking into their fences and over their fence is not what we have in mind here. Horse owners post in front of City Hall in Yorba Linda, Calif., on Aug. 2, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times) As Friedrich stood with her Shetland Pony, named Hope, residents riding and walking over a dozen horses held signs that displayed save the horses and no rezone. To meet Californias housing demand, the state mandates cities to rezone land for housing. Yorba Linda is obligated by the state to zone for over 2400 housing units in what is called this housing cycle, which dates from 2021 to 2029. The city does not need to construct the units, but only make space for them. Failing this, the city risks litigation, fines of up to $600,000 per month, ineligibility for state grants, and state control over local land usage, among other penalties. Cities can lose control over their building planning permitting authority, which would allow the state to come in and determine rezoning locations without any local input, the citys Community Development Director David Brantley told residents during the meeting. As I said earlier, our goal [and] guiding principle was to comply with the law to the least extent necessary to keep us out of trouble and to preserve Yorba Linda to the greatest extent as we can, Brantley said. Residents attend a city council meeting involving the rezoning of neighborhoods in Yorba Linda, Calif., on Aug. 2, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times) During the meeting, residents including the protesting horse owners filled the council chambers along with an overflow area set up in the city hall. As we all know, high-density condominium townhome complexes do not have enough parking, especially for a mom and dad, two kids, and the relatives who come to visit, 45-year Yorba Linda resident Ed Gunderson told city councilors. Some residents brought up challenges of water and irrigation for one of the three controversial sites. Fire safety has also been a reoccurring concern with some residents recalling the 14,000-acre Blue Ridge Fire of 2020, which created traumatic situations for parents as they tried to evacuate their children from local schools. Residents attend a city council meeting involving the rezoning of neighborhoods in Yorba Linda, Calif., on Aug. 2, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times) Following the councils vote, Yorba Linda resident Friedrich took to social media to celebrate the outcome. It was a Bitter Sweet VICTORY tonight at the Council Meeting, Council voted to take 3 properties out of the housing element that were nearest and dearest to our equestrian hearts, Friedrich wrote. Victory for us but sad the other 23 propert[ies] will be pushed through, so I feel bad for those neighbors. City councilors will conduct a second reading of the proposed sites. If approved, the citys voters will see the councils approved sites on Novembers General Election ballot in what is known as Measure B. VERNON A Connecticut State Police trooper accused of hitting a woman in the face has been charged again, this time in connection with past assaults and threats, police said. Jaime Solis, 29, turned himself in to the Vernon Police Department on Wednesday after learning there was a warrant for his arrest. He was charged additionally with two counts of disorderly conduct, two counts of third-degree assault, two counts of second-degree threatening and risk of injury to a minor, police said in a news release. Solis was released on $50,000 bond. He is scheduled to appear in state Superior Court in the Rockville section of Vernon on Thursday. Police previously charged Solis on Monday with second-degree assault, disorderly conduct and risk of injury to a minor. After the first charges, state police suspended Solis police powers and placed him on administrative duty until criminal and internal affairs investigations conclude. State police said on Wednesday that Solis powers remain suspended and he will stay on administrative duties pending the active investigations. The new charges stem from incidents of past assaults and threats. The woman estimated Solis assaulted her at least 40 times in the past year, including shoving her, punching her in the stomach and hitting her with a belt. She provided video and photographic evidence to police as well, according to Solis arrest warrant Wednesday. Police first arrested Solis on Monday after a domestic violence assault that evening. Police allege Solis hit a woman in the face while she was holding a baby, causing a severe laceration above her left eye that will likely require stitches. Police later said the woman received 13 stitches at the hospital to close the wound. The woman went to police Tuesday evening to report past domestic violence incidents. She told police that Solis has physically assaulted her dozens of times. Many of the incidents occurred when I attempted to stick up for myself, which started verbal arguments, she told police, according to the warrant. The verbal arguments would then escalate and Jaime [Solis] would often punch, slap, or strike me with objects including his belt. Jaime also has threatened to kill me and assault me numerous times in the past, she said, according to the warrant. In an incident from June 2022, Solis and the woman were arguing about money. When Solis became angry, the woman started to discreetly record on her cellphone in her back pocket. In the video, the woman said she can be heard screaming just after Solis shoved her backward, according to the warrant. Meanwhile, a child was crawling on the floor. The woman told police that, when Solis shoved her, she stumbled backward and accidentally stepped on the childs fingers, the warrant said. Solis then slapped her in the face, punched her in the stomach and continued to slap, shove and punch her numerous times, according to the warrant. When police watched the video, they said they couldnt see anything, but the sounds matched up with the womans recount. Police said in the warrant that they could also hear a child crying in the background. The woman also recalled an incident that took place around Christmas 2020. When she tried to stick up for herself, Solis started to verbally disrespect her and pushed her backward into a washing machine, the warrant said. When the woman tried to stand up, Solis allegedly backhanded the woman in the face, striking her near her left eye. The strike caused an open wound that bled out. Solis later went to the store to buy butterfly bandages to close the wound, according to the warrant. The woman told police she still has a scar from the injury, the warrant said. In another incident, the two were in an argument and hit her with a belt, brushing her arms, back, buttocks and leg. The woman also detailed how Solis has threatened, both verbally and through text, to beat her. The Vernon Police Department is continuing to investigate Solis. Anyone with information is asked to call the police department at 860-872-9126. WASHINGTON (AP) Republican U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski was killed Wednesday in a car crash in her northern Indiana district along with two members of her congressional staff and another person, police said. The crash happened about 12:30 p.m. when an SUV Walorski was riding in crossed the centerline on a state highway and collided head-on with a car, the Elkhart County Sheriffs Office said. Three people in the SUV, including Walorski, 58, were killed, as was a woman driving the other car, authorities said. The sheriff's department initially reported that the car crossed the centerline, but a news release Thursday corrected that to say it was the SUV. Walorski, who served on the House Ways and Means Committee, was first elected to represent Indianas 2nd Congressional District in 2012. She previously served six years in the state's Legislature. She has returned home to be with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Please keep her family in your thoughts and prayers, Walorskis chief of staff Tim Cummings said in a statement. Walorski and her husband, Dean Swihart, were previously Christian missionaries in Romania, where they established a foundation that provided food and medical supplies to impoverished children. She worked as a television news reporter in South Bend before turning to politics. Also killed in the crash were Zachery Potts, 27, of Mishawaka, Indiana; Emma Thomson, 28, of Washington, D.C.; and Edith Schmucker, 56, of Nappanee, Indiana, according to the sheriff's office. Cummings confirmed that Potts and Thomson were members of Walorskis congressional staff. Thomson was Walorskis communications director, while Potts was her district director and the Republican chairman for northern Indianas St. Joseph County. Schmucker was driving the other car, according to the sheriff's office. The crash, which occurred in a rural area near the town of Wakarusa, is still under investigation. Walorski was seeking reelection this year to a sixth term in the solidly Republican district. She was active on agriculture and food policy in Congress, often working across the aisle on those issues. A co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, she introduced legislation with Democrats to bring back a Nixon-era White House event on food insecurity. President Joe Biden pointed to that work in a statement crediting Walorski for years of public service. We may have represented different parties and disagreed on many issues, but she was respected by members of both parties for her work, Biden said. My team and I appreciated her partnership as we plan for a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health this fall that will be marked by her deep care for the needs of rural America. Indiana Republican U.S. Sen. Todd Young said he was devastated by Walorskis death. Jackie loved Hoosiers and devoted her life to fighting for them, Young said in a statement. Ill never forget her spirit, her positive attitude, and most importantly her friendship. All of Indiana mourns her passing, along with the tragic deaths of her staff Emma Thomson and Zach Potts. Walorski was a reliable Republican vote in Congress, including against accepting the Arizona and Pennsylvania electoral votes for Biden following the Capitol insurrection. As a member of the Indiana House, Walorski pushed anti-abortion legislation opposed gambling expansion proposals. She became a favorite of the conservative tea party movement. Walorski lost a close 2010 congressional race to Democrat Joe Donnelly before narrowly winning the seat in 2012 as Donnelly made a successful run for the Senate. She had easily won her reelection campaigns since then. House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Walorski a no-nonsense, straight shooter." Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Walorski lived a life of service. She passionately brought the voices of her north Indiana constituents to the Congress, and she was admired by colleagues on both sides of the aisle for her personal kindness, Pelosi said in a statement. Pelosi ordered the flags at the U.S. Capitol to be flown at half-staff in Walorskis honor. The White House said its flags would be lowered Wednesday and Thursday, and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb issued a similar flag directive for the state. At every level of public service Jackie was known to be a positive force of nature, a patriot, and a relentless policymaker with an unwavering loyalty to her constituents," Holcomb, a Republican, said. Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire said she and Walorski bonded as newly elected members of Congress in late 2012 over their husbands shared love of jazz music and became friends. I was proud to work with her on a variety of critical issues, including legislation to address the addiction crisis, end sexual violence, and help military sexual assault survivors access the care they need, Kuster said. ___ Davies reported from Indianapolis. Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed from Washington. ___ This story was first published on August 3, 2022. It was updated on August 4, 2022, to correct details about the crash that killed Warlorski. The sheriffs department now says the the SUV that Walorski was riding in crossed the centerline of a highway and into oncoming traffic crashing into a car driven by Edith Schmucker, 56, of Nappanee, Indiana. The agency previously said it was Shcmuckers car that crossed the centerline. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate PHOENIX (AP) Arizona voters relegated House Speaker Rusty Bowers to the history books after the conservative Republican crossed former President Donald Trump and refused to back his unsupported claims that he lost in 2020 because of fraud. Bowers was thoroughly trounced in Tuesday's GOP primary, losing to a former state senator by nearly 2 to 1 among voters in his district in the eastern Phoenix suburbs. He was trying to move to the Senate after term limits barred another state House run. Bowers knew his seat was on the line and said he had no regrets for standing up to Trump. I would do it again in a heartbeat, he said Wednesday. Id do it 50 times in a row." Bowers, who holds impeccable conservative credentials save one, had rejected Trump's pleas to help him overturn the November 2020 election results that saw him lose in Arizona, the first time a Republican had lost the presidential race in the state since Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection victory. And then he angered the former president and his backers in Bowers' district even more by testifying in June before a panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress about the president's actions. Trump endorsed his opponent, David Farnsworth, and the state Republican Party censured him. And then so did the voters. Bowers said the former president has soiled the party. President Trump is a dividing force that has thrashed our party," he told The Associated Press. "And its not enough to disagree. You have to disagree and then stomp on people and ruin their reputations and chase them down and thrash them and you just keep beating them up. Thats the Trump model. He said the state Republican Party, which broke tradition by strongly supporting Trump's candidates and denigrating those like Bowers who failed to fall in line, is in lock-step and has a bully mentality. And I think youre going to find out as all these people leave this party, that someday theres going to be a hard reckoning, Bowers said. And I have a feeling it can be later this year. Farnsworth automatically wins the Senate seat, since the heavily Republican district in the eastern Phoenix suburbs of Mesa drew no Democrats in the primary. Arizona Trump backers did very well up and down the ballot on Tuesday, with his chosen candidate for governor in the lead and candidates he endorsed for U.S. Senate, attorney general and secretary of state all winning their elections. Trump candidates succeeded in several other GOP legislative races as well. In another eastern suburban district, GOP Sen. Tyler Pace lost to a Trump-endorsed challenger. Robert Scantlebury's campaign website said Pace is a RINO like Jeff Flakey Flake (if thats even possible!), who never had a clue. Flake, who declined to seek reelection to his U.S. Senate seat in 2018 after admitting his refusal to back Trump made it impossible for him to win a Republican primary, now serves as President Joe Biden's ambassador to Turkey. Opponents call him a Republican in Name Only," or "RINO. Redistricting put two Trump-supporting state senators, Kelly Townsend and Wendy Rogers, into the same district. Rogers ended up easily beating Townsend. Rogers has faced repeated ethics charges for her inflammatory rhetoric, support for white supremacists and conspiracy-theory laden tweets. Townsend said she felt compelled to run against Rogers when she refused to denounce white nationalism after speaking at a conference in Florida in February. If I dont run against her and make that statement, win, lose or draw, then her actions become our own, Townsend said Monday. It sort of spoils the whole (Republican) party. Rogers has earned a national following, raising a whopping $3 million from donors across the country since taking office in early 2021. Townsend had raised about $15,000, much more typical for a state legislative race. Republican Rep. Joel John, who had secured the House majority by beating a Democrat in 2020 but angered some party members by opposing key school choice and social issue legislation, lost his bid for another term representing a sprawling district west of Phoenix. In the west Phoenix suburbs, former Rep. Anthony Kern, who attended Trumps Jan. 6 rally before the attack on Congress and unsuccessfully sued Democrats who asked the Department of Justice to investigate him, won his Senate primary. He was defeated in his 2020 House primary and is now aiming for a Senate seat. No Democrat is running, so Kern will automatically win the seat in November. Also making a successful political comeback was former Rep. Steve Montenegro, whose 2018 run for Congress was upended by a sexting scandal. He was the top vote-getter among four Republicans running in a west Phoenix House district for two open House seats. One Democrat ran in that district. Democratic Reps. Diego Espinoza and Richard Andrade were battling for a Senate seat after being drawn into the same district in the western Phoenix suburbs, with Espinoza holding a slight lead in a race too close to call. And Sen. Lela Alston, considered the most experienced lawmaker in the Legislature, easily beat two Democratic challengers in her central Phoenix district. One of them, political unknown Al Jones, sought attention by buying billboards across the city. RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein repudiated Republican General Assembly leaders allegations Wednesday that he neglected his duty to defend state law by refusing to seek enforcement of a blocked 20-week abortion ban after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Attorneys for Senate Leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore filed a brief last week asking U.S. District Judge William Osteen to lift an injunction on a 1973 state law banning nearly all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Osteen asked all parties in the case to file briefs by Monday that outline their positions on whether his previous ruling blocking the law retains legal force after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned nationwide abortion protections on June 24. Though Berger and Moore were not named parties in the case, they argued they had significant interest to intervene because Stein was dodging his duty to uphold the law. Weve been doing our jobs from the first day when this lawsuit was filed, Stein told reporters at a Wednesday news conference with U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross. My office and I defended the statute as it is written, and once the district court ruled that it was unconstitutional the office appealed the decision. I, however, recused myself because its not proper for a lawyer thats defending a law to speak out against it. Stein, a fervent abortion rights supporter, said he has continued to recuse himself from the case. His office, which has been representing the defendants, will file a brief outlining its position on Monday. Stein declined to comment on whether the brief would support lifting the injunction. The legislative leaders previously asked Stein to bring the ban before a judge himself, calling his noncompliance with their demand the latest example of his refusal to do his job. The attorney general is dedicated to promoting reproductive freedoms (i.e., abortion) rather than following and upholding the law, Berger and Moore wrote in their brief. (Stein) publicly opposes the statutes he is tasked with defending and is engaged in fundraising efforts based on his opposition. Though Republicans hold majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, Moore said Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper would have likely used his veto power if lawmakers had tried to pass additional abortion restrictions during the legislative session that ended July 1. Republicans are just three seats shy of a veto-proof supermajority in the House and two seats shy in the Senate, which Ross said makes state-level elections this November a crucial battle to maintain North Carolinas status as a safe haven for abortions in the South. Abortions remain legal in North Carolina until fetal viability, which typically falls between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy, or in certain medical emergencies. Republican leaders in the General Assembly are scheming to turn the clock back 50 years, Ross said. They have made it abundantly clear that, if given the chance, theyll enact restrictive abortion bans just like the draconian laws we are seeing in states all around the country. ___ Schoenbaum is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow her at twitter.com/H_Schoenbaum. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate GONZALES, La. (AP) A Louisiana judge has refused to set any bond for rapper Mystikal, who is accused of raping and choking a woman at his home outside Baton Rouge. State District Judge Steven Tureau ruled on Tuesday that evidence against 51-year-old Michael Tyler, his past history and the victims fears met the standard for holding him without bail, The Advocate reported. Tyler served six years in prison after pleading guilty in 2003 to sexual battery. In December 2020, prosecutors in Caddo Parish, in northwest Louisiana, dropped rape and kidnapping charges that had kept him jailed for 18 months. He was not convicted of other charges, including marijuana possession and misdemeanor domestic violence, that had been brought against him since the mid-1990s, the newspaper reported. Defense attorney Roy Maughan Jr., who had asked for $250,000 bond, maintained that Tyler is innocent of the most recent charges, including rape and domestic abuse battery by strangulation. But he told the newspaper after the hearing that Tyler probably wont appeal the bond ruling. Maughan tried unsuccessfully to get the court record to reflect that Tyler made all of his court dates in those cases and, as a celebrity, would have a hard time evading capture if he fled. He had been released on $3 million bond in February 2019, nearly two years before the Caddo Parish charges were dropped. Mystikal, who grew up in New Orleans and now lives in Prairieville, is accused of attacking the woman, taking her keys and holding her against her will, according to an arrest warrant. Sheriff's Detective Garrett Keith testified Tuesday that the woman went to Tyler's home about 8 p.m. Saturday to talk about alleged financial commitments he had made to her. He said the woman reported that Tyler's behavior changed abruptly after he went into the bathroom and returned: He accused her of stealing cash, choked her and pulled out her hair, Keith testified. Tyler later apologized, prayed with her and threw rubbing alcohol on her to cleanse her bad spirits before raping her, Keith testified. Maughan's cross-examination tried to show that the prayer and apology indicated that things were calmer and the woman wasn't afraid, the newspaper reported. Keith later told prosecutors that the woman was praying for her safety and didnt know what Tyler said. The woman was cut and bruised, and deputies found some of her braids, an earring and a broken nail in the house, the detective said. Some wounds were consistent with rape, he said. Maughan also cross-examined Keith about whether and how the woman had objected to sex. Keith quoted her as saying Tyler's threats had made her afraid to object at first, but she later clearly told him no. WFO ALBANY Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, August 4, 2022 _____ HEAT ADVISORY URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Albany NY 313 PM EDT Wed Aug 3 2022 ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM TO 8 PM EDT THURSDAY... ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TO 8 PM EDT FRIDAY... * WHAT...Heat index values in the mid 90s to lower 100s expected both Thursday and Friday afternoon. * WHERE...In Connecticut, Litchfield County. In New York, Dutchess and eastern Ulster counties. * WHEN...11 AM to 8 PM EDT Thursday and noon to 8 PM EDT Friday. * IMPACTS...Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses to occur. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. * WHAT...Heat index values in the upper 90s to lower 100s expected. * WHERE...The Mohawk and Hudson River Valleys and central Taconics in eastern New York and the Connecticut River Valley in southern Vermont. * WHEN...From 11 AM to 8 PM EDT Thursday. ...HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM TO 8 PM EDT THURSDAY... * WHAT...Heat index values in the upper 90s expected. * WHERE...Western Ulster County at elevations below 1500 feet. ...AIR QUALITY ALERT IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM TO 11 PM EDT THURSDAY... The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation at Albany has issued a Air Quality Health Advisory for Ground Level Ozone for Ulster and Dutchess Counties from 11 AM to 11 PM EDT Thursday. Air quality levels in outdoor air are predicted to be greater than an air quality index value of 100 for ozone. The air quality index... or AQI...was created as an easy way to correlate levels of different pollutants to one scale. The higher the AQI value, the greater the health concern. When pollution levels are elevated...the New York State Department of Health recommends that individuals consider limiting strenuous outdoor physical activity to reduce the risk of adverse health effects. People who may be especially sensitive to the effects of elevated levels of pollutants include the very young and those with pre existing respiratory problems such as asthma or heart disease. Those with symptoms should consider consulting their personal physician. For additional information, please visit the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation website at, https://on.ny.gov/nyaqi, or call the Air Quality Hotline at 800-535- 1345. ...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TO 7 PM EDT * WHAT...Heat index values up to 98 expected. * WHERE...In New York, Eastern Clinton and Eastern Essex Counties. In Vermont, Grand Isle, Western Franklin, Western Chittenden, Western Addison, Western Rutland and Eastern Windsor Counties. * WHEN...From noon to 7 PM EDT Thursday. _____ Copyright 2022 AccuWeather This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate HONOLULU (AP) In Hawaii, there's a common question posed in the pidgin language of the islands: Where you went grad? Knowing where someone went to high school has long been an important identity marker for Hawaii residents and helps connect people in the state's close-knit communities. It's an affiliation that goes far deeper than rooting for a certain team or cross-town rivalries. It's how you understand your place in Hawaii and your belonging, said Ty P. Kawika Tengan, a professor in the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "It tells all these stories about race, class and other things that are kind of implied by the school and the communities that you imagine go there. But for some, answering that question gets complicated when the school bears the name of President William McKinley, who many Native Hawaiians disdain for his role in the annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom to the United States. And now a proposal to change the name of Honolulu's McKinley High School has sharply divided graduates, often along generational lines. Sautia Tanoa, a 2005 graduate, said changing the name to Honolulu High the name the school bore before it was changed to McKinley in 1907 is appropriate and would help rekindle his pride in the school. As I grew up and I got more educated about the history ... all of these names that were chosen or celebrated were the very ones that overtook the place, he said. In the sense of historical justice, if I can be one of the many voices asking to restore the name, I can be a little bit more proud of being part of the effort and also being part of that school. But even talking about changing the schools name makes 1979 graduate Suzanne Chun Oakland cry. It was like stabbing me in the heart, the former state lawmaker said of hearing about the effort. Its like going into your family and saying you have to change your family name. The debate comes amid a growing movement across the islands to restore traditional Hawaiian place names to honor and respect Native Hawaiian culture and history. What used to be known as Barbers Point in west Oahu is now Kalaeloa. On Kauai, Fort Elisabeth State Historical Park was renamed to Paulaula. Iconic Diamond Head is increasingly being called Leahi and some people prefer to say Puuloa instead of Pearl Harbor. The movement to return to traditional names stretches beyond Hawaii, with efforts afoot across the United States. One of the most high-profile name changes also involved McKinley: North Americas tallest mountain, which was named after the former president for more than a century, was returned to its previous name, Denali, in 2015 to honor Alaska Natives. But the attachment many in Hawaii feel toward their high school is proving to be an unlikely stumbling block in the growing quest for authenticity in the islands, where some public schools are named for their locations and some are named after people, including the businessmen who dominated during Hawaiis sugar plantation past. Less than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from McKinley High, Central Middle School changed its name to Princess Ruth Keelikolani Middle School a change some say was easy because Where you went grad always refers to high school. Hawaiis statewide public school teachers union has backed plans to change McKinley High's name. The schools name glorifies a man who illegally annexed a country against the will of her queen and people, the union wrote last year urging members to support a legislative resolution on the matter. The resolution stalled in the last legislative session, as did another calling for the Big Island community of Captain Cook to be restored to its original name of Kaawaloa. I think were in this time period where people are really starting to recognize just the changes that need to be made, the historical wrongdoings that have been done towards Native and Indigenous peoples, and the importance of restoring place names, said state Rep. Jeanne Kapela, who introduced the name change resolutions. Kapela said she understands people may resist changing names of places they feel connected to. I have my own affinity to my own alma mater, but the reality is that no matter what the school is named, that school sits on a place, said Kapela, who graduated from Konawaena High School, which means central Kona, where its located. Its the community that built us. And that community is based on a place name. In order to honor that community, we have to honor the place its standing on. In arguing to keep the name, McKinley High's principal, Ron Okamura, also cited the connection between identity and high school, saying it goes deep into the make up of who we are." We are often asked Where you grad from? and the answer is always the name of our high school, he wrote in testimony opposing the change. It is not about who the school is named after, but the branding' of the schools culture that is attached to that school. Keeping the name also ensures history is learned from and not erased, he said. Still efforts to change the school's name continue. Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, a Hawaiian cultural practitioner who did not attend McKinley, said it's insulting to keep a name honoring a man who was no friend to Hawaiians." It would be one thing if you were to say, get rid of the school, she said. But to change the name is about the dignity of a people. The importance of the Where you went grad question has roots in Polynesian culture, which places an emphasis on knowing where someone is from, but it's also been co-opted by foreign colonizers who became Hawaii locals, she said. Because when you say, Oh, where are you from, they cannot claim the land itself because they know that's not where their family originated," Wong-Kalu said. But you can claim the school. Nanette Kaiwi, a Native Hawaiian graduate of the class of 1967 said she meets weekly with some of her classmates and they discuss plans for their upcoming 55th reunion and their strong feelings against the name change. Kaiwi said she and her classmates worry how they would answer when asked, Where you went grad, a question Kaiwi faced numerous times at a recent family gathering. They even worry how their descendants will remember them. It was not wanting our grandchildren, great-grandchildren to say, What school did Tutu go? Oh McKinley, wheres that? Kaiwi said using a Hawaiian term of endearment for grandparent. It was the thought of losing the identity of the school we went to. Kaiwi said she also wants to keep the name and a statue of McKinley that stands on campus so the injustices of the past are not forgotten. I want it to stay because I dont want people to forget that book he is holding is not a treaty," she said of the statue. "That its all a lie and that our lands were stolen. Catherine Anderson Orlans, a 2005 graduate, said she learned McKinley's true place in Hawaii's history not from school but from her kupuna, or elders. It's kind of like that awkward elephant in the room, she said of attending McKinley. As a Hawaiian student, you always kind of know the real meaning of who he is ... but it really wasn't taught at the school. While she's still proud to have graduated from the school, she believes changing its name will help heal a more profound identity loss for fellow Native Hawaiians. I have no problem saying in the future, I graduated from Honolulu High School, formerly McKinley High School,'" she said. Granite City Police Maj. Nick Novacich has been named to lead the Cross-River Crime Task Force. Novacich, the assistant police chief in Granite City, succeeds Madison County Sheriff's Department Chief Deputy Jeff Connor. Novacich was deputy commander of the task force under Connor. Connor won the June 28 Republican primary and is seeking to follow retiring Madison County Sheriff John Lakin. No Democratic candidate has been slated for the Nov. 8 Madison County Sheriff's race. Novacich was named Thursday during a short announcement that included remarks from Lakin and Madison County States Attorney Tom Haine. I feel like weve made an impact on our community, Novacich said. Im honored to take command. Last year, our team consisted of members from just about every law enforcement agency in Madison County. Were here for pro-active policing, he said. We plan to continue to innovate, so Madison County and lead our region in crime-fighting and public safety. Novacich said his priorities for the next year include better use of intelligence and working more with Missouri public safety agencies on crime trends in St. Louis City, St. Louis County and St. Charles County. With our proximity, we have to be a step ahead to understand what theyre dealing with, too, Novacich said. The Cross-River Crime Task Force was formed in June 2021. It is comprised of law enforcement officials from federal, state, county, and local agencies with the goal of combining resources and manpower to protect Madison County from criminals who cross state lines to commit violent crimes. Novacich said the task force had been slowed by COVID-19 and the shooting death of Pontoon Beach Police Officer Tyler Timmins. I would like to let you know that weve hit the ground running and were back at it, Novacich said. With anything, theres always a learning curve," he said. "Weve been pro-active, weve been innovative and we decided that this is the best way that we can fight back against the criminal element that has invaded our community. "Were after the worst of the worst motor vehicle thefts, homicide suspects and criminal sexual assault suspects. Novacich said he envisions the task force becoming flexible, well-trained and dedicated. He eventually wants to integrate volunteers from other agencies into the task force. And he seeks to be able to deploy the unit into multiple jurisdictions at once. This would allow us to cover more ground during each deployment, and possibly affect more communities each time were out, he said. Novacich will have two deputy commanders: Lt. Brian Koberna of the Madison County Sheriffs Department and Maj. John Franke of the Alton Police Department. New to the task force this year is a steering committee consisting of four chiefs: Pontoon Beach Police Chief Chris Modrusic, Wood River Police Chief Brad Wells, Collinsville Police Chief Steve Evans and Alton Deputy Police Chief Maj. Jarrett Ford. Evans and Ford were unable to attend Thursdays announcement. Novacich joined the Granite City Police Department in June 2000. In 2004, he became the School Resource Officer for Coordinated Youth and Human Services; in 2005 he was assigned to the Detective Division. He was part of the Detective Division and the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis from 2005 until 2009, when he was promoted to sergeant in the Patrol Division. During this same time frame, Novacich was a founding member of Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System (ILEAS) Region 8 Special Response Team for Weapons of Mass Destruction. He was an Assistant Team Leader for ILEAS 2005-2011 and then a Team Leader 2011-2013. He left the ILEAS team in 2013 for a leadership position on the Granite City Police Departments Warrant Service Team, which he stayed with until 2021. In 2015, Novacich was promoted to lieutenant and became a shift commander in the patrol division. In 2016, he was reassigned to detectives as a detective lieutenant and reassigned to the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis, where he was a deputy commander since 2017. In 2019, Novacich was promoted to captain of detectives; in 2020, he moved over to captain of patrol, where he stayed until his promotion to major in 2021. Novacich earned a bachelor's degree in sociology with an emphasis in criminal justice from McKendree University in Lebanon, which he obtained prior to working with Granite City. In 2007 he obtained a master's degree in Criminal Justice Administration from Lindenwood University in St. Charles. In 2018, he became a graduate of the FBIs National Academy Session 272 in Quantico, Virginia. Negotiators from Iran, the U.S. and the European Union resumed monthslong, indirect talks over Tehrans tattered nuclear deal Thursday, as international inspectors reported that the Islamic Republic is expanding its uranium enrichment. The resumption of the Vienna talks, suddenly called Wednesday, appeared not to include high-level representation from all the countries that were part of Iran's 2015 deal with world powers. The negotiations come as Western officials express growing skepticism over the prospects for a deal to restore the accord. The EU's top diplomat has warned that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted. Iran's top negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, met with EU mediator Enrique Mora, Iranian media reported. As in other talks, the U.S. wont directly negotiate with Iran. Instead, the two sides will speak through Mora. U.S. Special Representative for Iran Rob Malley also was on hand, tweeting Wednesday that our expectations are in check. Mora also met Thursday with Russian Ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov, who has represented Moscow's interests in the talks. Ulyanov also separately met with Bagheri Kani. As always we had a frank, pragmatic and constructive exchange of views on ways and means of overcoming the last outstanding issues, Ulyanov wrote on Twitter. But going into the negotiations, Iran laid out a maximalist stance. Through its state-run IRNA news agency, Tehran denied that it had abandoned its effort to get America to delist its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization as a precondition to a deal. That has been a main sticking point. IRNA also quoted Iran's civilian nuclear chief as saying turned-off surveillance cameras of the International Atomic Energy Agency would be switched back on only if the West abandons an effort to investigate manmade traces of uranium found at previously undisclosed sites in the country. Those positions could doom the talks. Iranian officials have been trying to offer optimistic assessments of the negotiations while blaming the U.S. for the deadlock. They may be worried that a collapse of the talks could send the country's rial currency plunging to new lows. Iran struck the nuclear deal in 2015 with the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China. The deal saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium under the watch of U.N. inspectors in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Then-President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the accord in 2018, saying he would negotiate a stronger deal, but that didnt happen. Iran began breaking the deals terms a year later. As of the last public IAEA count, Iran has a stockpile of some 3,800 kilograms (8,370 pounds) of enriched uranium. More worrying for nonproliferation experts, Iran now enriches uranium up to 60% purity a level it had never reached before. That is a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Those experts warn Iran has enough 60% enriched uranium to reprocess into fuel for at least one bomb. However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, likely a monthslong project. Iran maintains its program is for peaceful purposes, though its officials increasingly are discussing the country's ability to build a nuclear bomb if it chose previously a taboo topic there. Meanwhile Thursday, U.N. inspectors at the IAEA said that they had verified that Iran had begun feeding uranium gas into two IR-1 cascades previously unused at its underground Natanz facility. Those cascades will enrich uranium up to 5%. The IAEA inspectors also verified that Iran had completed installation of three advanced IR-6 cascades at the plant, each comprising up to 176 centrifuges. The IAEA said those cascades had yet to be fed uranium. Iran also told the IAEA it planned to installed six more IR-2M cascades in a new operating unit at Natanz, inspectors said. ___ Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP. Tsafrir Abayov/AP JERUSALEM (AP) The Israeli military said Thursday it is sending additional forces to the area around the Gaza Strip as it braces for possible attacks after the arrest of a senior militant in the West Bank this week. Authorities closed roads and other areas around Gaza after a raid Monday night, in which troops arrested a senior member of the Islamic Jihad militant group in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin. A Palestinian teenager, who Islamic Jihad claimed as a member, was killed during clashes with the Israeli forces. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is calling for calm in the Taiwan Strait, urging against any provocative action in the wake of a visit to Taipei by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that has infuriated Beijing. In a rare statement on such issues from the 10-nation group, some of whose members drift more toward China in allegiance and some toward the United States, ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia said Thursday that they were concerned the situation could destabilize the region and eventually could lead to miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers. Both U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi were taking part in the ongoing ASEAN meetings in Phnom Penh on Thursday and Friday. Pelosi received a euphoric welcome as the first U.S. House speaker, and highest ranking U.S. official, to visit Taiwan in more than 25 years, and China swiftly responded by announcing multiple military exercises nearby. China claims the self-governing island of Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments. Beijing has accused the U.S. of breaking the status quo with the Pelosi visit, while the U.S. insists there has been no change to its one-China position of recognizing the government in Beijing, while allowing for informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. On the other side, with China's recent increase in military activities around Taiwan, Washington accuses Beijing of no longer accepting the status quo. Shortly after Pelosi landed Tuesday night, China announced live-fire drills that reportedly started that night, as well as the four-day exercises starting Thursday. The Peoples Liberation Army Air Force also flew a contingent of 21 warplanes toward Taiwan. Meantime, the U.S. has an aircraft carrier group and other naval assets in the region. In their statement, the ASEAN foreign ministers called for maximum restraint and for all sides to refrain from provocative action. The world is in dire need of wisdom and responsibility of all leaders to uphold multilateralism and partnership, cooperation, peaceful-coexistence and healthy competition for our shared goals of peace, stability, security and inclusive and sustainable development, they said. We should act together and ASEAN stands ready to play a constructive role in facilitating peaceful dialogue between all parties including through utilizing ASEAN-led mechanisms to deescalate tension, to safeguard peace, security and development in our region. ASEAN is made up of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate CANBERRA, Australia (AP) The Sydney apartment where the bodies of two Saudi sisters were found in June is back on the rental market with a real estate ad advising their deaths were not a random crime and will not be a potential risk for the community. Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and her 23-year-old sister Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, were found dead June 7 in separate bedrooms of the apartment in the southwest suburb of Canterbury. Police believe they died in early May. The decomposed state of their remains complicated the task of determining the causes of death. The first-floor Canterbury Road apartment was open for inspection on Monday with rent set at 520 Australian dollars ($362) a week. That is AU$40 ($28) more than the sisters were charged. An online ad said the apartment had been designated a crime scene and the mysterious deaths remained under police investigation. According to the police, this is not a random crime and will not be a potential risk for the community, the ad said. But police would not confirm or deny the realtors advice. As the investigation is ongoing, police continue to appeal for information in relation to the deaths of the two women, a police statement said. No further information is available at this stage. Police released the sisters names and photographs last week in an appeal for more public information about how they died, but investigators have remained tight-lipped about many details, including how the sisters came to Australia as teenagers in 2017, their visa status and how they earned money. Multiple sources with knowledge of the case said the sisters had been seeking asylum in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. They had worked for a time as traffic controllers, a common job for backpackers and new immigrants. They drove a luxury BMW 5 Series coupe, the newspaper reported. Police Detective Inspector Claudia Allcroft said their family in Saudi Arabia was cooperating with police and there was nothing to suggest that they were suspects. She described the decomposition of the bodies as problematic. Police last week had yet to see the results of toxicology tests. There was no evidence of forced entry to the apartment, where the sisters kept to themselves, Allcroft said. The deaths are suspicious in nature as we dont know the cause of death, Allcroft said. The girls were 23 and 24 years old and they have died together in their home. We dont know the cause of death, its unusual because of their age and the nature of the matter, Allcroft added. The sisters seemed fearful and suspicious that food delivered to their apartment had been tampered with, unidentified associates told Sydney media. An unidentified senior police source told Sydneys The Daily Telegraph: It really does appear to be a tragic suicide. The sisters were able to show significant savings in a bank account when they applied to lease their apartment, property manager Jay Hu told the newspaper, but they had stopped paying rent early this year. They had always paid on time before then. ... They were good tenants, Hu told the newspaper. The overseas-based landlord had begun legal action to recoup the unpaid rent before the sisters bodies were found, Hu said. The real estate ad said the apartments bedrooms both had new flooring. CSW is concerned for the welfare in detention of Professor Richard Solomon Musa Tarfa, the co-founder of the Du Merci orphanages for vulnerable children in Kano and Kaduna states, Nigeria, who is currently serving a two year prison sentence in Kano state. The professor, who was convicted by a Kano state High Court of forging a certificate of registration from the Kano state Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development on 3 March 2022, has suffered a series of health challenges while in prison, including partial loss of sight. According to information received by CSW, immediately after taking a bath, Professor Tarfa noticed he could no longer see clearly, and rubbed his eyes, thinking it due to the soap or water. Later he began feeling pain, and his eyes started to swell. On 5 July Professor Tarfa was able to make a phone call requesting that his wife, Mercy Tarfa, bring an ophthalmologist, who is also a family friend, to the prison to examine him. Mrs Tarfa and the doctor arrived at the prison at around 3pm the same day but were told they could not visit without their lawyer. They were unable to contact their lawyers until 7 July, when treatment commenced immediately. They were subsequently granted a further visit on 11 July to continue the treatment. Professor Tarfa currently has double vision in his left eye, and still cannot open it properly. In a comment to CSW Mrs Tarfa said: Each time l visit him, my heart bleeds and l ask, why this injustice? He needs an urgent intervention. A notice of appeal has been submitted to the courts by Professor Tarfas lawyers and filed on the basis of several errors committed by the presiding judge, Justice Narisu Saminu, when passing sentence, including his disregard of credible evidence proving the professors innocence. CSW also remains concerned for the children from the two Du Merci orphanages who are still in state custody. Sixteen of the children seized during the raids on the Du Merci centres in December 2019 remain in the government-run Nasarawa Childrens Home in Kano City. At a meeting with the Ministry of Womens Affairs and Social Development on 13 June, Mrs Tarfa was told to submit a written request for visitation, which was sent on 15 June, and to which there is yet to be a response. Until now, the children had been denied access to education since entering the home. However, one of the directors at the Ministry informed Mrs Tarfa during the meeting that the children had been enrolled in school and that the Commissioner was paying their fees personally. However, this claim is yet to be confirmed. In January 2021 the authorities began the process of forcibly relocating the five youngest children from the government-run home to a facility in a remote area where their names have been changed, they can no longer speak in English (which was previously their first language), and they are obliged to learn Arabic, study the Quran and attend prayers at a mosque. CSWs Founder President Mervyn Thomas said: CSW remains concerned for the wellbeing of Professor Tarfa, and the toll of the current situation on Mrs Tarfa and the children who were under their care. We urge the prison authorities to ensure the professor receives consistent medical attention. His sentence constitutes a grave miscarriage of justice, and we renew our call for the overturning of his conviction, his unconditional release, and an end to the unwarranted suffering of this innocent man and his family. Given his earlier acquittal, we further call to the Kano state authorities to facilitate the immediate return of all of the Du Merci children to the care of Mrs Tarfa, and particularly the youngest five, whose treatment raises legitimate concerns of possible forced conversion. Reparations must also be made for the undeniable trauma this family has been made to endure for over two years. For further information or to arrange interviews please contact Claire Denman, Press and Public Affairs Deputy Team Leader at CSW on +44 (0)7507 733252 or email [email protected] . CSW is a human rights organisation specialising in freedom of religion or belief. We work on over 20 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. www.csw.org.uk LAGOS, Thursday, August 4, 2022: Media Rights Agenda (MRA) today called on the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to rescind its decision to impose fines of N5 million each on a television station and three pay TV platforms for allegedly undermining Nigerias national security by carrying documentaries on banditry in Nigeria, saying the regulators action is wrong and unjustifiable in a democratic society. The NBC announced in a statement on August 3, 2022 that it had imposed sanctions of N5 million each on Multichoice Nigeria Limited, owners of DSTV; TelCom Satellite Limited (TSTV); and NTA Startimes Limited for carrying a documentary by the BBC Africa Eye titled Bandits Warlords of Zamfara, which the Commission claimed glorified the activities of bandits and undermines national security in Nigeria. It said it had also fined Trust-TV Network Limited N5 million for its documentary titled: Nigeria's Banditry - The Inside Story. It accused them of contravening the provisions of the Nigeria Broadcasting Code, Sixth Edition, especially Paragraphs 3.1.1, 3.12.2 and 3.11.2. However, in a statement by its programme director, Mr. Ayode Longe, MRA described the NBCs action as unconstitutional and repressive, threatening to take legal action against the commission if the measures are not reversed. Mr. Longe said: We have no doubt that the decision to sanction the platforms and television station was actually taken by the Federal Government and is being enforced through the NBC in an effort to punish them for portraying the Government in bad light as it is clear that the Government is embarrassed by its inability to address the challenge posed by the so-called bandits to the safety and security of Nigerians and members of the public at large. According to him, It is our view that the reporting by the television station and the platforms is consistent with role assigned to the media by Section 22 of the Nigerian Constitution to uphold the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people, in this case, with respect to the security and welfare of the people. It is ironic that while the government regularly dialogues with the so-called bandits and pays them obscene amounts in cash as ransom, thereby enabling their activities further, it has chosen to sanction media platforms for merely reporting on the bandits and the security challenge that they pose to citizens. Mr. Longe criticized the NBC for allowing itself to be used by the Federal Government as a tool for the censorship of broadcasters and broadcast platforms when it should be playing the role of an independent regulatory authority in accordance with internationally established norms and standards for media regulators. He said: We find it abhorrent that the NBC is once again the law maker, the accuser, the prosecutor, the judge and the enforcer, all at the same time, contrary to the well-established principle of law that no one should be a judge in his own cause. It is even more repugnant that the NBC has accused the broadcast station and platforms of offenses which constitute crimes under our laws and has proceeded to find them guilty of these crimes, thereby usurping the function of the courts under our Constitution. Mr. Longe called on the NBC to seek appropriate guidance in the performance of its functions as the regulatory authority for broadcasting in Nigeria in order to stop bringing Nigeria into ridicule before the international community. For further information, please contact: Idowu Adewale Communications Officer [email protected] 3.50k per 1 ordinary share of 50 Kobo was approved for all shareholders on the Company's register at the close of business on 13 July 2022. The 2021 performance positioned BUA Foods as a listed company with the highest dividend payout in the Food and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods sector on the Nigeria Exchange Limited (NGX). Restates a solid commitment to bridging food security gaps and nourishing lives to create value. Abuja, Nigeria 4 August 2022 BUA Foods Plc ("BUA Foods" or "the Company"), one of Sub-Saharan Africa's most valuable companies based on market capitalization and a leading manufacturer of high-quality Foods, held its 1st Annual General Meeting in Abuja at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel. The Company declared a dividend with a total value of 63 billion for the fiscal year 2021 following approvals by the shareholders translating to 3.50 per one ordinary share of 50 Kobo- subject to the deduction of withholding tax- for all shareholders on the Company's register at the close of business on 13 July 2022. This was driven by the positive growth recorded in the financial year ended 31 December 2021, making BUA Foods a listed company on the NGX, with the highest dividend payout in Nigerias Food and FMCG industry. The period under review showed impressive results across the Company's three revenue-generating divisions- Sugar, Flour and Pasta. Operating profits grew by 56% to 79.9 billion, while Profit Before Tax (PBT) increased by 63.96% to 77.5 billion. The total profit at the end of the year was N69.8 billion (+97% y-o-y). Payment of dividends will commence on 4 August 2022, upon shareholders' approval at the meeting. Addressing shareholders at the meeting, the Chairman of BUA Foods, Abdulsamad Rabiu, said: "2021 was a pivotal year in our corporate history. It charted a new path for us to fulfil our vision to meet Africa's growing demand for food by promoting food security and nourishing lives. Our bold decision to consolidate and restructure our business strengthened our productivity and improved our efficiency as a food value chain company. Our business has remained resilient despite global economic challenges and plays a significant role in the FMCG industry. This was evidenced by the positive financial results recorded for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2021." Speaking further on growth ambitions, Rabiu said, "Our expansion plans have positioned us to provide a more diversified revenue stream in the years ahead, with a positive and demonstrable impact to create value for the business and shareholders. We are expanding our plant capacities across the entire business and investing in a backward integration program for sugar with farmers in host communities. We plan to recommence our rice division by the end of 2022 and edible oils in 2024 to further accelerate revenue generation. Also, our ongoing investments in export infrastructure, supported by strategically located ultramodern plants, will improve our capacity to serve Africa and other markets." "We will continue to invest in the future with a clarity of purpose for shareholders and make a difference through our sustainable business model driven by a committed team executing well-thought strategies for growth and value creation as we continue to lead with purpose." Also commenting, the Managing Director BUA Foods, Engr. Ayodele Abioye said: "2021 was an exciting year for us at BUA Foods. The restructuring of our business improved our position as a leading player producing and distributing high-quality, accessible, competitively priced and innovative food products. It strengthened our vision to lead confidently even as we expand our footprint across West Africa and provide end-to-end supply chain efficiency while leveraging the strategic location of our ultramodern plants. Our focus is on driving sustainable growth from our strong portfolio to create good investment returns for shareholders. This aligns with our plan to create liquidity, enhance visibility, and expand access to capital for future growth. We worked with some of the best advisers in the industry to achieve these milestones, and I thank them all for their support. Also speaking, the National President of Starlite Shareholders Association of Nigeria, Mr Tunji Bamidele, who represented professional investors, commended the company on its exceptional performance for the fiscal year 2021. He added that despite global security challenges, the company grew profits from 39 billion in the previous year to 69 billion in 2021, indicating a strong commitment to alleviating food security challenges. Dr. Ahmed Al Madbuh has been accredited as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the State of Palestine to the Republic of Bulgaria since January 2009. He has been the longest-serving Dean of the Bulgarian diplomatic corps - since 2014 and has been the most active ambassador in country. In the past 13 years, he has given countless interviews and lectures to the Bulgarian audience relating to the Middle East conflict, terrorism and international relations. His main effort as an Ambassador for his war torn county Palestine and also as the Dean of the entire diplomatic community has always been focused on promoting peace, unity and developing inter-cultural relationships between the nations represented in the host country. Many Palestinian exhibitions have been held in different parts of Bulgaria and Palestinian folk groups participates in various festivals in Bulgaria. The State of Palestine currently has bilateral recognition with 139 countries. Most African States extended recognition to the State of Palestine following the Declaration of Independence by the Palestine National Council on 15 November 1988 in Algeria. At the end of his diplomatic term in Bulgaria I spoke with H.E. Dr. Ambassador Al Madbuh, here is what he shared with me exclusively for the readers of The Voice magazine Ambassador Al Madbuh and the President of Bulgaria Rumen Radev TV: Please tell us about yourself and what made you become an ambassador? Ambassador Al Madbuh: I could say that my destiny began as a refugee who passed through to become a surgeon, then later an ambassador. I was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon. The camp is geographically situated close to Palestine. I was born there because my parents as well as my grandparents were forcibly driven out of Haifa. They fled and sought refuge in this camp. I studied in the schools of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees - UNRWA. After that, I did my medical degree in Russia and subsequently specialized in urological surgery. During my entire time in Russia, my work was accompanied by the ongoing battle for the Palestinian cause. When I was approached with the offer to become an ambassador, I spoke with my father who asked me What was your response? I told him that I replied - I will think about it. He responded, Whats there to think about?. So I called and accepted the offer. Subsequently, I became an Ambassador of the State of Palestine to Bulgaria since 2009, Ambassador Al Madbuh with King Simeon 11 of Bulgaria TV: Being the Dean of the diplomatic corps how were you able to successfully manage Ambassadors from different countries with different political views and cultures? Ambassador Al Madbuh: Of course, being the Dean of the diplomatic corps as well as being the Ambassador of Palestine is not an easy task. Its vital that during every speech and every word said, one must take into consideration the various political, cultural, social, and other tendencies so that words are not taken out of context or assumption that one is taking sides. Everything said must have a precise balance. Besides, sometimes issues occur between the different embassies and the host country which occasionally require the involvement of the Dean of the diplomatic corps. I dont mean bilateral relations issues, but concerns connected with the diplomatic work itself, for example - access issues to different areas of the airport or parking provision for diplomatic vehicles or value-added tax matters. On all such occasions, the involvement of the Dean of the diplomatic corps is required so that a mutually acceptable compromise can be reached. Nevertheless, the work executed as the Dean of the diplomatic corps is somewhat carried out at the expense of the ambassadorial duties for the respective country represented, meaning that the responsibilities as a Dean takes away time and energy from the work as an ambassador of the State of Palestine. At the same time, this is a position every ambassador should be proud of as one becomes a centre stage figure at events with the other ambassadors and the entire diplomatic community. By protocol, upon arrival, after submitting their credentials to the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria all new ambassadors must meet with the Dean of the diplomatic corps, as well as departing ambassadors at the end of their mandate after bidding farewell to the Bulgarian officials, meet up to bid goodbye to the Dean of the diplomatic corps. L-R: Ms. Jones and Ambassador Al Madbuh during the interview session TV: How do you think we can achieve a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict and the crisis in Eastern Europe? Ambassador Al Madbuh: Without a doubt, peace is what everyone wants! To achieve peace, courage and political will power is required. Regarding the Middle East conflict with the Palestine problem being the heart of it, we the Palestinian people and the Palestinian leadership took our course on the path of peace since 1988, since the boundaries of the State of Palestine were established in 1967 with East Jerusalem as the capital. This is also within the internationally legally declared Occupied Territories, the West Bank of the river Jordan, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. We accepted and agreed for our country to be established within those boundaries on the said territory, sadly there hasnt been an Israeli government to reach out their hand in peace based on International law rights mentioned. The war in 1967 lasted only 6 days. It is referred to as the Six-Day War. In six days, Israel occupied whatever was left of the Palestinian territories. So should the Israeli government find good political will for a peaceful resolution, they would have in the same manner withdrawn from the Occupied Territories in six days, and on the seventh day, we could both rest. Unfortunately, as I already said, there is no will or desire for peace on the Israeli side. Achieving a peaceful resolution could only be accomplished on the basis of international law. And international law states that the Palestinian territories are occupied territories from which Israel must withdraw. In addition, based on the same international law, the Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the places from which they were forcefully driven out. This means that as per international law, I have the right to return to Haifa, the place from which my grandparents and parents were forcefully expelled from. Till this moment, Israel refuses us to exercise our rights. We would like peace to be established in Ukraine where there is an ongoing war because peace cannot be achieved in any other way but at the discussion table. The sooner discussions are held; the sooner peace is going to be by established. If we are to run a parallel comparison between the ongoing war in Ukraine and the war in the occupied Palestine, we will establish the presence of a double standard with regards to the international relations conduct towards Ukraine. We saw how the United States and their allies, including the European Union imposed strict sanctions on Russia because of the war in Ukraine. If only 10% of those sanctions were imposed on Israel, the chances of achieving a peaceful resolution to the Middle Eastern conflict would have increased to 90%. Looking at Israel, we see that recently two reputable International institutions, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International published independent reports that concludes, that Israel is a country that exercises apartheid towards the Palestinians. Sadly it appears that the democratic world seem to turn their eyes away from those two reports, not noticing them and ignoring them. When apartheid was exercised in South Africa, the world imposed sanctions which abolished the apartheid regime in South Africa. Why is the same sanctions are not being brought upon Israel so that the apartheid regime that Israel exercises could be brought to an end? Ambassador Al Madbuh proudly among his fellow country man, women and children in Bulgaria TV: During your 13-year mandate, what bilateral relations were achieved between Bulgaria and Palestine and what future cooperation would you recommend? Ambassador Al Madbuh: During my mandate, we worked on strengthening the bilateral relations with Bulgaria. We entered into multiple bilateral agreements in the areas of tourism, labour and social policies. In foreign affairs activities, few political consultations were held between the two Ministries. There was exchange of visits at the highest level between the two countries and at all times we strived for our relations to maintain the highest level, not only politically but also in the inter cultural aspect between our two Nations. There were cultural exchanges between artists and performers from Bulgaria and Palestine, we organised numerous exhibitions in various Bulgarian towns, participations in folk festivals and the most significant achievement was the establishing of the Asian Festival together with the Ambassador of Indonesia. That event has now transformed into to a significant cultural event in the program of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria H.E. Dr. Ahmed Al Madbuh Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the State of Palestine in the Republic Bulgaria and Dean of the Diplomatic corps TV: What is the best that you would recommend about Bulgaria? Ambassador Al Madbuh: Bulgaria is a very beautiful country. By that, am not only referring its nature but to its people who are friendly, helpful and willing to co-operate. Foreigners are made to feel so welcome in Bulgaria that they feel as if they are in their own country. This is a very specific trait of the Bulgarian people. Bulgaria has a very diversified nature, I would recommend for all to experience the beauty of the Bulgarian nature. Each visitor to Bulgaria must go to the Black Sea side. For me, the Bulgarian coastline with its golden sand is one of the most beautiful sea sides in the world. Everyone must visit the green mountains as Vitosha, the Rila Mountain with its seven mountain lakes. The ski resorts, as well as the ancient villages and towns which have retained their authentic charm and traditions, as Etara, Bojentsi and the old beautiful capital of Veliko Tarnovo. In those places, one can see the restored old authentic houses and familiarise themselves with the Bulgarian history and the Bulgarian spirit. I am not able to mention all the places that represent the beauty of Bulgaria, but these are some examples of the places that should be visited. TV: And finally what is your personal message to The Voice news magazine readers? Ambassador Al Madbuh: In my opinion, a spirit of co-operation should be established between all people, with no room for discrimination in any shape or form. As all of us are born free and need to remain free, we are all equal; no one is or should be above the rest. Should this principle be applied, there will be no more Wars. Life is short and should be used for good deeds. It is not an exaggeration to say that the fire incident that razed down Temple Hill Supermarket in Festac Town on Wednesday, 3rd August 2022, has further exposed how ill-prepared and ill-equipped the Federal Fire Service is. In fact, there is no denying the fact that Nigerians are not adequately protected from fire incidents, and that fire service formations across the country usually fall below peoples expectations whenever they are contacted to quell fire incidents. The reason for the foregoing view cannot be farfetched as officials of the Federal Fire Service are wont to offer flimsy excuses to the public on why they were unable to successfully fight any given fire incident. Some of the excuses cut across explaining that a mob prevented them from accessing the scene of the incident, and that they received a call about the fire outbreak so late. Not done, they are wont to say that it was not possible to contend with the heavy traffic usually claimed they faced while heading to scene of fire incident, coupled with the behavior of angry mob who they often allege pelted stones at them. As if the foregoing excuses they are known for are not enough, they will most times say their ladders are not long enough or that they do not have enough water in the tank of the Fire Fighting Vehicle. In fact, if the ladders they took to the fire scene are not long enough, it could be that the hose are not long enough. Without resort to haul over the coals on the leadership of the service in this context, it is not an exaggeration to say that it can never be out of place to that time for Nigerians to be urging fire service men to go and tell their stories to the marine whenever they give excuses for being unable to fight any given fire incident across the country has come. Therefore, it is against the foregoing backdrop that yours sincerely visited Twitter. Facebook, and Naira land, being the top 3 popular social media platforms Nigerians often visit from my own personal observation, to sample the opinions of Netizens. For the sake of clarity in this context, a Netizen is an active participant in the online community of the Internet. A twitter user with the handle @DI0RDADDY tweeted, Omo Temple hill supermarket Festac has been burning for an hour + and the @LAG_FireService did absolutely nothing to help save it. In his reply to @DI0RDADDY, Eddy Lanky tweeted, Theyre literally still not doing anything, I think the first van came with almost an empty tank then waited for over 20mins for backup, now the second is here but isnt doing much either. He tweeted again, and said, This is one of the Best, Biggest and affordable supermarket in Festac. Funny how @LAG_FireService ran out of water. On Facebook platform, a user with the name, Anthony Abakporo commented thus, TEMPLE HILL supermarket is a landmark on 71 Road by 24 Junction Festac Town. The place is a two storey building with goods worth millions in it. Is on fire now @ 1am 4th August and the fire service men have come, fought the fire then left because they don't have water. He lamented, Someone's investment is burning because of lack of capacity in the fire service department. We need a new Nigeria . We can't survive like this Uzor Noble Emeka, also a Facebook user commented, Nigeria is done on me. Fire service leaving fire to fight wind. Temple Hill Supermarket Festac in rumbles. Chris Omeruo who is more detailed and explicit in his post said, TEMPLE HILL supermarket is a two storey building and a landmark on 71 Road by 24 Junction Festac Town, Lagos. Last night, it was engulfed by fire and goods worth millions of Naira burnt down. The fire service men who came couldn't succeed in putting out the fire as they left because they didn't have enough water. This is the reality of the Nigeria we live in where nothing works even when taxes are being paid to the government. We need a new Nigeria . Remigius Christian in his post said, Goods worth millions of naira were burnt as fire razes down Temple Hill supermarket in Festac, Lagos. While trying to curb the situation, unfortunately, the Fire Fighters ran out of supply. According to a source, the fire was caused by an electrical failure which occurred when power was restored Without resort to make this piece boring, it is expedient to opine in this context that, it is not proper for fire service stations to be literarily scattered across our cities without making any meaningful impact in the society. I am therefore through this medium suggesting that the problems bedeviling the fire service sector should be seriously looked into by both the Senate and the House of Representatives, while the Minister of Interior on his own should not rest on his oars in ensuring that the fire service sector is fully revamped. German mans girlfriend tests negative for monkeypox PHUKET: The girlfriend of the 25-year-old German man in Phuket who has tested positive for monkeypox is not infected, Dr Kusak Kukiattikoon, Chief of the Phuket Provincial Public Health Office (PPHO), confirmed today (Aug 4). health By Eakkapop Thongtub Thursday 4 August 2022, 11:34AM Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub Dr Kusak repeated from his announcement yesterday that health officials had identified seven high risk contacts under watch for developing symptoms of the disease. One was a high-risk touch contact, the Thai girlfriend, he said today. The PPHO sent samples to the Medical Science Center Region 11 office in Phuket for tests, which have come back as negative, he added. The remainder of the group have been quarantined for 21 days, Dr Kusak noted. Dr Kusak repeated his warning for people to beware of contracting the disease, while admitting that monkeypox needs direct contact or exposure to blood or secretions for people to become infected. Monkeypox is not easily transmitted, but it can be avoided by wearing a mask, washing your hands often and avoid touching your face, eyes, nose and mouth with your hands, he said. Watch out for animal bites or scratches. Do not share items with others. Do not come in close contact with monkeypox patients, and that should leave tourists and other people to still be able to travel to Phuket as usual, Dr Kusak said. Phuket officials prepare for APEC SME meeting PHUKET: Weerapong Malai, Director General of the Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion (OSMEP) was in Phuket yesterday (Aug 3) to coordinate preparations for the 28th Apec SME Ministerial Meeting to be held at the SAii Laguna Phuket resort on Sept 5-10. economicstourism By The Phuket News Thursday 4 August 2022, 05:51PM Phuket was selected as the host location for the meeting in consideration of the potential of the province in welcoming the ministers with a focus on small business operators, which are considered as the frontline of the countrys economy, Mr Weerapong said. The OSMEP believes that the results of this meeting will make various information helpful as a guideline for all relevant sectors for the promotion of developing SME entrepreneurs to recover sustainably and comprehensively, and have the ability to develop into part of the global supply chain and for them to be prepared to able to effectively cope with new challenges that arise in the future, Mr Weerapong noted. Phuket Governor Narong Woonciew explained that in addition to the ministerial meeting, other related meetings will be held on the island. In the event area, there will be a showcase of SME entrepreneurs developed with the BCG approach [Bio-Circular-Green economic model], he added. At the same time, parallel activities will be held to show the potential of Thailands readiness to drive the economy after the COVID-19 crisis, he said. The outstanding qualities of Phuket will be on show, whether they be the tourist attractions, the food or the cultural lifestyle of the Phuket Old Town, all of which is important as a soft power, Governor Narong said. We will be welcoming tourists from all over the world, including potential SME business operators, who are the main driving force of the area, he said. SME operators in Phuket suffered heavily under the tourism shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when the islands economy shrunk by 83%. In October last year representatives from small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across the island called on the OSMEP to provide support by providing access to low-interest loans without the onerous requirements currently required by government agencies and to set up a fund so they can reopen to serve tourists. Phuket officials target coastal erosion PHUKET: Local municipalities and administrations around the island have been asked to survey their areas for coastal erosion after the heavy inundation at Sai Kaew Beach in Mai Khao last month flooded Thepkrasattri Rd heading off-island. weatherconstructionSafetyenvironment By The Phuket News Thursday 4 August 2022, 10:16AM The issue of coastal erosion was discussed at a meeting at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MNRE) office in Phuket Town yesterday (Aug 3), chaired by Phuket Vice Governor Amnuay Pinsuwan. Present were officers from Sirinath National Park and the MNRE Region 10 office, along with local officials from Mai Khao Tambon Administration Organisation (OrBorTor), the Phuket Provincial Administrative Organisation (PPAO) and Thalang District Office. Vice Governor Amnuay highlighted the importance of the issue, noting that he had been ordered by Phuket Governor Narong Woonciew to look into measures to prevent coastal erosion. Of particular concern was the extent of heavy erosion at Sai Kaew Beach last month when storm conditions coinciding with a king tide resulted in the outbound road from Phuket along Thepkrasattri Rd (Route 402) being flooded. This affected traffic and posed a risk to the coastal and traffic surfaces in the area, he said. In total, 8.26km of shoreline around Phuket was affected by coastal erosion in 2020, the meeting was told. Only 160 metres had suffered severe erosion that year, but 5.79km of shoreline had suffered moderate erosion and a further 2.30km of shoreline had suffered minor erosion. Local government organisations are to survey their areas and report the situation of coastal erosion to the Phuket office of the Office of Natural Resources and Environment in order to bring the MNRE information up to date, Vice Governor Amnuay said. The Phuket Highways Office is to inspect road conditions, road surfaces and the areas immediately surrounding major roads, he added. The information will be used to review current plans and projects related to the prevention and solution of coastal erosion in Phuket in order to find a solution to solve the problem in the long term, Vice Governor Amnuay said. Prosecutors charge six suspects over Tangmos death BANGKOK: Public prosecutors have indicted six suspects over the death by drowning of actress Nida Tangmo Patcharaveerapong on Feb 24. deathaccidents By Bangkok Post Thursday 4 August 2022, 11:48AM Office of the Attorney-General deputy spokesman Prayut Petcharakhun and Nonthaburi provincial prosecutor Supaporn Nipavanich announce the indictments against six suspects in connection with the drowning of actress Nida Tangmo Patcharaveerapong. Photo: Supplied / Wassayos Ngamkham Nonthaburi provincial prosecutors announced the decision yesterday (Aug 3), after having postponed it three times, reports the Bangkok Post. The six are speedboat owner Tanupat Por Lerttaweewit, Phaiboon Robert Trikanjananun, Wisapat Sand Manomairat, Nitas Job Kiratisoonthisathorn, Tangmos manager Idsarin Gatick Juthasuksawat and Peam Em Thamtheerasri. Mr Peam was not in the speedboat when the actress fell into the Chao Phraya river and drowned, but he allegedly advised the other passengers to delay giving statements to police. Tangmos mother, Panida Siriyuthayothin, filed the case against the six with Nonthaburi police. Office of the Attorney-General deputy spokesman Prayuth Petchkhun told reporters that the prosecutors decided to indict Mr Tanupat on five charges - recklessness causing death, giving a false statement, driving a boat without a licence, dropping objects into the river, and illegally taking the anti-anxiety drug alprazolam, a category 2 listed psychotropic medication. Mr Phaiboon was indicted on four charges - recklessness causing death, driving a boat with an expired registration, driving a boat without a licence, and dropping objects into the river. Mr Prayuth said Mr Wisapat, who is a transgender woman, was charged with recklessness causing death. Mr Nitas was indicted on three charges - recklessness causing death, assisting others to avoid punishment or receive less punishment, concealing evidence, and dropping objects into the river. Ms Idsarin was charged with recklessness causing death, giving a false statement and assisting others to avoid punishment or to receive less punishment, and concealing evidence. Mr Peam was charged with directing others to make false statements and assisting others to avoid punishment or receive less punishment, and concealing evidence. The court later granted bail to all suspects. Ms Idsarin and Mr Nitas were each released on B210,000 cash Mr Tanupat placed B160,000 as surety. Mr Wisapat and Mr Phaiboon were released on B120,000 bail each. Mr Peam was released on B90,000 surety. Tangmo, 37, fell into the Chao Phraya River near Pibul 1 pier in Muang district of Nonthaburi on the night of Feb 24. Her body was found two days later. Ms Panida earlier withdrew a murder case against the suspects. Mr Prayuth said the police investigation report did not show any evidence to support a murder case. Around 10am yesterday, police took the six suspects to Nonthaburi Provincial Court for arraignment. The suspects showed no emotion and did not give any interviews. In April, police forwarded their investigation report into the death of the actress on Feb 24 to public prosecutors, after concluding the actresss death was caused by the reckless actions of people in the boat with her. They asked the prosecution to indict the six suspects on charges including reckless endangerment causing death. Commissioner of Provincial Police Region 1, Pol Lt Gen Jirapat Phumjit, earlier said investigators were convinced by the evidence in their possession and witness statements that Tangmo died after falling into the Chao Phraya River from the back of the speedboat she was travelling in with her friends, about 10.34pm that night. After she fell in the water she was sucked into the boats propellor and the blades left 26 gashes on her body - the largest of which was on the inner side of her right thigh, he said. The St. Lawrence River along the Verdun shoreline, taken Monday, July 25. Skies cleared behind a cold front early in the day, leaving some fair weather clouds along with strong west winds, gusting up to 73km/h at Trudeau Airport. This was part of what turned out to be a fairly average July across the Montreal region. Former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez has been arrested on bribery charges related to the financing of her 2020 campaign, the latest hit to an island with a long history of corruption that brought fresh political upheaval to the U.S. territory An Amnesty International report says Ukrainian forces have exposed civilians to Russian attacks by basing themselves in schools, residences and other places in populated areas John Badman ALTON While motorists were likely happy to see U.S. 67 again open Monday afternoon, headaches for the downtown area are far from over. Continuing work on West 3rd Street in Alton will make getting to restaurants, bars and shops a bit more challenging. Getty Images WOOD RIVER Motorists seeking to renew drivers licenses and purchase vehicle stickers can attend a free mobile unit event 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday at the Wood River Police Department, 550 E. Madison Ave., sponsored by state Sen. Kris Tharp, D-Bethalto, in partnership with the Illinois Secretary of State. The mobile unit offers a more convenient option for residents to receive necessary services without waiting for long periods of time at a driver services facility, said Tharp. I encourage anyone in need of an easy way to renew and obtain IDs and license plates to attend this upcoming event. WASHINGTON (AP) Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat Joe Manchin made the case on Wednesday for overhauling the 1800s-era Electoral Count Act, pushing for quick passage of a bipartisan compromise that would make it harder for a losing candidate to overturn legitimate results of a presidential election. Proposals from their group of 16 senators nine Republicans and seven Democrats are a response to former President Donald Trump and his allies pushing courts, state legislatures and Congress to somehow overturn his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden. Trump's efforts culminated in the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters pushed past police and broke into the Capitol as Congress was certifying the results. An update to the electoral law is something our country desperately needs, Manchin said Wednesday, testifying at a Senate hearing on the bill. The time for Congress to act is now. Manchin and Collins, who introduced a series of proposals to reform the law last month along with 14 other senators, are pushing for passage of the legislation before the end of the congressional session in January. The bills could face a harder path after Novembers midterm elections if Republicans take over the House, where Democrats are leading a separate effort to revise the law. This is something we shouldnt carry over into another election cycle, said Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, the top Republican on the Senate Rules Committee who has been supportive of the effort. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 governs the counting and certification of electoral votes in presidential elections and has long been criticized as arcane, vaguely written and vulnerable to abuse. Those fears were realized after the 2020 contest when Trumps allies worked to exploit those weaknesses, pushing states to put forward alternate slates of electors and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role in the congressional joint session on Jan. 6 to object to the results or delay certification. The bipartisan group of senators has worked for months to find agreement on a way to revamp the process, eventually settling on the series of proposals introduced last month. The legislation would add a series of safeguards to the electoral count, increasing the thresholds for challenging results so state or federal officials cant exploit loopholes to advocate for a preferred candidate. It would reinforce that the vice presidents role over the electoral count is solely ministerial, with no power to change the results. It would make clear that Congress can only accept the one legitimate slate of electors from each state and make it harder for members of either party to object to the results. And it would strike an outdated law that could allow some state legislatures to override the popular vote. Nothing is more essential to the survival of a democracy than the orderly transfer of power, said Sen. Collins,, of Maine, who testified alongside Manchin, of West Virginia. And there is nothing more essential to the orderly transfer of power than clear rules for effecting it. It is unclear how quickly the Senate might act when it returns from its August break in the fall. Both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell have signaled support, and the legislation is expected to have enough backing to overcome any objections and pass in the 50-50 Senate. Roadblocks await in the House, however, where some Democrats would like the bill to do much more. The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and the House Administration Committee, have been working on similar proposals to each other and promise to release them soon. While overwhelmingly supportive of the current Senate proposal, legal experts who testified at the hearing identified some potential sticking points. They recommended some tweaks, including better defining the specific grounds that members of Congress can use when objecting to a states electors during congressional certification and making it even harder for state legislators to delay or override a vote by declaring a failed election. The Senate compromise would already amend an 1845 law allowing states to declare a failed election," only permitting a state to modify election timing in extraordinary and catastrophic circumstances, but the experts said that might not be enough. They said such circumstances should be spelled out a natural disaster that prevents many people from reaching the polls, for example, and not simply what state lawmakers may consider a catastrophic election result. While recommending changes, the panel of experts including Bob Bauer, who was White House counsel in the Obama administration, and Brookings Institution Fellow Norm Eisen said the need for action is urgent. Jan. 6 has passed, but the danger has not, said Eisen, who served as a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee during Trumps first impeachment. The proposals introduced by the bipartisan group last month also include also include bolstered security for state and local election officials, who have faced violence and harassment, including doubled penalties for people who threaten or intimidate election officials. Some of those election officials testified at a separate Senate Judiciary hearing on Wednesday, asking for Congress to amend federal law to include strong penalties on those who threaten or harm anyone involved in election administration and to limit access to individuals seeking personal information of election officials. New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said threats to election integrity are growing by the day, noting the recent case in her state of a county commissioner who refused to certify the results of a primary. For the election officials and volunteer poll workers that our elections depend on, I fear that threats and harassment will cause them so much stress and uncertainty that they will simply give up the work for voters, she said. ___ Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report. Scranton, PA (18503) Today Considerable cloudiness with occasional rain showers. Thunder possible. High 77F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.. Tonight Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 58F. Winds light and variable. Job Title: Livelihoods Assistant (5 Job Opportunities) Organisation: ALIGHT Duty Station: Nakivale, Kyangwali, Oruchinga, Kyaka II & Rwamwanja, Uganda Salary Scale: UGX 900,000 1,100,000 Reports to: Livelihoods Officer About US: ALIGHT, formerly the American Refugee Committee (ARC), is an international non-profit, non-sectarian organization that has provided humanitarian assistance and training to millions of beneficiaries over the last 40 years. In 2011, Alight helped nearly 2.5 million people get essential services to regain their health and take back control of their lives. Alight works with its partners and constituencies to provide opportunities and expertise to communities of refugees and internally displaced persons in seven countries in Africa, Asia and Europe, including Iraq, Kosovo, and in the Darfur region of Sudan and is currently providing for emergency relief and recovery in Haiti. Alight provides shelter, clean water and sanitation, health care, skills training, microcredit education, protection to help survivors of war and natural disasters to rebuild their lives with dignity, health care, security and self-sufficiency. Job Summary: Reporting to the Livelihoods Officer, the Livelihoods Assistant will be responsible for providing support on all ALIGHT refugee and host community livelihoods sector activities. He/She will work hand in hand with the Livelihoods Officer ensuring that livelihoods activities are conducted as planned, present real and sustainable opportunities to refugees and host communities, and retain links to local and regional markets in a bid to increase sustainability and scalability of ALIGHTs livelihoods activities, particularly business development and promotion. This roles deliverables will support the Livelihood Officer in the development and implementation of joint host-community-refugee community livelihoods programming. Key Duties and Responsibilities: Livelihood Intervention development and implementation Support the Livelihood Officer in the development and implementation of livelihood interventions spanning across agricultural practices, VSLA, business development and management, cash-based interventions and ALIGHTs safe riders Support the Livelihood Officer with the processes by which livelihoods groups develop viable business, savings, and expenses plans, with heavy focus on integration of livelihoods activities in local markets, both refugee and host community, and, where relevant, regional markets Support the Livelihood Officer in ensuring the consultation with community-level leadership, that livelihoods activities slated for implementation are culturally relevant, effective, and reflective of community-level planning for livelihoods promotion Monitoring, reporting and evaluating livelihood interventions: Support the monitoring and evaluation of livelihoods activities planning and implementation, with a focus on identification of potential markets for livelihoods beneficiaries and the regular and active monitoring of livelihoods group income level, savings plans, and reinvestment planning to promote business growth and increased income for beneficiaries Support in the development and implementation of livelihoods assessments, rapid surveys, and provide insight on opportunities for livelihoods promotion which reflect local capacities, resources, and aspirations of beneficiaries Reporting and Accountability Assist the Livelihoods Officer by monitoring the use of materials provided to livelihoods beneficiaries, and ensure via frequent site visits the proper application of livelihoods implements by beneficiaries Support the Livelihoods Officer in the quality monthly progress reports for submission to donors and stakeholders, with an emphasis on concise quality reporting of both challenges and achievements within the sector works Support the Livelihoods Officer in ensuring that financial team requirements for livelihood activities are completed as required. Livelihood Partnerships Support the Livelihoods Officer in livelihoods proposal development and partnership establishment/maintenance Support the Livelihoods Officer in participating in livelihoods working groups / coordination groups at settlement level Perform any other professional duties assigned, as required. Qualifications, Skills and Experience: The applicant must hold a Bachelors degree in Community or Rural Development, Agricultural Development, Business, or related field. Three (3) years of working experience in Livelihoods programming. Specific experience in micro-enterprise development, market-oriented livelihoods promotion, and other innovative approached to humanitarian livelihoods service delivery is an advantage Experience in project report writing. Knowledge in tracking relevant livelihoods indicators in real time to enable achievement of livelihoods activities Experience working with the forming and monitoring of livelihoods groups and activities is essential; Knowledge of VSLA, SACCO, and other savings and loan models is essential; Must be fluent in written and spoken English. Language skills of populations ALIGHT serves and surrounding host communities is extremely beneficial (e.g. Kiswahili, Luo, Nuer, Kinyarwanda, Somali, etc.) Must have Motorbike riding experience with a valid permit. Strong analytical, written and verbal skills; High level of integrity, accountability and responsibility; Good interpersonal skills and ability and inclination to work in / with teams; High level of self-drive, discipline and desire to achieve; Ability to work with minimal supervision, hit deadlines, and produce high-quality outputs. How to Apply: All suitably qualified and interested applicants should apply online at the link below. Click Here Deadline: 16th August 2022 For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com or find us on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline An older subway car, with spots of rust on the exterior shell, is a parked with lights on at the Orange Line's Wellington Station train yard, Wednesday, July 13, 2022, in Medford, Mass. Transit officials are taking what they are describing as the unprecedented step of shuttering one of Bostons four major subway lines for 30 days to allow for track and signal work. The month-long shutdown starting Aug. 19, is the latest in a string of frustrating developments for Boston-area commuters who have suffered through fires, stalled trains and subway slowdowns. This photo provided by Irina Danilova shows Donovan Johnson at Boston Common in Boston, Nov. 17, 2019. A civil rights lawsuit filed Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022, says Johnson was minutes away from his home after leaving his job at a hospital in February 2021 when an officer who was chasing a white suspect ran up to Johnson, drew his gun and threw him to the snow-covered ground face first. Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, of West Springfield, Mass., charged with negligent homicide in the deaths of seven motorcycle club members in a 2019 crash, raises his hand while departing a courtroom at Coos County Superior Court in Lancaster, N.H., Tuesday, July 26, 2022. Zhukovskyy has pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of negligent homicide, manslaughter, reckless conduct and driving under the influence in the June 21, 2019, crash. Rolls-Royces incoming boss faces a long list of challenges as the aircraft engine maker tries to bounce back from its painful experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Tufan Erginbilgic, a former BP executive, is due to take over running of the FTSE 100 group in January with an initial pay packet worth almost 9million. He will replace Warren East, who yesterday gave his final results announcement as boss of the jet-engine maker. Challenge: Tufan Erginbilgic joins jet-engine maker Rolls Royce in January with an initial pay packet worth almost 9m His stint at the top has been dominated by crisis-fighting, first with engine problems and then with the pandemic. The half-year results were no different, missing analyst expectations, with the company reporting a profit of 125million, down from 307million a year ago. Rolls has been hard hit by the slow recovery of the airline industry from the pandemic as international restrictions on travel have remained in some regions. East, 60, said that in the first half of 2022 Rolls-Royce engines flew about 60 per cent of the hours they flew in 2019, the year before the pandemic, and were now at about 65 per cent of that level. Covid-19 lockdowns in China had been the key retardant for the Rolls-Royce fleet of engines, East said. The company expects flying hours to recover to pre-pandemic levels by 2024. The only silver lining in the results was the groups cash burn, which dropped to 68million in the first half from nearly 1.2billion last year. East remained defiant saying he was very pleased with the progress the company had made adding that he would leave Rolls-Royce a leaner, agile organisation with a more modern culture. Perhaps most worryingly for his successor, Rolls also admitted it was having problems hiring experienced, highly-skilled engineers. Rolls Royce has been hard hit by the slow recovery of the airline industry from the pandemic as international restrictions on travel have remained in some regions Andy Chambers, industrials analyst at research house Edison, said one factor behind Rollss struggles to recruit could be the pandemic-induced downturn in the airline industry, which may have made a long-term career in the sector seem less attractive than other areas such as electric vehicles. He added that Rolls was also dealing with international competition and work permits and visas could turn off potential hires. But these difficulties do not seem to be shared by rivals with BAE Systems reported last week to be planning to hire 1,000 engineers over the next 12 months in a push to help build the supersonic Tempest fighter jet. AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould said: The incoming chief executive needs to find a more dramatic fix for a now rather broken business. Ukraine said Russia had started creating a military strike force aimed at President Volodymyr Zelenskiys hometown of Kryvyi Rih, while NATO moved closer to its most significant expansion in decades as the alliance responds to the invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. Senate and the Italian parliament both approved on Wednesday Finland and Swedens accession to the 30-member North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Under NATO membership, which must be ratified by all 30 member states, an attack on one member is an attack against all. This historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan U.S. commitment to NATO, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement. Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, has repeatedly warned Finland and Sweden against joining NATO. NATOs 30 allies signed the accession protocol last month, allowing them to join the U.S.-led nuclear-armed alliance once its members ratify the decision. Ratification could take up to a year. Ukraine on Wednesday dismissed suggestions by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that Russia wanted a negotiated solution to the war and said any dialogue would be contingent on a Russian ceasefire and withdrawal of its troops. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Thursday that Ukraine was seeking an opportunity to speak directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help end the war. Its a very powerful state. Its a powerful economy So (it) can politically, economically influence Russia. And China is (also a) permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, Zelenskiy told SCMP in an interview. Chinas foreign ministry did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment. NEW OFFENSIVE On the battleground, Russian forces were engaged in considerable military activity, firing from tanks, barrel and rocket artillery in several parts of Ukraine, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said on Thursday. Earlier, Ukraine said Russia had begun creating a strike group in the Kryvyi Rih direction and that it could be preparing new offensive operations in southern Ukraine. The steel-producing city of Kryvyi Rih where Zelenskiy grew up lies around 50 km (30 miles) from the southern frontline. Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, said on the Telegram app that three civilians had been killed in Bakhmut, Maryinka and Shevchenko and five wounded in the past 24 hours. Governors of the Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk regions reported that their regions had been shelled overnight, and civilian infrastructure, houses had been damaged. The idea is to put military pressure on us in Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk over the next few weeksWhat is happening in the east is not what will determine the outcome of the war, Ukrainian Presidential Adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in an interview appearing on YouTube. The whole point of the Russian offensive in the east is to force Ukraine to divert troops from the area that is truly a danger Zaporizhzhia, Arestovych added. Mayor Yevhen Yevtushenko of Nikopol, west of Zaporizhzhia in central Ukraine, said his city had been shelled overnight. Russia in March was accused of firing shells dangerously close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, as its forces took it over in the first weeks of the invasion. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has accused Moscow of using Ukraines largest nuclear power plant as a nuclear shield in attacks on Ukrainian forces. Reuters was not able to verify battlefield reports. Russia denies it targets civilians, but many towns and cities have been destroyed and thousands killed in the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two. Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russian forces of war crimes. FOOD CRISIS Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in what he calls a special military operation to rid the country of fascists. Ukraine and the West said Putin launched an unprovoked imperial land grab. The war has sparked a global energy and food crisis. Russia and Ukraine produce about one third of global wheat and Russia is the main energy supplier to Europe. An agreement between Moscow and Kyiv, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, to allow safe passage of grain ships from Ukraine has been hailed as a rare diplomatic success in the war. The first ship carrying Ukrainian grain since the war started passed through the Bosphorus Strait on Wednesday. The vessel, Razoni, was carrying 26,527 tonnes of corn to the Lebanese port of Tripoli. Zelenskiy said Ukraine needed to export a minimum 10 million tonnes of grain to urgently help bring down its budget deficit which was running at $5 billion a month. A senior Turkish official said three ships could leave Ukrainian ports daily following the Razonis departure, while Ukraines infrastructure minister said 17 more ships had been loaded with agricultural produce and were waiting to set sail. SOURCE: REUTERS This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate SCHODACK Federal investigators from the Department of Labor are probing potential safety hazards at Amazons 1-million-square-foot fulfillment center in the town of Schodack. The probe, first reported by CNBC, focuses on injuries and Amazons record-keeping, as well as the companys use of forklifts that operators use to grab items that can be on shelves up to 30 feet high in the warehouse-style building. They are there all week, Heather Goodall, an employee at the warehouse said. Goodall, who is organizing a union drive there, said she filed a complaint to OSHA about overstuffed bins of inventory that were breaking and posing a hazard of falling and possibly hitting someone. The center handles large items such as vacuums, air fryers, and lawn mowers to name a few things. Goodall said one item, an end table, fell from about 15 feet and almost struck her recently. The investigation is being conducted by the U.S. Department of Labors Occupational Safety and Health Administration. They were referred to the facility by the U.S. Justice Department. OSHA received referrals from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York regarding allegations of safety and health violations at several Amazon facilities. We routinely receive referrals from various federal agencies, law enforcement, advocacy groups and others. Acting on the referrals, OSHA has opened inspections at Amazon workplaces in Colorado, Idaho and New York. Because these are active investigations, we are unable to provide more information at this time, a federal Department of Labor spokesperson said in a prepared statement. Well of course cooperate with OSHA in their investigation, and we believe it will ultimately show that these concerns are unfounded, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement. Goodall said OSHA investigators are interviewing employees and taking pictures. Part of the probe is likely looking at the rapid pace of work required by Amazon warehouse employees, who are reportedly under pressure to process shipping orders to meet the companys goal of fast delivery for consumers. The Schodack fulfillment center opened in September 2020 and is one of several facilities the online retail giant now has in the Capital Region, including smaller warehouses or what the company calls delivery stations. Company officials say they guard against injuries but there have been complaints nationwide over repetitive stress problems due to the fast-paced environment. OSHA is also looking at Amazon facilities in Denver, Colo,. and Boise, Idaho. Additionally, the companys logistics, or delivery trucks, have come under scrutiny for accidents that drivers have been involved in. The Times Union in April found more than 70 motor vehicle lawsuits filed in state Supreme Court in New York against Amazon Logistics, the network of third-party delivery services the company uses for deliveries. Most of the cases were filed in New York City or Long Island. That report came after an Amazon semi-trailer truck crashed on the state Thruway between Exits 24 and 25, killing two. It wasnt clear if the truck was owned by Amazon directly or by one of the third-party freight services the company uses. In addition to the OSHA probe, Amazon has also seen various degrees of union organizing at some of its sites, although just one location, on Staten Island, has voted to organize. Amazon is contesting that vote. Some employees at the Schodack center, known as ALB 1, have also complained of lax COVID protections, and as Goodall said, tumbling bins. Goodall on Wednesday alleged she was denied entry to work. She had been on disability for the past month after she was taken to the hospital from the facility when her blood pressure spiked. Wednesday was supposed to be her first day back at work, she said. rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate ALBANY There's a famous Monty Python bit about the funniest joke in the world, a joke so hilarious that it's immediately deadly to all who hear it. Allied soldiers are taught to tell the joke in German, a language they don't understand, resulting in devastating casualties for the Nazis. Of course, we never hear the joke. We're left to forever wonder about it. I mention that old skit because of THE QUESTION, the one we mortals aren't allowed to hear or read. The question in question was supposed to be asked on last June's Regents exam in U.S. history and government. But the state Department of Education decided to scrap the entire test because THE QUESTION might cause trauma for New York's high school students after the mass shooting in Buffalo. Keep in mind that the test was canceled nine full days before it was set to be administered. And yet it was still deemed too harrowing for students across New York, members of a generation sadly inured to mass shootings, students who had prepared for the test for three years. Wow. That must be some question. We're left to assume that THE QUESTION is a query of immense power, so incisively written that it would cut through teenage indifference and cause New York's students to run from their exam rooms in overwhelming grief. The author, sadly anonymous, probably deserves a Pulitzer or maybe even a Nobel Peace Prize. All of which raises the obvious question that you may at this moment be asking: What is THE QUESTION? That's a good question! Alas, the big question about THE QUESTION is a question that bureaucrats won't answer. Kathleen Moore, who covers education for the Times Union, even filed a Freedom of Information Law request asking questions about THE QUESTION, but the Education Department refused to hand it over. Well, that makes sense. A question with that much power is like a nuclear weapon, carrying an impact so potentially immense that it must not fall into the wrong hands. Only a select few should have access to it. If I were to hear THE QUESTION, I wouldn't be able to finish this column, so overcome would I be. And if I did somehow manage to type it out, despite my anguished wailing, waves of grief would no doubt roll over all who read it. Such a question could hurt the economy. As it spread around the country, it could throw us into a depression. It could ruin the world. No, a question like that is best locked away, never to be seen. It's too dangerous. We can't risk it. Right? Actually, no. The Education Department says it won't release THE QUESTION only because it is likely to show up on a future Regents exam. It wouldn't want to give students who read the news an unfair advantage, you see. Wait, THE QUESTION was so "not appropriate" that it forced the state to entirely cancel last year's exam, and yet administrators are just going to throw the same question out to students in future years? It will be, as the department put it, "returned to the question bank to be considered for future exams"? Yes, that's right, which leads a person to suspect that THE QUESTION isn't quite so powerful a question after all. One possibility is that state education officials believe that New York's tender students are as fragile as blown bubbles, sure to pop at the slightest aggression, and fear that the state's hardened adults, upon hearing THE QUESTION, will mock the decision to cancel the test. (We probably would, actually.) Another possibility is that the state sought to cancel the test for some other reason and decided to use THE QUESTION as a handy excuse. Students were allowed to graduate without it. Whatever the reason, this much is obvious: If THE QUESTION is just another question, lacking any special emotional power, there's obviously no reason the state can't tell us what it is. If it's just another question, it can be easily replaced with yet another question on future exams. Questions, after all, are not hard to come by. Don't you agree? (See what I did there?) But as they continue to stonewall, the state's education officials look like a bunch of supercilious buffoons who don't care about accountability to taxpayers or the teachers, parents and students impacted by the sudden cancellation. How in the world are these people in charge of education? Maybe that's THE QUESTION. cchurchill@timesunion.com 518-454-5442 @chris_churchill A thousand nursing students will have their tuition picked up by the state, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday. The future nurses are winners of the "Nurses for Our Future" scholarship program, part of a state push to boost New York's health care workforce as it still faces shortages two years into the COVID-19 pandemic. The program recruits and retrains nursing and health care professionals to serve as registered nurses, which are in high demand statewide. Winners, who completed an online entry as part of the one-time sweepstakes, will receive tuition to earn an associate or bachelor degree in nursing at a two-year or four-year SUNY or CUNY college or university. "Nurses have always been invaluable to the health care system, but throughout the pandemic, they proved time and time again the lengths they were willing to go to protect New Yorkers and save lives," Hochul said in a statement. "New York is proud of our nurses, and this scholarship will go a long way in strengthening the workforce with individuals who are ready to begin their education and training." The contest was open to current and aspiring nurses in and outside of New York. Scholarship recipients must agree to work as a registered nurse in a high-needs facility in New York for two years upon graduation. During her State of the State address, Hochul announced her goal to grow the state's health care workforce by 20 percent over the next five years. There are currently more than 9,300 openings for registered nurses in New York. "Nurses are the cornerstone of health care and became vital frontline first responders during the COVID-19 pandemic," New York State Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett said. "This scholarship program will ensure New York is equipped with the best and brightest SUNY and CUNY have to offer." According to SUNY Interim Chancellor Deborah F. Stanley, SUNY is expanding nursing training opportunities at its 64 campuses to help meet the need. "Our over 70 nursing programs across the state offer flexibility, top-tier training simulation labs, mentorship, and an open door to rewarding careers in medicine," she said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate SABINAS, Mexico (AP) Efforts to rescue 10 miners trapped in a collapsed and flooded coal mine in northern Mexico intensified Thursday with hundreds of people involved in the operation, authorities said. The collapse occurred after the miners breached a neighboring area filled with water on Wednesday, officials said. Authorities had not reported any contact with the trapped miners since the collapse. The miners are trapped between two 200-foot deep mine shafts more than half flooded with water, Undersecretary of Defense Agustin Radiala Suastegui said Thursday. Rescuers were working to pump water out of the flooded mine. A National Guard plane was expected to arrive Thursday with six special forces scuba divers who could enter the mine when conditions allow. Civil Defense Coordinator Laura Velazquez said that five miners had managed to escape the collapse. Three of them remained hospitalized. Authorities had initially reported nine trapped miners Wednesday, but revised that number to 10 on Thursday. The mine is in Sabinas, about 70 miles southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas. The mine began operations this year, and the local government said it had not received any complaints or reports of previous incidents. More than 24 hours after the collapse, relatives of the trapped miners waited in the shade of a tree outside the mine. Police and soldiers with rifles restricted access to the mine. Alfredo Torres, cousin of one of the trapped miners, said he had been volunteering in the rescue effort since Wednesday. Wearing a plastic helmet and clothes and boots coated in mud, he said they had been using small pumps since the day before to remove water from the flooded shafts, but the water remained high. No one can go in, Torres said. We have to first try to pump out all of the water, get it out, so the miners can go in to rescue their co-workers. He said that so far there had been no contact with the trapped miners. He said he still hoped to find them alive, but recognized that many hours have passed and the water is still very high. A small chapel was set up outside the mine where family members could pray for the miners rescue. Bishop Alonso Garza from the Piedras Negras diocese complained that conditions for miners continued to be bad and called on the government and companies to improve safety. Each time that a tragedy like this happens they say yes and unfortunately now no. In June and July of 2021, cave-ins at two Coahuila mines claimed the lives of nine miners. Mexicos worst mining accident also occurred in Coahuila on Feb. 19, 2006, when an explosion ripped through the Pasta de Conchos mine while 73 miners were inside. Eight were rescued with injuries including serious burns. The rest died and only two of their bodies were recovered. Lopez Obradors administration promised two years ago to recover the remaining 63 bodies, a highly technical endeavor that has still not begun. The Pasta de Conchos Family Organization made up of relatives of those lost in that tragedy said in a statement late Wednesday that the new mining accident shows that the structural dangers that led to the Pasta de Conchos collapse have not been addressed. There is a lack of inspections, complicity with mining companies and little protection for workers. They called on the government to do everything possible to rescue the miners and review mining conditions in the area. __ AP writer Fabiola Sanchez in Mexico City contributed to this report. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A new Capital Region task force has been organized to help low-income families find desperately needed specialty infant formula. Months into the nationwide shortage, it can still be difficult to find particular formulas. It can be frustrating for a parent who then must watch their baby deal with the gastrointestinal results of switching formulas. It can endanger the health of babies with special nutritional needs. And for those who dont have a car or the time to drive from store to store, it can be nearly impossible to find the right formula. And now people are giving up, said Natasha Pernicka, executive director of The Food Pantries for the Capital District. Theyll end up providing their baby with juice or milk or watering down the formula, she said. If you do that for a long period of time, you can impact the development of the baby. CDPHP and MVP officials reached out to the Food Pantries because so many of their members were calling asking for help. Now a task force made up of those three agencies, plus the nonprofits Mom Starts Here, CEO Food Pantry and the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, is trying to locate and distribute the hardest-to-find formulas. To some extent, its a matter of doing the difficult work of searching on behalf of the parent or relative who is caring for the baby. One grandmother contacted the Food Pantries because she was caring for a premature infant who needed special formula. She couldnt find it anywhere. We spent a lot of time calling stores, said spokesman Peter Koniuto. The grandmothers nearest food pantry, in Schenectady County, didnt have it. But a food pantry in rural Rensselaer County had multiple cans. The Food Pantries transported them to her local pantry, where she picked them up. Its the power of numbers, he said. For some formulas, even the food pantries are ordering small shipments. Even the distributors don't have the formula or can't find the formula within a 200 mile radius from my house, said Michelle Ferdinand of Watervliet, whose son needs Enfamil Enfacare Neuropro because he was born six weeks early. Her WIC clinic, funded by a federal grant program that provides nutritional help to mothers and small children, tries to get her the formula, but cant always find it either. I don't drive, so I ask my friends that live in certain faraway areas from me if they can look for the formula for me and I will give them the money for it, she said. Every time I get to my last can my heart aches because I'm worried if we can't find anymore or how my sons health is going to get better during this shortage. Ceeariah Madden of Troy also needs a hard-to-find formula: Neocate Infant DHA/ARA, based on amino acid, because her daughter is allergic to milk and soy. In my search for it, I have purchased from people from Facebook who overprice formula for their gain, I have traveled two hours away to buy it from stores at full price, she said. It is quite ridiculous that it is still going on with no end and no solution from anybody. This is literally the only formula my daughter can take and the only suggestion (from others) is to try something else. But weve literally tried everything. Her daughter is 6 months old. Madden hasnt been able to order the special formula from a store for more than four months, and when she finds it in stock, she cant use her WIC benefits to pay for it. I get WIC, but every store that takes WIC doesnt have the formula, she said. I get WIC because I cant afford to pay for all the formula she needs for a month. It defeats the purpose. She was able to find the $55-per-can formula at Walgreens, but not at one that takes WIC. Only three Walgreens in the Capital Region accept WIC, but Walgreens said it accepts WIC at more than 200 locations in the state and is working to add more. Other chains accept WIC only at certain stores. In Schenectady, CVS has four stores, but only one accepts WIC. Likewise, the Target stores in Rensselaer and Glenville do not accept WIC, but the stores in Colonie, Saratoga Springs and Niskayuna do, according to their website. Walgreens and CVS did not respond immediately to questions about why they don't accept WIC at all locations. The formula task force urges families to take several steps before reaching out to the Food Pantries for help, especially if they have the means to drive to multiple stores. They recommended: Use New York's Find a WIC Store website to locate stores that accept WIC. Then, use www.findmybabyformula.com to select a store and a formula and get texted when the store gets a shipment. Call your doctor or insurance company to see if they have suggestions on supplementing with a different formula. Look at generic alternatives and look for the compares to the nutrition of your brand on label to replace the brand-name formula you have used. Find your local food pantry through www.thefoodpantries.org and call to see if they have the formula. Join collaborative social media groups that have been set up to find formula, such as Capital District Moms Formula Hunt on Facebook. If all that fails, call The Food Pantries for the Capital District food access referral line at (518) 458-1167, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. The supply chain problems that led to the shortage may be nearing an end as far as one company. The Abbott Nutrition facility that had to close due to contamination, and then again because of a flood, reopened July 1 and began producing EleCare, one of its specialty formulas. There's no word yet on when formula will begin to be shipped or when the facility will begin making more types of formula. JamesBrey, Contributor / Getty Images ALBANY Albany County prosecutors said Thursday that Alex Ryan, 27, of Albany pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon, an armed violent felony, in connection with a shooting earlier this year. That plea satisfies the initial charges, which included attempted murder, District Attorney David Soares office said. The initial complaint alleged that on or about May 7 at about 1:35 p.m. near 70 Morton Ave., Ryan shot a victim twice in the upper leg with an illegally possessed handgun. HORICON - A New York City man was killed when the motorcycle he was driving collided with a car on Route 8 in the Warren County town of Horicon, sheriff's deputies said Thursday. At about 5 p.m. Tuesday, deputies were called to the crash involving a 2005 Toyota Sienna driven by a 72-year-old Schenectady man and a 2019 BMW motorcycle driven by Steven B. Schnall, 55 of New York. ROTTERDAM Local government's search for a new home went back to the drawing board Wednesday after a majority of the Town Board voted to reject a controversial lease deal with Via Port Rotterdam to move municipal operations across town to the mall an agreement that has already resulted in what could turn out to be a nonrefundable $1 million down payment. Supervisor Mollie Collins said Thursday that she and two other board members, Joe Mastroianni and Deputy Supervisor Jack Dodson, voted to rescind the lease signed in November before Election Day by the previous town administration. At that time, Democrats held the majority on the five-member body. When we felt that the lease due to no permissive referendum had a legal defect in it, we couldnt move forward with it, Collins said. A permissive referendum, which is unique to New York, enables voters to petition for an authorized resolution to appear on a ballot. The agreement with Via Port, including the $1 million down payment by the town, was struck a month after Collins was elected. Once she took office, the Republican questioned the deal and recently had a cost analysis done by an engineering firm comparing the price to renovate the outmoded police and court facilities and town hall, which are in different locations, versus going forward with moving into the old Kmart space at the West Campbell Road mall. A breakdown of the numbers by Barton &Loguidice last week revealed that it would cost an estimated $9 million to fix up the court and police facilities and $5.4 million for town hall while leasing or buying roughly 52,000 square feet at the mall would come in at around $9.2 million, plus furnishing costs. Collins said Thursday that she, Mastroianni and Dodson also voted against three separate resolutions that she characterized as different options as to the Via Port Mall lease. Councilman Evan Christou, who was part of the board when the now-scrapped deal was struck, said Thursday he had been unable to attend the special meeting because of an issue involving his business. I think we heard very clearly from the residents that, number one, whatever plan we decide to come up with, it has to be well-publicized and put up for permissive referendum," Collins said, "because youre talking about a great deal of money and a major move of their town hall, police department, and court. But right now its not like any of the buildings arent functional." She said some of the options include possibly purchasing town-owned property and building from scratch, or doing the repairs to the current municipal buildings in piecemeal fashion. Collins suggested that The Jefferson School on Princetown Road, which currently houses the police and courts, should be a top priority because it seems to be in worse shape than town hall on Sunrise Boulevard. Collins acknowledged that the uncertainty around the $1 million down payment is a big unknown, but expressed optimism that Rotterdam might be able to work out an agreement with (Via Port representatives) to see what happens to that million dollars. Democrat Samantha Miller-Herrera, who was also on the board when the lease deal was signed last year, abstained on all four resolutions put forward Wednesday. She read a statement at the meeting in which she gave her reasons for opting not to vote. Miller-Herrera said the sum and substance of the statement was that theres no true plan to move forward, and that were risking significant and prolonged litigation over this, and the costs dont make sense to take away, and that the new administrations plan is to build out the existing buildings, which is going to cost more, it does not include the cost of litigation, the cost of losing our deposit on Via Port, and until we have something better, and a plan, I wasnt comfortable on moving forward on four contradictory resolutions." Besides the resolution to void the lease, the other resolutions called for preparing a petition asking Schenectady County to validate the lease, reauthorizing the lease agreement subject to a permissive referendum, and authorizing the supervisor to negotiate a purchase deal with Via Port. Miller-Herrera surmised that Via Port would look to enforce the lease agreement because the propertys been off the market all this time. The board meets again Wednesday. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Rotterdam Police Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Rotterdam Police Show More Show Less 3 of 3 ROTTERDAM - Town police said they are seeking the public's help in identifying an armed robbery suspect who struck the Cumberland Farms convenience store Monday night on Highbridge Road. The robbery occurred at about 9:50 p.m. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate SARATOGA SPRINGS Among the materials unearthed from a time capsule recently discovered in Harlem include documents, newspaper clippings and other items that fill in the gaps of one of World War Is most celebrated units, the Harlem Hellfighters. The box discovered at the Harlem Armory in Manhattan in February is also a widespread celebration of Black culture in the historic Black community, according to officials touting the discovery. The New York State Military Museum in Saratoga Springs revealed the materials on Thursday, painting the discovery as an unexpected trove of what life was like in the neighborhood in the 1920s as well as a celebration of the famed wartime unit. Capital Region residents may recognize the Harlem Hellfighters originally the New York National Guards 15th Infantry but renumbered as the 369th U.S. Infantry upon their arrival in Europe for Albanys hometown hero Pvt. Henry Johnson, who routed a German unit out in front of his units trench line along with his pal, Needham Roberts, killing multiple enemy combatants. Theres unique things here we didnt know existed, Courtney Burns, director of the New York State Military Museum, said. Also discovered were issues of the New York Age, a prominent New York City-based weekly Black newspaper that covered the 369th U.S. Infantrys progress after they touched down in France. Not since the entry of the United States in the World War has such a glowing account of the bravery and daring of the American soldier on the French battle field been received on this side, led an article dated May 25, 1918, 10 days after Johnson and Roberts fended off the Germans including stabbing one in the head up to the hilt with a bolo knife. The Harlem Hellfighters regiment was commanded mostly by white officers and fought as part of a French division, which offered reporters more access than the U.S. military at the time, museum officials said. Workers replacing a deteriorating granite plaque at the Harlem Armory in Manhattan in February discovered the tin box, which was unknown to historians and military personnel because contemporary news accounts at the time of the structures construction in 1923 made no mention of a time capsule. Additional materials include promotional materials for a Harlem Hellfighters film, daily field reports, soldier registers, photographs, a history of the unit even promotional materials for the construction firm that built the hulking structure located on Fifth Avenue between the corner of West 142nd and 143rd streets, Post & McCoy, which also created Ebbets Field. Its a tribute to the accomplishments and advances that the 369th Infantry caused to civil rights in general, Burns said. Officials also interpret the cache as an overall celebration of Black culture in one of the nations most vibrant Black neighborhoods, fueled by the Great Migration into the industrial north following the war, giving birth to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The box was turned over to Burns and state Military Museum staff in May, who carefully sifted through the materials. Initially, they thought itd be packed with war decorations and other accolades. I was surprised it even existed, Burns said. We were literally unfolding stuff as the story was unfolding. It was just incredible to find. Ultimately, the regiment spent 191 days in combat, never retreated and accumulated 170 French Croix de Guerre awards for heroism. The materials will be eventually made available for digital viewing. UNITED NATIONS (AP) The United Nations chief sharply criticized the grotesque greed of oil and gas companies on Wednesday for making record profits from the energy crisis on the back of the worlds poorest people, while destroying our only home. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was immoral that the largest energy companies in the first quarter of the year made combined profits of close to $100 billion. He urged all governments to tax these excessive profits and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times. Guterres urged people everywhere to send a message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home, the planet. The secretary-general spoke at the news conference launching a report by the Global Crisis Response Group he set up to tackle the triple interconnected crises of food, energy and finance which have especially hit countries trying to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and deal with the devastating impact of the war in Ukraine. Guterres told reporters that we are seeing excessive, scandalous profits of the oil and gas industry in a moment in which all of us are losing money because of inflation around 7-8%. And nothing will be more popular than to tax the excessive profits and to distribute that money to the most vulnerable families, he said. The crisis group has already presented recommendations on food and finance and Guterres said he believes we are making some progress in those areas, especially on food. The report released Wednesday focuses on the energy crisis, and the secretary-general said it aims to achieve the equivalent of the grain deal he first proposed to the Russian and Ukrainian presidents to enable Ukrainian grain to be shipped from Russian-blockaded ports on the Black Sea to world markets in desperate need of food supplies. The first ship to leave Ukraine was headed to Lebanon Wednesday after a three-hour inspection in Turkish waters. Guterres said speculators and obstacles to getting grain and fertilizers to global markets during the Ukraine war sent food prices soaring. But since negotiations on the grain deal gained traction, he said, there has been a significant fall and today prices of most foodstuffs and fertilizers are more or less at their pre-war prices. But that doesnt mean that bread in the bakery is at the same price before the war, because these are quotations in wholesale markets, some of them related to futures, he said, and there are a lot of other factors contributing to rising prices including transportation and insurance costs and supply chain disruptions. U.N. trade chief Rebeca Grynspan, who coordinated the crisis group, said wheat prices are down almost 50% from their peak, corn and fertilizer prices have dropped almost 25% in the past month and crude oil is now around $93 a barrel compared to $120 dollars a barrel in June. Only natural gas has bucked the trend and is still higher than a month ago, she told reporters by video from Geneva. Falling prices are good news, Grynspan said, but they have been high for too long and since June forecasts for extreme poverty have risen by 71 million people and forecasts for food insecurity by 47 million. In another key recommendation, the crisis group urges richer developed countries, especially, to conserve energy including by reducing air conditioning and heating use and by promoting public transport and nature-based solutions. Guterres said new technologies including storage for batteries should become public goods, and governments must scale up and diversify supply chains for raw materials and renewable energy technologies. The group also recommends scaling up private and multilateral finance for the green energy transition. And it backed the International Energy Agencys goal of increasing investments in renewable energy by a factor of seven to meet the goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 to help curb man-made climate change. Today, developing countries are spending around $150 billion on clean energy, said Grynspan, the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. They need to spend $1 trillion in investments. SARATOGA SPRINGS Racing fans are reminded Whitney Day on Saturday will have an early post time of 12:35 p.m. with 12 races on the card. Five stakes worth a total of $2.885 million in added money will get underway with the Fasig Tipton Lure going 1 1/16 miles on the Mellon Turf Course for horses that have not won a graded stake this year. Fillies and mares will race a mile and half on the Inner Turf Course in the $250,000, Grade II Glens Falls. The $500,000, Grade I Longines for 3-year-old fillies will be contested as a seven-furlong sprint prior to the two $1 million classics. The $1 million, Grade I Whitney has drawn six entries for the mile and a furlong event. Eleven 3-year-old colts have been entered to run in the $1 million, Grade I Caesars Saratoga Derby Invitational at 1 3/16 miles. Pair of early claims Thursdays card opened with a maiden claiming event for 2-year-old fillies and two of them now have new owners and trainers. The winner, Sicilian Grandma, went from owners Michael Dubb and Michael Caruso to the Flying P Stable and trainer Tom Morley for the claiming price of $50,000. Lady Quinn, who was prominent until the field hit the stretch run, went to My Racehorse Stable and trainer Kelly Breen. November Rein faces Test Breen will ask the New York-bred November Rein to step up into stakes company in the Grade I Test on Saturday. The daughter of Street Boss comes in from an allowance win at Belmont in her latest outing. Racing in the colors of Ron Lombardis Mr. Amore stable, November Rein won last years Seeking the Ante at the Spa. Thunder and lightning put a hold on the post parade for Thursdays seventh race. The eight entrants in the 6 1/2-furlong turf sprint for fillies and mares were all in the paddock when the weather erupted at 4:17 p.m. They were held in the saddling shed until the stewards gave them the OK for Riders up. After the post time was delayed until 4:52, Spicy Marg galloped home the winner for Hall of Fame rider John Velazquez and trainer Wesley Ward. The weather delayed the start of the featured Alydar Stakes from the scheduled 5:05 to 5:23. Clement's dilemma Trainer Christophe Clement is facing a dilemma with the stakes winning City Man. The New York-bred son of Mucho Macho Man breezed a half-mile in 49.26 seconds Sunday on the Oklahoma training track. It was the horses first work since winning the Grade III Forbidden Apple on the second day of the current meet. The choice facing the French-bred trainer is either the $200,000 West Point against state-breds at 1 1/16 miles on the turf on Aug. 26 or the $500,000 Grade I Fourstardave Handicap on Aug. 13. If he decides to get ambitious and try the Fourstardave, City Man could earn Reeves Thoroughbred Racing, Peter Searles and Patty Searles runner a free nomination, a free entry and $25,000 shipping and expense bonus for the Grade I Breeders Cup Mile at Keeneland in November. ALBANY While New York holds itself out as a beacon of reproductive rights, there is a segment of individuals who are sometimes forced to leave the state to get abortions in their second and third trimesters. The Brigid Alliance, a non-profit that assists with travel for later abortion care, has helped 210 individuals leave New York for the procedure, with 25 percent of them seeking out-of-state treatment this year. According to Odile Schalit, the organizations executive director, those individuals could not get treatment in New York because they were pregnant for more than 24 weeks and did not qualify for care under the current law. Non-medical reasons requiring residents to travel out-of-state for care included delays in access due to high cost and distance needed to travel, the age of the pregnant person seeking treatment, personal safety concerns and medical reasons that dont fall under state regulations, such as a delayed notification or awareness of pregnancy. According to state law, abortion is permitted up to 24 gestational weeks; afterward, only if the pregnant person's life is at risk or the fetus is no longer viable. But the number of providers able to perform the procedure after that timeframe is so few that New York residents often still need to travel to places without gestational restrictions, including the District of Columbia, Colorado or New Mexico. Dr. Meera Shah, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, based in Columbia County, said she refers a handful of patients annually for later abortion care to The DuPont Clinic in the District of Columbia. Often, the reasons are because either developmental or genetic abnormalities werent picked up until later in pregnancy, she said. In Shahs opinion, the accessibility issue stems from a lack of training resources given to providers to perform that type of care; she noted that there are only a few health care professionals in the country trained in the specialty practice because most abortions occur in the first trimester rather than the second or third. "A lot of my colleagues are advocating in their respective hospital systems to allow for abortions later in pregnancy, but it can take a while to implement those changes," she said. Danielle Castaldi-Micca, vice president of political and government affairs at The National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund, an advocacy group that builds political power for reproductive freedom, said that legislation hasnt been introduced to eliminate the gestational limit in New York. Castaldi-Micca stated that, too, is stymieing the number of providers that treat abortions later in pregnancy because of the stigma attached to performing the procedure after 24 weeks. "If we're going to have the title of the abortion capital of America then we might as well actually be it," she said, while criticizing the countrys current framework requiring pregnant people to travel to different states for care. "People coming to New York to access care is and should feel like a last resort," she continued. "I don't want any of us to get comfortable or accepting of a place where, of course, you have to travel for abortion care." After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the pivotal court case that guaranteed the right to an abortion nationwide, Gov. Kathy Hochul funneled $35 million into expanding abortion access, as it appeared that New York would see a rise in pregnant people coming to the state for services. The monies went to clinics that offer the procedure and security provisions. An opponent of that decision, Dennis Poust, executive director of New York State Catholic Conference said, "We continue to be dismayed by Gov. Hochuls $35 million giveaway to the abortion industry. One thing New York does not need more of is abortion." Poust added that the organization would like to work with the governors administration to find solutions for mothers who would like to keep their babies and need assistance to do so. So far, nine states have instituted complete abortion bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health. Another four prohibit the procedure after six weeks. The closest anti-abortion state to New York is Ohio. In 2016, Erika Christensen went to Colorado from New York to terminate her pregnancy, after finding out in her third trimester that her baby would not survive outside her body. Before her experience, she said it was easy to think of New York as a "super progressive bastion." Christensen and her husband shelled out thousands of dollars for the care. The procedure can cost as much as $35,000 for out-of-state patients. Shortly after returning from Colorado, she began advocating for the passage of the Reproductive Health Act, codifying Roe v. Wade into state law. She said its frustrating to see the state tout itself as a haven for abortion care when there is a significant strain on services. Out-of-state clinics that perform later abortion care are reporting three to five week waits to access treatment, she added. "If New York really wants to contribute to the national problem, they would commit to keeping every single patient in state," she said. "Because right now hundreds of people are still getting on planes and leaving. And it's just a tremendous expense." One of the key figures in the passage of the Reproductive Health Act, state Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan, who introduced the legislation, said that she doesnt believe the Legislature is "going to be able to go further than we did in the New York state law," meaning that eliminating the 24-week language doesn't appear likely. Still, she said the issue remains a "great concern" for her. "Im very interested in trying to work to make sure that we as a state are providing the broadest array of health care services for reproductive health we can," she said. "If there are health care deserts in certain parts of the state where there are not providers to offer all these services, I want to know about it. And I want to work with the state Department of Health to make sure that we are providing information about where those services are available." ALBANY Gov. Kathy Hochul urged judges to follow the state's updated bail laws that remain under attack from law enforcement officials, many Republicans and also moderate Democrats, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The governor said amendments to the bail statutes that were made in this year's budget were intended to deter the level of burglaries, larcenies and robberies being attributed to repeat offenders who roll in and out of the criminal justice system. "I'm not sure why everybody intentionally ignores this, but people try to make political calculations based on this," Hochul said during a news conference in Manhattan Wednesday. "If they read what we've now given judges to consider, no longer do judges simply consider whether there is a likelihood of a person returning to court." Hochul's comments came ahead of a scheduled news conference by Adams, who, as he has frequently done, critiqued the state's bail laws and blamed them for the high level of crime in New York City. Adams, flanked by law enforcement officials, called for keeping the state's bail laws that were amended in 2019 but continued his push for providing more discretion to judges in handling the pre-trial decisions involving a relatively small number of individuals who are being charged dozens of times with petty crimes. The mayor, a former NYPD captain, is asking for a blanket "dangerousness" standard for judges to consider when setting bail on a defendant. "Her belief that the judges have the tools they need, yes they have tools that they need. They're not using them," Adams said. "They need to use all of their tools, but they need additional tools in the process as well." The "additional tools" Adams referred to in his remarks include the ability of a judge to consider whether a defendant, based on the judge's assessment, poses a risk of danger if they were to be released from custody at an arraignment. "I encourage everybody in the entire ecosystem related to public safety, starting with law enforcement, our district attorneys and judges, to review the bail laws that were enacted in the budget that became effect on May 9," Hochul said. "Every one of those changes gives them the tools they need to work toward our common objective of increasing public safety." Last year, at least half of the rearrests could be attributed to cases in which judges had the ability to set bail, according to a Times Union analysis of the data. After additional revisions to the law passed in a bitter legislative fight this April, judges have a little more ability to consider variables when deciding whether to release someone beyond a defendant's likelihood to return to court. But the law is nuanced. A judge can consider someone's criminal history, a violation of a protection order, prior instances in which they did not show up to court, use or possession of a firearm, and whether they are accused of causing serious harm to someone, but only to determine the release decision within the range of that particular offense. In other words, if an offense allows a judge to set bail, the factors could be used to set a higher bail. If the offense requires the judge to release someone from custody, they could still set conditions such as mandatory participation in a treatment program. State lawmakers this year agreed to add more "qualifying" offenses in which a judge has discretion to set bail for a defendant. The most prominent of those was the ability for a judge to set bail if someone is arrested on a felony or "Class A" misdemeanor charge that involves harm to either another person or to property, like robbing a drug store, and also if that person has an open, similar charge. The intent was to remedy the alleged crimes by repeat offenders the mayor frequently talks about. State law also allows a judge to set bail for someone who "persistently and willfully" has failed to show up to their court date. New York Police Department officials and the mayor, who has become a favorite among conservatives as they point to his desire to remedy crime, cited examples of repeat offenders who are contributing to the city's crime wave. But in many of those cases judges would have had discretion to set bail. He also called for gun crimes to be bail eligible although nearly all firearms offenses already allow a judge to set bail. "We caution the public from falling prey to this endless fear mongering, devoid of facts and ungrounded in reality," the Legal Aid Society said in a statement following the mayor's news conference. The mayor, despite being the main driver for the updated laws this spring, continued his push for revised laws. Last week, he called for a special legislative session to address his concerns about pretrial detention. "This is not an attack on righteous reform. This is an attack on those who are exploiting those laws," said Adams, who is calling for a dangerousness standard that advocates view as a retraction of the reforms intended to reduce racial disparities in the bail system. Republican officials, including Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt and the gubernatorial nominee U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin have also called for a special session of the Legislature to further amend the state's bail laws and implement a dangerousness standard for judges to consider when setting bail. Hochul and legislative leaders, including Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie, have pushed back against that call. Heastie on Wednesday said the mayor has not provided the Assembly with any data to support his claims. "We don't think it is necessary," Heastie had said in a statement last week. "The three types of crimes referenced by the mayor are bail eligible and detention can be sought in Family Court under current law." State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins issued a statement Wednesday also seeking to counter the mayor's remarks. "Everything the mayor cited is something that we have addressed, especially his concerns regarding repeat offenders and gun offenses," Stewart-Cousins said. She added the Senate is "always willing to work with" the mayor as it fights to "ensure New York state remains one of the safest states in the nation." ALBANY Gov. Kathy Hochul and top State Police officials on Thursday said a new unit created last year to pursue firearms trafficking cases is starting to pay dividends and has sharply increased the number of illegal guns being seized. They said gun seizures by the agency had increased more than 100 percent over the same period last year, many of them assault rifles and "ghost" guns self-manufactured firearms that have been banned in New York. The Gun Trafficking Interdiction Unit was funded by $2.5 million in the state budget and includes 14 positions, most of them investigators. State Police Superintendent Kevin P. Bruen said the agency also has transformed the manner in which it handles routine gun possession cases: troopers and investigators are being encouraged to look beyond the arrest they are making and to provide intelligence on potential cases in which trafficking case could be pursued. Bruen said Hochul embraced the plan when they agency presented it to her a year ago after she was sworn in as successor to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. "We are fully committed to slowing the flow of illegal guns into our state, through the commitment of our own resources and collaboration with law enforcement partners at all levels," Bruen said, adding that ghost guns began surging in New York about five years ago. In 2019, the Times Union reported that law enforcement agencies were seeing a proliferation in the untraceable firearms, including assault-style rifles and semiautomatic handguns, and that the weapons were increasingly finding their way into the hands of criminals, or anyone with the minimal skills needed to assemble them. They have been dubbed ghost guns because the self-manufactured weapons have no serial numbers and are unregistered. Their owners often lack the proper state permits or have not undergone the federal background check needed to legally possess them. And in many instances, they are being illegally resold to convicted felons. Many of the weapons being seized by police in the Capital Region are ghost guns. "Weve had one goal: get illegal guns off of our streets. This is the primary driver of crime that is violent," Hochul said. "Many lives will be saved because they will not be in the hands of criminals, who have been terrorizing our communities for far too long. It stops. Were going to get to that point where we can finally say, 'This war is over and we won.'" The superintendent said one of the initial investigations started by the new unit resulted in the seizure of 30 guns, including six assault rifles, seven high-capacity magazines, 12 ghost gun pistols and assorted ghost gun parts. They declined to provide details on who was arrested or where the cases are pending. This year, State Police have seized 795 guns, while all state law enforcement agencies have reported 3,166 gun seizures, up from 2,181 during the same period last year. Joshua Solomon contributed reporting for this story. ALBANY The state this week ratified a five-year contract with the Civil Service Employees Association that will provide 2 percent raises for the first two years of the agreement and 3 percent annually for the remaining three years. Gov. Kathy Hochul's office said the agreement will also provide one-time bonuses of $3,000 and "changes in longevity as a result of changes in the health insurance program that will encourage in-network employee utilization and help control health insurance costs." Hochul's administration had reached a tentative agreement with the union in June. The agreement, which runs through March 2026, was approved by more than 80 percent of the union's roughly 52,000 members in four executive branch bargaining units. "This contract fairly compensates the hard-working men and women of the Civil Service Employees Association who help to deliver critical services to New Yorkers every day," Hochul said in a release. Documents previously released by the governor's office had indicated the deal estimated would cost the state $350 million through the end of March 2023, covering 63,000 workers. It would be retroactive from April 2021. "The passage of this contract demonstrates that CSEA members appreciate that they are valued, and their work is properly recognized by the governor and our employers," CSEA President Mary E. Sullivan said in a statement Thursday. The deal is broken into two parts: $220 million for 53,000 workers in CSEA's collective bargaining unit and $130 million for 10,000 workers outside of the unit, such as management, according to a memo that was released by the governor's office two months ago. Employee salaries for this year will range from about $27,000 to $111,000 per year, according to the program bill that detailed salaries for the range of steps and tiers. The deal for non-union members is only for one year. The hiring rate for non-union members is between $28,000 and $158,000, but it also includes management. The proposed terms also lay out salary ranges for supervisors of correctional facilities, which are substantially higher at correction facilities with at least 400 inmates, $106,000 versus $136,000, as the base pay. Hochul has pledged support for labor unions as part of her gubernatorial campaign. There have been 97 confirmed cases of monkeypox in Ireland, according to the latest figures from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC). This is up from a total of 85 confirmed cases notified to health authorities in the previous week. The number of acute cases of monkeypox in Ireland remains the same as the previous week 10 patients have been admitted to hospital, four of whom were admitted for clinical care, two were admitted for isolation purposes only, and information on the reason for admission for the other four is still awaited. Among all 97 cases notified as of July 30, all patients are male and have a median age of 36. Typical symptoms of #monkeypox include: rash with blisters on face, hands, feet, eyes, mouth, genitals fever headaches muscle aches low energy swollen lymph nodesTalk to a health worker if you are concerned pic.twitter.com/K0HY9Gh2DD World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) May 20, 2022 In 75 cases, the sexual orientation of the person is known, and all self-identify as gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men (gbMSM). For each case, the HPSC said public health professionals are following up those who had close contact with the patient while they were infectious. Public health risk assessments have been undertaken, the HPSC said, and those who were in contact with the cases are being advised on what to do in the event that they become ill. A multi-country outbreak of monkeypox has resulted in more than 25,000 confirmed cases of the disease worldwide, leading the World Health Organisation to declare a public health emergency of international concern in July. It has been recommended that countries with cases of monkeypox should strengthen their public health and clinical responses to stop transmission and engage with affected communities. The vast majority of these cases do not have a travel link to a country where monkeypox has been endemic. Many countries have reported that the cases are predominantly, but not exclusively, in males who self-identify as gbMSM. Last week, the Government accepted a recommendation from the National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) to offer the smallpox vaccine to people who are at high risk of monkeypox infection in Ireland including gay, bisexual men and other men who have sex with men. Social Democrats co-leader and health spokesperson Roisin Shortall said there has been a complete absence of information about when the rollout is to begin. She added: The lack of urgency about addressing what the WHO have called a global health emergency is deeply worrying. We have a vaccine that is effective against monkeypox but communities most at risk have no idea about how they can be inoculated. Ms Shortall said the information gap was causing a huge amount of concern and frustration, and contrasts with fast rollouts in other countries. She said: There have now been 97 confirmed cases of monkeypox in Ireland and that number is bound to increase in the coming days and weeks. The minister must clarify when the vaccination programme, announced last week, will begin. A child in the north Dublin foster care service area was not visited by a social worker for more than three years, a report by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has found. Information provided to HIQA inspectors during an inspection showed that there were at least 63 children overdue a statutory visit, and there were four further cases where it was unclear if they had had an up-to-date visit. Almost all of these cases were held by one office, the report said. Seven cases were escalated to managers during the inspection, as visits were significantly overdue at the time. The report, published on Thursday, also found that governance and management systems in place at the time of inspection had not ensured that children were visited in line with the legal requirements set out in the Child Care Regulations. The report said that the lack of visits to children led to concerns regarding the safeguarding practices for children in foster care at the time of inspection. It said that regular statutory visits to children in care are a basic measure in place to ensure good safeguarding. HIQA also said it provides a critical opportunity for children to talk about any issues they are having in their placement or otherwise, as well as an opportunity for social workers to identify and deal with any concerns. Data provided by the service in advance of the inspection showed there were 422 children in foster care, with 277 placed in general foster care and 145 placed in relative foster care. According to this data there were 287 foster care households managed by the service area. HIQA also said that it became apparent through a review of files that there were significant periods where children in care were not visited in line with statutory requirements. As a result, inspectors looked at the files of 20 children to review the frequency and quality of statutory visits. We have published an inspection report on foster care services in the Child and Family Agency's (Tusla's) Dublin North City service area. Read our statement to find out more: https://t.co/CC2c0sHfCj pic.twitter.com/prqZPfToYH HIQA (@HIQA) August 4, 2022 The frequency of statutory visits to children in their foster homes is prescribed in the regulations and varies according to the length of time a child has been in their placement. Visits to children in their homes had been restricted during Covid-19 and social workers relied on phone and video calls to contact children. However, Covid-19 restrictions did not account for the gaps in statutory visits found by inspectors on the files reviewed. Inspectors were assured these children would be visited as a matter of priority, HIQA said. While the majority of supervision and support visits to foster carers were good quality, systems to oversee visits to foster carers required improvement to ensure more frequent visits. Inspectors also reviewed a sample of 16 foster carer files for supervision and support visits. Regular visits were evident in nine of 16 files. In the remaining seven cases there were insufficient supervision and support visits. Inspectors reviewed 13 files for the quality of supervision and support visits and found that 11 files showed evidence of good quality visits. While efforts to oversee visits to children and foster carers were evident in most staff supervision records, this had not resulted in consistent statutory visits to children in care or supervision and support visits to foster carers. In addition, given the risks identified during the inspection, an urgent compliance plan was issued to the area manager. The area manager assured HIQA that audits would be conducted to ensure that all children in need of a visit would be identified by the service and that the 63 children overdue visits at the time of inspection would be visited by April 22. The manager also told HIQA that a system would be implemented to ensure better oversight of visits to children, that a traffic light system was in place to highlight visits due, and that all outstanding supervision and support visits to foster carers would be completed by April 15. 34992 Right now we want to share the latest in an ongoing debate over Westport security as Kansas City, Missouri stands at 94 homicides and we're entering what is typically the most violent part of the Summer. Previously and following a deadly mass shooting at the Westport Ale House . . . Westport impresario Bill Nigro called out Mayor Q over funding for security personnel siphoned off by payments for "civil rights monitors" to protect against racial discrimination. And then . . . Mayor Q urged more discussion amongst Westport leaders and "community support" for the future of security in the party district. Right now . . . We share the latest retort from Mr. Nigro . . . You know that more security personnel deters crime. Kyle & Kim are afraid of protesting. I am not! Every time someone gets hurt, I will be coming after you to help. You know this isn't fair for Westport. You still haven't answered why Westport is the only one in the country being FORCED to hire civil rights monitors! Do you think this is fair? I'm not sure if you care about the safety of our customers. Bill" ########### Developing . . . Construction on the upcoming addition to the toy train has been an agonizing and expensive process. To wit . . . PROMISES OF STREETCAR ECONOMIC IMPACT OVERLOOK FINANCIAL HARDSHIP SUFFERED BY KANSAS CITY RESIDENTS IN THE PATH OF THE NEW LINE!!! Here are two examples . . . The KCATA hasnt always taken proper steps to improve service for residents who need it most, especially when it comes to adequately communicating drastic changes to riders. This can have severe consequences for workers. I dont like to be late, a rider said. I work so hard at my job for me to lose my job due to the miscommunications that the KCATA has given riders. It makes it really difficult when theyre not on time, or they dont show up, or they are redirected or rerouted. They dont let us know properly. Normally, she can walk about four blocks to catch the Main Max, but she no longer has this option. Because of the streetcar expansion, theyve got the Main Street Max all rerouted. On weekends, her line runs even more infrequently, about every 30 minutes, making any delays more stressful. To avoid these issues, she uses Uber to get home on the weekends. Meanwhile . . . Check this local biz complaint . . . Current construction has contributed to a five to 10 percent loss of business. While she notes the percentage could be worse, lost business is challenging nonetheless while navigating increased food prices and labor costs. "We have 44th Street shut off, we have 43rd in both streets shut off, we have 42nd Street off. It makes it extremely difficult for us to be on this island and trying to serve people," Laura Norris, Ragazza Food & Wine owner said. "This is what it takes. It's very difficult to do deliveries or people that do curbside pick-ups from here." Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . Businesses along Main Street navigate ongoing construction work KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Businesses along Kansas City, Missouri's, Main Street are navigating construction work related to improvements to the city's water system. Infrastructure and transit improvements near 43rd and Main S are part of the final phase of sewer work for the city's Upgrades on Main project . Zero bus fare does not equal easy commutes for Kansas City riders While it is free to ride the bus, only 12.8% of Kansas Citys low-income households are near a transit system. KCATA is working to hire drivers and expand routes. Developing . . . Insiders sent a quick message to our blog community that has implications for the upcoming KCMO election season. First a look at the dox . . . That's Henry Rizzo forming a new campaign committee for his council run in Kansas City's 4th District. Even more interestingly . . . Insiders offer deets about the groundwork this political veteran has already undertaken. "(Henry) Rizzo has always had a lot of support and now it seems his friends & neighbors are ready to back him up again. It makes sense . . . Nobody really likes the current councilman and, at the very least, Henry has always been very responsive to his constituents . . . The other guy doesn't answer calls or even return e-mails." We've heard this statement echoed in recent reports. And here's even more insight . . . "I think your readers are going to be surprised by the endorsements Rizzo picks up. Already I know of a couple of local groups and one very significant membership organization that's going to part ways with the incumbent and shift their resources -- That'll make the 4th a lot more competitive. It's still early but what I've noticed is Rizzo earning surprising support because voters in this part of KC really aren't happy with how things are going right now." We agree that it's early but here's what stands out right now . . . In Kansas City there has been a longstanding hope that social media, e-mail blasts and mobile phones will offer more opportunity, efficiency and optimization for campaigns. We don't know how Henry Rizzo will leverage tech . . . But what we do understand from our lifetime residing & voting in Kansas City is that he's well-known as an enthusiastic campaigner with a vast network of personal contacts across the metro and Missouri . . . Henry Rizzo's campaigns have always utilized an intricate array of connections to community, biz & labor which might still prove more effective than so many other present day election efforts relying on automation to do the difficult work of rallying votes. Developing . . . As promised, we return to the blog for a quick second in order to share some of our reading today on the topics of pop culture, community news and top headlines. Check TKC news gathering . . . Cowtown Garners More Bull . . . KC's professional bull riding team is set to make their debut The Kansas City Outlaws will be in town this weekend at the T-Mobile Center.If you aren't sure who they are, you aren't alone. The Kansas City Outlaws is a pro bull riding team. JoCo Construction Season Oopsie Crews rip roof off wrong Overland Park home to owner's surprise OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - A property owner in Johnson County couldn't believe the surprise he got on Monday morning. A roof repair company was ripping shingles from the top of his home - but he hadn't called for a new roof to be installed. That crew, according to Overland Park police, was at the wrong residence. Local Help For The Troops Former drill instructor led fight for veterans' families impacted by toxic water KANSAS CITY, Mo. - After some political back and forth in Washington D.C., the Pact Act awaits President Joe Biden's signature . The bill is supposed to help veterans affected by burn pits and other toxic chemicals. Another part of the bill also allows for Camp Lejeune families impacted by contaminated water to sue the government for damages. Sunflower State Saves Planet Spring Hill district debuts new solar project aimed to help cut energy costs SPRING HILL, Kan. - One local school district is harnessing the power of the sun to power up its classrooms. Wednesday morning, the Spring Hill School District unveiled its newly constructed solar array. The school district partnered with Evergy and EnergyLink to install a solar array directly behind Spring Hill High School. Summer Conversation Shifts Opinion: What do we talk about after the Aug. 2 election? After weeks of dialogue framed around voting 'yes' or 'no' on a constitutional amendment, are there other discussions worth having about abortion? With Kansas being the first state to weigh in on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Hottie Tease Taunts Sign Of Cross Addison Rae sparks backlash after posing in religious themed bikini Addison Rae sparked backlash after posing in a religious bikini on Instagram. The post, which has since been deleted, showed Addison, 21, wearing a bikini top which read 'Father' and 'Son.' Prez Biden Didn't Convince Saudi Prince 'A slap in the face': Saudis spurn Biden's request to boost oil output President Biden's trip to Saudi Arabia was deemed a failure by analysts after oil-producing states announced that they would boost output by just 100,000 barrels a day starting next month - well short of the amount needed to bring down sky-high prices of gasoline. MAGA Trial Coming Soon Latest subpoenas suggest DOJ probe could be aiming squarely at Trump | CNN Politics "This is probably bad ... for former President Trump." With dry understatement, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the insurrection, summed up on CNN on Wednesday a significant turn in the Department of Justice probe into the mob attack on the US Capitol and the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Single-Issue Voter Strategy Emerges Amid Midterm Red Wave 'Your Bedroom Is on the Ballot:' How Democrats See Abortion Politics After Kansas Aug. 3, 2022, 7:33 p.m. ET "The court practically dared women in this country to go to the ballot box to restore the right to choose," President Biden said by video Wednesday, as he signed an executive order aimed at helping Americans cross state lines for abortions. Info Wars Indeed After Alex Jones' lawyers accidentally leak years of emails, Infowars financial documents are revealed in court Lawyers for Alex Jones appeared to have accidentally sent over the entire contents of the Infowars founder's phone to the lawyers for the plaintiffs in his defamation trial, according to court proceedings Wednesday. Far East Flexes After Speaker Visit Suspected drones over Taiwan, cyber attacks after Pelosi visit TAIPEI, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Suspected drones flew over outlying Taiwanese islands and hackers attacked its defence ministry website, authorities in Taipei said on Thursday, a day after a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi that outraged China. Wayback Sound Endures Goo Goo Dolls' concert at Starlight was a literal thirst trap Goo Goo Dolls. // photo credit facebook.com/googoodolls Goo Goo Dolls with Blue October Starlight Theatre Monday, August 1 I have not kept up with Goo Goo Dolls since I first listened to them religiously in middle school, but I am almost offended at how easily I'm able to find a parking spot at their August 1 concert at Starlight. JoCo Dodges Zeus Lightning strike injures 2 workers in Olathe OLATHE, Kan. - Two people are recovering after a close call at work. Johnson County emergency responders said the two employees were working at a rock quarry near West 167th Street and Switzer Road Wednesday afternoon. Lightning hit a piece of equipment around 12:30 p.m. Slightly Cooler Temps Tomorrow Thursday will be warm with highs in the low 90s Hide Transcript Show Transcript 80S AND LOW 90S AROUND THE METRO. SO RAIN COOL THERE FOR MANY OF US GIVING US THAT BREAK FROM THE HEAT. REMEMBER YESTERDAY WE HIT. DEGREES GOING THROUGH THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS HERE. And this is the OPEN THREAD for right now. Right now we share this roundup of local crime news as another violent Summer weekend looms. Check TKC news gathering . . . Spouse of Olathe Hate Crime Victim Moves On, in Life and Location - Flatland Her beloved "Srinu," her husband for a few blissful years, still visits. Usually it's when she's stressed, overwhelmed with something at work or anxious about selling their home in Olathe and moving across the United States. Sunayana Dumala senses her husband caressing her hair, or the presence of his 6' 2" frame beside her. Johnson County receives 1st payment from opioid lawsuits OLATHE, Kan. - The government of Johnson County, Kansas, received its first payment from a lawsuit over the effects of the opioid pandemic. A payment of $113,560.43 arrived July 8, 2022. The money comes from the McKinsey case. In late 2021, the consulting firm agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit involving almost every U.S. Man sentenced for meth conspiracy near Kansas City elementary school KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A 43-year-old Kansas City man is sentenced to 10 years in prison without parole for making large amounts of crystal meth near George Melcher Elementary School. Ruben Ortiz-Vieyra was also ordered to forfeit over $1 million received through unlawful distribution of methamphetamine. 'They've Gotten Zero Justice Whatsoever': A Former Kansas City Detective is Accused of Sexually Assaulting Black Women, Girls and Treating Some Like Animals. State's Statute of Limitations Stops Them from Suing Two Black women who reportedly were victimized by an abusive and corrupt retired Kansas City detective are prohibited from taking civil action because of state law. According to reports, Roger Golubski, a white man, had a penchant for Black women, and he would use his power as a police officer to sexually exploit them. KC Crime Stoppers: Kennthony Jackson KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - Investigators have asked the public for help in finding a noncompliant sex offender. KC Crime Stoppers stated Wednesday morning Kennthony Jackson is wanted on a Jackson County, Missouri, failure to appear in court warrant for a sex offender registration violation. Autopsy: Family with KC-area ties killed at Iowa park shot, stabbed, strangled IOWA - Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday. Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and "multiple sharp force injuries," while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Independence man convicted of girlfriend's murder INDEPENDENCE, Mo. - A jury convicted an Independence man of killing his girlfriend shortly before Christmas 2020. Jurors found 27-year-old Brandon McDaniel guilty of second-degree murder and armed criminal action in the death of Oriana Starr. Independence police found Starr's body in an apartment near East 36th Street and 40 Highway on Dec. Kansas City police looking for missing woman last seen leaving an appointment Wednesday Police are attempting to locate a woman that hasn't been seen since Wednesday afternoon. Kansas City, Missouri, police say Ashley Woods was last seen on Aug. 3 at 2:30 p.m., leaving an appointment.Investigators say the appointment was in the 4400 block of East 50th Terrace in Kansas City. Independence man found guilty of shooting, killing Oriana Starr in Dec. 2020 KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A Jackson County jury found Brandon McDaniel guilty in a Dec. 2020 fatal shooting of his girlfriend at her apartment in Independence, Missouri. McDaniel's mother called 911 on Dec. 17, 2020, and said her son killed his girlfriend, Oriana Starr the day before , according to a court document. Kansas City Regional Police Academy entrant officers face final, most intense tests before graduation KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The 174th entrant officer class is on the home stretch of training at the Kansas City Regional Police Academy. KSHB 41 News has been following the class throughout training, which began in February. This week, entrant officers are facing their final and most intense tests. Develoing . . . TKC won't pretend to understand this intricacies of agribusiness but, in addition to celebrating the oeuvre of hottie Marissa, we can also spot a politicized news report when we see one. This morning public radio directs their listeners away from the stark reality of worsening food scarcity. Here's a clever premise that doesn't hold up to scrutiny or dire situations suffered by emerging nations: "Farmers can use far less chemical fertilizer which can be expensive and harmful to the environment and maintain high crop yields, according to a new study." By contrast here's another perspective to consider . . . "On Earth, the Marvel supervillain might have achieved his ruinous ends by doing away with artificial fertilizer. Synthetic fertilizers have boosted agricultural productivity so much in the past seven decades or so that half of the people alive today owe their existence to this often-overlooked innovation, which has been described as the greatest of the 20th century. Rising fertilizer prices and supply disruptions resulting from war and other hazards are now threatening the world's agricultural bounty, and with it, food security. Without enough fertilizer, farmers can't grow enough food. The fertilizer shortage is at the heart of various food crises emerging around the world." What's worse is that VOLUNTARY CRACKDOWNS ON FERTILIZER encouraged by environmentalists have sparked additional hardships. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . When it comes to chemical fertilizer - less is more, new study says The findings of a new, long-term academic may lay some farmers' fears to rest: farming regeneratively, or farming in ways that benefits soil, water and air quality, doesn't have to come at the expense of crop yield. Again, a counterpoint is in order . . . Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs W.M. Seneviratne sat watching a mechanised harvester slice through the jade green fields around him in eastern Sri Lanka's Agbopura village one recent morning, aware that this year's harvest would be only a fraction of what he was used to. 'It will be hard to find a farmer left': Sri Lanka reels from rash fertiliser ban riving through the verdant landscape of Rajanganaya, a rural district in north Sri Lanka where the hibiscus flowers pop out of rich green foliage and the mango trees are already weighed down by early fruit, it is hard to imagine this is a community in crisis. Climate change proposals putting American food supply at risk, says dairy farmer A fourth-generation dairy farmer fears that possible climate initiatives could threaten independent farmers and their ability to provide for the U.S. food supply. Several nations have imposed regulations on the agriculture industry, such as limits on nitrogen emissions, which have sparked backlash from farmers in those countries. Developing . . . Kansas City non-profit media betrays bit of bias with a politicized newsie intro . . . It's not that we don't think the list is newsworthy . . . But we've just had more fun calling it a panty raid: "Missourians charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol include an alleged member of the Proud Boys, a husband and wife, and a man who entered the Capitol dressed as George Washington." Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . 23 Missouri residents have been charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Here are their names One year after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol, 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is "in crisis and at risk of failing," according to an NPR/Ipsos poll. Five people died during or after the insurrection, and approximately 140 members of law enforcement suffered injuries. UPDATE: Check the Kansas numbers . . . This MAGA sentiment didn't really garner any traction but it's worth considering tonight as the Missouri politicos seems to be in a bit of a slump. Here's the crux of his argument . . . Sen. Josh Hawley (R - Missouri) was the sole no vote.Hawley telegraphed his vote in a press release on Monday, in which he argued that while the two countries request was entirely understandable given their location and security needs, the United States couldnt afford to come to their defense and also keep an eye on China and other interests in Asia.Hawley said the US needs to do less in Europe (and elsewhere) in order to prioritize China and Asia. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com links . . . Hawley lone 'no' vote as US Senate votes 95-1 to approve Finland, Sweden request to join NATO KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The US Senate voted nearly unanimously Wednesday - 95-1 - in approving a request from Finland and Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sen. Josh Hawley (R - Missouri) was the sole no vote. Hawley is only senator to vote against Finland, Sweden NATO membership Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was the only senator to vote against a resolution on Wednesday backing Finland's and Sweden's entry to NATO. The Senate approved the resolution in a 95-1 vote. One senator, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), voted present. The resolution backs Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Senate ratifies Sweden, Finland bids to join NATO amid Russia's war on Ukraine The United States Senate Wednesday officially approved efforts by Sweden and Finland to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a rebuke to Russia amid its war on Ukraine. The resolution passed 95-1 with Sen. Developing . . . Toronto residents, who meet the provincial criteria for vaccination to prevent monkeypox infection, may now book a vaccine appointment at one of three Toronto Public Health (TPH) clinics. A striking worker from a Pickering casino was struck by a vehicle and injured while picketing at Casino Woodbine on July 31, according to information provided by his union. - Unifor Health Minister Sylvia Jones is directing the regulatory bodies for nurses and doctors to "make every effort as expeditiously as possible" to accredit those trained in other countries. - Joshua Santos/Metroland Kristyn Wong-Tam, featured making an announcement in her previous role as city councillor, spoke Thursday on the need for more support from the provincial government for gender-based violence and sexual assault survivors. - Justin Skinner/Metroland file photo You are going to have to watch what you say on those Whatsapp messages, memes and Blogs afte Since the full-scale invasion began, Russia has committed 26,465 crimes of aggression and war crimes in Ukraine. As the Prosecutor General's Office posted on Telegram, out of the total number, 25,473 crimes relate to violations of the laws and customs of war, 73 plotting, preparing or initiating, and waging war of aggression, 27 propaganda of war, 892 other crimes. Moreover, 12,482 crimes against national security have been recorded. Of them, 8,630 encroachment on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine, 1,512 high treason, 1,739 collaboration, 106 aiding and abetting the aggressor state, 64 sabotage; 431 other crimes. As reported, the prosecutor's office has opened 1,451 criminal proceedings over crimes against children since the beginning of Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine. ol U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Ukraines Minister of Defense Oleksiy Reznikov in a phone conversation discussed Ukraines security assistance needs. This is stated in a press release published on the website of the U.S. Department of Defense, Ukrinform reports. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke with Ukrainian Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov. Secretary Austin again underscored the U.S. commitment to support Ukraines ability to counter Russias war of aggression, as reaffirmed most recently by the announcement of an additional $550 million of U.S. security assistance for Ukraine earlier this week. In addition to discussing Ukraines security assistance needs, Minister Reznikov provided Secretary Austin with an update on the situation on the ground, the document reads. It is noted that the leaders committed to remain in close contact. As Ukrinform reported, on August 1, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a memorandum on the allocation of a new $550 million aid package to Ukraine. iy Russia is likely exploiting the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine, to play on Western fears of a nuclear disaster. Thats according to Ukraines state-owned nuclear operator Energoatom, citing a report by the Institute for the Study of War. Russian forces are likely using Ukraines Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Enerhodar to play on Western fears of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine, likely in an effort to degrade Western will to provide military support to a Ukrainian counteroffensive, the report reads. The experts also noted that Russian forces based around the NPP have attacked Ukrainian positions in Nikopol and elsewhere in recent weeks, intentionally putting Ukraine in a difficult position either Ukraine returns fire, risking international condemnation and a nuclear incident (which Ukrainian forces are unlikely to do), or Ukraine allows Russian forces to continue firing on Ukrainian positions from an effective safe zone. It was earlier reported that the Russian forces deployed heavy military equipment right on the premises of the Zaporizhia NPP. They have long been shelling Nikopol and Marhanets from the NPPs satellite town of Enerhodar. Russian invaders captured the ZNPP on the night of March 4. Photo: Energoatom At the meeting of the Supreme Commander Headquarters on August 4, provision of the necessary weapons to Ukraines defense forces was discussed along with a report on the progress of the general mobilization. Thats according to the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Ukrinform reports. "On August 4, 2022, a meeting of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief HQ was held chaired by President of Ukraine, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. During the meeting, attended by key leaders of the security and defense sector, a number of urgent security issues were discussed," the statement reads. The first item on the agenda was the issue of providing the Defense Forces with the necessary weapons and military equipment. The report was also heard on the state of implementation of the HQs decisions, adopted at previous meetings, emphasizing personal responsibility of security and defense chiefs for their fulfillment. The progress in implementing the Combined Territorial Defense Plan was discussed, and a report on the progress of general mobilization was heard. Relevant decisions were made regarding all the issues put up on the agenda. Weapons, military equipment, mobilization: Zelensky convenes Supreme Commander HQ Thats according to the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Ukrinform reports. "On August 4, 2022, a meeting of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief HQ was held chaired by President of Ukraine, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. During the meeting, attended by key leaders of the security and defense sector, a number of urgent security issues were discussed," the statement reads. The first item on the agenda was the issue of providing the Defense Forces with the necessary weapons and military equipment. The report was also heard on the state of implementation of the HQs decisions, adopted at previous meetings, emphasizing personal responsibility of security and defense chiefs for their fulfillment. The progress in implementing the Combined Territorial Defense Plan was discussed, and a report on the progress of general mobilization was heard. Relevant decisions were made regarding all the issues put up on the agenda. Photo: Ukrainian President's Office Canada will resume the UNIFIER military training mission by sending military trainers to Britain to help teach Ukrainian soldiers. Canadas Minister of Defense Anita Anand stated at a press conference in Toronto, according to an Ukrinform correspondent. We are fulfilling our promise to resume large-scale training under Operation Unifier, she said. According to Anand, up to 225 Canadian military members will go to the U.K. to train new Ukrainian military recruits. The first group consisting of 90 military members will leave for the UK next week. The Canadian Ministry of Defense clarified that the initial duration of the mission is up to four months, but it can be extended if necessary. The first Canadian-led courses will take place at a military base located in South East England, and they will teach a flexible curriculum focused on individual skills required for front-line combat, including weapons handling, battlefield first aid, fieldcraft, patrol tactics and the Law of Armed Conflict, Anand said. At the end of January, Canada announced a three-year extension and significant expansion of its UNIFIER military training mission in Ukraine, but with the start of a full-scale Russian invasion, all Canadian instructors left the territory of Ukraine. As reported, the United Kingdom has offered to train up to 10,000 Ukrainian service members to help in their fight against Russian invaders. iy The Japanese government has announced another aid package for Ukraine, which includes vans and drones. The press service of the Japanese Ministry of Defense said this in a statement on Thursday, Ukrinform reports. "In response to a request from the Ukrainian side, we will provide new civilian vehicles (vans) to the Ukrainian government. We will also hand over additional small drones," the statement said. Earlier, the Ministry of Defense and the Self-Defense Forces of Japan provided body armor, helmets, protective masks, protective clothing, small drones, etc. to Ukraine. "The Ministry of Defense and the Self-Defense Forces will continue to provide as much support as possible to Ukraine," the statement said. Ukraine will launch a large-scale privatization from September 1, 2022. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced at an online meeting with regional heads, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Government portal. The President of Ukraine set the task to launch privatization from September. For this purpose, the Verkhovna Rada adopted the relevant legislation and the government developed all subordinate regulations. We have to make this process as fast as possible," said the head of the government. At the same time, according to Shmyhal, the state is launching grant programs to motivate businesses and people to create jobs. "Small-scale privatization, especially in regions where people in villages and towns know about facilities remaining idle for years or inefficiently used, is intended to provide an opportunity to buy these premises for a fair price and start work," the prime minister emphasized. "Small-scale privatization, especially in regions where people in villages and towns know about facilities that have been standing idle for years and are inefficiently used, is intended to provide an opportunity to buy these premises for a fair price and start work," he said. It is noted that privatization will also provide an opportunity to expand production for farmers. The Ministry of Economy reported that in early September, according to the schedule, auctions will be announced for elevator capacities and bread processing factories. Market operators who see capacity shortages will be able to participate in these tenders. As reported, privatization procedures in Ukraine will now last 25 days instead of 100, and relevant documents can be signed online. On July 28, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law designed to accelerate privatization processes during martial law. In addition, the Verkhovna Rada excluded a number of state-owned enterprises from the list prohibited for privatization. iy Russian society is saturated with anti-Semitism, and now with the closure of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sohnut, which disallowed further repatriation of Jews to Israel, there is a risk of a repeat of the Holocaust. Thats according to Petras Austrevicius, Member of the European Parliament from Lithuania, who spoke with Guildhall, Ukrinform reports. This interdiction of the Jewish Agency is unprecedented and absolutely impertinent. I suppose that it is a result of the Russian governments fear to lose more and more highly qualified citizens. The Jewish agencys main goal is helping Jews in the diaspora to emigrate to the state of Israel; and since the 24th of February, among Russian Jews, the number of those considering emigration to Israel has undoubtedly risen, MEP said. AfD is the only German party that has always supported the state of Israel in its fight against terror and delegitimization. I regard this attack on the free decision of Russian Jews whether they want to emigrate to the Jewish state or not, as deeply antisemitic, as well as Mr Lavrovs insinuations about Hitler being a Jews. If Israel will decide now to increase its support for Ukraine this wont be neither surprising nor convictable in my opinion, added Austrevicius. Earlier, MEP Michael Gahler (Germany), commenting on the process of liquidation of Sohnut in Russia, said that anti-Semitism has always been inherent in Russia, and referred to the Russian government as fascist. It should be recalled that tensions in relations between Russia and Israel arose in connection with the decision of the Russian Ministry of Justice to file a claim with a court to ban local operations of the Jewish Agency Sohnut. The organization has offices in nine cities across the Russian Federation, employing several Israeli emissaries and 100 staffers who are Russian citizens. The agency noted that the legal settlement of the issue is impossible, therefore, they plan to relocate the office to Israel. Applications are now being processed online. The decision to ban the organization is believed to be due to Israel's position on Ukraine. Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid instructed the country's Foreign Ministry to draft a number of political measures to be taken against the Russian Federation. They will be set in motion if the Jewish Agency in Russia is liquidated. It also was reported that a number of employees of the Jewish Agency for Israel had been wiretapped by Russian intelligence. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is disappointed by the decision of the court of Tripoli (Lebanon) to lift the seizure of the Syrian vessel Laodicea, which is transporting Ukrainian agricultural products stolen by Russia. Thats according to a statement released on Thursday, Ukrinform reports. "Despite the evidence provided, the court took no account of the position of Ukraines competent authorities," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated. Ukrainian diplomats noted that the decision of the Lebanese court allows the Laodicea, which is under international sanctions due to the illegal export of goods from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, to leave the port of Tripoli without hindrance, carrying stolen Ukrainian flour and barley. Read also: Lebanon seizes Syrian ship carrying stolen Ukrainian grain "The ruling actually encourages Russia to pursue theft in the temporarily occupied south of Ukraine with a sense of impunity. In addition, with such a decision, Lebanon is actually undermining its own food security, pushing Ukraine away as its reliable partner," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed. MFA Ukraine has called on the Lebanese side to cancel the move and take measures to prevent further attempts to use Lebanon to transship stolen Ukrainian grain. The statement notes that Ukraine has always undertaken efforts to support Lebanon's food security, being a top exporter of agricultural products to the country in 2021. Ukrainian food supplies did not stop even after the start of Russia's full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine. After the opening of Ukrainian Black Sea ports, the first grain carrier left Odesa for Lebanon. "Moreover, taking into account the difficult food situation in Lebanon, in coordination with the Ukrainian owners of the illegally exported cargo, the Lebanese side was offered to buy Ukrainian flour and barley at a discounted price," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalled. "Laodicea" (IMO: 9274343 (SY)) is one of three Syrian ships transporting Ukrainian grain stolen by the occupying force. Earlier, Lebanon seized the vessel pending investigation into the origin of the cargo, which may have been stolen by Russian invaders in Ukraine. Ukraines position in potential talks with Russia must include four main points, all of which are related to weapons. Thats according to Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to the chief of the Ukrainian Presidents Office. To talk with RF, you need to have the right negotiating position. It has 4 simple components: 1. Long-range artillery, MLRS and ACTAMS to destroy Russian logistics. 2. Air defense to protect cities. 3. Shock drones the best hunters. 4. Armored vehicles for counter-offensives, Podolyak tweeted on Thursday, August 5. As reported, on July 26, the head of the Russian foreign ministry stated that Moscow had never refused to sit down at the negotiation table with Ukraine, adding that Kyiv has allegedly not responded to such offers. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine considers Moscow's declaration of readiness for talks as a way to hinder a Ukrainian Armys counteroffensive. Ukraine seeks to expand ties with African countries. "We in Ukraine are changing this policy. And we began to change it before the start of a full-scale war on the part of Russia. Even during the war, I appointed a special representative of Ukraine for the Middle East and Africa. We want to expand our ties. It is very important for us. We also strive to find different areas for investment," Volodymyr Zelensky said during an online meeting with African journalists, the press service of the Head of State informs. The President noted that the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine was planning a tour of African countries in the autumn. Zelensky is convinced that in the future Ukraine and African countries will have many joint economic projects. According to him, Ukraine is ready to be a guarantor of food security in African countries On February 24, 2022, Russia launched an unprovoked war against Ukraine. As a result of Russias invasion, Ukrainian ports and the export of more than 20 million tonnes of grain, which were intended, inter alia, to the most vulnerable countries within the framework of the UN World Food Programme, were blocked. ol The government of Spain has approved the allocation of EUR 52.8 million in direct financial assistance to Ukrainians who have obtained temporary protection in this country. This was announced by Deputy Chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada, Olena Kondratiuk, Ukrinform reports with reference to the parliament's website. "This is one of the practical results of my working visit to Spain - high-level meetings in the Spanish parliament and government, acquainting with the activities of centers and conditions of assistance being provided to forced Ukrainian migrants in this country," Kondratiuk said. The funds, in particular, will go to autonomous communities in Spain where Ukrainians live. It is expected that payments of the new package of direct assistance will amount to EUR 400 per month for adults and EUR 100 for minor Ukrainians. The financial assistance will be provided within six months. "Spain has hospitably sheltered more than 137,000 our citizens, which is the fourth highest figure among EU countries. I spoke directly with Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration Jose Luis Escriva about enhancing efforts to provide support to Ukrainian migrants in Spain, the majority of whom are women, children and the elderly," Kondratiuk said. Russias full-scale military aggression against Ukraine started on February 24. Several million Ukrainians were forced to leave their homes to escape the war. iy | By Heidi Aungst A fruit fly genome is not just made up of fruit fly DNA at least for one fruit fly species. New research from the University of Maryland School of Medicines (UMSOM) Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) shows that one fruit fly species contains whole genomes of a kind of bacteria, making this finding the largest bacteria-to-animal transfer of genetic material ever discovered. The new research also sheds light on how this happens. Julie Dunning Hotopp The IGS researchers, led by Julie Dunning Hotopp, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at UMSOM and IGS, used new genetic long-read sequencing technology to show how genes from the bacteria Wolbachia incorporated themselves into the fly genome up to 8,000 years ago. The researchers say their findings show that unlike Darwins finches or Mendels peas, genetic variation isnt always small, incremental, and predictable. Scientist Barbara McClintock first identified jumping genes in the 1940s like those that can move around within or transfer into other species genomes. However, researchers continue to discover their significance in evolution and health. We did not have the technology previously to unequivocally demonstrate these genomes-inside-genomes showing such extensive lateral gene transfer from the bacteria to the fly, explained Dunning Hotopp. We used state-of-the-art long-read genetic sequencing to make this important discovery. The new research has been published in the June issue of Current Biology. In the past, researchers had to break DNA into short pieces to sequence it. Then they needed to assemble them, like a jigsaw puzzle, to look at a gene or section of DNA. Long-read sequencing, however, allows for sequences more than 100,000 DNA letters, turning a million-piece jigsaw puzzle into one made for toddlers. In addition to the long reads, the researchers validated junctions between integrated bacteria genes and the host fruit fly genome. To determine if the bacteria genes were functional and not just DNA fossils, the researchers sequenced the RNA from fruit flies specifically looking for copies of RNA that were created from templates of the inserted bacterial DNA. They showed the bacteria genes were encoded into RNA and were edited and rearranged into newly modified sequences indicating that the genetic material is functional. An analysis of these unique sequences revealed that the bacteria DNA integrated into the fruit fly genome in the last 8,000 years exclusively within chromosome 4 expanding the chromosome size by making up about 20 percent chromosome 4. Whole bacterial genome integration supports a DNA-based rather than an RNA-based mechanism of integration. Dunning Hotopp and colleagues found a full bacterial genome of the common bacteria Wolbachia transferred into the genome of the fruit fly Drosophila ananassae. They also found nearly a complete second genome and much more with almost 10 copies of some bacterial genome regions. There always have been some skeptics about lateral gene transfer, but our research clearly demonstrates for the first time the mechanism of integration of Wolbachia DNA into this fruit flys genome, Dunning Hotopp said. This new research shows basic science at its best, said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, who at the time of this writing was executive vice president for medical affairs, University of Maryland, Baltimore, the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor, and dean of UMSOM. It will make a contribution to our understanding of evolution and may even prove to help us understand how microbes contribute to human health. Wolbachia is an intracellular bacteria that infects numerous types of insects. Wolbachia transmits its genes maternally through female egg cells. Some research has showed that these infections are more mutualistic than parasitic, giving insects advantages, such as resistance to certain viruses. Sequenced just three years before the human genome, fruit flies have long been used in genomic research because of the abundance of common fly-human genetic similarities. In fact, 75 percent of genes causing human disease can also be found in the fruit fly. Authors from IGS, UMSOM, at the time of writing, include Eric S. Tvedte; Mark Gasser; lab research specialist Xuechu Zhao; Luke J. Tallon, executive scientific director, Maryland Genomics; Lisa Sadzewicz, executive director, Maryland Genomics Administration; lab research supervisor Robin E. Bromley; Matthew Chung; John Mattick, postdoc; and Benjamin C. Sparklin. Tvedte is currently affiliated with NCBI at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.; Gasser is currently affiliated with Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Md.; Chung is currently affiliated with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.; and Sparkin is currently affiliated with AstraZeneca, Rockville, Md. This work was supported by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant U19AI110820 and National Institutes of Health grant R01CA206188. August 4 2022 Detailed plans have been drawn up for the delivery of purpose-built student accommodation at Eyre Place, Edinburgh, following a public consultation. Fletcher Joseph Architects with Optimised Environments propose to replace a builders merchant with 142 studio flats and nine townhouses occupying a linear yard extending along Eyre Place Lane. The plan calls for a new 2m wide footway to open up the interior as well as a front access pend below a 'feature facade' fronting Eyre Place with the elongated site split into two development zones. In a statement of design intent, the applicant wrote: "The proposals look to create a sawtooth roofscape, which reflects the diversity of buildings in the local area, and breaks down the massing, avoiding large sections of flat roofs. Where possible, blue/green roofs will be incorporated along with solar panels. "A feature facade will address Eyre Place to continue on the streetscape scape and address the street as this is a major route connecting two local centres..." Massing will step down in height towards a run of townhouses to the rear with the proposed palette combining elements of sandstone, brick and standing seam grey cladding as well as gold-effect cladding to pick out entrance areas. Nairobi, Aug 4 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2022 ) :Raila Amolo Odinga, a veteran Kenyan political leader and one-time prime minister, has long cast himself as an anti-establishment firebrand, despite belonging to one of the country's top political dynasties. But his decision to strike an alliance with his arch-rival, President Uhuru Kenyatta, and secure the ruling party's backing as he vies yet again for the top job in the August 9 elections, risks taking the shine off his brand. The Kenyatta and Odinga families have dominated Kenyan politics since the country won independence from Britain in 1963. Uhuru Kenyatta's father Jomo was the East African nation's first president while his rival Jaramogi Oginga Odinga -- Raila's father -- served as vice president. Now 77, Raila Odinga's early years in politics saw him spend much of his time in prison or in exile as he fought for democracy during the autocratic rule of president Daniel arap Moi. A member of the Luo tribe, he entered parliament in 1992 and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1997, 2007, 2013 and 2017, claiming to have been cheated of victory in the last three elections. The 2007 polls in particular -- which many independent observers also considered deeply flawed -- cast a long shadow over Kenyan politics, unleashing a wave of ethnic violence that pitted tribal groups against each other and cost more than 1,100 lives. Few therefore expected Odinga and Kenyatta to shake hands and draw a line under decades of vitriol in March 2018. Known universally as "the handshake", the pact stunned Odinga's colleagues and supporters, effectively leaving Kenya without an opposition. Sabinas, Mexico, Aug 4 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 5th Aug, 2022 ) :Dozens of rescuers battled Thursday to free 10 workers trapped in a flooded coal mine in northern Mexico, where desperate relatives spent a sleepless night waiting for news. Soldiers, emergency workers and rescue dogs were deployed after the latest disaster to strike Mexico's main coal-producing region in Coahuila state, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said. "What I want with all my soul is that we rescue the miners," he told reporters. "We must not lose faith. We must not lose hope," he added. (@FahadShabbir) Lome, Aug 4 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2022 ) :Day and night, Komlatse Koto watches over the forest near his village in southern Togo, hoping to prevent the diminishing patch of woodland from being turned bit by bit into a treeless clearing. For years, inhabitants of Ando-Kpomey village, around 65 kilometres (40 miles) north of Togo's capital Lome, have anarchically cut down trees for firewood and charcoal. Koto and his fellow watchdogs are doing all they can to end the destruction, warning villagers that by harming the environment they also harm their own livelihoods. "The development committee keeps a close watch," said Koto, who for two years has guarded the forest surrounding his village of around 500 people. Each year, the small West African nation suffers more than 3,500 hectares (9,600 acres) of forest degradation, representing more than five million destroyed trees, the environment ministry says. That very high rate has accelerated in recent years, mostly because firewood is the main energy source for cooking in 90 percent of households. Gas is beyond their reach while other forms of energy are not widespread. Access to cooking gas for many Togolese has worsened since the Russian offensive in Ukraine, which made fuel and gas prices soar. "The situation is very critical. Inside the country, there is practically no forest left," said Sebastien Balouki, director of the NGO Reboisons Vite le Togo (RVT) dedicated to reforestation. "Everything has been destroyed for firewood and charcoal making. We must act quickly." A forest code approved in 2008 provides for prison sentences ranging from one month to two years and fines of 20,000 to 1 million CFA francs (approximately $31 to $1,560) for offences committed. But in Togo, where 60 percent of the rural population live in the greatest poverty, it is difficult to enforce such a law. "The penalties vary according to the extent of the destruction. But the text suffers in its application," said a Togolese environment ministry official, who requested anonymity. Togo is not alone on the continent. Nearly one billion Africans do not have access to a clean source of energy for cooking, according to a report by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation published in 2022. According to the same report, air pollution from wood smoke was also responsible for the premature death of half a million Africans each year. - One billion plants - Togo's government is making efforts. A reforestation operation started on June 1, with the goal of planting least 23 million seedlings by the end of 2022. "The government has finally heard our cries, by decreeing a reforestation campaign," said RVT's Balouki. The longer-term objective is to reach one billion plants by 2030. NGOs and associations, state services and several large companies are mobilising for reforestation operations on open spaces in Lome and other areas in the country. "Our ambition is to achieve 25 percent forest cover," according to the minister of environment and forest resources, Katari Foli-Bazi. "We have all the assets to succeed in this project, and our first strategy is mobilisation," he said. To motivate the population, the government has rewarded in recent weeks the three best re-foresters from all regions of the country. But reforestation is not enough without slowing deforestation, which is difficult when reliance on wood is so great. - Improved stoves - As part of those efforts, authorities have embarked on a campaign to promote improved stoves -- locally-made cookers that are very economical in charcoal consumption. The cookers are made using recycled galvanised sheet metal and ceramics. The government has distributed 1,500 in seven villages including Ando-Kpomey. The goal is to reach 10 more villages by 2025 and 500 by 2050. These stoves, produced locally and whose prices vary between 5,000 and 25,000 CFA francs, seem to have won over the villages where they are used. "Today it is impossible to prohibit the use of charcoal in households: rather, an alternative is needed to reduce the impact of deforestation through the ecological management of the use of charcoal and firewood," Balouki said. "And experience has shown that improved stoves can significantly reduce pressure on trees." In Ando-Kpomey, energy-intensive cookers have already been abandoned, and their remains tossed out of homes are still visible here and there. Rebecca Agbogla now prepares meals on her improved stove placed on the ground in front of her hut. Even more than an ecological alternative, for Agbogla, it is above all a source of savings. "I use twice, even three times less charcoal in one week than our terracotta cooker," she said. (@ChaudhryMAli88) In line with the instruction of the federal government, Balochistan is all set to observe the Youm-e-Istehsal flaying the Indian government move of revoking special status of the disputed Indian Illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir QUETTA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2022 ) :In line with the instruction of the Federal government, Balochistan is all set to observe the Youm-e-Istehsal flaying the Indian government move of revoking special status of the disputed Indian Illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir. "Youm-e-Istehsal will be observed throughout the city, to condemn the illegal, immoral, and inhuman action of the 5th August, 2019 by Modi-led Indian government," said administrator Metropolitan Corporation Quetta on Thursday. Talking to APP here, Administrator said the hundreds of banners inscribed with slogans against Indian move had been displayed across the city. The purpose of this activity is to apprise the world about the Indian illegal action and atrocities being committed in the disputed land of Illegally Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. On August 5, 2019, the Fascist Modi government struck down Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution. The illegal move of the government deprived Kashmir of its special status. "Metropolitan Corporation Quetta, with different other activities including rallies, demonstrations will mark the 3rd anniversary of the bleak August 05, 2019 day as 'Kashmir Siege Day'. Administrator hoped that the civilized protest by the peaceful Pakistani people will help disseminate a clear message to the world that India committed sheer human rights violation in IIOJK. "Our good-will gesture would also send a message to our Kashmiri brethren that the people of Pakistan would always stand with them in their just struggle for right to independence and right to self determination," he maintained. ISLAMABAD, Aug 4 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2022 ) :Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari met his Singaporean counterpart, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, on the sidelines of the 29th Association of the South Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum Ministerial Meeting in Phnom Penh on Thursday. The two Foreign Ministers reviewed the state of Pakistan-Singapore bilateral relations and agreed to enhance bilateral dialogue and cooperation. They also exchanged views on the global and regional issues of mutual interest, a press release issued here by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan discussed the potential for bilateral trade and economic cooperation between the two countries. Foreign Minister Zardari expressed admiration for Singapore's development model and the lessons it offered to developing countries including Pakistan. He emphasized the importance accorded by Pakistan to its relations with Singapore, which is a key partner in ASEAN Regional Forum. He also expressed Pakistan's keen desire to enhance its collaboration with ASEAN. Noting the importance of regular high-level exchanges between the two countries, the two Foreign Ministers agreed to remain in close contact to maintain the momentum in bilateral relations. Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari met his Vietnamese counterpart, Bu`i Thanh Son, on the sidelines of the 29th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum Foreign Ministers meeting in Phnom Penh on Thursday ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2022 ) :Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari met his Vietnamese counterpart, Bu`i Thanh Son, on the sidelines of the 29th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum Foreign Ministers meeting in Phnom Penh on Thursday. The two foreign ministers reviewed Pakistan-Vietnam bilateral relations and noted the tradition of cordiality and friendly ties between the two countries. In the backdrop of the 50-year celebrations of bilateral relations, they expressed satisfaction at the steady growth of mutually beneficial cooperation in various sectors, a press release issued here by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The ministers expressed their determination to enhance collaboration in various sectors including trade and investment, tourism, education, public administration and promotion of people-to-people contacts. Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari underscored that Pakistan valued its relations with Vietnam, which is an important partner in ASEAN Regional Forum. He also briefed the Vietnamese Foreign Minister on Pakistan's continued commitment to ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and its relations with ASEAN. The two foreign ministers agreed to enhance high-level exchanges and dialogue between the two countries. Foreign Secretary Sohail Mahmood received ambassador of the Netherlands Wouter Plomp for farewell call here on Thursday and discussed matters related to bilateral ties ISLAMABAD, Aug 4 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2022 ) :Foreign Secretary Sohail Mahmood received ambassador of the Netherlands Wouter Plomp for farewell call here on Thursday and discussed matters related to bilateral ties. The foreign secretary felicitated the ambassador on successful completion of termand appreciated his valuable contribution to strengthening of bilateral relations and underscored Pakistan's commitment to comprehensively upgrade cooperation with the Netherlands in diverse fields. RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Aug, 2022 ) :A metro bus was set ablaze after its engine reportedly overheated and burst into flames here on Thursday at the Rehmanabad metro bus station. The fire originated in the engine, resultantly, setting the whole bus ablaze. According to Rescue-1122, the fire incident occurred at the Murree Road Rehmanabad metro station but the passengers were unharmed. Furthermore, the administration mentioned that they were trying to figure out other causes behind the fire. Kenyan Bishops have appealed to candidates in the forthcoming elections to prepare their supporters for any result successful or unsuccessful. Vatican News. In less than a week, Kenyans will elect a new republican president and 47 governors to head the executive at national and county levels, respectively. Also vying for office are members of the legislature, namely, 47 senators, 290 members of Parliament and 1 450 members of county assemblies. Voting is scheduled for 9 August. Elections cannot be a do-or-die contest Kenyas Bishops, concerned about the possible outbreak of post-electoral violence, hope and pray that political parties and candidates, especially at the presidential level, will play their part in calming supporters, particularly when they lose the election. Kenya has had a history of post-election violence. Dear Kenyans, the election contest cannot be a do-or-die. We know it is not possible for all the candidates to emerge winners. For every elective seat, there will be only one winner. We have learned from the past how those who emerge victorious quickly develop a condescending attitude towards unsuccessful candidates. We urge modesty and respect from those who emerge winners. Please do so with some humility. As our Kenyan athletes have taught us, any worthy winner will first congratulate a worthy unsuccessful competitor. Those who lose should equally concede graciously without causing chaos. Unmeasured celebrations or mayhem do not advance the democratic space we are enjoying, said the Chairman of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Martin Kivuva Musonde. He is the Ordinary of the Archdiocese of Mombasa. Do not give in to voter apathy Archbishop Kivuva reiterated the recent call of Kenyan Bishops urging eligible voters to freely exercise their civic duty and vote for candidates of their choice. We recognise our common aspirations as Kenyans who are here to create the best environment for the development for ourselves. With our vote, we have a say on who takes charge of our development agenda right from the Ward all the way to the National level. To vote is to develop our country. Not only are we encouraging each eligible voter to go out to vote, but also to vote wisely for those who best embrace our aspirations in the most practical way. The risk we warn everyone against is feeling helpless or losing interest in voting for many reasons. Not going to vote gives room for less qualified candidates, said the Mombasa prelate. IEBC should guard the integrity of the vote Archbishop Kivuva also appealed to the electoral body, the IEBC, to do whatever is in its powers to address legitimate concerns that threaten the integrity of the electoral process meant to deliver the will of Kenyans at the ballot. Police fire tear gas against protesters near the UN's headquarters in Goma (AFP or licensors) The Bishops of the Democratic Republic of Congo voice their concern after protests against the UN peacekeeping force left three dozen people dead in the east of the African nation. By Christine Kinghombe and Evariste Citeya The Congolese government says that 36 people died and 170 others were injured in the wake of protests against the United Nations mission in eastern DRC. In response, the Catholic Bishops of the Democratic Republic of Congo expressed their understanding of peoples anger, but said that violence is never tolerable. In a statement signed by the president of the DRC Bishops Conference (CENCO), Archbishop Marcel Utembi Tapa, the Bishops called on people to demonstrate peacefully. The Bishops say they are closely following the unrest with regret and sadness, while noting the anger people feel in the face of the limitations of the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). The UN force in Congo has around 16,000 troops, but has failed to stabilize the insecurity in the countrys east, which has raged for over 20 years. Call for peaceful protests In accordance with the laws of the country, the Congolese Bishops invited citizens to avoid violence and looting, which they said will only perpetuate the evil and suffering of the people. Protesting is the right of every citizen by international law and the constitution of the DR Congo. The Bishops also called for an investigation into last weeks unrest, and offered their condolences to grieving families, entrusting those who died to Divine Mercy. Message for a return to peace In order to maintain peace, the Congolese Bishops recommended that politicians and community leaders refrain from speech that could lead to hatred and violence. They encouraged the government to engage in dialogue with MONUSCO and representatives of civil society, in order to re-establish the conditions for a return to peace. Roots of the demonstrations Following the protests, the Congolese government has asked the spokesman of the UN peacekeeping mission, Mathias Gillmann, to leave the country. The government says he made indelicate and inappropriate remarks implying that MONUSCO lacked the military means to deal with the rebel movement, M23, which lies at the root of the current tension in the east of the country. These most recent protests against the UN mission in DR Congo began on 25 July, and have intensified in several areas of the east of the country. Demonstrators have spoken out against the ineffectiveness of the UN force in dealing with national and international armed groups that have been operating in these areas for more than two decades. The head of the Chaldean Church expresses concerns over the political deadlock that has kept Iraq without an elected government for nearly 10 months, as rival demonstrations continue in the capital Baghdad. By Lisa Zengarini As tensions continue to mount in Iraq over the failure to form a government after nearly ten months of post-election deadlock, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako of Baghdad has joined outgoing Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi and other Iraqi leaders in calling for a national dialogue. The head of the Chaldean Church has warned that the country is on the brink of what he called a tsunami. Rival demonstrations in Baghdad Iraq has been without a new elected government since the election on 10 October 2021, which were won by the Sadrist Movement led by the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Unrest has been running high since the populist leader withdrew all his lawmakers from parliament following his failed attempt to form a government that excluded the rival Shiite Coordination Framework, which gathers parties and militias mostly aligned with Iran. Since then al-Sadr has exerted political pressure through his supporters preventing his rivals, including former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, from forming an alternative government. Tensions soared last week when thousands of al-Sadrs followers stormed Baghdads fortified Green Zone, which houses government buildings and foreign missions, and took over the parliament building in response to attempts by his Shiite rivals to form a government with premiership candidates he opposed. Pro-Iranian Shiite groups organized counter-demonstrations nearby. On Wednesday, in a televised address from Najaf, al-Sadr called on his supporters to continue their sit-in inside the parliament until his demands, which include dissolution of parliament and early elections, are met. Read also 21/12/2021 Cardinal Sako issues Christmas message calling for hope Amid post-electoral tensions, Patriarch Sako encourages Iraqi Christians to focus on hope and the Chaldean Church celebrates a national day of prayer for Iraq . Sako: the situation is frightening As the confrontation continues, Patriarch Sako has urged all political parties to establish a national consultation table, warning that the ongoing political deadlock will have dire consequences for everybody. In an appeal released from his summer residence in Ankawa, a suburb of Erbil, the Patriarch remarked that the situation is white-hot and frightening, and that no more delays can be tolerated. Political leaders, and also religious authorities, must remedy the situation, before a Tsunami sweeps us all away, he said. Failure of the quota system Cardinal Sako further pointed to the urgent need to remove the root structural causes of the continuing chaos in the country and, above all, to recognize the failure of the political system established in 2003, after the United States-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussei, by which power is distributed on an ethnic-sectarian basis. The quota system requires the Head of State to be chosen from among Kurdish political representatives, while the President of Parliament must be a Sunni and the Premier must be Shiite. It is blamed by many Iraqis for the endemic corruption and dysfunction that has prevented any meaningful progress for years, despite Iraq's oil wealth and relative peace after the defeat of the ISIL terrorist group in 2017. The sectarian approach has produced injustice and corruption The sectarian approach and the quota system said the Chaldean Patriarch - have produced "corruption and injustice". According to Cardinal Sako, it is therefore necessary to find "new approaches and new ways" to design an efficient political system, in which institutions are placed at the service of the people, and not of partisan interests. Sister Klara Malinakova, a religious of the Infant Jesus Sisters, reflects on the synodal process in the Czech Republic, saying the Church is called to a deeper response, a "paschal shift" from self-centeredness based on 'I' to an ecclesial we. By Klara Malinakova, IJS The Czech Republic is a highly secular country where three-quarters of the population does not affiliate themselves with any religion and where only some 5% of the 11 million inhabitants attend religious services regularly. In this context, the response to the Synodal process offered a welcome surprise. Despite the scepticism about it among some believers and even priests, a high number of 2,312 synodal groups got involved, in which the participants learned to work together in a synodal way, to listen and to discern where the Holy Spirit was leading them. Though the topics discussed in the groups were not always easy to talk about, we feel hope while looking back on the process so far. Some participants mentioned that for them, in the end, the official output will be less essential compared to what has already happened at their ground level. In their small groups, parishes or other types of communities, they became more alive and aware of their co-responsibility. A gaze into Synod results But lets talk more concretely. It will still take some time to summarise all the diocesan syntheses into the national one. However, we can take a closer look at the diocese of Brno, which is the second biggest diocese with 557 groups involved. The outputs from the groups were analysed using both text analysis and a statistical approach. Based on the preliminary reports from other dioceses, we believe that many of the basic findings could be generalised to the whole country. Our first finding regards the synodal reality in parishes, dioceses and the universal Church, which participants rated as rather below average. Most often they expressed a perceived lack of transparency and openness and a wish that the Church be more understandable, human, better able to accept feedback and attentive to the needs of the world. Almost one third of the groups stressed the importance of communication between the priest and laity. They explained that it is not just theological erudition they expect from their priest, but above all, an ordinary closeness, openness, a listening attitude and the ability to work in partnership. They want to be trusted, involved in decision-making and to use their charisms. Interestingly, in a presence of priests in synodal groups, the topic of passing on the faith and not changing the rules was more often discussed, while the reform of the Church, the celibacy of priests and the question of the ordination of women were raised in their absence. At the same time, groups that perceived that they were already experiencing a good synodal reality in their parish were ten times more likely to say that the same is true about the diocese and four times more likely to view the universal Church in this way. The statistics, then, support the statement of the participants themselves: As our parishes will be, so will the whole Church be. Welcoming Church However, a focus on communion and relationships goes far beyond the relationship between the priest and the laity. In fact, nearly 40% of the groups stressed the importance of brotherhood/sisterhood, concern for each other, respect and tolerance. They called for an accepting Church that would also welcome the marginalised ones and shared a concern that we live in closed bubbles without sufficient contact among ourselves or with the outer world. A statistical analysis showed that this theme appeared evenly across all types of groups (regardless of age, gender, the size of the groups etc.), which demonstrates its universality. The choice of this topic may have been influenced by the synodal proposal itself; however, such a strong response also shows that this theme resonated highly with peoples feelings. Is it possible that this response mirrors some characteristics of our time, that some scientists even call the lonely century? The Eastern-European countries, which include the Czech Republic, are among the ones with the highest prevalence of loneliness in Europe. However, all over the world, research shows a growing sense of loneliness, not only among people on the margins of society, but also among active and productive ones. Can this epidemic of loneliness also be a sign of the times we should listen to and to which we are called to search for a creative answer? Many organisations and even whole countries have already made practical steps to address this issue as does the Church. Still, we are called to an even deeper answer, the paschal transition from I, understood in a self-centred way, to the ecclesial we, as suggested by the International Theological Commission in the document, Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church (No. 107). Not an easy shift of paradigm, if we take these words really seriously! I to we This call for an ecclesial we is also overlapping with the spiritual desires expressed by more than a quarter of the groups who want to pray together more, to celebrate the holy Mass as a real Christian community and to deepen their spiritual life and relationship with God. Thus, it is not a need that can be fulfilled on a human level only but is also a call to be together closer to God, the God, who made us as a community, in Gods own image. There is a desire to experience communion with a God who is not a cold, self-centred I, but is, as a Holy Trinity, a burning mystery of We in its fullness. What can this teach us with regards to a profound experience of human loneliness? Sister of the Infant Jesus Sisters, Czech Republic File photo of a soldier patroling an IDP camp in Burkina Faso (AFP or licensors) At least 34 people died over the weekend in suspected jihadist attacks in northern Burkina Faso. By Francesca Merlo The death toll over from suspected jihadist attacks in northern Burkina Faso over the weekend has risen to 34. According to officials, in the Northwest of the country, 22 people including children were killed late Sunday at Bourasso in Kossi province. "Armed men moved around the village at around 5:00 pm, firing in the air. They came back at night and blindly opened fire on people," a security source said. Another 12 people had been killed in northern Burkina Faso on Saturday, in an attack at Namissiguima in Yatenga province. Three of the dead were members of a civilian militia, the Volunteers for the Defence of the Fatherland (VDP) - an auxiliary force set up in December 2019 to support the army. Long-running insurgency Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world, has been grappling with a Islamist insurgency that swept in from neighbouring Mali in 2015. The campaign, led mainly by groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State group, has claimed thousands of lives and forced some 1.9 million people to flee their homes. More than 40 percent of the country lies outside the control of the government, according to official figures. Burkina Faso underwent a coup in January, when disgruntled colonels ousted elected president Roch Marc Christian Kabore. The new strongman, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, declared security to be his top priority but after a relative lull, attacks resumed, with the loss of hundreds of lives. Show more Show less U.S. Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan and China responds with unprecedented military drills around the island. Welcome to VOA Asia Weekly. I'm Chris Casquejo in Washington. That story just ahead, but first, making headlines. Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen criticized Myanmars executions of opposition figures during an Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting, saying ASEAN may need to rethink its five-point plan to reduce violence in the region. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Myanmar military junta leader Min Aung Hlaing to discuss bilateral issues, including ways to boost tourism between Russia and Myanmar, state-run MRTV reported. The U.S. and Indonesia began two weeks of joint military drills. At least 5,000 troops from 14 countries, including Australia, Japan and South Korea are participating, according to the Indonesian military. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida arrived at the United Nations for the nuclear disarmament conference. He is reportedly the first prime minister from Japan to attend the conference. U.S. President Joe Biden said Monday a U.S. missile strike over the weekend killed one of the world's most wanted terrorists, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The al-Qaida leader was targeted in a drone missile attack in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Sunday. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Taiwans political leaders in the capital, Taipei, as China showed its fury over the visit by conducting military maneuvers in the water and air surrounding the self-ruled island. VOAs Michael Brown reports. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan late Tuesday to meet President Tsai Ing-wen, becoming the highest-ranking American official in 25 years to visit the self-ruled island claimed by China. "I just hope that it's really clear that while China has stood in the way of Taiwan participating and going to certain meetings, that they understand that they will not stand in the way of people coming to Taiwan. That's a show of friendship, of support, but also a source of learning about how we can work together better in collaboration. So, yeah, no, I think that that they made a big fuss because I'm speaker, I guess, I don't know if that was a reason or an excuse because they didn't say anything when the men came. During the visit, Tsai presented Pelosi with a medal for her contributions to the island territory. Speaking later at Parliament, Pelosi said she considered it a great honor to be referred to as a "good friend of Taiwan, adding that she and the congressional delegation that accompanied her came to Taiwan with a specific purpose. "On our visits as Congressional delegations, we have three purposes. One is security, security for our people, global security. Two is economics, to spread as much prosperity as possible. And three is governance. Based on its response, China holds a different interpretation of Pelosi's visit, launching a series of joint military operations around the island Tuesday night in retaliation for what it called a recent major escalation of negative acts by the United States on the Taiwan question, and a serious warning against separatist activities seeking what it called "Taiwan independence". The Biden administration, and Pelosi, say the United States remains committed to the so-called one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. But it remains unclear if the fallout over Pelosi's Taiwan visit will be overshadowed by earlier stops in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, where President Biden said she has already accomplished some important conversations. Michael Brown, VOA News. Visit our website voanews.com for the most up-to-date stories. Youre watching VOA Asia Weekly. All public institutions in Taiwan were hit by cyber attacks prior to the Pelosi visit, digital minister Audrey Tang said. Tang said the Tuesday disruptions on Taiwan government units surpassed 15,000 gigabits, 23 times higher than the previous daily record, with China and Russia believed to be responsible for some of the attacks. Finally on VOA Asia Weekly, K-pop boy band BTS may still be able to perform overseas while serving in the military. South Korea's defense minister made the announcement. The globally recognized stars were allowed to put off their mandatory military service until the age of 30. Thanks for watching VOA Asia Weekly. Im Chris Casquejo. Until next week. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday questioned the role of Russian peacekeepers in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh after a new flare-up left three soldiers dead. Pashinyan's rare criticism of ally Moscow came after tensions escalated on Wednesday in the disputed mountainous region, which is mainly populated by ethnic Armenians. The former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars -- in the 1990s and in 2020 -- over Nagorno-Karabakh. In the aftermath of the latest war, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades. Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce but tensions persist despite the ceasefire agreement. "Questions arise in Armenian society over the Russian peacekeeping operation in Nagorno-Karabakh," Pashinyan told a government meeting. He pointed to "gross, prolonged violations of a ceasefire regime" and "constant physical and psychological terror" of Karabakh residents in the presence of the peacekeepers. Pashinyan said the role of the Russian peacekeeping mission must be "clarified", adding that Armenia expected the contingent to prevent "any attempt to violate the line of contact". The two sides accuse each other of violating the fragile truce. On Wednesday, Baku said it had lost a soldier and the Karabakh army said two of its troops had been killed. The Azeri defense ministry said Karabakh troops targeted its army positions in the district of Lachin, which is under the supervision of the Russian peacekeeping force. The Azeri army later said it conducted an operation dubbed "Revenge" in response and took control of several strategic positions. On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin is hosting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for talks in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. Turkey backed Azerbaijan in the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Foreign ministers from ASEAN's member states and its dialogue partners are arriving in Phnom Penh for a summit likely to focus largely on regional and global crises, including the murderous military regime in Myanmar, Russia's unprovoked war on Ukraine and climate change. Ukraine is expected to draw the spotlight given the planned presence of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the series of meetings, which run from July 29 to August 5. Chheang Vannarith, president of the Asian Vision Institute in Phnom Penh, noted that differing alliances within ASEAN had prevented joint statements from being issued in Russia's war at recent summits. "Tensions and controversy will arise, especially with regard to Russia's presence at the meeting, as the West is opposed to Russia's presence," Chheang Vannarith told VOA Khmer on Friday. "It's hard to reach a consensus because it already has two blocs." Cambodia, as the rotating chair of ASEAN, is tasked with promoting regional and international cooperation on a range of issues, from revitalizing economic activity after the COVID-19 crisis, to ensuring food security, which has also been threatened by Russia's blockade of Ukraine's major ports, and efforts to limit carbon emissions and advance energy security. The first foreign representative arrived on Saturday. Among the key initiatives to bolster regional economic growth is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which came into force at the start of this year after a decade of negotiations, noted Chheang Vannarith. Besides the ASEAN countries, RCEP, the world's largest trade pact includes China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The 10 ASEAN members Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar and the Philippines will be joined by top diplomats from 11 dialogue partners Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has also confirmed his participation in the upcoming meetings in Phnom Penh. Blinken is scheduled to meet with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen while in Phnom Penh from August 3 to 5, and then will travel to the Philippines to meet with new President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. before beginning a tour of Africa. The State Department said Blinken will focus on the need for "ASEAN centrality," and "will also address the COVID-19 pandemic, economic cooperation, the fight against climate change, the crisis in Burma [also known as Myanmar], and Russia's war in Ukraine." Political scientist Em Sovannara in Phnom Penh told VOA Khmer that the crisis in Burma, which began with the military coup in February 2021, could remain a hot topic among the foreign ministers. The regime made global headlines and U.S. condemnation last week when it executed four pro-democracy activists, including a former lawmaker. Myanmar will not attend. Chum Sounry, spokesman for Cambodia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, told VOA Khmer on July 29 that "up to now, we have received only confirmation that no non-political representative from Myanmar to attend the 55th AMM (ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting) and related meetings." Em Sovannara said, "Perhaps the issue of Burma is a necessary point for discussing security issues in the region. Another point could be the issue of the so-called ASEAN position on building and maintaining relations with the United States, as agreed on May 13 at a special meeting with the United States on the United States' soil." He added that other issues, such as China's occupation of islands in the South China Sea, a central issue at past summits, will not be discussed in depth, despite China's territorial claims overlapping with those of other ASEAN member states including Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Indonesia. However, Pou Sothirak, executive director of the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, believes that the Philippines is likely to raise the South China Sea issue as its new president, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr., asserts his administration. "They can raise it again . Anything related to interests and points related to South China that affect their national interests, they can raise," he said. As for the crisis in Burma, Pou Sothirak said it was time for ASEAN to either find a solution to the situation or send it to the United Nations and admit it can't be resolved at the regional level. "I think there should be a summit at the United Nations, which means internationalize the crisis, make it an international issue," said Pou Sothirak, adding that junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing, "seems to ignore, he is very defiant, and he is mocking" other countries. The other 10 ASEAN member states agreed on a five-point consensus to end hostilities in Myanmar last year, but there are few signs that the military-led regime is abiding by the plan, which includes an end of violence and initiating dialogue. Pou Sothirak said Cambodia should also be prepared to respond to unforeseen problems, including U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit of to Taiwan, which has drawn warnings from Beijing that it will damage U.S.-China relations and escalate regional tensions. He added that the attendance of Blinken and Lavrov at the Phnom Penh gathering could also prove to be a logistical challenge. "Are they sitting at the same table?" Pou Sothirak said. "For this case, what position would Cambodia and the entire ASEAN take? This is another sensitive issue that I think will happen during meetings for the next few days." Blinken's itinerary, released over the weekend, did not include bilateral meetings with Wang Yi or Lavrov. VOA Khmer has asked the State Department about other potential bilateral meetings but received no response as of Tuesday. Cambodian Foreign Ministry spokesman Chum Sounry could not confirm whether there could be bilateral talks between Blinken and other delegates. President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order that the White House said would protect access to abortion care, part of the continuing fallout from a June Supreme Court reversal of its landmark 1973 ruling establishing a right to abortion. With each of the 50 states now free to write abortion laws as it sees fit, an early test came Tuesday when voters in the Midwestern state of Kansas voted decisively to keep that state's right to abortion. But several states now outlaw the practice, sometimes even in the case of rape or incest. "This is just extreme," Biden said before signing the order, which aims to help people seeking abortions travel to a state where it remains legal. "You know, even the life of the mother is in question in some case in some states. Republicans in Congress and their extreme MAGA ideology are determined to go even further, talking about nationwide bans that would outlaw abortion in every state, under every circumstance, going after the broader right to privacy as well. But as I said before, this fight is not over. And we saw that last night in Kansas." This was the second abortion-related executive order that Biden had signed since the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. The first executive order, last month, aimed to guarantee access to emergency contraception and abortion medication. Critics said these White House actions were too vague, and too slow. "What we're seeing is the federal government figuring out how they can support abortion patients without violating federal law," said Elizabeth Nash, state policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights. "And so that's why some of this is so piecemeal," she said. "And we're seeing what agencies are going to come up with. And frankly, this is the sort of announcement that we really needed to hear right when Dobbs came down. And so I'm hoping that these agencies can be kick-started into action so that they can catch up. Because we are seeing states ban abortion." On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration is working as fast as it can, but "there's steps and processes that we have to take in order to take actions as big as these. "But look, there has been an urgency from this president from day one when when the Supreme Court made this extreme decision to take away a constitutional right," she said. Thirteen states immediately banned abortion right after the Supreme Court ruling. In the coming months, four states California, Kentucky, Michigan and Vermont will vote on abortion, as Kansas did. Kansans on Tuesday voted in large numbers, and nearly 59% voted against a proposal to amend the state constitution to remove abortion protections. In this respect, the conservative state echoed national trends: A recent Pew poll found that 61% of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Anti-abortion groups decried the Kansas vote and Biden's actions. "Biden and the Democrats make a serious error in assuming Americans nationwide agree with their radical agenda using the full weight of the federal government to impose abortion on demand up to the moment of birth, illegally forcing taxpayers to fund it, 'cracking down' on nonprofits that provide life-affirming alternatives, and threatening to destroy any guardrails of democracy that stand in their way," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. No state allows abortion at birth. Most abortions about 91% of them happen before the 13-week mark, said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Research from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that abortions at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy represent just 1% of all U.S. abortions. Those cases, it said, are often the result of serious health risks to the fetus or the pregnant person. Since the ruling, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have urged Congress to enshrine abortion access into federal law. Harris has spent the past few weeks crisscrossing the country to speak about the issue with legislators, health care providers, faith leaders and others. She said the Biden administration's policy is clear. "We trust the judgment of the women of America to make decisions based on what they know is in their best interests," she said. "We trust the women of America to make those decisions, if she chooses, in consultation with her faith leader, with her physician, with her loved one. But we understand fully the government should not be making that decision for her." Traditional rulers in Cameroon are urging villagers to stop farming near Nigeria's Gashaka-Gumti National Park after a flurry of human-wildlife conflict. Wildlife officials say animals from the park, Nigerias largest, have been crossing the Cameroon border to eat crops. Village chiefs say some farmers responded by killing the protected animals and were arrested by Nigerian rangers. Villagers on Cameroon's northern border with Nigeria say hunger looms in their villages after wildlife destroyed several maize fields, leaving farmers devastated. The villagers say Ngoum, Katarko, Mayo Foorou and Mayo Lelewal, all villages in Banyo, a commercial, farming and cattle ranching district, were hit hardest by the damage. Mohaman Gabdo Yahya is a lawmaker in Cameroons Senate and the traditional ruler of Banyo. Yahya says within the past two months, animals from Nigeria's Gashaka-Gumti National Park have been causing havoc in Cameroonian border villages. He says lions from the park kill and eat cattle and sheep while elephants and primates ravage maize farms. Yahya says he is asking civilians who are disgruntled to be calm because Nigerian rangers harass Cameroonian farmers who fight back and kill wildlife from Nigeria's Gashaka-Gumti National Park. Yahya spoke on Thursday while visiting affected communities in Banyo. He said farmers and cattle ranchers should stop extending farm and ranching lands to fertile areas found in Cameroonian territory around the park. He said the farmers and ranchers should return to areas where they were either farming or ranching before. Cameroon wildlife officials say July was a period of harvest and animals from Nigeria's park were attracted by the yields. Villagers said they killed many animals. Wildlife officials attest that animals were killed, but say they do not know the number. Traditional rulers in Banyo who visited affected villages said Nigerian rangers arrested some Cameroonians for killing animals. Zubairu Haman Gabdo Mohamadou Sambo, the traditional ruler of Gashaka in Nigeria's Taraba state, says Nigerian troops have been assisting rangers to maintain peace around the national park since July. "We have Nigerian army barracks here and we always ensure that our people live in peace and harmony. We always try to foster peaceful coexistence especially at the border community, he said, speaking via a messaging app from Gashaka. This is not the first incident of human-wildlife conflict on the border. In 2020, Cameroons government reported that lions and elephants from Gashaka-Gumti killed seven Cameroonians and destroyed crops. Cameroonian villagers responded by attacking and killing some elephants, according to the West African states ministry of wildlife. The about 6,500 square kilometer Gashaka-Gumti National Park is said to be the largest game reserve in Nigeria. Both Cameroonian and Nigerian wildlife officials say the growing human presence in the park, including poaching, illegal grazing, mining, fishing, farming and logging has led to regular human-wildlife conflicts. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concluded on Wednesday a whirlwind visit to Taiwan that was warmly welcomed by the Taiwanese government and seen by Beijing as a major political provocation and a challenge to Chinas sovereignty. China said punishment for the United States and Taiwan would follow. Heres what Beijing has done so far. On the diplomatic front: Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi condemned Pelosis visit as a violation of the "one China" policy, according to Chinese state media CGTN. He told reporters on the sideline of an ASEAN meeting in Cambodia that those who offend China will be punished. Yet when asked Wednesday in a daily briefing about what punishment was planned, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying responded by asking for some additional patience and confidence. On Tuesday night as Pelosi landed in Taipei, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Feng called in Nicholas Burns, the American ambassador in Beijing, to protest the visit. Chinas state Xinhua News Agency quoted Xie as saying that the United States says one thing, does another, and uses any means to play the Taiwan card. On the military front: Chinas Peoples Liberation Army said it would be conducting live-fire drills Thursday through Sunday on six swaths of sea surrounding Taiwan, according to CGTN. Hua Chunying, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said on Wednesday this was to dialogue with the U.S. and the Taiwan separatist forces in a language they can understand. The large-scale drill could mark a new stage of brinkmanship. A spokesman for Taiwans defense ministry, Major General Sun Li-fang, said Wednesday that Taiwan would resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and national security but would not irrationally escalate conflicts. We prepare for war, but we do not seek it, he said. On the economic front: China has unleashed a slew of retaliatory restrictions aimed at Taiwan. On Wednesday, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced it had suspended natural sand exports to Taiwan, without specifying why. Chinas Xinhua News Agency quoted a ministry spokesperson as saying the suspension was in accordance with relevant laws and regulations. Chinas Taiwan Affairs Office said Wednesday that it would suspend imports of grapefruit, lemons, oranges and other citrus fruits from Taiwan. Chinas General Administration of Customs said the products had been found to contain pests and excessive pesticides residue on multiple occasions. The United States and other countries are warning China not to be provocative following the one-day visit to Taiwan by members of the U.S. Congress, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined his Group of Seven counterparts in issuing a statement Wednesday saying there is no justification for China to use the U.S. House speakers visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. Amid military drills and threats by China to retaliate against the United States for the trip by the lawmakers to Taiwan, which Beijing considers a rogue province, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre avoided specifics in answering reporters queries on how Washington might react. The United States will not seek, it does not want a crisis. We are prepared to manage what Beijing chooses to do. The White House spokesperson added the United States knew that Beijing was going to react in this way. In a statement, Pelosi said the congressional delegations visit to Taipei should be seen as a strong statement that America stands with Taiwan. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi. A just-concluded deal on freeing up Ukrainian grain, along with Russian backing for a new Turkish offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces will be on the agenda. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Friday meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Black Sea resort of Sochi will be the second time the two leaders have met in a month. The meeting comes just after the first ship carrying Ukrainian grain left the Black Sea under a Turkey-U.N.-brokered deal between Kyiv and Moscow. Analyst Ilhan Uzgel of the Duvar news portal said Erdogan's success in brokering the U.N. deal and the Sochi meeting sends a powerful message to Turkey's western allies about the Turkish leader. It helps to ameliorate his troublemaker image internationally and regionally. He is still trying to show that he can make deals with Putin, showing to the United States and Biden administration that Putin is a close ally and friend of Erdogan. He can meet Putin twice a month, he said. Zaur Gasimov, a professor of history at Bonn University and a specialist on Turkish-Russian relations, said, with Ankara pursuing a balanced approach to the Ukrainian conflict, the grain deal will further deepen ties between Russia and Turkey. The current Turkish Russian relations have definite bonds with the current war in Ukraine. Ukraine wheat exports is a new chapter for the region, and Turkey plays a quite significant role as an intermediary. And also, close military cooperation between Ukraine and Turkey and the aspect of Turkey not joining the anti-Russian sanctions all that results in dynamics that are of importance to Moscow and for Ankara, he said. Turkey-Russia relations are intertwined from North Africa to the Middle East, to the Caucasus, in a mixture of rivalries and cooperation. The two also have a deepening partnership on energy. Analyst Uzgel said Erdogan hopes the Sochi meeting will help resolve an impasse with Putin over Syria. The Turkish leader is looking to launch a major offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces, which Ankara accuses of being linked to an insurgency inside Turkey. They have already met in Tehran two weeks ago. It seems that Erdogan could not get what he wanted from Putin. The permission for a Turkish incursion in northern Syria, where he openly stated the names of two places, Tel Rifat and Manbij. Most likely that he is looking for the possibility of such a military move into Northern Syria, he said. Ankara needs Moscow's cooperation for its military operation, given that Russia controls Syrian airspace. Analyst Gasimov said Putin is wary of Turkey's growing military presence in Syria but says the two leaders are experienced in managing differences. Definitely, we see certain inconveniences on both sides but also the very huge readiness to discuss it with each other, he said. That readiness to talk and the growing list of common interests across the region means the frequent meetings between the two leaders may become a regular thing. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban received a warm reception Thursday in Texas, where he was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major event on the calendar of the right wing of the Republican Party. In remarks that ran for approximately 30 minutes, Orban demonstrated why he has become popular among American conservatives, rattling off a litany of claims and accomplishments that dovetailed with many American conservative voters' priorities. Orban touted his country's low crime rate, its success at preventing immigrants from crossing its borders, its crackdown on the political left, its restrictions on the rights of gay and transgender individuals, and its low taxes. He cast liberals and progressives as history's great villains and urged audience members to fight to place "Christian values" at the center of their politics. "The horrors of Nazism and communism happened because some Western states in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values," Orban said. "And today's progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on Western values and create a new world a post-Western world. Who is going to stop them if you don't?" Seen as strongman Orban, 59, began his career as a radical liberal, but over the years he steered the political party Fidesz, which he had helped found, in a more populist and conservative direction. He remains president of the party. When he became prime minister for the second time in 2010 (he had held the office from 1998 to 2002), Orban moved quickly to consolidate both political and cultural power in Hungary, facilitated by Fidesz's two-thirds majority in parliament, which allowed it to draft a new constitution. The revised constitution, which went into effect in 2012, wrote Hungarian nationalism and Christianity into the country's laws and helped cement Fidesz's political dominance. A new electoral system was put in place that allowed the party to retain more than two-thirds of the body's seats in the 2014 elections despite earning 44.5% of the votes cast. Transparency International has characterized Hungary's elections as "free but not fair." Citizens can cast votes, and the votes are accurately counted, but the structure of the system ensures that Fidesz consistently wins representation that far exceeds its share of the votes. Judicial, press freedom curtailed In addition to dominating parliament, Orban has restructured the Hungarian judiciary, reducing its independence and installing judges sympathetic to his administration. At the same time, the government has passed laws limiting freedom of speech and cracking down on independent media. Allies of Orban, meanwhile, have created a pervasive conservative media ecosystem that dominates the airwaves and generally echoes the positions of the Orban government. "Since returning to power in 2010, Orban has unceasingly attacked media pluralism and independence. After public broadcasting was turned into a propaganda organ, many private media were taken over or silenced," according to the organization Reporters Without Borders. "The ruling party, Fidesz, has seized de facto control of 80% of the country's media through political-economic maneuvers and the purchase of news organizations by friendly oligarchs." The prime minister's many critics argue he is an autocrat who has turned his country of 10 million people in the heart of Europe into a near-dictatorship. Orban has also been widely criticized for appointing friends and relatives to positions of authority and for turning a blind eye to corruption among senior leaders. U.S. President Joe Biden, when campaigning for the presidency, characterized Orban as a "totalitarian" and a "thug." Multiple controversies Under Orban's leadership, Hungary has passed laws discriminating against LGBTQ people and has made preserving Hungary's culture as Orban defines it a key element of his mission as prime minister. His defense of Hungarian culture has, according to his critics, frequently come close to explicit racism. In a 2018 speech, for example, he said, "We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed: We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want to be a diverse country." Just last week, in a speech delivered in Romania, Orban criticized other European countries for allowing the "mixing" of people of different races. Referring to Hungary, Orban said, "We are not a mixed race, and we do not want to become a mixed race." Those remarks prompted widespread denunciations from other world leaders, particularly within the European Union. One of Orban's own senior advisers resigned, calling the speech "pure Nazi text." Asked about Orban's comments, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted, "All EU member states, including Hungary, signed up to common global values." "Discriminating on the basis of race is to trample on those values," she said. "The European Union is built on equality, tolerance, justice and fair play." American following Over the past several years, Orban has amassed a considerable following among U.S. conservatives, chief among them former President Donald Trump. Comparing their governing styles, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has described Orban as "Trump before Trump." The former president has personally praised Orban on a number of occasions, and on Wednesday he posted pictures of himself with the prime minister, who visited Trump in Florida, on the social media site Truth Social. "Great spending time with my friend, Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary," Trump wrote. "We discussed many interesting topics few people know as much about what is going on in the world today." Major figures in American conservative media frequently praise Orban and his policies. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has produced a documentary on Hungary under Orban, met with the leader in Budapest, and even filmed his nightly television show there for a week last year. 'A lot to learn from Orban' Rod Dreher, an editor at The American Conservative magazine, characterizes himself as an Orban "booster." Writing from CPAC in advance of the Hungarian leader's speech Thursday, he said, "American conservatives have a lot to learn from Orban." He continued: "The United States is not Hungary, and some of what works there would not work here. Nevertheless, I appreciate Orban's aggressive conservatism, especially his social conservatism, when compared with the all-hat-no-cattle version we tend to get from American conservatives. And, I appreciate how Orban instinctively knows that we are in a struggle for the future of Western civilization and acts like it." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who some point to as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024, is also an admirer of Orban, according to his press secretary. Last year, DeSantis signed a bill into law that barred public school employees from discussing topics such as homosexuality and transgender identities. The restrictions were so broad that the legislation became known as the "Don't Say Gay" law. At the time, DeSantis' press secretary suggested the effort was modeled on Orban's laws in Hungary, saying, "We were watching the Hungarians and were inspired by their legislation." A Japanese journalist detained in Myanmar has been charged with breaching immigration law and encouraging dissent against the military, the ruling junta said Thursday. Myanmar's military has clamped down on press freedoms since its coup last year, arresting reporters and photographers as well as revoking broadcasting licenses as the country plunged into chaos. Toru Kubota, who was held while covering a protest in Yangon last week, "has been charged under section 505 (a) and under immigration law 13-1", the junta said in a statement. 505 (a) -- a law that criminalizes encouraging dissent against the military and carries a maximum three-year jail term -- has been widely used in the crackdown on dissent. Breaching immigration law 13-1 carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Filmmaker Kubota, 26, was detained near an anti-government rally in Yangon along with two Myanmar citizens. After the charges were filed, he was transferred from police custody to Yangon's Insein prison, a security source told AFP, requesting anonymity. "He's in good health and embassy officials have visited him already at the police station where he has been detained." According to a profile on FilmFreeway, Kubota has previously made documentaries on Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya minority and "refugees and ethnic issues in Myanma." Kubota had arrived in Myanmar on July 14 and was filming a "documentary featuring a Myanmar person," his friend Yoshitaka Nitta told a press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday. He is the fifth foreign journalist to be detained in Myanmar, after U.S. citizens Nathan Maung and Danny Fenster, Robert Bociaga of Poland and Yuki Kitazumi of Japan -- all of whom were later freed and deported. Fenster, who was held in May last year as he attempted to leave the country, faced a closed-door trial inside Insein on charges of unlawful association, incitement against the military and breaching visa rules. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison before being pardoned and deported. 'War on journalists' "The regime has declared war on journalists, and 505a is its preferred charge," said Richard Horsey of the International Crisis Group. "This charge against a Japanese journalist shows the regime is determined to continue stifling objective reporting, whether by local or foreign journalists." Japan's foreign ministry said in a statement that its embassy in Myanmar was "appealing to the Myanmar authorities for the early release of the Japanese man, and will continue to make efforts to gather information and request his early release." Tokyo is a top donor to Myanmar and has long-standing relations with the country's military. The already isolated junta stoked further international outrage last week when it announced the execution of four prisoners, in the country's first use of capital punishment in decades. "The situation in Burma has gone from bad to worse," United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, using the country's former name, after talks with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. Blinken met Borrell on the sidelines of a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Cambodia, from which Myanmar's top diplomat has been excluded over the junta's failure to open talks with its political opponents. More than 2,100 people have been killed in the crackdown on dissent in Myanmar and almost 15,000 arrested, according to a local monitoring group. As of March this year, 48 journalists remain in custody across the country, according to the monitoring group Reporting ASEAN. Only China jailed more reporters than Myanmar last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The U.S. Justice Department has charged four Louisville police officers involved in the deadly Breonna Taylor raid with civil rights violations. Federal charges against former officers Joshua Jaynes, Brett Hankison and Kelly Goodlett, along with Sgt. Kyle Meany were announced by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday. Garland said federal officials "share but cannot fully imagine the grief" felt by Taylor's family. "Breonna Taylor should be alive today," he said. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker, was shot to death by Louisville officers who had knocked down her door while executing a search warrant. Taylor's boyfriend fired a shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the door and they returned fire, striking Taylor multiple times. Hankison, who was dismissed from the department in 2020, was one of the officers at Taylor's door and one of three who fired shots that night. He was acquitted by a jury of state charges of wanton endangerment earlier this year in Louisville. Jaynes had applied for the warrant to search Taylor's house. He was fired in January 2021 by former Louisville Police interim chief Yvette Gentry for violating department standards in the preparation of a search warrant execution and for being "untruthful" in the Taylor warrant. Afghanistans Taliban administration claimed Thursday that it had "no knowledge" that slain al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was residing in Kabul and warned of unspecified consequences if the United States breached Afghan territorial sovereignty in the future. The official declaration in local and English languages came several days after an American aerial attack killed the fugitive terror mastermind in an upscale neighborhood in the heart of the Afghan capital. U.S. President Joe Biden confirmed al-Zawahiris assassination late Monday. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has no information about Ayman al-Zawahiri's arrival and stay in Kabul, the Taliban statement said, using the official name of the hardline groups government. The Taliban leadership has ordered a serious and comprehensive investigation into various aspects of the incident, according to the statement. The Islamist group again condemned the U.S. action as a violation of Afghan territory and international laws. The statement said the Taliban government wants to implement the Doha pact and the violation of the pact must end. If such action is repeated, the responsibility of any consequences will be on the United States of America, the Taliban said without elaborating. Zawahiris presence in the heart of Kabul is seen a humiliating blow to the Taliban, who seized power nearly a year ago and have been seeking international legitimacy for their rule. The February 2020 agreement the Taliban and Washington sealed in the Qatari capital of Doha called for U.S.-led foreign troops to withdraw from Afghanistan and the then-insurgent group to prevent transnational terrorists from operating in the country. Washington, however, accuses the Taliban of violating the 2020 pact. "By hosting and sheltering the leader of al-Qaida in Kabul, the Taliban grossly violated the Doha Agreement and repeated assurances to the world that they would not allow Afghan territory to be used by terrorists to threaten the security of other countries, according to a U.S. State Department official. A senior U.S. official said on Monday that al-Zawahiri, the 71-year-old Egyptian jihadist leader, was on the balcony of a three-story house in the Sherpur area of the Afghan capital when two Hellfire missiles fired from an unmanned aircraft struck him. The Haqqani Taliban members acted quickly to remove Zawahiris wife, his daughter and her children to another location, consistent with a broader effort to cover up that they had been living in the safe house, stated the U.S. official. The slain terror leader carried a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head. The weekend drone strike came just days after Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi reassured an international conference hosted by neighboring Uzbekistan that his government would not allow any groups, including al-Qaida, to use Afghanistan for terrorism against any country. He cited the specific counterterrorism clause in the pact. Last week in Tashkent we heard the Taliban trying to convince countries and organizations committed to supporting the Afghan people that they had full control over Afghan territory. They repeated their commitment that Afghanistan would not become a safe haven for terrorists, Tomas Niklasson, the European Unions special envoy for Afghanistan said on Twitter Wednesday. The killing of Mr. al-Zawahiri by the U.S. in central Kabul reinforces previous doubts about such claims. Were the Taliban unaware, unable or unwilling to take action against the AQ leader? the envoy asked. Niklasson went on to question whether the Taliban would be able to deliver on their commitments that they would rule the country through an objectively inclusive government and respect human rights. Are they more capable of delivering on these promises to the Afghan people? U.S. officials have said that al-Zawahiri was hosted in Kabul by senior members of the so-called Haqqani Network, a powerful militant faction within the Taliban with deep al-Qaida ties and links to the Pakistani spy agency. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the network, is the powerful interior minister in the Taliban government and carries a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Analysts quickly questioned Thursdays Taliban declaration. Not so smart on the part of Taliban to say on one hand they control the entire country and on the other hand they didn't know who lived in this house, said Torek Farhadi, a political commentator and former Afghan official. The best course of action would have been to recognize the truth and move on; to address the real challenges of Afghanistan, said Farhadi, citing humanitarian and economic hardships facing the war-torn and calamity-hit countrys nearly 40 million population. Washington and the world at large have declined to give legitimacy to the Taliban rule, linking such a move to easing of restrictions the hardline group has placed on women to restrict their access to work and education, and upholding counterterrorism pledges. The U.S. has imposed strict financial sanctions on the Taliban and has withheld from them about $7 billion of Afghanistan's foreign financial reserves. The United States and its allies invaded the South Asian country 20 years ago and dislodged the then-Taliban government in Kabul for permitting al-Qaida leaders Osama Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to plot the September 2001 deadly terrorist strikes against America. The Taliban later waged a deadly insurgency and took over the country last August when the Western-backed government and its security forces collapsed in the face of stunning insurgent attacks as international forces withdrew. Bin Laden, the founder of the al-Qaida network, was located and killed by U.S. forces in his hideout in the Pakistani city, Abbottabad, in 2011, and al-Zawahiri became his successor. A United Nations Group of Experts said it had "solid evidence" that Rwandan troops conducted military operations in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo between Nov. 2021 and July 2022 and that Rwanda has supported the M23 rebel group's advance there. The findings were contained in a confidential report seen by Reuters on Thursday. Rwanda has denied accusations by Congo's government that it supports the M23 and that it has sent troops into the country. "The Group... gathered solid evidence of the presence of, and military operations conducted by, members of the Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF) in Rutshuru territory," the report said. RDF members conducted joint attacks with M23 fighters against Congo's army and Congolese armed groups, and provided the rebels with weapons, ammunition and uniforms, it said. The M23 rebel group since May has waged its most sustained offensive in a decade, killing dozens of civilians, displacing tens of thousands of people and capturing towns near the borders with Rwanda and Uganda. The M23 formed in 2012 claiming to defend the interests of Congolese Tutsis, the ethnic group shared by Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, against Hutu-led militias. The United States has donated 24 armored personnel carriers to the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, three months after the deadliest attack in years on the U.S.-backed peacekeeping mission. The handover, attended by U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Larry Andre and senior officials of the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia, ATMIS, took place Thursday in Somalias capital, Mogadishu. The 24 armored personnel carriers (APCs), donated by the U.S. government will boost the A.U. forces capability to fight militant group al-Shabab. The specialized vehicles will be used by the A.U. Djiboutian contingent in joint military operations with the Somali National Army (SNA) in and around Beledweyne the capital of Somalias central region of Hiran. Ambassador Andre said the APCs will protect troops against roadside bombs. "The expression of our support, amongst other ways, is the donation of these vehicles to help protect African Union forcesin this case Djiboutis military contingentas they travel the roads of Somalia which too often will be trapped by dangerous explosive devices put there to harm those who only seek to help Somalia," he said. A top African Union official, Fiona Lortan, said the military hardware had arrived at an opportune time as the mission is reconfiguring its troops and equipment. On behalf of the African Union, its membership, and all the ATMIS troop contributing countries, including Djibouti and all the others since ATMIS is a collective effort of solidarity and support to the Somalia people, I would like to thank the government and the people of the United States for the generosity and steadfastness in supporting our presence in Somalia, said Lortan. Al-Qaida affiliated al-Shabab has been fighting Somalias government and A.U. peacekeepers in Somalia for 15 years, seeking to install a strict Islamist state like the Taliban in Afghanistan. In May, the group attacked an ATMIS base in Somalias Middle Shabelle region, using suicide bombers detonating three cars filled with explosives. Islamist fighters then pounded the facility with heavy gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades, killing several dozen African Union peacekeepers from Burundi. The military support by the U.S. comes as Somalias new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, announced that he is determined to wage war against al-Shabab militarily, as well as on economic and ideological grounds. The Somali military said it conducted an operation against al-Shabab in Somalias central Hiran region this week, killing 30 al-Shabab fighters. In May, U.S. President Joe Biden authorized re-deployment of U.S. troops to Somalia to help fight the militants. Bidens predecessor, Donald Trump, pulled around 700 American troops from the east African country during the final month of his presidency. The U.S. Senate approved Sweden's and Finlands accession into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Wednesday by a vote of 95-1, sending a strong bipartisan message of support for expanding the Western alliance against Russia. The NATO vote is a very important vote for American security around the world: Finlands and Swedens membership will strengthen NATO even further and is all the more urgent given Russian aggression, given Putins immoral and unjustified war in Ukraine. Putin is strengthening the NATO alliance, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said on the Senate floor Wednesday. The United States is one of 30 NATO member countries that will have to approve Sweden's and Finlands admission into the more than 70-year-old organization that has guaranteed European security since World War II. The usually lengthy process for admission has been fast-tracked in the U.S. Senate as part of a robust response to Russias unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. Prior to the vote, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez said the Senate vote would send a powerful rebuke to Russian aggression in Ukraine. The vote would "send a signal to the world that we will unite against those actors who seek to destabilize the supply of food that threatens hunger for millions of people all over the world; who seek to weaponize energy in the middle of an unprecedented heat wave; and who think they can simply invade a neighbor with no consequences, the New Jersey Democrat said. But Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who cast the only vote against the ratification, said the approval was not in the interests of U.S. foreign policy. I fear that some in this town have lost sight of that. They think American foreign policy is about creating a liberal world order or nation-building overseas. With all due respect, they're wrong. As you would pay this, you should be about protecting the United States, our freedoms, our people, our way of life. And expanding NATO, I believe, would not do that, Hawley said on the Senate floor. The Missouri Republican argued the United States cannot afford to focus on security threats in Asia and Europe, and he suggested European allies must pay more for their own defense. We have to prioritize, to focus, and that means we have to do less, in Europe, in order to prioritize America's most pressing national security interest, which is in Asia, with regard to China, Hawley said. Senator Rand Paul attempted to include an amendment ensuring NATO's defense guarantees do not replace Congress' own ability to authorize the use of military force. That amendment was not approved. The Kentucky Republican voted "present" on allowing Finland and Sweden to join NATO. An amendment offered by Senator Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, stating that Sweden and Finland should spend at least 2% of their annual GDP on military defense in line with a 2006 agreement between NATO members did pass. But a majority of Senate Republicans voted in favor of the admission, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky warning members of his caucus ahead of the vote not to damage the bipartisan agreement on admitting Sweden and Finland. If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote no, I wish them good luck. This is a slam dunk for national security that deserves unanimous bipartisan support, McConnell said. Three career diplomats in the U.S. Foreign Service answered questions Wednesday from senators during a hearing examining their credentials to lead U.S. diplomatic missions in Africa. If confirmed, three of the toughest diplomatic missions abroad will be led by women, who told the lawmakers that serving on the diplomatic front lines is a privilege and that they are committed to doing what they can to further peace and prosperity in the region. Lucy Tamlyn, who currently heads the U.S. diplomatic mission in Sudan as charge d'affaires, may soon head south to the Democratic Republic of Congo to serve as ambassador. The DRC is the largest country, by size, in sub-Saharan Africa. In her testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tamlyn described the DRC as a country of enormous size, complexity, and promise, and said "the DRC's dynamic, entrepreneurial, and creative population of over 100 million are eager to engage with the United States." Senator Chris Van Hollen, a member of both Foreign Relations and the Appropriations Committee, which has authority over U.S. foreign aid, pointed to the challenges awaiting Tamlyn at the hearing. "The DRC is an incredibly complicated place with all sorts of rivalries and conflict, especially in the East. My question for you is: what do you think is at the heart of those conflicts and what do you think you can do as U.S. ambassador to try to address them in the long-term interest of stability in the DRC?" Van Hollen, himself the son of a career U.S. Foreign Service officer, asked. A lack of governance, coupled with the possession of vast natural resources formed the basis of some of most entrenching challenges the DRC has faced, Tamlyn said in response to Van Hollen's question. "There's inevitably a competition, both inside the country as well as outside, for access to those resources. In the absence of strong government providing services to the people, you have instead a whole network of armed groups which provide some form of local governance," a situation that poses problems, she said. Tamlyn said it is important to communicate to the country and its people that things could change. "We want the Congolese people to know that corrupt mineral exploitation deals, illegal logging and environmental devastation is not inevitable, and that there are alternatives," she said. The United States is committed to supporting governments and leaders that provide security and services to the people, she said, while vowing to use "all our diplomatic tools, including leveraging visa ineligibilities and sanctions, to help the Congolese fight corruption," which she said was a common aspiration among the population. The committee also heard the testimony of two other senior career diplomats nominated to head embassies in Mali and Ivory Coast, both in West Africa. If confirmed, Jessica Davis Ba will represent the United States in Ivory Coast and Rachna Sachdeva Korhonen will lead the diplomatic mission in Mali. The State Department currently places Mali on Level 4: Do Not Travel in its Travel Advisory. Ivory Coast and the DRC both are Level 3: Reconsider Travel. The three senior members of the U.S. Foreign Service fully embraced the assignments awaiting them. "If confirmed, my husband and our five sons will be going with me," Davis Ba told the lawmakers, pointing to her husband and eldest son sitting behind her. Korhonen, whose family emigrated to the United States from India, told the senators that in looking at her, they were looking at "an American dream come true." Meanwhile, Tamlyn, whose home in the eastern U.S. state of Rhode Island stands in sharp contrast with the heat in central Africa, said in her testimony that "I feel privileged to have served in countries where we are literally on the front lines, where U.S. diplomacy really matters, and side by side with colleagues who answer the call despite the personal, family, and health sacrifices entailed." The DRC, Mali and Ivory Coast are among "some of the most difficult ambassadorships," former U.S. Ambassador to Chad Christopher E. Goldthwait said in a written interview with VOA. "These are not glamour posts, but are in the forefront or representing U.S. interests on a continent that suffers from great poverty and instability, but has enormous potential and the fastest population growth on the globe." Representing U.S. interests in these three countries and furthering the economic and political development that is at the core of these interests will not be easy, Goldthwait said, but he had no doubt the three senior members of the U.S. Foreign Service are up to the challenge. "It's always encouraging to see seasoned career foreign service officers entrusted with some of the most difficult ambassadorships," he said. Visitors to the United States, whether for business, education or leisure travel, are facing significant wait times for visas. Some international travelers are waiting six months to a year to schedule a visa interview, State Department data show. The reason, said David Bier, associate director of immigration policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, is the two-year, pandemic-induced lockdown of U.S. consulates around the world that halted visa services. They just stopped doing work during COVID. And that produced what we're seeing now, which is year-plus waits, massive backlogs and all the problems associated with that, he told VOA. Though wait times vary significantly from consulate to consulate, Bier said, it is the worst it's ever been since 9/11. Indeed, nearly two years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, a State Department official told a House committee hearing on visa services that the vast majority of our cases are completed within three weeks. But nearly 2 years after the pandemic began, according to a July report by Bier, there is an astounding eightmonth wait to visit the United States for a period of at most just 90 days. In July 2022, student visa interviews are backlogged 49 days five times the wait prepandemic. Temporary work visas are backed up 75 days up from 12. But the wait times apocalypse has come for tourists and business travelers: 247 days up from just 17 before March 2020, he wrote. The latest State Department data from its consulates show the wait for some visa interviews can routinely be more than a year, and the majority of consulates now take more than six months to schedule an interview for a tourist or business traveler. For example, as of July 28, a tourist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, can expect to wait 500 days for an interview; one in Bogota, Colombia, about 846 days. The U.S. allows citizens of 40 countries to travel to the U.S. for business or tourism for stays of up to 90 days without visas. Citizens of all other countries must apply for visas. In general, the application begins by completing an online form on the State Departments website, paying a visa fee and scheduling an interview. Impact Jon Baselice, vice president of immigration policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told VOA visa processing delays are disruptive for U.S. industries from tourism to seasonal work, or for potential business investors. "Those delays have a negative impact on the ability of businesses to grow, expand their operations, generate new economic activity and create jobs for Americans, Baselice said. In a February 2022 letter to the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, members of the U.S. Chamber Travel Coalition urged the Biden administration to ease domestic and international travel requirements and coordinate with other countries to ease travel between countries. The coalition is made up of Airlines for America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Travel Association. It wrote that as other sectors of the economy reached a full recovery, business travel spending was about 50% below 2019 levels and international travel spending was down 78% compared with 2019. Reducing wait times, backlog A State Department spokesperson told VOA that visa interview wait times vary by country and depend on local conditions and demand. The wait time for a routine visa appointment at half of U.S. consulates is less than four months, and at some posts is far shorter than that, the spokesperson said. "The State Department is actively addressing consular staffing gaps created by the pandemic by onboarding and training new employees, the spokesperson said in an email. The agency has doubled consular hiring in fiscal 2022 compared with fiscal 2021, the spokesperson said. Newly trained employees are making their way to overseas consular adjudicator positions. The additional employees are allowing the consulates to reduce the backlog, according to the State Department, which says the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in "profound" reductions in the departments visa processing capacity. "Many of our embassies and consulates were at times only able to offer emergency services. Some of our embassies and consulates are still facing COVID-19-related restrictions, and many continue to face staffing challenges that began during the pandemic. However, U.S. visa services are open for business. Nearly all U.S. embassies and consulates have resumed full visa services," the spokesperson wrote. But Bier said it was not enough. "The last time visa wait times grew above a few months, thenPresident Obama ordered that 80 percent of all temporary visas be issued in less than 21 days. This executive order (and the knowledge that it was coming) promptly brought visa wait times down to a few days, but former President Trump rescinded the order, and President Biden has failed to reissue it. There is no reason to wait for this crisis to worsen, he wrote in his July report. People are not coming to the United States, he said, unless they really, really have to. I mean, we've made it such a burden." They have to start doing more remote interviewing. It would speed up the efficiency of the process if you didn't have to bring people into the consulate. That adds precious minutes to a process that needs to be coming along at twice the pace of what it currently is, he said. In July 2019, 810,329 nonimmigrant visas were issued. In July 2020, that number shrank to 57,917. By July 2021, it had grown to 355,388. Latest available data show that in June 2022 there were 722,962 nonimmigrant visas issued. We are committed to reducing those wait times as quickly as possible, recognizing the critical role international travel plays in the U.S. economy and the importance of family reunification, the State Department spokesperson said. The latest talks between China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have renewed hopes that an ambitious planned railway linking these central Asian countries may finally become a reality. But the history of this project is filled with two decades of false starts and dashed expectations. Following a July 30 meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who also visited Tashkent last week for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) foreign ministers' meeting, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarovs office said Bishkek wants to sign the agreement at an SCO summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Sept. 15-16. Kyrgyz officials said Wang also told them Beijing is considering finalizing the deal at the summit. Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs said following the meeting with Japarov that the conditions and time for the construction of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway are getting ripe, and the first batch of Chinese experts have arrived in Kyrgyzstan recently for a site survey and the construction process of this railway has kicked off. China stands ready to work with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to speed up the feasibility study. There will be jobs. Our economy will boom, Japarov said two months ago, expressing confidence that construction will start next year. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev said the project is key to reaching global markets. The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway will link us to Asia-Pacific countries, paving the way for new economic opportunities. It will be a great addition to the existing East-West railways, Mirziyoyev said at a May 27 meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), where his country has observer status. Frank Maracchione at Britains University of Sheffield and Washington-based Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, assesses that the ongoing CKU study is a step forward. These next few weeks will be an important indication of whether the plan will proceed. In my recent conversations in Uzbekistan, I did not hear any lack of trust in the development of the project, Maracchione told VOA. Tashkent has maintained since the early 2000s that CKU would provide the shortest route from China to markets in the Middle East and Europe. Some analysts say Russia is concerned because the project would divert traffic away from its territory, but Moscow expressed interest in 2019 and allotted $3 million for a feasibility study. Competing interests Analysts say economic and geopolitical obstacles exist that may continue to be challenges for the CKU. Kyrgyzstan wants it (CKU) to pass its trade hubs and not just follow the faster route, but this impacts financial and technical feasibility, Maracchione said. Kyrgyzstan has less to gain in terms of connectivity as it borders China and is less impacted by the current lack of fast routes to the country, he contends. The project could also cause resentment from the public, which is already wary of Chinas influence. ... And the country is weaker than others, more vulnerable to Russian geopolitical threats and might suffer from sudden policy changes and retaliations. Kyrgyz observer Sovetbek Zikirov said Chinese interests will take priority in CKU project decisions. China is an economic superpower in the region, he told VOA, arguing that Bishkek will not be able to insist on its needs. Beijing is believed to see the new route as an alternative to its current dependence on a route through Russia and Kazakhstan for overland transit to Europe. That has become even more important in light of the Russian war on Ukraine. Russia seems to have accepted the endeavor since it is now among the priority projects of the EEU, said Maracchione. Opportunities for Central Asia Analyst Erkin Abdurazzoqov sees the CKU creating opportunities for Kyrgyzstan. If this route opens, our country will be able to sell its food products as well (as) metal and other goods through China. It could also bring more merchandise from China to our bazaars, which could lower prices, pleasing consumers, Abdurazzoqov said. The route would generate transit fees for Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and develop local manufacturing industry. In Uzbekistan, the railway would pass the densely populated Fergana Valley. Maracchione said a gigantic tunnel into this valley is already seen as one of the most useful Chinese projects in the country. Short-term benefits are mainly connected to construction of the railway since Chinese companies tend to hire local workers, partly because of the Uzbek labor laws, while long-term benefits are related to trade opportunities. Roadblocks and routes Earlier this summer, Kyrgyz Transport and Communications Minister Erkinbek Osoyev presented a preliminary route of the railway that would go through Torugart, Makmal and Jalal-Abad. Torugart is a high-altitude mountain pass in the Tian Shan range between Kyrgyzstans Naryn and Chinas Xinjiang regions. Osoyev explained that the Kyrgyz railway would connect with the Chinese line in Kashgar, Xinjiang and then with its rails, roads and air. In June, Chinas Deputy Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said Beijing is eager to implement the plan and is helping Kyrgyzstan to upgrade its highways. Wang and other Chinese officials have pledged to increase imports, including of Kyrgyz agricultural products. Kyrgyzstan has even sought to open a Kyrgyz branch of Alibaba, Chinas e-commerce and tech platform. Experts say logistical challenges and underinvestment have been the main difficulties in realizing this project. Kyrgyz officials admit their part is costlier because nearly 100 tunnels and weather resistant infrastructure could be necessary across the countrys mountainous topography. Agreement on track gauge is also needed: China uses the international standard of 1,435 mm, while Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstans railways are on wider tracks, a Soviet legacy. Industry experts caution that remedying gauge differences can cost money and time. They also emphasize that a final route map will need budget clarity, currently estimated at $4.5 billion. China has said over the years that CKU would form the southern part of a China-Europe freight corridor, linking Central and Eastern Europe via Iran and Turkey. This report originated in VOA's Uzbek Service. Davron Hotam contributed. Sirajuddin Haqqani has not responded to allegations that al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri lived under his protection in Kabul and he has not appeared in public since al-Zawahiris killing was reported, but Sirajuddin Haqqani still carries a $10 million bounty on his head for his alleged terrorist activities. The 42-year-old Taliban interior minister and leader of the Haqqani network, a powerful faction within the Taliban movement, is not the only designated terrorist in his extended family. His uncle, Khalil Haqqani, also a Cabinet minister in the Talibans Afghanistan leadership, and his younger brother, Aziz Haqqani, each has a reward of $5 million offered by the U.S. government in return for information that will lead to their arrest. Yahya Haqqani, Sirajuddins close aide and brother-in-law, has no monetary reward for his arrest but was designated a global terrorist by the U.S. government in February 2014. The Haqqanis are wanted for their alleged involvement in the execution and organizing of a series of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan over the past several years. Sirajuddin Haqqani is accused of planning the Jan. 14, 2008, attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul that killed six people including U.S. citizen Thor David Hesla. In March 2008, the U.S. Department of State designated Sirajuddin Haqqani a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. In February 2008, Khalil Haqqani was given the same designation. Among other terrorist activities, Khalil Haqqani is accused of aiding al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan with fighters, weapons and financial resources. Until the Taliban seized Kabul last August, the Haqqanis were living so secretively that there were no pictures of Sirajuddin and Khalil. Boasting of their Allah-aided victory against an invading superpower, the U.S., both Khalil and Sirajuddin Haqqani now appear in front of cameras acting as the liberators of Kabul. Return to hiding? But several Haqqani network leaders, including Sirajuddin, have left Kabul for hideouts in southwestern Afghanistan since the assassination of al-Zawahiri, according to Rahmatullah Nabil, a former director of Afghanistans spy agency. He told VOA that Sirajuddin Haqqani was last seen in several short videos tweeted by the Talibans interior ministry on August 1 in which he is seen greeting and talking with people in rural parts of Afghanistans Paktia Province. After the attack on al-Zawahiri, Siraj had gone to Paktia and all his closest aides have gone into hiding and are not seen in the interior ministry. Siraj is fearful for his relations and policies before and after the attack, Nabil told VOA. The Taliban have said they had no knowledge of al-Zawahiris residence in the heart of Kabul, less than a kilometer from the Talibans intelligence agency. U.S. officials, however, dispute that. There were senior members of the Haqqani Network that were aware, John Kirby, a White House spokesperson, told reporters when asked if the Taliban knew about al-Zawahiris presence in Kabul. Targeting Haqqanis U.S. officials say they will not allow the Taliban to once again turn Afghanistan into a hub for international terrorists. If we have credible evidence that a terrorist [is] operating in Afghanistan or anywhere else, the president will take action to defend this country and the American people, Kirby said on Tuesday. VOA asked the White House and the National Security Council whether leaders of the Haqqani Network might qualify as targets for U.S. counterterror strikes, but the White House responded that it had nothing to add. Nabil, the former Afghan intelligence official who closely worked with U.S. intelligence agencies, said the Haqqanis could fall on the U.S. target list. Given the depth of Taliban, particularly the Haqqani branchs ties to other terrorist groups, which are unbreakable, it is likely that U.S. will target them, and Siraj Haqqani will not be an exception, Nabil said. While the U.S. has not hit Taliban targets over the past year, a U.S. drone strike in 2016 killed Mullah Akhtar Mansour, a former Taliban leader, in southwest Pakistan near the Afghan border. I don't believe the U.S. will conduct any strike against Taliban leadership in the short term; this goes against the interests of the current policy of the U.S. in the region, which is limited to preventing the use of Afghan soil as a harbor for terrorist organizations that want to attack the U.S. and its allies, Riccardo Valle, an independent researcher on jihadism and security in Afghanistan and Pakistan, told VOA. By harboring al-Zawahiri in Kabul, U.S. officials say, the Taliban violated their commitment in the Doha Agreement that they will not allow any terrorist groups or individuals, including members of al-Qaida, to operate in Afghanistan. U.S. officials have accused the Taliban, specifically the Haqqani Network, of violating the agreement by allowing al-Zawahiri in Kabul, adding another item in the U.S. terrorism case against Sirajuddin Haqqani and his top collaborators. The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. Travelers heading from the United States to Europe this summer can also help transport relief supplies to Ukraine. Khrystyna Shevchenko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. China fired at least 11 ballistic missiles into water encircling Taiwan Thursday, according to Taiwanese authorities, a day after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrapped up a visit that enraged Beijing. The Chinese military fired Dongfeng ballistic missiles into the waters near Taiwan's eastern, southern, and northern coasts in a series of volleys Thursday afternoon, said the Taiwanese defense ministry. China initially said the live-fire military drills will impact six zones near Taiwan and will last through Sunday. However, the exercises on Thursday were extended to a seventh zone, where the drills will last a day longer, according to Taiwanese officials. China's state-controlled media said the tests involved "long-range rocket artillery" and "conventional missiles." The "expected results had been achieved," the reports said, without elaborating. Videos on Chinese social media showed projectiles being fired from Pingtan in eastern China's Fujian Province approximately 125 kilometers from Taiwan. The drills are China's largest and most provocative ever in the Taiwan Strait one of the designated live-fire zones, less than 20 kilometers from Taiwan's southern coast. Pelosi, who was making the highest-profile U.S. visit to Taiwan in 25 years, left the island Thursday. China viewed her visit as an unacceptable challenge to its claims over the island. The Chinese military activity appears designed to intimidate Taiwan, a vibrant democracy that has never been ruled by China's Communist Party. But the military maneuvers also serve a domestic purpose for China, according to Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official who is now a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore. "What they are doing is signaling their displeasure, their resolve, and meeting their own somewhat outlandish commitments to not be idle and to resolutely respond to provocation, to defend the motherland," he said. Some defense analysts, and even Chinese state media, have portrayed the exercises as a rehearsal for invasion and a demonstration that Beijing can impose a blockade on Taiwan. The developments have raised fears of a miscalculation that could result in hostilities, though analysts say there is little chance China is planning an assault. "It really is more propaganda than performance," said Thompson, noting that China's military is in the middle of its annual summer exercise cycle. In Taiwan's capital, where residents have dealt with many decades of threats from the Chinese Communist Party, the situation was calm, even as news coverage focused on the threats. "I wouldn't worry too much about the CCP, they are great at boasting," said Liang Bo-rong, a 65-year-old retiree and Taipei resident, referring to the party by its initials. While most Taiwanese are aware of the situation and realize the stakes, they are not overly worked up, said Chen Kuan-Ting, who heads the Taiwan NextGen Foundation, a research organization focusing on Taiwan's domestic and foreign policy. "Most Taiwanese will continue their normal lives that's the best way to defy China," said Chen. In a statement Thursday, Taiwan's military said it continues to closely monitor the "irrational" Chinese military activities and is prepared for conflict but that it does not seek escalation. Taiwanese officials have said the Chinese drills are a severe violation of the island's territorial waters and have compared the action to a blockade. Some commercial flights are being disrupted. Korean Airlines is canceling or rescheduling all direct flights to Taiwan on August 5-6 due to China's military drills, reported South Korea's Yonhap news agency. However, Taiwanese transportation officials said Wednesday alternative routes have been arranged and the impact will be minimal. Late Wednesday, Taiwan's military reportedly fired warning flares at a Chinese People's Liberation Army drone that was flying near the Kinmen islands, which lie next to mainland China. According to Taiwanese media reports, the drone later left the area and headed back to the mainland. In China's view, Pelosi's visit is the latest in a series of U.S. moves toward more explicit support for Taiwan. However, U.S. officials insist that their Taiwan policy has not changed and describe Pelosi's visit as routine. "We believe that what China is doing here is not responsible. We believe that it is escalating tensions unnecessarily," White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told National Public Radio Thursday. According to monitoring by the U.S. Naval Institute, a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group, led by the USS Ronald Reagan, was operating earlier this week in the Philippine Sea, which lies southeast of Taiwan. The U.S. military has a routine presence in the region. "The most important thing for us to communicate is a clear and steady message, both publicly and privately to China, that we are not going to be deterred or coerced from operating as we operate in the Western Pacific. And China needs to understand that," Sullivan said. "We are not looking to escalate, but we are also not going to be deterred," he added. In a statement, the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations expressed concern about China's "threatening actions" that risk "destabilizing the region." "There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally," the statement added. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy will travel to the Solomon Islands this week to commemorate the start of the U.S. battle there 80 years ago during World War II. The visit will highlight the current contest between the U.S. and China over which country has more influence in the Pacific Island region. In April, China and the Solomon Islands signed a security agreement that allows Beijing to send armed police to the islands to protect Chinese investments. The agreement could lead to the establishment of a military base in the archipelago nation of 992 islands, a possibility that worries the U.S. and other allies in the region. VOA's Mandarin Service spoke with some residents of Honiara, the capital, which is on the largest island, Guadalcanal. They welcome the visit and Washington's renewed attention on the island, they said, but they worry that the Solomon Islands could become caught between the two superpowers' competing interests. Peter Kenilorea Jr., an opposition lawmaker who chairs the Solomon Islands Parliamentary Foreign Relations Committee, said Sherman and Kennedy's visit was important and reflected the positive relations between the two countries. "But at the same time, I would like to highlight the importance of people-to-people relations between the U.S. and Solomon Islands, rather than playing this sort of cat-and-mouse game or catching up with that sort of thing," said Kenilorea, whose father, the late Sir Peter Kenilorea, was the first prime minister of the Solomon Islands. Kenilorea said he hoped the U.S. would focus on the issues Solomon Islanders face and what they need, such as more scholarships for study in the U.S. and more jobs if U.S. companies, attracted by incentives, invest locally. Switch in allegiances In November, riots broke out in Honiara after Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare refused to meet with delegates from Malaita, the nation's most populous province, which had received aid from Taiwan and the U.S. Sogavare had switched the nation's diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 2019, and resentment over that change fueled the riots along with long-simmering economic frustration and ethnic tensions that have erupted violently throughout the years since the Solomon Islands gained independence from Britain in 1978. VOA Mandarin reached out to Sogavare's office for an interview but did not receive a response. Ruth Liloqula, chief executive of Transparency Solomon Islands, a nongovernmental organization focused on promoting anti-corruption measures in the country, told VOA Mandarin that "there [are] no social security issues in the country. It's only in Honiara that every now and again it had this riot and looting and all of that. But this is because the prime minister refuses to meet with the people, to hear them out. So they took to the streets." Liloqula, who also served as secretary to the Cabinet during Sogavare's previous term, said her country was caught in the competition between Beijing and Washington. "The saddest thing about what's happening to us is that the superpowers are competing," she said. "Come up with a way of working together instead of competing. If it is helping us to grow and also helping our people to grow and our country to grow, [it] is the endgame," she said. "But if it is for their own gains and their own pride or their own geopolitics, it's not helping. It's like, you know, elephants fighting, then we are the grass that they're stepping on." Malaita Youth Council President Phillip Subu told VOA Mandarin that young people engaged on social media were "worried about security, especially the establishment of a military base here. They don't like any war and conflict." "The most we want is peace, prosperity and development in our country," he said. "And that is what our leaders should push for, advocate for." Daniel Suidani, premier of Malaita province, told VOA Mandarin that he was concerned about the security pact with China because he saw no external threat to the country. "We have the Royal Solomon Islands Police force here," Suidani said, "and they have been trained by Australians. And the way they bring in this new idea of getting the Chinese security is concerning, especially for myself and our province, one of the most populated provinces in the Solomon Islands. So the way I look at it, this security pact is mainly her for the purpose of protecting the national government." Subu said he thought the security pact between China and the Solomon Islands made people see China in a negative light, "especially with the military base. Like I said, people don't want war or conflict. We want peace, prosperity and development." For its part, China has sought to downplay local and international concern about the security pact. "The bilateral security framework agreement between China and the Solomon Islands is conducted in light of the request and need of the Solomon Islands and through consultations on an equal footing," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in early June. "Its purpose is to assist the Solomon Islands in maintaining social order." The U.S. State Department said Sherman's trip would highlight the "enduring relationship" between the two countries. In a press release earlier this week announcing the visit, it added she would discuss with Solomon Islands officials a recent announcement to open a U.S. embassy in Honiara. The United States has not had an embassy in the Solomon Islands since 1993. Remembering Battle of Guadalcanal During their visit, which will run from Saturday to Monday, Sherman and Kennedy will attend a memorial to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Guadalcanal. The battle, the first major campaign by the U.S. and Allied forces in the Pacific theater, began August 7, 1942. Fighting ended with the Japanese withdrawal in February 1943. Sherman's father, a Marine, was injured during the battle. Kennedy's father, John F. Kennedy, served as captain of a Navy patrol boat and was wounded in the Solomon Islands. He later became the 35th president of the United States. "Deputy Secretary Sherman will deliver remarks at a U.S.-organized ceremony on Skyline Ridge, the site of the U.S. Guadalcanal Memorial," the State Department said. "She will also deliver remarks at a Solomon Islands-hosted memorial at Bloody Ridge and attend additional memorial events organized by Solomon Islands and Japan." Preparations for the ceremony at the World War II Guadalcanal American Memorial overlooking Honiara have been underway for several weeks. Morgan Wairiu, chief of staff for Winrock International, an NGO that implements the U.S. Agency for International Development's scale sustainability project on the Solomon Islands, said that while the ceremonies and events are important to many on the islands, the nation needs to look to its future. "So long as we decide, we as a country decide, on what we want to do and what we are able to do for ourselves, then others can come and help us in whatever way," he told VOA Mandarin. "But we dictate to them. We say, 'This is what we want to do. If you are willing to help us, come on board, but you don't dictate things so that we can follow you.' They are only influencing us because of the lack of strong leadership. If you have a very strong leadership, [then] nobody dictates anything to you." Near the city of Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, a camp is hosting thousands of Yazidis who have not been able to return to their homes in Sinjar district of Iraq's Nineveh province. Snur Karim spoke to the women at the camp in this report narrated by Rikar Hussein. The High Court has ruled that Tinashe Kambarami should be reinstated as Ward 3 councillor and Bulawayo deputy mayor following his suspension from local authority activities over a theft case. Kambarami filed an appeal against his suspension and the Supreme Court set aside the lower courts decision to nullify his election as a councilor and deputy mayor. Kambarami said, I have been reinstated. As you know I had quite a number of applications following the Supreme Court judgment that was passed last year which basically set aside the nullification of my election as Ward 3 councillor and deputy mayor of the City of Bulawayo by Chief Justice (Thompson) Mabhikwa. I had to appeal against that before the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Mabhikwas judgment was set aside. Following that, I had to go back to council where I faced resistance. The council denied me access to my office and resuming my duties as a councilor and deputy mayor. I then approached the court for a declaratur and sometime early this year before we had by elections I had to approach the court. I had an urgent application which had to stop the Nomination Court for the Ward 3 by-election. After that, we had to wait for the outcome of the declaratur. We received the outcome today. I have been reinstated as councilor for Ward 3 and deputy mayor for the City of Bulawayo. Kambarami said he is happy to be back as one of the city fathers. Its a very good thing after all these battles in court and also it has been some kind of experience because I have gone through a lot of hustles, legal challenges and all these political fights where sometimes you will see some legal professionals even trying to push for political judgments instead of letting the law take its course. The ruling was made today by Justice Martin Makonese. There was no immediate comment from the Bulawayo City Council. UPDATE AT 4:31 PM: Great Falls Fire Rescue (GFFR) released more information on a fire south of Great Falls Wednesday. GFFR and Sand Coulee fire were dispatched to the fire around 2:00 pm. The initial fire that was found had started next to 13th St. South, close to the former Ayrshire Dairy. Heavy winds helped the fire spread rapidly and crews were able to stop it from burning any structures or injuring livestock. Fire units from the Montana Air National Guard, Malmstrom, Black Eagle, Vaughn and Gore Hill answered the Mutual Aid Call were requested by GFFR. The biggest challenge faced with this fire was all of the traffic that was impeding emergency vehicles. During an emergency event, please do not drive in that area affected to get a look. This is for the safety of all first responders, GFFR said. The cause of the fire is under investigation. UPDATE: Our reporter on scene says the fire has been put out and crews are no longer on the scene. GREAT FALLS, Mont. - Great Falls Fire Rescue (GFFR) is on the scene of an active fire. According to GFFR, the fire is near Highland and Mount Olivet Cemeteries. People are asked to avoid the area for the safety of responders and police are directing traffic. At this time, the intersection of 13th St. South and 24 Ave. South is blocked. Fire Marshall Michael McIntosh tells KFBB that there is no information being released on the fire as of now. This is a developing story, please check back for updates. Dante's Peak in Ciociaria: Discovering Patrica and Monte Cacume. The year 2021 witnessed a flurry of events centred on the 700th anniversary of Dantes death and a small, inconspicuous town in the historic region of Ciociaria south of Rome chose to celebrate its very own, small connection with il Sommo Poeta. Patrica rests, partly hidden from sight, on a hill that descends gently from the eastern edges of the Lepini mountains, overlooking the Sacco valley and in the shadow of Monte Cacume. This conical peak, though modest in height its altitude is just under 1,100 metres is visible from afar and it is crowned by a 14-metre high steel cross placed there in 1903 by the inhabitants of Patrica in honour of the Jubilee year of 1900, which took place during the papacy of Leo XIII (a selection of pictures on display in the chapel on the mountain documents the local inhabitants efforts). However, this curious feature is not the main reason why the mountain is unusual, after all there are crosses of all shapes and sizes on most Apennine peaks, but rather because scholars believe that Dante, who travelled through Ciociaria and mentions other places in the region (such as Anagni), cites this specific peak in the following verses of Purgatory (IV, 25-27): Vassi in Sanleo e discendesi in Nolli; montasi su in Bismantova e in Cacume con esso i pie; ma qui convien che omo voli. In these verses, Dante compares the steep trail that he walked with Virgil on his journey to Purgatory a feeling with which any amateur hiker can empathise with the difficult ascent to four distinct locations, among which he lists Monte Cacume. Dante visited Ciociaria at the very least on two occasions, in 1294 and in 1301 when he was a member of a Florentine delegation that paid homage to Pope Celestine V (the pope of the Great Refusal) and Pope Boniface VIII (the pope of the Anagni Slap) and it is likely that the mountain peak left an impression on the poet. Hikers can reach the peak of Monte Cacume, crowned by a 14-m high steel cross. All photos Jan Claus Di Blasio. However Dante would have not found todays marked trail so demanding as it is a moderate one that departs from Patrica and can be completed in three hours. More ambitious hikers can follow several other trails that lead deeper into the Lepini mountains (unfortunately, not a protected area yet) and are described in Stefano Milanis recent Italian-language guide, Monti Lepini. Guida Escursionistica. If you find yourself, however, out of breath after all there is an elevation gain of almost 700 metres to be tackled you can save face by halting at the many statues made of weathering steel that dot the trail. Each statue, created by local artist Cesare Pigliacelli and installed by volunteers from the local association LOrchidea di Patrica, represents character described in Purgatory though their punishments are not as exciting as those reserved for the dwellers in Hell along with the verses that accompany that characters story. As you ascend past the different terraces of Purgatory, leaving behind great names such as Manfred of Swabia or Barbarossa, you find yourself, symbolically, closer to Paradise and upon reaching the peak, with views that reach as far as the Pontine archipelago, the climax is the fateful encounter that marks Dantes next journey: you can discover who that is for yourselves! Hikers can reach the peak of Monte Cacume, crowned by a 14-m high steel cross. The mountain has a curious geological history; it is partly a klippe, an isolated residue of an older carbonate layer located, as a result of tectonic movements, on top of more recent waterproof clay layers. This is the reason why there are so many springs along the poorly marked trail that circumambulates the peak which requires an additional 30-40 minutes and why the area is such a botanical treasure trove with dozens of wild orchid species (visit in May and early June and youll be rewarded with a treasure trove of wildflowers). Also, keep an eye out for the sparse ruins of the mediaeval Benedictine monastery and the fortified settlement known as the Castrum Cacuminis that once stood on the mountain: a seemingly impregnable position. If you plan your hike in the early morning or in the early afternoon, you should include a light meal at the only restaurant in the old town, the small and delightful Comedia Bistrot (book in advance), or stop off at the local pasticceria Ricordi Lievitati. It is also strongly recommended exploring the old town: try to spot the mysterious symbols that appear on the keystones of several stone portals and observe, discreetly, the unusual figures that decorate the secluded Giardino allItaliana of the 16th-century Palazzo Spezza, named after a noble family of Spanish origin that has owned the palace since the 18th century. By Jan Claus Di Blasio HOW TO GET TO PATRICA Patrica is best reached by car from the Ferentino exit on the A1 motorway, however there are limited Cotral bus connections from Frosinone train station for those without a car. Photography tip: the best viewpoint over the town of Patrica is located by the statue of Belacqua, a minor character from the Divine Comedy who was punished for his indolence and laziness! This article was published in the July-August 2022 edition of Wanted in Rome magazine. Rome's state and city-run museums free on first Sunday of the month. State museums and archaeological sites in Rome and across Italy will be open for free on Sunday 7 August thanks to the Domenica al Museo initiative. The nationwide free entry scheme is held every first Sunday of the month in tandem with the monthly free entry for Rome's city-run museums. This means that practically all museums and archaeological sites in Rome will be free to visitors this Sunday, however some museums such as Galleria Borghese require advance booking. The initiative also gives free access to temporary exhibitions currently underway in the city's museums, with the exception of the Robert Doisneau show at the Ara Pacis. The Italian culture ministry encourages the wearing of masks when visiting museums however it is not obligatory. For details of participating museums see ministry website. Photo credit: silverfox999 / Shutterstock.com. Rome included in 'bollino rosso' heatwave warning. Italy's health ministry has issued a maximum 'red alert' warning for three cities on Friday 5 August due to an intense heatwave, the latest to sweep the country this summer. The cities included in the 'bollino rosso' warning on Friday are Palermo, Perugia and Rome. On Saturday the number of cities on the Level 3 red alert list will rise to 16 with the addition of Bolzano, Brescia, Campobasso, Florence, Frosinone, Latina, Milan, Rieti, Turin, Trieste, Venezia, Verona and Viterbo. The 'bollino rosso' indicates emergency conditions with possible negative effects on not just the elderly, sick or very young, but also on healthy and active people. The health ministry recommends avoiding exposure to the sun and outdoor activity in the middle of the day, as well as advising people to drink plenty of water, eat lightly and preserve their medication properly. Small children and pets should never be left in cars, even for a a short time, and people should check on elderly neighbours living alone. Dogs should be walked early in the morning or at night and given lots of water to drink. Tourists in Rome should be aware that the city's historic fountains are off-limits, no matter how hot it gets, with fines of 450 for those caught entering the waters. For full details see health ministry website. Cover image Turin. Photo credit: Michele Ursi / Shutterstock.com. Violent incident comes days after Nigerian street seller was beaten to death in Italian town. Police in the Italy's southern Calabria region have launched an investigation after a Nigerian woman was physically assaulted when she asked for the wages she was owed. The 25-year-old woman, who was employed as a dishwasher at a beach resort in Soverato, filmed the violence and posted the footage on Instagram before reporting the incident to police. Her post - titled "Beaten just because I asked to be paid" - has been shared widely on social media in Italy. The woman, named Beauty David, claims she was only paid for the hours stipulated in her contract, when in fact she worked much longer shifts. "He paid me for three hours a day but I was doing 12 hours", she said. The footage shows onlookers in the background as the woman was slapped, kicked and threatened by a man, allegedly her employer, who then stamped on her phone in an attempt to destroy it. The man subsequently went to police to give his version of events, reports Italian news agency ANSA. The incident comes days after the killing of a Nigerian street seller in the central Marche region caused outrage in Italy as the country enters a parliamentary election campaign in which the right-wing coalition has made immigration a key issue. Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share Legislation helping veterans exposed to toxic trash-incineration pits while serving overseas finally passed the Senate this week. Comedian and activist Jon Stewart, who had worked hard to elevate the problem and then to help get the bill across the finish line, expressed frustration that the process had been so arduous. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Im not sure Ive ever seen a situation where people who have already given so much had to fight so hard to get so little, Stewart said. Similarly, journalist Wesley Lowery tweeted: jon stewart is an excellent example of the power of celebrity when [its] wielded strategically and unrelentingly on a single issue - and also, it says a lot about our system that an issue like *this would require a celebritys unrelenting advocacy for years in order to be addressed Lowery is right. It does say something about the US political system and about democracy in general. But it isnt necessarily something bad. Advertisement First, democracy in general. There are no consensus issues in a country of 330 million people. Even if the basic idea is overwhelmingly popular few seem to oppose benefits for veterans who were harmed in the line of duty that still leaves questions including who should be eligible, what treatments should be covered and who should pay for them. Beyond that, something only becomes overwhelmingly popular if people notice it in the first place, and in a very large nation there are hundreds thousands? millions? of problems that people are upset about. So beyond the challenge of getting people to agree on everything, there is the challenge of convincing people to focus on the problem in the first place. Its not surprising that having a celebrity activist involved helps. In other words, it isnt easy because self-government for a very large polity is never easy. Advertisement But its probably more difficult in the United States thanks to the convoluted system of separated institutions sharing powers, which multiplies the veto points within the system and makes it difficult to get things done with simple majorities. But that, too, has its advantages. Or at least thats how I read James Madisons understanding of the system he helped create. Heres the history. The people involved in the American Revolution wanted to establish what they called republican government some form of rule by all citizens, or what we usually call democracy. This wasnt new to the 18th century US; there is a long line of political theorists and political participants who had similar republican views. Collectively they had a very limited idea of who should be included as full citizens, or even as full humans. But even among those they considered to be part of the people whom they wanted to rule, the revolutionaries believed that self-government could only work with a virtuous citizenry. If the people became corrupt, self-government couldnt work. And among their meanings of corrupt was the idea of narrow, material self-interest. Indeed, it wasnt just that self-government would fail if those involved cared only about narrow self-interest. Even more than that, they correctly worried that if people were mainly concerned about themselves, they wouldnt get involved in public affairs at all. Advertisement And as the revolution wound down, that was pretty much what seemed to be happening. George Washingtons decision to resign his military commission at the close of the revolution and leave public life (temporarily, as it turned out) was a strong example of republican heroism, since he rejected the idea of the hero of the revolution becoming a king. But it also played into the idea that those who cared about public affairs need only get involved during crises. That worried some of the Founders, who thought they were seeing the demise of republican virtue and the onset of corruption. If life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness turned out to be about private happiness and not the civic-minded idea of public happiness the satisfaction of acting with others in the political arena, with the reward of building the fame and reputation that Washington had won then the revolution would have been for nothing. But Madison came up with a bold solution. What if seeking narrowly self-interested objectives out of the government wasnt corrupt after all, but a legitimate lure to convince people to get involved in public life in the first place? The ultimate republican goal of self-government and public happiness the idea that participation in public affairs is valuable and rewarding for its own sake would still be the same. But Madison saw that most citizens wouldnt get involved without a private interest at stake. Advertisement If thats the case, then we can think of the complex system of multiple points where policy ideas can be initiated or vetoed as a mechanism to force those who choose to advocate for something such as a veterans health bill into having to learn the system, bargain with others with equally legitimate private interests and work out compromises. That is, its a system that tries to teach the advantages of a life of public participation. All of this can be extremely frustrating to those aware of injustices who cant manage to get them addressed, especially when they believe the majority is on their side. But democracy isnt the rule of majorities. Its the rule of the people, all of them (yes, all, not just Madisons narrow idea of all), right or wrong. That this often comes down to majority vote is fine. The Madisonian goal, however, isnt to translate majority opinion into government policy; indeed, Madison expresses doubt (in Federalist No. 10) that majorities as such even exist in the large polities he was imagining, which are surely much smaller than what the US has become. The goal is self-government. And if that makes something that should be easy into something much harder? It might be a trade-off worth making. More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion: Advertisement Pelosi Has Nailed the Optics of Her Taiwan Trip: Matthew Brooker Democrats Climate Bill Is a Clean Energy Dream. Thats Not Enough.: Tyler Cowen Democrats Need More Joe Manchins: Matthew Yglesias This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share Across Germany, executives have spent the last few months war gaming how to respond if Russian President Vladimir Putin cuts off gas supplies. And many, from tiny companies to global behemoths, have arrived at the same solution: switch to oil. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight In Munich, the municipal utility has converted two gas-fired boilers to run on diesel. Further South, in the German Alps, the Berchtesgadener Land farming cooperative has sent two milk-truck drivers to learn how to handle an oil-delivery rig, just in case they need to buy. To the North, the Veltins beer brewery near Dusseldorf has stockpiled five weeks worth of diesel to prepare for an emergency shift away from gas. In some cases, its about burning fuel-oil in boilers and steam generators previously fired with natural gas; in others, its about running diesel generators to avoid electricity blackouts. Advertisement Berlin is quietly encouraging the shift. Wiegand-Glas, which produces glass bottles, was able to get the paperwork needed to prepare its furnaces to run using heating oil rather than gas in days, for example. I have promised to reduce the bureaucracy when converting systems to an absolute minimum, Anja Siegesmund, the regional environmental minister, said. Privately, oil traders say they are getting inquiries from German companies that either havent previously bought fuel-oil or diesel, or abandoned the practice many years, or even, decades ago. Take Covestro AG, a chemicals company that produces the building blocks of plastics. For years, it has relied on natural gas. But earlier this week, it told investors during its second-quarter results presentation that it was initiating various measures to reduce its gas requirements in Germany in the short term, such as by switching to oil-based steam generators. Advertisement The incentive to reduce gas consumption is huge after Putin reduced supplies to Germany via the Nord Steam 1 pipeline. The Dutch TTF gas contract, a European benchmark, is trading above 205 euros ($209) per megawatt hour, 10 times its average in the decade through 2020 and equivalent to about $350 per barrel of oil. Meanwhile, Brent crude is hovering around $100 per barrel. Hans-Ulrich Engel, BASF SEs chief financial officer, did the math earlier this month: at prevailing prices, it may actually be cheaper to use, as an example, heating oil to produce your steam, than use very expensive natural gas, he said. The consequences are twofold. German industry, long used to running on cheap Russian energy supplies, may be able to reduce its reliance on gas by more than previously thought without having to shut down completely. German gas demand is already running well below its five-year average for this time of year. Morgan Stanley reckons that German industrial gas consumption fell 24% in July from the same month in 2021. If the trend continues, European gas prices may not rise as much as feared, even if Putin completely shuts down exports later this year. The worst-case scenario, with TTF prices surging above 300 euros or even 400 euros, may be avoided. But the corollary may be a surge in German oil demand this winter well above anything currently estimated, potentially boosting global petroleum prices. The size of the potential for incremental oil consumption is hotly debated, with bears and bulls offering good reasons for optimism and pessimism. Last year, oil bulls anticipated a significant demand boost from fuel-oil fired power plants that never materialized. Nonetheless, Energy Aspects Ltd., a consultant, estimates that if all of Europes oil-fired electricity plants operate this winter, it would add an extra 340,000 barrels per day to the continents demand. To put that into context, its larger than the 200,000 barrels per day increase in European oil demand anticipated by the International Energy Agency for 2023. Advertisement Moreover, those numbers dont take into account the potential explosion in the use of diesel-fired generators and the use of heating oil and fuel-oil in industrial boilers and steam generators. With little hard data about how many companies have refurbished their boilers to run on oil, and how many others have purchased emergency power generators, any estimate is more conjecture than forecast. Still, some oil traders and consultants are penciling in a further 200,000 barrels a day in Germany and neighboring nations. The gas-to-oil switch faces enormous obstacles, however. BASF, the German chemical behemoth, is paradigmatic of the difficulties. In a presentation to investors last week, the company said that preparations to substitute natural gas with, for example, fuel oil, were progressing well, echoing what other German companies have said in the last few weeks. But it included a big caveat in a tiny footnote: Precondition is the sufficient availability of fuel oil. If companies in Europes biggest economy switch to oil from gas simultaneously this winter, it could potentially just trade one problem gas shortages for a second issue a tighter market for diesel. Advertisement For now, European diesel has stabilized at around $1,000 per metric ton, down from a record of about $1,500 in early March, days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet the market will have to contend with the coming ban on Russian refined products, which will be fully effective by early February and will reduce diesel supply into Europe just when purchases may be peaking. Diesel is the workhorse of the global economy. Since the beginning of the crisis, it has been the hottest refined product, even if its often overshadowed by US gasoline prices. As German industry prepares to wean itself off Russian gas in the coming months, diesel prices may start to dominate the headlines for all the wrong reasons. More From Bloomberg Opinion: London Paid a Record Price to Dodge a Blackout: Javier Blas Advertisement Struggling to Stay Cool? So Is the Generator Powering Your Aircon: David Fickling Putins New Weapon of Mass Disruption: Kazakh Oil: Julian Lee This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. A former reporter for Bloomberg News and commodities editor at the Financial Times, he is coauthor of The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earths Resources. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share In the world of the movie Bullet Train, opening in US theaters this weekend, Brad Pitt is an assassin in a hyper-stylized, neon-tinged Japan; Sandra Bullock and Puerto Rican pop sensation Bad Bunny also appear. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight But forget them: The real star should be the train. A staple set for any movie that takes place in Japan, from Lost In Translation to Inception, its about time the Shinkansen itself got top billing. Based on a novel by Japanese mystery writer Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train shows the enduring obsession with Japans ultra-efficient and super-fast trains, nearly 60 years since their introduction. Famously, there has never been a fatal accident not even when a shinkansen derailed earlier this year after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake. But these are tricky times for what is perhaps the worlds most famous train. The pandemic has altered lifestyles in Japan in a way that might be permanent; Zoom calls are increasingly taking the place of the business day-trips that are the backbone of bullet-train revenues, and foreign tourists remain largely absent. Advertisement East Japan Railway Co. says revenue from its bullet trains, which includes the Tohoku Shinkansen route between Tokyo and Morioka used in Isakas original novel, is less than 60% of pre-Covid times, and expects that figure will still be 10% below 2019 levels at the end of its fiscal year next March. On the more famous Tokyo-Osaka route, operated by JR Central and featured in the movie version of Bullet Train, ridership remains at just 70% of pre-pandemic levels. This problem comes just five years before JR Central is supposed to open a brand new, 500 kilometer-per-hour line using magnetic-levitation technology that will connect Tokyo and the industrial heartland of Nagoya in just 40 minutes at a cost of more than $50 billion. And its far from the only issue the trains are facing. The maglev project itself seems highly unlikely to make its 2027 opening date, with work halted in Shizuoka prefecture over an environmental dispute. Cynics suspect the opposition might have more to do with the fact that while the train will pass through the prefecture, it wasnt deemed important enough to merit a lucrative stop. Advertisement Set to be the fastest in the world when it begins service, the train will also generate higher energy costs. At a time when Japan is facing the prospect of blackouts due to an energy supply squeeze, the maglev will use several times the power of a regular bullet train for its superconducting magnetic lines. In Japans southernmost island, JR Kyushu will next month open whats being referred to as the countrys shortest bullet train. The new route will join Nagasaki with Takeo Onsen in Saga prefecture but the track, just 67 kilometers long, isnt linked to the rest of the Shinkansen network. A dispute between national and local authorities means work to link to lines serving elsewhere in Kyushu hasnt even begun. And further north, the Hokkaido Shinkansen is still losing money, $111 million last fiscal year alone, with an average of just 1,700 people riding the train each day. The extension that will link it to Sapporo in 2030 the city that may host the Winter Olympics that year as well as the ski paradise of Niseko cant come fast enough. Advertisement But the issue attracting most discussion among Japans train lovers involves decidedly slower lines. The sustainability of local routes that are the lifelines criss-crossing much of the rural countryside has become a topic of debate. Ridership on some lines in JR Wests area has fallen to 10% of the level when the firm was privatized in the late 1980s, with more adults owning cars and fewer young people to take their place on the train. Thats led management to talk for the first time about potentially shutting some of these lines, something opposed by the elderly. The impact of changing times can be felt on Tokyos trains, too: Rail operators including JR East have brought forward the last train by 30 minutes, with fewer people staying out late due to the growing acceptance of remote work and a lingering reluctance to go to potentially Covid-spreading drinking parties. All of these highlight problems that will only increase as Japans population ages and shrinks; the pandemic has merely put these long-standing issues in focus. The bullet trains have long been profit-drivers for the JR companies, which were privatized in such a way that gave each of them a piece of the pie, in return for maintaining money-losing rural routes. Advertisement But this is also the beauty of Japans trains: while being private, dividend-paying enterprises, they also operate partly as a public service, whether its maintaining old train lines with dwindling ridership or moving ahead with ambitious projects like the maglev. With the UK hemming and hawing over its High Speed 2 rail link for northern England and the US permanently vacillating over the merits of high-speed rail, its good to have a first-world nation that still appreciates the role of infrastructure ahead of the relentless pursuit of profit. Skepticism over the maglev is understandable. Still, its worth keeping in mind that the original Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen itself was derided as being as expensive and functionally useless as the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the ill-fated World War II battleship Yamato. Now its the star of a movie, highlighting the international envy a forward-thinking infrastructure project can bring. Who knows, perhaps Brad Pitt can even star in a maglev-set sequel. More From Bloomberg Opinion: Advertisement Relax, This Isnt the Future of Japanese Tourism: Gearoid Reidy Cash-Loving Japan Could Warm Up to Crypto: Andy Mukherjee The Summer of Britains Railway Discontent: Therese Raphael (Corrects the spelling of Morioka in the fourth paragraph.) This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg News senior editor covering Japan. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load Whats it like to sail a huge cargo ship loaded with thousands of tons of grain out of port from a war-torn nation into mine-infested waters? That question became relevant with the launch this week of an innovative scheme to allow grain shipments to be exported from Ukrainian ports. Already, the prospects of food scarcity and political unrest, particularly in hungry nations in North Africa and the Middle East, have eased somewhat. But the maritime procedures are far from settled, and for the first few ships sailing outbound, the challenges are daunting. Will the Ukrainians be able to export a significant amount of the more than 20 million tons of grain straining their storage facilities? Consider the frightening situation faced by masters of merchant ships like the Sierra Leone-flagged Razoni, which on Monday sailed out of Odesa headed for Lebanon with 27,000 tons of corn. Often, the first inkling of mines in the water is, unfortunately, an explosion. As the master of the Razoni got underway from port, he was no doubt on the bridge moving from side to side, peering anxiously over both the port and starboard bridge wings. Advertisement Ive sailed through minefields, and it is a white-knuckle ride for even the most experienced of mariners. In the 1980s, the US Navy faced Iranian efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz as a part of the so-called Tanker War between the Arab nations and Tehran. In April 1988, the guided-missile frigate Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine and was almost sunk, saved by heroic damage control on the part of her highly trained crew. Over the course of the Gulf mission, the Navy had a number of other vessels strike floating mines, including the Princeton, a high-end Aegis cruiser, in early 1991. In the Navy, we pay a lot of attention to mines. Most are tethered to the bottom of the sea, and their positions are carefully marked by the nation laying them, so its ships can transit through safe corridors. Minefields can be used defensively (as Ukraine is doing to discourage the Russian Black Sea Fleet from attempting an amphibious assault on Odesa) or offensively as the Iranians did in the Tanker War, putting floating mines in regional waters and propelling them toward US or allied ships. Advertisement Mines can detonate in two ways: direct metal-on-metal hull contact on a trigger mechanism on the surface of the mine; or from an acoustic or seismic response by the mines arming system to the ships engines or the water pressure from its hull passing on the surface. On both Navy warships and merchant vessels, the first and best defense is good intelligence. The Razoni was escorted by a Ukrainian vessel that would have had exact locations of the mines Ukraines navy had laid. Despite all the advanced technology ships have today, a second key element in avoiding a mine strike is standing a taut visual watch. Having lookouts stationed far forward in the ship and on both sides is critical. For a merchant vessel with a very small crew, that means all hands on deck, using binoculars to constantly sweep the horizon for any unidentified floating objects. Advertisement Ideally, one sails through corridors that are not just clearly marked on charts, but also have been verified by a minesweeping vessel. The US operates very capable minesweeping ships that can clear such lanes or confirm they have already been cleared. And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has a standing minesweeping force that consistently trains and exercises as a team. In 2021, the UK agreed to provide the Ukrainian navy with two such ships, but the war interrupted that plan. Another safety measure is using overhead sensors that can detect the mines, usually done by helicopters operating either from ashore or the vessel itself, although today unmanned drones may do the job. Most merchants have a limited flight-deck capacity, but using a small helicopter or a drone with the first set of vessels transiting out makes sense. But all the precautions imaginable are hardly perfect. If the crew sights a mine in the water ahead, the dread sets in: You are operating in an uncleared minefield. The best solution is to try to simply back down, like putting a car in reverse, and creeping at the slowest stable speed to exit the area. Advertisement It is also possible to detonate or disable a mine using .50-caliber machine guns from the deck or a helicopter, but that is not an option for merchant ships like Razoni. Having Ukrainian or NATO warships within helicopter range would make sense Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey all have capable navies. These unfamiliar procedures will be going through the mind of any merchant ships master, as his knuckles go white squeezing the bridge railings. Perhaps some of these precautionary procedures will be tested in the days ahead, organized by the Joint Coordination Centre established under United Nations authority by Turkey, Russia and Ukraine. Every vessel attempting to clear the three Ukrainian ports overseen by this joint effort Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny will be inspected and monitored in transit. Advertisement There are roughly 80 vessels awaiting passage out of Odesa, many of which need seasoned mariners who have departed the war zone. The entire coast remains on the high-risk list maintained by Lloyds of London Ltd. Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to this export plan under duress, fearing that if he does not compromise on releasing the grain, NATO will simply do it by force, escorting the shipments with warships. He may try to subvert the scheme through a false flag operation he can blame on Ukraine or some other covert means. For now, the Western allies should do what they can to support the brave civilian mariners who are sailing into harms way. More From This Writer and Others at Bloomberg Opinion: Ukraines Coming Attack Could Win or Lose the War: Hal Brands How to Break Russias Blockade of Ukraines Black Sea Ports: James Stavridis Advertisement Europe Shouldnt Let Ukraine Go Into Default: Maria Tadeo This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A retired U.S. Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, he is vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group. He is the author most recently of To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load The global eradication of smallpox more than 40 years ago was one of the greatest achievements in public-health history, vanquishing a cause of death, blindness and disfigurement that had plagued humanity for at least 3,000 years. On the downside, it also led to the end of a global vaccination program that provided protection against other pox viruses. That includes monkeypox, which has been spilling over from its animal hosts to infect humans in West and Central Africa with increasing frequency since the 1970s. Now monkeypox has sparked unprecedented outbreaks worldwide, demonstrating again how readily an infectious agent in one region can mushroom into a global emergency. 1. Whats monkeypox? Monkeypox is a misnomer that results from the fact that it was discovered at the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen in 1958, when outbreaks of a pox-like disease occurred in monkeys kept for research. While monkeys are susceptible to it, just like humans are, they arent the source. The virus belongs to the Orthopoxvirus genus, which includes the variola virus, the cause of smallpox; and cowpox virus, also called vaccinia, which is used in the smallpox vaccine. Monkeypox is less contagious than smallpox and the symptoms are generally milder. About 30% of smallpox patients died, while the fatality rate for monkeypox in recent years has been about 3% to 6%, according to the World Health Organization. Advertisement 2. What does monkeypox do? After an incubation period of usually one to two weeks, the disease typically starts with fever, muscle aches, fatigue and other flu-like symptoms. Unlike smallpox, monkeypox also causes swelling of the lymph nodes. Within a few days of fever onset, patients develop a rash, often beginning on the face then spreading to other parts of the body. The lesions grow into fluid-containing pustules that form a scab. If a lesion forms on the eye, it can cause blindness. The illness typically lasts two to four weeks, according to the WHO. The patient is infectious from the time symptoms start until the scabs fall off and the sores heal. Mortality is higher among children and young adults, while people whose immune systems are compromised are especially at risk of severe disease. Pregnancy also carries a high risk of severe congenital infection, pregnancy loss, and maternal morbidity and mortality. Inflammation of the brain and seizures are rare neurological complications. 3. How is it transmitted? Advertisement Monkeypox doesnt usually spread easily between people. Close contact with the virus from an infected person or animal -- such as touching a lesion or contaminated object -- is the main pathway. The pathogen enters the body through broken skin, the respiratory tract or the mucous membranes in the eyes, nose, mouth, rectum and anus. Tests on various patient specimens, including saliva, rectal swabs and semen, have found traces of the virus. Detailed analysis of semen from a 39-year-old man in Italy found infectious virus in a specimen collected six days after his symptoms began. The findings, published Aug. 2 in Lancet Infectious Diseases, suggest genital fluids might be a source of infection. Infectious virus also was found in air samples collected during a bed linen change in rooms used to isolate patients, UK researchers reported in a study released in July, ahead of peer-review. That suggests monkeypox may be present in aerosols -- suspended skin particles or dust -- and not only in larger respiratory droplets, such as from a cough, which fall to the ground close to an infected individual. Advertisement High concentrations of virus particles were also detected on toilets, sinks and other objects used by hospitalized patients, though its not yet known whether they could be a source of infection, a study from Germany found. Transmission from mother-to-unborn baby has also been documented. It can also happen indirectly through contact with contaminated clothing or linens. Common household disinfectants can kill it. 4. Whats unusual this time? There have been multiple chains of human-to-human transmission occurring. This is the first time that cases and sustained chains of transmission have been reported in countries where infections arent linked to recent travel to places in West or Central Africa, where the disease is endemic. Outside those areas, the outbreaks have primarily affected men who have sex with men. Among cases with data on sexual orientation, 97.5% identified as gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, according to an Aug. 3 WHO report. Advertisement Flu-like symptoms havent always preceded the rash, and some patients first sought medical care for lesions in the genital and perianal region. Some patients experience complications, including bacterial super infections, painful ulcerations, and inflammation of the rectum and throat. In some cases, the lesions are mostly located at these sites, making them hard to distinguish from syphilis, herpes simplex virus, shingles and other more common infections, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 5. Is monkeypox a sexually transmitted disease? No. Although its one of many pathogens capable of being transmitted during sex, its not considered an STD because it also uses other transmission pathways. Sexual behaviors are important risk factors, however. A sexual encounter was the likely source of spread in 91.5% of reported transmission events, according to the WHO report, with the most common setting being a large event with sexual contacts. Clubs, raves, saunas and other venues where there is close contact with many people may increase the risk of exposure, especially if people are wearing less clothing. Data from outbreaks in Canada, Spain, Portugal, and the UK suggest venues where men have sex with multiple partners are helping to drive spread. Advertisement 6. How fast is it spreading? From just a handful of cases in Europe in early May, more than 25,000 cases, mostly in men, were reported from 85 countries by early August, including 11 deaths, according to WHO and data collated by global.health. The virus has probably been circulating undetected in Europe since at least April. In the US, caseloads tripled in July, with the virus reported in more than 40 states. Preliminary research estimates that among cases who identify as men who have sex with men, the virus has a reproduction number greater than 1, which means more than one new infection is estimated to stem from a single case. A UK study found anonymous sex has proved to be a barrier to effective contact tracing. 7. How is it treated? The illness is usually mild and most patients will recover within a few weeks; treatment is mainly aimed at relieving symptoms. About 10% to 15% of cases have been hospitalized, mostly for pain and bacterial infections that can occur as a result of monkeypox lesions. The CDC says smallpox vaccine, antivirals, and vaccinia immune globulin can be used to treat monkeypox as well as control it. Tecovirimat, also known as Tpoxx, was approved by the European Medical Association for monkeypox in 2022, but isnt yet widely available. In the US, its safety and efficacy are being studied by the AIDS Clinical Trials Group, the research network established in the late 1980s to rapidly assess the safety and efficacy of antiretroviral drugs for HIV infection. In the meantime, its available through an expanded-access process from the Strategic National Stockpile, though some physicians have said lengthy delays for test results and the very daunting task of completing the necessary paperwork have frustrated efforts to prescribe it. The UK Health Security Agency (HSA) also lists cidofovir as an antiviral that can be used. Advertisement 8. What about prevention? Public health experts say limiting spread will require a comprehensive, international vaccination strategy targeting high-risk groups -- and adequate vaccine supplies. Vaccination against smallpox can be used for both pre- and post-exposure and is as much as 85% effective in preventing monkeypox, according to the UK health agency, which is offering shots of Imvanex from Bavarian Nordic A/S to close contacts of infected people. Its a newer smallpox vaccine, based on non-replicating versions of the vaccinia virus, and is the only one also approved for monkeypox in the US, where its sold as Jynneos. (Its called Imamune in Canada). Immunization requires two injections administered four weeks apart. But supply has been limited, leading to shortages. Otherwise, the main way to prevent infection is by isolating patients with the infection, monitoring their contacts, and ensuring health staff wear appropriate personal protective equipment. 9. Is monkeypox a pandemic threat? Advertisement WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on July 23 declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern -- its highest level of alarm short of a pandemic. The so-called PHEIC (pronounced fake) empowers the agency to invoke new measures to curb the viruss spread. Tedros last declared a PHEIC in January 2020 during the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak. The WHO assesses the risk across its regions as: High in Europe Moderate in Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean and the South-East Asia regions Low-moderate in the Western Pacific region 10. Can it be stopped? The White House appointed Robert Fenton in August to coordinate the US governments response and increase equitable access to tests, vaccines and treatments. But former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in mid-July that the window for controlling the US outbreak had probably closed, with only a small fraction of the cases in the country reported. A case in a pregnant woman was reported in the US, where pediatric infections have also occurred. In the Netherlands, doctors reported a case in a boy under 10 with an immune impairment. Unable to identify how he was infected, they speculate that the virus may be present in the general population and that respiratory transmission may have played a role. Tedros warned that in some countries, the communities affected face life-threatening discrimination and so may not seek help, making the outbreak much harder to track, and to stop. Advertisement 11. Do all infections cause disease? Possibly not. Retrospective testing of 224 clinical samples collected in May for sexually transmitted infection screening found evidence of asymptomatic monkeypox infection in three men. The finding, by researchers at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, was reported in a study released July 5 before it was peer-reviewed and published. Asymptomatic carriership was previously thought to play a negligible role in the spread of orthopoxviruses, the authors said. The existence of asymptomatic infections indicates that the virus might be transmitted to close contacts in the absence of symptoms, which suggests that identifying and isolating only symptomatic patients wont be enough to contain the outbreak, and that vaccinating high-risk individuals is needed. Interestingly, one of the asymptomatic men in the study predated the first detected symptomatic case in Belgium by several days, wasnt linked to other known cases and hadnt traveled abroad or attended any mass gatherings. The authors said that might suggest that the virus circulated in Belgium before the outbreak was detected. 12. Where does monkeypox come from? The reservoir host or main carrier of monkeypox disease hasnt yet been identified, although rodents are suspected of playing a part in transmission. It was first diagnosed in humans in 1970 in Congo in a 9-year-old boy. Since then, most cases in humans have occurred in rainforest areas of West and Central Africa. In 2003, the first outbreak outside of Africa occurred in the US and was linked to animals imported from Ghana to Texas, which then infected pet prairie dogs. Dozens of cases were recorded in that outbreak. 13. Has the monkeypox virus mutated? The monkeypox virus might be undergoing adaptive changes to make it better suited to the human host. Analysis of the genetic sequence of the virus collected from patients in Europe indicates that the current outbreak in non-endemic countries is caused by a strain that likely diverged from the monkeypox virus that sparked a 2018-19 Nigerian outbreak, according to a June 24 study in Nature Medicine. The authors, from Portugals National Institute of Health in Lisbon, identified some 50 genetic changes or differences compared with the original strain, including several mutations the authors associate with increased transmissibility. The changes are roughly 6-to-12 times more than scientists would expect based on the observed evolution of orthopoxviruses, they said. The strain belongs to the West African clade, or branch on the evolutionary tree, that usually has a case-fatality rate of less than 1%. (That compares with 10% for a second clade called Congo Basin, which appears on the US governments bioterrorism agent list as having the potential to pose a severe threat.) (Updates with details from WHO Aug. 3 report, White House monkepox coordinator) More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com 2022 Bloomberg L.P. GiftOutline Gift Article Gift Article Share Parade attack suspect pleads not guilty Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The man accused of shooting into a Fourth of July crowd in Highland Park, Ill., pleaded not guilty before a Lake County judge on Wednesday. Robert Crimo III is accused of killing seven and wounding dozens more in the mass shooting in the tightknit Chicago suburb. Authorities have said the suspect confessed to the deadly attack and considered committing a similar shooting in Wisconsin later that same day. A grand jury indicted Crimo last week on 117 counts 21 counts of first-degree murder, 48 counts of attempted murder and 48 counts of aggravated battery representing those killed and wounded presented by States Attorney Eric Rinehart. On Wednesday, Crimo was handcuffed and wearing a mask as he sat straight in a chair and clearly told the judge that he understood the charges. His parents attended the hearing. Advertisement Susan Berger Paul Pelosi pleads not guilty to DUI charges Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pleaded not guilty Wednesday to misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence stemming from a May car crash in Northern California. Pelosi, 82, was arrested in Napa County on May 28 on a DUI charge. Records show he was booked on one count of driving under the influence of alcohol causing injury and one count of driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.08 or higher causing injury. Under California law, Pelosi was not required to be present at his arraignment Wednesday in Napa County Superior Court, and his lawyer, Amanda Bevins, entered the not-guilty pleas on his behalf. A settlement conference is scheduled for Aug. 23. Bevins said the court ordered that Pelosi remain free on his own recognizance. Advertisement The May 28 crash occurred in Californias wine country, near state Route 29 and Oakville Cross Road, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Fox News. Officers at the scene said Pelosi was found in the drivers seat of his Porsche, while the male driver of an SUV was standing outside his vehicle; both autos sustained major collision damage, according to the complaint. The complaint alleges that Pelosi had red and watery eyes, slurred speech, a strong odor of alcohol on his breath, and that he showed signs of impairment in field sobriety tests. The SUV driver was not named, and both he and Pelosi declined medical treatment, according to the complaint. The document alleges that the SUV driver later began experiencing shoulder and neck pain, headaches and difficulty lifting things with his right arm. Nancy Pelosi was traveling on the East Coast to deliver a commencement address at Brown University when her husband was arrested, her office said then. This week, the House speaker is leading a congressional delegation to Asia, including a much-scrutinized stop in Taiwan. Amy B Wang GiftOutline Gift Article Placeholder while article actions load Mass funeral held for officers killed in Syria Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Mourners poured onto the streets of Tehran on Thursday to pay their respects to several Iranian officers killed in Syria, a testament to the human cost of Irans involvement in the civil war and a public display of nationalist fervor as talks to revive Irans 2015 nuclear deal with world powers resume in Vienna. The remains of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps members were recently recovered a few miles south of Aleppo, Syrias largest city and for years the wars most important front line. The Guard identified the five deceased fighters, providing few details about their deaths with the exception of Gen. Abdollah Eskandari a decorated commander who became known as the headless general after his capture and beheading by Syrian rebels in May 2014. The bodies were repatriated after a lengthy process of recovery and DNA analysis. Advertisement Iran has increasingly admitted to casualties since it intervened to rescue Syrian President Bashar al-Assads government, a ground presence that coincided with Russias air campaign and helped Assad reestablish control over most of Syria. Dozens of Iranian troops have been killed fighting the Islamic State group and other extremists in Syria. Meanwhile, Irans Intelligence Ministry said authorities arrested 10 people who it said had links to the Islamic State and had planned attacks across Iran during rallies next week to mark Ashura, a commemoration of the 7th-century death of prophet Muhammads grandson Hussein. Associated Press Fire triggered by blasts rages in Berlin forest A large fire triggered by explosions at an ammunition dump raged Thursday in a major Berlin urban forest on one of the German capitals hottest days this year. Advertisement A huge cloud of gray smoke hung over the citys western districts, and residents were asked to keep windows and doors shut. A major highway was closed and train service was interrupted, but authorities said no homes or inhabitants faced direct threat. More than 100 firefighters, dozens of troops and police officers battled the blaze in the Grunewald forest. Army tanks cut corridors into the forest to contain the blaze and allow firefighters to get closer to the flames. The army also sent in a remote-controlled robot with four cameras and a grappler that can be used to detect and eliminate ordnance. Massive explosions were heard in the morning from the site where ammunition from World War II, fireworks and explosive ordnance is stored and controlled detonations of old munitions are carried out. Advertisement A Berlin fire department official said it was not clear what triggered the first explosions at the site on Thursday. The ammunition dump belongs to city police. Associated Press South Sudan again delays its first election: Parties to the peace deal ending South Sudan's civil war have again delayed the country's first elections since independence by extending the transitional period by two years. The vote meant for early next year has been pushed to December 2024. In explaining the delay, President Salva Kiir said he wanted to avoid creating conditions for more bloodshed. Kiir, who has led South Sudan since its independence from Sudan in 2011, called on holdout groups to join him in implementing the peace process. Kiir and opposition groups signed the peace deal in 2018. But its provisions remain largely unimplemented. Advertisement Ex-Venezuelan opposition leader gets 8 years in prison: Former Venezuela opposition lawmaker Juan Requesens was sentenced to eight years in prison for alleged involvement in the 2018 explosion of two drones at an event attended by President Nicolas Maduro, his attorney said, one of 17 people to receive sentences over the incident. Requesens's family and opposition leader Juan Guaido have denied his involvement. Maduro has said Requesens was named by people arrested in the case. The government says the incident was a failed assassination attempt planned by the opposition, Colombia and the United States. Family of British comatose boy want him moved to hospice: The family of a comatose boy that has fought to prevent doctors from ending his life-support treatment has filed legal action requesting permission to move him from a London hospital to a hospice. Archie Battersbee's parents announced the move after the European Court of Human Rights rejected a request to intervene in the case following rulings by British courts that backed doctors who said further treatment was not in the 12-year-old's best interests because he is brain dead. From news services GiftOutline Gift Article Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share MEXICO CITY A cave-in at a coal mine in northern Mexico trapped nine miners Wednesday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said. The president tweeted that the accident happened in the town of Sabinas in the border state of Coahuila. He said 92 soldiers, specialists and four dogs were at the scene assisting rescue efforts. The Coahuila state government said in a statement that the collapse occurred after the miners breached a neighboring area filled with water. The mine began operations this year, and the local government said it had not received any complaints or reports of previous incidents. Sabinas is about 70 miles southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas. Local media outlets reported that a miner managed to escape the collapse and alerted authorities. Milenio television said relatives of the trapped miners gathered outside the mine awaiting information. Advertisement In June and July of 2021, cave-ins at two Coahuila mines claimed the lives of nine miners. Mexicos worst mining accident also occurred in Coahuila on Feb. 19, 2006, when an explosion ripped through the Pasta de Conchos mine while 73 miners were inside. Eight were rescued with injuries including serious burns. The rest died and only two of their bodies were recovered. Lopez Obradors administration promised two years ago to recover the remaining 63 bodies, a highly technical endeavor that has still not begun. GiftOutline Gift Article Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share DAKAR, Senegal Senegals ruling coalition party has lost an absolute majority in the national assembly, according to official provisional results released Thursday by the electoral commission. President Macky Salls Benno Bokk Yaakar party, won 82 of the 165 deputy positions to be filled, a major blow to the leader who many feared would seek a third term in 2024 presidential elections if his party held the absolute majority. They held 125 seats before Sundays legislative election. Aly Ba, the president of the Court of Appeals of Dakar and President of the National Vote Counting Commission read the results Thursday. Parties can appeal to the Constitutional Council which will release final results by the end of next week. The two main opposition forces, Yewwi Askan Wi (Liberate the People) and Wallu Senegal (Save Senegal) obtained 56 seats and 24 seats respectively, according to the results. The other three seats are shared between the three other coalitions. This is the first time that the opposition has won so many seats in the National Assembly. Advertisement Election officials said the participation rate for more than 7 million registered voters was about 47%. Voting Sunday in the West African nation known for its stability remained calm and peaceful. A prime minister will now be appointed and a new government formed after the president on Wednesday chaired a last Council of Ministers meeting on Wednesday during which he asked the ministers to evacuate current affairs. The results come hours after the Senegalese opposition demanded the suspension of the publication of the results of the legislative elections of July 31. On Sunday, the ruling party had said they were going to hold a majority. The national vote counting commission has until Friday at midnight to publish the results, declared Dethie Fall, representative of the Coalition Yewwi Askan wi (Liberate the People) during a press briefing in front of the court which houses the vote counting commission. On Wednesday, Ousmane Sonko, the leader of the opposition who was disqualified from running warned against any treachery aimed at confiscating the votes of the Senegalese. GiftOutline Gift Article Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share ISLAMABAD The Taliban said Thursday they are investigating what they described as claims that al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the Afghan capital. However, the group insisted in a statement that it has no knowledge of the arrival and residence of al-Zawahri in Afghanistan. The statement marked the first time the Taliban leadership addressed the U.S. announcement that al-Zawahri was the target of Sundays strike. However, despite the Taliban denial of knowledge of al-Zawahris presence, U.S. officials have said the al-Qaida head was staying at a Kabul safe house linked to the deputy leader of the Taliban. The strike killed al-Zawahri when he stepped out onto the safe houses balcony. His presence in Kabul and the killing have further strained relations between the Taliban and the West, particularly as Afghanistans rulers seek an urgent infusion of cash to handle the catastrophic collapse of the economy that came after the U.S. withdrawal a year ago. Advertisement The Taliban had promised in the Doha Agreement not to harbor al-Qaida members or those seeking to attack the U.S. In the accord, the U.S. committed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and not to attack the Taliban. On Tuesday, the Talibans first statement on the strike only confirmed it had taken place, without mentioning al-Zawahri. In it, they condemned the strike as a clear violation of ... the Doha Agreement. In the new statement Thursday, the Taliban appeared to be trying to avert escalated tensions, particularly at ta time when they and U.S. officials have been holding talks over $3.5 billion in Afghan assets frozen in the United States. The Taliban said they ordered the investigative and intelligence agencies to conduct serious and comprehensive investigations on various aspects of the mentioned event. Advertisement The statement also assured the West there is no danger from the territory of Afghanistan to any country, including America. Pakistan, which has lobbied the world to improve ties with the Taliban, said Thursday that its airspace was not used for the strike that killed al-Zawahri. Although U.S. officials have not confirmed from where the drone with precision-guided Hellfire missiles was launched, there was speculation it used Pakistani territory. There is no evidence of this action having been undertaken using Pakistans airspace, Foreign Ministry spokesman Asim Iftikhar said. U.S. officials have said al-Zawahri had been staying for months at the Kabul home of a top aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani is the top deputy of the Taliban movements supreme leader, Mullah Haibatallah Akhundzada. He also serves as interior minister in the Taliban-run government and heads the Haqqani network, a powerful faction within the movement. Advertisement The Haqqani network is an Afghan Islamic insurgent group, built around the family of the same name. In the 1980s, it fought Soviet forces and over the past 20 years, it battled U.S.-led NATO troops and the former Afghanistan government. The U.S. government maintains a $10 million bounty on Sirajuddin Haqqani for attacks on American troops and Afghan civilians. However, the Haqqanis also have opponents within the Taliban leadership, some of whom feel Sirajuddin Haqqani is amassing too much power. Haqqanis apparent sheltering of al-Zawahri could exacerbate frictions within the movement, though his power in the leadership leaves him nearly untouchable. Regardless of who knew about al-Zawharis presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban as a whole has never ended its longtime alliance with al-Qaida. The terror network has greatly diminished in manpower and strength the past decade, making it more reliant on allies like the Taliban. Advertisement Al-Qaida has enjoyed greater freedom in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, according to a July report to the U.N. Security Council by monitors of militant groups. However, the monitors said its unlikely al-Qaida will seek to mount direct attacks outside Afghanistan, owing to a lack of capability and restraint on the part of the Taliban, as well as an unwillingness to jeopardize their recent gains such as having a safe haven and improved resources. GiftOutline Gift Article Keen to do a sticker run Well before neo-Nazi propaganda began appearing this year at sites around the city of Wollongong and in Sydneys CBD, the man calling himself Underland had started networking online across Australias extremist scene. Records of his communications obtained by this masthead reveal Telegram served as the perfect platform. It allowed him to mask his identity as he sought counsel and new introductions from entrenched extremist figures. After Underland had been directed towards the Melbourne-based European Australian Movement on a Telegram-hosted neo-Nazi channel, Underland began communicating. His contact uses the alias Aussie Meditations. In February, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald identified the user of this alias as Stefan Eracleous, a former young Liberal member turned neo-Nazi from Victoria. Eracleous was responsible for a January 19 propaganda video depicting three masked neo-Nazis burning an Aboriginal flag, reciting a white supremacist manifesto and attacking Greens senator Lidia Thorpe. In May, Underland asked Eracleous what stickers have you got an [sic] how much are they ... Me and a few of the boys are keen to do a sticker run. Eracleous responded swiftly, offering extremist stickers and posters that were very cheap and good designs. It is unclear if Eracleous helped Underland obtain neo-Nazi material, but it seems likely. After the pairs exchange of messages, Underland embarked on a propaganda campaign around Wollongong, placing stickers and posters up at several sites. One of Underlands aims appears to have been recruitment. Posters encouraged people to connect with his new neo-Nazi cell, the Illawarra Active, via its dedicated Telegram page. Young Australians were particular targets, with graffiti, stickers and posters placed on walls and signs at the University of Wollongong. Underland and a small number of others also targeted local migrant communities. One Telegram post uploaded by the group shows it placing Islamists not welcome posters at Wollongongs Omar mosque. The message exchange in which Underland asks for neo-Nazi material from a Melbourne-based extremist. Budding racists who responded to the request to follow Illawarra Actives Telegram account were confronted online with material that became increasingly disturbing. On May 21, the account shared a video promoting the European Australia Movement and urged supporters to help free one of its leaders. The man is on bail in Melbourne while facing charges relating to an assault allegation. His case has been turned into a rallying point by neo-Nazi groups across Australia. On June 2, the Illawarra Active account shared material created by a group that is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Australia, the overseas-based National Socialist Order. It included a video outlining the core beliefs set out in a white supremacist book, Siege, which has been used as inspiration by terrorist actors across the world and which champions violent conflict with mainstream society. Terrorgram The New Zealand Royal Commission called after the Christchurch massacre noted the Australian terrorist who committed the atrocity was an adherent to the views espoused in Siege, particularly the idea that violent action should be embraced to accelerate the reach and power of white nationalism. An image on the Illawarra Active social media site. The number of Australians who responded to the propaganda drive by following the Illawarra Actives Telegram account appears to have been no more than about 50 at any time, even after the group gained a publicity bounce from an Illawarra Mercury story on June 6 headlined Police investigate the white supremacy, neo-Nazi flyers found at University of Wollongong campus. But while the group remains small, its Telegram channel reveals devoted followers using the encrypted platform to communicate, publicise events and liaise with other neo-Nazi cells across Australia. Researchers from the USs Centre on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism recently described how Telegram had enabled the formation of a so-called Terrorgram community, which uses the encrypted platform as the principal point of online organising, identity building, propaganda distribution, and more. The researchers analysed thousands of Telegram messages from two new militant neo-Nazi networks to form insights into their diffuse networks and how they relate to the threats of real-world violence they pose. The report warns that even small online cells may pose a tangible terror risk, citing the June 2021 thwarting of a terror plot in Texas by a member of one of the two networks analysed in the report. Telegram is in many ways an ideal platform for dangerous actors. It has good functionality, communications are encrypted, its user base is expanding and content moderation is practically non-existent, says Lydia Khalil, a Lowy Institute research fellow and author of the upcoming book Rise of the Extreme Right. Evident in Underlands Telegram history is a hunger to move off the internet and into the real world. In one message thread with the Adelaide terror suspect, Eracleous and several EAM members, Underland discusses buying a large block of land to set up a decent community and creating a White Australia political party. Political or racist violence is a deliberate theme in many posts. Unintended consequences But Underlands online activity also has an unintended consequence, revealing a series of clues about his true identity. Three years of his internet posting, reviewed by anti-fascist researchers from The White Rose Society, reveals a job (arborist), a first name (Adrian) and a middle initial (J), all pointing to a 34-year-old Wollongong man called Adrian John Carr. Adrian John Carr claims his social media sites have been hacked. More online digging shows that Carr used his real email and name to set up a Skype account. Its profile photo displays the name Underland. An archived Twitter account reveals a similar link between Carr and the alias Underland. When called by this masthead, Carr denied he was Underland, claiming his various social media accounts had been hacked. I got defrauded, my identity got stolen, he said. He did confirm, however, that he was the author of a since-deleted post from his Facebook page that described Jews as scum. Carrs fellow cell members include Wollongong man Ben Thomas, 36, whose identity is given away by the distinctive hand tattoos that appear both on his Facebook page and on the Illawarra Actives Telegram page. Thomass hands can be seen on some of the cells propaganda videos plastering neo-Nazi propaganda around Wollongong. He could not be reached for comment. Ben Thomas. Another cell member, a 30-year-old Wollongong tradesman (who this masthead is not naming for legal reasons), shares with Carr and Thomas a history of police attention for alleged criminal activity, having spent years in jail. A NSW man who had been approached to join the group described Carr as its key actor and noted its members had nearly all experienced family and mental instability and trauma as younger men. The man, who asked to remain confidential, blamed people on the internet for radicalising Carr. I dont like what AJ [Adrian] is doing. I dont like the hate that is being spread. But you need to ask, why is Adrian the way he is? What is causing these young men in the regions to slip through the cracks? A global challenge The young men in Illawarra Active appear to relish the brotherhood formed first in the Telegram neo-Nazi community and then in person, as they urge each other on to become more radical. As researchers overseas have observed of European and American Telegram neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, the Australian terrorgram community is also notable not only for its extremist camaraderie, but its resilience. The chats involving Carr and his fellow cell members appear to observe the recent arrest of like-minded Australians by the federal police counter-terror teams as reason to continue their fight, rather than to rethink their views. It also shows how quickly a small band of disorganised and disillusioned men from regional Australia can fall into the orbit of highly organised international extremist groups. The National Socialist Order is banned in Australia as a terror group, but Illawarra Active has freely shared its propaganda online. Three people have been killed and one man with a gunshot wound has survived a shooting at a remote property in north Queensland. Police are still hunting the killer or killers through remote bushland in grazing country now subject to an emergency exclusion zone. The survivor was able to travel kilometres to raise the alarm at a homestead in remote Bogie, north of Mackay, to call for help. The man is fighting for life in hospital and undergoing emergency surgery after he was flown by RACQ CQ Rescue helicopter to Mackay Base Hospital about 11am. The sole survivor of a deadly shooting in a remote area north of Mackay was in a serious but stable condition in hospital on Thursday night as police tried to determine who was responsible. Two men and a woman, understood to be from the same family as the injured man, were found dead in grazing country at Bogie, near Collinsville. Police had yet to formally release their names. Despite a gunshot wound to the abdomen, the man was able to raise the alarm, prompting a day-long police operation that culminated in five people at a property being taken for questioning. In a statement on Thursday night, the Queensland Police Service said forensics officers would on Friday examine several crime scenes in the area. Almost 100 cafes across Western Australia are rallying to help raised funds for grassroots homelessness charities after the pandemic and increase cost of living pressures placed increased demand on their services. Participating cafes will donate $1 from every drink sold on Friday, with $1.6 million to be handed out to charities since the national CafeSmart program started. Delissimo director Tanya Cinanni and barista Alexia Lumsden. Credit:Holly Thompson The funds raised by each cafe will go directly to charities that operate in their area. One charity to benefit from the program, the South West Refuge Inc in Bunbury, has used the donations for ambulance cover, taxis for refuge residents, food and petrol vouchers, school uniforms, books and bags. The case for a national security strategy has been boosted by a new CSIRO report which makes for eyebrow-raising reading. The idea of a national security strategy has been kicking around Canberra and academic circles for some time but has been resisted by previous governments. However, the number and size of the human and natural challenges facing Australia now makes this strategy, and its thorough implementation, a necessity. While this weeks announcement by the government of a defence review is necessary and welcome, it only addresses part of the national security dilemma facing Australia. Hundreds of rescues were performed by everyday citizens as floods stranded the residents of Lismore. Credit: Elise Derwin Titled Our Future World, the report is a timely document that highlights issues that have a trajectory of change likely to have a substantial and transformative impact on individual, organisations and societies. It describes seven mega trends climate change, autonomy, health imperatives, geopolitics, the digital economy, the global push to net zero, and unlocking human potential in decision-making. Istanbul: Russian pilots have been told not to brake too much in order to reduce wear and tear, as Western sanctions mean there is a shortage of parts for plane repairs. According to internal memos from four Russian airline companies, pilots have been asked to be gentle when braking and taxiing. S7 Airlines has told pilots to use engine reverse thrust and to avoid autobrake mode if the runaway is long enough, the Aviatorshina Telegram channel reported. Aeroflot Airbus A330 plane taxies out at Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow. Credit:AP Russian airline companies are grappling with a shortage of spare parts as international companies refuse to sell to them because of sanctions put in place after the invasion of Ukraine. Pilots were also told they should get off the runaway quickly to make way for other planes. Washington: The legal team representing Infowars founder Alex Jones inadvertently sent the contents of his cellphone to a lawyer representing the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, the parents lawyer said in court Wednesday. The apparent blunder, revealed by attorney Mark Bankston as Jones was on the stand in the damages phase of his defamation trial, unearthed previously undisclosed texts about the massacre and financial information about his conspiracy media outlet Infowars. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones attempts to answer questions about his emails asked by lawyer Mark Bankston, representing the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Credit:AP Bankston, who represents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, told the far-right conspiracy theorist that his attorneys had messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone. And that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didnt have text messages about Sandy Hook, Bankston said. Allentown, PA (18103) Today A mix of clouds and sunshine and comfortably warm. Just the slight chance of a spotty afternoon shower, with the best chance from the Lehigh Valley on north. . Tonight Partly cloudy and another comfy night; just the slight chance of an evening shower. SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) Former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez was arrested Thursday on bribery charges linked to the financing of her 2020 campaign, the latest hit to an island with a long history of corruption that brought fresh political upheaval to the U.S. territory. Vazquez is accused of engaging in a bribery scheme from December 2019 through June 2020 while she was governor with several people, including a Venezuelan-Italian bank owner, a former FBI agent, a bank president and a political consultant. I am innocent. I have not committed any crime, she told reporters. I assure you that they have committed a great injustice against me. The arrest embarrassed and angered many in Puerto Rico who believe the island's already shaky image has been further tarnished, leaving a growing number of people who have lost faith in their local officials to wonder whether federal authorities are their only hope to root out entrenched government corruption. Concern over previous corruption cases led to a delay in federal aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria as the U.S. government implemented more safeguards. Thursday's arrest also was a blow to Vazquez's pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which is pushing to hold a referendum next year in a bid to become the 51st U.S. state. Vazquez, 62, was the second woman to serve as Puerto Ricos governor and the first former governor to face federal charges. Former Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila of the opposing Popular Democratic Party was charged with campaign finance violations while in office and was found not guilty in 2009. He had been the first Puerto Rico governor to be charged with a crime in recent history. For the second time in our history, political power and public office are used to finance an electoral campaign, said Jose Luis Dalmau, president of Acevedo's party. Using the power of the government to advance political agendas is unacceptable and an affront to democracy in Puerto Rico." Vazquez's consultant, identified as John Blakeman, and the bank president, identified as Frances Diaz, have pleaded guilty to participating in the bribery scheme, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In early 2019, the international bank owned by Julio Martin Herrera Velutini was being scrutinized by Puerto Ricos Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions because of transactions authorities believed were suspicious and had not been reported by the bank. Authorities said Herrera and Mark Rossini, the former FBI agent who provided consulting services to Herrera, allegedly promised to financially support Vazquezs 2020 campaign for governor in exchange for Vazquez dismissing the commissioner and appointing a new one of Herreras choosing. Authorities said Vazquez accepted the bribery offer and in February 2020 demanded the commissioners resignation. She then was accused of appointing a former consultant for Herreras bank as the new commissioner in May 2020. After the move, officials said Herrera and Rossini paid more than $300,000 to political consultants to support Vazquezs campaign. A flurry of messages exchanged during that time between people involved in the case included a heart emoji attached to the commissioner's resignation letter and three sealed lips emojis when someone provided Rossi's name to Vazquez, who requested the name of the guy from the FBI. In addition, Herrera texted Rossini about the need for a campaign manager and said he didn't want a monkey from Puerto Rico. After Vazquez lost the primary to current Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, authorities said Herrera then allegedly sought to bribe Pierluisi to end an audit into his bank with favorable terms. Herrera is accused of using intermediaries from April 2021 to August 2021 to offer a bribe to Pierluisis representative, who was actually acting under FBI orders, according to the indictment. Officials said Herrera then ordered a $25,000 payment to a political action committee in hopes of trying to bribe Pierluisi. Stephen Muldrow, U.S. Attorney for Puerto Rico, said Pierluisi is not involved in the case. Vazquez, Herrera and Rossini are each charged with conspiracy, federal programs bribery and honest services wire fraud. If they are found guilty on all counts, they could face up to 20 years in prison, officials said. Meanwhile, Diaz and Blakeman could face up to five years in prison, officials said. Muldrow said officials believe Herrera is in the United Kingdom and Rossini in Spain. It wasnt clear if the U.S. would seek to extradite them. Rossini resigned from the FBI in November 2008 as part of a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to criminally accessing a sensitive FBI database for personal purposes. Many of the searches were related to Anthony Pellicano, an infamous private eye for celebrities who was charged in 2006 with wiretapping certain stars and bribing a police officer. Attorneys for the other suspects charged in the case could not be immediately reached for comment. In mid-May, Vazquez's attorney told reporters that he and his client were preparing for possible charges as the former governor at the time denied any wrongdoing. Vazquez was sworn in as governor in August 2019 after former Gov. Ricardo Rossello stepped down following massive protests. She served until 2021, after losing the primaries of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party to Pierluisi. In a statement Thursday, Pierluisi said his administration will work with federal authorities to help fight corruption. No one is above the law in Puerto Rico, he said. Faced with this news that certainly affects and lacerates the confidence of our people, I reiterate that in my administration, we will continue to have a common front with federal authorities against anyone who commits an improper act, no matter where it comes from or who it may implicate. Vazquez previously served as the islands justice secretary and a district attorney for more than 30 years. She became governor after Puerto Ricos Supreme Court ruled that the swearing in of Pierluisi who had only been nominated as secretary of state as governor was unconstitutional. Vazquez at the time said she was not interested in running for office and would only finish the nearly two years left in Rossellos term. Rossello had resigned in late July 2019 after tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the street, angry over corruption, mismanagement of public funds and an obscenity-laced chat in which he and 11 other men including public officials made fun of women, gay people and victims of Hurricane Maria, among others. Shortly after she was sworn in, Vazquez told the AP that her priorities were to fight corruption, secure federal hurricane recovery funds and help lift Puerto Rico out of a deep economic crisis as the government struggled to emerge from bankruptcy. During the interview, she told the AP that she had long wanted to be in public service: as a girl, she would stand on her balcony and hold imaginary trials, always finding the supposed defendants guilty. MILAN (AP) Italys firebrand former interior minister, Matteo Salvini, put migration at the center of his electoral campaign during a visit Thursday to Italys southernmost island of Lampedusa, a gateway for tens of thousands of people crossing the perilous central Mediterranean Sea to Italian territory each year. Salvini pledged to move screening centers for people seeking political asylum to northern Africa, in a bid to prevent economic migrants from pouring into Italy. He said just 15% of current arrivals qualify as refugees. He also voiced concern that the migrant center on Lampedusa, Italys largest, was nearing collapse due to overcrowding, calling it unworthy of a civilized country. Salvini distinguished between those who qualify for asylum, saying they cannot be massed on the ground on mattresses in 40-degree heat, and those who do not: We cannot throw open the doors of Italy to thousands of clandestine migrants who are not fleeing war, he said. Salvini is pledging a return to his tough-on-immigration policies should the right-wing coalition win the Sept. 25 parliamentary vote. The early elections were forced after his right-wing anti-migrant League party, along with two other parties, yanked their support for outgoing Premier Mario Draghis 17-month-old pandemic unity government. During Salvinis short but dramatic tenure as interior minister in 2018-19, migrant arrivals in Italy dropped sharply as he pursued policies of deterrence, including long government delays in assigning safe ports to rescue ships. He is currently on trial in Sicily, charged with kidnapping in one such case, while the charges were thrown out in another. I think in 2018-2019 Italy was a safer country, more protected, more normal, more European, Salvini said. Lampedusa is the gateway of Europe. It cannot be the refugee camp of Europe. While his League led the right-wing coalition in Italy's 2018 election, it sank in popularity after joining Draghis consensus government. It is now lagging badly in the polls behind another right-wing coalition partner, the far-right Brothers of Italy led by Giorgia Meloni. That leaves Salvini fighting for political relevance. If the right-wing coalition wins the Sept. 25 vote, the leader of the party with the most votes would be tapped as premier to form a new government. Meloni is seeking to become Italy's first female premier, but Salvini is not counting himself out. And he insists that in either case, the interior minister should come from his League. Not everyone on the island of Lampedusa was keen to be part of Salvinis electoral rhetoric. The islands mayor is worried about the impact on tourism, and insists the current system of transferring migrants to Sicily and beyond was averting the emergency situations experienced during the peak arrival years from 2014 to 2016. With new arrivals daily from Libya and Tunisia, migrants typically spend less than 24 hours on the island. The crucial element is not to slow down or jam the transfer to the mainland, Mayor Filippo Mannino told The Associated Press on Thursday. A handful of aid workers and activists held a sit-in in Lampedusa ahead of Salvinis arrival, displaying banners disputing his depiction of an island swamped by migrants. Whoever comes to Lampedusa, doesnt see migrants. There is no emergency. The only emergency is for the migrants who are at the (migrant center), said Luca Casarini, an activist and chief of mission on Mare Jonio Italian rescue ship. He accused Salvini of propaganda to gain votes on the skin of people ... who die at sea, who are much worse off than us. Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman with the Italian offices of the International Organization for Migration, said while migrant arrivals are up this year by about one-third over 2021, they are still well below the 120,000 to 180,000 registered annually from 2014-2016. These are not emergency numbers. We are not facing a numerical emergency. But we are facing a humanitarian emergency, Di Giacomo said, citing 905 people who have died or gone missing at sea this year. David Lohmueller in Lampedusa, and Paolo Santalucia in Rome contributed. Follow all AP stories on global migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration. FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) Roses brought to honor love on that Valentine's Day in 2018 lay withered, their dried and cracked petals scattered across classroom floors still smeared with the blood of victims gunned down by a former student more than four years ago. Bullet holes pocked walls, and shards of glass from windows shattered by gunfire crunched underfoot at Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where shooter Nikolas Cruz killed 14 students and three staff members. Nothing had been changed, except for the removal of the victims' bodies and some personal items. Twelve jurors and 10 alternates who will decide whether Cruz gets the death penalty or life in prison made a rare visit to the massacre scene Thursday, retracing Cruz's steps through the three-story freshman building, known as Building 12. After they left, a group of journalists was allowed in for a much quicker first public view. The sight was deeply unsettling: Large pools of dried blood still stained classroom floors. A lock of dark hair rested on the floor where one of the victims' bodies once lay. A single black rubber shoe was in a hallway. Browned rose petals were strewn across a hallway where six people died. In classroom after classroom, open notebooks displayed uncompleted lessons. A blood-coated book called, Tell Them We Remember sat atop a bullet-riddled desk in the classroom where teacher Ivy Schamis taught students about the Holocaust. A sign attached to a bulletin board read: We will never forget. Two students died there. In the classroom of English teacher Dara Hass, where the most students were gunned down, there were essays about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for going to school, and who has since become a global advocate for educational access for women and girls. A bullet went straight to her head but not her brain, one student wrote. We go to school every day of the week and we take it all for granted, wrote another. "We cry and complain without knowing how lucky we are to be able to learn. The door of Room 1255, teacher Stacey Lippel's classroom, was pushed open like others to signify that Cruz shot into it. Hanging on a wall inside was a sign reading, No Bully Zone. The creative writing assignment for the day was on the whiteboard: How to write the perfect love letter. And still hanging on the wall of a second-floor hallway was a quote from James Dean: Dream as if youll live forever, live as if youll die today." In slain teacher Scott Beigel's geography classroom, a laptop was still open on his desk. Student assignments comparing the tenets of Christianity and Islam remained, some graded, some not. On his whiteboard, Beigel, the school's cross-country coach, had been writing the gold, silver and bronze medalists in each event at the Winter Olympics, which had begun five days earlier. Prosecutors, who rested their case following the jury's tour, hope the visit will help prove that Cruz's actions were cold, calculated, heinous and cruel; created a great risk of death to many people and interfered with a government function all aggravating factors under Florida's capital punishment law. Under Florida court rules, neither the judge nor the attorneys were allowed to speak to the jurors and the jurors weren't allowed to converse with each other when they retraced the path Cruz took on Feb. 14, 2018, as he moved from floor to floor, firing down hallways and into classrooms. Prior to the tour, the jurors had already seen surveillance video of the shooting and photographs of its aftermath. The building has been sealed and was surrounded by a 15-foot (4.6-meter) chain-link fence wrapped in a privacy mesh screen fastened with zip ties. It looms ominously over the school and its teachers, staff and 3,300 students, and can be seen easily by anyone nearby. The Broward County school district plans to demolish it whenever prosecutors approve. For now, it is a court exhibit. When you are driving past, it's there. When you are going to class, it's there. It is just a colossal structure that you can't miss," said Kai Koerber, who was a Stoneman Douglas junior at the time of the shooting. He is now at the University of California, Berkeley, and the developer of a mental health phone app. It is just a constant reminder ... that is tremendously trying and horrible." Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty in October to 17 counts of first-degree murder; the trial is only to determine if he is sentenced to death or life without parole. Miami defense attorney David S. Weinstein said prosecutors hope the visit will be the final piece in erasing any doubt that any juror might have had that the death penalty is the only recommendation that can be made. Such crime site visits are rare. Weinstein, a former prosecutor, said in more than 150 jury trials dating back to the late 1980s, he has only had one. In most trials, a crime scene visit wouldnt even be considered because years later it's not the same place as when the crime occurred and can give a false sense of what happened. But in this case, the building was sealed off so it could be done. Cruzs attorneys have argued that prosecutors have used what they assert is provocative evidence, including Thursday's visit, not just to prove their case, but to inflame jurors passions. After jurors returned to the courtroom Thursday, the mothers of two victims testified that the massacre permanently cast a pall over not only every Valentines Day but other important family celebrations. Helena Ramsay, 17, died on her fathers birthday. That day will never be a celebration and can never be the same for him, her mother, Anne Ramsay, said. Hui Wang, whose 15-year-old son Peter was killed, said the shooting occurred the day before Chinese New Year. A planned celebration was canceled that year and every year since then. This day of unity became a day that hurts the most, she said. The wife of athletic director, Chris Hixon, and their 26-year-old son, who has special needs, also spoke on the fourth and final day jurors heard from victims families. Hixon, a 49-year-old Navy veteran, died charging into the building trying to stop Cruz and protect the students. Corey Hixon described a weekly ritual of getting donuts with his dad. I miss him, he said, simply. A 30-year-old man accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old he met while working as a lifeguard at Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells was recently released on a $500 cash bond and a warrant issued for his arrest after he failed to show up in court Tuesday. The warrant was quashed Wednesday by Sauk County Circuit Court Judge Patricia Barrett and a hearing scheduled for Oct. 6 to forfeit his bond. Rajiiv David Isree, of Lake Delton, faces charges of second-degree sexual assault of a child, child sexual exploitation, child pornography possession, child enticement, strangulation and suffocation, misdemeanor bail jumping and obstructing an officer. Isree faces a maximum prison sentence of more than 143 years and 108 years of extended supervision. According to the criminal complaint: Isree met a 15-year-old while working as a lifeguard, complimenting the childs eyes and sharing his Snapchat information with the teen June 10 at the resort. The pair talked, according to the teenager, and Isree said he was a 19-year-old originally from Jamaica living in J-1 housing along Bunker Drive. They exchanged messages on the social media messaging app. A few days later, the teenager met with Isree at his apartment building, where he allegedly told the teen to disrobe and the pair engaged in sexual acts. According to phone data retrieved by Lake Delton police officers, Isree recorded the interactions. The teen said he also held the teen by the throat and caused breathing issues during the interaction. Isree had sent a short video via Snapchat to the teen, but had also saved longer ones to his phone. The teenager reported the assault after learning Isree had lied about his age. While 19 is still a teenager, the 15-year-old said learning Isree was twice as old felt like a violation and had gone to the Reedsburg Area Medical Center emergency room to report the rape. Isree was interviewed by police. He told them he had not interacted with the 15-year-old outside of the resort and a few messages, denying any type of sexual acts between the two but once police searched his phone, they found video evidence of it. As conditions of his bond, Isree is prohibited from having any contact with the teenager or the teens home or school. Isree was ordered to surrender his passport upon release on bail. Barrett issued the warrant after Isree failed to show up for a motion hearing in a separate case. He entered a deferred prosecution agreement in July 2021 on charges of contact after domestic abuse and bail jumping. A motion was filed to revoke the 18-month-long agreement after he was charged with sexual assault of a child. The hearing was to consider that motion, but Isree did not show up. He is scheduled to return to court Oct. 6. Supporting diversity in the classroom When: Wednesday, 09 March 2022 Where: Online Event Start time: 9:00 Enquiries: / Bookings contact: Candice.Michael@wits.ac.za The massive increase in enrolments at institutions of higher learning in South Africa resulted in increased diversity in the student population. A diverse classroom not only enriches the learning experiences for all students, but it also prepares them for the world of work and beyond. Diversity further enhances students cognitive skills particularly problem solving and critical thinking skills. This workshop aims to challenge your thinking while exploring the benefits of teaching a diverse group of students. In this session participants will deliberate and debate practical methods of creating a learning environment that ensures all students from all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives feel included, heard and valued. ort and/or work with students with relevant information to assist and support these students during their university career. Date: 9 March 2022 Time: 09:00-12:00 Venue: Online (Meeting link will be e-mailed once bookings are confirmed) Hong Kong student Chen Man-lin, 15, receives a letter of reply from Chen Dong, an astronaut aboard the Tiangong space station, on July 19. The letter was delivered and handed to the student by Hong Kong Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong. [China Daily] Most people remember the excitement of receiving the first letter from their pen pal. The beauty of the letter is the anticipation, the waiting and the curiosity of what is in the note. Chen Man-lin, a 15-year-old Hong Kong student, was over the moon. Her pen pal was orbiting in the Tiangong Space Station when he wrote inspiring words to her. Chen, a Form 3 student, or ninth-grader, at Pui Kiu Middle School in North Point, Hong Kong, learned in June about a national campaign of writing to astronauts in the Tiangong space station in a campaign called "Bring my dream to Tiangong". She drafted an outline of her letter that evening and detailed every moment of her planned journey and how she gradually got to know what astronauts do and about the nation's aerospace development program. It was not done on impulse. The seed was planted back when Chen was 6-years-old. She had watched a live broadcast of a science lecture by woman astronaut Wang Yaping, which was beamed back from space in 2013. Over 60 million primary and middle school students watched the class. The scene of floating water balls and spinning tops, experiments performed by Wang in space to demonstrate the concepts of weight and mass in a zero-gravity environment, captured the heart of Chen and many other youngsters. Since then, Chen has paid special attention to news and developments in aerospace. She put her passion for space into writing, along with her frustration and doubts about her studies and making choices in life. A three-page letter of reply arrived in about a month. Shenzhou XIV astronaut Chen Dong responded to the student. Chen Man-lin was one of the 30,000 students from all over China who took part in the campaign and became the only one chosen in Hong Kong to receive a letter sent from space. Her school threw a big party on July 19, when Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong hand delivered the letter of reply. Astronaut Chen Dong talks to students in Hong Kong in a video. [China Daily] Along with the letter, Chen Dong also recorded a video in the space station to share the student's letter and his reply. Teachers and students from the school gathered to watch the video together. In encouraging the student, Chen Dong recalled how he fumbled along the way to becoming an astronaut. He shared how he had conquered drowsiness when he had to start over to learn astronomy, physics, aerospace technology and everything necessary to become an astronaut. He told her how he was tested to the limit during hypergravity training, a technique that largely involves wearing weights for several hours a day. "During the training, every inch of my skin, my cells was put under unbearable pressure. It felt like my internal organs were being 'displaced'," he said. His intense training went on for six years. He almost cut himself off from the outside world during that time and was finally able to qualify for the mission in space. It was his dream that kept him going when he was feeling lost and fatigued, he wrote. On Oct 17, 2016, during his first space mission, Chen Dong was amazed when he saw the universe unfold in front of his eyes for the first time. "To level with you, life is like the sky, which comes with different weather. It is not all sunny days. There will be rainy, snowy and stormy days, making the sky a riot of color. Don't worry about stumbling blocks in life, or you will not have been at your best. Every day you encounter is a valuable sight to behold, making you one of a kind. Please cherish those days, which will reward you with great surprise," he said. "Before I went to bed in the space station, I would always like to search for our country through the windows of the spacecraft. In the gleams of the lights of every household, it is a thriving country. That is what I have been fighting for," he added. The letter from space was also a fitting tribute to mark the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland. Recalling the joy of celebrating the return of Hong Kong 25 years ago, the astronaut also encouraged young people in Hong Kong to follow their dreams and contribute to the development of the city and the country. The letter stuck in Chen Man-lin's mind. "I'll do what he said in the letter study harder and work out to keep healthy and stay curious about the universe and make contributions to the nation's aerospace development in the future," she told China Daily. Sun, Hong Kong's secretary for innovation, technology and industry, encouraged the students in the city to contribute to the nation's legacy of aerospace development by challenging themselves, getting to know the nation's development, and getting more involved in the field of technological innovations. Jack Ng Wun-kit, the principal of Pui Kiu Middle School, was also among those feeling the encouragement from space. Ng told China Daily that Hong Kong students need not become astronauts themselves to contribute to the legacy. They could also contribute via Hong Kong based satellite and communication companies in order to help aerospace development. The connections can be small but meaningful. In October 2003, China's first man in space, Yang Liwei, visited the school and planted a tree on the school grounds. That tree now stands tall and strong on the campus. Last year, a delegation of leading aerospace experts and scientists visited the city. During the visit, they met with students, gave lectures on the nation's aerospace development and brought along samples collected from the moon during the country's fifth lunar exploration mission in late 2020 for exhibitions in the city. Professor Quentin Parker, who teaches physics and directs the Laboratory of Space Research at the University of Hong Kong, said the letter campaign is crucial in promoting subjects in the natural sciences to Hong Kong students. As for Chen Man-lin, she had already made up her mind to become a researcher and hopes she can contribute to China's aerospace development. Curtis Lo contributed to this story. (Source: chinadaily.com.cn) Lu Fuying (1st R), an inheritor of the well-known Su Xiu (Suzhou Embroidery), instructs Kazak embroiderer Hatma Enedu (2nd R) during an exhibition on the intangible cultural heritage held in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, July 31, 2022. [Xinhua/Zhou Ye] URUMQI, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) A few days ago, Hatma Enedu immersed herself in the world of embroidery with her teacher Lu Fuying, in spite of the intangible cultural heritage exhibition bustling and being very noisy. Hatma Enedu, 45, is a Kazak embroiderer from northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, while Lu is an inheritor of the well-known Su Xiu (Suzhou Embroidery) which originates from east China's Jiangsu Province. Their story started in 2019 when Hatma Enedu took part in an embroidery training course in Jiangsu and met Lu. Two years later, Hatma Enedu made contact with the embroidery master and came under Lu's tutorship. "Su Xiu Embroidery is complex and its techniques are diverse, and the selection of materials is exquisite. The differences between the two handicrafts, Kazak embroidery and Suzhou embroidery, inspire me and help me improve my traditional Kazak embroidery works," Hatma Enedu said. Hatma Enedu said her teacher always helped her solve any problems she had and gave her helpful advice. "Lu told me to make more small and elegant embroideries featuring characteristics of ethnic groups. This can help the local embroidery become more well-known to more people," she added. At the end of July, an exhibition on the intangible cultural heritage was held in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, in which Lu was invited to participate. Learning of Lu's arrival, Hatma Enedu and her family took part in the exhibition. Her twin daughters created embroideries on the site under the guidance of Lu. "The two girls have been influenced by their mother. They love embroidery and are very talented and skillful. I really like to communicate with them," Lu said. "I found that Kazak embroideries are closely related to life, with strong practicability, unique patterns and bold and bright colors, which also broaden my horizons," she added. Hatma Enedu noted that she is striving to become an inheritor of Kazak embroidery, and hopes to contribute to the industry of the traditional stitchwork. In recent years, Xinjiang has rolled out a number of measures to protect and inherit its intangible cultural heritage, including various training and exchanging activities. Lu Fuying (1st R, front), an inheritor of the well-known Su Xiu (Suzhou Embroidery), displays Su Xiu techniques to daughters of Kazak embroiderer Hatma Enedu (2nd L, front) during an exhibition on the intangible cultural heritage held in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, July 31, 2022. [Xinhua/Zhou Ye] (Source: Xinhua) Wilson Lake is a reservoir spread across the Russel and Lincoln Counties in the central portion of the US State of Kansas. The reservoir is situated approximately 370 km from Kansas City, Kansas, 777 km from St. Louis, Missouri, and 270 km from the state capital Topeka. Constructed and managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, Wilson Lake is mainly used to control floods, wildlife preservation, and recreational purposes. Geography Of Wilson Lake A shot of Wilson Lake from Look Out Point with a view of the Dam with the water, trees and the Highway going over the dam. Wilson Lake is situated in the Smoky Hills section of the Great Plains, at an elevation of 462 meters. The Wilson Lake reservoir is impounded by the Wilson Dam and is fed primarily by its tributary, the Saline River. Some other smaller tributaries, including Elm Creek and Hell Creek, also flow into Wilson Lake. Wilson Lake covers an area of 36.60 sq. km, has a length of 39km, and reaches a maximum depth of 20m. With approximately 160 km of shoreline, the lake has a maximum volume of 299,154,000 cubic meters. The lake can be accessed and seen via Kansas Highway 232, along its eastern shore. History Of Wilson Lake The Wilson Lake was built in 1961 as a part of the Kansas Wilson Dam. The project was initially approved by the US Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). However, the Saline River's salinity made it unsuitable for irrigation. The USBR then gave control of the lake over to the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), who went on to build the reservoir and have maintained it since. The USACE works together with the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks, and Tourism (KDWP) to maintain the area around the lake. Ecology And Recreation In Wilson Lake Boating in the Wilson Lake. Editorial credit: Robert D Brozek / Shutterstock.com Several fish species are found in Wilson Lake, including crappie, smallmouth bass, black bass, channel catfish, striped bass, etc. The surrounding area also hosts many faunal species, including rabbits, turkeys, ducks, prairie chickens, and deer. Wilson Lake is surrounded by four parks: Lucas Park, Minooka Park, Sylvan Park, and Wilson State Park. The Wilson Lake area is also known for the Rocktown Natural Area, characterized by its sandstone pillars. An anti-abortion initiative was overwhelmingly defeated in a referendum held Tuesday in the US state of Kansas. As of this writing, more than 534,000 votes against the referendum initiative have been counted, as compared to under 375,000 in favor, a margin of 59 percent to 41 percent. The outcome of the referendum, which saw unexpectedly high voter turnout, is a popular rebuke to the reactionary nationwide offensive against abortion rights following the US Supreme Courts decision abolishing the constitutional right to abortion in June. The vote was a rare and exceptional opportunity for American voters to express their views on a political issue directly, without being distorted by the framework of the two corporate-controlled parties or the various institutions of the American government, all of which are viewed with mistrust and outright hostility by masses of people. The outpouring of popular opposition to the Republican-led attack on abortion rights in a heavily Republican red state exposes the anti-democratic character of the entire American political system. The Kansas legislature, including its Senate and House of Representatives, has a combined total of 115 Republicans and 50 Democrats. If America was a healthy democracy, one would expect, based on this distribution, that a Republican referendum put to a popular vote would pass by a greater than two-thirds majority. Instead, the result was a resounding defeat for the Republicans. The vote is a debacle for the states Republican leadership, which spent vast sums campaigning for the referendum, hoping it would ratify the reactionary campaign against abortion rights. Also taken by surprise was the American media establishment, which has been devoting disproportionate attention to the campaigns of far-right candidates in the Republican primaries and which widely predicted a closely contested outcome in Kansas. Republicans in the state legislature mounted the referendum in response to a 2019 decision by the Kansas Supreme Court that the states constitution protects the right to abortion. The referendum initiative would have amended the state constitution to say that it does not protect the right to abortion, clearing the way for the legislature to pass laws outlawing or limiting access to the medical procedure. In this photo from Thursday, July 14, 2022, a sign in a yard in Merriam, Kansas, urges voters to oppose a proposed amendment to the Kansas Constitution to allow legislators to further restrict or ban abortion. [AP Photo/John Hanna] Presented as the Value Them Both Amendment, the initiative was backed by the Catholic Diocese in Kansas, which spent $5.4 million campaigning for it, as well as numerous evangelical Christian groups. Tuesdays vote underscores the fact that the American population is well to the left of the political establishment, including both of its political partieseven in a relatively rural and conservative region like Kansas, where some 850,000 voters are registered Republicans, compared to around 500,000 who are registered Democrats. As the New York Times grudgingly admitted, abortion rights performed better than Mr. Biden, and opposition to abortion performed worse than Mr. Trump. The Times noted that in Wyandotte County, which includes Kansas City, Kansas, Biden received 65 percent of the vote in 2020, but 74 percent voted in defense of abortion rights. In the most populous county in the state, Johnson County, Biden won in 2020 by 53 percent, but 68 percent voted yesterday for abortion rights. Yesterdays vote disproves all attempts to justify the Democratic Partys failure to wage an aggressive struggle to defend democratic rights with the claim that the American people are conservative. On the contrary, it is the Democratic Party that is holding back the population. If the Biden administration and the Democrats made a genuine effort to mobilize popular sentiment in favor of the defense of abortion rightswhich they have no intention of doingsuch an effort would meet with an overwhelmingly positive response. Given this expression of popular sentiment in Kansas, where a greater proportion of the population lives in rural areas than the national average, one can infer that a referendum defending abortion rights would win by an even greater margin in any of the large urban metropolises in California, Texas or New York. Within Kansas, the urban population centers rejected the initiative by huge margins. In Douglas County, where the main campus of the University of Kansas is located, the initiative was voted down by a staggering 81 to 19 percent. In Sedgwick County, which includes the city of Wichita, the initiative was defeated by 58 to 42 percent. Wichita was the site of a right-wing terrorist attack on May 31, 2009, in which physician George Tiller was murdered by anti-abortion fanatic Scott Roeder. Tiller had been the target of relentless and vicious personal attacks by right-wing media, with Fox News calling for him to face Judgment Day. As medical director of Womens Health Services, Tiller had been compelled to wear a bulletproof vest in public. He survived an earlier attempt on his life by an anti-abortion terrorist in 1993. It is significant that the population of Wichita, now given an opportunity to express itself directly on the issue of abortion, voted in favor of abortion rights by a two-thirds majority. Among those counties voting against the initiative was Crawford County in rural southeast Kansas, which includes the small city of Girard, where the socialist Appeal to Reason newspaper was once headquartered. Published from 1895 until 1922, the Appeal to Reason had a wide circulation among largely immigrant coal miners in the region. In Crawford County, the ballot measure was defeated by 55 to 45 percent. These facts underscore that the violence and virulence of the Christian fundamentalists seeking to ban abortion are not a reflection of widespread popular support. On the contrary, these forces are compelled to resort to terror and state repression to enforce their views because a majority of the population is against them. The vote also exposes the lie that in overturning Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court was motivated by a desire to return the decision on abortion rights to the people, as suggested in the profoundly anti-democratic majority opinion written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito. The author of that ruling recently gave a smug and provocative speech defending his decision at the right-wing Religious Liberty Summit in Rome, Italy. These religious zealots and those who pander to them all received a richly deserved black eye in Kansas on Tuesday. For its part, the Democratic Party will seek to cynically capitalize on the mass support for the defense of abortion rights in its midterm election campaigns. Responding on Wednesday to the outcome of the referendum in Kansas, Biden attempted to position the Democrats as the beneficiaries. The voters of Kansas sent a powerful signal that this fall, the American people will vote to preserve and protect their right and refuse to let it be ripped away by politicians, Biden said. The defense of this key democratic right cannot be entrusted to the party that bears no small responsibility for the Supreme Courts decision in June. For a half-century after the Supreme Courts decision in Roe v. Wade, the Democrats refused to codify the right to abortion in federal law, despite countless promises and opportunities to do so. On October 9, 2019, for example, while he was a contender for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, Biden tweeted: Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, and we must fight any and all attempts to overturn it. As president, I will codify Roe into law and ensure this choice remains between a woman and her doctor. This election promise, like innumerable promises by Democratic candidates throughout the preceding decades, was forgotten as soon as Biden won the election, clearing the way for the Supreme Courts decision in June of this year. Despite the overwhelming support expressed in the referendum, the right to abortion remains highly vulnerable throughout the country and in Kansas itself, where it rests on a 2019 state Supreme Court decision in a case called Hodes & Nauser v. Derek Schmidt. This decision was based on an interpretation of the general provision in the 1859 Kansas state constitution that guarantees equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The 2019 decision held that this state constitutional provision protected the right to abortion, such that even if the federal Supreme Court found that the right was not protected by the federal constitution or laws, Kansas residents would still be protected. As the decision in June by the US Supreme Court demonstrates, a decision acknowledging a democratic right by one set of judges can, with the stroke of a pen, be turned into a decision abolishing that right by a different set of judges. Like the defense of all democratic rights, the defense of the legal right to abortion can be carried out only through the independent mobilization of the broad masses of the working population, who, as the referendum in Kansas indicates, overwhelmingly support the defense of abortion rights. On Tuesday, a spokesman for Russias defense ministry, Lt. Gen Igor Konashenkov, stated that contrary to White House and Pentagon claims, [the US] is directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine. Konashenkovs statement came in response to Mondays interview by the British Telegraph with the Major General Vadim Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraines military intelligence service. In the interview, Skibitsky acknowledged that Ukraine was not only using US-manufactured and -delivered HIMARS long-range missiles to target Russian fuel and ammunition depots and battlefield headquarters in eastern Ukraine, but that Ukraine was also relying on real-time information in these strikes. The Telegraph paraphrased Skibitsky as saying that before every strike, discussions took place between the US and Ukraine that would allow Washington to stop any potential attacks if they were unhappy with the intended target. In other words, the US is directly involved in the decision-making process for Ukrainian military strikes on Russian targets. In his statement, Konashenkov declared that this represented an official recognition by Ukraine that the Biden administration [that] is directly responsible for all rocket attacks approved by Kyiv on residential areas and civilian infrastructure facilities in settlements of Donbas and other regions that caused mass deaths of civilians. He added that the Russian military has marked it and will keep in mind this official confession. The US has not denied these accusations. Following Skibitskys highly provocative revelations, the Pentagon issued a statement, merely declaring that the US was providing Ukraine with detailed, time-sensitive information to help them understand the threats they face and defend their country against Russian aggression. The US involvement in the imperialist proxy war against Russia has become ever more overt and provocative in recent months. After ramming through a record $40 billion for weapons for Ukraine in Congress, on top of billions of direct military aid pledged by the White House to Ukraine since February 24 alone, the US began delivering HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) to Ukraine in late May. They are now being used for a major offensive by the Ukrainian army, which is seeking to reconquer parts of southern Ukraine that have been occupied by Russia. In July, a Pentagon spokesman refused to preclude that these missiles would be used to attack the Russian-built Kerch Bridge, which connects the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea with the Russian mainland. Since then, the US has publicly acknowledged that it is considering plans to send fighter jets to Ukraine, a move that, as US President Biden stated just a few months ago, could start World War III. The statements by Skibitsky to a leading British newspaper and the marked absence of an explicit denial by the Pentagon mark yet another major provocation of Washington against Russia. Skibitskys interview was published the same day as the first grain shipment from Ukraine since the start of the NATO-provoked war left the Black Sea city of Odessa, heading for the port of Tripoli, Lebanon. The ships departure marked the beginning of a 120-day deal brokered by the UN and Turkey and signed by Russia and Ukraine in July to resume vital grain shipments amid an ongoing global food crisis. The White House has been conspicuously absent from the negotiations around the deal with the US press insisting that it had no prospect of succeeding. Another 16 ships filled with corn, wheat, sunflower seeds and oil are ready to depart. They will require Ukrainian ships to lead them out as Ukraine mined its ports and shores following the Russian invasion in February. A Joint Coordination Center (JCC) located in Istanbul is charged with overseeing the export of Ukrainian grain throughout the 120-day timeframe. So far the war between Ukraine and Russiaboth major grain exportershas caused a reduction to the worlds grain supplies of 27 million metric tons. According to the UNs World Food Program, the war has caused 47 million people to experience acute hunger. Prior to the war, Ukraine was expected to be the worlds third largest exporter of corn and fourth largest exporter of wheat for the 2021-2022 harvest year, according to the International Grains Council. In addition, the former Soviet Republic is also a major exporter of barley, sunflower oil and rapeseed. Russia, meanwhile, is the worlds largest wheat exporter and was expected to export 36.5 million metric tons of wheat for the 2021-2022 harvest year. Countries in Africa and Asia, such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, imported a large amount of Ukrainian wheat and were already considered food insecure as the war loomed. Well aware of this information and despite already skyrocketing food prices and the clear threat of further shortages and even famine and warnings by the Putin regime about its red lines in Ukraine, the Biden administration recklessly pushed ahead with its provocations against Russia in the weeks and months leading up to the invasion. Following the resumption of Ukrainian grain exports on Tuesday, Zelensky warned that any failure to continue shipments will be blamed on Russia. We cannot be under any illusion that Russia will simply refrain from trying to disrupt Ukrainian exports. Russia consistently provoked famine in Africa and Asian countries, which have traditionally imported significant amounts of Ukrainian food. And now the threat of a price crisis and a certain food shortage is also present for some European countries, Zelensky stated while turning the historical record on its head in a video address. Should the deal actually move forward, it could double the volume of grain leaving Ukraine, according to Michael Magdovitz, a commodities analyst with Rabobank. If this proves even reasonably successful, it will go a long way to alleviating shortages of grains across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Magdovitz told the Washington Post. While the deal could potentially alleviate food shortages in regions previously dependent on Ukrainian grain, US workers will see little reprieve as the US imports little grain from Ukraine or Russia. In fact, the rising food prices within the US were largely due to other factors, such as climate volatility and logistical issues caused by the ruling class's homicidal COVID-19 policies. The increased use of biodiesel has also motivated farmers to produce less wheat, Pete Levangie, CEO of Bay State Milling, told the Washington Post. In regards to US workers, In terms of what the average consumer will feel with their weekly food budget, it wont move the dial, Levangie told the Post. As his comments demonstrate, the current food crisis is primarily a result of both the domestic and the war policies of the US government. Send in your statement of support for the truckers by filling out the form at the bottom of this article. All submissions will be kept anonymous. Truckers shut down the Port of Oakland, July 21, 2022 (WSWS Media) [Photo: WSWS] Nearly a week ago, the City of Oakland and the Board of Port Commissioners filed an intimidation lawsuit against truck drivers in California who have been carrying out a determined fight for exemption from California State Assembly Bill 5 (AB5). The aim of the lawsuit is to illegalize the truckers protests and send a message to 22,000 West Coast longshore workers that they would face the same treatment if they struck. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has kept dockworkers on the job for more than a month since the expiration of their contract and is urging its members to cross the truckers picket line. The ILWU is working closely with the Biden administration, including U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to prevent a strike. An emergency injunction would allow city officials to order mass arrests on protesting truckers. Concerned that such a crackdown would provoke wider opposition by port and other workers, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Delbert Gee declared Monday he would need more time before he made a final decision, FreightWaves reported. The transportation industry publication also reported that over 100 dockworkers refused to cross the picket lines in an act of solidarity in defiance of the ILWU. George, a nine-year ILWU member, told FreightWaves, We are working without a contract right now so we support the owner-operators and understand what they are trying to do. Videos by the World Socialist Web Site circulated on TikTok calling on dockworkers to defend the truckers have been viewed nearly 19,000 times. Workers left comments, including united we stand, and Theres no truckers without port workers, and theres no port workers without truckers. They need to join each other and fight! The WSWS spoke to a casual longshoreman in San Diego who is also going by the pseudonym Jose to protect himself from retaliation. Jose expressed solidarity with the striking truck drivers and denounced the lawsuit. Thats stepping on your First Amendment rights. Protests are a mans God-given right. The way America is going, you know, I dont think they want to uphold that particular amendment. Pointing to the punishing legal fines workers would face if the lawsuit was granted, Jose said, They are putting them through a court battle, you know, but you dont have the money fight it. The little man doesnt have any money to fight for litigation. Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom and state Democrats are pushing AB5 ostensibly to protect workers misclassified as independent contractors, such as Uber drivers. But the measure also threatens the livelihoods of 70,000 trucking owner-operators who haul the vast majority of freight from the states ports. They would either have to form their own companies at immense personal expense or become employees of a trucking company. The vast majority are immigrant drivers, and many are the sole providers in their households. The Teamsters union, which has long colluded with the trucking bosses to roll back the conditions of unionized drivers, is backing AB5 only because they cannot unionize independent contractors. The bill was introduced by Lorena Gonzales, who recently resigned from the California State Assembly to become head of the California Labor Federation. The Teamsters are trying to reel in truck drivers, Jose said. He called for the unity of dockworkers and truckers and for them to build independent rank-and-file committees to unify their struggles. Drivers should be organized so that they cant be tugged every which way. He denounced the tiered employment system accepted by the ILWU, which reduces casuals to the status of at-will employees with no guaranteed hours, job security or workplace rights. The daily work for a casual is a gamble. Most are not routinely trained and may have not operated particular machinery, such as large tractors, for five years. You can get fired for making one mistake. Jose called on fellow longshore workers to support the truckers, particularly casuals who are hyperexploited. We really have all the power as casuals because we are the ones who go out and do the majority of the work. Tens of thousands of workers have been exempted from AB5, including manicurists, lawyers, writers and rideshare drivers. But Newsom has doubled down on ensuring that truck drivers do not receive an exemption. Independent truckers face very difficult conditions, including constant pressure from shippers to reduce costs, longer working hours and higher diesel prices, insurance and loan payments. But the Democrats legislation has nothing to do with improving their conditions. On the contrary, the sole purpose of AB5 is to put drivers under the control of larger companiesand most importantly, the corporatist trade unionsto impose labor discipline on drivers who play crucial roles in the supply chain. This is particularly important as the Biden administration escalates its reckless military confrontations with Russia and China. Truckers have repeatedly displayed solidarity. Last year, they waged a powerful defense of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, who faced a vindictive 110-year jail sentence for a tragic highway accident caused by brake failure on his semi-truck. A wildcat strike by drivers halted virtually all commerce in and out of Colorado, forcing the judge to reduce the sentence to 10 years. Preventing similar disruptions is certainly on the minds of the proponents of AB5. The World Socialist Web Site calls on longshore workers and truckers to join forces and organize independently of the trade unions, which are beholden to the corporations and bound to the Democratic Party. A coroners report released last month revealed that the death of Aboriginal man Douglas Mootijah Shillingsworth was entirely preventable. The 44-year-old died on February 15, 2018 in Sydneys Silverwater prison. He had a chronic middle ear infection, known as otitis media, which spread to his brain, causing sepsis and neurological damage. Deputy State Coroner Joan Baptie said the death would have been preventable if proper detection procedures were put in place. Douglas Mootijah Shillingsworth (Image: Aboriginal Legal Service) Mootijahs death was the result of the systemic failures prevalent in the public health system, the custodial health system in NSW [New South Wales] and the lack of identification and appreciation of this silent killer, otitis media, Baptie said. Shillingsworth had experienced reoccurring middle ear infections, along with other health issues, all his life, resulting in hearing impairment. The rates of middle ear infections in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are far higher than the rest of the population. Days before he died, Shillingsworth went to the medical centre at the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre. He had toilet paper in his ear as a result of leakage due to the infection. The paper had been reduced to a paste-like consistency. His treating doctor believed the problem was caused by the paper and gave him drops to dissolve it. Only later was the infection acknowledged and Shillingsworth taken to the hospital for a CT scan, which revealed an abscess on his left frontal lobe. Despite surgery and a stay in intensive care, he died the following month. Shillingsworth had been jailed 13 times between 1997 and 2017, but at the time of his last arrest in March 2017 his ear infections had not been identified as a significant health issue, according to Bapties report. While his manner of death was from natural causes, this was clearly precipitated by the failure to identify and treat his ear disease while in custody, Baptie stated. Shillingsworths family wrote: Although there will be no justice, we sincerely hope that his death in custody will bring about change. His death has left his family devastated to the core in all forms of incapacity. Four recommendations emerged from the inquest, including the trialling of Medicare, the public health insurance system, for Aboriginal inmates. Due to rules around state and federal funding, an inmate in NSW cannot access Medicare, which includes an annual health check-up for Aboriginal people. The recommendations offer no solutions for the thousands of incarcerated Aboriginal people. Indigenous people make up 28 percent of prisoners, while only being 3 percent of the national population. In youth detention, they represent 48 percent of the inmates. Moreover, by all social indicespoverty, overcrowding, joblessness, mental and physical health issuesAboriginal working-class people are the most disadvantaged. Ear infections are widespread, particularly among children, as a result of horrendous living and social conditions. Acute otitis media (AOM), the main form of infections, causes a bulging of the eardrum. The middle ear canal fills with fluids, commonly referred to as glue ear. Chronic suppurative otitis media, typically the result of persistent AOM, is described as runny ear because pus, discharged from the burst eardrum, leaks out of the ear. Lifelong hearing loss can develop and impede cognitive development in children. According to reports from the World Health Organisation (WHO) Aboriginal children have some of the highest rates of AOM of any groups in the world, at around 12 to 46 percent. The condition is more prevalent in remote communities. The WHO considers a prevalence of 4 percent a public health problem that requires urgent action. Shillingsworths death occurred amid a continuing string of Aboriginal deaths in custody, generally at the hands of the police, as well as fatalities from COVID-19, which has been allowed to spread unchecked in remote communities after Labor and Liberal governments removed safety restrictions. On July 6, another NSW coroners report into the death of 57-year-old Kevin Bugmy ruled it was the result of inadequate care he received for chronic solvent inhalant use over many years in jail. Bugmy died in April 2019 from severe coronary artery disease. He was part of the stolen generation of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families, a practice still ongoing. Last year marked 30 years since the publication of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report. Despite two-thirds of the commissions recommendations being carried out, annual Aboriginal deaths in custody have increased by 50 percent. This cannot be explained as simply the product of racism from the police and court system. The number of deaths in custody for non-Aboriginal inmates is also high. Of 2,608 deaths analysed by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2018, 2,104 were of non-Indigenous people. Aboriginal people are the most oppressed layer of the working class. They are often used as guinea pigs for the implementation of draconian programs such as compulsory welfare quarantining through cashless cards. This was trialed in Indigenous communities before being imposed more broadly. Primary elections were held for both the Democratic and Republican parties across five states Tuesday, with Trump supporters winning most of the contested Republican races, in some cases with the open support of the Democratic Party, whose officials claimed that the far-right nominees would be easier to defeat in November. The tactic might be compared to hostage-taking directed against voters hostile to Trump and the dominant fascist wing of the Republican Party. The Democrats help the most repugnant candidates win Republican nominations, then use the provocative character of the Republicans to provide an argument to vote for Democrats. The reliance on such methods is a declaration of political bankruptcy. In effect, it admits that the Democrats can provide no positive reason for working people to support the Biden administration and its congressional supporters, given their right-wing record of militarism, surrender to the COVID-19 pandemic and failure to enact campaign pledges on issues like voting rights, curbing police violence and improving the social conditions for working people. The most obvious result of this cynical intervention was the defeat of incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer in the primary for the Republican nomination in Michigans Third Congressional District. Meijer is one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump in the final days of his presidency for his role in instigating the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress. In this July 25, 2022 photo, Michigan's 3rd District Congressional Republican Rep. Peter Meijer answers questions at the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Grand Rapids, Mich. ahead of the Aug. 2 primary. [AP Photo/Joey Cappelletti] Trump targeted Meijer for defeat, promoting the challenger, former Trump administration official John Gibbs, a fervent supporter of the bogus Stop the Steal campaign, who has long been associated with the promotion of conspiracy theories, including QAnon. Gibbs only recently moved into the district in order to challenge Meijer, but won by a narrow margin, 52 percent to 48 percent. Given the closeness of the contest, Gibbs owes his victory to support from the Michigan Democratic Party, which pumped at least $425,000 into campaign ads labeling him the most pro-Trump of the candidates for the Republican nomination. This sum was as much as the Gibbs campaign was able to raise on its own, in a contest where the wealthy Meijer, scion of the family that owns one of the largest supermarket chains in the state, far outspent his opponent. The Democratic attack on Gibbs was calculated to increase the name recognition of the largely unknown challenger and win support for him from pro-Trump voters in the Republican primary. The Democratic candidate in the Third District, attorney Hillary Scholten, came close to defeating Meijer in the 2020 election when Meijer first won his seat. Scholten is running again in a district whose boundaries were redistricted and are now much more favorable to the Democrats, and she will now be favored in November against Gibbs. As a result of Meijers defeat, six of the 10 Republicans who voted for Trumps impeachment following the January 6 coup have been purged, two in primaries and four by retirements triggered by redistricting or the threat of primary challenges. Three have survived, all on the West Coast in states with a jungle primary format in which both Democrats and Republicans compete. The tenth Republican, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, is widely expected to lose her primary contest next Tuesday. It is likely that no more than one or two of the pro-impeachment Republicans will return to Congress next January. Alongside the purge of Trumps opponents goes the promotion of Trump loyalists and conspiracy theory fanatics as Republican nominees for many offices that will have a decisive role in the 2024 election, in particular, governors and secretaries of state. In Arizona, the main focus of Trumps campaigning before the primary, boosted by an influx of millions of dollars from pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, election deniers won the Republican nominations for US Senate (Blake Masters), secretary of state (Mark Finchem) and state attorney general (Abe Hamadeh). Finchem was at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and has long been identified with the Stop the Steal campaign. He has identified himself publicly with the Oath Keepers, one of the fascist groups that led the attack against police lines on January 6. He brings to three the number of Republican candidates for secretary of state in key battleground states in the presidential election who claim that the last election was rigged against Trump: Michigan, Nevada and Arizona. In Pennsylvania, another hotly contested state, the governor appoints the secretary of state, and the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, is an election denier who was also at the Capitol on January 6. The contest for governor in the Arizona Republican primary remained undecided after a seesaw of results first showing attorney Karrin Taylor Robson, wife of a wealthy real estate mogul and the favorite of the party establishment, in the lead, then Kari Lake, a pro-Trump former TV anchorwoman. Lake followed Trumps example, claiming victory as soon as the vote counting tilted her way, but tens of thousands of ballots, mainly mail-in votes, still remain to be tallied, particularly in Maricopa County, which includes the city of Phoenix and more than half the states population. There were press reports that the Arizona Democratic Party carried out a largely unpublicized effort to promote Lake on the same basis as the Michigan operation, calculating that she would be an easier opponent for Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs, the outgoing secretary of state. Another target of Trump, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, was defeated in the Republican primary for a state Senate seat. Bowers, who left the House because of term limits, had blocked efforts in 2020 to overturn the election result and testified before the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack about the efforts of Trump agents like Rudy Giuliani to strongarm him into supporting the bogus claims of a stolen election. In Missouri, disgraced former Governor Eric Greitens was defeated by state Attorney General Eric Schmitt in the contest for the Republican nomination to succeed retiring US Senator Roy Blunt. Trump had initially sided with Greitens, but never would do so publicly, before issuing an endorsement of Eric on the eve of the vote. He thereby essentially conceded the contest, which Schmitt won easily. The results in Michigan, outside of the defeat of Meijer, were also mixed, with Trump sometimes winning and sometimes losing against the candidates backed by the billionaire DeVos family, whose fortune is based on the Amway franchise. Betsy DeVos resigned as Trumps secretary of education after the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, but she and her family are deeply reactionary promoters of charter schools and public funding of private and religious schools. The candidate backed by both DeVos and Trump, a former anchor for the right-wing streaming network Real Americas Voice and millionaire businesswoman, Tudor Dixon, won the Republican nomination for governor to oppose incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. Dixon won a five-way contest, in which none of the candidates had ever run for political office and all five denied the validity of the 2020 election and professed loyalty to Trump. In Washington state, with results being reported well after the day of the primary, the two Republican representatives who voted for impeachment, Dan Newhouse and Jaime Herrera Beutler, appeared to have placed in the top two in their primaries, with a Democratic challenger occupying the other spot, and a pro-Trump challenger third. That would mean November contests in each district between a Democrat and the anti-Trump Republican, with the outcome highly uncertain. On Tuesday, CNN reported that top officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) and the US Army wiped text messages on their government issued phones following requests from Congressional committees and oversight groups to preserve records following Donald Trumps failed coup on January 6, 2021. Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller address media at the Pentagon, Washington D.C., November 17, 2020 (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Department of Defense Photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jack Sanders) DoD officials whose records were deleted include former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, his Chief of Staff Kash Patel and General Counsel Paul Ney. Army officials whose records were wiped include former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, Chief of Staff General James McConville, General Counsel James E. McPherson and Director of Army Staff Lt. General Walter Piatt. American Oversight, a government watchdog group, filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records of top Trump officials on January 12, 2021. After not receiving a reply, in March 2021 the group sued the agencies for the records and did not receive a reply until January 2022. In a letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting he investigate the destruction of the records, American Oversight wrote that the DoD and the Army admitted to it in court documents filed on March 10, 2022, roughly three months before the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack held its first of eight summer hearings, that the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched. The letter revealed that opposing counsel confirmed to American Oversight that Neys phone was wiped on January 20, 2021, while Patels records were deleted on January 22, 2021, and Millers on February 2, 2021. These deletions occurred after American Oversight had filed its FOIA requests. American Oversight was not able to confirm the exact date that McCarthy and McPherson wiped their phones, although that too was after American Oversight had made its FOIA requests. In an attempt to characterize this blatant destruction of not only government records, but certainly criminal evidence, as just a standard bureaucratic operation, government lawyers justifying the erasure of the texts wrote to American Oversight on March 10, 2022: [W]hen an employee separates from DoD or Army he or she turns in the government-issued phone, and the phone is wiped. For custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched. This flimsy excuse mirrors other dubious explanations proffered by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari concerning Trump-aligned elements within the capitalist state deleting incriminating messages. Last week the Washington Post revealed that text messages sent on government phones by former top DHS officials including acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli had gone missing. Despite several pending requests from congressional committees and oversight groups, Cuffari neglected to inform the Select Committee that the texts from the DHS heads had gone missing until five months later. The revelation of deleted records at DHS followed a July 13, 2022 letter Cuffari sent to the Senate and House Committees on Homeland Security revealing that text messages sent by dozens of Secret Service agents on January 5 and January 6, 2021 had been erased after an alleged error during data migration. As with the DoD and the DHS, Secret Service agents deleted their texts despite the fact that multiple congressional committees had requested the records prior to the alleged data migration that was blamed for the missing records. This pathetic excuse ignores the fact that agents had received specific instructions on how to retain data prior to being issued new phones at the end of January 2021. The destruction of government records was not limited to the DHS, the Secret Service, the DoD and the Army. This past March it was revealed that the official White House phone logs had also been modified to conceal who exactly the aspiring dictator Trump was talking to during the attack on the Capitol. The logs omit nearly eight hours of phone calls, beginning at 11:17 a.m. and extending through 6:54 p.m on January 6. Seth Abramson, author of the Proof Substack blog, a lawyer, criminal investigator, Newsweek columnist and professor of journalism at the University of New Hampshire, tweeted on August 2 that the deletion of critical evidence continues to look likeat DHS, the Secret Service, and DoDthe biggest cover-up in American History. That none of these agencies has been able to present text messages to Congress over 18 months since the attack on the Capitoland that this has not been made a major issue in the January 6 hearings or by the Department of Justiceconfirms that the Biden administration and Democratic Party have been engaged in a cover-up of the role of the Pentagon, the Secret Service and other federal agencies in Trumps coup plot. Christopher Miller was the senior Pentagon official at the time of the coup. McCarthy was, by law, in charge of the D.C. National Guard, whose commander was requesting permission to send troops to the Capitol to drive off the mob of fascists. Patel was the principal link between them and the White House, and had been appointed Millers aide for that reason. It is extremely significant that text messages from top Army officials McConville, McCarthy and Piatt were deleted. It was reported last year first by the Washington Post, and then substantiated in congressional testimony by former D.C. National Guard Commander William Walker and his subordinate, Colonel Earl Matthews, that Piatt, McCarthy and General Charles Flynn, brother of retired general and fascist Trump ally Michael Flynn, were on the initial phone call with Walker, Matthews, D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee III and Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. The two police officials pleaded for military reinforcements as the Capitol was being overrun by Trumps paramilitaries. Walker had urgently requested authorization to deploy National Guard troops on standby to defend Congress from the mob. Walker, Sund and Contee have all claimed in testimony before Congress that the military denied their urgent requests for reinforcements. All three men testified that Piatt and Flynn said they did not like the optics of deploying uniformed soldiers to the Capitol. For roughly 3 hours and 19 minutes, Walkers request to deploy a quick reaction force consisting of 155 soldiers was delayed. Normally, Walker would have been able to deploy his troops to defend the Capitol on his own authority plus a pro-forma OK from Army Secretary McCarthy. However, in Walkers words, an unusual memorandum was issued by Acting Secretary of Defense Miller on January 4, 2021 that forbade Walker from deploying his troops near the Capitol without explicit approval from Miller himself. This approval was not forthcoming, as Matthews explained in a 36-page memorandum last year, because then-Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy was incommunicado or unreachable for most of the afternoon of January 6. The scale of the cover-up confirms the analysis of the World Socialist Web Site and exposes the false narrative presented by the Democratic-led Select Committee, namely that Trumps coup was organized soley by Trump and a few crazies in and around the Trump White House. The mass deletion of records by the major agencies charged with defending the government from threats foreign and domestic demonstrates that Trumps coup had wide support throughout the US government and substantial sections of the ruling financial oligarchy. That the heads of these agencies were involved in Trumps conspiracy underscores the advanced breakdown of American democracy, which has not lessened with the election of President Joe Biden and Democratic control of both houses of Congress. The opposite is the case. The Democrats are overseeing a massive coverup and allowing Trump, the fascistic Republican Party and their allies in the military, police and intelligence apparatus, allied with far-right paramilitary groups, to advance their conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution and impose a brutal dictatorship. Published below are comments by workers, youth and intellectuals about Wije Dias, chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Dias died from a massive heart attack in the morning of July 27, just one month before his 81st birthday. Thousands paid their respects to the veteran Trotskyist, starting on Thursday at the Jayaratne Respect Home in Colombo, where his body was held, and on Saturday, the day of his funeral. Some of these remarks have been posted as videos on the SEP Facebook page. Others were taken from the Condolences Book and comments on the live Facebook broadcast of the funeral. Kandeepan, Sarath Kumara, Ratnasiri Arangala K. Kandeepan, an SEP member and worker from the plantation district: Comrade Wije Diass death is a great a loss to the working class. Particularly as a worker from the plantations, I experienced the powerful involvement of Comrade Wije leading the partys fight for action committees in the plantations and against the grip of the trade unions. He always insisted on the importance of the unification of the Tamil and Sinhala working class, and also to unite with the working class regionally and internationally. He contributed to the struggle to orient the working class to an international socialist perspective. As an example, the SEP intervened in the Alton, Katukelle and Welioya plantation workers struggles recently and guided them to build independent action committees. Sarath Kumara, an SEP sympathiser and worker in the Middle East: I learned about the demise of Comrade Wije Dias while I was working in Saudi Arabia and I travelled to Sri Lanka to pay him my tribute. The news of his loss had such a shock on me that I felt I had lost a part of my body. His lectures, ideas and explanations and his approach to questions and his Marxist method were the things that attracted us to the party. Ratnasiri Arangala, University of Sri Jayawardenepura professor: We have lost one of the most senior leaders who fought for the defence of Marxism in Sri Lanka. He is one of the courageous few who advanced a political struggle against the betrayal of the LSSP, who claimed to be Trotskyist but later formed a coalition with the capitalist government in Sri Lanka. It is my belief that the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), formed on the basis of the theory of permanent revolution, has done a tremendous job in developing the class consciousness of the working class. The RCL was able to expose the class nature of the JVP through a sharp political analysis. So far, no such accurate Marxist analysis has been written about the JVP. Although it is a great loss for us to lose the guidance of comrade Wije, in the circumstances where such a huge political crisis has been created in Sri Lanka, I strongly believe that the SEP, which he led, will carry forward his fight. Avantha Atigala, Upali Karunaratne, Sureka Samarasena Avantha Atigala, a leading cartoonist: It is a great loss for us to lose the most experienced leader of the SEP, who was engaged in a decisive political intervention in the current class struggle that has erupted in Sri Lanka. While giving my revolutionary tribute to him I would like to mention in particular that while all other movements tried to explain this crisis nationally, only the SEP has analysed this crisis in an international context. Wije Diass death occurred at a time when he should have been with us to provide the theoretical and political guidance needed to expand this analysis and to take forward these struggles on a correct path. Upali Karunaratne, an SEP supporter: Comrade Wije: It is great thing to fully dedicate your life to win a decent life for the masses of the world who have been dragged into poverty and sorrow by a handful of exploiters. Your service to the mankind is immeasurable. It is difficult for us to bear the loss of such a revolutionary. We swear to build the world you expected, and worked hard for. My respectful, revolutionary salute to you. Sureka Samarasena, an author: He departed from us when the things said by Trotskyists like Wije Dias are more true than ever. He is an example for our generation. Our senior generations also have learned from Wije. Throughout these long periods, we have identified him as a person who had not betrayed the core of socialist principles by entering into parliamentary politics. There is a program led by him. We know that he dedicated his entire adult life to building a revolutionary party in Sri Lanka as part of the Fourth International. So, I would like to salute him here and also like to invite the younger generations to study his books, his ideas and his philosophy. Chaminda Hettiarachchi, Pradeep Kandamby, Lakmal Perera Chaminda Hettiarachchi, an SEP supporter: I would like to express my revolutionary condolences to comrade Wije. I was involved in revolutionary politics from 1991 to 1995, when I was an engineering undergraduate at the University of Peradeniya and under the influence of the RCL. It was at that time that I first saw the political brilliance of comrade Wije. Though I havent been able to meet him recently, I have been deeply influenced by his personality and politics. For example, remaining an internationalist amid pressures of nationalism, even when they are popular; opposing the discrimination over minorities; and assessing things in a scientific objective manner. Inspired by his career, these are the characteristics that I try to build on. I must thank comrade Wije for that. Pradeep Kandamby, an SEP sympathiser: From 195253, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) betrayed socialism step by step. Comrade Wije Dias was a pioneer in the fight against that betrayal. The so-called lefts, and even the leaders of the Galle Face struggle, have not even come close to the perspective advanced by the RCL and the SEP with the leadership of comrades like Wije. Comrade Wije has been explaining that capitalism had entered into a period of an enormous crisis and that if the working class understood the real roots of it, they could go forward to form a workers government in Sri Lanka. For that, the workers had to break from their traditional leaderships, the pseudo-lefts and the trade unions, who attempt to subordinate working class to capitalist governments. Comrade Wije put his full strength into making the working class conscious of this. I would like to appeal to youth to understand the scientific socialism advocated by him and his movement. Hudz Rhodsie commented on Facebook: Comrade Wije was a wonderful human being and tenacious fighter for Trotskyism. His legacy is immeasurable and generations of workers will know his name. In great honour and respect, and with condolences to his comrades and family, forward to world socialist revolution. Lakmal Perera, a senior lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka: I got to study Comrade Wijes political intervention after I was introduced to the SEP during the recent struggles in Sri Lanka. I discussed with SEP campaigners during the protest at the Galle Face Green and was attracted to its politics. Comrade Wije Dias had played a leading role in explaining the rotten character of capitalist rule for 60 years. He wrote and translated books and delivered lectures aimed at building a party of the working class. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to study the perspective developed by the SEP. Its a program for a real system change, economically, socially and culturally. Comrade Wijes clear and correct explanations on the nature of capitalism provided a great strength to that program and his departure at this critical moment is a huge loss to our society. Irangani, an SEP member: I belong to the group that joined the SEP after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. I saw how the RCL was strengthened by the guidance of comrade Wije, based on the lessons drawn from Trotskys fight against Stalinism. He departed from us at the very moment when he was working to provide similar theoretical and political strength to the party in its initiative to build a Democratic and Socialist Congress of Workers and Rural Masses in Sri Lanka. Thilaka from Chennai, the Tamil Nadu state capital in India: I felt very sad when I heard that comrade Wije Dias died of a heart attack on July 27 morning. Please convey my heartfelt condolences to all SEP comrades, and the family members of comrade Wije Dias. I saw comrade Wije Dias some 25 years ago when he addressed a meeting in Chennai. His powerful speech inspired me. I became more attracted to Trotskyism. I cherish the memory of comrade Wije Dias. In an important step forward for the work of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Australia and the region, the IYSSE has formed a new club at Melbournes La Trobe University. The formal founding of the club, ratification of its constitution, and election of the club executive took place at its Inaugural General Meeting (IGM) on Friday, 29 July. IYSSE members speaking with students at Melbournes La Trobe University The La Trobe club joins the already established IYSSE clubs in Australias second largest city and Victorian state capital at the University of Melbourne and Victoria University. La Trobe Universitys main campus is in the northern Melbourne suburb of Bundoora, more than 13 kilometres northeast of the city centre. The university was established in 1967 and now has over 36,000 students, including more than 7,000 international students from 110 countries. Of these countries, the top five home nations of international students at La Trobe are, in descending order (as of 2017): India, China, Singapore, Vietnam and Pakistan. La Trobe has also been one of the universities hardest hit by decades of pro-corporate restructuring accelerated amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At least 15 percent of the universitys permanent workforce will have been axed since the beginning of the pandemic. Entire courses, including sections of the humanities and agricultural departments, have also been junked as so-called cost-cutting initiatives. In the weeks leading up to the IGM, IYSSE members and supporters campaigned on campus to raise the level of political consciousness among the student population. The IYSSE campaigns won warm support, with dozens of students signing up to be members or contacts of the club. Among the issues raised by campaigners with students were: the threat of nuclear war erupting out of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and US aggression against China; the murderous let it rip policy of governments in Australia and internationally leading to a resurgence of COVID-19 cases and deaths; and the attacks on democratic rights highlighted by the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, zero-COVID doctor David Berger, and the lock on the Socialist Equality Partys Twitter account last month. Taylor Hernan At the IGM, Taylor Hernan was elected the clubs president. Hernan told the World Socialist Web Site that the formation of the club was a significant step forward for the building of a revolutionary leadership among students and youth. He added that it came after a protracted campaign and lots of discussions with students about a whole array of political and historical issues. This is how the IYSSE raises the level of consciousness on campus. The IGM was attended by 15 students and youth from across Melbourne. Immediately following the formal business of the IGM, the IYSSE held a political discussion on the campaign to defend Dr David Bergera remote area general practitioner and outspoken advocate of eliminating SARS-CoV-2 to save lives. For his exposure of government, media and health authority lies about the pandemic, Berger has been censured by the Medical Board of Australia and required to complete an Orwellian re-education program or be deregistered. In the discussion, one first year La Trobe psychology student said that the attempt to silence Berger is denying our right to being able to communicate with others regardless of authority. Were meant to have their freedom of speech to be able to complain and be able to say, I dont agree with the way were going, and we could possibly die. They dont want that. When other IYSSE members related the persecution of Berger to the decade-long attacks led by Washington against Julian Assange for his exposure of imperialist war crimes, the psychology student wrote in the chat, ohh yes I like Assange. Students and youth in the meeting spoke on the timing of the assault on Bergers free speech. Australia is seeing a resurgence of the pandemic. The day the meeting was held, 157 Australians died from COVID, over a hundred in Victoria alone. Dr David Berger (Image: Supplied) Another student asked about the specific allegations against Berger. IYSSE members explained that Berger is being falsely accused by internet trolls, right-wing commentators and others of undermining public health messaging about COVID-19 on social media because he has exposed government lies and corporate media falsehoods about COVID-19. It sounds incredibly vague in terms of what breaches that kind of code of conduct, added one La Trobe Masters of Science student. The way that people use Twitter and that method of communication, I can see why theyd want to silence someone like that who is effectively out of step with authority and is openly disagreeing with that body and may be gaining some traction. The governments and health authorities are getting a bit embarrassed about whats going on. Attendees watched a short clip from the interview Dr Berger did with the WSWS for the Global Workers Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic. The following resolution was unanimously passed during the meeting: This meeting condemns the censorship imposed on Dr David Berger by AHPRA and demands that all restrictions on him be lifted immediately and unconditionally. Dr Berger has warned of the dangers of COVID-19 and has advocated the necessary public health measures to deal with it in opposition to the let it rip policies carried out by governments. He has been a tireless advocate for the health interests of the population and has spoken the truth. All his warnings have been confirmed by events. This is why attempts are being made to silence him. The censorship is aimed not only at him. It is intended to silence the growing number of medical and health professionals appalled and concerned about official policy based on the scrapping of all necessary public health measures. The censorship imposed on Dr Berger must be ended immediately so that he and others can continue their advocacy in support of the necessary public health measures to deal with the most dangerous pandemic in more than 100 years, and possibly ever. The meeting concluded with an appeal for attendees to become active in the fight to build the IYSSE by joining campaigns and other initiatives, and to develop their political understanding through regularly reading the World Socialist Web Site. Written and directed by Sudabeh Mortezai Joy, written and directed by Austrian-Iranian filmmaker Sudabeh Mortezai, follows a Nigerian woman sexually trafficked to Austria, where she works as a prostitute to support her family back home in Africa and her young daughter in Vienna. The ironic title of the 2018 film is also the name of the lead character, Joy (Joy Anwulika Alphonsus). Joy paints a grim picture of a grim reality. Anwulika Alphonsus in Joy (2018) In the films disturbing opening scene, 17-year old Precious (Precious Mariam Sanusi) undergoes a traditional juju ritual in Nigeria before being sent to Austria. A medicine man uses the religious means to frighten Precious and commit the girl to paying the debt she will owe her trafficker while shunning all contact with the Austrian police. In other words, the ceremony in this case cynically serves business and money. In Vienna, veteran streetwalker Joy is charged with teaching Precious the ropes. The timid girl, however, is unable to sell herself, causing the ruthless Madam (Angela Ekeleme Pius) to have Precious brought into line by being raped by two male subordinates. Joy is warned: if Precious reneges on her debt, Joy will have to assume her proteges financial obligations. Dont look at the faces, look at the money, she advises the girl and also sets out to give Precious a new, sexier look. Joy ominously adds: In this game, its the survival of the fittestI will kill you if I have to, and I will steal your money if I have to. Joy and Precious belong to Madams stable of Nigerian women who live together, and when their interests dont seriously conflict, even demonstrate a modicum of solidarity. Desperately poor families back in Nigeria rely on their daughters prostituting themselves, regardless of the physical and psychological repercussions. Phone calls back home, to families who heap additional economic pressure on the unfortunate expatriates, generally add to the mental traumas of the women in Vienna. Mariam Sanusi in Joy (2018) The female semi-slaves get sent off to Europe after a traditional ritual, like the one Precious is subjected to, and then their bondage is reinforced in Austria by evangelical Christianity. Clergy at the Pentecostal church Joy attends are well aware of what goes on in the brothel and are not above demanding their cut. Precious is sold to an Italian procurer. The filmmakers pointedly have her and Joyin a cafe near the Italian borderwitness a Christmas-time ceremony dedicated to St. Nicholas that is as unusual to them as the African one is to Western audiences. On two occasions Joy visits the Austrian authorities to find out whether they will guarantee her asylum and possible remuneration if she testifies against the Madam, and both times leaves empty-handed and frustrated. When Joy finally succeeds in paying off her debt, her situation becomes even more precarious and deadly. Joys cast and crew were clearly committed to exposing a vicious form of exploitation and the social conditions that underpin it. The films claustrophobic and dim ambience notwithstanding, when cinematographer Klemens Hufnagl closes in on Joys face, an array of complex emotions break through the placid, hardened surface. My goal is to humanize these women, director Mortezai told europa-cinemas.org in an interview, to create a feeling of empathy within the audience, so the audience will understand where these women come from and why they do what they do. Cinema is a very powerful tool to do this; to build a human relationship this way. The perfidious nature of the system attracted Mortezai to the project. She mentions in interviews that the trafficking victims debts can amount to as much as 50,000 or 60,000 euros. The director also elaborates on how the women are cruelly manipulated: These [juju] rituals are a big part of the trafficking system. The womenbefore going to Europeare brought to a doctor by their traffickers to swear an oath to pay off their debts and to not go to the police. It is a very powerful control mechanism, which the women strongly believe in. Joy (2018) Speaking to austrianfilms.com, the filmmaker describes her meticulous research in the company of women with direct knowledge of the issue. In addition to the power of juju, which she describes as a kind of voodoo, Mortezai mentions the hypocrisy of the Christian religion. Because everybody knows who the Madam is and who the exploited women are. Everyone knows each other: its an open secret. It was only during my travels around Nigeria that I came to appreciate the impossibility of adopting moral standards unless you are in a reasonable social and economic situation The corrupt social systems where women like those in my film exist without any means of escape, she forcefully adds, have not come about in a vacuum. And we are not only talking here about the history of colonialism, but also the way exploitation of natural resources has proceeded ever since. In the global system we would all like to have everything and consume whatever we wantbut we dont want to know anything about the people involved. Seen from this perspective, the fate of these people involves us all. When Mortezai started to investigate this merciless system, she told filmintitu.at, witnessing the oppressive poverty in Benin City in southern Nigeriawhere the majority of the women come fromcaused her to understand the life stories and circumstances of these women and develop more and more empathy with them. Also, it became increasingly difficult for me to make judgments about good and evil in this game. Indeed, moralizing in this case, as in all others, does no one any good. Its not wickedness that the Nigerian families demonstrate in pushing their daughters into prostitution, but, above all, their horrendous poverty. Undoubtedly, the unrelenting and at times suffocating character of Joys drama reflects a genuinely harsh situation. Certain intractable conditions make struggle or even movement very difficult, or, in some cases, temporarily impossible. It is fully to the credit of an artist like Mortezai that she takes on these painful circumstances. Nonetheless, artistic representations like this, especially in the present cultural atmosphere, tend to be correspondingly restricted, with built-in limitations and narrow margins. Joy, in other words, treats certain sides of life, but not all of them. What it omitsoutrage, opposition, resistance, upheavalalso exists, in both Nigeria and Austria. The latest Dragon Ball movie pits the Z fighters against an adversary unlike any they've faced before: Superheroes. We've got an exclusive look both at these new enemies and the familiar faces on display. That's right, the new movie is titled Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, and that's not just a play on the name of the most recent TV series in the world-famous anime franchise. The story literally involves costumed crimefighters making themselves known in the world of Dragon Ball and despite their professed good intentions, it's clear that something's up. For one thing, they're androids and in Dragon Ball, that's never a good thing. Their arrival marks the resurgence of the Red Ribbon Army. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Crunchyroll The new android 'superhero' characters of 'Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.' "This movie really asks some questions about, what is a superhero? What defines a superhero, and how can superheroes sometimes be misguided?" Longtime Dragon Ball English-language voice actor Chris Sabat, who reprises his roles as Piccolo and Vegeta in the new film, told EW at San Diego Comic-Con. "There's a big theme about what it means when a superhero isn't necessarily given the right information." When it comes to the protagonists, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero has a specific focus. While the last film in the series, Dragon Ball Super: Broly, was mostly centered on Goku and Vegeta, Super Hero revolves around Piccolo (Sabat) and Gohan (Kyle Hebert) as the heroes primarily responsible for stopping this new threat. As motivation, it helps that Gohan's young daughter Pan (Jeannie Tirado) is in the villains' crosshairs. "One thing this movie definitely drives home is not just Piccolo's friendship with Gohan, but Piccolo's love for Gohan and his entire family," Sabat says. "Piccolo has spent quite a bit of time looking after Pan in a lot of ways. In the Dragon Ball Super series, there were scenes with him babysitting Pan, rocking her, stuff like that. It becomes clear in this movie that he is just like a great uncle or a family member to their family. He genuinely feels for Gohan. He definitely loves Pan." Story continues Below, check out an exclusive breakdown of the primary characters of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, from Piccolo and Gohan to the new faces of the Red Ribbon Army. These new characters were designed by original Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, who is still adding to his most popular franchise years decades after he first began. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Crunchyroll From familiar faces like Gohan and Piccolo to new enemies like Magenta, here are the main characters of 'Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.' "All the fans of Dragon Ball, not only in Japan but worldwide, are the source of this imagination," producer Norihiro Hayashida told EW at Comic-Con. "That's why Mr. Toriyama continues working on this. The power given by the audience is the motivation for the creator to continue working on Dragon Ball." Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero hits theaters on Aug. 19. Check out the trailer above. Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more. Related content: Greenville County Sheriff's Office Cops have nabbed a South Carolina couple they say shot and killed a 19-year-old college student before dumping his body on the side of a rural road outside Wichita, Kansas, in 2010. Kristopher and Candance Valadez, both 32, were taken into custody this weekend on murder charges in the death of German Luis Clerician Argentine immigrant known for having a thick New Jersey accent in the heart of the midwest. At the time, Clericis death shocked his loved ones, including his girlfriend, Shauna McKee, who vowed in 2010 that her partners killers would be found one day. SO...... any one know anything about my boyfriends murdered that wants to come clean? McKee wrote to Facebook. Just know, the truth will come out one day. Twelve years later, that day has arrived, according to police. The couple were arrested in South Carolina over the weekend, where they shared a 5-bedroom home outside of Greenville, property appraiser and arrest records show. Local deputies and cops sent from the Butler County Sheriffs Office in Kansas made the arrestsCandance on Saturday and Kristopher on Sunday. Both will be extradited to Kansas to face murder charges. Grief and Relief as Suspect Charged in L.A. Cold Cases McKee didnt respond to interview requests, but acknowledged her former boyfriends alleged killers on Facebook. She commented on Monday that both Candance and Kristopher used to work with her at a KwikTripa gas station chainin Kansas but transferred immediately after Clericis murder. KwikTrip confirmed to The Daily Beast on Wednesday that Candance remained an area supervisor for the chain. A spokesperson declined to comment further on her current status with the company or how long shed been employed there. Authorities said they reopened their investigation into Clericis murder last year after new evidence appeared, but declined to tell The Daily Beast in a phone call exactly what that evidence was. The Wichita Eagle reported at the time that police werent able to identify Clerici until the day after his body was discovered on Feb. 6, 2010. Story continues German Luis Clerici, 19, was missing for a week before a woman found his body abandoned next to a rural Kansas road. Butler County Sheriff's Office Clerici, whod been missing for a week, was finally found by a woman out for a walkhis body abandoned next to a rural dirt road, shot to death. But his shoes remained clean, prompting investigators to believe he was killed elsewhere before his body was dropped, The Wichita Eagle reported. His wallet also remained in his pocket, ruling out a robbery-gone-wrong as a possible reason he was slain, cops said. Authorities have released little information about the arrested couple. Candance, who has a public Facebook page, regularly posted pictures of a young girl and of her work at the KwikTrip. Her bio says she studied criminal justice at Wichita State University. Clerici was known as both Luis, his middle name, and Jersey, for his thick New Jersey accent, McKee told The Wichita Eagle in 2010. She told the paper her last conversation with Clerici was about him moving back into a house they shared. They had been fighting recently, she said, but they were working through it. I have no idea what happened, McKee, whose last name was Herrick in 2010, said. This is a complete and total shock to mefor everyone. Cops have not released why Clerici was targeted. At the time, McKee said she had no clue why anyone would want her partner killed, while the local sheriff confirmed Clerici had no prior record or known enemies. He was the best guy in the world, she said. He had the best heart. He was on the right track his friends were not bad people. Read more at The Daily Beast. Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now. Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now. The morning sun shone on black crosses, each painted with the name of one of the 23 victims. Community members carried them in solemn procession to the thrum of a single drum and planted them in a semi-circle in a park that for months in the wake of the shooting was home to a makeshift memorial of photos and flowers and mementos. Through testimony, prayer and song at Ponder Park, El Pasoans remembered those killed in the Walmart mass shooting on Aug. 3, 2019. "We were witnesses to the terrible consequences of hate," said Bishop Mark Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso in a prayer spoken in English and Spanish. The bishop asked for healing for those in El Paso and Juarez hurt in the tragedy: More than two dozen people were wounded in the mass shooting and many others live with the emotional trauma of what they saw, what they heard, who they lost. It was one of several memorials held Wednesday in remembrance of one of the deadliest attacks on Hispanics in U.S. history. A white man from a Dallas suburb drove 10 hours to an El Paso Walmart popular with shoppers and opened fire on a Saturday morning. He posted a hate-filled diatribe online minutes ahead of his attack, ranting about an "invasion" of Hispanics in Texas and echoing ideas popular with white supremacists. The majority of the victims he targeted were Mexican American or Mexican nationals. More:Canadas bold moves after horrific mass shooting hold lessons for Texas, US The prayers and testimonies shared at Ponder Park were imbued with anger and calls to action on guns, warnings about the deadly consequences of racism and pleas to end white supremacism. The memorial drew about 150 people. Women in the red shirts of the anti-gun group Moms Demand Action gathered in the narrow shade of one of the park's few trees. Others wore "Ni Uno Mas" T-shirts calling for "not one more" person killed by gun violence. A few families sat on the grass and coaxed their young children into silence with snacks. Story continues Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, which organized the anniversary memorial, called out the racist language invoked by the gunman, who was arrested across the street from Ponder Park, not far from the Walmart. The language the gunman used mimicked words used by then-President Donald Trump, Garcia said. "This was not a random attack," Garcia said. "This was a racist terrorist attack motivated by white supremacism." People hold crosses with victims' names at Border Network for Human Rights, #ElPasoFirme Community Memorial: A Call to Action Against White Supremacy, Racism and Xenophobia service at Ponder Park in East El Paso on August 3, 2022, the third anniversary of the Aug. 3 Walmart shooting. Guillermo Glenn, a longtime El Paso activist for immigrant rights, was at the Walmart near Cielo Vista Mall that morning in 2019, shopping for dog food, when the gunman opened fire. When the shooting stopped, Glenn, 78 years old at the time, ran from the back of the store to the front to help haul out the wounded. Glenn spoke at Ponder Park before a backdrop of U.S. and Mexico flags and a miniature Statue of Liberty. "Vi el gran panico de la gente," he said, recalling the day of the tragedy. "I saw the great panic of the people. I saw the people bleeding. It's a tragedy, a massacre, that I will never forget. The blood I saw, the bodies I found it's something that should never happen. This type of weapon, that is still legal in Texas, is still being sold. This same type of weapon killed the children in Uvalde. This same type of weapon killed the people shopping in Buffalo. No one should have to experience this." More:Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi issue statements on anniversary of El Paso Walmart mass shooting Pastor Michael Grady of the Prince of Peace Christian Fellowship in El Paso relived the morning he got a call from his wife that his daughter, Michelle, had been shot at Walmart. He drove to the store in disbelief and anguish, begging God to spare his daughter. "I was too afraid to weep," he said. "Vi el gran panico de la gente. I saw the great panic of the people. I saw the people bleeding. It's a tragedy, a massacre, that I will never forget." Guillermo Glenn Doves are released at the Border Network for Human Rights, #ElPasoFirme Community Memorial: A Call to Action Against White Supremacy, Racism and Xenophobia service at Ponder Park in East El Paso on Aug. 3, 2022 in remembrance of the El Paso Walmart mass shooting. His daughter has undergone 15 surgeries and is still recovering. He drew a direct line from the racist rhetoric of politicians, including Trump, to the tragedy that nearly took his daughter's life. And Grady, who is Black, said his family has had to confront racism even within the El Paso community: People still say to him, 'Oh, a Black person got shot at Walmart?' "We will never forget," he said. "These crosses behind us represent those who were taken. We like to say they were lost but they were murdered intentionally murdered because of the hatred that comes from the highest levels of leadership." At 10:39 a.m., at the hour and minute when the massacre began, Garcia read aloud the names of each person killed, and the crowd echoed Grady's refrain with every name: "We will never forget." Then Aaron Palacios, a local impersonator of the late Mexican singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel, stepped onto the grass dressed in a white satin suit and yellow shirt pinned with a crystal brooch. The chords began of Amor Eterno, a beloved tune often dedicated to loved ones laid to rest,and nearly everyone took out a cellphone to begin recording. Twenty-three doves were released, flapping their wings toward the sky, as Palacios crooned the mournful song in Spanish. "How I wish," he sang, "that you were still alive, that your eyes had never closed... Eternal and unforgettable love." This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: El Paso honors Walmart mass shooting victims at Ponder Park memorial China has expressed anger after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) touched down in the island nation of Taiwan earlier this week. Pelosi made the trip despite warnings from the Biden administration and threats from Beijing that a visit to Taiwan, which China claims as its own, could fuel U.S.-China tensions. Pelosi arrived in Taipei on Tuesday after kicking off her congressional delegation tour Monday in Singapore. Malaysia, South Korea and Japan are also on the itinerary. The island, which calls itself the Republic of China, has been self-governed since 1949 but the Peoples Republic of China, the government in Beijing, considers it part of the mainland under its One China policy. The U.S. has pursued a policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan. Its committed to aiding the island in defending itself against Beijing, but has also accepted the One China policy. Chinese officials said Pelosi flouted warnings and ignored potential consequences after she became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the island since 1997. Since then, China has made moves to express its unhappiness with the visit. Taiwan has also experienced cyberattacks from unknown actors coinciding the the Speakers trip. Here are five things that occurred around Pelosis trip to Taiwan: Military drills On Thursday, China began firing missiles throughout the waters of the Taiwan Strait and deploying planes and warships in the area. The Chinese Peoples Liberation Army is set to run live-fire military drills in the waters and skies around Taiwan for several days, effectively creating a blockade around the island. Taiwan has condemned the drills as military intimidation that threatens the islands sovereignty. Chinese Ministry of National Defense spokesman Wu Qian said that Pelosi provoked the drills. The Chinese Peoples Liberation Army is on high alert and will take a series of targeted military operations in response to resolutely safeguard Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, and resolutely thwart the interference by external forces and the separatist schemes for Taiwan independence, Wu said. Story continues Import bans China also levied trade restrictions against Taiwan on Wednesday, banning key imports like citrus and fish and halting the export of sand, a crucial construction material. The bans halted imports from as many as 100 Taiwanese companies, Bloomberg reported, impacting a $328.3 billion bilateral trade exchange. The Chinese government claimed that they were responding to certain contaminants in the shipments, Al Jazeera reported. The restrictions didnt cover processor chips of which Taiwan dominates production, producing half the worlds supply. The semiconductors are necessary for China to assemble and produce electronics like smartphones. Two-way trade between the countries reportedly rose 26 percent last year. China is Taiwans largest trading partner. Cyberattacks Hours before Pelosi landed on the island, the Taiwanese presidents office was struck by cyberattacks, according to a statement from a spokesperson for President Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai said her office experienced distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), a type of cyberattack meant to overwhelm systems. DDoS attacks have recently been used by Ukrainians attempting to overload Russian systems as they stave off Moscows invasion in their country. The websites of Taiwans foreign and defense ministries were also reportedly attacked, as well as the islands largest airport. It is unclear at this point if the attacks were carried out by China. However, they do coincide with Pelosis visit to the island. Television screens in Taiwanese 7-Eleven convenience stores reportedly flashed Warmonger Pelosi get out of Taiwan in additional cyberattacks on private companies. Drones Reuters reported that a pair of Chinese drones flew twice through a restricted area over Taiwans Kinmen Islands on Thursday. Taiwanese officials, who averted the drones by firing flares at the aircraft, said they expect the flyovers were an intelligence-gathering mission by the Chinese. Taiwan consists of a main island and a number of smaller islands and islets, many of which border the East and South China Seas. Among those, the Kinmen Islands are particularly heavily fortified, located less than 10 miles east of the Chinese city of Xiamen. Summons for U.S. ambassador The U.S. ambassador in Beijing was summoned the night of Pelosis trip to Taiwan to appear before Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng. According to a Wednesday release from Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns was called for an emergency meeting to discuss stern representations and strong protests about Pelosis trip. The release called the Speakers trip a deliberate provocation and a playing with fire that violated the One China policy. It also accused the U.S. of deleting phrases like Taiwan is a part of China from its State Department website and including Taiwan in its Indo-Pacific strategy. The move is extremely egregious in nature and will have extremely serious consequences. China will not sit idly by. The U.S. government must be held accountable. For quite some time, the United States has said one thing but done the opposite, constantly distorted, altered, obscured and hollowed out the one-China principle, the release continued. Xie reportedly told the U.S. ambassador that the U.S. side must pay the price for its wrongdoings. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Hiking Big Bear Lake, California Courtesy of Highlander Highlander, a long-distance hiking event series, is coming to America for an epic adventure through one of the nation's most beautiful landscapes. From Sept. 27 to Oct. 2, the event series is heading to Big Bear Lake in Southern California's San Bernardino National Forest. It's offering three different formats to allow for maximum accessibility, including a 60-mile, five-day trek; a 30-mile, three-day journey; and a 15-mile weekend trip. Founded in Croatia in 2017 by three friends who share a deep love of long-distance hiking, Highlander has grown to become the largest hiking club in the world, hosting more than 100 events in more than 20 countries, all with the mission of helping people further immerse themselves in the great outdoors. Hiking Big Bear Lake, California Courtesy of Highlander "This is a milestone moment for us, and we're thrilled that Highlander is finally being introduced in the U.S. as we further our ultimate goal of motivating people to enhance their mental and physical health through hiking adventures and unique experiences," Highlander's CEO Jurica Barac shared in a statement provided to Travel + Leisure. "We are confident that this Highlander experience, which explores one of the most unique destinations in the U.S., will help participants push beyond their limits and conquer self-doubt, giving them a newfound sense of gratitude for nature that will stay with them for the rest of their lives." The event isn't just about putting one foot in front of the other. According to the company's website, hikers will have the opportunity to enjoy lectures, yoga classes, presentations, and live music along their route. There are a few rules to follow for the hikes, including bringing your own camping gear, clothing, and a first-aid kit. The entry fees begin at $329 for individual entry to the 30-mile event and $519 for individual entry to the 60-mile event. Access to on-duty Mountain Rescue Service members, food, maps, and leisure activities is included. Story continues Hiking Big Bear Lake, California Courtesy of Highlander This isn't the only hike the company is hosting this year. Additional events include hikes in Croatia, the United Kingdom, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, Greece, Montenegro, and the United Arab Emirates. Highlander is also already plotting out excursions in Italy, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Patagonia, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Austria in 2023. Registration for the Big Bear Lake event is open now until Sept. 19. Space is limited, so if you're interested, make sure to snag your spot now. The event welcomes everyone from novice adventurers to seasoned hikers. Kendall Jenner seemed to enjoy her time in the country and is commemorating the trip with a new tattoo. As documented on her social media, Jenner recently traveled to Wyoming and fully inundated herself in the state's culture with hikes, days on the ranch, and of course, a rodeo. She now has debuted some new ink that marks the special trip. Kendall Jenner Red Hair Tight Ponytail 2022 Oscars Getty Images On Wednesday, Jenner's tattoo artist, Kate McDuffie aka The Ghost Kat shared a black-and-white snap of her work: a tiny cowgirl boot on the inside of Kenny's ankle. Despite its teeny size, the black tattoo included all the intricate Western designs found on the traditional footwear, like embroidery on the legs and toes. The second slide of the carousel includes a photo of the inspiration, a brown, distressed cowboy boot. RELATED: Kendall Jenner's Sunday Attire Included a Red Checkered Bikini and Nothing Else "Teeniest cowgirl boot for Kendall ," wrote McDuffie, who founded The Ghost Kat in 2018 and is known for her small but detailed designs. Jenner reposted the image to her Story writing, "When at the rodeo ..." You've probably seen McDuffie's signature style on some other big names she's also responsible for Pete Davidson's famous "My girl is a lawyer" tattoo, a reference to Kenny's big sister Kim Kardashian. Kendall has a few other very subtle tattoos that she's accrued over the years. According to Pop Sugar, Jenner has a small white dot on her middle finger, an inner-lip tattoo that says "meow," and a white broken heart on her other middle finger that she got with her good friend Hailey Bieber who shares the same tat but in black. Before she made her affection for Western culture a little more permanent, Jenner shared a gallery to Instagram earlier this week with images from her vacation. She professed her love for the rancheros in a tank top that read "J'adore Cowboys," a reference to the J'Adior tanks of the early 2000s. Manchester United left-back Alex Telles has completed a season-long loan switch to Sevilla. The 29-year-old moved to Old Trafford from Porto in October 2020 and made 50 appearances in all competitions for the Red Devils. Telles has mostly played back-up to Luke Shaw and was pushed further down the pecking order by the summer arrival of Feyenoords Tyrell Malacia. Brandon Williams has also returned to the club after spending last season at Norwich and Telles has joined Sevilla on loan for the 2022-23 campaign. It is understood the LaLiga side are covering his wages in full and that the deal does not include an option or obligation to sign the Brazil international. Telles becomes the latest player to leave Erik ten Hags new-look United. Paul Pogba, Edinson Cavani and Jesse Lingard left at the end of their contracts, as did Nemanja Matic and Juan Mata. Andreas Pereira has joined Fulham on a permanent deal, while Dean Henderson and Alvaro Fernandez have moved on loan to Nottingham Forest and Preston respectively. As the number of mass shootings continue to rise throughout the United States, many Americans have been left wondering when Congress is actually going to do something, rather than having members of the GOP offer their carte blanche thoughts and prayers before refusing to enact gun control. Viral comedian Randy Rainbow may not have an answer to that question, but he can certainly express that sense of unending frustration through music. And on Thursday (Aug. 4), Rainbow shared his latest musical parody, Thoughts and Prayers, calling out Republican lawmakers for their tired response to near-constant mass shootings. Starting off the video in a faux-interview with Sen. Ted Cruz, Rainbow wastes no time in making fun of this fking guy, and asking why his party refuses to act on gun control. As Cruz gives his same refrain yet again, Rainbow quickly interrupts him: Yeah, thats cute but with all due respect, prayers dont prevent these horrific tragedies. He adds, Should you really be sending out any more thoughts? You barely have any coming in to begin with. More from Billboard Rainbow then launches into his musical number, set to the tune of Dance: Ten, Looks: Three from the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. He roasts Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lindsey Graham, Fox Newss Sean Hannity, and pretty much every other Republican in Congress. Thoughts and prayers/ That would be appropriate/ If they all were running Hallmark stores, he sings. Thoughts and prayers wont save our lives/ So go shove yours! As the video goes on, Rainbows lyrics only get more brutal as he spells out the importance of gun reform legislation, and Republicans refusal to break party lines. When the problems getting worse/ Quote your favorite bible verse/ Faux compassion is so in fashion, he croons. To close out the big number, Rainbow offers a simple piece of advice to his adversaries across the aisle: Go fk yourselves! Story continues Check out the full video of Thoughts and Prayers below. Click here to read the full article. Archie Battersbee was allegedly taking part in a dangerous social media trend called the blackout challenge before his mother found him unconscious at their family home in April. The 12-year-olds parents have now sought permission to move the child from the Royal London Hospital to a hospice, as he has been on life support since April. His mother Hollie Dance believes Battersbee choked while taking part in the blackout challenge. The life-threatening challenge, made popular on TikTok, has allegedly led to the deaths of multiple children. TikTok has been sued by the families of two young children who allegedly died while participating in a viral trend called the blackout challenge. The parents of Lalani Erika Renee Walton, eight, and Arriani Jaileen Arroyo, nine, filed the suit on Tuesday 5 July alleging that the social media platforms algorithm is dangerous. They alleged that TikToks algorithm intentionally and repeatedly pushed videos of the blackout challenge onto the childrens feeds, which led to the young girls participating in it. Lalani, from Temple, Texas, died on 15 July 2021. Police determined her death was a direct result of attempting TikToks blackout challenge, the complaint said. Arriani, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died on 26 February 2021. When she was found unresponsive by her five-year-old brother. Although Arriani was rushed to a local hospital, she was taken off life support. TikTok was also sued in May by the family of 10-year-old Nylah Anderson, who died last December after reportedly attempting the same challenge. Her mother, Tawainna Anderson, accused TikTok of negligence and said the challenge was thrust in front of her daughter through her feed. What is the blackout challenge? The blackout challenge is a dare that encourages those who try it to hold their breath until they pass out due to a lack of oxygen. It is also sometimes referred to as the choking challenge or the pass-out challenge. Story continues The dare is not new, and has been around since 2008, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A study carried out by the regulatory body found at the time that at least 82 young people died as a result of the game. Why is it so dangerous? Because the challenge involves choking oneself, it can starve the brain of oxygen and result in suffocation. The CDC warned: Death or serious injury can result if strangulation is prolonged. What has TikTok said? Following Nylahs death, a spokesperson for TikTok told People: This disturbing challenge, which people seem to learn about from sources other than TikTok, long predates our platform and has never been a TikTok trend. We remain vigilant in our commitment to user safety and would immediately remove related content if found. Our deepest sympathies go out to the family for their tragic loss. The platform has not yet responded to the lawsuits. LETS MEET UP: As millions of cities, companies and corporations are still struggling to sort out how best and to what extent to get large groups together, the city of Helsinki has rolled out a potential template in Helsinki Design Week. First established in 2005, Helsinki Design Week is the largest design festival in the Nordic countries, but the curious or potential copycats dont have to fly to Finland to take part or glean ideas. This years edition will run Sept. 1 to 11 both online and in-person. Through an open call, organizers have decided on 100-plus events under the theme of We Are Open. For the first time in the events history, the main venue will be open to the public throughout the 10-day festival. On the top floors of what locals call the Sugar Cube, a sleek 1962 building designed by prized architect Alvar Aalto, visitors will be encouraged to brainstorm and exchange ideas, take guided tours, indulge at the pop-up restaurant Kuurna and listen in to talks about design and architecture. More from WWD Giving new meaning to cultural ambassadorship a principle that the design-minded Scandinavian country has a reputation for there will be Design Diplomacy discussions in ambassadors residences. Ten embassies will take part in those talks that will each bring together a design professional from Finland with one from the embassys home country. Conversation topics will be chosen randomly from a deck of cards and speakers will not be briefed beforehand to prepare in advance in the interest of a more natural conversation. HDW and the city of Helsinki will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the World Design Capital on Sept. 1 by honoring a designer or design team for contributing something positive to the city. Environmental design ideas will be highlighted in Life 1.5s Designs for a Cooler Planet exhibition. With help from the Helsinki International Film Festival, a series of surprise screenings will take place around the city. Story continues Eyeing the future, there will also be a What If? Alternative Futures exhibition at the Helsinki Design Museum that culls from the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitras report that explores such topics as whether feelings could be measured and different species could communicate. Helsinki city officials, designers and creatives may be onto something. While the preeminence of major cities is expected to be unaffected in a post-COVID-19 world, cities might increasingly become cultural and civic gathering places rather than shopping destinations or office hubs, according to the Cities in a Post-COVID World report. Three academics determined that more events will be held outdoors in city streets and plazas, as city centers transform into more pedestrian and bike-friendly places. The migration of affluent residents from cities to suburbs could give way to an influx of young artists and creatives, they wrote. But the cultural divide could become more pronounced as the disease and the financial fallout impacts the disadvantaged the most. There will also be more expected gatherings like the popular three-day Design Market, where designers and other creatives will sell fashion, accessories and other items. Understanding the importance of cultivating childrens interest in all disciplines of design, HDW will feature a slew of events for them in the Childrens Design Week. The main event will give children and youth a voice to express what type of city center would feel open to them. Best of WWD Sign up for WWD's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Chef Gregory Gourdet wants to tell you a story. It has many beginnings, though. One of those beginnings was 40 years ago, when Gourdet spent his childhood between New York, where he was born, and Haiti, where his ancestors are from. He snacked on sugar cane (kann) bought from street vendors while taking in all the spices and comforting dishes of his familys kitchen. More from Robb Report Another one of those beginnings was more than 500 years ago, when Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards anchored to that same land and learned a new way to cook seafood and meat, the way the indigenous peoples did, over a barbecue. This, according to scholars, could have been what spread the art of barbecuing throughout the world. And yet another one of those beginnings was in 2020, when Gourdet appeared on Bravos Top Chef: All-Stars Season 17 and won the shows Restaurant Wars challenge with his vision for a wood-fired Haitian restaurant. Gourdet presenting Kann to Top Chef judges. - Credit: Photo: courtesy Nicole Weingart/Bravo Photo: courtesy Nicole Weingart/Bravo And while the story begins in a lot of places, it only has one logical ending. On Aug. 4, Gourdet will open Kann, in Portland, Ore., the wood-fired Haitian restaurant of his dreams, his first solo project. We are super excited to tell the story of Haiti, he said. I know for a fact that a lot of people have never had Haitian food in their life. I know for a fact that a lot of people arent familiar with the history of Haiti. I want people to leave having an understanding of what Haitian food is. Before launching Kann, Gourdet, a James Beard Award winner and alum of Jean-Georges Vongerichtens New York empire, had been at Portlands Departure for years, happy for a long time, he said. And then one day I woke up and didnt want to go to work. And I just decided it was time for a change. I believe in making the changes you need to be happy. Story continues His exit plan was the restaurant that would eventually become Kann, a place where he could have complete control and refocus on the kind of cooking he really wanted to doHaitian, the cuisine of his family, while honoring the ingredients of Oregon, the food of the place he had called home since 2008. Tomato, berry, cherry and young coconut salad with coconut vinegar - Credit: Eva Kosmas Flores Eva Kosmas Flores This was 2018, though, so the endeavor hit a very large roadblock a few years later. Instead of trashing his dream, he traveled to New York City and LA and explored the Caribbean communities there. Then he did pop-ups around Portland, including an outdoor yurt village, narrowing in on the flavors and techniques he would eventually bring to Kann. He also spent this time reflecting on the opportunities he had been given in his career and clarifying his core values. Diversity is important. Women should have leadership positions. (His chef de cuisine at Kann is Varanya Geyoonsawat, a native of Thailand who worked with him at Departure.) Everyone on the team should have a voice. When I look at what makes a great restaurant, its not just about a beautiful dining room and great food, he said. Its about the entire holistic experience. Is the team happy that works there? I really want this restaurant to be about them as much as it is about me. Obviously, Im leading the vision, but Im only one person. Im only one piece of this project. I want them to get the recognition they deserve in terms of creating this restaurant as well. Spicy salt cod in pastry - Credit: Eva Kosmas Flores Eva Kosmas Flores The restaurant he built reflects this ethos. He brought in a Haitian scholar to educate his staff on the countrys history and culture. Physically, there are no walls between the 80 seats in the dining room and the wood-fired kitchen; everyone in the building is in this together. An eight-foot hearth is the centerpiece, an island, with a 13-seat chefs counter. The menu at Kann includes traditional dishes like Diri ak Sos Pwa (jasmine rice with red kidney bean sauce) and Griyo (twice-cooked pork) that are eaten in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora every day. Other dishes are rooted in the Pacific Northwest. A lot of it is tapping into our resources in Oregon and presenting those ingredientsbe it summer tomatoes or local berriesin a Haitian/Caribbean light, he said. Starters include plantain brioche served with chile-garlic-herb (Epis) butter; crispy taro root fritters (Akra) with remoulade; and a tomato, summer berry, cherry, gem lettuce and young coconut salad dressed with smoked peanut-coconut vinegar, black pepper, lime juice, habaneros and thyme (a common seasoning blend in Haiti). Whole grilled fish with stewed peppers - Credit: Eva Kosmas Flores Eva Kosmas Flores Other dishes take full advantage of the hearth. Hes chopping up tomatoes and smoked herring (a popular breakfast item in Haiti) and serving them over charred red cabbage with an African pepper sauce spiked with ginger and Scotch bonnets. Hes grilling whole fish with citrus, herbs and chiles. Hes smoking beef ribs rubbed in Haitian coffee. And hes even making Pekin duck (one of his specialties with a cult following) by smearing it in cane syrup and dotting it with pineapple and tamarind hunks. Sides include collard greens creamed with peanuts and coconut cream; a Haitian black mushroom rice pilaf with lima beans (Diri ak Djon Djons); and veggie stew (Legim). Desserts are fun dishes like soursop ice topped with coconut cream and berries; charred banana tarts; and grilled pineapple upside-down cakes with rum raisin ice cream. You probably wouldnt notice this unless someone told you, but the entire menu is dairy- and gluten-free, the way Gourdet likes to eat. And there is a long list of zero-proof cocktails available for those who avoid alcohol like Gourdet does. His goal is to build a global dining destination, one where people from all over the world will travel to experience the bounty of Oregon and also learn about the beauty of Haiti. I really want to take this opportunity to do something for my city and for the country, the culture where Im from, he said. We want to add to the fabric of American dining. Best of Robb Report Sign up for Robb Report's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Florida A&M University graduate student Sherita Ingram is one of 15 women of color going back to the classroom with fewer struggles and more self-assurance after FAMUs weeklong research boot camp for STEM scholars. "I was super nervous," said Ingram, a risk management and policy Ph.D. candidate at FAMU. "We had an assignment where we had to present on what our dissertations were going to be about, and I just changed my topic less than a month ago." After going through a camp full of motivation and mentorship, Ingram now has the confidence she's been looking for to move forward in the STEM field, where few people who look like her are represented. I'm ready to authentically be me, show up as me and be confident in who I am with everything I've learned instead of hiding or doubting my skills and my abilities," Ingram said. Other news from Florida A&M University: Jessica Saintibert, Joy Jefferson-Yager, Sherita Ingram and Ericka Horne (left to right) pose for a portrait on Thursday, July 14, 2022 during a FAMU Research Bootcamp for women of color in Florida who are STEM scholars. This was FAMU's second year hosting research boot camps, which they offer three times a year to work with STEM scholars in Florida who are Black, Hispanic, Indigenous or other women of color. The most recent camp, which ended last week, was funded by the National Science Foundation. FAMU is the lead university for NSFs Florida Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP), which aims to grow a more diverse research workforce. The purpose of the research camp was to identify women of color in the STEM field and support them from the beginning dissertation stage to the early career stage, as well as postdoctoral fellowships, through mentorship. The participants were chosen after going through an application process that included writing essays and stating their goals for the end of the boot camp. While FAMU maintains its Carnegie R2 (high research activity) designation for the third year in a row, the boot camp is one of the factors that can contribute to its goal of obtaining R1 status, which would increase the universitys level of grant funding and research output. Story continues Panelists Marcia Allen Owens, Sabrina Dickey, Shonda Bernadin and Natalie Arnett (left to right) speak on Thursday, July 14, 2022 during a FAMU Research Bootcamp for women of color in Florida who are STEM scholars. Underrepresented STEM scholars are 'not alone' At the top 50 research universities in the U.S., women of color hold less than 2% of tenured or tenured-track faculty positions, according to the NSF. Participant Jessica Saintibert, who is an epidemiology and biostatistics Ph.D. candidate at FAMU, shared what it meant to her to have mentors she can look up to while at the camp. Seeing other STEM scholars gives us a feeling of knowing that we are not by ourselves, Saintibert said. There are other people who look like us and understand our struggle, and were not alone. The four mentors in the program were former Florida Memorial University Vice Provost of Research Adrienne Cooper, Florida State University College of Nursing Associate Professor Sabrina Dickey, Florida International University Professor of Biology Lidia Kos and FAMU Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy Marcia Allen Owens. FAMU College of Education Dean Allyson Watson poses for a portrait on Thursday, July 14, 2022 during a FAMU Research Bootcamp for women of color in Florida who are STEM scholars. If we don't have women of color faculty in the classrooms as professors at our universities, we cannot grow women of color in these fields, said FAMU College of Education Dean Allyson Watson. Watson is also the lead principal investigator of AGEP's Pathways Alliance, which is a partnership of universities, including FAMU, with the goal of increasing the number of minority women faculty in the STEM field. The other universities in the alliance are Bethune Cookman University, Florida Memorial University, Florida International University and the University of South Florida. This work is very intentional, Watson said. We know that it's not every day that women of color can convene in a small setting and get one-on-one mentoring attention or salient ideas, key points and cues on how to be successful in their specific area. Tamara Bertrand Jones, an associate professor of higher education at FSU, was a host consultant for the boot camp. She is one of the founders of Sisters of the Academy, an organization creating an educational network of Black women in higher education. Jones reflected on what it was like being able to work with the participants during the research camp. FSU Associate Professor Tamara Bertrand Jones poses for a portrait on Thursday, July 14, 2022 during a FAMU Research Bootcamp for women of color in Florida who are STEM scholars. Jones is a doctor of philosophy in research and evaluation methods. "To see the light bulbs go off or to see when they make connections about something that we've talked about reminds me of the importance of this work, and it further reminds me that these kinds of spaces are needed for minoritized groups," Jones said. "There's something culturally validating about having a space of all women of color," Jones added, "and the proof will be in these women's future success." Contact Tarah Jean at tjean@tallahassee.com or follow her on twitter @tarahjean_. Never miss a story: Subscribe to the Tallahassee Democrat using the link at the top of the page. This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: FAMU hosts STEM research boot camp for Florida women of color On Tuesday, Kansas shocked the nation when voters in the conservative state beat back an attempt to remove constitutional protections for abortion rights. Abortion rights activists seemed to have an uphill climb. Democrats have not won the state in a presidential election since 1964. While the governor, Laura Kelly, is a Democrat, Republicans dominate the state legislature. And abortion opponents deliberately chose to put the referendum on the ballot on a day when turnout was expected to be low, and the electorate was expected to favor Republicans. With no competitive Democratic primaries on the ballot, they figured GOP voters would be the ones coming to the polls. But conservatives didnt just lose, they lost definitively. Fifty-nine percent voted no on changing the constitution, while just 41% voted yes. More than 900,000 people cast ballots, which is nearly twice the states turnout in the 2018 midterm elections. And according to a Washington Post analysis, 1 in 5 Republicans voted against the referendum. Its definitely a wake-up call for us, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) acknowledged to HuffPost Wednesday. While some Republicans are still in a state of shock, others are already trying to spin the results. Theyre arguing that the results are actually exactly what they wanted all along. Theyre meaningless. Voters were duped and actually do want to get rid of abortion rights. (Notably, Fox News has dedicated far less airtime to the results than the liberal-leaning MSNBC.) Here are some of the ways conservatives are trying to explain away the massive support for abortion rights in Kansas: Liberals spent millions of dollars. Conservatives are claiming that they were the ones at a disadvantage in Kansas, because they were up against an onslaught of spending from liberals. Pro-aborts poured millions into a massive disinformation campaign in Kansas. Pro-abort media pulled heavily for them, tweeted conservative activist Lila Rose, who also reiterated that message in an interview on Fox News Thursday morning. Story continues I do think that pro-lifers should understand that so much money was spent by hardcore abortion supporters to make sure that amendment failed, Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of conservative publication The Federalist, said on Fox News. Conservatives have been claiming that abortion supporters swamped the right in spending on the Kansas amendment fight, a claim that's just not true. (Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) Conservatives have been claiming that abortion supporters swamped the right in spending on the Kansas amendment fight, a claim that's just not true. (Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) Yes, abortion rights supporters put millions of dollars into the Kansas fight but so did abortion opponents. Conservatives spin conveniently leaves out all the money they spent to get the ballot measure to succeed. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that about $12 million had been spent on advertising in the campaign, split about evenly between both camps. The Catholic Church, in particular, funded a majority of the Value Them Both campaign, which was the leading group behind the vote-yes push. Liberals confused voters too much. Yes, the referendums wording was confusing. And that was by design but not because of liberals. It was because of conservatives, who were the ones who wrote it and pushed for it to get on the ballot. For example, the measure said it would ban the government funding of abortion, even though Kansas already bans taxpayer money from being used for abortion. It also said it would affirm there is no constitutional right to an abortion. But voting yes would actually have done more, completely removing the existing constitutional right to access. The amendment also said that by voting yes, the legislature would be allowed to pass laws regarding abortion, including ones that provide exceptions for cases resulting from rape and incest, or to save the life of the mother. It never said that a total ban, with no exceptions, could also be passed. How many Kansans who are generally pro-life but not plugged in went to the polls, read the ballot language, and thought, Shit, I dont want to let the legislature pass abortion laws. Im pro-life, tweeted right-wing commentator Erick Erickson, suggesting the language was tilted in a way that favored abortion supporters. The abortion lobbys message to voters was rife with lies that ultimately drowned out the truth, read a statement from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. But on Monday, some Kansas voters received text messages that warned, Women in KS are losing their choice on reproductive rights. Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect womens health. Those texts were incredibly misleading, at best. Voting yes would have taken away choice protections, opening the door for the GOP-led legislature to ban abortion. They were pushed by Republicans, crafted by a group connected to former Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.). The amendment actually needed to be more anti-abortion. Kansas traditionally leans Republican, but that voter registration advantage wasn't enough to pass the anti-abortion amendment. (Photo: John Hanna/Associated Press) Kansas traditionally leans Republican, but that voter registration advantage wasn't enough to pass the anti-abortion amendment. (Photo: John Hanna/Associated Press) While some conservatives are claiming that the amendment was not nearly as far-reaching as portrayed, GOP activist and commentator Matt Schlapp believes that the problem is that the amendment did not go far enough and conservatives opposed it because they wanted something that went further in banning abortion outright. Kansas is a strongly pro life state that does not want to take timid steps as VTB [Value Them Both] was. Ironically the pro choice crowd in Kansas should have embraced VTB as it is the best case scenario for them, he tweeted Wednesday. This isnt really a loss for conservatives at all! And finally, conservatives are trying to spin the loss in Kansas and what it could mean for the midterm elections, with a Democratic base fired up after the Supreme Courts decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization by saying that actually, they didnt lose at all. This is what they wanted the whole time! Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told HuffPost Wednesday it was a good thing because it pushed the issue back to the states. Well, I wouldnt have voted that way. I think the process is a good thing. I dont want to jump up and down too much about it because I think this is how it should be working, he said. The whole point of ending Roe is so states like Kansas can decide abortion for themselves, Erickson similarly tweeted. The media excitement just kinda makes the Dobbs cases argument for itself. Exactly the point - decide this democratically at the state level. On Fox News Wednesday, Kellyanne Conway, a former top official to President Donald Trump, said it was exactly what the Dobbs decision was meant to do kick it back to the states. And an op-ed in the conservative National Review said the amendment would simply have taken Kansas back to abortion neutrality although liberals distorted it as a ban, and won. And yet ... Republicans are already making clear that theyre interested in a national abortion ban. Igor Bobic contributed reporting. This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. Related... CANTON A 68-year-old Jackson Township man will spend four to six years in prison for defrauding investors in his radial engine start-up companies. At the conclusion of Charles M. Boulton's plea hearing Tuesday, Stark County Common Pleas Judge Frank Forchione ordered Boulton committed to the Stark County Jail, where he awaits transfer to a state prison, according to court records. Boulton had been free on $250,000 bond. Forchione ordered Boulton to pay $630,000 in restitution to seven victims who live in Medina, Stark and Summit counties as well as Nebraska and California, according to prosecutors and the Ohio Department of Commerce. The department investigated the fraud allegations and referred the case to the Stark County prosecutor's office. More:Stark entrepreneur accused of defrauding over $600K in investments headed to trial More:Stark County man faces fraud charges A message seeking comment was left late Wednesday afternoon at the law firm of Boulton's Strongsville-based attorney Aaron Schwartz. Radial engineer designer Charles Boulton arrested Boulton was arrested in January 2021 at his home by agents with the U.S. Marshals Violent Fugitive Task Force. A Stark County grand jury indicted him on 24 felony charges of unlawful securities practices, two counts of telecommunications fraud, one count of theft from a person in a protected class and one count of theft. Prosecutors said he made misrepresentations while soliciting and collecting more than $600,000 from 2015 to 2018 for what the investors believed to be a radial engine product Boulton said he was working on. Boulton's company names were Radio M92 Inc., Radia R&D LLC or Radial Engine Innovation Ltd. Instead, prosecutors, who were led by Assistant Stark County Prosecutor Kristen Mlinar, said he spent the money to cover personal expenses, loan payments and to provide him cash. As part of a plea agreement, Forchione dismissed the theft charges and one count of telecommunications fraud. He consolidated the unlawful securities practices counts into 12 counts with one telecommunications fraud charge. Boulton pleaded guilty to those charges. Story continues The sentence is shorter than the eight to 12 years he had agreed to in February as part of a proposed plea. Mlinar said the victims in the case and Boulton agreed to the tentative deal. But then Boulton backed out of the agreement before it could be presented to Forchione, apparently against the advice of his then-attorneys Frederick Pitini and Eugene O'Byrne. Mlinar indicated she would then seek a sentence of at least 20 years for Boulton when he decided to opt for a trial. Attorneys withdraw Forchione approved Pitini and O'Byrne withdrawing as Boulton's attorneys in March after they told the judge in a hearing that they "irreconcilable differences" with Boulton, according to court records. Schwartz replaced Pitini and O'Byrne in April and requested another delay in the trial. In a filing with Forchione in April, Schwartz wrote that he had yet to get the case files with a significant amount of information from Boulton's prior attorneys. And he asked for another postponement. Forchione extended the trial date to Aug 2 but he noted "no further continuances." Reach Robert at robert.wang@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @rwangREP. This article originally appeared on The Repository: Businessman Charles Boulton get 4 to 6 years for investment scheme The legal team for far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones accidentally sent two years of his phone records to the attorneys for parents of a Sandy Hook school shooting victim, cross-examination revealed Wednesday during his defamation trial. Your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message youve sent for the past two years, attorney Mark Bankston told Jones during a hearing to decide damages in the civil case. And that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didnt have to text messages about Sandy Hook, he added. Jones has long touted a theory that the 2012 shooting that killed 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax. He was found guilty by default in four defamation cases last year after failing to comply with court orders. Bankston argued Wednesday that Jones lied under oath about having searched his own phone for the texts and withheld the evidence in lawsuits brought by Sandy Hook families. Jones replied that hed given his phone over to his team. This is your Perry Mason moment, he told Bankston, making reference to the fictional TV lawyer who often presented dramatic evidence at trial that changed the proceedings. Bankston is part of the legal team representing Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of 6-year-old Sandy Hook shooting victim Jesse Lewis. The Washington Post reported that Bankston caught Jones in a similar contradiction about related emails, showing the court copies of emails sent by Jones despite his insistence that he does not use email. Bankston also revealed evidence indicating that Jones had not been truthful about his financial situation, perhaps in an effort to skirt the $150 million in defamation damages that the Sandy Hook parents are seeking, The New York Times reported. Joness company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy at the start of the trial and his far-right website Infowars did the same back in April. Story continues Jones testified Wednesday that he now acknowledges that the Sandy Hook massacre was real. He said that meeting the victims parents, whom he previously called crisis actors, changed his mind. Its 100 percent real, Jones said, according to The Associated Press. Despite this concession, Jones continues to defend his actions and argues that the trial violates his free speech rights. He arrived at the courthouse last week with Save the 1st written on a strip of duct tape over his mouth. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Birds from every continent except Antarctica have been photographed nesting or tangled in our rubbish. Photos were submitted by people from all over the world to an online project called Birds and Debris. The scientists running the project say they see birds ensnared - or nesting - in everything from rope and fishing line to balloon ribbon and a flip-flop. Nearly a quarter of the photographs show birds nesting or entangled in disposable face masks. The focus of the project is on capturing the impact of waste - particularly plastic pollution - on the avian world. "Basically, if a bird builds a nest using long fibrous materials - like seaweed, branches or reeds - the chances are it will have human debris in its nest somewhere," said Dr Alex Bond from the Natural History Museum in London, and one of the researchers involved. The project, which he and his colleagues have been running for four years, aims to draw attention to the widespread problem of plastic waste in the environment. "When you start looking for this stuff, you'll see it everywhere," he said. "And this has really illustrated the huge geographic scope - we had reports from Japan , Australia, Sri Lanka, the UK, North America - it's truly a global issue." In a recent study, the team looked into how many of the photos being submitted feature pandemic-related personal protective equipment (PPE). They found that it featured in almost a quarter of the photographs submitted. "It's almost all masks," said Dr Bond. "And if you think of the different materials a surgical mask is made from - there's the elastic that we see tangled around birds' legs or we might see birds injured by trying to ingest the fabric or the hard piece of plastic that secures it over your nose. "So we use this catch-all term of 'plastic' but it's a whole range of different polymers, and masks are a good example of that." Story continues The researchers say they want to highlight the "systemic problem" that leads to so much debris ending up in the environment. Lead researcher Justine Ammendolia from Dalhousie University in Canada told BBC News that seeing the breadth of the impact on species globally was "devastating". "In April of 2020, the first sighting of a bird hanging from a facemask in a tree was recorded from Canada and the sightings just internationally cascaded afterwards, " she said. "It really just demonstrates the harm that humans are capable of imposing on the environment in a very short window of time across the world." "Changing to a bamboo toothbrush or a canvas shopping bag is not going to save the world, [because] most large-scale plastic production today is commercial and industrial," said Dr Bond. "So it's a combination of top-down policies and bottom-up pressure for us to say 'enough is enough'." PhD researcher Justine Ammendolia added: "For people seeing these images for the first time, it's alright to feel sad. But we need to learn from the unnecessary and often invisible suffering that some wildlife experienced during the pandemic. "I hope people use their sadness to fuel their demand for action." Dr Bond likened the global action required to address plastic pollution to the Montreal Protocol that banned ozone-depleting chemicals - a treaty widely considered to be one of the most successful global agreements ever signed. "We need the same thing with plastic pollution, and we're moving in that direction, but just very, very slowly." Follow Victoria on Twitter BEIJING (Reuters) - China scolded foreign ministers of the Group of Seven (G7) nations on Thursday for telling Beijing not to use a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan as "pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait". China responded to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier this week by ordering live fire military drills in the waters surrounding the self-governed island, which Beijing regards as its sovereign territory. A G7 foreign ministers joint statement warned that China's escalatory response risked increasing tensions and destabilising the region and said it was routine for legislators from their countries to travel internationally. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi rejected their statement, and chided them for ignoring the provocation that had come from the U.S. side. "It groundlessly criticises China for taking such measures, which are reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity," Wang said in a statement issued by his ministry. "From where have they received such a prerogative? Who has given them such qualification to? To shield the infringer of rights and to accuse their defenders - how inexplicable!" The G7 statement had aroused "great indignation" among the Chinese people, he said. "Today's China is no longer the China of the 19th century. History should not repeat itself, and it will never repeat itself!" Due to the statement from G7, which Japan is part of, China cancelled a meeting between Wang and his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi on the sidelines of ASEAN events in Cambodia, said Hua Chunying, spokesperson at the Chinese foreign ministry. Hua added that if other G7 nations follow in the footsteps of the United States over the Taiwan issue, then that means they themselves have no independence in their diplomacy and policies. "(They) should adhere to the consensus reached by China on the one-China policy, as this is the most important political premise and basis for China's relations with them," Hua said. (Reporting by Maria Sheahan in Berlin and Martin Quin Pollard in Beijing; writing by Ryan Woo; Editing by Madeline Chambers & Simon Cameron-Moore) Anti-abortion sign in Michigan The votes are in, and Kansans have been unequivocal - the right to abortion in the state stays. More than 900,000 Kansans - about a third of the state's total population - cast their ballots on Tuesday in a state-wide referendum on whether the right to abortion should be removed from the state's constitution. In the lead-up to the vote, many polls predicted a nail-biting race. But when it came down to it, almost 60% voted against the change, a resounding victory for pro-choice advocates. The results will send ripple effects across the country in the months ahead, as more states hold their own referendums on abortion rights and as nationwide November elections loom. When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, it gave individual states the authority to ban abortion. Kansas is a stalwart "red" state, with a strong Republican base and a Republican government - if any state should be able to pass abortion restrictions, it's Kansas. But because abortion rights are a part of the state's constitution, anti-abortion lawmakers decided to put it to a vote, in the hopes of paving the way for more restrictive laws. That decision seems to have backfired. But while the battle to ban abortion in the state may have been lost, it continues in other states across the country. ON THE GROUND: The state where abortion is on the ballot Legal scholar Naomi Cahn, co-director of the Family Law Center at the University of Virginia, said the Kansas vote, while obviously having a significant impact on women in the state, will also reverberate far beyond its borders. "I suspect there will be similar initiatives across the country - either trying to enshrine the right, or trying to lose the right and get abortion banned," she told the BBC. In total, 10 states have the right to abortion enshrined in their state constitutions, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights: Arizona, Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, Kansas, New Mexico, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, and Florida. Story continues Lawmakers in some of those states have said they want to ban abortions, despite their state constitutions, and, like Kansas, could put the matter to a vote. Montana has already added abortion to the ballot for the November midterms. In Kentucky, the constitution does not guarantee the right to abortion, but state courts have played ping-pong with the state's strict abortion ban. Voters there will decide in November whether to amend the constitution to make it clear that abortion is not a right. Conversely, some states, notably California and Vermont, are making moves to shore up abortion rights by having votes on adding additional abortion protections to the constitution. The anti-abortion movement's failure in Kansas could give pause to other states considering similar referendums, said Kyle Kondik, a non-partisan political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, especially if it could give pro-choice Democrats an edge by encouraging voters who support left-wing causes to show up to the polls. "On this particular issue, Republicans, I think, have a pretty clear vulnerability," he said. That vulnerability could have major consequences in Michigan, a so-called swing state where power frequently changes hands between the Democrats and the Republicans. Pro-choice advocates garnered over 750,000 signatures to get abortion rights on the ballot in November. It's possible the issue could become a beacon for left-leaning voters, and influence not only the future of abortion rights in the state, but the political makeup up of the state legislature and its representatives in Congress. Getting abortion rights on the ballot could become a political tactic for Democrats to try and increase their voter turnout, said Mr Kondik - but it's not guaranteed to be a slam-dunk come November. "I think it's important to remember that often Democratic Party ideas are sometimes more popular than Democratic Party candidates," he said. Just because people may show up to the polls to vote for abortion rights, does not mean they will necessarily vote for pro-choice candidates. In 2018, for instance, 37 states voted in favour of expanding Medicaid, a left-leaning issue, while many voters still backed conservative candidates for office, Mr Kondik said. Pro-choice advocates gathered over 750,000 signatures on Michigan to get abortion rights on the ballot Lawmakers who want to ban abortion, but don't want to risk political blowback, could let the issue be fought out in the courts. That's what Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has done so far, where a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks has been volleyed back and forth and is heading for the state's Supreme Court. They could also wait until after November to put anti-abortion legislation on the agenda, and thus avoid tying their campaigns to a potentially unpopular idea. Regardless of whether states put abortion on the ballot or not, it's clear it will be on voters' minds this autumn. A June poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist found that 56% of Americans were opposed to the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, while 40% supported it. In the same poll, 51% said they are likely to vote for a congressional candidate who would restore abortion rights, while 36% said they would deliberately vote against a candidate who had that intent. Will voters support the Supreme Court ruling that abortion isn't a guaranteed right? Time will tell, but as the results from Kansas indicate, the court of public opinion can be unpredictable. STOCKHOLM, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Moberg Pharma AB (OMX: MOB) has signed a distribution agreement with Padagis Israel Agencies Ltd. for MOB-015 in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Under the agreement Padagis is granted exclusive rights to market and sell MOB-015 in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Moberg Pharma assumes production and supply responsibility. Padagis will conduct registration activities in Israel, and will be marketing, distributing and selling MOB-015 in Israel and the Palestinian territories upon completion of registration. "This is the sixth commercial agreement for MOB-015, this time with a leading provider of extended topical and other specialty pharmaceuticals in Israel. We look forward to work with Padagis and making MOB-015 available in Israel, contributing to our vision of making MOB-015 the leading nail fungus treatment worldwide", says Anna Ljung, CEO of Moberg Pharma. "As a leading pharmaceutical company in Israel, Padagis Israel welcomes the signing of this agreement with Moberg Pharma and look forward to a fruitful cooperation and collaboration between the two companies", says Shlomi Leibovich, SVP & CEO of Padagis Israel. According to Moberg Pharma's market intelligence, the Israelian market for topical drugs for onychomycosis amounts to approximately 6.5 million. For additional information, please contact: Anna Ljung, CEO, telephone: +46 707 66 60 30, E-mail: anna.ljung@mobergpharma.se About this information This information is information that Moberg Pharma AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out above, on August 4th, 2022, at 8.00 am CEST. About Moberg Pharma, www.mobergpharma.com Moberg Pharma AB (publ) is a Swedish pharmaceutical company focused on commercializing proprietary innovations based on drug delivery of proven compounds. The Company's main asset, MOB-015, is a novel topical treatment for onychomycosis. Data from phase 3 clinical trials in more than 800 patients for MOB-015 indicate that the product has the potential to become the future market leader in onychomycosis. Moberg Pharma has agreements with commercial partners in place in Europe and Japan, among others, and the Company's goal is to receive its first market approval and launch MOB-015 in 2023. Moberg Pharma is headquartered in Stockholm and the Company's shares are listed on the Small Cap list of the Nasdaq Stockholm (OMX: MOB). Story continues About Padagis, www.padagis.com Padagis is dedicated to improving the well-being of as many patients and consumers as possible by developing, manufacturing and distributing high quality, affordable specialized healthcare products. The company is a leading provider of extended topical and other specialty pharmaceuticals to its primary markets of the United States and Israel. Padagis employs over 1,300 people worldwide. This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/moberg-pharma/r/moberg-pharma-and-padagis-sign-agreement-for-mob-015-in-israel,c3610029 The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/1662/3610029/1611464.pdf Moberg Pharma and Padagis sign agreement for MOB-015 in Israel Cision View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moberg-pharma-and-padagis-sign-agreement-for-mob-015-in-israel-301599703.html SOURCE Moberg Pharma Aug. 3Six Dayton Police officers who three years ago ran toward a gunman and stopped a mass shooting in the Oregon District said every person who helped that fateful night are heroes and encouraged the community to continue to support each other. For the first time, Dayton Police officers Jeremy Campbell, Ryan Nabel, Brian Rolfes, David Denlinger, Vincent Carter and recently retired Sgt. W. Chad Knight publicly recounted the events of Aug. 4, 2019. They have been credited with saving countless lives when they charged toward the gunman, Connor Betts, and killed him within about 32 seconds from the mass shooting's start. Nine people were killed and dozens more were injured that night. The nine killed were Monica Brickhouse, 39; Nicholas Cumer, 25; Megan Betts, 22; Derrick Fudge, 57; Thomas McNichols, 25; Lois Oglesby, 27; Saeed Saleh, 38; Logan Turner, 30; and Beatrice Warren Curtis, 36. Campbell said it was his first night patrolling the Oregon District and him and some other officers were resolving another situation when he was first alerted something was wrong. "As I am finishing something up on the computer we hear what initially sounded like gun shots and I say out loud, I remember ,'is that gun shots?'" Campbell said. "Officer Rofles takes off running as fast as he can towards what he hears and the rest of us follow and that was the very initial thoughts." Knight said he was in car talking to Denlinger when he heard the noise. They jumped into action and the gunfire continued, he said. "His second volley (of gunfire) had started and it didn't stop until we stopped him," Knight said. Campbell said he thought about his kids and faced the reality that he was in a dangerous situations in the moments leading up to the confrontation with the shooter. "In an instant when I took that one step onto the side walk, and I'm still scanning for the threat and I see the threat and I see a guy wearing khaki shorts, black hoodie, black mask and he has a rifle with a drum mag, which I never seen something like that before, so in my mind I'm like 'is this real?'" Campbell said. "I've already got my gun, I've already got him in sight and it was in an instant where you see that bullets are hitting the ground, smoke flying up, you see bullets hitting people, people falling, people running everywhere. Story continues "It's a chaotic situation, but for me I just focused in, just this hyper vigilance almost on him and that's when I decided to shoot," Campbell said. "It was all very quick." For their actions, the six police officers were awarded the Medal of Valor by President Donald Trump. They also said they received a lot of gratitude from the community. "The Oregon District, the people who live there, the people who work there, it's kind of like a big family," Knight said. "Everybody knows everybody, it's a special group of people down there and they treated us very, very well." The officers noted that there were many first responders who urgently went to the scene that night and helped people and said they are heroes too. They also gave credit to employees working in the Oregon District and regular citizens who also quickly acted to aid those who were shot. The officers said they do still think about the shooting and usually wonder if they could have done more to stop it faster. They said they would trade in any distinction if it meant bringing the nine people who were killed back. They said the community support they have received has helped them and they hope the community continues to stay strong. "We just want them to make sure that they stay together and support each other," Knight said. China started its largest-ever military exercises around Taiwan today after Nancy Pelosis controversial visit to the island nation. US House speaker Pelosi left Taiwan on a US Air Force jet on last evening, concluding a historic and high-stakes visit that drew a slew of angry responses from China. Her next stop is South Korea. Taiwan said on Thursday that it had fired flares to drive away an unidentified aircraft probably drones that had flown in on Wednesday night above the area of its Kinmen islands. Beijing warned of punishing those who offend it, while Chinese state media called the speakers trip an opening salvo of war. On Thursday, Ms Pelosi met South Korean National Assembly speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of Parliament for talks on regional security, economic cooperation and climate issues. Meanwhile, Russia backed Chinas assertion that the trip was a deliberate attempt by Washington to irritate Beijing, while a Kremlin spokesperson said that the tension created from Ms Pelosis trip to Taiwan should not be underestimated. Key points Pelosi departs from Taiwan after a historic visit Taiwan deploys missile systems to track Chinese airforce activities We will not abandon our commitment to Taiwan, says Pelosi China curbs trade with Taiwan following Pelosi's visit Chinese military actions legitimate, drills not causing freedom of navigation issues China begins largest-ever military drills around Taiwan 06:40 , Maroosha Muzaffar China began its unprecedented live-fire military drills in six areas that ring Taiwan on Thursday. The state-owned CCTV said that the military drills would end at 0400 GMT on Sunday. The drills would include live firing on the waters and in the airspace surrounding Taiwan, it said. Meanwhile, Taiwan officials have said that the drills violate United Nations rules, invade Taiwans territorial space and are a direct challenge to free air and sea navigation. Taiwan deploys missile systems to track Chinese airforce activities 06:30 , Maroosha Muzaffar Story continues Taiwan has deployed missile systems to track the movement of Chinese air force activities near the Median line, Reuters reported. China began its largest-ever military exercise today in wake of Nancy Pelosis highly-controversial visit to the island. It was also reported that Taiwans navy chips are staying close to the median line to monitor Chinese navy activities. Several military aircraft briefly crossed the median line today morning, according to media reports. Taiwan said that it fired flares to drive away Chinese unidentified aircraft. Taiwan fires flares to drive away Chinese unidentified aircraft 06:00 , Maroosha Muzaffar Taiwan said on Thursday that it had fired flares to drive away an unidentified aircraft probably drones that had flown in on Wednesday night above the area of its Kinmen islands. China had warned Taiwan of the consequences of Nancy Pelosis visit and announced military drills in six locations surrounding Taiwan soon after she landed in Taipei on Tuesday night. Major General Chang Zone-sung of the Armys Kinmen Defense Command told Reuters that the Chinese drones came in a pair and flew into the Kinmen area twice on Wednesday night, at around 9pm and 10pm local time. What you need to know about Pelosi, China, and Taiwan 05:00 , Josh Marcus House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan, the highest-level trip by a US official in 25 years, has sparked a diplomatic crisis between the US and China. Beijing warned the United States that it was playing with fire by allowing the speakers visit to take place, and even Joe Biden had cautioned against it. So why is Ms Pelosis trip so controversial? Heres what you need to know. Why is Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan so contentious? ICYMI: Nancy Pelosi leaves Taiwan after highly controversial visit angers China 04:00 , Josh Marcus US House speaker Nancy Pelosi wrapped up her highly-controversial, historic visit to Taiwan on Wednesday amid massive criticism from China. Ms Pelosi is the first highest-ranking American official in 25 years to visit Taiwan despite strong warnings from China. In fact, China had openly criticised her visit with Chinese state-owned media calling the trip an opening salvo of war. But she had said that she and other members of Congress were visiting Taiwan to show they will not abandon their commitment to the self-governing island. Maroosha Muzaffar has the details. Nancy Pelosi leaves Taiwan after highly controversial visit More major geopolitical news out of the Senate 03:00 , Josh Marcus Nancy Pelosis Asia trip isnt the only thing shaking up the world stage. The US Senate on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to give its assent to making Finland and Sweden the 31st and 32nd members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, just under three months after President Joe Biden recommended that both nations be allowed to join the 73-year-old defensive alliance. The vast majority of senators 48 Democrats and 48 Republicans voted in favour of both nations accession to Nato, easily overcoming the two-thirds (67 votes) majority required to ratify the instrument giving American support to the two potential Nato members. Each of the 30 current member nations must unanimously agree before any new countries can join the alliance. Just a single Republican, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri voted against the expansion. Mr Hawley had previously announced that he would oppose allowing Finland and Sweden to join Nato because the US would be obligated to defend them from attack under Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. Nato members have only invoked Article V just once before: in 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Andrew Feinberg has more. US Senate votes 95-1 to allow Finland and Sweden to join Nato The other Pelosi controversy 02:00 , Josh Marcus As much of the world was focused on Nancy Pelosis trip through Asia, her husband Paul quietly pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to DUI charges, stemming from a May accident in Napa, California. Heres more background about the case against Mr Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi's husband charged with DUI in California Watch: Archival footage shows Nancy Pelosi unfurl pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square 01:40 , Josh Marcus In 1991, Nancy Pelosi was part of a congressional delegation that visited China. Standing in Tiananmen Square, where two years earlier the Chinese government had massacred pro-democracy demonstrators, the group unfurled a banner that read, TO THOSE WHO DIED FOR DEMOCRACY IN CHINA. I felt like that that was such a courageous and also formative, I would say, experience from her, Samuel Chu, whose father Reverend Chu Yiu-ming gave the representatives the banner, told The Washington Post on Tuesday. I think that that, in a way, was a foundational piece to the way that she had not only dealt with China, and human rights, but I think across the board. Watch video of the historic gesture below. 31 years ago, @SpeakerPelosi visited #China's Tiananmen Square to display a banner honouring the deceased demonstrators. A short footage of what happened next pic.twitter.com/5aJuUo1BKj Maxim A. Suchkov (@m_suchkov) July 31, 2022 Japan is concerned about Chinese military drills amid Pelosi Taiwan trip 01:20 , Josh Marcus US ally Japan is alarmed about Chinas plans to conduct live fire exercises around Taiwan amid House Speaker Nancy Pelosis controversial Asia tour. We are concerned that Beijing has announced various military activities, a Japanese official told Newsweek. Moreover, the area that China announced for its military drills includes Japans EEZ [Exclusive Economic Zone]. Dave Harding has more information about what China is planning. Nearly 3 million people tracked Pelosi flight to Taiwan, most ever 01:00 , Josh Marcus A whopping 2.9 million people tracked some portion of Nancy Pelosis flight to Taiwan, the most in the history of online flight tracking company Flightradar2, CNN reports. An unprecedented, sustained interest in this particular flight led to extremely heavy load on Flightradar24 infrastructure, the aviation data company wrote on its blog. Our teams immediately began efforts to maintain the stability of our services. Unfortunately, due to the volume of users, it was necessary to deploy our waiting room functionality, which meters access to Flightradar24 for non-subscribers. Pelosis Taiwan trip leaves Asian nations anxious about what happens next Thursday 4 August 2022 00:40 , Josh Marcus Nancy Pelosi may have left Taiwan, but the impact of her visit will linger. According to diplomats, many are nervous about what China will do next. The rising world power wont want to let what it views as an incursion into its domain of the island nation go unchallenged. However, in the words of one Singaporean diplomat, China doesnt want to start World War III either What countries in this region know is that China cannot do nothing it will look weak...China has no choice but to react, Singaporean diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani told NPR, adding, at the same time, China doesnt want to start World War III. A number of embassies in the region have urged restraint. The Philippines has asked both the US and China to avoid any miscalculation and further escalation of tensions. Meanwhile, Indonesia is calling on all parties to refrain from provocative actions that may worsen the situation. What Pelosis Taiwan trip looks like on Weibo Thursday 4 August 2022 00:10 , Josh Marcus Nancy Pelosis Taiwan trip has provoked a wide range of opinions in the US, China, and beyond. On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media app, some users rallied behind the Chinese government perspective. Pelosi has inaugurated a great era that naturally belongs to us, read one popular comment. We will take this opportunity to carry out sea and air patrols around Taiwan without any hindrance so they steadily become normalized, and unification will draw closer and closer. The Liberation Army is clearly training in fully blockading the island Taiwan, another popular hashtag said. Whats it like to travel through Taiwan Wednesday 3 August 2022 23:57 , Josh Marcus Whats it like to visit Taiwan? Heres a tantalizing excerpt from Sally Howard. I ate featherlight dumplings at atmospheric night markets; I poked about gilded Buddhist temples that were thick with the aroma of sandalwood incense; I enjoyed oolong ceremonies in 16th century teahouses where I could almost hear the bustle of Ming dynasty merchants; and I trekked through the eye wateringly sublime Taiwanese interior. Here, marble gorges plunge into blue-green rivers, and fissures in the earths crust bubble with the waters that supply Taiwans 130 hot springs (ideal for soothing trekkers muscles, once you get a grip on hot-spring etiquette). Sounds pretty good to us! Check out her full account. Still off-limits: Why I cant wait to get back to Taiwan Pelosi suggests Chinese criticism of Taiwan trip is sexist Wednesday 3 August 2022 23:37 , Josh Marcus Nancy Pelosi has suggested Chinas furious response to her trip to Taiwan may be sexist. In a joint press conference with the Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday, Ms Pelosi remarked that recent visits by senior US male lawmakers hadnt provoked the bluster and threats seen in recent days. I think they made a big fuss because Im Speaker I guess, she said. I dont know if that was a reason or an excuse, because they didnt say anything when the men came. Beijing warned that the US was playing with fire and launched live-fire drills as Ms Pelosi touched down in Taiwan on Tuesday night, portraying the House Speakers visit as an affront to its ambitions to reunify with Taiwan. Bevan Hurley is following this story for The Independent. Pelosi suggests Chinese criticism of Taiwan trip is sexist How has Pelosis Taiwan visit impacted financial markets Wednesday 3 August 2022 23:17 , Josh Marcus Londons markets finished with strong gains on Wednesday as tensions briefly eased between the US and China, allowing traders to focus on positive equity updates. Concerns over Chinas reaction to Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan eased back as the speaker of the US House of Representatives left for South Korea early on Wednesday. The FTSE 100 ended the day up 36.57 points, or 0.49%, at 7,445.68. Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, said: The choppier start to August has been reversed to an extent today, with the FTSE 100 and other indices making some headway as some of the fears around a Taiwan crisis begin to ease. Henry Saker-Clark has the story for The Independent. London markets close higher as US-China worries ease Voices: Here in Taiwan, this is what people really think of Nancy Pelosis visit Wednesday 3 August 2022 22:57 , Josh Marcus Nancy Pelosis whirlwind visit to Taiwan ended in less than 24 hours, but during that time, the small democratic island suddenly became the most talked-about topic in the world. Prior to Pelosis arrival, there were concerns in the United States that the visit may further escalate tension between Beijing and Washington. In seeming confirmation, the Chinese government was quick to issue a series of stern warnings. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that the US making themselves an enemy of the 1.4 billion Chinese people will not end up well. But here in Taipei, life remained relatively calm and business-as-usual. While international discussion largely focused on the risks of an escalated military conflict between two of the worlds biggest countries, news in Taiwan focuses largely on gossip or news about local politics. For that reason, some may think Taiwanese people are indifferent to the potential risks of Pelosis visit especially given the strident tone of the comments from Beijing but the truth is that Taiwanese people have simply grown used to this kind of rhetoric. In Taiwan, measured military threats from China occur on almost a daily basis. Get more of the local perspective from William Yangs piece for our Voices section. Here in Taiwan, this is what people really think of Nancy Pelosis visit Taiwan says Chinese live-fire drills amount to blockade in response to Pelosi visit Wednesday 3 August 2022 22:37 , Josh Marcus Taiwan has said that Chinese military drills in waters around the island nation amount to a blockade as Britain criticised Beijings inflammatory response to Nancy Pelosis visit. The US House of Representatives speaker arrived in Taipei on Tuesday despite continued threats from China, leading the Chinese military to announce four days of military exercises with artillery fire in waters around the island. The drills featured J-20 stealth fighter jets and test firing of conventional missiles, according to the state-run Global Times, and may result in delays or disrupt shipping to and from the island. In retaliation to Ms Pelosis visit, China also blocked imports of citrus and fish from Taiwan. Sravasti Dasgupta has the details. Taiwan says Chinese live-fire drills amount to blockade in response to Pelosi visit Secretary of State Antony Blinken joins G7 diplomats, calls on China to maintain status quo' Wednesday 3 August 2022 22:00 , Graig Graziosi Secretary of State Antony Blinken has joined fellow G7 diplomats in calling for China not to use force to disrupt the status quo in the Taiwan Strait following House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan. We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means, he wrote in a tweet. There is no change in the respective one China policies, where applicable, and basic positions on Taiwan of the G7 members. We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means. There is no change in the respective one China policies, where applicable, and basic positions on Taiwan of the G7 members. Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) August 3, 2022 Southeast Asian companies react to Chinas rhetoric following Pelosi visit Wednesday 3 August 2022 21:27 , Graig Graziosi Several Southeast Asian countries have issued statements calling for China to maintain peace after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on Tuesday and Wednesday. If not managed well, it may lead to open conflict and disrupt peace and stability, including in the Taiwan [S]trait, Officials from Jakarta said in a statement. It called on all parties to refrain from provocative actions that may worsen the situation. The world is in dire need of wisdom and responsibilities of all leaders to ensure peace and stability are maintained, Indonesian officials said in a statement. The Thai government also urged for peace. We do not wish to see any actions that would aggravate tensions and undermine peace and stability in the region, ministry spokesman Tanee Sangrat said. We hope that all parties concerned exercise utmost restraint, abide by international law and principles of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity and resolve their differences through peaceful means. G7 countries denounce China for destablising Taiwan Strait over Pelosi visit Wednesday 3 August 2022 20:52 , Graig Graziosi The G7 counties released a joint statement denouncing China for destablising the Taiwan Strait over House Speaker Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan. There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait, G7 foreign ministers said in a sttaement. Diplomats from the organisation said they were concerned by recent and announced threatening actions by the Peoples Republic of China, particularly live-fire exercises and economic coercion, which risk unnecessary escalation. NSC Spokesman Admiral John Kirby says US and China are not at the brink' Wednesday 3 August 2022 20:11 , Graig Graziosi NSC Spokesman Admiral John Kirby appeared on Good Morning America on Wednesday and said that despite Chinas rhetoric in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan, the US and Beijing were not on the brink. Mr Kirby said that he did not believe were at the brink now, and theres certainly no reason for anybody to be talking about being at the brink going forward. Pelosi leaves Taiwan for South Korea Wednesday 3 August 2022 19:49 , Graig Graziosi House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has left Taiwan after spending a day there meeting with officials. Chinese forces continued to conduct military drills around the time of her departure as a way to show its displeasure with her visit. Ms Pelosi will now head to South Korea, where she will meet with National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo, leaders of the ruling conservative People Power Party, and the opposition Democratic Party of Korea. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol will not be meeting with Ms Pelosi. He is on a planned holiday, though commenters have speculated he may be trying to dodge meeting with the House Speaker to avoid angering China. White House Press Secretary and Fox News host spar over Bidens lack of endorsement for Pelosis trip Wednesday 3 August 2022 19:20 , Graig Graziosi White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Fox News Peter Doocy sparred on Wednesday over the fact that Joe Biden has not endorsed House Speaker Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan. Mr Doocy asked Ms Jean-Pierre if Mr Biden was worried about hurting Xis feelings, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Ms Jean-Pierre responded that Mr Biden had made clear they could not tell congressional members where to go, which prompted Mr Doocy to say that Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Lindsey Graham, offered praise to Ms Pelosi for the trip. Ms Jean-Pierre refused to say Mr Biden supported the trip. Republicans have managed to work Mr Biden into a tough spot; by offering their support and noting his silence, it makes the president appear afraid to anger Beijing. If he does endorse her trip, it could ratchet up the already heightened tensions between the two nations. Karine Jean-Pierre refuses to answer Fox News' Peter Doocy's question about President Biden not voicing support for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan. Doocy: "Is President Biden worried about hurting Xi's feelings?" pic.twitter.com/jQz9iw3tHE Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 3, 2022 White House: There is no reason for China to turn Taiwan trip into crisis Wednesday 3 August 2022 19:02 , Johanna Chisholm While reponding to reporters questions during a briefing, White House Press Secretary reiterated the Biden administrations stance regarding Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan this week, stating that members of Congress have the right to travel wherever they choose and added that there was no reason for China to turn the House speakers visit into a crisis. No reason for #China to turn the visit by @SpeakerPelosi to #Taiwan "into some sort of crisis," says @PressSec. "We knew China was going to behave in this way." Steve Herman (@W7VOA) August 3, 2022 Theres no reason for Beijing to turn this visit, which is consistent with long standing US policy and into some sort of crisis, Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday. We have been very clear theres no change in our One China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. That has not changed. The press secretary emphasised that the US doesnt want a crisis, but noted that the administration was prepared to manage what Beijing chooses to do about that. Theres a Chinese official that says the US must pay the price for its own mistake. And we mean what we say when the Chinese threaten the US that the President takes them seriously, she said. Nothing has changed when it comes to our policies. Peter Doocy asked why the WH doesn't seemed "jazzed" like Republicans -- Grassley, McConnell, Graham -- that Pelosi went to Taiwan. @PressSec KJP: "We've been very clear for the past week or so that the speaker has a right to go to Taiwan. We have said that." Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) August 3, 2022 Video: China didnt say anything when the men came Wednesday 3 August 2022 18:42 , Johanna Chisholm While speaking at a press conference on Wednesday in Taiwan, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi contended that Chinese officials didnt make much of a fuss when male US leaders visited the self-governing island nation earlier this year. In April, five US senators Taiwan and the speaker suggested that the response from Beijing was muted in comparison the reception her unannounced trip evoked. She later said China perhaps made a big fuss because Im speaker, before quipping that they didnt say anything when the men came, a jest that was met with a roomful of laughter. Watch the full clip below. Canada calls on China to de-escalate tensions Wednesday 3 August 2022 18:08 , Johanna Chisholm Canadian Foreign Minister said Wednesday that she was concerned by the recent tensions in the Taiwan Strait after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taipei this week and specifically called on China to de-escalate the situation. We think that legislators do visits around the world and clearly the visit cannot be used as a justification for heightened tensions or a pretext, Ms Joly said to reporters in Montreal while speaking alongside her German counterpart Annalena Baerbock. So, in that sense we call on China to de-escalate because we think that there may be risks of not only heightened tensions, but also destabilizing the region, Ms Joly added. Kremlin: Tension from Pelosis visit should not be underestimated' Wednesday 3 August 2022 17:33 , Johanna Chisholm Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday that the knock-on effects and tension created from Nancy Pelosis trip to Taiwan should not be underestimated. While taking a question from a reporter who had asked about whether the Kremlin spokesperson believed the world was on the edge of war, Mr Peskov responded by saying that he wouldnt characterise the current geopolitical tensions as such but echoed earlier comments made by Russias foreign minister who said the visit was a provocation. The spokesperson noted that there were no new meetings planned between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in light of the recent visit. Video: Nancy Pelosi sends 'unequivocal message' that 'America stands with Taiwan' Wednesday 3 August 2022 17:04 , Johanna Chisholm Before taking off for Seoul on Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi vowed solidarity with Taiwan, while China lambasted the House speakers trip and launched military drills in response. Our delegation came here to send an unequivocal message: America stands with Taiwan, Ms Pelosi said during a news conference after meeting with the islands president. Watch the full clip below: Pelosi: China cannot prevent world leaders from travelling to Taiwan Wednesday 3 August 2022 16:46 , Johanna Chisholm US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released an official statement Wednesday as her unannounced trip to Taiwan officially came to a close. In her remarks, the Democratic lawmaker once again echoed earlier comments made about the self-governing island, emphasising how the trip should be viewed as a statement that America stands with Taiwan. We came to Taiwan to listen to, learn from and show our support for the people of Taiwan, who have built a thriving Democracy that stands as one of the freest and most open in the world, the speaker began. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at reacts to Chen Chu, the President of the Control Yuan and Chair of the National Human Rights Commission, during a visit to a human rights museum in Taipei, Taiwan (AP) She then listed the security, economic and governing priorities the delegation discussed with their Taiwanese counterparts, before turning to more controversy-stirring matters. Sadly, Taiwan has been prevented from participating in global meetings, most recently the World Health Organization, because of objections by the Chinese Communist Party, the speaker wrote. While they may prevent Taiwan from sending its leaders to global forums, they cannot prevent world leaders or anyone from traveling to Taiwan to pay respect to its flourishing Democracy, to highlight its many successes and to reaffirm our commitment to continued collaboration. Read the full statement here. G7 calls on China not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in region Wednesday 3 August 2022 16:36 , Johanna Chisholm The G7 foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union released a joint statement on Wednesday in response to Chinas recently announced threats following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan. The group of foreign ministers specifically cited the PRCs scheduling of live-fire exercises and economic coercion as risking unnecessary escalation in the Taiwan Strait, adding that there is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally. The PRCs escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region, the group wrote. We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means. There is no change in the respective one China policies, where applicable, and basic positions on Taiwan of the G7 members. The group also called on all involved parties to exercise restraint and keep an open line of communication in order to prevent any misunderstandings. Read the full statement here. Chinas foreign ministry calls US democracy nothing but a robe with lice crawling all over it' Wednesday 3 August 2022 16:09 , Johanna Chisholm Chinas Foreign Ministry slammed Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan on Wednesday, labelling it a provocation and infringement of Chinas sovereignty. The kind of democracy referred to by Pelosi is like nothing but a robe with lice crawling all over it. It may look opulent from a distance, but not really so when you look at it close up, said Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying in a video released on the ministrys main Twitter account Wednesday. Her dangerous provocation is only about fishing for political capital and in this ugly stunt, democracy has been reduced by the United States to a tool and a pretext. It is Speaker Pelosi who is playing to the gallery but it is the China-US relationship and the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait that are suffering, the spokesperson added. The foreign ministry went on to cite recent incidents in the US -- the death of George Floyd, the 1m deaths from Covid-19, and the Uvalde mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead -- as so-called proof of the hypocrisy and cold-bloodedness of democracy. The kind of democracy referred to by Pelosi is like nothing but a robe with lice crawling all over it. It may look opulent from a distance, but couldnt stand close scrutiny. pic.twitter.com/EFflIyVVYy Spokesperson (@MFA_China) August 3, 2022 Taiwans defence ministry says 27 Chinese military planes detected in air defence zone Wednesday 3 August 2022 15:48 , Johanna Chisholm Taiwans defence ministry tweeted on Wednesday shortly after Nancy Pelosis plane headed for Seoul, where shes expected to arrive late in the day, took off stating that 27 Chinese PLA aircrafts arrived in the area. The Ministry of National Defense tweeted in the evening on Wednesday Taiwan time that 27 aircrafts, which included models J-11*6, J-16*5 and SU-30*16, were detected flying over the self-governing islands air defence zone on 3 August. NEW: Just after @SpeakerPelosi departs Taiwan, 27 Chinese PLA aircraft arrive in the area as Beijing follows through on threats. This according to Taiwans @MoNDefense. https://t.co/oDk5sOFx44 Ramy Inocencio (@RamyInocencio) August 3, 2022 Pelosi's visit symbolises US support for Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, says rights group Wednesday 3 August 2022 15:33 , Johanna Chisholm Lauding US speaker Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan, the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) has said the trip symbolises a tougher stance against China. The international advocacy group, set up last year amid the crackdown on Hong Kongs pro-democracy movement, said in a statement to The Independent that it fully supports Ms Pelosis decision to visit Taiwan and applauded her courage in facing such threats, adding that China must bear the consequences of any escalation of tension. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong supports the visit to Taiwan, and the rest of Asia, by Speaker Pelosi and strongly welcomes the support from Republican senators willing to stand up against the threats by China, it said. This visit is more than just about Taiwan. It also shows continued US support for the people of Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Such support is vital as we need the US to take a tougher stance against China and its increasingly belligerent behaviour at home and abroad. Video: Russia says Pelosis visit to Taiwan was deliberate attempt to provoke China Wednesday 3 August 2022 14:55 , Stuti Mishra Striving for de-escalation in Taiwan Strait, says German foreign ministry Wednesday 3 August 2022 14:35 , Stuti Mishra Germany is striving for a de-escalation in the Taiwan Strait with international partners, said a German foreign ministry spokesperson, who added that military threats were unacceptable. Germany retains close relations with Taiwan, which is an important partner, said the spokesperson at a regular government news conference in the evening. Germany's government supports a clear "One China" policy like the United States, added a government spokesperson. Sydney, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Proactive, provider of real-time news and video interviews on growth companies listed in Australia, has covered the following companies: Surefire Resources NL (ASX:SRN) discovered a new mineralised gold trend in a recent reverse circulation (RC) drilling campaign at the Yidby Gold Project in Western Australia. Click here Creso Pharma Ltd (ASX:CPH, OTCQB:COPHF) has secured firm commitments to raise approximately A$7 million from institutional, professional and sophisticated investors through the issue of 175 million fully paid ordinary shares at A$0.04 per share. Click here Emyria Ltd (ASX:EMD) has kicked off a series of human cell-line pre-clinical studies to advance its MDMA-inspired drug discovery partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA). Click here Moho Resources Ltd (ASX:MOH) is making strong progress with nickel sulphide exploration programs at the Silver Swan North Project in Western Australia. Click here West Wits Mining Ltd (ASX:WWI)'s revised definitive feasibility study (DFS) for the Phase 1 Qala Shallows operation at Witwatersrand Basin Project (WBP) in South Africa demonstrates robust financials and an opportunity to grow beyond the initial phase, the company says. Click here Cobre Ltd (ASX:CBE) has completed a share placement to raise $7 million (before costs) with commitments from sophisticated and both international and domestic institutional investors to support the acquisition of Kalahari Metals Ltd, which owns the Ngami Project in Botswana. Click here American Rare Earths Ltd (ASX:ARR) has grown the Halleck Creek Rare Earth project in Wyoming, US, to more than 6,000 acres or 24.5 square kilometres with the addition of the newly staked Bluegrass area, which has demonstrated its potential with surface samples up to 5,065 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxide (TREO). Click here Chase Mining Corporation Ltd (ASX:CML) welcomes the news that Red Fox Resources (ASX:FXR) Pty Ltd, in which Chase holds a 40% stake, has been granted exploration permits (EPMs) across all tenements at the Selwyn Project, south of Cloncurry in northwest Queensland. Click here Lindian Resources Ltd (ASX:LIN) has a new CEO with Alistair Stephens to step into the role from Monday, August 8, 2022, and his first task will be to oversee the acquisition of Malawi company Rift Valley Resource Developments Limited and its globally significant Kangankunde Rare Earths Project. Click here Blue Star Helium Ltd (ASX:BNL, OTC:BSNLF) has spudded the Sammons 315310C helium well the first asset to target the companys Serenity prospect in Las Animas County, Colorado. Click here Dart Mining NL (ASX:DTM) is pleased with the findings from a regional soil survey at its Granite Flat Copper-Gold Project in Victoria, where its one step closer to understanding the scale of a base and precious metals system. Click here Radiopharm Theranostics Ltd (ASX:RAD) has secured key agreements with leading diagnostics and biopharmaceuticals companies Lantheus and Nanomab a strategic collaboration to develop the NM-01 imaging agent and a licensing agreement for imaging rights in China and worldwide IP rights for NM-01, respectively. Click here Kingwest Resources Ltd (ASX:KWR) has upsized its share purchase plan to $2.5 million amid strong shareholder demand. Click here Anson Resources Ltd (ASX:ASN) has delivered a material increase of up to 70% in lithium brine assays with drilling in the Clastic Zones of the Long Canyon No.2 well at the Paradox Lithium Project, in Utah, USA. Click here Jindalee Resources Ltd (ASX:JRL) has welcomed highly experienced lithium industry executive Darren Wates to the board as an independent non-executive director. Click here Brookside Energy Ltd (ASX:BRK) had notched up another success in the SWISH Area of Interest (AOI) in Oklahomas world-class Anadarko Basin with commercial production of oil and rich gas underway at the high-impact Flames 3-10-1S-3W WXH1 Well. Click here Frontier Energy Ltd (ASX:FHE) has positively assessed the hydrogen potential of its WA-based Bristol Springs green energy project in Western Australia through a pre-feasibility study (PFS). Click here Jocelyn Benson, Michigan secretary of state, left, is sworn-in during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., US, on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. Federal prosecutors have charged five people with threatening election workers since the Justice Department launched a task force on the issue last summer, according to testimony prepared for the committee hearing. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty The country's election workers are facing a growing number of hostile threats, Justice Department officials informed lawmakers Wednesday. During a Senate Judiciary hearing, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite said the Justice Department has reviewed more than 1,000 threats against election officials in the last year since a task force was created to examine threats against state and local officials who run elections. About 10% of the complaints the task force received warranted criminal investigations, Polite said, according to The Washington Post. "The trauma experienced in this community," Polite told the lawmakers, "is profound and unprecedented." RELATED: Ga. Poll Workers Testify at Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Hearing About Living in Fear Since 2020 Election Kenneth Polite Jr., assistant attorney general of the criminal division at the US Department of Justice (DOJ), speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., US, on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. Federal prosecutors have charged five people with threatening election workers since the Justice Department launched a task force on the issue last summer, according to testimony prepared for the committee hearing. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson also appeared before the committee Wednesday and spoke about threats she's received, WZZM 13 reports. "One night in December 2020, I was about to put my son to bed when dozens of individuals descended upon our home," Benson said. "Growing in numbers over the course of an hour, they stood outside my front door waking my neighbors shouting obscenities and graphic threats into bullhorns. To this day, these images and this memory of that evening still haunts me." Never miss a story sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer. Benson also told the panel that her young son has become aware of the threats and shared a heartbreaking anecdote with the lawmakers. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan secretary of state, speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., US, on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. Federal prosecutors have charged five people with threatening election workers since the Justice Department launched a task force on the issue last summer, according to testimony prepared for the committee hearing. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson "Not long ago, my son standing in our driveway, picked up a stick, turned to me and said, 'Don't worry, mom. If the bad guys come again, I'll get them with this.' He's six years old. Some of these incidents have been reported and drawn media attention. Many have not." RELATED: Michigan Election Official Alleges Trump Wanted Her 'Tried for Treason, Potentially Executed' for 2020 Results Elizabeth Howard, senior counsel in the elections and government program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center, told The Washington Post that the number of threats the task force has seen is "shocking" but also said the number is likely understated. Story continues A Brenner Center survey found that less than half of election officials receiving threats reported them to law enforcement and that only 20% reported to federal authorities, the Post notes in its report. New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver also testified and said that election workers in her state who've received threats feel it's no longer safe to work at polling places. "Without them, we simply do not have a democracy and we will not have a democratic process," Oliver said. "We are on the verge of not having that process anymore, because we are not going to have enough committed citizen individuals if these threats and the 'big lie' that is driving them continues." Aug. 4On the eve of the Oregon District mass shooting's third anniversary, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nan Whaley denounced Republican incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine as a "complete coward" on gun legislation. After a crowd of Daytonians chanted "Do something" at him in the wake of the shooting, DeWine pledged to take action on gun violence, but Whaley said he "gave up without a fight when the politics got too hard." Whaley was mayor of Dayton at the time of the shooting. The "Strong Ohio" package of gun reforms DeWine backed has gone nowhere in the General Assembly, and since the Oregon District shooting he has signed several bills that loosen gun laws, Whaley said. She cited Senate Bill 175, the "stand your ground" law; House Bill 215, allowing permitless concealed carry of handguns; and House Bill 99, allowing teachers and other school personnel to carry guns in schools with a few hours of training. In response, DeWine's campaign criticized Whaley for seeking to make the occasion an issue. "It's disturbing that Mayor Whaley is using a horrific shooting as a political stunt to promote herself and myopic policies," said Tricia McLaughlin, the campaign director of communications. As evidence of DeWine's concern for gun violence, his campaign pointed to the tremendous increase in Ohio warrants entered into federal crime databases, searchable by law enforcement. DeWine created a task force to improve issuance and service of warrants, and in early July rolled out a new voluntary system for counties to record and share warrants electronically. Whaley recounted the Oregon District shooting, in which a "troubled young man with too-easy access to a powerful gun" killed nine people and injured 37 just after 1 a.m. Aug. 4, 2019, in the city's historic entertainment district. The gunman was quickly killed by police, but that wasn't enough to prevent many deaths and injuries, she said. Story continues "There were 'good guys with guns' literally a block away," Whaley said. Whaley said she would seek to roll back the gun laws DeWine has signed, work to require universal background checks for gun purchases, and use the incentives recently created by the federal Safer Communities Act to promote "red flag laws" that reduce mass shootings and suicides. That legislation, which passed in June supported by all Democrats and a few Republicans, includes $750 million in grants over five years for states to create extreme risk protection order programs, known as "red flag laws." Polls tracked by FiveThirtyEight show Whaley trailing DeWine, by 30% to 45% as of late May, but her support has climbed steadily for several months while his remained relatively stable. Whaley noted the large number of undecided voters, who she said are still getting to know her in her first statewide race, while DeWine has been well known across Ohio for decades. She said her opinions align with the majority of the public on issues including gun safety and abortion. DeWine has also supported several bills to dramatically restrict abortions, one of which the "Heartbeat Bill" took effect in June after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Whaley supports legal abortion access; the ruling overturning Roe has increased Democratic hopes of driving strong voter turnout in what has been expected to be a Republican-leaning year. Whaley acknowledged that her proposals would face a legislature in which Republicans now hold a supermajority. But she noted that current state House and Senate district maps, expected to still favor Republicans, must be redrawn yet again before the 2024 election. CHONGQING, China, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On July 27th, the opening ceremony of the 2022 Jiangbeizui New Financial Summit was held at the Jiangbeizu International Fashion Center in Chongqing. With the theme of "Empowering Two High-Quality Development Goals, New Finance Garners New Momentum", the participants are expected to conduct in-depth discussions on topics including the new digital economy trends and digital transformation in finance, macroeconomic patterns, and the building of financial centers, integrated development of green industry and green finance. 2022 Jiangbeizui New Financial Summit Chen Mingbo, Member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Chongqing Municipal Committee and Vice Mayor of the Chongqing Municipal Government attended and addressed the opening ceremony. He noted that the Western Financial Center is a farseeing major decision made by the CPC Central Committee thinking in big-picture terms, which aims to boost the construction of the Chengdu-Chongqing Twin-Hub Mega-Region, a significant mission for Chongqing to shoulder. Over the years, Chongqing has accelerated the high-quality development of the finance industry, continued to improve the system of financial institutions, pooled featured financial factors, deepened financial reform and opening-up, and optimized the environment for financial development. These fundamentals serve as strong support for Chongqing in speeding up the construction of a Western Financial Center which is based in the west, facing East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, and serving the Belt and Road Cooperation. In his welcome speech at the opening ceremony, Teng Hongwei, Secretary of the CPC Chongqing Jiangbei District Committee, the host of the event, said that today, new finance, big data, smart technology, and blockchain integrate profoundly; and innovations, including sci-tech finance, green finance, and blockchain finance, emerge one after another; continuously boosting the high-quality development and providing a high-quality living for people. As the core area of the construction of the Western Financial Center in Chongqing, Jiangbei District has fertile soil for financial capitals to grow and a favorable environment for the western mode of the new finance industries to develop. Jiangbei District sincerely welcomes financial institutions to settle, start businesses, and prosper. At the opening ceremony, the 2022 Jiangbeizui Financial Development Report released by the China Economic Information Service of Xinhua News Agency presented a multidimensional and panoramic analysis of the achievements of financial development of Jiangbeizui, Chongqing. According to the report, as the core area of the Western Financial Center, Jiangbei District has attracted an agglomeration of institutions, deepened financial reform step by step, widened financial opening-up, shown a stronger atmosphere in terms of financial culture, optimized business environment, and enabled enterprises to march toward public offering steadily. As a financial pioneer of Western China, it has witnessed expanded radiation and influence. In order to further accelerate the construction of the core area of the Western Financial Center and promote high-quality development of the Chengdu-Chongqing Twin-Hub Mega-Region, after drawing on the experience of Beijing Financial Street and Shanghai Lujiazui, in light of actual conditions, Chongqing Jiangbei District, studied and rolled out the Measures on Accelerating the Construction of the Core Area of the Western Financial Center, also called "the Jiangbeizui Ten Measures of Finance", which was later released by Tao Shixiang, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Chongqing Jiangbei District Committee and District Mayor of the Jiangbei District Government. With attractive and favorable policies in household registration and development, "the Ten Measures" highly supports the agglomeration of major financial institutions, encourages the innovation and development of financial and technological industries, and continues to strengthen the service system and supporting framework of professional knowledge. In recent years, China's financial industry has made historic achievements. We have orderly promoted financial reform and opening-up, improved the financial market system, increased the competitiveness and influence of the financial center city, ensured the Beijing National Financial Management Center played a better role, upgraded the Shanghai International Financial Center, and made solid efforts to build the Chongqing Western Financial Center. At the opening ceremony, Beijing Financial Street Services Bureau, China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone Administration Committee Lujiazui Bureau, and Chongqing Jiangbeizui Central Business District Administration Committee signed a joint proposal: Deepening the Service Cooperation between Financial Centers and Empowering High-Quality Economic Development, aiming to continuously upgrade the functions of the core financial centers of Beijing Financial Street, Shanghai Lujiazui, and Chongqing Jiangbeizui with better services and a more favorable environment. According to the joint proposal, as professional institutions serving the construction of the financial centers, the three parties will further support finance to better boost the real economy, take multiple parallel measures to prevent and solve financial risks, promote deeper financial reform and innovation, join hands to build demonstration cases of financial party building, continue to improve the supporting system of financial services, make more exchanges between institutions for better communication among leaders and advance regional cooperation with publicity. In 2021, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the Outline of Advancing the Development of the Chengdu-Chongqing Twin-Hub Mega-Region, and six ministries and commissions, including the People's Bank of China, jointly printed and published e Planning of Chengdu-Chongqing Cooperation in Building the Western Financial Center, which ushered in major strategic opportunities for the construction of the Western Financial Center. As the core area of the Western Financial Center in Chongqing, Jiangbei District is committed to the guidelines of "planning regional development with big-picture thinking and serving the overall development with regional contributions", and the paths of gathering both financial institutions and functions, grasping strategic opportunities, advancing reform and innovation, elevating the stages of development, and promoting high-quality development of finance in western China. Currently, a multi-dimensional industrial structure, with the financial industry as its core, business and professional services as its support, and information service and emerging strategic industries as its complementation, has been completed in Jiangbei District. According to statistics, until the end of June 2022, the added value of the financial industry of Jiangbei District reached RMB17.77 billion, accounting for 23.6% of the GDP of Jiangbei District. The balance of savings and loans of RMB and foreign currency reached over RMB1.8 trillion, and the total ranked top in Chongqing. SOURCE Xinhua Finance Weather Alert ...EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 11 PM PDT FRIDAY... * WHAT...Dangerously hot conditions with temperatures up to 110 expected. * WHERE...In Washington, Eastern Columbia River Gorge of Washington, Kittitas Valley, Yakima Valley and Simcoe Highlands. In Oregon, Eastern Columbia River Gorge of Oregon. * WHEN...Until 11 PM PDT Friday. * IMPACTS...Extreme heat will significantly increase the potential for heat related illnesses, particularly for those working or participating in outdoor activities. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1. && In eight consecutive congressional sessions, Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced legislation pushing the use of independent redistricting commissions. She has yet to offer it in the current Congress. Today A mix of clouds and sun with a slight chance of thunderstorms this afternoon. High around 105F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%. Tonight Clear to partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Tomorrow Except for a few afternoon clouds, mainly sunny. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 104F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. This is only the first step of what is expected to be a lengthy process with a finale at the European Court of Human Rights. All of this so that their civil unions will become legally recognized in Poland. If successful, their case might set an important precedent, making the process easier for other same-sex couples in Poland. "The Polish Constitution does not prohibit same-sex marriage" - We are set on the fact that we will lose the case before the courts of all instances in Poland. We know it will be a long fight, but I think we will win in Strasbourg. We have the example of Italy, which was legally forced to introduce civil unions in this way. It's a matter of putting pressure on them to take up the cause. I can't imagine that the verdict will be negative because that would go against all the values of the European Union. The only question is when they will do it. That's why we are getting together in groups and we are very much encouraging more same-sex couples to come forward and fight for our common right to have our marriage recognized- says Karolina Skowron-Baka. Together with her wife Hanna they have already got a refusal from the Warsaw registry office. They appealed the decision to the governor of the Mazovian region and are now waiting for a response. The next step will be taking the case to two instances of court, although the lawyer, who cooperates with the same-sex couples involved in the action, is still checking the possibility of skipping this step and referring the case directly to the Strasbourg tribunal. Mateusz i Miosz Archiwum prywatne Mateusz Urban and his husband Miosz, who also wanted to register their union in Warsaw, received a refusal as well. - The letter was two pages long. Among other things, it said that although the marriage was concluded in accordance with German law and is legal in Germany, it cannot be recognized in Poland, because it would be in conflict with the Polish legal order- Mateusz says. He also admits that virtually the entire content of the refusal referred to Article 18 of the Polish Constitution, which reads "marriage, being a union of a man and a woman, as well as the family, motherhood and parenthood, shall be placed under the protection and care of the Republic of Poland". REKLAMA - Prof. Ewa etowska (professor of legal science specializing in civil law and former judge of the Constitutional Tribunal) stresses that this article does not exclude marriage for same-sex couples. It does not explicitly state that husband and wife are the only forms of family. So, there is no need to amend the Constitution. Everything is a matter of legal interpretation, and this is due to political opposition. The Catholic Church plays a significant role here Mateusz argues. Does the Polish legal system promote bigamy? Basia Starska - Wika z zona w dniu slubu Archiwum prywatne Basia Starska - Wika, an activist from odz, who has been living in Norway for two years, is awaiting the decision of the odz registry office. Her wife Lotte is Norwegian and it is there that they plan to build a life together. But Basia would like their wedding to be recognized in her country of origin as well. She stresses that even though she has moved away, she intends to fight for same-sex couples in Poland to experience the kind of equal rights they can enjoy in Norway. The couple submitted their application at the odz registry office in person and was told right away that it would be rejected. This was not something they expected. REKLAMA - The paperwork itself is tailored to different-sex marriages. In Warsaw, we see "husband-wife" boxes, but in odz, it there is only a "man-woman" box. However, I have the impression that the reception is better than it was a few years ago. There is a little more awareness among officials. There is no longer the kind of hostility that you would encounter in the past- notes Basia. Mateusz, on the other hand, says that he and Miosz did not communicate that they were aware of the fact that the law, which requires them to report to a Polish office to get married abroad within 30 days, does not apply to same-sex couples. The clerk repeatedly stressed that it was not her own opinion, but that this is the way it is officially established. - In this case, can I get a certificate that I am single? - Miosz asked. The response: yes. When asked if he could then get married for a second time in Poland, this time to a woman, the answer was also positive. - It looks as if the Polish legal order is promoting bigamy within the European Union, because, after all, our wedding is valid abroad- Mateusz pointed out. This is the normality we so desperately need" Karolina, Mateusz, and Basia unanimously admit that in Portugal, Germany, and Norway they did not encounter any difficulties when dealing with wedding-related formalities. The process was relatively simple. The most important thing was a certificate confirming their marital status from a Polish registry office and properly translated documents. REKLAMA Karolina: - Surprisingly, the hardest part was choosing the country where we would get married. When we checked the possibilities in different EU countries, it turned out that the requirements were very diverse. In some cases, we failed to meet them. For example, we had to live somewhere for a year, or show that we were residing there, paying the bills. In the end, we chose Madeira. One of the reasons was that there is a company called "Say Yes to Madeira" run by a Polish woman, Edyta Garcia Luis, which makes it easier for Poles to organize a wedding there. Basia, on the other hand, points out that in countries where same-sex marriage is legal, people's attitudes toward LGBTI people are very different. - In Norway, gay couples can adopt children and participate in the in vitro program. But it's not just about legal issues and the mere possibility of marriage. It goes much deeper than that. When the law changes, people's mentality changes as well - she emphasizes and adds: - There was a shooting in Oslo just one day before the pride parade. I don't know if the target was actually an LGBTI pub, but two people were killed, one of whom was from the LGBTI community, while more people, also LGBTI, were injured. Police suggested that the parade be canceled for safety reasons. The entire country responded by putting up rainbow flags on government offices. Even the King spoke out, admitting that he and his family are horrified by the events, that we need to support each other and how important equality is. If injustice happens, the solidarity is greater. People don't stand against each other, but on each other's side. I, a lesbian who grew up in Poland, am constantly moved by this, although, after all, this is how things should actually be. This is the normality we so desperately need. *** Every day, 400 journalists at Gazeta Wyborcza write verified, fact-checked stories about Polish politics and society, keeping a critical eye on the ruling camps persistent assault on democratic values and the rule of law; the growing cultural tension between religious fundamentalism and human rights; and the ongoing Russian invasion in Ukraine. Our journalists are on the front lines in 32 Polish cities, reporting from the streets, hospitals, and courtrooms about issues that move public opinion. We decided to make our service available to everyone free of charge in order to provide access to high quality journalism for expats and English speakers interested in Polish affairs. The access to information should be equal for all. Opposition Democratic Coalition (DK) lawmaker Zoltan Komaromi said there was an alarming shortage of GPs in Hungary. Recent figures by the national hospital directorate showed that there were 1,093 unoccupied medical positions in the country, of which 687 were GPs. A significant part of practicing doctors are above retirement age and the number of unoccupied GP practices has grown by 60% in the past three years, and the number of people left without a GP practice by 80%, he said. Komaromi said the policies of the Orban regime over the past 12 years resulted in a huge health-care disaster. He criticised the fact that the area was not overseen by a dedicated ministry. He said interior minister Sandor Pinter would be unable to resolve the problem of missing doctors and entire regions were left without regular health service. Fully 909,720 Hungarians live in areas without a GP and 725,430 people get no local dental care, he added. The number of Hungarians infected with Covid-19 is increasing but few of them require hospitalisation, Janos Szlavik, chief infectologist at the South Pest Centrum Hospital, told public broadcaster M1 on Tuesday, adding that a few days rest was usually enough to recover. Szlavik said the mild nature of the disease was due to the fact that a relatively high number of Hungarians had been vaccinated against coronavirus, and the shots were instrumental in avoiding hospitalisation. The new BA.4 and BA.5 variants of coronavirus will probably replace the original Omicron variant, but they seem to be less dangerous for the vaccinated than for the unvaccinated, he said. He warned, however, that those earlier infected with Omicron could still contract the new variants. Each new variant produces slightly different symptoms from earlier versions, BA.4 and BA.5 generally causing coughs and sneezes, rhinitis, fatigue and headaches, Szlavik said. He warned that those experiencing symptoms of a common cold should suspect Covid-19. Such patients who get tested or stay at home for a week will protect not only themselves but others too, he added. MTI Photo: Attila Kovacs The Hungarian population continues to support the right to have an abortion, provided that the age of the fetus has not reached the 20th week, according to an Ipsos poll. The polling company included 27 countries in its latest survey. In Hungary, 70% believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while 14% think that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. Internationally, the survey found an average of 59% for the former and 26% for the latter. 81% of the adults polled in Hungary said that abortion should be permitted if the pregnancy endangers the womans life or health, a result nearly identical with the international average of 80%. The poll also found that 82% of Hungarians felt that abortion should be legal even in the case of rape, and 81% supported it if the fetus has a serious disability or health issues. These were noticeably higher than the international averages of 70% and 67%, respectively. The fresh newsletter for the International Community in Hungary - described by readers as a "Great read each week" - is now available for your interest and use via the link below. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris looks like one of those easily dismissed films predictable, saccharine and unrealistic. And, in many ways, it is. But at a time when all news seems like bad news, its great to see something go right for a change. Set in the 1950s, the souffle-like drama follows a London housekeeper who dreams of owning a Dior original. When she sees one in a clients closet, shes smitten and tries to figure out how she, too, can be part of that elite. Taking on extra work (and encountering more than a little luck), Mrs. Harris (Lesley Manville) gets the money needed to go to Paris to be fitted for a dress. There, she encounters more than a little snobbery (Isabelle Huppert is at her haughty best) and a dash of kindness. Because shes a meddling sort (you can see why Murder, She Wrotes Angela Lansbury played this role in a TV movie), Mrs. Harris endears herself to the Dior workers, lieutenants and the man himself. Leaving Paris without a dress? It seems highly unlikely no matter how many roadblocks the writers put in her way. A matchmaker of sorts, she also pairs an accountant with a model and, well, you can practically hum Hello, Dolly! by the time the last hem is stitched. Director Anthony Fabian isnt afraid to borrow moments from films like Pretty Woman as he darts through Paul Gallicos novel. He gets plenty of those breathtaking sighs from his intended audience and provides a coda that makes Mrs. Harris a nudge to everyone who wants something but doesnt feel worthy. As unrealistic as the goal seems, it makes perfect sense in light of the loss and heartache the woman has felt. Manville maintains a cheery disposition, even though others conspire to bring her down. She has a great sounding board in a fellow cleaning lady and could find a reason to wear a Dior dress if a bookie (nicely played by Jason Isaacs) would put her at the top of his dance card. Just when Mrs. Harris looks likes its going to be a happily ever after story of a woman and her closet, another wrinkle appears and shows just how kindness is repaid, sometimes several times over. While Chumbawambas Tubthumping may not have been inspiration for this film, it certainly captures the get knocked down spirit. When Mrs. Harris gets to view the dresses on parade, get fitted for one of her own and, finally, has a reason to wear it, one cant help cheer for her success. A giddiness accompanies the final twist and, no matter how simple the film may seem, it works its magic. Alba Baptista and Lucas Bravo as that matched-in-a-minute couple are as Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant as a low-budget British film gets. Best of all Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris prompts thoughts of similar dreams. Like a Powerball ticket, it conjures what could be, not what is. And its entirely delightful. YORK A 30-year-old Omaha man has been charged with cocaine possession after allegedly driving dangerously on Interstate 80 in York County. Arraignment proceedings have been set for next week for Charles Vrana of Omaha. According to court documents, Vrana was initially arrested for fourth offense driving under the influence, possession of a controlled substance, leaving the scene of an accident, willful reckless driving and refusal to submit to a preliminary breath test. The only count against him right now is possession of a controlled substance. The case began when the York County Sheriffs Department was informed about reports of a reckless driver on Interstate 80. There were multiple reports of a black or gray pickup truck that was all over the roadway and last seen heading east from mile marker 349 (one mile east of the Bradshaw exit). The affidavit says deputies saw the vehicle come to a stop in the (passing) lane of travel and two vehicles traveling behind it had to merge into the driving lane to avoid a collision. One of the vehicles had to unsafely cut off a semi-truck to avoid a collision with the pickup truck. A deputy activated his lights and Vrana, the driver of the pickup truck, pulled off onto the shoulder. The deputy had Vrana exit the vehicle and could allegedly smell the odor of alcohol coming from his person. Court documents indicate field sobriety tests indicated impairment. Deputies also saw a device, in the pickup, which is typically used to ingest drugs. They allege Vrana would not submit to a preliminary breath test and he was arrested. A search of the vehicle led to the discovery, allegedly, of a bag containing 6.7 grams of cocaine, concentrated cannabis, a marijuana grinder and two empty Fireball whiskey shooters. At the York County Jail, Vrana submitted to a chemical test with indicated a blood alcohol content to .128 which is 1 times the legal limit. In talking with six named reporting parties, it appeared Vrana was driving in both the eastbound and westbound lanes of travel at different points in time. The driving behavior seen by these people included driving in the median, driving on the shoulder, improper passing, speeding in excess of 93 mph, failing to stay in a lane, varying speed from slow to fast, passing vehicles on the shoulder and hitting several reflectors mounted on posts just east of York. One reporting party thought the pickup driver was purposefully trying to push cars off the road and described the event as something she had never seen before. In a review of his criminal history, it was discovered Vrana is a multi-state offender with criminal histories in Nebraska and Utah. He has two convictions in Utah for impaired driving and a prior conviction for DUI out of Douglas County in Nebraska. YORK Johnathan Pfeifer, 53, of Lincoln, has been charged with having a very large amount of methamphetamine in a York hotel room. His arraignment has been set for next week in York County District Court. According to court documents, the York Police Department served a search warrant on the room. The affidavit says officers found Pfeifer and Paula Underwood, 50, in the room. During the search, officers allegedly found a bag containing 1.7 grams of methamphetamine and 7.7 grams of THC edibles. They also found a plastic babys bottle with a glass drug pipe attached. The officers also found a prescription pill bottle with the label removed which had pills that were identified as being prescription. Court documents also indicate there were several straws with methamphetamine residue, a plastic bullet used to snort illicit substances, a metal marijuana pipe and several small plastic bags. Underwood indicated that Pfeifer had a significantly larger amount of methamphetamine located in his vehicle parked outside. According to court documents, Pfeifer told the officers he had borrowed the vehicle from a friend in Lincoln and he denied consent to search. Shortly afterward, a Nebraska State Patrol canine handler arrived and the dog alerted to the presence of narcotics. The vehicle was searched and officers found a green military ammo can in which they found 10.7 grams. Also located inside the box was a digital scale, 21 empty plastic bags, two syringes (one loaded and one empty), a spoon containing methamphetamine residue and two straws with methamphetamine residue. Pfeifer has been charged with possession of 10-27 grams of methamphetamine, which is a Class 1D felony that carries a possible maximum sentence of 3-50 years in prison upon conviction. He has also been charged with having no drug tax stamp, a Class 4 felony, which carries a possible maximum sentence of two years in prison. YORK -- The classical story of Charlottes Web, written by E.B. White, is showcasing this week at the Yorkshire Playhouse Childrens Theatre. Cast and crew members invite the public to enjoy the thrill of an award winning tale about a girl and her best friend, a sweet little pig whos steering clear from the slaughterhouse. Director Lauran Ostberg said this years theme for Yorkshire Playhouse is to reenact popular, youthful stories and tales. So far they have showed: Murder on the Orient Express, Little Women and Peter Pan. Charlottes Web has been well known by kids and adults alike, said Ostberg. The story has been so much fun to direct. This is Ostbergs first year as a director at the Yorkshire Playhouse. She is co-directing with Judy Andrews this week, and together they are ready to dazzle the community with their talented cast and crew called the Rising Stars, made up of teens ages 12 through 18. Ostberg said she is impressed with the work the cast and crew have put in all summer long to create a perfect moment in the show. Just seeing the fruit of the labor and seeing the commitment of the cast is amazing. We can only do so much as directors. Theatre people are going to skip lines and forget lines, but they really learned how to cover one another, said Ostberg The cast spent five weeks learning their lines to play the charming characters in Charlottes Web and Ostberg delights in watching the kids bring their characters to life. One of our cast members totally commits, as the pig, shouting oink, oink on stage, said Ostberg. Another cast member fully immersed herself into her character as the uncle, and when actors fully embrace their characters, you cant help but laugh. Even the cast has been stepping to the plate and is learning how to change sets quickly, despite only having a couple of days to practice, said Ostberg. Ostberg said she hopes to continue bringing the best-loved shows to the Yorkshire Playhouse in the future. Charlottes Web will be showcased through Saturday. The show begins at 7:30 p.m. through Friday. On Saturday and Sunday, the show begins at 2 p.m. The student assistant director is Raima Kreifels. The stage crew is made up of Maddie Chapman and Mark Billington, with the set design being done by John Baker, Ostberg, co-director Judy Andrews and C. Danielle Deal. The cast includes the following actors: Cadence Marquart, Joseph Billington, Anna Vodicka, Andrew Onnen, Isaiah Kreifels, Leslie Staehr, Hannah Kreifels, Jackson Heath, Carter Heath, Gracie Hinz, Sara Reynolds, Madison Vodicka, Olivia Walling, Gracie (Angel) Long, Lena Groetzinger, Naomi Onnen and Jordan Noler. Once SpiceJet Ltd. demonstrates it has the necessary engineering strength and financial capacity to stockpile spares, India will let the airline resume flights in a "graded manner." India cut SpiceJet's allowed departures by 50% for eight weeks last week in an unprecedented action after an audit discovered the airline's incapacity to establish "a safe, efficient, and reliable" service. While placing SpiceJet under "enhanced surveillance," the regulator stated in its notice there was "poor internal safety oversight" at the airline and that financial issues at the carrier were leading to a "frequent shortage of spares". The chief of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), Arun Kumar, said SpiceJet will be permitted to reinstate its capacity but in a gradual manner and once it demonstrates it has fixed the manpower and spare part shortages. "At this point of time, we feel they can only operate 50% of their capacity without compromising safety," Kumar said, during an interview at the watchdog`s headquarters in India`s national capital New Delhi. Also read: Kerala Rains: 5 Calicut-bound flights from Middle-east diverted to Kochi Kumar said a review of SpiceJet`s operations and physical audit of the airline showed the carrier was "incapable" of flying at total capacity. "The decision is a pre-emptive step to ensure there is no safety issue in the future and does not mean the airline is not fit to fly. Our objective is not to disrupt service." SpiceJet did not respond to a request for comment on the DGCA`s observations. The airline has previously said it is confident in scaling up its operations and addressing any concerns the regulator may have. SpiceJet has reported close to a dozen safety incidents since May, which included a side windshield outer pane that cracked mid-flight and malfunctioning indicator light, prompting the DGCA to issue a notice to the airline on July 5 asking why no action should be taken against it. Since then, SpiceJet has shown an improvement in its operations, Kumar said. "An aircraft is a complex machine. When components break down or malfunction ... there is a process that needs to be followed to deal with it," Kumar said. With the growth in India`s domestic aviation market reaching pre-pandemic levels, new airlines coming on board, and old ones expanding, Kumar said the DGCA is looking to hire more people to maintain its surveillance of the sector. The regulator conducts 3,700 checks in a year and currently has about 1,300 staff to do that. It plans to add 400 more over the next year, mainly to its technical team, Kumar said. "The point is to make ourselves more robust to take on growth in the market," he said. With inputs from Reuters After a halt for over three years, Jet Airways is all set to make a comeback and is set to hit the skies in September 2022. Jet Airways takes a step ahead by opening its doors for A320, B737 cabin crew members. The airline took to twitter to call interested cabin crew members to join its aircraft fleet. If you are current cabin crew on A320/B737 or any other aircraft type and would like to join the team creating history, we would love to hear from you. Apply now on, read the tweet. If you are current cabin crew on A320/B737 or any other aircraft type and would like to join the team creating history, we would love to hear from you. Apply now on https://t.co/np4T2S3Jmx#JetAirwaysIsHiring pic.twitter.com/gdHBQYhgc8 Jet Airways (@jetairways) August 4, 2022 This time the airline is starting afresh with new management, and is expected rise much higher than the last time. The airline on July 26 started the process of hiring pilots for its Airbus A320 aircraft as well as Boeing's 737NG and 737Max planes. The airline received an air operator certificate from aviation watchdog DGCA on May 20. Also read: Aquaman Jason Momoa poses as flight attendant, hands out water on Hawaii flight- Watch Video Financial distress forced Jet Airways, which flew for more than two decades, to suspend operations on April 17, 2019, and a consortium of lenders, led by the State Bank of India (SBI), filed an insolvency petition in June 2019 to recover outstanding dues worth over Rs 8,000 crore. Due to poor weather, five Middle Eastern flights headed for Kozhikode International Airport were diverted to Kochi airport. Air Arabia from Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, Gulf Air from Bahrain, Air India Express from Abu Dhabi, and Qatar Airways from Doha are among the flights that were diverted. Four of them, with the exception of Qatar Airways, made a return to Kozhikode Airport as the local weather improved. The India Meteorological Department on Thursday issued a red alert for eight districts of Kerala as the state's ongoing rainstorm. Districts of Pathanamthitta, Alappuzha, Kottayam, Ernakulam, Idukki, Thrissur, Palakkad, and Kannur were put under red alert, indicating heavy to extremely heavy rains of over 20 cm in 24 hours. An Orange alert (very heavy rains of 6 cm to 20 cm) has been declared in the remaining districts except for Thiruvananthapuram, where a Yellow alert is in place. A yellow alert indicates heavy rainfall between 6 and 11 cm. The Met Department has predicted widespread rains in Kerala from August 4 to 8, and it has warned that the state can expect isolated extremely heavy rainfall over its ghat regions. Water levels in all major rivers across Kottayam and Pathanamthitta are rising fast, and people are being evacuated to relief camps. Over 2,000 people are in relief camps across the State. The shutters of Sholayar and Peringalkuthu Dams were raised at noon today, and the Chalakudy river is in spate. Also read: Jet Airways hiring: Airline invites A320, B737 cabin crew ahead of starting ops in Sept 2022 Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has urged people living on the banks of the Chalakudy river to move out as the water flow is likely to increase by evening. He said that those living in the low-lying areas of Thrissur and Ernakulam districts to be cautious. Due to the rains, the Idukki district has declared a holiday on Friday for educational institutions. Teams of the National Disaster Response Force have been deployed in areas in the state likely to be hit by landslides and floods, and air and naval forces put on standby. (With inputs from ANI) New Delhi: A 20-year-old man in New York has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting dead an employee of American fast-food giant McDonald`s for allegedly serving his mother cold fries, according to police and media reports. The deceased identified as Kevin Holloman, 23, died from three gunshot injuries at 771 Herkimer St. in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn on Monday, the New York Post reported citing police. The shooter Michael Morgan, who is facing charges of attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon in Monday`s fast-food shooting, was also slapped with murder and criminal possession of weapon charges over a killing in October 21, 2020, New York Post reported citing police. (ALSO READ: Gold price today, August 4: Gold prices increase by Rs 350, Check rates of yellow metal in Delhi, Patna, Lucknow, Kolkata, Kanpur, Kerala and other cities) The publication citing police reported that Morgan stormed the McDonald`s after his mother began questioning workers about cold French fries. The workers reportedly laughed at her for asking to speak to a manager and later Morgan barged into the restaurant in his mother`s defence. (ALSO READ: Markets maintain winning momentum on firm global trends, foreign fund inflows) Soon after the incident on Tuesday night, Morgan was arrested and charged with the shooting, police said. The mother of the shooter told in an interview with The Post that her son said afterward he did what he had to do. She described what exactly what led up to the shooting. "I talked to my son with the cops. My son is just saying that he gotta do what he gotta do and the [victim] came after him and whatever happened, happened,`` said Lisa Fulmore Shooting incidents have become more frequent in the United States. On August 2, one person was killed and at least six men were shot at an apartment complex in the northeastern part of Washington DC. The shooting was reported at about 8:30 pm (US time) in the 1500 block of F Street North East, outside the Azeeze Bates apartment complex The Washington Post reported citing Police Chief Robert J. Contee III said in a news conference. Monday`s violent night included three other shootings, none of which were fatal. A woman was shot on Gainesville Street SE; a man was shot on Newton Place NW; and another man was shot on Oglethorpe Street NE, all within the space of a few hours, according to officials. With increasing incidents of gun violence in the United States, President Joe Biden had said that the US needs to ban assault weapons for the sake of protecting children and families or raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21. Furthermore, on June 22, a group of US lawmakers reached a much-awaited deal on a bipartisan gun safety bill after recent mass shooting incidents in Uvalde, Buffalo and Texas, that struck a nerve in the country. The new bill aims to take firearms away from dangerous people and provide billions of dollars in new mental health funding. The bill does not ban assault-style rifles or significantly expand background-check requirements for gun purchases, but it gives states more resources to take guns away from dangerous individuals. In recent incidents, 7 people were hospitalized after a mass shooting in Orlando, Florida last week. An unidentified assailant pulled out a handgun and fired into the crowd, injuring seven people, reported CNN. A similar incident took place in the Haltom City of Texas last week where two people were killed and four others including three officers were injured. Police said that one woman was found dead inside the home and a man was found fatally shot in the home`s driveway. An elderly woman who called 911 was shot but expected to survive. On May 24, a mass shooting incident took place at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in which several people including 19 children were killed. This was the deadliest attack since the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed, according to CNN. On June 20, a teenager was shot dead and three others including a police officer were injured in a shooting in the area of 14th and U Street Northwest in Washington, DC. The shootout incidents in the US have been increasing. New Delhi: Zomato on Thursday said investment firm Tiger Global has reduced its stake in the company by almost half to 2.77 per cent by selling over 18.45 crore shares in the open market. Tiger Global's Internet Fund VI Pte Ltd had a holding of 5.11 per cent in the online food delivery platform before the sale. Between July 25- August 2, 2022, the fund sold over 18.45 crore shares aggregating to 2.34 per cent stake in the company in the open market, Zomato said in a regulatory filing. Post the sale, Internet Fund VI Pte Ltd has 2.77 per cent stake in Zomato, it added. On Wednesday, ride-hailing app Uber had offloaded 61.2 crore shares of Zomato for Rs 3,088 crore through an open market transaction. The shares were disposed of at an average price of Rs 50.44 apiece, taking the transaction value to Rs 3,087.93 crore. Uber picked up the stake in Zomato after the latter acquired its local food business UberEats in an all-stock deal in 2020. Upcoming Amazon Original Series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been the talk of the town for all the right reasons. Set thousands of years ahead of Tolkiens original trilogy, the series brings a new world in Middle-earth Second Age. With an ensemble cast of new actors representing different species such as the elves, dwarves, harfoots, and humans. As the curiosity of fans reaches an all-time high, heres a sneak peek into key characters and traits of Prime Videos The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power! Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) - Galadriel plays an important role in Middle-earth Second Age. From suspecting Saurons arrival to making her way to Numenor, Galadriels journey is filled with mysteries. Actress Morfydd Clark, who plays the character in the Amazon Original Series, has always wanted to play an ethereal elf. I always saw myself as more of a hobbit, she joked. Clark was enticed with the young, less regal Galadriel, and loved the armour-wearing ceremony. Talking about her shooting experience, she said, Rehearsing in my joggers in an office as Galadriel, that was probably the least fun. How can you pretend to be an immortal, thousand-year-old magical being in that? Then you get in the ears and the costume, and you're like, 'Thank God. Now it makes sense. Miriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) - The ancient island of Numenor is ruled by the regent queen Miriel, who has a deep love for her homeland, but is worried about the looming tensions. Actress Cynthia Addai-Robinson revealed some traits of her character and said, There's something relatable about how isolating that can feel and how you are grappling with things that no one else can really understand. Adding how ruling the throne is challenging Miriel, she shared, You have very few people who you can confide in, and you're aware of the implications of any decision that you make. She is burdened with the responsibility of making decisions for the greater good and wanting to maintain some stability in Numenor, but she understands that there are rumblings. There's something in the air. Elrond (Robert Aramayo) - An ambitious young politician, Elrond is searching for his purpose in Middle-earth Second Age. With a half-elven heritage, Elrond wants to bring about a change in the regal elven realm of Lindon. Robert Aramayo, who plays young Elrond, thinks that theres still a lot that Elrond needs to learn. He's sort of battling with the past, or at least that's how I felt, anyway. His father saved the world, which is a lot to live up to, Aramayo shared. Getting into the skin of the character was challenging for Aramayo, but he put his best foot forward to get it right. You can read about that choice, and you can read about what happened and why he made that choice. But as an actor, you start thinking, well, how did it feel to make that choice? How did it feel to watch your brother grow old and die, even though you were born the same? So yeah, I am a nerd, but what's fun is trying to bring your actor self into it as well, he added. Durin IV (Owain Arthur) - A young dwarf leader, Durin IV is filled with deep passion and pride for his kingdom and is loyal to his wife Princess Disa. Actor Owain Arthur shared that getting a chance to wear prosthetics hyped him up for the role. "The first thing that excited me about it was that I got to wear prosthetics. The inner child in me was really looking forward to it. And then, the adult Owain kind of went, 'Oh no, this is going to happen every single day. I have to wear prosthetics and this wig, and this beard that stops me from having my lunch!" he said. Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) - A resident of the Southlands, Bronwyn is a healer who is deeply attached to her homeland and can go to heights to protect her close ones. Actress Nazanin Boniadi connected with Bronwyns journey and shared, They're trying to redeem themselves from the shackles of their past. She wants to liberate her people from that. I've been an activist for my homeland for over a decade, so that resonated with me. On many levels, it's like a fantastical version of myself." Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) - High King of the Elves, Gil-galad, is fair and holds on to hope. As he tries to protect Middle-earth from unseen dangers, Gil-galad ultimately loses his life. Actor Benjamin Walker, who brought the character to life, explained, My favourite part is that he has this odd gift of foresight. He's prescient, and he's ahead of the curve. He can feel the pulse of evil rising. He's attuned to the life force of Middle-earth, and he's chosen to stay. Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) - A human from Southlands, Halbrand is a newly-introduced character in the fantasy. Curiosity around Halbrand was raised after a glimpse of his unexpected connection with Galadriel. Spilling beans about the same, actor Charlie Vickers teased, There are a few things about Hal which are quite interesting, particularly his relationship with Galadriel. He's coming from this place in his past where he's trying to let go of his past and move on. But in meeting her, she starts to illuminate some things in his mind, things about his past and his destiny that he maybe hadn't considered. It makes him look at things in a different way." Isildur (Maxim Baldry) He is a young Numenorean sailor, who is majorly responsible for everything that goes wrong in Middle-earth. As he deals with his inner demons, Isildur takes a step that leads to unforeseen situations. Sharing insights about the character, actor Maxim Baldry said, You see Isildur as a young man at a crossroads, wanting to pursue his father's shoes and become a ship's captain. But there's also something that's pulling him away from that and pulling him into this romantic view of life outside of the city. There's an emptiness in him, and he's grieving his mother. He wants to find himself, and it's a beautiful story of a young man trying to find his way in life. He makes mistakes along the way. Developed by J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings back Middle-earth with a focus on the unexplored Second Age. The much-awaited Amazon Original series will stream from September 2 on Prime Video in India and across 240 countries and territories. New episodes will release every week in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. New Delhi: Moon Knight, the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero origin series starring 'Dune' actor Oscar Issac might be returning for a second season if a recent tiktok is to be beleived. Mohamed Diab, the show's executive producer, tweeted a TikTok video that appeared to show him and Oscar Isaac, the star of the MCU show, in Egypt. Is there a season two? It is the question that Diab and Isaac posed in the video. "Why else would we be in Cairo?", the actor who plays Steven Grant/Marc Spector said in response. The show, which premiered in March on Disney Plus, was well received by fans and critics alike. A man named Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), who suffers from dissociative identity disorder (Mark Grant, the alternate personality), and works for the Egyptian moon god Khonshu, is at the centre of the story, which is mostly set in London and Egypt. The Egyptian goddess Ammit, who renders judgement on people according to their future sins, has power that Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) intends to unleash. Grant spector (Marc spector) and Layla El-Fouly (May Calaway), Grant's wife, battle to thwart Arthur's plans throughout the entire season. The third alter, Jake Lockley, was briefly introduced to us at the close of season one. Lockley, a significant character in the Moon Knight Marvel comic book, may continue this plot in the second season. The series which has six episodes was directed by Caden Butera and was written by Doug Moench. New Delhi: As the registration for the Senior Secondary Recruit (SSR) and Matric Recruit(MR) concluded on Wednesday (August 3, 2022), the Indian Navy received over 80,000 applications from women candidates, informed the officials.The recruitment of the above-mentioned profiles will be done under the Agnipath scheme. "Indian Navy`s SSR (Senior Secondary Recruit) & MR (Matric Recruit) registration process towards the #AgnipathRecruitmentScheme has been completed. 9.55 lakh Agniveer applicants including 82,000 women aspirants have registered," tweeted the official handle of Indian Navy. Focusing on gender-neutrality in all its branches, the Indian Navy on June 20 announced its decision to recruit women sailors, through the newly-unveiled Agnipath recruitment scheme. While all the three services - Army, Air Force and Navy - have had women officers, this will be the first time that positions of Personnel Below Officers` Rank (PBOR) will be open to women. "We are still formulating the exact number of women sailors to be recruited through the Agnipath scheme," Vice Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi, Chief of Personnel said in a tri-service press conference at the Ministry of Defence here on Sunday, adding that the training of the first batch of Agniveers will begin in November this year. "Indian Navy has 30 women officers at present sailing on different Indian Navy ships. We have decided that under the Agnipath scheme, we will recruit women also. They will be deployed on warships also," he added. He further informed that the arrangements are being made at INS Chilka in Odisha - the basic training establishment for the Indian Navy, to accommodate the women sailors. "From November 21 this year, the first naval `Agniveers` will start reaching the training establishment INS Chilka, Odisha. Both female and male Agniveers are allowed for this," Tripathi said. The "transformative" Agnipath scheme, announced by Union Minister Rajanath Singh on June 14, in the presence of the three service chiefs provides for the recruitment of into the armed services of youths in the age bracket of 17-and-a-half-years to 21 for only four years with a provision to retain 25 per cent of them for 15 more years. The Centre later extended the upper age limit to 23 years for recruitment in 2022. The Union Cabinet also approved the Agnipath scheme on June 14 and the youth selected under this scheme will be known as Agniveers. The government had announced that 46,000 Agniveers to be recruited this year. It had said that the armed forces will have "a younger, fitter, diverse profile" to face future challenges. There have been protests against the Agnipath scheme in some states and the government has announced support measures to allay apprehensions. Lucknow: The Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court on Thursday rejected the bail application of journalist Siddique Kappan who was booked under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in Hathras conspiracy case. A single bench of Justice Krishan Pahal passed the rejection order on Thursday. Prior to this, the bench had reserved its order on August 2 after conclusion of arguments by the counsels of the accused and the state. A Mathura court had rejected Kappan's bail plea after which he had approached the HC. Kappan, a reporter for Malayalam news portal Azhimukham and secretary of the Delhi unit of Kerala Union of Working Journalists (KUWJ), was arrested along with three others in Uttar Pradesh in October 2020 while on his way to Hathras to report on the gang-rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit woman. ALSO READ: Hathras case: Kerala journalists' body files plea in Supreme Court over arrest of Siddique Kappan The police had claimed that the accused were trying to disturb the law and order in Hathras. They had also alleged that the accused had links with the Popular Front of India (PFI). The woman had died at a Delhi hospital a fortnight after her alleged rape by four men from her village on September 14, 2020. She was cremated in the middle of the night in her village. Her family members claimed that the cremation, which took place well past midnight, was without their consent and that they were not allowed to bring home the body one last time. Kappan and others were charged under Sections 17 and 18 of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), Section 124A (sedition), Section 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on ground of religion) and Section 295A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings) of Indian Penal Code and Sections 65, 72 and 75 of the Information Technology Act. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Zee News staff and is published from a syndicated feed.) Mumbai: In yet another setback to Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, the Maharashtra cabinet led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde has reversed the previous MVA government's decision to increase the number of municipal wards in Mumbai from 227 to 236. The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government led by Uddhav Thackeray last year increased the number of BMC wards from 227 to 236. But at the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Shinde, who toppled the Thackeray government in June by rebelling against Thackeray, rolled back the decision. The BMC, thus, will have 227 wards as before. The coming elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will be held as per the old ward structure of 2017, the government said. Congress leader Milind Deora welcomed the decision, saying it was a big victory for his party and the people of Mumbai. "The Maharashtra government has nullified the brazenly undemocratic ward-wise delimitation orchestrated by Shiv Sena. It was an insult to MVA's coalition dharma as well as to ordinary Mumbaikars," the former MP tweeted. A big victory for @INCMumbai & the people of Mumbai. Maharashtra Government has nullified the brazenly undemocratic ward-wise delimitation orchestrated by @ShivSena. It was an insult to MVAs coalition dharma as well as to ordinary Mumbaikars. Jai Hind! Jai Maharashtra! Milind Deora | (@milinddeora) August 3, 2022 Last month he had written to chief minister Shinde, seeking scrapping of the new ward system. The statement from the Chief Minister's Office, meanwhile, also said that the number of corporators in other 26 municipal corporations in the state will be revised in proportion to population. The minimum number of seats in a civic body with a population of three lakh to six lakh will be 65 and the maximum number will be 85, it said. There will be an additional member/corporator for every 15,000 people in these cities. Civic bodies with a population between six lakh to 12 lakh will have minimum 85 seats and maximum 115 seats. For every 20,000 voters, there will be one additional member. For civic bodies with more than 12 lakh population, for every 40,000 people there will be an additional member. In cities with population of more than 24 lakh, there will be an additional member for every 50,000 people. In civic bodies with population of more than 30 lakh, there will be additional member for every one lakh people. The civic bodies with population between 12 lakh to 24 lakh will have 115 to 151 seats, while those with population of more than 24 lakh and up to 30 lakh will have minimum 151 and maximum 161 members. Civic bodies with more than 30 lakh population will have minimum 161 and maximum 175 seats. The cabinet - currently comprising only Shinde and his deputy Devendra Fadnavis - on Wednesday also decided to amend the Maharashtra Zilla Parishad Act, 1961. As per the amendment, Zilla Parishads will have minimum 50 and maximum 75 seats. At present, ZPs can have between 55 to 85 seats. The decision was taken considering declining population in rural areas, the official release said. Kolkata: The West Bengal CID has claimed that two of its teams in New Delhi and Guwahati were prevented by the local police at the two locations from carrying out an investigation in connection with the cash seizure from three Jharkhand MLAs. A senior officer of the probe agency alleged its officers were detained by Delhi Police on Wednesday when they were conducting a raid at a property belonging to an accused, a "close associate" of the three arrested legislators, in the national capital. The Congress MLAs from Jharkhand -- Irfan Ansari, Rajesh Kachchap and Naman Bixal Kongari -- were arrested by West Bengal Police after over Rs 49 lakh in cash was seized from a car in which they were travelling. "On Wednesday morning, a team of West Bengal Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers was restrained by Delhi Police from carrying out a search operation at a property of an accused person closely associated with one of the MLAs, despite having a court warrant," the officer told PTI. Four CID officers, an inspector, an ASI and two SIs -- were detained and restrained from conducting searches at the accused's residence under South Campus Police Station area in New Delhi in spite of having a court warrant, he said. Also read: Three Jharkhand Congress MLAs, who were held with a mountain of cash in Bengal, suspended The Delhi Police, which functions under the central government, later said it had provided all assistance to the CID team before it found certain "legal discrepancies" in the execution of the search warrant. "... Legal opinion was sought which revealed that the warrant is not executable. Hence, the same was conveyed to WB Police," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southwest) Manoj C was quoted as saying in a statement. The West Bengal government has sent a team of three senior officers to the national capital to resolve the matter, an official of the state's Home Department said. On the "detention" of the police personnel in Assam, the CID officer said talks are underway with authorities in the BJP-ruled northeastern state. Meanwhile, a senior officer of Guwahati Police told PTI that it had extended full cooperation to its counterparts from the neighbouring state in the investigation. "The rumour that we have detained them is completely wrong. In fact, they are moved around in the city in the vehicle provided by us," he said. The Congress, which is a part of the JMM-led government in Jharkhand, has alleged that the BJP was trying to topple the Hemant Soren government by offering Rs 10 crore each and a ministerial berth to the MLAs. The party has also named Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in the alleged conspiracy. The BJP, however, rejected the allegations, claiming that Congress was trying to hide its own corruption. CUET 2022 Exam: Common University Entrance Test, CUET 2022 Exam scheduled for August 4, 5 and 6 has been postponed for the centres in Kerala. In view of the disruptions caused by rains, National Testing Agency, NTA has announced that the examination postponed for these three days in Kerala would be conducted at a later date. As for the CUET Exam in other centres, they would be conducted as per the schedule. Also read: CUET UG 2022 Phase 2 Exam from TODAY NTA has issued an official notice Common University Entrance Test, CUET 2022 Exam scheduled for August 4, 5 and 6 has been postponed for the centres in Kerala. In view of the disruptions caused by rains, National Testing Agency, NTA has announced that the examination postponed for these three days in Kerala would be conducted at a later date. As for the CUET Exam in other centres, they would be conducted as per the schedule. In the notice, NTA writes, to support the student community, it has been decided to postpone the CUET (UG) 2022 for the candidates who will be appearing in cities of Kerala State for 4, 5 and 6 August 2022. Regarding the exam dates, the revised dates for the postponed examinations will be made known in due course on the NTA website and the official CUET website. The schedule for CUET exams that are scheduled to take place after August 6, 2022, has not yet been changed. It is recommended for students who have enrolled for the exam to regularly check the official website for the most recent changes on the exam dates and schedule. The announcements would be posted on cuet.samarth.ac.in and nta.ac.in. New Delhi: Delhi is reeling from an unprecedented liquor crisis as many liquor outlets face shortages of liquor or shut down after their stocks dried up. Liquor sellers are avoiding placing bulk orders to not have excess inventory by the end of the month. They are afraid to suffer losses when they will not be able to sell their inventory by the end of the month. This distress comes amidst the Delhi government's return back to the old excise system for liquor selling. After having a shortage of revenue from the liquor trade, the Delhi government decided to take over liquor selling in the capital from private sellers by the end of this month. Though there is no shortage of premium brands; however, non-premium brands arent available at many outlets. 468 liquor shops had been shut down from August 1. There are no liquor shops open in some areas of Delhi like Anand Vihar, Paharganj, Sarita Vihar, Punjabi Bagh, and many others. The lieutenant governor of Delhi Vinai Kumar Saxena last month recommended a CBI probe into the alleged violation of rules and process of the implementation of excise duty by the Delhi government. The city was divided into 32 zones across Delhi to implement a new excise policy. However, 16 zonal licenses had been surrendered. New Delhi: The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Indian Army on Thursday (August 4, 2022) successfully test-fired the indigenously developed Laser-Guided Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGM) from the Main Battle Tank (MBT) Arjun at KK Ranges with the support of Armoured Corps Centre & School (ACC&S) Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. In an official statement, the Ministry of Defence said that the missiles hit with precision and successfully destroyed the targets at two different ranges. Telemetry systems have recorded the satisfactory flight performance of the missiles. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh complimented DRDO and the Indian Army for the successful performance of the Laser Guided ATGMs. Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and Chairman DRDO Dr G Satheesh Reddy also congratulated the teams associated with the test firing of Laser Guided ATGMs. WATCH: According to the Ministry of Defence, the all-indigenous Laser Guided ATGM employs a tandem High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) warhead to defeat Explosive Reactive Armour (ERA) protected armoured vehicles. The ATGM has been developed with multi-platform launch capability and is currently undergoing technical evaluation trials from the 120 mm rifled gun of MBT Arjun. New Delhi: The RSS is full of patriotism and is always striving to serve the country, the BJP said on Thursday as it defended the Hindutva organisation against the Opposition's swipe at it for not using the tricolour as the display picture on its social media accounts. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had given a call to people to use the national flag as their social media profile picture between August 2-15 as the country gears up to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its independence. While BJP leaders have followed this, critics have taken a dig at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, considered the ideological mentor of the ruling party, and its senior functionaries for not doing so. Hitting out at critics, BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia told reporters, "Some people believe in creating controversies and dividing the country. They are levelling allegations against the BJP. Congress and Rahul Gandhi have also targeted the RSS. Every fibre of the RSS is full of patriotism and a sense of service to the country." Be it during crisis like floods, earthquakes and the Covid outbreak, the RSS always strives to ensure that no one goes hungry. It also works for children's education, he added. On the one hand, the country has welcomed 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign and feels proud of it and on the other, there is a mindset which feels bad about this too, he said. In a swipe at the RSS, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh had said that it seems Modi's message did not reach the organisation. Rahul Gandhi had alleged that those behind the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign have come from an organisation which did not hoist the national flag at its headquarters for 52 years, a view shared by Ramesh too. Under the campaign, the government has appealed to people to hoist or display the national flag in their homes between August 13-15. Slamming the critics, RSS Akhil Bhartiya Prachar Pramukh Sunil Ambekar had earlier said, "Such things should not be politicised. The RSS has already extended its support to 'Har Ghar Tiranga' and 'Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav' programmes. The Sangh had in July appealed for full support and participation of the people and swayamsevaks in the programmes to be organised by the government, private bodies and the Sangh-related organisations." New Delhi: Former Congress leader from Haryana Kuldeep Bishnoi Thursday (August 4) joined the BJP, a day after resigning from the Haryana Assembly. Bishnoi and his wife Renuka Bishnoi were inducted into the BJP in the presence of Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and other saffron party leaders. Kuldeep Bishnoi hailed Narendra Modi as the "best" Indian prime minister who always thinks about the country and the welfare of the poor. Further, he lauded Khattar for maintaining a "spotless" reputation despite serving as the chief minister for more than eight years, PTI reported. He also met BJP president JP Nadda after joining the party in Delhi. In July, Bishnoi had met Union Home Minister Amit Shah and JP Nadda in Delhi, setting political circles abuzz. Bishnoi, an MLA for four terms and two-time MP, was expelled by Congress from all party positions in June for voting for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Haryana Rajya Sabha elections, which led to the grand old party leader Ajay Maken losing the seat. Reacting to his suspension on June 11, Bishnoi had tweeted, "Congress also has rules for some leaders and exceptions for others. Rules are applied selectively. Indiscipline has been repeatedly ignored in the past. In my case, I listened to my soul and acted on my morals." Welcoming him into the party, Khattar said, "He has joined the BJP today, and I hope the BJP will also begin growing inside him very soon. The Haryana CM said Bishnoi has supported the BJP during the Rajya Sabha poll in June even though he was a Congress MLA. On Wednesday, after resigning from the Haryana Assembly, Bishnoi had said, "I feel the Congress is no longer what it used to be during Indiraji and Rajiv Gandhiji's time. The Congress has deviated from its ideology. It has been reduced to a party of 'chatukars' (sycophants). Many of those who are running the party are those who either have not fought elections or haven't won for decades." He added, "All decisions taken by them are proving wrong across the entire country." (With agency inputs) GSEB HSC Supplementary Result 2022: Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board have announced the GSEB Class 12 supplementary result 2022 for the general and science stream on August 4, 2022. Students can access the Gujarat Board's official website, gseb.org, to view the 2022 supplemental results. Their six-digit seat number will need to be entered. The GSEB HSC science result for the annual exams on May 12, 2022, has been released by the board. The results will be available to students who took the Gujarat board HSC supplemental test in 2022. GSEB HSC Supplementary result 2022: Statistics Number of students registered for HSC Science supply exam: 14039 Number of students appeared in HSC Science supply exam: 12250 Number of students pass: 3588 Overall pass percentage: 29.29% Number of students registered for HSC general stream supply exam: 41167 Number of students appeared in HSC general stream supply exam: 37457 Number of students pass: 23494 Overall pass percentage: 62.72% GSEB HSC Supplementary Result 2022: Heres how to download the result Visit the official website, gseb.org Enter your HSC seat number. Click on the Go button. Download the GSEB Supply 2022 result, and save it for future reference. Students are recommended to carefully review all information about the Gujarat board result 2022 extra. If there is a discrepancy on the online marksheet, get in touch with your school right away. New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday (August 3, 2022) took a dig at Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) Har Ghar Tiranga campaign while sharing a picture of himself visiting Karnataka Khadi Village Industries. The Congress leader in a tweet shared a series of pictures of himself posing with the National Flag and ironing one, with the caption that the history stands witness that those who are running the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign have come from the anti-national organisation which did not hoist the Tricolour for 52 years. "It was a great pleasure to meet all the colleagues of Karnataka Khadi Village Industries. History is witness that those running the 'Har Ghar Tricolor' campaign have come out of the anti-national organization which did not hoist the tricolor for 52 years. From the freedom struggle, they could not stop the Congress party even then and will not be able to stop it even today," Rahul Gandhi said in a tweet. The tweet comes soon after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) yesterday sealed the Young Indian office in the National Herald premises and barricaded the party headquarters and the residences of the Gandhis. On the completion of 75 years of independence, the central government has been conducting various programmes in the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign, under the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav. Meanwhile, BJP appealed to the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP) and other opposition parties not politicising the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign we all should unite and celebrate the National Flag. BJP's national spokesperson Sambit Patra appealed to all the parties by holding a press conference and said, "The 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign is not a political programme, it is a government programme. That's why today when the Tiranga bike rally took place in Delhi, this call was made by the Ministry of State for Elementary Affairs and Culture, a ministry of the Government of India. It was given that let's do tricolour bike rally together in Delhi and its flag-off was done by the hands of Vice President and Chairman of Rajya Sabha Venkaiah Naidu Ji because it is a politically neutral programme." "Politics is happening on this as well, a lot of statements are coming on this. BJP would like to request parties without naming them only with folded hands. Tricolour belongs to everyone and if all MPs participate in it, this animosity," he said. Earlier, on Sunday, PM Narendra Modi in his latest Mann ki Baat episode appealed everyone to change their social media display picture to the National Flag. Following this many Congress leaders launched a counter on BJP and changed party's official Twitter account to the image of Jawaharlal Nehru holding the National Flag. Party leaders also changed their social media photos to the same. "The pride of the country is our tricolour. Our tricolour is in the heart of every Indian," Rahul Gandhi tweeted as he changed his profile photo to Nehru holding the National Flag. "In the Lahore session of 1929, while hoisting the flag on the banks of river Ravi, Pandit Nehru said, 'Once again you have to remember that this flag has now been hoisted. As long as there is a single Indian man, woman, child alive, the prestige of this tricolour should not be lowered," Congress leader Ramesh tweeted. On the other hand, RSS has been questioned for not changing its social media photo to the National Flag. "Such things should not be politicised. The RSS has already extended its support to 'Har Ghar Tiranga' and 'Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav' programmes. The Sangh had in July appealed for full support and participation of the people and swayamsevaks in the programmes to be organised by the government, private bodies and the Sangh-related organisations," RSS Akhil Bhartiya Prachar Pramukh Sunil Ambekar said. This is a process. Let us handle it our way. We are thinking about how to celebrate. The Sangh has already clarified its stand and supported all the programmes initiated by the Centre regarding the Amrit Mahotsav, an RSS functionary said. New Delhi: India will celebrate its 75th Independence Day on August 15 but this year we will enjoy the free breeze with a clear sky. This means the sky will be cleared of kites. According to Indian Express, Delhi police is trying to ensure a free-kite zone around the Red fort this Independence Day. If implemented this would be the first of its kind security arrangement on the occasion. This security plan aims to prevent stray kites from falling inside Red Fort during the Prime Ministers address to the nation and the flag-hoisting ceremony. As per the Indian Express report, the police have sought the cooperation of 231 regular kite-flyers from the walled city area to ensure a clear sky for about three hours on the morning of Independence Day. How will the Delhi police deal with stray kite fliers? As per media reports, The police have identified at least 350 rooftop locations and their personnel will carry a long bamboo stick to catch and snag the stray kites if found flying during the Independence Day event. Indian Express report suggests that the police were also planning to rope in skilled kite-flyers to snap the strings of others kites but that move was later shelved. Over 1000 CCTV cameras to be installed around Red Fort Amid threats of various terrorist attacks and warnings of disrupting the Independence Day celebrations, the Delhi Police have decided to install more than 1,000 Internet Protocol (IP) based CCTV cameras in and around the Red Fort, India TV reported. This comes as the Intelligence Bureau (IB) on Thursday issued an alert for possible attacks by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) ahead of the 75th Independence Day celebration on August 15. Jaipur: The lumpy skin disease among animals has spread at an alarming speed in Rajasthan where more than 4,000 animals, mainly cows, have died due to it and over 90,000 have been infected. Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Thursday said the state government is making every effort to prevent the spread of the disease. He also appealed to cattle-breeders to contact the nearest veterinary institution if they see symptoms of the disease in the animals. Secretary, Animal Husbandry department, P C Kishan said the death toll due to the disease has gone past 4,000 in the state. "The infection has spread to 16 districts. Barmer, Jodhpur and Jalore are the worst affected and the disease is in the reducing stage in Ganganagar, Hanumangarh and Churu districts," he told PTI. Kishan is currently on a visit to the affected districts, starting from Barmer. Lumpy skin disease reported in Jodhpur, Barmer, Jaisalmer, Udaipur, other districts The disease has been reported in Jodhpur, Barmer, Jaisalmer, Jalore, Pali, Sirohi, Bikaner, Churu, Ganganagar, Hanumangarh, Ajmer, Nagaur, Jaipur, Sikar, Jhunjhunu and Udaipur districts. Of the 4,296 deaths reported till Wednesday evening, the maximum of 840 were recorded in Ganganagar, followed by Barmer (830), Jodhpur (730), Jalore (580) and Bikaner (527). Of the 94,358 infected animals, more than 74,118 have been treated. How does lumpy skin disease spread? The lumpy skin disease is spread by bloodsucking insects, certain species of flies and through contaminated food and water. It causes acute fever, running nose and eyes, salivation, soft blister-like nodules all over the body, a reduction in the milk yield and difficulty in eating. Officials in the animal husbandry department said the disease originated in Africa and came to India via Pakistan in April. "Lumpy skin disease spreading in cattle is extremely contagious. The state government is making every effort to prevent it. Take necessary precautions to protect your animals from this," Gehlot said in a tweet. He also appealed to gaushala (cow-shelter) operators, public representatives and voluntary organisations to cooperate with the government in controlling the disease. , Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) August 4, 2022 Animal Husbandry Minister Lalchand Kataria held a review meeting with officers on Wednesday and issued necessary directions. Chief Secretary Usha Sharma said a budget of Rs 8-12 lakh has been sanctioned at the divisional level in Ajmer, Bikaner and Jodhpur and a budget of Rs 2-8 lakh has been approved for the rest of the affected districts for buying emergency essential medicines. She said 30 additional vehicles have been arranged for the affected districts for the prevention of the disease, treatment of the sick animals and effective monitoring. The Centre has also deputed special teams to review the situation. A team from the National Agriculture Research Institute and the National Institute of High Security Animal Disease, Bhopal has collected samples from Jodhpur and Nagaur. Jaipur: Rajasthan's Minister for Animal Husbandry Lalchand Kataria on Thursday held a meeting with officials in view of the outbreak of lumpy skin viral disease in the state. The minister said that Gaushalas are most affected due to the viral disease, adding "Central team has also reached here. Funds have been given for emergency essential medicines. Rajasthan Animal Husbandry Min L Kataria held a meeting with officials in view of the outbreak of lumpy skin disease in cattle in the state Most affected are Gaushalas. Central team has also reached here. Funds have been given for emergency essential medicines, he said (03.08) pic.twitter.com/Z6WUWwkauw ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) August 4, 2022 In the meeting, he said that the state government is making all possible efforts with full awareness and sensitivity to save the cattle from this disease. He directed the officers to work on mission mode for the prevention of the disease. Kataria, after discussion with the district officials, inquired about the status of infection, measures being taken for prevention, availability of medicine, and the condition of medical personnel and directed them to make resources available in accordance with the need. He directed them to immediately reach spots where the infection is reported and make people aware of preventive measures. He said that state medical teams and teams from neighboring districts have been sent to the affected districts. For the affected districts, 29 veterinary doctors and 93 livestock assistants have been deployed from other districts. Approval of 30 additional vehicles has been issued for effective monitoring and treatment of sick animals. Notably, the nine most affected districts due to the lumpy virus disease in Rajasthan are Barmer, Jalore, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Pali, Ganganagar, Nagaur, Sirohi, and Jaisalmer. Over 3,000 cattle died and around 50,000 were infected due to the spread of a lethal skin viral disease. Lumpy disease, whose epicenter is Gujrat, has now spread to nine districts of Rajasthan, causing havoc throughout the state. Also Read: Monkeypox scare: Govt calls meeting of top health experts as tally rises to 9 Blood-sucking insects, certain fly species, contaminated food and drink, and flies are the main vectors for the viral disease's propagation. Acute fever, drainage from the eyes and nose, salivation, soft blister-like nodules all over the body, significantly decreased milk production, challenging feeding, and occasionally even death of the animal are symptoms of the illness. The viral disease reportedly has a 1.5% mortality rate. With the cow population of over 1 crore in the state, the officials reportedly stated that there is no vaccination available for the disease, and while studies with the goat pox vaccine have produced some promising results, they have not yet been approved for use. Antibiotics are presently being administered to the affected animals. (With PTI inputs) New Delhi: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is arriving here Thursday for a four-day visit during which she is likely to meet senior leaders and attend a Niti Aayog meeting on August 7, sources said. The TMC chief, who is expected to land by this afternoon, will hold a meeting in the evening with her party MPs who have been in the forefront of protests against the government in the ongoing Parliament session. Also on the cards is a visit to the Central Hall of Parliament and a meeting with Opposition leaders, the sources said. With the TMC warming up to the Congress in Parliament, Banerjee might also meet the grand old party president Sonia Gandhi, who is being probed by the Enforcement Directorate in a money laundering case. She is also expected to meet the new President Droupadi Murmu. Banerjee might also call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a one on one discussion on issues related to the state. Sources indicated that Banerjee is unlikely to address the media, with the Enforcement Directorate scanner on her former senior minister Partha Chatterjee, who has now been sacked. Prime Minister Modi will chair a Niti Aayog governing council meeting on August 7, where issues related to agriculture, health and economy would be discussed. The council meets regularly. Its first meeting was held on February 8, 2015. Banerjee had missed the meeting last year. She is expected to raise the concerns of non-payment of GST dues and federalism issues at this year's meet. New Delhi: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee arrived here on Thursday (August 4, 2022) on a four-day visit and is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday to discuss multiple issues, including GST dues for her state. After her arrival, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo met her party's MPs and discussed with them the current session of Parliament and the road to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, sources said. She also sought from them suggestions for the names of the seven new districts in West Bengal announced by her recently, they said. Our Honble Chairperson @MamataOfficial held a meeting with all MPs in Delhi. The current Parliament session, the road to 2024 & various issues were discussed, with several activities & initiatives outlined for the coming days. We are always committed to serving the people. pic.twitter.com/QKJIJ61SCR All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) August 4, 2022 On Friday, Banerjee is scheduled to meet President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In her meeting with Modi, she is likely to discuss the GST dues for West Bengal, sources said. The West Bengal chief minister will attend a Niti Aayog meeting on August 7, sources said, also on the cards is a meeting with Opposition leaders. With the TMC warming up to the Congress in Parliament, Banerjee might also meet the grand old party president Sonia Gandhi, who is being probed by the Enforcement Directorate in a money-laundering case. Meanwhile, TMC MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay said, "We met (Union Minister of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj) Giriraj Singh and he had promised to resolve the MGNREGA issue within 48 hrs. It has been over a month and all I received is a dour-page answer which I have given to Mamata Banerjee." With former West Bengal minister Partha Chatterjee under the Enforcement Directorate scanner in the cash-for-jobs scam in the state, sources indicated that Banerjee is unlikely to address the media. Prime Minister Modi will chair a Niti Aayog governing council meeting on August 7, where issues related to agriculture, health and economy would be discussed. The council meets regularly. Its first meeting was held on February 8, 2015. Banerjee had given the council's last year's meeting a miss. She is expected to raise the concerns of non-payment of GST dues and federalism issues at this year's meeting. New Delhi: Delhi has reported the fourth case of monkeypox, taking India`s tally to nine. A 31-year-old woman tested positive for Monkeypox in the national capital on Wednesday. This is the first case of the disease among women in the country. Out of the total of nine cases, four cases are from Delhi while the remaining five have been reported from Kerala. India's first case of monkeypox was reported on July 14 in a man travelling to Kerala. A 31-year-old man from Kannur in Kerala, who returned from Dubai, tested positive for monkeypox on July 18, making it the second confirmed case of the disease in India. Followed by a 34-year-old man from the national capital with no history of foreign travel has tested positive for the monkeypox virus. The country also recently reported the death of a man in Keralas Thrissur, who had tested positive for monkeypox in the United Arab Emirates before returning to India, state health minister Veena George said on Sunday. Here's what we know about monkeypox outbreak in India so far: - India has reported 9 Monkeypox cases and approximately 100 samples have been tested till August 2, said Dr Pragya Yadav Senior Scientist ICMR-NIV, Pune. "Till now at ICMR NIV Pune and VRDL have tested samples approximate 100 cases as on 2nd August 2022," she said. - The 31-year-old Nigerian woman who tested positive for monkeypox has fever and skin lesions and is admitted to Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Hospital. Her samples were sent for testing and the results came positive on Wednesday. There is no information about her travelling abroad recently. - Earlier on Tuesday, another 35-year-old Nigerian man living in Delhi, with no recent travel history, tested positive for monkeypox. The patient is admitted to Lok Nayak Jaiprakash hospital which comes under the government of Delhi. - A high-level central multi-disciplinary team of experts has been deployed to assist Kerala's health department in its outbreak control and containment efforts. Kerala also has taken several measures and issued a fresh set of guidelines to deal with the disease. - In the wake of an increase in the number of Monkeypox cases in the country, isolation rooms have been made operational for the treatment of such infections in three central government hospitals, according to sources. "The isolation rooms for the treatment of Monkeypox patients are operational in three major central government hospitals i.e Safdarjang hospital, RML hospital and Lady Hardinge hospital," official sources told ANI. - It may be noted that the 20 isolation rooms at the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital, while 10 isolation rooms have been set up in Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital (GTB) hospital and 10 at Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital. - The Joint Secretary in the Union Health Ministry on Monday wrote to Dr Hussain Abdul Rahman, Executive Director and IHR focal point in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), requesting him to intensify screening to ensure that persons exhibiting symptoms suggestive of Monkeypox disease are not allowed to board the flight to minimize the risk of disease transmission. - Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Tuesday, in the wake of the rising cases of Monkeypox in the country, assured citizens not to panic and said that an awareness campaign is being run in collaboration with the state governments to prevent the spread of the infection. - Mandaviya informed that on the basis of the observations of the task force, we will assess and study the further action to be taken and if the state government of Kerala needs any kind of help from the Central government, it will be given. - Mandaviya recently held a meeting with Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive officer of Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII), to discuss the possibility of a vaccine being developed for the disease. My meeting went well like always. All preparations for the vaccine are being done. I briefed the minister on this. We are researching the possible ways to develop a vaccine for monkeypox," he informed. - Meanwhile, NCDC, Delhi and AIIMS lab has also started testing for Monkeypox as ICMR-NIV is sharing reagents with National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and all over the country network of 15 laboratories has started testing. "There are fifteen Virus research and diagnostic laboratories (VRDLs) trained to undertake the diagnostic testing with ICMR -NIV Pune We have shared reagents to NCDC, Delhi also for performing testing. ICMR-NIV, Pune is a nodal center for testing and coordination," said expert. New Delhi: The Centre has called a meeting of top health experts on the need for revisiting existing guidelines on the management of monkeypox amid the rising number of cases of the disease in the country. India has so far reported nine cases of monkeypox including one death. A 31-year-old woman tested positive for Monkeypox in the national capital on Wednesday. This is the first case of the disease among women in the country. Out of the total of nine cases, four cases are from Delhi while the remaining five have been reported from Kerala. " This is a technical meeting to revisit the existing guidelines," an official said. The meeting is being chaired by Dr L Swasticharan, director of Emergency Medical Relief and is being attended by officials from the National Aids Control Organisation, National Centre for Disease Control and World Health Organisation (WHO) representatives. According to existing 'Guidelines on Management of Monkeypox Disease' issued by the Centre, any person having a history of travel to affected countries within the last 21 days presenting with an unexplained acute rash and symptoms like swollen lymph nodes, fever, headaches, body aches and profound weakness is to be considered to be a 'suspected case'. A 'probable case' has to be a person meeting the case definition for a suspected case, clinically compatible illness and has an epidemiological link like face-to-face exposure, including health care workers without appropriate PPE, direct physical contact with skin or skin lesions, including sexual contact, or contact with contaminated material such as clothing, bedding or utensils. A case is considered laboratory confirmed for monkeypox virus by detection of unique sequences of viral DNA either by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and/or sequencing. Defining contacts, the guidelines stated that a contact is defined as a person who, in the period beginning with the onset of the source case's first symptoms, and ending when all scabs have fallen off, has had one or more of the exposures-- face-to-face exposure, direct physical contact, including sexual contact, contact with contaminated materials such as clothing or bedding --- with a probable or confirmed case of monkeypox. Cases can be prompted to identify contacts across the household, workplace, school/nursery, sexual contacts, healthcare, houses of worship, transportation, sports, social gatherings, and any other recalled interactions. Contacts should be monitored at least daily for the onset of signs/symptoms for a period of 21 days from the last contact with a patient or their contaminated material during the infection period. In case of occurrence of fever clinical/lab evaluation is warranted. Asymptomatic contacts should not donate blood, cells, tissue, organs or semen while they are under surveillance. Pre-school children may be excluded from daycare, nursery, or other group settings. The ministry guidelines state that human-to-human transmission occurs primarily through large respiratory droplets generally requiring prolonged close contact. It can also be transmitted through direct contact with body fluids or lesions, and indirect contact with lesion material such as through contaminated clothing or linen of an infected person. Animal-to-human transmission may occur by bite or scratch of infected animals or through bushmeat preparation. The incubation period is usually from six to 13 days and the case fatality rate of monkeypox has historically ranged up to 11 per cent in the general population and higher among children. In recent times, the case fatality rate has been around three to six per cent. The symptoms include lesions which usually begin within one to three days from the onset of fever, lasting for around two to four weeks and are often described as painful until the healing phase when they become itchy. The WHO had recently declared monkeypox a global public health emergency of international concern. What is a Monkeypox disease? According to WHO, monkeypox is a viral zoonosis -- a virus transmitted to humans from animals -- with symptoms similar to smallpox although clinically less severe. Monkeypox typically manifests itself with fever, rash and swollen lymph nodes and may lead to a range of medical complications. It is usually a self-limited disease with symptoms lasting for two to four weeks. International passengers have been asked to avoid contact with dead or live wild animals such as small mammals including rodents like rats and squirrels and non-human primates like monkeys and apes). New Delhi: Taking a jibe at Congress over the Enforcement Directorate (ED) action in the National Herald case, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra on Thursday (August 4) asked why is the party afraid if they are innocent. "Law is same for all. If the Congress party is innocent, then what are they afraid of? All that the Congress workers want is how to save that one particular family, ANI quoted the BJP leader as saying. "The ED had also issued summons to Mallikarjun Kharge. But he also didn`t turn up. If he can come to the Congress office, then why did he not reach the National Herald," Patra asked. Patras remarks come in the wake of the ED 'temporarily sealing' the premises of the Young Indian Pvt Limited (YIL) located in the Congress-owned National Herald building in Delhi. Meanwhile, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said in the Upper House that he was summoned by the ED at a time when Parliament is in session. "This House is functioning and I am the leader of the opposition parties. But right now, I have received a summons from the ED to appear before it when a Parliament session is on. Right now, when Parliament is functioning, is it fair on the part of the ED to summon me?" He also raised the issue of additional police force deployment outside Congress president Sonia Gandhi and party leader Rahul Gandhi in the national capital. Notably, the ED sleuths resumed their raids at the Young Indian (YI) office after Mallikarjun Kharge reached the Herald House building. Reacting to the ED sealing the Young Indian office, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi said "not scared of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's suppressive government". Gandhi told reporters, "You are talking about National Herald, it`s an intimidation attempt. They think they will be able to silence us with a little pressure...We won`t be intimidated. We are not scared of Narendra Modi. They can do whatever they want..." (With agency inputs) Khandwa: With an aim to increase the power generation capacity of the central state of Madhya Pradesh and address the electricity problems in the region, a floating solar power plant is going to be built in Khandwa which will generate 600 Megawatt power by 2022-23, informed the officials on Wednesday. Said to be the worlds largest floating solar plant, the project is estimated to be worth over Rs. 3000 crores. "Omkareshwar Dam is built on the Narmada river. This is our hydel project and in this, we produce energy from water, but it is spread over about 100 square kilometers, there is a very large water body where the water level remains normal," Renewable Energy Department Principal Secretary Sanjay Dubey told ANI. Dubey also said that the change in water level in the area was nominal and it thus serves as a suitable site. "We will have a PPA of 300 MW. So we have given a little bit of leverage, maybe a little more or less as per the requirement, so in total instead of 300, we are doing PPA in the first phase of 200 MW," he added. Also Read: Khalistani terrorist has been arrested from Burhanpur Dubey also highlighted that with the new floating solar plant, Khandwa will become the only district in Madhya Pradesh to have thermal power stations, hydel and solar power. "In the next phase, we have called tenders for 300 MW more, so this will be the worlds largest project which will be called floating solar. Khandwa will become the only district in the state to have all three things including solar, hydel, and thermal with over 4,000MW power to be produced from a single district," said Dubey. New Delhi: The Supreme Court Thursday (August 4, 2022) asked the Election Commission not to take any decision for now on the Eknath Shinde faction's plea that it be considered the real Shiv Sena and granted the party poll symbol. A bench headed by Chief Justice N V Ramana said it would take a call by Monday on referring the matters related to the recent Maharashtra political crisis to a constitution bench. "We will decide whether to refer the matter to the 5-judges constitution bench," the bench, also comprising justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli, said. The apex court was hearing the petitions filed by the Shiv Sena and its rebel MLAs during the recent Maharashtra political crisis which raised constitutional issues including those related to splits, mergers of political parties, defections, and disqualifications. Mumbai: Senior Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut, who has been arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money-laundering case related to the Patra Chawl land redevelopment case, was on Thursday sent to the agency's custody till 8th August. Raut was earlier produced before a Mumbai special court as his ED custody ends today. Mumbai | Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut sent to ED custody till 8th August in connection with a money laundering case in the Patra Chawl land case. pic.twitter.com/qbcz11BenB ANI (@ANI) August 4, 2022 The ED sought extended custody for Raut till August 10 as it had secured certain documents and wanted to probe related matters, besides investigating other accused in the case. The central agency arrested Raut on Sunday midnight in connection with alleged financial irregularities in the redevelopment of Patra 'Chawl' (old row tenement) in suburban Goregaon and related financial property transactions involving his wife and alleged associates. The ED had produced Raut before the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court judge MG Deshpande on Monday and sought his remand for eight days. But the court sent the Sena leader to the agency's custody till August 4. The agency had told the court on Monday that Raut and his family received "proceeds of crime" worth over Rs one crore generated out of alleged irregularities in the housing redevelopment project. The Shiv Sena has slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the arrest of Sanjay Raut by the Enforcement Directorate, saying such targeting of the Opposition did not happen even during the Emergency imposed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. In an editorial in the party mouthpiece Saamana, the Sena said democracy and a country perish if the Opposition is not treated with respect. The 60-year-old Rajya Sabha member is a close aide of Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray. After Raut was arrested, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray had on Monday described him as a hardcore Shiv Sainik of Bal Thackeray who did not succumb to pressure. TJEE Counselling 2022: The Tripura Board of Joint Entrance Examination (TBJEE) commenced the registration process for Tripura Joint Entrance Examination (TJEE) counselling 2022 on August 3, 2022. At tbjee.nic.in, the official Tripura JEE website, eligible students can apply for counselling. Till August 10, 2022, applicants may register for admission to various professional degree programmes offered by Tripura's colleges and other institutions as well as other institutions. Candidates must connect with their old user ID or registration number and password in order to register for the TJEE 2022 counselling process. When registering for TJEE counselling, candidates must upload the following documents. ALSO READ: TS ICET 2022: TSCHE Answer key TODAY at 11 AM TJEE Counselling 2022: List Of Documents Required Marksheet of HS (Class 12) or equivalent Examination Certificates as proof of residency Admit card of madhyamik examination or birth certificate as age proof Caste certificate (if applicable) Persons with Disabilities (PwD) certificate (if applicable) TJEE Counselling 2022: Here's how to apply online Go to the official website -- tbjee.nic.in Log in with old user ID or registration number and password Click on the link that reads, 'Online Registration Enter details and upload the necessary documents Click on the Save tab and submit the application form Take a print of the confirmation page for future use. Candidates must fill out their choices after registering for TJEEE 2022 counselling in order to be assigned a seat based on merit. "In the official announcement, there was a statement, "Soon, information regarding the seat matrix, dates for choosing options, and other programme schedules relating to online counselling will be released. No candidate would be taken into consideration for any seat allocation unless he or she enrolled and did not participate in online counselling. New Delhi: India and the US will hold an over two-week-long mega military exercise in Uttarakhand's Auli in October amid the fast-evolving regional security scenario. The 18th edition of exercise "Yudh Abhyas" is scheduled to take place from October 14 to 31, sources in the defence and military establishment said on Wednesday. A number of complex drills are being planned for the mega exercise, they said. The last edition of the exercise took place in October 2021 in Alaska in the US. The sources said the exercise is aimed at enhancing understanding, cooperation and interoperability between the armies of India and the US. The "Yudh Abhyas" exercise is in the backdrop of India's lingering border row with China in eastern Ladakh. The Indo-US defence ties have been on an upswing for the past few years. In June 2016, the US designated India a "Major Defence Partner". Also read: PM Modi, President Biden hold first bilateral meeting, say 'new chapter in Indo-US ties has begun' The two countries have also inked key defence and security pacts over the past few years, including the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) in 2016 that allows their militaries to use each other's bases for repair and replenishment of supplies as well as provides for deeper cooperation. Also read: Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit: Japan expresses concern over Chinese Army drill The two sides also signed the COMCASA (Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement) in 2018 which provides for interoperability between the two militaries and provides for the sale of high-end technology from the US to India. In October 2020, India and the US sealed the BECA (Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement) to further boost bilateral defence ties. The pact provides for sharing of high-end military technology, logistics and geospatial maps between the two countries. New Delhi: The government on Wednesday (August 3, 2022) sprung a surprise as it spiked the much-debated and contentious Data Protection Bill from Parliament, which had alarmed big technology companies such as Facebook and Google. The government said it will come out with a "set of fresh legislations" that will fit into the comprehensive legal framework. "The government will bring a set of new legislation for a comprehensive legal framework for the digital economy," IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. "We have started the drafting of the new bill, which is in good advanced stages," minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, saying the draft release was "very close". "Personal Data Protection Bill has been withdrawn because the Joint Committee of Parliament (JCP) recommended 81 amendments in a bill of 99 sections. Above that it made 12 major recommendations. Therefore the bill has been withdrawn and a new bill will be presented for public consultation," the IT minister said in a tweet. Personal Data Protection Bill has been withdrawn because the JCP recommended 81 amendments in a bill of 99 sections. Above that it made 12 major recommendations. Therefore the bill has been withdrawn and a new bill will be presented for public consultation. Ashwini Vaishnaw (@AshwiniVaishnaw) August 3, 2022 The IT Minister noted that media protection from Big Tech and revamping IT intermediary rules would form part of the comprehensive framework. The government will soon begin consultations with stakeholders. What is Personal Data Protection Bill? The Personal Data Protection Bill was then introduced in India's parliament on December 11, 2019. It set the rules for how personal data should be processed and stored, and lists people's rights with respect to their personal information. The Bill sought to establish a Data Protection Authority in the country for the protection of digital privacy of individuals. The Bill was first drafted by an expert committee headed by Justice BN Srikrishna in 2018. The central government introduced a draft of the Bill in 2019 in the Lok Sabha, which was referred to the Joint Parliamentary Committee in December 2021 and was later tabled in Parliament after six extensions. Notably, the latest version of the bill included both personal and non-personal data under its ambit, which would be dealt with by a Data Protection Authority. Why was Personal Data Protection Bill withdrawn? The 2019 Bill was deliberated in great detail by the JCP, which proposed 81 amendments and 12 recommendations for a comprehensive legal framework for the digital ecosystem, as per the official statement circulated to Lok Sabha members on Wednesday. "Considering the report of the JCP, a comprehensive legal framework is being worked upon. Hence, in the circumstances, it is proposed to withdraw 'The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019' and present a new bill that fits into the comprehensive legal framework," the statement said. Additionally, the bill was criticised by privacy experts as it was seen as being more in favour of the government rather than protecting privacy, which the Supreme Court held as a fundamental right in 2017. The withdrawn Bill had proposed restrictions on the use of personal data without the explicit consent of citizens. It had also sought to provide the government with powers to give exemptions to its probe agencies from the provisions of the Act, a move that was strongly opposed by the opposition MPs who had filed their dissent notes. Why didnt the government scrap the Bill earlier? In an interview with an English news daily, Ashwini Vaishnaw explained why it took the government this long to scrap the bill. After the JCP presented the report, it took us a few months. That was the only time we could have even started on a new draft or think what to do with it (old draft). Our intent is absolutely crystal clear. What we are doing is basically in line with what the Supreme Court has told us to do," said Vaishnaw. "I fully understand that there has been a delay in this, but the subject was too complex. We could have withdrawn it, lets say, four months back, but we needed a little bit of deliberation before biting the bullet, he added. Personal Data Protection Bill likely to be replaced by more than one bill? The government would hold a wide public consultation before putting the new legislation to Parliament, sources said. According to sources, the Bill could be replaced by more than one bill, dealing with privacy and cyber security and the government may bring the new set of bills in the Winter Session of Parliament. The government circulated among members a statement, containing reasons for withdrawal of the Bill, which was introduced on 11 December 2019 and was referred to the Joint Committee of the Houses for examination. The report of the JCP was presented to Lok Sabha in December 2021. Meanwhile, after the Bill was withdrawn, Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrashekhar tweeted that this will soon be replaced by a comprehensive framework of global standard laws including digital privacy laws for contemporary and future challenges and catalyse Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision. He said the JCP report on the Personal Data protection bill had identified many issues that were relevant but beyond the scope of a modern Digital Privacy law. "Privacy is a fundamental right of Indian citizens & a Trillion-dollar Digital Economy requires Global std Cyber laws," he said in another tweet. The JCP report had also proposed to specify the flow and usage of personal data, protect the rights of individuals whose personal data are processed, as it works out the framework for the cross-border transfer, accountability of entities processing data, and moots remedies for unauthorised and harmful processing. (With agency inputs) New Delhi: The fifth episode of `Koffee with Karan 7` is finally out and needless to say, it was a blast. The lead star cast of the upcoming film `Laal Singh Chadha`, Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan graced the couch in this episode and had a fun chat with the host Karan Johar. During the quirky rapid-fire round, the `Dhoom: 3` actor reacted to Ranveer Singh`s nude photos. Karan, in the rapid-fire round, questioned Kareena, about which Instagram account will she visit for `thirsty photos.` In reply to the answer, the `Heroine` actor took Ranveer`s name. To which the `Kuch Kuch Hota Hai` director reacted and stated, "Oh well yeah..he`s been showing a lot." Karan questioned Aamir, "Have you seen Ranveer Singh`s nude images and do you like his thirsty photos?" To which the `Dangal` actor replied, "He`s got a great physique. I thought it was quite bold of him." With Aamir`s wittiness and Kareena`s charm, the episode was fun banter. The fifth episode of Karan`s chat show ended on a very happy note, with the `Sarfarosh` actor winning the rapid-fire round with 73 percent votes of the live audience and with Kareena winning the quick buzzer round with a majority of 15 points in her kitty. Meanwhile, talking about the work front, Aamir and Kareena are currently quite busy promoting their upcoming family entertainer film `Laal Singh Chaddha` which is all set to hit the theatres on August 11, 2022. The film is going to face a big Bollywood clash with Akshay Kumar`s next film `Raksha Bandhan. `Kareena, on the other hand, will be marking her digital debut with Sujoy Ghosh`s upcoming mystery thriller film which also stars Jaydeep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma. The film is based on a 2005 best selling Japanese novel `The Devotion of Suspect X` and will premiere exclusively on Netflix.The official announcement of Aamir's next film is still awaited. Mumbai: Actor Aamir Khan has been invited for a special talk at IIM Annual International Summit Vista. Aamir Khan will be interacting with the students and will be talking about 'Facets of Management in Films and Life'. Aamir has been invited for a special talk at IIM Annual International Summit Vista. He will be interacting with the students and will be talking about 'Facets of Management in Films and Life'. Along with Aamir, several other proclaimed Indian names will be joining the special talk at IIM Annual International Summit Vista in Bangalore. The names include filmmaker Advait Chandan, actress Mona Singh, actor Naga Chaitanya, Peyush Bansal CEO and Co-founder of Lenskart, Anil Agrawal Chairman of Vedanta, and Punit Renjen Global CEO, Deloitte. Interestingly, this is not the first time Aamir Khan will be in the IIM Bangalore campus. The actor has a much deeper connection with the campus as he has shot and stayed there during the shoot of 3 Idiots. Back in 2009, when 3 Idiots was released, the film took the nation by storm with its epic storyline which highlighted the pressure youngsters face while chasing their careers. The film was a blockbuster and was appreciated worldwide. Aamir is currently gearing up for the release of 'Laal Singh Chaddha', which will hit the screen on August 11. The film is an official remake of Tom Hanks Forrest Gump and is directed by Advait Chandan. Apart from Aamir, the film features Kareena Kapoor Khan, Mona Singh and Naga Chaitanya in pivotal roles. New Delhi: Superstar Akshay Kumar who has always been fastidious about paying his taxes was reportedly honoured recently by the Income Tax department as the country's "highest taxpayer". When asked about it, Akshay told ANI: "Ji mujhe kaha to yehi gaya hai (about being the highest taxpayer). I am really honoured. It feels great that the Income Tax department recognises the whole thing and gives credit to people. Also, It's good that when you earn, you give it back to the country." "It's one of the best feelings," the elated `Khiladi` actor said. Reportedly, in 2015 and 2019, Kumar was on the Forbes list of highest-paid entertainers in the world, ranking 52nd with earnings of USD 48.5 million (Rs 386 crore approx). Apart from films, a major source of his income also comes from brand endorsements. After reports surfaced that Akshay Kumar was felicitated by the Income Tax department, his fans hailed the actor as a "responsible citizen." According to haters, some journalists, fans of other actors he is not a Global superstar, he is Canadian and many more things but still he is paying highest income tax than rest of the industry from last 5 years. My superstar," a Twitter user wrote. Another one tweeted, "Income Tax Department has felicitated Superstar @akshaykumar with a Samman Patra and termed him highest taxpayer from the Hindi film industry. Haters must see this before calling him Canadian." Meanwhile, on the work front, Akshay will be seen sharing screen space with Bhumi Pednekar in `Raksha Bandhan`, which is scheduled to release on August 11. To note, `Raksha Bandhan` marks Akshay`s second collaboration with Bhumi after their 2017 release `Toilet: Ek Prem Katha`. Directed by Aanand L Rai and written by Himanshu Sharma and Kanika Dhillon, the film is produced by Colour Yellow Productions, Zee Studios, and Alka Hiranandani in association with Cape Of Good Films.Apart from Akshay and Bhumi, `Raksha Bandhan` also stars Sahejmeen Kaur, Deepika Khanna, Sadia Khateeb and Smrithi Srikanth who will be seen as Khiladi Kumar`s sisters. The film was shot in Delhi last year. London: British actor of Indian descent Dev Patel risked his life to break up a knife fight in Australia. The actor stepped in when he saw an altercation between a man and woman outside a convenience store in Adelaide, reports mirror.co.uk. As he tried to stop the fight, the man involved was stabbed in the chest - although his injuries are not thought to be life threatening. An unidentified woman was arrested at the scene, local police said. A spokesperson for the 32-year-old actor said he acted on his "natural instinct" to try and "de-escalate" the row. According to mirror.co.uk, although receiving praise from fans for stepping in, the star insisted there are "no heroes" in the situation. In a statement, Dev's spokesperson said: "We can confirm that last night in Adelaide, Dev Patel and his friends witnessed a violent altercation that was already in progress outside of a convenience store. "Dev acted on his natural instinct to try and de-escalate the situation and break up the fight. "The group was thankfully successful in doing so and they remained on site to ensure that the police and eventually the ambulance arrived. "There are no heroes in this situation and sadly this specific incident highlights a larger systemic issue of marginalised members of society not being treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. "The hope is that the same level of media attention this story is receiving (solely because Dev, as a famous person, was involved) can be a catalyst for lawmakers to be compassionate in determining long-term solutions to help not only the individuals who were involved, but the community at large." Video from the scene showed the concerned actor talking to police at the scene of the incident, which happened around 8.45 p.m. on Monday night. Officers were called to reports of a man and woman fighting inside a service station, South Australia Police said. When witnesses, including Dev attempted to break up the fight, the woman allegedly stabbed the man in the chest. A 32-year-old man was treated at the scene and taken to a hospital in Adelaide. The British actor, who was born in Harrow, west London and found fame as a teenager on drama 'Skins', now lives in Adelaide with his girlfriend Tilda Cobham-Hervey, who is Australian. The actors first met on the set of 'Hotel Mumbai' in 2016. New Delhi: The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), the regulatory body supervising and regulating pensions in India, has changed a rule related to contribution to the funds via credit cards. In what could be a setback for many investors, tier-2 accounts will now not be able to contribute to NPS via credit card. In an official notification dated August 3, 2022, PFRDA came up with the announcement related to the change in the rule of contribution to the NPS. The Authority has decided to stop the facility of payment of subscriptions/contributions using credit card as a mode of payment in the Tier-II account of NPS. Accordingly, all PoPs are advised to stop the acceptance of credit card as a mode of payment for the Tier-11 account of N PS with immediate effect," the PFRDA said in its statement. (ALSO READ: Tiger Global sells 2.34% stake in Zomato) This circular is issued in exercise of the powers conferred under Section 14 of Pension Fund "Regulatory and Development Authority Act, 2013 to protect the interests of subscribers and to regulate, promote and ensure orderly growth of the National Pension System and pension schemes to which the Act applies," it added in its official statement. (ALSO READ: Killed for serving cold fries! McDonald's worker shot dead by 20-year-old in New York) Meanwhile, the PFRDA and Bank of India launched the digital platform for NPS enrolment. The platform has been developed in association with K-fintech. According to a joint statement by PFRDA and Bank of India, customers can now easily and paperlessly register an NPS (National Pension System) account by scanning a QR code. An applicant must enter their Aadhaar number on the NPS account opening web page after scanning the QR code in order to retrieve their image and other information from DigiLocker. New Delhi: Founder and CEO of the People Group Anupam Mittal is known for his investment approach. He is also known as one of the innovative investors in India. The Mumbai-based investor is also the founder of Shaadi.com. His new post on LinkedIn usually becomes the most talked about topic among entrepreneurs. On August 3, he announced his new initiative DreamDeal.com to fund budding entrepreneurs. He wrote on LinkedIn, "Problem - Not enough time to help & listen to every founder Solution - DreamDeal.me. Thats right Now anybody can pitch to me. We bring you the 1st of its kind social media funding platform DreamDeal.me & all you need to do is make a 30 sec reel." (Also Read: Amazon fined for selling sub-standard pressure cookers from CCPA) "We are starting small with micro grants to help people move one step ahead on their entrepreneurial journey. Lets see where it goes from here Check out the rules & some of the amazing pitches so far instagram.com/dreamdeal.me Wanna help? Make a pitch or just spread the word & we could help create something BIG together, he added." (Also Read: Markets halt 6-day rally; end marginally lower) After posting it, he got mixed reactions from users of the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform. Some users complained about the malfunctioning of the link. But most people appeared to be interested in his new idea. Though, everyone knows that he is an angel investor and the most innovative enterprise in the country. Mittal was also one of the most popular investors to feature on the popular first season of the business reality show Shark Tank India. According to media reports, he may also feature in the second edition of the show as well. In his last post on LinkedIn, he talked about the right approach for investment. He posted, Money managers believe that spreading your risk is the best way to create wealth, but ask any successful entrepreneur about their journey and you will find that they have gone all in'. New Delhi: Amid rising complaints against mobile apps, the Centre has identified and blocked 348 apps developed by various countries, including China, for allegedly collecting user information for profiling citizens and transmitting it overseas in an unauthorised manner, the Parliament was told on Wednesday. "The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has identified 348 mobile applications which were collecting users' information and transmitting it in an unauthorised manner to servers located outside the country for profiling. (Also Read: Microfinance borrowers' resilience behind MFI industry's turnaround post-COVID) Based on the request from MHA, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has blocked those 348 mobile applications since such data transmissions infringe the sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, and security of the state," Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar told the Lok Sabha in a written reply. (Also Read: Bullish on cloud gaming, Bluestacks CEO Rosen Sharma sees India among top five gaming countries) These apps are developed by various countries including China, he added. New Delhi: Fintech platform BharatPe on Wednesday said it has appointed former SBI Card CFO Nalin Negi as its new chief financial officer, as it prepares for its initial public offering (IPO). In his new role, Negi will take charge of the finance function for BharatPe and will be working towards making the company EBITDA positive by March 2023. He will report to Suhail Sameer, CEO, BharatPe, and work closely with the Board of BharatPe, the company said in a statement. "His experience of listing SBI Card will be instrumental for us as we aim to go public in FY25," said Sameer. BharatPe closed the first quarter of FY23 with over Rs 3,600 crore in total loans facilitated and $18 billion in annualised TPV in payments. (Also Read: iPhone 13 gets MASSIVE discount on Flipkart ahead of iPhone 14 launch, get it at just Rs 54,999 --Here is how) "The company has become a preferred and trusted partner for millions of offline merchants in just 4 years of launch," said Negi, who will lead the financial readiness of the company as it prepares for the IPO. In April, the company announced the appointment of Smriti Handa as the Chief Human Resources Officer. (Also Read: Garena Free Fire redeem codes for today, 4 August: Check website, steps to redeem) The new appointment comes after BharatPe Co-founder Bhavik Koladiya moved on from the company to pursue other assignments. The company has seen several high-profile exits in recent months, including founding member Satyam Nathani, Ashneer Grover (who triggered a major controversy at the platform); Chief Revenue Officer Nishit Sharma; and Head of Institutional Debt Partnerships, Chandrima Dhar. New Delhi: Garena Free Fire releases redeem codes on everyday basis. The 12-digit redeem code consists of alphabets and numbers. Players can get rewards such as skins for in-game weapons and characters to improve their gaming experience. Garena Free fire is banned in India. However, if you are located outside India, you can access the reward codes and redeem them. For that you will be required to visit official Garena Free Fire reward site and log in to your Facebook, Google, Twitter IDs to access the Free Fire redemption page. (Also read: iPhone 12 gets massive price cut on Flipkart Big Saving Days Sale, offer details here) Check out the Garena Free Fire Redeem Codes for August 4, 2022 FF11WFNPP956 B61YCTNH4PV3 8F3QZKNTLWBZ SARG886AV5GR FF11DAKX4WHV WLSGJXS5KFYR FF11HHGCGK3B FF11NJN5YS3E ZRJAPH294KV5 Y6ACLK7KUD1N FF119MB3PFA5 FF10617KGUF9 FF10GCGXRNHY X99TK56XDJ4X YXY3EGTLHGJX MCPTFNXZF4TA FF1164XNJZ2V WOJJAFV3TU5E (Also read: Shocking! Ex-Amazon Web Services engineer hacked data of 10 crore customers) How to Redeem Garena Free Fire codes for today, August 4, 2022 Step 1: Go to the official Garena Free Fire redemption portal Step 2: Log in on the portal with either your Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google, VK, or Huawei ID. Step 3: Enter a redeem code in the designated text box. Step 4: Click on the Ok button to get free rewards in your game account. (Disclaimer: Garena Free fire is banned in India. Hence we advise people to adhere to government rules) New Delhi: Domestic chip manufacturer Polymatech Electronics on Wednesday said it will invest $1 billion in the country towards semiconductor manufacturing by 2025. Polymatech has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Tamil Nadu government with an initial investment of $130 million. Established in 2007, the company said it has imported all equipment for semiconductor manufacturing from Japan. "With a team of best global minds in tech and our investment in the business, we are sure to be able to capitalise on the industry's potential and scale the semiconductor market in India," said Nandam Eswara Rao, Founding President, Polymatech. Polymatech has successfully completed all required trials with the first phase of imported machinery that has a capacity of 250 million chips. To make India a leading semiconductor manufacturing hub, the government announced a Rs 76,000 crore production-linked scheme (PLI) package last year. "We plan to become one of the largest chip manufacturers in Asia by 2025," said Rao. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in May that India's own consumption of semiconductors is expected to cross $80 billion by 2026 and $110 billion by 2030. According to IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the government has received many applications under the semiconductor PLI scheme and expects the process to take about 15-18 months to complete. So far, India has received investment proposals from five global Semiconductor majors to set up semiconductor fabs and display fabs locally in the country. New Delhi: With the successful auction of spectrum, India has come closer to rolling out the fifth generation (5G) of telecom services. Consumers in the cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Pune are likely to start getting 5G services from October. How will the fifth generation of cellular technology impact telecom services and business in India? The fifth generation cellular technology is around 20 times faster than its predecessor fourth generation (4G) technology. The theoretical peak speed of the 5G technology is 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps). The peak speed of 4G technology is 1 Gbps. Gbps is a measure of bandwidth on a digital data transmission medium such as optical fiber. It denotes a data transfer rate equivalent to one billion bits, or simple binary units, per second. Clearly, the speed of uploading and downloading data will be much faster under the 5G technology than the 4G technology. However, it`s not just the speed that makes 5G superior to the fourth generation technology. The 5G comes with lower latency, which would significantly improve the performance of business applications and other digital experiences like online gaming, videoconferencing, and self-driving cars. In fact, 5G is not just an evolution from 4G. It is a giant leap forward. The fourth generation networks are built with large radio towers that transmit signals over long distances using lower frequency radio waves. On the other hand, 5G networks will add many more small-cell antennas connected to buildings, streetlights, and other objects. These small cells will transmit massive amounts of data over short distances using an ultra-high-frequency spectrum. Industry leaders and analysts feel the customers would be required to shell out more for the 5G services."Given the sizeable investments towards spectrum acquisition, we believe telcos will charge differential pricing for 5G services. Indeed, adoption of 5G services will hinge on the extent of premium over 4G tariffs," said Manish Gupta, Senior Director, CRISIL Ratings. In a bid to ensure mass adoption of 5G, telcos may raise tariffs for 4G services, too, despite the two rounds of major tariff hikes effected in December 2019 and November 2021, respectively."We expect another tariff hike for 4G services in the second half of the current fiscal. All the same, mass 5G rollout may happen only next fiscal as fiberisation (a pre-requisite for effective 5G deployment) is feeble now, and telcos are required to launch commercial services in at least one city of each circle by the end of the first year of acquiring the licence, as per rollout obligations. Thus, the full benefit of tariff hikes and 5G launch will be realised in fiscal 2024," Gupta said. Union Minister of Communications, Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw has expressed hope that the 5G services would be launched in October this year. Analysts feel that services would be first launched in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Pune. The spectrum auction of the 5G was completed on Monday. Total of 40 rounds of bidding were conducted in seven days of the auction that ended on Monday. The government had put 72,098 MHz spectrum to auction, of which 51,236 MHz (71 per cent of the total) has been sold with bids amounting to Rs 1,50,173 crore. Four companies have acquired spectrums in this auction. These firms are - Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, Bharti Airtel Limited, Vodafone Idea Limited, and Adani Data Networks Limited. Elaborating on the reasons for the possible hike in tariff, Gupta said the telecom sector is characterised by high capital intensity as it requires continuous investments for technological upgradation and spectrum purchase. Telcos have already invested nearly Rs 5 lakh crore over fiscals 2017-21 to roll out 4G services, resulting in the sector`s gargantuan debt (including lease liabilities) of Rs 4.73 lakh crore as on March 31, 2022.Additional spectrum purchased in this auction could elevate the sector`s debt to Rs 6.1 lakh crore. Therefore, the sector`s debt/EBITDA is expected to rise to 4.6x in the current fiscal, compared with 4.2x as on March 31, 2022, he said. The leverage ratio, however, should improve next fiscal, aided by full benefits of expected tariff hikes, 5G launch and customer uptrading, Gupta added. Reliance Jio has made bids worth Rs 88,078 crore accounting for 58.65 per cent of the total value of Rs 1,50,173 crore received by the government in the 5G spectrum auction. Bharti Airtel has made bids worth Rs 43,084 crore to acquire 19867.8 MHz spectrum in 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100MHz, 3300 MHz and 26 GHz frequency bands. Vodafone Idea Limited has made bids worth Rs 18,799 crore to acquire 6,228 MHz spectrum in 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2500 MHz, 3300 MHz and 26 GHz. Adani Data Networks Limited has made bids worth Rs 212 crore to acquire 400 MHz spectrum in 26 GHz frequency band. According to brokerage firm Nomura, "700 MHz band could potentially give Jio an edge in terms of network quality, especially indoors."Nomura said 5G rollouts would likely be granular, starting with metros and larger cities. "There is a potential for telcos to charge a premium for 5G vs 4G," the brokerage firm said."Despite the estimated weak leverage and elevated debt, cash-flow requirements of telcos would be supported by a moratorium of up to four years provided for adjusted gross revenue-related dues and favourable payment terms for the spectrum bought in the current auction," said Rakshit Kachhal, Associate Director, CRISIL Ratings. In contrast to the upfront payment requirement in the past auctions, this time telcos have an option to make payments in 20 equal annual installments, thereby aiding cash flows. Moreover, zero spectrum-usage charges on the spectrum acquired in this auction would be an additional (albeit not immediate) relief to telcos, as it would mean potential annual savings of at least Rs 3,000-5,000 crore over the medium to long term, Kachhal noted. New Delhi: Twitter has now dragged tech investors and entrepreneur friends connected to Elon Musk in the $44 billion takeover deal that has been terminated by the Tesla CEO and a legal trial is set to begin on October 17. According to The Washington Post, Twitter's legal team in a subpoena in the court has asked for "extensive requests for communications, including checklists, timelines, presentations, decks, organisational calls, meetings, notes, recordings" related to the deal's financing. The top investors mentioned in the subpoena are Marc Andreessen, founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), former Facebook executive and CEO of Social Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Sacks who helped Musk with the formation of financial services firm PayPal. Twitter's legal team has also gone after Tesla and SpaceX board member Stephen Jurvetson, and investors Jason Calacanis, Keith Rabois, and Joe Lonsdale. (Also Read: iPhone 13 gets MASSIVE discount on Flipkart ahead of iPhone 14 launch, get it at just Rs 54,999 --Here is how) Lonsdale, the general partner at VC firm 8VC, called Twitter's subpoenas sent to a "giant harassing fishing expedition". "Lawyers w/ TWTR are sending subpoenas to friends in the ecosystem around @elonmusk and @pmarca and @DavidSacks et al, a giant harassing fishing expedition," he posted. (Also Read: Garena Free Fire redeem codes for today, 4 August: Check website, steps to redeem) "I have nothing to do with this aside from a few snarky comments, but got a 'YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED' document notice," he added. Musk or his legal team were yet to react to the Twitter subpoena. The world's richest person has filed a countersuit against Twitter as part of an ongoing legal dispute with the microblogging platform. However, the lawsuit is not yet accessible to the public and a partially redacted version may be available soon under court rules. The US judge in the Twitter vs Musk legal battle has set October 17 as the beginning date of the high-profile trial for five days. BEIJING: Hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi departed from Taipei following a visit that has rankled Beijing, Chinas Eastern Military Command said on Thursday that it had carried out long-range firing in precision strikes at specific areas in the eastern part of the Taiwan Strait as part of planned exercises. Chinese navy ships and military aircraft briefly crossed the Taiwan Strait median line on Thursday morning, a Taiwan source briefed on the matter told Reuters on Thursday. China had on Wednesday commenced military drills around Taiwan`s main island, according to Chinese state media, hours after the US House Speaker departed from Taipei. Live-fire drills began in six identified zones around the island at noon local time, Al Jazeera reported citing China state media. According to Xinhua News Agency, the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People`s Liberation Army (PLA) on Wednesday organized joint combat training exercises in the northern, southwestern and southeastern waters and airspace off Taiwan Island. Under the Eastern Theater Command, the exercises involved troops from the Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, Strategic Support Force and Logistic Support Force. "The exercises focused on key training sessions including joint blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control operation, and the joint combat capabilities of the troops got tested in the military operations," Xinhua added. Responding to a question about the PLA`s decision to kick off the drills two days after Pelosi`s arrival, a military expert said that the arrangement shows the army`s rational and responsible attitude as it leaves time for domestic and foreign civilian ships and airlines to evacuate their ships and adjust their flights, Global Times reported. Zhang Junshe, a senior research fellow at the Naval Research Academy of the People`s Liberation Army, said that the drills include long-range live-fire shooting and conventional missile test launches. As per the international conventions, areas of military drills have to be disclosed three days in advance and 24 hours in advance under an emergency situation. "That is mainly to leave enough time for domestic and foreign ships to evacuate as well as for related civilian airlines to adjust their routes to avoid the areas. The move is intended to avoid hurting ordinary people during the drills, showing the rational and responsible attitude of the PLA," Zhang said as quoted by Global Times. Taiwan`s defence ministry said that an unidentified aircraft flew above the Kinmen Islands, Taiwanese territory off China`s southeastern coast, on Wednesday night and it had fired flares in response. Major General Chang Zone-sung of the military`s Kinmen Defense Command said that the Chinese drones came in a pair and flew into the Kinmen area twice on Wednesday night, at about 9 pm (6:30 pm IST) and 10 pm (7:30 pm IST), Al Jazeera reported citing Reuters News Agency. "We immediately fired flares to issue warnings and to drive them away. After that, they turned around. They came into our restricted area and that`s why we dispersed them," he said. The Group of Seven developed nations has expressed concern at China`s response to Pelosi`s visit, calling for calm and saying the moves by the People`s Republic of China (PRC) risked unnecessary escalation. Pelosi`s visit, which is also the highest level of US visits in more than two decades, left China heavily infuriated and the communist nation warned the US that it will "pay the price." Pelosi`s trip has heightened US-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her high-level position as leader of the House of Representatives. She is the first speaker of the house to come to Taiwan in 25 years since Newt Gingrich in 1997. The Chinese military had announced holding live-fire naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait after Pelosi`s visit which is mainly seen to build security and economic momentum for the Indo-Pacific and is also seen as a move by the US to build pressure on China over its claim on Taiwan, responding to which the Pentagon also sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Earlier, China sent 27 aircraft to Taiwan`s air defence identification zone (ADIZ), the island`s Defence Ministry said on Wednesday hours after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Taipei. China which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments, announced multiple military exercises around the island, issued a series of harsh statements and even summoned the US ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, to protest against Pelosi`s visit to Taiwan. Moreover, China has decided to avoid meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the ASEAN Foreign Ministers` Meeting in Cambodia. Washington: A gigantic plasma buildup has been observed on the eastern limb of the Sun, with flares erupting up to 3,25,000 kilometers, almost the distance between the Earth and Moon. According to the puzzled scientists, such a thing has never been seen before and exclaimed that the eruption is so huge that no scientific term would meticulously describe it. Astronomer Richard N. Schrantz captured the astronomical phenomenon from his backyard observatory in Nicholasville, Kentucky. He calls the explosion "ginormous," with a range up to 3,25,000 kilometers in space. It is nearly equal to the distance between Earth and the Moon. Images of the flare in orbit were made public by Spaceweather.com, which tracks the solar movements and the solar cycle. There were supposedly no negative repercussions on Earth since the eruption happened when the Sun was behind it and not facing the planet. Other astronomers also picked up on this event. Astronomers across the world were able to see the phenomenon directly using telescopes since the plasma eruption was not in the line of sight. Last week, a similar plasma eruption was observed by astronomers on the northeastern limb of the giant star. Despite being a strong explosion, astronomers had expected that Earth was not in the Sun's direct line of fire. Reportedly, Sunspot AR3068, which is now forming on the Sun, is expanding more quickly, and there is a probability that it may eventually build a beta-gamma magnetic field that will contain the energy needed to produce M-class solar flares. Since the sunspot directly faces Earth, any explosions shall be geoeffective, according to spaceweather.com. Huge solar eruptions called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) will likely become more frequent as we approach the peak of the Suns 11-year activity cycle called solar maximum in 2025. This video shows several CMEs soon after the last solar maximum.https://t.co/SWedOm7Uh9 pic.twitter.com/vf3MsSq0nz NASA Sun & Space (@NASASun) July 30, 2022 NASA has warned of more such Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), as we approach the peak of the Suns 11-year activity cycle in 2025. New York: A 20-year-old man in New York has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting dead an employee of American fast-food giant McDonald`s for allegedly serving his mother cold fries, according to police and media reports. The deceased identified as Kevin Holloman, 23, died from three gunshot injuries at 771 Herkimer St. in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn on Monday, the New York Post reported citing police. The shooter Michael Morgan, who is facing charges of attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon in Monday`s fast-food shooting, was also slapped with murder and criminal possession of weapon charges over a killing in October 21, 2020, New York Post reported citing police. The publication citing police reported that Morgan stormed the McDonald`s after his mother began questioning workers about cold French fries. The workers reportedly laughed at her for asking to speak to a manager and later Morgan barged into the restaurant in his mother`s defence. Soon after the incident on Tuesday night, Morgan was arrested and charged with the shooting, police said. The mother of the shooter told in an interview with The Post that her son said afterward he did what he had to do. She described what exactly what led up to the shooting. "I talked to my son with the cops. My son is just saying that he gotta do what he gotta do and the [victim] came after him and whatever happened, happened,`` said Lisa Fulmore Shooting incidents have become more frequent in the United States. On August 2, one person was killed and at least six men were shot at an apartment complex in the northeastern part of Washington DC. The shooting was reported at about 8:30 pm (US time) in the 1500 block of F Street North East, outside the Azeeze Bates apartment complex The Washington Post reported citing Police Chief Robert J. Contee III said in a news conference. Monday`s violent night included three other shootings, none of which were fatal. A woman was shot on Gainesville Street SE; a man was shot on Newton Place NW; and another man was shot on Oglethorpe Street NE, all within the space of a few hours, according to officials. With increasing incidents of gun violence in the United States, President Joe Biden had said that the US needs to ban assault weapons for the sake of protecting children and families or raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21. Furthermore, on June 22, a group of US lawmakers reached a much-awaited deal on a bipartisan gun safety bill after recent mass shooting incidents in Uvalde, Buffalo and Texas, that struck a nerve in the country. The new bill aims to take firearms away from dangerous people and provide billions of dollars in new mental health funding. The bill does not ban assault-style rifles or significantly expand background-check requirements for gun purchases, but it gives states more resources to take guns away from dangerous individuals. In recent incidents, 7 people were hospitalized after a mass shooting in Orlando, Florida last week. An unidentified assailant pulled out a handgun and fired into the crowd, injuring seven people, reported CNN. A similar incident took place in the Haltom City of Texas last week where two people were killed and four others including three officers were injured. Police said that one woman was found dead inside the home and a man was found fatally shot in the home`s driveway. An elderly woman who called 911 was shot but expected to survive. On May 24, a mass shooting incident took place at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in which several people including 19 children were killed. This was the deadliest attack since the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed, according to CNN. On June 20, a teenager was shot dead and three others including a police officer were injured in a shooting in the area of 14th and U Street Northwest in Washington, DC. The shootout incidents in the US have been increasing. Washington: The US Senate on Wednesday approved Finland and Sweden`s accession to NATO, the most significant expansion of the 30-member alliance since the 1990s as it responds to Russia`s invasion of Ukraine. The Senate voted 95 to 1 to support ratification of accession documents, easily surpassing the two-thirds majority of 67 votes required to support ratification of the two countries` accession documents. "This historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan US commitment to NATO, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow," US President Joe Biden said in a statement. Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership in response to the Feb. 24 invasion. Russia has repeatedly warned both countries against joining the alliance. NATO`s 30 allies signed the accession protocol for them last month, allowing them to join the US-led nuclear-armed alliance once its members ratify the decision. At that point, Helsinki and Stockholm were able to participate in NATO meetings and have greater access to intelligence, but were not protected by Article Five, the NATO defence clause stating that an attack on one ally is an attack against all. Also read: Zelenskiy seeking 'direct talks' with China's Xi to help end Ukraine war The accession must be ratified by the parliaments of all 30 North Atlantic Treaty Organization members before Finland and Sweden can be protected by the defence clause. Ratification could take up to a year, although it has already been approved by a few countries, including Canada, Germany and Italy. Also read: US blacklists President Putin's rumoured girlfriend in latest round of sanctions Senators from both parties strongly endorsed membership for the two countries, describing them as important allies whose modern militaries already worked closely with NATO. "The qualifications of these two prosperous, democratic nations are outstanding and will serve to strengthen the NATO alliance," said Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, urging support before the vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer invited the ambassadors and other diplomats from Finland and Sweden to the Senate to watch the vote. Republican Senator Josh Hawley was the lone no vote. Republican Senator Rand Paul voted present. Beijing: China is staging live-fire military drills in six self-declared zones surrounding Taiwan in response to a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island Beijing claims as its own territory. China has warned aircraft and ships to avoid the areas during the exercises, which run through Sunday. The drills appear to be a rehearsal for a potential blockade and invasion of the island that would almost certainly draw in Taiwan's chief supporter, the United States, along with American allies including Japan and Australia. China's 2 million-strong military is the world's largest and its navy has more ships than the U.S. Taiwan's armed forces can't compare in numbers, but it has vowed to resist coercive measures to impose Chinese Communist Party rule over the self-governing island democracy. It will take some hard diplomacy to reestablish a stable equilibrium," said Stanford University political scientist Kharis Templeman. I don't know how this confrontation will ultimately play out, but I think we are in for a rocky few weeks." The following is a look at the issues surrounding the escalation of tensions. WHAT IS CHINA DOING IN SEAS AND SKIES AROUND TAIWAN? China says it has begun exercises involving warplanes, navy ships and missile strikes in six zones surrounding Taiwan. Those lie as little as 20 kilometers (12 miles) off the island's coast, potentially infringing on Taiwan's territorial waters. Few details have been given by Beijing, but it has described the drills as punishment for the U.S. Allowing Pelosi's visit to proceed, even though President Joe Biden did not have the authority to prevent her travelling to the island. Live-fire exercises are a test of a military's ability to perform missions under conditions most resembling actual warfare. In this case, they are designed to show the level of force China could unleash against Taiwan if Beijing decided to make good on the pledge to seize control of the island and punish those supporting its independence. The exercises are thought to be the largest and most threatening toward Taiwan since Beijing launched missiles into waters north and south of the island in 1995 and 1996 in response to a visit to the U.S. By then-President Lee Teng-hui. China regularly sends warplanes into Taiwan's air defense identification zone and has at times crossed the middle line of the Taiwan Strait dividing the sides, but has stopped short of direct incursions or attacks that could spark a regional conflict. WHY IS CHINA TAKING THESE ACTIONS AND WHAT DOES IT HOPE TO ACHIEVE? China has increasingly forcefully declared that Taiwan must be brought under its control by force if necessary and in defiance of Washington and other backers of the island's democracy. Pelosi's visit came at a particularly sensitive time when Chinese President and head of the armed forces Xi Jinping is preparing to seek a third five-year term as leader of the ruling Communist Party. Xi has named no successor and he's accumulated vast powers despite criticism of his handling of the economy, partly as a result of his hardline approach to COVID-19 and a marked downturn in relations with the West. Xi has said Taiwan's fate cannot remain unsettled indefinitely and U.S. Military officials have said China may seek a military solution within the next few years. China's constitution incorporates Taiwan in its national territory and its 2005 anti-secession law threatens invasion if possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted," seen to apply in the case of a formal declaration of independence or foreign intervention. China insists that Taiwan accept its contention that the island is a part of China, whose sole legitimate government sits in Beijing. In the face of China's military threats and relentless campaign to isolate Taiwan diplomatically, islanders overwhelmingly support the status quo of de facto independence. That sentiment has been further reinforced by Beijing's ruthless crackdown on political rights and free speech in Hong Kong, which China has long touted as a model for its future governance of Taiwan. WHAT HAS BEEN THE RESPONSE FROM TAIWAN AND THE U.S.? Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defense drills. While its air force, navy and 165,000-member armed forces are a fraction of the size of China's, they have been bolstered by high-tech weaponry and early-warning systems intended to make a Chinese invasion as difficult as possible. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which China has tacitly supported, has also served as a wakeup call to Taipei, which is now looking to overhaul training and tactics. Numerous U.S. Naval and other military assets are currently deployed in areas close to Taiwan, including the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its battle group. Washington has comprehensively rejected China's claims that the Taiwan Strait is sovereign Chinese territory and maintains the right to sail past Chinese outposts in the South China Sea, despite Chinese protests. WHAT ARE THE RISKS AND HOW LONG WILL TENSIONS PERSIST? It remains unclear whether China will seek to keep tensions at a high pitch even after the end of the current round of exercises. Spokespeople from the Foreign and Defense Ministries, the Cabinet's Taiwan Affairs Office and other departments have vowed President Tsai Ing-wen's administration and the U.S. Government will pay a price over Pelosi's visit, but have not given details on how and when that objective will be achieved. Following the visit, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told U.S. National Public Radio that the possibility of some kind of incident is real," given the scale of the Chinese exercises. And we believe that what China is doing here is not responsible. We believe that it is escalating tensions unnecessarily," Sullivan said. The long-standing modus vivendi between Washington and Beijing is being seriously challenged" by both sides, said Templeman, the Stanford University political scientist. Washington has pushed back against Beijing with high-level visits, a relaxation of official contact restrictions and arms sales. Washington as a whole has become much less concerned about offending China and much less deferential to Beijing's demands related to Taiwan," Templeman said. Kyiv: Ukraine is seeking an opportunity to speak "directly" with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help end its war with Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday. In an interview with SCMP, the Ukrainian leader urged China to use its outsize political and economic influence over Russia to bring an end to the fighting. "It`s a very powerful state. It`s a powerful economy So (it) can politically, economically influence Russia. And China is [also a] permanent member of the UN Security Council," the report quoted Zelenskiy as saying. El presidente @PedroCastilloTe sostuvo que no hay otra forma de garantizar el bienestar de los pueblos, sino es a traves del empresariado, indico al reunirse con el Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, Marcelo Ebrard e inversionistas mexicanos. pic.twitter.com/6knkyXbNYd Respaldo a mis abogados defensores (Benji Espinoza y Eduardo Pachas) respecto a que tengo derecho a declarar en Palacio de Gobierno, sin embargo, les he pedido que me acompanen a la Fiscalia para defender mi inocencia y colaborar siempre con la justicia. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. The tactical situation at the line of contact in Artsakh overnight August 3-4 and as of 09:00 was relatively calm, the Ministry of Defense of Artsakh said in a statement. It added that the Azerbaijani forces again breached the ceasefire in some parts of the line of contact using various caliber firearms. There are no casualties from the Artsakh Defense Army in this latest Azeri ceasefire breach. 3 of the 19 soldiers who were wounded on August 3 are in serious condition, and 1 is in critical condition. Measures continue being taken by mediation of the Russian contingent command to stabilize the situation, the Artsakh military said. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. French-Armenian photographer Antoine Agoudjian, a descendant of the witnesses of the Armenian Genocide, has been presenting Armenia and the heritage of Armenians to the world through his camera for years. He is presenting not only Armenia, but also the countries which have had a direct link with Armenians in other periods. Antoine Agoudjians photos depict human suffering, pain, love and belief to the God. The photographer admits that his photos are not easy to understand, but notes that there is a light in each of his work, because, as he says, Armenians are happy people by nature. Antoine Agoudjian belongs to the third generation of the Armenian Genocide survivors. He was born in the French city of Alfortville, which he compares with a little Armenian village as there are many Armenians in the city, thanks to which Agoudjian learnt about Armenian traditions, songs and dance from early childhood. There were Armenian dance groups in the city, and I remember that my father was taking me to dance. When you dance, you can imagine yourself as living in Western Armenia. I grew up in an Armenian environment and got acquainted with the Armenian heritage. My grandfather was a soldier during the Armenian Genocide and has saved many Armenians. All these had an impact on me, he said in an interview to ARMENPRESS. The photographer also faced a great shock during the 1988 devastating earthquake in Armenias Spitak town. That time we were watching the photos of ARMENPRESS photojournalist Mkhitar Khachatryan taken on the spot. We were in a very emotional situation when Charles Aznavour visited Armenia to provide help. We also wanted to assist in some way. I arrived in Armenia and stayed here for a year. I started photography at that period, but as an amateur. I was photographing for foreign organizations. When I came back to France, a book-album based on my works has been published. And thats how my story began, the photographer says. It was that period that Agoudjian decided to tell the world about Armenians and the heritage of Armenians through photography. Since 2000 he has started visiting different countries aimed at finding an Armenian trace. He has been in Georgia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Turkey. He photographerd wars, conflicts and sold his works to international media outlets. He says he has always followed and listened to the little ghosts the Genocide survivors, who are with him. Agoudjian compares photography with the process of climbing a mountain, as he says that either you need to go up to the end or go down. He has decided to go up to the end and create his unique world. When I traveled to Turkey in 1997, there was a fear but also a pleasure. I knew that what I am doing has not been done by any other. I should transfer our heritage to our children, our generations. Why should we live if we do not create anything? We should create something by which we could help others. I have always thought so. I have read history a lot because the places I had to visit had a connection with our history. Thats how I matured and now I can talk freely, the French-Armenian photographer said. He also stood by his compatriots in Armenia during the 2020 Artsakh War. In Artsakh, he wanted to work like he did in Iraq by cooperating with a squad, but the photographer has not been provided much with that opportunity. Sometimes I went to the battlefield with a squad and then returned, and sometimes I went with my driver. I have been in Martuni, Martakert, Aghdam and Karvachar. I needed a lot to light a candle in Shushis St. Ghazanchetsots Church and I managed to do that. I seek to photograph for history. Whether its dangerous or not, you need to find good photos for our history, and the topic of war was very important. When wars started in Iraq and Syria, I left without delay because I was seeing a link with us. I didnt go there as a military reporter, but a person who will document the history. If a photographer is creating beauty, he/she should also depict the hell. It is so in my works, he added. The Cry of Silence, Traces of an Armenian Memory exhibition, covering the authors 30-year-old searches, contains photos that are heavy, dramatic, but have a light. Antoine Agoudjian doesnt consider himself a sad person. He says he likes to have fun a lot and is sincere when taking photos. What I present is a difficult heritage. I dont want people to get sad while viewing my works, I want them to understand that history is dialectical. Why is Turkey pressuring Kurds? Because it does not acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. As long as they have not acknowledged, they will run the same policy. In my works you should see the policy not sadness. There are people who say that there is no need to talk about the Armenian Genocide anymore, but until Turkey acknowledges the Armenian Genocide, we are in danger. The 44-Day Artsakh War proved that, he said. Antoine Agoudjian wants to frequently visit Armenia and work a lot. He doesnt want to do anything else besides photography. He admits he feels well with the Armenian people. He plans to display the exhibition The Cry of Silence, Traces of an Armenian Memory, which he held in Yerevan in June, also in Artsakh. The exhibition should be organized in a special place: that place must have a special architecture. I always think that place is also a living body and we should listen to it in order to understand how to build the exhibition. I was guided in this way in Yerevan when initiating the exhibition in the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art. I have many goals and must continue taking interesting photos. If 100 years later ethnic Armenian or foreign historians, sociologists want to understand what had happened 100 years before, maybe they will use my photos as well, he said. The French-Armenian photographer assures that he will continue photographing as long as there are opportunities to do that. Interview by Angela Hambardzumyan Photos by Mkhitar Khachatryan and Hayk Manukyan Archival photos have been provided by Antoine Agoudjian YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. Russia is concerned over the escalation in Nagorno Karabakh, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters. We are closely following. Naturally we are concerned over the escalation of the situation. We call on the sides to display restraint, and most importantly to implement the provisions of the trilateral documents, Peskov said. The Kremlin spokesperson said that Russian President Vladimir Putins schedule doesnt include a planned phone conversation with Azeri president Ilham Aliyev on Nagorno Karabakh. Right now its not in the presidents schedule. But if needed such a contact can be organized very swiftly, Peskov said. On August 3, two Artsakh soldiers were killed and 19 others were wounded when Azerbaijani forces violated the ceasefire and launched an attack on Artsakh military positions. The Azerbaijani military used mortars, grenade-launchers, combat UAVs in attacking a permanent deployment location of an Artsakh military base. The Russian peacekeeping force officially stated that Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. Russian Foreign Ministry is strongly concerned about the escalation of the situation around the Lachin corridor and other sections of the Nagorno Karabakh Line of Contact. The Russian peacekeepers are making all necessary efforts to stabilize the situation on the spot. Active work is being done with both sides through all channels and all levels, including the countrys top leadership. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is in close contact with his Azerbaijani and Armenian counterparts, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. We call on the sides to show restraint and observe the ceasefire regime. The settlement of existing disagreements should take place exclusively through political-diplomatic means by taking into account the positions of the sides and strictly observing the provisions of the 2020 November 9 statement of the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. We are convinced that the efforts of the sides should be focused on forming a positive agenda in the relations between Baku and Yerevan within the frames of existing trilateral negotiation formats, the statement adds. The Russian Foreign Ministry also expressed condolences to the families and relatives of those killed as a result of the escalation of the situation in Nagorno Karabakh. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. NATO calls for immediately ceasing the hostilities between the Armenian and Azerbaijani forces and returning to the negotiation table. NATO calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces. We deeply regret the loss of life and urge both sides to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table, Javier Colomina, NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy and Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, said on Twitter, adding: NATO supports the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. On August 3, two Artsakh soldiers were killed and 19 others were wounded when Azerbaijani forces violated the ceasefire and launched an attack on Artsakh military positions. The Azerbaijani military used mortars, grenade-launchers, combat UAVs in attacking a permanent deployment location of an Artsakh military base. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. The President of the European Council Charles Michel is in close contact with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan over the issue of their relations. He has already talked with the Prime Minister of Armenia and will talk with the President of Azerbaijan as well, ARMENPRESS was informed from the EU. It is also noted that Charles Michel's team and EU Special Representative Toivo Klaar have been in intensive contact with both sides in recent days to achieve immediate de-escalation and progress through dialogue on all the issues on the agenda. The tension in Nagorno-Karabakh started on August 1, when, according to the Artsakh Defense Army, Azerbaijani units resorted to provocation in a number of parts of the northern and northwestern border zone of the Artsakh Republic starting at 09:00 in the morning, trying to cross the contact line. As a result of the Azerbaijani provocation, the serviceman Albert Bakhshiyan was injured. Aggressive actions of the Azerbaijani side continued in the following days. On August 3, around 3:00 p.m., Azerbaijani units launched a new attack in the northwestern direction of the contact line, using attack drones, as a result of which two servicemen of the Artsakh Defense Army were killed, and 14 more servicemen were wounded in various degrees. YEREVAN, AUGUST 4, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian Assembly of America calls upon His Excellency Mr. Abdulla Shahid, President of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and current Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Maldives, to affirm the Armenian Genocide following the deletion of his original statement on Twitter about his visit to the Armenian Genocide Memorial (Tsitsernakaberd) and Museum-Institute in Yerevan on July 27, 2022, ARMENPRESS was informed from the Armenian Assembly of America. In response, Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) stated that The UN should not be complicit in Turkey's rejection of history. UN General Assembly President Abdulla Shahid was wrong for deleting his tweet and capitulating to pressure from Turkey. To date, 31 countries and dozens of international organizations recognize the genocide of the Armenian people committed by the Ottoman Turkish Empire from 1915-1923, which resulted in the loss of 1.5 million Armenians and the dispossession of a nation from its three millennia-old Western Armenian homeland. The UNGA codified the crime of genocide by adopting the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) in December 1948, heeding many of distinguished international human rights lawyer Raphael Lemkins ideas, who coined the term genocide in 1944 and referenced the 1915 Armenian Genocide as a seminal example of the act of genocide. The UNGA Presidents actions are demonstrative of genocide denial, which is the worst form of hate speech. To honor the 50th anniversary of the Genocide Convention in 1998, over 150 distinguished scholars and writers issued a statement to commemorate the Armenian Genocide and condemn the Turkish government's denial of this crime against humanity. In the statement, the scholars emphasized that the denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators. Denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide. It is what Elie Wiesel has called a double killing. Denial murders the dignity of the survivors and seeks to destroy remembrance of the crime. UNGA President Shahids action undermines the international communitys trust in and responsibilities towards upholding the letter and spirit of the UN Genocide Convention. The Armenian Assembly of America urges UNGA President Shahid to issue a public explanation and retraction with respect to his deleted tweet, and affirm his commitment to recognize the Armenian Genocide and condemn its denial. United States Congressman Frank Pallone is calling on Washington to use every diplomatic tool available to halt Aliyev's dangerous actions following the latest Azerbaijani attacks in Artsakh. August 4, 2022, 10:47 Congressman Pallone calls for every US diplomatic tool available to halt Aliyev's dangerous actions STEPANAKERT, AUGUST 4, ARTSAKHPRESS: This is the latest example of Aliyev threatening the people of Artsakh over absurd demands like the closing of the Lachin corridor. I urge the US State Department and the US Mission to OSCE to condemn these actions and use every diplomatic tool available to halt Aliyev's dangerous actions, Pallone tweeted. Armenia expects that any attempt to breach the line of contact in Nagorno Karabakh will be thwarted by the Russian peacekeeping contingent, and that the Azerbaijani military detachments located inside from the line of contact will be withdrawn, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at the Cabinet meeting. August 4, 2022, 11:29 Armenia expects Russian peacekeepers to thwart any attempt of breaching line of contact in Nagorno Karabakh Pashinyan STEPANAKERT, AUGUST 4, ARTSAKHPRESS-ARMENPRESS: A number of institutional issues exist in relation to this issue. Namely, point 3 of the 2020 November 9 trilateral statement clearly says that a line of contact exists in Nagorno Karabakh and the Russian peacekeepers are deployed along it. This is the area which is called the area of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in NK. We expect that any attempt to cross the line of contact will be thwarted by the Russian peacekeeping contingent, and that the Azerbaijani military detachments located inside from the line of contact will be withdrawn, the Armenian PM said. Speaking on the Russian peacekeeping contingents mandate, which Azerbaijan refuses to sign, the PM said that the signatures of Armenia and Russia are sufficient to fully implement this mandate. If not, then it is necessary to take measures to approve this mandate internationally or give a wider international mandate to the peacekeepers. I dont want to open up too many working details now, but weve been concerned about these issues since November 2020, weve made efforts to achieve concrete solutions and now these efforts must be doubled and tripled, the PM said. On August 3, two Artsakh soldiers were killed and 19 others were wounded when Azerbaijani forces violated the ceasefire and launched an attack on Artsakh military positions. The Azerbaijani military used mortars, grenade-launchers, combat UAVs in attacking a permanent deployment location of an Artsakh military base. NATO calls for immediately ceasing the hostilities between the Armenian and Azerbaijani forces and returning to the negotiation table. August 4, 2022, 17:09 NATO calls on Azerbaijani and Armenian sides to return to negotiating table STEPANAKERT, AUGUST 4, ARTSAKHPRESS: NATO calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces. We deeply regret the loss of life and urge both sides to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table, Javier Colomina, NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy and Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, said on Twitter, adding: NATO supports the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. An Auburn woman facing a murder charge from a March shooting death will remain in Cayuga County Jail without bail. Shameek Marie Copes, 28, of 1 Jefferson St., Apt. 1, was in front of Judge Thomas Leone for motion arguments in Cayuga County Court Thursday. Copes was charged by the Auburn Police Department in the shooting of John Wesley Smith III, 37, of Syracuse, who was found dead in front of Swifty's Tavern in Auburn around 1:40 a.m. March 15. During arraignment in late May, Copes entered not guilty pleas to charges of second-degree murder and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. Acting Cayuga County District Attorney Brittany Grome Antonacci said at the time that Copes was "caught on video shooting and killing the victim." In court Thursday, Rome Canzano, Copes' attorney, argued for the judge to set bail for his client, as she has been held at the Cayuga County Jail since being arraigned. Canzano said Copes has maintained that she had been in the process of moving while she was out of state earlier this year when police were searching for her and that she turned herself in to authorities in South Carolina when an arrest warrant was issued for her in Cayuga County. Canzano said Copes also indicated to him that she was "not a flight risk." Cayuga County Chief Assistant District Attorney Chris Valdina said Copes had fled to South Carolina. He argued against Copes receiving bail. "She's facing a life sentence. I don't think (bail) is a good idea at all. She's a tremendous flight risk," Valdina said. Leone ultimately remanded Copes back to the jail and did not set bail. Grome Antonacci previously noted Copes is facing maximum sentences of 25 years to life in state prison for the murder charge and 15 years in prison and five years of post-release supervision on the weapon count, running concurrently. Canzano also said in court Thursday that he has been unable to file motions because he doesn't have all of the discovery materials relevant to the case, saying there are "well over 1,000 pages" of discovery documents related to the case. Valdina said Canzano already had the "major parts" of the case, including videos and "major police reports." Leone gave the Cayuga County District Attorney's Office 45 days to gather all of the evidence so Canzano can file his motions. Copes' next day in court is scheduled for Oct. 27. Beginning in 2024, you will be able to get your own Harriet Tubman coin and most of the proceeds could benefit the abolitionist's former property in Auburn. President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Commemorative Coin Act. The bill requires the U.S. Treasury to produce up to 50,000 $5 gold coins, 400,000 $1 silver coins and 750,000 half-dollar coins. Consumers will pay surcharges $35 for the $5 coins, $10 for the $1 coins and $5 for the half-dollars. Two sites the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati will split the surcharges as long as the entities raise matching funds from private sources. If all the coins are sold, each organization will receive $4.75 million. The coins will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Tubman's birth. The American icon, who escaped from slavery, helped free others from bondage, served with the Union Army during the Civil War and spent the latter part of her life in Auburn, was born in 1822. Events are being held this year to commemorate her birth. In a news release, the White House thanked U.S. Reps. John Katko and Gregory Meeks, who introduced the bill in the House of Representatives, and U.S. Sens. Tom Carper, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman and Jacky Rosen. Rosen and Portman carried the bill in the Senate. After Congress gave final approval to the bill last week, Katko said that it was "one of the most significant steps forward in strengthening federal recognition of the Harriet Tubman Home since its designation as a national park in 2017." "Specifically, I am pleased that the coins issued under this legislation, bearing Harriet Tubman's likeness and symbolizing her legacy, will directly benefit preservation and education efforts at the Tubman Home in Auburn," he said. Katko, R-Camillus, first introduced the Tubman coin bill with Meeks, a Queens Democrat, in 2020. The bill did not receive a vote that year. In 2021, the New York congressmen reintroduced the measure. The revised version of the bill included the Harriet Tubman Home as one of the sites that would benefit from the sale of the coins. The initial proposal identified Project Legacy, a New York City nonprofit, as the potential recipient of the coin surcharges. This year, the bill gained momentum. The Senate passed it in February with no opposition. When the House voted on it in July, no member objected so it passed by voice vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who pushed for the establishment of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, believes the coins will help continue to tell Tubman's story and support the Harriet Tubman Home, which is part of the park. "The Harriet Tubman Home in Cayuga County is a beloved site that welcomes visitors from across the country to teach them of Tubman's extraordinary American life and today it has received the long overdue recognition it deserves," Schumer, D-N.Y., said. The law requires that the coins be "emblematic of the legacy of Harriet Tubman as an abolitionist." Tubman's likeness will appear on the coin. The Treasury Department will consult with the Harriet Tubman Home, among other organizations, before selecting the coin's design, which will also be reviewed by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. The coin will not affect plans to put Tubman's image on the new $20 bill. The Biden administration committed to placing the abolitionist's likeness on the redesigned note. Major local governments like Erie County buy tons of road salt every year to keep roadways safe and ice free during Western New York's frigid winters. But a state bill requiring that rock salt be purchased in only the United States has gotten the attention of highway superintendents around the state. The proposed law could cost Erie County hundreds of thousands of dollars, and other communities are facing the same type of increase. "It really boils down to two things: Were concerned about the increased cost, as expressed in the letter, and were concerned that if you limit the number of suppliers, that we may have some problems getting supplies of road salt when we really need them at critical times during the winter," said Bruce Geiger, legislative representative for the New York State County Highway Superintendent's Association, which wants Gov. Kathy Hochul to veto the bill. The state's Buy American Salt Act, which has passed in the Assembly and State Senate, was co-sponsored by Sen. Timothy Kennedy, D-Buffalo. The concerns raised by the association led to changes in the bill that would allow local and state government to buy from foreign sources if the requirement to buy in the United States "would result in unreasonable costs." The bill also allows governments in New York to buy foreign salt if there is an insufficient domestic supply. That change should put everyone at ease, said representatives for Kennedy and other bill proponents. "The provisions of this bill would not apply if the American-mined cost is not reasonable, not in the public's best interest or not readily available," said Mario Cilento, president of the New York State AFL-CIO, in a statement to The Buffalo News. "This bill simply allows state and local governments to go above the lowest bid in order to support jobs right here in New York and in this country." New York state is home to two salt mines. One is owned by American Rock Salt, which produces 4 million tons of salt a year and is based in Livingston County. The other is the Cayuga Salt Mine in Tompkins County, owned by Minnesota-based Cargill. American Rock Salt is the larger of the two mines and is locally owned and operated, employing roughly 400 employees, said Chief Administrative Officer Mark Assini. The mine represents the single largest employer in Livingston County. "We are the largest salt mine in the United States," he said. Supplying rock salt in New York is not a problem, he said. But freighters docking in New York ports and bringing in rock salt from Egypt, Morocco and Chile is, he said. Those countries offer substandard pay and don't have the same regulatory oversight regarding environmental protection or miner safety, he said, citing Egypt in particular for human rights violations. Those imports have caused American Rock Salt to lose between 300,000 and 400,000 tons of salt business a year, he said. "That's a big deal for us," he said. "That's several weeks of work for our employees." Opponents of the bill cite two problems. The first is that for some New York counties near the Canadian border, like Erie County, the law makes it harder to purchase salt from Canada, which is geographically close and not comparable with overseas foreign suppliers. Erie County likes to have salt-buying options from multiple suppliers to safeguard against potential supply shortages, said Erie County Public Works Commissioner William Geary. Assini also conceded that the law was not meant to apply to countries like Canada, though he also said American Rock Salt is easily capable of supplying sufficient salt nationwide. The only snag that exists is the amount of salt that truckers can physically deliver. Geiger, of the highway superintendents association, also said he worried about the vague language that exists to allow governments to buy from foreign sources in certain circumstances. "Who makes that determination?" he said, expressing concern about municipalities' potential exposure to litigation. Geary said Erie County typically buys from domestic suppliers like American Rock Salt but also wants the flexibility of contracting with suppliers across the border. A spokesman for Hochul said the governor is reviewing the legislation. Assini said he's hopeful the governor will sign the pro-American labor bill into law around Labor Day. Despite Erie County budget concerns expressed two weeks ago, the County Executive's Office said it has no opinion about the pending legislation. Officials with American Rock salt said the county contracted to buy salt from American Rock Salt earlier this month. An Ontario-based salt supplier, Compass Minerals, came in with a higher price this season. Shanghai (Gasgoo)- BYD Company Limited ("BYD") saw its monthly auto sales hit another record high of 162,530 units in July 2022, zooming up 183.1% year on year, while also growing 21.26% month on month, the company announced on Wednesday. The new vehicles sold last month were all new energy vehicles (NEVs) as BYD ceased the production of cars powered only by internal combustion engines in March this year.Compared to the same span in 2021, BYD's NEV sales in July soared 221.89%. The blooming growth was entirely ascribed to the 224.06% year-on-year surge in new energy passenger vehicles ("NEPV") sales, which stood at 162,214 units. Nevertheless, the July sales of new energy commercial vehicles still fell at a two-digit rate year over year. For the first seven months of 2022, BYD sold 808,929 vehicles in total, representing a 166.01% year-on-year spike. Its year-to-date NEV sales reached 803,880 units, surging 292% from a year earlier. Regarding sales of its main vehicle models, the Han family recorded a sales volume of 25,849 units in July. Notably, the sales of the BYD Han DM rocketed 387.3% from the year-ago period.In addition, the Tang, Song, Qin, and Yuan series saw their monthly sales reach 11,788 units, 38,697 units, 34,114 units, and 22,172 units last month, respectively.The automaker also sold 7,548 Destroyer 05 (Quzhujian 05) sedans in July, which edged up 1.1% from the previous month. Meanwhile, the sales of the Dolphin all-electric car came in at 21,005 units, shooting up 102.4% from a month ago. The 2022 Fortune Global 500 list was announced on August 3 with BYD taking a place for the first time. The company is on the path to be internationally competitive. Currently, BYD's NEV footprint extends to over 400 cities across 70 countries and regions worldwide. On July 21, BYD announced its official entry into the passenger vehicle market in Japan. With Gasgoo Daily, we will offer daily important automotive news in China. For those we have reported, the title of the piece will include a hyperlink, which will provide detailed information. XPeng G9 said to start presale on August 10th XPengs flagship SUV model, the G9, is anticipated to kick off presale on August 10th. The model is expected to officially hit the market in September. Photo credit: XPeng Changan Automobile to launch all-new pickup truck Changan Automobile released official spy shots of its brand-new pickup truck model. The model is said to vie with the Poer series from Great Wall Motor. The new model will be powered by the automakers trademarked Langjing (Blue Whale) powertrain with a 2.0T engine. 2022 AION V Plus to be showcased at Chengdu Motor Show 2022 The 2022 AION V Plus will be showcased at the Chengdu Motor Show 2022. The refreshed model offers a seven-seater option. The current version of the AION V Plus hit the market in September last year, positioned as a compact SUV. King Long Motor Group sells 2,725 vehicles in July Chinese commercial vehicle manufacturer King Long Motor Group saw a 18.87% year-over-year decline in its monthly sales, with a total of 2,725 vehicles sold in July. SAIC Motor puts 410 FCVs into commercial operation On August 4, a ceremony was held in Shanghai to put 410 fuel cell vehicles ("FCVs") of SAIC Motor into commercial operation, the Shanghai-based auto giant announced via its WeChat account. Dongfeng Nissans Venucia to initiate new energy vehicle transformation in H2 2022 Dongfeng Nissan, the joint venture between Dongfeng Motor and Nissan Motor, released its operation plan for the second half of this year regarding its three brands. Crewless mining solution supplier WAYTOUS lands strategic fund from Far East Horizon Chinas crewless mining solution provider WAYTOUS received a strategic investment from the countrys financing and industrial conglomerate Far East Horizons FE Fund. ZF inks agreement to expand EPS production capacity in Anting factory ZF Automotive Technologies (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. ("ZF Shanghai"), a subsidiary of German auto parts supplier ZF, on August 3 inked an investment agreement with Shanghai Anting Economic Development Center to expand its EPS (Electrically Powered Steering) system production capacity in China. Geely-backed Geometry to adopt Huawei HarmonyOS On August 4th, Geelys new energy vehicle brand Geometry announced the adpotion of Huaweis HarmonyOS on its vehicles. Innovusions new ultra-long-range AI LiDAR to be deployed by Baidu Apollo Chinese LiDAR supplier Innovusion introduced its one-piece ultra-long-range AI LiDAR, the Falcon AI. The product will be deployed by Baidu Apollo in its roadside solutions. BYD's monthly vehicle sales exceed 160,000 units for first time BYD Company Limited ("BYD") saw its monthly auto sales hit another record high of 162,530 units in July 2022, zooming up 183.1% year on year, while also growing 21.26% month on month, the company announced on Wednesday. The new Predator prequel is set 300 years ago, but star Amber Midthunder believes the film makes present-day history. Midthunder says Prey is groundbreaking through its depiction of the Indigenous characters who confront a bloodthirsty alien Predator who arrives in the Comanche Nation. Just the way that the characters are built and portrayed, especially in a period piece, is something that you so rarely see for Indigenous characters, Midthunder told the Daily News. Often, you think Native characters are either overly spiritual or theyre just really savage and kind of subhuman and one-dimensional, and you never get to see a variety of Native people who have full personalities and desires, and things to relate to, and relationships. On top of being a really exciting movie, Im extremely proud of that. Midthunder, 25, stars as Naru, an underestimated Comanche warrior eager to prove she belongs with the male hunters in her tribe. She faces her biggest challenge yet when the Predator lands on Earth and starts hunting humans for sport. Out Friday on Hulu, Prey features a cast of predominantly Native and First Nation actors. There are so many pieces in this film, in terms of Indigenous representation ... that have never been done before, said Midthunder, who is Sahiya Nakoda. Every single actor came back and dubbed their role entirely in Comanche, and that version of the film is being released at the same time as the English release on Hulu. Prey is the fifth standalone entry to the science-fiction franchise, which began with 1987s Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The new film takes audiences back to the beginning, showing how the Predator got to Earth and depicting its first hunt on the planet. Being a prequel, it definitely does go far enough back that it stands on its own story, Midthunder said. It is definitely an independent film from the others, as well as being connected, and I think thats what makes the Predator franchise fun in general. Theres the through line of having the Predator, but each movie nods to the others and simultaneously is its own story. Midthunder appreciated the films attention detail, with multiple scenes taking at least a week to shoot. Before production began, the actress and her co-stars underwent a four-week program to learn their stunts and train with weapons. Building the Predator was a team effort. Actor Dane DiLiegro suited up as the alien, while four members of the production team operated the creatures massive head. The Predator did not scare me, actually, Midthunder said. The first time I saw the Predator, I immediately said, I can take him. I dont know why. That was, I think, my Naru brain. I was mesmerized at how detailed and how real (it looked), because it was just all there. The feet. The hands. The hair. The face. The mouth. Everything is just so intricate. ... There was never a day shooting this movie that was not extremely exciting and challenging. The film marks the latest high-profile project for Midthunder, who is also known for the superhero show Legion and the science-fiction series Roswell, New Mexico. She loved adding a new action hero to the Predator franchise. That alone is just so incredible for women, but especially Indigenous women, to be able to look at a character like that and hopefully feel inspired or relate, or have something that they feel they can identify with, and feel represented and seen, Midthunder said. It is spring in the northern hemisphere, and the peaches cost eighty-nine cents with a digital coupon at Frys. Sam Sifton, the food guy for the New York Times, wrote in his recipe for peach pie that, For most of us, a great and truly perfect peach is a rare event. We can expect but one or two a season, for all our trying. Enter the pie. A peach pie can elevate good peaches to excellence and great ones to the sublime. That is usually true here but I hail from Utah where the peaches, especially Freestone, separate from the pit, etching the flesh red, are usually delicious. But this year, the peaches at Frys have been delicious. They come in hard, but you can press them and feel the slightest give. I had peaches that started hard as rocks and ended still like a rock but shriveled. Its a great peach year. My friends who grew the only peach tree I know about in Flagstaff are back for a visit. I am worried about them. They have nonstop appointments with everyone in town it seems. I picture them zooming up and down Flagstaff streets, weaving themselves back into the community that misses them. One thread from the fabric doesnt destroy the fabric and, when they visit, there is room to weft and warp them back into the fold. In Canyon De Chelly, the Dine planted peach trees and lived off their fruit for decades, even centuries, until Kit Carson came with his soldiers and forced them to walk from their land nearly 400 miles to the Bosque Redono Reservation at Fort Sumner. Carson and his men killed those who couldnt keep up. The survivors forced to live in the Reservation tried to farm the land, but the land wasnt arable. People starved, but some also survived. Eventually, the Dine were able to negotiate a return to their own lands where they started again to farm and raise sheep. Most of the peach trees had burned but a few survived. Reagan Wytsalucy grew up near Gallup, New Mexico. Her father, who grew up near Shonto, Arizona, helping his parents herd sheep, went on to own McDonalds franchises across Navajolands. Wytsalucy transferred from BYU in Provo, Utah to Utah State, in Logan where she could study with agricultural scientists and historians. Although some of the old trees survived, Wytsalucy wanted to find the remnants of the rest. She, her father and two horticulturists took off across Arizona and New Mexico, hunting down lost seed and orchards. It took three years for Wytsalucy to receive her first peach seeds, handed to her by an 85-year-old woman in Canyon de Chelly, a lush collection of gorges in northeastern Arizona in the Navajo Nation. Encouraged by that first success, Wytsalucy kept knocking on doors all over the Four Corners area. Eventually, she tracked down eight more orchards. Now, Wytsalucy works with communities across Navajolands to rediscover and replant these old peach varietals. Not everything can be repaired. One thread from a fabric doesnt fray the entire cloth, but if you take enough pieces out, threads fly far across the land. Wytsalucy is pulling the threads of the story of the peach tree back together but its not easy, and she has community and university support on her side. Trees have weird relationships with the soil in which they grow. In the Ponderosa Forest around Flagstaff, there are mycelia, the netting underneath the ground that produces mushrooms when conditions are right, use their tiny hyphae to transform microorganisms from the soil into nutrients for the trees. Mosses, ferns and dead trees all serve a purpose in the forest. If you take out a tree or a chunk of mycelia, its like taking chunks from a fabric. You lose the structure of the forest. You end up with not a forest but a stand of trees that are hamstrung by their lack of fellow forest partners. The State of Arizonas legislature just approved an expansion of the voucher program. This voucher system has no means testwhich means no matter how much money you make, you can use the $7,000 you make to send your kid to a private school. The previous voucher system was dedicated primarily to kids with special needs, but this new voucher system will provide that $7,000 to any schoolor home schooler. This, combined with the forced birth laws, means you can make money having kids. Recently, a parent tried to explainthrough social media mind youhow ESAs (Empowerment Scholarship Accounts) are necessary for her kids. She said the public schools could not provide individual instruction for her child. But, her childs school experience began after charter schools, and ESAs had already begun to decimate public school funding. If ten students stayed in the public schools, that would have afforded a special education teacher. If twenty students stayed, that would have afforded two and so on. But, instead what we have are people who can afford the difference between the $7,000 they get from public school money and the cost of private education and those who can't. Those who can't have fewer and fewer resources in the public school for lack of those special ed teachers. The current ESA Voucher program had already begun to unravel the fabric. Perhaps it had been just one thread pulled hard. Perhaps we could have recovered from this, but this ESA program intends to burn down the entire forest and take all the trees. It leaves the most vulnerable students who cant make up the difference between the private school, sometimes upwards of $30,000 in tuition and the $7,000 rebate to manage with fewer and fewer resources. It leaves teachers, who have been providing $30,000 per kid worth of education for $7,000 a kid, to try to be the moss, the ferns, the trees and the mycelia. It means schools are not what they were meant to beour community made from one whole cloth. Sam Sifton said theres one good peach a year, but then he offers a recipe for all the peaches. I get it. Your kid is the one great and perfect peach. But peaches in a pie, all together mean the peaches are all sublime. I first learned the fascinating history of the historic Beale Wagon Road when I started working as an archaeologist for the Kaibab National Forest in Williams in June 1990. As I would learn years later, the Kaibabs longtime recreation program leader Dennis Lund, (who sadly passed away in May), had an immense passion for history and sharing it with the public. Shortly before I arrived, Kaibab recreation staff and its band of archaeologists, John Hanson, Teri Cleeland and Larry Lesko, began developing interpretive trails so the public could learn about the forests rich cultural history. Out of those efforts came the Keyhole Sink petroglyph trail that discusses the long history of Native Americans and their ancestral lands; the historic Dow Springs site that interprets homesteading, mining and the railroad logging history near Garland Prairie; historic Route 66 mountain biking, hiking and driving tours; and todays subject, the historic Beale Wagon Roads 23 miles within the Kaibab. In the 1970s, Northern Arizona University student Jack Beale Smith was working on his masters thesis about the history of the Beale Wagon Road. In 1857, Congress allocated $210,000 to retired Navy Lt. Edward Beale to survey and build a wagon road across the Southwest from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the Colorado River. The effort became known as the Great Camel Experiment because Beale obtained 22 Middle Eastern camels to carry supplies and tools for his crew of about 50 men. The lieutenant found these ships of the desert surprisingly effective at packing heavy loads across the dry, rocky landscape, but his experiment failed in the eyes of muleskinners who considered the animals foul smelling, evil-tempered and ugly. At every opportunity in his journals, clearly trying to prove a point, Beale praised the camels. On Oct. 6, 1857, he wrote, ... it is so universally acknowledged in camp, even by those who were most opposed to them at first, that they are the salt of the party and the noblest brute alive ... they have been used on every reconnaissance whilst the mules were resting, and having gone down the precipitous sides of rough volcanic mesas, which mules would not descend until the camels were first taken down as an example. With all this work they are perfectly content to eat anything, from the driest greasewood bush to a thorny prickly pear, and, what is better, keep fat on it. Beales road-building efforts proved successful and thousands of emigrants followed his road westward. Across northern Arizona it was the transportation harbinger of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, the Old Trails Highway, Route 66 and todays Interstate 40. As part of his research, Smith meticulously pored over Beales journals and mapped the entire route from Fort Smith across Arizona. When he approached Kaibab officials about marking the trail across the national forest in the late 1980s, thanks to Lund and his staffs foresight, they contracted with Smith and his professor, Eldon Bowman, to mark the 23 miles with wooden posts, rock cairns, survey markers and tree blazes. The Forest Service then produced an interpretive brochure so the public could follow the route via foot and in some places on forest roads. However, over the years, juniper encroachment in the historic grassland made the markers difficult to follow. In fall 2013, fellow Kaibab archaeologist Liz Lane and I created a Geographic Position Systems (GPS) record of these markers so visitors could follow the overland hiking sections without getting offtrack. We often laughed about how fun it would be to ride camels across the overland sections, just like Beale did. Fast forward to June 28, when my fellow Willow Bend Environmental Center board pal Eric Souders, after years of my nagging him, agreed to take me out on the Kaibab with his two camels Rakuda (two-humped Bactrian) and Gamal (one-humped Dromedary). Beale had both types on his trips. Eric and I met at his ranch in Doney Park and loaded up the camels for the short drive to the western edge of Government Prairie. However, I have reached my word limit, so you will have to wait until my next Ask a Ranger column. Legal Aid of Nebraska, a statewide provider of free civil legal services, recently recognized outgoing board member and Beatrice attorney Michael Willet by renaming the Lincoln Legal Aid Office Client Services Center, the Michael Willet Client Services Center. Willet began his service in 1988 on the Legal Services of Southeast Nebraska board, which eventually consolidated with Western Nebraska Legal Services and The Legal Aid Society of Omaha to become Legal Aid of Nebraska, which has served low-income Nebraskans for nearly 60 years. Throughout his tenure, Willet helped to shepherd the merger and oversee the organizations financial growth. As a volunteer board member, his long and steadfast commitment to Legal Aid ensured equal access to justice was available to low-income Nebraskans. Today, Legal Aid is the largest statewide non-profit civil legal aid provider in Nebraska, providing free high-quality services to low-income Nebraskans in all 93 counties, with offices in Lincoln, Omaha, North Platte, Norfolk, Grand Island, Scottsbluff, and Bancroft. Receiving nearly 1,400 requests for assistance a month and serving an average of 10,000 Nebraskans a year, the organization provides low-income Nebraskans with legal assistance in areas such as eviction and housing-related issues, garnishment, child custody, divorce, domestic violence, bankruptcy, and issues with public benefits. For more information on Legal Aid of Nebraska and how to obtain free legal services, visit www.legalaidofnebraska.org. Novel voices echoed through the halls of the Beatrice Public Schools Administration Building. 18 new BPS teachers began training for the school year this week. Beatrice Assistant Superintendent Jackie Nielsen said 18 is a pretty common number of new teachers, though she suspects, with retirements on the horizon, that the range will grow to between 18 and 23 new teachers in the coming years. Nielsen said all staff will return to BPS next Monday, preparing for the Thursday, August 11 start of school. This week give new teachers the opportunity to find their bearings. "They're becoming one cohesive group," Nielsen said. "It's been so nice to see them talking and learning about each other. There isn't a lot of quiet time... We have pre-school teachers talking to high school teachers... That's important because we stress our saying of 'One school, one family,' and "One district, one family.' It gives them a common vision." The teachers will be challenged to a scavenger hunt on Wednesday afternoon, where they will look for clues and complete challenges throughout Beatrice. "This will allow them to better connect with the Beatrice community and find resources here," Nielsen said. New teachers and why they became teachers: Kirsten Baete - Paddock Lane Elementary, Special Education "I became a teacher because my mom is a special education teacher at Lincoln elementary and I loved going and working with her. I have always had a heart for teaching and working with young kids. I can remember the day where I knew 100% I wanted to be a teacher and I was in Mrs. Johnson's 4th grade class job shadowing and it just hit me. I had a lot of really good teachers growing up that inspired me to be a great teacher for my students someday. Plus, I still act like a kid most of the times, so I figured I would fit right in." Megan Dimas- 3rd Grade at Paddock Lane "I have always worked with children, but didnt think I wanted to be a teacher as a career. After trying many different career paths, I tried out and fell in love with teaching and I truly see the effects of a good solid education." Kathryn Katz- Elementary Media Specialist at Paddock, Lincoln and Stoddard Elementary "I started out as a substitute teacher so that I could see my own kids, get to know their teachers and be involved in their schools... however I quickly realized that I loved being in the classroom and I loved teaching. I then went back to school to get my Master's and teaching credential." Heather Garrelts- Beatrice High School, English Language Arts "I moved around so much as a kid that school was one thing I could always count on to be there." Robin Sugden- Beatrice Middle School, 6th Grade Resource "I became a teacher because I wanted to help children be the best that they could be in all areas and watch their face light up when they accomplished something that they had been striving for. I pride myself in being able to build relationships with all students and let them realize that they are important and I care about them." Carrie Jones- Beatrice Community Preschool, teaching 3-year-olds "I became a teacher because of the students. I love to watch them learn and grow each and every year! The joy the children bring each day with their smiles and the way they learn is the reason for me to always continuing learning as a teacher as well." Katie Sladek- BHS Counselor "I became a teacher and school counselor because of the influence of so many amazing educators before me. The support of my teachers, high school counselor, and college professors pushed me to become who I am today. I want to make that same impact in other students lives as well." Trish Diekman- Paddock Lane 5th grade "I became a teacher to give our future leaders a great foundation to set them up for success." Melissa Omar- Beatrice Middle School 8th Grade Resource "I had some great teachers growing up that made me excited to come to school. I wanted to have that same impact." Morgan Neverve- 9-12 Art at BHS "I love art in all of its forms and how it helps people communicate without words. I wanted to help others grow and learn about all of the possibilities along with me." Brian Doland- Paddock Lane Elementary, CORE "I have a strong passion for helping students find their confidence and practicing grit when attempting hard things. I discovered my passion for education back in 2014 when I worked as a Special Ed Para with Lincoln Public Schools. I love being a teacher." Nicole Grummert- Resource Teacher at Paddock Lane "I wanted to become a teacher so that I could have a positive influence in the lives of children." Jalen Weeks- Paddock Lane, 4th Grade "I became a teacher because I want to help students find the things that inspire them just like many of my teachers did for me when I was a student at Beatrice Public Schools." Brooklyn Stara- Beatrice Middle School, 7/8th English Language Arts "To provide an environment that is safe and welcoming for all students to help give them the best quality of education." Miranda Niemeier- Band at Beatrice High School "To help make the world a better place through music" Megan Gronewold- Speech-language Pathologist at Lincoln Elementary School "I became a speech-language pathologist because I love helping children communicate effectively. I enjoy seeing my students progress and develop skills that will help them communicate with peers, develop confidence, and succeed in the classroom." Amy Huls- Paddock Lane, Alternate Curriculum Program 3rd-5th "I became a teacher to shape young minds and I have always had a passion for teaching. As a kid I struggled in school but even when I was struggling I still found away to help my peers by helping them understand assignments or understanding new concepts that were taught." Derek Tomjack- SNAP through ESU #5 Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) (Michael Brochstein/Zuma Press/Newscom) A week before the House of Representatives approved a ban on "assault weapons," a federal judge in Denver explained why such laws are unlikely to pass constitutional muster. House Democrats either were not paying attention or did not care, because they view the Second Amendment as an outmoded provision that imposes no meaningful limits on gun control. Unfortunately for them, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held otherwise, ruling that the government may not prohibit law-abiding Americans from keeping handguns at home or carrying them in public for self-defense. The Court also has said the Second Amendment covers bearable arms "in common use" for "lawful purposes," which presents a problem for Democrats who want to ban many of the most popular rifles sold in the United States. On July 22, U.S. District Judge Raymond P. Moore, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, issued a temporary restraining order that bars Superior, Colorado, from enforcing its ban on "assault weapons." The city defines that category to include semi-automatic center-fire rifles that accept detachable magazines and have any of four features: a pistol grip, a folding or telescoping stock, a flash suppressor, or a barrel shroud. Two gun-rights groups argued that Superior's ordinance, which also bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, violated the Second Amendment. Moore concluded that they had "a strong likelihood of success on the merits." ..... Two brothers from East Helena accused of participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach in Washington, D.C., have reached a deal with federal prosecutors in which they are expected to plead guilty to obstruction, attorneys said Thursday. Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Allen told U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly during a Zoom status conference that Jerod and Joshua Hughes, who had nine counts filed against them, have agreed to plead guilty to the single charge. The remaining counts will be dismissed, Joshua Hughes' attorney said. Kelly set an Aug. 24 date for the change of plea hearing. He said he would permit the plea hearing to be held online, but said he would want the brothers to appear before him in Washington, D.C., for the sentencing. He asked Allen if the brothers should be heard separately and that is when Allen said they would both plead guilty to the same obstruction count. The news comes 575 days after a mob of supporters for then-President Donald Trump broke into the Capitol to contest the Electoral College vote being certified that would name Democrat Joe Biden as president. The Hughes brothers were part of a group who broke open windows and doors to get into the Capitol, according to federal court documents. The brothers, who drove to Washington, D.C., from Montana, turned themselves into authorities after they returned to Montana and initially were incarcerated in early 2021. They pleaded not guilty and were released from custody pending trial, on their own recognizance. Jerod and Joshua Hughes were charged with nine counts that include civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting; destruction of government property and aiding and abetting; entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; entering and remaining on the floor of Congress; entering and remaining in certain rooms in the Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building. The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has said the Hughes brothers placed themselves at the tip of the spear that day, actively engaged in the destruction of government property, harassed and interfered with Capitol police and obstructed a joint session of Congress. The brothers followed a man who pursued Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs and later found their way to the Senate floor, prosecutors said. Helena attorney Palmer Hoovestal, who is representing Joshua Hughes, told Lee Newspapers on Thursday the obstruction charge could bring his client 41-51 months of incarceration. Well obviously dispute that, he said, adding he was not happy with the guideline range and will ask the judge to reduce it. Hoovestal said he was sure his client felt remorse for participating Jan. 6, and added The scope of his participation was to follow the crowd. He didnt touch anything or break anything, he added. He made a poor decision when he went in and unfortunately was one of the first people who entered. Hoovestal said his client, who had a motorcycle helmet strapped to his backpack to put on in case left-wing activists became hostile, was extremely different than the other rioters. He was merely present and did not participate in any destructive conduct, he said. Jonathan Zucker, the attorney representing Jerod Hughes, did not return a call seeking comment. This story has been updated to say Jerod Hughes attorney did not return a call. Answers. Its a word that cant be found in the 150-some page bill granting health care to U.S. troops exposed to the toxic smoke of burn pits at military outposts over the past 20 years, but it is what veterans like Jeff Schepp hope will be delivered. Until now, medical professionals for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs havent treated veterans for toxic exposure. Veterans presenting symptoms believed to be associated with burn pits have been handed a survey to fill out, a chance to register their symptoms and identify exactly where it was they were exposed to toxins. Thats pretty much where the conversation has ended for more than 250,000 veterans according to VA reports. The PACT Act, which passed the Senate 86 to 11 on Tuesday night, will spend money not only looking for answers about toxic exposure, but also treating veterans. As many as 3.5 million combat veterans have been exposed to toxics while serving, according to the Department of Defense. It is unknown how many suffer from the related medical conditions, in part because Veterans Affairs has kept inquiries about toxic exposure to a minimum. It was just last year the VA added asthma, rhinitis and sinusitis to its list of presumptive conditions for disability claims, largely because of the registry, according to Defense Department records. But, what it didnt do was investigate burn pits as a root cause. The the VA has no evidence-based treatments for burn pit exposure. There are a lot of veterans that are suffering, and they dont know the cause of their issues, Schepp said Wednesday. I think the passing of this bill will allocate funding for research, so we do know. Veterans' frustration about the origins of their illness, as well as mixed diagnoses from equally confused doctors, turned up in a 2021 report published in the Annals of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. Researchers from Harvard, the California State University System, and the VA, identified 23 presumptive conditions reported by veterans registering problems from toxic exposure. The conditions included brain cancer, interstitial lung disease, and lymphomas, sleep and mood disorders, depression, cognitive impairment and respiratory illness. The report noted veteran frustration about "seeing too many experts who offered contrasting opinions, which caused further confusion." One veteran said "that both Veteran doctors and those who worked outside of the VA system seemed not to know what to do with their health condition. One comment was about disillusionment about the U.S. health care system. The person felt betrayed by the system, but the person was worried about the lack of support for the family when the person is no longer around because of death from ill health." The full report, titled "Slow Burns: A Qualitative Study of Burn Pit and Toxic Exposures Among Military Veterans Serving in Afghanistan, Iraq and Throughout the Middle East" is available for download free of charge. Schepp, state commander of the Montana Veterans of Foreign Wars, is one of those guys looking for answers. He didnt know what he was being exposed to in 2004 when he was deployed. No one did. The same can be said for veterans who where exposed to oil well fires in the Gulf War, or Agent Orange in Vietnam. Veterans from those previous wars are also in the ranks of veterans getting coverage for conditions newly recognized by the just-passed PACT ACT, which is the bills short title. The long title of the bill is the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022. Robinson was among the veterans fighting for this health coverage for more than a decade. He died in 2020 from illnesses stemming from toxic exposure. He served in Iraq and Kosovo as member of the Ohio National Guard. That fight by veterans to get this bill passed outlasted a lot of soldiers like Robinson. One of the big pushes now, Schepp said, is to enroll into the program veterans who are suffering before its too late. There is how a to apply page online for veterans at VA.gov/PACT. Its estimated that there are 66,000 Montana veterans who were exposed, mostly through burn pits. Burn pits have been a mainstay of military life over the past 20 years. As veteran Dylan Jefferson told Lee Montana Newspapers in May, everything on base is burned beyond use as a way of getting rid of things. If those things werent burned, there would be local scavengers, mostly children picking through the waste, which is also a hazard. Everything from munitions containers, medical waste, and electronics at U.S. military encampments gets burned in the pits. Needless to say, guys like Jefferson, who supervised the burning, are messed up. His own symptoms, which flare in the middle of the night, resemble stroke-like paralyses. Burn pits are so ubiquitous at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan that a pilot can point her helicopter at the black smoke on the horizon and be confident theres a military encampment at the other end of the flight. Thats what Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, said he experienced when touring Iraq with former Sen. Jim Webb, of Virginia. Webb left the Senate at the end of 2012. I can remember flying back to the bases where those helicopters were stationed. We flew to the burn pits. We flew to the smoke off of those burn pits, Tester said during Wednesday press call. Tester, is chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. A little more than a year ago, he authored a bill to cover the toxic exposure as a cost of war. That bill didnt make it, largely because of disagreements over the expense. Every generation of veterans has had to fight for benefits, whether its Civil War veterans fighting for pensions, or the veterans from the Spanish American War fighting for benefits. The latter were the creators of the VFW. The expense of benefits has been at the root of every fight. The COST Act was no different. Montana's U.S. representative, Republican Matt Rosendale, objected to the price of the bill and but eventually voted for the Senate version. Tester managed to move the bill forward in the Senate by partnering with his committees ranking member, Republican Jerry Moran, of Kansas. Tester agreed not to bring the bill out of committee without Morans agreement. That deal led to a leaner bill than a version passed in the House earlier. The one passed by the Senate was about $50 billion less, though still $278 billion in total. There havent been many big money bills that received better than an 86 to 11 vote recently. The National Defense Authorization Act, a $770 billion bill that passed in December 2021, was approved 88 to 11 in the Senate, but majorities in the high 80s are more likely to be seen for post office namings. There were speed bumps. Senate Republicans who previously supported the bill as written, including Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines, voted against the bill July 27 in a procedural vote that would have set the PACT Act up for passage last week. There were veterans on Capitol grounds ready to celebrate the bills passage July 27. When the bill stalled, veterans vowed to camp on the grounds until it passed. When it became clear Tuesday that Republicans, Daines included, were again in support of the bill, Tester went to the camped-out vets and thanked them for their resolve. Schepp said the reversal on support for the bill July 27 sparked a flurry of phone calls and emails to senators by veterans. The truth is, is most people who serve in the Senate know about burn pits Tester said. And a lot of these folks have been over to the Middle East. They saw the burn pits. Theyve actually smelled the smoke to come off burn pits they just didn't smell it for an entire tour. How I approached it on the floor to the folks who said, We can't afford this,' and there were a number of people who said, We can't afford this,' I said, you're telling me, we can't afford to take care of our veterans? And they said, Well, we just can't afford this. And I said, well, then we shouldn't send them to begin with. And I will tell you that I think that had had some impact. Veterans suffering from exposure to burn pits and other toxic sources are closer to health coverage Tuesday following Senate passage of the Honoring our PACT Act, a bill Republicans surprisingly walked away from a week earlier. Veterans had camped outside the Capitol for several days following the bills unexpected rejection a week ago. They had gathered July 27 for the bill's expected passage. Tuesday, the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022 passed 86 to 11. Robinson was in the Ohio National Guard when he served in Iraq and Kosovo. He died on 2020 from illnesses stemming from toxic exposure. The Department of Defense estimates that 3.5 million combat veterans were exposed to toxic trash fires and other sources of toxic emissions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Southwest Asia over the past 20 years. Roughly half of those veterans dont have health coverage. For hundreds of thousands of veterans of all generations, for our all-volunteer military, this bill puts us on a path to finally paying the cost of war, said Sen. Jon Tester after the vote. The Montana Democrat, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee had first introduced the comprehensive bill in early 2021, but it wasnt until seven months ago when the committees ranking member, Republican Jerry Moran of Kansas, agreed to partner on getting the bill passed, that the legislation stood a chance. Republicans had previously balked at the bills nearly $300 billion price, which was reduced through the process. Billings veterans who met with Tester in May talked about stroke-like paralysis and burning skin sensation stemming from exposure to pits used by the military to burn waste, some of which emits toxic fumes. The bill also allows residents of Camp Lejeune to seek reparations for exposure to toxic water during a 30-year period from 1950 to 1980. Several toxic exposure deaths are associated with the Marine Corps base in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Vietnam War veterans exposed to the defoliant Agent Orange, also gain coverage under the bill. Last week after earlier votes with strong, bipartisan support, the COST Act failed to muster the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. A lobbying effort against the bill by Sen. Patrick Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, had flipped the outcome. Toomey objected to bill language that guaranteed health care would be covered for 10 years. The lawmaker wanted Congress to vote on the funding annually. Montana Sen. Steve Daines was among the Republicans who sided with Toomey. A video of Daines and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz fist-bumping after the July 27 vote went viral. The moment was referenced in monologue of Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Monday. Tuesday, Daines voted for the PACT Act without the amendment requested by Toomey, or any concession concerning the climate bill. Today, I was glad to vote for the PACT Act to deliver disability and health benefits earned by Montana veterans suffering from toxic exposure that occurred during their military service, Daines said in a press release. In recent days, I worked to ensure the VA is held accountable for meeting the needs of these veterans while also preventing big spenders in Washington from funding unrelated programs. While Im disappointed these improvements did not pass, the PACT Act passed with my full support. I look forward to it becoming law in the very near future. President Joe Biden will now receive the bill for signing. Biden has long supported health coverage for veterans exposed to burn pits. He has suggested that toxic exposure was a cause of the cancer the killed his son Beau, a veteran. If you are looking for Paul Sauder in May, check Mann Lake at the crack of dawn its a safe bet youll find him at the end of the dock fishing for crappie. Sleep in and you are liable to miss him. The 98-year-old Lewiston, Idaho, man often has a stringer full before most people get out of bed. Two years ago, I got 800 off of this dock. Last year, I got 700. This year if I get 200, that will keep me happy, he said. I wore out three filet knives in the last five years. I got a new one in the car. It came in yesterday. According to Idaho Fish and Game records, Sauder is the second-oldest licensed angler in the state. He might be the oldest hunter and hopes to mark his 99th birthday the way he always does, shooting doves on opening day. I love to spend my birthday which is September the first dove hunting. Since Ive been here, Ive been doing it every year. He aspires to tag his 20th elk this fall and plans to pursue deer as well. I love to deer hunt. Theres never been a time we havent had venison or elk in the freezer. Last week, Sauder caught a spring chinook salmon during an excursion with Steel Dreams Guide Service. We get on the boat and were out there about 15 minutes and I hit a 20-pound salmon. And so maybe 20 minutes later, my buddy from Wyoming hooks another one thats two. Sauder headed to his rig for a nap while the rest of the party continued to fish. While I was up there sleeping, my son caught another 20-pounder. So thats three on that trip on the Clearwater. It was really good. If you spend some time with him, Sauder is likely to tell a story or three from his sporting life and maybe a few war stories. For example, theres the time in California he stirred up a hornets nest while packing out a deer. I got 16 stings before I got to the bottom of the hill and my deer was scattered all the way down the mountain. A couple of hours later, after it cooled off, I went back and was able to retrieve my deer. So you can have fun, even in California. During his first trip into Hells Canyon, he and a friend were nearly stranded when their boat got loose while they were on shore taking pictures of bighorn sheep. I said to (the boat driver), We got a problem. He said, Whats that? I said, Theres our boat floating down the stream, and he takes off and this is in the middle of winter he takes off and he swims out there. He dont make it, comes back, takes off more clothes and he runs down the beach until he gets below the boat and swims out again. This time he made it. That saves us 10 miles walking back home. Sauder grew up on a poultry farm near Fort Wayne, Indiana. He went to Bluffton College in Ohio to study conservation and forestry. But World War II intervened and he joined the Marines after he finished his first year of college. I figured if I go (to war), Im gonna go with somebody who knows how to shoot. I understand that the Marine Corps does. He was trained as a meteorologist and given the job of forecasting weather for fighter bombers flying off of Okinawa. I had 15 combat missions with the Navy. I got my Purple Heart on July the Fourth, 1945. Now I thought that was sort of patriotic. After the service, Sauder married his wife, Esther, and they moved to California, where he sold real estate in the San Fernando Valley. About 10 years ago, with his now-late wifes health failing, the couple moved to Lewiston to be close to their grandson Joel Sauder, a nongame biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. His son David now lives in Lewiston as well. Its one of the greatest places Ive ever been. I just enjoy the friendliness of the people. Sauder is looking forward to a walleye fishing trip to the lower Snake River near Little Goose Dam. He also has plenty more crappie to put in the freezer and hunting plans come fall. I dont know how long the Lord will allow me to have all this fun, but I thank him every morning. 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Shes not the first secretary of education weve had who understood her central purpose to be the dissolution of the agency of which she was in charge (until she resigned on January 7, 2021). Ronald Reagan famously pledged the elimination of the office when he ran for president in 1980, promising to undo Carters boondoggle. Terrel Bell, Reagans first secretary of education, insisted that the department should be turned into a foundation, and thus placed under the control of the private sector. Once Bell got wobbly on his commitment to eliminate the agency, Reagan turned control over to William Bennett, who actively called for the departments elimination. Reagans appointment of Bennett to run the agency pointed to a central paradox of modern government: Bureaucratic gains are irreversible, and as a result electoral politics become an intense competition for control of the bureaucratic apparatus. Conservatives could not eliminate the department they loathed, but they could support a secretary who at least seemed sympathetic to their interests. Its in the nature of the idea of public education that it will conflict with private ends. Parents are the first and thus primary educators of their children. The only way to bypass this would be to separate infants from their parents at birth, the path suggested by Socrates when he reflected on the proper formation of the guardian class. In Socrates ideal city, well-bred children would be placed in the care of nurses whose sole commitment is to the good of the city. While it is true that American constitutionalism asked for a well-educated citizenry, the request could never be entertained apart from the demands of liberty and the interests of both households and communities to maintain their independence. Education in America stressed both practical competency and mastery of arts and letters, and this emphasis was always connected to principles of freedom. As America transformed itself from a Republic of republics to a nation of consequence, the demand for more state control of education increased as well, bringing with it a seismic shift in our understanding of what the schools are, what role they ought to play, and on what principles education ought to be conducted. Consider, for example, the educational reforms of Horace Mann, who argued vigorously for government-supported common schools that would bring all children into the nation. Mann stressed three previously contestable aspects of public education: It had to be compulsory, it had to be universal, and it had to be managed by a centralized bureaucracy. Mann cloaked his understanding of public education in religious language, frequently referring to schools as sacred temples or places where, Christ-like, little children were being called to participate in the kingdom of heaven. Clearly schooled in the Bible and Calvinist theology, Mann sought to connect these to life in a democratic society, whose futurity required comprehensive organization and united effort, acting for a common end and under the focal light of a common intelligence. Mann viewed local governments as essential bunglers who couldnt move education toward its goal of ensuring national progress. Parents, likewise, were benighted educators who had only a minimal claim to their childs development. Parents had their children for only a short period of time, after which they would be bequeathed to society as adults. If parents do a bad job with the children, society pays the price. Better, Mann averred, that society intervene early in the process, protect the child from bad parenting, and ensure, via standardized school systems, the production of moral and intelligent adults. One cant bend an oak, he said, but one can move a seed. We see a similar emphasis in the development of the National Education Association, the main client connected to DoE policy and largesse. By 1918, the NEA insisted that schools be able to reach their authority back into the home and reform it, since the home was often a bastion of backwardness, ethnic division, and benightedness. The student could then be charged with carrying the ethos of the state back into the household for the purpose of standardizing households. Such standardization is the key to educational reform in the 20th century. The increase in centralized state authority found its handmaiden in the emergent social sciences, with their emphases on methods, aggregation of populations, and categorization, the last of which tended to see things only as species. These emphases can clearly be found in contemporary education, with the foci on standardized tests, measurable outcomes, and universal curricular guidelines. This nationalization and standardization received more formal status with the creation of the Department of Education in 1980, whose task it was to nationalize education through data collection and research. The department has not only grown in size since its inception but also has grown to dominate the nations educational landscape by using funds to entice schools to pursue both benchmarks and, more damningly, social reform. The emphasis on STEM to the exclusion of humane learning serves Americas position as a competitor in the local marketplace, and social reform and identity politics provide moral cover. Bureaucrats driven by the current social science research substitute their judgment for that of teachers and parents. Clearly DoE has taken center stage in the culture wars (consider the 2011 Dear Colleague letter as an example) and been a central actor in using the coercive power of federal funding to force compliance around a set of cultural markers and expectations. It has certainly not been immune from using its influence to advance a progressive agenda and identity politics. One would expect parents to push back against this. Secretary DeVos tenure was not without controversy, but also not without significant successes, even if eliminating the department wasnt one of them. Rolling back the open attacks on due process on our college campuses was a significant albeit short-lived achievement. And Id be remiss not to mention my favorite moment of her administration: threatening to withhold federal funds from Princeton University after the school issued an opportunistic and disingenuous admission of systemic racism. Just slowing down the progressive agenda was no mean feat. And while I cant speak for Secretary DeVos, my guess is that she rightly divines that such successes will last only as long as conservatives hold some kind of power; and that, furthermore, the internal logic of centralized bureaucratic enterprises will always be progressive, in no small part because the roughly 4,400 employees of that department are overwhelmingly progressive in their views. But even if they werent, the animating principle of the enterprise is to replace parents with teachers, experience with expertise, and local control with national objectives. These national objectives, in turn, are often contrary to the interests and well-being of local communities, particularly when those objectives have an economic or military hue. It may be in the interest of the state to sacrifice citizens in war, but its never in the interest of the parent, and thats true whether its a war of a military or a cultural variety. I will be making popcorn if Walker doesn't just deny that he has agreed to commit campaign suicide in the Georgia US Senate race. Raphael Warnock is one of the most eloquent speakers in the US Senate. Walker is a buffoon. The Root: Sen. Raphael Warnock recently posted a 30-second ad asking when his Republican opponent Herschel Walker will commit to a debate. Previously, Sen. Warnock scheduled three debates before the November elections, including one on Oct. 16, hosted by the Atlanta Press Club. The only question was if Walker would show up despite saying he would do it any day of the week. Walker responded to the ongoing criticism during his Fox News appearance on Tuesday and claimed he and Warnock have agreed to the first debate, The Hill reports. If he is to be truthful, Walker stated he and Sen. Warnock would have the debate on Oct. 14 "in front of a crowd" in Warnock's hometown of Savannah, Ga. The WSAV is set to host the event, and Walker added that it wouldn't involve the "media elite." Google's constellation of online products has long confused me. There is/was Hangouts, Hangouts on Air, Hangouts Chat, Google Chat, Google Workspace, Google Spaces, Google Talk, Google Allo, Google Currents, and probably other products I've forgotten. Now, to make things more confusing, Google is rebranding Duo and Meet, even though it already has a product called Meet. The Verge says it's less confusing as it seems, but I feel as confused as ever: We try not to think about it, but there's an enormous amount of social trust we rely on for daily interactions. A trip to your favorite fast food spot could quickly become tragic if the clerk behind the counter has a screw loose. The same applies to any service person that enters your home. We'd like to believe that whatever vetting process a company utilizes when hiring an employee will shield us from danger, and most times, we're correct. However, there are always a few monsters that slip through the cracks. When Betty Thomas allowed Roy James Holden into her home for a cable installation in 2019, she could have never assumed the man would murder her the following day. A few days ago, Charter Communications, the parent company of Spectrum cable, was forced to pay north of $7 billion in damages to Thomas' family by a Dallas county jury. The story is a chilling reminder of how unpredictable life can be. Poe honors Metrobank Foundation's outstanding Filipinos Sen. Grace Poe hailed this year's awardees of the "Metrobank Foundation Outstanding Filipinos" consisting of teachers, soldiers and police officers who exemplified selfless dedication and extraordinary public service. "It is always uplifting to cross paths with remarkable Filipinos who excel in their field and make a difference in other people's lives even amid the challenging times," said Poe, who served as chairperson of the board of judges. "We have a well of talents across the country just waiting to be recognized, for our people to emulate in promoting the greater good," Poe added. The 10 awardees consisted of four teachers Junmerth Jorta, Christine Joy Dr. Aguila, Mark Nolan Confesor and Leonila Dans; three soldiers Technical Sgt. Joel Tuganan, Col. Maria Victoria Juan and Col. Stephen Cabanlet; and three police officers Police Executive Master Sgt. Rogelio Rodriguez Jr., Police Capt. Rosalino Panlaqui and Police Col. Lambert Suerte. Each will receive a trophy, gold medallion and P1 million in cash. The Foundation annually recognizes exemplars in the academe, military and police who have devoted themselves to their communities even beyond the call of duty. Poe hailed the body for institutionalizing a platform and sustaining recognition for workers who give their best, while deepening public appreciation of the country's teachers and uniformed personnel. Poe is set to file a resolution commending the feats and contributions of the 2022 Metrobank Outstanding Filipinos. The resolution cites the awardees for their hard work and dedication to the country, the zealous performance of their sworn duties and responsibilities beyond reproach as role models for their respective communities. "The deeds of our awardees reflect the indomitable spirit of a true Filipino who pours his/her life to the service of our country and the least of our people in all circumstances," Poe said. Here's a shop you should visit if you're ever in Silver Lake or Eagle Rock (Los Angeles). They also have an online presence, so you actually can 'visit' from anywhere. It's called Vinovore, and it's a wine shop where all of the wines are (1) natural or made with "minimal intervention," and (2) made by women winemakers and produced at women-owned wineries. They have a terrific and well-curated selection of wines, and the folks working in the shop provide all the info you could want if you're not sure what you're looking for or looking at. While you're there you can also pick up flowers, greeting cards, chocolate, ice cream, books, candles, and sex toys. It really is a one-stop-shop for everything you need! We were there over the weekend, looking for a nice sparkling rose. The nice folks working there recommended this one, Faccia Di Vino Dry Rose Lambrusco Natural, from Emilia Romagna, Italy, and made by woman winemaker Coly Den Haan. The Vinovore website describes it like this: "All natural. Super dry tingles. Salted yellow raspberries. Wild herbs. Peach Dreams. Drink it or pour all over your face!" It was way too delicious to waste pouring it all over my face, but I appreciate the sentiment. Go support this awesome business forwarding women winemakers! Starbucks plans to unveil its new NFT program at its upcoming investor's meeting. Perhaps these NFTs with "perks" will distract folks from the store closings. I think that Starbucks may find it has missed the wave with crypto-coffee. TechCranch: Starbucks will unveil its web3 initiative, which includes coffee-themed NFTs, at next month's Investor Day event. The company earlier this year announced its plans to enter the web3 space, noting its NFTs wouldn't just serve as digital collectibles, but would provide their owners with access to exclusive content and other perks. At the time, Starbucks was light on details as to what its debut set of NFTs would look like, specific features they'd provide or even what blockchain it was building on. It said the plan was likely to be multichain or chain-agnostic, hinting at plans that weren't yet finalized. Overall, the coffee retailer kept its web3 news fairly high level, explaining simply that it believed digital collectibles could create an accretive business adjust to its stores and that more would be revealed later in 2022. Thermo Fisher Scientific is a Fortune 500 company with locations around the world and $7.7 billion in profits last year. But the life sciences powerhouse still has high regard for its Grand Island manufacturing plant, where it just completed a $76 million expansion. The investment affirms the Staley Road facility's place within Thermo Fisher's far-reaching operations. The expansion is expected to add 100 jobs to its current local workforce of 1,600. The Grand Island facility makes ingredients used by the biologics and vaccine industries. Those customers' products help treat diseases and illnesses including cancer, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, said Tiffani Manolis, vice president and general manager for cell culture and cell therapy. The investment, job growth and job retention bolsters the region's life sciences sector, which business recruiters have sought to develop for its high wages and growth potential. Some of those businesses are based on Grand Island, but there's also a tie-in with the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. The Massachusetts-based life sciences firm is investing $650 million at several facilities around the world, to step up its manufacturing capacity and serve customers more quickly, Manolis said. The Grand Island plant was a good fit for expansion given the site's history, knowledgeable workforce, infrastructure, and quality and information technology systems, said Eric Nalbach, general manager of media for Thermo Fisher's cell culture and cell therapy business. "It was the right decision," Nalbach said at a Thursday ceremony. "We talked about all the different options and this was the right one, not only for our customers, but for our facility and for the workforce." The high-tech Grand Island operations have humble roots, in the garage of Robert Ferguson, a former Roswell Park Cancer Institute employee. He started a company called Grand Island Biologics Co in 1962 that moved to a facility on Staley Road. The company was subsequently acquired and has undergone different name changes, before becoming part of Thermo Fisher. Gibco remains a brand name used by Thermo Fisher, six decades after it was created. Assemblyman Angelo Morinello, R-Niagara Falls, said the expansion strengthens Thermo Fisher's local connections. "They chose to stay in Grand Island," he said. "These companies can go anywhere in the world. But what did they do? They believed in their workforce." Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, said Thermo Fisher demonstrates the importance of domestic manufacturing, at a time when the United States is struggling to obtain semiconductors produced overseas. "We're coming to realize that if you're not the country that controls the supply chain, you're the country that's controlled by the country that controls the supply chain," he said. "This is why this work, this technology, is so critically important." Nalbach said the Grand Island operation is also a magnet for new hires. "With all the universities that are near us, a lot of the quality teams, the engineers, they're coming right from college to the facility," he said. The locally made apocalyptic thriller G.O.D. Givers of Death from Buffalo's Addison Henderson will have its red carpet premiere at 6 p.m. Aug. 5 at the North Park Theatre. Henderson, who wrote, directed and stars in the film, will be on hand for the event that includes a screening at 7:30 p.m. and a Q&A session afterward. The film opens in theaters nationwide on Aug. 5, the same day it will be available to watch via Apple TV. The North Park will host screenings daily from Aug. 5-11. It will also be available to watch in the future on Amazon and Showtime. "G.O.D." is about a hit man (played by Henderson) who is seeking peace at a time when a deadly virus has killed a third of the population. The lethal and painful disease has caused many to seek out hit men called "Givers" to end their lives. Since being made in Buffalo in 2019, the idea of a worldwide pandemic came true with Covid-19, leading producer Trent Boling to call the film "prophetic." "It was such a great idea by Addison, but you never thought that it was going to happen," Boling said. "A year after making it, we were living in it. It is a timely film." Also starring in the film are Lou Lombardi ("24"), Jonathan Sterritt ("Going Nowhere"), Jason Delane Lee ("Criminal Minds"), Yvonne Huff Lee ("Lucky") and Leah Cohen-Mays. Look for many familiar sights in the film including Woodlawn Beach, the Central Terminal and DBGBs in Allentown that was used for a club scene, as well as such Buffalo actors as JJ Alfieri, Richard Lambert and Pamela Rose Mangus who can be seen in the film's trailer. In a statement about the film, Henderson said he got the idea for "G.O.D." while working with the late Chadwick Boseman on the film "21 Bridges." "I wanted people to examine the meaning of life, question the universe, question God, and really think about what peace means to them," Henderson said. "Inspiration hit me like a wave. I wrote day and night. And, as soon as we wrapped, I went to Buffalo and started raising capital for 'G.O.D.' From script to screen was a nine-month process. It was grueling and there were times when I didnt think it was going to work out. But my team and I pulled through and brought my vision of 'G.O.D.' to life. Buffalo-born filmmaker Addison Henderson comes home to tell his story This Buffalo native-turned-Los Angeles actor and writer is star, director, writer and producer for G.O.D., which is filming in Buffalo through Along with Boling and Henderson, producers are area filmmaker Mac Cappuccino, plus Alfieri and Cohen-Mays. The Los Angeles-based company Buffalo 8 picked up distribution for the film. From Buffalo, Henderson will move on to screenings in Detroit on Aug. 6, Chicago on Aug. 7 and then to Los Angeles on Aug. 10. In addition to his promotional tour for "G.O.D.," Henderson is working on his next film, "Blythe," which he plans to shoot in Buffalo in 2023. The window for New York voters to change political party affiliation before the Aug. 23 primary is closing fast after a court decision Wednesday set a new deadline for Aug. 11. Prior to the reversal by a judge in Steuben County, voters would have had the unprecedented opportunity to change parties through Primary Day. At the behest of the state Board of Elections, acting State Supreme Court Justice Patrick McAllister, the same judge who determined the state's legislative redistricting, established a deadline that precedes the early voting period eliminating some of the unpredictability surrounding state races. Before Wednesday's change, voters had been allowed to change their party affiliation thanks to ripple effects from the state's political roller coaster this year. With two separate primaries June 28 and Aug. 23 established due to delays in solidifying new maps for congressional districts, some typical regulations were thrown into flux. When the second date was added, the State Legislature decided not to extend the enrollment freeze until seven days after the Aug. 23 primary, at least temporarily creating a rare opportunity for voters. In a year with one primary, voter party affiliation could not be changed from Feb. 14 until seven days after the June vote. Paladino, Langworthy spar over campaign's status as Primary Day draws nearer With Nick Langworthy branding his opponent "Cowardly Carl," and Carl Paladino's barbs aimed at "Lying Langworthy," Wednesday's developments surrounded a poll showing the pair in a statistical tie. Political analysts had been intrigued by how an "open" primary would impact some of the hotter state races, such as the heated GOP clash between Carl Paladino and Nick Langworthy in NY-23, but also elections downstate. The possibility that independent voters could suddenly enroll as Republicans or Democrats on Primary Day created an unpredictability. New York voters can change enrollment through Aug. 11 by visiting the voting registration section of the Department of Motor Vehicles' website or by downloading and printing the voter registration form from the New York Board of Elections website and following the mailing directions. Anything received by the Board of Elections Aug. 12 or later will not be effective until Aug. 30, an elections official said Thursday. Early voting runs from Aug. 13-21. In a public hearing Wednesday that turned combative at times with Mayor Byron Brown even walking off the stage momentarily speakers pressured Brown to veto a Common Council-approved measure that redraws the legislative body's boundaries. Almost 70 people attended the meeting at Burchfield Penney Art Center, with about as many submitting public comments on the citys website. Nearly 30 of them spoke in favor of an alternative map developed by Our City Action Buffalo, a politically active group whose proposed map is more racially equitable, its members say. You can veto these maps. You can veto this terrible, racist map, and by supermajority (Council members) can pass it but it doesnt have to be your fault. You dont have to be the scapegoat, Mr. Brown, said India Walton, a Niagara District resident who lost to Brown in last year's general election for mayor. Katrinna Martin-Bordeaux, however, criticized Our City Action Buffalo. Your people knew nothing about the communities that it dictated to," she said. "You dont know the neighborhoods. You dont know the people. You didnt engage anybody. You didnt ask anybody anything. Grassroots group backs candidates and takes on Buffalo Common Council: 'Time to prepare to govern' Our City Action Buffalo turned out voters to propel India Walton to a mayoral primary win last year. Now the group is leading the fight against Common Council district boundaries it says are gerrymandered. Harper Bishop, a spokesperson for Our City Action Buffalo, said the group used its network to speak directly with residents from every Council district. Excluding Martin-Bordeaux, speaker after speaker, many of whom are members of Our City Action Buffalo, blasted the Councils map and repeated their criticisms of it: The process was not transparent, the districts are gerrymandered and the proposed lines split racial, social, ethnic groups and voting blocks. Our City Action Buffalo's alternative map would have eliminated the Fillmore District and split it between the Niagara District and its proposed Elmwood-Allentown District. Niagara Council Member David A. Rivera has cited his district's diversity and inclusivity in explaining his vote for the Council-approved measure. The Council's map keeps the Latino and Puerto Rican communities together as well as other minority communities of interest such as the Karen and Somali communities that have been in the Niagara District for many years, Rivera has said. Council members unanimously approved the map created by the Commission on Reapportionment, which was tweaked by the Council. After the vote to approve it, South Council Member Chris Scanlon said that based on the phone calls, emails and conversations he had throughout the city, many more people have confidence in the new boundaries than those displeased with them. But it was those opposing the Council-approved map who dominated Wednesday's public hearing. Audience members bickered with one another and with Brown, with the protocol for the public hearing sparking a sharp exchange between Brown and an audience member. Comments were accepted from city residents, and speakers were asked to state their name and address for the record before speaking. Arise Shapley, a Buffalo resident, asked if comments from "unhoused" individuals, or homeless people in the city, would be allowed to speak. Brown replied that anyone who resides in the city who would like to speak during the meeting would have the opportunity. The mayor then asked if Shapley wanted to step to the microphone and speak. Thats when the conversation turned quarrelsome over the next two minutes. Im not unhoused. Im housed. I just think its a ridiculous policy, said Shapley, who kept talking until Brown interrupted. OK, I asked you if you wanted to come to the mic, Brown said. I dont want to talk to you because I already know that you are unresponsive to us," Shapley said. "Im not going to a microphone. You can hear me just fine, Shapley said. Brown addressed Shapley as ma'am. He did so, he said later, as a matter of respect. Shapley became upset. Thats the third time youve called me ma'am, and I am not a ma'am. How many times do I have to say that to you? Shapley said, adding that Brown could address Shapley as person. Brown repeatedly asked Shapley to come to the microphone to make comments, pointing out Shapley was out of order. I may be out of order, but so are you," Shapley said. "So is the fact this process has not been transparent. Brown interrupted Shapley, saying, Im not going to listen to someone out of order and insists on being out of order." And he walked off the stage. He returned minutes later, and the meeting resumed with more speakers. Brown has until Sept. 2 to approve or veto the new map. If he does not act, the maps automatically will become law. CLEVELAND (AP) A woman was convicted Wednesday of murder in the shooting of an off-duty Cleveland police officer during a carjacking on New Year's Eve. Tamara McLoyd, 19, of Garfield Heights, faces a potential life term with no chance for parole when she is sentenced later this year. She had confessed to shooting Shane Bartek, 25, but said she did not intend to do it. Jurors got the case Tuesday afternoon and deliberated for about 90 minutes. They returned Wednesday and deliberated for about four hours before reaching their verdict. McLoyd was found guilty of charges that included one count of aggravated murder of a police officer, along with murder, aggravated robbery and felonious assault charges. She showed no reaction as the verdict was read. Authorities have said McLoyd shot Bartek on Dec. 31 as they struggled during a carjacking in the parking lot of a Cleveland apartment building. A gun authorities said was used in the slaying was found on McLoyd when she was arrested. McLoyd is also charged in connection with three unrelated aggravated robberies authorities say occurred between October and December 2021. Her trial in those cases is to start Aug. 16. Bartek joined the Cleveland police department in 2019. He was remembered at his funeral as an officer who embraced community policing. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas watching Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri at a hearing on March 22. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Josh Hawley's opposition to adding Finland and Sweden to NATO is facing criticism from Republicans. Hawley argued in an op-ed article that enlarging NATO would limit the US's ability to counter China. Ted Cruz said Hawley was "mistaken," and Marco Rubio wrote an article contradicting Hawley's points. Sen. Josh Hawley's opposition to adding Finland and Sweden to NATO amid historic tensions with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine is leading even fellow Republicans to criticize his position. In a recent op-ed article that echoed former President Donald Trump's "America First" approach to foreign policy, Hawley contended that enlarging NATO would spread the US too thin in terms of its security commitments in Europe. The Missouri Republican said the US should instead prioritize challenging China. "We must do less in Europe (and elsewhere) in order to prioritize China and Asia," Hawley wrote. "Russia is still a threat, but the Chinese Communist Party is a far greater one." But Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told Politico that Hawley was "mistaken." "We don't beat China by retreating from the rest of the world," Cruz said. "We beat China by standing with our allies against our enemies." Similarly, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida wrote an op-ed article that served as a rebuttal to Hawley's stance on the matter. Rubio's article was titled "A stronger NATO allows America to focus on the threat of Communist China." "A strong and unified NATO is a powerful asset in the contest with Beijing," Rubio wrote. "When Finland and Sweden join the alliance's ranks and the free peoples of Europe become stronger than ever, more US resources will be available to focus on countering Communist China. If we do not rise to the challenge, it will be too late, and Americans will be held hostage by a totalitarian regime half a world away." The Senate on Wednesday approved a resolution to ratify NATO membership for Finland and Sweden in a vote of 95-1-1. Hawley was the lone "no" vote, and Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky voted "present." Story continues Indeed, there's strong support on both sides of the aisle for adding the Nordic countries to the alliance as the West continues to back Ukraine against Russia. Finland and Sweden have historically been neutral, or militarily nonaligned countries, and their move to join NATO stands as one of the most significant consequences of Russia's military offensive in Ukraine. In May, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Finland and Sweden would be "important additions to NATO." "I think the United States ought to be first in line to ratify the treaty for both these countries to join," he said. McConnell on Wednesday reiterated his support for enlarging NATO by adding Finland and Sweden, taking a veiled swipe at Hawley in the process. "If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote no, I wish them good luck," the Kentucky Republican said. "This is a slam dunk for national security that deserves unanimous bipartisan support." GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas on Wednesday also appeared to offer indirect criticism of Hawley as senators debated the resolution on Sweden and Finland's accession to NATO. "It would be strange indeed for any senator who voted to allow Montenegro or North Macedonia into NATO to turn around and deny membership to Finland and Sweden," Cotton said. "I would love to hear the defense of such a curious vote." Hawley in 2019 voted to allow North Macedonia into NATO, which seemed to be what Cotton was alluding to in his remarks. The schism between Hawley, who has been floated as a contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, and his fellow Republicans on the matter may be indicative of Trump's ongoing influence in the Republican Party. Trump was openly critical of NATO during his time in the White House, often going after fellow members on the issue of defense spending. Hawley also zeroed in on defense spending in his op-ed article, writing: "It's time for our European allies to do more. In particular, they must take primary responsibility for the conventional defense of Europe by investing more in their own militaries." Rubio countered this point in his op-ed article, writing: "Finland and Sweden are strong, stable countries with a long history of security cooperation with NATO allies. They are committed to national defense and would more than live up to their NATO obligations. Finland already spends more than the required 2% of gross domestic product on its military, and Sweden is on a fast track to do the same. Both nations require military service of their citizens." Hawley has repeatedly been an outlier among Republicans in terms of his stance on how the US should approach Russia's aggression toward Ukraine. He was among a small group of Republicans who voted against a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine in May, for instance, and also sparked controversy in February for suggesting the US should withdraw its support for Ukraine joining NATO. The White House accused Hawley of "parroting the talking points of Russian propagandist leaders." Russia firmly opposes the addition of Ukraine to NATO and has blamed the alliance, in part, for its unprovoked invasion of the former Soviet republic. Hawley's office didn't offer a comment when contacted by Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider South Africa: Amnesty for water and electricity theft The City of Tshwane has urged residents who have tampered with the water and electricity network to use the grace period to come clean and apply for amnesty to avoid fines and criminal charges. The call follows the Amnesty Programme for theft of water and electricity launched this week. This is for residents and business owners guilty of electricity and or water theft to apply for amnesty to be exempted from prosecution and fines under certain conditions. The citys Member of the Mayoral Committee (MMC) for Finance, Peter Sutton said the Amnesty Programme will run in partnership with law enforcement agencies from 01 August to 30 September 2022. The amnesty period aims to assist residents and business owners who are guilty of illegally connecting to the electricity and water network, and benefitting from these services without being measured and paying for consumption; tampering with an electricity and/or water meter, resulting in the measuring of incorrect or lower consumption; and illegally reconnecting and electricity and or water meter after a credit control disconnection. The amnesty period also aims to assist residents and business owners who are guilty of paying a bribe to remove an outstanding amount on an account or paying a bribe to illegally open a new municipal account without following the official process; and paying a bribe to have an electricity and/or meter bypassed to record incorrect or lower consumption. Conditions for the granting of amnesty To qualify for amnesty, the applicants must complete the application detailing how the illegal connection was made; who facilitated illegal connection and/or fraud on the account; how and to whom money was paid to facilitate the tampering; and the amount paid and how frequently the bribe money was paid (monthly or once off). Benefits of applying for amnesty Sutton highlighted that some of the benefits of applying for amnesty include that, in the case of successful of those implicated in the affidavit, the metering will be corrected and the account holder will start paying for services correctly from the date the amnesty is granted. The tampering and illegal connection fine will be waived [and] no criminal charges will be levied against the person or company granted amnesty, Sutton explained. Sutton also warned that the city has increased the fines for illegal connections and electricity theft to R200 000 for individual and household accounts, and R10 million for business accounts. In addition to these fines, we will also lay criminal charges and pursue recovery of lost income. We have established a highly skilled multidisciplinary revenue collection team for this purpose, to which we have allocated R68 million in this financial year, Sutton said. The amnesty application form is available at www.tshwane.gov.za, where an icon on the landing page of the website, which will, direct you to the amnesty page where you will be able to download the form. The amnesty application form will also be made available at all citys customer care walk-in centres across the seven regions of Tshwane. A dedicated email address has been created for this purpose where the forms can be submitted at amnesty@tshwane.gov.za, the MMC said. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2022-08-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. With Sarah Godlewski running for U.S. Senate, the state treasurers seat is up for grabs this fall. Republicans John Leiber and Orlando Owens will meet in the Aug. 9 primary, with the winner going on to the Nov. 8 election. The winner of the primary will face the winner of the Democratic primary, contested by Gillian Battino, Aaron Richardson and Angelito Terorio, in the Nov. 8 election. The term is four years. John Leiber Age: 44 Address: Cottage Grove Family: Married with three children Job: Attorney with Klein Law Office Prior elected office: None Other public service: Caledonia Parks and Recreation Commission president, 2009-12; Housing Authority of Racine County commissioner, 2011-12; Republican Party of Racine County board member, 2018-22 Education: Bachelors degree in history, UW-Parkside; law degree, University of Wisconsin Law School Orlando Owens Age: 48 Address: 6901 N. 40th Place, Milwaukee Family: Married with two children Job: Southeastern regional director for U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson Prior elected office: None Other public service: None Education: Business degree, Morris Brown College in Atlanta Q&A Why are you the best candidate for the job? Leiber: Im a true fiscal conservative and I understand the duties of this job. Ill focus on my responsibilities without expanding the office or governmental reach. Im committed to preserving and growing the fund overseen by the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands. This fund must stay robust to serve schools and continue providing low-cost loans to municipalities. If this fund is depleted, its gone and cannot be replaced. Owens: Im prepared to put my real-life experience to work in state government. As a former small business owner, a minister, and co-founder of the Joseph Project alongside Sen. Ron Johnson and Pastor Jerome Smith of Greater Praise Church, Ive helped people get their feet back on the ground and connect with job opportunities in their community. What unique experience/expertise do you bring to the office? Leiber: Im an attorney, former legislative staffer, and experienced board member. I understand the state budget and I know how to advocate for legislation if needed. Its critical to elect someone with personal and professional integrity who has the ability to effectively communicate and work with a variety of people. Im the only candidate ready to do the job on day one. Owens: I grew up in one of the toughest communities in the state to get ahead, but I was able to rise above my circumstances, start a business, and build a great life for my family. Now, Ive worked in workforce development for over 20 years, and I help others solve their problems and learn how to support themselves and their families. What goals would you bring to the state treasurers office and how would you work to accomplish those? Leiber: I have two goals. 1) Keep the office budget as small as possible while still carrying out its duties, and 2) protect and grow the $1.4 billion trust fund the treasurer helps oversee. Im the only candidate who doesnt want to expand the Office of the Treasurer. Adding programs and staff increases spending and I dont believe thats necessary in this role. Owens: I want to bring responsibility and transparency back to the treasurers office. Ill work with the Legislature and governor to provide financial oversight over the influx of federal aid coming into Wisconsin, and Ill advocate for better education, smarter state spending and helping those citizens who need it most. KEARNEY -- One person was shot amid a disturbance involving several people outside a strip club in Buffalo County early on Sunday morning. The Buffalo County Sheriff's Office said Richard Rios, 29, of Houston was shot in the lower-torso, although authorities said it remains unknown if the "shooting was accidental or intentional." Rios was taken by a private vehicle to the Lexington Regional Health Center with a gunshot wound following the shooting, and at least one other person was hospitalized with severe facial injuries following the altercation. No arrests have been reported, and no further details of the ongoing investigation were provided. The disturbance occurred in the parking lot of Paradise City, a strip club at the Interstate 80 Elm Creek exit. South Korean Banks May Be in Trouble as Regulator Probes Kimchi Premium Bitcoin Irregularities Source: Adobe/Monica South Korean banks could find themselves in the firing line after the government, media outlets, and regulators stepped up the scrutiny of the banks' role in enabling kimchi premium traders to make fast money when trading volumes rise. As previously reported, regulators stepped in last month to warn banks about their failure to stop traders from buying tokens like bitcoin (BTC) overseas via wire transfers which traders then sought to dump on domestic crypto exchanges for a hefty profit. When BTC prices have risen in recent years, retail investors trading volumes have soared historically leading to discrepancies of up to 50% between prices on domestic platforms like Upbit and global platforms like Binance. Some opportunistic traders have sought to take advantage of such price gaps by buying BTC from over-the-counter vendors primarily individuals based in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Japan. South Korean authorities, which already impose strict regulations on foreign exchange trading, have equated such trading with money laundering and have vowed to stamp it out. Banks have since responded with overseas remittance caps, but concern has since arisen that historically some USD 3.4 billion worth of illegal foreign exchanges have been carried out in recent years. And the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) last week said that all of this money may have passed through domestic banks. The FSS initially identified what it thinks were abnormal foreign exchange transactions at both Woori and Shinhan, with prosecutors also looking at the evidence. But per Energy Kyungjae, which quoted unnamed banking industry sources, the FSS has been aware of potential issues for over a year and has previously warned most domestic banks about possible violations. The media outlet added that the regulator had repeated its warnings several times in 2021. In addition to the aforementioned Woori and Shinhan, the regulator reportedly also issued private warnings to Kookmin Bank, KEB Hana Bank, and Nonghyup Bank. The FSS reportedly told all five banks to be careful about arbitrage trading aimed at the kimchi premium in 2021. KEB Hana was fined for violating the terms of the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act this year after an internal audit revealed historical irregularities possibly related in some cases to crypto dating back to 2018. Chosun, meanwhile, reported that the FSS was expanding its initial investigation to the entire financial sector, and claimed the regulator had conducted on-site investigations. The findings of these probes have been shared with the prosecution service, as well as the National Intelligence Service (NIS), and the Korea Customs Service. The latter has previously enjoyed some success in tracking down kimchi premium traders. However, digging deeper into the matter appears to have unearthed a network of suspicious-looking companies that some have suggested could have been used by overseas players to launder funds. The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) has found details about dozens of abnormal transactions related to an unnamed company based in Daegu, as well as similar instances involving possible shell or paper companies based elsewhere in the country. These companies appear to have conducted activities involving crypto via domestic exchanges then converting their coins for fiat KRW before remitting money overseas. Some have claimed that North Korea-linked individuals may be involved in the network. But, per Yonhap, Kim Kyu-hyeon, the Director of the NIS, told the National Assembly Intelligence Committee that the investigation into the alleged illegal USD 3.4 billion worth of foreign exchange transactions has not yet been completed. Meanwhile, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) will hold a landmark meeting with the heads of the countrys five biggest crypto exchanges later this month. The FSCs Chairman Kim Joo-hyun will personally attend the meeting, Seoul Kyungjae reported. Kim will listen to the exchanges proposals after the companies were asked to create a self-regulating body. The meeting will be significant as no FSC chief has previously held a direct meeting with industry leaders. An unnamed industry insider was quoted as welcoming the news and stating: The FSC seems to be more active in the cryptocurrency industry and market than it used to be. ____ Learn more: - South Korean Prosecutors Wrap up Terra Raids on Exchanges, Tech & VC Firms - First Bank Caps Remittances in Bid to Block Kimchi Premium Opportunists - 3 South Korean Banks Say They Wont Deal with Risky Crypto Exchanges - South Koreas Shinhan, LG CNS Unveil CBDC Platform - Banking Giant KB Creates Crypto, NFT & CBDC-compatible Wallets - South Korean Bank NH Launches Blockchain-powered Document Wallet KAMPALA, Uganda Apollo John Rwamparo speaks forlornly of the eight-legged stool, a symbol of authority for his ancient kingdom in Uganda, now glimpsed through a glass barrier at a museum thousands of miles away in Britain. The wooden stool is permanently exhibited at the University of Oxford, one of at least 279 objects there taken from Bunyoro-Kitara kingdom during the colonial era. Oxford has resisted attempts to have the stool repatriated, saying it was donated by a royal from a breakaway kingdom. Its quite frustrating, said Rwamparo, a deputy prime minister and minister for tourism for the kingdom. The best is for them to swallow their pride, like the French and the Germans have done, and return the artifacts. African countries efforts at restitution, after long resistance from authorities in Europe, are now blossoming with the return of treasured pieces that once were thought unattainable. Most recently, Nigeria and Germany signed a deal for the return of hundreds of artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes. The deal followed French President Emmanuel Macrons decision last year to sign over 26 pieces known as the Abomey Treasures, priceless artworks of the 19th century Dahomey kingdom in present-day Benin. African officials seek much more, from the exquisite to the macabre. Some are concerned that the British government in particular has been evasive, offering no commitments on restitution. In Uganda, which won independence from Britain in 1962, antiquities officials are preparing for a November trip to the U.K., where they will negotiate with the University of Cambridge for an unknown number of artifacts there. Cambridge, which recently gave back to Nigeria an elaborate bronze cockerel, appears forthcoming, said Rose Mwanja Nkaale, Ugandas commissioner for museums and monuments. Londons British Museum by comparison is difficult to penetrate, Nkaale said. We can start with those that are willing to cooperate. It is not useful to fight these people. The British Museum, which holds an extensive collection from across Africa, is protected by a 1963 law forbidding the trustees from repatriating items except under certain circumstances, including if an object is deemed unfit or useless. Some African officials believe that stand is increasingly weak as other institutions in Europe respond more positively. Nigeria is applying pressure so that laws in the U.K. and elsewhere are amended to allow for the repatriation of disputed collections, said Abba Isa Tijani, director-general of Nigerias National Commission for Museums and Monuments. But he expressed concern that while some countries are starting to open up, in Britain such efforts have not even started. Many of the desirable artifacts from Africa cant even be traced, leading an organization founded by the late Congolese art collector Sindika Dokolo to offer to buy looted African art from collections abroad. By 2020, when Dokolo died in a diving accident in Dubai, his campaign had successfully retrieved 15 items. Restitution remains a struggle for African governments, and the African Union has put the return of looted cultural property on its agenda. The continental body aims to have a common policy on the issue. Zimbabwe has pushed for the repatriation of about 3,000 artifacts from Britain. They include spears and swagger sticks as well as the skulls of fighters who resisted colonialism. They were decapitated and their heads shipped abroad as war trophies. Talks between British and Zimbabwean authorities have produced no breakthrough, but the matter is so important for the southern African nation that President Emmerson Mnangagwa last year suggested an exchange: the remains of colonialist Cecil Rhodes, whos buried in Zimbabwe, in return for the ancestral remains that mean so much to his people. Some Zimbabwean activists have started an online campaign called #bringbackourbones, protesting last year outside the British High Commission in neighboring South Africa. Items of funereal or ritualistic interest have no resonance outside Africa, said Raphael Chikukwa, who runs the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Why should we allow those so-called museums, which in fact are crime scenes and houses of stolen goods, to dictate to us, telling us that we have to prove that the items belong to us? he told the Associated Press. As much as we celebrate the return of former Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumbas tooth (from Belgium), lets not celebrate too much. Lets remind ourselves that the work has just started. Similar efforts are underway in South Africa, where the Ifa Lethu Foundation seeks to repatriate a range of items taken during the apartheid era, often by diplomats or private collectors. The organization has repatriated more than 700 pieces including valuable works by South African artist Gerard Sekoto, who died in Paris in 1993. In Rwanda, recent cooperation with former colonial master Belgium included the sharing of digital copies of over 4,000 songs and other recordings kept at the Royal Museum for Central Africa outside Brussels. Items including royal regalia remain at large, and since the digital sound archives werent shared in the context of repatriation you cannot say Belgium has already handed them back, said Andre Ntagwabira, a specialist in archaeological research at Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy. The heritage, both tangible and intangible items, are the footprints of our ancestors and we should own them, he said. Five years ago, Nicole Deary left her position as the Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce events and marketing director to become the executive director of Leadership Cumberland, an organization dedicated to developing and promoting leadership skills in the county. Come Aug. 22, Deary will return to the chamber as its new president and CEO, and shes bringing Leadership Cumberland with her. The chamber board announced Wednesday that it selected Deary to fill the role left vacant after the chambers former president, Michelle Crowley, stepped down June 1 to become an independent sales representative for the mid-Atlantic region for Free Spirit Fabrics. This role means a great deal to me because primarily it comes full circle, Deary said. I feel like the chamber really groomed me for working with the community and I got to hone in on my events and marketing skills, and then I got to transfer to Leadership Cumberland and lead that organization to greater success for the last five years, so to return to the chamber in this capacity kind of feels like Im coming home, so Im really excited about the opportunity. Vision Deary said her vision for the chamber boils down to one theme: collaboration. She said her priority for the first year is to reconnect with membership as well as establish a relationship with the board that will help it develop a strategic plan moving forward. She believes hearing from members of the chamber will allow them to identify needs in the community, though Deary already anticipates working on workforce development and overall business growth, as well as incorporating more diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the area. Deary would also like to work with organizations like the Downtown Carlisle Association and the Cumberland County Area Economic Development Corp. to allow more collaboration between the chamber and downtown Carlisle. I really believe were better and stronger together and I look forward to figuring out what those opportunities are and working with other leaders in the community, Deary said. A Carlisle High School graduate, Deary said her previous experience in Carlisle has defined her plans for the chamber. I think its shaped that vision for me because I actively participated in it. Carlisle kind of helped raise me into the person that I am and the wonderful community that Ive been a part of, that I want to return the favor and serve, she said. Partnerships Dearys focus on collaboration also applies to the partnerships the chamber is forming with the West Shore Chamber of Commerce and Leadership Cumberland, something Deary said also came full circle. The chamber announced Wednesday that Leadership Cumberland will now be facilitated by both the Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce as well as the West Shore Chamber of Commerce, allowing both chambers to work together alongside Leadership Cumberland to cultivate Cumberland Countys present and future leaders. Were really excited about that opportunity, Deary said. Leaving Leadership Cumberland was the only downfall I saw to taking the chamber position because I love it so much. ... We think Leadership Cumberland will make both chambers stronger in the ability that well be able to offer more member benefit around professional development and growth, and then Leadership Cumberland becomes stronger because now its an active program under two chambers of commerce and will be promoted as such. As for the circle, Deary said Leadership Cumberland originated about 33 years ago from the Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce as Leadership Carlisle. She said the chamber kept it for a year or two before it was passed to United Way before becoming its own entity as Leadership Cumberland. Leadership Cumberland also incorporated the West Shore Chamber of Commerce Foundations Junior Leadership program two years ago and has been running it since then, Deary said. Kind of like me returning to the Carlisle Chamber in a new role, Leadership Cumberland is also returning to the chamber, Deary said. She said the organization will continue to be a separate entity, and that bringing it back to Carlisles chamber doesnt mean it will be Carlisle-centric, but rather Leadership Cumberland will continue to have ties to the whole county, along with West Shores chamber. I think the closer alignment of the Carlisle chamber and the West Shore chamber along with Leadership Cumberland will ensure clarity of fulfilling the needs of the community and each of the respective chambers to focus on developing and building future business leaders for our communities, Kevin Curtis, vice chair of the Carlisle Chambers Board of Directors and partner at Summit Trail Advisors, said. I think its an extremely powerful and strong combination. The Carlisle chamber said Deary brings to the table over 18 years of fundraising, marketing, and community leadership experience, gained through her previous work at the chamber, as well as previous positions at Project SHARE and the Shippensburg University Foundation. Im extremely excited about Nicole joining the chamber and the ideas and the energy that shes going to bring to the chamber for the benefit of chamber members and the community, Curtis said. Nicoles experience paired with her drive and creativity will set the chamber up for success in the near and distant future, said Ashleigh Goss, Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce board chairperson. She has fantastic ideas that will build upon the chambers strong relationships to assist in the communitys growth as a whole. The Attorneys General of all 50 states have joined forces in hopes of giving teeth to the seemingly never-ending fight against robocalls. North Carolina AG Josh Stein, Indiana AG Todd Rokita and Ohio AG Dave Yost are leading the formation of the new Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force. In Stein's announcement, he said the group will focus on taking legal action against telecoms, particularly gateway providers, allowing or turning a blind eye to foreign robocalls made to US numbers. He explained that gateway providers routing foreign phone calls into the US telephone network have the responsibility under the law to ensure the traffic they're bringing in is legal. Stein said that they mostly aren't taking any action to keep robocalls out of the US phone network, though, and they're even intentionally allowing robocall traffic through in return for steady revenue in many cases. Stein said in a statement: "We're... going to take action against phone companies that violate state and federal laws. Im proud to create this nationwide task force to hold companies accountable when they turn a blind eye to the robocallers theyre letting on to their networks so they can make more money. Ive already brought one pathbreaking lawsuit against an out-of-state gateway provider, and I wont hesitate to take legal action against others who break our laws and bombard North Carolinians with these harmful, unlawful calls." The Attorney General referenced data from the National Consumer Law Center, which previously reported that American phone numbers get more than 33 million scam robocalls a day. Those include Social Security scams targeting seniors and gift card scams, wherein bad actors pretend they're from the IRS. In that report, the center warned that consumers will keep on getting robocalls as long as phone providers are earning from them. Stein already has experience sparring with shady gateway providers. Back in January, he sued Articul8 for routing more than 65 million calls to phone numbers in North Carolina and inundating residents with up to 200 fraudulent telemarketing calls every single day. He previously urged the FCC to implement measures designed to put a stop to illegal foreign calls made through providers like Articul8, as well. And in 2019, Stein became instrumental in the development of an agreement between the US Attorneys General and 12 carriers in the country to use the STIR/SHAKEN call-blocking technology. KISS, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister. Those bands caught the attention of 6-year-old Phil Hoffman. At that young age, he already knew he wanted to be in a band and play music just like that. He decided to play the guitar but quickly realized nearly every other musician he knew was also an aspiring guitarist. So, I decided to play bass because no one was looking for a guitarist, but nearly everyone was looking for a bassist, he said. Hoffmans decision to play bass proved to be beneficial because hes been a working bassist nearly nonstop since 1990. The bassist that was and still is my primary influence is Steve Harris of Iron Maiden, said Hoffman. Hoffman, of Park Hills, grew up in rural Washington County and attended Valley R-6 of Caledonia. He played trumpet in middle school band which taught him how to read treble clef music. He later taught himself how to read bass clef music so he could further advance as a bassist. He took bass lessons for less than a year in 1984 to 1985. Afterward, he learned how to play along to recordings and all his favorite songs. He never took any formal lessons for guitar. He learned the instrument simply by playing bass in bands and watching the guitarists. Hed watch the musicians, maybe ask questions, then go home and try playing those songs on the guitar. After doing this for a few years, Hoffman said he was a mediocre guitarist at best. It wasnt until I joined Dr. (Kevin) Whites classic rock ensemble Heritage that I really advanced as a guitarist, said Hoffman. He didnt need a bassist, but he did need a guitarist. White continuously challenged Hoffman in both the Heritage and Baby Boomer shows. This led to me becoming more and more proficient on guitar, said Hoffman. He plays electric bass, upright bass, steel string acoustic guitar, classical guitar and electric guitar. Hes been working as a professional or semi-professional musician for more than 30 years. He played in a few teenage garage bands until around 1988. Playing in these garage bands was a form of networking, and these connections eventually led to the formation of Triple XXX in 1990. With Triple XXX, Hoffman played all the St. Louis clubs and toured the Midwest from 1991 to 1993 with stops including Minneapolis; Denver; Casper, Wy.; and Killeen, Texas. After another Midwestern tour in 1993, the band took a break on a temporary hiatus. Hoffman joined the US Army in 1995. He auditioned for and won a special-duty assignment in 1997 to play bass for a Army music unit called The USAREUR Band & Chorus, located in Schwetzingen, Germany. In addition to playing at various military functions, the group also played town festivals all around Germany. It was a really great experience, said Hoffman. I played for that unit for two years, after which I left the military. After the military, he moved back to St. Francois County where hes been since then. From 1999 to present, Hoffman has played bass for Triple XXX, Pantheon Pros, Joker, Milestones, Crossroads, Ear Candy, and the annual History of Country Music show. During this same period, hes also played acoustic and/or electric guitar for Hawgstomp, Mofo Jones, 80 Proof Outlaws, Sidetracked, The Baby Boomer Reunion Concert, and various MAC ensembles and musicals. In addition, he plays classical guitar at St. Josephs Catholic Parish, and he occasionally plays solo classical guitar for weddings and other special events. Hoffman attended MAC from 2001 to 2003. Although he wasnt a music major, he played electric guitar in Whites classic rock ensemble called Heritage, later renamed Studio Music. Around that time is when White created the first Baby Boomer show. When he asked Hoffman if he wanted to take part in it, Hoffman obviously said yes. Hes now been part of every single Baby Boomer concert since the first show. Thats 19 years worth of Baby Boomer concerts, and hes loved playing in every one of them. While there are always some stand-out songs that I enjoy playing, its the overall experience of the show that I enjoy the most, he said. Working with some really outstanding musicians, getting to play music that I otherwise probably wouldnt get to play, the level of professionalism among the performers, and the family-like feeling of the whole event make it one of my favorite musical experiences of each year. Since hes been performing in Baby Boomer concerts for so long, Hoffman has gotten to know each of the performers. Each year is like a family reunion, he said. Seriously, its like a get-together of siblings and cousins. Each show we do together is a memorable experience. Hoffman said he generally gets about three to four weeks to prepare for Baby Boomers. As for the Baby Boomer audience, Hoffman said they are always appreciative and supportive of what the musicians do. Hes seen people of all ages in the audience. Theyre all there to enjoy some great music from local musicians, he said. When Hoffman isnt playing music, hes staff accountant and IT coordinator at Crouch, Farley & Heuring, PC, where hes worked for the last 16 years. Hoffman said each year the performers are introduced to the audience during the show. When hes introduced, the emcee usually tells the audience Hoffman is an accountant at Crouch, Farley & Heuring. One particular year, an audience member heard Hoffmans introduction and apparently found it difficult to believe that the very conservative John Crouch would hire that long-haired guitarist. The following Monday the man showed up at the office and asked to meet Hoffman. I think he needed to see it for himself, said Hoffman. We all had a good laugh about it. This weekend is the 2022 Baby Boomer Reunion Concert series The 20th Anniversary Spectacular. The shows take place Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. Call the Farmington Civic Center at 573-756-0900 for ticket information. Charlottesville city officials say an information/technology employee with access to public safety accounts who entered the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and invasion will not face discipline. Interim City Manager Michael Rogers told city councilors on Monday that the employee, whom he did not identify, has been interviewed by the FBI in regards to his presence in the Capitol and that no related charges have been filed against him. He said the employee wrote an apology letter to him, which he declined to share. Ive spoken with the employee, who has never been charged with any criminal offense. Hes been interviewed by the FBI three times over the past year and half, Rogers told the council. The employee reports no further contact from the FBI. The employee has not been charged with any actions stemming from his presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Rogers said the fact that the employee has not been arrested and did not commit vandalism or assault during the invasion and left the building when told to do so, led to his decision to not discipline the employee. So at this point, having looked at all of these factors and the employee having provided a letter of apology to the city manager, which I will not share, he is very sorrowful of his activities. Hes experienced a great deal of personal loss, Rogers said. According to Rogers, the employee admitted during his interview that he was at the rally during which protestors who believed the 2020 election had been stolen through widespread voter fraud, stormed the Capitol under encouragement from former President Donald Trump, attacked Capitol police, broke into Congressional chambers, vandalized officers and sent elected officials, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, running for safety. The employee admitted to entering the Capitol building. The employee in question admits he attended the event at the Capitol. He posted his presence on social media page, he shared this information with the FBI and he was not arrested, Rogers said. Rogers said he confirmed that the Charlottesville Police Department had notified the Richmond office of the FBI of the employees presence at the Capitol on Jan. 21, 2021. He said he was unable to discuss the issue with the FBI agent who interviewed the employee because the agent had retired. Officials in the FBI office in Richmond said they are not permitted to say whether they had interviewed anyone from Charlottesville regarding the Capitol invasion. They said the FBIs Washington, D.C., office would be responsible for filing any charges connected to the riot. The Washington office could not be reached for comment. It has been reported that more than 800 people who attended the rally and entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 have been arrested and charged, 80 of them to date have been convicted, Rogers told the council. In this group are individuals who are pictured and filmed by themselves and others of engaging in destructive acts and being disruptive. The arrests stem from their criminal activity, not merely their presence in the Capitol. Considering the totality of circumstances, including that its been a year and half without any action, I conclude that no further action review or is warranted in this case, he said. And I hope this settles this matter. The matter is likely anything but settled. Social media accounts buzz with the news, some of which have identified the employee and captured screenshots purporting to be posts the employee made before and during the Capitol protest. Those posts could not be confirmed because the accounts have been either removed or taken private. The name of the employee also could not be independently confirmed. Rogers decision was derided on Twitter by former Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney who reported the employee to the FBI. Brackney, who was fired in September 2021, has sued the city for $10 million in connecting with her dismissal. Did not realize a private, apology letter was in the Charlottesville employee handbook as an accountability option [for] Jan. 6 insurrectionists, she wrote. He requested Jan. 6 off to take his wife to the doctor. I think lying and integrity issues are terminable offenses, even in Charlottesville. Tanesha Hudson, a local race and equity activist, warned the council on Monday that having an employee in IT who attended the far-right rally and riot at the Capitol with access to city records is not a good idea. This is a major security risk for this city. [The employee] has access to Virginia State Police records, local Charlottesville Police Department records and many other things while working in IT, she said. He has access to numerous city data. He has access to compromise your data and anything else. Hudson said the council and city seems more concerned with retaining the white employee at his job than they were working with Brackney, former city manager Tarron Richardson, who resigned and former Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who declined to seek election, all of whom are Black. Yall spend so much time firing people for doing their jobs you that even when stuff is right in front of your face, you dont look to investigate that, she said. I dont see you going so hard after this white man the way you go after black leadership. Mayor Lloyd Snook told Virginia Public Media in an email that the city personnel policy does not give them the power to take disciplinary action against someone who is suspected of having done something 18 months ago outside of the Charlottesville area that has been investigated by law enforcement and has not led to any criminal charges. He said the city is considering updating its personnel policy and will monitor the employee in the meantime. His first day as retired Roanoke College president, Michael Maxey said he dropped down to North Carolina for a visit with his namesake grandson. Visits like those are the finer things Maxey looks forward to in retirement, now that Frank Shushok assumed the role of Roanoke Colleges 12th president on Monday. I have told everyone that I will certainly bow out and stay out of president Shushoks way, Maxey said Tuesday. But Ill be available to him and anyone else that needs me, for whatever that is. Maxey, who from 1985 until last week served in leadership roles for Roanoke College, said he is contemplating how best to involve himself in further community work beyond retirement. But hes taking a few months to formulate ideas, discipline his approach and pinpoint a worthy project. I want to help my profession, I want to help colleges succeed, and I certainly want to help Roanoke succeed, Maxey said. And I want to help my community, because thats so important to me. To be able to tackle all that as my next project, its fun. A 15-year stretch at the helm of Roanoke College required Maxey, 70, to focus on servant-style leadership, and to become a Swiss Army knife, he said. That means you can do whatever the college needs, he said. Ill continue to try to do that. Maxey said his successor faces a similar challenge as any other university president: balancing the tried and true traditions of a college campus with the innovation necessary to remain relevant through changing times. Were great at mentoring students. We never want that to go away, Maxey said. Figuring out how to do that better, differently and in relevant ways for the lives that future students want to live, thats going to be the challenge. That challenge is part of the how education is already changing, with schools such as Roanoke College emphasizing real world experience for students through internships, research placements and mentorship, he said. Thats what gives students an edge in their future, having real world experience in addition to the kind of traditional education we give, Maxey said. Continuing, he said: Youll see more and more emphasis on how we prepare you to enter the world. Known for always wearing a bow tie, Maxey said hell still don a bow tie-emblazoned ball cap on those more relaxed retirement days when he isnt in formal attire. He described his time with Roanoke College as a blessing, and repeated some advice he gave his successor: When you live in a community where you have all these smart people with great ideas, a big part of your job is to help their good ideas emerge, Maxey said. I was fortunate to be around a lot of people with great ideas. Its important to listen to them and help the best of the ideas come along and grow. Any city employee from Charlottesville who entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, should be fired or at least put on administrative leave. It is as simple as that. At a Monday city council meeting, Acting City Manager Michael Rogers said that a city employee did participate in the Capitol attack, but should not be fired or disciplined because he was never charged with a crime. This person, who works in the citys information technology department, entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 and posted his presence on social media. The person has since been interviewed multiple times by the FBI, but never charged, Rogers told City Council members. The employee later wrote city officials a letter of apology, Rogers said. He declined to read the letter publicly. The employee has been interviewed by the FBI three times over the past year and a half, Rogers said. The employee reports no further contact from the FBI. The employee has not been charged with any actions stemming from his presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Rogers told the councilors that so far, prosecutors have focused on individuals who are pictured and filmed by themselves and others...engaging in destructive acts and being disruptive. The arrests stem from their criminal activity, not merely their presence in the Capitol. Implying that entering the Capitol on Jan. 6 against the will of Congress and the police was not a crime betrays both law and common sense. We wonder how Rogersnot to mention Charlottesville City Council members would feel about someone who entered City Hall to force them to overturn a legal election aided by people who beat police officers and broke in through locked doors and windows. Would that person be innocent? We have a personnel policy that governs this persons employment, Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook said in a statement. I have been told that our present personnel policy doesnt give us the right to fire him for 18month-old conduct that, despite being investigated by the FBI, did not even result in an arrest. For better or for worse, we should follow the policy. We should also consider adopting a code of conduct or an add-on to the personnel policy that would apply to conduct such as what was involved here. The hearings of the House Select Committee investigation of the Jan. 6 attack make clear how destructive the Charlottesville situation can become to the citys reputation. Those who entered the Capitol knowingly committed a crime. Those who went inside intending to stop certification of the Electoral College committed treason. Then-President Donald Trump lied to those people, telling them that election fraud allowed Democrat Joe Biden to illegally win the presidency. Trump also lied to a crowd of thousands near the White House, telling them then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power and obligation to stop the certification process. Trump told crowd members they would have to fight like hell to stop the election from being stolen. Then, Trump urged the crowd to march to the Capitol and demand that members of the U.S. Senate and House, as well as Pence, call off the certification. Trump manipulated and exploited every person who acted in his behalf, including the city employee in question. But individuals bear responsibility for their personal decisions. Free speech does not include beating police officers and breaking windows. It does not include rifling desks in the Senate chamber after forcing its evacuation with chants of Hang Mike Pence. It does not include slamming a battering ram against the locked door of the House of Representatives. Even people who did none of those things placed themselves voluntarily amidst the criminal mayhem and did nothing to stop it. Accepting it, they became accessories in the moral, if not the legal sense. Criminal behavior by employees of private businesses is between worker and boss. Public servants are different. The Charlottesville city employee who attacked the Capitol Jan. 6, 2021, may have done so on their own time. But because taxpayers pay their salary, public interest attaches to their actions. Rogers told City Council that considering the totality of circumstances, including that its been a year and half without any action, I conclude that no further action or review is warranted in this case. And I hope this settles this matter. It does not come close. The Hill Country Turners, a local woodturning club, is looking for new members.The club recently finished an assignment to help out the Mason A Sweet Home man charged with multiple child sex crimes was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Wednesday morning, Aug. 3 in Linn County Circuit Court. Michael Anthony Giroux, 37, had pleaded no contest to 11 charges of first-degree encouraging child sexual abuse. He was arrested in April. Judge Brendan Kane delivered the sentence: 44 months for each count, to run consecutively for a total of 484 months. Following Girouxs presumptive release from the Department of Corrections, he will receive post-prison supervision for 10 years minus time served. Based on his prolific criminal history involving sex-related convictions, Kane said Giroux is ineligible for alternative correction programs, though he does qualify for earned time and good time. According to court paperwork, between Aug. 31 and April 14 Giroux possessed graphic visual recordings of sexually explicit conduct involving multiple children. The documents allege that each recording is of a different child. The Albany Police Department arrested Giroux on April 14 on suspicion of several counts of child pornography. The charged documents state that Giroux waived indictment and pleaded no contest to the charges on July 27. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Albany Democrat-Herald. Prosecutor Conor McCahill called child sex crimes a scourge in this country, and asked the court to impose the full sentence. Both McCahill and Defense attorney Erik Moeller declined a request for comment following the sentencing. Telecel Group announced it has opened dialogue with the Ghanaian government to acquire Vodafones unit in the country after the countrys regulator revealed it has not approved the deal. In a statement, Telecel detailed that it had indeed signed a sale and purchase agreement with Vodafone to acquire a 70% stake in its unit. Telecel said it has contacted the Ministry for Communications, the Bank of Ghana and the National Communications Authority (NCA) to get the deal over the line by fulfilling regulatory requirements. All three have yet to give the deal the green light, prompting the Africa-focused telecoms group to reconnect. The acquisition will be fully financed by the Telecel Group and its partners. The potential sale of Vodafone Ghana Towers will not go towards funding the acquisition, said Telecel. Vodafone confirmed a few days ago intentions to sell off its Ghana unit as it looks to refocus on core European markets and reduce debt. Media speculation followed claiming the NCA had blocked the deal, which the regulatory body denied but did outline it had not approved the deal either. Veon subsidiary Banglalink has signed a tower sharing agreement with BTCL (Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited). The deal will afford Banglalink access BTCLs tower infrastructure, allowing the operator to expand its 4G network and thereby enhance its quality of service. The agreement is expected to improve the energy efficiency of Banglalinks operations and make more effective use of Bangladeshs national resources. We always welcome network sharing opportunities to serve our customers better and ensure proper utilization of resources and infrastructures, said Erik Aas, Chief Executive Officer, Banglalink. In the last year, we have added more than 3300 4G base stations to our network; many of these are based on shared infrastructure. We will continue to expand the network, and our partnership with BTCL will give a fresh impetus to this endeavour. BTCLs Managing Director Dr. Rafiqul Matin noted that the firms already have a fibre-sharing agreement in place, and said: As a country, we have reached an impasse where infrastructure sharing can be an effective way to tackle national and global challenges. This initiative is an example of how two organizations can benefit from partnering. Kaan Terzioglu, CEO of VEON Group, said: VEONs future centers around an asset-light business model that enables us to focus on providing our customers high-quality connectivity and world-class digital services. By reducing our direct ownership of capex-intensive tower infrastructure, we can focus on these high-growth digital services, delivering greater value to our shareholders and our customers. The tower sharing agreement reached with BTCL represents another step towards implementing this strategy and follows similar deals in other operating countries. Enterprise Electronics Corp. (EEC), a locally-founded company with worldwide distinction, was recently host to visitors from the government of Tanzania, an East African country known as the home of the safari mecca, the Serengeti National Park, and the Kilimanjaro National Park, which features Africas highest mountain. Although the seven visitors shared information about their countrys culture and invited their American hosts to visit Tanzania in the future, they were in Enterprise to finalize the purchase of EEC Doppler weather systems to be used to help protect people and assets in their country. During the visit, EECs Chief Executive Officer Richard Stedronsky, Director of Programs Patrick Lamar and Chief Financial Officer Nicole Powell worked closely with Dr. Agnes Kijazi, Director General of the Tanzania Meteorological Authority (TMA) and a Permanent Representative of Tanzania with the World Meteorological Organization. The Tanzanian party of engineers, meteorologists and government leaders also included Engineer Aron Kasaka, Director of Transport Services, Ministry of Works and Transport; Engineer Mugundu Rambika, Senior Meteorological Engineer; Engineer Benedicto Katole, Meteorolgical Engineer; Michael Ntagazawa, Finance and Accounting Manager; Tumaini Hiluka, Procurement Services Manager; and Wilbert Muruje, Manager of International Cooperation. Enterprise Mayor William E. Cooper and City Administrator Jonathan Tullos also met with the visitors and welcomed them to Enterprise. We are happy to have you in Enterprise. Its an honor to meet you all, Cooper said. Enterprise is fortunate to have a hometown-based company like EEC that has an impact all over the world. Its nice to know that these systems made right here in Enterprise is going to help the people and the assets valuable to the life of your country. Kijazi expressed thanks for the hospitality of EEC and the City of Enterprise and said they were impressed with Enterprise. Cooper presented Dr. Kijazi with a key to the city and a replica of the Boll Weevil Monument, and told her the story of the monument. He presented each visitor with a City coin to remind them of their visit to South Alabama. The weather radar systems were being tested this week before their delivery to Tanzania. They will be used to expand the TMAs existing weather radar network, which was also supplied by EEC. These new tools will further aid the TMA in monitoring weather conditions and collecting other data that can be helpful in agriculture, public safety and transportation. EEC leaders said being able to plan and act based on accurate weather radar forecasts provides a vital service to the companies and governments that make up its customer base. EEC is the leading manufacturer of weather radar and data collection systems in the world, with 1,200 systems in more than 100 countries, covering every continent. The company, which was founded in 1971 in Enterprise, designs, manufactures, installs, delivers and trains operators for the variety of systems it offers. Main Street Marianna Executive Director Meghan Basford was in Deland Thursday, July28, to accept two Florida Main Street Awards from Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd. One of the awards was for Johnson Equity Holdings, which rents space to other businesses in its building on Lafayette Street, once home to Suntrust bank but now a hub of operations for several local entrepreneurs. Main Street Marianna and the Chipola College Tech Tribe jointly won the other, an Excellence Award in the category of Outstanding Private/Public Partnership. Byrd presented those and other Florida community awards at the annual Preservation on Main Street Conference. The awards program recognizes the innovative projects, people, organizations, and businesses in Floridas 57 Main Street communities, according to a press release from Byrds office issued early this week. I am proud to recognize the success and achievement of this years award winners, Byrd said in the release. Their efforts to promote economic development and historic preservation are crucial to revitalizing Floridas historic downtowns and the communities they support. The award taken home by Basford on behalf of MSM and Chipola College was a triumph for a shared vision of Basford and Connie Smith of Chipola College theatre. When Basford started looking for a way to create prop-style pieces for guests to enjoy at public events in Marianna, things that they could use for play and as photo opportunity stations, she turned to Smith, who leads the technical side of theatre instruction and stage presentations at Chipola College. Smith was immediately on board, seeing it as an opportunity for her students to apply the skills they were learning to real-world projects that would serve their community. So far, theyve created three durable sets of pieces that can now be used year-to-year. The projects and the effort were described in the nomination. Meghan described the theming for some of the prop pieces, Connie worked the concepts into the curriculum for the 2021-2022 school year, and the students went to work, it states. They created some scarecrow and pumpkin themed face-in-hole props for the Pumpkins in the Park event, a gorgeous life-sized sleigh for Santa Claus to greet children in during their Christmas in Candyland Parade & Festival, and a St. Patricks Day themed miniature croquet course for their Shamrock Shenanigans event. The students went above and beyond in their creativity and craftsmanship, and the pieces were enjoyed by thousands of people. Because of the partnership between Chipola Colleges Tech Program and Marianna Main Street, the students were able to display their talents to a much wider audience, and the community members were able to experience the plethora of talents and abilities that these students demonstrate. As for the Johnson Equity Holdings award, the nomination document from MSM explained some of the reasons it was chosen for submission. Owners Charlie and Nicole Johnson are lifelong residents of Jackson County with a national presence in the construction, property management and real estate fields, MSM explained, and after Hurricane Michael developed a vision and purpose far beyond personal profit for the old Suntrust Bank downtown off Lafayette Street. In the middle of downtown Marianna, the old SunTrust Building sat vacant for quite some time after the hurricane. The Johnsons saw the potential for this building and were able to visualize what they wanted its future to look like. After the purchase of the building, they began working right away. The Johnsons now have seven total companies that do business within the 16,000 square foot building, and they have a growing potential of 10-12 based on the size of the business. They were able to take what was once an empty, grey shell of a building, breathe life into it, and turn it into a thriving center of commerce for downtown Marianna. The Johnson nomination also stated that the two understand the positive impact that a thriving downtown has on the economy as well as community morale. The Johnsons believe that Marianna has so much potential, and they appreciate the charming, hometown feeling that Marianna has to offer. After Category-Five Hurricane Michael ravaged the entirety of Jackson County in 2018, the time had come to rebuild again. The Johnsons desired to become a part of the downtown revitalization efforts, and their hopes were that when local business owners and residents finally saw improvements being made downtown, it would ignite a flame in them as well. Their desire was to fan those flames of hometown pride and to embolden individual desire to make improvements all over the downtown area. After recently announcing its purchase of the historic Ellison Building in downtown Dothan, SmartBank plans to begin operating full time in the building by mid-October. As Dothan continues its rapid growth, our new location gives us the opportunity to advance our market presence and continue building relations, Regional President Jeff Williams said. The Ellison Building is located at 170 E. Main St. at the intersection of St. Andrews Street in the heart of downtown Dothan. SmartBank plans to have a full retail branch in the building, according to a Thursday news release. This move, according to the release, will allow SmartBanks local team to serve the Wiregrass with regional, commercial, private banking, and mortgage lending needs. So many things about SmartBank differentiate us, Williams said. To further set us apart in Dothan, we will be in the only commercial bank located downtown. We wanted to be geographically positioned and convenient to serve all of Houston County, rather than only one side of Dothan. SmartBank is currently located at 2890 Horace Shepard Drive in Dothan. We are so excited to be a part of the revitalization of historic downtown Dothan, Laura Watford, regional credit officer, said. Jeff Williams and Susan Wilkins, corporate relationship manager, have played significant roles in downtown redevelopment over the years, so I know they, along with the entire team, are looking forward to being part of downtowns resurgence. Founded in 2007, SmartBank currently has 40 branches and two loan production offices spanning Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. For more information on SmartBank, visit www.smartbank.com. In the midst of the hubbub of laughter and celebration at the launch of Marous new chocolate bar product line, uncle Lau a cocoa farmer from Tien Giang stood at the center. The noise slowly faded into astonishment as uncle Lau started to talk about a love affair with cocoa trees that began more than 37 years ago. In the early 70s, uncle Lau drank a cup of US-made cocoa. He thought, if Hawaii could grow such delectable cocoa seeds, Vietnam could do the same. He started planting cocoa trees himself. He nurtured his plants, hoping theyd soon make a flavorful cup of chocolate drink. Uncle Laus passion for cocoa trees spread out. Almost 10 years ago, the Marou team then a newly established brand that envisions putting the spotlight on Vietnams cacao met with him to talk about his cocoa beans. However, his beans didnt initially meet the companys standards. After that, experts came down to show me how to ferment following the procedure of Marou. It was also when I thought I had to make my cocoa beans based on what the market needed, not solely on what I know, shared uncle Lau. He worked with cocoa experts from Marou, learned new skills and techniques, and upgraded the quality of his cocoa products. After his four-decade journey with his beloved cocoa trees, uncle Lau was finally recognized as one of the best cocoa fermenters in the world. His feat was also celebrated by Sam Maruta and Vincent Mourou the French entrepreneurs behind the Marou brand. They became more than just partners in the business, theyre a family, uncle Lau said. Uncle Lau and Vincent Mourou, co-founder of Marou, were delighted when Uncle Lau was recognized as the world's best cocoa fermenter. Like uncle Lau, many of Marous cocoa bean suppliers have become an integral part of the chocolate brand. Vung, who handles raw material supply for Marou, says that maintaining good relationships with suppliers, especially with farmers, is important. Unlike other chocolate companies that only meet with suppliers once a year to purchase, the Marou team comes to the farm every month to collect and taste each batch of cocoa beans and nuts, detect problems and assist farmers with any production issues. They are not only material suppliers but also our family. We return to the farm as if we were going back to our hometown, asking about their health and familys situation, said Vung. Marou understands that quality products come from quality raw materials. Happy and caring farmers who receive life and technical support will also create the best quality cocoa beans. They also understand that the output does matter for farmers, so Mr. Vungs team ensures stable cocoa beans purchase, even during the Covid-19 pandemic when sales were low. Even in the face of difficulties and uncontrollable challenges, Marou has maintained quality and stable supply. We have been building relationships with cocoa farmers in Vietnam by providing them financial and technical support and building more cocoa farms. We are supporting generations of cocoa farmers that can last for decades to come. We want to be a leader in the cocoa community and give back to the community throughout our growth journey, said Vincent Mourou. It is this solid foundation and vision that brought Marou to life. In 2010, Sam and Vincent met by chance while exploring Vietnam. They were both impressed by how cocoa farmers grew their trees in the Mekong Delta. After a few simple Google searches of "cocoa farm," the two went straight to a farm with no specific address in Ba Ria - Vung Tau. On the ferry back to Saigon, they were already finalizing their company, which they decided to officially call Marou, Faiseurs de Chocolat. Marou is a combination of their surnames. By the end of 2011, the two Frenchmen received their business license in Ho Chi Minh City and worked on opening their store in 2012, marking the birth of Vietnams first and original chocolate brand. Right from the early years of its establishment, the brand of bean-to-bar chocolate has taken the chocolate world by storm, attracting the attention of international media, and being recognized by the international community as a new talent in the chocolate industry at a grand event in Paris; as well as making a deep impression on the late Michelin chefs Michel Roux and Pierre Herme. Marou has become the center of discussion, receiving the respect of great names in the industry as they brought a new sense of pride to "Made in Vietnam" products. Marou has launched a new line of chocolate bars with tropical flavors and energy bars. Marous first product line is pure chocolate with names representing the six provinces from which they originated: Ben Tre, Tien Giang, Dong Nai, Lam Dong, Ba Ria, and Dak Lak. The cocoa flavor in each product reflects the taste of that regions soil, including topographical and weather features. The drought creates a sour taste, while the heavy rainy season produces a fruity or warm flavor commonly found in spices. Notably, marking the milestone of a decade of development in 2021, Marou launched a special chocolate bar with pho flavor at the end of last year, a homage to Vietnams national dish. Pho Spice Bar is a blend of cocoa with five spices in turn to make pho, including cardamom, star anise, cilantro seeds, cinnamon, and cloves. To continue its 10th-anniversary celebration, Marou has launched two more lines of chocolate bars with a completely new approach of ingredients, styles, and customer profiles with the concept of graphic novel journey to the tropics. Marou Bars will expand its reach by blending more ingredients from fruits and nuts, creating three new different flavors. The size of the chocolate bar has also changed to suit more purposes of use, Vincent said. Marou, Faiseurs de Chocolate currently owns a large chain of stores in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi and, at the same time, exports made-in-Vietnam chocolates to 20 countries. Our vision is to be the most inspiring chocolate company in Asia, and we want to create unexpected experiences for our customers, Vincent said. Samsung workers in Vietnam bear brunt of slowdown in global demand for electronics Employees make their way to work at the Samsung factory in Thai Nguyen province, north of Hanoi, Vietnam October 13, 2016. Photo by Reuters/Kham Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has scaled back production at its massive smartphone plant in Vietnam, employees say, as retailers and warehouses grapple with rising inventory amid a global fall in consumer spending. America's largest warehouse market is full and major U.S. retailers such as Best Buy and Target Corp warn of slowing sales as shoppers tighten their belts after early Covid-era spending binges. The effect is acutely felt in Vietnam's northern province of Thai Nguyen, one of Samsung's two mobile manufacturing bases in the country where the world's largest smartphone vendor churns out half of its phone output, according to the Vietnam government. Samsung, which shipped around 270 million smartphones in 2021, says the campus has the capacity to make around 100 million devices a year, according to its website. "We are going to work just three days per week, some lines are adjusting to a four-day workweek instead of six before, and of course no overtime is needed," Pham Thi Thuong, a 28-year-old worker at the plant told Reuters. "Business activities were even more robust during this time last year when the Covid-19 outbreak was at its peak. It's so tepid now." Reuters could not immediately establish whether Samsung is shifting production to other manufacturing bases to make up for reduced output from the Vietnamese factory. The company also makes phones in South Korea and India. Samsung told Reuters it has not discussed reducing its annual production target in Vietnam. The South Korean tech giant is relatively optimistic about smartphone demand in the second half, saying on its earnings call last week that supply disruptions had mostly been resolved and that demand would either stay flat or even see single-digit growth. It is aiming for foldable phone sales to surpass that of its past flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Note, in the second half. It is expected to unveil its latest foldables on Aug. 10. But a dozen workers interviewed by Reuters outside the factory almost all said business is not good. Thuong and her friends who have been working for Samsung for around five years said they had never seen deeper production cuts. "Of course there is a low season every year, often around June-July, but low means no OT (overtime), not workday cuts like this," Thuong said. She said managers had told workers inventories were high and there were not many new orders. Research firm Gartner expects global smartphone shipments to decline by 6% this year due to consumer spending cuts and a sharp sales drop in China. Samsung town Samsung is Vietnam's biggest foreign investor and exporter, with six factories across the country, from northern industrial hubs Thai Nguyen and Bac Ninh where most phones and parts are manufactured, to Ho Chi Minh City's plant making fridges and washing machines. The South Korean company has poured $18 billion into Vietnam, powering the country's economic growth. Samsung alone contributes one fifth of Vietnam's total exports. Its arrival nearly a decade ago in Thai Nguyen, about 65 km (40 miles) from the capital Hanoi, transformed the area from a sleepy farming district into a sprawling industrial hub that now also manufactures phones for Chinese brands including Xiaomi Corp. Generous benefits including subsidised or free meals and accommodation have lured tens of thousands of young workers to the region, but reduced workhours have now left many feeling the pinch. "My salary was cut by half last month because I just worked four days and spent the remaining week doing nothing," said worker Nguyen Thi Tuoi. Job cuts are on some workers' minds but so far none have been announced. "I dont think there will be job cuts, just some working hour cuts to suit the current global situation," said one worker, declining to be named because she did not want to risk her team leader role. "I do hope that the current cut will not last long and we will soon be back to normal pace." HCMCs water supply, lifeblood of 13 million, faces serious problems Increasing number of pollutants, an outdated water distribution network and salt intrusion combine to pose an unprecedented, grave threat to HCMC water security. "Oil stain down the river." The 6 a.m. announcement jolted Dinh Xuan Hoa awake and he rushed to the Hoa An pump station around 30 km away from Ho Chi Minh City. "It was the most stressful Sunday in all my 33 years as head of the pumping station," Hoa said, recalling the first time he had to deal with oil contaminating the water supply. Five employees who lived close to the station were soon dispatched to the scene. The director of the Thu Duc water treatment plant downtown came along as well. About 14 km away from the scene, at another water treatment plant, employees from its water quality management department were also summoned. Water samples were frequently tested taken to see if there was any oil in them. Since 2009, the possibility of such a scenario playing out had been envisaged and prepared for by the Saigon Water Corporation (Sawaco), but it had not actually happened until now. Hoa said how quickly they deal with such problems would decide the likelihood of an environmental crisis akin to what happened in 2019, when water supply at a plant in Hoa Binh became contaminated with oil. The oil stains ebbed and flowed with every wave pushing against the two layers of buoys strung across a 140 m length. They were close to the pumps where raw water would be sucked into the plant. They had already stained black the surrounding dykes. People threw buoys around 175 m long into the water to block the oil, but even this was not enough. Tran Kim Thach, head of the water quality management department of Sawaco, asked for the raw water to be checked every 15 minutes. What worried him most unfortunately came true: two of three water treatment plants detected oil in their water supply. Thach immediately ordered that all water be flushed out of the system, hoping that this would remove all the oil as well. After discharging around 10,000 m3 of water within two hours, the oil was gone, thankfully. Such incidents are ticking time bombs for any water supply system, especially in HCMC, which is almost entirely dependent on outside sources for freshwater. Oil, which can be seen with the naked eye, is far from the most troublesome threat to the water supply. There are hundreds of other colorless, odorless pollutants out there that can trigger another environmental crisis, one that might be detected way too late. According to a report by the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, the total amount of wastewater released throughout the Dong Nai River could have reached 4.7 million m3 a day in 2020. The amount of wastewater released by daily activities in this river alone has already accounted for one-third the amount of wastewater released by the entire country. Water quality in the Saigon River, one of the most polluted rivers in southern Vietnam, has been dropping year after year as well. Over the past 10 years, the Saigon and Dong Nai rivers have been the fuel that drives economic growth in the Southern Key Economic Zone, which grows 1.5 times faster than the national average. In 2019 alone, the region has provided over 5.1 billion m3 of water to numerous plants, accounting for 68.3 percent of all the water used for industrial purposes in Vietnam. But at the same time, more and more wastewater is being discharged into rivers every day, all the way downstream. "The state of the economy and the environment are always inversely proportional to one another," said professor Le Huy Ba, adding that the push for GDP growth in HCMC, along with its high population growth at 2.28 percent a year, means the burden on the environment and its resources is getting ever heavier, especially when most fields of development require water as a resource. Environment pays the price "Using fuel comes with a price, and in this case, its the environment (that pays it)," Ba said. In just seven years (2014 to 2020), the amount of industrial wastewater discharged into rivers has increased eleven-fold, from 110,000 to 1.21 million m3 a day. And its not simply the sheer amount of wastewater thats the problem; the types of pollutants present are also getting more diverse and harder to detect. Over the past decade, numerous pollutants and contaminants, both chemical and biological, have been found very often in these areas, especially the Saigon River section running through Binh Duong and HCMC. Not only do they change the color, taste and smell of the water, they also trigger gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhoea. In accordance with regulations issued by the environment ministry, water quality near the surface must be evaluated every six months and tap water must be evaluated every month. A 2021 survey by the Asian Water Research Center (CARE) said new pollutants have been detected in the Saigon River and they have not been included in water quality metrics by both the environment ministry and the health ministry. Specifically, the center found 106 out of 205 known organic micropollutants in the samples. The results of another study released last April revealed that certain micropollutants, produced through industrial, agricultural and daily activities, were found in the water supply in HCMC and its neighbors Tay Ninh and Binh Duong. "These pollutants may affect water sources used by citizens as they were found near the sites where HCMC gets its raw water," said Professor Nguyen Phuoc Dan of CARE, adding that he had to send the samples to Sweden for analysis as Vietnam still lacked the technology and resources for such tests. Fortunately, these micropollutants were detected at low levels and were still within international standards. But it was an indicator that the water supply was being polluted and that the issue cannot be overlooked. Dan said factories and industrial complexes should have been placed in downstream areas, like HCMC or Ba Ria-Vung Tau, instead of upstream areas like Binh Duong and Tay Ninh as the pollutants they produce would affect the water downstream. "HCMC cannot completely manage the water quality on its end," he said, adding that the planning for the construction of industrial complexes should be done depending on regions, not localities. Dao Phu Khanh, deputy head of the department of environmental health and school medicine under the HCMC Center for Disease Control, said stable organic pollutants are among the most toxic of pollutants. Not only can they be carcinogenic and hard to get rid of, but also propagated over large distances and be accumulated inside organisms. As someone whose job is to monitor the water quality in HCMC, Khanh said he has never seen these kinds of pollutants in the water supply, simply because they are not included in the water quality evaluation list. This also means that there are no specific standards to see if certain levels of these pollutants are safe or not. "If we do discover the presence of these pollutants in raw water, we would also have to test the quality of tap water to measure their levels, as well as routinely monitor them and evaluate risks. It would be dangerous if tap water has high levels of these substances," he said. More and more chemicals While raw water sources for HCMC, home to 13 million people, are proving to be more unsustainable than ever, the citys 140-year-old water treatment and distribution system is not able to keep up with economic growth. Most worryingly, when an emergency arises, it lacks a contingency plan to respond to it. Tran Kim Thach, head of the water quality management department, said HCMC uses pre-oxidation and coagulation methods to filter its water. The water is then treated with chlorine to get rid of microorganisms before it reaches peoples homes. "The poorer the raw water quality is, the more chemicals would need to be used," said Thach. Furthermore, this filtration system can only satisfy basic water quality criteria. There needs to be more technological solutions in the future to deal with more novel organic pollutants in the water, such as antibiotics or organic micropollutants, he said. And even then, current technologies cannot treat water contaminated with salt, he added. Over the last seven years, the amount of chemicals used for water treatment in HCMC has always been higher than current standards set by the Ministry of Construction, especially at the Tan Hiep water treatment plant. For example, the amount of lime used for water filtration is around 10-13 times the current threshold, the amount of chlorine around 1.8-2.6 times and the amount of polyaluminum chloride three times higher. "The water sources of HCMC are much more polluted than usual, so the amount of chemicals required to purify them also gets higher," Thach reiterated. Despite the fact that the current tap water quality in HCMC satisfies standards set by the health ministry, its water treatment system is considered too "ancient" and prone to many risks, Thach said. For example, if the ammonium level in the water gets too high and chlorine is still used to treat it, toxic substances like nitrites or nitrates could be produced, causing numerous symptoms if ingested, including kidney stones. Problems are not confined to the water treatment system; they extend to how HCMC distributes its water throughout the city. Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, China and Japan are some of the countries where monkeypox has been detected. Per the latest decision, foreign entrants from countries with monkeypox will have their body temperatures checked and be subject to other monitoring measures. Those suspected to be infected with the condition will be isolated and have their biological samples taken for testing. The ministry is yet to issue specific instructions on how foreign entrants from countries with monkeypox should be monitored, or when exactly these measures are to be applied. Vietnam has not recorded any monkeypox cases so far. Last week, Ho Chi Minh City proposed that foreign entrants are asked to complete medical declarations at the border as one of the anti-monkeypox measures. Nguyen Van Kinh, former director of the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases, said he believed health facilities are likely to be among the first places where monkeypox cases would be detected, instead of airports, as had happened with Covid-19. Those with the highest risk of infection include direct caretakers of patients and lab workers involved in the testing of biological samples for monkeypox. Besides screening measures at the border, the health ministry has also requested monitoring at different health facilities and added vigilance at certain events in the community. As of July 30, the WHO has recorded over 21,000 monkeypox cases in 78 countries and territories. Seven people have died. Typical symptoms of the disease include fever, headache, muscle pain, skin lesions and rashes. It is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids or lesion material. Aircraft seen around Taiwan island at noon on August 4, when China has launched live-fire military drills. Photo by Flightradar24 Vietnamese carriers had to adjust their flight routes to Northeast Asian countries and the U.S. to avoid Taiwanese airspace as China began its five-day live drill Thursday afternoon. The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said 118 flights operated by Vietnamese carriers will be affected by the Chinese live-fire drills, with 36 operated by Vietnam Airlines and the rest by Vietjet Air. With flights from Vietnam to South Korea and Japan, a Vietnam Airlines spokesperson said aircraft would have to fly into China's inland area to avoid Taiwanese airspace, adding 10-15 minutes to flying time. With flights to the U.S. the carrier was forced to change its route by flying over the Philippines, with the detour adding 35 minutes. Flights between Vietnam and Taiwan remain operational. A representative of Vietjet Air said the carrier has changed its routes for a series of flights connecting with Japan and South Korea. In addition to adjusting flight routes, some flights may be delayed, with detours increasing fuel costs. China on Thursday launched unprecedented live-fire military drills in six areas around Taiwan, a day after a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island in what was described as the highest-ranking U.S. official to do so in 25 years. On Wednesday, China warned airlines operating in Asia to avoid flying in areas around Taiwan from Thursday to Sunday, prompting several Asian airlines to adjust their routes. Vietnam resumed international flights to the U.S. and Northeast Asian countries in January. A worker adjusts an ASEAN flag at a meeting hall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, October 28, 2021. Photo by Reuters/Lim Huey Teng Southeast Asian nations on Wednesday (Aug 3) urged restraint over Taiwan after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island prompted an enraged China to vow "punishment." Pelosi's dramatic trip to Taipei, defying stark threats by China, overshadowed a meeting of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers in Phnom Penh, which had been expected to focus on the bloody crisis engulfing Myanmar. ASEAN spokesman Kung Phoak, Cambodia's deputy foreign minister, said ministers at the closed-door talks - meeting face to face for the first time since the pandemic - had expressed concern over "growing tension in the Taiwan Strait." "We hope that all sides will try their best to deescalate the tension there, avoid actions that may contribute to the escalation of tension and engage in dialogue," Kung Phoak told reporters. Malaysia and Thailand echoed the calls for calm, with Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah urging all sides to tread "very carefully." Thai foreign ministry spokesman Tanee Sangrat said the kingdom called for "utmost restraint" and warned against "any actions that would aggravate tensions." Attention will now turn to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his American counterpart Antony Blinken who will join ASEAN and other ministers for regional security talks on Thursday and Friday. On Wednesday, Wang slammed the trip by Pelosi - the highest-profile elected U.S. official to visit Taiwan in 25 years - as a violation of Chinese sovereignty. "Those who play with fire will not come to a good end, and those who offend China will be punished," he warned in an interview in Phnom Penh with Chinese state media. China considers self-governing Taiwan a part of its territory to one day be reclaimed, by force if necessary. No ASEAN country formally recognizes Taiwan and none have shown an appetite for backing Taipei against China. On November 20, 2020, Burmas National League for Democracy party, or NLD, won an overwhelming majority of votes in the national election. Less than three months later, the Burmese military, seized control of Burmas government and detained the countrys leaders, including State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, as well as members of their political party. The regime launched the coup on February 1, 2021, as the newly elected Parliament was preparing for its initial session. The regime used lethal force to suppress protests throughout the country. According to the NGO Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, Burmese security forces killed over 2,000 people, and arbitrarily arrested over 14,000. The military also expanded abusive operations in ethnic minority areas, displacing more than 750,000 people. In an attempt to stop the bloodshed, leaders of the nine other ASEAN countries met with Burmas military Commander-in-Chief General Min Aung Hlaing. They prevailed upon him to agree to the Five-Point Consensus by which the Burmese military regime agreed to end the violence in Burma; to hold dialogue among all parties; to accept the appointment of a special envoy; to accept humanitarian assistance by ASEAN; and to allow the special envoy to meet with all parties. Unfortunately, the agreement changed nothing as the military regime has consistently failed to uphold its commitments. Its unfortunately safe to say that weve seen no positive movement, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. We continue to see the repression of the Burmese people. We continue to see violence perpetrated on them by the regime. We continue to see virtually the entire opposition in jail or in exile. And we continue to see a terrible humanitarian situation, exacerbated by the fact that the regime is not delivering whats necessary for the people. We will continue to look for ways that we and other countries can effectively put pressure on the regime to move back to the democratic path, said Secretary Blinken. Regional support for the regimes adherence to the Five-Point consensus developed by ASEAN is critical. All the ASEAN countries need to continue to demand an immediate cessation of violence, the release of political prisoners, and a restoration of Burmas democratic path. All countries have to continue to speak clearly about what the regime is doing in its ongoing repression and brutality, said Secretary Blinken. We have an obligation to the people of Burma to hold the regime accountable. No media source currently available The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, managed by USAID, estimates that 7 to 8 million South Sudanese people will likely require food assistance. ELKO Elko County Commissioners support the U.S. Bureau of Land Managements plan to convey land to the City of West Wendover for development of an industrial park and will send a letter to the BLM encouraging final approval. Like the other cities and towns in Elko County, West Wendovers growth has been stifled by being surrounded by federal land. The proposed action will expand the land area available to West Wendover, doubling their footprint and allowing them to plan for their own growth and economic development, wrote Elko Countys assistant manager and natural resources director, Curtis Moore. Commissioners voted at their Aug. 3 meeting to send Moores comments to the BLMs Elko district. The Elko BLMs Wells Field Office has released the environmental assessment on the proposed West Wendover Land Conveyance Project and is taking public comment through Aug. 14 on the plan that would provide roughly 6,366 acres to West Wendover and to Tooele County, Utah for runway protection. Most of this goes to Wendover, Moore said. The land is currently just outside West Wendover city limits, but he said that I imagine they will annex it. Patricia Ryan, public affairs officer for the Elko BLM District, said in an email Aug. 4 that if the conveyance is authorized, approximately 705 acres would go to Tooele County. Depending on the alternative chosen, approximately 5,661 acres or 5,311 acres would be conveyed to the City of West Wendover. The U.S. Air Force deemed the land excess in October of last year, and the BLM stated that under the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2023, conveyance of the land is authorized to occur in phases, and the BLM may release up to 14,595 more acres once the Air Force has determined future needs for the remaining land. Its a good idea. It secures their growth for many years, said Delmo Andreozzi, chairman of the commissioners. The BLM also released a finding of no significant impact for the proposed land conveyance that will be at no cost to the city and Tooele County, Utah, but the document isnt signed yet. The finding includes restrictions against interfering with flights near the Wendover Airport. The airport is on the Wendover, Utah, side of the twin communities. Commissioner Rex Steninger asked Moore if there is enough water for the new acreage the city will acquire, and Moore said the city believes there is sufficient water rights. The city has extra water rights near the Long Canyon Mine operated by Nevada Gold Mines and water rights in the Pilot Valley area. West Wendover City Manager Chris Melville told the Elko Daily Free Press last month that there has been interest in the property since the 1990s when the Air Force indicated it no longer had the need to use that property, which was part of the old Wendover Bombing and Gunnery Range. During World War II, Wendover was buzzing with military personnel and the Enola Gay plane that eventually carried the first atomic bomb to Japan was based at Wendover before that historic mission began. The old barracks buildings and old aircraft buildings are on the Utah side, as is a museum. According to the EA, roughly 6,251 acres of the lands to be conveyed have already been declared excess by the USAF, while the remaining 115 acres is for an area known as Landfill K, which is in the process of being cleaned up and remediated by the USAF. The proposed land conveyance is separate from the more than 80 acres the City of West Wendover purchased from the BLM last year to develop a downtown at the west end of the city. The city paid $840,000 for that parcel. The West Wendover City Council awarded the downtown infrastructure contract to Great Basin Engineering Contractors in Elko this summer. According to the BLM, comments on the land conveyance proposal can be mailed to the BLM Wells Office, Attn: Aili Gordon, 3900 East Idaho St., Elko, NV 89801 or remailed to WellsFO_NEPA@BLM.gov. ELKO U.S. Representative Mark Amodei (NV-02) met with Abigail B. Quintero, to offer his congratulations. Abigail, a junior at Wells High School in Elko County, and her mother traveled to Washington D.C. for the Congressional Art Competition winners reception. Her original artwork, called Nevadas Landscape, used acrylic paint, showcasing the natural beauty of Nevada. In her art competition entry form, Abigail wrote as part of her description, A Nevada landscape that is filled with bright color. A body of water is visible that has mountains and trees surrounding it. The painting captures a daybreak of the landscape. Rep. Amodei said, The annual Congressional Art Competition is a great opportunity for students to showcase their artistic talent, creative vision, and enthusiasm for their state. In her powerful painting, Nevadas Landscape, Abigail, Nevadas Second Congressional District winner, captures the magic of daybreak in Nevada. I applaud Abigails Nevada-inspired creation, and I look forward to seeing Nevadas Landscape shining bright at the Capitol for the next year. This years submissions as a whole were incredibly strong, and I congratulate Abigail on this exceptional achievement. Im proud of all our participants this year and hope students across Northern Nevada will join in this competition again next year. Each spring, the Congressional Institute sponsors the Congressional Art Competition for high school students nationwide. This is a unique opportunity for students in each congressional district in the country to be recognized for their artistic talent. Every year, the artwork submitted by students across Nevadas Second Congressional District are judged on aesthetics, creativity, and relation to Nevada. The winning artists work is displayed in the U.S. Capitol for one year. ELKO The Good Deed Project is coming to Elko. Mandy Telleria, who grew up in Elko County, is returning to her hometown to start a branch of her nonprofit, the Good Deed Project, in the area. Starting in 2014 as a 5013 nonprofit, the organization assists other groups, families and individuals with limited resources, some of whom were displaced due to Covid-19. According to Telleria, the nonprofit seeks to provide home rehabilitation and other services to improve their living conditions and quality of life. More than that, she said it lifts the burden off families who might have costly home repairs. appliance breakdowns or no furnishings that might be an additional stress to a low-income situation. This week, she has been meeting with community stakeholders and organizations, making connections and seeking partnerships with other groups that support low-income families. According to Telleria, the organization plans to team up with local nonprofits to bring in resources and help them further meet the needs of the people of Elko. Theres no one in town that provides the services we have, she said. Thats where theres a gap. There are agencies that provide food assistance, some utility and financial assistance. There really isnt an organization that helps with home repairs. In Las Vegas, she recalled helping a family of six living in manufactured housing who lost electricity in most of the home except for one room. Theyre not able to call an electrician, they dont have the finances to do that. But we can go and evaluate the situation and get the power back on. The Good Deed Project would be supplementing some of the other needs that opens up some finances. It gives them a little more money in their pocket so they can focus on daycare or utilities. She also described a ripple effect that would create less stress in homes for both parents and children. Although Telleria developed the nonprofit in Las Vegas, she said the organization would have an Elko office and warehouse operated with local staff with us offering guidance and me being here quite often. Were not going to be from a distance, trying to figure it out, she said. Were going to be hands on, boots on the ground with locals running the organization. Born in Elko County, Tellaria lived on the Maggie Creek Ranch before moving to Las Vegas after graduating from Elko High School in 2001. She attended University of Nevada Las Vegas for a degree in architecture. The intention were always to get my education, come back and contribute to my hometown, she said. It took me a little while longer than I would have liked to come back and contribute to the community. I think now is a really great time. Growing up, Telleria recalled watching her mother raise her while working multiple jobs. She said it was a factor in seeing the development of the Good Deed Project in Las Vegas. Telleria has maintained her connection to Elko County over the years. In 2017, Telleria, along with volunteers, brought carpets and mattresses for families whose homes were affected by the Humboldt River Flood. She recalled how donors willingly gave her materials and resources for her to bring to Elko without question. We had companies in Vegas that knew it was going to help families, she said. They didnt say, If its going to Elko so were not going to donate. I think thats special to share resources through communities. I live in Vegas, but Ive never really left. I still have ties to this community, I still love this community, she said. Its more that I am able to share the resources that weve built in Las Vegas and being able to bring them back here. Since its founding, the organization said it has completed more than $250,000 in facility improvements to teen shelter Living Grace and Nevadas second largest domestic violence shelter, S.A.F.E. House; a number of home renovations; and countless home repairs. For two years, volunteers have helped donate and deliver furniture to those in transition from homelessness as well as provide a holiday meal to hundreds of Nevada residents. The nonprofit received state recognition when it was awarded the 2021 Gold Governors Points of Light Award. For more information, visit www.thegooddeedproject.org. Political parties of various countries on Wednesday expressed strong opposition to the visit by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to China's Taiwan region, saying it severely violated China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Through messages received in various ways by the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the political parties also reiterated their adherence to the one-China principle, and urged the U.S. side to immediately stop interfering in China's internal affairs. Ivan Melnikov, first deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), also first deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma or the lower house of parliament, said Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region is an open provocation to China, it is contrary to a series of consensuses reached between the Chinese and U.S. governments, and is yet another example of how the U.S. side sabotages global stability. Melnikov said the CPRF firmly supports the efforts made by the Chinese people in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The secretariat of Mazdoor Kisan Party of Pakistan released a statement to express serious concern over Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, saying that the U.S. deeds of interfering in China's internal affairs are unacceptable. The statement also urged the U.S. side to earnestly comply with the three China-U.S. joint communiques and respect China's efforts in realizing national reunification. The Funcinpec Party of Cambodia said that it is impossible for anyone, any force, to stop the historical trend that China will achieve national reunification. The party reiterated its adherence to the one-China principle and firm support to China's efforts in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Communist Party of Egypt said it strongly condemns Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region, fully supports the one-China principle, and believes that the Communist Party of China has the wisdom and ability to achieve victory from this crisis and defeat the insidious conspiracies of the U.S. side. Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region violates the one-China policy, and is a provocative action that damages China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, posing a serious threat to regional security and stability, said Ahmed Majdalani, secretary-general of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, who also expressed firm opposition to other countries' interference in China's internal affairs. Pelosi's move is a provocation by the U.S. side against China, and all progressive countries in the world should condemn it, said Tandai Chirau, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) politburo member, deputy secretary for security, noting ZANU-PF supports the one-China principle and the Chinese side's actions to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Masonwabe Sokoyi, 2nd deputy secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the Western Cape province, said that Pelosi insisted on making the visit to China's Taiwan region is an unjust act in violation of the UN Charter and relevant resolutions. The progressive forces of the world, including the SACP, regard China as an example for various countries in the world and firmly support the one-China policy, Sokoyi added. Luciana Santos, president of the Communist Party of Brazil, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a blatant violation of the commitments made by the U.S. side in the three China-U.S. joint communiques. Taiwan has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times, Santos added, expressing firm opposition to the U.S. threat to world peace. Victor Gorodeki Kot, general secretary of the Communist Party of Argentina, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a grave provocation, which blatantly violates UN Resolution 2758 and the commitment of the Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America. The Communist Party of Argentina calls on the governments and people of all countries, as well as the political parties, trade unions and governmental organizations of Argentina, to speak out against the actions of the United States, said Kot. The Hungarian Workers' Party said Pelosi's visit to Taiwan would have serious consequences. Taiwan is a region of China, and recognizing the one-China principle is an important part of safeguarding world peace. Jose Luis Centella, president of the Communist Party of Spain, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a clear provocation and shows that the United States intends to put its will above international law and the United Nations, which is very dangerous to the international community. Patrik Koebele, chairman of the German Communist Party, said Pelosi's sole purpose of visiting Taiwan is to provoke China. The whole world, including the United States, clearly knows and recognizes that there is only one China. In addition, more than 60 political parties in more than 40 countries also expressed firm opposition to Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, including the Workers' Party of Korea, the Mongolian Civil Will-Green Party, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist-Leninist), the People's Movement of Tunisia, the Communist Party of Lebanon, the Communist Party of Swaziland, the AVANA party of Madagascar, the Communist Party of Chile, the Communist Party of Portugal and France's Solidarity and Progress Party, among other parties. At the press conference (Photo: giaoducthoidai.vn) The 9th edition of the program will be broadcast live on the HTV1 and HTV9 channels. The program aims to respond to the For national seas and islands For the fatherland frontline fund. At the same time, it will also honor the Coast Guard, fisheries surveillance force and fishermen who are working day and night around islands to protect the countrys sovereignty. According to Mr. Pham Minh Tuan, Deputy Chairman of the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF) Committee in HCMC, the program will inform the audience about the funds operation, activities supporting officers, soldiers and people in border and island areas in 2022 and mobilize organizations and individuals to support the fund./. At the reception (Photo: VNA) At the meeting, the two sides informed and evaluated the achieved results in socio-economic development, Party building, and authority building of the two provinces; and results of cooperation in all fields. In particular, they emphasized the good traditional friendship between the two sides, especially in support for each other in overcoming difficulties caused by natural disasters and the pandemic. Savannakhet Provinces Governor Santiphap Phomvihane expressed his joy and appreciation for the results of friendly cooperation between the two localities, especially in the past two years, when, even as the pandemic developed complicatedly, the two sides maintained their good traditional friendship in many flexible forms. Emphasizing that 2022 is a special year to mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations and the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Vietnam and Laos, the Governor of Savannakhet Province added he wished that in the coming time, the two localities would continue to promote cooperation in all fields to deepen the relationship in order to consolidate and cultivate the great friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two Parties and States in general and between Savannakhet Province and Thua Thien - Hue Province in particular. Secretary of the Thua Thien - Hue Provincial Party Committee Le Truong Luu affirmed that despite difficulties due to the pandemic, with great efforts and determination, the province has basically controlled the pandemic, with tourism and services increasingly stable again; and positive socio-economic development; and increased cooperative relations with Lao provinces. Mr. Le Truong Luu suggested that in the coming time, the two provinces should continue to promote cooperation in politics and diplomacy, improve the efficiency of cooperation in all fields; create favorable conditions to attract investment to develop the strong areas of the two localities, thereby contributing to further cultivating the strong friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between Thua Thien - Hue and Savannakhet in particular and between Vietnam and Laos in general. He shared that at the end of August 2022, the province will send a delegation to visit and work with the southern provinces of Laos, in order to tighten the relationship between Thua Thien - Hue province and other Lao provinces; and seek to strengthen investment cooperation. Over the past time, Thua Thien - Hue and Savannakhet have maintained and developed a special traditional relationship that is increasingly close, reliable, effective and practical in all fields. The two sides continue to direct functional sectors to closely coordinate to ensure security and order at the Vietnam - Laos border; making an important contribution to building the Vietnam - Laos border line of peace, stability, friendship, cooperation and comprehensive development. Cooperation in the fields of education and training of human resources, culture and health has made much progress, making an important contribution to the socio-economic development goals of the two localities. Since 2002, Thua Thien - Hue province has been receiving, for training in Vietnamese and studies in universities and colleges, 1,347 Lao students, including 227 international students from Savannakhet. In the past two years, the province has organized the reception of more than 500 Lao students returning home to avoid the pandemic and return to study at educational institutions in the province, and vaccination against COVID-19 has been carried out for all Lao students./. Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong delivers his remarks at a ceremony to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Viet Nam-Laos diplomatic ties and the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the two countries, Ha Noi, July 18, 2022. (Photo: VGP) The Vietnam-Laos relationship, founded by President Ho Chi Minh, President Kaysone Phomvihane and President Souphanouvong, and nurtured by generations of soldiers and people of both countries, has become a priceless asset and a unique relationship in world history. This year, the two countries celebrate the 60th anniversary of Vietnam-Laos diplomatic relations (1962-2022) and the 45th anniversary of the signing of the bilateral Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (1977-2022). Despite difficulties and challenges, including those brought by COVID-19 pandemic, the partnership between the two Parties and countries has continued to grow steadily in a deep and effective manner, while the bilateral political relations have been constantly reinforced and elevated from a traditional friendship to a great friendship, guiding their cooperation in other fields. The political relationship between the two Parties and the two countries is increasingly close and trusting, which is a solid foundation for the cooperation between the two countries in all fields. Many cooperation projects and works bearing the imprint of the faithful friendship and special relations between Vietnam and Laos have been effectively promoted. Typically, the new Lao National Assembly building inaugurated in 2021, a gift from the Party, State and people of Vietnam to the Party, State and people of Laos, is one of the meaningful symbols of the Vietnam-Laos special relationship in the doi moi (renewal) period. In terms of economic cooperation, so far Vietnam has poured approximately USD5.4 billion into 214 investment projects throughout Laos, ranking first among 78 countries and territories that receive Vietnamese investment. Following a period of decline, Vietnamese investment in the neighboring country is recording an upturn again in a steady direction. Last year witnessed Vietnamese investment capital in Laos rise by 33.3% year on year to reach USD118.3 million. Joint projects such as Hanoi-Vientiane Expressway and Vung Ang Port showed the special sentiments, high political trust and brotherhood between the two nations, and are unique projects in the cooperation between the two countries. An art performance at a ceremony held in the Lao capital city of Vientiane on July 18 to mark the 60th anniversary of Vietnam-Laos diplomatic ties (Photo: VNA) A number of investment projects by Vietnamese enterprises in Laos have registered an increase in investment capital this year. Many projects have operated effectively, making practical contributions to local socio-economic development, including generating steady jobs for local people, increasing workers skills, upgrading infrastructure, and improving peoples living standards. Defense and security cooperation is one of the important pillars of the Vietnam-Laos relationship. The two countries closely coordinate and support each other in maintaining political stability, ensuring national defense, security, social order and safety in each country, especially preventing and combating transnational crime, and firmly consolidating between the two countries the border of peace, friendship, cooperation and development, thus enhancing exchanges and bonding, making an important contribution to promoting socio-economic development in border localities between the two countries. Cooperation in education - training and human resource development has always been paid special attention by the Party and State of the two countries. Tens of thousands of Lao students have been studying and researching in Vietnam, and Laos also trains thousands of Vietnamese students. Many of whom have become outstanding leaders, managers and researchers, making important contributions to the development of each country. Local cooperation, science and technology, environment, health, and culture - society have obtained many positive results. The cooperation in COVID-19 prevention and control between the two countries over the past two years has once again proved that in any circumstances, Vietnam and Laos always stand shoulder to shoulder, side by side and support each other. Despite many difficulties, the two Parties, States and peoples of the two countries have tried their best to provide each other with timely and effective support in terms of resources, medical equipment and vaccines to serve COVID-19 prevention and control. People-to-people exchange has been promoted and deepened. Currently, all 18 cities and provinces of Laos have set up partnership and twinned relations with Vietnamese localities, including Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Not only comprehensive and deepening cooperation within the bilateral framework, the special friendship and solidarity between Vietnam and Laos is also affirmed at the multilateral level. The two countries share many common points, support each other, and coordinate closely at international forums such as the United Nations, ASEAN, ASEM, and the Greater Mekong Sub-region. Vietnam-Laos relations always have a top priority position in the foreign policy of the Party and State of Vietnam. The Party, State and people of Vietnam are always deeply aware that each victory in the cause of the struggle for national liberation and reunification in the past, as well as in the current renewal process of Vietnam, is associated with the solidarity, support and help from the goodwill of the Lao Party, State and people. During a ceremony held in the Lao capital city of Vientiane on July 18 to mark the 60th anniversary of Vietnam-Laos diplomatic ties, and 45 years of the signing of the Vietnam-Laos Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, Party General Secretary and State President of Laos Thongloun Sisoulith affirmed that in any circumstances, the Lao Party, State and people will always work to preserve and promote the great friendship and special solidarity between the two countries across all spheres for the sake of their peoples./. At the hand-over ceremony (Photo: VNA) Speaking at the event, Mr. Nguyen Van Hao, Principal of the Khmer-Vietnam friendship primary school, is a symbol of the friendship between Vietnams Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap and Prey Veng. Ms. Ngoc said the schools students will contribute to preserving and promoting the Vietnam-Cambodia friendship. Since its establishment 10 years ago, the school now has 220 students divided into seven classes, with five for the Vietnamese language and two for the Khmer language./. Obstetrics clinic inaugurated by Level-2 Field Hospital No. 4 in Bentiu (Photo: PANO) On the occasion, an action program themed joining hands for women's health was also launched. In addition, the hospitals board of directors actively developed a plan to implement the program joining hands for women's health. Accordingly, about 50 high-risk women at the mission will be examined obstetric and gynecological screening. According to Lieutenant Colonel Vu Minh Duong, Director of Level-2 Field Hospital No. 4, the program has contributed to strengthening the role and position of women in the peace process in the region. This is the first clinic of this kind built at a field hospital of Vietnam during the countrys four-term deployment at the UNMISS./. Minister of Social Policy of Ukraine Oksana Zholnovych has said that the government of Ukraine has no plans to raise the retirement age. "We will not increase it. All increases have already been spelled out until 2028, they are already happening, but not by age, but by length of service. Depending on how long a person has insurance experience, he can retire," Zholnovych said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine, answering the question of whether raising the retirement age is relevant today. Commenting on her initiative to provide citizens with the possibility of additional voluntary social contributions, the minister expressed confidence that people would join it. "Many of those who temporarily moved abroad are on unpaid leave today, so single social security contributions are not accrued for them, their insurance record is on pause. Therefore, they can pay such a contribution from their income abroad, especially if they work there, to extend your their period and retire on time, upon return. There are also families where not all family members work, and they have a problem with retirement. So why can't a husband and wife agree among themselves that the person who works pays single social security contribution for another person, so that the spouses have their own pension without any requirements when they reach retirement age. Why children who are wealthy and understand that for various reasons their parents of pre-retirement age have lost their jobs and are not able to get a new one will not be able to pay additional minimum contributions and when they reach retirement age, they will receive a full insurance record?" she added. The minister said that the bill on this innovation has already been prepared and will be submitted to the Verkhovna Rada for consideration. As reported, the Ministry of Social Policy initiates an opportunity for citizens to make additional social contributions to increase future pensions. Social Policy Minister of Ukraine Oksana Zholnovych has said the government does not expect an increase in the number of recipients of housing subsidies due to the war. "We have a planned subsidy budget, we increased it by UAH 3 billion compared to last year. Since May, subsidies have been assigned and paid, there are no debts, only there may be slight delays associated with the treasury," Zholnovych said in an exclusive interview with Interfax- Ukraine, answering the question, will the war affect the volume of utility subsidies. She also said that the government is taking measures to buy a predetermined amount of gas and energy so that tariffs do not increase in winter, which will allow "not to plunge people into an even greater state of poverty, so that the payment for them does not increase much." "Therefore, we do not expect that a very large number of people will come for subsidies compared to previous years. Approximately the same number of subsidy recipients is expected," the minister said. The plan for the restoration of Ukraine has already begun to be implemented, several laws have been adopted, but for better coordination it is planned to create a special state development Agency, Secretary of the National Council for Recovery Danylo Hetmantsev said. "It will be such an executive body in the structure of bodies that has a cross-cutting function - the restoration of the country The government is inclined to believe that it will be a state institution following the example of InvestUkraine," he said at a meeting with the European Business Association on Thursday. Hetmantsev explained that the National Recovery Council is finalizing the draft Plan, but cannot give instructions to the authorities and monitor their implementation. Therefore, it is proposed to create an Agency that will be an executive body, will be able to coordinate the work of ministries, maintain contact with foreign partners, propose changes to the plan and solve many other issues. Commenting on the criticism that this function could be performed by the Ministry of Economy and whether it is worth increasing the number of state bodies, the Secretary of the National Council stressed that "the restoration of the country implies not only the economy, this includes culture, education, medicine, security." Answering questions about the date of the final approval of the Recovery Plan, Hetmantsev noted that "we do not know where the front will be, this is the main risk, and we will adjust actions and the document for it." "Therefore, it cannot be approved once and for all," he explained. The Secretary of the National Council recalled that the first part of the plan is what can and should be done now, and this work has already begun, in particular, by passing the necessary laws by parliament. "Two strategic frameworks are the constant threat of war and integration into the EU, we are starting out from them," Hetmantsev stressed. As reported, preliminary costs for the implementation of a 10-year Recovery Plan are estimated at about $750 billion. It includes about 850 projects. The scope of the plan implies close cooperation between the state, business and the international community. On Thursday night, Russian invaders shelled the city of Nikopol and Kryvy Rih district of Dnipropetrovsk region, as a result, a woman was wounded, houses were damaged, and power grids were interrupted, according to Head of the regional military administration Valentyn Reznichenko. "Russian troops fired on Nikopol twice. Some 60 shells from Grads flew into residential areas. Previously, people were not injured. One house was destroyed, almost 50 were damaged, and three dozen outbuildings were hit. A fire broke out in two private courtyards. Rescuers tamed the flame," Reznichenko said in the Telegram channel on Thursday morning. In addition, "buildings and equipment of three local enterprises, as well as more than 100 solar panels were damaged by shelling. Two power grids were cut in the city. More than 3,000 Nikopol residents are without electricity. Emergency teams of electricians are working on the spot." In Kryvy Rih region, the invaders fired at Karpivska and Shyrokivska merged territorial communities from Hurricanes, there is destruction of houses. As a result of the shelling, a 44-year-old woman was wounded, she was provided with the necessary assistance. Zelensky: It is disgusting when former leaders of states with European values work for Russia, which fighting against these values President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that if Russia really wanted an end to the war, it would not transfer reserves to the Ukrainian south. "If Russia really wanted the end of the war, it would not accumulate its reserves in the south of Ukraine now and would not create mass graves of murdered innocent people on Ukrainian territory," he said in a traditional video statement on Wednesday evening. He said " a new propaganda activity started in Moscow. They suddenly decided to define "Azov" as terrorists, although when a terrorist state does this, it is obviously absurd." "They are activating various emissaries with theses that the terrorist state allegedly wants negotiations," Zelensky said. "In general, it is simply disgusting when former leaders of powerful states with European values work for Russia, which is fighting against these values," he said. Earlier, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder came up with the idea of negotiations with Russia after visiting Moscow. "Now it is felt that Russia has begun to realize the inevitability of being recognized as a terrorist state. After all that the Russian army and allegedly private Russian military companies have done, no other terrorist organization in the world can claim primacy in terror," the president said. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is disappointed by the ruling of the Tripoli (Lebanon) court to lift the attachment from the Syrian vessel Laodecia, which transports Ukrainian agricultural products stolen by Russia, according to the official statement of the Ukrainian diplomatic agency, published on Thursday. It clarifies that, despite the evidence provided, the court did not take into account the position of the competent authorities of Ukraine. "This ruling actually encourages Russia to continue thefts in the temporarily occupied south of Ukraine with a sense of impunity. In addition, with this ruling, Lebanon actually undermines its food security, pushing Ukraine away as its reliable partner," the Foreign Ministry said. According to it, Ukraine has always made efforts to maintain the food security of Lebanon, taking first place among the exporters of agricultural products to this country in 2021. At the same time, Ukrainian food supplies to Lebanon did not stop after the start of Russia's full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine, and after the opening of Ukrainian Black Sea ports, the first grain carrier left Odesa for Lebanon. "Moreover, given the difficult food situation in Lebanon, in coordination with the Ukrainian owners of the illegally exported cargo, the Lebanese side was offered to sell Ukrainian flour and barley at a reduced price," the diplomatic department said. The Foreign Ministry also said the decision of the Lebanese court allows the Laodecia vessel, which is under international sanctions due to the illegal export of goods from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, to freely leave the port of Tripoli with stolen Ukrainian flour and barley. "We call on the Lebanese side to revoke the ruling to lift the attachment from the Laodecia vessel and take measures to prevent further attempts to use Lebanon for transactions with stolen Ukrainian grain," the ministry said. The Turkish bulk carrier Ospreys sailing under the flag of Liberia is heading for loading at the seaport of Chornomorsk (Odesa region) under the Istanbul Grain Agreement, the vessel plans to arrive in Ukraine on August 5, Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesman for Odesa Regional Military Administration, has said. "The Turkish bulk carrier Ospreys sailing under the flag of Liberia is heading from the Dardanelles Strait to the port of Chornomorsk. The ship left the Turkish port of Iskenderun on the last day of July and should arrive in Ukraine on August 5. This will be the first ship not from among those blocked in our ports since February 24, which goes for the Ukrainian export grain," he wrote on his Telegram channel. As reported, the first ship Razoni (the flag of Sierra Leone) with 26,500 tonnes of Ukrainian corn left the port of Odesa on July 1 and headed for Lebanon. On July 22, in Istanbul, with the participation of the UN, Ukraine, Turkey and Russia, two documents were signed on the creation of a corridor for the export of grain from three ports on Ukrainian territory Chornomorsk, Odesa and Pivdenny. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky believes that China has economic leverage to put pressure on Vladimir Putin in order to end the conflict. In an exclusive interview with The South China Morning Post, the Ukrainian leader urged the Asian superpower to use its vast political and economic influence over Russia to stop the fighting. "It's a very powerful state. It's a powerful economy So it can politically, economically influence Russia. And China is [also a] permanent member of the UN Security Council," Zelensky said. The 40-minute Zoom interview was his first interview with an Asian publication since Russia's February 24 invasion of Ukraine. "I am sure that without the Chinese market for Russia, Russia would feel in complete economic isolation," he said. "This is what China can do - restrict trade (with Russia) until the end of the war," the president of Ukraine said. Zelensky also urged China to use its status on the UN Security Council to "show" countries that they need to abide by international norms. "If we are acting without legislation, then why do we need a Security Council at all, if any country... or a few countries in the world can simply decide to violate the rules by military means?" he asked. The Ukrainian leader said he understood China wanted to maintain a "balanced" attitude towards the war, but it is important to note that the conflict was based on Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine's sovereign territory. "The Russians are invaders this is a war on our territory, they have come to invade. China, as a big and powerful country, can come and kind of put Russia [in] a certain place," he said. "Of course, I would really like China to reconsider its attitude towards Russia," Zelensky said. The President of Ukraine also expressed his desire to have a phone conversation with the Chinese leader. "I would like to talk directly. I had one conversation with [President] Xi Jinping that was a year ago," he said. "Since the beginning of the large-scale aggression on February 24, we have asked officially for a conversation, but we (have not had) any conversation with China even though I believe that would be helpful," the president of Ukraine said. Zelensky said Xi was one of the few world leaders to have visited Ukraine "at least once," adding that the Chinese leader warmly recalled his ties to the eastern European country during a phone call between the two leaders last year. Asked if he would welcome Chinese help to rebuild his war-torn country, Zelensky said he hoped "China, Chinese business" and "the whole world" would help the process. "I would very much like the whole world [to unite] over this process. It is very difficult for us to overcome this," Zelensky said, adding that Russian missile strikes have destroyed infrastructure in many cities. On Thursday morning, Russian invaders shelled Toretsk from artillery, as a result of which eight people were killed, four were wounded, including three children, Head of Donetsk Regional Military Administration Pavlo Kyrylenko said. "Eight killed, four wounded these are the consequences of the shelling of Toretsk, which the Russians carried out today at about 11.00. Three children were among the four wounded," Kyrylenko said in Telegram on Thursday. He said that according to preliminary information, the occupiers fired artillery, got into a public transport stop, where at that time there was a crowd of people. "Besides, the Russians damaged the church and wounded the priest there, damaged the surrounding high-rise buildings," Kyrylenko said. "Every day, the Russian occupiers hit civilians every day we have dead and wounded. Everyone who still remains in Donetsk region puts themselves in mortal danger! I appeal to all residents of the region: do not turn yourself into a Russian target! Evacuate on time!" He said. USAID to provide WHO with extra $1.8 mln to support healthcare in Ukraine USAID will provide the WHO with an additional $1.8 million to support healthcare in Ukraine, the funds will be used to improve detection of infectious diseases and strengthen epidemiological surveillance. As Interfax-Ukraine was informed at the WHO, the decision to allocate funds was made following the meeting of USAID Deputy Administrator Isobel Coleman with WHO Regional Director for Europe Dr. Hans Kluge, which took place on August 2. The funds will be used to strengthen infectious disease surveillance and reporting in Ukraine, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable groups, including people with special needs, living in remote areas and internally displaced persons (IDPs). The funds will in particular be used to improve laboratory diagnostic capabilities for timely detection and reporting of infectious diseases, improve the existing surveillance system through event-based surveillance (EBS) in selected priority regions with a large number of IDPs, and strengthen health information systems providing regular data flow and better monitoring of service availability. Health should be at the center of humanitarian assistance, as well as a key component of Ukraine's renewal, Kluge said. He added that investing in health now will pay dividends later, when peace finally comes. In total, since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, USAID has provided the WHO with $15.5 million in critical healthcare support in Ukraine. The Russian Federation is building up its forces in Zaporizhia and Kherson directions, Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksiy Hromov said. "The enemy is building up its forces in Zaporizhia and Kherson directions. So, the enemy moved three battalion-tactical groups to Kryvyi Rih direction, which performed tasks in Novopavlivsky direction, and also additionally introduced one battalion-tactical group in Zaporizhia direction," Hromov said at a briefing at the Ukraine media center in Kyiv on Thursday. He added that the enemy is replenishing the lost weapons and military equipment, as well as building up the grouping of troops in Kherson and partly in Zaporizhia directions, especially in Melitopol, by rail - through the Kerch Bridge and the territory of the temporarily occupied Crimea. "In addition, the enemy uses the territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea as a springboard for the accumulation of weapons, military equipment, ammunition, material and technical means in order to replenish the losses of groups of troops in these areas," Hromov said. The relocation of the army aviation of the Eastern Military District to the operational airfields of the temporarily occupied Crimea is also noted, he noted. According to Hromov, the aggressor continues to form additional units, reserves for conducting combat operations on the territory of Ukraine, the removal of weapons and military equipment from long-term storage to complement its troops who have suffered losses. Kuleba on Amnesty International's statement: This isnt about finding and bringing truth to the world, but about creating false balance between criminal and his victim Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba believes that the statement of Amnesty International that the Ukrainian army allegedly endangers the civilian population of the country is not aimed at finding and reporting the truth to the world, but at creating a false balance between the criminal and his victim. "I, like you, have seen the statement of Amnesty International. I am just as outraged by it as you are, I consider it unfair," Kuleba said in a video message on Thursday. He noted that in response to criticism of this statement, the organization is likely to say that it criticizes both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian war. "But let's clearly agree on the understanding of simple things. This behavior of Amnesty International is not about finding and bringing the truth to the world, but about creating a false balance between the criminal and his victim. Between a country that kills civilians by hundreds and thousands, destroys cities, territories. And a country that defends itself by saving its people and the entire continent from this invasion," Kuleba stressed. The head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry called on Amnesty International to stop "creating a fake reality in which everyone is a little guilty of something." "Get involved in delivering the truth, the systemic and large-scale truth about what Russia is today. Do it at least in the name of civilian victims, citizens of Ukraine, who were covered by Russian shells at a public transport stop in the town of Toretsk, Donetsk region today," the minister summed up. Earlier, Amnesty International published a statement saying that the Ukrainian army allegedly endangers the civilian population of the country due to the fact that it creates its bases in populated areas. The United States will provide Ukraine with logistical assistance in clearing the liberated territories, Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Hanna Maliar said. "Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine and Deputy head of the national mine action authority Vyacheslav Shapovalov met with employees of the American company Tetra Tech the official representative of the U.S. State Department in Ukraine, which is tasked with providing assistance to our country in the field of mine action on behalf of the United States," Maliar said at a briefing at the Ukraine Media Center in Kyiv on Thursday. The Deputy Minister noted that Ukraine currently needs logistical assistance for the units involved and planned to carry out mine clearance work in the territories liberated from the Kremlin occupiers. "Such assistance will be provided as part of a comprehensive package of assistance for humanitarian demining, which is provided by the U.S. State Department," the deputy defense minister said. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has appointed Yaroslav Yanushevych to the post of head of Kherson Regional State Administration. According to the Presidents Office, the head of state signed relevant decree No. 553/2022. During the meeting in the Presidents Office, Volodymyr Zelensky handed Yaroslav Yanushevych a service certificate and expressed conviction that his experience and professionalism would be useful in fulfilling the tasks assigned to him as the head of an important region. "The Head of State also stressed that Kherson region will certainly be liberated from the Russian occupiers, and the collaborators will be brought to justice," the message says. Yaroslav Yanushevych was born in Kyiv in 1978. In 2000, he graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (special field of Finance), in 2009, Mechnikov Odesa National University (special field Jurisprudence) and the National Academy of Public Administration under the President of Ukraine (Public development management). He is a Doctor of Law. Since 1996, he worked in various positions in the State Tax Inspectorate of Kyiv, since 2001 in the State Tax Administration of Ukraine. In 2006-2007, he was Deputy Chairman of the State Tax Administration of Ukraine. From 2011 to 2013, he was Deputy Chairman of the State Migration Service of Ukraine. In 2013, he held the position of Director General of state-run enterprise Document. In 2013-2014, he was Deputy Chairman of the State Financial Inspectorate of Ukraine. From 2014 to 2016 Executive Director of the enterprise Ukrainian State Radio Frequency Center. Since 2016 Advisor to the Director General of the State Enterprise Ukrainian State Radio Frequency Center. Reznikov: Attempts to equalize Russian aggression and Ukrainian selfdefense, as done in Amnesty International material, is evidence of loss of adequacy Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said that any attempts to equalize unprovoked Russian aggression and Ukrainian selfdefense, as done in the Amnesty International material, is evidence of a loss of adequacy and a way to destroy one's authority. "The only reason why hundreds of thousands of our citizens are still alive, although they could have already died, and that millions have a home, although they could have lost it, is the selfless heroic actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. This is proved by the facts of the simply brutal behavior of the Russian occupiers: the Russians have already used all types of weapons against the civilian population, except nuclear; the Russians commit mass killings of prisoners of war; the Russians massively rape women and children, maim, rob, destroy all living things; the Russians commit the crime of genocide against the Ukrainian people," the minister wrote on Facebook. Reznikov stressed that "any attempts, even in passing, to equalize unprovoked Russian aggression and Ukrainian selfdefense, as is done in the Amnesty International material, is evidence of a loss of adequacy and a way to destroy its authority." "Any attempts to question the right of Ukrainians to resist genocide, to protect their families and homes, to protect their lives and the lives of their children, to resist the actions of the Russian Federation as a terrorist state is a perversion, no matter what legal structures disguise it," he said. The Defense Minister noted that Ukraine is a state governed by the rule of law, where events in the war are comprehensively analyzed and evaluated, including legal ones. "But we will not allow our army, our defenders, to be defamed. This is what I say as a lawyer," Reznikov stressed. Earlier, Amnesty International published a statement saying that the Ukrainian army allegedly endangers the civilian population of the country due to the fact that it creates its bases in populated areas. Lychakiv district Court of Lviv extended the measure of restraint to MP Viktor Medvedchuk in the form of arrest until September 19, 2022. "Today, the investigating judge of Lychakiv District Court of Lviv granted the petition of the prosecutor of the Prosecutor General's Office and extended the period of detention without determining the amount of bail to V.V. Medvedchuk, who is reasonably suspected of committing criminal offenses under Part 2 of Article 28, Part 1 of Article 111, Part 2 of Article 28, Part 1 of Article 258-3 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, within the term of the pretrial investigation, namely until September 19, 2022," the court said in a statement on its Facebook page on Thursday. Earlier, Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said that a petition was sent to the court to extend the preventive measure to Medvedchuk, and the investigation itself will be completed soon. As reported, the SBU continues pretrial investigation against Medvedchuk on the fact of financing actions aimed at overthrowing the constitutional order and on the fact of legalization of property obtained by criminal means. As reported, the indictment against Medvedchuk in the case of treason and attempted looting of national values was handed over to the court on June 2. Medvedchuk is accused that together with another MP from the Opposition Platform-For Life, who is wanted, as well as officials of the Russian Federation attempted to plunder national values its about illegal oil and gas production in the Black Sea shelf in Crimea. In case of long-term return to Ukraine, citizens should be removed from registration in EU countries Stefanishyna In case of long-term return to Ukraine, citizens should be removed from registration in the countries of the European Union, said Olha Stefanishyna, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration. "Citizens of Ukraine can return to Ukraine and back to the territory of the European Union. But in case of long-term return, citizens should be removed from registration in the EU and re-register in case of return," the press service of the Deputy Prime Minister quoted Stefanishyna as saying following the results of the meeting of the working group. She also stressed that the current EU system of temporary protection for Ukrainians will work until the spring of 2024. Among other things, the participants of the working group discussed the current problems faced by Ukrainian refugees abroad, the recognition of Ukrainian digital documents by EU member states, providing Ukrainian citizens with documents necessary for legal stay in EU member states, as well as for returning to Ukraine. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky called Russia's war against Ukraine "colonial". "Russia is a colonizer who wants to destroy our state," he said on Thursday, speaking to representatives of the African media. He called on journalists to "convey to every family on the African continent that we are peaceloving people. We are not different from you. We have the same values." Zelensky noted that Russia invests in the African continent less than 1% of all investments in Africa. "This is their belief in the future of the African continent. Russia does not invest in you. She invests in political terms. They say that they are the heirs of the USSR," he said. Zelensky stressed that Ukraine is ready to guarantee the food security of the African continent. Zelensky on possible dialogue with Russia: This is not dialogue, this is ultimatum President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that he does not believe in dialogue with Russia. "They don't offer us a dialogue. They offer us to surrender," he said on Thursday, answering questions from representatives of the African media. "I have been president for three years. You will not find a single president of the EU countries who has not received signals from me for three years that I want direct talks with the president of Russia, that we cannot allow a full-scale war, that there will be tens and hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees," he said. "I called him many times," Zelensky said, noting that "they always found reasons not to allow dialogue." "When they came to occupy us here, what should I do? Should I call again? This is not a dialogue or reconciliation. This is an ultimatum. It sounds like this: If you don't do as we want, we will kill you," Zelensky said, adding: "They tie our hands, cut off our tongue, and then say they are ready for dialogue." On Monday, August 8, at 12.00, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host discussion entitled Economic and financial state of wartime. Participants include Director of the Institute for Global Strategies Vadym Karasiov; economist, financial analyst Oleksiy Kusch; political expert Kostiantyn Matviyenko (8/5a Reitarska Street). The broadcast will be available on the YouTube channel of Interfax-Ukraine. Admission of journalists requires registration on the spot. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. The crushing blows inflicted by Azerbaijani army on the illegal Armenian armed forces in Karabakh should serve as a great lesson for Armenia, as well as a final warning, Deputy Director of Trend news agency, political expert Sahil Karimli said. "With retaliatory operation "Revenge", the Azerbaijani army has once again shown that terrorism and separatism in the sovereign territories of the country will be eliminated at any cost," he said. Karimli noted that the sooner Armenia begins to implement provisions of the trilateral treaty of November 10, the better. "The leadership of Armenia, which signed the act of surrender during the 44-day war second Karabakh war, has not fulfilled its obligations for almost two years. During this period, the Azerbaijani state approached the processes with patience and restraint and tried to resolve the issue peacefully, at the negotiating table. President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly stated that Azerbaijan does not want a new war in the region. But, unfortunately Armenia did not draw conclusions from these warnings. Azerbaijan's counter-terrorism operation has made it clear that the patience of the Azerbaijani state is not unlimited," Karimli said. He added, that after the war, Azerbaijan repeatedly gave Armenia a chance by demanding the withdrawal of illegal armed terrorist elements, but the Armenian side ignored these chances. According to him, as a result of the retaliation, several commanding heights were taken under control, a large number of manpower and military equipment of Armenian militants was destroyed. Karimli noted, that the Armenian side should draw up conclusion from all of this. "Today the whole world, international organizations should put serious pressure on Armenia. Armenia must be forced to implement its obligations. Azerbaijan is categorically against new war. Our country wants to achieve long-term peace and security in the South Caucasus. Recent incidents show that the only force that wants to prevent peace is Armenia," he stressed. Details added, first version uploaded 09:24 BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. Azerbaijan strongly rejects the statement of the Armenian Foreign Ministry on August 3, which unfairly accuses the Azerbaijani side, the statement of Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said, Trend reports. The fact, that the Armenian Foreign Ministry accuses Azerbaijan of violating the trilateral declaration is nothing but hypocrisy, the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan notes. "The Azerbaijani side has repeatedly emphasized that the provisions of the statement signed by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Russia and Armenia on November 10, 2020, have not been implemented, especially since the Armenian armed forces have not yet completely withdrawn from the territory of Azerbaijan. The article 4 of the trilateral declaration said that the peacekeeping contingent of the Russian Federation shall be deployed in parallel with the withdrawal of the Armenian Armed Forces," the ministry recalled. The ministry added that in addition to numerous testimonies from the Azerbaijani side about the presence of illegal Armenian armed forces on the territory of Azerbaijan, this fact was also recognized by Armenian authorities. "Thus, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Sahak Sahakyan said that Armenian conscripts serving in Azerbaijan's Karabakh region will be replaced by military personnel of long-term active military service during the meeting with the parents of those called up for military service on June 29 this year," the ministry noted. Furthermore, the ministry said, the Secretary of the Security Council of Armenia Armen Grigoryan stated that "the withdrawal of units of the Armenian armed forces from Azerbaijan's Karabakh will be completed in September of this year" during his interview on July 19, 2022. The ministry emphasized that the reason of the recent tension is the presence of illegal Armenian armed forces on the territory of Azerbaijan and provocations carried out by them. "The death of an Azerbaijani soldier on August 3 is also a result of Armenian's failure to implement its obligations under the trilateral statement. Referring to paragraph 6 of the trilateral declaration, we inform Armenian Foreign Ministry accusing Azerbaijan of violating this exact paragraph, that the construction of a new road along the Lachin corridor has been going on for many months along the agreed route, and the Armenian side is sufficiently aware of this," the ministry said. The Azerbaijani MFA pointed out that if the Armenian side, under various pretexts, seeks to delay the implementation of its obligations, as well as other provisions of the trilateral declaration, then this is another clear example of Armenia's unconstructive and subversive activities regarding the implementation of trilateral declaration and other agreements. "In order to ensure peace and stability in this region, as well as post-conflict normalization it's important to fully implement the obligations of trilateral statement. Azerbaijan fully implements its obligation and strongly demands that Armenia does the same. We remind the Armenian Foreign Ministry, which accuses Azerbaijan of "aggressive activities", that it was Armenia that occupied the territories of a neighboring state for about 30 years, and after the termination of the occupation policy, it still does not withdraw its illegal armed forces from Azerbaijani territories. Azerbaijan has the legal right to ensure the security and integrity of its territories," the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. The video footage spread in social networks about the so-called accumulation of heavy military equipment by Iran on the border with Azerbaijan is fake, the Iranian embassy in Azerbaijan told Trend. The embassy said that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) does not have an official telegram channel, and the official position of the IRGC can be learned only through official channels and the spokesman of this structure. "The reports spread on social networks are fake. Those footages were originally filmed several years ago during the different circumstances. Such rumors are circulated by those who want to harm the relations between Iran and Azerbaijan," the embassy said. --- Follow the author on Twitter:@BaghishovElnur BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. NATO supports the normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia, NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy, Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia Javier Colomina tweeted, Trend reports. "We deeply regret the loss of life and urge both sides to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table. NATO supports the normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia," the official wrote. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. United States is ready to facilitate dialogue between Azerbaijan and Armenia, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said, Trend reports citing US State Department. Blinken made the statement during a phone call with Turkish Foreign Minister Cavusoglu. During the phone talks, Blinken noted that United States is ready to engage bilaterally, with likeminded partners to facilitate dialogue between Azerbaijan and Armenia and help achieve a long-term political settlement. CCTV: On August 3, the G7 foreign ministers and the High Representative of the EU released a statement saying they are concerned by Chinas announced threatening actions which risk unnecessary escalation, and alleging Theres no justification to use Pelosis visit to Taiwan as pretext for aggressive military activity or coercion. They claimed its normal for legislators to travel internationally and There is no change in the respective one China policies, where applicable, and basic positions on Taiwan of the G7 members. Do you have any response to that? Hua Chunying: Reading this statement is like being transported back in time. The foreign ministers of these countries clearly believe that they still live in the days of the Eight-Power Allied Forces over 120 years ago. We no longer live in a world where the imperialist powers could run roughshod over Chinese people on Chinese soil. Todays China is not the old China humiliated and bullied over 100 years ago. It is time for these people to wake up from their imperial dream. Let me stress the following points. First, China has the right to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. The tensions in the Taiwan Strait is fundamentally caused by the US connivance at the third highest-ranking official of the US government to take a military aircraft to visit Chinas Taiwan region in disregard of Chinas strong opposition and serious representations. This is a major incident that seeks to upgrade the substantive exchanges between the United States and Taiwan. It causes serious harm to the one-China principle and to Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. China has repeatedly made clear its stern opposition to the incident and stressed its firm opposition to separatism aimed at Taiwan independence and foreign interference. China will allow no room for any form of Taiwan independence forces. If the US continues down the wrong path, then all consequences arising therefrom shall be borne by the US. And do not say that we have not told them so in advance. The US made a malicious provocation first, and China has been compelled to act in self-defense. In the event of such a blatant provocation that violates Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, it is only legitimate and necessary that we are taking countermeasures in response, and these measures are sure to be strong and resolute. The world sees this very clearly. Over 100 countries spoke up soon after the visit took place, stressing the importance of upholding the one-China principle and expressing support for Chinas efforts to uphold sovereignty and territorial integrity. If the G7 countries truly care about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, they should have urged the US early on not to make such a dangerous, reckless and irresponsible provocation against China. Before Pelosis visit, those countries played dumb and did not say a word. Now, however, they suddenly became vocal and made irresponsible accusations against Chinas justified response. This says everything about their hypocrisy and ugliness. Second, the one-China principle is an important political foundation for establishing diplomatic ties between the G7 countries and China. We have consistently and firmly opposed any form of official exchanges between the Taiwan region and countries having diplomatic ties with China. The leaders of the legislatures of the G7 countries should abide by the foreign policies recognized and committed to by their governments. If a countrys legislature acts against the countrys foreign policy and the government does nothing about it, it will only prove the governments political incompetence, poor governance and lack of credibility internationally. On this serious question, playing games with words or trying to redefine commitments means nothing and achieves nothing. Third, there is only one version and one connotation of the one-China principle, i.e. there is only one China in the world and Taiwan is part of China. The government of the PRC is the sole legal government representing the entire China. This is written down clearly in Resolution 2758 adopted at the 26th Session of the UN General Assembly in 1971. It is the basic norm in international relations and the political foundation on which China established and has developed diplomatic relations with 181 countries, including the G7 countries. Nothing should be unilaterally inserted into the principle. And there should be no misinterpretation or distortion of the principle. Fourth, either today or historically, members of the US-led G7 personify aggression and coercion. If anyone should be accused of aggression and coercion, the G7 countries deserve it more than anyone else. The G7 must not forget that they are in no position to represent the global community. Their views only represent a tiny fraction of the world of nations. As Singaporean scholar Kishore Mahbubani wrote recently, the G7 is dictatorial globally. The latest statement is a case in point. I need to remind the G7 foreign ministers again that we all live in the third decade of the 21st century now. There would be a problem if someone follows the mindset of over a century ago. Bloomberg: China often complains that too many in the West subscribe to what it calls the China threat narrative. But what would you say to those that will cite the military drills today, these missiles and weapons, as evidence of the threat that is posed by China? Hua Chunying: Your question is a typical example of how certain people think in the West. This is an issue about fundamental facts and principles because it involves Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. China has made it clear many times that we are firmly opposed to Pelosis visit. And we made it clear that once the visit is made, it would be a serious violation of the one-China principle and grave infringement on Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. China will definitely take strong and resolute measures in response and all consequences shall be borne by the US side. So do not say that we have not said in advance about the implications of this incident. Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinas territory. The Chinese military drills in the waters off the Taiwan Island are a necessary and legitimate measure to uphold its sovereignty and territorial integrity and a necessary and legitimate countermeasure against the Taiwan independence separatist forces and foreign interference. Chinas competent authorities have issued safety alerts and travel warnings in advance. So what we have done is consistent with international law and international practices. Anyone who try to use that to prove China to be a so-called threat will only prove themselves to be rather dark inside, because they choose to view the incident selectively, ignoring the basic fact that things have ended up like this all because Pelosi went ahead with a wrong decision in disregard of Chinas repeated serious representations and the repeated dissuasion from various parties. State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said this morning on the sidelines of the ASEAN-plus foreign ministers meetings in Phnom Penh to outline Chinas position on the USs provocation in violation of Chinas sovereignty. State Councilor Wang Yi said that Pelosis stunt is another bankruptcy of US politics, diplomacy and credibility. It proves the US to be the biggest saboteur of peace in the Taiwan Strait and the biggest troublemaker to regional stability. It proves the USs Indo-Pacific strategy to be highly confrontational and harmful. It also proves the hypocrisy and double standards of the US regarding international rules. If China does not firmly resist the USs recklessness, irresponsibility and extreme irrationality, then the principle of respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity in international relations will just become words on paper and separatists and extremists will only become more reckless and the hard-won peace and stability in this region will be seriously undermined. State Councilor Wang Yi also stressed that this incident is single-handedly orchestrated and provoked by the US and the cause, consequences and merits of the incident are crystal clear. China has done everything that is diplomatically possible to prevent this crisis which has been imposed on China. But we will not tolerate any act that harms our core interests and national rejuvenation. We will not sit by and watch the US play the Taiwan card to serve the USs domestic politics and the selfish interests of some politicians. We will not tolerate moves to incite tensions, confrontation and separatism in this region. The host of measures China is taking and will take are necessary, timely countermeasures that are defensive in nature which have gone through serious consideration and careful assessment, and theyre aimed at protecting our nations sovereignty and security. They are consistent with international law and domestic laws. They are a warning to the provocateurs and also aimed at protecting regional stability and peace in the Taiwan Strait. All parties need to clearly recognize the cause and nature of the current crisis, jointly oppose the recklessness and the provocation of the US, continue to support Chinas just position and measures and jointly protect regional and cross-Strait peace. CGTN: Nancy Pelosi said in a statement on August 3 that the Congressional delegations visit to Taiwan should be seen as a strong statement that America stands with Taiwan. Do you have any comment? Hua Chunying: We often hear US politicians say that they are standing together with so and so, but history and facts have repeatedly shown that whomever the US politicians claim they are standing together with would become the targets of chaos and disaster. Just look at Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, and also look at the people responsible for what Pelosi called a beautiful sight to behold in Hong Kong and the Hong Kong independence separatists. See what has become of them? Kyodo News: We just heard that the previously scheduled meeting between State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Japanese Foreign Minister today has been canceled. Can you confirm this? If so, is it Chinas decision or is it caused by the Japanese side? If its the former, does it have anything to do with the G7 statement that you just responded to? Hua Chunying: Ill answer your three questions altogether. China has made it clear that it will no longer schedule a meeting between Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers in Phnom Penh. Japan joined other members of G7 and the EU in issuing a joint statement which contains groundless accusations against China, confounds black and white and tries to justify the USs infringement on Chinas sovereignty. This has caused a public outcry among the Chinese people. We thus decided not to go ahead with the meeting between the two foreign ministers in Phnom Penh. Japan is historically responsible for its wrongdoing on the Taiwan question. Japan is in no position to make unwarranted remarks on issues related to Taiwan. RIA Novosti: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an interview with the South China Morning Post said that he would like to speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and discuss the Ukrainian conflict. Could you please confirm that there are some plans of organizing this conversation? Hua Chunying: China maintains close communication with Ukraine and other parties of the Ukraine crisis. Phoenix TV: The US Senate has passed a resolution approving the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO. If the two countries do join the grouping someday, it will be NATOs sixth expansion and the largest one since the 1990s. Do you have any comment? Hua Chunying: On European security, China hopes that all parties will follow the principle of indivisible security and, on the basis of respecting each others reasonable security concerns, follow the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, and build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture for peace and lasting security in the region through dialogue and negotiation. That is why we have put forward the Global Security Initiative. This reflects our consistent position on regional security issues. About NATOs role and function in world peace and security, there has been a lot of rethinking and reflection. NATO has its own narrative. But we all know that from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Kosovo, from Iraq to Afghanistan and Libya and so on, rough statistics show that ever since 2001, NATO has launched and participated in wars that have resulted in over 900,000 deaths, including 400,000 civilians, and the displacement of tens of millions of refugees. What role should NATO play in maintaining world peace and security in the 21st century? In what way should it play its role? What mindset and vision should NATO be guided by? These are all serious questions for relevant NATO countries to think about. AFP: ASEAN foreign ministers expressed their concerns in a statement today against provocative action in the Taiwan Strait. They said the current situation could lead to miscalculation and serious confrontation. Is China concerned about such potential miscalculations or confrontations resulting from military exercises this week? Hua Chunying: The root cause of the current tensions in the Taiwan Strait is the joint provocation of the US side and Taiwan independence separatist forces, which seriously violates the one China principle and infringes upon our sovereignty and territorial integrity. In the face of such flagrant provocation, we are compelled to take justified, necessary countermeasures to uphold our sovereignty and territorial integrity. All our measures are targeted against the Taiwan independence separatist forces. Anyone who is concerned about regional tensions should be asking the US to immediately and credibly follow the one-China principle, stop violating Chinas sovereignty and take real actions to uphold regional peace and stability. It is very clear here who is responsible for the incident and who is the provocateur. China is only being compelled to act in self-defense. I hope that you could see that fact. Im sure you know that in the statement, ASEAN says it is opposed to provocations. And Pelosis visit itself is a serious provocation. ASEAN countries hope to see peace and stability in this region and oppose any serious provocation like Pelosis visit. They are concerned that such reckless provocations could put regional peace and stability into a precarious situation. As I said yesterday, many countries spoke up immediately in various ways to express opposition to the visit, a serious and dangerous provocation, and reiterated the commitment to the one-China principle. The Spokesperson of the UN Secretary-General said that the UN is guided by the one-China policy. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres then reiterated that the UN abides by the one-China policy and UNGA resolution 2758. The League of Arab States expressed support to China yesterday. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization just made a statement saying that the SCO adheres to the one-China principle, firmly opposes interference in the internal affairs of its member states by any external force, supports all member states in safeguarding national unity and defending their own sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will continue to promote further cooperation among member states in this regard to ensure peace, security and stability in the region. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said again that he did not see any reason to create such an irritant literally out of nowhere. Pakistans Foreign Ministry reaffirms in a statement Pakistans strong commitment to the one-China principle and firm support for Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. Cubas Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning interference in Chinas internal affairs, stating its firm rejection to the actions aimed at harming Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity and emphasizing its concern over the increasing tensions as a direct result of the aggressive policy and high military presence of the US and its allies in the Taiwan Strait. Cuban Foreign Minister said on social media that Cuba rejects actions aimed at harming the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Peoples Republic of China, and condemns interference in its internal affairs. Iranian Foreign Minister said that his countrys support of one-China principle is indubitable. US provocative actions have turned into a source of threat to international peace and stability and the international community must stop it. Myanmars Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that Pelosis visit to Taiwan is causing escalation of tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Myanmar opposes any provocative actions causing instabilities in the region and attempts that aim to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and Myanmar fully supports the one-China principle. Spokesperson of the Indonesian Foreign Ministry said that Indonesia continues to respect the one-China policy. Pelosis visit to Taiwan may escalate confrontation between China and the US. If not managed well, it may lead to open conflict and disrupt peace and stability, including in the Taiwan Strait. The Thai Foreign Ministry said that Thailand stands by the one-China principle and it is important to abide by principles of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. Spokesperson of Vietnams Foreign Ministry reiterated that the country adheres to the one-China policy. The Ethiopian Foreign Ministry said that the country firmly supports the one-China principle, which is also supported by the UN and the African Union. The Sudanese Foreign Minister said in a statement that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinas territory and Sudan supports Chinas efforts to uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Republic of the Congos Foreign Minister said that upholding the one-China principle is his countrys unwavering policy and the Republic of the Congo firmly supports Chinas actions to defend its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. South Sudans Foreign Ministry said it supports the one-China principle and opposes interference in Chinas internal affairs. Chairperson of South African Parliament said that the US moves are a gross interference in Chinas internal affairs, which will ruin the efforts over the years to uphold peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and inevitably endanger regional peace and stability. Greek Foreign Minister expressed support for the one-China policy when it comes to upholding national sovereignty and territorial integrity during a meeting with State Councilor Wang Yi on the sidelines of the ASEAN ministerial meetings. Serbian Prime Minister said when meeting with the Chinese Ambassador that Serbia supports the one-China policy and considers Taiwan as an integral part of China. The Nicaraguan Vice President openly expressed support for China in its effort to uphold national sovereignty and condemned the imperialist intervention of the US. Nicaraguas Foreign Minister, in a statement, strongly condemned Pelosis visit and said Nicaragua fully supports Chinas position on the Taiwan question, supports China in defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and urges the US side to immediately stop its contemptible provocation against China. The Venezuelan foreign ministry said that Pelosis visit is a direct provocation and serious threat to Chinas independence and territorial integrity and Venezuela firmly supports the one-China principle and urges the US to respect Chinas sovereignty. General Secretary of Peoples Vanguard Party (PVP) of Costa Rica said that the PVP firmly supports China in defending sovereignty and territorial integrity. In Brazil, President of the Communist Party and Secretary of International Relations issued a statement titled Taiwan: Imperialism Provokes China and Further Threatens World Peace to condemn Pelosis visit to Taiwan. The Communist Party of Argentina released a declaration condemning the US for violating UNGA resolution 2758 and its commitment in the Joint Communique on the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the US, and pointing out that Pelosis visit to Taiwan is a strong provocation and imperialist aggression, and calling on governments and people across the world to speak up against what the US has done. In addition, press from Russia, Thailand, Cuba, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola have published commentaries to stress that Taiwan is a part of China and how Pelosis visit seriously violates the one-China principle, constitutes a serious provocation, seriously infringes on Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity and undermines peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. Well-known British scholar Martin Jacques wrote in an article that Pelosis provocation over Taiwan leads the US and the world into an age of disorder and instability. The tension in the Taiwan Strait is caused by the USs encroachment on the understanding it reached with China. All this shows that the one-China principle is a universal consensus and what is a just cause can receive the support of many around the world. So I hope what I have shared with you will help you understand who is the provocateur and should be responsible for the tensions in the region. China Daily: A US State Department official said that China should not use Pelosis visit to Taiwan as a pretext to continue seeking to change the status quo with regard to Taiwan. And if any escalation or crisis were to somehow follow her visit, it would be on Beijing. Do you have any comment on these remarks? Hua Chunying: This is the USs typical way of confounding right and wrong and acting like a thief crying stop thief. It shows how domineering, arbitrary and unscrupulous the US always is. I would like the US to answer four questions. First, what is the status quo on the Taiwan question? The facts are crystal clear, i.e. both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China and Taiwan is part of Chinas territory. Despite being politically against each other for a long time, Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity have never been split. This is the real status quo of the situation in the Taiwan Strait. Second, who is creating the crisis in the Taiwan Strait? The collusion between the US and Taiwan independence forces and their provocation is the fundamental factor in causing the tension in the Taiwan Strait. In recent years, the DPP authorities have refused to recognize the 1992 Consensus which embodies the one-China principle, and tried to solicit US support for Taiwan independence. The US side has been distorting, obscuring and hollowing out the one-China principle to serve its strategic goal of disrupting and containing Chinas development. The US has sought to play the Taiwan card to contain China. It has been upgrading its contact with Taiwan and increased arms sales to Taiwan. Pelosis visit to Taiwan in disregard of global backlash gravely upgrades the substantive exchanges between the US and Taiwan. It seriously violates the US governments commitment to the Chinese government on the Taiwan question and the basic norm in international relations and gravely infringes on Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. Third, who should be responsible for the tensions in the Taiwan Strait? China has repeatedly told the US the grave nature and harm of the visit and made it clear that all consequences arising therefrom should be borne by the US side. So do not say that we have not told the US all this in advance. But the US government and Speaker Pelosi staged a double act and insisted on pursuing the wrong path. The US made the provocation first, and China has been compelled to act in self-defense. The Chinese government has the right to do whatever necessary and justified to resolutely uphold our sovereignty and territorial integrity. Fourth, who is changing the status quo in the Taiwan Strait? The US cited its wrongful action 25 years ago to justify the visit. But we have made it very clear that past mistakes do not serve as justification for repeating that mistake. China always learns from past experience. We will not allow the US to continue to use salami tactics to encroach upon, obscure and hollow out the one-China principle. We will not allow the US to use any pretext or excuse to gradually change the status quo. Let me emphasize once again that at present any tension emerging in the Taiwan Strait is caused single-handedly by the US. Fundamentally, it is because Speaker Pelosi insisted on visiting Taiwan out of selfish interest and serious violated the one-China principle. We would not be dealing with this had Pelosi not made that provocative visit to Taiwan. Many countries and media outlets across the world also share a clear, objective and correct understanding of that and have warned the US in various ways. So if the US truly cares about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, then the most important and crucial thing for it to do is make sure at once that it would strictly abide by the one-China principle and the three Sino-US Joint Communiques in both words and deeds. Hubei Media Group: According to reports, the Australian Space Agency has recently confirmed the space debris found in New South Wales belongs to a craft built by the US company SpaceX. Cassandra Steer, Deputy Director of the Australian National Universitys Institute for Space, said the US side should be held accountable for the damage caused by the debris. Does China have any comment? Hua Chunying: Space debris is a challenge to humans sustainable exploration and use of outer space. China actively engages in space debris mitigation and international cooperation in this regard. We hope that the US and other countries in the world will take credible steps to minimize the safety risk caused by space debris and also shoulder the responsibilities in accordance with international law for the damage done by space activities. Bloomberg: The ROK President did not meet with Nancy Pelosi when she was in the ROK, although they did speak I believe by telephone. Does the Chinese foreign ministry have a view on the decision not to meet with Pelosi? Hua Chunying: We have noticed relevant reports and China will be following closely the developments of this visit. Dragon TV: According to reports, the negotiations on resuming compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal will resume today in Vienna after a near five-month hiatus. How does China see the prospect of the talks? Hua Chunying: China has always been firmly committed to upholding the JCPOA and we welcome the resumption of the talks in Vienna. This is a result of concerted efforts of all parties and is consistent with the expectation of the international community. With the resumption of the talks, there is a new opportunity to seek a political and diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. We hope that all parties can seize this opportunity, redouble diplomatic efforts and fully demonstrate goodwill and flexibility to seek a solution to the outstanding issues as soon as possible. The US is the country that created the Iranian nuclear crisis in the first place. It needs to fully rectify its mistake and respond actively to the reasonable concerns of Iran for the negotiations to produce early results. China has been in close touch with all sides and played an active role in advancing the negotiations. We will be constructively involved in future negotiation as well to contribute to bringing the implementation of the JCPOA back on track. We will at the same time resolutely uphold our own lawful rights and interests. Reuters: Has Chinas deepening tensions with the US over Taiwan now extended to the rest of the G7 nations? Hua Chunying: China always hopes to have friendly and cooperative relations on the basis of mutual respect, equality and win-win cooperation with the G7 countries and all other countries in the world. I believe this is the shared aspiration of people in all countries and serves countries common interests. Meanwhile, on issues concerning sovereignty and territorial integrity, there is no room for China to compromise or concede. All countries having diplomatic relations with China must abide by the one-China principle. And as for the impact of the tension emerging from the Taiwan question between China and the US on Chinas relations with other G7 members, I think its up to those G7 nations -- what they think and do about this. If they decide to follow the US and admit that they do not have an independent foreign policy or if they do not care about the interests of their own countries and peoples and are willing to tie their own countries to the US and be the USs sidekicks, then I very much doubt whether the people of their respective countries would say yes to that. If they are truly independent nations, then they should make decisions based on the interests of their own countries and peoples and follow the one-China principle, because it is the most important political prerequisite and foundation for their diplomatic relations with China. Relevant countries should be able to understand that because any responsible government would act in the long-term and fundamental interest of their own countries and the aspiration of their peoples and make independent decisions that best serve their interests. This statement will not win the G7 any dignity or respect. The G7 only represents a tiny minority. Even if every person in the G7 countries support this statement, they only account for less than 10% of the worlds population. They do not represent the international community. Not to mention the fact that 85% of Americans do not approve of US policies and believe things in the US are headed in the wrong direction. How many people can this G7 foreign ministers statement really represent? What significance can it possibly have? Reuters: You just told us that China has canceled a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister because of this statement or following this statement. Does that mean that China does not want to hold any foreign minister meetings with any G7 member nations for the moment due to this statement? And when will that change? Hua Chunying: I have been very clear that since Japan has joined the other G7 countries and the EU in issuing this statement, which makes groundless accusations against China, confounds right and wrong and tries to justify the USs violation of Chinas sovereignty. The Chinese people deplore this move. Japan is historically responsible for its wrongdoing on the Taiwan question and is in no position to make unwarranted remarks on Taiwan-related issues. As for the other G7 countries, unless they change their wrong practice on the Taiwan question, we may have to reconsider the meaning of having meetings and dialogue with them, which are supposed to boost trust and cooperation. Reuters: Does China believe that these drills are conducive with winning the hearts and minds of the people in Taiwan? Hua Chunying: Did you ask the Taiwan authorities, when they insisted on inviting Speaker Pelosi to Taiwan, had they asked the Taiwan people about their hearts and wills? I know that after Pelosi arrived in Taiwan, quite many people in Taiwan actually protested to that. Do Taiwan authorities put the expectations, wills and the welfare and interests of the Taiwan people close to its heart? As I have said, the measures we have taken are justified, necessary and resolute. The aim is to protect our sovereignty and territorial integrity and send a message of warning to the provocateurs. These measures are directed at the Taiwan independence separatist forces and interference of foreign forces. Bloomberg: Just to clarify on the Japan issue. So on the G7, are you saying that its only Japan that has been singled out for this treatment or will that extend to other countries? Hua Chunying: I think I have been clear enough. Japan, along with the other G7 countries, issued this so-called statement that accuses China, confounds black and white and does not distinguish right from wrong, not to mention that Japan is historically responsible for its wrongdoing on the Taiwan question. Thats why the Chinese people have been extremely unhappy about it. Under those circumstances, we no longer plan to schedule the meeting between the Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers in Phnom Penh. In todays world, global challenges like the COVID pandemic, the Ukraine crisis, and economic, energy and food issues, and regional hotspot issues all call for better cooperation between China and the G7 countries. However, if the G7 decides not to respect, and even hurt Chinas core interests on issues concerning its sovereignty and territorial integrity, then there is no way that such wrongdoing would not impact the G7s relations with China and cooperation on key issues. Kyodo News: First, given the meeting in Phnom Penh will still be going on tomorrow, is there any possibility for a meeting between Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers? Or what kind of atmosphere will it need for such a meeting to take place? Also you said yesterday, and I quote, Since China and Japan have not yet carried out maritime delimitation in relevant waters, China does not accept the notion of so-called Japanese EEZ. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that? Hua Chunying: On your first question, the reason is quite clear as to why China will no longer schedule the two foreign ministers meeting in Phnom Penh. To solve the problem, the most realistic way is for Japan to recognize its serious mistake and redress it through real action. Japan is historically responsible for its wrongdoing on the Taiwan question and is in no position to make unwarranted remarks, still less should it blindly follow the USs steps and violate our sovereignty and territorial integrity. This would not be in the interest of the Japanese people, either. As for your second question, China and Japan have not carried out maritime delimitation in relevant waters, so there is no such thing as Chinas military actions being held in or entering Japans EEZ. Competent authorities in China have put out a notice. The military operations are fully in line with international law and international practices. Bloomberg: So just now the Eastern Theatre Command announced that live fire training has been completed and that control of the airspace and sea in question has been lifted. So the question basically is, does that mean that the exercises are over? Are the exclusions lifted? Or will there be more going forward? Because originally it was through August 7th. Does that mean these exercises are over? Hua Chunying: I recommend that you follow the updates from the Chinese military. Reuters: You sort of suggested that if the G7 nations dont respect Chinas core interest on issues concerning Chinas sovereignty, then this could affect relations. How might Chinas relations with the seven countries be affected and for how long? Hua Chunying: It would be very unwise for the G7 to say or do something improper on issues concerning Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. Such things could easily remind the Chinese people of the days more than 100 years ago, in which China was invaded by the Eight-Power Allied Forces, a painful memory shared by all Chinese people. As I said just now, we no longer live in a world in which imperialist powers could ride roughshod over Chinese people on Chinese soil. Todays China is no longer the old China bullied and abused more than 100 years ago. The countries that historically invaded China and launched wars against China should develop a greater sensitivity and consciousness when it comes to issues concerning Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. They should respect Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, and not offend the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people on those issues. It might be useful for the G7 countries to think about how the US managed to keep the country unified whatever the costs during the Civil War. The UK has the issue of Scotland, while Canada has the issue of Quebec. Some states are seeking independence from the US. So on issues concerning sovereignty and territorial integrity, I hope these countries are fully aware of their own stakes and act prudently. As to how these countries wrongful actions on the Taiwan question could affect their relations with China, and how long would it take before relations could become normal again, thats entirely up to them, what they would do, whether they could quickly recognize the mistakes and whether they could take real actions to correct their mistakes. PTI: You took a question earlier on the status quo prevailing over Taiwan. There is a big report today in the Global Times, which says Pelosis visit changes the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. There is some kind of peace prevailing in the Taiwan Strait for a long time. So perhaps the status quo also means that. So the drills, the military exercises, is it going to be a new normal of what were going to witness in that region? Hua Chunying: About the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, I have said in detail what exactly the status quo is. The two sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. That is the real status quo of the Taiwan Strait. Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity have never been split. For some time, the US and "Taiwan independence" separatist forces have colluded with each other, substantively upgraded the exchanges between the US and Taiwan, intensified armed sales to Taiwan and violated the one-China principle and the commitments made to the Chinese government. In particular, Pelosis visit to Taiwan despite opposition from across the world is a grave provocation that substantively upgrades US-Taiwan exchanges. We have issued warnings many times. It is based on the experience and lessons we have learned from the past that we know we cannot let the US use this type of salami tactics to keep pushing the envelope on Chinas red lines. So in the face of such a provocation that seriously undermines Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, we are left with no choice but to take resolute measures to demonstrate our resolve and capability to uphold our sovereignty and territorial integrity. And will this become a new normal? It hinges on the action of the US side and the "Taiwan independence" separatist forces. Unless they stop trying to split China, China will never stop taking resolute actions to uphold our sovereignty and territorial integrity, not even for a day. And we will not stop demonstrating our resolve, will and capability. AFP: Human Rights Watch said yesterday that it wants the UN Human Rights Council to set up an independent expert body to investigate violations in Xinjiang. Whats Chinas response to this request? Hua Chunying: I think everyone knows what Human Rights Watch is up to. The so-called assessment on Xinjiang is nothing but a stunt orchestrated by the US and some other Western countries. We have time and again used facts to refute the false narrative against China by anti-China forces. It is nothing but rumors and lies made up by the US side to contain Chinas development and disrupt stability in China. They are indeed the lie of the century. We are firmly against fabricating false information to smear and attack China. Xinjiang is such a beautiful place where people from all ethnic backgrounds live a happy life today. I saw pictures online about tourists hitting the road in their own cars and pouring into Xinjiang this summer. There were even serious traffic jams on highways in Xinjiang with the best views. The rumors and disinformation about Xinjiang simply disappear in front of those facts. So for those who are trying to engage in political manipulation, smear Chinas image and contain and suppress China using the Xinjiang-related issues, they will not succeed. Reuters: Taiwans Digital Minister Audrey Tang said the volume of cyberattacks on Taiwan government units on Tuesday was over 15,000 gigabits, 23 times higher than the previous daily record. Whats Chinas comment? And is the Chinese government sponsoring these attacks? Hua Chunying: Im not aware of what you mentioned. AFP: Seeing as Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan is already over, what does China feel needs to be done either by Taiwan or the US in order to make amends for its move? Hua Chunying: Pelosis stunt ended very fast, but the grave damage and negative impact will not disappear any time soon. I believe the US and the Taiwan authorities know very well that the only way forward is to strictly abide by the one-China principle both in words and in deeds, and do nothing that will harm Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity. Reuters: The Taiwan authorities is saying that there have been such a large number of cyber attacks on them in recent days, is that a matter of concern for China and what does China make of suggestions that it may have been behind these attacks? Hua Chunying: This is not a foreign policy question. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Jeyhun Bayramov received new Ambassador of Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan Gurbanmammet Elyasov, the ministry told Trend. The ambassador presented copies of his credentials to Minister Jeyhun Bayramov. Jeyhun Bayramov congratulated the ambassador on his appointment. He noted that friendly and fraternal relations between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have reached a new stage of development, as well as the importance of mutual high-level visits, and legal documents signed in recent years between the two countries. The sides emphasized the significance of the work regarding the approval of the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, as well as the development of partnership between the two countries. The ambassador, conveying the most sincere greetings of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan Rashid Meredov, highly appreciated the current relations between the two countries, noted the effectiveness and positive dynamics of interaction and partnership. He also expressed satisfaction with the relations between the peoples of the two countries based on historical, cultural and ethnic unity. Elyasov noted the potential for further development of collaboration in the political, economic, trade, and transport areas, and stressed that he would make every effort to implement it. The meeting raised issues of regional cooperation between the two states, as well as mutual support in international organizations. Jeyhun Bayramov wished Ambassador Elyasov success in his activities for the development of Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan relations. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 5, Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had a telephone conversation. During a telephone conversation, the Turkish Foreign Minister expressed concern over the attack by a radical religious group on the building of the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Trend reports. Minister Jeyhun Bayramov informed the Turkish side in detail about this act of vandalism. The Turkish Foreign Minister fully condemned this attack and noted that Turkey is always close to Azerbaijan and is always ready to support it. Minister Jeyhun Bayramov thanked the Turkish Foreign Minister for his attention and offered support. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4, 8 people arrested in London on suspicion of illegal entry into the building of the Azerbaijani embassy and causing damage to the building, Trend reports citing British media. As noted, law enforcement officers arrived at the scene around 16:30 local time after receiving information that a group of protesters broke into the embassy building. There were no casualties during the incident, and the investigation is ongoing. Recall that on August 4, the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was attacked by a radical religious group. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. The body of servicemen Anar Kazimov, who died as result of Armenian provocation on August 3, has been transported to his hometown, Trend reports. In Shamkir city, the Kazimov's body was handed over to his family. A farewell ceremony was held for the dead Azerbaijani serviceman. Members of illegal Armenian armed formations in the territory of Azerbaijan, where the Russian peacekeeping contingent is temporarily deployed, grossly violated the provisions of the Statement of November 10, 2020, and committed a terrorist and sabotage act against the Azerbaijan Army Units on August 3. Serviceman Kazimov Anar Rustam became Shehid as a result of the terrorist and sabotage act. Moreover, members of illegal Armenian armed detachments attempted to seize the Girkhgiz high ground, located on a mountain range covering the territory of the Kalbajar and Lachin regions, and establish new combat positions there. As a result of the Revenge retaliatory operation conducted by the Azerbaijan Army Units, the Girkhgiz high ground, including Saribaba and several advantageous high grounds along the Karabakh range of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains were taken under control. Currently, Azerbaijan Army Units are carrying out engineering work on the establishment of new positions and laying supply roads on advantageous frontiers. During the operation, several combat positions of illegal Armenian armed detachments were destroyed, and an airstrike was inflicted on a military unit stationed in the Yukhari Oratagh settlement of the former Aghdara region. As a result, the manpower of illegal Armenian detachments was annihilated and wounded, as well as several D-30 howitzers, military vehicles and a large amount of ammunition were destroyed. Subscription to paid content Gain access to all that Trend has to offer, as well as to premium, licensed content via subscription or direct purchase through a credit card. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. As many as 7,415 people have been infected with the coronavirus (COVID-19) in the past 24 hours in Iran, reads the statement of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education of Iran, Trend reports. In addition, 81 people have died from the coronavirus over the past day. At the same time, the condition of 1,398 people remains critical. So far, more than 53.3 million tests have been conducted in Iran for the diagnosis of coronavirus. In total, over 153 million doses of vaccines have been used in Iran so far. A total of 64.8 million doses have been used in the first stage, 58.1 million doses - in the second stage, and 30.2 million doses in the third stage. Iran continues to monitor the coronavirus situation in the country. According to recent reports from Iranian officials, over 7.42 million people have been infected, and 142,290 people have already died. Meanwhile, about 7.09 million people have reportedly recovered from the disease. The country continues to apply strict measures to contain the further spread of the virus. Reportedly, the disease was brought to Iran by a businessman from Iran's Qom city, who went on a business trip to China, despite official warnings. The man died later from the disease. The Islamic Republic announced its first infections and deaths from the coronavirus on Feb. 19. The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019. --- Follow the author on Twitter:@BaghishovElnur India and Maldives on Tuesday inked six agreements to expand cooperation in several key areas with Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserting that New Delhi has been and will continue to be the first responder to any need or crisis facing the island nation, Trend reports citing The Print. After wide-ranging talks with visiting Maldivian President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, Modi announced a Line of Credit of USD 100 millionfor the neighbouring country for the completion of development projects in a time-bound manner. We also reviewed projects for the construction of 4000 social housing units in Greater Male today. I am happy to announce that we will additionally provide financial support for 2,000 social housing units, he said in his media statement. We have also decided to provide an additional line of credit of USD 100 million so that all projects can be completed in a time-bound manner, he added. The prime minister said the threat of trans-national crime, terrorism and drug trafficking is serious in the Indian Ocean and close India-Maldives ties were vital for peace in the entire region. He said the India-Maldives partnership is not only working in the interest of citizens of both countries, but it is also becoming a source of peace and stability for the entire region. India has been and will continue to be the first responder to any need or crisis of Maldives, he said. The six pacts inked between the two sides will facilitate cooperation in capacity building, cyber security, housing, disaster management and infrastructure development in the Maldives. In the last few years, there has been renewed vigour in the friendly ties between India and Maldives. Our closeness has increased, Modi said. He said despite the challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, the cooperation between the two countries is taking the form of a broad partnership. In his comments, Solih said both sides reiterated their firm commitment to deal with the threat of terrorism. Maldives will remain a true friend of IndiaOur relations with India will always be of highest priority, he said. BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 4. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield thanked Turkiye for its efforts in achieving an initiative to safely export Ukrainian grain to world markets through the Black Sea, said Thomas-Greenfield in an interview with CNN, Trend reports. "Let me just start by commending the Secretary-General and the Turkish government for their engagement to move this initiative forward," she said. "This initiative will move forward, and we are able to get those 20 million tons that are sitting on those 16 ships, out to market. And we will continue to support that effort," she noted. Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of trying to encourage extended hostilities in Ukraine as part of what he described Tuesday as Washington's alleged efforts to maintain its global hegemony. The first shipment of grain to leave Ukraine under a wartime deal appears to have ended up in Syria, even as Damascus remains a close ally of Moscow, satellite images analyzed Tuesday by The Associated Press show. Russia launched nighttime attacks on several Ukrainian cities, Ukrainian officials said Saturday as they and Moscow blamed each other for the deaths of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war in a separatist-controlled area of the country's east. The International Red Cross asked to visit the prison to make sure the wounded had proper treatment. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have a duty to react after shelling of a prison complex in Donetsk province killed the POWs. ``It was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war,'' Zelenskyy said in a video address late Friday. ``There should be a clear legal recognition of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.'' Separatist authorities and Russian officials said the attack killed 53 Ukrainian POWs and wounded another 75. Russia's Defense Ministry on Saturday issued a list naming 48 Ukrainian fighters, their ages ranging from 20 to 62, who died in the attack; it was not clear if the ministry had revised its fatality count. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has organized civilian evacuations in the war and worked to monitor the treatment of POWS held by Russia and Ukraine, said it has requested access to the prison ``to determine the health and condition of all the people present on-site at the time of the attack.'' ``Our priority right now is making sure that the wounded receive lifesaving treatment and that the bodies of those who lost their lives are dealt with in a dignified manner,'' the Red Cross said. Both sides alleged the attack on the prison was premeditated and intended to silence the Ukrainian prisoners and to destroy evidence, including of possible atrocities. Russia claimed Ukraine's military used U.S.-supplied precision rocket launchers to target the prison in Olenivka, a settlement controlled by the Moscow-backed Donetsk People's Republic. The Ukrainian military, however, denied making any rocket or artillery strikes in Olenivka. It accused the Russians of shelling the prison to cover up the alleged torture and execution of Ukrainians there. Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, Russian rockets hit a school in Kharkiv, the country's second-largest city, overnight, and another attack occurred an hour later, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said Saturday. There were no immediate reports of injuries. The bus station in the city of Sloviansk also was hit, according to Mayor Vadim Lyakh. Sloviansk is near the front line of fighting as Russian and separatist forces try to take full control of the Donetsk region, one of two eastern provinces that Russia has recognized as sovereign states. In southern Ukraine, one person was killed and six injured in shelling that hit a residential area in Mykolaiv, a significant port city, the region's administration said Saturday on Facebook. Friday's attack on the prison reportedly killed Ukrainian soldiers captured in May after the fall of Mariupol, a Black Sea port city where troops and the Azov Regiment of the national guard famously held out against a monthslong Russian siege. On Saturday, an association of Azov fighters' relatives dressed in black held a demonstration outside Kyiv's St. Sophia Cathedral and issued a statement calling for Russia to be designated a terrorist state for violating the Geneva Convention's rules for the treatment of war prisoners. A woman wearing dark glasses who gave only her first name, Iryna, was waiting for news of her 23 year-old-son. ``I don`t know how is he, where is he, if he is alive or no. I don`t know. It`s a horror, only horror. For a mother, it`s the biggest loss if her child has gone,'' she said. Moscow has opened a probe into the attack on POW prison, sending a team to the site from Russia's Investigative Committee, the country's main criminal investigation agency. The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said the competing claims and limited information prevented assigning full responsibility for the attack but the ``available visual evidence appears to support the Ukrainian claim more than the Russian.'' On the energy front, Russia's state-owned natural gas corporation said Saturday it has halted shipments to Latvia because of contract violations. Gas giant Gazprom said the shipments were stopped because Latvia broke ``terms for extraction of gas.'' It did not elaborate. The statement likely referred to a refusal to meet Russia's demand for gas payments in rubles rather than other currencies. Gazprom has previously suspended gas shipments to other EU countries, including the Netherlands, Poland and Bulgaria, because they would not pay in rubles. EU nations have been scrambling to secure other energy sources, fearing that Russia will cut off more gas supplies as winter approaches. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Saturday warned that the parts of Donetsk region that remain under Ukrainian control will face severe heating problems this winter because of the extensive destruction of gas mains in the war. She called for a mandatory evacuation of residents of the region before the cold weather sets in. Search Keywords: Short link: China has launched a volley of trade curbs against Taiwan in addition to live-fire military drills, as US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island despite Beijing's warnings. China considers Taiwan its territory and tries to keep it isolated internationally, opposing countries from maintaining official contacts with the self-ruled island. After Pelosi became the highest-profile elected US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Wednesday the response will be "resolute, forceful and effective". Here are the measures China has announced so far: Military exercises The first response was announced swiftly: live-fire military drills in zones encircling Taiwan -- at some points, within just 20 kilometres (12 miles) of the island's shore. The drills will include "long-range live ammunition shooting" in the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from mainland China and straddles vital shipping lanes. Taiwan's defence ministry described the drills as "an irrational move to challenge the international order". And the island's Mainland Affairs Council, which sets the government's China policies, accused Beijing of "vicious intimidation". Beijing cannot afford to be seen as toothless after ramping up the rhetoric ahead of Pelosi's arrival, analysts said. "It will be imperative for the Chinese regime to underline its nationalist credentials to its domestic audience," said James Char, an associate research fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. "Beijing cannot be seen as weak by its own people." Trade curbs China on Wednesday also imposed curbs on the import of fruit and fish from Taiwan. Its customs authorities said it would suspend some citrus fruit imports over alleged "repeated" detection of excessive pesticide residue. It also banned the import of certain fish from the island, pointing to the discovery of the coronavirus on packages. These bans came a day after Taipei's Council of Agriculture said China had cited regulatory breaches in suspending the import of Taiwanese goods including fishery products, tea and honey. It is not the first time Beijing has aimed at Taiwan's agricultural products -- it banned pineapple imports in March 2021, citing the discovery of pests. However, the move was widely seen as politically driven. The moves are part of a "common pattern for Beijing", said Even Pay, an agriculture analyst at consultancy Trivium China. More disruptions of agricultural and food trade can be expected in the coming days, she added. "When diplomatic or trade tensions are running high, Chinese regulators typically take an extremely strict approach to compliance... looking for any issues that can be used to justify a trade ban," she told AFP. The Chinese commerce ministry said in a separate notice that it would "suspend the export of natural sand to Taiwan" from Wednesday, without providing details. Natural sand is generally used for producing concrete and asphalt, and most of Taiwan's imported sand and gravel comes from China. Bans on 'secessionists' Beijing has ramped up pressure on Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016, as she views the island as a de facto sovereign nation and not part of "one China". The Chinese State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office said Wednesday that it will punish two Taiwan organisations with close links to "die-hard" secessionists -- the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy and International Cooperation and Development Fund. Enterprises that have donated to the groups, such as Speedtech Energy and Hyweb Technology, will also be prohibited from working with Chinese firms. Search Keywords: Short link: U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meeting leaders in Taiwan despite warnings from China, said Wednesday that she and other members of Congress in a visiting delegation are showing they will not abandon their commitment to the self-governing island. ``Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy,'' she said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. ``America's determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad.'' China, which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes any engagement by Taiwanese officials with foreign governments, announced multiple military exercises around the island, parts of which will enter Taiwanese waters, and issued a series of harsh statements after the delegation touched down Tuesday night in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. Taiwan decried the planned actions. ``Such an act equals to sealing off Taiwan by air and sea, such an act covers our country's territory and territorial waters, and severely violates our country's territorial sovereignty,'' Capt. Jian-chang Yu said at a briefing by the National Defense Ministry. The Chinese military exercises, including live fire, are to start Thursday and be the largest aimed at Taiwan since 1995, when China fired missiles in a large-scale exercise to show its displeasure at a visit by then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to the U.S. China's official Xinhua News Agency announced the military actions Tuesday night, along with a map outlining six different areas around Taiwan. Arthur Zhin-Sheng Wang, a defense studies expert at Taiwan's Central Police University, said three of the areas infringe on Taiwanese waters, meaning they are within 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) of shore. Using live fire in a country's territorial airspace or waters is risky, said Wang, adding that ``according to international rules of engagement, this can possibly be seen as an act of war.`` Pelosi's trip has heightened U.S.-China tensions more than visits by other members of Congress because of her high-level position as leader of the House of Representatives. She is the first speaker of the House to visit Taiwan in 25 years, since Newt Gingrich in 1997. Taiwanese President Tsai responded Wednesday to Beijing's military intimidation. ``Facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down,'' Tsai said at her meeting with Pelosi. ``We will firmly uphold our nation's sovereignty and continue to hold the line of defense for democracy.'' Tsai, thanking Pelosi for her decades of support for Taiwan, presented the speaker with a civilian honor, the Order of the Propitious Clouds. China's response has been loud and varied. Shortly after Pelosi landed Tuesday night, China announced live-fire drills that reportedly started that night, as well as the four-day exercises starting Thursday. The People's Liberation Army Air Force also flew a contingent of 21 war planes Tuesday night, including fighter jets, toward Taiwan. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng also summoned the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, Nicholas Burns, to convey the country's protests the same night. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV published images of PLA drills and video Wednesday, although it was unclear where they were being conducted. Pelosi addressed Beijing's threats Wednesday morning, saying she hopes it's clear that while China has prevented Taiwan from attending certain international meetings, ``that they understand they will not stand in the way of people coming to Taiwan as a show of friendship and of support.'' Pelosi noted that support for Taiwan is bipartisan in Congress and praised the island's democracy. She stopped short of saying that the U.S would defend Taiwan militarily, emphasizing that Congress is ``committed to the security of Taiwan, in order to have Taiwan be able to most effectively defend themselves.'' Her focus has always been the same, she said, going back to her 1991 visit to Beijing's Tiananmen Square, when she and other lawmakers unfurled a small banner supporting democracy two years after a bloody military crackdown on protesters at the square. That visit was also about human rights and what she called dangerous technology transfers to ``rogue countries.'' Pelosi is visiting a human rights museum in Taipei that details the history of the island's martial law era later Wednesday before she departs for South Korea, the next stop on an Asia tour that also includes Singapore, Malaysia and Japan. Pelosi, who is leading the trip with five other members of Congress, also met with representatives from Taiwan's legislature. ``Madam Speaker's visit to Taiwan with the delegation, without fear, is the strongest defense of upholding human rights and consolidation of the values of democracy and freedom,'' Tsai Chi-chang, vice president of Taiwan's legislature, said in welcome. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has sought to tone down the volume on the visit, insisting there's no change in America's longstanding ``one-China policy,'' which recognizes Beijing but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. Pelosi said her delegation has ``heft,`` including Gregory Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Raja Krishnamoorthi from the House Intelligence Committee. She also mentioned Rep. Suzan DelBene, whom Pelosi said was instrumental in the passage of a $280 billion bill aimed at boosting American manufacturing and research in semiconductor chips _ an industry that Taiwan dominates and is vital for modern electronics. Reps. Andy Kim and Mark Takano are also in the delegation. Search Keywords: Short link: Galyna Chorna sobs as she recounts the Russian rocket strike that obliterated the apartments above hers, shattering her windows, her door and any inkling of safety she still clung to. The 75-year-old is the only remaining resident of her nine-storey block in Saltivka, one of Europe's largest housing estates that has been ruthlessly and relentlessly shelled by Russia since the start of its invasion of Ukraine in February. "I'm so afraid because I'm alone here -- I'm really alone. I had a daughter, but she died a year ago because she drank too much," she says, trembling despite the warm sunshine. "So now I just sit here on this bucket. When a missile comes in, I just fall to the floor, on my front. That's why maybe I am still alive." Saltivka, in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, was once a thriving district, built in the 1960s as a "bedroom community" for Soviet industrial workers, and home to upwards of half a million people. A relentless barrage of Iskander missiles and unguided rockets began on February 26, hitting apartment blocks at random. As the war grinds on, much of the neighbourhood now lies in ruins. Early spring was so cold that the nails on Galyna's hands and feet turned black with the beginnings of frostbite. There was no running water in the area for the first six weeks of war, and no electricity until last month. The gas only returned this week. Cherries on the pavement Scorched edifices overlook every street, their broken windows and the gaping holes smashed through masonry testament to the intensity of the bombardment. Many of the buildings are scarred by deep fissures and look as if they are on the verge of collapse. Rusting cars with roofs pancaked by fallen rubble and twisted metal decay in the streets. Several apartment blocks appear to have been spared further into the estate, but no corner is genuinely safe, due to the random character of the shelling. Many of the attacks have been carried out using banned cluster bombs, rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say, accusations the Kremlin has denied. Parts of the district have returned to nature, and grass verges grow waist-high. With most of the children gone, the cherry trees have remained unpicked, their fruit left to drop on the pockmarked pavement. The residents who stayed eke out what life they can on government handouts of less than $100 a month and ready meals delivered by police and charity workers. A few of Chorna's neighbours have moved into a cavernous, gloomy shelter below the local school, where the dim light of bare bulbs reveals rock-ribbed floors that kick up thick dust. The beds are fashioned from school desks, chairs and wooden pallets. The refugees from the chaos above hunch over saucepans of soup heated in a makeshift kitchen. Antonina Mykolaieva, 71, moved into the shelter with her husband and around 40 others when war broke out, but he died of heart failure a month later. Their son, a soldier in the Soviet army, was killed decades ago when he was 21. She was unable to bury her husband in the same cemetery because it has been pulverised by shell fire. "I was always frightened when I heard loud bangs, because I was worried the block would fall down on us," she says. '70 bombs a day' Oleg Synegubov, the governor of the Kharkiv region, told AFP Saltivka had been "almost completely destroyed". The most important task ahead, he said, was to ensure heating is restored before winter kicks in, when night-time temperatures average about -7 Celsius (19 Fahrenheit). "But the destruction that is there, the existing damage to the buildings, will not allow them to be rebuilt to the state they were before," he said. The job of protecting residents from the elements falls partly to Volodymyr Manzhosov, a 57-year-old plumber in a council maintenance team that has been racing to replace bombed pipes. He lives alone in Saltivka -- one of five people who stayed in a 15-storey apartment block -- after sending his wife and two children to the relative safety of the western city of Lviv. "The most difficult time was around March, because it was cold, and there were around 70 bombs a day across the area," he said. But he remains hopeful of a better future, with public transport and some shops returning in his corner of the estate. "I live on the ground floor so if my block is hit, I will be okay," he grins. "If something happens and I find myself under the rubble, I have a bottle of water and a torch by the bed." Search Keywords: Short link: The UN secretary-general announced Wednesday he will launch a fact-finding mission to uncover the "truths" about a jail where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died in a bombing strike last week. Kyiv and Moscow have traded blame over the strikes on the prison in Kremlin-controlled Olenivka in eastern Ukraine. "We received the request from the Russian Federation and the request from the Ukraine" for the investigation, Antonio Guterres told a press conference. "I decided in line with my own competencies and powers to launch a fact-finding mission," he said, noting he did not have the authority for criminal investigations. He said the exact terms of the mission are still in the works, and hopefully Russia and Ukraine will reach an agreement on them. "We hope to have all the facilities from both sides for access and for the obtention of all data that is necessary to be able to clarify the truths about what has happened," Guterres said, adding they are looking for "competent, independent people" to join the mission team. The prison attack left over 50 people killed. Moscow said that among the dead were Ukrainian forces that had laid down their arms after weeks of fighting off Russia's brutal bombardment of the sprawling Azovstal steel works in Mariupol. Russia's defense ministry alleged that the strikes were carried out by Ukraine with US-supplied long-range missiles, in an "egregious provocation" designed to stop soldiers from surrendering. But Kyiv has laid the blame squarely on Russia, with President Volodymyr Zelensky calling it "a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war." Search Keywords: Short link: The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations headed to Africa on Wednesday, saying she was going to focus on how the United States can help Uganda, Ghana and Cape Verde deal with the food crisis that has hit the continent particularly hard _ not to compete with China and Russia. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the long-planned trip is not part of global competition with either of America's rivals, but it is part of a series of high-level U.S. engagements ``that aim to affirm and strengthen our partnerships and relationships with African leaders and peoples.'' Her trip from Aug. 4-7 will be followed immediately by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's visits to South Africa, Congo and Rwanda from Aug. 7-11. It also comes on the heels of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's visit last week to Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Republic of Congo where he accused the U.S. and European countries of driving up food prices. China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi began 2022 with a four-day visit to Eritrea, Kenya and the Comoros, keeping a 32-year tradition that the country's top diplomat make his first trip of the year to Africa. ``We're not catching up. They are catching up,'' Thomas-Greenfield said. ``We have been engaging with this continent for decades, and even my own career is very much evidence of that.'' Thomas-Greenfield first went to Africa as a student in the 1970s, and in her career as a U.S. diplomat she rose to be assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2013 to 2017. She said high energy prices, climate change, COVID-19 and increasing conflict have pushed millions of Africans ``to the brink,'' and that Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 has added to the crisis, ``especially since some countries in Africa once got up to 75% of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine.'' The U.S. ambassador said the three countries she is visiting _ Uganda first followed by Ghana and Cape Verde _ all face serious food security situations because of the significant rise in the cost of food and energy. But she said Ghana has been a leader in dealing with it and she will be visiting a market, meeting farmers and going to a grain factory in the country ``to see how we can help them improve on their production.'' In an interview and at a news conference ahead of her three-nation visit, Thomas-Greenfield said her trip happens to come on the heels of Lavrov's visit. Refusing to call Russia's invasion of Ukraine a war, Lavrov said: ``The situation in Ukraine did additionally negatively affect food markets, but not due to the Russian special operation, rather due to the absolutely inadequate reaction of the West, which announced sanctions.'' Thomas-Greenfield countered: ``Russia is there to defend what they know they have to defend _ that they took actions that are hurting Africans, and they're trying to somehow defend their actions and blame somebody else for the impact that their actions are having on the African continent.'' ``They can try to do that. But my question to them is, how are you helping Africans to address the food insecurity issue, not whom you're blaming for the food insecurity issues,'' she said. ``We're there to help Africans address those issues. Russia can deal with its own problems.'' As for China, while its trade with Africa last year was dramatically higher than U.S. trade, Thomas-Greenfield said ``if you look at our figures, and how far back our engagement has been with the Africans, then we really are far above those numbers.'' ``As you look at what China's doing in Africa, you need to look at the debt trap that African countries, many of them, have faced because of those relationships with China,'' she said. China has become one of the biggest lenders to developing countries through its Belt and Road initiative to expand trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Wang, China's foreign minister, insisted during his visit to Kenya in January that there is no ``debt trap.'' ``The so-called `debt trap' in Africa is not a fact, but a malicious hype-up,'' he said. ``It is an 'utterance trap' created by those external forces that do not want to see Africa accelerate development. If there is any `trap' in Africa, it is the `poverty trap.''' Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. is ``not telling African countries they can't engage with China.'' ``What we are engaged in is vision for economic development that promotes democracy and that promotes respect for human rights and transparency and strengthening the capacity for Africans to create jobs for their own citizens,'' she said. ``We respect the ability of countries to decide for themselves whether they want to partner with China or not.'' Search Keywords: Short link: By Azernews By Orkhan Amashov Revenge is a potent intoxicant that could take a hopelessly vanquished one through an agonisingly futile process of seeking to avenge. When one harbouring grievance is immeasurably weaker than ones nemesis, the grudge held is a recipe for self-destruction. Loose war coalition The revanchist cause in Armenia and amongst its diaspora remains strong. Its propagators and backers form a loose confederation, including the Kocharyan-Sargsyan supporters inside the National Assembly, considerable elements within the army, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the diaspora who has a vested ideological and financial interest in ensuring the preservation of Yerevans isolation within the neighbourhood, external arms suppliers and other actors driven by pecuniary considerations. This confluence of a wide array of forces is endangered by the possibility of peace, as a transition to stability will render them less consequential and with a lesser degree of authority over the affairs of the nation. The Church, as the custodian of the Armenian national identity as Gods uniquely chosen people is not remotely interested in peaceful coexistence with Azerbaijan and Turkiye, due to the massive loss of leverage over a society which has long been infested with what it has been preaching. If the Church provides spiritual foundations for the revanchist cause, the contemporary opposition, with ties to the former Karabakh clan regime, gives it a definable content in domestic political discourse. Given that the main strength of the aforementioned forces stems from pandering to the militaristic sentiments of society, after a comprehensive peace accord with Baku is signed, they will be politically emaciated, with their electoral base gradually evaporating. The dynamics of diaspora designs vs homeland realities will also be reshaped, as the worldwide Armenian diaspora will no longer be able to set the tempo or dictate the terms for Yerevan. Peace is also devastating for all three elements as it militates against their long-held and deeply-entrenched notion that Azerbaijanis and Armenians are inherently incapable of living together. Former Armenian President Robert Kocharyan once said that the two nations are genetically incompatible, using this streak of rhetoric in a more diplomatic tone during the negotiations to propound the idea of a civilisational difference between the conflicting sides. Sense of history The present circumstances entrapping Armenia form an existential moment. It is vital that its meaning is judiciously understood. The existential import does not lie in the loss of Karabakh per se, but in Armenias inability to accept this reality. Pashinyan, for all his frailties and vacillations, has taken some steps towards a final peace over the past few months. Whenever he did something which could have been interpreted as a step away from the logic of former days, he has been viciously accused of treachery and sacrificing sacrosanct Armenian objectives on the altar of a defeatist peace with Azerbaijan. The revanchist cause is inextricably interwoven with a design that this is the time of resistance, and instead of stooping to Azerbaijani demands, the line of vehement renunciation of the trilateral declaration provisions must be pursued. History has known successful examples of defying what might have been deemed to be an inevitable course of events through the consolidation of resources under extraordinary circumstances. Turkiye Armenias long-standing arch enemy - is a very good case in point. The year 1919 constituted the lowest ebb in Turkish history. This was when Izmir was occupied by the Greeks, and Istanbul, the nations then-capital, was under de facto Allied occupation. The Sultans government was totally paralysed and unable to make independent decisions. This prompted some seemingly sensible Turks, guided by their countrys best interests, to suggest a peace accord with the victors of the First World War as the best mode of action. A sense of defeatism and the premonition of even a greater calamity was palpable. The government of Damat Ferid Pasha was preaching a sensible retrenchment to protect whatever was left of the Ottoman Empire, accepting the Allies demands. It was the group of the resistant elements within the defeated Ottoman army, led by Mustafa Kemal, firmly convinced in the vital criticality of rejecting a defeatist peace accord, that organised a grand resistance from their newly-established base in Ankara. They reversed the course of history, much to the chagrin of the Armenians, who had had their own ambitions over the share of cake in the light of the Ottoman Empires dismemberment. The parliament in Istanbul, in its final session, adopted the National Oath in January 1920, defining the territories not occupied at the time of signing the Armistice of Mudros (1918), inhabited by a Turkish majority, as the homeland of the Turkish nation. On this basis proceeded the government of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, which pursued the line of resistance. Being never ratified, the Treaty of Sevres went down in the annals of history as stillborn. But its mere name is still cause for perturbation in Turkiye. Its association with inglorious acceptance of defeat and treachery remains palpable in the Turkish psyche. There are those in todays Armenia, fully convinced of their patriotism and sense of historic mission, who may think it is time to ride out the storm, reverse the unjust course of history, overthrow the government of defeatists and collaborationists and preserve the dignity of Armenian national pride. And somehow unwittingly before signing a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, Armenia seems to have developed its own Sevres syndrome, which mandates that any accord with Baku or rapprochement with Ankara must be resisted, and it is vital to get through the presently agonising stage. These final straw-grabbing soothsayers anticipate that circumstances may eventually be sufficiently auspicious to retaliate and reverse the results of the Second Karabakh War. Such a mindset largely forms the crux of the revanchist cause in todays Armenia. Its premise is predicated on the idea that resisting the loss of Karabakh is of existential importance. Herein lies the cause of the trouble. The false conviction as to who is the rightful owner of the given territory and the attempt to give it a meaning along the lines of national self-determination constitutes the basis of the grand delusion that feeds the toxic and ultimately destructive desire that guides the minds of the revenge-driven segments of Armenian society. What then? There is a journey ahead, the duration of which is unknown. Blood may yet be shed again. As sure as the Pope is Catholic, Armenias moment of relief from this angst will come once Pashinyan, or his successor, following the mores of cold reason, will sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, officially and unreservedly renouncing any claim on Karabakh. Voting technology was introduced in Kenya to build trust and credibility around elections -- but has sometimes had the opposite effect. Here's what to know as Kenya's votes on August 9: Fingerprints and photographs After the death of more than 1,100 people in violence after the 2007 election, technology was proposed as a way of bolstering transparency around polls and reducing the delay in announcing results, a major source of tension. In the subsequent 2013 and 2017 elections, results were transmitted electronically, and biometrics used to register voters and identify them on polling day. Biometric voter registration has been a success, boosting the electoral roll from 14.3 million in 2013 to 19.6 million in 2017 and 22.1 million in 2022. On election day, voters provide their fingerprints for identification against a digital database, before casting their ballot in a traditional manner using a pen and paper. Technology comes into play again when polling stations close and votes are counted. To limit the possibility of fraud, the official form displaying the outcome from each polling station will be photographed and transmitted digitally, instead of officials inputting the results manually as was the case in 2017. The photographs are pooled at a constituency level, then forwarded to a national tally centre, where they are cross-checked against the original forms which are physically transported. Chequered history Kenya's first stab at using voting technology in 2013 was not a success -- the system broadly failed, forcing the election commission to return to manual methods. The fiasco damaged public trust in electoral technology. The opposition, led by Raila Odinga, said it was a deliberate act of sabotage by Uhuru Kenyatta, his presidential rival who won the vote. During the next election in 2017, the biometric systems worked without a hitch, but problems in delivering the results electronically formed the basis of Odinga's successful legal challenge to Kenyatta's re-election. The Odinga camp claimed, again, that technology had been manipulated to favour the incumbent. OT-Morpho, the French company that supplied the voting systems, denied any manipulation or hacking had occurred. But in a landmark ruling, Kenya's highest court, citing irregularities in the transmission of results, invalidated Kenyatta's victory and ordered a fresh vote. An observation mission deployed by the European Union to monitor the vote noted an "improved use of technology, but insufficient capacity or security testing". 'Grey area' When the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) ran a test in June, less than half of the 2,900 polling stations successfully transmitted results. Another rehearsal in July, across a reduced number of locations, saw a 92 percent rate, but the outcome didn't inspire confidence. "We have 46,233 polling stations... So that's still a grey area. We don't know with certainty that the system of transmission will work 100 percent," said Mulle Musau from the Elections Observation Group, a Kenyan poll watchdog. This year, nearly 1,300 polling stations are in areas with little to no internet coverage, an improvement on the last election when 11,000 locations were in the dark. The IEBC says results will be transmitted from these locations by satellite, and that precautions are in place to avoid any failure. More than 55,000 electronic machines used for identifying voters and sending results have been deployed across the country, and each is powered by two stand-alone batteries. "It requires internet only when it is transmitting results. It is offline. It cannot be hacked," said Justus Nyang'aya, an IEBC official. Election officials say back-up kits have been provided, and polling officers can fall back on manual methods, like a paper voter registry, as a last resort. Distrust and disinformation "Technology has made our elections much more complex, much more unclear and therefore opaque," Musau said. "When they (voters) feel things are clouded... that is what becomes very dangerous. The biggest problem with our Kenyan elections is one word: trust." British firm Smartmatic, which replaced OT-Morpho as the software provider for this election, has denied criticism that its technology -- used in polls from Uganda to Venezuela and the Philippines -- has flaws. "Unfortunately, election processes, in general, are vulnerable to disinformation. Bad actors systematically disseminate lies to undermine elections by inciting fear, anxiety and distrust among voters and stakeholders," a Smartmatic spokeswoman, Samira Saba, told AFP by email. Episodes of criminality involving electoral technology have undermined public confidence in the security and reliability of these systems. In June, electoral officials said about one million voters had had their constituencies switched without their knowledge on the national database. The changes had been reversed on the registry and three electoral officers arrested, officials said, but the episode did not allay fears about the perceived opacity of these technologies. Search Keywords: Short link: Eight years on since the Islamic State jihadist group's massacres of Yazidis, more then 200,000 survivors are still displaced from their homes in Iraq, the United Nations said Thursday. The needs of displaced persons living in and outside camps, and returnees remain high said the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM). After seizing swathes of Iraq in 2014, IS jihadists carried out horrific massacres, including in the northern region of Sinjar where the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority -- a monotheistic, esoteric community -- has long been rooted. A lack of adequate shelter and basic services such as running water. electricity, health care and education is making durable solutions difficult for Yazidis returning home or seeking to do so. "Families are forced to focus on meeting their most basic needs rather than on meaningfully rebuilding their lives," the IOM said. IS destroyed around 80 percent of public infrastructure and 70 percent of civilian homes in Sinjar city and its surrounding areas, the Geneva-based agency said. IS fighters also destroyed the region's natural resources and farmland. "Mass executions, forced conversions, abduction and enslavement, systematic sexual violence and other heinous acts" perpetrated by IS "reflect a genocidal effort to destroy this historically-persecuted ethno-religious minority," the IOM said. More than 2,700 people remain missing, the agency added. Some are known to be held by IS, which persecuted Yazidis for their non-Muslim faith, but the whereabouts of others is uncertain. Generational impact Survivors among the non-Arab, Kurdish-speaking minority are unable to mourn lost loved ones, many of whom lie in unmarked and mass graves still awaiting exhumation, said the IOM. "The scale of the atrocities committed against the Yazidi community is such that it will have an impact on generations to come," said Sandra Orlovic, IOM Iraq's reparations officer. "The government of Iraq and the international community need to create conditions that will assure Yazidis that such atrocities will not happen again and support them in healing and rebuilding their lives." The Norwegian Refugee Council said in May that violence and sluggish reconstruction had prevented Sinjar city's Yazidi, Muslim Kurdish and Arab residents from returning home, as had a surge in violence earlier in the month. "A staggering 99 percent of those who applied for government compensation had not received any funding for damaged property," the aid group added. In early May, fighting broke out between Iraqi troops and Yazidi fighters affiliated with Turkey's banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). More than 10,000 people fled the fighting, adding to the displaced population. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypt welcomed on Thursday the extension of the truce in Yemen for two additional months, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced. The United Nations' Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg announced on Monday an extension of the truce in Yemen for two additional two months, from 2 August to 2 October. The truce extension included a commitment from the fighting parties to intensify negotiations to reach an expanded truce agreement as soon as possible, said Grundberg in his statement. Egypt is looking forward to the extension of the truce, which contributes in a comprehensive settlement for the Yemeni crisis and supports the initiatives for a political solution in a way that safeguards the unity of Yemen and its independence as well as its wealth for its own people who aspire to security, stability and prosperity, the Egyptian foreign ministry statement said. In May, Egypt announced that it resumed direct flights between Cairo and Sanaa for the first time in years due to the conflict. Egypt has repeatedly called for a political solution in Yemen that would meet the aspirations of the Yemeni people in achieving stability and development and ends the extended humanitarian crisis. The country has also reiterated its support to the UNs efforts in Yemen, calling for a solution to the crisis that is based on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Initiative, the outcome of the national dialogue, and the relevant UN Security Council resolutions. Over the past years, Egypt had stressed its unwavering support to the legitimate Saudi-backed Yemeni government of Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, which the Houthis ousted from Sanaa in 2014. Egypt has also discussed with the Yemeni government long-term partnerships in various fields to support Yemens redevelopment. Egypt also frequently condemned the Houthi rebel's attacks on civilian targets in Saudi Arabia, stressing its support for all Saudi measures aiming at protecting its national security. According to some estimations by the Yemeni embassy, there are currently 250,000 Yemeni refugees in Egypt. Search Keywords: Short link: The White House Thursday that a group of US naval vessels led by the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier would remain in the Taiwan region after China launched ballistic missiles in the area. White House spokesman John Kirby said the Pentagon had ordered the Reagan carrier group to "remain on station in the general area to monitor the situation." "We will not be deterred from operating in the seas and the skies of the Western Pacific consistent with international law, as we have for decades, supporting Taiwan and defending a free and open Indo-Pacific," Kirby said. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypts Foreign Minister and President-Designate of the UN Climate Change Conference 2022 (COP27) Sameh Shoukry made his first post Wednesday on the recently made official social media account for COP27, in which he called for swift action to address climate change. On Wednesday, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced the launch of the official COP27 Facebook page. It is incumbent upon us in these uncertain times to act swiftly to ensure that climate action remains on top of the international agenda, and that the current state of affairs is not taken as a pretext to backtrack or renege on previous commitments, especially those related to supporting developing countries, Shoukry wrote in his first post. On 8 June, Shoukry and the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Patricia Espinosa officially signed the Host Country Agreement for COP27, which will take place in Sharm El-Sheikh from 6-18 November. The COP27 agreement was signed in the German city of Bonn during Shoukrys participation in the Bonn Climate Change Conference (56th session of the Subsidiary Bodies) at the World Convention Centre. Earlier in May, Egypt also launched the official website of COP27, and revealed its official logo that is designed to represent the unique cultural identity of Egypt and Africa, according to the Egyptian foreign ministry. Egypt has repeatedly highlighted ambitions to build on the Glasgow COP26 outcomes and support global efforts in mitigation and adapting to climate change during the conference. Egypt has reiterated the need to maintain momentum in climate action to keep the increase in global temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius, with COP27 set to primarily focus on urging countries to abide by the Paris Agreement. In May, Egypt's Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly launched the National Strategy for Climate Change 2050, which is based on five main pillars to preserve the environment and aims to enhance Egypts climate change leadership internationally. Madbouly said that Egypt will spare no effort through its presidency of COP27 to move from the stage of commitments and pledges declared by the states to actual implementation of quick and tangible measures. Search Keywords: Short link: Minister of Higher Education Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar announced on Thursday that 12 newly established non-profit national universities would begin operation during the 2022/2023 academic year, starting in October. Abdel-Ghaffars announcement came only one year after President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi directed the government to establish and finance 15 modern non-profit universities. The minister added that the new universities have so far been funded to the tune of EGP 39 billion (more than $2 billion) El-Sisi's directives aim to upgrade the higher education system in Egypt and focus on modern sciences and scientific fields that could prepare graduates for the modern labour market whether inside the country or abroad. The minister said that tuition and fees at the new universities would be equal to the cost of providing the educational service. He emphasised that these universities are not seeking profit, but are partnered with public universities, helping to support them financially by transferring their surplus operating budget to them. He revealed that the new universities will offer scholarships to outstanding students according to varying criteria. Abdel-Ghaffar added that the Egyptian government has planned to establish these new non-profit universities, branching off from the public universities, due to the demand for new educational programs that meets the needs of a non-traditional labour market. He noted that the new fourth-generation universities are designed to provide higher education for the developmental needs of inhabitants of the countrys newly built cities. Egypt has succeeded in building 15 new fourth-generation cities, and there are plans still underway to build more to absorb the countrys population increase and create more real estate and developmental opportunities, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said during the Builders of Egypt Forum held in June. The new universities are located in the governorates of Assiut, Mansoura, Minya, Menofiya, Ismailia, Beni Suef and Port Said. They will offer several specialisations including medicine, dentistry, information technology, clinical pharmacy, engineering and artificial intelligence. The higher education minister pointed out that new universities will have an independent administration. He elaborated that the enrollment system to the new universities will be coordinated through the government, but will be totally independent and separate from that of public universities after Thanaweya Amma (high school) results. This years results are scheduled to be announced by the end of the first week in August, according to Minister of Education Tarek Shawky. He asserted that the minimum score for joining the new faculties will be announced by the private universities council, which is a part of the Supreme Council of Universities (SCU) in Egypt. Abdel-Ghaffars announcement came only one year after President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi directed the government to establish and finance 15 modern non-profit universities. The minister added that the new universities have so far been funded to the tune of EGP 39 billion (more than $2 billion) El-Sisi's directives aim to upgrade the higher education system in Egypt and focus on modern sciences and scientific fields that could prepare graduates for the modern labour market whether inside the country or abroad. The minister said that tuition and fees at the new universities would be equal to the cost of providing the educational service. He emphasised that these universities are not seeking profit, but are partnered with public universities, helping to support them financially by transferring their surplus operating budget to them. He revealed that the new universities will offer scholarships to outstanding students according to varying criteria. Abdel-Ghaffar added that the Egyptian government has planned to establish these new non-profit universities, branching off from the public universities, due to the demand for new educational programs that meets the needs of a non-traditional labour market. He noted that the new fourth-generation universities are designed to provide higher education for the developmental needs of inhabitants of the countrys newly built cities. Egypt has succeeded in building 15 new fourth-generation cities, and there are plans still underway to build more to absorb the countrys population increase and create more real estate and developmental opportunities, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said during the Builders of Egypt Forum held in June. The new universities are located in the governorates of Assiut, Mansoura, Minya, Menofiya, Ismailia, Beni Suef and Port Said. They will offer several specialisations including medicine, dentistry, information technology, clinical pharmacy, engineering and artificial intelligence. The higher education minister pointed out that new universities will have an independent administration. He elaborated that the enrollment system to the new universities will be coordinated through the government, but will be totally independent and separate from that of public universities after Thanaweya Amma (high school) results. This years results are scheduled to be announced by the end of the first week in August, according to Minister of Education Tarek Shawky. He asserted that the minimum score for joining the new faculties will be announced by the private universities council, which is a part of the Supreme Council of Universities (SCU) in Egypt. Search Keywords: Short link: The 74-year-old King had a haunting but gregarious presence, his gaunt features accented by his gray suit and gray sneakers, his walk tentative, as it has been since he was struck by a van and badly injured in 1999. But once sworn in, he was relaxed and happy to talk, and ever alert to how to tell a story, "My name is Stephen King. I'm a freelance writer,'' King said upon being asked to identify himself. The Justice Department is bidding to convince Pan that the proposed combination of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, two of the world's biggest publishers, would thwart competition and damage the careers of some of the most popular authors _ a status King holds like few others. King's remarkable career, with so many bestsellers he could only offer an estimate, has come amid waves of consolidation in the industry. As he noted in his remarks, there were dozens of publishers in New York when his breakthrough novel, "Carrie," came out, in 1974, and he has seen many of them either acquired by larger companies or forced out of business. Now, New York publishing is often a story of the so-called Big Five: Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishing, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan. The publisher of "Carrie," Doubleday, is now part of Penguin Random House. So is another former King publisher, Viking Press. Over the first two days, attorneys for the two sides have presented notably contrasting views of the book industry. The Justice Department sees an increasingly limited market for bestsellers, with the Big Five well in command. Penguin Random House's side sees book publishing as dynamic and open to many, with the proposed merger having limited impact. King's appearance in U.S. District Court in Washington _ highly unusual for an antitrust trial _ brought a narrative of the evolution of book publishing toward the dominance of the Big Five companies. As government attorney Mel Schwarz walked King through his history starting as a new, unknown author in the 1970s and his relationships with agents and publishers, King homed in on a critique of the industry as it is now. King crisply answered Schwarz's questions, with some moments of humor and brief flashes of gentle outrage, as he testified during the second day of the trial expected to last two to three weeks. "The Big Five are pretty entrenched," he said. Under questioning later in the day, Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp detailed a world of fiercely competitive bidding among publishers _ including between his firm and Penguin Random House _ for authors' works, sometimes besting each other by millions of dollars for high-profile writers. With his possible future boss, Penguin Random House Markus Dohle, among those looking on in the courtroom, Karp rejected the Big Five moniker, calling it "parochial and ethnocentric.'' "I think there are a lot of good publishers all over the country. It's not all about us,'' Karp said. As an example, he said the nearly 100-year-old Simon & Schuster has endured more aggressive competition recently from Amazon's book publishing business. But Justice Department attorney Jeff Vernon brought forward a message Karp had sent to John Irving, his favorite author, saying he didn't think the government would allow Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House to merge. "That's assuming we still have a Department of Justice,'' Karp wrote in the message. At one point, the judge appeared to support a core government argument _ that greater concentration in the industry could reduce the compensation paid to authors. Through two days of testimony, Pan said, "there's a sense that competition raises the amounts of advances'' and less competition lowers them. King's displeasure about the proposed merger led him to voluntarily testify for the government. "I came because I think that consolidation is bad for competition," King said. The way the industry has evolved, he said, "it becomes tougher and tougher for writers to find money to live on.'' King expressed skepticism toward the two publishers' commitment to continue to bid for books separately and competitively after a merger. "You might as well say you're going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house," he quipped. "It would be sort of very gentlemanly and sort of, `After you' and `After you,'" he said, gesturing with a polite sweep of the arm. King's was entertaining and informative, although he had little specific to say over how the merger might harm bestselling authors, with the government's case focusing on those receiving advances of $250,000 or more. Attorney Daniel Petrocelli, representing the publishers, told King he had no questions for him and demurred on a cross-examination, saying instead he hoped they could have coffee together some time. King has long been a public favorite, and spoke warmly Tuesday of "living the dream," paying all the bills while working at something he loves. But the author of "The Stand,'' "The Shining" and many others wonders who else might have the chances he did. He was not chosen by the government just for his fame, but for his public criticism of the $2.2 billion deal announced in late 2021, potentially forming what rival CEO Michael Pietsch of Hachette Book Group has called a "gigantically prominent" entity. "The more the publishers consolidate, the harder it is for indie publishers to survive," King tweeted last year. King's affinity for smaller publishers is personal. Even while continuing to publish with the Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner, he has written thrillers for the independent Hard Case Crime. Years ago, the publisher asked him to contribute a blurb, but King instead offered to write a novel for them, "The Colorado Kid," released in 2005. He has also written fiction for other small companies, saying some of his work doesn't have the kind of commercial power the Big Five might expect. King himself would likely benefit from the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster deal, but he has a history of favoring other priorities beyond his material well-being. He has long been a critic of tax cuts for the rich, even as "the rich" surely includes Stephen King, and has openly called for the government to raise his taxes. "In America, we should all have to pay our fair share," he wrote for The Daily Beast in 2012. Israel's army closed areas near the Gaza border to civilians Tuesday, citing a risk of reprisals, following the overnight arrest of two senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad members, the military and Palestinian sources said. A 17-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces during a late Monday raid in the flashpoint West Bank district of Jenin. The army said it had operated alongside police, who arrested "two wanted terror suspects." A Palestinian security source, who requested anonymity, told AFP that one of those arrested was Bassem al-Saadi, a senior figure in Islamic Jihad's political wing in the West Bank. The source identified the second person detained as Saadi's son-in-law, a Jenin-based fundraiser for militant group. The army said: "Following a situational assessment after terrorist activities were identified with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation, it was decided to block off areas and routes adjacent to the Gaza Strip security fence. "The area has been closed to civilians due to a direct threat and in order to prevent a possible attack on civilians." Prime Minister Yair Lapid was reviewing security Tuesday in light of the threat risk, a government statement said. Saadi was injured by an Israeli army dog during his arrest, the Palestinian source said. As news of his detention spread, crowd's began to gather in Jenin refugee camp and the nearby city of Nablus, as supporters voiced solidarity with Islamic Jihad. "We declare alertness and raise the readiness of our mujahideen (fighters)," the group said in a statement late Monday. Home to some 2.3 million Palestinians, Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since 2007 when Islamist group Hamas ousted forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas. Islamic Jihad, a militant group with close links to Iran, has a strong presence in Gaza, regularly using it as a launchpad for rocket attacks against Israel. The latest unrest comes amid rising violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At least 55 Palestinians have been killed since late March, mostly in the West Bank. They have included suspected militants and also non-combatants, among them Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American dual national, who was covering an Israeli raid in Jenin. Attacks on Israeli targets have killed 19 people over the same period, most of them civilians killed in attacks inside Israel. Three Israeli Arab attackers have also been killed. Search Keywords: Short link: Lebanon marks two years Thursday since an apocalyptic blast in Beirut port killed over 200 people, destroyed a large chunk of the city and deepened a painful economic crisis. AFP looks back at the legal and political battles that have raged ever since. August 2020 mega-blast On August 4, 2020, one of history's biggest non-nuclear explosions destroys much of Beirut port and wrecks swathes of the capital. The blast was caused by a fire in a warehouse where a vast stockpile of the industrial chemical ammonium nitrate had been haphazardly stored for years, authorities said. The huge explosion leaves more than 200 people dead, over 6,500 injured and the city in a state of shock. The tragedy strikes as Lebanon is mired in what the World Bank later calls one of the world's worst financial crises in 150 years. Macron rushes to Beirut Two days after the blast, French President Emmanuel Macron visits the ruined Gemmayzeh neighbourhood, where he is greeted by residents sickened by their own political class, seen as corrupt and inept. Macron calls for an international probe into the disaster, which President Michel Aoun rejects. On August 8, thousands of people demonstrate against Lebanon's leadership. The next day, a donor conference raises around $300 million in aid for the victims. The donors insist the money be distributed directly to the Lebanese people, not entrusted to the government. Aug-Sept 2020: wave of resignations On August 10, the prime minister, Hassan Diab, resigns amid further demonstrations. At the end of the month, diplomat Mustapha Adib is named as Lebanon's new premier. But on September 26, after weeks of political deadlock, he bows out. On October 22, three-time prime minister Saad Hariri is nominated to lead the country again. He promises to form a government of experts to stop the economic collapse. Diab stays on as caretaker PM until a new cabinet is formed. Dec 2020: PM Diab charged A week later, the lead investigator into the explosion, Fadi Sawan, charges Diab and three ex-ministers with negligence. But the probe is soon suspended and a court removes Sawan in February 2021. July 2021: parliament stalls probe In July 2021, the new magistrate in charge of the investigation, Tarek Bitar, takes steps towards indicting four former ministers but parliament stalls on lifting their immunity. On July 15, Hariri steps down, having been unable to form a government. Billionaire Najib Mikati -- Lebanon's richest man and already twice premier -- manages to form a new government on September 10, ending a 13-month power vacuum. Oct 2021: deadly protests The new government is shaken by demands from the powerful Shiite group Hezbollah for Bitar, investigating two ex-ministers from a party allied to Hezbollah, to be removed. Bitar is forced to suspend the probe following a series of court challenges. Hezbollah and its ally Amal call for demonstrations to demand Bitar's dismissal, accusing him of bias. Seven people are killed in gun battles during the rally. Dec 2021: probe halted again At the end of 2021, Bitar resumes his investigation but less than two weeks later he is forced to suspend work for a fourth time following more legal challenges. In April, the International Monetary Fund announces a conditional deal to provide Lebanon with $3 billion in aid over four years. Chile arrests a Portuguese man wanted in connection with the port blast. May 2022: voters punish establishment Hezbollah and its allies lose their outright majority in May 15 parliamentary elections, in which independent candidates make record gains. Mikati is tasked with forming a new government. In July, victims of the Beirut blast file a $250-million lawsuit against US-Norwegian energy services company TGS over its alleged links to the ammonium nitrate that exploded in the port. TGS denies any responsibility. July 2022: Silos collapse Parts of Beirut port's huge grain silos, which withstood the explosion, collapse in a huge cloud of dust after a weeks-long fire that broke out when remaining grain stocks fermented and ignited in the summer heat. Search Keywords: Short link: After repeatedly rebuilding his home only to have it demolished by Israeli soldiers, Mohammed Abu Sabaha has a new plan to remain on the land _ he is moving into a cave. Abu Sabaha is among some 1,000 Palestinians at risk of expulsion from an arid region of the occupied West Bank that the Israeli military has designated as a live-fire training zone. Israel's Supreme Court upheld their expulsion in May after a two-decade legal battle. Most residents of the area, known as Masafer Yatta, have remained in place since the ruling, even as Israeli security forces periodically roll in to demolish structures. But they could be forced out at any time, and rights groups fear Israel will do it gradually to evade international scrutiny. The entrance to Abu Sabaha's cave is surrounded by the ruins of homes and animal pens that the soldiers demolished in earlier raids. The coo and cackle of chickens can be heard from inside a wrecked coop. A set of stone steps leads down into the cave, where he has strung up electrical lights, but it will take time to turn it into a home for his wife, parents and six children. ``We have suffered a lot because of this ruling. Especially the kids, who were born here,'' he said, standing in the dimly lit cave. ``They fled demolitions, then went back when we rebuilt, so many times.'' When the army isn't demolishing homes it is staging training exercises nearby. Tanks throw up dust clouds and heavy machine-gun fire and explosions echo across the desert hills. Abu Sabaha says his 3-year-old daughter Zeynab tenses up every time she sees them. ``She's always afraid they will come to destroy once again,`` he said. The military declared this part of Masafer Yatta a firing and training zone in the early 1980s. Israeli authorities said the residents _ Arab Bedouin who practice a traditional form of agriculture and animal herding _ only used the area part of the year and had no permanent structures there at the time. In November 1999, security forces expelled some 700 villagers and destroyed homes and cisterns. The legal battle began the following year. The families say they have been there for decades _ from long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war _ and have nowhere else to live. Some residents have traditionally resided in caves part of the year, as they graze sheep and goats in different areas. Israel's Supreme Court sided with the state in May, after the villagers rejected a compromise that would have allowed them to enter at certain times and practice agriculture for part of the year. Since then, the army has demolished several structures and seized vehicles, setting up roadblocks and checkpoints to limit movement, according to Nidal Younes, head of the local council. ``All of this is within the framework of occupation, to frighten, to scare, to make people's lives extremely difficult to force them to leave,'' he said. Masafer Yatta is in the 60% of the occupied West Bank known as Area C, where the Israeli military exercises full control under interim peace agreements reached with the Palestinians in the 1990s. Palestinian structures built without military permits _ which residents say are nearly impossible to obtain _ are at risk of demolition. Area C is also home to several Jewish settlement outposts that are protected by the army despite being built without Israeli authorization. Nearly 500,000 settlers live in communities across the West Bank, most of which were planned and approved by the government. Many resemble small towns or suburbs, with apartment blocks, shopping malls and factories. The Palestinians and the international community view the settlements as a major obstacle to resolving the century-old conflict because they absorb and divide up the land on which a future Palestinian state would be established alongside Israel. Israel officially considers the West Bank disputed territory subject to negotiations, but every government since 1967 has expanded settlements, and the country's dominant right-wing parties are opposed to Palestinian statehood. One of the Supreme Court justices who issued the ruling on Masafer Yatta is a settler. Eugene Kontorovich, a legal scholar at Israel's Kohelet Policy Forum, a right-wing think tank, said Israel could not allow ``private squatters to determine the uses of state land`` and was justified in barring people from entering a military firing range. ``The technical, legal justification is that it's not their land,`` he added. Rights groups say several other Palestinian communities across the West Bank could face similar threats of expulsion if the international community does not pressure Israel over Masafer Yatta. Israel has declared firing zones in 20% of the West Bank, affecting some 5,000 Palestinians from 38 communities, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for the Israeli rights group B'Tselem, said Israel would likely implement a ``quiet transfer'' in which it gradually makes life so difficult that families trickle out on their own. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which has been waging a legal battle on behalf of the residents of Masafer Yatta for more than two decades, has filed another petition against the Supreme Court ruling. Roni Pelli, an attorney with the group, said the ``terrible ruling'' goes against international law, which prohibits the transfer of civilians out of occupied territory. ``The legal consequence is that international humanitarian law is no longer relevant in the West Bank because the military commander can issue any order he wants,'' she said. ``You don't have to put people on trucks to force them from the land,`` she added. ``I am really, really worried that it might become a humanitarian disaster.'' Search Keywords: Short link: South Africa: Government reiterates commitment to build better SA for all Government, working together with the social sector, has committed to forge deep paths upon which every South African will develop their skills and contribute to their family, community and the realisation of the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan (ERRP). Social Development Minister, Lindiwe Zulu, said that this is particularly true for youth, women, people with disabilities and the rural populations of the country. Zulu was delivering a keynote address at the official opening ceremony of the Presidential Social Sector Summit at Birchwood Conference Centre in Boksburg. The two-day summit is held under the theme, Fostering Social Cohesion to Enable Socio-economic Participation in Communities. The summit brought together 600 delegates across nine provinces to deliberate on five thematic areas, namely resource mobilisation, transformation and job creation, capacity building, regulatory framework and community development. We invite the sector to innovate indigenous and responsive paths by which our communities, in particular the demographic groups I have mentioned, can move towards improving and protecting their dignity and integrity, while increasing their productivity, contributions to economic growth and self-sufficiency, Zulu said. The Minister emphasised that building a socially successful nation is reliant on families, the community, educational institutions and every State department in the life of every South African child and young person. She said that a responsible, productive, patriotic and resilient citizen is a product of the sufficient reinforcements of all these contributions. Zulu said the role of families in directing learners career choices towards artisanal and entrepreneurial vocations needs to be improved and sustained. This will improve educational throughput rates, reduce dropouts and increase the economic absorption of graduates, as well as total entrepreneurship activity among young people, she said. Tackling inequality The Minister further called on the country to focus on the triple challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequality, including the value chain of our economy. Zulu emphasised that the focus must be put more on an economy that is not opening up, particularly to young and black people, to be able to own the means of production. Together with the social sector and in pursuit of the social economy whose importance the President emphasised earlier this year during SONA, this sixth administration of our democratic government pursues the realisation of the form of social development that recognises that the comprehensive success of our society is intrinsically linked to the well-being of each and every South African, she said. Zulu said her department is looking at social entrepreneurship because they believe that if people can be empowered, they will be able to change their lives. Through this Social Sector Summit, we are each confirming our determination to build a better South Africa for all, especially the ordinary South Africans, whose daily lived experiences we seek to enhance. As we sign and implement the framework agreement, we do so for those millions of South Africans who yearn to realise their dreams and aspirations, to belong, to free the potential of their lives, and to embody the purpose of their lives, Zulu said. Zulu emphasised that government and civil society must find each other and different interest at play must not tear apart government and civil society working together. Speaking on the Sustainable Strategies to respond to Social Ills and Contemporary Issues, the Deputy Director-General for Women Economic Empowerment in the Presidency, Namhla Mniki, said the response required from all role players is urgent. The way in which we are thinking about solutions needs to radically transform from what we have been doing all along to actually become impactful and results orientated in what we need to achieve as a country. In all analysis that has been done by multiple stakeholders, we can conclude that our problem is that we have lacked a comprehensive coherent strategy to address poverty and unemployment, she said. Mniki said building blocks towards a social compact need to be put in place to address challenges the country faces. Every household in this country needs to have a no poverty guarantee. We must agree as a nation that it is unacceptable to have any household living in poverty in this country. The no poverty guarantee is designed to break the cycle of poverty and further guarantee households out of generational poverty, Mniki said. She said social partners need to begin to see civil society as active agents in creating a conducive environment for change to ensure that SAs social economy is awake and active. - SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2022-08-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. By Azernews Azerbaijan Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov, EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia Toivo Klaar discussed the current situation in the region on the phone on 3 August, Azernews reports. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said that over recent days, provocations had been committed by Armenia both on the border of the two states and in the territory of Azerbaijan, where the peacekeeping contingent of the Russian Federation is temporarily stationed, and as a result of intensive fire opened by the members of illegal Armenian armed groups, an Azerbaijani serviceman was martyred. It was emphasized that the Azerbaijani army implemented adequate response measures to military provocations in its own sovereign territory. The foreign minister added that the provocations of Armenia are a gross violation of the tripartite declarations signed by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia, as well as the declarations between the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia mediated by European Council President Charles Michel and undermine mediation efforts. The minister added that the Armenian armed forces and illegal Armenian armed groups have not been fully withdrawn from the territories of Azerbaijan, contrary to the obligations arising from the tripartite statement, dated 10 November 2020, which is unacceptable. It was pointed out that non-fulfillment of commitments taken on by Armenia is the main reason for the tension in the region Powerful explosions rattled the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv on Thursday and a city close to the country's biggest nuclear power plant sustained a barrage of shelling amid Russian attacks in several regions, Ukraine's presidential office said. At least four civilians were killed and 10 more wounded over the past 24 hours, with nine Ukrainian regions coming under fire, the office said in its daily update. Two districts of Mykolaiv, which has been targeted frequently in recent weeks, were shelled. Russian forces reportedly fired 60 rockets at Nikopol, in the central Dnipropetrovsk region. Some 50 residential buildings were damaged in the city of 107,000 and some projectiles hit power lines, leaving city residents without electricity, according to Ukrainian authorities. Nikopol is located across the Dnieper river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which was taken over by Russian troops early in the war. Experts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War believe that Russia is shelling the area intentionally, ``putting Ukraine in a difficult position.`` ``Either Ukraine returns fire, risking international condemnation and a nuclear incident (which Ukrainian forces are unlikely to do), or Ukrainian forces allow Russian forces to continue firing on Ukrainian positions from an effective `safe zone,''' the Institute's latest report said. The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency earlier this week voiced alarm over the situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant. In northern Ukraine, the country's second-largest city, Kharkiv, was being shelled from Russia, the presidential office said. Several industrial facilities were hit in the city, which also has been a frequent target. In the nearby city of Chuhuiv, a rocket hit a five-story residential building. In the eastern Donetsk region, where fighting has been focused in recent weeks, residential buildings were being shelled in all large cities and a school was destroyed in the village of Ocheretyne. The region is struggling without gas supplies and, in part, without power and water supplies; its residents are being evacuated. Russia-backed separatist authorities in the city of Donetsk said that two people were killed and three others wounded in Ukrainian shelling of the central part of the city on Thursday. Russian forces have already seized the neighboring Luhansk region. Its Ukrainian governor, Serhiy Haidai, said on social media that local residents are being mobilized to fight against Kyiv's forces and that ``even indispensable mine workers are being taken.'' Ukrainian authorities reported another abduction of a mayor who reportedly refused to collaborate with the Russians in the southern Kherson region, which is also almost entirely occupied. The reported kidnapping of Serhiy Lyakhno, the mayor of the village of Hornostaivka, comes as Russia amasses more troops in the area in anticipation of a counteroffensive by Kyiv and ahead of a planned referendum on the region becoming part of Russia. Search Keywords: Short link: Russian prosecutors asked a court outside Moscow to sentence American basketball star Brittney Griner to 9 1/2 years in prison as closing arguments in her cannabis possession trial were made Thursday. The trial is nearing its end nearly six months after Griner's arrest at a Moscow airport and subsequent detention, a case that has reached the highest levels of U.S.-Russia diplomacy. She faces up to 10 years in prison, if convicted Although a conviction appears almost certain, given that Russian courts rarely acquit defendants and Griner has acknowledged having vape cartridges with cannabis oil in her luggage, judges have considerable latitude on sentencing. Lawyers for the Phoenix Mercury center and two-time Olympic gold medalist have pursued strategies to bolster Griner's contention that she had no criminal intent and that the canisters ended up in her luggage due to hasty packing. They have presented character witnesses from the Russian team that she plays for in the WNBA off-season and written testimony from a doctor who said he prescribed her cannabis for pain treatment. A lawyer on Griner's defense team, Maria Blagovolina, argued that Griner brought the cartridges with her to Russia inadvertently and only used cannabis as medicine and only while in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. A prosecutor, Nikolai Vlasenko, argued that Griner packed the cannabis oil deliberately. It's not clear when the verdict will be announced. If she does not go free, attention will turn to the high-stakes possibility of a prisoner swap. Before her trial began in July, the State Department designated her as ``wrongfully detained,'' moving her case under the supervision of its special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, effectively the government's chief hostage negotiator. Then last week, in an extraordinary move, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, urging him to accept a deal under which Griner and Paul Whelan, an American imprisoned in Russia on an espionage conviction, would go free. The Lavrov-Blinken call marked the highest-level known contact between Washington and Moscow since Russia sent troops into Ukraine more than five months ago. The direct outreach over Griner is at odds with U.S. efforts to isolate the Kremlin. People familiar with the proposal say it envisions trading Griner and Whelan for the notorious arms trader Viktor Bout. It underlines the public pressure that the White House has faced to get Griner released. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday that Russia has made a ``bad faith'' response to the U.S. government's offer, a counteroffer that American officials don't regard as serious. She declined to elaborate. Russian officials have scoffed at U.S. statements about the case, saying they show a disrespect for Russian law. They remained poker-faced, urging Washington to discuss the issue through ``quiet diplomacy without releases of speculative information.'' Search Keywords: Short link: Three more ships filled with grain will sail from Ukraine on Friday under a UN-backed deal lifting Russia's blockade of the Black Sea, Turkey's defence minister said. "It is planned that three ships will set sail tomorrow from Ukraine," the Anadolu state news agency quoted Defence Minister Hulusi Akar as saying, one day after the first ship passed Istanbul on its way to Lebanon. Ankara also announced that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu discussed the agreement's implementation by phone with UN chief Antonio Guterres, without disclosing further details. Moscow and Kyiv agreed in Istanbul last month to resume shipments of wheat and other grain from Ukrainian ports for the first time since Russia invaded its neighbour in February. The first ship, loaded with 26,000 tonnes of maize, set off from Odessa on Monday for the Lebanese port of Tripoli. It was cleared for passage through the Bosphorus Strait by a team that included Russian and Ukrainian inspectors on Wednesday. The ship's passage is being overseen by an international team that includes officials from Turkey, the United Nations and the two warring parties. The team said in a statement that the first ship's successful passage offered "proof of concept" that the agreement can hold. Ukraine said earlier this week that it has 16 more ships loaded with grain and ready to set sail. Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers of wheat and other grain. The halt of almost all deliveries from Ukraine has sent global food prices soaring, making imports prohibitively expensive for some of the poorest nations of the world. Search Keywords: Short link: The Sudanese Academy of Islamic Fiqh has called on the government to take precautionary action to counter the threats of the potential collapse of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and possible technical or administrative errors during its operation. In an official statement circulated by the Sudanese media on Wednesday, the government-owned academy said Ethiopia should be responsible for fixing any administrative or technical problems or natural circumstances that might take place during the operation of GERD. The academy stressed that the Ethiopian commitment in this regard should be guaranteed. The Sudanese government has to work on spreading awareness among the people of the dangers associated with the establishment of the mega dam, the statement added. The academy shed light on a number of technical concerns regarding GERD, saying it discussed the project with experts in the fields of engineering, water, geology, environment, physics, and law. The academy's statement denounced GERDs location that may not be compliant with geological conditions and cautions, including having a safe distance from earthquake zones, landslides, and other factors that may result in its collapse even after several decades or centuries. The possibility that the dam collapses still exists, the academy asserted. The academy warned that the huge amount of water stored behind the dam may affect the geological formation of the area and rifts can take place under the dams concrete body. The wide swathes of water behind the dam can also affect climate change in this area, which can have harmful impacts on the Sudanese people, the statement added. The academy also warned against a hidden goal behind the establishment of the Ethiopian dam. Filling the energy shortage [in Ethiopia] does not require such a huge dam, which indicates that there is another hidden goal that may harm the Sudanese people, the statement warned. On 26 July, Ethiopia told Egypt in a message that it would start the third filling of the GERD reservoir during the current flood season, which lasts from July till September, despite not reaching an agreement with the two downstream countries on the filling and operation of the mega dam. Egypt and Sudan have reiterated that they do not oppose development in Ethiopia but want the upperstream country to sign a legally-binding deal on the filling and operation of the dam to secure their water and peoples interests, a demand that Ethiopia rejects. While Egypt has expressed concerns over its water share as a result of filling the dams reservoir without a deal, Sudan has warned that GERD could threaten the lives and safety of millions of Sudanese people. African Union-sponsored talks have been stalled since the last round in Kinshasa, DR Congo, in April 2021, with the downstream countries blaming Ethiopian intransigence for the failure of the decade-long talks. The two countries have repeatedly called on the international community to persuade Ethiopia to stop its unilateral acts on GERD, the last of which is its ongoing third filling of the dams reservoir. Late last month, Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry sent a letter to the Security Council protesting against the Ethiopian decision to go ahead with the third filling. Shoukry urged the UNSC to intervene to ensure the implementation of the presidential statement issued by the UNSC in September, which obligates the three countries to negotiate to reach an agreement on the GERD as early as possible. Search Keywords: Short link: Nightlife, an essential signature dish for those on the island. When night falls, you can call your friends and go to the night market to get a variety of snacks and treat your stomach; take advantage of the high spirits to go to the bar in groups to exchange glasses of wine and have a reckless HAPPY, or hold the hand of your lover and go to KTV to sing, bursting out all the emotions and playing a dark night. Haikou night market allows citizens and tourists to taste the authentic "night life" of the city. Photo by Xu Ersheng A wide range of special dishes. Photo by Xu Ersheng This is a true reflection of the nightlife in Haikou, Hainan, after the epidemic. The nightlife is not just for young people, it is for all islanders. If you are a visitor from outside the island, there is no need to make a fuss, it is the right thing to do to eat, drink and be merry! In the post-epidemic era, the richness of the night decorates the coconut-flavoured city, giving Haikou a unique tropical flavour. Experience the city's "fireworks" After night falls, Haikou is even more charming. As a coastal city, Haikou has become more flavourful and charming. The "night economy" is an important window of Haikou's life and culture, and a new growth point for consumption. It's night time and we strolled around to try places like the Rimae Customary Night Market, the South Gate Night Market of Hai University,, the Binlian Tourist Night Market and the Jinpan Night Market. Here, you can choose from a wide range of snacks from all over the country, and there is everything you need to worry about whether you have enough balance in your account. If we say that Haikou before the "Double Creation" was a place of individuality, after the "Double Creation", it is a place of charm. Nowadays, the night market in Haikou is clean and standardized, attracting more people to join the nightlife. A U.S. congressional delegation led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed late Tuesday in Taiwan, despite warnings by China, which has threatened a military response to the visit. Pelosi's delegation arrived at Taipei Songshan Airport before 11 p.m. local time. The delegation was greeted by Taiwanese officials. "Our Congressional delegation's visit to Taiwan honors America's unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan's vibrant Democracy," Pelosi said in a statement issued after her arrival. "Our visit is one of several Congressional delegations to Taiwan -- and it in no way contradicts longstanding United States policy," she added. Pelosi is expected to meet Wednesday with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and other senior lawmakers, according to local media reports. For weeks, media reports have speculated about whether Pelosi, a prominent China critic, would go ahead with the Taiwan stop as part of a wider Asia tour. China has warned the visit would be an unacceptable violation of what it sees as its sovereignty over the self-ruled island. On Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying called the proposed visit "stupid, dangerous, and an unnecessary gamble." "It is hard to imagine a more reckless and provocative move," Hua said at a regular briefing. Though U.S. congressional delegations routinely visit Taiwan, China has warned of a "forceful" response, raising fears of a major crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Earlier Tuesday, several Chinese warplanes and warships neared the median line in the Taiwan Strait, according to an unnamed source quoted by the Reuters news agency. The source said the Chinese aircraft conducted "very provocative" tactical moves of briefly "touching" the unofficial dividing line and circling back to the other side of the strait. Taiwan dispatched aircraft to monitor the situation, Reuters added. In an apparent attempt to punish Taiwan's economy ahead of Pelosi's visit, China also banned shipments from more than 100 Taiwanese food exporters, Taiwanese media reported Tuesday. Taiwanese ruling party lawmaker Wang Ting-yu dismissed the ban, writing on Twitter that "we will not be intimidated by PRC's weaponization of trade." Taiwan also appears to be the victim of cyber-attacks. Late Tuesday, the main website of Taiwan's government was inaccessible and was replaced by a "502 ERROR" message. Its presidential website was also offline, with the office saying it was the target of an overseas cyber-attack. White House officials on Monday urged China to refrain from any provocations. "There is no reason for Beijing to turn a potential visit consistent with long-standing U.S. policy into some sort of crisis conflict or use it as a pretext to increase aggressive military activity in or around the Taiwan Strait," said John Kirby, a White House National Security Council official. Kirby expressed concern China could respond by firing missiles around Taiwan, conducting large-scale military exercises, or sending a large number of planes across the median line. China could also pursue "spurious legal claims," such as asserting that the Taiwan Strait is not an international waterway, he said. Last month, top European Union diplomat Josep Borrell said he had proposed a new draft text to revive the accord under which Iran curbed its nuclear program in return for relief from economic sanctions. "Bagheri Kani will leave Tehran in a few hours... In this round of talks, which will be held as usual with the coordination of the European Union, ideas presented by different sides will be discussed," said Nasser Kanaani, according to state media. Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani is traveling to Vienna on Wednesday to hold talks for the revival of the 2015 nuclear pact, Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson said, adding that Tehran is ready to reach a deal that guarantees its rights. In 2018, then-U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned the deal, calling it too soft on Iran, and reimposed harsh U.S. sanctions, spurring Tehran to begin breaching the nuclear limits set in the pact. The deal seemed near revival in March after 11 months of indirect talks between Tehran and President Joe Biden's administration in Vienna. But an impasse over various issues such as Tehran's insistence that Washington remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list has stalled progress. The EU-mediated, indirect talks between Bagheri Kani and Washington's special Iran envoy Rob Malley aimed at breaking an impasse over how to salvage the 2015 nuclear pact ended in June in Qatar without the progress. "Iran is determined to reach a stable agreement that guarantees the rights and interests of the Iranian nation," Kanaani said, calling on Washington to "provide the conditions for the effective progress of the talks by taking the necessary decisions." An Iranian official told Reuters that the talks in Vienna will be "in the format of the Doha meeting," where EU's envoy Enrique Mora shuttled between Iran's Bagheri Kani and Washington's Malley because Tehran refused to hold direct talks with Washington. Earlier on Wednesday, Mora tweeted: "On my way to Vienna to discuss #JCPOA back to full implementation on the basis of the coordinator's text tabled on 20 July." New Zealand released its first national plan Wednesday for dealing with the impact of global warming. The government in Wellington has warned that some communities could be abandoned as climate change triggers more intense storms and flooding. New Zealand's Climate Change minister, James Shaw, said severe weather events that had previously seemed unthinkable were "now happening at a pace and intensity we have never experienced before." He announced Wednesday the first long-term strategy to help New Zealand become more resilient and adaptable to a shifting climate. One possibility is that some homes near the coast could eventually be abandoned because of rising sea-levels. A guiding principle of the 200-page report was to prepare for adverse events before they occur, rather than after. KYODO NEWS - Aug 4, 2022 - 18:37 | All, Japan Foreign ministers from Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on Thursday pledged to cooperate in promoting maritime security in the Indo-Pacific in a veiled counter to China's muscle-flexing in regional waters. In a meeting with his ASEAN counterparts in Phnom Penh, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi voiced "strong opposition" to any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the East and South China seas, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said. The ministry, however, did not say whether the ministers discussed simmering tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan in the wake of a trip earlier this week to the democratic self-ruled island by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. China's attempts to increase its influence in the region have seen it send official vessels to waters around the Senkaku Islands in an attempt to undermine Japan's control over the East China Sea islets. Beijing has also militarized disputed areas in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway in which China has overlapping claims with some ASEAN members. In the meeting, Hayashi called on ASEAN peers to step up cooperation in achieving a free and open Indo-Pacific, a vision Japan and the United States have advocated based on the rule of law, not force or coercion. He also vowed to support the 10-member group's efforts to realize the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, an initiative aimed at maintaining peace, freedom, and prosperity in the region. Hayashi expressed support for ASEAN's commitment to addressing the crisis in the coup-hit Myanmar, while seriously deploring recent executions by the junta of pro-democracy activists. The ministers affirmed they will continue coordination in promoting post-COVID-19 economic recovery of ASEAN member states. The two sides agreed to step up communications and exchanges in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Japan-ASEAN relations next year and a summit Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will host next year to mark the anniversary. ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Myanmar, however, is absent from the series of ASEAN-related foreign ministerial meetings being held in the Cambodian capital. Related coverage: China skips foreign ministers talks with Japan in Cambodia Japan, S. Korea foreign ministers meet, with focus on wartime labor Japan, Cambodia vow to deepen security ties amid growing China clout KYODO NEWS - Aug 4, 2022 - 20:04 | All, Japan China said Thursday it has decided not to hold a foreign ministers meeting with Japan on the fringes of ASEAN-related gatherings in Phnom Penh, describing it as fallout from U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a press briefing that the Group of Seven industrialized nations, including Japan, unreasonably blamed China over its response to Pelosi's visit to the self-ruled democratic island in a statement issued Wednesday by their foreign ministers. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi had been arranging to hold talks on the sidelines of a series of meetings related to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the Cambodian capital. Hua said the meeting will not be held because Japan, together with other G-7 members, made "an irresponsible statement accusing China" and that the Chinese people are "strongly displeased" with it. "Japan is in no position to make unwarranted remarks and it should not follow the U.S. steps in violating our sovereignty and territorial integrity," she said. It would have been the first face-to-face dialogue between the foreign ministers of the two East Asian neighbors since November 2020. The talks were called off amid mounting U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan following this week's visit by Pelosi to the island, which Beijing regards as a renegade province to be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary. In the G-7 statement, the foreign ministers said they are "concerned by recent and announced threatening actions" by China, particularly live-fire exercises and economic coercion. The Chinese military started Thursday a four-day, large-scale drill in areas encircling the island in response to Pelosi's visit. Beijing has also restricted trade with the territory, banning imports of citrus fruits and some fish from Taiwan and stopping exports of natural sand to the island. "There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait," the G-7 members said, warning that Beijing's "escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region." "We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region," the G-7 said, using the acronym of the People's Republic of China, the country's official name. Hua warned that China's relations with G-7 members could be negatively affected if they do not respect Beijing's "core interests" with regards to Taiwan. "As long as they have not changed their wrong position, we have to reconsider the meaning of having dialogue with them because dialogue is about having cooperation," she said. The other G-7 members are Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States plus the European Union. Related coverage: China begins military exercise near Taiwan after Pelosi visit Japan PM Kishida eyes talks with U.S. House Speaker Pelosi on Aug. 5 Pelosi vows "ironclad" U.S. commitment to protect Taiwan's democracy By Azernews By Sabina Mammadli In violation of the November 10, 2020, trilateral statement, hammered out between Armenia and Azerbaijan through Russia's mediation to end the Second Karabakh War that lasted 44 days and ended with Baku's victory over Yerevan, on August 3, the Armenian separatist forces in Karabakh resorted to a blatant violation of the deal, in which, a private of the army was killed. In the wake of the tragic death of the Azerbaijani serviceman, the armed forces launched Operation Revenge to punish the separatist forces that have been recently violating the truce along the state borders and inside Karabakh, where the Russian peacekeepers are in temporary charge of the overall situation as stipulated under the trilateral deal. Azerbaijan's justified retaliatory operation triggered wide-ranging reactions and calls for a peaceful resolution of the remaining issues are now being heard again. On August 3, Azerbaijan Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov briefed EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia Toivo Klaar on the current situation in the region. The minister informed the opposite side of the flagrant violation of the tripartite statements and provocations committed over recent days, as well as the fact that the Armenian armed forces and illegal Armenian armed groups have not been completely withdrawn from Azerbaijani territories as stipulated by the mentioned documents. Further, Lead Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Peter Stano stated that the EU remains committed to facilitating resolving tensions in Karabakh and continuing to contribute to sustainable peace and stability in the South Caucasus. In an appeal to the international organizations, Azerbaijani Ombudsman Sabina Aliyeva called for taking legal measures to stop such criminal acts and fulfill the obligations arising from international law. The appeal specified the gist of the current aggravations, stressing that the illegal Armenian armed formations tried to seize the heights located on the mountain range covering the territory of the Kalbajar and Lachin districts and create new combat positions there along with the killing of the soldier. Since the signing of the tripartite statement, dated November 10, 2020, and to the present, Armenia has been constantly committing terrorist provocations, leading to the death of innocent people and the aggravation of the situation again, the statement noted. The Ombudswoman expressed her concern about actions that pose a serious threat to the peace-building process. "Addressing international organizations active in the field of human rights protection, we condemn the ongoing terrorist provocations of Armenia, which lead to the death of innocent people and pose a serious threat to peace in the region," the appeal noted. As for the United States, US Department of State Spokesperson Ned Price stated that the country is concerned over the situation in the Karabakh region and calls for reducing tensions. "The United States is deeply concerned by and closely following reports of intensive fighting around Nagorno-Karabakh, including casualties and the loss of life. We urge immediate steps to reduce tensions and avoid further escalation," the statement reads. He added that the?recent increase in tensions underscores the need for a negotiated, comprehensive, and sustainable settlement of all remaining issues related to or resulting from the Karabakh conflict. Meanwhile, the Iranian embassy in Azerbaijan has claimed that the video footage spread on social networks about the so-called accumulation of heavy military equipment by Iran on the border with Azerbaijan was fake. According to the embassy, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) does not have an official telegram channel, and the official position of the IRGC can be learned only through official channels and the spokesman of the agency. "The reports spread on social networks are fake. That footage was originally filmed several years ago under different circumstances. Such rumors are circulated by those who want to harm the relations between Iran and Azerbaijan," the embassy said. KYODO NEWS - Aug 5, 2022 - 08:55 | All, World The United States on Thursday slammed China's firing of an estimated 11 ballistic missiles near Taiwan following the House of Representatives speaker's visit to the island, and pledged "further steps" to show its security commitment to Japan and other allies in the region. "China has chosen to overreact and use the speaker's visit as a pretext to increase provocative military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait," White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, calling the missile launches "irresponsible" and at odds with the goal of maintaining peace and stability in the region. Touching on Japan's announcement that five of the 11 Chinese missiles landed in the country's exclusive economic zone, Kirby said it was "another example of how China's actions are undermining peace and security in the region." The United States is expecting from China more exercises and more bellicosity and rhetoric, he said. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Thursday directed the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan and the ships in its strike group to "monitor the situation," Kirby said. The carrier, whose home port is in Japan's Yokosuka, near Tokyo, is believed to be sailing in the Philippine Sea, east of Taiwan. The U.S. military will conduct "standard air and maritime transits" through the strait in the next few weeks, he added, emphasizing that this will be consistent with the long-standing U.S. approach to defending freedom of the seas and international law. "We will take further steps to demonstrate our commitment to the security of our allies in the region, and that includes Japan," Kirby said. But at the same time, he reiterated that the United States has no intention of escalating tensions in the region further and that it will reschedule a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile test that was slated for this week. China's missile launches were part of a large-scale drill that began on Thursday around Taiwan in response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to the island -- the first in 25 years by a holder of the powerful congressional position -- which came despite repeated warnings from Beijing. Her visit was the latest show of U.S. support for the democratic island, which is facing increasing military pressure from Beijing. Beijing views Taiwan as a renegade province awaiting reunification with the mainland, by force if necessary. It has opposed any form of what it views as "official interaction" between the United States and the territory. The United States changed its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but has kept up unofficial relations with Taiwan and supplies the island with arms and spare parts to help it maintain sufficient self-defense capabilities. While China says that the increased military activities around Taiwan are in protest at Pelosi's trip, Kirby asserted that they are also a "pretext" to "actually try to set a new status quo to get to a new normal where they think they can keep things at." "They're boiling the frog, right? They're taking the temperature up to a higher level, with perhaps the intention of maintaining that sort of intensity or at least being able to conduct those kinds of operations on a more frequent, regular basis going forward," he said. "That's a different status quo than the one that we had just a few days ago, just a week ago," the former Pentagon spokesman said. KYODO NEWS - Aug 4, 2022 - 17:56 | All, Japan Russian Ambassador to Japan Mikhail Galuzin on Thursday laid flowers at the cenotaph for victims of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing in Hiroshima, just two days before an annual memorial ceremony where he was uninvited due to Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine. "I came to express Russia's positive attitude toward nuclear weapons reduction," Galuzin told reporters, after paying his respects at the Peace Memorial Park, in a veiled jab at the United States that carried out the world's first atomic bomb attack on the western Japan city on Aug. 6, 1945, in the final stages of World War II. He also criticized a decision not to invite him to Saturday's event marking the 77th anniversary of the Hiroshima disaster. The lack of invitation from Hiroshima "disregarded that Russia is a leader toward nuclear disarmament," the ambassador said. After laying the flowers, he said he "deeply felt the inexpressible agony of the atomic bomb victims." Galuzin brushed off the international community's concerns that Russia may use nuclear weapons during the war with Ukraine, saying Moscow has "absolutely no intention" of using them, nor has it said "directly or indirectly" that it would. He also criticized the United States for "trying to distract public opinion from its own irresponsible nuclear policy." Related coverage: FEATURE: Hiroshima, Nagasaki museums step up efforts to convey A-bomb reality FEATURE: Hibakusha professor working to dispel A-bomb "myth" in U.S. A-bomb survivor says Japan PM's nuclear speech avoided "honest debate" KYODO NEWS - Aug 5, 2022 - 00:20 | Japan, All Five ballistic missiles fired by the Chinese military fell into Japan's exclusive economic zone on Thursday, the Japanese government said, with Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi demanding that China "immediately stop" the live-fire military drill near Taiwan. The missiles fell in the EEZ part of a Chinese-designated training area southwest of Hateruma Island in the southern prefecture of Okinawa, marking the first time that Chinese ballistic missiles have dropped within the waters, the government said. China is holding drills around Taiwan to protest U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier this week, including a four-day exercise that began Thursday in six areas encircling the self-governed island. "This is a grave issue that concerns our country's national security and the safety of the people," Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said at a hastily called news conference, calling China's move "extremely coercive." The Japanese government also lodged a diplomatic protest with the Chinese government. Hateruma is close to Taiwan and other islands such as Yonaguni and the Senkakus in the East China Sea. The westernmost Japanese island of Yonaguni is a critical defense line for Japan's Self-Defense Forces, while the Senkaku Islands, administered by Tokyo but claimed by Beijing, are at the heart of bilateral friction. According to the Defense Ministry, of the nine ballistic missiles launched by China on Thursday afternoon, five fell within the Japanese EEZ. The closest one came to Japanese territory was about 80 kilometers north-northwest of Yonaguni. The nine missiles flew somewhere between 350 km to 700 km after being launched from inland China and the coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, including four that likely crossed over Taiwan, the ministry said. Japan had expressed its grave concern about China's military drills in locations near Taiwan, saying that the area overlaps with the EEZ. Hayashi's demand to Beijing over the live-fire military drill near Taiwan came as he spoke to reporters on the sidelines of foreign ministers meetings related to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Hayashi and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a chat on the fringes agreed to strongly condemn China for its ballistic missile launches, the Japanese minister also said. The drills came in response to Pelosi's visit to Taiwan earlier this week, which has angered China and led to a flare-up in cross-strait tensions. The United States has said Pelosi's trip to the self-governed democratic Taiwan does not signal a change in U.S. policy on the island Related coverage: U.S. raps China missile launches near Taiwan, vows security of allies China begins military exercise near Taiwan after Pelosi visit KYODO NEWS - Aug 4, 2022 - 15:26 | All, Japan Torrential rain continued in wide areas of Japan on Thursday, with more than 100,000 residents in northeastern and central parts urged to evacuate, several people unaccounted for, and reports of power and water supply cuts. The weather agency issued the highest rain alert for the northeastern prefecture of Yamagata, where the Mogami River had overflowed at several locations, triggering landslides, inundating houses and disrupting water supplies. The town of Oguni in Yamagata was cut off due to landslides and flooding, local officials said. TV footage and aerial photos showed several residential districts and a number of houses and cars submerged in muddy water in Yamagata and the central Japan prefecture of Niigata, for which the highest level of alert was also issued. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, the central government's top spokesman, told a regular news briefing earlier in the day that two people remained missing and around 1,900 households including in Niigata were without electricity The heavy rain has affected railway services since Wednesday night. Railway bridges on the Banetsu West Line in Fukushima and the Yonesaka Line in Yamagata had collapsed and shinkansen bullet train services were suspended between Fukushima and Shinjo in Yamagata, according to operator East Japan Railway Co. As of Thursday morning, around 107,000 people had been urged to evacuate from their homes in Yamagata and five other prefectures, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. The village of Sekikawa in Niigata recorded 560 millimeters of rainfall in 24 hours through Thursday morning, 2.5 times the amount of rain that usually falls in the entire month of August, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. Rainfall of 410 mm was recorded over the same period in Murakami, Niigata, and 306.5 mm in Iide, Yamagata, the agency said. In the 24 hours through noon Friday, up to 250 mm of rain is forecast for the Hokuriku region along the Sea of Japan and up to 150 mm in the Tokai region in central Japan. KYODO NEWS - Aug 4, 2022 - 20:25 | All, Japan Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and his South Korean counterpart Park Jin agreed Thursday to speed up their consultations over a wartime labor issue that has soured bilateral ties, a Japanese official said. In a meeting in Phnom Penh, the two ministers expressed readiness to improve bilateral relations following Yoon Suk Yeol's inauguration as South Korean president in May. Hayashi and Park made no substantial progress in a dispute over compensation for the wartime labor issue in what became their second face-to-face dialogue in about half a month, the official suggested at a press briefing. The meeting on the sidelines of Association of Southeast Asian Nations-related foreign ministerial gatherings came as South Korea's Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on the envisioned liquidation of assets in South Korea seized from two Japanese firms. Following South Korean court orders in 2018 to compensate South Korean plaintiffs for their unpaid labor during Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, the assets of Nippon Steel Corp. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. have been seized. The companies did not comply with the orders as they heeded Tokyo's position that the issue of claims stemming from the colonial era was "completely and finally" settled under a bilateral accord signed in 1965. During their previous talks in Tokyo in mid-July, the first formal sit-down meeting since Park took office following Yoon's inauguration, the two ministers agreed to seek an "early settlement" of the labor issue. In Thursday's talks, Hayashi reiterated Tokyo's warning that there will be "serious consequences" for the bilateral relationship if the South Korean top court moves forward with the liquidation procedure, according to the official. Hayashi also conveyed Japan's regret over a recent military drill by South Korea focused on defending the disputed Takeshima islets in the Sea of Japan, the official said. South Korean media has reported that the nation's forces conducted an exercise last Friday around the Seoul-controlled, Tokyo-claimed rocky outcrops, which South Korea calls Dokdo. The drill is carried out about twice a year. The latest one was held for the first time since Yoon's inauguration. The move has irritated some members of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's Liberal Democratic Party, prompting them to demand that Hayashi not to have a meeting with Park in the Cambodian capital. Yoon won the presidential election in March with a pledge to take a future-oriented approach toward the relationship with Tokyo, after it sank to its lowest point in years during the administration of Yoon's predecessor Moon Jae In. Hayashi and Park also confirmed the need to step up their trilateral cooperation with the United States over North Korea's missile and nuclear weapons programs, sharing the view that Pyongyang's actions pose "a clear and serious challenge" to the international community, according to the official. Related coverage: China skips foreign ministers talks with Japan in Cambodia Japan, Cambodia vow to deepen security ties amid growing China clout ASEAN-plus-3 foreign ministers begin talks, focus on Ukraine war PRAGUE, Aug. 1 (Xinhua) -- The forest fire that has been raging for 9 days at the Bohemian Switzerland National Park in northern Czech Republic was brought under control, the country's fire rescue service (FRS CR) said on Monday evening. "We have the outbreaks completely under control. But our work is not over, now we still have to extinguish and dispose of them all," the fire rescue service tweeted. FRS CR Director General Vladimir Vlcek said the fire was not spreading to farther places and the area in which the firefighters were working had decreased to about 600 hectares. The intervention in the huge fire might end by extinguishing works in a few days, he was quoted by the Czech News Agency as saying. Around 1,000 firefighters have been battling the blaze at the park on Monday. 200 tanker trucks, 18 helicopters and five planes have also been deployed. According to the fire rescue service, firefighters will continue to tackle the fire on Tuesday "with the same intensity as today." "We are now concentrating on changing forces, maintaining equipment, checking the fire scene and eliminating small outbreaks in places that are completely under our control," it said. The fire broke out on July 24. In the past days, countries including Slovakia, Poland, Italy, Germany and Sweden have sent firefighting aircraft to help tackle the fire. According to the fire rescue service, four firefighters had minor injuries on Monday. So far, they have recorded a total of 56 injuries, most of which are minor. AMMAN, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Jordan welcomed the renewal of a truce in Yemen for another two months, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. Jordan's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Haitham Abou Al-Foul said Jordan repeatedly calls for supporting steps to end the crisis in Yemen through a political solution based on all agreed-upon references and initiatives. Such a political solution, he said, should lead to the unity and the territorial integrity of Yemen and ensure ending the suffering of all Yemenis. Jordan highly values the efforts exerted by the UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg and will continue to support the UN mission on Yemen, he added. Grundberg on Tuesday announced a two-month renewal of the truce in Yemen from Aug. 2 to Oct. 2. VILNIUS, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Lithuania has confirmed its first case of monkeypox, the country's ministry of health said on Wednesday. It said the patient, a man in his 40s, is a Lifhuanian citizen who has recently returned from another European country. His case was confirmed at the national public health care laboratory. Galina Zagrebneviene, a chief specialist at the ministry's public health department, told local media the patient's condition is "stable" and he should have been discharged from hospital for further treatment at home. Five people have been identified as his close contacts and preventive measures have been taken accordingly, according to Rasa Liausediene, an adviser to the infectious disease management unit of the National Public Health Centre (NVSC). The health ministry reported in July that Lithuania had ordered approximately 1,400 monkeypox vaccine doses. Jabs would be administered to close contacts after a high-risk exposure and there would be no possibility for a preventive vaccination. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), since the beginning of May, more than 23,000 cases have been identified outside of Africa. On July 23, the WHO declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Wheeled excavators clear a road after heavy monsoon rain in Noshki town, Balochistan province, Pakistan, on Aug. 2, 2022. Pakistani rescue teams recovered 15 more bodies in the country's southwest Balochistan province over the last 24 hours, taking the death toll to 162 as heavy monsoon downpours continued to lash parts of Pakistan since mid-June, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Wednesday. (Str/Xinhua) ISLAMABAD, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani rescue teams recovered 15 more bodies in the country's southwest Balochistan province over the last 24 hours, taking the death toll to 162 as heavy monsoon downpours continued to lash parts of Pakistan since mid-June, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Wednesday. The killed include 54 children, 43 women, and 65 men, said the NDMA, adding that thousands of stranded people have so far been shifted from the most-affected areas of the province to safer places. Balochistan has been the worst-hit by floods in the country, with nearly 14,000 houses completely or partially destroyed and flood waters washing away around 670 km of roads since the first spell of monsoon showers in mid-June, according to the provincial disaster management authority. Meanwhile, rescue and relief activities are in full swing in the province, with authorities providing food and other necessary items to the affected people. Owing to the huge losses in the province, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif on Wednesday directed round-the-clock monitoring of rescue, relief, and rehabilitation measures in the flood-affected areas. Provision of clean drinking water, proper cleaning, sanitation, among others, should be ensured to avert the spread of diseases, the prime minister said. People are seen on a damaged road after heavy monsoon rain in Noshki town, Balochistan province, Pakistan, on Aug. 1, 2022. Pakistani rescue teams recovered 15 more bodies in the country's southwest Balochistan province over the last 24 hours, taking the death toll to 162 as heavy monsoon downpours continued to lash parts of Pakistan since mid-June, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Wednesday. (Str/Xinhua) A damaged house is seen after heavy monsoon rain in Noshki town, Balochistan province, Pakistan, on Aug. 2, 2022. Pakistani rescue teams recovered 15 more bodies in the country's southwest Balochistan province over the last 24 hours, taking the death toll to 162 as heavy monsoon downpours continued to lash parts of Pakistan since mid-June, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Wednesday. (Str/Xinhua) A damaged road is seen after heavy monsoon rain in Noshki town, Balochistan province, Pakistan, on Aug. 1, 2022. Pakistani rescue teams recovered 15 more bodies in the country's southwest Balochistan province over the last 24 hours, taking the death toll to 162 as heavy monsoon downpours continued to lash parts of Pakistan since mid-June, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Wednesday. (Str/Xinhua) Damaged vehicles are seen after flash flood due to heavy monsoon rain in Noshki town, Balochistan province, Pakistan, on Aug. 1, 2022. Pakistani rescue teams recovered 15 more bodies in the country's southwest Balochistan province over the last 24 hours, taking the death toll to 162 as heavy monsoon downpours continued to lash parts of Pakistan since mid-June, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Wednesday. (Str/Xinhua) A road is flooded after heavy monsoon rain in Noshki town, Balochistan province, Pakistan, on Aug. 2, 2022. Pakistani rescue teams recovered 15 more bodies in the country's southwest Balochistan province over the last 24 hours, taking the death toll to 162 as heavy monsoon downpours continued to lash parts of Pakistan since mid-June, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Wednesday. (Str/Xinhua) BEIRUT, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank on Wednesday called on Lebanon to adopt and efficiently carry out a comprehensive program of macro-economic, financial, and sector reforms that put an emphasis on governance, accountability and inclusiveness. "The earlier these reforms will be initiated, the less painful the cost of recovery will be on the Lebanese people," according to a report posted on the World Bank's website. The current crisis in Lebanon has widened serious funding shortages for basic public services like water, electricity, transport, health care, education, and social protection, according to the report. The prolonged crisis that hit Lebanon since 2019 impacted both the supply and demand sides in critical sectors, it added. In order to address the population's immediate needs, the report proposes a number of macro and sector-specific measures and policies that are centered on three main goals: ensuring the sustainability and affordability of basic services, enhancing equity in public spending, and enhancing efficiency in government spending throughout the sectors. By Azernews By Sabina Mammadli The United States is ready to facilitate dialogue between Azerbaijan and Armenia, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said. The remarks were made during a phone call with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. During the conversation, Blinken noted that the United States is ready to engage bilaterally, with like-minded partners to facilitate dialogue between Azerbaijan and Armenia and help achieve a long-term political settlement. Earlier, US Department of State's Spokesperson Ned Price stated that the country is concerned over the situation in the Karabakh region and calls for reducing tensions. "The United States is deeply concerned by and closely following reports of intensive fighting around Nagorno-Karabakh, including casualties and the loss of life. We urge immediate steps to reduce tensions and avoid further escalation," the statement reads. Members of illegal Armenian armed formations in the territory of Azerbaijan, where the Russian peacekeeping contingent is temporarily deployed, grossly violated the November 10, 2020 statement's provisions and committed a terrorist and sabotage act against the Azerbaijan Army Units on August 3. Serviceman Kazimov Anar Rustam became a martyr in the terrorist and sabotage act. Moreover, members of illegal Armenian armed detachments attempted to seize the Girkhgiz peak, located on a mountain range covering the territory of the Kalbajar and Lachin regions, and establish new combat positions there. As a result of the Revenge retaliatory operation conducted by the Azerbaijan Army Units, the Girkhgiz peak, including Saribaba and several advantageous high grounds along the Karabakh range of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains were taken under control. Currently, Azerbaijan Army Units are carrying out engineering work on the establishment of new positions and laying supply roads on advantageous frontiers. BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday expressed sincere appreciation of the protests staged by multiple political parties, groups and individuals in China's Taiwan region against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made these remarks in response to recent demonstrations by various segments of the society opposing "Taiwan independence" and promoting national reunification in Taiwan to protest Pelosi's visit. Describing these protests as righteous actions, Ma said they are motivated by a sense of greater good for the Chinese nation. Such actions reflect a widespread public opinion in Taiwan to reject manipulation by external forces and to refuse to be held hostage by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities, demonstrating the people's call for peace, development and well-being, Ma added. The spokesperson said these protests exposed Pelosi's nefarious plots to whip up tensions across the Taiwan Strait and bring disaster to the Taiwan people, and denounced Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP authorities for colluding with foreign forces and making provocations in pursuit of "Taiwan independence." A team of representatives from the recently established Joint Coordination Center (JCC) wrapped up their inspection of a ship carrying Ukrainian grain off Istanbul's coast on Wednesday. Produced by Xinhua Global Service WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang on Tuesday lodged a stern demarche and strong protest to the U.S. National Security Council and the Department of State on U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region. In disregard of China's repeated serious representations and firm opposition, the U.S. side had Pelosi visit China's Taiwan region, which is a major event upgrading the negative movement of the U.S. side on the Taiwan question, and a serious violation of the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiques, Qin said. It has a severe impact on the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, seriously infringes upon China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, gravely undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for "Taiwan independence," Qin said. Egregious in nature, the visit has caused extremely serious damage and carries extremely bad influence, he said, adding that China strongly condemns and protests against the visit. Noting that the one-China principle is the political foundation of China-U.S. relations and the most fundamental guideline for handling the Taiwan question, Qin said the U.S. Congress should strictly abide by the one-China policy of the U.S. government and not have any official contacts with China's Taiwan region. The U.S. side has repeatedly committed that its one-China policy will not change and that it does not support "Taiwan independence," but now it had its House speaker visit Taiwan to provoke China, Qin noted. Where is the U.S. commitment to the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiques, to not supporting "Taiwan independence," and to international obligations, Qin asked. He said facts have proved that it is the U.S. side, not others, that has reneged on its commitments, triggered the crisis, and undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Noting that resolutely safeguarding the sovereignty and territorial integrity is the firm will of the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people, Qin said the will of the people cannot be defied, and those who play with fire will perish by it. He said that the complete reunification of China is an unstoppable historical trend, that the Chinese people are not to be bullied, the Chinese nation is not to be humiliated, and that any attempt to obstruct or block China's reunification will end in failure. China will firmly respond with forceful counter-measures, Qin said, adding that all serious consequences arising therefrom must be borne by the U.S. side and "Taiwan independence" separatist forces. Qin said that China firmly urges the U.S. side to stop playing the "Taiwan card" and using Taiwan to contain China, immediately correct its mistakes, manage and eliminate the pernicious impact of Pelosi's Taiwan visit, refrain from further taking dangerous and provocative moves to infringe on China's sovereignty and security, and adopt real actions to honor U.S. President Joe Biden's "five noes" commitment (i.e. not seek a "new Cold War"; not seek to change China's system; the revitalization of its alliances is not against China; not support "Taiwan independence;" not look for conflict with China). Also on Tuesday, Qin noted in an interview with CNN that then U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's visit to China's Taiwan 25 years ago was a complete mistake, to which China at the time voiced strong opposition. The U.S. side should draw a lesson from it, instead of making repeated mistakes, and one mistake cannot justify the following mistakes in the same nature, he said. "China has every right to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We are fully justified to do what we must. The current situation is created purely by the U.S. side, so of course it has to bear the responsibilities," Qin said. "We said it repeatedly in recent time that the PLA (People's Liberation Army) will not stay idle, and the duty of the PLA, China's military, is to defend China's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Qin stressed. "We will take whatever we can to respond to and to protect, to safeguard our sovereignty and territorial integrity, and our response will be very firm, strong and forceful," he said. MACAO, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) said on Wednesday that Speaker of U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region, in disregard of China's strong opposition and solemn representations, has grave consequences. The visit has severely violated the one-China principle and the stipulations in the three China-U.S. joint communiques, seriously damaged the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, grossly infringed on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and gravely undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, sending critically wrong signals to separatist elements advocating "Taiwan independence," the office said. Safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity is the firm will of over 1.4 billion Chinese people, said the office. "Taiwan independence" is doomed to be a dead end, it said, adding that no individual and no force can stop China from achieving national reunification. There is only one China in the world and Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, the office said, pointing out that the one-China principle is an established international consensus and a basic norm governing international relations. For a period of time, the U.S. side has been ramping up its efforts to play the "Taiwan card" with the attempt to use it to contain China, continuously distorted, blurred and hollowed out the one-China principle, thus bolstering "Taiwan independence" separatists, the office said. The whole world now knows which side is breaking its own words, which side is stirring up trouble, and which side is taking unilateral actions to change the status quo of the Taiwan Strait, it said. Regardless of how or when Pelosi, as the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. government, visits Taiwan, the move seriously violates the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiques, undermining China-U.S. relations and creating an egregious political impact, the office noted. The Taiwan question concerns China's core interests, over which there is no room for compromise, it said. "We will never allow any room for 'Taiwan independence' forces in whatever form," the office said. "No one should underestimate the great resolve, firm will and strong capability of the Chinese people in defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity. As the one who provoked the current tensions, the U.S. has to bear all the serious consequences arising therefrom." BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese military spokesperson on Thursday said the military exercises around the Taiwan Island are a strong deterrent to collusion between the United States and Taiwan region. Expressing strong indignation and opposition towards Speaker of U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region, Tan Kefei, spokesperson of China's Ministry of National Defense, said the Chinese armed forces will deliver what it says. The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has organized joint-service combat training exercises in the waters and airspace off the Taiwan Island, which include sea target assaults, strikes on land targets, and airspace control operations, as well as live firing of precision-guided munitions, according to Tan. Tan said Chinese armed forces will resolutely defend the country's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will never leave any room for any form of "Taiwan independence" activities and external interference. BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Political parties of various countries on Wednesday expressed strong opposition to the visit by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to China's Taiwan region, saying it severely violated China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Through messages received in various ways by the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the political parties also reiterated their adherence to the one-China principle, and urged the U.S. side to immediately stop interfering in China's internal affairs. Ivan Melnikov, first deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), also first deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma or the lower house of parliament, said Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region is an open provocation to China, it is contrary to a series of consensuses reached between the Chinese and U.S. governments, and is yet another example of how the U.S. side sabotages global stability. Melnikov said the CPRF firmly supports the efforts made by the Chinese people in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The secretariat of Mazdoor Kisan Party of Pakistan released a statement to express serious concern over Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, saying that the U.S. deeds of interfering in China's internal affairs are unacceptable. The statement also urged the U.S. side to earnestly comply with the three China-U.S. joint communiques and respect China's efforts in realizing national reunification. The Funcinpec Party of Cambodia said that it is impossible for anyone, any force, to stop the historical trend that China will achieve national reunification. The party reiterated its adherence to the one-China principle and firm support to China's efforts in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Communist Party of Egypt said it strongly condemns Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region, fully supports the one-China principle, and believes that the Communist Party of China has the wisdom and ability to achieve victory from this crisis and defeat the insidious conspiracies of the U.S. side. Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region violates the one-China policy, and is a provocative action that damages China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, posing a serious threat to regional security and stability, said Ahmed Majdalani, secretary-general of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, who also expressed firm opposition to other countries' interference in China's internal affairs. Pelosi's move is a provocation by the U.S. side against China, and all progressive countries in the world should condemn it, said Tandai Chirau, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) politburo member, deputy secretary for security, noting ZANU-PF supports the one-China principle and the Chinese side's actions to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Masonwabe Sokoyi, 2nd deputy secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the Western Cape province, said that Pelosi insisted on making the visit to China's Taiwan region is an unjust act in violation of the UN Charter and relevant resolutions. The progressive forces of the world, including the SACP, regard China as an example for various countries in the world and firmly support the one-China policy, Sokoyi added. Luciana Santos, president of the Communist Party of Brazil, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a blatant violation of the commitments made by the U.S. side in the three China-U.S. joint communiques. Taiwan has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times, Santos added, expressing firm opposition to the U.S. threat to world peace. Victor Gorodeki Kot, general secretary of the Communist Party of Argentina, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a grave provocation, which blatantly violates UN Resolution 2758 and the commitment of the Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America. The Communist Party of Argentina calls on the governments and people of all countries, as well as the political parties, trade unions and governmental organizations of Argentina, to speak out against the actions of the United States, said Kot. The Hungarian Workers' Party said Pelosi's visit to Taiwan would have serious consequences. Taiwan is a region of China, and recognizing the one-China principle is an important part of safeguarding world peace. Jose Luis Centella, president of the Communist Party of Spain, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a clear provocation and shows that the United States intends to put its will above international law and the United Nations, which is very dangerous to the international community. Patrik Koebele, chairman of the German Communist Party, said Pelosi's sole purpose of visiting Taiwan is to provoke China. The whole world, including the United States, clearly knows and recognizes that there is only one China. In addition, more than 60 political parties in more than 40 countries also expressed firm opposition to Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, including the Workers' Party of Korea, the Mongolian Civil Will-Green Party, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist-Leninist), the People's Movement of Tunisia, the Communist Party of Lebanon, the Communist Party of Swaziland, the AVANA party of Madagascar, the Communist Party of Chile, the Communist Party of Portugal and France's Solidarity and Progress Party, among other parties. BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- A public prosecution has been initiated against Gong Jianhua, a former senior legislator of east China's Jiangxi Province, over suspected bribe-taking. The Zhangzhou Municipal People's Procuratorate in east China's Fujian Province recently filed a lawsuit against Gong with the Intermediate People's Court of Zhangzhou, an official statement said Thursday. The lawsuit comes following the conclusion of an investigation by the National Supervisory Commission into Gong's case. He was formerly vice chairman of the Standing Committee of Jiangxi Provincial People's Congress. Previously, Gong had served in different positions in Jiangxi, including deputy mayor of Nanchang City, mayor of Yichun City, secretary of the Fuzhou Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and secretary of the Nanchang Municipal Committee of the CPC. The procuratorate charged Gong with taking undue advantage of his official authority or position to seek gains for others and illegally accepting a huge amount of bribes in money and valuables in return. Public prosecutors said that Gong should be held criminally responsible for committing the crime of bribe-taking. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa (Front) holds a torch before lighting the Independence Flame during the Independence Day celebrations in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, on April 18, 2022. (Photo by Wanda/Xinhua) Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday vowed to continue working for the development of Zimbabwe, warning that Western countries that have imposed sanctions on the country will not succeed in their machinations to derail the nation. HARARE, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday vowed to continue working for the development of Zimbabwe, warning that Western countries that have imposed sanctions on the country will not succeed in their machinations to derail the nation. He said Zimbabwe will achieve its development aspirations despite the economic warfare being waged against it by former colonizer Britain and her allies. Members of Zimbabwe Defense Forces parade during the Independence Day celebrations in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, on April 18, 2022. (Photo by Wanda/Xinhua) He said over 20 years of Western sanctions designed to weaken the Zimbabwean economy, and in turn force citizens to rise up against the ruling ZANU-PF government, have so far failed to instigate illegal regime change in Zimbabwe. He said the government was going full steam ahead with the country's development agenda despite hurdles on its way. He vowed that his government will resolutely defend the country's heritage. Mnangagwa also said Zimbabweans must draw lessons from the country's rich liberation war culture to accelerate the attainment of Vision 2030 which seeks to propel Zimbabwe into an upper-middle income economy. Tourists talk with a Cuban woman in the area of Old Havana, in Havana, capital of Cuba, Sept. 7, 2018. (Xinhua/Joaquin Hernandez) "The film festival has come back to Gibara this year, adding new experiences to the partnership, cooperation and strong cultural exchange we have forged for more than two decades," he said. HAVANA, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- The 16th edition of the Gibara International Film Festival (FICG) is underway in Cuba's eastern province of Holguin after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Running through Aug. 6, the event showcases 45 films from over a dozen countries, according to organizers. Sergio Benvenuto, director-general of the festival, told local media that the event aims to promote cinematic creativity during difficult times worldwide. "The film festival has come back to Gibara this year, adding new experiences to the partnership, cooperation and strong cultural exchange we have forged for more than two decades," he said. Along with film screenings, the festival offers concerts, art exhibits and discussion panels on the challenges facing the cinema around the world. Held annually since 2003, FICG is considered the second most important film festival in Cuba after Havana's Festival of New Latin American Cinema. ADDIS ABABA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Ayele Tadesse, a teacher at the Nedjo special boarding school in Oromia regional state of Ethiopia, spoke highly of exposing students to Chinese language studies at an early age. Tadesse, who studied the Chinese language at the Hawassa University in southern Ethiopia, has been teaching the Chinese language to some 88 students across three classes at the Nedjo special boarding school for the past close to eight months. "Teaching the Chinese language to school children is really an interesting thing. They are unbelievably fast in learning the language while also very active in the classroom," Tadesse told Xinhua recently. The school is one of nine special boarding secondary schools in the Oromia region of Ethiopia, where students are given the chance to voluntarily choose from Chinese, Arabic and French. Tola Beriso, head of the Oromia Education Bureau, said in line with China's growing global power, teaching the Chinese language to school children would further propel their future opportunities. "In these nine boarding schools, we enrolled high-caliber students. In addition to other subjects, students are taking Arabic, Chinese and French languages based on their preferences. We have about 1,522 students, of whom 305 have already selected the Chinese language," Beriso told Xinhua. Given that Chinese language education has been mostly available for students at the university level in Ethiopia, Tadesse believed that the rare opportunity would enable secondary school students to learn the language easily at a younger age. "Teaching the Chinese language at secondary school level is such a rare opportunity not just to let students learn the language but also to have the opportunities that are presented in having learned the Chinese language. It is a very good opportunity for these students," Tadesse said. Milky Tolemariam, a Chinese language teacher from the Bishoftu secondary special boarding school, also emphasized the crucial role of exposing secondary school students to the Chinese language. "Over the past seven months, I have noticed that the students are very active as they start learning the Chinese language earlier than how we started learning the language late at the university level," Tolemariam said. "It is a very good initiative because these young children will grow to become the future of this nation. Hence, teaching them the Chinese language at this age would further enable them toward becoming the connecting bridges between our two peoples." Tolemariam is now undertaking a summer camp of Chinese language training for Ethiopian teachers in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, along with eight other local Chinese language teachers including Ayele Tadesse. The summer camp is organized by the Oromia Education Bureau in partnership with the Confucius Institute at Addis Ababa University (AAU). Tolemariam said such opportunities enable both teachers and students to deepen their understanding of the language. "Summer camp and other similar opportunities are greatly contributing to active learning of the language. Similar summer camp opportunities had been also previously organized, enabling students and teachers to go to China for a few weeks to learn the language," Tolemariam said. According to Beriso, as language contributes to deepening the people-to-people relations between the two countries, teaching the Chinese language would further strengthen the already blossoming people-to-people ties between the two countries. "I think teaching our children the Chinese language is very important. We are also sending students to China for (study with) scholarships. So, I think it is important to strengthen the people-to-people relationship in this regard." In addition to the AAU in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, the Chinese language is now provided as a general interest course or an academic major in many other public universities across Ethiopia, including the federal Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Institute, Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia's northwestern Amhara regional state, Hawassa University in Southern Ethiopia as well as Arsi University in Ethiopia's largest Oromia regional state. The Confucius Institute in AAU, which started operation in Ethiopia in 2012, has so far registered more than 10,000 students who passed through various levels of Chinese language studies. Among them, more than 100 were able to get their bachelor's degrees in the Chinese language, according to figures from the institute. As a growing number of Ethiopians opt to study the Chinese language, AAU has recently announced that it has finalized preparations to launch its first-ever program, titled Master of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (MTCSOL), in the East African country. According to the Confucius Institute at the AAU, the MTCSOL is a two-year, full-time program, in which students study core lessons based at the AAU in the first year, and qualified students will receive further education in Chinese language teaching at Tianjin University of Technology and Education in China. Produced by Xinhua Global Service By Trend In disregard of China's solemn representations, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brazenly went ahead with her visit to China's Taiwan region, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, Trend reports citing Xinhua. "This move seriously violates the one-China principle, maliciously infringes on China's sovereignty and blatantly engages in political provocations, which has aroused strong indignation among the Chinese people and widespread opposition from the international community. It proves once again that some U.S. politicians have become "troublemakers" of China-U.S. relations, and that the United States has become the "biggest destroyer" of peace across the Taiwan Strait and for regional stability. The United States should not dream of obstructing China's reunification. Taiwan is a part of China. The complete reunification of China is the trend of the times and an inevitability of history. We will leave no room for the "Taiwan independence" forces and external interference. No matter how the United States supports or connives at the "Taiwan independence" forces, it will be all in vain. The United States will only leave more ugly records of gross meddling in other countries' internal affairs in history. The Taiwan question arose when the country was weak and chaotic at the time, and will surely end with national rejuvenation. The United States should not fantasize about undermining China's development and revitalization. China has found a correct development path in line with its own national conditions. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, 1.4 billion Chinese people are striding towards the Chinese-style modernization. We put the development of our country and nation on the basis of our own strength, and are willing to coexist peacefully and develop together with other countries. But we will never allow any country to undermine China's stability and development. Provoking trouble on the Taiwan question in an attempt to delay China's development and undermine China's peaceful rise will be totally futile and will surely lead to total failure. The United States should not fantasize about manipulating geopolitical games. Seeking peace, stability, development and win-win cooperation are the common aspirations of regional countries. The introduction of the Taiwan question into the regional strategy by the United States, which inflates tensions and stokes confrontation, is against the trend of regional development and goes against the expectations of the people in the Asia-Pacific. This is very dangerous and stupid. The one-China principle has become a basic norm governing international relations and an integral part of the post-Second World War international order. Have you ever heard of Qixi? While some people call it Chinese Valentine's Day, I don't think that does justice to the legend behind this annual festival. Qixi commemorates a bittersweet romantic story about two lovers who were only able to meet once a year. Click to find more. Produced by Xinhua Global Service BEIJING, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday blasted Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen's words for confusing right and wrong. Ma Xiaoguang, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the comments in response to a media query about the remarks Tsai made when meeting with Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Ma noted that by making these remarks, Tsai whitewashed the "Taiwan independence" secessionist agenda as so-called "upholding democracy" while defaming the mainland's justified actions of safeguarding national security and territorial integrity as "military threats." The current tensions across the Taiwan Strait originate from the collusion between "Taiwan independence" secessionists and external forces, Ma said. He added that Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities actively solicit foreign support and deeply engage in provocative actions, and the United States has been constantly fueling the tensions in an attempt to use Taiwan to contain China. There is no denying that the DPP authorities and the United States are the ones who seek to instigate cross-Strait confrontations, disrupt peace and stability across the Strait, and damage the interests of the Taiwan people, Ma said. He warned Tsai and the DPP authorities that relying on the United States to seek "Taiwan independence" will inevitably fail, and that "seeking independence by force" will only hasten their demise. BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The obstinate pursuit of "Taiwan independence" by Tsai Ing-wen and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities is extremely harmful and has an egregious impact, experts said. Since taking office as Taiwan's leader in 2016, Tsai has carefully packaged her words and deeds advocating "Taiwan independence" under the guise of "no provocations" and "maintaining the status quo," said Li Zhenguang, deputy head of the Taiwan research institute of Beijing Union University. Despite the efforts, Tsai could not conceal her nature of making provocations to seek "Taiwan independence," said Li. The DPP authorities demonize and smear the "one country, two systems" solution to the Taiwan question, Li said. These actions aim to make fool of the people in Taiwan and serve only the DPP authorities' interests in elections, and their vicious scheme is fully exposed, Li added. Yan Anlin, deputy head of Shanghai Institutes for International Studies noted that after Tsai became Taiwan's leader, the DPP authorities refused to recognize the 1992 Consensus, and their relevant erroneous remarks, in essence, are denial of the fact that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. "Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP authorities have undermined the common political foundation of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, and as a result, the institutionalized exchange mechanism between the two sides of the Strait has stopped functioning and the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations has been seriously damaged," Yan said. Li Peng, director of the Graduate Institute for Taiwan Studies of Xiamen University, said that the DPP authorities enthusiastically play along with the United States in the latter's actions of playing "the Taiwan card." Nancy Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region is an upgrade of collusion between Taiwan and the United States, said Li, adding that it is egregious in nature and will have grave consequences. The experts emphasized that Tsai and the DPP authorities have degraded themselves to be the pawns of anti-China forces in the United States. Their reckless provocations will only push Taiwan further into the abyss of danger. UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called for taxation on windfall profits of oil and gas companies to ease the impact of the energy crisis on the most vulnerable people. "It is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities and at a massive cost to the climate," said Guterres at the launch of the third report of his Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance over the Ukraine conflict. The combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year are close to 100 billion U.S. dollars, he noted. "I urge all governments to tax these excessive profits and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times," he said. "And I urge people everywhere to send a clear message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home, the planet." All countries, and especially developed countries, must manage energy demand. Conserving energy, promoting public transport and nature-based solutions are essential components of that, he said. There is also a need to accelerate the transition to renewables, which in most cases are cheaper than fossil fuels. At the same time, private and multilateral finance for the green energy transition must be scaled up, he said. Every country is part of this energy crisis, and all countries are paying attention to what others are doing. There is no place for hypocrisy, said the UN chief. Developing countries don't lack reasons to invest in renewables. Many of them are living with the severe impacts of the climate crisis. What they lack are concrete, workable options. Meanwhile, developed countries are urging them to invest in renewables, without providing enough social, technical or financial support, he said. Some of those same developed countries are introducing universal subsidies at gas stations, while others are reopening coal plants. It is difficult to justify such steps even on a temporary basis, he said. "If they are pursued, such policies must be strictly time-bound and targeted, to ease the burden on the energy-poor and the most vulnerable, during the fastest possible transition to renewables." Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen (R) meets with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Aug. 3, 2022. (Xinhua/Wu Changwei) PHNOM PENH, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen on Wednesday met with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, reiterating his country's firm support for China in maintaining its core interests. Asking Wang to convey his sincere greetings to Chinese leaders, Hun Sen wished the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China a complete success. Hun Sen stressed that Cambodia firmly adheres to the one-China principle, viewing Taiwan as an inalienable part of China's territory. Cambodia firmly opposes any words or deeds that infringe on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will continue to firmly support China in safeguarding its core interests and stand together with the 1.4 billion Chinese people, said the prime minister. Hun Sen said the iron-clad bilateral friendship has taken root in both nations, enjoying fruitful results from joint construction of the Belt and Road, which have brought huge benefits to their peoples. During the joint fight against COVID-19, the prime minister said, Chinese vaccines have effectively helped Cambodia protect people's life and health, and accelerated the country's economic recovery and return to normal life. The two sides will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of former Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk this year and the 65th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties in 2023, Hun Sen said. He noted his country looks forward to advancing the efforts to build the Cambodia-China community with a shared future, deepen the synergy between their development strategies, strengthen cooperation in various areas including economy and trade, infrastructure, mining, energy, agriculture and defense. For his part, Wang said Cambodia adheres to the development path in line with its own national conditions, which is widely supported by its people, safeguards its national independence and dignity, and plays an ever-increasing role in international and regional affairs. He said China-Cambodia relations have withstood the test of changing international landscape and remain rock-solid and unbreakable. China appreciates Cambodia's adherence to the one-China principle and supports China in safeguarding its core interests, Wang said, adding that China is also a reliable partner of Cambodia and stands firmly behind it in the process of its development and revitalization. Wang said China is willing to work with Cambodia to safeguard their respective sovereignty, security and development interests, to uphold the non-interference basic norms governing international relations, and to uphold international equity and justice. He said China is also willing to deepen strategic communication with Cambodia and carry forward the traditional friendship, so that the friendship between the two countries will be passed on from generation to generation. Wang said the high-quality Belt and Road cooperation between China and Cambodia has been yielding fruitful results and shown broad prospects for development. Both sides should stay firmly committed to the direction of building a community with a shared future and constantly upgrade all-round bilateral cooperation, Wang said. China will continue providing sufficient vaccine assistance to meet Cambodia's needs, import more high-quality agricultural products from Cambodia, and increase flights from Cambodia to China to help Cambodian students return to China for their studies, Wang said. Wang also elaborated on China's position on the Taiwan question. He stressed that the provocative act of the U.S. side on the Taiwan question is not accidental, but a carefully planned farce, which exposes its ugly face of treachery. The U.S. attempt to "contain China with Taiwan" cannot succeed at all, nor will it change the historical trend that Taiwan will inevitably return to the motherland, but will only inspire the 1.4 billion Chinese people to unite as one and speed up the construction of a great modern socialist country with Chinese characteristics, said Wang. The Taiwan question, which arose out of national weakness and chaos at that time, will surely come to an end with national rejuvenation, and the "Taiwan independence" forces will surely be judged by history, said Wang. Both sides pledged to strengthen communication and coordination on regional affairs, uphold the centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the regional architecture, and oppose bloc confrontation in the region and coercion of countries to take sides. The two sides also exchanged views on the Myanmar issue and the Ukraine crisis. PHNOM PENH, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi further expounded here Thursday on China's stance on U.S. act of provocation against China's sovereignty. Speaking on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers' meeting, Wang said the U.S. side trampled on the international law, breached bilateral commitments, sabotaged peace across the Taiwan Strait, supported separatism, advocated confrontation between blocs, which is a blatant provocation against the Chinese people and the peace-loving people in all countries in the region, and a political gamble with an odious impact. He said the performance of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has caused the U.S. politics, foreign diplomacy and credibility to go bankrupt again, proving the United States is the biggest destroyer of peace across the Taiwan Strait and the biggest troublemaker of regional stability. Her performance also proved the extremely confrontational and harmful nature of the U.S. "Indo-Pacific strategy," as well as the U.S. hypocrisy and double standards when dealing with international rules, Wang noted. If the Chinese side doesn't firmly reject the manic, irresponsible and extremely irrational behavior of the United States, the principle of international relations on respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity will become a mere scrap of paper, various kinds of separatists and extremist forces will intensify their activities, and the hard-won peace and stability in the region will be severely damaged, he stressed. Wang stressed that this incident was orchestrated and incited single-handedly by the United States, as the causes and consequences are clear, and so are the rights and wrongs. To avoid this crisis being forced on China, Wang said, China made the greatest diplomatic efforts, but at the same time it would never allow its core interests and the process of national rejuvenation to be jeopardized. He said China would not sit back watching the United States play the "Taiwan card" to serve its domestic politics and the selfish desires of its politicians, nor would China ever tolerate deeds to create tension, stoke confrontation and instigate secession in the region. Wang said the comprehensive measures China is currently taking and will take in the future are necessary and timely defensive counterattacks, which have been carefully considered and evaluated with an aim to safeguard national sovereignty and security. These measures are in line with international and domestic laws, serve as a warning to provocateurs, and will maintain regional stability and peace across the Taiwan Strait, he added. Wang called on all parties to see through the cause and essence of the current crisis, jointly oppose the U.S. side's risky adventures and provocations, continue to support China's legitimate position and measures, and jointly maintain regional peace and peace across the Taiwan Strait. SHIJIAZHUANG, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Bathed in summer sunlight, Niu Yuzhu, 52, starts his daily patrol of a forest farm in Zhuolu County, north China's Hebei Province. In addition to his patrol work, Niu has taken on other duties as the farm's "forest chief," including formulating forest management and protection plans, mobilizing locals to protect trees, and promoting the implementation of protection measures. To guard the green ecological barrier of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Hebei has carried out large-scale scientific afforestation. Forest protection has become a vital mission for Zhuolu, which is rich in woodland resources. Approximately 10,000 hectares of forests distributed across 13 townships in Zhuolu fall under the management and protection area of the forest farm where Niu works. "Four forest management and protection sites have been established and more than 100 forest rangers have been employed," Niu said. He is one of 139,828 forest chiefs appointed by Hebei, amid China's continuous efforts to protect its forests and grasslands. "After the implementation of the 'forest chief' scheme, our roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. We divide the forest and grassland resources into various grids that are managed by forest chiefs, rangers and law enforcement personnel to ensure that every plot of land can be taken care of," said Wang Zhong, deputy head of the Forestry and Grassland Bureau of Hebei Province. These efforts have borne fruit. By the end of 2021, Hebei's forested area totaled approximately 6.7 million hectares, and the province boasted a forest coverage rate of 35.3 percent, up from 31 percent in 2015. In May, female and nestling Baer's pochards were observed in Hebei's Baiyangdian Lake for the first time, proving that the Baiyangdian wetlands have become a breeding ground for these critically endangered ducks. "Baer's pochards require a high-quality ecological environment. Their arrival is strong proof that the ecological environment of Baiyangdian Lake has improved," said Yang Song, deputy director of the planning and construction bureau of the Xiong'an New Area. Hebei's significant ecological progress is a high point in China's comprehensive implementation of its "forest chief" scheme, according to Zhang Tao, an official from Hebei's Forestry and Grassland Bureau. Over a year ago, China issued a guideline to implement the "forest chief" scheme, and urged that the scheme will be rolled out nationwide by June 2022. Achieving this goal as scheduled, the country has appointed nearly 1.2 million forest chiefs to date. TEHRAN, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Iran's chief nuclear negotiator said on Wednesday that the United States should seize the opportunity of a new round of negotiations to revive the Iranian nuclear agreement. "Heading to Vienna to advance the negotiations. The onus is on those who breached the deal and failed to distance from ominous legacy," Ali Bagheri Kani tweeted. "The U.S. must seize the opportunity offered by the JCPOA partners' generosity; ball is in their court to show maturity and act responsibly," added Bagheri Kani, also Iran's deputy foreign minister. Iran signed a nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with world powers in July 2015, agreeing to curb its nuclear program in return for the removal of sanctions on the country. However, former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the agreement in May 2018 and reimposed unilateral sanctions on Tehran, prompting the latter to drop some of its commitments under the pact. The talks on reviving the JCPOA began in April 2021 in the Austrian capital but were suspended in March this year because of political differences between Tehran and Washington. The talks resumed in late June in Qatar's capital Doha but failed to settle the differences. Photo shows a view of the port of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug. 3, 2022, two years after the Beirut port blasts that occurred on Aug. 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Bilal Jawich) by Dana Halawi BEIRUT, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Two years have passed since Sahar Fares, a Lebanese paramedic, was killed by the huge explosions at the Beirut port, but her fiance, Gilbert Karaan, still cannot believe that he has forever lost the love of his life. "I try to survive this tragedy by telling myself that Sahar has been on travels and that I will see her again soon," Karaan told Xinhua on the second anniversary of the blasts that occurred on Aug. 4, 2020, killing at least 200 people and wounding more than 6,000 others. "I cannot accept that she has died," the 32-year-old man said, with tears in his eyes. Fares, then a 27-year-old paramedic, was rushing to the port for rescue after the first explosion took place, causing huge flames that engulfed a warehouse. Then the second explosion went off, killing the firefighters and medical workers at the site. Karaan said that, for the past two years, he has tried everything but failed to get over with the death of his beloved woman who "still means the world to him." "I go out and meet with people, but it only makes me feel worse because she is not there with me," he said. "It becomes even worse when I see a happy couple and remember all our beautiful moments together." For Samia Doughan, the time seems to have stopped ever since she lost her husband, also the father of their twin daughters, in the explosion. "They say that the pain of losing a loved one gets easier with time but this is definitely not my case or that of my daughters. We feel worse about this tragedy, especially when Aug. 4 gets closer," said Doughan, whose husband worked at the Beirut Container Terminal Consortium back then. She cannot forget how she felt at the time when she was anxiously looking for her husband at the port while bodies were recovered from the rubble and her daughters' phone calls kept coming in. "These moments have become imprinted in my mind, and I just can't get over with them," Doughan told Xinhua in a shaky voice. "It kills me when my daughters later said they envy me for having lived with both my father and mother until I got married," she said. Similarly, life has never been easy for William Noun, 29, who lost his brother, a firefighter, in the Beirut explosions. "Although I still wake up every morning, without my brother by my side, it will never be the same again for the rest of my life," Noun told Xinhua, adding that the sorrow still lingers among his family. Driven by his painful memory of losing his brother, Noun, along with the families of victims, has been supporting the investigations into the blasts in the hope to bring justice for his brother and all other victims. "My family lives for this cause now," he said. Youssef Lahoud, the lawyer who represents around 1,400 victims of the explosions, told Xinhua that the judicial system is determined to investigate the explosions and reach the complete truth, but more time is needed to achieve this goal. In an apparent message to the victims' families, Lebanese President Michel Aoun on Thursday reiterated his commitment to achieving justice for the victims of the port explosions. "I assure the families of the victims that I am committed to achieving justice by revealing the complete truth through an impartial judicial process away from any fraud, discretion or injustice, to hold accountable all those who are involved, because no one is above the law," Aoun said on the second anniversary of the tragic explosions. Photo shows a view of the port of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug. 3, 2022, two years after the Beirut port blasts that occurred on Aug. 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Bilal Jawich) Photo shows a view of the port of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug. 3, 2022, two years after the Beirut port blasts that occurred on Aug. 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Bilal Jawich) Photo shows a view of the port of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug. 3, 2022, two years after the Beirut port blasts that occurred on Aug. 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Bilal Jawich) TAIYUAN, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- China successfully launched a terrestrial ecosystem carbon monitoring satellite and two other satellites from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China's Shanxi Province Thursday. The satellites were launched at 11:08 a.m. (Beijing Time) by a Long March-4B carrier rocket and entered the planned orbit successfully. The carbon monitoring satellite is mainly used for terrestrial ecosystem carbon monitoring, survey and monitoring of terrestrial ecology and resource, major national ecological projects monitoring and evaluation. It will also provide operational support and research services in fields such as environmental protection, surveying and mapping, meteorology, agriculture, and disaster reduction. This launch marked the 430th mission for the Long March series carrier rockets. By Azernews By Ugur Duyan Libyas House of Representatives Speaker Aguila Salih has said that Turkish companies are playing an important role in the countrys reconstruction process, Yeni Shafak reports. Salih made the remarks during his visit to Turkiye that took place at the invitation of the Turkish Grand National Assembly Speaker Mustafa Sentop. He also met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of the visit. We need to cooperate with these companies in order to complete their old contracts so that they can contribute to the reconstruction of Libya again, Salih stressed. Underlining Turkish companies role in the development of Libya, the speaker added that they want to take the relations with Turkiye to the next level. The guest described his meetings with President Erdogan and Turkish Parliament Speaker Sentop as very productive, adding that he wanted support from Ankara for the preservation of Libya's territorial integrity. Salih said that he informed Erdogan about the situation in Libya during the meeting at the Turkish presidents office. In my opinion, during this meeting, we were able to explain the Libyan picture to him [Erdogan] very clearly. We conveyed to him that the most important thing is to preserve the unity and territorial integrity of Libya. Mr. President said that they will make all necessary efforts for the stability and prosperity of Libya, the Libyan official added. According to Salih, he also had a very productive meeting with Sentop in terms of discussing the latest developments in Libya. Stating that they are working to bring the bilateral relations between Turkiye and Libya to the highest level again, Salih pointed out that Turkish companies are playing an important role in the reconstruction of the country. Salih added that there are several Turkish firms in Libya and their contracts are still in effect, but the majority of them were unable to complete their projects. He stressed that his main goal is to bring the Turkiye-Libya ties to their prior level. Salih emphasized that Libya is eagerly anticipating the normalization of relations with Turkiye and that the country wishes to continue the cooperation that was put on hold as a result of the developments in the country. We think that the [Libyan] government should also fulfill this task with us [parliament]. In order for the government to complete their old contracts, they need to sit down and talk with the Turkish companies and cooperate so that they can contribute to the reconstruction of Libya again," he said. Salih stated that talks with the State Council on drafting a new constitution are still underway. When we reach an agreement, it will be presented to the Supreme State Council as well as to the House of Representatives. Of course, after the establishment of an election board, all this work will be put to a referendum and submitted to the appreciation of the Libyan people," he stressed. TEHRAN, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Iran's top nuclear official said on Thursday the Iran will reactivate the surveillance cameras of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at its nuclear sites only if the IAEA withdraws its accusations against Tehran. Mohammad Eslami, president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was also quoted by the official news agency IRNA as saying that Iran seeks to achieve a "good agreement" at the Vienna talks that would safeguard its people's interests. In June, the IAEA Board of Governors passed an anti-Iran resolution proposed by the U.S., Britain, France and Germany following the agency's reports that Tehran had not provided "technically credible explanations" for uranium particles found at three undeclared sites. After the adoption of the IAEA resolution, Iran announced a number of counter measures, including turning off the IAEA's surveillance cameras at its nuclear sites. Speaking of the ongoing talks in Vienna to revive the 2015 deal, Eslami expressed the hope for the U.S. side to show goodwill and willingness to reach an agreement, and refrain from breaking its promises. Iran signed a nuclear deal with world powers in July 2015, agreeing to curb its nuclear program in return for the removal of sanctions on the country. However, former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the agreement and reimposed unilateral sanctions on Tehran, prompting the latter to drop some of its commitments under the pact. The talks on reviving the nuclear pact began in April 2021 in the Austrian capital of Vienna but were suspended in March this year because of the political differences between Tehran and Washington. After almost five months, delegations from the remaining signatories to the JCPOA, as well as the United States, are currently in Vienna for a fresh round of talks on the revival of the agreement. KIEV, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine needs to export some 50 million tons of grain in the 2022-2023 marketing year amid the need to store last year's crops and grain from the new harvest, an industry body said on Wednesday. Ukraine is set to harvest 55-60 million tons of cereals and oilseeds this year, with domestic demand projected to be 20 million tons, the Ukrainian Agri Council said in a statement. Ukrainian farmers have already reaped some 12 million tons of cereals this year from 30 percent of the planted areas, the statement said. Currently, Ukraine has 18-20 million tons of grain in its silos from last year's harvest, according to the Ukrainian government. On July 22, Ukraine and Russia separately signed a deal with Turkiye and the United Nations in Istanbul to resume grain shipments from Ukrainian ports to international markets via the Black Sea. In the 2021-2022 marketing year, Ukraine earned 22.2 billion U.S. dollars from the export of 61.52 million tons of cereals and oilseeds between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022, the state-run Ukrinform news agency reported in early July. BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited China's Taiwan region in disregard of China's strong opposition and solemn representations. The international community has blasted the visit for grossly infringing on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, while expressing support for the one-China principle and all the necessary measures taken by the Chinese side to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. PROVOCATIVE VISIT The Russian Foreign Ministry said Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is "a clear provocation." "The principled position of Russia remains unchanged: we proceed from the fact that there is only one China in the world, the Government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory," the ministry said in a statement. Konstantin Kosachev, Russian Federation Council deputy speaker, said on social media that Pelosi's visit is a total provocation. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega condemned Pelosi's visit, regarding it an act of provocation against China. Vice President Rosario Murillo said Nicaragua resolutely supports China in safeguarding its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada said in a statement that Nicaragua strongly condemns Pelosi's provocative visit. "We reiterate our forceful condemnation" of the U.S. move, the statement said, adding that Nicaragua fully supports China in defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity on the Taiwan question. The Cuban Foreign Ministry expressed its "firm rejection of the actions aimed at harming the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the People's Republic of China" and condemned U.S. interference in China's internal affairs. Cuba reaffirms its strict adherence to the one-China principle and acknowledgement of Taiwan as an inalienable part of Chinese territory, the ministry said in a statement, adding that U.S. "aggressive" activities undermine regional and international peace. A spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said the DPRK "vehemently denounced" Pelosi's visit and "fully supported the Chinese government's just stand" on resolutely defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity. "The current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the U.S. in the internal affairs of other countries and its intentional political and military provocations are, indeed, the root cause of harassed peace and security in the region," the spokesperson said. UPHOLDING ONE-CHINA PRINCIPLE Jean-Claude Gakosso, minister for foreign affairs of the Republic of the Congo, said that the Congolese side firmly upholds the one-China principle. It is undoubtedly a universal consensus that the Taiwan question is a matter of China's internal affairs, said Gakosso, adding that the Congolese side firmly supports China's actions to defend its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Venezuela's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the country "strongly rejects the acts of interference and meddling" carried out by Pelosi with her visit to Taiwan. "We alert the international community about these actions that constitute a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Chinese nation, ignoring (the United Nations General Assembly) Resolution 2758," the ministry said. The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela reaffirms its unrestricted adherence to the one-China principle, the ministry added. Iran firmly supports the One-China principle, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani said, adding the recent U.S move that interfered in China's internal affairs and violated its territorial integrity will only intensify instability and stoke differences, and is thus deplorable. Pakistan reaffirms its strong commitment to the one-China policy and firmly supports China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that Pakistan strongly believes that inter-state relations should be based on mutual respect and non-interference in internal affairs. Cedric Thomas Frolick, house chairperson of committees at the National Assembly of South Africa, said the one-China principle is an "undertaking" made by the U.S. side for the relations with China. "To change that now directly or indirectly will fly in the face of previous commitments that have been given between the two countries," said Frolick. SUPPORTING CHINA'S MEASURES Peace and stability in all regions of the world, including the Asia-Pacific region, is a decisive prerequisite and fundamental foundation for cooperation and development of countries in the region and the world, said the Lao Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) reaffirms its consistent policy of supporting "one-China policy" and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any intention to create "two Chinas" or "one China, one Taiwan," the ministry said. The Foreign Ministry of Belarus said Pelosi's visit has heightened the tensions in the region. Belarus fully shares China's concern regarding Washington's destructive actions aimed at interfering in China's internal affairs and escalating the situation, the ministry added. Belarus supports the one-China principle and the consistent measures taken by the Chinese side to reunite the country, the ministry said. The Palestinian presidency affirmed Palestine's longstanding position supporting the friendly People's Republic of China, its sovereignty and territorial integrity and fully respecting the one-China principle. Palestine calls for halting any actions that run contrary to the one-China principle while affirming China's right to defend its sovereignty, security and development interests. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it condemns the "policy of provocation practiced by the United States against the People's Republic of China." The ministry said Pelosi's visit infringed on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and destabilizes the world. "Syria ... fully supports the positions declared by the People's Republic of China against this visit," the ministry said, adding that China has the right to take whatever measures necessary to protect and preserve its sovereignty and territorial integrity. UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday affirmed the world body's one-China policy as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit has created tensions. He clarified the position at a press conference for the launch of a report of his Global Crisis Response Group over the Ukraine crisis. "Our position is very clear. We abide by General Assembly resolutions, by the one-China policy, and that is the orientation that we have in everything we do," said Guterres. The UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758 in 1971, which decides to restore the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the United Nations and to recognize the representatives of the PRC government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations. BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- In disregard of China's strong opposition and solemn representations, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited China's Taiwan region this week, seriously violating the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiques. The move has also severely impacted on the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, seriously infringed upon China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, gravely undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and sent a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for "Taiwan independence." China has voiced firm opposition and strong condemnation, vowing to take all necessary measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity. All consequences arising from this shall be borne by the U.S. side and "Taiwan independence" separatist forces. Respecting each country's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity is a basic principle in international law and a basic norm governing international relations. The historical context of the Taiwan question is crystal clear, and so are the fact and status quo that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. This historical fact and legal grounds have never changed and cannot be changed. There is but one China in the world. Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory. The Government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. The one-China principle is a commonly recognized basic norm governing international relations and a universal consensus of the international community, with an unshakable basis of international law. The one-China principle is the prerequisite for forging China-U.S. diplomatic ties, as well as the political foundation of China-U.S. relations. The United States has made a solemn commitment to China on the Taiwan question. The China-U.S. Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations clearly stipulates that "The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People's Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China. Within this context, the people of the United States will maintain cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan." The U.S. Congress, as a part of the U.S. government, is inherently obliged to strictly observe the one-China policy of the U.S. government and earnestly honor its political commitments to China. Since Pelosi is a leader of the U.S. Congress, her visit to Taiwan, in whatever form and for whatever reason, is a major political provocation as it upgrades U.S. official exchanges with Taiwan, causing severe damage to peace across the strait, China-U.S. relations and international order. The Taiwan question is the most important and most sensitive issue at the very heart of China-U.S. relations. However, for quite some time, what the United States did was totally different from what it said it would do on the Taiwan question. Attempting to use Taiwan to contain China, the United States constantly distorts, obscures and hollows out the one-China principle, steps up its official exchanges with Taiwan, and emboldens separatist activities seeking "Taiwan independence." The U.S. side has claimed that it adheres to its one-China policy, does not support "Taiwan independence," does not want conflict and confrontation with China, and hopes for peace across the Taiwan Strait. On the other hand, it uses Taiwan as a tool to contain China and places its unilaterally-concocted "Taiwan Relations Act" and Six Assurances above the three China-U.S. joint communiques. The United States intensifies its military collusion with Taiwan, and continues arms sales to Taiwan to support Taiwan's attempt of "resisting reunification by the use of force." The gross interference in China's internal affairs tramples on the international law and basic norms governing international relations. The Taiwan Strait is facing a new round of tensions and severe challenges, and the fundamental cause is repeated moves by Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities and the United States to change the status quo and make trouble. The DPP refuses to recognize the 1992 Consensus, goes all out to push forward "de-sinicization", promotes "incremental independence," and becomes even more utterly brazen in the provocative attempt to seek "independence." The U.S. collusion with Taiwan gravely infringes on China's core interests and increases tensions across the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese government has taken decisive, forceful, reasonable and necessary counter-measures to resolutely safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests. These acts of justice will definitely win broad understanding and firm support from the international community. History has shown that when the one-China principle is fully recognized and earnestly followed, there would be tranquility and peaceful development across the Taiwan Strait. When the one-China principle is wantonly challenged or even undermined, there would be dark clouds or even violent storms across the strait. The more unequivocal the commitment to uphold the one-China principle is and the more forceful measures are taken to contain separatist forces, the more likely it is to ensure peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and the more likely it is that peace and prosperity in the region will be guaranteed. The position of the Chinese government and people on the Taiwan question is consistent. Their firm will of resolutely safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be defied, and the historical trend cannot be reversed. The U.S. side must fully understand the facts and status quo that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. It must take credible actions to observe strictly the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-U.S. joint communiques. The U.S. side should stop meddling with Taiwan affairs and interfering in China's internal affairs, and stop supporting and conniving at "Taiwan independence" separatist forces in any form. Otherwise, the United States will only reap the bitter fruits of what it has sown and be spurned by the international community. The Chinese people's affairs should be decided by the Chinese people. The Taiwan question is a matter of China's internal affairs, which concerns China's core interests and the dignity of the Chinese people and brooks no external interference. No one should underestimate the strong resolve, will and ability of the Chinese people to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity. China must be and will surely be reunified. No matter what actions the anti-China forces in the United States take, the historical and legal facts that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China will not be changed, and the historical process of China's reunification will not be stopped. Any dirty trick that goes against the historical trend, aims to make an issue out of the Taiwan question and undermines China's sovereignty and territorial integrity is doomed to fail. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks during her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., the United States, on May 13, 2021. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua) Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region is an open provocation to China, it is contrary to a series of consensuses reached between the Chinese and U.S. governments, and is yet another example of how the U.S. side sabotages global stability, said Ivan Melnikov, first deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Political parties of various countries on Wednesday expressed strong opposition to the visit by Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to China's Taiwan region, saying it severely violated China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Through messages received in various ways by the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the political parties also reiterated their adherence to the one-China principle, and urged the U.S. side to immediately stop interfering in China's internal affairs. Ivan Melnikov, first deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), also first deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma or the lower house of parliament, said Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region is an open provocation to China, it is contrary to a series of consensuses reached between the Chinese and U.S. governments, and is yet another example of how the U.S. side sabotages global stability. Melnikov said the CPRF firmly supports the efforts made by the Chinese people in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The secretariat of Mazdoor Kisan Party of Pakistan released a statement to express serious concern over Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, saying that the U.S. deeds of interfering in China's internal affairs are unacceptable. The statement also urged the U.S. side to earnestly comply with the three China-U.S. joint communiques and respect China's efforts in realizing national reunification. Photo taken on July 21, 2019 from Xiangshan Mountain shows the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taipei, southeast China's Taiwan. (Xinhua/Zhu Xiang) The Funcinpec Party of Cambodia said that it is impossible for anyone, any force, to stop the historical trend that China will achieve national reunification. The party reiterated its adherence to the one-China principle and firm support to China's efforts in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Communist Party of Egypt said it strongly condemns Pelosi's visit to China's Taiwan region, fully supports the one-China principle, and believes that the Communist Party of China has the wisdom and ability to achieve victory from this crisis and defeat the insidious conspiracies of the U.S. side. Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region violates the one-China policy, and is a provocative action that damages China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, posing a serious threat to regional security and stability, said Ahmed Majdalani, secretary-general of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, who also expressed firm opposition to other countries' interference in China's internal affairs. Pelosi's move is a provocation by the U.S. side against China, and all progressive countries in the world should condemn it, said Tandai Chirau, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) politburo member, deputy secretary for security, noting ZANU-PF supports the one-China principle and the Chinese side's actions to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Masonwabe Sokoyi, 2nd deputy secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the Western Cape province, said that Pelosi insisted on making the visit to China's Taiwan region is an unjust act in violation of the UN Charter and relevant resolutions. The progressive forces of the world, including the SACP, regard China as an example for various countries in the world and firmly support the one-China policy, Sokoyi added. Luciana Santos, president of the Communist Party of Brazil, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a blatant violation of the commitments made by the U.S. side in the three China-U.S. joint communiques. Taiwan has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times, Santos added, expressing firm opposition to the U.S. threat to world peace. Victor Gorodeki Kot, general secretary of the Communist Party of Argentina, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a grave provocation, which blatantly violates UN Resolution 2758 and the commitment of the Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America. The Communist Party of Argentina calls on the governments and people of all countries, as well as the political parties, trade unions and governmental organizations of Argentina, to speak out against the actions of the United States, said Kot. The Hungarian Workers' Party said Pelosi's visit to Taiwan would have serious consequences. Taiwan is a region of China, and recognizing the one-China principle is an important part of safeguarding world peace. Jose Luis Centella, president of the Communist Party of Spain, said that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is a clear provocation and shows that the United States intends to put its will above international law and the United Nations, which is very dangerous to the international community. Patrik Koebele, chairman of the German Communist Party, said Pelosi's sole purpose of visiting Taiwan is to provoke China. The whole world, including the United States, clearly knows and recognizes that there is only one China. In addition, more than 60 political parties in more than 40 countries also expressed firm opposition to Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, including the Workers' Party of Korea, the Mongolian Civil Will-Green Party, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist-Leninist), the People's Movement of Tunisia, the Communist Party of Lebanon, the Communist Party of Swaziland, the AVANA party of Madagascar, the Communist Party of Chile, the Communist Party of Portugal and France's Solidarity and Progress Party, among other parties. HANGZHOU, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Yang Chih-yuan, a Taiwan resident suspected of engaging in separatist activities and endangering national security, was detained by the national security organ of Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province on Wednesday. Yang, born in Taichung in 1990, has long been advocating "Taiwan independence," and colluded with others to establish an illegal organization with the aim to "push for Taiwan to become a sovereign state and join the United Nations." Having planned and carried out separatist activities for "Taiwan independence," Yang is suspected of crimes of splitting the country and inciting others to do so. The national security organs will leverage legal weapons such as the Anti-Secession Law and the National Security Law to punish the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces in accordance with the law for their attempts to seek "Taiwan independence," resist reunification and undermine peace, said a national security official. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks to the press at the UN headquarters in New York, Aug. 3, 2022. Guterres said Wednesday that he will set up a fact-finding mission to look into Friday's attack on a Donetsk prison in Ukraine that reportedly killed dozens of prisoners of war. (Xinhua/Xie E) UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Wednesday that he will set up a fact-finding mission to look into Friday's attack on a Donetsk prison in Ukraine that reportedly killed dozens of prisoners of war. He has received requests from both Russia and Ukraine for an investigation into the shelling of the prison in Olenivka, Guterres told reporters. "I decided, in line with my own competencies and powers, to launch a fact-finding mission -- I have not the authority to do criminal investigations, but (have the authority) to launch a fact-finding mission." The terms of reference for that fact-finding mission are being prepared at the moment. They will be shared with the governments of Russia and Ukraine, he said. "I hope we will be able to have an agreement on the terms of reference of that mission." At the same time, the world body is recruiting "competent, independent people" for the fact-finding mission and is engaged in heavy coordination work, he said. "We hope to have the facilities from both sides for access and for the obtention of all data that is necessary to be able to clarify the truth about what has happened," said Guterres. "This is a matter that we took very seriously and we are working hard for that." Ukraine and Russia accused each other of carrying out the fatal attack on the prison in Olenivka. By Azernews By News Center Turkiye has launched the mass production of domestic PMT 12.7 mm machine-gun, Yeni Shafak newspaper reports. Turkiye's breakthrough in the domestic and national defense industry continues to bear fruit. Projects started in several sectors are being completed one by one by the Turkish defense industry, which has become known internationally for its Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). As a result of the studies initiated by the Presidency of Defense Industries (SSB) and carried out by Samsun Yurt Savunma (SYS), the qualification tests for the PMT 12.7 mm machine gun were completed after more than a month of hard work. CANIK M2 QCB rifle successfully passed several tests such as high pressure, accelerated rain, salt fog, low and high temperature, icing, and chemical interaction during the qualification process, in which approximately 1 million shots were fired. As a result of the shooting and qualification tests carried out, it was discovered that the barrel, which was made in Turkiye utilizing materials and production techniques that had never been used before, has a longer lifespan than its international equivalents and that it is more durable and reliable for shots. The 12.7x99 mm machine gun, which is now used on land, air, and naval platforms and exported abroad, will be produced with domestic and national resources and delivered to the security forces. During his visit to Samsun, SSB President Ismail Demir stopped by the facilities of Samsun Yurt Savunma, the project's contractor, to assess the stage the project had reached. Demir, who made a shooting experiment with the PMT 12.7 mm rifle CANIK M2 QCB, made statements about the studies carried out. "Turkiye didn't even have a rifle until 6-7 years ago. After that, we began to manufacture infantry rifles in a variety of calibers. We even began to manufacture high-caliber weaponry on our own, despite their [foreign companies] attempts to put an embargo on us. Additionally, our 12.7 mm machine gun is built to fire rapidly from a variety of platforms. We have started the mass production of our 12.7 mm machine guns, the qualification processes of which have been successfully completed. With mass production, deliveries to our security forces will continue. This means that our security forces are armed with weapons far superior to their foreign counterparts. Thanks to everyone involved," Demir stressed. The 50 caliber machine gun, the most effective heavy machine gun in combat in the world, has been updated with the most cutting-edge technology and is now available for duty. CANIK M2 QCB (Quick Change Barrel) is the latest member of CANIK's superior firearms family. CANIK M2 QCB is the new performance-enhanced version of the M2 heavy machine gun, which is widely used by the infantry for anti-material and anti-personnel purposes in armored and unarmored vehicles, naval platforms, and on tripod bases. CANIK has doubled the life of the firing mechanism on the M2 and created the longest-lasting and best-dispersed barrel on the market by utilizing its expertise in designing and producing small weapons, aircraft, rockets, and missiles. It has also increased the working performance of the gun in environmental and heavy conditions. Another notable improvement is the ability to mount a wide variety of optical and lighting equipment on the machine gun. CANIK M2 QCB possesses a classic design that has been tested and proven in real combat environments, adapted to the requirements of current and future battlefields. KINSHASA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) deeply regrets the Congolese government's recent decision to expel its spokesperson, read a statement released Thursday morning. MONUSCO said in a statement that it "regrets the expulsion of its spokesperson by the Congolese government," noting that the mission is committed to continuing to work alongside the Congolese population and authorities to implement the mandate by the UN Security Council. The statement came after the DRC's foreign ministry released a diplomatic note Wednesday, asking MONUSCO's spokesman Mathias Gillmann to leave the Congolese territory "as soon as possible," given his "insensitive and inopportune remarks." The DRC government considers that "the presence of this official (Gillmann) on the national territory is not likely to promote a climate of mutual trust and serenity so essential between the Congolese institutions and MONUSCO with a view, not only to the better fulfillment of the mandate entrusted by the UN Security Council but also to complete the transition plan for the purposes of its definitive withdrawal by 2024 as agreed," read the diplomatic note. The DRC government asked the MONUSCO to process its request as a matter of urgency, without specifying the content of these "indelicate and inopportune statements." In an interview on the sidelines of the weekly MONUSCO press conference in Kinshasa, the capital of DRC, on July 13, Mathias Gillmann asserted that the deployment of a large part of the resources of MONUSCO and the Congolese army in the fight against the rebels of the Movement du 23 Mars (M23) has "negative implications" on other regions where other armed groups operate. Thirty-six people have been killed, including three members of the MONUSCO, and about 170 others were injured during the protests, said the government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya at a press conference late Tuesday, adding that the government decided to reassess the agreement on the withdrawal of the MONUSCO amid escalating protests against the MONUSCO in the eastern part of the country. ADDIS ABABA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said more than 20 million people are estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance in Ethiopia in 2022. The OCHA, in its humanitarian situation update for Ethiopia released Wednesday, said nearly three-quarters of those in humanitarian assistance are women and children. It said the humanitarian situation in Ethiopia has significantly deteriorated during 2021, leading to increased humanitarian needs across the country. As the situation persists, more than 20 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance and protection in 2022. According to the OCHA, conflict in the northern part of Ethiopia, violence in other parts of the country, and natural hazards such as floods and most notably the ongoing drought in the southern part of the country are the main drivers of humanitarian needs. It said that the 2022 Ethiopia Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) requires 3.09 billion U.S. dollars to target more than 20 million people across the country. The HRP prioritizes efforts addressing the immediate lifesaving requirements of the most vulnerable people and access to essential services. The annual humanitarian response plan further incorporates evolving needs caused by the extreme drought impacting the lives of millions of Ethiopians. The OCHA said that the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in Ethiopia has increased over the past decade amid growing man-made and natural catastrophes affecting the country. According to figures from the OCHA, between 2013 and 2015, the number of people who were targeted for humanitarian assistance rose from 2.7 million to 4 million people with funding requirements between 500 million U.S. dollars to 600 million U.S. dollars. The effects of the 2015-2016 El Nino coupled with other disasters sharply increased the number of people in need to 10.7 million and required 1.6 billion U.S. dollars to carry out the humanitarian response. Starting at the end of 2017, conflict-induced displacement emerged as another significant driver of needs. The OCHA said the number of people in need drastically increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching 15.1 million in 2020, followed by another increase in 2021 due to the conflict in northern Ethiopia. YAOUNDE, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- At least three militants of the Boko Haram group were killed early Thursday after they attempted to attack a military outpost in Cameroon's Far North region, according to local and security sources. The attack took place in Nguetchewe locality of the region. The heavily armed militants ambushed and attacked troops and after several hours, troops repelled them killing three on the spot, an army officer in the region who asked not to be named told Xinhua. The military was pursuing the rest of the assailants, the officer said. Boko Haram has killed over 2,000 people since it launched offensives in the region in 2004, according to security reports and local NGOs. PHNOM PENH, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi presented four proposals on promoting East Asia cooperation when attending the ASEAN Plus Three (10+3) foreign ministers' meeting here on Thursday. Wang said that over the past 25 years, the 10+3 cooperation among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, Japan and South Korea has deepened and achieved many important results. The countries have established the goal of building an East Asian community and improved their cooperation framework; built the world's largest free trade area with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and promoted the integration of East Asia's industrial and supply chains and interests; strengthened crisis response capabilities and made landmark achievements such as the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization. They have also established a regional cooperation architecture with ASEAN at the center, Wang said. Amid unprecedented challenges and opportunities from rapid changes in the international landscape and speedy advancements in technology and industrial development, the 10+3 cooperation is now at a critical period to build on the past and look ahead to the future, Wang said. China stands ready to work with regional countries to achieve new progress in East Asian cooperation, Wang said. To this end, Wang put forward four proposals. First, planning a blueprint for East Asia's long-term development. China supports adopting a new five-year work plan for the 10+3 cooperation to provide all-round guidance for and add new impetus to future cooperation. China also supports exploring the mutual reinforcement and common development of the 10+3 cooperation, the cooperation among China, Japan and South Korea, and the three 10+1 cooperation. Second, promoting regional economic integration. The Chinese side is willing to set up a special donation for the RCEP economic and technical cooperation under the framework of the ASEAN-China Cooperation Fund to help ASEAN countries enhance the ability to better implement the pact. China is also willing to work with relevant countries to push forward the integrative development of regional industrial and supply chains, and supports the establishment of 10+3 immigration and consular consultation mechanism as well as increasing direct flights between China and other 10+3 countries in an orderly manner. Third, elevating crisis management capabilities. The Chinese side supports the construction of a 10+3 emergency medical supplies reserve center and the establishment of a disaster management ministerial-level meeting mechanism, and will provide the list of medical supplies as early as possible. China will also increase funding support for the 10+3 emergency rice reserve mechanism to boost regional food supply capacity and better ensure food security. Fourth, guiding regional transformation and development. Wang called for expanding exchanges and cooperation in digital infrastructure, e-commerce, digital logistics and smart cities to facilitate regional digital transformation, and accelerating green development in the region with efforts towards a 10+3 low-carbon partnership, and strengthening cooperation in poverty alleviation to narrow development gaps in the region. At the meeting, all parties fully recognized the significant role of the 10+3 cooperation in regional countries' success in combating COVID-19 and recovering economy. They agreed to speed up regional economic integration, fully implement the RCEP, help countries increase economic resilience, ensure the smooth operation of industrial and supply chains, and jointly meet food and energy security challenges. All parties agreed to deepen cooperation in sectors including public health, digital economy and green development, make efforts to achieve low-carbon and sustainable development, and make the 10+3 cooperation better benefit the people of regional countries. KATHMANDU, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The general elections in Nepal will be held in a single phase on Nov. 20, the government said on Thursday. A cabinet meeting made the decision upon recommendation by the Election Commission. "The cabinet has decided to hold the elections for the House of Representatives and provincial assemblies on Nov. 20," Minister for Communication and Information Technology Gyanendra Bahadur Karki told the press. The previous elections for the lower house and assemblies of the country's seven provinces were held in two phases on Nov. 26 and Dec. 7, 2017. A meeting of the five-party ruling alliance on Wednesday agreed to hold the fresh polls in a single phase on Nov. 20. CANBERRA, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- A bill to enshrine the Australian government's new emissions reduction target in law has passed the lower house of Parliament. The House of Representatives on Thursday voted in favor of the Climate Change Bill after the governing Labor Party agreed to some amendments. The bill will enshrine in law the government's pledge to reduce carbon emissions by 43 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050. Amendments accepted by the government ensure a 43 percent reduction in Australia's minimum target and that climate change policies will benefit regional communities. It will now go to the Senate where it is expected to be passed into law in September. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in Canberra on Thursday that this is "a fulfillment of a core promise" that they made at the election of the reduction target and a renewable sector that will grow to 82 percent of the national energy market by 2030. However, the government rejected a push by the Greens to lift the 2030 emissions reduction target to 75 percent. Despite supporting the bill, Greens leader Adam Bandt said it would lead to the death of the Great Barrier Reef and worse natural disasters. "That is the science. That is why we are doing this," he said, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "We're not doing this to try to stop pollution a little bit. We are doing this to try to stop climate change from becoming a runaway chain reaction." The legislation was not required for the target, which Albanese formally submitted to the United Nations in June. PARIS, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- An explosion in a factory in the city of Bergerac in southwest France on Wednesday afternoon left eight people injured, one in critical condition, the French daily newspaper Le Figaro has reported. As many as 35 people were overcome with fumes from the explosion, which happened at around 2 p.m. local time, local authorities said. French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on his social media that those injured in the explosion were being treated. The factory owned by the Eurenco company is specialized in the fabrication of explosives. However, the origin of the explosion remains unknown. A total of 60 firefighters and 20 police officers attended the scene of the explosion. Two helicopters from intensive care units at Bergerac hospital were also present, with the hospital on high alert. The Manuco factory, present in Bergerac since 2013, is listed as a "high threshold Seveso" establishment, with an activity linked to handling, manufacturing, using or storing dangerous substances. In France, 705 industrial sites are on high threshold Seveso, while 607 are on low threshold. In 2019, a fire broke out at the Lubrizol factory, which was on high threshold Seveso, in the city of Rouen. Several people were injured, including eight requiring hospitalization. GUWAHATI: BJP-ruled Assam is also taking action from bulldozers against crime and terrorism on the lines of Uttar Pradesh. The madrasa run by Mustafa alias Mufti Mustafa, who belongs to a Bangladesh-based terror outfit, has been razed to the ground by the administration. Let us know that Mustafa was recently arrested by the Assam Police. Superintendent of Police (SP) of Morigaon district Aparna N confirmed the action and said, "The Jamiul Huda Madarsa run by Mustafa alias Mufti Mustafa in Moirabari area has been demolished today.'' Mufti Mustafa has recently been arrested for his links with Bangladesh-based terror outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team and AQIS. Assam Police had arrested 12 jihadis belonging to Bangladesh-based terror outfit Ansarul Islam. Just a day before that, a sleeper cell of jihadists was also busted. They were giving shelter to the Bangladeshi terrorist in their house. Let us know that the roots of the terrorist organization Ansarul Islam are spread in many countries. Recently, a report said that terrorists try to reach different states of India by entering India from the border of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Many times, terrorist organizations have made such attempts, but due to the strictness of the agencies, their nefarious acts remain unsuccessful. According to the data, in the last five years, the highest infiltration from Bangladesh and Pakistan has taken place in 2021. A large number of intruders have also been caught. As soon as office of Young Indian was sealed, panicked Congress leaders gathered at AICC 82k applications received in Navy, craze among women for 'Agnipath' You will be able to see the country's historical heritage for free for 10 days... New Delhi: The Muslim population is growing at a rapid pace near India's border with Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Concerns have been expressed by intelligence agencies and the Border Security Force (BSF). After studying the latest data of gram panchayats, the police of Uttar Pradesh and Assam have also sent their reports to the Union Home Ministry. These describe the demographic changes that have taken place in the region in 10 years. It has also been recommended by the intelligence agencies to increase the jurisdiction of BSF to 100 km in connection with the matter. Due to the increasing Muslim population in the border areas of the country, the threat of infiltration in these areas is also expected to increase. According to the report, the population of Muslims in the border areas has registered a growth of 32 per cent since 2011. While the population change figure in the country has been up to 15 per cent during this period. The intelligence and security agencies have termed the increase in population in the border areas as very alarming. In such a situation, it has been said from his side that the scope of the jurisdiction of BSF should be increased from 50 km to 100 km. So that the BSF can carry out search operations up to a radius of 100 km from the border. Earlier, in 2021, the jurisdiction of BSF was increased from 15 km to 50 km. To which non-BJP ruled states like Punjab, Bengal had objected. According to the media report, the Muslim population in the areas near Pakistan's border with Punjab has increased by 35 per cent, which the BSF has expressed concern over. At the same time, the increasing number of Muslims in the districts of UP bordering Nepal has once again become a cause for concern. Behind the huge surge in population, the police are speculating that Muslims may be being brought from outside and settled here. This could be part of the PFI's plot to make India an Islamic country by 2047, under which infiltration is being intensified by increasing the Muslim population in the border areas. Statistics show that Muslims have increased by 50 per cent in 116 villages in 5 districts of UP. At the same time, 25 per cent of mosques and madrasas have seen an increase in 4 years. In UP as well as in areas like Dhuwari, Karimganj, South Salmara and Kachar in Assam, the number of Muslims has increased by 32 per cent, while the national average estimate of the 2011 census should have been 12.5 per cent and 13.5 per cent as per the state-level estimate. Now, the agencies have become alert about this demographic change. Boycott Alia Bhatt is trending, Netizens compared her with Amber Heard, Know why Assam govt's bulldozer running on jihadists As soon as office of Young Indian was sealed, panicked Congress leaders gathered at AICC Italy: The Italian tax authorities seized assets worth more than 141 million (US$144 million) from an architect who designed a luxury estate on the Black Sea dubbed "Putin's palace" by opponents of Russia's president. The tax police issued a statement on Wednesday, claiming that they had seized the assets of a "well-known professional" in Brescia, northern Italy, for alleged tax evasion. According to two sources, the assets belonged to Lanfranco Cirillo, who designed a grand estate on Russia's Black Sea that became known as "Putin's palace" after a businessman claimed the property was built for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Cirillo's lawyer confirmed that his client's assets had been seized, but he was not guilty of any wrongdoing regarding Italian taxes, adding that he had lived in Russia for many years and had been granted Russian citizenship in 2014. "The architect, who is currently in Moscow, is very disappointed that having purchased some prestigious properties and works of art in Italy, as well as providing for his wife and daughter, are used to argue that he faked his move abroad," lawyer Stefano Lojacono said in a statement. According to the Brescia tax police, among the items seized were a helicopter, luxury properties, cash, jewels, and important works of art. President Putin has denied any connection to the Black Sea resort. The issue resurfaced in early 2021, when imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny claimed in an online video that Putin was the ultimate owner. Cirillo told Italian television in April that he designed the building but that it was commissioned by a private group and that he had no dealings with Putin. "It's insane to think that the president of such a powerful country would need to build a palace for himself," Cirillo said in an interview with La7 in Italy. Brahmos II could Be Modeled as Russia's Tsirkon Missiles it Will Not Be Exported Russia Invasion: Zelensky tries"direct talks" with Xi Jinping FM Melanie Joly will meet her German counterpart in Montreal amid the tensions with Russia By Azernews By News Center The Turkish Armed Forces will get armored combat vehicles (ACV) that have been nearly completely rebuilt utilizing the skills of the Turkish defense industry and outfitted with top-notch technology, Yeni Shafak reports. DAF turreted ACV vehicles in the inventory of the Land Forces Command will return to the barracks, equipped with modern weapon systems and high-tech mission equipment, within the scope of the Armored Combat Vehicles Modernization Project. FNSS Defense Systems General Manager Nail Kurt stated that a large number of vehicles that will significantly increase their striking power and survivability will be made available to the Turkish Armed Forces in 2022. Commenting on the Armored Combat Vehicles Modernization Project carried out under the coordination of the Presidency of Defense Industries, Kurt stated that the weapon systems of the vehicles, namely the striking power, were renewed within the scope of the project. Kurt explained that the vehicles' survivability would significantly increase with the unmanned remote-controlled gun turrets that replaced the DAF turrets. He added that along with the vehicles protective features, their mine protection abilities will also be enhanced. Kurt underlined that there will be a renewal of the fire suppression systems in the vehicles as well. He stressed that the vehicles' mobility systems will receive a considerable upgrade and renewal in addition to serious engine and gearbox maintenance. All outdated components will be replaced, with no exceptions, and the vehicles will be entirely reset. Additionally, significant components have undergone a thorough revamp. Together with our users, we decide which components need to be altered. With more capabilities, a true life extension procedure is carried out. It's a really thorough procedure. We can refer to it as a half-life evaluation and rejuvenation, Kurt emphasized. Despite the fact that the vehicles had reached the end of their useful lives, the user had maintained and utilized them properly and because of the integration of new technology and subsystems, the Turkish army would continue to use vehicles that are almost new, he added. "Some changes were needed that we had not foreseen before. There were changes, especially in the tower. After the completion of the qualification tests, a lot of deliveries will begin this year," Kurt said. The modernization process of the prototype ACV was started by ASELSAN in cooperation with FNSS at the end of 2019. The first phase of the project will include the modernization of 133 ACVs. As part of the modernization, the Nefer unmanned turret with a 25 mm gun, laser warning, close-range surveillance, driver vision, direction finding, and navigation systems are integrated into the vehicles. The solution package, which aims to increase the survivability of the vehicles and equip them with modern technological subsystems, was prepared in line with the feedback received from the users. With this solution package, the service lives of vehicles are increased, vital subsystems are replaced, and domestic subsystems are incorporated into them, giving ACVs the greatest possible level of survivability. At the end of the project, the Turkish Armed Forces will use vehicles that combine FNSS's ACV expertise and skills in new generation vehicle development technology with cutting-edge armament and mission equipment. Ukraine: In response to the invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine claimed that Russia had begun assembling a military strike force with its sights set on President Volodymyr Zelensky's hometown of Kryvyi Rih. At the same time, Nato moved closer to undertaking its largest expansion in decades. On Wednesday, the US Senate and the Italian parliament both approved the 30-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization's admission of Finland and Sweden (Nato). An attack on one member is considered an attack on all members of NATO, which requires the approval of all 30 member states. US President Joe Biden said in a statement that "this historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan US commitment to Nato, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow." Finland and Sweden have received repeated warnings from Russia, which invaded Ukraine on February 24 to avoid them joining NATO. Last month, the 30 members of NATO ratified the accession protocol, allowing them to join the nuclear-armed alliance led by the US. It might take up to a year for ratification. Additionally, Ukraine denied claims made by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that Russia desired a "negotiated solution" to the conflict and stated that any talks would be conditional on a cease-fire and a Russian troop withdrawal. The agreement on grain shipments from Ukraine last month, intended to ease a global food crisis, may offer a path forward, according to Schroeder, a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a figure who is increasingly mocked in Germany for his pro-Russia stance. Schroeder was referred to as a "voice of the Russian royal court" in response, and Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak made it clear that the grain agreement would not result in further negotiations. "Moscow has the initiative if it wants to engage in dialogue. A ceasefire and troop withdrawal should come first, followed by productive (dialogue)," Podolyak stated on Twitter. Zelensky also reacted angrily to the idea of talks with Russia in a video address on Wednesday night. When former leaders of important nations that uphold European values now work for Russia, a country that is at war with them, it is simply abhorrent, according to Zelensky. The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported on Thursday that Russian forces were heavily involved in military activity on the battlefield, firing from tanks, barrel artillery, and rocket artillery in various regions of Ukraine. That occurred as Ukrainian forces continued their counteroffensive to oust the Russians from the southern Kherson region that they had captured in the early stages of the conflict, close to the Crimean peninsula that the Kremlin had annexed. While 53 villages in the southern region were still under Russian control, the Ukrainian presidency claimed to have "liberated" seven more of them. Additionally, Ukraine claimed that Russia had started assembling a strike group in the direction of Kryvyi Rih and might be preparing fresh offensive operations in southern Ukraine. Zelensky was raised in the steel-producing city of Kryvyi Rih, which is about 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the front line in the south. The enemy may also be planning a hostile counteroffensive with the goal of reaching the Kherson region's administrative boundary, according to the southern military command. Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, reported on the Telegram app that three civilians had died and five had been injured in the previous day in Bakhmut, Maryinka, and Shevchenko. Kyiv has ordered the mandatory evacuation of the Donetsk region, which is currently suffering the brunt of Russia's offensive, because the government doesn't think it will be able to keep it warm during the chilly winter. The governors of the Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions reported that their areas had been shelled overnight, causing damage to homes and other civilian infrastructure. Nikopol, a city in central Ukraine west of Zaporizhzhia, was shelled, according to Mayor Yevhen Yevtushenko. As its forces occupied it in the early weeks of the invasion, Russia was accused of firing shells dangerously close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in March. The largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine is allegedly being used by Moscow as a "nuclear shield" to attack Ukrainian forces, according to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. A Russian-installed official in Ukraine, however, claimed that Ukrainian forces had repeatedly attacked the plant using weapons from the West. Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Russian-installed administration of the Zaporizhzhia region, said, "We are ready to show how the Russian military is guarding the plant and how Ukraine, which receives weapons from the West, uses those weapons, including drones, to attack the nuclear power plant. In a region close to Poland that is the farthest from the conflict, Moscow claimed on Wednesday that it had also destroyed a foreign arms depot. The attack happened when Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau was in Kiev. The largest conflict in Europe since World War II has resulted in thousands of deaths while many towns and cities have been destroyed. Russia claims it does not target civilians. Russian forces are charged with war crimes by Ukraine and its Western allies. To purge the nation of fascists, Putin dispatched troops into Ukraine in what he calls a "special military operation." Putin was accused by the West and the Ukraine of starting an unprovoked "imperial" land grab. According to new information from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly 6.2 million Ukrainian refugees have been compelled to relocate across Europe and another 6.3 million have been uprooted within Ukraine. Italian Police seize assets from architect linked to 'Putin's palace' Russia Invasion: Zelensky tries"direct talks" with Xi Jinping Zelensky, NATO secretary-general discuss aid for Kiev USA: The US Senate approved Finland and Sweden's membership in Nato on Wednesday, the most significant expansion of the 30-member alliance since the 1990s in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Senate voted 95 to 1 in favour of ratifying the two countries' accession documents, easily exceeding the two-thirds majority of 67 votes required for ratification. Sweden and Finland applied for Nato membership in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite Russia's repeated warnings against joining the alliance. Last month, Nato's 30 allies signed the accession protocol on their behalf, allowing them to join the US-led nuclear-armed alliance once its members ratify the decision. At the time, Helsinki and Stockholm were able to attend Nato meetings and gain greater intelligence access, but they were not protected by Article Five, the Nato defence clause that states that an attack on one ally is an attack on all. Before Finland and Sweden can be protected by the defence clause, the accession must be ratified by the parliaments of all 30 North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. Although it has already been approved by a few countries, including Canada, Germany, and Italy, ratification could take up to a year. Senators from both parties strongly supported the two countries' membership, describing them as important allies with modern militaries that already collaborated closely with Nato. "The qualifications of these two prosperous, democratic nations are outstanding and will serve to strengthen the Nato alliance," Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said before the vote, urging support. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer invited Finland and Sweden's ambassadors and other diplomats to the Senate to observe the vote. The lone no vote came from Republican Senator Josh Hawley. Republican Senator Rand Paul abstained from voting. US Senate votes to add Sweden and Finland joining NATO Charlie Puth shuts down troll related to BTS Jungkook about Left and Right US stuck in a 'horrible plateau' of Covid Casualties Mandatory evacuation begins in Donetsk Oblast, first train of evacuees arrives in Kropyvnytskyi Vereshchuk 2 August, 12:30 PM Local residents have begun to be evacuated from Donetsk Oblast (Photo:Iryna Vereshchuk/Telegram) The first trainload of evacuees from war-torn Donetsk Oblast in Ukraines eastern Donbas region arrived in Kropyvnytskyi, in Kirovohrad Oblast in the south-central part of the country, on Aug. 2, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk reported on Telegram. The mandatory evacuation of Donetsk Oblast began on Aug. 2. Residents of the oblast, which remains under threat of invasion by Russia, were earlier asked to evacuate, as the Ukrainian authorities cannot provide reliable basic services, such as gas, water and electricity supplies, due to the ongoing hostilities. Women, children, elderly people, many people with reduced mobility everyone was met and accommodated, everyone was helped, said Vereshchuk. Read also: Russian troops launch incendiary ammunition at Donetsk She thanked local government services, international organizations and volunteers for their help with the evacuation. It is not known how many people were evacuated. The head of the Kirovohrad Regional Military Administration, Andriy Raikovych, posted a video of the arrival of the evacuation train to the regional center on his channel on Telegram. Kirovohrad Oblast met an evacuation train from Donetsk Oblast, he said. All services were prepared properly. People fled from shelling, (they have) suffered a lot. Even a kind word is important for them now. We will help everyone, give them a roof over their heads, feed them, and shelter them. The government of Ukraine introduced mandatory evacuation of residents of unoccupied areas of the Donetsk Oblast due to constant shelling and the impossibility of ensuring there would be heating services in the coming winter. Today, 200,000-220,000 people are estimated to remain in the region, of whom 52,000 are children. Residents can refuse evacuation. To do so they have to confirm in writing that they understand and are aware of all the consequences of their refusal, and bear personal responsibility for their own lives. Ukraines Cabinet of Ministers on July 29 created a coordination headquarters that will deal with the evacuation from Donetsk Oblast. Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on all residents of Donetsk Oblast to evacuate to other regions of the country. Help NV continue reporting on the Russian invasion Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google News A staffer disinfects a movie theatre in Kathmandu in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Photo: Aryan Dhimal Kathmandu, August 2 Nepal spent Rs 214.2 million in purchasing the rights to show foreign films in the country in three months. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology informs the money was spent from mid-April to mid-July, the final quarter of the recently concluded fiscal year. Nepal spent Rs 100.1 million on purchasing Indian films and Rs 114 million on purchasing Hollywood and other films, according to the ministry. In this period, Nepal permitted 28 foreign films, and the government earned Rs 520,000 in revenues for issuing the permits for shows and filming, the ministry informs. This figure does not include the amount that the films earned from the audience in Nepal. Nepali audiences and film distributors are often blamed for prioritising foreign films over Nepali ones. The Class40 boat capsized 15 miles off the coast of the Sisargas Islands near Galicia, Spain. (Photo: SALVAMENTO MARITIMO via via REUTERS) The Class40 boat capsized 15 miles off the coast of the Sisargas Islands near Galicia, Spain. (Photo: SALVAMENTO MARITIMO via via REUTERS) A 62-year-old Frenchman survived 16 hours trapped in an air bubble inside his capsized sailboat in the Atlantic Ocean near Galicia, Spain, on Tuesday afternoon, according to CNN. The man, who has yet to be named, endured an entire night in cold waters before being rescued. While the Spanish coast guard was alerted Monday at 8:23 p.m. to the sailors distress signal, the seas were too dangerous to attempt a rescue dive, according to the BBC. Due to the conditions, the mans survival was not guaranteed, divers said. On the edge of the impossible, in an operation against the clock, with rough seas, at night, 15 miles from the coast and in the middle of nowhere, tweeted the Maritime Safety and Rescue Society on Wednesday. Yesterday we successfully completed the rescue of the French crew member who spent 16 hours inside his overturned sailboat in Malpica. Cada vida salvada es nuestra mayor recompensa Asi fue el rescate realizado ayer por Salvamento Maritimo al tripulante del velero frances JEANNE SOLO SAILOR que estaba quilla al sol a 14 millas NNW de Islas Sisargas. pic.twitter.com/gqobWTSoWc SALVAMENTO MARITIMO (@salvamentogob) August 3, 2022 Tracking data confirmed the man had set sail Sunday from the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, according to The Guardian. The search for his boat involved three helicopters and one rescue ship with five divers, who found the mans 40-foot boat named Jeanne Solo Sailor about 15 miles from the Sisargas Islands near Galicia. While he couldnt rescue him yet, one brave diver was lowered from one of the helicopters with a winch to attach buoyancy balloons to the boat to keep it afloat until conditions improved. The diver also confirmed the sailor was alive by having his knocks against the hull returned from inside. Story continues Dramatic footage shared Wednesday by Spains Maritime Safety and Rescue Society showed two divers braving a rescue Tuesday afternoon. They found the sailor in a neoprene suit and submerged up to his knees, only for him to jump into the water. Al filo de lo imposible, en una operacion contrarreloj, con mala mar, de noche, a 15 millas de costa y en medio de la nada. Ayer cerramos con exito el rescate del tripulante frances que permanecio 16 horas en el interior de su velero volcado en Malpica, @laSextaTV pic.twitter.com/CD5R0O30J0 SALVAMENTO MARITIMO (@salvamentogob) August 3, 2022 Of his own initiative he got into the water and freedived out, helped by the divers who had to pull him through because it was difficult for him to get out in his suit, said Vincent Cobelo, a member of the coast guards special operations team. The sailor was subsequently airlifted and briefly hospitalized but was released shortly after without injuries. The coast guard tweeted, Each life saved is our greatest reward. This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. Related... Infowars founder Alex Jones took the stand today in a trial that will determine what he owes to the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting. Last year, Jones was found liable in a series of defamation cases brought by the parents of Sandy Hook victims. For years, Jones and Infowars spread outlandish and disturbing conspiracy theories purporting that the 2012 tragedy, which claimed 28 lives most of them children was staged. The first trial to determine the damages Jones may owe is underway in Texas, with Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of six-year-old Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis, seeking at least $150 million. Late last month, Infowars' parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, likely a pre-emptive effort to dodge financial culpability before the outcome of the trial. In a surprise twist Wednesday, the lawyer representing the Sandy Hook victim's parents revealed that he recently received a trove of Jones' phone data, apparently shared to the opposing legal team by mistake. Jones lost four separate defamation cases relating to Sandy Hook by default after refusing to cooperate with Texas and Connecticut courts and provide requested documents. Jones also failed to produce any messages related to Sandy Hook in the discovery process for the damages trial a discrepancy that the family's lawyer Mark Bankston highlighted on Wednesday. "You know what perjury is, right?" Bankston asked. The plaintiff's lawyer also cited emails that showed Infowars making $800,000 a day a mind-boggling figure that Jones did not dispute in spite of his previous contradictory claims about the company's revenue. Jones claimed that any punishment above $2 million would "sink" his company. Whether any damages awarded would destroy his business or not, the trial could prove to be a cautionary tale for the countless businesses peddling conspiracies that, like Infowars, rake in revenue around dangerous and politically divisive misinformation. Story continues Shortly after the reveal, Rolling Stone reported that the January 6 committee plans to request those messages and emails in its ongoing investigation into the Capitol insurrection. Jones is in court after infamously claiming that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a fake event staged by "crisis actors" to advance a covert ideological agenda. The false claims spread online like wildfire in conspiracist echo chambers over the last decade, inspiring believers to stalk and harass the parents of Sandy Hook victims, some of whom even moved or went into hiding to escape the abuse. Heslin described the situation as a "living hell" in testimony this week. "What was said about me and Sandy Hook itself resonates around the world," he said. "As time went on, I truly realized how dangerous it was... My life has been threatened. I fear for my life, I fear for my safety." Alex Jones has cashed in on the Infowars conspiracy empire for years, promoting repeated claims of government coverups and false flag operations while pushing branded products like nootropic supplements promising to enhance "male vitality." While skirting the rules or even outright breaking them, Jones managed to stay active on mainstream social media platforms until just a few years ago. In late 2018, major tech companies including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Apple kicked Jones off of their platforms, citing his long track record of misbehavior, misinformation and harassment. Apple spearheaded the effort, erasing Infowars from the App Store after Jones' media empire broke its rules against hate speech. (Bloomberg) -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. posted better results than many investors feared, avoiding a sharp sales contraction while signaling an improvement in Chinese consumer sentiment in recent months. Most Read from Bloomberg Its shares slid about 2% in Hong Kong, shedding part of the 5.2% gained on Thursday before the results. Revenue shrank for the first time on record in the June quarter, albeit by a fractional amount that was less than analysts projected. The contraction marked an official end to a decade of sizzling growth for Chinas internet giants, which began to wind down in 2021 when regulators slapped curbs on a range of sectors from e-commerce to social media. Chinas e-commerce leader reported revenue of 205.6 billion yuan ($30.4 billion) in the June quarter, enough to beat projections for 204 billion yuan. Net income fell 50% to 22.7 billion yuan, even after Alibaba trimmed losses at newer businesses like local services and the cloud. Alibaba is still grappling with the fallout from nationwide Covid-related lockdowns and a near-economic contraction in China. Smaller rival JD.com Inc., which escaped the worst of Beijings crackdown, is overtaking Alibaba in sales growth, while up-and-coming competitors from ByteDance Ltd. to Pinduoduo Inc. are drawing users away. Still, consumption began recovering from June and quickened in July, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang said. The results signal resilience in the face of regulatory fears and domestic economic headwinds, said Rohan Reddy, director of research at Global X Management Co. Chinese tech stocks still have room for recovery with valuations at attractively cheap levels and an easing policy environment continuing for the foreseeable future. But there is still a dose of caution, as investors get a little spooked from time to time. Story continues Read more: Jack Mas Ant See Profit Fall 17% After Regulatory Setback Alibaba Jumps Amid Core Commerce Unit Profit Beat: Street Wrap Alibaba is also managing a series of run-ins with regulators. These range from antitrust fines to tax evasion probes, but have culminated in Chinas largest recorded cybersecurity breach, which experts linked to Alibabas cloud business. That division grew sales 10% in the quarter, the slowest pace on record. Abroad, the US added Alibaba to a growing roster of companies facing removal from US stock exchanges, because of Beijings refusal to permit American officials to review their auditors work. The company is seeking a primary listing in Hong Kong that would enable it to tap more mainland investors, while also maintaining its listing status on the New York Stock Exchange. Once the most valuable company in China, Alibaba has seen its market value tumble after Beijing launched its sweeping crackdown on the private sector more than a year ago. The government forced Alibabas finance affiliate, Ant Group Co., to call off what would have been the worlds largest initial public offering in 2020, and then launched reforms that have undercut Alibabas business model. Following a ferocious crackdown on the countrys most prominent billionaires, Alibabas co-founder Jack Ma has made significant concessions to appease Beijing. Last week, Ant said in a filing that Ma will cede control over the fintech arm and reduce his Ant shareholding over time to a percentage that does not exceed 8.8%. He currently holds 50.52% voting rights in Ant. The move, likely to reduce some of Alibaba and Ants regulatory headwinds, has weighed on Alibaba shares, on fears that a leadership change could further delay Ants initial public offering. Mas retreat also raises questions about his internet empire just as China enters a period of unprecedented uncertainty. It has been a choppy few months for Alibaba, like two steps forward, one step back, said David Waddell, CEO and chief investment strategist at Waddell & Associates. The report is a confirmation that theres a value here for investors who are patient. What Bloomberg Intelligence Says Alibabas shift to providing more cost-efficient e-commerce services for existing users in mainland China could ease price competition among major companies such as JD.com, Meituan and Pinduoduo into 2023. The company may streamline services and scale back expansionary moves for newer businesses, such as those related to grocery and food deliveries, to reduce cost burdens should revenue rise less than 6% above 2021s level through December. - Catherine Lim and Tiffany Tam, analysts Click here for the research. Revenue from Alibabas core China commerce division slid 1% during the quarter -- the first contraction on record. In response to slowing growth, Alibaba said in May it will take a more disciplined approach to spending and scale back expenses in areas that arent generating long-term value. This shift -- in line with Beijings incentives -- marks a major shift from the aggressive and wide-ranging market-share grab that characterized the e-commerce giant in the past. Adjusted earnings per ADS of 11.73 yuan beat estimates for 10.33 yuan, reflecting those efforts. Starting in July, we are seeing a gradual recovery of business performance compared to June, especially in the relatively more impacted categories in the past few months such as fashion and electronics, Zhang told analysts on a conference call. Alibaba has also turned increasingly outward, building Southeast Asian arm Lazada, Trendyol in Turkey and Daraz around South Asia into important units of the company. It has outlined a long-term goal of quintupling Lazadas gross merchandise value, the sum of transactions across its platforms, to $100 billion. While Alibaba has indicated that it will be focusing on costs, I think the magnitude of its leverage still surprised the market, said Vey-Sern Ling, an analyst with Union Bancaire Privee. There will be positive read-through for the rest of China internet companies who will have similar cost focus, especially given the new regulatory environment. (Updates with share action from the second paragraph) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2022 Bloomberg L.P. (CBS News) An Amtrak train from Washington DC with 142 passengers and crew onboard has collided with a semi-truck in Maryland. Officials say that there were no injuries in the incident that took place at around 5.20pm in Rockville, Maryland, in which the truck that had obstructed the track came into contact with the train. Amtrak says that the Amtrak Capitol Limited train 29 was on its way to Chicago when the accident took place. A traffic backup left the truck and its trailer stuck on the tracks when the train passed, according to Frederick County Fire and Rescue. The train struck the tractor-trailer, which was pushed into a passenger truck. The passenger truck in turn was pushed into a nearby building. Officials say that the driver of the passenger truck, identified by fire officials as an adult male, was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. It is the latest in a string of incidents for Amtrak in the last year. In June, an Amtrak train crashed into a dump truck in Mendon, Missouri, killing four people and injuring 150. Also in June, a train in Brentwood, California, struck a car, killing three people and leaving two others seriously injured. The intersection had no train crossing guard. In September 2021 an Amtrak train in northern Montana derailed, killing three and injuring dozens. Brittney Griner is "devastated," her lawyers tell PEOPLE, after a Russian court sentenced her to nine years in prison on charges of smuggling drugs into the country. In an interview Thursday, Griner's lawyers Maria Blagovolina, a partner at Rybalkin Gortsunyan Dyakin and Partners, and Alexander Boykov, from the Moscow Legal Center said that the nine-year sentence was nearly double what they were expecting, and difficult for the 31-year-old WNBA star to take in. "She's devastated. She is very upset and she's honestly quite shocked, so she needs to digest what happened today," Blagovolina says. Griner has not yet been able to speak with her wife, Cherelle, or any friends or family since the ruling, Blagovolina says, but she does "have permission" to do so and they "hopefully will be able to set up the call next week." RELATED: Brittney Griner Sentenced to 9 Years in Russian Prison on Drug Possession Charges Griner, who had pled guilty to bringing less than 1 gram of cannabis oil into Russia, said during closing arguments earlier Thursday that she "had no intents to break any Russian laws." Griner and her lawyers had also tried to establish that she had a prescription in the United States to use medical marijuana, and argued that she was not properly informed of her rights when she was arrested at the Moscow airport in February. For more on Brittney Griner, listen below to our daily podcast PEOPLE Every Day. A Russian court dismissed her request for leniency in their sentence, which is just below the maximum sentence for drug possession of 10 years. Blagovolina says this type of criminal court is usually "not so severe," and typically gives people five-and-a-half or six-year sentences. Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner holds images standing in a cage at a court room prior to a hearing, in Khimki just outside Moscow, Russia, . American basketball star Brittney Griner has returned to a Russian courtroom for her drawn-out trial on drug charges that could bring her 10 years in prison if convicted Russia Griner, Moscow, Russian Federation - 26 Jul 2022 Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP/Shutterstock Brittney Griner holds up photos from the courtroom "So nine years, it's pretty unusual and it contradicts the existing court practice in Russia," she says. "That's why we are really disappointed and very much surprised by this decision of the court." Story continues RELATED: WNBA, NBA and More React to Brittney Griner's Sentencing in Russia: 'Unjustified and Unfortunate' Blagovolina and Boykov now have 10 days to file an appeal to the ruling, which they intend to do by the end of next week. Boykov says, though, that the appeal process could "take a month or two or more than three. It's not very fast." They don't know if it will change Griner's sentence, but Blagovolina says that "as a legal team, we need to do [the] maximum to get a shorter term. We need to use every legal opportunity that we have, and [an] appeal is one of those opportunities." The hope, though, is that the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. State Department and Russia to release Griner as part of a prisoner exchange with Paul Whelan, another American imprisoned in the country, will be successful and get her home sooner. RELATED: White House Is 'Still Waiting on' Russia to Respond to Proposed Brittney Griner Exchange When Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the potential exchange last Wednesday, Griner "was quite happy to know that she had not been forgotten and that there are some possible developments," Blagovolina says. "But she's quite realistic about what's going on," she adds. FILE PHOTO: The Citigroup Inc logo is seen at a conference in Toronto, Canada (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc said its total exposure to Russia rose by $500 million in the second quarter due to a rise in the value of the rouble. The Wall Street bank on Thursday disclosed $8.4 billion in Russia exposure as of June 30, compared with $7.9 billion at the end of the first quarter. Citi said it had cut down on loans and cash on deposits in the country, particularly those from its institutional clients group, but that was offset by the rouble's more than 40% surge in the quarter. The rouble has become the world's best-performing currency this year, boosted by Russia's high proceeds from commodity exports, a sharp drop in imports and a ban on households withdrawing foreign currency savings after the invasion of Ukraine in February. Citigroup has been looking to exit sanctions-hit Russia and is in talks with Russian private lender Expobank over a possible sale of some of its operations in the country, Reuters reported last month. (Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni) By Trend U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to visit an inter-Korean border area that is jointly controlled by American-led U.N. Command and North Korea later on Thursday, Associated Press reported, citing a South Korean official, Trend reports citing Reuters. If that visit occurs, Pelosi would be the highest-level American to go to the Joint Security Area since then-President Donald Trump went there in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the report added. Earlier in the day, Pelosi will meet South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of Parliament for talks on regional security, economic cooperation and climate issues, AP said. FILE PHOTO: The logo for ConocoPhillips is displayed on a screen on the floor at the NYSE in New York (Reuters) -ConocoPhillips on Thursday raised its shareholder payout target by 50% after the largest U.S. independent oil producer beat Wall Street's earnings estimates on surging energy prices. Oil and gas prices have jumped with Western sanctions on Russia throttling energy supply amid a rebound in demand. Oil is trading about 25% higher since the start of the year and natural gas demand and prices have jumped on hot weather and Russian shortages. Conoco this year will devote $15 billion of cash from operations to shareholder returns, up from $10 billion originally set, it said, joining a parade of big energy companies using the price surge to reward investors. The payouts are fueling criticisms from officials around the world. Lawmakers have called for windfall profit taxes on energy profits, and a top official of the United Nations yesterday called soaring oil profits "immoral." Conoco shares were up a fraction at $91.65 in afternoon trading after the company trimmed its forecast for full-year production. It expects output to average 1.74 million barrels per day (mboed), compared to 1.567 mboed in 2021. Chief Executive Ryan Lance in remarks to analysts on a conference call said oil and gas demand will remain strong while warning of higher volatility and costs. Expenses for materials and labor are expected to boost costs by 7% to 8% this year. The company aims to increase its exposure to natural gas markets, pledging to invest in two liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects. Conoco is discussing a gas-supply agreement as well as an investment with a U.S. Gulf Coast LNG developer. "We hope to be pivoting over time to even supply a lot of this gas" to the U.S. LNG project," said CEO Lance, citing gas from its recent acquisitions in Texas. The investments will boost future spending. Conoco faces an about $900 million tab for participation in a second LNG project, in Qatar, officials said. A bill could come later this year or early next, said Executive Vice President Nick Olds, which will add to its existing budget. Story continues Houston, Texas-based ConocoPhillips said the average price received for a barrel of oil and gas rose 77% from a year earlier to $88.57. The company has not hedged any of its oil and gas sales to make the most of higher market prices, it said. Production of 1.69 million barrels of oil and gas per day (mboed) was in line with Wall Street estimates. The company forecast the current quarter's output would be in a range of 1.71 to 1.76 mboed. The company's second-quarter adjusted earnings of $3.91 per share beat Wall Street estimates of $3.80 per share, according to Refintiv IBES data. (Reporting by Shariq Khan in Bengaluru and Gary McWilliams in Houston; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Vinay Dwivedi) Story at a glance Smoking is a key risk factor for severe COVID-19 outcomes, including hospitalization and death. According to researchers, these risks may have contributed to increased quitting rates seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. However, whether rates will be sustained beyond the crisis remains to be seen. Regular smokers made significantly fewer cigarette purchases, cut down on the quantity of cigarettes they smoked and notably quit during the pandemic behaviors that researchers in a new study say were prompted by the health risks of COVID-19. Through the pandemic, numerous studies illustrated the heightened health risks of the disease among smokers, including a greater risk of severe symptoms, hospitalization and death. University of California-San Diego researchers in a study published Tuesday say one bright spot of the pandemic could be that heightened awareness of these risks may have led many to change their smoking habits and even quit smoking compared with the year prior. The study assessed data from Denmark and found that between 2019 and 2020, cigarette purchases among regular smokers decreased between 20 and 30 percent. Meanwhile, the data from more than 4,000 individuals showed quitting rates increased by about 10 percentage points between March 2020 and January 2021. Around 17 percent of the Denmark population smokes compared with 12.5 percent of the U.S. population. The health risks associated with COVID-19 and smoking may help some smokers overcome a key barrier to quitting that the enjoyment of smoking is felt in the present and health costs are usually felt in the future, said study co-author Sally Sadoff, an associate professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School of Management, in a statement. Despite rising rates of stress and declining mental well-being and physical activity seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic factors typically associated with higher tobacco use the data revealed sustained decreases in smoking, Sadoff added. Story continues America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news. Using information from a nationally representative sample of the Danish population, the researchers assessed tobacco purchases prior to the pandemic and during the pandemic at the individual level. Purchasing data were gleaned from an e-receipt program widely used in Denmark. The window spanning from March 2020 and January 2021 also saw a 24 percent dip in weekly tobacco purchase rates and a 12 percent decline in average quantities purchased, with these decreases largely driven by regular smokers. In addition, regular smokers purchased about 30% less often and they purchased about 20% fewer cigarettes, authors wrote. The analysis also found little change in purchase patterns among nonsmokers but showed increasing purchases among occasional smokers. It remains to be seen whether smoking rates will return to pre-pandemic levels among the population studied, authors wrote. However, data revealed declines in smoking were consistent for at least the first year of the pandemic while quitting rates lasted for at least six months, they noted. Although data limitations preclude any similar conclusions to be drawn for the U.S. population, we suspect there was a decline in smoking in this country and others during the same time period, Sadoff said. If the decline in smoking we document persists, not only could it help decrease the risks from COVID-19 as new variants emerge, but also have meaningful, longer-term benefits on population health and life expectancy beyond the pandemic. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Ekspress Grupp The Competition Authority has given permission for the merger of Geenius Meedia OU and OU RMP Eesti. On June 16, 2022, AS Ekspress Grupps 100% subsidiary Geenius Meedia OU and OU RMP Eesti signed an agreement to aquire the business activities of the RMP.ee portal in Estonia. The accounting and tax information portal RMP.ee has been operating for almost 18 years. The portal has more than 50,000 registered users and more than 25,000 newsletter subscribers. The portal collects an average of 80,000 unique users per month. The merger of RMP to Geenius products increases the amount of information offered to the business user and is an important addition to the content of Arigeenius and DigiPRO. Organizing of trainings and conferences forms an important part of RMP's activities. Together with the RMP team, Geenius Meedia plans to expand the training activities to the other topics. The acquisition of operations of RMP.ee portal is an organic step in our strategy. The parties have agreed neither to disclose the price nor any other terms of the transaction. The transaction is scheduled to be completed in the 3rd quarter 2022. Mari-Liis Ruutsalu Chairman of the Management Board +372 512 2591 mariliis.ryytsalu@egrupp.ee Geenius Meedia is a fast-growing company that builds precisely targeted media whose content is fact-based, understandable and valuable. Geenius is a noise-free and independent platform for talented authors, valued experts and ideas that make life better through science and technology. From December 2021, the owner of the company is AS Ekspress Grupp, the largest media group in the Baltic States, listed on the Tallinn Stock Exchange. AS Ekspress Grupp is the leading media group in the Baltic States whose key activities include web media content production, publishing of newspaper, magazines and books. The Group also manages the electronic ticket sales platform and ticket sales sites in Latvia and Estonia. Ekspress Grupp that launched its operations in 1989 employs 1,400 people, owns leading web media portals in the Baltic States and publishes the most popular daily and weekly newspapers as well as the majority of the most popular magazines in Estonia. Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the company's Cyber Rodeo event in Austin, Texas. SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP Elon Musk said Thursday that he's not planning to build a private airport near Austin, Texas. Local news site Austonia reported last week that an airport could help grow his companies in the region. But Musk said that's "not true" and it "would be silly" since Tesla HQ is so close to Austin's airports. Elon Musk said Thursday that he's not building a private airport outside of Austin, Texas. Local Austin news site Austonia reported last week that the Tesla and SpaceX executive was planning on building a new airfield in Bastrop outside of the city, in close proximity to his newly-purchased Boring Company property as well as the Gigafactory site, which he made Tesla's headquarters last year. But Musk took to Twitter to push back on that claim. "Not true," he tweeted in response to an article detailing the news. "Tesla is 5 mins away from Austin International airport. Would be silly to build another private airport, however the existing commercial airport needs another runway, as Austin is growing fast!" A private airport could help him grow his companies' operations, and he would need federal approval as well as the local regulatory go-ahead to build one, Austonia reported. Travel into and out of Austin is already serviced by both Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and the 585-acre Austin Executive Airport to the north, which is close to Tesla's Giga Texas on Tesla Road. Google/Insider Records show the Boring Company purchased a plot of industrial land in December 2020 in Pflugerville, a suburb north of Austin. The company is also planning to build a tunneling test site in Bastrop, Texas, per a separate report in February. Bastrop is about 24 miles east of Giga Texas. And his company SpaceX has set up shop in Boca Chica, Texas, close to the state's border with Mexico. Austin has long had a tech presence that has stretched back decades but has seen an even bigger rush in recent years. Many have fled to the city during the pandemic, and Musk said in late 2020 that he left California for Texas, though has not disclosed exactly where he's hung his hat. Story continues He was said to live in a $50,000 tiny home near his Space X's Boca Chica site, per mid-2021 reports. And the Wall Street Journal reported in December 2021 that he was staying in a lavish $12 million waterfront estate in Austin that is owned by a billionaire member of the so-called PayPal Mafia and was looking to buy a house. Musk denied those claims in an email to Insider at the time, saying "the WSJ article is false. I don't live there and am not looking to buy a house anywhere." Have a story about Tesla's plans in Texas? Contact the reporter of this story from a non-work email at kcanales@insider.com Read the original article on Business Insider Biolog-id Santarem District Hospital Blood Bank reports on the long-term impact of using Biolog-ids real-time Transfusion Solution combined with Biolog-ids Advanced Analytics Dashboards. PARIS, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Hospital Distrital de Santarem (HDS) is part of the Portuguese National Health Service, and servs a population of approximately 200,000 people in the central region of Portugal. The HDS Blood Bank is responsible for the transfusion needs of this 419-bed hospital with more than 6,000 blood transfusions each year. For the last 18 months the HDS Blood Bank has been using Biolog-ids Transfusion Solution alongside Biolog-ids Advanced Analytics Dashboards. Both the real-time and advanced analytics dashboards combine data collected directly from the RFID system with additional data from the Blood Bank Management System, such as Rh/Kell phenotype data. The ability to automatically and reliably record the movement of blood products throughout the hospital gives as a new degree of visibility and control, said Dra. Rute Ribeiro, Quality Coordinator at the HDS Blood Bank. This improves our ability to decide which units to send out, and which units to accept back, so we can reduce waste while improving the quality of our service to the hospital." The system provides us with digital visibility to inventory levels and product movements," said Dr. Joao Moura, Director of the HDS Blood Bank. It helps us improve decision-making and other common practices, which result in significant operational impact, and is an important step forward in safety. The experience of HDS over the last 18 months showcases the multi-dimensional impact of the Biolog-id portfolio, said Philippe Jacquet, Executive Director of Sales EMEA/LATAM at Biolog-id. We are excited to see the combined impact of our ability to support decisions in real time, with the power of robust retrospective analysis. About Hospital De Santarem The District Hospital of Santarem (HDS) is a Corporate Public Entity located in the city of Santarem in the central region of Portugal, in full operation since 1985. The Hospital is part of the Portuguese National Health Service (SNS). It was built in the late 70s with the aim of providing a new health infrastructure for the city. The Hospital is equipped with all the main medical and surgical specialties, serving a population of approximately 200,000 inhabitants. It has now a total of 419 beds, where more than 6,000 blood transfusions are delivered each year. Story continues HDS URL: https://www.hds.min-saude.pt/ About Biolog-id Biolog-id develops value-chain optimization solutions that create, collect, and consolidates high quality data to drive operational, commercial, and clinical impact for high-value high-impact products. Biolog-ids patented platform is used by multiple customers in the US, Europe, Middle East, India, and Asia Pacific. Biolog-id is owned by its founder and the Xerys Funds. Biolog-id URL: www.biolog-id.com Contact: Diane Muller, diane.muller@biolog-id.com (Bloomberg) -- Multiple news websites and social media accounts that claim to be independent have links to a Chinese public relations firm, according to the security firm Mandiant Inc. Some of them have allegedly published fabricated content, including a fake letter from a US senator. Most Read from Bloomberg Mandiant said it detected 72 news sites and several social media accounts that are part of an propaganda effort intended to disseminate content strategically aligned with the political interests of the Peoples Republic of China. The campaign focused on political enemies of the Chinese government, the Xinjiang region and criticism of the U.S., the report said. The websites, which present themselves as U.S. news outlets, were built using Chinese code, according to the report. Mandiant announced in March that it is being acquired by Google, a deal that is expected to close by the end of the year. In one instance, a Twitter account linked to the campaign posted a fabricated letter purporting to come from the office of US Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican from Florida. It was addressed to Adrian Zenz, a prominent critic of the Chinese governments systematic imprisonment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The letter falsely claimed that Zenz received financial support from Rubio and right-wing political operative Steve Bannon. The Chinese Embassy in the US didnt respond to a request for comment. I am not surprised that I was targeted by China once again, Rubio said, in a statement provided to Bloomberg News. It is important to expose these networks. Even sloppy efforts can cause confusion, and you can be certain the Chinese Communist Party will continue to slander its opponents in increasingly sophisticated ways. Story continues Zenz said the letter was bogus. Attacking my motivation has been a primary strategy of the Chinese state because they cannot successfully attack my research, which is almost entirely based on their own documentation, he said, in a message to Bloomberg. The campaign, which Mandiant dubbed HaiEnergy, wasnt particularly successful, failing to generate substantial engagement outside of the inauthentic amplification that we have identified, the researchers said. What makes this campaign stand out among past information operations linked to China is the involvement of a public relations firm, Mandiant said. The report didnt directly link any of the inauthentic activity to the Chinese government. The public relations firm, Shanghai Haixun Technology Co., hosted the domains used in the campaign, according to Mandiant, though researchers couldnt determine if the Chinese firm was aware of the full extent of the propaganda effort. On its website, Haixun offers content creation for positive energy geared toward English-speaking audiences. It purports to offer content creation in over 40 different languages. A representative for Haixun said Mandiants claims were nonsense and that the campaign described in the cybersecurity firms report didnt exist. Haixun was just a media distribution platform that worked with Chinese companies, the representative said when reached by phone. Chinas government has repeatedly denied claims it was behind cybersecurity attacks, saying the US was a bigger violators. We do know now that the private sector is involved to some extent in this game, said John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at Mandiant. Even though right now this isnt the most effective program, theyre clearly invested in it, and I think that the geopolitical realities are such that we have to keep a close eye on it. By leveraging a public relations firm to publish inauthentic articles and social media posts, Hultquist said, it gives the perpetrators the ability to obscure their responsibility. I think more and more players are going to rely on firms like this to do these types of operations, he said. (Updates with comment from Adrian Zenz in seventh paragraph.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2022 Bloomberg L.P. Fisher House Foundation awards 500 scholarships to children of military families PR Newswire WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2022 WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Scholarships for Military Children program once again came through for 500 students from military families who were each awarded a $2,000 scholarship grant for the upcoming 2022-23 school year. Fisher House Foundation Scholarships for Military Children recipients gather together to celebrate their awards. "This scholarship, honestly, it means a lot to me, not in just the aspect of lifting a financial burden, but also it keeps me motivated and reminds me of what my parents and so many other Americans choose to do," said scholarship recipient Amber Bishop. The program, created in 2001, recognizes the contributions of military families to the readiness of the fighting force and celebrates the commissaries' role in enhancing the military's quality of life. Fisher House Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps service members and their families, partners with the Defense Commissary Agency to administer the scholarship. "We are grateful for our partnership with the Defense Commissary Agency and all of our generous sponsors who help make this program a success every year," said Marshall Banks, Fisher House Foundation's director of community relations. No government funds are used to support the Scholarships for Military Children program. Commissary vendors, manufacturers, brokers, suppliers, and the general public donate to fund the program. Sponsors for the 2022-23 scholarship program are: At the four-star level, donating $50,000 to $199,999: 522 Foundation, Inc.; Major General Harry Greene AUSA Aberdeen Chapter; Procter & Gamble Company; PwC Charitable Foundation; and Synchrony Foundation. At the two-star level, donating $10,000 to $24,999: Dollar Shave Club, a Unilever brand; Simon and Merrilee Engel; The Hershey Company; Elissa Koff; Stephanie Larson; Padres Foundation; William and Helen Sherman. At the one-star level, donating $2,000 to $9,999: Anonymous; Maj. Gen. Susan Y. Desjardins, USAF (Ret.) and Peter D. Lennon; Elite Brands; Estate of Edwin H. Erland; General Mills; Robert and Tara Indresano; In memory of Roy V. Kinion, Jr.; Lt. Col. Ronald Mattana, USAF (Ret.); Capt. Victor and Mrs. Carol Palmucci, USN (Ret.); Patricia Stenzel Story continues Overseas Service Corp. and Webco Services Co. also supported the Scholarships for Military Children program. Businesses, organizations, and individuals interested in sponsoring the 2023-24 scholarships can contact sthomas@fisherhouse.org. To read the full wrap up of the 2022-23 scholarship program go to https://bit.ly/3b9r92d. More info about Fisher House Foundation's scholarship programs including the Scholarships for Military Children, Heroes' Legacy Scholarship, and an interactive scholarship search engine, can be found at https://fisherhouse.org/programs/scholarship-programs/ . About Fisher House Fisher House Foundation is best known for its network of 92 comfort homes where military and veteran families can stay at no cost while a loved one is receiving treatment. These homes are located at major military and VA medical centers nationwide, and in Europe, close to the medical center or hospital they serve. Fisher Houses have up to 21 suites, with private bedrooms and baths. Families share a common kitchen, laundry facilities, a warm dining room and an inviting living room. Fisher House Foundation ensures that there is never a lodging fee. Since inception, the program has saved military and veteran families an estimated $547 million in out-of-pocket costs for lodging and transportation. Fisher House Foundation also operates the Hero Miles Program, using donated frequent flyer miles to bring family members to the bedside of injured service members as well as the Hotels for Heroes program using donated hotel points to allow family members to stay at hotels near medical centers without charge. The Foundation also manages an awards program recognizing programs that support military and veteran communities and scholarship funds for military children, spouses, and children of fallen and disabled veterans. www.fisherhouse.org The Fisher House program provides a "home away from home" for families of patients receiving medical care at major military and VA medical centers. The homes provide temporary free lodging so families can be close to their loved ones during a medical crisis. www.fisherhouse.org (PRNewsfoto/Fisher House Foundation) Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fisher-house-foundation-awards-500-scholarships-to-children-of-military-families-301600048.html SOURCE Fisher House Foundation SINGAPORE, Aug. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Fullerton Health Corporation Limited ("Fullerton Health" or the "Company") announced today that it has completed a merger led by RRJ Capital ("RRJ") involving an equity injection by the private equity firm and a senior loan totalling S$390 million. The merger delivers a stronger balance sheet and a new capital structure which will propel post-pandemic growth opportunities for the pan-Asian healthcare provider. Fullerton Health office at 6 Raffles Boulevard, Marina Square. Singapore-headquartered Fullerton Health said the merger has been legally completed under the laws of Cayman Islands where it is registered, after having received approval by 85.8% of shareholders on 5 May 2022. The merger involved the combination of Fullerton Healthcare Corporation Limited with Fullerton Health and the latter continuing as the surviving entity. RRJ has subscribed for S$140 million of new ordinary shares in Fullerton Health, while the Company has entered into a senior loan facility agreement for S$250 million with three reputable banks. RRJ's existing perpetual securities and convertible preference shares have been cancelled and offset against S$180 million worth of new shares issued by Fullerton Health, as well as subordinated debt and cash. Following the merger, RRJ is now the majority shareholder of the Company. The remaining stakes are held by shareholders, such as Ping An Capital, who have elected to rollover. Founded by the brothers Richard and Charles Ong who have extensive corporate and private equity experience globally, Asia-based RRJ has over US$15 billion of long-term capital under management. A new nine-member board of directors ("the Board") will be set up for Fullerton Health, comprising three new directors, Mr. Charles Ong, Ms. Vivian Lam and Mr. Alex Yeung, and the following directors from the previous board: Independent Chairman Mr. Michael Lim, Independent Director Dr. Teh Kok Peng, Group CEO and Executive Director Mr. Ho Kuen Loon ("Mr Ho"), and Directors Mr. Richard Ong, Mr. John Batchelor and Mr. Wang Lin. Story continues David Sin of SIN Capital and two other co-founders, Dr Michael Tan and Dr Daniel Chan will no longer be involved with the Board. The two doctors reached a Settlement Agreement with the Company last month. The merger will allow the Company to cut borrowings substantially, increase working capital, and have more flexibility to raise funds. Fullerton Health operates in nine markets with a strong presence in Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. It owns over 550 facilities and has more than 6,000 employees. Fullerton Health's revenue crossed S$800 million for the financial year ended 31 December 2021, with healthy EBITDA margin at mid-teens and net profits. Mr. Michael Lim, said, "The successful merger marks a fresh and exciting new chapter. It positions the Company on a much stronger foundation to implement growth strategies. The pandemic has disrupted the healthcare sector in many ways and opened up opportunities for a proven regional operator such as Fullerton Health to seize them." Mr. Lim added, "We welcome Mr. Charles Ong, Ms. Vivan Lam and Mr. Alex Yeung to the Board; we are confident their experience and counsel will bring the Company to greater heights. The new Board, along with RRJ, intend to give their full support to the management team, led by our Group CEO and Executive Director, Mr Ho Kuen Loon, as we navigate the road ahead." Mr. Ho said, "The combination of our business operations and track record, along with RRJ's strong backing, will grant us much greater funding flexibility to manifest our vision to deliver affordable and accessible healthcare for all. We remain committed to serving our clients and patients. We have an ambitious plan to grow Fullerton Health through strengthening our fundamentals, deepening in our core markets in Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia, expanding into new markets, innovating new service and product lines, as well as digitalization." "The merger aligns the interests of all stakeholders who can now work more cohesively to capture the new opportunities in the post-pandemic healthcare sector in the region. This will allow us to fulfil our corporate mission and potential and thereby enhance value for all shareholders," RRJ's Richard Ong said. BofA Securities acted as the sole financial advisor to Fullerton Health. About Fullerton Health Fullerton Health is a leading integrated health system in the Asia Pacific region. Founded in Singapore in 2010, today the Company serves clients through over 550 owned healthcare facilities and a large global network of healthcare providers across nine markets in Asia Pacific. Fullerton Health's value proposition is the integration of healthcare service offerings with customized management and advisory capabilities, in line with its purpose to deliver affordable and accessible care for all in Asia Pacific. For more information on Fullerton Health, please visit http://www.fullertonhealth.com/ About RRJ Capital RRJ Capital is an Asian-based private equity firm with offices in Singapore and Hong Kong with over US$15 billion assets under management. Its founders Richard Ong was ex-Head of Investment Banking Asia Ex-Japan of Goldman Sachs, and Charles Ong was ex-Senior Managing Director at Temasek Holdings Limited. Both of them have extensive corporate and private equity experience globally. Richard Ong is also a non-executive, non-independent director of Fullerton Health. Fullerton Health (PRNewsfoto/Intellicare Group) SOURCE Fullerton Health Corporation Limited G2 Goldfields Inc. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES TORONTO, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- G2 Goldfields Inc. (G2 or the Company) (TSXV:GTWO; OTCQX:GUYGF) is pleased to announce that it has completed the second tranche and final tranche of the non-brokered private placement announced by the Company on June 22, 2022 and later upsized on June 29, 2022 (the Offering). The Company raised a total of $13,370,019.60 pursuant to the Offering. The first tranche of the Offering closed on July 15, 2022 and consisted of 19,733,401 common shares of the Company (the Shares) at a price of $0.60 per Share, for gross proceeds of $11,840,040.60. The second tranche consisted of 2,549,965 Shares at a price of $0.60 per Share, for gross proceeds of $1,529,979. The proceeds from the Offering will be used to advance exploration activities at the Companys 19,200-acre OKO project, Guyana and for general corporate purposes. The Offering is conditional on the satisfaction of customary conditions, including final approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. All of the Shares sold pursuant to the second tranche of the Offering are subject to a hold period which will expire on November 30, 2022 in accordance with applicable Canadian securities laws. Early Warning Disclosure In connection with the closing of the second tranche of the Offering, Patrick Sheridan, Executive Chairman of the Company, purchased 1,700,000 Shares for an aggregate subscription price of $1,020,000. Prior to the closing of the second tranche, Mr. Sheridan had ownership and control (together with any joint actors) over an aggregate of 38,144,074 Shares (which represented approximately 26.9% of the then issued and outstanding Shares) and convertible securities entitling him to acquire an additional 3,250,000 Shares (which represented approximately 29.2% of the Shares on a partially diluted basis). Following the closing of the Offering, Mr. Sheridan has ownership and control (together with any joint actors) over an aggregate of 39,844,074 Shares (which represents approximately 24.3% of the issued and outstanding Shares), and convertible securities entitling him to acquire an additional 3,250,000 Shares representing approximately 26.1% of the Shares on a partially diluted basis. Story continues The Shares were acquired by Mr. Sheridan for investment purposes. Depending on various factors including, without limitation, the Companys financial position, the price levels of the Shares, conditions in the securities markets and general economic and industry conditions, the Companys business or financial condition and other factors and conditions Mr. Sheridan deems appropriate, Mr. Sheridan may increase or decrease his beneficial ownership of Shares or other securities of the Company whether in the open market, by privately negotiated agreement or otherwise. The Company is located at 141 Adelaide Street West, Suite 1101, Toronto, Ontario, M5H 3L5. A copy of the Early Warning Report can be obtained from Mr. Sheridan (416.628.5904) or c/o 141 Adelaide Street West, Suite 1101, Toronto, Ontario, M5H 3L5 or on the Companys SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. About G2 Goldfields Inc. The G2 Goldfields team is comprised of professionals who have been directly responsible for the discovery of millions of ounces of gold in Guyana as well as the financing and development of the Aurora Gold Mine, Guyanas largest gold mine. G2 recently announced its maiden mineral resource estimate on the newly discovered Oko property in Guyana (see press release dated April 25, 2022), and has recently filed on SEDAR an independent technical report entitled NI 43-101 Technical Report and Mineral Resource Estimate for the Oko Gold Property, Cooperative Republic of Guyana, South America, with an effective date of April 14, 2022. Highlights of the report include: 974,000 oz. Au Inferred Mineral Resource contained within 3,274,000 tonnes @ 9.25 g/t Au; and 220,000 oz. Au Indicated Mineral Resource contained within 793,000 tonnes @ 8.63 g/t Au. Significantly, all of the maiden mineral resources lie within 350 meters of surface and remain open down plunge. The Oko district has been a prolific alluvial goldfield since its initial discovery in the 1870s, and modern exploration techniques continue to reveal the considerable potential of the district. All scientific and technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Dan Noone (CEO of G2 Goldfields Inc.), a qualified person within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Noone (B.Sc. Geology, MBA) is a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists. For further information please contact: Dan Noone CEO +1.416.628.5904 Email: news@g2goldfields.com Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements about the Offering, the proposed use of proceeds and approval of the final TSX Venture Exchange. Wherever possible, words such as may, will, should, could, expect, plan, intend, anticipate, believe, estimate, predict or potential or the negative or other variations of these words, or similar words or phrases, have been used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements reflect managements current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management as at the date hereof. Forward-looking statements involve significant risk, uncertainties and assumptions. Many factors could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results discussed or implied in the forward-looking statements. These factors should be considered carefully and readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, the Company cannot assure readers that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Kenneth Research Key Companies Covered in the Global Ostomy Market Research Report by Kenneth Research are Coloplast Corp., Hollister Incorporated, B. Braun Melsungen AG, ConvaTec, Inc., Salts Healthcare Ltd., Welland Medical Limited, Alcare Co., Ltd., Cymed Micro Skin, Marlen Manufacturing & Development Company, Torbot Group, Inc., and other key market players. New York, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The number of the geriatric population, i.e., adults of 60 years of age and older, is growing, as per the data from the World Health Organization. Globally, 1 billion people were 60 years of age or older in 2019. By 2030, this number is projected to reach 1.4 billion, and by 2050, it is estimated to reach 2.1 billion. Kenneth Research has published a detailed market report on Global Ostomy Market which includes the ongoing industry innovations and recent trends being adopted by the major industry players to achieve their business targets. Apart from that, the inclusive data on market size, growth rate, market revenue share, growth opportunities and challenges for the market players along with worldwide analysis on five major regions North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa have been provided in the report. It was noted that in the year 2020, 310 million major surgeries were performed annually throughout the world. Recent medical data suggests that over 80% of the patients undergo surgery for Crohns disease. Ostomy is considered to improve the quality of life among patients diagnosed with Crohns disease. The global ostomy market is estimated to garner approximately USD 5 billion in revenue by 2031, by growing at a CAGR of nearly 5% over the forecast period, i.e., 2022 2031. The growth of the market can majorly be attributed to rise in geriatric population, and increasing prevalence of inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease of the colon. In 2019 alone the total number of Crohn's disease patients identified with symptoms of diarrhea was roughly 60%, while around 55% complained of abdominal cramps. Additionally, rise in number of cases of several cancers, such as intestinal cancer, colorectal, bladder, and urinary tract cancer are increasing the demand for ostomy care. Recent report suggests over 2% of new cancer cases diagnosed annually in the US were stomach cancers. Globally, the number of stomach cancers stood at 1,091,105 approximately in 2020. Additionally, as per the WHO reports, total number of colon and rectum cancers worldwide in 2020 were recorded at 1.93 million. Furthermore, increasing disposable income per capita, and technological advancements in ostomy care products are also predicted to boost the global ostomy market during the forecast period. For instance, in 2020, the global disposable income per capita was USD 8,784. Story continues Get Sample Copy of This Report @ https://www.kennethresearch.com/sample-request-10070555 Moreover, government and NGO initiatives towards awareness generation pertaining to ostomy care are creating novel opportunities. Additionally, increasing healthcare expenditure in global GDP is expected to drive the market growth. According to the data by The World Bank, in 2019, global health expenditure accounted to 9.831% of the GDP. Additionally, upsurge in the number of cases of cancer deaths among the global population is another factor to contribute significantly in the growth of the global ostomy market. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 10 million people died of cancer across the globe in 2020. Regionally, the global ostomy market is segmented into five major regions including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa. The market in Europe region is estimated to witness significant growth over the forecast period. This growth can be accredited to the growing incidence of chronic bowel diseases. For instance, in 2020 there were more than 500,000 cases of inflammatory bowel disease in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, high adoption of technologically advanced products in the region, increasing healthcare expenditure, and growing R&D activities by companies to develop products that improve patient comfort in the European market are also driving the growth of the market in the region. Improved funding for ostomy device market players in Europe is also expected to fortify market growth in the region. In October 2021 Irish capital investor BGF allotted USD 3.06 million equity investment to Ostoform which specializes in surgical seals for ostomy patients. To Gain More Insights into the Global Ostomy Market Analysis, Browse the Summary of the Research Report @ https://www.kennethresearch.com/report-details/ostomy-market/10070555 On the other hand, the North America region is expected to hold the second-largest market for ostomy care on the back of growing geriatric population, increasing investments in research operations, and rising pool of patients with intestinal disorders in the region. Additionally, out-of-pocket spending per person in the region has been rising quickly over the past few years, and it is anticipated that this trend will continue during the forecast period. An out-of-pocket expense is a payment, which is to be made with ones own money even if he or she is reimbursed. It could be a business expense, such as paying for a flight that is reimbursed by ones employer, or a health expense that goes toward ones health insurance deductible. According to the data by The World Bank, in 2018, the out-of-pocket expenditure per capita was USD 1144.16 and it increased to USD 1185.77 in 2019. Hence, this is estimated to be a significant factor to fuel the market growth in the North America region. The study further incorporates Y-O-Y growth, demand & supply and forecast future opportunity in North America (U.S., Canada), Europe (U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Belgium, Netherlands & Luxembourg, NORDIC [Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark], Poland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Rest of Latin America), Asia-Pacific (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Rest of Asia-Pacific), Middle East and Africa (Israel, GCC [Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman], North Africa, South Africa, Rest of Middle East and Africa). Request a Sample PDF of Global Ostomy Market @ https://www.kennethresearch.com/sample-request-10070555 The global ostomy market is segmented on the basis of product into bags and accessories. Out of these, the bags segment is anticipated to hold the largest share in the market by the end of 2031. The growth of this segment can be majorly accredited to the high demand for ostomy bags on the back of rise in obesity and diabetes among the population, both in young and adult. The bags segment is further segmented into colostomy bags, ileostomy bags, urostomy bags, and others, out of which, the colostomy bags segment is estimated to witness the highest growth over the forecast period. The growth of the segment is attributed to the rising incidence of colon cancer, stomach cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in developed and developing countries, in which colostomy bags are most commonly used. For instance, lung cancer, which caused 1.80 million deaths, colon and rectum cancer caused death of 916,000 patients, 830,000 deaths from liver cancer, 769,000 deaths from stomach cancer, and 685,000 deaths from breast cancer were the most frequent causes of cancer-related mortality. Furthermore, the global ostomy market is segmented based on end user into hospitals, specialty clinics, ambulatory surgical centers, and home care settings. Out of these, the hospitals segment is anticipated to hold a substantial market share over the forecast period on the back of increasing awareness in healthcare and increasing diagnosis rate, which result in increased hospital admissions, and improved health expenditure per capita among the global population. According to The World Bank, as of 2019, current health expenditure per capita among the global population was USD 1,121.97. Enquiry before Buying This Report @ https://www.kennethresearch.com/sample-request-10070555 Some of the prominent players and their company profiling mentioned in the report include Coloplast Corp., Hollister Incorporated, B. Braun Melsungen AG, ConvaTec, Inc., Salts Healthcare Ltd., Welland Medical Limited, Alcare Co., Ltd., Cymed Micro Skin , Marlen Manufacturing & Development Company, Torbot Group, Inc., and others. The profiling enfolds growth opportunities, challenges, market trends, competitive analysis and positioning, along with the strategies used by them to stay ahead of their competitors. Browse More Related Reports: Cholera Vaccine Market Segmentation by Type (Killed, Whole-Cell Oral Cholera Vaccines, Other Oral Cholera Vaccines); by Product (Dukoral, Shanchol, Vaxchora, Euvichol, and Others)-Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2030 Genomics in Cancer Care Market Segmentation by Type (Consumables, Services, and Instruments); by Application (Personalized Medicines, Diagnostics, Drug Discovery & Development, and Others); by Technology {Microarray, Genome Sequencing, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), and Others}; by End Users (Hospitals, Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology, Research Institutes, and Others)-Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2031 Myasthenia Gravis (MG) Disease Market Segmentation by Treatment [(Medication (Cholinesterase, Inhibitors, Corticosteroids, and Immunosuppressant), Surgery, Therapy (Thymectomy, Monoclonal Antibody, Plasmapheresis, and Intravenous immunoglobulin), and Others)]; and by End-Users (Hospitals, Clinics, Retail Pharmacies, and Others)-Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2031 Hematologic Malignancies Therapeutics Market Segmentation by Disease Condition (Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Myeloma); by Therapy (Chemotherapy, Immunotherapy, Targeted Therapy, and Others); and by End Users (Hospitals, Medical Stores, and Online Pharmacies)-Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2031 Geriatric Medicines Market Segmentation by Indication (Cardiovascular, Arthritis, Diabetes, Neurological, Cancer, Osteoporosis, Respiratory, and Others); by Drug Class (Analgesic, Antihypertensive, Statins, Antidiabetic, Proton Pump Inhibitor, Anticoagulant, Antipsychotic, and Antidepressant); by Route of Administration (Oral, Parenteral, and Others); and by End-Users (Hospitals, Homecare, Specialty Clinics, and Others)-Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2031 About Kenneth Research Kenneth Research is a leading service provider for strategic market research and consulting. We aim to provide unbiased, unparalleled market insights and industry analysis to help industries, conglomerates and executives to take wise decisions for their future marketing strategy, expansion and investment, etc. We believe every business can expand to its new horizon, provided a right guidance at a right time is available through strategic minds. Our out of box thinking helps our clients to take wise decision so as to avoid future uncertainties. Contact for more Info: AJ Daniel Email: info@kennethresearch.com U.S. Phone: +1 313 462 0609 Web: https://www.kennethresearch.com/ By Trend ?brahim Kalin, the Turkish presidential spokesman and chief foreign policy advisor, met with Jason Crow, a member of the House of Representatives to discuss the bilateral relations, regional developments and joint counterterrorism efforts, Trend reports citing Hurriyet Daily News. Jason Crow paid a visit to the Turkish capital on Aug. 2 to hold talks with Kalin at the presidential compound. U.S. Ambassador to Turkiye Jeff Flake attended the meeting as well. Kalin and Crow discussed bilateral economic and political relations, cooperation in the field of the defense industry and other top issues of the common agenda. According to the Turkish media, Kalin underlined the importance of the ties between Turkiye and the U.S., stressing that this relationship can further be improved if the restrictions on economic and defense industry cooperation are lifted. He expressed Ankaras satisfaction over the U.S. administration support for Turkiyes request to purchase 40 new F-16 warplanes and 79 modernization kits for its existing fleets, asking a similar approach from the Congress as well. Although the administration greenlights the sale of these warplanes, the Congress should approve the contract. A recent amendment on an annual defense bill obliges the administration to prove to Congress that this sale to Turkiye is in the U.S. interest and that these planes wont be used against Greece. The two men also elaborated on the situation in Ukraine, particularly the recently brokered grain deal that will pave the way for Russia and Ukraine to export their food products to the world market to avoid a major food crisis. Crow described the deal as an important step to resolve the global food crisis, drawing attention to the crucial role of Turkiye in this process. Kal?n, for his part, emphasized that this deal between the two sides can help them to establish an environment of confidence for the resumption of peace talks. Turkiye continues its efforts to this end, he added. On the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, Turkiye will continue to prioritize peace and stability in the region but without making concessions from its national interests and legitimate rights, Kal?n said. He also mentioned the ongoing normalization process with Armenia and demanded the support of the international community to this joint effort by Ankara and Yerevan. The presidential advisor also stressed that Turkiyes fight against all sorts of terror will continue without making any distinction between PKK/YPG/PYD and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) which threaten the territorial integrity of Syria and the national security of Turkiye. Harvia Oyj Harvia Plc press release 4 August 2022 at 1:00 p.m. EET Harvia will publish its half-year financial report for the period of JanuaryJune 2022 on Thursday, 11 August 2022 at around 09:00 a.m. Finnish time. The stock exchange release and the presentation material will be available after publishing at https://harviagroup.com/investor-relations/ . Harvia will hold a webcast for analysts, investors and media on 11 August 2022 at 11:00 a.m. EET. The conference will be held in English. Harvias CEO Tapio Pajuharju and CFO Ari Vesterinen will host the event. The webcast can be followed at https://harvia.videosync.fi/2022-q2-results/ You can also participate in the conference by calling: Finland: +358 981 710 310 Sweden: +46 856 642 651 UK: +44 333 300 0804 US: +1 631 913 1422 PIN: 71569480# A recording of the webcast will be available later at the companys website https://harviagroup.com/investor-relations/ . HARVIA PLC For further information, please contact: CFO Ari Vesterinen, ari.vesterinen@harvia.com, tel. +358 40 505 0440 Harvia is one of the leading companies operating in the sauna and spa market globally, as measured by revenue. Harvias brands and product portfolio are well known in the market, and the companys comprehensive product portfolio strives to meet the needs of the international sauna and spa market of both private and professional customers. Harvias revenue totaled EUR 179.1 million in 2021, of which 79% came from outside Finland. Harvia Group employs more than 800 professionals in Finland, China and Hong Kong, Romania, Austria, United States, Germany, Estonia and Russia. The company is headquartered in Muurame, Finland, adjacent to its largest sauna and sauna component manufacturing facility. Read more: https://harviagroup.com Irwin Naturals Company announces licensing agreement with Entourage Brands for Canadian distribution of cannabis products LOS ANGELES, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Irwin Naturals Inc. (CSE: IWIN) (OTC: IWINF) (FRA: 97X) (Irwin or the Company), whose herbal supplements are already available in in 100,000 stores in North America, has reached a licensing agreement with Entourage Health Corp. (TSX-V:ENT) (OTCQX:ETRGF) (FSE:4WE), a Canadian producer and distributor of award-winning cannabis products, through its wholly owned subsidiary Irwin Naturals Cannabis, Inc. Under this exclusive arrangement, Irwin Naturals famous brand will be enhanced with cannabis and made available to dispensaries across Canada in a line of softgels in five different varieties: CBD, THC and three additional formulations that include both THC and another cannabinoid. Klee Irwin, CEO of Irwin Naturals said, Weve set out to become the first household brand to have its products available on dispensary shelves across America. This partnership with Entourage takes that plan international, pairing our trusted, proven herbal supplement business with a cutting-edge cannabis company to open a new frontier in our business. Entourages sustainable growth hub and its state-of-the-art extraction practices make it the perfect company to provide an array of new cannabis products for the customers who have come to love and trust Irwin Naturals over the past 28 years. George Scorsis, CEO and Executive Chairman, Entourage, Irwin Naturals needs no introduction. The history of its products, the loyalty theyve inspired, speak for themselves in health and wellness. Adding our expertise in the cannabis space creates a game-changing pairing that will put the Irwin Naturals brand on dispensary shelves all across Canada. Third-party data1 estimates the Canadian market for edibles and other alternative cannabis products to be worth C$2.7 billion annually. Cannabis alternatives were legalized in October 2019, offering more discreet and accessible alternative such as edibles that avoid the stigma that can be attached to smoking. Story continues This line of Irwin Naturals cannabis products will be offered as softgels that utilize hempseed oil and medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs). There will be five different formulations: THC (10 mg THC), CBD (25 mg CBD), 1:1 (10 mg CBD, 10 mg THC), 5:1 (50 mg CBD, 10 mg THC) and a 2:1 formulation that combines THC and the cannabinoid CBN (10 mg THC, 5 mg CBN). Entourage is one of the largest cannabis processors in Canada, and its most recent quarterly report was its strongest operating performance to date. It fulfilled some of its largest orders with exemplary delivery rates. In May, Entourage announced the debut of TeaPot, a cannabis-infused iced-tea beverage developed in conjunction with the Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams and Twisted Tea. Irwin Naturals was founded in 1994 and its best-in-class nutraceuticals have built it into a brand that is now recognized in 80 percent of American households.2 It has operated profitably for the past 27 years,3 and it is now seeking to use the equity and power of that brand in emerging markets like cannabis and psychedelic mental-health clinics. Irwin Naturals first entered into the cannabis industry in 2018 when it began infusing hemp-based CBD into its herbal supplements available in the United States. This year, it began formulating its products with THC with the goal of becoming the first household brand to have its products available in all 38 states where cannabis is currently legal. Because cannabis is not legal at the federal level in the United States, Irwin Naturals has gone state by state, reaching licensing agreements with cannabis manufacturers. It has already announced agreements in California, Colorado, Ohio and New Mexico. This agreement with Entourage in Canada means that Irwin Naturals cannabis products will achieve not just national, but international distribution. About Irwin Naturals Irwin Naturals has been a household name and best-in-class herbal supplement formulator since 1994. It is now leveraging its brand to enter into both the cannabis and psychedelic industries. On a mission to heal the world with plant medicine, Irwins growing portfolio of products is available in more than 100,000 retail doors across North America where nearly 100 million people know the Irwin Naturals brand.4 In 2018, the Company first leveraged its brand to expand into the cannabis industry by launching hemp-based CBD products into the mass market. The Company is now leveraging its famous halo of brand trust with an objective to become one of the first household name brands to offer THC-based products and psychedelic mental health treatment. Irwin Naturals became a publicly traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) in August 2021. The Companys shares began to be traded on the OTCQB Venture Market in November 2021. More information on the Companys stock can be found via Bloomberg as well as the Wall Street Journal. Klee Irwin _______________________ Klee Irwin Chief Executive Officer T:310-306-3636 investors@irwinnaturals.com IR Information For investor-related information, please visit ir.irwinnaturals.com/, call (800) 883-4851, or email Investors@IrwinNaturals.com. Press Contact Irwin Naturals Investor Relations Cassandra Bassanetti-Drumm T: 310-306-3636 investors@irwinnaturals.com Forward-Looking Information This news release contains certain forward-looking statements that reflect the current views and/or expectations of management of the Company with respect to performance, business and future events. Forward-looking statements can often be identified by words such as "may", "will", "would", "could", "should", "believes", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "expects", "plans", "intends", "anticipates", "targeted", "continues", "forecasts", "designed", "goal", objective, or the negative of those words or other similar or comparable words. Forward-looking statements are based on the then-current expectations, beliefs, assumptions, estimates and forecasts about the business and the industry and markets in which the Company operates. Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements related to information concerning the ability of the Company to perform the terms of the transaction referenced herein; the receipt of all necessary approvals, including regulatory approvals; expectations for other economic, market, business and competitive factors; and the Company actually entering into and doing business in the U.S. cannabis and psychedelics markets. Except for (i) the License and Supply Agreement announced herein and (ii) the other license and supply deals entered into referenced herein (with The Hive Laboratory, LLC, as described in the Companys April 19, 2022 press release; with Assurance Laboratories as described in the Companys May 13, 2022 press release; with BeneLeaves Ltd. as described in the Companys May 24, 2022 press release; Larsen Group II LLC as described in the Companys May 20, 2022 press release), the Company does not have any other active operations or agreements with respect to the entrance into the THC and/or cannabis markets. The potential entrance by the Company into these new business segments are in their preliminary stages and may be subject to approval from the board of directors of the Company as well as any regulatory approval, including that of the Canadian Securities Exchange. These statements are based on numerous assumptions that are believed by management to be reasonable in the circumstances, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including without limitation: board and regulatory approval, including the approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange; Irwin being able to acquire and/or enter into business relationships to enter into these new markets; the Company obtaining the required licenses; and changes to regulations and laws regarding cannabis or psychedelics. Further information on the regulatory environment and risks will be contained in future disclosures. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from that which are expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions which are difficult to predict. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information, which are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The Company does not undertake any obligation to release publicly any revisions for updating any voluntary forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable securities law. Neither the CSE nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. __________________ 1 Nurturing New Growth: Canada Gets Ready for Cannabis 2.0, Deloitte. 2 Consumer brand recognition information is based on a formal Company survey with a sample size of 500 randomly selected adults. 3 Under several corporate structures, Klee Irwin has operated the Irwin brand profitably since 1994, as measured by EBITDA adjusted for extraordinary costs. 4 Consumer brand recognition information is based on a formal Company survey with a sample size of 500 randomly selected adults. FILE PHOTO: The logo of Korean Airlines is seen on a B787-9 plane at its aviation shed in Incheon, South Korea SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's Korean Air Lines and Asiana Airlines are cancelling flights to Taiwan for one or two days because of Chinese military exercises in the area, local media reported on Thursday, Korean Air canceled flights between Incheon and Taiwan on Friday and Saturday, while Asiana Airlines canceled Friday's direct flight to Taiwan and will monitor the situation, news agency News1 and other local media reported. Spokespeople for Korean Air and Asiana could not be immediately reached. China launched unprecedented live-fire military drills in six areas that ring Taiwan on Thursday, a day after a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the self-ruled island that Beijing regards as its sovereign territory. (Reporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel) Straits Research - Market Research Strategy | Strategy Consulting | Business Research | Business Consulting | Market Research The global luxury pen market size was valued at USD 2,290 million in 2021. It is estimated to reach an expected value of USD 3,800 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 5% during the forecast period (20222030). Europe is the world's largest market for luxury pens and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 4.6% during the forecast period. New York, United States , Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A luxury pen is a high-end product with distinct qualities that can be adapted to the user's needs. It can be found in a variety of styles and colors. The demand for luxury pens has surged in recent years. Due to greater per capita wealth, the need for a luxury pen has outpaced the market for a standard pen. Rising disposable income and changing trends also affect the global luxury pens market. Additionally, extensive research and development and new product development provide immense potential for the global luxury pens market. Get a Free Sample Copy of This Report @ https://straitsresearch.com/report/luxury-pen-market/request-sample Rising Disposable Income and Changing Trends Stimulate the Demand for Luxury Pens The increasing discretionary income of individuals worldwide, particularly in developing countries, can be attributed to the growing global luxury pen market. After deducting taxes and other necessary expenses, disposable income is the amount of money left over. This allows individuals to spend or save properly, partly responsible for the increased demand for luxury pens. As disposable income rises worldwide due to lower taxes, lower essential expenses, and other factors, individuals can save a higher proportion of their income for non-essential products and services. Consumers in developing economies can indulge in luxury products as their salaries rise. The increasing demand for luxury goods in developing economies will fuel the future rise of luxury pens. Extensive R&D and New Product Development Create Lucrative Market Opportunities The introduction of a new product with improved characteristics may provide an opportunity for the global luxury pen market to expand. Design innovations and technological adoption can open up new chances for market growth. Manufacturers, for example, can strategically engage in product development by changing luxury pen nibs with platinum and other precious metals or merging the pens with new technological breakthroughs such as tracking systems or data sending devices (where one can transmit anything they write or draw to anywhere in the world). It is anticipated to pave the path for market expansion. Story continues Furthermore, people's need for branded products to boost their self-esteem can contribute to worldwide market growth. With high demand comes high competition. To compete in the domestic and global luxury pen market, players must put in extra effort to increase output and polish their production processes, innovation, and prices. Instead of flooding the market with new items, more emphasis should be placed on improving existing products and expanding the client base. This can be accomplished by encouraging people to purchase luxury pens with lower price tags, which will grow the market. Simultaneously, they must continue to invest in R&D, strategic acquisitions, and collaborations, lest a competitor overtakes them with a revolutionary new product. Report Scope Report Metric Details Market Size USD 3.80 Billion by 2030 CAGR 5% (2020-2030) Historical Data 2019-2020 Base Year 2021 Forecast Period 2022-2030 Forecast Units Value (USD Billion) Report Coverage Revenue Forecast, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors, and Trends Segments Covered By Type, Application, Distribution Channel, and Regions Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, LAME and Rest of the World Key Companies Profiled/Vendors A.T Cross Co. | Caran D'ache | Faber-Castell | Grayson Tighe | Hugo Boss | Jack Row | Montblanc | Conklin Pens | Fisher Space Pen | Bentley Motors | Bespoke British Pens Ltd Key Market Opportunities Extensive R&D and New Product Development to Impede the Market Growth Key Market Drivers Rising Disposable Income and Changing Trends to Boost Market Opportunities Buy Now Full Report @ https://straitsresearch.com/buy-now/luxury-pen-market Regional Insights Europe has the world's largest market for luxury pens and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 4.6% during the forecast period. Europe has maintained its dominance in the luxury pen market, accounting for the lion's total market share. With the increased buying of luxury items worldwide , the demand for luxury pens is also growing. As people in the country become more worried about their image, the need for luxury pens from the European market is projected to climb dramatically. Consumer affluence and expanding disposable incomes have provided profitable prospects for market participants who offer their products throughout the region. North America is the second largest region. It is estimated to reach an expected value of USD 325 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 7.4%. Luxury pens are becoming more popular in North America, owing to a growth in the number of consumers who want to buy luxury pens as collectors, as well as company promotions on luxury pen brands. The luxury pen market in the United States is predicted to expand as vintage pen enthusiasts go deeper into rare and antique pens, generating more significant demand for these high-end pens. Furthermore, more and more festivals are showing pens, increasing collector demand for higher-grade luxury pens . Given the existence of prestigious pen manufacturers in countries such as Japan, China, Hong Kong, and India, Asia-Pacific is predicted to be the fastest-growing region. They make the best luxury pens in the world. Japan, for example, has plants and gear for creating, polishing, and assembling premium pens. They also have many experts who work on the design of luxury pens. These countries' rising middle-class earnings have opened new chances for these established luxury companies. Key Highlights The global luxury pen market size was valued at USD 2,290 million in 2021. It is estimated to reach an expected value of USD 3,800 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 5% during the forecast period (20222030). Based on type, the global luxury pens market is segmented into Ball Point Pens, Converter Pens, Fountain Pens, Roller Ball Pens, Fine Liner Pens, Stylus Pens, Multifunctional Pens, Brush Pens, and Die Pens. Ball Point Pens is known to have the highest market share and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.2% during the forecast period. Based on application, the global luxury pens market is segmented into Calligraphy, Screenwriting, and Document Marking. Document Marking holds the highest market share and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 3.6% during the forecast period. Based on the distribution channel, the global luxury pens market is segmented into Hypermarkets & Supermarkets, Specialty Stores, Online Retail, and Others. Specialty Stores hold the highest market share and are estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5% during the forecast period. Region-wise, the global luxury pen market is segmented into North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and South America. Europe commands the leading position in the global market. Get a Free Sample Copy of This Report @ https://straitsresearch.com/report/luxury-pen-market/request-sample Competitive Players The key players in the global luxury pen market are A.T Cross Co Caran D'ache Faber-Castell Grayson Tighe Hugo Boss Jack Row Montblanc Conklin Pens Fisher Space Pen Bentley Motors Bespoke British Pens Ltd Global Luxury Pens Market: Segmentation By Type Ball Point Pens Converter Pens Fountain Pens Roller Ball Pens Fine Liner Pens Stylus Pens Multifunctional Pens Brush Pens Die Pens By Application Calligraphy Screenwriting Document Marking By Distribution Channel Hypermarket & Supermarket Specialty Stores Online Retail Others By Regions North America Asia-Pacific Europe The Middle East and Africa South America TABLE OF CONTENT 1 Introduction 1.1 Luxury Pen Market Definition 1.2 Luxury Pen Market Scope 2 Research Methodology 2.1 Primary Research 2.2 Research Methodology 2.3 Assumptions & Exclusions 2.4 Secondary Data Sources 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Overview 4.1 Report Segmentation & Scope 4.2 Value Chain Analysis: Luxury Pen Market 4.2.1 Vendor Matrix 4.3 Key Market Trends 4.3.1 Drivers 4.3.2 Restraints 4.3.3 Opportunities 4.4 Porters Five Forces Analysis 4.4.1 Bargaining Power of Suppliers 4.4.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers 4.4.3 Threat of Substitution 4.4.4 Threat of New Entrants 4.4.5 Competitive Rivalry 4.5 Environment & Regulatory Landscape 4.6 Forecast Factors & Relevance of Impact 4.7 Macro-Economic & Geopolitical Scenario 4.8 Parent Market Overview 4.9 Technology Landscape 4.10 Market Share Analysis 4.11 Potential Venture Analysis 4.12 Regional Price Trends 4.13 Raw Material Trends 4.14 Cost Structure Analysis 4.14.1 Labor Cost 4.14.2 Consumables 4.14.3 Maintenance Cost 4.15 Covid-19 Impact Analysis: 4.15.1 Pre and Post Covid-19 Market Scenario Analysis 4.15.2 Market Recovery Timeline and Challenge 4.15.3 Measures Taken by Top Players 4.15.4 Quarterly Market Revenue and Growth Forecast till 2021 4.15.4.1 North America 4.15.4.2 Europe 4.15.4.3 Asia-Pacific 4.15.4.4 Central and South America and the Caribbean 4.15.4.5 The Middle East and Africa 5 Product Type Overview 5.1 Introduction 5.1.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.2 Ball Point 5.2.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.3 Converter 5.3.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.4 Fountain 5.4.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.5 Roller Ball 5.5.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.6 Fine Line 5.6.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.7 Stylus 5.7.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.8 Multifunctional 5.8.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.9 Brush 5.9.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 5.10 Die 5.10.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 6 Application Overview 6.1 Introduction 6.1.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 6.2 Calligraphy 6.2.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 6.3 Screenwriting 6.3.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 6.4 Document Marking 6.4.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 7 Distribution Channels Overview 7.1 Introduction 7.1.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 7.2 Hypermarket and Supermarket 7.2.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 7.3 Speciality Stores 7.3.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 7.4 Online Retail 7.4.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 7.5 Others 7.5.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 8 Regional Overview 8.1 Introduction 8.1.1 Market Size & Forecast (Value & Volume) 8.2 North America 8.2.1 Economic Overview 8.2.2 Market Scenario 8.2.3 U.S. 8.2.4 Canada 8.2.5 Mexico 8.3 Central and South America and the Caribbean 8.3.1 Economic Overview 8.3.2 Market Scenario 8.3.3 Brazil 8.3.4 Argentina 8.3.5 Colombia 8.3.6 Rest of Central and South America and the Caribbean 8.4 Europe 8.4.1 Economic Overview 8.4.2 Market Scenario 8.4.3 Germany 8.4.4 France 8.4.5 The U.K. 8.4.6 Italy 8.4.7 The Rest Of Europe 8.5 Asia-Pacific (APAC) 8.5.1 Economic Overview 8.5.2 Market Scenario 8.5.3 China 8.5.4 Japan 8.5.5 India 8.5.6 Australia 8.5.7 South Korea 8.5.8 Rest Of APAC 8.6 Middle East 8.6.1 Economic Overview 8.6.2 Market Scenario 8.6.3 South Arabia 8.6.4 The UAE 8.6.5 Qatar 8.6.6 Oman 8.6.7 Turkey 8.6.8 The Rest Of Middle East 8.7 Africa 8.7.1 Economic Overview 8.7.2 Market Scenario 8.7.3 Nigeria 8.7.4 South Africa 8.7.5 The Rest Of Africa 9 Competitive Landscape Manufacturers & Suppliers 9.1 Competition Dashboard 9.2 Industry Structure 9.3 A.T Cross Co. 9.3.1 Business Overview 9.3.2 Financial Performance 9.3.3 Recent Developments 9.3.4 Portfolio 9.4 Caran D'ache 9.5 Faber-Castell 9.6 Grayson Tighe 9.7 Hugo Boss 9.8 Jack Row 9.9 Montblanc 9.10 Conklin Pens 9.11 Fisher Space Pen 9.12 Bentley Motors 9.13 Bespoke British Pens Ltd. 10 Conclusion & Recommendation 11 Acronyms & Abbreviations Table of Content and Figure @ https://straitsresearch.com/report/luxury-pen-market/toc Market News In July 2022, Makoba Pens launched Exclusive Boutique for Limited Edition Pens. The new store opened on July 10 at Greater Kailash 1, one of Delhi's most desirable addresses. Mayakoba, with headquarters in Chennai, is a ten-year-old brand of luxury pens in India. In May 2022, Writing and drawing instruments manufacturer Caran d'Ache anchored its presence on its home turf in Switzerland with a new pop-up boutique at Basel SBB railway station. News Media Global Digital Signature Market to Grow at a CAGR of 28% by 2030 Asia-Pacific to Hold Lions Share in the Digitally Printed Wallpaper Market Environmental Concerns Prompting the Increased Use of Kraft Papers Rising Disposable Income and Interest Towards Luxury Writing Products to Drive Market Growth Have a Look at the Related Research Report GPS Tracking Device Market Information by End-user (Automotive, Aerospace & Defense), Technology (Advance Tracker, Standalone Tracker), Type (Data Loggers), and Region Forecast till 2030 Applicant Tracking System Market Information by Component (Software, Service), Deployment (Cloud, On-premise), Organization Size, Verticals (BFSI, Retail), and Regions Forecast till 2030 Vehicle Tracking System Market Information by Type (Passenger and Commercial), Technology (GPS), Component (Software and Hardware), End-User, and Regions-Forecast till 2027 Motion Tracking System Market Information by Type (Ultrasonic, Optical, Magnetic) Application (Wireless, Head, Hand & Finger) End User (Sports, Medical, Military) Region Forecast Till 2026 Recycled Paper Market Information by Application (Newsprint Paper), Source of Collection (Industries, Offices), End-Use Industries (Printing and Paper), and Region Forecast till 2029 About Straits Research Pvt. Ltd. StraitsResearch is a market intelligence company providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision-makers. Straits Research Pvt. Ltd. provides actionable market research data, especially designed and presented for decision making and ROI. Whether you are looking at business sectors in the next town or crosswise over continents, we understand the significance of being acquainted with the clients purchase. We overcome our clients issues by recognizing and deciphering the target group and generating leads with utmost precision. We seek to collaborate with our clients to deliver a broad spectrum of results through a blend of market and business research approaches. For more information on your target market, please contact us below: Phone: +1 646 480 7505 (the U.S.) +91 8087085354 (APAC) +44 208 068 9665 (the U.K.) Email: sales@straitsresearch.com Follow Us: LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Henry Rodriguez from Married at First Sight season 11 and his new gf Henry Rodriguez Henry Rodriguez with his girlfriend Kayla Henry Rodriguez appeared on Married at First Sight's 11th season, which took place in New Orleans and aired in 2020. Though he was married to Christina Crochet at the time, the pair have since divorced. On July 6, season 15 of Married at First Sight premiered on Lifetime, following five San Diego-based couples as the reality of their newly-wed lives together sets in. Here, Rodriguez and his new girlfriend, Kayla, give PEOPLE their recap of Wednesday night's episode. In episode five of Married at First Sight, we watched the couples embark on their honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. There, they learned about sex, love and even identity crises. Here are our thoughts on each couple. Stacia & Nate Married at First Sight Mallory Kessel - Justin + Alexis, Nate + Stacie Madeline Barr Photo - Binh + Morgan, Krysten + Mitch Nick Crespo, Dreamer Photo & Film - Lindy + Miguel Mallory Kessel Stacia and Nate The couple started their first morning in Mexico with breakfast and tequila shots in the hot tub but the tub wasn't the only thing that's hot! This couple definitely has chemistry and we loved seeing it. Nate's ready to take things to the next level physically, but Stacia wants to take things a little slower, sharing that she wants to continue building sexual tension with him. Enjoy it, sis! They headed off to ride ATVs, where Nate was clearly having a good time but it seemed like he wanted to share his experience more with Instagram than he did with his wife. Can Stacia's "IG husband" learn to find the balance she needs? We are happy that Nate is supportive of the postnuptial agreement Stacia brought up over dinner. Stacia seems to be in it for the long-haul, taking on Nate's last name as "Mrs. Barnes" forever. RELATED: Married at First Sight Recap: Rachel Gordillo on Couples' 'Different Dynamics' Ahead of Honeymoons Lindy and Miguel Married at First Sight Mallory Kessel - Justin + Alexis, Nate + Stacie Madeline Barr Photo - Binh + Morgan, Krysten + Mitch Nick Crespo, Dreamer Photo & Film - Lindy + Miguel Nick Crespo, Dreamer Photo & Film Lindy and Miguel Lindy opened up about her past engagement and beliefs on love. She said she believes love is a choice as opposed to Miguel, who believes it's more of a feeling. We love the vulnerability that we are seeing between these two and hope that Miguel will eventually find the feeling he's looking for. Story continues Miguel also shared more about the struggles of his upbringing and his identity crisis, which led to his retreat into comic books and video games. Meanwhile, Lindy spoke about her experience coping with her parents' divorce. It will be interesting to see if these two are able to break their families' cycles. To us, it seemed like Lindy was holding back sexually while Miguel was clearly ready and Miguel was pulling out all the stops! He laid her down by the pool, hopped on top of her, massaged her back and even got a little excited in the process. RELATED: Married at First Sight Season 15 First Look: Meet the New Couples Hoping for Lasting Love Alexis and Justin Married at First Sight Mallory Kessel - Justin + Alexis, Nate + Stacie Madeline Barr Photo - Binh + Morgan, Krysten + Mitch Nick Crespo, Dreamer Photo & Film - Lindy + Miguel Mallory Kessel Alexis and Justin This couple shared multiple kisses as they went horseback riding on the beach. Alexis also revealed that Nate has her "losing control." While Alexis shared her struggle with vulnerability over dinner, Justin proceeded to drop the "L-bomb" even though she wasn't ready to say it back. Justin then got emotional while expressing that Alexis is his dream come true. We wonder if he's coming off too strong, too soon. Thankfully the L-word and Justin's emotional reaction didn't completely scare her away! RELATED: Married at First Sight : Dramatic Teaser Shows Couples Feuding over 'Vindictive' Acts and 'Trust' Issues Krysten and Mitch Married at First Sight Mallory Kessel - Justin + Alexis, Nate + Stacie Madeline Barr Photo - Binh + Morgan, Krysten + Mitch Nick Crespo, Dreamer Photo & Film - Lindy + Miguel Madeline Barr Photo Krysten and Mitch What a rollercoaster. The couple started off paddleboarding and seemed to have a good time. Thankfully, neither of them became a widower during this venture! Krysten later shared her non-negotiable qualities in a relationship: passion and humor. Mitch struggled under the pressure of the experience and consulted his brother about not feeling the physical spark with Krysten. Mitch was encouraged to discuss the issue with Krysten, and he brought it up with her at dinner that evening. Let us just say: Krysten handled that conversation like a champ! Mitch expressed to Krysten that he isn't feeling a sexual attraction and wants things to develop "organically". However, later in the episode, he made a move on Krysten, which confused things further. Krysten's patience seemed to be wearing thin but they both agreed to be open and honest with each other, which we hope will help their relationship. Will their authenticity lead to a deeper romantic connection? Krysten also made it clear that she needs sex or an "I love you" from Mitch, or else she is choosing divorce come Decision Day. Only time will tell for these two! Morgan and Binh Married at First Sight Mallory Kessel - Justin + Alexis, Nate + Stacie Madeline Barr Photo - Binh + Morgan, Krysten + Mitch Nick Crespo, Dreamer Photo & Film - Lindy + Miguel Madeline Barr Photo Morgan and Binh Morgan and Binh met each other's family and friends at the wedding. Everyone seemed to be getting along. The two couple appeared to be getting really cozy on their first night together and Binh expressed that he wouldn't mind a little birthday present when they saw the bowl of condoms next to the bed. It's nice to see the two of them finally married and join the other couples in Mexico. Never miss a story sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories This season is certainly shaping up to be a wild one and we can't wait to see how things play out once the honeymoon is over! Married at First Sight (produced by Kinetic Content) airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Lifetime. Saputo Inc. MONTREAL, Aug. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Saputo Inc. (TSX:SAP) Saputo Inc.'s Annual Meeting of Shareholders will be held in a virtual-only format on Thursday, August 4, 2022, at 10 a.m. (Eastern Time), via live webcast at: https://web.lumiagm.com/427557186. The speakers will be: Mr. Lino A. Saputo, Chair of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Maxime Therrien, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary. Fiscal 2023 First Quarter Results Saputo will release its fiscal 2023 first quarter financial results on Thursday, August 4, 2022. A webcast and conference call will follow at 1:30 p.m. (Eastern Time). The webcast will begin with a short presentation followed by a question and answer period. The speakers will be Mr. Lino A. Saputo, Chair of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer and Mr. Maxime Therrien, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary. To participate: Webcast: https://www.gowebcasting.com/11994 Presentation slides will be included in the webcast and can also be accessed in the Investors section of Saputos website (www.saputo.com), under Calendar of Events. Conference line (audio only): 1-800-705-7067 Please dial-in five minutes prior to the start time. Replay of the conference call and webcast presentation For those unable to join, the webcast presentation will be archived on Saputos website (www.saputo.com) in the Investors section, under Calendar of Events. A replay of the conference call will also be available until Thursday, August 11, 2022, 11:59 p.m. (ET) by dialling 1-800-558-5253 (ID number: 22019666). Investor Inquiries Nicholas Estrela Director, Investor Relations 1-514-328-3117 Media Inquiries 1-514-328-3141 / 1-866-648-5902 media@saputo.com VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / August 4, 2022 / Rockland Resources Ltd. (the "Company" or "Rockland") (CSE:RKL) is pleased to report additional grab sample assay results from the Lithium Butte Property in Juab County, Utah, USA, that show significant beryllium concentrations with values up to 4,810 ppm beryllium. The Lithium Butte Property is located in the Basin and Range geological province of west-central Utah and is interpreted to be significantly prospective for lithium (Li) and beryllium (Be) mineralization hosted in claystone volcanic tuff-breccia units. The Company has staked an additional 27 claims (540 acres) at the Lithium Butte property bringing the total number of claims to 551 claims or 11,020 acres (4,460 ha). Ten grab samples from the property were taken on a reconnaissance sampling program in May, 2022. Three of the grab samples returned significant beryllium concentrations with assays of 4,810 ppm Be, 4,290 ppm Be, and 1,790 ppm Be. These samples also contain anomalous Li with 380 ppm Li, 440 ppm Li, and 402 ppm Li respectively. The Be-mineralized samples were collected from an outcrop of bedded tuff-breccia approximately 340 meters east-southeast of the claystone tuff-breccia samples that contained previously reported high lithium values ranging from 4,080 ppm to 1,200 ppm Li (see press release June 29, 2022). Dr. Richard Sutcliffe, Rockland's President, stated: "Our early work at Lithium Butte is demonstrating that the Property hosts a volcanic formation that has a unique endowment in light metals including lithium and beryllium. This formation exhibits strong similarities with the Miocene Spor Mountain Formation that hosts currently mined Be deposits. Our initial results at Lithium Butte suggests that the Spor Mountain Formation may be more widespread than previously thought and has encouraged Rockland to significantly extend its property position in this region." Company personnel have recently conducted additional sampling from the clay altered rhyolite tuff breccia that returned the lithium assays up to 4,080 ppm lithium . The exposure has a stratigraphic thickness estimated to be greater than 20 meters and contains at least two intervals of claystone mineralization, each of which is several meters in thickness. Channel sampling was conducted across the stratigraphic section and along strike on an exposed dozer road cut. A total of 24 additional samples including 20 channel samples have been submitted to ActLabs laboratory for multi-element analysis using using sodium peroxide fusion and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The geochemical soil sampling program previously announced (see press release July 14, 2022) has been completed, involving approximately 1,000 soil samples taken at 150 meter intervals on east-west lines spaced at 300 meters for a total of 145.5 line-km of sampling, over the entire Lithium Butte property. North American Exploration of Layton, Utah was retained to complete the geochemical soil sampling program. A handheld Laser Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) capable of light metal detection (including lithium and beryllium) has been purchased from SciAps Inc., of Woburn, MA, and is currently being shipped to the property. The soil and rock samples from the property will be scanned using the LIBS instrument to fast-track the identification of anomalous targets, for additional exploration and drill targeting. Idaho based geologist, Travis Fisher is welcomed to the team and will lead the Utah exploration program as Project Manager. The Company is in the process of leasing a house/warehouse in the area to be used by additional Company personnel and contractors, and to serve as a sample preparation/analysis facility. Previous exploration on the Lithium Butte property focused on uranium in the 1950s and late 1970's, and in the 2010-2011 period on beryllium (Be), rubidium (Rb) and rare earths (REE). Lithium values from 2010 of the altered rhyolite tuff breccia returned up to 1690 ppm Li, and anomalous lithium (+300 ppm Li) values in rock and soil samples extend over and area 2.0 kilometres east-west, by 1.0 kilometres north-south. The current soil samples will significantly extend the previous survey area. About Beryllium - Beryllium is a strong, light weight metal with atomic number 4. Beryllium is considered a critical mineral by both the Canadian and US governments. In particular, beryllium is very strong for its weight and is good at holding its shape across a range of temperatures. Beryllium metal is used for lightweight structural components in the defense and aerospace industries including high-speed aircraft, spacecraft and satellites. The metal's characteristics resulted in the recent application of beryllium to construct the mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope. Program QA/QC - Previous and recent sampling on the Lithium Butte Property were carried out by Dr. Richard Sutcliffe, P. Geo., a Qualified Person as defined in NI43-101, who is also responsible for reviewing and approving the geological contents of this news release. Samples were transported in sealed bags by the Project Manager and shipped to Activation Laboratories ("Actlabs") in Ancaster, Ontario. Actlabs is an independent ISO/IEC 17025 certified laboratory. Li analysis will be performed using sodium peroxide fusion and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Rockland has set 800,000 options to directors, officers and consultants of the company at an exercise price of 20 cents for a period of three years in accordance with the company's stock option plan. About Rockland Resources Ltd. Rockland Resources is engaged in the business of mineral exploration and the acquisition of mineral property assets for the benefit of its shareholders. In addition to the Utah Lithium Property, the Company is acquiring the 41,818-hectare Elektra claystone project concessions that are contiguous with Gangfeng Lithium's Sonora Lithium Clay Project located in Sonora, Mexico. The Company also holds an option to earn a 100-per-cent interest in the Cole Gold Mines property, located in Ball township, Red Lake mining division, Ontario. The Cole Property hosts high-grade gold mineralization in a classic Red Lake-type structurally controlled gold deposit environment. On Behalf of the Board of Directors Dr. Richard H. Sutcliffe, P.Geo. President and Director For further information, please contact: Mike England Email: mike@engcom.ca Neither the Canadian Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. Investors are cautioned that these forward looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and, except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and by those made in our filings with SEDAR in Canada (available at WWW.SEDAR.COM). SOURCE: Rockland Resources Ltd. View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/710833/Rockland-Resources-Reports-Significant-Beryllium-Assays-on-The-Lithium-Butte-Claystone-Property-Utah RoslinCT RoslinCT and Lykan Bioscience Combine to Create Leading Advanced Cell Therapy CDMO Combination creates global leader in process development and GMP manufacturing of advanced cell and gene therapies with transatlantic footprint in the US and UK Key leadership, staff and shareholders of both businesses will remain and have reinvested in the new entity, with a shared strategic vision for growth EDINBURGH, UK AND HOPKINTON, MA, 4 August 2022 RoslinCT, a cell and gene therapy Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation (CDMO) developing life-changing therapies in Edinburghs BioQuarter, and Lykan Bioscience (Lykan), an innovative CDMO focused on cell-based therapies, today announce that they have entered into a business combination agreement to form a global leading innovative advanced therapies CDMO. The combined group will offer process development expertise and cGMP manufacturing for a broad range of autologous and allogeneic cell therapies, with unparalleled expertise in gene editing and industry-leading induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (iPSC) capabilities. The group will benefit from significantly expanded capacity, with process and analytical development laboratories and cGMP manufacturing facilities in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Lykan has a 64,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art cell therapy manufacturing facility and innovation/development laboratories with 16 cGMP processing suites running by the end of 2022. Further laboratory and cGMP capacity expansion in Scotland is planned to build on RoslinCTs existing 40,000 sq. ft facilities, including 8 cGMP suites. With demand for high-quality development and manufacturing capacity increasing across the world, this complementary pairing of RoslinCT and Lykan will shorten development and manufacturing timelines for advanced therapy sponsors, facilitating clinical and commercial GMP product release on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier in 2022, Global Healthcare Opportunities, or GHO Capital Partners LLP (GHO), the European specialist investor in global healthcare, announced its investment in RoslinCT. As part of the new agreement, GHO is making a majority investment in Lykan and is backing the funding of the combined entity. WindRose Health Investors, previously the majority owner of Lykan Bioscience, have reinvested in the new combined group along with Lykan Management. Story continues RoslinCT CEO Peter Coleman and Lykan President & CEO Patrick Lucy will remain in their current roles. Together, the new entity will have a global headcount of ~300 employees. Peter Coleman, Chief Executive Officer of RoslinCT said: This combination puts us in a strong position as a leading global CDMO in the process development and manufacturing of advanced cell therapies, and we look forward to working with our new colleagues at Lykan to fuel future growth and meet the increasing demand for innovative therapies. Patrick Lucy, President & Chief Executive Officer of Lykan Bioscience, commented: We are delighted to combine with RoslinCT to better serve the growing demand for manufacturing capacity and expand the range of innovative services we can provide our partners to support the development of advanced cell and gene therapies. The Partners at GHO Capital, said, This is a significant step towards the realisation of our shared ambition for RoslinCT and Lykan to build a leading global CDMO in the development and manufacture of advanced cell therapies. The collaboration represents an important step in the continued growth and internationalisation of the two businesses and we look forward to partnering with the combined Management teams and WindRose Health Investors to realise this vision. CJ Burnes, Partner at WindRose Health Investors, said, Lykan has grown tremendously during our ownership, including completion of their state-of-the art facility and the subsequent doubling of cGMP manufacturing capacity. The combination of RoslinCT and Lykan will further accelerate this growth as it creates a unique platform providing key value-added services to the highly complex segment of advanced cell therapies and we look forward to partnering with GHO, RoslinCT and Lykan Management through this next phase. Advisors Ropes & Gray and Slaughter & May acted as legal advisors to GHO, Alvarez & Marsal as financial and tax advisor, Dark Horse Consulting Group as technical advisor and ERM as ESG advisor. McDermott Will & Emery LLP acted as legal advisor to Lykan, and William Blair & Company served as financial advisor. ENDS About RoslinCT RoslinCT is a leading UK Cell Therapy Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation (CDMO) focused on providing services for companies developing cell-based therapeutic products. Originally founded in 2006 as a spin-out from the Roslin Institute, we built on the broad range of scientific expertise available in the field of cell biology. Based at the Edinburgh BioQuarter, we operate fully licensed GMP manufacturing facilities and have a proven track record in the delivery of cell-based products. For further information, please visit www.roslinct.com. About Lykan Bioscience Lykan Bioscience is an innovative contract development and manufacturing services organization (CDMO) focused on cell-based therapies. With decades of biopharmaceutical industry experience, Lykan offers a full range of development and manufacturing services. The state-of-the-art, purpose-built facility offering eight independent manufacturing suites is uniquely designed to fully integrate cGMP principles and advanced software solutions to enable real-time testing and release of product. Located in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, 25 miles southwest of downtown Boston and in the proximity of four international airports, Lykan Bioscience is ideally situated to deliver life-saving cell therapy treatments to patients on behalf of their partners. Visit www.lykanbio.com About GHO Capital Global Healthcare Opportunities, or GHO Capital Partners LLP, is a leading specialist healthcare investment advisor based in London. We apply global capabilities and perspectives to unlock high growth healthcare opportunities, targeting Pan-European and transatlantic internationalisation to build market leading businesses of strategic global value. Our proven investment track record reflects the unrivalled depth of our industry expertise and network. We partner with strong management teams to generate long-term sustainable value, improving the efficiency of healthcare delivery to enable better, faster, more accessible healthcare. For further information, please visit www.ghocapital.com About WindRose Health Investors WindRose makes equity investments in companies that operate within the services sectors of the healthcare industry. The firm focuses on companies with profitable business models and a demonstrated ability to deliver cost-effective solutions. WindRose manages over $2.6 billion in investments. WindRose is based in New York City. For more information, please email us at info@windrose.com. For Media Enquiries Consilium Strategic Communications Amber Fennell, Matthew Cole Tel: +44 (0) 20 3709 5700 ghocapital@consilium-comms.com Aug 4 (Reuters) - Russia's foreign ministry summoned Norway's ambassador to Moscow on Thursday in protest at what it called the Norwegian consul in Murmansk's "offensive Russophobic comments". Footage on Russian social media showed what it said was the consul appearing to say "I hate Russians". Reuters was unable to immediately verify the footage. Norway's foreign ministry said that it "deeply regrets" the incident. (Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge) (This content was produced in Russia where the law restricts coverage of Russian military operations in Ukraine) MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's central bank on Thursday recommended that the government order state companies to transfer their FX holdings in currencies of countries that have targeted Moscow with sanctions to those of countries that have not. The bank also said it would introduce additional measures aimed at reducing banks' operations in dollars and euros, accelerating a de-dollarisation drive that officials hope can help shield Russia's economy and citizens from some restrictions. Western nations imposed unprecedented sanctions against Russia after it sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, restrictions that have severely restricted Moscow's access to the international economic and global trading systems. Russia calls countries that have deployed sanctions "unfriendly". "It is advisable for non-financial organisations to transfer accumulated foreign currency funds in currencies of unfriendly countries to other countries," the bank said in a financial market report. The central bank has ordered some companies to withhold financial reports. On Thursday, it said it was important to resume publishing financial statements, while minimising sanctions risks. (Reporting by Reuters; Editing by David Holmes) By Trend Recently, suspicious reports of large cash winnings have been spreading on behalf of Azerbaijan Airlines CJSC (AZAL), Trend reports, referring to the statement of AZAL. Such messages, in particular, are sent via messenger, social networks or e-mail. "AZAL urges citizens to be attentive and not to follow up on suspicious links. All official information of AZAL is available on the official website of the airline (www.azal.az), as well as on the company's official social media pages. We also remind that recently, on behalf of AZAL, legal entities and individuals have received various offers of cooperation, employment, etc. Persons engaged in fraud, using the name AZAL, have nothing to do with the airline. AZAL does not bear any responsibility for the promises made on behalf of the airline, coming from unofficial sources. We ask citizens, who have faced such cases, to immediately contact law enforcement agencies," said the company. VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 4, 2022 /CNW/ - Stuhini Exploration Ltd. (the "Company" or "Stuhini") (TSXV: STU) and (OTCPK: STXPF) is pleased to announce that it has closed the first tranche of its non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") previously announced on August 2, 2022 for aggregate gross proceeds to the Company of $1,026,125. Stuhini Exploration Ltd. Logo (CNW Group/Stuhini Exploration Ltd.) Under the first tranche of the Private Placement, the Company has issued a total of 2,142,500 flow-through units of the Company ("FT Units") at a price of $0.45 per FT Unit (the "FT Unit Offering") for total gross proceeds to the Company of $964,125. Each FT Unit consists of one (1) flow-through common share of the Company and one half (1/2) of one common share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, an "FT Warrant"). The FT Units will qualify as "flow-through shares" for the purposes of the Income Tax Act (Canada) (the "Tax Act"). Each FT Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to acquire one common share in the capital of the Company (each, a "Common Share") at a price of $0.60 per Common Share for a period of two years from the date of issuance. The aggregate gross proceeds from the FT Unit Offering will be used to incur "Canadian exploration expenses" which qualify as "flow-through mining expenditures" (within the meaning of the Tax Act) ("Qualifying Expenditures") in order to fund exploration programs on Stuhini's Ruby Creek Project and Big Ledge Project which are located in British Columbia. The Company will renounce these expenses to the purchasers with an effective date of not later than December 31, 2022. The Company also issued a total of 155,000 non-flow through units of the Company ("NFT Units") at a price of $0.40 per NFT Unit (the "NFT Unit Offering") for total gross proceeds to the Company of $62,000. Each NFT Unit consists of one Common Share and one-half of one common share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, an "NFT Warrant"). Each NFT Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share at a price of $0.60 per Common Share for a period of two years from the date of issuance. Story continues The aggregate gross proceeds from the NFT Unit Offering will be used to fund exploration programs on the Company's other mineral properties, including the Que Project in the Yukon Territory, the South Thompson Nickel project in Manitoba, and any additional exploration projects acquired or staked in the United States through the Company's wholly owned subsidiary, Arizada Metals Corp, as well as general and administrative expenses. In connection with the closing of the first tranche of the Private Placement, the Company paid finders' fees of $43,200 to Mine Equities Ltd. ("Mine Equities") representing 6% of the proceeds raised from the sale of FT Units placed by Mine Equities. A certain insider of the Company purchased a total of 60,000 NFT Units under the first tranche of the Private Placement. The issuance of securities to such person is considered to be a "related party transaction" within the meaning of TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") Policy 5.9 and Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61101") adopted in the Policy. The Company intends to rely on the exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61101 contained in sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61101 in respect of related party participation in the Private Placement as neither the fair market value (as determined under MI 61101) of the subject matter of, nor the fair market value of the consideration for, the transaction, insofar as it involves interested parties, is expected to exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization (as determined under MI 61101). Closing of the second tranche of the Private Placement is expected to occur on or before August 19th, 2022, and is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals including the approval of the TSXV. All securities issued pursuant to the first tranche of the Private Placement are subject to a hold period of four months and one day expiring on December 5, 2022. About Stuhini Exploration Ltd. Stuhini is a mineral exploration company focused on the exploration and development of it's base and precious metal properties. The Company's portfolio of exploration properties includes: its flagship, the Ruby Creek Property, located approximately 20 km east of Atlin, BC; the Que Project located approximately 70 km north of Johnson's Crossing in the Yukon; the South Thompson Project located approximately 35 km northwest of Grand Rapids, Manitoba; and the Big Ledge Property located approximately 57 km south of Revelstoke, BC. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. Such forwardlooking statements concern, without limitation, the intended use of proceeds of the Private Placement and the renunciation of Qualifying Expenditures. Such forwardlooking statements or information are based on a number of assumptions which may prove to be incorrect. Assumptions have been made regarding, among other things: conditions in general economic and financial markets; timing and amount of capital expenditures; timing and amount of Qualifying Expenditures incurred; and effects of regulation by governmental agencies. The actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forwardlooking statements as a result of risk factors including, but not limited to: the availability of funds; the timing and content of work programs; results of exploration activities of mineral properties; the interpretation of drilling results and other geological data; general market and industry conditions; and failure to incur Qualifying Expenditures. Forwardlooking statements are based on the expectations and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. The assumptions used in the preparation of such statements, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date the statements were made. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements included in this news release if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as otherwise required by applicable law. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE Stuhini Exploration Ltd. Cision View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2022/04/c8110.html When Sutton Stracke's daughter, Porter, moved into her dorm room at the College of William & Mary, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member went all out to make the space "feel like home," even hiring an interior designer to assist in the process. However, as she explained on the August 3 episode of RHOBH, the experience will be entirely different with her son Philip. "After Philip graduates from high school, he's going to The Citadel, which is actually a military school," she said in an interview. "I think the good news is I don't have to decorate his room. It's not like a Porter situation. There's no like curtains and, you know, any of that stuff. I think you have to like bounce a quarter off your bed." With a laugh, she added, "Oh, Philip, guess what you have to do? Make up your bed every day, too." Earlier in the episode, Sutton explained how her son selected the school. "Philip, a year ago, said he was going to join the army. He said, 'I want to join the army because I've been too comfortable.' You know, he lives a nice life," she shared. "I said, 'Oh, well I'll make you uncomfortable then.' I sent him to Georgia when it was gonna be 105 degrees with a hundred percent humidity. I made him get a job. He had to be there at 5:30 in the morning to deliver vending machine cokes and stuff. A month later, when I picked him up, he wanted to go to college. So, I don't spoil them at all." With the decision to go to The Citadel, Sutton noted, she and Philip "both win." Watch RHOBH on Bravo Wednesdays at 8/7c and next day on Peacock. Catch up on the Bravo app. (Adds Grace Dahlia tanker and shows docked; removes tankers which have left ports) Aug 4 (Reuters) - The following liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers are expected to arrive in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands in the coming weeks. Estimated arrival dates, often revised by port authorities and AIS Live ship-tracking data on Refinitiv Eikon, are updated below. Some tankers heading for Belgium and Britain may be loading at the terminal. Those expected to load are indicated with an (L). Those likely to perform ship-to-ship transfers are indicated with (STS). Tankers that have docked are indicated with (A). For the Reuters LNG guide, click here: LNG TANKER CAPACITY in EXPECTED ARRIVAL FROM PORT cubic metres BRITAIN Lngships Manhattan 170,000 Aug. 5 Peru Milford Haven Umm Slal 261,000 Aug. 9 Qatar Milford Haven Pearl LNG 156,000 Aug. 15 Peru Milford Haven Al Rekayyat 212,000 Aug. 16 Qatar Milford Haven BELGIUM Mesaimeer 212,000 Aug. 3 (A) Qatar Zeebrugge Murwab 206,000 Aug. 8 Qatar Zeebrugge Al Utouriya 212,000 Aug. 12 Qatar Zeebrugge NETHERLANDS Golar Ice 160,000 Aug. 3 India Gate Grace Dahlia 174,000 Aug. 4 (A) United States Gate Gaslog Winchester 174,000 Aug. 5 United States Gate Gaslog Wales 176,000 Aug. 9 Egypt Gate Lng Rosenrot 177,000 Aug. 13 United States Gate Cubal 160,000 Aug. 14 Angola Gate Prism Brilliance 180,000 Aug. 15 N/A Gate Rias Baixas Knutsen 180,000 Aug. 15 United States Gate Soyo 158,000 Sept. 2 Angola Gate Sources: Ports, AIS Live ship tracking, Refinitiv Eikon data. (^) Partial unload (*) Arrival date calculated using www.searates.com at an average speed of 13.5 knots (Reporting By Nina Chestney) (Revises arrival date of Umm Slal) Aug 4 (Reuters) - The following liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers are expected to arrive in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands in the coming weeks. Estimated arrival dates, often revised by port authorities and AIS Live ship-tracking data on Refinitiv Eikon, are updated below. Some tankers heading for Belgium and Britain may be loading at the terminal. Those expected to load are indicated with an (L). Those likely to perform ship-to-ship transfers are indicated with (STS). Tankers that have docked are indicated with (A). For the Reuters LNG guide, click here: LNG TANKER CAPACITY in EXPECTED ARRIVAL FROM PORT cubic metres BRITAIN Lngships Manhattan 170,000 Aug. 5 Peru Milford Haven Umm Slal 261,000 Aug. 10 Qatar South Hook Pearl LNG 156,000 Aug. 15 Peru Milford Haven Al Rekayyat 212,000 Aug. 16 Qatar South Hook BELGIUM Mesaimeer 212,000 Aug. 3 (A) Qatar Zeebrugge Murwab 206,000 Aug. 8 Qatar Zeebrugge Al Utouriya 212,000 Aug. 12 Qatar Zeebrugge NETHERLANDS Golar Ice 160,000 Aug. 3 India Gate Grace Dahlia 174,000 Aug. 4 (A) United States Gate Gaslog Winchester 174,000 Aug. 5 United States Gate Gaslog Wales 176,000 Aug. 9 Egypt Gate Lng Rosenrot 177,000 Aug. 13 United States Gate Cubal 160,000 Aug. 14 Angola Gate Prism Brilliance 180,000 Aug. 15 N/A Gate Rias Baixas Knutsen 180,000 Aug. 15 United States Gate Soyo 158,000 Sept. 2 Angola Gate Sources: Ports, AIS Live ship tracking, Refinitiv Eikon data. (^) Partial unload (*) Arrival date calculated using www.searates.com at an average speed of 13.5 knots (Reporting By Nina Chestney) /NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES/ TORONTO, Aug. 4, 2022 /CNW/ - Talisker Resources Ltd. ("Talisker" or the "Company") (TSX: TSK) (OTCQX: TSKFF) is pleased to announce that further to its press release of July 20th, 2022 in connection with a "best efforts" private placement financing for gross proceeds of up to $6,000,600 (the "Offering"), the Company has agreed with Sprott Capital Partners LP and PI Financial Corp., as co-lead agents on behalf of a syndicate of agents (collectively, the "Agents") to increase the Offering to up to $7,320,000 (the "Upsized Offering"). Talisker Resources Ltd. logo (CNW Group/Talisker Resources Ltd) The Upsized Offering will consist of a combination of (i) up to 18,750,000 units of the Company ("Units") at a price of $0.16 per Unit (the "Issue Price") for gross proceeds of up to $3,000,000, and (ii) up to 24,000,000 common shares of the Company issued on a flow-through basis ("FT Shares") at a price of $0.18 per FT Share for gross proceeds of up to $4,320,000. The Units and the FT Shares shall be collectively referred to as the "Offered Securities". The Company has granted the Agents an option to sell up to an additional 15% of the number of Offered Securities issued under the Upsized Offering, exercisable in whole or in part, at any time up to three business days prior to the closing of the Upsized Offering. Each Unit will consist of one common share of the Company (a "Common Share") and one common share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"). Each Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to purchase one Common Share at an exercise price of $0.24 for a period of 2.5 years (30 months) from the date of issuance. The FT Shares will qualify as "flow-through shares" within the meaning of the Income Tax Act (Canada) (the "Tax Act"). An amount equal to the gross proceeds from the sale of the FT Shares will be used by the Company to incur eligible "Canadian exploration expenses" that will qualify as "flow-through mining expenditures" (as such terms are defined in the Tax Act) (the "Qualifying Expenditures") related to the Company's projects in Canada. The Qualifying Expenditures will be renounced by the Company in favour of the subscribers of the FT Shares effective December 31, 2022. The net proceeds from the sale of the Units will be used by the Company for working capital and general corporate purposes. Story continues The Upsized Offering is expected to close on or about August 11, 2022, and is subject to a number of closing conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, including the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange. The securities issued under the Upsized Offering will be subject to a four month hold period from the date of issue in accordance with applicable securities laws. In consideration for their services, the Company has agreed to pay the Agents a cash commission equal to 6.0% of the gross proceeds from the Upsized Offering and to issue the Agents non-transferable warrants ("Compensation Warrants") equal to 6.0% of the aggregate number of Offered Securities issued under the Upsized Offering. The Compensation Warrants will be exercisable into Common Shares at a price per Compensation Warrant equal to the Issue Price for a period of 2.5 years (30 months) from the closing of the Upsized Offering. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to sell any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. About Talisker Resources Ltd. Talisker (taliskerresources.com) is a junior resource company involved in the exploration of gold projects in British Columbia, Canada. Talisker's projects include two advanced stage projects, the Bralorne Gold Complex and the Ladner Gold Project, both advanced stage projects with significant exploration potential from historical high-grade producing gold mines, as well as its Spences Bridge Project where the Company holds ~85% of the emerging Spences Bridge Gold Belt and several other early-stage Greenfields projects. With its properties comprising 304,931 hectares over 500 claims, three leases and 197 crown grant claims, Talisker is a dominant exploration player in south-central British Columbia. Caution Regarding Forward Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or future performance. The use of any of the words "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on Talisker's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. In particular, this press release contains forward-looking information relating to, among other things, the Upsized Offering, including the total gross proceeds, use of proceeds, receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals and proposed closing date. Various assumptions or factors are typically applied in drawing conclusions or making the forecasts or projections set out in forward-looking information. Those assumptions and factors are based on information currently available to Talisker. Although such statements are based on reasonable assumptions of Talisker's management, there can be no assurance that any conclusions or forecasts will prove to be accurate. Forward looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. Such factors include risks inherent in the exploration and development of mineral deposits, including risks relating to changes in project parameters as plans continue to be redefined, risks relating to variations in grade or recovery rates, risks relating to changes in mineral prices and the worldwide demand for and supply of minerals, risks related to increased competition and current global financial conditions, access and supply risks, reliance on key personnel, operational risks regulatory risks, including risks relating to the acquisition of the necessary licenses and permits, financing, capitalization and liquidity risks, title and environmental risks and risks relating to the failure to receive all requisite shareholder and regulatory approvals. The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof, and Talisker is not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein. SOURCE Talisker Resources Ltd Cision View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2022/04/c1949.html Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he wants to discuss the Russian invasion of his country with Chinese President Xi Jinping directly and said he hoped that China might review its attitude toward Russia in light of its invasion of Ukraine. I would like to talk directly. I had one conversation with Xi Jinping that was a year ago, Zelensky said in an interview with the South China Morning Post published on Thursday. Since the beginning of the large-scale aggression on February 24, we have asked officially for a conversation, but we (havent had) any conversation with China even though I believe that would be helpful, he added. Zelensky called China a very powerful state and said that it had a powerful economy, asserting that Russias economy would seriously suffer should China take economic steps against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. Im confident, Im sure that without the Chinese market for the Russian Federation, Russia would be feeling complete economic isolation, Zelensky told the Post. Thats something that China can do to limit the trade (with Russia) until the war is over. China is trying to keep its sentiment regarding the Russian invasion balanced, Zelensky claimed, but he also suggested that the major Asian power had an obligation to do more as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. If we are operating without the legislation, then why should we have the Security Council at all, if any country or several countries in the world, could simply decide to violate the rules militarily? Zelensky told the publication. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. This season has gotten off to a slower start compared to the last couple of years, but it is important to remember that June and July are only the first gear of hurricane season. HAVE YOU EVER wondered why the letters of the alphabet are arranged in the order that they are? I have, and that question has been weighing heavy on my mind for some time now. Why would you start with A and end with Z? Okay, I can understand Z. It is one of the least used letters so it logically should be at the end. And A gets used a lot. But E is the most used letter so why doesnt the alphabet start with E and end with Z? I have checked several references and no one seems to know why the letters are arranged the way they are. One theory is that they are easier to memorize in their present order. Well, there is that kiddie song that helps little ones learn the alphabet, but I seriously doubt that whoever came up with the present order had pre-school and kindergarteners in mind. The English alphabet goes back at least 1,000 years and parts of it are known to have existed in the fifth century. It is said that the present order of letters was first recorded by a monk (in that day and time only the clergy and a few educated noblemen could read and write) in 1011 (coincidentally exactly 1,011 years ago, which is maybe why this question has been bugging me). This monk reportedly added five additional letters to his 23-letter alphabet (he left out J, U and W) and later someone else added a sixth. At that point there were 29 letters. Then someone subtracted the six letters that we dont use today and threw J, U and W into the mix. Why they inserted these three letters where they did is anyones guess. Nope, no one knows why the letters were arranged the way they were. We know how the universe began (Big Bang Theory) and how the Egyptian pyramids were built, but we dont know why the letters of the English alphabet are arranged the way they are. Heres an interesting note. You know how on Wheel of Fortune they start out with R, S, T, L and E? Well, L is not even in the top nine letters used today. And R is No. 9. The vowel E, however, is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet with the consonant T at No. 2. So why dont we go back and rearrange the alphabet in the order of the most used letters? Were rewriting all other history so why not get the alphabet right? I know. Someone is going to say, Why not rearrange the number system while youre at it? Numbers make sense the way theyre written. They are quantities that go from small to large in a sequential order. It is not the same with the alphabet. The letters seem to be just thrown together. A perfect example is those three added letters: J, U and W. Why werent they just tacked onto the end of the alphabet instead of being inserted where they are? Who knows? I suspect I am the only person in the whole world who cares. And I really dont. Im just curious. Besides, if we rearranged the order someone would have to rewrite that little song and then no one could remember the letters of the alphabet. Guess wed better leave well enough alone. One final question that has also been weighing heavy on my mind: How do we get that leftover food to the starving children in Africa? Parents continually preach to their children the fact that they should eat every crumb on their plates because there are children starving in Africa. Now, Im certainly sympathetic to African hunger, but how does my eating every crumb help those starving kids? And how do I get that leftover spinach over there? One day when I had extra vegetables I put them in a big box, addressed the package to The Starving Children in Africa and took it down to the post office. I felt I was fulfilling my humanitarian obligation. Guess what? The post office refused to take the box, something about perishable goods. At least I tried. So, if your mother tells you to eat your broccoli because there are children starving in Africa, tell her that if she can get that green vegetable across the Atlantic youll gladly donate it to the hunger effort. Then ask her why the alphabet is arranged the way it is. One week before the start of the 202223 school year, Spotsylvania County Public Schools has 114 vacant teaching positions, down from 162 a month ago. Interim Superintendent Kelly Guempel provided the School Board with a staffing update at a special meeting Aug. 3the third special meeting called in as many weeks to approve personnel packages. Guempel said the school divisions staffing needs are critical. We need helpmore bodies, more people. We do need more teachers, more paras and we certainly need more substitutes, he said. The number of vacant positions as of Wednesday was down 13 from last weeks update, and Guempel said a couple of offers are pending. Guempel provided a clarification of his remarks from last week, when he said the school year will start with all classes covered. He said covered could mean that there is another teacher, building administrator or long-term substitute in charge of a class for that day or that block of time. Covered means youre being creative in covering all classes, he said. Nobody thinks covered means we are in good shape. It just means that we are ready to begin classes for that day. The biggest concern at the moment is class size, Guempel said. [Class size] goes down with every single licensed hire we have, he said. Guempel said the school division has ramped up its support systems for new teachers, because there will be so many new teachersand teachers who are new to Spotsylvaniain the buildings. Every new teacher is assigned a mentor and there will also be two roving mentors who will move through the division to provide support for new hires. I have asked principals to ... ensure these folks are taken care of, Guempel said. Guempel and School Board members asked parents for patience as the school year gets started and also encouraged their involvement. The very best school divisions are where everybody is working togetherparents, teachers, students, everybody on the same page, Guempel said. Join the PTSO, get inside those buildings. I guarantee it will be a better experience than if you didnt. Spotsylvania is not alone in facing a teacher shortage. Across the country, school districts are scrambling to find people to put in front of students when they return to the classroom. Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, told the Washington Post that the shortage is worse than hes ever seen. Right now its No. 1 on the list of issues that are concerning school districts, he said. The state Department of Education is finalizing model policies to ensure parents are notified if their children are being taught sexually explicit instructional materials in the classroom. Wednesday marked the last day for Virginia residents to weigh in on the new policies that the department drafted. Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill in April sponsored by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico requiring the education department to develop and local school boards to adopt such policies. According to the VDOE policy, parents will be notified at least 30 days in advance if any instructional materials with sexually explicit content (as defined by the model policy) will be taught in their childs classroom. At that time, parents will be able to review the materials. On school websites, principals will maintain a current list of sexually explicit instructional materials by grade and subject. Local school boards have until January to adopt either VDOEs model policies concerning instructional materials with sexually explicit content, or more comprehensive policies. Youngkin, who has advocated for more parental involvement in the classroom, ran a campaign ad in October that criticized his opponent, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, for vetoing a similar bill when McAuliffe was governor. The so-called Beloved bill named after Nobel laureate Toni Morrisons book Beloved that McAuliffe vetoed would have required school districts to notify parents of assignments containing sexually explicit content. Dunnavant, who sponsored the bill in the most recent legislative session, was not immediately available for comment. Policies should be drafted which empower parents to exercise their right to decide whether the use of sexually explicit content in instructional materials is appropriate for their child, the model policy states. The online public comment period, which closes midnight Wednesday, garnered roughly 1,500 comments as of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. The online forum has a mix of comments in support of and against the model policies. One supportive commenter said the policies were a common-sense program, while another supporter wrote, these model policies are a wake-up call to school boards and teachers to attend to the voices of those who innately care most about the children: their parents. An opponent said, classrooms should be a place where students are free to ask questions, explore new ideas, and learn about diverse viewpoints. On Tuesday, the ACLU of Virginia submitted a comment to the town hall and sent a letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow in opposition to the proposed model policies. Educators and librarians cannot do their job if they are constantly being required to justify their curricula and instruction to parents who may hold diametrically opposing viewpoints, the letter states. Nor was the public education system put in place to present a homogenized viewpoint. The education of young Virginians will be disrupted by efforts to use classrooms to support a political agenda a space of control rather than a thriving ground for free speech and freedom of thought. The proposed model policies, according to the ACLU of Virginia, will force school divisions to adopt anti-free speech practices and deny students the opportunity to be inspired by stories of people from all walks of life. The ACLU of Virginia argues that the proposed model policies will lead to classroom censorship and will likely target curriculum by and/or that includes LGBTQ people and Black, Indigenous and other communities of color. The Pride Liberation Project, a student-led LGBTQ rights advocacy organization, published a letter with over 600 student signatures calling on the VDOE to explicitly state that instruction about LGBTQIA+ people is not inherently sexual. Failing to do so would have a chilling effect on our education, the letter states, adding that every student, including LGBTQIA+ students, deserves to be accurately represented in school curriculum. Erasing Queer people from our classes would lead to fictionalized and over-simplified instruction, given the immense contributions that LGBTQIA+ people have made to our state and county, the letter states. While Susan Muskett, president of Pro-Family Women, a pro-life organization based in Arlington, wrote positively of the model policies in the online town hall, she cited some concerns with the document. Muskett characterized the policies as a much-needed tilt toward restoring parental rights and welcomes all efforts toward making parental notification of sexually explicit material a more standardized and open procedure. The organization took pause with a sentence that says: when determining whether instructional materials contain sexually explicit content, teachers, principals, and division staff should consider student age and maturity, and whether a parent might reasonably consider the instructional content harmful to their child. Pro-Family Women wrote in the public comment section that including the sentence would undermine the law because it would allow school staff to make subjective assessments as to whether instructional material contains sexually explicit content impact[ing] whether or not students parents are given notice. Charles Pyle, a spokesperson for VDOE, said in an email Wednesday that the model policies became available at the beginning of July. After reviewing public comments, the department will communicate the final document to school divisions to inform the adoption of local policies by January 1, 2023, as required by the legislation, Pyle wrote. Youngkin signs bill requiring parental notification of sexually explicit content in schools Gov. Glenn Youngkins office announced Friday that the governor signed a bill to require the Department of Education to develop and local school boards to adopt policies for ensuring parental notification of sexually explicit instructional material. 23 Va. school districts have taken books off shelves in past two years The Times-Dispatch sent public records requests to each of the state's 132 public school systems seeking information on books that had been removed or placed under review in the last two school years. Biden returns to Arlington for McAuliffe, blasts Youngkin for touting effort to ban Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' ARLINGTON President Joe Biden is still targeting Glenn Youngkin as an acolyte of former President Donald Trump. Hong Kong: Imported malaria cases probed The Centre for Health Protection today said it is investigating a fatal imported malaria case and urges the public to maintain strict environmental hygiene, mosquito control and personal protective measures. The centre made the appeal as it has observed an upward trend in the number of imported malaria cases, all involving people coming from Africa. From July 1 to August 4, the centre recorded a total of 30 imported malaria cases involving 30 male patients aged 25 to 57 arriving in Hong Kong from July 1 to August 1. Of these patients, 21 came from Guinea, Africa. All patients underwent quarantine at designated quarantine hotels in accordance with the relevant entry requirement upon arrival. A 52-year-old patient passed away during quarantine and post-mortem results revealed that he carried the malaria parasite. The remaining 29 men have been sent to public hospitals for treatment. Ten of them were discharged after treatment, while four and 15 are in serious and stable conditions. The centre is conducting an epidemiological investigation and is following up on the cases travel collaterals who have been put under medical surveillance. Symptomatic patients will be sent to hospital, while blood tests would be offered to those who are asymptomatic. People who test positive would be sent to hospital for treatment. Malaria is a communicable disease transmitted by an infected female Anopheline mosquito. Based on the Food & Environmental Hygiene Department's (FEHD) malaria vector surveillance information, the Department of Health opined that the risk of local transmission of malaria is extremely low. Since imported malaria cases were found at quarantine hotels, authorities would follow-up on the mosquito infestation of relevant locations and step up anti-mosquito work on a needs basis. The centre said as malaria is more common in some African and Southeast Asian regions, travellers should be alert to the malaria risk of their destinations before departing and take preventive measures. Those who travel to malaria-endemic areas should use DEET-containing insect repellents during travel and for 14 days after returning to Hong Kong, it added. For further information, the public may visit the centres malaria page, Facebook page and YouTube channel, the latest travel health news, and the FEHD guidebook on control and prevention of mosquito breeding. Call 1823 to report mosquito problems. This story has been published on: 2022-08-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Dubais office sector has remained resilient over the first half of 2022, aided mainly by the continued demand for Grade A office space which has also led to a sharp drop in vacancy levels for this segment. According to Savills Dubai Office H1 2022 - Market in Minutes report, occupier demand has been strong on the back of a buoyant local economy where companies are crystallising their expansion plans, and amid an influx of senior executives, business owners and High Net-worth Individuals (HNIs). Dubais office utilisation levels in Q2 2022 were highest among Europe, Middle East and Africa cities tracked by Savills, with an average of 80% of workers back in the office in Dubai in some capacity, according to the recent Savills Prime Office Costs (SPOC) Report. Upgrading spaces Paula Walshe, Director, International Corporate Services, Savills Middle East says: Businesses are increasingly acknowledging the importance of upgrading their existing spaces or moving to new places altogether that better suit their renewed requirements, which were altered by the pandemic. Many of our clients are finding better value in consolidating their operations, which is allowing them to sharpen their focus while making significant savings against a backdrop of rising operational costs. Swapnil Pillai, Associate Director Research, Middle East says: Amid a flight-to-quality, a general shift in occupier preference towards Grade A space continues, driven by an increased focus on ESG compliance and right-sizing of existing real estate footprint for cost and operational efficiency. He added: Further diversification of the economy and the emergence of new sectors such as virtual assets are contributing to the expanding occupier profile. Rental values up As a result of increased occupancy levels across prominent Grade A developments in Dubai, rental values have increased by an average 10% compared to H2 2021 and by approximately 13% y-o-y. According to the SPOC report, several markets are seeing rising rents, especially for ESG-compliant spaces, as occupier demand continues to support the prime end of the market. Dubai saw headline rent rises over Q2, Savills says. The bulk of the leasing activity during the first six months of 2022 was observed across sub-markets such as DIFC, DWTC, DMCC, Dubai Media City and Dubai Internet City. In terms of rental performance across office locations, the highest year-on-year gains were witnessed at Dubai Investment Park (35%), followed by Barsha Heights (29%), Dubai Production City (27%) and Deira (25%). Meanwhile, the conjoined locations of Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, and Dubai Knowledge Village, and others such as Dubai Healthcare City and Dubai Design District largely remained stable. In a prominent trend, demand for flexible space options such as serviced office and co-working spaces has grown as a result of companies looking to reduce their capex spending and due to new market entrants looking to set up operations in the city. As a result, most of the prominent flexible space operators across Dubai are recording high occupancy levels, with a few players reporting this at 100% and charting plans to further expand offerings in the emirate.-- TradeArabia News Service With federal and state COVID protections expired, many families are finding themselves facing the possibility of being put on the street. Its one more page in Virginias long, ignominious eviction history. In fact, Virginia has one of the worst eviction records in the nation. In a presentation before the Fredericksburg Rotary Club earlier this year, the executive director of Legal Aid Works, Ann Kloeckner, pointed to a 2016 study that showed half of the top 10 counties in the nation for eviction rates were in Virginia. There are many reasons for our poor performance, but part of the problem lies in the fact that legal representation for civil cases isnt guaranteed in Virginia, nor is it in most other states across the nation. That means hiring an attorney to fight eviction, which could cost anywhere from $500 to $10,000, according to LegalMatch. Its money well-spent, as clients with legal representation are much less likely to lose their place of residence. Unfortunately, its also money that many families dont have. Even $500 is not something about 40% of households could pull together. So these people turn to Legal Aid Works. One of 10 legal aid groups in Virginia, according to the Virginia Bar Association, Kloeckners group serves Fredericksburg and 16 surrounding counties. Understaffed, underfunded, and stretched thin, this group handles more than 1,100 cases a year. Yet, for every case LAW and other legal aid organizations in the commonwealth take, two eligible clients are turned away. Those clients must face eviction hearings unrepresented, and, says Kloeckner, people are getting chewed up and spit out because they dont understand the system. Eviction isnt the only civil issue people face with no guarantee of legal representation. In Virginia, domestic violence cases (both accuser and accused) have no guaranteed right to an attorney, and neither do individuals going to court to litigate special education cases, employment discrimination, health care, immigration, and many more, according to the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. Many people falsely believe that a right to counsel is enshrined in the Constitution. It wasnt until 1963, however, that a right to an attorney for criminal cases was accepted as constitutional (Gideon v. Wainwright). Were not there yet with civil courts, Kloeckner says. That lack of guarantee gave rise in the late 1990s to the Civil Gideon movement, a push to establish the right to an attorney in civil cases, just as Gideon v. Wainwright did for criminal cases. Its been a long, uphill battle, with no major victories on the immediate horizon. Until that right is recognized, Legal Aid Works and groups like it depend on contributions, grants from legal filing fees, and a few other sources for funding. Starting salaries for LAW attorneys in Kloeckners office are just $55,200. We could go away tomorrow, Kloeckner says. That would be devastating. Between 2000 and 2010, according to LAWs website, the number of poor people in the area it serves has grown an astounding 65%. To put into perspective how bad the situation is, right now in Virginia there is one private attorney for every 346 Virginians, but just one Legal Aid Attorney for every 7,000 poor Virginians. Representation in civil matters is important as a matter of basic justice. People deserve the right to have a fair chance in court. Kloeckner is careful, however, not to define Legal Aid Works success in terms of cases won and lost. Im always really cautious about how you define success, she said. What truly matters is that our clients are believed and treated with respect, maybe for the first time in their lives. ... [Thats] our first goal. Equal justice under the law is not possible if equal representation for all appearing before the courts isnt available. We support the Civil Gideon movement in Virginia. Whether ones motivation is social justice, or individual freedom, ensuring that all Virginians have representation in civil cases should enjoy broad, bipartisan support. In its first decade, the Community Investment Collaborative (CIC) in Charlottesville loaned $2 million to low-income borrowers. In the next five years, the Charlottesville-based group hopes to loan $5 million more to people who might not be able to borrow from traditional financial institutions. Finding ways to get capital to nontraditional borrowers to buy homes or start businesses continues to be an ongoing challenge in the Charlottesville region and around the country. This is why local leaders like Stephen Davis, the president of CIC, and Sunshine Mathon, executive director of the Piedmont Housing Alliance, welcomed Mondays announcement of a new bipartisan U.S. Senate caucus focused on Community Financial Development Institutions (CFDIs) and Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs). The Senate Community Development Finance Caucus has 14 members. Seven are Republicans; seven are Democrats. They come from the Mid-Atlantic region, the Upper Midwest, the Great Plains, the Deep South, and New England. They all agree that CFDIs and MDIs offer ways to give nontraditional customers access to financial institutions. Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Idaho Republican Mike Crapo organized the caucus, which is dedicated to getting more money, education, and staff support to institutions that increase chances for low- and middle-income households and people of color to build businesses or buy homes. The caucus hopes to connect billions of available dollars with start-ups or mortgage loans. It is the kind of vision that attracts almost everyones blessing. But whats being planned here seems to be more than a pipedream. With its size and geographical breadth, the caucus brings collective political clout to its goals. Equally important, it seems more interested in results than platitudes. Properly executed, the relationships the caucus seeks can produce vital injections of funds into neighborhoods, households, and ethnic groups traditionally underrepresented in the American economy. Davis, whose group works in an area stretching from Charlottesville to Culpeper, summed up the challenge perfectly. The old expression is it takes money to make money, he said. But if you never had money, what do you do? Entrepreneurs with great ideas may not get funded. Mathon, whose group also works in the Charlottesville region, said the areas hot housing market often leaves low-income home buyers unable to come up with money for mortgage down payments that qualify them for loans. On the lenders side, Mathon added, one of the challenges for traditional lenders is the perception of risk. The new caucus believes CDFIs and MDIs can bridge this gap. The institutions exist to serve low-income communities. They have experience making loans in those communities. Most of the loans get repaid. Davis and Mathon say their respective organizations are mission-driven, not profit-driven. But they also say they can help private financial institutions identify reliable borrowers. Davis calls this capital lent in sustainable ways. The Community Reinvestment Act aids the caucus cause. The law requires private banks to do a certain amount of lending or grant-making in areas where they operate. There are also public funds. Warner, Crapo, and other colleagues worked with former President Donald Trumps Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to include a Jobs and Neighborhood Investment Act in the COVID relief act of 2020. The bill carved out $12 billion for CDFIs and MDIs with $3 billion going to grant funding and $9 billion going to loans that can be used to leverage up to 10 times that amount in other kinds of borrowing. It sounds complex. But all these technicalities boil down to a simple charge. This country should do whatever it can to give everyone, regardless of economic circumstance or ethnicity, an equal shot at the American Dream. Adapted from Charlottesville Daily Progress Fremont Public Schools is planning the same COVID-19 protocol for the new school year as it had for the 2021-2022 year. Those testing positive for COVID-19 must be isolated for five days (beginning with the onset of symptoms or a positive test). They may return to school on the sixth day, but must continue to wear a mask through the 10th day. Those who dont want to wear a mask need to stay home until day 10. People exhibiting symptoms must experience symptom improvement before returning to school. As with any illness, individuals must be fever free (less than 100.0 degrees Fahrenheit) for 24 hours before returning to school. COVID-19 is here to stay, said Mark Shepard, superintendent of schools, in a prepared statement. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have learned a great deal about how to manage this disease. The changes implemented last spring brought the protocol in line with other communicable diseases. Shepard stressed the districts vigilance in keeping track of the situation. We will continue to monitor and adjust as necessary to keep our students and staff safe, Shepard said. FPS continues to work with the Three Rivers Public Health Department. As in the past, the school system emphasizes that people stay home if they are: Sick. Have not been fever free (100.0 degrees) for 24 hours without medication. Have been tested for COVID-19 and have not received test results yet. More information about the school systems COVID-19 protocol can be found on its website: fremonttigers.org/return-to-school-2022/ FPS also shared information about vaccinations, testing kits and data sharing. Working with Three Rivers, FPS is scheduling the following COVID-19 Vaccine Clinics: Saturday, Aug. 20 9-11 a.m. Washington Elementary School. Tuesday, Aug. 23 6-7:30 p.m. Bell Field Elementary School. These clinics are free and open to the public. Testing kits are available in the nurses office in each building. Contact the school nurse in your students building if you would like to access them. At this time, the district is not planning to provide weekly updates with numbers of people testing positive for COVID-19. Neither Three Rivers nor FPS will send home letters regarding positive cases. The district will continue to monitor cases and groups. In the event a groups numbers begin to escalate, parents will be notified and appropriate action will be taken. New software can make it easier to register for a Fremont Parks and Recreation program or rent a facility. Nick Hansen, parks and recreation director, said the hope is to have CivicRec, an integrated Cloud-based software, available for use in October. Hansen talked about the new online activity software during a recent Fremont Parks and Recreation advisory board meeting. With the click of a button people can use this software at their convenience, day or night to rent facilities such as Christensen Field or a park shelter online instead of having to go to the parks and recreation office. People also could obtain a swimming pool membership or register for recreational activities or adaptive recreation activities. They could even purchase a cemetery plot. Besides the convenience of online access for users, the new software also is expected to save staff time. Hansen said the software is expected to cost about $15,000 and is in the parks department budget. He also said the parks department received a $7,500 grant from the Fremont and Dodge County Convention and Visitors Bureau toward the project. In other business, Hansen said M and E Repairs of South Sioux City will go to about seven parks to repair cracks, punctured and melted holes and scratched in graffiti in plastic playground equipment. Hansen said the parks department applied for 10 free trees through the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum. Friends of Fremont Parks also applied for an additional 10 free trees. Targeted areas where the trees would be planted, if received, include: Clemmons, Van Anda and Ronin parks and the right-of-way on North Platte Avenue. We dont know what specific type of tree it is, but its native to Nebraska, Hansen said. Hansen said Keene Memorial Library is moving materials from its facility to its temporary location in Fremont City Auditorium, where it will reopen to patrons in mid-September. The library closed Aug. 1 at its Broad Street location as it begins the moving process. The library will undergo a $9.4 million expansion and remodeling project. Friends of Keene Memorial Library, a nonprofit group, has been raising funds for the project. Hansen said the parks and recreation department has been coordinating with different organizations that might have wanted to have an event or meeting in the city auditorium to make sure they have those spots. Christensen Field is still available, but is filling up pretty fast, Hansen said. Hansen said the compressor came in for the machine that creates waves at Splash Station and the machine is working. Board members learned at a previous meeting that the wave machine has been in operation since Splash Station opened 15 years ago. The next meeting of the parks and recreation department advisory board will start at 7 p.m., Monday, Sept. 12, in the second floor conference room in the Fremont Municipal Building, 400 E. Military Ave. Meetings are open to the public. A group of former U.S. ambassadors has called on the United Nations to reimpose travel restrictions on Taliban leaders in response to the radical group increasingly reverting to its practices from the years when it first ruled Afghanistan. In a letter published by the Atlantic Council think tank on August 3, the six former diplomats said the killing last week of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Kabul, where he had taken shelter in a safe house, highlighted the Talibans continued close ties with the terrorist group, despite denying such ties since returning to power last year following the withdrawal of U.S.-led international forces. Furthermore, after returning to power in August, the Taliban has steadily reimposed extreme restrictions on human rights, especially targeting women and girls "by refusing them education, restricting their travel, dictating their dress, and limiting their movement," it added. "The bottom line remains: If the United States cannot find any actions to support its words, then its words are hollow. The women of Afghanistan will remain unsupported, and the terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan will remain --no matter what Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior U.S. and partner nation officials say," the letter says. "Reimposing the travel ban is one of the few actions the United States can take to show that its serious. It should use this opportunity." The letter was signed by James Cunningham, Ryan Crocker, Hugo Llorens, P. Michael McKinley, Ronald E. Neumann, and Earl Anthony Wayne, all of whom held positions at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan over the past 15 years. A U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban in late 2001 following proof that the radical group had sheltered and aided Osama bin Laden in his September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, which killed some 3,000 people. In the agreement signed with the United States in February 2020, the group's leaders vowed not to harbor terrorist groups once U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan and subsequently pledged to respect women's rights in line with Islamic traditions. "The juxtaposition of the Talibans evident and continuing support for international terrorism and the violation of the most fundamental rights of women and others justifies a next step in demonstrating global rejection of what they stand for," the letter said. The UN travel-ban waiver was originally granted to Taliban leaders in 2019 to allow them to travel to peace negotiations. "But the Taliban now takes advantage of it to allow its leaders to take business-class jaunts to multiple foreign capitals and conferences in efforts to bolster their perceived legitimacy," the letter said, urging the UN Security Council to rescind the waiver when it comes up for review later this month. This August 2021 photo shows locals of Pakistans southern city of Hyderabad planting saplings on a barren patch of earth. The planting is part of the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami, a drive to turn swaths of Pakistan green. Pakistans epic tree-planting initiative was inspired by a project in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which began in 2014 and aimed to plant 1 billion trees in the region. The success of that program inspired former Prime Minister Imran Khan to launch a nationwide tree-planting drive in 2019. The program is headed by Pakistans Ministry Of Climate Change and aims to plant 10 billion trees across the country by 2023. The stated goal is to revive forest and wildlife resources in Pakistan, to improve the overall conservation of the existing protected areas; encourage eco-tourism, community engagement and job creation through conservation. During the coronavirus pandemic, workers on sustenance wages faced ruin when Islamabad imposed lockdowns. The tree tsunami project became a lifeline for some 84,000 people when the central government diverted idle workers to tree planting for a daily wage of 500 rupees ($3). A tree planter told Reuters in 2020 during the height of the pandemic: "Due to the coronavirus, all the cities have shut down and there is no work. Most of us daily wagers couldnt earn a living." Thanks to the tree-planting initiative, "all of us now have a way of earning daily wages again to feed our families he said. Some have questioned whether trees will be able to survive on their own in many areas once payouts for workers end. The well-funded project has also been dogged by claims of corruption, which are under investigation. Inspectors OK 1st Ukraine grain ship but no sign yet of more The first grain ship to leave Ukraine under a Black Sea wartime deal has passed inspection in Istanbul and is heading on to Lebanon It started with a walk around the neighborhood. Like many people during the summer of 2020, the stroll outside was much-needed for Mikayla Taylor, a college student studying theater who was back home in Colorado Springs amid the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Just off a trail by a lake, Taylor saw something new to her. Rows of stone steps on the hillside forming a natural-looking venue, seemingly plopped there. An idea plopped in her mind: What if she held shows at the outdoor venue, which seemed fit for social distancing? She called a friend she met in a high school production of A Little Mermaid. Audrey McGee was also feeling the sting of everything being shut down. The pair got to work quickly. Within a couple of months, they wrote an original play, found a cast of 16 young actors, and put on eight performances. It provided something special for everyone involved, on stage and in the audience. It was something to do, something to create, McGee, 20, said. Having that outlet gave me a sense of community and empowerment that I had felt stripped of. The cast felt that, too. She and Taylor, 21, decided to put on more of these shows. They founded the Colorado Springs Young People Theatre Troupe, which is dedicated to bringing theater to the southern Colorado area in the midst of the crazy world we live in, according to its website. It has provided valuable directing, playwriting and leadership experience for the students. It was a blessing for the people around us, McGee said. It also continues to help us in our education and jump-start our careers. The troupe returns for its third season with an original musical inspired by Alice in Wonderland as well as Wonderland, a song by Taylor Swift. The result is Someday in Wonderland: A Musical of Madness, an adventurous love story set in London during World War II. It includes 10 original songs by up-and-coming composers at the Colorado Springs Conservatory. We try to work with classics in literature, because we love to bring old classics to light in a new era with a new filter, McGee said. Its thrilling to be able to create a whole new world and be able to see it come to fruition. They also love to bring their creations to the community with free shows, which run solely on donations. In the past, some audience members have reserved seats. Others show up to surprisingly see and stay for a performance, almost as if theyve fallen down a rabbit hole. McGee expects a similar experience for the upcoming round of Someday in Wonderland. This show is chance for people to pause and breathe, she said. Its for people looking for a sense of that childhood wonder again. In case you missed it summer's most popular meteor shower is set to peak tonight above Colorado, with the celestial event remaining active through September 1. Officials at the signing of the project restructure deal in June. South Koreas Doosan Enerbility has won the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract for Shuaibah 3 Independent Water Project in Saudi Arabia, reports said. The $640-million desalination project is developed by a special purpose vehicle (Shuaibah Three Water Desalination Company) launched by Saudi utility developer Acwa Power and Water & Electricity Holding Company (Badeel), which is owned by Saudi Arabias PIF sovereign wealth fund. Earlier, In June, Acwa Power, a leading Saudi developer, investor and operator of power generation, desalinated water and green hydrogen plants worldwide; Shuaibah Water Electricity Company (SWEC), and Saudi Water Partnership Company (SWPC), the off-taker of Shuaibah 3 IWPP, signed an agreement to restructure the Shuaibah 3 Independent Water and Power Project (IWPP). The agreement entailed the conversion and replacement of the IWPP from an energy-intensive power generation and thermal desalination facility to a greenfield seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant under the name Shuaibah 3 Independent Water Project (IWP). As such, operations of Shuaibah 3 Independent Water and Power Project (IWPP) will cease in 2025, saving nearly 45 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and 22 million barrels of light crude oil annually. The Shuaibah 3 IWP aims to establish the worlds largest reverse osmosis desalination facility in Shuaibah, located 110 km south of Jeddah. Under the EPC contract, Doosan Enerbility (formerly Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction) will build a desalination plant capable of producing 600,000 cu m of water per day and a 60 MW solar power plant. The project work is expected to start in September 2022 and completion is scheduled for May 2025. Once completed, the desalination plant will supply potable water to 2 million people. The solar farm will provide electric power to the desalination plant. Acwa Power said the switch from thermal to RO will reduce the power needed to desalinate seawater by 70 per cent. The new 25-year water purchase agreement (WPA) is valued at nearly SR3 billion ($800 million). Vadim Epelbaum lives in Brighton and is the father to a 15-year-old daughter. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom II and president of the Board of Directors for the Education Foundation for the Colorado National Guard. On the day Colorado county clerks are lawfully required to complete recounts of the June 28 primary election, and a day after El Paso County completed its recount, a county judge denied the request from a group of unsuccessful GOP candidates to extend the statutory recount deadline. On Tuesday, El Paso County coroner candidate Dr. Rae Ann Weber, clerk and recorder candidate Peter Lupia, sheriff candidate Todd Watkins, county commission candidates Lindsay Moore and David Winney, House District 18 candidate Summer Groubert and Senate District 9 candidate Lynda Zamora Wilson requested Judge Thomas Kelly Kane extend the recount deadline by two weeks, from Aug. 4 to Aug. 18. Kane on Thursday issued an order denying the request. The group of candidates sought discretionary recounts following their double-digit margin losses in the June primary. Because the final results for all races didn't meet the threshold set by Colorado law to trigger an automatic recount, that cost is paid by the candidates who requested them. Election law requires races within a margin less than or equal to 0.5% of the winners vote receive mandatory recounts, paid for by the state. Of the plaintiffs listed, only Weber, Lupia, Zamora Wilson and Tina Peters, who is not named as a petitioner in the El Paso County lawsuit, produced the sufficient funds for the recount. The cost of the recount for the county coroner and clerk and recorder races was about $20,800 in El Paso County, which the candidates shared, Clerk and Recorder Chuck Broerman said. Peters submitted $255,912.33 for the statewide recount of her 14.2-percentage-point loss to former Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder Pam Anderson for the GOP nomination for secretary of state. Wilson submitted $20,819.87 for a recount of the GOP primary bid for the SD 9 seat to Sen. Paul Lundeen of Monument. In their lawsuit filed July 29, the candidates minus Peters accused Broerman and Secretary of State Jena Griswold of including "exorbitant" additional costs for vendor programming and support, calculated at a rate of $250 per hour for an estimated 40 hours, for a total amount of $10,000. They asked the judge to order Griswold and Broerman to remove the costs for vendor programming and support and allow the candidates who failed to shell out the full amount to pay the adjusted, presumably lower cost of the recount. They also asked for a refund of any overpayment. "These unreasonable additional costs, and thus the actions of the secretary and clerk and recorder, serve to chill petitioners' First Amendment rights, and further violates their rights to equal protection and due process," they wrote in the lawsuit. Broerman, in a motion to dismiss the suit filed Wednesday, said the candidates' claims were "moot" and "unsupported by Colorado law. ... Petitioners' attempt to halt or otherwise interfere with a lawful recount, which has concluded, must be thwarted." He rejected the candidates' claims that their constitutional rights had been violated. State law, Broerman argued, "clearly states that the interested party shall pay the costs of the recount not partial costs to the election official within one day of receiving the cost determination." Furthermore, the clerk said in court documents, the law requires the entire amount of the funds paid for the requested recount be refunded back to the person who paid them if the "recount results in a reversal in favor of" the candidate. The results of El Paso County's June 28 primary were unchanged following completion of the recount Wednesday, the clerk's office reported. But the candidates may still be entitled to any excess funds not used during the recount, and that is Broerman's intent, he said in the motion to dismiss. "Thus, the interested party who requested and paid for the recount may receive refunds ... if the clerk is not required to utilize the full amount of funds estimated" in this instance, court documents say. Weber, Lupia, Watkins, Moore, Winney, Groubert and Wilson did not immediately return The Gazette's request for comment Thursday. Broerman told The Gazette this week the lawsuit was "groundless" and that the charges are "usual and customary." They reflect the work his office did to rescan about 153,000 ballots, he said. El Paso was the only county in the state that had to simultaneously rescan ballots for four races. The same group of candidates, including Peters, also filed a lawsuit in Denver District Court this week that sought to stop the recount and compel the Secretary of State's Office to conduct it instead. They alleged the recount "has not been conducted in a fair, impartial and uniform manner." Broerman this week also told The Gazette the claims in the Denver lawsuit are "categorically false in every way imaginable." The Secretary of State's Office on Wednesday said it was "without merit." The completed statewide recount of the June 28 GOP primary for secretary of state shows no major changes in the ballot totals, with Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters still losing the race by almost 89,000 votes. Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder Pam Anderson, who won the GOP primary and Peters each added 13 votes, while third-place finisher Mike ODonnells gained 11 votes, according to the Secretary of State's Office. Statewide recount for the Republican Secretary of State primary Candidate Net Change in Votes Percentage of Vote Total Pam Anderson +13 43.06% Tina Peters +13 28.86% Mike O'Donnell +11 28.08% State Republican primary race for Senate District 9 Candidate Net Change in Votes Percentage of Vote Total Paul Lundeen +1 66.36% Lynda Zamora Wilson 0 33.64% Secretary of State Jena Griswold confirmed that all 64 canvass boards have signed off on the statewide recount result, plus the Senate District 9 race in Monument. The recounts confirmed the winners in each of the races. The recounts are complete and confirm once again that Colorado elections are safe and secure," Griswold said in statement. "Accepting the outcome of free and fair elections is a cornerstone of American democracy. Disinformation and frivolous lawsuits do not change the fact that there are winners and losers in an election. The most substantial change in the recount came out of Elbert County and the discovery last week of 37 uncounted ballots by county election workers. According to Griswold's statement, Elbert County Clerk and Recorder Dallas Schroeder last week notified the Secretary of State's Office that his office found 37 unopened ballots in a bin of undeliverable ballots that were being prepared for storage after the primary. The clerks staff did not find the live ballots in the bin of undeliverable ballots when they arrived on June 10, and, as a result, those 37 unopened ballots were not counted during the initial processing of the primary election ballots. Schroeder was directed to open and process the 37 ballots, but it did not have any effect on the margins of victory for any statewide candidate or for candidates in Elbert County. . Griswold added: I commend election workers from across the state and from my office for conducting this recount. In the face of unparalleled pressure and scrutiny, they have stayed focused on our ultimate goal: ensuring that every eligible Republican, Democrat, and Unaffiliated voter has their voice heard. Repeating a lie over and over does not make it true. Colorados elections are secure, and voters can be confident in them. Peters, who lost by nearly 89,000 votes to Anderson as indicated by official election results, had sought the statewide recount. Peters twice asked for a hand recount, which was denied. Under the state's election rules, recounts must be conducted in the same manner as the original vote tabulation, which was by machine. Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said in a Thursday afternoon statement that the state's 64 county clerks and their election teams ran a professional, accurate and transparent recount of the Republican primary candidates for secretary of state. Crane pointed out that candidates for office in Colorado have the right to ask for and pay for a recount of their race. The statewide recount demonstrated, yet again, that Colorados voting systems are extremely accurate, he said. "Clerk Peters did not lose a close race; she lost this primary contest by 88,000 votes, almost 15%, statewide," Crane said. "The recount she asked for showed she lost, just as our post-election audits already held in every county and certified by volunteer citizen canvass boards found. Clerk Peters attempt to concoct a reason for this recount is window dressing for the larger effort to undermine confidence in our elections." Peters was required to submit $255,912.33 for the recount, which she paid a week ago. She raised more than $503,000 in a seven-day period. According to 9News, those contributions largely followed Peters' appearances on Steve Bannon's "War Room" program. A Colorado Springs man charged with kidnapping and sexually assaulting his ex-girlfriend made an appearance in court Thursday to ask for a bond reduction as he awaits trial. A judge denied the request to lower the $100,000 bond set for the kidnapping charge. Saul Bujanda, 30, was arrested in August 2021 and faces charges of first-degree kidnapping and second-degree sexual assault, among other charges, for allegedly breaking into his ex-girlfriend's apartment, taking her to his Colorado Springs home and assaulting her more than once over a 10-hour period. Bujanda pleaded not guilty to all charges. He has been held on bond at the El Paso County jail for over a year; his jury trial is set to start in December. At an appearance at the El Paso County Courthouse Thursday, Bujandas defense requested a bond reduction from $100,000 to $50,000. The defense said Bujanda was dealing with a substance abuse disorder when the alleged events took place in August last year. Since his incarceration, Bujanda has allegedly been clean and has a plan to not use substances, according to the defense. The defense also said Bujanda is open to complying with the conditions of bail, including GPS monitoring, and has had no contact with the victim since his arrest. He does not have a history of being unemployable or bad behavior in prison, the defense said. But the prosecution argued that the defendant poses a risk to the victim and the general public, citing Bujandas previous criminal history in four U.S. states. In 2011, Bujanda was convicted having a sexual relationship with a juvenile when he was 19 and served time in a Kansas prison, according to previous reporting. Bujanda was out on bail during the alleged kidnapping and assault in August 2021 after an April 2021 incident in which he is accused of drunkenly beating, choking and threatening to kill his then-girlfriend, and thus also faces bond violation charges. A second jury trial is set for December for counts of second-degree assault and other violent crime charges from the April 2021 incident. The alleged victim of both incidents spoke in court Thursday, calling Bujanda a predator and dangerous man with a pattern of violent abuse. She requested that the court reject lowering bond for her safety and the safety of the public. Sabic, a global leader in the chemicals industry, has launched a four-day dedicated training session of its Leadership Program designed for high-ranking officials from Madinah Province Governorate on August 1. The initiative was launched in the presence of Prince Saud bin Khalid Al-Faisal, Madinah Deputy Governor, and Yousef Al-Benyan, Sabic Vice Chairman and CEO, and consistent with its commitment to contribute toward the successful achievement of Saudi Vision 2030, particularly in human capital development. The session is to benefit from Sabic's experience in developing organizational leaders in Saudi Arabia to help realize the capacity-building objectives of Vision 2030. Sabic is drawing on its ongoing expertise in developing industry leaders at specially conducted courses at the Sabic Academy and sharing its Sabic Leadership Way ? experience that is aimed at developing a leadership strategy to build capacity and capabilities. Khaled Al-Muhaisen, Sabic Vice President, People & Organization said, We are honoured to have this opportunity to collaborate with the Madinah governorate and contribute to the Kingdoms transformational goals laid out in Vision 2030. As we continue to invest in supporting the Vision, the Sabic Academy has been delivering high-impact training to government officials with the aim of enhancing their leadership and executive skills. By expanding our support to the Madinah region, we are indeed happy to continuously share knowledge and best practices across our stakeholders in the Kingdom. Sabic has been utilizing its expertise in developing industry leaders at the Sabic Academy which has been the home of the companys successful global leadership learning programs that are focused on developing the skills of its top executives and future leaders. TradeArabia News Service El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder did not discriminate against a former Sheriff's Office lieutenant when Elder demoted him by two pay grades in 2016, a county judge ruled. Timothy Williams, who worked for the Sheriff's Office between 2002 and 2016, did not adequately prove he was demoted because of his age, El Paso County District Court Judge Laura N. Findorff wrote in a July 30 order ruling in Elder's favor. Elder and his attorneys, she wrote, "presented sufficient evidence that Williams was demoted for legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons, that is Elder's perceived ongoing insubordination by Williams and his loss of confidence in Williams' ability to lead the men and women of (the Sheriff's Office) as required of a lieutenant ..." In his lawsuit filed in 2018, Williams alleged Elder demoted him by two pay grades from a lieutenant into a nonsupervisory role as a senior deputy assigned to floor duty in the jail because of his age and eventual plans to retire. Williams testified that at the time he was in his mid-50s and he decided to resign immediately to avoid an adverse effect on his retirement benefits. During a four-day non-jury civil trial in March, Williams' attorneys sought to prove his demotion was directly related to his age and upcoming retirement plans. Findorff ruled over the recent weekend Williams did not show the reasons for his demotion were pretextual, that he involuntarily retired from the Sheriff's Office or that the working conditions he faced after his demotion "were so intolerable that he had no choice but to retire," she wrote. In an email to The Gazette, Elder said Findorff's ruling was correct. "Like I've said from the very beginning of this lawsuit, I did nothing wrong. ... There was absolutely no evidence presented that even remotely supported Williams' case," he said. "The judge reviewed lengthy briefs by both parties, deliberated on the testimony and evidence for nearly four months and made her ruling. ... This is the appropriate finding." Attorneys for Williams could not immediately be reached Thursday. Williams alleged in March 2016 he completed what he said was a mandatory survey that requested anticipated retirement dates from all employees. Williams noted he would be eligible to retire on Aug. 31, 2022, according to his lawsuit. "Elder used retirement plans to decide who to 'build the bench with,' unbeknownst to Williams," said Kiron Kothari, an attorney representing Williams, during the trial's opening statements in March. "Elder asked employees to focus on hiring younger employees, more fit, younger employees who would stay around longer." Elder testified the surveys were not compulsory. Rather, they were intended to help him get to know better his employees and their career goals, he said. Attorneys representing Elder and El Paso County further argued the sheriff took no adverse action against employees who elected not to fill out the survey. They said Williams did not indicate he did not want to answer the questions. Elder alleged Williams bad-mouthed him and how he was managing the Sheriff's Office with other employees and others outside the office. Elder claimed Williams did not discuss his concerns with him directly, nor did Williams bring his concerns to his direct chain of command. Williams' attorneys disputed that claim, saying their client did take his concerns to the appropriate people, including other bureau chiefs and the county attorney. Elder testified in March he had several conversations with Williams about his behavior in attempts to correct it. One such meeting in late October 2016 ran for 2 hours and included Williams' direct supervisor at the time, Larry Borland. Days after that meeting, Williams was heard playing "Send in the Clowns" by Judy Collins loudly in his office, which Elder said was "clearly" a dig at him and other employees. Borland handled disciplinary action against Williams, and the following Monday handed him a letter signed by Elder demoting him. On the stand, Williams said when he played Collins' recording he did not intend to criticize Elder or the agency. Instead, he was paying homage to his late father. It was common for him and other Sheriff's Office employees to play music, Williams said, and he often listened to music in his office on his lunch hour. On Nov. 3, 2016, he was listening to Collins' album "Judith" because it was the anniversary of his father's funeral, he said. Williams and his father both enjoyed her music, he said. Elder, though, said the incident was his "last straw" in what he called a pattern of "insubordinate" and "disrespectful" behavior from Williams. The sheriff said he believed Williams had been using the phrase "same circus, different clowns" to criticize his administration. Williams said he never used the phrase. In the first few minutes of June 17, 2021, Gwendolyn Watson was sitting in the parking lot of Woody's Bar & Grill when the driver of a white Range Rover pulled up nearby. She had just moments to recognize his face before he approached her, shot her three times point-blank, and sped off again, leaving Watson, 51, dead and still seated in the driver's side of an orange Jeep Wrangler. That was the story laid out by prosecutors Wednesday during the opening statements in the jury trial of Paris Toler-Anderson, 36, who was arrested and charged with Watson's murder at the southeast Colorado Springs bar over a year ago. The prosecution told 15 jurors that Watson had angered Toler-Anderson by threatening to expose the nature of their past relationship to his girlfriend at the time. She also threatened to reveal that Toler-Anderson, who has an extensive arrest record including robbery and assault charges, was providing fake pay stubs as proof of employment to a residential reentry center in Colorado Springs. The attorneys said these pressures prompted Toler-Anderson to silence Watson by shooting her multiple times. He then fled the state with his girlfriend and was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, by U.S. marshals a week after the shooting. The prosecution said the subsequent investigation yielded evidence that will show the shell casings found at the scene match a pistol bought 12 hours before the shooting by a man Toler-Anderson was with; that Toler-Anderson fled the state and changed his story multiple times and that his alibi is false; proving the defendant shot and killed Watson "with intent" and is "guilty of murder of the first degree." In response, the defense told the jurors it was "shocked" at the number of holes in the prosecution's investigation and assured them that regarding the prosecution's evidence and witnesses, "nothing can be trusted." The defense painted the picture of a hysterical crowd of 30-40 people surrounding the Jeep immediately after the shooting, with only a few patrol officers on scene trying to keep the growing crowd from pulling Watson's body from the vehicle. In the chaos, the defense said, the shell casings could be easily kicked around and that investigators had "no way to know that's where the evidence landed." The defense's statement also said the prosecution mainly hung its case on two eyewitnesses a man in the passenger seat of the Jeep during Watson's murder and Watson's goddaughter who lied to officers at the scene about who they were or who they were with. The defense ended its statement by advising the jury that the two eyewitnesses were framing Toler-Anderson for Watson's murder. If this was a simple, cold-blooded murder, they would have nothing to hide," the attorney said. "But they do. The prosecution's witnesses took the stand Wednesday after opening statements and will continue to do so through this week. Judge David Gilbert granted both eyewitnesses immunity to testify this week in response to fears they would be accused of and arrested for lying to police. Witnesses for the defense are expected to testify beginning early next week. Colorado State Patrol and other law enforcement will be conducting increased DUI enforcement from Friday through Aug. 14, coinciding with the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, according to a news release from the Colorado Department of Transportation. Last year's Sturgis rally had an attendance of more than 550,000, event organizers said. Many of those motorcyclists travel from and through Colorado on their way to the Black Hills of South Dakota. So far in 2022, 82 motorcycle fatalities have been reported in Colorado compared to 78 this time last year, CDOT said in its news release Thursday. In total there have been 140 deaths involving impaired drivers in Colorado this year, which is a 3% increase over last year. The latest DUI enforcement period in July resulted in 127 arrests across 71 agencies. Colorado Springs police had the highest number of arrests with 24, followed by Denver with 15 and Lakewood with 10. Your morning rundown of the latest news from Colorado Springs and around the country Sign Up View all of our newsletters. Some 44 students from the Pakistan School Bahrain scored A+ and A grades at the annual Secondary School Certificate (SSC) Part-II examinations for the academic year 2021-22. The examinations were conducted by the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (FBISE), an autonomous body responsible for testing students at Pakistani schools in and outside the country, and were taken by 123 students. The results were declared on August 3. Amongst the achievers included Aisha Tariq, who secured top position in the school with 98.19 per cent marks (1,080 out of a total of 1,100). She was followed by Shahzadi Eman (97.18 per cent) and M Hamza Saleem (95.91 per cent) in second and third places respectively. The FBISE resumed examinations after a long three-year pause due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The school Principal, Attiq ur Rehman, said a special event would be held to honour the students and their parents. Meanwhile, Sami ur Rehman, Board of Management Chairman, announced scholarships and awards for the high-achieving students. Pakistan School Bahrain was one of the first private schools in the country to have adopted remote teaching methods for uninterrupted schooling during the pandemic. Exam-oriented teaching strategies were implemented with tests conducted at frequent intervals. The student learning outcome (SLO) growth measurement tool was used for all monthly, mid-term, send up and pre-board examinations to help teachers measure student performance. The students were given comprehensive guidance to familiarise them with SLO-based testing Additionally, optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets and e-sheets were used in all these tests to acquaint students with them and to enable them to attempt the FBISE exams effectively. Tradearabia News Service FILE PHOTO: U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman speaks during a panel with the Friends of Europe in Brussels, Belgium, April 21, 2022. REUTERS/Johanna Geron/File Photo A series of arrest affidavits obtained by The Gazette reveal new details surrounding the arrests of three adults involved with a group of gang-affiliated juveniles after a seven-month-long undercover investigation. On Monday, Colorado Springs police announced that the four juveniles, who police said are affiliated with a local gang known as "P-Block," face two dozen new charges combined, including attempted first-degree murder, attempted first-degree burglary and assaulting a police officer. Police said the string of crimes occurred between December and July. The investigation began in December, when one of the juveniles, now 15, messaged an undercover detective's Facebook alias asking to trade firearms and for help in burglarizing a gun store, one affidavit said. When police arrested the juvenile outside his home on Dec. 21, police made contact with one of the juvenile's guardians, who is not his parent. The guardian gave permission to search their apartment, where police found a hidden handgun. The juvenile said April Louise Beese, 42, who "has no custody" over the child and "who is not allowed to see him," gave him the gun when she had picked him up from school a month earlier. The affidavit shows the juvenile texted Beese from a phone she had secretly provided him, bragging to her that he was "smart" for concealing the phone and a marijuana pipe. "OK that's cool I'm glad to hear babe," Beese replied. More texts show that the child asked Beese to take the handgun back after he got into an argument with his guardians, who did not allow him to have firearms where they lived. Online records show Beese was arrested in May and is being held at the El Paso County jail. The juvenile was arrested in December and released on bond but failed to appear for court, police said. Over the next three months, according to police, the same juvenile and two other juveniles participated in a series of violent crimes including an attempted carjacking, pointing a firearm at an officer while evading a traffic stop, shooting at a fleeing attempted robbery victim, and firing shots near moving vehicles and occupied homes. After one of the juveniles fired a round into a neighbor's house in January, his mother, Heather Marquez, "was aware (he) had a gun but did nothing to prevent it" and "directed him to a location away from police." After the incident, her red 1995 Subaru Legacy was painted black to avoid detection and was used days later when three of the juveniles drove to a fight near a middle school in southeast Colorado Springs and threatened to kill a group of sixth graders with multiple firearms, police said. A fourth juvenile suspect had arranged the fight in anticipation of an armed confrontation. Marquez, 36, not only knew about her child's possession of a firearm, an affidavit reads, but assisted him in trading handguns with Evan Hill, her boyfriend and the third adult arrested in relation to the juveniles' delinquency. Marquez was arrested and posted a $10,000 bond, according to online records. According to an affidavit, the undercover detective used a Facebook alias in July to investigate Hill's involvement in trading firearms with juveniles. The detective said he revealed himself to be a juvenile female in search of firearms, and Hill, 35, responded asking if the user would have sex with him in exchange for firearms and methamphetamine. Hill said he would knowingly solicit the juvenile for sex if she "thinks she grown." On July 18, the detective's alias asked Hill if he could provide her 16-year-old friend a handgun, to which he agreed if she would also pay with sex. Hill was arrested on July 15 and posted a $35,000 bond. Evan Hill was charged with: Soliciting for child prostitution Providing a handgun to a juvenile Unlawful purchase of a firearm Contributing to the delinquency of a minor Possession of a defaced firearm Heather Marquez was charged with: Providing a handgun to a juvenile Contributing to the delinquency of a minor Accessory to vehicular eluding Harboring a minor April Beese was charged with: Providing a handgun to a juvenile Contributing to the delinquency of a minor Possession of weapons by previous offenders Burjeel Holdings, a leading healthcare platform in Mena, has posted a revenue of AED3,351 million ($912.15 million) for 2021, representing an 18% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the three-year period 2019-2021. Burjeels record financial results reflect the strength of its diversified portfolio of high-quality healthcare assets, highly specialized services and its strong, connected growth platform. The company reported that EBITDA was AED779 million, representing an EBITDA margin of over 23%, and a 37% CAGR between 2019-2021. Profit for the year was AED234 million. The record results demonstrate Burjeels strong growth trajectory, building on the continued and consistent growth delivered over the past 15 years. Burjeel has a portfolio of 39 hospitals and medical centres across the UAE and Oman, supported by a network of retail pharmacies and other medical services. Since inception, Burjeel has invested AED4.2 billion of capital expenditure in the UAE and Oman including the establishment of Burjeel Medical City, a rising regional Centre of Excellence for Oncology and other complex treatments, and the largest private hospital in the UAE. Significant investment has also been made in driving digitalisation and innovation across the Company, in order to enhance clinical quality and operational efficiency, through initiatives including digitalised patient journeys, artificial intelligence enabled clinical/diagnostic support and seamless collaboration across clinical and operations. Dr Shamsheer Vayalil, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Burjeel Holdings, said: Burjeel Holdings record financial results for 2021 reflect the hard work and dedication of our people in helping to realise our vision to be the leading healthcare services provider in the Middle East and beyond, known for our quality and clinical excellence. Our patient-first focus is driven by our teams, who are directly responsible for the enduring power of our healthcare facilities and the successful, diversified businesses that are supporting our core business. The strategy and decisions we have made along the way have enabled us to achieve the levels of success seen in todays results. Burjeel Holdings operates 39 hospitals and medical centres across the UAE and Oman which provide healthcare services for all socio-demographics and are built around our commitment to offering highly specialised, complex and personalised services, underpinned by strong innovation and research capabilities. Our ambitions are demonstrated by Burjeel Medical City, our purpose-built state-of-the-art 400-bed tertiary care facility in Mohamed Bin Zayed City, which provides the highest level of care. As we continue along our journey of strengthening Burjeel Holdings as an organization, we will develop our brand to position ourselves as a platform to attract top talent that can succeed at the highest levels, helping to further develop our company. With the establishment of Burjeel Holdings earlier this year and the strong growth seen over the past three years, I am highly confident we have the platform in place to take the strategic corporate actions needed to drive our future growth. Healthcare is a key focus for governments across the Middle East and we look forward to supporting our partners in the UAE and the wider GCC, in helping build and enhance their healthcare services and infrastructure, he added. Burjeel Holdings became the new holding company for the group with effect from March 2022. Burjeel Holdings will build on the legacy of developing its network of hospitals, medical centres, and allied services. Burjeel Holdings assets cater to all socio-economic segments across a range of brands, including Burjeel, Medeor, LLH, Lifecare, and Tajmeel. TradeArabia News Service A Parker man may not proceed to sue the city of Aurora and one of its officers for being wrongfully arrested in front of his daughter for a theft he did not commit, a federal judge has decided. US-based United Parcel Service (UPS) has held on to the top spot as the most valuable logistics brand in the world with a brand value of $38.5 billion, says a new report from the leading brand valuation consultancy, Brand Finance. Despite disruptions to the global supply chain, the brand value of UPS jumped by a quarter over the year as demand for its services increased. Further, UPS has benefited from improved goodwill in many nations as it actively contributed to improving access to Covid-19 vaccination supplies for 110 countries. The brand used their logistics supply chain network to deliver shipments and medical equipment as needed throughout the world. Every year, Brand Finance puts 5,000 of the worlds biggest brands to the test, and publishes around 100 reports, ranking brands across all sectors and countries. The worlds top 25 most valuable and strongest spirits brands are included in the annual Brand Finance Logistics 25 ranking. Brand value grows The brand value of UPS has grown by 28% in part due to acquisitions. In 2021, UPS acquired Roadie, a new delivery platform that provides same day delivery in the US. UPS also forays into digital transformation with an innovation centre in Singapore to serve as a research and development hub in the APAC region. More broadly, the logistics sector is seeing a revival after pandemic induced restrictions with new technological innovations. Correlated with lockdown restrictions, many consumers shifted spending from services to goods causing a surge in demand for various goods just as the ability to move products was restricted. With the world now looking towards a post-Covid future, online shopping has increased significantly, creating growth in the consumer-facing parcel delivery sector. David Haigh, Chairman and CEO, Brand Finance commented: The logistics industry has transformed during the pandemic to keep up with changing customer demands adeptly. With new partnerships and acquisitions across the board, the sector has achieved great performance and brand value growth. Delivery Hero and Just Eat Takeaway Delivery Hero (brand value up 53% to $5.8 billion) is making its mark around the globe with acquisitions and owning major stake in various promising businesses: Hugo (a Salvadorean fintech and delivery app), Hungry (a Danish food delivery app) and Glovo (a Spanish food delivery app). The integration of each of these services has played a key role in global brand value, as the global brand is benefiting from local integration in diverse markets. Similarly, Just Eat Takeaway.com (brand value up 53% to $4.5 billion) signed various international strategic partnerships to increase the scale of the brand. Following the merger of Just Eat and Takeaway.com, the brand has made significant investments to increase their position and has been able to increase their orders by 6 times. The brand also expects to further strengthen their position through their wider network post the merger. BSNF and Canadian National lose brand value BNSF (brand value down 9% to $6.9 billion) and Canadian National Railway (brand value down 5% to $3.9 billion) dropped in brand value this year. Due to travel restrictions across the globe, railway companies lost significant revenue on tickets. As restrictions ease, passengers are demonstrating a preference for private travel, reducing future brand value expectations. JD Logistics innovates Chinese supply chain and logistics provider JD Logistics is a new entrant into the Brand Finance Logistics 25 ranking, valued at $4.1 billion, making it the 18th most valuable logistics brand. The brand recently acquired Deppon Express, a trucking and warehouse management service provider in the Chinese market to increase its logistical network and infrastructure. Despite severe supply chain disruptions over the pandemic, JD Logistics announced its IPO in 2021. The brand invested in cutting-edge technology and research to roll out an automated delivery service offering in selected cities in China. JD Logistics carry out deliveries in rural areas using new technology such as self-driving trucks and aerial drones. Additionally, the brand is also focussing on ESG projects such as establishing Chinas first carbon-neutral logistics industrial park which aims to provide carbon-neutral operations by lowering energy consumption. JD Logistics is also making the supply chain more sustainable by employing green warehousing, reusable packaging and the usage of renewable energy. These factors are increasingly important as business customers demand greater control and management of carbon emissions across their entire supply chains.-- TradeArabia News Service Facing increasing pressure from Democrats and veterans advocacy organizations, the U.S. Senate passed a bill late Tuesday expanding health care and disability benefits for millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. The Senate passed the measure, 86-11, with Iowa Republican U.S. Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley voting in favor. Ernst, a combat veteran, had previously objected with some other Republicans to a budget provision in the bill, which briefly blocked its passage. Democratic President Joe Biden has pushed for the legislation and is expected to sign the bill into law. Tuesdays vote ended a brief stalemate when the process derailed after some Senate Republicans including Ernst made a late attempt last week to change a budget provision in the bill and blocked it from advancing, infuriating veterans advocacy groups. A key voting bloc in the Nov. midterm elections, the advocacy groups ramped up the political pressure over the last five days on GOP lawmakers to act. The Honoring Our PACT Act first passed the Senate in June, 84-14, and by a 342-88 vote in the House. But technical corrections sent the measure back to the Senate for another procedural vote July 27. Twenty-five Republicans who supported the previous version of the bill --- including Ernst changed their vote over how the government accounts for spending slated for veterans programs. The bill is projected to increase federal deficits by about $277 billion over 10 years and does not include offsetting spending cuts or tax increases. When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scored the bill, it projected that nearly $400 billion slated to be spent on health services would move from discretionary spending to mandatory spending. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, said a reclassification of the $390 billion from discretionary to mandatory would both reduce the pressure to keep those costs under control and make it easier for appropriators to spend more elsewhere in the budget without offsets. Those dynamics, however, also applied to the bill when Senate Republicans had overwhelmingly approved the measure in June. But more than two dozen Republicans who voted for the bill in June voted this time against advancing the measure, raising questions about why Republicans blocked a do-over to pass the bill. Ernst blamed Democrats for not allowing the chance to offer amendments to strengthen the bill, and sided with Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, who sought a vote on an amendment he said would not reduce spending on veterans but would limit the ability of Congress to increase spending on unrelated, nondefense programs down the road. The amendment, which Ernst supported, would have kept the $400 billion in spending in the discretionary budget. Senate Republicans claim doing so will save Americans significant costs in the long run without sacrificing a dollar for veterans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer struck a deal Tuesday with Republicans to let the Senate vote on the Toomey amendment as well as two others, with 60 votes needed for passage, the same number that was needed to advance the bill itself. After voting for the Toomey amendment, which failed, Ernst voted with Grassley and others Tuesday to pass the PACT Act. Our veterans, who have sacrificed so much and continue to pay the price for their service, deserve the life-saving benefits in this bill, Ernst said in a statement. The PACT Act works to fulfill our duty to care for those who put on the uniform in the name of protecting our freedom, both past and present. Grassley has consistently supported the PACT Act and voted in favor of advancing the bill last week. Veterans who served in the post Sept. 11, 2001, era and were exposed to toxic burn pits will get 10 years rather than five of enhanced health care coverage through the Department of Veterans Affairs upon their separation from the military. The PACT Act also adds 23 illnesses to the VAs list of toxic-exposure-related ailments presumed to be connected to military service, ending the need for veterans with those conditions to prove to the VA their illnesses were linked to their deployments. And it would expand care for veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Since 9/11, over 3.5 million veterans have suffered from toxic exposure, and many more have faced other adverse health effects from their selfless service, Grassley said in a statement. The bipartisan Honoring Our PACT Act is a critical investment in our veterans, who deserve the best care possible. By making much-needed improvements to the VA, including strengthening its workforce and health care facilities, this bill will help ensure veterans who have sacrificed so much to defend freedom, peace and prosperity will be well taken care of. Weve promised to care for our military men and women who sacrificed for our freedoms. This bill helps to keep that promise. The Associated Press contributed to this report. CEDAR RAPIDS For six months, Kristi Casteels son slept 100 yards from an open-air burn pit in Iraq that incinerated everything from plastics and paint to electronics. The Cedar Rapids native had no idea the smoke from the pit may also have been destroying his lungs. Joshua Casteel died in 2012 at age 32 of lung cancer his family believes was caused by toxins from the burn pit at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where Casteel served as an interrogator from 2004 to 2005. The military routinely used open burn pits set ablaze with jet fuel to dispose of tires, batteries, medical waste and other materials during military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such fires are illegal in the United States. I think it should have been passed 10 to 15 years ago, Casteel said of federal legislation providing health care for military veterans impacted by burn pits. The Honoring Our PACT Act was set to pass Congress last week, but some Senate Republicans including Iowa U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, a combat veteran changed their vote over an added provision. The measure first passed the Senate in June, 84-14, and by a 342-88 vote in the House. But technical corrections sent the measure back to the Senate for another procedural vote Wednesday. Twenty-five Republicans who supported the previous version of the bill, including Ernst, did not support a vote to advance the bill. Fellow Iowa Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley voted in favor of advancing the bill and also had voted to pass the bill in June. I think what happened is unconscionable, Casteel said of Senate Republicans blocking passage of the bill. The PACT Act would expand U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs benefits to veterans who served in the post Sept. 11, 2001, era and were exposed to toxic burn pits during their military service. It also would add 23 illnesses to the VAs list of toxic-exposure-related ailments presumed to be connected to military service, ending the need for veterans with those conditions to prove to the VA their illnesses were linked to their deployments. And it would expand care for veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Senate Republicans raised objections because the bill would reclassify nearly $400 billion in current Veterans Affairs spending from discretionary to mandatory accounts, thereby potentially freeing up more budget authority to increase discretionary spending on other domestic programs unrelated to veterans. The text of the legislation, however, indicates the allocated money has to be spent only on health care for veterans. The bill is 100 percent dedicated to health care and benefits for toxic-exposed veterans. Any inferences or accusations to the contrary are untrue, the Veterans of Foreign Wars posted on Twitter. These senators supported or voted yes on final passage of the PACT Act in June, but flipped their support on the recent vote. They pulled the rug out from under veterans who are sick and dying from toxic exposure. Veterans advocacy organizations, including the VFW, contend the only part of the bill that changed was the necessary technical removal of a single sentence; that no additional sections were added; and that the funding structure of the bill which Ernst and other GOP senators supported in June has not changed. Ernst, though, blamed Democrats for not allowing the chance to offer amendments to strengthen the bill. I strongly support the PACT Act which will provide critical, life-saving care to thousands of heroes suffering from toxic exposure, Ernst said in a statement. Now, due to more Democrat mismanagement, it is back before the Senate. At least this time we have an opportunity to strengthen this vitally important bill without sacrificing a single dollar of care for our veterans. I agree with the VFW that the Senate should not go on August recess without this opportunity. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was expected to schedule another procedural vote Monday to break a filibuster. Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey has pushed for an amendment to fix what he called a budget gimmick. The amendment, which Ernst supports, would keep the $400 billion in spending in the discretionary budget and keep the Toxic Exposure Fund in place only for new funding resulting from the bill. Senate Republicans claim doing so will save Americans significant costs in the long run without sacrificing a dollar for veterans. Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough told the CNNs Jake Tapper on Sunday that proposed GOP amendments to the legislation would lead to rationing of care for vets. 'We want to see this thing passed Kristi Casteel said an oncologist told her that her son died of lung cancer without having any of the conventional risk factors such as smoking, asbestos exposure or radiation. The type of cancer was extremely rare for a healthy young man to have and the VA doctor in Iowa City said he was the only young male he had ever seen have this type of cancer, Casteel said. While her son did receive compensation and some acknowledgment that his cancer was military-related prior to his death, there was never an official acknowledgment that his cancer was the result of exposure to toxins from the burn pit. " (A)t least he did get some (compensation), and we were appreciate of that, but not everyone had the advocate that we did, Casteel said of a VA employee. Its always surprising to me when a combat veteran for any reason does not stand up for veterans rights, Casteel said of Ernst. Its discouraging to me and I dont understand it. It feels unconscionable to me. John Derner, department adjutant of the American Legion of Iowa, joined other veterans advocacy groups in criticizing Ernst and Senate Republicans for blocking passage of "groundbreaking legislation aimed at expanding care for veterans exposed to hazardous chemicals during their military service. We want to see this thing passed so those Iraq and Afghanistan veterans dont have to wait as long as those Vietnam veterans to receive compensation for the chemical exposures and hazards they were exposed to during their military service, Derner said. This is a commitment we owe to our veterans. They couldnt leave their post when exposed to these chemicals and we shouldnt be leaving them behind when providing them compensation for injuries and illnesses as a result of that exposure." EDITOR'S NOTE On July 25, 1972, Jean Heller, a reporter on The Associated Press investigative team, then called the Special Assignment Team, broke news that rocked the nation. Based on documents leaked by Peter Buxtun, a whistleblower at the U.S. Public Health Service, the then 29-year-old journalist and the only woman on the team, reported that the federal government let hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis for 40 years in order to study the impact of the disease on the human body. Most of the men were denied access to penicillin, even when it became widely available as a cure. A public outcry ensued, and nearly four months later, the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" came to an end. The investigation would have far-reaching implications: The men in the study filed a lawsuit that resulted in a $10 million settlement, Congress passed laws governing how subjects in research studies were treated, and more than two decades later President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the study, calling it "shameful." Today, the effects of the study still linger it is often blamed for the unwillingness of some African Americans to participate in medical research. In observance of the 50th anniversary of Heller's groundbreaking investigation, the AP is republishing the original report and a recent interview with her and others on how the story came together. BEHIND THE INVESTIGATION *** The original AP report: For 40 years the U.S. Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human guinea pigs, denied proper medical treatment, have died of syphilis and its side effects. The study was conducted to determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body. PHS officials responsible for initiating the experiment have long since retired. Current PHS officials, who say they have serious doubts about the morality of the study, also say that it is too late to treat syphilis in any of the study's surviving participants. But PHS doctors say they are rendering whatever other medical services they can now give to the survivors while the study of the disease's effects continues. The experiment, called the Tuskegee Study began in 1932 with about 600 black men mostly poor and uneducated, from Tuskegee, Ala., an area that had the highest syphilis rate in the nation at the time. One-third of the group was free of syphilis; two-thirds showed evidence of the disease. In the syphilitic group, half were given the best treatment known at the time, but the other half, about 200 men, received no treatment at all for syphilis, PHS officials say. As incentives to enter the program, the men were promised free transportation to and from hospitals, free hot lunches, free medicine for any disease other than syphilis and free burial after autopsies were performed. The Tuskegee Study began 10 years before penicillin was discovered to be a cure for syphilis and 15 years before the drug became widely available. Yet, even after penicillin became common, and while its use probably could have helped or saved a number of the experiment subjects, the drug was denied them, Dr. J.D. Millar says. He is chief of the venereal disease branch of the PHS's Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and is now in charge of what remains of the Tuskegee Study. Dr. Millar said in an interview that he has serious doubts about the program. "I think a definite serious moral problem existed when the study was undertaken, a more serious moral problem was overlooked in the post-war years when penicillin became available but was not given to these men and a moral problem still exists," Dr. Millar said. "But the study began when attitudes were much different on treatment and experimentation. At this point in time, with our current knowledge of treatment and the disease and the revolutionary change in approach to human experimentation, I don't believe the program would be undertaken," he said. Syphilis, a highly contagious infection spread by sexual contact, can cause if untreated, bone and dental deformations, deafness, blindness, heart disease and central nervous system deterioration. No figures were available on when the last death occurred in the program. And one official said that apparently no conscious effort was made to halt the program after it got under way. A 1969 CDC study of 276 treated and untreated syphilitics who participated in the Tuskegee Study showed that seven had died as a direct result of syphilis. Another 154 died of heart disease. CDC officials say they cannot determine at this late date how many of the heart disease deaths were caused by syphilis or how many additional deaths could be linked to the disease. However, several years ago an American Medical Association study determined that untreated syphilis reduces life expectancy by 17 per cent in black men between the ages of 25 and 50, a precise description of the Tuskegee Study subjects. Don Prince, another official in the venereal disease branch of CDC, said the Tuskegee Study had contributed some knowledge about syphilis, particularly that the morbidity and mortality rate among untreated syphilitics were not as high as previously believed. Like Dr. Millar, Prince said he thought the study should have been halted with penicillin treatment for participants after World War II. "I don't know why the decision was made in 1946 not to stop the program," Prince said. "I was unpleasantly surprised when I first came here and found out about it. It really puzzles me." At the beginning of 1972, according to CDC data, 74 of the untreated syphilitics were still living. All of them, Dr. Millar said, were men who did not suffer any potentially fatal side effects from their bouts with the disease. Some of them received penicillin and antibiotics in past years for other aliments, Prince said, but none has ever received treatment for syphilis. Now, both men agree, it's too late Recent reviews of the Tuskegee Study by the CDC indicate that treatment now for survivors is medically questionable, Dr. Millar said. Their average age is 74 and massive penicillin therapy, with possible ill side effects, is deemed too great a risk to individuals, particularly for those whose syphilis is now dormant. However, Dr. Millar, added there was a point in time when survivors could have been treated with at least some measure of success. "The most critical moral issue about this experiment arises in the post-war era, the years after the end of World War II when penicillin became widely available. "I know some were treated with penicillin for other diseases and then dropped from the program because the drug had some positive effect on the primary disease (syphilis). Looking at it now, one cannot see any reason they could not have been treated at that time." *** The mother of a 2-year-old girl found dead in an Oceanfront hotel room this week was arraigned Wednesday on a felony child abuse charge. Leandra Andrade, 38, of Washington, arrived Tuesday at the Virginia Beach city jail, shortly after her release from a hospital. Shes being held without bond. Her arraignment was held in Virginia Beach Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. A bond hearing is scheduled for Thursday. Andrade told substitute Judge Anthony Nicolo shes a housewife and wasnt sure if shed be able to afford an attorney. She said she plans to ask family for help. The judge said hed appoint a public defender if shes unable to get assistance. Deputy Commonwealths Attorney Tabitha Anderson said afterward that her office is waiting to receive reports from various agencies before deciding whether to charge Andrade with more serious offenses. The cause and manner of her daughters death has yet to be released but police said the circumstances appeared to be suspicious. Virginia Beach police responded to a hotel in the 3600 block of Atlantic Avenue Monday and found the girl dead and the mother suffering a medical emergency after D.C. police were alerted to their location. The woman left Washington after the girls father was awarded full legal custody of the child in a hearing July 26, according to D.C. police. Physical custody was split evenly between the two parents. An attorney for the girls father, Fabio E. Andrade, released a statement Wednesday in which he mourned the loss of his child and asked for privacy for himself and his family. My daughter Lanoix loved life and loved to make her friends and family smile, the statement said. I am devastated that the opportunity for Lanoix to continue living a happy and loving life was senselessly taken from her. The statement went on to say that Fabio Andrade had been fighting tirelessly since March to obtain full physical and legal custody of his daughter. The court ruling last week awarding me temporary sole legal custody was one of several successful steps toward that goal, the statement said. But that ruling did not affect the existing, court-ordered temporary shared physical custody schedule that put Lanoix with her mother last weekend. Leandra Andrade was last seen Friday in Washington, according to the areas Metropolitan Police Department. Posts on Leandra Andrades Facebook account contain numerous photos of Lanoix. Before the girl was born, there were multiple posts of Leandra and Fabio Andrade together at their 2015 wedding, on their engagement day, and on vacations to places like the Bahamas and Costa Rica. The posts began to indicate a change in their relationship starting in January. The state Department of Education is finalizing model policies to ensure parents are notified if their children are being taught sexually explicit instructional materials in the classroom. Wednesday marked the last day for Virginia residents to weigh in on the new policies that the department drafted. Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill in April sponsored by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico requiring the education department to develop and local school boards to adopt such policies. According to the VDOE policy, parents will be notified at least 30 days in advance if any instructional materials with sexually explicit content (as defined by the model policy) will be taught in their childs classroom. At that time, parents will be able to review the materials. On school websites, principals will maintain a current list of sexually explicit instructional materials by grade and subject. Local school boards have until January to adopt either VDOEs model policies concerning instructional materials with sexually explicit content, or more comprehensive policies. Youngkin, who has advocated for more parental involvement in the classroom, ran a campaign ad in October that criticized his opponent, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, for vetoing a similar bill when McAuliffe was governor. The so-called Beloved bill named after Nobel laureate Toni Morrisons book Beloved that McAuliffe vetoed would have required school districts to notify parents of assignments containing sexually explicit content. Dunnavant, who sponsored the bill in the most recent legislative session, was not immediately available for comment. Policies should be drafted which empower parents to exercise their right to decide whether the use of sexually explicit content in instructional materials is appropriate for their child, the model policy states. The online public comment period, which closes midnight Wednesday, garnered roughly 1,500 comments as of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. The online forum has a mix of comments in support of and against the model policies. One supportive commenter said the policies were a common-sense program, while another supporter wrote, these model policies are a wake-up call to school boards and teachers to attend to the voices of those who innately care most about the children: their parents. An opponent said, classrooms should be a place where students are free to ask questions, explore new ideas, and learn about diverse viewpoints. On Tuesday, the ACLU of Virginia submitted a comment to the town hall and sent a letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow in opposition to the proposed model policies. Educators and librarians cannot do their job if they are constantly being required to justify their curricula and instruction to parents who may hold diametrically opposing viewpoints, the letter states. Nor was the public education system put in place to present a homogenized viewpoint. The education of young Virginians will be disrupted by efforts to use classrooms to support a political agenda a space of control rather than a thriving ground for free speech and freedom of thought. The proposed model policies, according to the ACLU of Virginia, will force school divisions to adopt anti-free speech practices and deny students the opportunity to be inspired by stories of people from all walks of life. The ACLU of Virginia argues that the proposed model policies will lead to classroom censorship and will likely target curriculum by and/or that includes LGBTQ people and Black, Indigenous and other communities of color. The Pride Liberation Project, a student-led LGBTQ rights advocacy organization, published a letter with over 600 student signatures calling on the VDOE to explicitly state that instruction about LGBTQIA+ people is not inherently sexual. Failing to do so would have a chilling effect on our education, the letter states, adding that every student, including LGBTQIA+ students, deserves to be accurately represented in school curriculum. Erasing Queer people from our classes would lead to fictionalized and over-simplified instruction, given the immense contributions that LGBTQIA+ people have made to our state and county, the letter states. While Susan Muskett, president of Pro-Family Women, a pro-life organization based in Arlington, wrote positively of the model policies in the online town hall, she cited some concerns with the document. Muskett characterized the policies as a much-needed tilt toward restoring parental rights and welcomes all efforts toward making parental notification of sexually explicit material a more standardized and open procedure. The organization took pause with a sentence that says: when determining whether instructional materials contain sexually explicit content, teachers, principals, and division staff should consider student age and maturity, and whether a parent might reasonably consider the instructional content harmful to their child. Pro-Family Women wrote in the public comment section that including the sentence would undermine the law because it would allow school staff to make subjective assessments as to whether instructional material contains sexually explicit content impact[ing] whether or not students parents are given notice. Charles Pyle, a spokesperson for VDOE, said in an email Wednesday that the model policies became available at the beginning of July. After reviewing public comments, the department will communicate the final document to school divisions to inform the adoption of local policies by January 1, 2023, as required by the legislation, Pyle wrote. Youngkin signs bill requiring parental notification of sexually explicit content in schools Gov. Glenn Youngkins office announced Friday that the governor signed a bill to require the Department of Education to develop and local school boards to adopt policies for ensuring parental notification of sexually explicit instructional material. 23 Va. school districts have taken books off shelves in past two years The Times-Dispatch sent public records requests to each of the state's 132 public school systems seeking information on books that had been removed or placed under review in the last two school years. The North Carolina State Board of Elections voted unanimously to certify The Green Party as an official party. Some have suggested that we should make this decision quickly rather than ensure that it was done correctly, Board Chairperson Damon Circosta, who initially voted against certification in June, said. A hasty decision would have been a disservice to the voters of this state and the law. We spent the time and the effort to get it right. The board voted against certifying the Green Party in June, citing potential fraud in the petition campaign. While the board has now certified the party, the decision is somewhat moot as the filing deadline for new candidates passed on July 1. The only way for the Green Party to get on the November ballot now is through a court order or legislative action. The state board directed all county boards of elections to complete a signature matching review of all Green Party petitions prior to Mondays meeting. After doing so, the board found that the Green Party still had 1,607 signatures more than what was required to become a new party. Although the party is now certified, board staff said the investigation into potential fraud continues and any criminal findings will be referred to prosecutors. The Green Party has filed a lawsuit against the state board, alleging that by denying the it a spot on the ballot the board violated the partys due process and First Amendment rights. NCSBEs failure to certify NCGP as a new political party, despite NCGPs compliance with all applicable requirements under state law, without providing NCGP with notice or an opportunity to defend the validity of the signatures on its petitions or the integrity of its petitioning process, violates Plaintiffs right to due process of law, the lawsuit reads. The board filed a response to the lawsuit on Friday, writing that it opposed the Green Partys demand that a judge order its inclusion the 2022 ballot. But the NCSBE does not oppose the partys request that the candidate filing deadline be extended, should the board certify the party at its meeting Monday. The boards response also included a declaration from Matthew Martucci, the boards lead investigator. The Investigation Division elevated the Green Party investigation as a potentially criminal matter with high priority due to observing a pattern of petition pages submitted containing what appeared to be noticeably fraudulent signatures, he wrote. Oliver Hall, the Green Partys lawyer, said the board had no legal basis to deny the partys certification. Even if the board certifies NCGP tomorrow, as it is required to do, the harm that its unlawful and unconstitutional actions have caused NCGP is immeasurable, he said in a text to The News & Observer. A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 8 on the lawsuit. The denial of the partys certification, as well as the involvement of powerful organizations on both sides of the aisle have raised questions about political motivations in the process of certifying new parties. Leading up to the boards initial vote in June, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is represented by The Elias Group a law firm tied to influential Democratic politicians began contacting people who signed the Green partys petition for ballot access and asking them to remove their signatures. If the Green Party is on the ballot it will give Republicans a huge advantage that will help them win in North Carolina in 2022 and 2024, texts from the DSCC to petition signers said. Last week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee filed an amicus brief in support of the Green Partys lawsuit. The Democratic Party has acknowledged that it would benefit politically if the Green Party does not appear on the ballot in North Carolina the Green Party presents a separate option for left-leaning voters in the General Election, the brief said. Thus, it is not surprising that the Boards vote on whether to certify the Green Party was directly split 3-2 along party lines. All three Democrats on the board voted against certification, with the two Republicans voting in favor. Marc Elias, founder of the Elias Group, criticized Republicans involvement in a Tweet last week. It is incredible how *whenever there is actual fraud* in North Carolina, the Republican Party is all for it, Elias wrote. Pretend fraud, however, they must do everything in their power to make sure that can never happen. The Elias Group has not responded to multiple requests for comment from The N&O. The state board maintains that its decision was not made for political reasons. There is nothing political about this thats being performed by state board staff, Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the state board said. This is us administering elections as prescribed by our law. WENTWORTH Rockingham Community College has formed a partnership with WGU North Carolina, an affiliate of online nonprofit Western Governors University, enabling a seamless transfer of course credits for graduates to attend the online university. RCC President Dr. Mark Kinlaw hosted WGU North Carolina Chancellor Dr. Ben Coulter on the RCC campus for a signing of the collaborative agreement on July 14, according to a news release from RCC. WGU will now provide to RCC graduates flexible, personalized learning pathways to earn bachelors and masters degrees through WGU, the release said. Going a step further, the agreement also extends to RCC employees, in support of workforce development and employee development goals. We are thrilled to partner with RCC to support a shared mission of expanding educational opportunities and enabling career pathways which serve the workforce needs of our communities, especially in rural settings, across North Carolina, Coulter said. WGU offers more than 60 accredited online degree programs in business, information technology, K-12 teacher education and health professions, including nursing. These programs align perfectly with associates degrees RCC offers, so graduates will be able to transfer right into WGU to earn their bachelors and masters degrees. One unique feature of WGU is the ability for students to accelerate program completion in our undergraduate and graduate degree offerings, Coulter said. Our programs are intentionally designed to be flexible, especially for adults who may be working, supporting a family, or have other life obligations. And as we are competency-based, students who demonstrate mastery of course content and assessment criteria can progress at their own pace. Tuition is approximately $3,800 for a six-month term, during which a student can take as many courses as they want. That means that whether a student completes eight courses or 20 during a term, the tuition doesnt change, so the more courses a student finishes in a term, the quicker they finish, saving them money, Coulter said. Thats good news for RCC graduates, who already save a lot of money coming to the community college for their first two years, the release said. In fact, RCC graduate Noah Dorsett is already enrolled at WGU. Dorsett, who holds an Associate in Applied Science degree and works on RCCs Technology Support team as computer support and digital media specialist, is pursuing WGUs Information Technology pathway. Its wonderful to be able to continue my full-time employment and have a full online education where I can pursue certifications while still being able to gather experience in my professional environment as well, Dorsett told Coulter during the July 14 event. WGU is a non-profit, fully accredited institution established in 1997. More than 135,000 students are enrolled nationwide, including more than 3,800 in North Carolina, and it boasts nearly 300,000 graduates across the country. WGU North Carolina was established in 2017. WGU was an early innovator at the dawn of online learning 25 years ago, Coulter said. During that time, we have established best practices and effective teaching methods meeting the needs of different communities of learners that may be underserved, low-income, or currently working but looking to upskill or having a change in careers. We are inclusive of all learners and have a level of portability and flexibility supporting attainment of high-quality, accredited degrees and certifications through the convenience of online learning. RCC graduates and employees are eligible to apply for the WGU Community College Partner Scholarship in the amount of $2,500, disbursed in increments of $625 per semester for up to four terms based on academic performance, the release said. To find out more about WGUs transfer pathways, visit https://partners.wgu.edu. Abdulnasser Bin Kalban, Chief Executive Officer of Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), the largest industrial company in the UAE outside oil and gas, today (August 4) visited the companys medical centre in Al Taweelah to personally thank EGAs Covid-19 team, who pledged to keep EGAs workplace safe. EGA is a vital industrial company and a foundation of both the UAE and Guinean economies. Thousands of EGA employees remained on-site throughout the pandemic to run the companys industrial operations and ensure the production of the metal the world needs, EGA said in a statement. EGA makes one-in-every 25 tonnes of aluminium produced worldwide. EGA has closely followed the guidelines set out by the UAE and Guinean authorities to protect its people. In the UAE, EGAs medical centres are permanently staffed with 65 doctors, nurses, and other personnel who are on duty around the clock to keep people safe. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, EGA deployed two additional medical teams to conduct regular Covid-19 testing of all employees and contractors working at EGA sites in the UAE. In Guinea, EGA almost doubled the size of its medical team to support and care for employees. EGA also worked with authorities to provide neighbouring communities with vital information about protection measures, as well as with the hygiene equipment they need. The Covid-19 team was created to monitor the pandemic and guide EGAs responses to daily changes. The primary objective of the Covid-19 team was to reduce the pace of the virus spread and flatten the curve, ensuring EGAs operations shifts continued to run smoothly throughout shifts. To date, EGA's medical teams have performed more than 350,000 PCR tests and administered over 14,000 vaccinations to employees and contractors. For more than two years now, the Covid-19 team continues to closely monitor the latest developments of the pandemic. In addition, EGAs safety teams conducted intensive employee education campaigns, implemented social distancing at all of EGAs sites, installed disinfection tunnels at six key access points, and made use of more than 200 disinfection fogging machines to sanitise areas throughout EGAs facilities. Abdulnasser Bin Kalban, Chief Executive Officer of Emirates Global Aluminium, told the team: Everyone working on-site at EGA during Covid-19 was a hero, and all have relied on this dedicated Covid-19 team to keep us safe every day. Your commitment to your colleagues, despite unprecedented challenges and in many cases concerns about your own families in the UAE and abroad, has been inspiring for us all. On behalf of everyone at EGA, I thank you for your work which has enabled us to continue providing the world with a vital metal that makes modern life possible, including as part of much of the equipment and infrastructure used to fight the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, EGA partnered with Beeah, DP World and Masdar to launch a Vital Industry Covid-19 Task Force, a coalition of industrial companies operating across the UAE, convened to share best practices on the management of the global pandemic.--TradeArabia News Service RALEIGH Amid growing opposition from teachers, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt and State Board of Education chairman Eric Davis gave a strident defense Thursday for switching to paying educators based on their performance instead of their experience. A state commission is working on a new licensure and compensation model that would pay teachers based on their ratings on student test scores or evaluations and whether theyre willing to take on additional duties. In joint remarks Thursday, Truitt and Davis argued that the current model isnt working to encourage enough teachers to enter or stay in the profession. Teacher vacancies are soaring in schools across our state while enrollment in our colleges of education has fallen over the last few years, Davis said. In short, our state is in a teaching crisis thats having a significant negative impact on todays students and if not corrected will damage our state for generations to come. But their defense drew criticism from groups such as the North Carolina Association of Educators, which has opposed the new model. The current teaching crisis is not about our licensure system, Tamika Walker Kelly, the organization's president, tweeted Thursday. Chairman Davis (and others) are being incredibly disingenuous by continuing to repeat that to push a deeply disliked plan. The Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission hopes to present a final model in September to the state board for its approval later this year. It would be up to state lawmakers whether to fund the plan. Davis said that what they approve this fall will likely be a model that will be revised over the next few years. Its time to shed legacy thinking and move toward solutions that address the future and not the past, Truitt said. Currently, North Carolina teachers start at a state base salary of $37,000. They get annual state raises for their first 15 years, then less frequent raises after that. The scale tops out at $54,000, but school districts and the state often supplement the base pay. Teachers can get state bonuses based on their students test scores, but its not built into their base salary. Davis said the current model is keeping too many highly effective teachers from staying in the classroom. He said changing the model is essential to providing students with a sound basic education. Today, licensure is a too frequent barrier to teachers entering and staying in the profession, Davis said. The current licensure system does not contribute to a teachers growth and development but often limits the opportunity for students to have an effective teacher. Under the new model, there would be seven levels ranging from $30,000 for aspiring teachers who havent yet received a bachelors degree up to the highest level, where the proposed minimum salary is $73,000. Instead of advancing up with each year of experience, teachers would move up based on whether theyre considered to be effective. Teachers can meet these standards based on student growth on state tests, student surveys and reviews by their principal or a higher-level teacher. The highest-paid positions would go to effective teachers who take on additional leadership roles in their schools while still being able to stay in the classroom. The current draft would allow teachers to move into more advanced levels of licensure by demonstrating their skills, Truitt said. Teachers would choose how they demonstrate their impact on students they teach and the conceptual model will provide a menu of options. Davis added that the new model would reward teachers for creating better outcomes for students. The goal of this process," Truitt said, "is to ensure that every student has access to a highly qualified and excellent teacher. GREENSBORO With more people using at-home kits to test for COVID-19, health officials say its unclear how many active cases are in any community. What seems to be certain, however, is that more residents who have previously avoided COVID-19 are contracting it for the first time as high transmission levels remain in every county across North Carolina. Many are also learning about when and how to test at home. The rapid antigen test kits detect current infection and can provide a result in minutes. If you have COVID symptoms, test immediately, Dr. Daniel Jobe, a family physician at Novant Health Primary Care High Point, said in an email. For anyone who has been exposed to COVID-19 but has no symptoms, Jobe said to test on the fifth day after exposure. If that test is negative, he said the person should test again in one or two days to confirm. For those who test positive, Jobe said most people will no longer be contagious after 10-14 days. Locally, test results reported to the Guilford County Health Department are giving officials an idea of how COVID-19 is affecting the community. There were 270 new reported infections for a total of 2,834 active cases on Wednesday and no new deaths. The single-day rate of tests coming back positive is 20.4%. Statewide, there were 31,848 newly reported cases during the week ending July 30 down from 33,159 the previous week, according to a report Wednesday by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. At least 1,350 COVID-19 patients were admitted to hospitals across North Carolina during the week ending July 30. Thats up from 1,289 the previous week, according to the DHHS report. In Cone Health hospitals on Thursday, 64 patients were hospitalized with the coronavirus. Of those patients, 42 are unvaccinated and 22 are fully vaccinated. Cone Health said on its website that several factors are affecting why hospitals are seeing more vaccinated patients, including fewer people getting a second booster, existing vaccination wearing off, and more people testing positive without serious symptoms. Health officials are encouraging those who are eligible for a second booster to get one as the highly contagious BA.5 subvariant of omicron becomes the dominant strain. State vaccination data released to the public each Wednesday does not indicate how many residents have received a second booster. The percentage of all emergency room visits statewide for patients with coronavirus symptoms was 7.1% during the week ending July 30 down from 7.5% the previous week, according to the state report. Another metric that health experts are watching closely is the number of COVID-19 virus particles found in wastewater, which has been shown to be an early indicator of how quickly the virus may spread without relying on individual test results. In the states latest report, 23.2 million coronavirus particles were found in wastewater samples during the week ending July 27 an increase from 20.5 million the week prior. By comparison, 100 million COVID-19 particles were found in wastewater samples in late January during the peak of the omicron surge. GREENSBORO The U.S. Department of Commerce has awarded N.C. A&T a $23.7 million grant as part of the American Rescue Plans Good Jobs Challenge. The grant, which will be used to create a clean energy workforce training program, is the single-largest award the university has received for research. Gov. Roy Cooper was among those gathered on the universitys campus Wednesday to celebrate the achievement. North Carolina is quickly becoming the center of our countrys emerging clean energy economy, Cooper said. This transformative grant will invest in our states diverse workforce as we continue to create high-paying clean energy jobs and bolster N.C. A&Ts reputation as a national leader preparing students for the economy of the future. The grant was among 32 awarded from the $500 million jobs challenge administered by the Commerce Departments Economic Development Administration and will enable communities across the country to invest in innovative approaches to workforce development. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo said it was the first job training initiative implemented by the U.S. Commerce Department. She explained that its important everyone have an opportunity to get family-sustaining jobs with the right resources. A&Ts project, called STEPs4GROWTH, will train workers by using mobile units in certain counties, according to information provided by the university. The program, which will start in high school and continue through college, will allow participants to earn certificates and build skills all the way to a bachelors degree. It will set up partnerships in four areas energy efficiency, renewable energy, clean vehicles and grid and storage while establishing regional training centers. More than 40 employers including Duke Energy, Strata Clean Energy and Blue Ridge Power have committed to hiring 3,000 STEPs4GROWTH trainees over four years, then 1,500 trainees every year afterward, according to A&T. The program can be a model for providing training for the growing clean energy sector across the U.S., officials said. Through this important project, North Carolina A&T will play a leading role in preparing well-trained workers to fill the many skilled jobs in Americas rapidly growing clean energy sector, A&T Chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr. said in a statement. A&T recently celebrated 40 high school and 20 college students completion of the 2022 N.C. Clean Energy pre-apprenticeship and internship program at the university. That program served as the pilot for STEPs4GROWTH. Business leaders from Duke, Piedmont Services Group and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers attended the announcement Wednesday on the A&T campus. We are on a mission to make sure that every American regardless of where they live or the color of their skin, how old they are, whether they are in recovery, formerly incarcerated has a chance to get a real job, Raimondo said. A film produced by students in this year's "Humanities Through Film" two-week summer bridge program at Helena College explores the history of the state Capitol and the stories of Montana's founders. "Humanities Through Film: A Summer Bridge Program at Helena College" ran from July 11 to July 22 this year. The program accepts juniors and seniors in high school and recent high school graduates and goes from around 9 a.m. to after 3 p.m. each weekday. This year, 13 students attended, four of them returning students. The program itself is deeply rooted in the humanities. Los Angeles is the city of film schools, and theres all different styles of teaching film production. At most of the schools, theres a separation of the technical side of film and film history and film theory, said Dr. Ari Lee Laskin, the program's director. When I was in LA, I was part of a school that always tried to intertwine them." Laskin is originally from Canada and was a film producer for Helena Colleges TRIO Program. He was also a research professor at Occidental College and was a film instructor and director for MAPS Media Institute in Helena. The three-year program is funded by the Humanities Initiatives Grant that totals around $150,000 from the National Endowment for Humanities. Helena College was among the 21 colleges and universities awarded this competitive grant. Dr. Jan Clinard, who has been with Helena College for 11 years, was the one who spearheaded the grant. One of the on-site instructors was Director of Programming Dru Carr, a filmmaker out of Missoula and co-founder of the Big Sky Film Institute. Last years subject was very tangible for the (students) because they had just experienced a couple years of COVID-19, and lots of the things written about the history of the Spanish Flu were very similar and relatable, said Carr. This (year) is a bit difficult, thinking about a building (the Montana State Capitol) and how do you use that to represent ideas. Its harder, I think. A former student of Laskin, renowned cinematographer and Academy Award winner Rose Bush, was brought in to teach at the program as well. In addition to Helena College, Bush teaches at Columbia. The program's three main goals are to provide research experience and humanities instruction, produce a documentary film, and strengthen interest in humanities programs. Each of the three years has a different theme that focuses on present issues in Montana through the context of the past. The theme for 2021 was a comparative analysis of the social impact of COVID-19 in comparison to the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu. Out of this, students created the documentary No Ordinary Time. The students also made a podcast to accompany the film called La Grippe. The film was submitted to 36 film festivals and was selected to ten so far. It premiered at the Myrna Loy Oct. 12, 2021, and saw much success, including a regional student Academy of Television Arts & Sciences award or a Student Emmy. For 2022, the theme centers on the Montana State Capitol that began construction in 1896 and the contributions and founding stories around it that have been overlooked in the past. The students interviewed historians, archivists, architects, Native American educators and more. One of them being Kirby Lambert, who was the outreach and interpretation program manager for the Montana Historical Society and one of the authors of the book Montana's State Capitol: The People's House. This book inspired the title of this years student documentary about the Capitol called the The Peoples House. The first week of the program revolved around pre-production work like research, storyboarding, workshops, setting up interviews, etc. During this week, three Helena College professors ran workshops on their areas of research and expertise with the students. Virginia Reeves, a professor and author, has taught writing, literature and communications at Helena College for the past six years. This year, her workshop centered on storytelling and how the architecture of the Montana Capitol is itself a narrative of the time and people who built it. This narrative is then interpreted through the eyes of these students. The biggest thing I try to instill in these film students is that the maker of the film is always present. We like to think thats not the case with news and documentaries, but once a human makes a conscious decision to create something, theyre there," stated Reeves. Kim Feig is the professor of cultural studies and sociology and is the disability services coordinator who has been at Helena College for five years. Were incorporating history, art history, and social sciences into the students' purview to give them tools to understand the Capitol in terms of material building but also the symbolism involved and how to read those signs through a critical lens. And to understand that depending on your lens, your interpretation of the material building and the art thats in it, the flow of the building will shift, said Feig. Seth Roby, who has been a professor of art at Helena College since 2015, taught a workshop on creativity and strategies to start the creative process for any project in any medium. On July 21, students were in a classroom at the Donaldson Campus of Helena College working on script, editing, voice-overs, music selection and more. Earlier in the week, they were out gathering interviews and film around Helena and at the Capitol. Going into the second week, production week, homeschooled sophomore Libby Roberts stated that they had not started filming yet for the documentary because of all the planning that goes into a production before the camera starts rolling. Roberts was among the bunch of students at desktops working on video edits in Adobe Premiere. William Cranmore, a junior at East Helena High School, and Hadley Pearson, a senior at Helena Capital who was the main director of last years documentary, put their heads together working on a list of film festivals to submit the documentary to. The rough cut of the film was completed July 22, the last day of the program. The students film The Peoples House will premiere at 8 p.m. on Sept. 8 at The Myrna Loy. In 2023, the final year of the summer bridge film grant, the theme will examine the history of fishing in Montana, including its ecological and social impact. To sign up for next year's summer program, go to mailchi.mp/helenacollege.edu/summerbridge. Before this program I thought I had a plan, like I want to work in blockbusters, but coming here has opened my eyes to how many different paths you can take in this career. I mean a lot of these people here are focused in the humanities because that is what the grant is for, and that is something I never considered, said Mara Flynn, a sophomore film student at Montana State University who attended the program last year and is back as a teaching assistant this year. So because of this program, I feel like I have less of a life plan but in the most amazing, refreshing way possible. It has opened up the industry for me and what that can be like. Breweries from around the state will gather Saturday in Helenas Memorial Park for the Montana Brewers Summer Rendezvous brewfest. The fest will also feature local food vendors and local music. The VIP hour is from 3-4 p.m., followed by general admission from 4-8 p.m. The Montana Brewers Association (MBA) will donate $1 for every ticket sold to the Summer Rendezvous directly to flood relief funds for Park and Carbon counties. MBA's ticketing partner, Sellout, is waiving fees on additional donations people would like to add to flood relief efforts when they purchase tickets. The event will feature 23 breweries with 78 brews. Joining the MBA event for the first time will be Diamond X Beer, New Ventures Brewing, Shred Monk and Otium Brewing. Festival goers can enjoy fare from five Montana food trucks: Cheddars Gourmet Grilled Cheese, Aasved Acai, Brown Gringo Taco, Ohana Island Grinds and the Missionary Mexican. Helena jam band Under the Bleachers will perform while husband and wife duo, Just the Two of Us, will provide a special VIP hour performance. The decision to donate to flood relief efforts honors the MBA value of community, organizers said. Craft brewing is built on a foundation of community, MBA Executive Director Matt Leow said in a news release. In cities and towns across Montana, breweries are the main street businesses at the heart of our communities the places we gather to celebrate and make connections over a pint. When theres a neighbor in need, we step in to help where we can. The Summer Rendezvous is a fundraiser for the Montana Brewers Association to support its mission of promoting the production and sales of the freshest and highest quality Montana made beers. All beer samples and a collectible glass are included with each ticket. Advance VIP and GA tickets are on sale now. Advance tickets are $40 for VIPs, or $30 for general admission. On the day of the event, VIP tickets are $45 and general admission are $35. People can purchase advance tickets online for $5 off the day-of price through Friday, or for full price online or at the gate on Saturday. For more information and tickets, visit www.montanabrewers.org. Staff Writer Phil Drake can be reached at philip.drake@helenair.com or 406-231-9021. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality will allow cities to review certain water and sewer expansions in an effort to expedite permitting. Gov. Greg Gianforte and DEQ director Chris Dorrington announced the change this week, describing it as an effort to cut red tape and streamline review processes amid record subdivision applications. Dorrington was recently appointed to the governors new affordable housing task force, charged with making recommendations on executive action and legislation to address the states affordable housing crisis. Under the change, cities may complete a contract allowing city engineers to complete certain public water supply plan approvals. The contracts delegate the states authority to cover review of waste water and sewer system extensions of 50 or fewer connections. The contract will cut duplicate review of the projects, said DEQ spokesperson Rebecca Harbage. The current system requires contractors to submit water and sewer plans to cities for review. Cities must then submit plans to DEQ for review and approval, she said. This contract will allow city engineers, who are already reviewing and approving public water plans, to give final approval on these plans, Harbage said. The contract requires city engineers to review a few additional items that DEQ currently looks for, and this allows us to eliminate the final step in which DEQ engineers re-review everything. Cities will retain the DEQ fee as compensation and have the option to decline to review an application and pass it on to the state, she said. Harbage added that it is unclear what the change in workload may look like until cities sign up or how many reviews will continue to go to the state. A template contract for the program was developed with the Montana League of Cities and Towns for cities to sign up. Deputy Director Thomas Jodoin said under state law, DEQ has the authority to delegate reviews back to the city which would speed up the review process for developers. Most, if not all, of Montanas largest seven cities planned to pursue the contract, he believed. SUPERIOR AJ Allard and his family were on a drive home when he spotted a red haze in a wooded area off the side of the Thompson Creek Road the night of July 25. Allard, a former Mineral County deputy, felt uneasy about it. He called in the report and took the dirt road past a set of train tracks to check out the glow himself. He came upon a house burning with 20-foot flames over the roof. He saw there was a car in the driveway, and decided to enter the house. Less than 10 minutes later, Allard found two people inside, and got them out, likely saving their lives as the walls burned down around them. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, Allard said on Wednesday. Everyone is shining a light on me, but I just played a role in the rescue. Allards heroics earned him a lifesaving award from Mineral County Sheriff Mike Toth, and made him the center of attention at an award ceremony at the sheriffs office in Superior. Roughly 30 community members watched as county officials lauded Allards efforts. Toth said that without Allards quick thinking, the two residents might not have made it out alive. By the time first responders arrived, he was pulling the second victim out of the fire, Toth said. It really shows in our community that we have people that help each other out. When Allard made it to the house, he could tell it was burning fast. A fallen electricity pole sputtered sparks across the ground. The smoke was thick, and he said his family was scared. After moving them across a hill to safety, Allard made his approach. To the right of the main room, flames grew up the side of the wall. He called out for survivors, but heard nothing. You couldnt see your hand in front of you in there, Allard said. Despite the risk to his own life, Allard went room-to-room to find people. There, he found a woman still asleep. He shook her awake, and they crawled the best they could outside. Thats when she told him there was another person still inside. He turned around and darted back to the same room he found the woman. He found a man, grabbed him, pulled him out, and made sure no one else was there. Steve Temple, fire chief for the Superior volunteer fire department, said Allards efforts also helped responders save the house. We were immediately able to get hoses down and knock the fire back, Temple said. The fire started from a downed powerline that set a carport roof on fire, he said. Flames spread to the roof, where most of the damage was done. Firefighters had enough time to stop the fire from destroying the house and also saved many personal items before spraying on the inside. Toth emphasized how important Allards instincts were. AJ Allard did something really heroic that day, Toth said. Everything worked out the way it should. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of riders, locals and tourists, flock to Sturgis, South Dakota, for its famous 10-day motorcycle rally. Many who attend are white men. But this year, and for the last two years, there will be at least 200 Indigenous riders, participating in a Medicine Wheel Ride to raise awareness for the missing and murdered Indigenous women epidemic. The FBIs National Crime Information Center in 2021 reported 5,203 missing Indigenous women, though experts say the numbers are likely higher. Lorna Cuny, who is Oglala Lakota, co-founded the Medicine Wheel Ride group. Cuny said the organization worked with Sturgis Mayor Mark Carstensen to declare the first Sunday of the rally a missing and murdered Indigenous women awareness day. This year, the Medicine Wheel Ride will begin at 8 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 7. Riders will travel more than 70 miles from Bear Butte State Park to the Crazy Horse Memorial. Cuny grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and now lives in Rapid City. For me, being local, growing up around here, and seeing the rally, its like, why shouldnt we be here? she said. We have to be visible. We deserve to take up space at this huge rally. We love motorcycles, too. We want to make sure our women are safe, our communities are safe, and that the Indigenous people who live here are acknowledged. Each rider pays $40 to register for the Medicine Wheel Ride, and local businesses sponsor the event. The organization uses the funds raised to help Native families search for their loved ones, acquire billboards to raise awareness, pay for funeral expenses or gas money, among other things. The group helped send searchers to the Blackfeet Reservation in June to help look for Arden Pepion, 3, who was last seen in April 2021. Cuny said Sturgis attendees have been really receptive to the Medicine Wheel Ride and mission. A lot of people tell us they didnt realize this was a problem, she said. Especially at an event like Sturgis, we have to let people outside our own communities know this is an issue. Cuny said Sturgis is a great venue to get the word out not just because its a large gathering of people, but also because there have been sex trafficking incidents at past rallies. Last year, a child sex trafficking sting at the rally resulted in nine arrests, and in 2020, eight men were charged with sex crimes at the rally. Research from the National Congress of American Indians in 2018 found that more than half of Native American women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime; Native women are almost twice as likely to have experienced rape compared with white women, and Native women are almost three times as likely to be murdered when compared with their white counterparts. Cuny said some Native women joined her group after losing a loved one to violence, and some women joined after escaping domestic abuse. For Cuny, riding motorcycles makes her feel free. Its empowering to feel like I can do this, she said. Its freeing. Its not something that looking back 10 years ago, I thought Id be doing. Im a mother, Im a wife but Ive always felt daring. To learn more or support the Medicine Wheel Ride, visit medicinewheelride.org. Ten notable decision makers from Ethiopias public and private sectors explored Dubais success in digital services and discussed the prospects of potential business partnerships that would support the Digital Ethiopia 2025 Strategy. The delegation, headed by Ewnetu Abera, CEO of Perago Information Systems, the company mandated with implementing the .gov initiative for the Federal Government of Ethiopia, was hosted by the Dubai Chambers from July 25 to 30, 2022. Dubai Chambers representative office in Ethiopia made significant efforts that paved the way for the visit; the office is tasked with attracting foreign investments and supporting Dubai-based companies to expand in global markets. The visiting delegation included representatives of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology in Ethiopia and executives from Perago Information Systems PLC. The delegation held eight meetings with representatives from Dubai Chambers, Digital Dubai, and a number of companies, including OnTime, Value Grid, Digital Falcon, and World1Media, to discuss opportunities for establishing partnerships and collaborations. Collaborating on digital economy The delegation met with Khalid Al-Jarwan, Executive Director of Dubai Chamber for Digital Economy, who introduced them to the evolution of the digital economy in the Emirate of Dubai, as well as the Chambers efforts to fulfil the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, Ruler of Dubai, to promote the emirate as a world capital of the digital economy and a leading destination for international digital companies. Al-Jarwan stressed the importance of partnerships and collaborative efforts, highlighting the competitive advantages Dubai offers to digital startups looking to expand into global markets. He asserted that the Dubai Chamber for Digital Economy is prepared to provide the necessary facilities and support to encourage African digital companies in general and Ethiopian firms, in particular to choose Dubai as their base of operations and a gateway for their expansion. Ethiopia is a leading digital startup market in Africa and an important economic partner for the Emirate of Dubai, Al-Jarwan explained, noting that the digital economy is a fundamental pillar in efforts to establish future economic partnerships between the two regions. The visiting delegation applauded the strong partnership between the public and private sectors in Dubai, the rapid development of the digital economy, and the emirates reputation as a global destination for digital companies. The delegates noted that Dubai and its public and private sectors have accumulated extensive experience that can help Ethiopia achieve the objectives of its Digital Ethiopia 2025 Strategy. Representative offices: A strategic role Omar Khan, Director of International Offices at Dubai International Chamber, said that organising this delegation comes at a time when efforts are being made across the board to advance Dubais position as a global business destination, and a hub for international expertise in customer service and digital transformation. The Chambers representative office in Ethiopia is committed to supporting Dubai-based companies to expand into global markets and export the emirates successful experience in various fields as a means to achieve strategic objectives, he explained. Khan noted that the visit was successful in introducing the delegation to the competitive advantages of Dubais economy; it presented the model used to establish and administer strategic partnerships between the public and private sectors, and underlined the expertise that Dubai can offer its partners in foreign markets. The visit has opened doors wide for future collaborations, he asserted. Exchanging expertise in customer service The visiting delegation toured the Membership and Documentation department at the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, where they met with its Director Abdulla Al-Theeb and explored the smart services the Chamber offers its members. The delegates lauded the digital model the Chamber implements, which boasts seamless procedures and allows for speedy service provision to promote customer happiness. They also praised the Chambers performance evaluation process, which uses a digital dashboard, as well as its high-quality, efficient digital services, noting that it is a model that can be implemented across government entities in Ethiopia. Al-Theeb highlighted the principles that the Chambers customer service and digital transformation systems rely on, pointing out that customer happiness is a top priority that requires continuous investment to provide exceptional solutions for customers to complete their transactions easily and conveniently, saving them time and effort. Smart services are the basis of excellence in customer service, he noted, stressing the Chambers commitment to providing value-added services that keep pace with Dubais progress towards the future of business and the economy, and make it easier and more efficient for customers to complete their transactions. For his part, Abera said: The experience exchange programme organised by Dubai Chambers allowed us to explore the digital technologies that are driving a new level of growth. We have also benefited from the meetings we held with private sector companies including both startups and established corporations to discuss opportunities for collaboration in the Ethiopian market. We will be working closely with Dubai Chambers to turn these meetings and discussions into productive business opportunities.-- TradeArabia News Service Lots of perplexed Americans are asking the question, How did we get here? They ask how is it that a rich, powerful and generally happy country that was chugging along so smoothly in the 21st century has almost overnight become an economic, social and ideological train wreck? Its a fair question and the answer has little to do with the pandemic and the collateral damage weve done to ourselves with lockdowns and the war on COVID. Today, the country is divided into dozens of red-blue factions who argue bitterly about everything from federal spending and abortion to oil pipelines, gun control, vaccines and corrective gender surgery for 12-year-olds. The major liberal media have become shameless lapdogs of the Democrats in power in Washington, D.C. Comedians are being cancelled for being incorrectly funny. Future U.S. Supreme Court justices cant or wont define the word woman. Our great and special country has never been perfect, obviously. For starters, ask Native Americans, Blacks, women and gays. But 2022 America has gone mad in every sense of the word. And the person we can pin much of the blame on is . Barack Obama. In 2008 the sainted liberal from Chicago cruised into the White House on the ideal of hope and change, his powerful oratory and the promise of a better, colorblind and more equal future for all Americans. But once in office, as his big dreams evaporated, he lit the fires and fanned the flames of much of the political insanity and negative feelings about America we are suffering with today. For example, Obama was the first president in my lifetime who openly criticized specific people in the population. You didnt build that he told business people whove started successful companies. The whole hate the police theme which morphed during the Trump years into the Defund Police campaign was essentially sparked by Obamas attitude about police and his ignoring of the gang violence wracking cities like his hometown. Meanwhile, Obamas wife Michelle was the first First Lady to say publicly she was not proud of America. And when Barack went off to tour Europe, he made it a point to publicly apologize for Americas past failings. But its now clear that the worst thing Obama inflicted on the country in the long run was Joe Biden. Instead of his many possible but now forgotten VP picks, Obama chose a long-time, washed-up, gaffe-prone, moderate hack Democrat and failed presidential wannabe from the who-cares-state of Delaware. Sen. Amtrak was carrying around a careers worth of bad bipartisan baggage. Friend of KKK alums like Sen. Robert Byrd, foe of busing for school integration, plagiarizer, hawkish on wars in Iraq and other Middle East places, hard guy on urban crime, mis-handler of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings Biden held a bunch of positions that simultaneously offended or embarrassed his friends and enemies. Biden was the booby prize of VP candidates in 2008 and we can thank Obama for making it possible for Old Joe to eventually become the booby prize of American presidents in 2020. President Biden who some argue is really the front man for Barack Obamas third term is a mouthpiece for harmful leftwing energy and environmental policies that the Old Joe of old would never push. Sadly, were stuck with Biden for two more years, if he can last that long. But theres hope for America to become great again again. In the fall Republicans will retake Congress. Obamas socialist ideas and negative attitude about America will die the political deaths theyve always deserved. And well never hear of them again until 2024, when Democrats put Michelle Obama of Marthas Vineyard at the top of their ticket. Yikes. Those that refuse to acknowledge history are often condemned to repeat it. But what about those who want to keep a particular part of history front and center, with the suggestion that we are or should be repeating it? References to Nazism, Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust have multiplied the further we're distanced from their existence. The most recent example is Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey. Footage of a 2017 Facebook live appearance he did while running for the Illinois House in 2017 has resurfaced. Reading from prepared notes Bailey said, The attempted extermination of the Jews of World War II doesnt even compare on a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion. That comes on the heels of U.S. Rep. Mary Miller's remarks last year at a Moms for America event. Miller, who just defeated Rep. Rodney Davis for the Republican nod for candidacy in Illinois' 15th district, said at the event, Hitler was right on one thing. He said, Whoever has the youth has the future. (She later issued a statement claiming she was sincerely sorry for any harm her words caused.) Other very public and very loud comparisons have been made between Nazis and public policy or politicians. President Donald Trump was compared to Hitler by both CNN and ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon, presumably for very different reasons. Trump compared U.S. intelligence agencies to Nazi Germany. Students advocating for tightened gun control were compared to Hitler Youth by Mary Franson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota, and by disgraced broadcaster Alex Jones. Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made comparisons to Nazism as she complained about treatment of children separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico. Travel bans, COVID-19 regulations and animal rights issues have all prompted accusations of Nazism. Can we just stop? Can we agree that references to Nazism, Hitler and the Holocaust -- during which millions were murdered for the offense of where they were born, their religion, or their chosen lifestyles -- are extreme and should be avoided unless we're discussing actual occurrences from Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and from World War II? There are even names for the phenomenon. Goodwin's law says the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely a comparison with Hitler or Nazis emerges. "Reductio ad Hitlerum" (Latin for "reduction to Hitler"), also known as "playing the Nazi card," is an attempt to invalidate another's position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that "misplaced comparisons trivialize this unique tragedy in human history... particularly when public figures invoke the Holocaust in an effort to score political points." Invoking Nazis when attempting to argue a topic makes a discussion a clear good-vs.-bad issue, leaves people with little room for nuance and results in anger that boils to the point where issues are obfuscated. It's dangerous rhetoric, used purely as a scare tactic. We have let it become commonplace. We have to fight back against the combative language and realize that extremism has no place in our public debates, political or otherwise. Not doing it at all is the best idea. DECATUR Another thunderstorm packing a deluge of rain and wind gusts to more than 60 mph washed over the Decatur area Wednesday afternoon. Fire crews reported dealing with multiple downed trees and downed power lines. Acting Battalion Chief with the citys fire department, Capt. Justin Kraus, said one downed line near the Decatur Airport had left people trapped in their car, afraid to get out because of the danger from the live wire. Were on scene and were all waiting for Ameren Illinois to get there and be able to cut the power so people can walk out of the car, said Kraus. He explained that staying in the vehicle until downed lines are made safe is the right thing to do in that situation. The power line was likely felled by a wind gust clocked at 61 mph recorded at the airport about 4 p.m. The National Weather Service in Lincoln said Decatur was soaked with 1.41 inches of rain in the Wednesday storm, on top of the deluge it had received just the day before. Tammy Schneider, director of the Macon County Emergency Management Agency, said weather like this will flood underpasses and other vulnerable areas because storm drains become overwhelmed. She urged drivers to turn around and not attempt to drive through pools of standing water. Schneider said that is hazardous enough in the city but, out in the countryside on rural farm roads, it can be even more dangerous. On roads where you have got farmland on both sides, you dont know if the roadway is even going to be there, she said. The water could easily get under the roadway and wash it away. The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm watch until around 9 p.m. Wednesday evening and a severe flood watch extending into Thursday morning for much of Central Illinois. Meteorologist Matt Barnes said most of the severe weather risk for later Wednesday would be concentrated to the south of Decatur, and particularly around the Vandalia area. But he said Decatur wasnt quite out of the woods Wednesday evening. Were keeping our eyes on the potential for some additional development, he added. The forecast for the rest of the week predicts a 30% chance for showers and thunderstorms Thursday and a 30% chance for showers on Friday. Temperatures in the mid to low 80s for both Thursday and Friday. New Braunfels, TX (78130) Today Sun and clouds mixed. High near 100F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight A few clouds. Low around 75F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. BRISTOL, Tenn. A Bristol Tennessee School Board member wants the city to return $100,000 to the school systems budget after it was removed in June. City School Board member Jill Harrison addressed the Bristol Tennessee City Council Tuesday expressing clear frustration over an apparent lack of communication between the two bodies on budgeting. In delivering a lengthy school board liaison report, Harrison addressed the citys amending of $100,000 out of the school systems budget. According to Harrison, a Bristol Tennessee City Schools budget was approved by City Council in May, including $236,000 from the city for a cost of living increase, $100,000 of which she said was to be used for training Student Resource Officers (SROs); however, those funds were amended out of the budget in June, forcing the school board to amend its budget in July. To me, it is absolutely fair to ask why and how the school system will be made whole, Harrison said. I still dont understand why this happened, because the justification that was given for it when you drill down into it, its not there. Harrison said City Manager Bill Sorah told BTCS Director Annette Tudor the money was diverted to salaries and benefits for the city police department. According to Harrison, Sorah was asked to set up a joint meeting with city council on the matter, but the request was declined. I could not tell you a definite, 100% answer as to why this was handled the way it was handled, Harrison said on Wednesday. Ive tried to look at this every different way that I can to try to understand it, but I dont. Harrison said the city has applied for a grant that would cover the SRO funds, but its not clear if and when those funds will come through. Harrison added that she sees no malicious intent from the city, but that she just wants the issue resolved. Our message is we are not going to stop asking, Harrison told the council. We have that fiduciary responsibility to our school system, and while $100,000 may not seem like a lot, thats two teachers. Thats a whole lot of meals. There are a lot of things that $100,000 can buy. According to Harrison, there are SROs in every BTCS school, but an additional one may be needed when the Friendship Career Center opens. Council had no response to Harrisons comments. The Bluff City Tennessee Board of Mayor and Aldermen voted unanimously Tuesday to delay discussion over the first reading of its town budget due to shared concerns from council members over a proposed 4% increase in the citys water rates. The vote from Bluff City's Town Council to delay the first reading and discussion of the budget comes despite Sharon Greene, Bluff City's certified municipal finance officer (CMFO) and recorder, receiving a notice from Tennessee Comptroller Jason Mumpower regarding the tardiness of the citys budget. "Our CMFO, received this guidance from the comptroller yesterday evening at 7:17 pm," Mayor Jeff Broyles said. "Basically, it says to surmise, When are we getting the budget? So it would be in good measure and best interest to the town if we can discuss the budget now." Board member Carol Keith explained that although she agrees with everything proposed in the budget, she has concerns over the proposed increase to Bluff City residents' water bills and asked Broyles to set up a time to workshop the issue. "When I ran in the election, I told my supporters that I would not vote for increases, and I am a woman of my word," Keith said. "I want to be able to explain to them exactly why we are doing this. That's why I want the workshop. Is that too much to ask for?" In response, Alderman Ben Adams explained that a large portion of the $99,000 shortfall, which is the cause of the 4% rate increase, is due to five-year state-mandated repairs to the Bluff City water tower. He also highlighted that the alternative is to keep kicking the decision down the road and end up with an even bigger increase in water bills in the future. "I don't want to pay more for my water, but as a fiduciary for the city, we've got to fix this problem, and I want to do it in the least painful way possible. I agree with the 4% increase," Adams said. "We're really left with the choice of do we continue to kick the can down the road? Or, do we address it now with an increase? Or, we can basically send a budget to state that has a $99,000 shortfall in it, which we probably don't want to do." The 4% increase in Bluff City resident's water bills is just the most recent increase related to the accumulated costs of repairing the town's sewer and water tank since 2015 when the city entered an agreement with engineering and surveying firm, Mattern & Craig, to upgrade its water and sewer system. Randy Beckner, the presiding officer of Mattern and Craig, was present at the Bluff City Council meeting to inform them of an application they submitted to the First Tennessee Development District, seeking COVID relief money for the project. "First Tennessee Development District asked us to put together basically a letter with an engineering report for a new water storage tank for the system, in the hopes of seeking possible COVID relief money for that project, Beckner said. That's been submitted." Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) has concluded its Made for Trade Live roadshow in Chennai and Kerala, India, where it highlighted the benefits of doing business in Dubai for Indian firms looking to expand globally. The event saw senior DMCC executives address over 300 representatives of the Indian business community from a range of sectors, as well as government bodies. Speakers and delegates discussed the strategic geographic location and commercial appeal of Dubai and the ease of doing business in DMCC, which is the fastest growing and most interconnected free zone in the world. Bilateral business The discussions also focused on opportunities for the UAE and India to enhance bilateral trade and business relations. Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, DMCC, said: Facilitating trade, removing barriers to entry and unlocking new business opportunities are critical components of DMCCs mandate. Dubai and India share an extremely strong and long-standing trade relationship, and India is currently Dubais second largest trade partner. And the latest development that solidifies our relations is the UAE-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement - CEPA. The agreement, which came into effect in May this year, looks to boost bilateral trade to $100 billion in five years, an increase of 66% from the current $60 billion. Unparalleled potential He added: Through these roadshows, we showcase the unparalleled potential that DMCC has to offer for businesses looking to set up a company in Dubai. While the diplomatic and trade relations between the UAE and India have increased substantially over recent years, there is still a lot more we can do together by supporting exporters and businesses in both countries. Held in partnership with the FICCI, the full capacity roadshow event demonstrated DMCCs deep commitment to businesses in the region and underlined its focus on strengthening trade relations with India across a range of sectors such as Precious Metals and Stones, Technology and Telecom and Financial Services. The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry said: With the UAE-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement now in place, the commercial outlook for setting up a company in Dubai is high on the agenda for many Indian companies. DMCC, as a leading free zone, would provide these companies with the opportunities to further trade and investment. Key growth market With a rich history of cultural, diplomatic and commercial ties, India is a key growth market for businesses in Dubai and DMCC. India is the second largest trading partner for the UAE and the UAE is the third largest trading partner for India. Both countries have joined forces in many trade and investment pacts in the past decade. In February 2022, the UAE and India signed the UAE-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which officially entered into force in May. The key products that will immediately benefit from the agreement include oil and gas, petrochemicals, minerals, textiles, agriculture, jewellery and gems, metals and more. DMCC has played a significant role in enhancing UAE-India relations and is currently home to over 3,530 leading Indian businesses, which use the Free Zone as a hub for trading with countries around the world. DMCCs Made for Trade Live series plays a key role in promoting Dubai as a prime destination for foreign direct investment (FDI). DMCC attracted a record-breaking 2,485 new companies to the free zone in 2021 and reported the highest first quarter of 2022 of company registrations since inception, bringing the total number of member businesses to over 21,000.-- TradeArabia News Service HICKORY Veterans Coffee Connection, a coffee group for veterans of all ages and branches of military service, will meet Wednesday, Aug. 10, at 8:30 a.m. at Outback Steakhouse on Lenoir Rhyne Boulevard in Hickory. The group, sponsored by Carolina Caring, is designed to be a welcoming place for veterans to meet other veterans in the area. This free gathering, which meets on the second Wednesday of every month, is a great place to share a cup of coffee, enjoy doughnuts provided by Krispy Kreme and swap stories. Carolina Caring for Veterans is proud to be a Level IV partner of the We Honor Veterans program, an awareness initiative spearheaded by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. For more information, contact Cindy Stamey, Carolina Carings director of community and veteran relations, at cstamey@carolinacaring.org or call 828-466-0466. Carolina Caring, founded in 1979, is an independent, community-based, nonprofit health care provider. It specializes in programs that offer relief from chronic conditions, serious illnesses, and the challenges they bring, including palliative medicine and hospice care for all ages, primary care and grief counseling. Currently, Carolina Caring serves 12 counties across western North Carolina and the Charlotte region. For more information about Carolina Caring, call 828-466-0466 or visit www.CarolinaCaring.org . " " The Thames near Tower Bridge during the Great London Smog, 1952. Fox Photos/Getty Images It might seem like smog is a first world problem: Glamorous movie stars in Los Angeles, say, stuck in fancy cars that spew out enough emissions to obscure the Hollywood sign. Of course, smog is actually a problem from Dhaka to Paris. And as Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Frey explain on this episode of Stuff You Missed In History Class, a smog that enveloped London in 1952 long before cars were clogging freeways wreaked havoc on the city. The Great London Smog wasn't your typical "ugh, it looks gross out there" few days. "This was an environmental disaster that was worse than anything that had been documented at that point," Tracy says. "At its largest, the smog was 18 miles (30 km) around London, and before it was gone it had killed thousands of people." Advertisement How it Happened It all started on December 5, 1952 when a rather more typical smog hung in the air during the day. But by nightfall, the smog had thickened to a heavy, sulfurous smelling fog. While normally warm air near the ground rises up through the cold air above it, the air in London near the ground ended up becoming cooler than the air above it a thermal inversion. All the smoke and pollution from houses, industry, you name it it was all trapped near the ground. When mist formed in the layer of cold air, the sun couldn't reach the ground to begin the evaporation process. The mucky pollutants were left to hang in the air, where condensed water clung to them and created an acid fog. And it's not like the chilly December weather was doing them any favors. "It was also colder than normal, so people had to burn more coal than usual to heat their homes," says Holly. "So as the smog wore on, more and more pollution was added to this already stagnant cloud of hovering acid rain." What resulted was five days of somewhat apocalyptic conditions. Visibility was at a meter (or about three feet) by Sunday, and people literally couldn't see their own feet. Driving was nearly impossible, so abandoned vehicles clogged the roads. "It went on like this for days until the wind finally came to the rescue and it blew the fog down the Thames and out to the North Sea on Tuesday the 9th," says Tracy. But it wasn't exactly a quick fix. First of all, a "normal" death toll for London during that time period would've been 1,852 people. During the smog days, 4,703 people died. And death tolls stayed at elevated levels for months afterward, as those with lung conditions or health problems continued to be affected by the incident. Join Holly and Tracy as they tell you even more about the Great London Smog, its atrocious conditions and the fallout on this episode of Stuff You Missed In History Class. Now This Is Interesting According to the Met Office, 1,000 tons of smoke particles, 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide, 140 tons of HCL acid and 14 tons of fluorine compounds were emitted every day of the smog. " " HMS Thrush, a British 1st-class gunboat, saw action in the brief Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896. The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images It's generous to call the Anglo-Zanzibar War a "war." The entire conflict lasted less than an hour and the victory was ludicrously one-sided, yet this 1896 standoff between the British Royal Navy and a stubborn sultan is commonly cited as the shortest war on record. Today, Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous island nation off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean, but in the 19th century the Sultanate of Zanzibar was a powerful trading empire in East Africa. From the ports of Zanzibar, ships departed with ivory and spices from the African mainland and returned with textiles and guns. But the most lucrative trade in Zanzibar was enslaved Africans. An estimated 25,000 to 30,000 enslaved people were sold and shipped out of Zanzibar as late as the 1880s, according to The Historian magazine. And the Sultan of Zanzibar, who ruled from the royal palace, grew rich from the slave trade, even as the British tried to end the practice by raiding suspected slave ships in the Indian Ocean. In 1890, Britain signed a treaty with Germany that carved out separate "zones of influence" for the two imperial nations in Africa and Zanzibar became a British "protectorate" not quite a colony, but still under the thumb of the British government and military. Advertisement 'Gunboat Diplomacy' " " Khalid bin Barghash, sixth sultan of Zanzibar, who opposed the British. Walther Dobbertin/CC-BY-SA 3.0/Wikipedia After claiming Zanzibar as a protectorate (not that the locals had any say), the British wanted to install a sultan to put an end to the Zanzibar slave trade and generally do Britain's bidding in the region. Their choice was Hamad bin Thuwaini, a pro-British "puppet" who became the fifth Sultan of Zanzibar in 1893. Thuwaini ruled for three years but died unexpectedly Aug. 25, 1896. Rumor has it that he was poisoned by his nephew, Khalid bin Barghash, who immediately installed himself in the palace as the next Sultan of Zanzibar. The British didn't like Barghash. He was too independent and not willing to roll over to their demands. So, the British government engaged in a popular 19th-century practice called "gunboat diplomacy." They pointed the canons of three naval warships at the palace and politely asked the new sultan to leave by 9 a.m. the following day. Advertisement Why the War Was Just 38 (or 42) Minutes Barghash wasn't going anywhere. He rolled out heavy artillery guns and posted thousands of defenders (mostly civilians and slaves) around the palace walls. At 8 a.m. on August 26, he informed Basil Cave, the British consul, "We have no intention of hauling down our flag and we do not believe you would open fire on us." Cave, ever polite, replied that the British would prefer not to attack, "but unless you do as you are told, we shall certainly do so." When the clock struck 9 a.m., the British made good on their promise. The warships opened fire, relentlessly shelling the palace. It took just 38 minutes (or 42 or 45 by some accounts), for the sultan's defenses to be completely destroyed. By that time, Barghash himself was long gone. Two minutes after the start of the bombardment, he fled the palace and sought refuge at the German consulate. (Khalid was later smuggled out by the German navy and taken to what is now Tanzania.) " " British forces stand in front of the sultan's palace after its bombardment during the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War. Universal Images Group/Getty Images For such a short war, there were a large, if lopsided, number of casualties. Roughly 500 Zanzibarian fighters lost their lives in the shelling, yet just one British sailor was wounded. With Barghash gone, the British installed a new sultan who immediately outlawed the slave trade in Zanzibar in 1897. Apparently, he saw what happened to the last guy. Now That's Cool The Zanzibar port city known as Stone Town where the sultan's palace still stands is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Three verbs come, go and do are at the centre of the AI language. Photo: Shutterstock Aboriginal language Jingulu, spoken by the Jingili people in the Northern Territory, could help solve complex AI problems, Australian researchers led by UNSW Canberras professor Hussein Abbass has found. Its characteristics allow it to be easily translated into AI commands, potentially helping to solve some of the most challenging communication problems between humans and AI systems. Although other Indigenous languages could offer the same potential, its Jingulus structure, with its reliance on three light verbs only, that offers so many different applications in AI systems. It can be used to develop commands to direct movement of single- and multi-robot systems in many different applications, Professor Abbass told Information Age. The three verbs come, go and do make it unique and able to effectively communicate spatial movements. This simple, efficient syntax could reduce computational cost in AI systems and has been shown to work in situations where communication between humans and a large number of AI agents is required. This offers extreme flexibility in computer communication when words could arrive through different routes and the sentence can still be understood without paying extra cost in ordering it, Professor Abbass said. The research team recognised this is another example of Aboriginal peoples long history of contributions to the defence of Australia. During the Second World War, their languages were used for secret communications. Today were discovering that the wealth and richness of the Aboriginal languages and culture could hold the secret in human-AI interaction. Solving complex problems with simple AI commands Professor Abbass works with swarm systems, where groups of robots (or AI agents) work together to solve very complex problems or perform tasks. His systems draw their inspiration from sheepdogs, where a few sheepdogs can control a large flock of sheep. This problem is all about movements in different information and knowledge spaces, including the physical spaces, Abbass said. These movements are represented mathematically as elements that get attracted to each other or repulse from each other. For a long time, I have been looking at how we can design the languages used at the interface between the swarm and humans. Professor Abbass has investigated systems that rely on gestures, direct commands and even music, but they all had their challenges. They either had a richer language than what we needed or did not map exactly to the mathematics we use for guidance and control, he said. This all changed when one day, out of curiosity, he was searching on Google for studies that looked at the syntax of Aboriginal languages. I encountered a PhD thesis about Jingulu. I started reading it and then it didnt take much time before it clicked in my head this language would be perfect for my artificial intelligence-enabled swarm guidance work. The structure and makeup of Indigenous languages, which are both non-configurational and display free-word order, results in the meaning being preserved even when syntactic and word orders change. Working alongside University of Canberra linguistics expert associate professor Eleni Petraki and defence science and technology group Dr Robert Hunjet, the team created JSwarm, a language inspired by Jingulu. Finding other applications Jingulu can change the context of use without changing its syntax which allows the AI to be transferred between different domains with ease. Professor Abbass praised the language which can translate straight into AI commands and as a human language, humans can master its full understanding, paving the way for widespread adoption. Its a language that is born and used in Australia to support research and innovation that are born and used in Australia, he said. This is just the start and the researchers plan to widen the scope of applications. Im looking for funding and collaborators who would be willing to collaborate with us to transform this technology into multi-purpose application in different domains, Abbass said. SHELBYVILLE Watercolor paintings and art quilts are the subject of the upcoming art show at Flourishes Art Gallery in downtown Shelbyville. Featured artists Sue Watts and Karen Edwards will be available to talk about their work at an open house from 1-4 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 6, at 140 E. Main, Shelbyville. Edwards, of Sullivan, is a former educator who taught technology, business, and home economics. During COVID, Edwards took many quilting classes over Zoom to learn how to use technology, fabric, paint, and thread to create her art quilts from her travel pictures. She recently completed My Childhood Home which is an art quilt of the house she grew up in in Paris, Illinois. Ten of her original pieces will be on display in the upper lobby, with half shown alongside the photography she based them on. Her display will be on view through Sept. 17. Watts was born in Decatur and has lived there for most of her life. She has a strong print background and made graphic art her career. Now retired, Watts spent many years creating detailed pen and ink artwork and home illustrations on commission before attending her first watercolor workshop. DECATUR Manufacturers in Central Illinois are key to the states economy, according to a new economic report. The Illinois Manufacturers Association this week released a study on the economic impact of manufacturing on Illinois conducted by independent economists at the University of South Carolina. The study found that manufacturing in Illinois contributes a total economic input of between $580 billion and $611 billion annually, the largest contributor to the states gross domestic product of any industry. This new economic study confirms what we have long known that manufacturing is the key pillar of our state's economy, and its success is vital to our state's success, said Mark Denzler, the associations president and CEO, during an event Wednesday in Decatur. Denzler spoke at Richland Community College, the first step of what will be a statewide manufacturing matters tour of major manufacturing centers. He pointed to Richland as an example of an institution preparing a higher-skilled workforce for the rapidly-developing industry. At Richland, we strive daily to deliver the advanced technical and essential skills training that provides the workforce necessary to continue Illinois strong manufacturing history and contribute to its future, Cristobal Valdez, Richland's president, said in a statement released after the event. Manufacturing is especially important for Macon County as it contributes 50% of the countys annual economy. Illinois is the epicenter of manufacturing in the United States, Denzler said. Decatur and Macon County are the epicenter of manufacturing in Illinois. According to the report, counties across Central Illinois generate billions of dollars both directly and indirectly from the manufacturing industry, in addition to creating thousands of jobs. In Macon County, manufacturing generates $13.4 billion in total annual economic output and supports over 22,000 jobs. Manufacturing in McLean County generates $2 billion in total annual economic output and supports over 7,000 jobs. Coles County manufacturers generate $1.1 billion in total annual economic output and support 3,489 jobs. The state of Illinois is blessed with a strong manufacturing base, said Greg Webb, chair of the IMA Board of Directors and vice president of state government relations for Archer Daniels Midland Co. ADM is a leading employer in the region and has its North American headquarters in Decatur. Previous studies have underreported the manufacturing sectors contributions to Illinois economy, according to an economist who conducted the IMA study. An important takeaway from this study is the sheer size of manufacturings economic presence in Illinois, said Joseph C. Von Nessen, research economist at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Every job created by a manufacturer spurs additional hiring and spending across multiple industries in the state. This so-called multiplier effect, Von Nessen said, is significantly higher for manufacturing than it is for other Illinois industries, meaning economic growth in the manufacturing sector could also lead to significant economic growth in other sectors. The opportunities within the manufacturing sector are great, Webb said. Denzler suggested some state level policy changes could expand those opportunities. Continuing to advocate for workforce preparation and recruitment is necessary, he said, in addition to taking actions toward lowering energy costs for manufacturers. Manufacturers are innovators and entrepreneurs, builders and producers, dreamers and leaders for solving our challenges and envisioning the future, Denzler said. It's imperative that our elected officials enact policies to continue to allow the manufacturing sector to grow in Illinois. A kidnapped girl's escape in Alabama has led to the discovery of two decomposing bodies and the arrest of a man now facing murder and kidnapping charges, authorities said. Police got a call Monday morning from a driver about a 12-year-old girl walking alone along County Road 34 in Dadeville, Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett said Tuesday at a news conference. The girl had been restrained to bed posts for about a week, according to a criminal complaint. She had chewed off her restraints -- breaking her braces -- and her wrists show marks consistent with restraint, it states. The 12-year-old had been given alcohol to stay "in a drugged state" and was assaulted in the "head area," the complaint states. She had not been reported missing, the sheriff said. Jose Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, was arrested Monday about 25 miles away in Auburn on suspicion of first-degree kidnapping by US Marshals and police, the sheriff said, adding other agencies are also on the case. While searching Pascual-Reyes' home, detectives found two decomposed bodies, the sheriff said. A forensics team is working to identify the corpses, he said, and how and when they died wasn't immediately known. The sheriff further stated that "other people" were living in the residence. The sheriff did not say whether these people were being charged or held in connection with the alleged crimes at the residence. Pascual-Reyes also faces three counts of capital murder and two counts of abuse of corpse, Abbett said in a news release. "We're looking at multiple counts of capital murder, along with kidnapping in the first degree," Tallapoosa County District Attorney Jeremy Duerr said during the news conference. "And of course, once we continue and finish our investigation, I feel certain that several more charges will follow." Pascual-Reyes awaits a bond hearing at the Tallapoosa County Jail, Abbett said. It wasn't immediately clear if he had a lawyer. "This is horrendous to have a crime scene of this nature and also a 12-year-old juvenile to deal with this horrendous situation," Abbett said, calling the girl "a hero." While the Sheriff did not give any details about when the girl might have been kidnapped or any possible relationship with Pascual-Reyes, he did say she had received medical care and was doing well. "She's safe now and ... we want to keep her that way," Abbett said. You can read the full text of this article if you: Select an option Log In Buy Article Content & Permissions Access through Ovid Two more presumed cases of monkeypox have been reported in Lancaster County. The Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department said Thursday that testing is being performed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to confirm the cases, and it is investigating potential close contacts and will notify those who may have been exposed to the disease. Monkeypox causes flu-like symptoms and a rash that looks like pimples or blisters. It is mainly spread through close, skin-to-skin contact with someone who has a monkeypox rash, but it can also be spread by contact with fabrics, objects or surfaces that have been used by someone who has the virus and by contact with respiratory secretions through face-to-face contact, like kissing. The Health Department did not provide any other details on the cases, which are the second and third reported in Lancaster County. There have now been a dozen monkeypox cases reported in Nebraska, according to the CDC. On Thursday, the Biden administration declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency. There have now been more than 6,600 cases diagnosed nationwide. Although the risk to the general public remains low, the Health Department said its important for anyone who has an unexplained rash or other monkeypox symptoms to contact their health care provider to be evaluated. A ministerial meeting of OPEC+ nations has agreed to raise the group's oil output by 100,000 barrels per day during September. The meeting noted the dynamic and rapidly evolving oil market fundamentals, necessitating continuous assessment of market conditions, said a statement. The increase, equivalent to 0.1% of global demand, follows weeks of speculation that US President Joe Biden's trip to the Middle East and Washington's clearance of missile defence system sales to Riyadh and the UAE will bring more oil to the world market, said a Reuters report. The increase of 100,000 bpd will be one of the smallest since OPEC quotas were introduced in 1982, OPEC data shows. "This is a smaller increase but an increase nonetheless," Amos Hochstein, senior US State Department adviser for energy security, told CNN. An Opec statement noted that the severely limited availability of excess capacity necessitates utilising it with great caution in response to severe supply disruptions. The meeting noted that chronic underinvestment in the oil sector has reduced excess capacities along the value chain (upstream/midstream/downstream), it said. The meeting highlighted with particular concern that insufficient investment into the upstream sector will impact the availability of adequate supply in a timely manner to meet growing demand beyond 2023 from non-participating non-OPEC oil-producing countries, some OPEC member countries and participating non-OPEC oil-producing countries. It noted that preliminary data for OECD commercial oil stocks level stood at 2,712 mb in June 2022, which was 163 mb lower than the same time last year, and 236 mb below the 2015-2019 average, and that emergency oil stocks have reached their lowest levels in more than 30 years. - TradeArabia News Service An inmate serving time at the Nebraska State Penitentiary died in prison Wednesday. Daniel Holliday, 69, was 11 years into his 30- to 35-year sentence for two counts of first-degree sexual assault and one count of visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct. Holliday was serving time for crimes committed in Dawson County. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services said the cause of death has not been determined, but a grand jury will investigate, as is required by law. A Lincoln photographer got more than 20 years in federal prison Wednesday for making child pornography under the guise of a modeling job and molesting his teen victims. In court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tessie Smith said Gregory Dightman Sr. engaged in a "decade-long pattern of exploiting young women and sexually assaulting them in the process." While law enforcement identified four victims, she said it's very possible there were more they didn't know about because they weren't able to identify all of the people in the images and their ages. One of the victims only was ID'd after she read about Dightman's arrest in February 2020 and called the Lincoln Police Department to report what he'd done to her back in 2009. Identified in court as Victim 4, the young woman told U.S. District Judge John Gerrard she suffers from PTSD, anxiety and depression, has trust issues and fears for her daughter that one day she'll trust someone like Dightman. "I still find myself blaming myself for everything he did to me. I have a hard time forgiving myself for not reporting him right away as I could have saved other victims," she said. "He violated me and so many other underaged women. He did not have the right to do that." She said Dightman forced her to do things she wasn't OK with and wouldn't take 'No' for an answer. She said she has suffered more than he ever will in prison. Gerrard told her this wasn't her fault or her doing and asked if she understood that. "I do," she said, tearfully. Smith, the prosecutor, said despite these victims being older than the court usually sees in production cases, at 16 and 17, they still were vulnerable. "Similar to many human trafficking cases, these victims came from personal-life situations that were difficult, and Mr. Dightman took advantage of that," she said. Defense attorney, Dana London, said Dightman, 53, spared the victims from having to go to testify at trial by pleading guilty to four counts of possessing child pornography. And he said it was unfair to say it was a decades' long process, given that one victim reported incidents in 2009 and the three others between 2018 and 2019. Dightman offered an apology to the victims, saying they didn't deserve what he did to them. "As an adult, I knew better and I failed. I apologize," he said. "I've got daughters of my own, and I know I wouldn't want them treated this way." Then, Gerrard made sure that Dightman heard Victim 4. "All of these victims have names. They have lives. And these lives won't be the same. The court's hope is that with counseling, with belief in themselves, with support from their families the victims will recover to the fullest extent that they can," he said. In addition to the prison term, Dightman also will have to serve 10 years on supervised release and was ordered to pay $12,000 to the Child Pornography Victims Reserve Fund. The case began in November 2019 when a woman told Lincoln police she had learned that a professional photographer was taking inappropriate photos, included nude images, of her 17-year-old daughter. Police got a warrant to search Dightman's home, phones and computers and found he had taken more than 400 sexually explicit photographs of at least four underage girls at his Walton photography studio, Fat Boy Photography. The University of Nebraska Board of Regents will consider giving the systems top administrator a contract extension when it meets next week, and with it, a pay increase and chance at a lucrative bonus. Incentivizing President Ted Carter to stay at NU through 2027, including giving him a 3% increase in his base pay and providing a healthy deferred compensation package, should be seen as a vote of confidence in his leadership, Regent Bob Phares said. Ted Carter has been the right leader at the right time for the University of Nebraska system and our state as a whole, said Phares, of North Platte, ahead of the Aug. 11 meeting at Varner Hall. We want to keep him as long as we can. All told, Carters total compensation could surpass $1.5 million in 2023. The details of Carters restructured contract include: * Carter was hired by NU in 2019 and given a 5-year contract, but regents want to extend his time leading the university system with campuses in Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney until Dec. 31, 2027. * A 3% increase to Carters base pay the same merit increase provided to all NU employees this year through an agreement with the Legislature and Gov. Pete Ricketts would push his annual salary from $934,600 to $962,638. The increase in pay comes from NUs state-aided budget, which includes appropriations from the Legislature and tuition revenue. * The board will also consider awarding Carter a performance bonus for his work during the 2021-22 academic year. Under the terms of his contract, Carter is eligible to receive an amount equal to 15% of his salary if he hits a series of metrics determined by the board. Last year, regents said Carter met 95% of the benchmarks set for him and voted to give him a performance bonus of $140,190. This year, with first- to second-year retention numbers falling for NU students across the system, Carter met just 89% of the performance metrics set for him. The board will consider awarding him a bonus equal to three-quarters of the full amount he is eligible to receive, or roughly $105,000. * Under the new contract up for consideration, regents could also provide Carter a second deferred compensation package money he is eligible to receive each year he stays at NU. Carter already has a deferred compensation package -- funded by private donors -- equal to 11.5% of his base salary. Regents could award him a second privately funded package that would put $340,000 into an investment account beginning in 2023 that he would be able to draw from beginning in January 2024. Both deferred compensation packages would be managed by the University of Nebraska Foundation, a university spokeswoman said. James Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia who researches the contracts of university presidents, said deferred compensation packages have become increasingly more common across higher education. In the corporate world, deferred compensation packages are designed to keep high-performing executives in the company by promising them a payout after a certain number of years something often referred to as golden handcuffs, according to Finkelstein. The proposed change to Carter's contract includes the "golden handcuffs" language: "The university would suffer loss if President Carter were to accept another offer of employment, and it is thus ordinary, necessary, and reasonable to provide President Carter with additional compensation on a deferred basis to induce him to serve and continue to serve as president." While a deferred compensation package can be used to keep a leader in higher education at an institution the tenure of chancellors and presidents has shortened in recent years Finkelstein said most top administrators do not move into other leadership positions. What (a deferred compensation package) really accomplishes in higher education is that the public doesnt know the true value of a presidents compensation until the compensation is received, he said, often deferring public scrutiny until the compensation is paid years later. Still, deferred compensation packages are becoming the norm, particularly among universities in the Big Ten Conference, which outside of football and basketball coaches are often the highest paid public employees in their respective states. Penn State Universitys board will pay its new president, Neeli Bendapudi, a base salary of $950,000 with $350,000 in supplemental retirement contributions. And the University of Minnesota Board of Regents approved a deal with President Joan Gabel that increases her supplemental retirement contributions of $250,000 with $10,000 annual increments. Gabel's total compensation will reach $1.2 million this year. As the pay and benefits at one university increase, Judith Wilde, a research professor at George Mason who studies presidential contract language alongside Finkelstein, said other leaders in higher education will take note. "Presidents are aware of which of their colleagues are getting how much money and may even be aware of some of the perks," Wilde said. "They may be looking to get some of the same things." And, through attorneys who specialize in getting university leaders the best deal possible, those individuals are often able to get what they are looking for. Wilde said George Mason's research has also noticed governance boards more willing to play ball, too. "Larger universities and flagships in particular have boards where more people are coming from the corporate world," Wilde said. "They are used to seeing salaries like this; they are used to seeing some of the benefits the presidents are now getting. "It doesn't surprise them," she added. This weekend, the streets of Wilber, a town of close to 2,000 people, will be bright and bustling as festivalgoers from every corner of the country will gather for kolaches and traditional Czech fun. The city's biggest event, the Wilber Czech Festival, will celebrate its 61st annual weekend Friday through Sunday. The event is held in the Czech capital of the U.S. Despite temperatures forecasted to reach triple digits, the event still could see close to 50,000 visitors. Planning committee member Jen Pospisil said the festival attracts Czechs and Czech culture enthusiasts from all over the country. I'm always amazed by people who come, Pospisil said. They're willing to handle the heat. Czechs from Iowa, Minnesota, Texas and even overseas will congregate for cornhole, Czech dancing, parades and a beauty contest. Graduates of Wilber-Clatonia High School will play in the alumni band during the festival. Pospisil, who grew up in Wilber, is one of the band members. Pospisil has frequented the event since she was young. She said its helped to grow her Czech heritage. She was raised with two sets of grandparents who spoke fluent Czech, so seeing fellow Czechs from other states feels like a massive family reunion. She also enjoys seeing her fellow graduates circle back to their hometown. It gives people a reason to reunite and get together, Pospisil said. Whether attendees are Czech or not, Pospisil guarantees theyll have a wonderful time. The three-day itinerary is filled with family fun activities that range from costume exhibits to concerts. Parades are scheduled Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. But even though she believes the Czech festival can be enjoyed by all Nebraskans, its sentiment holds a personal meaning for Pospisil. It's really important to me, she said. This is my grandparents culture, their heritage thats instilled in me. GERING, Neb. (AP) Fire crews made substantial headway in containing a western Nebraska wildfire that has destroyed some homes, despite getting significantly less rain than officials hoped for. Officials believed the Carter Canyon Fire south of Gering was about 85% contained by Wednesday morning after being only about 30% contained a day earlier, Ben Bohall with the Nebraska Forest Service said. Fire crews had hoped storms Tuesday would bring heavy rains to help douse the flames, but Bohall said the area instead only saw light showers and lightning strikes that sparked two additional fires. The first fire was sparked inside the wildfire parameters and was extinguished after burning a little more than 3 acres (12,140 square meters), Bohall said. The second fire erupted in Banner County south of the wildfire and was put out after burning about 5 acres (20,234 square meters), he said. A jump in humidity has helped keep the wildfire from gaining energy, Bohall said. There also was a slight chance of thunderstorms and showers Wednesday night, but crews weren't expecting much in they way of help from Mother Nature, he said. Still, we're hoping that by tomorrow, we'll end up turning this effort back over to the Gering Fire Department, Bohall said. The wildfire has scorched about 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of mostly grass and timberland, destroying three homes and damaging several others over the weekend. Officials confirmed late Tuesday that the fire was started by several lightning strikes Saturday evening. It gained ground early on due to tinder-dry conditions, rough terrain and high winds. The National Weather Service has forecast scorching temperatures over 100 degrees (37.7 Celsius) each day through Friday, with the heat receding somewhat to the upper 80s on Saturday. Other large fires are raging in the West, including a Northern California fire that has burned roughly 90 square miles (233 square kilometers) in the Klamath National Forest. In northwestern Montana, a fire that started Friday on the Flathead Indian Reservation had 25 square miles (66 square kilometers) by Tuesday, and the Moose Fire in Idaho had burned more than 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. Four people died early Thursday morning in the small northeast Nebraska town of Laurel, and foul play is suspected, according to the Nebraska State Patrol's superintendent. At a news conference Thursday afternoon in the Cedar County town, Col. John Bolduc said authorities responded to an explosion at a home at 209 Elm St. at 3 a.m., where they found one person dead. Latest update in Laurel quadruple murder: Neighbor charged with 10 felonies in connection to four murders in small Nebraska town A second blaze broke out at around the same time at a home at 503 Elm St., where authorities found three more people dead. In a news release issued Thursday evening, hours after the afternoon news conference, the State Patrol said investigators have determined "that gunfire is suspected to have played a part in the incidents at both homes." No arrests have been reported, and Bolduc again urged residents of the community of fewer than 1,000 people, about 40 miles west of Sioux City, Iowa, to be vigilant and report any out-of-the-ordinary activity to 911. "We are not categorizing (the incident) as anything at this point," Bolduc said earlier Thursday when fielding questions at the news conference staged outside of a church. "We have multiple crime scenes. We have four dead. We're trying to get to the bottom of it." The identity of those killed have not been released. Fire inspectors believe that accelerants may have been used in both fires, Bolduc said, adding that investigators weren't sure if there was any connection between the victims. "We aren't sure if they knew each other," said Cedar County Sheriff Larry Koranda, who appeared at Thursday's news conference alongside Bolduc and the county attorney. Bolduc broadcast a report of a silver sedan seen leaving Laurel early Thursday morning, reportedly driven by a Black male who may have picked up a passenger before leaving the town westbound on U.S. 20. The colonel indicated the sedan's driver and reported passenger are suspects in the criminal investigation, which is being spearheaded by the state patrol. Bolduc said any potential suspects in the incidents may have been burned themselves in either fire. It's unclear where they might have been headed, he said. Bolduc asked anyone with information on the crime or surveillance video of the area to contact the State Patrol at 402-479-4921. Douglas Furlich, who lives blocks away from both locations where fires reportedly broke out, told the Journal Star he heard an explosion call while listening to the police scanner as he watched TV around 3:30 a.m. Thursday. Shortly after, he said, the town's sirens began to wail, signaling a fire or rescue call. "I went and took a drive to see, and they still have at the Third and Elm site they still have that blocked off; you can't get within a half a block of it. And there's a blue tarp that has been erected around the portion of the yard." Though the town's hall, school and public pool all went into lockdown on Thursday, Furlich said residents hadn't received word to do so themselves. At the news conference, Koranda said the sheriff's office would leave lockdown decisions up to local businesses and entities. Asked whether the public is in danger, the sheriff didn't directly answer. "It's a tight-knit community, about 1,000 people. It's a very safe community," the sheriff said, later adding, "if you see something out of the ordinary, please call." Gov. Pete Ricketts flew to Kuwait this week to thank Nebraska National Guard troops who are deployed in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. Ricketts was on hand to celebrate what was described as the rare occurrence of one team of Nebraska soldiers transferring its command to another detachment of fellow Nebraskans. The team of soldiers from the 1057th Military Police Company based in Scottsbluff, who deployed last October, were replaced by 1057th soldiers based in Kearney. Ricketts attended the event at Camp Arifjan Army Base in Kuwait. "Twenty-five years ago, Nebraskans in the National Guard rarely deployed overseas," Ricketts said. "Today, young women and men who join the Nebraska National Guard not only prepare to be deployed -- they expect to be deployed. "They're eager to support U.S. military missions abroad, and they have the training and skills to take on major responsibilities." Maj. Gen. Daryl Bohac, adjutant general of the Nebraska National Guard, joined the governor in thanking members of the Guard for their "skillful and dedicated service." The Nebraska unit has been providing law enforcement at Camp Arifjan. Currently, 425 soldiers and airmen from the Nebraska National Guard are supporting U.S. military missions around the world. A wildfire near Gering is about 85% contained and firefighting operations are expected to be turned back over to local authorities Thursday. The Carter Canyon Fire that began with several lightning strikes Saturday evening has destroyed an estimated 15,630 acres, Ben Bohall of the Nebraska Forest Service said Wednesday. Three homes were destroyed and seven more were damaged but no lives have been lost, he said. Bohall said a request has been made to survey the area with aircraft. That survey was expected to occur Wednesday afternoon. "We're hoping to have aircraft up to give us a good picture," Bohall said. "Barring anything unexpected happening, the plan is to transfer the command back to the Gering (Volunteer) Fire Department on Thursday." Thunderstorms moving through the area produced some rain Tuesday night but only "a minimal amount," Bohall said. Two lightning strikes from the storm did cause new fires to ignite but they were quickly extinguished. "The first strike hit near Robidoux Road," Bohall said. "That burned up about 3 acres, but an air tanker put it out right away." Another lightning strike about 7 miles south of Carter Canyon in Banner County caused a fire that burned over 5 acres, he said. It was also put out with the aid of aircraft. Utility crews with the Roosevelt Public Power District have restored power to all residences throughout the area. Crews are still working to repair damaged infrastructure such as downed power lines and utility poles, Bohall said. Landowners impacted by the fires should contact the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and Farm Services Agency for information about assistance programs. Assistance is available to help with fences, water structures, grazing lands and other issues, he said. Bohall said the public's donations of food, water and other resources were essential to keeping up to 200 firefighters from 35 fire departments working. He said donations can still be made through the Firefighter Ministry of Scottsbluff. "The success that we've had can be attributed directly to the public support," he said. "Everything they did was essential to keeping the firefighters on the fire line." Laura Ann Walker, the attorney for the teen against whom charges were dropped, told the Journal Times it appeared a witness had been untruthful in identifying her client as being involved in the crime. The prosecutor then "did what she is supposed to do as a prosecutor and that is to speak the truth, Walker said. So kudos to her. However, Walker did express concern about the rush to charge her client. I wish they would spend more time investigating prior to issuing the criminal complaint." 1. Yes. The new high school has made it a must. Thousands of people are impacted.. 2. Yes. Even if it means revising some budgets, these entities must move on the project. 3. No. Its been known for years that the road was a problem.. Why the urgency now? 4. No. If prioritizing the road means more taxes, forget it. The project will just have to wait. 5. Unsure. Its hard to say until school has been in session for a few months. Vote View Results Commodity malware outpaced ransomware during April, May and June 2022 for the first time in more than a year, comprising 20 percent of the threats observed, said Cisco Talos, a leading private threat intelligence team. Commodity malware threats were followed by ransomware, phishing, business email compromise (BEC) and advanced persistent threats. This quarter mainly saw an increase in commodity malware threats, widely available for purchase or download. This type of malware is typically not customized and is used by a variety of actors to deliver additional threats in various stages of their operation and/or to deliver additional threats. Cisco Talos also observed ongoing Qakbot activity, which leverages thread hijacking, allowing threat actors to use compromised email accounts to insert malicious replies into the middle of existing email conversations. Compared to previous years, ransomware made up a smaller portion, comprising 15 percent of all threats, compared with 25 percent last quarter. The drop is attributed to various factors including the closure of several ransomware groups, whether it be of their own volition or the actions of global law enforcement agencies and governments. Targeted industries: The top-targeted industry continues to be telecommunications, following a trend where it was among the top targeted sectors in Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, closely followed by organizations in the education and healthcare sectors. Other targeted verticals include financial services, local government, food services, retail, automotive, information technology, production and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the United States continues to be the top targeted country followed by Europe, Asia, North America and Middle East. Commenting on the reports findings, Fady Younes, Cybersecurity Director, EMEA Service Providers and MEA said: Organizations across countries of the Middle East and Africa hold a huge amount of sensitive data that is prone to cyber threats and needs to be secured. With cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated, the demand for comprehensive cybersecurity solutions is increasing. He added: Cisco is uniquely positioned to support governments and businesses of all sizes and across industries in our region, addressing the cyber security challenges they are facing, and helping them increase their security resilience. In order to protect from these threats, Cisco highly recommends organizations to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as Cisco Duo, on all critical services. Endpoint detection and response solutions like Cisco Secure Endpoint are also key to detecting malicious activity across machines and networks. Cisco Secure Firewall can help protect from commodity trojans and malware such as Qakbot, , while Cisco Secure Email and Secure Malware Analytics can help protect users from targeted phishing emails and business email compromise, which adversaries commonly used this quarter. TradeArabia News Service LOUISVILLE, Ky. The federal government filed civil rights charges Thursday against four Louisville police officers over the drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose fatal shooting helped fuel the racial justice protests that rocked the nation in 2020. The charges most of which stem from the faulty drug warrant used to search Taylors home are an effort to hold law enforcement accountable for the killing of the 26-year-old medical worker. One of the officers was acquitted of state charges earlier this year. Breonna Taylor should be alive today, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the charges, which include unlawful conspiracy, use of force and obstruction of justice. The charges named former officers Joshua Jaynes and Brett Hankison, along with current officers Kelly Goodlett and Sgt. Kyle Meany. Louisville police said they are seeking to fire Goodlett and Meany. Hankison was the only officer charged Thursday who was on the scene the night of the killing. Taylor was shot to death by officers who knocked down her door while executing a search warrant. Taylors boyfriend fired a shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the door, and they returned fire, striking Taylor multiple times. Hankison, Jaynes and Meany had initial appearances Thursday in federal court before Magistrate Judge Regina Edwards, who set their bonds at $50,000 each, according to a court clerk official. The three men face a maximum sentence of life in prison for the civil rights charges. Calls to attorneys for Jaynes and Meany were not returned Thursday. It wasn't immediately known if Hankison had an attorney who could speak on his behalf. Goodlett pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy, Taylor family attorney Ben Crump said Thursday, though records on her court proceedings were sealed. Goodlett faces up to five years in prison. Local activists and members of Taylor's family celebrated the charges and thanked federal officials. Supporters gathered in a downtown park and chanted: Say her name, Breonna Taylor! This is a day when Black women saw equal justice in America, Crump said. Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, said she has waited nearly 2 years for police to be held accountable. Todays overdue, but it still hurts, she said. The Justice Department is also conducting a non-criminal investigation of the Louisville Police Department, announced last year, that is probing whether the department has a pattern of using excessive force and conducting unreasonable search and seizures. In the protests of 2020, Taylor's name was often shouted along with George Floyd, who was killed less than three months after Taylor by a Minneapolis police officer in a videotaped encounter that shocked the nation. Protesters who took to the streets over months in Louisville were especially critical of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who presented only wanton endangerment charges against Hankison for a grand jury to consider in 2020. Members of the grand jury later came forward to complain that Cameron's office had steered them away from charges for the other officers involved in the raid. Thank God that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not get the last word in regard to justice for Breonna Taylor," Crump said Thursday. We have always said this was a conspiracy to cover up the death of Breonna Taylor. Today the Justice Department put forth the charging documents to show we werent crazy. Cameron, a Republican running for governor next year, said in announcing the indictment against Hankison in September 2020 that he would leave issues regarding potential civil rights violations to federal officials to investigate. Cameron had not responded to a request for comment Thursday afternoon. Garland said the officers who were at Taylors home just after midnight on March 13, 2020, were not involved in the drafting of the warrant, and were unaware of the false and misleading statements. Hankison was indicted on two deprivation-of-rights charges alleging he used excessive force when he retreated from Taylors door, turned a corner and fired 10 shots into the side of her two-bedroom apartment. Bullets flew into a neighbors apartment, nearly striking one man. He was acquitted by a jury of state charges earlier this year. A separate indictment said Jaynes and Meany both knew the warrant used to search Taylors home had information that was false, misleading and out of date. Both are charged with conspiracy and deprivation of rights. Jaynes was fired in January 2021 for violating department standards in the preparation of a search warrant execution and for being untruthful in the Taylor warrant. Former Louisville Police Sgt. John Mattingly, who was shot at Taylors door, retired last year. Another officer, Myles Cosgrove, who investigators said fired the shot that killed Taylor, was dismissed from the department in January 2021. Taylor's boyfriend, Kenny Walker, who was in her apartment that night and fired the shot at Mattingly, was initially charged with attempted murder of a police officer but that charge was dropped after Walker told investigators he thought an intruder was breaking into the apartment. The Taylor case also prompted a review of the city's no-knock warrant policy. Those types of warrants, used in drug investigations to attempt to prevent the destruction of evidence, were later banned in the city of Louisville. KEARNEY Kearney psychiatrist Reynaldo A. de los Angeles testified for 2 1/2 hours Wednesday how he tried to help a woman with her difficult drug addiction. But the prosecutor tried to paint a different picture one of a man who groomed his patient in an effort to take advantage of her. At the end of the three-day trial, a jury of five men and one woman convicted de los Angeles, 77, of misdemeanor third-degree sexual assault of a woman on Aug. 25, 2021, at his Kearney office. De los Angeles, a licensed psychiatrist, will be sentenced in September. He faces up to one year in jail. Born in the Philippines, de los Angeles said he came to the U.S. and got his medical license in Nebraska in 1991. He started working at Richard Young Hospital in Kearney in 1992, and he eventually went into private practice. He started treating the woman in 2004, and he saw her off-and-on until 2017, when she saw him regularly for mental health issues and to fight an opioid addiction. Over the last five years, de los Angeles said he had been weaning the woman off of street drugs with the help of strong prescription medication. As part of his practice, at every appointment de los Angeles said he uses a scale to rate his patients progress. As soon as sessions are finished, he said he routinely takes notes on their discussion, noting the date and time of the appointment, his clients demeanor, appearance and behavior, and he puts the notes at the top of his clients file. Defense attorney Aaron Bishop of Kearney asked de los Angeles about an Aug. 16, 2021, appointment he had with the woman, during which she claimed to have lost, or someone stole, her medications. De los Angeles said the woman was making progress in weaning off the street drugs, and he wanted to continue her progress, so he refilled her prescription and scheduled another appointment in two weeks. On Aug. 25, 2021, the woman called to ask de los Angeles if she could come in for an appointment. She didnt feel the medications he gave her on Aug. 16 were correct, and she feared having withdrawals. When she arrived de los Angeles said she seemed to have more energy and had difficulty focusing. Although he said it was typical for the woman to physically touch and hug him, he claimed she hugged him more on Aug. 25. He told jurors at one point she moved her chest on to me, hugging him, and because shes so short, her breasts were across his chest. It was something Im not used to. The hugging happened multiple times that day, he claimed. At one point, de los Angeles said the woman was in a hugging stance where her hips touched his. He said he asked her what she was doing, and she replied just getting friendly. The two talked, and de los Angeles claimed the woman asked him to look at a scar on her back where she had surgery. He said the woman lifted her long-sleeved shirt, and he looked and felt the area, not seeing a scar. However, Monday in court, the woman testified de los Angeles reached his hand under her short-sleeved shirt without her consent, placed his hand into her pants, past her panties and felt her buttocks. She told him to stop, then he reached his hand around her shirt to the front where he groped her breast. De los Angeles denied touching her buttocks or breast. De los Angeles said the two briefly went outside and then returned to the office, where he gave her some magazines. At some point de los Angeles said the woman tripped, and he tried to catch her, but he tripped, too, and the woman landed on top of him. The woman testified earlier that de los Angeles pulled her down onto his lap. Distraught by de los Angeles advance, the woman left the office a short time later, went to the pharmacy with her prescription and later went to police to report the sexual assault. Kearney Police Department investigator Cody Bolte went to de los Angeles office to question him about the Aug. 25 incident. During the 37-minute meeting Bolte, who was wearing a body camera, earlier testified he asked de los Angeles several questions, and de los Angeles showed him the womans file. Bolte asked de los Angeles if anything unusual happened during that session, and de los Angeles said no. Bolte also asked de los Angeles about a video camera in his office aimed at the lobby. Bolte testified de los Angeles said he could review the video on his computer or phone. At the time de los Angeles never mentioned to Bolte the tripping incident in the lobby between him and the woman. During his testimony de los Angeles said Bolte never asked him what the camera was for, that he didnt remember telling Bolte he could review the content on his phone, that he didnt know where the video recordings went to and that he only uses it as a deterrent. I dont even check on it. Im not interested. Our meeting was very brief, he only asked a few questions then left, de los Angeles said of Boltes visit. You have to remember its been quite a long time. Three days later Bolte served a search warrant at de los Angeles office and confiscated the womans file. In it he found three pages of handwritten notes of de los Angeles that give his account of the Aug. 25 session with the woman. The notes said de los Angeles was concerned about how the woman was interacting with him, her increased anxiety and agitation, although he didnt expect her to have any withdrawal symptoms from her newest prescription. When he touched the womans back, de los Angeles wrote in the notes the woman didnt tell him to stop, calling it innocent touching, and that, Shes getting a thrill over the mental game she is trying to play. I think she wanted to allow the innocent touching to continue. De los Angeles claimed the woman was having a fantasy about the two of them. His notes, which werent dated as he usually did, also indicated the woman was the aggressor on Aug. 25, and she was trying to blackmail him because she owed him money for prior appointments. However, on Aug. 30 when Bolte went to de los Angeles office, he never mentioned the woman had touched him or that she owed him money. I denied everything he was asking me, de los Angeles told jurors, citing patient-client confidentiality. Deputy Buffalo County Attorney Melanie Young questioned de los Angeles about whether his license had ever been suspended. De los Angeles claimed he didnt know. However, Young showed him a document saying his license had been suspended in Nebraska from 2011-2014. Young questioned if the suspension was because de los Angeles failed to maintain records of his medications and that he prescribed himself medication from his own supply. De los Angeles replied, Im trying very hard, but I cant remember why it was suspended ... There was some things the board of medical examiners questioned, so they suspended my license. Young recalled the victims mother, who said she paid more than $4,300 in checks and $1,000 in cash to de los Angeles despite never receiving a receipt. De los Angeles also never gave her a statement saying her daughter had any outstanding bills. Prosecutor Young said de los Angeles theory that the Aug. 25 victim wanted to blackmail him didnt make sense. The woman had nothing to gain by reporting the sexual assault to police, but instead she was losing the doctor who had been writing her prescriptions for years.Young said there were numerous inconsistencies between de los Angeles statements during the investigation and his testimony. She said the woman remained consistent in her account of the assault when she told people and the jury. There were no inconsistencies in her reporting what happened. It was clear, Young said, by the different styles de los Angeles used when he wrote his last progress notes on the woman, that he had written them after police had been to his office on Aug. 30. De los Angeles also failed to tell Bolte about any of the events that he penned in his notes. Young said de los Angeles touching of the woman was for sexual gratification. But defense attorney Bishop said the case was about the woman trying to get more drugs from de los Angeles to feed her addiction. Bishop said Aug. 25 was the first time de los Angeles told her he wouldnt give her the drugs she wanted, and she fabricated the story about being assaulted because she was angry. Her story is not credible, her timeline isnt credible, he said. She just wanted her drugs. She was struggling with her medications. She said she was going to die without them. KEARNEY Taylor Bunde still remembers the advice she received during a freshman general studies course at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. A guest speaker talked about the value of relationships how connecting with others can benefit you both personally and professionally. Thats something Ive been reflecting back on more recently as Ive been writing my speech, said Bunde, who was selected to speak during Fridays summer commencement ceremony. She plans to share a similar message with her fellow graduates cherish the relationships you made at UNK and never forget this time together. Im really glad I came to UNK, she said. Ive met a lot of great people here. Its definitely been really special. One of my favorite things about UNK and I know Chancellor Kristensen mentions this a lot is Kearney is kind of like a big, small town. And thats kind of what I was used to with Hastings, she said. Its provided a lot of familiarity and a lot of comfort to be at UNK the past four years. Its a place Ive always been excited to come back to every August. Bunde participated in a number of activities and organizations at UNK, including Circle K International, Future Business Leaders of America-Phi Beta Lambda, Phi Eta Sigma honor society and the Secondary Educators Club. She was also active with UNKs Center for Economic Education, which promotes economic and financial literacy in the state. In addition to attending the centers training sessions and professional development events, Bunde worked with high schoolers to help them prepare for state and national business competitions. She assisted with the annual Loper Business Invitational, which brought nearly 250 students from 24 schools to campus in February, and evaluated student presentations ahead of this summers FBLA National Leadership Conference in Chicago. Alyse Pflanz, director of the Center for Economic Education and coordinator of UNKs business teacher education program, knew she could count on Bunde to step up during these events. Taylor is one of the brightest and most genuinely kindhearted students to come through the business, marketing and information technology education program, Pflanz said. She excels at every single task laid before her, whether it be in the classroom, in an organization or in the workplace. A regular on the deans list for academic excellence, Bunde supported the community by volunteering with Junior Achievement, an organization that teaches young people about financial literacy, entrepreneurship and career readiness, and she served as a paraprofessional for the Kearney Community Learning Center after-school program, working with students at Kenwood Elementary from August 2020 to December 2021. She completed her student teaching at Gibbon Public Schools in the spring and graduates summa cum laude on Friday with a bachelors degree in business, marketing and information technology education. Im excited to be the commencement speaker. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it means a lot that the chancellor selected me to speak out of all the students who were nominated, said Bunde, whose older brother Dylan graduated from UNK in 2018. Although she remains passionate about education and teaching, Bunde will start her professional career as a client services assistant with Barney Financial Services in Kearney. Her future has limitless opportunities in both fields of education and business because of her passion to help others and succeed, all while maintaining the highest level of integrity and loyalty. That is hard to find, Pflanz said. KEARNEY Les Bruning spent his childhood in western Nebraska, in a place where tumbleweeds often blew through town. I grew up in Harrison, way out in the panhandle, he said from his studio in Omaha. I also loved to chase these dust devils which are like little tornadoes. There were always tumbleweeds blowing everywhere. Theyd be in the fence lines and blowing through town. I guess people dont like them so they call them Russian thistles. When Denise Christensen, executive director of the Merryman Performing Arts Center in Kearney, reached out to Bruning about creating a piece of art for the lobby of the center, the artist recalled his fascination with elements of his boyhood home in western Nebraska. The idea of the tumbleweed really hit me, he said. First, they happen all over the Great Plains, and secondly, I like the idea of movement, sense of movement and potential movement. And thats what you always have with tumbleweeds. They just kept going. After settling on the subject matter, something happened that drove home the point. It was funny because right after I got this idea, I went to my studio and there was this tumbleweed stuck right in the steps outside, Bruning laughed. Alright, the Gods are talking to me. While still in its preliminary phase, Bruning calls the piece of art Tumbleweed Symphony. He plans to work on the piece through October and November and expects to install it in the lobby of the Merryman Performing Arts Center during spring 2023. The Merryman received an $11,000 grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance as part of its annual Artistic Innovations grant program. The alliance recently awarded 19 grants totaling $255,418. These awards grant up to $15,000 for the creation of artworks and creative projects by artists and nonprofit organizations across Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. Support for this program comes from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional major funding will be from Scott D. and Rochelle Morris, who have supported the Merryman from its initial renovation. The theater is name after the Scott D. Morris family. Christensen hopes to include students from Kearney schools to witness the process of creating the work. As part of the whole project, Les will fabricate the mobile at his studio which is in the Hot Shops in Omaha, she said. Hes one of the founders of the Hot Shops. We hope to have Kearney High students travel to his studio and be there at the time hes fabricating so they can get to see some of the process. Christensen sees Tumbleweed Symphony as a signature piece of art for the Merryman Performing Arts Center. This is going to be a permanent sculpture in the lobby that captures the spirit of central Nebraska, she noted. Artwork of this caliber primes us to enter a space where we will see performances of extraordinary quality. It sets the stage for people to have an all encompassing arts experience at the Merryman. Bruning also found inspiration for Tumbleweed Symphony from an artist in the Hot Shops Art Center, an artist collective located in Omaha the specializes in creating art of molten glass, metal, ceramics and iron. Theres a guy here in the Hot Shops that uses Pyrex glass to make things, he said. This type of glass is the kind where it comes in sticks of various diameters. You can melt it together and slump it and then put it in the kiln to cure it. Its a different process from blown glass. Bruning plans to use elements of that technique for Tumbleweed Symphony, along with bronze, to make a glass tumbleweed. This will be suspended from the ceiling, he said. There will be a kind of spiral of light duty bronze. It is an ambitious idea because Ive made a lot of mobiles over the years, but Ive never tried glass like this before. The idea came together pretty quickly. Im anxious to build the piece. I like to do things that Ive never done before. To me, thats not a threat, its an inspiration. For the artist, the challenge of figuring out how to accomplish his goals makes the project even more compelling. KEARNEY In less than an hour a Buffalo County jury convicted Kearney psychiatrist of misdemeanor third-degree sexual assault of a former female patient. The jury of five men and one woman made their decision late Wednesday afternoon. The incident happened Aug. 25, 2021, at de los Angeles' office at 409 E. 25th St. Suite No. 6 in Kearney. De los Angeles showed no emotion as the verdict was read. The victim wasn't present in the courtroom for the verdict. Judge Gerry Jorgensen ordered the Nebraska Probation Office to complete a presentence investigation report, including a psychological evaluation. Findings of that report including background information on a defendant, family and criminal history, employment, and psychological and chemical dependency help the judge issue an appropriate sentence. Sentencing was scheduled for September. De los Angeles was released on his own recognizance, although he must surrender his passport. It's unclear what immediate effect the verdict has on his medical license. For nearly 2 1/2 hours Tuesday, de los Angeles testified on his own behalf. For details about his testimony check back to kearneyhub.com. Mauritius has lifted all travel restrictions related to Covid-19 and is welcoming all guests, according to the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority. The authority said guests are no longer required to test or self-isolate to enjoy a Mauritius holiday. The successful acceleration of the countrys vaccination programme has allowed Mauritius to progress with the full reopening and welcome visitors into a safe and secure environment. The nations double vaccination rate now stands at over 90 percent, and around two thirds of all over 18 have also received their booster shots, it said. Mauritius reopened its borders partially on October 1, 2021, and over 500,000 tourists have travelled to the paradise island since then. A perfect climate awaits the visitors who can enjoy various outdoor activities Mauritius has to offer as well as enjoy the world-renowned beaches, said the authority. Mauritius, lovingly known as the Pearl of Indian Ocean, is a diverse and rich island with tremendous natural treasures beyond its world-famous beaches. The diverse landscape of Mauritius is composed of mountains, rivers and gorges that provide an ultimate setting for outdoor and extreme activities. Outdoor activities include hiking opportunities with unforgettable views including Le Morne, a Unesco World Heritage Site, quad biking in the savannah, canyoning in the gorges and rivers, hiking and swimming in the canyon at Domaine de Chazal or the longest zip line of the Indian Ocean at La Vallee des Couleurs. Tourists can enjoy extraordinary in-air adventures like Seaplane, ultra-light aircraft, helicopter, parachute rides over the lagoons offering panoramic views of island, the mountains sculptures and the endless blue of the lagoons, said the authority. TradeArabia News Service The name Lindevig was common across Vernon County in 1900 thanks to Trond Lindevigs having emigrated from Norway to the U.S. in 1848 with his wife Christense and infant daughter Birgete. Ten children in all were born to the couple, nine in Wisconsin. And today their descendants number nearly 4,000 and counting. Many Vernon County residents can trace their roots back to them. Paul Olson, born in Viroqua and now a North Carolina resident, is one of those descendants and the coordinator of the upcoming Lindevig reunion to be held Aug. 12-14 at Norskedalen. His mother Borghild Lindevig Olson is well remembered by the older citizens of the county as a master genealogist. Olsons efforts to keep the family connected have taken up where she left off. Our first family reunions in the mid-1950s were held in Myrick Park, La Crosse, because of the enthusiastic turnout among cousins scattered westward from Wisconsin all the way to the Pacific Coast, Olson said. Smaller reunions followed and were held every five years in Coon Valley. Our generation wants those coming along behind us to know where their ancestors came from and what they did to create a new life and new opportunities in Wisconsin. We owe much to the courage and strength of Trond and Christense. We want to celebrate them. In 2018, the Lindevig reunion expanded. It drew 300 people from 46 states and Germany to celebrate the anniversary of the familys arrival from Norway. Participants decided to convene again in 2022 to commemorate Tronds 200th birthday. We hope lots of our cousins in Vernon County will join us. Admission is just $7.50 for those over 7 and under 70all others are free, Olson said. Even the meals are free dinner on Friday and lunch and dinner on Saturday. The catch is you have to register so theres enough food on hand for all attendees. Registration is free. Registration and more detailsRegistration is free but essential if you are going to be present for free meals. Visit www.lindevig.com, send an email to Olson at paul@lindevig.com, or call 800-789-3300. Visit Facebook, too. https://www.facebook.com/events/706100217173807 So, whos a relative? If youre a Veum, Johnson, Stakston, Jacobson, Simonson, Strangstalien, Monsoor, Muse, Stafslien and other Lindevig clan families in Vernon County, youre probably a cousin. Todays families may not know anything about their great-great-great grandparentsbut if your family includes any of the original Lindevig children, youre encouraged to get in touch with us and comeeven if for a little while, Barb Parks, family historian said. Family fun Activities for kids include playing Kubb (an old Norwegian game dating to the Vikings), blowing huge bubbles, face painting, and adventure hiking. There will be demonstrations of Norwegian food preparation like churning butter, and making lefse, as well as activities including wood carving, rosemaling, and hayrides around Norskedalen. Adults can learn more about family history from experts and gather with cousins from other parts of the country to compare verbal histories. Weve spent hundreds of hours tracking down family members, Olson said. Many whose ancestors moved westward did not know that their family history four or more generations ago in the U.S. started in Wisconsin. Many had never been to Wisconsin. But they came to the reunion in 2018 and many are returning this year. The reunion events will be held in the Long House at Norskedalen, an open air pavilion. There will be face masks, temperature checks at the registration table, and plenty of hand sanitizer for those concerned about COVID. Were mindful of this and will be taking precautions, Olson noted. DNA and more Curious if youre one of the clan? Family and professional historians will help you track your relationship back to Trond and Christense. The eight original children who had descendants were Birgete Lindevig Johnson, Theoline Lindevig Jacobson, Aasne Lindevig Veum, Ole, Gurine Lindevig Nelson, Ingebor Lindevig Burns, Christopher and Anne Lindevig Stafslien. Tracking the generations is challenging Today, there is just one remaining family with the surname Lindevig. Were happy they have several sons, Olson says, to carry on the name. They are still Wisconsin residents. Three men are in custody after they allegedly committed an armed robbery Tuesday in La Crosse. Taron A. Hill, 24, New Iberia, Louisiana, was referred to the La Crosse County District Attorney for armed robbery. Thaylon Boutte, 20, New Iberia, and Jacorrie Benoit, 21, Wisconsin Dells, were referred for party to an armed robbery. According to the La Crosse Police Department, officers were called to the 1100 block of West George Street around 1:30 p.m. for an armed robbery report. Police obtained a description of the vehicle, which was located by the La Crosse Sheriffs Office a short time later. A traffic stop was conducted, and the three were arrested with assistance from the Bangor and West Salem police departments and Wisconsin State Patrol. Police say the vehicle was searched and a gun was found. The three were transported to the La Crosse County Jail, where they are being held without bond pending a bail hearing. The investigation remains ongoing. Anyone with information regarding the incident is asked to contact the La Crosse Police Department at 608-782-7575. Anonymous tips can be sent to La Crosse Area Crime Stoppers at 608-784 TIPS (8477) or online at lacrossecrimestoppers.com. ONALASKA A Florida developer plans to acquire, remodel and add on to the former Shopko department store at 9366 State Road 16 in Onalaska creating spaces for five retail stores, including three in the existing building. Cory Presnick, a principal with Miami-based CORTA Development, told the Tribune he isnt ready to announce names of retailers that might lease space. But he said he anticipates store openings in 2023. The former Shopko property is under contract to be purchased by CORTA by the end of this year, he said. The building has been vacant since 2019, when Shopko filed for bankruptcy and closed all of its remaining stores. The City of Onalaska Plan Commission will hold a public hearing at 7 p.m. Aug. 23 in the city council chambers on an application from CORTA and the buildings current owner, Paradise Wisconsin Properties, LLC, for a Planned Commercial Industrial District amendment for the project. CORTA also has been redeveloping former Shopko buildings in the Wisconsin cities of West Bend, Fond du Lac and Sheboygan. Fond du Lac is complete, and Sheboygan and West Bend are under construction, Presnick said. CORTA has undertaken similar projects in other states, though none of those are in former Shopko buildings, he said. Besides the Onalaska building, there are two vacant former Shopko stores in La Crosse one in Bridgeview Plaza on the citys North Side, and the other on Mormon Coulee Road on the citys South Side. La Crosse County leaders were honored at a reception Wednesday at the Freight House Restaurant for implementing a collaborative program that reduces opioid use while connecting people to dental care. According to the Wisconsin Hospital Association, approximately 18,000 patients a year present in Emergency Departments and Urgent Care Centers in Wisconsin with nontraumatic dental pain, or pain not caused by an accident but caused by a broken or infected tooth or gums. In the not-too-distant past, those patients would be given 20-30 opioid pills, a prescription for antibiotics, and then sent out the door, says Dr. David Gundersen, a La Crosse native and member of the WDPP Advisory Group. When you do the math, the numbers are quite alarming that hundreds of thousands of opioid pills are floating around in our communities. Pills that set the stage for life-long dependency and even death, he continued. It was recently released by the CDC that over 100,000 people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses in 2021. Over 75,000 of those deaths were from opioid overdoses. Thats why in 2019 local leaders from La Crosse Countys Alliance to Heal, a coalition of health care, education, public health and community leaders fighting addiction, sought out help based on a new model from Dane County. With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via the Wisconsin Department of Health, La Crosse became the first community to pilot this new approach, which became known as the Wisconsin Dental Pain Protocol. The WDPP is a systemic approach implemented by communities to reduce opioid use for patients presenting in Emergency Departments and Urgent Care Centers with non-traumatic dental pain. Through the process of implementing the WDPP, La Crosse physicians, nurses, and PAs were taught how give local anesthetic shots, use effective non-opioid and opioid pain control, and the best ways to get dental infections under control. Most notably, on discharge, a system was established to connect patients with a care coordinator who helped them find dentists. Those dentists then take care of the problem and get the patients out of pain. But the WDPP would likely never have existed without La Crosses leadership. They really took the process and owned it, and demonstrated how the model can be adapted in communities across the stateand potentially the nation, even in the midst of a global pandemic, added Gundersen. The WDPP has now been implemented in Polk and Barron counties and will be rolled out in the Green Bay area this coming year. The CDC and Indian Health Service have also expressed interest in the model. Audra Martine, Health Officer for the La Crosse County Health Department summed it up. The impacts of La Crosse Countys leadership are just beginning. Not only does the WDPP assure people are getting important dental care, but it will also reduce the number of opioid pills in our community and that will save lives. Wisconsin cases of monkeypox have tripled and Minnesota infections doubled over the past two weeks, while New York is seeing four-digit infection numbers. The World Health Organization late July upgraded monkeypox to a public health emergency of international concern, and this week President Biden appointed Robert Fenton as the White House coordinator, and Dr. Demetre Daskalakis as deputy, in leading the response to the outbreak. Containing spread has grown increasingly difficult the U.S. currently has the most cases of any country but the odds of the disease reaching a COVID-level pandemic are miniscule. Its important to emphasize that its very unlikely that monkeypox will cause a pandemic to the scale of COVID-19 because the virus is different, says Matthew Binnicker, director of the Clinical Virology Laboratory at Mayo Clinic. Its spread in a different way. ... We dont think that monkeypox is going to cause millions and millions of infections like we saw with COVID-19. The current outbreak is the largest to hit non-endemic countries, with the disease typically contained to areas of Africa. On a global scale, infections totaled 26,208 as of Aug. 3, with national cases at 6,617. Wisconsin reported 19 infections, up from 6 on June 20. Illinois is up to 547 cases, and Minnesota has reported 39, up from 19 two weeks ago. The disease is typically contracted via sustained skin to skin contact or direct contact with bodily secretions, though it can be spread through contaminated fomites found on bedding, towels or clothes used by someone with the virus. Most cases, the CDC says, have been among gay and bisexual men or men who have sex with men. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that, across 16 countries from April to June 2022, 98% of the persons infected were gay or bisexual men. However, individuals of any gender identity, sexuality or sexual orientation can contract the disease. The New England Journal of Medicine study authors emphasized, Monkeypox is no more a gay disease than it is an African disease. While rare, monkeypox can also infect children there are five confirmed youth infections in the U.S. thus far. Symptoms may start with fever, chills or body aches, progressing to a rash, blisters and/or sores. Some may experience localized symptoms and others a rash across their body. That rash can then persist for several weeks, Binnicker says. Someone continues to be considered infectious until that rash is completely healed, which may take up to four weeks. Those with symptoms, or who had direct contact with someone with a confirmed infection, should be tested. Both Mayo and Gundersen Health System in La Crosse are equipped to administer the tests, using a swab to collect particles from a lesion. Labs including Mayo Rochester then conduct a polymerase chain reaction test. While the smallpox vaccine offers significant protection from monkeypox, it hasnt been routinely administered since the early 1970s, when smallpox was eradicated stateside. What were seeing is a population level decline in the level of protective immunity that was really intended to target smallpox but also helped with prevention of spread of monkeypox, Binnicker says. One theory why were now seeing this outbreak of monkeypox is because the level of immunity in the global population is slowly declining. There is a limited national supply of the Jynneos vaccine, which uses a strain of the vaccinia virus that triggers an immune response against both smallpox and monkeypox. The alternative, ACAM2000, has more side effects and is not suitable for individuals with certain medical conditions, though the CDC is allowing its administration under an Expanded Access Investigational New Drug application. The La Crosse County Health Department is waiting on Jynneos supply from DHS, and those who believe they are eligible are asked to contact their physician or call 608-785-9872 to find a vaccine location near them. The Minnesota Department of Health reports the amount of vaccine being provided to our state is only enough to vaccinate a few thousand people in Minnesota, and those at highest risk will be given priority. What direction the disease will ultimately take is uncertain, Binnicker says, for monkeypox to potentially become a sexually transmitted infection and part of STD testing. The next several weeks to a month are really going to determine whether that is the case or whether we can stop the spread of this virus, Binnicker says. To help limit spread, persons who develop symptoms are advised to limit their number of sexual partners or practice abstinence until they are tested. The New England Journal of Medicine paper reported those studied had a median number of five sexual partners in the previous three months. People should be aware, Binnicker says. They should especially take precautions when having sex with a new partner because that currently is appearing to be one of the main sources of transmission during this monkeypox outbreak. For more information, visit https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/disease/monkeypox.htm. BURNSVILLE, Minn. (AP) Secretary of State Steve Simon visited a suburban Minneapolis elections office on Wednesday for a public display of tests on voting equipment, part of a continuing effort to persuade voters that they can have confidence in the accuracy and security of elections as the state's primary looms next Tuesday. Simon answered questions and walked around the lower level of Burnsville's City Hall as more than two dozen people joined election workers around three voting machines to learn how the equipment works. The number one threat to our democracy in America is this cloud of disinformation about our elections," Simon said. So it's up to me and everyone who touches elections to talk about what the facts are and what the system is. Former President Donald Trumps repeated false claims of a stolen 2020 election have taken root with some voters who say they dont believe Joe Biden is the legitimate president and they no longer trust the countrys election systems. Simon is among elections administrators around the country who have warned that such rhetoric is undermining democracy, and devoted significant time to educating voters on how elections work. Simons office has added material to its website, Minnesota Elections Facts, that works toward that goal as it trumpets the state's regular status as one of the top-voting in the country, with such sections as Fact and Fiction. (Sample fact: Every ballot cast in Minnesota is associated with a registered, eligible voter. Sample fiction: Hand-counting ballots is a viable way to conduct an election.) Simon and Machael Collins the city clerk and election administrator for Burnsville ran through a series of legal requirements that they said help ensure the accuracy, reliability and security of voting. Jurisdictions have to conduct public accuracy tests of equipment before every election, for example. The equipment has to be certified at the state and federal level. Election judges from different political parties must be allowed to observe. And voting equipment has to demonstrate it can catch ballot errors. Theres so many checks and balances people just dont know that theyre there, Collins said. Still, a couple attendees raised concerns to Simon and Collins about election integrity. Heidi Flodin said she received a postcard with voting location information for her father, though he died eight months ago. Flodin said her friend received a similar postcard for her mother, who died twenty months ago. Their voter registration is supposed to show Deceased, so nobody else can vote in their name. But receiving these postcards tells me that this process didn't happen," said Flodin, who works as a volunteer election judge in the same county but at a different polling location. Simon told Flodin he would look into the issue. Mark Davis, who said he worked in the information technology industry for nearly 30 years before retiring, asked to see how election administrators would use Verizon 4G cards to transmit results. Collins said the cards had not arrived yet and that showing the transmission is not part of the public accuracy test. It's a new way to transmit the results," Collins said in an interview later. "At the end of election night, the county gives me an abstract of every count for every precinct for every candidate, and I can put that against my count that I take off the paper tapes. And if they dont jive, then we know somethings wrong. But they do jive. Collins added that precincts are also randomly selected around the state to be audited after the election, where it is verified that the hand-count in certain races was the same as the ballot count and the transmitter count. Simon, a Democrat, faces his own re-election battle this election season. His likely opponent is Kim Crockett, a Republican who has questioned the 2020 presidential election results and called to roll back changes that have made it easier to vote in Minnesota. Trisha Ahmed is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Trisha Ahmed on Twitter. Jazeera Airways has announced a new direct service to the Qassim province of Saudi Arabia, operating four return flights weekly starting August 22 to the provinces capital, Buraydah. The upcoming service on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays to Prince Nayef Bin Abdulaziz International Airport follows the success of the previously launched routes to Hail and Abha during the month of July. The airline operates seven routes to Saudi, including Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and Madinah. Jazeera Airways Chief Executive Officer, Rohit Ramachandran, said: Demand for flights to Saudi Arabia has really grown and were pleased to offer more choice to the Kingdom for Kuwaiti travellers. The momentum is expected to continue as events and festivals resume in the Kingdom for the cooler months. There are strong ties between Kuwaiti and Saudi families and we now offer a flight for them to connect rather than take to the highway. With over 60 flights a week now being offered, Jazeera is the number one airline from Kuwait. Jazeera is also working closely with the Saudi Tourism Authority to support the marketing of their event calendar in the Kuwait market to attract travellers. One of Saudis 13 provinces, the Qassim region is known for its wheat and its dates, which are popular throughout the country and earned the region the food basket naming in the country. The region has a relatively rich agriculture, growing most crops including grapes, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, mandarin oranges, pomegranates and other vegetables. Buraydah in the provinces capital city which is inhabited by approximately 60% of the regions total population. The capital hosts at the end of the summer the annual Buraydah Date Festival, a 35-day event which draws farmers and tourists from neighboring regions and countries every year to sell dates and date by-products. TradeArabia News Service Al Khoory Hotels, part of the Al Khoory Groups hospitality division, has announced the official opening of its latest 4-star property, Al Khoory Courtyard Hotel located on Al Waha Street, off Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, UAE. The new hotel provides easy access to Dubai International Airport. For families, the location is close to a myriad of attractions in Downtown, Dubai Marina, and Palm Jumeirah, while business travellers will enjoy the short distances to hubs such as Business Bay and the forthcoming District 2020. The hotel comprises 158 rooms categorised into eight configurations, ranging from the superior and deluxe rooms to the premium and Courtyard suites. Guests can choose from four distinctive dining experiences, including the authentic Al Baha Levantine Restaurant. Guests can relax in the spa and rooftop infinity pool or explore the many attractions and shopping destinations on the hotels doorstep. Jeff Isaacs, Hotel Manager, Al Khoory Courtyard Hotel, said: Al Khoory Hotels has seen incredible growth in recent years thanks to our strategic position in business and leisure hubs throughout Dubai. Each of our properties offers unrivalled connectivity, and the Courtyard Hotel is no exception. Guests to the new property will have access to world-class amenities and excellent F&B outlets, emphasising quality at unbeatable value. Our popularity and growth as a company are in recognition of our superior service, with business travellers, leisure visitors and families returning year after year. The hotel is Shariah-compliant, and all rooms are non-smoking with connecting room facilities available, making the Courtyard the ideal choice for families. The management team has also focused on adopting local traditions of hospitality to capitalise on the family-centric offering. Rooms feature complimentary Wi-Fi, a 43-inch interactive HD TV and a state-of-the-art guest room management system, enabling guests to set the lighting and A/C of the room and create a relaxed atmosphere as per their mood, adding to the overall experience. When it comes to leisure facilities, in addition to the rooftop infinity pool, the hotel has a fully equipped gym, @Calories, while separate male and female sauna, steam, massage and therapy rooms, part of Yasmine Spa, allow guests to relax and rejuvenate. The Little Bees Kids Club and childrens fountain for younger guests ensures the whole family remains entertained. Thanks to the propertys central location, guests enjoy unparalleled views of the Dubai skyline, including the world-famous Burj Khalifa from the rooftop infinity pool and view-facing rooms and suites. Al Khoory Courtyard has a range of restaurant options. Al Baha Restaurant, inspired by the warm and rich culture of Arabia, serves a range of hot and cold mezze, grills, manakeesh and Levantine food. In addition, Spices international all-day dining serves a multitude of international and Indian cuisines, focusing on the family. The lobby cafe and Shalal Cafe & Lounge are available for lighter bites and drinks throughout the day. We have taken the conscious decision to guarantee families feel at home at the Courtyard Hotel by ensuring all rooms are smoke-free, adding extensive kids menus to our restaurants, and providing babysitting facilities, allowing families to stay with us and enjoy everything Dubai has to offer, worry-free, said Hamed Mohamed Tayeb Mohamed Khoory - Director of Al Khoory Group. The hotel also provides a complimentary business centre, and the propertys location acts as a hub to access DIFC, the Dubai World Trade Centre, and District 2020, allowing for a mixture of business and leisure. To celebrate the opening of the Al Khoory Courtyard Hotel, when guests book one night, they can enjoy a special 50% discount off the second night. If booking two rooms, guests can enjoy a 50% discount on the second room rate, according to a hotel statement. TradeArabia News Service On July 27, Rijiju said in the Lok Sabha that the BJPs ideology on the uniform civil code should be taken as the countrys ideology on the same. Basil Islam | TwoCircles.net Support TwoCircles NEW DELHI Union Minister Kiren Rijijus recent remarks on implementing the uniform civil code have re-ignited the debate on the viability of a uniform civil code and its possible impact on the minority rights in the country. Answering an unstarred question in Lok Sabha, the union minister of Law and Justice Kiren Rijiju on July 22 said, There are some writ petitions pending in the Honourable Supreme Court of India regarding uniform civil code. Since the matter is sub-judice, no decision on implementation of uniform civil code in the country has been taken as of now. Rijiju said that the states are free to legislate on a uniform civil code (UCC). Personnel laws such as intestacy and succession; wills; joint family and partition; marriage and divorce, relate to Entry 5 of the List-II-Concurrent List of the Seventh Schedule to the constitution, and hence, the states are also empowered to legislate upon them, Rijiju stated in the written reply in Lok Sabha. Earlier the Uttarakhand government had formed an expert committee headed by retired Supreme Court judge Ranjana Desai to implement the UCC and check all the relevant laws that control personal matters in the state. Following the cue, Keshav Prasad Maurya, the deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, also stated that his government is working on plans to implement the UCC in the state. It is required that we get out of the system of one law for one person and another for others, Maurya told reporters in Lucknow. The UCC comes under Article 44 of the constitutions Directive Principles Of State Policy. It proposes to introduce personal laws that would apply to all citizens equally, irrespective of their religion, gender, caste, etc. However, they are regarded as only guidelines, and it is not mandatory to use them. Many minority groups, particularly Muslims, have been at the forefront of the protest against the implementation of UCC, claiming that it will go against the plural character of the country and minority rights. On July 27, Rijiju said in the Lok Sabha that the BJPs ideology on UCC should be taken as the countrys ideology on the same. This statement which comes out after a week when he said that it is a matter of the court, clearly reflects that the ruling party wants the issue on the hot plate. About Uniform Civil Code, you know what our governments thinking is on it. We want that what is our partys ideology should be taken as the countrys ideology. As the opposition benches strongly protested his statement, he responded, Its only a party that forms a government. Following the latest statement by Rijiju, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) reiterated their position of UCC being unconstitutional and anti-minority. The UCC issue has been raked up to push the agenda of hatred and discrimination. This anti-Constitutional move is not acceptable to Muslims at all. The AIMPLB strongly condemns this and urges the government to refrain from such actions, the AIMPLB general secretary Maulana Khalid Saifullah Rahmani said in a statement on July 28. Basil Islam is an independent journalist and researcher based in South India. He tweets at @baasiie In a major victory for abortion rights, voters in the U.S. state of Kansas on Tuesday rejected a ballot proposal that could have led to restrictions or a ban on abortion. It was the first time Americans could vote on the issue since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The decision last June ended the constitutional right to abortion on the federal level and left the decision to the states. Abortion is a medical operation that ends a pregnancy. In Kansas, the states highest court called abortion a fundamental right under state law in 2019. And the law permitted abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. So Republican lawmakers proposed a ballot measure to change the states constitution. If approved, the measure would state that Kansas law did not guarantee the right to an abortion. Tuesday's vote in Kansas drew higher-than-expected turnout. With most of the ballots counted, 59 percent of voters favored preserving abortion rights compared to nearly 41 percent who supported removing abortion protections from the state constitution. American President Joe Biden said in statement: This vote makes clear what we know: The majority of Americans believe that women should have access to abortion and the right to make their own health care decisions. Biden also called on Congress to pass legislation to bring back the right to abortion and asked Americans to use their voices to protect the right to womens health care, including abortion. Mallory Carroll is a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that supports an abortion ban. She called the result a huge disappointment. The group had spent over $1 million and talked with people at 250,000 homes throughout Kansas. Neal Allen is a political science professor at Wichita State University in Kansas. He called Tuesdays vote a wake-up call for abortion opponents. Allen told Reuters that voters came out on Tuesday because they believed lawmakers would push for a total ban on abortion. Stephanie Kostreva is a healthcare worker in the Kansas City area. She told the Associated Press that she voted for the ballot measure but is not fully against abortion. She said there are times when an abortion is necessary. I know there are medical emergencies, and when the mothers life is in danger there is no reason for two people to die. Other states may have similar proposals on the ballot this autumn. Voters will get questions about abortion in Vermont, Kentucky, California and possibly Michigan. The Guttmacher Institute is an organization that supports abortion rights. It says 26 American states are likely to ban abortion since Roe has been overturned. Im Dan Friedell. Dan Friedell adapted this story for Learning English based on reports by Reuters and the Associated Press. _______________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story fundamental adj. relating to the most important part of something, a basic right turnout adj. used to describe the number of people who came to an event, such as a vote access n. a way of getting to something or something being available disappointment n. the feeling of being upset about an unexpected result, or being let down wake-up call a phrase meaning to take something seriously ________________________________________________________________________ What do you think of the vote in Kansas? We want to hear from you. We have a new comment system. Here is how it works: Write your comment in the box. Under the box, you can see four images for social media accounts. They are for Disqus, Facebook, Twitter and Google. Click on one image and a box appears. Enter the login for your social media account. Or you may create one on the Disqus system. It is the blue circle with D on it. It is free. Each time you return to comment on the Learning English site, you can use your account and see your comments and replies to them. Our comment policy is here. China started live-fire military exercises Thursday in six areas around Taiwan. The action came one day after a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island. Chinas state news agency Xinhua said the exercises involved all parts of the military. It said the training sessions included: blockade, sea target assault, strike on ground targets, and airspace control operation. China's military said the firing was completed around 7:30 UTC on Thursday, adding that All missiles hit the target accurately. China has also warned aircraft and ships to avoid the areas during the exercises, which run through Sunday. Taiwans Defense Ministry said it followed the firing of Chinese Dongfeng missiles and counted 11 landed in the waters in the north, east and south of Taiwan. The ministry also noted the firing of rockets around the islands of Matsu, Wuqiu and Dongyin. Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said five of the missiles fired by China landed in the waters of Hateruma, an island south of the main islands of Japan. Ma Chen-kun is a professor at Taiwans National Defense University. Ma said the exercises were more complete than earlier ones directed at the island. If the Peoples Liberation Army actually invades Taiwan in an all-out invasion, the concrete actions it will take, its all in this particular exercise, Ma said. During the exercises, people in Taiwan remained calm. Chen Ming-cheng, a 38-year-old businessman, noted that China has said it would take Taiwan by force for some time. Chen told Reuters, "From my personal understanding, they are trying to deflect public anger, the anger of their own people, and turn it onto Taiwan." Lu Chuan-hsiong, 63, was enjoying his morning swim. He told the Associated Press that he is not worried. Everyone should want money, not bullets, adding that the economy was not doing so well. Why is China taking these actions? China has long declared that self-governing Taiwan is a part of its territory. And its 2005 anti-secession law says the island could be brought under control by force if necessary. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Pelosi's visit to Taiwan an "irresponsible and highly irrational" act, state broadcaster CCTV reported. And Chinas Defense Ministry said it would conduct targeted military operations to safeguard national sovereignty. Pelosis visit also came at a time when Chinese President Xi Jinping is seeking a third five-year term as leader of the ruling Communist Party. And Xi has said the issue of Taiwan cannot remain unsettled indefinitely. It remains unclear whether China will seek to keep tensions high at the end of the exercises. Chinese spokespeople from foreign and defense Ministries have said Taiwan will pay a price over Pelosis visit but have not given details. The United States has observed what is called a one-China policy for many years. Under the policy, the U.S. recognizes the Chinese government in Beijing. But the U.S. keeps informal relations and defense ties with Taiwan. The U.S. has not said it would intervene in the exercises, but it has an aircraft carrier battle group nearby. On Thursday, the U.S. Navy said the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier was operating in the Philippine Sea, east of Taiwan, as part of normal scheduled operations. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday, I hope very much that Beijing will not manufacture a crisis or seek a pretext to increase its aggressive military activity. We countries around the world believe that escalation serves no one and could have unintended consequences that serve no ones interests. Im Dan Friedell. Hai Do adapted this report for VOA Learning English based on reporting from The Associated Press and Reuters. _______________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story assault n. a military attack deflect v. to cause something to change direction sovereignty n. a countrys independent power and the right to govern itself scheduled adj. planned for a certain time pretext n. a reason given to hide the real reason for doing something _______________________________________________________________________ We want to hear from you. We have a new comment system. Here is how it works: Write your comment in the box. Under the box, you can see four images for social media accounts. They are for Disqus, Facebook, Twitter and Google. Click on one image and a box appears. Enter the login for your social media account. Or you may create one on the Disqus system. It is the blue circle with D on it. It is free. Each time you return to comment on the Learning English site, you can use your account and see your comments and replies to them. Our comment policy is here. The United Nations nuclear chief has warned that Europes largest nuclear power center is, in his words, completely out of control. Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, made the comment to the Associated Press (AP) Tuesday. Grossi said the situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine is getting more dangerous every day. He said, Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated at the nuclear production center. Russia seized the plant soon after it started its invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Grossi said the physical integrity of the plant has not been respected. At the beginning of the war, the center was shelled and both sides accuse each other of attacking it. He also called the situation paradoxical because the plant continues to operate with Ukrainian workers although Russia controls it. Grossi added that contact between the IAEA and the workers was faulty and patchy, meaning incomplete. In addition, supply lines for equipment and parts had been interrupted. So, it is unclear if the plant is getting all it needs, said Grossi. He added that the IAEA needs to perform some very important inspections to make sure nuclear material is being safeguarded. The Russian capture of Zaporizhzhia raised fears that the center with 15 nuclear reactors could be damaged. The fear was of another nuclear disaster like the one that took place in Ukraines Chernobyl plant in 1986. That was the worlds most severe nuclear accident. Russian forces also seized Chernobyl at the beginning of the war but handed control back to Ukrainians at the end of March. Grossi visited on April 27 saying IAEA assistance had been very, very successful so far. The IAEA leader said he and his team need protection to get to Zaporizhzhia and cooperation from Russia and Ukraine. He also said the agencys visit would ease conflict. The IAEA, by its presence, will be a deterrent to any act of violence against this nuclear power plant, he said. On Monday, Grossi spoke at an event marking the 50-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. The Argentinian diplomat also spoke about the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major world powers. He said the negotiations were complex but not impossible. He added that some IAEA inspections of Irans nuclear program would continue without an agreement. But he noted that cooperating with the IAEA would help Iran build trust and confidence. Grossi also said that the nuclear submarine deal between the United States, Britain and Australia would require an agreement with the IAEA to make sure no nuclear material is lost. Im Bryan Lynn. Edith M. Lederer reported this story for the Associated Press. Mario Ritter, Jr. adapted it for VOA Learning English. ______________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story integrity n. the quality of being complete and whole paradoxical adj. made up of two opposite things confidence n. the feeling or belief that someone or some group is good or able to succeed at something _______________________________________________________________________ We want to hear from you. We have a new comment system. Here is how it works: Write your comment in the box. Under the box, you can see four images for social media accounts. They are for Disqus, Facebook, Twitter and Google. Click on one image and a box appears. Enter the login for your social media account. Or you may create one on the Disqus system. It is the blue circle with D on it. It is free. Each time you return to comment on the Learning English site, you can use your account and see your comments and replies to them. Our comment policy is here. A team of doctors has used virtual reality technology to prepare for an operation that successfully separated twins joined at the head. Virtual reality, or VR, is a computer environment designed to simulate real-life conditions and objects. People can use headsets or other electronic equipment to experience VR environments. VR technology was used by doctors in Brazil and Britain who were involved in the operation, or surgery, involving the joined twins. The twin boys are named Arthur and Bernardo. They were born in a rural part of northern Brazil in 2018. The two were joined at the head and shared some brain tissue. Doctors in Brazil had attempted to separate the boys in the past, but they were unsuccessful. Medical experts had advised the parents that performing further surgery would be too risky. But the hospital that cared for the twins for the past two-and-a-half years decided to contact a British charity that has financed and provided medical teams to support similar separations. The charity is called Gemini Untwined. Its creator and director is Noor ul Owase Jeelani. He is a surgeon at Londons Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Jeelani specializes in separating joined twins, especially those linked at the head. Gemini Untwined has helped carry out several successful surgeries of child twins since it was established in 2018. But Jeelani said the separation of Arthur and Bernardo was the most difficult operation yet. He explained in a statement that this is because the boys shared important veins in the brain. At four years old, the twins were also the oldest with connected brain tissue to try separation surgery, Jeelani added. The process to separate the twins carried out at Rios Paulo Niemeyer State Brain Institute was long and intense. Jeelani said a total of seven surgeries, involving more than 100 medical workers, were required. The final two operations in June lasted about 33 hours. He said the surgeries were completely successful. Jeelani said a major reason for the successful separation was the VR training the medical teams from Britain and Brazil received in the months leading up to the real-life operations. The teams used brain scans of the boys to create a digital map of their shared heads and brain tissue. Using this data, doctors performed several trial operations with the use of VR equipment. The simulated surgeries permitted the teams to try out different methods that were used in the actual operations. VR technology is currently used in a number of ways in the medical field, including past separation surgeries involving twins. But Jeelani said it was the first time the technology has been used for this purpose in Brazil. Speaking to Britains PA Media news agency, Jeelani said, Its just wonderful, its really great to see the anatomy and do the surgery before you actually put the children at any risk. He added that VR training before this kind of operation is reassuring for the surgeons involved. In some ways these operations are considered the hardest of our time, Jeelani added. And to do it in virtual reality was just really man-on-Mars stuff, meaning the technology was something really unusual and complex. The boys' mother, Adriely Lima, expressed the family's relief and happiness as they look forward to finally bringing the twins home. "We've been living in the hospital for nearly four years," she said. Lima added, Our heart is full of gratitude. Im Bryan Lynn. Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from Agence France-Presse, PA Media and Gemini Untwined. Quiz - VR Technology Helps Doctors Successfully Separate Joined Twins Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz __________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story twins n. two babies born at the same time to the same mother simulate v. to do or make something that looks real, but is not charity n. an official organization that gives money, food or helps people in need vein n. one of the tubes in the body that carries blood to the heart scan v. to use a special machine to read or copy images into a computer anatomy n. the scientific study of the body and how its parts are arranged reassure v. say something to stop someone from worrying gratitude n. the feeling or quality of being grateful: feeling or showing thanks _____________________________________________________________________ What do you think of this story? We want to hear from you. We have a new comment system. Here is how it works: 1. Write your comment in the box. 2. Under the box, you can see four images for social media accounts. They are for Disqus, Facebook, Twitter and Google. 3. Click on one image and a box appears. Enter the login for your social media account. Or you may create one on the Disqus system. It is the blue circle with D on it. It is free. Each time you return to comment on the Learning English site, you can use your account and see your comments and replies to them. Our comment policy is here. LINCOLN A Lexington man serving time for sexual assault charges has died in prison. Daniel Holliday, 69, died on Wednesday, Aug. 3 at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. He was serving a sentence of 30 to 35 years on Dawson County charges that included two counts of first degree sexual assault and one count of visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct. His sentence started on June 10, 2011. The cause of death has not yet been determined. As is the case whenever an inmate dies in the custody of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (NDCS), a grand jury will conduct an investigation. In 2010, Holliday had been accused and charged with sexually assaulting two minor females, ages five and 14, without their consent. He had also been charged for the creation of a sexually explicit video featuring one of the two girls. The Lexington Police Department was contacted by Hollidays wife, who told investigators she saw the video her husband had made, recognizing his voice, and hand, in the video. The video also contained enough identifying body parts of the victim that she knew who she was, too. Holliday waived his Miranda rights when questioned by the police and disclosed the truth behind what he had done, advising police there were two victims, not just one. The second victim was interviewed by the Family Advocacy Network and verified that at least on one occasion, Holliday had subjected her to sexual assault. LEXINGTON A Quilt of Valor was created and presented to a local Korean War veteran in late June. Andrew Krajewski served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1954 and took part in the Korean War as a radio operator with the 68th AAA Gun Battalion, Headquarters Battery. Andrews wife, Mary, asked her friend a Plum Creek Quilt Guild member, Helen Ballue, if she could create a Quilt of Valor to honor his service. The Quilts of Valor Foundation began in 2003 while the founder, Catherine Roberts son Nat was deployed to Iraq. In a vivid dream, Roberts saw a young man in utter despair and then in the next scene, he was wrapped in a quilt, with a feeling of hope and well-being. The message she took away was quilts equal healing. The first Quilt of Valor was awarded November, 2003 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to a young soldier from Minnesota. A Quilt of Valor is a handmade quilt that is machine or hand quilted. It is awarded to a service member or veteran who has been touched by war. The quilts must be a specific size, have a label with the required information, it must be awarded, not gifted and it must be recorded. To date, 275,986 quilts have been awarded since 2003, with 2,633 coming in just the last month, according to the Quilts of Valor website. Ballue pieced the framed four patch quilt while it was machine quilted by Sheila Reinke. It was completed in May 2022 and is 69 by 80 inches. The quilt was presented to Andrew on Sunday, June 26, Mary said he was overcome when he saw what had been made to honor his service to the country. John M. Kang (University of New Mexico - School of Law) has posted The Political Urgency of Black Manhood: Frederick Douglass on Constitutional Theory (New Mexico Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 2, 2022) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: How did Frederick Douglassone who was born a slave, one who had been denied all formal education, one who had been sundered from his family, one who had been starved, tortured, and, on occasion, nearly killedmanage to muster the courage to do something as bold as challenge the United States Supreme Court? This Article suggests that Douglass, in order to assert his right as an American citizen, first had to assert his right as a man in an explicitly gendered sense. That is, Douglass had to muster a powerful sense of manliness that could elevate him psychologically to assert his right to equal citizenship under the Constitution. He had to generate a potent faith in his own gendered identity in order to overcome the debilitating political stigma that attached to his racial identity. Only by doing this, was Douglass able to make the powerful claim that he was entitled as an American citizento contest the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court. What makes someone a model employee? Often they anticipate what needs to be done, get it done and accomplish their work with a cheery, helpful, positive attitude. Yet these traits just scratch the surface of what Bob Militello accomplished and meant to the customers and employees at Larson Home Services. And because of Bobs legacy, Larson Home Services is honoring the memory of their superstar employee with a new charity initiative, the Bob Militello Giveback Project, which will award a deserving local family a new roof and gutter system. Bob Militello was a self-made man in every sense of the word. He built and operated a gas station in Delavan, Wisconsin, for over 15 years before returning to the University of Wisconsin to earn his degree in exercise and biomechanics. Following graduation, he went on to own and operate a gym and personal training studio for 10 years. His career pursuits were always fueled by his passion for serving those in his community of Delavan. So when he was left no choice but to shut down his gym in 2010 due to a life-threatening illness, he was at first unsure what his next move would be. Bob first heard of Larson Home Services from his longtime friend Rocky Feeney, who was a salesperson for the company at the time. After hearing about the customer service and product quality standards that Larson offered, Bob decided to join the team as a salesperson, eventually earning his GAF Master Elite Roofing certification. He spent countless hours inspecting his customers roofs, gutters, basements and attics and getting to know every inch of the property so he could make the right product recommendation for his clients. Every customer who worked with Bob could rest assured that he had one goal saving his clients time, energy and money. When I first introduced Bob to Larson Home Services, Bob didnt have any sales experience, recalls Feeney. But I knew he didnt need it because he was honest, because he was always going to do what he said he was going to do. He gave me integrity in that way. For Bob, working as a member of the Larson Home Services team was about more than a job. I love working for Larson Home Services because I get to help people each and every day solve problems with high-quality products, Bob says in a 2019 interview. Despite all the obstacles he encountered in his health and career journey, Bob focused on doing what he did best helping those in his community who needed it most. Bob was the type of person who would do anything for anyone in need, says Andrew Larson, owner of Larson Home Services. Thats why the Bob Militello Giveback Project is the perfect way to honor Bobs life, as he would have wanted nothing more than for us to help somebody because thats what he wouldve done. To honor Bobs legacy, Central Wisconsin and Dane County residents can apply for The Bob Militello Giveback Project sweepstakes at the top of this page. The person or family who is selected from the sweepstakes will be awarded a new roof and gutter system on behalf of Larson Home Services. When it comes to roofing and gutter repairs, customers want to be sure theyre getting a product that lasts. Thats why every product offered at Larson Home Services comes with a lifetime guarantee, and that emphasis on quality workmanship that lasts is what sets them apart from their competitors. To learn more, visit larsonhomeservices.com or find them on Facebook. This content was produced by Brand Ave. Studios. The news and editorial departments had no role in its creation or display. Brand Ave. Studios connects advertisers with a targeted audience through compelling content programs, from concept to production and distribution. For more information contact sales@brandavestudios.com. Garth Guthrie's initial plan was to break ground in late 2020 and open the doors on his new car wash eight months later. A series of events, including the pandemic, supply chain issues, weather and finding contractors, threw multiple delays into the more than $3 million project at 414 Grand Canyon Drive but an opening date is finally in sight for Dane County's first Bubble Time Express Car Wash. Guthrie, a 2010 Madison Memorial graduate, along with his father-in-law and developer, John McKenzie and brother in-law, Jack McKenzie, hope to have the high-tech car wash between Gordon Food Service and a Zimbrick service center open by the end of the month. "You used to be able to choose between building quick, quality and price, but now you don't get price and time is almost out the window, too," Guthrie said Wednesday during a tour. "It's been crazy and it seems like every contractor is super busy. And even if you can get a product, they're still booked out. There's still components we're still waiting for. Ground was broken on the project in June 2021, is just north of the Mermaid Car Wash just a few blocks away and adds to the growing list of car washes in the Madison area. They include businesses like Magic Wash, where customers use wands to wash their vehicles in bays, and the drive-thru car washes at convenience stores like Kwik Trip. The more elaborate set ups include Triton Auto Spa, Mister Car Wash, Mermaid and Mr. Splash. Bubble Time, however, is not a franchise, it's a locally created brand with the name conceived by John McKenzie and who along with Guthrie, built two car washes in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, in 2018 and 2021. They have since sold those businesses but are looking for other Bubble Time locations in the Madison area, according to Guthrie. The car washes are mostly automated where customers pull up to a kiosk and pay either by the wash, which can range from $8 to $20, or buy a membership for unlimited washes for between $20 and $37 per month. For those that buy a membership, a license plate reader provides access to the car wash without stopping at the kiosk. The property also has 10 self-service vacuums that are free. Customers stay in their vehicles and are guided into the car wash by an employee. Once inside, the car wash uses a series of senors to determine the distance between the vehicle and spray and dryer heads. In addition, three, 2,000 gallon reclamation tanks buried outside allows 70% to 80% of the water to be reused for the start of the wash cycle. New water, which goes through a reverse osmosis system, is used in the rinse cycle. The car wash can do about 120 vehicles per hour, Guthrie said. Because the property wasn't zone for a car wash, the city of Madison approved the project with the requirement that the building look like an office building. That's why there is a second story with windows, which will be used for storage, Guthrie said. "I think it works because everybody likes a clean car," Guthrie said. "We're selling a car wash but it's really an experience. We're touching every sense you have except for taste. There's tons of colors, foam, lights and scents that goes through the car. It's like going through a light show." Guthrie is a graduate of UW-Whitewater where he studied business and entrepreneurship before moving to Austin, Texas, where he worked for a real estate development company that was building car washes. He moved to Colorado in 2016, where his now wife, Taylor Guthrie, had graduated from college and was working in the Denver area. McKenzie is owner of McKenzie Apartment Co., which has properties in Madison, Middleton and Verona and last month announced plans to purchase a site for the construction of a $35 million regional workforce center for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County. He also has been instrumental in the development and funding of the 21,000-square-foot McKenzie Family Boys & Girls Club in Sun Prairie. The top-ranked franchise with Century 21 is expanding once again, this time to Southern California. Century 21 Affiliated, founded in Madison in the early 1980s, has purchased Century 21 Award, a company with 15 offices and 734 agents throughout Southern California and which is ranked among the top five franchises among Century 21 companies around the world. Madisons Century 21 Affiliated has held the top franchise spot for each of the last eight years and in 2021 had $2.8 billion in sales volume. The purchase of Century 21 Award further broadens the reach of Century 21 Affiliated, said CEO Dan Kruse, who joined Century 21 Affiliated when he was a junior at the University of Minnesota and became a partner in the business in 2008. The deal was finalized in early June and rebranding of the California offices is scheduled for 2023, Kruse said. The purchase makes Century 21 Affiliated one of the largest franchises in the world in the Century 21 network. Weve been on a very strong initiative for growth during the last 10 years and I just think that in todays world of real estate you need size and scale, said Kruse. We had been looking for other growth opportunities and we got connected through a third party friend. When we started thinking about what the next steps look like this company got recommended. With the merger, Century 21 Affiliated will now have offices in three time zones with 1,729 agents in 75 offices in California, Wisconsin, northern Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota. Founded by brothers Philip and David Romero, who purchased their first office about 20 years ago near their childhood home in Anaheim, California, Century 21 Award now covers Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. This is a rapidly evolving industry, and we are always looking for ways to continue to put our agents first, said David Romero, Awards CEO. This strategic partnership allows us to better serve our agents and their clients without compromising our core values. I truly believe this is the right move for both companies. Century 21 Affiliated has 40 employees at its corporate offices just off Rimrock Road near the Beltline and another 150 people who serve as managers and administrators across the Midwest. Century 21s world headquarters is based in New Jersey and was founded in 1971. Today, it has over 14,250 independently owned and operated franchise brokers across 86 countries and territories, according to its website. Theres a reason why when COVID-19 first spread around the Madison community in 2020, one local mental health clinics newly created waitlist and reach quickly grew. To this day, Anesis Family Therapys waitlist sits at around 600 people, said executive director and marriage and family therapist Myra McNair. The rationale for the waitlist in the first place: A rising demand among Dane Countys minority groups as amplified by the health crisis for mental health care thats more culturally competent than whats available, she said. But Anesis Family Therapy has sought to address that demand since 2016, said McNair, who opened the state Department of Health-certified clinic when she worked for Journey Mental Health Center. The business has since more than doubled its staff, purchased a new space, launched local drop-in clinics and started offering services in neighboring cities and northern Wisconsin also with the goal of creating a more diverse psychology workforce, said McNair, who is also an adjunct professor for the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at Edgewood College (her alma mater) and the community coordinator for a program called Raising Safe Families, in which McNair helps teach parenting skills. According to 2018 figures from the American Psychological Association, 86% of psychologists in the U.S. were white. But only 5% were Asian and Hispanic, with 4% being Black and 1% multiracial or from other racial and ethnic groups. And so what started as a part-time endeavor with one employee now has 50 staff members coming from diverse racial, cultural and linguistic backgrounds who take up up two locations on the West and North sides. Only three Anesis employees are white, McNair said. The 17,000-square-foot Forward Drive building, which includes 30 offices for providers to meet with their patients, is a 2020 buy worth $900,000 plus $250,000 in renovations that finished in May, McNair said. It was covered by a forgivable loan from the city of Madison. The International Lane space has 20 offices. The clinic chose both locations to increase its visibility to prospective patients, she said. Adorning the walls of the Forward Drive space are works of art that represent the various perspectives of both staff members and patients one wall features two distinct designs that depict side profiles of faces. The black-and-white line work used in the pieces is reminiscent of traditional African art styles, which employ vibrant colors and geometric patterns, McNair said. The business also hosts drop-in clinics at Mount Zion Baptist Church on Tuesdays and Thursdays and at Lighthouse Church on Fridays. Anesis is additionally doing contract work in both Janesville and Oneida County, she said. All are to accommodate the hundreds of patients the clinic serves through a range of services, including counseling for individuals, couples and families, as well as group therapy, in-home mental health treatment and case management, McNair said. Services are provided in English, Spanish, Albanian and Hmong to address language barriers. Out-of-pocket costs do apply if a patient doesnt have private insurance, but treatment is accessible through public programs for children in foster care, and people dealing with crises and first-time criminal offenses, among other things. Adding context Alvin Thomas, an assistant professor in the UW-Madison Human Development and Family Studies Department, said while there are many obstacles that minorities face in accessing mental health treatment, there are a few major issues that stand out. Several studies show some U.S. minority groups are more likely to be in a lower income bracket. And so the ability to pay for treatment can be a hurdle, he said, along with having a job that offers limited private insurance options. Representation can also be an issue a lack of diverse mental health professionals can mean a cultural or religious disconnect between a therapist and their patient. That can only worsen the trauma or ailment the patient sought treatment for in the first place, Thomas said. Barriers in treatment access can additionally be exacerbated by where a clinic locates its office, or by any biases a therapist may hold, he said. But being more intentional about hiring staff members from various walks of life can help close the gap, Thomas said, along with opening clinics in areas where minority population numbers are high. Even the art that hangs on the walls of a clinic can harbor significance for a client in terms of their comfortability. The onus should also fall on individual clinicians to educate themselves about their patients background, he said. I think its necessary for the therapist to be open, non-judgmental and a human being, Thomas said. I tell my students that when a client walks into the room that is not the time to figure out why the client is uncomfortable. MERCER Scores of dragonflies rose as John Bates navigated his Subaru Ascent around potholes, over bumps and through the occasional puddle. The -mile dirt road to Sherman Lake is just wide enough for a single vehicle and a step up perhaps from a logging road. Located just east of Highway 47, the 126-acre lake sits on the edge of the Powell Marsh and is bisected nearly evenly by the line that separates Vilas County from Iron County. Theres at least one beaver lodge on its shore, eagles and loons are common here, along with bullfrogs and, at times, common mergansers. We were deep into the Wisconsin Northwoods on this day and it was clear that Bates was in his element as he showed off one of the discoveries that consumed nearly four years of his life. Its just a wonderful adventure, Bates said as we slowly bounced along the access road. I always laugh because we pretended to be Sherlock Holmes, were going to analyze this lake for its various values. But really, most of the time, we were Inspector Clouseau. We got lost a lot. Bates was being modest. By using plat maps, websites, data from the Department of Natural Resources and tenacious detective work, Bates, who was often joined by his wife, Mary Burns, has chronicled an exhaustive list of the 140 lakes out of more than 15,000 in the state that are fully surrounded by public lands. Some have campsites or campgrounds, boat landings and even picnic areas. Several can only be accessed by foot, some require paddling across a different lake and then portaging, and some werent accessible at all, thanks to natural barriers like bogs, trees and shrubs that have overgrown trails and, in at least one case, a beaver dam. The result of Bates efforts is his 240-page book, Wisconsins Wild Lakes: A Guide to the Last Undeveloped Natural Lakes, published through Manitowish River Press, which he operates out of his home along the Manitowish River just south of Mercer. He has seven wild lakes within 6 miles of his house, including Sherman Lake. I live in lake country, so I was very curious which lakes up here are still truly wild, Bates said. There are some lakes that (have private property) but dont have any development, but I wasnt going to put those in there because they could be developed tomorrow. We found quite a few lakes that had just one lot on an otherwise publicly owned lake, but I couldnt do it. Decades in the wild Bates, 70, has spent more than three decades working as a naturalist and educator and is the author of 10 books. One tells the story of the states old growth forests while another is a comprehensive and detailed look at the 42-mile Manitowish River, its headwaters at High Lake and which empties into the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage. The last 14 miles of the river, beginning at the Highway 47-182 bridge out Bates front door, is likely the longest stretch of wilderness river left in Wisconsin. But most of Bates books are designed to inform their readers about the plants, birds, animals and insects that call northern Wisconsin home. It utterly enriches your experience up here if you know what these species are and you know their life stories, so that when you go outside youre not just a tourist blind to whats around you, Bates said. Then you feel like you belong. You dont feel like youre just wandering through an aesthetic blur. For his lakes books, Bates arbitrarily decided that to qualify for the book, they had to be at least 30 acres, which eliminated ponds. The lakes also had to be natural, which cut out any lake formed by a manmade dam such as Hay Lake in Price County, Straight Lake in Polk County and Black Lake in Sawyer County. Bates book lists his top 50 lake sites, some of which have multiple lakes, like the Nature Conservancys Catherine Wolter Wilderness near Boulder Junction, home to eight lakes with names like Knife, Bug, John and Canteen. Each site in the book has a map and detailed descriptions of the lakes size, depth, water clarity, watershed and nearby recreational opportunities. Another 64 wild lakes get just a paragraph or two, while Bates has kept 10 lakes secret in an effort to preserve their wildness. All of the lakes in the book are in 16 counties in northern Wisconsin, although Bates believes there may be one or two in southern Wisconsin. But revealing the locations of those lakes could be detrimental. One would be worried that we can love places to death, Bates said. The book, sprinkled with colorful and detailed wildlife illustrations by Rebecca Jabs in Manitowoc, also lists those lakes with campgrounds, like Sandy Beach Lake in Iron County, and those with walk-in or paddle-in campsites, such as Bastile Lake in Forest County and Lauterman Lake in Florence County. What was intriguing to me is that when I did the old growth book I didnt have a single person say to me, I wish you hadnt told people about these places. Everyone was thrilled to find out about them, he continued. And I the think difference is you can be hiking in a woods and you cant see people five minutes away, but on a lake you can see everyone. Theres a sense that if theres someone out there its really disappointing. Whereas, you can be in the woods and still feel alone even though there might be somebody else there. It just has a different feel to it. Total adventure Bates, a Pennsylvania native who in 1971 dropped out of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire when he was a sophomore and began hitchhiking across the country, later earned an English degree at UW-Green Bay, where in the late 1970s he met Burns. He taught in an alternative school for a time before getting a masters degree in environmental studies in the early 1980s at UW-Green Bay. That led to working with at-risk students in three northern Wisconsin high schools and 19 years working with students with disabilities at Nicolet College in Rhinelander. He spent six summers working as a naturalist for the DNR in the Northern Highland American Legion State Forest before forming Trails North, his own naturalists guide service. Bates has also served on the board of trustees for the Wisconsin Nature Conservancy, River Alliance of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Humanities Council, and is a board member for the Northwoods Land Trust. Bates did about half of the trips in search of lakes by himself and was aided in the process with a 21-pound $3,000 Kevlar canoe sold to him for $500 by a Milwaukee man who wanted to support Bates work. On the remaining half of the trips, Bates was accompanied by Burns, an artist who uses a high-tech loom in her home studio to make detailed weavings. Since 1984, the couple have lived in a home that was purchased by Burns grandparents in 1922. They share the home with their daughter, Callie Bates, a harpist and certified harp therapist, and the author of The Waking Land trilogy of books. Burns had no qualms about joining her husband to help him search out and explore bodies of water that hours before had been just a mark on a map. It was just a total adventure. You just never knew what was going to happen, Burns said. Finding these little lakes, it was just so special, feeling like we were blessed being in these wonderful places. To find some places that are set aside is lovely. A clear favorite While most of the lakes in the book are under 100 acres, the largest was Totagatic Lake in Bayfield County, which checked in at 538 acres and is filled with wild rice. The most challenging lakes to access included Anderson and Flynn lakes in Bayfield County; Atkins Lake, which borders Forest and Oneida counties; and Blomberg Lake in Burnett County. Not surprising, Vilas County, home to over 1,300 lakes, led the way with 25 wild lakes while Bayfield County had 19 wild lakes. As for his favorite lake, Bates considers Bass Lake in Price County as a true gem. The 93-acre seepage lake with a maximum depth of 45 feet is located west of Park Falls and requires a 10-minute portage from the parking lot to a landing that lies within an old growth hemlock forest. It was designated in 1983 as a wilderness lake by the DNR and sits within the 921-acre Bass Lake Peatlands State Natural Area, which is within the Flambeau River State Forest. Bates notes in the book that the lakes clear water encourages the growth of small, specialized sterile rosette aquatic plants while nesting birds include palm warbler, Lincolns sparrow and yellow-bellied flycatcher. It was just such a surprise. There was no information on this lake. I found it in the plat book and I didnt know if we could get to it, Bates said. Its probably one of the lakes we should have kept secret. Im just totally in love with it. At AzTec Taqueria, most everything is made from scratch, including the tortillas for the tacos, said Salvador Tecpoyotl Daniel, who opened the California-style, counter-service restaurant in a new development in Verona on May 5, Cinco de Mayo. People seem to like that, he said. Were trying to tell a story through our food and the adversity that we faced. Tecpoyotl Daniels family moved from Puebla, Mexico, to Fresno, California, when he was 4, and at 11, he started working in the fields harvesting grapes for raisins, which he called labor-intensive. It was the closest thing to slavery, he said, adding that they often worked in 100-degree heat with no water or food breaks. From sunrise to sunset, 14, 16 hours. The family moved to Madison in 2004 after about 15 years of farm work, he said. Tecpoyotl Daniels youngest brother, Rob, was at the counter taking orders during my visit. He asked if I wanted onions and cilantro on my tacos and gave me a choice of salsas. I wound up with pico de gallo and it was full of bright red diced tomato. Its the large, white, hand-formed corn tortillas that set the restaurant apart. They arent the uniform yellow corn tortillas most Mexican restaurants double up. Tacos here come with one ply. The asada (steak, $3.25), al pastor (pork, $3,50), camaron enchilado taco (marinated shrimp, $4.50) and slow-cooked adobo tofu ($3.25), were all decent, but the star of the show was the birria queso taco ($4.50), which gets a menu category all its own. Birria, which is gaining in popularity as a taco and burrito filling, is a meat stew made with chili peppers, garlic, cumin, bay leaves and thyme, cooked at low heat, making the meat, often lamb or beef, more tender and juicy. The tortilla here came stuffed with shredded beef, cilantro, onions, melted queso Oaxaca and salsa, and was served with a little cup of consomme. It had been grilled in oily birria juice, the cheese melding the edges of the tortilla together. My daughter appreciated the tofu taco, because its not something weve encountered in a Mexican restaurant before. I was only so-so on it. Tecpoyotl Daniel said the cubes of tofu are cooked in a secret red adobo sauce. Its gotten a lot of praise from the vegan community, he said. The burritos ($10.25) dont use homemade tortillas, but 14-inch ones Tecpoyotl Daniel gets from California. He said the average burrito tortillas are 12 or 13 inches. The beef birria burrito we ordered was excellent, with rice, pinto beans, cilantro and onions, and served with the restaurants fantastic salsa verde. Its described as medium, and had the perfect amount of heat. The salad AzTeca ($11) was another hit, even though it was strange to eat a salad in a paper-lined basket. It came with two small containers of dressing, one creamy and one oil-based. The avocado and poblano pepper one was particularly good. The combination of spring mix and romaine was ideal, and there was plenty of sliced ripe tomato, white onion and well-seasoned grilled chicken. The corn had been sliced from the cob in the kitchen, because some of the kernels were still connected. It was topped with cotija cheese, cilantro and two small scoops of guacamole. The horchata ($3.50), a rice milk drink, was too sweet at first, but terrific once some of the ice melted. The two agua frescas ($3.50) were the real deal. The pineapple-mango had lots of small pieces of fruit pulp. The cucumber-lime had bits of those two ingredients. During our visit, at 6:30 p.m. on a Monday night, every table filled up on the 41-seat patio, including part of the five-stool counter. The outdoor area features faux marble tables with umbrellas and sturdy, colorful chairs. Our view was of the nearby Pizza Ranch. Salvador Tecpoyotl Daniel, friendly and gracious, brought the food out himself, calling out customers names. Since we werent asked for a name at the counter, I assumed he was getting them from the credit cards. When I asked him later, he said he takes them from the point-of-sale Square system, which he called very advanced. Tecpoyotl Daniel said he makes sure every item out of the kitchen goes through him. He also got my name right on the first try, not an easy feat. Speaking of names, Tecpoyotl Daniel, who is of Mayan descent, said he spells AzTec the way he does to accentuate the first three letters of his second name. His parents, Guadalupe Tecpoyotl Daniel and Carlos Tecpoyotl, prep all the ingredients: the marinades, the vegetables, the sauces. Michael Tecpoyotl Daniel, his other brother, works in the kitchen. AzTec Taqueria feels like it could be a chain and thats because Tecpoyotl Daniel said he spent 20 years working in fast-casual corporate restaurants, including 18 years running them. He couldnt be persuaded to name the restaurants. A mural by Madison artist Julie Vornholt brings excitement and beauty to the space. Tecpoyotl Daniel owns the shop with his wife, Ashley Tecpoyotl, a stem cell scientist who works at Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics International at University Research Park and does all of the administrative work for the restaurant. Shes the brains of the business, he said. Her list of duties is pretty extensive, even though you never see her. Diner's scorecard Restaurant: AzTec Taqueria Location: 160 Keenan Court, Verona Phone: 608-497-0283 Website: aztectaqueria.com Hours: Monday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday 10:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Prices: Tacos $3.25 to $4.50, burritos and burrito bowls $10 to $12, quesadillas and tortas $11 to $12.25, appetizers and sides $2 to $4.50, salads $7 to $11, kids $5.99, desserts $4.50 and $4.99 Noise level: Medium Credit cards: Accepted Accessibility: Yes Outdoor dining: Yes Delivery: Yes, through third-party apps Drinks: Have applied for liquor license Gluten-free: Many options Vegetarian offerings: Many, plus vegan Kids menu: Yes Parking: Large lot Service: Excellent Bottom line: AzTec Taqueria provides a great, independent option for quick, California-style Mexican food. MADRID (AP) Police in Spain are investigating about 50 reported cases of women getting pricked with medical needles while at nightclubs or parties, a trend that previously came to the attention of authorities in other European countries. So far, Spanish police have not confirmed any cases of sexual assault or robbery related to the mysterious jabs. Police said that 23 of the recently reported needle attacks were in northeast Spain's Catalonia region, which borders France. Waves of needle pricks at musical events also have confounded authorities in France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands. French police have tallied over 400 reports in recent months, and said the motive of the jabs was unclear. In many cases, it also wasn't clear if the victims were injected with a substance. Spanish police so far have found evidence of drugs in one victim, a 13-year-old girl in the northern city of Gijon who had the party drug ecstasy in her system. Local media reported that the girl was quickly taken to hospital by her parents, who were near her when she felt a prick with something sharp. In an interview with national public broadcaster TVE that aired Wednesday, Spanish Justice Minister Pilar Llop urged everyone who thinks they received a shot without their consent to go to the police, since being stabbed with a needle is a serious act of violence against women. Spanish health authorities said they were updating their protocols to improve the ability to detect any substances that were possibly injected into victims. The toxicological screening protocols call for blood or urine tests within 12 hours of a suspected attack, Llop said. The guidelines advise victims to immediately call emergency services and go to a health center as soon as possible. In southwest France, a spate of needle attacks were reported during the Bayonne Festival, which about 1.2 million people attended last week in the city near Spain's border. Bayonne Deputy Prosecutor Caroline Parizel said 124 people received medical examinations after they reported potential needle attacks. They included both women and men. Eleven filed legal complaints. AP writer Sylvie Corbet contributed to this report from Saulieu, France. Madison police on Wednesday detailed how a puppy that was in a food delivery drivers car stolen at East Towne Mall on Thursday night was recovered safe on Tuesday afternoon. The driver was picking up a delivery order from Buffalo Wild Wings, 240 East Towne Mall, at about 10:20 p.m. Thursday when two people he didnt know got into his vehicle and drove away. On the front passenger seat was Malloy, a 10-week-old brown-and-white Boston terrier, police said. The car was recovered Friday unoccupied in the 600 block of Segoe Road. Malloys safe return was made possible by teamwork involving the puppys owners, West Towne Mall staff and Madison Police Department employees, police spokesperson Stephanie Fryer said in an update to the original report. Malloys owners were contacted after offering a reward for the missing dog, and set up an exchange Tuesday afternoon at West Towne Mall. Police were asked by mall staff to assist in the operation, Fryer said. A puppy retrieval team featuring Malloys family, West District patrol officers and detectives, and members of the Gang and Neighborhood Crime Abatement Team worked together to get Malloy, Fryer said. After ensuring the puppy was exchanged for cash, they took a juvenile female into custody and she was taken to the juvenile jail for receiving stolen property, Fryer said. The investigation into the incident is continuing, Fryer said. A pedestrian was killed when he was hit by a car on a Monroe County highway on Monday night, authorities reported. Shortly before 7:45 p.m. Monday, the Monroe County 911 Communications Center received a report of a pedestrian who was struck by a vehicle on Highway 71 near Dakota Avenue in the town of Little Falls, the Monroe County Sheriffs Office said in a statement. Deputies determined that while walking on Highway 71, Vaneng Vang, 77, of La Crosse, was struck by a 2013 Chevrolet Malibu driven by Brian Malchaski, 52, of Blair, the Sheriffs Office said. Vang was pronounced dead at the scene, the Sheriffs Office said. No enforcement action was noted and the crash remains under investigation by the Monroe County Sheriffs Office and Wisconsin State Patrol. Sparta Ambulance, Sparta Area Fire District, Cataract First Responders and Gundersen Air also were part of the incident response. Motorcycle crash victim ID'd Authorities have identified the man killed in a motorcycle crash in Beloit on July 23. Terry A. Ohl, 56, of Beloit, was killed in the crash that was reported shortly before 1:30 p.m. on July 23, the Rock County Medical Examiners Department said in a statement. The crash happened at the intersection of Town Hall Road and Milwaukee Road in Beloit, the department said. Preliminary results of a forensic examination confirmed that Ohl died from injuries he sustained in the crash, the department said. This death remains under investigation by the Beloit Police Department and the Rock County Medical Examiners Department. Aggressive driving and the waving of a gun preceded a road rage shooting Friday night on Highway 12 northwest of Middleton, which later led to a crash involving an alleged drunken driver who injured a sheriffs deputy involved in the shooting investigation, according to court records. A 32-year-old man was injured in the shooting. No arrests have been made for the shooting, and an investigation is still ongoing, Dane County Sheriffs Office spokesperson Elise Schaffer said Wednesday. But according to court records and one of two search warrants filed Wednesday, a man who admitted firing a gun at the other driver was arrested by Sauk Prairie police and charged with eluding police after the shooting. Zakary S. Sykes, 20, of Sauk City, was booked into the Sauk County Jail early Saturday. He was released Monday on $500 bail after appearing in Sauk County Circuit Court, where he was charged with felony fleeing or eluding police, according to court records. He was also ticketed for reckless driving and failing to stop at stop signs, court records state. Kyrie E. Heath, 25, of Mount Horeb, was charged Tuesday with causing injury by drunken driving and second-offense drunken driving after her vehicle struck two Dane County sheriffs officers on Highway 19 as they investigated the shooting incident at the location where the shooting victim had stopped and called 911, according to a criminal complaint. Sgt. Travis McPherson, the complaint states, sustained scrapes and bruises, along with a possible torn rotator cuff. Lt. Krista Ewers-Hayes sustained a minor foot injury, but Heath was not charged for that injury. Heath was released on a signature bond after appearing in court Tuesday. According to the search warrants: About 7:45 p.m. Friday, the 32-year-old driver of a Ford Explorer reported he had been shot. Deputies and medical personnel met him in the 7300 block of Highway 19 in the town of Springfield. When deputies arrived, the man was standing outside his vehicle, but he closed and locked the vehicles doors and left it running. He refused to open the Explorer and would not allow deputies to turn off the engine. The vehicles front windows were rolled up, but there were bullet holes in them, and the glass was held in place by dark window tint. The man asked, Have I really been shot? and a deputy saw there was a bleeding wound in his upper left chest area and another wound in his left armpit. The man would not allow deputies to search his vehicle, so investigators sought a search warrant. There was no information in the search warrant about the extent of the mans injuries. The man told a detective he had left work and was headed west in the left lane of Highway 12 when a blue truck passed him on the left, driving on the left shoulder and median. The man said his drivers side window broke, and he realized he had been shot. Asked whether he had any weapons in his vehicle, the man said he thought he should speak to an attorney. Police in Sauk County tried to stop a blue truck matching the description the man provided, but the driver later stopped and fled on foot. Agrees to meet The driver of that vehicle, identified as Sykes, contacted police later and agreed to meet with investigators. Sykes told police he was driving his blue GMC Canyon pickup truck westbound in the left lane on Highway 12 near Highway K in Dane County when an angry driver got in front of him and slammed on the brakes, nearly forcing Sykes into a guardrail. Sykes said the driver of the other vehicle waved a gun at him. Fearing for his life, Sykes told investigators, he took a gun from his glove box while he drove into the left ditch alongside the other vehicle and fired one shot. He said he saw the drivers side window of the other vehicle shatter. Sykes said he made his way to Sauk County and chucked the gun there. Sauk County authorities were able to find the gun and a magazine. Investigators found a 9mm bullet casing in Sykes pickup truck, along with a 9mm bullet. In the Explorer, investigators found a handgun, a rifle and ammunition. Deputies struck According to the complaint against Heath: Around 1 a.m., McPherson and Ewers-Hayes were struck by a vehicle as they were getting set to leave the scene where the shooting victims truck was stopped. Heath told police she was coming around a curve at about 30 to 45 mph and was dumb and not paying attention. She said she knew she had hit something because her airbags went off, so she slammed on her brakes and got out. Heath said she had been at Centennial Park in Waunakee. Between 9 p.m. and midnight, she told investigators, she drank four White Claw hard seltzers. Heath failed field sobriety tests, and a preliminary breath test found her blood alcohol concentration to be just over 0.16%, twice the legal limit for drivers. McPherson told investigators he and Ewers-Hayes saw a vehicle approaching that sounded as though it was accelerating and appeared as though the driver was losing control. McPherson said he saw the vehicle strike Ewers-Hayes vehicle, and said Ewers-Hayes tried to pull him out of the way before he was struck by the vehicle. He said he remembers going airborne, striking his squad car and then hitting the ground. He said he lost consciousness after that. Until the pandemic hit, Jana Goodman, a mother of three and longtime resident of Waukesha, never relied on free school lunches. Even though she said her family was always one broken down car away from a disaster, her only school-age child at the time, Jacob, did not qualify for free and reduced-price meals. Then the pandemic sent the Goodmans finances into a tailspin. After 15 years in the medical field as an administrative employee, she was furloughed for most of the summer in 2020. Her husband, who works three jobs, saw income from his most profitable gig as a DJ plummet as people stayed home. They got a lifeline through federal programs that gave schools, even those meeting virtually, the ability to provide free meals for all students during the pandemic. The free meals was a huge one, because it may not seem like it day to day, but lunch money adds up, Goodman said, adding that the family continued picking up the meals through the summer of 2021. What started out as an emergency relief provision has since turned into a nationwide experiment one testing the benefits and costs of offering universal free meals to an unprecedented number of U.S. students, regardless of family income. In 2019, 39% of children qualified for free or subsidized lunches across the 424 Wisconsin school districts participating in U.S. Department of Agricultures child nutrition programs, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. The abrupt halt to the meals during the pandemic was a blow to many who relied on them. For the 2021-22 school year, nearly every school in the state chose to offer universal free meals through the Seamless Summer Option, said Karrie Isaacson, the school nutrition assistant director for the state Department of Public Instruction. But the federal waiver that permitted universal free school meals expired June 30, and legislation to extend or permanently implement a free meals program has stalled at the state and federal level, leaving an uncertain future for free school meals in Wisconsin. Our challenge in Belleville is to make sure that qualifying families fill out the proper forms to keep their meal program in place, said Nate Perry, district administrator of the Belleville School District. They have not had to necessarily complete these forms since the start of the pandemic. The free meals during the pandemic brought other benefits, including freeing up administrators from having to keep track of students eligibility. It frees up their (schools) own resources from having to be gatekeepers and lets them just feed the kids and really treat food just like anything else that you get as part of the school day, said Judi Bartfeld with the School of Social Work at UW-Madison. It also addressed the problem of unpaid lunch funds. About three-quarters of the school districts in a 2019 national survey said they had unpaid student meal debt. And it eliminated lunch shaming, in which students who dont have money in their meal accounts are given alternative cheaper meals, like cheese sandwiches. After getting a trial run during the pandemic, Isaacson said there is broad support in Wisconsin schools to continue free meals for all. Thats not a surprise, said UW-Madison historian Andrew Ruis. Significant emergencies like the Great Depression (and) the COVID-19 pandemic often change peoples views about what is possible from a social or political standpoint, Ruis said. I think theres a real chance that universal school meals will be realized on a broader scale than they currently are. But funding remains a challenge. For all food service programs, federal money only reimburses the cost of meals served to students eligible for free meals. That means schools must pay costs, such as labor and food, above the provided federal assistance, which Bartfeld said can make it difficult for schools to take advantage of the federal assistance. Democrats in the state Assembly proposed to fill the gap by reimbursing schools that offer free meals to all students. But the measure, AB 805, never made it out of committee in the Republican-controlled Legislature. Battle in Waukesha The Waukesha School District was the only one in Wisconsin to opt out of the Seamless Summer Option last school year. Initially, the School Board voted 9-0 to revert to the National School Lunch Program, which provides free and reduced-price lunches to students based on income eligibility. The Alliance for Education in Waukesha led the charge to change the vote, drafting press releases, hosting rallies and generating local and national media attention, which prompted threats against some board members and spurred media inquiries from as far away as Moscow. Dave Dringenburg, a member of the Alliance and a father of two daughters in the district, said the boards decision was out of touch with the community, where nearly one-third of the districts 11,766 students qualified for subsidized meals in 2019. After the boards decision hit the national news, former member Greg Deets said he received at least 500 emails from around the world. Deets original rationale behind opting out of free meals was the dropping COVID-19 case numbers and the ability to to return to the free meals program if needed. Other members agreed. But what he learned in the emails changed his mind and reversed his vote. A narrow majority of the board came to the same conclusion, voting 5-4 last August to keep the free meal program through the 2021-22 school year. Several board members, however, made clear they did not support free meals for all. At the meeting where the decision was reversed, school board member Kelly Piacsek said the program was wasteful by design, noting students who dont need the program cant pay for meals even if they want to. She said Waukesha should not cede its authority to the federal government, likening the issue to the controversy over teaching young children about race and privilege. I believe it was important to make sure all children are fed, said school board member Joseph Como, who voted in favor of the option at a later meeting. I also believe that this program should not exist forever, and this board needs to make sure it does not continue forever. Future murky As the June 30 expiration date approached, Congress passed a bipartisan measure to temporarily increase school meal reimbursements. But it rejected the USDAs recommendation to extend the free meals waiver for another year. States including Maine and California have already passed legislation to ensure free meals for all students in their state budgets. Bartfeld isnt so hopeful here in Wisconsin, noting the states very polarized politics. Deets may be proof of that. He lost his school board seat in April along with two other incumbents to three Republican-backed candidates in the officially nonpartisan race. Deets said he thinks school meals were a piece of the reason he was ousted. For now, Goodman is preparing to face a school year without free meals for her two children now in school. The family finances have still not bounced back from the pandemic. And with food prices rising, she is bracing for a scary time of deciding between buying groceries and paying other household bills. Officials at Fort McCoy hired a former police chief despite a history of bad behavior that had been investigated by the U.S. Army, which found he sexually harassed a subordinate and two other women while he was the acting police chief of an Army base in Alaska. Ryan Cunningham, one of the top civilian employees at the Army base near Sparta, oversaw a toxic workplace environment that may have contributed to the suicide of another high-ranking civilian on the base, though what led to the mans death was inconclusive, according to an internal Army investigation obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal. The investigation into Fort McCoys civilian-led Directorate of Emergency Services, which includes an on-base police department, fire department and 911 communications system, found Cunningham routinely used slurs in referring to his officers, and uncovered mistreatment that prompted calls for other investigations into claims that Cunningham racially discriminated against officers and made death threats toward some employees. The investigation found that a hostile or unprofessional working environment at the bases garrison may have contributed to the suicide of Mr. James Hamilton but later qualified that by noting, The cause of Mr. Hamiltons suicide is inconclusive. Hamilton was the bases former director of emergency services who died in 2020. A garrison on a military base is akin to a local government and oversees the bases services. Hamiltons death, Cunninghams behavior and tensions between the police chief and Mark Fritsche, a different emergency services director, all created tensions that led to a toxic and hostile workplace environment that caused staff to fear retaliation and lose faith in their chain of command, the investigation concluded. Despite Cunninghams trail of misconduct at two U.S. military bases, he left Fort McCoy in January 2020 to work as the temporary police chief at a different installation, the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He was eventually made its strategic planner, according to his LinkedIn page, although he no longer works there, said Aberdeen spokesperson Quentin Johnson, who declined further comment on personnel matters. Cunninghams history raises questions about how sexual harassment and bad behavior within the militarys civilian workforce gets tracked, even as the military grapples with how it handles assault among servicemembers. Brigadier Gen. John C. Hafley, who led the investigation into Fort McCoys emergency services, urged the Army to take action against Cunningham and wanted his behavior referred to military criminal investigators. The more pressing issue is the overwhelming evidence that (Cunningham) was a toxic leader and the Army needs to do all it can to stop him from leading, Hafley concluded. Cunningham declined a request for comment. Hafley did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Tonya Townsell, a spokesperson for Fort McCoy, referred questions about Cunninghams employment to the Civilian Human Resources Agency, which oversees civilian hiring at the base. Amy Stevens, a division chief with that agency, said she was unable to comment. Past wrongdoing Cunningham became police chief of Fort McCoy in September 2016, just months after an investigation at Fort Wainwright in Alaska found he had sexually harassed a female Army sergeant and made unwanted sexual advances toward her and other women while he was the acting police chief, according to an investigation conducted by the base that was obtained by the State Journal. Cunningham repeatedly grabbed a female Army sergeant who worked as a military police investigator and asked about her underwear when she slept over at his house after a night of drinking with Cunningham, his wife and other friends, the investigation found. On previous occasions, Cunningham had gone into her office unannounced to tickle her or stare at her breasts. This made me uncomfortable and was starting to really piss me off, she said in statement to investigators at the time. This behavior needs to stop because I am not the first person that he has done this to and unless it is formally addressed then I believe there will be other victims. The sergeant could not be reached for comment. Other women who worked with Cunningham at Fort Wainwright told investigators he propositioned them for sex and made comments about their bodies or undressing them. In fact, Cunningham oversaw a police department where there was inappropriate sexual banter from most of the civilian employees, one female police officer told investigators. One of Cunninghams police lieutenants repeatedly spoke about fetish pornography in the workplace and another jokingly told both female and male employees to come over and receive their spankings or sit in his lap. Cunningham resigned from his position as police chief while the investigation was still ongoing. The fact Mr. Cunningham resigned from his position also adds further credibility to the viewpoint he did something wrong, wrote Stacy Seppi, who led the Fort Wainwright garrisons investigation into Cunningham. While the investigation substantiated the allegations against Cunningham, a commander recommended he face a discharge in lieu of disciplinary action. The commander further ordered counseling at the bases emergency services and an outside agency assessment. Sexual harassment is not tolerated by the Army, and a full investigation was conducted into the complainants report of harassment, Eve Baker, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Garrison Alaska at Fort Wainwright, told the State Journal. Baker said the probe of Cunningham was a local-level investigation, and there is not a central government repository for such documents. However, the command would have been in the position to answer questions from future employers, if queried, that the former employee departed Fort Wainwright while under investigation for allegations, Baker added. Within months of the Fort Wainwright investigation, Cunningham had taken a job as the police chief of Fort McCoy. The Armys Civilian Human Resources Agency declined to answer questions about who hired Cunningham. A suicide In August 2020, Fort McCoy held a memorial service for James Hamilton, who had served as director of emergency services and public works during his time at the base. A 45-year veteran of the federal workforce, Hamilton passed away unexpectedly, Fort McCoy said in a press release, which included photos of his service. Hamilton died by suicide, according to the investigation of his workplace. Although investigators were unable to determine what led Hamilton to take his own life, Hafley recommended that his death receive a complete, thorough and separate probe from outside of Fort McCoy, noting Hamiltons immediate supervisor who the report does not name has the appearance of a conflict of interest since he has an allegation of wrongdoing pending, in relation to the actual suicide. The brigadier general said he declined to interview Cunningham, asking instead that his reported behavior be referred to criminal investigators. Hafley also recommended other investigations into allegations against the former police chief of racial discrimination against police officers and possible death threats against employees. Townsell, Fort McCoys spokesperson, said she did not know whether a separate investigation of Hamiltons suicide or allegations of racism and death threats were conducted. Efforts to reach the Armys Criminal Investigation Division for comment were unsuccessful. While Hafleys investigation offers scant details about Hamiltons time at the base, it does illustrate what the environment around him was like. The evidence shows that tensions exist that would lead to a less than hospitable working environment or lead to employees fearing retaliation for actions in the past and going forward, Hafley wrote. There were several witnesses identified who were believed to fear retaliation. Hamilton and Cunningham worked together for about six months before Cunningham left Fort McCoy. Insufferable behavior Cunningham, who worked under Hamilton, had a record of insufferable behavior, from making fun of a persons ethnicity to using slurs against police officers and the chain of command, the investigation found. The relationship between Cunningham and Fritsche, a former head of emergency services who took the job again after Hamiltons death, created further confusion and chaos in the workplace. Fritsche started working at Fort McCoy in 2007 and was promoted to director of emergency services in 2011. Despite Fritsches long tenure at the base, he still feels like an outsider and felt Cunningham and other civilian officials tried to instigate an investigation of him to harm his career, the investigation noted. The environment at the bases emergency services directorate had improved by the time the investigation concluded in early 2021. Multiple witnesses expressed unequivocally positive sentiments, the investigation found. There are no ongoing workplace environment issues at emergency services, said Townsell, the bases spokesperson. Tracking slipshod Cunninghams ability to move on to new posts in the federal workforce despite a history of being investigated echoes past complaints about the Armys system for tracking sexual assault, harassment and the bad behavior of civilian personnel. In February 2021, the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that the Department of Defense does not know the extent to which its civilian workforce has reported work-related sexual assault worldwide. Between 2015 and 2019, 370 civilian DOD employees reported being sexually assaulted, the GAO said. But that data is incomplete because it doesnt include many types of assaults, including those that happen in the continental United States. While DOD has taken considerable steps to address and prevent incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault as they relate to servicemembers ... such efforts have been limited as they relate to the nearly 900,000 federal civilian employees a significant portion of its total workforce, the GAO concluded. Beyond sexual harassment, government agencies, in particular the military, have a tendency to reassign problematic employees rather than discipline them, said Joanna Friedman, a partner with D.C.-based Federal Practice Group, which specializes in federal employment law. I will tell you that the vast majority of time, even if we have a set of really egregious facts or findings of liability, that its uncommon for an agency to take corrective action, Friedman said. A change to federal law in 2017 might have tipped off Fort McCoy prior to hiring Cunningham that he resigned from Fort Wainwright while under investigation. The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act included language that required agencies to state in personnel documents that an employee resigned while under investigation. There are laws in place that are meant to protect federal employees to ensure that they have rights in the workplace, Friedman said. It would be fair to say that sometimes those rights end up protecting the wrong people. In its recommendations, the GAO said the Department of Defense needs to issue guidance for tracking and defining sexual harassment and assault among its civilian employees. The Wisconsin Elections Commission is sending postcards to thousands of voters to ensure the absentee ballots due to be delivered to addresses different from those the voters previously had on file arent part of a recent wave of fraudulent absentee ballot requests. Those nearly 4,000 postcards are part of an Elections Commission effort announced Thursday to ensure secure absentee voting after two Wisconsin residents admitted to fraudulently ordering absentee ballots for others in an effort to show that such fraud is possible. Other initiatives announced Thursday include monitoring the statewide voter registration system and expediting formal complaints related to fraudulently ordering absentee ballots. Voters should rest assured that voting absentee remains a secure way to vote in the upcoming August 9 Partisan Primary, Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement. However, to provide additional reassurance, election officials at the state and local level continue to closely monitor for any indication of potentially unauthorized absentee ballot requests, no matter how rare those incidents may be. The postcards will confirm receipt of the absentee ballot requests and state: The absentee request indicated you would like your ballot sent to an address other than your home/voter registration address. The postcards ask voters who didnt submit those requests to call or email the commission at elections@wisconsin.gov. It will tell voters who did make such requests that theyre not required to take further action. Commissioners also agreed to refer suspicious activity to municipal clerks, which could lead to clerks canceling potentially fraudulent absentee ballot requests. Clerks who identify and act upon suspicious activity are asked to report that to the commission and law enforcement. The commission and clerks would also work to fulfill law enforcement requests for data and information related to potentially fraudulent absentee ballot requests, the statement says. And while the website where people request absentee ballots, MyVote.wi.gov, previously contained some statutory language citing the rules, voters are now required to acknowledge a new warning before the request can be submitted that states, Any person who impersonates a registered elector, poses as another person for the purpose of voting at an election, falsely procures registration or election materials, or otherwise violates the law will be referred for prosecution. The commission also encouraged voters to check their status at MyVote to see whether an absentee ballot request has been made in their name. PEWAUKEE Former Vice President Mike Pence campaigned Wednesday with his pick in battleground Wisconsins Republican gubernatorial primary, calling Rebecca Kleefisch a proven conservative as she faces an opponent endorsed by Donald Trump. Trump plans to hold a rally Friday for Tim Michels just miles from where Pence appeared for Kleefisch in conservative Waukesha County, a Milwaukee suburb thats long been key to Republicans. Pence, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, appeared with former Gov. Scott Walker. Kleefisch served as Walkers lieutenant governor for eight years, and Pence and Walker have been close political allies for years. There is no candidate for governor in America who is more capable, more experienced, or a more proven conservative than Rebecca Kleefisch, Pence said. Your next governor needs to be a proven conservative who has stood in the pocket for Wisconsin in the past and thats Rebecca Kleefisch. The Pence visit comes during a sprint leading up to Tuesdays primary. The winner will advance to face Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, in what is expected to be one of the most hotly contested gubernatorial races in the country this year. The most recent Marquette Law School Poll, released in late June, showed Kleefisch and Michels running about even, with state Rep. Tim Ramthun trailing by more than 20 points. Ramthuns central issue is decertifying President Joe Bidens 2020 victory in Wisconsin, which would be unconstitutional. Back the badge Both Kleefisch and Michels are running as tough-on-crime candidates. Kleefisch is endorsed by most of the states sheriffs, the Fraternal Order of Police and the Milwaukee Police Association. She is calling for hiring 1,000 more police, instituting minimum bail amounts for violent criminals and adding more police to schools. Both she and Michels have pledged to fire Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a target for Republican criticism, on their first day in office. Kleefisch told the police gathered Wednesday that she was committed to ensuring they had the funding necessary to do their jobs. I will back the badge, she said to applause from many law enforcement officers and others. Emerging rivalry Wisconsin is the third state where Pence and Trump have supported different candidates in Republican gubernatorial primaries. As in Georgia and Arizona, the race in battleground Wisconsin highlights deep divisions among Republicans and the future of the party. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 before losing in 2020 by a similar number of votes. He has repeatedly called for those results to be decertified, and on Tuesday endorsed a little-known primary challenger to state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. That challenger, Adam Steen, supports decertification while Vos does not. Michels has been inconsistent on his views on decertification. He said during a debate last week that it wasnt a priority, but then on Monday at a town hall said that everything will be on the table. Kleefisch said she opposes decertification because its not constitutionally possible. Michels also wouldnt commit to supporting a Trump presidential run in 2024, but then reversed himself less than 24 hours later. TWIN FALLS A fiber-optic network under construction in Magic Valley will bring a "gold standard" of connectivity, company officials say. TDS Telecommunications held a groundbreaking ceremony Monday at the Twin Falls Visitor Center. Construction of the network is starting in Twin Falls, Jerome and Burley. When work is completed, spokesman Mark Schaaf said, approximately 32,000 addresses will have access. The network will provide speeds of up to 2 gigs, considered a "gold standard," Schaaf said. The average internet download speed in the U.S. is 193.9 megabits per second, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Schaaf anticipates the first customers will be connected in early 2023. Both businesses and individuals stand to benefit. Shawn Barigar, president of the Twin Falls Area Chamber of Commerce, said business owners looking to locate in Twin Falls often ask about internet service. "Connectivity is important to them," Barigar said. "We already have infrastructure from other providers, and TDS complements that." Built in phases, residents can connect to the TDS network once work is completed in their neighborhood. Residents will be notified in several ways before construction starts in their neighborhood, including signage and by postcard, letter, and door hanger, Schaaf said. Contractors will work to minimize disruptions to neighborhoods and restore any areas impacted by the burying of fiber-optic cable, he said. Only 43 percent of U.S. households have access to a fiber connection, according to a recent Fiber Broadband Association report. Residents can visit TDSFiber.com to register for service, monitor the progress of the network, and sign up for notifications about the new service. TWIN FALLS A group of cyclists are embarking on a four-day ride across Idaho to raise money for tactical bulletproof vests for police officers. Tyrel Ward is a former law enforcement officer whose goal is to provide high-level bulletproof vests to every patrol officer in the Twin Falls Police Department. Ward has partnered with Sheild616, a nonprofit whose mission is to raise funds to provide enhanced protective gear to law enforcement. Im an ex-cop, and if you didnt know, the regular vests that police wear are really only rated for pistol rounds, Ward said. We are raising funds to get them new vests that will help stop not only pistol but also rifle rounds. Each of the higher-rated vests costs $2,600 and Ward said it will take some time to outfit the roughly 90 patrol officers in the department. Its going to take us a couple years, Ward said, probably this year and next year to fully outfit Twin Falls PD. To raise funds, Ward and a group of 26 cyclists will ride across Idaho, starting in Jackpot, Nevada, and ending near West Yellowstone four days and 348 miles later. To participate in the ride, each cyclist must raise $616 in donations. Individuals are also able to make independent donations through the Shield 616 website. Want to attend the presentation? Bicyclists will present vests to the Twin Falls Police Department at 6 p.m. Thursday at Lighthouse Church, 960 Eastland Dr., Twin Falls. On Thursday the group will stop in Twin Falls and present vests to the Twin Falls Police Department at 6 p.m. at Lighthouse Church. The cyclists will continue toward Idaho Falls, where they will make another vest presentation on Saturday. This is the second year such an event has been held in Idaho. The bike-ride fundraiser began in Colorado six years ago. Non-riders can support the event with financial gifts of $25, $50 or $100. The ride is also accepting sponsorships for higher donation levels. Having knocked on thousands of doors across the State of Idaho, I thought I had seen it all until a couple of weeks ago. I was stumping for a candidate in a Right Wing district when I came upon a modest home in a Boise suburb. I made my pitch to a mother, who scanned the literature I gave her outlining my candidates priorities. I could tell from her body language she wasnt buying what I was selling. She cut me off and said, Im not interested, but thank you, and then closed the door. Ive encountered this kind of response many times over the years. Its a pretty standard blow-off. I proceeded to the next door on my list and had a fairly lengthy conversation with a gentleman who just moved to Idaho from Colorado. Once I finished, I headed out for the next door when the womans daughter came running across the street. Hey, she said. My mom wanted me to tell you she just made a donation to your candidate. She feels bad about how rude she was, so I just wanted to let you know. I thanked her for the gesture, but inside, Im thinking, Rude? She was actually pretty nice for someone who probably wont vote for my candidate. The candidate I was knocking for is a young woman, lifetime Idahoan, teacher, and a candidate for state office. Her stories of rude behavior by voters are very different. In one case, a Right Wing man screamed at her so badly, the neighbors actually heard him and showed concern. They ended up talking with my candidate in a much more civil manner and agreed to put up yard signs for her candidacy in the fall. Within the last week, a Right Wing male voter harassed and stalked a young female volunteer for this same candidate. Over the years, Ive heard a lot of stories of Right Wing men screaming at Democratic candidates and volunteers. Funny thing: all of the victims are women. Another funny thing: I have never ONCE received similar treatment. Coincidence? If youre keeping score at home, Im a 61 190-pound Italian-American male whos in pretty good shape for an old guy. As a registered Democrat, and former lifetime Republican, Ive been on Bill Colleys show several times and even challenged a Twin Falls Right Wing politician to a debate (he didnt show). When I engage voters, Im polite and professional. However, when I encounter a Right Winger with the courage to talk, I enjoy listening to them, and even challenging their political views. The goal is to find common ground on issues that affect all Idahoans. Ill admit. my best discussions have been with Right Wingers. The difference between me and the women described above is that my discussions tend to end in handshakesnot a screaming match which makes the neighbors contemplate calling the police. My question for Right Wing men is simple: Does berating and stalking women running for office make you feel like a man? How about their female volunteers? I dont know how you were raised, but where I come from, men who act that way are referred to something I cant put in print. Do you really feel threatened by a woman knocking on your door? Are you really that big of a (word I cant say in print)? Reason number 37(a) as to why I left the Republican Party after 30+ years is behavior like this. We were the party that got women the vote. Now members of your party are threatening Idaho women running for office and their volunteers. What makes this worse is that Right Wing Party legislators dont have the guts to call these people out. Snowflakes. With the election coming up, Republicans have an opportunity to step up and actually be Republicans. Right Wing men berating women never used to be part of our Republican values. We used to be tough enough to condemn this kind of conduct. Remember when Republicans were the tough party who could listen to opposing views without feeling threatened? Well, toughen up buttercups. Its time for you to send a message that intimidating Idaho women running for office does not conform with Republican or Idahovalues. To all you Right Wing tough guys who feel better about yourselves by intimidating women who knock on your door, I suggest you take a good long look at yourself. Youre not tough. Youre pathetic. And a word I cant put in print. Hundreds of people came out to National Night Out events in Martinsville and Henry County Tuesday evening in support of local anti-crime efforts. For 39 years neighborhoods have gathered on the same evening each year in opposition of crime and support of the prevention of the illegal use of drugs. The National Association of Town Watch, sponsor of the event, estimated Martinsville and Henry County joined forces with over 10,000 communities from all 50 states. Martinsville Police Chief Eddie Cassady greeted people as they entered the parking lot where the Martinsville farmers market is held. Im really tickled with the folks that are stopping in to see us, said Cassady. Anytime we can do anything to get with our citizens ... we always want them to know that were hear and were available to speak to them if they need us. Henry County Sheriff Lane Perry accepted the offer from Stone Memorial Christian Church on the busy Virginia Avenue strip in Collinsville to hold this years event in the county. It started out with the premise of turn you porch light on and get to know your neighbor, said Perry. Then groups started coming together around churches and Ruritan buildings and other events and they became good gatherings. People always come out and show their support for their first responders, and were thankful. Martinsville Sheriff Steve Draper and Lt. Daniel Brannock pulled up to the citys event on their motorcycles. It gives us an opportunity to ride a little bit, said Draper. We always enjoy meeting with the people that come out and we appreciate their show of support. Cassady called the event a chance for local law enforcement to build a relationship with the community they serve. We get to let folks know that were going to take a stand against crime, Cassady said. Were not going to put up with it in neighborhoods. When folks see something going on in the neighborhood or they feel like something is wrong then theyll give us a call. Cassady said he would rather citizens call and his officers come and find nothing amiss than a resident neglect to call and something bad occurs. Its to build cooperation because were only as good as our community, said Cassady. Weve got a great community and we want to do everything we can to keep that going. The origin of National Night Out can be found in the western suburbs of Philadelphia with the creation of the Lower Merion Community Watch Program in 1970, the National Association of Town Watch states. In 1981 the Association was formed and in August, 1984 the first National Night Out campaign began with 2.5 million neighbors across 400 communities and 23 states. The event has grown into a celebration beyond the early front porch vigils described by Perry to block parties, festivals, parades and cookouts, Town Watch says. The Association notes that Martinsville and Henry County were two of 124 communities across Virginia that participated in National Night Out this year. A Stuart man is in stable condition at a North Carolina hospital and a Stuart woman is in the Patrick County Jail after a stabbing Tuesday evening. Investigator Jason Kruse with the Patrick County Sheriffs Office said his office had determined an altercation between Patrick Russel and Ashley Dayton resulted in Russell being stabbed at approximately 6:05 p.m. on Tuesday. Kruse did not make clear what specific injuries Russell suffered or where he was when he was stabbed, but did state that he was in stable condition at the Wake Forest Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and was expected to make a full recovery. His injuries allegedly occurred after a disagreement between himself and Ashley Dayton, Kruse said. Dayton was charged with malicious wounding and the theft of Russells car, but a charge of grand larceny of the vehicle was incidental and not directly related to the malicious wounding. Dayton was jailed in the Patrick County Jail under no bond and is due for her arraignment on both charges in Patrick County General District Court at 8:30 this morning. No other details were made available. This 2003 electron microscope image made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right, obtained from a sample of human skin associated with the 2003 prairie dog outbreak. Africas public health agency says it doesnt know how many of the continent's reported monkeypox cases this year are in men who have sex with men, and it warned Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022 against any stigmatization that might delay case reporting and affect the outbreak response. Credit: Cynthia S. Goldsmith, Russell Regner/CDC via AP, File Africa's public health agency says it doesn't know how many of the continent's reported monkeypox cases this year are in men who have sex with men, and it warned Thursday against "any stigmatization" that might delay case reporting and affect the outbreak response. The monkeypox cases reported in Europe and North America have almost exclusively involved gay and bisexual men, though health officials have said the virus can infect anyone who is in close, physical contact with an infected individual, their clothing or bedsheets. But "that indicator is not relevant in the African context," the acting director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ahmed Ogwell, told reporters. Many of Africa's 54 countries criminalize consensual same-sex relations to some extent. Ogwell was asked how the issue of men having sex with men could be ruled out as a factor in the largely conservative continent's current outbreak if his agency had no statistics on it. "It's not an issue here," he said. "And frankly, we don't want to make it an issue because we have serious outbreaks to manage and don't want to get into a discussion that will distract us (from preparedness and response)." Although monkeypox has been endemic in parts of Africa for decades, it mostly jumps into people from infected wild animals and has not typically spread very far beyond the continent. Ogwell said health officials in Africa have collected data on monkeypox since 1970 and that men who have sex with men has never come up as a significant issue. He said the drivers of this outbreak are "traditional" ones, including close contact in confined spaces and living in communities in contact with animals that have the virus. "We have not seen any evidence of any specific group of persons being affected by monkeypox," he said. "All communities, all ages, all genders are at risk." He urged people to "avoid definitions and communications that may stigmatize those exposed." A more lethal form of monkeypox is spreading in Africa than in the West. Africa has had more than 2,800 confirmed and suspected cases in 11 countries this year, including 103 deaths. The number of confirmed and suspected cases increased by 766 since the Africa CDC's briefing last week, with 28 new deaths. The case fatality rate is "relatively high" at 3.6%, the Africa CDC said. Only a handful of deaths have been reported outside Africa in this outbreak. On Thursday, the World Health Organization said the number of cases globally increased by about 19% in the past week. More than 25,000 cases have been recorded. The Africa CDC director also said the continent still doesn't have any doses of monkeypox vaccines, though discussions continue with a number of countries and institutions on obtaining them. He said testing kits are urgently needed as well. Experts suspect the monkeypox outbreaks in North America and Europe may have originated in Africa long before the disease started spreading via sex at two raves in Spain and Belgium. More than 70% of the world's monkeypox cases are in Europe, and 98% are in men who have sex with men. In a separate briefing Thursday by the WHO, emergency officer Otim Patrick Ramadan said there is no evidence yet that monkeypox is transmitted by gay sex as 60% of cases in Africa are men while 40% are women, "so it would be clear from there that it is not the pattern we are seeing in our region." A gap in available data and limited sequencing means that health officials cannot confirm whether the monkeypox in Europe and elsewhere is genetically identical to that found in Africa in the past, Ramadan said, and nothing shows whether the cases in Africa are seeded from Europe and are not the indigenous form. Explore further Africa's alone in monkeypox deaths but has no vaccine doses 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Residents of the Malawi village of Tomali wait to have their young children become test subjects for the world's first vaccine against malaria, on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2019. Africa recorded a ten-year growth in its healthy life expectancy over the last ten years, exceeding the global average and progress seen in any other region over the same period, said the World Health Organization Africa office on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022.Credit: AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File Africa recorded a ten-year growth in its healthy life expectancy from 2000 to 2019, the World Health Organization Africa office said Thursday, exceeding the global average and progress seen in any other region over the same period. The healthy life expectancy in the region "rose by almost ten years to stand at 56 years in 2019 compared with 46 years in the year 2000," Dr. Lindiwe Makubalo, assistant regional Director for WHO Africa, said at an online briefing, citing the new WHO's State of Health in Africa report. The gain exceeds that of the average global healthy life expectancy that increased by five years over the same period, Dr. Makubalo said, attributing it to better essential health services, improvement in health service coverage, in productive and maternal health and in health services to tackle infectious diseases. Despite the progress made, "we certainly have a lot to do and we seem to be ready to move together," the WHO Africa official said, warning that life expectancy in the African region is still below the global average of 64 years. "Unless countries strengthen and make greater investments in the development of health systems as well as implementing effective catch-up plans, these life expectancy gains could easily be lost," she said, warning also that the COVID-19 pandemic which had "greater disruptions" to essential health services in Africa compared to other regions may also affect the continent's healthy life expectancy estimates. Health systems across the continent have been overstretched mostly by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by other disease outbreaks such as monkeypox, cholera and Lassa fever. Countries such as Nigeria, the continent's most populous nation, are battling as many as five of these outbreaks. To improve the health systems beyond the pre-pandemic levels and achieve "quality, equitable and accessible services for all," a major step would be in boosting public health financing, Dr. Makubalo said, noting that only seven countries in the region fund more than half of their annual national health expenditure. "Over the past 20 years, out-of-pocket expenditure has increased in about 15 countries," the official further said of the health situation in Africa, urging nations to do more to improve access to essential health services. A case in point for countries recording massive gains is Botswana where universal health coverage is "the cornerstone of our development and our response or approach to health care delivery in the country," according to Moses Kitele with Botswana's Ministry of Health. "We have made some strides in attaining UHC (universal health coverage) particularly with regards to minimizing the financial hardship," Dr. Kitele told the briefing, citing a recent WHO-funded study which shows that less than 1% of the households in Botswana face catastrophic health spending associated with health care. A similar feat could be replicated in other parts of the continent, said Makubalo, the assistant regional Director for WHO Africa. The WHO's State of Health in Africa report, she said, "provides us with an opportunity to reflect on where we are and the progress that has been made." "We cannot be complacent; there is so much that needs to be done especially the post-COVID-19 period," Makubalo said. "We do need to sustain investments, to sustain efforts, to continue to build and to continue to work together." Explore further Africa sees rise in measles as pandemic disrupts vaccines 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Although typically classified as a single ethnic group, people of Hispanic heritage have markedly different risks for brain tumors based on their geographic origins, suggesting greater diversity that warrants attention in the health care setting. The insightpublished in the journal Neuro-Oncology by a team of researchers at the Duke Healthresulted from an analysis of glioma brain tumors, which are known to be less prevalent among people of Hispanic heritage compared to non-Hispanic White people. The researchers confirmed the ethnic difference in glioma incidence, but identified a gap within the Hispanic group that had not previously been exposed. Notably, populations that trace their heritage to the Caribbean had higher rates of the lethal brain tumors compared to those from Mexico or Central America. "Cancer registries record Hispanic ethnicity with a single yes-no value, but U.S. Hispanics can trace their heritage to distinct geographical regions and are both culturally and genetically diverse," said lead author Kyle Walsh, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Duke University School of Medicine. "We hypothesized that prior studies about gliomasand potentially other diseasescould mask differences in incidence and outcomes if they rely on the limited information provided in the cancer registries," Walsh and colleaguesincluding senior author Quinn T. Ostrom, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurosurgery at Dukeanalyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States. The researchers found a relatively high incidence of gliomas among Hispanics from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other areas of the Caribbean. While their rate of glioma incidence was still lower than for non-Hispanic Whites, the Caribbean Hispanic groups had a notably higher rate than that found among Hispanics from Mexico and Central America. The researchers found, however, that Hispanics of Mexican or Central American origin tended to have worse outcomes from gliomas than those from the Caribbean. "These differences appear partially attributable to ancestry-associated genetic differences across U.S. Hispanic populations," Walsh said. Historically, Walsh noted, Europeans and Africans arrived in much greater numbers to the Caribbean regions than to Central America, blending over time with the populations native to the islands and potentially conferring the higher glioma risk. While greater European ancestry is associated with an elevated risk of glioma, African ancestry has been associated with better survival outcomes. In the Caribbean region, where enslaved people from African arrived in large numbers, populations inherited the higher incidence of glioma from European ancestry, along with the improved survival tendency from African heritage. Walsh said structural and economic factors are likely to contribute as well, particularly in influencing patient survival. "We demonstrate that appropriately recognizing and accounting for the cultural, socioeconomic, and genetic diversity that exists within U.S. Hispanics is imperative when examining cancer disparities," Walsh said. Explore further Racial and ethnic disparities in stroke outcomes More information: Kyle M Walsh et al, Influence of county-level geographic/ancestral origin on glioma incidence and outcomes in US Hispanics, Neuro-Oncology (2022). Kyle M Walsh et al, Influence of county-level geographic/ancestral origin on glioma incidence and outcomes in US Hispanics,(2022). DOI: 10.1093/neuonc/noac175 Jonathan Parducho, a pharmacist, removes a tray of vials of of the Jynneos vaccine for monkeypox from a box containing 20 doses, in the vaccine hub at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, July 29, 2022, in San Francisco. The U.S. will declare a public health emergency to bolster the federal response to the outbreak of monkeypox that already has infected more than 6,600 Americans. That's according to two people familiar with the matter said. Credit: Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via AP The U.S. will declare a public health emergency to bolster the federal response to the monkeypoxoutbreak that has infected more than 6,600 Americans, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday. The announcement will free up federal money and other resources to fight the virus, which may cause fever, body aches, chills, fatigue and pimple-like bumps on many parts of the body. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement. The declaration comes as the the Biden administration has faced criticism over monkeypox vaccine availability. Clinics in major cities such as New York and San Francisco say they haven't received enough of the two-shot vaccine to meet demand, and some have had to stop offering the second dose to ensure supply of first doses. The White House said it has made more than 1.1 million doses available and has helped to boost domestic diagnostic capacity to 80,000 tests per week. The monkeypox virus spreads through prolonged and close skin-to-skin contact, including hugging, cuddling and kissing, as well as sharing bedding, towels and clothing. The people who have gotten sick so far have been primarily men who have sex with men. But health officials emphasize that the virus can infect anyone. The announcement comes three days after the Biden administration named top officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to serve as the White House coordinators to combat the monkeypox outbreak. News of the expected declaration was first reported Thursday by Politico. Such a declaration is an importantand overduestep, said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University. Daniel Rofin, 41, receives a vaccine against Monkeypox from a health professional in medical center in Barcelona, Spain, July 26, 2022. The U.S. will declare a public health emergency to bolster the federal response to the outbreak of monkeypox that already has infected more than 6,600 Americans. That's according to two people familiar with the matter said. Credit: AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File "It signals the U.S. government's seriousness and purpose, and sounds a global alarm," he said. Under a declaration by the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency can draw from emergency funds, hire or reassign staff to deal with the outbreak, and take other steps to control the virus. A public health emergency can be extended, similar to what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gostin said the U.S. government has been too cautious and should have declared a nationwide emergency earlier. Public health measures to control outbreaks have increasingly faced legal challenges in recent years, but Gostin didn't expect that to happen with monkeypox. "It is a textbook case of a public health emergency," Gostin said. "It's not a red or a blue state issue. There is no political opposition to fighting monkeypox." The government's decision comes after others have made similar declarations. Last week, the World Health Organization called monkeypox a public health emergency, with cases in more than 70 countries. A global emergency is WHO's highest level of alert, but the designation does not necessarily mean a disease is particularly transmissible or lethal. California, Illinois and New York have all made declarations in the last week, as have New York City, San Francisco and San Diego County. Explore further Biden names FEMA, CDC officials to head monkeypox response 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain US President Joe Biden's government on Thursday declared monkeypox a public health emergency, a move that should free up new funds, assist in data gathering and allow the deployment of additional personnel in the fight against the disease. The move came as nationwide cases topped 6,600, around a quarter of them from New York state, and experts warned swift action was needed if the outbreak is to be contained in its early stages. "We're prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus, and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus," Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra said in a call. Observers believe the real number of cases could be much higher than official figures suggest, since symptoms in the current global outbreak, which began in May, have included subtle signs, such as single lesions, in addition to the more familiar widespread rashes. This can lead to cases being missed or misdiagnosed as the presentation is similar to common sexually transmitted infections. The US has so far delivered some 600,000 JYNNEOS vaccinesoriginally developed against monkeypox's related virus, smallpoxbut this number is still far short of the approximately 1.6 million people considered at highest risk and who need the vaccine most. Supply chain constraints mean the country should receive its next shipment of 150,000 JYNNEOS vaccineswhich was developed with US federal funding but is made by a small Danish company called Bavarian Nordiconly by September, said Dawn O'Connell, a senior HHS official. Sexual activity main driver Some 99 percent of US cases have so far been among men who have sex with men, HHS said last week, and this is the population authorities are targeting in the national vaccination strategy. In contrast to previous outbreaks in Africa, the virus is now predominantly spread through sexual activitybut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says other routes are also possible, including sharing bedding, clothing, and prolonged face-to-face contact. Authorities are carrying out specific outreach efforts to the MSM community, including advising them on new types of symptoms and suggesting reducing their number of sexual partners until vaccinated. There are a small but rising number of women and children who have also been affected as a result of sexual or household contact. Fortunately, there have been no reported US deaths, with all patients so far recovering. However, some have required hospitalization to treat extreme levels of pain. Some 14,000 doses of an antiviral drug known as tecovirimat, or TPOXX by its trade name, have been delivered to treat the diseasebut the drug was developed against smallpox and its efficacy against monkeypox isn't yet fully understood. The focus on MSMs has led to concerns of stigmatization. But writing in Medscape, University of California, San Francisco professor Monica Gandhi said the focus on the most affected population was helpful. "Just like with HIV and COVID, it is important to define populations most at risk so we can prioritize targeted messaging and resources toward those groups," she said. Five vaccines from one dose The US declaration comes after the World Health Organization also designated the outbreak an emergency last monthsomething it reserves for diseases of highest concern. Also Thursday, US Food and Drug Administration commissioner Robert Califf said his agency was considering changing the way the vaccine is injected, adopting an approach that would allow five times as many people to be vaccinated based on the same supply. The vaccine is currently administered underneath the skin, but the new technique would involve administering it within the skin, at a more shallow angle. This "means basically sticking the needle within the skin and creating a little pocket there into which the vaccine goes, so this is really nothing highly unusual," said Califf. The US will first need to declare another type of emergency so the new vaccine administration method can be greenlighted, he added. ia Explore further UK buys more vaccines for monkeypox as cases top 2,100 2022 AFP Until mid-June 2022, 427 cases of pediatric hepatitis of unknown origin were notified from 20 countries across the World Health Organization's European Region for the period 1 January to 16 June 2022. Credit: Eurosurveillance Scottish authorities were alerted about an observed unusual number of severe liver inflammation (hepatitis) cases in children in April 2022. The infection could not be linked to commonly known causes for hepatitis. Until mid-June 2022, 427 cases of pediatric hepatitis of unknown origin were notified from 20 countries across the World Health Organization's European Region for the period 1 January to 16 June 2022. In their outbreak report published in Eurosurveillance, Vidal et al. analyze demographic, epidemiological, clinical and microbiological data available from The European Surveillance System at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Most affected: Children under five years Most of the severe infections were diagnosed among very young children between zero and five years of age (77% or 330) and every second child (53%) tested positive for adenovirus. In the United Kingdom (UK), the majority (68%) of children with acute hepatitis of unknown origin were diagnosed with adenovirus at the same time. A distinctly smaller fraction among the notified 427 children had SARS-CoV-2 (10%) and the same number of children was coinfected with both adenovirus and SARS-CoV-2. The highest proportion (60%) of positive tests for adenovirus was found among the youngest group of children aged 0 to five years. At 36%, this group also accounted for the highest number of admissions to intensive care or high-dependency units (ICU/HDU) due to their acute liver inflammation compared with the age group of six- to 10-year-olds (22%) and adolescents between 11 and 16 years of age (10%). In addition, 16 of the 18 children across the WHO European Region who needed a liver transplant were younger than five years old (but the authors did not find a significant difference by age group in the odds of transplantation). Analyzing the data, Vidal et al. found that those children with adenovirus infections were significantly more likely to be admitted to ICU/HDU due to their severe hepatitis and "adenovirus infection is therefore one of the main etiological hypotheses under investigation, although a causal relationship has not been proven and additional cofactors are under investigation." Observed correlation between adenovirus positivity and disease severity More than half of the cases (59%) occurred between weeks 9 and 17 of 2022 with an observed decline from week 18 onwards. The authors however point out at a possible reporting delay caused by the fact that severe hepatitis might only develop weeks after the onset of the first symptoms and thorough investigations to exclude specific causes could take several days or even months which would make recent trends challenging to interpret. Looking at data from reported cases with a result on testing for adenovirus across different European countries, prevalence of adenovirus infection was 64% among the children in the UK compared with 35% in other countries (p infection than cases in other countries (odds ratio = 3.10; 95% confidence interval: 1.905.07). More than half of the children (53%, 74/140) with severe hepatitis in the UK were admitted to ICU/HDU compared with other European countries where 8 of the 101 children were hospitalized (p Vidal et al. summarize that their findings "may indicate a higher likelihood of severe disease in younger children, but what is not clear is whether reported cases across all ages share the same etiology. It may also prove difficult to identify a definite causative agent." They call for greater efforts to establish whether the reported cases are above the baseline incidence of severe hepatitis of unknown etiology in children and to better define this syndrome and standardize the diagnostic algorithms. Explore further Two case series describe acute pediatric hepatitis of unknown cause More information: Kimberly Marsh et al, Investigation into cases of hepatitis of unknown aetiology among young children, Scotland, 1 January 2022 to 12 April 2022, Eurosurveillance (2022). Kimberly Marsh et al, Investigation into cases of hepatitis of unknown aetiology among young children, Scotland, 1 January 2022 to 12 April 2022,(2022). DOI: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2022.27.15.2200318 Vidal et al, Hepatitis of unknown aetiology in childrenepidemiological overview of cases reported in Europe, 1 January to 16 June 2022, Eurosurveillance (2022). DOI: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2022.27.31.2200483 Provided by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) Credit: CC0 Public Domain Investigators at Cedars-Sinai and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have identified a component in the intestine that plays a critical role in repairing damaged tissue. Scientists found that endothelial cells in the lymphatic vessels produce molecules that are essential for the maintenance and regulation of stem cells and tissues in the intestine. These lymphatic endothelial cells reside near specialized stem cell niches, which are microenvironments that support stem cell regeneration. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Stem Cell. "It's important for us to understand niches and how lymphatics communicate with stem cells as part of the niche," said Ophir Klein, MD, Ph.D., senior author of the study and executive director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children's. "Deciphering the mechanisms that explain how the ecosystem that supports stem cells works will help to lay the foundation for future discoveries that could one day lead to therapeutic strategies to repair damaged tissue." The intestine undergoes continuous renewal to withstand the wear and tear that result from breakdown of foods, and from the presence of waste that can injure and kill cells. The intestine needs to replenish itself constantly with healthy cells, and fortunately, it has an exceptional capacity to regenerate cells. The division of intestinal stem cells to make more cells is regulated by their surrounding niche, which is comprised of several cell types and is an essential source of signals. However, it is unclear which niche cells produce signals during different states of injury. To better understand stem cell activity, the team wanted to learn which cells help the intestinal epithelial cells repair themselvesparticularly lymphatic endothelial cells. "Lymphatics are in very close proximity to the stem cells, and almost all the stem cell compartments are near lymphatics," said Brisa Palikuqi, Ph.D., co-first author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Klein Laboratory at UCSF. "Because the two cell types are in such proximity, this made us believe that these lymphatics may play an important role." Lymphatics express several factors, including a gene, Rspo3, that is known to be important for stem cells to function. To determine whether the gene played an important role in intestinal stem cell regulation, the investigators deleted the gene in mice and then used single-cell sequencing to see how stem cells in the intestine would react without Rspo3. Initially, the stem cells did not have any response to the change in the environment. The researchers then decided to injure the system by delivering a chemotherapy drug that kills any proliferating cells wherever the drug travels through the body. "When we did this, all of a sudden the stem cells and the intestine had to proliferate a lot more and replace a lot more cells on a daily basis," said Jeremie Rispal, Ph.D., also a postdoctoral researcher in the Klein Laboratory at UCSF and the other co-first author of the study. The loss of the Rspo3 gene led to a lower number of stem and progenitor cells, hindering recovery after the injury. "This discovery showed us that lymphatic endothelial cells are a key component of the intestinal niche and essential for intestinal repair after cases of damage, like chemotherapy," said Klein, who also holds the David & Meredith Kaplan Distinguished Chair in Children's Health at Cedars-Sinai. Klein noted that the study demonstrates how lymphatic endothelial cells play a much larger role than previously thought in stem cell regeneration and may play a role in disease, perhaps even influencing the promotion of cancer. "We are just beginning to understand the functions of the lymphatic vasculature," Klein said. Explore further How intestine replaces and repairs itself Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A new report from the Injury Prevention Center is the first in Alberta to provide data on injury-related emergency department visits by people experiencing houselessnessinformation that will help community organizations deliver injury prevention programs tailored to the distinct health-care needs of this population. "This is the first step in understanding what the injury issues are," says Kathy Belton, associate director of the Injury Prevention Center and adjunct professor in the School of Public Health. "What we need to do now as a center and as a province is to look at effective interventions for this population, for these injuries." As Belton explains, preventable injury is the leading cause of death for Albertans between the ages of one and 49, and can cost the health-care system upwards of $7 billion per year. Injuries also have trickle-down effects in the health-care system, with urgent injuries exacerbating wait times for non-urgent procedures. People experiencing houselessness face particular challenges when they suffer injuries, because their living situation may make treatment requirements like keeping a wound clean difficult. Stigma and unconscious bias also affect how they access health care for injuries. "Drawing attention to not only the additional risks faced by people experiencing houselessness, but also the difficulty accessing care for those injuries, is something that I feel is underreported and under-discussed in our society," says Laurence Braun-Woodbury, Bissell Center's director of service integration and advocacy. "There is a significant burden of injury here that we need to start addressing," adds Belton. Drawing attention to a complex issue For the report, the Injury Prevention Center compiled data from Alberta Health and consulted with Bissell Center to help write an introduction to the report and provide feedback based on their expertise. "Houselessness is such a complex social issue, and the center really didn't want this report to further stigmatize this population," says Belton. The report breaks down the data into five categories: unintentional or undetermined poisoning, violence, falls, natural or environmental injuries, and suicide or self-inflicted injuries. It also separates the stats by age and sex, and includes further specifics in categories where relevant, such as the site of injury (for example, injury to face, upper extremity or lower extremity). The findings indicate that unintentional or undetermined poisoning is the leading cause of injury, with 25% of emergency department visits falling into this category. This can include poisoning through substances such as drugs or medications that are taken in the wrong dosages or in dangerous combinations. A preventative measure for injuries in that particular category could involve facilities like safe injection sites, explains Belton. Other findings are specific to the challenges Edmonton's climate presents73% of the injuries within the natural/environmental injury category were from exposure to cold weather. The age and sex data highlight certain categories where particular groups are disproportionately affected; for example, males are more likely to fall than females, and this number is particularly high in the 55 to 59 age range. The report also indicated that 17% of individuals ended up leaving the emergency department without receiving treatment, although the data don't detail whether this is due to perceived stigma, difficulties accessing health care or some other reasonanother area that community-based programs may want to address. In terms of eliminating those barriers to access, Braun-Woodbury explains that Bissell Center has had success with strategies that involve meeting individuals where they're at with their health care, including partnerships with programs like StreetWorks, working with specialized medical providers such as the Boyle McCauley Health Center and training their case management team to advocate in health-care settings. Evidence to inform community efforts Having concrete data is essential in creating effective programs that will address the specific needs of people experiencing houselessness, Belton notes. "Using evidence and actually knowing what the issues are in Alberta and addressing them effectively is our best chance at reducing the cost of injury on the health-care system," she says. "Being able to have hard numbers to point to when talking about specific needs really allows me to go to funders and say, we need additional programming in this space at this time," adds Braun-Woodbury. Bissell Center's contributions also ensured that the report had up-to-date language that reflects a sensitivity to the lived experiences of houseless individuals, explains Braun-Woodbury. One example is the decision to use the term "houseless" rather than "homeless." This helps to eliminate some of the stigma and negative connotations linked with the latter term. It also honors the fact that while a house is always understood as a physical space, a home can be many different things to many different people. "The community could be your home, your friends, your family, your social support networks. Using the term homelessness could potentially sever that link between the homes that these populations have already established," says Jakob Koziel, a research analyst in Bissell Center's analysis and evaluation department and author of the report's introduction. According to Belton, the Injury Prevention Center plans to continue working with organizations such as Bissell Center to begin addressing the issue on a broader scale with the evidence in hand. "It's really important to develop sophisticated interventions that take into account health as a holistic phenomenon," says Braun-Woodbury. "Looking at the injuries sustained as they interface with mental health, with addiction, with social dislocation, and trying to approach those issues together with a constellation of solutions." Explore further Home injuries up during COVID-19 lockdowns BRAFV600E activates the Hippo tumor-suppressor pathway. a Representative immunoblot (IB) of dox-inducible BRAFV600E Mel-ST cells cultured dox for 24 h. b IB of two different dox-inducible BRAFV600E Mel-ST clones cultured dox for 24 h (n 4 independent experiments, graph shows mean relative intensity SEM, two-tailed unpaired t test). c Left, IB of two dox-inducible BRAFV600E Mel-ST clones cultured dox for 24 h; Right, intensity quantification of YAP phosphorylation from phos-tag gel (n = 4 independent experiments, graph shows mean relative intensity SEM, two-tailed unpaired t test). d Left, representative immunofluorescence staining of YAP/TAZ (green) alone or merged with DNA (DAPI, blue) and actin (Phalloidin, magenta) in indicated BRAFV600E Mel-ST clone; right, quantification of nuclear to cytoplasmic ratio of mean YAP/TAZ fluorescence (n > 300 cells from three independent experiments, graph shows mean SEM, scale bar = 20 m, two-tailed MannWhitney test). e Relative expression of indicated genes from RT-PCR in BRAFV600E Mel-ST clones cultured dox for 24 h (n = 3 independent experiments, graph shows mean SEM, two-tailed unpaired t test). f Left, IB of primary human melanocytes infected with lentivirus that express control vector (H2B-GFP) or BRAFV600E; right, intensity quantification of YAP phos-tag (n = 3 independent experiments, graph shows mean SEM, two-tailed unpaired t test). Source Data are provided as a Source Data file. Credit: Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31399-w In a small patch of skin no bigger than an inch, there are millions of cells all performing duties, like protecting us from bacteria and sensing temperature. A portion of them are melanocytes, a type of cell dedicated to producing melanin, the substance that gives color to our skin, eyes, and hair. If triggered by UV light from the sun, melanocytes can form moles, or beauty marks. Though harmless, moles are extremely common; some keep growing and mutating until they turn into melanoma, the most deadly type of skin cancer. While melanoma accounts for only about 1% of all skin cancers, it causes the majority of skin cancer-related deaths, most commonly in people under the age of 30, especially women. Approximately 30% of melanomas begin in existing moles on the skin. But why do some moles keep growing, while others don't? And can the same molecular function that stops regular moles from proliferating be applied to cancerous cells? A Boston Universityled team of researchers has some answersand their findings could lead to new drug targets for the successful treatment of cancer. In a paper published in Nature Communications, they discovered that a signaling pathway that regulates growth in all cellscalled the Hippo tumor suppressor pathwayplays a significant role in preventing the transformation of moles into melanoma. The pathway regulates growth by modulating two proteins in the cell. When active, these proteins change gene expression within cells to growth state. When inactivated, which happens when an organ reaches its full size, for example, the gene expression will change to stop growth in cells. "The Hippo pathway can monitor how squished the cells are, which is basically how it knows that something is done growing," says Neil J. Ganem, a corresponding author on the paper and a BU School of Medicine associate professor of pharmacology and medicine who studies differences between cancer cells and normal cells. "We thought that's what could be happening in these moles, and that the Hippo pathway stops the continuing growth of a mole," Ganem adds. They looked at mice and human cells to see what happened when the Hippo pathway was turned on or off. "When activated, we show the Hippo pathway restrains the growth of melanocytes and helps prevent their transformation into melanoma," says Marc Vittoria, a fourth-year medical student at BU and lead author of the study. "Similarly, we found that when the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway is suppressed in melanocytes, those cells rapidly go on to form melanoma in multiple experimental models." The study was supported by a five-year grant from the Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA), called the Jackie King MRA Young Investigator Award, named after a 21-year-old who lost their life to melanoma. The MRA aims to bring young biologists with expertise in cancer cell biology into melanoma research. "Melanoma is one of these cancers that can affect young people, making it particularly devastating," Ganem says. "If you find it early, it's easy to treat, but when you catch it late, and [it becomes] invasive, that is most difficult to treat." Doctors will often monitor moles that could be suspicious and opt to remove any that change over time. And discovering the mechanisms our cells employ to protect against tumor formation is key to identifying new drug targets for the successful treatment of cancer. "We hope our study highlights that targeted reactivation of the Hippo pathway is an attractive therapeutic possibility for the future treatment of melanoma," Ganem says. Though the research team focused on the role of the Hippo pathway in preventing moles from transforming into melanoma, they believe it may be acting similarly in other subtypes of cancer. Explore further Check moles during Skin Cancer Awareness Month More information: Marc A. Vittoria et al, Inactivation of the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway promotes melanoma, Nature Communications (2022). Journal information: Nature Communications Marc A. Vittoria et al, Inactivation of the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway promotes melanoma,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31399-w Graphical abstract. Credit: Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cgh.2022.06.031 Texas has the highest rate of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)the most common form of liver cancerin the U.S. Within Texas, incidence rates vary by race, ethnicity and geographic locale. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine examined these disparities at the neighborhood level, using the census tract to represent a neighborhood. They focused on measures of social determinants of health and the industries where most neighborhood residents are employed. Across Texas, they found that level of economic deprivation in a neighborhood and majority employment in specific industries are associated with increased risk of HCC. Additionally, they showed that the association between these neighborhood-level measures and HCC vary across the state. The results are published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Using data from the Texas Cancer Registry, the researchers analyzed more than 11,000 HCC cases diagnosed between 20112015. The team used measures of demographics, socioeconomic status and employment provided by the U.S. Census Bureau to characterize the neighborhoods where people lived when they were diagnosed with HCC. They conducted statistical and geographical analysis to identify neighborhood-level characteristics associated with HCC risk. They found that specific risk factors for HCC differ based on where a person lives in Texas. For example, the risk for HCC among African American and Hispanic populations was highest in West Texas, South Texas and the panhandle. However, some factors like age and socioeconomic status were not impacted by location. People over age 60 and people of low socioeconomic status had a higher relative risk for HCC across the entire state. "Two areas of employmentconstruction and service occupationsalso stood out as being associated with higher risk for HCC," said Dr. Abiodun Oluyomi, corresponding author of the paper and assistant professor of medicineepidemiology and population sciences at Baylor. "Our findings validate factors previously associated with HCC and our geographic analysis shows areas of Texas where specific intervention strategies may be most relevant. Further research, including longitudinal studies, are needed to clarify the roles of specific occupations in HCC risk." "HCC is a serious health concern in Texas and our foundational work is a step forward to better prevent this deadly disease," said Dr. Hashem El-Serag, co-author of the paper and chair of the Margaret M. and Albert B. Alkek Department of Medicine and professor in the section of gastroenterology and hepatology at Baylor. Explore further Broadly diverse genomes reveals new susceptibility genetic variants for lung cancer More information: Abiodun O. Oluyomi et al, Neighborhood-level factors contribute to disparities in hepatocellular carcinoma incidence in Texas, Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (2022). Journal information: Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology Abiodun O. Oluyomi et al, Neighborhood-level factors contribute to disparities in hepatocellular carcinoma incidence in Texas,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cgh.2022.06.031 Large EHR datasets represent valuable sources of data for clinical researchers to study numerous conditions including pediatric obesity. Credit: Pavel Danilyuk, Pexels (CC0, creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) Approximately one third of children in the United States are overweight or obese. A study publishing August 4th in PLOS Digital Health by Elizabeth Campbell at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, and colleagues suggests that childhood obesity may be associated with an array of underlying medical conditions. Childhood obesity is linked with an increased risk of developing multiple comorbidities including asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and psychological conditions. However, whether obesity is a single condition or is composed of unique phenotypes with different underlying causes is unknown. To identify clinically similar subtypes among a population of obese pediatric patients, researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study, accessing the electronic health records of 49,694 pediatric patients of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia diagnosed with obesity. Using a pattern mining algorithm, the authors analyzed common condition trajectories surrounding pediatric obesity incidence and compared them to a control group with healthy body mass index. The researchers found eight classes of health conditions that were highly prevalent among children diagnosed with pediatric obesity, including respiratory and sleep disorders, inflammatory skin conditions, asthma, seizure disorders, gastrointestinal/genitourinary symptoms, and neurodevelopmental disorders. The study had several limitations, however, including the potential for false discovery rate, as well as an arbitrary 10% prevalence threshold for classifying "high prevalence" conditions. Future studies are needed to pinpoint the factors mediating the associations between pediatric obesity and the co-prevalent illnesses identified in the study. According to the authors, "Obesity is a complex and socially significant health issue that may affect different clinical and demographic subtypes of pediatric patients differently. Grouping all types of overweight and obesity into one clinical condition may conceal associations between risk factors and specific subtypes of obesity, which has implications for improving prevention, recognition, and treatment of pediatric obesity. Our findings can support the work of public health researchers and practitioners who seek to address the social disparities component of the obesity epidemic." Campbell adds, "Electronic Health Records represent valuable sources of data for use in research to investigate pediatric obesity and other pressing health issues. We hope that our findings not only add to ongoing work that is combatting the obesity epidemic, but to methodological advances in using large complex datasets in clinical research." Explore further Childhood obesity rate in the U.S. Higher now than 12 years prior More information: Campbell EA, Maltenfort MG, Shults J, Forrest CB, Masino AJ (2022) Characterizing clinical pediatric obesity subtypes using electronic health record data, PLOS Digital Health (2022). Journal information: PLOS Digital Health Campbell EA, Maltenfort MG, Shults J, Forrest CB, Masino AJ (2022) Characterizing clinical pediatric obesity subtypes using electronic health record data,(2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0000073 Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Every year, some 13,000 people are added to the liver transplant waiting list in the United States, but fewer than 9,000 receive a liver. Placement on the list largely depends on a number called the MELD (model for end-stage liver disease) score, which estimates the short-term risk of death in patients with chronic liver disease. The goal is to minimize waitlist deaths by moving the sickest patients to the head of the line. Recent concern over the accuracy of the MELD score, including a sex disparity that disadvantages women, prompted Stanford Medicine researchers and collaborators to develop a new version of the score, called MELD 3.0. In June, MELD 3.0 was unanimously approved by the board of directors of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which governs the U.S. transplantation system. Objective measure of medical urgency Ray Kim, MD, professor and chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, led the team that developed MELD 3.0, but his history with the scoring system dates to its beginning. Twenty years ago, as an assistant professor at the Mayo Clinic, Kim directed the team that created the original MELD score. Prior to that, Kim said, liver transplants were performed on a first-come, first-served basis. In the 1970s, liver transplantation was an experimental procedure, but as it evolved into an established treatment for liver disease by the 1990s, the number of people waiting for a liver began to far outpace the number of available livers, which mostly came from deceased rather than living donors. Many of the sickest patients never got their turn. "The federal government gave a mandate to the transplant medicine community to come up with an objective measure of medical urgency to allocate organs in a scientific fashion," Kim said. The MELD system provided an objective way to prioritize candidates based on their predicted survival on the waitlist. It incorporated three common blood test valuesbilirubin (a measure of liver damage), creatinine (a measure of kidney function) and the INR (international normalized ratio, a measure of blood clotting time)to calculate a score between 6 and 40, with higher scores for sicker patients. "It really shuffled the waiting list, reduced the risk of waitlist mortality and increased transplants. We were able to allocate organs to people who need it most," Kim said. A 2016 update to the score, which was also based on work by Kim, added sodium to the formula and is known as MELDNa. Unintended sex disparity In recent years, data has revealed a new concern with MELD scoring: sex disparity. "People have shown that the transplant rate for women is lower and waiting list mortality is higher," Kim said. "Women have been disadvantaged in this system, and that was a completely unintended consequence of this score." Muscle mass affects the body's level of creatinine. Women typically have less muscle mass than men, so, on average, they tend to score 1 to 2 points lower than men, even if they have the same level of kidney dysfunction. "One point is all you need to make a difference at the margin," Kim said. One study found that women on the waitlist were 14.4% less likely than men to receive a liver transplant and 8.6% more likely to die waiting for one. In addition, the demographics of liver disease patients have changed since 2002, reducing the overall accuracy of MELD scoring, according to Allison Kwong, MD, an instructor in gastroenterology and hepatology as well as a co-author of the MELD 3.0 paper. When the model was created, nearly a third of patients on the waitlist had hepatitis C. Patients on the waitlist today are more likely to be older, have alcoholic liver disease or fatty liver disease, and have comorbidities like diabetes and obesitydifferences that make their mortality less predictable by the original model. Last year, Kim, Kwong and their colleagues published a proposal for MELD 3.0 to address these issues. Using three years of data from candidates who were on the liver transplant waitlist from 2016 through 2018, the researchers fine-tuned the model, adding 1.3 points for female candidates, including albumin (a measure of liver function and malnutrition) as a fifth blood test value, limiting the maximum level of creatinine, and adjusting for interactions among the variables. Together, these alterations will not only level the playing field for women, but improve accuracy for all patients, Kim said. Compared with MELDNa, the version currently in use, MELD 3.0 would have given significantly higher scores to 8.8% of people who had died while on the waitlist in 2019, particularly women, likely enough to have qualified them for a transplant. When MELD 3.0 was tested on a simulation of liver allocation, it resulted in approximately 20 fewer waitlist deaths per year compared with MELDNa. Before MELD 3.0 can be adopted, the computer system used for organ allocation will need to be updated across the country, a process that could take a few several months, according to Kwong, who also serves on the national committee that implements liver allocation. "It's going to be the formula that people use day to day to rank these patients on the waiting list," she said. Explore further Improving liver transplant waitlist mortality by improved risk assessment More information: W. Ray Kim et al, MELD 3.0: The Model for End-Stage Liver Disease Updated for the Modern Era, Gastroenterology (2021). Journal information: Gastroenterology W. Ray Kim et al, MELD 3.0: The Model for End-Stage Liver Disease Updated for the Modern Era,(2021). DOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2021.08.050 Four ceramic cups display Stephanie Dishnos self portrait of a woman blending into the wallpaper behind her. Its meant to share Dishnos introverted side, and is one of 100 individual unique designs coming to the Clay Studio of Missoula that center on the intimate moments of home and femininity. Now finishing her two years of residency at the Missoula studio, Dishno has presented her largest exhibit to date with This is all just a little uncomfortable a collection of figures, illustrations and cups that explores Dishnos thoughts on vulnerabilities as a woman and the messy human nature. Each cup is similar in size, but depicts variations of the female form. Each is painted on white background with laser-detailed images of people's lives, often framed by the background of the subjects home. Some depict partners in love or quarreling, others show more lighthearted connections with friends. Some show the subject isolated, entranced by their day-to-day tasks. It's a new medium for Dishno, who usually creates larger-than-life ceramic pieces of humans and animals. Dishno said she wanted to try a new gallery with smaller pieces in three different sets. Individually each piece reads as a snapshot in time, much like a chapter in a book, Dishno said in her artist statement. Together the figures and cups create a story from my perspective and curiosities as a woman in todays society. Dishno said the sculptures and standalone illustrations represent desire, longing and apprehension. Dishno said she pulled many of her own experiences and those of women around her to formulate the story lines. To her, it's another step to growing her ceramics toolbox. Dishno graduated with a bachelors of fine arts degree from Herron School of Art and Design in 2012. She got her post-baccalaureate from the University of Alaska-Anchorage in 2016 and a masters in fine arts from the University of Montana in 2020. After school, she set up shop at Red Lodge Clay Center for two short-term residencies. She was also a co-director at FrontierSpace Art Gallery in Missoula for a year and a half. Shes been at Clay Studio of Missoula since fall 2020. Shalene Valenzuela, executive director for Clay Studio of Missoula, said Dishno has added value to the studio through teaching adult workshops and her drive to learn new techniques. In the last two years her skills have grown significantly, Valenzuela said. This exhibit will culminate the new and old of her work. Art residency gives new artists time and space to continue building their craft. The Clay Studio of Missoula has hosted over 70 artists since the inception of its residency program in 2004. Resident artists are provided studio space and resources in exchange for supporting the studio by teaching classes, planning gallery exhibitions and integrating themselves into the creative community, Valenzuela said. For Dishno, the local connections she built in residency helped her learn different tracks of ceramic knowledge and got her name out to potential collaborators. Her passion for art drove her to co-founding Wildfire Ceramic Studio, a Westside Missoula space meant to develop young ceramicists. After her residency ends, Dishno said she will take time to teach ceramics as an adjunct professor at the University of Montana-Western. Then, she will get to spend most of her time at Wildfire studio, where she plans to continue getting young, local artists in the mix. WEDNESDAY, Aug. 3, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- President Joe Biden is poised to sign a new executive order that would make it easier for women to travel to another state to get an abortion. This would be eased in part by allowing states that have not outlawed abortion to apply for Medicaid waivers to treat those needing care. The signing of the order will launch the first meeting of a federal task force on access to reproductive care that will be led by Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House said. The order will also remind health care providers of the need to comply with federal nondiscrimination laws, and it will streamline collection of data and information on maternal health at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the latest in a string of executive actions signed by the president since the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman's constitutional right to an abortion in June. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department sued Idaho on Tuesday, arguing that a statute that criminalizes abortions violates federal law. "We will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that pregnant women get the emergency medical treatment to which they are entitled under federal law," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the suit. "And we will closely scrutinize state abortion laws to ensure that they comply with federal law." Democratic lawmakers and abortion advocacy groups have asked for additional Biden declarations, including one to declare a public health emergency on abortion. White House officials have said such a declaration would not free up many federal resources or activate new legal authorities, the Associated Press reported. An unexpected solution to maintaining affordable housing in Missoula emerged from a city committee meeting Wednesday. The city originally purchased the Bridge Apartments on West Broadway for $2.1 million in 2021 in the hopes of finding a private partner to preserve the 20 affordable rental units in the building. The costs associated with the 90s-era facility, however, prevented any potential buyers from coming forward to purchase the property. The unpredictability of the costs of managing the deferred maintenance paired with the capped revenues that are necessary to protect this project as affordable housing created too large of a hurdle for many affordable housing developers to navigate, explained Eran Pehan, director of Community Planning, Development and Innovation for the city. Instead of selling the property to a developer, the city opted to pursue a property management agreement and development agreement with BlueLine Property Management LLC. BlueLine is currently building The Villagio and Trinity Apartments projects in Missoula, in addition to managing three affordable rental homes in the area. Under the agreements, the city will continue to own the Bridge Apartments for the next five years while BlueLine manages the property and assesses its potential for redevelopment. This plan differs from what we originally had envisioned, Pehan said. But it provides options to preserve the income-qualified rental units that currently exist on the site. We are very grateful to BlueLine for the creativity that they presented to us in this proposal, she said. According to the agreements, which the city committee authorized Mayor John Engen to sign Wednesday, BlueLine will be responsible for renting and showing units in the Bridge Apartments for the next five years. BlueLine will receive a property management fee equal to 10% of rental payments and gross collections from tenants. As the owner, meanwhile, the city will be responsible for capital expenditures, emergency repairs and other costs associated with the project. The funds for those expenses will come from rental payments. We are working to rebuild an operational reserve through monthly rental payments, Pehan said. "Our hope would be that we dont see any major system failures that would exceed the operational reserves that were able to build through those monthly rental revenues." Part of the agreements with BlueLine includes exploration of redevelopment options, either in the form of upkeep to the current units or total renovation with expansion of additional units. The tenants of the building will receive relocation benefits in the event of redevelopment, giving them options to be temporarily or permanently relocated to units where their rent would stay the same as in the Bridge Apartments. The development agreement with BlueLine can also be extended if the developer applies for and receives Low Income Housing Tax Credits for the project within the five-year window. The Missoula Housing, Redevelopment, and Community Programs Committee was overwhelmingly pleased with the turn of events that led to the agreements presented Wednesday. The committee unanimously voted to send the agreements to the mayor to sign, with three council members absent. I think this is a great opportunity, said Ward 4 Council Member Amber Sherrill. Any time we can save and create affordable housing, Im happy to be advocating for it. I know this isnt quite what was envisioned when it was purchased, agreed Ward 1 Council Member Heidi West. "I really appreciate the flexibility in coming up with something that gets us to maintaining these units as affordable units in Missoula." A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the council members absent from the committee meeting. The Montana State Crime Lab determined a woman who went missing last summer died from drowning, according to the Mineral County Sheriff. Rebekah Barsotti vanished last July near Alberton and the Clark Fork River. This May, a body was pulled from the water at River Bend Road near Superior, and a few weeks later it was positively identified as Barsotti. Barsotti was last seen on July 20 at about 2:15 p.m. at a Town Pump in Superior. Her car and some personal items were found at a rest area near Alberton on Interstate 90. The cause of death still is under investigation, meaning officials havent determined why or how she drowned, Mineral County Sheriff Mike Toth explained. After the news of the identification, Barsottis loved ones posted on social media about how she was always happy and determined. Rebekah deserved so much more from this life, the post stated. In September, law enforcement said all leads had been exhausted in relation to her disappearance, but she remained an active missing-persons case. The Mineral County Sheriffs Office and the Missoula County Search and Rescue joined the Missoula sheriff in the investigation. Over 2,000 hours were dedicated to the search. At the time she went missing, Barsotti was with her dog, Cerberus. He was found dead a few days after his owner disappeared, about 10 miles downriver from where Barsotti was reported to have gone missing. Barsottis parents, including her mother, Angela Mastrovito, have been living in Missoula since Barsotti disappeared. For Mastrovito, her daughters case has transitioned into an effort to raise domestic violence awareness, citing allegations that Barsottis former spouse was abusive, although authorities have not connected Barsottis case to domestic violence. NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) A federal judge in Tennessee has extended a restraining order against 10 anti-abortion activists and all members of Operation Save America, ordering them not to interfere with patients and providers at a reproductive health clinic outside of Nashville. Tuesday's order came after the protesters attempted to enter the clinic operated by the nonprofit carafem organization twice last week during a national conference of Operation Save America formerly Operation Rescue, according to court documents. On July 28, three people entered the medical office building in Mt. Juliet where carafem is located and tried to gain access to the clinic by posing as patients, the complaint alleges. One of them, Bevelyn Williams, said on a livestream video that the trio would terrorize the whole building if it wasn't allowed inside the clinic. She also said the three were going to take this whole building down," according to court records. Also with Williams were Rickey Williams and Edmee Chavannes. The clinic went into lockdown with patients and staff sheltering in a locked room until police removed the trio from the building. The three then went to Planned Parenthood in Nashville, where they were arrested for trespassing after refusing to comply with multiple warnings to leave the property, according to Metro Nashville Police. Rickey Williams had a handgun in his waistband, according to court records. The three could not immediately be reached for comment. Rickey Williams and Edmee Chavannes do not have listed phone numbers and a number listed for Bevelyn Williams rang unanswered on Wednesday. Operation Save America National Director Jason Storms said on Wednesday that the three people arrested are not part of his organization, although their actions coincided with Operation Save America protests. Storms said the protests by members of his organization were lawful. The complaint accuses Storms and several other members of the group of crossing onto carafem clinic property and attempting to enter the building on July 26. They were stopped by security at the exterior doors but refused to leave, sending the clinic into lockdown, according to court filings. When police arrived, Operation Save America Assistant Director Matthew Brock told officers that the group had "men out here who are willing to do what needs to be done, according to court records. Storms said the group was trying to ascertain whether Tennessee's trigger law was in effect and whether the clinic was performing abortions in defiance of that law. In Tennessee, abortion is currently banned at around six weeks, but a trigger law is expected to go into effect on Aug. 25 that would ban all abortions statewide except in cases when the procedure is necessary to prevent the pregnant persons death or serious impairment of a major bodily function. It would make performing an abortion a felony and subject doctors to up to 15 years in prison. Brock told officers, 'If the trigger law is in effect, and you're not going to enforce the law, we have people here who will enforce the law,' Storms said. The group did not blockade any doors and people were entering and exiting the building during the discussion with law enforcement, he said. The clinic filed for a temporary restraining order on Friday, claiming the protesters violated the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. That same day, a federal judge in Nashville granted an order that would expire on Aug. 5. On Tuesday, the order was extended until Aug. 12, the maximum length possible, with a hearing scheduled that day to determine if further action is needed. Several of the protesters have been detained for blocking clinic access on multiple occasions. Bevelyn Williams and Chavannes were sued by the New York attorney general last year after they were accused of of repeatedly barring patients entrance to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Manhattan and threatening violence against patients and staff. In a settlement announced in April 2021, the pair agreed to a buffer zone around the clinics entrances and faced a $5,000 fine for any violation. Another day of fast winds, hot temperatures and dry air fanned the flames of several regional wildfires. In the last seven days, the National Weather Service issued four red flag warning days for the western part of Montana, alerting to most potent conditions for current fires to expand and potential sparks to become wildfires. Across much of central Idaho, western and central Montana, sustained winds reached 15 mph to 25 mph while gusts reached 30 mph to 40 mph on Thursday. High temperatures reached the 80s and 90s a small break from triple-digit temperatures that could return to the forecast next week. Fire danger on the Bitterroot National Forest is extreme, the highest of five levels. Fire danger is very high, the second-highest level, on the Lolo National Forest. Fire danger is extreme on the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho. Moose fire The Moose fire, located 17 miles north of Salmon, Idaho, is expected to expand quickly as the fire inches closer to communities and infrastructure to the south. The blaze had scorched more than 64,000 acres of the Salmon-Challis National Forest as of Thursday morning. At least seven structures, all minor out-buildings, have burned down. More than 350 single-family residences and one multi-unit residence are threatened. A dry cold front passing through is expected to worsen conditions. Roughly 20% of the fire is contained. The fire is threatening the Salmon municipal watershed, energy and mining infrastructure. The municipal watershed, which supplies area residents with water, is within 5 miles of the fires path. Its paramount the watershed is protected, thats a big concern for us, said Gil Knight, public information officer for the Moose fire. Great Basin Team 1, the largest Type I firefighting incident command unit, took control of the fire Aug. 3. More than 1,000 firefighters and 10 aircraft are battling the blaze. The Moose fire is one of the largest fires currently burning in the Lower 48 states. Fire experts forecast winds will contribute to surface and crown fires with potential for large group tree torching. The fire is burning in steep, hazardous terrain that has been historically difficult for firefighters. West winds with gusts as high as 48 mph could push the boundaries of the fire by a half-mile on the eastern flank by Friday. A large spot fire has developed along a ridgeline just west of the Salmon River corridor near the community of Carmen, Idaho. Communities from Carmen to the north fork of the Salmon River are in pre-evacuation stages. Salmon River Road is partially closed, with only residents, rafting outfitters and river users with float permits allowed to travel behind a pilot car. Highway 93 is still open. Redhorn fire No structures are threatened yet in the Redhorn fire, which reached 180 acres by Thursday in remote wilderness in the Mission Mountains. Fire officials are planning contingency lines in case the fire explodes in dry and windy conditions. Sparked by a lightning strike on Monday, the blaze is burning in tribal wilderness on the west side of McDonald peak. Its roughly 7 miles northeast as the bird flies from St. Ignatius. There are no evacuations or closures, although the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes usually close the area through Oct. 1 to protect grizzly bear habitat. A local Type III incident command team has responded to the scene, led by Art Trahan and Richard Fisher. In total, 42 people are monitoring the fire. Firefighters reported intense fire activity with group tree torching, up-slope runs and short range spotting on Wednesday. Aircraft will be used as conditions allow to limit the spread of the fire. More aggressive fire spread is expected under the red flag warning Thursday. Fire staff are scouting and assessing contingency lines south of McDonald Lake and North of Ashley Lake. Hog Trough fire Located in the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area, firefighters expect the Hog Trough fire to grow to the northwest and southeast. Active fire behavior pushed the burn, 17 miles northwest of Hamilton, closer to the edge of a 2005 Signal Rock wildfire scar it sparked in. Northern Rockies Team 5, a Type II incident command team, took control of operations Wednesday night. More than 300 firefighters are on scene, with a goal of containing the fire to the wilderness area. The fire is 749 acres in size and not threatening any structures, but triggered the closing of several Forest Service roads near Skalkaho Highway, which remains open. Fire crews plan to make containment lines on the closest roads to prevent spread out of the wilderness area. Other crews cut handlines along ridges to prevent the fire from jumping Highway 38. Helicopters doused hot spots with water buckets on the west and northwest flames of the fire. Weasel fire Located 14 miles northeast of Eureka, lightning sparked the Weasel fire in a wooded area near the convergence of the Canadian border and Flathead and Lincoln counties. At least 160 acres of forested area have burned, causing firefighters to close Big Therriault and Little Therriault campgrounds. A Type III team has taken control of the fire, and 74 personnel have joined firefighting efforts. Fire weather experts predicted moderate fire behavior with tree torching and small spotting. The team hopes to control the fire line along Road #114. Firefighters also successfully protected the historic Weasel Cabin with fire-resistant wrapping on Aug. 2. LENOIR A Morganton woman was arrested Wednesday on a charge of heroin trafficking in Caldwell County. Amber Dawn Harris, 35, of 5649 Wallace Road, Morganton, was arrested and charged with trafficking in heroin, Sheriff Alan C. Jones announced. She was placed in the Caldwell Detention Center under a $25,000 secured bond. A release from Jones said that at around 11 a.m., Harris was stopped as she was driving a 1995 Toyota Camry on Cajah Mountain Road in Lenoir. During the stop, a Caldwell County Sheriffs Office K-9 alerted to the odor of narcotics coming from the vehicle, it said. After narcotic agents searched the vehicle they found approximately 10 grams of heroin and 1 gram of methamphetamine, the release said. It said the drugs seized during the investigation have a total street value of $1,700, according to North Carolina State Drug Guidelines. We are continuing to be aggressive on our drug campaign, we are not letting up, Jones said. The Caldwell County Sheriffs Office is always in search of any information involving the use and distribution of illegal controlled substances. A concerned residents information and assistance will be kept confidential, the release said. Anyone with information concerning illegal drug activity in Caldwell County can contact the: Caldwell County Sheriffs Office I.C.E. Unit at 828-757-1178. Lenoir Police Departments Narcotics Division at 828-757-2145. Hudson Police Department at 828-728-5021. Granite Falls Police Department at 828-396-3358. Caldwell County Crimestoppers at 828-758-8300. LINVILLE Grandfather Mountain, the Linville nature preserve operated by the nonprofit Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation, is inviting guests to gather around the campfire from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 19, with Gordon Warburton, a retired biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, to hear stories and firsthand accounts from an expert in the field of conservation. Grandfather Mountain Campfire Stories is the first event of its kind to be held on the mountain and offers an experience similar to how researchers and scientists would share their own stories while out in the field. The purpose of Campfire Stories is to bring in experts from the conservation field to come and tell their stories and share the experiences theyve accumulated throughout their careers, said John Caveny, director of education and natural resources with the Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation. We want to show how fun the field of conservation is. Campfire Stories complements Grandfather Mountains Grandfather Presents speaker series, but at a smaller scale and in a more intimate and informal setting. The event begins with guests watching the sunset from Cliffside Overlook, where interpretive park guides will be available to share their own knowledge about the natural wonders of the mountain. The group then heads to outside the Wilson Center for Nature Discovery to enjoy smores around the campfire and hear stories from Warburton. Warburton worked for the NCWRC for 35 years and participated in the research and restoration efforts of several species, including deer, turkey, peregrine falcons and others. His career also involved the conservation of public lands in western North Carolina, as well as conservation work in Peru. Gordon has done a lot of work in the scientific community studying bears, turkeys and other creatures, Caveny said. Hell be sharing some of the interesting things that have happened throughout his career with the hope of inspiring guests, fueling their passion for nature and letting them see how fun and exciting the field of conservation can be. This event costs $50 for general admission and $42 for members of Grandfather Mountains Bridge Club. Registration is now open. Grandfather Mountain Campfire Stories is limited to 20 participants. In-park transportation will not be provided. Participants will use their own vehicles to drive up and down the mountain. Much of guests time will be spent outdoors, and the program will be held rain or shine. Guests should be prepared for a variety of mountain weather conditions and temperatures. Appropriate clothing, equipment and footwear are important. Jackets are needed on many summer evenings. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit https://bit.ly/3zQPGT7. ASHEBORO Reilly, a 23-year-old African lion at the North Carolina Zoo who had been battling renal disease for several years, has died, the zoo announced Wednesday in a news release. He was so tolerant of his rambunctious offspring and was fiercely devoted to his lady lion, Mekita, Zookeeper Beth Malott said in a news release. Reilly was a one-of-a-kind soul, and his morning roars will be greatly missed. Reilly was the oldest male lion in an Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) accredited institution. He battled renal disease for several years. With his advanced age and weakened physical state, the animal care team and veterinarians made the heart-wrenching, quality-of-life decision to euthanize him, the release said. Renal disease is not uncommon for a cat of Reillys advanced age, be it a domestic cat sitting on your chair at home or a lion at the Zoo, Dr. Jb Minter, the zoos chief veterinarian, said in the release. We had been extremely fortunate to be able to monitor the advancement of Reillys renal disease over the years using operant conditioning to get blood from his tail, but unfortunately, the progression of the renal disease along with his previously diagnosed spinal disease proved to be too much. I will surely miss hearing his roar from across the park. As the oldest male in AZA zoos, he far exceeded the average lifespan for lions under human care, Animal Management Supervisor Jodi Wiley said in the release. This speaks volumes of the amazing care the keepers have given him over the years. A lions average lifespan in the wild is about 10-15 years, while male lions under human care have a median life expectancy of 17 years. Reilly was born at Lincoln Park Zoo on Feb. 7, 1999, and came to the North Carolina Zoo on in 2001. He fathered nine offspring three males and six females. Mekita is now the only lion at the zoo. Decisions about future pride members, including possible mates for her, will be based on recommendations from the AZA, the zoo said. Male African Lions weigh up to 570 pounds, while females weigh up to 277 pounds. During peak health, Reilly weighed about 440 pounds, but his weight had dropped to 394 pounds, the zoo said. African lions are listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with populations continuing to decrease due to habitat loss and poaching, the release said. An estimated 23,000 to 39,000 lions remain in the wild. Lions are the only big cats that are social, living in prides comprising a dominant male, several females, and their offspring. They may sleep up to 20 hours per day. Lions are native to the savannahs and grasslands of Africa and can reach speeds of up to 50 mph for very short bursts. The nations top public health agency is relaxing its COVID-19 guidelines and dropping the recommendation that Americans quarantine themselves if they come into close contact with an infected person. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said Thursday that people no longer need to stay at least 6 feet away from others. The changes come more than 2 1/2 years after the start of the pandemic. They are driven by a recognition that an estimated 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity, either from being vaccinated or infected. These are recent reports of missing children made to local law enforcement. If you think you have seen a missing child, contact the National C